Quote of the Day

A man in a hat sat to my right, discretely.

It was knit and plum-red, and wrapped under his old chin. The room was cold even in the light of the rising sun that shone through the windows. He was at the corner where two of the long tables met, and he didn't speak except for occasional hums and soft grunts of recognition as others made their own points loudly. But when he finally spoke, it was deliberate.

"I look across the table and I see the same faces that I saw twenty years ago. I come to these meetings all this time with the hope of things changing, real change, when the people at the bottom finally get to stand up. And I think now, we are at a time when that is finally about to happen, in part because the people are so frustrated by the terrible things in Delhi that they may be ready for action."

He went on with the rest of the room silent, but his last words stuck with me.

"Three years ago no one was talking about women in meetings, and now that's all anyone will talk about here in India. My hope is that in three years we will remember that: 'Three years ago no one was talking about Participatory Governance, and now that's all anyone will talk about here in India.'"

"Redline"

In the 9 months since I moved to DC, I have never - not once - managed to catch the connecting REDLINE train towards Glenmont at Metro Station, though I have on rare evenings such as this brushed the sliding doors with my fingertips as they closed on my hopes and slipped away into the darkness once again.

"17 MIN".

One day....

Adventures on the Circulator

Each city handles fare evaders differently. Today I took the Circulator's Yellow Line over toward Georgetown to hear a panel of experts talk about the woes of human migration, and I experienced a brief moment of MUNI-ness. Three stops out from Union Station a group of individuals step onto the bus and move to the back of the car, while one woman wearing a heavy wool jacket clearly fails to pay her fare.

"Excuse me mam," the bus driver eventually says.

Silence.

 "Excuse me mam."

She wears a look of confusion, searching about for a source of the voice.

"Excuse me, MAM!"

She looks about once more and finally finds the furious gaze of the bus driver. He raises his eyebrows in the universal human gesture of "what the hell do you think you're doing?". She stares at him for a moment, and he supplements his massage with an open hand, palm up and flat, that slowly but deliberately directs her attention to the fare box, never breaking his gaze. "Yes?" She asks.

"Aren't you going to pay your fare?" The woman cocked her head to her left in the universal, cross-species sign of curiosity and did not say a word. "Aren't you going to pay the fare?!" he repeated.

"No.... we don't pay the fare."

Quote of the day, or Goat Proletariat

Excerpt from the comment section of a Berkeleyside news article this morning, “Goats reduce fire hazards in the Berkeley hills”:

"In an Animal Farm analogy, the 600 goats should become conscious of the fact that a handful of humans and a few guard dogs are exploiting and enslaving them for their own profit and benefit.  As the vanguard of the proletariat, we in Berkeley should sow dissension among the goats, support revolutionary goat liberation and foment the overthrow of "Farmer Jones."  The exploitation and mistreatment of these proletariat goats has already been documented locally."

Quote of the day, or "Thermostat WTF"

"The US military's bill for air-conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan each year is about $20billion - about a third of the entire UK defence budget."

סּ_סּ  http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9525000/9525737.stm 

Nobody's heard of evaporative cooling?

When it rains in June

"...Wesley Crusher."

“What the fuck are you talking about?!” bellowed the woman in stalkings as rain poured down around us. I should have seen that coming.

----------------- 

A tropical depression made it pour today, which just goes to show you that the San Francisco weather god has it in for us. Weird things happen when it rains here in June, and people don’t seem to know what to do with themselves. Two days ago it was beautiful and warm and college kids filled the Park for Alice’s Summerthing after the Pride Parade, but now citizens that had for months mastered the art of dressing for this City’s fickle winter weather strode about grappling with their coats and upturned umbrella’s.

Three o’clock rolls around and my eyes are about to fall out of my head because I’m stuck in an office with two flickering halogen bulbs and a full-spectrum lamp as bright as the sun (which I guess was the point, in retrospect). My left hand is soar from repeating the same keystrokes for 5 hours, and I pulled a muscle in my leg while attempting funky office stretches to stay awake :| Time for coffee.

I grab my jacket and frown because it isn’t a coat. Of course I did not plan on it raining today – because it’s June 28^th and it should be hot by now! – but my coworker offers me her “oversized umbrella”. I happily accept the gift and prance happily out of the office into the damp air.

-----------------

Ah, sipping warm coffee by a full-length rain-speckled window listening to weird Starbucks jazz, how I have missed you. I watch as a man in an expensive pinstriped grey suit and Oakleys in the rain gestures like a magician as part of some elaborate story he is telling to a very cold and wet woman in a purple dress. 

"Hey, what the hell are you doing here?!" My regular barista shouts to me across the cafe. "Don't you have to be at work or something?"

"I work for the government," I retort dismissively, returning my curious attention to the couple. "We don't work, we just drink coffee. Doesn't matter where I do it." . . . . 

Quote of the Day, or No fish for you

"Sometimes the supes act on the commission's recommendations, such as when they approved a ban on declawing cats. And sometimes they don't, such as when the animal panel suggested introducing birth control pills into birdseed to solve the city's pigeon problem."

The Board of Supervisors is preparing to consider legislation to ban the sale of gold fish in San Francisco. Seriously. The new ordinance would prohibit the sale of certain pets within the City limits in an effort to curb animal abandonment. The idea is that small cute animals are more vulnerable to "impulse buying" and consequently higher levels of discarding when owners get bored. San Francisco's Animal Control and Welfare Commission this week renewed its push for a pet sale ban after a year-long study cute animal sales, and its recommendations will appear before the Board in the coming weeks.

Quote of the Day

"We would like to have a laser inside the body of the animal, to generate laser light directly within the animal's tissue."

Excellent. Harvard scientists have used a genetically engineered human kidney cell as a "gain medium" to amplify light waves into a laser. It's nothing compared to the 1 megajoule power of Lawrence Livermore Labs's National Ignition Facility out here in Cali, but then again we won't be the first to get laser sharks :/

" Hundreds of different gain media have been used, including various dyes and gases [and Jell-O]. But no one has used living tissue. Mostly out of curiosity, Malte Gather and Seok-Hyun Yun of Harvard University decided to investigate with a single mammalian cell.

They injected a human kidney cell with a loop of DNA that codes for an enhanced form of green fluorescent protein. Originally isolated from jellyfish, GFP glows green when exposed to blue light and has beeninvaluable as a biological beacon, tracking the path of molecules inside cells and lighting up when certain genes are expressed.

After placing the cell between two mirrors, the researchers bombarded it with pulses of blue light until it began to glow. As the green light bounced between the mirrors, certain wavelengths were preferentially amplified until they burst through the semi-transparent mirrors as laser light. Even after a few minutes of lasing, the cell was still alive and well. "

Read the whole story at New Scientist.

Quote of the day

"The nation hit its nearly $14.3-trillion debt limit this week"

Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma said talks had hit an impasse. The "Group of Six" had met for several hours late Monday, but several sources report that Coburn ran into resistance when he proposed making cuts to Medicare that were considered "unacceptable" by other members. The Senator became upset, spilling his glass of milk all over the table and complaining that no one ever listens to him as he stomped out of the room.

The setback shifts attention to the closed-door negotiations being led by Vice President Joe Biden and congressional leaders to reach an agreement on budget cuts. Treasury officials have said the nation will default on obligations if its borrowing capacity is not increased by August 2. Republicans are demanding $2 trillion in spending cuts  in exchange for their votes to increase the debt limit and avoid defaulting on obligations.

This game of chicken is getting a bit old for local governments that depend on federal distributions to maintain some critical services, and once again we are facing a damaging cut in funds on one hand and a suspension of federal spending on the other. No good.

11 weeks and counting.