Showing posts with label Ai Weiwei. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ai Weiwei. Show all posts

Saturday, October 29, 2016

Saturday & Sundries

At Free Will Astrology this week Rob Brezsny told Aquarian types that:
In 1938, a chef named Ruth Wakefield dreamed up a brilliant invention: chocolate chip cookies. She sold her recipe to the Nestlé company in return for one dollar and a lifetime supply of chocolate. Maybe she was happy with that arrangement, but I think she cheated herself........(etc.)

Ms Wakefield did the world a favour! In my opinion, though, choc chip cookies do not beat wonderful British Chocolate Digestives by McVitie. From the Wikipedia page on Digestive Biscuits in general - sc roll down:
Chocolate digestive biscuits also are available, coated on one side with milk, dark or white chocolate. Originally produced by McVitie's in 1925 in the UK as the Chocolate Homewheat Digestive....American travel writer Bill Bryson described the chocolate digestive as "a British masterpiece". The McVitie's chocolate digestive is the most popular biscuit in the UK to dunk into tea.




The Sartorialist website one day this week (a daily stop for me) inadvertently introduced me to another artist I'd not heard of: Ai Weiwei, when The Sartorialist's photographer and the artist decided to take photographs of one another at the same time.

Ai Weiwei, I discovered, once created a set of bronze sculptures representing the Chinese Zodiac
See Zodiac Heads
and The Meaning of Ai Weiwei's 12 Zodiac Heads





An interesting topic upon which to exercise imagination:

The Amazing Cloud Cities we Could Build on Venus by Adam Becker
Space scientists are pouring much time and effort into colonising Mars. But could we also live in the atmosphere of Venus? BBC Future investigates.

Snips:
It’s hot enough to melt lead, the acid rain will scorch the flesh from your bones – and it’s the perfect place to raise a family. Venus, not Mars, might be the off-world destination of choice for future space colonists..........

So how could we ever possibly hope to live there? The key is to avoid the surface. “The problem with Venus is that the surface is too far below the one-Earth-atmosphere [of air pressure] level,” says Geoffrey Landis, the Nasa scientist and science fiction writer who was among the first to propose the idea. “The atmosphere of Venus is the most Earth-like environment in the Solar System (other than the Earth).” Some 50 kilometres (30 miles) above the surface, Venus is surprisingly hospitable........

To live on Venus, then, just fill a balloon with nitrogen and oxygen, and live inside the balloon. A big enough balloon will have enough lifting power to support you and your supplies – and a really big balloon could do even more. “A one-kilometre diameter spherical [balloon] will lift 700,000 tons – two Empire State Buildings. A two-kilometre diameter [balloon] would lift six million tons,” says Landis. “The result would be an environment as spacious as a typical city.”.........

All of which brought to mind this ditty:






Hat-tip to Avedon's Sideshow (link in sidebar) for this -

Watching This Rare Color Film Of London In 1927 Makes You Feel Like You're There, by Emily Davis.
This wonderful short film was shot by early film pioneer Claude Friese-Greene in 1927, and is some of the first-ever color film footage of London.


Which, in turn, brought to mind that we've been watching a new TV series on NBC "Timeless" (mainly because it follows "The Voice", so we're already on TV rather than partaking of Netflix offerings).



We've seen 4 weekly episodes so far. The series is not awful, but it isn't great time travel fare either. The episodes need to be longer, dialogue needs more depth. To date the time travellers have tried: to stop a rogue time traveller from preventing the Hindenberg disaster; from preventing the assassination of Abe Lincoln, from something we hadn't quite worked out, and this week from preventing the Nazis using an atomic weapon on Belgium, and preventing Werner Von Braun from going to work in the USA. What the plot's characters are doing isn't travelling back to change stuff themselves, but to prevent a rogue traveller from changing stuff, and in the process causing numerous potentially catastrophic "butterfly effects".

As we told one another on Monday evening, "This theme, done this way, could get old quite quickly now!"