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The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time #359: Texture Mapping
07.6.16
One or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations,
their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the
encounters they find there.
It's a bike ride.
Started by user nathansnider and user theroyalacademy.
It meets every Wednesday at 8:30pm at California Donuts #21.
We ride at 9pm.
On the seventh year of this bike ride, you might expect:
- more inconvenient passageways
- more full moon picnics
- perhaps more "cover" versions of other people's rides, performed with amateurish enthusiasm
- certainly more amateurish enthusiasm
- disorientation
- reorientation
- pool halls
- bowling alleys
- dance parties
- karaoke
- imaginary histories
- scavenging for fun and sustenance
- more geocaching
- more oblique strategies
- more Oulipian constraints
- traffic median tea parties
Furthermore:
- A medium pace (maybe not for beginners; certainly not a hustle)
- We're not in a rush; we don't need to run every light.
- Maybe some distance;maybe some hills
- Victory donuts!
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This week:
Texture Mapping
The universe contains textures over a vast range of scales, from ripples in the fabric of space-time down to
aggregations of subatomic particles. It is a bit of a pity that, by our nature as physical beings of a particular
size, we are all only able to experience the textures of the world within the rather narrow range of our senses.
There are variations over large scales that barely register as texture: the curving wall; the long, rolling hill. And
then, at the finest scales, there are those variations so small that we find ourselves once again scarcely able
to detect them: the surface of the paper between our fingers; the fresh asphalt beneath our tires.
Sure, we can employ statistical abstractions to condense those variations down to a chart or a set of numbers,
so that we might better comprehend the variations that the world presents to us. But in trying to reduce (or
expand) these textures to human scale, we no longer relate to them in the same way. Is it possible, with
greater effort, to expand the realm of textures we are able to sense? We think it is. So tonight (you probably
saw this part coming), we will be riding bicycles, trying to sample a range of textures that may be slightly
outside our day-to-day experience. Though we may never feel a gravity wave, perhaps we will feel waves on
scales to which we were not previously attuned.
(27 miles, a few modest hills; several stairways; some brief hiking)
Talk, talk, talk...
Check out our web site!
(and our tumblr!)
(and join the mailing list!)
The hacienda must be built.
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Ridazz Roulette!
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