BATMAN!!

... was the callsign of our short platoon. Instead of writing/reading page after page for my major, I was out in Adair getting cold and bruising my knees. To avoid getting too livejournalish, I just want to point out how important it is to expose yourself to opinions dichotomous to your own.





Oh, and knee-pads are yay.

MILLION-DOLLAR MURRAY

A cut and paste job, I found it a fascinating read:

Culhane then put together a database—the first of its kind—to track who was coming in and out of the shelter system. What he discovered profoundly changed the way homelessness is understood. Homelessness doesn’t have a normal distribution, it turned out. It has a power-law distribution. “We found that eighty per cent of the homeless were in and out really quickly,” he said. “In Philadelphia, the most common length of time that someone is homeless is one day. And the second most common length is two days. And they never come back. Anyone who ever has to stay in a shelter involuntarily knows that all you think about is how to make sure you never come back.”

Ad infinitum

Continuing the tone of my previous post, here's a good section from a play that I found today while I was going through my data archives. Atom is a beautiful word.

TILLIE: He told me to look at my hand, for a part of it came from a star that exploded too long ago to imagine. This part of me was formed from a tongue of fire that screamed through the heavens until there was our sun. And this part of me - this tiny part of me - was on the sun when it itself exploded and whirled in a great storm until the planets came to be.

And this small part of me was then a whisper of the earth. When there was life, perhaps this part of me got lost in a fern that was crushed and covered until it was coal. And then it was a diamond millions of year later - it must have been a diamond as beautiful as the star from which it had first come.

Or perhaps this part of me became lost in a terrible beast, or became part of a huge bird that flew above the primeval swamps. And he said this thing was so small - this part of me was so small it couldn't be seen - but it was there from the beginning of the world.


And he called this bit of me an atom. And when he wrote the word, I fell in love with it. Atom. Atom. What a beautiful word.