Feb 16 2023 - Fire Falls in Yosemite

 

This is the month when for three weeks there is an amazing phenomenon. Horsetail Falls on the east side of El Capitan is lit up by the sun for about 10 minutes a day towards sunset.  It looks like flowing fire.  To see this display reservations are required.  There's almost a full page of how to get them on the Yosemite website. And then the rules and regulations about being there. How does this natural phenomenon work?  Horsetail Fall must be flowing - it is an ephemeral waterfall so can be dry or not flowing.  Then the sky must be clear without cloud cover or haze. It occurs during a short time during sunset.  It is about 10 minutes. And how was this figured out? Ansel Adams had a picture of the falls in 1959, but no mention was made of the fire effect. There are no records by white settlers or native tribes either.  It was in 1973 when a hiker took a picture of the firefall and shared it later.  Looking at this picture below, doesn't it seem strange that this wasn't seen and recorded?  This comes from Dave Koch at PetaPixel and he provides all the information needed for photographers.  It is HERE.  He's got various shots taken with his numerous cameras.  And they are absolutely wonderful.   And this picture of Winterthur Spring Bank was taken a few years ago in April.  Today there are Crocuses blooming on the Spring Bank - I would assume millions of them.  They call them Tommis - latin name is Tommasinianus and is the earliest crocus.  When will mine bloom?  Early April - months away.  But  we do get Snowdrops in February and they are showing their tiny white flowers - they just don't want to open up yet. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

June 5 2022 - The Breadwinner

 

Breadwinner is tagged at the year 1821.  Bread is thought to have been a literal use, and winner from the verb "struggle for, work at." One who supplies a living for himself and others, especially a family. The tradition is to refer to the male head of the household. Bread was the staple of the time and for the overall general referential term for food.  The first Oxford citation is from Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel: “I was under no Necessity of seeking my Bread.”  So it was likely in use before the 1821 tagged origin. Bread and dough have come to be slang for money.  That came about in the mid-1800s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The guess is that it became slang reflecting the earlier use of bread for livelihood. And what about dough meaning money? There's no trace of the first slang usage of dough. The earliest printed use of dough as a slang for money was in 1851. "He thinks he will pick his way out of the Society’s embarrassments, provided he can get sufficient dough.” The quote appeared in the Yale Tomahawk, a publication of Yale's Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity. One blog writer called bread and dough the fraternal twins of monetary slang.  Here's the one bread and dough monetary joke:  I feel like I should invest in Dough Might sound crazy, but over time it'll make me a lot of bread I saw this is the 2018 archives and am so impressed with the beautiful stairway and stonework.  This is Winterthur.   Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

April 9 2022 - Canada and the US

 

Today we take a look at how Canada and the US compare.  There are places where we are similar and others where we are different.  Canadians have a keen sense of comparison whereas Americans hardly notice the country and citizens to the north of them. There are  many arenas and avenues that this comparison plays out as competition.  Some are formal - such as hockey.  Others make their way into jokes and sayings.    Here is an example: After digging to a depth of 10 feet last year outside Buffalo New York,  scientists found traces of copper cable dating back 100 years. They came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 100 years ago. Not to be outdone by the New Yorkers, in the weeks that followed, a Los Angeles California archaeologist dug to a depth of 20 feet just outside Oceanside . Shortly afterward, a story in the LA Times read,  "California archaeologists report a finding of 200 year old copper cable, concluding that their ancestors already had an advanced high-tech communications network a hundred years earlier than the New Yorkers."   One week later, a local newspaper in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan reported, "After digging 30 feet deep in his pasture near the community of Kindersley, Saskatchewan, Ole Olson, a heck of an engineer and a self-taught archaeologist, reported that he found absolutely nothing. Ole has therefore concluded that 300 years ago, Saskatchewan had already gone wireless."   This wonderful meadow of blue was taken at Winterthur nearly 10 years ago in April.  Winterthur is the largest naturalistic garden in the US, filled with spring blooms: "Beginning in March, the first early spring flowers awaken along the March Bank, which dazzles us with three phases of color—white, yellow, and blue. To walk along the March Bank during those still-chilly early spring days feels like a gift, a promise of what’s to come. As March gives way to April, the 500,000 blooming sunny daffodils, purposefully laid in clusters of various cultivars, begin to take over the landscape with their bright yellow and white blooms." Today is Winterthur's Daffodil Day and Daffodil Dash - a family-friendly parade through the garden.

Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Dec 25 2020 - Fauci saysSanta's a go

 

Last year we wondered how many gifts Santa delivered.  This year we wondered if Santa should be delivering gifts.  We could have a COVID headline - Superspreader Santa delivers disease at super speed, along with a few billion gifts. But don't worry.  Dr. Anthony Fauci, now our most trusted doctor in North America,  indicated Santa was "good to go". He announced on Sesame Street that he personally traveled to the North Pole and gave him the COVID-19 vaccine:  "I measured his level of immunity and he is good to go."  I am always focused on this question of how fast and how many gifts. Here's the NORAD site with answers for me:   How Fast Does Santa’s Sleigh Go?  Santa has A LOT of work to do on Christmas Eve. This is why we are able to spot him out practicing throughout the year. So, how fast does his sleigh go when Santa has to get to more than 90 million homes on one night? It goes faster than the speed of light! The elves know all of the math, because they are responsible for helping to keep Santa’s sleigh up and running. According to the elf team in charge, his top speeds are 650 miles per second—which is 3,000 times the speed of sound! Luckily, our state-of-the-art live map is able to capture Santa’s super-fast speeds. This way you can get live updates on where he is, no matter how fast he is moving.  On this topic from the Irish Times:  "In a nutshell, quantum mechanics allows objects – including Santa, Rudolph and co – to be in many places simultaneously. That is the key ingredient, which allows for his extraordinarily efficient delivery on Christmas Eve."   Isn't this a wonderful image for a hopeful Christmas day and New Year's! This is the seahorse in the pond at the Winterthur Museum in Pennsylvania. Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

April 11 - The Moon Has So Many Places in the Sky

When I look up out the window I see the moon ver the computer in the south.  Just a few days ago, during the Supermoon it was in the west over the back garden.  It is always somewhere different.  I never know where to look.  What makes it do this? "To keep the Moon in the same place at the same time every night, (i.e. to be able to say “It’s 2am - so the moon must be over the church”), the Moon would have to have an orbital period that was a fixed fraction of a day (i.e. a whole day, half a day etc). It doesn't." The moon orbits around the earth every 27.322 days.  And it orbits west to east and the earth rotes west to east, so all things in the sky move east to west. I hadn't thought about our rotation. Why don't I experience the earth move in its rotation when I jump up?  Here's a 'smart version' of my question: "If I'm standing at the equator, jump, and land 1 second later, the Earth does NOT move 1000mph (or .28 miles per second) relative to me, since my velocity while jumping is also 1000mph.  However, the Earth is moving in a circle (albeit a very large one), while I, while jumping, am moving in a straight line.  How much do I move relative to my starting point because of this? I realize it will be a miniscule amount, and not noticeable in practise, but I'd be interested in the theoretical answer." I don't need to look further - the question itself is sufficient to answer my own sufficiently. Here are some jumping jokes: My neighbor tried to wager money on whether I could jump the row of bushes between our properties... But I don't like to hedge my bets What do you call it when a thousand rabbits jump backwards? A receding hare line What does a janitor say when he jumps out of the closet? Supplies! We see a lovely bed of peonies blooming at Winterthur last May.  Winterthur is near Longwood, both south of Philadelphia.  Winterthur has America's greatest naturalistic garden and foremost Museum of American decorative and fine art objects.

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://www.blog.marilyncornwell.com Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Print me a Pizza

This Company can 3D print an entire pizza in one minute - you can watch it HERE. It makes a heart shaped pizza.  The company doing this is Beehex. It is a NASA-spinoff company that was founded to automate personalized meals for astronauts on deep-space missions. It is mostly used to decorate cakes and cookies.   There's a review of the best 3D food printers in 2018.  They range in price from $5,000 to $2,000 and print thick pastes, chocolate and 'anything formable.'  Think of this catchy phrase "Real Food, freshly printed."  Or what about this introduction:  From pixels to plate, food has become 3D printing's delicious new frontier. We did miss the 3D food and drink display at the 2019 Restaurant Canada Show in Toronto - it was in February.   But so far I don't see any 3D food printing in Toronto.  We're behind New York where one can get 3D printed chocolates using the Makerbot Replicator 2.  How about Peter Zaharatos who is a chocolate artist creating chocolate art using 3D printing. And there are eye-popping pictures at Chocedge.com  Today's pictures come from Winterthur.  The second one shows the railway station.

June 7 - Humour in the Bulletin

There are hundreds of thousands of churches and millions of church goers.  With services are every week stretching far into the past, the Church Bulletin Humour collected over the years is abundant:

1. Bertha Belch, a missionary from Africa, will be speaking tonight at Calvary Methodist. Come hear Bertha Belch all the way from Africa.
2. The Rev. Merriwether spoke briefly, much to the delight of the audience.
3. Applications are now being accepted for 2 year-old nursery workers.
4. The pastor will preach his farewell message, after which the choir will sing, “Break Forth Into Joy.”
5. Next Sunday Mrs. Vinson will be soloist for the morning service. The pastor will then speak on “It’s a Terrible Experience.”
6. The eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the church basement on Friday at 7 p.m. The congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.
7. At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be “What is Hell?”. Come early and listen to our choir practice.
8. Ushers will eat latecomers.

If you would like to see funny church signs go to this website HERE.  It also has funny church bulletin bloopers.

This year's sea horse at Winterthur is a midnight scene.

May 25 - Left and Right

Left and Right have been hijacked in Google and now retrieve left and right wing politics. One has to look for relative direction to find left and right.   I repeated the search and there's some 'smarts' in Google that now retrieves both concepts.  I knew they were watching me. So in relation to my question about direction, Wikipedia says that: "In situations where a common frame of reference is needed, it is common to use an egocentric view."  I had thought of left and right simply.  I find there are many paragraphs in Wikipedia on this.     I was drawn to the paragraph on Geometry of the natural environment: "The right-hand rule is one common way to relate the three principal directions. For many years a fundamental question in physics was whether a left-hand rule would be equivalent. Many natural structures, including human bodies, follow a certain "handedness", but it was widely assumed that nature did not distinguish the two possibilities. This changed with the discovery of parity violations in particle physics. If a sample of cobalt-60 atoms is magnetized so that they spin counterclockwise around some axis, the beta radiation resulting from their nuclear decay will be preferentially directed opposite that axis. Since counter-clockwise may be defined in terms of up, forward, and right, this experiment unambiguously differentiates left from right using only natural elements: if they were reversed, or the atoms spun clockwise, the radiation would follow the spin axis instead of being opposite to it." This means there is proof of the right-hand rule in nature. There are human cultures with no words denoting the egocentric directions. We use backwards, forwards, up, down and left, right.  They might say "move a bit to the east".   Betterphoto tells me that one of my images won second place in the landscape category.  Here it is - a picture from Winterthur a few years ago.  No azaleas blooming so beautifully this year.

And Now Here's Glenn: So You Want to Write a Fugue

Today's entry comes from Wikipedia and is our Canadian contribution to Bach through our own genius Glenn Gould.  So You Want to Write a Fugue? is a satirical composition for four voices and string quartet or four voices and piano accompaniment. It was composed by the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould and was a final piece for the television show The Anatomy of Fugue, which was broadcast on March 4, 1963 by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The work is the result of Gould’s intense study of the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, in particular Bach's late work The Art of Fugue, excerpts of which Gould had recorded in 1962. Structurally the piece is modeled on just such a Bach Fugue. The text, however, was written on the subject "So you want to write a fugue?" Both the text and the music are parodies of the rules and compositional techniques of the genre, as well as the relationship between intellectual methods and artistic intuition in the creative process (e.g., "Just forget the rules, and write one"). Lyrically, the 5-minute piece concludes tongue-in-cheek with the decision to "write a fugue right now!" The piece contains numerous quotes from various works of classical music, including the famous sequence of notes B-A-C-H, the Second Brandenburg Concerto by J. S. Bach, Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, and Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (altered from major mode to minor). "So you want to write a fugue? You've got the urge to write a fugue You've got the nerve to write a fugue So go ahead and write a fugue that we can sing Pay no heed to what we've told you Give no mind to what we've told you Just forget all that we've told you And the theory that you've read For the only way to write one Is just to plunge right in and write one So just forget the rules and write one Have a try, yes, try to write a fugue So just ignore the rules and try And the fun of it will get you And the joy of it will fetch you It's a pleasure that is bound to satisfy So why not have a try? You'll decide that John Sebastian Must have been a very personable guy But never be clever for the sake of being clever For a canon in inversion is a dangerous diversion And a bit of augmentation is a serious temptation While a stretto diminution is an obvious solution Never be clever for the sake of being clever For the sake of showing off It's rather awesome, isn't it? And when you've finished writing it I think you'll find a great joy in it (hope so) Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained, they say But still it is rather hard to start Well, let us try Right now? (yes, why not) We're going to write a fugue We're going to write a good one We're going to write a fugue right now! Here's the YouTube of Glenn Gould and the performance:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s4TKOaUZ7c We enjoy the preview of Spring in pictures today.

So You Want to Write a Fugue by Glenn Gould

This is Celebrate Bach Day on Google. Bach's final composition was missing its 'final' page.  Did it go missing?  Did he compose it it but had not written it down?  Did he deliberately leave it incomplete, by that meaning, is that what he intended? So are there 47 bars missing? How do we know this?  This number is the result of much analysis and thinking.  What is known is that in these bars, Bach would have combined the main theme of the entire work with the other three themes of his final fugue. There have been many written completions by others.   How many?  I haven't found that answer.  But there's a lot of time between 1750 when Bach died and the 19th century when the Bach Revival occurred. And even more time to our 21st century.  All the great composers have referenced Bach, so this unfinished fugue has received much attention. There was a period of decline in his popularity after his death in 1750.  The decline is easy to explain.  His work was so complex that few could perform it. He did not pursue publication of the majority of his work - only the final compositions.  Most of his work was created for teaching.  And the musical trend after him was towards simple, more homophonic sounds.  His music manuscripts were dispersed to students and inheritors, who did not actively preserve it.  What did persevere was the use of his music for teaching keyboarding and counterpoint. So a gap occurred between his death and 1781.  The Revival was supposedly sparked by Felix Mendelssohn's performance of the St. Matthew Passion in 1829.  Current thinking is that this performance was a major milestone along the way, rather than the beginning. His son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach left a large collection of his father's manuscripts to the German state library after his death in 1788. There they were made publicly available. His biography was published in 1802 and it is considered key to the Bach Revival.   Most mysterious at the last notes in the fugue is a note in the handwriting of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, stating:  "At the point where the composer introduces the name BACH [for which the English notation would be B♭–A–C–B♮] in the countersubject to this fugue, the composer died."  How wonderfully dramatic, but it has been successfully questioned and disputed based on Bach's declining abilities before he died.   That question of "How many completions are there of the Unfinished Fugue?" still intrigues me.  But I found this in theepochtimes.com article.  And it seems so satisfying as the conclusive completion. "Fretwork musicians perform their own completion. There are many completions of Bach’s 15th counterpoint in “The Art of Fugue,” but Boothby’s is unique: “The parts of the fugue are proportionate to each other. The first section is 1.4 times the size of the second, and the second is 1.4 times the third, and so forth,” Boothby said. Taking that relationship to its logical conclusion, the fugue would have to be 47 bars, he explained. "

Verbing and Nouning

There is the verb 'to noun', so that means there is the word 'nouning'.  I found the term verbal noun - a noun that is morphologically related to a verb and similar to it in meaning - an example is:  Brisk walking is good exercise. I wonder if there is something that can't be 'nouned'.  What isn't a person, place, thing, quality or idea? So back to our lead line today - this is a picture of a primula dell at Winterthur last spring - a small valley, usually among trees.  This one was magnificently planted in candelabra primulas.  One of the benefits of Winterthur is that it is magnificently planted - one of the legacies of Henry Francis du Pont.  May 15th is primula day at Winterthur.  This is the view you would experience.

Resolutions

This is the day when we wish each other all the best for the new year ahead.  

It is the day when improvement goals are set in our North American culture.  New Year's Resolutions are a secular tradition, but an ancient one. The Babylonians made promises to return borrowed objects and pay their debts. There seems to be lots of advice from everyone including Harvard economists on the best goals and how to achieve them.  This is followed by all sorts of studies that show that things don't actually turn out.

May your goals and dreams for 2015 all be fulfilled.

Great Gardens Near Niagara

Hi everyone,

This image makes me wonder what is in bloom in the Winterthur Garden.  It is North America's greatest naturalistic garden.  That means that everything appears to have happened by nature, and in fact is planted and cared for.  

I went to the website as they have a very active blog and the garden is awash in daffodils.  I would guess that 'awash' there means up to millions of daffodils.  There were hillsides with the leaves showing in early April.  In my garden 'awash' would be hundreds...

Here's the plant list from last week:

 http://www.winterthur.org/pdfs/April 24 2013 bloom list 15.pdf

Also, if you go to the website, you will see a most impressive list of what's in bloom where.  It's a list of everything desirable to the spring gardener:

http://gardenblog.winterthur.org

I had the good fortune to hop on the trolley when I was there and the driver was a knowledgeable gardener and historian.  A highlight of her tidbits of knowledge is about he cow barn floor - it is made of chestnut.  It became available when the chestnut trees on the property died.  

Another bit of information is that Dupont was good friends with hybridizers and growers, so much of the extensive azalea and rhododendron garden is unnamed hybrids from well-known hybridizers.  There is a propagation program to make them available and better known.

So today's post shows the wonderful Swathmore College with its 'idyllic' grounds and Scott Arboretum so that we have the benefit of being awash in daffodills.  

This is the beautiful March Bank, early April 2013 at Winterthur:

Spring Starts...

Spring gardens are my favourite!  I planted almost a thousand bulbs each year in my 46 Orchard Crescent garden, and kept with the tradition in my new garden in Grimsby last fall.  Around the Maple tree out front was a wonderful show of Snow Drops from March through to April.  Now the Pushkinias and Scillas are starting to bloom in their pretty blues. I'd like to have my own March Bank, after the famous hillside of spring colour at Winterthur, just south of Philadelphia.  I saw it this past spring and was awed by the grand scale of the planting and the brilliant results. 

Here's a painter's version done last week.