Go Great Circle

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

The Eyes Have It

Little Rock:  As part of my preparation for my radio talk with Dorothy Graves of the Science Cafe -- on our local NPR affiliate KUAR FM89.1 -- November 26, 2013 - about all things related to vision, I have revisited some of my poems and favorite quotes related to sight.  This is a smorgasbord of eye stuff:



Ode to the Eye: 1991
Patterned on the backmost curvature of eye, The great Retina-Dome, Rod and Cone—Inner-Cup Coliseum captures the illumined world and decodes with the aid of some many million R & C sense-cell minicams.

Do you remember rod and cone cells?


Bio 101 Refresher:


Consider your eye in form

A lollipop, with
lash attached and leering from the bone
like the part of a clam which shows,
between the parted shells:

Stereo tadpoles

bulbous in the skull;
tails streaming backward
at your brain …

Consider your eye, this time within:

Mini-twins
of the Houston Astrodome.
(This works best while lying on your back)

The spanning bubble roof with the skylight hole

corresponds to your iris,
The coliseum wrap with arena base –
your retina.

Billy Graham is preaching.

Every inch of stadium is full.

The CONE-heads in the center all wear

colored shades and sip a chosen hue:
lemonade, cyan, or red.
The RODgers on the rim
are colorblind and love dim rooms.


Now do you remember Rod and Cone cells?


The greater part of poetry would celebrate
the lesser part of any eye:
A marble-colored muscle, shinning life
and riveting our gaze.
But …
REAL seeing is a corporate vision.
The sum of each myopic rod and cone,
Siphoning a pixel, feeding a mosaic.


Remember –
Your first act of faith
is believing what you see.


*



Links related to sight and light, from the Journals of the Kirk:


                                     Quotes/Thoughts



What any eye is, God only knows.
( George McDonald )

Girl with the crystal chip eyes
You look into mine 
and affirm to me worth
Sharing an ember through glass.
KJ.



To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.

Charles Darwin: the Origin of Species. "Organs of extreme Perfection and Complication."

Note: I read from browsing on the Internet, that Evolutionists show that Creationists distort Darwin’s intent when they quote the first part of his eye-comment, but fail to include the latter. I don’t want to distort his intent -- nor affirm his view, but I will join him in his incredulity.




Yet they say, The Lord shall not see, neither shall the God of Jacob regard it. Understand ye brutish among the people: and ye fools, when you will you be wise? He that planted the ear, shall he not hear: He that formed the eye, shall He not see?
Psalm 94:2



Here is a monument that rises up behind us.
Here the sun falls severing the radiant dome of white,
piercing blue above – and below,
Here is the muffled throb of tourist,
as we move in and out of each other’s blurred snapshots.

Steve Scott—excerpt, Snapshots of the Taj.









His eyes are as the doves of the rivers of waters, washed with milk, and fitly set.

Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes.
Song of Songs 5:12, 4:9


(If she could do that with one, just imagine what she’d do with two)



The most amazing component of the camera eye is its "film" or retina. This light sensitive layer, which lines the back of the eye ball, is thinner than a sheet of Saran-Wrap and is vastly more sensitive to a wider range of light than any man made film. The best man-made film can handle a range of 1,000-to-one. By comparison, the human retina can handle a dynamic range of light of 10 billion-to-one and can sense as little as a single photon of light in the dark! In bright daylight, the retina bleaches out and turns it's "volume control" way down so as not to overload.

The light sensitive cells of the retina are like an extremely complex high gain amplifier. There are over 10 million such cells in the retina and they are packed together with a density of 200,000/mm{2} in the highly sensitive fovea. These photo-receptor cells have a very high rate of metabolism and must completely replace themselves about every 7 days! If you look at a very bright light such as the sun, they immediately burn out but are rapidly replaced in most cases. Because the retina is thinner than the wave length of visible light it is totally transparent.
(OOps I can not now find where I "borrowed this from.)




The eye is the lamp of the body. 
If your eyes are good, 
your whole body will be full of light, 
but if your eyes be bad, 
your whole body will be full of darkness. 
If then the light within you is darkness, 
how great is that darkness. 
Jesus. (Mathew 6:22-23)







I did not know that I was blind until I looked into your eyes… (Lyric fragment, Randy Stonehill)  






Brenda, your camera never lies …
(lyric fragment, Bill Malone – Vigilantes of Love)



Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Gild








While gilding the lily (or the gardenia or the rose) may add nothing to its glory, and be a waste at that, some applied spray-paint does allow us to see the form of the flower afresh.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Pure


I post pictures here, mostly so you will know I am still  living.   (This is more of a portal site).  So feel free to visit some of my other sites and look around.  Thanks.
  Kirk


Friday, October 4, 2013

A Gump of a Day






As a rule I don't post much from the day job... I feel more about my heart when I am chasing clouds and flowers... but every once in a while, well, I kind of feel like Forrest Gump.

Heber Springs Arkansas 10/3/2013  Governor Mike Beebe of Arkansas shares parting comments with former President Bill Clinton at the culmination of the 50th year Anniversary Celebration of the creation of Greer's Ferry Dam.  President John Kennedy was on hand 50 years earlier when the Dam first opened, creating a major sporting lake, and an important source of hydro-electric power for the area.

Photo by Kirk Jordan

See more from the series here:   Greer's Ferry 50 Year Anniversary Celebration.



Ps.  My Day job is with the State of Arkansas, where I work for our Governor, Mike Beebe.

Sunday, August 25, 2013

Tools



I posted this over in Facebook world, and was kind of surprised by the response.   More picture of old tools may be in my future!

Thursday, August 22, 2013


Her name is Kathy (or Cathy).  I do not know much about her.  She was an attendant cook at a recent church event with some important people.  She was a servant in the best sense of that word, and radiated joy and went out of her way to be of help to me.  Thank you K/Cathy for letting the "Fruit of the Spirit" shine through you.


Monday, August 19, 2013

Speaking of One Eye



Middle Earth Anyone.... or perhaps Kafka or even the Incredible Journey.  Dollar Bill.  It seems that the single eye staring down or through a portal has an almost iconic place in our shared image bank.  Most of the times it's creepy and Orwellian, though I do think God himself has been Illustrated with the single All seeing eye.  This one (the Iris) belong to my daughter Kayla, whereas the scaffolding (no longer in this form), is part of an ongoing construction and restoration project in the Arkansas State Capitol.   

Monday, August 12, 2013

Highlight of my Day


Over in Facebook world I am part of a group called "Arkansas 365."  I took this picture as part of a weekly theme "highlight of your day."  I can not  really share a link with you, because it is a private group, and only those who are in the group can see the work.  Nothing in it is the kind of stuff that can't be seen, we just work to craft a community where we get to know each other, and not every one in the world.  (If you live in Arkansas, and think you may be up to taking  and posting a picture a day for a year, contact me on Facebook.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Repent



The God of Heaven thunders.... Loudly.

Taken 5/30/13.... with my wife at the drivers wheel as we head down Interstate 40 headed back home to Conway.  Aprox 10 second bulb exposure, with the bolt closing out the exposure.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Black and Blue









Stanley's got the blues.   Eyes that is.
From a family reunion, 5/26/2013

Friday, May 17, 2013

Stolen Glory



Stealing the color from this flower feel kind of criminal .. but then, you get to see the other elements in new ways.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Mastodon sighting, Central Arkansas




Out of curiosity, what is the difference between a mammoth, and a mastodon.

From Easter Sunday 9I am that far behind) between Bigolow, Arkansas and Wye Mountain.






Photo Buff stuff:  This is my first time to try this approach. This is actually a blend of three "identical" pictures shot in rapid succession but at different levels. It would have been impossible to get detail in the sun and cloud area, and keep brilliance int he foreground. Our eye can do that range, but a single exposure generally cannot . So I took a dark, a medium and a light exposure then blended them together in Photoshop... using the lightest image for the foreground, the middle image for the barn area.. .and the darkest image for the sky area. I stacked the images on top of each other, then erased parts of each. There may be easier or beter ways to do this same thing but I haven't learned HDR yet.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Pretty in Pink



Dusting off the old Blog.  Gonna see if I can start more regular posting.

Arkansas State Capitol with a gift from the Japanese.  Really.  Not sure when, but these Japanese Magnolia pretty much announce our Spring.

Friday, February 15, 2013

You.

I wake into my first thoughts of you.
It is morning.
It is dark.
I have yet to place before my eyes the light bending glass

(that will take me
from dirty milk VHS
to blue ray, sorta.)

I am in the ocean
my eyes are in the ocean
my house, the room, enveloped
we are held, drenched, floating in this sea
the sea that is you..
the youness that did not sleep or sucumb to the dark
the youness that did not blink
or push crusties from his eyes.

I am staing on the floor
You are here
Here before, between, in... through.


--

the ruff start of a poem.

You.


Friday, January 25, 2013

One Eye Kirk. Real time.





Here's look'n at you kid.

Just so happened that I went to the eye doctor today.  So, while my eye may be big, and my head small, my eye was extra big today.
AND great GOD-be-praised Hallelujah news.  The blister on the back of my retina continues to shrink.  When looking through my left eye I still find that my vision is soggy (out of focus) in a center area, but all the wild distortion is gone.  I am SO thankful.

Monday, January 7, 2013

Great Circle made manifest




Can you see the circle?


Jan 7?   Just returned three days ago from the greatest adventure in my life.  Make that maybe the second greatest adventure.  Or third, or fourth.  (I just thought of what it means to be married, or a Dad, or Jesu's little brother....

I had hoped I would have plenty of stories to tell while I was IN travel.  But it just didn't work that way.

So look for posts over the next weeks or moth in which I flesh out our Go Great Circle trip.

This, from the final leg - Lincoln City Oregon USA....Jan 2nd, 2013.