On ugliness in art – If art seeks beauty, what is it to do with pain, deformity, terror, revulsion, and disorder? Artists should not simply exclude them, because the world does not exclude them if it can be reflected. Lessing saw this problem in Laocoon. Poetry and sculpture, he argued, do not suffer from the …
Continue reading “Ugliness in Art – Redemption & Romanticism”
There are many sources in the field of ethics in engineering and of artificial intelligence. Recently, in the press it was noted, that the Vatican and Pope Leo the Fourteenth wrote on artificial intelligence. The article is on much more than AI, and the best material is outside this subject. It is noteworthy that the …
I have only copied particular parts…
It is an excellent thing to live modestly, shun luxury and wealth and not lust after fame and fortune. Rare has been the wise man who was rich. In China once there was a man by the name of Xu You, who owned nothing and even drank directly from his cupped hands. Seeing this, someone …
A long time ago, when I was at NASA, I remember the closure of the Shuttle program. In its subsequent place and alongside the relative success of commercial crew, came the Space Launch System (SLS). Working in aeronautics and research, I assumed I would remain involved in fundamental research. That did not last, and by …
The Renaissance did not only restart antiquity, it reordered what could be observed and valued. From the margins, the coarse, the bodily, the obscene, moved into the center of cultural life. In Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, obscenity is no longer a feature of carnival or tolerated disorder. It becomes deliberate, cultivated, and visible within educated …
I finally published my compressible flow notes online. They are under classes – comp. flow. They are the result of teaching the course over nine years at University of Florida. I compressed the file a bit to conserve my website bandwidth. Enjoy!
Greek culture did not claim that the world was wholly beautiful. Its myths include monstrosities, mistakes, and bodies that fall outside any ideal. Plato sharpened that tension into philosophy. Sensible reality, as he saw it, was a diminished copy of a more perfect world of forms. The visible world was not the final standard. It …
Whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia could not, by force, take a drink from the Ohio river, or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. …
Recently my cousin and family member Paul Liebhardt passed away. He worked at NASA for a time and then became a photographer. While a photographer, he traveled internationally. His work as a photographer is well known. The remembrance celebration (link below) shows nice videos and writing of his students coming together from various paths of …
Continue reading “Remembering Family – Photographer Paul Liebhardt”
