(parenthetical citations)

americanspokenlanguage: “A KIND IN GLASS AND A COUSIN, A...

Tue, 07 May 2013 11:18:40 -0400

“A KIND IN GLASS AND A COUSIN, A SPECTACLE AND NOTHING STRANGE A SINGLE HURT COLOR AND AN ARRANGEMENT IN A SYSTEM TO POINTING. ALL THIS AND NOT ORDINARY, NOT UNORDERED IN NOT RESEMBLING. THE DIFFERENCE IS SPREADING.” [—gertrude stein]

*: to do --

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 18:21:21 -0400

*: to do --:

anneboyer:

1. write poems which allow me to believe I have written no poetry

2. write prose which allows me to believe I don’t know a word

3. read with a technique that convinces me I’ve read nothing

4. think in a way deniable as thought

5. sleep each night of sleep in a way of sleeping which feels as…

"(As I originally imagined this piece, it was to be a series of vignettes depicting varieties of..."

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 18:17:00 -0400

“(As I originally imagined this piece, it was to be a series of vignettes depicting varieties of nonsense, but instead of exhibiting pleasure, the result produced a cynicism, a sarcasm, that I didn’t really feel. Certain forms of nonsense, apparently, constitute a limitation of pleasure. Poetry shouldn’t succumb to piety, even with regard to illogicality and nonsense.)”

- Lyn Hejinian, “A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking,” in The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000): 11.

Photo

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 14:10:39 -0400

Melba Roy Mouton

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 22:48:00 -0400

I recently reposted a NASA image of a woman named Melba Roy, a graduate of Howard and, at the time the photo was taken (according to the NASA archive, 1960, not 1964 as given elsewhere), the head of “computers” (mathematicians charged with calculating Echo satellite orbits) at NASA’s Goddard Space Center. Then, as anyone would, I googled her to see if there was more out there. On vanilla google and on nasa.gov, I was not successful. Lexis-Nexis turned up a June 29, 1990 obituary in the Washington Post, however. Roy was her first married name; after her divorce from Wardell Roy, Melba Roy married a Webster Mouton; her obituary gives her name as Melba Roy Mouton. She had two children from her first marriage and one from her second. She had a bachelor’s degree from Howard University, as well as a master’s degree in mathematics, also from Howard. She seems to have been born and raised in the D.C. area (northern Virginia), and died in Silver Spring, MD of a brain tumor at only 61. The most interesting thing about Melba Roy Mouton is of course her career.* Her obituary states,

She had worked 18 years for the federal government before retiring in 1973, and spent the last 14 of those years with NASA. Earlier she had worked at the Census Bureau and the Army Map Service.
She had received an Apollo Achievement Award and an Exceptional Performance Award from NASA.

NASA’s own gloss on the photo above reads:

Melba Roy headed a group of NASA mathematicians, known as “computers,” who tracked early Echo satellites in Earth orbit. Roy’s computations helped produce the orbital element timetables by which millions saw the satellite from Earth as it passed overhead.

A 1968 NASA report on “The Goddard General Orbit Determination System” offers a little more specificity in the acknowledgments (all NASA reports cited in this post are pdfs):

The Goddard General Orbit Determination System was programed by a team of Goddard staff members under the direction of Thomas P. Gorman, who served for a number of years as Head of the Data Systems Division’s Advanced Orbital Programming Branch, and Melba Mouton, who succeeded him in that position and is currently serving as Head of the Mission and Trajectory Analysis Division’s Program Systems Branch.

She is also acknowledged for “generous support” in the 1968 NASA Technical Note “Application of Hansen’s Method to the Xth Satellite of Jupiter.” In a 1968 report (this was a good year for reports, apparently) titled “Experimental Use of A Programming Language (APL) at the Goddard Space Flight Center,” Melba Roy Mouton is named as a member of “a select group” that spent a week preparing Kenneth Iverson and his colleagues to give a two-week seminar on APL at Goddard. This preparation consisted of “indoctrinating Dr. Iverson’s staff in the types and range of problems of interest to Goddard.”

She is the author of “Motivation and Training or Automation,” in the proceedings of a 1970 symposium, “Automated Methods of Computer Program Documentation.”

Perhaps most interestingly, in 1972, NASA used her image, along with that of a number of black colleagues, in at least one newspaper ad declaring the administration’s commitment to diversity. This full-page ad is from The Afro American, 15 April 1972.

I wish more information on Melba Roy Mouton were easily available! *Actually, it’s not at all obvious that the most interesting thing about Melba Roy Mouton was her career. It’s just the most interesting thing that can be turned up on the internet in half an hour. And it’s pretty interesting.

vintageblackglamour: Melba Roy, NASA Mathmetician, at the...

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 21:39:57 -0400

vintageblackglamour:

Melba Roy, NASA Mathmetician, at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland in 1964. Ms. Roy, a 1950 graduate of Howard University, led a group of NASA mathmeticians known as “computers” who tracked the Echo satellites. The first time I shared Ms. Roy on VBG, my friend Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a former postdoc in astrophysics at NASA, helpfully explained what Ms. Roy did in the comment section. I am sharing Chanda’s comment again here: “By the way, since I am a physicist, I might as well explain a little bit about what she did: when we launch satellites into orbit, there are a lot of things to keep track of. We have to ensure that gravitational pull from other bodies, such as other satellites, the moon, etc. don’t perturb and destabilize the orbit. These are extremely hard calculations to do even today, even with a machine-computer. So, what she did was extremely intense, difficult work. The goal of the work, in addition to ensuring satellites remained in a stable orbit, was to know where everything was at all times. So they had to be able to calculate with a high level of accuracy. Anyway, that’s the story behind orbital element timetables”. Photo: NASA/Corbis.

"Steinese"

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 17:47:32 -0500

Milton C. Winternitz, dean of the Yale University Medical School, 1935, in response to a colleague’s notification that he has neglected to pay a bill for “a druggist, one Kwang Wan Lung Hung”:

During the past few months I have reached the point where I can no longer understand bills which are submitted in good old Anglo-Saxon. How would you expect me to interpret a Chinese manuscript? I thought it was a new form of art after the fashion of Gertrude Stein’s poetry, so I guess I was further off than you were. (173)

Quoted in Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, 2009.

theartofgooglebooks: Employee’s fingers autocorrected with...

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 00:34:52 -0500

theartofgooglebooks:

Employee’s fingers autocorrected with mirrored text.

Throughout An Exact Narrative of Many Surprizing Matters of Fact Uncontestably Wrought By an Evil Spirit or Spirits, In the House of Master Jan Smagge (1709). Original from Oxford University. Digitized March 10, 2009.

*: first teaching notes --

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 11:22:28 -0500

*: first teaching notes -- :

anneboyer:

western thought class no. 1 involves a blank map of the world and the task: “find the west”

western thought class no 2. involves the onion’s “historians admit to inventing ancient greece,” a chapter from boaz’s “a universal history of the destruction of books,” a sappho fragment, and this keat’s…

Amazing.

Photo

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 20:11:14 -0500

Ascher scarf designed by Sir Francis Rose, 1946. The Beinecke...

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 01:07:18 -0500

Ascher scarf designed by Sir Francis Rose, 1946. The Beinecke Library has one. You can see a note that Gertrude Stein wrote about it here. The circular text says “rose is a rose is a rose is a….”

*: WITCH YEAR COMIN

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 15:19:42 -0500

*: WITCH YEAR COMIN:

anneboyer:

goya year effigy year hate year crystallography year conspirator year sex year no sex year joan-of-arc year cat year cop year list year transparent year illuminated year destructuring year satan year shadow year sanguineous year blanquist year blanquist year blanquist year byron year repeasant…

havingbeenbreathedout: reckonedrightly: Bad literature is our...

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 15:18:50 -0500

havingbeenbreathedout:

reckonedrightly:

Bad literature is our only hope.

Amen. Let’s all raise our miniature liqueur glasses around our huge hats in honor of “Bad Literature.”

*: a novel, a day book, an account, a recording, a true romance, a fiction, a summation, an audit, a confession, an index...

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 15:17:38 -0500

*: a novel, a day book, an account, a recording, a true romance, a fiction, a summation, an audit, a confession, an index...:

anneboyer:

2012

1

on the first day, woke up thinking it was 2004

on the second day, the head of the snake bespoke the monster body obscured

on the third day, woke up with A. in my bed

on the fourth day, kept no records

on the fifth day, dreamed of three birds in the corner

on the sixth day, dreamed…

captainbirthday: latest fripperies. If any tool makers feel...

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 02:06:19 -0500

captainbirthday:

latest fripperies.

If any tool makers feel like carving/forging this lovely set of lily-tools, gimme a holler.

: Sexuality and Money, Movimento Femministo, 1979

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 13:04:59 -0400

: Sexuality and Money, Movimento Femministo, 1979:

anneboyer:

I found the suggestion that I might be happy on the market stalls where the vendor and the buyer were not different but only dressed differently. On sale besides were only an infinity of needs of the highest quality (the desire for) and of the worst production (need for). The cost was lifelong…

theartofgooglebooks: An employee flips through pages. From A...

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 09:04:39 -0400

theartofgooglebooks:

An employee flips through pages.

From A System of Mineralogy: Including an Extended Treatise on Crystallography by James Dwight Dana (1837). Original from the New York Public Library. Digitized April 25, 2006.

The book itself might teach well with Christian Bök’s Crystallography. But this gif is genius.

: full body photo number one

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 18:48:06 -0400

: full body photo number one :

anneboyer:

1. deep-shit hermeneutics

Think of the way one guy can make you feel, also the way “one guy” is one. Don’t you think why want that “one guy” who is just one guy and why wake up longing for a person and falling asleep longing for the same person and who knows if anyone else in this is longing?…

robertogreco: “OMG. Book as interface. Book as interface. Book...

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 20:35:25 -0400

robertogreco:

“OMG. Book as interface. Book as interface. Book as interface. (via greg kepler)” —cozylampshade

The view of science as unarticulated and ineffable skill is science circling its wagons [sic] to...

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 17:03:33 -0400

The view of science as unarticulated and ineffable skill is science circling its wagons [sic] to ward off incursions from politics and religion. (296)

Theodore M. Porter, “How Science Became Technical,” Isis 100.2 (2009): 292–309.