To Hell Without the Dignity of a Handbasket, Even



I just learned that Vic Chesnutt died today, aged 45: a suicide. In the last few years, I got to know his music well, and I thought him the finest songwriter alive. He was the only musician in whom I still took an ongoing, non-nostalgic interest. I saw him play at the Great American Music Hall less than a month ago: extraordinary, impassioned, a born artist, the real thing.

 In the most obvious way, his death is perfectly believable. Chesnutt was a paraplegic and had been in a wheelchair since he was eighteen. By his own account he had made four previous suicide attempts. His injuries had caused painful and costly medical complications, and, report has it, he could not pay for them. 

In another, more self-centered way, I find it unbelievable. During this year I had need to cling to Chesnutt's music: especially to his second album, West of Rome . Every other music reminded me of something else; not West of Rome . (His finest other albums include Is the Actor Happy? [1995] and A...

I have been catching up on my ultrasonics this morning and met with this abstract, helpfully prefixed to an article on "Vibration of Post-Buckled Homogeneous Circular Plates": The dynamic behavior of an axisymmetric post-buckled circular plate with initial in-plane compression loading is investigated. The static von Karman plate equations are solved numerically for clamped boundary conditions. The static solution is presented for a range of transverse and in-plane loads. Lumped element modeling is used to calculate the mass and compliance of the plate from results of the static solution. The resonant frequency, sensitivity, and maximum linear transverse pressure are calculated for a variety of in-plane loads. These solutions can be used to predict the post-buckled behavior of micromachined plates. Heaven knows it sounds right. But alas, here as elsewhere, gorgeous diction conceals faulty reasoning. We have grown so accustomed to solving clamped boundary conditions numerically...