More Art, Then Science
jfiore | May 18, 2009What do you expect when you pick up an autobiography of a rock musician? Sex? Drugs? Rock-n-roll exploits with a chainsaw and a gallon of baby oil at the Ramada? Scandalous stories of band-mates and sundry hangers-on? You get virtually none of that in Bill Bruford The Autobiography. It's much better. Insightful, entertaining, and well-written, Bruford gives the reader a unique view into his 40 year career as a drummer to see just how he got to where he is and precisely how this business works (or doesn't, as the case may be). You don't have to be a follower of his music or even a drummer to…
jfiore | December 29, 2008And now for something almost completely different on The Refuge: How well can you count? No, not like in grade school. I wrote and recorded a tune the other day. It's called Timmy Umbwebwe Lights A Candle (yes, I have a thing for odd titles). The initial beat was composed on the drum kit. Not that I planned it this way, but it turns out that the main theme is comprised of three measures of 9/8 followed by a measure of 13/8. This counting is somewhat "plastic" though, and if you prefer you can think of it as alternating measures of 5/8 and 4/8 with an extra measure of 4/8 thrown in at the end…
jfiore | December 2, 2008Well, at least Stevie Van Zandt and Britain's Youth Music seem to think so. A recent article in The Times refers to research by Youth Music indicating that the games have prompted upwards of 2.5 million children to take up musical instruments.
I'm skeptical. No doubt the games are a lot of fun for people who can't play a musical instrument and they're probably preferable to your average shoot-em-up. Further, it's a decent wager that they do pique interest to the point where the kiddies bug mom and dad to buy them a guitar or a drum kit. But these games, while they mimic real instruments, are…
jfiore | November 21, 2008Today would've been Magritte's 110th birthday. The Google homepage has an homage to the Belgian surrealist painter, a combination of the works The Son of Man and Golconda.
I've been attracted to his work for many years and have a reproduction of The Son of Man in my office and a lovely little Golconda magnet on the 'fridge.
bushwells | November 9, 2008A few regulars who drop by for grooming sessions and pant-hoots at the Refuge are probably aware that I am a long time J. Robert Oppenheimer fangrrl, or more accurately at my age, a fancrone. So when I discovered that Doctor Atomic was playing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, I impulsively bought tickets for yesterday's matinee performance and invited two friends to accompany me.
Gerald Finley as Oppie (left) and Richard Paul Fink as Edward Teller, right.
More below the cut.
John Adams' and Peter Sellars' (no, not the Dr. Strangelove species) opera focuses on J. Robert Oppenheimer and…
jfiore | June 19, 2008As part of my continuing adventures in drumming symmetry, I have been working on a dual electronic hi-hat pedal. The idea is to have a single hi-hat pad respond equally well to either a left or a right foot pedal. It is similar to having both left and right kick drum pedals. For the hi-hat, this effect is sometimes realized through the use of a switch, but that requires some extra motion and it's not possible to use both pedals at the same time. These pedals (both an FD-7 and an FD-8) are used with a Roland TD20 drum controller. The hi-hat pedal uses a resistive position sensor to indicate…
bushwells | April 2, 2008So. It's National Poetry Month. Type that key phrase into the "search" query field on the main page of SB, and you'll find that April brings forth a veritable poetry slam among Science Bloggers. In this fine tradition, I will don my black trousers, turtleneck, jaunty (but dirty) beret, take a drag from my half-smoked Gauloise ciggie and go Boho here with a selection from the original Botanical Pornographer, Erasmus Darwin, Charles' grandfather. Today, I have chosen his ode to digitalis. Cue bongo drums.
Bolster'd with down, amid a thousand wants,
Pale Dropsy rears his bloated form,…
bushwells | December 3, 2007Guido Daniele is a superb illustrator. I've seen some of his sportswear bodypainting, for example, check out this track suit:
Yes, he is naked.
I had not encountered his hand critters. This really gives a whole new meaning to flipping the bird.
If you can tolerate the barrage of advertisements, Animal Planet features videos of Signor Daniele creating handworks.
I realize that these images have made the blog rounds before, but hey, we geriatrics tend to repeat ourselves. The level of detail is amazing and straddles the boundary between the avant-garde and scientific illustration. Most…
jfiore | November 1, 2007In previous installments in the DIY NME series, I've looked at the application of symmetrical motor patterns using the drum kit. For this entry, the approach is a little different and says something about "handedness" as well. A few months ago I rearranged my semi-symmetrical drum kit into what I call the super symmetrical kit. The original semi-sym kit offered a centered hi-hat and three toms on each side, decreasing in pitch from front-center to rear. The remaining cymbals were arranged in a more-or-less typical configuration for a right-hander (ride to the right, crashes arrayed as desired…
bushwells | October 4, 2007Last Saturday (09/29) found me ambling around the DeCordova Sculpture Park in Lincoln MA. When I lived in Cambridge and indulged in hobbyjogging with a few other women, the sculpture park was a frequent pit (bathroom) stop during our long weekend runs on the Lincoln Conservation Trust trail system. In the summer, these runs were often followed by a cooling plunge into Walden Pond. Sorry about the brief nostalgic reverie, but hey, I'm old. It happens.
The DeCordova highlights contemporary sculpture with some pieces on permanent display and others as temporary installations. Sculptures…
bushwells | September 27, 2007Richard Dawkin's Unweaving the Rainbow: Science Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder is on my active reading docket. The book has been around for a while (published in 1998), but it's proving to be a most enjoyable discovery as I continue to read it. So far, I concur with complete reviews' take on the book. It is a marvelous paean to the majesty and artistry of science. Dawkins' sense of wonder very much resonates with my own - that feeling of transcendence when I look at light shining through green leaves or the transformations of calculations that are revealed as a colorful abstract…
bushwells | September 19, 2007Via Technovelgy - Where Science Meets Fiction, here's an article on a wild display surface upon which small panels move with precision and "ripple," creating strange, almost biologically protoplasmic motion:
HypoSurface Walls Are Full of Life.
Bill Christensen, the author of the Technovelgy article on HypoSurface notes that this technology is a close approximation of science fiction writer J.G. Ballard's warped domiciles:
HypoSurface is a pretty good implementation of the plastex walls in J.G. Ballard's psychotropic houses from his 1960's Vermillion Sands stories:
It was a beautiful room all…
bushwells | May 15, 2007Deep in my heart, I knew you'd leave. They said you'd never stay. But I couldn't come to grips with it. I convinced myself that you'd be with us forever. The mournful winds across the sere landscape of downtown Princeton say otherwise.
Like Writer's Block before it (see Tasha O'Neil's Photography for an excellent set of Writer's Block photos), Quark Park was intended as a temporary installation. The bare lot behind the sign is the future site of a condominium complex in bustling downtown Princeton.
From May 4, 2007:
Contrast this to the September 2006 scene...
My tart little review…
bushwells | April 25, 2007How many oratorios begin with a song celebrating biogenesis and conclude with an epilogue advising us to be good caretakers of our four billion year old home? As far as I know, only one and that would be Lifetime: Songs of Life and Evolution by David Haines. Lifetime had its North American premiere at the Kresge Auditorium at MIT last Saturday, April 21.
The oratorio, which celebrates evolution and life on Earth is part of this week's Cambridge Science Festival. The the great man himself was there all the way from South Devon, UK, to play the piano accompaniment and direct the North…
bushwells | February 14, 2007I took a pretty circuitous path to becoming a biochemist.
When I was six, I wanted to be a paleontologist, influenced by the "dinosaurs are cool" factor and my older (much older) sister's college textbooks which I attempted to read, trying to get a grasp of evolution. Then, I wanted to be a zoologist, specializing in mammology. Next, I imagined that I would be an astrophysicist (my brother's a physicist...not an astro- kind but a solid state physicist), and by the time I was in high school, I thought I'd be a good psychiatrist what with all my angst-ridden teenaged friends coming to me for…
bushwells | February 9, 2007These otherworldly blossoms have no genus and species so I'll reach back to my plant taxonomy class and name them Chihuliensis fabulosa.
These were spotted at the Dale Chihuly exhibit in the New York Botanical Garden last fall.
For more realistic glass flowers, if you're in Cambridge MA, be sure to check out the glass flower collection, which receives a four pant-hoot rating on the Bushwellian scale of cool and unusual things to see in the Boston area, at the Harvard Museum of Natural History:
This unique collection of over 3,000 models was created by the glass artisans, Leopold…
bushwells | February 7, 2007 Mr. Beck's evocative text...
Then the overdressed fitness-jogger types carrying gallon jugs of water or grog, huffing like crazy and staring grimly at the ground. I'm not sure if I was last, but I do know that my not-so-novel strategy of trying to escape my morass of perambulatory incompetence by swinging my arms in furious, powerful arcs resebling George Foreman uppercuts didn't do shit for my pace or standing.
...deserves an illustration:
There are three more panels of this cartoon, a rare Bushwellian original, but there are bad words and stuff used in the dialogue. Wouldn't want to…
jfiore | January 5, 2007Man-o-manischewitz this is some hot sh*t.
Science is wonderous, intriguing, captivating, sublime, but as Frank Zappa said, Music is the best!
Check out VC about 7:05 in.
bushwells | December 28, 2006I moved from Cambridge MA about two and a half years ago but stay in touch with friends who still reside there. I try to visit my old 'hood a few times a year. Cambridge is right up there with Madison WI as my city to which I'd most like to return. I was not only one of the many biotechies who worked in Cambridge, but also a resident and actively involved in the community, particularly through the public schools. By meeting other parents and kids of diverse backgrounds and interests, my daughter and I stumbled upon North Cambridge Family Opera (NCFO) and got hooked. She sang and I,…
jfiore | September 19, 2006I decided to do something a little different the other day. This doesn't seem to have much to do with science per se, but eventually perhaps it will. Just how sensitive are a musician's "hands" to their instrument?
For over two decades I have been playing electronic drums, designing my own in the pre-MIDI days, and currently playing a system based on a Roland TD-20 MIDI module. For many years prior I played acoustic drums. As I am not an economy size human, being a giant only in the land of dwarves and peoples of a similarly diminutive proportion who might look upon my 5'10" 142 pound frame…