moon traveller herald

Among the rights an American will assert is the right to privacy. We don’t cotton to police putting LoJacks on our or others' car undercarriages - at least not without a warrant. You can't come in my apartment or house without my invitation or a warrant. You can't film me in my boudoir unbeknownst, and so on. It's not exactly spelled in the Constitution, but the right to privacy is somewhere enfolded in the pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But digital technology and the Web as a channel has upturned the cart. To Be Cont. - Jack Vaughan

UPDATED OCCASSIONALLY - Jack Vaughan  ---- Strange Edison Electrical Illumination At about the age of 10, Edison goes to the creek with young friend George Lockwood, who disappears in the eddies to drown. Edison observes the creek water for a long time, maybe rapt by the dying Lockwood’s breath bubbles. At last, after the long wait for Lockwood to surface, Edison finally goes home to dinner and to bed without telling anyone about the event. Meanwhile, a party searches for Lockwood – eventually they come to hear Edison’s story of his drowning. Self-taught polymath,  noted as a man of amazing concentration.  He could look intently at what was there and was able to uncover deep first principles  as he tinkered with pieces of  metal, carbon, vulcanite, lamp black  and assorted materials. More than that,  he had a gift for  imaginative re-application of principles  to conjure new products,  and improve on existing su...

A recent Wall Street Journal article doesn’t hold back on the hype, at least in its headline. Quantum computing, it promises, will change the world as we know it. Courtesy of Google. The story that follows is a bit more measured. The obstacles to successful quantum computing are discussed, the murkiness of the applications is considered. There is a discussion of activity of some players - Dwave, IBM, and especially Google. Also noted- The NSA is building a quantum computer too. The conjecture is put forward that the nearest closest biggest opportunity for quantum computing relates to machine learning - guess because probability is involved and the computation problems could grow unmanageable eventually. We will see.  The most obvious expectation is that the NSA is anticipating the possibility of a point where quantum computers could break important codes. And thus disrupt the present status of Internet commerce. Is that as big a threat as Hitler? I ask that because there are p...

Lincoln in the Bardo, the first novel by noted short-story writer George Saunders, is set in a graveyard. It is at the time of the Civil War. Night, the first night of internment for little Willie Lincoln, the departed son of Pres. Abraham Lincoln. Willie was the most wonderful of children, and Great Emancipator Lincoln, completely disconsolate, goes to the graveyard to embrace his son's lifeless form, stacked in a crypt, ahead of an eventual journey to Illinois. Told in episodic bursts, the story reads like a play. That is due to its construction, which has various, graveyard characters delivering a stream of seeming recitations, or statements, many of which do not make immediate sense. Willie, like many of the other souls in the old graveyard, is in a twilight world between death and life - in, as Tibetan Buddhists might have it, a Bardo. We find him there persevering, observing, lamenting. The mood of melancholy is very deep. But broken from time to time by the humorous rim ...

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Holland Cotter in NYTimes Quite a scene it is. Cliffs soar skyward; torrents stream down. This is a nature as a theater of big, dwarfing effects. And it’s charged with a weird, creaturely energy. Streams and Mountains Without End. Hanging scrolls deliver their basic image fast — pow! — then leave you to sort out details. A second form of landscape painting, the hand scroll, operates on a different dynamic. When viewed as intended, slowly unrolled on a tabletop, one section at a time, it’s a cinematic experience, about anticipation, suspense, what’s coming next In a section called “The Poetic Landscape,” he links nature painting to Chinese literary tradition. Common to both was a goal of making mood — existential atmosphere — primary content. A 14th-century hanging scroll by the Yuan painter Tang Di is based on a couplet by the famed poet Wang Wei (A.D. 699-759). Wang’s poem is telegraphically stark: I walk to where the water ends And sit and watch as clouds arise. ...