Charles Wright’s book-length poem Littlefoot declares in its second line:

You can’t go back,
you can’t repeat the unrepeatable.

You can look back, though. In Littlefoot, written in 2007, the year he turned seventy, Wright stands on the ridgeline between past and future, moving forward with an elegiac awareness of everything behind him.

I’m starting to feel like an old man
alone in a small boat
In a snowfall of blossoms….
Voices from long ago floating across the water. Full story »

I have a rule that serves me well in life:

Never ascribe to treachery that which can be adequately explained by mere incompetence.

That said, sometimes the world of sports presents us with instances where it’s very, very hard not to suspect something sinister at work. Such was the case earlier today at Loftus Road in London, where referee Chris Foy put on an appalling display that pretty much single-handedly awarded Queens Park Rangers an upset victory over visiting Chelsea.

Witness:

• In the eighth minute, Chelsea center back David Luiz lightly bumped Ranger Heidar Helguson in the box on a high bouncing ball. Helguson went down like he’d been blind-sided by a wrecking ball. Full story »

Detroit is a city that is down and out though the struggle to revive it has energetic supporters in its Mayor, council and local media. The problems have seeped way beyond the boundaries of the city in cash-strapped, high unemployment Michigan, but nowhere more than in the city of Highland Park.

The city is entirely surrounded by Detroit. Beginning in August, the local utility company, DTE, started repossessing Highland Park’s street lights as a settlement for its $4M overdue electric bill, the result of almost a decade of partial payments. This leaves the small, blighted city’s 16,000 residents almost totally in the dark.

Man went to the moon
Never asked what she wanted
Man drove his rocket straight into the Moon
She turned her face away
And let it happen
Because it was simpler

He didn’t make it easy
He did a victory dance
Bounding like a child,
Like an ape howling into a vacuum Full story »

It was Sun Tzu who said, “Always leave an escape route for a surrounded enemy, for a soldier with no prospect of escape will fight with the strength of ten men.”  A person with no escape has nothing to lose, they have lost everything already, and so they will take many with them.

When I was very young I read a collection of horror short-stories.  They were mostly childish waffle except for one which has left a life-long impression on me.

In the story, a successful author begins to receive a series of letters from all across Europe.  The message is the same, “You made me and I am coming to meet you.” Signed with the name of the principle villain in the author’s long-running series of books.  The author assumes a prank but calls in the police.  Despite protection, one night the character arrives. Full story »

The Heartland Institute has a history of distorting peer-reviewed papers, lying in newspaper editorials and Institute blogs, and claiming extensive scientific expertise where little actually exists with respect to climate science and the reality of human-driven climate disruption. Given this history, the distortions in the Heartland Institute’s latest media advisory regarding the results of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project are only to be expected.

BEST analyzed more surface temperature data than any other study had previously and concluded that the established global temperature records were accurate. In this way, BEST confirmed what every climate realist already knew from three surface datasets and two satellite datasets – that the globe is warming and that the best available science indicates that the urban heat island effect has a minimal impact upon the measurements. However, the Heartland Institute’s media advisory claims that “the paper is seriously flawed,” attributing that statement to James M. Taylor, senior fellow for environment policy at the Heartland Institute.

It’s at this point, the second sentence of the media advisory, that the distortions start. Full story »

by Robert S. Becker

Will the Righteous Right survive its inane scrum deciding which defective personality carries forth its backward-bounding banner? True, the GOP message this season especially blends the vacuous and vicious, but that’s hardly stopped a resurgent national party, awash in money and media, from securing better hawkers.

Is the rightwing base so dumb not to realize that skewering its own frontrunners helps the vulnerable president they’re dying to depose? And what poll-struck, bottom-dwellers — from Romney to Trump to Bachmann to Perry to Cain. Why, if there were a bold, imaginative opposition party, I bet it could leverage such idiots spouting, well, idiocy. Dream on. Full story »

What’s wrong with this picture:

Anthony Watts published a post today titled “The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project puts PR before peer review” and complained that BEST didn’t peer review the four papers they pre-released today. This is the same Anthony Watts who published a paper with Joe D’Aleo titled “Is The US Surface Temperature Record Reliable?” two full years before he published the associated peer reviewed paper. Oh, and the peer-reviewed paper came to the opposite conclusion of the Heartland paper.

And the BEST papers? Pre-release versions of the papers they’ll be submitting shortly for peer-review at real scientific journals. The Watts/D’Aleo paper? Published by the climate disruption denying Heartland Institute. Full story »

“When I lie on the beach there naked, which I do sometimes, and I feel the wind coming over me and I see the stars up above and I am looking into this very deep, indescribable night, it is something that escapes my vocabulary to describe. Then I think: ‘God, I have no importance. Whatever I do or don’t do, or what anybody does, is not more important than the grains of sand that I am lying on, or the coconut that I am using for my pillow.’” Who said it? Full story »

The original X-Prize was for a private spaceship, and the goal was to prove that a privately developed manned spaceship was viable. The Ansari X-Prize (named for it’s financial sponsor) was $10 million, and it was won by Scaled Composites in in 2004. Since then, the X-Prize Foundation has turned its attention to more practical matters such as a 100 MPG car (Progressive Automotive X-Prize) and, the latest to be awarded, the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X-Challenge.

The challenge was to beat 2500 gallons per minute of oil with an oil recovering efficiency (percentage of oil vs. water in the recovered gallons) of 70% or greater. The previous record was less than 1100 gallons per minute. Two companies beat the challenge, with the winner more than doubling the goal. Full story »

I never imagined I’d be blogging on Apple issues, but here we go.

In anticipation of getting a new iPad2 I migrated my MobileMe over to iCloud. It’s hard to have a definitive idea of what a new service is going to do until you get your hands on it in earnest, but I had read about iCloud, asked some Apple types who knew more than I did about it, and felt like I had a fair idea that it was going to help me solve some problems I’ve been dealing with in the course of managing the logistics of my business.

I was wrong. Mostly, anyway. I knew I was in trouble when the guy at the Apple Store told me do not migrate, sweet gods, for the sake of all that’s sacred do not migrate!! Okay, that’s not exactly how he put it, and I won’t repeat the words he actually did use (which weren’t much much better), but suffice it to say that staff was finding iCloud to be “suboptimal.” Full story »

The Tech Curmudgeon read last week that Samsung was challenging Apple’s iPad patents, demanding that Apple prove its patents were valid. About damn time. Whatever lawyer it was in the patent office who granted the first software patent needs to be run out of town on a rail. And the lawyer who granted the first “design appearance” patent needs to be tarred and feathered and then run out of town on a rail.

Software patents are one of the most egregious misuses of patent protection that exist. There was a time when the patent office would reject patents for 3^rd Grade math or simple sorting algorithms, but no longer. For the last couple of decades, anyone could code an obvious calculation method for a spreadsheet program and then patent that code. With that patent in hand, you could not only sell a crappy spreadsheet program, but you could also sue all the other spreadsheet program developers who used your patented code for a simple, obvious calculation. Yay, more litigation! Full story »

by Hannah Frantz

Editor’s Note: The author is a junior at Gettysburg College. This semester she is studying abroad in Kigali, Rwanda and has agreed to share some of her experiences and insights (as well as her frustrations) with the Scholars & Rogues community. 

_____

Recently I’ve found myself very frustrated in Rwanda. And mostly when I get frustrated it’s because of discussions I’ve had with Rwandans.

Mainly, I’ve been really irritated with perceptions of America that you encounter here. Perhaps it’s my American pessimism getting the best of me, but I find myself getting irrationally angry at the idealistic assumptions Rwandans make about America. And I get angriest when Rwandan men tell me that more than anything they want a white wife.

For starters, many Rwandans seem to believe there’s no poverty in America. Full story »

The extent of the skepticism with which the Iran assassination plot has been met from many different quarters may be unprecedented. It parallels the serious coverage by the mainstream media that the Occupy Wall Street movement is being accorded. (If only those who knew that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction were accorded the same respect.) Full story »

Vermont’s vaunted maples have begun to flush crimson, but the oaks stubbornly cling to their sturdy green. By Robert Frost’s hillside grave, in Bennington’s Old First Churchyard, the birch trees have breathed in autumn and exhaled it as goldenrod.

These calico mountains, having abandoned most of the “Green” of their namesake, could not make a more picturesque Frostian site. He was the poet of rock fences, spring pools, and wood piles, of snowy evenings and roads not taken, of small-town New England life and simpler times. “I am an ordinary man, I guess,” he once told the New York Times Review of Books.

Frost has been on my mind since a Saturday trip last week to an apple orchard in North Chester, Maine. Al LeBrun balanced each Courtland, each McCoun, between his fingertips like a snowglobe, showing off its delicate beauty. Full story »

by Emily West

If you want a more intelligent pet than a dog, try a pig. Pigs learn tricks quickly. They have even figured out video games. Scientists have compared pig intelligence to that of a 3-year-old child.

In factory farms, pigs have been observed going insane and committing cannibalism.

Factory farming should be illegal.

In factory farms, corporations raise thousands of animals in a confined area. Chickens spend their lives in about one square foot of space. Once they reach full size, they die in slaughterhouses that process thousands of animals each day. Factory farmers ignore animal health and welfare in favor of a cheap steak. Around 98 percent of America’s meat comes from factory farms.
Full story »