Valerie Thomas, NASA scientist and inventor (1979)
Eugène Atget, Eclipse
From the Blanton Museum’s Art at Home newsletter:
French artist Eugène Atget (1857-1927) focused his lens on the city and people of Paris for nearly four decades, producing more than 8,500 pictures throughout his career. In his photograph Eclipse, a crowd is gathered in Paris’ Place de la Bastille to observe the 1912 solar eclipse. Rather than recording the astronomical event itself, Atget turned his attention to its spectators.
Fun fact: Surrealist artist Man Ray bought Atget’s photograph to illustrate the June 1926 cover of La Révolution Surréaliste—a subversive publication that adopted a pseudo-scientific format to explore the irrational nature of existence
Scientifically, tears are divided into three different types, based on their origin. Both tears of grief and joy are psychic tears, triggered by extreme emotions, whether positive or negative. Basal tears are released continuously in tiny quantities (on average, 0.75 to 1.1 grams over a 24-hour period) to keep the cornea lubricated. Reflex tears are secreted in response to an irritant, like dust, onion vapors or tear gas.
“This is the final inversion of blogging: not just publishing before selecting, nor researching before knowing your subject — but producing to attract, rather than serve, an audience. Traditional editors identify an audience who will pay for their publication (or whom an advertiser will pay to reach) and then find a writer who can speak to that audience. As a blogger, I’ve enjoyed the delirious freedom to write exactly the publication I’d want to read, which then attracts other people who feel the same way.”
Keeping a “writer’s notebook” in public imposes an unbeatable rigor, since you can’t slack off and leave notes so brief and cryptic that they neither lodge in your subconscious nor form a record clear enough to refer to in future. By contrast, keeping public notes produces both a subconscious, supersaturated solution of fragmentary ideas that rattle around, periodically cohering into nucleii that crystallize into full-blown ideas
I love it when a PDF I get off the internet has the library card in the back