For the Nation Twelve score and ten years ago,the British settlers of this abundant landtook matters into their own handsand demanded that King George leave them beand set them free. From the Massachusetts Bay to Georgia’s red clay,from Philadelphia’s philosophersto Virginia’s founding elites,cries of freedom were everywherelike a relentless drumbeat. Common sense and self-evident truthswere …
Continue reading “United States 250 – July 4th ‘For the Nation’”
Let us journey back to the time of Dr. Freud in 1919 – A lamp sits on a table in an ordinary room. The lamp rises, but there is something wrong about the lamp. This is the peculiar force of the uncanny, where it is not an ugly event. It is ugliness of situation, which …
I began myself to consider the movement of the earth. It seemed an absurd notion. Yet I knew that my predecessor had been granted the liberty to imagine all sorts of fictive circles to save the celestial phenomena. I therefore thought that I would be similarly granted the right to experiment, to try out whether, …
Continue reading “Copernicus’ Dedicatory Letter to Pope Paul III”
On ugliness in art – If art seeks beauty, what is it to do with pain, deformity, terror, revulsion, and disorder? Artists should not simply exclude them, because the world does not exclude them if it can be reflected. Lessing saw this problem in Laocoon. Poetry and sculpture, he argued, do not suffer from the …
Continue reading “Ugliness in Art – Redemption & Romanticism”
There are many sources in the field of ethics in engineering and of artificial intelligence. Recently, in the press it was noted, that the Vatican and Pope Leo the Fourteenth wrote on artificial intelligence. The article is on much more than AI, and the best material is outside this subject. It is noteworthy that the …
I have only copied particular parts…
It is an excellent thing to live modestly, shun luxury and wealth and not lust after fame and fortune. Rare has been the wise man who was rich. In China once there was a man by the name of Xu You, who owned nothing and even drank directly from his cupped hands. Seeing this, someone …
A long time ago, when I was at NASA, I remember the closure of the Shuttle program. In its subsequent place and alongside the relative success of commercial crew, came the Space Launch System (SLS). Working in aeronautics and research, I assumed I would remain involved in fundamental research. That did not last, and by …
The Renaissance did not only restart antiquity, it reordered what could be observed and valued. From the margins, the coarse, the bodily, the obscene, moved into the center of cultural life. In Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, obscenity is no longer a feature of carnival or tolerated disorder. It becomes deliberate, cultivated, and visible within educated …
I finally published my compressible flow notes online. They are under classes – comp. flow. They are the result of teaching the course over nine years at University of Florida. I compressed the file a bit to conserve my website bandwidth. Enjoy!
