When coffee in a bag just isn't good enough

Here's an interesting video showing how astronauts, inspired by rocket fuel tanks, have figured out how to create coffee cups usable in zero gravity. Naturally, I wondered how ice cubes and little paper umbrellas would work in them, but sadly they kept the demonstration booze free.

By the way, if you're a Moslem in need of some NASA self-esteem boosting, he mentions you could drink tea out of it too.


HT: Neatorama

For this, the Founders risked powder and ball?

There is a Washington Post Review, Norman Rockwell exhibit opens at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, by Blake Gopnik that's making the blog rounds and receiving much well deserved mockery in the process. 

I'm not a huge fan of Rockwell, I think he is rather schmaltzy, but it is clear he is an excellent and influential illustrator.

Glopnik on the other hand goes well around the bend in his disdain for Rockwell. He uses the 4th of July as an excuse to opine on the courage of American artists: Emily Dickinson for experimenting with her poetry, Louis Armstrong for playing jazz, and finally Jackson Pollack for splattering paint on canvas.

You can probably imagine what somebody who is a big enough twit to spin panegyrics about the heroism of Pollack's painting style thinks of Norman Rockwell. To put it mildly, he comes across as an insufferable snob.

What captured my eye in his piece, particularily in light of my last post Lopsided Democracy, was the following:

Rockwell's vision of "Freedom of Speech," included in the Smithsonian's show, doesn't invoke a communist printing his pamphlets or an atheist on a soapbox. It gives us a town hall meeting of almost interchangeable New Englanders, no doubt agreeing to disagree about something as divisive as the rates for those new parking meters. For this, the Founders risked powder and ball? 

First off, to answer Glopnik's question, yes, that is why the Founders risked powder and ball. The picture shows a common working man standing to speak at a meeting. On either side he is flanked by men, who are dressed in suits and looking up and seriously listening to what he has to say. That is about as simple an image as one could paint of Jefferson's subversive and revolutionary notion that "all men are created equal".

That dignity, afforded to all men to both speak and to order their own affairs --the affairs of the nation as well as the town hall town meetings that Glopnik so cavalierly dismisses -- is precisely why they fought the Revolution. The idea that no man is above another in either station, caste or dignity is the axiom from which all else American flows.

By the way Mr. Glopnik, all the archetypes on your list that you get misty-eyed over: communists printing pamphlets, atheists on soapboxes, Latino socialists, disgruntled lesbian spinsters, foul-mouthed Jewish comics and metrosexual half-Canadian art critics are free to speak their mind in this country which you seem to think is full of vapid bumpkins.

Perhaps you should scrub the cliches from your writing, and your list was certainly a string of cliches if I ever saw one, before you presume to tell other people what a shallow, maudlin fools they are for liking an illustration.

Lopsided Democracy

Below is an old post of mine. In light of the election it seems relevant. Indeed, "People will come together and cry: enough! ". Only it wasn't in fond nostalgia of the wise old elite, instead it was a lot of people who resented being called simpletons for their opinions. Anyway, the election brought this song and post to mind...



Above is the song Dimonkransa sung by Myra Andrade of the Cape Verde Islands. Cape Verde received their independence from Portugal on July 5th, 1975. The liberation movement was led by the socialist African Party of Independence of Cape Verde (PAICV). Andrade's father was a member of it, and in fact she was born in Cuba.

Upon independence Cape Verde was a single party government, but in 1990 at a party congress the PAICV approved the introduction of multiparty democracy. In the election that followed the opposition fared well, and Cape Verde has evolved into a stable multi-party democracy.

However, this is not a post about her politics, nor the sort of third world socialism that bubbles through the undeveloped world. It seems to me there is a deeper strata, a bedrock so to speak, which lies under the languid melancholy of her lyrics.

It was said that democracy,
Lopsided democracy,
It was said that democracy
Was like a hidden treasure,
But now that it has been found.
We have all opened our eyes
And each one, relying on his judgment,
Confidently declared that what was round was in fact square,
And went to work, with a great many theories,
To prove that he was right.

(lyrics from the version she sung on her first album Navega)

Andrade is ill at ease with democracy, but for social rather than political reasons. Early in the song she calls it 'lopsided democracy' and as its lyrics unfold her complaint is that each person, not matter how foolish they are (and she clearly thinks many if not most of them are fools), now express a cacophony of opinions and arguments that bury the truth. 

She ends the song singing of English businessman and listing names from Cape Verde's past, some who have been elevated and some who she fears are being forgotten, and expresses distress at this reordering of authority. 

Stripped to its bone, the song is about a lost elite. Andrade is expressing nostalgia for a short-lived one party rule and for an escape from European domination. Of course it is her party that should rule and she now makes her home in Paris. Perhaps it is she that is lopsided, rather than all of the happy fools she mocks?

The time will come when old Náxu’s opinions
Will not be held in higher esteem than those of a babe in arms.
People will come together and cry: enough!    

Americans forget how revolutionary we are. Jefferson's "all men are created equal..." is both intoxicating and destructive. It is a hell of a thing not to have to step into the gutter to clear the side walk for a swaggering aristocrat. Andrade is intimidated by and dismissive of people who have opened their eyes, and each one, relied on their own judgment, but a free man knows better.

As for coming together and crying "enough"? That is exactly what our 4th of July celebrates and we'll have our Gadsden flags mingled with the Stars and Stripes. Happy 4th of July to you all.

Flight of Passage

"Our original plan called for skirting the north edge of the Allegheny Mountains, where the peaks are lower and there would be less turbulence, following the gently rolling valleys of central Pennsylvania into Youngstown, Ohio. But that course was now obstructed by clouds and the weather had formed a narrow, irregular chute forcing us to divert south through Harrisburg and the lower Susquehanna Valley. That would mean facing the Alleghenies head-on in rough air, but we would have to worry about that when we got there.

On the map I found a rail line just south of Pottstown that meandered west to the Susquehanna, up through Reading and Hershey. If clouds blocked our way there were several intersecting power lines that we could pick up. Wiggling the stick to signal Kern, I ruddered over for the tracks and pointed them out on the map. Throwing open the side windows, I kept my head out of the slipstream to look for landmarks. The ceiling was dropping again and we didn't have a lot of airports in front of us. I didn't have the luxury of guessing at our position and I focused like a gnome on the land and then back to the map.

That's how we flew the first leg, like a pair of old airmailers. While Kern manned the plane and kept us straight and level from the front seat, I hung out the side from the rear, battered by the rain and slipstream as I concentrated on the terrain."

The plight of Abby Sunderland, the 16-year-old sailor who was attempting a solo circumnavigation of the globe, has been a compelling news story. She ran into heavy weather in the Indian Ocean, lost radio contact and had to activate her emergencies two hours later. Fortunately she's been found, her boat de-masted but still afloat and help is steaming towards her and less than a day away.

Her age, coupled with the thought of her trying to sail solo around the World, has drawn considerable criticism. Many people have argued that her parents were irresponsible for allowing her to attempt such voyage.

In following the story I've been reminded of a book I read, Rinker Buck's Flight of Passage.

The book is a memoir of Rinker (age 15) and his brother Kern's (age 17) flight across the continental U.S. At the time they were the youngest pilots to cross the country. They had bought an old Piper Cub for $300 and carefully rebuilt it for the flight.

Aside from being a good travel yarn, the book is a look back by the adult Rinker on his relationship with his brother, and beyond that his relationship with his father. It is an altogether touching book and in the end it reminds one of what it is like to be a teenager with the horizon before you and a nest to leave.

Thinking of the story told in the book, and having watched one too many helicopter moms in amazement, I think I come down on the side of Abby's parents who left her try her luck in that boat. There are certainly worse things a young girl could aspire to achieve. I wish her fair winds and trailing seas in her future.

Anyways, those were simpler days. In digging around for material for this post I bumped across a couple of videos of young Kern and Rinker Buck on the old TV show To Tell the Truth. They're after the jump. Click "read more" to watch and enjoy. 

I have been remiss for multiple days

Gah! It has been a lot longer than I thought since I've last posted.

In the past I have posted pictures of people blending themselves with record album covers and money. Recently I discovered another small internet photo fad -- multiplicity. People take multiple pictures of themselves and then photoshop them together to get an image with themselves appearing numerous times in it.

Most just turn out to be people making funny faces and what-not, but I like the three shown here because each told a little story.

In the top one we view a string of hims trying to suppress giggles as they are about to execute a prank on their sleeping self.

Next we have the young girl looking on in horror as she sneaks up on herself with a knife in her hand

Finally, the man fights himself, grabbing his face and arm in the process. Technically, it is probably the best of the lot.

For more view 35 Surreal Examples of Multiplicity Photography.

Mohammed Descending a Staicase

Whoops, I forgot Draw Mohamed Day. I never drew a picture of Mohammed which naturally makes posting one a bit of a problem. 

Facing that quandary I consider myself lucky to have remembered Marcel Duchamp and his readymades. A readymade is an "ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist."

So, to solve my lack of a Mohammed drawing on this most solemn of Draw Mohamed Days, I found a copy of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase and have readymaded it into a new piece of art which I call Mohammed Descending a Staircase. That's it to the left.


If you happen to be a jihadist, rest assured -- even though the details are a bit obscured -- it is a very, very offensive picture of Mohammed and you should be deeply outraged by it.

For the rest of us that are sane, well yes... I suppose I am torturing the definition of readymade a bit. It is a stretch to call me an artist, and I'm not sure that elevating a piece of art into another piece of art is quite within the rules of readymades. Still, Draw Mohamed Day is upon us, and so an artist has to do what an artist has to do.

 

I'm outraged a Moslem won the Miss USA Contest!

Well, ok... actually I'm not. In fact, I don't even know if she's Moslem.

I'll admit, since I've goofed off for a couple of weeks and not posted anything, that this post's headline and the picture to the right are just a cheesy attempt to lure some traffic back.

Beauty pageants are pretty vapid affairs. After all, they are just an excuse to parade a bunch of good looking young women around and pick which is the prettiest. Not that I object to that mind you.

The effort to make them seem more serious than they are leads straight to talent competitions, goofy simple-minded questions and political correctness run amok.

I hate to sound cynical, but because of that political correct imperative to be taken seriously, I have a passing suspicion that her name was far from an obstacle to winning.

Anyways, congratulations to Rima Fakih for her victory.

The Mongolian Death Worm goes Hollywood

If you're a monster, you know you've hit the big time when the SyFy Channel makes a movie about you.

Thirty Seconds of Fury

 

The above video is of the first 30 seconds, from the ignition of the engines to the rocket clearing the tower, of the launch of Apollo 11 on July 16, 1969.  Slowed down it takes 8 minutes to watch (the video is narrated).

was the mission that landed men on the moon for the first time. The film was shot at 500 frames per second and focuses on the base of the launch pad. As such, it is not so much a film of the launch as film of the tremendous punishment the launch pad took when the rocket's engines were lit.

There were assemblies called Hold Down Arms that held the rocket in place until its engines had fully fired up. The Hold Down Arms had to unlatch and retract to allow the rocket to leave the pad. Needless to say, the heat the engines put out punished the launch pad and those assemblies. They had to pour huge amounts of water on the pad to try to cool it down and minimize damage. 

It is an interesting view of a small piece of the engineering that went into putting men on the moon.   

From PetaPixel.

Will the insults ever cease?

As soon as I read the title of the article, The World's Ugliest Statues, I knew it was coming. Sure enough, weighing in at Number III was Saparmurat Niyazov, a.k.a. The Turkmenbashi (apparently now also known as Turkmenbashy the Great), who's golden visage is forever twirling about in search of the sun.

To add insult to injury, his beloved vassals seem to have moved the monstrosity to the suburbs as soon as he was six feet under.  Geez, next thing you know they'll unplug the electric motor that spins him around.
 

And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Twenty strokes of the bamboo

Once again Obama bows.

"So it is you!" said Xi-feng with a chilling smile. "I suppose you thought that because you have a somewhat more lady-like job than the rest, that you could afford to disobey my orders!"

"Oh no, madam, indeed not!" said the woman. "I've been coming extra early every day. It's only today, because I overslept, that I'm a bit late. Please let me off this once, madam! It really is the first time."

(Xi-feng is interrupted by other business for a minute, and then returns her attention to the woman)

"Tomorrow another one will be late and the day after that it will be somebody else," said Xi-feng turning to the still waiting offender, "and before we know where we are we shall have no one turning up at all. I should have liked to have left you off, but if I'm lenient with you the first time, it will be that much harder for me to deal with somebody else the second time; so I am obliged to make an example of you." Her face hardened as she pronounced sentence: "Take her out and give her twenty strokes of the bamboo!"

Seeing X-feng was really angry, the servants dared not show themselves slack in executing her command. The wretched woman was half-dragged from the room and the flogging administered in full view of the waiting throng, after which they came in again, the executioners to report that they had discharged their duty and their victim to thank Xi-feng for her punishment.

From that day onwards the staff of the Ning-guo mansion realized just how formidable Xi-feng could be and went about their duties in fear and trembling, not daring to idle or delay.

That scene is from the Chinese literary masterpiece, The Story of the Stone. The novel covers the affairs of two entwined high caste families, living in adjoining mansions, and their numerous servants (who are actually slaves of the families). 

One of the young wives of one of the families has died. Her mother-in-law is too ill to attend to the pomp and ceremony of her funeral, so Xi-feng, a cousin from the other household, is assigned the task of managing her household during the funeral. Xi-feng considers the household she's been tasked to manage as being lax in their discipline. She thinks the servants are allowed too much latitude and she is determined to enforce order. This leads to the caning of the old servant woman who overslept. 

Xi-feng's rationalization of what she has to do, the caning, and the requirement that the beaten woman 'thank' Xi-feng for her punishment is the ugly face of aristocracy, the ruling class, and status bought through bloodline. Through out history it was the condition of the common man. Even today it is still the condition of the common man in many places. There are betters and there are underlings, and that is just the way it is and will always be. Forget that and there is a bamboo staff, or worse, to remind one of the proper order of things.

We forget at our peril how revolutionary and subversive to the old order the United States is by simply being.

"All men are created equal" is a direct slap in the face of Divine Right and the attitude of To the Manor Born. It is beyond all else what we as Americans are all about. We are not a bloodline, or a clan, or an ethnicity; we are believers in the idea that all people are sacred. All people are born equal. We are all entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness without the fear of our betters caning us on a whim and expecting our gratitude for the act.

It is that which makes Obama's bow and scraping so teeth gritting. He may consider it politeness, or civility, or whatever; but free men do not bow and scrape to potentates and dictators. If only he had a bit of Alice Frazier in him. She understood what seems to be a mystery to him -- she understood her and a Queen's place in the order of things. 

This man is vapid and an embarrassment to the office. 

Linkage

A real Turing machine.

All by themselves, words can cause pain.

iPad lockin.

Chinese quality strikes again.

The newest Gulf war.

Are we living inside a black hole?

Why we hold onto things.

A tale of two health cares.

The art of the steal.

Neither a bull nor a bear be.

Cigarettes and coffee

At first I thought that was a can of beer bundled with the two packs of cigarettes, but it turns out to be a can of coffee. Regardless, forty cigarettes to go along with a single can of coffee seems a bit much to me. Are Japanese really such dedicated chain smokers? 

Anyways... as long as they're pushing retail tobacco product partnerships, why not go all the way? A pack of cigarettes, a six pack of beer and a package of Trojans is another combination that springs to mind.

As an aside, of course Marlboro is an American brand and it turns out that Georgia Black Emblem Coffee is a leading brand of Coca-Cola Japan. Can you imagine the ruckus such a promotion would cause in the United States? I wonder if they have a Hollywood celebrity pushing this in Japanese TV ads?

From the post Taboo Product Partnerships at Trendhunter Magazine.

Hellooooo visitors from Maggie's Farm.

Ghana Movie Posters

In the 1980s the appearance of VCRs lead to the growth of Mobile Cinemas. These were small operations which would travel from one small village to the next and set up temporary cinemas. They would set up televisions, often powering them with mobile generators, and screen films.

To advertise their show they hired artists to paint posters for their films. You can see more of them, as well as buy one if you want to, at ghanamovieposter.com. The book Extreme Canvas: Movie Poster Paintings from Ghana is also available which has many more examples.

Life and Death in the Late Cretaceous

67 million years ago a snake coiled in a nest of dinosaur eggs and ate the babies as they hatched. A landslide buried the scene and time and conditions fossilized it.
 
The discovery and identification is described in a Wired Science article:

"Geologist Dhanajay Mohabey of the Indian Geological Survey first unearthed the fossil 26 years ago in a rocky, limestone outcropping in the northwestern Indian village of Dholi Dungri. He thought all the bones at the site were those of dinosaur hatchlings.

But in 2001, University of Michigan paleontologist Jeff Wilson, took a second look at the fossils. The team then recognized they had actually found a snake coiled around a broken egg, with a hatchling and two other eggs nearby."

Linkage

Why we dream.

The joy of mephedrone.

Vix doesn't seem to be worth much.

Electromagnetic armor.

Where's the missing oil?

Why we're fat.

Cold Fusion still coming back.

What you can do with all that data.

Statistics isn't so good. The experts should take a look at this.

The top prospects in energy stocks.

Occasional Links

Bad stuff coming out of China.

Google's delusional arrogance.

Chinese jets for Chavez.

Travel like a human.

Grant redux.

Why surprises blind us.

Is China spoiling for a fight?

Your mind and your money.

Incentives rule the world.

Once bitten....

CNN Basically Prints a Press Release

Described as a "huge success" folks sat in coffee shops to talk politics. Turnout was higher than expected with an overwhelming 60 people showing up in Decatur, GA (suburb of small town Atlanta). One hates to ask how many they were expecting. A Political Movement is Brewing reads the headline. In Asheville, NC, 35 people gathered. Thirty showed up in Raleigh, NC. (about as many who are in the bathroom at any one time during one of Duke's preseason basketball games-- too much coffee). Coffee News Network. Res Ipsa Loquitor.

Occasional Links

Atrazine emasculates frogs.

It's raining men fish.

How to solve health care.

All your news are belong to us.

Grandma in Hubei.

Behind every great fortune....

"The only way you build an economy is through savings and investments."

Jihad Jane.

Seeing through the opaque—they do it with matrices.

The spread of goodness.

Unsurprising perhaps

This morning, while driving to work, some blather coming out of the radio clued me in to the fact that the Oscar awards happened last night. Not that it matters to anyone or anything but I got an odd, if momentary, sense of wellbeing from the fact that I'd been blissfully unaware of the Oscars. Not that I ever pay much attention to them, but ZERO attention was a new high water mark.

Pride may cometh before the fall, but may I be proud for this?