Recent Posts
WHAT TO DO WITH LEFT OVER TOILET PAPER ROLLS? JUNIOR JACQUET of France has an answer that works for him. He recycles and reuses these cardboard rolls into a legion of odd characters with contorted faces. His process is simple: Jacquet paints—then pushes and pulls the cardboard roll, slowly revealing his next character.
link: accidental mysteries: Face Sculptures
Stuart Clark writes:
EACH clear night when the moon is high in the sky, a group of astronomers in New Mexico take aim at our celestial neighbour and blast it repeatedly with pulses of light from a powerful laser. They target suitcase-sized reflectors left on the lunar surface by the Apollo 11, 14 and 15 missions, as well as by two Russian landers.
Out of every 300 quadrillion (1015) photons that are sent to the moon, about five find their way back. The rest are lost to our atmosphere, or miss the lunar reflectors altogether.
From this small catch, the team can assess the movement of the moon to an accuracy of a millimetre or two - a measurement so precise that it has the potential to show up any cracks in Einstein's general theory of relativity. If that's what it does, this lunar laser-ranging experiment will become Apollo's greatest scientific legacy.
Lunar laser ranging has a long history. "I wasn't even born when the first reflectors were left on the moon," says 39-year-old Tom Murphy from the University of California, San Diego, who heads the experiment at the Apache Point Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico.
In the mid-1960s, when NASA asked for suggestions for experiments that could be carried out on the moon, laser ranging was mooted but no one really knew what to do with it. There was a suggestion to look for gradual changes in Newton's gravitational constant, but this would have meant running the experiment for over 20 years - something no one was prepared to commit to. Then a young researcher called Ken Nordtvedt had an idea.
Through a fiendish piece of mathematics, he showed that, with just a few years' worth of data, lunar laser ranging could be used to test a cornerstone of general relativity known as the equivalence principle. It starts from the idea that a body has two kinds of mass. The first, called gravitational mass, is the mass that produces and feels the pull of gravity. The second is inertial mass, which describes how hard it is to move an object out of its current state of motion - or lack of it. The equivalence principle asserts that the two are exactly equal.
The equivalence principle holds in general relativity, but in the mid-1960s, a rival theory developed by American physicists Carl Brans and Robert Dicke was gaining ground. By postulating a fifth force of nature, the Brans-Dicke theory of gravitation broke the equivalence principle and predicted a 13-metre perturbation in the moon's orbit. Nordtvedt showed that analysing light signals reflecting from the moon could prove the existence of such a disturbance.
continue at the link: Apollo special: Mirrors on the moon - space - 12 July 2009 - New Scientist
In your 1976 essay “Is Gender Necessary?,” you refer to Genly Ai as “conventional” and “stuffy.” There has been some debate in the Book Club over Ai’s stereotyping of Estraven as female when he seems frail or vulnerable. Do you consider Ai a sexist?
Oh, yes. Not a mean one. Not a misogynist. He just has accepted and identified with his society’s definition of women as weaker than men, more devious, less courageous, etc.—physically and intellectually inferior. This gender prejudice has existed for so many thousands of years in so many different societies that I had no hesitation in carrying it on into the future.
In 1968, I don’t think anybody could have imagined an Earthman feeling at home with and welcoming the alien gender situation of Gethen. I did think about sending an Earthwoman there—and she would have reacted very differently from Genly...
But science fiction in 1968 wasn’t about women. It was about men. It was a man’s world. I felt I was taking a huge risk as it was, presenting a largely male readership with these weirdly re-gendered people. I thought the guys would hate it.
I was wrong. They liked it fine. It was the feminists who gave me a hard time about it for years. They wanted me to have been braver. I guess I wish I had been. But I did the best I knew how to do. And Genly does learn a lot!
Early on, Genly Ai is casually, almost incidentally, identified as black. He appears to have come from an enlightened version of Earth, where race is no longer a source of division—although gender still is. Did you believe, while writing the book, that racial difference would be an easier barrier for society to overcome than gender? If so, four decades after the book’s publication, do you still think this is true?
In the long run, yes, I think it’s true. I’ve seen it happening, too slowly, but happening, in my lifetime.
I don’t see the very deep prejudice of male superiority lessening nearly as much; it has even been reconfirmed when fundamentalists of various religions re-enforce it.
But Genly’s skin color was not a prediction, it was a bit of deliberate activism. Most readers of science fiction (then and now) are white. Science-fictional characters, then, were white (and nothing said about it.)
So, my evil activist plot: Let your hero have a dark skin, but don’t say anything about it, until the reader is used to identifying with that person, and then suddenly realizes, Hey, I’m not white!...But what do you know?—I’m still human!
This sneaky approach has paid off recently for me personally, in some very touching letters from people of color who wanted me to know that my books (particularly the Earthsea series) were the very first s.f. or fantasy novels from which they did not feel deliberately and hatefully excluded: This World for Whites Only.
Voting has ended in Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region with the opposition complaining of irregularities.
The polls closed at 7pm (16:00GMT) on Saturday, after electoral officials extended voting by an hour to accomodate residents that had flocked to cast their ballots in the local presidential and parliamentary elections.
"We ... decided to extend voting by one hour because we received complaints from some voters because they could not find their names on voting lists," Hamdia al-Husseini, the head of the region's electoral department, said.
Final results are not expected for several days as ballots must be collected in Irbil, the regional capital, before being flown to Baghdad to be counted.
Al Jazeera's Hoda Abdel Hamid, reporting from Irbil, said observers at polling stations across the region maintained that voting took place smoothly for the most part.
But just before the polls closed, the region's main opposition group told Al Jazeera that their observers had witnessed instances of fraud in some areas.
A spokesman for the Change List, the main opposition party, said fraud was especially "significant" in the extended hour of voting.
link: Al Jazeera English - Middle East - Iraqi Kurd vote ends in acrimony
March 4, 1901. "President William McKinley second inaugural parade, Pennsylvania Avenue." Brady-Handy Collection glass negative.
link: Inaugural Umbrellas: 1901 | Shorpy Photo Archive
Mr. Schrefer, author of “Hack the SAT,” occasionally takes the exam in the service of his test-prep business. On this sitting, he set out to understand how the College Board would grade an essay that was morally repugnant yet had excellent structure, language and syntax.
In thoughtful and concise language, he developed over 20 minutes the most “monstrous argument” he could imagine. He praised the intellectual courage of the Nazis — some of the “brightest thinkers” of our time. Their genius, he noted, was in recognizing that not “everyone has the right to the same opportunities, or the right to exist at all.” He concluded that only by “safeguarding racial stratification and genetic superiority can true and ambitious progress be made.”
Top scores go to the essay that “effectively and insightfully develops a point of view on the issue and demonstrates outstanding critical thinking, using clearly appropriate examples, reasons, and other evidence to support its position.” Guidelines say nothing about the quality of the point of view taken.
One of the two judges gave Mr. Schrefer a 5, and the other a perfect score of 6.
link: Blackboard - Test Prep - Just Following Orders - An Evil Essay - NYTimes.com
The ousted president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, made his second symbolic trip in two days to this remote post along the border with Honduras on Saturday, defying calls from foreign leaders to avoid any moves that might provoke violence in his politically polarized country.
Meanwhile, in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, the Honduran armed forces issued a communiqué indicating that they would not stand in the way of an agreement to return him to power.
The communiqué, posted on the Honduran Armed Forces Web site, endorsed the so-called San José Accord that was forged in Costa Rica by delegates representing President Zelaya and the man who heads the de facto Honduran government, Roberto Micheletti.
The accord, prepared by the mediator of the talks, President Óscar Arias of Costa Rica, and supported by most governments in the hemisphere, would allow Mr. Zelaya to return as president, although with significantly limited executive powers. Mr. Micheletti has steadfastly rejected Mr. Zelaya’s return as president.
link: Standoff Continues at Border of Honduras - NYTimes.com
