The Big Picture has a series of photographs on September 11, which is brilliant as usual. Such a great website.
I remember when The Big Picture didn’t exist, and the world was a much darker place.
Gordon Brown has issued a posthumous apology to Alan Turing, a great mathematician and father of modern computer science. He was also gay, found guilty of gross indecency after WWII was over, and chemically castrated. It was horrific treatment for which an apology was richly deserved, even if it’s much too late for Turing to hear it himself. It’s a good statement, so nice work to England for doing this. I look forward to the time when this kind of thing is an even more distant memory.
Courtesy of my friend Sweet Machine and person-I-don’t-know Joshua Robbins, here’s a poem by Dorianne Laux from 9/10/2002. I really like it, and hope you do too.
Cello
When a dead tree falls in a forest
it often falls into the arms
of a living tree. The dead,
thus embraced, rasp in wind,
slowly carving a niche
in the living branch, shearing away
the rough outer flesh, revealing
the pinkish, yellowish, feverish
inner bark. For years
the dead tree rubs its fallen body
against the living, building
its dead music, making its raw mark,
wearing the tough bough down
as it moans and bends, the deep
rosined bow sound of the living
shouldering the dead.
Buy Dorianne Laux’s book Facts About The Moon from W. W. Norton.