Publius Ovidius Naso, known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a contemporary of the older Virgil and Horace, with whom he is ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature; the Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus banished him to a remote province on the Black Sea, where he remained until his death. Ovid himself attributes his exile to carmen et error, "a poem and a mistake", but his discretion in discussing the causes has resulted in much speculation among scholars; the first major Roman poet to begin his career during the reign of Augustus, Ovid is today best known for the Metamorphoses, a 15-book continuous mythological narrative written in the meter of epic, for works in elegiac couplets such as Ars Amatoria and Fasti. His poetry was much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, influenced Western art and literature.

The Metamorphoses remains one of the most important sources of classical mythology. Ovid talks more about his own life than most other Roman poets. Information about his biography is drawn from his poetry Tristia 4.10, which gives a long autobiographical account of his life. Other sources include Seneca the Quintilian. Ovid was born in the Paelignian town of Sulmo, in an Apennine valley east of Rome, to an important equestrian family, the gens Ovidia, on 20 March, 43 BC; that was a significant year in Roman politics. He was educated in rhetoric in Rome under the teachers Arellius Fuscus and Porcius Latro with his brother who excelled at oratory, his father wanted him to study rhetoric toward the practice of law. According to Seneca the Elder, Ovid tended to not the argumentative pole of rhetoric. After the death of his brother at 20 years of age, Ovid renounced law and began travelling to Athens, Asia Minor, Sicily, he held minor public posts, as one of the tresviri capitales, as a member of the Centumviral court and as one of the decemviri litibus iudicandis, but resigned to pursue poetry around 29–25 BC, a decision of which his father disapproved.

Ovid's first recitation has been dated to around 25 BC. He was part of the circle centered on the patron Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, seems to have been a friend of poets in the circle of Maecenas. In Trist. 4.10.41–54, Ovid mentions friendships with Macer, Horace and Bassus. He married three times and divorced twice by the time he was thirty years old, he had one daughter, who bore him grandchildren. His last wife was connected in some way to the influential gens Fabia and would help him during his exile in Tomis; the first 25 years of Ovid's literary career were spent writing poetry in elegiac meter with erotic themes. The chronology of these early works is not secure, his earliest extant work is thought to be the Heroides, letters of mythological heroines to their absent lovers, which may have been published in 19 BC, although the date is uncertain as it depends on a notice in Am. 2.18.19–26 that seems to describe the collection as an early published work. The authenticity of some of these poems has been challenged, but this first edition contained the first 14 poems of the collection.

The first five-book collection of the Amores, a series of erotic poems addressed to a lover, Corinna, is thought to have been published in 16–15 BC. 8–3 BC. Between the publications of the two editions of the Amores can be dated the premiere of his tragedy Medea, admired in antiquity but is no longer extant. Ovid's next poem, the Medicamina Faciei, a fragmentary work on women's beauty treatments, preceded the Ars Amatoria, the Art of Love, a parody of didactic poetry and a three-book manual about seduction and intrigue, dated to AD 2. Ovid may identify this work in his exile poetry as the carmen, or song, one cause of his banishment; the Ars Amatoria was followed by the Remedia Amoris in the same year. This corpus of elegiac, erotic poetry earned Ovid a place among the chief Roman elegists Gallus and Propertius, of whom he saw himself as the fourth member. By AD 8, he had completed his most ambitious work, the Metamorphoses, a hexameter epic poem in 15 books; the work encyclopedically catalogues transformations in Greek and Roman mythology, from the emergence of the cosmos to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar.

The stories follow each other in the telling of human beings transformed to new bodies: trees, animals, constellations etc. At the same time, he worked on the Fasti, a six-book poem in elegiac couplets on the theme of the calendar of Roman festivals and astronomy; the composition of this poem was interrupted by Ovid's exile, it is thought that Ovid abandoned work on the piece in Tomis. It is in this period, if they are indeed by Ovid, that the double letters in the Heroides were composed. In AD 8, Ovid was banished to Tomis, on the Black Sea, by the exclusive intervention of the Emperor Augustus, without any participation of the Senate or of any Roman judge; this event shaped all his following poetry. Ovid wrote that the reason for his exile w

Ned Kahn is an environmental artist and sculptor, known in particular for museum exhibits he has built for the Exploratorium in San Francisco. His works intend to capture an invisible aspect of nature and make it visible. At the age of 10, Kahn staged his first exhibition of sculptures fashioned from items salvaged from a junkyard, where his mother had taken him. After graduating with a degree in botany and environmental science from the University of Connecticut, Kahn moved to San Francisco, where he was fascinated by the Exploratorium, he was hired and worked there from 1982 to 1996 under the tutelage of the museum's founder, Frank Oppenheimer. Kahn was the artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts starting in 2001. Kahn moved from San Francisco to Graton, California in 1998 and works from the Ned Kahn Studios in Sebastopol, he has two children. Kahn cites his daily meditation routine as key to his artistic development. Kahn won a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" fellowship in 2003, the National Design Award for landscape architecture in 2005.

Some examples of Kahn's work to capture the invisible include building facades that move in waves in response to wind. In 2003 Kahn collaborated with Koning Eizenberg Architecture, Inc. on Articulated Cloud, a piece installed on the exterior walls of the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh consisting of hundreds of movable flaps that respond to the wind creating visible patterns. His work is in the collection of Napa. Environmental art Environmental sculpture http://www.nedkahn.com http://greenmuseum.org/kahn "Ned Kahn". Spark*. KQED Arts

The Pine Valley Mountains are a mountain range in the U. S. state of Utah spanning Washington County north of the city of St. George; the highest point in the range is Signal Peak at 10,365 feet. The mountains are part of Dixie National Forest and are bordered to the south by the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area; the Pine Valley Mountains formed from the Pine Valley Laccolith, the largest laccolith in the United States and the largest in the world. The laccolith was formed during a 20 million-year period of volcanic activity. After 4-5,000 feet of volcanics had been deposited on top of the Claron Formation, the magma vents were sealed off. A final surge of magma, unable to find its way to the surface, instead pushed sideways along the weak seam between the Claron and the overlying volcanic layers, thus was injected a 3,000 foot-thick layer of monzonite porphyry to form the Pine Valley laccolith. The contact between the top of the Claron and the bottom of the laccolith can be seen in several locations, most notably near the headwaters of Cottonwood Creek along the southwest corner of the mountain range, at the headwaters of Leap Creek north of the Browse Guard Station.

After erosion exposed the laccolith, volcanic activity continued and the youngest flows are 1-1.6 million years old. Many volcanic cinder cones can still be seen in the foothills of the Pine Valley Mountains and these have been dated at around 20,000 years old; as a result of these lava flows, the valley for which the mountain range is named and in which the town of Pine Valley is situated, was formed when lava dammed off the Santa Clara River and formed a lake. Sediments filled the lake until they reached the height of the lava dam; these sediments form the floor of the present day Pine Valley, Grass Valley, Grassy Flat. The mountains straddle the divide between the Great Basin watershed and the watershed of the Virgin River, a tributary of the Colorado River; the Chinamen's Canal tunnel at the north end of Grass Valley diverts the waters of Mill Canyon Creek from the Colorado River drainage system into the Great Basin drainage system finding its way into the Newcastle Reservoir via Pinto Creek.

Zion National Park can be seen to the east from the mountains. Part of the range is in the Pine Valley Mountain Wilderness, which at 50,232 acres is the fourth largest wilderness in Utah; the 2,643 acres Cottonwood Forest Wilderness is located at the southeastern end of the range. The Pine Valley Mountains support spruce-fir forests, including a large stand of virgin Engelmann spruce; the mountains have numerous meadows up to 50 acres in size. Several threatened and sensitive species live in the mountains, including Bonneville cutthroat trout, Townsend's big-eared bat, the pygmy rabbit, among others. Botanically speaking, Pine Valley Mountain is the most diverse mountain range in Utah. A floristic survey was conducted between 1985 and 1987 and 967 species were collected. Since additional species have been added bringing the total to nearly 1,000. Three species new to Utah were identified including bitter cherry, common sandweed, Lemmon's onion. Nineteen ferns and fern allies are present, 18 gymnosperms, 150 species of monocots, with the remainder being dicots.

The three largest families represented in the flora of Pine Valley Mountain include the Asteraceae with 160 species, Poaceae with 85 species, Fabaceae with 63. The three largest genera and number of species collected are Eriogonum, 23, Cryptantha, 20, Astragalus, 20; some of the finds include: Forked spleenwort, a small grass-like fern found at a single high-elevation location north of Mill Flat. Grape fern found in the high meadows. Young bristlecone pines are found along the crest of the mountain near the summit of the Oak Grove trail and westward. Sequoia tree. A single tree planted behind the Browse guard station is four feet in diameter. Pistachios have escaped cultivation from old plantings near Harrisburg; the rootstocks for those orchards were the Mount Atlas pistachio while the upper portions of the trees were the edible pistachio. Some of the tops have died and trees have resprouted from the rootstocks and produced viable seeds. Birds have helped move them into the southern foothills of Pine Valley Mountain where they have become naturalized growing as bonsai trees out of cracks in rocks and cliffs.

Dollarjoint cactus scattered along the southern foothills. A yellow-flowered population of Bridges penstemon, along the south fork of Pinto Creek. Three species of orchids in the genus Corallorhiza. Pine Valley goldenbush, with its peculiar crinkled leaves, is only found in the Pine Valley Mountains, most along the Whipple Trail in Hop Canyon. Utah spikemoss has an limited distribution in southwestern Utah and one location in Nevada, but is locally common on Pine Valley Mountain wherever a shady spot and Navajo sandstone can be found together. All but one of Utah's conifers grow in the Pine Valley Mountains. Only the lodgepole pine is missing. There are numerous opportunities for recreation in the mountains, including hiking, rock climbing, wildlife watching, hunting, horseback