Author: foxtongue

I have a job interview there tomorrow

“It is only from one of the higher towers, the myriad smaller buildings laid out below and higher ones gleaming in the distance, that the City’s infinitude truly becomes intuitively and not merely intellectually apparent.”

Mastering new things generally comes easily to me, yet contact lenses are presenting a strange new kind of learning curve. Despite several months of switching them back and forth with my glasses, (a task that abruptly went from herculean to simple when I learned how to peel them off the skin of my eye with a fingernail), I remain severely discomfited by the visual change, how everything warps, the way my brain readjusts its input parameters to redefine normal.

When I first tried them, the doctor put them in for me then told me not to stand up right away. I didn’t mind waiting at first, but eventually even the marvel of peripheral vision became boring in the broom closet back office, so I stood up and tried to step to the door, thinking I was ready. Wrong. As I crashed immediately to the ground, shattering every pretense of sophistication and grown-up-ed-ness, I could hear him shout from the other room, “I told you so!”.

very bruce sterling

Wave Glider Self Propelled Robots Have Begun a Historic Swim Across the Pacific:

“Yesterday, four Wave Gliders—self propelled robots, each about the size of a dolphin—left San Francisco for a 60,000 kilometer journey. Built by Liquid Robotics, the robots will travel together to Hawaii, then split into pairs, one pair heading to Japan, the other to Australia. Waves will power their propulsion systems and the sun will power the sensors that will be measuring things like water salinity, temperature, clarity, and oxygen content; collecting weather data, and gathering information on wave features and currents. It’s not going to be an easy journey—the little robots will face rough weather and have to dodge big ships. […]

The data from the fleet of robots is being streamed via the Iridium satellite network and made freely available—in an accessible form on Google Earth’s Ocean Showcase, and in a more complete form to researchers who register. Liquid Robotics is eager to see what the scientific community does with all the data—so eager, that it’s asking for project abstracts, and will give a prize to the top five proposals—six months use of a Wave Glider optimized to collect whatever information the winner needs.”

Occupy: Pregnant Seattle protester miscarries after being kicked, pepper sprayed

The news just went from ugly to horrific:

“When Fox arrived at the hospital, doctors told her that the baby had no heartbeat.

“They diagnosed that I was having a miscarriage. They said the damage was from the kick and that the pepper spray got to it [the fetus], too,” she said.

“I was worried about it [when I joined the protests], but I didn’t know it would be this bad. I didn’t know that a cop would murder a baby that’s not born yet… I am trying to get lawyers.”

The Scoville heat chart indicates that U.S. grade pepper spray is ten times more painful than the blistering hot habanero pepper, according to Scientific American. While law enforcement officials regulary claim that the spray is safe, researchers at the University of North Carolina and Duke University found that it could “produce adverse cardiac, respiratory, and neurologic effects, including arrhythmias and sudden death.”

Here’s a photo of Jennifer being hustled to an ambulance after being sprayed. This is from the same event that pepper sprayed Dorli Rainey, the now iconic senior citizen.

EDIT: It is possible the miscarriage report has been fabricated, but this has yet to be verified.

a lot of cliches, but still awesomely impressive

ROSA from Jesús Orellana.

Via Wired, “Bunkered for months in his Barcelona basement, equipped only with computers and a vivid imagination, DIY filmmaker Jesús Orellana emerged after a year of solitary labor to deliver 2011’s most dazzling sci-fi short. […] The lush setting brings to mind Avatar’s Pandora, but instead of spending several million bucks on visual effects, 29-year-old comic book artist Orellana made the entire film for a grand total of $99.”

it hits me

Christina's World, (1948), by Andrew Wyeth

When I say that I miss you, I mean that I saved the flowers from the wedding that were worn in my hair, dried, delicate, fragile things that they are, so that some day I might give them to you. When I say that I think of you, I mean that your absence fills a hollow the size of the sky, that it took me six months before I could say your name, that your ghost is my shadow and that my shadow is your ghost, senseless, perpetual. I lean into it like the wind, like a sunrise dismantled, diffused throughout the air. I have not yet been anywhere that I did not wish you there too, have not seen anything beautiful I did not wish to share. You were my first photograph of the year, wrapped in a towel, frowning at breakfast as if trying to fathom the secrets of the universe. It shows every time I sit down to work, a burning reminder of your affection, once the essential electricity that let my heart beat, and the words you spoke at midnight, the words that carved into me as deep as the marrow of my bones.

The painting in the picture above is Christine’s World, by Andrew Wyeth. I like it so much that a postcard facsimile of the image was the only thing I brought home from MOMA, where it is a part of their permanent collection. The woman in the painting is Christina Olson, who suffered from polio.

hypocrisy as a police action

A comment by el_gallo on BoingBoing.com – Occupy Oakland: Riot police use tear gas, other nonlethal weapons on protestors:

My part of Oakland is full of poor people. There’s at least one murder a week. Old creeps pimp out teenaged girls in broad daylight. You can buy crack or heroin 30 feet from my door, and two of my neighbors have been held up at gun point this summer. And the City of Oakland says they don’t have the police to stop any of that. But a bunch of people protesting the fact that rich people got a bail out and everyone else got nothing? The city shuts them down tight. Bang. Done. Riot act. Do you ever get the feeling you’ve bean cheated? I do. Every day.

Report: NYPD cop pushes New York Supreme Court Judge into wall

Democracy Now quotes New York Supreme Court Judge Karen Smith:

I was there to take down the names of people who were arrested… As I’m standing there, some African-American woman goes up to a police officer and says, ‘I need to get in. My daughter’s there. I want to know if she’s OK.’ And he said, ‘Move on, lady.’ And they kept pushing with their sticks, pushing back. And she was crying. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he throws her to the ground and starts hitting her in the head,” says Smith. “I walk over, and I say, ‘Look, cuff her if she’s done something, but you don’t need to do that.’ And he said, ‘Lady, do you want to get arrested?’ And I said, ‘Do you see my hat? I’m here as a legal observer.’ He said, ‘You want to get arrested?’ And he pushed me up against the wall.

via bOINGbOING.

(He promised weeks ago that he would write a reply.)

Today’s best telescopes could see the amount of light produced by Tokyo from as far away as the Kuiper Belt.

I put the idea down, feeling like a fool as I walked down the path, dismissed from the large green house, and stepped under the arch of the overgrown hedge, a thick, living wall as solid as any made of stone. From the street, the house is hidden by its branches, as invisible as the steady burst of static that clouds my brain every time I approach it or even pass it, as I usually do, a solid block away. Something deep in my chest thudded as I walked under its shadow, wounded, let down by my own betrayal, that I had even approached that door. Why do I do these things? Why do I try? I was an echo of the spring, drained of everything worthwhile, too tired with myelf to even be angry. All that was left was to walk away.

Seattle was nice to visit. I rearranged all the furniture in Aleks’ apartment while he was at work and made a bed out of pillows in front of the fire. I enjoyed the concert, then the after concert concert, and two different movies, all of them good in distinct and lovely ways. I introduced friends to friends, met new friends of friends, spent some time chatting with Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaimen, who were gracious and sweet, had a cup of drinking chocolate while I wandered Pike Place Market, and Tony bought me a steak. It was like a teeny, tiny vacation. I no longer have any comforting intimacy there, nothing deep, it’s not my home, I still couldn’t sleep, but it was enough to feel okay on the surface, just to navigate a handful of days without any struggle.