Starpoet Blast Off!
NASA Daily Image
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| Experience Hubble's Universe in 3-D | ||
| This image depicts a vast canyon of dust and gas in the Orion Nebula from a 3-D computer model based on observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and created by science visualization specialists at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md. A 3-D visualization of this model takes viewers on an amazing four-minute voyage through the 15-light-year-wide canyon. The model takes viewers through an exhilarating ride through the Orion Nebula, a vast star-making factory 1,500 light-years away. This virtual space journey isn't the latest video game but one of several groundbreaking astronomy visualizations created by specialists at STScI, the science operations center for NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The cinematic space odysseys are part of the new Imax film Hubble 3D, which opens today at select IMAX theaters worldwide. The 43-minute movie chronicles the 20-year life of Hubble and includes highlights from the May 2009 servicing mission to the Earth-orbiting observatory, with footage taken by the astronauts. The giant-screen film showcases some of Hubble's breathtaking iconic pictures, such as the Eagle Nebula's "Pillars of Creation," as well as stunning views taken by the newly installed Wide Field Camera 3. While Hubble pictures of celestial objects are awe-inspiring, they are flat 2-D photographs. For this film, those 2-D images have been converted into 3-D environments, giving the audience the impression they are space travelers taking a tour of Hubble's most popular targets. Based on a Hubble image of Orion released in 2006, the visualization was a collaborative effort between science visualization specialists at STScI, including Greg Bacon, who sculpted the Orion Nebula digital model, with input from STScI astronomer Massimo Roberto; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. For some of the sequences, STScI imaging specialists developed new techniques for transforming the 2-D Hubble images into 3-D. STScI image processing specialists Lisa Frattare and Zolt Levay, for example, created methods of splitting a giant gaseous pillar in the Carina Nebula into multiple layers to produce a 3-D effect, giving the structure depth. Image Credit: NASA, G. Bacon, L. Frattare, Z. Levay, and F. Summers (STScI/AURA)... |
| The Bitch Goddess |
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| Prose - Global Warning | |
| Lisa Jain Thompson | |
| Saturday, 12 December 2009 09:00 | |
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Fairfax, VA, USA. We Americans, you and I, spring from some Platonic conception of ourselves, forever remodeling our past even as we reconceive our multiple futures. The possibility of success, tempered by the memories our well accomplished failures, bedevils us until our dying days. We worship a dual headed bitch goddess, pursuing fame, thinking it is success. [N1] In this, the early decades of a new millennium, we confuse our good intentions with actual accomplishment as if the act of aiming at a target is sufficient. [N2] We no longer actually have to hit the target to become famous. Being famous is enough, a well laurelled goal, in and of itself. Success? Everyone wants success but no one admits to wanting it. If we achieve success, we are half apologetic that we climbed our own personal Mount Everest. The ideal American archetype is a Tin Star who, having just rid the world of the bad guys, responds to praise from the townspeople by casting his eyes down and mumbling semi-audibly Aw shucks, I was just doing my job. {sidebar id=332}Visible, flagrant success is the biggest American sin of all, reminding others of their apparent lack of success. There is no hero so successful they will not be attacked for what they have accomplished, whose purity of intention will not be questioned and used to degrade their success. Proper, culturally approved ideology is all. If anyone could achieve the success a hero achieves, we all would be successful. By definition, and as charged, a hero is an elite member of our society. Success provides access to an elite, undemocratic club whose sole membership criteria is success itself. The rest of us need not apply. Not so with fame. You can become famous without being successful, or even very good at what you are doing. Look around. Take a good long look, a picture if you like. Anyone can become famous. You can be a relative failure and still be famous.
There are self-appointed leaders who appear to spend more time on retaining their personal fame and their supposed position of “leadership” than they spend actually achieving anything meaningful. [N4] A thirty second sound bite on national television becomes more noteworthy than two years of effort working the back halls of Congress. At its extreme, fame replaces success as a goal worthy of human endeavor. The fame monster can devour you. At first fame is novelty, then a given. It is not long after that you realize that fame can cause you to lose an awful lot of freedom. After the delight of being famous passes, you realize you have lost the ability to not be recognized. You can no longer hide, nor should you expect to. You have to anticipate you are being watched. [N5]
Transition [N7] can be like that if you transition at your work place. There are days in the beginning when it feels like the eyes of the world, let alone Texas, are upon you. Everybody knows. You begin to suspect that every whisper, every turn of a head in a hallway is a comment about you (as well it might be). [N8] Get used to it. You are famous of a sort. It will pass. [N9] The most effective way to put a stop to the side effects of fame — the knowing glances and nodding heads — is to be successful at work. Success on the job, whatever that might be, facilitates transition. The quicker you are quietly successful, the quicker you will become just enough woman or just another man. [N10] Your previous history will eventually be lost as much as the name of that secretary three secretaries back. You won’t be famous. You’ll just be another average worker with a back story that few people ever take the time to know. But that doesn’t mean they won’t point you out as being successful and speculate on how you got wherever it is you have gotten.
But I’d rather have the burden of success than the unrelenting glare of fame. Notes[N1 William James: Letter to H.G. Wells.
"The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That-with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success-is our national disease." [N2] It is not enough to aim, you must hit. - Italian Proverb. [N3] Fame is a song recorded by David Bowie and released in 1975, with a remix version in 1990. David Bowie met John Lennon late 1974, which led to socialization and jamming at Electric Lady Studios in January 1975. Lennon created the title and sang above a guitar riff written by Carlos Alomar. Bowie did the lyrics, with the tesult that the songwriting credit list order is David Bowie, Carlos Alomar, and John Lennon. [N4] A quick list off the top of the author’s head: Jessie Jackson, Al Sharpton, Britney Spears, Sarah Palin, most gender activists, everyone on most every reality show on television. Feel free to add to the list. [N5] This, of course, is one of a woman’s basic assumptions, someone is watching her, if not “The Man,” then certainly a man or group of men. [N6] Lisa Jain Thompson, 2009. [N7] A man or woman born transsexual’s transition to her or his correct physical sex and social role. Normally done in public, like a figure skater at the Olympics, there is no shortage of judges willing to score the degree of difficulty and your success. [N8] Never assume that it is your “fame” that produces a friendly comment. What you might suspect is a sarcastic critique may only be normal situational small talk. Women talk to women, men talk to men, both sexes like to flirt. If you stumble on a curb or slip on a step, people probably will see you but they are more likely wanting to help than to laugh. [N9] At any given time, there seems to be a half-dozen autobiographies dealing with transition on the best seller lists. One writes of the scars healed, another of the cruelty of the still open wounds given them by their parents or their spouse. The bloody marks of transsexual suffering are present everywhere. Life is hard whether you are a man or woman born transsexual or a normborn. We all had bad childhoods. High School, by design, is emotionally wrenching. Work has been rough for all of us at one time or another. Most of us survive without a bloody autobiography and a talk show tour where we complain how painful our celebrity is. Normborn: a man born man, a woman born woman. A useful term that I first learned from the writings of Susan Cooke and promptly stole. [N10] People will still gossip, of course. Gossip is a normal human activity. [N11] That’s Life, Gordon and Thompson, as sung by Frank Sinatra.
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| Last Updated on Thursday, 10 December 2009 19:59 |
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