Category: Art

Artistic satellite views of the Earth

The Tibetian Plateau. Image from the satellite Landsat 5 via the Eros Image Gallery.

For the geography nerds, but perhaps also for those with an appreciation of the natural beauty of the world. The US Geological Survey has a series of satellite pictures chosen just for their sheer beauty.

The Landsat satellites that take these pictures usually photograph in more than just the human-visible color spectrum. For many geologic and environmental purposes, different infra-red wavelengths are often better for seeing details on the Earth’s surface. The USGS has a nice primer on the Landsat program. Many of the color images posted here were reconstructed from different color bands.

Yukon delta. Image from Landsat 7: Earth as Art 3 collection.

The resulting images can be exceptionally beautiful and somewhat surreal. I like that there is an abstract surface beauty, divorced from the content, meaning and understanding that a closer analysis of the images yields to the eye of the trained observer: delicate swirls of algae might be signs of eutrophication to a biologist; dendritic deltas tell the geologist about sediment load, offshore currents and mass balance.

Phytoplankton bloom around the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea is reminiscent of Van Gogh's Starry Night. Image from Landsat 7.

Northwest Passage

The poignancy and romance of exploration are distilled in Stan Rogers’ ballard “Northwest Passage“.

Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage,
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea;
Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.
–Stan Rogers (1981) from Northwest Passage.

The Bounding Main website has the lyrics, including footnotes about Franklin and the others mentioned in the song, as well as major geographic features like the Davis Strait and the Beaufort Sea.

History and art collide. The music sticks in the brain then seeps down to catch the throat. I think this is a great way to get into (spark the imagination about) Artic exploration.

The next step is, of course, Shackleton and The Endurance.

Saudade

Saudade:
Pronunciation: (from Forvo)
Definition: Portuguese – One of the most beautiful of all words, translatable or not, this word “refers to the feeling of longing for something or someone that you love and which is lost.” Fado music, a type of mournful singing, relates to saudade. (from Jason Wire at MatadorNetwork)

The beauty of the words in Jason Wire’s list, “20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World” is that they express somewhat complex emotional concepts.

Last week I had to explain the English word, nostalgia. Its meaning was a little difficult to convey because, when you think about it, to feel nostalgic you need to have had a certain amount of self-reflection. Self-reflection is typically not a strong point of early adolescence, which is why we have Personal World every day.

Then I came across Jason Wire’s list, and there are some wonderful words on there, but the one that resonates right now is the Portuguese “saudade”. I like how it is subtly different from nostalgia, but I also like that there is an entire genre of music, fado, that embodies the word.

NPR has a great review of fado artist, Ana Moura:

Also, in looking up the pronunciation of the word I came across the Forvo website. It has recordings of people saying words from around the world, so you can hear the sounds of words from native speakers. I chose the one in this post, a female Portuguese voice (), because it seems to capture the poignant emotion of the word quite well.

Songs from the East Village

When sorting through the many issues around immigration and globalization it is nice to be able to highlight the small things that make it seem worthwhile.

The East Village Community School in New York City is selling a CD, as an arts fundraiser, of songs performed by its students. The songs and musicians have roots that span the globe, from Mauritius to Tibet to Spain to Ireland to name just a few.

The CD in $15 and you can order it from the School’s website.

NPR’s Weekend Edition had a nice article on the parent driven project:

Real estate crisis

Partially developed residential project in Florida. Image from Google Maps via The Boston Globe's The Big Picture.

Two poignant intersections of the foreclosure crisis and art came to my attention recently. One is the series of aerial photos of Floridian real estate developments that never came to fruition. The other, an article on photographers who document the insides of foreclosed homes.

Both are moving in very different ways. The former in showing unfulfilled potential (although there is a good argument that many areas should never have been developed in the first place), and the latter in illustrating the debris of dreams that were broken.

NPR’s On the Media has a fascinating interview with Paul Reyes, a reporter who’s covered the foreclosure photographers. Reyes points out that while there can be a certain aesthetic that makes for striking photography, the real poignancy, particularly in these examples, comes from knowing the tragic back-story behind the images.

The On The Media article:

Finding meaning in children’s poetry

The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
‘Twas half past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t’other had slept a wink!
– From “The Duel” by Eugene Field

Metaphor for the cold war?

Children’s poetry can be simple yet contain intricate, layered meaning. Project Guttenberg has a number of nice poetry collections available. Since they’re free it’s mostly older stuff, but human nature hasn’t changed that much in the last few hundred years.

Mary E. Burt’s 1904 collection, “Poems Every Child Should Know“, contains quite the number of classics like the one excerpted above. I like it a lot because when we talk about themes and issues in texts it is usually better to start with things that are very obvious, with simple language and simple sentence structure, to reduce the cognitive load.

However, just because the language style is simple doesn’t mean we can’t very quickly get to the complex.

The meaning of art is partially, at least, subjective, depending on the values and experiences brought to by the individual. Thus we have Edna St. Vincent Millay writing about the extinction of the dinosaurs.

So. If we read “The Duel” one morning while during the cycle when we discuss the Cold War and Mutually Assured Destruction, will students make the connection?

I hope they do, because then we can broaden the context and talk about human nature and the power of the classics.

Mitosis dance

Anaphase.

One way to represent the process of mitosis is through dance. One of my students suggested they do an interpretive dance for their natural world personal project. I think they were mostly kidding, but with a fair bit of encouragement they did end up doing it.

The dance is much more literal than it probably needs to be since I helped a bit with the final product. I still think it’s pretty useful though because it’s abstract enough that you have to know the mitosis process to figure out what’s going on. So much so, I had them perform it twice at the end of our synthesis discussion. The second time through I narrated it so the steps would be clear to everyone.

I think it might make for a good “spark the imagination” lesson if one was needed.

Right now the dance needs four people, two for the chromosomes and two for the centrioles, but it would be really neat if the entire class participated by representing the cell membrane.

The diagram with the steps is: mitosis.svg. The instructions are below.

Steps

  1. The DNA (DNA 1 and DNA 2) stand facing the audience with DNA 2 hidden behind DNA 1 since the DNA have not yet duplicated.
    • The centrioles (C1 and C2) just stand there with C2 pretending not to be there.
    • DNA 1 mimes touching the nucleus walls while DNA 2 pretends not to be there.
    • DNA 1 dances the DNA helix, which probably involves lots of hand motions and spinning around taking 23 steps to represent the number of chromosomes in humans.
  2. Replicating: DNA 2 steps forward while C 2 moves around the two DNA to get to the other side
  3. The DNA join hands and spin around (because it’s fun to do, apparently)
  4. The DNA line up next to each other and lock elbows while the centrioles start extending their threads, which probably involves some type of waving hand motion.
  5. The centrioles move in, with their threads, and grab the open elbows.
  6. The centrioles pull the DNA apart.
  7. The two DNA act out the reforming of their nuclear membranes.
  8. The DNA-centriole pairs wave each other goodbye as they become separate cells. (This is where having the rest of the group as the cell membrane would be nice.)
Steps to the mitosis dance.

The Edible Schoolyard

Alice Waters has been in the news a lot recently with the recent evaluation of the Berkley School Lunch Initiative (full report).

Waters instituted a program that:

… offered cooking and garden classes integrated with selected classroom lessons along with improvements in school food and the dining environment. – Rauzon et al. (2010)

The report, which followed 5th and 6th graders into middles school, found that they knew more about nutrition and had greater preferences for fresh fruit and vegetables than students in comparable schools.

The researchers did not go into all of the ancillary benefits of gardening and cooking in the school, because the lessons tie into science and social studies curricula. Of course these benefits should be familiar to the Montessori community since Montessori advocated the erdkinder farm school for adolescents.

Diagram of squash flowers.
Diagram of squash flowers.

The Hershey Montessori School seems to be a good example of what Montessori was aiming for (as is the glimpses we get of child rearing in Mirable). We do a lot ourselves in our little program. I’ve noted before how our greenhouse and bread baking tie into math, science, social studies and art.

I sometimes think that the progression of education traces the evolution of culture and technology over the course of human history much in the way that embryonic development was supposed to recapitulate the evolutionary history of the species.

Ontology does not recapitulates phylogeny, and my observations are probably just about as accurate, but the psychosocial development of early adolescents, who are just discovering who they are and realizing their place in society and history, parallels the fundamental reorganization of human societies brought about by the emergence of agriculture.