Like 'at

One of the things I love about listening to Bob Ross is his Florida accent, showing up when he says stuff like, "back 'ere".

Audiovisual

Soundbox:

The owl takes the cello down its throat

so the strings and wood are left,

song digested in its cells. The energy released

fuels its eyes, its perfect horns

like the slice of moon, bow drawn by arms

no one can see. The arrow

is also concealed, but the angle

of the bow shows the weapon points

at the earth, the goddess in her aim.

Body, neck, where fingers used to be, the owl

asks the same questions for centuries

or rather people hear it that way,

what is in their own mind, who will

come for me, who sees, who knows.

Angie Macri.

#throwbackthursday

Lefortovo Park, Moscow, where I spent much of one lovely day with my crush.  (1990)

On a cobweb afternoon

In a room full of emptiness.

Horror And

Futility:

Move him into the sun—

Gently its touch awoke him once,

At home, whispering of fields half-sown.

Always it woke him, even in France,

Until this morning and this snow.

If anything might rouse him now

The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—

Woke once the clays of a cold star.

Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides

Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

To break earth's sleep at all?

Wilfred Owen.

Can you stop your instincts?

Can you man your thought control, sir? 

It Was My Understanding That There Would Be No Math

The Margin of Difference:

One and one make two,

the literalist said.    

So far they've made five billion,

said the lateralist, or ten

times that, if you count the dead.

Les Murray.

Can't get enough of your commotion

I measure my length along the ground.

Le Vase Brisé

The Broken Vase:

The vase where this verbena’s dying
Was cracked by a lady’s fan’s soft blow.
It must have been the merest grazing:
We heard no sound. The fissure grew.

The little wound spread while we slept,
Pried deep in the crystal, bit by bit.
A long, slow marching line, it crept
From spreading base to curving lip.

The water oozed out drop by drop,
Bled from the line we’d not seen etched.
The flowers drained out all their sap.
The vase is broken: do not touch.

The quick, sleek hand of one we love
Can tap us with a fan’s soft blow,
And we will break, as surely riven
As that cracked vase. And no one knows.

The world sees just the hard, curved surface
Of a vase a lady’s fan once grazed,
That slowly drips and bleeds with sadness.
Do not touch the broken vase.

Sully Prudhomme.

Upon the Shoulders of a Giant

Robert Goddard's diary for March, 1926:

16... Tried rocket at 2.30. It rose 41 ft, & went 184 ft, in 2.5 secs, after the lower half of nozzle had burned off. Brought materials to lab. Read Mech., Phys. of Air and wrote up expt. in eve. 

17...The first flight with a rocket using liquid propellants was made yesterday at Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn. 

The day was clear and comparatively quiet. The anemometer on the Physics lab was turning leisurely when Mr. Sachs and I left in the morning, and was turning as leisurely when we returned at 5.30 pm 

Even though the release was pulled, the rocket did not rise at first, but the flame came out, and there was a steady roar. After a number of seconds it rose, slowly until it cleared the frame, and then at express train speed, curving over to the left, and striking the ice and snow, still going at a rapid rate. 

It looked almost magical as it rose, without any appreciably greater noise or flame, as if it said “I’ve been here long enough; I think I’ll be going somewhere else, if you don’t mind.” Esther said that it looked like a fairy or an esthetic dancer, as it started off. 

The sky was clear, for the most part, with large shadowy white clouds, but late in the afternoon there was a large pink cloud in the west, over which the sun shone. One of the surprising things was the absence of smoke, the lack of very loud roar, and the smallness of the flame. 

(ECG: my own comment now seams pretty excited, but it was a beautiful sight to us all.) 

That last comment is from Esther, his fiercely devoted wife.

I dabbled with rocketry in 4-H many moons ago, in large part because of Carl Sagan's Cosmos episode, Blues for a Red Planet.  Anyway, I've checked a certain almost-trillionaire's Twitter feed, and sadly see no mention of this century-old milestone on our journey to Mars.  He might act as though he's an engineer who developed spaceflight from first principles, but real ones know the true giant here.

Selah.

Love on a Real Train

It's some risky business.

Yes, Let Us Stay

Arequipa:

Leaves that fall.

Ought to breed

Fire from stone.

The world counts

On our fall.

Our solitude interests

The butterflies

And the lost gold

Of the afternoons.

Ochre and blue walls

And the fading peaks

Of volcanoes

And the sunlight

Plummeting beyond

The hills waken

Leaves to their

Lost trees.

To discover

You still have

A world

To make

At sunset

Sobers

The stones.

Ben Okri.

The Last Thing You Ate Is What You Have to Name Him

I generally use pre-trained LLMs for my various little demo apps, but I decided to train one up for fun in my usual half-assed fashion.  Here's an image I asked the model to ID:

The uncanny result:

Overall:

In conclusion: 60% of the time, it works every time.

UPDATE: Training on a dataset 5x larger resulted in 100% confidence that the cute puppy is not, in fact, pizza.

Kveikjum Bálkerti

I get it.