JANUS 2022/2023 PART 2

YESTERDAY, JANUS STARTED LOOKING backward and forward here at SimanaitisSays. Indeed, he was sufficiently curious to find enough relevance for today’s Part 2 as well. 

One Thing Leads to Another. I forget what prompted my two-parter on Dragons, but its “Puff the Magic Dragon” research led me to Lenny Lipton. (He wrote the poem transformed into this Peter, Paul, and Mary hit.) 

Lenny also put together a fascinating 795-page book titled The Cinema in Flux.

Its subtitle is spot-on. This book has already generated pieces here at SimanaitisSays about Christiaan Huygen’s magic lantern and “The Savoyards, Phantasmagorias, and One of My Favorite Broadway Musicals.” 

Lenny Lipton, rest his soul, passed away on October 5 this year. He was 82. 

Celebration of Wife Dottie’s 80 Years.  Wife and pal Dottie Clendenin died from COPD back in September 2021, with a Covid-delayed Celebration of Life planned for July 24 of this year. Alas, an Omicron surge precluded this. 

But SimanaitisSays offered a way for family and friends to get together. 

“Political Repartee.” On July 4, 2022, I noted that “Current politics are lamentably lacking in so many aspects, among them any sense of repartee, wit, or humor.” Regular readers of this website would have guessed I had (at least) one book remedying  this shortcoming.

One of my favorites from Dr. Grothe is when “William F. Buckley Jr. ran for mayor of New York City on a ticket of the newly formed Conservative Party. While nobody gave him much of a chance to win, his candidacy brought panache and humor to the campaign.”

“Late in the campaign,” Grothe wrote, “a reporter asked Buckley, ‘What’s the first thing you will do if you are elected mayor?’ Buckley replied, ‘Demand a recount.’ ” 

This was in an era when conservative humor could be intentionally generated. Now we must rely on MTG. 

Genuine Science. Quite apart from Rothschild space lasers, other photons have appeared here at SimanaitisSays in one of its more complex topics: “Delocalized Photonic Deep Learning on the Internet’s Edge.”

This article in AAAS Science, October 20, 2022, tantalized me because of its wealth of adjectives and nouns begging for definition. Succinctly, it turns out that digital overload encourages analog photonics: Loosely, light is more efficient than electrical current in handling data. 

I love this image of how photonic multiplication works. Note, it’s even quicker than digital’s “counting on two fingers, albeit very quickly.”

Yes, it has been an interesting year, and 2023 appears to have promise as well. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2022