yosibreak

Chris McManus: Beauty
What is this thing I call beauty? Not “art” as a social phenomenon based on status or display, or beautiful faces seen merely as biological fitness markers. Rather, the sheer, drawing-in-of-breath beauty of a Handel aria, a Rothko painting, TS Eliot’s poems, or those everyday moments of sun shining through wet, autumn leaves, or even a Powerpoint layout seeming just right. Content itself doesn’t matter – Cezanne’s paintings of apples are not beautiful because one likes apples, and there are beautiful photographs of horrible things. Somewhere there must be something formal, structural, compositional, involving the arrangement of light and shade, of sounds, of words best ordered to say old ideas in new ways. When I see beauty I know it, and others must also see it, or they wouldn’t make the paintings I like or have them hung in galleries. But why then doesn’t everyone see it in the same way?

— BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: Chris McManus: Beauty

5 October 2009

Day 94: Rainbow Spew (via poopoorama)

3 October 2009

Super Typhoon Parma intensified dramatically early this morning, forming a tiny “pinhole” eye (Figure 1) only seen in very intense tropical cyclones. The last Atlantic hurricane to form a pinhole eye was Hurricane Wilma, the strongest Atlantic hurricane of all time. Parma’s outer spiral bands are already beginning to spread over the eastern positions of the Philippines, and beginning Friday will likely bring 2 - 4 inches of rain to the regions hard-hit by Typhoon Ketsana, including the capital of Manila. (via Wunder Blog : Weather Underground

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1 October 2009