4/27/2007
4/26/2007
SUPERHERO PHYSICS
From an article in MIT news:
When the Green Goblin kidnapped Spiderman's girlfriend, Gwen Stacey, and pushed her from the George Washington Bridge to her death, the debate raged in comic book circles for years: Was it the fall that killed her or Spidey's attempt to save her by catching her in webbing mid-fall, causing her neck to snap?
If Gwen has a mass of 50 kilograms, falls 300 feet and acquires a velocity of 95 mph, there would be 10g of force on her body, which she could potentially survive. But stopping short against all that force in half a second would certainly break her neck, as the Green Goblin declared in a later issue after Kakalios was widely quoted making the same calculation. "If I can teach a homicidal maniac like the Green Goblin about forces and motion, I'm making a difference," he said.
4/19/2007
UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL, BOSTON
Mary Oliver
The trees on the hospital lawn
are lush and thriving. They too
are getting the best of care,
like you, and the anonymous many,
in the clean rooms high above this city,
where day and night the doctors keep
arriving, where intricate machines
chart with cool devotion
the murmur of the blood,
the slow patching-up of bone,
the despair of the mind.
When I come to visit and we walk out
into the light of a summer day,
we sit under the trees —
buckeyes, a sycamore, and one
black walnut brooding
high over a hedge of lilacs
as old as the red-brick building
behind them, the original
hospital built before the Civil War.
We sit on the lawn together, holding hands
while you tell me: you are better.
How many young men, I wonder,
came here, wheeled on cots off the slow trains
from the red and hideous battlefields
to lie all summer in the small and stuffy chambers
while doctors did what they could, longing
for tools still unimagined, medicines still unfound,
wisdoms still unguessed at, and how many died
staring at the leaves of the trees, blind
to the terrible effort around them to keep them alive?
I look into your eyes
which are sometimes green and sometimes gray,
and sometimes full of humor, but often not,
and tell myself, you are better,
because my life without you would be
a place of parched and broken trees.
Later walking the corridors down to the street,
I turn and step inside an empty rom.
Yesterday someone was here with a gasping face.
Now the bed is made all new,
the machines have been rolled away. The silence
continues, deep and neutral,
as I stand there, loving you.
4/10/2007
HEARTBREAK
A fiction anthology edited by my girl has been out for about a month now. Publisher said it sold out quickly at National Katipunan – of course the stock was probably low to begin with, but still, you'll have to agree that's still something, considering how poorly sales of local books fare in this country.
4/02/2007
THE WIRE
It gets kind of sad when you know there's this one great show that totally blows you away, that at times you can't stop thinking about and would want to discuss with someone, but nobody you know has watched it or has even heard of it.
What's more sad is, after I got hooked on The Wire and started reading about it on the Internet, I found out that not much of anyone else around the world has been watching it either despite all the critical acclaim it's received.
But then I suppose this HBO series really isn't for mainstream audiences. For one, it's a cop drama that doesn't have any wild car chases, flashy gunfights or on-cue music. It's gritty, raw, has tons of swearing, sex, violence that'll make you wince, and is hell of a lot more complex than what most people are used to comprehending on the idiot box.
I usually pride myself in being able to guess what's going to happen next in a story, but in The Wire, I find myself constantly surprised and on edge, owing to its subtle writing and the total absence of cliches and stock situations. In a show that carries about fifteen major characters and probably triple or quadruple that amount of side characters, it's just amazing how each one is so fleshed out, delivering some of the best dialogues you're ever going to hear, on-screen or otherwise.
If I can't convince you, take a look at Metacritic.com (a site which gathers reviews from the likes of the Los Angeles Times and Time Magazine), where in their TV section The Wire ranks at the top with a 98% score (an average of 21 major publications reviews) – the only other two shows coming close to it are The Sopranos and Battlestar Galactica. When even a very minor character in a show gets a full article from the New York Times, and with Stephen King raving about her (“perhaps the most terrifying female villain to ever appear in a television series”), wouldn't you even be the least bit curious?
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