I am … unhindered by talent

Just stumbled across Wordle, a neat tag cloud/text visualization tool, and am having way too much fun.

Some of my most common Flickr tags (click on the cloud to see it bigger on Wordle’s site):

The contents of the front page of my blog as of 3 July 2008:

I like how the latter captures our time in Spain quite nicely, and I really like how Wordle can intermingle the ascenders and descenders. Wordle can grind pretty hard on your CPU, but there are lots of neat options to play with and some very fun results to be had. w00t!

Thanks to banned photography inc for the tip.

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Last night we went on an very nice night-time (started at 9:30pm) guided walking tour of Cordoba. Our two hours of walking through the old part of the city included two bits where an actor appeared in the dress of local figures: first the 20th century painter Julio Romero de Torres, then and the 12th century Jewish philosopher Moshe ben Maimon or Moses Maimonides. "de Torres" appeared in Plaza del Potro, which was many centuries where horses were traded ("potro" = "colt"), and which apparently features in Don Quixote. This history and the name are commemorated by a statue of a colt above a fountain in the plaza, which cast this cool shadow on the wall of the building that houses the Museo de Julio Romero de Torres.

Tomorrow we take the train back up to Madrid, and then fly back to the UK, where we have a week with WeatherGirl’s mum before heading back to the U.S.! We’re happy, tired, excited, and sad all rolled up into one.

Ciao!

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Today we went to the justly famous Mezquita de Córdoba, the mosque/cathedral complex here in Cordoba. The mosque is huge and largely intact, a vast forest of columns and red and white arches that really gives on the sense of being in the woods rather than being in a building. As a sense of the size of the thing, after the Christian reconquest they built a quite large cathedral in the middle of the mosque, and you don’t actually see it right away when entering the the mosque. Even Sub-Evil, who’s quite jaded for a 14 year old, decreed that it was one of the most beautiful spaces he’d been in.

I took hundreds of photos in our 2.5 hours there, most of which attempt (usually with limited success) to capture the vast space and repeating columns and arches. As it’s rather dark, however, motion blur and lack of depth of field are chronic problems, and it’s going to take a while to sift through and pick a few that appear to have worked.

Thus I leave you with a little detail shot instead. The mihrab (prayer niche) is a truly remarkable piece of work, with wonderfully rich tile work and calligraphic decoration. In almost any other building it would be a showstopper; the Mezquita, however, is so large that you could almost miss it amongst all the other visual stimuli.

At one point there was this neat patch of light on a bit of the mihrab, so I took it’s picture. (Several, actually, but I’ll only bore you with one.)

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Last night the three of us climbed up into the Albaycin, which is the site of the original Moorish town, and the historical location of the old Muslim neighborhood in Granada. There are wonderful “postcard” views of the Alhambra from there, but unfortunately it was overcast and the light was all “blah”. WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy eventually got bored and headed back down the hill, but I stuck around hoping for the sun to creep below the clouds as it was setting. Happily I was rewarded with this wonderful view for the last 10-20 minutes of sunlight. Absolutely splendid.

The big square tower in the foreground and a bit to the left, along with many of the other buildings and towers in the left and center foreground, are part of the Nasrid (Muslim) palaces, and contain some spectacular rooms and spaces. The church spire in the back center is a Christian church built on the site after the Catholic reconquest. The large, square, decidedly non-Muslim building that dominates the right hand side is the palace of Charles V (the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella who captured Granada, eliminating the last Muslim kingdom in Spain), and houses some excellent museums.

And that’s only a quarter to a third of the entire Alhambra complex!

Tomorrow we leave Granada for Cordoba, so more wonderful stuff to see and photograph. Unfortunately the internet at the next hotel looks to be stupidly expensive, so there’s likely to be radio silence for the next week…

Ciao!

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Today we spent a wonderful, exhausting day at the Alhambra in Granada, and it’s every bit as cool as the books, etc., made out. Which is good, since that’s a key reason for this entire trip to Spain! I frankly don’t have any idea where to begin. I took over 800 photographs, plus there’s all those from WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy).

It’s like several really cool forts and castles, some spectacular gardens, archeological digs, museums, (Christian) churches, and a complete course in Muslim architecture and culture (complete with some of the finest examples on the planet), all in one (big) place. I’m both physically and mentally exhausted (and exhilarated!).

This shot is from the justly famous "Patio of the Lions" (Patio de los Leones). The lions themselves (part of a fountain in the middle of the space) were missing as they’re undergoing extensive restoration at the moment. Still, the space, the columns, the carving, and the light were enough to take my breath away. And that was after already seeing room after space after room of exquisite work.

I’m going to go sleep now.

Later.

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You should definitely check out the combined family blogstream at ThomasMcPhee.com as both WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy are actually posting words and things that carry information :-). In the meantime I’ll annoy you with some more photos. Again, clicking on a photo will jump to Flickr, where there may be a little info on the image.

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If you’re never been over to BibliOdyssey I highly recommend a visit. The sub-title for the blog is “Books~~Illustrations~~Science~~History~~Visual Materia Obscura~~Eclectic Bookart” which, well, sums it all up rather nicely. Lots of neat old illustrations, often (but not always) on scientific themes. The themes are interesting, the background info excellent, and the images are frequently just too cool.

The image above is from some of the earliest high quality mapping of Mars in the late 1800’s by Giovanni Schiaparelli, and is part of a really neat set of early modern maps of the red planet. Peacay (BibliOdyssey’s curator) has once again pulled together some great images that are really wonderful to look at in and of themselves, as well as being really cool historic and scientific documents.

Schiaparelli’s (in)famous ‘canali’ turned out to be a kind of optical illusion caused by interactions between light, dust clouds that form in the martian atmosphere, the orbital location and background interference from the planet’s surface itself. If a sketch is made of something that wasn’t really there but you believed it to be there at the time, can you call the result abstract art I wonder? I guess so.

I concur.

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We just finished two consecutive day trips to London (Friday and yesterday) and I’m thoroughly tired, and full of undigested photos. This fellow, one of the few I have processed, is from the Egyptian mummification exhibit at the British Museum (Rooms 62 and 63).

On Friday we started down in Greenwich. It was our first time through the Docklands on the DLR — it would be nice to walk those canals and take photos — and our first time to the Royal Observatory and the Prime Meridian. I wish we’d had more time there - it was a beautiful day and there was a ton of cool stuff one could see. Time was tight, though, so we zoomed off to the British Museum before rush hour hit, and spent the rest of the evening there.

While WeatherGirl wandered the museum, however, Sub-Evil and I snuck off and bought tickets for Avenue Q at the Noël Coward Theatre for the following night. He’s been keen to see that ever sense we got here, and it was nice to finally make that happen, but it did mean two consecutive days into London, which is frankly pretty tiring.

Yesterday Sub-Evil and I started at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology on the UCL campus. Sub-Evil is very into Egyptian history, writing, artifacts, etc., so he really wanted to see this. It’s a very cool collection, but pretty desperately in need of a new home, with the collection crammed into old victorian cabinets and spilling down an emergency exit staircase! Next was the British Library, which was just tremendous! The King’s Library alone was worth the (free) price of admission, and the display of the treasures (Magna Carta, illuminated manuscripts, handwritten scores, drafts, diaries, and letters by amazing folks) was really wonderful.

After all that we grabbed some dinner and then headed off to Avenue Q! We both had listened to the soundtrack about a zillion times, so there weren’t a lot of surprises. The production was tons of fun, however, and watching the puppet masters sing, dance, act, and run the puppets at the same time reminded me of the line about Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels :-).

Now we pack and organize, for tomorrow we’re off to Methwold Old Vicarage for our first stay in a Landmark Trust property!

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Our friend Jenny Nellis had a really nasty fall recently, and Jess Larson suggested we send her a happy photo or two. I thought a few shots of WeatherGirl and Jess when we were at the Tate Modern might help :-).

The photo above is the two of them being silly and fun with their hard sweets. The one below is WeatherGirl (on the right) photographing her bare foot with Shibboleth by Doris Salcedo, while Jess is photographing WeatherGirl. We had way too much fun with Shibboleth, which is a wonderfully experiential piece of sculpture, and took a gazillion photos. As you can see, WeatherGirl even took her shoes off in the name of art :-).

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We’ve ordered a couple of boxes of advance copies our book (a privilege of being the authors). They look really nice, and we’re quite excited about the grand unveiling on Wednesday at EuroGP! For those of you coming to Naples, definitely stop by our table at the poster session that night — you’ll be able to check out printed copies and maybe even score a postcard featuring that wonderful cover :-).

Whether you’re coming to EuroGP or not, we’ll be “turning on” the Lulu site Wednesday, so people can buy printed copies and download the PDF for free. As a teaser, the poster above contains the entire book — just really, really small! If you click on it you can see it a little bigger, but I still recommend waiting a few days for the Real Deal.

Thanks to Riccardo for using some of his major LaTeX mojo to create the mosaic of all the pages, and to Jess and WeatherGirl for their suggestions regarding the design.

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