Space Elevators and Man-Made Rings

This incredibly cool rings-around-Earth visualization has me dreaming about space elevators and a man-made ring around the Earth. So, people are already making plans to build a space elevator. Check this NASA story, and this great Wikipedia article. Now, of course this is a huge undertaking. The counterweight-end of the space elevator would be some 62,000 miles […]

Of Modern Poetry, by Wallace Stevens

The poem of the mind in the act of finding What will suffice. It has not always had To find: the scene was set; it repeated what Was in the script. Then the theatre was changed To something else. Its past was a souvenir. It has to be living, to learn the speech of the […]

T-Mobile G1 Pricing: LIES!

Okay, what’s the deal with T-Mobile’s pricing for the new “Android” phone, the G1? Word is out that it will go for $179. Sweet!, I thought. I immediately went online to my MyTmobile account to snatch up a pre-order. But what happens when I get to the page where I get to pick which color […]

Enchanted Rock

As great and ebon pillars frame The vaulted granite and nurture the Bell-watcher, so do overarching Branches bower all I feel From this bough-strung, airy cot. Ah! God’s world! Yes, He made it for us And lives astride it; and by prayer And right living, from within The forest grove we may yet See him […]

Eating is Becoming

An isolated incident. I’m a normal guy. I don’t know what happened. I mean, it could happen to anybody, eh? I’ve always figured there were too many people on this planet anyway, and that most of them are pretty miserable if they’re not starving to death. But I’m justifying myself in retrospect. Shit. Okay. I’ll […]

Blogging is…

blogBlogging is…Blogging is very frustrating… makes me feel somehow inadequate when i can’t get to it regularly… like i’m letting down my “audience.” As if anyone has time to sit and read my blog. I wish i had time to do all the things i would love to do, like create/compose/perform/record music, read books by crazy leftists, help get GWBush kicked out of office ASAP, etc.There are just so many diversions these days… I really think this is one reason the neo-conservatives have been able to take over the White House: the masses of Americans are too busy taking their kids to soccer practice, surfing the web, going to concerts, listening to their iPods, making iMovies, watching “Survivor” and “the Bachelor” and “West Wing” and “Carnivale” and “the Sopranos.” (One of my favorite mottos: “so much TV, so little time…”)I keep hoping that blogging will someday help me get my life together much like journalling used to in the 80s and early 90s. I need to be able to “puke on the page”– even if the page is a computer screen. But there is definitely a difference between writing in pen on paper and typing on a keyboard to a computer display. That whole “computer as separator” thing: the internet gives us “virtual personalities” in which we never really “meet” the people we’re “interacting” with… we never physically touch them… and to me, physical touch is the heart of knowing someone… And that same lack is there in typing to a computer display: touch the plastic of those keys down here, something happens up here on the screen– separate… what a quantum physicist might call a “non-local effect.” As is by “magic.” Which it literally would be to someone from Isaac Newton’s time.Anyway, going to see “Lord of the Ring: Return of the King” tonight! Soo-weet! Opened last night, and Milena & i and Lisa & Matt watched the extended “Fellowship of the Ring” at our place. Guess i’ll just have to remember “Two Towers” on my own… what power films can have…Posted by yugen at December 18, 2003 02:20 PM