Clipmarks | Rustee's clips

Kentucky Vietnam Memorial Sundial

Sun, 04 May 2008 21:13:46 GMT

clipped by: Rustee
clipper's remarks: Near the center are 154 names of those who died in one month during the worst slaughter of 1968. At 11:11 AM, each Nov. 11th, the shadow touches a marker for the WW-I armistice.

Clip Source: www.kyvietnammemorial.net

The design concept is in the form of a large sundial. The stainless steel gnomon casts its shadow upon a granite plaza. There are 1,100 names of Kentuckians on the memorial, including 23 missing in action. Each name is engraved into the plaza, and placed so that the tip of the shadow touches his name on the anniversary of his death, thus giving each fallen veteran a personal Memorial Day.

The location of each name is fixed mathematically by the date of casualty, the geographic location of the memorial, the height of the gnomon and the physics of solar movement. The stones were then designed and cut to avoid dividing any individual name. The resulting radial-concentric joint pattern suggests a "web", symbolic of the entangling nature of this war.

Clip Source: www.kyvietnammemorial.net

Tags: history, military

Martin Luther King Jr - An Inventive Mind

Sun, 04 May 2008 20:05:50 GMT

clipped by: Rustee

Clip Source: www.uh.edu

King gave us all a lesson in teaching. Using the tools of reason, literature, and history, he took us to the heart and meaning of non-violent protest. It was a disciplined performance.

I still hear him saying to us,

Our aim is as much to deliver the white man from the wrongs of segregation, as it is to deliver the black man. If we forget that, then we've failed.

King had the same quality of intellectual detachment as a theoretical physicist. But he also had a genius for communication.

Invention is a three-part process. The inventor must dream, he must think, and he must execute, King did all three. He harnessed his dream of racial harmony to powerful abstract and ethical engines. Then his dream rode those engines into a world that was, for the most part, delighted and stunned by what he'd forged.

I remember him laying out left-brain means for realizing a right-brain dream.

I remember that this dream-driven man of action was also a great intellectual of our times.

Tags: history

Pondering the Size of Things

Sun, 04 May 2008 19:56:40 GMT

clipped by: Rustee
clipper's remarks:

So we dwell in the right place at the right time. It's a huge and ancient place made to our measure. It's large enough to contain a free people. And it's small enough that we can either spoil it or shape it into a fit dwelling.

Clip Source: www.uh.edu

The extent of our universe is some 15 billion light years. It's about 10-to-the-nineteenth times bigger than earth. Earth in turn is about 10-to-the-nineteenth times bigger than an electron. As far as size goes, we're curiously placed right in the middle. Things reach just as far inward as they do outward.

The universe, expanding at the speed of light, is one light year larger each year. That's around ten trillion miles. It seems like a lot, but the universe is already so big that it expands by only a ten trillionth of a percent in a year.

And we're centered in all this magnitude. Our ability to comprehend is also centered. We can understand distances up to about 1000 times our length. We can see lengths down to about 1/1000th of our length. Beyond that, we fly on instruments.

The earth is as much larger than you, as you are larger than the cells that make up your body. We're oddly centered in a world that's both too large and too small to comprehend.

Tags: science

Forgotten Inventor - The Fresno Scraper

Sun, 04 May 2008 19:28:35 GMT

clipped by: Rustee
clipper's remarks:

Fresno Scrapers served the US army in WW-I. The two-horse model retailed for $28, yet today's bulldozer blades are its direct offspring. The gigantic scraper-carryall earth mover is its grandchild.

Clip Source: www.uh.edu

A 25-year-old Scot named James Porteous asked a ticket agent for passage to America in 1873.

By 1880 he was an American citizen who had been woven into Fresno Valley farm life. Valley agriculture depended upon irrigation. That meant canal digging.

Fresno farmers had been using something called a buck scraper to move earth. It scraped up dirt and pushed it along in front. It was hard to pull and hard to unload.

Porteus' C-shaped scraper had a blade along the bottom. It scooped dirt as it was pulled along. That much was like the buck scraper, but this machine rode on runners and could be tilted. An operator walking behind it could change the angle. When it was full, he tilted it back and let it glide on the runners. He could dump dirt as he passed over low spots and smooth out terrain. He could vary the angle of attack to match the soil.

It was soon being used all over the world. It was one of the most important agricultural and civil engineering machines ever made.

Clip Source: images.asme.org

Tags: history, technology, invention