Quotation of the Week (37/2010)

“For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.”

~ Edwin Way Teale (1899-1980) ~

360 + 540 = 900

One year ago today, 12 September 2009, I started my photo blog DawnTreader’s Picture Book. Today’s post in that blog is the 360th. Here at The Island of the Voices, the post I’m just writing happens to be the 540th. Together, that makes 900…

Thanks to everyone who has encouraged me with comments, and inspired me with your own blog posts!

♥  ♥  ♥ 

Walk With Me

Autumn is upon us. Every day now the colours in the trees are changing, and leaves beginning to drop…

I was almost tempted to leave the camera at home as I walked into town today… Thinking: I’ve been walking these streets for over a year now with my camera. There is nothing new to take photographs of.

But the thing is, with the camera I see things I might otherwise just have walked past and paid no attention to, or forgotten as soon as I had passed. 

 

Like a miniature spider web on top of the stone wall.

Like the graceful shadow of a branch on an ugly concrete wall holding up the motorway.

Like the unexpected muffin (!) left behind on a stone wall in a church yard, to the delight of some very small black ants.

Like a Limousine parked in a street (arousing the curiosity of a lot of people on the other sidewalk – I actually noticed the crowd before I noticed what they were all looking at!)

Like a lot of other people running around town with their cameras, too (I think there must have been some sort of photo contest going on because most of the people with camera – except me! - were also holding on to a piece of yellow paper).

Like a beautiful flower arrangement on the wall next to a jeweler’s shop.

And without the camera, I would probably never have bothered going up to the top of the hill in the park

… just to look down!

To finish off, here’s the main reason why I went into town in the first place:

I needed a new pair of walking shoes…

In Troubled Water

http://btt2.wordpress.com/2010/09/09/disaster/

Q: You’ve just dropped your favorite, out-of-print book into a bathtub, ruining it completely … What do you do now?

A: I really can't see that happening, since I

1/ don't have a bath tub
2/ never read in the bath tub even back in the days when I had one

I actually never understood how anyone can read in the bathtub.
It's WET in there! So if one of my favourite books ever ends up in a bath tub, it will be someone else's fault - and tub! And my pleasure (?) to yell at them. And their problem to find a replacement!

Going in search of an illustration of this activity that I never indulged in, however, I came upon some advice. There is a WikiHow article on it. Just as I suspected, it seems rather complicated, and comes with a warning: "Start with a magazine or cheap paperback that you don't mind getting wet. Never read a library book or other valuable book in the tub, just in case you drop it in."

Whatever did we do before the Internet was there to give advice?

Through The Wall

Don’t ask how I came to look into this, but when you find yourself walking into a wall you might as well make the most of it. So while studying the wall I found this:

One of the most central ideas of quantum physics is the theme of uncertainty. Quantum mechanics says that the location of anything is always uncertain. If you are looking at a book on a bookshelf, you can't say with 100% certainty that the book is on the bookshelf. Nor can you say that the book is still on the bookshelf when you leave the room.

Now this I believe. We have a bookshelf like that in The House. My brother and I have both noticed it. It’s in the room that used to be Mum’s sewing room. Every time one takes a good look at that bookshelf, there seems to be books in it that one has never seen before, or the books are in a different order than the last time. While Mum was still an avid reader, there was nothing really strange about this. It was after she claimed to have given up reading in the later years of her life that it became odd. Odder still over the year that has passed since her death, with dad hardly having been able to walk the stairs at all (and definitely not reading fiction). It still seems to me the books keep changing! I have been sort of wondering (jokingly) whether perhaps we have a library ghost. But now I find that it is all explained by quantum physics... ;)

 
Water colour by Lars Lerin

To return to the Wall:

Quantum tunneling is when particles will jump from point A to point B without passing though the space in between. This is an actual observed effect that has some applications in technology today. --- singular atoms may do this, but humans are made up of a lot more atoms. This means if quantum tunneling were to take effect, all the atoms in your body would move from one side of the wall to the other without passing through the wall itself.

If you would like to try this, go ahead, just walk into any wall....... about a couple of trillion times. One of those trillion times, your atoms are likely to tunnel right through the wall. Unfortunately, the time it would take you to run into a wall that many times would take you billions of years. Anyway, you would be dead after a certain number of intentful hits to the head. Or you could save yourself the time and just use the door!

Source:  wiki.answers.com

J.K. Rowling plays with the idea of walking through a solid brick wall in the Harry Potter books.

Hagrid, meanwhile, was counting the bricks in the wall above the dustbin.
’Three up… two across…’ he muttered. ‘Right, stand back, Harry.’
He tapped the wall three times with the point of his umbrella.
The brick he had touched quivered – it wriggled – in the middle, a small hole appeared – it grew wider and wider – a second later they were facing an archway large enough even for Hagrid, an archway on to a cobbled street which twisted and turned out of sight.
’Welcome,’ said Hagrid, ‘to Diagon Alley.’

And at Platform 9 3/4 at King’s Cross Station:

‘How to get on to the platform?’ she [Mrs Weasley] said kindly, and Harry nodded.
‘Not to worry,’ she said. ‘All you have to do is walk straight at the barrier between platforms nine and ten. Don’t stop and don’t be scared you’ll crash into it, that’s very important. Best do it at a bit of a run if you’re nervous. Go on, go now…’

---

The idea is older than the Harry Potter books, though:

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you!’ (John 20:19)

They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. He said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look and my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” (Luke 24:37-39)

Quotation of the Week (36/2010)

“I think there will always be a surplus of longing in man. That nothing will ever be quite enough.“

~Johannes Anyuru ~
(Swedish poet, born 1979)

 

“Feeling and longing are the motive forces behind all human endeavor and human creations.”

~Albert Einstein (1879-1955)~

Photo: Small Tortoiseshell butterfly © DawnTreader 2010

Change

Have you gone through any changes over the summer?
This bloke has.

 5 September, 2010

 
1 June, 2010

Compare the post Of Many Faces (5 June, 2010)

Revisiting this sculpture again three months after the first set of photos was a powerful reminder not only of the passing of time but also of the fact that while some changes come automatically, others require quite a lot of hard and determined work.