moon traveller herald

Tomorrow is UN Day - I posted this two years ago -  I headed it Cavalcade of the World – as recognition of the news of time time passing ….. and in homage to then retiring Scott Simon of NPR. The U.N. is a source of controversy now – conservatives see it as a Martian colony that landed East of Murray Hill In NY ….  ….. When I was young … it was hopeful thing… better than the League of Nations – say this in the wrong bar today and you get an F U. 'What's the big look back and ponder?' Simon is asked. He said more or less:"I recall when I started out the world was still working to ensure the carnage of the Holocaust and WW II would not be (easily) repeated. So we had UN, NATO, Berlin Airlift, and so on.The biggest surprise today is that motivation to put humanism ahead of nationalism has unexpectedly been TURNED ON ITS HEAD." Why does he still do radio he is asked and Simon says the likes to watch the Cavalcade of the World. (Cavalcade is formal procession of people...

Good to see Stewart Brand showed up in NYT science pages last week. The founding editor of The Whole Earth Catalog has never been quite the harmonist in the church choir, and there’s no sign that’s changed on reviewing the piece: An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New ‘Heresies’. What are the heresies here referred to? Well, Brand is ready to accept a renewal in nuclear plant building. I am ready to agree with him: The risk of global warming, and the planet’s inhabitant’s tendencies to want electricity, warmth, and individual mobility at this point mitigate in favor of the certainly risk-encompassing nuclear solution. As a viewer of earth phenomena Brand is non par. Twas Stewart who retrieved the Apollo program from cultural insignificance as he forwarded the conception of the importance of seeing the earth in whole in a photo. I have been largely entertaining and often much influenced by Stewart Brand over 30 years now. Since the day I first saw the Whole Earth Catalog at Dave M.’s....

Are there surprising things to discover. We all no the answer is yes, everyday. Yet consprirasists linger like Wilkes Boothes in the wings saying it can be so and here is a little germ of truth that I will blow on and conjure confusion. Had a discussion about Twin Towers on fire as hijacked planes hit with Jeff Hull. Caused me to revisit some PBS sites, and some overheard conversation with Failure Student Henry Petroski. I caught up with him in Tampa about three weeks after 911..when flying was really spooky..and heard him discuss failures of engineering [his specialty] and remember the [software] engineers around him discusing the recent great conflagaration.... Let's be base: What happened to the towers was not anticipated. Most structural engineers were surprised when the World Trade Center towers collapsed. Suprise is always possible as there are always new things to learn. Structural engineers are not dealing with a completely closed systems and they are always learning new th...

Or, How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they see the bare shoulders of those seductive quantitative models? The ships was free of bounds, it was true. But it had entered a phantasm allegorical. The compass needles spinning in overdrive, as the calendar pages sucked into the vortex. And the models began to spit out gibberish. Yet a lazy air conditioned mid-ought porch somehow came to mind. Spent a couple of evenings at Dr. Shroud’s home on a visit in the mid oughts. Piled high were scientific journals, to be tossed about, launched hazhapardly in the air, and ingested like artsy scientific popcorn, I guess. There was that and true fiddle faddle too, and the tube was always on. The mags were fodder for grand illuminations in underneath the Shroud’s bald cranium. The covers of the journals - I hadn’t really sat down with these types of publications for some ten years before - were surprising - very vivid, imagistic, literally abstract, because the computer model had come recent...