Mars, showing the southern ice cap
All this hoopla about Mars being closer to Earth than it has been in 50,000 years is interesting, especially because, even with backyard equipment, you can witness Mars melting right before your eyes.
Dog days of summer….not much to blog.
Arf!
The Blue Lagoon, near Reykjavik, Iceland.
I’ve always wanted to go to Iceland. I don’t know why, but I’m drawn to the north and the barrens.
Today I found a travelogue of a trip to Iceland last year undertaken by Sky and Telescope writer Paul Deans. It just reinforced my desire to go there.
If i had US$2775, I might consider this trip for myself. There’s no question it would make great blogging material…
Fountain Monument
Robert Smithson – Monuments of Passaic
The American sculpter and landscape artist Robert Smithson has a website containing drawings, films, photographs and writings. Much of his art plays with maps and scrawls on both the literal and metaphorical landscape. In the late 1960s he fell in with a bunch of artisits who were playing with the ideas of monuments, messing with the notions of time, marking, remembrance and location that define monuments.
Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future…They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages. They are involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than in representing the long spaces of centuries. Both past and future are placed into an objective present. This kind of time has little or no space; it is stationary and without movement, it is going nowhere, it is anti-Newtonian, as well as being instant, and is against the wheels of the time-clock.
— Robert Smithson, Entropy and the New Monuments
Link via Caterina
At CBC they have recently been discussing the redesign of cities and a beautiful and thought provoking flash presentation called Visionary Cities has been put up at CBC Webone. On it are clips and photos on preserving urban nature, honouring the past, and creating user friendly spaces. And if you read nothing more, the looped soundtrack consisting of a uniquely Canadian soundscape of water, wind, loons, traffic, children playing, crickets and other elements is a great wall of sound to bring a few minutes of relaxation to your day.