Mr. Uhouse,
Here is the following link to assist you with a FOIA request: http://www.foia.va.gov/FOIA_NCA.asp
V/R,
JC
JOSHUA C. WHITE
DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS
WASHINGTON CROSSING NATIONAL CEMETERY
Program Analyst
P: 609-877-5460
F: 609-871-4691
from "The Cyberiad" by Stanislaw Lem:
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Our asymptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart, Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove, And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel, Or Fourier, or any Bools or Euler, Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers, Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not - for what then shall remain? Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine! the product o four scalars is defines! Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind Cuts capers like a happy haversine. I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die, Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!
http://webplaza.pt.lu/laurent3/include/html/poems.html
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 8:06 AM on 16th July 2009
These extraordinary images reveal what happens when electrical surges pass through a metal board with a simple plant on top.
Photographer Robert Buelteman sends 80,000 volts through his flowery subjects and then literally paints photographs of the outcome.
In three awe-inspiring series, the 55-year-old uses roses, petunias, and even cannabis in mind-blowing detail to give an extraordinary view of ordinary plant-life.
Artist Robert Buelteman sends 80,000 volts through flowery subjects and then literally paints photographs of the outcome to create these amazing pictures
The process to capture these unique images is so complex it has taken him 10 years - and a gruelling average of 60 hours-per-week - to produce just 80 photos.
Working in complete darkness, he begins by placing his chosen plant onto a metal board which he then passes the electrical surge through.
He can even pinpoint areas where he wants to focus the charge using a wand and a simple car battery.
The artist uses roses, petunias, and even cannabis in his amazing works
As his subject lights up with the current, and emits radiation invisible to the naked eye, Mr Buelteman captures the moments by passing a fibre optic cable back-and-forth over the plant.
The cable emits a beam of white light which is just the size of a human hair and whatever the miniscule torch-beam touches, transfers the image onto film.
The captivating blue haze that surrounds every leaf, petal and stalk is actually gases ionising around them as the plant is electronically shocked.
To explain the baffling process, Buelteman, from Montara, California, USA, uses a trusted analogy.
This picture of Eucalyptus provides an amazing inside into plantlife
Buelteman spends an average of 60 hours-per-week - to produce just 80 photos
'You just have to imagine it like a painter creating a picture on canvass,' he said. 'The plant is the subject just like the painter's bowl of fruit or the person they are capturing.
'The electrified board I place the plants on is the canvass. The fibre optic cable emitting the light-beam is my paintbrush.
'Another way to try and understand it is like a normal photograph on a normal camera, except I am manually controlling the exposure by hand. In the same way the image I capture is simply burned onto film.'
To give the pictures an added dazzling effect, Mr Buelteman's aluminium canvass actually floats in liquid silicone.
This Geranium image has taken hours to produce
The Californian said his unique technique has been around for decades
And to make sure he doesn't get killed or injured in the process, he erects a protective frame of wood around his easel.
But despite these being the first pictures of their kind in his profession, Mr Buelteman says he has in fact invented nothing and uses a combination of age-old techniques developed decades ago.
Semyon Kirlian - developer of Kirlian photography - accidentally found in 1939 that it was possible to photograph electrical discharges at the edges of objects if that were being shocked on an electrified plate.
The 55-year-old makes ordinary Chrysanthemums look extraordinary
'When people see my work I want them to feel an awakening. The world is an amazing place and evolution has created some breathtaking things for us to look at.
'For me, art is about looking at the world and all it's wonder in a new way, seeing something differently.'
Mr Buelteman has written about the project and the techniques he uses in his book Signs of Life.
His works are being bought for a phenomenal five figures by art collectors.
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