The Songlines

 

“As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones.

There is one obvious reason why this should be so. The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey: a 'leveller' on which the 'fit' survive and stragglers fall by the wayside.

The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The 'dictators' of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the 'gentlemen of the road'.”

“in becoming human, man had acquired, together with his straight legs and striding walk, a migratory ‘drive’ or instinct to walk long distances through the seasons;

 

that this ‘drive’ was inseparable from his central nervous system; and that, when warped in conditions of settlement, it found outlets in violence, greed, status-seeking or a mania for the new.

This” 

 

Bruce Chatwin

Freedom from the Known

“Thought is so cunning, so clever, that it distorts everything for its own convenience.”

 

“To be free of all authority, of your own and that of another, is to die to everything of yesterday, so that your mind is always fresh, always young, innocent, full of vigour and passion. It is only in that state that one learns and observes. And for this, a great deal of awareness is required, actual awareness of what is going on inside yourself, without correcting it or telling it what it should or should not be, because the moment you correct it you have established another authority, a censor.”

“THE DEMAND TO be safe in relationship inevitably breeds sorrow and fear. This seeking for security is inviting insecurity. Have you ever found security in any of your relationships? Have you? Most of us want the security of loving and being loved, but is there love when each one of us is seeking his own security, his own particular path? We are not loved because we don't know how to love.”

 

“NONE OF THE agonies of suppression, nor the brutal discipline of conforming to a pattern has led to truth. To come upon truth the mind must be completely free, without a spot of distortion.”

“In all our relationships each one of us builds an image about the other and these two images have relationship, not the human beings themselves... The actual relationship between two human beings or between many human beings completely ends when there is the formation of images.”

“Passion is a rather frightening thing because if you have passion you don't know where it will take you.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Four Quartets

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”




 

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”









“Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.”










“So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres-
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” 

“In my end is my beginning.”
 

T.S. Eliot

Winter Song

The snow on your eyelids that curtsy with age

Is freezing the stares on tyranny's wings.

The bitter is hard and the warmth of your skin

Is diseased with familiar caresses.

Withdrawing from splendor and royal decay

Among all the triumphs and jaded awards

The angry and blazing circus of sun

Blasphemes as the crown prince arises.

You cannot beget all the sins that you owe

To the people of paradise magic

Pretend to answer passion and form

With foreign rationalizations.

Primroses are the jewels that lurk

Among masks of pleasure that flicker with doubt

Embraces of fame that's simultaneously fear

To advance and demand to be recognized.

The river shall flow through hollow green faces

Of caricature's resentment etched out of the tongues.

Both reluctant princess asleep before birth

The classical sensitive failures.

The worshipping wicked cling to the dark of your heart

Lying there and wait with your angels

Moan and ravish from dawn to dusk

The avaricious young lovers.

Nico

Jet d'Eau

The Jet d'Eau (French pronunciation: ​[ʒɛ do], Water-Jet) is a large fountain in Geneva, Switzerland, and is one of the city's most famous landmarks. It is also one of the largest fountains in the world. Situated at the point where Lake Geneva empties into the Rhone River, it is visible throughout the city and from the air, even when flying over Geneva at an altitude of 10 km (33,000 ft).

Five hundred litres (132 gallons) of water per second are jetted to an altitude of 140 metres (459 feet) by two 500 kW pumps, operating at 2,400 V, consuming over one megawatt of electricity. The water leaves the nozzle at a speed of 200 km/h (124 mph). When it is in operation, at any given moment there are about 7,000 litres (1849 gallons) of water in the air. Unsuspecting visitors to the fountain—which can be reached via a stone jetty from the left bank of the lake—may be surprised to find themselves drenched after a slight change in wind direction.

The first Jet d'Eau was installed in 1886 at the Usine de la Coulouvrenière, a little further downstream from its present location. It was used as a safety valve for a hydraulic power network and could reach a height of about 30 metres (98 feet). In 1891, its aesthetic value was recognised and it was moved to its present location to celebrate the Federal Gymnastics Festival and the 600th anniversary of the Swiss Confederation, on which occasion it was operated for the first time. Its maximum height was about 90 metres (295 feet). The present Jet d'Eau was installed in 1951 in a partially submerged pumping station to pump lake water instead of city water.

Since 2003, the fountain has operated during the day all year round, except in case of frost and particularly strong wind. It also operates in the evening between spring and autumn and is lit by a set of 12 lights totaling 108 kW. [ source ]

The history of CERN

Origins

9 December 1949

At the end of the Second World War, European science was no longer world-class. Following the example of international organizations, a handful of visionary scientists imagined creating a European atomic physics laboratory. Raoul Dautry, Pierre Auger and Lew Kowarski in France, Edoardo Amaldi in Italy and Niels Bohr in Denmark were among these pioneers. Such a laboratory would not only unite European scientists but also allow them to share the increasing costs of nuclear physics facilities.

.

French physicist Louis de Broglie put forward the first official proposal for the creation of a European laboratory at the European Cultural Conference, which opened in Lausanne on 9 December 1949. A further push came at the fifth UNESCO General Conference, held in Florence in June 1950, where American physicist and Nobel laureate Isidor Rabi tabled a resolution authorizing UNESCO to "assist and encourage the formation of regional research laboratories in order to increase international scientific collaboration…"

At an intergovernmental meeting of UNESCO in Paris in December 1951, the first resolution concerning the establishment of a European Council for Nuclear Research was adopted. Two months later, 11 countries signed an agreement establishing the provisional council – the acronym CERN was born.

Geneva was selected as the site for the CERN Laboratory at the third session of the provisional council in 1952. This selection successfully passed a referendum in the canton of Geneva in June 1953 by 16,539 votes to 7332. 

The 600 MeV Synchrocyclotron (SC), built in 1957, was CERN’s first accelerator. It provided beams for CERN’s first experiments in particle and nuclear physics. In 1964, this machine started to concentrate on nuclear physics alone, leaving particle physics to the newer and much more powerful Proton Synchrotron (PS).

The SC became a remarkably long-lived machine. In 1967, it started supplying beams for a dedicated unstable-ion facility called ISOLDE, which carries out research ranging from pure nuclear physics to astrophysics and medical physics. In 1990, ISOLDE was transferred to a different accelerator, and the SC closed down after 33 years of service. [ more ]