Sophianotloren

Going through local Craigslist ads for housing, since I’m still struggling to find a place after 6 months of looking… and a few themes popped up.  Now, I already count on the general overall message of “we don’t want you here” that comes across, but I kept seeing a handful of things repeated, enough that I started saving little snippets from various ads that illustrated my point.  Roughly filed into the following categories, here are a few examples:

Be quiet, be gone, don’t remind us you exist.

• Pets,drugs, loud party and smoking are not allowed on this property.
• No pets, smokers, or overnight guests.
• We don’t use drugs, 420, or alcohol, so I’m looking for a woman to share a no-drama, clear-headed lifestyle.
• This is a Non-Smoking, QUIET and PET-FREE house.
• looking for a single person who likes to live in tidy environment, and is considerate of noise levels, especially at night.
• I need the living room and kitchen to be relatively quiet at night after 9pm, and the living room lights need to be off starting at 10pm.
• Serious people only.
• preferably male, quiet, regular easy-going, working or student type.
• This is not a silent house, but is intended to be very peaceful and relaxing. At the same time, it is intended to be super fun and free, so their must be consensus between everyone.
• I will have some long and busy days and like to have my home be a space to recharge, so I value quiet evenings.
• looking for a chill roommate, preferably a mid 20’s kind of person, with a 9-5 sort of gig (like us).
• Grad student/ busy full-time employed person preferable…

Kids, pets, and/or smoke required — kinda the opposite of the previous.

• No pets, but there is a cat onsite.
• There are 4 pets in the house 2 dogs and 2 cats. I will consider another animal.
• 420 friendly, and work full time.
• there will be 2 children in the house
• Preferably no more pets, definitely no dogs
• two amazing dogs!
• we have one cat
• I have 2 nice cats.
• three roommates, who are employed and students, and 2 cats.
• there is already a cat in the apartment
• There are already two beautiful Persian cats in house
• Kitchen privileges. References required. private half bath. Must be ok with a cat
• The house is 420 and LGBT friendly.
• Household has two young cats, which spend the majority of their time indoors.
• nice, respectful, queer friendly, 420 friendly, dog friendly
• We have a 10-yr-old

Extremely specific requirements

• No meat or fish can be brought into house, this is a vegetarian household.
• Ideally, you have a daily meditation practice and have sat a 10-day Vipassana course as taught by S.N. Goenka.
• You: healthy life-style, financially stable and responsible, very clean, respectful, honest, common sense
• share some details about yourself, including your schedule, lifestyle, why you’re moving, links to Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, etc.
• someone who is fairly tidy and does not wear shoes indoors
• please have 2 references available for verification.
• work exchange for occasional care of our 5 yr old daughter
• I do not want the house smelling of bacon or pork. Gross!
• I am a guy looking for a fun open minded female roommate in a shared bedroom / You must be easy going and fun, and want to save on rent in this tough economy
• No perfume, incense and/or strong scents please!!!

No requirements (and maybe no standards?)

• studio apartment you’ll be sharing with me / typical bay area guy.
• Male or female theres one female already and two guys. Were looking for a forth.
• Please send a short description of yourself and what you are looking for.

And of course, “No wonder it’s that cheap!”

• Available now for Summer rental.
• single room in a big house with around 15 others
• looking for a roommate to live in a cornered off space of a large living room.
• for the the next school year.

Look, all I’m trying to find — absolute basic essential criteria — is 1) no men, 2) no pets, 3) no smoking. Unfortunately, the folks who also want “no smoking” seem to be uptight assholes who also want no alcohol (“no-drama, clear-headed lifestyle”) and no sex (“QUIET,” “quiet evenings,” “no overnight guests,” “quiet after 9pm,” “considerate of noise levels, especially at night,” “quiet, regular easy-going” etc.)

The folks who might not mind sex and alcohol gotta smoke their pot — which I don’t have a problem with, I just can’t live in the same space with the smoke (done that before, it does NOT work. Read back through my archives about living with the Girl-Child and Stoner Dude… ~shudder~)

And living with animals is apparently required if you’re among folks who understand that humans aren’t soulless robots meant to never enjoy anything… (“4 pets in the house,” “there is a cat onsite,” “two young cats,” “two beautiful Persian cats,” “already a cat,” “and 2 cats,” “2 nice cats,” etc.) My lungs and sinuses would like to be able to function, thanks, and I don’t much like animals around even when I’m not dealing with allergies from them.

I’m staying with The Rabbit right now, not dealing well with her cat, and isolated from public transportation. I’m trying to scrape by on $880 a month, a government check which is only that “high” because California supplements the federal amount of $720 monthly. Yes, you read those numbers correctly: The US Government expects someone who qualifies for SSI — essentially “permanent disability” — to be able to survive on $8,600 annual income, anywhere in the country.  And California’s added amount means that any permanently disabled person in California should be able to do just fine with barely over $10,000 a year to live on! For reference, that’s equivalent to an hourly wage of $4.13 and $5.08, respectively.  The federal minimum wage is currently $7.25/hour, and yet the same government expects someone who cannot work at the same capacity, someone with particular care needs beyond the average person, to survive on far less than that.

In fact, let’s compare one other set of numbers: The “Federal Poverty Guidelines” are a set of numbers that the government uses to determine, essentially, whether you’re broke enough to qualify for various assistance programs.  All the numbers I’ve been referencing so far are for a single individual, because those are the ones relevant to my situation, although the amounts get calculated for lager “family” sizes as well.  So, here’s the thing: the current “single individual” amount, the annual income that says “anything less than this means you’re so broke you automatically qualify for assistance” — is $11,670. Now, you might, if you have even a tiny bit of sense, notice that number is significantly larger than either “barely over $10,000” ($10,524, specifically) or $8600.  And if you’re particularly clever, you might even stop to ask, “Why, doesn’t that mean that the people living in poverty, the ones who are permanently disabled, are being given just enough ‘assistance’ to keep them in poverty?!” Yes! Exactly. That’s exactly what’s going on!

So, yeah. I have an income that’s equivalent to 70% of the federal minimum wage, 91% of the federal amount that says “you’re so broke you can’t handle basic needs,” being administered by the federal government. I’m not naïve enough to think it’s a matter of the left hand not knowing what the right one’s doing, especially when I’d be dealing with 56% of minimum wage and 73% of the “you’re definitely broke” amounts if I didn’t have that tiny extra bit from the state of California… Ebenezer Scrooge would be delighted to see the poor dying off, decreasing the supposed, imaginary “surplus population.”

Filed under: General

A black shooter is a thug, a Muslim is a terrorist, and a white attacker is perhaps mentally ill.

— an unidentified interviewer for RT network’s “In the Now“

Now is the time for mourning and for healing. But let’s be clear. At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency.

— President Barack Obama

This week’s featured post is “Please Take Down Your Confederate Flag“. But last August’s “Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party” is also topical again; it had picked up more than 20K new hits between the Charleston shooting and 9:30 this morning, making it the second Weekly Sift post to go over a quarter million page views.

This week everybody was talking about the terrorist attack in South Carolina

But not everybody was calling it that. Since the shooter was a white supremacist and his victims were not whites, the incident was usually referred to as a tragedy, i.e., one of those bad things that happens now and then that nobody can do anything about. Rick Perry even called it an “accident“. (I discussed this phenomenon after the 2012 Sikh Temple shooting in “White Right-Wing Christian Terrorist“.) An interviewer at RT put it like this:

A black shooter is a thug, a Muslim is a terrorist and a white attacker is perhaps mentally ill.

If the subject weren’t so serious, it would have been comical to watch Republicans and their right-wing media allies struggle against the notion — obvious from the beginning to anybody without ideological blinders — that this was a racial attack. Multiple talking heads on Fox News tried to spin the shooting as an attack on Christians, because the imaginary persecution of American Christians fits within the boundaries the Fox fantasy world, while the very real persecution of blacks doesn’t. (Larry Wilmore collected the clips and added appropriately amazed commentary. Media Matters gives the chronology, showing that witness accounts of the shooter’s racist statements were already public before Fox’ Christian-persecution spin.)

Lindsey Graham and Rick Santorum played along with that farce. (Jeb Bush merely professed ignorance: “I don’t know what was on the mind or the heart of the man who committed these atrocious crimes.” — as if he shooter hadn’t announced what was on his mind.) Fox trotted out a black minister, Bishop E. W. Jackson, to make the Christian-persecution case, not bothering to mention that he is also a Republican politician. Wilmore was not impressed: “Black don’t distract,” he said. He also ridiculed Jackson’s statement that the shooter “didn’t choose a bar, he didn’t choose a basketball court, he chose a church”, suggesting that Jackson could also have listed “a chitlin farm” or “a watermelon stand” as stereotypic places where blacks congregate.

In a particularly Orwellian editorial, The Wall Street Journal saw the shooting as a chance to congratulate America on its racial progress: Unlike after the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, authorities in Charleston are not conspiring to help the perpetrator get away.

The universal condemnation of the murders at the Emanuel AME Church and Dylann Roof’s quick capture by the combined efforts of local, state and federal police is a world away from what President Obama recalled as “a dark part of our history.” Today the system and philosophy of institutionalized racism identified by Dr. King no longer exists.

In a different context, Wilmore recently introduced The Nightly Show’s “Extremely Low Bar Award“. This looks like another strong candidate: Our law enforcement system is no longer conspiring with white-supremacist terrorists, so we must have this racism thing just about knocked. It makes me proud to be an American.

The New Republic‘s Jeet Heer also looked back to the Birmingham bombing, but pointed out that the conservative media’s response then was very similar to the denial of white racism we’re seeing today. He quotes a National Review editorial from 1963:

The fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur—of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro.

And the significance of this particular church to a white supremacist couldn’t be clearer: One of the oldest black churches in America, Emanuel AME was founded by (among others) Denmark Vesey, who was hanged for leading a failed slave revolt in 1822.

Discussion of the Confederate flag that still flies in front of the South Carolina state capitol, and can’t even be lowered to half-mast without an act of the legislature, is a topic I pushed into its own article. My main point there is that a symbol like the Confederate flag is so powerful that your personal intentions in displaying it don’t matter: It means what it means. Maybe you associate it with country music and good barbeque and The Dukes of Hazzard, but that just doesn’t matter. It is the flag of slavery and Jim Crow and the KKK and lynchings and Dylann Roof. You can’t make that stuff go away.

Finally, there’s the frequent statement — based on more-or-less nothing — that Dylann Roof was a “loner” or a “lone wolf”. We now have what appears to be his manifesto, and it’s filled with standard white-supremacist rhetoric and references. We still don’t know whether he met other white supremacists face-to-face or had any help planning his attack. But he clearly was plugged in to that network, through the internet at the very least.

Make the parallel to Muslim terrorists and ISIS. If a Muslim shooter had been browsing ISIS web sites and wrote a manifesto full of ISIS rhetoric, would we see him as a loner, or think of him as part of ISIS? Those same Republican politicians — Lindsey Graham, for example — who cast Roof as a disturbed loner would be demanding that a similar Muslim be grilled hard (and maybe even tortured) to identify his contacts in the movement.

and the Pope’s global-warming encyclical

Charleston dominated my attention this week, so I still haven’t finished reading Laudato Si or given its message the attention it deserves. Next week.

I do want to make two strategic observations that explain why I think this is a big deal:

• Climate-change denial is geared towards confusing people about science; it’s not well set up to oppose a religious movement that defends God’s creation. Scientists are well-known evolution-pushing liberals who are easy to cast as part of a global socialist conspiracy. A diverse consortium of religious leaders is harder to tar with that charge, and fossil-fuel conservatives look ridiculous when they try.
• What we’ve seen in regard to both women-in-the-clergy and gay rights is that no Christian denomination wants to be the most liberal group to defend a benighted conservative position. When the Congregationalists turn, that puts pressure on the Episcopalians, and when they turn the onus shifts to the Methodists, and then the Presbyterians, and so on. The Catholic Church has been the only denomination big enough to resist that kind of pressure, and now that it has taken a strong position calling for action against climate change, there’s no telling where the dominoes stop falling. American Christianity might wind up speaking with a fairly united voice on this issue.

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BTW: NOAA’s May statistics still have 2015 on its way towards being the hottest year on record, replacing last year.

and still more presidential candidates

Jeb Bush’s announcement was an anti-climax, because he’s so clearly been running for months now. And I’m left with the question: What issues will he run on? His positions on immigration and education are unpopular with the Republican base. I have heard no specific suggestions for how he would fight ISIS or terrorism in general differently than President Obama. I really don’t think his blaming Obama for “the biggest debt ever” will stick, given that Obama has drastically reduced the deficit he inherited from Jeb’s brother.

I’ll get to his speech eventually in my 2016 series, probably after I do Hillary’s, but my immediate reaction is surprise at how little is in there. There are hints of a tax plan, hints of increased defense spending, but the only number in the speech is his goal of 4% annual GDP growth. Increased growth would be good — I wonder why nobody ever thought of that before.

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Jeb didn’t stay in the news very long, though, because the next day Donald Trump announced his candidacy with a rambling speech that sounded like the kind of thing you’d hear from the guy on the next stool at your favorite bar. Digby warns us that we have to take the Donald seriously. But the comedians had a different reaction: Jon Stewart looked to Heaven and said “Thank you.” Larry Wilmore unwrapped Trump’s candidacy as a gift from the Comedy Gods.

Here’s what’s going to be amazing once the debates start in August: All the minor candidates are going to be looking to make headlines by saying something outrageous, but how are they going to compete with Trump? What will they have to say?

In the 2012 cycle, the crowd reactions were bad publicity for the GOP as a whole: They booed a soldier calling in from Iraq because he was gay. They cheered the idea of letting somebody without health insurance die. What is the audience going to do when Trump says that Mexican immigrants are rapists? Or voices one of his other incredible opinions? The general public may get a chance to see just how far around the bend the Republican base really is, and how every single one of the candidates panders to that insanity.

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I loved Jamelle Bouie’s take on Hillary Clinton: She was a nerd before it was cool, and her public-image ambiguity stems from trying not to look like the geeky policy wonk she really is. He thinks she should “go full nerd” and be herself.

and Rachel Dolezal

I am still trying to fathom the depth of the public reaction to Rachel Dolezal, the woman who was born to white parents and raised as a white girl, but at some point in adulthood began presenting herself as black, and eventually became president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP.

In part, the story attracts attention because of its man-bites-dog character. Light-skinned blacks have been passing as white in America since colonial times, as I discussed last year in a review of Daniel Sharfstein’s The Invisible Line. (One member of a black-turned-white family Sharfstein researched was a Confederate officer during the Civil War and a Louisiana senator afterward.) But passing in the other direction is not something you hear about very often.

But even that doesn’t explain the urgency with which writers of all racial and political identities have been addressing this topic, as if Dolezal’s situation demanded our immediate action. I suppose if I were connected to the Spokane NAACP, I’d have a responsibility to form an opinion about Dolezal. And I can imagine that I might feel conned if I belonged to the constituency of the Spokane NAACP, and counted on it to represent my interests. I might believe that I had at least deserved the chance to know the details of Dolezal’s claim to a black identity before she was hired, so that I could decide for myself how confident I felt in her ability to represent me.

But that doesn’t make it a national issue either.

A lot of the ink spilled about Dolezal concerned what her kind of “transracialism” says about transgenderism, which was still on everybody’s mind after the Caitlyn Jenner story broke a few weeks ago. But the parallel between Dolezal and Jenner escapes me. Jenner broke the story herself, and all she asks of us is that we let her live her life (and maybe watch her TV show). What if Dolezal had done likewise? She might have said, “Hey, everybody, for a long time now I’ve been thinking of myself as black. So I’m going to darken my skin and frizz my hair and try to live in the black community as a black.” And then everybody could do what they wish with that information.

I don’t see anything to object to in that scenario.

The transgender community is already discussing how they feel about Jenner’s celebrity, which will likely offer her a de facto spokesperson role, if she wants one. But to make the case similar to Dolezal, Jenner would have to be angling for a role not just as spokesperson for transgender people, but for women. I see no sign of that at all.

If you do feel compelled to form an opinion about Dolezal, here’s an interesting thought experiment: What if one of her parents had crossed the racial line in the other direction? Then Dolezal would be reclaiming some forgotten black grandparent, but her life might have been almost exactly the same. She might have been raised as a white girl by parents everyone believed to be white, and have had all the same experiences, giving her no additional insight into the black experience in America. Intuitively, it seems like the grandparent would make her claim to blackness more authentic. But why? Is it really just genes?

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In the section above, I was using a couple of abstract principles that someday I’ll have to flesh out on my philosophical/religious blog, where I post far less frequently. First, judgment is not an end in itself. Judgment is a tool for guiding action. If you can’t foresee playing a role in some relevant decision-making process, then you don’t really need to have an opinion, and there’s no inherent virtue in forming one. Sometimes thinking a case through is a worthwhile exercise that sharpens your mind. But it can also be a way to avoid other topics that really do demand your judgment. (On my Facebook news feed, I found it instructive how fast discussion of Dolezal dried up as soon as the Charleston shooting gave us a serious racial issue to think about.)

Second, the standards of judgment should serve the purposes of judgment. Just as judgment is not an end in itself, high standards are not ends in themselves either. So the answer to the question: “Do I believe Dolezal is really black?” depends on why I need to know. If it’s up to me to decide whether she gets some kind of affirmative action benefit, then I’d set a fairly high standard, and would probably say no. But if I’m her neighbor, and the question is whether I’m going to accept her for what she aspires to be, then I’d apply a lower standard and probably say yes.

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And finally, if you go full Zen on the topic, all our identities are false. We talk about “true” and “false” identities, as if we were dealing with a binary category. But authenticity is a continuum like anything else. (That was the philosophical theme of my Jenner article.) Anybody’s identity is only authentic up to a point.

All of which reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience:

The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. “I am no such thing,” it would say; “I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.”

I can’t help wondering what James’ crab voice sounded like when he gave the original lecture in Edinburgh in 1901.

and let’s close with something cute

It’s been a tough week. We need this.

With twisted, charred shapes distended in chaotic lines, clinker brick looks like the deranged work of a madman. Around 1900, thanks to the Arts and Crafts movement, these previously discarded chunks of vitrified material from the brick-making process were suddenly prized for their organic feel. Built into walls, fireplaces, and foundations across the United States, a few examples still stand, appearing like moments of insanity in our mostly uniform architecture.

I first came across clinker brick at Memorial Park Cemetery in Oklahoma City, where a huge wall rambles around the burial ground with waves of blackened brick that seem salvaged from some Krakatoa-like disaster, assembled as if someone built it by touch instead of sight. At first I couldn’t understand how anyone once considered this beautiful, yet comparing it to the huge neighboring car lots with their identical, shiny trucks and sedans lined up alongside the smooth highways, there’s something bold about how it celebrates disorder.

The “clinker” name comes from the ringing sound made when these bricks got too close to the kiln flames and fused together. Their use by architects like Greene and Greene based in Pasadena, California, was partly a reaction to the perfectly manufactured bricks that were the new standard in the 20th century. It was also affordable when mixed in with standard bricks. Clinker wasn’t the only unusual brick design of the early 1900s — tapestry brick, for example, mixed various colors — although it was the most distinctive, transferring the Arts and Crafts interest in rustic traditions onto the industrial material.

Craftsman-era bungalows, where much of the clinker brick survives, are where it got the nickname “peanut-brittle-style masonry.” There’s also the Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Strathcona, Alberta, which influenced the city of Edmonton to construct around 150 buildings with clinker brick. And there are a few examples in New York City, such as Crystal Gardens apartments in Astoria, and apartment buildings at 419 East 57th Street and 405 East 54th Street in Manhattan by the New York Architectural Terra Cotta Company. Susan VanHecke wrote in the 2006 “The Accidental Charm of Clinker Bricks” for Old-House Journal: “In these days of automated manufacturing, when perfectly identical bricks are produced thousands at a time, clinkers are all but nonexistent.” Now abandoned kilns are often the source for clinker renovation or restoration.

The architect behind the Oklahoma City cemetery is anonymous, although it inspired a man named Oscar Allison in 1933 to build the clinker Capitol Hill Monument Co. in the city. Below are more photographs of the cemetery wall, as well as some clinker brick examples from around the United States.

Floraform Jewelry

Computational design project from Nervous Systems creates unique 3D printed jewelry which are formed from generative structures which mimic organic growth:

We’ve generated a jewelry collection with Floraform. For each piece, we crafted a unique growth process that results in a specific emergent form. The flowering structures expand fastest along their edges, evolving from simple surfaces to flexuous forms that fill space with curves, folds, and ruffles. There are 24 new designs which come in 3D-printed nylon and sterling silver and are available in our shop.

The collection explores how different starting geometries interact with the growth process to produce the final pieces. We use contact with the body as an environmental constraint, producing designs that conform to or expand from the finger, wrist, and neck.

More Here

Scalia’s decision to give Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment to Kagan was inspired:

• “The parties set no end date for royalties, apparently contemplating that they would continue for as long as kids want to imitate Spider-Man (by doing whatever a spider can).”
• “Patents endow their holders with certain superpowers, but only for a limited time.”
• “To the contrary, the decision’s close relation to a whole web of precedents means that reversing it could threaten others.”
• “What we can decide, we can undecide. But stare decisis teaches that we should exercise that authority sparingly. Cf. S. Lee and S. Ditko, Amazing Fantasy No. 15: “SpiderMan,” p. 13 (1962) (“[I]n this world, with great power there must also come — great responsibility”).”

Substantively, the case is another example of the disagreement between Scalia and Thomas about the value of stare decisis. While I’m dubious about the idea of “superpowered” precedents in general, in this case — involving statutory interpretation in an area of law in which Congress has been very active and contract law — it makes a certain amount of sense. I also thought Kagan’s discussion of the implications of stare decisis was interesting:

Respecting stare decisis means sticking to some wrong decisions. The doctrine rests on the idea, as Justice Brandeis famously wrote, that it is usually “more important that the applicable rule of law be settled than that it be settled right.” Indeed, stare decisis has consequence only to the extent it sustains incorrect decisions; correct judgments have no need for that principle to prop them up.

I don’t think this is strictly accurate. Stare decisis could also have value in preserving rules that in the first instance could have been reasonably decided either way in the interests of stability. But courts generally prefer not to be explicit about how much discretion they have — “correct” and “incorrect” sound more authoritative than “a decision in a case that could have plausibly come out either way.”

Designer Joseph Walsh believes that the quality of life can be improved by surrounding ourselves with work that is valued beyond both its form and function, an idea manifested through his functional art and sculptures embedded with calculated chaos. Walsh designs and produces pieces that stimulate the mind, entice the senses, and exist as more than our traditional view of furniture and design objects.

Walsh designs one-of-a-kind pieces like the enormous desk he produced as a part of the Design Show exhibition at the New Art Centre in Roche Court in 2014. At its center the pieces looks almost like a traditional work surface, then it spirals upward, engulfing visitors and ending in a very large shelf that extends against one wall of the gallery.

In Walsh’s Lilium series he explores the relationship between the geometric and the organic, mixing symmetrical repetitions with elaborate abstract shapes. Through each of these techniques Walsh captures natural growth, calling forth nature’s sometimes random generations and curious patterns.

“In ‘Lilium’ I explore the relationship between the ordered and chaotic; the geometric and the lyrical; the perfect, effortless symmetry of the bulb, the regulated, controlled element and its freed form as it reaches through and beyond,” says Walsh. “The Lilium series is both a study and an expression of the relationship between the beauty we create and the beauty we allow to happen; the beauty we participate in creating and the beauty we quietly observe.”

Walsh founded his studio and workshop in 1999 in Co. Cork, Ireland. Self-taught, he continually seeks inspiration for his pieces in patterns of growth and evolution. Walsh does not work alone, but with a team of master makers and technicians, helping to both engineer and craft the final pieces that come out of the studio. You can see more images of his elegantly designed furniture and decorative pieces on his Facebook page. (via My Amp Goes to 11 and My Modern Met)

Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945, was bright, sunny, and perhaps a little uncomfortably warm. Except for a lingering anxiety among its residents that they were due for something special — Hiroshima had been spared the air raids and firebombs launched that summer against its neighbors — there was but the passing buzz of American B-29s to suggest anything to be concerned about. Several days earlier, much of Japan, including Hiroshima, was showered by American forces with millions of leaflets, each containing a seemingly humanitarian plea to evacuate the citizens of twelve cities named on the leaflet’s reverse side. There are three known versions of this leaflet, designed by General Curtis LeMay, and the cities named were almost all of questionable military or economic value. Hiroshima was not among them. At 8:15 in the morning, the city was leveled by the “brief reincarnations of distant suns.”

The “LeMay leaflet,” as it has become known, was twenty-one centimeters wide and fourteen centimeters high. It was printed in black-and-white, and features a fearsome photograph of five Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers casually dropping their payloads onto unseen targets. The image was taken from an air raid over Yokohama — a cropped version, officially released by the Air Force, contains fewer bombers — which occurred on May 29th, 1945, and killed as many as 8,000 people. The incendiary bombs appear to be falling directly on a half-border of tidy circles, illustrations superimposed over the photograph that contain the names of eleven or twelve cities. The other side of the leaflet is dedicated to a long, stern appeal to the hypothetical civilian discovering it, and explains that “America is not fighting the Japanese people but is fighting the military clique which has enslaved the Japanese people,” urging civilians, in no certain terms, to evacuate.

In 1958, the Operations Research Office, a department of Johns Hopkins funded by the United States military, commissioned William E. Daugherty, one of its employees, to document the use and effectiveness of military propaganda. The resulting work, exhaustively compiled by Daugherty, was called A Psychological Warfare Casebook, and describes the LeMay leafleting as having occurred on three separate days. The following leaflet was dropped on July 27:

The next day, half of these cities — Aomori, Ichinomiya, Tsu, Ujiyamada, Ōgaki, and Uwajima — were subjected to firebombing, and thousands were killed.

Daugherty writes that Japanese cities were next leafleted on July 30 and again on August 1. A report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s “Studies in Intelligence” website also claims that leaflets were dropped “on 33 cities,” including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 3.

These leaflets contain, with some exceptions, a different set of cities, but their design and the message on the back have not changed. On August 1, Mito, Hachioji, and Nagaoka were bombed, and Toyama, Maebashi, and Saga followed in the days after. The next Monday saw the first use of the atomic bomb in human history, and that following Thursday the second. The Imperial Army of Japan continued to fight until August 15, and the firebombings continued until then, most against cities warned on the leaflets, but also against some which were not. In several cases, such as with Akita, cities were not targeted for an air raid until more than two weeks after being named on a leaflet.

Daugherty makes clear that the leaflets were successful in one aspect: they managed to scare the citizens, not save them. As people attempted to evacuate, wartime production halted, and the movement of noncombatants tied up the military forces, leading to the “further breakdown of social structure in Japanese communities.” When the B-29s finally arrived, whether carrying incendiary devices, nuclear bombs, or simply more leaflets, there was little either the army or the civilians could do. As Daugherty, whose book was explicitly written to “meet the particular needs of Army personnel,” explains, “Warnings … tend to increase the impact of lethal weapons.” In the ensuing chaos and confusion, the US military could hope for even more casualties. But in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were never named on the leaflets they received, the humanitarian pretense was dropped entirely. Small wonder that nobody expected what was to come.

I've put Stick Shift on Greenlight. Because why not? I thought it would be a good fit for Steam because it's probably the most game-y of my recent sex games, with the exception of Cobra Club -- though Cobra Club has been unilaterally banned from Twitch.TV so I doubt Steam will allow for dicks, unfortunately.

Please YES it if you want to help me wreck Steam. Thanks.

JULES ANTOINE (1863-1948) ATTR. – Vincent Van Gogh in conversation with friends, Paris, 96 rue Blanche, December 1887 Melanotype, direct positive and reversed image on blackboard (carton photographique), 86×112 mm, “Gautier Martin” stamp, recto. Vincent Van Gogh in conversation with Paul Gauguin, Emile Bernard, Félix Jobbé-Duval. André Antoine is standing between them.

Some experts believe this recently discovered 1887 melainotype showing six men drinking around a table may include a rare sighting of painter Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh famously recorded himself in numerous self-portraits, but was known to abhor photography and supposedly never sat for a photo as an adult; only two rare photos of the artist as a child are known to exist, taken when he was 13 and 19.

The image first came to the attention of French photo expert Serge Plantureux when two individuals acquired the photo at an estate sale and thought they recognized a few of the faces, among them, artists Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard—a significant discovery in and of itself. Analyzing the photographic process, the photographer (thought to be to Jules Antoine), and pinpointing the when the photo was taken raised the chances significantly that a bearded figure who appears amongst the gathering of stoic men might be Van Gogh. Serge Plantureux writes for magazine L’Oeil de la Photographie (The Eye of Photography):

The photograph they had brought to show me was small, dark, and rather difficult to see. Six characters were around a table. The light was pale, perhaps it was a winter afternoon.

They told me, still hesitant, that they thought they recognized the people in it, artists in whom they had long been interested. They were collectors and liked the painters of the late 19th century, in particular the neo-impressionists. They also said it was possible that one of the figures around the table was someone whose true face had never been seen.

The photo went to auction just this weekend and was expected to fetch between $136,000 to $170,000, though a final sale price hasn’t been made public. Still, some experts aren’t convinced. The photo expert for the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam feels it can’t be the artist “because it simply does not look like him,” and also mentions the artist’s desire to never be photographed. Others note that Van Gogh didn’t mention the gathering in his meticulously written letters from the time period.

Regardless, the photo is still of significant historical value and only time will tell if experts reach a consensus in the identities of everyone depicted. (via PetaPixel, Hyperallergic)

via http://retrozone.tumblr.com/page/154

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I have some truly horrifying news for the snivelling manchildren of the world: women do not exist to entertain you. In other news, there is basically always something to get angry about on Kinky & Popular. Specifically the comments on this writing titled “None of your fucking business.”

For people who don’t do Fetlife, this woman had the apparently ridiculous idea that she had the right to exist in public without some asshole hassling her, and when said asshole deliberately made her uncomfortable (spare me the bullshit about teh poor socially awkward mans. Actual socially awkward people are horrified by the idea of making someone uncomfortable and would’ve apologized profusely and then probably run away to have a serious bout of self-loathing in private), she told him that her name was “None of your fucking business.”

Cue the snivelling manchildren in the comments clutching their pearls about how meeeeeean that woman was and how creepypants was just trying to be nice and make conversation and why do women have to be such bitches about existing in public without being harassed and the human race is totally going to die out if creepy sacks of shit can’t badger strange women for no good reason (no, thinking someone has nice tits is not a good reason).

First of all, the idea that some asshole who wasn’t even there knows how to handle a situation better than the woman who actually experienced it is some serious bullshit. If you weren’t there, you don’t know what sort of subtle or not remotely subtle signals she was getting that made her think that the man harassing her was not safe to talk to. By saying that she should have handled it differently, you woman hating sacks of shit are saying that women can’t be trusted to make even the smallest decisions about how to respond to people harassing us. And then you worthless wastes of space turn around and blame us for being raped. How exactly are we simultaneously too stupid to tell a nice guy from a creepy motherfucker and at the same time psychically able to tell people would commit rape from people who wouldn’t?

I have another horrifying revelation for the misogynistic assclowns of the world: women have different experiences from men. What looks and feels harmless to you is fucking scary to us. Sure, you wouldn’t be scared if a man who was your size or smaller came up and asked “What’s your name, sweetheart?” Now imagine you’re an average sized woman, with an average woman’s upper body strength talking to someone a foot taller than you with 40 pounds of muscle on you. Would you feel safe knowing that he either doesn’t care that he’s making you uncomfortable or is actively enjoying it? Would you feel safe knowing that if he wants to hurt you or drag you away there’s nothing you can do to stop him?

But god forbid you should think about what it’s like to be a woman. That might cause you to question the apparently sacred belief that women exist to make you pathetic sacks of shit feel special. Somehow, I make it through my day without expecting men to stop whatever it is they’re doing and stroke my ego. Somehow, I make it through my day without assuming that men owe me their attention for absolutely nothing in return. If you can’t do the same, then I am a better, stronger, more worthwhile person than you are. Shape up, shitstain. If you think you’re better than me because you’re a man, BE BETTER. Grow a sense of self-worth that doesn’t rely on me patting you on the head like a puppy and telling you you’re the bestest guy in the whole world. Be interesting enough that I would ever choose to talk to of my own free will. Make my life better, not worse if you’re going to interact with me. Stop acting like a fucking two year old and assuming the world revolves around you. Grow the fuck up and learn to deal with women who are *gasp* be better than you at something.

Or at least be honest and admit that you are less than me and always will be.

It’s probably fitting that a novel titled Burning Down George Orwell’s House doesn’t focus much on the author of classroom classics like Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Instead, Andrew Ervin’s debut novel centers on Ray Welter, a Chicago adman whose life has come apart and who flees the grid for Jura, the Scottish island where the writer born Eric Blair penned Nineteen Eighty-Four. More comedy than tragedy, Ervin’s novel shifts back and forth between the events that led to Welter’s self-imposed exile—let’s just say the SUV industry likes Ray more than he likes them—and his attempt to hit the reset button on his life in Scotland. Nearly half a century separates Ray Welter from Don Draper, that other adman fighting for his soul in the soul-stunted field of advertising, but in many ways Ray is even less equipped to navigate the fast-changing world around him.

From a young age, Ray Welter identified with Nineteen Eighty-Four, a connection that deepens as the dystopian parable seems to explain his capitalistic, increasingly joyless career. His marriage, too, is on the rocks, but life doesn’t get any easier or better when he arrives on Jura. The natives treat their visitor only a little less kindly than the local cuisine treats his stomach. Throw in a feisty, underage daughter of one of these locals, that daughter’s belligerent father, and what might or might not be the local werewolf Blair/Orwell himself alluded to in one of his letters, and that grid Ray left behind in Chicago doesn’t seem half as bad.

Andrew Ervin’s collection of linked novellas, Extraordinary Renditions (Coffee House Press), was named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2010, and The Millions called it one of that year’s most underrated books. While preparing for the May release of Burning Down George Orwell’s House, the launch party for which will feature a performance by the Dead Milkmen, Andrew answered some questions via email about Big Brother, the double-edged sword of technology, the enduring relevance of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and how to acquire the taste for Scotch.

***

The Rumpus: One of the reasons Nineteen Eighty-Four lingers in the public consciousness, if not in the classroom, is terms like “Big Brother” and “Thought Police,” which many use, I’m sure, without connecting it to literature. In fact, themes of government surveillance could be more relevant now than they were when Orwell’s novel was published—see Snowden, Edward or Act, Patriot. Is Big Brother bigger now than it once was, or does it just seem that way because of what technology makes possible?

Andrew Ervin: Every generation gets the Big Brother that its technology dictates. The ongoing transition from analog to digital technology is allowing for the collection of data and of metadata on a scale that was unthinkable in Orwell’s day. Only the tools have changed. The global war on terror (and what a perfectly Orwellian term that is) gave government agencies the opportunity to frame the debate as Privacy v. Security. With all those supposed evildoers out there who “hate our freedom” (whatever that means) we’re being told that we can be safe or we can have privacy, but we can’t have both and that’s of course absurd. If we’re determined to put things in simplistic terms, the debate would be better understood as Liberty v. Tyranny, but even that formulation is missing something important. Big Brother has exactly as much authority as we grant him.

Rumpus: The role we play in our own surveillance, this complicity, is a big part of Ray Welter’s predicament, isn’t it?

Ervin: Ray Welter believes that he’s facing a very similar choice: he can stay on the grid and have his every keystroke recorded or he can escape to a remote island where there’s limited electricity and fend for himself. What happens—and I don’t want to spoil anything here—is that those simple dichotomies (Privacy v. Security or Liberty v. Tyranny or Evildoers v. Good Guys) prove to be less than clear cut. My novel does not have a specific moral or political agenda, but it does try to question the very notion of binary logic. Limiting ourselves to either/or thinking is itself a form of self-imposed tyranny. I suspect that Orwell understood that.

Rumpus: Ray isn’t a writer, nor does he aspire to be, when he rents the house where Orwell wrote his most famous novel. But a lot of writers will identify with his need for isolation and his struggle to extricate himself from the world of iPhones and constant contact. Many writers I know, for whatever reason, seem more resistant to technology than the average person. Does this match your experience? Why do you think so many of us are Luddites?

Ervin: It would be very easy to blame “technology” for my inability to concentrate for long periods of time or for spending too many days in a row away from my writing, but that’s ultimately a cop-out. I’m responsible for my own inactions. When we try to specify what we mean by “technology,” however, it becomes a terribly flimsy excuse for some bad habits. My eyeglasses are a form of technology as is the process that makes the printing of books possible. The question, then, is one of categorization.

Are some technologies (Facebook, Twitter, Donkey Kong) detrimental to the writing life? Only if we allow them to be. There are all sorts of romantic notions about clacking away on a typewriter and drawing ink into a fountain pen. We—writers, I mean—are terrific at fetishizing the past. I just had bookplates printed for my home library. I understand the nostalgia for old-timey ways of doing things, I really do, but I also love the wondrous technologies at my disposal. We each need to find the specific tools that work for us.

The technologies I personally use change depending on what I’m writing. For this novel, I wrote the first draft by hand because notebooks and pencils were what my protagonist had at his disposal and they helped me get into his head. Also, I wrote it on graph paper because that grid on every page reminded me of the social structure from which he was escaping. The most valuable writing time, however, was when I transcribed those pages into Microsoft Word, which allowed me to edit easily. It would be silly of me, now, to bemoan the evil effects of technology. As with Privacy v. Security, the generally assumed formulation of Technology v. Artistic Freedom is too limiting for my tastes.

Rumpus: Many writers seem to be embracing social media. You’re on Twitter. Have you found that technology detrimental to your creative work?

Ervin: Social media presents detriments and advantages to my creative work. The reason I got on Twitter in the first place was because I needed to better understand Welter’s wired world, and I planned to get off again after the book got published, but it’s a tool that has helped me find so many interesting people and new ideas that I could not have possibly discovered on my own. I follow a lot of video game developers, and that whole world has inspired my own thinking about narrative in countless ways. I do own a smart phone now, but it’s not very smart. It’s an Android and not so easy to use, so there’s not a great temptation to spend a great deal of energy tweeting.

Rumpus: Have you had to strike a balance to separate the space for social media from the space in which you write?

Ervin: Yes, I suppose I do keep those spaces somewhat separate, but they’re close. My writing room is a newly converted attic. For most of my creative work, I use an early-generation iMac which is stripped of everything but a few word-processing programs and a Dropbox link. That desk faces out the window and overlooks the Schuylkill Valley. My wife and I live in a northwest Philadelphia rowhouse, but other than the attached neighbor on one side we’re surrounded by trees and a huge community garden. It’s an oasis in the city and if I squint it can feel removed from the technological realm. In that same room, though, I have a drafting table for writing and drawing by hand and also another desk with a newer iMac, which I use for other projects, like teaching prep and World of Warcraft and the occasional interview.

Rumpus: Since you brought up video games, your next project involves them, does it not? What is something about narrative you’ve learned from video games?

Ervin: I’ve signed a contract with Basic Books for a nonfiction project about video games and aesthetics. The transition from analog to digital technologies is an obsession of mine. Both Burning Down George Orwell’s House and Extraordinary Renditions look at this change, so to start nailing down my own thinking in systematic and critical terms is very exciting. The digital revolution could end up being as radical and far-reaching as the Industrial Revolution, but because we’re right in the middle of it there’s no way to see the scope or fully understand the eventual effects. One theory I’m working on is that the short history of video games, from Tennis for Two (1958) to Bloodborne (2015), can serve as a way of beginning to understand the post-human world. Also, the kinds of interactivity insisted upon by literature and by video games are different, sure, but I’m curious to see how they’re similar. The book is still very much a work in progress. I’m spending a lot of time with the paintings of René Magritte right now. That pixelated tennis net in Pong (1972) isn’t a tennis net any more than Magritte’s pipe is a pipe.

Rumpus: Returning to the digital-free zone of Jura, many readers might covet the serenity of an isolated rental house in the United Kingdom, but Scotland as it’s portrayed in your novel is hardly romanticized. Ray’s nausea is established in the first sentence, and the absolute hell he’s given by some of the locals makes Ray’s retreat feel like another shitstorm from which he needs to escape. On behalf of the Scottish tourism industry, is there anything you’d like to take back about the fair isle of Jura?

Ervin: Shortly after I finished graduate school, I took a two-year position down at Louisiana State University. What could have been the greatest gig in the world turned into a bit of a nightmare. I should have known things were going to be challenging when, shortly after I arrived, Hurricane Gustav blew through Baton Rouge. That storm didn’t get as much national attention as Katrina, for instance, and with good cause, but it did knock out power to most of the city for over a week. Louisiana is no joke any time of year, but summer’s a particularly bad time to lose the A/C. (That is another technology I wholeheartedly embrace.) On a basic level, living without power for a few days helped rid me of any romantic notions about the serenity of life off the grid. It definitely made me reconsider some of my own first-world assumptions. The idea of escaping from social media and voluntarily getting away from it all could only come from someone like me or Ray Welter who is very privileged. Maybe that’s true too of the disdain for technology. It’s easier to hate Twitter, even as some stand-in for “technology” in general, when one has consistent electricity and clean running water in the house.

I’ve never been to the Isle of Jura. The fictional setting I’ve created is more a representation of one American man’s (impossible) idyllic escape than an attempt to describe the actual place. That said, I have wondered many times how welcome I will be there after this book is published. The closest I’ve come was the ferry port over on Islay, next door, where the novel begins. The rest of it is complete fiction. The main reason I’ve stayed away is to maintain my plausible deniability: I’ve never tried to create a realistic portrait of that place. (And portraits are unlucky, right?) I’ve never met the people or been to the hotel and so there’s zero possibility that my characters are based on real residents. I’d certainly like to visit soon if I’m still welcome.

Rumpus: Your novel’s epigraph quotes a letter from Eric Blair referencing a werewolf on Jura. What all that means won’t be spoiled here, but it sets the stage nicely for Ray’s unpredictable stay on the island. If there’s one predictable aspect of his tenure, however, it’s the copious amount of Scotch Ray consumes. The reader is left with the sense that the author has some expertise in the matter of this particular export. For readers less well-versed in Scotch, who only know, to paraphrase Orwell’s other classic, single-malt good, blended bad, what kind of advice can you give Scotch beginners?

Ervin: Even Orwell was seduced by the comforts of binary thinking. Yes—I certainly did some extensive “research” on this particular topic. The flavors in scotch result from many different factors, as Welter discovers for himself, but the most important one is geography. There’s no separating where it’s made and how it tastes. In addition to the scotch produced on Jura, I’m a big fan of the Ardbeg and Bowmore. Both come from Islay, but they taste wildly different. Ardbeg’s distillery is right on the water and you can taste the peat smoke and sea air in every sip. The town of Bowmore—one of my favorite places I visited in Scotland—sits in the crook of a bay, so the conditions are a bit softer and the resulting scotch has some of the sweeter characteristics associated with the Highlands distilleries. I also like the lowland Auchentoshan a great deal, but it’s tough to find here in Philadelphia.

All that said, since I finished writing the book I’ve been (mostly) giving sobriety a try and I find it very appealing. After I submitted my final edits, I went to the doctor to get my liver checked out and was surprised to find out that it’s perfectly healthy. Still, I’m enjoying taking it easy on myself. My next novel will need to be about healthy living and exercise.

***

Author photo © Angelica Bautista.

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• Weekly Geekery
• The Rumpus Interview with Richard Ford

musesandlovelydays:

• You can feel really confident in yourself but when someone comments badly on you, you begin to crumble.
• You doubt yourself a lot.
• Your head begins to hurt when you over think.
• You forget to eat sometimes.
• You get quiet around friends.
• You break down more often
• isolation.
• You’re confused 
• You don’t know why your confused because you’re over thinking all the bad decisions you’ve made in your in your life.
• You forget your value, You forget your worth.

All true :(  But I don’t even need someone to comment badly on me sometimes, my brain just recalls when somebody did, or something I did that I worry hurt somebody or was looked badly on by somebody, and that’s all it takes :(

(Like right now)

facts-i-just-made-up:

scaryshorts:

facts-i-just-made-up:

zukana13731:

facts-i-just-made-up:

zukana13731:

facts-i-just-made-up:

canadian-ninja-warrior:

facts-i-just-made-up:

thehylianbatman:

facts-i-just-made-up:

pimp-shark:

facts-i-just-made-up:

Venus, the closest planet to the sun. These images taken by the Pathfinder probe are taken from the exact equator of the planet, thus its famous rings are not visible. The planet was first discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1781, and has yet to complete a single revolution around our sun, Proxima Centauri.

Venus looks suspiciously like Jupiter.

….I bet they were identical twins separated at birth.

It looks absolutely nothing like Jupiter. Jupiter can be instantly recognized by its black pentagons:

Pretty sure the biggest planet in our system isn’t a soccer ball.

Um no. I’m pretty sure I know my planets, because I graduated from NASA University with a masters in planet recognition. I think I can tell the difference between Jupiter and a Soccer Ball:

Jupiter doesn’t even have leaves.

Also, little late to the party but at least I’m showing up, the Sun’s official name is not Proxima Centauri, THAT is actually a star about 4 light years away from the Sun

The ignorance on this site is shocking. No, Proxima Centauri is our sun. The nearest star 4 light years away is called Beetlejuice. And since nobody out there seems to know even the local star system, take a look from most distant to closest and educate yourself:

You’re welcome.

some masters degree. you spelled Betelgeuse wrong.

Uh, hello, Betelgeuse? What does a Terry Gilliam movie starring Buster Keaton, Stephen Baldwin, Gina Gershon and Wynonna Judd have to do with the solar system??? Good movie though-

i was referring, of course, to the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy.

Yeah, I know that I was kidding. Of course I know Hitchhiker’s Guide, Charles Addams is my uncle. I’m the one who suggested the joke about the towel to him, and I came up with the famous number 32.

You’re way out of your league here. I’m like Major League Baseball and you’re like League of Legends baseball. And I’m a Colonial Marine too who served on the Sulaco. Don’t mess with me or I’ll go Tron on your ass.

WHAT IS THIS MESS???

It’s basically the tumblr equivalent of macaroni and cheese that’s been left in the sink for 2 months and it’s grown all kinds of nasty shit that no human being can ever fully understand or smell without fainting.

What will tomorrow’s solar panels look like? This week, along with colleagues from Oxford and MIT, I published a feature in Scientific American making the case for cheap and colorful solar coatings derived from a new class of solar materials: perovskites. In this post, I’ll critically examine prospects for commercialization of solar perovskites, building on our article’s claim that this technology could represent a significant improvement over current silicon solar panels. We argue:

Perovskites are tantalizing for several reasons. The ingredients are abundant, and researchers can combine them easily and inexpensively, at low temperature, into thin films that have a highly crystalline structure similar to that achieved in silicon wafers after costly, high-temperature processing. Rolls of perovskite film that are thin and flexible, instead of thick and rigid like silicon wafers, could one day be rapidly spooled from a special printer to make lightweight, bendable, and even colorful solar sheets and coatings.

Still, to challenge silicon’s dominance, perovskite cells will have to overcome some significant hurdles. The prototypes today are only as large as a fingernail; researchers have to find ways to make them much bigger if the technology is to compete with silicon panels. They also have to greatly improve the safety and long-term stability of the cells—an uphill battle.

We wanted to write for a popular science magazine, with a general audience in mind, to share an exciting story of scientific discovery that has largely been confined to specialist journals. Indeed, for solar perovskites to overcome the odds stacked against an upstart clean technology breaking into the market, we believe the academic, private, and public sectors really need to pay more attention to each other.

The lack of awareness by the clean energy industry about solar perovskites, despite the commotion in the scientific community, demonstrates how scientific research can proceed in a bubble. Following the big announcement of a highly efficient solar perovskite from our research group in Oxford, hundreds of laboratories around the world jumped on the perovskite bandwagon, in many cases abandoning their research into other solar technologies. The race among labs to publish record solar efficiencies in the top journals involved international intrigue—the UK banded with Italy, trading records with the Swiss-Chinese coalition, and everyone was eventually upstaged by the South Koreans when they reported a 20 percent efficient solar cell late last year (for reference, silicon solar cells have plateaued at 25 percent efficiency, a target solar perovskites should soon surpass). The excitement and drama reflect the gravity of the perovskite discovery—time will tell, but many of us believe this is the field’s biggest breakthrough since the original invention of the solar cell sixty years ago.

However, when I talk to industry executives at major solar manufacturers and developers, very few have even heard of solar perovskites. This does not bother scientists, many of whom narrowly focus on demonstrating a higher efficiency solar perovskite, even if it is a fingernail-sized cell that degrades in hours. Some might argue that a scientist’s value is in basic inquiry and complementary to industry’s expertise, and they have a point. But aloof regard for real markets from the ivory tower leads many academics to naïvely assume that a superior technology will naturally make the leap from prototype to profitability.

In fact, broader feedback from professionals outside of research labs is integral to commercializing solar perovskites. Currently, solar perovskites can be worryingly unstable (although we’ve demonstrated longevity if they are properly sealed away from moisture). That’s a red flag for investors familiar with a mature, 50 billion dollar silicon solar panel industry in which every panel comes with a 25-year performance warranty. And because solar perovskites contain lead, a toxic element, any commercial product will need to undergo extensive safety testing, with which private industry veterans have experience. These professionals can guide research into the stability, safety, and real-world performance of solar perovskites, which are every bit as important as the efficiency under idealized lab conditions, the paramount academic metric.

Elsewhere in the physical sciences, the transition from basic research to product development is better institutionalized. This is one of the reasons why I have argued that Moore’s Law for computer chips, which predicts rapid deployment of scientific advances, does not apply to the solar panel industry, whose products have improved at a comparatively plodding pace. Whereas in computer chip development there are established conferences at every step of commercialization from basic device physics to chip integration that bring together scientists and industry, advanced solar technology development is confined almost exclusively to the realm of academia.

Fortunately, leading researchers in the United States and Europe are making a concerted effort to bridge the gap between academia and industry. For example, one of my co-authors and the leader of the Oxford research group, Henry Snaith, founded a company to tackle real-world deployment and commercialize solar perovskites. His strategy is actually to partner with the silicon solar panel companies, adding a perovskite coating on top of silicon to boost its performance. That approach seems prudent, because allying with powerful incumbents is easier than fighting them for market access. And through a partnership, his company will benefit from gaining access to experienced solar engineers, investors, and developers to guide the design and delivery of a compelling product.

My co-authors and I do hope our article will bring professionals in the solar industry up to speed on the latest research, but our target audience is even broader. We envision architects reimagining the aesthetics and functionality of windows, roof shingles, and facades; policymakers tweaking green building codes and incentives; and the military investigating the use of solar perovskite coatings to power forward deployed bases. These applications may seem far-fetched, and they are—solar perovskites are still a risky bet to succeed in a monolithic market. But if scientists continue to broadly communicate our progress, those odds can only improve.

Read our feature, “Outshining Silicon,” in Scientific American’s July 2015 issue, here

captain-snark:

the shitty thing about depression/anxiety is the fact that you live with it so long and so much that you forget how insidious it actually is. When you can’t do something and you think it’s because you’re lazy and unmotivated and then you have an up day and you get so much stuff done and you don’t think about how it’s because you’re having an up day. That this is literally how people without mental illness function

dcblogs writes with these snippets from a ComputerWorld story about a study that says nearly a third of all data-center servers are are comatose ("using energy but delivering no useful information"). What's remarkable is this percentage hasn't changed since 2008, when a separate study showed the same thing. ... A server is considered comatose if it hasn't done anything for at least six months. The high number of such servers "is a massive indictment of how data centers are managed and operated," said Jonathan Koomey, a research fellow at Stanford University, who has done data center energy research for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "It's not a technical issue as much as a management issue."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

living400lbs:

amaditalks:

“I have a dream that one day white peoples will care about black people dying without Jon Stewart telling them they should.” Clint Smith III

I am glad that Jon Stewart said what he said. I’m glad that he’s getting through to people.  But I wish more people would listen to the black people first. 

nico-de-gallo:

White privilege is being a 21-year-old loser who plots and kills 9 people in their church and when you are confronted by the police, armed, you survive without incident. Later, when you’re escorted to the police station, you are not handcuffed and you even have a bulletproof vest for protection. Meanwhile, the media is already infantilizing you and blaming your actions on anything other than you, even though you planned this attack for 6 months. No one is asking why White men are so violent when 87% of mass killings in America have been committed by White men and nobody’s calling you a terrorist when your very intent was to cause terror.

A few months ago, I saw a painting by Peter Reginato for the first time. It was on the streets of Manhattan. A middle-aged man was making his way down the sidewalk, and what caught my attention, before I looked at the painting, was his beatific smile. Clearly the proud owner, he seemed overjoyed to be able to carry a painting that I estimated to be 5 x 6 feet to its new home. When I asked the man who the artist was, he answered cheerfully, “It is by Peter Reginato. I have wanted something of his for years.”

By this time I was looking at the painting and thinking that it did not look familiar, which made me even more curious. Once I learned that it was by Reginato, I became more inquisitive. I certainly knew Reginato’s painted steel sculptures, which I first saw in the late 1970s, and which I have always felt deserved more attention, but I did not know that he was also a painter. As luck would have it, I did not have to wait long to see more, because there is an exhibition of paintings and sculptures, Peter Reginato | Fiction, currently at Adelson Galleries (June 4–August 21, 2015).

I am not the only person who has been struck by what David Cohen calls “Reginato’s wildness” and wondered how an artist known for his “gutsy, boisterous assemblages, [which] mate the mediums of sculpture and painting” (Cohen’s words) would come across in the more constrained realm of two-dimensional surfaces. I was not disappointed. There is an infectious exuberance to the paintings — a feeling that they are trying to break out of their rectangles, as well as jump out of their skin — which doesn’t feel forced.

In four of the five identically-sized, vertical paintings on one wall, Reginato uses differently colored diagonal lines to define a plane jutting toward the painting’s top edge, suggesting an aerial view of a corner of the artist’s studio, where a lot of fervent activity is taking place. The space is ambiguous, as a layer of splashes seem to be hovering above the plane, not having landed on the surface below. This feeling of movement animates the paintings, lifting them out of the literal into a fictive space.

In “Blue for Now” (2014), the plane, with its various blues, can be read as both the floor on which the canvas is laid down and the painting the artist is working on. The angle of the plane adds a vertiginous note to the composition, even as it conveys its discomfort with being contained. In a number of paintings, Reginato pushes this tension between containment and expansion by placing ellipses and other defined forms along the painting’s right and left edges.

The splashes recall Jackson Pollock’s studio floor in Springs, while the ellipses bring to mind Larry Poons’ paintings of the 1960s. For all the materiality of their surfaces — Reginato works in enamel — the paintings are, as the exhibition’s title underscores, fictions. By defining the painting as a made-up space in which an open-ended narrative (or dream) can unfold without reaching a resolution, Reginato gains an immense amount of freedom for himself. This is what connects his paintings and sculptures.

Like Robert Motherwell, Reginato does feel not compelled to overthrow his predecessors, which includes early modernists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Joan Miró, as well as the Abstract Expressionists and Color Field artists. He has absorbed possibilities from a wide field of art history and made of those artists he loves something all his own. He employs a variety of means, from drawing in paint to laying down a field of variously sized splashed dots. The palette is largely primary and secondary colors, with an occasional black or gray. Curling lines, like giant scribbles, convey an unexpected joyfulness, while the shapes and splashes of paint seem to float in ambiguous space that underscores underscore a world which has not hardened into a fixed image or literal surface.

In “Night Shift” (2014), Reginato does something very different. Overlapping clusters of dark blue and black biomorphic shapes, which recall Reginato’s sculptures, are laid over a ground of yellows and reds. It is as if we are standing in a dark room looking out. In both composition and mood, this painting provides a vivid contrast to the five vertical ones on the opposite wall. Between them, in the center of the gallery, are three brushed stainless steel sculptures, the light gleaming off their surfaces.

Known for his polychrome sculptures, these works are further proof of Reginato’s expansiveness. Assembled out of twisted wire, an accordion-like plane, and pieces of metal the artist has cut, the undated “Thin Woman” resides in that space between abstraction and figuration without tilting into either. This ambiguity is also true of a number of the paintings, which can be read as rooms as well as loosely painted, geometric abstractions. Reginato is one of the few artists that I know of who is successful at employing what I think of as the kitchen sink approach, where anything goes. And yet, instead of becoming ponderous, as some of Frank Stella’s behemoth constructions can be, Reginato’s unruly work conjures multiple readings with a graceful intelligence.

Peter Reginato | Fiction continues at Adelson Galleries (730 Fifth Avenue, Midtown, Manhattan) through August 21.

Last week, the world lost Ornette Coleman, whose 1959 releases The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century marked the advent of free jazz and changed the face of music forever.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

—William S. Burroughs

What does not change / is the will to change

—Charles Olson, “The Kingfishers”

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

—Susan Sontag

A brave world, Sir, full of religion, knavery, and change: we shall shortly see better days.

—Aphra Behn, The Roundheads

Even a god cannot change the past.

—Agathon, quoted in Aristotle’s Nicomachaean Ethics

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.

—Ellen Glasgow

I shall sleep, and move with the moving ships,
Change as the winds change, veer in the tide.

—Algernon Charles Swinburne, “The Triumph of Time”

[…] as when the sun new-risen
Looks through the horizontal misty air
Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon
In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs.

—John Milton, Paradise Lost

It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change.

—Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Ah! would ’t were so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any
Writhed not at passed joy?
To know the change and feel it,
When there is none to heal it,
Nor numbed sense to steal it,
Was never said in rhyme.

—John Keats, “In drear nighted December”

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

—Margaret Mead

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven’t changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don’t change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

—Doris Lessing

These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.

—Virginia Woolf

A lot of people ask me where music is going today. I think it’s going in short phrases. If you listen, anybody with an ear can hear that. Music is always changing. It changes because of the times and the technology that’s available, the material that things are made of, like plastic cars instead of steel. So when you hear an accident today it sounds different, not all the metal colliding like it was in the forties and fifties. Musicians pick up sounds and incorporate that into their playing, so the music that they make will be different.

—Miles Davis, The Autobiography

From the day itself:

And then from the next day:

It’s been interesting watching Dylann Roof be, in himself, the very best rebuttal against all the (almost entirely white) people who were desperate for his massacre to be about anything other than what it so very obviously was: racism and racial hatred. All the scrambling and denial, from presidential candidates to news networks to Twitter commenters, all undone by Roof’s insistent, persistent desire to hurt black people. There was no rationalization that stood up to that simple hatred.

Not that there probably still aren’t people who are willing to try to pretzel themselves into arguing it’s something other than racism or racial hatred. So, you know, again, and to be clear: If you are arguing that a white man who clearly held racist beliefs, going into a place where he knew he would find black people, waiting an hour in pretend fellowship with them, announcing he was there to shoot black people, shooting them while spouting racist comments at them while they begged him to stop killing them, reloading several times, and then when arrested declaring that the reason he was killed all those innocent people was to start a race war, wasn’t motivated by racism and racial hatred,

a) you are so very laughably wrong;

b) you are being as racist as you can possibly be.

Dylann Roof is a racist. His attack was a racist attack. The denial of his racist attack being racist is racist. There were an appalling number of people being racist in the aftermath of this fundamentally racist act. And despite everything, there are people continuing to be racist about it now. I am continually amazed at how difficult it was, and is, for people to recognize that this was a racist attack, by a racist. I’m continually amazed by everyone who still has a hard time admitting that this country is still racist as hell, and especially toward black people.

All of the above is stupidly obvious. And yet some people choose to be stupid about this. This willful ignorance embarrasses me as an American. I was in the UK when all of this happened. No one over there had any doubt what it was about, as far as I could see. And when it was made clear to them that I wasn’t intentionally stupid about it either, the attitude I received the most was: Sympathy. The UK has its own social crosses to bear, to be sure. They easily enough recognized the one my country bears.

I’m very sure most of us knew immediately why Dylann Roof did what he did. It’s just that so many the people who argued so very hard against the obvious are those who want to control the levers of our politics and discourse. It’s embarrassing to me that so many very clearly intelligent people worked so mightily to pretend this killing was something it was not. It’s ironic how difficult Roof made it for them, and gratifying that this very fact exposed their mendacity for what it is: Ridiculous, risible, and racist.

Now that I’ve returned to the US and have parked myself in front of the computer again, people are asking me what I think of Amazon’s plan to tweak the way its Kindle Unlimited system pays KDP Select authors. In the past, Amazon would designate a certain amount of cash ($3 million this June, according to this Verge article, although in the comments Annie Bellet quotes a higher figure) as a payment pot, and all KDP Select authors participating in Kindle Unlimited would get a small bit of the pot if someone who downloaded their book read more than 10% of it. This predictably led to authors making short books in order to get to the 10% mark as quickly as possible, and equally predictably diluted the effectiveness of the tactic. It also made authors of longer works complain quite a lot, as they had to compete with bite-sized books for the same tiny bit of the pot.

As a result, Amazon is now tweaking its system so that instead of getting paid when one reaches that 10% marker, KDP select authors will get paid for each page read — a move that will, within the context of the KU system, at least, address the “small book vs. big book” disparity. The system will also define a standard “page” so fiddling with margins and type size won’t fool it, and somehow track how much time you spend on each page, so just clicking through all the pages as quickly as possible won’t do the trick (this makes me wonder what Amazon defines as a decent amount of time to read a page). The short version is: You get paid for what your readers read. If your readers don’t read the whole book, you don’t get paid for the whole book.

I have a lot of questions about how this will play out in theory — will an author get paid if you re-read a book? What about if you go back and re-read a page? Does that count? Doesn’t this mean that authors of “Choose Your Own Adventure” books get really screwed? Not to mention any author who is writing anything other than a page-turning narrative? — but ultimately any objections or praise I might have for this new Amazon model is irrelevant, because of a simple fact:

Amazon is still making KDP Select authors compete against each other for a limited, Amazon-defined pot of money, and no matter how you slice it, that sucks for the authors.

Why? Because Amazon puts an arbitrary cap on the amount of money it’s possible to earn — and not just a cap on what you, as an author, can earn, but what every author in the KDP Select system participating in Kindle Unlimited can make. Every KDP Select author participating in Kindle Unlimited can not, among all of them totaled up, make more than what Amazon decides to put into the pot. Why? Because that’s the pot. That’s how much Amazon wants to splash out this month. And the more pages are read in the month, the smaller any bit of the pie that you might get for your pages read becomes. It’s a zero-sum game for every KDP Select author participating in Kindle Unlimited. Next month, who knows what the size of the pot will be? You don’t — only Amazon does. But whatever amount it is, it’s an amount designed to benefit Amazon, not the individual authors.

This is a bad situation for the authors participating — bad enough that ultimately the minutiae of how the money is allocated is sort of aside the point, because the relevant point is: You will never make more for your work than Amazon wants you to make. And yes, just Amazon, as the work KDP Select authors put on Amazon are exclusive to Amazon.

I’m not one of those people who believes Amazon is glowy-red-eye evil — I remind people again that I’ve rather happily had a fruitful relationship with its Audible subsidiary for a number of years — but Amazon is looking out for Amazon first, and when it does, it’s not an author’s friend. There is no possible way in this or any other timeline that I would ever, as a writer, participate in the sort of scheme that Amazon runs with its KDP Select authors on Kindle Prime. I don’t approve of putting a cap on my own earnings (particularly one I have no say on), and I don’t approve of being in a situation where my success as an author comes by disadvantaging other authors, or vice versa. In the system in which I currently participate (i.e., the open market), there is no limit to the amount I can make, and no limit to what any other author can make. It’s a great system! I support it, and so should you.

So, yeah: By page, or by percentage, KDP Select authors on Kindle Unlimited still can’t make more than Amazon says they can. That sucks, and that’s the long and short of it.

Skin Stretch

Computer graphic research from the USC Institute of Creative Technology is a method to produce highly realistic human skin with ultra-fine detail:

Simulating the appearance of human skin is important for rendering realistic digital human characters for simulation, education, and entertainment applications. Skin exhibits great variation in color, surface roughness, and translucency over different parts of the body, between different individuals, and when it’s transformed by articulation and deformation. But as variable as skin can be, human perception is remarkably attuned to the subtleties of skin appearance, as attested to by the vast array of makeup products designed to enhance and embellish it.

Advances in measuring and simulating the scattering of light beneath the surface of the skin have made it possible to render convincingly realistic human characters whose skin appear to be fleshy and organic. Today’s high-resolution facial scanning techniques (e.g. record facial geometry, surface coloration, and surface mesostructure details at the level of skin pores and fine creases to a resolution of up to a tenth of a millimeter. By recording a sequence of such scans or performing blendshape animation using scans of different high-res expressions, the effects of dynamic mesostructure - pore stretching and skin furrowing - can be recorded and reproduced on a digital character.

More Here

Scanner Error Series

Art experiments from Jeff Donaldson uses a broken scanner to capture abstract compositions (which are reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism and Gerhard Richter):

It is similar to camera-less photography wherein photographic paper is exposed directly with light - the ccd of the scanner takes the place of photo chemistry to develop an image. I’m manipulating ambient light sources (halogen light and television static) for each scan. I don’t know what the results will be until each scan is complete.

More Here

Jeff has a Tumblr blog [notendo] here