Category Archives: News

Feb12

Masters of Venice Art Exhibit

Posted on by
Masters of Venice Art Exhibit

I loved the Masters of Venice exhibit at the DeYoung of Renaissance paintings visiting from Vienna featuring Titian, Giorgione, Tintoretto and Veronese. There was almost no overlap with the Titian exhibit Peg and I saw in London. One of the most striking was Tintoretto’s Susanna and the Elders (1555 – 1556). It is a huge canvas that filled an entire wall. The museum sign was hilarious. It recounted the bible story that the lecherous Elders spied on Susanna in her bath, then demanded that she lie with them or else they would tell her husband that she was adulterous. The painting shows Susanna’s beauty and purity, and the icky manipulative greed of the peeping old men who seek to debase the young wife. I flashed on Saddam Hussein’s private murals when I read the museum notes that Venetian art of the period was often erotic scenes for private viewing by the purchaser. This is one of the most copied works in history, and the museum said it was hung in bedrooms “to remind young wives of the value of purity.” Hmmm. I don’t think that was why it was hung in bedrooms.
Tintoretto Susanna Elders

Another favorite was Titian’s Danáe (1560s) which he painted for Pope Pius III. According to the museum, DANAE was a Greek princess, a daughter of King Akrisios. When her father learned a prophecy that he was destined to be killed by a son of his daughter, he locked Danae away in a tower. Her prison, however, was easily infiltrated by the god Zeus who impregnated her in the guise of a golden shower. She conceived and bore him a son named Perseus. In the painting, you can see the gold coins. My question, why does a Pope commission a painting like this?
Titian Danae

Two more artists were featured whose work was new to me. First is the very tender portrait of a Youth With an Arrow by Giorgione whose life was cut short by the black plague.



The paintings of Veronese were spectacular, including beautiful and noble Greek historical heroine Lucretia poised to take her own life rather than accept dishonor, and the biblical heroine Judith who saved her people by beheading the invading general Holofernes as he dozed after she had seduced him. I am really grateful tot he DeYoung to bring these works to SF because I don’t think I will ever go to impressive Vienna museum.
Veronese Judith Holofernes

Oct11

Learn JavaScript Not Dreamweaver

Posted on by
Learn JavaScript Not Dreamweaver

HTML5 CSS3
A self-taught web developer with an engineering degree posted a question on list-serv. "What certficates or degrees should I get to become a web developer?" Here is the feedback from Estelle Weyl, the Bay Area luminary who wrote the book on CSS3.

You don’t need certifications to be a web developer.  In fact, unless you are considering .Net roles, certifications are kind of frowned upon since there is no single respected source that provides them.

You also don’t need a masters degree. You have an engineering degree, so you have the “technical” background they are looking for. Not sure what type of engineering you did, but if it’s not CS related, a course in programming logic and OO fundamentals is REALLY helpful.

It takes about a month to learn to be a web developer, and a lifetime to master it. So, take a month and learn the basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, or if you want to be a mid tier, focus less on the CSS and more on the PHP, MySQL and Ruby.

My recommendation is to deep dive into Javascript. JS is required for so many roles, and there are very few people who are good at it. But, it is really what YOU want to do. What part of building the site did you like the most.

Do NOT learn Dreamweaver, jQuery or any other programming software until you have attained a certain level of expertise in markup and code, as having a crutch that does the work for you can be debilitating to your learning curve.

Oct4

First Rain

Posted on by
First Rain

Yesterday was the first substantial rain of the season. The paths along the creek had absorbed the moisture, transforming from the hard and dry of summer to soft, springy and organic. The raindrops had battered the bay leaves so that this morning at sunrise the fragrance of bay leaves burst through every 100 yards or so. The creek was running fast enough to be audible. Sonoma County is so beautiful in October.

Sep14

Logout, go outside! – Alison Chaiken

Posted on by
Logout, go outside! – Alison Chaiken

I went to a linux meeting last night and the speaker was a GIRL! MIT graduate, Lawrence Livermore Lab and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center physicist, but she was FIT! Skinny, muscled, Jane-Fonda-in-the-70s arms, trim tight body under a relaxed polo shirt tucked into herringbone slacks. God, is she smart.

The linux guys were more animated than usual (I was the only other female in the room) and her talk was on linux in CARS. Cars! The guys loved it. And she was funny. At one point she grumbled, “I’m too old and bitter to think they will fix that…” The audience laughed.

Then I realized she was bike lady. http://www.exerciseforthereader.org/ I had found her page months ago from her postings on the devchix listserv.

My take away is how she manages stress. Her website is simple and full of info. It says “Logout, go outside!” This woman has fun. She apologized to the guys for her attire. “I had to go to Intel today for a developers conference and I knew I had to dress up to cope with the scary grownups.” She got a laugh. She likes Chrissie Hynde’s advice to women:

Chrissie Hynde's Advice

I think Christianne Northrup is right, your body is a barometer of how you are doing in your life — in the largest, spiritual sense. I think I am going to change my attitude about work being more important than exercise. I can exercise more and accept a lower work output. I don’t want to be forced into taking care of myself due to a bad diagnosis. I want to choose it.

I choose it now.

Aug18

Whacking the Volvo

Posted on by
Whacking the Volvo

As I left the gym today, I heard the sound of a Volvo in distress. Someone was cranking the engine of a 1983 Volvo wagon but the engine wasn’t catching. I kept walking, “Don’t meddle. No one wants car advice from a girl…” but the faded maroon wagon kept cranking loudly. I walked back.

      “Hi, I have a Volvo wagon and it sounds like your fuel pump…”
      “Yeah,” a young man grinned up from the driver’s seat. “I just replaced the relay, but… ”
      “There are two fuel pumps. One in the gas tank and the other under the driver’s seat. It’s different in every model, I don’t know exactly where yours is.”

He knew where the fuel pump was and he had tools. He had recently purchased this elderly Volvo, Eleanor, for $250 and had been working on it with great enthusiasm and affection. I offered to crank the engine while he applied “percussive maintenance” to the fuel pump. He crawled under his car and yelled, “Ready!”

I cranked, he whacked, the Volvo started right up. He whooped and jumped to his feet. Brandishing his ratchet handle, he showed me his tattooed forearm. “And I’m the one with the Volvo tattoo! My name is Bryce.”

I smiled, shook his hand and walked away. He will never know if I, too, have a Volvo tattoo.

Jun5

Attention > Dopamine > Detailed Memory

Posted on by
Attention > Dopamine > Detailed Memory

Joyfulness seems factory-installed in the young, but can slip away as people get older. Young people easily remember specific times they were happy, and can recall enthusiastic, unconditional love. As we get older, many of us start to ruminate broadly. “I never get a break,” for example. That over-general “tape loop” leads to feeling bad.

Detailed Memories of Happiness

Spanish researchers have reported that aging patients showed fewer symptoms of depression and hopelessness after they practiced techniques for retrieving detailed memories, according an a May 10, 2011 article in the NYTimes Science News. Teaching people to focus on moment-to-moment experiences and to accept their negative thoughts may make them more tolerant of negative memories. The Mindfulness Meditation technique he teaches short-circuits the over-generalization habit that people often develop as a way of dampening emotional effects, according to Dr. Hermans.

Over-generality creates a risk factor for PTSD. “Some people tend to ruminate at a very categorical, general level about how unsafe life is or how weak I am, or how guilty I am,” says Richard Bryant. “If I do that habitually, that sets me up for developing PTSD after a trauma.”

“If you’re unhappy and you want to be happy, it’s helpful to have memories that you can navigate to come up with specific solutions,” Dr. Williams said. “It’s like a safety net.”

The formation of detailed memories is impaired by screensucking according to Nicholas Carr in “The Shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains.” On page 193 he points out that the key to memory consolidation is attentiveness. Storing explicit memories and forming connections between the requires strong mental concentration, amplified by repetition or by intense intellectual or emotional engagement. The sharper the attention, the sharper the memory. This is why arousal is important. When you are afraid or very excited, the memory formation is sharper and more likely to become permanent.

The Web is a Technology of Forgetfuless

Because web browsing fills up short term working memory but does not leave time for deep memory formation, Carr says, “The Web is a technology of forgetfulness.”

Nobel prize winning biologist Dr. Eric Kandel says, “For a memory to persist, the incoming information must be thoroughly and deeply processed. this is accomplished by attending to the information and associating it meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already well established in memory.”

The influx of competing messages that we receive online overloads our working memory; making it much harder for us to concentrate on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started. And, thanks, to the plasticity of the brain, the more we train our brain to be distracted, the harder it becomes to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers. Our use of the web makes it harder to lock information into our biological memory, and we’re forced to rely more and more on the Internet. It makes us shallower thinkers.

Attentiveness Produces Dopamine

Leaning to think includes learning to exercise some control over how and what you think, over where we focus our attention. The establishment of attention lead the neurons of the cortex to send signals to neurons in the midbrain that produce the powerful neurotransmitter dopamine. The axons of these neurons reach all the way into the hippocampus, where the dopamine jumpstarts the consolidation of explicit memory.

You need dopamine to learn, and learning is pleasurable. Is this why dopamine sensitive people love new learning experiences? Attentiveness and the dopamine it produces help create specific memories that can be accessed with sufficient granularity to ward off depression.

We can choose where our attention goes and where our energy flows. We can practice mindfulness meditation and choose to remember pleasant experiences rather than ruminating on over-general fears.