All posts by keith

Art

Robert Strati’s Delicate Scenes in Ink Burst from Shattered Porcelain Plates — Colossal

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Some beautiful work.

We often associate objects with memories—a stuffed bear reminds us of childhood playtime or a family heirloom of a beloved ancestor—but for Robert Strati, certain items also contain narratives of their own accord. The artist (previously) draws elaborate scenes that appear to burst from shattered porcelain plates as part of his Fragmented series. Perfectly matching ink to the design on the dinnerware, Strati expands the story within the vessel to the paper below, rendering large-scale, monochromatic scenes that seem to emanate from the original composition.

 

Source: Robert Strati’s Delicate Scenes in Ink Burst from Shattered Porcelain Plates — Colossal

Monday Musings, motivation

Monday Musings — 24JUN24

Wow, it’s Monday already. Had a terrible weekend due to chemo side effects, and have nothing reallly prepared for today.

So let’s talk about procrastination. Which I have been doing a lot of lately. I talked about this with my palliative care docs on Friday an basically everyone agrees that that I need to stick to a plan and do something daily. But how to do that and be accountable is the problem. Maybe putting it out there for everyone to see is a start.

I belong to a Zoom meeting group that meets every week day morning, and that is helping me get some rough work done, if I keep it up.

Ha ve you got tips for not procrastinating? Leave them in the comments.

That’s today’s story.

Monday Musings

Monday Musings — 17Jun24

Let’s start with a poem, about crows.

ABOUT CROWS

by John Ciardi

“The old crow is getting slow; 

the young crow is not. 

Of what the young crow does not know, 

the old crow knows a lot. 

At knowing things, 

the old crow is still the young crow’s master.

What does the old crow not know? 

How to go faster. 

The young crow flies above, below, 

and rings around the slow old crow. 

What does the fast young crow not know? 

WHERE TO GO.”

Beautiful paintings and sculpture from McCreery L. Jordan

And just for the heck of it Micheal Moorcock’s advice on how to write a novel in 3 days.

  • “If you’re going to do a piece of work in three days, you have to have everything properly prepared.”
  • “[The formula is] The Maltese Falcon. Or the Holy Grail. You use the quest theme, basically. In The Maltese Falcon it’s a lot of people after the same thing, which is the Black Bird. In Mort D’Arthur it’s also a lot of people after the same thing, which is the Holy Grail. That’s the formula for Westerns too: everybody’s after the gold of El Dorado or whatever.” (Cf the MacGuffin.)

    • Love you all. Have a great productive week–if that’s what you want. Don’t let me tell you what to do.

    Science

    Permanent gene edits to tardigrades help shed light on their amazing resilience

    “CRISPR can be an incredible tool for understanding life and aiding in useful applications that can positively impact the world. Tardigrades not only offer us a glimpse at what medical advances might be possible, but their range of remarkable traits means they had an incredible evolutionary story, one we hope to tell as we compare their genomes to closely related creatures using our new DIPA-CRIPSR-based technique.”

    Source: Permanent gene edits to tardigrades help shed light on their amazing resilience

    My favorite microscopic animal.

    Uncategorized

    Modern seeds aren’t ready for climate change: Smallholder farmers may hold the key to future food security

    Humans have radically altered the evolution of agricultural plants since World War Two, remaking our seed system with industrial agricultural practices to feed a growing population. Yet in the changing climate of decades to come, UVM researchers say, the seeds that will feed the world are in the hands of smallholder farmers.

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    In a new discussion in Plants, People, Planet, Chen and co-authors examine how the emergence of professional crop breeders have “disrupted evolutionary processes” to “reshape the entire food system.”

    The mass production of high-yielding seeds in limited varieties has created a chasmic divide between a “formal seed system,” which now sells most seeds worldwide, and the “informal seed system,” which consists of farmers who select their own seeds to develop diverse, locally adapted crop varieties, known as landraces.

    Source: Modern seeds aren’t ready for climate change: Smallholder farmers may hold the key to future food security