pendulous movement
I grew up in a college town. I still identify as a townie even, but that's not the point on this post, this post is about pendulous movement (not bipedal pendulous movement, which is pretty excellent all by itself, but should be saved for another post).
There was a building on campus that had a ginormous foucault pendulum in it. I could not remember the name of the building - save for that it was next to the door I used to break into the chemistry building via, and had a telescope on the roof which I once used quite late at night to view mars or some such. The interweb taught me (relearned?) that it is in fact Culler hall.
The pendulum though, it was amazing. a bowling ball sized orb (marble maybe?) with a downward pointing metal spike. It was attached to a 10 meter or so long cable. Centered below this fine mechanism was an array of pegs resting evenly placed about a circle.
I discovered this right around the same time I first read the pit and the pendulum which made the whole thing even cooler (probably 4th or 5th grade), but it was pretty damned cool all on its own.
The whole point of this thing was that the rotation of the earth caused the pendulum to pivot slightly and predictably. you could even tell the time by how many pins had been knocked over. it was cool as shit. it was so cool that you didn't want to mess with it even though there would (at least for me) have been a huge temptation to do so normally.
a rather handy explaination can be found in the wikiverse.
why does all of this matter? well because pendulous movement is the answer to a lot of questions people ask: from the snarky what goes around comes around to the not so subtleties of what happens when you used to be the ranking member doesn't really matter so much when you're the chair to the cynicism asuaging of course there is no thing progress, but there is no thing but progress as well. even if you have to position youself as a peg in the path of giant metal spike to understand how even the inevitable carries a hell of a lot of weight at some, if not all, moments in time.
There was a building on campus that had a ginormous foucault pendulum in it. I could not remember the name of the building - save for that it was next to the door I used to break into the chemistry building via, and had a telescope on the roof which I once used quite late at night to view mars or some such. The interweb taught me (relearned?) that it is in fact Culler hall.
The pendulum though, it was amazing. a bowling ball sized orb (marble maybe?) with a downward pointing metal spike. It was attached to a 10 meter or so long cable. Centered below this fine mechanism was an array of pegs resting evenly placed about a circle.
I discovered this right around the same time I first read the pit and the pendulum which made the whole thing even cooler (probably 4th or 5th grade), but it was pretty damned cool all on its own.
The whole point of this thing was that the rotation of the earth caused the pendulum to pivot slightly and predictably. you could even tell the time by how many pins had been knocked over. it was cool as shit. it was so cool that you didn't want to mess with it even though there would (at least for me) have been a huge temptation to do so normally.
a rather handy explaination can be found in the wikiverse.
why does all of this matter? well because pendulous movement is the answer to a lot of questions people ask: from the snarky what goes around comes around to the not so subtleties of what happens when you used to be the ranking member doesn't really matter so much when you're the chair to the cynicism asuaging of course there is no thing progress, but there is no thing but progress as well. even if you have to position youself as a peg in the path of giant metal spike to understand how even the inevitable carries a hell of a lot of weight at some, if not all, moments in time.
2 Comments:
So is there progress in history? Or is it just a pendulum?
Brezhnev and Andropov may lead to Yeltsin .. but what if Yeltsin is a drunk and leads back to Putin, who leads a whole nation back to Brezhnev? (or Catherine the Great)
FDR's new deal may lead to Johnson's great society, but doesn't it just lead back to Nixon's silent majority and 4 decades of the GOP southern strategy?
I really go back and forth on this one. (mostly back today)
The great henry kaiser has an album called those who know history are doomed to repeat it. I tend to agree, but it would be silly to pretend that history doesn't inform agents today. putin has no desire to be brezhnev, he learned that controlling extraction is way better than means of production in a closed circle. if anything he's thanking his lucky stars that breznev wasn't as smart as he is. the current state is the antithesis of breznev in that it's outward looking (okno v europa anyone?) but expressly willing to export mineral wealth that 30 years ago would have rightly been (xenophobically) reserved for the russians themselves or wasted in battle against us.
as for johnson leading to nixon, johnson went where FDR wouldn't go (just ask elenor) in the south. nixon just had to "be there" given how much the south hated LBJ for listening to bobby. You could argue that the Kennedys' deaths had more of a role than FDR anyway, since LBJ felt he needed to stand on his own rather than be one Kennedy and felt, I think, that the other was actually just right. If anything, the end of the anti-LBJ south is getting close as race plays a much smaller role in southern politics than it ever has. nixon benefited for 40 years, but LBJ won in the end. can you even envision a david duke like we saw 20 years ago?
maybe that's actually where my idea breaks down - some day we may see some race baiting in the south again, but meth depraved nutsos don't look like willie horton, which means there'll need to be something a lot more drastic in an economic shift to get that race card to work like it did through the 80s/early 90s. if anything the new willie horton will be mexican, which means you lose FL, IL, CA, NY, CO, AZ, NV and NM to try and make that card work.
in a big part this is why the christian parties are the biggest threat to GOP control of the south. big tents are hard to keep up when the winds are blowing.
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