The Coffee Bean Wall Shows the Science and Color of Coffee

If you're vacationing in Orlando at the newly opened Cabana Bay Hotel (Universal Studios), you might accidentally run across some colorful science in the Starbucks there. They have a "coffee bean wall" that shows the progression of beans, from green to red (peeled) to light and dark brown (roasted less vs. more). It makes for a nice-looking wall but the science of coffee is behind it. Well, I don't know what's actually behind it because I haven't been there but maybe I'll fix that on a future vacation. For example, the dark-roast beans have less caffiene because the heat has burned the caffiene right out of them. [Thanks to Theme Park Insider for the photo tour that showed this.]

The Town Built Under a Rock

[Photo by zanzibarcordoba]

This is a picture from Setenil de las Bodegas in Spain, a small town built in -- and into -- a gorge. This results in streets that have natural rock awnings. And rocks in the roof. And rock as a back wall. The village grows out of the rock like an organic development. Which, in a sense, it is.

The house built upon a rock will stand when the flood comes. What about the town built under one?

Take a virtual tour at this page, or visit the Flickr photo network here.

Book Review: The Old Ways

Robert Macfarlane is usually classified as a travel writer, and that's technically correct. His pace of travel may be slow, because he always writes about walking, but it's certainly moving from one place to another and describing what happens. So he's a travel writer, and an excellent one at that -- but I wouldn't read him if he was merely a travel writer. What's remarkable about his writing is that the case could equally well be made that he is a poet, and could almost equally be made that he is a science writer or an art writer (or both). In fact, it's only toward the end when he veers more into history and biography than describing his own experiences that his writing begins to lose its unique quality.

Macfarlane writes about rocks and geology, but also people and how they live among those rocks, why their feet scraped out the paths that he later follows.This is a book about the value of walking, from the UK, a country where walking is practically the national sport. Although perhaps the best chapters are not about walking, but about taking to the sea and following the boat paths. Close enough.

Here's two quotes that give a taste of the philosophical edge to Macfarlane's descriptions:

"The massif is a terrain shaped by what Nan Shepherd once called 'the elementals'. Mountain lanscapes appear chaotic in their jumbledness, but they are in fact ultra-logical landscapes, organized by the climatic extremes and severe expressions of gravity: so hyper-ordered as to see chance-made." -- p. 192

"'As I watch [the world],' wrote Nan Shepherd in 1945, 'it arches its back, and each layer of landscape bristles.' It is a brilliant observation about observation. Shepherd knew that 'landscape' is not something to be viewed and appraised from a distance, as if it were a panel in a frieze or a canvas in a frame. It is not the passive object of our gaze, but rather a volatile participant -- a fellow subject which arches and bristles at us, bristles into us. Landscape is still often understood as a noun connoting fixity, scenery, an immobile painterly decorum. I prefer to think of the word as a noun containing a hidden verb: landscape scapes, it is dynamic and commotion causing, it sculpts and shapes us not only over the courses of our lives but also instant by instant, incident by incident. I prefer to take 'landscape' as a collective term for the temperature and pressure of the air, the fall of light and its rebounds, the textures and surfaces of rock, soil and building, the sounds (cricket screech, bird cry, wind through trees), the scents (pine resin, hot stone, crushed thyme) and the uncountable other transitory phenomena and atmospheres that together comprise the bristling presence of a particular place at a particular moment." -- p. 255

Between Heaven and Earth

One of my favorite places on earth, its essence caught in a photograph:

The title of this work is "Midday Prayers" by Michael Kenna, from a show at the Tacoma Art Museum. I feel a trip to Tacoma coming on (since the north coast of France is even farther away) ...

The Periodic Table of M&Ms

M&Ms are so fundamentally elemental -- the round shape, the bright colors, even the different things in the middle -- that they lend themselves particularly well to a periodic table parody. This is apparently on the wall at the new M&M store in London:

Cute and local, but not much truly periodic about it. I give it a B. Let's see some more ...

And more periodic table parodies can be found here.

National Parks from Space

They put the best ones first in this collection, by the way, so don't feel like you have to click through all of the pics:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/national-parks-from-space/?utm_source=pulsenews&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Fscience+%28Wired%3A+Science%29

The Abandoned Subway Stop

Deep under New York there is a beautifully preserved, abandoned subway stop for City Hall. I can't believe the pictures found here. (I think I'll have to have a category for "Modern Ruins" soon ... )

Washington DC Thoughts

If the last post was about "I must decrease, He must increase," this post is about a town where the opposite's true, where power hangs in the sky like smog and scandal is a matter not of "if" but of "when."

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Washington DC is a city of new gods. In places it's almost exactly what a Greek citizen would see in Athens, what Paul gestured to on Mars Hill. The random larger-than-life statues of liberators and generals that cars speed past all look the same except to historians. And I was wondering, now that the WWII memorial is complete, will we ever be able to build white marble monuments again, or will every new war monument have to be like the Vietnam and Korean War Memorials, black and reflective?

As an aside about the WWII memorial, it is incoherent and jumbled, but I think that just makes the architecture of the moment more suitable for a truly global conflict. I don't think it throws off the emptiness of the Mall. The Mall's still really big. (Rule for DC: Always allow 15 extra minutes for walking anywhere.)

Perhaps it was the original Washington Monument on display in the Museum of American History that sums up this visit to DC. My first reaction is that it was a statue of Zeus, but when I got around to the front, it was George himself looking back at me. At first I'd had enough of all the neo-classical new empire symbolism, but then looking closer, the way he holds his lightning bolt, er, sword, stood out. The sword is backwards, Washington stepping down and handing power back to the people after two terms. I can get behind that (actually, that was my first viewpoint!).

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And then there's the Lincoln memorial, perhaps the most like a Greek temple in style and form but the least like one inside. I mean on the inside walls, not the Zeus-like statue of Lincoln. On the walls are two of the most sublime collections of words in the English language: the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. I am going to make a tradition now, anytime I'm in DC, of stopping by the Lincoln Memorial and reading the Second Inaugural aloud (under my breath, I'm not THAT kind of tourist). It is an amazing political document and poem. As a theological document, the basic idea is the kind any follower of Jesus should adopt after immersing oneself in the Gospels. But the truly theologically amazing part of it is how it puts that solid theology into practice in few enough words to fit on a wall. Not since MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN has the writing on the wall been so significant and succinct. Everyone should read it.

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So in this city of white marble and sharp-edged grassy fields trampled and wilted, there are monuments to empire, as in every empire's capital. But some of those monuments are to something more, to handing back power and to the humility of forgiving even the worst of human nature after the worst of wars. Those make me proud of my country.

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[Reference song: "Our Song" by Joe Henry off the Citizens album.]

Book Review: The Devil in the White City

The Devil in the White City is an incredible, intense book. It's the story of the 1893 Chicago "World's Fair" (the actual name's too long!), which survives today only as the Museum of Science and Industry in Jackson Park, and of a serial murderer who built a hotel to help him kill unattached women who came to the fair. Seattle author Erik Larson balances the two stories effectively; whenever the "building the fair" story gets too political or frustrating, the author shifts his focus to the Jack-the-Ripper hotelier down the street. Larson's also a master at witholding just enough information that you're guessing what happens next or what the significance of this or that detail is. As a result, you have a history book that reads like a thriller, combining Chicago, one of my favorite cities, with elements of building a giant theme park a century before EPCOT, a criminal mastermind who eludes the law, the giant engineering project that was the largest building in the country plus the original Ferris Wheel, the politics of Gilded-Age Chicago, appearances by everyone from Buffalo Bill Cody to Mark Twain, and the literally diabolical architecture of the serial killer's hotel.

You have to pinch yourself every few pages to remind yourself that this really happened. You couldn't make this stuff up. The serial killer is truly frightening and if you're bothered by real crime novels, YOU WILL BE BOTHERED by this.

On a side note, I really wonder what is the point of the cultural fascination with the serial killer. When you look close enough at one to figure out how he ticks, you find a blank abyss looking back at you. You find evil. For all this book's detail, I still don't feel like I know what made the killer tick, why he did things, expect perhaps as a very base form of idolatry. It didn't provide many new insights on evil, except to remind that it is very, very real.

The shortcoming of this book is that, at 400 pages, it still feels short. Larson wrote it just right, but I want to know more about what it was like at the fair. More pictures, more on the exhibits!

If you can take the description of pure evil, this book has unique rewards and the Museum of Science and Industry will never look the same to me again.

Pictures from Old Abandoned Theme Parks

Call it the Scoobie-Doo Hall of Fame, the Ozymandius-Meets-Mickey-Mouse Hybrid, call it what you like, but I'm fascinated by what happens to old theme parks when they're shut down.

Here is an article about 8 abandoned parks. The New Orleans one wins my vote for most haunting.

Also, here's photos from the Disney World water park River Country, closed in 2001.

And here's photos from Splendid China, closed about the same time near Disney World.

I still have a hand-drawn calligraphy poster of 1 Cor. 13 from Splendid China. It's actually one of my most valued possessions!

Of course, the scientist in me thinks these are first-hand examples of what the book The World Without Us predicts (reviewed earlier here). I'd like to see how much of that book is right and how much is not given these specific "experiments."

Best Science-Themed Bar and Grill in Boston

Just up the street from M.I.T., and next to the M.I.T. museum (which expressly forebade me from posting pictures on a blog on the ticket, so sorry about that), there is a small bar and grill called "Miracle of Science." This is its menu. If you have to ask what I ordered then you don't know me very well. OK, one hint: It's near to where rubidium should be. :)

Ah, Venice!

We only spent a few hours in Venice, but I put the tourist map up on my wall for a few years afterwards, and would watch it, wondering what it was like to live there -- really wondering what the ups and downs are, not dreaming of how perfect it must all be. Here's an article that answers some of my questions, with nice pictures to boot:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/08/venice/newman-text/1