Here's a funny site. A bunch of libertarians are making plans to invade and conquer the state of New Hampshire! Seriously, their goal is to get 20,000 libertarians to move to New Hampshire, which, according to their research is already one of the most libertarian states in the Union. An interesting idea. I wish we could convince all of the progressives to move to Northern California and everyone else to move out, so we could cecede from the Union and make our own little financially-powerful Netherlands-esque utopia headquartered in San Francisco. :o)

I just learned of something that happened last year that I hadn't been aware of previously (no surprise there!), and it really made me think... I was checking out the Radio Free USA site and saw two articles on this page regarding an unfortunate graduation ceremony fiasco in Illinois last Spring. I read this transcript of a radio interview of the speaker, Chris Hedges, after the event. I went to the Rockford Register's site, where I read the two articles and the editorial published there. I listened to the speech for myself. I read three full pages of comments by readers, starting here, and another page here. And I really wavered back and forth, but I've got to say that I think the blame for the marred event has to fall on those who decided to have someone come and give what was—undeniably—a somber reflection on the current state of the world...at a college graduation ceremony. I just don't think that's a proper thing to do, and I would not have liked to have been one of the graduates there that day.

Obviously I completely agree with Chris Hedges, so that's not the issue. The issue is: what is the purpose of a graduation ceremony? And in my opinion, the purpose of a graduation ceremony is to congratulate, to honor, and to CELEBRATE! I agree with every word Hedges spoke, and he said it brilliantly and eloquently, but it was depressing! No one wants to be depressed on their graduation day.

The comments in the forums were really quite interesting to read. While some were more intelligent and articulate than others (would that the utterly stupid inaugural one could be stricken, but it's more or less an aberration!), many good points were made by people on various sides of the issue. And I see the merits in the arguments that stress the importance of being polite to a speaker, as well as in those that stress the importance of standing up for your own needs. I'm torn; I really am. I feel for Hedges and for those who wanted to listen to him, and I feel for those who felt that the speech was ruining their graduation ceremony...

I think those who planned the ceremony should have put themselves in the shoes of the graduates and families and considered what they would want and like for their graduation celebration. Of course people need to be challenged and need to hear different ideas, but that does not mean that this needs to happen at every time, in every place. When your dog has just died, when it's your birthday party, when you're making passionate love, when you need some time to relax and unwind—all of these are examples of times in life when you don't really need to be challenged by varying intellectual ideas and philosophies!!

Some will disagree with me, but I just don't think that a graduation speech should be intellectually challenging so much as positive and uplifting and celebratory. Certainly it should be intelligent and inspiring, and it could have moments of challenge or reflection, but the overall tone and theme should be positive and focus on the purpose of the event, which is to mark the passage of the graduates from a past life as students to an exciting future life in the larger world.

There's plenty of time in life to be outraged, and to question unquestioned assumptions, and to cry out against injustice, but when you've finally made it to your college graduation, what you want to do is to FEEL GOOD! And on a more general note, yes, even while our government is sending our young people to kill and be killed in far away lands, as horrible and depressing as that is, we must set aside some times to be happy, to celebrate, to be attentive to and thankful for that in our lives which is fulfilling and beautiful and joyous—it's the only way to go on, the only way to survive, the only way to keep up the courage to fight the good fight for justice and peace.

For me, the bottom line is that there's a time and a place—and this principle was not respected for those graduates. I don't know what I would have done in their shoes. I would have been angry at those who booed, at those who were against Hedges simply because they were pro-war and didn't like what he was saying, but I would also have been angry at the organizers for having him there to make that speech in the first place. Probably the best thing for everyone would have been to sit quietly and wait out the 18 minutes and then go on with the ceremony and CELEBRATE—and then complain loudly to the administration afterwards!!

It wasn't fair to be rude to him, and yet I've got to wonder how he himself could have thought that his speech was an ideal graduation speech...surely he could have come up with a speech that had a political nature and was anti-war, but was not so very somber and intellectual—one that had more of a tie-in to the graduation theme... I guess it just boils down to a difference of opinion over the nature and purpose of a graduation ceremony...

If you waste enough time wandering around on the Web, you come across the most fascinating people and ideas! This woman, Christine Fielder, has written a wonderful essay here. The larger site is here and also a commercial version here. I first came across this thing, for lack of a better word, they are selling and still have not really figured out what it is or whether it is something I might wish to purchase. It all seems a bit grandiose and complicated—and really, when would I have time to look at it all? I haven't even had time to look at the fabulous "112 Years of National Geographic" on 32 CD-ROMs that my mom gave me for Christmas! But it all seems very fascinating at any rate...and a great essay!

I hadn't really imagined I'd ever have a science lesson in one of my blog entries, but what the heck! On this blog, I came across an entry that informed me of a cool new device that this company has invented. In the description of the technology behind this thing, they stressed that the process is not holography. My immediate thought: what they heck is holography anyway?! So, a nice opportunity to take advantage of my "premium service" subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica that I get as part of my SBC Yahoo! DSL service. So, here we have it, more than most of us ever wanted to know about holography:

 Encyclopædia Britannica Article

HOLOGRAPHY

A means of creating a unique photographic image without the use of a lens. The photographic recording of the image is called a hologram, which appears to be an unrecognizable pattern of stripes and whorls but which—when illuminated by coherent light, as by a laser beam—organizes the light into a three-dimensional representation of the original object.

An ordinary photographic image records the variations in intensity of light reflected from an object, producing dark areas where less light is reflected and light areas where more light is reflected. Holography, however, records not only the intensity of the light but also its phase, or the degree to which the wave fronts making up the reflected light are in step with each other, or coherent. Ordinary light is incoherent—that is, the phase relationships between the multitude of waves in a beam are completely random; wave fronts of ordinary light waves are not in step.

Figure 1: Gabor’s original method for creating holograms.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Dennis Gabor, a Hungarian-born scientist, invented holography in 1948, for which he received the Nobel Prize for Physics more than 20 years later (1971). Gabor considered the possibility of improving the resolving power of the electron microscope, first by utilizing the electron beam to make a hologram of the object and then by examining this hologram with a beam of coherent light, as shown in Figure 1. In Gabor's original system the hologram was a record of the interference between the light diffracted by the object and a collinear background. This automatically restricts the process to that class of objects that have considerable areas that are transparent (see Figure 1A). When the hologram is used to form an image, twin images are formed, as illustrated in Figure 1B. The light associated with these images is propagating in the same direction, and hence in the plane of one image light from the other image appears as an out-of-focus component. Although a degree of coherence can be obtained by focusing light through a very small pinhole, this technique reduces the light intensity too much for it to serve in holography; therefore, Gabor's proposal was for several years of only theoretical interest. The development of lasers in the early 1960s suddenly changed the situation (see laser). A laser beam has not only a high degree of coherence but high intensity as well.

Of the many kinds of laser beam, two have especial interest in holography: the continuous-wave (CW) laser and the pulsed laser. The CW laser emits a bright, continuous beam of a single, nearly pure colour. The pulsed laser emits an extremely intense, short flash of light that lasts only about 1/100,000,000 of a second. Two scientists in the United States, Emmett N. Leith and Juris Upatnieks of the University of Michigan, applied the CW laser to holography and achieved great success, opening the way to many research applications.

Basic principles of holography

In essence, the problem Gabor conceived in his attempt to improve the electron microscope was the same as the one photographers have confronted in their search for three-dimensional realism in photography. To achieve it, the light streaming from the source must itself be photographed. If the waves of this light, with their multitude of rapidly moving crests and troughs, can be frozen for an instant and photographed, the wave pattern can then be reconstructed and will exhibit the same three-dimensional character as the object from which the light is reflected. Holography accomplishes such a reconstruction by recording the phase content as well as the amplitude content of the reflected light waves of a laser beam. How this works is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Arrangements for (left) creating a hologram and (right) reconstructing an image from a hologram.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

...

Citation:
"holography" © Encyclopædia Britannica  from Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service.
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=41719
[Accessed January 24, 2004].

To read the whole article, click here.