1864. A passel of Yankees in repose. "Federal picket post near Atlanta, Georgia." Wet collodion glass plate negative by George N. Barnard
Recent Posts
Monday, June 29, 2009
1864: Atlanta Picket
Rescue and Recovery: The History of Lost Events
Sam Roberts writes:
Forlornly unidentified and altogether forgotten, these sites have been literally lost to history.
On Avenue of the Americas, there is a block where the first cellphone call was completed in 1973; on West 125th Street, where the old Blumstein’s department store stood, nothing marks the place where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was stabbed in 1958.
Then there is the spot on Fifth Avenue where Winston Churchill, crossing against the light, was struck by a car in 1931 and nearly killed.
And what about the old Winter Garden Theater at 691 Broadway? In 1864, on the very night that Confederate sympathizers singled out the Lafarge Hotel next door in their plot to burn down New York, the Booth brothers — John Wilkes, Junius Brutus Jr. and Edwin — starred in “Julius Caesar.” The benefit performance, which was billed as the brothers’ sole joint engagement, raised $3,500 for the Shakespeare statue that still stands in Central Park.
Andrew Carroll, 39, an amateur historian, is embarking this week on a 50-state journey to uncover, memorialize and preserve these and other sites where history happened serendipitously, and which, for one reason or another, have been relegated to anonymity.
link: On a Mission to Mark Places of Long-Forgotten Historic Moments - NYTimes.com
If Nobody Else Chews the Way You Chew, Are You Rude? Dino Mastication
Unlike most animals, which have a complex joint on the lower jaw, these dinosaurs had a hinge between the upper jaw and the rest of the skull to allow for much more movement than many of their peers had. The tiny scratches show that when they chomped down on food—likely cattails and other low vegetation—the upper jaw would be forced outward, sliding teeth sideways across those in the lower jaw. This motion, combined with up, down, front and back movements, would shred and grind fibrous plant material that made up their diets.
link: Duckbilled dinosaurs dined with an unusual bite: Scientific American Blog
Dalai Lama: No Monk Left Behind on Science
Tibetan monks and nuns may spend 12 hours a day studying Buddhist philosophy and logic, reciting prayers and debating scriptures. But science has been given a special boost by the Dalai Lama, who has long advocated modern education in Tibetan monasteries and schools in exile, alongside Tibet’s traditions. India is home to at least 120,000 Tibetans, the largest population outside Tibet.
Science may seem at odds with Tibetan religious rituals. Reincarnations of high Tibetan monks are identified through dreams and auspicious signs. The Dalai Lama credits the state oracle with helping him decide to flee Tibet in 1959 as Chinese troops advanced on Lhasa.
Yet the Tibetan spiritual leader views science and Buddhism as complementary “investigative approaches with the same greater goal, of seeking the truth,” he wrote in “The Universe in a Single Atom,” his book on “how science and spirituality can serve our world.” He stresses that science is especially important for monastics who study the nature of the mind and the relationship between mind and brain.
Initial resistance from some senior monks and fears of diluting traditional studies in monasteries have gradually eased. Now the Dalai Lama hopes that, with help from Emory and other programs, science will become part of a new curriculum, with science textbooks in Tibetan and specialist translators, leading to a generation of monastic leaders that are scientifically literate.
link: Tibetan Monks and Nuns Turn Their Minds Toward Science - NYTimes.com
Controversy over Rafsanjani's Stance in Iran
Rafsanjani Has NOT Caved
June 29, 2009 Guest post by Jill Marie Parillo, Physicians for Social Responsibility
Very little press reported on Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s speech Sunday June 28, and I just don’t buy the analyses that are out there on it. CNN does have a better piece, which is more neutral. Most analyses claim that Rafsanjani is caving to Khamenei. For one, the speech does not sound to me (what I have heard translated into English) like a clear statement in support of Supreme Leader Khamenei, and it’s never a good sign when PressTV claims it to be true.
Rather, Rafsanjani said that he supported Khamenei’s decision to extend the Guardian Council’s time (by 5 days) to consider complaints of election fraud. In some ways this is only confirming that he thinks there was fraud and complaints need to be heard. Coming as no huge surprise, the 12 member Guardian Council confirmed today, after a partial recount, that the election was legal and Ahmadinejad is still President.
link: niacINsight
Cartoon Map of Britain
'Britannia' Etching by James Gillray; published in London by Hannah Humphrey in 1791 Image source: British Museum
link: BibliOdyssey
Health Care Status Quo "Highly Concentrated," not Competitive, Study Shows
Zachary Roth writes:
Defenders of the status quo on health care like to point out that a public option will destroy the system of robust free-market competition that currently exists. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), speaking earlier this month on Fox News, called President Obama's plan the "first step in destroying the best health care system the world has ever known." A public option, Shelby added, would "destroy the marketplace for health care."
But the notion that most American consumers enjoy anything like a competitive marketplace for health care is flatly false. And a study issued last month by a pro-reform group makes that strikingly clear.
The report, released by Health Care for America Now (HCAN), uses data compiled by the American Medical Association to show that 94 percent of the country's insurance markets are defined as "highly concentrated," according to Justice Department guidelines. Predictably, that's led to skyrocketing costs for patients, and monster profits for the big health insurers. Premiums have gone up over the past six years by more than 87 percent, on average, while profits at ten of the largest publicly traded health insurance companies rose 428 percent from 2000 to 2007.
link: Health-Care Market Characterized By Consolidation, Not Competition | TPMMuckraker
The Wisdom of Indefinite Detention?
Bob Herbert writes:
No one seems to know how old Mohammed Jawad was when he was seized by Afghan forces in Kabul six and a half years ago and turned over to American custody. Some reports say he was 14. Some say 16. The Afghan government believes he was 12.
What is not in dispute is that he was no older than an adolescent, and that since his capture he has been tortured and otherwise put through hell. The evidence against him has been discredited. He has tried to commit suicide. But the U.S. won’t let him go.
link: Op-Ed Columnist - How Long Is Long Enough? - NYTimes.com
Atlanta Garage Collapses
Part of a six-floor parking garage near downtown Atlanta collapsed, crushing at least 35 cars. There were no immediate reports of injuries, though firefighters were waiting for the building to be stabilized before doing a car-to-car search. A cause was not immediately known. Hardin Construction, the general contractor on the garage, was one of three companies that were working at the Atlanta Botanical Garden when a pedestrian bridge collapsed in December, killing one worker and injuring 18.
link: National Briefing - South - Georgia - Collapse at Parking Garage - NYTimes.com
Spain: General Franco Demoted
MADRID (Reuters) - Madrid's city hall Monday stripped former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco of his title as honorary mayor and adopted son of the capital, 33 years after his death began the transition to democracy.
Councilors of all political colors unanimously voted to remove the titles, as well as medals Madrid conferred on the right-wing general, a spokesman for the council said.
"The capital of Spain is now clean of support for dictators," left-wing Councilor Milagros Hernandez, was quoted as saying on the website of TV news channel CNN+.
link: Madrid strips Franco of honorary titles | Oddly Enough | Reuters
O Arizona: Your Traffic Cameras are Biting you in the Ass
Greg Gurule writes:
Paradise Valley will have to refund more than $36,000 to more than 1,000 drivers who received tickets for running a bad traffic light.
The yellow turn signal at the intersection of Tatum Boulevard and McDonald Drive lasted only three seconds instead of the four-plus seconds that the city requires.
The town is investigating whether it was human error or a mechanical problem that led to the mistimed light between May 7 and June 17 of this year.
Paradise Valley said it has repaired the problem and plans to refund all the citation money to drivers who were ticketed by the bad light.
Fly Away Home, Environmental Meance: Ladybirds Pose Problems in UK
The Harlequin ladybird is putting over 1,000 species in the UK in peril, scientists have warned.
"The rate of spread is dramatic and unprecedented," said Dr Helen Roy of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.
The ladybird has spread to most parts of the UK in just four years, preying on many other insects.
link: BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Ladybird 'risk to 1,000 species'
Sweden Short on Creationism Museums: Let's Send Them One
The worlds of academic paleontology and creationism rarely collide, but the former paid a visit to the latter last Wednesday. The University of Cincinnati was hosting the North American Paleontological Convention, where scientists presented their latest research at the frontiers of the ancient past. In a break from the lectures, about 70 of the attendees boarded school buses for a field trip to the Creation Museum, on the other side of the Ohio River.
“I’m very curious and fascinated,” Stefan Bengtson, a professor of paleozoology at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, said before the visit, “because we have little of that kind of thing in Sweden.”
link: Paleontology and Creationism Meet but Don’t Mesh - NYTimes.com
Guardian Council: Election Confirmed
Iran's Guardian Council announced its "final decision" Monday on the disputed June 12 presidential election, dismissing all opposition complaints of fraud and affirming a landslide victory for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
link: Guardian Council Declares Ahmadinejad Victory 'Final' - washingtonpost.com
Druid Litter: Stonehenge
This year 36,500 members of the great unwashed public were allowed in [at Stonehenge] to celebrate the solstice and have a massive drinking party. They responded by leaving plastic rubbish all over the place...
link: TYWKIWDBI: Summer solstice at Stonehenge
Slate's Photo Essay: Portraits of Instability
Rainbow Raid: Gay Pride in Texas
Shortly after midnight on Sunday, police raided a gay bar in Fort Worth, TX, and arrested seven customers for public intoxication. (One man was taken to the hospital “with bleeding in his brain after officers threw him to the ground and used zip-ties to handcuff him.”) Police said they were simply conducting an “alcohol beverage code inspection” when several customers made sexual advances toward the officers. However, the owner of the Rainbow Lounge, J.R. Schrock, said that claim was a “lie.” “The groping of the police officer — really? We’re gay, but we’re not dumb,” Schrock said.
link: Think Progress » Home Page
Iran: Breaking the Chain
Translated news from an human rights activists in Iran:
“People in Melat Park, Valiasr Sq., Vanak and sidewalks of Vailasr St. are holding hands and are trying to form a human chain.”
“But reports of sporadic clashes indicate that the armed forces are trying to prevent the formation of the human chain.”
“Urgent: Mojtaba Tehrani, reporter for the Etemade Meli newspaper which belongs to Karroubi, has been arrested.”
“Security police officers entered Mojtaba Tehrani’s house and in addition to searching the house took away personal items such as computer and compact CDs.”
link: niacINsight
Iraqi Refugees in the US: Whoops, Got Us Again
According to an IRC report released this month, "The resettlement program in the United States fails individuals with high levels of vulnerability, especially during difficult economic times." The report called for increased emergency funding and an overhaul of the program.
In an example cited by the organization, Hajer, a 38-year-old Iraqi refugee, arrived in Phoenix, Arizona, with her three kids last year speaking very little English. She could afford only one semester of English classes at a local college. Last December, she fell ill and lost her job at a daycare center. The public assistance she receives, $335 dollars a month, leaves her short $481 after paying rent of $816.
With the economic crash, only 51 percent of refugees are becoming self-sufficient after 120 days in 2008, down from 74 percent in 2007. Twelve percent of the refugees newly resettled by the IRC are at risk of homelessness.
"Few imagined that they would receive such short-term and limited assistance upon arrival or that they could become homeless in the country that offered them shelter," said IRC President George Rupp in a public statement. "They deserve better."
link: Crossover Dreams: Iraqi refugees in the U.S.: strangers in paradise
Borges: "A Dream" (Iran)
A DREAM by Jorge Luis Borges
In a deserted place in Iran there is a not very tall stone tower that has neither door nor window. In the only room (with a dirt floor and shaped like a circle) there is a wooden table and a bench. In that circular cell, a man who looks like me is writing in letters I cannot understand a long poem about a man who in another circular cell is writing a poem about a man who in another circular cell . . . The process never ends and no one will be able to read what the prisoners write. (Translated, from the Spanish, by Suzanne Jill Levine.)
link: A Dream: Poetry: The New Yorker
The Saving Power of Art: Pol Pot
A survivor of the Khmer Rouge's notorious Tuol Sleng prison wept at the trial of his torturer Monday and called for justice for the 1.7 million Cambodians who died under Pol Pot's tyrannical regime.
In a harrowing account of his detention at the S-21 interrogation center, where more than 14,000 people died, artist Vann Nath said his life was only spared because chief torturer Duch liked his paintings of "Brother Number One," Pol Pot.
"I survived because Duch felt good when he walked into my workshop," Nath said in his testimony against the ailing chief of the S-21 prison, whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav.
"My suffering cannot be erased -- the memories keep haunting me," said Nath, who lost two children to Pol Pot's 1975-1979 "killing fields" reign of terror.
link: Pol Pot paintings saved my life, S-21 survivor says | International | Reuters
The End of Kodachrome
Doug Steley said:
"I took this picture of a sand dune near Windorah, Queensland, Australia, on 64 ASA Kodachrome, nothing did RED like Kodachrome.
link: BBC - Viewfinder: Kodachrome II
When You're a Lion You're a Lion All The Way: Lion Pride
Lions form prides to defend territory against other lions, not to improve their hunting success, a study reveals.
In doing so, they act much like street gangs, gathering together to protect their turf from interlopers, says a leading lion expert.
The bigger the gang, the more successful the lions are, information that could help conserve wild lions.
The discovery helps explain why lions, uniquely among the cat species, live together in social groups.
link: BBC - Earth News - Lion prides form to win turf wars
Book Review: "In the Land of Invented Languages"
As Arika Okrent writes in her new book, "In the Land of Invented Languages," "from an engineering perspective, language is kind of a disaster." English in particular is choked with irregular words and anachronistic phrases that long ago stopped making intuitive sense. If it were a car, it would be a jalopy patched together from a bunch of spare parts. Such is the curse of the natural language. It's not as if French or Swahili is much more logical.
So it's easy to understand why thousands of people over hundreds of years have tried to create a better language from scratch
link: Book Review: 'In the Land of Invented Languages' by Arika Okrent - washingtonpost.com
D.C. Metrorail Crash: The Problem of the Interface
The problem, said several experts who have studied such accidents, is that these investigations invariably focus our attention on discrete aspects of machine or human error, whereas the real problem often lies in the relationship between humans and their automated systems.
link: Metro Crash May Exemplify Paradox of Human-Machine Interaction - washingtonpost.com
Krugman: "people who show no sign of being interested in the truth"--The Climate Debate
Paul Krugman writes:
In other words, we’re facing a clear and present danger to our way of life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify failing to act?
Well, sometimes even the most authoritative analyses get things wrong. And if dissenting opinion-makers and politicians based their dissent on hard work and hard thinking — if they had carefully studied the issue, consulted with experts and concluded that the overwhelming scientific consensus was misguided — they could at least claim to be acting responsibly.
But if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.
Book Review: "Conquest of the Useless"--Hertzog Makes "Fitzcarraldo"
This is what “a beautiful, fresh, sunny morning” was like for Werner Herzog during the Sisyphean miseries that plagued the shooting of his Amazonian epic “Fitzcarraldo” (1982): one of two newly hatched chicks drowned in a saucer containing only a few millimeters of water. The other lost a leg and a piece of its stomach to a murderous rabbit. And Mr. Herzog realized, for the umpteenth time, that “a sense of desolation was tearing me up inside, like termites in a fallen tree trunk.”
Iran Situation Warped Usual Journalistic Processes
Many mainstream media sources, which have in the past been critical of the undifferentiated sources of information on the Web, had little choice but to throw open their doors in this case. As the protests against Mr. Ahmadinejad grew, the government sharply curtailed the foreign press. As visas expired, many journalists packed up, and the ones who stayed were barred from reporting on the streets.
In a news vacuum, amateur videos and eyewitness accounts became the de facto source for information. In fact, the symbol of the protests, the image of a young woman named Neda bleeding to death on a Tehran street, was filmed by two people holding camera phones.
link: In Iran, Journalism Makes Use of Unverified News - NYTimes.com
Louisiana's Marshes Shrink Inexorably
Desperate to halt the erosion of Louisiana’s coast, officials there are talking about breaking Mississippi River levees south of New Orleans to restore the nourishing flow of muddy water into the state’s marshes.
But in a new analysis, scientists at Louisiana State University say inland dams trap so much sediment that the river no longer carries enough to halt marsh loss, especially now that global warming is speeding a rise in sea levels.
As a result, the loss of thousands of additional square miles of marshland is “inevitable,” the scientists report in Monday’s issue of Nature Geoscience.
link: Dams Are Thwarting Louisiana Marsh Restoration, Study Says - NYTimes.com
Who Owns the Rain? In Colorado, A Real Legal Issue
For the first time since territorial days, rain will be free for the catching here, as more and more thirsty states part ways with one of the most entrenched codes of the West.
Precipitation, every last drop or flake, was assigned ownership from the moment it fell in many Western states, making scofflaws of people who scooped rainfall from their own gutters. In some instances, the rights to that water were assigned a century or more ago.
link: It’s Now Legal to Catch a Raindrop in Colorado - NYTimes.com
