The Eiffel Tower rises above Paris with such familiarity that it is difficult to imagine the city without it. Its lattice of iron has become part of the visual order of Paris, alongside the stone facades, the river, the bridges, and the great monuments created from earlier centuries. Yet, when the tower was proposed in …
Author Archives: saemiller
Literature – Cheng Yaotian
Its (literature) influence can be more inspiring than being in the presence of a great man because it calls upon us to articulate our ideas and it beckons us to draw analogies. And so what literature offers is more than just something to rely on: it takes us by the hand and bolsters us up; …
United States 250 – July 4th ‘For the Nation’
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 …
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The Uncanny and the Failure of Order
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 …
Copernicus’ Dedicatory Letter to Pope Paul III
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, …
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Ugliness in Art – Redemption & Romanticism
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 …
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Excerpts from Magnifica Humanitas of Pope Leo XIVON – Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence
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 …
Notes from Essays in Idleness by Kenko
I have only copied particular parts…
Kenkō on Modest Living
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 …
NASA SLS in My Hands
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 …