Interesting People and Events at UAA

I had a meeting at UAA Wednesday and the walk over in the new snow was wonderful.

These palm bending tree trunks looked a lot more 

mysterious in a night picture not long ago.

And Nikki Giovanni will be speaking on campus January 21, 2009.  We'll be in Juneau by then so I'll miss this, but you've got a warning now to put this on your calendar.  And if you don't know who she is, go to the library and check out one of her books and start reading before she gets here.

Here's a sample (taken from ncat.edu)

Balances  

in life
one is always
balancing
like we juggle our mothers
against our fathers
or one teacher
against another
(only to balance our grade average)
3 grains of salt
to one ounce truth
our sweet black essence
or the funky honkies down the street
and lately I've begun wondering
if you re trying to tell me something
we used to talk all night
and do things alone together
and i've begun
(as a reaction to a feeling)
to balance
the pleasure of loneliness
against the pain
of loving you 

I also visited with Fannie, with whom I worked in the past.  She had a great picture up on the wall.  

Her niece, Nicole, from Napakiak, was Miss Indian World 2008-2009.




Fannie also had a picture of her nephew as her screen saver.  He's in Iraq and due back in April.   




While I was in the College of Business and Public Policy I had a chance to meet the Interim Associate Dean, Dr. Claudia Clark.  We chatted a bit and then it got interesting when I learned she was also a filmmaker.  An award winning filmmaker.  She won an award for best production last year for twelve 1 minute shorts on the International Polar Year Educational Outreach and is up for another award this year for her historical biography of Alaska's Bob Bartlett.  It's called Mr. Alaska: Bob Bartlett goes to Washington.  In the video she talks a bit about it.  

 



And at the film website, I couldn't help but steal this picture of Bob Bartlett.  Regular readers will surely know why I like it. 










I also learned that Freakonomics author Stephen Dubner will be in Anchorage at the end of January to talk at the Anchorage Economic Development Council (AEDC) and that he'll spend a day with UAA students. 

Lt. Gov. and I Agree on Body Scanners

I was pleased to see that the Lt. Gov. of Alaska and I are in complete agreement on body scans for most passengers as an approach to security at airports.  I suspect on most other issues we aren't nearly so closely aligned.  Craig Campbell presents the position much more clearly and persuasively than I did in the previous post.   Some quotes from his piece in today's Anchorage Daily News:

While serving as Alaska's commissioner of the Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, which oversees state Homeland Security, I questioned the use of full body scanners at airport security checkpoints. I quickly determined their use was an excessive and unnecessary invasion of personal privacy. . .

 Full body scanners create graphic images of our bodies that, as the ACLU pointed out, are "pictures of virtually naked bodies that reveal not only sexual organs but also intimate medical details such as colostomy bags and mastectomy scars." Full body scanners amount to a visual strip search by depicting a naked electronic image viewed by a federal agent.

We are told that the images will be immediately deleted from the system after the passenger exits security. Really, we already know that e-mails are not eliminated when deleted from computers and that these images can be reconstituted. . .

 We can achieve safety without infringing on personal liberties. Abdulmutallab's explosives would have been detected if existing security procedures, already in place, had been fully utilized. We don't need knee-jerk reactions that deprive Americans of yet another civil liberty in the name of security to ensure air travel is safe.

I hope the Anonynous commenter in the previous post reads this whole piece by a man who oversaw Homeland Security in Alaska. 

Creating Child Porn to Stop Terrorists?

At what point do we say, "Enough is enough"?   For some reason, we are willing to let 40,000 people a year die in traffic accidents in the US and others to die because they don't have adequate health insurance, but we're willing to give up more and more of our dignity every year to make sure no one dies from a terrorist attack on an airplane.

The terrorists don't have to take any planes down, they just have to think up new ways to mess with the security equipment and we all have to go through another hoop at the airport.  This new one is pretty invasive.

This picture comes from the Guardian which carried an article about the full body scanners in the UK, where they've been delayed because they would breach child pornography laws.  

Here are some excerpts from the story which you can get in full at the link.

The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned. . .

They also face demands from civil liberties groups for safeguards to ensure that images from the £80,000 scanners, including those of celebrities, do not end up on the internet. The Department for Transport confirmed that the "child porn" problem was among the "legal and operational issues" now under discussion in Whitehall after Gordon Brown's announcement on Sunday that he wanted to see their "gradual" introduction at British airports.

A 12-month trial at Manchester airport of scanners which reveal naked images of passengers including their genitalia and breast enlargements, only went ahead last month after under-18s were exempted. . .

And what sort of rays pass through our bodies?  Do we know they don't cause cancer or some other harm?  When I was a kid we had fluoroscope machines in the shoe stores so we could see our feet inside our shoes.  Until someone realized this was not healthy for kids.   Will this be the same?  Scan now, check on health dangers later? 

What if airline passengers were ready to turn around from security and say no?   Just flying less doesn't seem to work.  Can we figure out ways that get people to join in a mass boycott of airport security, ways that overcome all the pressures to just suck it up and let them do it to you - the cost of the ticket, the inconvenience of making huge changes in one's plans, the threat from the TSA for doing anything to question them, etc.   

It has to be planned so people can get their refunds (buying first class tickets maybe?), where enough people do it to get attention, where airlines are affected by the loss of already paid passenger revenue, and where people have the time to deal with the likely hassle.   It's time to force the powers that be to consider reasonableness as well as safety in designing security.

Maybe here in Alaska where privacy is protected by our State Constitution we can argue that TSA is forcing us to give up our State Constitutional rights to privacy if we want to exercise our Federal Constitutional rights to interstate travel. 

You know the frog in the pot of water story?  Well, bubbles are starting to appear as I write.

Mt View Forum - Interviews Patrick Flynn

The Mt. View Forum blog demonstrates today how blogs make important contributions to our local information sources.  His interview with Assemblyperson Patrick Flynn covers a number of important issues:  the budget, property taxes, public-private partnerships, land use planning, and utilities.  All, of course, in the context of Anchorage today.  It's definitely worth ten minutes of your time, if nothing else, get a sense of Flynn, to get an intelligent view of Municipal issues, and to see the Mt. View Forum blog. 

Tea Beats Swords - Red Cliff and The Tea Master

J wanted to see Red Cliff because she studies tai chi and there was supposed to be some good sword moves.  I was more skeptical.  I'd seen the previews and it looked like an artsy war flick that would require a trip to the blood bank afterward.  I was right.  A friend afterward said,  "but it had an anti war message."   I'm not sure saying "Today there are no victors" after almost two and a half hours (total 147 min) of blood, via arrows, lances, and a whole array of pointy weapons I couldn't name, plus lots of fire, typhoid victims floated into the enemy camp as a weapon, to name a few, qualifies it as an anti-war movie.  The desensitization to all those severed and burning body parts, the normalization of human destruction is a visual message far more powerful that those few words.  And the Red Cliff website touts this dubious reviewer comment:

"The spectacular battle scenes are the engorged heart of the delirious adventure..."

This sort of Chinese historical epic plays on several channels every night on Beijing television, so it's not particularly new for me, though the story is good and the film is well made. I just don't need to spend what time I have left in this world watching people killing each other.  And I just don't think this is an effective way to end warfare.

But there was one scene that reminded me of one of the films at the Anchorage International Film Festival that I particularly liked, but in the rush of movies, never got to mention - The Tea Master.  It was one of my favorites.  A short, well-made film with a great story. It turns out the filmmakers were able to concentrate on other aspects of the production because they already had a good story:

The Tea Master is Aaron Au’s rendition of a Japanese fable titled “The Samurai and the Tea Master”. The story has been told for hundreds of years and there are numerous versions.

The Tea Master's story is told at hubpages:

A humble chado, or tea ceremony master was challenged to a duel by an unscrupulous ronin who was confident of winning with ease. The chado knew he was no match for the master-less samurai but could not refuse without losing honour, so he prepared to die.

He therefore went to see his neighbour a Kenjutsu (sword) master, to ask how he should best prepare to die with honour. “ How honourable your intent neighbour” he says. “but before we talk of such things we must drink some tea together”

The chado set about the task of preparing the tea in his usual manner. He was clearly relishing this, probably the last, time he would be able to perform his life long art. As he became absorbed in the ceremony the sword master was greatly impressed by the serenity that this supposedly doomed man was demonstrating. (You can read the rest of the story at hubpages. Picture from The Tea Master web page.)

The tea ceremony is an important part of Japanese and Chinese culture and has a powerful effect on people who can appreciate its art.

In Red Cliff, a tea ceremony also plays an important role in distracting the power hungry prime minister/general Cao Cao just long enough for the wind and the war to change direction.  

Perhaps in the next fifty or 100 years,  enough research will be completed that we will better understand why some people have such a strong need to control others and to destroy those who get in their way.  My suspicions are that the secret lies partly in genetics but that genetic disposition doesn't need to show itself if children get the love and support they all need to become whole people.  I'm guessing that when the Rush Limbaugh story comes out on film, we will learn about an abused fat kid who spent his formative years fantasizing his revenge on all the hip people of the world who ridiculed him as a kid.  Too bad he didn't learn the tea ceremony.

Evidential Language

My son sent me this linguistic tidbit from Barking Up The Wrong Tree:

Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.

Since most of my posts are way too long, I'll just let you ponder the significance of this on your own. (Tuyuca is spoken, it says, in the eastern Amazon. Ethnologue says there are about 815 speakers in Columbia and Brazil.)

Share the Damn Link

Below is an email I got today asking me to trade links with another website. That was a key strategy offered for getting more hits when I first started blogging. But then it was more bloggers linking to each other. Technorati, one of the sites that tracks blogs and ranks them,
now says

Please note that links in blogrolls don’t count towards Authority, as they are not indicative of interest in relevant content; we stopped including blogroll links in August 2008.

On occasion I've mentioned ways sellers have attempted to advertise on this site.  Some leave comments - usually with a couple of generic compliments about the site first.  Then put in a link to an unrelated website.  Usually I just delete the comments unless they are relevant to the post.  For example, I deleted one that sold modern Italian furniture that was in a comment on a large Asian furniture complex that we visited in Thailand, but I left a link to dvd's that taught children Mandarin Chinese that was linked to a post where I had pictures of children writing Chinese characters.

Others offer to pay you if you write a positive post about their products.  They pay more if you don't mention that you're getting paid.  I'm sure a lot of bloggers must take them up on that, but I think that's pretty slimy.  People buy things that bloggers endorse because they think this is a genuine testimonial. And it hurts blogger credibility in general when people find out some bloggers are paid to do that.   It's an example of how the market contaminates honest dialogue. (I'm not against the market, I'm just for honest, sensible understanding of its benefits and costs.)

Dear owner of http://whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com,


I'm the webmaster of http://www.sharethedamnroad.com.


We came across your site on the Internet and feel that it would fit
perfectly into our collection of quality links at
http://www.sharethedamnroad.com/content/link-partners.

1. Here's the carrot as he works on my vanity by calling this a quality link.
2. It's about bikes, and this is a bicycle friendly blog.  But it's not like the two Alaska bike links I have on the right that talk about biking in general.  It's selling bike jerseys.
3. And it's a generic email.  He didn't even use my first name, which isn't hard to find.

We've already placed a link to your website along with a description at our site on the page, which we encourage you to check for accuracy. Once you place a link back to use, your link will be moved up to a more visable spot on the page.

3. And I get a link from them, and when I get back to them I get more visible shelf space.

We'd appreciate it if you place a link back to our site using the following HTML code (just copy and paste it into your links page): http://www.sharethedamnroad.com" title="Cycling Jeresys That Make A Statement">Road Cycling Jerseys Cycling Jeresys That Make A Statement On your page, the code will look like this: Road Cycling Jerseys Cycling Jeresys That Make A Statement If you'd like the description of your site modified, the category changed, or if you have any other cross-promotion ideas, feel free to email us. Please note that if you don't place a reciprocal link to us somewhere on your site within a week, the link to your site will automatically be removed from our directory. Please link to us using the code above, and let us know where we can find the link.

4. And now the stick - put something up or we're going to take your link down.

Best regards, Jonathan Ciaccio Cycling@ciaccioseo.com This is NOT SPAM -- this is a one-time reciprocal link request. We have NO INTENTION to email you again. You can also reply to this email with REMOVE in the subject line to make sure we'll NEVER send you any more e-mails in the future.

I'd guess the difference between this and spam is that these aren't computer generated messages to zillions of people.  At least I'm assuming that these went to bike related blogs.  Though biking is not the focus of this blog.

As these things go, this is fairly reasonable. It came as an email, not as a comment. That's good.  It's bike related and I like that too. I'm guessing someone saw the post I did with the Share (bike) sign. But I do think wearing "Share the Damn Road" on your back when you bike through traffic is more likely to get you in trouble (all you need to do is piss off one driver) than increase support for cyclists.

So I wrote back saying I'd probably put up a post. And so I have. Not to get a link on his site.  It gives me a chance to remind readers of the kinds of things people do to advertise in the blogging world.

Boycott blogs with non-transparent paid advertising testimonials - if you can figure out which ones they are.

Under 30 at Out North

We made it on time to Out North last night for Under 30. (Under 30 refers to the time (minutes) of the performance, not the age of the performers. It seems they now spell it Under :30 which I thought was a typo, but now see it's trying to clarify the meaning.) Last week we got to Santaland Diaries a few minutes late and it had already begun and was full, so we weren't allowed in, although we had purchased tickets in advance online. We were able to transfer our payment to this show. So we got there early enough this time to check ou the retrospective exhibit of the Under 30: Sweet Sixteen Archive Exhibit.



The exhibit has a wall length time line of the Under 30 programs from the beginning. And then there were these various props from different shows over the years. We've been to a fair number of them and they are always interesting, and usually there's at least one performer we know.

The last page of the program has a recruitment ad for next year's Under 30.

Many of the performances over the years have been done by people who don't normally do theatrical work.  It seems like as good a way as possible to work on and present something important to the world.  A lot of the work is still in the development stage.  This is the first public showing and gets important feedback for the next stage, if the person wants to go further with it.  Some manage to work well even at this stage. 

There's a more complete proposal description on their website.

The performances were introduced by Scott Turner Schofield who is a visiting performer who will be putting on Debutante Balls Jan. 14 -17. He seemed totally comfortable onstage and I'm sorry we're going to miss his show, but we leave for Juneau on the 11th.










Given that taking pictures in the middle of the show is often forbidden I'm filling in with these pictures from the exhibit.

All four performances last night kept my attention, though for me the third one - Jonathan Lang's "Radio" - worked most fully. It was a retrospective of radio in Alaska, starting from when Jonathan's family arrived in Alaska through his days on radio in Anchorage. The juxtaposition of taped 'radio' in the background, some props on stage, and probably the relatively uncomplicated content, made it the most complete and unified piece for me.



Van Le's "Letters to Ho Chi Minh" represented, perhaps, the most ambitious work, as she tried to articulate her family's experiences as refugees who survived smugglers, pirates, refugee camp in Malaysia on the way to the United States and the cross generational conflicts of children who want to know what happened and parents who want to forget. Some of the obstacles she still has to work out in the piece are technical ones - jumping back and forth between different time periods. Others are probably more emotional - I think more reenactment rather than telling of the stories would be more powerful. I got to meet Van Le when she was volunteering for the Anchorage International Film Festival and so it was particularly fun to be able to see how she put this together. The photo was taken after her performance, but before they moved things off the stage for the next performance.

Don Decker's piece  integrated video into the performance.  I liked a lot of the parts - particularly the extreme closeups of the lines in the videos.  And he had some audience members laughing almost non-stop.  I just didn't follow how all the pieces came together as one coherent statement.  But maybe that wasn't intended.

Mark Muro's monologue started shakey, then got into gear, and then seemed to veer into different directions.  Mark's done the Under 30 thing four times before according to the program and he could talk off the top of his head and it could be interesting and provocative.  And I've heard him do that more effectively than his piece last night - but then last night he had to carry it off for thirty minutes.  But Mark took the challenge and stood up and did his thing.

That's one reason people should go to the performance this afternoon at 3 or next weekend.  The challenge is out there for next year's Under 30.  This is something anyone could actually do.  The only thing different from those on stage and you and me is that they put in their proposals.  So, being in the audience is also a personal challenge.  What do you have to say and how could you say it so it would keep an audience's attention for 30 minutes?

November/December 2009 Google Searches

Once again I post some of the search terms people used and what they got to list some interesting search terms and to see how google works.


Bullseye

santa monica trapeze school - this was an image search that got to a post on the Santa Monica pier with a photo of the trapeze school.

rockin dentist - I actually have a post called 'Rockin Dentist'. I got scheduled once with another dentist in my dentist's office and it turned out he has a second amateur career as a rock guitarist.

how do you get prickly pears outta your skin - I had the answer to that at the bottom of a post on eating prickly pear. (Duct tape)

unfuck the world, the song -  This got to an audio clip of the song from Kathryn Blume's play Boycott when she performed it here in Anchorage.  But the most interesting part of this was that the computer seeking this came from the World Bank.  Does this mean they finally have defined the problem they're working on? 


black members of congress -  I take a certain amount of pleasure when someone at
the ISP "Information Systems, U.S. House of Representatives" comes to a blog in Alaska to get information about Congress.  


fruit flies fungus gnats difference - Got to  Tiny Black Bugs - Fruit Fly or Fungus Gnat?  The visitor, from Boston, probably had fruit flies, because the outclick was to the Oklahoma State University page on fruit flies, not the Colorado link on fungus gnats. 


pantalla en negro snow leopard - Ah, even in Spanish they get to  snow leopard black screen disease. 

Close


picture of seven mangoes -  This image search got a picture labeled "six mangoes in plastic."

famous people who was born in pansilvania that start with the letter c - First, I need to say this person was from Pennsylvania.  Google did manage to get him to the post on famous people born in 1909, and two - David Riesman and Joseph L. Mankiewicz - were born in Pennsylvania, but as you can see there was only one c between them and it wasn't at the beginning.


difference between a clique and a colloquialism - Never thought about a connection between those two words, but I can see how this Dutch searcher might have. Unfortuantely, I don't have anything on that and google sent him to Difference between a Cyclone and a Hurricane. (I probably jumped to the wrong conclusion on the nationality. It was from Holland, but Schiphol, which is the Amsterdam airport and the computer uses US English.)

a yellow egg with a tan spot. the moment you look away from it, it moves to another space - got to a picture of a yellow egg I did in photo shop in class last year..

Not even close.


2.employee bloggers sometimes use pseudonyms. under what conditions might the blogging service be forced to provide the real identity of the blogger? - This one got to a post that at least touches the issues here, The Right to Privacy, Bloggers and Privacy. This post discusses privacy in general and specifically the outing of Alaska's most read blogger at Mudflats. It doesn't quite get into the question sought though.

gender butterfly abdomen - When I stopped to think about it, it seemed to be about how to tell the gender of a butterfly.  If it was, it got a pretty picture of a white butterfly with brown markings in the foothills in Northern Thailand, but nothing on determining gender.  This one got me wondering. If you're interested, Clay shows how to identify a Monarch's gender when it's still a chrysalis.  Dragonfly power gives a more thorough explanation.  Scroll down to Part 1.

do flies know when they're full - Interesting query.  I'm not even sure where this one landed. I certainly didn't have the answer. 



do humans live in alaska -  This one came from a computer that is set for Arabic from Jordan.  So at least we can say some people in that part of the world are as ignorant of us as we are of them.  Google sent them to the post "To Live and Die in Wales Alaska"  He did get the answer, that yes we do. 

do hipsters go skiing -   I wrote about the movie Hipsters and I mention skiing now and then in my posts, but there's nothing that answers the question.  Google took them to a post on the Russian movie Hipsters that won the Anchorage International Film Festival Best Feature.

Missed the target even.

if you don't know when you were born how old are you -  This is a legitimate question. Got to famous people born in 1909.

how to get lover out of house  - got them to "cat lovers should check out this house" 

racket tailed drongo sound clip - There actually is video with a racket tailed drongo calling, but Google took this person to a post in the same month on Burma and bio fuels policy.  If the searcher had been persistent, he might have followed my search instructions in the upper right hand corner.  If he had searched for the word drongo on that page he would have found the link to the post with what he was after.  But the Sitemeter data suggests that he didn't get to it.  He was so close to exactly what he wanted, but Google should have put him on the right page. 

how much does it cost to get into amber in nature the mueseum in warsaw??tell me now!!! i need this for homework!!! - Despite the fact that my blog can't even come close to answering the question, What Do I Know came up first out of 1340 hits.  Why?  Because google uses robots, not people to find the hits.  They found a page with enough posts to match six of the words in his search command.  (It does sound like some bratty kid doesn't it?)  But there are no two words together even.  If mine was the number 1 hit, can you imagine how useless the others were?  And if there were some that got him to the museum in warsaw, why was mine number 1?  Does google think it's better to give lots of wrong answers than to say, "Sorry, we can't find anything useful"?  Here's the google link he found:

What Do I know?: July 2009

You can get the whole letter at the Warsaw Gazette.] ...... There's so much to tell...... I don't need to do my homework, the college guys like me just the way I am. ...... Seward Highway that is now a bike trail to Girdwood, I found this nature lesson - on cottonwoods. ...
whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html - Cached -

Google Sense of Humor

politicians laughing - This image search got to a picture of a white crested laughing thrush. Why not? Unfortunately, it wasn't even a good picture.

Renewing the Brain for 2010

It's time to pump up the brain and get moving on this second decade. It's not that I partied hard last night, but I'm still trying to get some other things done. We did connect on an apartment in downtown Juneau this week, so the ethics issue over staying with a friend is moot. I'm trying to get up this year's post on famous people born a hundred years ago, but my original source of such information has changed its format and a new source has way more names than I can handle. But I can tell you at least two seem to be still alive - a sports legend and an economist. Some everyone knows - like Mother Theresa and Jacques Cousteau - and some are obscure and I might not include. At least one of the obscure has affected so many lives I probably will include him - the inventor of instant noodle soup. There's lots of B actors I think I'll skip, though my mother might know them. More tomorrow. The bread is almost done then we're off to friends for dinner.