New Worlds Weam » 2011

pERFECTLY dISCONNECTED.

byronius, June 27th, 2011

PS: Watching this video — I kinda know this guy. Met people like him.

Disassociatives, I heard somewhere, man, are drugs that separate the conscious mind and the body, allowing painful procedures like bone-setting to be undertaken while the patient is still physically conscious. Something like that.

This chemical condition lurks within our population. Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes crafty, and sometimes it runs for political office.

The Disconnected.

As Mos Def so eloquently offered:

some lies open
some lies close
some stretchers role with no lies at all.
some riders don’t know what they riding for
hands on the wheel and their mind is gone

On automatic, unable to control thirty-million year old primate patterns, and often capable of actions that devastate whole sectors.

Hopefully not sector seven.

Hell, John Wayne (Gacy) isn’t even a flea on the butt of the BFE. WhaddamItalkinabout. Pffft. A Mote in Prescott’s eye.

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Around and around and around and…

SkyHarbor, June 26th, 2011

Georges Seurat: «Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte»

(yet another Sunday Sky ‘special report’)

In a recent comment, our estimable Demonweed mentioned the ‘Chaos Game’ method of generating the famous Sierpinski Triangle or ‘gasket’ (see below). I’d verified this method years ago, but it had been awhile since I’d revisited Michael Barnsley’s ‘Iterated Fractal System’ (IFS) approach to fractals… So, making the wild assumption that I just might have learned a little since then, I went back and whipped up a simple Python program to experiment anew with this novel way of creating fractal images…

thessalian nectarine

byronius, June 25th, 2011

silence and time
white dust to blue water
deep down we know nothing
hot that sun the one the only one
cool the cave
sweet the water
to float
early running mid roaring late release
spring away from the shelter
take trees and bring all us that are this
and that true lovers true servants
to equi and pach leaf and moss
because nothing is so perfect
nothing was so perfect
the sky needs nectarines
the outstretched arms need cool water poems
the hot giants need stone shapes
singers of their souls
benches beneath summer night breezes
passionate hands.

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When a ‘VIC-20′ filled a room…

SkyHarbor, June 23rd, 2011

(if you don’t know what a ‘VIC-20′ is, then I suggest you bypass this post! ;-})

I stumbled over some old New Yorker magazine cartoons from the late ’40′s through the ’60′s that featured computer ‘humour’ of the day… I thought the two above were rather amusing… (click on either to enlarge)

Helene!

byronius, June 22nd, 2011

Planetary.org

Cassini finally catches Helene

The Cassini team has had a wretched time trying to get pictures of Helene in the past, but their streak of bad luck is over. Helene is one of the four “co-orbital” moons in the Saturn system, which occupy metastable spots in the leading and trailing Lagrangian points on the orbits of Tethys and Dione. It’s the biggest of the four, but that’s not saying much; it’s only about 36 by 32 by 30 kilometers across, so it’s in the same general size range as Phobos. It’s proven challenging to predict where it’s going to be with enough accuracy to make sure Cassini can capture it in its camera field of view, with the result that nearly every imaging sequence that Cassini has been commanded to take of Helene has seen the moon wander out of the field of view at one time or another.

Well, Cassini has finally achieved gorgeous global imaging of Helene with a spectacular flyby on Saturday, in which they absolutely nailed the spacecraft’s pointing and got Helene to pose prettily for the camera from beginning to end of the encounter. And what a wacky, wacky world Cassini has revealed Helene to be!!

Looks perfect for burrowing out and making a vacation paradise in.

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