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BOTANY: BETWEEN ART AND SCIENCE/BOTANIQUE:ENTRE ART ET SCIENCE
The Buffon Museum in Montbard has opened a new exhibition on botany, using the collections from the University of Burgundy. I suppose they have on display some of the material we saw in the University...
View ArticleIF ALL THE ICE MELTED/SI TOUTE LA GLACE FONDAIT
National Geographic has a wonderful site, and in it you can find maps of the different continents redrawn to give you an idea of what the world would look like if all the ice melted - that is if the...
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CROSS-MODAL INTERFERENCE/LES INTERFERENCES CROSS-MODALES
During the fascinating Synaesthesia Conference we held at the end of June, all the participants visited the Laboratoire des Sciences du Goût et de l'Alimentation, on the Dijon campus, where we were...
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LOOKING AT LANDSCAPES/REGARDER LE PAYSAGE
Yesterday, on the way back from a short stay in the Alps, we drove up to the summit of Mont Revard, and discovered an interesting feature, no doubt quite new, to inform people about the names of the...
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EULER AND VENN DIAGRAMMES/LES DIAGRAMMES D'EULER ET DE VENN
Today's doodle from Google celebrated John Venn, and I was curious to learn more about him. John Venn (1834-1923) was an English logican who perfected Euler's diagrammes. Euler himself (1707-1783), a...
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RIDDLES OF FORM CONFERENCE/COLLOQUE SUR LES ENIGMES DES FORMES
The Dundee-based IAWIS conference took place last week. I was unable to attend all the events, but would like to thank the organisers for a very packed schedule, full of interesting things. I had the...
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D'ARCY THOMPSON ZOOLOGY MUSEUM/LA GALERIE ZOOLOGIQUE D'ARCY THOMPSON
The D'Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum is situated in the Carnelley Building in Dundee University. It is open on Friday afternoons in the summer, and you go to the basement of the building, past staff...
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EXHIBITION IN MONTBARD/EXPOSITION A MONTBARD
The exhibition in Montbard, entitled Botany : Between art and science, is particularly interesting, and suited to the Buffon Museum. You are greeted in the entrance hall by a giant model of a poppy,...
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TERRAE GENESIS
This week-end, I visited the Terrae Genesis Centre, a geology gallery dedicated to minerals, mining, fossils and the history of the earth, in the Vosges, the mountain range in the east of France, close...
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HERBARIA AND LOCAL SCHOLARS/DES HERBIERS ET DES ERUDITS LOCAUX
Last week-end was heritage week-end in Europe, an event that was created in France in 1984. In the village of Losne, Burgundy, local historian Alain Cessot, who has studied extensively the history of...
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FRACTALS/FIGURES FRACTALES
We have all come across the word "fractal". It was invented in 1974 by the Franco-American mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot (1924-2010) who drew attention to the repetitive patterns in some natural...
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KJELL BLOCH SANDVED AND THE BUTTERFLY ALPHABET/KJELL BLOCH SANDVED ET...
A short post today on Norwegian nature photographer Kjell Bloch Sandved, born in 1922, because his butterfly alphabet is a lovely sunbeam in an otherwise grey foggy day. His site, on which you can...
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A HISTORY OF FLOWERS/UNE HISTOIRE DES FLEURS
Valérie Chansigaud continues to collaborate with publishers Delachaux et Niestlé. Her latest opus deals with the relations between mankind and flowers. As usual, the illustrations are impressive, and...
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BIRDSONGS AND SONOGRAMS/CHANTS D'OISEAUX ET SONOGRAMMES
Last week, I took part in a day's seminar on songbirds in the Cité de la Musique in Paris. It was organised by Martine Clouzot, a medievalist from the University of Burgundy - who has already...
View ArticleTHE TECHNICAL IMAGE/L'IMAGE TECHNIQUE
The University of Chicago Press is due to publish in the spring an English translation of the German book from 2008, "Das technische Bild". Unsurprisingly, it will be entitled "The Technical Image"....
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ZUMBO
I listened yesterday to a piece on France Culture entitled "les regardeurs", a programme in which artists and/or art historians, gallery curators, etc...discuss works of art - in this case, a wax scene...
View ArticleHOTTEST YEAR ON RECORD/L'ANNEE LA PLUS CHAUDE JAMAIS ENREGISTREE
2014 was the hottest year on record, and the ten hottest years since records began in 1880 have all been since 1998. So, we are living through an unprecedented era of global warming, no doubt linked to...
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WALLACE, HIS LINE AND BIRDS OF PARADISE/WALLACE, SA LIGNE ET SES OISEAUX DE...
I have just finished reading Alfred Russel Wallace's The Malay Archipelago (1869) in which Wallace (1823-1913), the co-discoverer of evolution, recounts his travels in Malaysia and New Guinea, his...
View ArticleTILING/PAVAGE
Between art and science, the skill of decorating a flat surface with repetitive patterns has long been the subject of geometry and mathematics. Apparently, there are only 17 ways of tiling a surface...
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COSIMA LUCOTTE
In the summer of 2013, I visited the small exhibition of X-Ray photographs by Cosima Lucotte in the Dijon botanical gardens. This French artist takes X-rays of flowers and animals, which gives them an...
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