It is wonderful that within a city there are still spaces big enough to see this sky.
Sky from Martial Cottle Park
Adobe Art – San Jose Semaphore
If you look at the top of the Adobe headquarters building in San Jose you will see four yellow circles with lines across them, each 10 feet in diameter and made of LED lights. That is the San Jose Semaphore , a puzzle and art piece. If you watch, the four wheels you will see that they spin every few seconds, each independently and to a different degree to relay an encrypted message.
The first puzzle was programmed into the spinning semaphores in 2006 and was solved by Mark Snesrud and Bob Mayo in 2007 to be the full text of the 1966 novel, The Crying of Lot 49.
This second semaphore puzzle went up in 2012 and eluded all code breakers until 2017 when Tennessee high school teacher Jimmy Waters broke the code. Once the spinning wheels were decoded he found that they appeared to represent an audio wave. Feeding that audio wave into software that converts it to sound resulted in the code breaker listening to the Neil Armstrong broadcast from the moon, the famous one that ended with “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
How cool is that?
What will the third puzzle solution be?
Five Skaters
Five Skaters is a public art piece that honors five bay area Olympic champion skaters: Peggy Fleming, Debi Thomas, Brian Boitano, Kristi Yamaguchi, and Rudy Galindo.
Succulent in south San Jose
Skate Park and Murals
Butterflies
Camaraderie – Public Art
This sculpture, Camaraderie, is striking in its shape and presentation. The artists collected the words that make up large portions of its surface from the words veterans used, in person or as recorded in Library of Congress documents, when telling stories of friendship and solidarity.
From just south of San Jose border
Public Art at Wallenberg Park
Bernal-Gulnac-Joice Ranch
Now part of the Santa Clara County Parks, this 20 acre San Jose, California ranch was once part of the nearly 10,000 acre Rancho Santa Teresa. It was run by Bernal and his descendants continuously from 1834, when this was still Mexico, until 1980.
It was purchased by IBM and then traded as part of a deal so that IBM could build a research lab up in the Santa Teresa hills of San Jose that had belonged to the Santa Clara County Parks.
