Award-winning art

The artist explains that she has created a "shelter" -

A sculpture made from sofas abandoned on the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland, has won a £10,000 art prize. Edinburgh College of Art graduate Emily Binks won the award for a shelter she created from discarded furniture. She will be provided with a house and studio for three months and a monthly stipend as part of the Glenfiddich Residency Award.

Ms Binks, who is originally from West Yorkshire, will also be given a budget to create new works... "I have been re-homing discarded pieces of furniture from around Edinburgh, then combining that with my experiences of being a Scout leader and my knowledge of survival skills...

The piece was chosen from 61 artists on show at the RSA New Contemporaries exhibition which opened in Edinburgh on Saturday...

I'm wondering what the losers of the competition looked like.

Atmospheric gravity waves

"The wave pattern seen in the image is not from large ocean waves, however. The pattern is of atmospheric gravity waves on the surface of the ocean. As the name implies, atmospheric gravity waves form when buoyancy pushes air up, and gravity pulls it back down. On its descent into the low-point of the wave (the trough), the air touches the surface of the ocean, roughening the water. The long, vertical dark lines show where the troughs of gravity waves have roughened the surface. The brighter regions show the crests of the atmospheric waves. Beneath the crests, the water is calm and reflects light directly back towards the sensor."

Some additional details at NASA.  These are not the same as the cosmic gravitational waves much in the news this past week.  I don't understand what's going on here, but I think it's cool.

Crows exchange trinkets for food

Eight-year-old Gabi Mann sets a bead storage container on the dining room table, and clicks the lid open. This is her most precious collection...

Gabi's relationship with the neighbourhood crows began accidentally in 2011. She was four years old, and prone to dropping food. She'd get out of the car, and a chicken nugget would tumble off her lap. A crow would rush in to recover it. Soon, the crows were watching for her, hoping for another bite.
As she got older, she rewarded their attention, by sharing her packed lunch on the way to the bus stop. Her brother joined in. Soon, crows were lining up in the afternoon to greet Gabi's bus, hoping for another feeding session...

The crows would clear the feeder of peanuts, and leave shiny trinkets on the empty tray; an earring, a hinge, a polished rock. There wasn't a pattern. Gifts showed up sporadically - anything shiny and small enough to fit in a crow's mouth...

Not all crows deliver shiny objects either. Sometimes they give the kind of presents "they would give to their mate", says Marzluff. "Courtship feeding, for example. So some people, their presents are dead baby birds that the crow brings in."  

Unfortunately the family's neighbors are not happy with this relationship:

Less enthused about the 8-year-old’s flock were her East Shelby Street neighbors, who objected to the flying, pooping horde. Two of the neighbors – Matt Ashbach and Christine Yokan – made it official Monday when they sued Gabi’s parents, Lisa and Gary Mann...

In the lawsuit, Johnsen said her clients are owed more than $200,000 for damage caused by the girl’s feathered friends. The Mann family’s neighbors say the birds’ leavings have damaged their homes and properties, and that the feeding draws rats...

Nanotechnology in ancient Rome

This jade green goblet looks red when lit from behind.

The glass chalice, known as the Lycurgus Cup because it bears a scene involving King Lycurgus of Thrace, appears jade green when lit from the front but blood-red when lit from behind—a property that puzzled scientists for decades after the museum acquired the cup in the 1950s. The mystery wasn’t solved until 1990, when researchers in England scrutinized broken fragments under a microscope and discovered that the Roman artisans were nanotechnology pioneers: They’d impregnated the glass with particles of silver and gold, ground down until they were as small as 50 nanometers in diameter, less than one-thousandth the size of a grain of table salt. The exact mixture of the precious metals suggests the Romans knew what they were doing—“an amazing feat,” says one of the researchers, archaeologist Ian Freestone of University College London.

Further explanation at Smithsonian.

One of our presidential candidates being arrested

That's Bernie Sanders on August 13, 1963, protesting against segregation.  Via Reddit.

The best video about thru-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail

YouTube link

I saw a brief video yesterday made by a thru-hiker with a Go-Pro, and emailed the link to a family member who had completed the trail last summer.  He responded by sending me the link to a much better video (embedded above).

It's a relatively long film (40 minutes) as You Tube entries go, but that length emphasizes that a 2,663-mile journey cannot be effectively captured in a brief video.

This eatery rewards courtesy

Image cropped for emphasis from the original.

"Nones" explained

Some of your friends and neighbors may be "nones" -

[Nones are] a massive group of Americans who reject any label or affiliation to describe their faith. At 23 percent of the U.S. population, this left-leaning group called “Nones” are the Democratic parallel to the GOP’s white evangelicals — except without organization, PACs, leadership and a clear agenda. They do, however, have one big expectation of political candidates: Be ethical, and go light on the God talk...

A huge group that skews under 40, white and non-immigrant, the Nones want politicians to tone it down not because they’ve made some final determination about God — the vast majority are believers — but because they are fed up with religious institutions they see as corrupt and discriminatory. And in the process, they are rewriting the country’s political discourse on morality.

Experts say the country is just beginning to feel Nones’ political power, in good part because their turnout has been low at about 12 percent — unsurprising for a disproportionately young group. But that is likely to change, with early research suggesting they are not inclined to become more religious as they grow older...

In addition to their skepticism about religious institutions, Nones share anger at secular institutions they feel are immoral, interviews show. Their political priorities include reducing big money’s influence on politics, raising wages and making college affordable. They do not trust government to police personal morality...

At the moment Nones are breaking hard for Sanders, a secular Jew who seems ambivalent about how to portray his faith. He has said he is not religious and chose to spend last Rosh Hashanah — a major Jewish holiday — speaking to evangelicals at Liberty University...

In fact, the Nones are a complex and sometimes contradictory group. They believe in God — but on their own terms. They don’t particularly want to hear about religion, but they aren’t anti-religion.

Braided hair

Image found at imgur.  Credit to the watermarked source.

Cache of Ty Cobb baseball cards found

As reported by ESPN:

Card experts in Southern California said Wednesday that they have verified the legitimacy and seven-figure total value of seven identical Ty Cobb cards from the printing period of 1909 to 1911. Before the recent find, there were only about 15 known to still exist...

The family who discovered the cards in a neglected paper bag at the run-down house of a deceased
great-grandfather has asked to remain anonymous...

The cards with Cobb, the Hall of Fame Detroit Tigers slugger, come from a lot known as T206, the group most prized by collectors. That lot also includes the Honus Wagner card, arguably the most famous sports card ever.

The back of the cards say "TY COBB -- KING OF THE SMOKING TOBACCO WORLD" in green ink.

See also:
Why you should clean your attic
A Honus Wagner baseball card
Amazing baseball cards found in attic

The musical theme of "Cinema Paradiso"

YouTube link. YouTube link. 

I'll have more to blog about this movie in the future. For now, just the superb musical theme, in two videos. The top is a live performance, apparently by the Munich Symphony Orchestra. The composer/conductor is Ennio Morricone, better known - at least to American audiences - as the composer for all of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. and Once Upon a Time in the West).

The theme for Cinema Paradisio is more lyrical and more evocative than the memorable music from the western epic films. The six-minute version embedded on top features solo performances on piano, clarinet, and flute. If you have seen the movie, this theme music may be enough to bring a tear to your eye.

If you have not seen the movie, I offer the bottom video as a lure. This three minute scene is the iconic closing moment of the movie - a movie that won the Academy Award and the Golden Globe as Best Foreign Movie, plus the Grand Prize at the Cannes film festival. If you do plan to see the movie, I highly recommend the "director's cut" - the unedited version available on DVD - rather than the shortened version that was shown in theaters, for reasons I may discuss at some future blog entry. A superb movie; it deserved all of its awards.

Reposted from 2008 to celebrate Ennio Morricone finally being awarded a well-deserved (and long-overdue) Academy Award.

"Jill's Theme" in "Once Upon a Time in the West"

YouTube link.

In an unusual but inspired move Leone had Morricone write the score before filming began, and then had the music played on the set, which not only allowed Leone to synchronize camera movements and modulate editing rhythms with the tempo of the music, but also inspired the actors to shape their performances around the rhythms of the score. The result is an unrivalled marriage of music and image.

Consider the 90-second track and crane shot that accompanies Jill’s arrival in Flagstone. As the first few notes of Jill’s Theme begin, the camera tracks with Jill as she walks to the Flagstone train station, and then, as the music continues to build, the camera slowly cranes skyward, higher and higher until it passes over the station’s rooftop, finally revealing Jill on the other side walking in the bustling, half-built Western town just as Morricone’s soaring music reaches its rhapsodic crescendo.

I never knew that; you learn something every day. More re the musical score of this movie at Notes of a Film Fanatic, a blog that should interest film buffs.

Via Old Hollywood, an excellent photo-based film blog.

Addendum:  For those who are interested in the content of the video as well as the music and are wondering why her new family didn't meet her at the train station, this video picks up where the previous one left off:

YouTube link.

Addendum #2:
Here is the same piece performed by Patricia Janečková:

YouTube link.

Quite a voice.  I believe she was 12 years old at the time of this performance.

Patricia Janečková (born 18 June 1998) is a German born Slovak opera singer. She was the winner of the Czecho–Slovak television show Talentmania (cs) in December 2010.

Her webpage is here.

Reposted to celebrate Ennio Morricone finally being awarded a well-deserved (and long-overdue) Academy Award. 

Sung-bong Choi performs on "Korea's Got Talent"

YouTube link. 

Before you watch this, think about what your life was like during the years between your 5th and 15th birthday.

The piece he is singing is an Italian song - "Nella Fantasia" ("In My Fantasy") with music by Ennio Morricone.  You can read more about the young man here.

Keep a box of tissues handy; there's a reason this video has almost 10 million hits. [That was in 2011; in 2016 the total is over 150 million hits].

Reposted from 2011 to celebrate Ennio Morricone finally being awarded a well-deserved (and long-overdue) Academy Award.

A Zamboni for a backyard rink

YouTube link.

It doesn't shave the ice, but other than that, the result looks pretty good.

p.s. - "Zamboni" explained, for those of you in freeze-deprived areas.

Via Miss Cellania.

Are the media complicit in the rise of Donald Trump?

You decide.  Here are some excerpts from a Washington Post article with comments from the CEO of CBS:

As Slate’s Jim Newell pointed out in December, each piece of major Trump news is inevitably followed by meta-commentary from journalists themselves condemning their colleagues for lavishing attention on the billionaire real estate mogul...

But with debate viewership larger than it has ever been before, television networks are certainly reaping the benefits of having celebrity merge with politics, even if it means watching the country’s would-be leaders descend into petty trash talk.

Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, shared a candid view of the presidential race on Monday: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco, the Hollywood Reporter reported, Moonves hopes to continue indulging in the “bomb-throwing” “circus” of the 2016 election cycle.

“Most of the ads are not about issues. They’re sort of like the debates,” said Moonves. “Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? … The money’s rolling in and this is fun.”

And he’s not planning on getting off the ride any time soon: “I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”