Scottunder

Jim Denevan's Big Ephemeral Art

I don't know much more than what his website tells me: Jim Denevan makes temporary drawings on sand, earth and ice that are eventually erased by waves and weather.

Be sure to check out this zoomable page with "the largest artwork in history" -- nine miles in circumference.

The Protean World of Ernst Haeckel

 

I first learned about Ernst Haeckel when I found his book Kunstformen der Natur online, in high-res PDF form. (You can now buy it in handy book form.) Using someone else's plotter and paper, I made some lovely posters for my apartment, but I never learned much about the man.

Last night, I watched Proteus, a 60-minute documentary about Haeckel. He was a scientist who wanted to be an artist, and vice-versa. He loved painting landscapes, but he was drawn, Goethe-like, to live in both worlds, art and science, and so he studied biology and used his extensive skill to record what he found.

He became a classic naturalist, traveling the world in search of every form nature took, but the documentary focuses on his decades-long obsession with radiolaria, the microscopic protozoa that leave uncountable varieties of mineral skeletons on seafloors throughout the world. Haeckel drew thousands of these, recording the minute variations in an impossibly beautiful, draftsman-quality hand (see above).

Haeckel became the primary proponent of Darwin's theories in Europe, and easily bridged his spiritual questions about the "first cause" with the wonder of nature he studied as closely as anyone ever could. In addition to his extensive printwork and literary output, Haeckel had some unadmirable, 19th-century ideas about race and politics. But he sure made pretty drawings.

 

Ramayana: The Divine Loophole

This is part of a two-page spread from Ramayana: The Divine Loophole, a marvelous retelling of the famous Indian epic story by Sanjay Patel.

Patel is a Pixar animator who earlier created The Little Book of Hindu Deities, also recommended.

The Ramayana is a story most people in India know something about. Vishnu, one of the three primary gods in the Hindu pantheon, needs to defeat Ravana, a powerful ten-headed demon, so he reincarnates himself on earth as the human Rama, a warrior-prince with blue skin. Rama falls in love with Sita, who gets abducted by Ravana, setting the stage for years of wandering and fighting. Along the way we meet the monkey god Hanuman, a golden deer (meeting Sita, above), shape-shifting demons, and an army of monkeys and bears. 

I particularly enjoy Patel's drawing style. In the back of the book, he provides several pages showing his hand-drawn sketches, which he scans and imports into Illustrator, where he creates his final, ultraprecise geometric artwork. Also included is a sort of biographical dictionary of everything from gods to animals. 

Here, Rama approaches the city gates of Ravana on the island of Lanka just before the final battle. 

This would be a great book to read with kids, because the text is quite short, and each turn of the page reveals a discrete chunk of the whole story. 

Lookshelves

If you're the type, like me, who always inspects the bookshelves in the homes of friends and strangers, you might like this simple site, Lookshelves. 

Here's mine.

RIP Doug Bourn

 

L-R: me, my sons Ryan and Eric (hiding) and Doug; circa 2000 at Boise Municipal Airport

RIP Doug Bourn, who died Wednesday piloting his twin-engine Cessna.

Doug was an old-school electrical engineer I worked with for ten years at IDEO. He was generous to a fault and so good-natured you couldn't imagine what he was like when angry. 

Doug loved to fly. The first time I flew with him, he took up my two young sons to take part in the 100th anniversary of the birth of flight and let them both take the controls for a spell. Later, he flew my whole family up to Boise for the start of a two-week camping trip -- we loaded his twin with so much gear, Doug had us take a picture of the unloaded plane. And a couple years after that, Doug took my son up to spend the summer in Plains, Montana, and Doug and I and another friend flew on to Kalispell and camped in Glacier National Park.

He was a thoroughly professional, cautious pilot who earned his instructor's credentials and immediately began to teach ground school after hours at IDEO. He certified many of my friends and colleagues, and continued to teach at Tesla Motors.

My life is richer from having known him. He will be missed by many.

Roger Ebert and the Meaning of Life

I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

-Roger Ebert

These words come as close to stating my version of the meaning of life as anything I can imagine writing.

Roger Ebert is a great writer. He started his career as a journalist, then became a well-known movie critic, first in print and later, most famously, on television. He loves writing about movies, but he has also written long profiles, screenplays, and other features, including a forthcoming cookbook. In the last few years, due to cancer in his jaw and its unsuccessful treatments, he has lost his speaking voice, and his ability to eat and drink. But he has turned this deficit into the best writing of his career, through the medium of his blog. He has written terrific, long-form entries on the death of his great friend and colleague, Gene Siskel; on eating and not eating; on his childhood and early reporter days; on his alcoholism; on his condition; and on a huge variety of wonderful experiences he's had in his life. He's got no time for anger anymore; even his posts on things he dislikes about the world have a tone of disappointment rather than rancor.

I liked the paragraph above when I first read it, and I'm glad to have read it again in this excellent profile of Ebert in the latest Esquire. I recommend it.

More storytelling: E.O. Wilson and the Ants

Among E.O. Wilson's many fine qualities is his status as one of the world's foremost authorities on ants (a myrmecologist). His seven-pound masterwork, The Ants (cowritten with Bert Holldobler) is perhaps the most definitive text on a single organism ever written. I have Wilson and Holldobler's smaller, more accessible version written a few years later for general readers, The Journey of the Ants. The "superorganism" aspect of ants fascinates me, even as I'm cursing them in my kitchen.

Yet I learned more about ants from reading Wilson's 6200-word short story "Trailhead" (in the Jan 25 New Yorker magazine) than I have from any of the technical books or articles I've read (or, you know, skimmed). There's a good lesson here for people who need to communicate complex information: because Wilson took his vast knowledge and put it into a narrative, even including the biological details help to propel the story of the life cycle of a colony.

Because ants live most of their lives in underground darkness, they cannot communicate through sight or sound. Pheromonal, they think only in taste and smell. The members of the Trailhead Colony transmitted their messages using about a dozen chemical signals, which they picked up by smelling one another constantly with sweeps of their antennae. An ant who was well fed said to a less well-fed nest mate, Smell this, and if you are hungry eat. If the ant approached and was in fact hungry, she extended her tongue, and the donor ant rewarded her by regurgitating liquid directly into her mouth. When a wood thrush flew by the Trailhead mound carrying a grasshopper to her own nest and dropped part of the crushed insect to the ground, a patrolling worker found it in less than a minute and triggered a chain action. The worker examined the grasshopper, tasted it briefly, then ran back to the nest entrance. On the way, she touched the tip of her abdomen repeatedly to the ground, laying down a thin trail of chemicals. Entering the nest, she rushed up to each nest mate she passed, brushing her face close to theirs. With their antennae, her nest mates detected both the trail substance and the smell of grasshopper. The signals now proclaimed, Food. I have found food. Follow my trail! Soon a mob of ants ran out, followed the trail, and gathered around the delicious grasshopper haunch. Some of the first to arrive ran back to the nest, laying trails of their own, reinforcing the message, saying, Come on, come on, we need help. The ants still by the grasshopper piece began to drag it toward the nest entrance. A catbird perched on the branch of a nearby tree saw the activity and swept down to investigate. She pecked at the grasshopper, scattering the ants and injuring several. The ants expelled a pheromone from a gland that opened at the base of their jaws. A chemical vapor spread fast. It shouted, Danger! Emergency! Run!