It just so happens that I have a friend in the coffee and tea business. Better yet, they do fair trade, organic coffee and tea. Plus, I've got a can of their coffee beans sitting on my desk that I get to sniff at regular intervals. Yum!
Don't you wish you were me? Well, you can be! Check out Taylor Maid Farms
Either that, or we can check out their store in Sebastopol someday . . .
[Ed note: Scripps alums among us might note the use of a La Semeuse-type figure for their logo.]
My brother Carl sent me the URL of Theocracy Watch. I guess being informed is our best defense... Still it makes me feel pretty scared in a tummy-twisting kind of way.
The folks over at the Mars Homestead Project are collecting recipes to compile a Mars cookbook. Know any good ones? I'm not sure how one would test low-pressure and low-gravity baking on Earth, but there are probably some creative ways to get around that. 3-Bean Spirit Chili, anyone?
New Scientist has a beautiful interview with Benoit Mandelbrot, who discovered the Mandelbrot set and brought fractals to the masses. It's refreshing to see someone with such history and brilliance at the same time. Mandelbrot is 80 years old, yet he's still pursuing revolutionary branches of mathematics.
[I am] A mathematical scientist. It's the official name of my chair at Yale and it was chosen with care. It is deliberately ambiguous. In a different era, I would have called myself a natural philosopher. All my life, I have enjoyed the reputation of being someone who disrupted prevailing ideas. Now that I'm in my 80th year, I can play on my age and provoke people even more.
I have a personal fondness for Mandelbrot because the idea behind fractals -- complex forms emerging from a simple function recursively applied and geometrically expressed -- provides a compelling reason why it's possible for us to understand the workings of a complex Universe at all. It doesn't have to be just randomness out there. We can discern patterns that may turn out to be simple and elegant, even when they are capable of infinite variety.
The Columbia Journalism Review has a thought-provoking article on media coverage of science, specifically the role of "balance" in determining the journalistic merit of a science article. This has been on my mind lately, since public perception of scientific topics like climate change, medicine, and evolution is so crucial to making sound decisions.
Hey kids, I'm not sure I'm up to this idea of embracing the red states. I'm usually all for that kind of thing, but it gets difficult when they don't want to be friendly. (Josh Marshall explains my reluctance more eloquently than I could.) A case in point is this recent explosion of fascist vitriol masquerading as a "modest proposal" for mainstream America:
As a class, liberals no longer are merely the vigorous opponents of the Right; they are spiteful enemies of civilization's core decency and traditions...
When they tire of showering conservative victims with ideological mud, liberals promote the only other subjects with which they feel conversationally comfortable: Obscenity and sexual perversion. It's as if the genes of liberals have rendered them immune to all forms of filth.
As a final insult, liberal lawyers and judges have become locusts of the Left, conspiring to destroy democracy itself by excreting statutes and courtroom tactics that fertilize electoral fraud and sprout fields of vandals who will cast undeserved and copious ballots on Election Day.
(Yes, you heard that right. Our crimes include talking about sex and encouraging everyone to vote.)
Ugh. That commentary would have sickened me if I hadn't been bolstered by the simple beauty of Sorry Everybody, a collection of heart-felt apologies to the rest of the world (i.e. victims of our foreign policy) and sweet replies from the world community.
It seems that Leonardo Da Vinci hasn't ceased to astound. This month's Wired has an article about a three-wheeled cart designed by Leonardo that may actually be a physically programmable robot. As Keanu would say, "Whoa."
OK, OK, I'll write something about the election. I was just giving it a chance to... cool off or something.
The bad news: four more years of Bush. No link for that, because everyone knows it already. The good news: four more years of Fafblog, and that almost makes it worthwhile. OK, it doesn't, but we can still laugh. Her. her. heh.
Oh, and in case you suddenly feel surrounded by hordes of brain-eating Jesus-talkin' red-state zombies, please review the map that puts the election results in perspective. Scroll down to that last map and behold our shredded country, at the very least. It doesn't change the basic fact that 51% of voters actually seemed to vote for Bush, but it tones down that feeling of "religious uprising" that we keep hearing about.
Alright, people, are any of y'all going to post with something helpful? I am feeling totally depressed. I'm trying not to. I console myself with "we lived through Reagan and the first Bush, we can live through this." But I alternate with, "so how do you know when the water is starting to boil and it's time to flee for your life?" I am the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors after all.
I consider the poor educational system in this country, our provincial attitudes towards the rest of the world -- I mean, how many people in the U.S. can actually name and locate an African country or a baltic state on a map? Forget that, how many could even find France?
I listen to Democracy Now! and realize that most everyone else is watching Fox News or some derivation. I really do think that Rupert Murdoch is the anti-christ and I don't even believe in that stuff. I do believe Michael Moore when he says that Americans are decent people -- or at least like to think they are decent people. So what is it? Are we, as a country, just so poorly informed that we fall for all the doublespeak? Are we so anti-intellectual that half of us are willing to vote for an arrogant upper class man who pretends to be a good ol' working class boy?
'Course it wasn't like the choices were terribly great -- giant douche or turd sandwich? You South Park fans will get the reference. Guess I'll just watch the Daily Show and South Park and try to keep my depression from becoming overwhelming.
From a post on Slashdot today:
Your friends are watching you
All around the world, we're watching you today. We love America, we want you to lead and inspire and show us what democracy and freedom and technology can do. But right now we're feeling scared, confused, and angry about what your President has lead you to do over the past three years.
Please, give us back the America we admire and believe in. Don't turn yourselves into a religious state. Don't turn your back on the UN and the other peoples of the world - in the end we are people first, American or French or Iraqi or Chinese second. Give us back the America that went to the moon and carried out the Berlin airlift and brought us the IT revolution. Give us back the America of Kennedy's vision and MLK's dream.
And please, don't let the world's most successful democracy be reduced to a joke with a repeat of last election's Floridan antics.
This just in from Yahoo! News: making sure toy stores are safe for the Rubik's Cube lover!
Homeland Security Agents Visit Toy Store
Visit the link above or I've posted the whole article below:
Thu Oct 28, 5:20 PM ET
Strange News - AP
ST. HELENS, Ore. - So far as she knows, Pufferbelly Toys owner Stephanie Cox hasn't been passing any state secrets to sinister foreign governments, or violating obscure clauses in the Patriot Act.
So she was taken aback by a mysterious phone call from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to her small store in this quiet Columbia River town just north of Portland.
"I was shaking in my shoes," Cox said of the September phone call. "My first thought was the government can shut your business down on a whim, in my opinion. If I'm closed even for a day that would cause undue stress."
When the two agents arrived at the store, the lead agent asked Cox whether she carried a toy called the Magic Cube, which he said was an illegal copy of the Rubik's Cube, one of the most popular toys of all time.
He told her to remove the Magic Cube from her shelves, and he watched to make sure she complied.
After the agents left, Cox called the manufacturer of the Magic Cube, the Toysmith Group, which is based in Auburn, Wash. A representative told her that Rubik's Cube patent had expired, and the Magic Cube did not infringe on the rival toy's trademark.
Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said agents went to Pufferbelly based on a trademark infringement complaint filed in the agency's intellectual property rights center in Washington, D.C.
"One of the things that our agency's responsible for doing is protecting the integrity of the economy and our nation's financial systems and obviously trademark infringement does have significant economic implications," she said.
Six weeks after her brush with Homeland Security, Cox told The Oregonian she is still bewildered by the experience.
"Aren't there any terrorists out there?" she said.
___
Information from: The Oregonian
