Man, even in a case, is the measure of all things. Or as Lila insinuated, you cannot be wrong.
At 05:57 PM 2/4/2009, you wrote:
>Marsha: >QUESTION EVERYTHING!!! > >[Krimel] >Not to belabor the point but that is EXACTLY what scientists do. mel: Except when grant money is at stake and then they become...flexible. Marsha: I question that. That is an ideal. Do you even read a newspaper??? [Case] A newspaper? I remember newspapers... There I am in 1976. It's Uncle Sam's birthday. I'm growing the only goatee I will ever wear To commemorate the occasion. I spend my days talking: To anyone I can find Who has done... Anything, the least bit interesting... Yeah, I remember newspapers... At night I attended public meetings. There were Chairmen and Secretaries, Agendas and Minutes... I had a pad and pen in the hip pocket of flared Levi cords. Whatever I could decode from the deteriorating script in the pad I typed onto newsprint with a manual Underwood. There were scissors and oil cans filled with glue On every flat surface in the newsroom. Narratives were pieced together from shreds of newsprint Bound together with beads of rubber cement I once handed my editor story that was five feet long He took the scroll. Grumbled... Scribbled furiously with his red ink Rolled it up and sent it out for typesetting. Typesetting involved "keypunching" The result was a roll of perforated paper tape. The tape was feed into a player piano But instead of a song it played light Through a font wheel Hammering photons onto sheets of photo paper The paper was scissored, coated with bees wax And stuck onto sheets of paper Lined with "non-reproducible blue" The final "page layout" was taken into a camera So big that you could walked around inside it. There the "layout" was flashed onto Sheet metal covered in silver nitrates. The "plates" were bolted onto rollers Covered with ink and splattered Onto paper fed from spools That had to be replaced by forklifts. By the time my musing on a meeting Or my interview with an itinerant Moonie Arrived at its highest and best use: Catching bird droppings or wrapping fish It had been scribbled, typed, chopped up, reassembled, retyped, punched, photoed, chopped up and re-reassembled etched, inked, Folded and flung... Read by a few over coffee Or before dinner And in the end it all came down to Bird shit and fishheads Thoughts flowed from head to fingers, Were moved and molded thus Pondered on sofas and toilets and >From thence to dust... For a while I worked in a "Bureau" For a "Bureau Chief" Once I was a "stringer" I had to fill a "news hole." The "lead graph" of one of my stories once read something like this: "The smoldering volcano of Eagle Lake politics, erupted in hot charges and fiery accusations at last night's city council meeting." My wife thought, it sounded like porno. At the bureau newsroom there were no higher order transductions of ideas. We type on our Underwoods and glued our stories together. I loved the smell of pools of rubber cement drying into what looked like wads of snot. I would roll them into tiny balls and bounce them on my desk, chain smoking between phone calls to "sources." When a story was written to my satisfaction, I had to type it ++perfectly++ into a "teletype" machine that went "chugga chunk" when you banged on its keys. It produced a printout and sent a telegraph signal to the main office were it "chugga chunked" out on the other end. Somewhere near the "city desk" in the main office newsroom my chunga chunk was added to the chugging from the other bureaus, from the AP and from New York Times, sports wires, Rueters... When you went into the teletype room all that information was spooling onto the floor. It was like you might want to dance but it was hard to pick out a rhythm. All those stories. They spooled-in "chunga chunk" from all over the world. Stories of tragedy and heroism, recipes for slumgullion, box scores, the Dow Jones. My ideas pooled onto the floor, their rhythms dissolving into occasional syncopation with the AP machine across the room. It was intoxicating. It made you want to roll it all up in a ball and bounce it on your desk. It was just as well to work in a bureau away from the frantic transduction of ideas. For a while I worked alone in quiet office on the mezzanine. There were polished wooden railings in a building constructed during the land boom of the '20s. My office door had the name of the newspaper hand-painted on frosted glass. Some days I half expected Peter Lorie to come through that door with an arm load of exotic statuary. At the last paper I worked at, there were still people in the building who knew how to run the linotype machine in the back of the warehouse that housed the composing room and darkroom and the everything else room. I never fully understood how linotype worked but it sounded like a huge typewriter that you had to sit inside and instead of ink and paper you were typing with molten lead. A newspaper is a system for delivering information. After a series of transductions, the final format is ink on paper. Here is a static form of information, whose process of becoming, has changed from lead to light to laser printing. The process of formatting the information has become ever more dynamic. So dynamic in fact that these days the whole idea of unfolding a newspaper just seems quaint. The information it contains is been set free of its earthly bonds. It exists as clouds of zeros and ones; encoded as microscopic patterns of light and shadow, disturbances in magnetic fields and streams of electrons emptying in a well of knowledge that may never be filled but might one day be unplugged. But to get to your questions: I think science began as alchemy and has become alchemy once more. Transducing lead into gold is nothing compared to turning lead into data or transducing dirt into computer chips. I've watched a mulletwrapper shape-shift into liquid crystals. I've seen science fiction plot devices integrated into economic systems. Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Well, I say, "Abracadabra, motherfucker." Look around! Science has given ideas substance; whether they had any before or not. But no I don't read a newspaper. Haven't read one in years... Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
_____________ QUESTION EVERYTHING!!!
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