what? geometry?

The Daily Post at WordPress has suggested GEOMETRY for the weekly photo challenge. To me, geometry is about the underlying maths of points, straight lines, curves and intersections, surfaces and solid shapes, theorems and proofs. Artists, architects, engineers and all [even nature, look up the golden ratio, not a pop group] use it to create form, beauty, utility  and strength.

In China, many parks are laid out with geometric precision.

Photo 1: the boys do not seem to notice the beauty of the tilings underfoot

A public park between Pubei Road and Guilin Street, Shanghai.

Photo 2: The building draws the eye, but notice the tiles in the foreground, again geometric layout.

From People’s Park, Shanghai.

One of my “fond” memories of achievement is that long ago, I got 100% for geometry in Northern Ireland’s Junior Certificate of Education – BUT – I got it on THE GIRL’S PAPER !!!  In those days, in NI at least, there were different papers for girls and for boys, in subjects such as geometry where girls were assumed to need a different type of question, as they “had a different kind of aptitude”. I will never know if I could have got 100% in a more equal kind of examination.

All young people who read this blog – can you believe that sort of stuff happened, not centuries ago, but relatively recently. What do you think “we” might be assuming now which is just as silly? Or worse, damaging to development?

Weekly photo challenge: Foreign

Is it becoming harder to find the completely foreign? Shanghai Yu-yuan district

Yellow arch of MacDonalds is a frequent sight

Or – a little further north near People’s Square,

I have been told there are about 300 Starbucks in Shanghai

When I was in Shanghai Botanic Gardens with my grandsons, it just felt like “being with the boys”. Now, when I look at photos and wonder what they were thinking in each of these, it seems to me that ‘foreign’ can be anywhere unknown, in  the thoughts of another?

Ali, in the bamboo grove

and, in another part of the Botanic Gardens, some weeks later

Louis, watching the fisherman fish?

This theme made me think about what “foreign” means to me, especially as my computer is full of photos from four continents. [I'll have to try getting to the others but not making any plans.] Foreign is simply any part of a culture which is not like the place I grew up in. So Macdonalds and Starbucks are foreign, in that definition. I am comfortable in many different cultures, and uncomfortable in others, some things seem familiar, some foreign, but no way are these the same sets, they do not match.

 

Weekly photo challenge: Big

This challenge had to be some of the photos from China, but I added one from Block Island too.

Who is this big guy? [When the boys were three, they were a bit lacking in respect for Mao the warrior/scholar]

Also from China,

The Shanghai Stadium complex – so many wide roads and big big buildings, colossal statuary – like cathedrals of past eras in Europe, this is meant to induce awe, the true meaning of AWESOME [not the way WordPress uses it every time someone pushes the 'like' button.]

I prefer human size, maybe that is why I like it so much here (Block Island) where the only big is the ocean, and its power.

Why Bother to Blog? To be better?

Reblogged from elspethc:

Why Bother to Blog? The question came from MargeKatherine whom I have  just met online in this wonderful cyberland. I still do not really know if there is an etiquette about referring to someone else's blog without asking them first, but I am saying nice things. Thanks for the question MK and for the blogs of yours I have read so far.

Read more… 962 more words

Wordpress Daily Post today wrote about the value of comments. It made me want to look at what I had said before - so I decided to reblog this post from six months ago. I am more than ever appreciative of fellow bloggers and their comments, almost none from the originally intended audience for the blog.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Solitary

Weekly Photo Challenge: Solitary

I am just lucky I suppose. Being given solitary experience is a huge opportunity. There is so much to discover and then share. OK OK this is a photo challenge: Here goes

Recreation Grounds, Huangpu, Guangzhou, China, January 2011.

So, who is solitary?

The woman in silhouette?

The runner in white sweatshirt?

Not all those tower blocks with hundreds thousands millions of people?

None of them

the solitary is me behind the camera

this picture of the recreation grounds in the Huangpu district of Guangzhou was a shortcut from where my chinese in-laws lived to the nearest Starbucks, for my coffee. I took photos.

You would not believe, but I really had not taken it in,

the recreation ground belonged to the local Chinese Army Barracks

White western woman taking photos…maybe I shouldn’t be publishing here…

On my next attempt to walk through the rec, I was banned. Very polite, very young, very unshakeable chinese guards told me I could not enter.

No different from anywhere. Probably nicer than most places. I had to walk all the way round (about 3 miles of street) if I wanted that coffee.

The solitary different person does not take photos of army territory, even of innocuous running track.

I may not have been the only western person in HuangPu, though until my son arrived I might have been, Guangzhou is a huge city with many westerners, but this is not one of the areas where they usually live. I do think I was probably the only western white-haired elderly woman in the whole of the area. What on earth did I think I was doing?

 ’Solitary’ seems personal, it says “I am the only one, I’m by myself”.

An opportunity…

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Everyday never the same

Weekly Photo Challenge: Everyday Life – offers a picture of Ho Chi Minh city which shows that everyday is not typical for some of us, or that it depends where your everyday happens to be. Different lives, different cultures, different places and different ages and stages.

First – kids bathtime in a chinese apartment which only has shower facilities, but everyone knows kids like tubs, so you can buy these big plastic tubs easily in China.

Louis, Dou Dou and Ali
(Louis and Ali are brothers, Dou Dou is their cousin, all three years old)

Next one not from every day – it is girls make breakfast on Sunday. Ordinary life for this family.

Sunday Breakfast

I was going to take photos of my everyday cup of coffee, but I think I will just drink it instead!

Near and far … Contiguous

Postaday photo challenge near and far. The prompt photo is one of the most beautiful I have seen for a long time.

 

Two photos, one the visual for the prompt and one for what it made me think about!

 

first from yesterday evening, now it is September, a little cooler, a little more wind and wave, not so many tourists and the locals are on the beach every evening – my iphone can’t show the 20/30 kids and adults out paddling waiting for a wave, nor the sense of soft air and well-being I feel watching kids with health and strength and good company. But it manages “near and far” not so much as perspective, but as the sense of relative distance.

 

Surfing in September

But what did it make me think of? One of my favourite words, not often used, contiguous
It means that which is NEXT. Not near, though it might be, not far, though it might be. Depends on your point of view, where you are, and what it is you are thinking of.
Just next. CONTIGUOUS.

 

Screenshot from StarWalk app – what is ‘next’ to us in the system – depends if we are considering star or planet or galaxy.

For anyone who has been following my posts, ‘contiguous’ is another notion used by Michael Faraday in his discovery of the wave theory of electricity and magnetism – electromagnetic waves. Through years of puzzling about HOW moving magnets could produce an electrical current (one of his earlier discoveries, magnetic induction of electricity) he left Newtonian ideas centred on ‘action at a distance’ [near or far] behind.  The thoughts, theories, evidence were all over the place. I love the amazing six month delay intervals in 1840′s correspondence  with Joseph Henry in USA. Henry was inadvertently producing induction effects in the next room which hindsight says were the first recorded instance of radio waves but then-sight said what he h… is going on here? lets ask MF over in London. History is about then, not about hindsight, history of science shows scientific thinking in action, the search within confusion and the tenacity with which people kept working and thinking however the observations contradicted previous certainty, or the evidence forced them to give up a favourite theory.

 

In Michael Faraday’s experimental Diaries, hidden among pages of alternating sense and nonsense, possibilities and dead ends, hope and despair, sublime and mundane, Faraday kept on returning to ‘contiguous’, the distance between electrical effects might not be so important as that which was ‘next’. And then, there it is, as far as I know the first mention of the really truly new idea:

but what if space is not empty?

 

Once thought, it returns again and again, contiguous action and space is indeed full.

 

WAVES

 

Time to get back to surfing!!! HaHa we would not have internet surfing if we had not had Faraday and Henry and all, but we might have had water surfing on wooden planks, not the light weight wonder boards riding contiguous to the land.

 

Weekly photochallenge: Near and Far. Two great scientists across the Atlantic, were they near or far?

Brian Cooney, thankyou for this prompt and the wonderful phots of Ireland

MICHAEL FARADAY (Photo credit: roberthuffstutter)

Portrait of Joseph Henry (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Spirit – free or not free?

Weekly Photo Challenge: Free Spirit!

Are they giving away the whiskey now? Just facetious, it’s part of what often happens with me, my first thought is irreverent and needs to be censored. Try again. (Curiosity – does that happen to others often too?)

This very old favourite photo is of three very spirited sisters, my mother and two of my aunts.  [I posted it before under friendship - but that's the thing about an iconic photo - it can mean many different things.]

Three sisters, circa 1930′s

Now, they are dust ashes wormfood free. Their spirit lives on in me, and my sisters and cousins and their grandchildren. Even though the photo shows joy, these women were not free. 1920′s, 30′s … no way were they without ties or shibboleths dictating their choices, though they were adventurous they also took on responsibility and accepted those restrictions on their freedom.

Try again, “free spirit” 2012 style:

Jumping at Payne’s Dock

If this is free spirit, it is momentary – next moment she is in very very deep waters.

Freedom is in essence a freedom to take on oneself and the world, with its responsibilities and demands, if one jumps, accept the consequences too. This jumping was a joyous day.

Free Spirit – No, I think this is a fantasy, a desire, a dream. Real life with its ties is where spirit lives.

But – I expect there will be a lot of good photos coming up, it is a great theme!

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Knotty problem

Inspired by Weekly Photo Challenge: Wrong

What could be WRONG with this, lush greenery caught in the sunlight, showing the beauty of leaf and delicate shade of red on the stem?

What is wrong is that it is one of the most invasive species known, Japanese knotweed, and can be seen alongside the road in many places on Block Island. At other places one can still see the local wild vines, bramble, roses and sweet pea, but too many parts of the west side are now uniform, Fallopia japonica, syn. Polygonum cuspidatum, Reynoutria japonica (from wikipedia)

Wikipedia also says: It is a frequent colonizer of temperate riparian ecosystems, roadsides and waste places. It forms thick, dense colonies that completely crowd out any other herbaceous species and is now considered one of the worst invasive exotics in parts of the eastern United States…

and I do not know why wikipedia singles out USA here, as it is just as bad in many other countries also.

This ‘coloniser’ makes me think of other kinds of wrong, particularly those whose way of being apparently cannot bear difference, and who use their strength (economic, military, political, moral) to impose their way of being upon others, as though there was no other culture which had value and no other way of attempting a ‘good life’.

Hurray for beach roses and brambles, even the ‘prickers’. I put some other photos of variety on a previous post, here.

London now, Shanghai then, celebration

Weekly photo challenge: Purple

Colours are straightforward, except for those who cannot see them. Two of my friends are colour blind, and though they have each tried to explain how they see shadings, I cannot imagine what it is like to be without the glories and contrasts of colour. If there is a way to honour all those who are colourblind, who often stay quiet about their difference, who do not moan, just get on with living, maybe I will find a way to blog it soon. I have folders full of flowers, purple flowers, this post is a celebration of people and place.

Purple has always meant particular splendour and privilege – Porphyrogenitos, Greek for born to the purple – so I’ll start with this one, borrowed from the Guardian blog.

But I am not sure I want to celebrate too much when there is such austerity and hardship in many families. So I looked also at a personal family celebration from some years back. Chinese weddings can be quite low-key, but the photo celebrations which do not have to happen on the same day, or even in the same country, are spectacular. This wedding was in 2003.

And, staying with the chinese connection, I took this photo one evening last summer in Shanghai of the building where we were living. Shadows and light came out this way, I love it. [My Shanghai blogs are July - December 2011, try here.]

Pubei Lu from the corner with Guiping Lu