Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

For the first day of spring... the glorious print of tulips from Robert John Thornton's stunning "Temple of Flora" and "The Sacred Egyptian Bean" (1807):



And.... for all in the southern hemisphere here's a rendition by the Trinity Choir of James Edmeston's 1820 hymn "Saviour, Breathe an Evening Blessing."

Rendition by the Trinity Choir of James Edmeston's 1820 hymn "Saviour, Breathe an Evening Blessing", which somehow, on its journey to disc, ended up being enigmatically appended with the title "Autumn". The composer is listed as being Louis Van Esch, about whom we couldn't find any information. An architect by profession, Edmeston was best known for his prolific hymn writing — the total number of which was said to total more than 2000, one written every Sunday.

"Savior, Breathe an Evening Blessing"
by James Edmeston

Savior, breathe an evening blessing
Ere repose our spirits seal,
Sin and want we come confessing;
Thou canst save, and Thou canst heal.

Though destruction walk around us,
Though the arrows past us fly,
Angel guards from Thee surround us;
We are safe if Thou art nigh.

Though the night be dark and dreary,
Darkness cannot hide from Thee; Thou art He who, never weary,
Watcheth where Thy people be.

Should swift death this night o'ertake us
And our couch become our tomb,
May the morn in heaven awake us,
Clad in light and deathless bloom.

The image seems to first appear in L’atmosphère: description des grands phénomènes de la Nature, written by Nicholas Camille Flammarion, a French astronomer in 1872. The image may have been made by Flammarion himself, and thus bears his name, but really we don’t know who created it. The image includes a caption which reads: “Un missionaire du moyen âge raconte qu’il avait lrouvé le point oû le ciel et la Terre touchent.” “A missionary from the Middle Ages says that he had found the place where heaven and earth touch.” We don’t know Flammarion’s source for this medieval missionary. All we know is that he appears to have used the image to showcase a mistaken understanding of the cosmos, namely a Christianized Ptolemaic understanding of the cosmos as one might find in Dante.

The Flammarion Engraving

The Flammarion engraving is a wood engraving by an unknown artist, so named because its first documented appearance is in Camille Flammarion's 1888 book L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire ("The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology"). The wood engraving has often, but erroneously, been referred to as a woodcut. It has been used as a metaphorical illustration of either the scientific or the mystical quests for knowledge and, more recently, of the psychedelic experience.






1983 Winner of four Primetime Emmy's SPECIAL BULLETIN began with Mr. Zwick's dream of nuclear annihilation. The TV movie premiered on NBC on March 20, 1983. When this film was first broadcast, the network superimposed the word "dramatization" on the bottom of the screen every few minutes and ran disclaimers after every commercial break, to remind people it was only a movie. That didn't stop some people in Charleston, South Carolina from panicking anyway.


Excerpt from the director's book Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood (2024) by Ed Zwick:

During one such sob session, I told him about a terrifying dream I'd had the night before about seeing TV news of imminent nuclear annihilation, and how I woke up, sweating and unable to breathe, still believing it to be real.

"We should do it!" he said.

"Do what?"

"Pitch it as a movie!"

"I'm talking about an anxiety attack, not a development deal!"

"I'm serious," he said. "What if we were to tell a story on TV but we did it only through what you would be able to see on the news."

"You mean, like Orson Welles's War of the Worlds?"

"Except not about aliens. We'll choose something more plausible and terrifying."

"Like nuclear annihilation, you mean."

"And we'll create all the news footage ourselves."

"Like The Battle of Algiers?"

"Never heard of it."

And so it began.

Book excerpt: "Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions" by Ed Zwick

Dick Higgins, the Navy radioman whose amphibious plane was utterly demolished in the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, died Tuesday in Bend, Oregon. He was 102.

Higgins was born July 24, 1921, to a cotton-farming family in Oklahoma that was besieged by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl ecological disaster, Higgins said during a video interview in 2022 with the American Warriors YouTube channel.

He enlisted in the Navy in 1939 and trained as a radio operator.

At the time of the attack, Higgins was stationed on Ford Island as a radioman in a squadron of PBY Catalina amphibious planes, which were used for patrol bombing and anti-submarine warfare. They could carry bombs and torpedoes.

A PBY hangar on Ford Island was the first thing to be bombed that morning, noise that sent Higgins and his fellow sailors racing to get outside, he said in the interview. They were stopped by Marine Corps guards at the doors.

“They wouldn’t let us out until the first wave had slacked off a bit,” he said. “[The Japanese] were strafing everything that moved — and some things that didn’t.”

When they did exit, most ran to the runway to roll undamaged PBYs away from the blazing remains of others.

“We were very busy that morning trying to save planes,” Higgins said in the interview. “There were tracers going right past the wing of the plane I was pushing on,” he said.

“The plane I flew wasn’t there; it was a crater about seven feet deep and 20 feet in diameter. No PBY anywhere.”

It likely had disintegrated from the explosion of its full gas tanks and bombs, he said.

Higgins was unscathed by the attack.

“I didn’t even get a Band-Aid,” he said. “I guess I lucked out.”

Luck stayed with him for the rest of the war as he flew missions in a PBY in the vicinity of what is now Indonesia.

Higgins made a career in the Navy, retiring in 1959 as a chief petty officer. In subsequent years he worked for General Dynamics and Northrup Corp.

Stars And Stripes

When I was stationed on Ford Island I would sometimes walk the old airstrip tarmac and count the bullet holes (hundreds) from the Jap strafing.


Shall we play a game?

In Greek mythology, Tantalus so angered Zeus with his treachery that his punishment was to go thirsty and hungry while standing in an always receding pool of water with bountiful fruit trees just above his reach. His fate serves as a reminder to humanity that foolish actions can lead to unpredictable and enduring consequences.

At Sandia, the name Tantalus is associated with an experimental multiplayer online war game used to study different conditions within cyberdeterrence strategy. More importantly, the game is a human research study to gather data about how people’s decisions during threatening situations can impact national security.

“We’re interested in understanding the theory of cyberdeterrence — the notion that the threat of cyberattacks can modify or inhibit the actions of others,” Jon Whetzel, the lead online game designer, said.

To learn more about the human element of cyberdeterrence, researchers pursued increasing Sandia’s experimental war-gaming capabilities, and the Program for Experimental Gaming and Analysis of Strategic Interaction Scenarios created Tantalus. As part of the PEGASIS portfolio, Tantalus was a three-year Laboratory Directed Research and Development project on cyberdeterrence funded through the Energy and Homeland Security Investment Area Team. The project recently ended, and the team published its preliminary findings in September.

Combining scientific rigor with the art of war game design

Tantalus is unlike most war games because it is experimental instead of experiential — the immersive game differs by overlapping scientific rigor and quantitative assessment methods with the experimental sciences.

“We consider real-world problems,” said systems research analyst Jason Reinhardt. “And the war games are a laboratory where we can experiment on deterrence problems and understand how they change under different circumstances.”

Tantalus is a three-player war game where players navigate between building and defending their nation. Players act as the leader of a hypothetical country with a mission to increase key “metrics” in their country’s mining, infrastructure and manufacturing while fending off attacks from rival countries. The game consists of 12 to 18 randomly selected rounds, with four phases per round: Planning, Threats, Revision and Execution. Players choose to influence or deter each other by force (kinetic, cyber or nuclear) or engage in espionage.

“We wanted to have the players strive for something that could be taken out of reach by the other players,” Jon said.

Full article: Sandia cybersecurity analysts created an online war game - Press the "Start Tantalus!" button to access the tutorial and game! Only Chrome and Firefox are supported.



Another victim of the dreaded "loss of confidence" - WTF is going on!!!

Naval Special Warfare Command commander Rear Adm. Keith Davids relived the commodore of Naval Special Warfare Group Eight Wednesday, citing a loss of confidence.

The Special Warfare Command release does not indicate where Capt. Richard Zaszewski, who took on the command in August 2021, according to his releasable biography, will go. Deputy Commodore Capt. Stig Sanness assumed the commodore duties.

“There is no impact to NSWG-8’s mission readiness,” reads the release.

There are no additional details about what led to the loss of confidence in Zaszewski’s ability to command.

Zaszewski’s career has mostly been in special warfare since he commissioned into the Navy through the Villanova University Reserve Officer Training Corps. He reported to his first East Coast-based special warfare unit in May 1998.

Since then, he has been a part of nine other special warfare units. His releasable biography does not indicate which units or what billets he had.

Prior to taking over as commodore of Naval Special Warfare Group Eight, Zaszewski was at the Joint Special Operations Command in Fort Bragg, N.C.

Over his career, Zaszewski has been awarded a Silver Star, three Bronze Stars and a Legion of Merit, among other commendations.

Navy Removes Special Warfare Group 8 Commodore from Command

Hmmm, there's Fort Bragg again.



Ultra Rare Pepsi guaranteed original early 1950s cone top design can.


I've seen a few on eBay going for $1000 dollars, for one!


Sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor designed Ocean Atlas, a 60 ton, 18-foot high sculpture that lies beneath the sea near New Providence in the Bahamas. It represents a young girl holding the weight of the ocean. He has underwater sculptures all over the world.




First trailer for Fede Alvarez's Alien: Romulus (2024) movie. The new Alien film takes place between the events of Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) and while the film does not directly follow the Ellen Ripley story arc - it very much still connects to the first two films, as well as Ridley Scott's Alien prequels Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. Alien: Romulus' official release date is set for August 16th, 2024.




Weird Al warned us...