Will Occupy Wall Street be able to keep up the pressure through the winter? Well, that depends on a lot of things, and not just the weather. Even if enthusiasm remains high, you’ve got mayors and police forces to deal with.
Among the innovative approaches OWS has taken, one in particular caught my fancy: bicycle-powered generators. I want one of them!
Steve Jobs died on October 4, and much is being said about him. There’s no doubt he was an interesting guy. Although I have never owned an Apple product, I don’t care to get into the hoary and endless Mac vs. PC debate, or offer a tedious analysis of what Apple once was compared to what it is now.
No, I’ll just drop a Steve Jobs quote and get on with it:
I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. Humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list … That didn’t look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a man on a bicycle blew the condor away. That’s what a computer is to me: the computer is the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
The image is from an online article about a carbon fiber–based bicycle that will be operated through brainwaves. It was not developed by Apple. But! But!
The biker will be able to shift the gears with the help of a neuron helmet. The special helmet is equipped with electrodes to detect brain activity to transmit signals to the gear shifter fixed under the seat. But initially the cyclist will have to train his ride to obey his mind. This guidance can be done through an iPhone application in which a cube remains in motion until the technology matches it with neurotransmission. [emphasis added]
Now will you bow down to your Cupertino overlords, WorldWideWeber? “Get on with it,” indeed.
There’s nothing like an execution—especially the execution of someone who is probably not guilty of the crime he was charged with—to give the lie to the claim that America is a “Christian nation.”
There’s no need to belabor the point. We don’t turn the other cheek; we don’t trust Samaritans, good or otherwise; we certainly don’t love our enemies, and we are fully capable of turning a blind eye to all manner of injustices committed in our name, across the ocean or right in our backyard.
Oh, we can be generous—when we can spare it. We do feel sorry for starving children in far-off places, and kitties that face euthenization. But when push comes to shove, we Americans shove—and then some.
When faced with a difficult decision, one that tries their moral core, some people are guided by a simple question, invoking the name of the sweet, forgiving, loving person they profess to adore and strive to imitate. But due to a diabolical twist of the tongue, an unconscious communal speech defect, it comes out this way: “What would Genghis do?”
It’s not that nothing interesting happened in August.
Maybe because it was unusually busy, or maybe because I’m becoming increasingly lazy, it will all go unrecorded for now—my faithful reader will have to wait.
Bits of August 2011 will undoubtedly get stuck in with other bits of experience and show up in this space eventually as a woven object of some sort.
For now, it’s all being held in reserve, maybe even fermenting without my knowing.
And, once again, a month will appear in the archive list with an embarrassed look on its face.
I have to admit, though, that as I watch the world through my own little eyes, more and more often I am simply speechless. And more and more I feel as if I’m drowning in other people’s words.
Random stuff from a recent brief visit to New York City …
There seemed to be more bicycles on the streets than in years past. Two things set them apart from the DC variety: many seats are covered with plastic bags, and most of the bikes sport kick-ass locks and chains.
A doorway on West 17th—maybe you can make out the boobs for eyes. (Unfortunately, the rise of smart phones has led to a resurgence of poor-quality photography. Since I was lugging all my belongings around Manhattan in a backpack for two days, I decided to leave my real cameras at home. I suppose the phone camera is better than nothing …)
Some kind of bird in the pond at the south end of Central Park—a crane? (Yes, there’s a bird somewhere in there.) I was just a little surprised to see it in the middle of the city.
Also in Central Park: a nice rock resting on one of the many outcroppings. The temperature was in the nineties, so the breakdown of people moving and people reclining/sitting in the shade was about 50-50. I spent half my time doing each.
Despite the heat, you were rarely out of earshot of music being played on various instruments. I have no idea what this one is called—it had a single string attached to a board at one end and a flexible stick at the other. It was amplified, and the player changed the pitch and vibrato by manipulating the stick. (He was also accompanied by canned music.)
Addendum 2011.07.22: Forgot to mention our visit to the Society of Illustrators on East 63rd, which had a show devoted to the cover art of pulp fiction from the ’30s–’50s. Also had a great buffet lunch in the Society’s dining room, courtesy of cousin Nishan, who is a member.
A day in the life of Russia, 14 July 2011, courtesy of headlines in the Argumenty i fakty phone app. Some of the stories seem to have disappeared, so I can’t provide links.
I’ve watched with some fascination the arrival of bike sharing in the Washington, DC, area—and its continued growth. I now pass a half-dozen Capital Bikeshare racks on my daily commute, and on many days—especially sunny days—they’re either empty or almost so.
The other day, I pulled up alongside a guy in a suit on a Bikeshare bike on Key Bridge and asked him something I could easily have researched online but hadn’t: did he have to return the bike where he got it? No, he did not. I was mildly surprised (and wished I could do the same with a Zipcar), but it obviously makes the system more attractive and worth the extra effort it takes to get bikes to where they’re needed.
Plans were recently announced to expand the program to Montgomery County. What took them so long?
Will bike sharing ever be as popular in the US as it is in Hangzhou, China? This city of seven million has 50,000 public bikes, available at 2,050 bike stations. Capital Bikeshare currently has a mere 1,100 bikes at 110 stations. London has 5,500 bikes. New York City is still trying to get their program off the ground.
The Financial Times recently ran a great story about bike sharing in London, which is enormously popular. One passage in particular resonated with me. The reporter decided to shadow a few riders to get a sense of how the system works:
A man in a suit with silver hair and a pink shirt was getting into the saddle, and I asked if he would mind if I could follow him. Tom Stafford, an independent financial adviser fresh in from Guildford, said that was fine. He was going to his office near Baker Street. The journey would take about 20 minutes.
Stafford, who said he uses the bikes every day unless it is actually raining—even on wet days, the bikes are used 12,000 times—rode fast. Cutting round the back of Covent Garden, he went smartly over a zebra crossing just as a woman with brown hair was stepping out. “It’s a pedestrian crossing, you idiot,” she said. Stafford plunged on. Neither of us mentioned it until a few minutes later, when Stafford confided that people on foot are the biggest danger to cyclists in London. “They’ve got their iPods in and they’re not looking,” he said. “If she decides she wants to step out … Well. I don’t want to stop when I’ve got some momentum.”
Pedestrians! [Rant redacted. If you like reading rants, click here and say the magic word.]
Mr. Stafford was probably in the wrong. He has no right to barrel into, or buzz, someone in a crosswalk. Yes, it would have been nice if the woman had understood that it’s much easier for her to stop and start than it is for a cyclist. The energy expenditures just aren’t comparable. A bicyclist naturally want to keep rolling; a bicycle is not designed for stop-and-start traffic. Unfortunately, unless you’re a cyclist, you won’t understand that—such thinking would be totally alien to you. And it’s probably silly for bicyclists to expect any random person on the street to understand it.
The bottom line is: Mr. Stafford had an opportunity to be chivalrous (if not merely law-abiding) and he passed it up. That’s a counterexample I will try ever to keep in mind. (Until the glorious day arrives when the law says everyone must always yield to bikes, hurrah!)
I must’ve felt something rustling around on my head. Or maybe I always run my hand through my hair when I take my helmet off after biking. In any case, today I discovered a freeloader:
It was escorted out of the house on a flyer from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, featuring violinist Karen Gomyo. Got in her hair as well, looks like.
Here’s a close-up of the little bugger:
Anybody know what it is?
I figure I picked it up while peddling through the woods on the Capital Crescent Trail—lots of insects in the air in certain stretches. (Peddle with your mouth closed—that’s my advice.)
I had to memorize this in high school:
(though not in this format).
Now that Barack Obama has released a copy of his long-form birth certificate (the supposed Holy Grail of birtherism), the predictable reponses are already airborne: “Is it real?” (launched by The Donald), “What about his school records?” (ditto), and “What took him so long?” (courtesy of The Newt).
Since the first two questions are incredibly stupid and the third is only remarkably stupid, I’ll take a stab at answering the third.
First of all, it never needed to be released. The State of Hawaii’s short-form birth certificate is recognized as valid by the federal government and all other states in the union. It’s the real deal, and no other evidence should be required by any sane person. From this angle, there was no “delay,” because there was never any reason to do it. (Come to think of it, there was no compelling reason to produce the short-form birth certificate, an unprecedented act of presidential deference to noisy persons who are either unhinged haters or cynical operators.)
But I like to think of it this way. Obama, who professed to being “puzzled” by the whole manufactured controversy (think of it as his Whitewater “scandal”), at first expected it to just go away. But as time passed, I suspect he decided the let the boil on the nation’s backside get as big as possible before he popped it, so as to spray the greatest amount of juice on the greatest number of people. Unfortunately, most of the folks getting doused just think it’s raining. You can’t win an argument with people who think they’re brilliant and doubt any and every piece of evidence that undercuts their belief. The belief comes first, last, and always. That’s what makes them brilliant: their brilliant beliefs. Evidence is for dopes like Obama and me.
Of course, the birther pseudocontroversy is a proxy for aspects of Obama that some Americans don’t like but can’t say in public—for instance, his race (or mixed-race, which may be more troubling to some); or would make them look intolerant—“He’s a Muslim,” “He spent too much time in strange, scary countries while he was growing up,” etc. These are actually facts, so we can’t say birthers ignore facts. It’s just the facts they detest are things most Americans have learned to accept (or even embrace), and so they need to be a bit roundabout in attacking the man. Hence the apparent obsession with a dumb technicality—it’s not about birth certificates at all. Obama has to know this, realizing that each time he responds to them he helps keep the stupid issue alive.
Obama says birtherism is “silliness” distracting us from the real issues that the government should be focusing on, real problems that need to be solved. On the surface, it is. It’s a silly whopper. But some silly whoppers run deep, and this is one of them. Ronald Reagan told tons of silly whoppers. It got him two destructive terms in the White House and a golden legacy that still astonishes me.
This headline from 2009 is just the closing touch I needed:
Afterbirthers Demand To See Obama’s Placenta
On second thought, this one is better, and much fresher:
Trump Unable To Produce Certificate
Proving He’s Not A Festering Pile Of Shit
Addendum 2011.04.28: A quick roundup of the birthers who still don’t believe, with a great quote from Jonathan Swift: “You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.” (That may be a paraphrase—Wikiquote has it thus: “… reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired …”)
