Nina's Blog - Monday 11th August 2025

@ninalanyon I'm sorry about the broken arrangement.

As for the artwork, when it comes to signifying anything scientific or engineering, many artists in any genre are lost. I appreciate their genuinely not knowing the subject, but not inexcuseably doing no basic homework for it.

As I heard in a radio programme this morning about a stolen hoard of coins in England: the totally needless sound-effects included a telephone ringing - no clue whether land-line or portable - with that single-burst jangling of old-style American telephones.

Or as in others when we supposedly hear a Crown Court judge rapping a gavel: an Americanism not British trial practice.

Or music presenters and critics who should know better saying some venue has "an excellent [i]acoustic" - singular form so the adjective not the noun for the context. Mercifully they rarely use resonance when they obviously mean reverberation although I have heard that too, a few times over the years.

@ArishMell It's not as if you need a PhD in chemistry to know that the crystals are cubic.

@ninalanyon Exactly!

Same with those examples I offered: they are all no more than general-knowledge or at highest, dictionary, level.

@ArishMell I thought I'd better look up the crystal structure of sodium chloride just in case I'd made a mistake. It all hinges on point of view. I was thinking of the sodium and chlorine together, that indeed is cubic. However the octahedrons refer to one species, either the Na+, or the Cl- but not both together. So the artwork reflects a less visible structure than what one can see with the naked eye.

So i was a little hasty in my criticism.

See
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_chloride
- https://lazerian.com/work/seven-sisters/

@ninalanyon Ah, OK, thankyou! In this case I forgive the artist!

Interesting description of the sculptures, despite the slightly pretentious tone as usual with anything artistic - I like those nocturnal photographs.