Belgium

Toll
Excalibur
Steele
Fillet
2Tim. 2:15

"Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth." Atomium
Atomium, Brussels

Chess: "Excalibur" "Toll" "Steele" "fillet"

Grain

Nutrition
Grain
Southern
Sydney's Opera House
Psalm 14:4
"Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge? who eat up my people as they eat bread, and call not upon the LORD."

Squirrel in Bird House

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Chess: "Grain" "Nutrition" "Nourishment" "Sydney's Opera House" "Southern"

Devil's Garden Southern Utah

Flavor
Gulf
Simil
Like
Missing Link
Psalm 14:2
"The LORD looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God."

Devil's Garden Southern Utah

Chess: "flavor" "Gulf" "sabor" "como" "like" "Simil" "Missing Link" "El Eslabón Perdido"

Minor C. Keith

"Quantum Mechanics"
"Montenegro"
"Everest Á" 
"Cheops"
Mark 11:23  
"For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith."

Let's get closer!!!

Mountain Reflections, Alaska  

by Daniel Leffel

Chess: "Quantum Mechanics" "Northern Railway Co." "Minor C. Keith" "Montenegro" "Cheops"

Cornucopia

Cornucopia
Happy Thanksgiving from the Webshots family to yours!

Gold Medal

Gold
Hope
Prov. 18:2
"A fool hath no delight in understanding, but that his heart may discover itself."

The weather project: Tate Modern

Salon d'Ete, Hotel Ritz Paris

For the past twelve years my research team has been using all the brain research tools at its disposal, from functional MRI to electro- and magneto-encephalography and even electrodes inserted deep in the human brain, to shed light on the brain mechanisms of consciousness.

I am now happy to report that we have acquired a good working hypothesis. In experiment after experiment, we have seen the same signatures of consciousness: physiological markers that all, simultaneously, show a massive change when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information (say a word, a digit or a sound).

Chess: "Hope" "Gold" "Gold Medal"

Sir Francis Bacon

Temple
Christmas Eve
Dawn
Alborada

Prov. 18:1 
"Through desire a man, having separated himself, seeketh and intermeddleth with all wisdom."

"Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim."~~~Aristotle

lucenarium - service of light

Voando

Congratulations to the latest Creative Challenge winner, anario106, for their entry for the Jump! challenge!

Chess: "Christmas Eve" "Dawn" "Temple" "Araya" "Alfred Hitchcock"

Film

50 Years of Dizzy, Courtesy of Hitchcock

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

Published: May 11, 2008

“I LOOK up, I look down,” says Detective John (Scottie) Ferguson of the San Francisco police, standing nervously on a stepladder in an early scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.”
Scottie (James Stewart) is trying to cure himself of the title affliction, recently discovered during a rooftop chase in which his fear of heights resulted in the death of a fellow officer. So, impatient with his recovery, he gingerly mounts the three steps of the ladder, looks up, looks down, looks up and looks down again, then collapses into the arms of his college friend Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), who always seems ready to catch him when he falls.
Fifty years and two days ago, at a preview in San Francisco, moviegoers looked up at the screen and saw “Vertigo” for the first time, and maybe some of them looked down too in confusion or dismay, wondering, as in a dream, where they were and how they had gotten there and how they would make it back to safer ground.
With “Vertigo” you never know. It’s a movie that — even if you know that it will always end the same way, tragically — never takes you to that inevitable conclusion by the same route. You feel as if you are wandering, which is the word Scottie and the object of his desire, Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak), use to describe their days.
Neither, actually, is quite as purposeless as that sounds. Madeleine is chasing the ghost of her great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdes, and Scottie is tailing Madeleine, a private-eye job he’s doing as a favor for another old college chum, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), who is her husband. But it’s a desultory sort of surveillance, which turns gradually and with a mysterious inexorability into something else: a love story in which Scottie and Madeleine wander together, pursuing the past and running, with all deliberate speed, from themselves.
You can’t help wondering what those first Bay Area viewers 50 years ago must have thought as they watched this strange, drifty, hallucinatory romance unfold on the big screen, with the strains of Bernard Herrmann’s lush score — brazenly echoing the “Liebestod” from Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” — swelling on the soundtrack. It wasn’t what they had come to expect from Hitchcock, the beloved portly “master of suspense,” who had been making impishly macabre thrillers for 30-some years and had since 1955 also been the host and impresario of a very popular mystery-story anthology series on television.
“Vertigo” — based on a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the authors of “Diabolique” — features one murder and two other deaths, but it isn’t built like an ordinary suspense film. Its only action sequence is the first scene, that rooftop chase. The detective never really investigates the movie’s lone murder because he doesn’t know until just before the end that one has been committed; the killer is not brought to justice.
And Hitchcock doesn’t content himself simply with violating genre conventions. He seems determined to unsettle every reasonable expectation — anything that could give us a footing in the shifty, unstable world he’s creating before our eyes.
A couple of years later he notoriously killed off his lead actress in the first 40 minutes of “Psycho,” but that is only marginally more perverse than what he does with Kim Novak in “Vertigo”: in the first third of the picture, when Scottie is following her, she has precisely one close-up and not a single line of dialogue. And in the movie’s final third, every supporting character drops off the screen, leaving Mr. Stewart and Ms. Novak to work out their characters’ awful fate alone. Along the way Hitchcock also throws in a bizarre, partly animated dream sequence and a startling scene in which, as the lovers kiss, the camera pans 360 degrees around them and the background changes from a small hotel room to the stables of an old Spanish mission, where they had kissed once before. You never do know quite where you are in “Vertigo.”
The film wasn’t a hit in its initial release, and it wasn’t enthusiastically reviewed either. But its stature has increased exponentially in its five decades of screen life, especially in the 12 years since its brilliant restoration by Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz; it now routinely places in the Top 10 in critics’ and viewers’ polls of the greatest movies ever made.
For a movie so revered, “Vertigo” hasn’t been terribly influential. The films that try hardest to recapture its twisted, doomy romanticism, like Brian De Palma’s 1976 “Obsession” (with a score by Mr. Herrmann) and Mike Figgis’s 1991 “Liebestraum” (in which Ms. Novak plays a supporting role), always wind up proving that Hitchcock’s dark vision is too wayward, too eccentric to be imitated: there’s never enough wandering in them.
And in a way the wandering is all that matters when you’re watching “Vertigo,” for the first time or the 10th or — like the fictional correspondent of Chris Marker’s beautiful essay-film “Sans Soleil” (1982) — the 19th. This movie isn’t constructed, as most thrillers are, to get us from point A to point B as swiftly and as efficiently as possible. “Vertigo” instead circles compulsively around a set of visual and verbal (and musical) motifs — spirals, towers, bouquets, the words “too late” — which keep bringing us back to the same places, turning us in relentlessly on ourselves. There’s a wonderful scene in which Scottie follows Madeleine through the dizzying streets of San Francisco to his own home. He looks puzzled, utterly disoriented, and the viewer knows exactly how he feels.
Seeing “Vertigo” on DVD is maybe a shade less overwhelming, less deranging, than seeing it as its first audience did, but it has the compensating quality of seeming a more solitary and more intimate experience, and this is, always has been, a movie that makes you want to be alone with it. It’s like Scottie’s surveillance of Madeleine: he watches from a distance, then there’s no distance at all, just him and her, no one else around. Jean-Luc Godard once described the difference between cinema and television as the difference between raising your eyes to the movie screen and lowering them to the TV screen. Whether you look up at “Vertigo” or look down, the effect is the same: You fall and hope that somebody’s there to catch you.

Time

Positively so!
Lobo

Cornwall 
Miner
Russellian Semantics
John 14:6 
"Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me."

More Russell Lupins.

Russell Lupines

Indian corn

 Cornwall
 Bedruthan Steps

 Cornwall

Taken about 30 mins before sunset, with a brisk westerly pushing the rollers in.
A feat of engineering to build these. The lower engine house was built in 1835 to contain a beam engine to pump out and drain the mine.
The other house had a winding engine to work the inclined Diagonal Shaft which ran out under the sea to a depth of 1360 feet.
It is said, on stormy days, the miners could hear the large boulders being rolled about on the sea floor above their heads.
One hell of a place to work!

Chess: "Time" "Russellian" "Cornwall" "Lobo" "Miner"

Logical Atomism
by Bertrand Russell

The philosophy which I advocate is generally regarded as a species of realism, and accused of inconsistency because of the elements in it which seem contrary to that doctrine. For my part, I do not regard the issue between realists and their opponents as a fundamental one; I could alter my view on this issue without changing my mind as to any of the doctrines upon which I wish to lay stress. I hold that logic is what is fundamental in philosophy, and that schools should be characterized rather by their logic than by their metaphysics. My own logic is atomic, and it is this aspect upon which I should wish to lay stress. Therefore I prefer to describe my philosoophy as "logical atomism," rather than as "realism," whether with or without some prefixed adjective.
A few words as to historical development may be useful by way of preface. I came to philosophy through mathematics, or rather through the wish to find some reason to believe in the truth of mathematics. From early youth, I had an ardent desire to believe that there can be such a thing as knowledge, combined with great difficulty in accepting much that passes as knowledge. It seemed clear that the best chance of finding indubitable truth would be in pure mathematics, yet some of Euclid's axioms were obviously doubtful, and the infinitesimal calculus, as I was taught it, was a mass of sophisms, which I could not bring myself to regard as anything else. I saw no reason to doubt the truth of arithmetic, but I did not then know that arithmetic can be made to embrace all traditional pure mathematics. At the age of eighteen I read Mill's Logic, but was profoundly dissatisfied with his reasons for accepting arithmetic and geometry. I had not read Hume, but it seemed to me that pure empiricism (which I was disposed to accept) must lead to scepticism rather than to Mill's support of received scientific doctrines. At Cambridge I read Kant and Hegel, as well as Mr. Bradley's Logic, which influenced me profoundly. For some years I was a disciple of Mr. Bradley, but about 1898 I changed my views, largely as a result of arguments with G.E. Moore. I could no longer believe that knowing can make any difference to what it is known. Also I found myself driven to pluralism. Analysis of mathematical propositions persuaded me that they could not be explained as even partial truths unless one admitted pluralism and and the reality of relations.An accident led me at this time to study Leibniz, and I came to the conclusion (subsequently confirmed by Couturat's masterly researches) that many of his most characteristic opinions were due to the purely logical doctrine that every proposition has a subject and a predicate. This doctrine is one which Leibniz shares with Spinoza, Hegel, and Mr. Bradley; it seemed to me that , if it is rejected, the whole foundation for the metaphysics of all these philosophers is shattered. I therefore returned to the problem which had originally led me to philosophy, namely, the foundations of mathematics, applying to it a new logic derived largely from Peano and Frege, which proved (at least, so I believe) far more fruitful than that of traditional philosophy.
In the first place, I found that many of the stock philosophical arguments about mathematics (derived in the main from Kant) had been rendered invalid by the progress of mathematics in the meanwhile. Non-Euclidean geometry had undermined the argument of the transcendental aesthetic. Weierstrass had shown that the differential and integral calculus do not require the conception of the infinitesimal, and that therefore, all that had been said by philosophers on such subjects as the continuity of space and time and motion must be regarded as sheer error. Cantor freed the conception of infinite number from contradiction, and thus disposed of Kant's antinomies as well as many of Hegel's. Finally Frege showed in detail how arithmetic can be deduced from pure logic, without the need from any fresh ideas or axioms, thus disproving Kant's assertion that "7+5=12" is synthetic--at least in the obvious interpretation of that dictum. As all these results were obtained, not by any heroic method, but by patient detailed reasoning, I began to think it probable that philosophy had erred in adopting heroic remedies for intellectual difficulties, and that solutions were to be found merely by greater care and accuracy. This view I have come to hold more and more strongly as time went on, and it has led me to doubt whether philosophy, as a study distinct from science and possesed of a method of its own, is more than an unfortunate legacy from theology.

Frege's work was not final, in the first place because it applied only to arithmetic, not to other branches of mathematics; in the second place because his premises did not exclude certain contradictions to which all systems of formal logic turned out to be liable. Dr. Whitehead and I in collaboration tried to remedy these two defects, in Principia Mathematica, which, however, still falls short of of finality in some fundamental points (notably the axiom of reducibility). But in spite of its shortcomings I think that no one who reads this book will dispute its main contention, namely, that from certain ideas and axioms of formal logic, by the help of the logic of relations, all pure mathematics can be deduced, without any new undefined idea or unproved propositions.. The technical methods of mathematical logic, as developed in this book, seem to me very powerful, and capable of providing a new instrument for the discussion of many problems that have hitherto remained subject to philosophic vagueness. Dr. Whitehead'sConcept of Nature and Principles of natural Knowledge may serve as an illustration of what I mean.

Steppenwolf

Sólo
Solo
Steppenwolf
Prov. 18:5
"It is not good to accept the person of the wicked, to overthrow the righteous in judgment."

Chess: "salir a la Gramática española""sólo" "solo" "Steppenwolf"

Colour And Light Modifications.

English Country HousesEstancierosGoldsmith Prov. 18:20"A man's belly shall be satisfied with the fruit of his mouth; and with the increase of his lips shall he be filled."

Colour And Light Modifications.

Chess: "English country houses" "estancieros" "Goldsmith"

Prologue to `Zobeide

IN these bold times, when Learning's sons explore
The distant climate and the savage shore;
When wise Astronomers to India steer,
And quit for Venus, many a brighter here;
While Botanists, all cold to smiles and dimpling,                5
Forsake the fair, and patiently ....go simpling;
When every bosom swells with wond'rous scenes,
Priests, cannibals, and hoity-toity queens:
Our bard into the general spirit enters,
And fits his little frigate for adventures:                      10
With Scythian stores, and trinkets deeply laden,
He this way steers his course, in hopes of trading --
Yet ere he lands he 'as ordered me before,
To make an observation on the shore.
Where are we driven?  our reck'ning sure is lost!                15
This seems a barren and a dangerous coast.
____ what a sultry climate am I under!
Yon ill foreboding cloud seems big with thunder.
                 ('Upper Gallery'.)
There Mangroves spread, and larger than I've seen 'em --
                 ('Pit'.)
Here trees of stately size -- and turtles in 'em --
                 ('Balconies'.)                               20
Here ill-condition'd oranges abound --
                 ('Stage'.)
And apples ('takes up one and tastes it'),
     bitter apples strew the ground.
The place is uninhabited, I fear!
I heard a hissing -- there are serpents here!
O there the natives are -- a dreadful race!                      25
The men have tails, the women paint the face!
No doubt they're all barbarians. -- Yes, 'tis so,
I'll try to make palaver with them though;
                  ('Making signs'.)
'Tis best, however, keeping at a distance.
Good Savages, our Captain craves assistance;                     30
Our ship's well stor'd; -- in yonder creek we've laid her;
His honour is no mercenary trader;
This is his first adventure; lend him aid,
Or you may chance to spoil a thriving trade.
His goods, he hopes are prime, and brought from far,             35
Equally fit for gallantry and war.
What!  no reply to promises so ample?
I'd best step back -- and order up a sample.