Flow chart - diagrams

click on image to get it into a larger format to see the whole thing ... sorry I can't get it differently...

Problem solving flow chart - now this is my humor of the month:

































Circuit diagram:
































the holy water is my favorite part

Identity matrix doesn't function normally either

Cute website. My favorite it even made Mr.Gopher smile:

What I want to review

John Carter of Mars
Yeah, sure ... so I'm a woman? I'm almost automatically a minority with respect to old-fashioned SciFi. Dig the cover of the first volume of the Mars stories, Princess of Mars. The cast for the movie is pretty impressive, too. You are surprised that I like this? I'm not.

Try those power-pusher women who guiltily read bodice rippers with throbbing members seeking her moist femininity with ... but I digress. Those are truly misogynistic, in a way that old male-driven SciFi can never hope to achieve. ... ... Old white guys in the '30s writing about women being subservient to men? So what's news? Middle-aged white women in the 21st Century demanding million dollar contracts for stories about young white women being frustrated in their social inequalities while putting out for some hunk they don't really want to like? Who's undermining socio-eco-political equality more? Some dead dude or a NY Times best seller author? (e.g. #4,8,9,16 on the mass market paperback list, 2/25/10.)

Hypocracy? No. Sure, I read them once in a while. But I don't read anything with guilt.

SciFi, possibly even more so in its own golden age in the 1930s, provides more fodder for the imagination. Those 'bodice rippers' truly pale in comparison to Pulp Science Fiction as a genre.

Quite often you at least need to use your imagination to see the world in a way beyond 'ordinary' fiction. Well, afterall, there was no Wikipedia in 1930 (unless it was the one entitled "Encyclopedia Britannica") ... yet there are plenty of photographs of just about anywhere in the UK or the Wild West the most popular locations for bodice rippers recently. John Carter of Mars starts off in the American Civil War. We even have photographs of that. But Mars? You need imagination, even with the author's words, to really enter into the story. Ray guns, interstellar travel, green skinned aliens ... Star Trek was not, by 80 years, unique.

I suppose Boris Valejo might be an okay artist, but boy, does he paint to his audience, which would be any white Euro-American male who discovered SciFi around the age of 12 and who likes big tits. I can only hope that - unlike Lord of the Rings - the director doesn't use the most popular art style of the source material as the basis for the art direction of the film.

What do I want to see on the big screen? John Carter of Mars? Or The Elusive Bride (#8, above)? Mars, hands-down. If there's a great-looking leading man in the "romance" story, his primary function is still going to be "good looking man"; at least in John Carter of Mars he gets to be "good looking man who can kick ass" and will still likely have sex in the movie, with fewer violins & no soft-focus.

Within recent literary consumption here in GopherLand was
David Weber, Shadow of Saganami (modern techno-heroine sci-fi)
Robert E. Howard, Solomon Kane (gothic/demon fantasy & yes, the author of Conan the Barbarian)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (I can go finish the book now, film review coming eventually) &
Henning Mankell, Die Hunde von Riga got set aside when Mr.Gopher practically ripped it out of my hands and sucked it down whole ... I think instead of buying him books in English, I might want to switch languages - doubly so since we own a copy in German, but the original is Swedish which he no doubt would also enjoy)
Stieg Larsson, another Swedish offering, The Girl Who Kicked a Hornet's Nest, a follow-up story to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire. The latter of which is a cliff-hanger & I'm going to have to wait in line at the library for a copy.

Robert Howard's Solomon Kane is also on the slate for release as a movie soon eventually. With James Purfoy as Kane (a.k.a. Marc Antony in Rome, and some Martian in John Carter, too). I've never read Conan the Barbarian, or the Conan books; I have, however, read Howard's Bran Mak Morn, something I found while perusing old Irish sagas. 'Solomon Kane' was written in the grand style of the heroic-fantasy. My Irish forefathers 300 years ago would have recognized the general heroic epic aspect of it; my dad/mom might recognize the dime store pulp fiction magazine serialization of the epic style; me? I just enjoyed it.

Had I been a 10 year old boy when I read either Solomon Kane or John Carter of Mars, I would likely have been found the next morning playing sword & pistol kill-the-demons in the back yard. I am a 44 year old woman, and I would still rather read them than the mysogenistic lame-o excuses for un-erotic literature currently marketed as "romance". (a completely different rant)

Who would I rather close my eyes and imagine being? A beautiful never-over-25 woman who is oppressed and dismissed by society but can't manage to either keep her legs together or pull her head out of her ass and become her own woman .... ... or the sword-wielding powerful hero(ine) destroying evil and receiving adulation from all?

Seriously ... Cerebus the Aardvark: yes; Arwen the Elf, no.

So, it is with no guilty pleasure that I look forward to both Solomon Kane and John Carter of Mars on the silver screen. Or if someone manages to make anything from E. E. Smith (e.g., Galactic Patrol), or (almost) anything else from Boroughs. but lord, lord, lord, not another dorky Tarzan!. Afterall, I really liked The Mummy, too.

.

Earth in High-Density Beauty

utterly beautiful

Greek aesthetics

This is not the traditional Greek aesthetics. This is post-modern American, HealthyGopher's aesthetics. Socio-eco-political-b.s. about the Greek financial woes is a separate issue. This, however, is simply an absolutely striking photograph taken earlier today (CET):

German Poetry in color

... and no, not Goethe ...

Farben
Vor allem Schwarz und Weiß und Grau
vergesse ich manchmal
die bunten Farben in meinem Leben:
Du bist für mich
weder Schwarz nor Weiß
sondern Rot und Blau und Gelb und Grün
meine Lust und Freude

rev: it occurred to me that most of my friends don't speak German, so a translation is in order:

With all of the Black and White and Grey,

at times I forget

the brilliant Colors in my Life:

You are for me

neither Black nor White

but rather Red and Blue and Yellow and Green,

my Passion and Joy

My friend The Author enjoys poetry; I braved the elements of authorship & posted something I wrote on her blog. to wit:

The only thing vaguely like poetry that I’ve written in my adult, post-college life was in German.
We do not, and will certainly not, even consider what spewed forth from my pen during those heady days in Arnold Hall dating one of the ... uh, no, the greatest asinine Idiot I've ever given my affections to. Boy, and that's some epitaph. What a waste of paper that relationship was.

This is why one should clean out the car regularly, besides achieving the status of mobile microbiological experiment station. One might leave bits of paper with incriminating doodles indiscriminately about a semi-public space.

My mother-in-law saw a small bit of such paper in my car. My heart sunk, as she read it. Her comment was along the lines of “it looks like something written to a lover”.

I responded, with forced courage, “I wrote it for Mr.Gopher” (who at the time of maternal discovery was my husband, although he was my lover at the time I wrote it).

I’m not sure if the surprise was due to the fact that I wrote it, or that I wrote it for her son. Although, I suppose, the surprise might simply have been that I wrote anything in German.

And, strangely enough, I didn't feel embarrassed, when I contemplated sharing it on The Author's blog. This is strange since I’m horribly, mortally embarrassed every time I think about asking for someone’s opinion on the prose fiction that I wrote. Perhaps this is simply too short to be able to be embarrassed.

8' x 10' = 20' ??

St. Johns Abbey & University is just a bit north of here in Collegeville. The main chapel there is rather pretty. We stopped to see it on the way home from the Gopher Family Annual Independence Day Camp-Out. This is a video of them trying to get their 20 foot tree through the front door, which is 8 x 10 feet. Sideways? Of course. But, a 20' tree is going to have a diameter larger than the door. Hmmmmmm......

30 Second Bunny Theater

What's your favorite movie? Re-enacted in 30 seconds by Bunnies? Season 3 has 38 episodes. You'll just have to suck up watching the same f'in 0:15 intro to a 1:00 show. Every time.

(you need a Netflix subscription, $, though I'm sure you can find it elsewhere, too)

I particularly liked:

Die Hard

March of the Penguins

Terminator

Casablanca

and Harry Potter, #1-5 (yes, all 5 movies in 30-ish seconds)

hee hee hee hee

Halloween pictures, finally

Creepy benefits of leaving jack-o-lantern out for a few days at the mercy of biological decomposition and the neighborhood squirrels. Need to consider this for a plan next year. The gaping maw is due to the invasion of squirrels eating all of the teeth. Sorry, don't have before / after pictures (see note below about missing camera).




















JrGopher1 didn't want his picture taken with his head visible. Wall-E was a better visual success than a wear-able success. Cardboard U-Haul moving box + schedule 40 PVC piping + twine & cardboard & medical tape. Nope, didn't have duct tape - eee!





















Jr.Gopher2 wanted to be EVE as soon as he heard #1 wanted to be Wall-E. They really like the movie. This is a Target size 3 diaper box, and the handles from one of those pretty gift bags. The gun was borrowed from a friend.
















Our camera is broken, so there's a delay between photos & sharing (acutally, more like delay between Halloween & borrowing a camera for pictures yesterday).

Who is it for?

While I'm not sure I want to see The Antichrist this month, when it's at the Lagoon, I am assuredly not offended by the picture used to advertize the film. Unlike 7 people in England, who are concerned children might see the ad.

The ASA is apparently like our MPAA, giving the film an 18 rating (NC-17). I found their criteria/comments regarding the ad interesting:

was "unlikely to cause sexual excitement"
in ... The Times and The Independent, which the ASA felt children were unlikely to see.
"If children did see the ad, it was not considered particularly explicit.
"unlikely to be seen as irresponsible or cause serious or widespread offence"
"cinema at its most extreme"

Intriguing that whether or not a child see it impacts where it's offensive.

Then, there was von Trier's comment:
The Danish director defended his work at Cannes, saying: "I don't think I owe anyone an explanation. I made it for myself."

Well, unless he's a lot richer than I'd guess, this is a bit disingenuous. He made it for his investors, not himself.

Some order, please!

Every one of you has certainly heard of the Periodic Table of the Elements. Or the Periodic Table. Or the Periodic Chart. Period. You have, no doubt, seen the "modern" or "standard" version:

















Then there are different methods to present the same information. These still demonstrate the periodicity of the atomic structure & therefore chemical properties, in different visual patterns. There were a couple others, but they wouldn't copy as easily as this:















Then again, there are some periodic tables which are apparently designed to refute information (while the top is amusing, the bottom part is the highlight):

The Powers of Peat

I want to make a psalter. I started ruminating on this quite a few years ago B.C. (Before Children.) I had been doing medieval calligraphy for quite a few years and wanted to branch out into a medieval, yet more personal, effort. Psalters - a collection of the psalms - were one of the few types of books which were common in the Middle Ages. Yes, this would be if you were wealthy to start off with. There are some doozies out there. The stupendously wealthy would have them custom made, in lieu of a Mazeratti to show off wealth. One of the most spectacular examples is from Jean Duc de Berry. I used to have a copy of excerpts. It is the most impressive example of late medieval illumination I've ever seen. The calligraphy I posted a few days ago was based upon this.

There are extant examples dating back to the 7th Century (in Ireland) from across Europe. The earlier stuff - Merovingian, Carolingian & early Irish - are really appealing to me. Convenient, since they are light on the illumination. A companion skill I never developed much beyond a rudimentary level. I worked with several skilled illuminators, so I didn't see any point in pursuing something I didn't really care for.

A couple years ago, a bulldozer operator in the middle of Ireland discovered a psalter while excavating peat in a bog. It is estimated to be from ~750 AD, apparently based upon the one visible page. As the director of the National Museum in Ireland stated, it is utterly astonishing that this thing managed to survive 1000 years or more. I can't wait to see what it looks like. The museum has a page about it here.

It's intriguing the limitations they have for conservation & restoration:
can't freeze it, or it will destroy the parchment;
can't use bio-cides or it will ruin the paints or inks;
don't want too much oxygen or it will actually start decomposing ...

The problem is that, having sat in a peat bog for 1000 years, the book is rather ... well .. rather wet. How to dry it out without destroying it? There will likely be quite a few dissertations addressing the many facets of this.

This link goes to a page, at the bottom of which is a .pdf file providing a summary of the conservation project. As both a scientist and an avid interest in the specific type of object, I was utterly enchanted. p. 9 has a before / after photograph of one of the first pages they've treated. Holy cow!

This is just soooooooooo coooooolll

bragging rights

This is one of the nicer pieces I did. Not as nice as I'd want, but I certainly wasn't embarrassed to present it to the SCA group. This is from the Great Book of the Middle Kingdom. It is a collection of all of the "official" ceremonies and the associated texts for each. These particular pages are the opening of the Crown Tournament. And, while not credited, I did the calligraphy on the opening page for the following section.

The calligraphy & capital letters are mine. The illumination is Pharamond's. In the course of my efforts, I did quite a bit of collaboration with him: me with a pen & him with a paint brush.

There are a few other pieces of mine I wish I had high-quality photographs of, rather than the photocopies sitting in my portfolio.

Calligraphic attraction

There is an International Exhibition of Calligraphy in Moscow. Barring the mediocre English on their website (by both the exhibit and contributors), it looks like there is actually something in Moscow I would like to see.There are a couple of pieces in their collection which are stunningly breathtaking. A couple contributors are German. Their brief essay (2-3 paragraphs) were in a spectrum of opinions as well as English competency. At least one of which I wish I could have read in German, because it didn't make a lot of sense in English.

Two of the pieces I particularly liked:


Truth, texts from Demokrit, Aristoteles, Leibniz, Feuerbach, Goethe, Schiller, Lichtenberg, La Mettrie, Hebel, Berger, by Joachim Propfe
If you look carefully at some of the dark & light shadowing is actually text.





Psalm 25:7, Remember not the sins of my youth, by Avraham-Hersh Borshevsky
this is one which took my breath away.

Self expression & children

From a comment posted earlier ...
>>I love that you encourage him to just do whatever he wants to do...

Well, we don't encourage him to do quite anything. (grin)

When it comes to creativity, then yes, pretty much the sky is the limit for permission. He's on a soccer team for a few weeks. (sports are creative, too.) If he wants to go skating again this Winter, I'll be happy to take him. Art? yes! Music? yes! Sculpture? sure! Writing the Great American Novel? why not!

The expression of himself is critical to the development of his Self. I enjoy seeing what he creates. It gives me the opportunity to see the world through his eyes. What kind of story does he tell? That story shouldn’t be limited to one created in words.

Some people are handicapped by their language ability. They can't use the written or spoken language effectively. This is especially true for children, who haven't had the opportunity to learn this skill.

Giving children additional outlets for self expression will give them an opportunity to communicate with the rest of the world. I only hope that the world bothers to listen.

Having learned a 2nd language, I have been confronted with the truly overwhelming bitterness of being incapable of saying something. The lack of vocabulary, the lack of colloquial use of those words, and then the sheer physical impediment of the brain suddenly going off line in both languages. I can hardly explain - in any language - how frustrating this is. I’ve been close to tears over this, and as an adult at least I know why. For a small child? It should be no wonder that they have melt-downs. They’re pushed to their intellectual limits - and beyond - on a daily basis. They don’t understand why this frustration is happening. “Sweetie, you’re engaged in language acquisition” isn’t really an effective explanation to a 5 year old.

I drew a mouse for Jr. Gopher #2, using his stuffed mouse as a model. Subsequently, he wanted me to keep drawing another mouse. He then started drawing his own mice. I don’t think I would ever have considered his art to be a mouse. It made him happy to be able to do something like mom. I think it also provides a sense of ownership, of a relationship with the creation. "That's my mouse!"

Below is our Wall of Art in our bedroom. Artwork is all the boys’ (except for the vapid-looking giraffe, courtesy of yours truly). Most of them are Jr.Gopher#1's butterflies.

[review] The Soloist

Went to see The Soloist a few days ago. Music & Drama: a pleasant combination. Downey & Foxx: another pleasant combination. Author & Ms.Gopher: friends always a pleasant combination. Altogether, a pleasant experience. The Author wrote - of course - a nice review of the movie here.

Up here in lovely (and as of today mosquito-free) Land of the North Star, the question of ethics and medical treatment are the topic d'jour. (Although perhaps the topic of ethics & Hollywood & Good Samaritan-ism ought to be, too.) Anyway - movies

How much right do We (a.k.a. Society) have to dictate someone else's well-being? If someone is not demanding anything of Us, should we be able to demand anything of them in return?

An L.A. Times writer inadvertently meets a mentally ill, yet extremely talented, homeless musician. I'm wondering how to describe this person. Does our description reveal our prejudices? Which is the noun used here? Musician, homeless, or schizophrenic? Does it matter? At one point in the film, we see 'sanity' merging with 'insanity' with sufficient stress and stellar acting from Downey.

I don't recall anymore what the specific script prompt was, but it included the Lord's Prayer. I sincerely wish I could watch that 2 minutes of it again. The musician & reporter were in Skid Row to give The Viewer a montage of the misery of living on the streets and being God Awfully Poor. The recitation of the prayer had gotten to "... give us this day our daily bread..." as the camera is panning down the alley past a soup kitchen line. "... for thine is the kingdom ..." looking down a seemingly endless homeless shelter. Driving home (no doubt quite intentionally) the point that these people are the God's Kingdom as much as the Rich sitting on their therapists' couches explaining their financially motivated neuroses.

Unlike my friend The Author, who is concurrently A Musician, I am an enthusiast rather than a skilled musician. I wouldn't have recognized the specific pieces of Beethoven's music (in fact, I wouldn't have even recognized it as Beethoven). Being stupendously ignorant of the specifics of music theory or classification (is he Baroque?Romantic?HeavyMetal?Other?), I'm not sure if the choices of music were really the best available from J.S.'s extensive repertoire. They are stylistically apt, at any rate.

I'm not sure if the central point of the movie is the issues of mental illness & coping with society's expectations thereto - or whether it is about the relationship between two different men - or perhaps nothing at all. Will the musician get treatment? (maybe yes, maybe no) Will the reporter get a story? (definitely, this is based upon a book) Will Society act on the burgeoning poverty in L.A. (who are you kidding?) Perhaps the one aspect the most appealing is the depiction of the musician's descent into mental illness. This one string of the story is the most interesting. At what point is it recognized as illness? How does this effect the family cohesion? This topic could perhaps get its own movie, solo.

The soloist is whom? The isolated homeless man? The divorced reporter? Or any one of us in society who are inevitably cut off from a whole lot of the rest of society?

Gopher's Rating:
Definitely see it on video

Latino award titles

Who came up with these award names?

The Setting Us Back Award for Negative Stereotyping in a Movie

The 'Worst Fauxtino of the Year' Award for Worst Portrayal of a Latino

The 'No Espeak Espanish' Award for Poor Spanish Speaking Skills in a Movie

The 'I'd Rather Be Watching the Weather Channel' Award for Worst TV Show

Award for Ickiest Onscreen Chemistry in a Movie

win-max = fn(η-min)

St. Olaf Professor of Physics Jason Engbrecht said you'll want to see this "because obscenely complicated machines are cool."



St. Olaf was not only the only liberal arts school in the competition, it was also the only school without an engineering program.

The annual competition aims to bring to life Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Rube Goldberg's drawings of complicated machines and gadgets that accomplish simple tasks. Using as many whimsical, counterintuitive steps as possible, the machines must complete a task determined each year by contest organizers. The contest is sponsored by the Theta Tau engineering fraternity (at Purdue) and rewards machines that most effectively combine creativity with inefficiency and complexity.

This year's task was to replace an incandescent light bulb with a more energy-efficient light-emitting design. It took 239 steps to turn off an incandescent light and turn on dozens of LED lights spelling "St. Olaf."

Team members built a record player from scratch that, as it spins, allows lasers to fire through pre-drilled holes. The lasers are picked up by light sensors, which trigger several other steps and eventually enable a gate to open and release a ball.

The team also constructed a Gauss rifle, a mechanism that uses a magnetic chain reaction to launch a metal ball at a very high speed, and a simple harmonic oscillator, a system that employs simple harmonic motion and magnetic induction to trigger the start of a car moving along a track. They even turned an ice auger into an Archimedes' screw that caught pool balls and took them from the machine's lower level to an elevated track.

Collectible = ? = $ =???

Mr. STFU&GBTW mentioned the manga "Apocalypse Meow". The preview looks pretty cool. The library system here has the source book. I can check it out for free. Well, actually I can request it and get it in a few weeks.

Amazon carries it too. Available new for a measley $175. And, yes, that is a period at the end.

Chernobyl

More academic procrastination:


The text of a term paper on the use of different analytical methods for tracking radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl disaster.