O Death, where is thy Pyrrhic victory?
O Death, where is thy cursèd venom sting?
Alas, from sullied tank of algae pine
Dost thou into latrine Charybdis gyre —
Like Death did I with net as scythe reap thou
Sans pomp nor circumstance nor fun’ral shroud;
Alone swam’st thou, forsaken and deprived
As Sisyphus condemned to search for friends;
Alack!
Thy rock the mountain ne’re shall overcome,
Alack!
For thou art Solamente — fish reborn
I made a post a while back on a video I recorded on Euler’s Identity, in which I explored the poetic elegance of mathematics. In a similar vein, a recent video I published on Tsiolkovsky’s Equation explains how, based on a few fundamental physical observations, we can represent the seemingly complex way a rocket works in one stunning, and relatively straightforward, equation.
But what exactly is Tsiolkovsky’s Equation, and how can we use it to travel to the cosmos? Well buckle up, because it’s going to be a fun ride!
All was silent
On Pad 39 —
Fifty-one years
And thirty billion miles
Since Armstrong and Aldrin
Dipped their timid toes
In Selene’s Tranquil Sea
The clock strikes 10…
We hold our breath
9, 8, 7, 6, 5…
We close our eyes
4, 3, 2, 1…0
We jolt with liftoff!
As sky clears
And Bob and Doug
Ride a once-dormant Dragon
From ashes to aether
On the thirtieth of May.
Theirs is but one step
Chasing Time’s Arrow
To lift heavy ignorance
And shine a candle
Into quiet Unknown —
To climb up, up
Until we have scaled
Mons Vero
And we are at last
Alone with the cosmos.
Yet as we drift out there
We are never alone —
From Hypatia to Lovelace
Coleman to Jackson
Hamilton to Jemison
And me to you
Our candle joins the chorus
Of Elysian light in a
Cantata d’amore
Across every hue
Of the human rainbow
And so when we witness
Hephaestus’s Crucible of Creation
Breathing light into darkness
Forging stars, nebulae, galaxies
From pure chaos
We will discover a truth
Long known by the sinews
Of the heart —
From dust to dust
And ashes to ashes
We go as one
One Humanity
One Life
One Universe
All stardust.
Hello again! To view the .pdf of the sixth and final issue of The NewsBreaker for which I am editor, please follow the link below.
Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I am unable to offer any paper copies of this issue.
Below is my final “Words From Your Editor” commentary excerpted from the aforesaid issue.
Hello Internet! I would like to share with you the speech that I gave this past Friday, May 29, at the Laguna Seca raceway for the Pacific Grove High School Class of 2020 graduation ceremony. You may also read an article on my speech by the Monterey County Weekly here. The text of the speech follows.
In his play Hamlet, William Shakespeare deliberately presents the ghost of King Hamlet as mostly a just apparition; however, there do exist some potentially ambiguous or otherwise “evil” characteristics of the ghost that tinge its apparent purity.
In Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the titular characters Rosencrantz (Ros) and Guildenstern (Guil) experience what Palestinian American literary theorist and cultural critic Edward Said termed an “unhealable rift.” Ros and Guil struggle through the play over the dichotomy between reality and illusion, never quite coming to understand the difference therein. They experience an exile of essence, an irreconcilable schism between existence and identity: their lack of purpose degrades them to mere pawns whose absurd, tragic end arrives despite any attempt to subvert fate.
Hello again! To view the .pdf of the fifth issue of The NewsBreaker, please follow the link below.
Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I am unable to offer any paper copies of this issue.
My Cathy,
I feel a strange, warm wind in the air. I smell the first golden furze blossoms. I hear the vanguard of the lapwings returning to the whinstone-lined hills. Winter, I believe, is ending.
You are my love, my life, my soul. We are like the rocks of Penistone Crags: inseparable, the threads of our souls intertwined beyond the workings of any mortal. Our love is the sea in all its uncontainable beauty, passion, and wildness. And yet, you chose Edgar Linton — a feeble lamb whose entire capacity for love could barely fill a bucket — for a husband over me. Poor Edgar could not even bear a few teaspoons of our love.
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a novel built upon the foundations of two interconnected and interdependent stories, each chiefly concerned with a different generation of the Earnshaw, Linton, and Heathcliff families; the stories effectively form two halves of the novel, and the lives and experiences of the characters therein mesh deeply in the very soul of the work. To thus disregard the second half of the novel vouchsafes the fate of Milo; to neglect the evolution of the remainder of the work is to tear Wuthering Heights from the center, to split the rocks of Penistone Crags, and to sunder Heathcliff from his Catherine and Catherine from her Heathcliff. The themes of ignorance versus education, religion versus spirituality, and revenge versus love interact and develop through the second half of the novel, cultivating Hareton’s intellect and nobility, tempering Catherine Junior’s naive mockery and disdain, and extinguishing Heathcliff’s all-consuming drive for retribution to enable a denouement of wholesome character metamorphoses and ultimately a sense of redemption over the sins of prior generations.
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén