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Mother of All Demos
Doug Englebart single-handedly invented (along with his amazing development team) the modern world of computers as we understand them, geared for use to non experts and useful for more than just calculating. In 1968 he demonstrated in front of a live audience his vision of a networked office environment, with hyperlinks, a mouse oriented GUI,…
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Vivens Machina
I have a deep affection for robots. All sizes and shapes. I long for the day when artificial intelligence that is indistinguishable from a human’s comes into existence. Imagine the conversations with a sentient robot, what insights we will gain about ourselves from having a third party to contemplate them with. I also fear the…
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What do you see?
Philo T. Farnsworth was the American inventor of electronic (as opposed to mechanical) television. He single-handedly designed and built the first complete system, from cameras to receivers. The first person ever broadcast on his system and the first woman on television, was his wife Pem. He credited her equally responsible for the development of the…
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Ink and Flame
I It was a pleasure to read. The black letters scattered across yellowing pages like ants on a lemon cake, each receding line swallowed whole with a cursory chew. The rain echoing on the plate glass and rat-a-tatting on the thin metal roof was a joyous cacophony to peach fuzzed ears in the early evening.…
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Contact: An Appreciation
Words can barely describe how much I love the book Contact. Carl Sagan gifted the world a vision of the human experience in the cosmos where it could find a place, a home, in the grand scheme of nearly infinite space. He understood that we reach out to touch each other through love. Love is…
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Consider the lilies of the field…
I have read the Bible in many different versions; some strange translations that leave out the sex and the violence. Versions that illuminate Jesus’ words in bright red ink. I have a beautifully illustrated copy where the black lines that make up the agony of patriarch’s faces, the lines that showcase indifference and paternal powers,…
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Watched
Watches don’t tell the time, they manifest it. The various little voices that tick out speculative moments: the second, the minute, the hour, all accordion noise to waltz through the seasons of our lives. Where the passing of time is measured by the heat of the summer sun, its mercurial reflection on winter…
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Evolving
I hate it when people say they don’t “believe” in evolution, as though evolution was a silly suggestion and not a law of nature. The path that evolution has taken us is to one of being able to comprehend this vast and awesome cosmos without resorting to fairy stories or magic books. The world is…
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One Year On
I didn’t realize the interesting coincidence of announcing some good news and celebrating the first year of the Numinous Cosmos’s existence! I have written over 15,000 words for my blog and shared several of my drawings and other projects with you. I am grateful for all of the individuals who have read and commented on my work and…
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Never Knowing
The thoughts that linger of time and space, about a light bringer about an unreal place, of souls and angels of words and phrases, painful wrangles, orbits out of phases. Hopes for greater hope, hope for life eternal, grabbing hold of a slippery rope, down to fire infernal, sliding down into a well built inside…
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Masters of War
I finished this drawing yesterday, the title speaks for the subject matter: Please check out http://www.wagingpeace.org/ for an outline on ridding the world of nuclear weapons.
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Billy Pilgrim
The city is a riot of color. The stones speak as loud as human voices, the angled streets and the sideways glances of the citizens walking the pavement stones, set to music the standards of ancients; whose strong arms and hands placed one on top of the other each of these piles of masonry…
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Paul Simon: Note Perfect
PAUL SIMON THE ONLY LIVING BOY IN NEW YORK There was a young boy in Queens, New York City, who played baseball and grew up to create beautiful music. His father and mother listened to jazz and classical music and made sure to share it with their son. This boy was Paul…
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On the Sly
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, independent of the nature of dogs for the fox does not want to engage and the dog naturally does not want to be engaged but the system tells it how it is. The space between the two is intricate webbing of atoms and diatoms, of carbon…
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Red Light
I was thinking on something Carl Sagan said about the last perfect day on Earth. One day, in the far future, the sun will one day change from the happy main sequence star we know, to a bloated red giant—many times its original size, engulfing the entire inner solar system. We are standing on…
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Getting Warmer
“It’s been hot lately, the weather reports coming out of the San Francisco desert are surprising. 137 in the day, 24 degrees or lower at night! Old Evans said that the concrete shafts of the Trans-America pyramid are starting to expand and contract so much that you can hear cracking off in the Oakland shelters.”…
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On the Surface
Imagine archaeology on the surface of another world. Exploring the remnants of a civilization lost to the tides of time on a world totally alien to our own.
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29,028 Feet, 1953
I The mountain stands taller than any part of the sky, the air so thin, two men so high. It’s there for the taking, it’s there for the eye to eat, it’s there like wildfire made of ice for the heartbeat and there is nothing more that can be made of it, excepting death and…
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DOS it
The hum of the fan echoes throughout the room, the soft grinding of the disks reading bytes off platters; the green phosphorescence of the monitor shows some blocky bits of image data and allows the user to see proof that the electricity he’s Using isn’t wasted. One day, some day I’ll use one of these…
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Avalon
The man moves through traffic floating, seemingly apart from the stream. Around, so many stand and watch. All colors, all genders, hazy like a dream. He recognizes a few faces, some from his preexisting life, each a connective link, like the woman sitting next to him, grinning, dressed in pink. He smiles, she waves.…
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The Numinous Cosmos 