As inspiring as the man himself.
This is the kind of thing auto-tune is best for, imo. Making music of inspiring things people said, but did not sing… I saw another one of these once made with Carl Sagan. (More of that.)
Painting: Spectrum
I’m back!
Spectrum, acrylic and latex caulk on 11″ x 14″ canvas, January 20, 2013
Spectrum! Because I am not going to call it ‘rainbow’, grunt, snort, wow that spot on the floor is interesting. But enough feigning of manly insecurities, the deal with this painting is not so much the spectrum as that it’s my first experiment with using latex caulk as an art media. It does give it some texture… This picture with the harsher lighting shows better the blobs of caulk that I painted over.
Spectrum, acrylic and latex caulk on 11″ x 14″ canvas, January 20, 2013
One note on spectrums though — it strikes me as fascinating and unfathomable that the only real difference between colors is frequency and wavelength. Same difference between the frequencies we see and those we don’t. Makes you wonder if some kind of neurological manipulation could allow us to further subdivide the visual spectrum and experience more colors. Colors we cannot even imagine now. Or going the other direction… after the singularity I just want gamma-ray eyes, is all I’m sayin’…
On a housekeeping note, I’m changing how I write this blog. You may have noticed, I’m not going to slavishly post twice a week anymore. That led to lame posts between paintings I think, and more importantly it was starting to turn blogging, and worse, painting into work. Not work in the sense of something I get paid to do, but in the sense of house work and yard work — something I’d just rather not do at all. We don’t want that to happen to painting and blogging do we?? No Zorgs, we don’t!!
One of the best pieces of advice my dad gave me was that the best way to ruin a good hobby is to turn it into work. And wouldn’t ya know it, that’s exactly what I was doing. That Cosmic Calendar stuff… it was a really cool idea when I decided to do it, but wow it got to be a drag in the last days of December. The irony of this change is not lost on me — I first decided to stick to a biweekly schedule because I wanted the pressure of needing to finish paintings so I’d have something to blog about twice a week, and get more paintings done that way. But I just don’t think I need that motivator anymore. Quite the opposite, too much blogging was threatening to kill the blog and the paintings. Before last weekend I hadn’t painted in about a month. Just didn’t feel like it. Tried painting anyway, but just wasn’t having any fun. I gave up that day after I broke my palette knife.
Until last weekend when suddenly I had five new paintings going all at once! 🙂 This is the first of those. So now it’s going to be a normal blog and I’ll post when I want to. Hopefully this will lead to better posts when I do.
Filed under Paintings
2012 in review
Ah what the heck. I’ve found your reports interesting, those of you my friends who have posted them, so here’s mine. 🙂
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 6,600 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 11 years to get that many views.
Filed under Uncategorized
Cosmic Calendar: Oh the Humanity!
December 31st, at 10:30 pm, on the Cosmic Calendar: Modern humans, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, have finally arrived! Our entire history, both written and archaeological, is only one and a half hours on the cosmic calendar.
December 31st, at 11:46 pm, on the Cosmic Calendar: Fire is discovered. What we did for the 2 and a quarter million years before we had fire I cannot imagine. Carpaccio and sashimi every day? They must have had guts of steel. These were not neanderthals — these were home sapiens exactly like you and me in every way… except perhaps dental hygiene.
11:59 pm:
December 31st, at 11:59:20 pm, on the Cosmic Calendar: The domestication of plants and animals begins. 20,000 years ago.
December 31st, at 11:59:35 pm, on the Cosmic Calendar: Settled agricultural communities become the first cities, during the neolithic revolution.
December 31st, at 11:59:50 pm, on the Cosmic Calendar: Recorded history begins — Mohenjo-daro, ancient Sumer and Egypt. Everyone you have ever heard of, from Sargon of Akkad, Tutankhamun, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Queen Elizabeth, Abraham Lincoln, to Carl Sagan and you and me — lived in the equivalent of 10 seconds out of a year.
When the entire history of the universe is compressed into one calendar year, one second is 500 years, one minute is 30,000 years, and one day is 43 million years (43,200,000). If this cosmic calendar were the size of a football field, all of human history would be a handful of dirt you could scoop up.
An hour and a half we’ve been here, and we haven’t done anything of significance until the last 40 seconds of the cosmic year. Frankly we’ve lived like animals for the majority of our time here. In the last 5000 to 8000 years, we’ve really only just started! 🙂 Look out universe!
Note the comparison of skulls — not just the hottie… we’ve become? Don’t know about you, but I’m not that hot. Obviously. You can tell from my avatar I look more like that guy in the middle.
You may remember Cosmos, the 1980 PBS series by Carl Sagan. Maybe you also recall Sagan’s “Cosmic Calendar” from the series, where in order to put the immensely vast history of the universe into a comprehensible scale, he mapped it onto a calendar year. In other words, if the entire history of the universe were one year, with the big bang in the first second of midnight on January first, and the present day on the last second of December 31st, New Year’s Eve. A project of mine this year has been to note the major events in the Cosmic Calendar, on the real calendar, on this blog!
And Happy New Year!
Filed under Cosmic Calendar
Cosmic Calendar: Australopithecus
December 31st, at 9:36 pm, on the Cosmic Calendar: Australopithecus appears, one of the most well-known of our pre-human ancestors. You’ve probably heard of Lucy — she was an Australopithecus afarensis and metaphorical mother to us all, that lived between two and four million years ago.
Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis celebrity
Here we are in the final hours of the cosmic year, and still no human beings yet. And that is how mind blowingly long the 13.75 billion year history of the universe is!
You may remember Cosmos, the 1980 PBS series by Carl Sagan. Maybe you also recall Sagan’s “Cosmic Calendar” from the series, where in order to put the immensely vast history of the universe into a comprehensible scale, he mapped it onto a calendar year. In other words, if the entire history of the universe were one year, with the big bang in the first second of midnight on January first, and the present day on the last second of December 31st, New Year’s Eve. A project of mine this year has been to note the major events in the Cosmic Calendar, on the real calendar, on this blog!
Filed under Cosmic Calendar
Cosmic Calendar: The first flowers and the end of the dinosaurs
December 28th on the Cosmic Calendar: The first flowers appear, and the meteor that wipes out the dinosaurs hits in the Gulf of Mexico just off the Yucatan causing the KT event.
Four days left in the Cosmic Year — just four days — and only now do we see flowers. Plants had been living on land for 300 million years before any of them flowered. I’d kind of always assumed that flowers had been around pretty much as long as plants had been on land, but this is not the case. That is how mind blowingly long the 13.75 billion year history of the universe is.
So if you ever see a dinosaur movie with flowers in the background, I’d say you’re 95% safe calling bullshit on it.
Archaefructus liaoningensis, the earliest known flowering plant. This is as floral and flowery as my blog is likely to ever get.
Say goodbye to T-Rex and Diplodicus
You may remember Cosmos, the 1980 PBS series by Carl Sagan. Maybe you also recall Sagan’s “Cosmic Calendar” from the series, where in order to put the immensely vast history of the universe into a comprehensible scale, he mapped it onto a calendar year. In other words, if the entire history of the universe were one year, with the big bang in the first second of midnight on January first, and the present day on the last second of December 31st, New Year’s Eve. A project of mine this year has been to note the major events in the Cosmic Calendar, on the real calendar, on this blog!
Filed under Cosmic Calendar
Cosmic Calendar: Birds!
December 27th on the Cosmic Calendar: The first birds! Birds evolved from dinosaurs in the Cretaceous. Birds and crocodiles are the only living clades of Archosauria, and the two main extinct clades of Archosauria are the dinosaurs and pterosaurs. Crocodiles predate the dinosaurs, but birds evolved from Theropod dinosaurs. Tyrannosaurus Rex was a theropod. Whenever I look at birds — geese, ducks, robins — and think these thoughts, I think “Oh how the mighty have fallen!” Still, it’s fun to look at birds and realize that they are dinosaurs. It’s also fun to think of eating dinosaur when having chicken or turkey. It’s the simple things in life, ya know? 🙂
Archaeopteryx, the first bird
Archaeopteryx would like some lemon and tartar sauce with his fish
Archaeopteryx
Microraptor was another early bird
The first birds were… about the size of a bird.
You may remember Cosmos, the 1980 PBS series by Carl Sagan. Maybe you also recall Sagan’s “Cosmic Calendar” from the series, where in order to put the immensely vast history of the universe into a comprehensible scale, he mapped it onto a calendar year. In other words, if the entire history of the universe were one year, with the big bang in the first second of midnight on January first, and the present day on the last second of December 31st, New Year’s Eve. A project of mine this year has been to note the major events in the Cosmic Calendar, on the real calendar, on this blog!
Filed under Cosmic Calendar
Cosmic Calendar: Mammals!
December 26th on the Cosmic Calendar: Actual hairy, lactating, bug-eating mammals! Not Synapsids anymore! The earliest mammals lived in the Jurassic and Cretaceous, yes, in the shadow of dinosaurs. The first group of no-doubt-about-it mammals were the Triconodonts (again, the earliest currently known).
Jeholodens jenkinsi, a triconodont mammal that lived about 120 to 140 million years ago
Not all of the tricodonts were small though. Repenomamus was a meter long — about the size of a beaver! Big enough to eat small dinosaurs!
Mmmm! Dinosaur tastes like chicken!
You may remember Cosmos, the 1980 PBS series by Carl Sagan. Maybe you also recall Sagan’s “Cosmic Calendar” from the series, where in order to put the immensely vast history of the universe into a comprehensible scale, he mapped it onto a calendar year. In other words, if the entire history of the universe were one year, with the big bang in the first second of midnight on January first, and the present day on the last second of December 31st, New Year’s Eve. A project of mine this year has been to note the major events in the Cosmic Calendar, on the real calendar, on this blog!
Filed under Cosmic Calendar
Cosmic Calendar: Dinosaurs!
December 24th on the Cosmic Calendar: Dinosaurs rule the Earth! Finally! Having scaled the entire 13.75 billion year history of the universe down to one year, the dinosaurs — who we usually think of as having lived in the inconcievably distant past — yes, they only show up in the last week of the cosmic year. That is how long the 13.75 billion year history of the universe is. 251 million years is only one week on the cosmic calendar.
Tyrannosaurus Rex
Tyrannosaurus Rex
Diplodicus
Triceratops
Stegosaurus
So there are the classic four dinosaurs — Tyrannosaurus Rex, Diplodicus, Triceratops, and Stegosaurus. But since this is an art blog, even though it’s been hijacked by the history of the universe for the last several posts, and for the next several too, I’ll close with my favorite dinosaur painting. Animal Plumbing by Brian Filipowich. At least I always thought the animal plumbed here was a Tyrannosaurus… 🙂
Animal plumbing, by Brian Filipowich
You may remember Cosmos, the 1980 PBS series by Carl Sagan. Maybe you also recall Sagan’s “Cosmic Calendar” from the series, where in order to put the immensely vast history of the universe into a comprehensible scale, he mapped it onto a calendar year. In other words, if the entire history of the universe were one year, with the big bang in the first second of midnight on January first, and the present day on the last second of December 31st, New Year’s Eve. A project of mine this year has been to note the major events in the Cosmic Calendar, on the real calendar, on this blog!
Filed under Cosmic Calendar
zorgor 