Category - Art & Science

“It’s an odd mission…

October 29, 2023
Paul Schatzkin
Art & Science, Digest, farnovision
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HEAS 2023

… but this seems to be my destiny in this life.

(what follows is the reading I did at Richard Hull’s High Energy Amateur Science (HEAS) gathering in Richmond, VA on October 7, 2023. If you don’t care to read the whole thing, here’s an audio recording I made with my iPhone (no promises re: the quality). Photo above by David Rosignoli.

______________

Tonight’s reading is in two parts.

Part 1 is the Foreword to the 2023 Edition of The Boy Who Invented Television:

 

“It’s an odd mission… but this seems to be my destiny in this life.” 

I tossed that line off to a friend in March 2023.  

At the time I was nearing the release of my second book, The Man Who Mastered Gravity – the biography of a mercurial figure named Thomas Townsend Brown.  That book is now available from booksellers worldwide. 

Some guys fly to the moon. Some guys start a company and make a billion bucks. Some guys become doctors or lawyers – that’s what my parents always expected of me.  Some guys become auto mechanics, bakers, candlestick makers or Indian chiefs. 

Some guys become writers and publish dozens of books.

And some guys… well, so far I’ve written/published two books.  

It has only taken me fifty years.  

Nobody is ever going to accuse me of being prolific.

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Hey Mister, That’s Me…

June 25, 2023
Paul Schatzkin
Art & Science, Digest, farnovision, Writing
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…up on the jukebox*!

My last post here was a couple of weeks ago after I learned that the Mysterious Universe podcast had been talking about my new book, The Man Who Mastered Gravity. 

I contacted the host/producers of Mysterious Universe, and we spent more than two hours talking about the Townsend Brown biography and my earlier (recently re-released) bio of Philo T. Farnsworth, The Boy Who Invented Television.  This was really the first opportunity I’ve had to talk about how the two stories dovetail to suggest a single story of forbidden science (fusion and gravity control) and the veil of mysteries surrounding both men.

Here are links if you listen via Apple Podcasts:

Paul Schatzkin joins us in this episode to explore his remarkable research on the obscure historical figures of Philo T. Farnsworth and Thomas Townsend Brown. We delve deeply into the narratives of these men, who pioneered technologies that revolutionized the world, while also contemplating some of the unrevealed technological advancements. Did Farnsworth unlock the enigma of fusion energy? Was Brown connected to a clandestine, highly advanced group?

..or here if you listen to podcasts on Spotify:

I am rather surprised and delighted that both books are starting to sell. It’s not huge numbers by any stretch, but I’ve been learning how to run ads on Amazon and get them to show up when users are searching related titles.  I’m also working on tying my books into the release of the expected-to-be-a-blockbuster feature Oppenheimer when it comes out this summer:

*

I have been thinking a lot about what ties all these stories together: that all the science involved begins with Einstein in 1905.

Townsend Brown was born in 1905, Philo Farnsworth in 1906.  So both men were “relativity natives.” Like kids today who grew up with computers and smartphones and are considered ‘digital natives’ – these men who were born in the first decade of the 20th century never knew a world where relativity and its related discoveries didn’t exist.

At the very least, the breakthrough theories that led to the atomic bomb also led to electronic video – yes, the the screen you’re looking at now.   Even though video is by far the more common and useful technology (lemme check… nope, no a-bomb in my pocket), that connection is largely lost to history. That is mostly because  corporate greed and public relations swept Philo Farnsworth under the rug of history after the 1940s.

And Townsend Brown?  Who the hell knows what happened there.  I’ve been on that story for twenty years now and still have more questions than answers.

You can get a better idea what I’m driving at here:

Television: The Theory of Relativity in Our Living Rooms

Such are the things I think about…

___________

*And in case you don’t recognize the song, Hey Mister, That’s Me Up On The Jukebox, listen to James Taylor from the album Mud Slide Slim (from 1971 –back when he, like me, still had hair:

“Hamilton” – and Slavery:
I Made a YouTube

July 14, 2020
Paul Schatzkin
Art & Science, commentary, Digest
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If you don’t wanna read all the verbiage, I’ll put the video here at the top:

Here’s a direct link if you’d rather open it in the YouTube app or a browser:

OK, Two things:

I suppose by now everybody who wants to has seen the Original Broadway Cast recording (not film!) of Hamilton – the musical sensation where a multi-ethnic cast (only George III is portrayed by a Caucasian actor) sings and dances their way through the classic (i.e. white-man’s version) tale of America’s Founding.

I’ve watched through the whole thing twice already, and various fragments of it as well and honestly… I think it’s pretty fucking fantastic.

I (finally!) managed to see the stage rendition last December when one or the ‘bus and truck’ road shows (finally!) found its way to Tennessee Performing Arts Center (aka TPAC) in Nashville. And I thought it was pretty fucking fantastic then, too.

So, I will admit to being a bit of a Hamilhead – though perhaps not as much as the fellow I watched it with on the 4th of July who has seen it on stage like half a dozen times. I considered myself quite fortunate to have seen it the once.

Anywhoo…. Hamilton was the First Thing.

The Second thing was… this ongoing discussion (via video conferences) that we’ve been having at my job about the whole #BlackLivesMatter moment and the necessary conversation the country has been having about the systemic racism which has been part of the American Story since…. well, since 1619, if you wanna be precise.

As part of that discussion, I volunteered for a “History subcommittee” that was assigned to come up with presentations to the rest of the staff about… well, whatever we wanted to dig into.

And since this discussion was all happening around the video release of Hamilton… I got the bright idea to do a (semi) deep-dive into the role (black) slavery played in the lives of all the (white) characters who are featured in the musical.

Open rabbit hole… fall in.

This turned into about 6 days of pretty much non-stop work: researching all the Founders portrayed in the musical (thank you, Internets), and then distilling what I learned into a Keynote presentation. Which also meant getting somewhat skilled with Keynote (Apple’s version of PowerPoint) and putting all my Photoshop chops to the test as well.

What was supposed to be maybe 10 minutes morphed into more than 20 minutes worth of material, and I finished the first complete top-to-bottom run through last Saturday – about 15 minutes before presenting it to a Webex with 100+ people tuned in. It was very warmly received and several people asked me to make it a video and put it on the YouTube.

Which meant another two days of fine-tuning; In addition to sorting out the vagaries of the Keynote application, I have also been grinding my way through a program called Logic to learn audio editing, which I decided to do to grab some clips from the actual show. And then I had to figure out how to put it all together in iMovie so that I could upload it all to YouTube.

It’s a 24 minute production that took me about 60 hours total to compile -basically the most actual “work” I’ve done in all the time I’ve been #HomeAlone. I guess it was about time I did something useful.

That’s all you need to know about what this is and how it got here. I’ll drop it the embed in here again so that if you’ve read this far you don’t need to scroll back to the top.

Thanks for watching. Leave your comments on the YouTube page.

 

Today in #TMITM – Just Stop Whatever You’re Doing…

January 19, 2018
Paul Schatzkin
Art & Science, Digest, gizmos
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..and listen to Ezra Klein’s podcast interview with Jaron Lanier:

“The problem here is that as technology improves and as algorithms improve… the whole system is just trying to optimize itself… advertising turns in to something very different than what it started as. It turns into behaviorism on a global scale, it turns into feedback loops that modify peoples’ behavior by algorithm and for pay, and once you’ve gone over that threshold you really make society insane…”

You’re welcome…

 

New Desktop Portals for June

June 23, 2015
Paul Schatzkin
Art & Science, Digest, photography, travel
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Greetings, Time-and-Space Travelers,

I know, when I started this program I said I’d send out some new “desktop portals” every month. I’m just a little slow on the uptake this month… but it is still June!

So I have two new images for your computer and mobile gizmo.

For your computer, I present the Beauly Priory, a small monastic ruin on a peninsula called “The Black Isle” near Inverness in the Scottish highlands.

Desktop-Beauly16-PA064846click here to download “Beauly Priory”

If you are a fan, you might recognize the site, which I just learned has been used as a location for the “Outlander” TeeVee Series. It has an even greater signifance for me, personally – because in a very real sense, this is where “Portals Of Stone” began. I first visited the site when touring Scotland with my wife in the fall of 2012, but I didn’t have nearly as much time as I wanted to photograph the ruins. I remember very clearly thinking to myself as we drove away, “I need to come back here…” – which I did about six months later.For your mobile device, here is one of the very first portals that appeared after that return trip to Scotland in the spring of 2013:


This is looking out the main entrance of a ruin called Hermitage Castle in The Borders region of Scotland. The castle served as fortress for a variety of families and has a somewhat colorful if brutal history; the site also figures prominently in the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, for it was here that the conspiracies that led to her undoing were first hatched.

Click here to see more of Hermitage and the other Castles and Abbeys from my 2013 expedition.

I hope you enjoy these images and you will download them and use them on your gizmos.

click here to download “Hermitage Stargate”

* * * *

Before I go, I have one other bit of news to share:

We probably met when you stopped by my installation at the “O” Gallery in the Arcade during one of the First Saturday Downtown Art Crawls over the past year or so. So it is with some sad reluctance that I let you know that that installation will be coming down at the end of the month. My last day there will be this coming Saturday, June 27. I’ll be there from 1-4:00 PM, and after that I’ll be taking everything down. If you’ve ever thought you might like to have one of these pieces to hang on your wall, come by Saturday and, well, you know… let’s make a deal…

I have no idea at the moment where I will display this work next, if anywhere, so if you’ve got any ideas or suggestions, by all means, pass them along.

I will try to get some more desktop files for you next month, but it’s already so late in June that I might just wait for August. In the meantime…

Thanks, and see you “on the other side of the Portal…”

–PS

Barcamp = MOMOP (#bcn13)

November 1, 2013
Paul Schatzkin
Art & Science, commentary, photography
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bcn13_theme_banner

Tomorrow’s Seventh Annual BarCamp Nashville is going to be one of those “coming around full circle” events for me.

The very first Barcamp in August 2007 was something of a “coming out” event for me. After selling songs.com – my early-stage, “Internet one-point-oh” business – to Gaylord Entertainment in the fall of 1999 (and spending a year watching them run it into the ground), I sorta went into seclusion for several years, during which I wrote two biographies of obscure 20th Century Scientists.

Then in the summer of 2007, I started reading about this event that was going to gather all the disparate elements of Nashville’s emerging digital arts and business communities for an “unconference” that covered a vast array of topics – the only unifying factor being some interface with “new media” and their underlying technologies.

Here, see for yourself:

I have not made it to every Barcamp since, though I have made it to several and made lasting friendships at each one.

This year, for the first time, I’ll be making an actual contribution other than my usual wandering around between sessions and heckling the presenters. I have signed on as an “in-kind” sponsor which means that in exchange for hanging the “Cohesion Arts” logo in strategic places around the (undisclosed) location (a designation that puts me in some most-esteemed company), , I’ll be providing still photography coverage for the event.

More than just taking photos, though, I hope to engage everybody in attendance who has a cell phone / camera (who am I kidding, that’s everybody...) in the day’s photo coverage. There will be a video screen in the front of the venue offering a continuous Instagram feed that will include not just my photos, but any photo that bears the hashtag ” #bcn13 .”

Barcamp is a hard event to describe to somebody who is not familiar with the concept. Yes, it’s an assembly of the region’s digerati, but there is no single theme for the day. It’s really just an excuse to get a lot of similarly minded people in a room and start bouncing ideas around.

For me, Barcamp has always been first and foremost about the people I get to meet. It’s a welcome departure from the virtual, online experience that tends to dominate our lives these days. Which brings me to the acronym in the title of this post, which came to mind while trying to describe BarCamp to a friend today:

You’ve heard of “mooc“s, right? That’s a “massively open online course,” those classes that universities offer for free to thousands of students around the world over the Internets.

And then there is the concept of “meatspace” – what was once – before we all started living our lives through screens and keyboards – known as “the real world.”

So BarCamp is a

Massively Open Meatspace Opportunity

or

MOMOP

At least, that’s what I’M calling it.

Now y’all get those cell phones out and start tagging your photos w/ ” #bcn13 “

And if you see a guy with a rumpled photographers vest and a couple of cameras round his neck, stop and say hello, and I’ll make sure we get an “official” photo into the stream…

P.S. A special shout out to Kerry Woo for suggesting I volunteer for this assignment. I’m glad they accepted the offer, and I hope I can live up the exceptional standard that Kerry has brought these events in the past.