Professional Documents
Culture Documents
VOLUME I:
The Early Years, 2005-2007
Steve Donachie
Contents
A Word About the Nort Spews.............................3
Protesting the War in Iraq....................................7
Farewell to Robert Moog.....................................9
Katrina:No Such Thing as a Small Hurricane...13
The World of Wars.............................................17
Cosmic Perspectives, Part 1: Distant Light........20
Cosmic Perspectives, Part 2: Voyager................23
Another Space Race...........................................28
Let's All Evolve!................................................32
Takin' the A-Train..............................................38
Wilma: Hurricane No. 2.....................................40
Disasters are Good Practice...............................44
From Primordial Soup to Immemorial Nuts......46
My Father, the Veteran.......................................50
The Once and Future Draft................................55
A Day in the Life of the Book Fair....................61
Signs and Wonders.............................................70
Open Letter to My Representatives...................74
Unto Us a Child is Born.....................................79
Math and Magic.................................................82
Spiritual Machinery...........................................87
Time Capsule for the Real Millennium..............91
The NORT SPEWS
News & Reviews
When I was a kid, the age of the earth had been pegged
pretty accurately at around four billion years--quite a
difference from the Biblical estimates of four thousand
(only a small fraction of human history). The rest of the
universe was thought to be somewhat older, but perhaps
not more than double that figure, or around eight billion
years. Gradually, astronomers refined the figure upward
till it exceeded ten billion. But the aging process didn't
stop there. Current estimates range from eleven to as
high as twenty billion years. (To get some idea of how
the calculations are done, check this out, or Google the
age of the universe.) The estimates vary so widely
because there is still so much we don't know, such as
how much "dark" matter and energy is out there--the
existence of which was only recently discovered.
So, twelve billion years ... the place is at least that old--
older, because the star had already formed and burned
for at least some millions of years before it blew up. And
it is at least that large in all directions from here. Does
that mean it's twice twelve billion? Or even larger/older?
Or is that just a trick of perspective, due to space itself
being curved?
Even so, I find this more exciting than anything that has
happened in space exploration since the manned moon
landings. (More on them another time.) As someone
who has grown up through the era of rocketry, I have
followed it since I was a small child, when Werner Von
Braun and his team of German scientists founded the US
missile program, and later the space program. I used to
have a scrapbook filled with every photo I could find of
rockets and satellites. I even kept a log as each satellite
and space probe was launched, giving it up as hopeless
when the launches reached into the hundreds (now
thousands).
A footnote to this:
Could be it
has something
to do with
NASA's
recently
unveiled
designs for the
vehicles that
will replace
the shuttle and be able to do all this. Not that they won't
work, or that they aren't a wonderful exercise in
practicality and utility. It's just that they're not, well ...
sexy.
The very idea that we have not been back to the moon in
thirty years is enough to make you wonder what we've
been up to. If, instead of squandering all our money on
shuttle development and two space stations of dubious
utility (letting the first one, Skylab, burn up in the
atmosphere for lack of funding), suppose we had
continued to fund the existing Apollo program for all
that time. Plans had already been made to add an extra
stage to the Saturn V through orbital rendezvous, which
would have made it possible to land enormous payloads
on the moon. We might have had a thriving lunar colony
by the 1980's for a fraction of what it will cost us now.
Instead, as soon as the "moon race" was won, we lost
interest and shut the project down.
(2) Science is not about Why, it's about What and How.
There are other forms of human inquiry that address the
Why question. They are known as philosophy and
religion. Far from being antagonistic to one another, all
of these disciplines serve us best when they complement
each other, when what we know of the world informs
our speculation about what we do not know.
Personally, I believe that the universe around us is the
body of the supreme, self-existent being we call God,
and that our minds are tiny inklings of the vast
intelligence of which we are small parts. But I don't
believe that God sits on a cloud or in an office
somewhere and micromanages all of creation. The
divine power I imagine, glimpsed through the insights of
physicists and cosmic theorists, is one that sparked a
whole cosmos into being from a single point, that
established from the instant of its beginning all the laws
that would govern the behavior of everything from
atoms to stars and galaxies, that built these laws into
unimaginably small bits of energy (currently called
"strings") which make up everything we see and
everything we don't see. This is the power that made life
in such a universe an inevitable, "natural" development.
All we can do is study the details of how it has
happened, and to marvel at its wonder.
That was the end of his war. His lung had collapsed and
he lost a lot of blood, but he pulled through okay. The
rest of his time in Europe was spent convalescing. After
the war was over he even got to do some sightseeing on
leave, visiting Switzerland and Italy as well as France
and Germany. By the time I knew him, his wound was
an old scar--a small one on his chest near the right
shoulder, a larger one on his back from the exit.
Perhaps the best question of all is: how much longer can
we maintain a policy of global military offensive with an
army of volunteers? It seems clear from enlistment
statistics that the draft, so long abhorred by the country
and so recently set aside, will soon have to be
resurrected yet again.
Saturday
Sunday
Only 363 days until the next one. Book your rooms now.
nortspews.blogspot.com
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Right off the bat, for example, one of the first of these
"sayings of Jesus" goes like this: "Let him who seeks
continue seeking until he finds, and when he finds he
will be troubled, and when he has been troubled he will
marvel, and he will reign over the All." Heady stuff,
seeming to describe the feelings of a modern reader
trying to make sense of all this, as well as the condition
of spiritual seekers of all ages, and pointing the way
toward the eternal.
Open Letter to My
Representatives
To: Senators Bill Nelson and Mel Martinez,
Representative Illeana Ros-Lehtinen
And if that one isn't exciting enough for you, try to find
the Roche Sisters Christmas album, We Three Kings.
Their version has all the vitality of their legendary a
capella performance of the Halleluia Chorus, and adds
the contemporary touch of tasteful electric bass and
synthesizers, with voice doubling effects to sweeten
their angelic sound even further. On top of that, they
came up with an inspired concluding sequence of
descending tones that nails down the message with
magnificent finality.
Each time they arrive at the part that says, "His name
shall be called," it gives me chills as they seem to add
the exclamation points that the text cries out for. Let me
leave you with this:
Spiritual Machinery
I've just read Ray Kurzweil's 1999 book, The Age of
Spiritual Machines. This follow-up to his earlier
volume, The Age of Intelligent Machines, attempts to
predict what will happen if current technological trends
continue for at least another century. Even though I'm
predisposed to look favorably on the prospects, I found
his conclusions challenging, not to say breathtaking.
And he's worth paying attention to. As an inventor who
did seminal work on computer speech recognition, he
knows what he's talking about. Many of his earlier
predictions for the decade of the 1990's have turned out
to be right on target.