Category Archives: GeekWorld

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Overview Effect

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Beltane                                                                                              Early Growth Moon

“There have been household gods and household saints and household fairies. I am not sure that there have yet been any factory gods or factory saints or factory fairies. I may be wrong, as I am no commercial expert, but I have not heard of them as yet.”
G.K. Chesterton

The video below, 20 minutes long, came to me via friend and cybermage Bill Schmidt through his daughter, Moira.  I include the two quotes along with it to emphasize a subtle point.  Chesterton was looking anthropomorphically at the locus of fairies, gods and saints, ok as far it goes, but he neglects the much longer tradition of nymphs, dryads, fairies of the woodlands and fields, holy wells, sacred mountains, places of pilgrimage and, most tellingly underlined in this wonderful video, the dynamic, vital oasis in the midst of the vacuum of space:  Earth.

(John Byam Liston Shaw  angel offering the fruits of eden)

We live already, as Bill likes to point out, in paradise.  We are, unfortunately, working hard, very hard, through the godless, saintless and fairyless world of commerce–Chesterton surely had this right–to expel ourselves from paradise.  There is no east of Eden in space.  If we lose this paradise, there is not another for us to inhabit.

“Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears  The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.”   NYT yesterday

I enclose the second, seemingly far out of context, quote which comes from our money manager because it highlights a fall in the prices of copper, platinum and paladium.  This fact, falling commodity prices, rather than science or political will, are the main things that will work in favor of stopping the Polymet mine near the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area and its follow-on mines that await only its successful completion of its environmental impact statements.

(expulsion, Masaccio)

“PolyMet expects to mine copper by late 2015   One day after announcing plans to raise $80 million in cash, officials of PolyMet Mining Corp. on Thursday said they are moving headlong toward permitting and, eventually, construction of Minnesota’s first copper-nickel mine.”  Duluth Tribune

We should not, must not, leave these decisions to the whims of the market.  We must develop the political and personal will to say no.  Hard?  Yes.  Necessary?  Listen to the astronauts and look at the thin layer of atmosphere that is all that protects us from the harsh reality of the space we inhabit.

“Commodities markets. It wasn’t all bad in April: natural gas futures rose 9.0%, cocoa futures gained 9.1%, and wheat futures rose 6.3%. Now for the bad news: gold fell 7.8% last month to an April 30 COMEX close of just $1,474.00. Silver cratered 14.6% in April; copper fell 6.4%, platinum 4.3% and palladium 9.2%”

 

 

OVERVIEW from Planetary Collective on Vimeo.

GeekWorld, Humanities

Why They Lectured In the First Place

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Beltane                                                                             Planting Moon

I have begun reading various books I have collected about Ovid.  In Ovid Recalled, a book I started today, I found an odd piece of random knowledge that really made me stop.

In giving an example of outdated practices that persist in cultures the author, a Cambridge don, used the university lecture.  The lecture began as a work around because texts were not readily available in sufficient quantities, nor were they affordable.  After publishing became commonplace, the rationale for the lecture no longer existed.  My guess is you sat through as many as I did.

Now this made me think about the recent hooplah about massive open online courses or moocs.  One criticism of moocs from various university faculties is that they ruin the interactive nature of–you guessed it–the lecture.  All this reminds us that there is nothing fixed about professors and lectures and classrooms on physical campuses.  It just represents the most convenient to deliver education based on one set of assumptions; that is, gather students physically then disperse them among classrooms.

We can and should rethink all these assumptions.

 

GeekWorld

Minneapolis standoff ends when robot subdues holed-up suspect

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Spring                                                                     Planting Moon

A headline you don’t expect to see, tucked back in the second section:

Minneapolis standoff ends when robot subdues holed-up suspect.

Very Robocop.  Omni Consumer Products (OCP) in Minnesota?  Could find no picture of the device, but here are a two of actual robotics in use by police departments in the U.S.

 

The scene where a suspicious vehicle was discovered on W45th Street near Seventh Avenue in the Times Square section of Manhattan.

 

 

Note that credit.  Formerly local company.  Will it transform into OCP?

 

 

GeekWorld

A Sheet of Light

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Spring                                                         Bloodroot Moon

Here’s a clip from a fascinating interview with Al Worden, command module pilot for Apollo 15*.  The interviewer identifies 7 men, all command module pilots for Apollo missions, as holding (having held) the loneliest job in the world.  Of course, it wasn’t in or on the world, but quite far away from it.  When these men were orbiting the backside of the moon, not only were they over 2,000 miles from their crew members; they were also further away from earth than any other human has ever been.

His description of the stars from there.  That’s what got me.

 

“You were a quarter of a million miles away from home though.

Yes, you’re a long way away but the thing that most impressed me about being in lunar orbit – particularly the times when I was by myself – was that every time I came round the backside of the Moon, I got to a window where I could watch the Earthrise and that was phenomenal. And in addition to that, I got to look at the universe out there with a very different perspective and a very different way than anyone had before.

What I found was that the number of stars was just so immense. In fact I couldn’t pick up individual stars, it was like a sheet of light. I found that fascinating because it changed my ideas about how we think about the Universe.

There are billions of stars out there – the Milky Way galaxy that we’re in contains billions of stars, not just a few. And there are billions of galaxies out there. So what does that tell you about the Universe? That tells you we just don’t think big enough. To my mind that’s the whole purpose of the space programme, to figure out what that’s all about.”

* from NASA Apollo 15 site

Mission Overview

The primary objectives assigned to the Apollo mission were as follows:

  1. to perform selenological inspections, survey and sampling of materials and surface features in a preselected area of the Hadley-Appennius region;
  2. to emplace and activate surface experiments;
  3. to evaluate the capability of the Apollo equipment to provide extended lunar surface stay time; and
  4. to conduct inflight experiments and photographic tasks from lunar orbit.
Dogs, Family, GeekWorld, Third Phase, Travel

I Knew Her Right Away

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Spring                                                                              Bloodroot Moon

Home again, home again.  The dogs greeted me with unusual joy and vigor.  Vega spun round and Gertie jumped up, biting at me to come play.  Tumultuous.  And wonderful.

Kate came into the Loon Cafe and picked me up from the Hiawatha light rail.  She had on blinking ear-rings.  The server at the cafe, before I arrived, had asked her, “Is that how your friend will recognize you?”  It was.  I knew her right away.

She led us through the maze of parking spaces to the truck, not easy in the mammoth commuter ramps that collect cars from the western burbs.

The trip home had no remarkable moments, a good thing for travel.  I did use, for the first time, a bar code boarding pass on my cell phone.  Felt very with it.  You all have probably done it for years, but it was amazing to me.

It’s nice to use the full size key-board and not the 92%, slick metal keys of the netbook.  Having said that, the netbook has been the best single computer purchase I’ve ever made.  It goes everywhere with me when I travel.  It’s compact, picks up wi-fi with ease and has a 92% keyboard, which is why I bought it.  It’s allowed me to post on this blog from as far away as Cape Horn, south of Tierra del Fuego.

 

GeekWorld, Writing

III

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Imbolc                                                              Valentine Moon

Considering a strategy for revision.  How do I utilize the comments, opinions, various thoughts from my beta readers?  Where do I begin?  Do I proceed from front to back or do I manage certain structural issues first?  How much time should I give myself to complete it?  May 1st seems good.  That would give me six weeks accounting for the D.C. trip and beginning work in the garden and with the bees.

OK.  May 1st.  Beltane.  Finish revision III in time for the growing season.  A good time to start full bore on writing Loki’s Children.  And getting that revision in the hands of an agent.  I have a March 30 class on publishing at the Loft, so that should work well with that timing.

Given the time frame, which if you notice I set as I wrote, I can reason backwards to plan.  Review all the comments.  Have done.  Note down all that needs to be done.  Their ideas, my impression of what they mean for Missing, and my ideas sparked by the reader’s impressions, then set to work.

(note, I revised my ideas on revision after I found this handy pyramid.  I’m gonna follow it.)

Make sense to me to deal with structural issues first.  Transitions, movement of the story as regards John and the unmaking–their relative weights and interleaving.  The POV issue is structural, too, in this case.  Finding those areas where the action flags and cutting them out.

After those I can attend to the character development/recognition matters and the map/diverse number of places, plus revamping the action in light of the cuts above.

Finished up my computer upgrade this morning by installing the speakers.  Now I have a Pandora station playing, Early Music.  Nice with the snow falling.

Art and Culture, GeekWorld, Humanities, Media

Collecting

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Imbolc                                                                       Valentine Moon

Tumblr.  Addictive in a sense I don’t fully understand yet.  I’ve selected bloggers on Tumblr, largely where folks post images of one sort or another, who present art.  Over 100 of them at last count.  At any one time only a handful might be posting, so keeping up, or at least staying roughly abreast is doable.  The range of images that folks select is wide, one of  the charms of Tumblr for me, a chance to both get inside people’s heads as they choose images to post and an opportunity to see art that I wouldn’t have found on my own.  In that sense it’s a very eclectic museum.

(folder: architecture)

The addictive part for me is that I’m saving images, image after image, in those files I talked about reorganizing a while back.  Many, many art folders:  art contemporary, art Russia, art Symbolist, artist Blake, artist Matisse.  Cinema and television.  Natural world.  Cities.  War.  Travel.  So on.

Like a squirrel delighted with finding an abundance of acorns, I pluck these images up in my digital cheeks and carry them over to the small holes I’ve dug in my hard drives memory to cache them.  The folders have begun to grow fat with image after image.  Perhaps a hundred images or more in some instances.

(folder, art photography.  the pope’s apartment the night before his announcement about his retirement.)

My question is, why am I doing this?  Part of it is a desire to see again striking images or historically significant images or funny images or moving images.  That’s true, but mostly, like the squirrel, I dig the hole, then go on to dig another hole, often forgetting the one I dug before.  This is what oak trees count on.  How oak forests grow.  Of course, I know where all my folders are and I can open them whenever I want, but my point is that I’m more engaged in stuffing them full than utilizing them.

Utilizing them for what?  My first approach to answering this question will come on Thursday when I start reading the catalog for the Pre-Raphaelite show at the National Gallery.  I have a folder filled with Pre-Raphaelite art and will find images, I imagine, of most of the pieces in the show.  Perhaps I’ll curate them myself, re-organize them in different ways, trying to emphasize different aspects of this 19c phenomenon.  Perhaps I’ll use the images for comparison, for tracing the history of certain themes and techniques.  Or, I might just open the folder and look at them, one after the other, taking in their color, their subject matter.

(folder History England.  a 1920 poster for the tube.)

This is an activity only possible with the internet and large hard drives.  And a lot of time.  It feels important; that’s why I’m writing about it.  But why?  No idea.

GeekWorld, Great Work

Look. Up in the sky…

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Imbolc                                                                  Valentine Moon

A big day for Asteroid 2012 DA14, but an even bigger one for the Chelyabinsk fireball.  Must have a great PR agent.  Timing its fiery entrance as space shuttle sized DA14 passed by ensured the Chelyabinsk meteor, “only” the size of an SUV according to an MIT scientist, a forever memory in the hearts of all of us interested in astronomical phenomenon.

(Asteroid 2012 DA14, seen from the Gingin Observatory in Australia. Image via NASA.)

I heard a New York Times reporter ask the same scientist from MIT if Siberia attracted these kind of events, referencing, of course, the Tunguska event in 1908 that flattened an area of the taiga roughly 1,000 square miles in area.  No, he said.  Coincidence.

When asked about the how much we should be concerned about an extinction level event, the same scientist, dodged the question.  Didn’t make me feel secure.  Here’s a link to the article and the video interview.

 

Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work, Holidays, Our Land and Home

Pruning Weather

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Imbolc                                                                   Valentine Moon

Last of the furnace vendors.  Get your hot one, right here!  Red hot and cozy!  Discounted. Tax credited.  Rebate worthy.

We’ve made a decision.  We’ll go with Centerpoint, a dual-stage, variable speed motor operating at 95% or 96.5% efficiency.  A bit more with these options but they optimize the conservation of both natural gas and electricity.  Once we get it in that’s one less matter we’ll have to worry about over the next few years.  A good thing.

After Brad left, an interesting guy, knowledgeable about food as a former catering manager for Lunds, we put on our winter gear.  I got out the Sorel’s and clapped my work gloves on, wool hat and down vest.  Kate got ready.  She has less stringent requirements for work in the cold than I do.

Outside in the deep snow, bright with a clear day’s sun, we first cut back to the ground all the raspberries.  In clearing the snow with a coal shovel, I discovered that I could clear snow and prune in the same motion.  Kate went in afterward and cleaned up.

When I finished in the raspberries, I went to the tangle of grapevines that have grown on our front 6-foot chain link fence.  Originally a Celt (our first and dearest Irish Wolfhound) escape prevent barrier, it now serves mainly to give us an ample supply of wild grapes in the fall thanks to the volunteer vines.  Last summer though there were few grapes.

Lots of leaves and vine, not many fruit.  We’d never pruned it before, or if we did, it was a while ago, so it had overgrown.  I whacked away at the orchard side today;  I’ll finish it tomorrow.  Kate got after the bittersweet.  It was a good day for this work.

Back inside I had a snack of bacon and blue cheese with chestnut flower honey, the first installment in my birthday gift, a monthly specialty bacon club.  How cool is that?  Thanks, Kate.

Asia, GeekWorld, Latin, Literature, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Just Stuff

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Imbolc                                                                                 New (Valentine) Moon

The images, each moved from their numbered folders into new folders named for the organizational scheme that moved me at the moment, have a new home.  I’ve checked the prior machine for missing images, found a few and they’ll get added in tomorrow, but in essence the big image reorganization, self-inflicted, is over.

(Valkyrie (1908) by Stephan Sinding located in Churchill Park, Copenhagen, Denmark)

On March 1st I’m going to hit Missing with my third revision.  I’m hoping this one puts me close to finished that I can begin shopping it to agents.  I think it will, but until it’s done, I won’t know.  Research for Loki’s Children goes well, too. I’m almost done with all the Eddas, then I’ll go back over them again, looking at my notes and underlining, taking pieces here and there that I’ll use.

With the image reorganization I’ve felt a bit off my game this last week, but I’m back now.  Time to step up again.

Each day, though, I have (for the most part) finished a sentence of Jason and Medea.  That doesn’t sound like a very ambitious rate, but by the time a sentence is done, which can be between 2 and 14 lines long, I’m ready to put away the Lewis and Short, the Wheeler and the Anderson, close Perseus and go upstairs.  It’s a pace that, for now, allows me to work at an intense level, get work done steadily and yet allows enough time to do a quality job.

Been reading Civil Servant’s Notebook by Wang Xiaofang.  Author of 13 novels, all about Chinese bureaucracy, this is his first translated into English.  Published by Penguin.  Of all the material I’ve read on China of late this one seems to have the most insight into contemporary China.  Wang gives a satirical perspective on life inside municipal government, but he also strips the veins of a culture deep with history and short on ethical guidance.  I’ve read elsewhere of a moral aimlessness that inflicts contemporary China, but I was never able to put my finger on it until reading Civil Servant’s Notebook.  I don’t have it down here with me now, but tomorrow I’ll quote a few lines from it to show you what I mean.