Color!

Color has always fascinated me. I was reminded of this yesterday when my mom sent me to the pit of doom to hang up 25 pieces of laundry (oh gnoes!). It was quite a challenge, until I found the baskets of laundry behind the door. It's much easier to do a job when you have the right materials. So, back to relating this to color. I had hung several shirts when I looked up and realized that I had subconsciously been hanging them in the order of the color wheel (incidentally, I purposefully do this very thing in my own closet, which probably explains why I started hanging everyone else's clothes that way). I had hung almost all the green shirts and had just put up a few blue ones. So I continued the trend and hung them all in color order! It made the job so much more interesting. Since it has been brought to my attention once more that I love colors, I'll ramble about it for a bit today. I'm sorry if you get annoyed by the fact that I'll be typing every color-word in it's color, but I just can't resist. I promise I probably won't do it again.


Just consider the very concept of colors for a second.










Aren't you fascinated? You should be. I mean, think about how it occurs. Certain molecules are shaped so that they reflect only certain wavelengths of light. The specialized cells in the eye then receive the waves of light and interpret them into this idea that we call color. See, look! They did it just then so you could read the word! Astonishing! Of course your eye only do this if you're not colorblind, and if you were I would show one of the shirts I received for Christmas and then laugh at the fact that you would have no way of knowing why I was laughing.

And then there's the whole idea of colored light and colored pigments being very different. We generally thing of colors in terms of pigments (or at least I do, since I've been working with them as paints and pencils for most of the past week), meaning that we think of the primary colors as red, yellow, and blue, and that white is the absence of pigmentation and black is all colors. Thinking about it this way makes me happy because it can be easily seen and tested by me with things I have sitting around that I really should be putting to other uses. At the same time, it gives me great joy to ponder colored light (which is much different) because I really don't exactly understand how it works, and being confused can be a pleasant relief. How on earth can green be a basic color while yellow isn't? I can grasp that black is the absence of colored light and, thanks to rainbows and prisms, I can see and accept that white light actually contains all colors, but how on earth would you get yellow light if it's not one of the basic colors? I tried to figure it out by making a custom color for my desktop since it uses the colored light system rather than the pigmented color system, and when I picked a pure yellow the boxes underneath told me that (and that whole spiel about boxes and custom colors probably made no sense, so just forget I wrote that if you're confused and move on to the main point of the sentence which comes after this parenthetical note) yellow is made of equal parts red and green. What!? When I mix equal parts red and green paints, I get a neutral greyish-brown color. Definitely not yellow. How? I think I'm going to have to do some research eventually, but I've been telling myself that for some time now. Someday I'll actually get around to it, for I can't just leave such a riveting question like this unanswered. Why do colored light and pigment divide differently anyway? I mean, if we see colored pigments based off of waves of light being received by our cone cells I guess my mind is just stuck in pigment mode.

Once you finish thinking about that, you can then consider the complexity of the eye and brain that allow the phenomenon of color perception.

And to finish up, you can hardly help but admire the creativity of a God who can invent the delightful concept of colors.

Optometrists

The optometrist's office isn't a nice place to be, in my opinion. I am always annoyed, conflicted, and downhearted there.

The annoyance is both from the atrocious interior design of my optometrist's office (that wallpaper makes me want to sob sometimes) and that little eye-puff machine. That one where they tell you to stick your chin on a ledge of some contraption and look at the lights while they sends puffs of air into your eye. I know it's coming, but I can never stop myself from blinking, which annoys me. Even though the whole point of the machine is to make sure that your eyes do blink when something comes at them, for some reason, I always want to do my best not to blink.

Once I enter the examiner's room and they start testing my prescription with the face-piece-of-the-many-lenses, the internal conflict begins. They always ask whether 1 or 2 looks clearer, A or B, or some other combination. Some days I'm in the mood for everything to follow a pattern, so I get annoyed when the clearer choice doesn't fit in with the pattern. Then I have to decide if I want to follow the pattern or pick the clearer choice (don't worry, if the difference is definitely noticeable, I pick the more defined lens no matter what, but sometimes there really is no noticeable difference between the two options). Sometimes it's the inverse; I'm tired of everything following a sequence so I want to make the order of choices as unpredictable as possible. Most days it's a combination of the two, so I'm stuck with deciding whether to build patterns, break them, or just do what actually follows my vision best. In the end, I usually opt for the latter on almost all of them and even if I don't every time I end up with an accurate new prescription by the time they're done.

I'm downhearted because my prescription needs to be strengthened by at least a smidgen every time I visit. I wish I could keep my eyes from getting worse, or maybe for one day I could be able to see without my glasses or contacts. But the reality is that both those wishes are unlikely so I just move on with life. I can still see better than some by a long shot.

The Mystery Unveiled

A bit back, I wrote about a mysterious object which I swiped from someone's garbage. Originally, I had planned for it to be part of the white elephant gift exchange, but fortunately I've actually found a place for it at my house so it gets to stay with me and now I can tell you about it, although I think I already told Ellen about it.




And here it is. This massive piece of woodworking measures 3' x 4' and is fairly bulky and entirely useless except as a kitschy decoration. It does show some decent creativity and skill. The use of colored stains instead of opaque paints allows the grain of the wood to show through (one of my favorite features of the thing) and the pieces were well cut and sanded. I considered hanging it in my room, but I don't have enough for my artwork and smaller pieces of oddity (like the linoleum tile from the chemistry room or the horseshoe that was worn long ago by a Clydesdale that belonged to some relative of my old gym teacher's) as is, so I decided against it. However, my dad is willing to attack it to the wooden beams in the ceiling of the area of the basement that serves as a craft center. Although it would have been fun to see some poor person wind up with this on Friday (I had even come up with a way of bestowing it upon someone without them consciously picking a three-by-four-foot piece of plywood - it's a pity I can't use the little trick anymore), I'm really quite glad that it gets to stay with me.

But fear not, I still have a "fun" prize for the albino pachyderm exchange!

Over-Achievment in Art Strikes Back!

So I've finally decided that my world would be a happier place if I just decided not to make everything I ever do a complex masterpiece. But it's a little too late for the two art projects I have to work on over "break". I'll enjoy working on them, and they'll look pretty good by the time I'm done, but that time is a lot sooner than I'd like it to be considering how precise I'm being.

First, we have the photorealism project that was originally supposed to be due the day before Thanksgiving break, but we kept on getting extensions so now it's not due until the second day back from winter "break". This one is the least of my worries time-wise, but it will still be a hassle to get done. Here's the current progress:

The picture on the right is a photo montage I made with an obscene amount of detail (which is hard to see in the picture, I'm not the world's most accomplished photographer). It it now my job to reproduce it in colored pencil onto the paper on the left. I've already made some good progress, and I've done most of the sky which will probably be the hardest part.

Here's a close-up of the bee-homes. I've got to make them a little more orangey, but other than that, they're pretty much done. It's one of my favorite parts of the composition.

And here we have the two skies compared. The colored pencil one needs to me darker before it's done, but I'm happy with how it's coming along.

Now for a preview of my current project. Sometimes I debate whether or not there's any chance of it being done by the end of the quarter, but that's depressing so I normally switch thoughts quite quickly. For the project, we choose an artist whose style we want to imitate, and then we paint a self-portrait on a 24" x 30" canvas. The artist I chose had two main styles: using tiny dots of primary color to cover the entire canvas and produce the visual effect of other colors, and the use of small squares (normally about a quarter inch by a quarter inch) of mixed color to produce a mosaic-like final effect. I chose the latter style because it's slightly less time-consuming, but let's take a look at what I've managed to accomplish in about 9-11 hours:

This is all I've gotten done. The canvas is about twice as wide as the wave, and there's still about 8-12 inches above it too, so I don't really have much accomplished.

As you can probably see, this is a portion of the painting. The squares are about three-quarters the size of the real ones. You can see the little dots of white between the squares that I need to fill in. On the other parts of the canvas, I'm underglazing it with a watered down coat of paint so I don't have to worry about the white specks.

Let's play find the artist! The paint on my hand has worn off to some degree, but while I was painting earlier it served as a test palette, so it was entirely covered in tiny squares the colors of the waves. One of my friends suggested that we cover my arm in the squares, hold it up to the canvas, and have people try to find the arm. He called his game find the artist.

"Nature Always Finds a Way"

Wow. It takes a ridiculous amount of blind "faith" to be a hard-core naturalist. We watched a movie in biology about how mutations allow evolution. One example was that two-winged insects evolved from four-winged insects, and to "prove" it, they showed a specimen from a a group of drosophila (a two-winged species) that had been bombarded with enough radiation to mutate a blue whale into chihuahua. This fly had been mutated so that it had four wings, like its supposed ancestors. Sure, it couldn't fly and died pretty quickly, but since it's possible for a two-winged fly to mutate into a four-winged fly, no matter how dysfunctional, it must be possible for four-winged insects to evolve into fully functional two-winged insects. The conversation following the video went something like this:

• teacher: "Isn't incredible how they can prove evolution?"
• me: "Have they been able to do anything in the opposite direction? Like produce a two-winged bug from one with four wings, like they think really happened?"
• teacher: "Oh, I'm sure they have. They can get all sorts of mutations to show up if they try long enough,"
• me: "I wonder if they could have used the wings. The fly in the video couldn't fly with its extra pair of wings," (as a side note, I wonder what you call a fly that can't fly?)
• teacher: "I seriously doubt it could have. I mean, that's a pretty major mutation and it probably messed up a bunch of things,"
• me: "How could it have passed the genes for four wings to a new generation if it would die before mating because it can't fly away from predators?"
• teacher: "Oh I'm sure most of the first ones died,"
• me: "Then how would they pass it on? How did it help them survive?"
• teacher: "They would eventually have learned."
• me: "How? If they keep on dying, how would they learn to fly with two wings?"
• teacher: "I don't know. That's a really good question. But nature always finds a way. Nature always finds a way."

At this point, I gave up on the argument, because it clearly wasn't going to go anywhere. But some of my classmates looked interested, so hopefully they aren't so willing to blindly accept something that seems so unlikely.

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

This may possibly end up being one of the corniest-titled posts I've produced yet, as you will soon discover. It is trebly meaningful.

First, I've made a resolution that I'm going to try not to stress out about all the crap that my teachers are going to throw at me within the next few weeks. So far, it's working. Let's see if I can keep to my decision and keep from being bogged down by despair.

Second, it is the title of a fun song from Spam-a-Lot brought to the world by Monty Python. I sometimes sing it during biology with a friend of mine who also loves it. She knows the words, and I'm content to sing the few words I know and sing "la la la" with great energy for the parts I don't know, so we make a great duo.

Third, (and this is the part that makes my title kind of lame), I discovered something fascinating sitting on someone's curb for garbage collection after school today. My mom pointed it out as we drove past and I told her to turn around and let me get out and snag it. So we turned around and I had to stuff this thing in the trunk along with six backpacks and a clarinet because the car was already crammed with seven people in a vehicle made with six seatbelts that provides uncomfortable seating even when only five people are in it. This item is now sitting in my room, and I'm not sure what to do with it. When I started typing this, I had intended to describe it and add a picture. But presently the only possible use I can come up with for this unique piece of craftsmanship is the white elephant gift exchange, and I don't want to ruin the surprise for anyone. But I can assure you it relates to the title of my post. You can try to guess if you'd like, but asking any of my siblings, the Corbins, the Browns, or the McCrates is cheating (even though most of you wouldn't know who they all were to ask them, I thought I'd make it clear that you can't ask them for those of you who do know them).

David Darling's Encyclopedia of Science

I accidentally discovered something wonderful and exciting on the internet the other day. It calls itself "The Worlds of David Darling" and the main page contains two links to archives of knowledge called "The Internet Encyclopedia of Science" and "Encyclopedia of Alternative Energy and Sustainable Living". If you scroll down the page, you will find links to articles about recent science news concerning topics such as antigravity, supermassive black holes, and other fun things. Although it doesn't go into in-depth details for most, it gives some interesting links to visit.

Here's one of my favorites: Educational Games from Nobel Prize.org . I must confess, I couldn't beat any of the ones I tried (all I tried were a few from the medical section). I dare you to see how long you can stand the Mr. Split-Brainy game. I was fed up after the first coffee break. There's one with an excellent name and description, but I haven't tried it yet. It's the Nuclear Weapons game, and here's the description: "Take on the mission to disarm the world of nuclear weapons with the help of eight 'Peace Doves!' " Yes! I can't wait to help the Peace Doves! It's what I've been aspiring to do throughout my entire life. It will give me purpose and meaning...
I'm sick of the existentialist books we're reading in English class.