ceLebRaTe

President Barack Obama, right, and first lady Michelle Obama dance together at the Neighborhood Inaugural Ballin Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2009

Obama Attends National Prayer Service

President Obama attended the traditional Inauguration National Prayer Service.

Dr. Sharon Watkins, general minister and president of Disciples of Christ and the first woman to deliver the sermon at the service, said Mr. Obama's choices in office should reflect the values and ethics of the Lord, reports CBS News White House Correspondent Mark Knoller.

Sun Halo over Jogja

Did you ever seen sun halo ?

Sun halo is natural phenomenon that happen beacause ice crystals in cold cirrus clouds. Here the picture I took using SE K770i at November 25, 2008

Blogger's new Geotagging feature

The Blogger team have added a new "Geotagging" feature to Blogger in Draft which enables you to add a location to each of your blog posts. This will then display in your post-footer section (near your post labels, timestamp, etc), and will act as a link to a page on Google Maps where readers can learn more about the location.

Primeval Culture

Big game hunting was paramount throughout the Ice Age. The Sami of Northern Scandinavia and Russia, today forced into farming and herding today, were still big game hunters in the seventeenth century CE. Travellers have accounted how parties of men, women, children and dogs drove hundreds of reindeer in corrals of piled rocks, and slaughtered them all in blood-soaked excitement. In our times, only a remainder of the Bambuti Pygmies of Africa still mobilizes the whole clan to drive game into nets.

At the end of the Ice Age, the large herds disappeared and foraging shifted to a wide variety of rodents, insects, fish, shells and plants. Collective drive hunting turned into more solitary observation and stalking, a new way of food gathering demanding its own world-image.

Reality was made up of appearances. It was laden with the unexpected, set forth in a manifold of particular, surprising experiences and recounts. Coming to terms with this environment requires careful reading of covert signs, searching for hidden relations, and marking thin threads of recurrence and resemblance in a turmoil of perceptions. This environment was too complex to ever be confronted entirely. Yet, it had a decisive impact on food, health and safety.

Ancient foragers re-enacted, replayed, strengthened, extended and exchanged those encounters: rhythmic repetition created an illusive universe, steadily expanded by fresh signs. Words were caused accidentally, by the need to recount - not as sounds obtaining meanings, but as meanings acquiring sounds, each meaning its own sound at its own time. Evocations grew into patterns and tokens, and into language and myths. First was art, then came words, and then came myths.

Those people were not actors themselves, but were totally predisposed at responding to the agile environment. However puzzling the behaviour of encountered entities, it was essential to make the best out of the world as it appeared; good and bad were no directives, they rather were a challenge to the forager’s creativity. This world-image was designed to provide the best possible life, nothing less and nothing more.

The Engineer's Obligation to Cultural Progress(2)

Nietzsche
I suppose it would be appropriate to mention a few biographical "highlights" concerning Nietzsche before we start looking at some of his work. Nietzsche was born in 1844 at Röcken, in the Prussian province of Saxony. His father, who was a Lutheran pastor died shortly before Nietzsche's fifth birthday, and Nietzsche grew up with his mother, sister, grandmother, and two maiden aunts. He studied philology at Bonn University, and at the University of Leipzig, where he received his doctorate. In 1869 he was hired to teach at the University of Basel, in Switzerland. In 1870 he was promoted to full professor, became a Swiss citizen, and served as a medical orderly with the Prussian forces during the Franco- Prussian war. Nietzsche's war experience had a devastating effect on his health, which forced him to resign from the University in 1879, with a small pension. His retirement from teaching coincided with a dramatic increase in the volume of his writing, culminating in 1888, the year that he first began to develop a following (beginning with the Georg Brandes lectures on Nietzsche at the University of Copenhagen). Nietzsche collapsed into insanity early in January of 1889. Twilight of the Idols, part IV of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Antichrist, and Nietzsche Contra Wagner were all published after Nietzsche became incapacitated. Ecce Homo (behold the man) was published in 1908, eight years after Nietzsche's death. The Will to Power, an "organized" collection of aphorisms from Nietzsche's notebooks, was compiled and published by his sister in an evolving form between 1895 and 1904.

The Engineer's Obligation to Cultural Progress(1)

There is some indication that Walter Chrysler (figure 1) may have first experimented with the design of a "horse-less" carriage in the 1890’s, as a young man in Ellis, Kansas. If this is the case,
then Walter's first exposure to automotive engineering was perhaps typical of his generation. As a young, mechanically inclined adolescent on the Kansas prairie, he learned engineering from
practical experience and frequent inquiries to The Scientific American. Out of High School, Walter served an apprenticeship at the local railroad round house, and then left town to gain experience as both a locomotive mechanic and an effective manager of railroad "motive" power. As he moved around the western United States, Walter honed his understanding of engineering science with selfstudy, by picking the brains of fellow engineers, and with correspondence courses. He quickly developed a reputation for taking marginal shops and making them productive, usually staying for only a year or two before moving to the next, greater challenge. Eventually this led Walter to locomotive manufacture, and to his first job in the automotive industry'as head of the failing Buick division at General Motors, in 1912. Walter became more interested in automobiles in 1905, when he saw a "Locomobile" at the Chicago Auto Show. He borrowed most of the $5,000 purchase price, and had the car shipped to his home in Oelwein, Iowa. Then, rather than taking the car for a spin, he had it towed into a barn, where he spent his free time dismantling and re-assembling the car. In a classic example of reengineering, Walter saw how the parts functioned together, gained familiarity with the design, and was then able to imagine how the design might be improved. Although he would be involved with railroad locomotives for another seven years, he was well prepared to move into automobile
production when the opportunity materialized. While Buick was interested in Chrysler's renowned management skills, Walter also understood the engineering process and how it might be applied to the automobile.