Monday, November 29, 2010
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Fragile and The Robust
Beauty and the Beast is a 1991 American animated film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation, released to theaters on November 22, 1991 by Walt Disney Pictures. The story is based on the fairy tale La Belle et la Bête by Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, who was uncredited in the English version of the film but credited in the French version as writer of the novel. The movie also uses some ideas derived from the 1946 French film. It centers around a prince who is transformed into a Beast and the beautiful young woman whom he imprisons in his castle.
Beauty and the Beast is the perfect couple to represent our concepts because the Beast represents the robustness and Bella represents the fragility. The Beast is a wolf-like creature that is very strong and is very angry. bella instead is a petit girl that is very beautiful sweet and delicate.
J. Frazer, The Golden Bough
(Fragile, p.301a)
It would be idle, perhaps, to lay much weight on evidence drawn from the calendar of flowers, and in particular to press an argument so fragile as the bloom of the rose.
(Robust, p.499a)
These leaves were then distributed to everybody, old and young. When all was ready, a band of robust men, attended by a guard of exorcists, carried one of the cars down to the sea on the right side of the village graveyard, and set it floating in the water.
The Back Swan: on Robustness and Fragility
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese philosophical essayist, scholar and practitioner of mathematical financial economics. He is best known as the author of the 2007 book (completed 2010) The Black Swan. Taleb has been critical of the finance industry and has been credited with making warnings regarding financial crises and making a fortune out of the 2008 crisis. Taleb is an activist and a promoter of what he calls a "Black Swan robust" society as well as aggressive "stochastic tinkering" as a means of scientific discovery.
Three years after the pubication of The Black Swan, Nassin Nicholas Taleb write the new book, where he studies the 2008 crisis, and about the economists should analize and take care of it, with annotations that have the taste of the irony and the skepticism.
Robustness and fragility summerize three years old life of a strong idea, that it’s able to change and modify our mental paradigms. From these meetings it was born "Robustness and Fragility", his new philosophical story where, furnishing us a topographical paper of the Estremistan, Taleb it teaches us whether to move us in a world dominated by the case and by the uncertainty.
Australia's Hot Air Balloon
Australia Post has recently issued a series of 4 postage stamps depicting hot-air ballooning. Released on May 6, 2008, the stamps celebrate the 150th anniversary of the first successful balloon flight in Australia. One-hundred fifty years ago, no one could have imagined that stamps would someday fly across the world attached to letters and carried on jet airplanes.
The earth is the most fragile thing of all...
This stamp was created bye the U.S Postage for Earth Day with the slogan "The earth is the most fragile thing of all..." It's purpose was to create awareness to the public of the fragility of the planet. We find it representative for our blog because it shows how people think earth is so big and robust that it cannot be hurt by us, but the reality of the situation is that everyday we are damaging the earth and its becoming more and more fragile.
Monday, November 8, 2010
The Twin Towers, the crumbling of America
The World Trade Center (WTC) was a complex of seven buildings in Lower Manhattan in New York City that were destroyed in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The site is currently being rebuilt with six new skyscrapers and a memorial to the casualties of the attacks.
The original World Trade Center was designed by Minoru Yamasaki in the early 1960s using a tube-frame structural designPort Authority of New York and New Jersey agreed to take over the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad which became the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH).
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda-affiliated hijackers flew two 767 jets into the complex, one into each tower, in a coordinated terrorist attack. After burning for 56 minutes, the South Tower (2) collapsed, followed a half-hour later by the North Tower (1), with the attacks on the World Trade Center resulting in 2,752 deaths. The World Trade Center collapsed later in the day and the other buildings, although they did not collapse, had to be demolished because they were damaged beyond repair. The process of cleanup and recovery at the World Trade Center site took eight months. 
The fall of the Twin Towers has represented for all the Western Hemisphere the collapse of the economic power of the United States.
The terrorist attack had two consequences, the first on a symbolic level because the nation that was considered the strongest and “untouchable” was penetrated and attacked in their own soil, and the second one was the exposure of the fragility and vulnerability of this nation, attacked in its most important and world-known economic center.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Ron Mueck
While many artists strive to glamorize, and portray our world to be better than it actually is, others simply find art in our ordinary lives and our simple bodies. Mueck is one of those artists, and is now well known for his super realistic sculptures where he portrays humans at key stages in the life cycle, from birth through middle age, to death.
Ron Mueck, now working in the United Kingdom, was born in 1958 in Melbourne, Australia. The son of German-born toy-makers, he grew up making creatures, puppets and costumes in his spare time, experimenting with materials and techniques. He started his career as a model maker and puppeteer for children’s films (such as Labyrinth, The Storyteller and etc.). Later he was making photo-realistic props and animatronics for the advertising industry. In 1996 Mueck transitioned to fine art and in 1999 he was appointed as Associate Artist at the National Gallery, London.
Without further ado, let’s take a little virtual museum tour, and explore these mind-blowing photo realistic sculptures by Ron Mueck.
"It wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast."
King Kong is a 2005 remake of the 1933 film of the same name directed by Peter Jackson and stars Naomi Watts, Jack Black and Adrien Brody. Andy Serkis, through performance capture, portrayed Kong.
King Kong may be one of Hollywood's most emblematic characters. The story of the giant ape that falls in love with a beautiful woman, which cosequently leads him to his death. Once again we find another example of a character that seems robust and stong but in the end is defeated because of a weakness, in this case his weakness was the love he felt for the woman that will lead him to his downfall.
Cow and chicken.
Cow and Chicken is an American animated series, created by David Feiss. The series shows the surreal adventures of a cow, named Cow, and her chicken brother, named Chicken. They are often antagonized by "The Red Guy", who poses as various characters to scam or hurt them.
Cow, is Chicken's 7 year old sister, with a weight stated as 600 pounds. Cow looks up to Chicken, who she refers to as "Big Brother". She is often viewed by Chicken as infantile and stupid, and is quickly prone to emotional outbursts. She is the only character to appear in every episode of the show. Cow has employed Blackmail to get Chicken to do what she wants and often attempts to get the other characters to do the right thing. Cow's alter ego is "Supercow", a superhero with the ability to fly.
Chicken, is Cow's 11 year old brother. He can be mean to his younger sister, and even to the rest of the family. He has a powerful ego, but in spite of this, has a powerful conscience, usually only displayed when Cow is in danger. His speech is riddled with malapropisms and sarcasm. Despite being a male, he demonstrated the ability to lay eggs. Chicken is very fond of ice skating. Like other chickens, he cannot fly, and is afraid of flying. Chicken is the only character in the show who knows that his sister and Supercow are the same person.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXIScJ1LT8
Cow and Chicken are two characters that represent very well each one of our concepts. Cow is the personification of Robust, both physically and in personality. Chicken, instead, is the personification for Fragile.
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