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The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence
Happy Bloomsday! I have no computer.
There are a couple of reasons that yesterday was outright awful until the evening, when![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks and I went to see Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) at the Harvard Film Archive (it is one of the best black-and-white films I have ever seen, meaning that it could not have been made in color; and the ghosts are uncanny, but Deborah Kerr is terrifying), but one of them was the way my laptop failed to boot for over an hour in the morning and only came back, slowly and waveringly, sometime after dark. This morning, it wouldn't come back at all.
I do not really feel like recounting the details of a day spent at the Apple Store, except that at one point I textedderspatchel, "I am the only person with a book in this entire store. Everyone else around me waits staring into their phones or the air. I'm reading ethnography from 1912, but I feel like I'm conducting it a hundred years later." I had thought the problem might be that one of the fans in the computer had died, leading to overheating, but when the utilikilt-wearing employee at the Genius Bar (whose logo is a sort of stylized Bohr model of the atom; I am amused that the universally recognized sign for genius is still something to do with nuclear physics) popped the back off, it transpired that my machine only has one fan, which was not in the specs. I may have to name it either George VI or Owen Pugh. In any case, there were tests run, the hard drive appeared to be fine, it was decided that the problem was software corruption and the machine was taken off into the back room to have its operating system razed and reinstalled.
The operation was a success and the patient died: the hard drive failed during reinstallation. The good news is, a replacement is actually covered by the insurance I bought three years ago August. (For once, paranoia rewards. I cannot, cannot afford to buy a new computer. I am not sure I could have afforded a new hard drive.) The bad news is, I am unlikely to get the machine back before Monday, and until such time I have really no access to my e-mail and no ability to do my job. I guess this month is my exercise in unplugged weekends. But at least I could write about the last one without resorting to pencil and paper. I just don't write that fast by hand.
There are a couple of reasons that yesterday was outright awful until the evening, when
rushthatspeaks and I went to see Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) at the Harvard Film Archive (it is one of the best black-and-white films I have ever seen, meaning that it could not have been made in color; and the ghosts are uncanny, but Deborah Kerr is terrifying), but one of them was the way my laptop failed to boot for over an hour in the morning and only came back, slowly and waveringly, sometime after dark. This morning, it wouldn't come back at all.I do not really feel like recounting the details of a day spent at the Apple Store, except that at one point I texted
derspatchel, "I am the only person with a book in this entire store. Everyone else around me waits staring into their phones or the air. I'm reading ethnography from 1912, but I feel like I'm conducting it a hundred years later." I had thought the problem might be that one of the fans in the computer had died, leading to overheating, but when the utilikilt-wearing employee at the Genius Bar (whose logo is a sort of stylized Bohr model of the atom; I am amused that the universally recognized sign for genius is still something to do with nuclear physics) popped the back off, it transpired that my machine only has one fan, which was not in the specs. I may have to name it either George VI or Owen Pugh. In any case, there were tests run, the hard drive appeared to be fine, it was decided that the problem was software corruption and the machine was taken off into the back room to have its operating system razed and reinstalled.The operation was a success and the patient died: the hard drive failed during reinstallation. The good news is, a replacement is actually covered by the insurance I bought three years ago August. (For once, paranoia rewards. I cannot, cannot afford to buy a new computer. I am not sure I could have afforded a new hard drive.) The bad news is, I am unlikely to get the machine back before Monday, and until such time I have really no access to my e-mail and no ability to do my job. I guess this month is my exercise in unplugged weekends. But at least I could write about the last one without resorting to pencil and paper. I just don't write that fast by hand.
My condolences...
whose logo is a sort of stylized Bohr model of the atom; I am amused that the universally recognized sign for genius is still something to do with nuclear physics *
Well, nuclear physics managed to invent the most deadly weapon yet known... and Einstein is the Genius Incarnate in the collective mind (I wonder who was it before him, maybe Edison? And yet before - maybe Charles Watt?)
Everyone else around me waits staring into their phones or the air *
Well, that depends of the phone (and one's use for it). Some people actually read e-books on their phones (and I admire them for it, one must realyy like reading to do it on a phone on subway). And my e-reader is happily full of vintage public domain books from Gutenberg.org
Re: My condolences...
Yeah, when Cap didn't recognize the name "Stephen Hawking" in the recent Avengers, Coulson really should have switched the analogy to Einstein - but I guess it was part of the buildup to:
"Monkeys?"
"I understood that reference!"
Re: My condolences...
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I was expecting Einstein! Especially for somebody who's been frozen since 1943.
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I loved that one.
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elephantsturtles in the road ahead"?no subject
Thank you . . .
Well, nuclear physics managed to invent the most deadly weapon yet known... and Einstein is the Genius Incarnate in the collective mind
Christopher Frayling makes just this point (which I don't disagree with) in Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema (2005), which I was reading before I left for D.C.:
In the same year as Margaret Mead's pioneering survey of schoolchildren's attitudes [toward scientists, 1957], Roland Barthes noted in his collection of essays Mythologies that Einstein had already come to stand—in the public mind—for the whole of science. Barthes was writing at a time when two hospitals were fighting for possession of the late great man's brain.
"Einstein fulfills all the conditions of myth, which could not care less about contradictions so long as it establishes a euphoric security: at once magician and machine, eternal researcher and unfulfilled discoverer, unleashing the best and the worst, brain and conscience, Einstein embodies the most contradictory dreams, and mythically reconciles the infinite power of man over nature with the 'fatality' of the sacrosanct, which man cannot yet do without."
Above all, Barthes concluded, "through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula." The single secret to the world. The philosopher's stone. The transmutation of base metal into gold. The world in a grain of sand. The only equation from physics that lay people actually know. The simple and beautiful e=mc2.
Forty-five years later, Albert Einstein still has the highest recognition factor of any scientist of the modern era . . . Einstein's public image neatly combines the two great popular stereotypes of the scientist in one: the unworldly saint and the dotty sinner. Saint in the sense of the man who selflessly gave us a completely new vision of the universe, and who when he died in 1955 was still working on unified field theory—a theory of everything that would bind together the great forces of quantum physics, relativity theory, gravitation and nuclear power; a theory that would unlock the mysteries of time, space and the universe and in the process maybe solve the mystery of existence. Sinner in the sense of the man whose ideas inspired the ultimate horror—his first Time magazine cover superimposed his mature face on a mushroom cloud, with e=mc2 written on the mushroom.
I don't know who the prevailing single image of the scientist was before him—Newton?
Some people actually read e-books on their phones (and I admire them for it, one must realyy like reading to do it on a phone on subway). And my e-reader is happily full of vintage public domain books from Gutenberg.org
Understood. But I was still the only person in the store with a dead tree!
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English poet Alexander Pope was moved by Newton's accomplishments to write the famous epitaph:
Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;
God said "Let Newton be" and all was light.
English poet Sir John Squire amusingly satirised this:
It could not last; the Devil shouting "Ho!
Let Einstein be!" restored the status quo.
Sinner in the sense of the man whose ideas inspired the ultimate horror—his first Time magazine cover superimposed his mature face on a mushroom cloud, with e=mc2 written on the mushroom. *
Well, maybe, but he wasn't an only one, and his ideas are also giving power (as in electrical power) to many computers in the world (via nuclear power stations)... so he is the force for Youtube, and pornvideos, and live-streaming of street protests.... wow....