Science
Test Your Focus: Can You Spend 10 Minutes With One Painting?
You made it , longer than about percent of readers so far.
The Painting
As you may recall, the painting you just spent time with is “Nocturne in Blue and Silver,” by the American artist James McNeill Whistler. (You may be familiar with one of Whistler’s more famous paintings — a portrait of his mother.)
The one you just spent time with currently hangs on the second floor of the Harvard Art Museums:
Lauren O’Neil for The New York Times
The painting, part of a series that Whistler started in the late 1860s, shows the industrial banks of the River Thames in London in hazy blue tones.
In an 1885 lecture on the interaction between nature and the artist, Whistler spoke of the transition from day to night, “when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night.”
That mark we just saw is Whistler’s “signature,” and we see a version of it in many of his paintings. It is derived from the form of a butterfly; he iterated on the symbol throughout his life.
And the second reflection? Well, this is where things get fun. You may crave a definitive answer, but the painting itself doesn’t really provide one.
Kate Smith, a senior conservator of paintings and head of the paintings lab at the Harvard Art Museums, has looked at infrared photographs of the painting. She has a theory of her own.
She believes Whistler may have started the painting one way and then simply changed his mind, flipped the panel upside down and started over.
Ms. Smith explained that this mystery reflection could be what’s called a pentimento — a change to a piece of art that slowly emerges over time. It’s possible that when this painting was finished, this reflection wasn’t there — by design. It may have emerged only decades later.
Or Whistler may have intentionally left the ghostly reflection in for us to see. He described the paintings in this series as arrangements of “line, form and color first.” Once, he was asked to confirm if figures in another painting were people. He wouldn’t say one way or another.
“They are just what you like,” he said.
(If you want, look again now that you know more.)
The Point
This painting was well suited as a subject of our experiment: It has mysteries revealed upon close inspection. But the point of the exercise was not exactly for you to notice the mysteries. It was just to get you to notice at all.
The act of focusing is both possible and valuable, researchers say, no matter how intimidating or pointless it might seem. That’s particularly important in a world where typical office workers spend an average of less than a minute at a time on any one screen, according to research by Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “Attention Span.”
When you’re used to a manic social media feed, “it’s hard to pay attention to content that doesn’t change,” she said.
Think again about the time you spent looking at the painting.
At first, you may have felt that it was too dull to hold your interest for even 10 seconds, much less 10 minutes.
When Professor Roberts at Harvard first conceived of this assignment — the three-hour version — she saw it as a launching point to help students write an art history research paper. But these days she also sees it as a way to teach patience. (She recommended this Whistler painting for our exercise.)
Many of her students, she says, react to the assignment with “horror.” (This may have happened to you, too.)
“It’s a combination of, ‘Oh, my God, that’s impossible,’” she said. “And also at the same time, the sense that it’s remedial.”
But they usually find the experience, as you may have, neither too difficult nor too simple. The students see that they did not notice everything worth seeing in the painting at first glance, she said. And they find that by being a little bored, and a little outside their comfort zone, they can see something new.
If you liked the way you felt, try the exercise again with any piece of art. Or, if you’re feeling bolder, print out Professor Roberts’s original assignment. Then go to a museum, pick a work of art and settle in.
Consider also a song, or a poem. Or skip art altogether.
“You can just go look at a tree,” she said. “You can look at a rock.”
Your attention is a product of a lot of things, said Professor Mark, not all of which are in your power. But a little practice can help. “We do many behaviors that are automatic,” she said. “Becoming aware of such automatic behaviors is a skill, and we can then better control where we place our attention.”
And with that skill honed, you may linger more, and better.
Temperatures on Venus hover around 870 degrees, but the second-closest planet to the sun got a little bit cooler recently when NASA showered it with Missy Elliott’s hit song “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly).”
The feat took place at 10:05 a.m. July 12, when NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge beamed the song via a 112-foot-wide radio dish antenna near Barstow, Calif.
The signal crossed the solar system at the speed of light, covering a distance of about 158 million miles in just 14 minutes.
The transmitter, which is coincidentally also named Venus, is part of the Deep Space Network, or DSN. The network is an array of radio antennas that’s used to track, send commands and receive scientific data from spacecraft headed to the moon and elsewhere in the solar system.
NASA catapulted Elliott, who released the song on July 15, 1997, into the record books. It was the first hip-hop track, and only the second song ever, that NASA has radioed into space. The Beatles’ “Across the Universe” was the first.
The “Evening Star” — which is also known as the “Morning Star” when visible at sunrise — is the artist’s favorite planet.
“I still can’t believe I’m going out of this world with NASA through the Deep Space Network when ‘The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)’ becomes the first ever hip-hop song to transmit to space!” Elliott said in a NASA statement ahead of the event. “I chose Venus because it symbolizes strength, beauty, and empowerment and I am so humbled to have the opportunity to share my art and my message with the universe!”
NASA’s collaboration with the futuristic artist arises as the agency prepares for two upcoming, uncrewed Venus missions aimed at gathering data about the mysterious planet, where an atmosphere made up mostly of carbon dioxide and clouds of sulfuric acid create unlivable conditions for Earthlings.
The partnership is fitting because “both space exploration and Missy Elliott’s art have been about pushing boundaries,” said NASA spokeswoman Brittany Brown, who initially reached out to Elliott’s team.
The interplanetary music drop took place on the second night of Elliott’s swing through Los Angeles on her space-themed “Out of This World” Tour at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, the first headlining tour of her three-decade career. And it came days after the famous Cancer treated fans to a free party in downtown L.A. to celebrate her birthday — complete with an air show in which choreographed drones took the shape of her face as well as a flying saucer.
Opening the concert for Elliott were longtime producing partner Timbaland, the rapper Busta Rhymes and singer Ciara.
The “Get Ur Freak On” singer wowed fans again with dancers in glow-in-the-dark costumes, projections of spaceships and an animation of Elliott dressed as an astronaut and grinning as she glides through the cosmos. Fans were given wristbands with remote-controlled lights that flickered like stars to the beat.
At the close of the show, Elliott was lifted by a hydraulic riser with jets of smoke streaming around her, as if she were ascending to the heavens in the mother ship.
Book Review
The California Sky Watcher: Understanding Weather Patterns and What Comes Next
By William A. Selby
Heyday Books: 384 pages, $30
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The winter before last, my wife and I were driving back to L.A. from Mammoth when our car began veering across the lane markers as dust devils rose from the desert floor. We were in an Antelope Valley windstorm.
A barely visible 18-wheeler about 100 yards ahead of us suddenly toppled over. By the time we had crept through the storm, we had counted at least a dozen more semis lying on the shoulder like tipped cows.
What had caused such violent winds? Did we miss any warning signs? Was such strange weather in fact remarkably common?
William A. Selby’s comprehensive account of California’s varied meteorological phenomena, multitudinous microclimates and seasonal extremes, “The California Sky Watcher: Understanding Weather Patterns and What Comes Next,” solves many such mysteries of the climate that creates — and is created by — the state’s landscape and civilization.
Raised in Santa Ana, Selby is a retired Santa Monica College professor who has conducted research for the National Weather Service. His latest book, complete with helpful, dizzying and sobering diagrams and photographs, could easily serve as the text for a college earth science course. It takes a thoroughly empirical approach to California’s four seasons and their manifestation across its myriad topographies.
Selby demands a lot of his readers from the get-go: In the introduction, he offers a primer on the fundamental physics of atmospheric science, suggesting that most of what follows won’t make much sense without it. Some readers might be unpleasantly reminded of the days when they were graded on their ability (or inability) to grasp such concepts. But those who muscle through the book’s occasional pedantry — often regarding the negotiations between air masses and geographic formations — will gain a better appreciation of the epic forces contributing to California’s alternately eerie, chaotic and idyllic weather. And those most familiar with the state’s unique climate will be more likely to share Selby’s fascinations.
The science here is most compelling when Selby spins thermal columns, updrafts, trade winds and cloud formations into a history of California’s cities and often manmade geography. He tracks an annual winter cyclone pattern from the North Pacific all the way down to Orange County to tell the story of the 1938 flood, the consequences of which are still evident today. Up to 30 inches of rain in less than a week led to more than 100 deaths and a host of flood control measures, an overreaction that paved river channels and obliterated L.A.’s riverside habitats (and didn’t even fix the flooding problem). To this day, we’re still spending money to remove that concrete and restore lost riparian ecosystems.
Selby aims not only to explain the science of the state’s weather but also to demonstrate its ubiquitous influence on our history and society. His examples range from quotidian comedy to bizarre criminality.
He laments, for example, how San Francisco’s summertime fog and swirling winds resulted in four decades of disastrously entertaining Giants baseball, defined by freezing fans and fly balls thrown unexpectedly off course. The franchise relocated from wind-whipped Candlestick Point to a basin shielded by hills in 2000 — and finally started winning championships.
The state’s weather has also influenced its industry, including the less legitimate sectors. In Northern California’s Emerald Triangle, known for its marijuana farms, clandestine cannabis growers have taken advantage of heavy rainfall and dense forests to illegally reroute water courses. The notion might seem comical at first, but these rogues have poisoned natural ecosystems with chemicals and even murdered civilians and bandits perceived as threats.
Selby thus relates the state’s weather to its people — who may act in accordance with or, more interestingly, in defiance of it — offering respite from the book’s drier passages.
His greatest gift to readers is to reveal the climate as an indomitable equalizer. He consults great wordsmiths such as Joan Didion, Joni Mitchell and Annie Dillard to convey the fear and awe that California weather inspires. Patience and perseverance through the book’s atmospheric science pays off: When Selby concludes, “Earth’s natural rhythms, cycles, and systems will always rule our lives in the long run,” we know just how true this is. And a sky watcher should wax philosophical every once in a while.
In the book’s final chapter, on climate change, Selby juxtaposes early settlers’ primitive or nonexistent means of forecasting the weather with today’s mind-blowing technologies. He notes that although more and more Californians live on disaster-prone terrain, the number of lives lost to weather-related disasters has dropped, thanks partly to the availability of such information. If I’ve ever taken my weather app for granted, I won’t do so again anytime soon.
Now about that windstorm. A relatively stable air mass blows from southwest to northeast over the Transverse Ranges north of L.A. That air rushes down the northern side of the mountains as if on a roller coaster, reaching such velocity that it drops below its level of equilibrium and blasts across the desert floor. To compensate for this sudden change, the winds loop back toward the mountains and mix with the remaining stable air mass, creating oscillations that animate dust storms.
As dramatic and frightening as it was to experience, it’s an annual occurrence that wreaks regular havoc across the desert. Fortunately, we made it back safely to L.A. and a windless, 62-degree day in the middle of February. Behold, the Golden State.
Daniel Vitale is a writer in Los Angeles and the author of the novel “Orphans of Canland.”
Pete Theisinger, the longtime employee of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who led the Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity rover missions to Mars, died June 26 after a long illness. He was 78.
During a career at JPL that spanned more than half a century, Theisinger worked on missions to six planets. With JPL colleague Richard Cook, he was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2013 for his work on Curiosity, and he was honored in 2017 with a lifetime achievement award from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
Born in Fresno in 1945, Theisinger was from an early age a “consummate engineer,” his family said in a statement. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from Caltech and planned on going to graduate school.
A summer job at JPL changed that trajectory. He would stay at the La Cañada Flintridge facility for the rest of his career, save for a three-year stint as a JPL contractor.
As an engineer, Theisinger worked on the 1967 Mariner mission to Venus, the 1971 Mariner orbiter mission to Mars, the 1977 Voyager mission to the solar system’s outer planets and the 1989 Galileo mission to Jupiter.
He was perhaps best known for his role shepherding Mars rover missions. The twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity launched in 2004 for what were intended to be 90-day missions on the Red Planet.
Both robots far exceeded their initial goals. Spirit lasted six years before getting stuck in a sand trap and sending its final communications in 2010. Opportunity roved the planet until 2018, when communications ceased after a massive dust storm. NASA declared the mission over in 2019.
“His integrity and sense of honesty emanated from JPL all the way to NASA headquarters,” said Rob Manning, JPL’s former chief engineer. “They trusted Pete not to pull the wool over their eyes, to do the right thing and be honest.”
Mere days before Spirit’s scheduled landing on Mars, the engineering team discovered a critical design flaw that could cause the robot to crash upon landing, said Manning, at the time a lead system engineer for the mission.
Manning and colleagues presented Theisinger with a fix that would radically restructure their carefully planned landing. With barely 12 hours to go before touchdown, Theisinger called a meeting and said that as long as the team agreed on the plan unanimously, he would back them up.
The plan worked. Spirit landed safely, and so did its twin rover three weeks later.
“He stood fast. He didn’t panic. He didn’t let us panic. He made us make the case and took full responsibility for the decision,” Manning said.
Theisinger’s next challenge was Curiosity, the largest and most sophisticated rover NASA had yet sent to Mars. Five times heavier than its twin predecessors, Curiosity required an innovative landing apparatus that had to unfold perfectly over seven carefully choreographed minutes. At the end of the famed “Seven Minutes of Terror,” Theisinger was among those who burst into cheers at JPL when the rover landed safely on Aug. 5, 2012. He retired from JPL in March 2017.
Theisinger is survived by his wife, Dona; four children, William, Peter Jeffrey, Tracy and Kelly; and granddaughter Sienna.
“He raised the IQ in whatever room he was in. Not just because he was brilliant and had a diverse set of interests,” his family said in a statement. “Rather, he made everyone around him smarter because they wanted to be better in front of him.”
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