|
Contributed by Editor One
|
|
Tuesday, 04 October 2005 |
Two men atop a fallen Russian spacecraft are surrounded by a flock of white butterflies.
The photograph was taken by Norwegian photographer Jonas Bendiksen in the Baikonur region of Kazakhstan. While Russia has moved its more sensitive military lauches closer to home, it still launches multi-stage commercial rockets from the Baikonur Kosmodrome. The lower stages of these craft fall back to earth, raining both valuable scrap metals and toxic chemicals on the hapless farmers and delighted scavengers below. Metal scavengers trek to remote sites where rocket stages and fuel tanks are likely to fall and wait for the fiery missiles to plummet toward them from the sky.
|
Read more...
|
|
|
Contributed by Editor One
|
|
Sunday, 02 October 2005 |
 Gone are the days when Disney created sumptuous visual feasts of animation. Lately Pixar has stolen the show with its computer rendered animation films like Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. Pixar's computers have generated perfect visual perspective on shiny toy-like faces to rack up billions of dollars in sales while Disney's in-house features have fallen so flat that they have given up on their own two dimensional animation.
Some moviegoers still long for the expressiveness of a hand drawn line. We still remember being wowed by the beauty of Snow White, or Alice in Wonderland, films whose landscapes could be hung on a wall (and often are).
There is an animated film available on DVD that single-handedly revives the hand drawn animated feature film. Triplets of Belleville (2003) features a lovingly drawn cast of quirky characters living out lives that detour from the ordinary into the extraordinary. As you might expect from a French film, even scenes of the ordinary have a captivating luminescence to them.
|
Read more...
|
|
|
Contributed by Editor One
|
|
Friday, 26 August 2005 |
Today there is a President's Council on Bioethics to ponder such weighty possibilities as human cloning and human-animal chimeras. Such issues are part of the fabric of mythology, both ancient and modern. James Dickey, the poet consultant to the Library of Congress from 1966 to 1968 created an uproar with his own work on the subject. One Mr. Swain told the Librarian, "if Dickey is your idea of a poet, then, sir, i have no respect for you whatsoever..." Dickey's merit as a poet may be debated, but he held a firm grasp on the otherwise inchoate terror humans have for their chimera:
Say I have heard tell
That in a museum in Atlanta
Way back in a corner somewhere
There's this thing that's only half
Sheep like a woolly baby
Pickled in alcohol because
Those things can't live his eyes
Are open but you can't stand to look
I heard from somebody who ...
But this is now almost all
Gone. The boys have taken
Their own true wives in the city,
The sheep are safe in the west hill
Pasture but we who were born there
Still are not sure. Are we,
Because we remember, remembered
In the terrible dust of museums?
Merely with his eyes, the sheep-child may
Be saying saying
I am here, in my father's house.
I who am half of your world
-- from James Dickey' poem, The Sheep-Child
|
|
|
Contributed by Editor One
|
|
Wednesday, 27 July 2005 |
 In ancient Greece, the future was foreseen by oracular priests inhaling hallucinogenic gases. Today's most effective oracles tend to be engineers by training. People like Ray Kurzweil, Bill Joy, and Jaron Lanier have tinkered with nascent technologies that, like the oracle's gases, gave them visions of distant futures. In his book, Radical Evolution, Joel Garreau reminds even those of us familiar with the works of these men how precisely they have envisioned the circumstances of our time: In the Age of Intelligent Machines, Kurzweil in 1989 predicted the World Wide Web, the taking of the world chess championship by a computer, and the dominance of intelligent weapons in warfare....the collapse of the Soviet Union. It may seem obvious in hindsight, but in 1988, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency averred that that regime would be America's principal foe through the lifetimes of our children and our children's children. Kurzweil, by contast, saw the Soviet's dilemma. "Either they would support these decentralized technologies, which would ultimately destroy how tight a control they would have, orthey would avoid them -- as they tried to relinquish, say, photocopiers -- in which case they would destroy their economy and ultimately fail."
|
Read more...
|
|
|
Contributed by Editor One
|
|
Monday, 18 July 2005 |
 The perennial story of a serial killer like Dennis Rader has a special power to make our skin crawl. How inhuman these creatures must be to kill others, in cold blood, again and again. They are not like us. We bear no resemblance to them.
Yet there are serial killers who may once have felt the same repulsion that we do at the notion of committing even a single murder. Therre are thousands of these people. And with such a large population of them, we cannot honestly lock them in a mental box with John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and the others. They cannot all be reptilian creatures masquerading in human skin. At least a handful must be ordinary people like you and me who somehow became something else.
Jean Hatzfield has compiled a story of the Rwandan genocide that presents the testimony of some of these people. The accounts revealed in Machete Season are riveting and bone-chilling. The interviews also shed some light on how yielding to conformity can unleash unambiguous evil from everyday people.
|
Read more...
|
|
|
|
Shrode Report
