Archive Page 48
Monday, April 7, 2008
Nick Cardy Batman Page
Nick Cardy always had a emphasis on body weigh, usually by using strong shadow areas to define shape. This page is from a 1970 issue of the DC Comics book The Brave and the Bold. Issue 390.
Click on image to enlarge to 1400 pixel width.
Nick Cardy 1970 Batman artwork page. Click to Enlarge.
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Internet to become obsolete
Some news sure to make Hollywood execs and music company bosses even more unhappy:
"...The internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.
At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.
The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.
David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.
The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe."
Complete article by Jonathan Leake from the Times UK Online here.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is being built in a circular tunnel that is buried around 50 to 175 meters underground. The tunnel is 27 meters in circumference. It straddles the Swiss and French borders on the outskirts of Geneva. A film strip about the collider which is termed as a "matter penetrator" (and even a time machine reconstructing creation) is at brightcove.com here.
Exit question: What can you do with hyper-speeds like this? Content delivery suddenly becomes super-effecient, and large screen TVs become computer monitors that much easier. Entire bank systems can have their records stolen in a matter of minutes.
You can juggle endless number of online streams and inputs from just about every device that can carry a wireless connection - - monitor your home, turn the air conditioning on and off from a remote place, etc. A doctor in London can direct and see multiple operations by video probe in the most distant places of world. Piracy goes to heights not yet experienced. Spam email will multiply like never before as spammers hijack huge data streams. The security business booms.
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Guy in Wendell North Carolina
Click to Enlarge
Wendell, North Carolina, Population 4, 447.
I drove through on the way back to Richmond, Virginia
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Truck in Washington DC, 9th and F Street
Click to enlarge to see the whole street
A special index of all Washington DC related pages is here.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Umbilicus
"...His race was like none before. It stood at a unique place in history. it joined the two halves of the world. Whitman's great vision culminates in his celebration of the spanning of our continent with rails, the closing of the gap between Europe and America with the transatlantic cable, and the opening of the Suez Canal. These completed the circle of which Columbus had drawn the first brave arc. More than commerce would flow along the new route that at last belted the whole wide earth. Why should not ideas as archaic as man himself immigrate along that line?
One reason Whitman is so interesting right now is that we do not yet know if that band around the earth is an umbilicus or a strangling cord. Albert Speer explained at Nuremburg that radio and telephone had amplified Hitler's scope and accelerated the implementation of his orders so far beyond any such power available to previous tyrants that we need a new kind of imagination to grasp how so much evil could have been done in those twelve infernal years. "
From the book Geography of the Imagination, by Guy Davenport. Page 72, essay titled "Whitman," book published originally in 1981.
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Homeless in Washington DC
Click to enlarge
Friday, April 4, 2008
Emah on the Couch
Watercolor.
Click to enlarge.
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Napoleon by Francois Rude.
This reminded me of a homeless person bedding down for the night.
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More Museum
Smithsonian American Museum of Art / National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. More about these museums and the DC area in which they dwell updated here. Map added here.
Go to Archive Page 47
