Unimaginable Futures

East Totem West Art Show Photographs

2011-12-06T13:16:00.000-08:00

Alchemical Horses 1970 By Satty

Here is a link to photographs of my ETW show June 16-18 2011.

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/pix/easttotemwest/index.html

East Totem West Mail

2011-11-02T15:38:00.000-07:00

Here is an interesting curiousity. I don't own this envelope but found images of the contents in an online auction a couple of years ago.

This looks like what was sent out when someone requested a catalog from ETW. This is what was inside.

Inside was a letter and a ETW catalog. Here is the letter:

I thought this would be fun to share.

East Totem West: "Peace" and "Grass Grows All Around"

2011-05-16T09:51:00.000-07:00

Here are some very late ETW posters. Both are attributed to ETW but distributed by Thofra.
This first one is dated 1970 and is called Peace. It is by Howard Bernstein and is extra large maybe 36 by 40.

The second is The Grass Grows All Around and is dated 1971

It was distributed by Thofra and is also by Howard Bernstein and is 23 x 35 inches. I am curious how these came to be printed. Were they printed after ETW had been sold or were they just licensed to Thofra to distribute as away to generate income?

East Totem West: White Rabbit

2011-05-05T12:05:00.000-07:00

By far White Rabbit was ETW's best selling poster. I own two variations on it. The one on the top (left) looks orignal while the one on the bottom (right) has more purple in it and the lettering at the bottom is printed in blue. Both images are the same size so it is interesting to see them side by side. The only difference between them is that the top one is larger because of its white border but (as I said) the image size is the same.

East Totem West: Evening Raga

2011-04-28T14:10:00.000-07:00

This poster was used for an overprint also, since this is the original (right) and mine has an orange flame-like overlay with flames over the center image. The overly seems not to be another poster but rather specific to this poster (maybe the colored elements in the screen for the original intensified).

East Totem West: Flight Patterns

2011-04-27T19:44:00.000-07:00

Are there other variations of this poster?

"Man, was he deep": Jacques Piccard dead at 86

2008-11-05T10:24:00.001-08:00

One of my childhood heroes has died, Jacques Picard. He established in Jan 23, 1960 the record for deepest depth achieved in the ocean when he and his partner went 7 miles (10,116 m) down in the Trieste. I read his story in an anthology of undersea stories when I was around 9 in 1968. He went deeper than any other human before or since, I think he should be remembered.

His obit from his son's web site says it all (http://solarimpulse.com/common/documents/news_affich.php?lang=en&group=news&IdArticle=53):

01.11.08 - Death of Professor Jacques Piccard
One of the last great explorers of the 20th century, a true Captain Nemo who went deeper than any other man, Jacques Piccard passed away on Saturday, 1st November at his home on the edge of his beloved Lake Geneva at the age of 86.Born in Brussels on 28 July 1922, Jacques continued the work of his father, the famous physicist Auguste Piccard who invented both the stratospheric balloon and the bathyscaphe.

On board the Trieste he became, on 23 January 1960, the deepest man in the world by reaching the bottom of the Mariana Trench, 10,916 metres below sea level, together with American Don Walsh. After this exploit he went on to build four mesoscaphes (mid-depth submarines), including the first tourist submarine that carried 33,000 passengers into the depths of Lake Geneva during the Swiss National Exhibition in 1964. With total faith in technology, he designed and directed the construction of each submarine, himself diving to the depths in his last pocket submarine up to the age of 82.

Ahead of his time in his concern for environmental questions and with a lifelong passion for the study and protection of the seas, he spent a month in 1969 drifting 3,000 km underwater in 1969 exploring the current of the Gulf Stream.

But his greatest achievement was his discovery in 1960 of living organisms at a depth of more than 11 000 m, leading to the prohibition of nuclear waste dumping in ocean trenches.This heritage, combining scientific invention and exploration, he passed to his son Bertrand, a psychiatrist and aeronaut, who was to perpetuate the Piccard family’s pioneer spirit.

Bertrand has more than once rendered homage to this Captain Nemo of his childhood. “He passed on to me a sense of curiosity, a desire to mistrust dogmas and common assumptions, a belief in free-will, and confidence in the face of the unknown. His three children, Marie-Laure, Thierry and myself all owe him a certain vision of life, in which respect for others is the guiding principle, and dreams can be realized through perseverance.”

Black Rock City Update

2008-09-02T13:28:00.000-07:00

Research biologists and sculptors, the FLG, have found a facinating new plant in the deserts of Nevada. "B. Man Mutopia" grows only on the flat Playa of the Black Rock Desert and produces flames at night. Blooming only during the last week of August, visitors enjoys a walk in the garden.

Shooting in mid-air

2008-05-28T12:40:00.001-07:00

This picture is making the rounds of the geek-o-sphere. NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander can be seen parachuting down to Mars, in this image captured by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This is the first time that a spacecraft has imaged the final descent of another spacecraft onto a planetary body.

There was a VERY narrow window to take this picture so this is amazing to see!

From a distance of about 760 kilometers (472 miles) above the surface of the Red Planet, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter pointed its HiRISE obliquely toward Phoenix shortly after it opened its parachute while descending through the Martian atmosphere. The image reveals an apparent 10-meter-wide (30-foot-wide) parachute fully inflated. The bright pixels below the parachute show a dangling Phoenix. The image faintly detects the chords attaching the backshell and parachute. The surroundings look dark, but correspond to the fully illuminated Martian surface, which is much darker than the parachute and backshell.

Dark Enough for Ya?

2008-01-15T16:00:00.000-08:00

Scientists have created the darkest material ever:

From SPACEMART:
http://www.spacemart.com/reports/Scientists_create_darkest_material_999.html

What would you do with a really dark coat of paint? For me visions of Wiley Coyote and painted tunnels to trick roadrunners comes to mind :)

Rats

2007-12-19T17:51:00.000-08:00

What is wrong with this Headline?

"Giant Rat Discovered"

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/photogalleries/giantrat-pictures/

A 3 pound rat gives you paws (get it) to consider what life on Earth was like during the age of the giant mammals. My favorite giant mammal was the enormous armadillo:

http://www.fossil-treasures-of-florida.com/giant-armadillo.html

Think about a 6 foot armored mammals. just think about it.

For more general giant armadillo stuff see Wikipedia entry:

Glyptodon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyptodon

Cretaceous Lawnmower

2007-11-16T09:08:00.000-08:00

Skull of a what!!!!

Just when we think we have a handle on what dinosaurs looked like along comes something that looks totally strange. Look at this latest finding in PLOS One (free to the world!)

Structural Extremes in a Cretaceous Dinosaur

http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0001230

"Growing your own from scratch"

2007-11-15T17:05:00.000-08:00

I was using Technorati to find blogs about developmental biology

I was struck by how cloning and regeneration research keeps coming up with new milestones. Have you consider what it would mean to live in a world where the following 2 news items lead us?

From eBiologyNews

"New limb regeneration protein identified"

http://www.ebiologynews.com/3654.html

From Reason Magazine's Blog: Reason Hit and Run

Monkey Clones Today - Human Clones Tomorrow

http://reason.com/blog/show/123544.html