 been to SDCC plenty of times…,” THEN WE SAY UNTO YOU… “NAYYYY!”
Now listen up: With the ever increasing scarcity of hotel rooms, I’m sure more than a few of you readers will be stacked like sardines with 8 other people in a 4-person room, your sleeping space sectioned off under a table where you have a small array of snacks and water so you do not die during the night. LOOK, trust us, WE’VE ALL BEEN THERE, and that’s even MORE reason to say FAREWELL to sleep, and commit to being the best Party Tiger you can be.
And if you wanna know where WE are during the con, we will be all over social media, sharing party info, snapping pics of amazing nerds, and probably posting one too many selfies the drunker we get. TALLY HO:
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Canyon Lake property owners received a letter in April from Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District Board President Phil Williams discussing the ongoing litigation between the CLPOA and EVMWD.
“The Canyon Lake Property Owners Association (CLPOA) Board of Directors welcomed news in a recent mailer from EVMWD Board President Phil Williams in which he expressed that EVMWD is willing to resume negotiations with the CLPOA over the extension of the lake lease. CLPOA accepts the offer, and is willing to pay for a professional mediator to help facilitate an agreement that is fair to both the property owners association and EVMWD, now and in the future.
The CLPOA Board’s statement continues: “In a mailer issued last week to EVMWD ratepayers who are Canyon Lake property owners, EVMWD Board President Phil Williams discussed the legal costs being incurred by CLPOA and EVMWD in relation to the lake lease extension and explained that his board would prefer to see the litigation replaced with negotiations.
Until now, EVMWD officials indicated they would only negotiate if CLPOA permanently and irrevocably dismissed its litigation. CLPOA is demonstrating its commitment to resolution with EVMWD while protecting the rights of its members. This ensures that both EVMWD and CLPOA can be protected.Images of Distant Stars
Last week, astronomers from the University of Michigan announced that they have successfully obtained the first image of a distant Sun-like star. Using a technique known as optical interferometry, the scientists combined the light from a group of four small telescopes scattered across the top of a mountain in California -- effectively creating one huge telescope more than 200 meters across. The resulting image is about 100 times sharper than the view from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Astronomers have been making images of the nearest star (our Sun) since the time of Galileo, but other stars are so far away that even the most powerful telescopes see them as single points of light. In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope obtained the first direct image of a distant star -- the supergiant Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion, which is so enormous that it would span the orbit of Jupiter in our solar system. The technique of interferometry -- combining the signals from many individual telescopes to produce a sharper image -- has been used in radio astronomy for a long time, most famously in New Mexico at the Very Large Array that was featured in the movie Contact, with Jodie Foster. Recent advances in technology have now made it possible to do a similar thing with optical telescopes.
The target of the University of Michigan study was Altair, the brightest star in the constellation Aquila, which is about 80% more massive than the Sun and spins about 60 times faster. It's rotation is so fast -- more than 600,000 miles per hour at the equator -- that Altair bulges out around the middle. The new image not only reveals this flattened shape, it also shows that the star is much cooler around the equator than near the pole. Although this feature was expected, the predictions do not match the observations exactly -- suggesting that astronomers may need to improve the theory.
There are several arrays of telescopes around the world that are designed for this type of imaging. As the technology continues to improve, imaging of distant Sun-like stars will become routine. This is just the beginning of an exciting era for interferometry.Maria Sibylla Merian was a game old bird of entrepreneurial bent, with an overwhelming obsession with insects. Born in Frankfurt in 1647, she sacrificed her health and financial stability in pursuit of her passion. It carried her halfway across the globe and earned her lasting renown among a handful of cognoscenti.
Merian was 15 when Jan Goedart published the first of his three volumes of Metamorphosis et historia naturalis insectorum and is unlikely to have seen the book until later. Goedart’s purpose, based on close observation of a range of insects, was a fuller understanding of insect life cycles. It was the same purpose to which Maria Merian devoted herself — even resorting to selling snakes, lizards, a tortoise and a crocodile to fund her compulsion. Like Goedart and his contemporary Jan Swammerdam, Merian’s published work would explode the belief then current that butterflies and moths burst into life spontaneously rather than through processes of metamorphosis.
Silkworms were her first enthusiasm. Afterwards she focused on ‘the far more beautiful butterflies and moths that developed from caterpillars other than silkworms’, notably those she saw in the Dutch colony of Suriname, on the north-east coast of South America. Surinamese specimens are showcased in her best-known work, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, published in 1705. Hand-coloured plates from the latter, printed on vellum and acquired by George III in the late 1760s, comprise the current exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace.
Merian made no bones that hers was a vocation and she presented herself as a dedicated naturalist. She would claim that, in order to study insect metamorphosis, she ‘withdrew from society and devoted myself to …investigations’; she claimed, too, that her interest in painting arose specifically from entomological curiosity: ‘I wished to become proficient in the skill of painting in order to paint and describe them from life.’ In fact, art dominated her life from childhood. Her stepfather, Jacob Marrel, was a flower painter, whose art collection included works by Titian, Van Dyck and Gerrit van Honthorst. He taught Maria to paint, who in turn taught the burgher daughters of Nuremberg.
In the free time available to her between teaching, looking after her infant daughters and the demands of late-17th-century housekeeping, Merian painted flowers for herself. She consistently strove for botanical and scientific exactitude, precise in every filament and fibre. A glowing quality to her palette — as iridescent as stained glass — suggests a romantic side, too. Observe, for example, her later study of tattered leaves of the gumbo-limbo tree, on which she depicted white witch moths, or the bulbous roots of cassava, a platform for sphinx moth eggs.
She did not, however, forfeit her first love for the more lucrative pursuit of flower painting. Following what appears to have been an amicable split from her husband and six years in a religious commune in the Netherlands, Merian placed an advertisement in an Amsterdam newspaper, offering for sale the entire contents of her studio. Her purpose was to fund a costly trip to Suriname to study insects in the wild.
Accompanied by her younger daughter Dorothea, Merian set sail in June 1699. She would return two years later on grounds of ill health, possibly malaria. In the meantime, assisted by local guides — who were also Dutch slaves — she hacked her way through Surinamese forest undergrowth in pursuit of caterpillars and their host plants. At home, she made annotated drawings and paintings. Back in Amsterdam, she spent four years transforming preliminary sketches into the dazzling plates currently on display at Buckingham Palace.
At first glance, the vivid luminescence of these images is startling. The dominant carmine reds and bright Prussian blue of ‘Branch of Pomegranate and Menelaus Blue Morpho Butterfly’ and the contrasting yellow-amber and blue-brown highlights of ‘Branch of West Indian Cherry with Achilles Morpho Butterfly’ glitter like the coloured shards in a kaleidoscope. For all her entomological earnestness, Merian evinces an unabashed joy in colour. The yellow-blue contrasts in ‘Branch of Pomelo with Green-Banded Urania Moth’, bisected by a bold slash of green in the form of the pomelo branch, recall handpainted Chinese silk wallpapers exported later in the century. That she revelled in gentler tonalities, too, is clear from the nougat-coloured swirls of the insect wings in ‘Branch of Pomegranate with Lanternfly and Cicada’ or the soft pink furbelows of petals in ‘Confederate Rose with Androgeous Swallowtail Butterfly’. Thanks to the fineness of Mer