In 5 years ... :)

 The Singularity awaits ...

What art truly is.

Bob Saget, Fairfax Media/Getty Images

Penn Jillette nails it. What is art? Well, yours truly is one and Jillette's take's spot on as it all about risk. Do you have the guts to reveal your innermost feelings to the world? When writing, one soon finds out there's no shield to hide behind like that of being a musician as I was one and the set of drums, I still have, was my shield when expressing my feelings to the world, Music's the most fun of all art forms IMHO, but this this blurb isn't about just music, it's about trust and bravery, something Bob Saget had in spades when telling "The Aristocrats" joke, the filthiest of all time, a joke expressing Carlin's 7 dirty words and then some.

My children are teenagers, ages 15 and 16, and they know the comic Bob Saget was my friend. They know he died earlier this week, and that I’m grieving. They want to comfort me. But when they saw clips of Bob on the internet, making hard-core jokes about pedophilia and incest, they were offended. They thought my friend must have been a bad person, and it was hard for them to understand how I could have loved him.

The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg understood that this kind of gamble was intrinsic to great art. He is said to have said, “The poet always stands naked before the world.” I think there’s more to it. The artist must bravely say, “I am going to show the world who I am, and I trust that someone will understand.”

Real art, beautiful art, is always a scary act of trust. We look to art to see another person’s heart. That human connection is all that matters. For me, it is a reason to live.

Read Jillette's wonderful essay. You'll be glad you did.

As an aside, here's brief glimpse of what Jillette's The Aristocrats flick is all about.

For those of you who have not already put down your newspaper and rushed off to buy tickets (and I hereby authorize the advertising department at ThinkFilm to plaster the previous sentence wherever it likes), perhaps I should add that "The Aristocrats" is also possibly the filthiest, vilest, most extravagantly obscene documentary ever made. Visually, it is as tame as anything on PBS or VH1's "Behind the Music," but there is scarcely a minute of screen time that does not contain a reference to scatology, incest, bestiality and practices for which no euphemisms or Latinate names have been invented.

And while "The Aristocrats" is full of howlingly funny moments -- Kevin Pollak blending the joke with a Christopher Walken impression; Paul Reiser, Gilbert Gottfried and Bob Saget (yes, him) turning in notably disgusting renditions -- it works on the mind as well as the funny bone and the gag reflex. It makes you reflect on the mysteries of timing, context and delivery, those aspects of discipline that make comedy an art and separate the pros from the cocktail-party bores. It also takes you deep into the land of the id, not just of individual comedians (some of whom have pretty scary ids), but also into that murky collective terrain of desire, regression and fear where we all started out and where a few brave souls remain to make a living.

Taking the shot takes guts, right?

Jillette speaking at the Young Americans for Liberty National Convention in 2016

Alignment 101

Focusing on the task ahead for the Webb to become a functioning telescope will take month as aligning the 18 mirrors to peer into the past is most exacting as one can well imagine. 

As the telescope completes its deployment, engineers are working on aligning the mirrors in order to focus correctly on faraway galaxies. To do that on the surface would have been difficult enough, and now they have to align it in the vacuum of space. The 18 hexagonal-shaped mirror segments are 1.32 meters in diameter, flat to flat and the secondary mirror is 0.74 meters in diameter.

The Webb team last week began the month-long process of aligning the telescope’s optics by moving the mirror segments out of their stowed launch positions.

"Aligning the primary mirror segments as though they are a single large mirror means each mirror is aligned to 1/10,000th the thickness of a human hair. What's even more amazing is that the engineers and scientists working on the Webb telescope literally had to invent how to do this," Lee Feinberg, Webb Optical Telescope Element Manager said in a statement.

The James Webb Space Telescope mirrors vs the Hubble mirror. (Graphic: Nasa)

Each of Webb's mirrors has an individual designation. A, B, or C denotes which of the three mirror prescriptions a segment is. The photos show the flight version of every mirror on the telescope! (Photo: Nasa)

Once the Webb is finally tuned, a revolution in science begins.Yours truly can't wait. :)

Chasing Ice 2022 ...

Channel Line

Intersect

The letter j

Fall's End

Orders of Magnitude

Strata Lines

The Tragedy of Macbeth

Yours truly's favorite play, the first example, IMHO, of existentialism writ large, where existence cares not but simply is, no matter what man conjures up regarding his brief participation on Shakespeare's world stage. In viewing Coen's amazing adaptation, one sees what the abyss looks like, echoing later writers like Camus, Melville, Beckett and Conrad, in trying to explain a reality we will never fully understand.

And it is that feeling of being stuck in a world we do not fully understand and cannot control that The Tragedy of Macbeth is most interested in. Of all the versions of the Scottish play I have seen, this one is by far the scariest, a work of cosmic horror in which supernatural beings pursue their own games, delighting in their ability to manipulate and destroy the mortals caught it their web. As the witches, Kathryn Hunter, a virtuosic shapeshifter and Shakespeare veteran largely unknown to moviegoers, is genuinely uncanny, her body curling around itself, her voice scraping the very bottom of her register. By going all-in on this idea, the film downplays the original’s other themes of the destructive and ultimately hollow nature of ambition. 

Of Winter ...

The Tender Bar ...

The Tender Bar, not bad, not bad at all. Coming of age in the early 70s, mentored by Uncle Charley, a most intelligent and savvy uncle, enables a young guy to take the shot and become a writer. Teriffic sound score with a true gem by early Steely Dan ... Go Back Jack And Do It Again

In the mornin' you go gunnin' for the man who stole your water

And you fire 'til he is done in but they catch you at the border

And the mourners are all singin' as they drag you by your feet

But the hangman isn't hangin' and they put you on the street

You go back, Jack, do it again, wheel turnin' 'round and 'round

You go back, Jack, do it again

When you know she's no high climber then you find your only friend

In a room with your two-timer, and you're sure you're near the end

Then you love a little wild one and she brings you only sorrow

All the time you know she's smilin' you'll be on your knees tomorrow, yeah

You go back, Jack, do it again, wheel turnin' 'round and 'round

You go back, Jack, do it again

Now you swear and kick and beg us that you're not a gamblin' man

Then you find you're back in Vegas with a handle in your hand

Your black cards can make you money so you hide them when you're able

In the land of milk and honey, you must put them on the table

You go back, Jack, do it again, wheels turnin' 'round and 'round

You go back, Jack, do it again

Magawa

Magawa with his handler last year in Siem Reap, Cambodia.Credit...Cindy Liu/Reuters

A hero just passed away, the four legged kind who sniffed out over 100 mines in Cambodia with far greater efficiency than the use of electronic hardware to do the same thing.

Magawa, a rat who spent most of his life sniffing out land mines in Cambodia and was recognized for his lifesaving contributions, died last weekend, the nonprofit that trained him said in a statement on Tuesday.

The African giant pouched rat was part of the “HeroRAT” initiative run by the Belgian nonprofit APOPO, which works across Southeast Asia and Africa, training rats to detect land mines and tuberculosis.

Over the course of a yearslong career with APOPO, Magawa found more than 100 land mines and other pieces of unexploded ordnance, the nonprofit organization said, describing him as the most successful rat in the program to date.

In comparison to electronics ...

APOPO’s so-called “HeroRATs” are trained to detect the explosive TNT, and can search an area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes. The same work would usually take a person with a metal detector four days.

Girls just want to have fun :)

Bottlenose dolphin. (Stuart Westmorland/Getty Images)

Porpoises have more fun on the sexual side of things than us rubes thanks to how their female's anatomy is not only similar to humans but is superior in terms of how pleasurable sex can be for dolphons in general. 

The visible tip of the human clitoris is but the size of a pea and located slightly north of the vagina and urethra (although much of the structure remains hidden in the pelvis or under a 'hood' of skin).

The head of the dolphin clitoris, on the other hand, is slightly larger and located right near the vagina entrance. What's more, the whole organ has an 'S'-shaped bend in it, which suggests it can stick out even further when erect.

During copulation, it would be almost impossible for a dolphin penis to avoid, experts say.

"The dolphin clitoris has many features to suggest that it functions to provide pleasure to females," says biologist Patricia Brennan from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

"We knew that dolphins have sex not just to reproduce, but also to solidify social bonds, so it seemed likely that the clitoris could be functional."

No sexual preference hangups either.

In the wild, for instance, bottlenose dolphins have been observed partaking in group orgies, where male and females alike use their snouts, flippers, and flukes to rub the protruding clitorises and penises of their peers.

Direct stimulation of the clitoris has also been observed in sexual interactions between only females. 

One can only wonder about other cetacean lifestyles, right?

Cyndi rules. :)

The year in physics

 

Toons yet again :)

The betting pool

The art of deception

Democracy in the crosshairs

Pollock lives

It's the 2 of us