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If the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)
Right now everyone is sounding off about the University of Oklahoma chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, one of the oldest and largest national/Southern fraternities for their stirring rendition of "If You're Happy and You Know It."
"There will never be a nigger in SAE. There will never be a nigger in SAE. You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign with me There will never be a nigger in SAE."
I'm angry. My blood is boiling. I'm furious, flabbergasted and disgruntled. This was a case of racist nonsense gone amok. It was nasty, celebratory, defiant—and our response to it is all wrong…and that's what I'm angrier about. Have the rallies, punish them accordingly, unify as a campus community, get the deep, heart-killing frustration out, but don't hinge this on "nigger."
I do not believe in policing beliefs or expressions of belief. If you want to call me a "nigger," do it if it makes you feel better, but we'll both be wearing icicle underwear in hell before I answer to it. We are not talking about "sticks and stones…" here. The word and concept behind the term "nigger" is very complicated, controversial and fraught with narratives that position anyone who uses it in any form–of any background-within a certain and pained history.
Without reading the depressing comments on social media defending the S.A.E. chapter, I think it's safe to say that some will immediately rally to "Rappers get paid millions to say a lot worse yet these boys are going to have their lives ruined over political correctness." (Let me tell you, thoughts like these–with all their false equivalancies and nonsense—that come so fast and so fluid—remind you as a Black man how well you are trained to prove the validity of your causes) However this whole discussion is not a re-appraisal on the "n word" debate. It hinges on whether we have conditioned ourselves to outcry over a name or word as if it's use is the epitome of white supremacy, when far more white supremacy is being exercised in ways that demand constant and current agitation.
I'm not playing devil's advocate when I protest blocking or banning S.A.E. at the University of Oklahoma. What are they learning? "Don't say nigger. Don't get taped saying nigger. Don't say nigger in a way that can be distributed on social media. You can think nigger but don't say nigger." This is the wrong message. Apparently we don't want to eradicate systemic racism, we just don't want to hear "nigger."
We will never heal as a culture on the so called issue of race if we keep lying to ourselves and each other. I pity these young men, I don't fear or hate them. I'm no handkerchief headed Uncle Tom…I'm no apologist…so don't get it twisted. If The Cooking Gene has taught me anything its about the ability of many white Southerners to search themselves and come to a place where they were mentally able to process seeing their way out of the inheritance of white supremacy they were raised with, or in other cases, the acceptance of the status quo. Know this… The Old South is not dead. It is alive. It is real. It is not an isolated incident. It is not history. It is now. Stop pretending otherwise.
I want to heal the disease not just blast the lesion. If we were serious about matters of racial justice and harmony we would end the cycle of outrage and begun beefing up the grassroots movement of not only resistance but systemic change. I'm extremely proud of the movement that has grown and developed in response to brutality, abuse of authority and overreach by law enforcement. We need more…we have men and women being shot dead before alternative solutions can be found to deal with conflicts. We have a wave of voter suppression efforts aimed at crippling the votes of people of color. The same state that is acting shamefaced about this incident is banning A.P. U.S. history because in their opinion it does not support their ideas and values about American history. You know the same history that neighboring Texas wants to change in every textbook where the Middle Passage gets annihilated as an American memory or where "states rights" trumps the inherent anti-democratic and morally evil nature of race based chattel slavery as the cause and purpose of the Civil War. You've done a wonderful job cutting off the head of the Hydra, but trust my words–in a world where systemic racism thrives at every possible level and intersects with gender oppression, class inequality, homophobia, religious hatred, regional prejudice and 100 other ills—you've not put to rest a racist trope. In fact it will come back stronger than ever before.
We have amply demonstrated to each other how racism hurts "minorities." Yet we have failed to show white males how racism hurts them, and that's why I reserve my pity for this chapter. It doesn't hurt them when we express our outrage. For some it emboldens a spirit of resistance against what some inherently believe is a reversal of natural or social order. In the Pelosi documentary, "Right America Feeling Wronged," you could see the fear, depression and despair in the eyes of some of the bigots she interviewed. 400 years of racial animus bullshit and these men were cracking under its pressure and burden. They spat, swore, and cried. One man went from defiant smiles to volcanic tears as he said something to the effect of, "There used to be a time when being a white man meant something in this country." Racism should come with a dire warning, especially the anti-Black kind among its many varieties, real power+bigotry+the means to harm others and maintain such authority as a matter of birth and privilege will drive you insane.
What does that mean?
"There will never be a nigger in S.A.E." The pride, the outlandish jubilation at being exclusive, in repeating the past, in referencing the hanging tree. The smiles were those you see in the crowd photographs of lynchings. Had these young men ever seen that? The infamous photograph of Laura and L.D. Nelson, a black Oklahoma woman and her son hanging over a river, a proud assembly having done the ritual of restorative racial injustice acknowledging their kill. A colored wench and her male seed cut down. Or to quote the Ferguson police department, "crime prevention."
Did they ever meet survivors of Oklahoma's prosperous Black Wall Street in Tulsa where the presumed "assault" against a white woman led to an outright pogrom against Black economic and social power? Do they know about redlining, housing discrimination, the war against Black farmers and landowners, the conflict over whether Freedmen – formerly enslaved members of The Five Civilized Tribes – should have a treaty honored with THEM…
Don't punish these guys for saying nigger. Punish them deeply….i.e. Educate their asses. Make them sit down with the elders that saw this. Make them break bread with the people they say will never enter their "privileged" ranks. Make them spend a year making it right by doing something bi-partisan like getting elders and lower income people to places where they can obtain identification so they can vote without fear of being turned away from their RIGHT (not a privilege) to vote their conscience and be able to decide if the people policing them, controlling their children's education, and making policy about their health care, economic well being and opportunities to achieve the American dream are safeguarded, not abused. (I bet that one won't go over well…..)
Make these boys take classes in African American history. Make them work with young Black kids with a Black fraternity. Make them understand that working together we have more to gain than we do constantly figuring out ways to misunderstand each other. Make them go to an HBCU in an academic exchange so they can feel what it's like to be in the minority for a change. Make them see the world differently, make them care.
I am not a universalist. I believe in the power and beauty of owning your cultural, regional, and ethnic "location," while respecting our common humanity and doing and working towards maintaining that respect. I also believe in crossing borders, being outside the box, and being as complicated as we need to be to solve the root issues of our struggles.
I don't want these young men to harbor fear, resentment, pangs of lack when they look at someone like me. I want them to see a human, a human who is certainly and especially proud of the miracles of nature that have given him the extraordinary opportunity to be a descendant of some of earth's strongest–beaten but never bowed, broken but self-mended, insulted but never un-crowned. These young men, many of whom might well call themselves "Southern," share a heritage with me, a past, a history with connections unusually intertwined and close the way no two other groups with ongoing issues and enmity share. We are kin. If we sat down to eat, we'd probably eat the same foods, be able to tell the same stories about our grandmothers, hear the same hymns, appreciate life's simple gifts the way only a Southerner can.
This kinship means we don't throw our cousins out and think we have solved the problem. This kinship means we will resist their fear, their hate, their ignorance and give them a means to self improve. It's not a free pass, it's not tolerance for intolerance, it's the plain notion, here and now that if we do not start telling the truth to each other and ourselves that if we do not find a means of living meaningfully together we will surely die miserably apart.
There's always a food component here at Afroculinaria.
Now unemployed: The African American chef who cooked for these guys. Read more here.


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Sunday, April 18, 2010
While I was out of town over the weekend, I spoke to Bob on the phone a number of times. I let him know that my friend Wendi had been kind enough to pass along to him, some Star Wars costumes that her boys had outgrown. When I returned home, Bob tackled me, told me that he loved me and then immediately asked for the costumes. Jeff and I watched as Bob pulled each piece out of my suitcase.
"Mama! It's Darth Vader's mask!"
"That's right."
"It's Yoda's Jedi cape!"
"Look at all of it! There's a Storm Trooper thing!"
"I know. How great is that?"
"You are one lucky guy, buddy," said Jeff.
I followed Bob as he carefully carried a Storm Trooper mask to our bedroom. He stood in front of our full length mirror, adjusted the mask over his face and quietly said, "Yes... Oh yes."
We returned to the living room and Bob noticed a brown paper shopping bag near my suitcase. "What's in there?" he said.
"That's for you too, honey. You can take it out of the bag. Daddy can help you."
Jeff said, "Hey Bob, check this out."
"It's a wood board with magnets?" said Bob
"I found it for you at a toy store in the airport. It's called a Responsibility Board. It's to help keep track of all of your family jobs," I said.
"Thanks, Mama. Which jobs?"
"There are a lot of jobs to choose from but let's see they have here. Okay, there's Take Care of Pet, Make the Bed, Set the Table, Take out the Trash, Empty the Dishwasher..."
"When we're all done living then we die?" Bob asked.
"Wow. I guess you're not into the Responsibility Board," I said.
"He's so not into it he preferred to change the subject to death," said Jeff.
"Can I put on the Yoda Jedi robe, mama?"
"And Mama? We don't have a dishwasher."
13 comments:
The "Yes...Oh Yes" killed me. But the whole "hey look over there it's death" redirect was truly awesome.ReplyDelete
Awesome. Just awesome. I totally would have brought my kids a responsibility board and they totally wouldn't have been into it, either.ReplyDelete
Helpful of him to note for you, the one who does the dishes, that you do not have a dishwasher.ReplyDelete
LOVE the joy that these costumes brought him. We had some old "Bionicle" costumes that we gave to the neighbors across the street, and to see the little boy's eyes pop out when he saw what I had in my arms for him was heaven on earth!!ReplyDelete
Loved the "Yes..Oh yes." Looks like your day is all planned..
Thank you, and tell your kid thanks from me, too. Ya'll cracked me up!ReplyDelete
"Yes, oh yes."ReplyDelete
And I hope Wallace liked them, too.
Wow, what a redirect...I see a future as a White House press secretary.ReplyDelete
When I read this post this morning I was so happy for Bob! I don't even know him but I was just so excited for him and those costumes knowing how elated he was. And yeah, whatever about the "responsibility board"...ReplyDelete
Ha ha ha!! Awesome. Now Bob did NOT really say that did he? He's one brilliant little dude that one.ReplyDelete
Maybe you can tell him he can do his chores with his Darth Vadar mask on!
He has the Jedi wisdom! Chores = death.ReplyDelete
(It was great to meet you this weekend at the EBWW!)
This was so funny it made my sides hurt! I will never read this to my child. He may get an idea of how to change the subject too!ReplyDelete
I seriously just spit out my gingerale (and my nose might sting a little from it coming out there too...) :)ReplyDelete
Thanks for sharing :)
Shaking head in Bob magnificence...ReplyDelete
"Responsibility board" sounds like almost as fun a gift for kids as "sweater vest"

subset: commoncrawl


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"I'm going to sit, because I'm fat. I hope you're drinking stuff," Guillermo del Toro said as he took the stage at Portland's Baghdad Theater & Pub. Ostensibly he was there to read from his new book... but he digressed.
What really happened was this: del Toro talked about his book for like 10 minutes, then opened it up to questions for the next hour or two, talking about everything from the book (conceived "before vampires were teenybopper dreams"), to how the Hellboy comics saved his life while he was shooting Mimic, to Hitchcock (did you know he wrote a book on Hitchcock? Me neither).
I took notes. In no particular order:
- The bloody, pulpy Strain Trilogy was originally going to be TV series on FOX, until studio executives asked del Toro a question: "Yeah, but can we have it as a comedy?" Del Toro asked for his script back.
- When asked about he assembled his filmmaking team: "I draw and sculpt, but I'm not a great sculptor, I'm not a great draftsman. So you hire people who are better than you, and you are loyal to those people... The rule is to work only with people you admire or you love. Or both."
- "When you tackle a 'B' premise, you need to tackle it like an 'A' premise," he said, noting this is the case regardless of what you're working on, even if it's something like Blade II, which some people (incorrectly) assumed was a "paycheck movie." "I'm not postmodern," he said later. "I absolutely hate being smarter than my material." He's excited beyond belief to do The Haunted Mansion for Disney, a ride he's been collecting ephemera from for years. "The flavor of that ride is unlike anything else in the world."
On adapting other peoples' work: "Once the material is out, it belongs to all of us." And: "Adapting material is like marrying a widow. You have to be very respectful of the late husband's memory, but at some point you've gotta fuck."
The Science of Fairy Tales: An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology by Edwin Sidney Hartland, published in 1891, is the book that most influenced the Strain Trilogy (though it sounds like it's influenced a lot of del Toro's other stuff, too; it's available online for free.) "I needed to make Pan's Labyrinth feel like a real fairy tale... like it was ancient," del Toro said. "I think everything I write is a fairy tale, to a degree." Chapters of The Science of Fairy Tales include "Changelings," "Swan-Maidens," "Robberies form Fairyland," no fewer than three chapters on "The Supernatural Lapse of Time in Fairyland," "Fairy Births and Human Midwives," and, naturally, "Fairy Births and Human Midwives (Continued)." The first line from the book's preface:
The chief object of this volume is to exhibit, in a manner acceptable to readers who are not specialists, the application of the principles and methods which guide investigations into popular traditions to a few of the most remarkable stories embodying the Fairy superstitions of the Celtic and Teutonic peoples.
On writing: "If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer." "We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth." There will be a collection of his short fiction published, at some point, by Harper Collins.
He thanks people for listening to his DVD commentaries. He prepares his DVD and Blu-ray special features "very carefully" so that they're "as educational as possible." "DVDs are the most democratic way to teach film."
He's been wanting to make At the Mountains of Madness for 30 years; it was the first film he ever wanted to make. Lovecraft, he says, writes about "the existential insignificance of man in the universe."
"We fear the dark. Make no mistake about it: You can drive your Prius and and type on your iPad, but if we leave you in the dark, you will shit your pants."
At one point, a guy gets up to give del Toro some concept art he's drawn. He wants a job working on At the Mountains of Madness. Del Toro takes it, flips through it, says he likes it, asks if the guy's contact info is inside. Later, a kid asks how he can audition to be in At the Mountains of Madness. Del Toro says they'll probably shoot in Vancouver, "so it's not too far," tells the kid to email him at his personal address, and says he'll write back and let him know when auditions start. Later, an exceedingly nervous girl tells del Toro that his elaborate notebooks inspired her to start documenting her dreams. She's made a copy of these drawings for del Toro, she says, and would like to give it to him. He gladly accepts, thanking her and noting, "I show my dreams to everyone."
At the Mountains of Madness will be in 3D. So will his pal Alfonso Cuarón's next movie. 3D is no longer a gimmick.
"If you're not operating on an instinctive level, you're not an artist." Later: "Reason over emotion is bullshit, absolute bullshit." And: "We suffocate ourselves in rules. I find fantasy liberating."
"We live in a world that creates impossible standards... I say to all of that, 'Screw you and die.' We should celebrate imperfection, because that's the one thing all of us can achieve."
- He is, unsurprisingly, a big book nerd — fine, the word he uses is "bibliophile" — loving them both for what they contain and what they are as objects. "We are animalistic creatures," he said. "We need talismans." He said he went into debt so that he could have an entire house that serves only as a place for his books, with seven libraries in seven rooms. ("I"m a very, very organized hoarder.") He's currently building an eighth room, the "Rain Room," where it will rain 24 hours a day — rain and lighting will always be lashing against this room's windows, so that he can always write in a thunderstorm.
- "Do whatever the fuck you want, even if it's wrong, and then tell about it with honesty. That is filmmaking to me." And: "Success is fucking up on your own terms."
- The way he made the little kid in The Devil's Backbone tremble during a key scene? He dumped a bucket of ice down the kid's pants. "I should be in jail!"
- The last question of the night was about videogames. Del Toro, a dedicated gamer — his children serve as his "wingmen" when he plays Left 4 Dead — is moving into making games, stating matter-of-factly that they're as legitimate of a medium as film and literature. "I expect and hope to create what I would like to see in a videogame," he says, after rattling off some of his favorite videogames at near-incomprehensible speed, just as he did when someone asked him his favorite authors: Shadow of the Colossus, Ico, Gadget: Invention, Travel, & Adventure, Marathon, Halo, Gears of War, Call of Duty, Katamari, Left 4 Dead, Red Dead Redemption, Prototype, Bioshock, Uncharted 2. He plays a ton of games, though he doesn't finish anything he doesn't like — and this holds true for books, film, whatever. "If it doesn't engage me, I leave it," he said. "I do not do homework with my life."
- Last thing: There are more videos from del Toro's reading. You can find 'em here.
This post by Erik Henriksen originally appeared at the Portland Mercury. Erik Henriksen is a senior editor at the Mercury. He also writes comic books. He can be found here and here.


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Ransomware authors are using the bitcoin blockchain, which serves as the cryptocurrency's public transaction ledger, to deliver decryption keys to victims.
The technique, which removes the burden of maintaining a reliable website-based infrastructure for cybercriminals, was observed in a recent version of the CTB-Locker ransomware that targets Web servers.
CTB-Locker has targeted Windows computers for a long time, but a PHP-based variant capable of infecting websites first appeared in February, marking an interesting evolution of this ransomware threat.
The decryption routine in the original PHP-based CTB-Locker version involved a script called access.php that served as a gateway to the attackers' back-end server. This gateway script was hosted on multiple hacked websites and was necessary to obtain the decryption key after victims made a payment.
The approach was not reliable, according to researchers from Web security firm Sucuri, because those hacked websites could be cleaned by their owners. Constantly updating the list of gateways used by the malware was probably a hassle for the criminals.
Because of that, CTB-Locker's creators came up with a new approach: using the bitcoin blockchain itself to deliver the decryption keys. This new behavior was observed by Sucuri's researchers in a CTB-Locker version released in March.
The technique relies on a field called OP_RETURN that was introduced in the Bitcoin protocol in 2014 to allow transactions to hold arbitrary bits of text, or metadata.
The new CTB-Locker variant generates a unique bitcoin wallet address for every infection. Once the victim pays the ransom by sending the required amount of bitcoins to that address, the attackers generate a new bogus transaction from that same wallet to which they append the encryption key in the OP_RETURN field.
The transaction is not validated in the bitcoin system, but it does get recorded in the blockchain and can be viewed through websites like blockexplorer.com and blockchain.info.
The CTB-Locker script uses the blockexlorer.com API to check the transaction history for the wallet corresponding to the infection and extracts the decryption key from the bogus transaction once the payment has been made.
"So, instead of using unreliable gates on third-party hacked sites, the March version of the CTB-Locker reads the keys directly from public and much more reliable blockchain information services," the Sucuri researchers said in a blog post. "That's the beauty of Bitcoin transactions — everything is public and transparent, and at the same time it's possible to keep things anonymous and not traceable to real IPs."
There are many applications that can benefit from distributed, tamper-proof systems like the blockchain, which is why the technology is being adopted by banks and other industries. Security researchers also demonstrated last year that the bitcoin blockchain can be abused by malware authors to store malicious code or commands, and the idea seems to be catching on.


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First published on Fanny Pack.
What's happened to the metrosexual man?
At the advent of the new millennium it seemed as though the laddish, matching-tracksuit-wearing man of the '90s was becoming deeply unfashionable, replaced by an all-new slicker, cleaner, prettier model. The metrosexual man wore chinos and tight jeans. He wasn't afraid to use moisturiser. He wore expensive underwear. His chin was stubble-free and his trainers were designer. His bed-head hair was quiffed to perfection. He worshipped at the altar of Beckham.
But now, like the 'lad's lad', the metrosexual man is a dying breed: hunted out of high-fashion by a strange new type of man that emerged out of the wilderness late last year. He's grown his moussed-quiff out into a top-knot and thrown out his over-priced razor to let his facial hair grown wild like a sexy lawn. He has tattoos of Mexican skulls and '40s pin-up girls on his arms. He wears flannel, wife-beater vests, and American Apparel hoodies. His glasses make Christopher Reeves's '70s frames look embarrassingly undersized.
You know this man. You've probably seen him drinking imported beer outside of a bar decorated with sheet metal and taxidermy. Or maybe you've seen him rifling through a rack of over-sized denim jackets at a thrift store. This man is the lumbersexual.
But is the lumbersexual just another fad of the past year, or does he represent something deeper about the current 'crisis of masculinity'? In a world in which the male suicide rate is climbing at an alarming rate, could something as superficial as a fashion statement really help stabilise this crisis? Should we even be calling it a 'crisis' in the first place?
The lad and the metrosexual may be two opposite ends on a spectrum of conventional (and broadly heterosexual) masculine behaviour and fashion, but what they share is authenticity. The men subscribing themselves to them are subscribing to forms of masculinity that they recognise within themselves – either careless or aspirational.
The lumbersexual is purposefully inauthentic, and could only exist now. Since the start of the new millennium, we've been sliding into a cultural zeitgeist in which irony and recycling has become the widest accepted currency in pop culture and fashion. A zeitgeist in which tackiness is the new chic and new ideas are old ones in disguise. Trends like the lumbersexual are a perfect culmination of this ironic re-appropriation: a delicately mixed recipe of romanticised blue-collar Americana, a vague sense of tribalism, and a dash of punk for good measure. An on-point lumbersexual has got his keys to his vintage truck in one hand and his brand new iPhone in the other. The perfect hyper-masculine costume for the 21st century. A parody – not an homage – of masculinity.
This trend could be seen as either a new wave of broad exploration of what it means to be a man in our society today, or symptomatic of a deep-seated 'crisis' of masculinity that so many have speculated about in the last year. Columnist Katie Glass certainly seemed to indorse the latter in her article for September's Sunday Times magazine, in which she voiced her concern for the increasing male suicide rate in the UK (which is currently a bigger killer than murder, road accidents, and HIV/AIDS combined) in relation to women's progress:
"It's hard not to see male suicide in the context of feminism. That while young women grow in confidence as feminism has evolved from dry academic discussion to being featured in Vogue, as women come together on social media […] nobody gives the same empowering message to young men. […] Young men are victims of patriarchy too."
To assert that the empowerment of women has lead to the disillusionment of men to me is a patriarchal statement in itself, but I do agree with her that the patriarchy is also the culprit in this case. And it seems that most of the data on the gender divide concerning suicide rates supports this idea. Professor Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman noted in another similar article for the Guardian last January that:
"Even in their choice of suicide method, males and females act out culturally prescribed gender roles."
Despite more women being diagnosed with depression and attempting suicide than men, women tend to opt for less violent means such as over-dosing, whereas men more often choose firearms or hanging and therefore have a much higher suicide success rate.
So, how exactly does donning a plaid shirt and buying beard oil combat suicidal thoughts? How do we help men fight the crisis of masculinity? Well, for starters, what if we thought of it as less of a 'crisis', and more of a deconstruction? Think of previous iconic trends that have briefly torn up the rulebook for men's fashion: from the longhaired hippies of the '60s, to the glam rockers of the '70s, to the new romantics of the '80s. Or what about looking outside of conventional heterosexual masculinity altogether? Think of drag queens, cross-dressers, and 'gender-fucks' like Conchita Wurst. Whilst feminine fashion and behaviour has allowed for fluidity, mainstream masculinity – although fluctuating occasionally – has generally remained stubbornly rigid, and the men who challenge it always perceived as more scandalous than women who do the same.
This is why trends like the lumbersexual matter. Not as a genuine expression of 'back to the good old days' grunting and unwashed hyper-manliness, but as an ironic costume. Men dressing up as men like some kind of weird reverse drag act. Fashion – as ephemeral as it may seem to some – matters. The way we dress and project ourselves matters. Masculinity doesn't need to be saved or preserved; it needs to be torn down and rebuilt. It needs expanding and exploring. It needs redefinition. If our construction of gender runs so deeply through our psychological governing that it even affects how we choose to kill ourselves – and how 'successful' we are at it – then surely that alone is proof of how urgently we need to change this construction – for both genders.
If we want to save generations of young boys from feeling helpless enough to take their own lives we need to stop telling them to 'man up', or even 'woman up'; we need to tell them to shirk oppressive gendered expectations in favour of simply being more comfortable in their own skin. To explore their own sense of what it means to be a man, just like Caiden Henson and his proud lumbersexual father, Paul:


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Tech giant Intel, Oregon's largest private employer, faces new challenges in its never-ending race to stay ahead of the pack.
Tech giant Intel, Oregon's largest private employer, faces new challenges in its never-ending race to stay ahead of the pack.
Intel Oregon's Ajay Bhatt
Ajay Bhatt's expertise as a chief client architect and research fellow for Intel Oregon is so deeply technical that it would be difficult to explain in plain English what he has accomplished — were it not for three simple letters:
Bhatt was struggling with multimedia applications at his home computer one night in 1991 when he decided there had to be a better way. "At that time, you had to open up the PC, add a card, set a whole bunch of switches, run some programs, and see if you could get a sound out of the machine," he recalls. "And if it didn't work you would fiddle with the switches again, restart it and try again. And I was just thinking, why is it this way? What would happen if it was just like an electric outlet, where you plug things in and turn on a switch and things just work?"
That's what Bhatt and his team eventually accomplished. USB became an immediate game changer that enabled all sorts of innovations from all sorts of companies, and the technology has improved exponentially with each revision. The second version was 40 times faster than the first, and the recently completed USB3 will be more than 10 times faster than that once it starts trickling into the market later this year.
Having smashed down that barrier, Bhatt is now targeting others from his Beaverton cubicle. His latest objective is a laptop that lasts all day on a single battery charge. Sounds simple, but nobody's managed it yet. And when it arrives, innovations, profits and jobs will likely follow.
Bhatt, or rather a Bollywood actor playing Bhatt, stars in a hilarious, over-the-top Intel commercial that casts the company's nerdy technologists as swoon-inducing rock star hunks. It's all great fun, but it is also part of a serious "Sponsors of Tomorrow" campaign by the world's top maker of computer chips to reassert itself as the lead dog in an increasingly competitive and fragmented business landscape. The $38 billion technology giant that employs 15,300 people in Oregon with an average salary of $113,000 has defined itself through its innovations for 40 years. But this is no time to become complacent. If Intel hopes to return to the awesome growth of its glory years, it will need to expand into new markets where it barely has a toehold, much less a near monopoly. Intel microprocessors may power the vast majority of the world's supercomputers, servers, PCs and Macs, but they do not power the iPod, the iPhone, the BlackBerry or the Kindle. This is huge. Even Intel CEO Paul Otellini has to admit, as he did publicly earlier this year, that "the old, boring beige desktop that we all grew up with is about dead."
That stark pronouncement helps explain why, even while backing away from outdated manufacturing facilities amid a faltering economy, Intel continues to invest optimistically in Oregon, recruiting scientists, engineers and developers from around the globe to join a multi-faceted brain trust that thrives on constructive confrontation and the anti-hierarchical principle that the best science wins.
The mind-boggling advances that have become commonplace at Intel are often broadly attributed to Moore's law, the principle named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that guarantees exponential performance improvements as engineers manage to cram ever-more, ever-smaller transistors into integrated circuits. But while that explanation is technically accurate in many instances, it omits the vital human factor: the creativity and drive of the people who make these things happen.
Consider Bhatt's story. Born and raised in India in an era of limited opportunity there, he came to the United States on a specific mission to study with and learn from a professor whose research had caught his fancy. He read all of the professor's work, contacted him repeatedly and eventually earned a position in his idol's lab, earning $200 a month at City University in New York, developing technology that would help power the Columbia Space Shuttle.
"I didn't even care about the money," he says. "I just wanted association with the professor. I just wanted to learn and soak all the knowledge in."
Before he was able to complete his PhD, Bhatt was recruited into the private sector, first by Wang Laboratories and later by Intel, where he has worked on PCI Express and Accelerated Graphics Port as well as USB, earning nine patents for his discoveries. He moved to Oregon in 1996. In 2005 he became an Intel Fellow, a role reserved for the company's top innovators, to pass along lessons learned and mentor promising colleagues.
It is worth pointing out that one of the key moments in the development of USB involved insubordination. Bhatt worked closely with a senior Intel fellow who disagreed with some of the architecture Bhatt and his colleagues were building. "I would go to him and he would say, you know, this doesn't make sense," says Bhatt. "And then I came back with the data and sat down with him, and this very senior, very well-respected technologist said, 'You know, you were right, I was wrong. You have proven me wrong.'"
The message to Bhatt was an encouraging one on several levels: "In a lot of other companies, it's the hierarchy that rules," he says. "That doesn't exist here. Anybody who has a good idea can come and challenge you. It is all data-driven. That exchange, that open environment, really works."
It's also exactly the sort of environment he enjoys as a scientist. An important part of Bhatt's job as mentor involves encouraging challenges from upstarts within Intel's mobile platforms group as they race to build the next great game-changer. Which brings him back to the elusive all-day laptop battery charge. "None of the things I've done were easy when I started them," he says. "I like to pick up projects where nobody gives you a chance to succeed. Those are the best ones."
Anand Pashupathy (left) and Mojtaba Mirashrafi developed an idea for an anti-theft service for laptops into a shipped product in just 12 months.
Mojtaba Mirashrafi shares Bhatt's passion for making complex things work simply. Born in Tehran, Mirashrafi came to Oregon State University to study computer science, and by 1985 he had gotten a job offer he couldn't refuse, building mission control equipment for nuclear reactor shutdown procedures and offshore oil platforms.
Before long he was scooped up by Intel, where he worked on supercomputers, videoconferencing and, in the mid 1990s, voice-over IP (early versions of today's Skype). At that time Intel was backing a lot of spin-offs, so Mirashrafi left the mothership in 1996 and caught the start-up bug, building a voice-over IP enterprise called Effusion and three other companies before returning to Intel in 2006 to work with a colleague from his videoconferencing days named Anand Pashupathy.
Pashupathy, an Indian immigrant with advanced degrees in computer science and business, was interested in building a new anti-theft service that automatically disables computers once they are stolen to protect their data. He worked on the business plan, while Mirashrafi, who holds 15 patents, fine-tuned the technical details. Not only did he and Mirashrafi sell the idea to their managers, they managed to win permission to function as a startup within Intel, with their VP serving as VC.
"Once we had [our supervisor] convinced and once we got the money, he said, 'Only come back to me if you screw up something or you have a big deal that you need my approval on,'" says Pashupathy. ""All the small stuff, don't come to me.'"
That enviable level of freedom brought quick results. "We took it from an initial idea to a shipped product in about 12 months, which is unheard of at Intel," says Pashupathy.
Mirashrafi attributes that quick progress to Intel's willingness to nurture "the spirit of the hungry startup." And he sounds more like a serial entrepreneur than an engineer as he describes the road ahead: "If we can replicate this we'll keep a small agile team. Two years from now our team will be different. We'll have to integrate it with the big machine in order to scale. But just learning how to start it small, get the concept, get the momentum, and then hand it off to the rest of the big Intel team to deploy it worldwide, and then to go start a different one and keep the pipeline going."
$37.6 billion
Another key, of course, is the quality of the team itself, and its chemistry. Pashupathy and Mirashrafi clearly enjoy working together, and they make a compelling, if somewhat odd, couple, with Pashupathy playing the smooth pitchman honed in on sales and markets while Mirashrafi cultivates the role of the rumpled genius whose real interest lies in solving extremely elaborate puzzles. They joke with each other often as they describe their project, but they also show a great deal of pride in their results.
"Everybody on the team saw this as an opportunity for change and decided to make it happen," says Pashupathy. "We were trying to do something different for Intel, and to change, in a very small way, how Intel will make money."
There are small ways to change how Intel makes money, and there are much, much larger ways. One of the biggest changes under way at Intel in Oregon involves open source software. Intel has recruited and hired some of the best minds in open source, including Keith Packard, Marcel Holtmann and Alan Cox. It has become the second-largest contributor to the open source Linux software code. And it recently invested $884 million to buy Wind River Systems, a California software company that has developed the world's most widely used operating system for devices such as navigation systems, appliances and robots. Not long after announcing that purchase, Intel said it had formed a partnership with Nokia, the largest manufacturer of cell phones in the world.
During the great Age of Exuberance, Intel dominated hardware with the same ruthlessness with which Microsoft dominated software. That dynamic has changed dramatically with the powerful rise of Google, Apple, ARM, Qualcomm, Amazon and Research in Motion, which have executed a devastating end run around Microsoft's would-be monopoly on software and threaten similar damage to Intel. Intel's foray into open-source software is no idealistic experiment; it is both a hedge and a vital move toward diversification, not to mention an offering customers are demanding. Behind the investments and partnerships is an Oregon-centered R&D race that is inherently different from other Intel pursuits because open source is, well, open, and Intel has never been known for its openness, as evidenced by the title of legendary Intel CEO Andy Grove's 1999 book, Only the Paranoid Survive.
At the heart of Intel's open source play is Moblin, an operating system for smaller devices: netbooks first, with a future eye on smartphones. Intel is backing Moblin's development, but it does not own it. In fact, Intel has opened the process of building the system to anyone who wishes to participate, by transferring it over to the Linux Foundation. That's hardly a move one would expect from a company that was recently fined $1.45 billion by the European Union for monopolistic practices. But Imad Sousou, a Jordanian-born developer who has been working on open source at Intel in Oregon for 15 years, says moving Moblin over to the Linux Foundation has brought stronger participation and better results.
Sousou's interest in open source isn't just professional. He is a true believer who makes the case that the Intel ideal of a technical meritocracy liberated from politics and position is best served through open collaboration. Moblin represents Intel's biggest foray into that model, and Sousou says the operating system is off to a good start that will only improve with further revision. "What we've done is create an animation framework," Sousou says. "In essence the software developer, instead of being a coder, becomes the director of a movie. It's closer to video games. Moblin enables you to do this really advanced user experience with 3D animation on a very small device."
When most consumers think of really advanced user experience on a very small device, the word that generally comes to mind is iPhone. Sousou, who began his career as a Mac programmer, clearly respects what Apple has accomplished, even though the iPhone is not powered by an Intel processor. At least not yet. Intel has missed out on the smartphone boom while other, smaller companies have thrived. That is expected to change in 2011, when Intel plans to enter the market with a chip for handheld devices.
"Over time Apple will probably move over to the better hardware," he predicts, "and that will definitely be the Intel platform, as Intel moves over towards smartphones and small devices."
That would be huge.
Ronak Singhal is focused on the next version of the Intel Xeon processor, due out in 2013.
Not all of the research going on at Intel Oregon represents forays into new areas. There is also the perpetual race to make the next great microprocessor that is more powerful and complex than anything that has come before. That's the quest that occupies Ronak Singhal, senior principal engineer of the team that created the Intel Xeon 5500 series. Xeon is the brain inside 80% of the world's fastest supercomputers, powering everything from server farms to research institutions, and few if any people know more about the contents of these brains than the 34-year-old Singhal, a Carnegie Mellon grad who has spent his entire career at Intel Oregon and already earned four patents for his innovations.
When Singhal describes the new Xeon as "the fastest processor on the planet," he isn't boasting so much as stating a fact. He speaks quickly and with that sort of crystalline precision you would expect from someone whose life work revolves around maximizing performance and efficiency in an industry with ridiculously high standards in those areas. With the release of Xeon 5500, Singhal and his team have already begun looking forward to the next version that will set the new standard, due to be released in 2013.
But how long can these chips keep getting faster, smarter and cheaper? Isn't there an endpoint out there somewhere for Intel? Singhal doubts it. He expresses full confidence that, contrary to the suggestions from critics that the innovations cannot possibly continue, they will. "Every few years someone says, 'You're running out of steam, you're going to fall off this curve. You can't keep generating these gains and improving your power and performance while making it cheaper to the consumer. At some point the laws of physics are going to catch up to you.' But Intel always finds a way."
It would be quite a challenge to create a research position further from Singhal's never-ending quest for the ultimate computer brain than Genevieve Bell's job as an Intel anthropologist. At first glance it seems impossible that the two people could work for the same company.
Bell's research is as free ranging as Singhal's is narrowly focused, and her unapologetic style and overstated personality contrast sharply with Singhal's precision. Whereas Singhal takes all of 30 seconds to describe his upbringing, education and hiring at Intel, Bell launches into a richly detailed narrative that leads the listener from the outback of Australia to the bar in Silicon Valley where a wacky entrepreneur decided on the spot that the tech world needs more anthropologists.
Intel anthropologist Genevieve Bell focuses on the big questions in her research, especially the question of what comes next.
Daughter of one of Australia's most prominent anthropologists, Bell has spent much of her life serving as an outsider looking in, gaining trust, immersing herself into a culture, participating in it and distilling her findings into generalized truths. She learned under her mother's tutelage in the outback, honed her skills on the Indian reservations of the United States and the campus of Stanford University, and ended up working for Intel Oregon through a quirk of fate that only could have been possible in the silicon boom years of the mid-1990s. She has been with the company for 11 years, conducting field research with a team of social scientists who attempt to anticipate the market by investigating who is using technology, how, where and to what purpose. They were conducting field research in India and China in 1998, and Bell recalls thinking, "If this takes off, it is going to be very big and very different." It has. In 1998, 65% of the people online were Americans. By 2008 that share had plummeted to 16%.
"When you look at Intel's original single-page business plan from 1968," she says, "there's this wonderful line that says, 'We anticipate that much of our market share could come from outside of California.' Well, what does the future of the Internet look like when only 16% of the users are Americans?"
That's the sort of wide-angle question Bell has built her career on answering. "Our point has always been that people matter," she says. "Moore's law is great. Smaller, faster, cheaper, absolutely, but what Moore's law doesn't tell you is what happens next. For my colleagues and me, that was always what was interesting: What happens next? And can you reverse engineer it? What is it that people value? What motivates us? What do we care about? What are we passionate about? Can you take the things that people care about now and use that as the starting point for new technologies?"
Good questions. And she has more. "Now that the Internet is on phones and GPS devices, what does that mean? How does that change things? And a corollary to that is the tension between devices that function best when they are constantly connected and human beings who function best when they are periodically disconnected. How do we start talking about technology in ways that won't consume people's entire lives?"
What does all this have to do with a company that manufactures computer chips?
Wait 20 years to find out. Bell's research won't produce the next great game changer in the tradition of USB, or the next amazing chip that disproves the skeptics by setting new standards for performance, or the operating system that enables Intel to sprint from nowhere into the lead in the arms race for the perfect hand-held computing device, or the innovative new service that rewards Intel for internally seeding hungry start-ups.
Rather, her job is to tie these and other efforts together and make sense of what they mean, the human needs these innovations help us to fulfill, the needs that remain unfulfilled, the lingering problems that technology may help us to solve one day.
When you think about it in those terms, it's easy to conclude that Intel's most inventive technologists aren't really like rock stars at all. They're way, way cooler.


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My office used to receive phone calls about once a week asking if we held support groups for kids with diabetes. I had honestly never thought to have one. Why would any kid want to come to a support group when there are cartoons to watch and siblings to torment? But finally, I agreed to give it a shot.
It was an epic failure and a rousing success all wrapped up in one.
The kids were miserable. They ranged in age from 4 to 14, which may have accounted for some of the struggles I and my staff had in getting them focused. As much as we tried to engage them in fun social activities, the younger ones were incapable of holding still, and the older ones slouched in their chairs with looks on their faces suggesting thoughts such as, "This is stupid. I'd rather be on Facebook." About the only time they would look up was to check the clock.
The parents, on the other hand, had the time of their lives. We had coffee and snacks for them in the other room, and I could hear them laughing and carrying on. Some of the snippets of conversation I overheard stuck in my brain:
"…you wouldn't believe the food stash I found under his bed…"
"…if she remembered her meter like she remembered her cell phone…"
"…anyone else have bloody test strips all over their house?…"
"…we change his pump while he's sleeping so we don't have to sit on him…"
"…exercise? You've got to be kidding…"
All things considered, it was some of the best venting I had heard since the HVAC convention was in town. It was then that we decided to give the kids a reprieve and instead start a support group for parents of kids with diabetes.
For years, the group met, shared some things, learned some things, and taught me a thing or two. I already understood how complex it can be to manage diabetes in a growing child, having worked with so many over the years. (I was lucky enough to be diagnosed at age 18.) But I also learned that parenting a child with diabetes is very different from having diabetes. For example, when my blood glucose level is high or low, I deal with it and move on. But when their child's blood glucose level is high or low, most parents become frustrated, dwell on it, and feel a bit guilty.
One of our most productive parents' meetings was an impromptu discussion of tips for a family dealing with a recent diabetes diagnosis. From that discussion (and with a bit of refinement on my part), we developed our own "Top Ten" list of techniques for managing blood glucose in kids. (Most of the same principles can be applied by adults managing their own Type 1 diabetes.) It goes something like this:
Parenting is a never-ending challenge, and so is diabetes care. Parents need to stay involved in their child's management even when he is old enough and mature enough to perform many of his daily self-management rituals on his own. Your involvement keeps your child accountable and on his toes.
That's not to say that the parent who usually oversees the diabetes tasks can never take a break. Ask someone else to help handle your tasks or oversight for a day or two. And give your child opportunities to indulge in favorite foods or ease back on exercise, record-keeping, and frequent blood glucose monitoring once in a while. Just don't ever miss the basic things that keep him out of immediate danger: taking insulin, and checking blood glucose at least a few times each day.
Maintaining daily routines helps to keep blood glucose levels in target range. But it can be a challenge, because we all know about the odd appetites, habits, and assortment of activities that pervade kids' lives. The fact remains, however, that kids thrive in a structured environment. So look for ways to have your child eat meals at consistent times, play or exercise at regular intervals, and go to bed and get up at about the same times each day. In addition, check blood glucose levels, take insulin, change pump infusion sets, and so on on a schedule. The more consistent your child's daily life, the more consistent and predictable his blood glucose levels will be.
This deserves special attention because of the tremendous influence physical activity has on blood glucose regulation. Often, kids get involved in sports[1] or other physical activities that are intermittent. They may be very active on weekends and "slugs" all week. Or they may run like crazy in the summer and fall, then sleep their way through the winter and spring. These types of inconsistent activity patterns cause major changes in insulin sensitivity, or how well the body's cells utilize insulin to lower blood glucose.
As mentioned in item 9, above, consistency counts. And that goes for physical activity as well. Encourage your child to stay physically active on a regular basis, year-round, and provide the support he needs to do that. And remember, if all else fails, there is nothing more effective than leading by example!
As annoying and time-consuming as it can be to keep written records, there is nothing like them when it comes to achieving and maintaining high-quality blood glucose control. Sure, you can upload the data from the memory of your child's meter, pump, or continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) system[2] to your computer. But there is a psychological advantage to writing something down: It makes us instantly accountable for our actions. And if the records are kept in a format that is easy to analyze, they let you take a step back and see how things are going.
In general, I find that people who keep written records are able to achieve better control than those who do not. Records should certainly include blood glucose levels, but they can also include factors that affect blood glucose levels, such as insulin, carbohydrates, and physical activities. Many people find that blood-glucose-only records work fine until a problem comes up. Then, more detailed records enable more effective troubleshooting. A series of log sheets that can help with record keeping can be found at my website, www.integrateddiabetes.com/logs.shtml[3].
A person's insulin program should match his body's needs as closely as possible. In a person who doesn't have diabetes, the pancreas takes care of this by releasing a small amount of insulin around the clock and larger amounts after eating, when a lot of glucose is entering the bloodstream. It also makes minor adjustments throughout the day as a person's insulin needs fluctuate because of exercise, the release of other hormones, etc. The ultimate goal is to keep blood glucose levels in a fairly narrow range, so that the cells that need glucose have it when they need it, and so that the bloodstream is not inundated with sticky glucose.
A person who has Type 1 diabetes (and some with Type 2) accomplishes this by injecting or infusing insulin. To replicate the pancreas's slow, steady release of insulin around the clock, basal insulin is used, and to handle the glucose from meals, bolus insulin is taken.
When injecting insulin, a long-acting insulin such as Lantus, Toujeo, Basaglar, or Levemir may be used to serve as basal insulin. When using an insulin pump, a small amount of rapid-acting insulin is infused all the time to provide basal insulin. Whichever method you use, your basal insulin should hold your blood glucose steady when you haven't eaten or taken a bolus of rapid-acting insulin for several hours. This is usually best accomplished with an insulin pump.
The amount of bolus (mealtime) insulin should be matched to the amount of carbohydrate being consumed, with appropriate adjustment for the premeal blood glucose level, anticipated physical activity, and amount of insulin remaining (if any) from the previous bolus. (If any of these concepts are unfamiliar to you, talk with your child's physician or certified diabetes educator[4] about learning more.) Again, this can be accomplished through injections of rapid-acting insulin at each meal and snack, but it is far easier and more practical to do with an insulin pump. Today's insulin pumps have built-in software that can help calculate correct bolus dose sizes, and they can give doses in very small, precise increments.
Your physicians and diabetes educators are essentially paid consultants to you and your family. You are ultimately the decision maker when it comes to your child's daily diabetes care, but every good decision maker relies on the expertise of others to do the best job possible. Your child's health-care providers should have the knowledge and time to accommodate your needs and interests. For example, they should be comfortable and experienced at using the latest technologies — or at least be willing to learn. They should be accessible when you need them.
If your child's current health-care providers are falling short in these areas, it may be time to seek consultation elsewhere. But before giving up on your current team, make sure you're doing your part. You must communicate with them, cooperate with them, provide them with necessary information, and keep yourself informed so that you can ask the right kind of questions.
Even if most kids don't want to participate in a formal support group, meeting and spending time with other kids who have diabetes can have potent effects. When your kids see other kids using devices like pumps and continuous glucose monitors, they'll develop an interest in them, too. When they see other kids checking their blood glucose level before a soccer game, they'll be more likely to do it themselves without having to be told. When they see other kids giving their own shots or changing their own infusion sets, they'll become more comfortable at taking that next step. And psychologically, there is nothing like being around other kids with similar challenges, doing things together, to feel more comfortable in real life.
There is also the opportunity for your child to set an example and teach or show other kids what he has learned and accomplished. This process, called modeling, helps to reinforce the value of appropriate behaviors and provides a sense of pride. So check into diabetes camp for your child. Bring him to local diabetes fund-raisers and educational programs. Check out the Children With Diabetes conferences and online resources at www.childrenwithdiabetes.com[5].
Insanity is often defined as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. Of course, that may seem like the norm when it comes to blood glucose levels! How many times has your child had the same meal, taken the same insulin, and done the same things and had radically different blood glucose results?
Patterns, however, are a different story. If you detect a pattern of out-of-range blood glucose levels, don't keep doing the same thing. Look for a potential cause, and try doing things a bit differently. Are adjustments needed to accommodate for physical activity? Are carbohydrates being under- or overcounted? Is insulin being given at the right times and into skin that is absorbing it properly?
Insulin requirements can change rapidly in growing kids, so don't hesitate to adjust doses to meet your child's changing needs. Don't forget that the first step in fixing a problem is detecting it, so make sure you're keeping and analyzing records on a regular basis (see item 7), staying on top of your child's control (item 10), and utilizing your health-care team for expert advice (item 5).
Many kids feel helpless when it comes to their diabetes. They didn't ask to get it, and they certainly don't like being told to check, count, calculate, bolus, record, etc., on a daily basis. Whenever possible, involve your child in the goal-setting and decision-making processes. With a young child, it might be as simple as having him choose which finger to prick, or what color pen to use when writing down blood glucose levels. With older kids, it could involve having them set HbA1c[6] or blood glucose targets, or letting them decide how much carbohydrate to have at their meals and snacks. Restoring some sense of control over their own lives is important for establishing "ownership" of their diabetes and avoiding burnout[7] and depression.
When you have diabetes, numbers are important. But they are not everything. Try not to take the numbers too seriously. You and your child have lives to live! Taking care of diabetes should not be a full-time job, and it should not keep you (or your child) from doing anything you want to do. From sleepovers[8] to sports camps to adventure vacations, there are always ways to adjust so that diabetes can coexist with your chosen lifestyle. In most cases, it is worth sacrificing a few tenths of a point on an HbA1c so that you and your child can enjoy life to the fullest.
Now I realize that these 10 items encompass a lot of stuff. Asking you to implement every one of them right away would be a clear violation of our number-one strategy. Instead, tackle one at a time, starting with the one that seems the easiest. Perhaps you could take the advice in item 2 and ask your child which one he would like to do first! As I tell my clients, the idea is not to do everything perfectly and have perfect control. That's just not possible. What is possible is improvement. If you can find a way to make things just a little bit better, give yourself (and your child) a pat on the back!
Want to learn more about caring for a child with Type 1 diabetes? Read "Type 1 Diabetes and Sleepovers or Field Trips,"[9] "Writing a Section 504 Plan for Diabetes,"[10] and "Be Aware of Hypoglycemia Unawarness."[11]
Source URL: https://www.diabetesselfmanagement.com/about-diabetes/diabetes-kids/top-10-tips-for-better-blood-glucose-control/
Disclaimer of Medical Advice: Statements and opinions expressed on this Web site are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the publishers or advertisers. The information, which comes from qualified medical writers, does not constitute medical advice or recommendation of any kind, and you should not rely on any information contained in such posts or comments to replace consultations with your qualified health care professionals to meet your individual needs.
Copyright ©2023 Diabetes Self-Management unless otherwise noted.


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Please note, if you haven't seen it yet, there was a bonus chapter posted Wednesday that started off this arc. You may want to use the Previous Chapter button to check that out if you happened to miss it.
"Have you ever wondered why they're all first-year teachers?"
Blinking across the library table at Vanessa as the blonde girl finished speaking, I asked hesitantly, "Wondered why who are all first-year teachers?"
It was Tuesday, January 16th, a couple days after Avalon, Shiori, and I had met with Seth and Calvin (and Buddy, of course). They had promised to get in touch once they actually had a meeting set with Fahsteth. So on that front, all I could do was wait as patiently as possible.
In this particular case, waiting patiently partly involved working on a project for Heretical Geography that Vanessa and I had been assigned to do together by Professor Vandel. He'd said something about me being one of the few people outside of her own team that he could believe wouldn't just rely on Vanessa to do all of the work. Which was either flattering for me or really disparaging toward the rest of the class. Probably both.
Looking around briefly, the blonde girl leaned closer while lowering her voice. She had already put a special privacy coin between us (apparently Scout had taught her how to use it). Yet, like Koren, she was still smart enough to be cautious. "Headmistress Sinclaire, all the teachers she said we can trust, the ones in her inner circle, they're all first-year teachers. What about the ones that teach the older grades? Does she… not really trust any of them?"
Lowering my own voice, I shrugged. "I thought about that, and I've got a couple options. First, maybe she just plays her cards close to her chest. You know, like she doesn't tell us everyone she trusts. We are students, after all. She told us people in the first-year staff that she trusts because those are the teachers that we actually interact with. Why would she tell us about someone we hardly ever see, let alone talk to? How many of the upper-year teachers could you even name?"
The other girl's mouth opened, but I stopped her with a raised hand. "Sorry, I forgot who I was talking to. All of them, obviously. My point is, how many of the upper year teachers could the average first-year student name? Someone without a perfect memory."
After the other girl conceded that point with a nod, I added, "It's, um, compartmentalization. If someone like Ruthers finds out something from us that they shouldn't find out, her entire network isn't taken apart. It makes sense that she wouldn't tell us everything. Especially if they believe that those are the only people firmly on Gaia's side in the whole thing. There's a better chance they'll slip up and someone else that's loyal to her, someone she didn't tell us about, can warn her."
"That… yeah, that makes sense." Vanessa agreed. "What about the other option you mentioned?"
I looked at the table for a moment before answering. "The other option is that the teachers she trusts are all at the first-year level because it's easier to hire new teachers, people she can personally vet or already knows, for the younger grades. It makes sense, doesn't it? A new teacher comes in and they go for the younger students while the more experienced faculty move up to teach the older students. So if Gaia wanted to hire more people, they'd be at this level."
Vanessa tilted her head, clearly considering that for a second before slowly nodding. Her voice was quiet and thoughtful. "It makes sense for another reason too. Maybe she was preparing."
Raising an eyebrow, I asked, "Preparing for what?"
"For new students like–" The other girl paused before gesturing back and forth. "Like you and me. Like Shiori. Like Tristan. Like Koren. Students who need extra… guidance. Extra help, from people who understand, people who can tell them–us the truth. Maybe that's why she stacked the deck for the first-years. Because from second year on, we can still talk to the first-year teachers. They can still help. But you said it yourself, most of us don't even know who the upper-class teachers are, let alone have any idea of how to get advice from them. She puts the people she trusts in the younger years and lets us bond with them earlier instead of spreading them out."
"You're right," I agreed. "That does make sense. So… I guess the answer is probably a little bit of all of the above. Gaia has her reasons for not telling us about everyone she might trust, but she also puts most of them in the first year staffing positions because it gives us people to talk to."
"I guess so." Vanessa looked thoughtful for a moment before focusing. "But umm, changing the subject, Scout said you guys were trying to find out everything you could about Avalon's mom."
Surprised that Scout had said anything at all about that, I hesitated. "Oh, uh, I guess, but it's–"
"A secret," she finished for me. "I know. Don't worry, Scout said she talked to your roommate first and got the okay to ask me."
Well that was also a little surprising. "Avalon gave the okay to talk to you about her mom?"
She nodded. "I just had to promise not to tell anyone about it. Not even Tristan. Which…" Pausing, Vanessa made a face. "It feels weird, but I get it. My brother's not… subtle."
"Yeah, he has a lot of good qualities," I agreed. "But keeping things quiet isn't his strongest suit."
Shrugging, the girl pointed out, "He's kept the whole hybrid thing quiet so far. And your secrets."
Quickly nodding in agreement, I pointed out, "Sure, but there's a difference between not blabbing secrets and being subtle. Tristan stands out. He loves standing out. He's um, how do I put this?"
"He's a show-off," Vanessa finished for me. "I know. Not subtle. But that's not why I didn't tell him anything about how you guys are looking into Avalon's mom. I didn't tell him about it because Avalon and Scout asked me not to. I owe you guys. I… you helped get my brother back. So you ask me for help, you ask me to keep a secret, ask me for anything and I… I'm there. Promise."
Swallowing, I met her brown-eyed gaze. "And I promise that I'll find a way to help get your mom and dad back, Vanessa. We're not done with just your brother. We're gonna find your family."
There was a look in her eyes for a moment before she glanced away. Her voice was even quieter than it had been the whole time, to the point that I could barely hear her. "I'm not used to having anyone to talk to about this stuff. The whole time I was growing up, no one believed what I told them about what happened… until I realized that I had to keep quiet about it or they'd keep sending me to…" She paused, biting her lip as she finished a little hoarsely. "Special homes. So having Headmistress Sinclaire, you, Scout, Tristan, I… I don't know how to deal with it."
That was why she came off as so shy most of the time, why she didn't tend to interact much with people. Besides the fact that she had been busy desperately looking up anything she could to find her parents and brother, she'd also conditioned herself to keep quiet about what she knew so that the people who were supposed to take care of her wouldn't think she was crazy and lock her up.
"Well," I coughed, shifting in my seat. "I know we're not like, best friends or anything. But any time you wanna talk about… anything, I wouldn't mind. Even if Tristan isn't magically glued to me anymore." I said the last bit with a tiny smile, since Gaia had finally succeeded in switching the anchor spell from me to Vanessa just the other day. "Doesn't mean you have to be a stranger."
Her brow knitted as she looked at me. "Was that last part a joke?"
"Was what a–" I stopped, flushing a little. "Right, don't have to be a stranger. Uh, no, just a coincidence. But can I take credit for it anyway?" Giving the other girl a smile, I added, "Sorry, you were saying something about Scout telling you about looking for stuff about Avalon's mom."
Nodding at that, Vanessa reached down into the bag on the chair beside her. "Yeah, so I um, I looked into it too. I wanted to help, especially since Scout was already helping Tristan and me by looking into anything she could find about the… um, my mom's people while they were in Europe."
Raising an eyebrow, I asked curiously, "Did she find anything important?"
"Maybe," the other girl replied slowly, frowning thoughtfully. "She found some books and journals and stuff that mention beings that can possess others. I've gotta read all of them and compare it to the stuff we have in this library. You know, Strangers that were already identified and catalogued."
Squinting then, Vanessa muttered, "I would've been through all of them already, but Tristan and the others keep distracting me. And," she looked back up while pulling a folder out of her bag. "I wanted to keep looking for stuff about Avalon's mom. You know, because I sort of have experience with…" She trailed off briefly before amending herself. "I know what it's like to try to hunt down information about your parents and have everything end up being a dead end. Before I came here, I couldn't find anything about mine."
Swallowing the thick lump in my throat, I nodded. "A lot of us seem to have at least one missing parent. I guess it makes us part of the cool club or something." The words sounded hollow even to me, and I shook it off before gesturing for her to go on. "I take it you actually found something? Wait, are you sure you shouldn't tell Avalon about it?"
"You can tell her," Vanessa quickly replied while blushing slightly. "She um, she kinda scares me."
I coughed. "I guess she can have that effect on people. But she wouldn't hurt you or anything."
"I know, but um, still. You can talk to her better than I can. I get nervous and um, then I start to babble and she gets impatient and it's a whole thing." Laying her hand on the folder, she opened it to show me the first page. "Her name was Ophelia Penn. Before she was married to Avalon's dad, I mean. And before that, her name was Adelind Jaspers. That lasted about two years, and before that one, she was Francesca Dumont. And–"
Holding up a hand, I frowned. "She kept changing her name? How far back does that go?"
"As far as I can tell?" Vanessa hesitated before flipping through some papers in the folder. "The earliest name for her I can find is Giselle Meyer, when she was sixteen. That's when it was changed to Kaia Pierce. Before that, I dunno. There's some school records, but they're spotty, like someone went through and started getting rid of them, but didn't finish."
"She was hiding," I murmured under my breath. "She and her family, I guess. It doesn't go any further back than that? What about her mom and dad?"
Flinching, the other girl shook her head. "Sorry. All I've got for them is a couple names that popped up on her school records. Kinsley and Brennan. Last name Meyer, just like the name she used when she was sixteen. If it was anything else before that, I dunno. There's no birth certificate, nothing like that. The earliest thing I could find was a note in her freshman year of high school about being excused from gym for the semester because of a broken leg. Before that, there's nothing. It's like she just poofed into existence."
"Or like whoever went back and erased her identity did a really good job up to that point," I muttered under my breath. "It sounds like they were working on scrubbing everything about her and just didn't finish." Thinking about it for another moment, I added, "Maybe it was her. Maybe she was the one erasing her past and it stopped when she… when she died."
"There's something big about her, isn't there?" Vanessa asked, her eyes squinting at me. "Someone's trying to kill Avalon. And now you guys are looking into her mom's history and there's all this stuff?" Before I could say anything, she held up a hand. "I know, it's secret. Don't worry, you don't have to tell me. I just…be careful, okay? It sounds like they were trying really hard to hide from someone. If it's the same someone that's after Avalon now, that means it was Heretics the whole time. And if Heretics were after Avalon's family for that long… it's something big."
Swallowing hard, I nodded. It took me a second to find my voice. "Trust me, we know. Don't worry about it. You've got enough to focus on. I'll umm, I'll look through this stuff you found and see if anything jumps out. Did you notice anything else?"
"There was one big thing," Vanessa started slowly. Glancing at me, she reached out to shuffle through the papers before coming to a single page. It was blank, but I could tell there was something on the other side, from the colors that bled through. "She visited the high school counselor a few times. Most of the file's gone, but this was in there. It's a watercolor she made when he told her to draw what she was dreaming about."
Watching my expression, she turned the paper over, and I found myself staring at Avalon's mom's painting.
It was the lighthouse, the one here on the island. That much was obvious. But surrounding the lighthouse there was a pair of folded, half-visible angel wings. And above it, there was a face topped by a halo. It was like there was a giant, mostly invisible angel guarding the lighthouse. Yet the expression of the angel was… dangerous. It looked menacing.
Seosten. Avalon's mother had made a painting of the Seosten and the lighthouse when her counselor told her to draw what she dreamed about. But she hadn't been a Heretic, had she? I had to believe that if she was, Gaia would've said something.
Unless that part was erased from her memory too, of course. But that was just… we needed to know more. Maybe one of her parents was here and told her stories about it. If it was… I started to talk out loud to work it out. "Maybe whichever one of her parents wasn't being… chased originally used to go here. Maybe they were part of the group looking for the other parent, and they found them. But instead of bringing them in, they… fell in love and started running away. Then the parent that went here told Avalon's mom stories about this place."
It was little more than a guess, really. But I had to believe that Gaia would know if Avalon's mom had gone here. But if one of that woman's parents had gone here before leaving, that might have been enough for Gaia to not make the connection. I'd have to see if she recognized the names Kinsley or Brennan, though I doubted either were their real names by that point.
Shaking that off, I looked up again. "Vanessa, thanks for this. You didn't have to do all this work. It couldn't have been easy."
She shrugged. "It's like I said, I'm used to digging into people's pasts. And you–you helped bring my brother back. I owe you."
My head shook at that. "No, you don't. We don't have to get into the 'who owes who what' game. But helping each other because we can? That I'm good with."
The other girl watched me for a moment before nodding. "Okay. But um, we should probably help each other by doing that project so we don't fail Professor Vandel's course.
"Because that would be really embarrassing."
"Revolutions," Professor Ross began the next morning. "There's been a lot of them throughout human history. Some the Bystanders know about, others they don't. But one in particular stands out both within the Bystander world and our own. The American Revolution."
Standing in front of her desk, the elderly woman watched us for a moment before continuing. "Can anyone tell me why the American Revolution is important to both Bystanders and Heretics?"
Vanessa's hand went up immediately, of course. And in this case, so did most of the other Heretic-born students. On the other hand, my fellow Bystander-kin looked as confused as I felt.
"Mr. Gerardo," Professor Ross nodded toward Sean. "Why is the American Revolution important to both Bystanders and Heretics?"
The boy shifted in his seat and straightened while laying his hand on Vulcan's head. "Because what the Bystanders call the American Revolution, we call the Splinter-Rebellion."
Before my brain could finish summoning the image of a giant mutated rat directing his turtle pupils to wage war for independence, Professor Ross continued. "Very good. Yes, and what was formed from the Splinter-Rebellion, Mr. Leven?"
Zeke all-but snarled the answer. "Eden's Garden." He was pointedly looking in Avalon's direction.
That brought my head up and around, as I blurted, "Wait, what?"
"If you have a question, Miss Chambers, raise your hand," Professor Ross admonished before answering anyway. "But Mr. Leven is correct. What began as a war between Crossroads and those who splintered off to create what eventually became Eden's Garden bled into the Bystander world. However, where the Bystander war was about the American colonies fighting for independence from Great Britain, the Splinter-Rebellion centered around a… violent disagreement over which Heretic group should control the territory of the new world.
"Small and young as they were, Eden's Garden possessed a good deal of influence over the British Parliament and leadership. They had begun to use that influence to immediately begin giving themselves advantages in the colonies. Crossroads could not directly combat those kind of connections. So, we went for a different tactic."
Raising my hand until she nodded to me, I managed a slightly weak, "… Revolution. Crossroads pushed for the American Revolution to separate the colonies from Great Britain so that all that influence Eden's Garden had wouldn't mean anything."
The woman smiled a little at me. "Yes, very good, Miss Chambers. Exactly. It's slightly amusing if you think about it that way. Eden's Garden staged their own revolution in order to be independent from Crossroads. Then, in order to combat their new political power that would have given them a great deal of influence over the shape and direction of the new continent, Crossroads helped to stage a revolution in the Bystander world. That revolution resulted in the formation of the United States, and helped cut a good deal of the power away from Great Britain.
"Of course," she added then, "There were other wars going on at the same time with the same intention. Eden's Garden had firm control over Great Britain, which meant that Crossroads had to attack them from multiple fronts, using different proxy countries.
"You might say that without Crossroads working to neuter Great Britain's power, and thus the power of Eden's Garden, the United States never would have been formed.
"And wouldn't that have been a very different world to live in?"


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Seminole FC/Seminole Shooting Stars Soccer Association is a non-profit and educational organization whose mission is to cultivate the physical, mental and emotional development of youth through the sport of soccer at all levels of age and competition. We are dedicated to building an organization that serves our community with integrity, respect and leadership. We will achieve soccer excellence through hard work, sacrifice and the complete commitment to every individual player from the recreation to the club level.
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Bray and von Storch just published the results of their latest survey of climate scientists. It contains lots of interesting and very detailed information, though some questions are a little biased in my opinion. Still, they find a strong consensus on human causation of climate change: 87.4% of respondents are to some extent convinced that most of recent or near future climate change is, or will be, the result of anthropogenic causes (question v007). Responses were given on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 7 (very much). In line with Bray (2010) a response between 5 and 7 is considered agreement with anthropogenic causation. In their 2008 survey the level of agreement based on the same question was 83.5% and in 2013 it was 80.9%.
Question v013 asked a somewhat similar question as we did in our 2012 climate survey, namely the percentage of global warming that is attributable to human activities:
84.2% of respondents picked one of the two answer options that correspond to the canonical "more than half" or "most" of global warming that according to the IPCC is human caused. However, the corresponding IPCC statement is with regards to warming since the 1950's, about which there is a lot more confidence, whereas this question specifies the warming since 1850.
But wait a moment, hasn't the earth warmed a lot more than 0.5-0.7 degrees C since 1850? Yes, it definitely has; we've recently breached the 1 degree mark relative to the 1850-1880 average, so the range given in their question is quite outdated. A defensible choice at the time of drafting the survey would have been to quote the latest IPCC number of 0.85 (0.65 to 1.06) degrees warming over the time period 1880-2012, even if current temperatures have gone up sharply since then.
Global average surface temperature relative to the 1850-1880 mean. Last annual average shown is 2015; if the first few months of 2016 are a guide, the vertical scale might have to be adapted for 2016. Figure by Jos Hagelaars.
Moreover, the answer options for v013 do not cover the full range of possibilities. Natural factors could have caused warming or cooling. Imagine that natural factors would have caused a cooling of 0.1 degrees C since pre-industrial times (which is not at all implausible), then to achieve closure with the observed warming of 1.0 degrees, anthropogenic factors should have contributed 1.1 degrees, or 110% of the observed warming. We discussed this argument in detail in our ES&T paper emanating from the climate science survey we conducted in 2012.
I emailed Dennis Bray about these and other issues after having responded to their survey back in 2015. He defended their choice of lowballing the observed warming as being consistent with their previous surveys and not being much different from more recent, and also likely contested, estimates. Strangely, he disagreed with the possibility of a factor being responsible for more than 100% of the observed warming, even in the hypothetical example above.
Cook et al (myself included) recently wrote an article in which we reviewed the existing 'consensus' estimates. This latest Bray and von Storch survey finds a level consensus on attribution that is consistent with other studies, though towards the lower end of the range. From their description I don't think there is a bias in their sample of scientists, though there is always the possibility of self-selection, where people might be more likely to respond to a survey if it originates from a source who they perceive to be credible. Repeatedly, surveys have found that the level of consensus goes up as you zoom in to a sample of scientists with more relevant expertise. The Bray and von Storch results, as are ours, are mostly representative of a broad group of climate related scientists.
A detail of particular interest to me is that the survey questions included the response option "no answer". That explains the different sample size for different questions ("Number of obs"). It's probably no coincidence that question v013 (asking for a specific range of percent contribution) has a smaller sample size (n=587), and by inference more "no answer" responses, than the other, but simpler, attribution question v007 (n=640). This is consistent with what we found in our 2012 climate science survey: fewer respondents picked a specific percentage range of attribution compared to providing a qualitative judgment thereof. Though admittedly "no answer" (in the Bray and von Storch survey) is less ambiguous in this context than "I don't know", "unknown" or "other" (in our survey).
Amidst the questions on science and society I perceived some questions to have an "anti-consensus" (v069) or "anti-alarmist" (v067) tone to it, but there were no questions asking for mirror image perceptions. Doomsday stories need to be investigated before they get out of hand (v067): of course. But no question was asked whether stories downplaying a scientifically established risk should be investigated. I would have likewise responded: of course. To his credit, Dennis Bray acknowledged in his email that this was an oversight on their part.


text: You can buy paid support for ROCKS from clustercorp. In addition you can buy paid support for xCAT (with RedHat) through Sumavi. And of course, which ever vendor you decide to buy hardware from will have a supported offering as well. On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 9:23 AM, Richard Chang <rchang.lists at gmail.com>wrote: > On 10/22/2010 6:21 PM, Michael Di Domenico wrote: > > Is there something Rocks is not providing that you need? I haven't > > used Rocks in a few years, but from what I can recall it's a decent > > solution for someone just starting out. There certainly are other > > solutions on the market. I think it comes down to which flavor of HPC > > software you feel most comfortable administering, not necessarily what > > other people "think" you should be running. > > > > Thanks Michael, > > I am satisfied with Rocks, but my group people wanted something well > supported that means, RHEL instead of CentOS and "some other PAID" cluster > manager instead of Rocks, especially, when we have the budget. > > Somehow, I have not been able to convince my folks that Rocks is a much > better solution than the PAID ones. > > Thanks for your suggestion anyway!!. > > regards, > Richard. > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/attachments/20101022/4005b04a/attachment.html>


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TEHRAN, Iran, Feb. 16, 2008 — -- No, it's not made of solid gold -- just ordinary aluminum. But it does come with the swagger of being labeled no. "1." And that's evidently worth a record $14.3 million.
Today, a businessman named Saeed Abdul Ghafour Khouri was willing to pay 52.2 dirham -- the equivalent of $14.3 million -- for the local license plate labeled "1" at an auction at the 7-star Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi, making it the world's most expensive license plate.
The previous record was held by Abu Dhabi plate number 5, bought at auction for $6.8 million by stock broker Talal Khouri last year.
The oil-rich cities of the Persian Gulf are driven by car culture, with relatively few pedestrian areas or public transport options. Vanity plates are a matter of personal pride and indulgence.
The value of a plate depends on a a mix of math and emotional appeal. Normal license plates have 5 randomized numbers. From there, they get more expensive. Prices go up for fewer digits and cooler numbers. Number one is considered the most prestigious.
"From 1 to 10, these are the most expensive numbers," said Abdulla al Mannaie, managing director of Emirates Auctions. "Ten to 99 are the second category. On the other side, you look to numbers which is like 11, 22, 23 they are expensive because it carry [repeating digits].
"We are trying to link between car models and number plate, like a Ferrari 599 and the plate 599, as well as date of birth or anniversary," said al Mannaie. "They are looking to the number plate as if it is their identity, their personal identity."
Plates "5" and "7" sold for nearly 10 times the value of the luxury cars they adorn.
"Our job at Emirates Auction is to make an expensive car without a prestigious license plate worth nothing," al Mannaie told ABC News. "Owners will change their car, but they will keep using the same plate for life."
He has had the number "383" for more than 30 years. He has since bought a cell phone number to match.
Al Mannaie said vanity plates are good business -- an investment with more than a 20 percent annual return. Meanwhile, they're a status symbol on wheels.
"The value of the plate will increase while the value of the car will decrease," al Mannaie said. "So overall there will be zero percent depreciation."
Gulf Arab countries like the United Arab Emirates, home to Abu Dhabi, are swimming in cash after windfall profits from high oil prices. At this rate, the Gulf region will pull in $6.2 trillion in oil money before the year 2020, management consulting firm McKinsey & Company estimates.
The auctions take place monthly, organized by Al Mannaie's company on behalf of the Abu Dhabi Police Department. The past five auctions raised $56 million across 393 plates, with all proceeds going to charity. Money from today's record sell will go to victims of road accidents.
Lara Setrakian reported from Tehran; Ron Bagnullo in Abu Dhabi and Maryam Shahabi contributed to this report.


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The Police Department is located just one block west of Ronald Reagan Blvd. (County Road 427), off of State Road 436, at 175 Newburyport Avenue, Altamonte Springs, FL 32701 (Public Safety Complex).
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We offer fingerprinting services at the COPS Center on Monday through Saturday from10 a.m. to 4 p.m. (excluding holidays). The cost for inked fingerprints is $15 per card. Live scan fingerprints are $20. For more information about the COPS Center, call (407) 571-8463 or visit the COPS page.
The Altamonte Springs Code of Ordinances has the current City Code available.
No. Crimes should be reported by calling 9-1-1. However in certain cases where the victim lives out of the area, we may accept a written report from another police agency or allow the victim to complete a courtesy incident report. Please call our Investigations Division at (407) 571-8270 to determine if you are eligible to complete a Courtesy Incident Report.
Learn more about bias-based policing.


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My adult children have moved back home for the summer. In September, when both of them moved out of the house, I missed them terribly. I wondered how I would ever fill my life again. But I adjusted, as did my … Continue reading