Latin, Squares, and Other Things

Greetings, fellow readers! Lemony Snicket once said, "February is the shortest month of the year, so if you are having a miserable month, try to schedule it for February." As much as I revere the esteemed Mr. Snicket, I have to disagree. February is the month of my birthday; therefore, how could it be anything but a time of joyous celebration and revelry? But that's not for another two weeks, alas.

Today is Allison's birthday instead; we celebrated with presents and pizza. We also worked on a Catullus poem Allison is translating for her Latin reading group. She did the translating, I organized the rhyme and meter. English major school is good for some things, you know!

Translating the poem was a lot of fun; it's challenging trying to figure out how to write good poetry in English while staying true to the original Latin. It's something I've always wanted to try. Who knows, maybe someday we'll give the entire Catullan corpus a shot!

Speaking of challenging, this was also a good week for the budding computer scientist in me. Inspired by a class demonstration of objects (this refers to the massive storehouses of information which make Java so powerful and efficient), I created a program to draw Albers squares. These were pioneered by Josef Albers, a designer and artist who used them to illustrate his scientific study of color.

"There is no difference between science and art when it comes to creativeness, productiveness, to come to conclusions and formulations."--Josef Albers

The gist of the program is this: computers create colors by interpreting sets of RGB values, numbers between 0 and 255. This stands for "red, green, blue" and indicates what proportion of these colors needs to mix to create a new color. For example, red is 255 0 0: all red, no green, and no blue. You can get really fancy and make colors like Orchid (218 112 214) and Spring Green (0 255 127), but in the end, it all comes down to mixing red, green, and blue.

My program allows you to input the RGB values for up to three colors--a total of nine numbers separated by spaces. Then, it draws two Albers squares using the colors you've chosen.

This was a really fun project to work on, and an important milestone for me. I'm beginning to realize how much I can do with just some basic knowledge of computer programming. Our next class project is to write a program that draws fractal art, a challenge much more complicated than simply making squares. Stay tuned for my thoughts about that one!

Today was a good day for my school reading as well. I'm writing an essay on "Night the Fourth" of The Four Zoas, a truly bizarre work by Romantic poet William Blake. I'm not the biggest fan of Blake--he's a little too obtuse and mystical for me--but he certainly does demand that you pay attention when you read his poems.

I've also been writing another blog for my Internet Literature class; it's not finished yet, but I'll post the link when I'm done. It's very different from this one, focusing instead more on art and my own aesthetic sensibility. It, too, is an interesting project to work on.

Not much reading for fun lately, though I did manage to get through The Emperor of All Maladies, which was excellent. I highly recommend it. It doesn't look like I'll have much chance to pursue reading of my own between now and spring break, but I'll keep you posted.

Until next time,

Anna