| Until next time |
[05 Apr 2009|05:23pm] |
Please, remember me, happily,
by the rosebush laughing
with bruises on my chin, the time when
we counted every black car passing
your house beneath the hill, and up until
someone caught us in the kitchen
with maps, a mountain range, a piggy bank
a vision too removed to mention
and please remember me, fondly,
i heard from someone you're still pretty
and then they went on to say that the pearly gates
have such eloquent graffiti
like: “we'll meet again” and “fuck the man”
and “tell my mother not to worry”
and angels with their great handshakes
but always done in such a hurry
and please remember me, at Halloween
making fools of all the neighbors
our faces painted white, by midnight
we'd forgotten one another
and when the morning came I was ashamed
only now it seems so silly
that season left the world and then returned
and now you're lit up by the city
and please remember me, mistakenly
in the window of the tallest tower
call, then pass us by, but much too high
to see the empty road at happy hour
gleam and resonate just like the gates
around the Holy Kingdom
with words like: “lost and found” and “don't look down”
and “someone save temptation”
and please remember me, as in the dream
we had as rug-burned babies
among the fallen trees and fast asleep
beside the lions and the ladies
that called you what you like and even might
give a gift for your behavior:
a fleeting chance to see a trapeze-
swinger high as any savior
and please remember me, my misery
and how it lost me all i wanted
those dogs that love the rain, and chasin' trains
the colored birds above there runnin'
in circles round the well, and where it spells
on the wall behind St. Peter
so bright on cinder gray in spray paint:
“who the hell can see forever?”
and please remember me, seldomly
in the car behind the carnival
my hand between your knees, you turn from me
and said the trapeze act was wonderful
but never meant to last, the clowns that passed
saw me just come up with anger
when it filled with circus dogs, the parking lot
had an element of danger
and please remember me, finally
and all my uphill clawing
my dear, but if i make the pearly gates
i’ll do my best to make a drawing
of God and Lucifer, a boy and girl
an angel kissin’ on a sinner
a monkey and a man, a marching band
all around the frightened trapeze-swinger
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| Stupid Insurance |
[15 Apr 2008|11:39pm] |
I had a peculiar train of thought today. Not really peculiar in the local context of my own mind, but very much so in the global context of what goes on in the greater population of minds.
See, I went to sleep at 4am last night because I was stupidly entranced by an amusing message board. This meant I got very little sleep. So I woke up thinking, "Man, I better not say or do anything today cuz I'm bound to do it stupidly." (This is all I learned from my entire high school experience.)
So my train of thought while driving home this evening, after not doing anything too stupid, went something like, "Man, cognitive science is actually kinda useful sometimes, even if it's only to predict when somebody's going to do something stupid." And that got me thinking about who benefits the most from predictions of the future: insurance companies!
We all have our stupid moments. Who wouldn't benefit from some insurance to hedge everyday stupidity? Who wouldn't benefit from somebody stepping in to clean up the mess?
It's pretty awesome that I've been able to go the day without saying or doing anything phenomenally stupid yet. Which means, odds are... Fuckin' a!
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| Enigmas |
[26 Dec 2007|02:03pm] |
You've asked me what the lobster is weaving there with his golden feet?
I reply, the ocean knows this.
You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent bell? What is it waiting for?
I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.
You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?
Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.
You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal,
and I reply by describing
how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.
You inquire about the kingfisher's feathers,
which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?
Or you've found in the cards a new question touching on the crystal architecture
of the sea anemone, and you'll deal that to me now?
You want to understand the electric nature of the ocean spines?
The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?
The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out
in the deep places like a thread in the water?
I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its jewel boxes
is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,
and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the petal
hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light
and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall
from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.
I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead
of human eyes, dead in those darknesses,
of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes
on the timid globe of an orange.
I walked around as you do, investigating the endless star,
and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,
the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.
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| Lousy Prions |
[07 Dec 2007|01:30am] |
"I killed smart people to eat their brains and all I got was this lousy prion disease." This was a T-shirt slogan I came up with and posted as a comment in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.3) s3nsational's journal. (I couldn't find the original post.)
I've been thinking about prion diseases tonight. A family friend of a friend is having the plug pulled on her tomorrow after suffering rapidly degenerative neurological symptoms over the past two weeks that have been diagnosed as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. CJD is one of those ultra-rare diseases you hear bandied about week after week on House that the patient never has. The reality of prion diseases isn't as funny as that joke I made about prions years ago.
I'm not a molecular bioengineer or anything, but it seems like it would be possible to manufacture a virus that would inject a heat-shock-promoted chaperone sequence designed to bind and capture prions to transform them back to their native conformational state. Once the patient is infected, you can either rely on the immune system to respond to infection by causing a fever or you can put the patient in a hot tub. This may kill the virus and would activate the by-then injected DNA sequence. The prion-hunting chaperones would be assembled and clear the infected cell of prions.
There's one issue I don't have a solution for. Since prions reside in nerve cells, that's where we'd want to target the viral vector. While the immune system is normally cause for concern to viral gene therapy techniques, the brain is immunologically privileged, and for good reason. The usual immunological defensive tricks involve invoking cell-death routines and sending in the cleaners to pick up the pieces. Dismantling brain cells is bad news. (That's what the prion disease is doing, after all.) The problem, however, relates to how to safely get rid of the virus if the immune system doesn't see it. It'd be designed for low virulence of course, but who wants to be saved from a devastating neurological disease only to live in fear of a potentially mutable virus hanging around in their brain that could reek havoc later on?
Potential pitfalls aside, several pieces of this problem are hard. Unless such a chaperone already exists and is discovered, both unknown to me and unlikely, the protein would have to be bioengineered. Maybe in 10-20 years time we'll have the understanding and technology to create proteins as complex as prion-selective chaperones.
I'm enjoying thinking about this stuff. It's preparing me for the conference on the genetics of neurological diseases I'm going to in Paris during spring break next year.
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| Weird is the Norm |
[28 Oct 2007|10:16pm] |
A: enjoy talkin to ya dude
A: reminds me how much of a dilettante I am
keckos: Yeah. I'll try to sign onto AIM more often again.
A: first time I've logged on in months
A: since we last chatted actually
keckos: Well, just synchronicity, then,
A: funny that
keckos: me too.
keckos: Pretty weird, actually.
A: yea
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| TISTAAFL |
[27 Oct 2007|05:49pm] |
A: leopard on any pc son
F: huh
A: osx 10.5 dvd installer's been patched to install on any pc
F: o sry i dont pay for software
A: who said pay
F: (i had that pre typed up)
F: theres no free lunch son
A: ya eat me
F: lol
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| Fucking Evolution |
[03 Oct 2007|06:44pm] |
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To choose to be a magical thinker is to essentially believe that the world isn't already amazingly cool and mysterious enough as is.
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| Taming of the Dudes |
[21 Sep 2007|02:15pm] |
Photo by Flickr user Baldass
I'm tempted to pull critical theory out on this. Instead of deconstructing with the typical Freudian and Marxian frames, I'd channel Darwin and Dawkins, referencing natural selection, cyclical memetics, and sexual selection in the form of the recent war, generational rebellion, and male socialization by females, respectively. I'd call it The Pussy Theory for several reasons, some less obvious than others. But I'm gonna hold off because it's all fucking bullshit.
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| Where's My Cricket Bat? |
[01 Aug 2007|10:57pm] |
|
I haven't been writing a lot lately. Life's been so dense I haven't had time to reflect for myself, let alone for others.
Tom Stoppard's plays have always made me feel warm and fuzzy about words, so I'll leave you with an excerpt from The Real Thing that made me wanna write something, anything, even if it's just to share the words of others.
We pick up where actress Annie is trying to convince her writer boyfriend Henry to help out her new convicted activist friend Brodie with a play about his prison experience.
HENRY: You're all bent.
ANNIE: You're jealous.
HENRY: Of Brodie?
ANNIE: You're jealous of the idea of the writer. You want to keep
it sacred, special, not something anybody can do. Some of
us have it, some of us don't. We write, you get
written about. What gets you about Brodie is he doesn't
know his place. You say he can't write like a head waiter
saying you can't come in here without a tie. Because he
can't put words together. What's so good about putting
words together?
HENRY: It's traditionally considered advantageous for a writer.
( Read more... )
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| Talk Neurdy to Me |
[17 Jul 2007|12:46am] |
The other night...
V: Would you like some Toblerone?
A (practically deaf): Did you just ask if I wanted some dopamine?
V (shows me the Toblerone): Might as well have.
A: Love some.
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| Drama in the GOV |
[21 Jun 2007|11:49am] |
Cheney's like a root ninja disabling system logging processes. The intellectual curiosity defense doesn't work here.
This is one critical House oversight committee fact sheet:Since 2001, Vice President Cheney has made repeated efforts to shield the activities of his office from public scrutiny. These efforts include exempting his office from the presidential executive order governing the protection of classified information, challenging the right of the Government Accountability Office to examine the activities of the Vice President’s energy task force, and refusing to disclose basic facts about the operations of his office, such as the identity of the staff working in his office and the individuals who visit the Vice President’s residence.
Exempting the Office of the Vice President from the Executive Order on Classified National Security Information. Over the objections of the National Archives, Vice President Cheney exempted his office from Executive Order 12958, which establishes a uniform, government-wide system for safeguarding classified information. In response to the protests of the National Archives, the staff of the Vice President proposed abolishing the office within the Archives that is in charge of implementing the executive order.
Blocking GAO Oversight. In 2001, Vice President Cheney headed a task force to develop a national energy policy. After GAO sought to learn the identity of the energy industry officials with whom the Vice President’s task force met, Vice President Cheney sued the Comptroller General to prevent GAO from conducting oversight of his office.
Concealing Privately-Funded Travel. Vice President Cheney has refused to comply with an executive branch ethics law requiring him and his employees to disclose travel paid for by special interests.
Withholding Information about Vice Presidential Staff. Every four years, Congress prints the "Plum Book," listing the names and titles of all federal political appointees. In 2004, the Office of the Vice President, for the first time, refused to provide any information for inclusion in the book.
Concealing Information about Visitors to the Vice President’s Residence. The Vice President has asserted "exclusive control" over any documents created by the United States Secret Service regarding visitors to the Vice President’s residence. This has the effect of preventing information about who is meeting with the Vice President from being disclosed to the public under the Freedom of Information Act.
Allowing Former Vice Presidents to Assert Privilege Over Documents. An Executive Order issued by President Bush in November 2001 provided the Vice President with the authority to conceal his activities long after he leaves office. Executive Order 13233 took the unprecedented step of authorizing former Vice Presidents to assert privilege over their own vice presidential records, preventing them from being released publicly. There's so much drama in the GOV,
cuz Dick Cheney's hiding from scrutiny.
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| Knowledge Representation |
[10 Jun 2007|04:05am] |
Ted Nelson, coiner of teledildonics, reminds: EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. In an important sense there are no "subjects" at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly.
Hierarchical and sequential structures, especially popular since Gutenberg, are usually forced and artificial. Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged - people keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't.
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| Latin Pig Latin |
[06 Jun 2007|05:08pm] |
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atermay uatay icetacray uitfay, teay aterpay uotay edoluitray acarumbay ambucussay
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| Well-Formed Trolls |
[22 May 2007|01:30pm] |
From Shermer's The (Other) Secret: The inverse square law trumps the law of attractionCeteris paribus, it is undoubtedly better to think positive thoughts than negative ones. But in the real world, all other things are never equal, no matter how sanguine your outlook. Just ask the survivors of Auschwitz. If the law of attraction is true, then the Jews--along with the butchered Turkish-Armenians, the raped Nanking Chinese, the massacred Native Americans and the enslaved African-Americans--had it coming. The latter exemplar is especially poignant given Oprah's backing of The Secret on her Web site: "The energy you put into the world--both good and bad--is exactly what comes back to you. This means you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you make every day." Africans created the circumstances for Europeans to enslave them? Wow. That reframe is impressively on par with those uttered by Aaron Eckhart's cigarette lobbyist character in Thank You For Smoking. Pardoning the near invocation of Godwin's Law, I can almost accept the argument.
Almost, if not for that beautifully subtle straw man compounded by a fallacy of composition. Shermer assumes that an individual's circumstances scale predictably as you move spatially to the population level and, if I'm reading it as intended, temporally over generations as well. In doing so, he fails to recognize there are necessarily unpredictable interaction-level effects along both dimensions whenever you go from the short-term behavior of a complex unit to a population of them acting over the long-term. I'm disappointed because his final question, posited as a statement, matches my intuition, but it doesn't follow from its premises.
That Shermer's argument ends poorly is not to say that Oprah isn't silly and The Secret isn't new age bullshit. I'd almost be willing to cut him some slack because he practically has to stoop to their level to argue against such a ridiculous explanation. But again, I can't, because by publishing in SciAm, he's just preaching to his choir, appealing to his core audience's biases, as well-formed and reasonable as they may be. He's not being a Missionary for Science like a Good Skeptic ought to be.
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