Giant Ginkgo

I just stumbled across a review of this book in the CSMonitor: ENVISIONING SCIENCE: The Design and Craft of the Science Image By Felice Frankel

After checking out these images from the book, I know it is at the top of my list of things to purchase. Besides, it has ferrofluid in it, which is some insanely cool stuff.

I was hoping to score a ticket to the KMFDM concert tonight at Metro but I was out of luck since it was sold out. I wandered down to Belmont and picked up some new CDs. Hopefully I will get around to reviewing them after I get a chance to listen to them. Here is what I got:

• Peter Gabriel Long Walk Home: Music from the Rabbit-Proof Fence
• the baldwin brothers Cooking with Lasers
• Tom Waits Blood Money
• Die Form Suspiria de Profundis
• Bjork Debut

I'm listening to the Peter Gabriel album right now, and it is quite beautiful. It isn't as good as Passion but I definitely recommend it so far. It is another instrumental score with a focus on the regional instruments and music from the area that the movie takes place in (Australia).

Following up on the storm watching last night, came this new information about the formation of summer thunderstorms in the US.

I remember watching the space shuttle footage of large storm chains producing beautiful patterns of lightning in the IMAX film Blue Planet; somehow the lightning in one end of the storm cluster would set off other storms nearby. I wonder if anybody has figured out what the mechanism for those bursts are yet.

When I was watching the storms last night, I was thinking about the sprites and elves that eminate out of the tops of the thunderstorms. While some of the electrical discharges (Check out the photos!) are fairly well understood, scientists are still at a loss to explain the blue jets and gamma-ray bursts. It wasn't until the mid-90s that it was even confirmed that the phenomena existed.

It amazes me just how little we know about the world immediately around us...

On the way home from a quiet evening at Chase Cafe, I stopped at the end of the pier on Pratt and watched the lightning arc through the clouds over southwest Chicago and Lake Michigan to the north. The beach has been one of my favorite places to sit back, relax, and find myself again in.

For some reason or another, I feel much more connected to Lake Michigan than the Gulf of Mexico (when I lived in Florida). Every time I see the Lake I am amazed at the enormous range of color and the intensity that it can possess over the course of a day. When I moved here, I hadn't given it a second thought. Since then, it has become a part of me and I don't want to move far away from it. It has become synonymous with Chicago for me.

You should have seen the moon tonight! It was probably the creepiest, most disturbing I have ever seen it. It was a dark, dead orange and parially obscured by sinuous clouds. The moon looked like death, or something from Dhalgren.

I love it when the Mulberry trees start to drop their fruit onto the sidewalk, the patterns that form are quite lovely to look at. And the berries are tasty to boot! I didn't know that they were an alien pest, brought over to start an industry that never got going.

Perhaps starlings are the primary spreader of the plant. It would be a rather amusing synergy between two pests.

I'm not quite sure what to think about this new form of plastic that is being covered in Wired Magazine. While I am all for the idea of biodegradable materials, I can't help but wonder about what hidden costs there are in this new type of materials. All too often the eco-miracle turns out to have a very dark side.

Is that all that it really breaks down into? Or are there other ingredients that are currently considered 'safe' because nobody has actually sat down and tested them properly. And what happens when there is high humidity? Will your plastic containers start to get gooey around the edges?

What happens when you put posters of Britney Spears in the NYC transit system. I've seen similar stuff here in Chicago, but nothing quite as systematic.

Stanislaw Lem's Solaris is being remade by James Cameron and Steven Soderbergh. The Soviet movie version is a very slow and ponderous work that is considered to the be Russian the answer to 2001. The original takes a while to really get roling (there are other Soviet films that are much slower BTW!); which loses a lot of Americans who can't handle the pacing. It is a shame, because it is a good film.

I've seen a number of people gasp and complain about the idea of remaking this movie... The only thing I really have to say is 'Have you read the book?' Stanislaw Lem was one of the best science fiction authors in the world. When I first read the novel, I was really enraptured by the descriptions of a world which transcends human understanding. Will the new movie come closer to capturing it?

Neo 623A is an interesting Kazaa client for OS X that doesn't actually go through the proper network, instead it runs a port scan on an IP address range. It reminds me of the anti-piracy tools that are currently being used that scan people's hard drives. The interesting question is, is it legal for anyone to run a port scan these days, even if it is in the name of anti-piracy?

I've been spending this morning getting my shiny new web site up and running, I've decided to use Movable Type for my blog interface since it is easy to set up and use on the server side. I had originally planned on using Radio Userland, but I decided against it since the program resides on a local machine. I definitely prefer being able to create new entries from anywhere that has net access.

I just wanted to see what would happen if I filled out the additional text field.