//Why are some leaves purple?
Typically leaves are green due to the pigment chlorophyll but can be any colour. Leaves are only green because chlorophyll reflects green and blue light while absorbing red. Another pigment known as carotenoids absorb blue but reflect orange and yellow light and a third group of pigments called anthocyanins reflect reds and purples.
It is the various combinations of these three pigments in leaves that determine leaf colour.
Purple leaves are caused by high levels of anthocyanins and chlorophyll in leaves.
(Thank you Quora.)
2011-05-28
2011-05-23
>"How heavy is your heart?"
>>"As heavy as a stone that floats."
Today, thick white clouds muted the bright Los Angeles sun, toning the atmospheric intensity down to a languid lull. It played off nicely against the night prior with Dylan at the Exchange. (note to self: Manda is an awesome chick.)
The Silverlake Jubilee festival played out in this calm. It was filled with beautifully eccentric people. Later on, it was also filled with scenesters. In this crowd, beautiful girls with colourless skin and blister red lips stalked the block with aged boots. Bewitching.
Nattycakes and Lehmen came too. Jonathan looked like a dragqueen: effeminate sunglasses that had a feline-esque silhouette, probably borrowed from his girlfriend, played off curiously with his very manly frame that a picnic-table red shirt emphasized. I smiled when I saw him plodding in from the distance.
As a souvenir to the day, I donated a 1-minute oral story to ConcreteVoices. I tried to tell a trainspotting story, sharing a spot Dan and I discovered while going on practice adventures. It is a space under a bridge by the train tracks. There, a life-guard chair allows one to perch over a wire fence. The LA river backgrounds this. The height of the chair seat makes it feel like a throne, ruling over a kingdom of debris. The oddity of the situation is delicious: a lifeguard chair, abandoned trailers overgrown with plants, hydroponic tubes, giant water bladders and the odd nature that is the LA river. It is an accidental collage that arranged itself unconsciously, waiting to be interpreted.
I think I should have slowed down and elaborated a bit more on the details when telling the story. I fear my rendition may have been too abstract and fall apart as a string of words without conjuring up a feeling for the atmosphere the space creates. Too much mind-clutter.
>>"As heavy as a stone that floats."
 |
| BoxViolet under the Bridge (She Jumps like a Jellybean) |
Today, thick white clouds muted the bright Los Angeles sun, toning the atmospheric intensity down to a languid lull. It played off nicely against the night prior with Dylan at the Exchange. (note to self: Manda is an awesome chick.)
The Silverlake Jubilee festival played out in this calm. It was filled with beautifully eccentric people. Later on, it was also filled with scenesters. In this crowd, beautiful girls with colourless skin and blister red lips stalked the block with aged boots. Bewitching.
Nattycakes and Lehmen came too. Jonathan looked like a dragqueen: effeminate sunglasses that had a feline-esque silhouette, probably borrowed from his girlfriend, played off curiously with his very manly frame that a picnic-table red shirt emphasized. I smiled when I saw him plodding in from the distance.
As a souvenir to the day, I donated a 1-minute oral story to ConcreteVoices. I tried to tell a trainspotting story, sharing a spot Dan and I discovered while going on practice adventures. It is a space under a bridge by the train tracks. There, a life-guard chair allows one to perch over a wire fence. The LA river backgrounds this. The height of the chair seat makes it feel like a throne, ruling over a kingdom of debris. The oddity of the situation is delicious: a lifeguard chair, abandoned trailers overgrown with plants, hydroponic tubes, giant water bladders and the odd nature that is the LA river. It is an accidental collage that arranged itself unconsciously, waiting to be interpreted.
I think I should have slowed down and elaborated a bit more on the details when telling the story. I fear my rendition may have been too abstract and fall apart as a string of words without conjuring up a feeling for the atmosphere the space creates. Too much mind-clutter.
2011-05-18
//5July2007, Inhabiting Celluloid
Like on the set of Raising Arizona, at the 99cent store - crazy old grannies with leather-ed skins to match their purse and dyed barbie doll hair, thin and stringy. At the entrance, conspiracy theorists - smelled before they are seen - crazy eyes and wild hair. They mutter to themselves, throwing indecipherable phrases at everyone, anyone and no-one.
Like on the set of Raising Arizona, at the 99cent store - crazy old grannies with leather-ed skins to match their purse and dyed barbie doll hair, thin and stringy. At the entrance, conspiracy theorists - smelled before they are seen - crazy eyes and wild hair. They mutter to themselves, throwing indecipherable phrases at everyone, anyone and no-one.
2011-05-16
//La Dolce Vita, excerpts
--
Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times)
"once again, everything collapses in an exhausted dawn."
"... The echo chamber. The Mass at dawn. The final desperate orgy. And of course the touching sequence with Marcello's father, a travelling salesman who joins Marcello on a tour of the night. In a club they see a sad-faced clown lead a lonely balloon out with his trumpet. And Marcello's father, filled with the courage of chamgpagne, grows bold with a young woman who owes Marcello a favour - only to leave ill, gray and ashen, again at dawn."
"... there may be no such thing as a sweet life. But it is necessary to find that out for yourself."
--
Philip French (Guardian)
"... La Dolce Vita introduced him (Fellini) to a popular audience far beyond the art house circuit. It also introduced three terms into the English language. The first is 'Felliniesque' as an adjective to describe something quirkily outlandish or bizarre in the style of the director. The second is 'paparazzi', the pejorative term for brazen celebrity-stalking photographers, named after the journalist hero's camera-toting sidekick Paparazzo, which in turn was borrowed from a hotelier in George Gissing's 1901 travel book, By the Ionian Sea. The third, of course, is the title, La Dolce Vita, used ironically thereafter to describe a shallow materialistic lifestyle, though Fellini claimed he'd used it without irony to mean 'the sweetness of life' rather than 'the sweet life'."
"'It's not plot-driven, it's about them wandering around."
--
Stella Papamichael (BBC)
" rather than wallow in cynicism, Fellini's genius is characterised by a zest for life - albeit a tragically insatiable one - as he sprinkles dreamlike snapshots like glitter in the darkness."
"Tragic desperation is underlined, and also tempered, by Fellini's boundless appetite for beauty and passion... Fellini knows: it's the bitter edge that makes life sweeter."
--
Mick LaSalle (SF Chronicle)
"La Dolce Vita" is always two things at once: It's a wallow in decadence disguised as a moral saga, and it's a moral saga disguised as a wallow in decadence. It's always both, and that tension is always there, within the film and the filmmaker. That's why the scene of Ekberg bathing in the Trevi Fountain has always been such a compelling symbol of the movie as a whole"
"In "La Dolce Vita," Fellini critiques Roman decadence but offers no alternative but boredom; he exposes the frivolity and meaningless of it all, while offering no higher vision.
Accordingly, the film can be seen as an essentially despairing work, but it certainly doesn't feel that way, because the filmmaking is so exuberant. Fellini believes everything that Marcello believes, but he can't be depressed, because he knows something else: He knows he's an artist. "La Dolce Vita" bursts with the excitement of a filmmaker suddenly and completely discovering his power."
 |
| The Sweetness of Life |
Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times)
"once again, everything collapses in an exhausted dawn."
"... The echo chamber. The Mass at dawn. The final desperate orgy. And of course the touching sequence with Marcello's father, a travelling salesman who joins Marcello on a tour of the night. In a club they see a sad-faced clown lead a lonely balloon out with his trumpet. And Marcello's father, filled with the courage of chamgpagne, grows bold with a young woman who owes Marcello a favour - only to leave ill, gray and ashen, again at dawn."
"... there may be no such thing as a sweet life. But it is necessary to find that out for yourself."
--
Philip French (Guardian)
"... La Dolce Vita introduced him (Fellini) to a popular audience far beyond the art house circuit. It also introduced three terms into the English language. The first is 'Felliniesque' as an adjective to describe something quirkily outlandish or bizarre in the style of the director. The second is 'paparazzi', the pejorative term for brazen celebrity-stalking photographers, named after the journalist hero's camera-toting sidekick Paparazzo, which in turn was borrowed from a hotelier in George Gissing's 1901 travel book, By the Ionian Sea. The third, of course, is the title, La Dolce Vita, used ironically thereafter to describe a shallow materialistic lifestyle, though Fellini claimed he'd used it without irony to mean 'the sweetness of life' rather than 'the sweet life'."
"'It's not plot-driven, it's about them wandering around."
--
Stella Papamichael (BBC)
" rather than wallow in cynicism, Fellini's genius is characterised by a zest for life - albeit a tragically insatiable one - as he sprinkles dreamlike snapshots like glitter in the darkness."
"Tragic desperation is underlined, and also tempered, by Fellini's boundless appetite for beauty and passion... Fellini knows: it's the bitter edge that makes life sweeter."
--
Mick LaSalle (SF Chronicle)
"La Dolce Vita" is always two things at once: It's a wallow in decadence disguised as a moral saga, and it's a moral saga disguised as a wallow in decadence. It's always both, and that tension is always there, within the film and the filmmaker. That's why the scene of Ekberg bathing in the Trevi Fountain has always been such a compelling symbol of the movie as a whole"
"In "La Dolce Vita," Fellini critiques Roman decadence but offers no alternative but boredom; he exposes the frivolity and meaningless of it all, while offering no higher vision.
Accordingly, the film can be seen as an essentially despairing work, but it certainly doesn't feel that way, because the filmmaking is so exuberant. Fellini believes everything that Marcello believes, but he can't be depressed, because he knows something else: He knows he's an artist. "La Dolce Vita" bursts with the excitement of a filmmaker suddenly and completely discovering his power."
2011-05-07
2011-05-04
//CS106A_Assignment01_Problem02
/*
* File: StoneMasonKarel.java
* --------------------------
* The StoneMasonKarel subclass as it appears here does nothing.
* When you finish writing it, it should solve the "repair the quad"
* problem from Assignment 1. In addition to editing the program,
* you should be sure to edit this comment so that it no longer
* indicates that the program does nothing.
*/
for more information on free classes, go to cs106a.standford.edu
/*
* File: StoneMasonKarel.java
* --------------------------
* The StoneMasonKarel subclass as it appears here does nothing.
* When you finish writing it, it should solve the "repair the quad"
* problem from Assignment 1. In addition to editing the program,
* you should be sure to edit this comment so that it no longer
* indicates that the program does nothing.
*/
for more information on free classes, go to cs106a.standford.edu
//Conversations with my Left Hand
I STILL haven't gotten off my ass... but I did find this picture off p.cam's blog!
ok. Now I'm leaving. PROMISE.
tschues!
I STILL haven't gotten off my ass... but I did find this picture off p.cam's blog!
 |
| National Library, Minsk |
 |
| Soviet Beach Architecture |
tschues!
2011-05-03
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