I am … unhindered by talent

In what has to be one of the more unusual concepts for a concept album, the Genomic Dub Collective in Birmingham (UK) is using the text of Darwin’s The origin of species as lyrics in their reggae inspired drum and bass. They apparently premiered this last Friday as the closing event on Darwin Day at the University of Birmingham (where we spent a wonderful year on sabbatical 4.5 years ago). I wish I could have been there.

To quote Professor Pallen (one of the creators) from this article:

When I was thinking about this year’s celebrations, I was very keen not to just play to the creationist versus evolutionist thing.

I wanted to make it very broad.

Both Charles Darwin and his grandfather Erasmus were profoundly affected by the slavery they witnessed in places like Brazil and wrote poetry speaking out against it. I invited the poet Benjamin Zephaniah to read the poems last year and that gave me the idea to do something different.

Kudos to WeatherGirl for pointing this out to me.

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Last week I finally finished The Kite Runner, and definitely enjoyed it. Parts of the novel are extremely powerful, and it nicely raises important questions of diversity. You could easily transplant many of the issues from Afghanistan to, for example, the American south and get something not unlike To kill a mockingbird.

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I just got back from a nice concert by Grace Doval at the Common Cup. I’m guessing that this was her first one-person show at a venue like that, and she did a really nice job. She’s got a wonderful voice and has some real potential as a song-writer. About 2/3 of the material was self-penned, and it held up well with the covers. The playlist had a heavy emphasis on relationship songs, which isn’t what I tend to buy at the record store, but I definitely enjoyed the evening and hope she does other shows.

Grace was one of the performers at the open mic night two weeks ago. At the time I was struck by the quality of many of the performers and thought that there several (including Grace) that were good enough to do something like this. It’s nice that some of them are heading that direction.

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In doing some homework for the REAL ID Act for a class, I was reading the text of the bill at the Library of Congress’s excellent Thomas site and discovered that the LoC has been making new bills available in XML format since Feb 2004. Pretty cool, eh?

Less cool is the fact that HR 418 passed the house yesterday with a solid margin, which sadly included Collin Peterson (my elected member of The Valiant Opposition) voting in favor. It seems likely that it will go on to pass the senate with little meaningful protest from The Valiant Opposition, to then be signed by Our Most Excellent President. Sigh.

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I was sitting here trying to figure out how to post something sensible here about North Korea’s announcement that they have nuclear weapons and are suspending nuclear talks. But it’s all just so big and depressing, with our wackos arguing with their wackos, that I was pretty well lost and ready to give up. (My one suggestion would be to ensure that one’s reading includes some non-U.S. press.)

I was, however, saved by my sister, who IM’ed me all the way from the Galapagos islands!

Last year she did 3.5 months of field work there, and she left last Saturday for another two months there this spring. (Why doesn’t my job send me to incredibly cool places like that :-)?) She’d been trying to IM me for a day or two, but I was always off teaching a class or some such, but today we hooked up and chatted for 10 or 15 minutes. It was very cool.

The amazing thing (to me, at least) is the level of internet access they have there. When she went last year we all assumed that she’d be pretty much out of touch electronically, but she in fact had regular access to the Net everywhere except on the uninhabited island of Espanola. This included her time on Isabela, where the village of Puero Villamil had sand streets (see photo) and an internet cafe.

Ain’t life amazing?

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As your constituent, I urge you to oppose the REAL ID Act of 2005 (H.R.
418), which is an uncalled-for assault on immigrants and would force
states to deny driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants in violation
of their own policies. I believe our borders can be protected and our
security ensured through proper responses to critical needs, not misguided
proposals on a nationalized drivers licenses and new requirements for
people fleeing persecution.

I am concerned by this bill for a whole host of reasons as it represents
another slip away from the freedoms that we speak so highly of, but which
we seem intent on dismantling piece by piece in response to the horrors of
September 11, 2001.

My ancestors came to this country from England, Scotland, Switzerland, and
Belgium, and elsewhere. Some were well off and comfortable when they
came, while others were in fairly desperate straits. Some became
lumberjacks, some dairy farmers and bankers, and others lawyers. All
raised families, sent their kids to school, and contributed to the dream
and success of the United States.

This bill is a slap in the face of all that history. It forgets our past,
and limits our futures.

And for me this is not an academic exercise. My wife of nearly 16 years
is a British citizen and a permanent resident of the U.S. (”green card
holder”). Our son is a dual citizen of the U.K. and the U.S. I would
hope that at these internationally difficult times, we might value the
diversity my wife and son represent. Bills like HR 418, however, serve to
make honest people afraid and do little or nothing that would actually
hinder Bad Guys. In what universe, for example, does it make sense to
require asylum seekers to obtain supporting evidence from the
governments they are fleeing?

Particularly distressing is the open-ended nature of the provisions regarding charitable donations. My wife has been very generous over the years to a variety of causes in this country and back in the U.K.; she has been one of George Bush (Sr)’s “Thousand points of light”. Can that continue if this bill passes? Will past donations to organizations such as Amnesty
International, Habitat for Humanity, and the Center for the Victims of Torture be seen as
“acceptable” in the future, or used as grounds for deporting her? What does this teach our son about the value of compassion, charitable giving, and democracy?

Once again, I urge you to oppose the REAL ID Act of 2005 (H.R. 418). I
believe our borders can be protected and our security ensured through
proper responses to critical needs, not misguided proposals on a
nationalized driver’s licenses and new requirements for people fleeing
persecution.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this matter.

The first and last paragraphs are ACLU boilerplate. The Politech mailing list did much to raise my awareness on this issue.

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Via a Kuro5shin article, I just ran across an article on Wired.com entitled “The Long Tail” that says some really nice things about the impact of digital media on its sales and distribution.

The short version is that there’s at least some reason to hope that the vanishing distribution costs can break the stranglehold of Big Media with its emphasis on the big hits. At some level it’s all stuff I’ve heard (or even said) before, but it’s a nice analysis with more actual evidence and support than me just ranting.

If you haven’t thought about or read about these issues, you probably should, and these are nice places to start.

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WeatherGirl and I saw The aviator last night in its epic three hour glory. I didn’t really know what I was going to think of it, in part because I didn’t really know much about Howard Hughes’s love for and understanding of aviation, and was therefore somewhat confused by the title. (To me, he was an incredibly rich recluse, probably because what little sense I had of him was probably formed by news of his death when I was a kid.)

The film focusses on what is probably the most productive period of his life from when he inherits the family business and money in the 20’s through the Second World War and the beginning of his descent into increasingly debilitating psychological problems. In this period he made movies that won Oscars, cost millions, and got him in trouble with the censors (although not always at the same time), pushed the envelope in both commercial and experimental aviation, and courted both famous movie stars (Cate Blanchett as Kathrine Hepburn is quite amazing) and political trouble.

All of which made for an incredibly gripping story under Scorsese’s direction. It was a (quite literally) white knuckle ride in several places, despite the fact that we all know (at least in vague terms) how it’s going to turn out. DiCaprio was excellent (and I can’t say I’ve been a big fan of his), and the cast (and acting) is full of wonderful surprises. And, perhaps most importantly, I never once wanted to look at my watch and see how much longer we’d have to be there.

Check out WeatherGirl’s thoughts on the film.

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Ross Kyle showed me quick how to generate and use faveicons (the little icons that show up to the left of URLs in your browser). So now there’s a little picture of me next to the URL for my blog. :-) It’s a (very) little thing, but it makes me happy. I used this generator, but have no reason to recommend them beyond “it worked”.

Currently listening to “Banjo picking girl” by Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard from Roots Music: An American Journey on Rounder. This is a very nice collection which I remember paying next to nothing for. Looks like they charge real money for it now, but I don’t know why.

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The marketing minions at UMM decided (quite sensibly) to change our domain from “mrs.umn.edu” to “morris.umn.edu” to improve “name recognition”. While I quite agree with the intent, the timing and details of the the switch were perhaps less than perfect.

Anyway, the deed is mostly done now, and it went quite smoothly for the most part. High marks to the Computing Services staff for staying up late to make it happen (especially since it wasn’t their idea, but they had to implement it). Most of our CSci lab is converted over and working, although you still can’t connect to the developer’s lab clients using morris.umn.edu. The teaching lab clients and all the servers, however, seem to be ticking right along in the new universe.

People should point e-mails and web links to morris.umn.edu instead of mrs.umn.edu. The old domain should continue to work for several years (if not forever), but there will some sort of warnings generated sometime in a few months.

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