Tag: art

Dreamlike Realities: Exploring the Surreal Art of Nicola Pucci | August 14 2025, 12:58

Nicola Pucci. Some of his paintings feel like snapshots from a dream. He has a very interesting technique, strong stylistic consistency, and a wild imagination.

Exploring Must-Have Russian Books for Science and Art Lovers | August 10 2025, 14:01

Can you recommend some interesting books to bring (or order) from Russia to the USA, considering my interests (popular science, primarily local non-translations from English, as I can read the originals in English, and perhaps drawing) and various other intriguing things (see part of my collection)?

Concert Weeks: From Pink Martini to Postmodern Jukebox | July 30 2025, 03:40

I have two weeks of concerts. Today — Pink Martini! Next week Postmodern Jukebox, and this past weekend was a great piano concert (Beethoven, Shostakovich, Chopin, Rachmaninoff at the Washington Piano Festival). Facebook cuts out the sound from concert recordings, so I’m attaching a cool video that’s already been cleared (or missed) by Facebook from some Pink Martini performance, featuring Thomas Lauderdale with Hunter Noack, who is either his wife or husband, and I’ll try to add my own in the comments

Exploring Unusual Time Signatures: From Prokofiev to Pink Floyd | July 28 2025, 05:32

A small concert at a Catholic university. Prokofiev’s 7th sonata features a tricky musical meter — 7/8. It’s interesting, but it seems I’ve never heard or known anything else in this meter. Early 20th-century composers were quite the innovators. Oh, I remember now. The closest to 7/8 was in Pink Floyd’s “Money” with their 7/4.

Rediscovering Peder Severin Krøyer: The Overlooked Impressionist | July 23 2025, 22:40

I haven’t posted anything about artists in a while. Today, I want to talk about an Impressionist you’ve probably never heard of, yet he deserves to be ranked alongside Degas, Manet, Monet, and Renoir. His name is Peder Severin Krøyer, a Danish painter from the second half of the 19th century.

Interestingly, a film about his wife, Marie Triepcke, was released in 2012. She was considered the most beautiful woman in Europe, and he — at least in Denmark — the most talented painter. She was an artist too, but eventually stopped painting entirely in his shadow. According to some sources, not without the influence of her brilliant husband, who actively convinced Marie of her lack of talent.

Posts like this are grouped under the hashtag #artrauflikes, and on beinginamerica.com in the Art Rauf Likes” section you can find all 152 entries (unlike Facebook, which forgets — or ignores — nearly half of them).

Stylish Contrasts in “Squid Game” Season 3: Script and Design Highlights | July 17 2025, 04:19

We finished the third season. They did a great job, but I really want to highlight two things — the script and the design. Probably one of the most stylish shows, and they managed to film the third season in such a way that it is simultaneously predictable in some aspects and full of completely unexpected twists in others.

Have you watched it? What did you think?

AI-Powered Smart Glasses: Revolutionizing Real-Time Discussion and Information Access | July 15 2025, 20:19

Here’s what would be great to do with AI – a system that reads the screen, listens to what’s being discussed on the call, including what you say, and what is said to you, and _on the screen_, and better yet, directly on smart-glasses, gives pop-up tips and hints that help you timely ask a counter-question or request a clarification, or respond to a question directed at you. Not just for passing interviews, although that would also be nice, but for more effectively conducting discussions — from technical to commercial ones.

In the case of smart-glasses, you could enjoy this without a computer in front of your eyes. I’m just afraid of having to send absolutely everything that happens around you to the cloud, analyze it, and return it in real time, which is technologically challenging (=expensive).

Such a system would be no less useful for conducting interviews than for passing them. For example, you ask someone a question, they start to respond, and then the system suggests — aha, it seems they are struggling with this topic. Let’s ask this question. Then you decide whether to ask this or something else. Why not? It’s convenient. Of course, the interviewee could employ the same system, and then it would not be simple.

Right now, I’m flipping through a book by Johannes Itten on color, and I think about how I miss dynamic illustrations and commentary. I’ve reached Piero della Francesca and for the life of me, I can’t recall what his paintings are like. This is where smart-glasses would come in handy. You look at a word, snap your fingers, and around it appear pop-up windows with contextual illustrations, comments, and links to detailed information, which you can visit now, or save to read later. It would be possible to ask any question verbally while looking at the text segment it pertains to and get an answer not verbally, but in a pop-up window that you can quickly close if you didn’t find anything new, or perhaps add a clarification by voice, after which the content in the window updates.

If I had smart-glasses, I would experiment with this. It seems straightforward.

Pearls and Mother-of-Pearl: Nature’s Fascinating Defense Mechanism | July 14 2025, 20:58

I realized that I don’t know much about pearls and started reading up on them today. It turns out that pearls are formed as a natural defense by oysters to irritation: when a micro-particle (a grain of sand, a piece of shell, or a microorganism) gets into the shell, the oyster begins to cover it with layers of nacre. Nacre (nacre) — the inner layer of shells, thin layers of calcium and protein. Interestingly, nacre and pearls are essentially the same in composition. The word “nacre” comes from German and means “mother of pearl” (Perlmutter). A single layer of nacre can form several times a day to several weeks, and it takes up to 2 years for a full pearl to form.

Wild pearls are extremely rare (one in 10000), as not all mollusks are capable of producing them — only some species can. There is also black pearl, found only in the southern part of the Pacific Ocean, and the colors of natural pearls vary from white and grey to green, blue, and red.

Most of the pearls on the market are cultured: humans manage to “trick” the oyster by placing a bead or a piece of fabric inside the shell so it starts the process of covering it with nacre. In other words, to put it simply, almost all the pearls in the market have a plastic bead inside, and nacre is just a thin “skin” around it. Cultivation of pearls occurs on special farms, where oysters are provided ideal conditions for growth and are regularly cared for. The mortality rate of mollusks after transplant is between 10-40%.

Pearls can burn: this is an organic material (97% calcium and 3% water and proteins), and it does not withstand high temperatures, it also dissolves in vinegar.

It turns out, edible oysters also produce pearls, but they are not as shiny.