Category: Art

Fog on the Downs and Lake

Early morning.

The first few mornings at Heifer were cold. About five or six degrees Celcius (in the 40’s Fahrenheit) at sunrise. The large barn we slept in had been “converted” from housing horses to housing people. Apparently, horses prefer wide-open, drafty places.

But a warm sleeping bag goes a long way. And being forced to wake up just before the break of dawn does have certain advantages. I’m rarely up and about in time to capture the morning light. With the early morning fog drifting across the slopes and rising off the lake, those first few mornings were wonderful for photography.

Sunrise is usually the coldest time of day. After all, the Sun’s been down all night, and is only just about to start warming things up again. Cold air can’t hold as much moisture (water vapor) as warm air, so as the air cools down overnight the relative humidity gets higher and higher until it can’t hold any more – that’s called saturation humidity; 100% relative humidity. Then, when the air is saturated with water vapor, if it cools down just a little more, water droplets will start to form. The cooler it gets the more water is squeezed out of the air. Water vapor in the air is invisible, but the water droplets are what we see as fog. Clouds are big collections of water droplets too; clumps of fog in the sky.

Early morning fog drifts over the lake.

Butterflies in the Herb Garden

A spicebush swallowtail butterfly (Papilio troilus) in the herb garden.

At the Heifer International ranch. Time spent weeding the herb garden. Not much weeding done (by me at least), but much photography. Pretty. A word designed for butterflies.

A variegated fritillary butterfly (Euptoieta claudia) in the herb garden.
An eastern tiger swallowtail butterfly (Papilio glaucus; officially documented by Linnaeus in 1758).
A skipper (family Hesperiidae) extracts nectar from a flower in the herb garden.

Butterflies are classified as:

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Lepidoptera

References

Maggie Eisenberger, personal communication.

Opler, Paul A., Kelly Lotts, and Thomas Naberhaus, coordinators. 2011. Butterflies and Moths of North America. Bozeman, MT: Big Sky Institute. http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/ (Version 10/08/2011).

Flynn, J., 2007. Georgia Butterflies, Bibb Co. GA. http://www.shrike.net/butterflies/0-regions/bibb.htm (Accessed 10/08/2011).

The Difference Between Plagiarism and Repurposing

There’s not much of a difference between what’s being called repurposing as opposed to plagiarism, at least as far as I can tell. Andrew Sullivan excerpts from an essay to highlight Kenneth Goldsmith’s “Uncreative Writing” class where:

… students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness. …

After a semester of my forcibly suppressing a student’s “creativity” by making her plagiarize and transcribe, she will tell me how disappointed she was because, in fact, what we had accomplished was not uncreative at all; by not being “creative,” she had produced the most creative body of work in her life. By taking an opposite approach to creativity—the most trite, overused, and ill-defined concept in a writer’s training—she had emerged renewed and rejuvenated, on fire and in love again with writing.

The essence of Goldsmith’s article, however, is that creativity, these days is more built upon the work of others than ever before. No longer does the picture of a lonely, isolated artist, creating truly original work, seem to fit. Creativity these days is much more often found (and rewarded) in people who are rearranging, reimagining, and repurposing the work of others. It’s the “unoriginal genius”.

Periodic Table Spiral Galaxy

The objective is to show the shape of the whole and to express the beauty and cosmic reach of the periodic system.

— Stewart (2006): The Chemical Galaxy

Chemical Galaxy II: A new vision of the periodic system of the elements by Philip Stewart.
Periodic Table of the Elements - a traditional view by Wikimedia Commons User:Cepheus.

The traditional periodic table of the elements breaks the elements into rows as their chemical and physical characteristics repeat themselves. But since the sequence of elements is really a continuous series that gradually increases in mass, a better way of displaying them might be as the spiral, sort of like the galaxy.

When the chemical elements are arranged in order of their atomic number, they form a continuous sequence, in which certain chemical characteristics come back periodically in a regular way. This is usually shown by chopping the sequence up into sections and arranging them as a rectangular table. The alternative is to wind the sequence round in a spiral. Because the periodic repeats come at longer and longer intervals, increasing numbers of elements have to be fitted on to its coils. …

The resulting pattern resembles a galaxy, and the likeness is the basis of my design. It seems appropriate, as the chemical elements are what galaxies are made of.

…

The ‘spokes’ of the ‘galaxy’ link together elements with similar chemical characteristics. They are curved in order to keep the inner elements reasonably close together while making room for the extra elements in the outer turns.

— Stewart (2006): The Chemical Galaxy

While the spiral version of the periodic table is not used a lot, it is scientifically valid. There are other ways of representing the spiral and the periodic table itself. It all depends on what you want to show.

Benfey's spiral table first appeared in an article by Glenn Seaborg, 'Plutonium: The Ornery Element', Chemistry, June 1964, 37 (6), 12-17, on p. 14. (via Wikimedia Commons)

Indeed, Mendeleev’s monument in Bratislava, Slovakia has the elements arranged as the spokes in a wheel.

Monument to the periodic table and Dmitri Mendellev (photo by mmmdirt, caption via Wikipedia).

Creativity, Depression and Anger

[A]nger … triggers a less systematic and structured approach to the creativity task, and leads to initially higher levels of creativity. … [However] creative performance should decline over time more for angry than for sad people.

— Bass et al (2011): Creative production by angry people peaks early on, decreases over time, and is relatively unstructured

Here are a couple of studies on the interaction between negative emotions and creativity whose implications require some very careful consideration. We want to encourage creativity, but how and at what cost to the student?

Social rejection was associated with greater artistic creativity

— Akinola and Mendes (2011): The Dark Side of Creativity: Biological Vulnerability and Negative Emotions Lead to Greater Artistic Creativity

Anger

Anger, it appears, leads to more unstructured thinking, thinking that is more flexible and able to make new connections among different categories of information. However, anger’s creativity boost does not last that long – strong emotions take a toll – and people soon revert back to a more normal baseline.

These results come from an initial study, and there are a lot of unanswered questions. In particular, I wonder just how much anger is useful for this beneficial outcome. I find it hard to believe that too much anger is terrible useful. And, I’m also curious about the negative consequences in terms of group interactions. Brett Ford points out that some studies have found that anger is useful in negotiation, but only when that negotiation is confrontational. Another study found that angry leaders were better at motivating groups of less agreeable people. Conversely, more agreeable people responded better to less angry leaders.

In a scenario study, participants with lower levels of agreeableness responded more favorably to an angry leader, whereas participants with higher levels of agreeableness responded more favorably to a neutral leader.

— Kleef et al. (2010): On Angry Leaders and Agreeable Followers
How Leaders’ Emotions and Followers’ Personalities Shape Motivation and Team Performance

It seems that the ability to project anger may be a useful skill to have in one’s toolbox, given the variety of people we will have to deal with in life.

Depression and Creativity

Modupe Akinola and Wendy Berry Mendes point out that highly creative people tend to introversion, emotional sensitivity and, at the extreme, depression and other mood disorders. Unfortunately:

[M]ood disorders are 8 to 10 times more prevalent in writers and artists than in the general population (Jamison, 1993).

— Akinola and Mendes (2011): The Dark Side of Creativity

On top of the general mood, strong, more transient, activating moods, like anger and happiness, also affect a person’s ability to be creative. Both positive and negative activating moods (the hedonic tone) enhance creativity, but in different ways:

  • negative activating moods, like anger and fear, increase perseverance;
  • positive activating moods, like happiness and elatedness, increase mental flexibility.

Curiously enough, although creativity is associated with a baseline of sadness and depression, these two are not among the activating moods that can spur the creativity of the moment.

A Matter of Control

The implications of these studies are complex. I certainly need to think about them a lot more, but it would seem reasonable, or perhaps responsible, to encourage students to carefully monitor their moods and to help them better understand themselves and their behavior. Ultimately, it is probably better if we are able to control how we use our emotions, rather than the other way around.

The pre-frontal lobe, which is responsible for formal thinking, is the part of the brain that can put the brakes on impulsive emotional behavior. It can also, to a degree, modulate how emotions are expressed. As adolescents’ pre-frontal cortex develop, they should be better able to control and use their emotions to their benefit. But to do so, they need to be aware of their emotions and the power of their emotions, which would suggest training in emotional awareness and control.

I’m not aware of any programs or curricula that delve all the way into how to use your emotions proactively, but I’d like to see something that particularly discusses how to use the different activating moods.

Global Warming Art

Global temperatures (averaged from 1961-1990). Image created for Global Warming Art by Robert A. Rohde.

Talk about evoking conflicting emotions. The image is astoundingly beautiful – I particularly like the rich, intense colors – but the subject, global warming, always leaves me with sense of apprehension since it seems so unlikely that enough will be done to ameliorate it.

The source of the image, Global Warming Art has a number of excellent images, diagrams and figures. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also has lots of beautiful, weather-related diagrams. I particularly like the seasonal temperature change animation I made from their data.

Harry Potter and the Making of the Peace

Here’s a wonderfully serious piece in the magazine Foreign Policy on what the wizarding world should do to recover and reconcile now that Voldemort has finally been vanquished.

… if history teaches us anything (consider the bitter legacy still lingering from the 17th-century Goblin Wars or the recent experience of American Muggles in Iraq and Afghanistan), it is that the defeat of Voldemort by Harry Potter may have been the easy part. Indeed, one might even say it was child’s play. The hard work of postwar stabilization still lies ahead.

— Malinowski et al, 2011: Post-Conflict Potter in Foreign Policy.

It’s a bit long, but it’s worth reading at least through the first section on, “Transitional Justice and Reconciliation”.

This section points out that, sure, Voldemort’s henchmen need to be prosecuted before the law (and not just detained without charge), but it will be a lot more difficult to deal with the thousands who supported Voldemort in greater or lesser ways. After all, some of these only did what they did under threat. The article recommends a Truth and Reconciliation Commission like in South Africa.

Among their other recommendations are:

  • the breaking the monopoly of the Daily Prophet on the news media,
  • a Comprehensive Curse Ban Treaty,
  • more transparency at the Ministry of Magic,
  • a Charter on the Rights of Witches and Wizards,
  • “that the Wizengamot, the high council of Magical Great Britain, be split into separate legislative and judicial bodies,”
  • and closing Azkaban immediately.

You’ll notice that a number of these recommendations focus on expanding the rights of the individual and build in more checks and balances into government and the media. These, and the overall emphasis on building mechanisms to prevent future conflict, align well with the ideas of peace education. It might also be an interesting focus for a class discussion/Socratic dialogue.

I’d be curious to hear from any Harry Potter fans who might come across this post and have the time to read the article (even though school’s restarted and the homework’s being piled on).