Here's "The Iceman"! Check it out, for reallll. The philosophical and ethical implications are boundless and I want to discuss them with all of you!
On a semi-related-but-not-really note, I finished reading two books in the last two days, one of which qualifies under the "recommended to me" goal, and one which I just picked up, started reading, and promptly stole from my friend because it is thoroughly awesome.
How I Became Stupid is a delightful reexamination of the age-old plague of ennui that befalls all the youthful intellectuals of the world from time to time. Although it doesn't provide any realistic* "solutions" to the deeply painful experience of being too aware of the world, it playfully deconstructs all the normal alternatives: alcoholism, suicide, and Prozac. Moral of the story: moderation is the key to a (functional) intellectual life. It's not groundbreaking or exceedingly innovative in any way, it's just a legitimately pleasurable reading experience.
The second novel, Identity, seems like a reasonably standard story plot (middle-aged couple begins to question their love because they are really - gasp - questioning their own identities) but is a technical marvel. For instance: it was not until page 150 that I became aware that every few paragraphs or so, the narration switched between past and present tense, normally something that I'm a huge stickler against. But when handled properly, tense change is an incredibly effective way to pace a story. Like most advanced writing techniques, tense changes are best experienced on a subliminal level, to be discerned explicitly upon a second, closer read. Nabokov has the same effect with his use of metaphor: there are certain sentences in Lolita that you need to read over and over again to realize exactly what has just been said. Not because the language is too dense, no - it's more that you've just been lulled into such a sense of bewilderment at the ease and flow of the language that you don't pay attention to the actual words. Since ripping one such example out of context from either book would only negate the effect in question, you just have to take my word for it. And all this is not to say that the philosophical discussions of projecting and mirroring and identity-depending-on-other-people's-perceptions-of-you-as-well-as-your-own aren't valid and equally good parts of the book, just. I wanted to highlight the joyous element of simply reading this text.
Reading these two books at the same time amplified certain themes that have been simmering in my mind lately, and each highlighted certain undertones in the other that... well, I probably would have picked up on them anyway, but the juxtaposition was lovely. Only they both cut pretty heavily into my aim to become a hard-hearted cynic, traversing the world in self-satisfied, misanthropic solitude... stupid need for stupid friends and stupid love and stupid human contact. Blech.
*Re: Realistic solutions.... spoiler alerts. See below.
What the fuck, stupid indie soulmates. That's some fucking bulllllshit. I spent ten years of my life undoing the damage Disney did me as a child, and having my hard won pragmatism battered from all pop culture angles... It isn't enough that Carrie and Big end up together, or Jim and Pam, or Josh and Donna... now the fucking offbeat literature that is supposed to PROMOTE shrugging off all that mass media crap and living your own life has to succumb to the storybook happy ending? Yes, it's very easy to live true love when SOMEONE IS WRITING YOUR SCRIPT FOR YOU.
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Showing posts with label Articles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Articles. Show all posts
Monday, February 22, 2010
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Four little things
For the past couple days, I've been bouncing back and forth between the bathrooms at the office in order to read two lengthy biographical profiles in two separate issues of the New Yorker - a magazine which now hates me, because I can't even post a link to an article from LAST WEEK'S (dated this week, but that's another beef for another post) issue. See, unlike every other periodical publication on the planet, the New Yorker has seen fit to completely digitize their archive through some sort of flash player... you see the layout exactly as you would if you were holding the paper copy in front of you, with the cartoons interspersed in the articles and everything, but it's a flat image. You can't highlight the text, no copy-pasta... the pages aren't even pdf, half of them are jpgs and half are pngs. Utmost fail. I do, however, have Adobe Acrobat here at the office... I might make my own pdfs and toss them up to mediafire for future safekeeping.
The best I can do for now, though, is tell you a bit about them and post links to the abstracts. First up, "The Iceman." In the far reaches of the frigid north, fittingly, a ninety-one year old man is leading the charge for cryogenic freezing to replace standard burial practices. In Ettinger's ideal vision of the future, everyone on earth takes turns playing Frye - being "reanimated" in a couple hundred years, checking out the sights, and going back to sleep to give someone else a shot/wait another couple centuries to see what else is happening. I have two major questions about this: 1) since you can only be frozen by having your body pumped full of antifreeze after you die, meaning that your brain is off - electricity, dead, synapses, dead. Let's grant that in the distant future, there's a way to reanimate your cells physically - where is the scientific basis for believing that that body would actually be you? I mean presuming you could walk and talk, would you be able to reminisce about your past, or even care that you were alive again, let alone at all? If you didn't have memories, wouldn't it really traumatize you to be a zombie? You probably wouldn't even know what a zombie is, you wouldn't have any language at all - you'd be an infant trapped in an adult body with a fully developed yet completely empty brain. How would that even begin to work?
Second question is, say you even can get over this whole dead synapse thing (and please, if you know anything about neuroscience at all, by all means let me know what the plausible scenarios are here), or work out the cylonesque up- and downloading of consciousness... anyway, say reanimation works, and when you wake up, you are still aware that you are you and this thing has happened and you understand that you are in the future... and so are ten thousand other people that day whose turn it is to live again. If everyone is really truly living in turns, for a few years at a time, say, how does progress continue? By the third or fourth cycle, will anything have even changed? We have the innovations we have today because of the combination of the collective unconscious and the constant injection of new minds into the macro thought process. You build off what's come before... and if you're what came before, and so is everyone else, and if everyone was only in it to see the rocket cars and moon colonies, then it just stops. Right? At the end of the day, I respect the equitable impulse to say that everyone should be able to have their turn at glimpsing FutureEarth, but... how long would that actually be interesting? How long until people would begin to not refreeze? Is it possible to be that petrified of death?
The way the New Yorker piece describes Ettinger's history and psychology, I think perhaps this freezing nonsense is the (pseudo)scientific equivalent of the rapture mania in the far-out evangelical churches of America. As a young boy, Ettinger feverishly read sci-fi stories about conquering death and the consequences thereof; after being shot in the Second World War, he even wrote one of his own. Interestingly, his story has an odd sort of twist that makes cryogenics seem much less appealing than you'd think the founder of alab warehouse for it would want you to think it is. I would describe it to you, but I firmly believe this is an article worth reading, and so on Monday, I will make the pdf and post it. Plus, this is long enough already, and those four little things I was going to post became one big thing so rapidly that, aside from the other article, I can't even remember what the third and fourth things are. Ooopsie. More soon.
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The best I can do for now, though, is tell you a bit about them and post links to the abstracts. First up, "The Iceman." In the far reaches of the frigid north, fittingly, a ninety-one year old man is leading the charge for cryogenic freezing to replace standard burial practices. In Ettinger's ideal vision of the future, everyone on earth takes turns playing Frye - being "reanimated" in a couple hundred years, checking out the sights, and going back to sleep to give someone else a shot/wait another couple centuries to see what else is happening. I have two major questions about this: 1) since you can only be frozen by having your body pumped full of antifreeze after you die, meaning that your brain is off - electricity, dead, synapses, dead. Let's grant that in the distant future, there's a way to reanimate your cells physically - where is the scientific basis for believing that that body would actually be you? I mean presuming you could walk and talk, would you be able to reminisce about your past, or even care that you were alive again, let alone at all? If you didn't have memories, wouldn't it really traumatize you to be a zombie? You probably wouldn't even know what a zombie is, you wouldn't have any language at all - you'd be an infant trapped in an adult body with a fully developed yet completely empty brain. How would that even begin to work?
Second question is, say you even can get over this whole dead synapse thing (and please, if you know anything about neuroscience at all, by all means let me know what the plausible scenarios are here), or work out the cylonesque up- and downloading of consciousness... anyway, say reanimation works, and when you wake up, you are still aware that you are you and this thing has happened and you understand that you are in the future... and so are ten thousand other people that day whose turn it is to live again. If everyone is really truly living in turns, for a few years at a time, say, how does progress continue? By the third or fourth cycle, will anything have even changed? We have the innovations we have today because of the combination of the collective unconscious and the constant injection of new minds into the macro thought process. You build off what's come before... and if you're what came before, and so is everyone else, and if everyone was only in it to see the rocket cars and moon colonies, then it just stops. Right? At the end of the day, I respect the equitable impulse to say that everyone should be able to have their turn at glimpsing FutureEarth, but... how long would that actually be interesting? How long until people would begin to not refreeze? Is it possible to be that petrified of death?
The way the New Yorker piece describes Ettinger's history and psychology, I think perhaps this freezing nonsense is the (pseudo)scientific equivalent of the rapture mania in the far-out evangelical churches of America. As a young boy, Ettinger feverishly read sci-fi stories about conquering death and the consequences thereof; after being shot in the Second World War, he even wrote one of his own. Interestingly, his story has an odd sort of twist that makes cryogenics seem much less appealing than you'd think the founder of a
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Thursday, January 28, 2010
Historical Documents
Re: active SETI, ie sending messages instead of listening for them:
I give you "Exolanguage: do you speak alien?" It reminds me of that scene in Independence Day when they send up the "welcome wagon" helicopter with all the flashy lights, as though blinding the aliens with high beams (but there's patterns!) isn't going to bug them or anything. The article does raise an interesting theory, that perhaps math is not math to aliens, and that we should not assume that any extraterrestrial civilization advanced enough to hear our broadcasts will understand that 1+1=2. My favorite line is, "Maybe everyone's listening but no one is transmitting. Maybe it takes an audacious young civilisation like ours to do that." Would make sense to send porn out into the universe, then, right? Like some cosmic-scale fart joke? [Aside: holy christ we should from now on send nothing but rickrolls!]
See also: "What's on Earth Tonight?"
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Instead, Shostak suggests that we just gabble. "My conclusion is that you would just send them the Google servers. That's an enormous amount of information, much of it redundant and pictographic. Much of it is pornographic too, but I expect they could handle that." (Although it raises questions like, can Earth handle a trillion orders for Viagra?)
I give you "Exolanguage: do you speak alien?" It reminds me of that scene in Independence Day when they send up the "welcome wagon" helicopter with all the flashy lights, as though blinding the aliens with high beams (but there's patterns!) isn't going to bug them or anything. The article does raise an interesting theory, that perhaps math is not math to aliens, and that we should not assume that any extraterrestrial civilization advanced enough to hear our broadcasts will understand that 1+1=2. My favorite line is, "Maybe everyone's listening but no one is transmitting. Maybe it takes an audacious young civilisation like ours to do that." Would make sense to send porn out into the universe, then, right? Like some cosmic-scale fart joke? [Aside: holy christ we should from now on send nothing but rickrolls!]
See also: "What's on Earth Tonight?"
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Saturday, December 19, 2009
So glad I'm not one of those people who made a goal about posting frequency...
So as it turns out, the business of living my life has actually gotten to the point of interfering with my ability to write about said life. Oops. Here's a quick run-down of the last I-don't-know-how-many-weeks.
Can't really think of anything else I was in the middle of... Free Rice has sort of faded back into obscurity, it's the wrong season for Walks for the Cure, and Rosetta Stone is still on hold. Oh! I did get an email from Donors Choose, with a follow-up thank you letter and pictures from the teacher of the class I donated the Scholastic Weeklies to a couple months ago. Second graders are ADORABLE and curious and their teacher says they were ecstatic to learn that the magazines are theirs to keep and take home. I'm so glad that they have a new outlet for that inquisitive energy, and hopefully it will inspire them keep researching things they're interested in outside of the classroom. So anyway, that's that. Pictures soon. Articles in the next week, as they become interesting. And, maybe possibly soon I'll finally get the confidence to post my two-month-old drabble.
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- Swingset #5 (picture unavailable) - Ponce Inlet lighthouse playground. Swung late at night, and this set is literally right underneath the lighthouse. There's a large oak(?) tree that was filtering the lights overhead (the lens is fractured, and there are two or three strong beams and four or five thinner ones on each rotation) and it was sort of magical except for the strong odor of fish coming in off the docks across the street.
- I started knitting a yellow cardigan (loosely pictured here) while out at the bar with my friends. I have to date completed the back panel, three quarters of one front panel, and have about seven inches or so (of more than 24) on the second front panel. After that, there will just be the arms and the two buttons/collar strips to complete the front, and sewing it all together. Monday will be the end of the third week I've been working on it, so it should hopefully be done by New Year's. I say hopefully both because Florida's cold season is very very short, and because I promised each of the bartenders who initially made fun of me that I'd knit them something, too - fingerless gloves for Pete and a knit replica of his work t-shirt for Jake, complete with the bar's logo on the front and 'CURRENTLY WORKING OFF MY BAR TAB' on the back.
- Knitting is fun, but it isn't actually progress on goal 40. Luckily, I purchased fabric and a pattern to sew a strapless dress, and it really shouldn't take too long to complete once I actually sit down and get to it. Of course, a dress isn't a whole outfit; I am thinking that if I get really ambitious, I might make a lightweight black trench jacket to go with it. My friend Katelyn insists that I also make the, um, unmentionables to be worn with this outfit... this is already a multi-stage project, so why not?
- As a sort of combo step towards achieving both goals 67 and 79, I did in fact purchase a watercolor journal, paints, and brushes. I won't really say any more about it, other than this: "snails."
- There's an SPT of me in a moose hat, an SPT of me trapped on my camera, and 13904810 SPTs from last night of me acting with a questionable amount of class at a semiformal event. These pictures will hopefully be posted shortly.
- Writing is slow and not actually going where I initially thought, but I am making an effort to at least think about it everyday, if not actually putting words together into real sentences. I just feel like I'm not being very... artful, as though four years of essay and technical writing ruined my imagination. But that's what all this practice is for, right? Right.
On the non-fiction front, I am thinking about writing an alternative history book (a la Lies My History Teacher Told Me) aimed at kids. Or, to be more precise, writing a history book whose primary purpose is not the indoctrination of American children into a brouhaha of blind national pride or Eurocentric elitism. As Joel Stein put it, I love America, like an adult loves another adult - I see her flaws and I desperately want to help her overcome them. I believe in being honest about those flaws, not trying to hide them.
This may or may not be inspired by the fact that my little sister and another girl I met separately who happened to be in her high school class don't know who Nelson Mandela is. Worse, they can't even comprehend why that might be a problem. - Article reading is still going along nicely, although now that I have paper copies of two of the three magazines, posting links and blurbs seems more trouble than it's worth. Now that I'm, uh, caught up, if there's a particularly interesting thing, I will post about it. Swear. No more batch posts, because that's what seems to be slowing me down. If I like it, I'll post it. End of story.
- Book reading is going okay, too, but I keep getting sidetracked by new books and going out and knitting and... well... I haven't actually finished a book in over a month. I'm about halfway through three, and started two others, if that makes any difference. I really want to finish the Terry Prachett book I'm in the middle of, The Wyrd Sisters, before Christmas. New mini-goal. Woot.
Can't really think of anything else I was in the middle of... Free Rice has sort of faded back into obscurity, it's the wrong season for Walks for the Cure, and Rosetta Stone is still on hold. Oh! I did get an email from Donors Choose, with a follow-up thank you letter and pictures from the teacher of the class I donated the Scholastic Weeklies to a couple months ago. Second graders are ADORABLE and curious and their teacher says they were ecstatic to learn that the magazines are theirs to keep and take home. I'm so glad that they have a new outlet for that inquisitive energy, and hopefully it will inspire them keep researching things they're interested in outside of the classroom. So anyway, that's that. Pictures soon. Articles in the next week, as they become interesting. And, maybe possibly soon I'll finally get the confidence to post my two-month-old drabble.
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Friday, November 20, 2009
ENID: It’s probably the slang.
Still busy busy busy. Last weekend I swung swingset #4, a picture of which should hopefully be uploaded shortly. So too will last week's SPT, after my friend whose camera such a picture should be on uploads them to Facebook. The past two weeks, my drabble has turned into the inkling of a Something, and it's up to about 400 words now. (That doesn't sound too impressive, but keep in mind that a drabble is only supposed to be 100 words and an attempt at a semi-self-contained short story to keep your creative juices going.) It's using the same character as the last Oversized Serious drabble I wrote over a month ago, which I will post tomorrow or Friday, and then after a suitable period of introspective judgment, I'll post this current one, too.
I also began knitting a grocery bag, although I have three sweater patterns that I really want to get to work on. I just needed something a bit more simple to get back into it. I unfortunately did not buy a watercolor journal last week as I said I was going to, because Michael's ended up being on a different (and much further away) street than I thought and I was in a rush to meet a friend for his going away party. I could have bought it by now at Walmart, but I'd prefer not to feed the giant - and, it turns out, there's one even closer than where I was going to go that is legitimately local, Southern Paint and Supply. They supply Actual! watercolor tubes, so I can use something other than a dinky little Crayola tray. Not that I'm knocking my mad elementary school art skillz or anything, but... yeah. I want rich colors, ergo, real paint.
In terms of wine connoisseurship, yesterday I got a call from my mom asking me which I'd prefer to drink with Thanksgiving dinner. When I replied, "Oh, um, well, like, pinot grigio, pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon. I can bring my own," she asked, "What brand is that?" Long story short, I popped a quarter mile down the road to the grocery store to help her find something to drink that isn't white zinfandel or blackberry Manischewitz. We got a pinot noir and a beaujolais, and I also picked up two bottles of Spanish wine I had over the weekend for my own nefarious purposes. Mission successful. Sorta.
That's about it. I forgot to keep all the links for articles last week, so below are the four I found most memorable.
"Lunch with M." is purportedly the first-ever meeting between a journalist and a Michelin restaurant "inspector." It really isn't an interview, because the inspector cannot divulge any identifying details - even her parents aren't supposed to know her real occupation, lest they boast to their friends; the New Yorker reporter just sits down with the head of the Michelin guides and a woman who would just like to be called "M." For all that he's not allowed to tell us about their conversation, it is a surprisingly comprehensive exposé of the Michelin organization as a whole and the incredibleshroud Kevlar vest of secrecy they've built up to protect it.
As we all know, the shuttle fleet is retiring next year and the new Orion capsules aren't due to come online until the middle of the next decade. At least. "Is this the end for human space flight?" Inquiring minds want to know, so the science editor of The Daily Mail (seriously?) and a science journalist in residence at some college in Canada argue about it. The former says, yes, we're done with space, because no president will take the Kennedyesque step of committing resources to something that may or may not pan out three administrations down the road. The latter says, no-well-maybe; humans are creatures ofconquering exploring and inquiring stock, and we really really WANT to see what's out in space. All I have to say about it is this.
"Four ways to feed the world" provides NS readers with a very simple plan for feeding the extra 3 billion or so people who will be on the Earth in the next 15 years, in addition to the 17% of those already here who are chronically starving. It's simple, really; grow more high-yielding crops on the same amount of farmland with less water, and build more roads to move the harvest around. Genius. Why has no one thought of this before??? This is the sort of quality reporting that drew me to NS in the first place.
I don't even know what this is but the best way I can think to describe it is "forcibly stripping the porn out of the porno script" (pun fully intended). It made me giggle, anyway, if mostly in a WTF-am-I-reading way.
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I also began knitting a grocery bag, although I have three sweater patterns that I really want to get to work on. I just needed something a bit more simple to get back into it. I unfortunately did not buy a watercolor journal last week as I said I was going to, because Michael's ended up being on a different (and much further away) street than I thought and I was in a rush to meet a friend for his going away party. I could have bought it by now at Walmart, but I'd prefer not to feed the giant - and, it turns out, there's one even closer than where I was going to go that is legitimately local, Southern Paint and Supply. They supply Actual! watercolor tubes, so I can use something other than a dinky little Crayola tray. Not that I'm knocking my mad elementary school art skillz or anything, but... yeah. I want rich colors, ergo, real paint.
In terms of wine connoisseurship, yesterday I got a call from my mom asking me which I'd prefer to drink with Thanksgiving dinner. When I replied, "Oh, um, well, like, pinot grigio, pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon. I can bring my own," she asked, "What brand is that?" Long story short, I popped a quarter mile down the road to the grocery store to help her find something to drink that isn't white zinfandel or blackberry Manischewitz. We got a pinot noir and a beaujolais, and I also picked up two bottles of Spanish wine I had over the weekend for my own nefarious purposes. Mission successful. Sorta.
That's about it. I forgot to keep all the links for articles last week, so below are the four I found most memorable.
"Lunch with M." is purportedly the first-ever meeting between a journalist and a Michelin restaurant "inspector." It really isn't an interview, because the inspector cannot divulge any identifying details - even her parents aren't supposed to know her real occupation, lest they boast to their friends; the New Yorker reporter just sits down with the head of the Michelin guides and a woman who would just like to be called "M." For all that he's not allowed to tell us about their conversation, it is a surprisingly comprehensive exposé of the Michelin organization as a whole and the incredible
As we all know, the shuttle fleet is retiring next year and the new Orion capsules aren't due to come online until the middle of the next decade. At least. "Is this the end for human space flight?" Inquiring minds want to know, so the science editor of The Daily Mail (seriously?) and a science journalist in residence at some college in Canada argue about it. The former says, yes, we're done with space, because no president will take the Kennedyesque step of committing resources to something that may or may not pan out three administrations down the road. The latter says, no-well-maybe; humans are creatures of
"Four ways to feed the world" provides NS readers with a very simple plan for feeding the extra 3 billion or so people who will be on the Earth in the next 15 years, in addition to the 17% of those already here who are chronically starving. It's simple, really; grow more high-yielding crops on the same amount of farmland with less water, and build more roads to move the harvest around. Genius. Why has no one thought of this before??? This is the sort of quality reporting that drew me to NS in the first place.
I don't even know what this is but the best way I can think to describe it is "forcibly stripping the porn out of the porno script" (pun fully intended). It made me giggle, anyway, if mostly in a WTF-am-I-reading way.
Click for more!
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
PROCRASTINATION
Yeah, writing up articles all the time gets really sort of dull. I'm trying not to let myself get too far behind, though. These are the highlights of my readings from the last two weeks; you'll notice that the Economist is still conspicuously absent; that's due to the fact that it's still arriving conspicuously late - UNTIL THIS SATURDAY. It was sitting on my desk Monday morning, and there's no post on Sundays, which means only one thing - it actually arrived ON TIME on Saturday. Amazing. Expect article postings to resume a more normal schedule this starting this weekend.
Oh, and on a side-note, the narrative responses for the Foreign Service are due tonight and I submitted them promptly at 1:13pm. Unless I somehow completely blow them away with my brilliance, though, I don't expect to hear from them until late January. Sigh.
"Where do ghosts come from?" Mostly your brain, but possibly also magnets.
"Captives" is an amazing and extensive look at this decade's violence in Gaza and the capture and detention of Gilad Shalit by Palestinians. Even more, though, it's about how difficult any peace deal might be, because the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are not synonymous. Separated geographically by Israel, they are also controlled by two different factions - Gaza by Hamas, the West Bank by the (relatively) more moderate successor of the PLO, the Palestinian Authority. This excerpt below sums it up well enough, but the whole article is really very good.
"Clearing oasis trees felled ancient Peruvian civilisation," or, those who do not learn history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them, non-Eurocentric edition.
"Rap Sheet" examines the history of American gun ownership and the history of Americans as a murderous sort of people. Guns, it turns out, probably just enabled us to act out our more murderous impulses, rather than creating them, because - get this - we became a democracy before we were civilized. Seriously. Read, it's good for a laugh, and sort of does make you wonder why we keep creating new "frontiers" outside our homes and borders that we have to "defend" ourselves from...
"Governments should get real on drugs" is a scientific editorial by David Nutt, who was ousted this month as the chairman of Britain's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for pointing out that marijuana causes fewer health problems and deaths than either alcohol or tobacco. If this fact is news to you, or even if it isn't, you should take a look.
And finally, recovering nicely from that Sam Shepard debacle a few weeks ago, "Alone" has renewed my faith in the fiction editor's judgment. It's a sort of slow-moving story, but it isn't exactly boring... I kept at it, anyway, and I'm glad I did. No spoilers, just click it if you like short stories.
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Oh, and on a side-note, the narrative responses for the Foreign Service are due tonight and I submitted them promptly at 1:13pm. Unless I somehow completely blow them away with my brilliance, though, I don't expect to hear from them until late January. Sigh.
"Where do ghosts come from?" Mostly your brain, but possibly also magnets.
"Captives" is an amazing and extensive look at this decade's violence in Gaza and the capture and detention of Gilad Shalit by Palestinians. Even more, though, it's about how difficult any peace deal might be, because the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are not synonymous. Separated geographically by Israel, they are also controlled by two different factions - Gaza by Hamas, the West Bank by the (relatively) more moderate successor of the PLO, the Palestinian Authority. This excerpt below sums it up well enough, but the whole article is really very good.
"Such potential solutions have been poisoned by the frustration that both Israelis and West Bankers feel toward Gaza. The political distance between the two Palestinian entities has caused many Israelis to start talking of a three-state solution, rather than two. “Hamas in Gaza is a fact of life until further notice,” Yossi Alpher, a political consultant and a former Mossad officer, observed. “All our ideas about dealing with them have failed.” Shavit and other Israeli intellectuals have proposed that the Egyptians deed a portion of the Sinai to Gaza, to make the Strip more viable—“a semi-Dubai,” as Shavit terms it. The Egyptians have expressed no interest. “Egypt’s strategy for Gaza is to make sure it’s Israel’s problem,” Alpher said."
"Clearing oasis trees felled ancient Peruvian civilisation," or, those who do not learn history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them, non-Eurocentric edition.
"Rap Sheet" examines the history of American gun ownership and the history of Americans as a murderous sort of people. Guns, it turns out, probably just enabled us to act out our more murderous impulses, rather than creating them, because - get this - we became a democracy before we were civilized. Seriously. Read, it's good for a laugh, and sort of does make you wonder why we keep creating new "frontiers" outside our homes and borders that we have to "defend" ourselves from...
"Governments should get real on drugs" is a scientific editorial by David Nutt, who was ousted this month as the chairman of Britain's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for pointing out that marijuana causes fewer health problems and deaths than either alcohol or tobacco. If this fact is news to you, or even if it isn't, you should take a look.
And finally, recovering nicely from that Sam Shepard debacle a few weeks ago, "Alone" has renewed my faith in the fiction editor's judgment. It's a sort of slow-moving story, but it isn't exactly boring... I kept at it, anyway, and I'm glad I did. No spoilers, just click it if you like short stories.
Click for more!
Saturday, October 31, 2009
To no one's surprise...
This week I am boycotting The New Yorker AND The Economist because they have been getting on my nerves. The New Yorker's penchant for the pretentious seems to have become more pronounced of late, manifest by the one and only thing I read in it during the week: the first 3/4 of the first page of this short story by Sam Shepard that is completely tired and boring. It doesn't seem to be going anywhere; it's not even luridly poetic (ie, art for art's sake); and its focus on Xanax obviously makes it Hip and Cool. Perhaps the only redeeming value is that it is perfectly illustrative of the fact that waiting in an endless line REALLY IS THAT DULL.
The Economist, meanwhile, has incurred my wrath by arriving on Thursday, five days late, every week of the past three. It's not news at this point, it's editorial retrospective. For that reason, I am going to type up three of the news blurbs of world events you may have missed hearing about for the week of October 17-23.
"In Russia, to no one's surprise, the ruling United Russia party won nationwide votes to local and municipal councils by a landslide. More surprisingly, opposition politicians walked out of parliament, complaining of vote rigging, and threatened to demonstrate in protest."
"Cuba's government denied Yoani Sanchez, a blogger, an exit visa for her to travel to New York to receive a prize from Columbia University's graduate school of journalism."
"Romania's government collapsed after a vote of no confidence in parliament. The vote was connected to political infighting before presidential elections due next month and may jeopardise the cash-strapped country's relations with the IMF."
The most stimulating thing I read all week (aside from finishing Imperial Life in the Emerald City) was "Timewarp: how your brain creates the fourth dimension". The way we perceive time as it's happening and the way remember it after the fact may or may not process separately in the brain. Ergo, experimenters decided to drop people from an eight-storey harness into a safety net and have them look at a special device that rapidly flashed a light - so quickly that, under normal conditions, the human eye would simply perceive it as a solid light. Researchers theorize that frame rate governs our perception of time, and that during certain traumatic moments, the phenomenon of "time slowing down" is actually due to an increase in the number of "frames" your mind takes in. Later on, your brain remembers all those frames but conceives of them with the normal frame rate, which makes them take up morespace time. This also means that we may be on the verge of a cure for schizophrenia, if we can figure out why schizophrenic's brains don't have the same frame rate processor as the rest of us, and how to fix it - if that is in fact the reason for their delusions. The article does a much better job of explaining how this all is connected, so just go read it.
Apparently, if we can somehow figure out a way to make free-floating sea ice go where we want it, "We still have a chance to save the polar bears." All it depends on is international cooperation and a commitment from every country in the northern hemisphere not to promote economic development in the Arctic.
Poor polar bears don't stand a chance.
And finally, according to "Multiply universes: How many is the multiverse?" there may actually be a Discworld out there somewhere. Now, I'm not going to lie, I've read this three times and I still don't quite understand how this is science and not philosophy, but they assure me that it is, so we'll go with it. What it comes down to is perspective and observability and obviously we need to find the subtle knife to cut into one of these other universes and see what it's like. Duh.
Click for more!
The Economist, meanwhile, has incurred my wrath by arriving on Thursday, five days late, every week of the past three. It's not news at this point, it's editorial retrospective. For that reason, I am going to type up three of the news blurbs of world events you may have missed hearing about for the week of October 17-23.
"In Russia, to no one's surprise, the ruling United Russia party won nationwide votes to local and municipal councils by a landslide. More surprisingly, opposition politicians walked out of parliament, complaining of vote rigging, and threatened to demonstrate in protest."
"Cuba's government denied Yoani Sanchez, a blogger, an exit visa for her to travel to New York to receive a prize from Columbia University's graduate school of journalism."
"Romania's government collapsed after a vote of no confidence in parliament. The vote was connected to political infighting before presidential elections due next month and may jeopardise the cash-strapped country's relations with the IMF."
The most stimulating thing I read all week (aside from finishing Imperial Life in the Emerald City) was "Timewarp: how your brain creates the fourth dimension". The way we perceive time as it's happening and the way remember it after the fact may or may not process separately in the brain. Ergo, experimenters decided to drop people from an eight-storey harness into a safety net and have them look at a special device that rapidly flashed a light - so quickly that, under normal conditions, the human eye would simply perceive it as a solid light. Researchers theorize that frame rate governs our perception of time, and that during certain traumatic moments, the phenomenon of "time slowing down" is actually due to an increase in the number of "frames" your mind takes in. Later on, your brain remembers all those frames but conceives of them with the normal frame rate, which makes them take up more
Apparently, if we can somehow figure out a way to make free-floating sea ice go where we want it, "We still have a chance to save the polar bears." All it depends on is international cooperation and a commitment from every country in the northern hemisphere not to promote economic development in the Arctic.
Poor polar bears don't stand a chance.
And finally, according to "Multiply universes: How many is the multiverse?" there may actually be a Discworld out there somewhere. Now, I'm not going to lie, I've read this three times and I still don't quite understand how this is science and not philosophy, but they assure me that it is, so we'll go with it. What it comes down to is perspective and observability and obviously we need to find the subtle knife to cut into one of these other universes and see what it's like. Duh.
Click for more!
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Rocket-powered unicorns and other, slightly less interesting, things
These are the articles from the last two weeks. Oops. Oh well.
Remember Goodnight, Moon? Blueberries for Sal? Little Bear and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Apparently today's toddlers are being lulled to sleep (or not, actually) by bedtime stories that, as the New Yorker puts it, are initiating them into a Gossip Girl reality. "The Defiant Ones" reveals a number of these stories to those of us momentarily without a little bundle of snot in our lives, analyzing the psychological effects their themes have on the children and the parents reading them along the way. Very, very interesting stuff.
An interesting turn of events in the business world lately has been the defection of a number of high-profile corporations from the US Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobby in the country. "Exit Through Lobby" awkwardly tries to contrast this new trend with the historical reluctance of American individuals to resign their posts, even when asked to do something they feel goes against their morals. It's a good piece about how Big and Small Business are fighting over the cap-and-trade system, though, and, if anything, that tie-in is just another example that corporations don't behave like real people (their resignations from the Chamber are likely more financially motivated than morally) and don't deserve "personhood."
According to "Meet future woman" and the longitudinal study of a Massachusetts town it's covering, human women will genetically "evolve" to be shorter, plumper, and more fertile over the next 40 generations. Really, it's just because women who have more children tend to be shorter and hold onto their baby weight, and - look at the Duggars - pass on the proclivity to breed more and start having babies earlier. There doesn't actually seem to be a genetic advantage to being shorter or heavier, except that perhaps it is easier to carry children comfortably.
Down in the comments section to this article there's a good debate going on about the reliability of the study's findings. Some people find fault with the selection of a smallish, ruralish American town to generalize about the entire human race. (The study's defenders rush to point out that it was important to find a relatively closed population, as it is a genetics study, so that they could look at multiple generations of women from the same family easily.) Others have a problem with, as I mentioned, the idea that being short and heavy causes you to reproduce, rather than - a radical proposition here, I know - babies changing the way your body is shaped. Another point that really stuck out to me is that Americans and others in developed nations have actually grown taller and wider in the last few decades because of better nutrition (or overconsumption). Height is an interesting variable, but it's really no mystery that women with lots of children tend to be homebodies more than their unchilded counterparts, and homebodies eat more and exercise less. Maybe there should be a study done on the heritability of homebodiness.
"Blanche Lincoln's balance" and "Ready, set, go" are from the Economist of two weeks ago. Blanche Lincoln is a Democratic senator from Arkansas - one of those 'Blue Dogs' who are very, very centrist liberals from states that you normally wouldn't envision would even consider electing electing a Democrat to a national office.She voted for the health care bill; let's move on.
"Ready, Set, Go," provides a contrasting image of the plan for Chicago's - and all of America's - schools. Arne Duncan, as everyone knows, is the Education Secretary and the former superintendent of the Chicago school system. He has been giving a sizable chunk of stimulus money to invest in our generally painfully underfunded schools; what he has done to try to ensure that the money is most effectively spent, however, is to allow states to essentially rid themselves of the No Child Left Behind rules and test their schools against international benchmarks AND try and reduce the influence of teachers' union contracts. By stopping the freefall of testing standards and making teacher pay and promotions based on their ability to actually educate their students, Duncan hopes to prove that just $4.4b can change the way we view education in America. The best part? States that refuse to use students' test results to even partially evaluate the teachers won't see a dollar of the new money. Obviously, it's not the only reason there are huge gaps between rich and poor and minority and white kids, but it's a step. PS We aren't funding abstinence-only sex ed anymore, either.
An Awesome Book! is awesome and completely redeems the modern children's book from the bile depicted in that first New Yorker article. Click the link and scroll sideways, not down, to read the whole. entire. thing. Then click on the store; I'm thinking of buying the poster of rocket-powered unicorns. Thoughts?
And finally, our science lessons for the week. Both "Underwater town breaks antiquity record" and "Stone age hunting traps found deep in Great Lakes" discuss the living habits of prehistoric humans. "Underwater town" is particularly intriguing because, like Pompeii, Pavlopetri is an extremely well-preserved ancient city, complete with streets and home foundations - except that new artifacts show that it may have been settled during the early Bronze Age, making it three thousand(!) years older than Pompeii. There are also a few cool pictures attached to the article, with the little foundation stones in neat lines. It reminds me of Roxaboxen, one of my favorite books from elementary school.
Click for more!
Remember Goodnight, Moon? Blueberries for Sal? Little Bear and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Apparently today's toddlers are being lulled to sleep (or not, actually) by bedtime stories that, as the New Yorker puts it, are initiating them into a Gossip Girl reality. "The Defiant Ones" reveals a number of these stories to those of us momentarily without a little bundle of snot in our lives, analyzing the psychological effects their themes have on the children and the parents reading them along the way. Very, very interesting stuff.
An interesting turn of events in the business world lately has been the defection of a number of high-profile corporations from the US Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobby in the country. "Exit Through Lobby" awkwardly tries to contrast this new trend with the historical reluctance of American individuals to resign their posts, even when asked to do something they feel goes against their morals. It's a good piece about how Big and Small Business are fighting over the cap-and-trade system, though, and, if anything, that tie-in is just another example that corporations don't behave like real people (their resignations from the Chamber are likely more financially motivated than morally) and don't deserve "personhood."
According to "Meet future woman" and the longitudinal study of a Massachusetts town it's covering, human women will genetically "evolve" to be shorter, plumper, and more fertile over the next 40 generations. Really, it's just because women who have more children tend to be shorter and hold onto their baby weight, and - look at the Duggars - pass on the proclivity to breed more and start having babies earlier. There doesn't actually seem to be a genetic advantage to being shorter or heavier, except that perhaps it is easier to carry children comfortably.
Down in the comments section to this article there's a good debate going on about the reliability of the study's findings. Some people find fault with the selection of a smallish, ruralish American town to generalize about the entire human race. (The study's defenders rush to point out that it was important to find a relatively closed population, as it is a genetics study, so that they could look at multiple generations of women from the same family easily.) Others have a problem with, as I mentioned, the idea that being short and heavy causes you to reproduce, rather than - a radical proposition here, I know - babies changing the way your body is shaped. Another point that really stuck out to me is that Americans and others in developed nations have actually grown taller and wider in the last few decades because of better nutrition (or overconsumption). Height is an interesting variable, but it's really no mystery that women with lots of children tend to be homebodies more than their unchilded counterparts, and homebodies eat more and exercise less. Maybe there should be a study done on the heritability of homebodiness.
"Blanche Lincoln's balance" and "Ready, set, go" are from the Economist of two weeks ago. Blanche Lincoln is a Democratic senator from Arkansas - one of those 'Blue Dogs' who are very, very centrist liberals from states that you normally wouldn't envision would even consider electing electing a Democrat to a national office.She voted for the health care bill; let's move on.
"Ready, Set, Go," provides a contrasting image of the plan for Chicago's - and all of America's - schools. Arne Duncan, as everyone knows, is the Education Secretary and the former superintendent of the Chicago school system. He has been giving a sizable chunk of stimulus money to invest in our generally painfully underfunded schools; what he has done to try to ensure that the money is most effectively spent, however, is to allow states to essentially rid themselves of the No Child Left Behind rules and test their schools against international benchmarks AND try and reduce the influence of teachers' union contracts. By stopping the freefall of testing standards and making teacher pay and promotions based on their ability to actually educate their students, Duncan hopes to prove that just $4.4b can change the way we view education in America. The best part? States that refuse to use students' test results to even partially evaluate the teachers won't see a dollar of the new money. Obviously, it's not the only reason there are huge gaps between rich and poor and minority and white kids, but it's a step. PS We aren't funding abstinence-only sex ed anymore, either.
An Awesome Book! is awesome and completely redeems the modern children's book from the bile depicted in that first New Yorker article. Click the link and scroll sideways, not down, to read the whole. entire. thing. Then click on the store; I'm thinking of buying the poster of rocket-powered unicorns. Thoughts?
And finally, our science lessons for the week. Both "Underwater town breaks antiquity record" and "Stone age hunting traps found deep in Great Lakes" discuss the living habits of prehistoric humans. "Underwater town" is particularly intriguing because, like Pompeii, Pavlopetri is an extremely well-preserved ancient city, complete with streets and home foundations - except that new artifacts show that it may have been settled during the early Bronze Age, making it three thousand(!) years older than Pompeii. There are also a few cool pictures attached to the article, with the little foundation stones in neat lines. It reminds me of Roxaboxen, one of my favorite books from elementary school.
Click for more!
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Dreadful Murder
This week's articles are, if I'm counting correctly, all here. My favorite, about halfway down, has been copied in its entirety because it is Just That Awesome. You should probably put down any beverages you might be consuming when you read it - especially if it's milk - because you will certainly do a spit-take if you don't. It's seriously that hilarious. A preview: a murder suspect is described as "a fine young man."
However nihilistic it might be, "How the planet will recover from us" explores global warming from an epochal perspective. Rather than using this longest of long-term analysis to decry the "myth" that humans are causing the Earth's climate to change dramatically, however, the author examines periods of rapid carbon and methane gas release, long before the dinosaurs, that led to mass extinctions. The fossil record gives a surprising - but very clear - picture of how life on Earth strives to hold on as the planet rights herself into a stable biosphere once again.
In "Two legs good, 24 better," NS interviews Aimee Mullins, an actress/model/athlete who also happens to be a double amputee. Mullins also happens to be more articulate than your everyday model, and discusses passionately why equal rights for persons with disabilities hinges on viewing them apart from their disabilities and seeing what they can do - which, incidentally, is a lot.
The new "Chicago School Violence Plan" hopes to prevent off-campus shootings of students by assigning statistically-calculated "high risk" kids with life coaches, psychological counseling, job opportunities, and other things that, hopefully, will lead them to see the error of their gang-banging ways. It'll be interesting to see how this turns out, especially since there are far more kids actually "at risk" of being involved in a shooting than the program's $30m will initially be able to reach.
So, yeah, it's a New York Times article, but I think it's pretty important and the one New Yorker piece below is really long and involved, so... yeah.
"The Last Mission" is a highly detailed account of Richard Holbrooke's rapid rise - and subsequent decades-long plateau - in the ranks of the State Department. Now on the verge of retirement, he's answered President Obama's call to oversee State's mission in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or Af-Pak, as he's dubbed it. Of equal interest to me is the conspicuous system of patronage and apprenticeship at State, the network of people who care as much about who you know and have served under as what you know and where you were stationed when you learned it. It worries me a bit that I'm not coming out of Yale or Harvard, but I know that I can connect with my superiors and force my way into that web of who-knows-who if I get the chance.
On a much lighter note, "There's gold in them there bacteria!" Apparently, there's a certain class of bacteria that's allergic to gold, and has evolved a way to break it down in its system to neutralize its harmful effects and, due to the law of conservation of energy (or something), this process causes them to emit a light which prospectors can then use to determine whether or not a particular patch of soil holds a gold deposit.
And on a more dreadful note, The Economist has transcribed its first issue and published all the articles online. For some reason, they decided not to do the ads. I feel like this is a huge oversight; very few things in this world are more entertaining than pre-Victorian print ads. Except the stories running alongside them. This one is short enough that I'm actually going to paste in the full text.
Dreadful murder
Sep 2nd 1843
Since Tuesday morning the beautiful seat of the Earl of Darnley, at Cobham park, near Gravesend, in Kent, its village, and the surrounding suburbs, have been the scene of much excitement in consequence of the perpetration of a murder, attended with circumstances of a truly distressing character. The victim is Mr Dadd, sen., 55 years of age, a person who a few years ago carried on a most extensive business at Rochester, as a chemist and druggist. He had lately, however, retired, and had gone to London, where he has since resided, in Suffolk street, Pall-mall East, and gained some notoriety by the manufacture of an improved oil for artists. He was found lying by the roadside, with his throat cut, and a knife not far from his body. It has since been ascertained, beyond a doubt, that the murderer of the unfortunate gentleman is no other than his third son, Richard Dadd, a fine young man, 24 years age, and that he committed the act whilst labouring under an aberration of intellect. He was an artist of some celebrity, and has gained several prizes at the Royal Academy. A year or two ago this unfortunate youth accompanied Sir Thomas Phillips, the late Mayor of Newport, on a tour through Italy, Switzerland, Germany, &c., for the purpose of improving himself in his art. Owing to his arduous studies and constant exposure to the sun, his brain became affected to such a melancholy extent as to produce insanity. The circumstances attending the dreadful deed have not yet been correctly ascertained, nor has the youth been apprehended.
I hope I never live in New York long enough to be this uppity. Some New Yorker blogger decided to do his weekly column on the recently-published list of art the Obamas have pulled from the national collection to display in the White House, and judge them, heavily, for their choices. They like what they like. Deal with it.
Finally, there was an entire issue full of good Economist articles, but the ones that I want to share are "How many Mexicans does it take to drill an oil well?" and "Please do feed the bears", mostly because of their titles. The first is about Mexico's state-run oil companies and their rapidly declining production capability. The latter is a caveat to government regulators to remember that it was bulls, not bears, that caused the market bubbles. Their trading habits should not be restricted, nor should their frequents portents of financial disaster be ridiculed without careful examination of their reasoning. A good policy to hold in general, I'd think, but sure, let's keep it to just the stock market for now.
Click for more!
However nihilistic it might be, "How the planet will recover from us" explores global warming from an epochal perspective. Rather than using this longest of long-term analysis to decry the "myth" that humans are causing the Earth's climate to change dramatically, however, the author examines periods of rapid carbon and methane gas release, long before the dinosaurs, that led to mass extinctions. The fossil record gives a surprising - but very clear - picture of how life on Earth strives to hold on as the planet rights herself into a stable biosphere once again.
In "Two legs good, 24 better," NS interviews Aimee Mullins, an actress/model/athlete who also happens to be a double amputee. Mullins also happens to be more articulate than your everyday model, and discusses passionately why equal rights for persons with disabilities hinges on viewing them apart from their disabilities and seeing what they can do - which, incidentally, is a lot.
The new "Chicago School Violence Plan" hopes to prevent off-campus shootings of students by assigning statistically-calculated "high risk" kids with life coaches, psychological counseling, job opportunities, and other things that, hopefully, will lead them to see the error of their gang-banging ways. It'll be interesting to see how this turns out, especially since there are far more kids actually "at risk" of being involved in a shooting than the program's $30m will initially be able to reach.
So, yeah, it's a New York Times article, but I think it's pretty important and the one New Yorker piece below is really long and involved, so... yeah.
"The Last Mission" is a highly detailed account of Richard Holbrooke's rapid rise - and subsequent decades-long plateau - in the ranks of the State Department. Now on the verge of retirement, he's answered President Obama's call to oversee State's mission in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or Af-Pak, as he's dubbed it. Of equal interest to me is the conspicuous system of patronage and apprenticeship at State, the network of people who care as much about who you know and have served under as what you know and where you were stationed when you learned it. It worries me a bit that I'm not coming out of Yale or Harvard, but I know that I can connect with my superiors and force my way into that web of who-knows-who if I get the chance.
On a much lighter note, "There's gold in them there bacteria!" Apparently, there's a certain class of bacteria that's allergic to gold, and has evolved a way to break it down in its system to neutralize its harmful effects and, due to the law of conservation of energy (or something), this process causes them to emit a light which prospectors can then use to determine whether or not a particular patch of soil holds a gold deposit.
And on a more dreadful note, The Economist has transcribed its first issue and published all the articles online. For some reason, they decided not to do the ads. I feel like this is a huge oversight; very few things in this world are more entertaining than pre-Victorian print ads. Except the stories running alongside them. This one is short enough that I'm actually going to paste in the full text.
Dreadful murder
Sep 2nd 1843
Since Tuesday morning the beautiful seat of the Earl of Darnley, at Cobham park, near Gravesend, in Kent, its village, and the surrounding suburbs, have been the scene of much excitement in consequence of the perpetration of a murder, attended with circumstances of a truly distressing character. The victim is Mr Dadd, sen., 55 years of age, a person who a few years ago carried on a most extensive business at Rochester, as a chemist and druggist. He had lately, however, retired, and had gone to London, where he has since resided, in Suffolk street, Pall-mall East, and gained some notoriety by the manufacture of an improved oil for artists. He was found lying by the roadside, with his throat cut, and a knife not far from his body. It has since been ascertained, beyond a doubt, that the murderer of the unfortunate gentleman is no other than his third son, Richard Dadd, a fine young man, 24 years age, and that he committed the act whilst labouring under an aberration of intellect. He was an artist of some celebrity, and has gained several prizes at the Royal Academy. A year or two ago this unfortunate youth accompanied Sir Thomas Phillips, the late Mayor of Newport, on a tour through Italy, Switzerland, Germany, &c., for the purpose of improving himself in his art. Owing to his arduous studies and constant exposure to the sun, his brain became affected to such a melancholy extent as to produce insanity. The circumstances attending the dreadful deed have not yet been correctly ascertained, nor has the youth been apprehended.
I hope I never live in New York long enough to be this uppity. Some New Yorker blogger decided to do his weekly column on the recently-published list of art the Obamas have pulled from the national collection to display in the White House, and judge them, heavily, for their choices. They like what they like. Deal with it.
Finally, there was an entire issue full of good Economist articles, but the ones that I want to share are "How many Mexicans does it take to drill an oil well?" and "Please do feed the bears", mostly because of their titles. The first is about Mexico's state-run oil companies and their rapidly declining production capability. The latter is a caveat to government regulators to remember that it was bulls, not bears, that caused the market bubbles. Their trading habits should not be restricted, nor should their frequents portents of financial disaster be ridiculed without careful examination of their reasoning. A good policy to hold in general, I'd think, but sure, let's keep it to just the stock market for now.
Click for more!
Monday, October 5, 2009
I don't think a brisket really counts as an ethnic recipe. Right?
It's been two weeks since the last articles post and although I was collecting their links, and for some, even got around to writing responses, I couldn't get around to posting them. Too much other stuff was in the way... hello, I had a FAVICON to make? But seriously, the reason the last two weeks of articles is being folded into a three-day-late weekly update post is that this weekend, my computer died. Entirely. It's a long and complicated story involving the power supply and the battery, but it's on right now because I literally forced it into place, and everything important is all backed up to an external and all that... but it's been time-consuming, and I honestly wasn't motivated to write posts on my dad's ancient Windows ME laptop (complete with Firefox version 1.0!). Plus side- I rediscovered (for the umpteenth time) an old DOS game called Lexicross, which running on a semi-modern processor is like Wheel of Fortune and Scrabble's crack baby, on speed, and meth, and... you know, those genes that gave Superman his super speed. Good times.
I also had a four-hour brisket to make on Saturday, as well as apple bread for dessert, in honor of either Rosh Hashanah (if you ask my grandmother) or my sister coming home for the weekend (if you ask her). It turned out splendidly, I think, and because the recipe calls for a cup of red wine, I had (almost) an entire bottle to myself to nurse for the afternoon while it roasted. Extra good times.
So with all that, I forgot to mention that I started writing actual! scenes! of screenplay. I'm still completely unsure about the beginning, so I decided to just skip ahead a bit and write a crucial intermediate exposition scene. I'm actually remotely satisfied with the way it's coming out so far, although it's very awkward getting used to the screenwriting software. It helps you autoformat everything more easily, so you don't have to spend so much time typing mundane things like the characters' names over and over. Theoretically a good idea, but apparently the guild-approved format calls for reentering the character's name after they have direction and speak if you want to add more direction. Anyway, perhaps when it's finished I will put it up. (Probably not.)
I also began reading a book I purchased a few years ago, right after the author was promoting it on the Daily Show, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Aside from having an awesome title, this very well-researched book exposes the realities of both life in Baghdad's "secure" Green Zone in 2004-05 and the political conflicts that did not just hinder, but visibly set back the progress of rebuilding Iraq as an independent nation. The author lived in Baghdad, across the river from his interviewees, all of whom were employees of the various US agencies represented in the occupation government. The storytelling is so smooth that it reads almost like a novel, and I'm excited to jump back into it tonight. So I'm going to. Below the cut are links to the articles I did end up reading (and, in the case of the Economist, bothered gathering links for) and, yes, I know, it's very light on the New Yorker. Sue me.
"What to do with Moody's, S&P, and the rating agencies?" I was attracted to this New Yorker piece because I was only vaguely aware of the rating agencies' role in the financial system, not knowing much beyond the fact that they had rated AIG AAA - apparently a good rating - right before it collapsed. This article explores that theme further while demonstrating the history of increasing the entrenchment of these agencies into the system. (That very system also writes the agencies' paychecks, which is why the ratings are so slow to change.) It also advocates for a "divorce," removing the government seal of officiousness from the agencies themselves.
What's most interesting about this is the grade inflation that went on over the last three decades without anyone appearing to take notice. When AAA becomes the standard and not a way to differentiate truly low-risk investments from the rest - and when the supposedly perpetually-secure real estate busts nationally - there's no question that America's major disease is greed.
If, in high school history class, we had been given "Trial of the Century" instead of half a paragraph in our textbook to learn about the infamous Dreyfus Affair, I would almost certainly have retained enough of the details to not have clicked on a New Yorker book review to quench my curiosity. This six-page review, after giving a short summation of the book's main point - that the historical context that enabled Dreyfus to be wrongly convicted (twice) of treason by supposedly spying for the Germans before finally being allowed to return to his home - gives a detailed history lesson about that very context. The review does a very good job of it, so I won't paraphrase. Just go read it.
Normally, I wouldn't really care to read a biographical piece about the prospective new owner of the NY Nets. But any article that begins, "Being a Russian oligarch these days isn't easy" is, in my opinion, one worth taking a peek at.
"Rethinking the bees' waggle dance:" so it turns out bees might not actually be as smart and communicative as we thought. Waggledance is still fun to say, though...
"Overconsumption is the real problem" is one article in a large special feature NS published about the looming specter of overpopulation. The whole feature is good, but this is the one that spoke to me most.
"Economic Vandalism:" an anti-American-protectionism tirade. Sort of. Apparently we pissed off China by putting a tariff on shoddy tires instead of letting the market sort it out - never mind that when tires fail, BAD THINGS LIKE ACCIDENTS happen.
"The power of mobile money" explains the new trend of mobile banking in Kenya, and how it's helping jumpstart the economy there. It's a pretty nifty system; people can transfer small amounts of money from one another, which they can then withdraw at local convenience stores - useful in a nation with a very small banking infrastructure.
"Set Angela free" is a little dated now, but this piece is still an informative primer on the dynamics of Germany's multiparty government.
Last, but certainly not least, "The Best of the Ig Nobel Prizes" is best described as the Razzies for science. Two of them involve innovative applications for alcohol, so... just read it.
Click for more!
I also had a four-hour brisket to make on Saturday, as well as apple bread for dessert, in honor of either Rosh Hashanah (if you ask my grandmother) or my sister coming home for the weekend (if you ask her). It turned out splendidly, I think, and because the recipe calls for a cup of red wine, I had (almost) an entire bottle to myself to nurse for the afternoon while it roasted. Extra good times.
So with all that, I forgot to mention that I started writing actual! scenes! of screenplay. I'm still completely unsure about the beginning, so I decided to just skip ahead a bit and write a crucial intermediate exposition scene. I'm actually remotely satisfied with the way it's coming out so far, although it's very awkward getting used to the screenwriting software. It helps you autoformat everything more easily, so you don't have to spend so much time typing mundane things like the characters' names over and over. Theoretically a good idea, but apparently the guild-approved format calls for reentering the character's name after they have direction and speak if you want to add more direction. Anyway, perhaps when it's finished I will put it up. (Probably not.)
I also began reading a book I purchased a few years ago, right after the author was promoting it on the Daily Show, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Aside from having an awesome title, this very well-researched book exposes the realities of both life in Baghdad's "secure" Green Zone in 2004-05 and the political conflicts that did not just hinder, but visibly set back the progress of rebuilding Iraq as an independent nation. The author lived in Baghdad, across the river from his interviewees, all of whom were employees of the various US agencies represented in the occupation government. The storytelling is so smooth that it reads almost like a novel, and I'm excited to jump back into it tonight. So I'm going to. Below the cut are links to the articles I did end up reading (and, in the case of the Economist, bothered gathering links for) and, yes, I know, it's very light on the New Yorker. Sue me.
"What to do with Moody's, S&P, and the rating agencies?" I was attracted to this New Yorker piece because I was only vaguely aware of the rating agencies' role in the financial system, not knowing much beyond the fact that they had rated AIG AAA - apparently a good rating - right before it collapsed. This article explores that theme further while demonstrating the history of increasing the entrenchment of these agencies into the system. (That very system also writes the agencies' paychecks, which is why the ratings are so slow to change.) It also advocates for a "divorce," removing the government seal of officiousness from the agencies themselves.
What's most interesting about this is the grade inflation that went on over the last three decades without anyone appearing to take notice. When AAA becomes the standard and not a way to differentiate truly low-risk investments from the rest - and when the supposedly perpetually-secure real estate busts nationally - there's no question that America's major disease is greed.
If, in high school history class, we had been given "Trial of the Century" instead of half a paragraph in our textbook to learn about the infamous Dreyfus Affair, I would almost certainly have retained enough of the details to not have clicked on a New Yorker book review to quench my curiosity. This six-page review, after giving a short summation of the book's main point - that the historical context that enabled Dreyfus to be wrongly convicted (twice) of treason by supposedly spying for the Germans before finally being allowed to return to his home - gives a detailed history lesson about that very context. The review does a very good job of it, so I won't paraphrase. Just go read it.
Normally, I wouldn't really care to read a biographical piece about the prospective new owner of the NY Nets. But any article that begins, "Being a Russian oligarch these days isn't easy" is, in my opinion, one worth taking a peek at.
"Rethinking the bees' waggle dance:" so it turns out bees might not actually be as smart and communicative as we thought. Waggledance is still fun to say, though...
"Overconsumption is the real problem" is one article in a large special feature NS published about the looming specter of overpopulation. The whole feature is good, but this is the one that spoke to me most.
"Economic Vandalism:" an anti-American-protectionism tirade. Sort of. Apparently we pissed off China by putting a tariff on shoddy tires instead of letting the market sort it out - never mind that when tires fail, BAD THINGS LIKE ACCIDENTS happen.
"The power of mobile money" explains the new trend of mobile banking in Kenya, and how it's helping jumpstart the economy there. It's a pretty nifty system; people can transfer small amounts of money from one another, which they can then withdraw at local convenience stores - useful in a nation with a very small banking infrastructure.
"Set Angela free" is a little dated now, but this piece is still an informative primer on the dynamics of Germany's multiparty government.
Last, but certainly not least, "The Best of the Ig Nobel Prizes" is best described as the Razzies for science. Two of them involve innovative applications for alcohol, so... just read it.
Click for more!
Monday, September 21, 2009
On a Streetcar Named Getting-My-Ass-In-Gear
For the first time, I feel really good looking back at the progress I've made in the last week. It might be because I got paid and so everything just looks a little cheerier, but it just seems like I've gotten over some kind of hump (or maybe just my plague) and am better equipped to listen when I tell myself to turn off the TV and do something else. In fact, on Thursday night I was too good at that and missed half of the Bill Clinton interview on The Daily Show - even though I had set up a reminder and the cable box had switched itself over to the channel. But the reason I missed it was that I was so engrossed in my Adaptation project, and the interview is online, so I don't feel horrible about it. I think this week I am actually going to write a scene, instead of just taking endless notes. Three or four possible ideas for an opening scene have been fighting to claw their way out onto the pixel-page, so I might just do all of them and see where it goes.
I read almost all the articles I meant to, which can be read about in the post below this one, and I finished Sourcery, the first next Discworld novel on the list. I also began Streetcar on Saturday morning and got about halfway through it. If you've never read the introduction that Tennessee Williams wrote himself for it, you can download it from me here. I would pull out one of my favorite quotes, but 1) I don't have just one, and 2) I can't bear to rip any of them out of context. They're all better together. Suffice it to say that reading it, and then lovingly transcribing it because it seems not to exist ANYWHERE ELSE on the internet, I was reinvigorated about both this project and the general direction I want to take my life.
Speaking of which, the Foreign Service test is just a little over two weeks away. It's intimidating. There's this huge, seemingly-singular event in my too-near future and it. It seems like applying to Vassar all over again. I have my sights set on this one thing, to the point of totally blocking out any other potentiality, and I'm not sure how many more times this is going to work for me. To that end, I've begun to think about how else I might leave Daytona in next spring or summer. It's actually not as hard as I thought it would be to do this... I imagined that planning alternatives might feel like a concession of defeat before I'd even given myself a chance to see what I could do. Instead, although I'm still dealing with those feelings, I also feel more confident in myself, and sort of feel resourceful for the first time in my life.
Besides wanting to be a career diplomat, one of my other long-standing career dreams has been to be an editor at a publishing company. I don't just love grammar, I have a sort of unnatural eagle-eye for spotting errors and typos (think an extra space between words) at a glance. Unfortunately for this particular dream - though greatly to my credit for the State Department, obviously - I majored in Political Science, not English, so I'm not immediately qualified, on paper, to get a job in publishing. I do, however, have a bit of practical experience editing manuscripts, papers, and, recently, business reports.
Enough experience, I think, to post a craiglist ad in the major cities advertising my availability for freelance editing services. This idea is still in its infancy, but hopefully, if I can get this venture up and running by the beginning of November, and people are into it, I'll be able to have at least six months of experience to put on my resume and a list of references to vouch for my abilities. If it doesn't work out with the State Department, I can still move back up north (or west, or somewhere completely off my radar right now) and apply for real editing gigs and do something (else) that I love with my life.
So there's that. Another thing I love is books. (Yeah, completely and unartfully changing gears here). On Friday afternoon, my brother and his girlfriend flew into town and I left work early to hang out with them, and discovered that Kristen really likes books, too, and that, furthermore, my brother had never heard of Mandala, my very favorite used bookstore... possibly ever. So we turned right back around after we got home and headed down once more to "Daytona proper" and spent a good two hours rummaging through the overcrowded shelves and floor-stacks and old National Geographics and Playboys. I ended up with three new Philip Roth books; The Satanic Verses; a book called Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz, one of the fathers of the modern Arabic novel; Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man; and a National Geographic from 1975 revealing the amazing future of wind power (including a really excellent artist's rendering of a futuristic, multiturbine, exceptionally top-heavy oceanic device, which, thanks to the power of the interweben, I need not scan because some kindly person has already done it for me. The picture will be below the cut, along with my final purchases, four new postcards! I'm really excited about them and I can't really remember this second if I made any more good goal progress this week - rode the bike to work on two days last week? Stretching regularly every night? - so I'm just going to skip right to the pictures :)
First, the windpower of the future!, as envisioned by National Geographic in, once again, 1975.
I know, right? Craaaazy hippies. What were they thinking?
Now, postcards. Tomorrow I plan on sharing the 17 postcards I already have, but first up tonight is Gustav Klimt's "Cartoon for the Stoclet Palace: Expectation." Secret: I really love the Klimt aesthetic but my inner indie snob has always prevented me from buying a poster of "The Kiss," because everyone else has it. What I enjoy most about "Expectation" is the way the woman's body is facing left, but her head is turned back. What is she looking at? A man? A mirror? A squirrel? The world may never know.
Next, the Monets.
This "Japanese Bridge" lives in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, according to the back of the postcard, and is the much warmer, more vibrant brother of the painting I've seen a few times at the National Gallery in London, and I like it more, I think. I'm a huge sucker for the interplay of the full spectrum of colors.
The second Monet is "Venice, Palazzo Dario," which feels cool and refreshing to look at, with all that bright-blue water. I don't really remember seeing any Venice paintings by Monet before, but the fuzzy detailing in the water really drew me into it. If I have to pick only one city in Europe to go to to satisfy my travel goal for the list, I think it has to be Venice. What with the whole sinking thing (even though that may not be true anymore), it seems rather urgent that I get there as soon as possible. Maybe I'm just in the mood for delicately ornate architecture right now. Who knows.
And the parting shot is Renoir's "La Déjeuner des canotiers," or, "The Luncheon of the Boating Party," for the more English-inclined. Not going to lie, I am a bigger fan of Renoir's ballerinas (second only to those by Degas), but I bought this postcard because of Amélie, one of my favorite movies of all-time-ever. If you've seen it, you know it features semi-prominently in the film, with Amélie playing a semi-metaphorical Girl-with-Drinking-Glass. It's one of those beautifully complex paintings of people that I love, where every person is their own character, and you can tell just by the way Renoir has painted their faces that they all have a unique backstory and set of motivations that make them more enduring than just the luncheon scene itself.
Click for more!
I read almost all the articles I meant to, which can be read about in the post below this one, and I finished Sourcery, the first next Discworld novel on the list. I also began Streetcar on Saturday morning and got about halfway through it. If you've never read the introduction that Tennessee Williams wrote himself for it, you can download it from me here. I would pull out one of my favorite quotes, but 1) I don't have just one, and 2) I can't bear to rip any of them out of context. They're all better together. Suffice it to say that reading it, and then lovingly transcribing it because it seems not to exist ANYWHERE ELSE on the internet, I was reinvigorated about both this project and the general direction I want to take my life.
Speaking of which, the Foreign Service test is just a little over two weeks away. It's intimidating. There's this huge, seemingly-singular event in my too-near future and it. It seems like applying to Vassar all over again. I have my sights set on this one thing, to the point of totally blocking out any other potentiality, and I'm not sure how many more times this is going to work for me. To that end, I've begun to think about how else I might leave Daytona in next spring or summer. It's actually not as hard as I thought it would be to do this... I imagined that planning alternatives might feel like a concession of defeat before I'd even given myself a chance to see what I could do. Instead, although I'm still dealing with those feelings, I also feel more confident in myself, and sort of feel resourceful for the first time in my life.
Besides wanting to be a career diplomat, one of my other long-standing career dreams has been to be an editor at a publishing company. I don't just love grammar, I have a sort of unnatural eagle-eye for spotting errors and typos (think an extra space between words) at a glance. Unfortunately for this particular dream - though greatly to my credit for the State Department, obviously - I majored in Political Science, not English, so I'm not immediately qualified, on paper, to get a job in publishing. I do, however, have a bit of practical experience editing manuscripts, papers, and, recently, business reports.
Enough experience, I think, to post a craiglist ad in the major cities advertising my availability for freelance editing services. This idea is still in its infancy, but hopefully, if I can get this venture up and running by the beginning of November, and people are into it, I'll be able to have at least six months of experience to put on my resume and a list of references to vouch for my abilities. If it doesn't work out with the State Department, I can still move back up north (or west, or somewhere completely off my radar right now) and apply for real editing gigs and do something (else) that I love with my life.
So there's that. Another thing I love is books. (Yeah, completely and unartfully changing gears here). On Friday afternoon, my brother and his girlfriend flew into town and I left work early to hang out with them, and discovered that Kristen really likes books, too, and that, furthermore, my brother had never heard of Mandala, my very favorite used bookstore... possibly ever. So we turned right back around after we got home and headed down once more to "Daytona proper" and spent a good two hours rummaging through the overcrowded shelves and floor-stacks and old National Geographics and Playboys. I ended up with three new Philip Roth books; The Satanic Verses; a book called Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz, one of the fathers of the modern Arabic novel; Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man; and a National Geographic from 1975 revealing the amazing future of wind power (including a really excellent artist's rendering of a futuristic, multiturbine, exceptionally top-heavy oceanic device, which, thanks to the power of the interweben, I need not scan because some kindly person has already done it for me. The picture will be below the cut, along with my final purchases, four new postcards! I'm really excited about them and I can't really remember this second if I made any more good goal progress this week - rode the bike to work on two days last week? Stretching regularly every night? - so I'm just going to skip right to the pictures :)
First, the windpower of the future!, as envisioned by National Geographic in, once again, 1975.
I know, right? Craaaazy hippies. What were they thinking?
Now, postcards. Tomorrow I plan on sharing the 17 postcards I already have, but first up tonight is Gustav Klimt's "Cartoon for the Stoclet Palace: Expectation." Secret: I really love the Klimt aesthetic but my inner indie snob has always prevented me from buying a poster of "The Kiss," because everyone else has it. What I enjoy most about "Expectation" is the way the woman's body is facing left, but her head is turned back. What is she looking at? A man? A mirror? A squirrel? The world may never know.
Next, the Monets.
This "Japanese Bridge" lives in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, according to the back of the postcard, and is the much warmer, more vibrant brother of the painting I've seen a few times at the National Gallery in London, and I like it more, I think. I'm a huge sucker for the interplay of the full spectrum of colors.
The second Monet is "Venice, Palazzo Dario," which feels cool and refreshing to look at, with all that bright-blue water. I don't really remember seeing any Venice paintings by Monet before, but the fuzzy detailing in the water really drew me into it. If I have to pick only one city in Europe to go to to satisfy my travel goal for the list, I think it has to be Venice. What with the whole sinking thing (even though that may not be true anymore), it seems rather urgent that I get there as soon as possible. Maybe I'm just in the mood for delicately ornate architecture right now. Who knows.
And the parting shot is Renoir's "La Déjeuner des canotiers," or, "The Luncheon of the Boating Party," for the more English-inclined. Not going to lie, I am a bigger fan of Renoir's ballerinas (second only to those by Degas), but I bought this postcard because of Amélie, one of my favorite movies of all-time-ever. If you've seen it, you know it features semi-prominently in the film, with Amélie playing a semi-metaphorical Girl-with-Drinking-Glass. It's one of those beautifully complex paintings of people that I love, where every person is their own character, and you can tell just by the way Renoir has painted their faces that they all have a unique backstory and set of motivations that make them more enduring than just the luncheon scene itself.
Click for more!
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Missing a New Yorker piece...
But otherwise, I got in the full count of articles for the week. (Actually had a lot more in The Economist, because I have real-life physical copies of it now, but it's been a busy weekend so I only had time to write blurbs for the first three that I read.) My weekly update post will be made sometime tomorrow, due to the same busy weekend. I actually got a lot done! (And yet, so very little...)
"Time Square vs. The High Line" contrasts and compares the new pedestrian-plazafication of Times Square with the opening of the High Line, a park created on a stretch of abandoned elevated rail tracks. Interesting to think about the new standards of "public spaces" in American society - one in the midst of one of America's most famous consumer hotspots, and the other offering prime views into other people's houses; be sure to note the part about the cabaret someone set up on their fire escape nearby.
"Happy Feet" is a cute little fluff piece about Zappos.com. When I clicked it, the leader made me think it was going to be so much more - an in-depth analysis of the American sense of entitlement to shoe collections of Imelda Marcosesque proportions. Instead, the article reveals the interesting corporate philosophy that enabled Zappos to grow so popular so quickly - and, like YouTube to Google, so powerful a competitor that they simply had to be purchased. Still worth the read, though.
"Unnatural selection" is yet another of those first-anniversary-of-the-market-crashing pieces that every media outlet in the world is doing this week. Obviously, though, since this one is by The Economist, it's one of the ones you should definitely take a look at if you're into this sort of thing. Notable sections include: why allowing Lehman to fail was a (kind of) good decision; how to get the message out to banks that the government won't be so generous next time in bailing them out; and why "bonuses are the symptom not the disease." If for no other reason, you should click on this article just to see the awesome carousel graphic which was also the cover of this week's issue.
Breaking news: Moon is coldest known place in the solar system. Sorry, Pluto. Tough toenails.
"Why are we the naked ape?" is a short history of the various theories that have been proposed since Darwin's time to explain why humans are significantly less hairy than the other primates. The theories are all very interesting, and the way in which scientists are currently making headway on this question may unpleasantly surprise you.
So now the robots can ask us for help about how best tomap our world conquer all the humans. Hooray!
"Re-rigging Hamid Karzai" describes the... awkward state of Afghani democratic practices. This sentence sums it up best: "The tragedy is that he would probably have won a clean vote: he is still the closest thing Afghanistan has to a national leader."
And finally, "Will Russia and China pitch in?" is, on the surface, about why America and Western Europe need Russia and China's firm support on the UN Security Council to keep Iran's nuclear warhead program from advancing any further, it's also about the deeper issue of that for the last few (or five) decades, Americans have believed they can dictate the world's foreign policy and, now, when we need assistance in preventing a nation we've made loathe our government from attaining weapons to hurt us, the allies we need are nations we've alienated in the past. We never learn to just stop messing with things. Eloquent, I know, but it's 12:30 in the morning and I'm about to head to bed.
Click for more!
"Time Square vs. The High Line" contrasts and compares the new pedestrian-plazafication of Times Square with the opening of the High Line, a park created on a stretch of abandoned elevated rail tracks. Interesting to think about the new standards of "public spaces" in American society - one in the midst of one of America's most famous consumer hotspots, and the other offering prime views into other people's houses; be sure to note the part about the cabaret someone set up on their fire escape nearby.
"Happy Feet" is a cute little fluff piece about Zappos.com. When I clicked it, the leader made me think it was going to be so much more - an in-depth analysis of the American sense of entitlement to shoe collections of Imelda Marcosesque proportions. Instead, the article reveals the interesting corporate philosophy that enabled Zappos to grow so popular so quickly - and, like YouTube to Google, so powerful a competitor that they simply had to be purchased. Still worth the read, though.
"Unnatural selection" is yet another of those first-anniversary-of-the-market-crashing pieces that every media outlet in the world is doing this week. Obviously, though, since this one is by The Economist, it's one of the ones you should definitely take a look at if you're into this sort of thing. Notable sections include: why allowing Lehman to fail was a (kind of) good decision; how to get the message out to banks that the government won't be so generous next time in bailing them out; and why "bonuses are the symptom not the disease." If for no other reason, you should click on this article just to see the awesome carousel graphic which was also the cover of this week's issue.
Breaking news: Moon is coldest known place in the solar system. Sorry, Pluto. Tough toenails.
"Why are we the naked ape?" is a short history of the various theories that have been proposed since Darwin's time to explain why humans are significantly less hairy than the other primates. The theories are all very interesting, and the way in which scientists are currently making headway on this question may unpleasantly surprise you.
So now the robots can ask us for help about how best to
"Re-rigging Hamid Karzai" describes the... awkward state of Afghani democratic practices. This sentence sums it up best: "The tragedy is that he would probably have won a clean vote: he is still the closest thing Afghanistan has to a national leader."
And finally, "Will Russia and China pitch in?" is, on the surface, about why America and Western Europe need Russia and China's firm support on the UN Security Council to keep Iran's nuclear warhead program from advancing any further, it's also about the deeper issue of that for the last few (or five) decades, Americans have believed they can dictate the world's foreign policy and, now, when we need assistance in preventing a nation we've made loathe our government from attaining weapons to hurt us, the allies we need are nations we've alienated in the past. We never learn to just stop messing with things. Eloquent, I know, but it's 12:30 in the morning and I'm about to head to bed.
Click for more!
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Sicko.
It's been a long, hard week. I've had trouble sleeping, I've gotten a sore throat, I've gotten a non-fever fever, and a cough of painfully epic proportions. I didn't go to work until noon on Tuesday, and I left at 1:30 on Friday. I have been on the couch or in bed almost all of the rest of the time. Blah.
I did do SPT, and make a little progress on various goals, and I will be posting links to and short blurbs about the articles I've been reading below. I cut because I care :)
First, the picture:
This was taken outside my office building after work, and that redness about the face is the fever. It's definitely not the best picture out there of me, but it's probably not the worst, either.
Next, I checked out the next two Discworld novels from the library when I went to stock up on sicky TV to watch (Stargate SG-1 from the beginning and The Duchess, for those interested in such trivial details). I plan to finish Sourcery tomorrow and get started on Wyrd Sisters shortly thereafter. I want to keep a steady stream of these coming in; they're good bedtime stories.
I've written another Drabble that I'm not yet ready to share. Maybe tomorrow. We'll see.
Adaptation is going slowly, but steadily. Well, more slowly than steadily, to be honest, but I'm blaming the sick. Very soon I'm going to stop blaming, I swear, but I've been making very solid notes and cross-referencing and getting some ideas together about the best way to tell this very long and convoluted story.
I obviously haven't ridden the bike to work this week, since I don't want to go into cardiac arrest from lack of oxygen or anything. But, I did find the handweight that I'd stashed in my room a while back to use while I watch TV, and I started stretching a little bit and doing leg lifts and crunches more regularly. I haven't explicitly tried to do a split since the gym in Portland, but I'm sure I'll actually get to that fairly soon.
I scheduled the Foreign Service Officer Test! It's on Wednesday, October 7th, and I have to drive to Orlando for it but that's okay. Within three weeks of the test, I'll get scores back and find out if I've been invited to write the five "personal narratives" about my life experiences that I feel qualify me to do the work of the State Department. I believe that about three weeks after that, I will find out if I've been invited for an interview, which they call an All Day Oral Assessment. Intimidating, I know. If they decide they like me after that, between two and twenty-four months later I will be offered a position. So. That's the process in a nutshell. Please, please continue to keep your fingers crossed for me!
And, finally, the articles. You'd think that with all this downtime, I'd have done almost nothing else, but my sick is the sick of ache and muscle exhaustion. Half the time I've been watching TV, my computer has been closed. Closed. That is so incredibly weird for me, because usually TV is in no way stimulating enough to occupy my full attention. Anyway, the last two weeks' worth of articles that I have read are:
For those keeping score, that works out to two in The Economist (first subscription issue should be arriving next week!), three in New Scientist (plus one science article in the Guardian about Alzheimer's and one in the NYT about the food industry battling the health care bill), and four in The New Yorker (subscription starting next week). Behind, yes. But these articles were a great start and I'm really excited to start reading the magazines all the way through. Next week, I hope to have this goal more complete by Friday, so it doesn't get folded into the Weekly Update again.
So that's where I stand right now. I'm still working on cleaning up my room and going through my boxed stuff, but mostly I'm just tired ALL THE TIME. Like now. So I'm going to bed. Goodnight!
Click for more!
I did do SPT, and make a little progress on various goals, and I will be posting links to and short blurbs about the articles I've been reading below. I cut because I care :)
First, the picture:
This was taken outside my office building after work, and that redness about the face is the fever. It's definitely not the best picture out there of me, but it's probably not the worst, either.
Next, I checked out the next two Discworld novels from the library when I went to stock up on sicky TV to watch (Stargate SG-1 from the beginning and The Duchess, for those interested in such trivial details). I plan to finish Sourcery tomorrow and get started on Wyrd Sisters shortly thereafter. I want to keep a steady stream of these coming in; they're good bedtime stories.
I've written another Drabble that I'm not yet ready to share. Maybe tomorrow. We'll see.
Adaptation is going slowly, but steadily. Well, more slowly than steadily, to be honest, but I'm blaming the sick. Very soon I'm going to stop blaming, I swear, but I've been making very solid notes and cross-referencing and getting some ideas together about the best way to tell this very long and convoluted story.
I obviously haven't ridden the bike to work this week, since I don't want to go into cardiac arrest from lack of oxygen or anything. But, I did find the handweight that I'd stashed in my room a while back to use while I watch TV, and I started stretching a little bit and doing leg lifts and crunches more regularly. I haven't explicitly tried to do a split since the gym in Portland, but I'm sure I'll actually get to that fairly soon.
I scheduled the Foreign Service Officer Test! It's on Wednesday, October 7th, and I have to drive to Orlando for it but that's okay. Within three weeks of the test, I'll get scores back and find out if I've been invited to write the five "personal narratives" about my life experiences that I feel qualify me to do the work of the State Department. I believe that about three weeks after that, I will find out if I've been invited for an interview, which they call an All Day Oral Assessment. Intimidating, I know. If they decide they like me after that, between two and twenty-four months later I will be offered a position. So. That's the process in a nutshell. Please, please continue to keep your fingers crossed for me!
And, finally, the articles. You'd think that with all this downtime, I'd have done almost nothing else, but my sick is the sick of ache and muscle exhaustion. Half the time I've been watching TV, my computer has been closed. Closed. That is so incredibly weird for me, because usually TV is in no way stimulating enough to occupy my full attention. Anyway, the last two weeks' worth of articles that I have read are:
- "Kennedycare" is a really excellent summary of Ted Kennedy's decades-long fight for better health care and coverage for Americans, Reagan and Nixon's creation of the "socialist Trojan horse" defense, and how all of this history is affecting Obama and how the best legacy he (and Kennedy) can leave is to "shift the trajectory of American politics."
- "The Rubber Room" was another excellently informative article, though this one is about something I'm sure very few of us are aware of: the hundreds of teachers employed by the New York City Schools who are paid for years to sit in these holding tanks called "Rubber Rooms" because they've been accused of misconduct or incompetency in the classroom. The reason the city is forced to continue paying their salaries (including full benefits and pension contributions) is the contract with the Teachers Union - it mandates arbitration to resolve these charges, and it can take years for a particular teacher's turn to come because the hearings for one person can go on for months. The article is fairly long because it details three of these cases, but I really recommend you read it, especially if you're a New Yorker yourself.
- "The Fountain House"I'm reading three articles a week in The New Yorker. You knew one of them was going to be fiction. It had to happen. I can't really say anything about this story that won't give part of it away, but it was just really sweet and it made me smile to read it.
- "The Vote that Changed Japan" is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a description of the recent election that saw the first solid defeat of the party that had controlled the country since the 60s and what that means for the country's future. If you have no idea what I just said, that's all the more reason for you to check this one out.
- "Pain-free animals?" will tell you everything you need to know about the next possible breakthrough in food production: animals genetically engineered to not feel pain, as such, so that killing them for food will be more humane. This article did more than Fastfood Nation could to make me seriously contemplate the ethics of my carnivorism. In the end, though, I reached the same conclusion I always do: chic-ken gooooood.
- "The Shrinking Archipelago" will remind you about the disproportionately devastating effects global weirding (bonus link yay!) has on developing nations. In the case of Indonesia, climate change will not only cause hundreds of smaller islands to be completely submerged in the next half-century; Indonesia is one of the leaders in deforestation (along with Brazil) because of Western demand for palm oil and other cash crops that Indonesians are increasingly opting to grow.
- "HIV's Weak Spot" summarizes the findings of a new study which shows that the HIV virus literally has a weak spot in its structure - a place where antibodies may actually be able to attach if they're taught to look for it, ie, through vaccination. Read, learn, love.
- After reading the previous article, I felt a little behind on the history of the search for an HIV vaccine. Luckily, New Scientist provided a convenient link in the last paragraph of that article, so if you're a clickaholic like me and have already read it, you can skip this one. If not, "Fears over HIV vaccines laid to rest" will tell you briefly about previous efforts to create a vaccine for HIV, why those efforts failed, and why the mere existence of an HIV vaccine was maligned!
- Finally, "Strife in Yemen" is a short piece about latest mid-East hotspot and the civil war currently being waged between the government and a wealthy tribal family and their supporters. Apparently Yemenis really miss monarchy.
For those keeping score, that works out to two in The Economist (first subscription issue should be arriving next week!), three in New Scientist (plus one science article in the Guardian about Alzheimer's and one in the NYT about the food industry battling the health care bill), and four in The New Yorker (subscription starting next week). Behind, yes. But these articles were a great start and I'm really excited to start reading the magazines all the way through. Next week, I hope to have this goal more complete by Friday, so it doesn't get folded into the Weekly Update again.
So that's where I stand right now. I'm still working on cleaning up my room and going through my boxed stuff, but mostly I'm just tired ALL THE TIME. Like now. So I'm going to bed. Goodnight!
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Saturday, September 5, 2009
Her name is Bea Arthur.
As of today, I officially have nine goals in progress, but this is a lot harder than I thought it would be, what with all the working full time and the moving in and also, sometimes inertia is just inertia.
What has happened since the last weekly update:
So, there it is, the week in review. Now that all the goal detail posts are done, I won't have them as an excuse to delay doing actual goal-related activities, and the posts in the coming week will be far more substantive. I'm going to really get started, I swear!
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What has happened since the last weekly update:
- I got a car! It's an '03 Honda Civic EX with sunroof and power everything and I have named her Bea Arthur. Why, you ask? It's fairly simple. We're in Florida, the car is in her golden years, and, of course, she has silver
hairpaint. We've been together, oh, about a week, now, and we're very happy. I think we're going to be together for a looooong time :) - I worked a 41 hour work week for the very first time! It's almost like I'm something vaguely resembling a real adult! Almost. Nothing very exciting to report about the office. It's an office, I file, enter data, and fill out forms and generally just learn things about pensions and 401(k)s and that - get this - they are different things. I'm getting paid; hooray.
- I started "training" for my ten minute real-world mile by riding my bike to work on Tuesday (and home on Friday - rain). It's not, you know, hugely excellent training, but it's a start. Hopefully once "autumn" sets in properly and it stops raining every afternoon, this will be a more regular thing and I'll be able to start jogging at night. I definitely want to head over to the middle school nearby and time myself on the track to set a baseline, so I know just how out of shape I am now and precisely how difficult it will be to get down to a ten minute mile. Let me remind you that I can already do this on a treadmill, but the actual physical forward movement of running in the real world makes me lose my breath and get a stitch in my side much more quickly. I hope to do this in the next few weeks, weather-permitting; I'll next update on this once I do get the baseline time.
- I wrote my first fiction drabble two nights ago but I don't think I'm going to post it. I don't think I'm there yet. It feels a little too melodramatic and I'm not completely sure it satisfies the "quality" aspect of that particular goal, but it's only the first week and I haven't done this in a while. I'm sparing you, I promise.
- I was a little sloppy on my article reading goal. I got three done in The New Yorker and two in the Economist (which I also put in a subscription for (signing bonus woo!)), but didn't, um, make it around to the New Scientist at all. Tomorrow I will finish the reading and post all the links and (a short) reaction to each article. Also of note: I plan on getting a subscription to the New Yorker, too, as soon as I get my first paycheck. It's only $70 for two years! I didn't realize it was so cheap! I will definitely read more as soon as I have the actual magazines, and I'm very much looking forward to that.
- Ashamed as I am to admit it, I was also sloppy on starting up Tennessee Williams, Salman Rushdie, and (I feel the worst about this one) the screenplay. With the books, it's partially because I realized around Tuesday or Wednesday that the books were still packed and I really have a lot more to clean up in my room before I get to unloading those six or seven boxes. With the screenplay, though, it's all me and my. Laziness. There, I said it. I have the post-its out, ready to color-code, ready to coordinate with a OneNote Notebook on my computer. I told myself I was waiting until I had the right mechanical pencils on hand, so I could make notes in the book itself, but I bought those on Thursday and still haven't done anything more than think about beginning to read. I honestly can't understand what happened. I was, and am, so excited at the prospect of this undertaking. Maybe that's the problem - I like the idea of starting remaining on the horizon.
Well. No more. I'm running out of excuses (i.e., things to watch on On Demand that aren't Apocalypse Now, by the way) and tomorrow I have An Agenda. I am going to lunch at noonish with an old friend, and when I get home, I am doing a LOT of laundry, and while I am doing laundry, I am going to keep the TV off and the classical/soundtrack music on and start in on this book. I am going to tackle it head on and I am pretty sure that after it gets rolling, the other half of that law of motion (the part about when objects are in motion) will kick right in and it won't seem quite so possibly impossible anymore. - Attentive readers may have noticed that in the previous post, Sundries - Part 3, one goal had been moved into the "In Progress" category: number 90, Intentionally go out in the pouring rain and soak through. Seems a bit of a one-time thing, doesn't it? Either you've stood out and soaked or you haven't. Not so. Twice in the last two days (that is, last night and this morning) it sounded, in the house, like it was a torrential downpour outside. This morning, it was actually loud enough that it woke me up, and I checked out the window before changing into rain-appropriate attire (that is, not my velvet pajama pants) to ensure that this time, it really was a good solid rain. Literally by the time I was out the door, it still sounded slightly ferocious, kind of like a lion cub on the verge of lion puberty trying out an intimidating roar, and by the time I was across the yard and into the street, the rain felt nice, but I could tell it was definitely not of the "soak through" sort. By the time I was back inside, changing back into my cozy pjs, the rain had slowed to a trickle. The real measure? My shirt was completely dry within five minutes.
Therefore, goal number 90 is in progress because I continue to be vigilant in my search for a proper hard rain and. Seriously. The next time there is one, rain-appropriate attire be damned. I will own that rain, even if it means I have to be ridiculously uncomfortable doing it.
Probably. - I hit submit. I sort of have a phobia about that, finalizing things that I sometimes don't have complete control over: airplane reservations online, intrawebal submissions of papers, and hitting "send" on just about anything that isn't a casual email. I have a tremendous fear about not being able to take things back. One day I might tell you about the realization of this fear in a funny little story I like to call "Half an hour of tears and screeching with the Virgin Atlantic call center in India." Yeah. It's a good one.
So, what did I submit? The registration packet for the Foreign Service Officer Test. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the entire application, though it did ask for basic resume stuff. I feel like the real application should have essay questions about why I want to be a part of the Foreign Service. I should probably work on preparing those answers, anyway. Yeah. Anyway. The test window is sometime in October, so I should be receiving my invitation to register for a seat sometime in the next week. I'm hoping. Fingers crossed. You should, too. - Finally, Selfportrait Thursday, goal 37, is underway. You can see it three posts back from here; I will not be mentioning that I have done SPT again in the weekly update unless I'm feeling particularly down about my goal progress that week. It'll sort of be our secret code; you'll know I'm really mad at myself for not getting anything done because I'll bring it up. Know that I am chastising myself quite enough even now, for this grave, underperforming transgression.
So, there it is, the week in review. Now that all the goal detail posts are done, I won't have them as an excuse to delay doing actual goal-related activities, and the posts in the coming week will be far more substantive. I'm going to really get started, I swear!
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Sunday, August 30, 2009
Reading Goals
19. Read at least 3 articles in each of these weekly: The Economist, New Scientist, and the New Yorker. Bonus points for taking out a subscription.
54. Finish the Discworld series.
55. (re)Read the complete works of Tennessee Williams.
56. Read 25 "Classics."
57. Read 3 "Russian Classics."
58. Read the complete works of Salman Rushdie.
59. Read every book on the shelf that has not yet been so.
85. Read ten books that are recommended to me.
Each of these goals has its own tag (although 57 will assume the tag of 56, "Classics") and I will post a short summary/review/announcement within two days of finishing any book or article.
19. Read at least 3 articles in each of these weekly: The Economist, New Scientist, and the New Yorker. Bonus points for taking out a subscription.
54. Finish the Discworld series.
55. (re)Read the complete works of Tennessee Williams.
56. Read 25 "Classics."
57. Read 3 "Russian Classics."
58. Read the complete works of Salman Rushdie.
59. Read every book on the shelf that has not yet been so.
85. Read ten books that are recommended to me.
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54. Finish the Discworld series.
55. (re)Read the complete works of Tennessee Williams.
56. Read 25 "Classics."
57. Read 3 "Russian Classics."
58. Read the complete works of Salman Rushdie.
59. Read every book on the shelf that has not yet been so.
85. Read ten books that are recommended to me.
Details
Each of these goals has its own tag (although 57 will assume the tag of 56, "Classics") and I will post a short summary/review/announcement within two days of finishing any book or article.
19. Read at least 3 articles in each of these weekly: The Economist, New Scientist, and the New Yorker. Bonus points for taking out a subscription.
I really love these magazines but I sometimes... forget about them. Especially with The Economist, I find it a lot easier to read the articles in the physical magazines (well, hell, I usually read them cover to cover if I have an actual copy) than reading on the internet. I also felt this goal would be good because, now that I'm not in college, I've found myself doing a much poorer job of keeping up with the goings-on in the world, and I'm upset about that. With this goal as an active reminder, I won't be able to slack off anymore and let the days pile on into weeks without reading a single article.
54. Finish the Discworld series.
At the end of my freshman writing class at Vassar, a course in the Cog Sci department called "The Science and Fiction of the Mind" (yes, Vassar is awesome like that), my professor gave each of us a sci-fi or fantasy novel that he thought would inspire us to continue writing. Shamefully, I did not pick up the book he gave to me, The Color of Magic, the first in the Discworld series, until the day after graduation. I immediately purchased the second book, and placed a hold at the library on the third, which turned into holds on the fourth, fifth, and sixth - well, by the time I left Portland, I had about 100 pages left in Sourcery, the fifth book (in order of publication, not by story line).
I don't consider it cheating to have a goal to finish a series of which I have already read five books, because THERE ARE 36 OF THEM AND COUNTING, in addition to short stories, graphic novels, and official reference volumes. According to that first link, two more are scheduled for release this year and next. This is a project, but a fun, minimal effort sort of project that I am glad to take on. And though I doubt he'll ever see this, I owe an enormous debt of repentant gratitude to Professor Livingston for introducing me to this wonderful alternate universe.
Books read: 5
55. (re)Read the complete works of Tennessee Williams.
I don't think this goal needs any justification at all, but here it is: Tennessee Williams is the man, and his plays are the bomb-diggity, and if you disagree, you should try reading something other than The Glass Menagerie.
Plays read: 0.66
56. Read 25 "Classics."
Sort of in line with my need to see 25 new great and classic movies, I need to read 25 new great and classic books. I tried a few times to read Jane Austen, and in school, we only read abridged versions of Dickens. My brother sent me Atlas Shrugged for Christmas last year because I never thought it would be my kind of book and he insisted that I had to read it anyway. I havne't yet. Like the movies list, the 50 or so books that make it onto this list will be posted in a separate entry which I will update whenever I complete one of the books on it.
57. Read 3 "Russian Classics."
These are long and epic and have funny-sounding names, so they get their own post. Tentatively, I'm putting War and Peace, The Idiot, and either The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, The Master and Margarita, or the Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol on this list. The Master and Margarita is (relatively) short, so it might sneak up onto the regular classics list to make space for something else.
58. Read the complete works of Salman Rushdie.
Midnight's Children was one of my very favorite books I got to read for class last year. It was my very first experience reading Rushdie, although I was aware of the controversy with The Satanic Verses and everything, I was unaware that he is actually a genius with the English language. Although I will read them loosely in order of publication, the first one up (ie the one that I already own) is East, West, almost the exact median publication. Let the Rushdie love commence!
Rushdies read: 1
59. Read every book on the shelf that has not yet been so.
The is more a target than a definite goal. I'm one of those people who buys books because I like to have them around me, not necessarily because I'm looking for something new to read at the moment. More precisely, I almost never buy just one book. There is, then, quite the backlog on my shelves of books I meant to read but never got around to because of classes, or other books, or whatever. Some of then will fall under the "Classics" reading goal; others I will just read whenever I get need a break from the structured, specific reading goals. Obviously, because I do not intend to stop buying books in the next 2.75 years, this will be a fluid goal, and new books will be incorporated into it.
Backlog finished: 3
85. Read ten books that are recommended to me.
As if I needed more reading on my plate, this is an open call for recommendations for books that I absolutely need to read, right now. Every suggestion, no matter how ridiculous, will be considered. And hey - if only ten books are recommended, the ridiculous one is a shoe-in!
Recommended reading completed: 2
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