Intersections

I'm always thrilled when the disparate threads of my life come together in unexpected ways.  One of the puzzles for me in Vargas Llosa's book, La Guerra del Fin del Mundo,  was his choice of a phrenologist to be a principal character.  Some light was shed on that choice for me today when I read the latest posting at a favorite blog, Genealogy of Religion, about Franz Joseph Gall who founded the discipline of phrenology.  While his association of head bumps with brain functions did not hold up to scrutiny, he was nevertheless a pioneer of scientific thought in relation to the conception of the mind as a product of physical structure rather than evidence of another dimension as posited by religions.  The path started by Gall led directly to the scientific revolution epitomized by Darwin, as well as a questioning of social and political systems by the 19th Century revolutionary thinkers like Karl Marx.  The Church, of course, recognized quite early on that the Gall's course would lead to a dissolution of the magical thinking that held it all together and therefore promoted the persecution of phrenology wherever it raised its head.  Vargas Llosa, in his book, does a marvelous job of illuminating this complicated historical conflict, which is one of the things that make him a great novelist.

Lost Love

I seem to have drifted back into Sketchup. I'm not quite sure what got me started on modeling a Sixteenth Century stonebow. I've got most of the parts sketched out with the exception of the bow, which will probably be the most difficult component.

When we moved to the city I decided to give away all my archery gear, including a fine little book by Saxton Pope on the rediscovery of the joys of making and using the longbow.  I had a couple recurves and an old longbow which I never strung or shot.  I never did own a crossbow, though I was always interested in them.  I recall that the De Young museum in San Francisco had a nice example of a stonebow very similar to the one I'm working on now in Sketchup.

The illustrations and plans I'm working from are out of The Book of the Crossbow by Ralph Payne-Gallwey.

Life's Clutter

While my interest in photography with old cameras has taken up much of my time over the past ten years, I haven't been able to resist looking into other subjects, a few of which are illustrated here.

My longest-running hobby is actually reading novels, mostly by Spanish and Latin American writers.  I never had patience for English and American literature, and always felt fiction something of a waste of time.  Reading in Spanish always seemed less self-indulgent as I could tell myself I was also building some language proficiency.

I'm not quite half-way through 2666 by Roberto Bolaño.  The endless digressions and philosophizing get a bit tiresome, but he was an accomplished storyteller, and I'm working at withholding judgment on the book until I'm done with it.  The story has a lot in common with the trilogy by Stieg Larsson, though the swede's style was more nimble.

Another writer with a lot in common with those two is Mario Vargas Llosa.  I've read most of his novels, including most recently La tía Julia y el escribidor and La guerra del fin del mundo. Vargas Llosa is often slow in starting his stories; I was about eighty pages into La guerra before I felt I knew where the plot was headed.  The peruano's strength is in developing interesting characters, something that has been helped along considerably by his having lived with a succession of interesting women.

In the past few years I've been reading more non-English-speaking writers in Spanish translation.  I enjoyed the exotic stories told by Orhan Pamuk, and reading him in Spanish seems appropriate as Turkish and Spanish have some grammatical similarity in their use of a familiar tense.

Bolaño's novel is probably going to last me a couple more weeks at the rate I'm going.  After that, I'm hoping to read a bit of Tolstoy, possibly Anna Karenina.  I started to read it on line, but digesting a novel with my desktop is tiresome.  If anyone out there has a dog-eared copy of the Spanish edition, I would be happy to pay a reasonable price for it.  

me262

The Germans fielded the first operational jet fighter in WWII, the me262.  

This model was constructed in OpenVSP.  I've learned a few more things about using the program, but still don't understand how one might round off the wingtips, nor how to properly shape the cross-sections.  I used a POD object to form the canopy; it gives a smoother result than the FUSE object, but no individual cross-section control. Perhaps I'll try this same model in Sketchup.

Excursion

I took a quick trip on my motorcycle through Albuquerque's Old Town to test my new video setup.  The camera is not vintage, but the Honda Shadow is twenty-five years old.


The frame for holding the camera is made from a couple pieces of  angle iron.  There is a camera strap that goes around my neck, and a leather shoelace loops around my back.  A small ball head allows me to properly adjust the camera's forward tilt.

MiG-15

More doodling with OpenVSP.

This is a rather crude rendering of the mid-century Soviet fighter.  I still haven't figured out how to do cross-sections which would create a canopy, so I approximated one using a short fuselage object.  It also isn't clear to me how one might round off the tips on the wings and tail surfaces.  I'll work out the answers to some of my questions with practice, but it would be nice to see how others are dealing with some of the challenges.

OpenVSP

I put away my 3D drawing projects for some time because of a combination of frustration with the complexity of the tools and the nagging thought that they were taking too much time away from my photography.  Recently, I have been seduced into the 3D world again by the appearance of a new tool, OpenVSP.   As the NASA web site says:

OpenVSP is a parametric aircraft geometry tool. OpenVSP allows the user to create a 3D model of an aircraft defined by common engineering parameters. 

Compared to anything else I've tried, OpenVSP is blazingly fast, and * taa-daa * it's free.

Here is an example design that comes with the program showing its capabilities:

Here are  several doodles I produced in a few minutes each:

Here's my x-plane that I've been using to familiarize myself with the program's drawing tools:

There is a very good manual for OpenVSP which includes instructions on all the basics and a few ok video tutorials.  To get beyond the basics takes some dedication; I'm trying to figure out at the moment how to construct a typical aircraft coss-section which inludes a canopy.  Hopefully, there will be some online discussion developing around the program which will help to answer questions.  Since NASA has released the program as Open Source, perhaps there will also be some development of additional features and import/export options.