RIP Mr. Wizard

The NPR site has a brief obituary, with video links. Longer obits in the Washington Post and NY Times; the official Mr. Wizard website is here. I was too young to have watched the original TV shows (and too old for the revived version on Nickelodeon), but Mr. Wizard was definitely part of the cultural background in which I grew up.

Take my old car . . . please

In Slate, a piece by Paul Boutin titled "I Hate My Classic Car: Thank goodness they don't make 'em like that anymore."

The car in question is an early '60s Avanti, but even taking cars ten or fifteen years old the contrast with current-production vehicles is dramatic. I seem to have misplaced the link, but there was an article in the (Sunday?) Times of London a while back about an experiment where several drivers of late-model performance cars were put through various gymkhana-type tests, first with their own cars, and then with a car 15 years old. Upshot was that much of their fancied driving skills was due to improved automotive technology, as control was quickly lost on the old car lacking sophisticated traction control systems, antilock brakes, and the like.

Basel blowout

“Is there anything left?” Anne Mosseri-Marlio asked as she surveyed the red dots beside many of the paintings in Paula Cooper’s booth.

The doors to Art Basel, the annual contemporary art fair here, opened promptly at 11 a.m. Tuesday, and 10 minutes later Ms. Mosseri-Marlio, a collector from Basel, looked distraught. Works by artists like Kelley Walker, Sherrie Levine and Rudolf Stingel had already been sold.

Steven P. Henry, director of the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea, seemed just as surprised. “People literally ran and were here by 11:01,” he said. . .

By Tuesday evening William Acquavella, a New York dealer, said he had sold about 10 paintings by blue-chip masters like Magritte, Warhol, Mr. Freud and Mr. Twombly. “Eighty percent of the buyers were new people, the majority of them Europeans,” he said. “It was a huge day.”

From today's NY Times.

Backyard massacre

It's the time of year when little birds are trying out their wings, cascading out of the trees and hopping about, unable to get back into their nests. Not such a bad rite of passage, were it not for the neighborhood house cats. . . .

Which brought to mind this recent post on the latest attempt to sabotage wind power, which cynically cloaks itself in the mantle of environmentalism -- to wit, bird protection. Yet even if the number of wind turbines were increased a hundredfold, the appended statistics indicate that the added bird deaths would be negligible when the total human impact on bird life (cats included) is taken into consideration.

Napoleon's sword auctioned

A gold-encrusted sword used by Napoleon has been sold at auction in France for 4.8m euros ($6.4m). . .

The sword, which belonged to eight of the emperor's descendants, was believed to be the last of Napoleon's blades in private hands. . .

"It's a world record for a souvenir of the emperor, for a sword and for a weapon in general," auction house spokesman Bernard Croissy said. . .

The sword was declared a national treasure in 1978 and, while it may be sold to a foreign buyer, they must have a French address and keep it in France for six months a year.

From the BBC. It seems from this report that the buyer was from the family:

Osenat did not identify the buyer, but said the sword will remain in Napoleon's family, which had put it up for sale in the first place.

Now you seem them, now you don't: ephemeral inkjet prints

THE preservation center at Canada’s national archive here might have the last word when it comes to keeping the color in color photography. . .

But even officials at the archive are uncertain how to manage the medium that now dominates photography: inkjet prints.

Do inkjet prints really "dominate photography"? Consumer photo printers are used to churn out zillions of snapshots, but I don't think I'm alone in looking at the resulting prints as ephemeral, the permanent record being the digital file which can be reprinted at will. Art photography generally doesn't rely on consumer inkjets, either.

As more people began using inkjet printers for photographs, their makers turned to Mr. Wilhelm to develop a system of accelerated testing — torture tests using bright light, high heat and varying humidity — to estimate how the prints would fare over time.

Mr. Wilhelm posts detailed results for many printers at wilhelm-research.com, although not all models are represented. Consumers can see snippets of Wilhelm Ratings in advertising and on packaging.

From the NY Times. The article also notes that mounting and printing paper make a huge difference in print life.