Jeux sans frontières

Whistling tunes, we hide in the dunes by the seaside.

Viento, agua, piedra

Wind, Water, Stone:

Water hollows stone,

wind scatters water,

stone stops the wind.

Water, wind, stone.

Wind carves stone,

stone's a cup of water,

water escapes and is wind.

Stone, wind, water.

Wind sings in its whirling,

water murmurs going by,

unmoving stone keeps still.

Wind, water, stone.

Each is another and no other:

crossing and vanishing

through their empty names:

water, stone, wind.

Octavio Paz.

Paving the Way

Standing on the shoulders of giants.

As the Artemis II crew prepares for launch no earlier than April 1, they recently took a moment to pay homage to the Apollo 10 crew and the groundwork they laid for the Artemis II Moon mission. pic.twitter.com/uP8LpIDkcp

— NASA Artemis (@NASAArtemis) March 31, 2026

No whirlygigs on this mission, okay?  My old ticker probably will not take kindly to a repeat of this scene from Apollo 10:

We thought we were ready to stage, so we prepared to fire the ascent engine and blew the bolts. When we did, all hell broke loose. Snoopy went nuts.

“GIMBAL LOCK!” Tom screamed.

“SON-OF-A-BITCH!” I yelled over the open microphone. “WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?” We were suddenly bouncing, diving and spinning all over the place as we blazed along at 3,000 miles per hour, less than 47,000 feet above the rocks and craters—much closer if you consider those damned mountains that seemed to be grinning around us like gigantic decayed teeth.

Thinking we were in Ags, Tom shouted, “Let’s go to Pings,” and again flipped the switch, which put us back into Ags. “Goddamn!” The computers were by now totally confused and useless. The spacecraft radar that was supposed to be locking onto Charlie Brown had found a much larger target, the Moon, and was trying to fly in that direction instead of toward the orbiting command module.

Things went topsy-turvy and I saw the surface corkscrew through my window, then the knife edge of a horizon, then blackness, then the Moon again, only this time coming from a different direction. We were totally out of control. “Okay,” I gasped. “Let’s … let’s make this burn on the Ags, babe.” We scrambled to stop the gyrations.

Five seconds later. Tom sent a fresh set of heart attacks to Mission Control, where people wearing headsets had jumped to their feet, not believing the onslaught of warnings that were flashing on their computer terminals. “We’re in trouble!” he called. Houston didn’t know what the hell was happening and things were moving much too fast for them to help.

That old devil Moon whipped past my window again, this time from left to right, and looked awfully close. I stole a glance at the eight ball, which spun crazily as it hunted a nonexistent horizon. Again the lunar surface dodged by, now bottom to top. “What the hell,” I called. “Let’s get on the Ags. I’ve got to get this damn thing.”

“Snoop, Houston,” called an alarmed Charlie Duke. “We show you close to gimbal lock!”

Thinking we might have an open thruster, similar to what had happened to Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott on Gemini 8, Tom overrode the computers and grabbed manual control of the spacecraft. Then, as swiftly as it had started, the horrifying little episode ended, a fifteen-second lifetime during which we made about eight cartwheels above the Moon, and Tom jerked Snoopy back onto a tight leash. Ole Mumbles do know how to fly. After analyzing the data, experts later surmised that had we continued spinning for only two more seconds, Tom and I would have crashed.

Space is hard, and terrifying at times.  At least Artemis II won't have to contend with rendezvous in lunar orbit.  Godspeed.

Don't you know

Talking about a revolution?

don’t bother this is navel gazing

Apocalypto for a Small Planet:

Drone strikes & opium poppies.

Oil spills & poisoned wells.

Drought zone. Famine. War zone.

Tess Taylor.

Godspeed, the Crew of Artemis II

The countdown begins.

Teams at @NASAKennedy have arrived to their stations at the Launch Control Center. We are about 48 hours from the launch of the Artemis II mission around the Moon. https://t.co/PqaR8eyxu4 pic.twitter.com/shEs8WWtWP

— NASA (@NASA) March 30, 2026

The last man to stand on the moon, CDR Gene Cernan, December 15, 1972:

America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. As we leave the moon and Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came, and, God willing, we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.

LMP Jack Schmitt is the only Apollo 17 crew member still alive, and I'm glad he made it to see our long-delayed lunar adventure renewed.  I, myself, am absolutely giddy.

Lost in the Aether

I spent most of this weekend continuing my journey into darkness with AI (as I do in most of my spare time these days), building out stuff for labs and demos as though my livelihood depended on it. It all has reminded me of the very beginning of my career at Hill Associates, when I joined our workshop team. 

Young NTodd toiled through countless hours on many a long night and weekend, mucking with tons of super expensive hardware, plumbing the depths of protocol operation, device configs, troubleshooting, and whatnot¹.  It taught me so damned much that I still carry with me.  Perhaps fewer details about defunct technology reside in my dusty memory, but plenty of hard-learned lessons that were reinforced over three decades inform what I do today.

Sadly, while I was in the midst of some tinkering, refining, and testing on Sunday morning, I got a notification that my old colleague, mentor, and boss from those heady days had died earlier this month.  It feels a rather fitting way to find out.

Craig was an all around great guy; also great to work with, and for.  Couldn't ask for a better guide while I was still cutting my teeth. A lot of good memories.

My second ever delivery was when we team-taught the pilot of our first TCP/IP & Internet workshop² in Atlanta for BellSouth, which was terrifying and exhilarating, and ultimately gave me a lot of confidence.  I also think often about mountain biking with him and the rest of our "mud for lunch" gang, riding technical trails in the woods not far from the office, occasionally returning covered with a bit more blood than mud.

Oh, and I'll never forget another time in Hotlanta (JFC, we were down there so damned much³) when he and I missed our flight home. It was actually a shameful travel fail on our part that might have involved getting overly wrapped up in our beers and talking geek shit. But that extended stay ended up being super fun.

Time is a flat circle. I hold Craig and his family in the Light.

I've seen more battles lost than I have battles won

And I've got this intuition, says it's all for your fun.

Manifest Destiny

Why We Are Truly a Nation:

Because we rage inside

the old boundaries,

like a young girl leaving the Church,

scared of her parents.

Because we all dream of saving

the shaggy, dung-caked buffalo,

shielding the herd with our bodies.

Because grief unites us,

like the locked antlers of moose

who die on their knees in pairs.

William Matthews.

The Thing That Hath Been, It Is That Which Shall Be

You can’t have a scientific debate with a conclusion that isn’t allowed to change.

As the old line goes, you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into - which is why I rarely engage in debates about evolution anymore.

Not because I think it can’t… pic.twitter.com/wew6IBO4vP

— Alex Boge (@alexboge) March 29, 2026

Snip:

In practice, almost everyone I encounter arguing against evolution is coming from a creationist framework - typically rooted in literal interpretations found in traditions like Christianity, Islam, or Judaism. And that matters, because it’s not just disagreement over data - it’s a commitment to a conclusion that can’t be revised, grounded in faith rather than evidence - a framework that holds the conclusion in place.

At most, you’ll get limited acceptance of “microevolution,” while rejecting the broader framework regardless of the evidence.

And critically, no new evidence is ever brought forward.

Instead, the pattern is always the same:
- arguing definitions,
- setting arbitrary or impossible standards,
- or demanding that evolution occur within a timeframe of their choosing, incompatible with the theory.

So the discussion never progresses. It just cycles...

Reminded me of venerable Jorge:

[T]he work of our order and in particular the work of this monastery, a part—indeed, the substance—is study, and the preservation of knowledge. Preservation of, I say, not search for, because the property of knowledge, as a divine thing, is that it is complete and has been defined since the beginning, in the perfection of the Word which expresses itself to itself. 

Preservation, I say, and not search, because it is a property of knowledge, as a human thing, that it has been defined and completed over the course of the centuries, from the preaching of the prophets to the interpretation of the fathers of the church. There is no progress, no revolution of ages, in the history of knowledge, but at most a continuous and sublime recapitulation.

Human history proceeds with a motion that cannot be arrested, from the creation through the redemption, toward the return of Christ triumphant, who will appear seated on a cloud to judge the quick and the dead; but human and divine knowledge does not follow this path: steady as a fort that does not cede, it allows us, when we are humble and alert to its voice, to follow, to predict this path, but it is not touched by the path. 

I am He who is, said the God of the Jews. I am the way, the truth, and the life, said our Lord. There you have it: knowledge is nothing but the awed comment on these two truths. Everything else that has been said was uttered by the prophets, by the evangelists, by the fathers and the doctors, to make these two sayings clearer.

Nothing to add, I guess.  And there is no new thing under the sun...

I dreamed I saw the bomber jet planes

Riding shotgun in the sky, turning into butterflies above our nation.

Ἡ τελευταία μέρα

The Last Day:

The day was cloudy. No one could come to a decision;

a light wind was blowing. ‘Not a north-easter, the sirocco,’ someone said.

A few slender cypresses nailed to the slope, and, beyond, the sea

grey with shining pools.

The soldiers presented arms as it began to drizzle.

‘Not a north-easter, the sirocco,’ was the only decision heard.

And yet we knew that by the following dawn

nothing would be left to us, neither the woman drinking sleep at our side

nor the memory that we were once men,

nothing at all by the following dawn.

‘This wind reminds me of spring,’ said my friend

as she walked beside me gazing into the distance, ‘the spring

that came suddenly in the winter by the closed-in sea.

So unexpected. So many years have gone. How are we going to die?’

A funeral march meandered through the thin rain.

How does a man die? Strange no one’s thought about it.

And for those who thought about it, it was like a recollection from old chronicles

from the time of the Crusades or the battle of Salamis.

Yet death is something that happens: how does a man die?

Yet each of us earns his death, his own death, which belongs to no one else

and this game is life.

The light was fading from the clouded day, no one decided anything.

The following dawn nothing would be left to us, everything surrendered, even our hands,

and our women slaves at the springheads and our children in the quarries.

My friend, walking beside me, was singing a disjointed song:

‘In spring, in summer, slaves . . .’

One recalled old teachers who’d left us orphans.

A couple passed, talking:

‘I’m sick of the dusk, let’s go home,

let’s go home and turn on the light.’

George Seferis. 

I'll put a pebble in my shoe

And watch me walk.

θεὸς ἄγει πρὸς ἄταν

The Breathing, the Endless News:

Every god is lonely, an exile
composed of parts: elk horn,
cloven hoof. Receptacle

for wishes, each god is empty
without us, penitent,
raking our yards into windblown piles ...

Children know this; they are
the trailings of gods. Their eyes
hold nothing at birth then fill slowly

with the myth of ourselves. Not so the dolls,
out for the count, each toe pouting from
the slumped-over toddler clothes:

no blossoming there. So we
give our children dolls, and
they know just what to do ---

line them up and shoot them
With every execution
doll and god grow stronger.

Rita Dove.