A tribute to Carl Sagan and Steven Hawking by colorpulse:
It turns out that autotuning can make clever people tuneful as well.
October 7th, 2009
ipod, check; coins, check; phone, check; keys, check;
Candies for cuties,… Oh, blast, I forgot my candies for cuties.
September 3rd, 2009
In My Room (1943)
Shorpy‘s seemingly inexhaustible source of high quality, high definition, vintage photographs from all eras of American history never ceases to fascinate and impress me.
Here’s a terrific shot from 1943 of a teenage girl relaxing in her bedroom after a day of work in a war factory:
And below that is one from 1863!
July 1863. “Gettysburg, Pa. Three captured Confederate soldiers, likely from Louisiana, pose for Mathew Brady on Seminary Ridge following the Battle of Gettysburg.” Wet plate glass negative, half of stereograph pair.
Terrific.
August 9th, 2009
Frank O’Hara
I bought a massive tome of contemporary American poetry from a secondhand bookstore, for 3 dollars.
I like this one by Frank O’Hara. Especially the last five lines.
To John Ashbery
I can’t believe there’s not
another world where we will sit
and read new poems to each other
high on a mountain in the wind.
You can be Tu Fu, I’ll be Po Chu-i
and the Monkey Lady’ll be in the moon,
smiling at our ill-fitting heads
as we watch snow settle on a twig.
Or shall we be really gone? this
is not the grass I saw in my youth!
and if the moon, when it rises
tonight, is empty —a bad sign,
meaning ‘You go, like the blossoms.’
July 25th, 2009
Arcturus is watching Little House on the Prairie
June 16th, 2009
original syn
The New York Times has an article attempting to plot our progress to date in working out the puzzle of life’s origins on Earth.
So little fossil evidence has been found to explain the origins of life on Earth that scientists, in order to figure out how life may have begun, are taking the approach of attempting to recreate the conditions that might make this spontaneous synthesis of living cells possible. But there are many theories as to what these conditions might have been.
The three researchers, Jack W. Szostak, David P. Bartel and P. Luigi Luisi, published a somewhat adventurous manifesto in Nature in 2001, declaring that the way to make a synthetic cell was to get a protocell and a genetic molecule to grow and divide in parallel, with the molecules being encapsulated in the cell. If the molecules gave the cell a survival advantage over other cells, the outcome would be “a sustainable, autonomously replicating system, capable of Darwinian evolution,” they wrote.
“It would be truly alive,” they added.
June 11th, 2009
geological time
Ebonmuse of Daylight Atheism wrote a wonderful meditation on.. a rock. Well it’s much more than a rock, as he explains beautifully. It represents the unimaginable stretch of time before us, and stands as an omen for our future.
Here’s the introduction:
It was out in the open with no ropes or glass around it, inviting visitors to touch it. I brushed a hand across its polished surface, which was as smooth and cool as a sheet of glass. Nothing about that touch hinted at the stone’s age or history; yet it had traveled down immense vistas of time to come here, to our era, so that I could see and touch it on that day. And in the moment of that touch, I knew, I as a modern Homo sapien was briefly reunited with predecessors ancient beyond imagining, perhaps some that date back almost to the origin of life on Earth itself.
The curious, gorgeously colored strata of this stone are called banded iron formations. The dark bands are layers of metallic iron oxide compounds such as magnetite and hematite, while the reddish layers are silica-rich quartz minerals like chert, jasper and flint. Banded iron formations occur almost exclusively in very ancient rocks, and are common in strata dating to between 2.5 billion and 1.8 billion years ago.
June 6th, 2009
moderation, intelligence and sharing
Home is an important, sobering film, but it’s also beautiful and optimistic. It’s available on YouTube in its entirety, in high definition, for free.
It is directed by the renowned aerial photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, which affords the film a powerfully god-like perspective, albeit one weakened by a rather uninspiring narration; the information is good, but the diction is clichéd and the delivery flawed (some words are mispronounced by the narrator, hardly in-keeping with a god-like voice, and she often sounds unenthusiastic and disengaged, like she isn’t thinking about what she’s saying — give me David Attenborough or Dr. Ian Stewart!).
The effect of Bertrand’s aerial perspective is that we get to take a step back — avoiding sentimental human detours for the most part — and consider the earth as one big organism. Everything is linked, as the narrator reminds us constantly.
The general message to take home is that although our planet is in jeopardy, we can save it through “moderation, intelligence and sharing”.
There have been other films like this. This film stays quite general and factual in its approach however, choosing not to hammer away at any one specific point — simply letting the powerful images and facts do the work. The plain facts and footage it offers on meat production, for example, — without rhetoric demanding people stop eating meat — should be enough to convey to people the severity of the impact of humanity’s meat-fixation. That particular section was quite powerful, I thought, as that particular environmental issue has generally been skirted recently, as if it were not even an issue worth considering, or as if there were no sensitive way to broach the topic to a world of meat-lovers.
Cheers to Aengus who aroused my attention to this.
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May 31st, 2009
Sebald’s last interview
From 2001:
Sebald: The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder. Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life. Without memories there wouldn’t be any writing: the specific weight an image or phrase needs to get across to the reader can only come from things remembered – not from yesterday but from a long time ago.
May 29th, 2009
I go back to May 1937
The Poetry Foundation has a video reading by Sharon Olds of her popular poem I go back to May 1937.
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,
the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips aglow in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
Go here for the video (can’t embed it here unfortunately).
May 10th, 2009
made of this
More Intelligent Life has a fun little collection of “first memories” which ended up apparently exerting some guiding force upon the lives of the rememberers. Here’s one, for example:
MARTHA LANE FOX Businesswoman, 36
I have vivid memories of our slightly fraught and crazy family holidays, when we would travel to Italy. My dad would drive us and my mum would fly, because she couldn’t stand to be in the car with the rest of us. We’d go on a circuitous route to look at important sites on the way, including, very often, Munich’s botanical garden, where my dad had worked when he was 19. He would recall every flowerbed—either flowerbeds that something illicit had happened in, or that had been the home of some important plant. I remember thinking, “This is like death.”But all that circuitousness set a pattern for my life, I hope, involving curiosity and love of travel and deep admiration of my father. He was so encouraging: nothing is too ridiculous to go and look at, no journey is too bonkers to undertake. It may have felt like death but I don’t recall any anger or resentment—in the end it was always funny. He always made things fun. When we’d eventually get to the art galleries in Italy, for instance, small crowds would gather to listen to him talk because people would assume he was the official gallery guide.
I’ve never told him about this memory, but it’s his birthday soon, so I might bring it up.
April 25th, 2009
Roger Ebert on God
Take infinity. We know there must be an infinite number of numbers, because how could there be a Last Number? The more interesting puzzle is, how did there come to be a First Number, and why do many mammals other than man know how to count, at least a little? I don’t believe the universe counts. Counting is a mental exercise, and mathematics is useful to the degree it helps us describe and understand the universe, and work within it in useful ways. A Last Number is not important; only the impossibility of one.
…
Quantum theory is now discussing instantaneous connections between two entangled quantum objects such an electrons. This phenomenon has been observed in laboratory experiments and scientists believe they have proven it takes place. They’re not talking about faster than the speed of light. Speed has nothing to do with it. The entangled objects somehow communicate instantaneously at a distance. If that is true, distance has no meaning. Light years have no meaning. Space has no meaning.
In a sense, the entangled objects are not even communicating. They are the same thing. At the “quantum level,” and I don’t know what that means and cannot visualize it, everything that there is may be actually or theoretically linked. All is one. Sun, moon, stars, rain, you, me, everything. All one. If this is so, then Buddhism must have been a quantum theory all along.
Roger Ebert: How I Believe in God
April 19th, 2009
not everything is a poem
but these are two by Walt Whitman:
Are you the new person drawn toward me?
To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;
Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover?
Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy’d satisfaction?
Do you think I am trusty and faithful?
Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?
Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?
Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?
Here are some excerpts from Whitman’s rather long “Song of Myself” (yes I am butchering it to extract my favourite parts, but it is 52 verses long; read the whole thing here if you’re interested):
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.…
Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.…
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps.This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.…
I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious,
Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy,
I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish,
Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the friendship I take again.That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be,
A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.To behold the day-break!
The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,
The air tastes good to my palate.…
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’œuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots,
And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over,
And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
But call any thing back again when I desire it.…
These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This the common air that bathes the globe.…
My lovers suffocate me,
Crowding my lips, thick in the pores of my skin,
Jostling me through streets and public halls, coming naked to me at night,
Crying by day Ahoy! from the rocks of the river, swinging and chirping over my head,
Calling my name from flower-beds, vines, tangled underbrush,
Lighting on every moment of my life,
Bussing my body with soft balsamic busses,
Noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to be mine.…
And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.)I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.…
And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me,
I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing,
I reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish’d breasts of melons.And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,
(No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven,
O suns—O grass of graves—O perpetual transfers and promotions,
If you do not say any thing how can I say any thing?…
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
Read the whole poem here.
April 18th, 2009
Planet X and the “Wow!” signal
I wish that were the title of a film, but it’s merely a summation of my favourite stories from this NewScientist article: 13 things that do not make sense .
Also interesting was the question raised by homeopathy research (a field the concept of which I didn’t really understand before reading their summary here):
MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen’s University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.
In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These “basophils” release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions – so dilute that they probably didn’t contain a single histamine molecule – worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths’ claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.
So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this “mother tincture” in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.
You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. “We are,” Ennis says in her paper, “unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon.” If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.
April 10th, 2009
good fri, sat, sun, mon, tue, wed, thu
I’ve just found that the “Growing up in the Universe” Christmas lectures by Richard Dawkins are all on youtube, and in better quality than in the version about which I posted before: See here.
March 19th, 2009
Waking up in the universe
Michael Faraday started the Royal Institution Christmas lectures in 1825 and said the following:
“Let us consider, for a little while, how wonderfully we stand upon the world. Here it is that we are born and bred and live. And yet we view these things with an entire absence of wonder to ourselves respecting the way in which all this happens.”
Richard Dawkins gave the 5 hour-long Christmas lectures in 1991, on “Waking up in the universe” — the origin of life. All five lectures are in a torrent which I’ve hosted here.