PRI & NPR on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

On August 21, PRI's radio show, The World, featured the Great Pacific Garbage Patch on its Geo Quiz. The story makes great listening and their website supplements the audio with a photo from the patch and a map of the location of the North Pacific Gyre, the phenomenon where the trash is accumulating.

The story also features an interview with Miriam Goldstein aboard the research vessel New Horizon, which hosts the team from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, out studying the patch. She also contributes to the Seaplex blog about their research, and she was also a guest on NPR's Talk of the Nation Science Friday--audio and a transcript of that interview are available on NPR's site, and links to different resources are on Science Friday's own site.

Bulwer-Lytton and the Old Salt Blog

I've always enjoyed the annual Bulwer-Lytton prize, and in reading about the 2009 winners came across the Old Salt Blog which has a delightful article, A salty dog wins the 2009 Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest, highlighting the wonderful entries by David McKenzie and Dr. Sarah Cockram.

The rest of the blog, hosted by Rick Spilman, covers much of interest to MaritimeCompass readers, from current maritime news to museums, so I've added it to the resources on our site, and recommend it highly.

NMMprints.com

Everyone who works at a museum; everyone who is at an organization that sells reproductions of collection images; everyone who purchases reproductions of images--pay attention. Click over to NMMprints.com right now. Don't even waste time reading the rest of this post. Just go there. Check it out!

OK, I haven't actually ordered a print yet from this new site from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, but I have ordered a print from the Museum the past, and let me tell you, it wasn't this easy back then! Back then, in the dark ages, I wasn't even able to see the image I was ordering before it arrived.

This new site, from the Museum that brings you the excellent NMMimages.com, is a destination for those that want a hardcopy reproduction. They have prints, framed prints, canvases, even framed canvases available. The search interface is excellent, so if you know you're looking for something to hold in your hands or hang on your wall, just head to NMMprints.com; if you need an image electronically, then NMMimages.com is still your destination.

As far as I can tell (and I count on Douglas McCarthy, the Picture Library Manager to correct me if I'm wrong) there are still more images in NMMimages.com (for example, a purse from the Franklin expedition is beautifully imaged in NMMimages.com but not present in NMMprints.com). So for browsing and research, NMMimages.com might still be the prime destination.

For the future, I hope we see a little link below the images in NMMimages.com that says, "Order a print" to take one right to the NMMprints.com image details/order page. Or, if permissions don't allow this, perhaps text that says, "Sorry, print orders for this image not available; would you like to see related images from NMMprints.com that are available?" The "related images" link that appears with each image on NMMimages.com is such a wonderful feature, it would be great to see it apprear not only within NMMprints.com but into NMMprints.com from images in NMMimages.com. In the far future, perhaps the sites could be integrated; in the very far future, perhaps after one has selected "Order a copy," one could pick a .jpg of the image, or a framed print, or a tshirt, or a book bag (a la CafePress or Zazzle).

So why not start your Christmas shopping now? Why not celebrate the winter solstice with a lovely print as a gift? Start browsing the collections on the left; I really like Staff Favourites.

Marques d'impressors = Printers' Devices

The Centre de Recursos per a l'Aprenentatge i la Investigació has put up Marques d'impressors, a wonderful database of printers devices, which include some with maritime themes, with searching available on printer, device/motto, ensign, city, mark term, or keyword in Catalan, Spanish, and English.

This device is that of Simone Tini.

Northwest Passage news

If you've been following the Open Passage Expedition, or the news about the Beluga Fraternity, you may be interested in the reader feedback that the NY Times has published on their Dot Earth blog as well as following the Open Passage Expedition on Pipes.

And if you read the NY Times article in print, do check it out online; not only does the article contain links to resources to allow further exploration of the topic, they revise and correct the article in response to reader feedback.

The Prismatarium

Juli Carter took the time to comment on a previous post about the Aquatic Park Bathhouse, alerting me to her lovely photos of the ceiling of the room that Hilaire Hiler called the Prismatarium. Juli generously granted permission to reproduce her photos here, and writes:

"Alerted by recent pictures in the Guess Where SF Flickr pool and subsequent discussion, a friend and I made a special trip to see the newly cleaned and restored Maritime Museum (formerly Aquatic Bathhouse). Everything about it is spectacular: the architecture, the murals, the view towards Alcatraz...

The Prismatarium was empty of exhibits, full of echoes and shade. These pictures show the light fixture at the center of the circular room, with the color wheel that extends out to the windows, in natural light (with the windows blocked to preserve the art) and with the exposure digitally manipulated."

Juli's photo of the ceiling in natural light:



And Juli's digitally manipulated photo:



It is a fascinating room, and these photos show only the center point of the large, colorful ceiling. In Aquatic Park Building Decoration, Hilaire Hiler the room, originally "The Ladies Lounge," and this ceiling fixture are described:

At the opposite end of the Portico is another circular room which is used as a Ladies' Lounge. The form of this room made it appropriate for the decoration which consists of a color circle covering the entire ceiling. A moving lighting fixture containing lights in the color of the Physical Primaries makes it possible to give striking demonstrations on the relationship of color and light. Charts showing the Psychological the Pigment Primaries [sic], and the Solar Spectrum, etc. adorn the walls and make the room a veritable full size schema of the world of color in outline form, which its designer, Hilaire Hiler, calls a "Prismatarium" functioning in relation to the world of color much as a Planetarium does for the heavens. These considerations in no way interfere with the function of the room as mentioned above, as the fondness of the Fair Sex for colors is too well known to merit discussion.

To see a couple of the "charts" mentioned above, go to the NPS Museum Collections catalog, and search: hilaire AND hiler AND painting

My thanks to Juli for her wonderful contributions to MaritimeCompass.

Photos © All rights reserved, Juli Carter, http://www.flickr.com/photos/auntijuli/
Used with permission