It is in the last paragraph. I'd love to see this scene in a sci-fi movie!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
Another amazing project to know, in case you survive 2012:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
- Re: Munch's Scream used as a warning sign for the next 10,000 yearsposted on 12/03/2010
There is an exhibition of Munch's works at the National Art Gallery east building in DC now. Very dark and depressing. Not worth seeing. There is another exhibition - an 16th century Italian painter's works at the same level of the same building. Funny and lively. Full of life (pun intended). Highly recommended. The Italian painter's name is Arcimboldo. - posted on 12/03/2010
Munch的画还是有得看头,有不少精品。孤独冷漠绝望,也还有阳光:
the Sun, Edvard Munch
Vampire, Edvard Munch
最近看了Munch的电影,也是北欧一路文化行,蛮不错。
那一回回历史时间表陈述,我听到日本入侵中国,许是甲午战争。Munch一家父亲
神经衷弱,母亲有柿痨,孩子一个连一个死去,那年代北欧好象都是,除非很旺的人
家。
幸好他赶上自由女权俱乐部,不过他还是反对自家人结婚,因为遗传。
走题了。 - posted on 12/03/2010
蒙克的Girls on the Pier 和 The Scream 都被天体物理学家分析过。全文在下面,我挑相关的两部分贴出来:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Celestial-Sleuth.html?c=y&page=1
Forensic Astronomer Solves Fine Arts Puzzles
By Jennifer Drapkin and Sarah Zielinski
Smithsonian magazine, April 2009
In painter Edvard Munch's Girls on the Pier, three women lean against a railing facing a body of water in which houses are reflected. A peach-colored orb appears in the sky, but, curiously, casts no reflection in the water. Is it the Moon? The Sun? Is it imaginary? Does it matter?
To Donald Olson, an astrophysicist at Texas State University, the answer to the last question is an emphatic yes. Olson solves puzzles in literature, history and art using the tools of astronomy: charts, almanacs, painstaking calculations and computer programs that map ancient skies. He is perhaps the leading practitioner of what he calls "forensic astronomy." But computers and math can take him only so far.
For Girls on the Pier, Olson and his research partner, Texas State physicist Russell Doescher, traveled to Asgardstrand, Norway, the resort town where Munch made the painting in the summer of 1901. By mapping the area and studying old postcards, the pair determined the exact location of the original pier (which had been torn down), the heights of the houses and the spot where Munch likely stood. They then retraced the paths of the Sun and the Moon across the sky at the time Munch was there.
They concluded that the setting Sun did not appear in that section of sky at that time, but the Moon did. As for the missing reflection, it was not an artistic choice, as some art historians had proposed, but a matter of optics: from the artist's perspective, the row of houses blocked it.
Reactions to the findings have varied. "Olson makes points that art historians have managed to miss, such as how Munch was a very careful observer of the natural world," says art historian Reinhold Heller, author of the 1984 biography Munch: His Life and Work. But Sue Prideaux, author of 2005's Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, offers only caustic praise. "I think that it's absolutely splendid that two such learned scientists as Don Olson and Russell Doescher bend their considerable brainpower to decoding Munch rather in the manner of crossword addicts. Photographic fidelity was never Munch's aim." Prideaux adds that Munch was interested in capturing the feeling of a moment and that objective details were of little consequence to him. As he himself once wrote, "Realism is concerned only with the external shell of nature....There are other things to be discovered, even broader avenues to be explored."
"You can't ruin a painting's mystique through technical analysis," Olson says. "It still has the same emotional impact. We are just separating the real from the unreal."
Olson, 61, began his scientific career exploring Einstein's theory of general relativity. He worked on computer simulations of the radiation near black holes and the distribution of galaxies. In other words, he spent his days inside a lab delving into topics that few people outside the lab understood. Then, one evening two decades ago, he and his wife, Marilynn, an English professor also at Texas State, attended a faculty party at which one of Marilynn's colleagues mentioned having difficulties with some passages in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales—they were loaded with astronomical references. Chaucer was no mere stargazer—he wrote an entire treatise on the astrolabe, an instrument used to calculate the positions of stars and planets—and sections of "The Franklin's Tale" deal in technical language with the prediction of a strange mammoth tide. Olson agreed to help decipher the passages. "I can remember exactly where I was standing in the room because that moment changed my life," he says of accepting that challenge.
Analyzing computer simulations of the positions of the Moon and Sun, Olson surmised that a phenomenon described by Chaucer—"And by his magic for a week or more / It seemed the rocks were gone; he'd cleared the shore"—occurred in 1340. That year, when the Sun and Moon were at their closest points to Earth, they lined up in an eclipse of the Sun; their combined gravity caused extremely high tides off the coast of Brittany.
"Most people see liberal arts on one side and sciences on the other, but I get to break those barriers down," Olson says, though he admits that he now gives relativity relatively short shrift. "I would love to know what happened before the Big Bang," he says, "but I don't think I'm smart enough to figure that out." He adds that he prefers "problems that are challenging but solvable."
--------------------
Olson delved into Munch's best-known work, The Scream, in 1995. About the time Munch painted it, in 1893, the artist wrote himself a note—which Olson read with the help of Norwegian dictionaries—about a walk he had taken at sunset years earlier, on which "a flaming sword of blood slashed open the vault of heaven—the atmosphere turned to blood—with glaring tongues of fire...and truly I heard a great scream."
In Oslo, Olson located the road featured in a sketch for the painting. Details in it—a cliff, a road with a railing and an island in a fjord—indicated to Olson that Munch must have been facing southwest when he drew it. Olson concluded that the painting's blood-red sky was no metaphor but the extraordinary aftereffects of the 1883 eruption of Mount Krakatoa in Indonesia, which sent so much gas and ash into the atmosphere that skies were darkened or colored worldwide for many months.
Some Munch experts have challenged Olson's interpretation. Biographer Prideaux points out that Munch expressed contempt for realism in painting and "stated that his purpose was to paint the vision of the soul." Furthermore, "you'd hardly call the figure [in The Scream] realist, so why the sky?" And art historian Jeffery Howe of Boston College notes that Munch didn't paint The Scream until ten years after Krakatoa erupted. Howe admits that Munch "might have remembered the scene and painted it later," as the artist's note suggests, but Howe remains unpersuaded.
Olson insists his finding doesn't diminish Munch's creation. "How many people in Europe saw the Krakatoa twilights?" he says. "It would be hundreds of thousands, even millions. And how many people created a painting that people talk about more than a hundred years later? One. We think [our work] doesn't reduce Munch's greatness; it enhances it."
Olson now is working on an analysis of the skies in three other Munch paintings. After that, Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise. In the 1970s, John Rewald, an Impressionist scholar, asked whether the painting's sunrise might actually be a sunset. Tucker tried his hand at the problem in 1984, consulting period maps and photographs of Le Havre, where Monet painted the piece, and concluded that the artist had indeed captured a sunrise. But, he said, "I would be more than happy to be corrected, and if [Olson] were able to bring scientific [and] astronomical issues to bear, all the better."
Whatever his findings, Olson's forays into art and literature are likely to keep stirring the debate about the sources of great art. His work may not change the way we see Munch or Adams or Chaucer, but it does tell us at least a bit about their three-dimensional worlds. And from there, we can see where the true genius begins.
- posted on 12/04/2010
Arcimboldo 是画蔬菜瓜果人的,自然透着喜庆。:)
这张the Sun风格迥异,简直不能相信是Munch画的,不过真是漂亮。
我要是小麦转的这个天体物理学家这么有趣的工作就好了。。。对了,新编Sherlock有
一集好像就在抄这个人的故事:Sherlock发现博物馆的vermeer是赝品,因为天空上
的星星的位置与年代不符。
这个事情好玩的地方是:要设计一个一万年以后的人也看得懂的警告牌。文字是不
可靠的,因为还没有一个存活一万年之久的文字,今后也不能保证英文,中文等能
存活那么久。但是我看用Scream也有点悬:如果人类都灭绝了,或者进化得面目全
非了,那么看到这画的生物是否还能意识到这是危险信号?
- Re: Munch's Scream used as a warning sign for the next 10,000 yearsposted on 12/05/2010
Susan wrote:
但是我看用Scream也有点悬:如果人类都灭绝了,或者进化得面目全
非了,那么看到这画的生物是否还能意识到这是危险信号?
人类大概不会care非人类能不能意识到这是危险信号. 通常情况下,任何一国会为外国人特意做语言上的安全标注吗? - posted on 12/06/2010
现在那里就用六国语言标注,就是考虑到新墨西哥州可能有一天会被讲中文或阿拉伯
文的人控制啊!将来人类与外星人交流频繁,像Valcan, Klingon 什么的外星语言
也会加上去。:)
说起语言,碰到这篇文章:The World's 10 most influential Languages。
http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/reprints/weber/rep-weber.htm
讲中文的这段好玩:
Chinese is a language whose speakers are noticeably disinterested in spreading its use outside their own people. Although Chinese is not really one but several languages held together by a common script, we shall disregard such finer distinctions here and call all these Chinese languages (usually and misleadingly called dialects) Chinese. It is a tenet of the language business that in order to penetrate a market you have to know its language. This may apply to most markets but China is different. Like any other people, the Chinese appreciate it if a foreigner makes the effort to learn their language, but they do not appreciate it if the foreigner succeeds. To tell the Chinese that their language is fiendlishly difficult and practically impossible to learn, cheers up their whole day. Everybody may feel proud to have mastered something that is too complex for most others. The Chinese have elevated this feeling into a national art form. A foreigner who speaks or (worse still) writes excellent Chinese is regarded with grave suspicion. Foreign visitors to China, diplomats as well as businessmen, have been known to pretend to a far lower knowledge of the language than they actually possessed. Not unlike the Japanese, the Chinese prefer to deal with foreigners in English.
小麦 wrote:
Susan wrote:
但是我看用Scream也有点悬:如果人类都灭绝了,或者进化得面目全
非了,那么看到这画的生物是否还能意识到这是危险信号?
人类大概不会care非人类能不能意识到这是危险信号. 通常情况下,任何一国会为外国人特意做语言上的安全标注吗? - posted on 12/07/2010
Susan wrote:
现在那里就用六国语言标注,就是考虑到新墨西哥州可能有一天会被讲中文或阿拉伯
文的人控制啊!将来人类与外星人交流频繁,像Valcan, Klingon 什么的外星语言
也会加上去。:)
嗯,我心胸狭隘地觉着这个标注formality的意义大于关心谁谁安危的意义。这六国语言从你给的链接上来看是:
“This information will be recorded in the six official languages of the United Nations (English, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Arabic) as well as the Native American Navajo language native to the region."
你刚刚给的“The World's 10 most influential Languages”的头六名是:
English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese.
将来如果要考虑加外星语言上去,这个外星国大概得符合以下两种情况之一:
1)特有势力;
或者
2)特不喜欢守规矩,像东南亚某些国家的警告牌专用中文写一样。
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