In Honor of Memorial Day (Observed)

From our brother comes this beautiful tribute to those fallen that have gone on to rest.

Ev’ry Morn Thereafter

Of sons He passeth over,
Their blood to thank, have we;
For Death they meet, so peaceful,
Our homes and homeland may be;
For in ev’ry field and acre,
A soldier to bury, have we.

Our homes, He passeth over;
For sons to take, hath He,
To war! To hell! So wakeless,
Our dream of freedom may be;
An’ for ev’ry morn thereafter,
A soldier to bury, have we.

Our arms, He passeth over;
An’ fire to cease, pray we!
But hell they pay, so fearless,
Our lives, however, may be;
For in ev’ry ‘bed of roses’,
A soldier to bury, have we.

Of sons, He passeth over,
Their death to thank, have we,
An’ horror they face, so only,
Our hour of darkness may flee;
An’ for ev’ry morn thereafter,
A soldier to bury, have we.


Jacob Mannan
March 2009

In Honor of Memorial Day (Observed)

Verwundeter (Herbst 1916, Bapaume) [Wounded soldier - Autumn 1916, Bapaume], plate 6 from Der Krieg by Otto Dix

From The National Gallery of Australia

Otto Dix seems to cry out through his images: 'Trust me. This is what really happened. I was there.' After volunteering for the German army at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 he was sent to the Western Front and fought as a lance corporal in a field artillery regiment in Champagne, Artois, and the Somme. As an eyewitness to some of the most horrific events of the First World War, he is putting them on the record: these soldiers were actually buried alive; this is what dying from poison gas was like; this is what a dead horse looks like; these were the expressions on the faces of the wounded. This image is reminiscent of plate 69 in Goya's series, The disasters of war, which Goya titled, '"Nothing!" That is what it says'.

More from The National Gallery of Australia

Otto Dix at Wikipedia

In Honor of Memorial Day (Observed)

The Dragon and the Undying

ALL night the flares go up; the Dragon sings
And beats upon the dark with furious wings;
And, stung to rage by his own darting fires,
Reaches with grappling coils from town to town;
He lusts to break the loveliness of spires,
And hurls their martyred music toppling down.

Yet, though the slain are homeless as the breeze,
Vocal are they, like storm-bewilder’d seas.
Their faces are the fair, unshrouded night,
And planets are their eyes, their ageless dreams.
Tenderly stooping earthward from their height,
They wander in the dusk with chanting streams,
And they are dawn-lit trees, with arms up-flung,
To hail the burning heavens they left unsung.

Siegfried Sassoon, 1918

Sassoon has written some of the best war poetry that I have read. Brutal, touching, and so visceral you feel as if you are in the bloody trenches with him, haunted by the ghost of his slain younger brother. You can read more at Bartleby.com. Also, check out Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves. I forget what Memorial Day is all about other than a long weekend until I read this stuff. Let us not forget that though they may fade away into anonymity, and though their names no longer ring, the slain in battle are the very bands that made this human engine we now pilot possible. They were the first modular men, and we salute them.

Does this apply to the Kindle?

The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man.

'Spiritual Laws', Ralph Waldo Emerson

KOBIAN

More about KOBIAN at the consistently cool Pink Tentacle

Does this work for porn too?

Via Everything Is Terrible

Let's get Google on that right away!

From Pink Tentacle:

Can GPS tracking technology prevent a swine flu pandemic? Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications hopes to find out this autumn by testing a mobile phone-based GPS tracking system that constantly monitors each individual’s location and sends text alerts to participants if they cross paths with anyone who is later identified as a flu victim.

The primary purpose of the test, which will involve about 2,000 volunteers in both urban and rural areas, is to verify the precision of GPS tracking technology, estimate the potential costs of operating such a system, and determine whether or not such a system can be put into practical use.

More from Pink Tentacle

Welcome to Death Row

"Welcome to Death Row"
Some Deaths Take Forever (1980)
Bernard Szajner

For Whom the Google Tolls

Nicholas Carr writes:

It's amazing that, before Google came along, any of us was able to survive beyond childhood. At the company's Zeitgeist conference in London yesterday, cofounder Larry Page warned that privacy-protecting restrictions on Google's ability to store personal data were hindering the company from tracking the spread of diseases and hence increasing the risk of mankind's extinction. The less data Google is allowed to store, said Page, the "more likely we all are to die." (This is a particularly sensitive issue for Page, as he's a big backer of the Singularitarians' attempts to secure human immortality.)

More from Nicholas Carr

Ethical Guide for Robot Warriors in the Works

Smart missiles, rolling robots, and flying drones, currently controlled by humans, are being used on the battlefield more every day. But what happens when humans are taken out of the loop, and robots are left to make decisions, like who to kill or what to bomb, on their own?

Ronald Arkin, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, is in the first stages of developing an "ethical governor," a package of software and hardware that tells robots when and what to fire. His book on the subject, "Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots," comes out this month.

He argues not only can robots be programmed to behave more ethically on the battlefield, they may actually be able to respond better than human soldiers.

More at Discovery News

Jed The Humanoid-Grandaddy

Jed the Humanoid - Grandaddy

Last night something pretty bad happened.
We lost a friend,
All shocked and broken,
Shut down, exploded.

JED-E3 is what we first called him.
Then it was "Jed,"
But Jed's system's dead.
Therefore, so's Jed.

We assembled him in the Kitchen,
Made out of this and
Made out of that and
Whatever was at hand.

When we finished Jed we were so proud.
We celebrated,
We congratulated,
At what we'd created.

Jed could run or walk, sing or talk, and
Compile thoughts, and
Solve lots of problems.
We learned so much from him.

A couple years went by and something happened.
We gave Jed less attention.
We had new inventions.
We left for a convention.

Jed had found our booze and drank every drop.
He fizzled and popped,
He rattled and knocked,
Finally he just stopped.

In memory of Jed Bulla.

June Cleaver, feminist

The House of Memory and Automata

BLDG BLOG:

"...In some ways, though, I also had the distinct feeling that I had stepped into a variant screenplay for Blade Runner, as directed by Stanley Kubrick: Blade Runner's wounded maker of surrogates incorrectly edited into the penultimate scene from 2001, in which astronaut Dave Bowman awakens to a bedroom full of Louis XVI furnishings, with all of his friends and family transformed into mythic wax figures and talking machines."

More from BLDG BLOG