14TeV

Anything interesting from 13.6 eV up to 14 TeV

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Stefano Mancuso: The roots of plant intelligence.

Accompanying video to the book Brilliant Green, by Mancuso & Viola. The book, or rather manifesto, is interesting and offers some fine insights on the vegetal world. The writing is awful though.

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Yusef Lateef - Plum Blossom. From the album Eastern Sounds, 1961.

Yusef Lateef (flute)

Barry Harris (piano)

Ernie Farrow (drums, rabat)

Lex Humphries (drums) 

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Le Nu Divin N13. Ronald Martinez (circa 2012).

Photograph of a woman lit by a single source of light. Chiaroscuro in the age of digital photography. Tradition and modernity. This sensational work illustrates the cover of Ibrahim Maalouf’s wonderful Kalthoum album

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Very interesting interview of David Bowie, in 1999 (or 2000).

Bowie said that if he were 19 at the time of their conversation, he wouldn't have gone into music. "The Internet carries the flag of being subversive and possibly rebellious and chaotic, nihilistic," whereas music had lost its place as the flag-bearer of rebellion.

He was to express the idea of a significant paradigm shift in the way the relationship between artist and audience will be changed by the internet. Quite prescient indeed. Interestingly, Bowie was deeply inspired by technology and its new challenges, instead of being afraid - an attitude that defines the music industry to this day.

Bowie cites Duchamp and his ideas on the creative act and the meaning of art, “It's becoming more about the audience," he said. "So from my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience. There is a breakdown."

"I don't think we've seen the tip of the iceberg," Bowie tells his host,  "It's almost if we're on the cusp of something both exhilarating and terrifying."  Perhaps we haven’t seen it either. 

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Quick reminder of how stunning our planet is.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released the first batch of images taken by its recently launched GOES-16 satellite.  For weather forecasters, this is the “meteorological equivalent of going from black and white to ultrahigh definition color TV.” 

GOES-16 is a next-generation geostationary weather satellites from NOAA. It orbits the planet at approximately 22,300 miles above Earth, and can provide images of the full Western Hemisphere every 15 minutes, as well as images of the entire continental United States every five minutes. The satellite is also designed to observe a number of meteorological phenomena such as fog, dust storms, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions and lightning.

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All of Bach

Did you ever dream of having all of the music of Bach accessible, for free, from everywhere, with historical and artistic background accompanying every piece?

Well, the Netherlands Bach Society is doing just that. Here’s what they say about this great project:

All of Bach

Every week you can find here a new recording of one of Bach’s 1080 works.

In September 2013 we started performing and recording all of Bach’s works. The first recordings were made available on this site on 2 May 2014, followed by a new Bach recording every Friday. Each piece of music by Bach has its own page where site visitors can choose: the recording, interviews, background information or audience reactions. You can watch and listen to every single piece in its entirety. Musicians will talk about what the music does for them. Background information is provided for each work and all the facts about the recording are compactly summarised. The public section of the site has space for reactions from listeners.

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Glenn Gould - Off the Record, by Wolf Koenig & Roman Kroitor. 1959 | 29 min.

Four years after recording the Goldberg Variations for the first time, the National Film Board of Canada documentary Off the Record, captured Glenn Gould’s playing in the intimacy of his retreat in a lakeside cottage. We see the 27-year-old Gould practicing (playing and singing) Bach’s Partita No. 2, first movement.

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Andante, by Gavin Carver

A professional cellist, Ruth Boden, heads to Oregonn’s Wallowa Mountains to play her art. A journey that symbolizes the progress of an artist in her craft. And what does she play atop the mountain? Bach.

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Interesting and very well produced video on the Brachistochrone problem. The answer to the final ‘challenge’ is actually trivial after using Snell’s law and the physical fact that y is proportional to t^2. I also suspect that it’s not a good approach to describe problems of minimization as it fails to smoothly recover the particular case of vertical free fall.

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Flying the hawk free, unencumbered by the creance, nothing stopping her headlong flight out and away but the lines that run between us; palpable lines, not physical ones: lines of habit, of hunger, of partnership, of familiarity. Of something the old falconers would call love. Flying a hawk free is always scary. It is where you test these lines. And it’s not a thing that’s easy to do when you’ve lost trust in the world, and your heart is turned to dust. (...) Hunting with the hawk took me to the very edge of being a human. Then it took me past that place to somewhere I wasn’t human at all. The hawk in flight, me running after her, the land and the air a pattern of deep and curving detail, sufficient to block out anything like the past or the future, so that the only thing that mattered were the next thirty seconds. (...) Yet every time the hawk caught an animal, it pulled me back from being an animal into being a human again. That was the great puzzle, and it was played out again and again. (...) Hunting makes you animal, but the death of an animal makes you human. (...) Of all the lessons I’ve learned in my months with Mabel this is the greatest of all: that there is a world of things out there – rocks and trees and stones and grass and all the things that crawl and run and fly. They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world. (...) In my time with Mabel I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not.

Excerpts from the fascinating and intoxicating book, H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (2014), on a relationship between a woman and a goshawk; a Human and Nature, through an archaeology of grief.

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A couple of incidences

A surprising thing happened to me: I suddenly forgot which comes first -- 7 or 8. I went off to the neighbours and asked them what they thought on the subject. Just imagine their and my surprise when they suddenly discovered that they too couldn't recall how to count: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 they remembered, but they'd forgotten what followed. We all went to the overpriced food shop, the Gastronom on the corner of Znamenskaya and Basseynaya street, and put our quandary to the cashier. The cashier smiled sadly, pulled a small hammer out of her mouth and, twitching her nose a bit, said -- I should think seven comes after eight whenever eight comes after seven. We thanked the cashier and joyfully ran out of the shop. But then, having thought about the cashier's words, we got depressed again, since her words seemed to us to be devoid of any sense. What were we to do? We went to the Summer Garden and started counting the trees there. But, getting as far as 6, we stopped and began to argue: in the opinion of some, 7 came next, and in the opinion of others -- 8. We would have argued for ages, but fortunately then some child fell off a park bench and broke both his jaw-bones. This distracted us from our argument. And then we dispersed homewards.

A certain old woman, out of excessive curiosity, fell out of a window, plummeted to the ground, and was smashed to pieces. Another old woman leaned out of the window and began looking at the remains of the first one, but she also, out of excessive curiosity, fell out of the window, plummeted to the ground and was smashed to pieces. Then a third old woman plummeted from the window, then a fourth, then a fifth. By the time a sixth old woman had plummeted down, I was fed up watching them, and went off to Mal'tsevisky Market where, it was said, a knitted shawl had been given to a certain blind man. 

And so on one occasion Petrakov wanted to lie down for a sleep but, lying down, he missed the bed. He hit the floor so hard that he just lies on the floor and can't get up.  And so Petrakov made a supreme effort and got up on all fours. But his strength deserted him and he again fell down on his stomach and just lies there.  Petrakov lay on the floor for five hours. At first he just lay there and then he fell asleep.  Sleep restored Petrakov's energy. He awoke completely refreshed, got up, walked up and down the room and lay down cautiously on the bed. 'Well — he thought — now I'll have a sleep.' But he just didn't feel sleepy. Petrakov turns over on to one side and then the other, but cannot get to sleep at all. And that's just about it.

Daniil Kharms, Incidences, ca. 1930.

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We are what we know. For me the thirst for knowledge was evidenced throughout the journey (...) Equally important is my passion for work, which I consider one of life's gifts. By the same token, I feel that drive for success should not come at the expense of respect for others or personal contentment (...) With passion, contentment and optimism, I cannot see how anyone can fail. It may seem that I am offering a formula for success. I don't know an exact formula that applies universally, but one thing is clear to me — we must have a dream, if we are to cross the boundaries of the ordinary.

A. Zewail, Voyage through Time, P234

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“ From a 1989 VHS. The story of how the great Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov conceived and created his masterpiece 'Lolita', told in his own words and those of Antonia Byatt, Martin Amis, Edmund White, his son Dmitri Nabokov and biographer and critic Brian Boyd. Also Maurice Girodias, Olympia Press.”

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“Whoever has had the opportunity to observe the lovemaking of snails will not question the seductiveness of their movements and airs, which anticipates the amorous embrace of these hermaphrodites.”

- Darwin quoting Louis Agassiz, in The Descent of Man.  As quoted in The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating  by Elisabeth Tova Bailey.

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Artist James Lewis works in the Creative Studio of the UK’s National Space Centre museum. Inspired by the work of Andrée Wallin. Check out the rest of his paintings in his website.

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Ever wondered how did Chopin look like?

This is the 3rd known photo of Chopin, the two others can be seen here. It was discovered by a Swiss physicist. According to El Pais, it was taken around 1847 in Louis-Auguste Bisson’s studio, that is 2 years before his sudden death---he was only 39---.

Here’s S. Richter’s interpretation of Polonaise N.7.