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Sunday, October 16, 2005
La Arcada
This is a little shopping center on State Street.
We ate lunch there today, as much for the atmosphere
as for the food. Down this path on the right
is Gallery 113, the gallery of the Santa Barbara
Art Association. A fitting place for a gallery.
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Sunday, April 24, 2005
La Arcada Phone
Still experimenting with the evening shots.
I particularly like the phone booth in this shot.
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Saturday, January 22, 2005
DCXVIIII
There is a great little area at State Street and Figueroa
in Santa Barbara called La Arcada. It is a little walkway
lined with shops and restaurants and a number of Galleries.
One of which,
incidentally, has a display of my photography right now.
After the rain subsided a bit last week I spent some time at La Arcada
trying to get some shots of the Christmas decorations before they take
them down.
When I was getting this image ready for the site, I noticed
the roman numerals on the face of the clock, particularly the four. The interesting
thing is that it is made up of four roman numeral ones IIII, rather than IV.
This stood out to me because I remember learning roman numerals from my
Mom and Dad. They had a rug inside of our front door when I was a kid
that had a clock face on it with the number four made up of four 'I's.
I vividly remember my dad pointing it out to me and saying that
it was not the proper way to write four in roman numerals. Unfortunately,
at the time, we did not have access to something quite as cool as
the Internet to learn why some clocks were made that way.
Ahh, but even the Internet doesn't have all the answers. It has some
good theories though. The best explanations I could find are listed
here. If you have a better theory, I'd love to hear it...
- A popular notion is that the visual balance of the clocks
were thrown off by the fact that the VIII on the left was
so much larger than the IV on the right. So it was
a visual decision to use the IIII. Sounds reasonable
but there are good references to extremely old clocks that
were not symmetrical in other ways but still used this
style of markings.
- One theory was attributed to a number of different monarchs.
It goes something along the lines of a clock maker made a clock
for (pick your favorite monarch). When presenting
the clock the monarch stated that the numeral IV should
actually be IIII. And, who wants to argue with the guy
who has all the guillotines. Unfortunately,
this one sounds more like a legend started by
someone who did not know the real answer.
Further discrediting this theory is the fact that
the earlier clocks and sun dials are even less likely to have the numeral
IV.
Monarch theory and quite a few others.
- A much more plausible reason stated hinges on the fact that
in the Roman language, Jupiter (as in "king of the
gods" Jupiter) was spelled IVPITER since there was no
J or U. Not sure the deity of deities would take kindly
to having his name abbreviated on the face of all of their clocks,
the clock makers erred on the side of not offending
him.
- Another interesting thought is the fact that using IIII
made it easier for metal smiths to cast the numbers
because you then had a balanced number of 'I's 'V's and
'X's (twenty, four and four respectively).
So you could cast four identical sets of XVIIIII and have
one set of numerals for a clock face.
Clock numeral casting theory.
- In the end though, it seems that the contractions for fours and
nines may not have been used in a consistent way at all.
It may have just been
common practice for the Romans to use IIII in place of IV.
IV could have been a Latin practice much later.
The oldest known surviving clock-face along with documents from
the same age seem to use IIII regularly. As do the
numbers on the surviving doors of the Roman Colosseum.
Other good examples of IIII
And, still more.
Again, if you have any interesting thoughts I would love to hear from you.
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