Web Log 2010
Here is another stop animation video composed of 4000 some photographs of wood blocks, seamlessly matched with the song “Grindin” by Nobody Beats the Drum. Even if you are not fond of the music, it is a pretty impressive visual accomplishment. It really starts to take off in the second half, as the song gets a little more frantic.
Nobody Beats The Drum – Grindin’ from nobody beats the drum on Vimeo.
Just found this Kodak Retina IIIS kit today at the camera shop, and I couldn’t be more excited. I recently sold my canonett GIII rangefinder, with it’s beautiful sharp 50mm 1.9 lens, and have since been shooting an old heavy Canon FT QL. My only qualm with the Canon is that the mirror mechanism and shutter shake the whole camera. It’s quite an embarrassing spectacle. The rangefinders like the Kodak Retina, on the other hand, use a leaf shutter, which beside being able to flash sync at any speed, is whisper quiet. This kit is in great condition, and included Schneider 50mm f1.9, 135mm f4, and what I am really excited about, a wide 28mm f4. Will post my first roll when I get it back.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget how humiliatingly invalid our theories can prove to be, even if they do seem to explain what we observe with a certain amount of reliability. Not more than 300 years ago, the common consensus to explain combustion went something like this. Everything that is capable of burning, can do so because it has been endowed with a certain amount of an invisible, massless, colorless, odorless substance called Phlogiston. As the substance burns it releases it’s phlogiston into the air. Once that happens, the air becomes saturated with this phlogiston, and can hold no more, then there is sort of an equilibrium of phlogiston between the burning object and the air, then the object stops burning.
I have been listening to the Bowerbirds new album “Upper Air” pretty consistently for the last few months, and I have to say it really doesn’t seem to be getting old. I came across this great stop motion music video for their song “In Our Talons” from their 2007 release “Hymns for a Dark Horse.” I am kind of a sucker for intricate stop motion. Maybe it’s just knowing all the work that’s involved.
In my last quarter of the General Chemistry sequence we started examining something called beta-decay. It presented the possibility of essentially changing one atom into another, say start with silicon and end up with phosphorus.
This has to do with the interplay of what makes up all atoms, like everyone learned in high school, we have protons(+) and neutrons(0) in the nucleus, and a bunch of electrons(-) swarming around them. The number of protons in an atom determines the identity of the atom and are balanced by the number of electrons swarming around the atom. The neutron has no charge, so this does very little in the atom other than determine how heavy it is.
You can add and subtract neutrons from the nucleus without changing the identity of the atom. When you do this you get what are called isotopes. Each atom has a stable number of these neutrons, and when you find isotopes that are not stable, they stabilize by undergoing beta decay.
I heard a track off this guys new album on Aquarium Drunkard the other day, and it’s been stuck in my head. He’s some kind of Swedish rockabilly. His new album The Wild Hunt comes out this March, and sounds like it could be quite good. This is a performance he did for NPR for his debut album “Shallow Grave”
