Is this right?
Self, room, house, neighborhood, city, county, state, region, country, continent, hemisphere, planet, solar system, galaxy, local group, super cluster, observable universe, universe.
Black in Latin America
We’ve seen a few episodes from Henry Gates’ excellent series Black in Latin America. The episode on The Dominican Republic and Haiti was especially fascinating, as you have a microcosm of evolutionary pressures present in such a small space. All the episodes are available online.
quote out of context
The tests are not measuring intelligence alone, but also the desire to prove it.
one bedroom apartment plus boyfriend
I have a sunny one bedroom in Noe Valley. I also have really cute legs. This will make sense in a second . I decided this place was feeling just too big so I thought I would look for a roommate and then I remembered that I was looking for a girlfriend too so why don’t I just throw all my eggs in one basket and go for the whole Shibang. Kittenkaboodle. Ball of wax. Whatever. This might sound nuts but I bet there is some lovely woman out there saying to herself, ” GOD I wish I could find a good man… with a full size refrigerator and new tile in the bathroom.”
I have an unusually high IQ, interesting sense of humor, and there is plenty of cabinet space in the pantry and good water pressure in the shower head
coming out of sleep
Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my butt to keep.
And if I poop before I wake.
Computer Gossip
A computer generated poem ‘Nonchurchgoing’, made from only human gossip the structure of human gossip.
It all started when Genevieve, Kenda and Michelina arrived. Don’t tell Jacquelin I said this, but Tamekia and Tina were nonchurchgoing with reckless abandon. According to Renaldo, Claribel and Inell were unwilling with Scottie. From start to finish, it was bizarre but not really amazing.
Totally.
Mike Huckabee defends American Exceptionalism from Facts, History
What does it mean that Learn Our History is “unbiased”?
Learn Our History’s products have been developed to correct the “blame America first” attitude prevalent in today’s teaching. While we recognize that America is not perfect and has never been perfect we celebrate our incredible history with a balanced account of the events that created this great nation. We don’t feel bad about the great things America has achieved — we celebrate our success!
You’d think we’d be better at computer generated animation.
Claro y Obscuro: Elsa Muñoz (National Museum of Mexican Art)
National Museum of Mexican Art. May 20 through November 27, 2011.
Chicago area artist Elsa Muñoz paints still settings and meditative moments in time, suggesting something has just transpired, or that a new sequence of events is about to unfold. At times eerie, the work reflects her personal exploration and interpretation of the chiaroscuro technique–an approach where the shadow itself acts as a dominant character in the scene.
“These works are as much about what is plainly revealed in light as they are about what is concealed in darkness . . . the relationship between light and shadow as metaphors.” (Elsa Muñoz).
Masks and Time
I found a wonderful little book at the used books place yesterday: Mexican Art: From the Beginnings to the Olmecs, Bernard Noel, Tudor Publishing Co., New York, 1968. It has many fine plates that I find somehow more pleasing because they are presented in black and white. The one above is a Guerrero mask. The text is wonderful too. Here’s a bit I read to Cindy yesterday as one of those things that confirms aspects of her fine knowledge of Mexican time:
The pre-Classic period began with the expansion of agriculture; it was a formative period during which societies organized themselves and invented a religion, which became more and more complex. This religion was fundamentally a worship of time. All agricultural societies have more or less deified time, but the Mexicans refined infinitely on this conception. It was not an abstract entity for them; it was bound to space and with it formed a unique substance which went through an endless cycle of birth, growth, decline and rebirth according to the pulsation of a rhythm that man maintained but did not control. Without man, time would have perished, so man had both to understand and foster it.
So you didn’t like it?
I love it when reviewers of poetry books just go all out with the invective. This review of a Robert Hass book contains a wonderful response to a passage:
The second volume, Praise, now reads as a primer in late-seventies period style, the kind of laid-back beach koans that led people to believe Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear” was a good poem. There are more berries, more naming of flowers, more embarrassingly tin-eared warbling in the demotic:
It is different in kind from a man and the pale woman
he fucks in the ass underneath the stars
because it is summer and they are full of longing
and sick of birth. They burn coolly
like phosphorous, and the thing need be done
only once.
—From “Against Botticelli”Does ass fucking really require such a high-minded justification? Upon being told someone is fucking someone else in the ass, has anyone ever responded, “What! Why?” I regret to inform the reader that Hass goes on to compare this sex act to the sacking of Troy.
(Thanks, Rick S.)
two quotes from The Singularity Is Near
Halfway through The Singularity Is Near, you get:
Advancing computer performance is like water slowly flooding the landscape. A half century ago it began to drown the lowlands, driving out human calculators and record clerks, but leaving most of us dry. Now the flood has reached the foothills, and our outposts there are contemplating retreat. We feel safe on our peaks, but, at the present rate, those too will be submerged within another half century. I propose that we build Arks as that day nears, and adopt a seafaring life! For now, though, we must rely on our representatives in the lowlands to tell us what water is really like.
– Hans Moravec
and:
The advent of strong AI is the most important transformation this century will see. Indeed, it’s comparable in importance to the advent of biology itself. It will mean that a creation of biology has finally mastered its own intelligence and discovered means to overcome its limitations. Once the principles of operation of human intelligence are understood, expanding its abilities will be conducted by human scientists and engineers whose own biological intelligence will have been greatly amplified through an intimate merger with nonbiological intelligence. Over time, the nonbiological portion will predominate.
Kurzweil spends hundreds of pages establishing dozens of examples that support his ideas, but now you have a better idea of his underlying assumptions.
Sit down. Shut up. (I’ve done this before — and some audiences actually laughed.)
Brian Beatty in Minnesota Playlist on how and why he does what he does:
Poetry entered my stand-up sets because I wanted to up the “snob” factor of my stage persona, to increase the comedic tension.
Just so we’re clear, you’ve all seen the original, right?
Last night, Amanda posted this, and Joel pointed out it was a riff on Andy Samberg’s rap crew spoof The Lonely Island. Three more Lonely Island videos after the jump.
from the comments
I imagine a vagina made up in eastern Washington has a different look and smell to one made outside New Orleans.
from the comments
At bean salad’ll stay like it is in the compost pile while all the rest goes dirt vagina.
He said, Phoenix
Twitter spam name
Fernandey Stammer
“I Just Had Sex”
The jam of the Summer has arrived.
via Ned Hepburn.
photo out of context
church on the hillside
The dome of Immaculate Heart of Mary on Polish Hill, and a closed warehouse.
Everything Tracy Jordan Said Season 5
Oh no! I missed it. Do it again:
Episode 3
-That’s Tracy Jordan spelled backwards.
-Don’t worry about it, Jacky D, I’m on it. Call Griz. I need someone around me who’s not just a yes man.
-So, what do we want to see on TV? I personally love cop shows. I can’t wait for Law and Order to start back up.
-Why? It was a tent pole. A tent pole!
-I’d like to see that incorporated in to your re-write. OK, meeting over.
-The only thing that worked in the read through was the dog.
-Good, and there’s a lot of buzz. Can you hear it, too? Or is my tinnitus acting up. Hey, that food is for DotCom Productions only. TGS’s food is backstage.
-Yo, Jacky D. I had dinner with Don Imus last night. He told the following joke…
-And thank you, Representative. What you’re doing is very important. I can assure you that NBC is committed to making diversity, a priority. Then just walk away, and don’t try to kiss her, Tracy. And don’t say that last part.
-I’ll kill you, white devil.
-I’m cutting that fat cracker’s head off.
-Yes! Great fix, Griz.
from the archives: October 15, 2008
The Flaming Squirrel: A Mixological Remembrance:
The Flaming Squirrel
3 oz Canadian whiskey
1 oz Frangelico hazelnut liqueur
2 dashes orange bitters
2 dashes Angostura bitters
overproof rum and orange peel for garnishCombine whiskey (for fuzzy warmth), Frangelico (for general nuttiness) and bitters (for the tragedy of existence, &c.) in a rocks glass. Stir. Dip a wide slice of orange zest in overproof rum. Ignite over glass–when you burn your fingers, don’t come crying to me. Drop flaming zest into glass; garnish appropriately–orange peel squirrel tail charred under the broiler, mine.
Procure eye dropper. “And one for my little homie…”
National Jukebox
The National Jukebox debuts, featuring more than 10,000 78rpm disc sides issued by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1900 and 1925.
GET OUT OF OUR WAY!
Precession of the Equinoxes
The thing that caused everyone to freak out because their astrological signs had changed is one of the more fascinating stories in the history of intellectual evolution. That thing is called precession of the equinoxes, and precession is one of those phenomena that is simultaneously invisible and obvious, observable and hidden.
Let’s start with the technicalities and move to the history of it.
In astronomy, axial precession is a gravity-induced, slow and continuous change in the orientation of an astronomical body’s rotational axis. In particular, it refers to the gradual shift in the orientation of Earth’s axis of rotation, which, like a wobbling top, traces out a pair of cones joined at their apices in a cycle of approximately 26,000 years. The term “precession” typically refers only to this largest secular motion; other changes in the alignment of Earth’s axis — nutation and polar motion — are much smaller in magnitude.
So, precession is essentially the planetary equivalent of the wobble in a top as it spins.
If you carve the horizon into twelve roughly equivalent sections, each year, at the equinoxes, the sun will appear to rise in one and set in its opposite. Because of the wobble in the axis of the earth, the section of the sky the sun appears to rise and set in will shift very slowly over a period of roughly 2,160 years. This is the basis of astrology, as various civilizations applied meaning to the constellations they saw in each section. More interestingly, I think, our tracking of it appears to be the basis of astronomy.
To begin to notice that tracking takes time. To fully understand the cycle, and be able to project it forwards and backwards, to mark the passage of time in the relative movement of the stars, would take hundreds, if not thousands, of years — observation, measurement, notation. Once a culture had an awareness of that pattern, no matter on what scale, it could begin to find a place for itself, and make a story out of it, and because we are human, of course, that is what we did.
If you are interested in this subject, and are comfortable with an approach equal parts academic and poetic, you might enjoy Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechen’s Hamlet’s Mill. It shows glimpses of precession’s possible influence throughout the history of art, an astronomical code for our place in the universe embedded in language.
