Yesterday I went for the SF Open Studios and saw a breathtaking photography exhibit by Monica Denevan, who photographed the human form during her trips to Burma.
The sheer technical brilliance, original composition and seamless blending of the human form into the environment was truly exceptional and she provides a welcome relief from the more pastoral works presented by other photographers at the Open Studios.
On a completely different level were the dreamy and somewhat haunting photographs of Pep Ventosa, who collages hundreds of singular snapshots of one scene into phantasmagoric and psychedellic creations, almost alter egos of the original scene. Shown here is my personal favourite – The Road to Monument Valley.
NASA has recently announced that they discovered phase variations in the light curve of the transiting planet HAT-P-7. As was reported in the Science magazine the amazingly precise light curve shows both the transit of the planet as well as its occultation, when the planet hides behind the star. The light curve is here:
The really good news is that the precision of detection of the secondary eclipse is enough to detect a transiting Solar – Earth analogue around a 12th magnitude star. So the race is on! Will Kepler find and confirm the first transiting Earth?
Today I stumbled upon this video documenting the wholesale destruction of entire mountains in West Virginia to get coal cheaply into our grid. Pretty sickening stuff.
My life so far has been dominated by crazy and sometimes bad ideas: go to India for a year and teach, go start a PhD in America or go to Burningman to mount and audio-visual tent. In retrospect a lot of these ideas seem a bit suspect to say the least. So here is another idea:
In a couple of years I will get Suzuki Hayabusa, so far the fastest production motorbike in the world, lower it, put some turbo on it and go race at Bonneville Salt Flats as I saw two weeks ago. Here are some pictures that I took:
Today we went to the Franklin Institute in Philladelphia to see the Medici exhibition of rennaisance astronomy and surveying instruments. The sheer range of gold plated amazing gadgetry on display proved intoxicating. The entire exhibit was topped off by the original of Galileo’s telescope, secretly photographed below:
The astrolabes, armillary spheres and sextants were augmented with mechanical calculators, cosine and sine machines and protractors. Hmmm, what a joy to see scientific positivism materialized.
Today I saw a truly astounding exhibition at the Walter’s Art Museum in Baltimore, close to where I live, which depicted a new illuminated rendition of the celebrated text of the St. John’s Bible.
As the Baltimore Sun noted
At a time when books can be written and distributed to millions by high-speed computer, there is no earthly reason why anyone would need to spend $5.5 million to create an illuminated manuscript of the Catholic Bible, featuring calligraphy applied by hand on calfskin parchment and other bookmaking methods dating back to the Middle Ages.
As a complete atheist I was pleasantly surprise how the stunning images and hand lettered large print seamelssly blend into an impressive whole that almost leaps out of the page. It has been a long time since I saw anythingnearly as impressive as this.
Downloaded the Skype for IPhone and it crashes immediately after making a call. Ahhh.
Today I managed to get Itunes 8.x to run on my 64bit Ubuntu in Sun xVM VirtualBox and completely sync my 3G iphone. Yeah. 
ivanmladek
