Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Pinhole image of Crosses in Lafayette, CA


Here is a picture I took with my pinhole camera of the crosses for soldiers killed in Iraq. I added the map of Iraq and the dog tags.

Saturday, January 27, 2007

A few of my favorite quotes

"With lunacy comes responsibility; we have a duty to make life at least a little more surreal for those whose lives make too much sense." - Trygve Lode

"If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It's a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved. Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing. More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn't get any better than that." - Tom Robbins

"In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards victory." - Alfred North Whitehead

"Technology is not kind. It does not wait. It does not say please. It slams into existing systems...and often destroys them. While creating a new system." - Economist Joseph Shumpeter

"TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests." - David Foster Wallace

Uncovering the Mysteries of natural phenomena that were formerly someone else's "noise" is a recurring theme in science. - Alfred Bedard Jr. and Thomas Georges, Atmospheric Infrasound, Physics Today, vol. 53, no.3, March 2000

"It is the business of the future to be dangerous". A. N. Whitehead
"A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill." - Robert A. Heinlein

"Chance favors the prepared mind." - Louis Pasteur

"Nor do I know, if men are like sheep, why they need any goverment: or if they are like wolves, how they can suffer it." - Sir William Temple (1751)

"Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century." - Greg Egan

Certain elements of the crew had decided to pretend that it was not a crash but a crash landing that was seconds away. After all, the difference between the two is only one word. Didn't this suggest that the two forms of flight terminaton were more or less interchangeable? How much could one word matter? An encouraging question under the circumstances, if you didn't think about it too long, and there was no time to think right now. The basic difference between a crash and a crash landing seemed to be that you could sensibly prepare for a crash landing, which is exactly what they were trying to do. The news spread through the plane, the term was repeated in row after row. 'Crash landing, crash landing.' They saw how easy it was, by adding one word, to maintain a grip on the future, to extend it in consciousness if not in actual fact...Suddenly, the engines restarted. Just like that. Power, stability, control. -- Don DeLillo, White Noise

"There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down." - Don DeLillo

"A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure." - Theodore Adorno

"My formula for success is rise early, work late, and strike oil." - Paul Getty

"The greatest cunning is to have none at all." - Carl Sandburg

“Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?” - M.C. Escher

"There's no such thing as fun for the whole family." - Jerry Seinfeld

"All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking." - Friedrich Nietzsche

“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

More pictures I've taken with my digital pinhole camera,




Here are a few more pictures I've taken with my Nikon D50 pinhole camera. I pretty sure that I need to make a smaller hole.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

My Self Portrait


Here is a self portrait that I took with my Nikon D50 pinhole camera. This is my first attempt at making a pinhole camera. picture is blurry but I hope to improve it as I learn more.

I turned my Nikon D50 into a pinhole camera by drilling a small hole in the body cap and covering the hole with aluminum foil and then poking a very small hole into the aluminum foild and then putting the body cap on the camera and take some pictures.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

In the beginning


My first day of class. Here is one of my favorite pictures from my Flickr site.