The Art of Mario Mariotti

In going through photographs with my mother, I saw she had downloaded some striking images of hands painted to look like animals. These are the work of an Italian artist, Mario Marriotti (1936-1997), with photography by Roberto Marchiori.

Mario Mariotti was an experimental and conceptual artist who lived and worked in Florence. He began to experiment with painting his own hands in the late 1960's.  Animani, which was published in 1980, shows the colorful representations of animals Marriotti created with his hand art. Subsequent books include Umani, Rimani, Humands, Hanimations, Hand Games, and Hands Off.

Photographs of Mariotti's work also were on display at an exhibition, Animani, from November 29, 2009 through April 11, 2010 at the Instituto degli Innocenti in Florence.  This exhibition was curated by Stefano Filipponi, Francesca Mariotti, Gianni Pozzi and Andrea Rauch, and included workshops showing children how to re-create Mariotti's hand characters

In learning about Mariotti, I discovered a collaborative art project he organized in which the citizens of Florence were invited to submit images which were projected onto the exterior of the Santo Spirito during a performing arts festival.  You can see some of the striking results in  Santo Spirito Projections at the website Fictional Cities.

For your enjoyment, I've provided a slideshow of photographs by Roberto Marchiori of Marriotti's body art.

Astrophotography with FITS Liberator

Modern astronomical telescopes save their raw data in a format known as FITS (Flexible Image Transport System). The colorful images we see from space are created by transforming FITS imaging data into a standard graphical format, such as TIFF, to create a set of files that can be imported into an image editing application such as Photoshop or GIMP. If you know how to use image editing software, you can create your own "pretty pictures" of astronomical subjects by obtaining FITS files (available from a number of sources) and using the FITS Liberator to transform them into TIFF images.

FITS Liberator, developed by ESA/ESO/NASA, was originally a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop.  With the release of version 3, the open-source FITS Liberator has become a stand-alone application, with versions available for both Windows and Mac OS X.

Using FITS data I obtained from NASA's virtual observatory, SkyView, I created the above image of M51, also known as the Whirlpool Galaxy.  There are no doubt better images of M51 around, but this one is uniquely mine. Creating it was a fun learning experience.

You can learn more about FITS data and how to obtain it from The FITS Support Office
at NASA/GSFC and from Image Processing Resources for Astronomy Teaching by by the Astronomy Education Committee of the American Association of Physics Teachers.

Google Custom Search Engines

Google provides tools for creating a Customized Search Engine (CSE) that can be embedded in blogs and other websites to provide specialized searches. In this blog, for example, I might wish to provide an Astronomy search that would respond to a query for "tadpole" with a list of web pages providing information about the galaxy by that that rather than web pages about immature frogs.

Blogger has a Search Box gadget that can be configured to search over a list of links, such as the Space Exploration links listed on the side panel of this blog. I could use that to create a search that would query only the websites in the list, and this might give the kind of results I wanted in most cases. If I wanted to have a search feature like this within a post rather than on the sidebar, I could do that quickly and easily by visiting the webpage for Google's on-the-fly CSE to find code that I can add to my posting using the HTML editor.

The Blogger search box and the on-the-fly CSE are both limited to searching linked sites. With a little more effort, it's possible to create a CSE that is more finely tuned. Using Google's CSE wizard lets you create a gadget that you can embed using an automatically generated code snippet. You can later manage your CSE, editing and refining as you gain experience with its workings. Using this method, I've created a CSE for an Astronomy search and provided a gadget below that you can use to try that CSE. I haven't yet gone much beyond what the wizard creates, so you may or may not find the kind of information you're looking for. To see how it works, try searching on "tadpole," "egg," and "mice" -- and have fun comparing the orange links returned by the CSE with the sponsored links that appear above and to the right of those.

Searching Google+

When a Google+ post is public, that post is available on the Internet for anyone to see.  This allows public posts and their comments to be found using a search engine.

Suppose Ann Able adds a comment about Yosemite Falls to a post that Bob Baker puts on Google+ asking about places to hike and camp in California.  Later on Ann wants to find that comment.  If Ann remembers it was Bob who made the post, she can go into Bob's profile and look through his posts until she finds the one that includes her comment.  But suppose Ann doesn't remember who made the original post -- is there a way she can search Google+ to find her comment?  Yes there is, provided that Bob's post was public.  Using the Google search engine, Ann can enter a query that looks like this:

site:plus.google.com "Ann Able" "Yosemite Falls"

This will result in a search across all public posts on Google+ for those that include Ann's name and the keywords she provided.  The search results will show a list of all the public posts and profile pages (a) that people named Ann Able have created, commented on or shared, and (b) that also include the phrase "Yosemite Falls."  If that's a short list, Ann should be able to find her comment easily.

This same technique can be used to search for public posts and comments on a specific topic.  For example, if Ann is interested in what people are saying in public posts on Google+ about earthquakes, she might use the search query:

site:plus.google.com "earthquake"

Going back to the original example, suppose Ann wants to look at all the comments she's made on Bob's public posts.  So she tries this:

site:plus.google.com "Ann Able" "Bob Baker"

This gives her a listing of all posts and profile pages throughout Google+ that somewhere include the names Ann Able and Bob Baker.  Suppose this turns out to be a long list, in part because there are other people named Ann Able and Bob Baker.  Ann can narrow her search to the posts and profile page of the Bob Baker she knows by using Bob's ID number rather than his name.  To find that number, Ann need only look at the URL for any of Bob's posts or Bob's profile page; the ID number appears in the URL immediately after https://plus.google.com/.

For understandable reasons, these techniques only work for public posts.  Posts that are shared on a limited basis cannot be found in this way, even by those with whom the post was shared.  In the future, Google may provide a way for Google+ users to search both the public and the private posts that have entered their stream, or all the posts they have made, or all the posts they have commented on.  At this time, however, I'm not aware of any way to do these things.

Stellar Spire in the Eagle Nebula

Photo Credit: NASA, ESA, and The
Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

I enjoy viewing astrophotography.  Images from space have a special beauty, and I find that contemplating the scope of the cosmos helps to put my own small problems in perspective.

The image I'm posting today shows a spire or pillar in the Eagle Nebula, located in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way galaxy.  I enjoy the NASA news release accompanying this image as much as the image itself:

"Appearing like a winged fairy-tale creature poised on a pedestal, this object is actually a billowing tower of cold gas and dust rising from a stellar nursery called the Eagle Nebula. The soaring tower is 9.5 light-years or about 57 trillion miles high, about twice the distance from our Sun to the next nearest star.

Stars in the Eagle Nebula are born in clouds of cold hydrogen gas that reside in chaotic neighborhoods, where energy from young stars sculpts fantasy-like landscapes in the gas. The tower may be a giant incubator for those newborn stars. A torrent of ultraviolet light from a band of massive, hot, young stars [off the top of the image] is eroding the pillar.

The starlight also is responsible for illuminating the tower's rough surface. Ghostly streamers of gas can be seen boiling off this surface, creating the haze around the structure and highlighting its three-dimensional shape. The column is silhouetted against the background glow of more distant gas.

The edge of the dark hydrogen cloud at the top of the tower is resisting erosion, in a manner similar to that of brush among a field of prairie grass that is being swept up by fire. The fire quickly burns the grass but slows down when it encounters the dense brush. In this celestial case, thick clouds of hydrogen gas and dust have survived longer than their surroundings in the face of a blast of ultraviolet light from the hot, young stars.

Inside the gaseous tower, stars may be forming. Some of those stars may have been created by dense gas collapsing under gravity. Other stars may be forming due to pressure from gas that has been heated by the neighboring hot stars.

The first wave of stars may have started forming before the massive star cluster began venting its scorching light. The star birth may have begun when denser regions of cold gas within the tower started collapsing under their own weight to make stars.

The bumps and fingers of material in the center of the tower are examples of these stellar birthing areas. These regions may look small but they are roughly the size of our solar system. The fledgling stars continued to grow as they fed off the surrounding gas cloud. They abruptly stopped growing when light from the star cluster uncovered their gaseous cradles, separating them from their gas supply.

Ironically, the young cluster's intense starlight may be inducing star formation in some regions of the tower. Examples can be seen in the large, glowing clumps and finger-shaped protrusions at the top of the structure. The stars may be heating the gas at the top of the tower and creating a shock front, as seen by the bright rim of material tracing the edge of the nebula at top, left. As the heated gas expands, it acts like a battering ram, pushing against the darker cold gas. The intense pressure compresses the gas, making it easier for stars to form. This scenario may continue as the shock front moves slowly down the tower.

The dominant colors in the image were produced by gas energized by the star cluster's powerful ultraviolet light. The blue color at the top is from glowing oxygen. The red color in the lower region is from glowing hydrogen. The Eagle Nebula image was taken in November 2004 with the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope."

Savvy Google Searching -- and Beyond

In much of life, what you find depends not only on where you search but also on how you search.  This is certainly true when using Google to search the Internet.  Choosing your keywords and hitting the search button is the first step to finding the information you seek.  If it's also your last step, you may be overlooking features that can greatly improve your search experience.  Next time you do a search, check out the left-hand panel that appears with the search results.  Finding information that's outdated?  Try clicking on "Past year" or "Past month" or whatever time frame fits your search best.  Not finding quite what you wanted?  Try checking out "Related searches."  When planning a vacation, try changing your location to the city you plan to visit before you start searching for restaurants, hotels, events, etc.  I'm not going to give detailed instructions and screen shots.  The left-panel features of Google search are pretty intuitive, so it will be quicker and easier for you to just try them out.

Those who'd like to become Google power searchers, might want to check out Google's search features and then work through some master lessons on search.  If you've got a specific question about Google search, the help pages can be helpful.  And finally, if you're a webmaster, you'll want to keep track of how the pages in your site are ranked by Google.  Page Rank Checker is a convenient way to do that.

Beyond Google Search

There's useful information on the Word Wide Web that can't be found using conventional search engines.  At MakeUseOf, Saikat Basu reviews some alternative methods in 10 Search Engines to Explore the Invisible Web.  Most of the resources described are not what I'd consider search engines, but they are definitely worth knowing about.

Pseudonymous Blogging

In my last post, I mentioned pseudonymous blogging.  Boing Boing! has an article by Maggie Koerth-Baker on Pseudonyms and Science.  It provides a thoughtful and concise explanation of why pseudonyms make sense for certain kinds of blogging.  The article also provides links to further discussions of pseudonyms on the Internet.

Writing under a pseudonym was not invented with the Internet.  The custom of "pen names" is well-established.  I am entirely comfortable with Lewis Carroll, Andre Norton, George Eliot, and Mark Twain.  What I fail to understand is why pseudonymous blogging on the Internet is considered by some to be inappropriate.  As far as I know, no one is being forced to read pseudonymous blogs, which is perhaps more than can be said of Tom Sawyer.

Two Profiles, Five Photos, One Google

Last week I created a Blogger account so I could explore the interaction between Google+ and Google's blog platform.  There is a profile associated with my Blogger account, and new blogs I create show a link to this profile by default.  My Blogger profile is separate from my Google+ profile, and I think that is a good thing.  I like that my Blogger profile can use a photo that's been customized to fit in with the color scheme of my blogs.  I also favor making pseudonymous blogging available and easy.  However, it would be nice to have a box in the Blogger profile editor that says "use my Google+ profile" -- as an option, not a requirement.

Before I decided to get fancy with colors, I figured I'd save some server space by using in Blogger profile the photo I'd already uploaded for my Google+ profile.  Turns out that's not possible.  While Blogger allowed me to specify a profile photo by URL, Blogger doesn't simply use that same photo.  I know this because I ended up with four more copies of the photo in my Picasa Web Albums!

If I want my photo to display properly in my Blogger profile, I probably need to leave the copies Blogger has created and placed in an album called Blogger Pictures.  Having this separate album makes sense, as it keeps me from accidentally deleting my Blogger photo while pruning Picasa Web Albums -- though I'm not sure why four copies of my photo are necessary.

So far, as to interaction with Google+, I'm not seeing much difference between Blogger and any other blogging platform.  That may change over time.

Jupiter Portrait from NASA

NASA provides wonderful images.  This is a true color portrait of Jupiter, composed from images taken by the Cassini spacecraft on December 29, 2000, during its closest approach to the planet.

According to the NASA website:  "Everything visible on the planet is a cloud. The parallel reddish-brown and white bands, the white ovals, and the large Great Red Spot persist over many years despite the intense turbulence visible in the atmosphere. The most energetic features are the small, bright clouds to the left of the Great Red Spot and in similar locations in the northern half of the planet. These clouds grow and disappear over a few days and generate lightning. Streaks form as clouds are sheared apart by Jupiter's intense jet streams that run parallel to the colored bands. The prominent dark band in the northern half of the planet is the location of Jupiter's fastest jet stream, with eastward winds of 480 kilometers (300 miles) per hour."  "Unlike Earth, where only water condenses to form clouds, Jupiter's clouds are made of ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and water."

You can see a scalable version of this Jupiter Portrait on the NASA Images website, where you will find many other extraordinary photographs and visualizations.  For more information on the Cassini mission and its images, visit JPL's Cassini pages and the Cassini Imaging website.


Image Credit:  NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute                      

Tis Brillig

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ ”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master that’s all."

---

Some say "brillig" refers to four o'clock in the afternoon, or the time you begin broiling things for dinner.  I say it can mean whatever you choose it to mean. So in this blog, "brillig" can mean a number of different things. In making "brillig" mean so many different things, however, I am not trying to be master. Rather, I'm recognizing that "brillig" is a made-up word from a nonsense poem, and, as such, lies outside the shared conventions that govern our ordinary use of language. (There's glory for you!)

Thus brillig can mean the time of day when I write for this blog. That could be in the late afternoon, around four o'clock, or it could be later in the evening — which is when when broiling things for dinner tends to happen in my household. I find it best to write, though, when the time is available and the inspiration strikes. When that happens, tis brillig.

Brillig can mean the state of mind I experience when I come to understand something better through writing about it. I've found that explaining something to other people leads me to deeper learning than just reading or taking personal notes. So when I understand something well enough to write a short, coherent article, tis brillig.

And so I will continue to write, whether I have many readers, few readers or none at all. I write for an audience in order to write for myself. While writing to learn, though, I also seek to add something new — whether it be information, humor, juxtaposition, stimulation, explanation, interpretation, or just my personal opinion (though I try not to put too much stock in that). When I can add something usefully new, tis brillig.

Brillig also can mean a time or a state of mind for you, the reader, when you visit this site. Perhaps a search engine has brought you here quite by accident. Perhaps you followed a link on a social site because you have a little time on your hands while broiling something for dinner. Perhaps you were actually seeking information on a subject I've written about. However you got here, if you find information of use to you, understand better, see differently, make a new connection, or find something that makes you smile — tis brillig!