Belleza maculada - Alkionai hémerai

Hace muchos años, por las fechas en que el Marqués de Tamarón publicaba su Belleza maculada, apareció este poema de Sánchez Ferlosio, también en el ABC que D. Rafael fustigaba. Entre papeles ha reaparecido hace poco y estas páginas se merecen su inclusión.

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Cielo desgarradoramente azul

para el recuerdo de los días alegres:

azul testigo del azul perdido

de los azules días del cormorán, 

todos ayeres.

Bajamos por escabrosas escombreras

hacia los ríos parados y podridos,

perdiendo hasta el ayer: los días del alción

en la sonrisa de los hijos muertos.

La mar se vuelve negra,

se muere el cormorán,

¿y quién hará el azul, quién hará el día,

quién hará el ayer?

Tiempo apresado en el futuro escrito

del libro encalendado e idumarcial,

sin todavía.

Tiempo forjado en hierro de trofeo

y en bronce ecuestre fundido y perpetuado,

y bruñidas de historia las medallas

de las edades enfuturecidas

blanquean rojos cruores

de antiguas sañas en cándido alabastro:

peer en botija para que retumbe,

para que otumbe y para que lepante.

El calendario trae el tiempo ya apagado,

exorcizado, amortizado, reinvertido

en valores de viuda, no temáis:

toda zozobra anticipadamente

ha sido degollada

por Herodes el Grande, por Futuro Magno:

Ne redeant Saturnia regna!

Clavada la vertical del fiel de la balanza,

ventura y desventura, cada una en su platillo,

pesarán para siempre exactamente igual.

Némesis protectora y vigilante,

cascando de un mismo golpe el uno contra el otro

sus blandos cráneos de recién nacido,

cuidará de matar cada mañana

la desesperación y la esperanza.

Peril on the sea

Durante algún tiempo participé en un foro donde se discutían asuntos relacionados con el futuro de la energia. Aprendí varias cosas, aunque no conseguí acostumbrarme al tipo de discusiones que se daba (en rigor, que dábamos), y lo terminé dejando. Este artículo del Economist acerca de la posible interrupción de las vías de transporte marítimo de la energía (Peril on the sea) me llamó mucho la atención.
Naturalmente hay muchos otros Perils on the sea, pero una cosa no quita la otra.

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Iba a copiar el artículo aquí aunque veo que el enlace funciona bien sin necesidad de subscripción. Lo dejo de todos modos por si la generosidad del Economist tiene un límite. El diagrama no es del artículo.

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Peril on the sea

Oct 2nd 2003
From The Economist print edition

Are terrorists now aiming to block shipping lanes and disrupt the flow of oil and other goods ?

ON MARCH 26th, the Dewi Madrim, a chemical tanker off the coast of Sumatra, was boarded by ten pirates from a speedboat. They were armed with machine guns and machetes and carried VHF radios. They disabled the ship's radio, took the helm and steered the vessel, altering speed, for about an hour. Then they left, with some cash and the captain and first officer, who are still missing.

So what? South-East Asia is the home of piracy. There was an alarming 37% increase in incidents during the first half of this year. Raiders board ships, steal cash and kidnap crew members, then hold them for ransom. Some criminals even steal a ship and sell its cargo—then repaint it, equip it with false documents and put it to work. The region, with its lax security and poor maritime supervision, is famous for such “ghost ships”.

But according to a new study* by Aegis Defence Services, a London defence and security consultancy, these attacks represent something altogether more sinister. The temporary hijacking of the Dewi Madrim was by terrorists learning to drive a ship, and the kidnapping (without any attempt to ransom the officers) was aimed at acquiring expertise to help the terrorists mount a maritime attack. In other words, attacks like that on the Dewi Madrim are the equivalent of the al-Qaeda hijackers who perpetrated the September 11th attacks going to flying school in Florida.

Coupled with this, there is evidence that terrorists are learning about diving, with a view to attacking ships from below. The Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines kidnapped a maintenance engineer in a Sabah holiday resort in 2000. On his release in June this year, the engineer said his kidnappers knew he was a diving instructor; they wanted instruction. The owner of a diving school near Kuala Lumpur has recently reported a number of ethnic Malays wanting to learn about diving, but being strangely uninterested in learning about decompression.

Any labor which accepts the competition with slave labor - is slave labor

Norbert Wiener ha sido uno de los padres fundadores de la computación moderna y esa disciplina a la que dieron nombre y que luego ha quedado diluida: la cibernética. Uno no deja de sorprenderse al leer que estudió con Hilbert, Hardy, Russell o Landau y ver la actividad intelectual que desarrolló. Ocurre que usamos la misma palabra (universidad) para realidades que, a lo que parece, no tienen nada que ver - salvo ocasionalmente compartir edificios. Preocupado por el futuro, Wiener puso a salvo su alma confiando en que los desarrollos tecnológicos, de por sí mismos, pudieran ser moralmente neutros. Copio unos párrafos al respecto de su libro Cybernetics (or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine), 1961, 2nd ed.

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Let me now come to another point which I believe to merit attention. It has long been clear to me that the modern ultra-rapid computing machine was in principle an ideal central nervous system to an apparatus for automatic control; and that its input and output need not be in the form of numbers or diagrams but might very well be, respectively, the readings of artificial sense organs, such as photoelectric cells or thermometers, and the performance of motors or solenoids. With the aid of strain gauges or similar agencies to read the performance of these motor organs and to report, to "feed back," to the central control system as an artificial kinesthetic sense, we are already in a position to construct artificial machines of almost any degree of elaborateness of performance. Long before Nagasaki and the public awareness of the atomic bomb, it had occurred to me that we were here in the presence of another social potentiality of unheard of importance for good and for evil. The automatic factory and the assembly line without human agents are only so far ahead of us as is limited by our willingness to put such a degree of effort into their engineering as was spent, for example, in the development of the technique of radar in the Second World War.
I have said that this new development has unbounded possibilities for good and for evil. For one thing, it makes the metaphorical dominance of the machines, as imagined by Samuel Butler, a most immediate and non-metaphorical problem. It gives the human race a new and most effective collection of mechanical slaves to perform its labor. Such mechanical labor has most of the economic properties of slave labor, although, unlike slave labor, it does not involve the direct demoralizing effects of human cruelty. However, any labor that accepts the conditions of competition with slave labor accepts the conditions of slave labor, and is essentially slave labor. The key word of this statement is competition. It may very well be a good thing for humanity to have the machine remove from it the need of menial and disagreeable tasks, or it may not. I do not know. It cannot be good for these new potentialities to be assessed in the terms of the market, of the money they save; and it is precisely the terms of the open market, the "fifth freedom," that have become the shibboleth of the sector of American opinion represented by the National Association of Manufacturers and the Saturday Evening Post. I say American opinion, for as an American, I know it best, but the hucksters recognize no national boundary.

Here a sad story indeed must be told

Hace unos fines de semana estuve en un gran museo y no dejé de pasar por el departamento asirio. Recordé lo leído acerca de la otra cara de las expediciones arqueológicas (y los museos). Copio de Otto Neugebauer, The exact sciences in antiquity, 1969, 2nd ed.

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At this point it may be useful to insert a few general remarks about excavations and publication of texts because little is known about these problems outside the small circle of the initiated.

A modern excavation is a highly complex enterprise. A staff of architects, draftsmen, photographers, epigraphers, and philologists have to assist the archeologist in his field work. But this is only the first and easier phase of an excavation. The preservation of the ruin, the conservation of the objects found, and, most of all, the publication of the results, remains the final task for which the work in the field is only the preliminary step.
Here a sad story indeed must be told. While the field work has been perfected to a very high standard during the last half century, the second part, the publication, has been neglected to such a degree that many excavations of Mesopotamian sites resulted only in a scientifically executed destruction of what was left still undestroyed after a few thousand years. The reasons for this fact are trivial. The time required for the publication of results is a multiple of the requirements for the field work. The available money is usually spent when a fraction of the original planned excavation has been completed, benefactors are hard to find to pay for many years of work without tangible or spectacular results, and.the scholars get interested in special aspects of the problem involved or go out for new material instead of performing the tedious work of publishing the thousands of details which the accidents of excavation have provided. The final result is not much different from the one obtained by the treasure-hunting attitude of the earliest excavators.