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Showing posts from February, 2012

Our Sky Tonight via Star Chart

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This was the sky off our front porch tonight at 8:43 pm. It appears to be a majestic alignment of almost every planet, partially obstructed by the curve of the Earth. Above our horizon is a crescent Moon, along with Venus, and Jupiter . This was a special treat to behold in itself. Jennifer and I stood out in a chilly evening breeze to admire the formation in the vividly clear night sky, which prompted me to fire-up Star Chart on my iPad. This revealed a wider juxtaposition . Below the horizon was the Sun, of course, which is the cause of the "lens-flare effect" in this view of my Star Chart app. Accompanying the Sun was a comparatively nearby Mercury with a far more distant Uranus above it (but still below the horizon looking west off my porch). Neptune was below the Sun. Mars and Saturn were the only planets missing from this view - and Pluto as well, but it is no longer considered a planet. Of course, the alignment itself was merely our perspective. In reality

A bigger, fatter Now?

This interesting factoid was in yesterday's Wall Street Journal : "If every image made and every word written from the earliest stirring of civilization to the year 2003 were converted to digital information, the total would come to five exabytes. An exabyte is one quintillion bytes, or one billion gigabytes—or just think of it as the number one followed by 18 zeros. That's a lot of digital data, but it's nothing compared with what happened from 2003 through 2010: We created five exabytes of digital information every two days . Get ready for what's coming: By next year, we'll be producing five exabytes every 10 minutes . How much information is that? The total for 2010 of 912 exabytes is the equivalent of 18 times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written. The world is not just changing, and the change is not just accelerating; the rate of the acceleration of change is itself accelerating." As you may know I am rather fascinated wit

A Speech Unsurpassed

I have recently undertaken the project of backing up and organizing all my assorted audio file CD/DVD collection on to an external hard drive. In the process of going through some older stuff I have on CD I came across Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a Dream” speech. The speech lasts a bit under 17 minutes; and I have listened to it a couple of times over the past few weeks. February is Black History Month so the time was rather auspicious that I would rediscover this audio file after so many years. February is also the month that I place the Stars and Bars flag out on my front porch. The first elected Confederate Congress met in Richmond, Virginia on February 18, 1862, some 150 years ago this past Saturday. I’ll let my readers struggle with the apparent contradiction between my admiration for Dr. King’s speech and my lifelong appreciation for the failed Southern Confederacy . There is no incongruity in my mind. Anyway, as I listened to Dr. King’s speech a couple of things occ

J.M.W. Turner

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Norham Castle , Sunrise. (circa 1845) Last weekend was extremely windy and cold. So, Jennifer and I spent much of the time indoors, piddling with this and that. I was reading the introduction to one of my books on Impressionism and noted in particular the influence of earlier painters on the movement. One heavyweight artist that stood out to me was Joseph Mallford William Turner . But, the book I was reading only had one painting of his. I recognized the work, however, as a piece I had seen many years ago, just after college, when a Turner exhibit came to the University museum. This motivated me to fire up my iPad and go the terrific app, Art Authority , to see what was contained there on Turner's work. There are 127 Turner paintings in Art Authority. Jennifer and I both enjoyed looking at them, spending more time on some of the ones presented in this post. Jennifer was particularly taken with Turner's precise titles for his paintings, mostly watercolors - the mediu

The Age of Social Catastrophe

I have posted several times on my interest in the Eastern Front of World War II . There was never anything like it in terms of sheer numbers of dead and prevalence of destruction in human history. But, Robert Gellately succeeds in placing this appalling war unto itself in a larger context with his work Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler . Originally published in 2007, the book just now came around in my reading queue. Much of what it contains I already knew from other readings through the years. But, particularly where Lenin is concerned, the book taught me some new things and certainly it transforms the Eastern Front from a thing upon itself into something within wider social forces at work in Russia and Germany since the end of World War I, leaving the East Front tragedy as the horrific exclamation point at the end of a long, atrocious sentence in the twisted narrative of human history. There is very little in my personal library about Vladimir Lenin . His political life is examined with a

We Are Hosed

Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke spoke before House Budget Committee today regarding our fragile economic recovery and its relationship to the growing US debt situation. While he sees an improving economy , Bernanke is simultaneously worried about the growth of public debt and the role of the government in guiding the economic recovery. What Bernanke is recommending is a classic Keynesian approach to economically sluggish times. Unfortunately, there are signs that the Keynesian model could be wrong and even harmful . Fundamentally, in a high-debt environment Keynesian economics, the dominant economic theory at work in the world today, inevitably leads to one economic bubble after another . Reading my iPad last night I came across a couple of current pieces on various economic issues. The best one is written by respected investment analyst Bill Gross . He does not mince words. “A 30-50 year virtuous cycle of credit expansion which has produced outsize paranormal returns for fina