Brave New World

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” There was a long silence.

“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.

Neuhaus - Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Neuhaus speaks of "the toxic cultural air of a disenchanted world in which the mark of sophistication is to reduce wonder to banality. Even more, the acids of intellectual urbanity turn sacrifice into delusion, generosity into greed, and love into self-aggrandizement. In academic circles, this is called 'the hermeneutics of suspicion,' meaning that things are interpreted to reveal that they are not in fact what they appear to be. At least things that seem to suggest the true, the beautiful and the good are not what they appear to be. They must be exposed and debunked if we are to get to 'the truth of the matter.' The false, the self-serving, the ugly and the evil, on the other hand, are permitted to stand as revealing 'the real world.'" (Chapter 4 of Death on a Friday Afternoon, p. 125)    

Santayana on William James

"Perhaps in the first years of his teaching he felt as a military man might feel when obliged to read the prayers at a funeral.  He probably conceived what he said more deeply than a more scholastic mind might have conceived it; yet he would have been more comfortable if someone else had said it for him.  I think he was glad when the bell rang, and he could be himself again until the next day.  But in the midst of this routine of the class-room the spirit would sometimes come upon him, and leaning his head on his hand, he would let fall golden words, picturesque, fresh from the heart, full of the knowledge of good and evil." -- George Santayana on William James

Luna 3

October 4, 1959 -- the Soviet Luna 3 launches.  Three days later, it would take the first ever images of the dark side of the moon.  With no rockets to correct or aim the Luna's course, the means of getting this four foot tall hermetically sealed cylinder (read as: fancy garbage can) boomeranged into space, pointed in the right direction at the right moment to take a set of photos, develop the film, scan the film, and transmit them back to Earth was nothing short of a feat of technological acrobatics.

"Photograph 1" -- the first transmitted image. What a shame that all the original photos burned up with the ship.

The radiowave transmission of the photographs in the Luna 3 operated via a scanner which measured the intensity of light and dark pixels on the film.  These areas (pixels) would be assigned an electronic value according to their intensity, encoding the image in a series of numbers which could then be transmitted back to earth via electromagnetic waves (radio waves) and reconstituted as an image--not unlike how a TV works.  (Note to self: look up a better explanation of my cursory understanding of this.)

The Luna 3 spent the following five months locked in a looping ellipse, completing eleven orbits around the moon and Earth before falling back to Earth and disintegrating in the atmosphere in March, 1960.

A 2D image of 4D gymnastics.

(Rotated to approximate the photograph from the Luna 3).

The dark side of the moon (or, more accurately: the far side of the moon), as pictured by the Apollo 16 in 1972 -- Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon came out shortly after, in March, 1973.