moon traveller herald

  Highlights from the discussion A giant snow was coming up from Missouri. The same excitement today as long ago. A new subscription magazine appears thru the mail chute. The New York Review of Books in 2026 as welcomed as Car & Driver in 1966. In 1966 - that's when I first discovered NYRB. I was working in the Children's Library in Racine, and going up to the adult stacks and periodicals on break. In those days the nickname for the pub was 'The New York Review of Viet Nam" - and it offered a more worldly view than the Racine Journal Times concerning what goes on. Intellectual, for sure. This was going to give me fodder for class discussions. It was my ticket to the elbow patch sports jacket and collegiate-like erudition. An IQ boost.  Well of course, those were different times. But I'm still trying to hone a world view...as it happens, this is as the present world order is shaking, rattling and rolling. Gee, but the essayists today face a hard task. The world ...

  Blues is fading because the bulk of people with the soul of blues have left the world. Young people are either cool to a frozen degree [that is, my view of pop is it’s a kind of empty with cheap majesty ] or wildly hot [Garbage Metal]. The big beat is big. Electronic Dance Music, a Spanish World Beat Big. And rhyming. Maybe rhyming is eternal. The idea of a fade speaks also for Jazz.  Jazz built on blues, had a couple of blues refreshes [MJQ, Les McCann …] but blues gave way to swing. Finger snapping. To me the roots of jazz are as much a commentary/statement/riff/re-imagining of American popular music from 1915 to 1955, as anything. Reflection on Bing Crosby. With swing and then just abstraction. Jazz musicians rightly held up their music as as good as classical, but in the process got academic. Intellectual. Young people are not likely to relate to any of the above. All moot points. Jazz ages - the audience is gray haired in large part. At least in this country. . I...

THIS IS A SATRICAL PIECE. SOME OF THE TECHNOLOGIES AND ALL OF THE STATISTICS ARE MADE UP FOR EFFECT. WHEN COMPOSED, THE AUTHOR DID NOT FORSEE THE FUTURE OF WEB STRIDING LANGUAGE MODELS. In the era of the Stasi there was an overarching NSA style apparatus. Projections  were mainly of 'grays and dour greens.' Citizen informants were networked nodes. These were the browser cookies of the time. But they were embedded not in a browser but in a physical world. This was when humans were computers, or computers were humans , have it as you will. It may have been an apex of sorts, though "the jury is still out." The platform as you might say was East Germany, or GDR  (1946-1990). Then and there was created an internet of spies, detecting on their neighbors – on each other – with fault tolerance, high availability and cyclical redundancy checking. Psychological Zesetung, or Brainwave Decomposition, was a common application type. There were 8 Stasi agents for every 5 citize...

The Dalai Lama spent a few days in Boston, and Cecelia and I were able to go to see him in Foxboro at Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots. Thought I would try and herald his Holiness’s message. Call us the Modern Day Quicksilver Messenger Service. You should, he said: “Keep a warm heart – and a calm mind.” That is the basics. Yes, pretty basic. But you got to go back to basics, right? Sometimes. When you are a hitter in a slump. Or a golfer turning duffer. “Keep a warm heart – and a calm mind.” Remember the kindness of your mother. He went on. The kindness of a mother is nurturing – it instills inner values. He remembers his own mother as very patient and kind. He rode on her shoulders until he was three, and he would pull on one or the other of her ears to tell her the direction he wanted to go. He laughed remembering this spate of youthful cruelty – he laughed many times in a disarming an infectious way. We could not see the Dalai Lama especially well. We were no clos...

There I am in the Rocket Garden. Take a picture of a family taking a picture in front of a Saturn. Mailer was here 29 years ago to cover the launch to the Moon, Jules - blinded by the Sun, entranced by the alligators, stymied some as he tried to get the story from the Waspy Nasa of the day - another big anniversary is a year away, and here I am too. Mailer is dead in the last year. Here I am. Coming down here, knowing where I was going, reading Of a Fire on the Moon - [and smartly too, 2001 was showing on the Orlando TV] - thinking back to how the Moon quest was part and parcel of my youth - seeing how this Mailer piece, mere journalism at the time, for lucre at that, resonates like few tomes on tech - and seeing how the Space program had left its mark on the present day - no where more clearly than at the airport - with droning Midwest voice messages - with moving sidewalks and coolly alienated populace - with birds on tarpaulins. Red light glow of National Rental Car Pontiac dashboa...

A girl named Star hit the front pages of the Boston papers not long ago. Star Simpson, an MIT student, was at the airport, going through Security, when all hell broke lose. She was wearing a PC circuit board populated by blinking LEDs connected to a 9V battery. Not too imposing, but to the TSA folks, a suspect device. Push all the alarms. Get on the walkie talkies. Close the perimeter. This is the Post 9/11 world! Shut down the airport. Chaos necessarily ensued. What would the old time Boston comedian Jack Burns say? Probably something like: ‘Katy bah the doah?’ In this age where everything has changed, you may not be aware that MIT students have also changed. Few have sheathed calculators on their belts. Some like Star, have the look of the slacker, if an achieving one, in this case with vividly dyed hair. And SocketToMe embroidered on her sweatshirt back. Artsy. But techno artsy. As in Performance Art meets Radio Shack. Thus the Hello World breadboard and Nine-Volter. We smell headli...

Been working with a team: Nuno, Jake and me. To get a technology cartoon. Working like a year on this off and on. And finally got something I like. Running under name of "Zorb" [Zorb Bickowitz, nee Barf Bickowtiz] http://www.theserverside.net/tt/cartoons/TalesFromTheServerSide.tss

Cecelia and I had a nice dinner one evening up at Harvard Sq not very long ago. The students were packing for summer. I remember looking at young people in a restaurant, many of them of the school, and thinking how privileged they were in health, training and connections. I don’t mean privileged in being snooty or anything like that because I didn’t see anything like that. In reading Bill Gates’s commencement speech I was heartened; not that I could articulate it earlier, but I thought a message of some kind somehow similar was needed. He noted that complexity was a problem at the time of the reformation of Europe after World War II, that George Marshall, he of the Marshall Plan, pointed out the difficulty individuals had in processing the mass of facts presented by press and radio at that time, pointed out in fact at a Harvard Commencement 60 years ago. http://www.theserverside.net/blogs/thread.tss?thread_id=45849

Our story so far:Shroud Take March 10, 2007 http://moontravellerherald.blogspot.com/2007/03/shroud-take-march-10-2007.html Shroud talks: Spysmasher..he had the patent on the rheostat. Wire-round variable resistor controlling ovens, heaters and the like. For making bleeder circuits and voltage dividers. You know. But nobody remembers. I am all that’s left. Spysmasher was a monster euchre player. He could play the game of euchre . Which it was not my game. My game was coon can. I watched him with that euchre. Drove a 500-mph Gyrosub . At one point he was brainwashed by The Mask using a Brainograph. A Brainograph was actually conceptually pretty similar to a glass harmonica. Programmed to overthrow U.S. government. Programed to kill. First person he kills: The Mask. Went on a saboteur spree, sister. Not the Spysmasher with the Tommy Gun bursting into warehouses and flying on exploding dynamite barrels. But somebody reversed the process that made him an anarchist. Or he just got over it. B...

“Western man in the middle of the 20th century is tense, uncertain, adrift. We look upon our epoch as a time of troubles, an age of anxiety. The grounds of our civilization, of our certitude, are breaking up under our feet, and familiar ideas and institutions vanish as we reach for them, like shadows in the falling dusk.” * The late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote these words, which appear in History, Written in the Present Tense. an appreciataion found in Sunday's NYTimes. He's described as the last great public historian..which may be a bit much. But this selection shows a tremendous sweep .. and very well sums up the era I grew up in, and the prose poem that was in the air then. Described in his obit as partisan he was. Maybe that is where the sweep comes from! He was the great intellectual of Kennedy's Camelots. With many buds he fathered American studies. One of the subtexts of this blog has been: Famous people I saw on the street. And Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is one of tho...