Stoiber and Shroeder are two young seals at a wildlife rehabilitation center in northern Germany. Survivors of the phocine distemper plague, they are now nearly ready for return to the wild. Center employees named them after German politicians, and staged a herring-eating competition for them. Stoiber (shown above), though smaller, won. [article in French]

In other pinniped news (or lack of it), nothing has been reported on Tama-chan since September 15, when he appeared in Yokohama's Ooka River. Isabel, proprietor of the weblog A Gaijin in Tokyo, reports that Tama-chan's face is appearing on bumper stickers. [Check the Topics page for earlier Tama-chan stories]


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:02 PM

Invisible trees

It's too simple, perhaps. But Gert Van Tonder and his team may be onto something. Their spacial analysis of the famous Zen garden at Ryoan-ji temple in Kyoto indicates that the calming sensation produced by the minimalist garden may be due to the form of its negative spaces. The midlines of the spaces between the stones (the technical term is the medial axes) form the trunk and branches of a tree converging on the optimal viewing spot. Such schematic axis lines are believed to be a basic level of visual processing, abstracting visual meaning in the way a stick-figure implies a man.

---

Why "too simple"?

We in the West describe visual harmony by the shapes of positive or negative spaces. Discovering a dendritic pattern in the medial axes of the negative spaces, we cry "Oh! The spaces really represent a tree!" But a tree-like organization of space is pleasing in its own right. This, as well as the associations of memory, is why trees are beautiful.

Radial patterns, dendritic patterns, dappled patterns, certain kinds of elaboration best described by fractals seem to stroke something deep in us. Snowflakes, ferns, waterfalls, fireworks, the dark lacework of trees against snow, the half-random spatter of the stars: these all touch this sense of complex beauty.

To find an invisible tree in the spaces between the stones does not make them a picture of a tree. But the pleasure of the branching spaces is the pleasure given by the tree. They touch the same deep archetype. What is important in this story is not the specific "tree-ness" of the pattern, but the discovery of a new way of implying pattern in art. I suspect it is one that has been long used in garden design, with or without conscious understanding of why it pleases.

---

More photos of Zen gardens, particularly the karesansui or "dry landscape" minimalist gardens of raked gravel, can be seen here and here.

A particularly brilliant work on viewing gardens, both literal and metaphoric, is Seeing Gardens by National Geographic photographer Sam Abell. Much more than a stunning coffee-table book of photographs, this is a work of visual philosophy.

"The garden is an image of home, but I was for 30 years almost never at home," Abell explained. "Did this mean that I couldn't have a garden? It meant instead that I had to find gardens where I was. So looking for gardens and seeing them gave me a garden state of mind."

Another sort of invisible tree is described in this art project by CalTech student David Kremers, whose drawings of palm trees can only be seen through polarized glasses.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:30 PM

So why are you raising that eyebrow?

An article in Nature describing the peculiar intersection of cognitive psychology and prestidigitation reminded me of a recent piece in The New Yorker (unfortunately not online) on a system for coding and reading facial expressions. This, of course, would be of great use to cold-readers of all descriptions, and I'm sure the best of them understand it instinctively. The rest of us can be taught, thanks to the FACS (Facial Action Coding System) description of facial expression created by Paul Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen, and Joseph C. Hager, and available commercially from Dataface. Examples of the kind of facial analysis included in this system can be seen here, here and here.

Besides providing a new tool for police interrogators, the FACS system is now being used by animators to generate realistic expressions in faces. [more]


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:06 PM

posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:33 PM

The new Google News service is not only a fine summary of the ongoing news-flood. It is an awesome piece of technology. The fine print at the bottom of the main page says:

This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors.
No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page.

How do they do it? I haven't seen a "ringer" yet; related stories are reliably grouped together.

Since Google News indexes far more sources than any human-edited site could, I was able to quickly discover a whole raft of unsuspected stories about the Smithsonian, many dealing with SI's expertise in forensic anthropology, which it puts at the service of local criminal investigations. Here's one from Aberdeen, South Dakota, regarding the identification of a skeleton unearthed in a construction project. And this story from the Daily Local News describes a school workshop in Westtown, Pennsylvania, conducted by Smithsonian forensic anthropologist Doug Owlsey. Owlsey gets around: besides forensic and medical investigations, he works with NMNH paleontologists to reconstruct dinosaurs.

On a not completely unrelated story, Smithsonian biochemists recently helped discover an previously unknown African elephant species, through analysis of DNA in dung samples. That means there are now three African elephants, all quite similar morphologically. One does wonder if the dung sample is now the holotype of the new species. It seems to me it must be, but what a concept!


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:09 PM

Here today, gone asatte

My apologies to my regular visitors for my irregular postings. I've been too busy to post since last Wednesday, and starting this Wednesday I'll be on vacation until the following Monday. And, as luck would have it, there has been plenty to report: our visit to the Smithsonian's Inaugural Pow Wow [more] on the Mall, NMAH's September 11 exhibit, the beginning of Japanese night-school class (it starts tonight), lots of news on Tama-chan (who has reappeared in Yokohama), the Archives' new high-tech phone system and the general foggy-blogginess of being. I haven't lost interest. I've just lost a bit of time.

Pinniped-watchers, do check Yakitori! for the latest Tama-chan bulletins, including a site with movies. "Kawaii!" hardly covers it. On the other hand, he or she is painfully thin for a pinniped. We need our blubber-layers, even in tepid Yokohama rivers. Critters do wander off in the wrong direction -- I have seen the wrong-headed migratory land-birds caught in mist-nets on SE Farallon Island off San Francisco, and knew that when they were banded and released they would not make it to Hawaii. Poor things. One hopes that Japan's lost seal is luckier.

This semester we start kanji. Oh my.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 3:49 PM

A possible happy ending

The Daily Yomiuri announced today that Tama-chan, the young Arctic bearded seal which has spent the past several weeks in rivers near Tokyo and Yokohama, may have returned to the sea. The seal was last sighted on August 30, swimming toward the mouth of the Tsurumigawa river.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 4:30 PM

A year after

Some events demand to be memorialized, but are damnably hard to commemorate. Much ... has ... been ... said ... about ... the inadequacy of the official 9/11 ceremonies tomorrow, and the inappropriateness of the expected commercial exploitation. But what sort of public event, besides the world-wide performance of Mozart's Requiem (an event conceived and organized by a few individuals), would be appropriate? We cannot expect any president to rise to the heights of a second Gettysburg Address, and even the first was not fully appreciated until long after its delivery. Public ceremonies are, by definition, public. They will appeal to everybody and satisfy no-one. Commemoration may be a public exercise, but grief is private.

My own memorial has been to listen to the Smithsonian Silk Road recording when work allowed--much of the day, as it happened, since I've been cutting CD-ROM's and doing simple HTML. Sufi hymns seem like a proper antidote to Al Quaeda and Wahabbi madness. I would have burned a candle if Smithsonian fire codes allowed it. Perhaps I shall tonight, unless Mouse and I go out for Scotch and conversation.

Besides the Silk Road, I've been listening to Bruce Molsky [this one]:

Train on the island,
Thought I heard it blow.
Run and tell my true love
I'm sick and I can't go:
   I can't hold the wheel.

Train on the island,
Headed for the west.
Run and tell my true love,
The one I love the best:
   I can't hold it wheel.

No, I don't know why it's appropriate either. But it is. Intuition, like grief, is a private mystery.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:23 PM

posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 3:58 PM

Marebito

For the early Japanese, the notion of the marebito (stranger-deity) was one of the ready representations used for encompassing what lay beyond the local community. The marebito was a stranger suddenly appearing in a village--such as a peddler, smith, or shaman--who, in spite of outward appearances, was actually a god in human guise and thus beneficial if properly and respectfully treated.... [However] they could, like the deities and cosmological order itself, manifest a negative side at any moment....

Comtemporary Issues in Japanese Society, John Nelson, Japan Faculty, UT Austin

Tama-chan, the misplaced Arctic seal who appeared in the rivers near Tokyo a few weeks ago, continues to evoke complex and contradictory reactions from the Japanese. On one hand he (or she--one can't tell at a distance) is cute (kawaii) in the big-eyed way that strokes the part of the Japanese soul vulnerable to "Hello Kitty". But he is also in danger, and apparently already in ill-health from the extreme pollution of his river environment, evoking environmentalist guilt and humanitarian frustration. And he is profoundly unnatural--an Arctic animal in the tropical heat of Japan, a wild animal in the city, a marine mammal in fresh water. At once a miracle and an omen, Tama-chan is raising some contradictory responses in the Japanese press.

JapanToday speculates that he may be the harbinger of an earthquake:

"In 1993, a tsunami killed 193 people on Okushiri island located southwest of Hokkaido. Before it struck, residents recall seeing unusually large numbers of mice," said Satoru Kikuchi, an associate professor at Shinshu University specializing in cognitive psychology. "And before the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995, it was reported that dogs grew restless. If you look up old records of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, you'll find references to an unusually high fish catch before the disaster."

Might an Arctic seal be lured into Japanese rivers by an abundance of sardines? It seems unlikely. But one seeks for explanations.

Worry, and environmental guilt, are starting to show up in both weblog posts on Tama-chan and in articles in the traditional press. A recent article in Asahi Shimbun repeats these worries and introduces the new element of seal-as-marebito--the visiting foreigner who is both sinister and divine:

I am also reminded of Shinobu Origuchi, another prominent folklorist who presented the concept of "marebito.'' The term is the name Origuchi gave to the gods who come from a distant land across the vast ocean. Those gods bring people happiness. Such an idea is at the roots of Japanese people's belief, he thought.

"Marebito'' is also "marodo,'' an old Japanese term for guest or visitor. The "marodo'' Tama-chan in the contemporary world became the subject of public attention thanks to wide media coverage. I secretly thought that perhaps the interest in Tama-chan has to do with the ancient "faith in marebito'' in the depths of the people's minds.

I find it interesting that the word is spelled in katakana, the characters reserved for adopted alien words: an alien word for a troubling alien visitation. Beyond the media frenzy and the enthusiastic cries of "He's so CUUUTE!" there is a fear--fear of a vengeful nature, and of our own guilt if the visitor from beyond the sea dies from nature's corruption.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:15 PM

Runaway horses in America

Former president Jimmy Carter warned against an increasingly divisive and belligerent mood in America yesterday. His careful essay, The Troubling New Face of America, appeared in the Washington Post and on the Carter Center website .

Meanwhile, columnist James Lileks has become increasingly agressive in his call for immediate and bloody war against Iraq. His prose can make you weep, but the buttons being pushed are much too simple.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:34 PM

Wandering seals in Japan

Tama-chan fever continues in Japan. There has even been talk of having Australian swimming champion Ian Thorpe compete against the seal during the Pan-Pacific Swimming Championships in Yokohama. And the wayward marine mammal is receiving the kind of attention usually reserved for rock stars. A TV reporter described the scene:

"People would follow it along and scream whenever it raised its head above the surface. Everybody was walking along slowly, covering its moves. It was like some mass Exodus. There must have been over 200 reporters from TV, radio and print media. God, they even had the company helicopters tracking the seal. I saw at least three kids fall into the river as they tried to keep up with Tama-chan."

But all may not be well with Japan's new pinniped idol. The seal appears to be losing weight rapidly. There is concern that the heavily-polluted river may be too murky for effective hunting. And seals can have medical problems if they stay too long in fresh water. Seal specialists are considering trying to capture Tama-chan to return him to the sea if his health deteriorates. But that is easier said than done -- catching marine mammals in nets can easily drown them.

[previous story]


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:12 PM

posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:33 PM

Faux cuisine

Good heavens! That volcanic green paste at the sushi bar is probably not wasabi. It's horseradish dyed green with food coloring. And the "balsamic vinegar" sprinkled on your salad is almost certainly a cheap imitation of the real (and terribly expensive) thing. Do Americans just not know any better? So it would seem. And we've been feeling so sophisticated the past few years. [originally from the Wall Street Journal]


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:24 PM

Permissions and copyrights

Duke University's law school received an anonymous $1m gift to challenge the recent extension of copyright laws. [from wood s lot] Here's what Thomas Babington Macaulay said about excessive copyright terms in the 1840's. This is not a new problem; however, the ease of access provided by the Internet makes it all the more urgent to provide a legal basis for reasonable fair use.

And today the National Academy of Sciences convenes a two-day symposium on The Role of Scientific and Technical Data and Information in the Public Domain.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:09 PM

What's going on?

Not much. I've been editing the archives, which are now set to accumulate monthly. (There seems to be no way to recombine the old weekly ones into monthly files. Oh well.)

The re-posting of the archive files means that visit-counters will record the footsteps of visitors to all the rooms in this museum, and also what brought them here. As in, "Elvis Presley Crop Circles" (What? We have some of those?) Greetings to the many visitors seeking news of Tama-chan, Tokyo's wayward seal. A cheerful wave of flipper to the person who stumbled in from having typed "What is a pinniped?" An enthusiastic greeting and a glass of virtual champers to the growing number of direct hits. Oh wow! You have me bookmarked! That is so cool!

And, a heartfelt thanks to Yakitori! for the new sidebar link. I would write directly, but I can't find your mailto. It's been a long day.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 6:12 PM