by William Carlos Williams, as quoted by the National Book Foundation
Publishing visual poetry as a frozen gif image makes a lot of sense when you consider how little integrity control one has in publishing with markup languages like HTML, even with style sheets.
A documentary by BBC4 explores views of risk in terms of cultural clues and imagery. It interviews numerous experts to reveal the origins of The Great Wave off Kanagawa print, and shows how it has represented very different things to different people.
The Japanese viewer apparently sees groups of men set together in harmony with nature to achieve success — possibly a spring-time catch of bonito fish for a hard-working crew returning as quickly as possible to a market. The huge, towering wave is not an image of despair but of power and collective effort. Toshio Watanabe, a Japenese Art Historian, explains:
(1:14/10:04) “It’s depicting, basically, speedboats like DHL or FedEx.” […] (9:14/10:04) This is an image of courage and perseverance because the oarsmen have a job to do. “There are so many rowers because they need speed and they are not worried about the waves at all. They are taking it in great stride.”
Dr. David Peat, a Physicist at the Pari Center in Italy (among several others) suggests a very different effect for a viewer from the West. He sees the Great Wave as a moral lesson for an individual, which centers around mortality, anxiety and a fear of the unknown (based on chaos theory):
(5:40/8:25) It’s telling us something about being on the edge of chaos; something about how we live our lives. We have to have regularity and order. But if we have too much then we become dead. So it’s telling us where life lies. It’s telling us something about ourselves. We have to learn how to live on the edge of chaos.
Although it is easy to split the views and categorize them among Far East and Western views, following the BBC’s narrative, it could be split a different way. Those who live in and around water and on small boats may look at the Great Wave as familiar and controllable; while those who spend all their time on land may look at the wave with fear of the unknown — “surf’s up” versus “run”. Which are you?
Deutsche Welle has had the best coverage I have seen anywhere of the nuclear disaster unfolding in Japan. The interview with analysis of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, for example, was extremely useful to understand the various risks in different reactors.
They have now announced that Germany is shutting down its older nuclear reactors until an updated security analysis can be completed.
Chancellor Angela Merkel announced Tuesday that seven of Germany’s 17 nuclear power stations would be shut down, at least until the end of a three-month moratorium on the extension of the lifespans of Germany’s nuclear stations.
The decision was made as a direct result of the nuclear disaster currently unfolding at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan.
Merkel is banking on the fact that Japan has brought new risk calculation data to light. Her opposition is not buying it. They accuse her of ignoring the risk before the disaster.
Sigmar Gabriel, head of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) was withering on Merkel’s new plan: “She claimed then that all safety concerns in German nuclear power stations had been cleared up, and she claimed we needed nuclear power in Germany. Now we know that none of that was true.”
With 80% of Germans now said to oppose nuclear energy, it could just be a wise political move but it is still good to see infrastructure security receive serious attention.
The effect of Japan’s unfolding nuclear catastrophe on Germans could not be clearer. After the protests in Baden-Württemberg on Saturday, an estimated 110,000 people demonstrated in 450 German towns on Monday against the extension of nuclear power.
Only 110,000 people? That’s the same size as the growing protests against the Regressive Governor in Madison, Wisconsin.
Up to 100,000 people protested at the Wisconsin state Capitol on Saturday against a new law curbing the union rights of public workers that is seen as one of the biggest challenges in decades facing U.S. organized labor.
Wow, perspective. More Americans are protesting in Wisconsin today than during the Vietnam war; about the same as the number protesting today’s nuclear crisis in Germany.
Amazon says in a blog post that they are so excited they can barely contain themselves.
Today we are releasing a set of features that expand the power and value of the Virtual Private Cloud.
Woo hoo, break out the cloud party hats. More power. More value. This EC2 goes all the way to 11…or maybe not.
You can think of this new collection of features as virtual networking for Amazon EC2. While I would hate to be innocently accused of hyperbole, I do think that today’s release legitimately qualifies as massive, one that may very well change the way that you think about EC2 and how it can be put to use in your environment.
Yes, ok, I see trusted security partners still are relied upon to provide advanced features for EC2/VPC. I take that to mean this a core/basic security announcement; it’s like an “oops, here’s that thing you have been looking for” release.
The first three comments on the blog post emphasize a sort of underwhelming-ness. Not everything you have been looking for is there yet.
Let me get out my language pattern analysis toolkit…yes, yes, aha! IPv6 apparently is not yet supported.
A little more digging and it appears the security group you can attach now to the VPC Internet gateway is stateless. Stateful-packet filtering is ages old. It also is required for PCI compliance (DSS v2.0 Requirement 1.3.6), and Amazon says they are PCI compliant. So perhaps I am missing something in this “new” networking model; but it looks to me that you would have to manually configure inbound high-level ports. That makes it neither secure nor compliant.
What about cost?
I think this is the best part of the Virtual Private Cloud: you can deploy a feature-packed private network at no additional charge! We don’t charge you for creating a VPC, subnet, ACLs, security groups, routing tables, or VPN Gateway, and there is no charge for traffic between S3 and your Amazon EC2 instances in VPC. Running Instances (including NAT instances), Elastic Block Storage, VPN Connections, Internet bandwidth, and unmapped Elastic IPs will incur our usual charges.
The usual charges. A NAT for 2-tiers with a private IP range to the public will set you back at least 0.09/hr — a micro instance is not allowed. So a networking instance you setup is going to bring cost but they are not adding an additional burden for the above networking features. Imagine if they tried to charge to add an ACL. Like I said, this is the “oops, here’s that thing you have been looking for” release. Party like it’s 1999. Or should I say dude, where’s my DMZ?
In related news an Amazon EC2 bicycle now has tires…and here’s the best part: they let you put in air and lubricate your chain at no additional charge!