All the woman was trying to do was create a junior high school. Why would people return an act of love with such fury?
The story so far in last week's NY Times.
Audio MP3 of Almontaser interviewed on WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show. Listening to the stress in her voice you can imagine what it feels like to be a normal person under such a bizarre attack.
Yesterday in my 7th Period Biology class, students passed a really, really nasty note across the class, tossing it ultimately onto the desk of a bullied freshman. It wasn't addressed to him, or to anybody. It was full of awful words and when I grabbed it it I was frustrated: I couldn't tell who wrote it, whether it was a direct threat. I really felt I let some kid down.
Well, today, I saw notes crossing the room again, first one then another, every kid wrote a line and then passed it along. While we watched part of a film ("Gattaca") I watched the kids sidelong. They knew I was mad about yesterday's note. And as they passed a note, I felt I had to do something. So I did. Here's what I confiscated from them today (click for larger):
New York City Public Schools are a mecca for cheating.
A how-to-cheat primer for the uninitiated would include practicing the three most common cheating methods:
1) Brazen staring at their neighbor's paper. In the same way that one can sometimes sneak past a movie usher or stadium guard by confidently walking past them without showing any ticket or badge, the students in NYC avoid furtive shady sideway glances, looking across the row with a calm gaze like a king on a mountain assessing his lands. Lesson from the streets: don't act like a thief, especially if you intend to be a thief.
2) Tapping signals/ hand signals. If the answer to #3 is "(2)" a charitable student might do a TAP-TAP-TAP followed by TAP-TAP.
3)Whispering. My hearing is so bad, apparently, that entire exchanges can occur. On last week's DNA quiz, question #9 asked my biology students "Name two things that can cause DNA mutations." One of the possible correct answers should have been Ultraviolet / the sun / UV radiation, something like that. Instead, I got a girl in the 3rd row writing, correctly "sunlight" but the girl sitting right in front of her, straining to hear the whispered answer, writing for an answer "salate".
Special mention to the semi-bold technique of pocketing the blank quiz [to give to your friends at lunchtime] and then saying "Hey, I didn't get a quiz."
Two techniques popular in other schools but noticeably absent in Board of Ed student culture:
1) crib notes/ arm tatoo/ post-It note on your neighbor's back. This level of preparation is so laborious that kids here would throw their hands up and just study, I think.
2) Text or notes on floor to flip open and closed with your feet.
3) Taking advantage of accidently present chalkboard information or reference posters left visible during the test.
4) snatching the answer key. More than one NYC teacher has told me "I would welcome that level of initiative."
The
hard cider on the left is from
. The vintner (arborer?) notes that it contains
exactly one ingredient. Even the yeast
is left to the chance of whatever was hitching a ride on the apple skins before
putting it down to ferment.
The
bottle on the right is 30% mead – hard to find. I seek mead with nostalgia for Lord of the Rings and the Mead Halls of
the Beowulf Vikings (where the warriors followed up their drinking by sleeping
on the “mead benches” right at the table). Note the rime of fungus deliberately left visible near the cork.
Both liquids are opaque with God-knows-what. Both from Spuyten Duyvil, where, true to the NY Times review, I didn't recognize a single brand of beer.
Hey, since when do any physics textbook examples happen within some kind of context? And even when they do, it's always an inanimate context. Way too much humanity going on here:
For a hardcore physicist there's so much implied humanity and interaction in this example that it smacks of English class! "Write a 200 word essay proposing explanations for this scene." "Make a time line of events leading up to this event."
In further disturbing intrusion of organic flavor into a science, a PERL Computer Language textbook I'm reading puts personal meaning on all the number examples, specifically saying:
“You can define an array of data by saying
$mynumbers = 23, 42, 69”
Bravo for choosing (to a nerd) three sort of funny integers. Gotta appreciate textbook humor where you can find it.
When I was in Harrisburg last week, 
My sister and I took lawnchairs and sketchpads to pay tribute to a tree.
Its transient blossoms were even then dropping and
Their pinkness was so pale I thought them white.
Sitting there and sketching was really just an excuse to sit still,
To spend quality time with my sister
And admit the tree to our communion
(Communion is easier if you have an excuse).
Our excuse was clutching pens,
Applying the downward pressure
The tree guiding our hands on the sketch pads
The way a ghost would steer a pair of Ouija pointers.
Amy's sketch:
My Sketch:
Historical footnote
The tree we sketched sits on the remains of Fort Couch, really just a hilltop trench dug in the same year as the nearby Battle of Gettysburg.
The text and images of a 500 year old reformation era prayer book are here.
If you go to the site be ready for all the blackletter you can handle:
One funny thing about church back then is that this 1549 Book of Common Prayer puts a high barrier to recieving communion, not only giving the Eucharist a preamble reminding us to not presume the deserving of even "the crumbs under (His) table", but also instructing the rector, right up front, that people who are quarrelsome or vexed on that particular Sunday should put off communion until they've made right. As the BCP puts it:
"The same ordre (exclusion from the eucharist) shall the Curate use, with those betwixt whom he perceiveth malice, and hatred to reigne, not suffering them to bee partakers of the Lordes table, untill he knowe them to bee reconciled."
The senior citizen in the next seat at the library was having a full-on existential crisis, making intermittent announcements as he paged through The Economist.
(For full effect, insert 60 seconds in between each utterance):
Old Man, breaking the silence of the library: "What kind of life is this?" (Sigh.)
*Turns a few pages*
Old Man: (Sigh.) "Every day, every day the same" (Sigh.)
*stands to leave*
Old Man: "I can't take much more of this." *Walks away with a pace of infinite weariness*
Which left me with an empty sadness. Is this how we end? Not in my family, I think. But who knows. Enter Hamlet, who asks:
"Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of
merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? "
Justin Werfel at M.I.T. wants to adapt the algorithms of Nature’s tiny architects to human construction presumably on a microscopic/epic scale.
The basic idea is to understand how a dumb, locally focused termite can create the 12 foot tall complexity if a termite mound. Once we figure this out, we can then build stupid, myopic robots that build beautiful miracles.
My thoughts:
1 It’s visually appealing and amusing at first to see the Lego Robots driving around on the card table. Then you realize the profundity of what Werfel is seeking. This is deep understanding of God/Nature (your choice) on the same scale of Newton’s piercing the divine curtain. One more step out of Plato’s Cave!
2 This is a crucial missing link amidst the nano-buzz floating around in the chemistry and materials science worlds. Most nanotechnology research published in JACS or Nature has been molecular, like inventing mortar and bricks, whereas J K Werfel seems to be on a whole meta level above this. Instead of inventing the nouns, this guy is inventing the verbs.
3 This could bear tangential fruit in brain research, to whit, the idea of how neurons know how to organize themselves when all they can see is their hundred nearest neighbors. [For related research, enjoy the beautiful images of the Blue Brain: a slice of rat brain being built from THOUSANDS of microprocessors]
4 What a lovely tying together of 200 year old abstract math (Hamilton, topology), undergrad chemistry (closest packing, unit crystal), African zoology (the termite mounds), and science fiction (grey goo that can build Arthur C. Clarke’s space elevator cable, a necessarily nano-constructed diamond cable).
[I stumbled across all of the preceding while looking on Google Images for "Skeptic", so, as usual, a banal Internet search turned up really cool stuff. ]
I won the pie eating contest.
You Tube link is here.
An audience of 550 witnessed it in the school assembly Friday morning
A trashbag protected me
The cherry filling encouraged me.
My advantage was I ever have conceptualized my mouth and esophagus as little but a coal chute.
I theatrically brandished a big goldfish bowl for a vomitorium but the prophesy ironically self-fulfilled in early waves of initial gagging which luckily I was able to eat right through.
Maybe my secret weapon was a big breakfast: a 12" submarine sandwich eaten just minutes before, walking up Bedford Ave from the subway.
Happily no post-victory nausea ensued. After eating the entire pie in about 70 seconds, I felt nothing but a pleasant sugar rush for the rest of the morning.
I'm loving the Blue Brain update at 86 Words.
The Stress Eraser has been advertising a lot, especially in The Smithsonian. The Stress Eraser is a pocket biofeedback machine that says it can change your life and your sleep and reduce acute anxiety attacks. It costs $300 though and all it seems to do is train you to control your breathing, an effective remediation but not a good use of a microcomputer. Buddhism class already taught me about breathing pretty much.
As Lora Jansson points out (in Amazon customer comments), “If this is what you want -- to moduate breathing for enhanced calm -- count to 4 as you breathe in, count to 8 as you breathe out, and -- at the end of the exhalation - hold for two. Count consistently as fast or as slow as you need to. This will produce better results for you than the Stress Eraser (and it's free).”
In fairness, you and I both have to admit, as we nod our heads in support of slow breathing, that having read about it, we won't do it. Talking about breathing won't fix anything and even doing 2 straight minutes of slow breathing won't help much. It's got to be a full on 15 straight minutes of slowness. The key of this $300 dollar device is that it locks you into a 15 minute session of slow breathing, partly because it's blinking lights hypnotize you a bit and partly because your money forces you to
So the Stress Eraser can give pretty cool sounding results -- just check out these quotes of support: Wired and, better, The Washington Post
I imagine the Stress Eraser is completely effective and it's for the same reason a $100 electric toothbrush is effective. Being the satisfied owner of a top of the line electric toothbrush I can say that I brush for MUCH longer than I used to. I now brush twice a day and keep at it for 4 or 5 minutes each session and my teeth are MUCH cleaner than when I was young.
But I will skip buying this $300 box and use the money for some other type of biofeedback device. (Amazon has many available.) While I'm at it maybe I'll buy a 15 minute candle to go with the breathing sessions.
The biofeedback device I am interested in now claims in favor of heart rate consistency being a driving factor that influences brain performance.
Seeing photos of the Quebec Ice Hotel (Hotel De Glace ) over at India Ink made me recall some of the coldest nights of my life. In order, from merely amusing to miserable:
4. [ Snow camping in tents in Ontario in January] Sleeping was not too bad, it was the getting up. All our clothes had frozen into ice. You never realize how much moisture you emit all day, even in winter, until you leave a pair of jeans in a tent overnight. It was stupid but cotton jeans were just what every camper wore in the 70’s.
3. [A temple in Nagano, Japan.] This was a wooden building in a snowbound mountain regio near the site of the 1998 Winter Olympics. We knew the monks would put us up for a small donation. The temple was unheated and had paper doors like you see in Japanese movies. I was traveling with a fellow teacher (Jack Hildreth if you’re out there drop me a line!) and our host gave each of us two futons, one to go underneath and a second one to pull over you, as if the futon were a blanket. This futon-human-futon sandwich made for such a crushing weight that I wondered if it were possible to stop breathing accidently during deep sleep, sort of a Sudden Infant Death syndrome but for an adult.
The sleeping in the Japanese temple wasn’t too bad but the evening shower was sort of crazy. The mandatory wash up was done while squatting naked on a plastic milk crate in an unheated room, naked, and squirting yourself with boiling water from a garden hose between frigid sudsing up episodes. The sensation approximated the dilemna of a space walker, alternating spells of unbearable cold followed by unbearable heat. Passing aShinto monk in the hall afterwards he commented "that was pretty exhilirating, right?" or something like that.
2. [The winter of 1999 in Taiwan] It's not supposed to get very cold in the tropics, so none of the Taiwan buildings have heat. Ninety straight days of living and working in rooms where I could see my breath was really hard to take. Day after day you could see your breath indoors everywhere, at work, at home, in the shops. It was cold enough that people wore ski jackets, ski hats, ski gloves. My teachers dormitory was an all cement basement room. The temperature was 45 to 55 degrees for days and weeks on end, with no place to ever get warm.
You’d get home from a rainy day motorcycle ride or bicycle ride, or a long walk from the city bus. You’d take off your damp clothes and change into less-damp clothes (the country is humid, winter or summer alike) and then sit under a wool blanket. The constant rain and ubiquity of fluorescent lighting made it even worse. This went on for about forty days, at least.
1. [An autumn overnight hike, 10 miles from my Michigan house]. The other Boy Scouts brought actual sleeping bags. I saved weight by bringing a US Army poncho liner, basically just a nylon bed spread. We slept in a cornfield and I chattered in the pitch black tent interior for a couple hours before building a 4 am fire and just sitting there til everyone else got up a few hours later.
Fascinating: scientists have run a computer simulation of
the dating market and have published their conclusions in a scholarly journal
of mathematics. Sanmay Das (M.I.T.) and
Emir Kamenica (Harvard) used a scenario from Game Theory, “The Two Bandit
Problem”, to predict regret and relationship stability in dating partners. 
The simulation invokes things like the Boltzman distribution (familiar if you’ve ever taken third year college chemistry, sometimes called P-Chem), applied here to dates instead of molecules!
The study concludes that relationships are most stable when “agents are patient in two different ways —if they are more likely to explore early or if they are more optimistic.”. Whatever that means. I don’t yet completely understand the article.
Three quotes from the experiment:
I learned a bit about life in Mesopotamia this morning. The code of Hammurabi is online at the University of Evansville, translated by L.W. King
I liked these parts:
You have a right to not be overcharged for beer:
108. If a tavern-keeper does not accept corn according to gross weight in payment of drink, but takes money, and the price of the drink is less than that of the corn, she shall be convicted and thrown into the water.
You can accumulate real estate just by taking care of it for someone else. If you tend someone else’s field for them for four years, in the fifth year it’s yours.
60. If any one give over a field to a gardener, for him to plant it as a garden, if he work at it, and care for it for four years, in the fifth year the owner and the gardener shall divide it, the owner taking his part in charge.
You should always ask for a receipt.
104. If a merchant give an agent corn, wool, oil, or any other goods to transport, the agent shall give a receipt for the amount, and compensate the merchant therefor. Then he shall obtain a receipt form the merchant for the money that he gives the merchant. 105. If the agent is careless, and does not take a receipt for the money which he gave the merchant, he can not consider the unreceipted money as his own.
If you leave the water running, you are obligated to repay your neighbor.
55. If any one open his ditches to water his crop, but is careless, and the water flood the field of his neighbor, then he shall pay his neighbor corn for his loss.
We owe Michael Jackson an apology. I picked up an issue of Ebony at an airport recently and was pretty much blown away. I was blown away by the positivity, the respect, the complete warmth of the portrait. The article presented Michael Jackson as an adult, with significant accomplishments, a thinking, genius artist, in control of his art, and deserving of admiration. In other words, the complete other side of the coin from what (white) TV and (white) newspapers have tarred and feathered him as.
Ebony asked the questions that actually humanized him: “How did you and Quincy come to consensus on creative decisions?” (When was the last time you saw mainstream media portray MJ as a clever decision maker and working man?) And Ebony asked “What has been challenging about raising your sons? What lessons do you try to teach them?” (I think my entire knowledge of his parenting comes from a single tabloid photo of him, as if that describes his entire decade as a parent.)
After I got a glimpse of from this sympathetic Ebony interview portraying Jackson as fully human, the underlying reasons for our mainstream media culture (white media culture) started to look ridiculous and even creepy.
If you think of an objective summary of MJ and everything he is or has been, and then then contrast it to the conventional wisdom on him, it presents a snapshot of our subconscious. The white journalists’ conception (and by extension, OUR conception) of MJ as a nut, a masquarade, or at best an object of pity, reveals our conceptions about celebrities and specifically black celebrities. The journalists and editors that broadcast, filter, amplify (and perhaps slander or invent) the freakshow aspect of the story, feel confident that their story will get traction, that it will find a receptive audience. I find this damning of us as readers, because they are right: we the audience have pretty dutifully accepted it.
When was the last time you read a story about Jackson freakishness and then internally longed to get his side of the story? Where in white media are there any public apologists for him? Do papers run Opinion pieces defending MJ’s side of things, the way they would for, say, a politician? When you call out Bill Clinton on his freakiness, does he not have high profile defenders?
When we hear about weird stuff done by young, blonde actor isn’t there a tiny element of “what made this person crazy”, “lets try to explain the logic of how this happened, what drove them to this” or even “hey, everybody has a bad day” and (if it’s a guy) “hey, we all sow our wild oats”. But if MJ does something it’s straight to “yeah, man, whacko Jacko, not quite human” and, parenthetically, probably subconsciously, “dude’s black, afterall.”
I don’t think it’s an overreaction to say we need to look into our hearts and be aware of the race element we bring into our judging of Michael Jackson.
On a cheerier note, I can offer no more complete defense of Michael than this excellent song for your iPod. Right click ‘save as’ and go make a cup of tea.
Download 01_i_want_you_back.mp3
The Ebony MJ interview is paid-content but there is a free postscript here.
And an innocent Jackson 5ive Saturday Morning Cartoon is here.
Everything is cool with my housing situation. I’m still locked out (along with all the other 100 tenants of 475 Kent) but I have a floor to sleep on in my best friend’s building and I’m really happy.
I think what I’m happiest about is being forcibly disconnected from my stuff. I am totally freed by having just some pants and two suitcases of clean shirts and a computer. I've got plenty of books and music. What more could I need? It’s beautiful. Really.
I don’t post to the blog too much now because my job has got me freaked out frequently, trying to catch up at night. And I can only get internet up the block at the (corporate chain) Connecticut Muffin on Cortelyou.
For some reason, I spend my time in the ConnMuff corporate coffee shop instead of the Fair Trade, Union Shop Vox Pop Coffee House across the street. The Vox Pop staff and owner are all nice -- the owner is a young candidate for the Green Party and has a beautiful ABC No Rio DIY thing going on -- but the place is small and I feel uneasy sitting amongst their crunchy stroller pushing demographic. Plus the Newport Folk Festival on their stage at night drives me nuts. And the Conn Muff coffeeshop has a human face – the staff are jokey regular guy types and the franchise owner seems a pretty sympathetic entrepreneurial type as well.
Actually our whole building, 100 apartments, is being evicted on 6 hours notice on the coldest night of the month. Huh! They told me I have to leave by midnight and that the Red Cross can help me.
The fire department inspected our building, 475 Kent Avenue, this afternoon, found no sprinklers, leaking standpipes, and explosion prone grain silos on the premises. Was there sketchiness? Was the eviction political? I don't know who initiated things downtown, but the guys on the ground, shutting down the building seemed to be responding to real things they were discovering on site.I could tell that the inspection wasn't going well: there were puddles
running down the stairwell after the standpipe failed the firemen's
leaktest. Later, around 3 PM I eavesdropped on the cell phone conversation from a Dept of Emergency (DoE) in the fifth floor of the stairwell. He was kind of torn on what to do, calling back to HQ: "...no, no, the cell reception is terrible here...so what... We might have to evacuate the tenants..."
I am off now to Borough Park to sleep on my buddy's couch, who is ultra generous and immediately offered to host me as soon as he guessed what was going on. I hope things work out. My worst fear is that we never get to return or that something destroys the building while we're away this week. I'm taking a photo album and my passport.
UPDATE: A good, coherent report is at The Gothamist. Comments not interesting.
A lively discussion is at The Brownstoner with better comments section (50 comments so far)
Lots of photos of 475 Kent lofts over at Flickr if you search "475Kent"
UPDATE: The New York Post noted that it was a "pricey" apartment building. They interviewed me while I was walking the dog. I immediately regretted speaking to the Post but they instead ran quotes from a sobbing young college student that they spoke to right after me so I was kind of relieved. The New York Post headline called it a "Matzo Bawl at Building":
Last night’s attempt at Mah Jong lasted about an hour. The whole game aspect was bewildering. I'm not even competent at regular American card games so I don't know what I was thinking saying yes to Mah Jong. The hour was mostly, for me, just a chance to read Chinese. The tiles feature simple Chinese Characters: numbers 1 – 10 in Arabic, numbers 1 – 10 in Mandarin, the four compass directions.
Our game dissolved an hour later after playing two hands [my incompetence and disinterest didn't help] and we moved on to a game I had thought up in the meantime. Here is a description of my invented game:
All during Mah Jong, I had been compulsively jotting down phrases people said:
--don’t intend to win
--the dead wall
--worse than chickenfoot
--if you have flowers
--you and your motherfucking
--Chinese pornstar moustache
--pretty as a painting
--crazy couplet
I was wondering how many Google hits would come up for each one. We made it into a guessing game.
How to play Evan’s Google Game:
I was surprised my friends liked it.
I guess that’s why we are all friends though.
Who won:
I'm becoming ridiculously obsessed with an artist that I had ALWAYS FOUND TO BE RIDICULOUS.
Blame it on the crazy movie, I’m Not There and my accidental viewing of it at a theater twice within 18 hours. [I accidently double booked with two different sets of friends to see it last month.] So now, I have Bob Dylan on heavy repeat while biking, commuting, lying down to sleep, grading papers, and everywhere else.
And today, as usual, only complete with a ritualistic playing of the last song from his 1966 notorius Manchester concert, Like a Rolling Stone, basically a 6 minute long sneer at his detractors, caught on tape, a great moment that stands alongside other art biography moments, e.g. The Agony And the Ecstasy.
The song itself is way better than I ever realized, on many levels. It occurrs to me that an entire book of chapter titles might be created based on the lines from the lyrics of Like a Rolling Stone. Every couplet of that song is as quotable as Shakespeare or at least the Old Testament. Admittedly it would be a real bummer of a book, since, from my interpretation, Bob is singing about people living with cognitive dissonance, armchair quarterbacks and other people living at a distance from the people in this world [like presumably Bob] who are having an authentic experience.
If you're in a spending mood, I can only say that I think downloading the live 1966 version of “L.A.R.S.” is the best 99 cents a person could spend at the Apple Music Store – that version especially is probably worth about 10 bucks, just on its own, especially for the hecklers at the beginning and Bob’s dismissive response.
UPDATE:
Majority Opinion: A.O. Scott loving "INT" in the NY Times Movie Review
Dissenting view: "Dylan Pic wins Worst Movie of 2007" in the lit mag n + 1
I struggle to "get" poetry but then something like this zooms in past my prejudices.
Adrift in a Pennsylvania treetop with Dave at via Negativa.
You will enjoy this low-tech Ween video.
Cardboard robots stomp around to their song "Roses Are Free".
I was hooked all the way through because the robots kept changing. Low budget animation + lots of ideas = pleasurable viewing. A charming video -- especially the guitar solo!
I think you also need to watch their submission for a Pizza Hut commercial (rejected!).
And, if you're still with me, here they are in 1993, rocking a falsetto and a very slowed down version of their song about Philadelphia prostitutes on something called The Jane Pratt show.
I returned to my hometown library this week, a favorite holiday pilgrimage of mine. Libraries always feel like candy stores where they're giving everything away for free.
There ought to be a line stretching around the block. Instead, there are plenty of open seats, which makes it even better.
I think of a library as a decadent spa, full of delicious food.
Entering the second floor , I pick out four books from the New Non Fiction shelf and grab an armload of CDs to rip into my laptop while I read.
I look around and the room has a scattering of the usual pragmatic types, people here to
--work on their resume
--study for an exam or
--check their e-mail.
I notice my peer group of fellow idlers are over at the periodicals, lost in perusal.
The youth outreach at Rochester Hills Public Library is in full effect, titles like Santa Manga on display in the Anime Section. Some teen-suitable furniture is nearby, similar to the Giant Hand Chair from Woody Allen's Sleeper.
I am stunned to notice that something links the 2007 RHPL to my 1982 RHPL: a gentle giant of a man, long thought gone, is once again there shelving books. I want to talk to him but am not sure what we would talk about. Where have you been? Why can you afford to make your living by just shelving books year after year? Does he rank first in seniority and loyalty to this great place? I want to thank him for connecting this new building to the old one, his presence a kind of button to fasten the two incarnations, a silent, Collossus astride two eras of my hometown like the original Colossus stood across the harbor in Rhodes.
A Margaret Atwood poem in one of the new books catches my eye:
This Atwood poem has extra meaning since my own aging mom, a Maple Leaf in her heart, has always been a fan of these Canadian women authors ( see also Carol Shields). In Atwood's poem, the ache of mortality is poignant, not exactly sad, her family ties made keener by their participants shifting relative to one another, like a frog's eyes only noticing something's presence if that something changes position.
RHPL homepage.
How glad I am to visit the National Cancer Atlas as a stats junkie and not as a concerned relative. Do you have questions about who dies of which types of cancer? There are lots of lucid graphs here, for example, state by state lung cancer deaths per 100,000 Americans.
Who knew they split cancer into so many types! There were at least 5 different parts of your genitals that can get cancer, for instance.
Which cancer types do you think kill the most people? Try this yourself: which of the following do you think has the highest death rate?
Brain Cancer?
Breast Cancer?
Lung Cancer?
Skin Cancer?
It’s not even close. Of every 100,000 Americans, 70 will end their life due to lung cancer. Next worst (that I saw) is prostate. Here are the death rates per 100,000 Americans:
Lung 70 per 100,000
Prostate 22
Pancreas 10
Leukemia 10
Bladder 7
Stomach 8
Brain 5
Skin Melanoma 4
Breast 0.3
Testes 0.5
Thyroid 0.3
This confused me. I thought (still think) breast cancer kills many. No?
Here are the state by state rates for white men dying of lung cancer.
Blacks and Whites die of different cancers and, moreover, in different places. Note that these are rates. It’s not a measure of where the white or black people are numerous, it’s a measure of where they have the highest odds of losing the battle with cancer. Here are white men dying of skin cancer in Texas:
Look at where the death rates are worst in Texas. What kind of work do whites do in the different counties? Are they of more mixed race and more sun resistant in certain areas? What do they do for fun; is it rich guys getting sun exposure from tennis lessons or poor guys getting sun while carrying drywall?
Here are high death rates for stomach cancer, left and right are Black Men versus White Men.
If you’re African-Michigander (a new hyphenated word --I made it up...) then it’s better to get cancer in Detroit than out on the west side of the state:
The map shows a neutral rate for Detroit, which means black mortality rates are just equal to the national average but a very high rate out by Benton Harbor and St Joseph. This might be explained by greater poverty in west Michigan.
You can spend hours at this huge site.
The index to the maps is here.
and the bar graphs are here or here.
I would like to know where a more optimistic site is. Is there a national map of cancer survival rates? What are the odds that you can get prostate cancer but then kick it? I will put an optimistic update here if I can find cancer maps of encouragement and hope.
Here is my sister the genealogist, visiting NY for 24 hours.
In from PA, she wanted to see Ellis Island.
We caught the penultimate boat back and were alone on deck.\
UPDATE: Though ultimately thwarted by sleet, our Sunday tourism destination was to be a less conventional NY destination: a self guided $12 walking tour of Williamsburg's numerous Hassidic Jewish landmarks. Download the Soundwalk MP3 here.
I didn’t donate blood this morning. I couldn’t because I slept through my appointment.
I’m a pretty good giver: O positive people like me can give to recipients who are Type A, Type B, Type AB, or Type O, as long as they are RH Positive. It feels hospitable, being able to give to so many other types of people.
It also makes me a bad recipient. My body can’t handle A, B, or AB.
In the future, genetic manipulation may allow parents to tweek their children’s DNA for things like blood type. What could this do to our nation’s blood types? Wouldn’t all the parents want to make their kids universal acceptors?
Universal Donor: Type O Negative
Universal Acceptor: Type AB Positive (but very limited donation ability)
Which raises the prospect of a nation where every child of a well-to-do person can universally accept blood but the children of the lower social classes are the ones more likely to be able to give blood. What an extreme way for the top 10% to ride on the backs of the poorest 50%. Almost literally a pound of flesh.
Rich people receiving all the blood. Poor people donating all the blood. Such a demographic shift, similar to China’s shift towards all-male, one-child families, could be rich fodder for writers.
Thomas Freidman could write an editorial essay saying that the one-way giving was beneficial to the poor people.
Ayn Rand could write a guest Op-Ed piece proving that the people who were receiving the blood deserved to receive because they were on top due to their merits.
Rod Serling could write a script where the last universal donor died, leaving the universal receivers somehow doomed. [Scientifically this doesn’t work in the way I have set out the premise. I leave it to Rod Serling to figure out a way]
As far as the actual mechanics of tweeking your kid’s DNA, it seems possible within our lifetimes. In Gattaca, a film that we show in Biology class each year, the DNA manipulation premise isn’t even particularly high tech. Gattaca imagines a future world where you can view a thumbnail sketch of the genotype in all the sperms from an ejaculation. The doctor can then select the single fittest sperm from the dad, the one that has no hypertension, no acne, no shortness, and combine it with a similarly culled egg from the natural mother. Kind of a best-foot-forward strategy for conception.
I never gave Jackson Browne songs any thought, assuming they were relentlessly upbeat, some longer playing version of "Theme from the show Bosom Buddies" or something, but this morning, over a pre-commute coffee, WFUV-FM blew me away playing treacly Jackson Browne from 1982. Hearing the actual words to "Running on Empty" made me want to jump off the 8th floor.
Darkness and nihilism from the No Nukes hippy! This made me happy!
I'm curious to go sample Browne's whole back catalog now. And what about Barry Manilow...
Have you ever had an abrupt epiphany about what a song is really about ?
The songs of J Browne (if you dare).
2003 Version (dystopia)
1929 Version (pre-Irony)
English translation of lyrics to Mickey 3D's "Respire" is here.
One of my favorite physics stumper questions: rank the three strong men according to what strain they are feeling.
This illustration is immediately recognizeable to any high school physics teacher as the work of Paul G Hewitt (as in “Hewitt Drew It”). His textbook, Conceptual Physics is one of my 3 favorite textbooks and 10 favorite all-time books.
Besides this best physics textbook, if anyone cares, my other beloved texts (hard to winnow!) would probably be Organic Chemistry by Streitweiser & Heathcock (a sophomore text), and maybe “Physical Chemistry” by Peter Atkins.
The Streitweiser book, though technical and encyclopedic, is thrilling as a secret society induction. With subdued tones which certify their authority, Streitweiser and Heathcock admit you as co-conspirator in peeling away the layers of God’s mind, albeit just the parts of his playbook that are revealed by close study of carbon chemistry.
Atkins’ Physical Chemistry grips me in the frustrated infatuation of failed courtship. Those evening hours I spent wooing it in the long dark Illinois winter of 1994 have fixed that text, forever bathing it in the aura of an unrequited love. I gave that book all I could and it flatly said “That’s not enough.”
This morning’s surf online:
O ^__^
o (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----w |
|| ||I think it’s fated that I go.
The impressions from one enthusiastic attendee last night
UPDATE: I went but just to the daytime open mic session. One act was playing music via 2600 Pong Paddles. One Gameboy maestro had a crazy Flying Lizards robot singer. And one of the musicians was funky as hell. Got me to throw my hands in the air at 5 in the afternoon.
UPDATE: Here, by coincidence is a painting that would be right up the low res blip fetishist alley.
How to visit a nuclear missile:
If the silo still has liquid fuel in it you will need to wear an airtight rubber suit but if it is 2007, the silo was decommissioned during Reagan’s SALT II treaty so, the silo will having no fuel, you can probably just show up for the tour in your flip flops and a hardhat (many steel girders and low spaces are inside).
If you are the youngest member of the tour group, you will probably be given the questionable honor of helping end the First and Second Worlds as we know them. You will perform this duty at the climax of the one hour walk, underground in the concrete reinforced control bunker. When the tour docent turns his control panel key, you will be allowed to turn your key. Those redundant triggers will then send the largest ballistic hydrogen bomb ever made, on its merry way to vaporize a city of Soviets.
The tour guide says that this particular missile was calibrated to fly to one of three targets, depending on what punch card stack was fed into the computer. Even today, 20 years after de-commissioning, it is not general knowledge what destination the punchcards aimed the missile at. And yes, the mightiest weapon was indeed aimed by a punchcard. It's primitive but there's certainly no possibility of an internet virus there! This is the actual punchcard reader. 
Being on the tour, seeing an 8 year old boy turn the actual warhead launching key was probably disturbing for most of the adults present. When the 7 year old turned his key the pit kind of fell out of my stomach. I felt like I was on a tour of Golgotha and they asked a child to hammer a nail or two into Christ’s cross.
The boy was completely enthusiastic of course. He loved it. The sober tour guide reminded all present that “The Titan II was meant as only a deterrent – it would be launched in an act of ” (and here the child’s ears perked up) “RETALIATION.” The child yelled “Yeaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!” and punched his little Bobby Brady fist into the air.
This is the actual instruction manual for launching the missile.
This is where you would put your hand as you pulled open the code drawer to see whether the phone call was legit.
The guys on the tour (and believe me, it was all guys) wanted to see the rocket motors. Luckily the tour docent had lots of great details. I had wrongly assumed the motors burned hydrogen and oxygen. That would be hard to keep fueled, probably. Turns out the oxidizer was nitrogen tetroxide, the fuel was asymmetrical dimethyl something (azide? can't remember...). The nozzle has two beautiful sets of perforations for injecting these liquids, which then react spontaneously, vigorously inside the engine cone.
One weird detail about the fuel: it is such an exotic substance, it solidifies at something like 40 degrees F but boils at room temperature, so it was critical to chill the entire 100 foot silo to the temperature of British ale all the time or else the entire setup would boil/freeze.
Believe it or not, there is at least one hour worth of interesting things to see there. After the tour, you may choose from many AWESOME souvenirs at the gift shop. These gift items were really much more inspired stuff than I am used to. Want any of the following?
Credit for making the gift shop so awesome goes to
Yvonne Morris, Director.
Official site of the Arizona Titan II Missile Museum.
Wreckage from the Columbia.
Seen at NPR.
Walking around in the desert.
Planning a hike with Google Earth is like playing a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, with you as the tail and the whole county as a giant donkey..
Rivers in the desert are open for business intermittently. The rest of the time they are tempting trails.
Walking along a dry wash.
Horses and wild pigs use these trails too.
In a sense the area is like a stand of virgin forest: nothing has altered it since the time of the Indians.
Although Saguaro cacti are a sort of icon of deserts, the plant itself only grows here in Tucson. It is as localized as a California Sequoia
The Saguaro lives hundreds of years and then dies, leaving its strong wooden ribs.
Lichen do well in the desert.
The final goal of my walk was some Indian petroglyphs I had heard about. Snake motif visible at the top.
I am in Tucson until Friday.
Mercutio: "No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as
a church door, but 'tis enough."
Photos and dialog from the Royal Shakespeare Co.
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