Meg Giry, are you a dancer? Then come and practice.

I'm utterly useless when it comes to entries this week, sorry about that. Dance class was good last night and I agreed to be one of the donation basket-bearers at the performance Friday night. We're all dancing the show to help raise funds for tsunami relief. We did some rehearsal last night and ended up running "Hinko" twice through. My arms are protesting it acutely today. That number is just the most physically challenging dancing I've ever had to do, and it's all pretty much upper body and arm work. Ow.

I have my concerns about doing this at Straw Hat, the venue holds some seriously mixed memories for me, but after the Flamenco Society fiasco I figure I can pretty much handle it. Just have to avoid getting my veils in someone's pizza.

Just to liven things up a bit, and because I liked the question I posed to ravenmb so much I had to share it, I'd be fascinated to see some responses to the following:

You were on that ill-fated flight from Sydney to LA and find yourself on Lost Island, do you remain on the beaches of Sayidistan, or head to Cave Town? Who do you end up befriending? What survival skills do you bring to the table? What is your deep dark flashback secret? And what item from your luggage are you the most desperate to find?


Most creative answers win!

This just made my day

Hockney 'was wrong' over art copying claim:

In his 2001 book Secret Knowledge, Hockney set out to show that the heightened realism of many Renaissance paintings was achieved by projecting images of the subject onto the canvas, which the artists then traced. This would have required artists to use a device such as a camera obscura.

But Hockney's theory is contentious among both art historians and physicists. It implies that from around 1420 artists were using sophisticated optics to project images onto the surfaces they were painting. Yet it was not until hundreds of years later, in the early 18th century, that artists like the Venetian Canaletto are generally acknowledged to have used such projectors. "The issues I raised have disturbed some people," Hockney says.

But next week, Stanford University physicist and art historian David Stork, who has been a fierce critic of Hockney's idea, will present evidence at the Electronic Imaging Conference in San Jose, California, that he believes show Hockney is wrong.

Stork has used computer imaging software to analyse the shadows in Georges de la Tour's 1645 painting Christ in the Carpenter's Studio (right) in a bid to plot the direction and intensity of the light illuminating the scene. This allowed him to determine whether the candle in Christ's hand was the only source of light. To illuminate the scene brightly enough to project it onto the canvas, de la Tour would have needed an external light source, probably the sun,

Stork claims his analysis shows that a candle was indeed the only light source in the scene. He also says that given the type of lenses or concave mirrors available at the time, the brightness in the scene would have been reduced around 1000-fold at the canvas, making any projected image all but impossible to see and trace, unless several dozen oil lamps or hundreds of candles lit the scene. As well as showing that the shadows cast can be plotted back to the candle, Stork's software indicates that the way light rays are reflected off Joseph's head are consistent with the candle being de la Tour's only light source.


Oh I will be such a happy, happy camper if that Hockney moron's theory can finally be dismissed as the rubbish it is, and it sounds like that day may not be too far off. *happy sigh*

The Return of Real-Time Lost Recapping!

( It's just like that Twilight Zone episode... )