We did a walk yesterday along a path by the Port of Oakland, along the backside of all those huge gantries that are seen from all across the bay, but especially from the Bay Bridge. (Expand the pic, and you can see “Port of Oakland” on the gantry.)
Brief post, since I’m working hard on expanding and refining my Rocketdyne essay. Need to get it done.
NYT, Pamela Paul, 21 June 2022: She Wrote a Dystopian Novel. What Happened Next Was Pretty Dystopian.
Here’s an article that makes good points about the changing demographics of gays and lesbians and transgenders, but for me misses the key reason that the “born this way” argument is irrelevant.
Salon, Julia Serano, 17 Jun 2022: It’s time to rethink “born this way,” a phrase that’s been key to LGBTQ acceptance
There’s a graphic meme going around on Facebook — no, of *course* I can’t find it now, or a link to it — that compares America’s possible future as being Star Trek’s or The Handmaid’s Tale‘s.
The former’s vision of a wise, technocratic, egalitarian society, expanding humanity’s knowledge and range beyond Earth, vs. the latter’s vision of a theocratic authoritarian society in which women are forced to bear children they do not want.
I think for a while, from the 1960s when Trek began, maybe up through the ’90s, it was possible to believe we — the entire human race — was on a path toward the Trek future. Since then, we’re going the other way. Further comments at the end.
Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.
Robert Frost
Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley, 10 Jun 2022: Does Donald Trump Really “Know” Anything?.
Continue reading
Here’s another item I saw just recently, which shares with the previous post how a design principle can be crystalized in numbers.
Via Boing Boing, Devin Nealy, 31 May 2022: The 60-30-10 percent rule of color
I was quite struck some years ago, 2014 it must have been, by an analysis of the design of the original starship Enterprise that showed how it relied heavily on the “Golden Ratio,” the artistic proportion of 1.618. And how I realized that all the later iterations of the Enterprise betrayed that aesthetic.
The Golden Number, Gary Meisner, 2 May 2014: Phi in the 23rd Century – Design of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise.
Feeling a bit under the weather today — temperature up about a degree, and sleepy — so I’ll just post a couple links without comment.
