So, um, did you guys just feel an earthquake? I am very certain I felt the ground shake and I even thought for one split second that it was an earthquake, but it was over too quickly to register.
UPDATE: DCist says it was merely an explosion triggered by a group called the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which is drilling deep into the Earth's core. Nothing to worry about there!
UPDATE II: It was an earthquake! So to add to the snowy winters, the District now has earthquakes. But what, then, is this NGIA up to?
UPDATE III: Wrecky? Didn't even so much as try to tug my sleeve to warn me that an earthquake was imminent. No use!
How is that Cory Arcangel's dystopian possibility isn't realized all the time?
While Sommer was away on vacation, a friend of ours emailed the both of us and a dozen other people about plans for a party. I, and I assume everyone on else on the thread, received Sommer's automatic out-of-the-office response. No problem. But if another person had set up his email to reply automatically, would we be stuck in the dread loop?
Courtland Milloy, if you're so damned opposed to a man smashing his penis with rocks, why won't you support HPV vaccination? We all wish the world were a disease-free place, but wishin's just wishin'—it's time you considered the bottom line about the world we live in. Even the most enlightened sex education isn't good enough when there are women's lives and men's penises on the line and curbing mortality is a real possibility. And clearly enlightened sex education isn't in the cards now—the best anyone can hope for is that the Bush administration's strenuous public support for abstinence education hasn't permanently burned Dick Cheney's scowling visage onto so many young retinas that we wind up with a Children of Men–style population meltdown. Maybe after the 2008 election? America is in some ways growing more liberal, but Silda Spitzer will take Elliott back in her bedroom before we, as a nation, are in the mood for reliable sex education in all our public schools.
But support for HPV vaccination, at least, is widespread, and the opposition (yourself included, Milloy) isn't yet so intractable that they've managed to find the narrative handhold on the issue that somehow skirts over the fact that one shot will prevent many, if not most, cases of cervical cancer among the next generation. (As for your angle, Milloy, it should be clear by now that calls to racial conscience don't exactly resonate in conservative eardrums.) So then: You may choose a Stone Age world where men smash their penises with rocks and women die of utterly preventable cervical cancers, or you may choose a world enlightened by sound science, where cock goes unmolested except in the best sense of the word and cancer-causing HPV is prevented by simple vaccination. Embrace perfect penises, Milloy—for the future.
In the Washington Post story on the astounding and inevitable news that scientists have created entirely artificial DNA, staff writer Rick Weiss asks:
What kinds of organisms will scientists, terrorists and other creative individuals make?Whenever a story overblows the historical significance or marvelous might of al Qaeda et al., I'm reminded of the Barbary pirates. I have a vision of shipwrights and patentmasters wringing their hands throughout the 1780s, losing sleep over the steam engine and the frightening applications such technology might be put to by Tripoli. If the Ottoman corsairs get their hands on one—! It's not a totally random association of mine: Tripoli told the first Continental Congress that the pirates attacked American ships because they were charged to by the Qur'an, and that every Muslim lost while battling or pressing Westerners into service would see paradise. Furthermore, no one remember the Barbary pirates—just as no one will remember al Qaeda from an era that saw the birth of the artificial organism.
The manosphere is micropulsing over Tom's writeup following his recent Gillette Fusion purchase. Naturally, I scoffed. I've been enjoying micropulse technology for months now. In fact I am such a devoted fan of micropulse technology that when I initially purchased the Gillette Fusion (again, months ago) I also bought the Oral-B Pulsar, the best toothbrush a man can get. I patiently await a prototype entry into the as-yet-unexamined field of micropulse deodorant, at which time every single one of my hygienic needs will be met by products that vibrate in a barely perceptible way. So much could go wrong with a Micropulse Cool Stick Clear, of course; I have every confidence that the people at Right Guard labs are simply determined to get it right the first time. Think about what hangs in the balance.
So I read on, comforted by the fact that Tommy is only now catching up in this critical game of razor-consumption oneupsmanship. Just this weekend, as I slapped down $25 to re-up on Fusion cartridges, I pondered the many increased benefits afforded by an asymptotic rise in the number of blades per razor system. I am not paying $25 for nothing, you know! I like to think that I'm doing my part to realize the gradual development of the Gillette Aleph.
Still comforted by my purchase, and not at all doubting the amount of money I was paying for disposable razors, I humored the rest of Tommy's post. But as he began to enumerate the technical specifications of his product (available courtesy of Gillettepedia, which is a nonprofit and nonpartisan online scientific resource foundation 2.0), I felt a growing sense of dread. Certainly, my face has felt the comfort of five flowing blades. Without question, I have trimmed and tidied sideburns using the single reverse blade, or as I like to call it, "the option." I think I have been very clear about my feelings on micropulse anything. But in a panic-inducing revelation, Tom revealed, much to my panicking, that he was now shaving at another level. I had been left behind.
The Gillette Fusion Phantom. It has an onboard microchip for consistent power, shave after shave. I'll see you at CVS—or I'll see you in hell.
This is the name of a peppy mix I made to do while I'm researching boring stuff:
μ-waveMatters of larger import will have to wait for at least a week. But right now, I'm cracking myself up with that one.
To note today's Phoenix launch, Nasa has debuted a video series on the challenge of getting to Mars. The first installment is satisfyingly militaristic, featuring the standard submarine-movie soundtrack and the text that appears across the bottom of the screen to identify time and location but more importantly bleep in such a way to let you know that government/potentially classified text is being typed.
Unfortunately, it's dreadfully dull. The short is about how it's hard to ship satellite-sized packages from Colorado to Cape Canaveral. Granted, it did rain during the drive from the lab to the military base for transport—but that can't possibly even be on the list of worst-case scenarios, since rain poses no threat of the satellite exploding. Nasa doesn't even show the viewer how the convoy caravan would respond to (for instance) an attack by the Taliban.
But another movie about interplanetary bacteria is much better. It's got a picture of a hypothetical far-distant planet that looks like Earth but with rings, along with a British scientist—that's crucial—explaining that there are no shortcuts in the search for trace organic compounds in the dirt. Now we're getting somewhere.
Yet Nasa's still missing the big picture—the defining element that makes Nasa movies Nasa movies.
Ed Harris. And nerds who erupt into fist-pumping cheers in Houston. Probably just a loop of that would do.
Anil Dash and Kieran Healy explain that some publications have taken a shine to square pie charts. Here's the example they've both posted (the left chart taken from the New York Times; the right, from Wired):
Stylish, maybe, and the pie format certainly has its shortfalls, but Healy explains why square doesn't take the circle:
The main problem with this [square] style of presentation is that it uses two dimensions to display unidimensional data. As the graphic on the right, especially, makes clear, the layout of the subcomponents of the graph is arbitrary.My first thought was about the use of color, and how color (and of course, pattern) could be used by scheming editors and their nefarious art departments to sway in subtle ways a reader's appreciation of the graph. If you were to remove the data tags, after all, you would have forms that would read in appreciable ways to a viewer.
Josef Albers, White Line Square VII, 1966.
What would Josef Albers say? Here are some potentially pertinent lines from a 1964 concrete essay, "The Origin of Art":
THE ORIGIN OF ART:Wordy guy, that Albers. (That's the long and short of that essay.) In another essay from the same year, titled "The Color in My Paintings", Albers expands on the function of color within the set pattern of his "homage to the square" series:
The discrepancy between physical fact
and psychic effectTHE CONTENT OF ART:
Visual formulation of our reaction
to lifeTHE MEASURE OF ART:
The ratio of effort to effectTHE AIM OF ART:
Revelation and evocation of vision
[Colors] are juxtaposed for various and changing visual effects. They are to challenge or to echo each other, to support or oppose one another. . . .Of course, all the concrete abstract painters working at this time were thinking experimentally and focusing on the theatricality of abstract painting, though I'd say that Albers was one of few to do the science right and narrow that focus down to a single variable. Given his belief that color value is contextually determined, I doubt Albers would agree that color could be arbitrarily assigned, which has perhaps not a whole lot to do with data presentations so long as you are trying to have a very serious Friday.[ . . . ]
Such action, reaction, interaction—or interdependence—is sought in order to make obvious how colors influence and change each other: that the same color, for instance—with different grounds or neighbors—looks different. . . .
[ . . . ]
Such color deceptions prove that we see colors almost never unrelated to each other and therefore unchanged; that color is changing continually: with changing light, with changing shape and placement, and with quantity which denotes either amount (a real extension) or number (recurrence). And just as influential are changes in perception depending on changes of mood, and consequently of receptiveness.
All this will make [us] aware of an exciting discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect of color.
THE BANANA: Creationists call its pop-top design an "athiest's nightmare"; Darwinists who disprefer peeling from the stem side mourn the "ignoble, instinctive knowledge, innate and undistinguished by having been won through effort" of our foremonkeys. This world can truly make a soul feel as though he has no place.
Via Felix and Ben, respectively.
Becks gets back to us on her tour of the MoMA conservation studio (previously mentioned here):
Considering how you always hear about how light can damage works of art, I really expected that they would want to protect the works they were restoring from sunlight. On the contrary, the lab was designed to let in as much Northern light as possible so that the conservators could assess pigments and materials using natural light.Funny, I also expected something off a CSI set, with lots of bones piled up in the corners. Even in art conservation, bones are industry standard—any work that involves tiny little tools calls for lots of human skulls.
Anyway, as I understand the light concern, pigments that absorb light mostly convert absorbed light into heat—so, no sweat, if you will. But even the fairly energy-resistant molecules that make up the inorganic pigmentation used today in the plastic arts undergo the occassional chemical change, usually in the form of oxidation.
Now, I understand why conservators would need light for their work. But why would full-spectrum white light be less cause for concern than a more rarefied light? For the record, I've never heard of photons. Recalling even this much chemistry has brought me dangerously close to the edge of systems failure.
The rest of the conservation studio? Total bat-cave. The space is lined with lead and features special paints on the filing cabinets that do not emit gases. Unlike the rude thing near your desk.
I'm running out the door to make my way to the Options 05 reception, so I haven't checked to see what the science wonks are saying about the news, but if the news is true that a genetically engineered vaccine prevents the two HPV strains associated most highly with cervical cancer—and does that trick with 97-percent efficacy—then that's one of the great sexual health developments of our lifetime. Pretty sweet news. I'm even looking forward to the cartoon marketing campaign!
(Courtesy of Sommer.)
While I'm as sympathetic as the next Austinite to Amanda's impassioned pleas to spare Austin from the curtain of smoking bans closing on the nation, except, well, I'm not as sympathetic as the next Austinite. I should be. Not only am I a smoker, but the thought of someone asking me to step outside the Casino or Lovejoy's or (God forbid the day ever come to pass) Nasty's to have a smoke makes me want to have a full-bore seizure. It kills me to break ranks with Norbizness and out myself as a prude favoring the slippery slope toward a dystopian Austin of wheat-grass shots, hybrid sushi/Baja-style Mexican restaurants, and David Gray concerts, which is I assume precisely the sort of godless liberal anthem a smoking ban supporter would march to—because deep inside I know that cigarettes go with bars go with cigarettes, and anyone who doesn't understand this is someone I don't want at the Showdown.
But I have to give my full support to the smoking ban because those few bar employees who don't smoke—hypothetical though they may sound—are on the side of science. Environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) or passive smoking is the most harmful indoor air pollutant, a class A carcinogen up there with asbestos. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, along with every Western nation's leading cancer agency (if I recall correctly, there are no longer any exceptions, but check me if I'm wrong), has identified a causal link between passive smoking and lung cancer. Suffice it to say that my uncle is the only person left who refuses to acknowledge that secondhand smoke is terrible, and that's because he's been auditioning to become the Marlboro Man since he was 12. (Yeah, I smoke too, but he smokes way more.)
Lindsay Beyerstein notes that 15-year-old OSHA standards suggest that indoor ETS isn't usually sufficient to amount to overexposure. (It's very clear that OSHA has never been to Nasty's. On any given night you've got, what, 4 feet of visibility?) These data require some caveats—one, these standards are old. The entire Western world only came to agree that ETS was a carcinogen in 2002, so it's possible (and probable) that we've learned some things since 1990. Two, even if these standards aren't arbitrary measures antiquated by newer, different data, it's hard to see how the newer context of ETS hasn't affected the OSHA standards. Did OSHA set its limits at the atmospheric levels at which ETS is no longer carcinogenic, or the levels at which ETS is not recognized to be an irritant? Those are my complaints before we even introduce the lobbying factor and the effect of the politics on the implementation of these standards.
I would definitely be willing to reconsider my opinion if the answers to these questions revealed a favorable correlation between the science on smoking and the OSHA standards, and I admit that it's bias that assures me that the answers would show otherwise. (Lindsay would, too.) Nonetheless, the accompanying OSHA directive—"[i]f the [permissible exposure limits] or [short-term exposure limits] for any of these air contaminants is exceeded, corrective action must be taken by the employer to reduce employee exposure to the contaminant"—is a joke. How can a bar know whether it is within the appropriate range? Smoking bans work; toothless standards don't.
As for the caveat emptor argument—employees can choose to work somewhere else if they don't want to work at smoke-filled bars—I'd remind that the same defense stood when the few non-smoking stewardesses rallied to have smoking banned on air flights; and the fact is now as it was then that so long the culture generally tolerates smoking and there is an enormous financial incentive behind permitting smoking (and selling cigarettes), smoke-free alternatives aren't going to emerge. I remember listening to Julian Sanchez debate against a District smoking ban on the Kojo Nnamdi show, and—I mean, I know he's doing the Lord's work, because I'd hate to not be able to smoke in bars—he offered that the Health Bar on U Street shows that the market tolerates non-smoking bars. It was a bit flimsy, given that Health Bar is, well, it's called Health Bar, I think you can infer what that place is. It ain't the Black-Cat-just-without-smoking—and as far as I'm aware, that bar doesn't exist.
If, if, one could be reasonably assured that every employee of every smoking bar in Austin (or DC, or whever) is a smoker who will never want to quit smoking, then I think it would be reasonable to say that everyone involved assented to the tremendous health risks involved with ETS—but that's really not the case. If ventilation systems sufficient to mitigate the risks of ETS could be required in such a way that isn't disadvantageous for smaller bars, that would be a reasonable application of basic health standards—but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that. If a market existed that tolerated non-smoking bars, it would be reasonable to say that the market provides for bartenders et al. who mind the risks associated with ETS—but the market doesn't tolerate non-smoking bars, except in the form of abhorrible Health Bars. So I think you have to give that joyless son-of-a-bitch bartender his healthy workplace and support the smoking ban.
God forbid they ever pass them, though—what the hell kind of good is a bar without smoking?
If you've seen these clips somewhere—and maybe you were aware all along—you know that octopi are smarter than I am. Those are some sweet moves. If I knew these tricks, I would never be in danger.
UPDATE: But I could kick a Tremoctopus violaceous's ass.
Check out Margaret Wertheim's interview with geometers David Henderson and Daina Taimina for Cabinet Magazine. When I saw the images of Taimina's crocheted hyperbolic figures, I was immediately struck by how instructive it could be as an applied tool to teach non-Euclidean geometry, because—well, I don't know anything about crochet, but I get the sense that this is true—one could viscerally experience ultraparallel lines or even space curvature. It turns out that Taimina, in fact, invented the first workable model of Lobachevskian, i.e., hyperbolic geometry by abandoning paper and turning to crochet. Certainly makes a great deal of sense after the fact, doesn't it?
Daina Taimina, Crocheted model of hyperbolic plane, 1970s.
See Taimina's pseudosphere, too. And the interview isn't a bad introduction to non-Euclidean geometry, either.
I'd definitely love for them to have expanded on the conversation about hyperbolic forms in nature, particularly the nudibranch. I was happy to see that Taimina was appropriately dismissive of hyperbolic lettuce, which one can find in the grocery store but not nature. The purist knows that exotic forms of geometry are to be found under the sea, damnit. (In another life, I study the Ordovician Period ancestors of my favorite cephalopod and sea creature, the chambered nautilus—how time has humbled that once fearsome predator!)
Nature, Nudibranch, Cambrian period.
And on an unrelated note: If you're interested to see the form of awesome executed in nature, see the eurypterid, the ancient chambered nautilus's greatest enemy (except the former was freshwater and the latter seawater, so they never fought per se though I don't see how that's relevant).
Apropos of this discussion:
Courtesy of Sean Carroll of Preposterous Universe, which has become one of my regular reads. I feel like our respective blog mission statements would look pretty similar, but whereas I'm writing about contemporary art and politics, he's surveying contemporary physics and same. I think that means he gets the big piece of chicken. I don't think I've ever dovetailed topics so gracefully:
Apparently the worry is that handing out condoms with color and flavor (just like quarks!) will encourage people to have sex.It's the subatomic theory that gets me movin'!
