Dali House

Jeremy Pettis, a product of the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, has had lots of cybertime in Blogworld with his website devoted entirely to one, admittedly great, piece of artwork, a typographic installation called “Twenty-Six Types of Animals”, with each letter of the alphabet corresponding to a different beast. It’s like one of those email-forwards, I guess, with no other information about Pettis accompanying it.

“Best of Friends” by Emile Vernon, an oil on canvas from 1917. One doesn’t know what to say.

Some days you just have to set aside the lush coffee-table books of gorgeous paintings by the masters and have a go yourself. And if the aroma of oil paint and turpentine is going to upset the neighbours, you go online and muck around fume-free.

There’s a segment of the dedicated browsing community at StumbleUpon.com that has an artistic bent and shares discoveries of interactive, Flash-happy websites where you can flex your creative muscles. One called ISketch involves many game rooms in various languages where up to a dozen people take turns speed-drawing while the others race to guess what it is.

Too frantically Pictionary for me, but the following sites are kinder, gentler and more aesthetically rewarding … well, sort of.

Cards, for lack of a name in a language I understand, is a Russian site that’s nevertheless easy to follow. The image at the top of this post shows its interface.

There’s a huge array of tools and clipart add-ins (like the little girl icon), indoor and outdoor settings and texting in several languages, but the best thing is the lines can be animated or appear as cascading drops. The purple hearts in my “finished” image here were pulsating. See the rest.

Tom Waits, one of my favourite singer-songwriters, may or may not have spent a lot of time gazing at the night sky while lying on his back in a gutter, but he sure ended up with a lot of descriptions of the moon, as other bloggers have noted far more cynically.

Recently he and Iggy Pop were having a coffee on the sidelines of the annual B List Slipping to C List Performers Congress in Reno, Nevada, and Tom let loose with the full stream-of-consciousness litany of literary lunar allusions.

Poor Iggy kept trying to get the check, but as Waits observed in yet another song, “You can’t find your waitress with a geiger counter, cause she hates you and your friends, and ya can’t get served without her …”

The moon’s all up, full and big — apricot pit in an indigo sky.

You wear a dress, baby, and I’ll wear a tie, and we’ll laugh at that old bloodshot moon in that burgundy sky.

Outside another yellow moon has punched a hole in the nighttime.

Looks like a yellow biscuit of a buttery cue ball moon rollin’ maverick across an obsidian sky.

The moon’s a yellow stain across the sky.

November only believes in a pile of dead leaves and a moon that’s the color of bone.

The Moon is a cold chiseled dagger and it’s sharp enough to draw blood from a stone. He rides through your dreams on a coach and horses and the fence posts in the moonlight look like bones. See the rest.

Having packed in the study of mathematics as absolutely soon as possible midway through high school, I take great pleasure in (a) reading about somebody else having to solve an egregious bugger of a math problem, and (b) being told that the solution looks like this.

As widely reported last month, a squad of 18 integer boffins at the American Institute of Mathematics in Palo Alto, California, finally, at long last, someone order a round of beers, concluded four years of work figuring out the “Lie group E8″, a riddle posed 120 years ago by one of their own, the Norwegian Sophus Lie, the bastard.

Newsmen forced to come up with an angle on the story that Joe Average and his wife Amoeba could understand between mouthfuls of cereal talked the researchers into quantifying the scale of the problem like this: If you trained every monkey on the planet to write out the calculations, eventually, assuming they got it right, they’d cover the entire island of Manhattan with the paperwork.

A little less inanely, as explained at the institute’s website, the answer is a matrix with 453,060 rows and columns and 205,263,363,600 “polynomial entries”. If each entry was written in a one-inch square of paper, the patched-together calculation would measure more than seven miles on each side. There’s about 60 times as much data in the answer as there is in the map of the human genome. If you packed it tightly into your iPod, it would keep playing for 45 days in MP3 format. See the rest.