John's Junk Drawer

People have been asking me, as if being there gives you some magical ability to estimate crowd size. I don't know how to estimate this. Here is an image of the King march (225K) and an image of the Restoring Honor Rally so you can decide for yourself.




Martin Luther King March
Here's the MLK march from the Lincoln Memorial looking out. It is estimated that there were 225,000 people here. You can see the crowd thinning out and the green grass of the mall starting just a little past half the length of the reflecting pool






Restoring Honor Rally
Here's a shot of the 828 Rally, looking back on the Lincoln Memorial from above the Washington Monument. This one really doesn't get everybody. We were sitting about two blocks behind this at the Washington Monument. The area between us and the WW2 memorial (bottom of this picture) was crowded but they weren't shoulder-to-shoulder like they were in these areas.

We don't stand AGAINST the bullies
We stand WITH those whom they are bullying
This is who we are
This is what we do
We have always done this
And as long as we are here
we always will.

I stand with the children, the parents, and the siblings of those who have lost their lives at ground zero.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1tFQMjc-IE

As funny as it may seem...
Some people get their kicks
stomping on a dream...

A Computer Scientist Says:


"This code is very reliable. There is only about a one in a billion chance of it ever failing."




Exact Same Statement Made by a Programmer:


"On a typical laptop, this code will fail about once per second."




-djr

Better than a church bell ringing. Better than a choir singing out.

Eastern philosophy = "Nothing matters"

Western philosophy = "Everything matters"

They might both be wrong, but which one would you rather have working on your mission-critical engineering project?


-djr

Nine innings of wholesome, regimented, fun.

And if you go a little crazy, and have a spontaneous moment, that's okay too...

...Our tazers are charged and ready.

You know you've truly arrived when newspapers keep a draft of your obituary on file.

-djr

Having so much faith in logic that you believe it eliminates the need for faith.




-djr

"All things work together for good to them that love God..." -Romans 8:28

All of creation is limitations. It would have been great if we had mental telepathy, for example. But mental telepathy wasn't in the design, so we learned other, more interesting ways to communicate.

In doing so, we discovered that those other ways we learned --to overcome the limitation and express ourselves-- have their own beautiful characteristics. Those beautiful characteristics would have been unimaginable, and completely hidden, if we had been "blessed" with telepathy, and were not limited in this way.

Consider... music, poetry, dance, paintings, and sculpture, for examples of what would never have been.

Within every limitation there is some new, previously unseen and unknown thing to learn, and learn about. And with the learning, comes the purpose.

-djr

Great video.

I like how the previous attempts (previous takes) become part of the final work. The colors on their outfits for example. But also check out the messed up, and broken props, which can be seen in the backgrounds of each area. Left-overs from previous takes.

IBM has found that picking up a single carbon-oxide (CO) molecule onto the tip of their AFM (Atomic Force Microscope) allows them to get a much sharper "point" with which to obtain much sharper images of atomic scale entities. This image is simply amazing...





View the IBM Press Release (w/video)


-djr

One of the best renditions I've heard.

As sinners go, the guy who wrote this song was right up there with the worst of them. Amazing! Salvation... offered, and accepted, and the angels celebrate by giving us one of the best songs ever written. Sometimes it's not hard at all to know what's important to them.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V84STSWVp3g

Observer As Art