31.7.04
Natives Arms
David Scott Mitchell Collection.Specimens of the Arms of the Natives of this Country are here given; their Names are as follows or at least I have adhered as near to the Sounds as possibleSelect Specimens From Nature of the Birds Animals &c of New South Wales Collected and Arranged by Thomas Skottowe Esqr. The Drawings By T. R. Browne. Newcastle, New South Wales, 1813
PICMAN
Photographic Collections
State Library of New South Wales
30.7.04
© MBARIResearchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Moss Landing, California, discovered a whale skeleton that was "carpeted with worms" while searching for clam beds in the trough of Monterey Canyon, some 3,000 metres deep.A female worm (Osedax frankpressi). The greenish roots normally burrow into whalebone, while the pink tendrils sweep microscope males into her egg sac.
news@nature 29.Jul.04
"...He sees that his ego is his persona or social role, a somewhat arbitrary selection of experiences with which he has been taught to identify himself. (Why, for example, do we say "I think" but not "I am beating my heart"?) Having seen this, he continues to play his social role without being taken by it..."
Alan Watts at whiskey river
There it is again, that word!
Before I Am Born
...not bread crumbs in a forest nor twine in a maze
but the careless scatter of someone interrupted at work....
Judith Barrington
Poetry Daily
Jul.02.04
Brian Bolland's covers for Animal Man
29.7.04
four hundred and seventeen
Potter's Field
...now, as only the wind
four hundred annresembles our breath
now, as only waves
four hundred annlap like tongues, our
only reach that of thirsty
four hundred anngreen trees...
Mark Irwin
Verse Daily
Jun.00.04
Carolines, hand loom, Oualan
Louis Duperry
Pacific
Kauai Fine Arts
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Etchings Made By the First European Scientists to Visit Kosrae
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In 1987 archeologist Felicia Beardsley...was helping direct an Earthwatch Program on Easter Island, a Chilean territory that's home of the staring stone statues of staggering size.One of Beardsley's duties was to greet volunteers at the airport, and that attracted the resentment of local hotel owners who were in the airport hustling business for their lodgings. The owners complained, and the police brought her in for questioning: "I was grabbed by two soldiers with machine guns, brought into a tiny room at the back of the airport for questioning. 'Who are you?' the soldiers screamed in Spanish. 'What are you doing?'"Running Afoul
The situation was all the more ominous, she says, because the Esmeralda, a Chilean navy training vessel, happened to be anchored in the harbor. This was in 1987, during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, and, she says, the curriculum on the four-masted sailing ship supposedly included training in interrogation. "They would take prisoners and torture them, then throw them in the ocean."
Eventually, she was released, only to face a moral hazard. When Pinochet himself arrived at Easter Island, the police "rounded up everybody on the island and took us to the airport, where we stood behind a fence and waved Chilean flags," Beardsley says. "All the guards with machine guns were behind us, and there was no way we could leave."
La Esmeralda : El buque de la tortura
"el buque escuela de la muerte y la tortura de la Armada de Chile"
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The Why Files "science behind the news"
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Felicia Beardsely's Micronesian Diary
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link far outliers
28.7.04
27.7.04
For almost three decades researchers had done complex experiments on what they thought were breast cells, prostate cells, or placental cells, and suddenly, rumor had it they'd been working with HeLa cells all along. To believe this would be to believe that years of work and millions of dollars had, in essence, been wasted.
The truth was, Henrietta's cells had traveled through the air, on hands, or the tips of pipettes, overpowering any cell cultures they encountered. And researchers had no idea. There was no way to know which cells were growing in the petri dish. And there was no universally accepted test for a cell culture's identity.
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To this day, members of the Lacks family feel they've been passed over in the story of the HeLa cells. They know their mother's cells started a medical revolution and are now bought and sold around the world. They're pretty sure that someone, somewhere, has profited from their mother's death. They know that someone wasn't related to Henrietta. And their experience is not well-known. In cases like these, Faden agrees, a good way to begin addressing this problem is through the telling of a story from which everyone can learn. This story starts with Henrietta and the origin of the HeLa cells: They were not from Helen Lane or Helen Larson, as many publications have mistakenly reported, they were from Henrietta Lacks, wife of David, mother of five.
Rebecca Skloot
link Albert Goldbarth
I can barely glimpse it now but for a moment there I could see a way it works. This level of opulence, the gold the jewels the entire focused beauty of human craft, first to the church and through the church to God. Because it lifts it above the human. There is no man at the center of it. There is no greed, even though it's an attainment, even though the people's wealth is taken and used, it doesn't go to human agency, and it becomes obvious, it's clear when the man takes it, the usurpation, the deifying of the self, it's more obvious. Because we see the dangers of it, the opulence of the priesthood, the absence of God, but what if it was an ennobling not of man now, or some imaginary God, but the possible, that thing children point toward with their lives, the way we all have in our time, and isn't that the mystery anyway? Where does it go, out past the foreseeable? What do children become eventually? Isn't this rising toward something that might as well be called God? And if it isn't then what's the point?
We judge as we've been taught to judge. But the teachers weren't sane, and their hearts weren't calm. There was hysteria and desperation, and narrow-minded ambition. And what they didn't teach us was how profane the human focus was. How ugly and frightening human opulence is when it goes nowhere, when it exists only to gratify temporary man.
Thus the big rush to achieve physical immortality, to deserve that opulence, to justify it; but we had that already, that's what I saw there, the constant birth of the human thing still becoming, and that dedication to the inexpressible, to something beyond speech, beyond teaching.
We had immortality, through death and birth and the cycles of life. On their way to an artificial version of it these current Lords will destroy everything, just to have it for themselves.
Do you see? It isn't the church that has the gold, it's something ahead and behind. When it's clean, when it's right. We're taught to judge that by its failings, but those same teachers taught us to ignore the failings of what replaced the church, what now takes the workingman's wealth, what lavishes the gold and jewels on itself. The difference is time. One way goes up and out, and on. The other is lost in a desperate drive toward an artificial version of what we already had, that goes nowhere.
This thought started with an image of this bleak relic of a much simpler church. I saw the men and women almost mad with the long Russian winter, and the cold and the food running out, and the children sick and the old dying. It's an alien thing to people who stay connected through wires all day and night, who can jet away from trouble as long as they have the money and the political freedom. But for people who had only small dark rooms, and the bitter dangerous cold outdoors, the church and its reason, its sameness, its message of steadiness and love, the shelter, the surrender to something outside the self, that was a refuge, not a hiding place.
We judge as we've been taught to judge. But the teachers weren't sane, and their hearts weren't calm. There was hysteria and desperation, and narrow-minded ambition. And what they didn't teach us was how profane the human focus was. How ugly and frightening human opulence is when it goes nowhere, when it exists only to gratify temporary man.
Thus the big rush to achieve physical immortality, to deserve that opulence, to justify it; but we had that already, that's what I saw there, the constant birth of the human thing still becoming, and that dedication to the inexpressible, to something beyond speech, beyond teaching.
We had immortality, through death and birth and the cycles of life. On their way to an artificial version of it these current Lords will destroy everything, just to have it for themselves.
Do you see? It isn't the church that has the gold, it's something ahead and behind. When it's clean, when it's right. We're taught to judge that by its failings, but those same teachers taught us to ignore the failings of what replaced the church, what now takes the workingman's wealth, what lavishes the gold and jewels on itself. The difference is time. One way goes up and out, and on. The other is lost in a desperate drive toward an artificial version of what we already had, that goes nowhere.
This thought started with an image of this bleak relic of a much simpler church. I saw the men and women almost mad with the long Russian winter, and the cold and the food running out, and the children sick and the old dying. It's an alien thing to people who stay connected through wires all day and night, who can jet away from trouble as long as they have the money and the political freedom. But for people who had only small dark rooms, and the bitter dangerous cold outdoors, the church and its reason, its sameness, its message of steadiness and love, the shelter, the surrender to something outside the self, that was a refuge, not a hiding place.
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Color Images
Prokudin-Gorskii Collection
(about 1,900 glass plate negatives by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii using three-part color separation technique, with about 100 modern digital color renderings and approximately 2,400 prints mounted in fourteen albums.
1909-1915. Photographic survey of the Russian Empire, showing people, religious architecture, historic sites, industry and agriculture, public works construction, water and railway transportation routes, villages and cities.)
Prints&Photographs
American Memory
Library of Congress
[replace the terminal 'r.jpg' in the address with 'v.jpg' for a much larger image.]
The Spices
...her kitchen shelf, repeatedly,
until the sunrise stops her...
Albert Goldbarth
Poetry Daily
Jul.27.04
Yes and No
... I want a hand to feel my ribs
and like them ...
Liz Waldner
Verse Daily
Jul.27.04
26.7.04
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