The Campaign for Phonetic Spelling

The campaign for simple spelling, which activists say started more than 100 years ago, is experiencing a revival with kids who have taken wholeheartedly to phonetic spelling in electronic messages.

"I think right now the young people are sending us a text message," said protester Roberta Mahoney, a former Fairfax County school principal who was dressed in a yellow-and-black-striped bumble bee costume. "They're saying enough of this foolishness."

Washington Post

Missile Silo Confessions

The Titan II missile silo complex was first carved out with dynamite in the early ’60s and manned by a crew whose job it was to ensure our enemy’s mutual destruction should we enter nuclear war. It was later dismantled and sealed up to comply with international treaties. After sitting buried beneath rubble for two decades, the site was ready to be explored.

Wired

Memorial Day: "Dulce et decorum est"

"Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.


In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori."

Wilfred Owen

"This book is not about heroes.
English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might,
majesty, dominion, or power, except war.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may
be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets
must be truthful."

The Eyes Have It

An excellent article about the erosion of privacy and its profound social, and spiritual, implications.

"The private life is dead in the new Russia," said a Red Army officer in the film of Boris Pasternak's "Dr. Zhivago." There were many scarifying things in that great movie, but that was the scariest, the dry proclamation that the intimate experience of being alive would now be subordinate to the state. An odd thing is that when privacy is done away with, people don't become more authentic, they become less so. What replaces what used not to be said is something that must be said and is usually a lie.

When we lose our privacy, we lose some of our humanity; we lose things that are particular to us, that make us separate and distinctive as souls, as, actually, children of God. We also lose trust, not only in each other but in our institutions, which we come to fear. People who now have no faith in the security of their medical and financial records, for instance, will have even less faith in their government. If progressives were sensitive to this, they'd have more power. They always think the answer is a new Internet Privacy Act. But everyone else thinks that's just a new system to hack.

At technology conferences now they say, "Get over it." Privacy is gone, get with the new world. But I'm not sure technologically focused people can be sensitive to the implications of their instructions.

Peggy Noonan, WSJ

Thanks, Andrea.

How to permanently delete your Facebook account.

Original Star Wars Trailers

Carmen of the Spheres

Transforming orbital data into phase minimalism.

Greg Fox takes orbital frequencies of the (at the time) nine planets, transposes them into octaves audible by the human ear, and then sets them to music by applying the same data to the duration of the notes. The result is an empirically-based representation of the real music of the spheres.



Greg Fox
Carmen of the Spheres on Archive.org

Distress of 9/11 may have led to miscarriages, research says

The shock and stress felt by pregnant women after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, may have contributed to an increase in miscarriages of male fetuses in the United States, according to a study released Monday.

Researchers found the male fetal death rate increased in September 2001 and subsequently affected the ratio of boys born in a later month, according to the study published in the journal BMC Public Health.

The authors hypothesized that this might be a case of "communal bereavement." Even without direct relationships with the deceased, pregnant women may have been distressed by the attacks, resulting in miscarriage, according to the research.

CNN

The Little Black Piezoelectric Dress

On a Wednesday night in February, one week after fashion’s biggest names descended on New York for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, techy designer Diana Eng’s models were strutting a different kind of stuff: the Twinkle Dress, for example. As a striking brunette model slinked by, her flirty frock, embroidered with LEDs, conductive silverized thread, and microphones, lit up in response to tunes from a quartet playing homemade digital instruments. Off the runway, the dress’s microphones can pick up sounds from the wearer’s voice: when she speaks, she lights up in true diva style.
Although labs around the world have been creating wearable computers for more than a decade, and spacesuits and military uniforms are technologically versatile, you probably won’t find them on the cover of Vogue anytime soon. But Eng is one of several up-and-coming technophiles who take fashion as seriously as technology. Her delicate silk chiffons stand apart from the hardware that makes up most of our gadgetry, yet they enable the wearer to make technology a working part of her wardrobe.

The Atlantic

Chladni Singing

"Chladni patterns were discovered by Robert Hook and Ernst Chladni in the 18th and 19th centuries. They found that when they bowed a piece of glass covered in flour, (using an ordinary violin bow), the powder arranged itself in resonant patterns according to places of stillness and vibration. Today, Chladni plates are often electronically driven by tone generators and used in scientific demonstrations, but with carefully sung notes (and a transducer driving the plate), I'm able to explore the same resonances. I'm currently writing songs based on sequences of patterns."

Meara O'Reilly

Chladni Singing from meara o'reilly on Vimeo.

Life Form Created With Man-Made DNA Offers Benefits, Dangers

The first life form created entirely with man-made DNA opens the door to manufacturing new drugs and fuels, while raising the possibility that mail-order germs may one-day be available for bioterrorists.

Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, reported today in the journal Science that for the first time, they made a copy of a bacterium’s entire genome and then transplanted it into a related organism, where it functioned normally.

The culmination of 15 years of effort, the work provides a blueprint for making organisms that could be used to make better fuels, drugs, vaccines and sources of food, the institute’s researchers said in a statement. It also suggests that companies that can manufacture DNA should stay on guard, said James Collins, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute-supported bioengineer at Boston University, in a telephone interview.

“They sent out chunks of the genetic code to companies and asked them each to synthesize parts of it,” Collins said. “You don’t want bad guys to order 10 parts of a nasty virus from 10 different groups and then put them together.”

Even so, lawmakers and the public can’t afford to turn away from this rapidly evolving technology, which holds both peril and promise, said Arthur Caplan, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist, in a commentary written for msnbc.com today.

Bloomberg Businessweek