"you are because you have to be"

"For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love." - Carl Sagan

"The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true." - Carl Sagan

THE GREASY HANDS PREACHERS

The Greasy Hands Preachers is a feature documentary film about ...shall we say...a special breed. A project by Clement Beauvais and Arthur de Kersauson, which is in production and i can not wait to see.

They have been posting teasers that i have been seeing and i could not miss this  quote by Saint Francis of Assissi which must date back to the begging of 13th century and says: 

 "He who works things with his hands is a laborer,
   He who works with his hands and his mind is a craftsman,
   He who works with his hands, his head and his heart is an artist." 

                                                                                                St Francis of Assissi

Mathematics: Why the brain sees maths as beauty

By James GallagherHealth and science reporter, BBC News

Brain scans show a complex string of numbers and letters in mathematical formulae can evoke the same sense of beauty as artistic masterpieces and music from the greatest composers.

Mathematicians were shown "ugly" and "beautiful" equations while in a brain scanner at University College London.

The same emotional brain centres used to appreciate art were being activated by "beautiful" maths.

The researchers suggest there may be a neurobiological basis to beauty.

The likes of Euler's identity or the Pythagorean identity are rarely mentioned in the same breath as the best of Mozart, Shakespeare and Van Gogh.

The study in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience gave 15 mathematicians 60 formula to rate.

One of the researchers, Prof Semir Zeki, told the BBC: "A large number of areas of the brain are involved when viewing equations, but when one looks at a formula rated as beautiful it activates the emotional brain - the medial orbito-frontal cortex - like looking at a great painting or listening to a piece of music."

The more beautiful they rated the formula, the greater the surge in activity detected during the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans.

"Neuroscience can't tell you what beauty is, but if you find it beautiful the medial orbito-frontal cortex is likely to be involved, you can find beauty in anything," he said.

A thing of great beauty

To the untrained eye there may not be much beauty in Euler's identity, but in the study it was the formula of choice for mathematicians.

It is a personal favourite of Prof David Percy from the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.

He told the BBC: "It is a real classic and you can do no better than that.

"It is simple to look at and yet incredibly profound, it comprises the five most important mathematical constants - zero (additive identity), one (multiplicative identity), e and pi (the two most common transcendental numbers) and i (fundamental imaginary number).

"It also comprises the three most basic arithmetic operations - addition, multiplication and exponentiation.

"Given that e, pi and i are incredibly complicated and seemingly unrelated numbers, it is amazing that they are linked by this concise formula.

"At first you don't realise the implications it's a gradual impact, perhaps as you would with a piece of music and then suddenly it becomes amazing as you realise its full potential."

He said beauty was a source of "inspiration and gives you the enthusiasm to find out about things".

Mathematician and professor for the public understanding of science, Marcus du Sautoy, said he "absolutely" found beauty in maths and it "motivates every mathematician".

He said he loved a "small thing [mathematician Pierre de] Fermat did". He showed that any prime number that could be divided by four with a remainder of one was also the sum of two square numbers.

So 41 is a prime, can be divided by four with one left over and is 25 (five squared) plus 16 (four squared).

"So if it has remainder one it can always be written as two square numbers - there's something beautiful about that.

"It's unexpected why should the two things [primes and squares] have anything to do with each other, but as the proof develops you start to see the two ideas become interwoven like in a piece of music and you start to see they come together.

He said it was the journey not the final proof that was exciting "like in a piece of music it's not enough to play the final chord".

He said this beauty of maths was missing from schools and yet amazing things could be shown with even primary school mathematical ability.

In the study, mathematicians rated Srinivasa Ramanujan's infinite series and Riemann's functional equation as the ugliest of the formulae.

Divine Comedy

Very interesting read on - progression lets say :)....breaking rules and much more

"Readers often cannot understand how such a serious work may be called a "comedy." In Dante's time, all serious scholarly works were written in Latin, a tradition that would persist for several hundred years more until the waning years of the Enlightenment, and works written in any other language were assumed to be more trivial in nature. Furthermore, the word "comedy" in the classical sense refers to works which reflect belief in an ordered universe, in which events tended toward not only a happy or amusing ending but one influenced by a Providential will that orders all things to an ultimate good. By this meaning of the word, as Dante himself wrote in a letter to Cangrande I della Scala, the progression of the pilgrimage from Hell to Paradise is the paradigmatic expression of comedy, since the work begins with the pilgrim's moral confusion and ends with the vision of God."

"He wrote the Comedy in a language he called "Italian," in some sense an amalgamated literary language mostly based on the regional dialect of Tuscany, but with some elements of Latin and other regional dialects. He deliberately aimed to reach a readership throughout Italy including laymen, clergymen and other poets. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, he established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression. In French, Italian is sometimes nicknamed la langue de Dante. Publishing in the vernacular language marked Dante as one of the first (among others such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio) to break free from standards of publishing in only Latin (the language of liturgy, history and scholarship in general, but often also of lyric poetry). This break set a precedent and allowed more literature to be published for a wider audience, setting the stage for greater levels of literacy in the future."



Source:wikipedia

"We value our customers who are patiently waiting more than anything"

What a wonderful statement ! 

"Making something from passion and soul, not necessary money and fame takes time." How true is 

that?

Source: http://shinyakimura.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/the-last-ride.html

"the word art etymologically means to do" Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp

We took part recently in a architectural competition for a building for an European Chess association and i was reading trough some of the chess books i ordered at the time  and came across the name of Marcel Duchamp, who I learned had turned a very successful chess player in his later years. (to a certain discontent of some of the established a the time chess masters).

The book is called  The Chess Artist by J C Hallman, One  quote stuck in my memory - "He preferred a beautiful loss to a boring win"

Duchamp, along all the attributions he has to the modern art we know today, was also one of the first artist to try and express/implement  4th dimension in his work, which could be very tricky when you are working with "static" lets say media/tools.

AJ exclusive: James Pallister spoke with Swiss starchitect Peter Zumthor on the eve of his RIBA Gold Medal lecture

Many details that make your work so rich seem to come from very close observation of daily life. Do you think architects’ work would be better if they learnt to relax and play a little more?
I know exactly what you mean but it gives the wrong impression of how I work. I try to create emotional spaces that feel right for the purpose and the place. So I try to go into the use of the building very deeply and see what could be beautiful and comfortable.