The best azulejos in Portugal

Ever have one of those moments where you finally go see something you’ve meant to see for years, and then wonder what the heck took you so long?

Today we visited the Igreja de São Lourenço (Church of Saint Lawrence), a small church not 20 minutes away from our home. I’ve wanted to see it since hearing about it in one of my language classes, but never got around to it. Today we finally made a point of it. And — wow. My language teacher forgot to mention that it’s a national art treasure.

We arrived just after lunch to find the doors closed and the whole area quiet as a siesta. My wife hopped out of the car to see what the church hours were, and shouted back to me, “What time is it?”

I looked at the dashboard clock and held up two fingers. At that very moment, the church bell rang out the hours and my wife leaped half a meter straight up. Once she came back down and calmed her heart, she said it opened at 2:30. So I parked the car, and when I opened the door and got out, I could still hear the reverberations of those bells. No audio recordings here; these are the old fashioned hammer-on-the-bells variety.

Since we had half an hour to kill, I entertained myself with photographing the exterior. It’s a lovely building. The original shrine of São Lourenço dates back to sometime in the 15th century, and was rebuilt and reconstructed several times. Construction of the current church began in 1722, meaning this building predates the birth of my nation by 54 years. (I’m an American; these kinds of dates always blow my mind.)

The church is famous for its azulejos, or painted and glazed tiles. Traditional Portuguese azulejos are painted in blue and assembled to form mosaics, sometimes of astonishing complexity. I was happy to see that the exterior offered some previews of what waited inside.

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Dubai’s answer to the Bellagio Fountain

Dubai does everything bigger. (Best viewed in full screen HD.)

A note about the music: “Baba Yetu” was composed by Christopher Tin and sung by the Stanford Talisman, an a cappella group from Stanford University. This is what you get when you take the Lord’s Prayer, transform it to Swahili, set it to an uplifting African rhythm and invite a skilled choral group to lend it their voices.

What tickles me is that it was not composed for a symphonic performance, nor for a movie soundtrack, but for a video game (Civilization IV). Now it is being used in a choreographed fountain display at the base of the world’s largest skyscraper, in a major Middle East tourist attraction, where millions of people will enjoy it despite having never heard of the game.

Creative musical genius is finding all sorts of new outlets, to the vast benefit of the rest of us.

Via the Daily Dish.

iStat Menus 3.0 = candy for geeks

I’ve been using iStat Menus for a couple of years now, all the while marveling that it was donationware. It was such a handy and well-developed bit of software that I couldn’t figure out why the developers weren’t charging for it.

As of this week, that has changed. The software was updated, turning it into an even more useful application than before, and the developers are finally selling it — $10 right now on an introductory sale. For us European users, that works out to 7.50 euros.

It is so worth it.

iStat Menus allows you to monitor various aspects of your computer’s activities via small icons in the menu bar. Two of them — Date/Time and Battery — replace OS X icons, so you don’t lose any menu bar real estate on those. And they do so much more than the Apple default versions. For instance, Apple’s Date/Time doesn’t do this:

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Wallpaper Monday

Last week’s wallpaper was of a place made beautiful after cataclysmic violence. Today’s feature is of a place made beautiful by a very different sort of destruction: the slow grinding of a glacier.

I never associated sun-drenched Portugal with glaciers, especially considering that during the last ice age, the Iberian Peninsula became a place of refuge where many species survived that were wiped out elsewhere in Europe. But not even Portugal was immune. Up on the highest peak, an ice cap formed that sent out seven glacial lobes. One of them reached the present-day village of Manteigas, 13 kilometers downhill, and in the process carved out one of the largest glacial valleys in Europe: Vale Zêzere, now a part of Serra da Estrela Natural Park.

As always, click on the image above to go to the wallpaper download page. Photographer Joel Antunes also posted a broader view of Vale Zêzere, taken from the bottom of the valley and including the Zêzere River. It’s incredibly gorgeous when spread across one’s monitor, and I had a hard time choosing between the two photos. It was the contrast between the threatening clouds and the warm glow of the wooden door that tipped this one for me, but you may find you like the other better, with its lack of visible human influence. (Though, if you look hard, you’ll see the stone houses on the left bank of the river.)

ISS = claustrophobia

Much as I would love the view on the International Space Station, I’m not sure I’d last long without tranquilizers. Take a tour with Captain Barry Wilmore, pilot of the space shuttle Atlantis, as he escorts viewers from one end of the ISS to the other. (Best viewed in 720p if you’ve got the bandwidth.)

It reminds me of the inner workings of a clothes dryer.

Volcanic fallout (or, let’s talk about a REAL eruption)

(Click the image above for a comic that convincingly explains how Eyjafjallajökull got its name.)

Planes are flying again, though not everywhere, and now the blame game has begun. I’ve been watching this with a bit of amazement. Have we humans gotten so complacent about the living, breathing, heaving planet we live on that we expect to be compensated whenever it moves?

Passengers are demanding that the airlines repay their expenses incurred for lodgings and alternative transportation. The airlines, meanwhile, are making noise that their respective governments should compensate them for lost revenue. And both passengers and airlines are vociferously blaming the EU governments for the airspace closure. This last part amazes me most of all, because you can bet that if a single jet had flown into ash-related trouble, the condemnation of all involved EU governments for their failure to protect human life would have been loud and instant.

All this rumpus for a little bitty volcano.

This is not to discount the very real troubles that people, businesses and governments have experienced due to the eruption. But the truth is that Eyjafjallajökull, for all its beauty and damaging behavior and newsworthiness, is in fact a weenie. And I say that in the scientific sense of the word.

There is an index for indicating the strength of volcanic eruptions, just like there is for earthquakes. It’s called the Volcanic Explosivity Index, or VEI, and it rates volcanoes on a scale from 0 to 8. The numbers correspond to official descriptions: non-explosive, gentle, explosive, severe, cataclysmic, paroxysmal, colossal, super-colossal, and mega-colossal. (I am not making that up. Those are the technical terms.)

(Chart source: Wikipedia)

Eyjafjallajökull hasn’t yet been officially rated, but I’m mostly seeing references to a VEI of 2, or “explosive.” The 1991 eruption of Pinatubo, by comparison, was a VEI 6, or “colossal.” Each number on the VEI scale is 10 times the kaboom of the number before it, so the difference between Pinatubo and Eyjafjallajökull is 10 to the fourth power — meaning Pinatubo was 10,000 times more powerful than Eyjafjallajökull. It didn’t shut down European airspace, though, so despite the evacuation of more than 60,000 people, it wasn’t huge world news.

Even Pinatubo pales next to the biggest eruption in my home state’s history. So let’s talk about a real eruption. One rated a VEI 7, or 100,000 times more powerful than Eyjafjallajökull. An eruption so vast that there have been only six others like it in the last ten thousand years.

It was called Mt. Mazama.

Though no one knows for sure just how tall Mt. Mazama was, the National Park Service says it may have been 12,000 feet (3,658 meters) above sea level. That would have made it the highest mountain in Oregon. It took over 400,000 years for Mazama to grow to that height, in a series of constructive eruptions that resulted in a massively broad-based volcano made up of multiple vents and overlapping cones. It was not a tidy, single-peak mountain — but that was because it had a tremendous magma chamber beneath it, which erupted in multiple locations over time. The sheer size of that chamber is the reason for what happened later.

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Mãe Soberana II

Two weeks ago I posted a short photo essay on the light display around the old São Francisco church during the Mãe Soberana festival. The culmination of that festival was last Sunday, the Festa Grande of Mãe Soberana. This is the biggest religious event in all of southern Portugal, and it is not to be missed. You don’t have to be Catholic to enjoy it. You don’t have to be religious at all.

To recap, Mãe Soberana (Sovereign Mother) is the name of Mary in her incarnation as the grieving mother of her dead son. She is the patron saint of Loulé, my home city, and resides most of the year in a 16th century chapel on a hilltop just outside of town.

The dome shape in this photo is not the original sanctuary, but a modern and much larger church built just behind it. A 360-degree view from the hilltop can be seen here.

On Easter Sunday, the city’s beloved icon of Mãe Soberana is brought down from her hilltop sanctuary and into the São Francisco church in the historical city center, where she resides for two weeks. The church and its plaza are theatrically lit up every night of this period. On the second Sunday after Easter, the icon is returned to her normal home. This return trip is the highlight of the two-week festival, and attracts thousands of celebrants.

The locals say it never rains on Mãe Soberana, and my three prior experiences with the event certainly lived up to that. But we had thunderstorms and heavy rain squalls last Saturday, and when I woke up Sunday morning, I took the photo above. It looked like this would be the year that statistical reality caught up with the faith of the Mãe Soberana participants.

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More on Iceland’s unpronounceable volcano

I’m still working on a photo essay post, which is now being pushed back until tomorrow. In the meantime I’ll offer up a couple of very cool items regarding the Eyjafjallajökull eruption.

First, Marco Fulle’s gorgeous shot of lightning in the ash cloud, which was yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Be sure to click the link above to see the full-sized version. Also, boston.com’s Big Picture has a new series of 35 hi-res photos of the eruption and its effects. If you didn’t see the original series of 18 photos, you can find that here.

Finally, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute has put up an animation of the ash cloud’s spread, which is just geeky enough that I had to watch it about eight times.

I’ve read two contradictory explanations as to what the colors represent, and unfortunately the Institute itself isn’t explaining, at least not where I can find it. My best guess is that the black is the finest ash, remaining in the atmosphere, and the yellow is the heaviest ash, which is the first to fall back to the ground. The red is either a medium weight or else ash that has fallen due to precipitation.

Wallpaper Monday

Definitely click on that image to see (and download) the full version, because shrinking it to blog size did it no favors. The link takes you to a thumbnail; click on that for the real thing.

This is Crater Lake, Oregon’s only national park and one of the eight wonders of the world, in my entirely unbiased opinion. I’ve been thinking about it since Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano grounded all airline flights into and out of northern Europe. There’s been a lot of press about that volcano, and plenty of historical articles about past eruptions that made global impressions, but nobody has mentioned one of the most incredible volcanic eruptions ever — the one that created Crater Lake.

I’ll be remedying that oversight later this week.

In the meantime, here is a second wallpaper of this unique geologic wonder:

A similar view to the black and white image above, this photo more clearly shows the caldera and the cinder cone in its center, called Wizard Island. To give you some idea of scale, Wizard Island stands 764 feet (233 meters) above the surface of the lake. The lake itself is 6 miles (9.7 km) across at its widest point.

Crater Lake is almost impossible to photograph properly, due to its sheer size. Unless you have an excellent fish-eye lens, access to an airplane, or the legs and lungs to climb one of the mountain peaks on its rim, you’ll never be able to capture its entirety. It’s the kind of place where photographers take 150 pictures and aren’t happy with more than two of them.

This aerial photo from Wikipedia provides a proper perspective. Now you can see that Wizard Island is actually tucked up against the edge of the caldera. The two wallpapers I’ve featured here were both shot from the rim closest to the island, making it look much larger in relation to the lake than it really is. But Wizard Island is a baby volcano, sitting in the remains of a mighty giant that once dominated the skyline of central Oregon.

There is such a thing as too pure a mind

This is a religious icon. I kid you not.

It’s produced by Atlantis, a Portuguese factory that makes crystal figurines. This one, which is 24 centimeters high (9.5 inches), is called “Nossa Senhora,” or Our Lady.

Clearly, not a single person working in this factory has a sufficiently dirty mind to make the obvious mental leap. There is such a thing as too much purity.

Not being burdened with this particular limitation, my first thought is that the factory could have an international bestseller on its hands with a little creative marketing. A toy that not only does not need to be hidden, but can be actively displayed? Ingenious.