Thursday, December 31, 2009

Sunday, December 27, 2009

A Walk In The Woods

Beaver Snack


.... Reminds me of one of my favorite Onion articles: Beaver Overthinking Dam

Beavers are cute.
And good role models for artists (architects & construction workers too)... being such good builders and all...


Tracks

Raccoon

Bunny

Deer

Train

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Footnote to Monet

.. At the gas station in Swanton, VT. What would Walter say...

Friday, December 25, 2009

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Chance Present

A bit more Glitz & Glitter.
Still flirting with Lady Luck?
Still deciphering the game?
Or are we stuck in a marriage of convenience & philandering with a
quick fix that has no future...

Chance History @ SFO

Gaming machines from the mechanical age.
The gears and levers of luck.
Let us try our hand.
Let us shape in wood & steel & paint that mechanism that throws
fortune our way, those channels by which our present is shaped and our
futures re-alligned.
Let us build, and in building, let us approach an understanding of the
play.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Christine Kesler & Grace Rim @ NOMA Gallery

Two Great Shows at NOMA Gallery



CHRISTINE KESLER

In A World Where You Are Possible
Through January 17th, 2010














































Christine Kesler (left) with Kelly Lynn Jones
Kesler will be a featured artist on Jones' Little Paper Planes next month!





















































*****************************************************

GRACE RIM
Flow
Through January 17th, 2010



Friday, December 18, 2009

On Display



Empty Vitrines are almost as exciting as filled ones...

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Tom Bonauro @ The Curiosity Shoppe

This book is great.
Go look at it.
It's there through December.

Passion Flowers

Red Tailed Hawk

On the corner of 24th & Florida
Right Now!!

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Like bonding with Like

This bottle was stuck in the grate but the orange of it really wanted
to be with the orange of the resting barricade. Now it is content, and
they are peaceful.

Yves?

Rain Paints A Picture

With the leaves in San Francisco.

Friday, December 11, 2009

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

"... including...

... ultraluminous galaxies that are breeding stars copiously inside shrouds of dust..."


See Explanation.  Clicking on the picture will download  the highest resolution version available.
photo by Chris Hetlage

(On what NASA expects to see with its new WISE)
FULL ARTICLE TEXT by Dennis Overbye

Saturday, December 5, 2009

New Blue Chromophore

Mn3+ in Trigonal Bipyramidal Coordination





"The researchers were trying to make compounds with novel electronic properties, mixing manganese oxide, which is black, with other chemicals and heating them to high temperatures.

Then Mas Subramanian, a professor of material sciences, noticed that one of the samples that a graduate student had just taken out of the furnace was blue."

FULL TEXT

-New York Times: Kenneth Chang



Abstract Image



"We show that trivalent manganese, Mn3+, imparts an intense blue color to oxides when it is introduced at dilution in trigonal bipyramidal coordination. Our optical measurements and first-principles density functional theory calculations indicate that the blue color results from an intense absorption in the red/green region. This absorption is due in turn to a symmetry-allowed optical transition between the valence-band maximum, composed of Mn 3dx2y2,xy states strongly hybridized with O 2px,y states, and the narrow Mn 3dz2-based conduction-band minimum. We begin by demonstrating and explaining the effect using a well-defined prototype system: the hexagonal YMnO3−YInO3 solid solution. We then show that the behavior is a general feature of diluted Mn3+ in this coordination environment."
-Journal of the American Chemical Society