Interview with author Colin Wilson at The Argotist Online
Interview with author Colin Wilson at The Argotist Online: http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Wilson%20interview.htm
Poems by others: Paul Klee, The retrospective view . . .
The retrospective view at the end of the year should perhaps be taken more seriously than before. It's not such a harmless pass-time to bring children into the world. Bluish across the horizon, phosphorescing sheet-lightning. I, as actor, with folded arms at the centre of the circle: 'Let it lightning!' The pose, meanwhile, didn't last long. One becomes in the course of one day, for a while, a bit larger, and then a bit smaller again. Something of the spirit of Joseph the carpenter is also appropriate to such a small-scale patriarch. Something of the sublimity, something of the pretension, something of the bizarre, something of the spiritual, all lying under lock and key. --Paul Klee tr. Harriet Watts in Three Painter-Poets: Arp/Schwitters/Klee [Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1974] Hal Halvard Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard http://entropyandme.blogspot.com http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com http://www.hamiltonstone.org
Java Bean Salad :: Xanax Pop, by Lewis LaCook
Java Beans is a component architecture for Java. It's finally a little later. Winter hits us strangely here on the Black River, green and snaked with disease. Everyone's coughing as they wait in line for the guillotine. My quills adrift in liquors distilled from everything else. I'd gladly trade my foreground with your background, if only a little later you'd hold me as I shook the rain from my head. Rolling off the hot tin roof, I'm a fool to believe that subclassing the atmosphere and parsing the distances between myself and other people will ever stop me from eating the centers from everyone I love. http://xanaxpop.lewislacook.org
How Do You Paint a Veil?
How Do You Paint a Veil?* Tell the flowers To eat everything on their plate. They improve greatly upon acquaintance With their dancing. They're always on time. Whatever you imagine Can be improved. Tom Savage 12/20/06 *Written while watching The Painted Veil, a movie by John Curran based on a novel by Somerset Maugham __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
Kotowaza 4
The parasite hesitates on the third helping. [fr. Kotowaza No Izumi (Fountain of Japanese Proverbs by Taiji Takashima) Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1981]
NASA Mars Team Teaches Old Rovers New Tricks to Kick Off Year Four
MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE JET PROPULSION LABORATORY CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011 http://www.jpl.nasa.gov Guy Webster (818) 354-6278 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. News Release: 2006-152 December 28, 2006 NASA Mars Team Teaches Old Rovers New Tricks to Kick Off Year Four NASA's twin Mars rovers, nearing the third anniversary of their landings, are getting smarter as they get older. The unexpected longevity of Spirit and Opportunity is giving the space agency a chance to field-test on Mars some new capabilities useful both to these missions and future rovers. Spirit will begin its fourth year on Mars on Jan. 3 (PST); Opportunity on Jan. 24. In addition to their continuing scientific observations, they are now testing four new skills included in revised flight software uploaded to their onboard computers. One of the new capabilities enables spacecraft to examine images and recognize certain types of features. It is based on software developed for NASA's Space Technology 6 thinking spacecraft. Spirit has photographed dozens of dusty whirlwinds in action, and both rovers have photographed clouds. Until now, however, scientists on Earth have had to sift through many transmitted images from Mars to find those few. With the new intelligence boost, the rovers can recognize dust devils or clouds and select only the relevant parts of those images to send back to Earth. This increased efficiency will free up more communication time for additional scientific investigations. To recognize dust devils, the new software looks for changes from one image to the next, taken a few seconds apart, of the same field of view. To find clouds, it looks for non-uniform features in the portion of an image it recognizes as the sky. Another new feature, called visual target tracking, enables a rover to keep recognizing a designated landscape feature as the rover moves. Khaled Ali of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., flight software team leader for Spirit and Opportunity, said, The rover keeps updating its template of what the feature looks like. It may be a rock that looks bigger as the rover approaches it, or maybe the shape looks different from a different angle, but the rover still knows it's the same rock. Visual target tracking can be combined with a third new feature -- autonomy in calculating where it is safe to reach out with the contact tools on the rover's robotic arm. The combination gives Spirit and Opportunity a capability called go and touch, which is yet to be tested on Mars. So far in the mission, whenever a rover has driven to a new location, the crew on Earth has had to evaluate images of the new location to decide where the rover could place its contact instruments on a subsequent day. After the new software has been tested and validated, the crew will have the option of letting a rover choose an arm target for itself the same day it drives to a new location. The new software also improves the autonomy of each rover for navigating away from hazards by building better maps of their surroundings than they have done previously. This new capability was developed by Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, and JPL. Before this, the rovers could only think one step ahead about getting around an obstacle, said JPL's Dr. John Callas, project manager for the Mars Exploration Rovers. If they encountered an obstacle or hazard, they'd back off one step and try a different direction, and if that direction didn't work they'd try another, then another. And sometimes the rover could not find a solution. With this new capability, the rover will be smarter about navigating in complex terrain, thinking several steps ahead. It could back out of a dead-end cul-de-sac. It could even find its way through a maze. This is the most comprehensive of four revisions to the rovers' flight software since launch. One new version was uplinked during the cruise to Mars, and the rovers have switched to upgraded versions twice since their January 2004 landings. Callas said, These rovers are a great resource for testing software that could be useful to future Mars missions without sacrificing our own continuing mission of exploration. This new software will be a baseline for development of flight software for Mars Science Laboratory, but it's also helpful in operating Spirit and Opportunity. NASA's Mars Science Laboratory is a next-generation Mars rover in development for planned launch in 2009. Spirit and Opportunity have worked on Mars for nearly 12 times as long as their originally planned prime missions of 90 Martian days. Spirit has driven about 6.9 kilometers (4.3 miles); Opportunity has driven about 9.8 kilometers (6.1 miles). Spirit has returned more
Ten Good Things About 2006
Let's Toast to Ten Good Things About 2006 By Medea Benjamin December 28, 2006, CommonDreams.org http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1228-28.htm As we close this year on the low of a devastating conflict in Iraq and a President contemplating sending yet more troops to fight and die in an unwinnable war, let us not forget that it was a year of many positive gains for the progressive movement. Here are just ten. 1. First, of course, is the November elections, when voters gave Repubicans an 'electoral thumpin. From California's Jerry McNerney to Ohio's Sherrod Brown to Minnesota's Keith Ellison-Democrats all over the country won elections by slamming Bush's war. The collapse of one-party rule in Washington reflected a spectacular repudiation of George Bush and handed Congress a mandate to get out of Iraq. 2. Latino communities throughout the United States took center stage in the spring of 2006, putting May Day back on the map as a day of grassroots mobilizing. From high school students to union members to community organizers, the spirit and energy of millions of immigrants demanding to be treated with dignity and respect took the nation by surprise. Immigrants not only carved out new political space, but in the age of e- activism, they breathed new life into the importance of 'street heat.' 3. After decades of dictating the rules of the global economy, World Trade Organization talks fell flat on their face in 2006. Activists the world over celebrated its collapse after years of work to sink this titanic tool of empire. The work to derail corporate-dominated trade policies is far from over, with bilateral free trade agreements taking the place of the WTO. But the WTO and its model of globalization have been exposed as a dismal failure and opposition continues to grow worldwide. 4. George Bush opened 2006 with a State of the Union Address bemoaning our 'addiction to oil'; 86 prominent Evangelicals called global warming a moral issue; Al Gore educated millions with his film, An Inconvenient Truth; and Time magazine declared the Earth is at a tipping point with melting ice, drought, wind, disease, and fires raging out of control. Historians may one day look back on 2006 as the 'tipping- point' year when human societies-including the United States as the major superpower and the major polluter-woke up to the precarious state of our world and decided it was time to find solutions. 5. As a clear indicator of the shift from debating global warming to doing something about it, this year California passed the nation's toughest legislation to curb greenhouse gases. The groundbreaking bill would require the state to cut back its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020-a reduction of approximately 25 percent. A smart politico, Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger saw the green writing on the wall and joined the state's Democrats in setting a new environmental standard for the rest of the nation to follow. 6. In a year when Enron executives were found guilty of cooking the books, Muhammad Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for proving that poor people can be more reliable money managers than rich ones. Yunus' 'microcredit movement' that started out giving small loans to poor Bangladeshis, mostly women, mushroomed into a worldwide movement that has extended small loans to millions of the world's poor. By awarding Yunus the Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee not only recognized the credit-worthiness of the poor but acknowledged that poverty is a threat to peace. As Yunus said in his acceptance speech, 'I believe that putting resources into improving the lives of the poor people is a better strategy [for combating terrorism] than spending it on guns.' 7. While the fighting between Israel and Lebanon left over 1,000 dead, mostly Lebanese, a ceasefire was achieved after only 34 days. When the violence threatened to spiral out of control, the United Nations, the Arab League and individual governments stepped forward to insist on negotiations, to hammer out a ceasefire agreement and to provide international peacekeeping forces to serve as monitors. What could have been a prolonged conflict with devastating consequences for the entire region was halted. The lessons that SHOULD have been learned when the powerful Israeli military was unable to 'win' the conflict through force are that military aggression will not solve the deep-seated problems in the region, and that negotiations and peace processes can work. 8. Speaking of dialogue, Jimmy Carter, with his new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, took on the greatest taboo in US politics: the gross violation of Palestinian rights and the unqualified US government support for the Israeli government. Likening Israel's policies in the Palestinian territories to the racist white rule in South Africa, Carter has raised a firestorm of controversy. But finally, FINALLY, someone with the credentials of a statesman, a peacemaker and a friend of
