Dennis Oppenheim

Device to Root Out Evil

From the Stanford Daily, 28 September 2004, pg 1, "University censors Sculpture:"

[Oppenheim] joked that the title of the cancelled Stanford sculpture, Device to Root out Evil, which caused him trouble with the University, has grown ironically appropriate.

"It really did root out evil in a strange, circuitous way," Oppenheim mused. "The President [John Hennessy] and others have conservative views and are afraid of a work of art, and now we know about it. It really worked."

The Flapper

This paper airplane flaps its wings when thrown.

I found the design here. Yesterday, I messed up my first attempt at making it, but this afternoon Cole and Owen and I succeeded.

It works—it's best to throw it in a quiet place so that you can enjoy the soft sound of the flapping—something like the sound of several pigeons taking off from a ledge, high above you.

The design calls for a penny to be taped into the bulgy part at the bottom. The airplane hardly veers off to the side at all when it's thrown—Cole and I were practically playing catch with it.

Ten years as a card carrying member

Yes, ten years, not nine. I counted with my fingers.

Interstate 205

M.S. Carriers

Extreme Subtleties

From Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, I (1945):

106. Here is is difficult as it were to keep our heads up—to see that we must stick to the subjects of our every-day thinking, and not go astray and imagine that we have to describe extreme subtleties, which in turn we are after all unable to describe with the means at our disposal. We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider's web.

Forma Urbis Romae

From the Stanford Computer Science Newsletter on my desk:

And now, let us return to the continuing saga of Professor Marc Levoy and his Indiana Jones adventures trying to assemble that ancient map of Rome (see last year's newsletter). In March, Marc, his Ph.D. student David Koller, and Professor Jennifer Trimble (Marc's collaborator in the Classics department) traveled to Rome to present a sequence of talks at a conference devoted specifically to "New Discoveries Related to the Forma Urbis Romae." The conference was attended by every leading Italian-speaking Roman archaeologist in the world.

According to all reports, David's talk on "solving the puzzle" was the runaway hit of the day. Earlier talks had focused on one or another fragment of the map; for example, proposing a new placement for the fragment, re-interpreting the meaning of its incised architecture, etc. By contrast, David started his talk by throwing up a slide listing 50 proposed new matches. This drew audible gasps from the audience. He then marched through the list, spending less than a minute on each match. Such things are simply not done in that research community. The murmuring of the audience grew with each match. When he finished, there was loud and sustained applause, so much that David began blushing. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, director of the British School in Rome was heard exclaiming, "Today changes everything; the study of this map will never be the same!"