Linking Art and Science

Linking passion together. An article, "She Calls It 'Phenomena.' Everyone Else Calls It Art", from The New York Time (June 12, 2007), caught my eyes. The images are from Felice Frankel, an research scientist as well as a photographer. She discovered the beauty of science from her camera and image manipulation. She pointed out, she didn't like take pictures of people that much, because you are too dependent on them to make a good picture. With architecture, you have to rely on your own sense of composition. It is very interesting points. On the contrary, I like to have people in my pictures though not necessary being the main subject. I think I am more interesting in the talking/communication between the human and environment.

One of the first photographs she made in Dr. Whitesides's lab, water droplets arrayed on a slide with a water-repellent grid, ended up on the cover of the journal Science. Since then, Dr. Whitesides said, "her impact on scientific communication has been very large, in the way science talks to science and science talks to the world outside science."

Based on her great sense of color and design, plus her passion at science, her photography is so different from others. It speaks out the beauty of science to the world.

Her web: http://web.mit.edu/felicef/

Reflection: it is important to have personal own vision of photography.

Life extends in his beliefs

Watching second times of the documentary tape of Ayrton Senna's Racing Is In My Blood.
I strongly sensed the passion of learning and challenging himself through his life. Like he said, he put his personality into race. He was racing with his mind, his body, his psychic, and beyond. " By focusing and absorbing your body and mind into the racing, only by doing it, you learn about yourself," said Senna. As Senna recalled, "during racing, you commit yourself, no compromise." "When you give more, you find more." "During racing, you need to have a clear mind to know when to be aggressive, when to do calculating, when to give, and when to hold." To me, this is the essence of developing the sense of photographing.

After Senna's death it was discovered that he had donated millions of dollars of his personal fortune to children's charities, a fact that during his life he had kept secret. In the documentary film "The Right to Win" made in 2004 as a tribute to Senna, Frank Williams notably recalls that as good a driver as Senna was, ultimately "he was an even greater man outside of the car than he was in it."
Senna died at the age of 34 but his beliefs and passions are continuing passed and installing to people's mind.

Senna's famous quotes:(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayrton_Senna)

"I continuously go further and further learning about my own limitations, my body limitation, psychological limitations. It's a way of life for me."

"My car quit so I parked it." (after retiring from the 1988 Monaco Grand Prix)

"Being second is to be the first of the ones who lose."

"On a given day, a given circumstance, you think you have a limit. And you then go for this limit and you touch this limit, and you think, 'Okay, this is the limit'. And so you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high."

"One particular thing that Formula-1 can provide you, is that you know you're always exposed to danger. Danger of getting hurt, danger of dying. This is part of your life, and you either face it in a professional, in a cool manner, or you just drop it, just leave it and don't do it anymore really. And I happen to like too much what I do to just drop it, I can't drop it."

"Racing, competing, it's in my blood. It's part of me, it's part of my life; I have been doing it all my life and it stands out above everything else."

Thinking Advance

Just reading an article on the newest "Time Magazine" issue (June 18, 2007), Bill Gates Goes Back To School. Bill Gates wrote the rules and system to transform people' thinking. He installed the engineer's approach - a literal, analytical, hacker's approach- to everything on the use of computer and the Web. On the other hand, Steve Jobs showed the use of technology differently, re-stalling the nature of human thinking.

In this article, as Lev Grossman stated,
"Bill Gates was at the center of the personal computer revolution and the Internet revolution, but now the big innovation are about exactly the things he's bad at. The iPod was an aesthetic revolution. MySpace was a social revolution. YouTube was an entertainment revolution. Technology doesn't need Gates anymore. Now education and health care - those are areas in which the bedrock problems, the bits and bytes, have yet to be solved. Sickness, death, ignorance, illiteracy --- those are the problems that need nerd, Gates 3.0. "

According to the article, Gates was never good at social skills. He foreseen there were forces reshaping the world weren't just political or cultural but technological if you knew there the bits and bytes were buried. An admirable and respectable action hero, for his courage and ambition to try to make a better world.

Modern steps on historial present

While reorganizing the photos from summer 2006 Beijing trip, I found the images I tried to capture the sacred spirit of Temple of Heaven. Chinese people like to use circle to symbolize "Heaven" and square to symbolize the earth. Seeing tourists wondering around the Temple of Heaven, tall standing reaching the sky in the middle of the square ground, makes me realize the grand of Heaven and the power of natural. It also reminded me an article "Thank to Heaven" from my junior-high-school textbook. There are too many things and people to thank to therefore we thank "Heaven", giving the blessings to the people under the heaven.

Moving with thinking

Just read the email forwarded from Show-Hua, "Frustration is the blessing to the future."
Like photography, trying to see life and things from different angles, frustration in our life is the necessary process to make us wise.
Learning from frustration, we will stand firmly and stronger in front the difficulties.
It is the best way to grow and think beyond the ordinary.