Local wonderful Edinburgh

Daily Prompt: Local Flavor

I don’t usually do the Daily Prompt from WordPress, but today I did a typically Edinburgh thing – went out to see what is on.

Science Festival has begun – in the Magnificent setting of the National Museum a troupe of dancers from Scotland and China based their piece on the study of mathematical patterns. Whatever, quite beautiful. And very typical of Edinburgh’s free offerings, nearly always there is something something unexpected.

Janis Claxton Dance: Chaos and Contingency

Afterwards I went to a lecture on brains and scanning – quite different and also absorbing. [Thanks consultant neurologist Rustam Al-Shahi Salman and the Medical Research Council.]

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Unique

Weekly Photo Challenge: Unique

I liked the Daily Post photo of the lone red tulip among all the others, particularly because we have one of those too at the end of the road, where a lone tulip emerges each year among a plantation of daffodils. To some of us, one bulb looks pretty much like another does it not? But then it flowers, not the same at all.

But what photo can I choose? Search good old i-photo and those thousands I mean to sort out sometime … soon… maybe…

Guangzhou: Haizhuang Park

A memorial wall in Haizhuang Park temple, Guangzhou, China

This is only a small part of one of several memorial walls in the rooms at Haizhuang Temple. Each ‘card’ is about the size of a postcard. I asked permission to take a photo as I could not just point and click in the reverent atmosphere of respect.

And oh, each is indeed unique, a memory of one person. As are we all, however unknown or unimportant.

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

Weekly photo challenge: Inside

I didn’t want to take up this challenge – there seemed to be too many possible ideas impossible to convey in photo, like an egg yolk once seen is not inside any more. Then, two thoughts at once!!

I looked up from the sofa and saw this – its the view into the loft bedroom of my condo, from the living space sofa. It reminded me of one of the other meanings of “inside”.  Far too many people ‘inside’, far too many made criminal by ‘war’ on drugs, or illness post-war, mental health and education would be a better use of the money spent on more and more incarceration. But, I like these rails, they are not bars

Inside – the loft bedroom in the condo

Second thought – hard to find the photo

The Faraday Cage: In 1836, Michael Faraday observed that the charge on a charged conductor resided only on its exterior and had no influence on anything enclosed within it. To demonstrate this fact, he built a room coated with metal foil and allowed high-voltage discharges from an electrostatic generator to strike the outside of the room. Now the ‘cage’ is used e.g. for MRI scanning, and in numerous other applications like protecting electronics from unwanted fields. Google and find more, plus dozens of youtube videos of people inside them safe from electric shock. This picture is from Wikipedia.

I can’t locate Faraday’s diagram – wanted to take a photo of that, but thanks to Gutenberg, here is the paragraph where he reported his findings in the Transactions of the Royal Society, part of a long series, “Experimental Researches in Electricity” where 1174 is the paragraph number.

1174 I put a delicate gold-leaf electrometer within the cube, and then
charged the whole by an _outside_ communication, very strongly, for some
time together; but neither during the charge or after the discharge did the
electrometer or air within show the least signs of electricity. I charged
and discharged the whole arrangement in various ways, but in no case could
I obtain the least indication of an absolute charge; or of one by induction
in which the electricity of one kind had the smallest superiority in
quantity over the other. I went into the cube and lived in it, and using
lighted candles, electrometers, and all other tests of electrical states, I
could not find the least influence upon them, or indication of any thing
particular given by them, though all the time the outside of the cube was
powerfully charged, and large sparks and brushes were darting off from
every part of its outer surface. The conclusion I have come to is, that
non-conductors, as well as conductors, have never yet had an absolute and
independent charge of one electricity communicated to them, and that to all
appearance such a state of matter is impossible.

 

Detailed stuff, still in use and very relevant, sometime I must post what he said about photography , he was pretty impressed with it.

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Weekly photo challenge: Dreaming

fisherman… forever hopeful…  tonight… maybe…

Fishing

Weekly photo challenge: Dreaming

Fleeting moment – July 3rd

This is a response to the Weekly photo challenge – Fleeting Moment Not an emotional choice, Maybe too many of them, but maybe worth an aaagh ooogh aaagh

Why do we use the fleeting spectacle of fireworks to celebrate the not-so-fleeting moments of history like Independence Day? Posting today, Independence Day July 4th 2012, there will be lots of fireworks and celebrations here.

July 3rd, fireworks on Block Island watched from the Hogpen