Wikipedia, the online free content encyclopedia, has several sister projects. All Wiki's are work in progress with varying degree of completion, but quality should constantly improve over time. All sites are free:

Wikiquote: a online compendium of quotations

Wiktionary: a multilingual dictionary

Wikibooks: dedicated to developing and disseminating open content textbooks

Snippets:
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CD: George Winston: Autumn (1980). Piano solo. Beautiful and relaxing.
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Lyonel Feininger: Exhibition at the 'Hamburger Kunsthalle' in Hamburg, Germany. Before becoming an artist, Feininger was a caricaturist for the Chicago Tribune. Later, he became renowned through cubist paintings of medieval churches and ships.
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Web Site: Nation Master: Statisitcal information about each country compiled from various sources. Many categories. Incredible resource!
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Video: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). 116 min. w/ Charles Laughton (Quasimodo) and Maureen O'Hara (Esmeralda). Directed by William Dieterle. Probably the best and most memorable version of the Victor Hugo classic. Gripping.
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Katabatic winds = winds that flow from the high elevations of mountains, plateaus, and hills down their slopes to the valleys or planes below. E.g., Foehn.
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A thought: One can perceive a piece of art in ways of increasing intensity: 1.) it can make you think, 2.) it can move you and whirl you around, bring out the best or the worst feelings in you, or 3.) it can carry you away leaving you breathless for hours, carving itself into your mind, growing in you the desire to never part with it again.

Snippets:
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Video: Notre Dame - Witness to History (1996). 56 min. New River Media Inc. A documentary around of the gothic cathedral in Paris and its history. Informative. Also covers some of the history of France.
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Book: Albert Camus: Der Fremde (1942; in German; English: The Stanger). Story of a young man who lives detached from his life, and is seemingly unaffected by pretty much everything that is going on around him. After killing an Algerian for no obvious reason, he stands trial not only for his deed, but for his character. Sad story, lacking any love, faith or hope. Camus presents a superb analysis of an indifferent personality, and raises many fundamental questions.
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The Mongoose is a member of the family that includes ferrets, weasels and martens. It is a rather small, weasel-like carnivore native to Africa, southern Europe, and Asia. It is famous for its snake-fighting abilities, where it is almost always victorious because of its speed, agility and timing, and also because of its thick coat. The mongoose is resistant to alpha-neurotoxins contained in snake venoms. It has been shown that the mongoose acetyl-choline receptor (AChR) does not bind alpha-bungarotoxin (BTX) [Barchan et al., PNAS 89, 7717 (1992)]. The most 'famous' mongoose is Rikki-Tikki-Tavi in The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling.

Snippets:
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Digipac®: CD packaging consisting of a sturdy plastic tray and high-quality cardboard. Alternative to Jewel Case. Allows more fancy cover designs. Usually more expensive than the Jewel Case.
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Video: Taxi Driver (1976). 114 min. w/ Robert DeNiro, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Set in NYC during the dangerous 70s. The lonely, mentally unstable, psychotic cab driver Travis Bickle (DeNiro), in looking for his own identity, feels he needs to "sweep away all the scum from the streets." After a failed date with a beautiful political campain worker (Shephard), he arms himself and decides to violently 'rescue' a child prostitute (14-year old Foster) from the street. Film noir. Great cast, great acting. Disturbing story.
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The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, is recognized as one of the most important university museums in the country. The museum hosts Asian, African, European, and American art. Click here for links to the Permanent Collection.

The building was designed by world-renowned architect I.M. (Ieoh Ming) Pei, who also built the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington DC, the Pyramide du Louvre in Paris, France, the Hancock Tower in Boston, and the Javits Convention Center in New York City. The museum building looks like a giant sewing machine and overlooks the valley and Cayuga Lake.

Other Links:
Other buildings by I.M. Pei
Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, Architects LLP. w/ lots of pictures

Snippets:
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Book on Tape: Michel Ondaatje. The English Patient. [Abridged] (1993). Read by Michael York. 3 hours.The book on tape helps understanding the intertwined story better. Good abridgment: contains all parts essential for the story and a lot of beautiful passages.
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Video: Churchill - The Finest Hours (1964). 111 min. Narrated by Orson Welles. Academy Award nomination in 1964 for Best Feature Documentary. Biography of Winston Churchill mostly from original film footage. Gives a good overview of Churchills life, and also the key events in both World Wars. Contains plenty of Churchill quotations. Well done.
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An intriguing thought from 'The English Patient' by Michael Ondaatje: "Tell me, is it possible to love someone who is not as smart as you are? [...] Could you fall in love with her if she wasn't smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you. But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? Think now."

Snippets:
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Video: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994); 123 min; w/ Robert De Niro (The Creature), Kenneth Branagh (Victor Frankenstein), Helena Bonham Carter (Elizabeth); directed by Kenneth Branagh. The Classic with a great cast.
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Video: Young Frankenstein (1974); 108 min; w/ Gene Wilder (Dr. Frederick Frankenstein), Peter Boyle (The Monster), Marty Feldman (Igor), Teri Garr (Inga); directed by Mel Brooks. Very funny! Teri Garr looks like an earlier version of Lisa Kudrow.
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Video: The Fall of the House of Usher (1960); w/ Vincent Price. Thrilling horror movie after the novel by Edgar Allan Poe. A young suitor comes to visit the family of his bride-to-be in the House of Usher and tries to rescue her from the madness of her brother. Well done, even though the story itself is a bit slow.
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Book: Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient (1993). The intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Complex story. Jumps between times and places. Need to pay attention to detail. Need to read slowly! Full of many hidden treasures.
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Video: The English Patient (1996). 162 min. w/ Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Kristin Scott Thomas, Willem Dafoe. Directed by Anthony Minghella. Received 9 Oscars, including Best Picture. Gripping. Tragic. Sad. Deviates from the book in many points, but in itself a good movie. Great cast.
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Video: Rebecca (1939). 130 min. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. w/ Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Restored version. Based on the novel by Daphne Du Maurier. Young, inexperienced girl marries the rich widower Maxim de Winter, but soon realizes that the 'shadow' of de Winters first wife, Rebecca, is all around. First hour is much too slow and, though Fontaine's acting is superb, her role is annoying. Olivier alternates between macho, temperamental, and depressed. Overall a good movie, but story could just as well have been told in less than an hour.
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Video: Girl, Interrupted (1999). 127 min. w/ Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie, Whoopi Goldberg. Directed by James Mangold. Girl (Ryder), after attempting suicide, checks into a mental hospital and quickly makes friends among the patients. But she learns that she needs to make a choice between them and the 'sane' world outside. Good movie, dramatic at times. Good tempo (most of the time). Plot reminds of 'One flew over the cuckoo's nest'. Jolie is quite scary and won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
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Dynamic Planet Blog
TOC: Table of Contents
October 2003

1.) Brown Dwarfs
2.) Virtual Observatories
3.) Alexander the Great
4.) Robert K. Merton: The Matthew Effect in Science
5.) More on Dido & Aeneas
6.) Roger Bacon
7.) Funny computer stories
8.) Khaos / Erebus / Elysian Fields
9.) Some numbers about Blogs

Some numbers about Blogs: NYT October 23, 2003: 'Blog Bog and an E-Mail Pony Express' by Pamela LiCalzi O'Connell. Recent study by Perseus Development, a research firm and maker of software for surveys: 66% of the 4.12 million Blogs, created on eight leading blog-hosting services, have been "abandoned'', i.e., not updated for at least two months. 1.09 million of those were one-day wonders. Fewer than 50,000 of the sites in the study were updated every day. The typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends. However, only blogs on eight leading blog-hosting services were studied. According to Perseus's research: 2002: 1.62 million active blogs, 2003: 3.3 million. In 2004: 5.86 million predicted.

Snippets:
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Video: The Greeks: Crucible of Civilization. PBS Home Video (2000). 165 min. History of ancient Greeks with focus on Cleisthenes, Themistocles, Pericles, and Socrates. Informative, but too long.
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Video: Naked Lunch (1991), 115 min. Based on the book by William S. Burroughs; w/ Peter Weller (Robocop), Judy Davis (Deconstructing Harry), Roy Scheider (Jaws); directed by David Cronenberg (The Fly). Music by Ornette Coleman. A drug-addicted pest-control man drifts into the hallucinatory world of 'Interzone'. Imagination and reality melt into a horror trip. Surreal, weird, great special effects with lots of bugs and phantasy creatures. Just don't watch it while you are eating.
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Glossary of Greek Mythology:

Khaos (Chaos): Greek goddess; was the first of the Protogenoi (ancient elemental gods); the female personifcation of air; also means lower atmosphere of the earth - air, mist and fog; her name means "gap", i.e., the gap between earth and sky. Others say that Chaos is the void which came into being before anything else, or a shapeless and confused mass of elements.

Erebus (Erebos): Greek god; the male personification of darkness; his thick mists of darkness were said to envelop the edges of the world; husband of Nyx (Nox, =Night). Erebus' name was often used to describe the cavernous underworld of Hades.

Elysian Fields (Elysium): happy otherworld for heroes favored by the gods; final resting place of the souls of the virtuous; paradise of the heroes, either in the Underworld or in the far West.

Other Links:
Theoi Project: A Guide to Greek Gods, Spirits, and Monsters


Snippets:
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Video: The Piano (1992). w. Holly Hunter, Sam Neill. Slow. Boring. Depressing. Waste of time.
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Book on Tape: Jules Verne: Around the world in 80 Days (originally published in 1873). The English gentleman, Phileas Fogg, his servant Passpartout, the Indian princess Aouda, and the detective Fix travel around the world in most unusual ways for the purpose of winning a wager. A classic book with a couple of suprises! A good read. Other stories by Jules Verne.
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David Pogue (NYT, October 16, 2003) amused us by reciting a couple of short, but 'effective' funny computer stories:

"Hello, Apple? My cup holder broke off." "Uh, sir, that's your CD-ROM tray."

Or this: "Hello, Dell? My mouse is squeaking." "Squeaking?" "Yeah — and the funny thing is, it squeaks louder the faster I move it across the screen!" "Ma'am, why are you dragging your mouse across the screen?" "Well, I saw a message that said, Click HERE to continue!'"


Snippets:
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Video: 'Tut: The Boy King' (1978). Hosted by Orson Welles. Warner Home Video. Objects from King Tut's tomb filmed in the National Gallery in Washington DC (on loan from the Cairo Museum). Archeologists Howard Carter and Lord Carnaravon discovered these treasures of ancient times in 1922/23.
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Video: 'Joe versus the Volcano' (1990); w/ Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. When a hypochondriac is told by a physician that he has a 'brain cloud' and only six more months to live, he accepts the offer to jump into a volcano on the remote tropical island Waponi Woo. During his trip he learns to enjoy life. Cheesy, but funny! Unconventional characters. Meg Ryan in three roles, you can hardly recognize her!
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Video: Great Souls: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn --- Voice of Truth (2002). 56 min. Biography of the Russian writer who was a Gulag prisoner, was sent to labor camps in Siberia, and finally set the stage for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Major books are 'The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956', 'The First Circle', 'Cancer Ward ', and 'The Red Wheel'.
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Book: Aldous Huxley: Science, Liberty and Peace (1946). Harper & Brothers Publishers. Huxley was a visionary, forseeing many of the problems that the science and technology race in the 20th century has brought up. To him, applied science aids a few people seeking control over the masses. He especially refers to the science that is conducted for warfare, and discusses the social impact of the atomic bomb. Short book (86 pages), but addresses a lot of very relevant questions!
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Notes on Book 'Calendar' by David Ewing Duncan (1998):

Roger Bacon: Franciscan friar (c.1214 - 1292); interest in mathematics, optics and general sciences; one of the first scientists at the end of the Middle Ages; wrote his 'Opus Majus' in 1266; it contained, among others, the idea of a reform of the Julian Calendar, since it was off by one day every 130 days; dispatched the book to Pope Clement IV, who unfortunately died suddenly in 1268, driving Bacon's ideas into oblivion; it took three more centuries, until Pope Gregory XIII (1502-1585) finally fixed the calendar in 1582.

Length of the (tropical) year: 365d, 5h, 48min, 45sec

Lunar month: 29d, 12h, 44min, 2.9sec

Julian Calendar (Julius Caesar): since Jan. 1, 45 B.C.

45 B.C. is known as the 'Year of Confusion'. Length: 445 days

Gregorian Calendar (Pope Gregory XIII): since 1582; Gregory eliminated by papal bull the dates October 5-14, 1582

The Gregorian Calendar is off from the true solar year: 25.96768 sec per year

Other Links:
Roger Bacon: Friar Bacon His Discovery of the Miracles of Art, Nature, and Magick
Roger Bacon: Biography
Catholic Encylopedia: Roger Bacon
WSHU: Engines of our Ingeniuity: The Temptress Moon on 1/24/03


Snippets:
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Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO): international network dedicated to communicating Buddhist truths in ways appropriate to the modern world. Other Links to FWBO.
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Bas Hoeben's Photo Gallery dedicated to The Art of Black and White Photography
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CD: Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool. Recorded in New York, New York on January 21 & April 22, 1949 and on March 9, 1950. First released in 1956. Remains one of the defining, pivotal moments in jazz. Three sessions where the sound known as 'cool jazz' was essentially formed.
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Video: Eastern Philosophy. Cromwell Films 2002. Part 1: Confucius, Shinto (50 min). Part 2: Hinduism, Buddhism (50 min). Part 3: Judaism, Islam (50 min). Informative overview, but -of course- far from comprehensive.
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Index Librorum Prohibitorum = Index of Prohibited Books = 'list of forbidden books' of the Roman Catholic Church; the first catalog of banned books to be called an index was published in 1559. Publication of the list ceased in 1966, and it was relegated to the status of a historic document. The Index of 1559 (in Latin). Some more information here (including 20th century authors). Index Expurgatorius = list of books allowed only in expurgated form.
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CD: Eric Dolphy: 'Outward Bound' (1960); Dolphy plays alt saxophone, bass clarinet, and flute; Freddie Hubbard on trumpet; also contained on the Dolphy compilation 'The Complete Prestige Recordings' (1995).
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Aristarchus of Samos (c.310 - c.230 BC): proposed a heliocentric universe; of his original works, only 'On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon' survived. His heliocentric treatise is known to us through references by Archimedes. Copernicus, in his famous 'De revolutionibus caelestibus' gave Aristarchus credit for his idea (although interestingly it was crossed out shortly before publication).
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Video: So I married an Axe Murderer (1993). 93 min. w/ Mike Myers, Nancy Travis, Anthony LaPaglia, Amanda Plummer. Funny, creative guy falls in love with mysterious woman from a butcher shop, who he supects is a bloody killer. Sometimes rather poor acting, especially at the beginning. But has some very funny moments!
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CD: Latin Quarter: Mick and Caroline (1987). Intriguing lyrics and music. WWW: Latin Quarter (German and English)
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CD: John Coltrane Quartett: The Complete Africa/Brass Sessions (1995). Two sessions recorded May 23 and June 4, 1961 at the Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Coltrane's first recording for Impulse. Trane's Quartett is supported by a brass orchestra that, among other distinguished musicians, includes Booker Little (tp), Freddie Hubbard (tp), and Eric Dolphy (as, bc, fl). This studio recording was made just a few months before the legendary recordings at the Village Vanguard in November 1961.
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Video: Metropolis (1927). Directed by Fritz Lang. w/ Gustav Froehlich (as Freder Fredersen), Brigitte Helm (as Maria/The Robot (AKA Futura)). Silent movie. Story of a revolt of the Working Class against the Upper Class of the city Metropolis. The pacifist leader Maria is abducted and exchanged by a robot who then leads the revolt. Great science fiction movie with unbelievable special effects, considering it was filmed in the 20s.
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More on Dido & Aeneas:
1.) Dido and Aeneas: Aeneas is the Trojan equivalent to the famed Greek hero Odysseus (= Ulysseus).
2.) Bulfinch's Mythology
3.) Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) painted 'Dido Building Carthage; or, the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire' in 1815, which can be viewed at the National Gallery, London. For this and other Turner paintings, also see WebMuseum , Paris.
4.) Carthage Empire: about 800 BC the Phoenicians (Queen Dido) established Carthage on the edge of a region in North Africa that is now Tunisia. The city became the commercial center of the western Mediterranean and retained that position until overthrown by Rome.

Robert K. Merton (1910-2003): 'The Matthew Effect in Science'. Science 159, 56-63 (1968). Article about the reward and communcation systems of science. Highly productive scientists that study at one of the major universities gain more recognition than equally productive scientists at a lesser university.

Merton, a sociologist at Columbia University, New York, NY, received the National Medal of Science and is perhaps best known for having coined the phrase "self-fulfilling prophecy" (= a prediction that, in being made, actually causes itself to become true). Merton developed this concept out of his interpretation of W. I. Thomas' "definition of the situation," i.e., "If men define things as real, they are real in their consequences."

Other Links:
Garfield Library (UPenn): Robert Merton
Wikipedia: Robert K. Merton
William Isaac (W.I.) Thomas: California State University, Dominguez Hills
W.I. Thomas: The Unadjusted Girl (HTML Text)


Snippets:
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Book-on-Tape: Miles Davis: 'Miles: The Autobiography' [Abridged]; Quincy Troupe (Contributor), Levar Burton (Reader); book published in 1989; MD tells the story of his musical career, but also talks about family and personal matters, including his drug and alcohol addiction.
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Video: Mummies and the Wonders of Ancient Egypt: Hieroglyphs. A&E Home Video (1996). Hieratic: ancient Egyptian cursive writing; derived from the earlier, pictorial hieroglyphic writing. Hieroglyph: from the Greek word for "sacred carving".
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Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.): Son of Philip II of Macedon. Was tutored by Aristotle. Unified the divided city states of Greece and conquered, among others, Persia and Egypt; marched all the way to the borders of India before he retreated. Through his journey the Greek language and culture was carried into the eastern Mediterranean and into Mesopotamia. Alexander's conquest was described by Flavius Arrianus (Arrian, circa 87 - after 145 A.D.), in his 'Anabasis' (translated into English by Aubrey De Selincourt in 'The Campaigns of Alexander' in 1958).

Other Links:
Alexander the Great at Livius.org
Alexander the Great on the Web

Snippets:
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Video: Alexander the Great (1956) w/ Richard Burton (Alexander), Claire Bloom (Barsine). Mediocre story of Alexander's life and battles, especially the conquest of Persia.
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Virtual Observatories (VOs): allow new ways to analyze astronomical data:
- GAVO (German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory)
- NVO (National Virtual Observatory)
- SkyView Virtual Telescope
- Astrobrowse
- NASA/IPAC Extragalactic database

Other Links:
'Google fuer Sterne' by Stefan Schmitt. DIE ZEIT 04.09.2003 Nr.37 (in German)

Brown Dwarfs (originally called black dwarfs): Objects that, when formed by condensation out of a cloud of hydrogen gas similar to stars, do not accumulate enough mass to generate the high temperatures needed to sustain nuclear fusion at their core. They radiate energy through gravitational contraction. Mass approx. 13-70x Jupiter. First Brown Dwarf, Gliese 229B (GL229B) was discovered in 1995 by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Other links:
The Discovery of Brown Dwarfs by Gibor Basri. Scientific American, April 2000
Wikipedia: Brown Dwarfs


Snippets:
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Video: The Blair Witch Project (1999); w/ Heather Donahue, Joshua 'Josh' Leonard, and Michael 'Mike' Williams. Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. Tagline: In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittesville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. One year later, their footage was found (IMDB). I am split on this one: on one hand it's great to see a movie that can scare you without any special effects; on the other hand the movie drags out too long on the same cheap thrills. I bet the scare was more dominant while the film was still in theaters, and everyone believed is was truely the 'real' footage of three film students.
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Video: The Color Purple (1985); w/ Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, Oprah Winfrey; director: Steven Spielberg; based upon the novel by Alice Walker. The decades-spanning story of Celie (W.G.) who grows from a suppressed girl to an emacipated woman. Good story, but too long, and too sappy!
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William Gibson: Author; father of 'cyberpunk'; coined the term 'cyberspace'; first novel: Neuromancer (1984).
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Book on Tape: 'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley. Unabridged. Read by Peter Firth. 6.5 hours. Sterling Audio (1992). Book originally published in 1932. A vision of a future world, where the 'ideal' society achieved 'happiness' through genetic cloning, abandoning criticism, and constant dullness by taking psycho-stimulating, anti-depressant 'Soma' tablets. A must-read!
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Dynamic Planet Blog
TOC: Table of Contents
September 2003

1.) Soviet Army Memorial in Berlin
2.) Adult peristence of head-turning asymmetry
3.) Robert Kanigel: Apprentice to Genius
4.) Virgil: The Aeneid
5.) Total solar eclipse in New York City 1925

The last time a total solar eclipse visible from New York City (and Connecticut, Rhode Island) was on Saturday, January 24, 1925, just after 9 AM. It was a cold, clear day, and the city was covered by snow. Observers were stationed at every other intersection between 72nd and 135th Streets to determine the most southern part of the 'belt of totality'. Totality could only be observed above 95th to 97th Streets, so residents of Brooklyn, southern Queens, Staten Island, and much of Manhattan missed the full spectacle. Nevertheless, Millions of people witnessed the Eclipse. They crowded onto roofs, bridges, and the upper floors of skyscrapers. Open spaces in the city's northern reaches were mobbed by eclipse gazers, who braved the 9-degree cold to watch as the moon's shadow gradually cast the city into morning twilight. Streetlights across the city flickered to life. Skyscrapers blinked in empty streets. At the Bronx Zoo, herds of deer raced in panic. At 9:11, the sun disappeared completely. ''As the black ball of the moon settled over the fiery sphere of the sun, the brilliantly shimmering corona came into sharp relief against the dull sky.'' The sun reappeared about 30 seconds later.

Other Links:
Solar Eclipse Newsletter Vol 6(2), Feb. 2001 (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader)
Eclipse Home Page by NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center
Path of the 1925 solar eclipse at Dave Owen Home Page


Snippets:
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Video: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1988). Wonderworks Family Movie. Award-winning BBC production. Very close to the book.
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Three famous men died all died on the same day, on Friday, November 22, 1963: John F. Kennedy (assassinated), Aldous Huxley, and Clive Staples Lewis.
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Virgil (70-19 BC): The Aeneid (written 19 BC). A brief summary can be found here. The Aeneid is an ancient Roman Epic about the adventures of the Trojan hero, Aeneas, who was destined to go to Italy and set up a new kingdom after Troy fell to the Greeks. On his way, Aeneas encountered many problems, but through many trial and errors he completed his journey and became the true founding father of Rome. On his way one of the people Aeneas meets is Dido, the young Phoenician queen and builder of Carthage, who falls hopelessly in love with him.


Snippets:
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Video: Moby Dick (1956). After the novel by Herman Melville; directed by John Huston; w/ Gregory Peck (Captain Ahab). The tale of hunting the White Wale.
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Video: The Matrix (1999). w/ Keanu Reeves (Neo), Laurence Fishburne (Morpheus), Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity). Finding out about the true nature of 'reality'.
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Carrie-Ann Moss also played Natalie in the movie 'Memento' (2000).
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Internet Broadway Database: Comprehensive history of shows produced on Broadway, including historical information about theatres.
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Online Bible Study Aids: including online bible versions, commentaries, dictionanries and bible concordances.
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Video: Wag the Dog (1997). Directed by Barry Levinson; w/ Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Anne Heche. Plot: Before elections, a spin-doctor and a Hollywood producer join efforts to "fabricate" a war in order to cover-up a presidential sex scandal (IMDB). Plot is a nice idea, but after a half hour becomes repetitive.
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Book: C.S. (Clive Staples) Lewis: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950). Oldest volume of 'The Chronicles of Narnia'. The four children (Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy) enter the land of Narnia, and help the lion Aslan to free the country from the terror of the White Witch.
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Book: Sue Townsend: Adrian Mole. From Minor to Major. The Mole Diaries: the first ten years (1991). Incorporating 'The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4' (1982), 'The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole' (1984), 'True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole' (1989), and 'Adrian Mole and the Small Amphibians' (1991?). First two parts are hillarious, don't bother with the rest.
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Video: Monster's Ball (2001) w/ Billy Bob Thornton (Hank Grotowski) and Halle Berry (Leticia Musgrove; Academy Award Winner Best Actress). Directed by Marc Forster. Plot: A Death Row prison guard in the Southern US quits his job, then falls in love with the wife of a black man he has executed. Movie is breathtaking at times. Weird plot. Good movie!
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Henry Purcell (1659-1695), one of England's greatest composers. Epoch: Middle Baroque. Opera: Dido and Aeneas. Purcell wrote only this one full opera, a short work supposedly designed for a girls' school.
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Notes to 'Apprentice to Genius' by Robert Kanigel (1985):

Chain of mentors

James Shannon: director NIH

Bernard B. ('Steve') Brody: anti-malaria drugs, drug metabolism

Julius Axelrod: drug metabolism

Solomon Snyder: opioids

Candace Pert, Gavril Pasternak, Diane Rusell: opiods

Terry Moody: bombesin receptor; Michael Kuhar: autoradiography in brain

Sol Snyder was the youngest full professor in the history of Johns Hopkins Univ.; 'idea man', rarely working at the bench. Snyder has reputation of 'stealing' other researchers results; very competitive, always trying to scoop them; e.g., competition for publishing the enkephalin story first after hearing about it from a different froup at a conference. Snyders approach: do it quick, don't spend too much time on details; conflicts with Pasternak, who was opposite.

Julius Axelrod was at first a technician under Brody, then moved on to get his Ph.D.; always working at the bench; he discovered COMT; considered a pioneer of modern neuroscience; won Nobel Prize in 1970.

Candace Pert co-discovered opiod receptors by binding studies (1973); used the antagonist naloxone as ligand.

Pedro Cuatrecasas: discovered insulin receptor by binding studies.

The book opposes various scientific approaches:

sloppy and fast vs. carefully and slow

idea man vs. bench man

take a flier (i.e., pursue your best guess first) vs. systematically trying everything

keeping things simple vs. trying to cover every aspect

Candace Pert one-liners:

"And what do you do besides standing around looking adorable?"

"Manic depressive psychosis is like diabetes of the dopamine receptor"

...the brain is "a little wet minireceiver for collective reality"

"You can't be secretive. [...] You have to surround yourself with the smartest people your ego can stand, then concentrate on the work, not on who'll get credit for it."

Snyder/Pert: Choose your problem with exquisite care, distinguishing those that are merely interesting from those that are important as well.

Snyder: "One experiment in the lab is worth a week in the library." So don't think about it too much. Just get hysterial and do it!

Snyder, even years after working with Julius Axelrod, would sometimes ask: "What would Julie do?". He wouldn't waste time on the trivial or the impossible. He'd keep it simple. He'd do it fast. He'd take a flier.

Albert Lasker Award for Basic Biomedical Research; is the 'American Nobel Prize'; Snyder has won it in 1978 for the opiate/enkephalin story; Pert was upset because she was not included, even though it was her work. Pert wrote a book (Molecules of Emotion) which is largely autobiographical.

Robert Merton (1967/1968): The Matthew Effect in Science: "Them that has, gets"

Most important U.S. schools: Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, Princeton.


Other Links:
Bernard B. ('Steve') Brodie:
NIH/Stetten Museum of Medical Research
International Society for the Study of Xenobiotics
Lasker Foundation
BASi

Julius Axelrod:
Profiles in Science/National Library of Medicine
Nobel E-Museum
NIH/Stetten Museum of Medical Research

Solomon Snyder
Candace Pert

Lasker Award
NIH/Stetten Museum of Medical Research


Snippets:
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Database: Gene Knockouts from the online journal 'Frontiers in Bioscience', a non-profit organization created by scientists for scientists for fostering international scientific communication and for providing scientists, physicians and patients with a diverse array of information, tools and techniques.
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Video: The X-Files (1998). w/ David Duchovny (Agent Fox Mulder), Gillian Anderson (Agent Dana Scully), Martin Landau (Alvin Kurtzweil, M.D.). Mulder and Scully try to unravel a conspriacy around a dangerous alien virus.
~~~~~~~

Onur Guentuerkuen, Nature 421, 711 (13 Feb 2003): Adult peristence of head-turning asymmetry. A preference in humans for turning the head to the right, rather than to the left, during the final weeks of gestation and for the first six months after birth constitutes one of the earliest examples of behavioural asymmetry and is thought to influence the subsequent development of perceptual and motor preferences by increasing visual orientation to the right side. Interestingly, twice as many adults turn their heads to the right as to the left when kissing, indicating that this head-motor bias persists into adulthood. Of 124 kissing pairs, 80 (64.5%) turned their heads to the right and 44 (35.5%) turned to the left (ratio ~ 2:1), which is statistically significantly different from 50% (1:1). Funny, what some people do research on!

The Soviet Army Memorial in Berlin was built shortly after World War II, long before the Berlin Wall was raised. However, the memorial to the Soviet forces ended up just West of the dividing line. The memorial is located adjacent to the German Reichstag which was the scene of heavy fighting during the Soviet capture of Berlin. It is flanked by two T34 tanks, said to be the first to reach Berlin. The curved structure itself is created from marble presumed to be taken from Adolph Hitler's Chancellery ("Reichskanzlei"). At its focal point is a bronze statue of a Soviet solder holding a child in one hand and a sword smashing a Nazi swastika in the other. The stones from Hitler's Chancellery are engraved with the Soviet sickle-and-hammer design along with quotes from Stalin. The monument was guarded around the clock by the Red Army until German reunification in 1990.

Other Links:
Berlin von A bis Z: Sowjetisches Ehrenmal (in German)


Snippets:
~~~~~~~
Video: Subway. The Empire Beneath New York's Streets. Hosted and narrated by Jack Perkins. A&E Home Video (1994). Documentary about the history of the NYC subway.
~~~~~~~
Timothy 'Tiggy' Ticehurst. Painter born in Kent, UK, in 1965. Lives and paints in NYC. Sells his art on the street near the Metropolitan Museum. Previously worked under the names Timot and Timotoo.
~~~~~~~
Restaurant: Blue Room. 1 Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA. Serves a world of ethnic entrees. Buffet-style brunch. Dinner.
~~~~~~~
Movie: The Perfect Storm (2000). Directed by Wolfgang Petersen; w/ George Clooney (Captain Billy Tyne), Mark Wahlberg (Bobby Shatford), Diane Lane (Christina 'Chris' Cotter; Bobby's girlfriend on shore), Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (Linda Greenlaw, fellow skipper). Fight of the Gloucester sword-fishing boat Andrea Gail against the 'storm of the century' that took place off the New England coast in 1991; book by Sebastian Junger; film is based on a true story (even though no member of the ship survived to tell the story).
~~~~~~~.
Video: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). First volume of J.R.R. Tolkiens fantasy story. Movie is rather disappointing.
~~~~~~~
Music: Stina Nordenstam. Swedish singer; similarities with Anja Garbarek. Voice not particularly interesting, but music is intriguing through its strangeness. Stina's web site is very well designed. Requires Shockwave Flash plugin.
~~~~~~~
Music: Skin. Former singer of British punk band Skunk Anansie. Album: Fleshwounds. Softer than S.A.
~~~~~~~
Book search engine: Fetchbook. com. With price comparison. Used and new books. Good!
~~~~~~~
Jefferson Davis (1808 - 1889): Only president of the Confederate States of America
~~~~~~~
Video: The Civil War 1861-1865 (1991). Dan Dalton Productions. Dramatic recreation of events through use of historic still photographs and early cinematic dramatizations of the war. Story of the war is told within 90 min; some of the film clips are repeated on several occassions throughout the film.
~~~~~~~

Dynamic Planet Blog
TOC: Table of Contents
August 2003

1.) Laser
2.) Brain Teaser: Cork in Glass
3.) 'Cavendish Experiment'
4.) Brain Teaser: Cork in Bucket

Cork in Bucket: Brain Teaser from Braingle

Question:
A cork, say from a wine bottle, is held by a robotic clamp at the bottom of a bucket of water and released the moment the bucket is dropped off the side of a tall building. What will happen to the cork during the fall? Will it float to the top of the bucket normally, slower than normal, faster than normal, or not at all? Assume that there is no air resistance to slow the bucket down.

HEY! DON'T JUST LOOK AT THE ANSWER! THINK ABOUT IT!

Answer:
The cork will stay at the bottom of the bucket and not float up at all during the fall, since the cork, the bucket and the water all fall at the same acceleration g (neglecting air resistance as all good physics questions do). The buoyant force of the water does not push the cork upward in this case since in free fall the buoyant force is zero. In other words, a cork only floats up when the water around it is heavier and pushes it up. In free fall the water is weightless, as is the cork and bucket, so there is no force to push the cork to the top of the bucket.

Snippets:
~~~~~~~
ARIN WHOIS Database Search by the American Registry for Internet Numbers: Find out who an IP address belongs to.
~~~~~~~
Video: Amelie (2001). w/ Audrey Tautou. In French with English subtitles. Introverted Paris girl spices up other people's boring life. Worth seeing!
~~~~~~~

The 'Cavendish Experiment' can be used to determine the gravitational constant of the earth (G) using an apparatus (torsion balance) designed by geologist John Mitchell (1724-1793). It was first used and improved by Henry Cavendish (1731-1810) who, in 1798, used the results to calculate the average density of the earth. This allowed calculation of earth's mass ("weighing the earth") and G.

Other Links:
- The Mitchell-Cavendish Experiment by Laurent Hodges, Iowa State University.
- Measuring the Mass of the Earth by Donald G. York, Univ. Chicago; contains experimental setup and calculations. (requires Adobe Acrobat)

Cork in Glass: Brain Teaser from Braingle:

Question:
If a cork is put into a glass of water, the cork will almost always drift to the side of the glass. There is one simple way, however, to get the cork to float on the surface in the center of the glass. What is it? Water, the glass, and the cork are all that is required.

HEY! DON'T JUST LOOK AT THE ANSWER! THINK ABOUT IT!

Answer:
The reason that a cork drifts to the side of a glass is that it floats to the highest point. Since water "clings" to the glass, the highest point is around the edge of the water. To get the cork to float in the middle of the glass, all you have to do is fill the glass as much as possible. The water will form a convex shape above the glass, with the highest point at its center. This is where the cork will settle.


Snippets:
~~~~~~~
Richard Feynman: Six Easy Pieces (Audio of physics lectures given in 1961/1962): When you take an apple and magnify it to the size of the earth, then the atoms in the apple are about the size of an apple.
~~~~~~~

Notes to Book: Curt Suplee: Physics in the 20th Century (1999)

Laser = light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation
Precursor: Maser = microwave amplication by stimulated emission of radiation

Microwaves have longer wavelengths and therfore less energy than visible light

Einstein: Atoms can emit photons in two different ways: spontaneous (e.g., sun, light bulbs) and stimulated (maser, laser).

When an atom is excited by a quantum energy that exactly corresponds to one of its specific allowed energy states (postulated by Niels Bohr), it absorbs the energy, but then almost immediately sheds it by emitting a photon. Variation of effect: If an electron is already in an excited state and then struck be a photon of excactly the right energy, it emits two photons. The new photon is identical to the first; each quantum of radiation is perfectly matched, meaning the new photon is exacty in phase with the one that stimulated its emission: 'coherent'.

Snippets:
~~~~~~~
Video: "Cassatt" (Portrait of an Artist Volume 2: May Cassatt. Impressionist from Philadelphia. Produced by WNET/Thirteen for 'Women in Art' (1977), 30 min. Cassatt was, after Whistler, the most important American Impressionist Painter; she spent much time painting in Paris; she was a close friend of Degas; they thoroughly critiqued each others work; especially known for her mother-child portraits.
~~~~~~~
Video: Big. w/ Tom Hanks. A 13-year old boy makes a wish at a fair and slips into the body of a grown-up. Funny; childish at times; Hanks plays the role real well.
~~~~~~~
Brain-Teaser: The Flash Mind Reader. Can you find out how it works?
~~~~~~~
Design: Ritzenhoff (in German). Lots of pictures.
~~~~~~~
Designer: Michal Shalev, b. 1958 in Tel-Aviv, Israel; carpet and textile designs, also curtains, paper products, porcelain and shower curtains; has been working closely with such German firms as Ritzenhoff, Karstadt, Rosenthal, Design House since 1994.
~~~~~~~
Metric System Prefixes: Exta = 10^18, Peta = 10^15, Tera = 10^12, Giga = 10^9, Mega = 10^6, Kilo = 10^3
~~~~~~~

Dynamic Planet Blog
TOC: Table of Contents
July 2003

1.) Herman Hesse: Siddhartha
2.) Geometric Brain Teaser
3.) Mortimer J. Adler: Aristotle for Everybody
4.) Brain Teaser: Coffee with Cream

Coffee with Cream: Brain Teaser from Braingle

Question:
You are served a hot cup of coffee and room-temperature cream at a restaurant. You want to wait a few minutes before you drink the coffee, and you want it to be as hot as possible when you drink it. Should you pour the cream in the coffee:

a) Immediately
b) Just before you drink it
c) It doesn't matter

("don't add any cream" is not an option)

HEY! DON'T JUST LOOK AT THE ANSWER! THINK ABOUT IT!

Answer:
The driving force for heat transfer is temperature difference. The coffee by itself is very hot and will therefore cool down at a fast rate. Then once the cream is added the temperature will drop even more. If the cream is added immediately, then the temperature will drop initially but will then drop at a slower rate since the coffee with cream is cooler than the coffee alone and therefore the driving force for heat transfer is less. As an added bonus, adding the cream will increase the mass of the contents of the cup. A larger mass takes longer to cool down than a smaller one at the same temperature. Therefore, the cream should be added immediately.

Notes to Book: Mortimer J. Adler: Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought made Easy (1978):

• physical things: 3 dimensions: length, breadth, height; i.e., spatial dimensions, in which a body can move.



• human beings = persons: personal dimensions; i.e., directions, in which we can act as human beings: making, doing, knowing.
  
  
  • making: man, the artist or artisan: producer of goods (shoes, houses, paintings).
  
  
  • doing: man, the moral and social being; distinguish right and wrong, associate with other human beings.
  
  
  • knowing: man, the learner; acquisition of knowledge about human nature and knowledge itself.
  
  
• man is a thinker in all these dimensions, but he thinks differently in each dimension.



• Aristotle speaks about:


• maker: 'productive thinking'.


• doer: 'practical thinking'.


• knower: 'speculative' or 'theoretical' thinking.


• Heraclitus: everything changes.
  
• Parmenides (and Zeno): everything remains constant.


• Aristotle: some things change, some remain the same.



• Euclid's geometry:
  
  • definitions: points, lines, straight lines, triangles.
  
  
  • axioms: cannot bew denied; confirmation cannot be avoided; "the whole is greater than the parts", "things equal to the same thing are equal to each other".
  
  
  • postulates: assumptions that Euclid makes in order to prove the propositions that need proof "a straight line can be drawn from any point to any other point."
  
  
• Socrates was Plato's teacher, Plato was Aristotle's teacher.



• Socrates: an unexamined life is not worth living.



• Aristotle: an unplanned life is not worth examining, for an unplanned life is one in which we do not know what we are trying to do or why, and one in which we do not know where we are trying to get or how to get there. An unplanned life is also not worth living because it can not be lived well.



• A happy time is one filled with pleasures rather than pains, with satisfactions rather than dissatisfactions.



• "good" = desirable; "better" = more desirable; "best" = most desirable.



• Aristotle: these two notions -- good and desirable -- are inseparably connected; 'the good is desirable' and 'the desirable is good'.



• Moral virtue is the habit of making right choices. If the wrong choices greatly outnumber the right choices, one will steadily move in the wrong direction, away from achieving happiness instead of toward it.



• Aristotle was a great logican; he founded the science of logic.

Geometric Brain Teaser found on Aiyueh Kwan's Web Site:

If you can't solve it, please send email to dynamicplanet@yahoo.com

Hermann Hesse in 'Siddhartha' (1922): "I can think. I can wait. I can fast."

Snippets:
~~~~~~~
Movie: The Fountainhad (1949); w/ Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal; directed by King Vidor; after the novel by Ayn Rand.
~~~~~~~
Talk: Richard Feynman: There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom (1959). Nanotechnology. Interesting to see, how small things can get.
~~~~~~~
Book on Tape: Richard P. Feynman: Six Easy Pieces (1994); Recordings of basic physics lectures that Feynman gave to Caltech undergrad students in 1961/1962; lectures resulted in Feynman's landmark book 'Lectures on Physics'.
~~~~~~~
Music: The Outlaws. Country Rock from the 70's. Single: 'Green Grass and High Tides'
~~~~~~~
Music: Tadd Dameron, jazz pianist; CD with John Coltrane: Mating Call; also included in the CD Box 'John Coltrane: The Complete Prestige Recordings'
~~~~~~~
Word: pizzicato: by means of plucking instead of bowing strings (Merriam Webster Dictionary)
~~~~~~~
Language: Grammar: Conjugation of German verbs: Institutio Steiger (in German)
~~~~~~~

Dynamic Planet Blog
TOC: Table of Contents
June 2003

1.) Mary Oliver: Excerpt from 'In Blackwater Woods'
2.) Adrian Deckbar
3.) Louisiana Purchase
4.) Lake Pontchartrain Causeway
5.) The Atman which is Brahman

Hinduism: is based on Vedas, which are the oldest sacred writings of the Hindus (2000-1000 BC); more recent Vedas are called Upanishads (ca. 600 BC); in Indian (Vedic) philosophy it holds that: The Atman ("Self") which is Brahman ("World Soul"); Hindu philosophy further holds that this World Soul should itself be regarded as being the Three-in-One God known as the Trimutri: Brahma-the Creator, Vishnu-the Preserver, and Shiva-the Destroyer, are all perceived as being aspects or manifestations of the One-ness which is Brahman.

Snippets:
~~~~~~~
CD: Patricia Barber: Verse (2002)
~~~~~~~

Louisiana Purchase: Treaty signed April 20, 1803 in which the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory (2 million square kilometer, from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, for 60 million francs ($15 million). At first, France had ceded Louisiana to Spain in 1762, but the French had regained the area in the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1800 under the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon envisioned a great French empire in the New World with the island Hispaniola (today: Haiti/Dominican Republic) as the heart of this empire. He therefore anticipated the Mississippi Valley to become crucial as a food and trade center. However, a rebellion of Haitian slaves and his soldiers struggling with yellow fever forced Napoleon to abondon the island, which also made Louisiana useless to him. In order to fund his military venture in Europe, he sold the territory to the United States in 1803.

The longest bridge in the world: The Second Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, which joins Mandeville and Metairie, Louisiana, USA, is 38.422 km (23 miles 1,538 yd) long. It was completed in 1969. The First Causeway Bridge was opened in 1956.

Snippets:
~~~~~~~
New Orleans' Oldest Candy Store: Laura's Candies; est. 1913
~~~~~~~
Other interesting artists featured at the Hanson Gallery, New Orleans: Edward Povey, Joanna Zjawinska, Joseph Lorusso.
~~~~~~~
Linnzi Zaorski: vocalist, New Orleans; strives to re-create the classic vocal stylings of 1920s and 30s era jazz legends.
~~~~~~~
Book: The Lost Continent: Small Towns in America by Bill Bryson; very funny, often sarcastic or ironic, describes author's experiences while traveling the U.S.; sometimes low density of information; often negative perception.
~~~~~~~
Book: Tanazaki Jun'ichiro: Lob des Schattes. Entwurf einer japanischen Aesthetik (1933, in German).
~~~~~~~
Book: Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson: The One Minute Manager (1983).
~~~~~~~
Book: Siegfried Lenz: Das schoenste Fest der Welt (1955 in German): book on tape; audio show.
~~~~~~~
Book: James Abbott McNeill Whistler: The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1892, edition of 1967): reflections on art and art critics. Letters, newspaper clippings. Whistler drew plenty of butterflies for this book.
~~~~~~~
Book: Hermann Hesse: Siddhartha (1922, in German): condensed wisdom.
~~~~~~~
CD: John Coltrane: Stellar Regions (1967): free jazz; spiritual.
~~~~~~~
Movie: Trading Places (1983): w/ Dan Ackroyd, Eddie Murphy, Jamie Lee Curtis. Comedy. Two commodity brokers make a bet that they can turn a drug dealer into a successful businessman, and an honest employee into a criminal by mixing things up a little. But the two victims of the plot get their revenge. Funnny!
~~~~~~~
Actress: Jamie Lee Curtis (b. 1958): daughter of Janet Leigh (Psycho) and Tony Curtis (Some Like It Hot); starring roles in Halloween (1978), Trading Places (1983), A Fish Called Wanda (1988), and True Lies (1994).
~~~~~~~

Adrian Deckbar: American, contemporary realistic artist; paintings and drawings are psychologically and emotionally charged; drama enhanced by strong lighting and unusual perspectives; similarity of paintings to Cindy Sherman's 'Untitled Film Stills'; represented by Hanson Gallery, New Orleans.

Other links: Adrian Deckbar: Diva Art Group


Snippets:
~~~~~~~
Einstein Documents: Einstein Archives Online
~~~~~~~
Movie: Duel (1971, TV); w/ Dennis Weaver. Man gets chased by a mystery truck, and fears for his life. Movie is very slow at times.
~~~~~~~
Juan Medina; super-realistic technique and surreal imagery; represented by Bryant Galleries, New Orleans.
~~~~~~~

Excerpt from 'In Blackwater Woods' by Mary Oliver (taken from: 'American Primitive', Pulitzer Prize in 1984)

Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.

To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Snippets:
~~~~~~~
Die Klage-Industrie (Der Spiegel, 17/2003, p122; in German): In the U.S. it has become very popular to sue companies for all kinds of things (drug side effects, open shoe laces, obesity, tobacco); class-action suits are especially profitable for lawyers; a 'culture of victims' is nurtured.
~~~~~~~
Vertigo (1958). Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Starring: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes. Ex-cop with acrophobia falls in love with apparently suicidal girl.
~~~~~~~
Book: Martin Milar: Die Elfen von New York (1996, in German). Two Scottish fairies turn New York City upside down.
~~~~~~~

Dynamic Planet Blog
TOC: Table of Contents
April 2003

1.) Arai Hakuseki's "Told round a brushwood fire..."
2.) Ludwik Fleck and Thomas Kuhn
3.) Albert Einstein
4.) Poetry of Sight, The Prints of James McNeill Whistler
5.) Lunar Eclipse
6.) Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
7.) The Structure of DNA

The Structure of DNA: The Double Helix (1986) by James D. Watson summarizes his personal views and experiences from the time in 1952/53 when he and Francis Crick raced against Linus Pauling to indentify the three dimensional structure of DNA. This book, though very subjectively written, and perhaps not entirely correct, is a gripping story of what led to the discovery of the 'Secret of Life'. Some people (e.g. Rosalind Franklin, a crystallographer who produced critical X-ray photographs of DNA) are presented unfavorably in the book, and there has been a large controversy as to whether Watsons 'personal account' is accurate. Also, Watson describes his own role in the work as having been there in the right place at the right time. Overall, the book is a thrilling story of how important discoveries in science are sometimes made.

Other facts and impressions from The Double Helix: Watson was working on viruses (phages), but DNA was always a side track that he was very passionate about; Crick was more the mathematician and model builder, Watson the visionary and driver of the enterprise; up to 1952 it was debated whether protein or DNA is the substance of genetic heredity; Pauling had published that proteins can fold into an alpha-helix structure; he has also published a triple-helix structure for DNA that proved to be incorrect.

The story, from the view of Linus Pauling, is also told on the web site Linus Pauling and the Race for DNA. It contains a narrative, a day-by-day personal account, hundreds of letters, manuscripts, photographs, published papers, and other media. Great resource!

The recent celebration of the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA structure yielded a large number of exhibitions and journal articles that recollect the events of early molecular biology. An exhibition at New York's Science, Industry and Business Library (New York Public Library), Feb. 24 - Aug. 24, 2003, displays crucial findings that led to the discovery, with special emphasis on the events in the New York area (Columbia, Rockefeller and Cold Spring Harbor Universities).

Notes from the exhibition:

• Friedrich Miescher (1844-1895) isolated DNA; elemantary analysis.


• Phoebus A.T. Levine: Book: Nucleic Acids (1931); was the first to isolate the carbohydrate portion of nucleic acids; distinguished DNA and RNA.


• Erwin Chagraff, Columbia Univ.: A and T, as well as C and G, occur in equal quantities (1:1) in all species.


• Oswald T. Avery, Colin MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarthy (Rockefeller, 1944): work with pneumococcus bacteria: DNA, not protein is the principle of life, i.e. carries the hereditary information; called the 'transforming principle'


• Max Dellbrueck (1906-1981), Salvador Luria (1912-1991): Phage Group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (started 1945, peak late 1940s/early 1950s).


• Alfred Hershey (1908-1997) and Martha Chase (Cold Spring Harbor): using phages, they proved once more that DNA, not protein is the material of heredity. Experiment: Hershey and Chase labeled the protein component of phage with 35S-containing amino acids and the nucleic acid component with 32P; after infection of bacteria and centrifugation, 32P was found in cells, and 35S in the supernatant.


• John Kendrew (1917-1997), Max Perutz (1914-2002): formed the Medical Research Conuncil Unit for Molecular Biology at Cambridge University, UK. Here, Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA; Cavendish Laboratories.


• Linus Pauling, Californina Institute of Technology: had already worked on protein structures in 1948; proposed a triple helix structure for DNA before W. & C. suggested the double helix.


• Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958): took X-ray diffraction images of unprecedented high quality; worked at King's College, London, under Maurice Wilkins (1916-).


• Books: James Waton: The Double Helix (1968); Francis Crick: What Mad Pursuit (1988).

Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clérel de Tocqueville (1805-1859), an aristocratic Frenchman who travelled the United States in 1831 to study the American people and their political institutions; wrote 'Democracy in America', Volume I (1835) and Volume II (1840). It is one of the earliest and most profound studies of American life; concerns the legislative and administrative systems in the U.S. and the influence of social and political institutions on the habits and manners of the people.

Other Links:
Democracy in America, Online Version (HTML)
Democracy in America, Online Books (TXT, ZIP)
Toqueville.org

Snippets:
~~~~~~~
Blog Tracking: blo.gs
~~~~~~~
Papiertaschentuch-Sammlung (collection of tissues): over 1000 packets from many differnt countries (in German)
~~~~~~~

A Lunar Eclipse! It's happening right here, right now! What a fantastic sight!

Notes to Exhibition: Poetry of Sight, The Prints of James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) at the New York Public Library (see Dynamic Planet Blog, April 27, 2003):

• Seymor Haden: husband of W.'s half-sister


• Ruskin trial left W. bankrupt


• W. sometimes paid his bills with his art


• W. had at least two unacknowledged children


• portrait of W. by William Merrit Chase: painting each other; W. did not like C.'s picture


• W. had difficulties drawing hand and feet; often only sketched or left out


• W. liked to depict doorways in his prints


• W. had several mistress-modells / model-mistresses


• Venice and Thames sets are very serene, down to earth; great!


• The Gentle Art of Making Enemies: W. created over 100 different butterflies to comment upon text


• Drypoint: technique where fine needle is directly applied to plate


• W. had interest in lower class figures


• W. broke many friendships and relationships violently


• W. sometimes drew on plates that were used previously; sometimes figures and objects can be seen; W. then writes: 'Figures not mine' etc.


• Second Venice Set (1879/80) was inspired by Japanese prints
  

Snippets:
~~~~~~~
Synesthesia: Ramachandran and Hubbard, Scientific American May 2003, 53-59: explores linking of certain brain regions in synesthetes.
~~~~~~~
Notes to Boston: MIT; Newbury Street: galleries, shopping and restaurants; Copley Square: Trinity Church; Boston Public Library; Freedom Trail: Old State House
~~~~~~~
Betsy Ross: sewed the first American flag; house in Philadelphia
~~~~~~~

Albert Einstein Exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, Nov 15, 2002 - Aug 10, 2003. Notes to the Online Exhibtion:

May 29, 1919: solar eclipse proved that the Sun's gravity acts like a lens and deflects light from distant stars; confirmed Einsteins General Theory of Relativity.

LIFE

March 14, 1879: Albert Einstein born in Ulm, Germany; poor student, but excelled at math and science; taught himself geometry at the age of 12; embraced intellectual independence as a child;

January 6, 1903: Einstein marries Mileva Maric, a fellow physics student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology; daughter Lieserl born out of wedlock in 1902; Albert's passion for Mileva ran deep, but that didn't stop him from meeting other women when they were apart; Albert and Mileva divorced in 1919.

1905: Einstein (age 26) received his Ph.D. from the University of Zurich, publishes four groundbreaking articles in physics that were published in the prestigious journal 'Annalen der Physik'.

When Albert fell ill in 1917, his cousin Elsa Loewenthal nursed him back to health. He found her devotion endearing. Even before the couple married in 1919, Albert embraced Elsa's two daughters, Ilse and Margot, as his own children.

First job out of college as a patent clerk at the Swiss Federal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern.

Einstein's Nobel Prize (1921): He won the prize for his distinguished career in physics, most notably for his theory of light and electrons called the Photoelectric Effect (1905), not his more controversial theory of relativity.

Einstein never actually made it to Stockholm to accept his medal; Einstein was in the midst of a world lecture tour and headed to Japan when the Nobel telegram arrived at their Berlin residence in 1922. The German ambassador to Sweden attended the December award ceremony on Einstein's behalf, overlooking that the scientist had renounced his German citizenship in 1896. After much confusion over whether Einstein was a German or Swiss citizen, the Swedish ambassador hand-delivered the medal to Einstein in Berlin in 1923. Later that year Einstein visited Sweden to give his "Nobel lecture"— on relativity. With the medal came a sum of 121,592 kronor (roughly $32,000), which Einstein gave to his ex-wife Mileva as part of their divorce agreement.

LIGHT

1905: light always travels at a constant speed (300,000 km/sec = 186,000 miles/sec)); 'ether' to speed up light or slow down does not exist; light from a moving source has the same velocity as light from a stationary source.

1887: Albert Michelson and Edward Morley (both American scientists): Interferometer; they hoped it would enable them to prove the existence of the ether. Michelson and Morley ran their interferometer experiment numerous times but never saw any evidence of the ether.

The Michelson-Morley interferometer works by splitting a single beam of light in two. The two beams bounce off mirrors and arrive at a detector. If the ether existed, it would remain still while the Earth moved through it. The ether would then change the speed of light depending on whether the light was moving in the direction of Earth's motion or at a right angle to that motion. Michelson and Morley expected to find that two light beams arrived at the detector at different times. Instead they found that no matter which direction light traveled, it always moved at the same speed—indicating that the ether does not exist.

How long does it take to get to the Moon? Light travels the 380,000 kilometers (240,000 miles) between the Moon and the Earth in 1.3 seconds; Electron: 2.9 minutes; space shuttle (orbital speed): 14 hours; sound (70 F): 13 days; passenger jet: 18 days; NYC subway car (maximum speed): 220 days; human (walking): 9 years

Why can't you travel faster than light? The faster an object travels, the more massive it becomes. As an accelerating object gains mass and thus becomes heavier, it takes more and more energy to increase its speed. It would take an infinite amount of energy to make an object reach the speed of light.

TIME

Q: If the speed of light is constant, how could different observers measure the same speed for light when the observers themselves were moving at different speeds? For speed to remain constant, intervals of time and distance would have to change...

A: Time is not absolute; despite our common perception that a second is always a second everywhere in the universe, the rate at which time flows depends upon where you are and how fast you are traveling. Time does not progress at the same rate for everyone, everywhere. Instead, Einstein showed that how fast time progresses depends on how fast the clock measuring time is moving. The faster an object travels, the more slowly time passes for that object, as measured by a stationary observer.

Earth are traveling at 107,000 kilometers (67,000 miles) an hour around the Sun.

Different 'frames of reference' are defined in part by speed. In the Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein determined that time is relative—in other words, the rate at which time passes depends on your frame of reference. The effect of time slowing down is negligible at speeds of everyday life, but it becomes very pronounced at speeds approaching that of light.

Hypothetical 'light clock' experiment: Imagine a clock that consists of a pulse of light and two mirrors, one at the top of the clock and one at the bottom. The clock "ticks" when the pulse reaches the mirror at the top of the clock. and "tocks" at the bottom. The pulse bounces back and forth between the mirrors at a constant rate. When the clock moves, the time between ticks is longer. (diagonal path).

Effect is only detectable at high speeds: two highly accurate atomic clocks, flew one around the Earth aboard an airplane. When the airborne clock returned to Earth, it was a tiny fraction of a second behind the one that remained on the ground.

Intriguingly, someone moving will not think that their clock is running slow, because everything in that frame of reference will have slowed down as well. According to a stationary observer in space watching Earth move around the Sun, all of the clocks on our planet are running slow, yet we don't notice anything out of the ordinary.

A very fast spaceship is a time machine to the future. Five years on a ship traveling at 99 percent the speed of light (2.5 years out and 2.5 years back) corresponds to roughly 36 years on Earth!

The fastest spaceships of today travel at only 0.00004 % the speed of light. The most cutting-edge proposals for new engine technology would enable humans to travel at 0.1 percent the speed of light. Time travel—at least to the future—is theoretically possible, according to Einstein's Theory of Relativity. (Time travel to the past remains impossible.)

Cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev spent a total of 748 days on the Russian space station Mir. Because Mir was moving relative to Earth, it was also a time machine. Avdeyev is 0.02 seconds younger than he would have been had he never traveled in space.

ENERGY

For centuries, scientists thought that matter could not be created or destroyed—it could only change form. The same idea seemed to apply to energy. Einstein: Mass and energy are different forms of the same thing: E=mc²

GRAVITY

Einstein postulated: gravity and acceleration are equivalent (equivalence principle); this idea was the seed that—over the next nine years— became the 'General Theory of Relativity'.

4-D Space-Time: Space and time make up the four-dimensional arena in which all things exist. Space-time valleys create the effect of gravity. So, the bowl-shaped warp made by Earth's mass, for example, alters the course of an object, like a satellite, that travels into that warp.


Snippets:
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Model, writer: Sophie Dahl, granddaughter of writer Roald Dahl; book: The Man with the Dancing Eyes (Der Spiegel Nr. 19, 2003, 5.5.03 (in German))
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More Models: Storm Models
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Photography: The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth: Access to all photographs since 1961. Searchable. Example: NYC
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CD: Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: Moanin' (1958)
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Ludwik Fleck (1896-1961): Polish physician and philosopher; sociologically-oriented approach to the study of the evolution of scientific and medical knowledge. Book: Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache: Einfuehrung in die Lehre von Denkstil und Denkkollektiv (in German, 1925; translation: Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact).

Fleck introduced the term 'thought collective': "People exist who can communicate with each other, i.e., who think somehow similarly, belong, so to say, to the same thought-group, and people exist who are completely unable to understand each other and communicate with each other, as if they belong to different thought-groups (thought-collectives)." "Every thought-collective considers that the people who do not belong to it are incompetent." "...cognition must be considered as a function of three components: it is a relation between the individual subject, the certain object and the given community of thinking (Denkkollektiv) within the subject acts; it works only when a certain style of thinking (Denkstil), originating in the given community is used."

Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996): scientist and philosopher; Book: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Science is not a steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge; instead, science is a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions ('paradigm shift'); a scientific revolution is a noncumulative developmental episode in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one; during periods of 'normal science', the primary task of scientists is to bring the accepted theory and fact into closer agreement.

The passage in Arai Hakuseki's "Told round a brushwood fire: The autobiography of Arai Hakuseki" that I referred to recently (Dynamic Planet Blog, Jan. 27, 2003) goes like this:

"When winter began, the days were short, and sometimes the sun set before I had finished my task. I then took my desk out on to a bamboo veranda, facing west, and so finished my writing. Also, when practicing calligraphy at night, I would be overcome with sleepiness, so I secretly arranged with the man who waited on me to have him draw and set ready two buckets of water on the verandah. When I grew very drowsy, I would take off my clothes and pour first one bucket of water over me, dress again, and study. Although at first I felt awakend by the cold, after a while I became warm and sleepy again, so, once more, I would pour water over myself, as before. With the help of the second lot of water, I would get through the greater part of my task. This happend during the autumn and winter of my ninth year [1665]." (Translation by Joyce Ackroyd, 1979, p. 60)

Snippets:
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Seeking the Secret of Life: The DNA Story in New York. Online Exhibition and Exhibition at the Industry and Business Library in New York City. Good overwiew.
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Text ueber Text: Includes a nice collection of prose and poerty (in German).
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Gedichtepool: Collection of poems (in German); well organized.
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Dynamic Planet Blog
TOC: Table of Contents
April 2003

1.) William Butler Yeats
2.) James Abbott McNeill Whistler
3.) Karluk

The Karluk was the flagship in an Arctic expedition initially led by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, famous for his studies of Inuit culture, who hoped to find a last unexplored continent hidden under the cap of the North Pole. The story of Karluk's voyage is similar to that of Shackleton's Endurance (see Dynamic Planet Blog, Feb. 5, 2003), but was not quite as fortunate. "We did not all come back" begins the book written by Captain Robert (Bob) Bartlett, in which he tells his story of what happend to ship and crew in 1913/14.

The expedition was poorly organized, and when the Karluk got stuck in the ice in the winter of 1913, Stefansson is believed by some to have deserted his men, claiming he would go on a hunting trip, and vanishing on a 5-year expedition of his own. After his return to Canada in 1918 he was criticized by the government and the press for abandoning the ship, but he suggested the deaths were justified in the name of science and progress. Moreover, he blamed Captain Bartlett for the disaster.

After Stefansson did not return, Captain Bartlett carried the responsibility for the lives of the 22 men, most of them scientists insufficiently accustomed with the Arctic conditions, an eskimo woman and her two children aboard the Karluk. But he was determined to save their lives after the Karluk got crushed by the ice and sank. The Captain has had polar experience: he had commanded the Roosevelt under Admiral Peary, when Peary had made his try for the North Pole.

Bartlett maneuvered his party and their supplies to Wrangle Island, 200 miles off the Siberian coast, arriving there in March 1914. Because the others were too weak, he then decided to make the further trip alone only in the company of a young unmarried Inuit, Kataktovick, and the two successfully reached Siberia. Here, they were welcomed and helped by the native Chukches, and could organize a rescue mission of the other party members.

William Laird McKinlay was one of the scientist aboard the Karluk and the last surviving member of the expedition. He published his memories in 1976, some 60 years after the voyage. Some of his unpublished writings greatly influenced Jeniffer Niven's book 'The Ice Master', which is the most recent analysis of the events in the Arctic.

Vilhjalmur Stefanson (1879-1962) wrote some 24 books and more than 400 articles about the high north and its people. He was an ambitious and successful explorer. He soon became a public figure in North America and Europe, well-known for his description of the "Copper Eskimo" (a group of Inuit with unexpectedly European features), his discovery of new lands in the Arctic, and his anthropological approach to travel and exploration. Despite all his accomplishments, Stefansson's reputation was tarnished for his role in the tragedy of the Karluk. It still remains controversial whether he had indeed intentionally abandoned his ship and crew.

Other Links:
Photos of the Karluk and Bob Bartlett
Photo: The Karluk in Ice
The Fate of Those Aboad the Karluk
Article: The Intimate Arctic: The article studies Stefanssons writings on how he dealt with his Inuit companions and his intimate relations in the Arctic.
Jeniffer Niven Website
Other Arctic Expeditions
Enchanted Learning: Explorers

Books:
1.) Jennifer Niven, The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk (2000)
Review: MostlyFiction
Review: The Frederick A. Cook Society
Review: MyShelf

2.) William Laird McKinlay, The Last Voyage of the Karluk: The Classic Memoir of an Artic Disaster (1976)

3.) Robert A. Bartlett: The Karluk's Last Voyage (1916)

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903): Painter, draughtsman, decorator, writer; born in America, raised in Russia; spent his adult life as an artist in Paris, London, and Venice; forged his own aesthetic philosophy, which he articulated through his images (prints, paintings) and writings; he produced over 600 etchings, drypoints, and lithographs (incl. Twelve Etchings from Nature = The French Set (1858), The Thames Set (1859), and First and Second Venice Sets (1879-80)). Book: Whistler wrote "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies". The New York Public Library shows Whistler prints (Poetry of Sight, Jan 24-May 10, 2003).

Whistler Etching

Other Links:
Whistler Prints
Whistler Biography and Paintings
Art Encyclopedia: James McNeill Whistler

Snippets:
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Jazz Vocals / Vocal Improvisation: Kyoko Kitamura: seen at 55 Bar, NYC, March 15, 2003; w/ Khabu and Mike McGinnis, and on April 19, 2003 at The Three Jewels Cafe, NYC, w/ Ras Moshe (on reeds). Very intriguing experimental vocalist.
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Author: Jean Améry. Book: Jenseits von Schuld und Suehne. Bewaeltigungsversuche eines Ueberwaeltigten (in German). Jean Améry Biography.
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CD: Fairground Attraction: Ay Fond Kiss
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"People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind." (W.B. Yeats)

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939): Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer; one of the outstanding and most influential twentieth-century poets writing in English; received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923; produced a tremendous amount of works; central theme in Yeats's poems is Ireland, its history, folklore and contemporary public life. After 1910, Yeats's dramatic art took a sharp turn toward a highly poetical, static, and esoteric style. His later plays were written for small audiences; they experiment with masks, dance, and music, and were profoundly influenced by the Japanese Noh plays. Yeats is one of the few writers whose greatest works were written after the award of the Nobel Prize. Whereas he received the Prize chiefly for his dramatic works, his significance today rests on his lyric achievement. His recurrent themes are the contrast of art and life, masks, cyclical theories of life (the symbol of the winding stairs), and the ideal of beauty and ceremony contrasting with the hubbub of modern life.

Other Links:
William Butler Yeats: Literature Network
William Butler Yeats: Nobel E-Museum

Snippets:
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Video: The Straight Story (1999); directed by David Lynch; Plot: Alvin Straight, 73, rides for weeks and hundreds of miles on a lawn mower to mend his relationship with his sick brother. Midwestern touch.
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Video: Blue Velvet (1986); directed by David Lynch; w/ Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern. Plot: Young man finds ear --- investigates murder --- meets beautiful and mysterious woman who is involved with a violent and perversely evil man.
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Dynamic Planet Blog
TOC: Table of Contents
February 2003

1.) Wikipedian: Dynamic Planet
2.) Tamara de Lempicka
3.) Difficult (Failed) Journeys: Shackleton, Burke/Wills, Donner Party
4.) George Berkeley
5.) René Descartes
6.) Cuba Missle Crisis
7.) Seifollah Samadian: The White Station
8.) Memes
9.) Ariadne's Thread
10.) Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson (1859-1941): French philosopher, awarded Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927; argued that the intuition is deeper than the intellect; his works 'Creative Evolution' (1907) and 'Matter and Memory' (1896) attempted to integrate the findings of biological science with a theory of consciousness; concept of 'élan vital' ('creative impulse' or 'living energy'); offered an interpretation of consciousness as existing on two levels, the first to be reached by deep introspection, the second an external projection of the first. The deeper self is the seat of creative becoming and of free will. Bergson also suggested that the traditional association between the model of space and time is incoherent. Unlike space, time is not measurable by objective standard.

Quotations by Henri Bergson:
"To perceive means to immobilize . . . we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself" and "An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known."

Other Links:
Nobel e-Museum: Henri Bergson

Snippets:
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Writer: André Breton (1896-1966): French Surrealist. Nadja (1928)
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Photographer: Gisele Freund (1908-2000): French, Portraits of Paris Writers.
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Video: Tesla - Master of Lightning (2000), PBS Video: good summary of Tesla's life and work
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CD: Minus 8: Elysian Fields (2000): Nu Jazz
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Ariadne's Thread: According to myth, Ariadne gave Theseus a thread with which to find his way out of the Labyrinth. Today the term is used to describe navigation in difficult environments.

Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos of Crete, who attacked Athens after his son was murdered there. The Athenians submitted and had to sacrifice 14 youths to the Minotaur in his labyrinth every year. She fell in love with Theseus, a young man who volunteered to come and kill the Minotaur, and helped him by giving him a magic sword and a ball of thread so that he could easily find his way out. (Encyclopedia Mythica). Ariadne's story is told, among others, by Gaius Iulius Hyginus in his Fabulae (#42)

Other Links:
Bulfinch's Mythology
Encyclopedia Mythica

Snippets:
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Encyclopedia Britannica 1911 Edition
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Meme (pronounced 'meem'): [Source]

A contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern. Term coined by Richard Dawkins in the book 'The Selfish Gene'.

Meme is the mind analogy of 'gene'. Individual slogans, catch-phrases, melodies, icons, inventions, and fashions are typical memes. An idea or information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, i.e. to repeat it to someone else. All transmitted knowledge is memetic.

If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.

Memes, like genes, vary in their fitness to survive in the environment of human intellect. Some reproduce like bunnies, but are very short-lived (fashions), while others are slow to reproduce, but hang around for eons (religions, perhaps?).

Other Links:
Memes.org
Memes.net


Snippets:
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Photomodel: Monica Bellucci: Pictures | Bio | Matrix Reloaded
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Other Supermodels
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Video: Rand McNally: Southern Africa Safari (1995): Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia
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CD: Paul Simon: Graceland (1986)
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CD: Michelle Branch: The Spirit Room (2001)
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Seifollah Samadian: The White Station (1999): The Iranian filmmaker took the pictures for this film out of the window during a snow storm in Tehran. A description reads:

"On 13 January 1998, the Iranian capital of Tehran is swept by an incredible snowstorm. As far as the eye can see, everything is covered by a thick layer of snow. The snow keeps falling ceaselessly, while a lone figure waits for a bus. The dark silhouette, which in the end credits is thanked as "the waiting stranger", stands out against the white background. Two hands cling to a dark umbrella; both feet gradually disappear beneath the white blanket of snow. The scene is filmed from the window of a room on the opposite side of the road. The only audible sound is that of the wind, at times sweeping the snow by almost horizontally. On the screen, everything is reduced to its essence, in natural black and white. Aside from a few passers-by, one of them walking backwards against the storm, the area is a no man's land, marked only by the promising sign of the bus stop." (Source).

The film was also presented at the Documenta11 in Kassel, Germany, in 2002.

Other Links:
Documenta11 (Home)


Snippets:
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CD: Dido: No Angel (1999)
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Photographer: Paul Strand
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