Skinner's Room: 01/06/2009

Tuesday, 30 June 2009

devant la

Send us, we beseech thee, in this our necessity, such moderate rain and showers, that we may receive the fruits of the earth to our comfort.

maître de la pluie

Legend says that a sudden shower once fell, soaking everyone except St Médard who remained perfectly dry, because an eagle had spread its wings over him.

1525 (Night of June 7 - 8): "In 1525, during the night between Wednesday and Thursday after Whitsuntide, I had this vision in my sleep, and saw how many great waters fell from heaven. The first struck the ground about four miles away from me with such a terrible force, enormous noise and splashing that it drowned the entire countryside. I was so greatly shocked at this that I awoke before the cloudburst. And the ensuing downpour was huge. Some of the waters fell some distance away and some close by. And they came from such a height that they seemed to fall at an equally slow pace. But the very first water that hit the ground so suddenly had fallen at such velocity, and was accompanied by wind and roaring so frightening, that when I awoke my whole body trembled and I could not recover for a long time. When I arose in the morning, I painted the above as I had seen it. May the Lord turn all things to the best.
Albrecht Dürer"

Loyola - Diary of Tears

Sunday, 21 June 2009

cosmic ray

Electrical or magnetic interference inside a computer system can cause a single bit of DRAM to spontaneously flip to the opposite state. It was initially thought that this was mainly due to alpha particles emitted by contaminants in chip packaging material, but research ^[5] has shown that the majority of one-off ("soft") errors in DRAM chips occur as a result of background radiation, chiefly neutrons from cosmic ray secondaries which may change the contents of one or more memory cells, or interfere with the circuitry used to read/write them.

radiation

Sunday, 14 June 2009

Looking Glass

Her love o f paintin g hath transformed her into a picture

Hilliard is quite secretive about the painting of his 'artificial' rubies. Examination of the objects and reading of other treatises only partially reveal the technique. First a reflective base of silver is painted and then burnished. On top of this is placed a tiny blob of coloured turpentine resin using a hot needle. However, attempts to reconstruct this technique failed to produce a smooth blob as a tiny tail of resin is left behind by the needle. Studying other treatises suggested the need to apply heat from a fire to the miniature without explaining why. During reconstruction we found that the heat source allowed the resin peaks to melt into the smooth shape of the gem. Only the practical experience gained from reconstruction gave this insight.

the law

french emblems at glasgow

sans autre guide

english emblem books

An emblem book contains images and text. An emblem creates dialogue or tension between image and word. Frequently allegorical in theme, emblems were designed to engage, challenge, and instruct the audience.

Today, emblem books seem to be an unfamiliar textual form. An emblem book represents a particular kind of reading. Unlike today, the eye is not intended to move rapidly from page to page. The emblem arrests the sense, leads into the text, both image and word, to the richness of its associations. An emblem is something like a riddle, a "hieroglyph" in the Renaissance vocabulary -- what many readers considered to be a form of natural language.