Good
morning.
NPR
recently had a piece about an Icelandic youngster (age 15 now) who started, at
age 10, working on a Lego model of the Titanic.
Brynjar Karl Birgisson is also autistic, by his own account, but said
that "autism . . . is not a negative thing. It is a gift, because many
people [with autism] are really intelligent — like many people [with autism]
can do stuff too. We are people as well.
We just seem a little bit different on
the outside, but the inside, we're always the same."
The ship
required 56,000 Legos (just a few more than we have) and nearly a year to
finish. It's 26 feet long and 5 feet wide.
It's on display in Tennessee at present.
I sent the
URL for the article to Elliott because we've spent so much time together building
with Legos (when he was young). We
follow Lego stuff. I didn't expect the
response I received.
Odd how this is considered a crazy
project, that the article has to mention he's autistic, and that a lot of
people would probably call him, an adult (a young adult; 15 is on the edge), a
loser for undertaking this. Yet if I
were to spend 11 months working on a 26'-long painting, no one would bat an eye
and it would be hailed as an artistic achievement. No real difference from a creative standpoint.
I told
Elliott I'd have to think about that comparison. He pursued his line of thinking.
It's all a matter of perception. Legos are advertised as a kid's toy primarily
so people overlook their complex engineering brilliance. Painting is an "adult" hobby. Both require a particular mental acuity at
high level. Or compare it to sculpting. If you glued Lego sized wood chips together to
form a giant ship, it would be artistic. But putting Legos together to the same end is
not the same thing. For no discernible
reason.
I wasn't convinced—yet. One point that occurs to me is whether it's
original or copying. My paint-by-number painting
is not original. The Lego Titanic model
is not original. Elliott painting a
26-foot painting would be original--unless doing a landscape, for example, is
also just "copying" (what you see as you paint). If you glued wood chips together to form a
ship that existed nowhere other than your imagination, that would be original;
is a wood chip version of the Titanic original?
Kathy made Elliott's point in a subsequent conversation: putting together a Lego kit from instructions
is not creative. Building something new,
or a re-creation of something (i.e., the Titanic) is.
Elliott contended that "there
is no creative difference between observing a ship and recreating it with Legos
or recreating it in paint. Both require
you to transcribe a complex model into a different medium and scale. If it took no creativity or engineering skill
to make a huge Lego model, little kids would all intuitively build those. Instead they build crappy little huts that
fall over."
My point was slightly
different. "Is there a difference
between recreating—with whatever medium—and imagining and creating something
entirely new?" That's the
distinction I was making. Elliott agreed
with my point. "But if that's the
distinction between impressive or not, then a portrait should be comparable to
building a Titanic model. I'm just
transferring something I'm looking at into a different medium. The entire art is in the transcription
process."
There's the point, I think: the "transcription process." I think about some of the most famous Impressionist
landscape paintings; the artist was interpreting a scene, not photographing it
(although, Kathy argued, even a realistic painting is still creative because it
requires a high level of skill and training to paint realistically. Or to paint a portrait.)
(It would just barely fit in our living room/parlor, across
the full interior width of our house from side to side.)
* * *
While I'm
on the subject of painting, more or less, I can report that I never knew that
the color red is toxic (literally) or it's unstable. Bloomberg reported that a guy at Oregon
State, Mas Subramanian, a professor of materials science, accidentally developed
a new blue.
YInMn blue (pronounced YIN-min) is
an amalgam of yttrium, indium oxide, and manganese—elements deep within the
periodic table that together form something unique. YInMn was the first blue
pigment discovered in more than 200 years. . . . Subramanian soon realized that by adding
copper, he could make a green. With iron, he got orange. Zinc and titanium, a
muted purple. Scanning these creations,
scattered across his workbench like evidence of a Willy Wonka bender, he
frowns. "We've made other colors," he says. "But we haven't
found red."
This is a
big deal (which, I confess, had never occurred to me before). A new color is worth hundreds of millions of
dollars (e.g., in plastics, cosmetics, cars, construction). "More than 200 natural and synthetic red
pigments exist today, but each has issues with safety, stability, chromaticity,
and/or opacity. Red 254, aka Ferrari
red, for example, is safe and popular, but it's also carbon-based, leaving it
susceptible to fading in the rain or the heat." The director of "Harvard's Straus Center
for Conservation & Technical Studies and curator of the Forbes Pigment
Collection" (how's that for a job title?) says that the problem with Red 254
is true of all organically-based colors:
they fade. The only red that "is
stable, nontoxic, and everlasting: iron
oxide, or red ocher, the ruddy clay found in Paleolithic cave paintings." But that's not the color that comes to mind
for most of us when we think "red."
So, Subramanian continues to search for a YInMn red.
(The story
behind the historical search for blue is an interesting one all by itself, but
not one I'm going to narrate here. But YInMn
blue won't be widely used in the near future.
Oregon State, which shares ownership of it with Subramanian—a common
arrangement in universities—granted an exclusive license to a company, Shepherd
Color Co., to produce it.
The early market for Shepherd has
been limited somewhat by its high price, a function of the cost of indium, a
metal primarily used in the clear, thin, conductive layer of smartphone
touchscreens. For this purpose it needs
to be exceptionally pure, which, coupled with high demand, meant it was selling
for $720 per kilogram at the end of 2017. (The figure for manganese was $1.74.) As a result, Shepherd lists YInMn blue at
$1,000 per kilogram, by far its most expensive pigment. Ryan, Shepherd's marketing manager, jokes that
unless an indium meteor crashes into southwestern Ohio, the price will remain
high.)
Anyway, the
quest for a non-toxic, stable, non-deteriorating/fading red continues. Many widely-used reds (e.g., Monet, van Gogh,
and Munch) contained cadmium, which is now deemed carcinogenic (although not
banned). So is cobalt, used in
blues. Another possibility for a red
used rare elements, rendering it so expensive it was impractical.
I sent Elliott
the article and asked him about red. He
knew. "Yep. All the red pigments suck or are toxic. That's why I paint with gloves. Because I use the latter. The heavy metals in the paint get into your skin.
Or you can breathe it in while it's
being mixed with the paint thinner, depending which variety of toxic you've
got."
So in all
the red you own, it's either toxic or it will fade.
* * *
Although
there was certainly no harm done—to the contrary, I suppose—I learned that it
pays to read carefully when one is ordering items online. I was browsing for new classical music CDs,
focused on the Baroque, and found a set of the complete keyboard sonatas of
Domenico Scarlatti. I like his music, so
I decided to order the set. I don't remember
what I paid, but it wasn't a large amount, maybe $35-40.
When the
package arrived, I was puzzled why it was as big as it was. I opened it and found the set of CDs—all 34
of them! I won't be able to listen to
the full set more than a few times before I die. I'm glad I like Scarlatti. . . .
There is a
sad story behind them. Scott Ross, the
musician who recorded all 555 sonatas—and it was just one guy—was dying of AIDS
when he was making the recordings. He
began recording in June 1984 and finished in September 1985—and died in 1989 at
age 38 (of pneumonia related to AIDS). By
the time he died, however, he had recorded a large number of CDs of Baroque music—he
was a superb and highly-regarded musician.
* * *
(Shortly
after I composed the following paragraphs, Minnesota Public Radio highlighted
this article.)
It is difficult to be really green. Two researchers, one at Lund University in
Sweden and the other at the University of British Columbia, published an
article in Environmental Research Letters
identifying four ways that people can change their "individual lifestyle
choices and calculate their potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,"
based on a wide-ranging study of developed nations. There are many things one can do, they point
out, but there are four steps that would have the largest impact: "having one fewer child, living car-free,
avoiding airplane travel, and eating a plant-based diet [CO2 emissions
per action deleted]."
I am sure
that they are correct in asserting that those four actions would have the
greatest impact on greenhouse gas emissions.
I am also sure that I would not follow them. If Pat and I had had one fewer children, we
would now be childless, a situation that would be devastating for anyone who was
a parent. Living car-free would mean that
a 10-15-minute commute to work turns into an hour or more on public transit, so
a sacrifice of 22,500 hours per year (an additional 45 minutes per day each way
x ~250 work days per year), to say nothing of the difficulty and time required
just to get groceries. Yes, one can read
or work on an iPad or listen to music, but that's disjointed because our
commute requires two transfers. Avoiding
airplane travel, along with having no car, essentially means no travel, period. In Europe you can do much travel by train,
but not in the U.S. Finally, there is
zero chance that I (or almost anyone I know) will voluntarily become a
vegetarian, much less a vegan. The implication
of their statement is that one should become a vegan, because dairy and egg
products require animals.
So, while
their conclusions about the most efficacious individual actions we can take to
reduce CO2 emissions are no doubt accurate, they fall in the utopian
category: the recommendations (probably
not the authors) seek a world they want to be, that they wish could be. My view is that we (that is, the world) needs
to speed up clean energy production (including much more research) and adopt
public policies that mitigate global warming without expecting the great mass
of people to make such dramatic changes in their lives, some of which are
nearly impossible.
(For anyone who wants to read the original, here's the
pdf: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf)
Warmly (and it finally actually is, here in Minneapolis)—
Gary
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