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A study by a group of prominent seismologists suggests that a pattern of subtle but active faults makes the risk of earthquakes to the New York City area substantially greater than formerly believed. Among other things, they say that the controversial Indian Point nuclear power plants, 24 miles north of the city, sit astride the previously unidentified intersection of two active seismic zones. The paper appears in the current issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.
Many faults and a few mostly modest quakes have long been known around New York City, but the research casts them in a new light. The scientists say the insight comes from sophisticated analysis of past quakes, plus 34 years of new data on tremors, most of them perceptible only by modern seismic instruments. The evidence charts unseen but potentially powerful structures whose layout and dynamics are only now coming clearer, say the scientists. All are based at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, which runs the network of seismometers that monitors most of the northeastern United States.
Lead author Lynn R. Sykes said the data show that large quakes are infrequent around New York compared to more active areas like California and Japan, but that the risk is high, because of the overwhelming concentration of people and infrastructure. "The research raises the perception both of how common these events are, and, specifically, where they may occur," he said. "It's an extremely populated area with very large assets." Sykes, who has studied the region for four decades, is known for his early role in establishing the global theory of plate tectonics.
The authors compiled a catalog of all 383 known earthquakes from 1677 to 2007 in a 15,000-square-mile area around New York City. Coauthor John Armbruster estimated sizes and locations of dozens of events before 1930 by combing newspaper accounts and other records. The researchers say magnitude 5 quakes—strong enough to cause damage–occurred in 1737, 1783 and 1884. There was little settlement around to be hurt by the first two quakes, whose locations are vague due to a lack of good accounts; but the last, thought to be centered under the seabed somewhere between Brooklyn and Sandy Hook, toppled chimneys across the city and New Jersey, and panicked bathers at Coney Island. Based on this, the researchers say such quakes should be routinely expected, on average, about every 100 years. "Today, with so many more buildings and people, a magnitude 5 centered below the city would be extremely attention-getting," said Armbruster. "We'd see billions in damage, with some brick buildings falling. People would probably be killed."
Starting in the early 1970s Lamont began collecting data on quakes from dozens of newly deployed seismometers; these have revealed further potential, including distinct zones where earthquakes concentrate, and where larger ones could come. The Lamont network, now led by coauthor Won-Young Kim, has located hundreds of small events, including a magnitude 3 every few years, which can be felt by people at the surface, but is unlikely to cause damage. These small quakes tend to cluster along a series of small, old faults in harder rocks across the region. Many of the faults were discovered decades ago when subways, water tunnels and other excavations intersected them, but conventional wisdom said they were inactive remnants of continental collisions and rifting hundreds of millions of years ago. The results clearly show that they are active, and quite capable of generating damaging quakes, said Sykes.
One major previously known feature, the Ramapo Seismic Zone, runs from eastern Pennsylvania to the mid-Hudson Valley, passing within a mile or two northwest of Indian Point. The researchers found that this system is not so much a single fracture as a braid of smaller ones, where quakes emanate from a set of still ill-defined faults. East and south of the Ramapo zone—and possibly more significant in terms of hazard–is a set of nearly parallel northwest-southeast faults. These include Manhattan's 125th Street fault, which seems to have generated two small 1981 quakes, and could have been the source of the big 1737 quake; the Dyckman Street fault, which carried a magnitude 2 in 1989; the Mosholu Parkway fault; and the Dobbs Ferry fault in suburban Westchester, which generated the largest recent shock, a surprising magnitude 4.1, in 1985. Fortunately, it did no damage. Given the pattern, Sykes says the big 1884 quake may have hit on a yet-undetected member of this parallel family further south.
The researchers say that frequent small quakes occur in predictable ratios to larger ones, and so can be used to project a rough time scale for damaging events. Based on the lengths of the faults, the detected tremors, and calculations of how stresses build in the crust, the researchers say that magnitude 6 quakes, or even 7—respectively 10 and 100 times bigger than magnitude 5–are quite possible on the active faults they describe. They calculate that magnitude 6 quakes take place in the area about every 670 years, and sevens, every 3,400 years. The corresponding probabilities of occurrence in any 50-year period would be 7% and 1.5%. After less specific hints of these possibilities appeared in previous research, a 2003 analysis by The New York City Area Consortium for Earthquake Loss Mitigation put the cost of quakes this size in the metro New York area at $39 billion to $197 billion. A separate 2001 analysis for northern New Jersey's Bergen County estimates that a magnitude 7 would destroy 14,000 buildings and damage 180,000 in that area alone. The researchers point out that no one knows when the last such events occurred, and say no one can predict when they next might come.
"We need to step backward from the simple old model, where you worry about one large, obvious fault, like they do in California," said coauthor Leonardo Seeber. "The problem here comes from many subtle faults. We now see there is earthquake activity on them. Each one is small, but when you add them up, they are probably more dangerous than we thought. We need to take a very close look." Seeber says that because the faults are mostly invisible at the surface and move infrequently, a big quake could easily hit one not yet identified. "The probability is not zero, and the damage could be great," he said. "It could be like something out of a Greek myth."
The researchers found concrete evidence for one significant previously unknown structure: an active seismic zone running at least 25 miles from Stamford, Conn., to the Hudson Valley town of Peekskill, N.Y., where it passes less than a mile north of the Indian Point nuclear power plant. The Stamford-Peekskill line stands out sharply on the researchers' earthquake map, with small events clustered along its length, and to its immediate southwest. Just to the north, there are no quakes, indicating that it represents some kind of underground boundary. It is parallel to the other faults beginning at 125th Street, so the researchers believe it is a fault in the same family. Like the others, they say it is probably capable of producing at least a magnitude 6 quake. Furthermore, a mile or so on, it intersects the Ramapo seismic zone.
Sykes said the existence of the Stamford-Peekskill line had been suggested before, because the Hudson takes a sudden unexplained bend just ot the north of Indian Point, and definite traces of an old fault can be along the north side of the bend. The seismic evidence confirms it, he said. "Indian Point is situated at the intersection of the two most striking linear features marking the seismicity and also in the midst of a large population that is at risk in case of an accident," says the paper. "This is clearly one of the least favorable sites in our study area from an earthquake hazard and risk perspective."
The findings comes at a time when Entergy, the owner of Indian Point, is trying to relicense the two operating plants for an additional 20 years—a move being fought by surrounding communities and the New York State Attorney General. Last fall the attorney general, alerted to the then-unpublished Lamont data, told a Nuclear Regulatory Commission panel in a filing: "New data developed in the last 20 years disclose a substantially higher likelihood of significant earthquake activity in the vicinity of [Indian Point] that could exceed the earthquake design for the facility." The state alleges that Entergy has not presented new data on earthquakes past 1979. However, in a little-noticed decision this July 31, the panel rejected the argument on procedural grounds. A source at the attorney general's office said the state is considering its options.
The characteristics of New York's geology and human footprint may increase the problem. Unlike in California, many New York quakes occur near the surface—in the upper mile or so—and they occur not in the broken-up, more malleable formations common where quakes are frequent, but rather in the extremely hard, rigid rocks underlying Manhattan and much of the lower Hudson Valley. Such rocks can build large stresses, then suddenly and efficiently transmit energy over long distances. "It's like putting a hard rock in a vise," said Seeber. "Nothing happens for a while. Then it goes with a bang." Earthquake-resistant building codes were not introduced to New York City until 1995, and are not in effect at all in many other communities. Sinuous skyscrapers and bridges might get by with minimal damage, said Sykes, but many older, unreinforced three- to six-story brick buildings could crumble.
Art Lerner-Lam, associate director of Lamont for seismology, geology and tectonophysics, pointed out that the region's major highways including the New York State Thruway, commuter and long-distance rail lines, and the main gas, oil and power transmission lines all cross the parallel active faults, making them particularly vulnerable to being cut. Lerner-Lam, who was not involved in the research, said that the identification of the seismic line near Indian Point "is a major substantiation of a feature that bears on the long-term earthquake risk of the northeastern United States." He called for policymakers to develop more information on the region's vulnerability, to take a closer look at land use and development, and to make investments to strengthen critical infrastructure.
"This is a landmark study in many ways," said Lerner-Lam. "It gives us the best possible evidence that we have an earthquake hazard here that should be a factor in any planning decision. It crystallizes the argument that this hazard is not random. There is a structure to the location and timing of the earthquakes. This enables us to contemplate risk in an entirely different way. And since we are able to do that, we should be required to do that."
New York Earthquake Briefs and Quotes:
Existing U.S. Geological Survey seismic hazard maps show New York City as facing more hazard than many other eastern U.S. areas. Three areas are somewhat more active—northernmost New York State, New Hampshire and South Carolina—but they have much lower populations and fewer structures. The wider forces at work include pressure exerted from continuing expansion of the mid-Atlantic Ridge thousands of miles to the east; slow westward migration of the North American continent; and the area's intricate labyrinth of old faults, sutures and zones of weakness caused by past collisions and rifting.
Due to New York's past history, population density and fragile, interdependent infrastructure, a 2001 analysis by the Federal Emergency Management Agency ranks it the 11th most at-risk U.S. city for earthquake damage. Among those ahead: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland. Behind: Salt Lake City, Sacramento, Anchorage.
New York's first seismic station was set up at Fordham University in the 1920s. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, in Palisades, N.Y., has operated stations since 1949, and now coordinates a network of about 40.
Dozens of small quakes have been felt in the New York area. A Jan. 17, 2001 magnitude 2.4, centered in the Upper East Side—the first ever detected in Manhattan itself–may have originated on the 125th Street fault. Some people thought it was an explosion, but no one was harmed.
The most recent felt quake, a magnitude 2.1 on July 28, 2008, was centered near Milford, N.J. Houses shook and a woman at St. Edward's Church said she felt the building rise up under her feet—but no damage was done.
Questions about the seismic safety of the Indian Point nuclear power plant, which lies amid a metropolitan area of more than 20 million people, were raised in previous scientific papers in 1978 and 1985.
Because the hard rocks under much of New York can build up a lot strain before breaking, researchers believe that modest faults as short as 1 to 10 kilometers can cause magnitude 5 or 6 quakes.
In general, magnitude 3 quakes occur about 10 times more often than magnitude fours; 100 times more than magnitude fives; and so on. This principle is called the Gutenberg-Richter relationship.
Columbia University Warns of the Sixth Seal
A study by a group of prominent seismologists suggests that a pattern of subtle but active faults makes the risk of earthquakes to the New York City area substantially greater than formerly believed. Among other things, they say that the controversial Indian Point nuclear power plants, 24 miles north of the city, sit astride the previously unidentified intersection of two active seismic zones. The paper appears in the current issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.


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The simple ideas are often the best ones.
I've previously reviewed Irish Company Amphibia Sport's excellent Evo Sports Bag and I recently received in the post one of the company's long-awaited (for me) silicon Sports Ring.
I forgot to test swim it the weekend after I received it, so it had to wait until this past week to be taken for a swim. And no better weekend to test it. How did it perform?
Before I answer, I'll explain further what it is, and why it's necessary.
Technically, it's a ring itself, as it goes around your finger. But it could also accurately be described as a ring-protector for sport, to wear over and protect a metal ring.
I used to wear a ring all the time, a thick silver band that I had custom-made many years ago. I learned early in open-water swimming to remove it (well most of the time I remembered), as shortly after immersion it would feel like it was going to slip off my finger and I would have to swim with my fingers tightly closed, something I don't normally do. All my concentration would still be on whether the ring was still going to slip off, not a comfortable way to swim. The ring wasn't oversized, so it wasn't a case of being too loose. Metals, particularly precious metals, have very well-defined thermal properties, their expansion and contraction in heat and cold. We don't think of organic materials as have expansion or contraction properties to anywhere near the same degree. We don't for example think that our pants might fall down if the weather is colder!
So why does your well-fitted ring feel like it is going to fall off? (And in fact there are many cases of this actually happening to swimmers).
As we've often discussed about cold, cold immersion leads to various physiological responses, amongst which the most important is peripheral vaso-constriction, the reduction of blood-flow in the extremities. Another that goes along with this it he constriction of external blood vessels. This constriction causes other responses, (on which I've written a post that I still need to publish), but the relevant one here is the reduction in diameter of the fingers. And that contraction occurs in relatively warm water (for us Irish skin-swimmers) such as 12 to 14 degrees Celsius. In fact the diameter of the finger seems to contract more than any ring diameter will contract, so the ring becomes loose. Wedding bands, engagement rings and more have been lost this way.
Test conditions at the Guillamenes were pretty ideal for experimentation. The air temperature had been dropping for a few days. The water was a quite acceptable 8.6 degrees Celsius, warm for the time of year, slightly up from where it had been for the previous weeks. But the air temperature was 4° C, with a biting northerly wind whose wind chill contributed to making it feel sub-zero. I put the ring on before I arrived and spent a short while taking some photographs (nothing much useful) so my hands were cold before I swam, something I usually try to avoid. I've also lost some weight recently so the ring hadn't to be forced on, though I'd given up wearing it about two years ago.
And the water was rough, despite the off-shore wind, there was about two metres of swell incoming, with plenty of surface chop on top of it.
I swam for about 30 minutes, and with the wind it felt the coldest swim of this winter thus far. With the Amphibia Sport Ring protector in place, my hands could take their normal shape with fingers slightly parted (the optimum spacing for fingers while swimming is about half a centimetre). If I thought about it, I could feel the silicon protector comfortably touching the adjacent fingers. I never once felt like I was going to lose my ring, and in fact, and this is the important part, I very quickly forgot about the ring.
I'd hazard that maybe Amphibia Sport didn't get to test the product in what many people would consider to be such extreme conditions, but not abnormal for Irish open water winter swimmers!
That's a lot of words to say that the Amphibia Sport Sports Ring (protector) performs extremely well for open water swimming, a simple idea very well executed. Highly recommended.

subset: commoncrawl


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[dropcap style="font-size:100px; color:#992211;"]P[/dropcap]ain can be a relief. If you accidently kick your toe against a doorframe you are probably going to find it very painful.
Pain management, as in not hurting yourself in the first place.
As a purely intellectual experiment, imagine purposefully kicking a doorframe hard enough to potentially break your toe. When it turns out your toe has been battered but not broken, the pain may be interpreted more as a relief.
"It is not hard to understand that pain can be interpreted as less severe when an individual is aware that it could have been much more painful. Less expected, however, is the discovery that pain may be experienced as pleasant if something worse has been avoided," explains Siri Leknes, Research Fellow at the Department of Psychology at the University of Oslo.
Pain Management : The lesser of two evils
When working as a research fellow at Oxford University, Dr Leknes became curious about what can be called the "it could have been worse" phenomenon. How is the experience of pain affected by a feeling of relief from realising that it was not as bad as expected?
Dr Leknes recruited 16 healthy subjects who prepared themselves for a painful experience. They were repeatedly exposed to heat of varying intensity applied to their arm for four seconds.
The experiments were carried out in two different contexts: in the first, the heat was either not painful or only moderately painful – about the same as firmly holding a coffee cup that is slightly too hot. In the second, the heat was either moderately or intensely painful. In this context, moderate pain was the lesser of two evils.
The research subjects reported how they interpreted the pain. In addition, while they were exposed to the stimuli their brain activity was measured by MRI.
Pain Management : Comforting pain
"As expected, the intense heat triggered negative feelings among all subjects whereas the non-painful heat produced positive reactions," explains Siri Leknes.
What intrigued the researchers was the subjects' response to moderate pain. In the experiments where moderate pain was the worst alternative, the pain felt was unpleasant. In the instances where it was the best alternative, the subjects experienced the moderate pain as positive – even comforting.
"The likely explanation is that the subjects were prepared for the worst and thus felt relieved when they realised the pain was not going to be as bad as they had feared," states Dr Leknes.
"In other words, a sense of relief can be powerful enough to turn such an obviously negative experience as pain into a sensation that is comforting or even enjoyable."
The MRI examinations revealed that the brain changed how it processed moderate pain according to the context and what the alternative was. When the pain was comforting, there was more activity in the areas of the brain associated with pleasure and pain relief and less activity in the areas associated with pain.
Pain Management : A future in treating pain?
Dr Leknes believes that the study illustrates that exposure to one and the same stimulus is interpreted very differently among individuals and that the experience is connected to expectation and context. Some individuals like the burning sensation of eating chili peppers, for example, while others enjoy sadomasochistic sex.
Also, envisioning that an even worse alternative exists than what is actually experienced may even help a person to interpret involuntary pain as something agreeable.
Nevertheless, Dr Leknes points out, pain is generally a highly unpleasant experience and current pain alleviation treatments are inadequate for many people.
"That is why it is so important to find out how and to what degree the brain can control pain on its own. We are currently carrying out basic research, but we hope that this knowledge will one day be applied to develop improved methods for treating pain," she says.
Would it always be advisable then for a doctor to inform a patient that a procedure or treatment is going to be very painful?
"In some situations this may be a good approach, but not always," replies Dr Leknes. "Doctors observe that their patients react very differently to the information they are given; certain patients are likely to experience a genuine sense of relief if they prepare for the worst only to find it not so bad after all, whereas others prefer to avoid worrying beforehand and want to know as little as possible about what they will be undergoing," she explains.
Pain Management : Substance abuse – from pleasure to relief
The study has been partially funded under the Programme on Alcohol and Drug Research (RUSMIDDEL) at the Research Council of Norway. "Relief is also likely a vital factor in substance abuse," asserts Dr Leknes.
"Over time, the effect of alcohol and drugs will change from triggering feelings of pleasure to primarily alleviating the discomfort of addiction. The brain's regulatory processes change, causing substance abusers to experience a shift; at some point, they use alcohol and drugs in order to achieve a neutral state and avoid feeling awful," explains Dr Leknes.
"By studying relief in order to understand how this process works, we can come up with new ideas for treating substance dependence more effectively. From our pain research, we know that the relief mechanisms in the brains of patients with chronic pain become disrupted. This may be something shared by patients suffering from pain and alcohol and drug addiction alike," she concludes.
Source: Eurekalert. The Research Council of Norway
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. – Aristotle


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April 28, 2014 by Randolph Rosarion M.D. 0 Comments
States – Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
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CDL knowledge test for qualified veterans, active duty personnel waived – easing transition into civilian careers as professional truck, bus operators Source: USDOT Proposals Simplifies, Reduces Costs to States and to Individuals in Obtaining Commercial Driver's License – Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Due to the continued shortage of qualified truck and bus drivers, this […]
The States and Washington DC are the backbone of Commercial Driver's Licensing. They issue the licenses and assess the qualifications and validity of each of their drivers. Source: States – Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration For rules regarding: Certification and Records check: CDLIS (Commercial Driver Licensing Information System), and NDR (National Driver Registry), Self Certification Forms […]
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The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) medical examination process assures that pilots *requiring medical certification do NOT have any of the disqualifying medical conditions under 14 CFR Part 67 and that they meet […]
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(Australian Associated Press)
Employers are being forced to accept a "new social contract" in which businesses adopt a greater role in protecting worker wellbeing and pushing for social change, new data suggests.
The research, commissioned by Australian software giant Atlassian, found many workers had over the past 12 months de-prioritised their careers in favour of their mental health and wellbeing.
The survey of more than 1200 Australians found more than three quarters wanted their employer to speak up on societal issues.
A similar number of respondents wanted businesses to be "just as concerned" with their social impact as their financial performance.
More than 35 per cent of workers, meanwhile, said they would quit their job if their employer's values did not align with theirs. This includes nearly half of respondents from "Gen Z".
On the flip side, more than two thirds of respondents agreed an employer who speaks out on societal issues is more appealing.
Atlassian co-founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar said technological advancements were creating a "global war for talent" and employers had to do more to retain the best people.
Atlassian earlier this year said its employees could permanently work from any location, even after the COVID-19 pandemic's conclusion.
"We're in a global war for talent and employees want change. There have never been higher expectations on business, and how we respond as leaders is crucial," Mr Farquhar said.
The study found mental health had become the "top issue of importance" for workers in 2021 after a year of coronavirus-prompted lockdowns, restrictions and hybrid work arrangements.
Mental health overtook "cost of living" as workers' key concern.
Almost seven in 10 employees said they would consider rejecting a job promotion to preserve their mental health, the survey found.
Furthermore, 40 per cent said their employer was their most important provider of mental health support.


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This delightful breakfast dish is baked in the oven, warming your kitchen on a chilly morning and scenting your home with a cinnamon fragrance. You'll love it!
2 1/2 cups almond milk
1 1/2 cups water
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 3/4 cups rolled oats
1 cup dried cranberries
1/2 cup walnuts, chopped
1. Preheat oven to 400°. Coat a medium-size baking dish (8″ x 8″ or larger) with margarine or canola oil.
2. Mix first five ingredients together in a large mixing bowl. Stir in oats, cranberries, and walnuts. Pour into baking dish. Cover and bake for about 35 minutes or until most of the liquid is absorbed and the oats are tender.
Substitution suggestions: Instead of cranberries, try dried currants, golden raisins, or dried apricots. Try toasted almonds or pecans instead of walnuts.


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Every now and then one comes across a story that belongs in you, that should have come from you, that tells it exactly how you have been meaning to tell it, but you can't because well, you are the story. La Salle de Départ shortlisted for this year's Caine Prize was stolen from inside my soul. I should sue the author, Zimbabwean Melissa Tandiwe Myambo for doing this to me. This is one of the finest stories I have ever read. It features vivid soaring searing imagery with profound insights, yet tender, sensitive, touching. Still, Virginia Woolf's gentle but insistent spirit comes bleeding through, holding the hands of her brown sisters. I salute you, Myambo.
What is this pretty story about? A young man (Ibou) ends up in America thanks to the generosity of the extended family. On a visit back home (Senegal), he balks at taking responsibility for the future of his nephew Babacar who the mother (Fatima) wants to go to America, the land of milk and honey. The dream is America; the nightmare is the nephew, Babacar. The extended family spreads poverty and the protagonist kicks against this new imposition.
Where do I start? Pretty does not even begin to describe the prose. The dignity of this story spoke quietly to me and comforted my soul. Bravo. La Salle de Départ is a familiar story revamped in colorful black and white. In untrained hands, this would have been another tired tale of home and exile. Instead, Myambo pulled it off as a thoughtful treatise on that movement we call immigration. Quietly, everything is laid bare: The politics of blood and (un)belonging in the era of globalization.
A good story should be like good sex, you want some. I got some in this story. The reader's mind floats on a lazy river of laconic prose, built on the sturdy backs of painstaking research and searing attention to detail. It is interesting, Myambo barely moralizes or editorializes, for once, this is a story, what a concept. You enjoy it quietly, sigh, and then the story's issues start to tug at your conscience's shirt, insistently thus: "Can we talk about this?" And for once the italicized words did not draw my ire; they seemed to dignify the words, drawing you in, inquisitive at these French words that are now the other against Senegalese words. It is brilliant how she explains the words – with dignity and pride. Nice.
Rather than a tired tale told perhaps for profit and a desired audience, this story comes across as a lovely time marker of an era when all the civilizations came together under a gnarled baobab tree and amused each other with the strangeness of (not knowing) the other. These civilizations and their technologies, tools and toys brush against each other like strangers overflowing in an overloaded elevator. And the reader is reminded: Halcyon times are dying, love letters giving way to the intensity of digital texts and (e)motional affairs. Myambo's eye for detail is complimented nicely with exquisite prose poetry. Hear her describe those Baroque buildings that are the hallmark of American university campuses:
"Father nodded at her to begin reading the letter and it was only then that she noticed the photograph that had slipped out from between the pages. Picking it up, she gently shook the dust off of it and wiped it on her pagne. It was Ibou with two other young men and two girls standing on the steps of what looked like a library or some other majestic university building propped up by ornately-decorated columns. To Fatima, it looked like a concrete wedding cake."
"It looked like a concrete wedding cake." Anyone who has ever been in an American university campus will enjoy the brilliance of that quote.
It is very clever how Myambo buries the clues to the meanings in subsequent sentences, like a lovely and enchanting egg hunt. To get a sense of how beautiful this story is, think about Jhumpa Lahiri's short stories (Interpreter of Maladies, and Unaccustomed Earth), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (The Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun), Chinua Achebe (No Longer at Ease) and Camara Laye (The African Child). Behind all that beauty and powerful prose she fearlessly examines and updates notions of physical, emotional and spiritual boundaries. This she does with careful research, exquisite pacing and lovely prose poetry wrapped in a familiar but enchanting ambience. And yes, there's technology jostling for space under the Baobab tree. People actually text in Africa! What a concept:
""It's a text message from Ghada. I can't believe my roaming is finally working again and of course, just in time for me to go to the airport.""
Where there is a certain viewpoint, it is not a cloying, in your face unctuousness; you simply catch a whiff of it. And they are real issues, e.g. patriarchy, the extended family system, immigration, etc.
"Perhaps she would have more choices if she had more brothers to rely on. Brothers were like the wind, they could go places she could not. She was like the sand. She could only be blown by the wind. But now she had a son and Ibou had to help her build wings for him. Her dream for Babacar was for him to go and live with his Uncle Ibou all the way, theeerrre in America, to go to school there, sow success for the family there and harvest green US dollars to bring back here."
Everywhere the reader's eyes roam, there is sad beautiful prose:
"Again. He was always leaving. Her memories of him were distilled down to a series of departures, snapshots of ever leaving. And now he was leaving without having agreed to take Babacar with him. It was her turn to fix her gaze on him, willing him to respond in the affirmative…"
And again:
"I am the one who waits always and watches others come and go. I am the one who always remains behind so that you can go."
The story reminds us that daily familiar themes are renewed in our consciousness even as we fight our individual wars and get comfortable in the new municipality of the individual, the ME. In Senegal, we witness culture clashes, with hygiene as proxy, resulting in alienation at home and in exile.
"Delicious! An excellent cook, but why was the squat toilet never flushed properly? Why were there always lumps of other people's shit floating next to the foot pads? He pushed the carrot around with his tongue, trying not to think about that and he wished he felt guiltier for constantly thinking about it. But he couldn't stop himself. Ghada was luckier in that sense, she was closer to her family. But then again, her family was different."
The advocacy here is more sophisticated than I remember. All through Myambo expertly takes us on ride through sleepy streets pregnant with the fragrance of fried beignets and cold bissap juice. Lovely.
The new nuclear family is about cutting clean through the umbilical cord of poverty and family ties. Or is it? Are we breaking free past the shame of self-loathing? Is this self-loathing, liberation, acculturation or mindless assimilation?
"He looked at her for a long time but he couldn't hold her gaze. It wasn't so much that he was afraid of what he would see but rather of what she would see, the feelings he did not care to admit even to himself. Somewhere deep down, Ibou experienced familial obligation as an intolerable irony. When his mother passed away in October of his first term at university, a strange aloofness was born in him. He never mourned her. It all happened so far away, in another time and place. Instead, all his childhood memories were slowly suffused with a sepia tint typical of old-fashioned photos, the type of photos one looks at but feels no connection to. Somewhere along the way, Senegal had died for him. It was all too abstract, too removed from his daily reality; family responsibility weighed on him but not as heavily as he felt it should. How many years had he been away? Half his life had been spent in another country, in another culture, where the ties of family do not strangle one's bank account and stifle one's emotional resources. He wished he felt more guilty. If he were a better person he would."
We see the tension between home and exile and the expectations of the extended family that ironically funded the protagonist's new independence:
""When we sent you to America, it was for the good of the family. We sent you to study for us.""
This story cut me all over like a playful knife and it ends too soon for me, gifting me with the best sad ending I have encountered in a long time:
""Goodbye," he said. "Thank you for everything." Awkwardly, he embraced her rigid shoulders and then quickly turned and pushed into the crowd putting their luggage through the X-ray machine. He took his carry-on and put it on the moving belt. Then he took off his watch, his iPod and his cell phone and put them in a tray along with his laptop. He stood in front of the metal detector. When the official waved him to come forward, he stepped through the metal frame, trapped for a second on the border between his world and hers, silhouetted against the bright light of the other side. Time teetered; she held her breath. But then he was through, into a world where she would never venture. He looked back at her and lifted a hand. Then he was gone. She would wait for his plane to take off.""
I have thought hard about what I did not like about this story; I am not coming up with much. The themes are familiar but they are still here with us and Myambo addresses them expertly in real, rather than in nominal terms. Of all the writers on the Caine Prize short list that I have read to date, her writing comes across as the most polished and sophisticated, it is almost as if she is overqualified for the competition. She is not; there are many more where she came from. As an aside, Myambo must lead a very interesting life, a Zimbabwean writing so convincingly and evocatively about Senegal.
Finally, as I was trying to figure out how and why Myambo's La Salle de Départ spoke to me so beautifully, I chanced upon Jasmin Daeznik's poignant and at times sad New York Times piece, Home is Where They Let You Live. And then it came together for me personally; both pieces made me refocus and reflect in a profoundly personal way on the notion of home and exile and the responsibilities and burdens I have had to bear and in some instances jettison on the way to crafting a sustainable self-identity. Home is not always home.
Related posts:
Stephen Derwent Partington "On Admiring Melissa Tandiwe Myambo's 'La Salle de Départ'"
Ayodele Olofintuade – Long Drawn Out Departures
Backslash Scott Thoughts Caine Blog: "La Salle de Départ" by Melissa Tandiwe Myambo


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Reviewed by:SoundBoiler (Audio Enthusiast)
Review Date October 22, 2009
Overall Rating 5 of 5
Value Rating 5 of 5
Used product for More than 1 year
Nobody I know of who heard the original Ohm A speakers thirty five years ago ever forgets the experience.
They were tall, bulky and expensive. But when they were allowed to speak, they vanished—leaving behind a wide, deep sound field with an articulated and detailed midrange, highs without a hint of grit or sibilance, and lows with neither hollowness nor resonance at any level they were driven and in any octave anyone could hear.
And whether the music was played by a symphony orchestra, a jazz ensemble, or single human voice and whether you walked left or right or even through the middle of the pair of Ohms, the stereo image stayed solidly in place. It was as if in disappearing they took the room with them, leaving behind the concert hall or club or chamber that the music had been played in.
They sounded so well because of their remarkable down-firing single driver, invented by Lincoln Walsh and developed by Marty Gersten to produce the entire audible range seamlessly and without any crossover components. But the driver's mass and orientation required both powerful magnetic assemblies and equally powerful amplifiers. Inevitably, the drivers had to fail.
I thought the company itself had failed; but when I learned that Ohm Acoustics had reinvented itself as an enterprise that dealt directly with consumers via the internet and after I read some very favorable reviews of the MicroWalshes, I talked with the Ohm folks and bought a pair of MicroWalsh Talls and their SB-5.2 subwoofer. That was six or seven years ago.
They arrived quickly and safely; but though they sounded good initially—smooth, clear, and spacious—they were a little thin. Maybe with good reason: because my listening room is large (24 by 24 feet), oddly shaped (5-foot knee walls supporting a gabled roof 15 feet high), and very live (the floors and ceiling of bare wood, the gable walls of bare plaster and glass with nary a rug or drape to cover them) because of my allergies,.
I called Ohm and talked with John Strohbeen, the engineer who heads the company. I asked whether I should consider trading up to a bigger model. John said wait a month or two for them to break in (the Ohms come with a 120-day money back guarantee).
He was right. Their range, clarity, and sound stage expanded significantly—much like the original Ohms I had heard decades ago, even though they and their subwoofer cost less than half that of the originals.
I drove them for years with an NAD 30-watt stereo receiver which played larger than its spec. Somewhere along the way I turned off the subwoofer. It just wasn't needed for the music I liked—jazz ensembles and an occasional orchestral classic. The MicroWalshes have surprising bass extension all by themselves, essentially flat down to the 40-something Hertz range, when they are well broken in.
A month ago I replaced the NAD with a considerably more powerful and versatile pair of separates, a Sherwood Newcastle P-965 Preamp/Tuner and A-965 Amplifier—the latter capable of 200 watts per channel at 4 ohms with two channels driven; and then I fired up the Ohms with the Sherwoods set to a jazz channel on XM radio that happened to have a1950′s vintage Ella Fitzgerald number playing.
Before I replaced the NAD, I might have said that the MicroWalshes' greatest virtue is that I never tired of them, as I had with a precession of good but conventional closed and vented box speakers. And I would have been wrong—because I was dazzled by what I heard.
The little Ohms had disappeared; and there was Ella in the room she sang from, solidly positioned in the center of the field no matter where I walked. There too was much of the wondrous Ohm A sound stage with just about the sort of the depth, clarity, and range I'd been impressed with decades before. I found myself being drawn into the cliché you hear from anyone who gets a good new audio component—the compulsion to play all one's old favorites. Sure enough, I discovered not just nuances but whole new layers of musicality I had not heard before–like the three different halls and two different studio venues from a Willie Nelson CD that hadn't shown them before.
The battle scene early in Master and Commander was a revelation. The thuds, thumps and horrific crack and crash of cannons coming from the Ohms shook my 24 by 24 foot plank floor so well that I had a hard time wiping the smile from my face.
And that was without the subwoofer. The Sherwoods' power had given the MicroWalshes the "air†to drive my big, live room.
So I turned the volume up; and what happened is what's supposed to happen when you have a good, tough set of speakers driven hard: the Ohms just got louder.
But I also met the dark side of the cliché: a good sound system inevitably reveals the deficiencies of the media you play. And some of my favorites—the voices of Tierney Sutton, Judy Wexler, and Norah Jones— consistently displayed a hollow, strident segment in the upper midrange that I had not heard much of before.
I remembered that John Atkinson (www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/687ohm/index.html) reviewed a pair of the larger Ohm Walsh 5′s some years ago and was puzzled by the same sort of coloration. He swept the Ohm tweeter range with a 1/3 octave band generator and found them essentially flat. Lacking the test instruments, I played a Blu-Ray setup disc that drives each speaker with a 20 to 20,000 Hertz sweep and heard no resonances in the upper register.Then I jacked a pair of decent headphones (Grado 125′s) into the front panel of the preamp and listened. I heard the identical coloration that I had from the speakers.
So I fed the Ohms a recording with neither electronic nor room acoustic enhancements, Madeleine Peyroux's Half the Perfect World (Rounder 11661-3252-2). I heard no resonances, no hollowness, no coloration from the Ohms; but I did hear the trumpet breathe on the disc's last track. I was satisfied that the Ohms weren't adding coloration.
The opening of 2001, A Space Odyssey taxes the MicroWalshes' bass range. But with the SB-5.2 sub turned on, the small Ohms played the 20 Hertz or so organ drone at high levels–as they did with other virtuoso organ pieces. In fact, the Ohms have such spaciousness and presence when driven by two-channel mix-down codecs like Dolby VS that I'm not sure I need to supplement them with a couple of extra pairs of channels for HD movie viewing.
Some reviewers of the MicroWalsh Talls recommend them only for rooms a good deal smaller than mine and with a lot more square feet of sound absorbent surfaces. I'm sure that's good advice, but I found that the little Ohms absolutely glow in a big, live environment.
Impressively smooth, detailed, sound field with great width, depth, and stereo solidity. Surprising bass extension. A bargain entry to high end listening.
• You're not going to find them at your local big-box store, or even your local high-end dealer.
• You'll need the better part of a thousand dollars to try them out.
• If you really need the bottom of the lowest octave you'll want to add a subwoofer.
• Your receiver or amp should be able to provide at least 30 clean watts at 4 ohms for modest-level listening; but 75 honest watts or so will let you hear much more of what the Ohms can say.
• They play what they are fed—no more, no less.
• Unlike the original Ohm A's, they don't break easily.
• They don't mind big, live spaces to live in.
• They project a wide, deep sound field so stable that you can walk around or even between the speakers and the stereo effect stays put.
• Because they don't sound like boxes, you probably won't tire of them.
• They're so small and nicely finished (especially in Rosewood) that they pass the "wife factor†test with flying colors.
• You might not need center or surround channels to enjoy movies.
• They're made in the USA.
• You can talk to the president of the company, and he'll give you good advice.
|Featured Merchants
Ohm Acoustics


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Western Christianity
Western Christianity is one of two sub-divisions of Christianity (Eastern Christianity being the other). Western Christianity is composed of the Latin Church and Western Protestantism, together with their offshoots such as the Old Catholic Church, Independent Catholicism and Restorationism.
The large majority of the world's 2.3 billion Christians are Western Christians (about 2 billion – 1.2 billion Latin Catholic and 800 million Protestant).[citation needed] The original and still major component, the Latin Church, developed under the bishop of Rome. Out of the Latin Church emerged a wide variety of independent Protestant denominations, including Lutheranism and Anglicanism, starting from the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, as did Independent Catholicism in the 19th century. Thus, the term "Western Christianity" does not describe a single communion or religious denomination, but is applied to distinguish all these denominations collectively from Eastern Christianity.
The establishment of the distinct Latin Church, a particular church sui iuris of the Catholic Church, coincided with the consolidation of the Holy See in Rome, which claimed primacy since Antiquity. The Latin Church is distinct from the Eastern Catholic Churches, also in full communion with the Pope in Rome, and from the Eastern Orthodox Church and Oriental Orthodox Churches, which are not in communion with Rome. These other churches are part of Eastern Christianity. The terms "Western" and "Eastern" in this regard originated with geographical divisions mirroring the cultural divide between the Hellenistic east and Latin West, and the political divide between the Western and Eastern Roman empires. During the Middle Ages adherents of the Latin Church, irrespective of ethnicity, commonly referred to themselves as "Latins" to distinguish themselves from Eastern Christians.[3]
Western Christianity has played a prominent role in the shaping of Western civilization.[4][5][6][7] With the expansion of European colonialism from the Early Modern era, the Latin Church, in time along with its Protestant secessions, spread throughout the Americas, much of the Philippines, Southern Africa, pockets of West Africa, and throughout Australia, and New Zealand. Thus, when used for historical periods after the 16th century, the term "Western Christianity" does not refer to a particular geographical area, but is rather used as a collective term for all these.
Today, the geographical distinction between Western and Eastern Christianity is not nearly as absolute as in Antiquity or the Middle Ages, due to the spread of Christian missionaries, migrations, and globalisation. As such, the adjectives "Western Christianity" and "Eastern Christianity" are typically used to refer to historical origins and differences in theology and liturgy, rather than present geographical locations.[citation needed]
While the Latin Church maintains the use of the Latin liturgical rites, Protestant denominations and Independent Catholicism use a wide variety of liturgical practices.
For most of its history the church in Europe has been culturally divided between the Latin-speaking west, whose centre was Rome, and the Greek-speaking east, whose centre was Constantinople. Cultural differences and political rivalry created tensions between the two churches, leading to disagreement over doctrine and ecclesiology and ultimately to schism.[8]
Like Eastern Christianity, Western Christianity traces its roots directly to the apostles and other early preachers of the religion. In Western Christianity's original area Latin was the principal language. Christian writers in Latin had more influence there than those who wrote in Greek, Syriac, or other languages. Although the first Christians in the West used Greek (such as Clement of Rome), by the fourth century Latin had superseded it even in the cosmopolitan city of Rome, as well as in southern Gaul and the Roman province of Africa.[9] There is evidence of a Latin translation of the Bible as early as the 2nd century (see also Vetus Latina).
With the decline of the Roman Empire, distinctions appeared also in organization, since the bishops in the West were not dependent on the Emperor in Constantinople and did not come under the influence of the Caesaropapism in the Eastern Church. While the see of Constantinople became dominant throughout the Emperor's lands, the West looked exclusively to the see of Rome, which in the East was seen as that of one of the five patriarchs of the Pentarchy, "the proposed government of universal Christendom by five patriarchal sees under the auspices of a single universal empire. Formulated in the legislation of the emperor Justinian I (527–565), especially in his Novella 131, the theory received formal ecclesiastical sanction at the Council in Trullo (692), which ranked the five sees as Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem."[10]
Over the centuries, disagreements separated Western Christianity from the various forms of Eastern Christianity: first from East Syriac Christianity after the Council of Ephesus (431), then from that of Oriental Orthodoxy after the Council of Chalcedon (451), and then from Eastern Orthodoxy with the East-West Schism of 1054. With the last-named form of Eastern Christianity, reunion agreements were signed at the Second Council of Lyon (1274) and the Council of Florence (1439), but these proved ineffective.
Historian Paul Legutko of Stanford University said the Catholic Church is "at the center of the development of the values, ideas, science, laws, and institutions which constitute what we call Western civilization".[11] The rise of Protestantism led to major divisions within Western Christianity, which still persist, and wars—for example, the Anglo-Spanish War of 1585–1604 had religious as well as economic causes.
In and after the Age of Discovery, Europeans spread Western Christianity to the New World and elsewhere. Roman Catholicism came to the Americas (especially South America), Africa, Asia, Australia and the Pacific. Protestantism, including Anglicanism, came to North America, Australia-Pacific and some African locales.
Today, the geographical distinction between Western and Eastern Christianity is now much less absolute, due to the great migrations of Europeans across the globe, as well as the work of missionaries worldwide over the past five centuries.
Original sinEdit
Original sin, also called ancestral sin,[12][13][14][15] is a Christian belief in a state of sin in which humanity has existed since the fall of man, stemming from Adam and Eve's rebellion in the Garden of Eden, namely the sin of disobedience in consuming the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.[16] Theologians have characterized this condition in many ways, seeing it as ranging from something as insignificant as a slight deficiency, or a tendency toward sin yet without collective guilt, referred to as a "sin nature", to something as drastic as total depravity or automatic guilt of all humans through collective guilt.[17]
Filioque clauseEdit
Most Western Christians use a version of the Nicene Creed that states that the Holy Spirit "proceeds from the Father and the Son", where the original text as adopted by the First Council of Constantinople had "proceeds from the Father" without the addition of either "and the Son" or "alone". This Western version also has the additional phrase "God from God" (Latin: Deum de Deo), which was in the Creed as adopted by the First Council of Nicaea, but which was dropped by the First Council of Constantinople.
Date of EasterEdit
The date of Easter usually differs between Eastern and Western Christianity, because the calculations are based on the Julian calendar and Gregorian calendar respectively. However, before the Council of Nicea, various dates including Jewish Passover were observed. Nicea "Romanized" the date for Easter and anathematized a "Judaized" (i.e. Passover date for) Easter. The date of observance of Easter has only differed in modern times since the promulgation of the Gregorian calendar in 1582; and further, the Western Church did not universally adopt the Gregorian calendar at once, so that for some time the dates of Easter differed between the Eastern Church and the Roman Catholic Church, but not necessarily as between the Eastern Church and the Western Protestant churches. For example, the Church of England continued to observe Easter on the same date as the Eastern Church until 1753.
Even the dates of other Christian holidays differ between Eastern and Western Christianity.
Lack of essence-energies distinctionEdit
Western denominationsEdit
Today, Western Christianity makes up close to 90% of Christians worldwide with the Catholic Church accounting for over half and various Protestant denominations making up another 40%.
Hussite movements of 15th century Bohemia preceded the main Protestant uprising by 100 years and evolved into several small Protestant churches, such as the Moravian Church. Waldensians survived also, but blended into the Reformed tradition.
Major figuresEdit
Bishop of Rome or the popeEdit
Relevant figures:
- Clement of Rome (fl. c. 96), one of the apostolic fathers of the church.
- Pope Leo I
- Gregory the Great
The ReformersEdit
Relevant figures:
- Martin Luther (1483–1546), the most famous reformer and theologian in the Reformation and in the 15th century.
- Jan Hus (c. 1369–1415), one of the most relevant theologian in the 14th century.
- John Calvin (1509–1564)
- John Knox (1514–1572)
- Hans Tausen, Bishop of Ribe (1494–1561), leading theologian of the Reformation in Denmark and Holstein.
- Laurentius Petri, Archbishop of Uppsala and all Sweden (1499–1573), along with his brother Olaus Petri were regarded as the main Lutheran reformers of Sweden, together with the king Gustav I of Sweden
- Primož Trubar (1508–1586), mostly known as the author of the first Slovene language printed book,[18] the founder and the first superintendent of the Protestant Church of the Duchy of Carniola, and for consolidating the Slovenian language
- Jiří Třanovský, sometimes called the father of Slovak hymnody and the "Luther of the Slavs"
- Mikael Agricola bishop of Turku (1554–1557), he became the de facto founder of literary Finnish and a prominent proponent of the Protestant Reformation in Sweden, including Finland, which was a Swedish territory at the time. He is often called the "father of literary Finnish".
Archbishop of Canterbury and primate of all EnglandEdit
Relevant figures:
- Augustine of Canterbury (597–604)
- Thomas Cranmer (1533–1555), one of the major reformers in England
- Matthew Parker (1504–1575),(Parker was one of the primary architects of the Thirty-nine Articles)
Archbishop of Lyon and primate of the GaulsEdit
Relevant figures:
- Irenaeus of Lyon (died c. 202)
Patriarch of AquileiaEdit
Relevant figures:
See alsoEdit
- Aristotelianism
- Augustinianism
- Bohemian Reformation
- Calvinism
- Latin Church Fathers
- Ecclesiastical differences between the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church
- Holy Roman Empire
- List of Christian denominations
- Neoplatonism
- Radical Reformation
- Scholasticism
- Swiss Reformation
- Theological differences between the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church
- Thomism
- Western culture
- Western religions
- ^ Hugh Henry, "Agnus Dei (in Liturgy)" in Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1907)
- ^ UNESCO World Heritage: Vatican City
- ^ "Distinguishing the terms: Latins and Romans". Orbis Latinus.
- ^ Perry, Marvin; Chase, Myrna; Jacob, James; Jacob, Margaret; Von Laue, Theodore H. (1 January 2012). Western Civilization: Since 1400. Cengage Learning. p. XXIX. ISBN 978-1-111-83169-1 – via Google Books.
- ^ "Roman Catholicism". Encyclopædia Britannica.
Roman Catholicism, Christian church that has been the decisive spiritual force in the history of Western civilization.
- ^ Hayas, Caltron J.H. (1953). Christianity and Western Civilization. Stanford University Press. p. 2.
That certain distinctive features of our Western civilization—the civilization of western Europe and of America—have been shaped chiefly by Judaeo – Graeco – Christianity, Catholic and Protestant.
- ^ Jose Orlandis, 1993, "A Short History of the Catholic Church," 2nd edn. (Michael Adams, Trans.), Dublin: Four Courts Press, ISBN 1851821252, preface, see [1], accessed 8 December 2014. p. (preface)
- ^ "General Essay on Western Christianity", Overview Of World Religions. Division of Religion and Philosophy, University of Cumbria. © 1998/9 ELMAR Project. Accessed 1 April 2012.
- ^ "Latin". The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. Oxford University Press. 2005. ISBN 978-0-19-280290-3.
- ^ Encyclopædia Britannica: Pentarchy
- ^ "Review of How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization by Thomas Woods, Jr". National Review Book Service. Archived from the original on 22 August 2006. Retrieved 16 September 2006.
- ^ Golitzin, Alexander (1995). On the Mystical Life: The Ethical Discourses. St Vladimir's Seminary Press. pp. 119–. ISBN 978-0-88141-144-7 – via Google Books.
- ^ Tate, Adam L. (2005). Conservatism and Southern Intellectuals, 1789–1861: Liberty, Tradition, and the Good Society. University of Missouri Press. p. 190. ISBN 978-0-8262-1567-3.
- ^ Bartolo-Abela, Marcelle (2011). God's Gift to Humanity: The Relationship Between Phinehas and Consecration to God the Father. Apostolate-The Divine Heart. pp. 32–. ISBN 978-0-9833480-1-6 – via Google Books.
- ^ Hassan, Ann (2012). Annotations to Geoffrey Hill's Speech! Speech!. punctum. pp. 62–. ISBN 978-1-4681-2984-7 – via Google Books.
- ^ Cross 1966, p. 994. sfn error: no target: CITEREFCross1966 (help)
- ^ Brodd, Jeffrey (2003). World Religions. Winona, MN: Saint Mary's Press. ISBN 978-0-88489-725-5.
- ^ "Trubar Primož". Slovenian Biographical Lexicon. Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Archived from the original on 4 November 2013. Retrieved 25 April 2013.


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It's a memory aid! A robotic assistant! An epidemic detector! An all-seeing, ultra-intrusive spying program!
The Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person's life, index all the information and make it searchable.
What national security experts and civil libertarians want to know is, why would the Defense Department want to do such a thing?
The embryonic LifeLog program would dump everything an individual does into a giant database: every e-mail sent or received, every picture taken, every Web page surfed, every phone call made, every TV show watched, every magazine read.
All of this -- and more -- would combine with information gleaned from a variety of sources: a GPS transmitter to keep tabs on where that person went, audio-visual sensors to capture what he or she sees or says, and biomedical monitors to keep track of the individual's health.
This gigantic amalgamation of personal information could then be used to "trace the 'threads' of an individual's life," to see exactly how a relationship or events developed, according to a briefing from the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, LifeLog's sponsor.
Someone with access to the database could "retrieve a specific thread of past transactions, or recall an experience from a few seconds ago or from many years earlier ... by using a search-engine interface."
On the surface, the project seems like the latest in a long line of DARPA's "blue sky" research efforts, most of which never make it out of the lab. But DARPA is currently asking businesses and universities for research proposals to begin moving LifeLog forward. And some people, such as Steven Aftergood, a defense analyst with the Federation of American Scientists, are worried.
With its controversial Total Information Awareness database project, DARPA already is planning to track all of an individual's "transactional data" -- like what we buy and who gets our e-mail.
While the parameters of the project have not yet been determined, Aftergood said he believes LifeLog could go far beyond TIA's scope, adding physical information (like how we feel) and media data (like what we read) to this transactional data.
"LifeLog has the potential to become something like 'TIA cubed,'" he said.
In the private sector, a number of LifeLog-like efforts already are underway to digitally archive one's life -- to create a "surrogate memory," as minicomputer pioneer Gordon Bell calls it.
Bell, now with Microsoft, scans all his letters and memos, records his conversations, saves all the Web pages he's visited and e-mails he's received and puts them into an electronic storehouse dubbed MyLifeBits.
DARPA's LifeLog would take this concept several steps further by tracking where people go and what they see.
That makes the project similar to the work of University of Toronto professor Steve Mann. Since his teen years in the 1970s, Mann, a self-styled "cyborg," has worn a camera and an array of sensors to record his existence. He claims he's convinced 20 to 30 of his current and former students to do the same. It's all part of an experiment into "existential technology" and "the metaphysics of free will."
DARPA isn't quite so philosophical about LifeLog. But the agency does see some potential battlefield uses for the program.
"The technology could allow the military to develop computerized assistants for war fighters and commanders that can be more effective because they can easily access the user's past experiences," DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker speculated in an e-mail.
It also could allow the military to develop more efficient computerized training systems, she said: Computers could remember how each student learns and interacts with the training system, then tailor the lessons accordingly.
John Pike, director of defense think tank GlobalSecurity.org, said he finds the explanations "hard to believe."
"It looks like an outgrowth of Total Information Awareness and other DARPA homeland security surveillance programs," he added in an e-mail.
Sure, LifeLog could be used to train robotic assistants. But it also could become a way to profile suspected terrorists, said Cory Doctorow, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In other words, Osama bin Laden's agent takes a walk around the block at 10 each morning, buys a bagel and a newspaper at the corner store and then calls his mother. You do the same things -- so maybe you're an al Qaeda member, too!
"The more that an individual's characteristic behavior patterns -- 'routines, relationships and habits' -- can be represented in digital form, the easier it would become to distinguish among different individuals, or to monitor one," Aftergood, the Federation of American Scientists analyst, wrote in an e-mail.
In its LifeLog report, DARPA makes some nods to privacy protection, like when it suggests that "properly anonymized access to LifeLog data might support medical research and the early detection of an emerging epidemic."
But before these grand plans get underway, LifeLog will start small. Right now, DARPA is asking industry and academics to submit proposals for 18-month research efforts, with a possible 24-month extension. (DARPA is not sure yet how much money it will sink into the program.)
The researchers will be the centerpiece of their own study.
Like a game show, winning this DARPA prize eventually will earn the lucky scientists a trip for three to Washington, D.C. Except on this excursion, every participating scientist's e-mail to the travel agent, every padded bar bill and every mad lunge for a cab will be monitored, categorized and later dissected.
Spy Plan Faces Critical Deadline
Do Privacy Fears Allow Terrorism?
Tech Firms Eye Juicy Contracts
Bush's Year of U.S. Surveillance


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Bioware announced on Friday that its Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO is now Free 2 Play. As a result, my productivity over the weekend suddenly dropped dramatically (heh). The subscription option is not gone entirely, but players are now able to create characters up to level 50 without paying anything. This approach is similar to the way World of Warcraft and Star Trek Online handle the Free to Play model.
Installation is simple, and is just a matter of walking through a few standard steps and accepting the EULA. While the initial download for the installer is small, you cannot jump into the game until you download all of the assets — and Star Wars: The Old Republic is far from a lightweight game with an asset download of about 25GB required to play (plus future smaller patches).
As a free subscriber you get access to the entire game, but there are several other limitations that might just annoy you into purchasing a subscription. If you are vigilant, it is possible not to pay anything. Some of the larger restrictions include XP-rates, number of characters per account, medical probes, reduced reward choices, and not being able to sprint until level 15 of all things (!). After level 10, the rate at which you gain experience points is reduced compared to paying subscribers. As an alternative, you can purchase XP boosters to make up the difference. Unfortunately, you cannot purchase it with in-game currency. At least it's another one-time charge instead of paying every month for a subscription. The number of characters per account is restricted to two, so you will need to delete one or pony up for a subscription if you want to play as additional classes to get their stories. That's unfortunate, but not a deal breaker and something that Star Trek Online also does. Medical probes allow you to respawn in the same area as opposed to respawning at a medical center. This would not be so bad if it was not for the biggest issue I have with the Free To Play version: getting around the game takes forever! With a quick travel that has a 2 hour cooldown and not being able to sprint until level 15, it takes a long time to get from mission areas and back again. This became especially evident on Coruscant where walking from the taxis to the senate tower in particular was a slog.
With all the major limitations out of the way, I will say that the game is just as good as my friend has been trying to tell me since launch. In particular, SWTOR is really fun, and I would even go as far as saying it is addicting. While it is not KOTOR 3, it is really close and definitely fills in a gap. It definitely encourages you to go for the subscription option but it is enoyable enough that the restrictions are worth putting up with, however annoying.
When I started out, the combat took a bit of getting used to, as you move around with WASD, aim the camera with the mouse, and also right click to attack. With ranged weapons it will likely not be an issue but when you are running in with a lightsaber, it may take a bit of training before you hurt the enemies more than yourself (heh). I wish that there was a keyboard key to auto-target the nearest enemy, especially since my companion just loves to walk in front of me when I'm trying to target someone with the mouse (KOTOR did combat that way, from what I remember). The force abilities of the Jedi Consular are satisfying indeed.
(Hint, if you go with the Jedi Shadow option as I did when you chose an advanced class, you get a free double bladed lightsaber in a backpack that shows up in your inventory–the game doesn't make this clear at all and it took me reading on a forum after looking around the game for a couple hours trying to find a double bladed saber that is required for some of the Jedi Consular's abilities… It ended up being in my inventory the whole time, d'oh).
You can grab the game from Bioware's SWTOR website. If you are a Star Wars fan, I encourage you to try it out for yourself. The download is huge but ultimately worth it. Just keep an eye on the time as otherwise you may look up and notice it's 5 AM and you missed all the Black Friday deals!
What do you think of SW:TOR?


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UPDATE: check my progress via this link!
I want to lose four kilograms in January. I'm old enough to realise that midriff fat is not only unsightly but a health risk. I think I know the incentives that will make losing it a cinch.*
That's not to say that losing 4 kilos is easy. But I have a three-pronged strategy that I believe will work on me.
1. Cash incentives. Humans hate losses more than they enjoy gains. I pledge to pay $500 in penalties if the 4kg is not lost by the morning of February 1. This is the concept behind the website stickk, set up by Yale Economics Professor Dean Karlan, which currently has $16 million of incentives pending. Enforceable contracts are powerful incentives.**
2. Writing down everything I eat, and its kilojoule content. I've done this before when I've wanted to lose weight. It works in two ways – I learn a lot about portion sizes, and what snacks are "bad value"; it also discourages me from eating something, because I know I will have to write it down and add it up at the end of the day.***
3. Transparency. I will create a separate page on this blog in which I will place a daily photo of my scales. Public enforcement alone can be insufficient, as News Limited economics editor Jessica Irvine so publicly proved at Dietonomics. The long-abandoned blog's three weeks of sad posts stands as testimony to the difficulty of losing weight. But I think it will add to the power of the other two prongs
But that's not all.
Just to ramp up the suspense, the donation I give if I fail will be to the Motoring Enthusiasts Party. "Ugh!" I hear you say. "You are a sicko… Why would you want to donate to them?"
My response: "Precisely."
The Motoring Enthusiasts could not be further from my affections. The thought of a slice of my recent redundancy payment going to them will be a strong motivator in case anyone opens a Haighs Dessert Block in front of me during January. The Motoring Enthusiasts will not see a cent. This is my pledge.
If you would like to get involved, please do so! Pledge a goal and an incentive and I can report your progress too. Doesn't matter if you've missed the start of the month.
*Classic economic models of human behaviour do not make such a distinction between short-run and long-run incentives. Economics says if you are a bit overweight, that reveals a preference for being fat. Thomas the Think Engine adopts a more nuanced theory of human behaviour, including the possibility of hyperbolic discounting.
** This blog is run on these methods. As a self-manager, I know I want to post daily by 12.30pm. But my tendency is to procrastinate. So I must pay a $60 fine to my significant other if the blog is not updated by that time. Works a treat.
*** I've done this before when I've wanted to shed a few kilos, and I've learned a lot of very disappointing things about cheese.
EPILOGUE: I made it. See my progress at this link!


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There has been a lot going on lately. Last Sunday I attended the celebration of life for Trinity Sumlin. I met her mother Sheryl when we were fighting for medical cannabis and HB 885 during the last Georgia legislative session. A couple months after HB 885 failed to pass — thanks to political gameplay, not lack of support — Sheryl took Trinity to Colorado to treat her. They were one of the families I shared about in this post. But sadly, Trinity passed away September 5. She was only 11. I was honored that Sheryl asked me to write the story to go in the children's book she wanted to pass out at the celebration.
Connor's seizure activity has been up and down. We really don't see much activity in his waking hours, with the exception of little myoclonic jerks of his arms or sometimes his head. But all his complex-partial and tonic-clonic seizures are sleep related, so those happen during naps or at night. He's also had a couple strange incidents in which he was not having obvious seizure activity, but he was weak and lethargic as though he had. Sometimes that has lasted several hours which concerned us. On Friday he was like that all day. Sometimes he'd start to perk up, only to decline again. He couldn't sit on his own or even support his head. I slept with him on Friday to keep an eye on him. By midnight he was raring to go and things looked promising. Saturday morning he wasn't quite as perky, but he did eat breakfast well (the day before he had no interest in drinking and eating) and was laughing so we thought it would turn out to be a normal day. Chris' parents were in town and we all had plans to go to the North Georgia State Fair. This is how the day started:
As you can see, Connor looks less than enthralled. The one ride I took him on I had to hold his head to keep him from slumping over. We had never had two days of this before and all I could think was that there was some subclinical seizure activity going on (for those who don't live in the world of epilepsy, that means seizures that appear on EEG but don't cause visible activity). We called his neurologist's office and his actual neuro also happened to be the one on call–which makes life soooooo much easier–right, TSC families?! When I told him he wasn't really eating or drinking, he advised us to go to the ER. We were hesitant. believe it or not. That probably sounds crazy to those outside this life, but as most of us who have been dealing with this stuff for a while know, you start to realize how little can really be done at the ER. You'll find many special needs families that have the attitude of "what can you do at the hospital that I can't do at home?" (Besides infect me with MRSA). I mean if he was in a status seizure, or had something life threatening going on, that's obviously ER territory, but this? We weren't real confident. But it had been going on so long, we followed the advice. This is how the weekend ended up:
They ran all the standard blood and urine tests (Connor chose not to pee for hours so when he did fill the bag there was no way to get it off without spreading the golden warmth everywhere). He was also hooked up to a keto-friendly (he's on MAD) saline drip. Tests all came back normal. But when he didn't really perk up after the saline, our neuro told the ER doctor not to send us home. This is where things got hairy. The ER doctor told us we were being admitted because of possible subclinical activity. So guess what we thought? How does one find out about subclinical activity? WITH AN EEG!!! I went home to pack a bag while Chris stayed with Connor. I was on my way back when I got the text. We were admitted , but they don't do EEGs on the weekends. The rest of my texts to Chris were 90 percent F-bombs. The. Monopoly. Children's. Healthcare. System. In. Georgia. Doesn't. Do. Emergency. EEGs. On. Weekends. I was well aware that they didn't schedule routine EEGS on the weekend, but…but…but… (And I later found out this happened to another TSC family who went in with INFANTILE SPASMS on a weekend). This is inexcusable. Utterly inexcusable. But I've never been quiet about how I feel about Children's Healthcare of Atlanta at Scottish Rite (or CHOA in general). So we spent the night with Connor hooked to an IV to keep him hydrated. He did start to perk up late that evening and was much better the next day so we were discharged. I was happy to have him get the IV until he would eat and drink again and I totally understand why he was admitted. When we talked to Connor's neuro, he said that was the reason he asked for us to be admitted, and that's fine. The ER doc was either confused or we misunderstood the implication about the EEG, I guess.
But that doesn't change my thoughts on the matter. There is no excuse that someone can't get an EEG on the weekend for an emergency situation. I understand that hospitals aren't as heavily staffed at that time, but this is not okay. So if a child has a seizure for the first time ever on a Friday night, you are crap out of luck until Monday? If a child presents with infantile spasms on a Saturday morning, too bad? We can't confirm until Monday even though IS requires immediate treatment? I'm just at a loss.
I do want to say that other than that, the stay itself was probably the best one we've had. Attentive and proactive nurses and the attending doctor on the floor was fantastic, a far cry from the time he got EEG glue in his eye and I had to demand something be done for 17 hours before anyone would look at him. By then his eye was swollen shut and he was in terrific pain and requiring antibiotics. It also made me feel better about the fact that it took 16 hours to get paper towels brought to the room and that the urine sample that was spilled never got mopped or sanitized (there went our four paper towels that were left in the room). Requests were definitely made by our nurse and techs for those things to happen, but whoever was on the other end of the line has a sweet job because they never bothered to do it.
On an amusing note, the pharmacy didn't have his meds on hand (a specialty one they never have, and the other they didn't have in the right form) so we were asked to turn over our meds to be dispensed by the pharmacy. (Wonder what that will look like on the bill?) They have to keep his Onfi under lock and key because it's a controlled substance. His Klonopin is too, but I didn't turn that over since it's just for clusters. It's funny to think he's prescribed two meds with more street value than the medical marijuana the law prohibits me from having.
Rosie the dog and Connor had an exciting couple of weeks. My parents went to Italy so we had their batsh** crazy full-grown kittens for two weeks. Rosie is in love with Thatcher the black cat. Followed her adoringly and stalkerish the whole time. She also enjoyed chasing Theo, who spent a good portion of the past two weeks hissing at everyone. One of them broke a wine glass. They were allowed to live only because my wine wasn't in it.
I awoke one morning with four cats in my room looking at me. It was an eerie glimpse into the life of a cat lady, a possible calling I chose to ignore. I emailed my mom to tell her of the terrifying experience and she responded by offering to bring these back from Italy for me:
Random note: Connor and I made the local news. Check it out here.
I leave you with photos of our zoo. Our two cats are not present in the photos as they opted not to set foot outside our bedroom for the duration of this social experiment.


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The Cassini spacecraft takes a break from the Saturn system to check out the Seven Sisters.
Cassini imaged the Pleiades star cluster, also called the Seven Sisters, as part of a routine to monitor the health of the spacecraft's cameras. This image of these familiar stars was an observation used to check that the camera's sensor, or charge-coupled device (CCD), was calibrated properly. For a brighter view of these stars, see PIA08260.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Sept. 29, 2008.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.


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On this week's That's A Wrap podcast with me and Angie Greaves we're discussing a Beyonce symposium being held by the British Film Institute.
Plus. is Bey getting back together with Kelly and Michelle for a Destiny's Child reunion? Joan Collins returns to the big screen, what links British actor Toby Jones to Justin Timberlake and my thoughts on Marvel's latest, Doctor Strange.
Continue reading That's A Wrap: Beyonce at the BFI, Joan Collins, Doctor Strange and more


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From the Calendar of LGBT Saints:
St. John of the Cross was one of the great Spanish mystics, whose outstanding Dark Night of the Soul is still read by all interested in Catholic mysticism. He also wrote a series of intense religious canticles. St. John, like other mystics such as St. Theresa of Avila, used the language of courtly love to describe his relationship with Christ. He also discussed, with rare candor, the sexual stimulation of prayer, the fact that mystics experience sexual arousal during prayer. With the male Christ of course, this amounts to a homoeroticism of prayer. It must be said that St. John was not entirely happy with this aspect of prayer. He was beatified by Clement X in 1675, canonized by Benedict XIII in 1726, and declared a Doctor of Church Universal by Pius XI in 1926
Quoted at The Wild Reed:
(from ) On a Dark Night
"Oh, night that guided me,
Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined
Beloved with lover,
Lover transformed in the Beloved!
Upon my flowery breast,
Kept wholly for himself alone,
There he stayed sleeping,
and I caressed him,
And the fanning of the cedars made a breeze.
The breeze blew from the turret
As I parted his locks;
With his gentle hand
He caressed my neck
And caused all my senses to be suspended.
I remained, lost in oblivion;
My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself,
Leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies."
Related articles
- "The Last Judgement", and the Homoerotic Spirituality of Michaelangelo.
- "Finding God in the Erotic": Fr Donal Godfrey


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The second presidential debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney, a town-hall affair at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., was a bizarre orgy of testosterone, lies, and silly anecdotes, with moderator Candy Crowley of CNN presiding over the melee like Michael Vick at a dogfight. At one point, between all the overtalking and Obama's left-field mention of "gangbangers," I thought I was watching Steve James's documentary, The Interrupters.
But women's issues, almost entirely absent from round one, finally came up. In the second question of the night, "undecided voter" Katherine Fenton asked Obama: "In what new ways do you intend to rectify the inequalities in the workplace, specifically regarding females making only 72 percent of what their male counterparts earn?"
For Romney, who has been consistently down in the polls compared with Obama when it comes to female voters, it was his chance to show 50.8 percent of the country that he cared.
Obama responded by mentioning the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act—the first piece of legislation he signed into law.
Then came Romney's turn.
The businessman and former governor of Massachusetts said he "learned a great deal" about gender pay inequality while building his cabinet.
"And I—and I went to my staff, and I said, 'How come all the people for these jobs are—are all men.' They said: 'Well, these are the people that have the qualifications.' And I said: 'Well, gosh, can't we—can't we find some—some women that are also qualified?' And—and so we—we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet. I went to a number of women's groups and said: 'Can you help us find folks,' and they brought us whole binders full of women."
Binders full of women.
The comment immediately went viral, birthing a hilarious tumblr parody Twitter account @Romneys_Binder with more than 13,000 followers and counting, and a Facebook fan page dubbed "Binders Full of Women," which had amassed nearly 200,000 likes at time of writing. The #bindersfullofwomen became a trending topic on Twitter and the phrase also was the third-fastest rising search on Google during the televised debate.
For me, the comment brought to mind Al Gore's infamous "lockbox" comment from the debates, for which he was excoriated in numerous Saturday Night Live parody sketches, as well as the "Joy Book" from the HBO series Big Love—an actual book featured on the FLDS-focused show where pictures of frighteningly young girls who are considered marriageable are displayed. A truly awful (and admittedly tasteless) coincidence.
It's even worse for Romney, however, when you consider that his "binders full of women" comment, arguably the debate's most memorable line, reportedly is a lie.
According to political writer David S. Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix:
"What actually happened was that in 2002—prior to the election, not even knowing yet whether it would be a Republican or Democratic administration—a bipartisan group of women in Massachusetts formed MassGAP to address the problem of few women in senior leadership positions in state government. There were more than 40 organizations involved with the Massachusetts Women's Political Caucus (also bipartisan) as the lead sponsor.
"They did the research and put together the binder full of women qualified for all the different cabinet positions, agency heads, and authorities and commissions. They presented this binder to Governor Romney when he was elected."
Now, Romney did, according to Bernstein—who cited information from MassGAP and MWPC—have 14 women among his first 33 senior-level appointments (42 percent), but Bernstein then cited a UMass-Boston study that found that "the percentage of senior-level appointed positions held by women actually declined throughout the Romney administration, from 30.0 percent prior to his taking office, to 29.7 percent in July 2004, to 27.6 percent near the end of his term in November 2006. (It then began rapidly rising when Deval Patrick took office.)"
And at Bain Capital, which Romney ran for 15 years until 1999, there are only seven women among the company's 87 managing directors and senior executives, or 8 percent, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, falling ever-so-slightly below the national average of 8.1 percent.
Romney dug the knife in further re: women's issues when he later chose to share an anecdote about one of his female employees.
"I recognized that if you're going to have women in the workforce that sometimes you need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school. She said: 'I can't be here until 7 or 8 o'clock at night. I need to be able to get home at 5 o'clock so I can be there for making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school.' So we said fine. Let's have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you."
The notion that women need flexibility from their male employer (Romney) so they can be home in time to cook dinner for their family is June Cleaver–antiquated, to say the least.
At 1:04 a.m. Wednesday morning, hours after the dust had settled, the Obama administration fired off a tweet.
It read: "Mitt Romney still won't say whether he'd stand up for equal pay, but he did tell us he has 'binders full of women.'"
Your move, Mitt.