moon traveller herald

Vermork Hydroelectric Plant in Norway. Site of German production of Heavy Water as mixer in Atomic stew during WW II. I woke up yesterday, thinking about the frenetic sheer terror of the Jewish expatriate scientist community relating to Hitler that made the bomb happen. Generally, I tend to think of it more as mankind or Western man on this push. Just had a weird iteration thereof that a.m. For a couple plus years I have been jabbing at a book on the German bomb.  I can't really put Thomas Powers' Heisenberg's War ahead of American Prometheus, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, or Now It Can be Told – all important stories of the atomic bomb - but it belongs on the same shelf that tells the saga of the Western World's creative drive toward absolute destruction. That the Reich team sputtered does not detract from the tale - failure can be informative. It is the story of Germany's failed effort to build a bomb before and during World War II, and as such is fa...

When you tell the story so many times that you begin to worry - maybe that is the time to write it down and put it aside and put it right there. That may be the case with the first time I ever heard Bob Dylan singh. The route was circuitous in that I came to him under a cover. The Byrd's version of Tambourine Man was this gigantic hit - as hits could be for mere days in that time - it was a gigantic hit for me, cause it turned around what I listened too (Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett) - The guitars were electric folk, like the Searchers but almost psychedelic in their reverberating drone. Now we know that sound - something like Fill Spector meets Leadbelly - was the creation of the Wrecking Crew - the Los Angeles studio band par excellence. The words though - wow - total poetry. Take me on a trip up on your magic swirling ship all my senses have been. Stripped and my hands can't field to grip outside the kin of pop or Broadway … I guess I knew Bob Dylan wrote Blownin in...

Flew this week to SF and back. Some turbulence over Rockies. How grand to watch Warriors with Dave and Jim. Yell! When I got home read the details on Egypt air crash. Cozy&safe on my porch, with no expectations to fly again soon. Watched doc on The Last Man on the Moon - Gene Cernan. There he was, at beginning, sitting in cowboy hat at rodeo, and nobody about him knowing, he was the last man on the moon: A poem. G ot to thinnin bout the 'pilot talk' best described by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff... (J.Vaughan) Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot… coming over the intercom… with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself… the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because 'uh, folks, it might get a...

[ View the story "Week of May" on Storify ]

When Tarzan left Wisconsin normalcy was slow to return the cows got disconnected, some ran off the farm One even surfed the Atlantic to hear again the apeman's song.

   On 100th anniversary of his birth - Claude Shannon was born in Petoskey, Mich., and grew up in Gaylord, Mich. He worked as a messenger for Western Union while in Gaylord High School, and attended college at MIT, where he was a member of Tau Beta Pi. Although the algebra of digital binary bits was first uncovered by mathematician George Boole in the mid-19th century, it was Shannon who saw the value of applying that form of logic to electronic communications. As a student of Vannevar Bush's at MIT in the 1930s, he worked on the differential analyzer, perhaps the greatest mechanical (analog) calculator. His paper, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits," which led to a long association with Bell Laboratories, laid out Shannon's theories on the relationship of symbolic logic and relay circuits.... When I was young, Shannon's work was a tough nut to crack, but it certainly was intriguing. As a high school boy, I was interested in the future ...

In 1967 my parents took a monthlong tour of Europe, leaving me, my brother and sister with my aunt and uncle in Milton Mass in some pseudo farm and horse country outside of Boston. This was a serious dislocation from my high school friends who I was sure we're having the most wonderful summer ever at North Beach In the day and the Point at night. All I had was records I’d brung along [Happy Jack, Electric Music for the Mind and Body, The Grateful Dead, Moby Grape and Sgt. Peppers(5a)] and a little turntable. That is like: background. One night on tv there was a show about ‘hippies’. They had these guys on, and I would bet they were from the commune that John identified: The True Light Beavers. The joke was one of them had a basketball uniform top on saying “True Light Beavers”. I knew it was a put on. And I liked it. They took their name from the shirt they found at a Goodwill. Are you religious? The moderator asked. Yes, they said. Our religion is called the True Light Bea...