Recently I had the opportunity to attend an art workshop held by the Altadena Library on how to create button art. A quick web search on “button art” reveals a treasure trove of cool ideas. After browsing a bit, we sat down with bowls of color-sorted buttons of all sizes, a canvas, and a hot glue gun.
Here’s the composition I came up with:
It’s fun to sort through the buttons and figure out how to position them for a particular shape or effect. It’s a bit like creating a tile mosaic, except that the pieces are not uniform in size. To fill spaces, you end up layering buttons on top of other buttons, which gives it a neat three-dimensional quality. Fun to touch!
I think this would be a great craft to do with kids, although the hot glue gun makes it better for older kids. I wonder if a sheet of two-side sticky tape could do as well for younger kids. And for buttons, apparently you can order them in batches by color (or mixed colors). Overall, I think there’s something fun about seeing a daily household item, like a button, out of its context and elevated to become a piece of art. :)
One artist whose work I enjoyed was Bradford Salamon. The first item in the gallery is a dynamic locomotive he painted (titled “Unknown Adventures”), which sadly I cannot find online or on his website to share with you (and photos were not permitted). It was accompanied by a charming statement describing how he enjoys painting “portraits” of objects, not to reproduce the objects, but instead to trigger a memory or feeling associated with them. He paints typewriters, phones, radios, cars, … and trains. Here is one of his trains that I was able to find:
There were also several woodblock prints from Japan that were commissioned to get the public excited when trains were first introduced in Japan (~1850s). Because they were commissioned before the trains actually arrived, and none of the artists had ever seen one, they often copied from U.S. or British publications that showed steam engines… and in one case a steam fire-engine (to put fires out)!
One artist copied from a picture of a train on the Panama Railway, in which one car had “U.S. Mail” printed on it; in the Japanese version, this became “U.S. Maus” (‘maus’ happens to be ‘mouse’ in German). The gallery showed the source images that the artists had used, and you could definitely see how “Mail” could be misinterpreted as “Maus” if you did not speak English!
Here is the Panama original (but not at high enough resolution to read the relevant letters):
Now I want to ride the Panama Railway! You can – it’s a one-hour ride that costs only $25, and includes an open-air viewing deck! Time for a trip to Panama? :)
Yesterday I volunteered with Kids Building Things to offer a Tool Petting Zoo. This is a chance for kids (and their parents) to see, touch, and use tools of all kinds — screwdrivers, bubble level, wire cutters, hammers, saw, a drill press, and more.
Even better, I got to learn some new tools myself! I got to use a pipe cutter, which looks like this:
You put the pipe inside its jaws and then spin the screw until it grips the pipe. Then you rotate the cutter around the pipe, tightening the screw whenever it feels slack, until it slices through the pipe. Magic!
I then got to use a pipe bender:
This picture shows a pipe after it’s been bent with the tool. It requires very little effort. You put the flat pipe through the device. Then, as you squeeze the handles together, the pipe bends in a nice curve, supported by the metal disk, which dictates the radius of curvature. You stop squeezing when you have as much curve as you want. This is great fun!
Finally, I learned to use a rivet puller:
You line up the holes in whatever pieces you want to attach, then put a rivet through it and squeeze the handle. This pulls the bottom of the rivet up, fattening it out on the reverse side, and eventually it can pull no further, the top snaps off, and you’re left with a beautiful rivet.
The kids were encouraged to make a sculpture, or whatever they wanted, with the tools. I made a mini Loch Ness monster:
Check out my cool rivets and bent pipe!
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High-speed photography can capture athletes in action. But you need really high-speed photography to capture events like a nuclear explosion.
At the recent National Radio Science Meeting, I first encountered the idea of a rapatronic camera. These cameras have exposure times as short as 10 ns. They were developed in 1940 to capture the rapid expansion of a nuclear explosion, and they were gems of ingenuity. No mechanical shutter at that time could possibly open and close that quickly, so Harold Edgerton came up with a non-mechanical way of controlling the shutter: he put a Kerr cell between two polarizing filters oriented at 90 degrees from each other. Normally, no light would penetrate between the crossed polars. But when voltage is applied to the Kerr cell, it rotates the polarization of the incoming light 90 degrees—permitting it to pass through the second filter. By only activating the Kerr cell for a very short time, you obtain an ultra high-speed shutter.
Likewise, there was no way to mechanically advance the film fast enough to permit a single camera to take a sequence of high-speed shots, so in these tests they’d set up an array of the cameras, each with a slightly different delay. (Although I immediately wonder if you couldn’t have an electronically controlled refractive material behind the single lens to direct the light across a series of film segments so you wouldn’t have to physically move anything.)
The results are stunning:
At left is an explosion from Operation Tumbler-Snapper (1952), about 1 ms after detonation. The spikes along the bottom edge are evidence of the tower’s guy wires being vaporized by associated gamma rays. At right is an explosion from Operation Hardtack II (1958). This one was suspended from a balloon and the spikes here are the balloon’s mooring cables being vaporized. A beautiful ghostly array of such images is available from a google image search on “rapatronic”.
One thing I haven’t been able to determine is the etymology of “rapatronic”. It may be that Edgerton just coined it (with “rapa” for “rapid” and “tronic” for “electronic”—but that’s just a guess). Please share if anyone knows more!
Vanity license plates can be an interesting form of constrained art, like the sonnet or haiku, but much, much shorter. In California, they can contain up to 7 characters, which are letters, numbers, and a few special symbols (like ♥ and a handprint). To while away the tedium of my commute to work, I enjoy spotting new and interesting plates. This being California, I always have plenty of plates to consider.
On July 28, I started recording the vanity plates I’d seen. As of today, I’ve collected 167 distinct plates. It surprises me that I’m able to find at least one new one practically every day I drive to work. There must be just enough variability in my (or everyone else’s) travel time that I get a slightly different sample of cars each day.
Some of the plates are funny, some are clever, and some are cryptic (probably in-jokes that don’t make sense unless you know the person). Here are some of my favorites:
1 HOBBIT
BK WERM
BMRNATR (on a BMW)
C ATROX: a good puzzle — hint (rot13): fanxr
CAKE 4 U: it’s not a lie?
DTH STR
ESC2PCH: local reference
FTDHTR: really?
GODZLLA
HAUNT3D
HTLIKME
HYR N U (on a jacked-up SUV)
IDIG K9Z
IFYTE4U (the vehicle was emblazoned with lawyer ads)
KNEADY (the vehicle had massage therapist ads)
KRPT2NT
LYSDXIC
MI♥ZTKN
MJSSAYN
RMAGETN
SASSIQT
TUF CKY
UKARYOT: go science!
ULIV1NS
WB OUIVR: a French geek?
Another cool one, which I didn’t spot but a friend did, is “TWS BRLG”.
Some are just a bit weird, or too obscure for me to “get” them:
1MADHUN
7THSONN
AE6KO: ham radio call sign?
BYE BTZ
EOEOEO
IOWE GOD
KHAL8
LMN DROP
MY2CATZ
MY MUZIK
NOR DO I
OWL BAIT
YYYYYY2
Z DAWGZ
What’s your favorite vanity plate?
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