3 November 03
Nonviolence And Electronic Voting
We just came back from hearing Arun Gandhi speak as part of the Campus Community Book Project on nonviolence as he learned it from his grandfather, Mohandas K. Gandhi. He spoke of the culture of violence and how much of we do perpetuates it, even passively. Anger is like electricity, his grandfather would say, it must be channelled in the right direction to do good. Nor can peace just stay within—it must go from thoughts to words to deeds to values.
Out in cyberspace, a civil disobedience campaign is going on which I think M.K. Gandhi would be pleased with. A writer named Bev Harris has been researching the perils of electronic voting systems, well-known to computer security experts as posing high risks for corruption and fraud. In particular, she was investigating the biggest manufacturer of these systems in the U.S., Diebold Election Systems, and was appalled by the woeful lack of security in their systems, not to mention the lack of any auditable duplicate paper printout trail from the votes. She posted on her website internal memos from an email list archive of Diebold’s which document a pattern of mismanagement and technical failure.
Naturally, Diebold was incensed by this, and sent Harris a cease-and-desist order to take the memos off her website, on grounds of copyright violations. But the genie was out of the bottle, and many people started mirroring the memos, beginning with students at Swarthmore College. Diebold followed up with more cease-and-desist orders, but they aren’t catching up with the mirrorers. And today, the students turned the tables. They filed suit, with help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, against Diebold to block their cease-and-desist orders on grounds that publishing the memos constitutes fair use because of the importance of the memos to the public debate over electronic voting.
2 November 03
Coffee Houses
Another joint Ecotone entry; this one is on Coffee House as Place.
I remember the first time I entered a Starbucks. It was on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, Mass., and what seemed so different about it was how people seemed encouraged to linger: to buy only one overpriced cup of designer coffee but then to sit there all morning. It was almost opposite Harvard Law School and I suspect most of its clientele were law students, choosing a study environment that would never, ever work for me. But I liked it that they weren’t chased out. I ordered tea.
Since those days, Starbucks has covered the globe in much the same way MacDonald’s has, and its cookie-cutter designs render it identical in Cambridge or Davis or London. I avoid it, especially since I stopped drinking coffee many years ago. Yet there are several coffee shops here in Davis: Common Grounds, Mishka’s, Espresso Roma, Cafe Roma, Chamonix—that offer a similar “we won’t chase you out of here even though you’ve only spent $2.65” message. Many of them offer free wireless internet as well (unlike Starbucks, where you have to pay). Cafe Roma features poetry slams and concerts; Common Grounds has book readings and political gatherings.
For a drink that seems to load people up with an energy that leads to the shakes, it’s a civilized antidote, this relaxed notion of how long you can stay. I like it. I can’t give any kind of critique of the quality of the coffee, but each of these havens has its own defining sense of place. Appealing to neo-hippies, Euro-wannabes, or aging grungers, the coffee houses become an extension of the people who sit in them for hours. Even when they’re almost empty, it’s easy to tell if you’d fit in or not.
1 November 03
The Three O’Clock Cookie Run
A note for the Ecotone Wiki topic on Coffee Shop As Place
Not far from the building where I work is the main student center on campus, housing the bookstore and the student-run eatery (supposedly the largest restaurant in Northern California). I always get my lunch from there—the food is cheap and wholesome. Students being students, their newfound coffee habit well nourished by too many all-nighters, naturally there is a place to pick up a mocha during a five-minute run between classes. There is no place to sit down in this little coffeeshop, and people who want to settle into their coffees often sit on the tables and chairs just outside the MemU. Because no one lingers, this coffeeshop doesn’t seem to have much of a sense of place, though I’m sure it does to the student workers there.
Myself, I’m not a coffee drinker, but the coffeeshop is my destination for the usual mid-afternoon baked good run. Most often a cookie, but if I’m lucky they have blueberry muffins. Bakeries as place—now there’s a topic.
31 October 03
Halloween Costumes
I decided not to go into work today with two black boots pretending I was Frankenstein’s monster, not because they wouldn’t have been great for the purpose, but because I couldn’t figure out how to handle the head. Plus I had physical therapy during the day: difficult to do floorwork with two bolts sticking out of your neck.
Lots of my coworkers dressed up, though, and much jollity ensued.
The best costume I’ve seen for many years was on a person standing outside the front of Mrak Hall where I work. It was dark. The figure was hooded and caped and stood motionless outside the front door. A scythe emerged from behind the black cloth. Tall: Darth Vader plus scythe.
When we got round the front of this sinister figure, a full human skeleton started talking to us, explaining that his wife was a forensic anthropologist, and he wasn’t trying to scare people, and he was waiting for his ride. For a second, though, it appeared as though the angel of death were delivering a particularly interesting message to the administration of the University.
30 October 03
Periodic Tables
The cover article in Science News this week (unfortunately not online, but see this writeup in the Guardian) is about a geologist’s redesign of the periodic table of elements, that graphic beloved of chemists. The geologist, Bruce Railsback, set out to redesign the periodic table so that it would be more useful for earth scientists, who deal with elements mostly in their ionic forms. In his table, elements are arranged according to their ions, rather than their neutral atoms, and some elements may have multiple entries in the table if they have several different commonly found ions (e.g. an entry both for ferrous (Fe2+) and ferric (Fe3+) iron).
It’s a pretty amazing graphic (downloadable from here) and I’m tempted to print it out on the large-format plotter at work. It might even lead me to read up on some geochemistry. My chemistry is quite rusty, but there’s something archetypal in studying about elements, their forms, and the earth.
29 October 03
Floppy Timing Chain
Lila’s front chain, the one used by the front passenger when there is one, got pretty loose a few weeks ago. Since this is not a conventional rig I took her back to Peter the Whymcycle guru. He performed technical miracles (removed the shoe from his right foot and pushed the bar holding the wheel a bit further down, to be precise).
Chains do stretch over time, however, and we have simply removed the timing chain so I don’t have to stop every time I hit a bump in the road on the way to work and get bike grease all over my hands. Today I gave a coworker a ride to the local Indian restaurant for lunch. I did all the work instead of have a pedalling stoker. It was okay, but I wouldn’t want to try this on a hill!
28 October 03
Maggot Art
As Fred from Floyd is showing interest in career possibilities involving decay-loving creepy-crawlies, I should point out a similar opportunity for those of an artistic bent. Rebecca Bullard, a UC Davis graduate student and a forensic entomologist by training, has created a teaching curriculum she terms Maggot Art. By bathing her maggots in non-toxic water-based paint and then letting them crawl on paper, her dipteran collaborators produce trails which can be surprisingly beautiful. The first public exhibition of these paintings will be held in Davis in April 2004, so now is the time to become a pioneer in this art form.
27 October 03
Back School Started Today
I’ve been so impressed with Numenius’ progress with his back problems that I’ve decided to go to back school myself in order to fend off what seems to be an almost inevitable result of being a biped, namely, pain in the lower back. Today I got the thorough work-over, trying to determine where my weak spots were (between L5 and S1, for all you PTs out there). On Wednesday I learn how to lift, bend, deload deload deload, and so on.
Mat the PT talks of the back as analogous to a bank: you put checks in, you take checks out. Deloading sets up credit; lifting boxes of books sends you shopping. I’m not sure I quite understand all this but I’m happy to start super-strengthening my trunk; to deload when I get home from work (lie on the floor and push myself away from the door with a broom handle); to bounce around on the exercise ball; and to watch how I sit. I might start raising a few eyebrows at work, is all.
26 October 03
Baseball’s Paleontologist
We’re still celebrating the defeat of the New York Yankees here, and remain convinced that the only people who have any business rooting for the Yankees are those that actually grew up in New York. As the saying goes, rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for Microsoft.
One famous Yankee fan who did grow up in New York was Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard paleontologist and prolific writer who died a little over a year ago. I just finished reading Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball, which is a collection of his many pieces on baseball. I was happy to see this collection come out, which he left as a neatly organized manuscript before he died.
Gould grew up in Queens in New York in the late 1940s and 1950s, which was a golden time and place for baseball. There were three teams in town then: the New York Yankees, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the New York Giants. Loyalties were quite divided depending upon the borough, but almost every boy and a good many girls were fanatical about baseball there and then. Gould rooted for the Yankees, and secondarily for the Giants. Of his intellectual attraction to baseball, Gould saw this as a contingent fact of his upbringing, and not of any inherent quality of baseball itself. (For a 1950’s childhood baseball memoir from the opposite side of town, see Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Wait Till Next Year. She was a Dodgers fan, and was heartbroken when the team left for Los Angeles in 1958, along with the Giants, who moved to San Francisco.)
I think the most analytic piece in the collection is the essay “Why no one hits .400 anymore”. The last batter to have a batting average over .400 was Ted Williams in 1941. Gould explains the absence of .400 batters these days as an outcome of the long-term trend towards there being much less variation in the quality of major-league baseball players.
Gould was a Yankees fan who held season tickets to the Red Sox, and had dual loyalties to both teams. Though he hated the introduction of wild-card teams to the playoffs (a change starting in 1995), he did see the Red Sox meet the Yankees once in post-season play in 1999, and I suspect he would have been thrilled to see the 2003 matchup as well—baseball at its finest, though the ghosts haunted the Red Sox in the end.
No ghosts appeared Saturday night though: I guess they forgot the game was on, and didn’t appear in time to rescue the Yankees.
25 October 03
Poetry, Peacemakers Theatre, Pink
Today was the Peace Picnic, an event that is part of the Campus Community Book Project but which took place within the community rather than on campus. We spent last night in a production line in the kitchen making 600 pooris; this morning I must have chopped about 300 potatoes. It was wonderful to be around people with so much laughter!
We read poetry; we watched a jujitsu demonstration; we participated in a conflict-theatre-demonstration; we had a great Indian lunch; and we stood in a circle at the end and exchanged thoughts, ideas, prayers, and songs for peace.
It got hot today, into the 90s, hot for late October. It was perfect for a picnic.
And then, to round off a splendid day, the Florida Marlins beat the Yankees 2-0 to win the World Series. We went out for ice cream to celebrate. Josh Beckett pitched a 9-inning shutout and was named Most Valuable Player of the Series. Watch out for this fearless 23-year-old!