Time to Move On

Blogger has been good to us, but it's time to move on. The new blog is at

www.sahelidatta.com .

We've been blogging for a while there, and I think we got most of the kinks ironed out. I'll be transferring over the blog roll and updating the template here as appropriate, but in the meantime, please come and visit! Thank you!

Cheers,
Saheli

Happy 108!

Today is the fourth day of the bright fortnight of the month of Padmanabha. May true good fortune be had by all the inhabitants of the Universe. . ."Every soul is related to every other soul."
If, in the course of your life, you come across true, essential goodness, my advice to you is that you snatch it up and try to slip it into your heart. It's often not easy---like bringing a bouquet of lotuses home to a vase, when you realize your only vase needs washing. I'm still washing, but ever so grateful to have seen the lotuses.

Subversion

Yarrrr. It's International Talk Like a Pyrate Day. Light be running out like grog on a barnacl'd ship, so set to it, me harties! Arrrr!

I bin talking like a pyrate near three days now, and my pate be addled. With all the brethren of the coast yarrin an arrin', some landlubbers growl that we be a dark and evil tide, throwing good booty after that which be real and very, very bad. Ye olde costumed pyrate aside, sea-robbers are real, they're still around, and and nice they ain't. So whence all this arrrrdor?

Any time ye be aiming for fancy britches and sword play and corsets, all hornpiped to history-like, ye be ignorin' problems with luck and morrrality. God'fearrin' pyrates from the Golden Age might have been right cruel sea-dogs, but so were the better dressed and better lettered Red Coats, Conquistadors, East India Company Men, and assorted other fortune-hunters who chased 'em this way, and stole their tricks that way. Even fancy land-lubbin Knights dined by common folk slavin'. I be sounding like a cheap scurvy dog, but there's a bit of truth in me excuses--those legal sailors were as often not dragged to the seas 'gainst any liking, see that yarn by Cap'n Melville, Billy Budd. One man's pirate or mutineer is anothers' freedom fighting slave, as be found in Benito Cereno. If the established legal crown are just sponsors of pirates themselves, what's wrong with being a pirate for yourself? Live free and die fighting be an old and true part of the Code.

Talking like pyrate doesn't mean killing like one, and there be new means to live free and die fighting. Leave out the plank walking and the keelhauling, I'll take the stomping and the hornpiping and the free range of britches. If there be warriors for peace, there be pirates for right heartiness, and let a bit o' blinnnnnng and arrrrin' remind ye there be treasure in freedom.

From Unfogged: Pyrate Alphabet via Lizardbreath. From Daphne: Pyrate Law.

Yarrrr! Harr Harr, Yaar!

Tomorrow be talk like a pyrate day, and if ye be addlepated, scurvy dogs, I'll lend ye timbered visions to bring about the groggy voice. Avast and watch! Link from Michelle. Apologies to PowerPoint Bilge Rats.

Of Blogs and Bridges

The blogosphere can, in fact, occasionally get stuff done, and the proof was on Saturday.

My friend Steven met me because he read my blog. He's also a journalist, and when he came home to the Bay Area, he asked me if I wanted to meet up. We hit it off, not only with each other, but with each other's friends, and now we work mere blocks away from each other and meet up for coffee and collegial griping. We possibly would have met eventually, since many of his classmates have worked with me, but instead of being passing acquaintances, we've become good friends.

Steven's girlfriend Katie works at a spunky, ambitious charter school in Oakland, KIPP Bridge College Prep School. It has slowly been moving into an old building that previously belonged to Lowell Middle School, finally getting the whole building this school year. They didn't have any janitorial service until very recently, so the teachers had to clean the classrooms themselves--on top of a grueling work schedule. (KIPP schools have very long days, and teachers carry cell phones so their students can call them for help after school and on the weekends.) Steven felt bad that no one had time to wash the school's windows, which were covered in cobwebs, and that the library was unusable because it was overflowing with old textbooks and dust. The teachers have had a slow time clearing it out on top of all their other duties. Since I'm an East Bayer he asked me if I'd be interested in helping them do a little cleaning, and maybe my friends . . .?

I put out an email request. A couple of the usual suspects you know answered--Scotto and Emily Cooper and EChan--as well as another friend Emily. Let us say these were the friends I have in "real life." That's a pretty good gathering. But from blogospheric-friendland I also got replies from Robin of Snarkmarket, and Salil, a fellow commenting Sepia Mutineer. Again, like Steven--perhaps I would have met these guys anyway, but probably not. And their enthusiastic email replies were the tipping factor that made me think that yes, this was going to happen.

Several flurries of email later, we met up on Saturday afternoon. Steven brought three of his friends. We boxed shelves and shelves worth of old text books up, clearing space in the warehouse so that the library itself can be cleared out and made clean and organized so children can go look for knowledge and stories and have a nice place to do their work. There's a lot of work left, but I think we made a sizable dent. Windows were cleaned, both from the inside and outside. Salil and Steven's friend Joel were quite a sight, standing on the roof of a walkway, hosing off cobwebs and grime, uncomplaining about the fact that they were soaking themselves wet, despite the cold. The Emilies applied their eyes for detail and organizational skills. EChan boxed up copies of the U.S. Constitution study guides. Robin and I rebonded over library memories like D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths. Steven's friends Sue and Ashanti brought bagels. Scotto kept everything safe. (Not trivial with huge boxes of books--at one point he had to come and unpin me and EChan.) We worked pretty solidly for four or five hours with music and snacks. There's still a lot of work to be done, and I'm not sure if, when, or how it will get done. But I do think we helped. It's really wonderful to have friends who are willing to party with me like that.

The whole thing gave me a lot of food for thought on the whole subject of our public school system and the way our communities and our age group interact with that system. It'll be many years before I have school age children, and now I think I'm going to need all of them to do my bit for the school system. There's a lot to say and think about that, and I'll try to later. But for now I'm glad that we put aside the saying and thinking and did more of the doing. I was raised with the belief that unselfish hard work is life's greatest joy, and while I usually feel about as far away from that ideal as from the stars, every now and then I brush against it and feel its truth.

I want to emphasize how simple this was. All you need to do is have a friend who is a teacher at a school in need, a Saturday afternoon, and some other friends, and less coordination then you would put into a BBQ. Try it! It's a huge amount of fun.

Building 253 after the rains

Building 253 after the rains
Originally uploaded by Telstar Logistics.

My colleague Telstar Logistics, editor and flickr maestro extrordinaire, has been documenting the abandoned military bases of the Bay Area. I thought this photo was really lovely, even without considerations of context and history---the plate glass, the shimmering reflection, the colors and contrasts, the composition. Here's a black and white postcard of the same building in its engineering heydey.

The Right to Travel

I don't normally reblog stuff from Sepia Mutiny, since they have a larger and more focused audience, but this is too important and too general to ignore. Siddhartha brings our attention to the news that the United States has denied re- entry to two American citizens--one naturalized and one-native born--unless they first agree to be interrogated by the FBI abroad without a lawyer and take a polygraph test. They have not been charged with any crime. From the New York Times article by Randal Archibald:

In Hong Kong, Ms. Mass said, they were told there was a problem with their passports; other family members traveled on to California, while the Ismails returned to Pakistan. There, a consular officer suggested there had been a mix-up and advised them to book a direct flight to the United States, but at the airport, they were told they were on the no-fly list, she said.

Jaber Ismail, who was born in the United States, was questioned by the F.B.I. at the American Embassy in Islamabad, but his father, a naturalized United States citizen from Pakistan, declined to participate, Ms. Mass said. Jaber Ismail has refused further interrogation without a lawyer and has declined to take a polygraph test; Ms. Mass said the men were told these conditions had to be met before the authorities would consider letting them back into the United States.

The San Francisco Chronicle's Demian Bulwa appears to have broken the story, and here is more coverage from Reuters and the Stockton Record. Ms. Mass is a lawyer with the ACLU.

As you can tell, these two American citizens are Pakistani-American. They are from Lodi, and are also related to Hamid Hayat, the 23-year old Lodi resident who was convicted of supporting terrorists earlier this year. They have apparently been in Pakistan for more than four years. It would not be surprising if the FBI had a good reason to want to question them.

But let us not forget that the FBI has a long and storied past of using its powers unjustly. Let us not forget the right to counsel in the Sixth Amendment, or that Habeas Corpus cannot be suspended for a citizen. The FBI could arrest them, handcuff them, and bring them home to be questioned in the presence of a lawyer. Instead it is treating them like foreigners and convicted criminals.

In some sense the specifics of the case are irrelevant to general discussion. If they are guilty, or dangerous, there are constitutional ways of dealing with that. What is relevant is this: two American citizens are being prevented from coming home except on condition of giving up the very rights of their citizenship. They are being deprived of liberty without trial or even accusation. There are two interpretations of this.

Either all American citizens now forfeit their rights by traveling. Or these two are not really considered American citizens.

The former is a disastrous attack on our liberty. And the latter is a disastrous attack on our citizenry. Please don't ignore it. Please support the ACLU.

The Birth on the Eighth Day of the Moon

It's still my favorite story. The sleepy guards of the jail, the sudden, fragrant rain, the lining up of constellations and half moon as the sun has swung completely away, leaving behind the cover of a darkness that's humming with anticipation. And then. . .

Happy Sri Krishna Janmashtami everyone!

"May there be good fortune throughout the universe, and may all envious persons be pacified." -- Srimad Bhagavatam,5.18.2

The Creatures Who Sit Around Watching While We Use Our Inner Eye

So over the years I have spent hours and hours reading and writing in my living room, and glancing out at our wide view of the north bay every now and then. My attention is frequently grabbed by something quickly moving across the blue. It's usually a bird of prey or carrion or sometimes even a hummingbird.

Now I have an office window with a much more industrial but still somewhat large view--three or four downtown office buildings, the new condos of SOMA, the port of San Francisco, Hunter's Point, a good portion of the bay, and of course, a large blue chunk of sky. And again that motion across the sky catches my attention.

The thing is this time it's usually planes, not birds. But even though I've been sitting here for weeks, there's no reason to see a bird around here or expect a bird to go so fast, and the motion is pretty unbirdlike, I keep thoughtlessly expecting to see a bird. And I am viscerally surprised when it's not a bird. Then I feel this odd mental hiccup, a weird dream-like tug on a body memory, and almost a sense of a barely visible sense of my living room *rushing away* as if it was, somehow, sitting silently around my working mind until focusing on the real world in front of me forced me to notice it wasn't really there.

It reminded me of this post by Matt at Snarkmarket, which is an excerpt from the book
The Singularity is Near describing some Berkeley research about how compact and brief optic information is as it travels from our eyes to our brain. It also made me think about all the things that visual cortex is doing when it's not actively looking around and being a wonderful camera and watcher.

I was at a conference recently filled with bloggers staring at laptops, and it's a bit eerie to see so many people whose eyes are so tightly focused on the area of the screen, and so carefully processing it for abstract informatoin. You can see them thinking. They are oblivious to their real periphery because their real focus is so densely occupied by virtual thoughts. I'm sure, of course, that I spend the vast majority of my day looking like that. And I wonder what the part of our brain that deals with peripheral vision does to amuse itself while we starve it all day. I wonder if it revels in reprocessing scenes and backgrounds from childhood and other times when we gave it a little more attention.

Popularity Dialer

ToastyKen sent me this amusing link: A web-service that places a prescheduled callt o your phone (most likely your cell phone) with a recording of one side of a conversation. Your options are a male friend, a female friend, an affirmation monologue or a boss demanding your immediate return to the office. The idea is that you either need to seem popular, get out of meeting, get some AI companionship, receive a reminder that isn't obviously a reminder, or play hipster pranks on your friends. Listen to the four types of calls if you can.

The idea itself seems obvious in retrospect. Cell phone calls have become acceptable interruptions of pretty much anything, and there are tiny but unsettling shifts in power dynamics that result from someone getting a phone call. Too many is just annoying, but a couple does indicate that a person has other people to talk to and other people to hang out with. It's also a sign of how phone-speakers have gotten really loud--you can no longer fake a call to yourself because people can catch snatches of your conversation. Though I try to step away from the group when I'm taking a call, as much to allow the group to continue its conversation without me as to protect my own privacy.

The affirmation call is silly and should be more creative and contain more pauses. The boss call is funny---the boss irately wants you to come back to the offie to fix a copy machine that is vomiting ink everywhere. It makes me wonder how many hipsters really have Marten-like drone jobs. It's prety useless for me, though--my boss would have to be insane to ask me to cure a hungover copier. I can barely move the monstrous paper tray to fix a jam. The first two calls, however, the male and female friends calling to find out what's up and if you'll hang out, are eerily familiar: overly mellow laughs, the gratuitiouslyinsinuating tone, the generically playful coaxing whine. My friends don't talk like that, but I've certainly overheard a lot of conversations that sound like this. I guess a Saheli-tailored version would insert some extraneous discussion of cephalopods. That would sound pretty authentic.

UPDATE: Cephalopod-oriented half of a conversation for your talking pleasure, courtesy of ToastyKen.

Josh Wolf In Jail

Er, I just found out about this and am rather sketchy on the details. In late 2004 when I was thinking about learning more about video, I met a young guy named Josh Wolf whose enthusiasm and dedication to becoming a documentarian was almost overwhelming. I quickly decided that running around with a video camera was not something I felt like doing at the time, so I only hung out with him and his fellow camera-geeks a few times. So now, apparently, he is in jail for contempt-of-court because the judge wants him to change his mind about handing over footage of a demonstration (turned violent) to the feds. This is quite in line with the feds constantly obsessing with chasing dissenters. On the face of it, this seems wrong to me, and this SF Chronicle column seems to make the case quite well.

To spell out for people what's wrong with this picture---if journalists have to hand over their outtakes and their notes and negatives, if every camera--even a journalists's camera--at every protest or gathering automatically becomes federal property, nobobdy will talk to us, and nobody will let us take pictures of their gatherings and videotape their opinions. And it's not because people know they're doing something illegal. It's because people know that even legal things can be held against them, and they don't want to have to deal with the incovnenience of being on a mistaken no-fly list or proving their innocence. And if journalists are not allowed to check things out and write about them, independent of the government, you, the citizen, won't know anyone else's side of the story.

I can't say I knew Josh terribly well. I only met him a few times, mostly in loud bars where everyone was awkwardly talking about their camera-size and editing software. But he was a kind and patient explainer of technical details, and even so kind as to worry that I had become ill or something when I stopped hanging out. So I hope things work out with his legal battles. Here's a blogpost from his mom, and here's a Huffington Post article.

Awesome! My Superhero Diagnosis! And Other News!

Your results:
You are Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman 90% Spider-Man 80% Superman 80% Supergirl 70% Robin 60% Green Lantern 60% Batman 55% The Flash 50% Hulk 50% Catwoman 45% Iron Man 35%

You are a beautiful princess with great strength of character.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero are you?" quiz...


Aw shucks. I was barely hoping for Catwoman, but I guess I'm not quite villainous enough. The description here seems calculated to appeal to 9-year olds. The kind whose fallback Halloween costume was frequently "magical princess." Though that was usually because I could never remember to ask for blood and teeth for a vampire.

From Kevin "Iron Man" Powell.

In other super hero news: On Saturday I was presented with a can of Muscles in Heavy Syrup (to be consumed, along with the can, when needing super strength) from the Brooklyn Superhero Store. I've decided to save it for emergencies. But when the emergencies come--I'll be ready!

Yesterday I was delighted to be given a just-because gift of "Superman, the Dailies: 1939-1942" from a friend who's also a reporter and who remarked on how much more central Clark Kent and Lois Lane's journalistic careers are to the plots. Superman's also a bit of a of a jerk, and not in the wackily insane ways carefully preserved on Superdickery.com, but in a more realistic and therefore scary way---he intimidates criminals into talking with little cause (though of course he's always right), and frequently arranges matters to make sure Clark Kent gets a scoop, even if that's slightly suboptimal morally. Nevertheless, the comics are still thoroughly delightful, especially the simple art. I've carefully loaned it to the art director for the day so that I actually get some work done.

Scott just showed me this interesting site, girl-wonder.org. Filed away for future investigation!

Awesome! Aloo Tikki in the Financial District

I knew that one of my work-hood sandwich shops, EatCetera on Market, was either owned or operated by desis. There's an older uncle and his two kids who are super friendly (as are the Latina & Latino cashiers), and there's a chicken Biryani which I can't eat, of course. I usually go for the salad bar, the hefty avacado sandwich on Dutch crunch, and the bananas. But they have finally heeded my frustrated cries to heaven for some real Chaat in the Fi-di. I have often asked the operators of Vik's in Berkeley to open more branches, but they always shake there heads and say, "so much work!" I think they like to be warehouse purists, even if the warehouse now has tiled floors and real tables. So now EatCetera has ventured into the breach with Aloo Tikki for a dollar. (Aloo Tikki are the lightly fried spiced potato patties. ) Not bad! Spicy, not as fried a crust as I like, and the tub of chutney's more sweet and less sour than I'd prefer. But for a dollar, that's a good deal. Tomorrow I'll try the samosa. I just told Om--too bad he now mostly works at home.

I'm totally fantasizing about EatCetera meeting with such wild success that it provides a full line of Chaaty goodness, a la Kal Ho Na Ho, but for now I'm just thrilled to get a real spicy snack around here.

I read the news today, Oh boy. . .

Sorry about the blog silence. I realize it sounds tacky, but I was actually somewhat demoralized by the sudden and rather unexpected outbreak of war in the Middle East. To put it mildly, I'm not a big fan of bombs or disproportionate violence. The realization that's stuck with me for the last few days is that by the time the bombs start falling, it's kind of too late to really do much of anything except be horrified and angry. We spend so much time and energy recoiling acutely at the horrors of war, and it's hard to come up with a good "diet of daily action" to carefully, regularly nurture the peace.

So anyway, here's a little bit of what I've been reading: Cyrus Farivar is right on top of this stuff, with a Wired News article about Beirut bloggers and posted a letter from a friend of his studying there. Matthew Yglesias has been doing a lot of commentary. BoingBoing recently posted this all kinds of writing blog, which is by an Israeli-Canadian named Melly who flew back to Israel to be with her family in Haifa.

I've done some very shallow Google/Wikipedia research to come up with a following list of peace groups in no particular order. Please note that I am not vetting or endorsing these, since I don't have time or resources to investigate them quiet yet, but they may prove a useful starting point for those of you who are interested:

Gush Shalom, an Israeli group

Bat Shalom, another Israeli group

Tayuush, another Israeli group

Forum for Development, Culture & Dialog, a Beirut-based group which is the interim contact for

The Arab Partnership for Conflict Prevention and Human Security

The International Solidarity Movement, which appears to be both Israeli & Palestinian, and has quite a long history according to its Wikipedia article

The Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence, based in Bethlehem.

The Initiative for Inclusive Security, formerly known as Women Waging Peace, appears to be international, as does

Nonviolence International.

There's also Seeds of Peace.

The Tomorrow Party of Egypt looks promising (Wikipedia article), though its leader has been sentenced to hard labor.

Quakers rock.

Ethan Zuckerman has some wise and timely words on the repercussions of everyone focusing on the Middle East:

In total, it’s likely that, over the past decade, at least forty times as many people have died directly or indirectly from violent conflict in central Africa as have died in the Middle East. With forty times the violent death toll, you’d expect to hear a bit more about conflicts in central Africa - instead, Congo, Uganda and Sudan rank #1, #2, and #3 on Alertnet’s list of “forgotten emergencies.” . . .I mourn the deaths of everyone killed on both sides of the current conflict in the Middle East and I pray for a speedy end to the conflict, followed by negotiations that lead to progress, not a resumption of conflict. But I also pray that elections go smoothly in Congo, that they augur progress towards stability… and that somebody outside of Africa notices. Far be it from me to suggest that anyone stop reading the newspaper. Let me suggest an experiment instead:

When you read a story on the Israel/Lebanon conflict, assign yourself some homework: a story on the ongoing conflicts in northern Uganda, DRC or Sudan. You won’t find many on Google News - you’ll need to lean on AllAfrica.com or Global Voices. If you find yourself interested in the role of minerals in the DRC - critical to understanding the situation, IMHO - I recommend Global Witness’s reports on the region. You’ll likely find the news confusing, complicated, incomplete and unhelpful in forming your opinions about how Central Africa can move towards a peaceful future. And that, oddly enough, is a useful first step.

A post well worth reading in total. With that let me point to an excellent Christian Science Monitor series Ethan blogged previously about Africa's peacemakers.

Take Care Bombay

Blasts rock commuter trains of people going home, news courtesy of the Mutiny. It's a city I've only met as a layover, but know well as a character in my mother's funny tales and many, many movies and books. The gateway to India is at the top of my destination list, and the Maximum City shines on despite rain and chaos. My prayers and wishes for the Mumbaikers. Keep an eye on India Uncut and Ultrabrown for updates.

Moo Power
by ToastyKen

If you're a resident of Vermont, you can for just 4 cents more per kWh, get some of your electricity from dairy farms that burn methane from cow manure. Found this item via this /. article, where one commenter proclaimed the idea to be a complete load of BS. ;)

Wind-assisted Freighters
by ToastyKen



A German company has developed a computer-assisted sail system for large ships that uses computers to figure out the optimal route. It's supposed to be able to cut fuel costs by a third.

I don't really have anything clever to say about it. I just thought that picture was really cool. :) (Well, and this is related to all that cargo container post on this blog from before.)

Electric Cars

Ruchira tells us to go see Who Killed The Electric Car, a movie I also want to catch. The other day I caught a couple minutes of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom on the radio; he was talking about health care but someone asked him about transport. He conceded that now he's driven around in a City chauffered vehicle, but that before he was driving an EV1 that he liked very much and misses. This is how I always hear about these cars, and the sheer oddness of taking away a product that tests well is so baffling that I'm looking forward to a serious explanation. One Word Changing blogger dubbed it an excellent murder mystery, while another shrugs and says the real story is who's rebuilding the electric car, citing, among others, the Wrightspeed that Business 2.0 featured a few months ago.

At some level, electric cars are a bit of a shell game. They still have to be charged, and most of our electricity still comes from fossil fuels--coal instead of oil. But powerplants can be more efficient than internal combustion engines, and getting the biggest source of greenhouse gases--the cars--ready and waiting for cleaner energy sources (solar, wind, nuclear, or carbon-neutral biofuel)would still be a big step forward.

Superman Returns

I went in with my expectations on the floor. First of all, the original Christopher Reeve Superman movies were my favorite childhood movies. That's just asking for disappointment. Secondly, it feels a little weird to be ancticipating a Warner Brother's film when I now work for yet another TimeWarner company.* Finally, the buzz was all bad. Bad reviews, changed directors, apparent cowering in anticipation of pirates, none of it boded well. Then Scotto emailed a bunch of us with this quote:

I saw the critic screening last night, and I have to say that the movie is a tapestry of missed opportunities. I was prepared to hate it, but the first half had such amazing moments that I ended up enjoying myself...until the second half, where it veered into the abyss and kicked my soul in the groin.

Wow, that's an intense mixed metaphor. So intense that when I shared it with editor Nancy Einhart, she said that while she had had no plans to see the movie, she was now kind of curious just to see what the hell that guy was talking about. In email discussion it has been permuted from "kicked my soul in the groin" to "kick my soul's groin" to "a soul-kick to the groin," with a slight detour to "kicked my groin in the soul."

A bunch of us decided we still wanted to see this move, and pledged to shield each other. Our expectations were further lowered by the horrible, horrible medley commercials, commercials for previews, and trailers that preceeded the movie at Jack London Square. And then, finally, the Warner Brothers logo (I woohoo'd 'Time Warner!' probably utterly confounding the people around us) and then---the music. The John Williams Music. I really need to find my copy of that soundtrack, because damn if it doesn't still get me after 20 odd years. I took a deep breath, and remembered to keep my defenses up. And I kept them up for almost three hours.

And it turned out no shielding was necessary. Our groins, atmic** or otherwise, were safe and unharmed. It was a pretty good movie. If I wasn't so busy and cheap, I'd even consider going to see it again with 3D bits at the Metreon. I liked it. I'll almost certainly watch it again on DVD.

In fact--besides being just fine, which was a major accomplishment, given everything it was fighting, it was actually sort of objectively interesting and good. I think the filmmakers decided that it was simply too much to try and replacethe legend of Christopher Reeve, especially so soon after his tragic death. And so Brandon Routh's characterization is greatly in homage to him. And that's okay this time, because he did it well, and it needed to be done once. Scott told me that the rumors were he looked just like Reeve, and I was highly skeptical, especially after the opening scenes. But when Clark Kent first appeared on the screen I actually said, "ah!" out loud. And that helped me forget that I was watching a new person, and just watch the movie, and get lost in it. The differences emergde, and I think they show great promise, but now was not the time to expand on them. I'm not totally sold, but I think Routh may very well make the role his own, in a good way.

The movie is basically set up as a 5-year later sequel to Superman II, but with everything shifted into current times. Superman has been away for a few years. The big deal is that when he gets back he (actually, Clark) finds that Lois Lane has a live-in boyfriend and a son. When I read this in reviews I figured it would make for annoying soap opera, but it actually gave shape and substance to all three or four characters (depending on how you count), and made for a surprisingly sympathetic, admirable Lois Lane. It also includes a Lex Luthor who got out of jail legally, and has an army of henchmen including the celebrated Kal Penn. The weird thing is that this time around Kevin Spacey's Lex is actually almost nice to his henchmen, and there is nothing dorky about them. They are intelligent, efficent, engaged, very creepy villains--sympathetic almost, and not because they're being bullied by Lex. This makes him more sympathetic as well, and makes the climax of evil much more gruelling.

It's visually stunning, as is to be expected from the director of X2 and The Usual Suspects. There were relatively few campy moments, though there was lots of iconic homage to the comics and the older movies, and lots of quiet little har-har we-love-this-old-joke moments. The action was also very much in homage, carefully updated but with a couple of major exceptions (and a lot of good use of water) not very surprising. The plot was kind of ripped off from a a classic science fiction novel by one of the great masters (I won't give it away, but maybe you should wear some sunblock) and the costuming and design was not terribly daring--Luthor et al got the best stuff there. But over all, I was happy, and I'm looking forward to the next one, which is always a good sign.

*Though TimeInc (Business 2.0) and DC Comics have absolutely nothing to do with each other as far as I can tell, which is too damn bad, because now that I work for a huge corporation, it would have been nice to feel like my colleagues include my first favorite reporter.
** In discussing this kick to the groin of one's soul, I realized we didn't have a good adjective for "having to do with the soul." It should be psychic, because Psyche really means soul, but it's come to mean mind. So I coined atmic, from Atma, the Sanskrit word for soul. Please share!

Cephalopod Sex on the Centimeter Severed Arm Scale

Hedgehog pointed me to this story in the Syndey Morning Herald, via MemeMachineGo:

The male blanket octopus faces a significant gender imbalance - he is just two centimetres long, while the female of the species can measure up to two metres. . . .This reproductive arm, known as a hectocotylus, is tucked away in a white spherical pouch between its other arms. When males mate, the pouch ruptures, the penis injects sperm into the tip of the arm, the arm is severed, and passed to the female. It stays there until used to fertilise the female's eggs, which can be weeks later. And while the human post-orgasm is sometimes referred to as "the little death", for the male blanket octopus the term takes on literal meaning. The male dies, but the female carries on, free to have sex with more males. "It's kamikaze sex, effectively," said Dr Norman. "They've found females with up to six male arms in the gill cavity.

It's old news (2003), but still so Cephalosexy. I like some of the quotes from this National Geographic article:

Imagine if your spouse was 40,000 times heavier and a hundred times larger than you. This is reality for the male blanket octopus, which was recently spotted alive for the first time off Australia's northern coast . ."Imagine a female the size of a person and the male a size of a walnut," said Tom Tregenza, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Leeds in England. . .Females have the odd appearance of a "big pink drifting blanket" said Tregenza, explaining the origins of the octopus's name.. . Such expeditions involve taking a boat to sea on moonless nights and suspending a diver up to 20 meters (66 feet) into the pitch-black water. The researchers then waited in the eerie silence and used torches as light sources in the hope of attracting interesting passers-by, said Tregenza..

The last bit sounds like they were actually hazing a young marine biologist who happened to get lucky! In more current Octopus news, Oregon State University has an opening for a charismatic midsize octopus to greet visitors.

Proud

I didn't make it into the City today, but I thought I'd say:





"I disagree. It's a debate about whether you think gay people are part of the human condition or just a random fetish. . . .Being gay is part of the human condition." Jon Stewart, debating Bill Bennet about gay marriage on the Daily Show.

I look forward to the day when Pride can be all party and no protest.

A Wookie Plays the Drums

I like the Gnarles Barkely Crazy single making the rounds of the airwaves. If you like Gnarles or Star Wars or both, you might appreciate this YouTube clip of the MTV Movie Awards, courtesy of Telstar Logistics. It's kinda crazy.

Relying on Dinosaurs
by ToastyKen

In the comments to the last post, badmash pointed out how much he liked Saheli's phrase, "I'll move my weight around myself instead of relying on dead dinosaurs."

Well, Saheli, that's because they're dead, silly. It'd make much more sense to have live dinosaurs move you around, instead:



Did you know? Brontosauruses emit Wi-Fi connectivity from their frontal lobes. It's a little-known fact!

P.S.: Yes, I know the proportions aren't right, but if I depicted Saheli at actual size, she'd be, like 3 pixels tall. :D Pretend it's a baby brontosaurus.

An Inconvenient Truth

On Saturday evening a bunch of us went out to go see An Inconvenient Truth. There weren't too many particular pieces of new information in it. I hadn't realized the extent to which the glaciers are melting. I hadn't really visually absorbed the extent to which the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has exceeded the levels of the last 650,000 years. I didn't know about the polar bears drowning because the ice is too thin to hold them. But it was still a useful exercise in being reminded of something we'd rather forget. 928 papers in the ISI index about human-caused climate change, and not a one that disagrees with the notion that we are causing dangerous changes to our planet. To me that's the most basic statement of why it's time to stop arguing and throwing the dust of manufactured doubt in people's eyes, and time to start changing things.

I recommend you go see it, if only as a reminder. I don't know if it can change someone's mind, but I've heard that the slideshow it's based on has done so in the past.

We need more reminders in our culture of inconvenient truths, and less sensitivity to having our faces rubbed in our derelicted duties. I'm as guilty as the next person. It never ceases to amaze me how even the most rationale of people--myself included-get utterly defensive when our contributions to pet peeves like climate change and the war in Iraq are pointed out to us. It's almost as if we are socially and mentally built to constitutionally oppose any kind of helpful feedback. Humility, thou art a difficult prize. And of course, in my experience, the people who posess the most humility need it the least.

It makes me wonder if perhaps we need to be able to look in the mirror, say, "God, you're awful," and mean it, and not collapse under the weight of such a statement. Bite the bullet, nod, and go, "Yep. Time to change." My whole life almost everyone from Mr. Rogers to my grade school teachers to college professors said, affectionately, "look in the mirror and say you're wonderful." Sure, sometimes that's useful. But admire yourself unconditionally? Approve of yourself unconditionally? That can't possibly always be good.

So here, I'll start it. I'm wasteful. I drive more than I should or even "need to" by relative California standards. I often leave the lights on. I buy bottled drinks even though I have a perfectly good Kleen Kanteen. Etc. etc. So then what?

Find a friend to get better with. I've been working with some friends to become a competent cyclist, so that eventually I'll move my weight around myself instead of relying on dead dinosaurs. My goal is to drastically cut my gas consumption by the end of the year, and eventually be able to move my self around to my routine destinations. It's slow, slow going, but it would be impossible going without a lot of help from my friends. In general this working-with-friends strategy seems like a good one. My friends encourage me. They cheer me on at all the right moments, and they take time out of their busy weekends to help me feel safe on the busy roads and answer my questions about my bike. It's not that they stare at me grimly and say, "Saheli, you are an awful person for burning so many fossil fuels," every time I bring it up. But neither do they spend too much time defending me to myself when I feel bad. Instead they listen, and when I ask for help with some countervailing project, they give it to me.

To me, that's really what friendship is really about. Hanging out, having fun, relating to each other, mutual admiration--these are all good things. But a card I saw recently had the quote that love is not staring at each other, but looking out in the same direction. "I got your back," implies "I'm going to go into this battle with you." My favorite wedding toast was from someone who said, "You know you're with the right person when being with them puts you in the direction of the best person you ever wanted to be." Less exactingly applied, I think that's a pretty good standard for friendship too. Partner-in-crime was always one of my favorite titles.

So instead of my usual wonkish, numerical meditations on what we can do to stop global warming, I say this--go out and be a good friend, and get good friends. If it's something that's really bugging you, talk about that. Let people you care about know that it's upsetting you, and that you want to change it, much as you would want to get healthier or be more efficient. I think that you will find that the people who want to help you--even if "only" with encouragement, which is so very valuable--are often the people who really care about you.

Stephen Colbert Gives a Commencement Speech

In the middle it gets a little sarcastic and satirical, Stephen Colbert the character rather than Stephen Colbert the guy. Straight funny, good stuff. But at the beginning and the end it's quite beautiful.

Lovelines I Like

I was just griping to ToastyKen about how much I can't stand LoveLine, the nationally syndicated call-in question-and-answer show about sex and relationships that's aimed at teenagers. It's gotten all kinds of press for being an effective educational tool, but it strikes me as puerile prank caller heaven, and I just can't see how it helps anyone. That's not what really bothers me about it. What bothers me is that it's on at 10 pm, Sundays through Thursdays, on my main radio station KITS Live 105.3. This is particularly frustrating on the rare times I have to drive on a Sunday night--at least, I think, I can catch SoundCheck, but no! It quickly gets supplanted by the boring LoveLine. I mean, when more do you need to rock out then when you're stuck driving after 10? This is my grudge against LoveLine.

On the other hand Ruchira just sent me a much more elegant Lovelines--a blogscraper that displays recently blogged lines of the form "i love --." Sarcasm, affection, triviality, passion, overenthusiasm--it's a taste test of the web's emotional spicing. Check it out but don't get hypnotized.

How Did I Miss This?!

Authorities say two separate Pensacola teachers apparently made the big bucks by accepting $1 payoffs from students wanting to get out of gym class. Their names are Terence Braxton and Tamara Tootle. I think Ms. Tootle must have been destined to appear in an odd news segment at some point of her life.

You might think that my titular question was an allusion to missing a two-month-old news story. But what I am really confounded at missing is the opportunity to bribe my way out of physical education. Scrupulous child that I was, that would have been awfully tempting. As it is I somehow managed to dance my way out of most P.E. classes.

I actually kind of regret this. I have no fond memories of the enforced Friday mile of seventh grade, but it was regular, and I did eventually get better at it. I've griped often about how adults end up doing less math in real life than they ought to because they did less math in school, but in all honesty that is probably even more true with respect to exercise. How to do a good crunch or sit-up is useful information that you don't want to be looking up every single time you need it.

The P.E.-averse brainiac is a staple of popular culture--if memory serves, genius Kid's avoidance of P.E. was a crucial plot point in Class Act--and the stereotype is that such children are simply lazy. Well, okay, I'm a tad lazy. But like a lot of other kids who shied away from PE, I've since also really enjoyed rock climbing, hiking, dancing, swimming, martial arts and soccer. It's always struck me as a little bizarre that P.E. is made as boring and routine as possible for younger children, who will have no appreciation of the need to exercise. I'm convinced that the combination of opportunities to look stupid and be made fun of with deathly dullness infected me with needless aversions. Eventually there are going to be Kumons and Sylvan Learning centers for kids who need to get motivated to play ball. It's a business opportunity for someone, but apparently not Tootle & Braxton.

Memorial Day

It's almost over, but I feel the need to observe it.* It has become the start of summer, a weekend of shopping, a day for barbecuing and sailing. It is supposed to be the day we remember the battlefield dead. Oddly enough, it doesn't seem to have acquired much more gravitas in the last 4 years when we actually have known battlefield dead again. Here's a little reminder:

Iraq: 2689 Total Coalition Deaths, 2456 Total U.S. Deaths.
Afghanistan: 378 Total Coalition Deaths, 296 Total U.S. Deaths.

Source: icasualties.org

It is my belief that any community of large enough size needs a trained and professional group of people, ideally volunteers, who are skilled in the use of force and able to be called on at a moment's notice to deal with that community's defense. It is an ancient lesson of warfare that such a group of people must have some measure of obedience "in the moment" and leave decisions about the wisdom of such a deployment to commanders. It is a fairly modern but brilliant assertion that a community wishing to rule itself, with some combination of democratic and republican ideals, should make such a group submit to the will of the community government as a whole--the civilian command. And so we have an Army and Navy and Air Force and Coast Guard and Marine Corps: people who volunteer and promise to fight and risk death when and where our government asks them to, and to be as obedient as possible. If you believe in the American system of government, and you believe that it is working, and you believe that when your government asks you to risk death and homicide, it must be doing so for the necessary defense of your community as you conceive of it, well then, this pledge of obedience is quite awe-inspiring. So as part of that community, I thank you for it. I may disagree with many of your beliefs, and try hard to dissuade you from them, but let us say, I appreciate the commitment.

Now another set of you may quibble with my basic, underlying belief. Assumptions have to start somewhere, and that is where I choose to start mine. I do not wish to quibble about it now, but to move on and make the next point. If we are going to send people to other lands to die (and more importantly, to kill) it is our duty to make absolutely certain that we understand what we are doing, that we know why we are doing it, and that we have thought and intelligently dismissed every single reason why we should not. The fact is, we do not do this. We citizens spend too little time considering our foreign policy, our military budget and organization, our treatment of veterans, our war crimes, and the repercussions of our opinions on war and peace and international trade. We spend too much time watching TV and shopping. We've been invading countries and overthrowing governments to please a fruit company here and a timber company there for well over a hundred years, spilling perfectly good American blood and, more horribly, staining its honor with the blood of innocent foreign civilians and foreign democracy. The best that can be said of most of us is that sometimes we take the trouble to recognize our absurdity and laugh darkly at our horror while watching the Daily Show, sometimes we take off a busy weekend to go protest an invasion, and sometimes we pat a traumatized soldier on the back.

It is my humble assertion that the best thing you can do to support the troops and honor the dead is carve out some time from your busy schedule to be a better citizen and pay attention to budgets and foreign affairs from an American perspective. It is not enough to know that there is civil unrest in a given country--one must also know how American companies are acting in that country, and what wealthy or otherwise influential Americans have a vested interest in that country, an interest they might be more than willing to let American troops risk dying and killing for. It is not enough to know that we are going to spend this or that percentage more on the defense budget--one must also know to whom we are handing over the money, and how much more they stand to make if someone decides their equipment and their help will be required for American troops risking death and homicide. And it is not enough to know these things, one must make noise if one does not like the way these things are going, if one might, just might, think they are a bad use of resources and perhaps, even, immoral. Make noise or something more forceful, but surely we should not be silent.

In the mean time please remember that the dead lie there in obedience to our command, even if we give it sleepily and by proxy.

*Especially since I actually went to work today.

SAVE CODY'S

I have just found out that Cody's Books on Telegraph is scheduled to close in two months and I am beyond distraught. I went there on my first day in Northern California, years and years ago, visiting with my parents. I can still remember the bright sight of flowers in front of a bookstore. I've probably bought the overwhelming majority of my books there, and certainly almost all of my non textbook hardcovers. Almost every author reading I've been to was there. I've discovered most of my favorite poets there. When I was in college I would, for the sake of grades, avoid bookstores for most of the semester. When I handed in my last final, I would run straight to Cody's, money in hand, and luxuriate there for the rest of the day, carefully choosing and stacking my vacation treasure. I can walk up to the customer service people and babble about some book, neither title nor author in hand, and 95% of the time, they'll find it. When we started bombing Iraq I curled up in a chair upstairs and listened to Pico Iyer's soothing voice and prayed. I really, really don't want to lose it.

If you have any ideas, please let me know. Seriously.

UPDATE: What the hell? Ruchira is telling me she's not seeing my level of alarm anywhere else. The Fourth Street store is staying open, so people are nonchalant. WHAT THE HELL? The Fourth Street store is great if you're looking for stuff on art or textiles, or want hand crafted paper. Fine. I met Oscar the Grouch there and that was cool. I got an education about Nantali Finland by a cashier once. But there is NO COMPARISON with Telegraph. Former Presidents and Senators aren't enticed to Fourth Street. You can't pack a room with people interested in science policy at Fourth Street. The Fourth Street store wasn't bombed for stocking Rushdie. Howl wasn't written across the street from the Fourth Street store. Dustin Hoffman didn't stop Elaine Robinson on the bus on Fourth Street! You can't buy music at late hours near Fourth Street, or sell records, or rummage through vintage clothes, or get the best damn feta-almond-spinach-fuji salad in California! You can't go to an author reading and then grab take out and eat dinner under the stars in a Redwood grove, or off in a plaza filled with vendors! IT's NOT THE SAME!

I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but Fourth Street is Yuppie central. Now I probably qualify as something of a yuppie--though certainly not because of my wages--but that's the whole point. I don't NEED my whole universe to blandified into a well-designed set of tasteful, pleasant landscapes where everyone is just like me. Cody's on Telegraph is connected to the street. Cody's lets you loiter in the front and talk to people. Cody's lets street poets and homeless guys set up tables in front of the store. How many truly great bookstores--bookstores that great authors from all over the world carefully pen into their tour calendars--are so perfectly at the intersection of art, science, wealth, and poverty? I imagine there are some in Boston and NYC. I've always wanted to visit Powells--seriously, that's like the main reason I want to go to Portland. Well this is ours.

Update II: Non Berkeley-Friends who are trying be sympathetic and comforting have all kinds of sage observations about market forces and the nature of nostalgia. My initial reaction above reached into sentiment and nostalgia, but this is not a sentimental, nostalgic problem. It's not even about saving ambiance. This is a community disaster. Cody's Telegraph is one of a very small number of Bay Area bookstores that regularly hosts authors of new, cutting edge journalism, policy and science-writing. One knocked off the list will make the Bay Area one less plausible stop for a cash-strapped book tour, and non-trivially dents the chances that any given author will visit the area or spend a reasonable amount of time here. That means less opportunities to to be a guest on shows like KQED's Forum, less opportunities to be interviewed by local papers (and relate their writing to local issues), less reasons to speak at the Commonwealth Club or the World affairs Council. Less discussion. Less purchasing. Fewer books. Less journalism. Less democracy.

I really don't mean to dis the Fourth Street Store. I like it a lot and I've been to some very lovely literary readings there. I also like the new San Francisco store a lot. But you can't get to Fourth Street by BART, and San Francisco is very far away from a large portion of the Bay Area. Ten years ago I was a frequently broke, carless teenager who lived in Concord. Get rid of Cody's and you get rid of most of that teenager's opportunities to interact with the wide world of books and authors and adults who like to read about serious topics. I was lucky in that my parents are great lovers of books--if they wanted to treat me, they would take me to Cody's, and I'm sure if it had been necessary, they would have let me go to San Francisco. Not everyone is that lucky.

Cody's also anchors the street. Apparently Telegraph's increasingly unruly crowd is what's driving it out in the first place, but Cody's going will make the problem ten times worse. An abandoned Telegraph avenue is bad for the University--and I don't mean the dry institution that's often mismanaged by the regents, I mean the living community of people who work had to provide the best public higher education.

The owner, Andy Ross, doesn't seem to feel that this incarnation of the store can be saved, and I am sure he hasn't made this decision lightly. Right now I'm wondering about two options--can the store be moved to the Downtown Shattuck area, which has been experiencing a Rennaissance of book culture, and isn't quite as unruly? Or, can someone else buy the Telegraph store and keep it open?

The East Bay really should not lose its premier forum for the discussion of new writing, especially new nonfiction.

National Priorities

The war in Iraq is more expensive than signing and abiding by the "prohibitively expensive" Kyoto Protocol would have been, according to Cass R. Sunstein of the University of Chicago, writing in the Washington Post.

Arbitrary Bastardization

Here's a little serious note about the American way of regarding other countries. Over at Slate's Today's Papers, Eric Umansky was discussing the coverage of Iranian President Ahmadinejad's unprecedented letter to President Bush and lack of seriousness with which the Administration read it. I haven't fully read the relevant stories, but the lack of seriousness seems not entirely unreasonable, at least in the abstract--the letter apparently rambles. (On the other hand, it seems distinctly less reasonable to deride and dismiss such an unusual overture so quickly and so publicly, even if the letter was totally nonsensical.) This passing line by Umansky caught my eye:

USAT flags what seems to be a bit of little-appreciated history: Three years ago, Iran proposed wide-ranging negotiations, including over the nuclear issue. The Bush administration, according to one national-security official involved at the time, refused to talk.

I can't find the flagging in the three stories USAToday currently has on their website, but the link from Umansky leads to Council on Foreign Relations Interview with Brookings Scholar (and CIA and Bush II National Security Council Veteran) Flynt L. Leverett. The letter referenced was sent over as an unclassified fax (!) via the Swiss government in 2003 from the much more reformist President Khatami, and it seems to have been basically ignored. This chunk from the Leverett interview got me thinking:

Ultimately the president is, on this issue, very, very resistant to the idea of doing a deal, even a deal that would solve the nuclear problem. You don’t do a deal that would effectively legitimate this regime that he considers fundamentally illegitimate. I think that’s the real issue.

And he considers it illegitimate because of what? Because it overthrew the Shah in 1979?

No, in the president’s view you have this unelected set of clerical authorities, epitomized by the supreme leader, who are thwarting the clearly expressed will of the Iranian people for a more open, participatory political system, for more political, social, intellectual, and cultural freedom—all this kind of thing. And so it’s a system that in Bush’s mind is fundamentally illegitimate. It’s a system that needs to change, and he is not going to do a deal that lets this regime off the hook, even if that deal would solve our problem with them over the nuclear issue. [bold emphases mine; italics = interviewer's question.]

Something that a lot of Americans forget is that the Iranians actually have a democracy. It's a theocratic democracy that's missing a lot of what we would consider basic civil rights--it's not a Republic, let us say--but they do vote, and they do get to express their will a little bit. (And, interestingly enough, the women vote and the women even get elected, unlike the case with our dear friend Saudi Arabia.)And they voted for Khatami, and they voted for Ahmadinejad. It seems like a significantly more legitimate goverment than, say, the monarchy in Saudi Arabia, the dictatorships in Pakistan and Egypt, and the "Communist" party dictatorship in China--all governments that Bush deals with quite contentedly. In other words, we go around arbitrarily deciding whether or not a government is legitimate pretty much based on how we feel about it. It doesn't really matter what the facts are. It just matters what Bush's gut tells him. And that totally arbitrary bastardization matters more than anything--even more than solving our apparent national security problems.

Fun Stuff Since It's Friday

From Unfogged--Apostropher gives us yet another skating video, this one simply outrageously fun, and Lizardbreath gives us pick up lines from Geoffrey Chaucer's blog, or, I should say, "GALFRIDUS CHAUCERES LYNES OF PICKE-VPPE": "-Yf thou were a latyn tretise ich wolde putte thee in the vernacular" and "Makstow a pilgrymage heere often?"

Chris Taylor, one of my editors at Business 2.0, cites a solution to the Fermi paradox that fascinates ToastyKen--the aliens haven't found us because they're too busy playing video games. Since about half of what I know about video games I've learned from ToastyKen, this amuses me greatly.

An interesting blogtale from the prolific indeterminacy. "Read it three times, carefully," the instructions said, "closing your eyes a few minutes after each reading, to impress the vivid language into your psyche. As time passes, the content will be indistinguishable from an authentic memory.

A fun picture of the Rock Bottom Remainders playing in LA from Dave Barry's blog.

And finally, Sam Javanrouh's magic eye in Toronto.

Day Without Immigrants

I've been known to gripe about the efficacy of modern protests, but I have to say that the recent wave of demonstrations and gatherings protesting the surge in harsh policies and politics regarding immigration has really made me think about the issue. I'm very impressed with the fact that on a Monday, Market street here in San Francisco is filled with a sea of white shirted marchers pounding west and shouting loud. I'm not nearly as liberal about immigration as many of my friends (and readers) are, and I may not agree with many of the marchers on what our policies should be, but I do feel that we, the machine, need to be reminded that we, the people, can gunk up our machine-gears , and we cannot afford to cannibalize ourselves for mere political expediency.

Telstar Logistics, who works in my office, has just flickrd pictures of the march here.

Stephen Colbert

Is my new hero. See ToastyKen's blogpost on his White House Correspondents' dinner performance, complete with YouTube linkage.

Colbert is not my hero for his political commentary, though I appreciate that unlike most political humorists he kept the hammer almost entirely on the true issues of substance--Why did we invade Iraq? What are we doing about Global Warming? What's up with the degradation of Civil liberties?. What I am in utter awe of his how he managed to hold his performance and character mere feet away from the man he was making ruthless fun of. Who just happens to be the most powerful person in the world. He didn't just stand a few feet away from him. He kept turning to the president and looking at him and addressing him directly while he delivered his sarcastic lines. He didn't once break it up with self-deprecatory let's-be-friends fluff, or lose the focus of his jabbing. I cannot even conceive of how much theatrical nerve that must take. Verily Colbert hath steel wires lining his gut.

I wonder if history's judgement will be that had Colbert emerged at a different time, he would have been a great thespian in the traditions of Olivier and Burton, or a great live-comic like, like the youthful Robin Williams. Perhaps the necessity of political humor was the only stage on which he could have emerged, but such straight up chutzpah indicates a purer talent than I think we have recognized before today.

ElectroTaps
by ToastyKen



This is an automatic bugle that plays Taps all by itself. Here's the full text of the caption:

The U.S. military has found the perfect way to demonstrate that it's purely the thought that counts. This bugle emulator sits in a real bugle and plays a collection of calls, including "Taps." Due to a shortage of actual bugle players, the Pentagon had already ordered 700 of these to be used at military funerals in 2003.

Is it just me, or does "shortage of actual bugle players" sound like a euphemism for "a surplus" of, well, the need for bugle players? :P Morbid, yes, but, on the other hand, I also find the phrase "shortage of actual bugle players" kinda hilarious, too. It just sounds so ridiculous. :P

(Found via /., where some comments point out that military funerals have been using CD players more and more, so this is an improvement.)

(Whoa! Another /. comment points out that there's actually an organization of volunteer bugle players called Bugles Across America. Now this post is actually linked to the activism theme of this blog. :) )

Off the backboard, through the Internet, across to the UN, over the Atlantic, into Africa, NOTHING BUT NET
by ToastyKen

A Sports Illustrated column titled, Nothing But Nets, is asking people to go donate to the UN Foundation to help buy mosquito nets for Africans to fight malaria. I can't vouch for the UN Foundation's effectiveness or anything, but I love the tie-in aspect of calling it "Nothing but Nets", and I love that it's a in a Sports Illustrated column, of all places. At the very least, the column's novelty factor has helped it to spread the word (This blog post is a case in point!) about just how big a problem it is. (A couple million deaths a year!)

Virtual Iraqis
by ToastyKen



You've probably heard of Massively Multiplayer Online Games like EverQuest and World of Warcraft. There's also a smaller market for MMOGs that don't center around violence. I interviewed at one such company a couple of years ago, called There. (Yes, it led to many "Where?" "There." "Where?" "There." jokes. :P) They don't seem to have done as well as Second Life, possibly because Second Life actually allows users to write their own scripts to introduce new behaviors into the game. (Though I think it's more likely due to the fact that they didn't hire me. ;) j/k )

Anyway, There eventually announced that they got a military contract to adapt their game for military training. This I found really interesting. Eventually, that became the focus of the company, which then changed its name to Forterra Systems. The old There product languished and eventually spun off into its own company. Forterra has a couple of interesting videos on their site: Company Video and Defense Video.

Now, using computer games for military training is nothing new. I think the military's even used modified versions of Quake for training. There are two new things here: (1) many people from all around the world can participate in a single simulation, including off-duty soldiers, and (2) in addition to combat tactics training, their software also has a focus on the non-violent and cultural interaction that are big parts of our deployment in Iraq today.

On that second front, I recently saw this Wired article titled, Troops Learn to Not Offend. A company called Tactical Language Training, spun off from USC research, is writing computer games to teach soldiers nonverbal cues and cultural taboos. From the article:

Ironically, although the game was developed for the military, it contains no weapons or combat situations. It emulates a civil affairs mission and develops like a multipart story in which soldiers must gain the trust of the people they interact with in order to rebuild communities. "I got a kick out of removing the weapons and replacing them with gestures," Vilhjalmsson says.

I'm glad, too, that the military is spending at least some fraction of its research budget on cutting edge technology that actually tries to reduce violence. :)

In somewhat news, I randomly heard on Live 105 a mention of mydeathspace.com. " Only three things are certain in life. MySpace, Taxes, and Death. If you have a MySpace account and you die, this is where you will end up." Disturbing! The directory summarizes reasons for death, and most are because of car accidents, unsurprisingly. The relatedness? There are a few entries where the reason is listed as "Iraq": Sgt. Akers killed by an IED, Lance Cpl. Modeen and Sgt. Stevens killed by an IED, and Sgt. Jakoniuk killed by "Non-Combat Related Injuries". (He was a Blackhawk crewman, so presumably it was some sort of helicopter accident.)

You can click on their pictures to get to their old Myspace profiles. *shudder*

Happy Survival Day, Homeland Mine

100 Years today ago the city I'm in shook and burned, and the region as a whole went through a lot of shock and trauma, but it survived. Here's to survival.

Be prepared, and help your community prepare.

Pigs now fly, planes now don't
by ToastyKen

Patrick Moore, a founding member of Greenpeace, has written a WaPo article advocating nuclear power.

In related news, some Chicago company is turning Lear Jets into Limos:



That appears to be a CGI mockup. Here's what the real thing looks like so far.

Google Calendar

I'm not sure what I think of the new calendar.google.com. Admittedly by its very nature it's impossible to evaluate in a day--you have to see how it performs over an extended period of time. But the sharing of calendars immediatley strikes me as a bad idea--do I really want to know what friend-so-and-so thinks is a better thing to do than hang out with me? How many times Miss X does laundry? When Buddy Joe Smith is going to his dermatologist? Do I want them to know about my movie watching habits? What a weird concept.

That's So Cool!

I'm still bouncy and grinning because on the way to work this morning I saw the neatest combination of cool, geeky, cute, and good--a Brompton folding bike. This lady just wheeled it over the escalator, went up with me while she told me how it worked, unfolded it, and biked away. Totally worth the trans-Atlantic, trans-continental shipping costs!!

Le Sigh

I'm a bit worn out. I've been firing off black humored emails to my friends with rants and vignettes like this:

Person, tidying up a hospital room, holds up small bottle: Is this bottle something we should take home? What do we do with it?
Saheli: Well, what does the label say?
Person: It says, "All kinds of dangerous."

And calling them up late at night with inane requests for advice because I can't think straight. C'est la vie. Somehow, we have to make sense of it and do the best we can. Ah well, please be patient.

Anyway, you'll note that I have added a blogbadge to the right-hand sidebar:it's a link to a CIVIC/GiveMeaning campaign to raise money for medical care for two Iraqi women, Manal & Aliyah, who are civilian collateral damage from our little adventure there. I'm afraid I can't compose an eloquent appeal beyond asking you to read their stories. The director of the campaign emailed me personally to ask for help, and I cringed when I saw that the day they'd been shot by American troops in a checkpoint misunderstanding had been my birthday.

Anyway, below the fold, find some thoughts on the 62+ comment thread about Petroleum and Breakfast.

Continue Reading Here.



First, to the main point at hand--how can we better engineer our consumption to be more sustainable?

I think a lot of this discussion is being skewed by our not being practiced at holding multiple causes in our heads. In particle physics we would always talk about modes of decay--multiple phenomena could lead to the final event recorded in our detector, and our job in analysis was very often to tease out how much of the signal was due to cause A, how much to cause B, cause C, etc.. If the interactions of the tiniest particles can have so many components, much more complex phenomena, like ecology and behavior, almost certainly do. I don't want to *demonize* anything, but sprawl AND highways AND inefficient vehicles (AND computers AND agricultural subsidies AND. . .etc..) are all to blame in various amounts. My original plaintive request--for a little "engineering"--was essentially a request for some hardheaded tools of analysis for teasing apart these modes of destruction, figuring out where there was leverage and how an individual can figure out how their life interacts with those points of leverage, and how they can best exert the personal energy and resources they have to devote to the cause in the most optimal way. That's what I mean by engineering, not building a better car or better solar cell. Engineering as the systematic, quantitative solving of problems.

Rishi wrote: Echan brings up a great point, which is when you start to question any particular energy expenditure, the cost / benefit value of the use versus the environmental cost (assuming we value the environment very highly) seems to make any activity wasteful. . . My point is not mass suicide, of course, but to point out that when you start to think of any action on a micro level, including your drive to the store, or eating your bowl of cereal in the morning, you are never going to find an environmentally efficient one. It is only on the macro level that these questions even make sense.

This is true, but its truth shows that I did not express my original quest very well. Reductionism is always dangerous if you don't keep the big picture in mind. But reductionism is a tool for holding the big picture in your mind in the first place. It can't be dismissed out of hand. Spherical cows are also absurd, but they can still be useful.

Michael brought up the footprint calculator, which was actually sent to me by Peter during the initial conversation that led to the blogpost. I agree with TK that equal sharing of all resources is a useless and unnecessary thing to strive for--some poeple don't even want to have the what would be their equal share of the whole, and what you work for has to be taken into account somewhere--but I disagree with him that this makes the footprint calculator fallacious. Even if we were the average world consumers, the equality assumption in the calculator would be a good metric of how sustainable our consumption was. As it is, we are almost certainly at the high end of consumption. Our high demand is driving up the price for everyone so that some people can't even surive. Also, as Michael replied, we already have the 6 billion people. Even rapidly declining birthrates isn't going to decrease that number without equally drastic amounts of death and suffering. I'd like to find some other way.

When you actually think about the mechanics of the problem, it mostly has to do with things like habit, convenience, and imperfect information. So I'm actually interested in building practical tools. I'm thinking of actual calculators, software for a cellphone, notebook templates and worksheets for keeping track of purchasing choices, 12-step programs, diets, something--to make for better habits and routines. There's a lot of hyperbole about going on a "shopping diet," but it's actually a powerful analogy if you're willing to get beyond faddish advice. For example, I've lately had to think a lot about how to construct a very specific diet for someone with a lot of health issues. What was before a casual, effortless thing--eat three times a day, what you mostly feel like, trying not to make it too horribly unhealthful--has now turned into a carefully recorded and planned excercise in adding up calories, grams of protein and percentages of potassium, and balancing that against palatability and ease of preparation. When someone is healthy, anything goes. When someone is sick, you have to engineer their diet. Our planet is sick.

Finally, I'm not going to contort myself into philsophical knots trying to defend my desire to make sure the environment isn't irreparably damaged and the planet lasts for a good long while, despite the eventual heat death of the universe. Of course we have to balance that with other concerns--but we're wasiting time in doing that complex balancing act if we're still arguing about the validity of the concern. I just assumet that it is a valid concern. Conversations have to have some basic assumptions and that's mine. :-p

And I'm tired, so I'll talk about more meta-matters of social activism, capitalism, and the like later.

Four Things I Wish To Make Known

1. I really like the discussion going on in the post about petroleum and breakfast, despite its cantakerousness, and I hope it continues.
2. I have a lot of things to say about it.
3. I'm horribly painfully busy and cannot yet organize my thoughts on the subject. So please keep it up without me.
4. This video, courtesy of Apostropher at Unfogged, is simply one of the most wonderful web videos I have ever seen*. (I've linked directly to the video, but Apo's intro's funny too.) If you want snarky commentary and interpretation (gay, hot, sexy, whatever--these things are not my concern) Unfogged can do that much better than I can. All I can say is that I was having a no-good, very bad, quite awful day, and this thing made me laugh--appreciatively!!!--so hard that I dropped the keyboard and almost fell off the chair.

*The closest competitor that comes to mind is Matt is Dancing Around the World. In case you haven't noticed, I have a weak spot for dancing.

The Petroleum in Your Breakfast and the Carbon Dioxide Coming out of Your Shoes

Peter Slote, my first Aikido instructor and Oakland Recycling Specialist, kindly chastised me recently for even hoping that some recycled/recyclable plastic razors and tooth brushes were particularly environmentally friendly, pointing out that shipping to their east coast home and back alone consumed enough oil to be problematic. (On the other hand, I bet the normal ones are mostly shipped from China.) He just sent me a great article from today's Chronicle analyzing the fuel that went into transporting a simple, cheap, organic San Francisco breakfast to San Francisco.

There was a great (if annoyingly New York centric) article in Slate a couple weeks ago about the dark side of organic produce at places like Whole Foods---if your only concern is the environment (and not your probably non-threatened health or the health of the farm workers), you are over all better off buying local conventional produce than Chilean organic produce. (I was gratified because the day before this article came out I had picked my way through Whole Foods in Berkeley, carefully reading labels to pick up local cheese and crackers, but I was amused because most organic-supplying stores like Whole Foods label their produce adaquately enough for the consumer to make that choice and in the Western United States organic very often is as local as its going to get.)

Recently on Snarkmarket I left a somewhat snarky comment calling for a little browser plugin that would inform you how much the online purchase you just made would cost the atmosphere in carbon emissions to be shipped to your house. I later pointed out to Robin, climateboy, and Saurabh by email that this would be unfair, because the exact same problems apply to most "local" traditional stores, and Robin got the same feedback over at WorldChanging. In fact, shipping and handling may very well be more efficient than individual consumer driving.

I've been thinking about locality ever since last fall, when I went to the Peak Oil talk where I first met up with Hedgehog. For example, we have noticed that it is almost impossible to buy a solid pair of local shoes. Scotto is fond of pointing out that we basically take oil and turn it into food. Take a look at the Chad Heeter article Peter sent me:

What they've discovered is astonishing. According to researchers at the University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Agriculture, an average of more than 7 calories of fossil fuel is burned up for every calorie of energy we get from our food. This means that in eating my 400-calorie breakfast, I will, in effect, have consumed 2,800 calories of fossil fuel energy. (Some researchers claim the ratio is as high as 10 to 1.)

It is, actually, pretty easy for me to mostly eat local food, because of where I live. Normally, my staple is basmati rice, and that, of course is shipped from India, but I have been eating less of that lately, and I know that almost everything else I eat is from Northern California, or at least packaged here. But the real problem here is an information problem. The oh-so-glorious free market is supposed to work when all the players are fully informed about all the risks and consequences of their choices. Besides their being ludicrous assumptions about how fast information can travel in time in that model, there are ludicrous assumptions about how much the information there even exists for the consumer to process. Heeter writes:

But if there was truth in packaging, where my oatmeal box now tells me how many calories I get from each serving, it would also tell me how many calories of fossil fuels went into the product.

In light of Colin's excellent recent post on James Woolsey's recommendation for avoiding foreign oil consumption, let me point out that this isn't just about foreign policy or even peak oil. This is about the fact that we are in a hell of a lot of trouble. See this week's Time cover -- our planet is melting. All the burning Turkey offal in the world may save us from more wars (though I doubt it) but it won't save our atmosphere. Hedgehog likes to give us pointed reminders that the best way to reduce our dependence on oil and save the atmosphere is to reduce consumption. (They're surprisingly effective reminders--small but spiny mammals land memorable punches)

I've been trying to drive less--and trying to come up with a palatable caffeine source that can get me to the closer parking lot without itself getting here from half way around the world. I've been very, very, very slowly working on becoming a competent biker with a lot of help from my friends. I've also been paying more attention to what I buy and where it comes from, and trying to cut down on non-local purchases. I'm not as enthused about having such a globetrotting 2006 as 2005 was. But it's all very slow and haphazard. It hardly seems optimal. I want to engineer something better, precise.

So, what do we do? Speak up, dear readers. I am at a loss. Really, we all are.