On photography…

Far from the maddening crowd. I walked away thinking in "Lipstick" they had actually shot part of the film with one of those motor-driven fashion cameras, put directly in the film, it gave a sense of the pressure. Those flashes at events are horrid. The changes in photography have been amazing, though. I once measured 3D info from flat photos in close-range photogrammetry developed by Rollei, brought aerial photos to Earth, from a series of purposefully "oblique" photos then measured on a digitizing "tablet". Canada wanted something for our air-crashes in Gander, Newfoundland (Brits use for car ones). The laser imaging chip was invented at Los Alamos, NM, which has revolutionized “as-built” recording and other uses, CGI in cinematography, architecture, modeling, etc.  I have a new small camera and have gotten used to not holding it up to my eye!

See for example:  Laser light, GPS, Subaru used for precise glacier measurement – Fairbanks Daily News-Miner one month ago.

One of the last Liberty ships...

I recall working on a "predictive model" of archaeology resources on the Passaic River in New Jersey back in the early 1980s. Near the mouth of the river was a large scrap yard. We happened on one gentleman who showed us onto the property with proper ID from the US Army Corps of Engineers. He mentioned that the ship at dockside, was one of the last Liberty ships, over 2000 constructed in World War II, ("The 250,000 parts were pre-fabricated throughout the country in 250-ton sections...")  and it was being scrapped. I consulted Wikipedia and narrowed down the search to these three, the only reported among the last scrapped Liberty ships:

• SS Henry L. Pittock  24 June 1943 Russia 1943 as Askold, later Dalryba, scrapped 1982

Named for the famous 19th century American newspaper publisher in Portland, Oregon.

• SS Samlamu 14 June 1944 Sold private 1947, scrapped 1982

"Loan Great Britain" Later traveled in the South Pacific, i.e., New Zealand, etc.  “ex- Samlamu, 1947 purchased from MOWT renamed Kingsbury, 1960 sold to Poland renamed Huta Bedzin.”

• SS Thomas Nelson 4 April 1942 Kamikazied off Leyte 1944, repaired, converted to diesel 1956, scrapped 1981

Army Transportation Service. Named for the famous American patriot who replaced Thomas Jefferson as Governor of Virginia.

So I think, from the date when I visited the scrap yard in New Jersey and this info, it appears that one of the last Liberty ships scrapped, and in New Jersey, may have been used by the Russians at first in war and then for fishing before scrapped, the SS Henry L. Pittock, as the Russian Dalryba or perhaps was scrapped by Poland as the Huta Bedzin ("Bedzin Ironworks"). Many ships and boats (PT boats JFK served on) were built in New Jersey some reportedly lengthened like the "P2" my grandfather Lawrence G. Urquhart served on, the USS Admiral E. W. Eberle  which was renamed U.S. Army Transport General Simon B. Buckner and then USNS General Simon B. Buckner. One of the few, perhaps, US Navy ships, named after an Army general. My grandfather used to joke they built so many ships, they ran out of admirals and had to start naming them after generals! I’m inclined to think it was the Huta Bedzin as it seems to stir some part of the little grey cells as Hercule Poirot used to say.

Interestingly, the Liberty ship SS George B. Cortelyou, the only ship in US history to ever been named "Cetus" (after the whale constellation, and when renamed) was as, the keel was laid down, named after the native New Yorker, who held three Cabinet posts under Presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, VP when President McKinley died from an assassin’s bullet, eight days after an attempt on his life in Buffalo, New York at the Pan-American Exposition, also attended by Mr. Cortelyou. He is sometimes credited as our "first White House Press Secretary" (US National Archives journal article) inviting the press in to inform them about the wounded President McKinley, then expected to recover. He started as a short-hand teacher in NYC and later was Chairman of the Republican Party and after serving as Postmaster General, lived at "Harbor Lights" in Huntington, NY, recently up for sale. The first known New York historically recorded, "Cortelyou" was a Jacques Cortelyou hired by the Dutch to survey Brooklyn, NY and a "downtown" street there bears that surname. So, the only official US ship ever named after “whales” once also had a French-American name.

Dangerous Minds | Tropic of Cancer: the movie (and the summer solstice in Northern hemisphere)

Jun 11, 2010 George Stephen Myers says:

Thank you for the link to “Ulysses”. To think I had to “go to China” to see it seems outrageous or at the very least, extreme. Here, we have Mayor Bloomburg, hardly Leopold. I’ve seen a few live productions at the university level (Stony Brook, where Nobel laureate C.N. Yang taught) of “Ulysses in Night Town” and attempted to read the story a number of times and I thought the film wonderfully close to the authors intent, a masterful use of cinema to tell a story, one hard to understand in print, though in retrospect, once kept out of the USA by “legal” prejudice.

Jun 11, 2010 George S. Myers says:

I also noticed the so-called “Vulcan salute” from TV’s “Star Trek” (1966) used by the “alien” Mr. Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy, is shown also used by “Leopold Bloom” played by Milo O’Shea in “Ulysses” (1967) directed by recently deceased Joseph Strick. It’s in a “dream sequence” where he’s mayor of Dublin, Ireland or somewhere near that in the film. Mr. Nimoy states it is from the Jewish worship he attended.

Dangerous Minds | Tropic of Cancer: the movie

Faisal Shahzad, Times Square Car Bomb Suspect, Pleads Guilty To 'Mass Destruction' Charge

Could this guy be considered delusional? To my knowledge, from a few years of listening to this topic reported by the press and tested by the US Army, depicted in a photo in Newsday on Long Island, (once also published in the Bronx, gone after a headline of "44 Blocks of Boos" reporting on then Mayor Giuliani's attendance in the yearly Puerto Rican Day parade) that so-called fertilizer bombs have to be immersed in oil and nothing less than very unstable mercury fulminate used to make it "exothermic" otherwise one big "ridiculous" if that's allowed, attempt at terrorism. Will there be any consideration whether this had potentially any "real" probability of working? Not that I support said acts of terror in any form, this one perhaps a different "orchestration" by Muslim devotees.

Faisal Shahzad, Times Square Car Bomb Suspect, Pleads Guilty To 'Mass Destruction' Charge#comment_51224413

Further: It was reported to have been parked outside the headquarters of Comedy Central, Inc. where the controversial stop motion cartoon, "South Park" had been admonished for its mis-use of the Prophet Mohammad in its "comedy" of mostly children and some adults. Or is it?

Surveying Wildlife in Alaska - Readers' Comments - NYTimes.com

I read that the drilling there is non-destructive because the rigs "walk" on the tundra (NY Times mag.) We've been going through a tundra warming in Alaska, and glaciers have also melted further south. I worked in the Federal archeology of Skagway, AK, the gold-rush town about 90 miles from Juneau, without a road from there to it. It is an international port, and has a railroad, and now vehicle road into the Canadian Yukon and British Columbia. I wonder, seeing some mineral resources go overseas to Asia, pre-processed molybdenum for steel production rail-shipped out of B.C., then freighter from Skagway ("home of the north wind") if we might explore obtaining resources a little closer to home rather than mukluking in the melting tundra, as some have predicted. After all Canada is a very large country. Who'd have thought diamonds would be mined there? Surveying Wildlife in Alaska - Readers' Comments - NYTimes.com Bronx, NY June 21st, 2010 12:33 pm

msnbc.com technology & science - Experts to tunnel for Aztec rulers' tombs

I would hope it might further explain the trade in turquoise and peyote in the American Southwest where ancient turquoise mines are found. I was told there is a room outside Pueblo Bonita that had over a million pieces in it and two "Meso-American" style burials under it. A professor had a National Science Foundation grant at Stony Brook University for the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in New York years ago for "neutron activation trace element analysis in statistical hyperspace" which would allow "signatures" of turquoise retrieved in clinal sampling, at great risk it appeared to me then by a university in Illinois, thin columns holding up ceilings, and the origin or "fake" artifacts found attributed to Aztecan art determined to be "real" or not. The method also can be used to determine the "signature" of modern materials and purity of constituents for materials research, so a large national center has been opened by a consortium of universities, which should lead to better materials, i.e., longer lasting and stronger, etc. Hyperspace was like stacking spreadsheets, invented since and finding patterns for the trace elements amounts, through the levels of data, or spreadsheets. Most desktop programs now can do that. msnbc.com technology & science - Experts to tunnel for Aztec rulers' tombs#comments

On receiving an invitation to the NRA…

One step forward two steps back they used to say about the USSR. Now we too step back and execute people with rifles, in my opinion two steps back. 17,000 Latvian Rifles brought the Russian Revolution, and I think the Latvians also ended it, though the fodder shortage and the breakdown of "state-barter" systems had a lot to do with it. I recall 1963, JFK shot and killed and being shown pictures of the first woman given the electric chair in Cook County, Illinois, a newsman's smuggled photo and large gatherings of people for hanging in the desert West. I was in the last public hanging location in New York state Mayville, NY near Lake Chautauqua, a couple of times, this time when our governor was suggesting the death penalty for a Mr. Williams, accused of purposefully infecting underage white girls with the HIV virus. Times have changed, only one news truck with a satellite link outside the county-seat courthouse. Is this what the Supreme Court decided to bring back? Two steps?

Al Franken Slams Supreme Court For Dismantling Legal Protections

One of New York state's famous lawyers, and there's been a few, Lewis Henry Morgan, once posited three evolutionary stages of "state formation" 1) savagery 2) barbarism and 3) civilization. I object to a court that "looks back" onto the US Constitution and considers it anything other than 3). Those other two stages were usually led by a small circle of "supreme" people who relied on the interpreters of entrails, birds, weather, gas-induced oracles and other hooey. #comment_50901057

I used to listen to Senator Franken on "Air America" when his daughter was teaching public school in the Bronx, NY where I am and where the most recent Supreme Court justice, the Honorable Sotomayor, is from. I've even read one of his books! But these warnings he's telling us about, and it's not because I used to dig archaeology test holes around Princeton University with the grand-daughter of a co-founder of the ACLU, who is now on the Register of Professional Archaeologists, or that I sat there next to President Theodore Roosevelt's great-grand-daughter also an archaeologist at a conference in Forbes College (where one can actually get a meal on campus) at Princeton University, or my former Stony Brook U.'s professor, Elizabeth Stone is trying to help put back Iraq's (and the world's) archaeology or that I tested Fort Drum, NY back in '83 before the "mountain was sent to Mohammad" his warnings are very worrisome. I think the Supreme Court should leave the US Constitution alone or at least for PR visit "the last Federalist", Presidential candidate, our first New York US Senator and our first Ambassador to England for the new republic, fought slavery in the North, a public park in Jamaica, Queens his residence, now across from the new Family Court, the home of Rufus King, after they have the Constitution in tatters, like the Congress came to NYC for a session after 9/11/2001.  Al Franken Slams Supreme Court For Dismantling Legal Protections (VIDEO)#comment_50908716

In the view of an anthropologist how would Sep 11, 2001 influence a person? - Yahoo! Answers

In the view of an anthropologist how would Sep 11, 2001 influence a person? - Yahoo! Answers

First we might consider if it was over cows, wars, pigs or witches, topics anthropologists are often concerned with and narrow it down, for "influence". In the political economy, it resulted from some ideas in order to have been completed. Take for example "Ground Zero" a term that when I asked a newsman for its origin, that is who used it not what it means, he had no source, but it came from people in charge and carried around the world by media, influencing many. The original term over Hiroshima, is a misnomer the a-bomb exploded over the ground. Depending upon one's circle of distance away from "ground zero" from those events in Japan, a differential compensation is paid for those suffering from the effects of the radiation exposure and collateral damage. No policy as far as I know has been proposed or considered for the events of 9/11/2001, particularly for NYC where it was described, i.e., "ground zero".

It seems we might consider that it is over wars, conducted overseas that we cannot stop, i.e., the opium crop in Afghanistan, as much as we would like to, without devoting a large part of our political economy to supporting idle Afghans. We once tried that to return wild Atlantic salmon to the rivers of Maine, they have such good fishing in nearby New Brunswick, Canada. We'd dammed the river, spent much on the "fish-ladders" and then paid off the fishermen of Greenland, where it's thought the little fish grow. Former head of the Dept. of Interior's idea. Didn't work. The US Air Force finally bombed the dams and maybe now Americans can fish in their own country! Unfortunately our Illinois Air Guard bombed and killed some Canadian troops in Afghanistan, apparently on some mood-altering drug, many untested (anthrax vaccine, etc.) it's said tried out in America's new "Unconventional war". That leaves out the cows, pigs and witches and puts the "wars" "casus belli" which might be misleading, perhaps the "daisy cutter" and other bombs killing any life that needs oxygen in a certain area perhaps even more the reason, in "peasant" societies the basis for plotting revenge.

Source(s):

Marvin Harris, "The Rise of Anthropological Theory" and "Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches" a compendium of articles.

• 6 days ago

Quiero a presentarme mi poco amiga...

"I want to introduce my little friend..." Those were the days. Poco would play at the local school and Amiga computers had not been invented yet. Of course you might also think...hey...that's from "Scarface" and cocaine was not a huge friggin' problem...yet and automatic pistols and rifles weren't something one saw on the evening news. Even now I try to remember what was scary about the Poco concert? Crowd control, you sway with it and you might end up on the ground. In very tight crowds it's recommended to get into the "fetal position" and you will eventually pop up like a cork from the breathless bodies crushed together. I don't recall the rest of that advice though. Do you walk or crawl over the dead breathless victims of bad crowd control? Probably "swim" and think of Bruce Lee fighting up the different floors of the pagoda, (...called Palsang-jon, the only remaining wooden pagoda in South Korea - Wikipedia) and at the top finding Kareem Abdul-Jabar? ("The Game of Death" - 1978)

EPA Seeks Review Of Plum Island Animal Site

 
The "Brooklyn Eagle" once characterized Donald Trump's father, a developer there as "Blitzkrieg Trump" over the development of one of the battlegrounds in the "Battle of Long Island" which General Washington lost and was saved from defeat by Glover's Massachusetts's Marbleheaders in the Bronx, giving him enough time to escape to fight another day. After the development a history of the area was handed to the purchasers of the houses, in what was "Paerdegat Woods" it was said. There were perhaps the fallen there. (See also: "Brooklyn 'Forest' is site for homes; Paerdegat Woods in Flatbush Section Giving Way to Trump's Project" NY Times, May 19, 1940)

As once an assigned "Program Director" for the Suffolk County Archaeology Association, in grad school at Stony Brook University on Long Island, I seem recall reading the property on Plum Island, NY used by the government, was first purchased from a DAR woman (Daughters of the American Revolution) 115 or 150 acres? Shouldn't that be a part of the study they will do? I also heard the first military battle of the American Revolutionary War may have been fought there. Perhaps over, like nearby Montauk, to protect from raids on the sheep herds by the hungry British Navy or others. There a muster of men marched in full view around a hill, out-of-sight, reversed  jackets, and then marched around the other side of the hill, dissuading, by apparent numbers and "turning-coats", sea-raiding. It was organized by a veteran of the "Green Mountain Boys" and native of Bridgehampton, Captain Hulbert, a design for the US flag submitted in his name, allegedly the 13 stars in the shape of the "star of David" in the blue corner above the stripes, a copy in the Suffolk County History Museum in Riverhead, NY, found however, to have been machine woven in the 19th century, by the Smithsonian Institution. A "Green Mountain" design was of the 13 star-pattern seen overhead in Vermont. American history still records that some design was submitted.

The Suffolk County, New York "seal" (not MA or VA) depicts a large steer. A record book of "cattle brands" now in the State Museum in Albany, legally recorded the brand design from the 1600s until the 1960s. I hope its history will not be ignored. The Rough Riders were in quarantine there on Montauk, after coming back from the Spanish American War. I think the site of the lab had more than just "remote" in it and suspect it may also have historical significance beyond its community restored lighthouse. Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

270-Year-Old Almshouse Discovered Under City Hall Park -- Daily Intel

Much of its cemetery is thought further to the north, under the watchful eyes of the Horace Greeley statue, where he sits in a chair, said to have said "Go west young man and grow up with the country". Nearby is a monument to Joseph Pulitzer from the days when reporters would clamber at the fence for a story from City Hall, "Newspaper Row" across the street. In 1999 some of the burials were found in the security and other improvements to City Hall Park under then Mayor Giuliani, who came out to see our work a couple of times. Most were treated where they were and left in situ, discovered in the upgrades to the City Hall Park, I recall then ~$17 mil?

Another ceremony was being conducted over the Federal cemetery, in 1999, the "Middle Passage" the term for the roughest part of Atlantic Ocean crossing, where those who hadn't survived were said to be dumped overboard, was commemorated, from a terrible time when slavery in the US had to be fought and Great Britain blockaded Africa from slave-running. The tribute left the Roberto Clemente State Park, at the Harlem River dockside and for every burial removed at the now African Burial Ground National Monument, a mile was traveled out into the Atlantic and there the sculpture commissioned, like two standing whale ribs, was dumped into the ocean. It was reported that small replicas of the sculpture were sold in the Caribbean.

I am glad the impact-directed and archaeological monitoring has finally found the "elusive" so-called "First Almshouse" though some of New Amsterdam's earliest settlers were youths from Holland's almshouses who stayed at Isaac Allerton's Warehouse, outside "The Wall". A monument was placed there over a century ago by The Mayflower Society, today, gone and the parking lot in the South Street Historic District, used by many to visit there and the tragedy of September 11, 2001. Allerton Ave. is an exit between the Bronx Wildlife Conservation Society (Bronx Zoo) and the Bronx Botanical Gardens on the Nation's oldest motor parkway, the Bronx River Parkway.

270-Year-Old Almshouse Discovered Under City Hall Park -- Daily Intel  By georgejmyersjr on 06/04/2010 at 4:04pm

The Globe And Mail: The 'Graveyard of the Atlantic’ – reborn

“A fog-shrouded place of dunes, shipwrecks and wild horses, Sable Island is on track to becoming Canada’s newest national park”  Note: see ponies?

6/3/2010 9:52:22 PM
My grandfather, from Grand Manan Island, NB, encouraged us to visit with him from NYC in the US to Canada. Last time to Seal Cove, I recall, Guelph U. was doing a DNA and behavior study of the "right whales" our countries share, which, from on-line sources has been quite successful so far, i.e., Cape Cod warning system, etc. On an earlier visit to Grand Manan, I was thrilled to read about a US National Geographic trip to Sable Island, and I am still mesmerized by shifting sands and ships that appear and disappear in that once very dangerous part of the sea. More recently I was alarmed to see a plan, in a full page advertisement in the New York Times, for a gas/oil platform, nearby Sable Island, in what's been reported the roughest water, the North Atlantic, and a plan for it, a natural gas pipeline to Quebec. More recently I was also surprised to read that perhaps the largest gas reserves ever found, are in the much safer underground of New Brunswick. I will probably never step foot on Sable (French: "sand") Island, but inspiration for me to think of other islands, particularly Long Island, NY (actually many islands) growing up. I hope it is preserved and enjoyed in the coming years.

Washington Post: E.J. Dionne Jr. - David Souter vs. the Antonin Scalias

From a collection about Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, a photo of a practice when the dead are found along a lonely road in Ireland. (The Unnamable)

---

Not at Harvard University's commencement speech by former Supreme Court Justice David Souter from New Hampshire (not there either, sometimes I am on Memorial Day) I thought to say something from the new "fountain of justice" New York City:

Washington Post:

E.J. Dionne Jr. - David Souter vs. the Antonin Scalias

georgejmyers wrote: The Constitition states that in the amount of $20 and over a citizen has a right to a trial by a jury of his peers. I don't see that happening in the Bronx, NY. All undercover "buy and busts" involve often that or less, at least in my Grand Jury experience of over 240 cases in one four week session. Where's the rights of jurists? I had to swear them in!

I'm afraid the spelling of "Constitution" was not on purpose, though someone might see it that way.

ESA - Human Spaceflight and Exploration - A chance to name Europe’s next astronaut mission

This would be my entry, feel free to submit it: New Projections which Bing translates: Nuove Proiezioni
 
However, there is a map reference my friend owns, bought in Europe at the end of the World War II:

La Germania

divifa

Ne Suoi Circoli

Di Nuova Projezione

Venezia.1776

Preffo Antonio Zatta

Con Privilegio dell’ Eccellentmo Senato

G. Zuliani, Inc.

I think perhaps “Nuova Projezione” might look better, and more in keeping with “2001: A Space Odyssey”.

I worked with an early Rolleimetric 3D metric recording system back in 1990s using 80386/80387 CPUs. Reseau crosses on a glass plate documented film stretch (documented medium format camera and specific lens data) photos, 8"x10" were processed and 3D points digitized on a large GTCO digitizing tablet and magnifying "puck" for archaeology recording in an EPA Superfund site in Cold Spring, NY, which recovered the Parrott rifled cannon gun platform perhaps used to fire on Charleston, South Carolina in 1863 in the American Civil War. Known as the "Swamp Angel" 200 pound shells and 300 pound shells, thought incendiary, and fired with brass "sabot" (attached foot found the rifling) some of which then President Lincoln witnessed. The cannon exploded in the swamp in South Carolina and citizens of Trenton, New Jersey raised money to exhibit it there. (“Swamp Angel”) I have to wonder if they had broken the "sound barrier" one "misfire" required that the Federal government repair the first Catholic church in the Hudson Valley:

The Chapel of Our Lady roman Catholic church was built in 1833 and served the local congregation from 1834 until Our Lady of Loretto opened on Fair St in 1907. When Chapel of Our Lady opened in 1834 it was the first Roman Catholic diocese in NY north of 14th. St. in New York City. ("Chapel of Our Lady" flickr.com)

Nearby to the West Point Foundry across the Hudson River from the military academy, I read it was the first religious structure in the US that the government had to repair, found at fault. Also nearby are the now demolished defensive works on Constitution Island, designed by Dutch patriot Bernard Romans, cartographer to the American Revolutionary Army, still part of West Point Military Academy. A stone dike, now broken, used to connect Constitution Island with the West Point Foundry manufacturing and railhead core. Jules Verne used the West Point Foundry in his 1865 novel, "From Earth To The Moon" the first to be translated into English from French in 1865. His 1863 "Five Weeks in a Balloon" and 1864 "Journey to the Center of the Earth" were translated later into English, in 1869 and 1871, respectively.