Griffith Observatory...renovated and open to the public

"Griffith Observatory: Astronomy for the Public"

by

Elizabeth Howell

SPACE.com

Griffith Observatory is a Los Angeles-based facility that bills itself as the most-visited observatory in the world.

While many professional facilities are solely used by astronomers, Griffith has free public telescopes that are open each evening that the observatory and skies are clear. The telescopes are available until 9:45 p.m., while the building is open until 10 p.m.

In 2006, the Griffith Park observatory got a much-needed facelift after nearly 70 years of serving the public. A $93 million renovation saw many exhibits removed and replaced with more modern ones. Additionally, the facility installed a brand-new planetarium complete with digital laser projectors.

Griffith Observatory came to be through a gift of a wealthy benefactor — Griffith J. Griffith, a businessman who got rich through the Mexican silver mine business and also real estate in southern California.

In the early 1900s, Griffith visited the then-new telescope at Mount Wilson, where he got a chance to look through the 60-inch telescope.

"The experience moved him profoundly — a distant, heavenly body suddenly being brought so close and made so real," wrote John Anson Ford, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, in text quoted by the observatory .

Ford, the observatory added, quoted Griffith as saying "Man's sense of values ought to be revised. If all mankind could look through that telescope, it would change the world."

In 1912, Griffith worked to bring the experience to Los Angeles. He expressed his willingness to donate $100,000 (worth roughly $2.3 million today) for an observatory that would include an open-access telescope, a theater capable of showing "motion pictures" (then very state-of-the-art) and a science hall with exhibits.

Griffith died in 1919, but provided for the observatory in his will as he grew ill. Serious planning for construction began in 1930, with the dedication for the new observatory taking place on May 14, 1935. One major change took place to Griffith's vision: a planetarium, a technology that wasn't available when Griffith was alive.

A new four-year mission

Griffith had its share of changes and renovations over the years, but by far the largest one took place starting in 2002. Organizers took an unprecedented step in the observatory's 67 years of operations: they shut down the facility for four years to change it inside and out.

 The public-private partnership had four main goals: refurbishing the entire building, putting in a state-of-the-art planetarium, expanding public space and rejuvenating the exhibit program.

"This has involved taking the time, spending the money, and getting the people necessary to do the job right, so that the result is something the people of Los Angeles can celebrate with justified pride," the observatory stated at the time of the renovation.

When the observatory re-opened in November 2006, its changes drew awe in Larry Evans, a National Space Society official who wrote of his experience of seeing it in SPACE.com.

"Old favorites such as the Foucault Pendulum that demonstrates Earth's rotation, art deco wall panels and ceiling fresco, or the giant moon globe, remain intact," he wrote. "New exhibits on meteorites, the solar system, and the universe beyond, are all state-of-the-art."

Griffith Observatory has also seen its share of fires over the years, including one that came a little close to the facility in May 2007, just six months after re-opening.

One of the observatory's more unusual attractions received mention in a New York Times account of the fire: "Tourists flock for views of the city and to see the bust of James Dean that commemorates the movie 'Rebel Without a Cause,' which was filmed there," the newspaper wrote.

Col. Griffith J. Griffith's contribution to astronomy

Orwell's Burma residence

"George Orwell’s Burmese Home Comes Back to Life"

by

Nang Lwin

May 4th, 2013

THE IRRAWADDY

An ancient building in northwest Burma, once home to George Orwell, will be restored for visitors after a long period of disrepair under the former military regime.

Now largely abandoned, the old red building in Sagaing Division stands at the end of a narrow path overgrown with grass. Two trees flanking the edifice enhance the seclusion of the home where the famous British writer lived during British colonialism, plotting parts of his famous book “Burmese Days.”

“We started talking to community leaders about repairing the building, and now we’re collaborating with tourism agents,” said Thaung Htike Oo, a township administrator. “The repairs will be complete this year.”

Orwell came to Burma as an Indian Civil Service officer, assigned in 1926 to a remote town in Sagaing Division along the west bank of the Irrawaddy River. The town, Katha, was the inspiration for the fictional district of Kyauktada in “Burmese Days,” which was published in 1934. The book presents the dark side of British colonialism in Burma, then part of the British Indian empire, with biting descriptions of discrimination against the Burmese as well as feelings of isolation among the British colonial officers.

Orwell’s former two-storey home is now owned by the township’s administrative department, with some civil servants and their families taking up residence there.

The historical building has never been repaired; vines snake up cracked, concrete walls, while the doors hang off their hinges. The floor lies beneath piles of garbage, with insects rummaging between. Weeds curve alongside the fireplace and dust covers the railing up a broken staircase.

Soon, however, the township hopes to breathe new life into the neglected residence, and to attract tourist dollars in the process.

Foreigners with an interest in the famous British author have long journeyed to Katha to view for themselves the landscapes painted in the novel.

“Tourists choose the Irrawaddy River cruise to Katha,” said Daw Tint Tint Lwin, managing director of Irrawaddy Princess River Cruise. “All the tourists want to see the building” where Orwell lived.

In February, news spread that Orwell’s former residence might be torn down by investors to make room for a skate park, but plans for renovation ultimately won out.

“The value of our colonial heritage may fade away if they turn this place into a skating ground,” Daw Tint Tint Lwin said.

Still, she stressed that reconstructing and repainting the crumbling building should be done carefully.

“We want to charge a fee for entering and visiting the building,” she said. “With that income, we can repair and maintain the building without disturbing its historical value.”

She criticized the building’s current tenants for failing to care for the space.

“They’ve put two [township] employees’ families in this building, and now it looks like a local hut,” she said. “All the buildings, including the British Club and tennis court, need to be repaired and maintained properly so this place can be a tourist attraction with entry fees.”
The British Club, which makes frequent appearances in “Burmese Days,” was a popular gathering spot for British colonial officers and their families to socialize on the verandah with a view of the Irrawaddy River. Coconut trees line the road leading to the club, which was built on a hill and is separated from a tennis quart by an open field and living quarters for laborers.

Orwell was born in India in 1903 and moved with his family to England one year later. He joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma in 1922 but despised colonial life and resigned several years later. In addition to “Burmese Days,” he is known writing the dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “Animal Farm.”

"Excerpt: 'Finding George Orwell In Burma'"

by

Emma Larkin

July 28th, 2010

NPR

George Orwell, ' I said slowly. 'G-e-o-r-g-e O-r-w-e-l-l.' But the old Burmese man just kept shaking his head.

We were sitting in the baking-hot front room of his house in a sleepy port town in Lower Burma. The air was oppressive and muggy. I could hear mosquitoes whining impatiently around my head, and I was about to give up. The man was a well-known scholar in Burma, and I knew he was familiar with Orwell. But he was elderly; cataracts had turned his eyes an oystery blue, and his hands trembled as he readjusted his sarong. I wondered if he was losing his memory but, after several failed attempts, I made one final stab.

'George Orwell,' I repeated — 'the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four.' The old man's eyes suddenly lit up. He looked at me with a brilliant flash of recognition, slapped his forehead gleefully, and said, 'You mean the prophet!'

A year before George Orwell died in 1950, his typewriter was confiscated. Orwell lay tucked under an electric blanket in a small wooden chalet in the green and pleasant heart of the Cotswolds, dying of pulmonary tuberculosis. Piled around his sickbed were a variety of books: tomes on Stalin and on German atrocities in the Second World War, a study of English labourers in the nineteenth century, a few Thomas Hardy novels, some early Evelyn Waugh. Under the bed was a secret stash of rum.

The doctors at the sanatorium where Orwell was being treated had advised him to stop writing. Any kind of writing, they said, would tire him out. What he needed was total rest. Both his lungs were clogged with lesions, and he was coughing up blood. The disease had now reached a critical stage, and doctors were not hopeful of his chances of recovery. Even if he did survive, he might never be able to write again — or at least not with the same intensity he was used to. Orwell, however, continued to write. He scribbled letters, composed essays, reviewed books, and corrected proofs of his soon-to-be-published novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. And, simmering in his fevered mind, was an idea for another book: a novella entitled 'A Smoking Room Story', which would revisit Burma, a place he had not been to since his youth.

Orwell had lived in Burma in the 1920s as an officer of the Imperial Police Force. For five years he dressed in khaki jodhpurs and shining black boots. Armed with guns and a sense of moral superiority, the Imperial Police Force patrolled the countryside and kept this far-flung corner of the British Empire in line. Then, suddenly and without warning, he returned to England and handed in his notice. Just as abruptly, he began his career as a writer. Exchanging his real name, 'Eric Arthur Blair', for the pen-name 'George Orwell', he donned the rags of a tramp and marched off into the dank London nights to collect the stories of the down-at-heel. Orwell based his first novel, Burmese Days, on his experiences in the Far East, but it was his later novels such as Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four that would turn him into one of the most respected and visionary writers of the twentieth century.

It is a particularly uncanny twist of fate that these three novels effectively tell the story of Burma's recent history. The link begins with Burmese Days, which chronicles the country's period under British colonialism. Not long after Burma became independent from Britain in 1948, a military dictator sealed off the country from the outside world, launched 'The Burmese Way to Socialism', and turned Burma into one of the poorest countries in Asia. The same story is told in Orwell's Animal Farm, an allegorical tale about a socialist revolution gone wrong in which a group of pigs overthrow the human farmers and run the farm into ruin. Finally, in Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell's description of a horrifying and soulless dystopia paints a chillingly accurate picture of Burma today, a country ruled by one of the world's most brutal and tenacious dictatorships.

In Burma there is a joke that Orwell wrote not just one novel about the country, but three: a trilogy comprised of Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

As I walked down a busy street in Mandalay on my first visit to Burma, in 1995, a Burmese man strode purposefully towards me twirling a black umbrella. He smiled brightly and said, 'Spread our need of democracy to the rest of the world — the people are so tired.' Then he turned around and walked briskly away. And that was it: one of the few, fleeting glimpses I had that all is not as it seems in Burma.

During the three weeks I spent wandering through postcard-perfect scenes of bustling markets, glittering pagodas and faded British hill stations I found it hard to believe I was travelling through a country that has one of the worst records for human-rights abuse in the world. To me, this is the most staggering thing about Burma: that the oppression of an entire nation of some 50 million people can be completely hidden from view. A vast network of Military Intelligence spies and their informers ensures that no one can do or say anything that might threaten the regime. The Burmese media — books, magazines, movies and music — are controlled by a strict censorship board and government propaganda is churned out not only through newspapers and television, but also in schools and universities. These methods of reality-control are kept firmly in place by the invisible, though ever present, threat of torture and imprisonment.

For an outsider like myself, unable to see beyond the façade the generals have created, it was impossible to imagine the daily fear and precariousness of living in such a state. It was during my efforts to understand this aspect of Burmese life that I became fascinated by Orwell. All his novels explore the idea of individuals being trapped within their environment, controlled by their family, the society around them or an all-powerful government. In Nineteen Eighty-Four he conjured up the ultimate vision of oppression, even giving us the language with which to describe it: 'Big Brother', 'Room 101', 'Newspeak'.

As I reread Orwell's novels — books I had not read since my schooldays — I became curious about his personal connection with Burma. What was it that had made him trade his career in the colonies for that of a writer? And why, after nearly a quarter of a century away from Burma, did he look to the country for inspiration while he lay on his deathbed? I began to imagine that Orwell had seen something in Burma, had had some thread of an idea, that had worked its way into all his writing. I looked through the various biographies that have been written about Orwell, but their authors seemed to underplay the significance of Burma and, as far I could gather, none of them had ever conducted any research in the places where Orwell spent five life-changing years. The towns and cities where Orwell was posted span the geographical heart of the country and, in a sense, it is still possible to experience Burma as Orwell knew it — almost half a century of military dictatorship has given it the air of a country frozen in time. But a journey through Orwell's Burma would lead through an even eerier and much more terrifying landscape: that of a real-life Nineteen Eighty-Four where Orwell's nightmare visions are being played out with a gruelling certainty.

Foreign writers and journalists are denied entry to Burma. Occasionally some are able to slip into the country posing as tourists, but if they are discovered their notebooks and photographic film are confiscated and they are swiftly deported. For the Burmese people they interview, the repercussions are infinitely greater. Under the country's 1950 Emergency Provisions Act, providing foreigners with information that the regime considers inimical is punishable with a seven-year prison sentence. Though I worked as a journalist, I rarely wrote about Burma and so it was still possible for me to blend in among tourists or the small expatriate community of business people who are granted long-stay visas. In basing a book on my experiences there were concessions to be made: I would have to change the names of the Burmese people I spoke with and, in some cases, their locations. But, if I was careful, it would be possible to forge a pathway through this seemingly impenetrable country.

Before I left for Burma, I went to the George Orwell Archive in London to look at Orwell's final manuscript. When Orwell died, in 1950, he had only just begun the project. 'A Smoking Room Story' was planned as a novella of thirty to forty thousand words which told how a fresh-faced young British man was irrevocably changed after living in the humid tropical jungles of colonial Burma. In an inky scrawl on the first three pages of a notebook bound in marbled paper Orwell had written an outline for the tale and a short vignette. I flicked through the rest of the book and found the pages blank. The rest of the story, I realized, lay waiting in Burma.

Finding George Orwell In Burma

by

Emma Larkin

ISBN-10: 0143037110
ISBN-13: 978-0143037118

Household robot MKS-4355's quest

A short story from Nautilus [May, 2013]

The Candle Burned

by

Mike Gelprin

Andrey Petrovich had given up all hope when the videophone rang.

“Hello, I saw your ad. You give private literature lessons?”

Andrey Petrovich peered at the man on the screen. He was about thirty, with an open smile and serious eyes, dressed in a suit and tie. Andrey Petrovich’s heart skipped a beat. Posting the ad on the Net had become but a hapless habit. In the past ten years he had received six responses. Three callers had dialed the wrong number, two others were old-fashioned insurance salesmen who still made phone calls, and the last one had confused literature with legislature.

“Y-yes, I d-do,” Andrey Petrovich stuttered anxiously. “In my apartment. You are interested in literature?”

“I am,” the man nodded from the screen, and introduced himself. “My name is Maksim. How much do you charge?”

Andrey Petrovich almost blurted, “it’s free,” but caught himself. “Rates are per hour. And negotiable.” He took a deep breath. “When would you like to start?”

“Well, I… you see,” Maksim started.

“First lesson is free,” Andrey Petrovich said quickly. “If you don’t like it, there’s no obligation.”

“Let’s start tomorrow then,” Maksim said definitively. “Are you free at ten in the morning? I drop the kids off at school by nine, and then I’m good until two.”

“I’m free,” Andrey Petrovich said happily. “Here’s my address. Got a pen?”

“I’ll remember it,” Maksim assured him. “Go ahead.”

Andrey Petrovich couldn’t sleep that night. Pacing from wall to wall in his tiny room, nearly a closet, he tried to tame his shaking hands and jumbled thoughts. For the past twelve years, he had been living on a meager subsistence, ever since the day he was fired. He had given up all hope of teaching.

“Your specialty is too narrow,” the principal of The Arts and Humanities Academy for the Gifted and Talented had told him during their last conversation. “You are an excellent pedagogue, but your subject has outlived itself. Children don’t study it anymore. Why don’t you retrain, take on something modern like virtual ethics or robotic torts legal code? Or as a last resort, the history of cinematography. It’s on its way out too, but it would carry you to retirement. The Academy would reimburse you for some of the cost. What do you say?”

Andrey Petrovich declined the offer, which he regretted later. There were no jobs in literature and philology, and former teachers were moving into other disciplines, grasping at any conceivable straws. For the first two years, he diligently went through liberal arts colleges and conservatories, but departments of humanities were disappearing and libraries were closing. When all proved fruitless, he tried to retrain, despite his aversion to the dry modern disciplines. When his wife left, he gave up.

As his savings dwindled, Andrey Petrovich spiraled into poverty. First, he sold his aircar, old yet still in good shape. Then he let go of the antique tea set, his mother’s memento. Furniture and clothes followed. And once he was left with nothing in his sad bachelor pad, it was the books’ turn. The real books—the old-fashioned, leather-bound tomes with original illustrations, still smelling of ink, paper, and glue. Collectors paid top price for the rare old volumes, so Leo Tolstoy brought food to his table for almost a month. Fyodor Dostoevsky lasted for two weeks. Ivan Bunin sufficed for about ten days. Every time Andrey Petrovich thought about his lost treasures, he felt like throwing up.

Finally, he was left with a few dozen of his absolutely favorite books, which he couldn’t sell even if faced with starving to death. Hemingway, Balzac, Zola, Pasternak and a few other authors huddled together on his four remaining shelves, and every day Andrey Petrovich lovingly dusted them.

“If the lessons work, I may be able to buy back Tolstoy,” he mumbled to himself, shuffling from wall to wall, anxiously waiting for the morning. “Or maybe Murakami. Or should I do Amado first?”

Suddenly, a realization struck him. It didn’t matter whether he could reclaim his books. What mattered was that he could pass on his knowledge of the long forgotten art: the beauty of the language, the flow of the story, the insights of its authors. He could impart, transfer, and transform.

Maksim rang his bell at 10 a.m. sharp.

“Please, have a seat.” Andrey Petrovich ushered him in. “What would you like to start with?”

Maksim awkwardly lowered himself into a chair.

“What do you think I should start with?” he asked—and blushed. “I have to confess, I’m a total ignoramus. No one ever taught me anything. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Oh, but of course I understand!” Andrey Petrovich burst out sympathetically. “No one taught anyone for generations. Literature has been an academic stepchild for more than a hundred years. It’s even been abandoned by schools with a humanitarian focus. It’s no longer offered anywhere.”

“Anywhere?” Maksim echoed.

“I’m pretty sure of it,” Andrey Petrovich replied with a sigh. “See, the crisis began at the end of the twentieth century. People had no time to read. First children had no time to read, then their kids really had no time to read, and so on, every generation worse than the one before. Interactive entertainment pushed out reading. Technology pushed out philology. Literature, history and geography couldn’t compete with cybernetics, quantum mechanics, and plasma physics. But literature was worst of all. It just fell by the wayside. Do you understand?”

Maksim nodded. “Yes, I do. Please continue!”

“In the twenty-first century electronic platforms took hold and publishers stopped printing paper books. Because people no longer read, the number of writers dwindled and eventually they went extinct. Writers stopped writing! The literary reserve built over twenty centuries of writing is still more than sufficient to teach literature, but no one cares anymore. We’re losing our history.”

Andrey Petrovich paused for a few seconds and wiped off his suddenly sweaty forehead.

“It’s so hard to talk about,” he finally uttered. “I understand that it was an inevitable process. Literature died because it didn’t fit into evolutionary progress. But it used to carry the wisdom of mankind to the next generation. It used to nourish souls and build spirits. It helped form the minds of children. Today, our children are raised emotionally and intellectually empty. They grow up soulless like machines. It’s horrible and it’s frightening!”

“That’s what I felt too.” Maksim nodded. “That’s why I came to you.”

“Do you have children?” asked Andrey Petrovich.

“Well…” Maksim stuttered. “Yes, two, a year apart. Pavlik and Anechka. I need the foundation. I’ll find and read the manuscripts on the Net. I just need to know what to read. And how to think about what I read. Will you teach me?”

“Yes,” Andrey Petrovich said, inspired. “I will and I shall.”

He stood up straight and spread his shoulders, suddenly growing taller and stronger as he filled his lungs with air. “Boris Pasternak, poetry,” he announced, fetching the dormant words from his memory.

“As blizzards whirled around the earth

And snow churned

A candle burned upon the table,

A candle burned…”

When the lesson was over, Andrey Petrovich asked, with a slight tremor in his voice, “Will you come tomorrow?”

“I sure will,” Maksim answered with determination. “The only thing is—you know, about the payment. I work as a secretary for a wealthy couple. I manage bookkeeping, I do shopping, I run errands. My salary is kind of low, but I can bring food, clothes, merchandise, and even some electronics—as payment. Would that work for you?”

Andrey Petrovich blushed. He felt so inspired after his first lesson, he would do it for free.

“Of course it works,” he said. “Thank you. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Literature is not only about the story, but also about how that story is spoken.” Andrey Petrovich was pacing around the room as he explained to Maksim the art of storytelling.

“The language is a wonderful and wondrous tool, and our talented ancestors had mastered it brilliantly. Just listen to the words, just listen!”

Maksim listened intently. He always looked as if he was trying to absorb and commit to memory every line Andrey Petrovich uttered. He had an almost uncanny ability to focus, and he never seemed tired or overwhelmed.

“Pushkin, ‘Eugene Onegin,’” Andrey Petrovich would announce the next poem, and then recite. When he was done, he would move onto another author. “Lermontov, ‘Demon.’ Vysotsky, ‘Capricious Horses.’ Have I tired you, Maksim?”

Maksim was never tired. He never lost his concentration either.

As weeks and months went by, Andrey Petrovich rejuvenated. He grew youthful and energetic. His life made sense again, it now had purpose and reason. After poetry they moved onto prose and fiction, which were more complex and time-consuming, but by then Maksim had developed into a terrific student with a keen intuition. Originally nearly tone-deaf to the beauty of the language, he warmed up to the rhyme and rhythm, the cadence and the harmony of words. He made leaps of progress every day as Andrey Petrovich ventured into Balzac, Hugo, Hemingway and Nabokov. Together, they went from classics to science fiction and from mysteries to fantasies, traveling through centuries, countries and empires— from Shakespeare to Remarque, from Maupassant to Fitzgerald, and from Mark Twain to Rabelais.

It was just another Wednesday morning when Maksim didn’t come. Andrey Petrovich waited anxiously. By the end of the day he was a nervous wreck. He tried to convince himself that his student had suddenly fallen ill, but his sixth sense told him otherwise. Punctual like a Swiss clock, Maksim wouldn’t miss a session without fair warning. In a year and a half he hadn’t been late once. He would’ve called. As a matter of fact, he would’ve called the night before!

When Maksim didn’t show up the next morning, Andrey Petrovich knew something bad had happened. He found Maksim’s number in his videophone history, poked the callback button, and gasped when he heard the cold metallic response.

“This number has been disconnected.”

The next few days were a blur. Even his favorite books didn’t save Andrey Petrovich from the swiftly resurrected feeling of uselessness, which now gnawed him with newfound strength. He considered calling hospitals and morgues, but didn’t know how to describe the person he sought after. Looking for a fellow named Maksim, thirtyish, sorry, no last name?

When he finally felt so stifled he could no longer breathe inside his chipping walls, Andrey Petrovich staggered outside.

“Hey there, Petrovich,” Nefedov, his neighbor from the floor below, greeted him on the stoop. “Good to see you again. Whatcha hiding for? It wasn’t your fault.”

Andrey Petrovich stared at him in bewilderment. “What wasn’t my fault?”

“Well, that guy of yours, you know.” Nefedov made a cutting move across his throat. “The one who’s been coming to see you all this time. I was wondering cuz it’s not like you to hang out with those types, but I just kept my mouth shut.”

“What types?” Andrey Petrovich asked, still stupefied. “Who are you talking about?”

“Who do you think? Them, the smartass thugs,” Nefedov snorted with distaste. “I can tell ’em a mile away. Spent thirty years training that sort.”

Andrey Petrovich grew cold. “Can you tell me what you’re talking about?” he pleaded desperately. “I don’t get it!”

“You really don’t know anything?” It was Nefedov’s turn to be stunned. “Check out Net News, it’s all over the place!”

Andrey Petrovich stumbled back into the elevator and almost fell into his apartment. He booted his computer up, connected to Net News—and moaned in almost physical pain.

“Caught stealing foodstuff, merchandise and electronic equipment,” the words blurred in front of his eyes. So did Maksim’s picture, but he forced himself to keep reading. “Household Robot-Secretary, enhanced self-learning model, serial number MKS-4355. In his statement, MKS-4355 said he unilaterally resolved that children were growing up soulless and took it upon himself to educate them on literary subjects outside of the established school curriculum, while keeping it secret from his owners. The manufacturer identified a bug in the knowledge control module and issued a recall for the MKS series while liquidating the defective #4355 from the force. The incident caused public outrage and raised questions about the loyalty and honesty of our machines.”

On disobedient legs, Andrey Petrovich staggered into the kitchen and reached for a bottle of cognac Maksim had brought a few weeks ago as yet another payment. He frantically searched for a glass, didn’t find it, and latched onto the bottle in a long gulp. But the alcohol was too strong for his old throat and he doubled over in a wheezing cough. His knees gave way and he sank onto the floor.

“MKS-4355,” he moaned, fighting a sharp pain that suddenly squeezed his heart. “A machine, oh my God, another faceless machine!”

He felt betrayed, cheated, humiliated. He had given this piece of electronic equipment everything he had—his knowledge, his heart, his soul. All this time he thought he was teaching a human being who’d bring the sacred spirit of storytelling back into the world. Instead, he had wasted his time on a preprogrammed whirl of wires. Literature was doomed, and he was doomed with it.

With a sudden determination, Andrey Petrovich pulled himself up and slammed his window shut. Then he stumbled over to the stove to turn on the gas. It would take an hour, max, and then it would be over.

His hand was on the knob when the doorbell rang. Andrey Petrovich moaned, but let go of the stove and staggered to the hallway. At the door stood two kids: a boy of ten and a girl, about a year younger.

“You give literature lessons?” she blurted out, her bright eyes dazzling from under her long bangs.

Andrey Petrovich was rendered speechless. “W-who are you?” he finally managed.

“I am Pavlik,” the boy answered. “And this is Anechka, my sister. Maks sent us.”

Andrey Petrovich gasped. “Who?”

“Maks,” the boy repeated with determination. “He told us to tell you, before they…
before he… before his…”

Anechka stepped forward. “As blizzards whirled around the earth and snow churned…” she began.

“A candle burned upon the table, a candle burned,” Pavlik continued.

Trying to push his pounding heart from his throat back into his chest, Andrey Petrovich swallowed hard. “I can’t believe it,” he whispered. “I can’t believe it.”

“Andrey Petrovich, will you teach us?” asked Pavlik. “Maks said you would.”

Grasping at the coat rack to keep his balance, Andrey Petrovich stepped back into his hallway.

“Come in, children, please,” he whispered. “Come in, children, my dearest.”

[A New York writer originally from St. Petersburg, Mike Gelprin has published more than a hundred science fiction and detective stories in Russian periodicals. His book, The Reluctant Nomads, will be released in Moscow this summer. “The Candle Burned” is his first story published in English.]

Go ahead and "think outside of the box"...it's healthy

Abstract...

Any ambitious construction project requires architects for its design and engineers who apply the design to the real world. As scientific research shifts towards large groups which focus on the engineering aspects of linking data to existing models, architectural skills are becoming rare among young theorists. Senior researchers should mentor qualified students and postdocs to think creatively about the big picture without unwarranted loyalty to ancient blueprints from past generations of architects.

"On the Importance of Conceptual Thinking Outside the Simulation Box" by Abraham Loeb

An old atom smasher...the Atomic Physics Observatory in Washington DC

"There's a derelict atom smasher nestled in the middle of suburban Washington DC. The old Atomic Physics Observatory sits in the middle of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, a scientific research campus in the city's Chevy Chase neighborhood. The APO was named and likewise designed to look like an astronomical observatory, in hopes that the nearby residents wouldn't put up too much of a fuss when the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism built a particle accelerator in the well-off suburb."

Read the whole article.

A cool and creepy engraving

Radishes, jelly fish, coral...creepy stuff from this engraving of men walking on the floor of an ocean bed. The notation reads..."A walk under the water" with a page number. I have no other information.

Norbert Wiener and the future from the essay “The Machine Age”

"In 1949, He Imagined an Age of Robots"

by

John Markoff

May 20th, 2013

The New York Times

It was a vision that never saw the light of day.

The year was 1949, and computers and robots were still largely the stuff of science fiction. Only a few farsighted thinkers imagined that they would one day become central to civilization, with consequences both liberating and potentially dire.

One of those visionaries was Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), an American mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1948 he had published “Cybernetics,” a landmark theoretical work that both foreshadowed and influenced the arrival of computing, robotics and automation. Two years later, he wrote “The Human Use of Human Beings,” a popularization of those ideas and an exploration of the potential of automation and the risks of dehumanization by machines.

In 1949, The New York Times invited Wiener to summarize his views about “what the ultimate machine age is likely to be,” in the words of its longtime Sunday editor, Lester Markel.

Wiener accepted the invitation and wrote a draft of the article; the legendarily autocratic Markel was dissatisfied and asked him to rewrite it. He did. But through a distinctly pre-Internet series of fumbles and missed opportunities, neither version ever appeared.

In August, according to Wiener’s papers, which are on file at the M.I.T. Libraries, The Times asked him to resend the first draft of the article so it could be combined with the second draft. (It is not clear why the editors failed to keep a copy of the first draft.)

“Could you send the first draft to me, and we’ll see whether we can combine the two into one story?” wrote an editor in the paper’s Sunday department, then separate from the daily paper. “I may be mistaken, but I think you lost some of your best material.”

But by then Wiener was traveling in Mexico, and he responded:

I had assumed that the first version of my article was finished business. To get hold of the paper in my office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would involve considerable cross-correspondence and annoyance to several people.

“I therefore do not consider it a practical thing to do. Under the circumstances I think that it is best for me to abandon this undertaking.

The following week the Times editor returned the second draft to Wiener, and it eventually made its way to the libraries’ Archives and Special Collections. It languished there until December 2012, when it was discovered by Anders Fernstedt, an independent scholar who is researching the work of Karl Popper, the 20th-century philosopher.

Almost 64 years after Wiener wrote it, his essay is still remarkably topical, raising questions about the impact of smart machines on society and of automation on human labor. In the spirit of rectifying an old omission, here are excerpts from “The Machine Age,” courtesy of the M.I.T. Libraries (all rights reserved).

Consider the Abacus

By this time the public is well aware that a new age of machines is upon us based on the computing machine, and not on the power machine. The tendency of these new machines is to replace human judgment on all levels but a fairly high one, rather than to replace human energy and power by machine energy and power. It is already clear that this new replacement will have a profound influence upon our lives, but it is not clear to the man of the street what this influence will be. ...

To understand what a computing machine is, let us compare a paper scheme of mathematical computation, a Chinese ... abacus and a Marchand or Fridén decimal computing machine for office use, and an electronic computing machine. Of these, the abacus is actually the oldest, but is not too familiar to the average man in the modern West.

Let us then begin with an ordinary paper schedule of computations. In this, we depend on certain memorized combinations of numbers and rules of procedure to enable us to carry out our actual operations on our numbers. The multiplication table and the rules of elementary arithmetic represent something which needs human intervention to be carried out on paper, but this human intervention follows certain inhumanly rigid and memorized laws.

In the abacus we carry out a human intervention of exactly the same sort as in combining numbers on paper, but in this case the numbers are represented by the positions of balls along a wire rather than by pen or pencil marks. The notation is just as arbitrary as in an ordinary pen or pencil computation, but the operations have a more mechanical appearance, in that they consist of the bodily motion of certain pieces of matter. Nevertheless, there is not the slightest logical difference between the abacus and the ordinary paper computation.

In the third stage, that of the desk computing machine, the same operations which occur in the abacus are made according to rules which are not memorized in all their details, but which are entrusted to the instrument, and carried out by its intervention. There is no replacement of true thought by the machine, since the level of thought of the elementary processes as we carry them out on paper is that of routine. The desk computing machine is neither more nor less than a mechanized abacus, in which our memory is replaced by certain internal interlockings of the machine.

Finally, the high-speed electronic computing machine differs from the desk machine only in the speed of its operations and the much higher complications of its interlockings. Thus an operation which previously took hours may be reduced to a matter of seconds.

Mass-Produced Laborers

We have so far spoken of the computing machine as an analogue to the human nervous system rather than to the whole of the human organism. Machines much more closely analogous to the human organism are well understood, and are now on the verge of being built. They will control entire industrial processes and will even make possible the factory substantially without employees.

In these the ultra-rapid digital computing machines will be supplemented by pieces of apparatus which take the readings of gauges, of thermometers, or photo-electric cells, and translate them into the digital input of computing machines. The new assemblages will also contain effectors, by which the numerical output of the central machine will be converted into the rotation of shafts, or the admission of chemicals into a tank, or the heating of a boiler, or some other process of the kind.

Furthermore, the actual performance of these effector organs as well as their desired performance will be read by suitable gauges and taken back into the machine as part of the information on which it works.

The general outline of the processes to be carried out will be determined by what computation engineers call taping, which will state and determine the sequence of the processes to be performed. The possibility of learning may be built in by allowing the taping to be re-established in a new way by the performance of the machine and the external impulses coming into it, rather than having it determined by a closed and rigid setup, to be imposed on the apparatus from the beginning.

The limitations of such a machine are simply those of an understanding of the objects to be attained, and of the potentialities of each stage of the processes by which they are to be attained, and of our power to make logically determinate combinations of those processes to achieve our ends. Roughly speaking, if we can do anything in a clear and intelligible way, we can do it by machine.

What the economic limitations will be — namely, how we may determine whether it is desirable to use the machine rather than human effectors — is something which we cannot state unambiguously until we have more experience. It is, however, quite clear that apart from the taping, which is the job for an intelligent man rather than for a deft man, the apparatus which we shall depend upon in the future machine age is largely repetitive, and will be capable of being manufactured by the methods of mass production.
 
The Genie and the Bottle

These new machines have a great capacity for upsetting the present basis of industry, and of reducing the economic value of the routine factory employee to a point at which he is not worth hiring at any price. If we combine our machine-potentials of a factory with the valuation of human beings on which our present factory system is based, we are in for an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty.

We must be willing to deal in facts rather than in fashionable ideologies if we wish to get through this period unharmed. Not even the brightest picture of an age in which man is the master, and in which we all have an excess of mechanical services will make up for the pains of transition, if we are not both humane and intelligent.

Finally the machines will do what we ask them to do and not what we ought to ask them to do. In the discussion of the relation between man and powerful agencies controlled by man, the gnomic wisdom of the folk tales has a value far beyond the books of our sociologists.

There is general agreement among the sages of the peoples of the past ages, that if we are granted power commensurate with our will, we are more likely to use it wrongly than to use it rightly, more likely to use it stupidly than to use it intelligently. [W. W. Jacobs’s] terrible story of the “Monkey’s Paw” is a modern example of this — the father wishes for money and gets it as a compensation for the death of his son in a factory accident, then wishes for the return of his son. The son comes back as a ghost, and the father wishes him gone. This is the outcome of his three wishes.

Moreover, if we move in the direction of making machines which learn and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes. The genie in the bottle will not willingly go back in the bottle, nor have we any reason to expect them to be well disposed to us.

In short, it is only a humanity which is capable of awe, which will also be capable of controlling the new potentials which we are opening for ourselves. We can be humble and live a good life with the aid of the machines, or we can be arrogant and die.

Norbert Wiener [Wikipedia]