Non-Prophet

freedom of voice!

Well hell yeah. My pal Sue Spengler, oft seen on the Springs Culture Cast, teaches adult students in a Pre-GED class. She has started a blog for them. This is fantastic, as it provides a creative outlet for the skills that they're learning and at the same time provides a tangible and authentic forum for them to exercise said skills. What you should do is pop on over there and comment the hell out of the place. All bloggers like to know that they're being read. :0)

From the site:

We all have different cultures and we are very creative with open minds. However, we can be sort of shy at times. We work together on some things, and we put our minds together to have one big creative mind to work with. We are making an effort to improve ourselves.

Nano-Tech

Check it:

Imagine a machine so small that it is imperceptible to the human eye. Imagine working machines no bigger than a grain of pollen. Imagine thousands of these machines batch fabricated on a single piece of silicon, for just a few pennies each. Imagine a world where gravity and inertia are no longer important, but atomic forces and surface science dominate. Imagine a silicon chip with thousands of microscopic mirrors working in unison, enabling the all optical network and removing the bottlenecks from the global telecommunications infrastructure. You are now entering the microdomain, a world occupied by an explosive technology known as MEMS. A world of challenge and opportunity, where traditional engineering concepts are turned upside down, and the realm of the "possible" is totally redefined.

Aye Aye

Check out this freaky little guy. Madagascar is loaded with alienesk nightmares like this. Like it or not, this bird is a primate, just like you. With a face only a blind mother could love, the aye aye is a long fingered freak that makes my day a little bit weirder. The pic is of a juvenile.

wikieverything

The Aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis) is a strepsirrhine native to Madagascar that combines rodent-like teeth with a long, thin middle finger to fill the same ecological niche as a woodpecker. It is the world's largest nocturnal primate, and is characterized by its unique method of finding food; it taps on trees to find grubs, then gnaws holes in the wood and inserts its elongated middle finger to pull the grubs out.

NSARCHIVE Probes Email Loss

If you aren't tuned into the NARCHIVE email list you should really sign up. You get a ping whenever they use the freedom of information act to crack open some bit of info that might be something we should know. God bless these gadflies. They're totally fun.

Their bare bones presentation of the disclosed facts is here:

Washington D.C., October 29, 2007 - The National Security Archive filed a motion on Friday, October 26, seeking expedited discovery against the Executive Office of the President to find out what e-mails are missing from the White House e-mail system or backup tapes.

Archive General Counsel Meredith Fuchs explained, "The pressing need for the information arises out of troubling representations by the EOP and its components about its document preservation obligations and the location of its backup tapes. We need information so we can take steps to preserve all possible sources of e-mails deleted from the White House servers."

Also on Friday, a similar motion was filed in a virtually identical lawsuit brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) on September 25, 2007.

The Archive filed this case on September 5, 2007, against the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and its components seeking to recover at least 5 million federal e-mail records improperly deleted by the EOP. After the government failed to provide adequate assurances that backups and copies of the missing e-mail would be preserved throughout this litigation, on October 11, 2007, CREW filed a motion for a temporary restraining order against the White House defendants in its case. A hearing in CREW's case was held before Magistrate Judge Facciola on October 17, 2007. Magistrate Judge Facciola issued a Report and Recommendation on October 19, 2007, advising the Court to grant a temporary restraining order. The government has filed objections to Magistrate Judge Facciola's Report and Recommendation, and CREW has responded to the government's objections.

Visit the Web site of the National Security Archive for more information about today's posting.

MPrize: Fountain of Youth

A while back I posted a bit on how people die, and when they die. The data showed that while life expectancy has increased, the maximum age people are reaching hasn't changed much in the last 200 years. Enter the MPrize. These guys are interestingly trying to further methods and data to actually make us live longer.

The Methuselah Mouse Prize (Mprize), is the premiere effort of the Methuselah Foundation and is being offered to the scientific research team who develops the longest living Mus musculus, the breed of mouse most commonly used in scientific research. Developing interventions which work in mice is a critical precursor to the development of human anti-aging techniques, for once it is demonstrated that aging in mice can be effectively delayed or reversed, popular attitudes towards aging as 'inevitable' will no longer be possible. When aging in mice is shown to be 'treatable' the funding necessary for a full-line assault on the aging process will be made available. This is the true power of the Methuselah Mouse Prize, to demonstrate a proof of principle, and give hope to the world that decline in function and age-related disease are no longer guarantees, for us, or for future generations, if we work together now.

Stonehenge: Interpretive Park

Well, this figures. Nothing is sacred. Not even a big circle of rocks out in the countryside.

here:

From 1901 to 1964, the majority of the stone circle was restored in a series of makeovers which have left it, in the words of one archaeologist, as 'a product of the 20th century heritage industry'. But the information is markedly absent from the guidebooks and info-phones used by tourists at the site. Coming in the wake of the news that the nearby Avebury stone circle was almost totally rebuilt in the 1920s, the revelation about Stonehenge has caused embarrassment among archaelogists. English Heritage, the guardian of the monument, is to rewrite the official guide, which dismisses the Henge's recent history in a few words. Dave Batchelor, English Heritage's senior archaeologist said he would personally rewrite the official guide. 'The detail was dropped in the Sixties', he admitted. 'But times have changed and we now believe this is an important piece of the Stonehenge story and must be told'.

Super Plastic

Plastic -- other than its ubiquitous and non-biodegradable nature -- is wonderful stuff. That it is still being re-invented to be as strong as the strongest materials on earth is truly amazing. These polymers could be the building blocks of the futuure.

nanitenews.com

By mimicking a brick-and-mortar molecular structure found in seashells, University of Michigan researchers created a composite plastic that's as strong as steel but lighter and transparent.

It's made of layers of clay nanosheets and a water-soluble polymer that shares chemistry with white glue.

A Tender Moment With Noel Black

I headed into this piece thinking I'd end up making a bunch of jokes about how Springs Culture Cast had acquired Newspeak! during a 18 minute marathon Noel monologue... but after watching this piece I went away impressed with my pal Noel. This is really a wonderful, informative and perhaps important snapshot of the state and history of the city I live in. This piece, far more than I was ever expecting, actually is a "tender moment." If it's relevant where you are.. spin this sucka.

Manitou Springs: Hippie Mayberry?

Manitou Springs got a nice writeup about it published today in the New York Times and Colorado Springs got seriously slammed. Not that I don't agree with their assessment entirely, it just sounds a lot worse than it actually is. That, and my hood is all kinds of wonderful. :)

nytimes.com:

Manitou, an artsy, charmingly eccentric town of 5,000 residents, has a many-layered history — sacred ground to several Indian tribes, gold-rush-era resort, tuberculosis treatment center and Old West mountainside tourist trap as well as 1960s hippie haven. A 752-building swath of town was declared a national historic district in 1983, and many of its late-19th-century buildings are now bed-and-breakfasts.

Manitou is also defined by what it is not — its neighbor Colorado Springs, a sprawling, chain-stored center of conservative evangelical Christianity looming just beyond the Garden of the Gods, a 1,300 acre array of Gaudíesque red-rock formations that acts as a sort of buffer between the towns.

“Manitou is very different from Colorado Springs,” said a soft-spoken Manitou restaurant manager, Frog Rainbowstar (not quite his real name — that, according to his Colorado driver’s license, is Purplefrog Eightoak Rainbowstar).

Springs Culture Cast in the Gazette

Man, what a long way these boys (and girl) have come in the last 10 months. I think I met Klayton less than a year ago, but it seems like I've known him for the better part of my life. Good people, those SCC folks are. The article is pretty funny too. Check it.

Gazette:

In less than a year, a pair of unlikely journalists have turned a bare-bones video webcast about the local arts scene into a miniature media empire, with a TV show, a radio segment and a burgeoning Web site.

Klayton Elliot Kendall and Craig Richardson set out simply to show people what was happening around town with art, theater and music. When they launched Springs Culture Cast, though, they connected with an arts community hungry for the attention.

....

Kendall and Richardson rented an office in July, and they’re contemplating bringing in some interns to help out. Kendall, a former GED math teacher, also recruited his former co-teacher Sue Spengler early on as a correspondent.

“I had no idea it was going to grow the way it has,” she said. “I thought it was going to be this little webcast.”

It’s still a shoestring project. The Culture Cast Media office is a single room on the fourth floor of a downtown building, just a little bigger than the two desks Kendall and Richardson sit at, facing each other.

There’s a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red whiskey atop a minifridge, which is empty except for a bottle of vodka. The ceiling is covered with squares cut from a foam mattress-topper — a cheap substitute for acoustic shielding, Kendall said. They turn in their video, on a DVD, to the Library Channel on Monday mornings, which usually requires marathon editing sessions Sunday nights. Kendall estimates that every minute of video that airs on TV requires two hours of work to create.

“Oftentimes we’re here until 6 o’clock in the morning,” Richardson said. “There’s a hell of a lot of work that goes into it that’s not apparent.”

I know for a fact that the downtown office is actually Craig & Klayton's masturbatorium, so when they talk about all of the work that they put into each SCC broadcast know that is really an inside joke. iMovie more or less takes care of everything all by itself. God help the interns. :0)