Dermott Hayes's Blog: Postcard from a Pigeon, page 38
September 29, 2016
September 28, 2016
NUNQUAM CEDE
The Black Knight is not a quitter. It says so on his family coat of arms, ‘Never Give Up’ it says, in Latin, ‘NUNQUAM CEDE’ and he is damned if he is going to let the side down. It is true, he’s legless and armless, but finished? He disagrees.
Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Powered Early Space Exploration
A heartening testament to “the triumph of meritocracy” and to the idea that “each of us should be allowed to rise as far as our talent and hard work can take us.”
By Maria Popova
“No woman should say, ‘I am but a woman!’ But a woman! What more can you ask to be?” astronomer Maria Mitchell, who paved the way for women in American science, admonished the first class of female astronomers at Vassar in 1876. By the middle of the next century, a team of unheralded women scientists and engineers were powering space exploration at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Meanwhile, across the continent and in what was practically another country, a parallel but very different revolution was taking place: In the segregated South, a growing number of black female mathematicians, scientists, and engineers were steering early space exploration and helping American win the Cold War at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.
MASK OF SURVIVAL
Let Maya Angelou tell you how it is…
WOLVES GIVE LIFE
Norway plans to kill off its critically endangered wolf population. Are they crazy?
I love to eat shellfish and scallops are one of my particular favourites. I don’t like to eat them, though because the way they are fished – dredging – is hazardous to other sea life and their ecosystem. So, when I saw a documentary about a Norwegian initiative to catch scallops, diving and then work to restore and propagate the species in its natural environment, I thought, good for Norway, that’s the way forward.
Which is why it’s all that much more distressing to learn Norway is going to cull 70% of its wolf population, particularly since that population amounts to only 68 wolves in total and they are classified as ‘critically endangered.’ So I implore people to watch this video about the US’s decision to repopulate Yellowstone Park with wolves and the impact that had on the environment of the United States’s largest national wilderness reserve. And when you do that, please spread the word.
September 27, 2016
I0Ts, desktop death stars?
Investigative reporter, Brian Krebs is one of the the most authoritative voices on computer crimes and cyber security in the world. His krebsonsecurity blog is the go to source for analysis on internet crime. Last week his blog was shut down following a sustained DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. Since then the web is abuzz with theories and rumours of who perpetrated this attack but what’s most sinister is how it was done.
In contrast, the huge assault this week on my site appears to have been launched almost exclusively by a very large botnet of hacked devices. – Krebs
In the two articles below, Brian Krebs puts forward his own theory on the method and authors of this attack and Dan Goodin of Ars Technica writes Why the silencing of KrebsOnSecurity opens a troubling chapter for the ‘Net
read more
Have You Ever Seen Donald Trump Laugh?
Picture credit: Donald Trump smiles during a campaign rally in Fort Myers, Florida, September 19, 2016. (Reuters / Jonathan Ernst)
If only Donald Trump could deeply, even convulsively laugh at himself—God knows, he has the material—he probably wouldn’t be running for president today. As Trump himself might say, there’s something going on. By Leslie Savan for The Nation.
How to watch movies and read books more intelligently, according to New York’s most powerful critics
What are you thinking? (Reuters/Claudia Daut)
Sometimes it seems we’ll never get back to the blissful college days of doing nothing but reading, thinking, and discussing. (Or drinking while discussing. Or drinking while not discussing.) The farther you get along in career and family, the more you wonder: Will I ever find time to finish (or start) Moby Dick? Fitzcarraldo? The Wire?? And then, do I still have it in me to say something intelligent about them?
Even professional culture critics face the same fears. On Sunday, Sept. 18, a group of legendary US critics opened up at the Brooklyn Book Fair, sharing their own strategies for reading and watching, and thinking critically.
If Bruce Springsteen Wrote a Short Story Collection…
From Literary Hub, on the eve of the publication of Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen‘s autobiography, they shuffle through Springsteen’s back catalogue of songs and ask, suppose they were short stories?
Presenting New York Times Bestseller, Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back
September 27, 2016 By Literary Hub
Though known primarily for his raging, elegiac novels about the daily struggles of working-class American life (most notably the 1979 National Book Award-winning Washing the Sins Off Our Hands, which later became an Oscar-winning film starring Willem Dafoe and Jessica Lange, and 2003’s epic ode to post-9/11 resilience and recovery, Sky of Mercy, Sky of Fear), Bruce Springsteen’s status as one of the country’s most accomplished and prolific short story writers is sometimes overlooked. With the release this week of The Boss’s much-anticipated memoir, Born to Run (Simon & Schuster), we thought the time was right to take a quick glance back at his, to date, only short story collection: Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back. Drawn from a career spanning four decades and almost 300 published stories, the 12 tales that make up this slim volume (recipient, by unanimous decision, of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) showcase, in his trademark poetically dirty realism, the full power and humanity of Springsteen’s sweeping vision of America.
Unfinished
Picture credit: Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree
The game is never up,
the last tune never played,
if life is just for chance,
there’s nothing worth saving,
not even the last dance
Don’t cry aloud
don’t rail at me, just smile
and grip the moment, living,
until there, it’s gone
like a passing cloud,
when autumn leaves are falling.
And round and round the circle goes,
unfinished, never broken.
Winter clears the rot away
Spring awakes, life begins,
the wheels continue turning.
Postcard from a Pigeon
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