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:
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CD: Patricia Barber: Verse (2002)
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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:
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New Orleans' Oldest Candy Store: Laura's Candies; est. 1913
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Other interesting artists featured at the Hanson Gallery, New Orleans: Edward Povey, Joanna Zjawinska, Joseph Lorusso.
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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).
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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!
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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).
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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:
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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:
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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))
~~~~~~~
More Models: Storm Models
~~~~~~~
Photography: The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth: Access to all photographs since 1961. Searchable. Example: NYC
~~~~~~~
CD: Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: Moanin' (1958)
~~~~~~

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.
~~~~~~~
Text ueber Text: Includes a nice collection of prose and poerty (in German).
~~~~~~~
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.
~~~~~~~
Author: Jean Améry. Book: Jenseits von Schuld und Suehne. Bewaeltigungsversuche eines Ueberwaeltigten (in German). Jean Améry Biography.
~~~~~~~
CD: Fairground Attraction: Ay Fond Kiss
~~~~~~~

"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.
~~~~~~~
Video: Tesla - Master of Lightning (2000), PBS Video: good summary of Tesla's life and work
~~~~~~~
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)


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CD: Dido: No Angel (1999)
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Photographer: Paul Strand
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Cuba Missle Crisis: In 1962 the stationing of Russian nuclear war heads in Cuba brought the world to the brink of a, possibly nuclear, war between the two super powers. The intense decision making process is documented in transcripts of discussions that were secretly taped in the White House (The Kennedy Files)

Movie: Thirteen Days (2000), with Kevin Costner, Bruce Greenwood

Text of the Letters exchanged between Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy from 1961-1963. Especially interesting are documents #65 to #70, written in the heart of the crisis.

I found the following passage by Khrushchev most impressive:

"Mr. President, I appeal to you to weigh well what the aggressive, piratical actions, which you have declared the USA intends to carry out in international waters, would lead to. You yourself know that any sensible man simply cannot agree with this, cannot recognize your right to such actions.

If you did this as the first step towards the unleashing of war, well then, it is evident that nothing else is left to us but to accept this challenge of yours. If, however, you have not lost your self-control and sensibly conceive what this might lead to, then, Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose.

Consequently, if there is no intention to tighten that knot and thereby to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot. We are ready for this." (Telegram From the Embassy in the Soviet Union to the Department of State, Moscow, October 26, 1962, 7 p.m.)

Other Links: Cuba Missle Crisis:
Wikipedia
Time Line
National Security Agenecy (NSA)
National Security Archive

Hans Joachim Stoerig: Kleine Weltgeschichte der Philosophie (in German): René Descartes (1596-1649): preference for mathematics combined with scepticism against all other sciences; alternating phases of reclusiveness / concentration and adventurous life style; two basic elements of cartesian thinking: God and Soul, but logically discussed; tried to approach philosophy as a kind of universal mathematics, reducing all philosophical principles by deduction from simple basic elements; first awareness that everything that I know or perceive can be wrong; then out of this doubt follows at least the basic assurance of being a thinking entity; this leads to 'cogito ergo sum' (I think, therfore I am) as a fundamental starting point.

Other Links:
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: René Descartes

George Berkeley (1685-1753), Irish philosopher: Esse Est Percipi: To Be Is To Be Seen (more exactly: the ability to be seen). In German: Sein heisst wahrgenommen werden (genauer: wahrgenommen werden koennen)

Berkeley was close to British Empirism: God stands high above us, and his ways are not intuitive to man. We therefore cannot know his laws (laws of nature) to begin with, and cannot find them through logical deduction. We have to learn them through observation and experience.

Berkeley also was a consequent Idealist (as opposed to a Materialist): The only objects of human knowledge are ideas and the minds that have the ideas. How can that be? If all exists only in our minds, what difference does exist between the sun in the sky, a sun that we dream about, and a sun that we can imagine at any given point in time. Berkeley says that the vision of the 'real' sun occurs in all minds to the same extend, whereas the 'dreamed' sun is only happening in one (my own) mind, and the 'imagined' sun only in my mind if I want to imagine it.

Modern theory of Ideas: ideas are formed in three ways :
1.) directly imprinted on the senses
2.) introspected in the mind (passions, emotions)
3.) formed by memory and imagination

Other Links:
George Berkeley's Philosophy
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: George Berkeley

Snippets:
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DJ Duo: Kruder & Dorfmeister: Drum and Bass
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Difficult (Failed) Journeys:

1.) Ernest Shackleton's Antarctis Expedition (1914-1916): Failed expedition with the objective to be the first to cross the Antarctic continent on foot.
Links:
Nova: Shackleton's Voyage of Endurance
Antarctic Connection: The Endurance

2.) Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills in Australia (1860-1861): The fatal attempt to cross the Australian continent; exposed to many dangers, especially shortage of water and food.
Links:
Terra Incognita

3.) The Donner Party (1846-1847): 90 emigrants on their way to California get trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains in Nov. 1846 with insufficient food supplies. Cannibalism occured.
Links:
Chronology
PBS Special: The Donner Party
The Donner Party by Daniel Lewis
The Donner Party by Daniel M. Rosen

Snippets:
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CD: Freddie Hubbard: Hub-Tones: superb!
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Painter: Sidney Nolan, Australia
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