Monday 6 February 2012

Finding My Way

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
...Douglas Adams

I've learned to use a new tool, called Foreground Select, in GIMP, an open source graphics program, thanks again to Tay for installing it. I had fun putting together the image above. I used the new tool to cut out the Road Art sculpture (same one as seen in my last entry) and then deleted the background. I layered the sculpture over Spiral Galaxy M100, one of the amazing photos from NASA's Hubble telescope. What an amazing time to be alive, to see such wonders and to play with such tools.

My energy is returning, no doubt about it. Just in time, too, as J hasn't felt himself since having a wisdom tooth extracted. In amongst preparing soup and other soft foods, I'm sorting through clutter, shredding old papers, making another pile to take to the op shop this week. Each time I stand back and regard an (admittedly tiny) empty space, I realise how truly, at my age, Less is More.

We have interesting news from Max:
Late last year a team of archaeologists from Latrobe University spent about three weeks doing field work in our area. It will be several month yet before everything has been analysed, but already some results are available. 

Richard Cosgrove, who led the team has emailed: "We have received two radiocarbon dates from the rock shelter. The oldest charcoal sampled from the base of the excavation is, when calibrated, about 7,359 years old. ... This dates three artefacts made of rhyolite, probably gathered from the river nearby as many of the flakes and cores have river cobble cortex. The age of the charcoal from the layer above is about 4,348 years old. So the shelter appears to have been occupied by people at least 7,300 years ago and then repeatedly visited through 4,300, probably until the European contact era."

I leave you with a Swedish proverb:
"Fear less, hope more; Whine less, breathe more; Talk less, say more; Hate less, love more; And all good things are yours."


post and photo editing by M in JaM
RoadArt photo by J in JaM
Spiral Galaxy M100 photo by NASA's Hubble

1 comment:

Diana Troldahl said...

1. LOVE the Gimp tool! I will be playing with it (or a close cousin) myself next time I do a pattern photo. Love the astral rock sculpture. Beautiful.
2. Timely Swedish quote for my life! Oscar has some Swedish ancestry as well as the Norwegian etc.