Still On My Feet

.

Given the ungodly number of hours that I’ve been awake, busy, and on my feet in the past two days, I find it a monumentally cosmic injustice that it is still only Tuesday.

Sunday night after Christian Artists’ Group was spent back in the lab at MICA, working on a webcam performance piece. At 3am of Monday morning, with the video work exported and uploaded, I walked out to Penn Station, hoping to catch a taxi home. There were none; the station was closed and deserted. A brief internal debate ensued, as to whether I should call for a taxi on my cellphone, or just walk back to the lab and sleep for the two hours it would take till the light rail opened.

The latter option won, but sleep was brief.

At 5am, I awoke, boarded the light rail, stayed home long enough to shower and dress, then was off once more to Penn Station to catch the MARC train to work. A half day of work, the MARC train back to Baltimore, vandaWeb class till 10pm, two more hours spent working on that webcam piece, taxi home, do laundry, dry laundry, fold laundry, sleep, wake, back to MICA, present webcam piece in class, fall into couch in lab, sleep, wake, dinner, back to lab, blog.

That’s it. I’m going home and unplugging.

Nixon Contingency Moon Speech

.

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace…”

It turns out President Nixon had a contingency speech ready in case the astronauts of Apollo 11 were irretrievably stranded on the moon. How morbid is that?

ZDE on OS X

.

The good news is that Zend Studio, an excellent Java-based PHP development environment, runs smooth and fast on MacOS X. The bad news is that it forgets your preferences and key bindings as soon as you exit, so that you have to set them again and remember not to Command-Q when you’re done working.

Columbia Down

.

Good God. We just lost another space shuttle.

NASA: STS-107 Mission Status Page.

Jim Flowers: “Shuttle Lost” metablog.

Time.com: Three Possibilities.

Scripting News: Lots of links.

Instapundit: The “Zipper” Effect.

Apparently Columbia broke up at an altitude of over 200,000 feet, while travelling at Mach 18. CNN is showing videos of the shuttle breaking up in a cloud of flaming debris, and pieces have been falling over the South, from TX to LA, right along the landing trajectory.

NASA says that a launch video shows a piece of insulated foam falling from the external tank and striking the wing during ascent, but saw no reason for concern. My initial piece of uninformed conjecture is that the extreme stresses of launch and landing, combined with the age of Columbia’s 22-year old frame, may have exacerbated the effects of the impact into massive structural failure at some sensitive spot, exposing combustible material to the exterior so that the ram-pressure heat of reentry sparked an explosion.

My prayers go out to the families of the crew, and even now I hope against all cosmic unlikelihood for a miraculous survival.

Update: Ron Dittemoor, NASA shuttle program manager, has just spoken on the news. I only hear these words: “Sudden loss of … indicator in left wing … left wing … tire pressure in left main gear … left inboard and outboard hydraulic systems … left wing …”

Fire at Mile Long Building

.

Mile Long Building on fire. That was where I had my first job, interning as a Media 100 editor for Scene Stealers Productions, which was on that same floor that just burned up. My mom’s dentist is there too. I certainly hope they’re all still intact after this.

The Architecture of Doom

.

Just one link to offer from Crisis Century class yesterday: The Architecture of Doom, a brilliant documentary of esoteric insight into the artistic roots of Adolf Hitler’s ideology. His fixation on the “cleanness” of dramatically representational Western art, alongside his obsession with romanticized visions of the cultures of antiquity; with a dash of Eugenics twisted by extreme Darwinist supposition — these were among the primary conceptual influences of the Nazi genocidal superiority complex.

This film should be an especially poignant eye-opener to kneejerk Godwinist anti-theists who are over-quick to dismiss Nazism as the fault of Anti-Semitic Christians’ religious belief. A detailed study of Hitler’s artistic fixations shows that religion had far less to do with it than his own preoccupation with the supposed “superiority” of classic Western art, as well as his dreams of reviving the perfect race, based on an erroneously overblown concept of the Roman Empire, the Greek city-states, and other civilizations of antiquity.

Oh, and Cowboys and Indians, too.