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Grief Is A Paradox

GRIEF IS A PARADOX

Grief is a paradox, the presence of an ab-
sence, mushroom cloud where there once was Elugelab.

This couplet was inspired by a poem by Robert Pinsky, "Grief, " in the June 7th 2012 edition of NYR, which was printed after an amazing article by Jim Holt, reviewing Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson:

The computer, one might well conclude, was conceived in sin. Its birth helped ratchet up, by several orders of magnitude, the destructive force available to the superpowers during the cold war. And the man most responsible for the creation of that first computer, John von Neumann, was himself among the most ardent of the cold warriors, an advocate of a preemptive military attack on the Soviet Union, and one of the models for the film character Dr. Strangelove. As George Dyson writes in his superb new history, Turing's Cathedral, "The digital universe and the hydrogen bomb were brought into existence at the same time." Von Neumann had seemingly made a deal with the devil: "The scientists would get the computers, and the military would get the bombs."…
And what was MANIAC used for, once it was up and running? Its first job was to do the calculations necessary to engineer the prototype of the hydrogen bomb. Those calculations were successful. On the morning of November 1,1952, the bomb they made possible, nicknamed "Ivy Mike, " was secretly detonated over a South Pacific island called Elugelab. The blast vaporized the entire island, along with 80 million tons of coral. One of the air force planes sent in to sample the mushroom cloud—reported to be "like the inside of a red-hot furnace"—spun out of control and crashed into the sea; the pilot's body was never found. A marine biologist on the scene recalled that a week after the H-bomb test he was still finding terns with their feathers blackened and scorched, and fish whose "skin was missing from a side as if they had been dropped in a hot pan."

GRIEF, by Robert Pinsky

I don't think anybody ever is
Really divorced, said Lenny. Also,
I don't think anybody ever is
Really married, he said. Because

English was really his second language
And because of Yiddish and its displaced
Place in the world, he never really

[...] Read more

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Freeman Dyson

Einstein in real life was not only a great politician and a great philosopher. He was also a great observer of the human comedy, with a robust sense of humor.

in The New York Review of Books, Einstein as a Jew and a Philosopher (7 May 2015)Report problemRelated quotes
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Esther Dyson

I joined the board of the Santa Fe Institute.

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Esther Dyson

A worker's paradise is a consumer's hell.

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Freeman Dyson

It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear.

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Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success.

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One of the most fun inventions of my lifetime is the Mini.

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Esther Dyson

Change means that what was before wasn't perfect. People want things to be better.

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Freeman Dyson

There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.

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Esther Dyson

Having seen a non-market economy, I suddenly understood much better what I liked about a market economy.

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