craft activity, nativity pop-up card

This post is for children. Should you find yourself with a house full of children I suggest this fun time activity. They will need their usual art supplies, plus card stock, lots of that to draw and cut and experiment with undisciplined abandon, the usual,  scissors, glue, coloring pencils, pens, or crayons, regular child's imagination. The post is lengthy with photos in an attempt to avoid words.

The idea is concentric bands that stand up. They must be made. When the paper bands are folded in half lengthwise then the length of the smashed band must fit the shortest dimension of the card.

The paper bands are divided in three for six equal sections each to make a hexagram.  I'm using a string instead of measuring. 

ostrakon

It is a shard of pottery used for practice. I had it wrong all along. When I notice the tiny black line denoting the bottom of her chin and understood it as such I became excited because the artist arrived at a solution so similar to one I painted myself. I saw my own earlier picture where before I had seen something more like Matisse, more unusual, but no, it conformed to canon and the little black line is the tell. 

mid tones

Of course the Oregon shooter is Photoshopped, or the like. It is an essential step of photography, post processing. Whereas regular people upload directly from their cameras photographs that are already compressed by the camera in order to be reasonably manageable to Instagram and to Facebook and similar sites, photographers on the other hand run all of their photographs through post processing on their home computers to get the most out of them by their own artistic eye and not by successful algorithms, before uploading or printing or both. Just as with film photography requires a developing lab that employs their personal photo developing art. Unless it is automatic. In Photoshop when using RAW format files with all the available information that can expand the full dynamic range, uncompressed files, there are two levels of post processing available, not just one level as with JPG and other compressed file formats. Yes, of course photographs are post processed to arrive at the proper tonality and this is especially important with races of people to get the skin tones just right, for blacks, to get the detail within skin tones so they don't process to blobs, and with whites for the same reason so they do wash out to ghost. With both in a photo, or with questionable correctible light, then mid tones reign supreme to balance the needs of both extremes, or, for printing, so the photograph is the most clear.

This is especially important for politicized race-obsessed American media. This man is British with mixed race parents, however, it's vitally important the media depict the man as "white supremacist" even while they contrive new races to maintain their racial insistence, "White-Hispanic" brand spanking shining neologism (itself dependent upon a contrived and objectionable ethnonym) applied to Zimmerman. It was important the tales be told and repeated just so.

At this point it can be safely assumed American media is lying to you, and for the best of  reasoning they can muster. Here, the Daily Mail did not do what all American media did do.

  

Alexis de Tocqueville

The original Alexis de Tocqueville is memory holed at a paid site. 

horse

It is the largest horse in the world. The photo posted on another website. This drawing was posted immediately after so readers of that website would already be familiar with the image.

Here's the dealio, Amelio. The Artist who draws in this style, Guillaume Azoulay, would use a dynamic horse, one that is running, not one that is standing, it must be moving, one with a wild mane and long luxurious tail, the musculature would be accentuated by line but not entirely realistically. The anatomy of the face would be technically incorrect. See examples of his early work, dancers and horses with oddly delineated musculature seemingly caught in a web.

kanji horse

hummingbird

Photographed through a screened door. Had I opened the door for a clear shot the bird would have flown off.

It's sticking its face in the petunia.

Closeup.

Another basket

Closeup.

Back to the petunias

Closeup.

I don't see many hummingbirds around here although the place is on their migration route to the mountains immediately west. This is a rare thing. They don't hang around downtown. Nevertheless I do want something to be available even as the flowers fade in the fall. I want there to be enough to satisfy travelers. Individual birds repeat specific migration patterns. If some come around they might come again another season.

This is the first feeder I made. It's among the most crude and ridiculous. Others are here on this site, use that box up there if you like for "hummingbird feeder" There are nine of them. I think.

western fires strange orange sunset #2

western fires, odd sunset

Trump to Lex Luthor to Super Trump Luthor

New Jersey rattled by earthquake

courthouse, Lafayette, Louisiana

George Clooney

seagull

metal-free zone

soaring bird

bum hunter

Wyoming man shoots homeless men while they were resting on mattresses at Center of Hope. A parks worker, the man said he was tired of cleaning up after them. 

[wyoming man shoots homeless]

Don't worry

optic fiber cable repair

ouroboros

pine tree

when the moon is in the 7th house

planter

Bernie Sanders

Straight up Vermont socialist draws crowd of 10,000 in Madison Wisconsin. 

Aaron Schock's office

Why hold back? Why the restraint? I say, if you're going post-modern, shaggy chic, flea market find brothel house gauche then go for it. Seen on Gawker. 

baby caladiums

John Audubon

I lived with a huge misapprehension having to do with a hero. I thought John Audubon possessed photographic memory. I found it amazing he had that ability and also artistic ability and also drive to use all of it together. I admired him greatly.

The fateful evening in Aspen after flipping through a coffee-table book of Audubon's work when Tom Deusterberg an older man who I had just only met told me point blank that John Audubon was bird hunter. He did not use photographic memory of glimpses of birds through his binoculars and then reconstruct the finest artistic detail in paintings from memory, say, as Mozart did music, rather he was taxidermist who shot his birds and in very large numbers and was very good at posing them. How everyone found Tom disabusing me so terribly funny. Tom shot tersely as if impatient with an idiot, "He shot them."

snails, drop of bleach

A. Rod

cylinder and string

i09

i09 solution

Puzzle stumped 96% of America's top maths students, twenty years ago. World-wide only 10% of students got it right and only 4% in the U.S. So says that article but I doubt it.

They tell you the string wraps around the cylinder 4 times, the cylinder is 4cm circumference and 12cm length. How long is the string?

This is so easy it burns because they tell you the numbers. You don't even have to solve the circumference from the ratio from the diameter, no pi, no volume of a cylinder to solve, no nothing. They veritably tell you how long the line. Then ask you how long the string. It's insane. 

If you had to solve for the circumference of the cylinder, then that would be a different story, but they tell you so that part is done for you. 4. And exactly 4 of those loops around so 16. 

Forget cm. It can be anything, inches, feet, yards, meters, snakes, dung beetles, anything. Anything at all. Forget cylinder, think: toilet paper tube or paper towel tube, 4 circumference times 4 loops and 12 length. 

Presently the loops are a coil 16 somethings in length how much must the coil stretch to go one end of the tube to the other? 12 somethings. How much will be added to the coil? 12 somethings? No, because it's like a spring, and not a straight line plus the loops. The loops themselves form part of the length because they are not proper loops but stretch to the next stretched loop, but how much? How much to add? This is the core of the problem. This is where intuition kicks in. Let your mind go fuzzy and the answer pops out. You have 16 somethings X 12 somethings with a string that goes from one corner to the other. How long is the string? 20. 

Why? Because, not as mathematician but rather as artist you know that a 16*12 square  has a 20-something cross inside it. Any such square with sides so lovely as  4:3-somethings will have an X shape of two lines of 5-something inside it. Boom. You can see it in your mind.

From doing pop-up cards and such things a origami and certainly framing. By folding squares in half and measuring the resulting diagonal, by wrapping handles with rope, or sticks with string, or pulling a spring around a post, by wrapping string for a kite. You just know to add a pinch for each incomplete loop and that pinch is 1-something for each loop to stretch to the next stretched loop and that total to add is 4-somethings more. Double intuition check, 4-somethings loop with 1-something extra times 4 loops equals 20. The string is 20.

The mathematician divides it down to 4 Pythagorean triangles added back up, but it's really one big triangle. That's how to see it.

leaders in Germany

No Putin. Leaders discussing dumping Greece. 

dragonfly

stop comparing

Juxtaposing her photo with similar things went on for awhile then it stopped.