20210429

Thu Apr 29 06:00:01 EDT 2021 ======================================== Slept from eleven-thirty to seven-thirty. Woke very briefly around four. A pretty good night's sleep. Cooler. Rain likely until late afternoon, then chance of rain early in the evening. Highs in the mid 50s. North winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent. Work ---------------------------------------- - follow up on VS laptop shipment Done. - follow up with RealPage about pricing Done. (Jesus, their Contact Sales form didn't work until I disabled Privacy Bader, disabled uBlock Origin, and set my machine to a non-filtering DNS server. Assholes.) - What the Heck does Dave Tracy want — a bag or a laptop? Just a bag. - contact Microsoft with 365 questions Done. - Entrata cache database Done. A rainy day outside. Rode the exercise bike for fifteen minutes at lunch. Started playing with Gophish a little. Home ---------------------------------------- Changed sheets and towels, vacuumed. Finished reading the new Murderbot book. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/james-turrell-visionary-artwork-arizona-desert-180977452/ > Turrell, who turns 78 this year, has spent half a century challenging the conventions of art. While most of his contemporaries work with paint, clay or stone, Turrell is a sculptor of light. He will arrive at a museum with a construction crew, black out the exterior windows, and build a new structure inside—creating a labyrinth of halls and chambers, which he blasts with light in such a way that glowing shapes materialize. In some pieces, a ghostly cube will appear to hover in the middle distance. In others, a 14-foot wedge of green shimmers before your eyes. One series that Turrell calls “Ganzfelds” fills the room with a neon haze. To step inside is to feel as if you are falling through a radioactive cloud. In another series, “Skyspaces,” Turrell makes a hole in the roof of a building, then winnows the edges around the opening to a sharp point. The sky above appears to flatten on the same plane as the rest of the ceiling, while supersaturated tones of light infuse the room below. > The volcano is different. It is Turrell’s most ambitious project, but also his most personal. He has spent 45 years designing a series of tunnels and chambers inside to capture celestial light. Yet Turrell has rarely allowed anyone to visit the work in progress. Known as Roden Crater, it stands 580 feet tall and nearly two miles wide. One of the tunnels that Turrell has completed is 854 feet long. When the moon passes overhead, its light streams down the tunnel, refracting through a six-foot-diameter lens and projecting an image of the moon onto an eight-foot-high disk of white marble below. The work is built to align most perfectly during the Major Lunar Standstill every 18.61 years. The next occurrence will be in April 2025. To calculate the alignment, Turrell worked closely with astronomers and astrophysicists. Because the universe is expanding, he must account for imperceptible changes in the geometry of the galaxy. He has designed the tunnel, like other features of the crater, to be most precise in about 2,000 years. Turrell’s friends sometimes joke that’s also when he’ll finish the project. > One thing I came to understand about Turrell was that, deep in his marrow, the crater was not just a vision but a kind of duty. The decades of struggle to gather funds, perfect the design and continue work on the project were culminating in the twilight of his life with a painful recognition that time was running out. Turrell had completed the first major phase of construction in the early 2000s, but a decade later, his progress was slowing, and the remaining work seemed like more than a man in his 70s could expect to complete. He had, reluctantly, shifted his focus to drafting meticulous blueprints for the crater, so that if he did not complete it, someone else could. But there was little peace in that. He seemed to be torn between the forces of obsession and mortality. > Afterward, they can climb an outdoor staircase to an area known as the Fumarole Space. It is the most complex installation at the crater, with three levels of rooms and corridors. “It’s a Faraday cage,” Turrell said, referring to a space that cannot be penetrated by electromagnetic radiation. “The only energy coming in comes from the sky.” A Skyspace admits light to a chamber with a large glass bowl at the center. The bowl is filled with water and serves as a bath where visitors may sit or lie down. Because the bowl is connected to a transducer that converts energy into sound, anyone who submerges their head in the bath will hear the radio frequencies of space. Depending on the season and time of day, the water may buzz with solar energy, or the differing tones of Neptune, Jupiter or Uranus, or the white noise of the Milky Way. When no one is in the bath, light passes through it to an expansive sphere below, and the curvature of the glass bowl acts as a lens that projects an image of the sky onto a bed of white sand. Visitors who descend into the sphere can gaze at the sand to observe clouds, glimmering stars or the shifting hues of twilight. “So it’s a radio telescope,” Turrell said, “but it’s also a camera obscura.” https://www.tor.com/2021/04/26/tordotcom-publishing-acquires-six-martha-wells-books-including-three-murderbot-diaries/ > It’s a big deal for Murderbot fans and the largest deal to date for Tordotcom Publishing: Executive Editor Lee Harris has acquired six more books by Martha Wells for the imprint! Started reading The Cloud Road. Servings: grains 3/6, fruit 1/4, vegetables 3/4, dairy 4/2, meat 2/3, nuts 0/0.5 Lunch: banana, carrots, soup, salami sandwich, coffee Dinner: naan, sausage, tomato, cucumber

< ^ txt