Sam Redlark

image generated by Grok If you have a large sum of money burning a hole in your pocket and are planning on spending some of your fortune redecorating your home over the coming weeks, then you could invest in some Dimelow Domina Avem wallpaper.  The paper, which is hand-woven from reed fibres on a bespoke loom at the Dimelow factory in Wrexham, comes embossed with a variety of patterns. The manufacturers are happy to incorporate your own designs upon request. After it has been hung, the paper is brushed with a special sugar solution which is absorbed into the raised parts of the pattern. These act as tiny reservoirs.  During early Autumn, ladybirds who have found their way indoors to escape the cold temperatures will gravitate to the Domina Avem where they will plug themselves into one of the pronounced areas. The sugars stored-up in the paper will sustain them during their hibernation period which lasts until early spring.  I first encountered this unusual home décor in...

  image generated by Grok One of the home economics teachers at my old secondary school was obsessed with a woman called Edith Morfett, who had paid for her daughter’s lavish wedding ceremony, at The Durrance Hotel in Teignmouth, by taking in their laundry. She did this for seven years until the debt was paid off. Ms Morfett lived in a Mornedh – a traditional style of house that is unique to the south-west coast of England. They are built over or among rock pools. The ground floor is designed to flood at high tide. Traditionally, Mornedh's were used as landlocked lobster pots and fish traps, providing their owners with a subsistence living, rather like a seaside croft. There is sketchy historical evidence to suggest that, prior to being used for human habitation, Mornedh's were shrines built to provide a home for the sea when it crawled up onto the land. (This claim, made by Professor Gerald Hillier in the 1960s, goes in and out of fashion; it has been discredited and reapprais...

  image generated by ChatGTP In July 1945, the chief architect of the atomic bomb, J Robert Oppenheimer, pondering on the success of the recent nuclear test at White Sands, recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” One hundred-and-forty-three years earlier, and approximately five-thousand miles to the east, another man of science, this one a “rattle-brained” naturalist by the name of Edward Caton, had also earned himself the moniker 'destroyer of worlds.' On this occasion the title was not self-appointed, but was bestowed upon him by his peers at The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Knowledge of the Natural Sciences (later it was renamed The Royal Society of the Natural Sciences by men with more common sense than its founders). Caton's grand folly, which was to earn himself a toehold in the footnotes of history, was the careless placement of a perfectly spherical gharial egg (a gharial is a narrow-jawed, fish-eat...

image by Grok A.I. Additional processing by GIMP The framework of the Crystal Palace was made from an iron alloy known as Mittene, which was patented in 1812 by Jean-Louis Fouré. The following year, Fouré was knocked down by a horse in the streets of Paris and only partially regained consciousness. He died in 1814 while in the care of the nuns at Petit Gethsémani in Montmartre. Eleven years later, a nephew of Fouré named Laurent Vigier, who worked in the naval shipyards at Brest, pushed for the use of his uncle’s alloy in the construction of the early ironclad warships. The weight of the material and the additional expense involved in its production meant that it was never a serious consideration. Only three vessels incorporating Mittene parts alongside conventional iron plate ever took to water. Mittene exists in a constant state of rapid chemical reaction and it is these processes that give the material its stability and high tolerance to external loads. The heat generated is around ...

image generated by Grok A.I. The Norwegian writer and commentator, Harald Bɵrja, is regarded as the founding-father of the mikro-estetisk (micro-aesthetic) school of art criticism. He has vigorously distanced himself from the movement. In interviews he defines himself as a scientist, for whom visual beauty is incidental and subservient to underlying physical processes that are invisible to the human eye and all but the most powerful microscopes and scanners. He regards the universe as deterministic and therefore void of any true creativity or spontaneity, which he demotes to a byproduct of artistic vanity. I will not delve any further into Bɵrja's complex opinions on this subject, mainly because all attempts to accurately translate his 2700 page treatise from its original Norwegian, in a manner that conveys its true meaning, have failed. Regrettably I do not speak the language well enough to make my own attempt. For Bɵrja, a masterpiece is defined by details that exist beyond the s...

image generated by Grok Nobody would dispute that the impression Harald Bɵrja has made upon the global art scene has been largely through force of personality. In the past he has been criticised for his use of intimidation and aggressive behaviour to draw attention away from his selective approach to the hard scientific data which underpins his methodology. I have been on the receiving end of one of Bɵrja's flem-flecked tirades, which was delivered three inches from my face in bellowed Norwegian, while an accompanying interpreter calmly listed an inventory of diseased farm animals (including many non-native species) that my mother apparently had congress with in order to bring me into the world. I was once a passenger on a cross-channel ferry, during a force 10 gale, and came away from that experience rather less rattled than I did following the five minutes that I spent in the rabid company of Harald Bɵrja. The source of our disagreement (as far as I can tell) was the beauty, or l...