A Glowing Study on Lampyridae

(See, "glowing", get it?)

Fireflies are nifty.
I've never met anyone that doesn't like fireflies.
They are one of the select few that never have to pay their light bill, you know? Bioluminescence.
From Wikipedia:
The enzyme luciferase* acts on luciferin, in the presence of magnesium ions, ATP (adenosene triphosphate), and oxygen to produce light.
*Yes, as in Lucifer (light bringer)

"You would not believe your eyes, if ten million fireflies lit up the world..."
This song, entitled "Firefly" by the group Owl City, piqued my interest. How many fireflies would it take to REALLY light up the world? So, with the vast power of the internet gods at my disposal, I determined to find out. Turns out that 1 firefly weighs in at around 1/40 lumens. In other words, you'd need about 40 fireflies to equal the brightness of one candle. Woopee. In contrast the BIG YELLOW ONE which is the SUN, when measured in lumens,(which is a really dumb way of measurement by the way) trickles in at 6,840,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 lumens.

Soooo, if you were to light the world with fireflies, it would take(deep breath): 273,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 fireflies!

Better get those old Ball jars out and get busy, because if you catch an average of 1,000 a night it would take you forever-to-the-"nth" power, dude...

Later

On Music

One of the biggest problems I have with modern music is that I see it bludgeoning the cultural taste buds of this generation, overloading and rendering them incapable of distinguishing the much more refined flavors of emotion from, say, most music written before the 1900's.
One of the statements I've heard quite a lot from many of my peers is that they think classical music "all sounds the same"!
Their overstimulated senses are now rendered incapable of appreciating the music for what it is: Man's potential for genius realized through the art of sound.
It would be like having a exquisite meal prepared for you by a 5 star chef, and then turning it away because they don't have any ketchup with which to douse your pâté de foie gras...
Please, friends, do yourself a favor and don't criticize what you don't understand.

Whew.

Pause

A haiku for you:

The next street over
the sun is always shining
as I walk up it.

Resume.

Ike's Blog 2.5: The Blog Strikes Back

(Not the movie, still the book)

Sooo, I have decided to go back into the archives and pull out some unpublished drafts that never saw the light of your screen. Until now. I give you, in their somewhat incomplete yet unedited form; The Drafts.

Draft the Ist: If Wishes Were Horses...

>If wishes were horses, beggars would ride."

How many times have you heard that phrase, or have come across it in writing?
There are some inherent problems in this statement, however, and it is on these that I will be focusing on for the rest of this post.
From the information given it is impossible to know the time of the relation
(wishes=horses)
which might give us a clue as to the validity of the argument. In other words, at what point in time did this transmutation of non-corporeal thought into corporeal Equine occur, as it were.
Is this simply another question like "Hey, I wonder what this world would be like if we were all upside down?" and of course the answer is that philosophically there would be no difference if we were created that way. If that was all we had ever known, to us we would be right side up!
So if since the beginning of time
(wishes=horses),
pedestrian beggars would still be because wishes would not be wishes at all, they would be horses, or vice versa!
But then what if, say, this change happened over night, and all of a sudden wishes become horses. At first your average beggar might be pleased, although reasonably very startled. He could sell the horse and make some money. But soon, assuming the wish rate among beggars is rather high, the market would be flooded with horses, and the value would drop precipitously until they would be worthless. Not to mention the sophistication required for the waste removal system after the inundation of the streets... <

The Effects Of Caffeine On An Artist

Some people get jitters and shakes.

For me, it’s like everything slows down so I can process it.

After coffee, even walking down a street becomes a intoxicating rush of information.

With the caffeine loosing my brain, it’s as if a switch has been thrown-“click” as suddenly it begins to come alive with the river of patterns…

The words “ smooth flavor” flashes across my thoughts. I stop; mentally I backtrack, and realize the source was a piece of paper blowing in the wind past me, glimpsed by my eye for a fraction of a second as I hurried along.

An ant on the pavement who’s short one antennae…a girl with three earrings on her left ear, two on the right(I wonder if she feels off-balance?)…three blooms, two buds on that bush across the street(hmm, rather late in the season)…sounds, shapes, colors, all being processed and organized simultaneously at light speed. I get the feeling that if I really wanted to, I could think a great thought…

Or something.

=)

Attack of the Flavonoids

Sounds scary, right?
"Phasers have no effect, sir!"
"Keptin, we must-" *BZZZZZZZ (static)
"Billy? Billy!!"
"Curses upon you, Flavonoid!"

Or it sounds like some you need surgery to remove.
"What's the matter with him?"
*hushed tone "Oh, he's got flavonoids."
"Flavonoids? No way, man. That's rough..."

Turns out, Flavonoids are actually good things. Flavonoids are a polyphenolic compound and are found in most of the fruits and veggies that we eat, and are known for being high in- (Oh, pick me!) Antioxidants!
Go here, if you want to learn more.
Or go here, if you want to see a cool website that will help you do the stuff you do better, and give you some new ideas too.

And now, back to my tea.
Which contains flavonoids.

We all scream for art...

>

Aristotle wrote: “Experience produces art, but inexperience only luck. Art is produced when out of many ideas gained through experience we draw one general conclusion about some class of like cases.”

Hmmm…

Now, Aristotle and I don’t always see eye to eye, but on the philosophy of art I tend to agree with him, at least this far.

I could suddenly start painting a series of paintings of Africa, but chances are the resulting pieces would lack inspiration and originality, since my only experience of Africa is second hand, a trickled-down compressed myopic view from someone else’s experience of that country. The quality would suffer because of the dearth of inspiration. It would be dead to me.

Art, in my opinion, needs subjectivity. In order to be art, it needs to provoke a response, however subtle, in the viewer. There is some art that I really don’t like. Take “The Scream”, by Edvard Munch for example. Not my favorite piece. But I have to concede that it is still art. Creepy? Yes. But still art.

Whenever I paint I try to remember this principle, and strive to let my work speak…

That’s all.