Posts Tagged ‘Ptolemy’
“Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition”*…
Artist Bill Domonkos:
I view my work as a collision and recombination of ideas. My process unfolds gradually and spontaneously—using found materials such as archive film footage, photographs, and the internet. I experiment by combining, altering, editing and reassembling using digital technology, special effects and animation to create a new kind of experience. I am interested in the absurd, as well as moments of sublime beauty—to renew and transform materials, experiences and ideas. The extraordinary thing about cinema is its ability to suggest the ineffable—something that cannot or should not be expressed in words, only hinted at through sounds and images. It is this elusive, dreamlike quality that informs my work.
Check out more of the work that The Boston Globe‘s Michael Hardy calls “Spooky. Hypnotic. Lush. Witty. Sublime.” at his site, and on his Tumblr, devoted to GIFs like those above.
* Max Ernst
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As we amuse ourselves with animation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that the first leap second was added to a day. The modern definition of a “second” was settled in 1874 by European scientists working from Muslim scholars’ improvement on Ptolemy’s Second Century calculations. But in the early 1960’s astronomers realized that the rotation of the earth is irregular– fundamentally, it is slowing. Coordinated Universal Time (CUT), calculated with an atomic clock, was systematically slowed each year, for a decade, to compensate…. But that meant that CUT and UTC (the time standard used by broadcasters, transportation providers, and other commercial and military users, a standard still fixed on the original definition of the “second”) were diverging. To true them up, the leap second was added to the UTC. Since 1972, a total of 25 seconds have been added– that’s to say, the Earth has slowed down 25 seconds compared to atomic time since then. (But this does not mean that days are 25 seconds longer nowadays: only the days on which the leap seconds are inserted have 86,401 instead of the usual 86,400 seconds.)
Cubed…
Nearly 40 years ago, a Hungarian architecture professor, Emo Rubik, created a puzzle to use with his design students- a puzzle with 43 quintillion possible combinations and one solution. Within five years, it had been played by over 20% of the world’s population, and has so far sold over 350 million units (not counting “unofficial” versions).
Read an interview with Rubik at CNN, and find other confounding facts (like the ones above) here.
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As we twist and turn, we might spare a thought for Ulugh Beg; he died on this date in 1449. Probably Mongolia’s greatest scientist, Beg was a Timurid ruler and sultan, a mathematician, and the greatest astronomer of his time. In his observatory in at Samarkand he discovered a number of errors in the computations of the 2nd-century Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy, whose figures were still being used; his star map (of 994 stars) was the first since Hipparchus’.
Forensic facial reconstruction
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