Selections from a Skidmore College collection of 34 remarkable photos by Phyllis Galembo. Via Harper's.
link: TYWKIWDBI: West African masquerade
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Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Costumes from West Africa
Mousavi Accused of "Bringing 'Pessimism' Into the Public Sphere"
Iran's Basij militia has asked prosecutors to investigate the role of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the defeated opposition candidate, in protests that broke out after the presidential election he maintains was rigged.
The government militia that enforced much of the crackdown against protesters last week, accused Mousavi of several crimes including undermining national security, which could see him jailed for up to 10 years.
The semi-official Fars news agency said the Basij sent the country's chief prosecutor a letter accusing Mousavi of taking part in nine offences against the state, including "disturbing the nation's security".
"Whether he wanted to or not, Mr Mousavi in many areas supervised or assisted in punishable acts," said the Basij letter, which also accused Mousavi of bringing "pessimism" into the public sphere.
link: Al Jazeera English - Middle East - Iran to investigate defiant Mousavi
Revised Health Care Bill Would Cover 97% Of Americans
Democrats on a key Senate Committee outlined a revised and far less costly health care plan Wednesday night that includes a government-run insurance option and an annual fee on employers who do not offer coverage to their workers.
The plan carries a 10-year price tag of slightly over $600 billion, and would lead toward an estimated 97 percent of all Americans having coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office, Sens. Edward M. Kennedy and Chris Dodd said in a letter to other members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. The AP obtained a copy.
link: New HELP Bill Covers 97 Percent Of Americans, Costs $600 Billion
Species Vanishing: Biodiversity #Epicfail
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than 800 animal and plant species have gone extinct in the past five centuries with nearly 17,000 now threatened with extinction, the International Union for Conservation of Nature reported on Thursday.
A detailed analysis of these numbers indicates the international community will fail to meet its 2010 goal of bolstering biodiversity -- maintaining a variety of life forms -- a commitment made by most governments in 2002.
link: More than 800 wildlife species now extinct | Science | Reuters
Iran: Opposition Leaders Defy Regime
TEHRAN, July 1 -- Three opposition leaders, including a former president, openly defied Iran's top political and religious authorities Wednesday, vowing to resist a government they have deemed illegitimate after official certification of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's reelection.
Their defiance in the face of harsh official denunciations and threats of arrest and prosecution appeared to dash the government's hopes of pressuring the opposition into accepting the disputed June 12 election.
Rather than dropping his complaints of extensive vote-rigging, leading opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi took his fight to a new level Wednesday, risking arrest by urging followers to continue their protests. After formal certification of the election results Monday night by the Guardian Council, a top supervisory body of Shiite Muslim clerics and jurists, Iranian authorities warned that no further protests would be tolerated.
Best Face of the Wood Tick
Colorized scanning electron micrograph found at Moqo-moqo.
link: TYWKIWDBI: Wood tick season is beginning in the Upper Midwest
Images from Annual Festivals in the Miyako
The Miyako1 Nenju Gyoji Gajo (Picture Album of Annual Festivals in the Miyako) is a 2-volume work, delicately hand-painted on silk by Nakajima Soyo in 1928 and available online [thumbnails] among the Nichibunken databases at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto (homepage in english).
link: BibliOdyssey
O Arizona: Schools About to Suffer Heat Death
Arizona State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne announced Wednesday that without an education budget, state public school districts will continue to operate for only a couple weeks.
"If nothing passes by July 15, then I think we're in serious difficulty," said Horne.
Horne said it’s vital that a budget agreement be reached soon between the Legislature and the governor.
The state plans to distribute $600 million to public school districts this week.
link: AZ Schools Can Operate For A Few Weeks - Education News Story - KPHO Phoenix
Making Faces: Franz Xaver Messerschmidt
Jessica Joslin writes:
There’s something that I can’t help but love about the strange story of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783). Messerschmidt was a technically brilliant and accomplished court sculptor in Vienna. He spent his early years creating masterful, but rather dull, portrait busts of wealthy and powerful patrons. However (and this is where is gets interesting!) during the 1770’s his work underwent a mysterious transformation. He began to create his infamous character heads, a series of grotesque, humorous (and IMHO absolutely marvelous) portrait busts. At the time, it was whispered that an undiagnosed mental illness had prompted the drastic transformation of his work. Shortly thereafter, he was expelled from teaching at the academy, lost many of his patrons, and went into isolation in Bratislava, where he spent the rest of his life working on his character head series. It has always remained unclear whether he was indeed insane, or merely pissed off the wrong people.
link: Coilhouse » Blog Archive » Canonical Grimaces: Franz Xaver Messerschmidt
Geezers Sound Good!--40 Years of Crosby, Stills, And Nash
David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash are certainly aware they’ve been working together for a long time, but when Rolling Stone spelled out a number — 40 years — the figure still stunned the trio. “It certainly seems to have gone very quickly,” Nash told RS during a recent trip to our offices. “In my memory it’s like yesterday,” he said. “We love each other,” Stills added. Which is clearly what’s helped keep them on the road and in the studio together for so long despite some major hiccups along the way.
The other major factor: creative synergy. “For me, it has to do with the music,” Crosby said. “I love both of them as human beings, but they keep coming to me with music that is absolute magic to me. It’s a completely different chemistry. Each human being has a completely different vibe, and the four of us [including Neil Young] is a completely different chemistry than the three of us or two of us or solo, and that’s fascinating and it keeps it fresh.”
"The Rage to Injure What's Injured Us"--A Conversation with Robert Hass
In "Time and Materials," published in 2007, Mr. Hass addresses everything from "Poor Nietzsche in Turin . . . Dying of syphilis . . . in love with the opera of Bizet" to an early memory of his father grinding up the antidrinking drug Antabuse ("It makes you sick if you drink alcohol," he writes) and forcing his long-suffering, alcoholic mother to swallow it. Later, he watched as she sat down with a bottle of booze and "gagged and drank, Drank and gagged." In another poem, he writes of his father's death and his feelings of "love and anger and dismay and relief at the sudden peacefulness / of his face. . . ."
In a poem for his friend and longtime collaborator, Czeslaw Milosz -- who died in Krakow in 2005 at the age of 93 after living through the Nazi occupation of Poland and the rise and fall of communism -- Mr. Hass writes how Milosz "never accepted the cruelty in the frame / Of things, brooded on your century, and God the Monster, / And the smell of summer grasses in the world / That can hardly be named or remembered / Past the moment of our wading through them, / And the world's poor salvation in the word."
This idea, this lament -- "the world's poor salvation in the word," that language often fails us, yet it's our only hope for redemption -- permeates Mr. Hass's latest book, which was completed in 2005 at the height of the Iraq war. In a poem titled "Bush's War," he conflates 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with the brutal history of the 20th century, when the slaughter of civilians and the "firebombing" of entire cities was commonplace. "Forty-five million, all told, in World War II," he writes. "Why do we do it?" Certainly there's a rage / To injure what's injured us."
link: The Bard of Berkeley - WSJ.com
Amphibians Have a Leg Up on Mammals
Mexican salamanders who can re-grow amputated legs are not pulling off quite as big a biological trick as scientists had first thought, which may help doctors trying to regenerate human limbs.
The little buds that eventually produce a brand-new leg have not completely reverted to an embryo-like stage, the researchers reported in the journal Nature.
Instead, they seem to form a new leg from cells that partly remember how to make bone, muscle, or nerve tissue, Elly Tanaka of the Center for Regenerative Therapies in Dresden, Germany, and colleagues reported.
However, how the little animals called axolotls or water monsters do this is still a mystery.
"How this is achieved in the salamander and why it does not occur in mammals remains an important question," the researchers wrote.
link: Regenerated legs no big trick for salamanders | Science | Reuters
Iran: Khatami makes Statement
BC Persian released a statement from former president Khatami (these statements are from today):
Statements were made a day after Ahmadinejad made the statement that the ‘velvet revolution has lost’, while Khatami was visiting the families of those individuals who were arrested.
“I have to say that a velvet revolution has been used against the people and the Republic nature of the regime”.
“The voice of the people has been suffocated, those who should protect the rights of the people are instead degrading the people and this is all done under a poisonous atmosphere of state controlled media ”.
“The regime should be passionate and accountable for spilling even one drop of blood, instead they have systemically labeled the movement as hooligans”.
“The philosophy of the elections is that candidates who are most represented through ballots is selected, however once the people have contested the results, the electoral philosophy goes under the question and here is where the regime loses.”
“It is very strange that a marvel such as Mr. Mousavi who was one of the founders of the revolution is barred from making public speeches or seeking legal action. His image has been tarnished through the poison that is the state media.”
link: niacINsight
Walking On Air Makes the Bears' Defensive Line Look Really Small: Changes at the Sears Tower
The view from the tallest skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere just got better.
Some may experience a floating sensation when stepping into one of four glass boxes that jut out from the indoor observation deck at the Sears Tower.
"At first I was kind of afraid but I got used to it," said Adam Kane, 10, a visitor from Alton, Illinois, as clouds drifted past. "Look at all those tiny things that are usually huge."
"The Ledge," unveiled on Wednesday, invites visitors to step onto a 1-1/2 inch-thick glass floor suspended 1,353 feet in the air.
link: The view from Chicago's 'Ledge' gets more dizzying | Lifestyle | Reuters
Millions for Nuclear Weapons, Nada for Kimchee: North Korea Facing "Critical Food Shortage"
North Korea is facing a "critical" food shortage, especially for children, the UN's food agency has said.
The World Food Programme's director for North Korea said the agency was unable to reach millions of North Koreans due to a shortfall in funding.
link: BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | North Korean food need 'critical'
Digital Economy Zero: Free Stuff!
[Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine] believes the digital world is leading the way in successful business and will continue to reduce their prices until they reach zero.
"In the 20th century it was pretty much a trick, there's no such thing as a free lunch and you get what you paid for.
"In the 21st century it's based on the underlying economics of digital stuff, which is Moore's Law," he added.
Moore's Law describes the long-term trend in the history of computing, where the power and capacity of a computer improves every two years, in turn bringing the cost down.
"Everything online gets cheaper by 50% every year; that's a deflationary economy.
"Moore's Law is more than 50 years old and now that it is online, the storage and bandwidth equivalent which are even faster, are making it even more deflationary.
"That's why zero is the ultimate price because the costs are falling to zero as well," he added.
Monster Telecommunications Satellite Hefted Into Orbit
The world's biggest commercial telecommunications satellite has been put into orbit by an Ariane 5 rocket.
The TerreStar-1 platform weighed just shy of seven tonnes at launch.
Built for TerreStar Networks, the spacecraft will provide voice, messaging and data connections to the North American market.
The satellite was so big it was the only passenger on Ariane which routinely carries double payloads from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana.
link: BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Ariane lofts biggest 'space bird'
Watch Out for That Tree! Highway Design, Conditions, Major Killer
Bad highway design and conditions are a factor in more than half of the fatal accidents in the United States, contributing to more deaths than speeding, drunken driving or failure to use seatbelts, according to Ted R. Miller, who co-authored the 18-month study released today.
link: Faulty Highway Conditions Contribute to Half of Fatal Auto Accidents - washingtonpost.com
Off to Chihuahua: Archaeology of the Southwest
A decade ago in “The Chaco Meridian: Centers of Political Power in the Ancient Southwest,” [Steve Lekson] argued that for centuries the Anasazi leaders, reckoning by the stars, aligned their principal settlements along this north-south axis — the 108th meridian of longitude. In an article this year for Archaeology magazine, he added two older ruins to the trajectory: Shabik’eschee, south of Chaco, and Sacred Ridge, north of Aztec. Each in its time was the regional focus of economic and political power, and each lies along the meridian. As one site was abandoned, because of drought, violence, environmental degradation — the reasons are obscure — the leaders led an exodus to a new location: sometimes north, sometimes south, but hewing as closely as they could to the 108th meridian.
“I think the reason is ideological,” Dr. Lekson said on a recent visit to Paquimé. “The cultural response to something not working is to move north, and when that doesn’t work you move south. And then you move north again and then you move south again, and then you finally say the hell with it, I’m out of here, and you go down to Chihuahua.”
Iran Twitter Statistics
# From 7 June 2009 until the time of publication (26 June 2009), we have recorded 2,024,166 tweets about the election in Iran.
# Approximately 480,000 users have contributed to this conversation alone.
# 59.3% of users tweet just once, and these users contribute 14.1% of the total number.
# The top 10% of users in our study account for 65.5% of total tweets.
# 1 in 4 tweets about Iran is a retweet of another user’s content.
link: Web Ecology Project
Talk to the Animals: Gay Nature
Mark Moford writes:
Behold, the ongoing, increasingly startling research: homosexual and bisexual behavior, it turns out, is rampant in the animal kingdom. And by rampant, I mean proving to be damn near universal, commonplace across all species everywhere, existing for myriad reasons ranging from pure survival and procreative influence, right on over to pure pleasure, co-parenting, giddy screeching multiple monkey orgasm, even love, and a few dozen other potential explanations science hasn't quite figured out yet. Imagine.
Are you thinking, why sure, everyone knows about those sex-crazed dolphins and those superslut bonobo monkeys and the few other godless creatures like them, the sea turtles and the weird sheep and such, creatures who obviously haven't read Leviticus. But that's about it, right? Most animals are devoutly hetero and straight and damn happy about it, right?
Wrong.
New research is revealing so many creatures and species that exhibit homosexual/bisexual behavior of some kind, scientists are now saying there are actually very few, if any, species in existence that don't exhibit it in some way. It's everywhere: Bison. Giraffes. Ducks. Hyenas. Lions and lambs, lizards and dragonflies, polecats and elephants. Hetero sex. Anal sex. Partner swapping. The works.
Let's flip that around. Here's the shocking new truism: In the wilds of nature, to not have some level of homosexual/bisexual behavior in a given species is turning out to be the exception, not the rule. Would you like to read that statement again? Aloud? Through a megaphone? To the Mormon and Catholic churches? And the rest of them, as well? Repeatedly?
Iran: Cleric Assails Khamenei
11:51 am: Conservative cleric turns on Khamenei – Haddi Ghaffari, a former minister under Ayatollah Khomeni, gave a speech Monday directly addressing the Supreme Leader and criticizing him for his behavior since the election and for his support of Ahmadinejad. Ghaffari played a major role in the creation of Hezbollah — he is no reformist by any stretch of the imagination — and his frontal assault on Khamenei would have been extremely taboo prior to the election.
“Khamenei, your recent actions and behavior has brought shame to us clerics. Our image in the streets and bazaars has been tarnished as everyone is placing us in the same category as Ahmadinejad.”
“Khamenei, you are wrong, your actions are wrong. I believe in the velayat e fagih more than you.”
“I’m not preaching these messages so that I could be associated with the West. I loathe the West and will fight to the last drop of my blood before I or my land succumbs to the West. On the contrary, I’m preaching these messages on the count that the respect for our profession is gone.”
“Young people are not praying anymore, whose fault is that? It is your fault Mr. Khamenei, it’s your fault for placing us in the same line as that lunatic Ahmadinejad.”
“Ahmadinejad is nobody, you should congregate with us instead of him.”
link: niacINsight
PA State Senator "Allows Gays to Exist"
Leach: Should our only policy towards [same-sex] couples be one of punishment, to somehow prove that they’ve done something wrong?
Eichelberger: They’re not being punished. We’re allowing them to exist, and do what every American can do. We’re just not rewarding them with any special designation.
link: Think Progress » Home Page
Even God Wants Joe the Plumber to Say Out of Politics
Asked if he has plans to run for public office, he replied, “I hope not. You know, I talked to God about that and he was like, ‘No.’”
He continued, “I believe he’s gotten me on this grassroots movement. If I can encourage leaders to step up, that’s what I would like to do. That’s a heavy role. That’s something I don’t know if I am prepared to do yet.”
But Wurzelbacher said he will keep that door open if God ever calls him to be that leader.
link: Think Progress » Home Page
Dept. of "It's a Tossup": Worse for Hugo Chavez or for George Bush?
Mr. Obama’s nonconfrontational diplomacy seems to have caught Mr. Chávez off balance. “Chávez is beginning to understand that he’s dealing with someone with a very different approach than his predecessor,” said Michael Shifter, vice president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington policy research group. …
Mr. Chávez’s threats of belligerence in Central America led one opposition party here, Acción Democrática, to issue a statement on Monday that was full of irony: “Hugo Chávez has become the George Bush of Latin America.”
link: Think Progress » Home Page
Jame Agee Centennial
Tennesseans are preparing to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of poet, writer, and critic James Agee. The Knoxville-born author is the subject of an upcoming art exhibition at the Nashville Public Library, and will also be feted with a three-day festival at the Knox County Library.
The Nashville Public Library Art Gallery is hosting an Agee-inspired exhibition by visual artist DeLoss McGraw until September 27. McGraw’s series focuses on Agee’s poetry and his 1935 prose piece “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” (famously adapted for voice and orchestra in 1947 by Samuel Barber). In Knoxville, the public library has partnered with the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound for a celebration of Agee’s film work. The series, to run from October 23 to 25, is to include a screening of the rarely seen Bride Comes to Yellow Sky (1952), which Agee wrote and acted in.
Agee, who partnered with photographer Walker Evans to produce Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1958 for his autobiographical novel A Death in the Family. That book, first published two years after the author’s early death in 1955, was reissued two years ago in an edition that preserves portions of Agee’s original manuscript.
link: Tennessee Libraries Celebrate James Agee Centennial | Daily News | Poets & Writers
O Arizona: Legislature Pulls an All Nighter
The Legislature early Wednesday completed action on nine budget bills to implement most of a compromise $8.4 billion budget negotiated with Gov. Jan Brewer, whose administration told state employees to report to work as scheduled though she hadn't yet received the bills or acted on them.
Lawmakers omitted a sales tax increase that Brewer demanded to help protect important services from damaging cuts.
The lack of an approved budget before the new fiscal year began at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday had raised concerns about a possible state government shutdown. Legislature did not finish approving the budget bills until shortly before 3 a.m.
Lawmakers then delayed sending of the budgets for several hours so they would go to Brewer with nearly all other legislation approved by lawmakers during their 2009 session.
A notice posted on the Department of Administration's Web site at 5:30 a.m. said Brewer was "anxiously awaiting the budget bills" and that she "will act to continue state operations."
The Senate approved the bills shortly before 3 a.m., about three hours after the House's action just before midnight Tuesday. The bills modify a legislative budget approved June 4 but not sent to Brewer. Those bills also were being sent to Brewer on Wednesday.
link: Legislature Wraps Up Session - Politics News Story - KPHO Phoenix
Laser Dazzlers: When the Local Police Have This Technology, I Will Be Too Old to Drive (I Hope)
Green laser dazzlers designed to temporarily blind drivers were sent to US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan for just this purpose. But at short range they can damage the eye, and a number of US troops and civilians have ended up in hospital with eye injuries after "friendly fire" incidents.
Now the US Department of Defense's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) in Quantico, Virginia is developing a pulsed laser designed to prevent eye damage. Its wavelength means a portion of the light is absorbed by the vehicle windscreen, vaporising the outer layer of the glass and producing a plasma. This absorbs the rest of the pulse and re-emits the energy as a brilliant white light that is dazzling but harmless.
Because the light is emitted from the windscreen, the effect on the driver's eyes should be the same regardless of the vehicle's distance from the laser.
link: Laser weapon dazzles but doesn't blind - tech - 01 July 2009 - New Scientist
Ever Consider Leaving the Gun at Home?
"I began to hunt alongside my husband," said Gaya Güldemir, the widow of station founder Ufuk Güldemir. "He knew everything about the animal he was going to hunt. He taught me to respect animals.... The hunting itself is not important. The real joy is the preparation, waiting in nature for hours."
link: Turkish Hunters Give Nature a Hand : TreeHugger
Iran: Mousavi and Karoubi "Have Not Yielded"
Fredrik Dahl and Parisa Hafezi write:
Although hardliners have appeared to be in the driving seat since security forces overcame street protests that erupted in the days after the poll, Mousavi and Karoubi have not yielded.
Both men issued statements on their websites describing Ahmadinejad's future government as "illegitimate" -- even though Khamenei, the Islamic Republic's ultimate arbiter, has upheld the result and thrown his weight behind the president.
link: Ahmadinejad's rivals defiant on Iran vote | International | Reuters
Mood Offices: Quick, Fire the Grouchy
Today work is somewhere you travel to - in the future work will come to you.
So says a report attempting to work out what the offices and workplaces of 2030 will be like.
It predicts that as workforces get more mobile, technology will ensure that everything an employee needs is available no matter where they are.
Head offices and individual desks are likely to disappear in favour of hot desks, collaborative spaces and decor that adapts to a worker's mood.
link: BBC NEWS | Technology | Workplaces set to get 'smarter'
Anthill Earth: They Are Small but They Have Cell Phones
Matt Walker writes:
A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered.
Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same interrelated colony, and will refuse to fight one another.
The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.
What's more, people are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together.
Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) were once native to South America. But people have unintentionally introduced the ants to all continents except Antarctica.
These introduced Argentine ants are renowned for forming large colonies, and for becoming a significant pest, attacking native animals and crops.
In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (375 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the 'Californian large', extends over 900km along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan. The enormous extent of this population is paralleled only by human society Entomologists reveal the ant colony's true size
While ants are usually highly territorial, those living within each super-colony are tolerant of one another, even if they live tens or hundreds of kilometres apart. Each super-colony, however, was thought to be quite distinct.
But it now appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony. . . .
"The enormous extent of this population is paralleled only by human society," the researchers write in the journal Insect Sociaux, in which they report their findings.
link: BBC - Earth News - Ant mega-colony takes over world
Technological Racial Discrimination?
Mike Musgrove writes:
During the past two years, Arbitron has switched how it measures listenership. Where survey participants once wrote down their radio-listening habits in paper journals, they now carry an electronic device, called the Portable People Meter, to do it automatically.
The new system has caused turmoil in the radio industry; many stations that were popular under the former system have seen their ratings plummet under the new one. Arbitron says the devices give advertisers a more accurate and detailed look at a radio station's audience size, but some radio companies are complaining that the PPM service fails to include minority listeners.
"The increased used of the PPM may unfairly threaten the financial viability of minority-targeted radio stations whose advertising revenues depend on the size of their rated audience," Towns said.
link: Lawmakers Question Arbitron's Data on Minority Radio Listeners - washingtonpost.com
Supreme Court: Where's the Activism?
On another point, the ruling underscored the emptiness of the “judicial activist” label that Republicans like to use in debates over nominees to the federal courts, including Judge Sotomayor. In the firefighters’ case, she actually refused to second-guess the city’s decision — an act of judicial restraint. It was the court’s conservatives, including Chief Justice John Roberts, who voted to overturn the decision of an elected government.
link: Editorial - Firefighters and Race - NYTimes.com
Iran: "Don't Worry, I'll Come Back"
11:00 pm: 18-year old victim identified: His name was Ashkan Neda Soltan has become the face of those killed during the post-election protests, however other victims include 18 year-old Ashkan Sohrabi. Rooz online interviewed his sister, Elham, who remembered Ashkan’s last words, “Don’t worry, I’ll come back.” According to Elham, he was shot 3 times in the chest.
link: niacINsight
