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  Lithographic bubble burstingMar 15, 2013 7:09 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I found myself wishing I could use the delicate black and white medium Alfons Mucha used for (warning: mild artistic nudity) his printed illustrations of the "Our Father" that I rambled on about a couple days ago; that was lithography, a printing process that starts with the artist either (I think?) drawing an image with an oil-based medium, or scratching it into one, and then there's something with gum arabic and acid, but eventually you get to a point where you've got a plate with a copy of the drawing on it in a substance your ink will stick to, surrounded by a substance the ink will not stick to; a century or two ago those plates were the semi-smooth faces of big stone tablets, like these in an archive in Munich:
 
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image by Chris 73 (source)
 
I guess it might be a little complicated to produce. :P It's appealing to me though because you can start with a pencil-like drawing process yet end up with a permanent, black and white final image. The simpler way to do that for me would be to do what real ink artists do, and work with a dip pen, but those jam and sputter and can only move in certain directions across the paper, blah. Well I suppose then what I really should do is just work with markers, like a lot of people do, but markers don't produce as dark or varied a line as I would like. So I guess I'll just keep trying to get good with a brush; the brush doesn't always do what I want it to do, but it usually does something kind of interesting, so that's fun. Anyway here's the pencil work for today's page, and I should just give up trying to convert the pencil sketch directly into brush strokes, because those thin lines just look silly and cobwebby in the full black of ink:
 
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Yep too much white space, can't have that. I thought I could yesterday but it just wasn't right and I added more and more black until I couldn't really add any more black and then it was almost okay. :P Today I sort of knew I couldn't really do that but tried a really light but dense liney approach for a while just to see how that would go; in the end it still wasn't strong enough and I had to work over it in thicker black and white, but the final result has a bit of play in it that appeals to me--well, more than yesterday's slightly different approach did. I suppose it's a tad closer to a lithographic look, too, although I really should give up any notion of pulling that off with brush and ink.
 
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Here's an article with some interesting points, insight, and history on Google's announcement yesterday that they're soon going to retire their "Google Reader" RSS reader, which is funny in a very Google way given that I think it's the RSS reader used by like 90% or something of people who use such things; not many other companies would ditch something that's dominating its field. I'm sad about it too because according to their stats about the A* RSS feed, there are some 465 people who subscribe to A* updates through Google Reader; Google said that the use of Reader has been declining, and I guess the whole RSS reader field isn't big enough for them now that they've got super big stuff like cell phones to worry about, and they couldn't seem to get their ad system working right in RSS feeds, which means they couldn't make enough money off it for their liking, but dang Google, 465 people is pretty good as far as I'm concerned! I hope those folks'll be able to find a good alternative--certainly there *are* other RSS readers out there, even conveniently web-based ones like Reader, and it will be interesting to see which comes to the fore now that Reader is retiring; hopefully this will all inspire a spurt of growth and innovation in the field.
 
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Oh yeah also scientists at the CERN supercollider have collected 2.5 times more data on high energy collisions since their first announcement of having possibly detected the long-theorized Higgs boson, the subatomic particle thought to convey mass by means of an energy field permeating the universe, and since this further data has been consistent with the initial finding, they've now announced that it pretty much definitely is a Higgs boson--"a" Higgs boson because some theories beyond the Standard Model say it could just be the lowest-energy particle in a while series of increasingly powerful Higgs', or something.
 
Also, other scientists have been trying to drum up drama by saying that the existence of Higgs means the universe will almost certainly be wiped out in some tens of billions of years by a chance permutation in the Higgs field somewhere in the universe. That, at any rate, is the theory of false vacuum, which postulates that, with the Higgs boson and another particle, the "top quark," being just massive enough to cross a mathematically calculated boundary for stability--how near they are to this border is still a matter of speculation, since their masses haven't been measured with sufficient precision yet--then the energy field they constitute across our universe is not a perfect low-energy state, and a more stable state, a more perfect vacuum, could exist; given that, the right chance permutation in the Higgs etc energy field somewhere in the universe should inevitably find that more perfect rest state and, it being nicer and cozier than the universe around it, it would "catalyze the conversion of our universe to a lower energy state in a volume expanding at nearly the speed of light, destroying all that we know without forewarning."
 
Neat! Although some other articles I was reading earlier today pointed out some significant quibbles with that dire interpretation of theories and masses; for instance, the known universe is already expanding at the speed of light--or even a tad faster perhaps due to cosmic inflation, I dunno--so even if that perfect vacuum bubble did show up, it wouldn't necessarily catch up to the rest of the universe anyhow; and that if this kind of thing *does* happen, we should see ripples or echos of past vacuum bubble burstings, or something, and apparently we don't, yet.
 
At any rate, various theoretical physics bubbles are still constantly forming and bursting, which is reassuring--for a while there I was afraid theoretical physics was rather running out of steam!
 
 
 
 
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