|
 Saturday, February 5, 2005
RENT, or STOMP, or CLOMP, or some piece of crap. A little off-topic, but this is a promotional photo from the off-Broadway show COOKIN’!
They’re all playing cooks. In the show, they’re cooking a big Korean dinner, rhythmically. (Contain your excitement. CONTAIN IT!) And they put the woman in a chef’s coat with the belly cut out. You know, where the burners are.
I can’t even begin to express how stupid that is. [Crooked Timber]
And, the men all have knives. She has salt and pepper mills. They are in sensible shoes. She is in spike heels. You've come a long way, baby! 4:13:08 PM 
|
|
Academic freedoms and Ward Churchill. Stephen Bainbridge steps in for the right, and says that basic principles of free speech and academic freedom mean that Ward Churchill shouldn’t lose his job. I think he’s right; but I also think that there is something to Timothy Burke’s argument that Churchill shouldn’t have been invited to speak at Hamilton in the first place (the two positions are of course not contradictory). Not because of his extreme opinions - but because he seems to be neither a good nor thoughtful academic. [Crooked Timber]
Now this is a much better way to approach the controversy. Tim BUrke's link uses non-vitriolic terms to push back against Churchill. For instance: Churchill, like others, constructs the hegemony of global capitalism and Western domination as being near-total. The unmitigated and simplistic totalizing that suffuses Churchill[base ']s writing makes it impossible to explain his own existence and professional success or anyone like him. He is incarnated impossibility of his own analysis. The only contradiction Western domination faces is produced, according to his oeuvre, by the dedicated and militant resistance of its subjects. But how is it possible that a totalizing system of domination permits such an uncompromising practicioner of resistance to publish over 11 books and occupy a tenured position at a university? (I know, I know: doubtless from a Churchillian perspective, the recent controversy is the system finally getting around to slapping him down. Quite a delayed reaction if so.) This is the sort of discussion that this should be prompting, not whetehr the man should get to keep his job. 4:10:16 PM
|
|
HIV vaccine trial breaks ground for future research. The results of the world's first phase 3 HIV vaccine efficacy trial are reported in the March 1 issue of the Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online. Although the vaccine was ineffective in preventing HIV infection, the trial represents a landmark in the fight against HIV and offers the scientific community a foundation on which to build future trials. [EurekAlert! - Infectious and Emerging Diseases]
Vaccines against HIV still remain difficult. 3:59:36 PM
|
|
Pain's new victims, pain's new vanquishers. Cory Doctorow:
Steve Silberman has turned in a fantastic long feature for Wired Magazine in which he describes the way that the advances in body armor (which doesn't cover legs or arms) has created a new cohort of disabled veterans with missing or badly disabled limbs. Concomittant with this is the rise of terrible, chronic pain, something that is being treated with new technology that blocks specific nerve-endings. This is a disturbing, fascinating piece.
The blocks used by Buckenmaier and his team are made possible by the recent invention of small, microprocessor-controlled pumps which bathe nerves in nonaddictive drugs that discourage the transmission of pain signals. The pumps also can be used for weeks after surgery, enabling soldiers to adjust the level of medication themselves as they need it.
For soldiers evacuated from the battlefield, the advantages of nerve blocks over traditional methods of pain control are clear. The wounded troops flying in and out of Landstuhl are often in misery or a narcotized stupor, while those treated with blocks remain awake and pain-free despite massive injuries.
This new war on pain is the brainchild of John Chiles, the Army's chief anesthesiologist. "Places like Duke were doing great things with peripheral nerve blocks, but they had fallen by the wayside in the Army," he says. "I wanted us to be on the cusp of these advances." The Walter Reed program is supported by grants from the Murtha Neuroscience and Pain Institute, founded by the US representative from Pennsylvania. John Murtha, who was wounded in combat in Vietnam, visits the troops once a week at Walter Reed.
Link [Boing Boing]
Unfortuntely, war often leads to new technological developments. Treating pain is an obvious one. 3:54:10 PM
|
|
iPod Stereoscope. David Pescovitz:
Paul Bourke's iPod-Photo Stereoscope is an exquisite retro tech/new media mash-up:
 For those wondering what "stereoscopic" is all about, viewing stereoscopic images give an enhanced depth perception. This is similar to the depth perception we get in real life, the same effect IMAX 3D and many computer games now provide. Stereoscopic viewing of any sort involves independent presentation of a different image, called a stereopair, to each eye. These stereopairs are essentially two different views of the world corresponding to the slightly different views our eyes see because they are separated horizontally....
Images can be downloaded to the IPOD-Photo, the images can subsequently be recalled and presented on the colour display. A series of images can also be presented manually or as a self running slide show with some user selected delay between each image. So to use this as a stereoscopic storage and presentation device one simply labels two IPOD-Photos as "left" and "right", the images corresponding to each eye are installed on the appropriate IPOD-Photo.
Link (via Leander Kahney's The Cult of Mac) [Boing Boing]
What a fun idea. The cheapest iPod Photo is $499. So for less than $1000 you can have an instrument that can display about 17,000 different sterograms. 3:52:09 PM
|
|
Bless Me, Ultima. Fang-Face writes "First Amendment Center has
an article about more than two dozen copies of Bless Me, Ultima being given to a parent to be destroyed. The books were given to the parent by the superintendent of schools in Norwood, Colorada. True to form, he denied that this unilateral action was censorship, commenting" "It's less a matter of censorship than a matter of sponsorship. That's not the kind of garbage I want to sponsor at this high school." Also true to form, he had not read the entire book." [LISNews.com]
And then the parents went out and burned the books. What sort of people really think that is a good way to deal with things like this? Very, very scared people whose fear allows others to control them. Private people burning books banned from schools. What a nice place to live? 3:34:01 PM
|
|
Legal Experts: Ward Churchill's Job is Safe. The Rocky Mountain News has extensive coverage of Ward Churchill today, including an article that quotes legal experts, including Churchill's veteran and prominent civil liberties attorney, David Lane, who explain why Churchill's job is not in danger. Unless, of course,... [TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime]
I certainly do not think anyone will change their mind about this but the reason we have academic freedom and free speech is so we can hear things we do not wish to. If this man's speech is offensive, deal with it by your own speech. Use rational arguments to show it is iincorrect (I know, a virtual impossibility in these days of hot-talk punditry, which uses speech with little rational thought behind it). If your only response is to get him fired, all you have demonstrated is you have more power than him, not that you are right. I wonder about people who thik so little of their own position on an issue that they respond by attempting to squelch other's exercise of free speech rather than by using the marketplace of ideas to overwhelm it. 3:31:36 PM
|
|
|
|
|
