
Here is a photo of my work in progress---"The Eyes Of Texas..." I would say that she is about 65% done...I may barter or sell her, not sure yet. If you want to buy her please contact me via email.
June 27, 2008 -- Medieval bones from six different Danish cemeteries reveal that monks who wrote Biblical texts and other religious materials may have been exposed to toxic mercury, which was used to formulate just one of their ink colors: red.
The study, which will be published in the August issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, also describes a previously undocumented disease, called FOS, which was like leprosy and caused skull lesions. Additionally, the researchers found that mercury-containing medicine had been administered to 79 percent of the interred individuals with leprosy and 35 percent with syphilis.
Since the monks, who were buried in the cloister walk of the Cistercian Abbey at Øm, did not have these diseases but contained mercury in their bones, scientists believe the monks were either contaminated while preparing and administering medicines, or while writing the artistic letters of incunabula, or pre-1500 A.D. books.
Kaare Lund Rasmussen, a University of Southern Denmark scientist at the Institute of Physics and Chemistry, suspects that ink used in the abbey's scriptorium was the culprit.
He told Discovery News "it is very human to lick the brush, if one wants to make a fine line."
Even today "one should really not touch, or much less rub, the parchment pages of an incunabulum," Lund Rasmussen said, adding that mercury "was used in the first place because cinnabar (a type of mercury) has this bright red, beautiful color."
It is also known that metallic liquid mercury was given in vapor form to diseased patients. So if the monks "were just a little careless, they would be exposed this way, however, they might also be exposed during the preparation of the medicine."
For the study, Lund Rasmussen and his team drilled bone samples from the buried individuals, some of which were also friars buried in the cloister walk of the Franciscan Friary in Svendborg. Unlike the Øm monks, the friars showed no signs of mercury poisoning.
FYI--the flourescent bulbs everyone is cheering about in america are full of the same mercury
Most artists are not writers nor are they philosophers but rather they are “noodlers” pencil and brush “pushers” whose work is severely limited by their lack of learning in the areas of literature, philosophy and humanity. Leonardo lived a life of shame because his name was not “high born” as was his rival's Michelangelo. Michelangelo need only to look back in his rear view mirror a few miles to see a line of princes and dignitaries who shared the Buonarroti name. Leonardo was a bastard child whose “low born” name simply meant “from the town of
The tetrahedron, cube, and octahedron all occur naturally in crystal structures. These by no means exhaust the numbers of possible forms of crystals. However, neither the regular icosahedron nor the regular dodecahedron are amongst them. One of the forms, called the pyritohedron (named for the group of minerals of which it is typical) has twelve pentagonal faces, arranged in the same pattern as the faces of the regular dodecahedron. The faces of the pyritohedron are, however, not regular, so the pyritohedron is also not regular.
In the early 20th century, Ernst Haeckel described (Haeckel, 1904) a number of species of Radiolaria, some of whose skeletons are shaped like various regular polyhedra. Examples include Circoporus octahedrus, Circogonia icosahedra, Lithocubus geometricus and Circorrhegma dodecahedra. The shapes of these creatures should be obvious from their names.
Many viruses, such as the herpes virus, have the shape of a regular icosahedron. Viral structures are built of repeated identical protein subunits and the icosahedron is the easiest shape to assemble using these subunits. A regular polyhedron is used because it can be built from a single basic unit protein used over and over again; this saves space in the viral genome.
In meteorology and climatology, global numerical models of atmospheric flow are of increasing interest which employ grids that are based on an icosahedron (refined by triangulation) instead of the more commonly used longitude/latitude grid. This has the advantage of evenly distributed spatial resolution without singularities (i.e. the poles) at the expense of somewhat greater numerical difficulty.
Icosahedron jams
Some materials crystallize as they cool, arranging their atoms into a highly regular pattern called a lattice, Royall said, but although glass "wants" to be a crystal, as it cools the atoms become jammed in a nearly random arrangement, preventing it from forming a regular lattice.
In the 1950s, Sir Charles Frank in the Physics Department at Bristol suggested that the arrangement of the "jam" should form what is known as an icosahedron, but at the time he was unable to prove it.
An icosahedron is like a 3-D pentagon, and just as you cannot tile a floor with pentagons, you cannot fill 3-D space with icosahedrons, Royall explained. That is, you can't make a lattice out of pentagons.
When it comes to glass, Frank thought, there is a competition between crystal formation and pentagons that prevents the construction of a crystal.
If you cool a liquid down and it makes a lot of pentagons and the pentagons survive, the crystal cannot form.
It turns out that Frank was right, Royall said, and his team proved this experimentally.
You can't watch what happens to atoms as they cool because they are too small, so Royall and his colleagues used special particles called colloids that mimic atoms, but are large enough to be visible using state-of-the-art microscopy.
The team cooled some down and watched what happened.
What they found was that the gel these particles formed also "wants" to be a crystal, but it fails to become one due to the formation of icosahedra-like structures — exactly as Frank had predicted.
"It is the formation of these structures that underlie jammed materials and explains why a glass is a glass and not a liquid — or a solid," Royall said.
The findings are detailed in the June 22 issue of the journal Nature Materials. The research was supported in part by a grant from Britain's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology as well as the Royal Society.
Hey Alex:
I was down in Amish country a number of years ago. On the Friday night we arrived, shortly down the road from where we were staying, we watched a huge barn burn to the ground. On my daily runs, starting on Sunday morning a proceeding through the following Friday, I watched as what seemed to be the entire male community descend like ants in and around the ashes. Before the week was up, through a massive communal effort, a bigger and more beautiful barn was erected before my eyes . There must have been 100 - 150 men young and old working day and night. This must have been 30 years ago and the sight sticks with me still. I thought it was truly an amazing display of humans working together.
Over the past few years, a chorus of propaganda intended to demonize the Internet and further lead it down a path of strict control has spewed forth from numerous establishment organs:
ISP's have resolved to restrict the Internet to a TV-like subscription model where users will be forced to pay to visit selected corporate websites by 2012, while others will be blocked, according to a leaked report. Despite some people dismissing the story as a hoax, the wider plan to kill the traditional Internet and replace it with a regulated and controlled Internet 2 is manifestly provable.
"Bell Canada and TELUS (formerly owned by Verizon) employees officially confirm that by 2012 ISP's all over the globe will reduce Internet access to a TV-like subscription model, only offering access to a small standard amount of commercial sites and require extra fees for every other site you visit. These 'other' sites would then lose all their exposure and eventually shut down, resulting in what could be seen as the end of the Internet," warns a report that has spread like wildfire across the web over the last few days.
The article, which is accompanied by a You Tube clip, states that Time Magazine writer "Dylan Pattyn" has confirmed the information and is about to release a story - and that the move to effectively shut down the web could come as soon as 2010.
Kley studied "practical arts" at the Karlsruhe Akademie and finished his studies in Munich. His early works were conventional portraits, landscapes, still lifes, city scenes and historical paintings. From about 1892 he won a reputation as an "industry artist", painting manufacturing scenes in oils and watercolors. They proved his deep understanding of the modern machine world. Kley attained greater notoriety with his sometimes darkly humorous pen drawings, published in Jugend and the notorious Simplicissimus.
The date of Kley's death is uncertain. Rumors initially suggested his demise in the early 1940's. It is also suggested that Kley died on August 2, 1945. Some sources mention the time of death on February 8, 1952.
Cartoonist Joe Grant was well aware of Kley's work and introduced his drawings to Walt Disney, who built an extensive private collection. A number of early Disney productions, notably Fantasia, reveal Kley's inspiration.
Due to Disney's interest and reprints by Dover Publications, Kley is still known in the USA, while he is nowadays little regarded in Germany.
12 x 16 inches on arches paper to purchase https://tendollarart.com/products/alice-in-winter-watercolor