The Trinity Site and the Very Large Array

You'd expect the trinity site to be a moving, awe-filled experience but overweight tourists in american flag t-shirts walking dogs really somehow take you out of it. Still kind of amazing. The Very Large Array, however, delivered in every way.

The Very Large Array










McDonald Ranch House and Trinity Site

Ha

After hearing about "tiger blood" all week....

I decided to watch the Charlie Sheen interview and I'm left wondering...

What do ABC and its viewers see in George Stephanapolous? I get putting him on the politics beat, but beyond that, I'm at a loss.

Yojimbo

Liked the movie, loved the music.

From Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation:

Everyone of a certain age thinks of the 1969 moon landing as a symbolic dividing line between the new technological era and the old. At the time, the moon landing occasioned great excitement and it was heralded as the beginning of a new age. But it's more properly seen as the culmination of some older technological developments.

This is meant literally in a usefultohumanitytechnological sense but damn if it doesn't feel right in a spiritual sense too. How inward our ambition, will, and dreams seem to be.

Lectures on electricity

In all ages the thunder of heaven has contributed more powerfully to promote the cause of imposture and tyranny. By the science of electricity, however, the future possibility may be exterminated of renewing these frauds. It has enabled the most common artificer to avert every danger of attending a thunderstorm. It teaches the vulgar mind to smile at a thousand religious ceremonies.

--George Cadogan Morgan

Score Your Very Own 80's Film

Urushi Musical Interface from Yuri Suzuki on Vimeo.

Links

Abstract Concrete

Minimal Products

What Science Fiction Authors Think About

Indonesian Dessert

Herzog (from the other end)

Welcome to Lagos

Best thing like this I've seen in a long, long time. Refreshing to see this take on poverty and the human spirit. No patronizing shots with sad dull music, it's not a lamentation that says "look at these poor people" it's a celebration of the people and a look at human civilization in the throws of change for better or for worse. And...it's all on youtube.

I picked up Ayn Rand and the World She Made. I can't wait to jump into it. There was a time when Rand for me was the end-all, and I absolutely adored her and her work. Later I distanced myself from her completely. My thoughts on her now are a bit more complicated. I realize how deeply flawed she was and also how brilliant she could be. The things that shape us as teens don't ever really leave us; we internalize them and even if we think much differently as adults, the essence of these things must still be there. I'm excited to read a book that is neither full of condemnation or unquestioning praise, and to get a feel for what someone who encountered Rand as an adult for the first time has to say.

From the Fountainhead:

"I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body."

Perdido Street Station

You haven't read any book like this. It's delightfully genre-bending but it isn't really delightful. You could accurately pin almost any adjective to it but doing so would be doing the novel a disservice. It's just... new. Or at least it's new to me.

Here's a taste:

"He entered. Light seemed to give up the struggle halfway through the thick, soiled windows, leaving the interior in shadows. The walls were unadorned except by dirt. The pub was empty of all but the most dedicated drinkers, shambolic figures huddled over bottles. Several were junkies, several were Remade. Some were both: The Dying Child turned no one away. A group of emaciated young men lay draped across a table twitching in perfect time, strung out on shazbah or dreamshit or very-tea. One woman held her glass in a metal claw that spat steam and dripped oil onto the floorboards. A man in the corner lapped quietly from a bowl of beer, licking the fox's muzzle that had been grafted to his face."

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