Author: Mr. Homegrown

Saturday Tweets: Labor Day Weekend Edition

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Saturday Linkages

Lost in Light: A Short Film on Light Pollution

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Nature Awareness, Thoughtstylings
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Via BoingBoing, a beautifully shot video by Sriram Murali showing the damage done by city lights.

Shot mostly in California, the movie shows how the view gets progressively better as you move away from the lights. Finding locations to shoot at every level of light pollution was a challenge and getting to the darkest skies with no light pollution was a journey in itself. Here’s why I think we should care more. The night skies remind us of our place in the Universe. Imagine if we lived under skies full of stars. That reminder we are a tiny part of this cosmos, the awe and a special connection with this remarkable world would make us much better beings – more thoughtful, inquisitive, empathetic, kind and caring. Imagine kids growing up passionate about astronomy looking for answers and how advanced humankind would be, how connected and caring we’d feel with one another, how noble and adventurous we’d be. How compassionate with fellow species on Earth and how one with Nature we’d feel.

This is an easy problem to fix. On the political front we could start by getting rid of billboards like the mayor of São Paulo did. On the technological front, there are a lot of lessons to learn from the lighting designers of the High Line in New York.

Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Sundials

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Design
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Sundial Print: Umbra Solis 1975 Ian Hamilton Finlay 1925-2006 Bequeathed by David Brown in memory of Mrs Liza Brown 2003 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/P11953

Sundial Print: Umbra Solis 1975 Ian Hamilton Finlay 1925-2006.

On my long bucket list is the construction of a Root Simple sundial. Towards that end I’ve begun a short Sundial Pinterest board that, as of today, is entirely made up of Ian Hamilton Finlay sundials. Finlay’s poetry, art and gardening deserves greater recognition. The print of one of his sundials, above, is a clever meditation/pun on the distinction between the map and the territory.

You can own an original Finlay print for a modest sum. The perfect gift for the gardener in your life!

Video Sundays: Slow TV

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Picture Sundays
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In the 1990s I had a job at a tiny low-power TV station operated by the University of California, San Diego. To fill the hours between our sparse programming, a fellow employee named Steve would play one of two things: a recording of bird sounds or, if the space shuttle was up, NASA’s feed. The funny thing about the NASA feed was that it was mostly a static shot of a bunch of engineers at Houston Mission Control staring at their computers.

Guess what? People loved the bird sounds and NASA feed way more than the boring lectures that were our main programming. The producers at Norway’s national television station discovered this same phenomena a few years ago with a surprise “Slow TV” hit that consists of over seven hours of footage shot from the cab of a train going from Bergen to Oslo. They followed up this show with an eighteen hours of salmon fishing, real time knitting, a fire and a five day ferry voyage. You can see producer Thomas Hellum discussing these shows in a Ted Talk.

Should you want something more pastoral, allow me to suggest three hours of bison grazing. It’s surprisingly relaxing:

And a winter train journey:

Hopefully this slow TV thing will replace the violent junk and reality shows that otherwise dominate our mediasphere.

You can find many of the Norwegian Slow TV experiments in both Netflix and on Youtube.

If you want a little more narrative with your Slow TV I suggest Andrea Tarkovsky’s movies which you can access for free.

Saturday Tweets: The Earth Laughs in Flowers

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Saturday Linkages
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