. In the unfinished attic of my parents’ house — unfinished because the most important thing after the incendiary bomb had struck 80 years ago, on February 4, 1944, was to put a roof back on — I found boxes with unpacked things, an old stroller, Mickey Mouse cartoons, illustrated children’s books and magazines from the … Continue reading
from THE FREE PRESS, Dec 4, 2023 . It’s been all over the local news: Fergie Chambers, self-styled left-wing revolutionary and heir of a billionaire, is using his $250M family payout to establish a commune in Alford, in the town of Great Barrington. He has bought land some place on East Road, and set up … Continue reading
. The other day, in Manhattan, I noticed a remarkable proliferation of a statement welded onto gigantic steel plates used to cover holes on the street, the ones that go perplank! when a car runs over it. Here are only a few examples of it. The statement is a simple word, TRIUMPH. Nowadays, our tired … Continue reading
. I didn’t want to make a lot of fuss about it, but earlier this year I found two iron butterflies. The first one in particular is recognizable by its shape, and by the rebar that is popping out of the concrete, reminiscent of the strange dragon-like patterns on the original album of our friends … Continue reading
. Walking up and down on Rowe Road the other day, on a cold day — but Rowe Road is always sheltered from wind — I saw patterns everywhere, and this is the photo journal from that day. . . .
“North America prior to illegal immigration” – a map I found on Mastodon “Australia prior to illegal immigration” – Connection And Wellbeing Australia (CAWA PTY LTD) 2016 Three recent news items attracted my attention: The first one was a map of North America with its native peoples in 1491, “prior to illegal immigration” — … Continue reading
. I joined Bluesky on invitation of Karolin Luger. Found many people interested in cryo-EM in the first two days.
https://www.vangeline.com/research . Human experience and inventiveness have no limits. I recently discovered this preprint (title, authors and abstract pasted below) as I was browsing biorxix, the archive of biology-related preprints, and with it I learned about the existence of Butoh dance in Japan and elsewhere, including the New York Butoh Institute in Manhattan. So, it … Continue reading
. I wrote a poem entitled “How Do I Feel?” during the first US war against Iraq, under George W. Bush. I still remember the feeling of outrage and hopelessness at peace gatherings with friends in an Albany church that had hosted many such gatherings before. I also remember feeling something seemingly impossible: a real … Continue reading
. We are all flooded by AI-related messages. There is no conference where the subject of AI is not elevated to a panel discussion. Like lemmings, we jump over the cliff of rational accountability. The experts who created chatGPT and similar contraptions of generative AI recoil from their Frankenstein products, but it is apparently too … Continue reading
. Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) said that he was reversing his opposition to banning military-style rifles after 18 people were killed in a mass shooting on Wednesday in his hometown of Lewiston, Maine. (Rolling Stones, October 2023) . Susan Collins Here are the statements of this nitwit, one without and one with my running commentary. Of course, … Continue reading
. . After days and days of staying home, because of a nasty cold, this was my first walk outside in Riverside Park. Here we look south with the New Jersey skyline and the majestic Hudson river — Muh-he-kun-ne-tuk, or the “river that flows two ways,” as the Mohicans called it when they were still … Continue reading
. In my March 2022 post Falling Man, I contemplated on the tension between art and human suffering; how art may ignore suffering or even exploit it. Here Auden’s poem “Museé des Beaux Arts” brought out the conflict in sharp contour with sarcasm and biting wit. Recall that the poem was inspired by that famous … Continue reading
. Beautiful brass, polished by 10,000 shoes stepping over it every day. I’m told it signifies the location of subterranean pipes. Water? Gas? Sewage? What started as a simple interdiction of smoking at this particular point has become a watered-down Maybe-you-can-I-don’t-care-if-you-do. Wait for another year of abuse of the artwork by pedestrians, and smoking is … Continue reading
. As you all, I have longed to see the mugshot of the great dissembler. What I imagined was that it would be posted on billboards across the country by people who share our collective sigh, that we would see thousands of bumper stickers mocking and deriding the man we so despise. Instead he has … Continue reading
. . It is rare that we get a rush of recognition of the past as a vivid spectacle played by fellow humans, but this is what happens when you are confronted with the snapshots preserved in the volcanic ashes of Pompeji and the volcanic sludge descending on Herculaeum in 79 AD. (I was … Continue reading
. I’ve been reading a book, “Semantic Antics,” by Sol Steinmetz, that traces the change of meanings for a number of interesting English words from as early as 800 AC to the present time. Amazing, for instance, to learn that a word like “nice” originally had a meaning that was opposite to its current one. … Continue reading
. . Germanna is a curious word, a concatenation of “Germany” and “Anna” — Queen Anne. It refers to the name of a colony of immigrants from Germany — all iron miners and smelters with their families — in Virginia. We are talking the beginning of the 18th century, and all these immigrants came from … Continue reading
. . . . Each year, the Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting brings close to 600 young scientists from all over the world together with Nobel laureates for a week of talks and informal gatherings. I showed above slide after my science talk on June 27, telling the young scientists that apart from science I do … Continue reading
