Sam Kean is doing a series of blog posts in support of his new book, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements
Monthly Archives: July 2010
Rebuffing Romantic Rapscallions
Close Examination: Fakes, mistakes and discoveries at the National Gallery, review
Scientific evidence can be invaluable but it has to be used with caution and always in tandem with historical research. For example, Corot’s ravishing plein-air sketch The Roman Campagna, with the Claudian Aqueduct has always been dated to about 1826, soon after the artist’s arrival in Rome. However, the green pigment called viridian that Corot used throughout the picture only became available to artists in the 1830s. The landscape wasn’t a fake and for stylistic reasons couldn’t have been painted later than the mid-1820s. All became clear when art historians did further research and discovered that the firm that sold artists’ supplies to Corot in Paris started making the newly developed colour available to selected customers in the 1820s, long before it came into widespread use.
Cat's Eye View
Up on the hot, possibly tin, roof.
Zoom into your Roof: Checking the Thermal Performance of Homes
[H]ow can individual citizens determine whether such a costly renovation is worthwhile for their own house? The online project “Zoom into Your Roof” [antwerpen.be] tries to help solve this question through a relatively simple visualization. During the winter of 2009, a small airplane with an infrared scanner made a wide sweeping thermal scan of a large part of Belgium, which resulted in the largest thermographic map currently available online. Inhabitants living within this area are able to select their home address and answer a few questions (such as the angle of the roof). in order to determine for themselves how their own roofs actually perform.
Server Golf
Either the upgrade of the strain of golfing against Judge Smails for $40,000 has left the blog admin software acting a little psychotic lately; I am intermittently not allowed in to post or edit, and then later it acts as though everything is fine. (I will not, will not, will not speculate on the server’s gender, though you may insert your own joke — and nothing else — here.) At the moment I have successfully distracted the beast with some cheese which allowed me to post this, though, so I can apologize for not posting other things.
Tread on Me
I’ve pointed out geodrawing before, in which one uses a GPS receiver to record a track of some artistic merit. There’s a new one up that’s quite an achievement: Traverse Me
The University of Warwick campus map was drawn on foot at 1:1 scale with 238 miles of GPS tracks walked over17 days
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I responded to the structure of each location and avoided walking along roads and paths when possible.
The route was recorded with GPS technology and was walked in stages over the 300 hectare site.
My shoes turned brown in the dry fields and they turned green in the long grass.
Security was called on me twice on separate occasions and I lost count of how many times I happened to trigger an automatic sliding door.
A Little Downtime
SFN server will be (or was, depending on when you read this) offline today for an upgrade, ~1700-2100 UTC.
The Pop of Pop
The Baron of Bubbles
The Sultan of Soda
The Ayatollah of Coca-Cola
Cocktail Party Physics: father of fizz
In honor of ” Pepsipocalypse,” and my own inordinate fondness for Diet Coke (which I share with Bora!, as evidenced by the photo at the end of this post, although he’s partial to the sugared variety), it seems appropriate to pay tribute to the grand-daddy of fizzy drinks: British scientist Joseph Priestley. He didn’t actually invent carbonation, which is a natural process: at high pressures underground, spring water can absorb carbon dioxide and become “effervescent.” “Seltzer” originally referred to the mineral water naturally produced in springs near a German town called Niederseltsers, although today, it’s pretty much just filtered tap water that’s been artificially carbonated. No, Priestley is responsible for the artificial carbonation process, along with “discovering” oxygen (more on that, and the caveats, later) and eight other gases, including carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide (laughing gas).
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What to call it: I have previously linked to a Soda vs Pop map
Clavula, Next Stop! Next Stop, Clavula!
Interesting “body as a map” artwork by Samantha Loman
Bony Landmarks – The cranium drawn as a map
Underskin – the body’s various systems drawn as a subway graphic, and there’s no Taconic parkway leading to the clavula (did Ty just make that up?)
Unfortunately only part of the Underskin drawing is shown in high resolution; I found another site with the work that lets you click for more detail
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Other artsy stuff inspired by subway graphics
How Google Works, or Not
Learn How Google Works: in Gory Detail
As nice as Google is, I am finding it to be somewhat less useful these days. I don’t know how much of that is from changes in Google, or because of changes in website “strategy.” In the early days of the internet, many web pages were all one page, and a search could give a hit because the terms all appeared, but in disparate topics located in different parts of the page. Then people learned they could/should link to different pages, and they segregated content to reduce load times, especially when pictures were being included and everyone had dialup. A long load time is bad for traffic — people are impatient (probably even for porn. Or especially for porn). But now we’re back to large pages, probably because enough people now have high speed access. So a search on reducing government waste will get you news or blog links that have stories on weight loss, politics and trash removal all on the same page. But some of it is due to the way Google has changed the way they do a search.
I am occasionally annoyed by Google because of the expansive use of synonyms and including different verb tenses, which lead to many more useless searches. Part of that is because it’s a very Microsoftian “I know what you want better than you do;” I haven’t gotten used to putting single words in quotes because it didn’t used to be necessary. (A blog search on swansont and some other term(s) should give my blog posts, but now I get masses of hits that include swan song and swansong, which I find to be less than useful. No, I typed what I meant, dammit. You used to ask did you mean “X” when you thought it was a typo.)
Another annoyance is searching on multiple terms and getting hits that don’t include all the search terms in the link. No, I wasn’t kidding about wanting to find that word in the text. It’s not optional.
A-12
The Secret Film of the CIA Supersonic Spy Plane’s First Flight
After Lockheed Aircraft completed “antiradar studies, aerodynamic structural tests, and engineering designs,” the CIA gave the green light to produce 12 aircraft on January 30th, 1960. It was called the A-11 at the time. Lockheed engineer Clarence L. Johnson was the main designer, who was responsible for the U-2. Despite Johnson’s experience, many were skeptical at first and, after months of drawings and wind-tunnel model testing, they were not convinced this beast could fly.