...and dust to dust

One of my favorite Shakespeare quotes is from Macbeth:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.

Ah, dust!  This latest heat wave across America has kicked up a lot of it.  Add that to the particulate-laden smoke from all the forest fires burning, the scare of microbe-terror by airborne airburst, and the ever-terrifying phenomena known as dust devils...

(yes, I was traumatized by a dust devil when I was a child),

...then we have the recipe for:

Yet there is another side to dust that has slithered lately into our technology, culture, and language.  Can dust serve us?  Can it become an adjunct in ushering us into a techno-utopia?

Dr. Kris Pister, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, is among the scientists who aim to give microbatteries a trial run with a wireless network based on MEMS technology. Dr. Pister is the inventor of smart dust, or networked airborne motes of silicon that are designed to sense, measure and transmit data like temperature, humidity and light intensity.

—Anne Eisenberg, "A World of Wee Devices Seeks Some Batteries to Match," The New York Times, January 10, 2002

and...

The Pentagon has a proposal for fighting dirty in the future: clouds of "smart dust" that could track enemy troops or check for dangerous chemicals. The tiny particles, about 1 millimeter wide by 1 centimeter long, could be shot into the air in a bullet and fall slowly in a cloudlike mass, according to Defense News, a weekly newspaper.

—Jennifer Files, "Tech Bits," The Dallas Morning News, May 26, 1997

add to that...

In 1999, Gonzalez received $1.4 million from the National Institutes of Health to compare his enzyme-nutritional therapy with the best chemotherapy now available for the treatment of advanced pancreatic cancer. As a percentage of the fifteen billion dollars that the federal government spends on medical research annually, the grant amounts to what one federal health official described to me as "decimal dust."

—Michael Specter, "The Outlaw Doctor," The New Yorker, February 5, 2001

So how much of this federal decimal dust is being used to develop such smart dust ?  ...dust to dust !  LOL

As a final reflection, consider the outbreak of blogs in the blogosphere as a form of smart dust: networked internet-borne motes of meaning-embedded bytes that are designed to sense, measure and reflect this incident called Life from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, lighting fools the way to dusty death.

'Forget all the rules. Forget about being published.
Write for yourself and celebrate writing.'



Melinda
Haynes