moon traveller herald

Holland Cotter in NYTimes Quite a scene it is. Cliffs soar skyward; torrents stream down. This is a nature as a theater of big, dwarfing effects. And it’s charged with a weird, creaturely energy. Streams and Mountains Without End. Hanging scrolls deliver their basic image fast — pow! — then leave you to sort out details. A second form of landscape painting, the hand scroll, operates on a different dynamic. When viewed as intended, slowly unrolled on a tabletop, one section at a time, it’s a cinematic experience, about anticipation, suspense, what’s coming next In a section called “The Poetic Landscape,” he links nature painting to Chinese literary tradition. Common to both was a goal of making mood — existential atmosphere — primary content. A 14th-century hanging scroll by the Yuan painter Tang Di is based on a couplet by the famed poet Wang Wei (A.D. 699-759). Wang’s poem is telegraphically stark: I walk to where the water ends And sit and watch as clouds arise. ...

I was reading a Thelonius Monk biography while just hanging in the waiting room at the Music School. I read a bit about Monk. How, let's call him Leonard Fritters, wrote a bad review on him in a book about Bebop. Said he didn’t play very well, the usual thing. When Monk saw him next at Rockefeller Cntr - per family lore -  he started to strangle Leonard, and held him over the fencing above the ice rink. Saying : "You are taking food off the table for my family." Wow! It's like the era of our parents came from  -that which we in effect came out of was an age of Looney Tunes - when the slightest motivation turned into act, and consequences were whatever they were.  Where's Ralph? He walked in front of a train. Darn, pass the biscuits. And after us, whaat? -Jack Vaughan

UNDER CONSTRUSION - A new profession takes a time to truly develop, if it's animal husbandry, barbering, bridge building or what have you. For software development, the journey is just underway. The software profession took clear steps forward during the 1960s. Programmers had become essential to U.S. military defense, and, led by IBM, it was entrenched in American industry The imperative to go to the Moon set a lot of money to circulating, and there was interest and enough of it to fund study of how software teams were successfully formed, and how their results could become reliably reproducible. If you had the right methodology, your process could  be repeatable, said the expert, just before telling you to that you could throw away yours and use his. that his methodology was the best. Predictable. There was Yourdon and Booch and Rumbaugh and Popkin and so on. That is overstated for effect, of course. So is the joke:  Q: What is a methodology? A: It’s a method...