moon traveller herald

 Alpha Tracks Of Radium1912 https://www.cloudylabs.fr   Reading Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics [U Cal Press;1996] by Ruth Lewin Sime.  The noble reason to read the book would be to learn the story of a woman and a Jew [secular] who accomplished great science but who was overlooked by the patriarchal and antisemitic societies of the time.   But reading it in fact because I'd like to learn something about the interaction and interdependence of experiment and theory in science. Yet, addressing the sexism and racism in her life and times is clearly i nescapable.   The life of Lise Meitner is the choice because her work was intricate to the discovery of nuclear fission and the Atomic bomb. I knew bits of her story and wanted to know more. An    In Our Times Podcast provided special impetus. That's the context for the summer research undertaking.-JV   The story of the  nuclear bomb has been told by some very capable historians and p...

   Bill Gates Source Code: Harvard Drop-Out Makes Good Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2025 With the likes of Sam Altman and Elon Musk dashing about, we crouch for shelter now in an era where well-funded high-tech bros can live a life that was once reserved only for Doctor Strange. That tends to make Bill Gates’ “Source Code: My Beginnings” a much more warmfy and life-affirming book than it might otherwise have been. In this recounting of his early days, and founding of Microsoft, he paints a colorful picture of a bright and excitable boy making good. Much of Source Code is set in “the green pastures of Harvard University.” [ story continues ... ] [I posted this on Amazon][But if they move the URL, note it is also on LinkedIn, Facebook, and ProgressiveGauge.]

The Sweet Triangle On one level, John Eliot Gardiner's "Bach" is a biography of the most sublime composer J.S. Bach. But it is so much more than a parade of facts. It is endlessly informative and illuminative.  Most of Bach's music was done as part of his work for the Lutheran Church, and according to its liturgical cycle. It is not surprising then that Gardiner deeply explores Bach's spiritualistic bearing. The works are directed to or from heaven, as indicated in the book's subtitle: "Music in the Castle of Heaven." Worth noting it is that Gardiner is penetratingly aware of the abyss between the trusting cantata writer Bach and today's world, mistrustful of such. We may never see another so strong in "imaginative gift, cratsmanship and human empathy." Gardiner is a leader of the original instrument movement that arose in the 1970s He was a driver of a movement that sought a path to re-inhabit music that was becoming something of a lif...

November is a Bee complex where dreams where dreams waltz like leaves The dead remind you that they are there Scratching electrons in electric air Near Where you’re living above your station And the docs are odd mechanics Mechanical Turks Lifting the hoods Interrupted endlessly just to pump gas eyeing the battery that won’t hold charge Advising you like Dr. Williams: “It’s just given up the ghost” You think back to the grey tube in the TV room of flickering fate Where pencil mustached Jack Bailey eminence Leads housewives through laments asking enthusiastically How would you like to be queen for a day? And their circumstances are measured with an applause meter as they tear up the meter measures Under neighbor Maude’s ironing board You crawl But you will wake up you got to get to your job Your morbid preoccupation Thinking Seeing November And you reach your destination. - Jack Vaughan

First heard the Paul Butterfield blues band early in the summer of love 1967. We lent the record among our crew. For us they were something of a sleeper among the tremendous abundance of creative bands at the time. Certainly different in that they were closer to the roots of street expression - more so than some of the crimson and chiffon butterfly "psychedelicists" that were about. That year I caught on to Taj Mahal, Canned Heat, the Dirty Blues Band and the Butterfield Blues Band, whose lead guitar player, Mike Bloomfield, was a very big notch above anyone else on an instrument that was coming to define the era. He was the first rock guitar hero, ahead of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, and held the mantle, Mickey, at least for a while. When I re-imagined Black Orpheus ( itself a reimagining of Orpheus in the underground) I imagined Mike Bloomfield as the Pan-like protagonist, probably having learned by then that his guitar was the transcendental and evocative...

Born in 1924 from a family of noted European mathematicians, Benoit Mandelbrot had an early interest in maps, and began early on to study nature's rough terrains - phenomena beyond traditional geometry and its straight lines and arcs. In a long research and academic career, with much help from the first commercial computers that came about after World War II, he created fractal geometry. In his memoir, "The Fractalist," partially completed before his death in 2010 (and finally compiled by family and colleagues), Mandelbrot tells the tale behind the tale - the one best remembered in his widely read "The Fractal Geometry of Nature." He shows the excitement he found in his early evolution as a scientist, one who had Kepler as an idle. He writes: "I allowed my finger to be touched by a complicated set of gears that soon grabbed my body - and never let go." (This after  Uncle Szolem gave him a reprint of a review of Zipf book.) It is amazing how m...

James Wolcott's memoir: Lucking Out. He is humble enough to point out his great luck. That should not cover the fact that he achieved great things as a writer in New York in the '70s and thereafter, and he saved enough brain cells to remember it pretty well for this memoir. He arrives from Maryland in the great city with a letter of reference from Norman Mailer. Coming to the city with hope of a literary life. Some hungry days, but he throws himself and is mixing with the strange New York crowd of the day. A story a tad Dickensian (with cynical urbanity all around, he remains as tender as Copperfield) , but this time with the backdrop of the Nixon era. Arriving as he does in 1972, he enters New York City at a particularly portent time. (Think of that Stevie Wonder number where the guy full of hope gets off at Port Authority, only to immediately be arrested and sent to Attica forever.) New York in 1972 - still relatively cheap, never more dangerous, (one day that year 24 people ...

Sunnyland Slim Meets Little Brother Montgomery- This poem depicts Sunnyland's first encounter with Little Brother in Canton, Miss. in 1923. Jack Vaughan, of Boston, Mass. recorded this reading Jan. 19, 2013.

Bill Belichick is respected, not loved, in my neck of the woods. I know it is different elsewhere. Far and wide he is loathed. He is depressively catatonic in most press conferences, and his conspiracy to surreptitiously video the New York Jets has definitely gone down on his permanent record. But even his critics give him great measure as a football coach. Here I agree. I’d say I have never seen a coach so able to prepare his team for games yet at the same time be so able to adjust at half time to whatever the opposition had going for them. [As I kid I grew up on Lombardi – I just don’t remember that many games when they didn’t dominate from the start. Mind may play tricks.] In David Halberstam, Belichick met a well versed and able biographer. A bit slow and turgid and perfunctory at times, but most of the artifice was used to gain good narrative. Halberstam’s “The Education of aCoach” gives you a great view on the inner game of football, where scouts roam from game to game,...

Theodore Roosevelt's legacy has risen and fallen several times since his death in 1919. Be that as it may, his work was great enough to get him a placed on Mount Rushmore along with our greatest presidents - being the only one from the 20th century so enthroned. Even after all these intervening ears, only cousin Franklin Roosevelt has vied with Theodore Roosevelt for confirmation in the pantheon presidential beyond Rushmore. The book at hand here considers a Roosevelt who had to leave the Republican Party that had quickly started to undo progressive measures Roosevelt had enacted after h, following the near equivalent of two terms, left the White House. Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) lived a god-awful long time ago, but still is figure of interest. He is of special interest to dyed in the wool history buffs and some politically obsessed others. From wealth but a Progressive at heart, he tried to divert the Republican Party from kowtowing to big capitalist interests. It is the ...

When he was a year old, Albert Einstein's family moved to Munich, where his father began work in his brother's gas and electrical supply company. Munich was one of the earliest European cities to switch to electric lights. The city had a very small minority of German Jews such as the Einsteins. At four or five, sick in bed, the young Einstein was given a compass, its needle controlled by the invisible field of magnetism. It produced in him a sense of wonder that, according to biographer Walter Isaacson, stayed with him through life. He sought a particularly visual understanding of problems, even when young; relied on the approach later, in his greatest work. In a relatively quick burst of work in the early 20th Century, the brilliant but lowly Zurich patent clerk Albert Einstein upended the conventional Newtonian physics of his time – this despite a mixed academic record, plenty of setbacks associated with anti-Semitism, and a troubled bohemian marriage. He won the Noble ...

Have been reading U.S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs this year. Finally: Big job, won’t finish soon. But here is my book report. This book has a reputation as one of the best autobiographies by a president or general and it fully lives up to that status. Grant wrote it, in need of money, as he battled cancer. He composed it at the behest of Mark Twain, and the writing at times reaches a level like Twain’s. It deals with the Civil War, Grant didn’t live to write about his presidency, which was a debacle, anyway. Grant was known to be somewhat taciturn – and with a bit of a dour countenance. Yet he was known for brilliant simplicity in his war making – in the way he wrote memos, as one example. His quietness belied a deep thinker; his writing style makes for great literature. Grant’s fame lies in the fact that he brought the Civil War to an end. Many would argue that he spilled too much blood in the process. His perspective was probably that shorter war equaled less blood. That, itself a bloo...

It is coming, a book on the Bomb that discloses all A-bombs can be traced from Oppenheimer's Abomb ... But that is not the reason I am rehosting a bit of a homage or review [it focuses on his Cambridge life] of a great book on Oppenheimer and the bomb... Reposted from RJ 11 - It is weird to think that the leader of the U.S. teams that created the first A-bomb was a delicate mesh of scientist and poet, in the end, a tragic figure, done in by his lethal invention and his soft-spot for arty friends who, in the style of their times, promoted liberal and communist causes. Robert Oppenheimer is a truly haunting figure, well depicted in “American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin. [2005] Doctorow is quoted in the book saying “The Great golem we have made against our enemies is our culture, our bomb culture-its logic, its faith, its vision.” Sensitive, Oppenheimer tried to put the killer genie back in the bottle after creating it. This proved another reason he was marked as haun...

Late summer and I’m on vacation. Have noticed too late August is a time when politicians show up at the yearly conventions of The American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. A few years ago Dick Cheney used such a convocation to prime the pump for the last push toward going to war in Iraq. This year’s VFW convention was held in Kansas City. The Legion was a couple of weeks later. And Pres Bush spoke to the vets, choosing this VFW occasion to prime the pump for the upcoming discussions about leaving Iraq by drawing comparisons between our Iraq occupation and our earlier occupations of Viet Nam and Japan. All summer I have been reading American Caesar, a life of Douglas MacArthur by William Manchester. As chance would have it, I am at the part where MacArthur takes over supreme command of Japan after Allied vitory. At some future point I will review the book. But, when picking up today’s paper I had to remark upon the falsity of the Iraq-Japan analogy. MacArthur spent over 20 years...

I try to read some history each year, usually U.S. history, often military history. This year I read Crusade in Europe . By Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower. Amazing. Maybe someone would correct me, but it is my impression that he really wrote this – it does not have the feel of the ghost writer that often comes in to provide the voice-over for the great man. The personality that comes through is quite similar to that which Eisenhower conveyed in public. Able. Able to create consensus. A listener. Casual. Hands in back pockets. Stern if need be. Analytical. Concerned for his troops. But most of all the sense emerges of Eisenhower being a modern organization man. The job for America beginning in 1940 [when Eisenhower is still a colonel] was to mobilize. Eisenhower proved adept at understanding this, and gradually - but not too gradually - bringing the forces to bear. He appreciated amphibious war, tank war, and air war. He came to appreciate all these over many years of basically boring assig...