Thursday, October 1, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
Zeffirelli Adds More of His Own Boos for ‘Tosca’ - ArtsBeat Blog - NYTimes.com
It’s like having married a woman who’s still beautiful in your eyes, still wonderful, and for some legal reason they replace her with another one,” Mr. Zeffirelli, 86, said Friday by telephone from Rome.
This analogy makes no sense to me. Can they replace one's spouse for legal reasons? I mean, they might upgrade you to the newest Stepford wife model, but would they really downgrade you?
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Yeah, you can see -- but don't look in the mirror
Video: doctors implant tooth into eye, restore sight, creep everyone out
by Vladislav Savov
posted Sep 22nd 2009 at 6:25AM
Osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis. It's a real procedure that really does revive people's ability to see, yet we get the feeling that people will be more, um, excited about how it's done than why it's done. The seemingly Mary Shelley-inspired doctors extract a tooth from a blind person and drill a hole through it, where a prosthetic lens is placed, and the resulting macabre construction is implanted into the blind person's eye. The tooth is necessary as the body would reject an artificial base. It's not at all pretty, and it cannot repair every type of blindness, but it's still a major step forward. To hear from Sharron Thornton, the first American to have undergone the procedure, check the video after the break, but only if you can handle mildly graphic content -- you've been warned. [Via Daily Tech]
via engadget.com
Let's hit the rewind button on technological progress. We've gone too far.
And yes, that's horribly insensitive.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Probe gets clearest glimpse yet of cosmic dawn - space - 17 September 2009 - New Scientist
The Planck spacecraft has obtained its first peek at the afterglow of the big bang, revealing it in unprecedented detail. Its first map of the entire sky is set to be complete in about six months.
via newscientist.com
"The afterglow of the big bang" ... We are sending peeping tom probes into deep space. The Planck spacecraft, sitting in a tree staring into the universe's window.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Yale and service
Washington Monthly ranks Yale 23rd in its social contribution. While I think it's fair to rank Yale well below the nation's top public universities, I have a nit to pick. WM's "Service" metric includes ROTC participation; for reasons dating back to the Vietnam War, ROTC has a very low profile on Yale's campus. But WM doesn't effectively track community service performed on campus, so the work of Dwight Hall, an independent organization on campus that generates thousands and thousands of student community service hours, goes unnoticed. Yale definitely felt like a place where service was considered extremely important; sadly, that's not reflected in the ranking.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Snowy Range, WY
Liz and I drove up to the Snowy Range in Medicine Bow National Forest,
only a few hours north of Boulder. We hiked to the top of Medicine Bow
Mountain where there's still snow at 12000'. We also saw a moose and
her calf when we came around a bend along the Libby Creek trail. We
weren't more than 15' from the two of them. They watched us warily for
a bit before going back to breakfast. Lifelong dream to see a moose:
check. Time to dream bigger.
only a few hours north of Boulder. We hiked to the top of Medicine Bow
Mountain where there's still snow at 12000'. We also saw a moose and
her calf when we came around a bend along the Libby Creek trail. We
weren't more than 15' from the two of them. They watched us warily for
a bit before going back to breakfast. Lifelong dream to see a moose:
check. Time to dream bigger.
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