2008/6/6
just like in a movie...
You know those plots – a world is built up, then suddenly it’s all confusing and bad, and then you discover what you are sure is the context, the explanation… only to discover that while the context is true, the bad-confusion continues, so it’s not so much causal as accidental, and the author is sitting there, snickering into hir fist?
Yeah, Author? I’d like to request less misleading like that, please. If you would. (0)
2008/3/30
curiouser and curiouser...
…and not necessarily in a good way. Spring is definitely springing; everything is happening all at once. Some of it is very, very good (more on that soon). Some is… not. My heart aches for its attendant body-and-mind, and – in a different way – for a loved one. My mind reels. My body is a bit shell-shocked by all the house-painting and weight lifting and weather changes, but this part is good, it reminds me I’m still alive and not suspended in some alternate universe, flailing a bit and effecting change whose ramifications won’t become clear for months to years hence. And so we walk on. (0)
Albert Hofmann’s dead. At the age of 102, in good health almost right up until the heart attack at the end. As someone on a mailing list said, he had a good run.
Thank you, Dr. Hoffman, for the wonder and perspective you’ve brought into the world.
I have other thoughts to post, perhaps later. But just look at this for 40 seconds:
Molly rightly says, “I have never seen a more bad-ass pink cardigan.” Gods, I’d love to see this woman as our first lady.
What I like about this small collection of links is that none of them came from News of the Weird. This is all off my feed reader – you know, BBC, Wired, ScienceBlogs, personal blogs, that sort of thing. On to the articles of interest:
If your surgeon is a videogaming geek and has played around with a Wii, you may be in luck! Chances are, her skills have improved.
I love Norway: “A millionaire real-estate magnate and art dealer from Setesdal in southern Norway has been fined NOK 425,000 (USD 85,000) for drunk driving, and been further required to chop wood for 30 days.”
Hey, baby, want to see my spy gear?
And on a slightly more serious note, here’s a well-written article on the politics of legal and illegal drugs. Even if the author get just a tad too earnest, I am thankful for publications like SFGate, which run these stories from time to time to remind us that the war on drugs has nothing to do with science.
Wired: “Group Touts Seaweed As Warming Weapon.”
The idea is simple: deforestation? No problem – just use the vast amounts of space out there in the oceans to grow a bunch of seaweed and algae of various sorts, which apparently photosynthesize carbon dioxide “at rates comparable to the mightiest rain forests.” Better: they grow quickly.
Critics say that this isn’t truly carbon sequestration if the seaweed is then fed to people, because then the carbon is released right back out. I clearly don’t know enough of the mechanics of photosynthesis – I thought the carbon was transformed and/or incorporated into more complex structures, not merely stored? And if it’s stored as something other than carbohydrates and (as the Wired article says) the carbon is released into the atmosphere as seaweed decomposes, isn’t it a good idea to feed it to people, then?
Ahha, gummint scientists to the rescue:
Q. Should we be concerned with human breathing as a source of CO2?
A. No. While people do exhale carbon dioxide (the rate is approximately 1 kg per day, and it depends strongly on the person’s activity level), this carbon dioxide includes carbon that was originally taken out of the carbon dioxide in the air by plants through photosynthesis - whether you eat the plants directly or animals that eat the plants. Thus, there is a closed loop, with no net addition to the atmosphere.
Anyway. The question of using seaweed to combat the insanely high levels of carbon dioxide humans put out is only beginning to be explored, but already it is an interesting idea!
Did you hear about the Boston “bomb” scare?
Here’s a CNN article that tells about it. BBC has reported on it, too. Lots of coverage.
They were art pieces advertising Aqua Teen Hunger Force. They were put up by a member of the Glitch Crew video art collective, who was contracted to do so by Turner Broadcasting. Some people thought they were bombs; bomb squads went berserk.
A good friend of mine, also a member of Glitch, was helping Peter put them up. He’s in jail too, with a $100,000 bail on his head. Arraignment is tomorrow morning, and I hope they’ll just be let go.
They got arrested after Turner owned up. As far as I know, Turner is letting them spend the night in jail. Which, as far as I’m concerned, may be easier but is… a bit assinine on the part of one of the richest media companies in the U.S.
I’ll post again after I know what happens at the arraignment. Meanwhile, here’s a link to a Grand Text Auto post that mentions other instances in which artists have gotten in trouble because we’re now scared of EVERYTHING.
Edited to add: no, wait. I’m taking issue with some stuff in the CNN article. (I’m sure other news sources are no better, by the way, just picking up on their wording.)
Peter Berdovsky, 27, a freelance video artist from Arlington, Massachusetts, was facing charges of placing a hoax device in a way that results in panic, as well as one count of disorderly conduct, said Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley. The charge is a felony, she said.
According to his Web site, Berdovsky is a graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art and a founding member of a video artists group called Glitch who goes by the nickname “Zebbler” and sings in a band called “Superfiction.”
Authorities believe Berdovsky was “in the employ of other individuals” as part of the marketing campaign, Coakley said. “How exactly this was executed, we are still investigating.” Berdovsky is scheduled for arraignment at 9 a.m. Thursday in Charlestown District Court.
“In the employ of other individuals”? YES, YOU DIPSHITS, HE WAS IN THE EMPLOY OF TURNER. And also, stop calling them “suspicious packages.” They’re not packages. They’re CIRCUIT BOARDS WITH LIGHTS AND THREE AA BATTERIES IN THEM. If you hold them up, you can see through the holes in them. Nothing was ever hidden from view in them. So stop fucking scaremongering now that you know what they are.
Gah. News media.
Edited again: Oh, good. Now CNN has updated the article to include “Sean Stevens, 28″ in the two-name list of the people arrested. Now I don’t feel quite as weird about talking about Sean by name.
Also, ha! NOBODY IS SAFE. CNN again: “Turner Broadcasting said the devices had been in place for two to three weeks in Boston; New York; Los Angeles, California; Chicago, Illinois; Atlanta, Georgia; Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; Austin, Texas; San Francisco, California; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.”
Back from California, with a cold given to me by brother and nephew, who brought it with them from New York.
The funeral was… a funeral. It was sad. We cried.
I feel like my grandmother left so long ago, it’s difficult to find the words for talking about her death as something recent. Far more real for me was my mother’s pain, and my uncle’s. From this perspective, the family time was a very good thing indeed.
Now we’re back, and I would be diving right into the work if not for the cold that waylaid me in the morning and early afternoon. And I have a doctor’s appointment in an hour (unrelated)! Guess today’s a sick day.
Last week Ethan and I and other family had a long and at times heated conversation about politics, environment and other controversial topics. My mom and I have one of those more or less every time we see each other, and given that we’re on the opposite sides of the political spectrum from each other, you can imagine how they tend to go. One thing, though – we’re learning to not let the disagreements cloud our interactions for days. I guess that’s a good thing.
I’m all for providing information, but hate it when someone force-feeds it to me. So, WHEREAS I desire to share information on contentious topics with my mother, AND I love her, AND I don’t want to force all of it upon her, LET THEREFORE be established a new purpose for this weblog, BEING to more thoroughly document my perception of the world.
Let’s see if this lasts for more than a day, mm? I was always terrible at letter-writing, and diary-writing, and blogging. I’m hurtling headlong into the (hopefully?) final stages of my dissertation. But the world keeps going, and I need an outlet – and a tangible link to the outside of my head.
The evening after our big debate, I found the following interesting bits on the web.
Personal Responsibility
Wired reports that people can cause earthquakes! The 5.6 one that took place in 1989 in Australia was caused, National Geographic says, by 200 years of coal mining. And, HA ha, the extensive damage done by the earthquake cost more than all the coal they got out of that mine, put together. The damage and undoubted deaths aren’t funny, but in a perverse sense, the whole thing is. Remember, gang: what we do with our environment affects everyone.
Global warming isn’t new. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again. With or without us. Except that this time around, it’s us making it happen.
Fear not, though, some of us are acting to make things better. Jyllands-Posten reports that Danes will have access to bioethanol by 2010. Denmark is generally pretty cool, as Brad DeLong documents in “The Scandinavian Model.”
So what can you do? Well, for one thing you can offset the emissions you generate through travel by buying energy credits. Their calculator is flawed, but the money goes to developing renewable-energy projects.
Depending on where you live, you may also have the option of paying a little more to get your energy from renewable sources only. Here’s one place to start (in the US, at least).
You can even join Al Gore’s information troops.
Giving The Man The Finger
All passports issued by the US State Department after January 1 will have always-on radio frequency identification chips, making it easy for officials – and hackers – to grab your personal stats. Getting paranoid about strangers slurping up your identity? Here’s what you can do about it.
They do warn that tampering with these chips is illegal, and let me emphasize that I’m linking to someone else’s article here. Don’t shoot the messenger, Mr. Man!
Just Cool
Off to the doctor’s. Y’all take care now, y’hear?
TUCSON, Ariz. - A preliminary study of the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms has found it is effective in relieving the symptoms of people suffering from severe obsessive compulsive disorder, a University of Arizona psychiatrist reports.
Dr. Francisco A. Moreno led the first FDA-approved clinical study of psilocybin since it was outlawed in 1970. The results of the small-scale study are published in the latest edition of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
Psilocybin is, as you will surely know, the psychoactive ingredient in mushrooms of the Psilocybe genus. The article above is a fun little read, and the Erowid link… well, Erowid may not be a “little” read, but is always fun and educational. :)
(If you follow the second link above and find the information interesting and well presented, won’t you donate to Erowid before the year is out? They are the largest online repository of information on psychoactives from caffeine to smart drugs to heroin; they do some great work, and are supported entirely by [non-governmental!] donations. Definitely a worthy cause to support.)
Meant to write a mini-news-update on Denmark and Norway, who’ve had a particularly productive news day today. Behold:
Denmark leads social justice rankings, says a German think tank. *wistful sigh* Color me transplant-wannabe, and that’s just the first link.
Over 7000 Swedes commute to Denmark daily for work, and a new EU directive may relieve the tax burden on Danish employers, who at the moment are technically supposed to pay a sizeable chunk of cash in taxes to the Swedish government in addition to what they already pay to the Danish one. I’m not sure how it is that Sweden wins, here; it’s likely to be a touch-and-go process. But if they do succeed in working something out to everyone’s benefit, great.
Denmark, the brand name. They’re putting forth a serious effort to promote their country, presumably to drum up tourism and improve the country’s image (as if it needs to be improved, much). Go go Denmark gadget; given funds availability, I’d go there again in a heartbeat. Then again, see transplant above.
Compare and contrast to Norway, whose chief profits are still coing from oil. From conversations with Jill a few years ago, Norway at least seems to be going about oil production more responsibly than most other countries that have access to this resource.
“High consumption lands Norway among world’s worst: Norway, which generally prides itself on maintaining high environmental standards, seems to actually be using way more than it should of the world’s natural resources.” Oh yeah, Norway? Well, the good ol’ USA is second in the worst-offenders list, compared to your paltry 11th! We sure showed you!
Oy.
Finally, the young Norwegian who cracked DVD protection a few years ago claims to have done the same with the dread iTunes/iPod combo. “Johansen claims he’s mastered the inner workings of the iPod and its FairPlay encryption technology, allowing him to remove many of the restrictions Apple places on its users. Today, songs purchased from Apple’s iTunes store can’t be played on non-iPod devices, and, if you’ve bought songs from other music stores, the chances are you won’t be able to play them on the iPod either since they use a form of copy protection that Apple doesn’t support. […] Johansen’s driving force is his belief that users have the right to listen to songs they have bought legally on any device they own. […] Unlocking the iPod-iTunes ecosystem is seen by many as a good thing for consumers, as it will most likely result in increased competition to the iTunes Store, possibly resulting in lower prices and a higher quality service.” No particular comment here, except that I’m pleased: the iTunes/iPod black box has gotten on my nerves more than once.
Via the inimitable Ms. Bitch comes a link to a Washington Post article (free registration required, I believe): “As Europe Grows Grayer, France Devises a Baby Boom.”
France has woken up to a bit of population crisis going around Europe: all of Europe is below replacement rate, meaning the population count is going down. In addition, they like families. You know, have family values. I remember hearing something about that in the U.S., vaguely and only once or twice.
Some excerpts from the article:
When the municipal day-care center ran out of space because of a local baby boom, the town government gave Maylis Staub and her husband $200 a month to defray the cost of a “maternal assistant” to care for their two children.
When Staub delivered twins last December — her third and fourth children — the nation not only increased their tax deductions and child allowances, the government-owned French train system offered 40 percent discounts off tickets for the parents and the children until they reach their 18th birthdays.[…]
France heavily subsidizes children and families from pregnancy to young adulthood with liberal maternity leaves and part-time work laws for women. The government also covers some child-care costs of toddlers up to 3 years old and offers free child-care centers from age 3 to kindergarten, in addition to tax breaks and discounts on transportation, cultural events and shopping. […]
A century ago, France was one of the first European countries to face a declining population. Since then, almost every elected French government — regardless of party — has instituted laws that encourage bigger families and make it easier for women to keep their jobs while raising children.
Now that’s family values.
This is mostly a reminder to self, as I’m running out of said patience.
BBC, today: “Man ‘took 40,000 ecstasy tablets’”.
For two years, he took five tablets every weekend, rising to an average of 3.5 tablets per day for the next three years, then soaring to 25 tablets a day over the next four years.[…]
When he saw doctors at the addiction centre at St George’s Hospital, Tooting, south London, he was still using cannabis, and said he had previously taken solvents, benzodiazepines, amphetamines, LSD, cocaine, and heroin. […]
[Dr Kouimtsidis] told the Guardian: “This is probably an extreme case so we should not blow any observations out of proportion. But if this is what is happening to very heavy users, it might be an indication that daily use of ecstasy over a long period of time can lead to irreversible memory problems and other cognitive defects.”
Stop with that, already! “Might be an indication”? The guy’s use surpassed the previous known lifetime-use record twenty times over; he’s used a bunch of other substances; so spare me singling out MDMA for scaremongering. If I drank 25 cups of drip coffee a day for years, I’d have paranoid delusions too.
I love it how they take an extreme case and do a News Story on it, without putting it into perspective.
(Edited to add: The Guardian reported this as well; and Mindhacks has a response to the Guardian article much along the lines of mine, only more substantiated and less sputtering.)
2006 has been decidedly a mixed bag so far. An extended family visit was emotionally draining, despite its many shining moments. Driving home through sleet was about as much fun as it sounds, and when we got home we were so exhausted that there was immediately a vicious fight and subsequent bad feelings lasting well over half an hour.
…I’m pretty lucky, huh? E. and I have our problems, and it’s been a difficult couple of weeks, and there are issues to work on, but I have never experienced a long-term relationship in which love truly does conquer all. Quickly, even.
Today, I am sick; mostly, it seems, from allergies to Aki the Cat Who Charmed The World (Including His Catsitter). Muscle pain too, though, so it might still be a cold caught from Tesher the Nephew Who Couldn’t Stop Coughing (But Who Is Still Charming As Hell). See lucky, above: Ethan has been cleaning the house for the past hour or so, while I’m sequestered in the living room.
But none of this matters. Yesterday, Rhode Island became the eleventh state in the Union with a medical marijuana law on the books. The bill was first passed last summer, and in his infinite scientific good judgment, Governor Carcieri vetoed it immediately. State Senate overrode his veto a while back; yesterday, the House did the same. HELL YES. Finally.
The document can be found here. It provides the opportunity to use marijuana for medical purposes, and protections that go therewith, to patients suffering from AIDS, multiple sclerosis, cancer and other debilitating diseases. Here are some excerpts:
Modern medical research has discovered beneficial uses for marijuana in treating or alleviating pain, nausea and other symptoms associated with certain debilitating medical conditions, as found by the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine in March 1999 […]
According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, ninety-nine (99) out of every one hundred (100) marijuana arrests in the United States are made under state law, rather than under federal law. Consequently, changing state law will have the practical effect of protecting from arrest the vast majority of seriously ill people who have a medical need to use marijuana.[…]
States are not required to enforce federal law or prosecute people for engaging in activities prohibited by federal law. Therefore, compliance with this chapter does not put the state of Rhode Island in violation of federal law. […]
Boo yah. The distinction between medical and non-medical use is made loud and clear, and the lawmakers were careful not to include any politically inflammatory language regarding the war on drugs in general. Damaging and senseless as the marijuana prohibition has been in general over the past… oh, eight decades or so, this isn’t the place to fight it. The point is, people in Rhode Island who spend their days in pain and misery can now alleviate that pain without being considered criminals when no other pain reliever works.
Thank you, Rhode Island legislature. This step toward sanity is courageous in the current political climate.
[The subject of this post has nothing to do with this awesome site, and I hope that by advertising them I get to use their name in my lowly post without fear of wrath.]
Well, this is something to look forward to when we’re biking around Denmark.
Straight out of a Greek myth, this one. “And the birds pecked out his liver over and over and over again until the END OF TIME.”
Thanks to Wil for the midday injection of surreality.
We bomb an Iraqi house by mistake, fourteen people reportedly die including seven children, and we apologize for the loss of “possibly innocent lives”??
Un. believable.
Good weekend. No, great weekend, thanks to the kindness and all-around coolness of a friend and his stunning video art. More later.
I am looking to start a small project, for which I’d like to find a few reputable sources of information. By reputable I mean written by decent people whose main interest is the truth, with as little spin as possible. I’d like to get to points of view that aren’t normally in my field of vision, so I need a conservative publication or two (besides Andrew Sullivan’s blog, which I haven’t been reading until now, but will) and a publication that is sympathetic to the Republican party. They don’t need to be separate publications necessarily, but I’d like to find a total of at least a couple. Syndication feed availability for their news articles would be a big plus. If they’re local or regional, that’s at least as good as national. Too much liberal- and/or Democrat-bashing would be a minus. I don’t care for partisanship, I want their point of view.
Suggestions, anyone?
Not bad, as reading goes. This LA Weekly article summarizes pretty well why I admire Earth and Fire’s work so much.
Rob Wittig, one of my favorite contemporary writers and artists, appears in a New York Times article today: “Call me Email: The Novel Unfolds Digitally.” (Subscription required, sorry. Look to NikkiNewsNet for a login cheat, if you will; and NNN is wonderful reading in its own right as well.)
And after you read the article, run do not walk to Wittigwords.
So, the Mac OS X Trojan scare was just that. A PLOY by a virus protection software company to FURTHER its own ECONOMIC INERESTS.
Well, I never.
Talked to my sister-in-law and brother on the phone today. They live in Rome, together with my 3-year-old nephew. But this isn’t about them, it’s about a news bit.
Do you know why there was no electricity in all of Italy for an entire day recently?
Because a tree fell in Switzerland.
