moon traveller herald

This week the Sunday Globe Arts and Ideas section ran an interview with Lightman, who recently wrote about the 25-some-top scientific miracles of the 20th Century. Among the types of discovery, he notes, is One kind that is just an accident! Penicillin is always the big [exemplar - templar] there. Of course you have to have developed receptivity to appreciate the value in the mistake. In Lightman’s words, “You have to have a prepared mind and be open.” XRays would have been discovered earlier had a certain decaying process not been overlooked. Anyway, according to Lightman, First you work hard on a problem and have what I call a prepared mind. You've done your homework, you've defined the problem. Then you get stuck. But getting stuck is a very important part of the process. It's a good thing, not a bad thing. It catalyzes the creative imagination. There is a change in perspective, a shift in thinking, and you see the problem in a different way. That leads to discovery. Bes...

Came across V.Bush sideways at first. See related . This is how it played. More or less. Was done in days not long after discovering the tenets of Investigative Poetry. It wasnt about Bush but was about Welch. Delivery for Welch In the neighborhood up where Doctor Bush lives Everything is cozy There’s green grass past the golf course There’s stone walls and trucks of spring water Doctor Bush..he’s ancient ... one of his neighbors is Robert Welch. ...so it goes on and describes Chris, the long-haired delivery boy from Belmont Groceries showing up with Post Toasties, potatoes, milk ... for the founder of the John Birch Society.. Maid looks at him and shuts the door. It opens again There’s a dude with a shoulder-holstered gun who informs him they ‘don’t appreciate long haired delivery boys, ' especially with no advance notice.

In studying musical feedback, ’ve looked mainly at Elmore James and Hound Dog Taylor on the one hand, and Jimi Hendrix and the Velvet Underground on the other. The key Hendrix song for our purposes has been Third Stone from the Sun. When you listen to it, there are a whole host of musical influences on display..running about the full gamut. It is hard now to think of first hearing of the song. But (thanks in no small part to the artist dropping hints) the probable first impression was this was a satire that mixed surf music with space invader music. So guitar influences you’d pick out would include Dick Dale and The Ventures... and Forbidden Planet. Could we throw in Duane Eddy and Link Wray? [If you traipse back to Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt.. we come up to say Les Paul.. and T-Bone Walker ... and head out in two directions.. blues and country... and its not hard to get to Link Wray.. and rocknroll] Link Wray died Nov. 5 at home in Copenhagen. Less interested in feedback t...

You come to a lot of things in very roundabout ways. You see the scientist-administrator in a Sunday serial. Then you sneak up on a real life person like Vannevar Bush. A friend of mine used to deliver groceries to Bush [who lived in a Belmont, Mass. neighborhood; on the grocery route as well was Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society; there is another story there]. My friend told me that Dr. Bush had built the A-bomb, and I thought I knew enough about the A-bomb to know he was wrong. But still learning later, I discovered Bush’s very significant management role in the Manhattan project. Gaunt cheeked. Pipe smoking. Greyng. Well suited. Like a New England minister. That was bush. In school I studied the roots of computing, and came across his Differential Analyzer. I great machined contrivance, it filled a basement room at M.I.T. and was something of the apex of mechanical analog calculators. It held a fascination. And may have represented the end of the era where you could fe...

He goes down in the bowels of the Great Northern Search Company’s cluster server farm. Admires the work of the engineers uploading the works of mankind online. You might think “good going guys” – putting the works of mankind online worthy – and the guys might discern your thinking. And then they jar you saying “we’re doing this for the machines.” Google me with a stick! On October 31 last, Google ran a full page ad featuring its Halloween Day home page--one on which a morbidly surreal landscape morphs onto Google’s usual logo banner. It’s like pages they’ve done on BloomsDay, Thanksgiving, the anniversary of the first manned Moon landing, and other special days in years past. For me this one was spooky in an unfunny way. Google as friendly is at risk. The company’s plan to put the world’s books in their index, Borgesian and innocuous and grand both at first, has proved a defining moment, if you consider the notion that this is to feed AI agents of tomorrow. Its great algorithms notwith...

China, U.S. shoot for moon's helium stock : CHINA's recent announcement that it plans to put a man on the moon by 2017 has started a space race with the U.S. for the lunar equivalent of El Dorado. Only it's not gold these two nations are after. It's helium-3, the gas some scientists tout as the fuel of the 21st century. The top metre of the moon's surface is believed to hold more than 1-million tons of helium-3, a substance rare on Earth. Gerald Kulcinski, director of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says a single pound of helium-3 could generate as much electricity as one to 10 million pounds of coal. Read it ...

I grew up very near Lake Michigan. Was never than five or six blocks away, and was for many years about two blocks away. Never remember the Lake at night during storms. With Winter storms particularly, one would be thinking inland. Of course in the late 70s Gordon Lightfoot wrote The Edmund Fitzgerald. Which described those storms. I guess I remembered then the newspaper stories about ships going down in the winter. The eels in the lake were also a scary fascination. My father would say well it's not like the ocean..he was from Boston. BUt he'd note as the paper would, that the lake could create strange and dangerous vortexes. We'd go for fish dinner in Whitefish Bay. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitgerald is a great song. After the thirities, few mythic folk songs passed over to pop and the general radio in such a way that mixed Tin Pan ALley with Chaucer. Nintey-mile winds and 30-foot waves I did not know. An NPR story describes the day, which was in November 30 years ago, the...