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At the Twilight’s Last Gleaming (Saying Farewell to a Dynasty)
Maybe it’s the fresh take on the space-time bending and head-blowing implications of Goodnight Moon, which has retroactively haunted my many thousands of readings of that book. Or maybe it’s just my usual interest in comparisons of Rome and America. In either case, I was struck by this passage: The stagnation of the Roman Empire… Continue reading
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Automatic for the Not-People
I used to work at a place where colleagues of mine were replaced, one by one, by algorithms. This was viewed as the inevitable march of progress that all good for-profit corporations undertake. So now we have a hypothesis that the corporation itself could be replaced by an algorithm: I hypothesize that the management overhead which makes… Continue reading
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A History of Jacke in 100 Objects #3: The Blood Cake
We’re fast-forwarding now, past high school, past college, past the years in Chicago and Italy and Taiwan, which is when I had this exchange with my older cousin: COUSIN: You know, when you were a kid, you were so freaking smart. We all thought you were a genius. ME: Really? I’m flattered. Long pause. COUSIN:… Continue reading
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A History of Jacke in 100 Objects: #1 – The Padlock
I have a theory that everyone has what I call the Personal Singularity. This is the period in your life when some trend or phenomenon so defines you, so matches where you are in life, so inspires you to be all that you can be in a particular direction (for better or worse), that you… Continue reading
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An Uneasy Alliance with My Bete Noire, Dark Energy
Sorry to keep freaking you out, readers. I can’t help it! I’m obsessed with Dark Energy. What’s not to like? (And by “like” I mean “be terrified about.”) Here’s Matthew R. Francis, writing in Slate: Even the name “dark energy” is a placeholder for our ignorance, representing the fact of cosmic acceleration without indicating its… Continue reading
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The Genius of Vermeer
It’s hard to imagine a more revered painter than Vermeer. But is this our conception of a great artist at work? But the funny thing about Vermeer is that many of his paintings were probably made by the careful application of small splotches of paint, in an almost paint-by-numbers attempt to reproduce, inch by inch,… Continue reading
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Black Hole
I’ve always had a love-hate thing with deep space. On the one hand, I’m fascinated (note to terrible poets: I’m happy to consider a poem about space for our terrible poem breakdown series). On the other hand, I find myself overwhelmed by the feeling of insignificance when thinking about anything farther away than the moon.… Continue reading
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Charlie Brown Is Alive and Well
Apparently he’s now running a Travelodge: I notice the lights are plugged in but aren’t on. Glad to see the sly dog still has the Christmas spirit! Image Credit: http://www.breakingnews.ie Continue reading
Jacke Wilson 