the guy by the door …

Headlines and archived streams.

… simply to try to vilify and defame him in the hope that maybe what he’s writing will disappear.

Part II of the joint interview with Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now! included this remark by Noam. He is referring to the Dersh’s attempts first to stop publication [according to Chomsky] of Finkelstein’s book Beyond Chutzpah¹ then failing that, to cause Finkelstein to be denied tenure. Noam claims that DePaul University has complained to Harvard administration about Dersh’s kibitzing. In an April 12 article [w. correction 4/14], A Bitter Spat Over Ideas, Israel and Tenure, Patricia Cohen of the New York Times says:

A Patriots Day special report Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now! for the full hour.

• Patriotism to me means doing what you think your country should be doing… supporting your government when you think it’s doing right, opposing your government when you think it’s doing wrong. [Howard]
• Howard recently asked a class of young students, “Who here has heard of My Lai?” No one had.
• This [the war in Iraq] is one of the worst catastrophes in military history and also in political history. [Noam]

Archived video and audio streams available from Democracy Now!

I kinda learned that in grade school, but it remained a blur.

It was a dazzlingly brilliant day, so much that it almost hurt. And there she was. Her traditional robe gently unfurling in the breeze. She had to be African. Not African-American*, African-African*. I was right. She is Ashanti. She looked lost. It took almost two years for Harvard and Cambridge to help her find her way, but they did. I don’t know how she is doing now.

I don’t know the full history of the Hutu’s and the Tutsi’s, but I do wonder where the machetes came from. Would things have been different if we African-European-Americans* had The Prime Directive or better if we had never gone back at all?
I know a man from Tanzania and young man from Eritrea. They have pretty good ideas where they are going. If you work at Harvard long enough the whole world drops in. Slowly the fog is lifting.

This is Africa Week at Harvard. Tonight a Film: The Invisible Children; The lives of children soldiers in Uganda. Tonight Thurs. April 5, 2007 @ 7:00 PM Emerson 305.

Last night, Professor Jacob Olupona from [among many places] Harvard Divinity School
addressed the question, “Is Jesus a White Man’s God?” I speak not even one African language. Fortunately he spoke English. Unfortunately, I still had a hard time**. Hopefully the text will be posted to the net. But I heard what I most needed to. “It is often assumed that Christianity in Africa is nothing more than a tool of colonial oppression. This racist assumption is false.” After duly noting the disclosure implicit in his job title, I still feel compelled to take this seriously. It is the assumption I held. It is tenaciously held by some on the ideological left, who seem to believe that denouncing others magically makes them free of racsim. I almost wish it were that simple. For me, unlearning the racism of youth*** has been and may well be a lifelong task. I am a work in progress.
Full schedule of events in the Science Center
*According to the Human Genome Project, we are all African-somethings.

** In graduate school I learned that multilingual people are also better at understanding non-native English speakers than I am. My Greek colleague could understand by Chinese colleague’s English and ‘translate’.

***My mother’s commentary on “Gone with the Wind” and a fortiori “Amos ‘n Andy” was tragedy and farce.

Harvard’s Legal Left took me to dinner and a movie and didn’t ask me for sex afterwards. I had a good time anyway. With more time, I’ll describe the conference hosting the movie. I promised my companero who could not stay that I would take notes.

The movie focuses on the workers at one factory that management closed as “inefficient” and describes their struggle to organize themselves and take over the factory. It depicted their occupation of the factory, getting the factory back into production, and appearances in court in the hope of obtaining legal title – expropriation. [Perhaps “eminent domain” is more familiar.] The movie ended on an optimistic note for the workers.

In his trip to Latin America, George W. Bush remarked, ‘We are all sons of George Washington and Simon Bolivar.” Venezualan President Hugo Chavez implied different heritage and pointed out a strong difference in the careers of Washington and Bolivar. Democracy Now! had substantial clips from Chavez’ “shadow tour” of Bush. According to Chavez, George Washington was born to a poor family and ended up a wealthy slave owner, while Bolivar was born ‘with a silver spoon in his mouth’ but [after leading the successful struggles for independence in several Latin American countries] died wearing borrowed clothes. Which historiography is more nearly right? Let’s go to the Internets!

Shortly after 8 PM, as I was crossing the overpass just north of the Yard I heard sirens, under me and on Mass Ave. As I crossed the Yard headed for the T, more sirens. Something big was happening. When I stepped out of the Johnston Gate, I saw a sea of flashing lights. Out of Town News was surrounded by emergency equipment. Cambridge Fire had a ladder truck, a remote controlled nozzle truck, special services truck [Tactical Rescue 1], and other units. There was at least one patrol car and one paddy wagon from the MBTA police and several commercial ambulances.

The station was still open with T personnel directing North bound passengers to shuttle buses at Johnston Gate. Since Inbound trains were still running I was allowed to go through the turnstile, but I went up the Outbound ramp to see what I could learn. A woman sheepishly told me someone had been hit. I could see that the train was stopped with only the head of one car in the station. Then I heard an MBTA officer calling in that a man had jumped on the tracks. There was a witness.

I thought to investigate further, but it made me feel like a ghoul. I remembered the “Subway” episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. I did not want to see it for real. What was my responsibility? A professional journalist would have marched up the platform and asked the emergency workers what was going on. My experience as a Unix system mother told me that right after a crash is just the time you don’t want to be answering questions. WIth lives at stake, focus is critical. What should a ‘citizen journalist’ do. I decided to take what I had, make a quick post, and e-mail the ‘pros’ at the Crimson. When I returned at 9:30PM only about 1/3 of the emergency vehicles were still there. The train had not moved. I was looking from the North end of the platform this time. I saw no victims.

UPDATE: The Crimson reports that the man hit by the train survived and is likely to recover. There is no mention of injuries to passengers due to the motorman slamming on the brakes. I would guess that there were minor injuries treated, but no hospitalizations. The report doesn’t capture the magnitude of the emergency response. It was impressive and I don’t believe excessive. Not knowing just what they are facing, I would rather our public employees show up with too much rather than too little strength. I’m proud of them.
I found no other reports of the event on Yahoo news.

A Multimedia Showcase of the People and Places of Inman Square.

[[The pictures are in my other pants.]]
ABZ Gallery; 186 Hampshire St.
Jan 13-15, 2007 10 AM – 7 PM [MLK day today! Last chance :)]

Well worth the short walk from Harvard. Multimedia in this case means video with sound and slideshows on three screens with attention to temporal relations between the screens. I don’t know the word the professional art crowd would use. I call it an ensemble piece, because it clearly depends on synergy between the components. Ordinarily, I would find a picture of laundry in a dryer unexciting, but in context it clearly served a definite purpose. The Harvard students who did the work [their names are in my other pants] clearly had a good relationship with the community in order to get the shots they did. For me, the piece de resistance was the faces of ‘local color’ including but not limited to Issy. [He’s holding a flower pot in the show.] You may have seen Issy around the Pit. His principle axes are more nearly equal than most of us. And he is a lively wit. Stay for a full cycle. I think it’s about 30 min.

I had no plan to go Widener that night. There has been discussion about closing the Littauer Library for years. Last spring, people in several cirulcation departments told me they were sure this time. Most recently, I’ve been told, “there is no plan.” So I made the rounds. That took me to Widener. I found Levi putting out the lights on the Chanukkiyah. He told me that this is a word of recent origin [ ~60

I so much enjoyed schmoozing with Levi that I forgot to take his picture. So if you want to see want caring for the Chanukkiyah looks like, you’ll have to look at last year’s Third Light. I promised Levi he could have the full size picture. Berkoblogs are all under the Creative Commons License – free to Levi’s and non-Levi’s alike. Just click the pic. I may be a goy, but I’m no piker. But, Levi, send me an e-mail anyway. We’ll schmooze.

To my goyish friends, my Old Yard Chrismas lights will have to be posted either from New York City or Houston.

And I suppose I should talk about losing one’s parents. The short form: it’s painful with and without.

Life is full of pain and misery…

…and over far too soon.           Woody Allen

Young Harvard women supporting breast cancer awareness:

I didn’t buy a bra. I’m a little conventional and I couldn’t think of who I could give one to with impunity. They were also supporting women in science at Harvard:

That’s the last one they had at the table, but you can buy them through the Women’s Center.

An ageless Harvard woman, Professor Lisa Randall was on Charlie Rose last night. It was impressive in every way I can think of.* She seemed very comfortable with herself, Charlie and the audience. She was there because she’s ‘an authority’ yet she sounded like someone who travels in places few can go. Mostly, she wanted to share with us. The only downside was that Charlie’s camera person did such a good job of capturing her persona [an order of magnitude better than the book jacket] that it made me feel… well… inadequate. [If you must know, her tendency to laugh uncontrollably when she sees me, does influence my thinking.]

If I’ve read the schedule right, the program will re-air tonight Wed. Dec 13 at midnight on Channel 44.

*would ‘of which I can think’ really be better? Come on now. Or am I dating myself?

You can piss off some of the people all the time

and all the people some of the time,

but you can’t piss off all the people all the time.

Trust me, I know! 🙂

Grays Hall, Old Yard

Pop quiz: “CLOSE THE TOWN STOP”

Night becomes you.

My apologies for the lack of honorifics, but I wanted to pay homage to that truly great TV sitcom, “Welcome Back, Cotter.” So long as you’re here, I have a question prompted by recent discussions with Lee Smolin. He classified string theory as a “background dependent” theory. I think I know what that is, and I think he’s prolly right about that. But he also said that string theory is ‘like general relativity in more dimensions’. That seems not quite right to me. For one thing it seems like a good thing to let the number of dimensions flap in the breeze. [Although, why we’re stuck on the integers is a bit cryptic what with fractals and all.] Anomaly cancellation seems like rather heavy machinery for fixing the dimension, but it does seem a lot better than a guess*. Writing the metric of the embedding space in the action does assume diffeomorphism invariance? But I don’t see y’all assuming the Equivalence Principle. If the Equivalence Principle becomes a theorem, then I’d have to say you’d really done something beyond GR. So what’s the story?

Maybe it’s a good thing you were on a plane when I put this up. It’s been too long since then young Dr. Sean [Now Professor Sean and inheritor of Feyman’s desk] taught me how to calculate spin connections. Google(assumptions of GR) -> inconclusive {so far}, but I’m thinking EP is assumed in ST. Not that that’s a bad thing. The big problem** with GR is that you can’t quantize it. If you take the assumptions of GR except allow dimension to float then fix it due to quantum mechanics, it IS conservative relative to other approaches, but often in science, that’s a good thing.*** It’s hard to make these judgements when the experimental air is thin. I feel dizzy.
*You could callthe choice of 3+1 dimensions the result of observation, but there are psychological experiments that cause me to question whether it is obvious.

**The assumption that the fundamental object of the theory has finite extension seems less important with the re-emegence of point particles in the form of D0 branes.
***I won’t bring Martha Stewart into this having already slightly abused Josh Lapan with my fractional wit.
——

Ed Witten, who some people regard as the smartest person in the world*, is one of the leading physicsts working in string theory. I ran into him yesterday in the basment of the Science Center. There is evidence that suggests that in one regard at least he is mortal. On the other hand, today when I gave him the score of The Game, I had to explain it.

Middle-aged Professor Sean, has wriiten the definitive review of “The Trouble with Physics.” I’m not the first to feel that the overall concerns of the book are wothy of attention, but the supporting examples are not the best. Loop Quantum Gravity is probably an especially poor choice. Also, Sean Pf. Diddy Cosmos** points out [though I suspect it was on the grapevine] that just because String Theory is “background dependent now” doesn’t mean it always will be. His recommendation? Worh a read with a critical eye.

*This assumes that “smarter than” is a transitive relation.

**Okay. It needs work.

Contrarians have always been important to science. Sometimes, like Continenetal Drift Guy, their ideas languish for years. But now we measure the movement of tectonic plates with laser ranging from the moon. Einstein was able to leap tall paradigms with a single bound. Then he tripped on quantum hurdle. But sometimes the contrarians just don’t pan out. Pons and Fleishman thought they had discovered cold fusion. It would have been wonderful. We could have avoided what Cockburn and Ridgeway called, “The Last Play”. Gene Malove got the job of a lifetime as CTO of KMS Fusion and nothing has been heard of it since. Looks like The Establishment was right.
…

Lee Smolin is visiting Richard Freeman’s

Economics 2888hf : Economics of Science and Engineering Workshop

to discuss his book, with the declarative title, “The Trouble with Physics”.

3:30 PM

53 Church St.

Lower Level Classroom.

A first for Harvard: My earlier post had the address wrong!*

Security will admit Havard ID holders on their own recognisance. Non Havard people need to come early so Jack Trumpbour can let you in.

*Havard makes mistakes all the time. The admitting it part seems to be hard 🙂

Wikipedia stand-off in search for online truth*

The British business newspaper Financial Times reports on the competition between “Jimbo” Wales , who cofounded and still leads Wikipedia, and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia cofounder, who is soon to launch Citizendium. The collectivist/anarchist discussion gets more overt near the end. The online and print editions are largely the same. There is one difference in ‘nuance’:

Print ediition:

Wales has also made changes to his own entry in the encyclopedia. Sanger also admits to having edited his own entry in Wikipedia “in the early days, along with a lot of other people”, though he adds he stopped when, “at a certain point, it became clear that it was against the policy of Wikipedia”.

Online:

Wales has also made changes to his own entry in the encyclopedia, even after a rule was adopted against this practice in 2002.

Sanger also admits …

Citizendium will not be the first such effort. Berkoblogger j points out that Scholarpedia is already online. It has yet another sociological/epistemological model, but it appears closer to Citizendium than Wikipedia. To justify their model, Scholarpedia links to pages by experts Benoit Mandelbrot, Lotfi Zadeh, Edward Lorenz, John Conway, Richard Karp. Unfortunately those pages are all ‘stubs’**. However, there are quite a few pages that are complete. ‘Controlling Chaos‘ is fully developed, while the more general ‘Chaos’ page is a green link – it points to a “ballot” to elect a “curator” for the page.

*There were mulitple links to the article when I looked and the one above was free.
**in Wikiworld a ‘stub’ is a placeholder for a future page – a Wiki I.O.U.

Today the Harvard Undergraduate Research Symposium had a “poster session” in the Science Center. I blurred through on my break. I apologize to the folks. I was the drive-by interrogator. Perhaps, I will blog lights. I don’t want to call them highlights. I will call them “posters I had a clue about”. I didn’t know cell biologists could spell isotropy let alone use it. Perhaps I was a bit too flippant. My remark is not about the young folks. It’s ’bout me – being so old; having accomplished so little. I don’t envy them. Well not much. I celebrate them. Bunji Sakita was a rather modest man. When he said, “You did rather well,” it meant something. Folks, you did rather well.

Sadly, I couldn’t stay and talk to more of the folks. There may be other people who couldn’t make it or didn’t know about it. Can we scan the posters and put them online? As long as you have an e-mail account with the Harvard Computer Society, why not talk to them about blogs/wikis?

Havard undergraduates presenting their research in the Science Center. In the lower left is one of the early almost electronic* computers built by Havard’s Howard Aiken.

*It was electromechanical rather than electronic, but it was a ‘stored program’ machine unlike previous calculating machines.

Can i get back to you on that?

Thanks Viriato! You helped me collect my thoughts!

We met at the Harvest Coop Cafe. We talked about cycles of history.

It’s OK for non-historians to talk about cycles of history. Historians, on the other hand, seem not to understand the complexity of what they are looking at. It is as if Avogadro’s number doesn’t even exist. At least, think in 3 (2+1) dimensions and talk about a helix.* But I’ll grant the historians that physicists have their sins too. The idea that time can be made to look like a spatial dimensional and reduced to visual metaphor certainly does some damage. Fortunately, Professor Lisa is trying to do something about that.

Anyway, one distressing repetition of the past that surely will continue into the future is the debate about what “The American People” actually voted for [or against]. Did they vote against the Iraq war? Or are they, as Scott Ritter claims, “opposed to losing in Iraq”? If the Rumsfeld ‘plan’ had worked, would they vote differently. Here’s the thing. What “would have been” is very hard to measure.

* If you run around in a circle and end up in the same place only later, your world line is a helix.

I agreed with their assertion last year. The world is still here, but in considerably worse shape I’m giving them a plus mark in truth in advertising. It’s a little earlier this year. It may well be bigger this year. They have been advertising on Air America Radio with a click through to the WCW national site. The Boston group has a blog. Today Oct. 5 starting at noon at the Bandstand on Boston Common. I will stop by at noon, but briefly. I’m going to respond to an invitation forwarded to me by the Harvard Cambridge Peace Walk.

Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Special Seminar

The Imperative and Possibilities of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons: Hibakusha and Japanese Movement Perspectives

Hiroshi Takakusaki, General Secretary of Gensuikyo (Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs)

Shoji Sawada, Professor of Physics (emeritus), Nagoya University, and a Hibakusha (a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing)

(Co-sponsored by the Weatherhead Center’s Program on U.S.-Japan Relations)

*

This event is being carried out in cooperation with the Cambridge office of the American Friends Service Committee and Joseph Gerson.

This is important because some people actually don’t know that seeking hegemony is a bad thing and why. One of the justifications for the invasion of Iraq was nuclear weapons. It was a policy of Non-Proliferation through Preemptive War. According to Scott Ritter the U.S. Government has been flying U2’s over Iran for at least two years. This is an act of war. Scott was right about the Iraqi nukes. So mostly likely, we are secretly already at war with Iran. The question is, will that war go “hot” or nuclear. Scott was wrong about the bombing starting June a year ago, but seeing the future is an imprecise science. The drumbeat from the administration has gotten louder. And with the manpower problems of the military, if the war does go “hot”, the “nuclear option” is likely. Then there is North Korea. The notion of a series of small nuclear wars to prevent proliferation is not the classical picture of THE UNTHINKABLE, but that’s kind of the point. The administration seems to be dedicated to making THE UNTHINKABLE thinkable. I don’t buy the premise.

So I’ll go briefly to WCW06, then to the Knafel, then get with Marion Lamm, then I’ll go to my little desk by the door. Maybe latter I’ll reconnect with WCW, they say they’ll be there for 24 hours, but I’m not sure they’ll be able to do it.

…and apparently someone else.

I found this posted on G level of Littauer [the old one.] Nicely done. Art and economics. Pop quiz. Identify the pictures. I know the second offhand, but I will have to Google the first. Hmm, I think I’ve got it, but I’ll Google to be sure.

I did know the answer to the first picture. I don’t see it offered in the near future at the Harvard Film Archive*, but I’m sure it’s available on DVD.

On looking at the second picture again, I realize that I don’t have any special knowledge about it. It is, obviously high tech. I initially assumed from the clean suit that it was semiconductor microchip manufacture, but mybe not. The technician in clean suit is looking at one of a row of monitors. I don’t know what is in h(er|is) hand. => I don’t know if the technician is a man or a woman. In the early days of integrated circuit manufacture, the workers who sat for hours at microscopes microsoldering the the chips to package leads where overwhelmingly women. I was in high school then. In college, the doctor from Planned Parenthood who came to give us a birds, bees, and condom talk***, added that the technicians who handled the eggs in vaccine manufacture were overwhelmingly women. But it’s different now?

——–
*You might like, En El Hoyo** offered on Saturday October 21 as part of the Boston Latino International Film Festival. Mass College of Art and the Latino Arts Center are cosponsors. I don’t know the full meaning of that.
**according to Google translate it means “In the Hole” although it sounds like the film happens above the main roadway.
***I think the Dean of Women at the time was the fossil that called the freshman women together and told them not to wear patent leather shoes. She retired early in my college career. She was worried about reflections. I’m not making this up. She had been there for a Sagan of years and it was a small Methodist school. She was worried about reflections.

You’ll have to believe me for now, that there are quite a few Black Alumni here. There were two very photogenic women at the reception table. I told them what I was up to, but they were still nervous. There was a panel, “State of Blacks at Harvard: Leveraging Our Resources for the Community at Large.” I recognized two names Soledad O’Brien ’88 from the TV and Chuck Turner ’62, Boston City Councillor for the neighboring community of Roxbury. If you wonder how I know so many black politicians, it’s because I live in Dorchester. The politicians who speak up for me, just happen to be black [and Latin(a|o)]. Well except for Sam Yoon.

A member of the Wabaseemoong Independent Nation. Like many stories of the clash between industrial culture and Native American cultures, it is not a pretty picture. Where’s the forest? Going fast – clearcutting.

Anne McDonald, originally from Canada, currently does research and teaching on the environment at Miyagi University in Osaki City, Japan [not Osaka as I said]. She is acquainted with the methyl mercury poisoning of the coastal village just south of Osaka for which the disease is now named – Minamata disease. When she discovered that the effects of Minamata disease still afflict the Ojibwa people in her native Canada [and her parents have a cabin nearby] she felt compelled to take on yet another project. She discovered that a fellow Canadienne had meticulously documented the affliction of the Ojibwa. And that Marion Lamm gave her documents to the Harvard College Library. Anne and her collaborator and publisher Hiroshi Isogai are here furiously pouring over 59 boxes of documents. I wonder whether her project and environmental study at Harvard would both benefit from some collaboration. They will be working mostly at Littauer Library in the North Yard through Tuesday.

*From the title of their book, “Ojibwa Voices Through the Forest: visual field notes of Canada’s Minamata experience.” Shimizukobundo