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Weak XXXIII

13 August 2024

No. 7,283 (cartoon)

Everything happens so much.

What’s the problem?

There’s too much of never enough.

14 August 2024

Easy Photography

I came across a collection of photographs made with a scanning electron microscope. The images, “gold film displaying exotic physicochemical properties ... a cerebral snapshot of a synthetically grown brain organoid ... an array of nanocellulose crystals ... dendrite generated on a zinc surface,” were great. Of course they were. Whether it’s a closeup of stem cells or a photograph of distant nebulae, any image of something invisible to the naked eye is quite likely to be visually interesting.

That’s why I doubt that I’ll ever make a photograph with a microscope, a long telescope, or even a drone: that’s just too easy, even for someone as slothful as me. I’ll continue to make images of what almost anyone could have seen or imagined, but didn’t.

15 August 2024

Home Invasion!

You may have heard stories about brazen break-ins in the wild Oakland hills. I’m sorry to report that they’re all true.

It’s an atypically hot tonight, so I left my bedroom door open. Big mistake: a masked miscreant tried to rob me. I panicked when I stared into the gnawing jaws of death so I threw an empty little box at him as a deterrent. It didn’t work: he came in to sniff it and see if I was sharing food. I finally drove him away by fiddling with my camera. The vicious killer got bored waiting for me to make a nice portrait then wandered off.

(That’s why I like to photograph inanimate objects: they’re eternally patient, don’t care about how they’re depicted, and never ask for a print.)

16 August 2024

Spacings Between Eigenvalues of Random Elements and Pizza

Calling Perfesser Hagedorn a math hombre would be more than a small fraction of an understatement. I confirmed this by reading a few chapters of the book on his bedside table, Nicholas Katz and Peter Sarnak’s Random Matrices, Frobenius Eigenvalues, and Monodromy.*

I joined him at a small dinner party tonight where he cut a pizza into six slices for the seven people at the table.

“Did you not count the number of guests before cutting up the pie?” I asked.

“Of course, I did,” he replied, “but sevenths are really tricky.”

I admire him for being a brilliant as well as a practical mathematician.

*The Internet describes the work thusly: The main topic of this book is the deep relation between the spacings between zeros of zeta and $L$-functions and spacings between eigenvalues of random elements of large compact classical groups. This relation, the Montgomery-Odlyzko law, is shown to hold for wide classes of zeta and $L$-functions over finite fields.

17 August 2024

Severed Cable

I was enjoying a nice walk with Evelyn when we spotted a curious sight by the side of the road: a severed cable. And not just any cable; this was a very thick cable comprised of hundreds and hundreds of wires inside. It was sticking out of the ground; did a construction worker accidentally sever it with a backhoe and leave without burying the evidence?

I wished I was a cartoon character and could pull the cable out until whatever was on the other end popped up ... maybe a data center would emerge from the hole.

Evelyn remarked that we have no idea what’s happening in the world. We grab our shiny pocket computers and miraculously have a video chat with a friend in Berlin without any idea of how all the underground wires, satellites, undersea cables, and radio waves that envelop us work. And then there are the coal-fired generators powering the “clean” technologies ...

I could go on but that is quite enough of that. I’ll conclude by saying that I’m pleased with my photograph of the severed cable. It ain’t art, but it is a nice little glance at an unseen world, and that’s enough for today.

18 August 2024

Bucatini no. 15 Tortilla Zia

The Zia is an ancient symbol; people were even using it before I was born. The tortilla has been around for quite a while too, so I combined one of the corn disks with my most photogenic pasta to make Bucatini no. 15 Tortilla Zia.

19 August 2024

Planar Bucatini no. 15

Alexia was visiting my studio earlier this week when I was creating Bucatini no. 15 Tortilla Zia. The photograph was relatively easy to make, but fabricating it turned out to be much more work than I’d anticipated.

I originally thought it would be easy to make a grid of eight bucatini, and I was right. Here’s where I went wrong: I failed to consider that stacking the thick pasta would have made the assemblage too thick. I wanted each piece on the same plane, and that required a printed template with lots of tape, glue, and work. I thought that I was done—twice!—when part of a delicate, brittle bucatino snapped off and I had to repair it.

“You should document how laborious this thing is to make,” she suggested. “You could write about it and puff it into a notebook entry.”

“That sounds like a lazy way to get out of work for a day,” I replied. “I like it!”

And speaking of lackadaisical, it’s time for self-congratulatory drink.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2024 David Glenn Rinehart