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Custom oil paintings inspired by you

03.18.08 | art, personal | Share | Share

Although the tag line of my website mathoda.com is the “art and observations of Ranjit S. Mathoda”, I shall now confess that I have never felt that art and observation are very separate things.

When I was young I concluded that the best reason to admire Leonardo da Vinci was not his anticipation of the helicopter, his accuracy in depicting the organs of the body, or his vibrant and subtle paintings. I admire da Vinci because he relentlessly focused on observing what is there and concluded from that what is possible.

To do so required him to question common knowledge and perhaps more challengingly, personal knowledge. When I first tried to draw a can of soup, the result was barely a rectangle, and definitely not a cylinder. The eye saw, the mind reinterpreted, and the hand faltered. No such object actually is a perfect cylinder. Capturing the shape precisely requires a constant elimination of assumption, and a direct connection with what is actually there.

From Leonardo I learned that creativity does not spring from an extra deft hand. It is conjured by a special focus of the mind. This was a pleasing thought for a young child with bad penmanship.

Creating a work of art is an attempt to capture a particular focus of the mind, at its best a vibrant and insightful focus, and share it. To further that ambition and to broaden the scope of my inspiration, I am now offering a service where I will make custom oil paintings inspired by anyone who contacts me. The details of this service, and images of the paintings I have made in the past, can be found at mathoda.com/art.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Tagged with: art • davinci • oil • painting

Are fuel driven cars (gas, hybrid, ethanol) about to be overtaken by an all electric vehicle?

05.10.07 | tech | Share | Share

If you are interested in the future of car design, or how to start an innovative physical products company, there is no more interesting company to watch than Tesla Motors (wikipedia), which is developing an all electric 2 seat sports car.

It has great range (200 miles), incredible performance (3.9 seconds to go from 0 to 60 miles per hour; top speed of 130 miles per hour), gets the equivalent of 135 miles per gallon (but electricity costs 2 cents per mile), and is relatively cheap for a startup sports car ($100k). Oh, and it’s a rather beautiful car (http://www.teslamotors.com/). 380 people have already put down a deposit.

I highly recommend their blogs, which you can find here (http://www.teslamotors.com/blogs.php?js_enabled=1). The blogs cover all aspects of their business. The innovation isn’t just in the cars, but how they have re-imagined the car dealership (you could see your car being worked on in a crystal clean room, for example), and the refueling station (they are offering roof mounted solar panel systems for home recharging).

And in 2010 they will start selling a sedan for $50,000 to $70,000.

Update, 5/17/07: Apparently they plan on selling a third vehicle in the $30,000 range after the roadster and the sedan. See this interview for more information on founder Elon Musk’s take on Tesla: http://www.autobloggreen.com/2006/07/26/exclusive-q-and-a-with-elon-musk-on-the-tesla-roadster-and-the-fut/

Update, 6/12/07: A great article on the founding of Tesla Motors, from Vanity Fair: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/05/tesla200705?currentPage=1Â

Tagged with: car • cars • ethanol • fuel • gas • hybrid • oil • tech • tesla motors

Analyzing the effects of oil

12.16.05 | issues, political, tech | Share | Share

It seems to me that people make three big mistakes with oil: (a) they think it will run out soon, (b) they think oil must by necessity be terrible for the environment, and (c) they think that if it runs out that’s bad.

All of these ideas are absolutely true, for a particular state of technology. However, they are all false, for a different state of technology. The problem is people don’t talk about the context of technology which makes these statements true or false, or how to shape policies to encourage new technologies to be produced.

(a) Will Oil Run Out Soon?

For example, let’s consider the thought that oil will run out soon. What country has the most oil? Saudi Arabia. The next most oil? Iraq, right? But that’s only true with the current state of technology.

Did you know there’s more oil in India than in Iraq? It’s just harder (ie, less economical) with current technology to extract…

As the amount of oil available at a current state of technology shrinks, or as demand from third world countries grow, the price of oil goes up, and new technologies become more valuable to develop and deploy. Extracting oil from places it previously wasn’t economical now becomes worth it.

(b) How Bad Is Oil for the Environment?

On the question of the environmental impact of the oil industry, technology is really diminishing the environmental cost of extraction. Oil extraction doesn’t need large open pit mines. As technology advances, more advanced drill bits can be guided by better oil finding technologies at many more angles in the ground, making it possible to have much less surface disturbance for a given amount of underground extraction.

Technology can also have significant effects on improving the safety of transporting oil, particularly when laws exist to punish companies that don’t use more advanced technologies.

Technology is also improving the environmental effects of consumption, with hybrid engines. Clearly the environmental effects of consumption is a large current problem, particularly in light of the shift of the third world (China, India, particularly) to higher levels of oil consumption. An effective global regime of capturing the cost to the environment of such costs, and imposing those costs on the consumers of the oil, is the best method of encouraging the faster development of technologies that would make consumption of oil less a problem, or creates alternatives.

(c) What if the Oil Runs Out?

Which brings me to the last point. If technology creates alternative for oil (like hydrogen fuel cells, safer nuclear processes), then it’s very possible the economy can keep on advancing, when the oil runs dry. And if that’s the case, let’s look forward to when the oil runs dry.

(As with any of my posts, I recognize I could be really wrong. Feel free to tear me apart…)

Tagged with: issues • oil • political • tech