Because the Universe is Confusing
Archive for January, 2008
How is that name pronounced anyway?
Jan 28th
And now for what some might consider a vaguely frivolous post. I’d like to correct a few pronunciation issues: one prevalent amongst too many people that I meet, and the other, connected, and prevalent in the astronomy world. This is partly because I’d rather not have the lovely readers of this blog walking around pronouncing my name wrong and also because I’ve had a bone to pick with astronomers who should know better for a while.
First of all, pronounce my name like it is spelled. My name is not Shanda! That would be awful, since “shanda” means shame in my grandfather’s first language, Yiddish. My grandfather insisted that my parents be careful about that.
Second of all, it is not Chandra. Where the hell does the extra r come from?
Third of all, in Hindi, there is no such thing as that horrid “a” that we hear in “at.” (If you can follow pronunciation guides this sounds like ‘at.) So, I am not Ch’anda, and the great Nobel Laureate astrophysicist Chandrasekar is not Shandra or Ch’andra! The “a” is pronounced more like “uh” — Chunda, Chund-ra — if you are trying to get close to the Hindi pronunciation. Otherwise, Chonda works.
By the way, can anyone tell me of a language that does have that “at” sound in it, besides English? I can’t think of one.
Oh well, it’s such a shanda that so many people mispronounce Chanda.
Scientists refuse to kill
Jan 27th
I just wanted to point out a couple of news stories that have hit the radar in Canada the last couple of weeks. Both of them are engineers who refuse to be part of the war machine. Good for Paul Cottle and Trevor Williams.
This is TOTALLY AWESOME
Jan 27th
repost from: http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/01/major-labels-al.html
Major Labels Allow P2P Music Sharing on QTrax
By Eliot Van Buskirk January 26, 2008 | 12:01:00 AM
Categories: Digital Music News, Events, Getting Artists Paid, Music Software and Sites, Social Media
After years of fighting peer-to-peer file sharing companies, the major record labels have decided that if they can’t beat them, they might as well join them — in one case, anyway. At the MIDEM conference in Cannes, QTrax announced deals with all of the major music labels and publishers to offer the first free and legal ad-supported P2P service to include major label music.
“You can’t change the attitudes and habits of what is now probably amounting to two generations who believe that music ought to be free on the internet,” said QTrax CEO Allan Klepfisz. “Those people are not going to be discouraged by Supreme Court decisions, they’re not going to be discouraged by technological interference. Ultimately, what will discourage them is a demonstratively better service.”
Klepfisz pegs the catalog of the service over 25 million songs, which would dwarf those of iTunes and other online music stores. The songs will be wrapped in Microsoft’s Windows Media subscription DRM. This means that unlike the free, ad-supported services offered by imeem and Last.fm, QTrax’s songs can be downloaded onto compatible players. The application is based on the Songbird engine, so sharing and downloading occurs within a Firefox browser — no separate application required.
As of now, the tracks are not compatible with the Apple iPod, but Klepfisz said that the service would be compatible with iPods before too long — an indication that Apple could apply the subscription technology developed for iTunes Movie Rentals to the music market.
To get the industry onboard with P2P, QTrax signed over “the lion’s share of revenue” to labels and publishers, paying out on per-download and per-play bases. The site also categorized the music of the world into three lists. One list includes artists who do not permit their music to be made available online in any capacity. “The blacklist is fast-disappearing — my prediction is that in a year, the blacklist won’t be in existence,” said Klepfisz. The white list consists of the standard digital catalogs from the major and indie labels — the same five-plus million songs that are on iTunes.
The gray list constitutes the difference between what’s available on iTunes and what’s available on BitTorrent. “Then you have the gray list, which is that vast body of stuff that’s out there on P2P, where there are rights holders, but the rights holders themselves may not even know that a song is being downloaded frequently… To the best of our ability, we identify the rights holder and pay them a percentage of the advertising revenue. In the minority of cases where we can’t identify a rights holder, we will actually put up the song for claiming, and will reserve the portion of the ad pie until that song is appropriately claimed.” As with other free, ad-supported services, revenue comes from advertisers who want to target ads to specific types of listener.
Advertisers have long understood the power of music to move product, and some have developed specific music strategies for working with new services such as QTrax, according to Klepfisz. But without the labels’ sign-off on this service, a sanctioned P2P service of this size never would have been possible.
With these deals, the labels have demonstrated openness towards revenue streams that deviate from the record store model.
“This is a tacit acknowledgment that ‘bulletproof’ wasn’t working,” said IDC consumer audio analyst Susan Kevorkian. “And it hasn’t been working. But it was an experiment the music industry needed to undertake in order to figure out how to address digital distribution. It was a very long learning process, but fortunately there’s still the possibility of finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”
R.I.P. Heath Ledger
Jan 22nd
He was going to be one of the great actors of my generation, I think.
Thanks for Brokeback, Heath. You saved lives. It’s a role not everyone would have done.
The Day I Became A Nigger
Jan 21st
December 31, 1997 — Just like every winter break, I spent this one in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. at my dad and step-mum’s house. I had a few friends in the area, and this time, one of them invited me to join her and her cousin at a New Years party in Bowie, Maryland. So exciting!! I was fifteen and had never been invited to a New Years event before. No parents! Boys I didn’t know! And in Bowie – home of a new minor league baseball team in the Baltimore Orioles family. I’d been there for a game, and I liked it.
I don’t remember how much time I spent preparing, but I remember wanting to look attractive. My dad suggested I might not want to go to the party because Bowie might not be as cool as I thought, but I waved him off. “Dad, this is the 90s. Just because we’re south of the Mason-Dixon line doesn’t mean everyone’s a racist. You’re white. You’re not.”
Mary’s sister picked me up and drove us me, her, her cousin, and a male friend the 30 minutes to Bowie. We were slated to be picked up sometime after midnight. This was 1997, so none of us had a cell phone, but Mary’s sis had the number for the house.
When we got there, I think we were a bit disappointed. No hot guys really, and it was fairly quiet. We giggled because they were a little backwoods. Then again, it was Bowie — not in the DC Metropolitan area. So who could expect them to be as cool as we were?
People didn’t talk to me much, but I took this as a confirmation of my low self-esteem: I wasn’t pretty and my breasts were small, so I wasn’t really the one to talk to. Mary and her cousin were definitely more deserving of the attention.
“Nigger …” I don’t know what the rest of the sentence was. But I came from Los Angeles, from 1997, from the modern era. So I said, “What did you say? Were you talking about me?” And he said, “I was talking about some niggers. Not Mexicans like you.”
Was I stupid to come out? Perhaps. I said to him, “I’m Black. Don’t use that word.” And suddenly the room collapsed. People were saying things like, “There’s a nigger at the party.” I don’t know how I got there, but suddenly I was screaming at someone to shut up, that they were wrong, that this wasn’t okay. And we were using the phone to try and call Mary’s sister, who I think wasn’t answering. We were hoping to get picked up, to get the hell out of there.
It turned out that that night was the coldest night of the year in the area. Which added to the pain when we were essentially forced to leave the party. There was some concern as to whether we were safe. As the evening crawled toward midnight, we were essentially in the middle of nowhere with no money and nowhere to go. We decided to walk back toward a crossection of highways that we remembered passing through. There were no sidewalks, so we walked down the street.
We got to the intersection and happily discovered there was one lone business — a McDonalds! They had closed minutes before, but we banged on the door, pleading with the manager to let us in. We had not dressed for the cold. I was in a pair of docs and a dress and a coat. Mary was in heals and something approximating a jacket. Etc.
The manager pointed us to a callbox outside the restaurant and proceeded to ignore us. As I write this, I am remembering to thank my mother for letting me memorize her calling card number. We didn’t have any change, and I didn’t know anything about calling someone collect. Tearfully, I called my dad, told him the intersection we were at, and begged him to come pick us up. He promised he’d be there in 40 minutes.
Those 40 minutes were some of the worst moments of my life. As my watch turned to midnight and 1998 began, I was shivering in a huddle with three friends, trying to get as much heat possible from four cigarettes that we had lit up and were holding in the middle of our circle.
To their credit, Mary, her cousin and friend Mike stuck with me. They never questioned my reaction, they stood up for me, and they walked out with me. They huddled with me, and they comforted me while we stood in the cold. Never once was the blame ever laid at my feet for what had happened. You’ve probably guessed by now that they were white, and I am not.
It took me a long time to feel safe around white guys my age again. Every time I saw one that I wanted to meet or talk to, I thought “but what if he is thinking nigger in the back of his head?” I thank those three who stood by my side for keeping me from thinking that this is how all white people are. And my dad for being aware enough of racism to try and warn me. Not everyone is so conscientious. I wasn’t.
–
Today the US remembered Martin Luther King, Jr. and though Canada doesn’t really bother to take a moment to remember him, I took a couple of hours to have some alone time. I decided to watch “This Is England,” which captures of a snapshot of working class youth in small town England during 1983, in the midst of the Faulklands War. The film confronts head on the painful mixture of sorrow at lost comrades, nationalism, and racism that combine when people have been kicked in the teeth enough times. And as I watched the individualized violence it can beget, I realized how grateful I am that Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and so many others marched and spoke out to try and end that violence. (And Malcolm X was killed in part because he stopped advocating another kind of race-based violence against Jews.)
I’m lucky nothing happened to me, physically, at that party. I didn’t even catch a cold the next day, I don’t think. But I realize now what could have happened. It scares the living daylights out of me. What scares me more is that I might carry that experience with me and never do anything productive with it.
May I always find the strength to walk a path that is inspired by Dr. King.
It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries…. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. — MLK on the Vietnam War, April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination.
I have an idea: let's destroy our universities because they are totally useless right?!?
Jan 18th
This stuff really upsets me. UC was once the ideal university from the perspective of admissions: anyone who wanted to go and who worked hard enough, even if they had to spend time at a community college, got to go to a UC. It was affordable. And UC Berkeley and UCLA were two of the most diverse campuses in the world. Thanks to anti-affirmative action measures and prioritizing prisons ahead of education, UC tuition has essentially doubled in the last 6 years and students of colour are scarce in a state where an underrepresented group is soon to be the majority population. What the fuck, people?!?
San Francisco Chronicle article re-posted below:
UC regents, facing budget cuts, raise chief of staff’s salary 26%
Tanya Schevitz, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, January 18, 2008
(01-18) 04:00 PST Los Angeles –
The UC Board of Regents got a gloomy list of options on Thursday to cover a projected $417 million gap in state funding next year, but they smiled brightly on their top administrative aide by awarding her a 26 percent pay increase of $61,000.
The raise boosted the annual salary of Secretary/Chief of Staff Diane Griffiths to $295,000 and came less than a year after she was hired.
Minutes later, the board received a dire budget report that included possible student fee increases of up to 10 percent, freezing faculty salaries and turning away as many as 5,000 eligible students this fall.
Students in the regents meeting audience on the UCLA campus waved signs protesting the university’s priorities. “Where is the money going? Not toward lowering student fees!” “Where is the money going? Not 2 Students!” “Where is the money going? Executive compensation!”
In approving the salary increase, with just Lt. Gov. John Garamendi opposed, the regents said Griffiths’ duties have been significantly expanded to better serve the board as it takes a more active role in running the university system.
Facing a state budget deficit of $14.5 billion, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last week proposed a budget that would leave UC about $417 million short of its projected need, meaning it may have to make difficult decisions about where to cut spending and raise revenue.
Among the possibilities outlined for regents by Provost Rory Hume and Katie Lapp, the executive vice president for business operations, is increasing student tuition fees by 10 percent instead of the 7 percent proposed in November.
Tuition has nearly doubled at UC since 2002, including a 7 percent bump in 2007. The average UC undergraduate student currently pays about $7,350 per year in tuition fees. That does not include expenses such as room, meals and books.
UCLA graduate student Mona AuYoung told the regents that a fee increase of even a couple of hundred dollars makes a big difference for students.
“That is two months of groceries for us or 162 loads of laundry,” she said. “It may sound petty, but it really is a huge part of our lives.”
Hume and Lapp told the regents that the 10-campus university system may also have to turn away 5,000 eligible students. That would hurt the university’s efforts to increase its diversity and would come when the state is graduating its largest high school class in recent history.
In addition, Hume and Lapp said, UC may have to consider freezing salaries for faculty and staff.
While fee increases are controversial, the prospect of turning away eligible students is likely to be an explosive issue. The university’s long-standing promise is to provide a seat at a UC campus to the top 12.5 percent of graduating high school seniors.
The university turned away eligible California students once before, during a budget crisis in 2004. The university ended up rejecting 7,600 would-be students.
The regents did not take action Thursday but were told they would have to make a decision before admission letters are sent out in coming weeks. UC Riverside sends out its letters to accepted students Feb. 1, so a decision would have to be made by then, Hume said.
“The overwhelming mood within the university is to preserve our commitment to the people of California at all costs, but these circumstances mean we have to look at all options,” Hume said.
None of the options was acceptable to students.
“There needs to be other ways to fix fiscal problems than again putting it on the students to suffer the repercussions,” said Louise Hendrickson, president of the UC Students Association.
Gary Coyne, 25, a graduate student at UC Riverside, told the regents that they should not act quickly to impose the burden on students.
“Let’s tell the Legislature they need to make the tough decisions they were elected to make,” he said.
E-mail Tanya Schevitz at tschevitz@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page B – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
why isn't there a real post below this meta subject line?
Jan 17th
because i am working on a guest post about science funding for is>than that i agreed to do last month and it is due tomorrow, to be published soon after, i hope. this one i spent more than hour on, although i fear it’s going to sound like i spent an hour on it.
79
Jan 15th
Had Martin Luther King been allowed to live, that’s how old he would be today.
Why do we remember this day? We remember it because Martin Luther King is worth remembering and because a whole movement was built to fight for a day in his honour in the United States. After years of fighting for it, Americans won the right to celebrate this great man with a Federal holiday, the third Monday of January.
In honour of this struggle’s success, I offer you Stevie Wonder’s Happy Birthday, written as a part of the protest.
As I think of our tremendous loss, I think of MLK’s remarks the day before he died:
And they were telling me –. Now, it doesn’t matter, now. It really doesn’t matter what happens now. I left Atlanta this morning, and as we got started on the plane, there were six of us. The pilot said over the public address system, “We are sorry for the delay, but we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane. And to be sure that all of the bags were checked, and to be sure that nothing would be wrong with on the plane, we had to check out everything carefully. And we’ve had the plane protected and guarded all night.”And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?
Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.
And I don’t mind.
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!
You can listen to the full speech in real audio format here. (btw, you can use a program called Media Player Classic to listen if you hate Real Audio’s software.)
Surely these are in part the words that have inspired a song by The Nightwatchman that I keep coming back to, “The Road I Must Travel.” I offer it here, in the hopes that you will all go out and buy a copy of his album, One Man Revolution.
By the way, who is The Nightwatchman? Tom Morello is a Black American musician better known as the prolific guitarist for Rage Against The Machine. He was also a member of Harvard College Class of 1982 who went on to push for revolution instead of just settling into a bobo* lifestyle.
I know that MLK believed that he would be walking with us even once in Heaven. So, I guess I’ll just say thanks man. Thank you for everything I have and for leading people in struggle so that I could have all of the opportunities that I have had. Even in death, you have given life to many.
(*New term that professional geographers are using to denote the emerging creative class, which includes scientists and often artists as well. It is short for “bohemian bourgeoisie.”)
SI SE PUEDE!
Chapter 4: We Glide Over the Unburied (The Book of Negroes
Jan 10th
For a variety of reasons, in the last few days I have been thinking of my Grandpa Norman, even more often than usual. My yiddish grandpa was my best friend, and he died when I was six. The loss was profound, the wound deep, and I miss him every day. I mention this now because I often think about how my grandpa would have guided me as I tread difficult waters, especially in the last year. He was a machine worker who dreamed of becoming a scientist. I am living that dream, but struggling with it. He was also a machine worker who believed in social justice, who had (perhaps naively) hoped for a fair Israel, who loved his little granddaughter even though she was darker than him and taught her to dream big. I think he hoped that I would laugh a lot.
Today I have been wondering about how my grandfather maintained that laughter, despite all he had seen. He was man who lived through the Depression, felt the ripples of the Holocaust, American anti-semitism, what had most educational doors closed to him, who maybe spent much of his life in heartbreak and rarely saw his son. Yet, into his 70s, he was teaching his granddaughter to laugh. As I thought about writing this entry, again I came back to the question of how he did it. Much has been written about the Yiddish sense of humour, so perhaps that’s where I should start. Regardless …
Frankly, sometimes it is hard to laugh in this world, especially when you know its story. Anyone who knows something of slavery knows what Chapter 4 is about: the Middle Passage, so-called because it was the middle stage of a three part journey. Ironically, this is a reference to the journey of the ships which carried slaves to the Americas, not the journey of the slaves themselves. The ships began and ended in Europe, carrying “goods”: people, spices, etc.
I don’t want to give away the chapter, but I want to urge everyone to know this chapter, if not in this book, from another one, a non-fictional account. Anyone who has ever been moved by accounts of German concentration camps or Stalinist prison camps should come to understand the precedent for these structures: the grotesque ships which carried African peoples away from their freedom. Why grotesque? Not just because of the cargo they carried but because of the way the people were held. With little room to move, they lay in each other’s waste for months as the ships crossed the Atlantic.
Not only were the conditions physically unsanitary, they were also psychologically destructive. As Aminata notes,
A child had certain advantages on a slave vessel. Nobody rushed to kill a child. Not even a man-stealer. But also, the child’s mind has elasticity. Adults are different — push them too far and they snap. Many times during that long journey, I was terrified beyond description, yet somehow my mind remained intact. Men and women the age of my parents lost their monds on that journey.
I think it will never be clear, though, what the greater tragedy is: the experience of those who survived the middle passage to be auctioned into slavery, or the people who didn’t. While it was in the interests of slave ship captains to keep as many Blacks alive as possible, obviously they considered the optimization problem and decided that the quarters would be as they were. Between disease, starvation and what some considered to be the “lucky” successful suicide, something like 20% of the ship’s captives died before reaching North and/or South American shores.
Notable about Hill’s particular rendering of the Middle Passage is his ability to make it survivable. Not easy, not easier, nothing like that. Simply that many did survive with language, with culture, with some sense of dignity, however fractured. I have wondered many, many times how one does that in the face of such brutality. To come to understand, even a little bit, is to have a lesson in the strength of the human spirit, really.
I feel this has been a craptastic entry, and I don’t think it’s an accident. I don’t have the emotional energy to think about the Middle Passage too deeply right now. I have the privilege of not letting it tear me up and because I have spent so much of my week dealing with a really tragic and very personal instance of homophobia, I just can’t do it today.
A couple of vaguely related media items that I’d like to recommend, though:
1. Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography. Equiano not only survived the middle passage but went on to become an abolitionist. The publishing of his autobiography in 1789 turned out to have a major international impact. As Haiti revolted and France was in the throws of questioning what freedom meant, Equiano forced the world to look at cold facts. You can get this book from Amazon or via special order at any bookstore. If you’re in Boston, you can almost definitely find it on a shelf somewhere in Harvard Square.
2. Gary Younge’s recent analyses of the Barack Obama candidacy. I’ve thrown my cap in with Edwards, vaguely begrudgingly, but not really. Younge (whose book about retracing the steps of the 1960s Freedom Riders will be the subject of a later entry) is much more articulate and eloquent than me, so he can describe why I am completely unimpressed with Obama better than I can. There’s one in The Nation and a condensed version of that was published in Monday’s Guardian (UK).*
3. Watch the film Cool Hand Luke! A fantastic exploration of how cruel systems attempt to destroy a man’s spirit in order to gain control of his body and his will. What might be terrifying about watching this film is that what goes on, for the most part, is Slavery-Lite. These guys have it easy in comparison, and it’s still hard to watch.
*Okay, I can’t help myself. I have to quote one comment posted on the Guardian site in response to Younge’s comment. It is from a young Black woman who hails from North America. She’s apparently better at gathering her thoughts than I am, because when I sat down to write a comment, I meant to say much of the following but something less lengthy and less useful came out instead, I think. Anyway, here is part of what she had to say:
Let us not forget that while many Blacks are enthused with the strength of his campaign and the potentiality of him being a First, Obama also represents the elitist White institution having been raised in a white home, and attended the predominantly white institutions of Harvard and Columbia. I say this not to question or challenge his blackness, coming from the Black middle-class myself and having to defend my own Blackness because of where I live and my educational background. I point it out because to a single mother living in an inner-city marred by violence and having few opportunities to change her situation, a rich lawyer from Harvard, despite his race, has little in common with her. It’s a simple case of class beating out race (unfortunately); and let’s not forget that the white middle-class who support Obama, might have more in common with him as a consequence of class, than difference due to race.To end, let’s not get our hopes up about what Obama can do materially for race relations. To change the institutions of racism, take a movement not a man.
