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A customer of mine has been clearing her house of a lot of old stuff over some months. While there to replace some doors recently, I snagged from her latest pile of outgoing junk her late husband's 1949 edition Ginn & Co. algebra text. I thought I'd keep it in the truck, with the idea of boning up a little, since I want to take the GRE later this year. When I finally took a look at it this week, I was delighted to discover that it contained as frontispiece a facsimile of a sixteenth-century English algebra — in fact, it seems, the very first English algebra, The Whetstone of Witte of Robert Recorde.

In the mid-sixteenth century one wouldn't publish even an algebra, apparently, without some opening verse to put things on sound footing. Here's that metrical matter rendered in today's less noble & arbitrary orthography:

Though many stones do bear great price,
The whetstone is for exercise
As needful, and in work as strange:
Dull things and hard it will so change
And make them sharp, to right good use:
All artsmen know they cannot choose
But use his help; yet as men see,
No sharpness seemeth in it to be.

The ground of arts did breed this stone;
His use is great, and more than one.
Here if you lift your wits to whet,
Much sharpness thereby shall you get.
Dull wits hereby do greatly mend,
Sharp wits are fined to their full end.
Now prove and praise as you do find,
And to yourself be not unkind.

Lovely!

If you're wondering what 'the cossicke practise' might refer to, and whether the term as used here contains a pun, see the bottom of this page.

Villa Nurbs

Apropos of the mention of my coursework intro to computer-based 3D modeling, check out this slick NY Times web special about architect Enric Ruiz-Geli and his Villa Nurbs*, a house designed with use of related computer-based modeling. It was commissioned for property near Barcelona and is under construction now.

While I don't think the notion of house as 'machine for living' is any more convincing today than when Le Corbusier & those like him first promoted it early in the last century, and while I think architects like Ruiz-Geli and publicist-critics like the NY Times's Ouroussoff misunderstand something fundamental about well-living when they can talk about a house functioning as 'isolation chamber' and 'luxury car' as though this were a good, or at least an indifferent, thing, it can't be said that the latter-day expressionist-futurist formal exploration and the technological tricks on display in this luxury villa aren't impressive & intriguing for their own sake.

School fun

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I've been taking a few technical classes at a community college here in the Baltimore area. The program I'm following — just a handful of courses — is meant to qualify you as an entry-level drafter in architecture/construction settings. Sooner or later I expect to have a use for this training.

For the most part, it's been quite basic & predictable stuff in these classes. ('Blueprint Reading' — e.g.) But last term I found a fruitful challenge in the course apparently designated this program's crash intro to the brave new world of BIM, and in this final term there've been some surprises in 'Technical Animation.'

'Technical Animation' essentially means an introduction to 3ds Max, which is one of the software packages supplied by industry giant Autodesk in their sponsoring role with the college's CADD department. It's software much better known at present for uses in the entertainment world than in architecture, though. Besides this, our instructor's education is in fine art & graphics and his technical experience mainly in medical illustration. So we're not really much concerned with architectural modeling & rendering, except to the degree we pursue it ourselves. I'd say it's just as well not to be too application-oriented here, however, because this software really is awfully complicated stuff from a novice's point of view. Knowing where to find things in its menus, alone, is a semester's work.

We're at the middle of the term today, it happens, and just getting started on the individual projects that take up the remainder of the course. As the parameters for this original-concept project necessarily have to do with basic software features rather than with any real-world-like design problem, I've figured there's no reason not to have some fun with it. What I have in mind re-uses the product of a 'mesh modeling' lesson from an early session and works it into a whimsical minute-long (or so) animated fancy. We'll have to see how it comes together between now & early May.


That 'mesh modeling' lesson of a few weeks ago leads step by step to the slightly surreal ash tray in the picture here. You perform certain numerically specified transformations on a flat-ish cylindrical virtual object and you end up, Voilà, with this ash tray shape. (Don't think the instructions that get you there are easy to follow, though.) After I had the ash tray, I couldn't resist adding a cigarette. It just seemed to want that.

And now the afterthought of the cigarette is the center of my plan for finishing out the class. Looking at this image I'd made of apparently solid non-existent objects, I began at some point to imagine the cig crawling across the ash tray like an inch worm; and on that, a whole little dream sequence has taken root.

At top, my first trial study for the motion of a cigarette hopping. I'm pretty pleased with the effect. Call to your mind's eye, if you will, the vision of a partly smoked cigarette scooting off an ash tray and hopping around a table (ideally, with little puffs of extra smoke coming off its 'head' with each hop). I call the pleasure in trying to see such an absurdity become 'real' very sufficient reason to keep showing up in class for the next few weeks.