I came across this last image and it just hit me hard. How dedicated a society must be in order to organize, fund and construct such an magnificent edifice. I suppose it helped that everyone belonged to the same church and everyone went to church on Sunday.
Google Earth (first image) has become a real pain to use. You can still rotate the view, but the center of rotation is six feet in back of the viewer so you turn the image a couple of degrees and then slide it back and then repeat a zillion times and you can finally get the view you want. There is probably a better way, but it's too early to be learning new tricks.
City of Shadows - Official Trailer | Netflix
MVSRS
This is like a remake of 1992. We're in Barcelona, Spain, where we have a determined madman taking gruesome revenge on various civic leaders over the urban redevelopment that took place in preparation for the 1992 Olympics. We have several of the standard Netflix players here:
Turns out the madman has a sister and they are working together to not only exact revenge for having their home taken when they were kids, but also for their treatment in the orphanage. The madman was a real firebug when he was younger and that aspect of his personality re-emerges when he sets out on his course of revenge.
Milo is under suspension for punching his boss. To be fair he's been having a hard time. He lost his father to schizophrenia, his nephew to suicide, his wife has moved out, and his brother is slowly losing his mind. Also, his boss is a jerk. Rebeca isn't much better off, she just lost her mother in Madrid and moved to Barcelona.
Cast
Isak Férriz: Milo Malart - Detective investigating the murders
Verónica Echegui: Rebeca Garrido - Investigator working with Malart
Ana Wagener: Susana Cabrera - judge who happened to sentence the madman to the orphanage
I suspect Jordi and Jordi play coppers, did not find any definitive information about their roles. Note they have real life brother and sister playing the sibling villains.
Verónica Echegui died of cancer in August of this year. She was 42 years old.
By coincidence I came across this photo of Gaudi's cathedral from 1906:
La Sagrada Familia Temple (the holy family temple) is the elaborate Catholic cathedral in Barcelona Spain. Designed by Antoni Gaudi, construction was started in 1882 and is still ongoing.
I suspected the above picture was of Westminster Abbey, but it wasn't labeled, so I did a little checking. As you might expect, the internet is full of pictures of this place, but they were all different. Like almost none of them had the same window at the end. Here's one:
The number of commercial airlines flights has plummeted since the beginning of the year, which means airlines have been parking large numbers of aircraft in boneyards in out of the way locations like Victorville, California, Roswell, New Mexico and Marana, Arizona. But what about Europe? They aren't going to want to fly all their excess airplanes half way around the world just to park them.
EL SILENCIO DE LA CIUDAD BLANCA. Tráiler Oficial - Ya en cines
The Silence of the White City (2019) Belén Rueda | Javier Rey | Aura Garrido
Atresmedia Cine
Meticulous serial killer terrorizes Vitoria, Spain. Pretty standard murder mystery with a couple of novel bits: horrific way of killing people with bees, and the killer is closer than anyone expects. There is also lots of running. The lead detective and his boss both run for exercise, which is good, because everytime, everytime, they try to collar someone they take off and we have to chase them down. There was one chase scene across the roof of the cathedral that was pretty cool.
Digging into the past, our detectives discover an old tragedy where an entire family was killed in a house fire. Through movie magic we discover that the family was killed by poison from the leaves of a Yew tree, the fire was set to conceal the crime. Yew trees are kind of weird. They are almost entirely poisonous, they live dang near forever, they are popular with churches, and they make good bows for archery.
Chasing down obscure leads, our hero visits an old monastery, just after the 45 minute mark. Could not locate the actual building, if there was one. I supposed it could all be faked, but being as Europe is riddled with old buildings, I imagine it could easily be a real one.
The woman detective reminds me of Detective Megan Wheeler from Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Probably just the hair.
Did not really care for the movie. It didn't really grab me, not sure why. Okay, there were two scenes where the bad guy sneaks up behind a person and jabs them with a hypodermic needle, except! you can hear his footsteps and the intended victim just stands there and waits to be jabbed. Could these two incidents have spoiled the entire movie? I dunno, but it didn't help.
On Netflix, in Spanish with subtitles.
Update August 2020 replaced missing video trailer with a slightly different one.
Update December 2024 replaced missing video. Point and click to get English subtitles.
The town is considerable; there is a handsome cathedral with an immense dial; an arrow-hand makes the circuit of it once in a hundred years.
Cremona Cathedral Clock Face
It looks like this clock has 5 hands and one or two rotating dials. The face has six scales, from the outside in:
the hour in Roman Numerals, from 1 to 24, clockwise starting at the bottom
the names of the constellations of the zodiac
a line of approximately 100 black dashes
icons of the constellations
the 12 months of the year
another line of 100 dashes, this time in red
numbers indicating day of the month or something.
The innermost black faced dial might be showing the phase of the moon, currently showing it as 'full'.
The numbered scale around it shows the day of the month and goes from 1 to 29 and a plus sign.
Detail of inner portion of clock face
I am not sure what the five hands are for. The one that reaches the central pivot is the time in hours. The other four have so sort of icon attached near the base. One is the sun, another is the moon, and seems to be attached to the moon phase disk. I have no idea what the other two symbols are, or how you would interpret what they are pointing to.
And I still don't know which hand indicates the passing of the years.
Notre Dame isn't the only cathedral in Europe. Here we have a map of Gothic cathedrals in France, except some are in England, like Durham (above), which is almost in Scotland.
Building a cathedral was a massive project, similar in scale to our program to put a man on the moon. But it took 200 years to build a cathedral, now our time lines are much shorter. Might that be because we are traveling so much faster and we cannot see that far ahead?
I heard about the fire, and I got to wondering if I had posted anything about this cathedral before. I did:
The Wolves of Paris were a man-eatingwolf pack that killed forty people in Paris in 1450. The animals entered the city during the winter through breachesin its walls. A wolf named Courtaud, or "Bobtail", was the leader of the pack. Reports of the animal suggested it was reddish in color. Eventually, the wolves were killed when Parisians, furious at the deaths, lured Courtaud and his pack into the heart of the city. There the Parisians stoned and speared the wolves to death in front of the Notre Dame Cathedral.
This was 200 years after the cathedral was finished. Those were different times.
P.S. I originally got the quote from Wikipedia, but that article has vanished. The new link is not quite so sure that this is a true tale.
I am ambivalent about this show. It's a little heavy handed in its depiction of just how awful things were in the 14th Century, but I imagine there are some audiences that enjoy getting their emotions drug around for no discernible purpose. If I can keep myself supplied with adult beverages I can tolerate it. Another problem is that it's dubbed. Unless the dubbing is exceptionally well done it just doesn't convey the same feeling. The dubbing here is adequate so we have two layers of crap icing laid over the story which makes it a little hard to watch, but the story underneath is pretty good.
We watched two episodes last night and so far it it very reminiscent of The Pillars of the Earth, which I almost managed to finish. Maybe I didn't drink enough.
I looked up the cathedral on Google Maps (because that's who I am), and, well, look at this.
I can't imagine how many electrons gave their lives to bring this image to the screen. I just wonder whether this was done by stitching together a bunch of images, or whether they started with a geometric model. It's not a Mission Impossible level of detail, but it's pretty dang good, especially considering it is halfway around the world, and Google didn't really have any advance warning that I would be looking for this. Well, actually they did, since all those big tech companies are in cahoots, and if they were watching me they could reasonable expect that I would be looking up this cathedral on Google Maps. But that would be nuts. On the other hand, there are all those server farms out there, looking for things to do, so maybe there is a bot* assigned to watch me and whenever it finds an intersection of two data sets it sets about projecting what I might be asking for next. "Oh look! He's watching this show about a cathedral in Spain and we know he likes maps. I'll bet he's going to look up this cathedral on Google Maps, so we better get to work putting together a 3-D model of this thing." Careful Chucky, that sounds an awful lot like the road to paranoia.
But back to the story. You may notice that our hero is carrying a
cross-bow, a cross-bow he picked up on his way out while stealing his
son back from his lord's armory. (Why is the kid in the armory? Because that's what villains do, obviously.)
The story portrays the lord as a bad, bad man who is persecuting our hero only because he can, but being as a cross-bow was about the 14th Century equivalent of a modern F-16 fighter, you could understand the lord being really pissed about the theft. But that wouldn't make our hero very sympathetic, so it doesn't get mentioned. They do show it, so I imagine it will have an important part to play later on.
*
If you mess with the controls, you can turn on English subtitles. It's
not really worth it since they don't tell you much. I was going to try
and figure out how to do it, but I couldn't even get it to stop at the
end without automatically replaying the clip.
**A bot is a little program that gets called up to perform some kind of action whenever a certain triggering event occurs.
Update April 2019 replaced missing video with something similar.
Update May 2020 replaced missing video with something similar.
We watched The Flowers of War on Amazon Prime last night. I wasn't impressed. There were too many people being stupid, but I suppose that is probably more realistic than the action-adventure movies were the hero always knows exactly what to do and then does it without any hesitation. My wife thoroughly enjoyed it.
The story revolves around a Westerner protecting some Chinese who have taken refuge in a western church compound during the Rape of Nanking. We saw another movie with a very similar storyline a while back. I suppose I can't blame the movie people for fixating on this one story. Outside of this one enclave it was pretty much just murder and mayhem and it wouldn't take long to get your fill of that. Unless you're demented. We'll get back to that.
There were a couple of bits that stood out for me. One was the view through the Chinese sharpshooter's rifle scope. Usually these views in movies just have the bare visual cues to indicate that you are looking through the shooters scope, that is, the view is restricted in a circle in the center of an otherwise black screen, and there will be reticle overlay (see above photo). In this movie they showed the image going from a blur and then into focus along with some distortion. This is more what it's like with rifle scopes. You need to have your head in the proper position, not just in line with scope, but also at the proper distance. It takes some getting used to.
This happened during the one action-adventure scene. The Chinese sharpshooter strews some grenades around an area, lures the bad guys in and then proceeds to decimate them by detonating the grenades with well placed rifle bullets. He dies a heroes death because there is only one of him and there is an endless supply of bad guys.
Another part that was (unpleasantly) well done was the portrayal of the Japanese troops as crazed with blood lust, bent on raping the women and killing everyone. Real horror show stuff. Don't see that on the screen very often, at least not in shows involving recent history.
Christian Bale portrays a mortician who has come to Nanking to prepare a recently deceased priest for burial. Makes you wonder what kind of idiot he is. Who would come to a city that has been turned into a war zone? But churches have their own agenda. There may be a war going on, but we have our rituals and we are going to observe them. And our mortician is not the brightest guy. His only interests money, booze and, when the harlots show up, women.
Harlots performing an ancient song
Oh yes, the harlots. A band of whores seeks refuge in the church and in spite of the whole world going to shit all around them spend their time as if everything was normal, i.e. squabbling about clothes and jewelry and who is being bitchy. A couple of them even sneak out to fetch some earrings and guitar strings from their old home which gets them, unsurprisingly, killed. I suspect logical thinking
might be difficult when you under stress, but gee-willickers, that was really stupid.
China still holds a grudge against the Japanese for WW2 while the Japanese would pretty much like to forget it ever happened.
WW2 eliminated most of the culture of mass-murder from Japan and Germany, but it is still going on in other parts of the world, notably Southeast Asia and Africa, though it is not quite as organized or on the same scale. But it still pops up on a semi-regular basis all over the world. Some demented jerk gets hold of a powerful device (gun, car or bomb) and proceeds to lay to waste all those around him. The news media has a field day with every instance of aberrant behavior. Mass murder gives them a chance to spout off about something different than who's-fucking-who. Sex, drugs and / or violence, it's all the same to them.
The more people you have, the more normal people you have, but you also get more people on the fringe and the more people you get on the fringe, the weirder and wider that fringe gets. I don't think we will ever get a handle on it. Even if we get the 'thought police', they will never be able to catch everybody, and that might be a good thing. If everyone is the same and we know how everybody thinks, would we every get any new ideas? Many new ideas are bad, but every once is a while a good one pops up. Stamping out the abnormal could very well lead to stagnation, and then, when the spiders from Mars invade, what are you going to do, Bucky? Well, punk, are you feeling lucky?
Roger Ebert wrote a decent review, though he complains about there being a white guy in the film. Problem is that if there hadn't been a white guy, there wouldn't have been a story. Well, not this story anyway.
Okay, half of the movie is set in the present and half is set back in 1492 in Spain back when the Templars were trying to kick the last of the Moors out of Spain. Naturally the Templars are the bad guys. The Assassins are with the Moors. Whether they actually were ever in Spain is something for people to argue about.
There is a good scene where The Inquistion is putting on a big public show of burning some heretics. The have a huge audience. People can accept anything if they are properly introduced to it. Executions used to be public. Not so anymore. Not quite sure why that is. There is also a good scene of a cathedral under construction, and another of the inside of the cathedral where Christopher Columbus was interred.
Assassin’s Creed: 125 Feet Free Fall Stunt - Michael Fassbender | ScreenSlam
ScreenSlam
I came across this video while looking for stuff about the movie. They filmed a guy jumping from 125 feet because they wanted the realism of a real person jumping as opposed to a computer generated character, BUT they didn't do it on the set, which means they had to fill in the background, and they certainly used the computer for that. I supposed they could have taken a picture of the set and then merged the two, but if you have the set why not do the jump there? Which makes me think the background is computer generated. There was a lot of CGI in this movie, but it was very good CGI. Some of stunts in the fight scenes were a little over the top.
Update August 2026 replaced missing video with one on the same topic.
There is something wrong with Muons. On one hand they weigh (mass) 207 times as much as an electron, but when they decay all you get is an electron and two virtually massless neutrinos. What happens to all the extra mass? Does it get turned into energy? We aren't talking about very much mass here. . . pause while we figure out just how much a muon masses.
So we're dealing with something like one-ninth (105 / 931) of one atomic mass unit. If all that gets turned into energy, how much is it?
Well, Wikipedia's Elevtronvolt page translates electronvolts to joules, so we don't have to do the energy to mass to energy conversion. We go straight from one form of energy to another:
A square kilometer contains one million square meters. 10,000 muons impact every square meter every second. In one second, ten billion muons will impact our square kilometer of land. In a day we'll have 86.4 trillion muons, which is 86.4 x 10^12. So in one day all those muons will generate one-twentieth of a Joule, or about one Watt for 5 milliseconds. Might be enough to make an LED flash. Guess we don't need to worry.
When I started searching for information about muons, I found a couple of people who claimed to have built muon detectors for cheap, but they didn't actually tell you how they are made. The muon detectors used in the video above, and in the pyramids don't just detect the muons, they also tell you what direction they are coming from. You could do that with home made detectors, if you could find out how to make them. They would just need to be very small and you would need a bunch of them.
I've started reading The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. It's not a great book, but it's a good story about building a cathedral in 12th century England. The story is painted in broad brush strokes. The hero is brave, strong and true, the princess is beautiful and the villain is despicable. In this way it is similar to Ertugrul, the Turkish soap opera we've been watching about a tribe of nomads in 13th century Turkey / Syria.
Today I figured out why I like these stories. It's because they include many of the details of everyday life back then. Most scholastic history is all about names and dates. 'So and so went to war against these other people and defeated them at the battle of the slimy swamp', which is all very well if you want to chronicle the power struggles that were going on at the time. But that shit is endless. There is always somebody picking a fight, and someone betraying his allies and somebody getting their ass kicked, but it doesn't really tell you very much about the how or why of something happening.
Now occasionally a small group of motivated, and presumably talented, warriors will score an unexpected victory, but more often it is a matter of training, tactics and superior weaponry. And those come from a society that is rich enough to spend time developing these things. And you get a rich society from free trade, free minds and the rule of law.
The Pillars of the Earth is more nuts and bolts, building a cathedral requires a great many craftsmen making things. The politics, so far, has all been of the local variety. Ertugrul is more like propaganda: the Muslims are good, the Templars are bad, but it does a good job of portraying life in a nomadic encampment, well at least life among the one-percent-ers.
I'm flipping through the WSJ this morning, I see this picture and I immediately think "Hey! Wayne!", because the style and composition are so similar, but then I start reading and I realize that while it is the same artist, it is not the same painting. Still it is kind of weird that I would encounter two paintings by some guy I had never heard of in the same week. Did my blog post provoke this? Or maybe my watching the Top Gear video pushed it over some mystical YouTube threshold that caused it to be spread far and wide, which in turn started a ground swell of appreciation for all things Constable. More likely it is just coincidence.
We've been watching the Medici: Masters of Florence series on Netflix. It's not the greatest show, the portrayal of the characters is a little heavy handed, but given the amount of story they are trying to cram into the allotted time, understandable. You could stuff all the information into a dry, tedious documentary, but we want an entertaining story, so we take some shortcuts. The history portrayed is compelling.
How an Amateur Built the World's Biggest Dome
All this happens in the 1400's, which seems to be lost in time, but when Cosimo visits Rome, he is entranced by the Pantheon, which was built over a thousand years before that. At this time, the Florence Cathedral is unfinished, it lacks its dome. Cosimo commissions Brunelleschi to finish it. The techniques used to finish the dome are amazing, especially since the math that modern engineers would use to guide them in their design did not yet exist. James Gillick has an interesting story On the Economics of a Cathedral.
Some things are a little unsettling, like riding horses on the polished interior marble floors of buildings, but why not? Marble floors are easy to clean, the doors are big enough, and why should I have to walk outside to get my horse?
We also have all the standard elements of a good drama: love, hate, intrigue, betrayal, conflict, disaster and successes. We also have some words of wisdom that are truly at odds with our modern, secular, the individual-is-king philosophy. Reminds me of the old saw about how the poor save for Saturday night, the rich save for four generations.
John and Donna Crean funded the construction of Crean Tower. John made his fortune with Fleetwood Enterprises. The tower was built in 1990. The bells used to be played every Sunday but stopped a few years ago. Since the Catholics have taken over a new player has entered the scene and the bells are being played again.
Playing the Carillon 200 feet over Garden Grove at the Christ Cathedral
The tower is pretty spectacular in a Science-Fiction-y sort of way. That's California for you. It's also spectacular in a basic construction sense. This video gives a look inside the thing.
Tour of the Christ Cathedral Carillon
There used to be a lift, but it's broken, a victim of general upheaval going on all around it.
I couldn't find much information about the tower. Seems like being part of a church makes it off limits for any kind of discussion. That strikes me as a little odd.
Here's a short video of a tune being played.
