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| The Incomparable Marge and some doofus she saved... twice. Or maybe thrice. |
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| Surreal postmodernist art: That's Aldrin; but if you look at the reflection in the visor, you will see Armstrong. |
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| Some folks make bigger footprints than others |
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| Left to right: Armstrong, Collins, Aldrin Collins is the Forgotten Astronaut |
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| No brainer: The brain of the patient (left) compared to a normal MRI scan (right) |
He came with the night mail on the West Shore Line at just that moment when the world teetered between one day and the next. Midnight is a magic time, the single instant when there is no present; only a receding past and an unrealized future. He stood alone on the platform with his greatcoat and valise and watched the red lanterns of the caboose vanish into the night.
The breezes whipped up by the train’s passing died, and with them the fading clackety-clack of wheels on rails. The flurry of activity that had greeted the mail’s arrival – station-master, post-master, Negro porters, conductor – had evaporated like ghosts. The stars looked down on the empty platform through a cloudless sky, unreachable and yet at the same time unbearably close. On nights like this, the stars alone could cast shadows; and would have done so had the gas lamps lining the platform not overwhelmed them. Their guttering flames peopled the station with silent, capering shadows.
A gentle rain of soot and cinders fell in the locomotive’s wake and the man brushed absently at his sleeves and shoulders. It was a warm night and damp with the recent rains. A wretched hour to arrive anywhere; but Elmira was as remote as Khatmandhu so far as railroads were concerned and midnight it was, “unless the gentleman would care to wait until tomorrow.”
The gentleman would not, and so the night mail it had been. He looked around to get his bearings and, hefting his valise in one hand and draping his greatcoat over the other arm, he strode briskly to the stairs at the end of the platform. The worried glance he spared just before stepping off was aimed not at the lights of the departed train, but at the glimmering stars overhead – as if he expected that at any moment one would drop and strike him upon the head.
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The frowsy hotel was just as he remembered it, though five years had gone since he had last stayed there. The night clerk was a shrunken and wrinkled old man, aged in a pickle vat. He looked up when the bell rang, but gave no sign of recognition, and made no comment while the stranger signed the register. He did, however, drop the double-eagle on the countertop to hear its ring before placing it in the strongbox. “You must receive a fine class of boarder these days,” the stranger commented dryly. But the clerk simply shrugged – a comment as eloquent as a thousand words from lesser lips. He handed over a heavy brass key with the number 28 stamped into it in uneven numerals. The stranger hefted his valise. “I was told Mr. Clemens was in town,” he said.
“Couldn’t say,” the clerk answered. Then, as if words cost four bits apiece, “Hear tell, he’s down Ha’tford way.”
The stranger shook his head. “I’ve just come by way of Hartford. They told me that he had come here.”
The clerk chuckled. “That man Clemens is full of comin’s and goin’s, Mr....” His eyes dropped to the register, reading it upside down. “Mr. Kipling. Don’t clear his travels with me, anyways.”
We distinguished the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter the one who makes no demands on himself, but contents himself with what he is, and is delighted with himself.
Installations have always seemed the genre best suited for people whose ambition to be an artist is greater than their willingness to acquire the skills necessary to become one.
But then I am a bit old fashioned in that I still believe in truth, that people ought to be able to distinguish by smell a Big Mac from a filet mignon.
It is the point about the Prussian that with him nothing is mutual. The definition of the true savage does not concern itself even with how much more he hurts strangers or captives than do the other tribes of men. The definition of the true savage is that he laughs when he hurts you; and howls when you hurt him.
Since being sent to a state prison near Ann Arbor [for planning the murder of her father and attempted murder of her mother], Tia Skinner said she has not heard from her mother, her siblings or anyone else from the close-knit Yale community near Port Huron.
"It's been rough. It's hard losing your whole family in a blink of an eye," she said. "It's tough because that's my family; they're supposed to stay by you through thick and thin."Come to think of it, isn't that the definition of chutzpah, too?
Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. . . . It may mean that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal; and that you are a paralytic.
-- G.K. Chesterton, “On Dialect and Decency”, Avowals and Denials
In physics it is a fundamental truth that energy can neither be created nor destroyed (the first law of thermodynamics). This simply reflects the metaphysical truth that since all changes in nature require natural causes, and since those causes are finite, and since finite causes cannot create something out of nothing or turn something into nothing, a natural substantial change is not a series of creations and annihilations. Positively speaking, a substantial change is an actualization of the potentiality which some substance has with respect to some new substance: walls can be turned into rubble but not into fish.
The question to be considered is whether time is made up of durationless instants.
The short answer to the question is that it cannot be, for the reason Zeno originally proposed in respect of lines: if a temporal interval or a line segment were composed of durationless instants or points of zero length respectively, then neither the interval nor the segment could have a length greater than zero. The usual approach to the problem now is to invoke the mathematical consistency of proposing finite sums to series of infinite numbers, but this does not dissolve the paradox since infinite series never literally sum to a finite number, they only converge on it as a limit. ... Similarly, when derivatives are invoked to model motion at an instant, they are only ever limits to an infinite series of measurements: instantaneous velocity, for instance, is no more nor less than v = lim (dt→0) dx/dt. While it is convenient to ignore talk of limits when calculating using such concepts as instantaneous velocity, and while such concepts may be mathematically consistent, the ontological truth is that limit concepts do not denote actual entities. And an instant, conceived of as durationless (not as a fleeting “chronon” or “instanton” of some physical speculation), is just such a limit concept – it is not an actual something, it is an actual nothing. And no number of nothings can ever make up a something, no matter what sorts of mathematical technique are invoked.
In the concept of instantaneousness the concept of the passage of time has been lost. Events essentially involve this passage. Accordingly the self-contradictory idea of an instantaneous event has to be replaced by that of an instantaneous configuration of the universe. But what is directly observed is an event. Thus a duration, which is a slab of time with temporal thickness, is the final fact of observation from which moments and configurations are deduced as a limit... [I]t is an essential assumption that a concrete fact of nature always includes temporal passage.
[S]ince the triumph of what was called rationalism, we have successfully cultivated everything except reason.The first essay in the collection involves our friend from an earlier post, the Loch Ness Monster.
-- G.K. Chesterton, “On Monsters and Logic”, Avowals and Denials
Irrational natural explanations are no less irrational for being natural.
I attacked the foundation of morality in Erewhon, and nobody cared two straws. I tore open the wounds of my Redeemer as he hung upon the Cross in The Fair Haven, and people rather liked it. But when I attacked Mr. Darwin they were up in arms in a moment.
-- Samuel Butler, quoted by John Lukacs in "History and Physics."
As long as the piece of paper called a BA remains the emblem of educational success, it will lead to colleges and community colleges that collude with students to provide that piece of paper without regard to anything that is learned.
Bureaucracy vs. MeritocracyIn reality the term 'meritocracy' was misleading. As in so many other spheres of life, the rules that governed the practices and functions of schools and universities were bureaucratic rather than meritocratic. It is bureaucracy, not meritocracy, that categorizes the employment of people by their academic degrees.
The majority of people during the last one hundred years who learned how to read and write made little use of it. ... [I]n the long run the literacy of the masses made very little difference.
We learned this week that a Reddit user, named Lompolo, had discovered rogue apps bearing DroidDream onto pre-Gingerbread Android platforms - viral botnet malware that exports handset ID and other sensitive data, enabling a remote server, via known exploits bypassing security controls, to install code partly beyond the reach of Google's remote kill switch, which it was anyway hesitating to launch pending reference to the Android Police.Our purpose today is to contemplate how such a short time ago, this announcement would have been incomprehensible. Viral botnet malware , forsooth.
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| The 153rd Pennsylvania, "Northampton's Own" Barlow's Knob, Gettysburg |
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| The lovely bride, Ms. Aivaz, celebrates her nuptials with the traditional mandolin-playing clown. |
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| The attractive widow, inappropriately dressed in white, breaks down and is removed from a City Council meeting. |
