Fiat Lux

2006-12-19T11:23:00.000-05:00

I will de discontinuing the use of this web space for my research and reading storage. Some of the content here will shift over to my livejournal where I have been maintaining the lion's share of my on-line presence recently.

I have had this blog for almost two and a half years, but its usefulness for me has diminished of late.

Thank you to anyone who has been reading. And if you like what is here I do encourage you to keep an eye on this space.

Peace,

-L

Why Shakespeare works

2006-12-19T11:14:00.000-05:00

Link

Shakespeare uses a linguistic technique known as functional shift that involves, for example using a noun to serve as a verb. Researchers found that this technique allows the brain to understand what a word means before it understands the function of the word within a sentence. This process causes a sudden peak in brain activity and forces the brain to work backwards in order to fully understand what Shakespeare is trying to say.

Professor Philip Davis, from the University’s School of English, said: “The brain reacts to reading a phrase such as ‘he godded me’ from the tragedy of Coriolanus, in a similar way to putting a jigsaw puzzle together. If it is easy to see which pieces slot together you become bored of the game, but if the pieces don’t appear to fit, when we know they should, the brain becomes excited. By throwing odd words into seemingly normal sentences, Shakespeare surprises the brain and catches it off guard in a manner that produces a sudden burst of activity - a sense of drama created out of the simplest of things.”

Experts believe that this heightened brain activity may be one of the reasons why Shakespeare’s plays have such a dramatic impact on their readers.

Think Happy Thoughts

2006-12-18T23:53:00.000-05:00

Link

A group of Canadian researchers looking into how moods affect our mental processes found that a good mood appears to enhance your ability to think laterally, or outside the box.

Conversely, they suspect that the tunnel vision associated with fear and anxiety can be an asset when it comes to tasks requiring close attention to detail.

The underlying mechanisms are still unclear, but in study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers suggest the phenomenon may have something to do with the way our mood affects the way we process information.

'We think the underlying mechanism is selection, the way in which we filter information,' said Adam Anderson, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto in Canada and author of the study.

'If attention is like a spotlight, then a good mood will widen that spotlight, while a negative mood will focus it very tightly.'

From museum to Condo

2006-12-14T08:36:00.000-05:00

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It was as if someone had told devotees of Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon” or Matisse’s “Dance” that the Museum of Modern Art had changed hands and would soon be shut down for residential redevelopment, with all the art inside to vanish as part of the deal.

In this case the art is not hanging inside the building but is splashed all over the walls outside, in spray paint, wheat paste, rubber, plastic, metal, cardboard and various other unidentifiable substances, a story-high gallery of graffiti and street art that seems to have grown almost organically (and mostly unimpeded by the authorities) over the last two decades.

Depending on your point of view, the hulking 19th-century brick building at 11 Spring Street in NoLIta, a former stable and carriage house, was either a stunning eyesore or one of the most famous canvases and lodestars in the world for urban artists. When those of the latter view heard recently that the building had been sold and would soon be gutted and converted into condominiums, they considered it the end of an era. Bearing their cameras, they began showing up at the building over the last few weeks in a kind of mournful procession.

Political Clarity

2006-12-10T12:45:00.000-05:00

Link

"Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind," wrote George Orwell in his prescient essay "Politics and the English Language."

Beset as we Americans are by a misguided war, errant governance, unaddressed environmental threats and growing social injustice, it is perhaps easy to downplay the importance of language in solving our problems in a rationale manner.

While Orwell became familiar with the manipulation and corruption of language through the fascist and communist movements of the 1930s, he would most certainly be discouraged by the degree to which mutant parlance has advanced since he wrote his celebrated essay 50 years ago. Borrowing from the commercial advertisers and PR "consultants," politicians now spin, distort and lie to sell themselves with ever greater impunity, creating deceptive virtual worlds of pseudo reality in the process.

In the last few years, the wanton corruption of the meaning of words in political discourse has reached a perilous point where it is difficult to take the utterance of any public figure at face value. The Bush administration's tortured defense of the Iraq war effort leading up to the congressional elections could serve as Exhibit A.

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity," Orwell continued. "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were to long words or exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

Precious Sleep

2006-12-05T16:13:00.000-05:00

Link

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg have been investigating how memories might be consolidated. Their new study offers the hitherto strongest proof that new information is transferred between the hippocampus, the short term memory area, and the cerebral cortex during sleep. According to their findings and contrary to previous assumptions, the cerebral cortex actively controls this transfer. The researchers developed a new technique for their investigations which promises previously impossible insight into the largely under-researched field of information processing in the brain (Nature Neuroscience, November 2006).

The question of how the brain stores or discards memories still remains largely unexplained. Many brain researchers regard the consolidation theory as the best approach so far. This states that fresh impressions are first stored as short-term memories in the hippocampus. They are then said to move within hours or a few days - usually during deep sleep - into the cerebral cortex where they enter long-term memory. Investigations by Thomas Hahn, Mayank Mehta and the Nobel Prize winner Bert Sakmann from the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg have now shed new light on the mechanisms that create memory. According to their findings, the areas of the brain work together, but possibly in a different way from that previously assumed. 'This is a technically sophisticated study which could have considerable influence on our understanding of how nerve cells interact during sleep consolidation,' confirmed Edvard Moser, Director of the Centre for the Biology of Memory in Trondheim, Norway.

Book Covers

2006-11-22T20:20:00.000-05:00

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'We're told not to judge a book by its cover, but we do this spontaneously,' explained Adams. 'In fact, it's quite an effort to undo the inferences that we make.'

Sometimes, in fact, those inferences are dead-on. In the 1990s, psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Nalini Ambady -- who Adams later worked with at Harvard University --conducted a study in which college students were asked to evaluate a professor's teaching ability. The students' ratings were based solely on watching a muted 10-second clip of that professor in front of a class. Remarkably, these instant ratings substantially matched those given after an entire semester.

[SNIP]

"Sometimes not thinking is important," he explained. "When your body seems to know before your mind, your mind seems to get in the way."

Sounds good, tastes better

2006-11-22T20:05:00.000-05:00

Link

For most of us, the boundaries between our bodily senses are clear-cut and rigid. But for a few rare individuals, the demarcation between vision and hearing, or between taste and touch, are less solid, with one bleeding into the other.

These people have a condition called 'synesthesia,' in which two or more of the senses are crossed. Some see colors when listening to music, while others associate tastes with shapes or words with colors.

A very small number of synesthetes can 'taste' words.

A new study finds that individuals with this last form of synesthesia—called 'lexical-gustatory' synesthesia—can taste a word before they ever speak it, and that the word's meaning, not its sound or spelling, is what triggers this taste sensation.

Positive Peace Protests

2006-11-19T01:40:00.000-05:00

Link

Living on their houseboat off the Marin County coast, anti-war activists Donna Sheehan and her partner, Paul Reffel, concocted a way for the world to communally create a lot of peaceful vibes.

They want everyone to have an orgasm on the same day.

On Dec. 22, they're asking the world to contribute in their own way to the Global Orgasm for Peace. Sheehan said not to worry if you don't have a partner.

Busy multi-taskers shouldn't despair about trying to cram this global activism into their busy schedules, either, she said. Take any time during the 24-hour period at the beginning of the winter solstice to join the demonstration. Just make sure to think of peace before or after participating.

Once you've committed, there's even a secret sign to show others that you plan to take part: Flash the universal 'OK' sign and wink. Or, as it has been redubbed, 'The O' sign.

Welcome to the Future Mr. Tesla

2006-11-14T22:45:00.000-05:00

Link

Typically, systems that use electromagnetic radiation, such as radio antennas, are not suitable for the efficient transfer of energy because they scatter energy in all directions, wasting large amounts of it into free space.

To overcome this problem, the team investigated a special class of 'non-radiative' objects with so-called 'long-lived resonances'.

When energy is applied to these objects it remains bound to them, rather than escaping to space. 'Tails' of energy, which can be many metres long, flicker over the surface.

'If you bring another resonant object with the same frequency close enough to these tails then it turns out that the energy can tunnel from one object to another,' said Professor Soljacic.

Plugs and cables
Wireless energy transfer has been thought about for centuries

Hence, a simple copper antenna designed to have long-lived resonance could transfer energy to a laptop with its own antenna resonating at the same frequency. The computer would be truly wireless.

Any energy not diverted into a gadget or appliance is simply reabsorbed.

The systems that the team have described would be able to transfer energy over three to five metres.

Rumsfeld and War Crimes

2006-11-11T11:39:00.000-05:00

Link

Just days after his resignation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is about to face more repercussions for his involvement in the troubled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. New legal documents, to be filed next week with Germany's top prosecutor, will seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of Rumsfeld, along with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior U.S. civilian and military officers, for their alleged roles in abuses committed at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

[Snip]

Germany was chosen for the court filing because German law provides "universal jurisdiction" allowing for the prosecution of war crimes and related offenses that take place anywhere in the world. Indeed, a similar, but narrower, legal action was brought in Germany in 2004, which also sought the prosecution of Rumsfeld. The case provoked an angry response from Pentagon, and Rumsfeld himself was reportedly upset. Rumsfeld's spokesman at the time, Lawrence DiRita, called the case a "a big, big problem." U.S. officials made clear the case could adversely impact U.S.-Germany relations, and Rumsfeld indicated he would not attend a major security conference in Munich, where he was scheduled to be the keynote speaker, unless Germany disposed of the case. The day before the conference, a German prosecutor announced he would not pursue the matter, saying there was no indication that U.S. authorities and courts would not deal with allegations in the complaint.

Personal Foreign Policy

2006-11-10T15:04:00.000-05:00

Link

The sentence is one almost every German -- and certainly every German from Berlin -- still cherishes to this day: "Ich bin ein Berliner." And it was uttered by a man West Germany instantly took into its heart when he visited the divided city in 1963 at the height of the Cold War.

Now, President John F. Kennedy has a museum dedicated to his memory in the heart of Berlin, right next to the Brandenburg Gate. Set to open to the public on Saturday, the new exhibit provides a glittery overview of the Camelot era, when America had a lean young president with a glamorous wife and a pair of beaming young children. Museum curator Dr. Andreas Etges also says the collection shows the start of a "new era in politics and media."

[SNIP]

The outpouring of support for Kennedy in Berlin contrasts mightily, of course, with the sour German attitude toward current US President George W. Bush. Anthony Kennedy-Shriver, a nephew of the former president who came to Berlin on Friday to help open the museum, said there was a fundamental difference between his uncle's foreign-policy style and the style of almost every administration since.

'The best way to describe the different approach,' he said, 'is that when Kennedy came here, he said, 'I am one of you,' and when President Reagan came here (in 1987), he said, 'Tear down this wall.'' Reagan came to project aggressive power, said Kennedy-Shriver, while Kennedy came to show sympathy. 'The other approach,' the way of aggression, he said, 'is the one that always fails.'

2006-11-07T07:27:00.000-05:00

Remember,

Vote Early, Vote Often

. . .

Patriots say Rumsfeld must go

2006-11-05T11:55:00.000-05:00

Link

For two years, American sergeants, captains and majors training the Iraqis have told their bosses that Iraqi troops have no sense of national identity, are only in it for the money, don't show up for duty and cannot sustain themselves.

Meanwhile, colonels and generals have asked their bosses for more troops. Service chiefs have asked for more money.

And all along, Rumsfeld has assured us that things are well in hand.

Now, the president says he'll stick with Rumsfeld for the balance of his term in the White House.

This is a mistake.

It is one thing for the majority of Americans to think Rumsfeld has failed. But when the nation's current military leaders start to break publicly with their defense secretary, then it is clear that he is losing control of the institution he ostensibly leads.

These officers have been loyal public promoters of a war policy many privately feared would fail. They have kept their counsel private, adhering to more than two centuries of American tradition of subordination of the military to civilian authority.

And although that tradition, and the officers' deep sense of honor, prevent them from saying this publicly, more and more of them believe it.

Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt.

This is not about the midterm elections. Regardless of which party wins Nov. 7, the time has come, Mr. President, to face the hard bruising truth:

Donald Rumsfeld must go.

MORE REASONS TO VOTE

2006-11-02T20:02:00.000-05:00

HOUSE SCANDALS:

Rep Brian Bilbray (R-CA)
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/000355.php
http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/energy_environment/index.html
http://www.dccc.org/stakeholder/archives/004612.html
Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO)
http://www.beyonddelay.org/summaries/blunt.php
Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA)
http://www.beyonddelay.org/summaries/calvert.php
Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT)
http://www.beyonddelay.org/summaries/cannon.php
Rep Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-CA)
http://tpmmuckraker.com/cunningham.php
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050702/news_1n2duke.html
Rep. Tom Delay (R-TX),
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12141276/
http://tpmmuckraker.com/delay.php
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/000182.php
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/30/AR2005123001480_pf.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/28/AR2005092800270.html
Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA),
http://www.auburnjournal.com/articles/2005/12/26/news/top_stories/01doolittle.txt
http://tpmmuckraker.com/doolittle.php
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/10/AR2006071001164.html
Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL)
http://www.beyonddelay.org/summaries/feeney.php
Rep Mark Foley (R-FL)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2006/10/03/LI2006100301024.html
Rep. Jim Gibbons (R-NV)
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/cats/jim_gibbons/
Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA)
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/007125.php
http://loper.org/~george/archives/2006/Mar/972.html
http://tpmmuckraker.com/goode.php
Rep. Katherine Harris ’06 Sen Candidate (R-Fla)
http://tpmmuckraker.com/harris.php
http://www.sptimes.com/State/82598/Harris_backed_bill_ai.html
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/cats/katherine_harris/
http://www.tbo.com/news/metro/MGBM27UOPME.html
Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-IL)
http://www.beyonddelay.org/summaries/hastert.php
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/05/24/hastert-being-investigated-by-the-fbi/
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/05/federal_officia.html
http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/node/793
Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ)
http://www.beyonddelay.org/summaries/hayworth.php
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/1223hayworth23.html
http://www.jackinthehouse.org/characters/details.php?view=19
http://www.dccc.org/news/20050628_hayworth/
Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA)
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20051204-9999-1n4adcs.html
Rep. Steven LaTourette (R-OH),
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-02-10-abramoff_x.htm
Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA)
http://tpmmuckraker.com/lewis.php
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13191097/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/11/AR2006051101881.html
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/20051223-9999-lz1n23lewis.html
http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2006/05/wilkes_and_the_.html
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/cats/jerry_lewis/
Rep. Gary Miller (R-CA)
http://www.beyonddelay.org/summaries/miller.php
Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, (R-WV)
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/000824.php
Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO)
http://www.beyonddelay.org/summaries/musgrave.php
Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/28/AR2006042801879_pf.html
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/cats/bob_ney/
http://tpmmuckraker.com/ney.php
Rep. Richard W. Pombo (R-CA),
http://tpmmuckraker.com/pombo.php
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/29/washington/29pombo.html?ex=1303963200&en=e1f05b7b09e0f3d2&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
http://www.californiachronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=8078
http://www.beyonddelay.org/summaries/pombo.php
http://www.dccc.org/pombo/
Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ)
http://www.beyonddelay.org/node/94
Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/22/AR2006042200995.html?nav=rss_politics
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA),
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/01/10/rohrabacher-abramoff/
http://www.eritreadaily.net/News0306/article0306261.htm
Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH)
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/000506.php
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/08/24/rep_schmidts_marathon_ad_questioned/?rss_id=Boston.com+%2F+News+%2F+Nation
Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI)
http://www.citizensforethics.org/press/newsrelease.php?view=131
Rep. Don Sherwood (R-PA)
http://www.beyonddelay.org/summaries/sherwood.php
Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX),
http://www.citizensforethics.org/press/newsrelease.php?view=116
Rep. John Sweeney (R-NY
http://www.beyonddelay.org/summaries/sweeney.php
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/000158.php
Rep. Charles Taylor (R-NC)
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/cats/charles_taylor/
Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA)
http://www.beyonddelay.org/node/15
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/cats/curt_weldon/
http://www.harpers.org/sb-curt-weldon-kim-employment.html
Rep. Don Young (R-AK),
http://tpmmuckraker.com/young.php
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-02-10-abramoff_x.htm

SENATE SCANDALS:

Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT),
http://tpmmuckraker.com/burns.php
http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2006/04/23/news/state/25-post.txt
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12227763/site/newsweek/
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX)
http://tpmmuckraker.com/cornyn.php
Sen Bill Frist(R-TN)
http://thinkprogress.org/frist-stock-timeline/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/23/AR2005092301811.html
Sen Mel Martinez
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/001539.php
Sen Rick Santorum (R-PA)
http://www.citizensforethics.org/press/pressclip.php?view=1827
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=11174
Sen John Thune (R-SD)
http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2005/07/08/news/local/news04.txt
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=John_Thune
Sen George Voinovich (R-OH)
http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050403/NEWS24/504030349
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_bob_fitr_050731_dramatic_new_charges.htm

REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS:

Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/28/ap/politics/mainD8H8SGRG0.shtml
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/000496.php
Gov. Matt Blunt of Missouri
http://www.firedupmissouri.com/delayblunt
Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida
http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/node/878
Gov. Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/kentuckydocket.php#fletcher
Gov. John Rowland of Connecticut
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_13_56/ai_n13648239
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/john_g_rowland/index.html?inline=nyt-per
Gov. Bob Taft of Ohio
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_bob_fitr_050731_dramatic_new_charges.htm

DISHONORABLE MENTION:

Ralph Reed, '06 Lt. Gov. Candidate (R-Ga.)
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB114548590969830492-KX98zvSUWRHqye46SjeFOdagWUQ_20070419.html?mod=blogs
http://tpmmuckraker.com/reed.php
Ex-IL Gov. George Ryan Sr. (R)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0604180306apr18,1,6246344.story?coll=chi-news-hed
I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, Jr.
Assistant to the President, Chief of Staff to the Vice President
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=I._Lewis_Scooter_Libby
http://www.slate.com/id/2128530/
HUD Secretary Alfonso Jackson
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/09/AR2006050901593.html
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/05/10/jackson-unethical/
Interior Secretary Gale Norton
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/17/AR2005111701682.html
http://denverpostbloghouse.com/washington/?p=367
White House OMB Official David Safavian
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/19/AR2005091901859.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-10-05-official-indicted_x.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/20/AR2006062001626.html
White House Chief Domestic Policy Adviser Claude Allen
http://www.slate.com/id/2138116/fr/nl/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/24/AR2006042401825.html
Ex-FDA Commissioner Lester M. Crawford
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/29/washington/29fda.html?ex=1303963200&en=9c06cfc1730afb55&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
DHS Chief Financial Officer Nominee David Norquist
http://public.cq.com/public/20060508_homeland.html
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/000619.php
White House prostitute/shill Jeff Gannon/Jim Guckart
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27730-2005Feb15.html
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/02/man-called-jeff.html

DON'T FORGET TO VOTE ! ! !

Patriotism

2006-11-02T11:08:00.000-05:00

Ghost Busting

2006-11-01T11:46:00.000-05:00

Link

Like the 'Ghostbusters' of the silver screen, no story is too crazy for the nine volunteer ghost hunters who work for Paranormal Investigation of NYC.

'If there is evidence there, I want to be the one to find it,' said founder Dominick Villella.

Villella, who's been fascinated by the paranormal since childhood, met a group of like-minded individuals through the Internet three years ago.

Soon after meeting, they went beyond discussing the possibility of the paranormal to actively trying to prove its existence.

Now with a Web site, 24-hour hotline, and thousands of dollars worth of gear, Villella, 38, a stay-at-home Brooklyn dad, and his team of 'paranormal investigators' will look into any suspected haunting in the region for no charge at all.

Color by Numbers

2006-10-30T08:40:00.000-05:00

Link

Each of the 10 possible decimals of the number pi is displayed by a distinct colored pixel.

Googling Language

2006-10-29T22:01:00.000-05:00

Link

Google has launched an effort to keep people from using their name as an all-purpose verb. According to Michael Krantz on the Google blog, they still think that saying something like 'I googled it' is acceptable if it's the alternative to 'I looked it up on Google.' If you used some other search engine, however, 'google' as a verb is 'bad. Very, very bad,' writes Krantz. 'You can only 'Google' on the Google search engine. If you absolutely must use one of our competitors, please feel free to 'search' on Yahoo or any other search engine.'

Pardon me if I don't feel chastised for googling on yahoo. I'd rather celebrate and encourage the linguistic process that turns a name into a verb, and I think Google should too. Here's why.

The meanings of words expand and contract all the time, and one feature of English that makes the language particularly rich is how one part of speech can easily be made into another: verbs become nouns, nouns become verbs, nouns become adjectives. To some this is a messy clusterfrot; to others, it's a source of why English, and language in general, is productive and creative – and, some argue, one reason why English has such power as a global lingua franca.

Patriots Oppose Bush's War in Iraq

2006-10-25T14:26:00.000-04:00

Link

More than 200 active duty U.S. armed service members, fed up with the war in
Iraq, have joined an unusual protest calling for withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country, organizers said on Wednesday.

The campaign, called the Appeal for Redress from the War in Iraq, is the first of its kind in the Iraq war and takes advantage of Defense Department rules allowing active duty troops to express personal opinions to members of Congress without fear of retaliation, organizers said.

'As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq,' states the appeal posted on the campaign's Web site at www.appealforredress.org.

'Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home,' it adds.

Patriots Want to Impeach Bush

2006-10-25T13:37:00.000-04:00

Link

Other parts of a potential Democratic agenda receive less support, especially calls to impeach Bush: 47 percent of Democrats say that should be a “top priority,” but only 28 percent of all Americans say it should be, 23 percent say it should be a lower priority and nearly half, 44 percent, say it should not be done. (Five percent of Republicans say it should be a top priority and 15 percent of Republicans say it should be a lower priority; 78 percent oppose impeachment.)

Well . . . there THAT is

2006-10-20T12:37:00.000-04:00

Cloaking Device ON!

2006-10-19T18:12:00.000-04:00

Link

Scientists have created a cloaking device that can reroute certain wavelengths of light, forcing them around objects like water flowing around boulders in a stream. To creatures or machines that see only in microwave light, the cloaked object would appear nearly invisible.

'The microwaves come in and are swept around the cloak and reconstructed on the other side while avoiding the interior region,' said study team member David Smith at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering. 'So it looks as if they just passed through free space.'

The device [image] only works in the microwave range of light, so cloaked objects are still visible to humans. Also, it only works in two dimensions and only for microwaves moving in a plane. A three-dimensional invisibility cloak would hide an object completely.The microwave cloak is also slightly reflective and casts a partial shadow.

Despite these shortcomings, however, the new device is 'a very good achievement,' said Ulf Leonhardt, a theorist at the University of St. Andrews in England who was not involved in the study.

'It's surprising that it's as simple as it is and that it works so well,' Leonhardt said in a related news article about the work in the journal Science.

The achievement, reported online today by the journal, comes five months after the same team published a study detailing the precise mathematical specifications a needed to build such a cloaking device.

Who I am/Where I am

2006-10-18T17:39:00.000-04:00

My name is Lucas Benjaminh Krech. I am a Lighting Designer in New York City

I moved to New York five years ago for graduate school from Berkeley, CA. For the last two years I have split my time between New York and Oakland, CA. I am now based permanently in New York, although I seem to travel across the country to design and assist, wherever needed.

As of now I maintain two blogs. My blogger that is used for research and storage of articles that might be useful. Or when I am pissed off, politics and the horrible antics of our corrupt and illegal government. And then there is my LiveJournal for theorizing. This is almost exclusively theatre based, it is original creative theoretical writings.

I also maintain a portfolio where I have archival pictures of past shows and artist/design statements.

I have a Flickr account for hosting images on line.

I have a My Space account for general social networking and keeping track of friends. Friendster for the same, although few people seem to use it anymore.

I have another portfolio on a british website as well as my NYU Portfolio.

My del.icio.us account is used in fits and starts. Often depending on how much text research I am doing for a show as opposed to visual research.

I have an AIM/iChat account but I will not tell you my user name in a public forum.

Have a good day.

Oh, and as always, if you like what you read I can take donations

Goodbye Childhood

2006-10-18T11:20:00.000-04:00

Link

Tag, you're out! Officials at an elementary school south of Boston have banned kids from playing tag, touch football and any other unsupervised chase game during recess for fear they'll get hurt and hold the school liable.

Recess is 'a time when accidents can happen,' said Willett Elementary School Principal Gaylene Heppe, who approved the ban.

Bright Ideas

2006-10-17T11:11:00.000-04:00

Link

The light bulb is often used in cartoons to depict the formation of a great idea. We think that building LEDs into a bulb that can be screwed into a standard 120V light socket is a great idea. These LED Light Bulbs come in three different sizes with an output up to 120 Lumens. The bulbs are also long-life and low power consumption.

Vivid - This 18 LED light bulb makes an excellent high definition reading light. Perfect to help you not feel guilty about leaving an accent light on all night. Run it for twelve hours a day for a whole year at a cost of about 80 cents. Makes a great reading light.

Vivid Plus - Turn any household lamp into a low cost, high-tech marvel by installing the Vivid Plus LED Light Bulb. This ultra-bright light bulb shares the energy efficiency of the Vivid and casts a broader array of light. Particularly well suited for reading. 36 LEDs.

Spotlight - A money-saving LED bulb that fits your porch spotlights and the motion-sensor lights on your garage or roofline. Spotlight uses just 8 Watts of electricity to power 60 ultra-bright White LEDs. The light is ideal in pitch-black conditions, and casts the signature blue-white light that's as soothing as it is bright. On average, it will cost you just $4.00 per year to run this LED Spotlight in your home or workplace. Fits PAR 38 sized fixtures.

When Humans Go Away . . .

2006-10-14T12:20:00.000-04:00

Why Does George Bush Hate Freedom?

2006-10-13T10:13:00.000-04:00

Not your Grandma's cheapseats

2006-10-09T08:53:00.000-04:00

Link

The discounts, underwritten for the most part by corporate donors, are an effort to compete for leisure time with an increasing array of multimedia offerings and, in an era when patrons of the theater, opera and classical music are aging rapidly, to reach a younger, more diverse population.

“We’ve watched audiences decline in a rather alarming way and we have to do something to bring people back in,” said Paul Kellogg, the general and artistic director of City Opera. “The competition across generational lines is Netflix and pretty much anything on the Web, and we need to be active in getting people out of their houses and into a theater.”

Cheap tickets are one of the major weapons in the arsenal. The approach arrives at a time when arts institutions — from museums, where admission can go as high as $20, to the opera, to Broadway theaters, where $100 is now the benchmark — have been criticized for increasing prices even though their costs keep going up. Ticket sales declined precipitously after 9/11 and have never been as dependable since. Subscription sales have also fallen as more people forgo advance purchases for last-minute plans.

The Met’s $20 ticket program is part of a larger effort by the new general manager, Peter Gelb, to throw wide the doors of the opera house. A free open dress rehearsal with brown-bag lunch last month was followed by a populist opening night — with the gala performance of “Madama Butterfly” simulcast free on large screens on the Lincoln Center Plaza and in Times Square.

“The goal is to broaden our audience and to fill the house,” Mr. Gelb said. “The average age was 65 when I arrived.”

At all of these institutions, box office response has been overwhelming. The Signature’s $15 tickets — which normally go for $55 — sold out within the first 48 hours for August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running,” which begins on Nov. 7. City Center’s six-day dance festival sold out in three days last year, so the program was extended to 10 days this year; more than half of the 2006 festival’s 27,530 tickets sold in a single day.

“We were all amazed that out of the woodwork these people came roaring up,” said Norman Peck, the president of the Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, one of the festival’s sponsors, “and they’re just the kind of people you want to get.”

“If you don’t do something, you’ll be left with guys who have false teeth and white hair,” added Mr. Peck, whose foundation also supports Opera-for-All. “Eventually, they’ll all die and you’ll have nothing.”

In the first year of City Opera’s Opera-for-All — which includes introductory videos before the performance — 71 percent of the audience had never been to City Opera before, and the two performances sold out. Of those who attended, 11 percent came back to the series this year, Mr. Kellogg said, a significant return, given that direct mail efforts typically average 0.1 percent to 3 percent response.

This season, City Opera obtained e-mail addresses and other contact information from everyone who bought a $25 ticket; 90 percent had never been in the data base before, something that Mr. Kellogg called “one of the most encouraging and astounding statistics I’ve seen at City Opera in a long, long time.”

Beam Me Up

2006-10-06T23:54:00.000-04:00

Link

Beaming people in 'Star Trek' fashion is still in the realms of science fiction, but physicists in Denmark have teleported information from light to matter bringing quantum communication and computing closer to reality.

Until now scientists have teleported similar objects such as light or single atoms over short distances from one spot to another in a split second.

But Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have made a breakthrough by using both light and matter.

'It is one step further because for the first time it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects. One is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium,' Polzik explained in an interview on Wednesday.

The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further.

'Teleportation between two single atoms had been done two years ago by two teams, but this was done at a distance of a fraction of a millimeter,' Polzik, of the Danish National Research Foundation Center for Quantum Optics, explained.

'Our method allows teleportation to be taken over longer distances because it involves light as the carrier of entanglement,' he added.

Understanding the current state of politics in America

2006-10-06T00:56:00.001-04:00

This is a good read.

I just don't understand

2006-10-04T23:17:00.000-04:00

Why does George Bush support pedophiles?

Why does George Bush purposefully and materially support the goals of the terrorists?

Why does Dick Cheney hate America?

Better than Robots

2006-10-02T01:27:00.000-04:00

Link

When paleontologists find fossilized dinosaur bones during a dig, they usually do everything in their power to protect them, using tools like toothbrushes to carefully unearth the bones without inflicting any damage. However, when scientists found a massive Tyrannosaurus rex thigh bone in a remote region of Montana a few months ago, they were forced to break the bone in two in order to fit it into the transport helicopter. This act of necessity revealed a startling surprise: soft tissue that had seemingly resisted fossilization still existed inside the bone. This tissue, including blood vessels, bone cells, and perhaps even blood cells, was so well preserved that it was still stretchy and flexible.

A scanning electron microscope revealed that the dinosaur blood vessels, which are 70 million years old, are virtually identical to those recovered from modern ostrich bones. The ostrich is today’s largest bird, and many paleontologists believe that birds are the living descendants of dinosaurs. Scientists may be able to confirm this evolutionary relationship if they can isolate certain proteins from the recently discovered T. rex tissue. These proteins could also help solve another puzzle: whether dinosaurs were cold-blooded like other reptiles or warm-blooded like mammals.

Does this discovery of soft dinosaur tissue mean that scientists will soon be able to clone a Tyrannosaurus rex? Probably not – most scientists believe that DNA cannot survive for 70 million years. Then again, before this discovery, most scientists believed that soft tissue could not survive for 70 million years either.

Spirals=Awesome

2006-09-26T11:18:00.000-04:00

Click here now.

The Zombie Chorus

2006-09-17T13:28:00.000-04:00

From The Children

Word

2006-09-14T22:11:00.000-04:00

Link

A stone block from Mexico thousands of years old apparently inscribed with a previously unknown writing may be the oldest text in the New World, an international team of archaeologists said today.

This find lights the hope of future discoveries of written records detailing the Olmecs, the likely creators of the block and the ancient civilization that in many respects was the progenitor of all later complex societies in Mesoamerica, such as the Maya and the Aztecs.

'This reveals the Olmecs, in many ways the first civilization in a vast part of the ancient Americas, were literate, which we did not know for sure before, and hints that they were capable of the same large-scale organization assisted by writing like you saw in early Mesopotamia or Egypt,' researcher Stephen Houston, an archaeologist at Brown University in Providence, R.I., told LiveScience.

'It ratchets up what we might find about them in terms of all the concepts that can be recorded in written form, like rituals and economics and politics, sequences of kings,' he added. 'And it suggests the groups that followed that we knew were literate may not have developed writing on their own.'

Competative Philanthropy

2006-09-14T09:02:00.000-04:00

Link

The ambitious founders of Google, the popular search engine company, have set up a philanthropy, giving it seed money of about $1 billion and a mandate to tackle poverty, disease and global warming.

But unlike most charities, this one will be for-profit, allowing it to fund start-up companies, form partnerships with venture capitalists and even lobby Congress. It will also pay taxes.

One of its maiden projects reflects the philanthropy’s nontraditional approach. According to people briefed on the program, the organization, called Google.org, plans to develop an ultra-fuel-efficient plug-in hybrid car engine that runs on ethanol, electricity and gasoline.

The philanthropy is consulting with hybrid-engine scientists and automakers, and has arranged for the purchase of a small fleet of cars with plans to convert the engines so that their gas mileage exceeds 100 miles per gallon. The goal of the project is to reduce dependence on oil while alleviating the effects of global warming.

Theories

2006-09-11T13:26:00.000-04:00

Link

'After studying this fairly intensively over the past 2 1/2 years,' says Barrett in a phone interview, 'I'm convinced that 9/11 was orchestrated by top U.S. officials and presumably perpetrated by members of what could be called the American allied intelligence community.'

Little Electrical Doodads

2006-09-10T19:04:00.000-04:00

Link

The Millennium Technology Prize is the world's largest technology award, equivalent to the Nobel Prizes for science. It recognises technological developments that have a positive impact on quality of life and sustainable development.

It is awarded every two years. The first prize, awarded in 2004, was presented to Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web.

Receiving the award, Professor Nakamura said: 'I hope the award of this prize will help people to understand that this invention makes it possible to improve quality of life for many millions of people.

"This is not just a source of light that makes enormous energy savings possible, it is also an innovation that can be used in the sterilisation of drinking water and for storing data in much more efficient ways."

As LEDs are more robust than traditional lightbulbs and use relatively little power they can easily be combined with solar panels to provide lighting in remote areas of developing countries.

Food for Robots

2006-09-10T18:41:00.000-04:00

Link

China has launched a satellite carrying fruit and vegetable as part of a plan to help develop space-enhanced produce to feed the country's 1.3 billion people.

Derrida on Blanchot

2006-09-01T10:46:00.000-04:00

There was no signer, by right, before the Declaration [of Independence], which itself remains the producer and guarantor of its own signature . . . The self rises forth here or extends credit to itself, in a single "coup de force," which is also a stroke of writing, as the right to writing. The "coup de force" makes right , founds right or law, gives right, brings the law to the light of day, gives both birth and day to the law. Brings the law to the light of day, gives both birth and day to the law: read The Madness of Day by Maurice Blanchot.
-Jacques Derrida, Negotiations

First Law Redux

2006-08-31T08:38:00.000-04:00

Link

The yearlong research, being conducted in a house near Hatfield, England, involves a 4-foot-tall, silver-headed robot, The Guardian reported.

The robot has no name. "Once you name them then people will put gender associations on them, which is a big problem," researcher Kheng Lee Koay told the newspaper.

The study indicates people become uneasy when the robot comes too close or approaches directly from in front. And the volunteers say they strongly dislike it when the robot moves behind them.

A conference on human-robot interaction will be next week at the University of Hertfordshire and one suggestion to be considered is offered by a Japanese robotics expert, Shuji Hashimoto, The Guardian noted.

He suggests ignoring Isaac Asimov's famous "first law of robotics," which states a robot should be programmed never to harm a human, either deliberately or by inaction.

Hashimoto says robots should be given the ability to make decisions and even harm humans if necessary.

"The philosophy of Asimov is too human-centered," says Hashimoto.

This Week for Pisces

2006-08-30T20:51:00.000-04:00

Pisces

If you're alert, people whose magic you had become deadened to will reveal stirring secrets. Places you've visited a thousand times may seem to have undergone an overnight transformation, exposing you to a series of mini-awakenings that ultimately add up to a full-blown aha. You may find yourself penetrating to the heart of mysteries that you previously didn't even realize were mysteries. By week's end, if you're brave enough to keep welcoming the surprises, you will be ripped free from an especially sneaky illusion and reunited with a lost fragment of your soul.

Public Service Announcement

2006-08-24T21:29:00.000-04:00

Link

Focus on the Family, the horrid anti-gay evangelical church based in Colorado Springs that wields too much power for anyone's good, has a store on their website that will give you books, CDs, and DVDs absolutely free of charge. Usually people pay for their items by donation, raising millions of dollars to help Focus on the Family produce more hate-propaganda featuring "experts" on homosexuality who claim it's a curable "sickness". (They're practically defined by their book A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. Course, there's no mention of having less kids, which is the only proven method. No, no, you shouldn't use birth control, that would be wrong. They need more worshippers, how dare you prevent god's will.)

It's a little bit time-consuming, but not enough to deter me. (Nor should it you). The chance to take money out of their pockets is too useful, not to mention satisfying.

Here's how to do it in 10 steps:

1. Go to www.family.org and look for the "Resources" link in the blue bar on the left-hand side, right above the "Search" box, and click it.

2. Under the "Resource Category" menu on the left-hand side, you'll notice categories such as "Homosexuality" under "Resource Category." Me, I went straight to the CD's and DVD's under "Resource Format."

3. Go through, find something you like, such as the recently released movie, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or The Chronicles of Narnia Radio Theatre Complete Set, suggested donation US $79.00, or the three disc Les Misérables soundtrack. It's not a very wide range of products, but there's bound to be something either you like or you could use as a sweet gift for someone else. Click the "Add to Cart" button.

They won't send more than $100 worth of materials for free in any given shopping trip, so be sure to go through a few times, until you're sure you've dinged them.

4. Select "Add New Shipping Address," decide to send it yourself or someone else, and once you're done picking up to $100, click "Proceed to Checkout." Some people have been sending items to themselves to sell later on eBay, some have been ordering the more controversial items as conversation pieces or educational props, (as anti-anti-propaganda), but I plan on using mine as gifts, mostly. I've found no reports on receiving Focus on the Family junk mail after inputting an address, so I figure it's fairly safe.

5. The next screen asks you to sign-up for an account and give your information. Fill it out with fictitious information, enter whatever name and address you like. You might want to make up a phone number too and an e-mail account too. After filling out all the required fields, click "Proceed to Checkout" one more time.

6. This will take you to the "Here is Your Cart" page. You may have to re-enter your data again after this part to actually confirm your account. Eventually, you'll get to the "How Much Would You Like to Donate?" page.

7. Select "Enter other total amount" and enter 0.00 as the amount you would like to pay. (Don't put in a dollar sign or it will ask you for credit-card information.) Don't be fooled by the field in the lower-right-hand corner that shows you the suggested donation amounts, simply Proceed to Checkout.

8. The next screen is a guilt screen, to make you feel bad about how little you donated. ignore it. Ignore it utterly. Think of how many people they're persecuted and had in their "gay kids can be cured" camps. Just proceed to checkout again.

9. Click "Checkout Now."

10. Finally, pass this information on to all your friends. They've got money to back them, we have word of mouth, let's see if we can win.

Montezuma's Revenge

2006-08-23T20:57:00.000-04:00

Link

Evo Morales has a new ally in his quest to promote Indian languages — U.S. software giant Microsoft Corp. — which is teaming up with the Bolivian president for the local debut of Windows and Office software in the Andean tongue of Quechua.

Morales, elected in December as the country's first Indian president, will join local Microsoft executives on Friday in the colonial city of Sucre for the programs' Bolivia launch.

'The translation of these technologies into Quechua helps to re-value the language so that it will not be lost over time,' Javier Medrano, spokesman for Microsoft's Bolivia operations, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The boddhisatva of pop music

2006-08-19T10:09:00.000-04:00

Link

Free your mind, and your ass will follow, as St. George (Clin’in) so famously said…but the key is to first free your mind. As a liberated psyche, your job is to funk the kids into recognition of the primal truth that they are not separate from the universe around them; not a focal point, but merely another point, if there’s anything “merely” about the astonishing set of circumstances chemical, physical and evolutionary that has led evolved primates to go out on a Friday night and shake they asses in the pursuit of sex, love and money. And the highest form of art — whether it be music, movies, the designing of virtual worlds or even, God help us, street performance — is to reconcile the stimulation of the forebrain and backbrain, to engage the mind and the ass in motion, to unify our minds and our bodies in one joyful, spasmic act.

Anything else isn’t really worth the effort anymore, is it?

Creative Recognition

2006-08-18T09:13:00.000-04:00

Link

Another way of saying this: I may not know what you look like, but I can recognize when I see it... and when I don't. And a series of those recognitions can lead to a surprisingly acute representation of your face. As a musician, I work very much the same way. I can't specify in advance what I want something to sound like, but when I start listening to sounds I can very quickly reject the 'wrong' ones and select the 'right' ones. If you asked me to justify each decision I'd have a hard time explaining why those things are wrong or right, but my quickfire certainty is a big part of the way I operate as an artist. Nope, nope, nope, YES. Why? No idea.

Take the A-Train to Fashion

2006-08-17T17:13:00.000-04:00

It's research, because I am lighting a zombie musical set in the 80's.

Fifth Noble Truth?

2006-08-17T16:04:00.000-04:00

Link

Protesters calling for an end to recent violence in Sri Lanka found themselves brawling with hardline Buddhist monks Thursday, after a rally dubbed a 'peace protest' turned unexpectedly violent.

Organizers said there were around 1,000 people in a park in the capital, Colombo, listening to a range of speakers when hardline saffron-robed monks opposed to concessions to Tamil Tiger rebels mounted the stage and erected banners.

Some more moderate Buddhist monks, protesting for peace, were already on the stage when punches were thrown. Soon, monks' robes and fists were flying, although no one was badly hurt, witnesses said.

Wake Up!

2006-08-17T14:17:00.000-04:00

Link

The finding, published last week in the journal Neuroscience, changes the way scientists understand nitric oxide's role in the brain, and it also has them rethinking the function of the thalamus, where it is released. The thalamus was thought to be a fairly primitive structure, sort of a gate that could either open and allow sensory information to stream into the cortex, the higher functioning part of the brain, or cut off the flow entirely.

Godwin says the new research shows it's more accurate to think of the thalamus not as a gate but as a club bouncer, who doesn't simply allow a huge rush of people to go in or no one at all, but picks and chooses whom to let in and out.

"Instead of vision being a process going straight from eye to cortex, it's more of a loop," Godwin explained. "This constitutes a new role for the thalamus in directing, not just modulating."

While this study is the first to identify nitric oxide's role in the thalamus, elsewhere in the body it was already known to have an important, if somewhat different function. The molecule is actually integral to controlling blood flow and is, in fact, the molecule Viagra targets in order to increase blood flow to the penis.

Novelty makes you learn

2006-08-14T11:26:00.000-04:00

Link

In a second set of oddball experiments, the researchers sought to determine whether the SN/VTA encodes the magnitude of novelty. In those experiments, the researchers measured activation of the region by images of different levels of familiarity or novelty. In yet other studies, the researchers assessed whether the subjects' memory of familiar images was better when presented along with novel images or very familiar images.

The researchers found that the SN/VTA does, indeed, respond to novelty, and these response scales according to how novel the image was. They concluded that their data provide evidence for 'a functional hippocampal-SN/VTA loop' that is driven by novelty rather than other forms of stimulus salience such as emotional content or the need to respond to an image.

The researchers said their finding that the SN/VTA is more activated by greater novelty is compatible with models of brain function 'that see novelty as a motivating bonus to explore an environment in the search for reward rather than being a reward itself.'

Also, Bunzeck and Duzel found that novelty enhanced learning in the subjects. 'Thus, the human SN/VTA can code absolute stimulus novelty and might contribute to enhanced learning in the context of novelty,' they concluded.

Interrupted NY Times

2006-08-14T10:09:00.000-04:00

Link

In the 1920's, the Russian scientist Bluma Zeigarnik performed an experiment that illustrated an intriguing aspect of interruptions. She had several test subjects work on jigsaw puzzles, then interrupted them at various points. She found that the ones least likely to complete the task were those who had been disrupted at the beginning. Because they hadn't had time to become mentally invested in the task, they had trouble recovering from the distraction. In contrast, those who were interrupted toward the end of the task were more likely to stay on track.

Gloria Mark compares this to the way that people work when they are 'co-located' - sitting next to each other in cubicles - versus how they work when they are 'distributed,' each working from different locations and interacting online. She discovered that people in open-cubicle offices suffer more interruptions than those who work remotely. But they have better interruptions, because their co-workers have a social sense of what they are doing. When you work next to other people, they can sense whether you're deeply immersed, panicking or relatively free and ready to talk - and they interrupt you accordingly.

Don't Look

2006-08-11T10:44:00.000-04:00

This is certainly not for the faint of heart. But if you enjoy the aesthetics of body modification it is truly beautiful.

Political Consumerism

2006-08-08T17:05:00.000-04:00

Here is a good guide on where to shop for the politically minded. I've posted this before, but it bears repeating.

On Free Elections

2006-08-04T15:33:00.000-04:00

Link

'Socialism is superior to capitalism. It's much more humane,' said retiree Luis Poey, 66, whose last job was delivering food to workers in Old Havana.

These Cubans even defend their system as a democracy in which the National Assembly and provincial and city leaders are directly elected. Assembly members then elect one of their own to be president of the country — Castro, a representative from the eastern city of Santiago, has repeatedly won out.

Castro's critics say the notion that Cuba is democratic is a farce — that tight state control, a heavy police presence and neighborhood-watch groups reporting on 'anti-revolutionary' conduct prevent any real political freedom.

Some Cubans retort that a system allowing
President Bush to 'steal' elections and wage wars without the people's support is certainly more flawed than their own.

Consevative Culture

2006-08-04T14:13:00.000-04:00

Link

Ask a conservative activist to explain what anchors and unites their fractious movement, and he will point to ideas: to weighty tomes by Eric Voegelin, Russell Kirk, Wilhelm Roepke, Edmund Burke; to the development of the philosophy of 'fusionism,' by which the furrow-browed theorists at National Review cogitated their way past the conflicts between the traditionalist, libertarian, and anti-communist strains of the American right. They will make it sound almost as if the 87 percent of Mississippians who voted for Barry Goldwater did so after a stretch of all-nighters in the library.

They will not mention an illustration popular among college conservatives in the 1960s: a peace symbol-shaped B-52 bomber with the words 'Drop It' on the wings. Nor will they discuss the annual 'McCarthy-Evjue' lecture that student conservatives in Wisconsin (among them, present-day right-wing luminaries David Keene of the American Conservative Union and Alfred Regnery, formerly of Regnery Publishing) put on to honor their favorite Wisconsin senator and to mock William Evjue, the editor of the Madison newspaper William F. Buckley labeled 'Prairie Pravda.' (They advertised the lecture on pink paper.) They will not mention the Southern Californians who flocked to church basements, high school auditoriums, and VFW halls to hear hellfire-and-brimstone lecturers like World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker, author of The Socialistic Sixteenth — A National Cancer, or the Reverend Billy James Hargis ('Is the Schoolhouse the Proper Place To Teach Raw Sex?').

And they certainly will not mention the John Birch Society meetings in suburban parlors nationwide, in which chapters no bigger than two dozen members — a cell structure ostensibly to prevent Red infiltration but that, as it happened, was also the ideal size for a cocktail party — plotted how to forestall the Communist takeover of the PTAs by taking them over first. 'I just don't have time for anything," a Dallas housewife told Time in 1961. "I’m fighting Communism three nights a week."

They will not mention, in short, the extraordinary role the development of a self-contained and self-conscious conservative culture played in transforming the politics of the United States. One way to define "culture" is not as a set of ideas or a static social code, but rather as the performances people enact in their everyday lives that outline the boundaries between those who belong and those who don't. "Culture" is the set of practices that reminds each individual within the group that they are normal and correct, that their beliefs are natural and true.

Evolving Evolution

2006-08-03T15:40:00.000-04:00

Link

In a state primary election, Kansas voters have ousted two radical conservative school board members who opposed teaching evolution in schools.

The result of the 1 August election guarantees that the Kansas state school board will be transformed in January 2007 from one that mainly opposes the teaching of evolution to one that has majority support for it.

'I am thrilled,' says Janet Waugh, a pro-evolution school board member and Democrat who lives in Kansas City and won her primary on Tuesday. 'The people of Kansas are tired of being the laughing stock of not just the nation, but the world.'

Although the election was a primary and not a general election, the result ensures that two of the school board's six anti-evolution members will not stand in the general election in November 2006.

As both the Republican and Democrat candidates for those seats are now very likely to be pro-evolution, the result of the general election should be immaterial: at least six out of 10 school board members will be pro evolution when the current school board hands over in January 2007.

'The only thing that can happen is for things to get better for us,' says Jack Krebs of Kansas Citizens For Science, a non-profit group that seeks to educate the public about evolution.

Outstanding News

2006-07-19T11:43:00.000-04:00

I have been nominated for Outstanding Lighting Design for Cupid and Psyche by the Innovative Theatre Awards. My fellow designer on the show (and NYU alum) Michael Moore was also nominated for Outstanding Set Design. He is a fabulous designer and infinitely pleasant to work with. One of the most cheerful under pressure personalities I have ever encountered. His work was truly fantastic on the show. I sadly do not have any pictures of Cupid and Psyche yet, so if you did not see it you will have to imagine.

More in my LiveJournal

Don't Touch

2006-07-19T11:30:00.000-04:00

The video is awesome. Ha!

Architectural Tetris

2006-07-14T14:47:00.000-04:00

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As Vanderbilt explains, the 'V' and the 'M' building shapes only entered into the design process after the architects 'experimented with any number of permutations, the totality of which – collected on a display board – looks like some strange alphabet. They eventually settled on fashioning the south-facing block into a V and the north-facing block into an M. 'By bending the shapes,' Ingels says, 'you open up the maximum toward the two canals, which ensures that the apartments, instead of just looking at one another, all have orientation toward the landscape.' It also ensures that both evening and morning sun can enter the courtyard. The move shatters what would be a dense rectilinearity into a kind of crystalline parallax-view refraction of light and circulation.'
The whole complex was also finished with very tastefully bold, solid neo-Modernist colors. These eye-popping central corridors will, at the very least, wake you up every morning as you stumble out the door for work.

I Love My Hometown

2006-06-28T17:44:00.000-04:00

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The People's Republic of Berkeley has done it again.

The liberal, left-leaning city has become the first city in the nation to put a referendum on the Nov. 7 ballot to impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Anti-war mom Cindy Sheehan and Daniel Ellsberg, a Vietnam whistle-blower who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, both spoke in favor of the resolution at Tuesday's City Council meeting.

``Berkeley is a place where things begin,'' said Mayor Tom Bates. ``It was the first place in the nation that called for divestment from South Africa, it was the first city in the nation to have curb cuts for disabled people, we were the first city in the nation to have dog parks and the first city in the nation to really protest the Vietnam War,'' Bates said.

Let's not forget banning Styrofoam take-out containers in restaurants.

``What happens in Berkeley people need to pay attention to because it travels, it has legs... what happens in Berkeley today is conventional wisdom in the rest of the country tomorrow,'' Bates said.

Freedom of Access

2006-06-27T14:47:00.000-04:00

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A Spanish firm is to sell subsidised routers as part of a plan to turn domestic wi-fi networks into public hotspots.

Fon will sell wi-fi routers, which allow people to surf the net wirelessly, for $5 (£2.75).

The company, which has financial backing from Google and Skype, aims to create public wi-fi networks street by street across the US and Europe.

'Wi-fi is universal in cities, but access isn't,' said Juergen Urbanski.

Mr Urbanski said Fon was aiming to have 50,000 working hotspots worldwide by September, 150,000 by year-end and one million hotspots by the end of 2007.

[SNIP]

The company is hoping to create a 'social movement' as well as a business.

The router offer is designed to overcome obstacles to helping consumers quickly set up hotspots using Fon software.

In exchange for receiving a router, users must agree to share their wireless connections with other Fon users for 12 months, the company said.

Users register their router with Fon via a PC which then lets other people access their wi-fi network safely - if they can pick up the signals from outside their homes.

Who I am/Where I am - On the Globe and In the Network

2006-06-27T13:06:00.000-04:00

As of now I maintain two blogs. My blogger that is used for research and storage of articles that might be useful. Or when I am pissed off, politics and the horrible antics of our corrupt and illegal government. And then there is my LiveJournal for theorizing. This is almost exclusively theatre based, it is original creative theoretical writings.

I am curious of the readers of these if it would be useful to merge the two. It seems, based on my own blog reading, that there is a preference for the blogger type blog. I use the two for different purposes and each one is suited to its own purpose quite well. The 'blog this' functions of blogger integrates into Firefox quite well and makes it easy to grab bits of articles and post links. LiveJournal allows for comment threads, which I love for conversations as it can keep two divergent trains of thought going simultaneously without getting muddled.

If I do not hear anything back from the readers I will assume the status quo is good enough.

While I am at it I also maintain a portfolio where I have archival pictures of past shows and artist/design statements.

I have a Flickr account for hosting images on line.

I have a My Space account for general social networking and keeping track of friends. Friendster for the same, although few people seem to use it anymore.

I have another portfolio on a british website as well as my NYU Portfolio.

My del.icio.us account is used in fits and starts. Often depending on how much text research I am doing for a show as opposed to visual research.

I have an AIM/iChat account but I will not tell you my user name in a public forum.

I moved to New York five years ago for graduate school from Berkeley, CA. For the last two years I have split my time between New York and Oakland, CA. I am now based permanently in New York, although I seem to travel across the country to design and assist, wherever needed.

I have an amazing girlfriend who will be moving to New York from Oakland this fall around our two year anniversary.

How is that for Web 2.0 meets Bio 2.0?

Have a good day.

Oh, and as always, if you like what you read I can take donations

Brand/Identity

2006-06-26T18:07:00.000-04:00

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A while ago, I was designing the identity for a large, fashion-oriented organization. It was time to decide which typeface we'd use for their name. Opinions were not hard to come by: this was the kind of place where people were not unused to exercising their visual connoisseurship. But a final decision was elusive.

We decided to recommend a straightforward sans serif font. Predictably, this recommendation was greeted by complaints: it was too generic, too mechanical, too unstylish, too unrefined. I had trouble responding until I added two more elements to the presentation. The first was a medium weight, completely bland, sans serif 'C.' 'Does this look stylish to you?' I would ask. 'Does it communicate anything about fashion or taste?' Naturally, the answer was no.

Then I would show the same letter as it usually appears as the first in a six-letter sequence: CHANEL. 'Now what do you think?'

It worked every time. But how?

The answer, of course, is context. The lettering in the Chanel logo is neutral, blank, open-ended: what we see when we look at it is eight decades' worth of accumulated associations. In the world of identity design, very few designs mean anything when they're brand new. A good logo, according to Paul Rand, provides the 'pleasure of recognition and the promise of meaning.' The promise, of course, is only fulfilled over time. 'It is only by association with a product, a service, a business, or a corporation that a logo takes on any real meaning,' Rand wrote in 1991. 'It derives its meaning and usefulness from the quality of that which it symbolizes.'

Where are the Theatres

2006-06-24T14:30:00.000-04:00

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Time for a pop quiz: Name three important arts institutions that are not in (a) New York City or (b) the place where you live.

I recently asked this question of 20 art-conscious friends all across the U.S. Between them, they listed 42 different institutions, seven of which received more than one vote. Most frequently cited was the Art Institute of Chicago, with four votes.

Only five of them mentioned a theater company.

Time is a Cultural Construct

2006-06-13T13:55:00.001-04:00

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The linguistic evidence seems, on the surface, clear: The Aymara language recruits “nayra,” the basic word for “eye,” “front” or “sight,” to mean “past” and recruits “qhipa,” the basic word for “back” or “behind,” to mean “future.” So, for example, the expression “nayra mara” – which translates in meaning to “last year” – can be literally glossed as “front year.”
[Snip]
These findings suggest that cognition of such everyday abstractions as time is at least partly a cultural phenomenon,” Nunez said. “That we construe time on a front-back axis, treating future and past as though they were locations ahead and behind, is strongly influenced by the way we move, by our dorsoventral morphology, by our frontal binocular vision, etc. Ultimately, had we been blob-ish amoeba-like creatures, we wouldn’t have had the means to create and bring forth these concepts.

“But the Aymara counter-example makes plain that there is room for cultural variation. With the same bodies – the same neuroanatomy, neurotransmitters and all – here we have a basic concept that is utterly different,” he said.

Why, however, is not entirely certain. One possibility, Nunez and Sweetser argue, is that the Aymara place a great deal of significance on whether an event or action has been seen or not seen by the speaker.

A “simple” unqualified statement like “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” is not possible in Aymara – the sentence would necessarily also have to specify whether the speaker had personally witnessed this or was reporting hearsay.

In a culture that privileges a distinction between seen/unseen – and known/unknown – to such an extent as to weave “evidential” requirements inextricably into its language, it makes sense to metaphorically place the known past in front of you, in your field of view, and the unknown and unknowable future behind your back.

Though that may be an initial explanation – and in line with the observation, the researchers write, that “often elderly Aymara speakers simply refused to talk about the future on the grounds that little or nothing sensible could be said about it” – it is not sufficient, because other cultures also make use of similar evidential systems and yet still have a future ahead.

Inconstant Light

2006-06-11T16:40:00.000-04:00

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Physical quantities such as the speed of light, the gravitational constant and the electron mass are believed to be the same independent of where and when they appear in the universe.

Therefore, they are known as constants of nature. Should they deviate from their actual values the universe would have looked different and neither man nor other living organisms would have existed.

But imagine that the fundamental constants – and thereby also the fundamental laws – are not at all constant but have gradually changed over time. Implications that this is the case have been known for some time and are now supported by new measurements – for instance from Lund University, Sweden.

The constants are so fundamental that it is usually impossible to detect any possible changes since the tools we use to measure these changes are also changing. For instance, if the size of the atoms would increase the atoms in the measuring device would also increase to the same extent and everything would appear normal.

But there are dimensionless constants, i.e. they are independent of units. On April 21 this year new findings were published in Physical Review Letters implying that a dimensionless constant – the ratio between the electron mass and the proton mass – has changed with time.

Morality and war

2006-06-09T14:40:00.000-04:00

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In a rare case of officer dissent, a Fort Lewis Army lieutenant has refused orders to head out to Iraq this month to lead troops in what he believes is an illegal war of occupation.

1st Lt. Ehren Watada was scheduled to make his first deployment to Iraq this month. His refusal to accompany the Stryker brigade troops puts him at risk of court martial and years of prison time.

'I feel that we have been lied to and betrayed by this administration,' Watada said Tuesday in a telephone interview from Fort Lewis. 'It is the duty, the obligation of every soldier, and specifically the officers, to evaluate the legality, the truth behind every order — including the order to go to war.'

In a statement released today, Watada said the 'war in Iraq violates our democratic system of checks and balances.

'It usurps international treaties and conventions that by virtue of the Constitution become American law. The wholesale slaughter and mistreatment of the Iraqi people with only limited accountability is not only a terrible moral injustice, but a contradiction to the Army's own Law of Land Warfare. My participation would make me party to war crimes.'

First Law

2006-05-26T12:47:00.000-04:00

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Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is working on a new set of safety guidelines for next-generation robots. This set of regulations would constitute a first attempt at a formal version of the first of Asimov's science-fictional Laws of Robotics, or at least the portion that states that humans shall not be harmed by robots.

Californians Age Well

2006-05-25T23:26:00.000-04:00

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Thirty years ago, nine French wine experts shocked the world -- and themselves -- when they ranked certain California wines above their French counterparts in a blind taste test that came to be called, notoriously, 'The Judgment of Paris.' The French defended their belles dames at the time by sniping that the young west-coast wines wouldn't age well. 'Our wines will improve with time,' they sniffed. So the Briton who organized the Paris contest mounted a thirtieth-anniversary re-enactment on Wednesday in London and California, to see how time had treated the wines. Results? In brief: California smacks down France -- again!

Activate Cloaking Devices

2006-05-25T23:17:00.000-04:00

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Imagine making a hole in space the right size to fit a desired object. 'This hole is akin to one that can be opened up in a woven cloth by sticking a pointed object between the threads and compressing the fibers radially outward,' Schurig explained. 'In essence, the electromagnetic fields are confined to the 'threads of the cloth' and cannot reach an object placed in the 'hole.' Outside the compressed region the 'threads' and the fields are returned to their original paths, undisturbed.'

The key ingredients for cloaking devices are compounds known as metamaterials. Metamaterials that deal with light are made of structures smaller than the length of a wave of light -- if the structures were larger, they would scatter the light instead of guide it. Red light has a wavelength of roughly 650 nanometers or billionths of a meter, while blue light has a wavelength of about 475 nanometers. Radio waves, microwaves and infrared waves have longer wavelengths than visible light while ultraviolet rays, X-rays and gamma rays have shorter ones.

Net Neutrality Bill

2006-05-25T23:11:00.000-04:00

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The Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2006 introduced by House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., R-Wis., and ranking member John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., last week seeks to prohibit broadband providers from favoring one provider's Web traffic or their own content over another's by ensuring faster downloads to companies that pay a tax, thus creating a two-tier system.

And so it begins

2006-05-24T02:18:00.000-04:00

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Seven fifty-five p.m. A moment, in theater, of whispered anticipation, of studying Playbills, of turning off cellphones. And a perfect time, before a performance of 'Stomp' at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village last night, for a commercial.

Creative Freedom

2006-05-17T14:21:00.000-04:00

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Creation is simply a mode of existence. Human beings are essentially creative but our creativity is stifled by the false authority of education and media that tell us how to think, tell us our impulses are incorrect or invalid or futile. We must approach creativity as a collaborative process of mutual exploration. There is no end goal, no ideas of progress or success or failure. There is only motion, interaction, curiosity and play. The idea is not to 'change the world' ; the world is in a constant state of change. The idea is to direct this change in a way that allows human beings to recognize the reality of their freedom, creativity, and collaboration in the whole process.

A New Scientist Subscrption Would Rock My World

2006-05-12T22:34:00.000-04:00

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COLIN BAIN hands me goggles as protection against the blinding power of his infrared laser, then pulls back the heavy blackout curtains that hide his experiment. This is where Bain makes matter.

In front of us is a solid metal worktop covered with lenses, prisms and mirrors. Bain's laser sits at one end, poised to fire along this optical obstacle course, which ends at a microscope that we are peering through. In the field of view is a slide containing a sample of water spiked with the building blocks of Bain's matter. Through the microscope, they look like fleas in motion, flitting from one location to another. In reality, they are polystyrene beads a few hundred nanometres across being buffeted by water molecules.

Republicans Chime in

2006-05-12T13:27:00.000-04:00

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Katrina, Harriet Myers, The Dubai Port Deal, skyrocketing gas prices, shrinking wages for working people, staggering debt, astronomical foreign debt, outsourcing, open borders, contempt for the opinion of the American people, the war on science, media manipulation, faith based initives, a cavalier attitude toward fundamental freedoms-- this President has run the most arrogant and out-of-touch administration in my lifetime, perhaps, in any American’s lifetime.

You can make a case that Abraham Lincoln did what he had to do, the public be damned. If you roll the dice on your gut and you’re right, history remembers you well. But, when your gut led you from one business failure to another, when your gut told you to trade Sammy Sosa to the Cubs, and you use the same gut to send our sons and daughters to fight and die in a distraction from the real war on terror, then history will and should be unapologetic in its condemnation.

Backwards Through the Speed of Light

2006-05-11T19:54:00.000-04:00

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In the past few years, scientists have found ways to make light go both faster and slower than its usual speed limit, but now researchers at the University of Rochester have published a paper today in Science on how they've gone one step further: pushing light into reverse. As if to defy common sense, the backward-moving pulse of light travels faster than light. Confused? You're not alone.

Quote for Today

2006-05-08T04:03:00.000-04:00

freedom of thought . . . is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom. With rare aberrations a pervasive recognition of that truth can be traced in our history, political and legal.
-- Palko v. State Of Connecticut

ASLSP

2006-05-05T12:52:00.000-04:00

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If you miss Friday's musical happening at St. Burchardi Church in this eastern German town, no worries. There is always 2008. And the next year. And the one after that.

In fact, you have about six more centuries to hear developments in the work being performed, a version of a composition by John Cage called 'As Slow as Possible.' A group of musicians and town boosters has given the title a ridiculously extreme interpretation, by stretching the performance to 639 years.

Like the imperceptible movement of a glacier, a chord change was planned for Friday. Two pipes were to be removed from the rudimentary organ (which is being built as the piece goes on, with pipes added and subtracted as needed), eliminating a pair of E's. Cage devotees, musicians and the curious have trickled in to Halberstadt, a town about two and a half hours southwest of Berlin by train known as the birthplace of canned hot dogs and home to a collection of 18,000 stuffed birds.

'In these times, acceleration spoils everything,' said Heinz-Klaus Metzger, a prominent musicologist whose chance comments at an organ conference nine years ago sparked the project. 'To begin a performance with the perspective of more than a half-millennium — it's just a kind of negation of the lifestyle of today.'

Art and Politics

2006-05-01T15:56:00.000-04:00

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What might that be, art that is not elitist? Folk art? Surely every form of art that manifests itself in superficial political statements can, in essence, be reduced to entertainment. Art must stand with both feet in society. Art takes place in the twilight zone where invention and reality stand in each other's way; it is up to the viewer to decide what the meaning of it all is. And that is the difference between art and entertainment. Art can only be used for strictly political ends when the interpretation of reality is a confirmation of what the spectator already knows—in which case the spectator cannot himself decide what the meaning of the whole thing is, but simply assumes that what he sees is the truth. This is why "politically committed" art is a false concept and reduces art to entertainment. To put it more simply: Burning an American flag or giving someone from an ethnic minority the leading part, not because he is good but because of his origins, has nothing to do with art but with politics and demagogy.

Politics is politics and art is art, but both should be engaged in life itself. Life and life alone is what it is all about—only there will art and politics come together. Art can never change the world and "truth" is never its aim; it should return our gaze and ask questions.

A tribute to the President

2006-05-01T14:56:00.000-04:00

Steven Colbert Reports

Chaotic network learning

2006-05-01T00:53:00.000-04:00

elearnspace. Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age

Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.

A new Repor(t)

2006-04-30T08:54:00.000-04:00

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A blistering comedy “tribute” to President Bush by Comedy Central’s faux talk show host Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondent Dinner Saturday night left George and Laura Bush unsmiling at its close.

Earlier, the president had delivered his talk to the 2700 attendees, including many celebrities and top officials, with the help of a Bush impersonator.

Colbert, who spoke in the guise of his talk show character, who ostensibly supports the president strongly, urged the Bush to ignore his low approval ratings, saying they were based on reality, “and reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

Intelligence and Schizophrenia

2006-04-28T07:39:00.000-04:00

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Working with researchers at the Harvard Partners Center for Genetics and Genomics in Boston, the Feinstein team from the Zucker Hillside Hospital campus examined the genetic blueprints of individuals with schizophrenia, a neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by cognitive impairment, and compared them with healthy volunteers.

They discovered the dysbindin-1 gene, which they previously demonstrated to be associated with schizophrenia, may also be linked to general cognitive ability.

'A robust body of evidence suggests cognitive abilities, particularly intelligence, are significantly influenced by genetic factors,' said the study's primary author, Katherine Burdick, noting existing data already suggests dysbindin may influence cognition.

Not your Grandma's Rice and Beans

2006-04-24T17:14:00.000-04:00

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Forget ethanol fuel blends from sugar, tomorrow's cars could be full of beans, according to University of Queensland legume biotechnology expert Professor Peter Gresshoff.

Professor Gresshoff has shown that oils extracted from soybeans and peanuts are a cheap, environmentally sound source for biodiesel production.

“The focus to date has been on ethanol blends made from sugar and petrol, but our research shows that the biggest potential environmental rewards are diesel alternatives made from grain legumes such as peanuts and soybeans,” Professor Gresshoff said.

As the Director of the Australian Research Council Centre for Excellence for Integrative Legume Research at UQ, he said Australian growers had increasing opportunities and markets for alternative fuels.

“Given increasing pressure for environmentally friendly products and increasing fuel prices, the demand for renewable fuels is escalating rapidly,” he said.

“The Australian Federal Government has set a 350-megalitre-target for renewable fuels by 2010.”

Visual Thinking

2006-04-21T18:13:00.000-04:00

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Thinking through writing, as I am doing now, is one way of experimenting with the expression of an idea. But thinking through making work is entirely different. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that, as a tangible proving ground for a hypothesis, the idea of thinking through making is perhaps unique to designers. We demand nothing less of our students.

But have you tried this yourself lately? It’s really hard.

[Snip]

But back in the studio, the dialogue between the maker and the thing is something quite different: there’s a kind of blind faith, an anti-discipline at work in which the process of discovery is fueled less by what than by what if? What if you turned it upside down? What it you switched materials? What if you shut out the noise that smacks of responsible conclusions and replaced it with loopy questions, fragmented notions, implausible fictions?

This is where the pencil comes in.

No Greenhouse Gas

2006-04-21T17:09:00.000-04:00

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When David Mears and his wife Dorothy put their house up for sale at the end of last year, it wasn't just the four-plus acres of beautiful woodlot land that made the property appealing. Nor were the five bedrooms or extra cabinet space in their roomy kitchen the most significant features.

The main attraction was the fact that the couple hadn't paid their heating bill for more than 25 years.

That's because they hadn't received one since 1980.

Using his knowledge of alternative energy sources for commercial greenhouses in response to the energy crisis of the 1970's, David Mears, a professor of Bioresource Engineering at Rutgers University, virtually eliminated the use of fuel oil for heating his home.

Multiply that ...

According to the Department of Energy, more than 85 percent of all the energy consumed in the United States comes from fossil fuels, including coal, oil, and natural gas.

Some 2,700 pounds of carbon per person each year, or 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, come from operating individual homes, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates. Most of emissions from a residential home come from operating a typical heating, ventilation and air conditioning system.

Goals

2006-04-21T13:01:00.000-04:00

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Bisio and Nývlt used laser light at an energy which Einstein would have said was not high enough to knock a photon out of copper. But the electrons lassoed in a number of photons at the same time, collecting together the energy necessary to escape the metal lattice. In the theory, Einstein proposed that only the colour (the energy) of the light, and not its intensity, determines whether electrons can be ejected from a metal. But Einstein never knew what a laser was. Lasers deliver light pulses so intense, that they can induce phenomena which physicists label 'higher order' or 'non-linear'. Scientist have been using lasers in this way for some time already, but Max-Planck-Physicists, for the first time, have now carried this procedure to the fourth grade of non-linearity.

It is an extremely improbable phenomenon. Bisio and Nývlt were only able to observe it because they used very intense pulses of light. Kirschner calls it 'a curious thought: non-linear quantum effects make phenomena possible which classical physics would call linear - and which we have thought, since the time of Einstein and Planck, is a physical impossibility.'

Bisio and Nývlt had another trick up their sleeve, besides the high intensity light. They did not just gather all electrons emitted from the copper plate. Rather, they only collected electrons that were emitted at particular angles from the surface. In these conditions they could see electrons that were not just moving away from the metal’s surface, but mostly parallel to it. The electrons moved around quite a bit - but only on a single plane above the copper plate. It was as if a soccer player kicked a ball - and it just hovered, rather than flew out of the stadium.

Bright Idea

2006-04-20T18:55:00.000-04:00

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The device -- The DaySwitch -- was designed at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Lighting Research Center in Troy, N.Y., as an alternative to traditional dimming ballast systems that adjust light levels by reducing lamp current.

'The DaySwitch is designed to build end-use efficiency by reducing light energy usage in commercial buildings and maintaining occupant satisfaction,' said Peter Morante, director of energy programs at the LRC. 'It is estimated the DaySwitch will be able to reduce lighting energy consumption by 30 percent in buildings with significant daylight contribution through windows or skylights, allowing for a payback period of approximately three years.'

LRC researchers say the new switch works with all conventional fluorescent ballasts and, because of its simple circuitry, the cost to produce the device is minimal and far less expensive than traditional daylighting control systems that utilize dimming ballasts.

No really, someone ELSE wrote this

2006-04-18T18:26:00.000-04:00

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One cannot even begin to discuss The Themantics Group’s latest production, Cupid and Psyche, without first mentioning the glorious technical team. Michael Moore’s set is a delightful symphony of white, with a large gold frame at the back of the stage. The mortal world is confined by the frame, while the immortal world has all the space and unconstricted movement of center and downstage. Erin Elizabeth Murphy’s bright and colorful costumes offset the white netherworld of the gods, and the subtly powerful lighting design (especially the soft candle lights that hang from the ceiling, almost like stars) by Lucas Benjamin Krech really bring this mythological world to life. It is an impressive and astonishing achievement.

Eat your veggies

2006-04-14T21:17:00.000-04:00

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The food that people eat is just as important as what kind of cars they drive when it comes to creating the greenhouse-gas emissions that many scientists have linked to global warming, according to a report accepted for publication in the journal Earth Interactions.

Both the burning of fossil fuels during food production and non-carbon dioxide emissions associated with livestock and animal waste contribute to the problem, the University of Chicago's Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin wrote in the report.

The average American diet requires the production of an extra ton and a half of carbon dioxide-equivalent, in the form of actual carbon dioxide as well as methane and other greenhouse gases compared to a strictly vegetarian diet, according to Eshel and Martin. And with Earth Day approaching on April 22, cutting down on just a few eggs or hamburgers each week is an easy way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, they said. 'We neither make a value judgment nor do we make a categorical statement,' said Eshel, an Assistant Professor in Geophysical Sciences.

'We say that however close you can be to a vegan diet and further from the mean American diet, the better you are for the planet. It doesn't have to be all the way to the extreme end of vegan. If you simply cut down from two burgers a week to one, you've already made a substantial difference.'

Those clever Japanese

2006-04-14T21:14:00.000-04:00

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Japan's biggest rail company will soon test using fuel cells to help power a train, following the lead of automakers in rolling out cleaner, more efficient transportation.

Pollution-free fuel cells generate electricity through a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen, producing only water vapor as exhaust.

East Japan Railways Co., which serves the congested Tokyo area and carries 16 million passengers a day, will start test runs of the NE Train, or New Energy Train, in July with the aim of operating it on regular tracks by the middle of next year.

The initial train will consist of a single car powered by electric batteries and capable of traveling at up to 62 miles per hour. A diesel-run generator will provide most of the electricity, with two 65-kilowatt hydrogen fuel cells chipping in about a third.

Keybored?

2006-04-14T13:28:00.000-04:00

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Remember when you were promised all those amazing future tech innovations? Just around the corner was supposed to be a shining technology utopia with flying cars, personal space travel to distant galaxies, and bio-implantable cell phones. It's almost disappointing enough to make you sit at home and watch old episodes of 'Space 1999'.

Don't lose hope! An amazing glimpse of this promised future has just arrived at ThinkGeek in the form of the Bluetooth Laser Virtual Keyboard. This tiny device laser-projects a keyboard on any flat surface... you can then type away accompanied by simulated key click sounds. It really is true future magic at its best.

Quote for Today

2006-04-14T02:23:00.000-04:00

"And the question we must now ask is whether, in this slippery world which is committing suicide without noticing it, there can be found a nucleaus of men capable of imposing this superior notion of theatre, men who will restore to all of us the natural and magic equivalent of the dogmas in which we no longer believe."

--Antonin Artaud, Theatre and Its Double

The New Natural Light

2006-04-13T12:04:00.000-04:00

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A natural light source that could put the traditional light bulb in the shade has been invented by US scientists.

The organic light-emitting diode (OLED) emits a brilliant white light when attached to an electricity supply.

The material, described in the journal Nature, can be printed in wafer thin sheets that could transform walls, ceilings or even furniture into lights.

The OLEDs do not heat up like today's light bulbs and so are far more energy efficient and should last longer.

Maximalism

2006-04-11T15:59:00.000-04:00

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But tools aren’t the only culprit here. In Eye’s recent issue on ornament in design, Alice Twemlow speculated on some of the cultural reasons for the recent popularity and widespread prevalence of decorative excess. To many (most?) of us, it comes as a welcome visual language in the wake of so many years of modernist restraint. It’s like design’s been on a diet and finally gets to eat that giant cheesecake: shifting notches on the belt buckle, we’re so happy for the sugar high that we don’t realize we’re slipping. And slipping we are.

[Snip]

And where does it come from, this inability to stop, to hold back, to self-edit? I blame the culture of easy-access: Flickr, Photoshop plug-ins, skateboard culture, IM’ing, DJ mash-ups, and the failure of the slow food movement to gain any traction in the design press. Funny, yes, but I’m actually serious: many a cultural historian has tried, and will try to excavate the provenance of design work that is pictorially layered and comunicationally dense, and they should, because it’s everywhere. It’s on T-shirts at Old Navy and in classrooms at every design school I’ve visited in the last two years. It’s on packaging and in posters and pushing its way through publications and the somberist of annual reports. Some of it is breathtakingly beautiful, compelling, even entertaining. But most of it is excessive, indulgent and impossible to parse. Of course, one might argue that such density makes you slow down and look harder, experiencing deeper meaning as a result. (In this case, maybe the slow food movement has gained some traction.) On the other hand, it’s a can of worms, particularly because it’s so easy to hide behind it — and even harder, in many instances, to "get" what's really going on. Long term, that's going to present some serious obstacles for design.

Just in case you were not listening

2006-04-07T09:13:00.000-04:00

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Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff testified that he was authorized by President Bush, through Mr. Cheney, in July 2003 to disclose key parts of what until then was a classified prewar intelligence estimate on Iraq, according to a new court filing.

The testimony by the former official, I. Lewis Libby Jr., cited in a court filing by the government made late Wednesday, provides an indication that Mr. Bush, who has long criticized leaks of secret information as a threat to national security, may have played a direct role in authorizing disclosure of the intelligence report on Iraq.

The disclosure occurred at a moment when the White House was trying to defend itself against accusations that it had inflated the case against Saddam Hussein.

Here's some real Homeland Security

2006-04-05T02:01:00.000-04:00

New York City Is Establishing an Office to Support Arts Groups - New York Times

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced yesterday that the city would create a new office to 'aggressively pitch New York City around the world as the nation's art and cultural capital' by helping nonprofit organizations, especially those in the arts, cope with the high costs that threaten their survival.

"We won't and can't be complacent," Mr. Bloomberg said, adding that he was determined not to cede New York's status as a world cultural center. "In the creative sector, as in so many other areas, at one time New York City didn't have to compete with other cities," he said at a conference at the Museum of Modern Art that brought together 220 officials, artists, business people and academics. "Now we do. Other cities are quickly learning the benefits of being a creative hub."

The daunting challenges facing artists hoping to thrive in New York were underscored by one participant at the conference, Creative New York. The choreographer Bill T. Jones said that it was meaningless to talk about "creative capital" without first addressing the decline in support for arts groups and the precarious existence of individual artists.

"You don't make a damn cent in dance," he said. "So when I'm asked to be on this panel and asked to be part of the new economic engine of New York City — are we serious?"

His dancers "are real depressed; I would dare say they are despairing," he said. "And that made me feel very sad, and, I dare say, angry."

The new office, which will include at least two employees and be part of the city's Economic Development Corporation, represents a recognition that skyrocketing rents have made it much harder for smaller arts groups to flourish. It will help such groups navigate the real-estate market, obtain technical advice and attract financing.

Upper West Side - Setting Sun

2006-04-01T11:57:00.000-05:00

Um . . . beg pardon?

2006-04-01T11:52:00.000-05:00

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Q I want to be clear because I've heard you say this, and I've heard the President say it, but I want you to say it for my listeners, which is that the White House has never argued that Saddam was directly involved in September 11th, correct?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: That's correct. We had one report early on from another intelligence service that suggested that the lead hijacker, Mohamed Atta, had met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague, Czechoslovakia. And that reporting waxed and waned where the degree of confidence in it, and so forth, has been pretty well knocked down now at this stage, that that meeting ever took place. So we've never made the case, or argued the case that somehow Osama bin Laden [sic] was directly involved in 9/11. That evidence has never been forthcoming. But there -- that's a separate proposition from the question of whether or not there was some kind of a relationship between the Iraqi government, Iraqi intelligence services and the al Qaeda organization.