Mon - November 14, 2005

Aluminum Foil Helmets 

It's been a while since I've added anything new here (flying in a B-52 is hard to beat) this humor item caught my attention.
 

On the Effectiveness of Aluminum Foil Helmets:  An Empirical Study  space

Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

Read the whole thing, it's funny. 

Posted at 09:05 PM    

Mon - November 22, 2004

Mon - November 8, 2004

a more accurate view

A useful image adjustment, courtesy of Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman,
University of Michigan

...We can correct for this by making use of a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states have been rescaled according to their population. That is, states are drawn with a size proportional not to their sheer topographic acreage -- which has little to do with politics -- but to the number of their inhabitants, states with more people appearing larger than states with fewer, regardless of their actual area on the ground. Thus, on such a map, the state of Rhode Island, with its 1.1 million inhabitants, would appear about twice the size of Wyoming, which has half a million, even though Wyoming has 60 times the acreage of Rhode Island.

Here are the 2004 presidential election results on a population cartogram of this type:

Posted at 12:02 PM    

Wed - October 6, 2004

Is Russia coasting toward dictatorship?

CRITIC AT LARGE


Back in the USSR: Soviet Memories and Russia's Literary Future
By CARLIN ROMANO

At this year's BookExpo America, in Chicago, one news release among hundreds stood out for its chilly remembrance of things past.

"Outcry Against Putin's Book Censorship Campaign to Surface in the U.S. on Eve of 2004 Book-Expo," the notice declared. "Books by American and Russian Writers Banned."

The release announced a teleconference staged by Ultra.Kultura, a Russian publishing house, protesting the confiscation by Russia's newly formed Federal Anti-Drug Service of eight of its books, among them translations of Inside Terrorism, by Bruce Hoffman, and Marijuana: The Forbidden Medicine, by Harvard professors Lester Grinspoon and James B. Bakalar. Ilya Kormiltsev, Ultra.Kultura's chief editor, sought to draw attention to an April raid by the service on Trading House Stolica, a Moscow distributor of books to retailers.

The teleconference attracted little press. Like Russia's return march to authoritarianism or totalitarianism in recent years -- it's not yet clear where the march will stop -- Kremlin assaults on freedom of the press have been largely ignored by American media transfixed by the Middle East, and traditionally unwilling to cover much foreign news free of bombs or murder.

Only in the past two months, after terrorists simultaneously exploded two Russian planes on domestic flights and brought us the Beslan massacre, have American newspapers found front-page space for the world's geographically largest country, the nation from whom Americans once feared a nuclear holocaust, the nation for which we don't need weapons inspectors to confirm the world's second-largest cache of WMD's, some of them presumably as well protected as those two domestic flights.

Beslan's shocking political aftermath -- President Putin's announcement that Russians will no longer be permitted to elect their governors in Russia's 89 substates, and will, in effect, be able to vote directly only for president -- showed that "Back in the USSR." continues to be the Kremlin's current theme song. And the Ultra.Kultura matter formed just one ripple in a wavelike return to the Soviet mentality in publishing. As our own annual Banned Books Week passes this week, American authors, publishers, and news media should resist with raised voices.

The last few years in Russia offer multiple examples of literary censorship on the rise after the "anything goes" spirit of the Yeltsin era. A Russian youth organization allied with Putin, Walking Together, has begun propaganda campaigns against freewheeling and critically acclaimed post-perestroika writers like Victor Pelevin (A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories) and Vladimir Sorokin (Blue Lard). In the case of the postmodern Sorokin, Walking Together protesters publicly tore up copies of Blue Lard (which imagines a homosexual relationship between clones of Stalin and Khrushchev) in downtown Moscow and tossed the remains down a mock toilet bowl. The Moscow prosecutor's office subsequently brought charges against Sorokin of pornography, later dropped, under Article 242 of the Russian Federation Criminal Code.

Threats have also been made against other writers, such as Bayan Shiryanov for his novel, Lower Aerobatics, accused of being pro-decadence and drugs. While Izvestia at one point labeled Walking Together "silly," the group's high-pressure campaign against oligarch Boris Berezovsky and his properties helped drive him into exile.

Then there's the prominent case of avant-garde novelist and radical nationalist Eduard Limonov, who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and got his Russian citizenship back only from Gorbachev in 1991. In 2001 the Federal Security Service (FSB), successor to the KGB, arrested Limonov, leader of the National Bolshevik Party, in the Russian republic of Altay. It cited his connection with four members of his party arrested for supposedly buying weapons in a plan to invade Kazakhstan and set up an independent state. Limonov rejected the charges against him as politically motivated. He served more than two years in prison before being released, in June 2003.

As the Kremlin crackdown against free expression proceeds from the once free national television networks to print, one couldn't ask for a better jolt of reality than Emma Gerstein's Moscow Memoirs. Just published in the United States by Overlook Press, it's the most vibrant and insightful autobiographical achievement by a Russian writer since such classics as Nina Berberova's The Italics Are Mine and Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned (with which Gerstein clashes). Here we learn again of the sorrow and ignominy faced by writers under Soviet rule, and get a taste of what the current government's "ahead to the past" agenda may mean.

Gerstein (1903-2002), a peppery nonagenarian when the book appeared in Russia in 1998, became close personal friends in the 1920s with Osip Mandelstam (Russia's supreme 20th-century poet according to Joseph Brodsky) and his wife, Nadezhda. In the decades to follow, Gerstein also grew to be intimate friends with Anna Akhmatova -- Russia's greatest female poet and an artist some consider superior to Mandelstam -- as well as with Akhmatova's son, Lev Gumilyov, and Boris Pasternak. Professionally, Gerstein won praise as a literary scholar of the 19th-century poet Mikhail Lermontov.

Composed of multiple essay-length reminiscences, Moscow Memoirs shocked many Russian literati because it recaptured the Mandelstams in a way that left their literary importance intact, but their nobility of character dented. Gerstein remembers Osip Mandelstam, who famously reviled Stalin in a 1933 "Epigram" and apparently died in a Soviet transit camp in 1938 on the way to the Gulag, as a reckless and not-always-courageous martyr to poetry who named names too easily, a man with "a cruel mind but a kind heart." She portrayed Nadezhda, revered by many Soviet literary dissidents as the indomitable widow who saved much of her husband's work for the world through prodigious feats of memorization and determination to survive Stalin's evils, as an untrustworthy reporter of her experiences. She also, to some tastelessly, included reminiscences of Nadezhda's bisexuality and enthusiasm for developing threesomes with her sometimes unbalanced poet.

The crucial impact of Moscow Memoirs is profound and cumulative, recalling a time when "the crack of skulls being crushed could be felt in the air." Gerstein's command of distant detail illuminates the Mandelstams' moves from place to place and their many humiliations (as in Osip Mandelstam's wretched time assigned to provincial Voronezh). She re-creates the feeling of pressure to violate one's own integrity. (At different points, both Mandelstam and Akhmatova grimly praised Stalin in poetry in an effort to save one or another's life.) Above all, Gerstein shows us that literary life under totalitarianism rarely comes down to heroism versus cowardice, nobility versus shabbiness, but to a day-by-day struggle to behave the best one can under monstrous circumstances. The thought that Russian writers may be headed back into the abyss can only sicken the soul.

Some recent polls indicate that more than 70 percent of Russians regret the collapse of the Soviet Union, and 76 percent back censorship as an integral part of the media. Earlier this year, as he did more recently in his speech after the Beslan massacre, Putin mourned the death of the Soviet Union as a "national tragedy on an enormous scale." In the September 27 New Republic, Masha Gessen, one of Russia's shrewdest observers of her country's nomenklatura and intelligentsia, writes, "To be blunt, Russia is about to turn itself into a dictatorship" -- and a fascist one at that.

Gerstein would have recognized the tune. Is anyone else listening?

Carlin Romano, critic at large of The Chronicle and literary critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer, is a newly elected fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University.

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 51, Issue 7, Page B14

If the current wave of literary and media censorship provides any clue, the future doesn't look promising...




...Beslan's shocking political aftermath -- President Putin's announcement that Russians will no longer be permitted to elect their governors in Russia's 89 substates, and will, in effect, be able to vote directly only for president -- showed that "Back in the USSR." continues to be the Kremlin's current theme song. And the Ultra.Kultura matter formed just one ripple in a wavelike return to the Soviet mentality in publishing...

Posted at 06:52 AM    

Mon - March 29, 2004

Fabrication of a Fabrication

Some timely humor from The Stranger

The books editor for The Stranger committed an unconscionable act of journalistic fraud last week in a feature article entitled "The Liars" Club," an investigation by Stranger journalists has found. The egregious fabrication represents a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 12-year history of the newspaper.


FRIZZELLE Leaving the office after being fired late Friday morning.

The editor, Christopher Frizzelle, 23, misled readers and Stranger colleagues by submitting a piece that purported to be an exclusive interview with disgraced journalists Jayson Blair, formerly of the New York Times, and Stephen Glass, formerly of the New Republic, conducted in a bar in Brooklyn, New York. The Stranger has since discovered that Frizzelle did not travel to New York City, and spent the last two months writing the piece far away from there, in his Capitol Hill apartment. He fabricated comments. He concocted scenes. He lifted material from other newspapers and magazines. He altered a photograph to create the impression he had been somewhere, and had seen someone, when he had not...

Posted at 09:57 PM    

Tue - December 16, 2003

Sun - December 7, 2003

Newly-elected mayor promises the city of Houston bigger pants

Mr. Sanchez, who narrowly lost the 2001 election to Mayor Lee P. Brown, a three-term mayor who has reached the end of his term limit, conceded on Saturday night, saying: "We drove the candidates to a consensus — higher taxes are on the way out."

Mr. White, who ran a cerebral if sometimes plodding campaign heavily focused on the city's traffic and budget problems, claimed victory before Mr. Sanchez finished his concession speech. "I'm ready to serve as Houston's next mayor," he told cheering supporters.

Houston's elections are non-partisan with candidates not running on party lines. But Mr. White was long identified as a Democrat and Mr. Sanchez a Republican. Although Mr. Sanchez attracted some support from national party echelons, Mr. White maintained good relations with the Bush administration and was spared partisan attack.

The race was notable for several factors. In a city with no majority bloc it is roughly one third each African-American, Latino and Anglo — Mr. White, who is white, fended off challenges by a Latino and a black candidate, drawing support from both their constituencies, defying stereotypes of race-based voting patterns and confirming Houston's image as a city of tolerance.

In the last few weeks, Mr. White was endorsed by Mayor Brown, who is a former New York City police commissioner, as well as all four other living mayors of Houston. Mr. White was also endorsed by the Houston Chronicle.

The campaign broke spending records. Mr. White. put up to $3 million of his own fortune into the race and raised $6 million more from contributors large and small. Mr. Sanchez spent about $4 million and the third candidate, Sylvester Turner, a member of the Texas House of Representatives who lost a bid for mayor in 1991, spent $1 million or so. As the bottom vote-getter in the November election, Mr. Turner was dropped from the race, leaving the runoff to Mr. White and Mr. Sanchez.

Some $14 million in expenditures — this for a job paying $165,817 a year. But the mayor of Houston enjoys one of the nation's strongest city pulpits. The mayor has appointive powers beyond many of his big-city colleagues and sits on the City Council. Houston will also occupy a national spotlight as host of the Super Bowl on Feb. 1 and will showcase a new light rail system for the occasion.

"Houston is like my 12-year-old son who outgrew his pants three times last year," Mr. White said in an interview in his bustling campaign office as the race wound down a few days ago. "Which is good," he continued. "But traditionally Houston waits to buy its pants until they're outgrown."

He would remedy that, he promised, with better road-building and redevelopment projects.

His victory, he said on Saturday night, "reminds Houstonians that we're all neighbors — isn't that great!" He told his supporters, "You have transformed a political campaign into a civic movement."

The New York Times reports: HOUSTON, Dec. 7 — Bill White, a Clinton administration deputy energy secretary who began well behind two challengers in the race for Houston mayor, swept to a decisive victory in the campaign to lead the nation's fourth largest city for the next two years.



Mr. White, who ran a cerebral if sometimes plodding campaign heavily focused on the city's traffic and budget problems, is not without his colorful moments. Bill White appears to have an unprecedented fondness for metaphors involving pants.

"Houston is like my 12-year-old son who outgrew his pants three times last year," Mr. White said in an interview in his bustling campaign office as the race wound down a few days ago. "Which is good," he continued. "But traditionally Houston waits to buy its pants until they're outgrown."

Is that a metaphor? Or a simile?

Posted at 01:57 PM    

Fri - November 21, 2003

JFK assassination theories continue to thrive

From the Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Forty years after his death, nowhere is the memory of John F. Kennedy more alive than in the ongoing drama over who killed him and why .

Posted at 02:53 AM