Philip Larkin
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
This short-film made by a 17-year old film-maker Kiri Davis (NYC) is winning awards and stirring up a storm of controversy across the United States.
At parties, people often ask me what I do. Normally I answer that I simulate molecules on a computer. Most people seem satisfied with that answer, after all, it's only an ice-breaking question (people are secretly hoping you answer something along the lines of "sex-worker" or "published novelist").
But once in a while, I'll actually get someone who really wants to know. Then, I'll give an impromptu explanation, complete with flying arms and sound effects.
But really, the best way to understand what I do, is to look at the results of a simulation. And here is one of the simplest simulations using the techniques of molecular dynamics, the neuro-peptide enkephalin in a box of water molecules:
A stiff Vice President campaigns on his administration's legacy of unprecedented prosperity. Looks terrible on TV. Bows out, following a disputed vote count. Then, two terms later, with no incumbent in the race, he re-enters the fray. Promises to change the course of a disastrous war founded on lies. And charges to victory. I'm referring, of course, to the 1968 campaign of Richard Milhous Nixon. But four decades later, history has a chance to repeat itself for Albert Arnold Gore. .... [more]
My intentions are pure
But my gaze begins to wander
As the voice drones on and on
It is the nature of the Speaker
to Speak
And his words pour forth like raindrops
But try as I might I can only
Focus on the space between the words
The voice drones on and on
He pulls out a handkerchief
Dabbing one round silvery bead of sweat
That has appeared on his high shiny Brow
All the meanwhile
The voice drones on and on
My concentration is my friend
But my friend is weak
I wish it were made of steel
Instead of one-ply toilet paper
My mind is easily scattered into the eight corners of the room
The voice drones on and on
My mind drops my body
But not in a good way
The voice drones on and on
Looking up at the scorching white of the overhead
An errant pointer scurries across my eyes
The screen flickers
The power is cut
A universe dies
But the voice drones on and on
I look into my cup of tea
And see some people swimming
I swirl my cup
Making waves and minor storms
I look carefully and see
That they are mostly accountants
Treading tea in pin-striped suits
Some are frightened, others just smile
And wave
I wave back
If they could they would advise me
Of fantastic opportunities
I could invest in the toaster
For example
After a time my thirst takes hold
I raise the cup to my lips
Surprised, I see that some
Are hanging onto the rim
But undeterred I take a sip
The liquid swirls around the accountants
As they wash down my throat and
I barely notice them
Like the 37th decimal place of π
I feel the tea slide
Some of the accountants no doubt will try to
Abseil back up my windpipes
But that would be as futile
As filling in a tax return
Maddox's page of Unintentionally Sexual Comic Book Covers. Here's one example to the left (can you see anything vaguely sexual?). 
And while we're at it, here's Pop Culture Addict's Top Ten Lamest Superheroes of All Time, including Matter Eater Lad, with his power of (you guessed it) "super eating":
I read 49 books, 3 short of a book a week, which in my books, is close enough. This year, I got to read some contemporary poetry. I also revisited some old friends. I also spent an ungodly amount of time wiping Proust and Pynchon off my classics reading-list.
On people who like Joanna Newsom:
"It's like people who say they love nature but you can't imagine them camping because their haircuts are too complicated."
~Brianna Toth (new flatmate)
I live in California, ergo, I must do some kind of exercise. My chosen sport (or anti-death activity) is football, or as they call it here, soccer. For convenience, I play it indoors. Some people I play indoor soccer with are very good, some are average. And then, there's Zinedine Zidane:
"Make injections and decapitations quicker and easier with Braintree's DecapiCones®.
...injections can be made directly through the film!
...DecapiCones® restrain post-decapitation kicking and prevent personal contact with feces and urine.
...Animals enter readily, heading for the breathing hole at the small end. Then you simply roll and squeeze the large end closed.
...For decapitation, hold at the rear and insert the small end into the decapitator."
Get it quick before it goes, for mice (or gerbil) fetishists:
Comes with everything you see: Complete small-mouse, double-section, fixed Racks with Hepa Filter/Blower Module; Cages; Wire Screens; Water Bottles; Cage Filters; and Identification Tags. 11 cages high, 7 cages on each side of shelf.
wefeelfine.org is one of the most unusual websites I've come across. It's a trippy animation. It's a social network. It's a place to tell the world how you feel.
Why do I love les chantueses françaises so much? See following, this girl sings from her id:
How do 2 proteins come together to form a complex? Although we can sometimes determine the crystal structure of a complex, this only gives us a static picture, the end product of a dynamic process.
To provide a glimpse into how two proteins come together, Tang and co-workers, in the paper "Visualization of transient encounter complexes in protein–protein association" Nature (2006) 444:383, devised a brilliant scheme to capture the alternative ways that two proteins bind together in solution.
They studied the binding of the N-terminal domain of enzyme I (EIN) to the phosphocarrier protein (HPr). The figure on the left shows EIN on the left (mostly blue). HPr is the protein on the right (green). In the experiment, they attached Mn2+ ions (3 red balls on the far right) onto the surface of HPr.
The key idea is that these Mn2+ ions induce a magnetic response in EIN where the magnetic response (ΔΓ2) of the backbone H atoms in EIN depends on the distance of the H atoms from the Mn2+ ions. The magnetic response ΔΓ2 (red dots) for each backbone H atom in EIN is plotted below:
The black line in the figure above is the ΔΓ2 calculated from the crystal structure of the complex of EIN bound to HPr. The measured ΔΓ2 (red dots) show a number of peaks that deviate from the black line. These peaks correspond to transient binding sites of HPr to other parts of the EIN surface.
From the results of a series of similar experiments, Tang and co-workers reconstructed the most likely transient binding sites of HPr to EIN. The alternate conformations of HPr are shown as a density map (green) in the following image. The actual binding site of HPr in the crystal structure is shown in blue, and EIN is shown as an eletrostatic surface map (red is positive, white neutral, blue is negative):
The alternative conformations of HPr bind to positively charged parts of the surface of EIN. However, near the actual binding site, there are few alternate conformations, even though the surface around the actual binding site is also strongly charged.
Tang and co-workers conclude that it is very easy for two proteins to stick together, drawn by simple electrostatic attraction. But this binding is weak. To explain the absence of alternative conformations around the actual binding sites, they argue that once the HPr binds close to the actual binding site, there is a large energy funnel that forces the HPr into the actual binding site.
This is the first study to show, experimentally, that two proteins can transiently bind anywhere through electrostatic interaction, a truly significant result.
What does the the membrane that wraps around our cells look like? We know that the membrane is choc-a-bloc full of proteins, but we can't see them directly because the level of detail is too small for our electron microscopes to look at, without destroying the cell.
Is there a way to re-construct the mosaic of proteins that normally stud a membrane? In "Molecular Anatomy of a Trafficking Organelle" Cell (2006) 127:831, Takamori and co-workers studied the synaptic vesicle - a little bubble wrapped up in membrane that carries neuro-transmitters from one synapse in the brain to another. 
This is a synaptic vesicle as seen with electron microscopy. You can't go into any more detail. Instead, Takamori and co-workers determined the precise composition of all the proteins that float in the membrane of the synaptic vesicle. With this information, they built this delightful model of a synaptic vesicle:
This image is somewhat reminiscent of the vibrant watercolors painted by David Goodsell, which were created using some deep intuitions about protein density and oodles of artistic license:
If I were to tell you that recently, I went to an experimental modern dance piece , you might raise your eyebrows. If I were to tell you that the piece explored trans-gender issues in a social activism festival, you might even start to smirk. And if I were tell you that it was brilliant, you would roll your eyes around and around until I could only see the whites of your eyes. Well, I went to, saw, and vastly enjoyed Sean Dorsey's "The Outsider Chronicles", as part of the ManiFestival (Dance Brigade's Festival for Social Change) in San Francisco.
"The Outsider Chronicles" is a loosely biographical collection of consists of 6 short pieces. The stories revolve around the theme of sexual identity. Before the show, I was a little afraid that this was going to be a niche piece. The audience was not your typical theater crowd, mainly lesbian couples and trans-gender folks. Would the piece speak in a secret code of the trans-gender community, impenetrable to the ears of an outsider? Fortunately this was not the case. "The Outsider Chronicles" spoke in a universal language. It spoke in the form of story.
The most significant artistic choice that Dorsey made, was to perform the dance pieces over a spoken word performance. I had never seen this fusion of spoken word and dance before. By engaging the audience through a series of beautifully written story, Dorsey had highlighted a fundamental problem with most forms of dance that I have seen - although kinetically enthralling, most dance is intellectually dis-engaging. To fully engage in a scene, I think it is imperative that we get under the skin of the characters on stage. Dance alone cannot tell such stories. With spoken word, character and dialog are refracted onto the movements on the stage.
The miracle of the "The Outsider Chronicles" is that Sean Dorsey is every bit as good a spoken-word performer as he is a dancer. There were six beautifully written stories, full of vigor, life and humor. There was a piece about the first time he kissed a girl. Another was a poignant piece about the drive of a couple to have an emergency meeting with his father. These spoken word pieces could easily stand on their own. Here, they formed the platform on which the dance unfolded.
The stories and the dance dove-tailed as we see flying bodies act out the conflicts and confusions of the relationships embedded in the stories. The spoken dialogue gave flesh to the movements. Movement and intention become one. I could felt the stories wash over me, kinetically, bodily. Reflecting on this, I realized that the vacuity of much of traditional ballet was due to the inherent limit of dance to convey rich emotional experience. Whereas seasoned ballet enthusiasts already know the story of the ballet that they will see, and hence can interpret the actions on the stage, there is no such recourse for a novice. In "The Outsider Chronicles", Dorsey cuts through that incomprehensibility by merging voice with dance.
I was also enthralled by the lighting and staging. The staging was spare, allowing the rather imaginative use of light to cut through the space. Slabs of light were used to conjure up a conjugal bed, another to project the interior of a car free-wheeling on a road-trip. In another scene, a wash of vertical light conjured up a bath-room on the front of the stage.
Dorsey examines the line from desire to the fulfillment of a fully-realized self-identity. His stories document his struggle to engage with the world, though specific to trans-gender issues, there is a universal dimension to his story. The strength and compassion in the way he recounts his past, makes his struggle heroic. In the last piece "Creativity", Dorsey laments a moment in his youth where he missed a chance to seize the moment and declare himself, and pit himself against everyone around him. But if he failed in that moment in the past, he has more than made-up for it in sublimating his story into a muscular work of art.
I know the cute factor to this video will drip through your computer screen and onto the carpet. But I really, I couldn't resist posting the daily adventures of penguin shopper, Lala-chan:
I was just reading about Verónica Michelle Bachelet Jeria, the current president of Chile. Her biography is phenomenal (from wikipedia):
Bachelet—a surgeon, pediatrician and epidemiologist with studies in military strategy—served as Health Minister and Defense Minister under President Ricardo Lagos. She is a separated mother of three and a self-described agnostic, which sets her apart in a predominantly conservative and Catholic country. A polyglot, she speaks Spanish, English, German, Portuguese and French.
When you are inside the political circus of the United States, it's easy to forget that the victims of the spasmodic American war machine in the Iraqi war are actually living, thinking human beings, some even brilliant bloggers: http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
I love the comment system invented by those guys at reddit.com. It's a genuine innovation by bringing together a couple of simply ideas, resulting in an elegant way of visually structuring a conversation.
Reddit started with the idea of ranking comments, form sites such as slashdot and amazon. Each comment in a thread is scored, whereby comments in a thread can be rated with an unobtrusive up-or-down arrow. The innovation is that the comments in a thread flow up or down a page in terms of the comment rating. Those that are popular float to the top of the page, and those that are unhelpful sink to the bottom.
It's a remarkably intuitive system that rewards good contribution to the conversation, without resorting to draconian censoring measures. Bad comments are not hidden; they just sink to the bottom of the page. If you feel inclined, you simply scroll down to the bottom-feeders and see the shit. Good comments are not just rewarded just by brownie points, but they get to be read first simply in lieu of being at the top of the page. This provides a genuinely useful service for other readers.
Having threaded comments is also important. Replies to specific comments get attached to the parent comment, and they move up or down with them. However brilliant rejoinders to a shitty comment deserve their day in the sun, and whole threads get moved up if the replies are rated higher than the parent comment.
On reddit.com, the cream does float to the top. But if you really want to, you can still lick the scum at the bottom.
This was seen in a display window of the Myers department store in Melbourne, Australia. As an Australian expat, I believe it demonstrates the true meaning of Australian mate-ship, marsupial-style:
Party-poopers claim the hydraulics was "broken", in a brokeback mountain kind of way
I'm of the opinion that more people should know at least one other language. I'm not talking about some kind of cheesy tourist phrase-book or a I'm-trying-to-pick-up-girls-at-a-summer-course kind of thing.
I'm talking about honest-to-god bilingualism. I'm talking about being in a place where you have to use the language just to survive. I'm talking getting the power cut-off if you can't explain to the guy on the phone that your papers are in actual order. I'm talking about being able to order the food that you actually wanted. It's hard, it's difficult, and it'll turn your world upside down.
Being able to talk in another language means that you'll end up thinking differently. It's a strange thing to slip in and out of one language. Strange associations jump out at you from different angles, as you begin to understand different idioms. Each language has its favorite phrases and pronouns. By choosing that slightly different alternative to say the same thing - you start seeing the world in slightly different ways, with profound effects on what you easily see, or don't see. Speaking in another language, textures your world much more than a character mod in a DOOM extension pack.
There's also nothing quite like the loneliness and frustration in being stuck in a land where no one can communicate with you. People who are generally smart will feel the pain of being slow and retarded. Your tongue will feel thick and unwieldy. Whereas once you were always quick with a witty rejoinder, you are suddenly reduced to monosyllabic responses. Yet there are subtle joys. As you feel your language skills click up a gear, you will feel the pleasure of rediscovering latent social skills.
But more importantly, once you realize that, what was once your monolithic world, is but one of many worlds bound by your native vocabulary, you will realize that it is just that - only one world in a vast universe of possible worlds.
I am a computational biologist. I compute molecules. I sit in the darkness of the computer lab and sculpt molecules by wielding the sharp scalpel of my mouse. Inside the computer I manipulate the coordinates of a molecule (currently the PDZ domain) and surrounding bath of water molecules. I apply force-fields, mathematical descriptions of the interactions between atoms, to my molecule, and hopefully, I coax the molecule into doing something remarkable: a flip, a rotation, a clamping of the active site - an action that might explain a chemical reaction in precise atomic detail.
This kind of precision is beguiling, and it engenders a kind of arrogance. That's why I often have to pinch myself hard to remember that, even though I might know the behaviour of these molecules down to the sub-Angstrom (0.00000001 m) level, I barely know anything about the molecule.
Chemicals start off as something in the ground, or in the ground up substances of animals. I rarely know whether the molecules that I study inside my computer comes from an animal, a plant or a bacterium. And what if I did? I still have to know how to squeeze that particular chemical out of the carcass of, say, a dead cow. This requires expertise in the manifold arts of physical chemistry, whereby you separate, from the rough and guts of a ground-up cow, the millions of different chemicals that make up the once living cow. Understanding a chemical requires not just in knowing how to find it in nature, but also how to purify it till it's purer than the driven snow. But to truly understand a chemical, you have to know what it does, how it reacts with other chemicals, and under what conditions.
In biochemistry, the problem of knowing what a chemical has taken a rather strange turn. We actually possess a rich source of important biological chemicals, but no way of knowing what these chemicals actually do. This source is the human genome, which exists as a publicly available database. As we know quite a lot about the grammar and syntax of DNA, a computer scientist can trawl the database for sequences of DNA that code for a completely novel biological molecules. It's then a simple matter of sending in an order for a biotech company to make the molecule from scratch.
But how to figure out what the molecule does in our bodies? We don't believe in mysterious life forces any more. We believe that all of life's processes, from digestion to respiration to the way old people lose their memories must rest on some kind of chemical process. Every chemical extracted from living things could potentially have an important function in the living process. But given a molecule picked out at random from the human genome, we have no way of knowing where the molecule should be found in the body, what biological processes that it takes part in, and what other processes it depends on. The human genome remains silent on such issues.
The precise knowledge of the 3-dimensional coordinates of a molecule is probably the last thing that scientists get to know about a chemical. 3-dimensional coordinates are finicky things, and knowledge of them normally comes at the end of a long investigative process. By then, much of the chemical properties of the chemical are already known.
The other day, we had the world's greatest sculptor, Richard Serra, visit the UCSF campus where I work, in Mission Bay, a former industrial area south of downtown San Francisco, which was a dead zone that the local council was in the process of converting into a biotechnology park.
A solemn man, Richard Serra's face is permanently set into a metaphysical scowl, yet he dressed in casual gear - jeans, comfortable dark-blue shirt, and sneakers. He had been commissioned by UCSF to build a sculpture, and thereby, was obliged to come to UCSF and talk about his piece. The piece, "Ballast", consists of two huge flat metal plates, 50 feet high and 14 feet wide, that lent in slightly off-horizontal off-vertical directions. If you stand at the base and look up, you will see a disorientating curve in the metal.
The meeting was held in an auditorium in our new community center, a striking building designed by Mexican architects Ricardo and Victor Legorreta, which was bathed in a bold earthy red, which balanced the lego-like austerity of the form. The community center building stood out from the surrounding beige-ness of the other buildings.
I was keen to see how they would set up the talk. In the auditorium, two comfortable sofa chairs were set up on the stage with a black curtain backdrop. The talk was going to be conducted as an interview in a PBS special. I didn't know who the interviewer was, but a friend later informed that the interviewer was a local construction magnate. I had always known about the symbiotic relationship between obscene wealth and high-end art, but I had never seen it in the flesh like here in the auditorium, where a very rich man doubled as the probing interviewer of an artist of very expensive modern art.
The entanglements of moneyed interests and art was more intricate in this case, as the piece was commissioned by UCSF, which was investing in a very large construction project at the Mission Bay campus, which necessarily involved complex construction and real estate interests. So it made sense that a construction magnate would interview the artist, who was patronized by a scientific institute that was rapidly expanding its building infrastructure.
Serra was a brilliant interviewee, crisp, articulate, and was an inexhaustible source of anecdotes, which involved the suitable name-dropping of everyone from Phillip Glass to Jasper Johns to Charlie Mingus. Because Serra was born and raised in San Francisco, he recounted many childhood reminiscences - baseball games in the local park a couple of blocks from the campus, climbing through old warehouses - typical experiences of a nascent internationally acclaimed sculptor.
Later, he moved on to more familiar territory - a standard narrative of how he became the sculptor that he is today - from English lit major, to embryonic painter/drawer, to studying art history at Yale with abunch of soon-to-be-very-famous artists, and then onto a fellowship in Italy, and finally to New York as struggling artist. It was an absorbing story, which illustrated how the contingent factors of his biography inevitably coalesced into the choice of large-scale fabricated steel as his media of choice, and "weight" as the leit-motif of his artistic vision. This was as deft a piece of self-invention if I ever heard one.
The sculpture was described as the "centerpiece" of the new UCSF campus at Mission Bay by the UCSF chancellor, Michael Bishop, the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine. Such was the occasion that Michael Bishop himself gave the opening address to the interview, thus completing the on-stage triumvirate of the interaction of science (Bishop), art (Serra) and money (construction magnate/interviewer).
Still, what surprised me was how the interaction between the work of art and the science at UCSF was virtually non-existent. Michael Bishop did not interact with Serra at all, on-stage, but more to the point, the purpose of UCSF - medical research - played no part in the design of the sculpture. Serra described his process: when during a visit to the site, he realized that the campus was an immensely flat landscape. Wouldn't it be interesting to put up something completely vertical? Serra had already done a vertical metal plate piece in Germany(?), so he decided that for this piece, he would explore the interaction of two such vertical standing pieces.
Science played no part in the design of the piece. And as I looked around the auditorium, which was very well attended, I realized that there were very few grad-students or faculty from the medical research facility next door. Instead, the audience was made up of architects, art patrons (including the former owner of the Bank of America), and students from the nearby College of Creative Arts. Though fetching that female art-students often are, as an art-loving scientist, I felt very lonely indeed.
So Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco (the seventh circle of hell for bible-belt americans) will be the Speaker of the House, the third highest political position in the USA. Maybe one day the USA will join much of the Islamic world in electing a woman head-of-state.
All praise to those brilliant men who conceived of the Constitution of the United States of America. They foresaw the inevitable tides of fascism that roll back and forth every few decades and constructed a system of government that keeps it at bay. The system of checks and balances works, slowly, but it works. The Democrats have taken back the House, the Senate is tied. The Executive is next. The world can take a deep deep breath.
This article ostensibly talks about a Walmart first, the whole staff of a Wal-mart store walking out. Given Wal-mart's aggressive anti-union, anti-labour policies, what drove these, mainly hispanic workers, to take such a drastic step. It was the implentation of a new company policy, that is a sign of indentured work in the future to come:
moves to cut the hours of full-time employees from 40 hours a week to 32 hours, along with a corresponding cut in wages, and to compel workers to be available for shifts around the clock.
In addition, the shifts would be decided not by managers, but by a computer at company headquarters. Employees could find themselves working 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. one week and noon to 9 p.m. the next. "So workers cannot pick up their children after school everyday, and part-timers cannot keep another job because they can be called to work anytime," says Vasquez.
In addition to scheduling changes and reduction in hours, workers are now required to call an 800 number when they are sick. "If we are at an emergency room and spend the night in a hospital and cannot call the number, they won't respect that," says Larosa, who has worked at the store for six years. "It will be counted as an unexcused absence."
I went to India 7 years ago, and it was one of the most mind-blowing experiences of my life. Music and vibrant primary colors saturate every pore of your skin.
The songs of a blockbluster movie are released months before the movie is released. These songs are broadcasted over every little tin-pot battery radio receiver held by every grizzled shopkeeper in every roadside stall in every dusty streets in the state of Utter Pradesh.
And so the songs of the hit of 1999, "Taal" has sedimented somewhere in the deep dark recesses of my travelling memories. The movie stars the scrumptuous Aishraya Rai, former Miss World (who only lipsynchs). It was the only film I saw in a cinema, somewhere in Delhi. Although I didn't understand a word of Hindi (namaste), I got the gist of the 3 1/2 hour story, and a kindly doctor explained the story to me a week later. Well i had though those memories lost, that is, until I found on Youtube, a music video of "Ishq Bina", the hit-song from the movie, a gorgeous fusion of Indian lyricism with some western flourishes. Enjoy.:
Note the product placement and displaced sexual metaphor in the last frenzied minute of the film clip.
Why do earnest spiritual seekers often find it necessary to learn to read spiritual texts in the original language? We have middle-class white buddhists contorting their hands around sanskrit letters, young black muslims coughing out arabic glutturals, biblical scholars struggling with declensions of aramaic and ancient greek, and of course, young american jews struggling with the hebrew of the Torah in downtown Manhattan.
Learning languages is hard. I lived in a foreign country and it took me over a year and a half to learn the basics. That's only to have a non-idiotic conversation at a party, talking about where I come from. It takes at least double that time to achieve the proficiency to read complex spiritual texts. So why the bother?
Most religion wrap themselves around a holy book. There's something majestic and authoritative about marks on papyrus. And ultimately, theology in written form is just more transportable. In the days before the printing press, books were much more precious commodities - laborious to make, expensive to finance, and difficult to make accurate copies of - books were expensive treasures for the rich and indolent, and the scholars that they would patronize. Even today, with the technologies of the printing press and the word processor, a beautifully produced book still possesses the qualities of a magical object.
Religious books in America are less exotic treasures and more of a marketable commodity. There is a whole cottage industry of translating religious books. All you have to do is march down to your nearest esoteric book store, and you will find a gazillion different translations of the Bhagavad Gita, all printed on cheap india paper in dirt cheap ink-type, that is thick and heavy, and hard to read. Differences between translations are enormous. Some translations translate difficult terms literally, keeping the phoneticisms of the original language. In other translations, english words are appropriated in awkward sounding ways, like the use of that clunker, lovingkindness, in South-east asian buddhist texts.
However, in many different traditions, it is taught that the earnest seeker must learn the original language that a holy book is written in, before they can truly understand the meaning behind the books. Why watch a grainy video shot by a handicam inside a noisy cinema when you can experience glorious 75 mm film in dolby surround sound?
If you've ever met earnest beginning spiritual seekers, you will find that they generally tend to be insufferable puritanical party-poopers, full of pointless trivia, and prescriptive to the hilt. Like the cool kids, they'll wear the right gear, say the right things, and rain down a stream of do's-and-dont's. To join a new religion is to deny one's original culture. It is an act of identity recreation. Speaking a new language, is the final erection of the new self.
But what is to be gained in reading the original book in the original language? The simple reason is that the great holy books are often, also great works of poetry. Spiritual power is poetic power married with spiritual insight. And poetry transmits meaning not just in the simple meaning of the words, but through shades of meaning and technical effects of rhyme, rhythm and meter. The Koran contains a myriad of puns and in-jokes, in arabic.
And because spiritual writing is poetry, it suffers the same difficulty in translation. Poetry is notoriously virtually impossible to translate. Most religious translations are made by earnest religious scholars, not linguistically adept poets. That is why teachers of religions find translations tinny and stilted. When religious teachers complain that a translation misses the spiritual essense, they are really saying that it lacks poetic fluency. So when a spiritual seeker takes the long and arduous journey in learning the original language of a spiritual text, they are really taking the world's most painful poetry class.
Live and direct from the marsh cafe, this is warren longmire bouncing light across the keys of one BASCO HO's macbook. Lovely keyboard indeed I must say. There is something sexy about a nice keyboard. But I digress...
Check out my search for the san fran god scene at www.ascatteredlight.blogspot.com. It's the hotness. Be well. Be merry. I'm out.
Trawling on youtube, I find an extreme example of pan-national cross-cultural fertilization. Bic Runga, new zealand singer of malaysian chinese descent sings in french - "ne me quitte pas" the signature song by belgium's greatest export, jacques brel. It's the torch-burning song, and Bic gets to shows off her singing chops, on-stage emotional histrionics, and command of the french language:
Today, I had a conversation with two friends, an architect and a painter, and we started talking about psychologically disturbed people to be found in art school. (They both went to the former CCAC, now known as the CCA).
At the end of an anecdote, my painter friend concluded that there must be a lot of people with border-line personality disorder amongst art-school students. My architect friend added that, when she went to the CCAC, the psychological distresses of art-school was so severe that the CCAC had round-the-clock counselors to service troubled art-school students.
That got me thinking, whilst studying physics, I didn't meet many border-line psychotics, but I did know a lot of socially dysfunctional people. Boys who couldn't interact with normal people, who couldn't emphasize with other people's emotion, let alone recognize emotions, or make eye contact. In short, in science schools, there was a surfeit of borderline autistics.
In conclusion, one can say that art-schools breed border-line psychosis, whilst science schools breed autism.
I was introduced to a new poetic form the other day. It's called the Pantoum, and it's one of the most brilliant forms I've encountered. It originates from Malaysian, often used in song form, and it goes something like this:
First line
Second Line
Third Line
Fourth Line
Last Second Line
New Second Line
Last Fourth Line
New Fourth Line
.
.
.
.
Last Second Line
Original Second Line
Last Fourth Line
Original First Line
"He could almost have been an American, but I could tell straight away that he wasn't. He had what no American man I've ever met has had, and that's intuition."
Recently (as in the last two years) I published papers in the journals, BMC Structural Biology and Protein Science. It appears that BMC Structural Biology trawls through the authors of Protein Science, and spams these authors to get them interested in their journal, BMC Structural Biology. I got one of those emails:
Dear Dr Ho,
We noticed that you recently published an article in Protein Science. As an active researcher publishing in the field of structural biology, have you considered publishing in BMC Structural Biology?...
BMC Structural Biology boasts a wide, international readership. More than 4,900 users have signed up to receive email alerts, and last month alone articles in BMC Structural Biology were accessed over 3,500 times from our website, and many times via the PubMed Central website.
For example, this article by Ho and Brasseur has been accessed 205 times in the past 30 days:
Research article
The Ramachandran plots of glycine and pre-proline
Bosco K Ho, Robert Brasseur
BMC Structural Biology 2005, 5:14 (16 August 2005)
...Why not submit your next research article to BMC Structural Biology?...
The latest blog that has captured my rapt attention is hipsterotica. I see hipsters all around in the Mission, here in San Francisco. They're like pigeons, pecking crumbs off the ground and swarming away when little kids try to catch them. Imagine if they had sex.
U2's "with or without you" is one of the greatest song ever written - it's a song that tears at your heart and then shreds it into a thousand pieces. I've seen various versions of them performing it, but never quite like this. If rock-stars are the gods of the secular era then the girl that was pulled-up unto the stage, got to make love with a fallen god, in front of 50,000 people. Cry girl. Cry.
Je suis recemment allé à Montreal où j'ai pu achêté des livres françaises. C'etait vraiment un longtemp que je peux le faire. Après une grande peine de reflechir, j'ai choisi:
Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing
Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist
Science 8 September 2006: 1451-1452
Physical cleansing has been a focal element in religious ceremonies for thousands of years. The prevalence of this practice suggests a psychological association between bodily purity and moral purity. In three studies, we explored what we call the "Macbeth effect"—that is, a threat to one's moral purity induces the need to cleanse oneself. This effect revealed itself through an increased mental accessibility of cleansing-related concepts, a greater desire for cleansing products, and a greater likelihood of taking antiseptic wipes. Furthermore, we showed that physical cleansing alleviates the upsetting consequences of unethical behavior and reduces threats to one's moral self-image. Daily hygiene routines such as washing hands, as simple and benign as they might seem, can deliver a powerful antidote to threatened morality, enabling people to truly wash away
A while ago, a friend dragged me off on a Friday night, out to the burbs, to see a show that had San Francisco plastered all over it. It was the Peaches Christ "Midnight Mass", an alternative religious festival to coincide (fortuitously) with the Christian festival of Easter.
Who is Peaches Christ? She is a transvestite cabaret performer, a consummate entertainer. She is her own institution, a dynamo of sneering attitude and arch campness. She is a large woman, with, obviously, the frame of a man, and with a huge hairdo, and thick garish makeup, she was more god than human. She owned the stage. In the show that I saw, she entered the stage but bursting out of volcano, complete with flames and crumbling plaster.
Every year, Peaches Christ puts on a number of movies that score through the roof on the camp scale. As the movies are shown at midnight and involve a pre-movie cabaret show, the cinema which hosts the event is waaay out in the outer Richmond, and we had to get there by taxi (taxis in San Francisco are not all like taxis in nyc, they are expensive and infrequent).
That night's show was based on scenes from Showgirls and also involved a free lap-dance at the end of the cabaret act (more on the lap-dance). The cabaret show took crucial scenes from the movie - in this case, it was the masterful dialogue from screen-wright Joe "My adolescent sex-fantasy" Ezterzas - and took the scenes to their logical conclusion. The one that stuck in my mind was where the feuding show-girls were reminiscing about their childhoods where one of the girls admitted that she was once so poor that she had to eat dog-food. "You too," squealed the other show-girl, as they shared their stories about their favourite dog-food. Peaches Christ and friend then replayed the scene which ended up with the two of them eating dog-food on stage and then fisting each other under strobe lights. You get the idea.
At the end of the cabaret set, we were treated to the real draw-card of the show, the free lap-dance for everyone who had a box of pop-corn. Shamefully, I have to admit that I had to hide my box of pop-corn, because the thought of getting a lap-dance from a heavy set bearded transvestite was somewhat unsettling. Call me a prude if you must. Except it was much much worse. We were first asked to raise our box of pop-corn. About a hundred people raised their pop-corn, there was going to be a lot of lap-dances a coming. Then the lap-dancers were brought up. The first one was what you might imagine, a femmy looking transvestite, that thin sleek androgynous looking tranny in tight tight clothing.
After that, my mind was blown. The other lap-dancers included: an abraham lincoln look-alike in suspenders and pants, a large person in a suit and wearing a bunny head, large bearded men, someone in a green martian suit, some very drunk people in stripped stockings... and so the list went on. And just when you'd seen it all, the very last lap-dancer was introduced, who made everybody in the audience gasp. This lap-dancer was a short stocky woman in a full burkha.
The Royal Society of England, the most venerable scientific institution in the world, has just release online, the archive of their journal, Philosophical Transactions, which dates back from the year of our lord, 1665.
They will allow free access for non-sciencey peoples for the next two months. So check out those musty pdf's. Guardian blogs have provided links to some classic papers that can be found in the Royal Society archive.
This is a writing exercise that I didn't know what to with, except to post it here:
If I don't eat at the French Laundry my life would not be complete. But how to get there. I don't have a car. It's not near public transport. Nor do I have filthy lucre, I don't have a sugar daddy. The mechanics of the deal is simple. Ring up exactly 6-months to the day that you want to go, and book a table. Keep ringing and ringing until they pick up the phone. But it seems so far away, some undetermined time in the future, like some kind of spy-thriller novel, "Igor, I will meet you on the Steps of Rome, in 6 months time". It's a restaurant for god's sake, not state secrets of inner Siberia. Perhaps I can with Igor. I've got to go with someone. Someone, preferably, no necessarily, with a car. For that drive up to that place up in the middle of the country-side. People with cars, who like to eat. You know, maybe I should just advertise on Craigslist, and offer something in return.
This is beautiful and wonderfully ridiculous at the same time
Whining, you wriggle in my nose
You loop in my ear canal
Striking always in the moments before sleep
I can't take it
I want to snatch you up
Smash your face
Just like that
Then crumple you with my fingers
into a mixture of pus and blood leaving a tiny little stain of red
I rub that smear of insect paste into my cheeks Like rouge
I feel the cool of new death on my skin
It is not unpleasant
It calms
It feels like sacrament
Like the fist time I touched a dead body, I have violated the living
The breathing and the dead are separated by a film so thin but impenetrable
I run my fingertips along its surface
before long, I can longer tell
where my warm body begins from where the dead insect ends
My blood coagulates
The tracery of my veins harden into marble
Standing hunched over keyboard in this apple store
Tap tap tapping away before they catch me
Spinning words on the fly, stolen
From the crackled energy of this city
I look up to see buildings whoosh up from the ground
The trees here are not kings but servants
They serve but to green the
Feet of the true masters of this city
Those glorious scrapers of the sky
Shaving off the majesty of high flying birds
And flinging it back down onto the masses below
I see potent mixes of blacks and whites, olive and brown
All packed in the ovens of the underground
The subway so hot that everybody perspires
Their sweat melts, merges and pools in
The hidden arteries from Harlem to Soho
To Wiliamsburg from the hispanic busboys
To the dolled-up girls of fashion school
To the grizzled Italian bar-man serving
As much attitude as alcohol
And the beating thudding heart in that
Neon black-hole of times square
A bear-trap for the epileptic
It ripples and flirts and entertains
I see dancers and singers and poets
And tourists looking for that elusive something.
The eye that I see God with
Is the eye that God sees me with
