New

The direct image of GJ 758 B (circled as B) was taken with the Subaru Telescope's HiCIAO instrument in the near infrared. An unconfirmed companion planet or planet-like object, C, can be viewed above B. Credit: Max Planck Institute for Astronomy/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

Astronomers say they have taken the first direct image of a planet-like object orbiting a star much like our own sun.
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Impossible

Does not want yesterday,

Does not want tomorrow,

Believes only in today,

Believes only in perpetual motion.

the map is not the territory

In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild drew a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography saw the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray under the Sun and winters.

In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; and in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Jorge Luis Borges, from "On Exactitude and Science"

thanksgiving laser

This is a photo of the laser measuring the prime meridian from the Greenwich Observatory.

These are happy physicists after a successful proton collision on Wednesday at the Cern Massive Hadron Collider (above) under the Swiss Alps, near to Geneva.

These experiments help recreate conditions as they existed billionths of a second after the Big Bang, which formed the universe and space-time, no big deal. The protons in turn break down into smaller constituent parts and enable physicists to study the fundamental nature of matter.

We are looking into infinity
What do you mean by infinity?
Infinity means eternity
How do you explain eternity?
By eternity I mean a seemingly endless time interval (waiting)
Such as?
Forever and ever
and what does that mean?
Infinity (?)

Remembering Milton in the Night at Sea

...Through the gloom were seen
Ten Thousand Banners rise into the Air
with Orient Colours Waving....
-Milton's Paradise Lost

The night was pitch dark. The whole sea luminous.
Every part of the water which by day is seen as foam
glowed with pale light. The vessel drove before her bows

Two billows of liquid phosphorus. Her wake was a milky train.
As far as the eye reached, the crest of every wave was bright;
& from the reflected light the sky-just above the horizon-

not so utterly dark as the rest of the Heavens.
Impossible to behold this plain of matter, as it were melted
& consumed by heat, without remembering Milton!

yesterday + today

Summit Screening

difference

This week I finished the third chapter of Baudrillard's For the Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, entitled Fetishism and Ideology: The Semiological Reduction. I was interested to is description of Fetishism not as manifested ideas represented by objects (typical of Marzist analysis of fetishization) but as an obsession with the reflection/refraction in the code of the system of objects, or words, the fetish is then embedded in the act of play with structural differences of the sytem in question. This is a systematic analysis of the systems themselves.

In The Politics of Difference: An Intro To Deleuze by Todd May, I found an interesting correllary, which I believe applies the significance of negative space in another way:

"We do not want to say, one should live in such a way. There is no general perscription. We have done globalizing concepts. It is not a question of how we should live; it is a question of how we might live. Seen from Deleuze and Guattari's viewpoint, the question might become something like this: "What connections might we form? Or, What actualizations can we experiment with?" If we ask the question this way, we need to bear in mind that "we" is not a given we. It can be a group. It can be an individual. It can be an ecosystem or a pre-individual part or a cross-section within an environment or a geographical slice. What makes it a "we" is not the stability of an identity. It is the participation in the formation of connections.

Wil this participation be a matter of living together? Will it involve power? Yes to both questions. Politics is an experiment in machinic connections; it is not a distribution of goods to those who lack them. To ask how we might go about living is not to repeat the dreary question of who needs what. It is instead to probe the realm of difference that we are in order to create new and (one hopes) better arrangements for living, in the broadest sense of the word living.

I think this exerpt is an incredbly beautiful one, I felt like the nihilism of Baudrillard needs to be balanced out somehow.

They totally look the same.

Conversations with myself

Botched Taxidermy

prints, porcelain, and hand-dyed silk

Zack and I Summit Baltimore

Weird

stuff going on

Google sky

I've been using this program quite a bit lately in my work, when I listen to the tutorial I feel like it will be amusing to look back at this in a few years..

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Halloween At Robert E. Lee

Walked to Robert E. Lee at dusk, got caught in the rain. Watched a 1922 Swedish/Danish silent film by Benjamin Christensen, Haxan: The Witches or Witchcraft Through The Ages. Based partly on Christensen's study of the Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th century German guide for inquisitors, Häxan is a study of how superstition and the misunderstanding of diseases and mental illness could lead to the hysteria of the witch-hunts.The film was made as a documentary but contains dramatized sequences that are comparable to horror films. With Christensen's meticulous recreation of medieval scenes and the lengthy production period, the film was the most expensive Scandinavian silent film ever made, costing nearly two million Swedish krona. Although it won acclaim in Denmark and Sweden, the film was banned in the United States and heavily censored in other countries for what were considered at that time graphic depictions of torture, nudity, and sexual perversion.

crazy

Found on Inhabitat todayAny one point on a busy street can receive up to 50,000 steps a day, so imagine if you could take all that foot traffic and turn it into something useful – like energy! A new product designed by Laurence Kemball-Cook, the director of Pavegen Systems Ltd., can do just that. With a minuscule flex of 5mm, the energy generating pavement is able to absorb the kinetic energy produced by every footstep, creating 2.1 watts of electricity per hour.

View Through a Telescope

This painting represents the definitive outcome of several studies Giacomo Balla made following his observation of a partial eclipse of the Sun caused by the planet Mercury, which occurred on November 7, 1914. The eclipse takes place in the upper center of the painting, with a small circle, Mercury, encroaching on a large circle, the Sun. The dazzle of white triangles nearby can be explained as the impact on the naked eye as Balla looked away from his lens. The green cone may also refer to a specific retinal color effect experienced by Balla as he peered down his telescope. Balla was continuing his experiments in conveying the sensations of movement through space with the use of transparent planes, rectilinear and curving forms

I thought this was an interesting parallel to the post I made a few weeks ago with my version of a telescope.

first attempt

After much delay the first kite is finished. I want to mess around with the dye more so I can match the sky better on the day the photo is taken. The idea is for the kite to disappear.

together

good morning

Orrery

I would really like to make one of these

In the meantime:
http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/solar_system/

tomorrow

I am going to the University of Pennsylvania veterinary lab. A field trip for Botched Taxidermy.

inside/outside

An accumulation of stylized objects that subvert their own use value, the interior becomes a reflection of the inhabitant's idealized self.

I just read part of Baudrillard's dissertation on furniture.

ugh.

Lancaster

Spent the weekend in Lancaster

Worked on some ideas

Ate good food

Tried to fly