All posts by keith

Art

Michelle Segre

Mandelas and Nebulas.

Michelle Segre, “I Talk to the Trees” (2021), yarns, canvas, muslin, acrylic polymer, wire, thread, sponges, and lotus root, 144 x 187 x 33 inches (all images courtesy the artist and Derek Eller Gallery, NY. Photos by Adam Reich)
Instead of looking in awe at the latest testimony to precision fabrication, we stand in front of a large handmade object in which craft is neither obvious nor fetishized. What about the fact that the yarn and the loose, impermanent weaving of frayed strips of colored cloth invite viewers to closely examine how the work was made, as we might do while looking at the layered skeins of paint in Jackson Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)” (1950)? What do we make of the disarray, the unfixed weavings and joinings? I cannot think of anyone else who makes artworks like Segre’s, particularly on this scale. And yet they don’t feel monumental or overwhelming.

More work: https://www.derekeller.com/artists/michelle-segre

Uncategorized

Quantum magnets in motion

The Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality combines classical everyday phenomena such as coffee stains with quantum mechanical spin chains in a surprising way. Credit: Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics
The behavior of microscopic quantum magnets has long been a subject taught in lectures in theoretical physics. However, investigating the dynamics of systems that are far out of equilibrium and watching them “live” has been difficult so far. Now, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching have accomplished precisely this, using a quantum gas microscope. With this tool, quantum systems can be manipulated and then imaged with such high resolution that even individual atoms are visible. The results of the experiments on linear chains of spins show that the way their orientation propagates corresponds to the so-called Kardar-Parisi-Zhang superdiffusion. This confirms a conjecture that recently emerged from theoretical considerations.
Science, Uncategorized

Heart progenitors spontaneously regenerate cardiac muscle via a tight junction ‘honeycomb’ in salamanders

However, investigating the dynamics of systems that are far out of equilibrium and watching them “live” has been difficult so far. Now, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching have accomplished precisely this, using a quantum gas microscope. With this tool, quantum systems can be manipulated and then imaged with such high resolution that even individual atoms are visible. The results of the experiments on linear chains of spins show that the way their orientation propagates corresponds to the so-called Kardar-Parisi-Zhang superdiffusion. This confirms a conjecture that recently emerged from theoretical considerations.
Uncategorized

Reading

This week I’ve been reading

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Panic Fables

The Locked Room by Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö with Paul Britten Austin (Translator)

Also

Rotten by John Lydon (Johnny Rotten)

and A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

Those last two are bit on the back burner while I read the enormous Panic Fables which I must say started as a bit of a slog, as did The locked Room, which is a murder mystery/procedural that was recommended by someone. It was gotten more interesting in the third act, but I don’t think I’ll read any more in the series. The Panic Fables is just plain crazy. A weekly strip done for about 6 years I think–conceptual comics.

Rotten is about John Lydons life, and Paradise is “A startling investigation of what people do in disasters and why it matters.”