 | Last login: 23 hours agoJoseph is a single guy from Chicago, Illinois, USA. Politically Moderate, Underemployed Jewish Applied Mathematician / Electrical Engineer tutoring all knowing freshmen in Mathematics. This profile, like most of the Web, is optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, and probably best viewed in Firefox. A more complete listing of posts, including archived ones, can be found on the introduction page for this site, and is backed up on this page at Googlegroups, with occasional commentary found on Stumbling into the Void on Tribe.
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- Kim Riley - Photography
 Dec 14, 2008 9:09am  (2 reviews) photography http://www.rileyphotography.com/
 
Once and future home of Kim Riley Photography. By default, there can't be any adult images here, because there are no images; I'm guessing that Ms.Riley just moved her site to a new host. However, if this sampling of thumbnails of her work from BM2001 is representative, we should see some interesting photos on this site in the near future.
- Burning Man: Deidre DeFranceaux and Jann Nunn
- Dec 14, 2008 9:09am (1 review) arts, burning-man, burningman http://lea.mit.edu/gallery/burningman/de...
About the cradle installation at BM2001
- Burning Man :: Image Gallery - Space & Plastic Chapel
- Dec 14, 2008 9:08am
 (1 review) burning-man, burningman http://images.burningman.com/index.cgi?i...
A thumbail of this photo can be seen in the second paragraph of this post, with credit given here and in the alt tags on the thumbnail. The full sized image, seen here, is a night time picture of saucer taken near Plastic Chapel, Burning Man 2001, and is credited to Kim Riley Photography, very tentatively reviewed above.
- Charles H. Trapolin
- Dec 14, 2008 9:08am (1 review) arts, burning-man, burningman http://www.soulatlas.com/maze.htm
Some things I liked, some I didn't, but I suppose you expected that ... continued
- Dec 14, 2008 9:07am
This one, I'm reviewing with the usual mixed feelings I have as I approach Burning Man sites. The title you see on this review is the one applied to every page on Mr.Trapolin's site (Charles H. Trapolin, Fine Art and Design), which may cause some confusion in the future because there are more pages on the man's site to be reviewed, but the StumbleUpon system forces us to give the review of a page the same title as the one the site owner, so this can not be helped.
 
The page I'm reviewing right now is the one Mr.Trapolin devoted to the mazes he designed for Burning Man 2000 and 2001, with pieces created by other artists appearing within. I missed Burning Man 2000, not surprisingly; being partially disabled and living below the poverty line, I find Burning Man a difficult event to get to, but I did manage to get to Burning Man 2001, so I'll talk about that year's maze.
Trapolin makes an understandable, if fundamental error in shooting his piece during the day; by day, one can't help but notice that like most of Black Rock City, the maze was constructed very cheaply, of plywood, as it would have to be. Keep in mind the fact that the whole city gets torched at the end of every event; if "Black Rock City" (the temporary community built at Burning Man) wasn't built cheaply, the expense of this yearly recreational arson binge would be enough to send Microsoft into receivership.
The question one is left with is "how does one deal with that reality"; the answer at Burning Man 2001 seemed to be "play with light and shade, and the limits of human perception"; "Black Rock City" was an imaginatively crafted illusion, made possible by the fact of its remote location, far away from the lights of any real town.
When one gets out into the middle of the Black Rock Desert of Northern Nevada, the nearest community (Gerlach) has maybe 150 people, if one counts outlying areas, and it is some tens of miles away, on the other side of a mountain range. About two hours away, one finds the largest city in Northern Nevada - Reno, which at 210,000 people, just barely qualifies as a city, failing to raise that familiar bubble of light on the horizon that in places like Northern Illinois, serve as an eternal reminder that the beloved metroplex is never so far away as one might imagine, even after one drives a few hours seeking an elusive night.
[ continued ]
- Dec 14, 2008 9:07am
[ continuing ]
A smallish city and a town that probably should be called a village, and really little more - one finds little but the emptiness of a desert so barren as to inspire incredulity in some at the notion that people could live here at all; the evening, left to its own devices, would at times become almost impenetrably dark. Away from the encampment, one sees the Jackson range faintly traced out against a velvety black night sky in the soft blackish blue tones that remain of the moonlight, after it has worked its way through the dust which, even at night, does not have a chance to completely settle out of the air; more silhouette than landscape, the mountains reveal little more their profile, coyly granting only the vaguest hints of their more prominent features to those who would lovingly gaze upon them. The brilliant stars of one's imagination are not to be seen, as far away from most of the world as one is; their light barely ever had a chance to reach the ground. Even the light of the moon, so bright in the starlessly overlit red midnight skies over Chicago, is dimmed.
The pitch black night, like the Playa, becomes an empty canvas. During the day, when sudden dust storms haven't turned the air opaque, the sun reveals all in blinding detail and the artist must accept this. As the sun sets, however, those creating Black Rock City find that since like almost everything else, light is present only to the extent that somebody had the foresight to bring it, that this allows them to do what would be impossible in more brightly lit locations: to sculpt the light, choosing what the viewer will see and how he will see it. What by day is clearly a shabby looking sheet of plywood, by night, with the right lighting, become the wall of a convincingly solid if fittingly mysterious looking temple. Nighttime is when the visuals of Black Rock City came alive, the sunstroked day being more a time to scurry out of the merciless light in search of shade, company, quieter creative activities, and if such gods as one believed in pleased, maybe a little air conditioning or at least a mister; daytime temperatures easily topped 100.
 Cultures carry over, even when a fashionable postmodernism encourages participants to pretend that they could leave such things behind, and "work during the day and play at night" is a well-ingrained pattern of behavior in much of the Western World; most of the participation seemed to take place during the day, the tired participants relaxing to enjoy the spectacle at night, as a light show played itself out against the darkened open playa.
[under construction]
- Dec 14, 2008 9:05am
[ next post about maze goes here ]
- Britney Spears Guide to Semiconductor Physics - Lasers and Optoelectronics...
- Dec 14, 2008 9:05am (89 reviews) semiconductors http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm
Ah, memories ...
- Dec 14, 2008 9:04am
Quoth the author of the pedagological masterpiece that is the
page you see under review 
"It is a little known fact, that Ms Spears is an expert in semiconductor physics. Not content with just singing and acting, in the following pages, she will guide you in the fundamentals of the vital semiconductor laser components that have made it possible to hear her super music in a digital format."
Yeah. Did I mention that life can get very lonely in the lab? In our electrical engineering department, there were only four possible women out of a pool of over 400 students. We weren't completely sure of the gender of one of them, so maybe it was three, but out of those who remained, two of them were dating each other, and the fourth was "Katie the laser lady", an absolutely brilliant, angelically sweet and blisteringly hot girl from Texas, her every classmate's fantasy, who of course had to be dating one of the MBA students, helping us in our education as we became accustomed to the one basic truth of life for an engineer in America.
There is no hope. But then, we were mostly a bunch of Indian and Jewish guys, so we basically got that from the beginning, anyway. So blessed, we instinctively understood the need to wash early in the day, before the dorm's cold water supply ran out and the shower got to be even hotter than Katie. Seeing this site, I see the authors probably shared our fondness for diving naked into snowdrifts and wriggling until some of our more troublesome parts turned agreeably numb, all the while reminiscing nostalgically about those crazy party times we had as Math majors, once, oh so very long ago.
But I digress.
On skimming this page, I see what looks like a very cursory introduction to a few topics in semiconductor processing and device design mixed with some Britney Spears fan material (photos and song lyrics) which the author is using to bribe people to read about his real subject matter. I think somebody is a little desperate for visitors, but we all understand how that goes and so I guess we might as well wish him such luck as he can get.
- Kate Raudenbush Experiments
- Dec 14, 2008 9:04am (4 reviews) photography, burning-man, burningman http://www.kateraudenbush.com/
I like this site, but wish that I could see the artist's work offline for a few reasons ...
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