Irregular Flow from 4khz

Sometimes it is a simple idea matched with the breath of execution.

irregular flow from 4khz on Vimeo.

There is not much more I can add except h/t to Buddha at Musings. I went to Vimeo to find out more about it and the creator but there are only a few more videos and a lot of positive comments.

Yes, video can be like this and more.

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Ethnographers That Record A Changing World

Shi Pei Pu died July 2, 2009. If you boil the story down to the essentials this is a story about a man who pretended to be a woman who fooled another man into loving him. He was the real life person that inspired the play and the movie "M Butterfly." Ethnographically speaking, it is a journey into many lands where I am an outsider trying to understand.

There are questions about the world of 1960s spies. The Chinese Theater and men performing as women. The boundaries of lies, truth and love and how they intersect when there is a heart involved. If you read the New York Times obituary you'll find that the real life escapades are a tad more interesting than the play or the movie. As I read the obituary I was aware of what I didn’t know about male boarding schools, Chinese culture, French culture and how easy it is to be fooled.

Learning about other cultures can help you from feeling like a chump. Ethnography is branch of Anthropology. An Ethnographer visits people, environments and cultures. They observe, record and document what they see and experience. We all study other people and have questions about differences in life, social order and culture. If you write, read or perform some kind of artistic skill you might be an involuntary Ethnographer.

Mia at Kahliyah-logue is an artist who loves making hand made materials. This led her to her seeing textile books as metaphors for the important things a culture wants to express. Mia was in a Cypress bookstore and discovered books that had examples of Cypriot historical textiles. One of the things an Ethnographer can do is compare her present life with that of her ancestors.

From the first moment I set eyes on this ”experience”(the written booklet with the set of photos)I was immediately stricken by a magic spell which took me at once to this ancient land in its original version,another time,when oddly enough,it seems as though ”less” was ”going on” but everything had ”more” meaning…

Some folks get paid to document those type of experiences.  Professor Karen Nakamura is a Photo-Ethnographer – she use both digital and analog cameras to record her journeys into various communities.

My own interest in photoethnography comes from a merging of two sides of me that have previously been kept strictly apart - my vocation as an assistant professor of cultural anthropology and my avocation as a photographic artist. At times, these tensions operate synergistically, at other times they threaten to tear me apart.

At her blog you can learn about her current activities, processes and what kind of software/equipment she is trying out to help her tell the story.  You can view photos of her work and check out other Photo-Ethnographers she recommends.

One of her recommendations was the work of Masaru Goto and the portraits of the Burakumin people of Japan. If this gets you interested you should also check out Global Compassion for other photographic representations of communities seen and unseen.

Traveler Laura Greeman at Ecoescape.org combined her honeymoon and a bit of ethnography when she visited Denmark and Sweden. Laura gives observations about transportation via bicycles, the behavior of the citizens and that there did not seem to be "hover moms" around the kids:

There is not only real life ethnography but digital ethnographers as well. Dr. Michael Wesch at Kansas State University is looking at environments like YouTube to get a sense of the cultures, the behaviors and the type of comments that are shared publically. What would that tell us about the users, the needs and wants of that community and what is acceptable and what is not.

Cynthia Van Guilder at Ethnography.com wonders about the constant documentation that occurs as she observes the world of her 15-year old daughter. How much do we need to record everything in a person’s life?

The fact is that what makes a person recognizable to those not fully indoctrinated in visual culture is a whole set of sights, smells, sounds, movements, and personal energy.  What does this tell us about identity, humanity, and perhaps an awareness of ourselves and the people around us, that we might be in danger of losing?

I confess I am a little biased. I say shoot first and sort it out later. But always with permission and respect.  Photographically speaking no, means no and ease up on the Photoshop. Oh, one more thing. When in doubt, everybody get naked.

Gena Haskett is a Contributing Editor at BlogHer where this post originally appeared.

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We Are All Astronomers – 2009 International Year of Astronomy

Human have look to the stars for freedom, faith, wishes and destiny. It is in our fiction and our non-fictional tales of survival. May 2009 has a been a great month for star gazing and thoughts about galaxies beyond sight. And no, I’m not referring to a certain Paramount movie franchise reboot. 

In space the main story is the successful repairs to the Hubble Telescope. Not only is it a great month for astronomers but it is a great year for Astronomy. This is the 400 anniversary of the invention of the telescope. In addition, 2009 has been designated as the International Year of Astronomy.  Let’s talk about actual space, the infinite frontier.

Astronomers That Plotted The Paths

This is Annie Jump Cannon. At the Smithsonian Photo blog I learned that:

“Annie Jump Cannon systematically categorized the hundreds of thousands of stars shown on the photo plates taken at the Observatory to create her own special classification system, which is still in use today. Cannon’s colleague, Henrietta Leavitt, devised a theory that helped to determine the size of the cosmos and discovered 2,400 variable stars—about half of the total number of variable stars known at that time!”

Despite the best efforts of academic educators of the time, there were women who made significant contributions to Astronomy. Annie was one of those women. A.J. Cannon was one the first persons to figure out a way to classify stars and objects in space.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center has a biographical page on Ms. Cannon and her tremendous contributions to astronomy, and, as a graduate of Wellesley College, there is certainly a biographical tribute page to this important alumna.

Annie Jump Cannon help to show the path for contemporary astronomers like Amanda Bauer at AstroPixie.  Amanda has been keeping her eyes on the Hubble repair mission.  Amanda will be participating in the “We Are Astronomers” project as well as speaking about Astronomy in the United Kingdom.  Amanda has posted a teaser project short video that shows the changes in human perception about the makings of the universe narrated by David Tennant.

Nicole and her co-workers at One Astronomer’s Noise were also bonding to their monitors watching the Hubble repairs and reflecting on how modern astronomers have to adjust their perceptions of the universe with each new discovery:

From this, we can improve our models of galaxy formation and evolution.  This is important since, after all, galaxies make stars and stars have planets and planets have us!

400 Years of Watching The Skies

As I mentioned at the top of the post, this is the 400th anniversary of the Telescope, The star gazers have been busy celebrating and documenting the experience. One of the places you have to visit is the 400 Years of the Telescope – A Journey of Science, Technology and Thought. This is a video that has aired on PBS; this is the trailer for the video:

The website has hours of video about astronomers, their influences and their vision of the future. If you can’t view the video that is ok, they have transcripts available on the site.  This is a portion of a transcript o Catherine Cesarsky on How She Became An Astronomer:

I was studying physics in the University of Buenos Aires and I was very lucky that at the crucial year a new professor came and he was in astronomy. I decided to work with him and became an astronomer and I have been thankful ever since. I always loved to look at the sky and I was always interested in knowing, but no, I didn’t think from early on that I would be an astronomer. It happened.

I think astronomers all over the world in the last decade were realizing that the next important project in astronomy was going to be a very large, millimeter, sub-millimeter interferometer. So the Japanese started one project, the Europeans got together and studied another and the Americans were in fact the most advanced in their studies. Eventually we realized that it was much better to all get together and make a very, very big one. So we got together, we called it ALMA: Atacama Large Millimeter Array, which also means soul in Spanish so it’s a really beautiful name. The Americans and the Europeans first agreed to do it; we signed the agreement, actually I signed with the head of the NSF on the 24th of February 2003 and the Japanese joined later and they brought with them also Taiwan, so now we have these three parties for the project of the price tag of about $1 billion.

There are some astronomers who have fallen in love with their topic and it comes out as a passion to teach or convey what they know. Alice Enevoldsen at Alice’s AstroInfo  uses her blog to answer beginner questions about astronomy. What to know what an actual sunspot is? Go ask Alice, or rather read her explanation.

2009 International Year of Astronomy

This is a year long celebration and many countries of the world are participating; you can find out if your country has an informational node that indicated participation in the festivities and country specific contributions to astronomy.

The activities are not only happening on a international or national level. It can be a close as your media player. If you don’t have time to read or watch the videos (and you should) then I recommend that you download a podcast or two from Astronomy Cast. 

Star Stryder (aka Dr. Pamela Gay) and the other collaborators work the auditory canal through Galaxies, Gamma Ray Astronomy and How Old Is The Universe? Dr. Pamela has her own blog and when she isn’t teaching she is trying to locate all of the Astro-Twitters, which is a great way to network and check out what other folks are doing in astrological fields.

This is just a pebble in one of Saturn’s rings on Astronomy blogs and Astronomical events occurring this year. I hope that you will check out the above blogs and websites. If you know of others pop them in the comments.  And for those of you jonesing for even more, psst…100 Hours of Astronomy.

This post originally appeared on BlogHer where I am a Contributing Editor.

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