"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures — in this century as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing people together."
Eva Cassidy was born in Maryland in 1963 and worked the Washington, D.C. club circuit in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Her takes on classics like “People Get Ready” (above) and “Fields of Gold” blew away audiences and put her on the local map, and her one-of-a-kind voice led to work with Chuck Brown and others.
She faced several musical disappointments in her too-short career — most notably the bankruptcy of Apollo Records just as a record contract seemed on the horizon — and she died of melanoma in 1996. In 2000, a British DJ stumbled across two of her tracks and played them on BBC radio, to huge response from his audience. Since then, her songs have held Top 10 spots in Australia, Germany, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland, along with three #1 tracks in the U.K., and her take on “Over the Rainbow” became her signature across Europe and elsewhere. Of the 11 records she contributed to, 9 were released after her death.
And for some reason I can’t wrap my head around, hardly anyone I know has ever heard of her.
Unless you haven’t turned on a television lately, you know that ten days ago the Israeli army launched a full-scale attack on Hamas forces in Gaza, with the stated aim of halting the barrage of homemade rockets that have been launched into Israeli towns since 2000. As I write this, the fight has left more than 530 Palestinians dead and nearly 2,750 wounded, along with two deaths and 12 injuries on the Israeli side.
As for the rockets that apparently motivated the invasion, a staggering 4,000 of them have been fired into Israeli towns since 2000, and the BBC reports that as of Jan. 2008 they had killed 13 Israelis in total. Wikipedia says two more were killed last year, and if that number seems low given the huge number of launches, it’s because Hamas’s rockets are unguided, extremely inaccurate, and generally handmade with salvaged scrap metal, sugar and fertilizer.
A few of you have asked me to weigh in on the morality of this war, but I’m not going to do that — at least not here. I like to think that people visit this site to find information they might not have found elsewhere and then make up their own minds, rather than coming here to be preached to about what’s right and what’s wrong. I’m not any better equipped to determine what’s right than you are. That said, there’s one point that I just have to bring up.
The first casualty of war
We like to think that in democracies at least, the press is free to critique and condemn, to unearth corruption and expose the unjust. To a large extent, this ideal has been achieved — in reasonably free countries, naughty leaders are routinely takentotask by fierce media scrutiny, and reporters have repeatedly brought the horrors and abuses of war into our living rooms — from Vietnam to Kosovo, from Rwanda to Iraq. They also help prevent atrocities, as the promise of worldwide headlines is sometimes enough to deter armies from massacring innocents. It’s a thankless and dangerous job, and though the media’s track record certainly isn’t perfect — they’ve missed or ignored some truly colossal human rights abuses — most of us can agree that the truth is a heck of a lot more likely to come out with a free press than without one.
But when Hiram Johnson famously declared that “the first casualty when war comes is truth,” he knew what he was talking about. Governments have always fought hard to prevent reporters from shedding light on the dark endeavours of war, and Israel in this case is no different. Since November, Israeli troops have prevented international reporters from entering the Gaza Strip, initially claiming that it was too dangerous, then saying that there was simply no time to process reporters’ papers because the border guards were so busy handling all the Palestinians trying to get out of Gaza.
On New Year’s Eve, Israel’s own Supreme Court ruled that the army must allow journalists into the war zone, but even this ruling continues to be ignored, with Israeli officials insisting that lifting the press ban is just “a question of working out the logistics,” whatever that means. Though eight hand-picked reporters have since been allowed in, the world is still getting nearly all its Gaza War reporting from a handful of poorly equipped, semi-professional Palestinian reporters who can’t pretend to be neutral as they see their neighbourhoods destroyed. In their shoes, I sure wouldn’t be.
As for the real reason behind the press ban, it seems to me that the Jerusalem Post says it best:
Banned from Gaza, the foreign press has been reporting on the assault on Hamas from the Gaza-Israel border, and using Palestinian reports and video from inside the territory.
In the past, Israeli officials have voiced displeasure over the international media’s coverage of events in Gaza, saying it inflates Palestinian suffering while not always making clear that Israeli military actions were in response to Palestinian attacks.
[…] “The foreign press must not be allowed to open a PR office for terrorism and terrorists,” [Shas leader Eli] Yishai said in a statement, adding that the recent petition to the High Court on the issue had been filed “in the name of phony principles to promote a terror organization.”
Whether the war is justified or not, equating the entire international media with “a PR office for terrorism” is ridiculous at best. The world’s news agencies cover the entire spectrum, from violently pro-Palestinian stances to violently pro-Israeli ones, and with the vast majority somewhere in between. Besides, it’s hard to see how fairness and neutrality in the news can be achieved by leaving all the reporting to Palestinians whose houses are on fire and whose relatives are being bombed.
Israel’s government has repeatedly told Palestinians to address their grievances within the confines of the rule of law, and obeying its own courts would increase its credibility in this department. Israel’s army says too that it’s taking extraordinary measures to minimize civilian casualties — this should be praised if it’s true and condemned if it isn’t. Either way, we can’t confirm or discredit this claim without reporters on the ground, and the world ought to know the truth. While it’s true that a good chunk of the reporting on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict hasn’t been fair to one side or the other, this refusal to even let the story be told is unfair in the extreme.
Stuffed with turkey, pie, and all sorts of yummy holiday foodstuffs, I’ve been a little delinquent with my posting lately. Some good friends are in from overseas, so I haven’t had much time to write, and I likely won’t be posting regularly until next week, when I finally collapse in a festive heap of post-Christmas bloatedness. To tide you over until then, here’s one I’ve been meaning to post for a while now.
Until he died in 2007, France’s Michel Lotito had eaten two pounds of metal every day for more than 40 years, and he still holds the Guinness record for the world’s “strangest diet.” To cement his title, he dismantled a 1,111-pound Cessna 150 airplane and ate it — piece by piece — over two years.
Apparently though, bananas and hard-boiled eggs made him sick to his stomach.
His diet since 1966 included 18 bicycles, 15 supermarket trolleys, seven TV sets, six chandeliers, two beds, a pair of skis, a low-calorie Cessna light aircraft and a computer. He is said to have provided the only example in history of a coffin (handles and all) ending up inside a man. By October 1997, he had eaten nearly nine tons of metal
According to the truly strange people over at Wrongtown — apparently quoting a CNN article that no longer exists — he nearly died after being attacked and stabbed in 1981. “He underwent major surgery and recovered surprisingly quickly,” they report. “Three weeks later he ate a robot.”
If you like, you can watch Lotito eat a wine glass, a light bulb and a bicycle here.
Researchers at McGill University in Montreal are hoping that mutant roundworms will help the West win its epic struggle with obesity. Led by researchers Patrick Narbonne and Richard Roy, the team discovered a genetic mutation that makes some C. elegans worms burn off fat extremely quickly, and are hoping to apply their new knowledge to help obese people lose weight.
“These mutants somehow cannot shut down the process of cell division, which is why we noticed them in the first place,” Roy said. […] “They store up their six-month lipid reserves, but as soon as they shift into dauer they use them up within a few days.
[…] “I think we should start looking at the enzymes involved in this cascade, particularly in obese individuals. They are likewise accumulating lipids, but in a reverse situation to C. elegans — this enzyme isn’t recognizing it, or something is blocking its function. We’re making the case that we can uncouple this enzyme from its normal regulation. If we could develop drugs to do that selectively in fatty tissue, we’d be able to chew up all the fat.”
Of course, it can’t be healthy to burn six months worth of fat in just a few days — and it certainly isn’t healthy for the worms, which don’t tend to survive the process. The best way to lose weight is still a sensible combination of diet and exercise, but if it can be made safe, a drug developed from the worms’ enzymes might offer hope to people whose genetic makeups don’t let them burn fat fast enough, no matter how much exercise they get. And with 34% of American adults obese, researchers are looking for whatever fat-fighting tools they can get their hands on.
By the way, have you ever wondered what exactly constitutes obesity, as opposed to plain old overweightness? As a general rule, people — unless they’re bodybuilders or pregnant — are considered obese if they have a Body Mass Index (BMI) above 30, which can be calculated with the following formula:
(Weight in pounds) * [ 703 / (height in inches)2 ]
So, if you’re six feet tall and weigh 170 pounds, your BMI is:
According to new data from a U.S. military satellite, the ionosphere — the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space — is lower than it used to be, meaning the sky is quite literally falling.
The Air Force’s “Communications and Navigation Outage Forecasting System” satellite — C/NOFS for short — uses nifty-sounding instruments like an ion velocity meter and a planar Langmuir probe to measure activity in the ionosphere, which can interfere with radar and satellite transmissions. Since its launch in April,
One of C/NOFS’s first discoveries has been simply to identify where precisely in the sky the ionosphere is right now; and it is a lot lower than expected.
During the night it has been detected at about 420km, rising to 800km during the day. Scientists here at the American Geophysical Union meeting said more typical values would be 640km during night-time and about 960km during the day.
A little while ago, I got an e-mail from Meg White, a graduate student at Columbia College Chicago who’s working on an article about India’s space program. She had stumbled across my post on the Chandarayaan lunar missions, and wanted to bounce a few questions off a non-scholarly blogger type.
Because I though that was so damn cool — and because I thought I made my point a little better via e-mail than in the original post — here’s the text of the interview, with Meg’s permission:
Meg White: Your blog entry about the space program seems critical of the lack of humanitarian involvement by the Indian government. I’m wondering if this was a reaction to a particular event, or something you observed in India. Is there a story you can share that brought you to this conclusion? (Also, when exactly were you in India?)
Flickering Pictures:I wouldn’t say it was a reaction to a particular event, though my five weeks there over the summer of 2007 was a real slap in the head for an over-consuming middle-class Westerner like me.
But if I had to pick one flick-of-the-lightswitch event, it might be my stopover at Mumbai airport on a many-legged trip from Dharamsala to Manipal, when I was sitting in a gorgeous newly renovated glass-and-steel terminal and picked up a copy of the Mumbai Mirror – a hobnobby sort of newspaper with a wealthy target audience. The lead story was on leptospirosis – a disease that comes from drinking water contaminated with human and animal urine – which was killing people in the streets during the monsoon. Buried near the back of the paper was an opinion piece on a debate about whether or not to bulldoze a slum and forcibly relocate its residents outside of town. Those in favour of demolition had enlisted movie stars and other celebrities to lobby the city, and insisted that Mumbai would be a cleaner, safer, less disease-prone place if the poor were tossed outside the city limits. Those against argued that the cost would be prohibitive, and that the people who lived there would just end up elsewhere in the city. No one brought up the ethical question of whether it’s okay to wreck thousands of homes just because they happen to be made of corrugated iron and plastic sheeting.
That moral blind spot is reflected in the government’s priority-setting – in its push to join the community of developed nations, it’s simply focusing on the developed bits and hoping the rest will go away. And the fact is there are hundreds of millions of near-destitute Indians who will not go away, and who need government-funded education, health care and social services a lot more than they need lunar rovers.
MW: You mentioned many problems in India. Is there one or two that you think could be a silver bullet that would help solve other problems? What do you see as the biggest problem in India?
FP:No question, the silver bullet – as it has been in South Korea and other recently developed countries – is a combination of good education and hard work. The work ethic is already in place, but right now too many people are using it to diligently scour garbage dumps for salvageable trash, because they have no education and no better alternatives. To my mind, educating landfill-scourers’ children and keeping them healthy enough to surpass their parents’ income levels is far more important than investing in space programs intended to bolster the prestige of India and its technocrat classes.
MW: Some of my sources seem to think the space program will help build educational opportunities in India, but I was struck by the high illiteracy rate, etc. Do you think space exploration educational programs are a leap that young Indians could make?
FP: It makes sense that the space program would create educational opportunities for budding young researchers. But if you’re a budding young researcher in Bangalore, there’s an excellent chance that your father was too. If, on the other hand, your father cut lawns with a machete in tourist areas, or drove a bicycle rickshaw through the dirt roads of Varanasi, the odds are that you’re not faring much better. The idea that investment in space exploration will usher in a new age of opportunity for a significant chunk of Indian children is a lot like the economic trickle-down effect that we still haven’t seen much of in the West – most of the benefits go to the top of the food chain, with some upward mobility for the middle and an occasional table scrap tossed toward the bottom of the pile.
If you want to effect change in India and bring upward mobility to the millions of destitute people there, you start by giving them what they need in order to live, then giving them what they need in order to learn. Affordable food, shelter and medicine meet those criteria – rockets don’t. While the small emerging middle class is encouraging, it’s a drop in the bucket among India’s 1,200,000,000 people, and the lower-class masses are long tired of walking past billboards hawking dishwashers and luxury cars that in their wildest dreams their grandchildren will never be able to afford. How do you think they feel when they hear about an 8-billion-rupee plan to put a robot on the moon?
Germany’s world-renowned Max Planck Institutes, whose science and technology researchers are among the world’s finest, accidentally printed an ad for a Chinese brothel on the cover of its latest journal.
There were red faces on the editorial board of one of Germany’s top scientific institutions, the Max Planck Institute, after it ran the text of a handbill for a Macau strip club on the front page of its latest journal. Editors had hoped to find an elegant Chinese poem to grace the cover of a special issue, focusing on China, of the MaxPlanckForschung journal, but instead of poetry they ran a text effectively proclaiming “Hot Housewives in action!” on the front of the third-quarter edition. Their “enchanting and coquettish performance” was highly recommended.
The use of traditional Chinese characters and references to “the northern mainland” seem to indicate the text comes from Hong Kong or Macau, and it promises burlesque acts by pretty-as-jade housewives with hot bodies for the daytime visitor.
Following the post on impromptu jam sessions in the backs of London’s black cabs, here’s a much, much better version of Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love,” for those of you who love his music as much as I do.
Cracked.com features eight of the most pathetic exercises in futility in Guinness history.
Featured record attempts include a mass fire-walking event, a fellow who attempted to break the sound barrier by free-falling from 34 kilometres up, and something called “smurfing.”
Yesterday’s Boston Globe featured an unbelievable collection of photos of the ongoing anarchy in Athens. Nearly any one of these shots, if you took them, would be the best photo you’d ever take.
The riots were sparked by the police shooting of Alexis Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old boy who was allegedly with other youths who threw firebombs at police.
