Peep this: three 30 something guys from New York decide they're finally fed up with their rambunctious 60 hour work weeks, 6 am wake ups and lack of status to show for it. The three, all financial gurus dabbling on Wall St., pack up their belongings and relocate to
Buenos Aires to begin the world's first high definition internet-only television show called
mariposaHD. The show now more than one year in the making and currently totaling seven episodes is devoted to seeking out beautiful women, outdoor adventures and spirited fellowship, all the while keeping things captivating
and PG. The American trio - Dominic, Mike & Jeff - team up with a South American news celebrity (Tamar Lotan) and set off in pursuit of photographing the most
jaw-dropping gorgeous women they can find with resounding success, and they do all this with seemingly low-mid budget hardware (Canon digital SLRs & videorecorders). Their escapades, chronicled in episodes that are split into 3 segments, involve some exotic locales: from bustling Buenos Aires to the mesmerizing vistas of
Punta del Este, Uruguay to the sun-drenched coast of
Oaxaca, Mexico reveal a fantasy life that all young North American men with bland desk jobs can only dream of; where else in the world are sexy, convivial women so eager to drop their clothes and flaunt their beauty? All agree that making the decision to quit their day jobs was difficult but none have any regrets about transitioning from a bland, middle-income life to an upper-class ex-pat world of South American babes & bounty. Dominic LoTempio, the unofficial brainchild of it all, who was
recently featured in New York magazine considers his decision to move to B.A. a form of ``lifestyle arbitrage,'' especially considering the fact that his hard earned USDs go a long way in vibrant B.A. All the show's episodes are available for free download via BitTorrent and the producers consider their creation to be an experiment of the open-culture society that the internet was originally conceived for. The production itself is intentionally amateur with crude editing that reveals just how real it is and it is amazing just how far along digital technology has evolved - the HD picture quality is breathtaking to behold and at
720p (my 20'' LCD widescreen has resolution 1600x1080 and is unable to render the full 1080p which is the maximum resolution offered for download) and 30fps requires almost 6MB/s of data (yes, the data files are rather huge, high speed connection required!). A brilliant experiment, I wonder how long it will last?
An amusing conversation with two friends regarding the nature of quality film-making, especially as it relates to contemporary cinema, revealed to me some interesting insights. What initiated the discussion was mention of the recent box office success of the latest installment in the Batman series, The Dark Knight, which has gone on to shatter ticket sales (surpassing the $300 million mark in the first 10 days of its release). To me, the action genre is a good example of the shifting artistic paradigm in film making that has occurred during the last 20 years. I would argue that much of the success of the Dark Knight isn't solely the result of captivating fight scenes or polished CG car chases, but in fact is due to the incisively evil psychological portrayal of a heinous villain or profound issues having to do with the meaning and execution of justice in modern, liberal societies. Part of what makes the appeal of this movie so unique is its tendency to appeal to a broad & highly diverse audience: the 10-year olds who delight every time Batman lays a whopping on the bad guys (yes, yes, the movie is PG-13), the 20-something nerds who are enthralled with the latest gadgets & beautiful heroines, and even the (mature) middle-aged crowd that shirks in fear when confronted with the pathological maliciousness of the Joker. The point I am trying to make is that 20 years ago, this genre was populated by massively successful (and for the most part, trite, vapid) franchises like Rambo, Terminator and Jean-Claude Van Damme but nowadays these types of movies are both derided by film critics and moviegoers alike (a testament is the most recent Rambo flop). Given that art is a reflection of the human condition, is it any wonder then why film-making has evolved the way it has? The human experience, though grounded in certain fundamental timeless endeavours, has no doubt radically changed over the last two centuries, and is continuing to undergo change at a break neck speed. One could argue notions of death (say, of close relatives) were far more frequent of an occurrence during the unceasing, war like societies of the past than they are today, yet at the same time the way humans dealt with death then was perhaps very different than what it is today given how frequent it was and how unfrequent and unfamiliar it is nowadays. Yet surely the biggest change to affect the trajectory of mankind's existentialism is the changes wrought by science. As early as 400 years ago human beings had no knowledge that the earth was but one of nine planets in a vast cold, empty space that circled a star that was part of a galaxy of many circling a black hole in the centre of a grand & magnificent universe, 200 years ago no one was familiar with the notion of evolution by
natural selection, and 100 years ago we had not yet grasped the significance of the
Uncertainty Principle which emphatically stated that we can never have precise knowledge of all things simultaneously. These three theories are but a sampling of the many violent shake ups in intellectual discourse that have profoundly affected our very being. Now of course, the vast majority of people living right now on this planet are either not familiar with any of these ideas or have not yet fully absorbed their implications in their daily life. So what then about art? It is art that provides commentary on our existence and it is the responsibility of art to really grapple with the significance of these ideas. With regard to films, I find value in those movies that can operate on many different levels; those that can provide the instant gratification of an exhilarating chase while also leaving the viewer with something to ponder even after leaving the solitary sanctuary of the theater. These movies are ones that leave an indelible stamp, that provoke introspection and insight into another mind or another world. This is art at its best, when it is able to truly elicit a response worthy of our progress and still celebrate our receding past.
While spending the memorable summer of 2003 in lovely
Ithaca, New York as part of my first
academic research experience at Cornell University, I was introduced to the works of the renowned American writer
Kurt Vonnegut during a physics colloquium on carbon nanotubes given by
Professor Paul McEuen in which he made reference to ``ice-nine,'' a mythical substance in
Cat's Cradle that has the ability to instantly freeze any water in which it comes into contact with & hence is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Intrigued, I sought out Cat's Cradle then and recently finished re-reading it (which I rarely ever do with novels). Cat's Cradle, published in 1963, was Vonnegut's first big breakthrough as a writer and would later form his master's thesis in anthropology (?) at the University of Chicago. To understand Vonnegut, one really needs to understand his dreary past; while an undergraduate at Cornell he was drafted into WWII and subsequently taken prisoner by the Naazis and confined to forced labor in an underground Dresden slaughterhouse while the British & Americans firebombed the once majestic city into
oblivion in February 1945. That his life was spared & he blessed with a remarkable penchant for writing, have enabled him to not only recount the horrors of war (in a later masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five) but to scrutinize the many themes underlying modern liberal Western societies -- the nature of man's existence, the ethical responsibilities of destructive technologies, the relationship between individuality & subordination in democracy -- that suffuse his work. He has the uncanny ability to economically convey profound meaning with humor that is deeply refreshing given the circumstances of what he was made to endure & in the context of the wider genre at large. Although a profound cynic of humanity's condition, Vonnegut nevertheless aspired to find meaning in life (& by extension his writing) through simple acts of human kindness (in addition to rearing his own three children, he adopted four more among which were the three children of his sister who died prematurely of cancer). Cat's Cradle is about many things, among which are a witty, satirical diatribe of science's role in society (as relevant in the aftermath of WWII as it is now), the power of organized religion to befuddle rational thought, & the intrinsic humanistic tendency to disengage from reality with morbid consequences thereof. The strong & wide ranging emotions that the story evokes doesn't diminish with a re-reading, a true sign of its genius. Last spring, when news broke out of Kurt Vonnegut's
death (so it goes) at the age of 84, my initial melancholy gave way to subdued happiness knowing that his beautiful writings will always provide us with a lifeline to the man himself.
An enlightening discussion with a friend today on the issue of the spread of democracy in the world helped me to clarify some of my thoughts on the matter and to come to a few (as yet, not fully developed) conclusions. Of course, we had to begin with the neoconservative experiment on exporting democracy to troubled states, and of course we began with Iraq.
Marjane Satrapi, author of the delightful book Persepolis (made into an equally delightful movie), once said during a lecture before an MIT audience two years ago that you cannot bring democracy to a people by first bombing them. Her assertion was correct but how then can democracy spread? Each country is different, we need to at least acknowledge as much, some in profound ways and some in minor ways. Territories that have been peopled by the same ethnic group(s) continuously over long periods of time have their own unique political histories. When
Martin Luther, a German monk, posted his 95 theses on the door of the Wittenberg Castle in 1517, he set into motion seminal events -- most notably the
Protestant Reformation -- that would radically alter the trajectory of European history & politics. Five hundred years ago the seeds for modern
European democracies, a
"government by the people for the people", were established whose fruits including freedom of speech, separation of church & state, independent judiciaries, checks & balances, people in free societies take for granted everyday. The reformation represented a movement to question authority, to disavow privilege, to emphasize rationality, and most importantly to respect individuality. A period of profound instability ensued spanning four centuries involving endless wars & massive destruction and eventually culminated in the triumph of modern republican ideals through populist revolution and overthrow of monarchies. The Islamic world, at the time in the sixteenth century a comparably devout though culturally advanced medieval society (as evident in numerous achievements in
mathematics, astronomy, visual art among others), never experienced such an awakening and one could argue that its legacy is manifest today. And so when on
March 19, 2003, American troops poured into Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein's government, the incontrovertible dichotomy of many centuries of political evolution reached a boil. Now of course I am glossing over many, many events & details, but I simply wish to make the point that a serious failure to fully appreciate the nuances of the regional situation lead to such a catastrophe whose history is currently being written. The United States & other European powers had been continually
meddling in the region since oil was discovered in the early 20th century. Autocratic, despotic regimes ruled by tyrannical dictators - the Shah of Iran, the Saudi Royal family, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and Saddam Hussein himself -- had been continually propped up in order to guarantee access to cheap oil, that most vital of commodities driving the world economy in the post Industrialization age. Is it any wonder then that such cruel suppression of the people gave rise to such violent extremism, fanned by the flames of fanatical religion? I am continually puzzled when I hear native-born Americans tell me that their government is not acting in the interest of its people when pursuing such deleterious foreign policy. Yet it is usually the same people who demand cheap fuel for their oversized, gas-guzzling automobiles or insist on paying almost nothing to consume meat (produced from animals raised on very cheap corn harvested by fossil fuel-based fertilizer). There is indeed a "hidden" (and ugly) cost to the rampant consumerism that exists and I am not suggesting that capitalism and by corollary globalization are ills to be singled out. I am only suggesting that we raise our consciousness, to borrow a phrase from Richard Dawkins (though used in an entirely different context), and be mindful of the ramifications our materialistic lifestyles.
There is a fascinating
Nature podcast interview this week with the noted Harvard (formerly of MIT) cognitive psychologist
Steven Pinker on the origins of modern swear words. Pinker, celebrated author of the influential book
The Language Instinct (on my summer reading list this year) is an expert on what language reveals about human cognition and he is at his best when dissecting grammar, figures of speech, syntaxual formalisms and the like. He begins by remarking that the quintessential swearing idiom in the English language (f--- you!) has no universal meaning. Moreover, statements like ``close the f-ing door'' make no logical sense at all and we must ask how the f-word came to have such uses. Pinker argues that in every context in which the f-word is invoked, there exists a "religious antecedent". That is, in former times when religion held a more ubiquitously prominent role in society, it was conventional that items of little value that needed to be disparaged were damned by God (``close the God-damnned door''). Over time, as Western societies embraced liberal, secular traditions, the choice of religious associations began to lose poignancy and thus had to be replaced. Furthermore, synonyms like feecees (I use the incorrect spelling because of a censure worm running on the blog server) & sh-t were necessary to distinguish intended effect since the latter word has strong offensive connotations while the former word is strictly objective. Pinker's eloquence and seamless choice of pertinent examples help him convey his ideas with ease. Additionally, he discusses how language is suffused with particular world views that science has been forced to readdress. As an example, he points to the anthropic nature of language to instill ``beingness'' in cats which is counter to all known findings of evolution. I look forward to exploring more of his works in the near future.
Have you ever thought to yourself during a typical day in the urban jungle: why is my environment so unnaturally loud? As long as I can remember I have had very sensitive hearing and as I have grown older I have become keenly aware of their inevitable degeneration. Last year for the first time in my life, I had a thorough auditory exam at MIT following concerns that I might be suffering from
tinnitus. I was made to sit in a soundproof room and identify a range of tones at a multitude of volumes in both ears (thankfully, I was deemed to have perfectly normal hearing). My love for language & music necessitates that I keep my auditory range as robust as possible & I aspire to maintain the high quality of auditory sensory perception that I have been genetically endowed with well into old age. More recently on my daily commute to campus, a brisk 10 minute walk across the main traffic artery linking Cambridge to Boston -- the (in)famous Massachusetts Avenue -- I have become increasingly attune to the harsh, booming sounds made by a never-ending assortment of tractor trailers, buses, honking automobiles and the perennial construction. Unnaturally loud sounds bother me in many ways: in addition to damaging my hearing & jolting my thoughts, they give me nasty headaches. When I was in Europe a couple of months ago, I learned that the European Union has very stringent labor codes that prescribe maximum noise levels in the work place. To my knowledge, there are no such standards in the United States at the federal & state levels. Responsibility in this libertarian minded society lies with the individual & so I took it upon myself to start thinking more seriously about this issue. I am convinced that today's iPod generation will be suffering from widespread hearing loss in a few decades owing to the ever increasing volume of music from sources placed within the ear canal. I am sure we all have experienced sitting next to someone on a bus or walking past them and hearing the booming music from their ear buds at a distance (nevermind the raucous automobiles that are fitted with the highest wattage speakers that blare trite music). The problem here lies in our tendency to increase the volume above the natural limit to dangerous levels without realization so as to overcome ambient noise. The ubiquity of portable electronic devices, cell phones and MP3 players in particular, have placed increasing strain on our hearing system to cope with unusually high volumes placed at very close distances to our ears for prolonged periods of time. I gave up listening to music on headphones several years ago because I was alerted to this issue by a roommate of mine in my junior year at the University of Toronto whose mother was a professor of speech pathology (at the University of Western Ontario) who had advised her son never to wear headphones (rather austere, but nevertheless beneficial in the long run). I now wear ear plugs whenever I walk to campus or go running outside & have noticed that they have immeasurably enhanced my enjoyment of being outdoors. Some might think it strange to wear ear plugs while engaged in strenuous physical exercise, but I highly recommend it for you will be listening to your pulsating heartbeat and can better assess your workouts (try it if you haven't). I have experimented wearing ear plugs wherever I go and have discovered that I can have normal conversations and still hear necessary sounds (perhaps a tribute to my ultra sensitive hearing). Lately I have begun to wonder whether I could design a device that can
selectively attenuate acoustic frequencies. My dream is to be able to stand in an airport runway and have a conversation at normal speaking volume with someone standing next to me. In other words, what if you could remove certain frequencies (like the bassy, rumbling sound of a jet engine) but admit vocal frequency ranges? Perhaps this can be done, but it would have to be manufactured cheaply to compete with inexpensive foam ear plugs which identically attenuate all frequencies. This is an interesting idea that I am pursuing.
Four months and only a measly two posts to show for it. C'est grave, non? It occurred to me today upon my return to Boston from a two-week trip abroad that my grand idea for an exclusively research-oriented blog was noble in conception but totally uninspired in execution. Let us put to rest this failed experiment and return to the 'eloquent delinquent' for there is a dizzying array of topics to muse on so let me begin (I apologize for the interruption but nonetheless welcome you back). As I have already mentioned I returned today from a modest vacation to western Europe where I had the good fortune (enhanced considerably by excellent hosts) to visit the following majestic locations: southwestern Germany (the bustling financial center of Frankfurt am Main, the Rhine River valley region between Koblenz and Mainz -- the idyllic heartland of German romanticism, and the enchanting medieval town of Heidelberg), the Netherlands (the wildly cosmopolitan urban center of Amsterdam, the historic `college town' of Delft and the unofficial capital Den Haag (The Hague)), and finally beloved Paris. The trip presented me with an opportunity to temporarily transcend the American universe and to peer into life across the Atlantic via several major centers of western European civilization. Among the main differences I noticed of the European lifestyles (compared to North America which I am most familiar) were: the acute awareness of historical context, sustainability and joie de vivre. Let me explain each in turn. The specter of WWII looms very large in modern Germany even after sixty years of relative peace and I came to realize that the government has made great efforts to purge its dark past from public consciousness and accordingly gone the way of extreme political correctness. In Germany as I learned one must never mention the National Socialists or call into question the legitimacy of the immigration policy that has brought millions of unintegrated foreign labor to the geographic center of Europe. A sense of uneasiness with many issues such as these is pervasive and is written into the frustrated and also stoically muted faces of the ethnic Germans who it seems have never been allowed to full reconciliate with their past. In Paris, I vividly remember newspaper stands dotting every square of the city showing the voracious appetite of citizens to be kept abreast of their surroundings and nightly news featuring massive strikes by blue collar workers and multiple political tv shows involving ordinary citizens. Amsterdam was chock full of cyclists, special `coffeeshops' and something I found to be quite melancholic: window shopping for prostitutes.
So far we have introduced notions of the electromagnetic (EM) wave via the Maxwell equations but I have left unanswered a key question: what happens when this EM wave interacts with matter? We should expect the EM field to have a strong effect on the sub-atomic particles, particularly the negatively-charged electrons that surround the positively charged nucleus according to the
classical model of the atom. This interaction is accounted for in the material relations of Maxwell equations that relate the electric and magnetic fields to the electric and magnetic displacements, respectively. In the simplest case of isotropic media, the electric displacement is proportional to the electric field via a scalar quantity known as the
permittivity; it is this quantity that incorporates physical properties of matter into Maxwell's theory. Let us only concern ourselves for the time being with
dielectric materials which are for the most part simply insulators and ask the question: what happens to these dielectrics in the presence of an electric field? The answer is charge separation: the applied field acts to separate the electrons from the nucleus (beyond their equilibrium positions) inducing what is commonly referred to as a dipole moment. A measure of the extent of this charge separation is a quantity termed
atomic polarizability. In order to solve for the atomic polarizability, one employs a classical electron model where individual electrons are bound elastically to the nucleus and are driven using a harmonic forcing function with known frequency, this amounts to solving a second order
ordinary differential equation which has a
Lorentzian solution. An important part of this theory is to suppose that each atom has a resonant frequency of electron oscillation about the nucleus whose calculation need not concern us at this point, the salient point to be made is that for most materials in the presence of
visible light, this resonant frequency is much larger than the light frequency and allows us to simplify our result showing that the atomic polarizability (and hence the permittivity) is independent of frequency. We deal with the case of frequency-dependent permittivity, the topic of dispersion next.
...there were
Maxwell's equations. Although one could probably begin the discussion much earlier with
Euclid who ca 330 BC began studying optics through the mathematical framework he pioneered. I do not wish to recount the vast history of optics research and have chosen as my starting point the emergence of classical wave optics. The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell writing more than two millenia after Euclid in 1861 was the first person who succeeded in unifying all hitherto research in optics with his set of 4 equations which put forth the notion of light as an electromagnetic wave. The wave nature is significant principally because an intellectual war had been raging in the centuries before Maxwell between proponents of the corpuscular theory of light whose main advocate was the towering scientific figure of
Isaac Newton and those in support of the wave nature of light lead by the Dutch physicist
Christiaan Huygens. The corpuscular nature of light did experience a revival in the early part of the 20th century with the advent of quantum mechanics and ultimately gave rise to the notion of
wave-particle duality but we shall not explore that topic for a while. At their core, the four equations constituting Maxwell's equations explain the following phenomena: 1) time-varying electric fields and electric currents produce spatially-varying magnetic fields, 2) there are no magnetic monopoles, 3) time-varying magnetic fields give rise to spatially-varying electric-fields, and finally 4) electric fields are derived from electric charges. Maxwell showed that these four equations can be manipulated and equivalently expressed in terms of a wave equation that accurately describe the behavior of electromagnetic waves having wavelengths that span nearly 18 orders of magnitude: from radio waves used in telecommunications (100s of m) to gamma rays (1e-11 m) produced by sub-atomic particle interactions.
After some thought, I have decided to retire the 'Eloquent Delinquent'. This might seem a little surprising to some but I have decided that I need to take this weblog in a new direction, one that is closer to my nascent scientific career. Starting today, this blog will be about the wondrous entity that is
light and the blossoming field of
photonics: I will attempt to explain in simple, clear and precise language the sheer beauty of what light is from a theoretical and computational perspective. I can think of nothing more captivating in the universe than light and feel that a forum like this can be a valuable place to disseminate information. There are at least 2 other blogs out there -
Excited Light &
the Photonics Spotlight - that focus on photonics but do so from an experimental framework focused mostly on laser technology. To my knowledge, this will be the first and only blog dedicated to the theoretical and computational investigation of light. This new blog, christened 'a universe of photons', will feature weekly posts on the nature of light along with key scientific milestones, reviews of important theoretical breakthroughs and novel computational approaches to model light both past and present, and commentary on all such things. I hope you enjoy.
The three panel window in my new apartment has endowed me with a gorgeous panoramic view of
Cambridge: the tree lined streets (now radiating with fall colours) and the many steeples that dot this city all the way to Harvard square, set against the backdrop of the lush elevated hills that surround Boston. Every day as I work I occasionally look up from my desk and stare in rapt awe at the teeming intellectual capital before me enveloped by a brooding azure sky. I especially enjoy seeing the sun set on the weekends (on evenings that I'm not at the office) mainly because for a brief moment of my torrid life I become conscious of the magnificent complexity of our environment: the
gravitational force that keeps the Earth rotating around the
Sun which is rotating around a black hole at the center of the
Milky Way galaxy, the nuclear fusion occurring on the Sun's surface to emit the intense light that travels 150 million kilometres to reach us, the
Rayleigh scattering of this light off the atmosphere that gives its blue hue, the ability of our
retina to convert these
photons into electrical signals deciphered by the
cerebral cortex that ultimately enable us to have such an experience. The sheer complexity of it all is (euphemistically) massive and made bittersweet when certain neurons fire to cause our facial muscles to twitch slightly; and we smile :) Returning to my apartment, there is a dilapidated park that always seems to draw my attention which is a popular place for local residents to bring their dogs. The owners stand idle partaking in their usually bland dose of small talk, while their dogs delight in chasing one other and hunting down plastic balls. The intensity of their childlike joy is graspable in the ferocity with which their tails wag. It is as though in these brief minutes, the whole of their evolutionary ascendence has in some ways been realized. Though oblivious to the staggering complexity that has made them experience such joy, they can nevertheless delight in it with the utmost intensity. And I observing all this from a far away distance, cognizant of such things, delight in their delight.
When I was in my early teens and had just started my enduring love affair with the piano, I chanced upon the glorious
contrapuntal music of the towering Baroque master,
Johann Sebastian Bach. One of my favorites at the time was the
Goldberg Variations, especially as I had first heard it played by one of my childhood heros, the acclaimed Canadian pianist
Glenn Gould. Gould's famous
1981 recording, made a year before his death, as I hear it again today is splendidly rich in detail & fills me with intense nostalgia. When one hears Gould's
first recording in 1955 at age 22 (his debut recording) played at a torrential tempo but still magnificently colourful and compares it to the last recording he made when he was nearly 50, the artist's maturation and fusion with the music are clearly manifest. The Goldberg Variations were first published in 1741 and have been considered to be a masterpiece of variational form: after commencing with a curt aria introducing the main theme, 30 variations of the bass line and chord progression are presented. The variations' diverse range spans slow melancholy to capricious elation with many shades in between. It is a divinely serene yet technically demanding piece and I have set myself the ambitious (yet utterly foolish) task of playing it. So here goes.
Last night was a special night as I had the good fortune of being a part of the lucky few to get a sneak preview of the new documentary,
In the Shadow of the Moon to be released later this week. I first became aware of this film when (excitedly) reading Stephen Holden's
review in the Times last Friday and was pleasantly surprised when I found out that both the director (David Sington) and co-producer (Christopher Riley) would be on hand
Monday night to present it to the MIT community. The documentary was screened in a large lecture hall and the room was at capacity 10 minutes before it was scheduled to start and this being MIT, people(/nerds) crammed in along the aisles and some stood along the back walls eager to get a glimpse of this much anticipated film that chronicles the experiences of the men who had been a part of the Apollo manned missions to the moon in the 1960s. Among those in attendance were some of the engineers, now greying, from the original mission who had worked at the MIT Draper Laboratory who duly received a resounding standing ovation when introduced before the film commenced. The film begins with JFK's famous speech to Congress in 1961 where he lays out his bold vision of sending a man to the moon and returning him to Earth by the end of the decade, coming just weeks after the Soviet Union had made
Yuri Gagarin the first man ever to venture into space. This marked the start of the space race and set the United States to feverishly devote the needed resources to accomplishing this ambitious science fiction fantasy in order to show the world, to quote David Sington in his post-film talk, "what a free and democratic people are capable of." In this ideological war pitting two superpowers, great feats of scientific achievement were seen to be just as important as military superiority, a crucial point obscured in the hair-trigger nuclear-alert arms race of those heady days. The filmmakers, in a post film talk, revealed that they had scoured NASA archives to find never-before-seen footage of the Apollo missions which to date have been extensively chronicled. Several clips of the
Apollo 11 mission in particular are simply breahtaking to behold on the big screen: especially a stirring montage taken from the Columbia command module showing the Eagle lunar module disengaging as it begins its voyage to the lunar surface. Though there is little mention of the engineering accomplishments that pushed the frontier of aeronautic research (the producers hinted that this may form the subject of another upcoming documentary) -- particularly that of designing a rocket propulsion system able to escape the Earth's immense graviational pull and venture some 300000km to the moon -- the emphasis is on the personal anecdotes of the individuals who had the privilege of being the first human beings to set foot on another world. I am still awestruck when I think just what an accomplishment that we as a human race were able to achieve, a point that resonates throughout the film; as Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins realized on their 25 country tour upon their return. People all over the world came up to the them on their visit and congratulated them, rejoicing that "
we had done it." Noticeably absent in the film is Armstrong, utterer of the now famously witty phrase "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" upon being the first man to set foot on the surface of another heavenly body, who to this day remains extremely reclusive and has never made public statements about his experiences. When asked to explain Armstrong's reticence, Sington stated that Armstrong viewed the Apollo 11 mission as humanity's accomplishment, not to be personalized by the individual men who went there. In fact Sington pointed out that the Apollo 11
mission badge was the only badge of the Apollo missions that omitted the names of the crew to underscore this point. Armstrong is believed, comically, not to have even discussed his experiences with his own wife. In a time when the world was polarized by deep ideological struggle, when American culture was undergoing radical changes owing to the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, and widespread disenfranchisement the Apollo missions brought a sense of optimism and light in those dark days. The filmmakers have done a beautiful, moving job of capturing all the different aspects of what made these missions so profound. I beseech everyone to see this film if you have the chance, it will touch you.
When I read this
story at the office today, I was balling my eyes out and thought I should share it with everyone. Now we all now that how gaffe prone the President of the United States of America is, we know this all too well from the many classic one liners through the past 7 years. His most recent blunder is sobering only because it illustrates yet again the utter disregard and disinterest Mr. Bush has for the rest of the world. While attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC)
meeting recently in Australia, a group of Pacific rim countries that meets biannually to discuss issues of trade, security and cooperation, Mr. Bush began his speech to business leaders on Friday addressing Prime Minister John Howard with: "Thank you for being such a fine host for the OPEC summit".
OPEC, we all know, is the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries a group that consists of America's arch foes Venezuela and Iran. But if that wasn't embarrassing enough for PM Howard, Mr. Bush went one further when thanking him for Australia's commitment to send troops to Iraq -- only problem was that he referred to them as "Austrian troops." Yet it seems to me that our amusement at the expense of the most powerful person in the world is, in its own right, illustrative of how disparaging our view of him is -- an out-of-touch, incompetent (I'll stop myself there) figurehead who has endangered global order by indelibly altering the course of world history. Laughter though may be
our best recourse for coming to grips with such a tragedy.
The contemporary music of Iran, now under the ascetic guidance of the Islamic Republic for the last thirty years, has been tightly curtailed: content deemed unislamic has been banned, western influences expunged and artists screened for their moral and spiritual purity. In this inhospitably restrictive environment there has emerged some astounding musicians whose boundless creativity have superseded all such attempts by the authorities to contain them. One such artist is the nascent
Mohsen Namjoo, who was recently featured in an
NYT piece. Such pieces, routinely penned by the Iranian journalist Nazila Fathi, serve to grant western eyes a glimpse behind the iron wall that the Iranian regime has barricaded around its borders and offer much needed insight into the paradoxically thriving arts culture that lies within. I was introduced to Namjoo by a musically inclined Persian physicist friend of mine here a few months ago and have, like many others, felt a deep attachment to it. The music of Namjoo is a blend of ancient Persian poetry, particularly that of the revered
Hafez and
Rumi, with his soothing Bob Dylanesque voice and warm Persian lute playing. Elements of Persian classical music and contemporary Western melodies are fused in a rich aural mélange that is simply enchanting to behold (I have posted two of his works
here). His ability to speak to the modern Iranian way of life and distill its oppression and heartache resonates with the many young people whose voice has been utterly and emphatically choked in this vexing political climate. His marriage of the masterpieces of Persian poetry with the modern western musical tradition is a beautiful testament to the complex struggle for the soul of Iran. Let me illustrate this with an example instead: one of my favorite Namjoo pieces titled
"Zolf bar baad"("tresses in the wind") is based on the following poem by Hafez:
Let not the wind into your tresses or I will go into the wind
Let not seduction be your way or I will lose mine
Drink not with any old contender or I will drown in pain
Savor not your wine or I will turn red in sobriety
Lock not your hair or I will be locked in remorse
Twist not your hair or I will get twisted
Become not the rival's friend or I will become mad with rivalry
Feel not for others or I will cease to feel
Open your face and I won't need a flower
Stand tall and I won't need the air of heights
Paint not the town red or I will shed blood for tears
Cherish not the other's company or I will perish
Steal not the limelight or all light will leave me
Ogle not or I will melt beneath your gaze
Be kind to this poor suitor and come to my aid
For me not to appeal to the Messenger
Hafez will never turn away from you
For he became free the day he was entrapped by you.
The sheer beauty of this magnificent piece transcends culture, language and country. The ability of music to do all these things is truly wondrous.