Bill Cheng's Blog, page 134
January 30, 2013
thenewenlightenmentage:
Step into the Twilight Zone: Can...
Step into the Twilight Zone: Can Earthlings Adjust to a Longer Day on Mars?
On the eve of science writer Katie Worth’s experiment to live on Mars time and blog about how it feels, she explains how living between time zones across the universe can prove disastrous without guidance from sleep scientists.
“Mutinous” is not a word frequently used to describe teams of NASA scientists and engineers.
January 29, 2013
"It’s not always technical walls that stop change in its tracks. Sometimes, innovation is limited by..."
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Rob Goodman, “Bad Metaphors, Bad Tech” (via millionsmillions)
Additionally:
We’re free to write language, images, and anything else with the mushy look of the humanities out of the history of progress. We’re even free, like the state of Florida, to consider charging more for a college education in the comparatively “useless” fields of English and history. But the result might be a generation of would-be innovators even more prone to be unaware of, and trapped in, the dominant metaphors of the day — like the sculptor too busy modeling little angels to give much attention to the miraculous flying machine underneath.
myimaginarybrooklyn:
“Georeferencer: crowdsourcing the past....
theparisreview:
Manuscript fragment of James Joyce’s Ulysses,...
Manuscript fragment of James Joyce’s Ulysses, via The Morgan Library & Museum. Click the link to zoom in on the manuscript so you can read all of Joyce’s squiggles.
nypl:
livefromthenypl:
Do what the man says.
The John Irving...
nypl:
The John Irving Meme is officially a thing. (Or we just made it one, anyway.)
LIVE from the NYPL’s Spring 2013 season begins tonight with John Irving! Get tickets here.
90outloud:
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, read by Steven...
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, read by Steven Volynets
Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones can be found at http://www.amazon.com/Salvage-Bones-Novel-Jesmyn-Ward/dp/1608196267 and other major bookstores.
Keep up with Steven on twitter: @StevenVolynets
January 28, 2013
Son House
I can’t get over those hands. The trembling,...
Son House
I can’t get over those hands. The trembling, palsied fingers lifting and peeling from the resonator. He is steel on steel, a wreck of iron. Then there is the voice. On some recordings from near the end of his life, you can hear him rasp for breath— the low hiss between phrasings, digging for air. It pushes through the slack muscles of his lungs and like last life, flares out in bright searing pain. The song hurks-and-jerks, and I stumble with it, forward into naked space, and it catches me from below— and all at once I am in its rhythm, the dream-like clang of a hydraulic press, driving forward and forward, inexorable, impossibly.
myimaginarybrooklyn:
Rich Kids, Greasers And The Life-Changing...
Rich Kids, Greasers And The Life-Changing Power Of ‘The Outsiders’
by ALLY CARTER
Teenage girls read in packs. It’s true today, and it was true when I was a teen growing up in a small town in northeast Oklahoma. Battered paperback copies swept through our ranks like wildfire, but the one I will never forget is The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton.
One by one, each of my friends became obsessed with the story of a group of boys from the wrong side of the tracks in Tulsa, a city that was just 60 miles away but might as well have been on the other side of the world from the rural Oklahoma that we knew so well.
Of course, now I know that The Outsiders is an American classic, that millions of teens have been devouring it for decades, but at the time it felt like we had discovered it — that it was our book. A secret. I was one of the more reluctant readers of my group of friends, but there was something about this book that made me both sad it was over and eager to read it again. And yet the true impact The Outsiders had on my life had very little to do with those conversations with my friends. Instead, it came from an offhand comment from my father.
“You know she’s from Tulsa, don’t you?” he asked one day when it was my turn to drag that paperback copy home.
I’m ashamed to admit it, but at the time I hadn’t realized that S.E. was a woman. And I had never dreamed that she was actually from Tulsa — just an hour’s drive away. And when I found out that she’d been a teenager when she wrote this book that my friends and I loved so much, something inside me clicked. A light went on, and from that point on, I couldn’t get enough.
Over the next few weeks, I read more of her books. I devoured That Was Then, This Is Now. I made my parents buy me a Siamese fighting fish when I finishedRumble Fish.
But the bigger impact lasted far after my pack moved on to other fare.
My father’s words stayed with me
S.E. Hinton was a girl about my age. She was from my state. And she had created this story — pulled it out of thin air and made it come alive.
It was easy to believe, between lessons on Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, that all of the great stories had already been written by dead Europeans. But every time I saw The Outsiders, I knew better. It was the first time I’d realized that real people write books. Not only that — I realized that real people who were like me wrote books.
And if she could do that, I could do that.
And that made all the difference.
Keys
a cursory examination of my keyboard shows significant balding on the H, N, L, comma, and period keys. Most dramatic is the ablation on the right-most region of the spacebar. There is a nickel-shaped island where the varnish had been stripped away by the oils of my fingers.
What words I’ve stamped to a peace with these meaty hands!
"When I’m writing fiction I forget who I am and what I come from. I slip into utter absorption mode...."
- Jennifer Egan, Jennifer Egan: “Goon Squad” could have been better! - Salon.com (via housingworksbookstore)
