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Archives
It's 4/20!
The Inside Dope on '420' Buzz
Ageless I hadn't been to this site for some time, even though my site is listed. wood s lot jogged my memory. It links to personal sites organized around the age of the site owner. If you check out the 1940s you'll see that I'm listed just above that young whippersnapper Doc Searls.
We're sending the message that the personal, creative side of the web is diverse and ageless and if each of you personal website builders out there will openly share your date of birth with us, we'll be on our way to proving it!
Disease Black Death and plague 'not linked' They looked at bishops' records which show that many priests died during the epidemic. Dr James Wood, professor of anthropology at Penn State University, said: "These records indicate the spread of the Black Death was more rapid than we formerly believed. "This disease appears to spread too rapidly among humans to be something that must first be established in wild rodent populations, like bubonic plague."
Modern bubonic plague typically needs to reach a high frequency in the rat population before it spills over into the human community via rodent fleas. thanks to reenhead.com
Israel/Palestine
Israel: the generals’ grand design In conventional political discourse, Israel’s recent attacks on Palestinian civilians, villages, and governmental institutions are described as “retaliatory acts”. They are justified as a “response” to the latest wave of terror attacks on Israeli civilians. In fact, these “retaliatory measures” are part of a systematic assault on the Palestinian Authority that was carefully prepared long before the current “war on terrorism.” As far back as October 2000, at the outset of the Palestinian uprising and before the terror attacks had started, military circles in Israel had prepared detailed operative plans to topple Arafat and the Palestinian Authority.
In a statement published in Israel’s major newspaper, Ha’aretz, on 18 October 2001, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared, “Oslo [the peace accord] is not continuing; there won’t be Oslo; Oslo is over.” Oslo is now widely considered in Israel to be “an historical mistake.” Since March of 2001, the Israeli media has openly discussed plans to re-establish full military control of the territories. -----------
David Horowitz, editor of the Jerusalem Report, recently said on the NPR show To the Point that Barak offered "basically all the territory the Palestinians were purporting to seek." This is a widely repeated claim— that Israel offered something like the "pre-1967 borders" that had long been the mantra of Palestinians who favored a two-state solution. But for Palestinians to get all the territory that had been under Arab control before the war of 1967 would mean getting a) all of what we now think of as the West Bank; b) all of East Jerusalem (which some consider part of the West Bank); and c) all of the walled "Old City" that lies between East and West Jerusalem. Barak never offered any of those things—not at Camp David, not at Taba. ----------
Missing in action We asked all of these people what came to their mind when they heard the words "Israeli/Palestinian conflict" and what its source was. A small number of people had direct experience (two individuals) and listed accounts from relatives as what had come to their minds. But most (82%) listed TV news as their source and to a lesser extent newspapers were also named. The replies showed that they had absorbed the "main" message of the news, of conflict, violence and tragedy.
But the research also showed that many people had little understanding of the reasons for the conflict and its origins. It was apparent that this lack of understanding (and indeed misunderstanding) was compounded by the news reports. Explanations were rarely given on the news and when they were, journalists often spoke obliquely, almost in a form of shorthand. For example, in a news bulletin that featured the progress of peace talks, an ITN journalist made a series of very brief comments on the issues which underpinned the conflict: "The basic raw disagreements remain - the future, for example, of this city Jerusalem, the future of Jewish settlements and the returning refugees. For all that, together with the anger and bitterness felt out in the West Bank, then I think it's clear this crisis is not about to abate."
Language Mark Twain and the English Language You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
With these sentences, Mark Twain not only began his finest novel but uttered a clarion call for a new way of writing. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain used seven distinct dialects to reflect the speech patterns of various characters, and he also became the first important author to capture the freshness and vitality of the newly hewn American idiom in narrative as well as dialogue. Just as Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is the first significant work written in the English language, Huckleberry Finn is the first novel of world rank to be written entirely in the American language.
Ninja
 thanks to /usr/bin/girl
Russia
Russia's population decline spells trouble Russia is facing a demographic crisis so dire that its population could shrink by half within 50 years. The only obvious solution – to encourage youthful immigrants from overpopulated Asian neighbors such as China – is so politically sensitive that Russian leaders refuse to even discuss it.
Russia's challenge is a double whammy. Like most of the developed world, birthrates have fallen far below levels that would sustain the population. At the same time, Russian death rates, particularly among working-age males, have skyrocketed due to post-Soviet poverty, substance abuse, disease, stress and other ills. thanks to Ethel the Blog
Signs I love signs.
 thanks to BookNotes
Piles My filing system has been failing me lately so I spent most of the day rearranging piles. One of my first entries in this blog was about a similar experience so I repeat it here. I use a chronological filing system. Some call this a pile. Piles have certain fail-safe characteristics. They can only get so high before they fall over. That is when I move to multipile piles also known as RAP or Random Access Piles. When you move your office these piles are put into boxes. The pile in a box is known as the Archive. This is when having a small office comes in handy.
Parkinson's Law
Today my DRS (Data Retrieval System) failed and, to find something, the piles had to go. Pile catharsis. I deleted and defragged piles.
This Ought to Upset Apple Fans Department
 thanks to MetaFilter
Age Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age I suppose this might be a little depressing for those in their twenties. It may appear you are a little behind others in making your mark on the world. At age 26:Napoleon Bonaparte conquered Italy. But, for old farts like me (57), it shows their is still hope. At age 59: English novelist and journalist Daniel Defoe wrote his first and most famous novel, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. thanks to consumptive.org
Baseball Last year the Mariners won 116 games. It was a magical season that everyone knows can't be repeated. They opened with a 3-3 homestand and just finished a 10 game road trip where they were 10-0. Their record is now 13-3 which is better than last year! Oakland is 4 games behind after 13 games. Texas' season is pretty much over—they're 8 1/2 games back.
The antisuv
Less than 1 litre/100 km - that's the fuel consumption of Volkswagen's latest super-economy car, unveiled at the company's AGM, and driven 230 km to the meeting by outgoing chairman Dr. Ferdinand Piëch.
Israel/Palestine Building the terror infrastructure
14. Every Saturday, Monday, and Thursday, Leila Abu Muweis travels to the hospital in Nablus for dialysis. Every Tuesday and Friday, her son Rami goes there for dialysis, too. They don't go together because she can't stand to see him attached to the machine. Since the village was put under siege, it takes them three hours each way. They leave at dawn and come back late at night, two dialysis patients, completely worn out. During the last two weeks, even that route was closed. Their fate at present is unknown. ----------
Letter From Israel
Even when some of the atrocities in the West Bank are reported in the Israeli press, it is done in a way that keeps the readers emotionally detached. It is also a function of the division of labour in the press. A tabloid like Yedioth Achronoth, with its cheap melodramatic overplay of every Israeli casualty, gives little or nothing on living conditions in the Occupied Territories. The quality paper Ha'aretz, with its excellent journalist Amira Hass (the only Israeli journalist living in the Occupied Territories), is confined to a high-brow, factual, unemotional style. (Ha'aretz journalist Gideon Levy, in a personal weekly column, breaks this rule, which is why he is permanently under fire.) ---------- Cover story - If only I could teach them what I have learnt
Twenty years separate these two experiences. Twenty years, a lot of miles and too many wars ever to believe things can be worked out by fighting. I was a field intelligence officer in the Rhodesian security forces during a small and bloody war in what is now Zimbabwe. Today, I am a journalist cameraman covering my umpteenth war, this one between the Israelis and Palestinians. I put down my rifle and picked up a camera, but the road has changed my mind.
Java Jive
The CoffeeResearch.org website is dedicated to advancing coffee quality through education and science. Embedded within over three hundred pages are tips and information on coffee brewing, espresso preparation, coffee roasting, coffee blending, and recipes. Advanced topics include information about the coffee market, consumption statistics, the coffee sciences, coffee agriculture, and the social issues related to coffee. thanks to MetaFilter
Where wars come from Psychohistory: Childhood and the Emotional Life of Nations The purpose of this book is to reveal for the first time how the ultimate cause of all wars and human misery is the parental holocaust of children throughout history--an untold story of how literally billions of innocent, helpless children have been routinely killed, bound, battered, mutilated, raped and tortured and then as adults have inflicted upon others the nightmares they themselves experienced.
Most of what you will read here will be new, upsetting and difficult to believe, despite the extensive historical, anthropological, clinical and neurobiological evidence I will present. But after you read it I think you will be able to understand for the first time why what Kierkegard called "the slaughterbench of history" happened, where we are today in the evolution of humanity and what we can do tomorrow to bring about a peaceful, happier world. thanks to abuddhas memes
Literature thanks to Dumbmonkey
Photography Some photography links thanks to plep. Two Jacob Riis... A Century Apart: Images of Spirit and Struggle, Jacob Riis and Five Contemporary Photographers
 And some beautiful plant pictures...
38 megapixels on a budget Justin—read carefully. I have been needing to upgrade my camera. I have been using an Olympus D-600L for four years now but I need to do higher quality work than it is capable of. A new digital camera that would do mostly what I want would be at least $2,000, which is out of the question. I recently purchased an Epson Perfection 2450 scanner that does a *super* job of scanning negatives, particularly the 6 x 9 cm negs from my old medium format Mamiya Universal. It occured to me that it would make more sense to dust off and repair the Mamiya and scan those big 120 roll film negatives. The Mamiya Universal is a range finder system camera with interchangeable backs and lenses and accessories such as ground glass backs (I have one). It's a completely manual camera with no interlocks. They were built between the late 60s and 1991. Mine had an old lens with a sticky shutter and an early grip that I wanted to update. Through the miracle of Ebay, I picked up a body with a broken range finder, and no back, but with a good lens and a later grip with the flash shoe on the grip for not much more that rebuilding the old lens.
 Mine is on the left and the "new" one is on the right. After transferring the lens and grip, removing the grip cable release (it's easier to flick the shutter release on the lens with my thumb), and adding my Vivitar 283 to the top of the grip, I have a fully functional medium format camera. Now to order some Fuji NPH 400.
 But wait! There's more! Just before the auction ended I discovered that the body on the "new" camera wasn't a Universal but a Super 23, which used the same lenses and backs, but was a little different. I wanted to use some of the body bits on my Universal and it looked like I wouldn't be able to use as much as I wanted. It was just the day before it arrived that I realized the big difference in the Super 23 was that it had a bellows back...
  Now, most of you brought up on sissy 35mm cameras probably don't know about the perspective control you get in a view camera. You can make converging verticals parallel. You can enlarge your depth of field. It's great for close-ups. I had decided to forgo the larger 4 x 5 format, with its bellows, and go with medium format and I still got bellows. This is way to cool. You can see the movements of the back it has full movement up to the full extension. I'm going to keep this body and flat top it...
 The range finder is broken and I will be using the ground glass so I will be removing the rangefinder. It will be great a wide angle camera when I get the wide angles lens since they don't use the range finder. They have their own finders. I will also be taking the old lens apart and using the mounting base for a pin hole. Let the fun begin. Where does the 38 megapixels come from? I compared the size of the images from my 1.4 megapixel Olympus to the scans from the Mamiya negatives. They are that much bigger. How much bigger?
Comics
Latest Volume: Pogo Volume 11The award-winning reprint series of Walt Kelly's landmark newspaper strip Pogo - widely considered one of the three most important newspaper strips in the medium's history - winds its way into the most fertile and fantastically-drawn period in the strip's existence. In POGO Volume 11, we finish up 1953 (August) and head into 1954 (January) in the prime years of Walt Kelly's cartooning life. Classic comedy sequences include the hijinks at Ma'm'selle Hepzibah's big soirée, a run of baseball strips to coincide with the World Series, an incredibly pointed satire of academia and college football, an attempt by Sis Boombah to take over coaching duties, and another patented Pogo Christmas. Also, find out the answer to the question, "Why do you hate the poor parsnip so?" The Comics Journal says this is the THIRD best comic work of the 20th Century - find out why! thanks to Ethel the Blog ------------ The above link is located at this amazing compendium of things comic.
Fantagraphics Books
Evolution
The time lord thanks to wood s lot
Death don't have no mercy
MEMENTO MORI: The British sociologist Geoffrey Gorer makes some interesting observations on the difference between cultural attitudes toward death in the Victorian era and our own. In his 1955 article, "The Pornography of Death," Gorer points out that death is treated in twentieth century society much like sex was treated in the nineteenth century. The subject is avoided, especially with children, or spoken of in euphemisms if it cannot be avoided. Death now, like sex then, is hidden, an event which takes place behind closed doors. The opposite is also true: in the nineteenth century, death was discussed as freely and openly as sex is today. If, as Freud has postulated, society is founded upon--and defined by--its repressions, our society has undergone a psychological about-face since the nineteenth century.
 thanks to Andrew Abb at American Samizdat
Israel/Palestine thanks to cynthia korzekwa at American Samizdat ----------
Why Bush dances to Sharon's tune thanks to cynthia korzekwa at American Samizdat ---------- The lunar landscape that was the Jenin refugee camp ---------- Report from Jenin: voices heard under the rubble ---------- Background / Barghouti's arrest could spell trouble ----------
Robert Fisk: Fear and learning in America thanks to also not found in nature
Language In Japan you will see many signs and products with english descriptions. At first glance they seem quite ordinary and normal blurbs of text. However upon closer inspection you will realise that many of the english you see, does not make any sense at all. And thus the word is born; "Engrish". Lest there remain any doubt whatsoever in anyone's mind that the entire function of the English language in Japan is to serve as meaningless decoration, I would like to present you with the largest gallery of engrish pictures on the internet.
 thanks to /usr/bin/girl
Israel/Palestine Israel’s strategy: the impotence of arms
The real purpose of Israel’s military assault on the Palestinian Authority is to systematically destroy its ability to function as a state. By pursuing the logic of force, Ariel Sharon’s government is putting Israel’s security at serious risk. ---------- Amid the ruins of Jenin, the grisly evidence of a war crime A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed. Its troops have caused devastation in the centre of the Jenin refugee camp, reached yesterday by The Independent, where thousands of people are still living amid the ruins.
A residential area roughly 160,000 square yards about a third of a mile wide has been reduced to dust. Rubble has been shovelled by bulldozers into 30ft piles. The sweet and ghastly reek of rotting human bodies is everywhere, evidence that it is a human tomb. The people, who spent days hiding in basements crowded into single rooms as the rockets pounded in, say there are hundreds of corpses, entombed beneath the dust, under a field of debris, criss-crossed with tank and bulldozer treadmarks. ---------- Letter from a Palestinian to an Israeli Dear neighbour: I am in pain. I see people on the streets dying, I see people in their homes bombed, I see people in restaurants killed. I decided to write to you today despite all the barriers between us. This is just an explanation of how we Palestinians think and what we Palestinians believe. Maybe, just maybe, it will bring us closer.
Some of my words you will not trust. Some of my words will shock you. Indeed, some might even hurt you. But you must read on because life is too short and the land we share is too small. Because our children are too troubled. Because our dreams are too precious. ----------
You won't break them Sir, You don't know me. There's no reason why you should and little cause for you to listen to what somebody like myself may have to say. Should it interest you, I'm a writer born in South Africa, now living and working abroad. As a writer, I'm deeply apprised of the need to keep words uncluttered of any urge to rouse easy emotions. This is what facile comparisons do - they nullify the understanding of complexity by a rush of outrage, heating the throat and staining the adversary with vicarious condemnation. Apartheid was not nazism, though to say so was a striking slogan. And the policies now perpetrated by Israeli forces on the Palestinian people should not be equated with apartheid. Each one of these processes and systems is evil enough to merit a thorough description of its own historical singularity.
And yet, it is all only too familiar. The underlying assumptions informing your actions are racist. As was the case with the South African regime, the methods by which you hope to subjugate the enemy consist of force and bloodshed and humiliation. Cynically you think you can get away with this as long as you play up to the supposed vital interests of the United States. I don't think you really care a fig for America's interests. Your doppelgänger, Netanyahu, employs this crude propaganda more openly. But you too, by echoing the American president, who describes every "other" as a terrorist, have shown that you take the rest of the world for fools. Surely, not all of us agree that the highest good in the world is America's greed for cheap oil, and that we are hence expected to adhere to the inviolability of corrupt regimes in the region.
Art The book showcases over 400 examples of contemporary stencilled works from across the globe, their innovation and vitality achieved with new materials, methods and approaches. "Street art is both an expression of our culture and a counterculture in itself. ‘Communication’ has become a modern mantra: the city streets shout with billboards, fly posters and corporate advertising, all vying for our attention. They almost invite a subversive response. As high-tech communications have increased, a low-tech reaction has been the recent explosion in street art."
 thanks to Andrew Abb at American Samizdat
Family Stuff Jenny and Katie needed to clean out Jenny's storage on the Island and move it down to Tacoma so Zoe and I watched Robyn and Mikey for the day. We took them down to Freeland Park so the kids could burn off some energy. It didn't work. Running after small children does take your mind of the worries of the world for a little while. All these great pictures were taken by Zoe.
 
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