The sun fades into the sea
The fire on the water
Weaker than that in my heart
The depth of the sea
Contrasts poorly with my love
I drink of your lips
No wine can compare
We fade together
Yes, it’s an original work, no matter how derivative and simple it is, complete free verse…
current_mood: artistic
Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labor and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here, no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.
current_mood: devious
This page is truly bizarre. I’ve really got to stop picking up weird magazines when I’m on business trips. WYWS had this company listed, so don’t blame me for it. Who wants a bronze replica of the Oklahoma City Federal building, post-bombing? WTF?
current_mood: amused
Last Edit: 24 May 2002 @ 08:25 PM
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At the age of 25, Salvador Dali met Gala Eluard. She left her husband and 3-year old child for Dali, and became his muse, lover, and chief inspiration.
Damn, art makes people crazy.
Just got back from the Dali Museum a little while ago. You would think, considering how famous it is, that the Persistence of Memory would be a large canvas, but it’s only about 10 inches wide. On the other hand, the Hallucinogenic Toreador, a painting I’d never heard of before, was 15 feet tall and absolutely gorgeous. My new favorite Dali, far outstripping the Disintegration of Persistence of Memory even. Wow, what a great gallery. Anyone who hits Tampa or St. Petersburg needs to go there, it’s fantastic. And, I got me a new t-shirt there too. 🙂
current_mood: awed
Last Tuesday, they told me to head to Florida on Sunday. On Friday, they told me that my part of this trip wasn’t actually scheduled until the middle of the second week of the test, but I had to go for the first day anyhow. On Monday, between joking about the broken equipment, they told me that I was the only one who knew what I was doing, and I barely know myself. On Tuesday, while watching the green suiters gibber at the broken satellite dish, they told me that my part of the test may not happen at all, but nobody can actually make the call that will allow me to go home now rather than after a long weekend alone in Florida.
Anyone in Tampa? Anyone? Beuller?
current_mood: cranky
Talking with a social worker, preparing for my eventual adoption of the adorable Alex, the woman asks us to describe our personalities. I have always hated being put on the spot by such off-the-wall questions, much like Barbara Walters asking what kind of tree one might be. Here’s how I wanted to answer, but figured would freak her out:
I’m an artist, author, poet, music aficionado, literati, intellectual, sarcastic and cynical observer of the human condition. I’m a lover, a husband, a father. I’m a liberal libertarian who questions everything and believes nothing. I think the worst of the deadly sins is sloth.
Never say what you want to say, instead stick with the simple and safe statements they want to hear. 🙂
Quote of the night: Love is not kind or honest, and does not contribute to happiness in any reliable way. – Alice Munro
current_music: Barenaked Ladies – Falling for the First Time
current_mood: pensive
Listening to a strange potpourri of music lately, from J. Ralph to the Afghan Whigs to Lyle Lovett. This is from the very first Lyle Lovett song I ever heard…
Look
I understand too little too late
I realize there are things you say and do
You can never take back
But what would you be if you didn’t even try
You have to try
So after a lot of thought
I’d like to reconsider
Please
If it’s not too late
Make it a cheeseburger
Ever have a flash of memory, and wonder why you’d think of such a thing at that time?
I just remembered a surreal night from almost 15 years ago. My friend Jason was heading out to boot camp to be in the Navy Reserve, and there was a party in Long Beach or Bellflower. I lived in Anaheim then, so it was a 30 mile drive or so. After getting lightly toasted at the party, I hopped in the car and drove home, on the nearly deserted freeway. At 3 am, I only saw about 1 car every 2 minutes during the drive home. Up ahead, I saw some flames from the center divider. Being a cautious sort (especially when I was sure that I would NOT pass a breathalyzer and I was underage anyhow), I pulled into the far right lane, and continued on. The flames were coming from a single car accident. The van was facing 45 degrees back toward traffic, nose against the concrete pillar of an overpass, and was completely engulfed in flame. In my illegally inebriated state, I had two thoughts: “there but for the grace of…”, and “ain’t no way I can stop to help.” Not that there was anything any normal person could have done to save them, but isn’t it the right thing to do, to stop for an accident and at least notify authorities?
Why in the world would that memory blossom in my mind, fully formed and vivid?
current_mood: content
I check my home email from a laptop at work, to bypass the LAN nazis by logging into Earthlink instead of using the corporate LAN. Using Endymion’s mailman demo, I can check and send mail without a problem. So, today, I see something that has a subject line mentioning a meeting of some kind. I try to open it in MailMan and it kicks me out of the mail client. Bizarre.
I get home and check my email with Eudora, and that message pops up and immediately I get some weird-ass window on my computer that looks like a spreadsheet. When I close it, it comes back three times until I reset the computer in disgust.
After rebooting, there is no trace of anything wrong, and I just updated my virus definitions today. Maybe it was a wacky popup? Eudora does use MSIE for HTML parsing…
Anyone else seen this, or is it some anomaly of my system for the day?
current_music: Alex saying, “I’m myself cleaning up.”
current_mood: confused
New York Times
May 13, 2002
By Andrew C. Revkin
Scientists working for the Pentagon have trained ordinary honeybees to ignore flowers and home in on minute traces of explosives, a preliminary step toward creating a buzzing, swarming detection system that could be used to find truck bombs, land mines and other hidden explosives.
The research, under way for three years, initially focused on using bees to help clear minefields. But the effort has broadened, the scientists say. In two tests last summer, before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, trained bees picked out a truck tainted with traces of explosives.
The work is in its early stages, and bees, like bomb-sniffing dogs, have limitations. They do not work at night or in storms or cold weather, and it is hard to imagine deploying a swarm to sniff luggage in an airport. But they also have extraordinary attributes, including extreme sensitivity to scant molecular trails and the ability to cover every nook around the colony as they weave about in search of food.
Pentagon officials acknowledge that the idea of bomb-sniffing bees has a public relations problem, a “giggle factor,” as one official put it. But that official and scientists working on the project insist the idea shows great potential.
“It appears that bees are at least as sensitive or more sensitive to odors than dogs,” said Dr. Alan S. Rudolph, program manager for the Defense Sciences Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is overseeing the experimentation.
The Air Force Research Laboratory at Brooks Air Force Base, in Texas, has just completed an analysis of a round of tests of bees’ bomb-sniffing ability and confirmed that they found the explosive chemical more than 99 percent of the time, project scientists said.
In coming weeks, the team plans the first field tests of a new radio transmitter, the size of a grain of salt, that could allow individual bees to be tracked as they follow diffuse trails of bomb ingredients to a source. Such a system would help if bees were used to search a wide area for hidden explosives.
But such sophisticated technology would not be necessary at, say, a truck stop, where the clustering of alerted bees would be apparent.
Scientists involved in the project said bees were also being considered for sniffing out illicit drugs, which release more volatile chemicals into the air and are easier to trace than explosives.
For many years, biologists, notably a group at the University of Montana, have been training bees to prefer different scents, using sugar as a reward. After one bee learns the new cue, it somehow transfers that knowledge to others. Within hours, an entire hive, and sometimes adjacent hives, switch to searching for the new scent.
Scientists have found that it takes less than two hours to use sugar-water rewards to condition a hive of honeybees to eschew flowers and instead hunt for 2,4-dinitrotoluene, or DNT, a residue in TNT and other explosives, in concentrations as tiny as a few thousandths of a part per trillion.
In tests of 12 trained bee colonies last summer at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, one to two bees an hour were seen flying around uncontaminated controls, while “we were getting 1,200 bees an hour on the targets,” said Philip J. Rodacy, a chemist in the explosives technology group at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. Sandia, the Southwest institute and the University of Montana are among many institutions contributing to the research.
One idea is to place a hive of trained bees near important security checkpoints to guard against potential terrorists, Dr. Rudolph of the defense research agency said. But he added that much more work had to be done before that could happen.
“It’s not straightforward to move from watching bees hovering around a box to watching trucks parking in a weigh station for a minute,” he said. “This is not a capability until we know how predictable it is.”
The work is a facet of a much broader effort overseen by Dr. Rudolph to exploit the chemical sensitivity and mobility of bees, as well as moths and other insects, so they can scour broad areas for a whiff of a chemical. Over all, the Pentagon has spent $25 million since 1998 on ressearching what it calls controlled biological systems, traits of animals that might be turned into war-fighting technologies.
Scientists are also exploring whether moplike insect hairs can be used to screen the air for releases of biological or chemical weapons. Early tests have shown that bees are an efficient sampling mechanism for airborne bacterial spores, including those of a close cousin of the anthrax bacteria, said Dr. Jerry J. Bromenshenk, an entomologist at the University of Montana.
He and other researchers there have developed “smart hives” that monitor the comings and goings of the insects and, with equipment developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, sip the air as bees return, to test for explosives.
current_mood: amused
Why I’m suddenly remembering a few of my dreams, when I haven’t remembered any for years, I don’t know…
In this one, the Jackal (LAN security Nazi from work) called me at home, from his home, to harass me in cryptic fashion about something, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. He made nonsensical statements, and of course ended them with, “it will go no further” which has been proven to be an untruth at work.
Very surreal…
Coolest thing I’ve heard in a while:
Dylan Thomas reading “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”
Although, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” is a very close second. I didn’t realize how funny Thomas could be.
current_music: Pearl Jam – Jeremy
current_mood: happy
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – An economist testifying on behalf of Microsoft Corp. on Thursday had to recant his charge that strict antitrust sanctions sought by nine states against Microsoft were developed by its competitors.
University of Virginia professor Kenneth Elzinga admitted he had mischaracterized the states’ proposals in his written testimony to U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly when he said the sanctions were “developed” by Microsoft’s competitors.
Under questioning from states’ attorney Steve Kuney, Elzinga acknowledged that many of the restrictions the states wanted to impose on Microsoft were actually proposed by the original trial judge.
“Perhaps ‘supported’ was a better word than ‘developed,”‘ Elzinga conceded.
Since those two words are not even very closely related in English, is it a wonder folks think MS is not being very truthful?
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in his hand
Who saith ‘a whole I planned,
Youth shows but half: trust God: see all nor be afraid!
I can’t post from work anymore, since the LAN nazis think there’s something possibly embarrassing about LJ. Paranoid freaks.
Here’s something I thought about today while reading the news (which is allowed).
There’s a militia commander in southern Afghanistan who is giving Karzai a headache. The commander’s name is Bacha Khan. Does that make anyone else think of a Prince remake from the late 80s?
Bacha Khan, Bacha Khan…I feel for you…
current_mood: silly
Some people are referred to as being “so smart they never stop thinking so they’re hard to follow.” That’s not smart, that’s stupid. If you are expected to impart information to another, you must be smart enough to deal with your audience.
There’s a guy yapping about FTP’ing files and ATM LANs and such, when he really doesn’t need to show off how much he knows by spouting acronyms to a non-technical audience.
One of my bosses was mentioned as being too smart a while back. The catalyst was his penchant for changing his mind on major philosophical approaches for documents or test programs. The truly intelligent don’t need to show off their knowledge, and they are capable of forming an opinion or decision before telling it to others. If you can’t get your thoughts in order, you’re not intelligent, you’re scatterbrained. One need not be smart to confuse others. To enlighten others without seeming effort is a good hallmark of intelligence, though, in my opinion.
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