Our Kind of Ridiculous: Yous, Me and Blackness as Probable Cause

Kiese Laymon

When I was twenty-four, I flew paper airplanes past the apartment of a thirty-two-year-old white boy named Kurt in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. Kurt rocked a greasy brown mullet, bragged about ironing his bleached Lee's, and said the word "yous" a lot. Even with caked-up cornbread sealing the cracks of his teeth, and a raggedy mustache that looked like it was colored by a hyper six-year-old, Kurt always reminded me of somebody cute.
Kurt, whose apartment was directly above mine, lived with two women. One was his girlfriend. She could see. One was his wife. She could not.
Three little boys lived in the apartment with Kurt and his two partners. The youngest boy was Kurt's girlfriend's child. This miniature Viking loved to run his muddy hands through his blond hair and grin when he wasn't growling. The other two boys looked like they rolled around naked in a tub of melted tootsie rolls before coming outside to play.

http://gawker.com/5990859/our-kind-of-ridiculous-yous-me-and-blackness-as-probable-cause

Why is there a Pope?

Why is there a Pope? (No other major religion has the equivalent.) There's probably a ridiculously long explanation for this though you won't find it in the New Testament. Yes there is Matthew 16:18 but that passage doesn't say "Pope." And there is no absolute proof that Matthew, apostle and one-time tax collector, was the scribe of the first synoptic gospel but may have been written by an unknown non-observer.   I think the idea of such a church structure that has at its head a "ruler" who has the last word didn't come from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth but is based on the political organization of the Roman Empire. 

British scientists announce breakthrough in turning DNA into data storage

© AFP Photo

Scientists in Britain on Wednesday announced a breakthrough in the quest to turn DNA into a revolutionary form of data storage.

A speck of man-made DNA can hold mountains of data that can be freeze-dried, shipped and stored, potentially for thousands of years, they said.

The contents are "read" by sequencing the DNA - as is routinely done today, in genetic fingerprinting and so on - and turning it back into computer code.

"We already know that DNA is a robust way to store information because we can extract it from bones of woolly mammoths, which date back tens of thousands of years, and make sense of it," said Nick Goldman of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge.

"It's also incredibly small, dense and does not need any power for storage, so shipping and keeping it is easy."

DNA is the famous double helix of compounds - a long, coiled molecular "ladder" comprising four chemical rungs, adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine, which team up in pairs. C teams up with G, and T teams up with A.

The letter sequence comprises the genome, or the chemical blueprint for making and sustaining life. Human DNA has more than three billion letters, coiled into packages of 24 chromosomes.

The project entails taking data in the form of zeros and 1s in computing's binary code, and transcribing it into "Base-3″ code, which uses zeros, 1s and 2s.

The data is transcribed for a second time into DNA code, which is based on the A, C, G and T. A block of five letters is used for a single binary digit.

The letters are then turned into molecules, using lab-dish chemicals.

The work does not entail using any living DNA, nor does it seek to create any life form and in fact the man-made code would be quite useless in anything biological, the researchers said.

"We have absolutely no intention of messing with life," said Goldman.

Only short strings of DNA can be made, which means the message has to be chopped up into small sections of 117 letters, each attached to a tiny address tag, rather like packet-switching in Internet data, which enables data to be reassembled.

To prove their concept, the team encoded an MP3 recording of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech; a digital photo of their lab; a PDF of the landmark study in 1953 that described the structure of DNA; a file of all of Shakespeare's sonnets; and a document that describes the data storage technique.

"We downloaded the files from the Web and used them to synthesise hundreds of thousands of pieces of DNA. The result looks like a tiny piece of dust," said Emily Leproust of Agilent, a US biotech company that took the digital data and used it to synthesise molecules of DNA in the lab.

Agilent then mailed the sample back across the Atlantic to the EBI, where the researchers soaked the DNA in water to reconstitute it and used standard sequencing machines to unravel the code. They recovered and read the files with 100-percent accuracy.

The work follows a big step last year when scientists at Harvard announced they had stored 700 terabytes of data - enough for around 70,000 movies - in a gram of DNA.

The new method eliminates the risk of error when the DNA is read, say the researchers, whose work appears in the journal Nature.

"We figured, let's break up the code into lots of overlapping fragments going in both directions, with indexing information showing where each fragment belongs in the overall code, and make a coding scheme that doesn't allow repeats," said co-author Ewan Birney.

"That way, you would have to have the same error on four different fragments for it to fail, and that would be very rare."

Data is accumulating massively around the world, and storing it is a headache. Magnetic and optical discs are voluminous, need to be kept in cool, dry conditions and are prone to decay.

"The only limit (for DNA storage) is the cost," said Birney.

Sequencing and reading the DNA takes a couple of weeks with present technology, so it is not suitable for jobs needing instant data retrieval.

Instead, it would be appropriate for data that would be stored for between 500 and 5,000 years, such as a doomsday encyclopaedia of knowledge and culture.

But on current trends, sequencing costs could fall by a factor of 20 within a decade, making DNA storage economically feasible for timeframes of less than 50 years, the authors claim.

Source: Agency France-Presse

Facing it

Denial

    There's a scene that plays out in my head every time I hear a certain part of Richard Strauss's "Death and Transfiguration." The music slowly but dramatically builds, crashes with the cracking of a kettle drum, then thundering brasses and tireless strings take over; suddenly the sound is like a soaring jet coming in on a strafing run. A gash opens up in the sky as the plane passes overhead and a flood of emotion sweeps me away, as my flesh rises and my breath feels pulled from my lungs.

The music levels off to cruising speed and everything is taken with it. Floating souls of all earthly beings head toward the horizon which has become an amorphous pink depth.  All creatures that crawl, walk, fly, or swim swirl into this pink entrancing foam.  A vortex sucks up from the sky and I can almost feel the rush of air as the brasses plummet beneath the strings, and I am loosened from myself for that brief instant when it feels like I've taken flight.  The whole universe seems to be engaged. It's on a grand scale and it's a gigantic palette.  Something is waiting, somewhere above and beyond and all the last images that were cherished diminish in a movie fade out.  There is no longer pain, grief, remorse.  I am transfigured.

    Such is idealized death, idealized as to bode promise not fear, idealized because it is my imagination prompted by Richard Strauss, my Catholic background and about 40 years of watching movies.  However, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross might, if she were here, call it "denial." The terminally ill as we have learned through her writing first deny when they have been told they are going to die.  Art, being emblematic, sometimes seems to me a way to ward off evil, a sort of totemism. Even though I am not ill terminally or otherwise, Kubler-Ross has already uttered it. I am going to die someday. I am terminal. That is why for me creating art is denial.

Anger

    I am on a small boat, running on a vein of royal blue, twisting deep into the dense green jungle towards its heart. The destination is a rendezvous point, a small dock on a tiny river village outside of Santa Domingo in the Dominican Republic. It's the middle of April, 1965, three days before the U.S. invades, and this can only be a movie that I am in and am about to replay for you.

    This morning after the secure from general quarters, the Officer of the Deck instructs me to get ready to put my boat, the PL, in the water. The PL has a super charged, bored
and stroked six cylinder, gray marine, that accelerates so smoothly a nickel can stand on its end on the head cover as the throttle is pulled fully open.  It's my job to take care of that engine. It's now my luck to go where it goes. My job notwithstanding, I still have to put on full dress whites, wrap my bell bottoms in canvas puttees, and spit shine my shoes. They change their minds about the shoes in the last minute, telling me to put on my tennis shoes.
    After the boat is launched, the coxswain pilots it along-side a Jacob's ladder hanging from my ship, the landing ship dock, The USS Fort Snelling (LSD-30). Two marines climb down with M-16’s and both the Gunnery officer and the XO follow with forty-fives strapped to their sides.  They’re in battle fatigues, and without rank identified, they huddle in the cabin with the coxswain who steadies the boat with short revs of the engine. Suddenly we pull away with a jolt.

    At about two miles to go to the island the boatswain’s mate (known as the bow hook) and I are made to stand at parade rest in the well of the boat behind the engine compartment.  The boat is about twenty-five feet long and six feet wide.  It's all battleship gray, made of wood, but molded and streamlined for speed, looking a bit like a small PT boat. The bow has a six inch high chrome railing, the cabin follows with hand grips on the roof;  and behind the cabin in the well the engine roars inside a raised wooden compartment.  We stand just behind the engine, grateful we're not made to stand on the space above the rudder assembly, the stern or the tail of the boat where an American flag flaps wildly.

    We enter the mouth of the river and as the coxswain de-throttles, the supercharger screams then lowers its tune from a shrill whistle to a faint sigh. The Gunnery officer peers out from under the cabin and orders the bow hook to stand on the bow.  I can see the shadow of the officer's beard even though it is only about 0800..

    I stay put and watch the bow hook shimmy his way forward along the cabin, gripping the hand grips then leaping agilely onto the bow.  He gets down on his hands and knees, pulls a line pole from its holder, and begins to knock away at the hanging brush as we pass through. The gunnery officer, a little dramatically, I think, loads & cocks his forty-five.  The XO hunkers himself down behind the coxswain his gun unholstered and the two marine guards each lean their weapons out of both sides of the cabin, the muzzles pointing toward opposite shores. Finally the gunnery officer orders me to jump up on the boat's stern and stand at parade rest. I was scared shit before, now I may have to ask someone to pass me the toilet paper.

    Up on the stern I think of this, this preparation done as though I am the sacrifice. I assume the parade rest position, but then look around trying to hide the look of stark terror I know is on my face.  I see blue water, the green jungle, my boat and the automatic weapons. I wonder almost out loud why I don't have one, and grow so angry that I wish I could snatch a weapon and do away with these officers and marines.  My God, I am going to die, you mother fuckers.  Suddenly, the flag whips between my legs and flaps ominously, wrapping itself around my legs and swathing my genitals, a death shroud. But no I can’t die. I won’t die, ever.


Bargaining

    I am on one of my many early morning walks. It's Sunday. Winter floods all the senses. I walk as usual across Smith Street, down Butler, across Court, along Kane and finally cross over the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and onto Columbia Street. I walk south. The neighborhood changes from Carroll Gardens to Red Hook. Buildings are in deserted and collapsed states. Lumber, bricks, garbage are scattered amid oil blotches and dog shit. Abandoned shopping carts look as though they were tossed by a tornado against a rusting chain link fence, and curbs sinking into the gutter blur the distinction between sidewalk and the street. It's Beirut, Baghdad, Brooklyn. It's not a movie, but as usual I think I am in one.

    It is frigid, but a man, a Rambo styled bandana tied around his head, naked to the waist, sleek and muscular, emerges from under a broken stairway. He stops to watch me. I remind myself, since there isn't another soul on the block in either direction, that I have two six pound weights in my hands. If he takes steps in my direction, it's either him or me. During this rush of terror I have no other thought and just pump my arms like a prizefighter and continue moving.  The feeling is the same as taking off in airplane. You can't back up.  Mercifully he disappears beneath his stairway like a troll.

    By the time I reach Carroll Street to traverse the footbridge back over the BQE to civilization, back through Carroll Gardens, I've convinced myself that I'm just a paranoid. But as I climb the steps of the bridge the incident becomes a message. St. Stephen's church on the other side of the bridge tolls its bell heavily. Blung. Blung. Blung. It repeats for several minutes. Beneath the walkway, the cars and trucks roll thickly and noisily even at this hour, most heading up and out of the blackened pit of the BQE toward the open air Gowanus Expressway. Two large green signs with white lettering point the ways. I'm humbled by the bells and overwhelmed by the traffic noise. I turn around to see the sun's winter brightness, low on the horizon blotting out the distance where the westbound traffic is coming from and the eastbound traffic is going. I'm praying for forgiveness and salvation, suddenly and I see it as a long take with deep focus. I’ll be good. I’ll be good I promise I’ll be good. I just need another chance.  

Depression

    I'm in Seward Park High School. This is a famous old school on the lower east side just south of Delancey Street on Essex. I'm there for a civil service exam. All test takers are hustled into an auditorium, a high-ceilinged, arching structure.  Sunlight streams in through the sandy colored windows.  We're made to sit on peeling wood laminated seats for nearly an hour, and then given instructions by a bald man who reminds me of Ed Koch.  The first question he fields is about toilet availability.  He pauses and looks around, beckoning laughter with his wry look.  I'm unwilling even to smile as I'm overtaken with my thoughts. I look around; nearly everyone looks between 40 and 50. About forty years ago we would have been in a similar auditorium, acting out our thoughts instead of thinking them.

    We're dismissed to our testing rooms, row by row, and in silence, and I'm reminded of church services that I attended when we would get up row by row to receive communion.  We follow one another through the hallways, which deepen the mystery for me, up winding dirty gray stairways, worn with a century of foot falls, past the wire meshed windows, up to our rooms on the fourth floor. So this is what it's like, our final hour already passed, I think to myself, as I slide into a seat joined to a desk and feel a millennium's worth of frozen hard gum stuck to the underside.  Fade to black.

Acceptance

    I am at Yankee stadium. What can be here to disturb my imagination? Then it happens, something I have witnessed at least a million times.  For both teams it's a meaningless game, both being out of the pennant race and it's the end of September.  The game is tied in the bottom of the ninth. There are two out.  Runners are on second and third.  The batter, not a bad hitter, has a three and two count. The pitcher puts his foot on the rubber, leans forward and looks into the catcher for the sign. Those of us left  in attendance, about three thousand  are mostly on our feet, getting ready to leave as soon as a run is knocked in.  We all should have left a long time ago but they’ll be no more baseball for us until next year. The pitcher takes the sign, and then takes a deep breath. He looks over to the runner at third, then at second. Will he forget them and just pitch to the hitter? Anyone who would try to steal home in this game would have to just be crazy anyway. It's not worth it. Or is it?

    The pitcher works from the set position then releases the pitch. It's an outside fastball, but too close to the hitter’s zone to let it blow by. He swings. The ball is fouled up to his right into an empty upper deck in right field. The ball bounces among the empty seats, rolls down the stairs and disappears. I stare after it lost in thought. No one goes chasing the ball. I turn back to the game but too late to see the batter strike out. The game goes into extra innings, but I've suddenly lost interest. Where has the ball disappeared to? No one has pursued it. Clearly it was only a foul in an unimportant game. Even the baseball maniacs who would show up for a game like this don't want it. For that minute I see it as the long and final take before the end.

    It is what it is, but it’s not a satisfactory end. What is wrong with that foul ball that it should be ignored and shunned as it was except for my eyes that followed it? As a ball it started out pretty much the same as all the others. It had a cork center, surrounded by two layers of rubber. It was wrapped in gray and black twine and dipped in a gluey substance. The two halves of horsehide, looking like figure eights, had been hand-sewn with ninety-six stitches, by piece workers in Haiti. And at its beginning it was a brand new spanking baseball, snowy white, with raised red stitches and a black logo, weighing in at 5 1/4 ounces and nine inches of spherical circumference.  An auspicious beginning, its chance come round, a misguided then forgotten hit.  

    Unfortunately after writing this, I'm facing death left with one nagging almost childish question: What is the relationship of one ordinary baseball, that goes foul, to that of the entire universe?  So I am brought back to Strauss, to art. Deny. Deny. There's no money in just accepting the inevitable. 

Big box stores collecting for charitable organizations

I don't like these big box stores that ask me if I want to contribute a $1 to some fund. You know they don't turn that money over instantly to wherever it's going, but they keep it in their vaults and make money off it until it's time to send the charitable donations in. And what annoys me even more is that I'd like to offer an explanation to the clueless checkout person giving me looks that seem on the judgmental side. "You know I give directly to X Y &Z charities every year, so this stinking dollar doesn't mean a thing to anyone other than your stinking overseers because it's more money for them in the long run."  But I never say that. I just say "No."

Kubrick vs. Burgess

Stanley Kubrick has been my all time favorite film director.  I've seen his complete but rather small output many times over.  I've lauded these films.  A Clockwork Orange of course is part of this oeuvre and I can't even count the number of times I've seen it and how often I have extolled its virtues as the complete film experience, my droogies.  And then I had to read the book. After the book I felt let down. . . by Stanley Kubrick.  Anthony Burgess, who wrote it, possessed a rare & remarkable genius for language which to the credit of Kubrick and to the gifted snarling Malcolm McDowell did a pretty good job with the language in the film. But the boy from the Bronx  missed the boat in terms of the entire novel. Most unfortunately the initial American version of the book had the last chapter excised. It was this version that Kubrick used for his script.  When he found out about the last chapter he claimed that it did not seem realistic. In the movie the rebellious and seemingly psychopathic, Alex De Large, after first being "cured" of violence via Skinnerian like methods, is eventually restored to health and violence and has a government minister literally spoon feeding him at the end as he goes back to his violent ways and the movie ends.  But the book does something different. It is opposed to excessive governmental abuse of criminal behavior and it's also opposed to "well-meaning" liberals who would use Alex's condition to cudgel the government while sacrificing him for the good of all.  The last chapter eventually has Alex growing up and internally feeling his life had to change in order to be a productive human being. In other words he came to this much the same way as many rebellious teens seem to do.  They grow up! . . . For Burgess's part he didn't think much of the book itself and dismissed it as a minor work.  It was just something he banged out in a few weeks. Yes it was this book that made him famous via Kubrick's version. But his masterworks are nothing like this book. The London Times a few years ago ranked Burgess as 17 out of a list of 50 of great writers since 1945.  I shall be reading more Burgess henceforth.  

Romney vs Obama

The Chief executive of a Fortune Five Hundred Corporation is the Chief Executive and is considered the leader of the corporation who more or less (to use religious terms) creates the corporation in his own image. He or she has the final word on the direction of said corporation. He or she takes responsibility for the outcome of a corporation's activities. He or she is the person to whom the rest of the corporation in the end answers to. And if anything the CEO takes the credit for all successes and is beaten up over all the failures.
The modern U.S. Presidency has been likened in some quarters to that of the Chief Executive of the Corporation known as the United States of America.  Yes, the president is the Chief Executive of the U.S. though I don't think when the constitution was written that the President was considered as a CEO of a Corporation known as The Unites States simply because no such thing existed. 

Mitt Romney though believes that the President is like the CEO of a Corporation. Why? Because he's been selling us this idea based on his experience as one. I'm too lazy to look up quotes and such but I'm sure they are all over the place.

The problem though as I see it, if in fact he believes he is the CEO of a corporation known as the Mitt Romney campaign and if  he believes he will one day be the CEO of the United States, is that Romney is not acting like the CEO in his own campaign.  He has cobbled together images of himself that he believes will be palatable to the average Republican and hopefully to the average voter. Rather than demonstrating who he really is, he comes off as wooden, out of touch, believing his own press releases, a typical country club old boy walking around with his hand in his jacket pocket. He has not lead the way. He has not taken responsibility and he acts as if he is not being beaten up over his failures and then denies that they have happened.

In short he offers us a leader who would "mail it in," like so many of his class who hang around the country club and don't get their hands dirty doing the work that they are supposed to be doing. Those are the people whose corporations fail. And if the U.S. is a "corporation" as he believes and many pundits say, then with Mitt Romney we can look forward to four years of failure.

Barack Obama offers a far different contrast as a man who is always on the job and always respects and follows through on what his job title as Chief Executive of the U.S. entails. Obama's problem is the problem Presidents have been handing down since Ronald Reagan, namely taking more control of the government instead of allowing for Congress (which is also a problematic matter but that's another story altogether) to do its job the way they should.

This attempt by recent Presidents to subvert the Constitution is an extremely serious policy & constitutional law issue though one that a lot Americans would probably not see the significance of. And obviously is not even thought of during a Presidential campaign. Certainly we don't hear about this from the pundits.  It seems to me that it's another version of "guns and butter." Lyndon Johnson tried to ameliorate the impact of Vietnam by creating the Great Society. Obama in some way has done something similar by attempting to provide better social programs while at the same time seeking the power to subvert parts of the constitution, namely the fourth and the first amendments in the name of "national security."  The fact is it seems that it doesn't affect anyone who thinks they are following the law, that is, until it happens and then it's too late.  

Fortunately a Circuit Court  judge recently denied legislation to the Obama Admin that would further eviscerate the constitution. That's a good thing for us. It also provides a more acceptable reason for me to be able to vote for Obama this year.  Perhaps it will also let the Obama Administration be a little more clear-eyed regarding the Constitution.