Troubled Water

 Les fêtes n'existent que pour colorer les angoisses. Léonor Fini - L'Oneiropompe (1978) [...] Shortly afterwards he met one of his colleagues who had heard about the grant. ‘How do you dare to accept such a huge grant for a risky project? Just imagine that you fail.’ To which Svedberg answered: ‘I am not going to fail.’ Svedberg approached Mr F. Ljungstrom of the Ljungstrom Steamturbine Go., Stockholm, who proposed the use of oil-turbines which would simplify the lubrication problem. He also made other valuable suggestions and let one of his engineers, A. Lysholm, assist Svedberg in the construction and testing of the ultracentrifuge which was built at the workshop of the Ljungstrom Steamturbine Go. On 10 January 1926, the first oil-turbine ultracentrifuge was tested in Uppsala. It was disappointing; instead of the 40-42 000 rev/min aimed at, only 19 000 rev/min were reached. Many technical difficulties had to be solved. The turbines were drastically modified, the bearings w...

« Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield was born in 1919 near Sutton on Trent, near Newark in Nottinghamshire, the youngest of five children of a steel-worker turned farmer. He recalled that his childhood was idyllic. It gave him a lifelong passion for the outdoor life, and the opportunity to explore electrical and mechanical farm machinery. He eventually rigged up a projector for the village cinema. He attended Magnus Grammar School, Newark, but was not strong academically, and he left to work for a local builder. On the outbreak of war in 1939 he volunteered for the RAF, which was to be his making. He was encouraged to study radio mechanics, and passed his first examination with such flying colours that he spent the rest of the war as an instructor, first at the Royal College of Science, London, and then at the Cranwell Radar School. He received a Certificate of Merit for experimental work, and after the war he was awarded a scholarship to study for a diploma at the Faraday House Electrical En...

“Життя лиш доти має вартість, доки чоловік може помагати іншим. Коли він став для інших тягарем, а хісна не приносить їм ніякого, тоді він уже не чоловік, а завада, тоді він уже й жити не варт. Хорони мене боже, щоб я коли-небудь мав статися тягарем для інших і їсти ласкавий, хоч і як заслужений хліб!” “Сіл і присілків більше, хат по селах більше, але зате по хатах убожество більше і нужда більша. Народ нужденний, прибитий, понурий, супроти чужих несмілий і недотепний. Кождий дбає тільки про себе, не розуміючи того, що таким робом роздроблюються їх сили, ослаблюється громада.” Appendix: A Brief Outline of Ukrainian History To the majority of people not only of Western Europe and America, but also to political and intellectual circles, Ukraine is a “terra incognita”. Many foreigners and Muscovites to whom the Tzarist regime taught a falsified history of Russia have come to believe that Ukraine as a political concept does not exist. Some have gone so far as to say that it was conceived b...

“She would write a story, she decided, about a woman in an upstairs room above a main street in a country town, writing a story about a woman writing a story.” “[…] a God-forgotten tree-stump of a town halfway to nowhere whose population (two hundred and seventy-four) was tucked for leisure either in the bar of the Legless Lizard or in front of television screens, videos, Internet adult movies or PlayStation games for the kiddies.[…] No one was reading anymore.” “A world of gum trees, bark stripping, dangling, their bony limbs rejecting grace, crowded arrogant as beggars in their rags.” “Or a spot of Calvino clutter - no matter how meticulously brilliant - as if some gabmouth has found a defenceless alienist and vacant couch and is determined, the nerd, to fill the poor bastard in on every nuance of landscape, movement, his reactions thereto, oh God, those endless reactions and possibilities of reactions, and of possibilities of possibilities like some never-ending sorites.” “The count...

Legend maintains that Jesus Christ gave no response to the question of Pontius Pilate: “What is truth?” And it is very likely that in these tragic moments he hardly had the heart to concern himself with philosophical arguments. But even if he had the time and the desire to engage in a controversy concerning the essence of truth, it would not have been easy for him to respond in a definitive manner. Many centuries have passed since then. Humanity has made more than one step toward knowledge of the world. The question of Pontius Pilate has troubled humanity, it has made people think, work and seek in all directions, and it has brought suffering to a great number of minds. The ways and methods of the search for truth have varied many times… Yet the question always remains without an answer. Three principal obstacles arise along the path we follow to seek and establish objective truth, no matter in what direction or in what region we hope to find it. The first of these obstacles is impress...

[...] Parmi les phénomènes sociaux les plus alarmants, le rapport met en lumière la montée de la migration clandestine . Il la présente comme une conséquence directe de l'absence de justice sociale et de l'aggravation des crises sociales, aggravées par une "laxisme chronique des autorités". En ne s'attaquant pas aux causes profondes de ce phénomène (chômage, exclusion sociale, et perte d'espoir), le gouvernement contribue à alimenter cette fuite de cerveaux et de compétences. Le rapport alerte aussi sur l'augmentation de la consommation de drogues parmi les jeunes. Il note que 9,4 % d'entre eux ont déjà consommé du haschich, de la cocaïne ou d'autres substances. Le Maroc, loin d'être un simple marché de consommation, est aussi un lieu de transit majeur pour ces stupéfiants. Le rapport conclut que ces problèmes ne sont pas de simples "défis individuels", mais bien le résultat direct de politiques gouvernementales inefficaces qui témoig...

[...] In the underdeveloped world arises envy and resentment; in the overdeveloped world, fear and bigotry. Even when the productive classes become aware of the vectoral dimension to their exploitation, they represent their interests purely in local or national terms, and become deaf to the contradictions between different local interests. The struggle for an abstract expression of the interests of the global producing classes finds itself beset by thickets of local and particular interest that refuse reconciliation, but which class awareness on a global scale is not abstract and multiple enough to embrace.  The hacker class always finds its interest in the free productivity of information subordinated to the interests of the vectoral class in extracting a surplus from the hack and from furthering only those hacks that generate a surplus. But it also finds that the vectoral class recruits more and more subjects into this world in which they appear to themselves as nothing more tha...