Monthly Archives: July 2012

Gallery concat

Published by peter on 2012-07-31 in Art and Concats. 0 Comments

For the record, a listing of fine art galleries and museums I have visited (AFAIR), in alpha order:

  • 21er Haus, Vienna Austria
  • Aberdeen Art Gallery, Aberdeen Scotland UK
  • Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin Germany
  • Altes Museum, Berlin Germany
  • Altonaer Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Altona, Hamburg Germany
  • American Folk Art Museum, New York City NY USA
  • Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki Greece
  • Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington VA USA
  • Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
  • Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada
  • Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago IL USA
  • Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco CA USA
  • Asia Society Museum, New York City NY USA
  • Ateneum, Helsinki Finland
  • Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney Australia
  • Australian War Memorial, Canberra Australia
  • Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham UK
  • Barbican Gallery, London UK
  • Belvedere Museums, Vienna Austria
  • Bletchley Park Museum, Bletchley UK
  • Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool UK
  • Bolton Museum and Art Gallery, Bolton UK
  • Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, The Netherlands
  • BOZAR – Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels Belgium
  • Bribie Island Seaside Museum, Bribie Island, Moreton Bay, Queensland Australia
  • British Museum, London UK
  • Bury Art Museum, Bury Lancashire UK
  • Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris France
  • Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, Paris France
  • Colegio del Patriarca, Valencia Spain
  • Communist History Museum, Moscow RF
  • Coptic Museum, Cairo Egypt
  • Courtauld Gallery, London UK
  • Cycladic Art Museum, Athens Greece
  • Musée National Eugène-Delacroix, Paris France
  • Dia: Beacon, Beacon NY USA
  • The Drawing Center, New York City NY USA
  • Dreifaltigkeitsfriedhof, Kreuzberg, Berlin Germany
  • Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra Australia
  • Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London UK
  • Ethnological Museum of Berlin, Dahlem, Berlin Germany
  • Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge UK
  • Frank Lloyd Wright Gallery, Chicago IL USA
  • The Frick Collection, New York, USA
  • Frida Kahlo House, Mexico DF, Mexico
  • Fundacio Joan Miro, Barcelona Catalonia Spain
  • Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris France
  • Galleria Borghese, Rome Italy
  • Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Milano (GAM), Milan Italy
  • Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome Italy
  • Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Australia
  • Gallery Seomi, Seoul, Republic of Korea
  • Gardiner Museum of Ceramics, Toronto Canada
  • Gemaldegalerie, Berlin Germany
  • Glypotek Museum, Copenhagen Denmark
  • Guggenheim Museum, New York City NY USA
  • Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich Switzerland
  • Hayward Gallery, London UK
  • Highgate Cemetary, London UK
  • Hofburg Palace, Vienna Austria
  • Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong PRC
  • Hortamuseum, Victor Horta House, Brussels Belgium
  • Hyde Park Barracks Museum, Sydney Australia
  • Imperial War Museum, Duxford UK
  • Imperial War Museum, London UK
  • ING Art Centre, Place Royale, Brussels Belgium
  • Insadong-gil galleries, Seoul Republic of Korea
  • International Slavery Museum, Liverpool UK
  • Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin Eire
  • Izumo-taisha Shinto Shrine, Izumo-shi, Shimani Prefecture, Japan
  • Jewish Museum, Prague Czech Republic
  • Kiasma – Museum for Contemporary Art, Helsinki Finland
  • Kronborg Castle, Helsingor Denmark
  • Kunsten – Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg Denmark
  • Kunsthalle Hamburg und Galerie der Gegenwart, Hamburg Germany
  • KunstHausWien, Vienna Austria
  • Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna Austria
  • Lady Lever Gallery, Port Sunlight, Wirral UK
  • Lafcadio Hearn House, Matsue, Shimani Prefecture, Japan
  • Lancaster City Museum, Lancaster Lancashire UK
  • Landesmuseum, Zurich Switzerland
  • Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany
  • Leopold Museum, Vienna Austria
  • Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek Denmark
  • Luton Hoo, Luton Bedfordshire UK
  • Manchester City Gallery, Manchester UK
  • Marc Chagall National Museum, Nice France
  • Martin Gropius Bau, Kreuzberg, Berlin Germany
  • Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MOCA), North Adams, MA USA
  • Matthew Flinders Art Gallery, Bribie Island Community Arts Centre, Bribie Island, Qld, Australia
  • Mauritshuis, Den Haag, The Netherlands
  • Mayakovsky House, Moscow RF
  • Memento Communist Sculpture Park, Budapest Hungary
  • Mémorial de la France combattante, Mont Valérien, Suresnes, Paris France
  • Mendelssohn Gesellschaft, Berlin Germany
  • Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool UK
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City NY USA
  • Modern Art Oxford Gallery, Oxford UK
  • Moravian Museum of Bethlehem, Bethlehem PA USA
  • Musée Bourdelle de Paris, Paris France
  • Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris France
  • Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris France
  • Musée Libération Leclerc Moulin, Paris France
  • Musée du Louvre, Paris France
  • Musée Matisse, Nice France
  • Musée national de la Marine, Trocadero, Paris, France
  • Musée national Picasso, Paris France
  • Musei Vaticani, The Vatican
  • Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon Portugal
  • Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (MAMbo), Bologna Italy
  • Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico DF Mexico
  • Museo de Bellas Arts de Valencia, Valencia Spain
  • Museo di Strumenti Musicali dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome Italy
  • Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona Catalonia Spain
  • Museum Bahara – National Maritime Museum of Indonesia, Jakarta Indonesia
  • Museum of Asian Art, Berlin Germany
  • Museum of Australian Democracy, Canberra Australia
  • Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago IL USA
  • Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Australia
  • Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, Cairo Egypt
  • Museum of Islamic Art,  Cairo Egypt
  • Museum of Modern Art, New York City NY USA
  • Museum of Popular Musical Instruments, Athens Greece
  • Museum of Portuguese Music, Casa Verdades de Faria, Monte Estoril Portugal
  • Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester UK
  • Museum Nasional Indonesia, Jakarta Indonesia
  • Musical Instrument Museum, Brussels Belgium
  • Musikinstrumenten Museum Berlin Germany
  • National Archeological Museum, Athens Greece
  • National Computer Museum of Great Britain, Bletchley UK
  • National Gallery, London UK
  • National Gallery of Art, Washington DC USA
  • National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Australia
  • National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Australia
  • National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare Zimbabwe
  • National Jewish Museum, Budapest Hungary
  • National Maritime Museum, Greenwich UK
  • National Museum of Australia, Canberra Australia
  • National Palace Museum, Taipei Taiwan RoC
  • Neues Museum, Berlin Germany
  • New Italy Museum, nr. Woodburn NSW Australia
  • Palace Museum, Forbidden City, Beijing PRC
  • Palais des Beaux-Arts (Bozar), Brussels Belgium
  • Pergamon Museum, Berlin Germany DDR
  • Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy
  • Powerhouse Museum, Sydney Australia
  • Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow RF
  • Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane Australia
  • Questacon – The National Science and Technology Centre, Canberra Australia
  • Rose Seidler House, Wahroonga, Sydney Australia
  • Royal Academy of Arts, London UK
  • Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon Aerodrome, London UK
  • Saatchi Gallery, London UK
  • San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco CA USA
  • Science Museum, London UK
  • Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh Scotland UK
  • Seattle Art Museum, Seattle WA USA
  • Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC USA
  • Sonoma Gallery of Shona Sculpture, Sonoma CA USA
  • State Historical Museum, Moscow RF
  • State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Australia
  • Sudley House Gallery, Liverpool UK
  • Tate Britain, London UK
  • Tate Liverpool, Liverpool UK
  • Tate Modern, London UK
  • Tenterfield School of Arts, Tenterfield NSW Australia
  • Trotsky House, Mexico DF Mexico
  • Unhyeongung – Unhyeon Palace, Jongno-gu, Seoul Republic of Korea
  • Verulamium Museum, St. Albans UK
  • Victoria and Albert Museum, London UK
  • Vikingeskibs Museet, Roskilde Denmark
  • Walker Gallery, Liverpool UK
  • The Wallace Collection, London UK
  • Whitechapel Gallery, London UK
  • Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City NY USA
  • Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester UK
  • Wiener Secessionsgebäude, Vienna Austria

Poem: Cape Cod

Published by peter on 2012-07-30 in Poetry. 0 Comments
A poem by George Santayana.
Cape Cod
The low sandy beach and the thin scrub pine,
The wide reach of bay and the long sky line,—
      O, I am sick for home!
The salt, salt smell of the thick sea air,
And the smooth round stones that the ebbtides wear,—
      When will the good ship come?
The wretched stumps all charred and burned,
And the deep soft rut where the cartwheel turned,—
      Why is the world so old?
The lapping wave, and the broad gray sky
Where the cawing crows and the slow gulls fly,
      Where are the dead untold?
The thin, slant willows by the flooded bog,
The huge stranded hulk and the floating log,
      Sorrow with life began!
And among the dark pines, and along the flat shore,
O the wind, and the wind, for evermore!
      What will become of man?

Dan Adams RIP

Published by peter on 2012-07-27 in Obituaries. 0 Comments

A post to remember Dan Adams (1919-2011), a retired glass industry executive I first met in Zimbabwe when he was consulting for ZimGlass, through the International Executive Service Corps.   He grew up on an apple form in Ohio, and his obituary appeared in the Toledo Blade (2011-09-20), excerpted below:

Dan Boyd ADAMS (1919-08-21   –  2011-09-17)
Dan was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania to Charles and Jessie (Boyd) Adams and grew up in New Waterford, Ohio on an apple orchard farm, Adam’s Apples, owned by his parents.  He graduated from Ohio State University (OSU) with a degree in economics in 1941 and was a member of Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity and played on the polo team for OSU.
He began working for Owens-Illinois (O-I) in 1941 as a chief industrial engineer and became Senior Industrial Engineer in 1947.  He later became plant manager in Clarion, Pennsylvania in 1956 and Huntington, West Virginia in 1957.  He later was assistant plant manager in Bridgeton, New Jersey before transferring to O-I headquarters in Toledo, Ohio where he rose to the position of Vice-President for Domestic Operations until his retirement in 1982.
On May 9, 1953, Dan was married to Mary Calista Newhard in Bucyrus, Ohio. They lived in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, New Jersey, and England before retiring to Payson, Arizona in 1983.   In retirement, Dan remained active with the Payson Packers hiking club and the Republican Club as well as being active in contacting elected officials on issues of concern, particularly natural resource management and economics.
He also was a volunteer with the International Executive Service Corps (IESC), a not for profit organization of American business people who provide managerial and technical assistance to private enterprises in developing countries.  He and Mary traveled extensively, helping in countries such as Zimbabwe, Zambia, Honduras, Russia, Poland, Egypt, and Pakistan.
He wrote for local papers including the Backbone and the Payson Roundup. Dan is preceded in death by his brothers, Boyd “Doc” and Frank, and his son, Michael.  Dan is survived by his wife, Mary; his children, Tony, Eve and Ann, and his sisters, Ginna and Elizabeth, and grandsons, Ben and Jesse.  In lieu of gifts or flowers, his family suggests that in remembrance of Dan to write or call one of your elected officials about a political issue that concerns you.

The value of an education

Published by peter on 2012-07-07 in Culture and Human intelligence. 0 Comments

In a letter to Rupert Hart-Davies on 29 November 1956 George Lyttelton included this statement from William Johnson Cory (1823-1892, Master of Eton 1845-1872) on education:

At school you are engaged not so much in acquiring knowledge as making mental efforts under criticism. A certain amount of knowledge, you can indeed with average faculties acquire so as to retain; nor need you regret the hours you spent on much that is forgotten, for the shadow of lost knowledge at least protects you from many illusions.  But you go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment’s notice a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage, and for mental soberness.”

Reference:
Rupert Hart-Davis (Editor) [1978-79]: The Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters:  Correspondence of George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955-1962. London: John Murray.

RIP: Ernest Kaye

Published by peter on 2012-07-07 in Computer Science, Computer technology, Matherati and Obituaries. 0 Comments

While on the subject of Britain’s early lead in computing, I should mention the recent death of Ernest Kaye (1922-2012).  Kaye was the last surviving member of the design team of the LEO computer, the pioneering business and accounting machine developed by the Lyons Tea Shop chain in the early 1950s.  As with jet aircraft, computers were another technological lead gained and squandered by British companies.
Kaye’s Guardian obituary is here.   A post on his LEO colleague John Aris is here.  An index to Vukutu posts on the Matherati is here.

Computing in Cottonopolis

Published by peter on 2012-07-07 in Computer technology and History. 0 Comments

A 1951 article about the Manchester computer, reprinted in The Guardian today.

To think of two twelve-figure numbers and write them down and then to multiply them together would involve considerable mental effort for many people, and could scarcely be done in much under a quarter of an hour. A machine will be officially “opened” at Manchester University on Monday which does this sort of calculation 320 times a second. Provisionally named “Madam” – from the initials of Manchester Automatic Digital Machine and because of certain unpredictable tendencies – it is a high-speed electronic computer built for the University Mathematics Department, and paid for by a Government grant. It is an improved version of a prototype developed by Professor F. C. Newman and Dr. T. Kilburn of the Electrical Engineering Department, and Professor M. A. Newman and Mr. A. Turing, of the Mathematics Department.
The practical applications of the machine are great and varied, and it is, of course, of greatest use where long, repetitive calculations are involved, some of which would probably be impossible without its aid.  There are also commercial possibilities as yet unexplored relating to accountancy and wage departments. It is significant that one of the largest catering firms in the country has recently installed a similar machine, which may replace the work of hundreds of clerks. Will it perhaps solve the problems of redundancy it may create? Large-scale private or national statistics can be prepared in a far more up-to-date form, in some cases in a matter of weeks rather than years. Finally, of course, there are such sidelines as teaching the machine to play chess or bridge.
There are two features that might be mentioned: the magnetic drum for storing permanent information and the cathode-ray tubes for storing information produced in the course of a calculation. These have added immensely to the “memory” of such machines. The magnetic drum will hold 650,000 binary digits and each of the eight cathode-tubes sixty-four twenty-digit numbers. It will add up 500 numbers before you could say “addition”, and it could work out in half a day the logarithmic tables which took Napier and Briggs almost a lifetime.
It is an alarming machine, in fact. A tool like a plough is friendly and intelligible, but this reduction to absurdity of mental arithmetic is another matter. Those associated with the machine stress that what it can do depends on the “programme” fed to it. Nobody knows what Manchester’s machine will be able to do, and Mr. Turing said to-day that, although it will be used on problems of pure mathematics, the main idea is to investigate the possibilities and theory of such machines.  In an article in “Mind” six months ago, Mr. Turing seemed to come to the conclusion that eventually digital computers would be able to do something akin to “thinking” and also discussed the possibilities of educating a “child-machine.”  One feels that whatever “Madam” can do she will do it for Mr. Turing.

The government grant mentioned in paragraph 1 was awarded to the pure mathematician Max Newman because of his secret cryptographic work at Bletchley Park during WW II.   Because of that work, he knew Turing and his capabilities very well, and recruited him to Manchester to work on the project.   It is interesting that even in a newspaper article published in 1951 mention was made of machines playing chess.
An earlier post on long-lived memories of Alan Turing is here.  Some information about Turing’s death is here, including his mother’s theory that his death by poison was accidental, occurring while he attempted to silver-plate a spoon.