Wow- the photos in Thomas' blog are SPECTACULAR.

Out of a museum exhibit or something. Amazing pictures, amazing colors, and fascinating stories. A picture counts for a thousand words, and he has thousands of beautiful pictures.

Enough gushing. I admit I'm slightly jealous. Slightly upset that my tenacity in academia has cut me down a dimension or two. My interests are as varied and deep as his many photographs, but running a marathon leaves little time for smelling roses, and I'm right in the middle of mile 25. For inspiration then here is a two axis!! tourbillon cage from Jaeger LeCoultre:



A list of non-academic things I want to do:

-Build a working double three legged gravity escapement timepiece, as whimsical and delightful as the sculptures of Arthur Ganson, as well engineered and creative as Harrison's chronometers.

-Become practiced enough at sketching to capture the essence of face and figure.

-Improve my French to the point of being able to hold intelligible conversations.

-Learn enough Latin to read Huygen's original treatise on pendulum clocks.

-Sing in a choral group.

-Re-learn keyboard from the ground up (as my mother has done), in parallel with the development of a solid understanding of music theory, (i.e., scales, keys, tuning schemes, etc).


How exciting! Anticipation is a wonderful thing, (perhaps the only thing), and so here I indulge in plans for the future. Impediments abound, but I will overcome!!, principly my misconception that breadth and depth are irreconcilable, that these spoiled children are at opposite ends of an inflexible see-saw. On a (sub?) conscious level I'm petrified by any suggestion of departure from the intense all consuming devotion to my work that has defined my last five years. I imagine disaster and ruin. And yet, in the pleasant aftermath of a hard party I make leaps and bounds in research that would simply be impossible if all I did was read books for hours on end... Time-spending is NOT a zero sum game. Productivity and pleasure obey no conservation law. And so I resolve to spend an hour every day on the things I really enjoy.

Hooray for watches! (And also for clocks and steam engines.)

Real machines give me true joy; there is nothing else in the world that can hold my interest for days on end. I can walk the length of San Francisco, oblivious to everything, save the picture in my mind's eye of a perfect double three-legged gravity escapement. I see the parts and pieces that I plan to build, swining back and forth... My plan is to get at least a crude version up and running in my apartment, with winding accomplished by the motion of my front door. My only fear is that the ticking might keep me up at night. My marine chronometer from russia had noise issues and so it's been several years since I've wound it.

My fascination with machines is like Cesar's fascination with laser dots. Cesar is Kevin's cat, and a red dot zipping across the floor is far more attractive to him than any mouse. I wonder if he knows it's just a game. I wonder if he accepts the absurdity but chooses to partake nonetheless. Or perhaps he really thinks that a very fast red bug is always just beyond his reach, vanishing when he pounces on it and reappearing on the ceiling. His nemisis. He probably stays awake at night plotting strategy, thinking of better ways to hunt.