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ET Diaries - Vol 1

by rg
Fri Feb 1st, 2008 at 07:24:18 AM EST

(Reaching for the book)

"What did you say it was called?"

Hokkay. MMM LLP. Where art thou? And all the diarists of days gone by, where be ye?

I have created the book. It was available to buy at £10.50--for two minutes, then I decided that I should probably check a lot of things first, I made the book private, then I edited a file and on the upload the book site sneezed and as I had already asked their help person (hi Tina!) for help twice in the previous twenty minutes I thought...."Okay, this is do-able."

And done! I have a .pdf 132 pages long!

But the best part was the cover--and I can't show it to you, unfortunately! ('Twas yellow, across the top ET Diaries. Below this, smaller, in italic, Vol 1. In the bottom right hand corner it said compiled by rg)

But we don't need no book. Think of the trees!

Although the book price was £10.50, the download price was £0.00. But, who careth? ET is full of diaries, who needs to dig up old ones?

The Stream Flows On

Always always something to see, read, hear, do...and the past....is another country.

But I used to live there, and I enjoyed so very much my time there...

I wrote a long long time ago that I felt ET would become a come-and-go kinda place if people didn't feel locked in (secured?) to some....entity of which they were members....I felt such a structure would be difficult to construct, I thought Chris Cook's comments about the LLP structure...they lead me to think that such a thing as ET LLP could be created--that such a structure--a community!--could develop, the internet and the non-electrical working together--all the possibilities!

Well....cough cough cough!

I feared (worried!) that if such a structure wasn't put in place, then people (like me!) would drift....away....to be replaced by others who would, in their turn, blaze (maybe!) and then....drift...

But cough!

Yeah, we keep blowing each other up--so hey! Nothing's built to last, your average star only lasts...hmmm...

Star Lifespan: How long does a star live?

Each star is unique, and the lifespan of every star is determined primarily by it's mass. The more massive a star is, the shorter its lifespan.

But What About a Neutron Star?

Neutron star - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Structure A model of a neutron star's internal structure
Current understanding of the structure of neutron stars is defined by existing mathematical models. A neutron star is so dense that one teaspoon (5 millilitre) of its material would mass over 5×10¹² kg.^[5] On the basis of current models, the matter at the surface of a neutron star is composed of ordinary atomic nuclei as well as electrons. The "atmosphere" of the star is roughly one meter thick, below which one encounters a solid "crust". Proceeding inward, one encounters nuclei with ever increasing numbers of neutrons; such nuclei would quickly decay on Earth, but are kept stable by tremendous pressures. Proceeding deeper, one comes to a point called neutron drip where free neutrons leak out of nuclei. In this region, there are nuclei, free electrons, and free neutrons. The nuclei become smaller and smaller until the core is reached, by definition the point where they disappear altogether. The exact nature of the superdense matter in the core is still not well understood. While this theoretical substance is referred to as neutronium in science fiction and popular literature, the term "neutronium" is rarely used in scientific publications, due to ambiguity over its meaning. The term neutron-degenerate matter is sometimes used, though not universally as the term incorporates assumptions about the nature of neutron star core material. Neutron star core material could be a superfluid mixture of neutrons with a few protons and electrons, or it could incorporate high-energy particles like pions and kaons in addition to neutrons, or it could be composed of strange matter incorporating quarks heavier than up and down quarks, or it could be quark matter not bound into hadrons. (A compact star composed entirely of strange matter would be called a strange star.) However so far observations have neither indicated nor ruled out such exotic states of matter.

(Hat tip--as always!--to DoDo)

Too Much Weirdness--Bring Me Two Donkeys!

So. . .neutron star donkeys write a book about dreaming LLPs?

Ah yes, wind turbines!

The Book, Man! Talk About the Book!

Contents:

Three conversations, by FarEasterner
The world is weirder than you ever thought, by Migeru
When The Levees Broke, by Izzy
The Iranian Disease, by heathlander
The Pirates of Sweden, by A swedish kind of death
The Italian Uranium Forgeries- Adventures in Manipulation, by de Gondi
Zurich to Johannesburg, by LondonYank
The US as nuclear rogue state. Part I of II, by Sirocco
The US as nuclear rogue state. Part II of II, by Sirocco
three torturers, by the stormy present
The LSD (and Consciousness) Symposium, by whataboutbob
Where were you on the 25th of April?, by Torres
How Sweden deals with nuclear waste, by Starvid
millennial mayday in the msm mountains, by melo
Matrix Collision Theory, by Sven Triloqvist
Short course on English humour, by Ritter
Chew on this, by Alex in Toulouse
About concrete and its avatars..., by margouillat
Levels of enlightenment (or of paranoia), by leftymathprof
Rural Population Decline [with comments!], by Zwackus
The breakdown of Mass Production and the rise of Mass Control, by Trond Ove
A lousy Turkish T-Shirt., by kcurie
Little boy and hell on earth., by Elco B
The Future I Was Promised, by DeAnander
The Little Dutch Girl, by Keone Michaels
Why I don't do charity, by Jerome a Paris
Athenian Idol: Alcibiades and the Sicilian Expedition, by Alexander G Rubio
Blackwater, The Privatization of War And Public Enemy Number One, by BobHiggins
The Better Part, by Captain Future
The Death of a Dictator and his Authoritarian Legacy, by Gjermund E Jansen
Conversations on the Road: Israel, by Nomad
Archetypes, Quanta and the new Iran story, by geezer in Paris

....(! RSI!)...which means that the very last lines of the book are as follows:

The Godzales of torture--he may be an asshole, but, today, he's our asshole.

The only good Arab(terrorist) is a dead Arab(terrorist). 650,000 invisible souls. Right? (Yawn).

"Fear is the best, healthiest thing for the masses (us) to understand. Keeps `em busy, and out of our hair." According to Strauss.

Is this REALLY our current American story?
It is now- until we change it.

....but I ain't amuricain!

Well, those are the last lines of ET Diaries Vol 1.

Points

First, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth....so many points...

And more!

Bach Prelude in d minor Walden Hughes

And Finally...

Thanks to all the writers who wrote those diaries--I enjoyed them!

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ET Diaries - Vol 1 | 11 comments (11 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: ET Diaries - Vol 1 (4.00 / 4)

I wrote a very brief intro the book (very brief and most of that was Shakespeare's sonnet 61) which ends--which is why I mention it--as follows:

(PS - The original diaries usually had pictures; in a word they're probably better (that's the
word) as individual pieces when viewed in their original format. The value of this book is-if
it has any maybe this is one!--that you can read it in the bath, on the train, halfway up a
mountain, you can give it as a gift, and you -oh!--you can see various diaries together...you
can get a flavour, no more, and maybe an historic flavour, even good wines change over
time...change over time...maybe that should be the title of something! Enough! Read and
enjoy--I hope!)

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Fri Feb 1st, 2008 at 07:30:31 AM EST

Re: ET Diaries - Vol 1 (4.00 / 2)

Almost forgot the poem (from which came the first song in the diary)

A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Edgar Allan Poe

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Fri Feb 1st, 2008 at 07:40:02 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: ET Diaries - Vol 1 (4.00 / 2)

Surprised and honored to be in "that" book (whatever the cover)!
I just realized that the pictures were "off"... I'll remedy at that this week end... Thank's

"What can I do, What can I write, Against the fall of Night". A.E. Housman

by margouillat (hemidactylus(dot)frenatus(at)wanadoo(dot)fr) on Fri Feb 1st, 2008 at 09:17:03 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: ET Diaries - Vol 1 (4.00 / 3)

The fiber path.

On another set of thoughts and since those old adobe walls of neolithic times, some searchers (quite a lot) wondered about reinforcement of concretes.
Concrete in structural use, has to have steel rods or bars for tension forces. Without those bars, the test specimen would break sooner.
But what really happened at micro-metric scales ? Thousand of small hairline cracks appeared in the concrete, and joined to make bigger cracks that ended with the breaking of the whole test specimen.(to make it short!)

The big iron bars at, say, a beam scale didn't really stop the fine cracks but, like a giant staple held all that concrete matter together (ie. the beam "held" for a given strenght). After a tension limit it was those steel bars that played the tensile role.
Now what would happen if some mini staples were used to delay the joining of those micro cracks in the concrete matter ?
Surprise... It worked much better then the "life scale" steel bars ! It works so well that concrete made this way was a "ductile" (or tensile) material... Almost as good as a classical I beam of steel !

I loved that diary. The title...and then the content; it's a classic!

Maybe it's also that I read it after talking to a friend who is a wild fan of concrete--he showed me some of the details on a local building made of concrete. So those two experiences have given me a respect for and a pleasure in concrete as a building material--

Yeah!

Concrete also makes me think of this (which I really saw for the first time maybe around the same time)--

Seems it's a tourist attraction these days.

Concrete!

You took me on ze voyage of discovery! As did all those diaries. And the voyage continues. I just discovered (I'm a slow learner!) that Pantheon (of course...pan "all" "theon" gods...but isn't "pan" also a god? All the gods of pan? Heh...) means:

Online Etymology Dictionary

pantheon
c.1300, from Pantheon, temple for all the gods, built in Rome c.25 B.C.E. by Agrippa (since 609 C.E. made into the Christian church of Santa Maria Rotonda), from Gk. Pantheion (hieron) "(shrine) of all the gods," from pantheion, neut. of pantheios, from pan- "all" + theios "of or for the gods," from theos "god" (see Thea).

(My emphasis--!)

I discover that it was built in commemoration...

("com": "bring to" or "together"--)

...of The Battle of Actium...

Battle of Actium - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Battle of Actium was the decisive engagement in the Final War of the Roman Republic between the forces of Octavian and those of Mark Antony. It was fought on September 2, 31 BC, on the Ionian Sea near the Roman colony of Actium in Greece. Octavian's fleet was commanded by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, while Antony's fleet was supported by the fleet of his lover, Cleopatra VII, queen of Ptolemaic Egypt.
The victory of Octavian's fleet enabled him to consolidate his power over Rome and its domains, leading to his adoption of the title of Princeps ("first citizen") and his accepting the title of Augustus from the Senate. As Augustus Caesar, he would preserve the trappings of a restored Republic, but many historians view his consolidation of power and the adoption of his honorifics flowing from his victory at Actium as the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire.

Hey!

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Fri Feb 1st, 2008 at 05:41:12 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: ET Diaries - Vol 1 (none / 1)

Or a time trip from Agrippa to Frank Lloyd Wright... :-)

Ah... Pan (not the sweetened down "Peter" one)! Dionysos versus Apollo the drama of our era without ambiguities... (close the blinds)!

It has become the new signal for distress, replacing the old S.O.S on radios, it's now Pan, Pan, Pan, three times, as the knocks on the scene for the beginning of the play...

After all, isn't it a gigantic play, "la comédie humaine"...?

"What can I do, What can I write, Against the fall of Night". A.E. Housman

by margouillat (hemidactylus(dot)frenatus(at)wanadoo(dot)fr) on Fri Feb 1st, 2008 at 07:01:41 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: ET Diaries - Vol 1 (4.00 / 2)

I'm getting the sense that there are many comedie humaine and the sad part is that the evil bastards "never give a sucker an even break"

caution and indictement!

Pan! I now discover that I was making a common mistake.

Pan (mythology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The parentage of Pan is unclear; in some myths he is the son of Zeus, though generally he is the son of Hermes, with whom his mother is said to be a nymph, sometimes Dryope or, in Nonnus, Dionysiaca (14.92), a Penelope of Mantineia in Arcadia.^[1] His nature and name are alluring, particularly since often his name is mistakenly thought to be identical to the Greek word pan, meaning "all", when in fact the name of the god is derived from the word pa-on, which means "herdsman" and shares its prefix with the modern English word "pasture". In many ways he seems to be identical to Protogonus/Phanes.
Probably the beginning of the linguistic misunderstanding is the Homeric Hymn to Pan, which describes him as delighting all the gods, and thus getting his name. The Roman counterpart to Pan is Faunus, another version of his name, which is at least Indo-European. However, accounts of Pan's genealogy are so varied that it must lie buried deep in mythic time. Like other nature spirits, Pan appears to be older than the Olympians, if it's true that he gave Artemis her hunting dogs and taught the secret of prophecy to Apollo. Pan might be multiplied as the Panes (Burkert 1985, III.3.2; Ruck and Staples 1994 p 132^[2]) or the Paniskoi. Kerenyi (1951 p 174) notes from scholia that Aeschylus in Rhesus distinguished between two Pans, one the son of Zeus and twin of Arkas, and one a son of Cronos. "In the retinue of Dionysos, or in depictions of wild landscapes, there appeared not only a great Pan, but also little Pans, Paniskoi, who played the same part as the Satyrs".

Always good to see you here, margouillat!

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Fri Feb 1st, 2008 at 07:26:24 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: ET Diaries - Vol 1 (none / 1)

Merci...!

The big Pan is dead, and with him the enchantment of the world...! Something Mircea Eliade could have said in his study about Chamans and the first beliefs of humankind !

I wish I had some more time to put up some diaries on weird subjects :-)

"What can I do, What can I write, Against the fall of Night". A.E. Housman

by margouillat (hemidactylus(dot)frenatus(at)wanadoo(dot)fr) on Fri Feb 1st, 2008 at 07:39:31 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: ET Diaries - Vol 1 (4.00 / 2)

Hey!

An ETer once said to me, "I've learned so much!" That's the way I feel--and yes! Diaries on weird subjects! Fascists cry: Death to the Weird! And there's a shrug:

"When the going gets tough, the weird turn Pro"

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Fri Feb 1st, 2008 at 08:07:24 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: ET Diaries - Vol 1 (4.00 / 2)

are you going to put up a pdf?... i love to buy my own stuff.
recall that all money colelcted should be shared :).. My part goes directly for some of your painting.. well more like collage.... :)

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

by kcurie on Fri Feb 1st, 2008 at 06:25:51 PM EST

Re: ET Diaries - Vol 1 (4.00 / 5)

(you can download a copy here...and see the cover! But shhhhhhh! I think I'll have to make that private quick!)

Just been re-reading Izzy's diary.

Citizens who remained in the city, those too sick or too poor to evacuate, were just starting to breathe a sigh of relief and count their blessings when the water started to rise.

In some places the water rose so quickly, the people barely made it into their attics. Many rushed from the wall of water in their underwear or without shoes. On almost any television news channel, you could find someone bemoaning how "everybody knows" you should take an axe to the attic, never mentioning that the people left behind thought the worst was over. They were off guard when the wall of water hit.

By Monday night the situation was grave. Two confirmed levee breaches and not enough help. The people inside the city knew all of this. As the water continued to rise, local authorities knew, but many in the outside world did not learn of it until a woman named Karen Troyer Caraway called CNN.

Ms. Caraway is the Vice President of Tulane University Hospital. She called CNN to report that the worst had happened, the levee at 17th Street Canal was breached. She clearly and calmly conveyed this news to the world -- that the water was rising an inch every five minutes. The hospital had moved the ER to the second floor. There were whitecaps on Canal Street. The state police knew. CNN confirmed the story with local authorities.

So this was it. The people were trapped, the water was rising, it would only get worse as the flood rose to the level of Lake Pontchartrain. The only hope of averting complete disaster would be to plug the breaches before the pumps became overwhelmed and stopped working.

Once that happened, there would be no way to get rid of the water. The infrastructure would fail, the city would drown. In such a situation, it was imperative that every resource in the nation be called to help. Every bus, every boat, every helicopter would be needed to evacuate the city. The entire population would need water, food, shelter. If ever there was a time for unity, generosity, and leadership, this was that time.

That time did not come. The world awoke on Tuesday to headlines still proclaiming the good news, the near miss. The cable news spoke of the breaches and the helicopter that was dropping sandbags in the attempt to plug the breach at Lake Pontchartrain. All day we saw footage of local rescue workers doing their best, plucking survivors off of the roofs one by one. All day we saw footage of the water rising.

But there were no calls for national unity, no experts explaining the state of things, no marshaling of buses and boats and helicopters. Our national leaders were absent. Our national pastimes went on. The experts who were on the news did not speak of the levee, the pumps, the flood, the emergency. They spoke of the revenue, the casinos, the oil, the markets.

The public did not learn that the levee breach meant New Orleans would drown, but we learned that our gas prices would go up. We did not learn that the breaches guaranteed a catastrophic death toll, but we heard that losing the casino tax revenue would be devastating.

The people who remained in the city were referred to as looters more often than victims. Instead of pondering why there was no emergency evacuation for those without means, the anchors pontificated about why people would be so foolish and stubborn as to stay.

And as the day lengthened and the light faded from the sky, the killing blow was dealt. The helicopter that had been dropping the sandbags was not dropping the sandbags. It never had been. The pumps failed. The infrastructure failed. New Orleans could not sustain life.

Slowly on that Tuesday night, the news started reporting what it all meant. They started bringing in experts to explain the ramifications. The world on Wednesday awoke to the bad news -- New Orleans was doomed. It was so unexpected, they said, no one could have predicted it.

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Fri Feb 1st, 2008 at 06:51:54 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: ET Diaries - Vol 1 (none / 1)

I absolutely love it!!!

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

by kcurie on Mon Feb 4th, 2008 at 07:10:37 AM EST
[ Parent ]

ET Diaries - Vol 1 | 11 comments (11 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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