"...close to music..."

"The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time. One might argue that photography is as close to music as to painting."

- John Berger, from "Understanding a Photograph" (1968).

Bucky, December 2010. (Click image for full-screen.)

"If you can't have the [static magnetic] field you love, love the [static magnetic] field you have." - William A. Edelstein

Ever have an MRI? If so, you benefited from many inventions by Bill Edelstein, whose passing, earlier this week, is mourned by many.

Under the influence.

Heraclitus said that you can't step into the same river twice, but sometimes I wondered whether I was photographing the same dog twice, thrice, and more.

I like to photograph Bucky. Sometimes, though, I found that I would take a photograph of him, and it would look very familiar:

(July)

(October)

(November)

(Click any image for full-screen.)

Old dog, new photo. If you photograph the same dog, repeatedly, how different can any new photo be...?

Last weekend, I visited the Yousuf Karsh exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (USA). In spite of my familiarity with some of Karsh's truly iconic images (his portraits of Churchill & Hemingway, for instance), looking at his prints moved me. Wow. What exquisite compositions! What use of light - and darkness - to frame, and to highlight!

After visiting the exhibition, I took these two photos (click any image for full-screen), indoors, by available window-light; I think they are different from all my earlier photos of Bucky:

Thank you, Mr. Karsh!

And thank you, Bucky.

"He's silent, wherever he is." [On metaphorical terrain.]

"By now one more American sheep the shepherds have temporarily lost track of, somewhere in the high country above this ruinous hour, cragfast* in the storm."

-From page 402 of "Bleeding Edge" by Thomas Pynchon.

______
*From the Oxford English Dictionary:

Magnetic fields: Threat, or menace? [repost]

I have worked with magnets for over thirty years, yet I admit that I'm not sure if magnetic fields are real.

Now, they tell you that the magnetic field is real, real like the river's undertow that pulls you past the eddies beneath the sharp rocks and beats you down, but it's not. Not really. You feel magnetic forces, to be sure, but the magnetic field is not the fundamental truth. The truth is the magnetic vector potential. And this is not just my opinion; this has been known for over sixty years.

The magnetic field (what you hear about) is written as B; the magnetic vector potential (what you perhaps never heard about before today) is written as A. They are related by:

B = ∇ x A

("The magnetic field is the curl of the magnetic vector potential.")

The truth is revealed by the Aharonov–Bohm effect, in which particle traveling past a long thin solenoid experiences a phase shift, even though the magnetic field is confined to the interior of the solenoid, which the particle never enters! Why does this happen? It happens because the particle sees the magnetic vector potential outside the solenoid. (A cool animation is available.)

So, A (the magnetic vector potential) is what's true and real and actually felt by the particle, while B (the magnetic field) is sort of an emanation, or a mathematical device, that almost always gives you the right answer (except in clever made-up configurations designed to demonstrate the Aharonov–Bohm effect, that is), and is handy. I suppose an attorney might say that while the magnetic field is (usually) a truth, it is not the whole truth.

Perhaps it's like your car's engine, where horsepower is what you read about, but torque is what you feel. The magnetic field is what you read about, but the magnetic vector potential is what you feel.

[Please note: Persons seeking legal advice should consult a member of their state Bar Association; we may in the future discuss an alternative approach to interpreting the Aharonov-Bohm effect, which does not appear to to rob the magnetic field of so much of her charm; post title refers to this.]

[reposted from June, 2010]

Edward I. Koch, 1924-2013

"Good morning Baltimore! Every day's like an open door."

"My ma tells me no 
   but my feet tell me go!"

-from "Hairspray"'s opening song "Good Morning Baltimore!"


Tickets are still available for "Hairspray in Concert" narrated by Mr. John Waters with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in Meyerhoff Hall, Baltimore, tonight and tomorrow night, plus Saturday and Sunday matinees. Saw the world premier last night at Strathmore; laughed so hard I cried. And how often does that happen at the symphony?


From the BSO website:

Jack Everly, conductor
John Waters, narrator (BSO debut)
Micky Dolenz, Wilbur Turnblad
Beth Leavel, Velma von Tussle
Paul Vogt, Edna Turnblad
Featuring:
Marissa Perry as "Tracy Turnblad"
Julie Kavanagh as "Penny Pingleton"
Nick Adams as "Link Larkin"
Rhiannon Hansen as "Amber von Tussle"
NaTasha Williams as "Motormouth Maybelle"
Marcus Terell as "Seaweed J. Stubbs"
Bret Shuford as "Corny Collins"
Alix Korey as "Female Authority Figure"
Chris Briante as "Male Authority Figure"
Also with: The Divas of Song (Natalie Renee, Nikki Stephenson, and Melissa VanPelt) as "The Dynamites."

"How strange is the lot of us mortals!"

"Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving." 

- Albert Einstein.


h/t: Andrew Sullivan

"To be a successful soldier you must know history."

Today is the 75th anniversary of George S. Patton's anticipation of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

On June 3, 1937, Patton filed a report that foresaw the attack that would take place on December 7, 1941.

James Charles Marshall, 1923-2012

"You come running in on platform shoes
with Marshall stacks
to at least just give us a clue..."

R.I.P. Jim Marshall.

2011's "rise of civic consciousness"

‎"A positive development that has gathered strength over the past year has been the rise of civic consciousness, the acceptance by ordinary citizens that they too must play a part in the process of change and adaptation. This is not so much protest against the inadequacies of government as recognition of the importance of balancing rights with responsibilities." 

- Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese politician and Nobel peace prize-winner


[from "A sense of balance" by Aung San Suu Kyi, in "The World in 2012" from The Economist Newspaper.]

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16!

The New York Times obituary of Dr. Lynn Margulis (1938 - 2011) notes that her groundbreaking 1967 paper proposing the endosymbiotic theory of the origin of eukaryotes had been rejected by fifteen journals before its eventual publication.

"Hearts and kidneys are tinker toys! I am talking about the central nervous system!"

This morning we attended the dedication ceremony for the new Maryland Neuroimaging Center in College Park. The University of Maryland's Vice President for Research began his remarks by saying: "Everything I know about the brain, I learned from the movie [...pause...] Young Frankenstein."

"We've paid our bills and the President's been elected."

"We'd tried the music first, so it seemed only reasonable to start things roundabout, putting the dance first. Later, when thinking-caps were used, it became evident that underneath both music and dance was a common suport: time. This partial truth would have been hard to come by for a choreographer, due partly to the multiplicity of elements in the theatrical dance and due for the rest to the fact that analytical thought in the field of the dance was centered formerly on the problem of notation. Music, on the other hand, was, in those days, a relatively simple art: a succession of pitches in a measured space of time. ... All one had to do was establish a time-structure. Neither music or dance would be first: both would go along in the same boat. Circumstances – a time, a place – would bring them together. We've paid our bills and the President's been elected. Now we get down to business. ... The time-structures we made fell apart: our need faded, so that aesthetic terms have totally disappeared from our language. Balance, harmony, counterpoint, form."

- from John Cage's 1963 essay "Where do we go from here?" in "A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings by John Cage", 1969.

"... on the other hand ..."

"Doris Dennison had been born Doris Suckling. That was why she changed her name. Her step-brother, Peter, on the other hand, took the name she discarded. Peter Suckling had been born Peter Perfect."

- from page 88 of "A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings by John Cage", 1969

"... like looking out a window ..."

Just one sentence from John Cage's 1962 lecture/essay "Rhythm Etc." in "A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings by John Cage", 1969:

"The Indians long ago knew that Music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn't stop when one turned away."

A thought for the Labor Day weekend.

"Our Western education teaches us caution. And so we hesitate before crossing the great waters. We wouldn't want, would we, to throw ourselves away? Realizing we might have been elected President of the United States, we want somehow to settle for a life not too ignoble. Well, there's always Madison Avenue. And it needs us to keep itself going."

- from John Cage's 1961 "Lecture on Commitment" in "A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings by John Cage", 1969.

Fresh & stochastic.

Last night in the kitchen, after cooking & canning peach jam, the sounds of lids popping combined with the rumble of the dishwasher to form what John Cage would certainly have called music.

from SERIOUSLY COMMA

IT MUST BE DONE IN A WAY

IT CANNOT BE TAUGHT (HE

SIMPLY HANDED ME A SPEC-

IMEN AND WAS GENEROUS

ENOUGH TO SAY: IT IS EASY

TO IDENTIFY. HE SAID

NOTHING ELSE. I THEN

NOTICED THE OPPOSITE

LEAVES ARRANGED ALTER-

NATELY ON THE STEM AT

RIGHT ANGLES). IT REMAINS

TO BE SEEN WHETHER

I'LL REMEMBER, HAVE TIME

TO DIG.

- from SERIOUSLY COMMA by John Cage, originally published in Preuves (Paris) March 1966; reprinted in "A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings by John Cage", 1969.

Some things cannot be used twice.

When I heard this morning on the Writer's Almanac that today is the anniversary of the experimental detection of antimatter by Carl Anderson in 1932, I thought back to last month's MIT symposium in honor of the 80th birthday of Prof. William Bertozzi, where I heard a speaker lament: "Unfortunately one cannot use antiprotons twice."