Art Sunday: NGC 474 and the coming galactic set-to
NGC 474. Credit: P.-A. Duc (CEA, CFHT), Atlas 3D Collaboration. Image source: Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). All the individual points of light are stars within our own Milky Way galaxy and are in the extreme foreground. The two galaxies are 10,000 times further away than the stars. There are some other galaxies in [...]
Jerry Coyne falls into the gap
Eugene Berman, The Good Samaritan (1930). The Samaritan, a clear out-group representative from the perspective of Jesus’ audience, was plenty good. What Jesus didn’t know is that it was “evolution and secular reasoning,” and not God, that made him good. Turns out that’s what made Jesus good too. Image source: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum [...]
Job redux: Loss and the glory of the world meet in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life
Sean Penn as Jack in Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life. Penn works his world-weary visage to great effect in the film Don’t worry, there are no spoilers here. In fact, I’m having a hard time even imagining a spoiler for this film. I could tell you the whole thing and it wouldn’t change its [...]
Art Sunday: Pia Stern’s wonderful way out
Pia Stern, Rondo for Galileo. Oil on canvas, 2004-05. Used with permission of the artist I’ve been thinking a lot lately and it has kind of worn me out. I tend to live in my head. There may be some good things about this, I don’t know. But it can be a real weakness, and [...]
On sex and negative theology
Daniel Bonnell, Adam and Eve, 2011. Black crayon on grocery bag paper. See more of Bonnell’s works here. Used with permission of the artist Back in my physics grad school days I hung out with a lot of people who were students at the University’s divinity school. And several times, just for grins, I would [...]
So this guy eats some plums
The guy who ate the plums: William Carlos Williams‘s 1921 passport photo. Image source: Wikimedia Commons Look here to read William Carlos Williams’s poem This is Just to Say. Williams, the selfsame fellow who brought us the white chickens beside the red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater, published this piece in 1934. What is it about? [...]
TBSP, Reznor style
Cassini Mission from Chris Abbas on Vimeo. Make sure to full-screen it and set it on HD. Read more about it here This is really a wonderful, hypnotizing look at Saturn (tbsp) and its flying circus of rings and moons. It really capitalizes on the beautiful (dare I say haunting) grayscale images that are a [...]
The absence
Edward Hopper, Sun in an Empty Room (1963). Image source: archi-ethan.blogspot.com The Absence It is this great absence that is like a presence, that compels me to address it without hope of a reply. It is a room I enter from which someone has just gone, the vestibule for the arrival of one who has [...]
Art Sunday: Stories and numbers meet in the theater of the sky
Stanislaw Lubieniecki, Theatrum cometicum (The Theater of Comets). Amsterdam, 1666-68. Here, the sea monster Cetus seems ready to chow down on some comet. Image source: Out of this World from the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering, and Technology. The interested reader will also want to investigate Thinking Outside the Sphere, another fine online exhibition [...]
Art Sunday: Seven from Sister Wendy Beckett
Pia Stern, The Room of Longing (2008). “I saw the spirituality of her images right from the start,” said Sister Wendy of Ms. Stern’s work. Wendy’s enthusiasm for Ms. Stern made me curious, and today I’m a fan. See more of her work here. Used by permission of the artist. Click on image for a [...]
