Michael Franti

Playing his new song live in New York City.

"Barack Obama, yes we can!"



Special thanks to a New York City reader for sending this our way.

Precisely the Sort of Thing that Makes Editing Take Forever

So, my stupid paper is largely about a leftist, Marxist, socialist (of course) group of scientists called "Science for the People." In order to not have to type out S-c-i-e-n-c-e- -f-o-r- -t-h-e- -P-e-o-p-l-e 87 times over the course of the paper, I abbreviate this as "SftP."

The problem: "SftP" is acting as a sort of stand in pronoun for the collective of people, like "group" or, yeah, "collective." So it's a singular noun.

But SftP notoriously acted as a bunch of people, not as a singular entity, especially in their writing. So my paper has sentences like this:

"SftP relied on their conception of the lay audience to determine the best means of convincing the public that their position was correct."

Which feels very natural, like "The Utah Jazz win the game" or "The Heat are dominating the Celtics." Unfortunately, these are not single syllable faux-plural basketball words. SftP is a singular noun. So it should probably read:

"SftP relied on its conception of the lay audience to determine the best means of convincing the public that its position was correct."

I will now go dig through 28 pages and replace the relevant pronouns. Sigh.

(On top of this is the don't-even-get-me-started-factor that the text and the rhetoric, being extant entities, *do* certain things, while the people that *wrote* them *did* them. Attack of the killer verb tense).

(And if you were wondering, yes, this is why i don't post while I'm writing papers).

UPDATE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Okay, nix that. I just came across this sentence:

"It is true enough that SftP utilized an emotional rhetoric because they thought the topic was important..."

and I can't bring myself to write "it thought" there. "It" can have conceptions and an argument, but "it" cannot think.¹ So we're back to the original with a footnoted disclaimer about bad grammar. I am a nerd.

¹ "Open the pod bay doors, Hal." "I can't do that, Dave." to the contrary.

Cell Phone trick

Follow this link to a video of a fancy trick you and your friends can do with your cell phones.

Thanks to the Durham reader who sent this craziness our way. It wasn't Photoshopped? Right? Nah, there's no way.

Didn't Even Have to Use My AK (Week 15, too)

Greetings from the depths of academia.

It's very hard to write on ye olde Ballade when there's a constant pressure to be writing elsewhere. So if I go under for a week here or there, trust that that's why.

The writing project of late that has eaten my time like an event horizon has been a paper for the HSD core seminar. I'm writing on rhetoric in public science communication during the Sociobiology controversy of the mid-seventies. The reason today was a good day¹ is that after dragging my feet/knuckles for a solid couple of weeks - I was reading and doing a ton of background work in that time, but still, I just couldn't get myself to start writing - I finished the first draft of the paper. Huzzah!

Considering this is pretty much all I've been doing (aside from a slew of other research projects and the usual class reading and such) for the past LONG WHILE, it feels pretty good to have it done. It's not in shareable form yet; I need to do some editing and rewriting and the like, but I'll post it when I get it to the readable stage. 28 double spaced pages of some pretty annoying quotey detailed analysis, so i suppose we all have that to look forward to.

Speaking of 28... sigh:


(Photo nabbed from Boing Boing; Yoko sent it specially to them to commemorate his passing. Other than typing DAMMIT four thousand times, I have little to add here. I was two at the time).

So the week 14 account is somewhat boring, mainly because of the previously mentioned paper-write-a-thon. We suffered through our last shared lab on Monday - actually scratch that, the lab itself was pretty cool; Dr. Hall talked about some of his work on Evolutionary Development (aka Evo Devo). But we suffered the death rattle of the lab in that form; seems the desire to divorce HPS/BPL from HSD has become overwhelming, so next semester we are back on our own. This has all kinds of icky politics behind it so I will forego that here; suffice it that sunnier days are ahead (theoretically) from both camps' perspectives.

Also sat through my last law class, so that requirement is dead and gone.

Tuesday - Thursday was sorta a mess because Beck was sick and coughing all night. So I did research for my paper from home and did my reading for Friday. Friday's class was another eagerly received death knell of a class; we were treated to a trio of presentations on the Philosophy of Technology, the height of which were the claim that computer software is immaterial and that the tale of Icarus is an anti-technology fable. People couldn't get out of there fast enough; this class was also drenched in political ill and represents a divorcing of departments for next semester. So yay for that. We did cap Friday with a party at Jane and Richard's house - the whole department etended showed up, and a good ol' time was had by all.

When I look at this semester's classes... YECK. Not a great first semester class-wise, though things should turn better this spring. And I suppose the fact that I didn't go running crazy from the premises in response to the circumstances is a solid sign that I like what I'm doing despite the objective badness of the classes I found myself in this semester. So, that's... good?

(Musical insert: Axl just asked me, over a sonicscape of thunderstorm and raindrops, "What's so civil about war anyways?" What indeed, W. Axl.)

Anyways, back to the good day - tossed the frisbee with Johnny, melissa, Mark, matt and Genevieve and then got a burrito at lunch today. That was fun in a stupid tossing on the quad kinda way, followed by the usual awesome lunch hijinks. At some point today / yesterday we also watched this video, which is funny as hell but decidedly unsafe for work. Get that song running through your head for a (short but) good time.

And yeah, I stomped that paper! Seriously, after not getting anywhere near as much done this weekend as I wanted, I ran through and got a ton of pages written by hunkering down in the lab the past two days. Go team Nyet. Er, me.

So anyways, that's the tale of week 14 and part of week 15. The plan is to finish editing / rewriting on both papers tomorrow and get those suckas turned in so I can get on to the next thing. Fun times.

Hopefully this means I'll get some more updates in soon. Still gotta do GPGDS and the Rochester Turkey week. And discussing Men's League and the uberfun Royal WEfnuk dinner (as well as the DOPE t-shirts that Alexxx has designed) would be a good idea, too. Until then...

Would you PLEASE give it on up to Homeslessville?

¹ Knowest ye thy Ice Cube?

Sad story

The Clarion Content is fond of the old saw, "The bus can come for ya any day." Meaning any given day can be one's last. We strive to follow the immortal words of Steven King's unforgettable character Ellis Boyd 'Red' Redding, "Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'." Rarely is our inevitable mortality brought home so forcefully as it was by reading this tragic story this morning.

Three generations of a family and four people were wiped out in an instant, a mother, her baby, her other 15 month old daughter, and a grandmother. An F/A-18D Hornet fell from the sky over a residential neighborhood in San Diego. The house burned to the ground as did the thankfully unoccupied house next door. The young Naval Aviator flying the plane was ordered to fly to Marine Corps Air Station Miramar rather than attempt to return to the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, after one of his engines failed. En route his other engine failed, he ejected and survived the crash.

What a sad story.

A hero in a bad scene

From the terrorist assault on Mumbai, perhaps you have already heard this story. Perhaps, you have read other stories of heroism from this dastardly terrorist attack. The Clarion Content read about a heroic nanny, Sandra Samuel.

She was in the Chabad House with two-year-old Moshe Holtzberg and six other people when the assault began. Only Sandra Samuel and Moshe Holtzberg made it out alive. When she was shot at early in the assault, she locked herself and fellow employee Zaki Hussein in a downstairs utility room. As Samuel described it there was screaming, hundreds of gunshots and periodic grenade blasts that shook the building. Conflicting reports say, as the gunmen went door to door looking for survivors, Sandra Samuel unlocked her door, eluded some gunmen and dared others to shoot her. All reports agree that she ran upstairs to find the boy's American and Israeli parents shot and the child crying over them. She picked him up and made another dash past the gunmen for the door.

Both, two-year-old Moshe Holtzberg and the boy's heroic nanny, Sandra Samuel are both recovering from the affair in Israel.

Venice under water

Follow this link to way better pictures

On no! Venice, Italy is experiencing its worst flooding in twenty years. The fourth highest tide in modern history surged into the city Monday. The pictures from the Daily Mail of England are hard to fathom. The debate in many media organs is whether or not Venice which is known to be sinking risks becoming uninhabited. The population in recent years has dwindled to 66,000 and a large percentage of those residents are elderly. The city is flooded several times a year. Residents this week say you can literally swim across St. Mark's Square. Yet the city receives as many as twenty million tourist visits a year according to the Daily Mail.