Ciarán Ryan notebook

Angle of repose - mining term - the angle at which sliding dirt and debris comes to rest

The prints, which are 117 000 years old and thought to be those of a woman and possibly a child, are preserved in soft sandstone on the shore of Langebaan Lagoon in South Africa’s West Coast National Park. Archaeologists are worried that the sea and wind will erode the prints and have been pushing the government to move them to a museum.

David Roberts of the government’s Council for Geoscience in Cape Town, who discovered the site in 1995, warns that the wind and waves that cracked open the sandstone and uncovered them three years ago will soon destroy them.

“Maybe I’m being an arrogant human; but I don’t know where this leap into greater overall ’smartness’ would come from. I think they’ll have peculiar characteristics - they’ll use language very well, yet have the sentience of a slug. “

Introduction of survival element?

Science: The mind machine
Independent, The (London), Mar 23, 1998 by Charles Arthur

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19980323/ai_n14144812

BBC chief warns of knowledge underclass - 6/4/98

John Birt: “At the heart of the public broadcasting tradition is universality - reaching out to every household in the land - the poor and the prosperous - offering enriching experience and information which extends understanding.”

“Television has become a mirror in which the public likes to recognize itself,” Pivot said. “The public either likes to see itself, or it likes something very far away, exoticism. Culture is neither of those.” Even when programs feature “popular” culture, rap musicians from the Paris suburbs, for example, the emphasis is not so much on what they perform as on how they got there, Pivot says, how they “made” it, so that the viewer can relate and dream how he might “make” it and be a celebrity too.

http://www.iht.com/articles/1998/04/02/pivot.t.php

A Cultural Icon Slams the Poverty of French TV

By Katherine Knorr

Published: THURSDAY, APRIL 2, 1998

In ”Palimpsest,” Mr. Vidal endorses the passage in Plato’s ”Symposium” where Aristophanes tells his dinner companions that there were once three sexes, people shaped like globes: male, female and hermaphrodite; they were divided by the king of the gods for behaving offensively and have ever after sought reunion, to make themselves whole again.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE2D61139F93AA25750C0A96E958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

A miniature microphone was also be on board to record sounds on Mars. Attached to the lander spacecraft were a pair of small probes, the Deep Space 2 Mars Microprobes, which were to be deployed to fall and penetrate beneath the martian surface when the spacecraft reached Mars.

http://www.etsimo.uniovi.es/solar/eng/msur98.htm

Mars Polar Lander

King leans forward. “I’ll tell you something that’s absolutely astonishing. In China, when Mao died, at his funeral there was a photograph taken of all the bureaucrats in a long, long line. But there were four carefully retouched blanks in the picture - the Gang of Four. Underneath, in the caption to the picture, they laboriously listed everybody, a name and then a comma. When it got to the Gang of Four, there were three x’s, comma, then three x’s comma… Amazing. They wanted you to know that they’d gone, and this was a warning: this is what you’re going to get, if you don’t watch out.”

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19991130/ai_n14270884/pg_2

Arts: Retouched by the hand of God
Independent, The (London), Nov 30, 1999 by Linton Chiswick

also music

http://www.chesternovello.com/default.aspx?TabId=2432&State_3041=2&WorkId_3041=11869

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Four

“Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers.” Sir Joshua Reynolds - English painter

“Now for Australia and a crack at the Japs!” says Errol Flynn in the film Desperate Journey - WWII adventure / propaganda

Fact and fantasy would collide. Reagan would famously recount scenes from films he had seen as though they had actually happened.

Reagan’s air of “gentle abstraction” as a child - got him harrassed by local kids

He tried to join the communist party in 1938 - but was turned down for being a “flake”

In his retirement - in decline - he would rake leaves from the pool for hours - not understanding that his secret service men were replenishing the leaves in the pool.

Dutch: A memoir of Ronald Reagan  by Edmund Morris

“He never quite threw off the image of the weakest member of the gang, pushed forward after a nasty killing when the police were on their way”

Hockney on Art (Paperback)
by David Hockney (Author)

Perspective is tyranny  a renaissance invention ( but seen in photography)?

But perspective is the least truthful - cos humans don’t see images that way - human eye engages emotionally. It remembers what the back of the object looks like. Single viewpoint is not the best view. Eye circles and spends time with objects.

Only painting can recreate this real way of seeing - cubism etc

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world”

Mahatma Gandhi

Toxic clothes `killed 250 apartheid opponents’
Independent, The (London), Dec 24, 1999 by Jeremy Laurance Health Editor

AT LEAST 250 opponents of apartheid may have been murdered during the Eighties by agents of the South African regime who laced their clothing with poison, according to the most detailed account yet given of the attempt to assassinate a religious leader.

In what became known as the “case of the poisoned underpants”, two doctors have described how the Reverend Frank Chikane - who now heads the office of President Thabo Mbeki - almost died in 1989 after a special South African military unit slipped a highly toxic substance into his suitcase before he left for a trip to New York.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19991224/ai_n14272092