Archive for May, 2011

Sampurna Chattarji: Agreement/Disagreement

Friday, May 6th, 2011

The agreement of shapes like a parliament of clowns.
Cats’ whiskers, tumbrils, tendrils.
Plants are agreeable, they point towards the sun,
sunning themselves like cats.

In the back room, the weak spot spreads like a rumour.
The floor is made of earth, didn’t you know?
If you wait, and ask nicely, I can show you the way to dig
yourself out, or in, depending on climate and skin condition.

The red-eye flight of the calibrarian.
Postulate, pustule, preposterous.
Brimming with the unequal power of water,
the lake refuses to lie.

Stones disagree. They grow heavy, cold, relapse
into stony silences. They brood insects.
Hating the hand with a vengeance they shut out the sun,
seal the mouths of caves, arrive at the shape of the burial mound.

Sampurna Chattarji

Gilbert: Magnetic Disagreements

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

But here we notice another curious fact … * [ZB Magnet 2] William Gilbert, De Magnete (London: Petrus Short, 1600), Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Alte Drucke und Rara, XVI.28, p. 133.

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Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

Judith Albert

William Gilbert: Dip or Inclination

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

Magnetic needles, pointers, rods or wire have a tendency toward the earth’ s centre, the so  called magnetic dip or inclination. Inclination variers. Here a magnetic wire in a cork shows its dip in a bowl filled with water. [ZB Magnet 2] William Gilbert, De Magnete (London: Petrus Short, 1600), Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Alte Drucke und Rara, XVI.28, p. 203.

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SPEEDI*

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011


Barbara Ellmerer

*System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose
SPEEDI, designed to predict the dispersal of radioactive materials based on forecasts by ERSS, is likely to have delayed the effective evacuation of residents in Fukushima Prefecture. The systems’ failure casts doubt on the government’s disaster-prevention policy, which said that the systems should be used to analyze and predict the amount and spread of radioactive material into the environment during a nuclear crisis.

William Gilbert: Deviation

Monday, May 2nd, 2011

Long loadstone with versoria. Versoria deviate according to the distance from the middle or equator of the loadstone (CD). The deviations are greater the greater the distance of the versoria is from the equator. [ZB Magnet 2] William Gilbert, De Magnete (London: Petrus Short, 1600), Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Alte Drucke und Rara, XVI.28, p. 164.