Hello lovely people! I just upgraded my wordpress install. In the past I have managed to hork my entire blog doing this. This time, it appears the upgrade has come off without a hitch - which has me worried. If you see any wonk, please let me know and I will endeavor to figure it out or at least make pleas to some helpful software deities.
So I just got back from my first Democratic Caucus. What a fascinating process. When you think of the word “grass-roots”, it’s really happening. You and your neighbors getting together to discuss the candidates and attempting to woo undecided voters to your camp. The turnout at the Thornton Creek School Caucus was insane. People were standing in the hallways until we broke out to into our individual precinct sessions.
Check the photos. The first one is the main gathering area and the second one is in my precinct caucus:
Our particular caucus was civil, but I could easily see how these things could turn heated. Did any of you have crazy experiences out caucusing? If so, please leave them in the comments.
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The original “Yes We Can” speech…
I’m looking forward to a president than can speak and inspire unity with something other than fear. Aren’t you?
Funny.
If you don’t know who Will Wright is, you should. He’s one of the most visionary game developers alive today. Here he previews his newest game, “Spore,” wherein players develop life forms from single-cell, all the way to complex human beings who conquer the galaxies. Will speaks a lot about developing games as if they’re educational toys, ways of understanding both time and space, as well as the complex systems governing the world.
An award winning article regarding the physics of violin acoustics and the mysteries of the “Stradivarius sound.” A very compelling read that makes me want to learn to play violin - showing it as a complex and sensual instrument while breaking some of the mystical taboos associated with the greatest instruments.
Every violin, whether a Stradivarius or the cheapest factory-made copy, has a distinctive “voice” of its own. Just as any musician can immediately recognize the difference between Domingo and Pavarotti singing the same operatic aria, so a skilled violinist can distinguish between different qualities in the sound produced by individual Stradivari or Guarneri violins. The challenge for scientists is to characterize such differences by physical measurements. Indeed, over the last century and a half, many famous physicists have been intrigued by the workings of the violin, with Helmholtz, Savart and Raman all making vital contributions.
Article originally discovered via this post over at Signal vs. Noise.
At 8,000 euros I’m going to have to call this one “unnecessary.”
Try going to the Seattle Library on a rainy or a cold day and counting the number of homeless people taking refuge there. This points to a huge problem. These people need help beyond finding temporary shelter in our public structures. In Seattle, our new library cost more than $165 million and yet we have not found a better way to take care of our mentally ill and chronically homeless populations than to let them inside in the morning, monitor them for behavioral issues, and then clear them every night.
Former assistant director of the Salt Lake City Public Library system, Chip Ward, has written an outstanding piece called “How The Public Library Became Heartbreak Hotel” (found via a short pointer piece at LibraryJournal.com) for the Atlantic Free Press, in a column called Hard Truths for Hard Times. This is a fascinating read and it touches on some real loopholes and ineffectiveness in our policies to deal with the mentally ill. I strongly recommend you take a few minutes to read it.
Although the public may not have caught on, ask any urban library administrator in the nation where the chronically homeless go during the day and he or she will tell you about the struggles of America’s public librarians to cope with their unwanted and unappreciated role as the daytime guardians of the down and out. In our public libraries, the outcasts are inside.
The library wrestles with where to draw the line on odor. The law is unclear. An aggressive patron in New Jersey successfully sued a public library for banning him because of his body odor. That decision has had a chilling effect on public libraries ever since. When library users complain about the odor of transients, librarians usually respond that there isn’t much they can do about it. Lately, libraries are learning to write policies on odor that are more specific and so can be defended in court, but such rules are still hard to enforce because smell is such a subjective thing — and humiliating someone by telling him he stinks is an awkward experience that librarians prefer to avoid. None of this was covered in library school.
The cost of this mad system is staggering. Cities that have tracked chronically homeless people for the police, jail, clinic, paramedic, emergency room, and other hospital services they require, estimate that a typical transient can cost taxpayers between $20,000 and $150,000 a year. You could not design a more expensive, wasteful, or ineffective way to provide healthcare to individuals who live on the street than by having librarians like me dispense it through paramedics and emergency rooms. For one thing, fragmented, episodic care consistently fails, no matter how many times delivered. It is not only immoral to ignore people who are suffering illness in our midst, it’s downright stupid public policy. We do not spend too little on the problems of the mentally disabled homeless, as is often assumed, instead we spend extravagantly but foolishly.
What do you think about a culture that abandons suffering people and expects them to fend for themselves on the street, then criminalizes them for expressing the symptoms of illnesses they cannot control? We pay lip service to this tragedy — then look away fast. As a library administrator, I hear the public express annoyance more often than not: “What are they doing in here?” “Can’t you control them?” Annoyance is the cousin of arrogance, not shame.
Jim Butcher came to town yesterday in support of his new book, White Night (The Dresden Files, Book 9). The series, for those of you unfamiliar, is about a wizard detective named Harry Dresden. I was unfamiliar with Butcher’s printed work and went to this “non-reading” (more on this in a moment) because I’ve been enjoying the new “Dresden Files” show on the Sci-Fi Channel and I thought it might be fun to see what the books and author are like. There’s usually interesting fodder for questions when a writer’s work gets adapted for tv or film.
I wasn’t really prepared for the mob of people that would be in attendance. Typically, when I show up 20 minutes early for a reading, as I did last night, I have my pick of where to sit. Last night, I could hear the “standing-room only” audience upstairs at the University Bookstore long before I saw them. The place was packed down the aisles with enthusiastic fans, some of which apparently showed up at 1 (the event was at 7). It turns out that this was all for good reason since Jim Butcher proved himself to be a “fan’s fan” - a highly caffeinated, energetic, and funny presenter who kept answering questions until he was told that he needed to stop and sign books so they could close the store.
I’d definitely check out Jim Butcher the next time he comes to town and I may even try reading some of the Dresden books before he comes back. They’re pulpy (I read the first two chapters of the new book while waiting for him to come on), but they’re fast reads with fun characters, lots of crime scene dialog, and a funny hero who gets persistently beaten down.
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