history
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“I Hadn’t Cried in Twenty Years”
Walking through the science museum in Kensington, you stop once more in front of the stack of wrought iron and intricately machined cogs and gears of Mr. Babbage’s computing engine and wonder what he would think of this modern world of vacuum tubes and television. Often, as you’d wander down the marble halls, you’d look…
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“Higher, Orville, Higher!”
The aluminum cooled engine sputtered to life and amid the twangs of warping wings and pings of sweating muslin the airplane took off into the sky. Below, the cow pasture with it’s animal reek and tufts of overgrown grass longing for the same said cows, shrank into a bland smudge from 350 feet above. In…
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Armistice Day
The sky is a wonderful blue and the air is just the right touch of cool for November. Southern California days in the lateness of the year are a pleasure – which makes this parade exhilarating instead of tiring. Armistice Day, 1924! We came back from France changed, my old self, dead. I hardly remember…
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IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
Its hot and muggy in this brick oven the gray painted walls tacky from the heat around the various small tables sit sweating men in Southern cotton and Northern wool. They haggle and argue and face off about the injustices that roil all English blood and come to the point, that independence from the Crown…
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Charles-Henri Sanson
(Place de la Révolution, 1793) 3000 people under him float on a sea of blood and sin; of them that went, all are left ahead. In his two fists grappling greasy hair and plunging neck lines crimson, this man Sanson executes the law of the land. In his red uniform designed to hide the…
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The Ultimate Trip
I was around 10 years old when I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey on my local PBS station, KCET Los Angeles. I was flipping through the channels when I stumbled upon the sight of a giant room awash in red light within which, moving along to the sound of classical music, a round vehicle…
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Make a Woman Make
Make a woman understand in the land of what and why how she played the game with dignity, her head held high. They called her a mathematical fairy a beauty and a wife, her friends were male and genius who all enhanced her life. Despite the scandal of being thought of as an equal with…
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Entering the City
“This great city of Tenochtitlán is built on the salt lake, and no matter by what road you travel there are two leagues from the main body of the city to the mainland. There are four artificial causeways leading to it, and each is as wide as two cavalry lances. The city…
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Cortez
Walking down from out of the small hills, we saw on the lake, floating like a ship in a fevered dream, Tenochtitlan. Its palaces and temples and strange structures unnamed, its majesty rivaling anything in Europe. Everything in ordered rows, painted in bright colors, marketplaces full of people and fruits and vegetables and wares, everywhere…
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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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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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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.…
The Numinous Cosmos 