"You are wrong, and I don't know what you're talking about" (Part I)

The California Department of Motor Vehicles gave me an early birthday present this year, validating our long unspoken love for one another. But we will get to that.

In October of 2010, the registration for my 1999 Silver Volvo V70 station wagon with turbo and spoiler(yeah!) was scheduled to expire. As often happens in the case of responsible and modern law abiding citizens, the registration was updated, fees were paid, and a receipt of my online activities was delivered to my inbox. The experience was unnecessarily complicated, but no more so than filing the forms in person. The Renewal Notice and instructions thanked me for following the law, and suggested that I allow up to 8 weeks for my Registration Tags to be delivered. And so passed without my consideration, the first of several mythic signs of things to come.

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.

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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.

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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." . . . . 

Street Art

San Francisco has an incredible Art Commission, but compared to other cities like Seattle or Boston, San Francisco has a fairly limited public art program. The smallest detail of a public art project can become a divisive political battle leading to countless public hearings, sabotage and conspiracy theories. Such is the civic culture of this city. (At least they're engaged, right? ... ...right??) But a vacuum attracts content, especially when it is surrounded by activists, culture, media, hippie artists and resources.

Over the past several years, more and more private displays (especially guerilla art) have cropped up across the foggy city in areas bountiful with flat surfaces but lacking in advanced color schemes. It's become a sort of pastime of mine to record some of my favorites. Here's a teaser sample below.

Le Enchante Cafe @ 26th & Geary

Langton Labs @ Howard & Langton, SF

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.

Rollerblade group at Powell BART Station

Some pretty fun antics go down in San Francisco at late hours. I was trying to find Pandora Karaoke Bar last Friday when I came across this flashmob of rollerbladers, skaters, skate boarders and people on various wheeled devices. An announcer was challenging more and more of them to make it down the escalators on their wheels, and one guy not only accepted but jumped over 4 people laying side-to-side and made it down the escalator backwards.



Does anybody know what group this is that rides around SF late at night? Props to them. (risk management lag!)

MUNI makes it onto FailBlog

Yup. Nuff said. (8 June 2011)

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.

Realignment and the Corrections Crisis, or "9 Fellows Walk Into a Bar..." (Pt.5)

I visited Sacramento four months ago with my fellowship cohort to meet with policy wonks, and to ask some uncomfortable questions about the state of the State. A $26B budget deficit, gridlocked politicians, a frumpy economy, a mess of jurisdictional mishaps and dozens of uncoordinated populist initiatives that don't look so hot the next morning had (and still have) all conspired to ruin everything.  Wild rumors had been flying about in San Francisco that the state was considering a wide-reaching reorientation of public services, and that local governments would expectedly "get the shaft" in these changes. That turned out to be true.

It was hailed as the great "Realignment" and in this shifting of authorities, monies and services, prison reform (kinda) made it onto the list. And rightly, considering that California has one of the largest prison populations out of any state in the Union, and that the Union has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the ENTIRE WORLD. That mean's we're the best!

My group has started working with the County Sheriff's office on a project to evaluate the levels of recidivism in San Francisco, the effectiveness of corrections programming and alternative sanctions, and CCSF's ability to adapt some of those services to a new population. It could not be timelier. The US Supreme Court last month upheld an injunction against California's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for civil rights violations like inadequate medical care and services, and violence, due to overcrowding (see Brown v. Plata). The number of prisoners incarcerated in California since the 1970s has increased sevenfold, and the system is now over 175% of its official inmate capacity with 143,000 prisoners (down from 173,000 in 2006). This was identified as a significant cause of the rights violations, and so the State was ordered to either (a) increase capacity and services or - since California’s annual budget is still short by several billion dollars - (b) to release or redistribute approximately 33,000 prisoners.

The ruling itself was no surprise. The case was pending for several years, and it was really a matter of time before the High Court followed up in the case - it was just a bit earlier than anyone thought. Unfortunately this means San Francisco and hundreds of other municipalities across California will be absorbing some of the State prisoners into their jails and local corrections programs. The official objective is to move low-level offenders closer to their communities, as this has shown to encourage rehabilitation and stabilization - but it's also about money and a federal injunction.

This is a new demographic for county sheriffs - more serious crimes, different affiliations, somewhat more radical behaviors, and parolees. Counties are generally ill-equipped to manage these offenders, but we have to learn. The City's expecting at least 700-800 new state prisoners next year. It's hard to know a definite number, though; the state doesn't share all inmate records that signify who's eligible for the transfer.

As a state, we need to ask some important questions, foremost of which is how our already enormous corrections system has swelled to nearly twice its official capacity. Is it the judges, or lawyers, or the police? Whoever it is, they're clearly crazy. Unfortunately the problem isn't that simple. There does not seem to be any single mechanism to blame or switch to flip that would resolve this crisis - and with costs skyrocketing, a structural state deficit, abuses gaining public attention, report after report indicating that the prison systems are often overtly and procedurally racist, and with a new court injunction, it really is a crisis for the state. 

But if I were to dismiss nuance and point to something as a fundamental structural flaw, I would start with California's infamous Three Strikes Law.