Photo: Bruce Sterling
First things first: oh, you world travelers, for pleasure or for work, never, ever fly Baltic Airlines. First they will stiff you by making you pay sixty euros to carry regular-sized hand luggage. You will note their particular eagerness to pounce on innocent non-Baltic travellers, especially haplessYankees with credit cards.
During the flight you can expect to be charged for the air you breathe, since they don't even give free water.
Finally, god forbid if something goes wrong with your flight and ticket, for Baltic Airlines will gladly maneuver you into buying a heavily-priced new one. Fleeing home via Baltic Airlines beats prison and deportation, but not by much.
Decades of Soviet occupation leave some deep cultural habits. Despite the proud independence and nationalism of the three independent Baltic republics, it hasn't been that long since 1991. It's hard to find any mishap in Estonia that isn't some blamed on Russians. If the roads are bad (and they are bad enough to burst tires), it's the Russian roads. When the coffee is lousy (the imported Italian coffee is quite good), then it's the communist coffee. If the storks are too big and dangerous, it’s because they were bred to an ungainly size by the Russians.
Photo: Bruce Sterling
I lived under Communism, but not the Soviet kind. The Estonians saw the real deal hard core of totalitarianism, the kind with mass deportations, mass shootings and mass hunger. That kind of regime doesn't leave mere "traces" in society, it leaves trenches. The Estonian nationality barely escaped being one of Europe's submerged or even extinct nations. Well before any Soviets showed up they were gleefully trampled by Swedes, Poles, Danes -- back when they were harmless pagans, they were even massacred by Christian Crusaders.
In the seventies in Rome, I once took part in a magazine called "La Citta di Riga," an Italian pun which refered to the capital of Latvia and also meant "the city of lines." This conceptualist magazine was an art project through which period artistic luminaries such as Francisco Clemente, Alighiero Boetti, Achille Bonito Oliva, Fabio Mauri, Umberto Silva, etc, wanted to change the world. Since this was the 1970s, concepts were considered more important the materialist objects or political policies. "The City of Riga" was a distant, romantic place for these Roman radicals of the Cold War days, a city carrying the flag of the globalist artsy utopia.
At the time, I was the only one in that group who came from a communist country. Most dissidents from the Soviet bloc had a keen understanding of the conceptual differences between alternative culture and the rigorous strictures of their daily lives. But I had my ticket back to Belgrade, the non-aligned way station that was half Moscow yet half Paris. I, too, could treat Riga as a mythical city of drawn lines, instead of a grim urban kolkoz where unruly ethnic populations were mixed, matched and eliminated at the whim of Stalin.
Photo: Bruce Sterling
Our Estonian literary festival in Tartu was full of stories, often stories where Siberia loomed as large as Siberia actually is. It seemed that most every family had lost relatives to Siberian exile: a parent, a grandparent.
A woman poet vividly explained how, during her childhood, her mother was deported. After years of absence a stranger returned: she had no teeth nor hair, but only wrinkles and bones. Our poet said: this is not my mom, my mom was a pretty woman! Until this day she writes patriotic poetry, due to that sense of horror and guilt towards her mother and her country.
At the same festival, a dissident Russian historian passionately described how Russians fail to deal with their impossible past, much preferring to hide the darkness under the carpet.
In Russia, history is an instrument of power, rather like Russian courts where there is no presumption of innocence, so only the guilty show up. When it comes to historical crimes like the Estonian deportations, however, nobody was there, nobody is guilty, nobody is responsible and nobody remembers.
However, this convenient denial and falsification is a poor counsel for peoples who still have to live together in the world, and who tend to repeat the mistakes of their parents.
This story is obviously well known in both the Baltics and the Balkans. It's distressing to hear that some story told in a small, Finno-Ugric language, yet on such a colossal scale. It's especially painful when told in the clear words of the victims, rather than the rambling evasions of the perpetrators.
The Prima Vista Tartu literary festival is keen on the appreciation of words. Words are cherished, and the event was held within the handsome library of the famous university of Tartu.
E-Stonia, the country where Skype was invented, has free internet everywhere. Obsessed as I am with wifi, I checked it obsessively, and I always found that connectivity flowed like water.
What a contrast to benighted nations like Italy and Britain, where free Internet is associated with terror and fraud for the benefit of rapacious and conniving phone companies.
In E-Stonia, the dark prospect of an Internet takeover by global copyright lords brought the population into the streets.
"Respect existence or expect resistance," say these shy and softspoken people, who know what human rights abuse looks like, no matter what mask it wears or what shape it takes.
Someday even the cruel dictatorship of Baltic airlines will be relegated to the ash-heap of history. Occupy Air Baltic, and give a free return ticket to all!
Photo: Bruce Sterling
"I used to spend 20 dollars a year on TOM THE DANCING BUG collections… Happy to support him and pass the word." -Neil Gaiman
Please click HERE for information.
Canipre, a Canadian company that helps the entertainment industry send legal threats to people alleged to have infringed copyright, has been caught using several infringing images on its website. Included in the art that Canipre appropriated for commercial gain without permission is a CC-licensed photo that they could have used legally simply by crediting the photographer. Canipre blames its web developer.
I ended up getting a flurry of phone calls and e-mails from a guy named Barry Logan.
Logan claimed that the company used a 3rd party vendor to develop their website and that the vendor had purchased the image from an image bank.
I pointed out to Logan that if that was true, he had basically paid his vendor to rip off other people's creative work. Logan told me that he would contact his web provider and have the image removed. He also told me that he would provide me with the name of the website developer and the name of the image bank where they obtained my photo.
I did notice that they took down my photo, but I have not heard back from Logan regarding the name of the developer and where they sourced my image. I plan to contact Logan later today if he doesn't get back to me. [sic]
The best part is that the company claims it is motivated by a higher calling than mere profit: "[We want to] change social attitudes toward downloading. Many people know it is illegal but they continue to do it... Our collective goal is not to sue everybody… but to change the sense of entitlement that people have, regarding Internet-based theft of property."
The Company Helping Movie Studios Sue You for Illegal Downloading Has Been Using Images Without Permission [Vice/Jamie Lee Curtis]
This is the third story in a multi-part series on taxonomy and speciation. It's meant to help you as you participate in Armchair Taxonomist — a challenge from the Encyclopedia of Life to bring scientific descriptions of animals, plants, and other living things out from behind paywalls and onto the Internet. Participants can earn cool prizes, so be sure to check it out! The deadline is May 20th
As depicted on Star Trek: The Original Series, the tricorder is a device that looks like the bastard love child of a Polaroid camera and a 1970s-era portable cassette deck. It was worn around the neck on a strap. It was black and clunky and definitely not what we would, today, call a sexy piece of electronics.
What made the tricorder a great piece of fictional technology wasn't its looks, but what it did. "Mr. Spock could use it to identify any organism, plant or animal, anywhere in the galaxy," said Carlos Garcia-Robledo, postdoctoral fellow in the department of botany at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. A portable tool that could quickly identify any species anywhere would be a game changer for science. Eventually, according to Garcia-Robledo and others, we'll have just that — put a piece of leaf or fur or insect leg into a machine and out pops its taxonomic information.
But what makes this really awesome is that — aside from the portable part — this is something we can actually do already. Garcia-Robledo does it regularly in his lab. The real-world tricorder isn't just something that's going to transform science someday. It's already doing that, right now.
The non-fictional tricorder is based on an idea called DNA barcoding, which originated in 2003 with Canadian biologist Paul Hebert. He thought there might be an easy way to quickly identify species using short DNA sequences that are unique to one species or another. If you had a database of these sequences, then all you'd have to do would be to match a sample to a sequence and you'd know what species you were looking at. It's similar to the way we store fingerprints, and then use those to match prints from a crime scene with an individual person.
Of course, like fingerprinting, DNA barcoding turns out to be more complicated than it sounds. The sequence most commonly used to barcode animals is a gene called CO1. It's a piece of mtDNA. This DNA is found inside the mitochondria — organelles within a cell that produce energy. It's there because, once upon a time, those mitochondria were independent bacteria, doing their own thing as single celled organisms. MtDNA doesn't create you, it creates parts of your cells.
The mitochondria, and their DNA, get passed down from generation to generation in egg cells — sperm don't usually have them. So you carry your mother's mtDNA. And she carries her mother's. But that mtDNA doesn't travel through the generations intact. Over time, it picks up little errors and changes to the sequence. This is where DNA barcoding — and its complications — come in.
Image: A room full of DNA sequencers, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from jurvetson's photostream
The idea is that the changes that happen to CO1 should be able to serve as a marker between species. In order for that to work, though, the mutation rate has to hit a sweet spot, said Karen James, a staff scientist at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory. She does a lot of work with DNA barcoding and described the ideal amount of variation in the DNA sequence as being a Goldilocks sort of problem. If you have too little variation (i.e., if the mtDNA doesn't change fast enough) then you'll have too many different species that share the same barcode. But if the mutations happen too quickly and you have too much variation, then you could get a bunch different barcodes within the same species. Either way, the barcode would be useless — just as if lots of people shared the same set of fingerprints.
The good news is that, for many animal species, CO1 hits that sweet spot. The bad news is that it doesn't work for everything. In fact, it doesn't work for plants at all. Their mtDNA changes too slowly. In 2009, James was part of a team that identified alternative DNA sequences that can be used to barcode plants.
CO1 also varies in how well it works for different kinds of animals. Like plants, mtDNA changes slowly in cnidarians — a phylum made up of more than 10,000 species, including many kinds of jellyfish. The plant sequences won't work for them, either, so cnidarians are notoriously difficult to barcode.
All of this explains part of why DNA barcoding can't really be used to identify new species. If you don't know the organism well enough to know how quickly its mtDNA are mutating, than you have no idea whether the changes you see represent a new species, or just variation within an old one. But that's okay, say researchers like Garcia and James. It doesn't mean DNA barcoding is useless. Think back to the tricorder, and what Mr. Spock actually did with it. He wasn't identifying new species. Instead, he was figuring out which previously-identified species lived on which planet.
Rolled leaf beetles. Carlos Garcia-Robledo pulled half-digested plant bits out of their stomachs and used the DNA from those samples to find out what the beetles were eating. Photo by Charles Staines.
DNA barcoding can be used, along with traditional taxonomy, to help identify new species. Paul Hebert demonstrated this in 2004, when he figured out that a single species of tropical butterfly was actually 10 species of tropical butterfly, cleverly masquerading as one. But naming new species and pinning them to a board really isn't what the tool is best at — and it's not the most interesting way to use it, either. Even though the tricorder of today currently takes up a space the size of a room, it's already being used to study the world far outside the lab.
For example, Carlos Garcia-Robledo uses DNA barcoding to study the relationships between beetles and the plants they eat. His team figured out how to extract plant DNA from a beetle's stomach. Compare that DNA to a barcode library, and you start to get a good idea of what different beetles in different places are chowing down on. That matters, because the beetle's diets are changing along with the climate. As habitats get hotter, some plants can't survive. So what happens to the beetles that eat them? Garcia-Robledo uses DNA barcoding to track those patterns of adaptation and extinction.
Turns out, DNA barcoding is very good at helping us answer questions of sustainability and environmental change. It's especially important in places where it would be really hard to understand biodiversity and species interaction simply by collecting and counting — like the oceans, for instance.
We know that things people do can affect ocean ecosystems. And we know that some parts of the ocean bear more of the brunt of this than others. In order to understand what those differences really mean for wildlife, Smithsonian invertebrate zoologist Allen Collins has started collecting samples of all the biodiversity in a plot of ocean — from bacteria to charismatic megafauna. DNA barcodes tell him exactly what species live there. He can go back and sample the same spot over time to see how the mix of species has changed. And he can compare those changes in places relatively untouched by humans to what's happening in areas that have a lot of human impact. What, exactly, does "human impact" mean for ocean animals? That's what he's going to find out.
There are even consumer applications. Earlier this year, the ocean advocacy group Oceana released a report showing that restaurants and grocery stores have a habit of selling customers one fish, but labeling it as another. In fact, 33% of the 1200 samples they took over two years were mislabeled. When you think you're buying red snapper, you're often actually buying much cheaper tilapia. The secret swaps can affect your health and they can also affect fish populations. All Oceana's data came from DNA barcoding, Karen James said.
So far, all of this relies on bringing the world back to the laboratory for testing. But the real, portable tricorder is inching closer. We often talk about the $1000 genome, in terms of being able to sequence the entire thing cheaply. But the same technology that's making that dream a reality also applies to the much easier and faster task of sequencing a small strand of genome — you just have to adapt the tools to the purpose of barcoding.
Last year, a company called Oxford Nanopore announced that it had developed a miniature genome sequencer that could plug into a laptop's USB port. The device, called the MinION, isn't the real-world portable tricorder. It's designed to sequence entire genomes, for one thing, which isn't really what DNA barcoders want. It's also a one-time-use tool that's expected to cost $900 a pop — if it ever makes it to the marketplace. But the MinION is a step in the right direction. Someday (and probably someday soon), scientists will be able to study changing ecosystems instantly, while they're standing in that ecosystem — just like Mr. Spock.
Samples of organisms that Allen Collins brought back to the laboratory from a research trip to Bali. Someday, he'll be able to skip this step.
PREVIOUSLY:
• What leeches and ligers can teach us about evolution
• In the leech library: Behind the scenes at the American Museum of Natural History
• Be an Armchair Taxonomist!: A challenge from The Encyclopedia of Life
The New Yorker today launched ‘Strongbox,’ a whistleblower submission system designed to allow anonymous leakers to digitally transmit important information to journalists.
"The underlying code, called 'Dead-Drop,' is an open-source project and was written by the Internet pioneer and legendary coder Aaron Swartz, before he tragically died in January," writes Trevor Timm at a Freedom of the Press Foundation blog post. "You can read the underlying code here and the details for how it works and the background, written by the project's manager Kevin Poulsen, here."
Strongbox makes use of the anonymizing Tor network.
From the introductory newyorker.com blog post by Amy Davidson:
Strongbox is a simple thing in its conception: in one sense, it’s just an extension of the mailing address we printed in small type on the inside cover of the first issue of the magazine, in 1925, later joined by a phone number (in 1928—it was BRyant 6300) and e-mail address (in 1998). Readers and sources have long sent documents to the magazine and its reporters, from letters of complaint to classified papers. (Joshua Rothman has written about that history and the magazine’s record of investigative journalism.) But, over the years, it’s also become easier to trace the senders, even when they don’t want to be found. Strongbox addresses that; as it’s set up, even we won’t be able to figure out where files sent to us come from. If anyone asks us, we won’t be able to tell them. The project was many months in the making, but launches at an interesting time: just days after the Associated Press revealed the Justice Department had secretly acquired some 60 days of call records for 20 different AP phone lines, in a leak investigation involving the outing of a CIA agent in Saudi Arabia.
Projects like this need deep security scrutiny from the security community. Now that it's launched, of course, that can happen more easily; the open-source nature of the project could help facilitate robust review.
This won't be the first time that a news organization has launched a Wikileaks-style leak transmission system—Al-Jazeera and the WSJ encountered big problems when they launched similar projects two years ago, and their usefulness is dubious. Hopefully Strongbox won't suffer the same fate.
Again, Trevor Timm at Freedom of the Press Foundation (disclosure: I'm a board member):
Leaks have never been more critical to democracy, given that government secrecy is at an all time high. Countless times over past decade—from NSA warrantless wiretapping and CIA secret prisons, to secret drone strikes and unprecedented cyberattacks—leaks have exposed corruption, wrongdoing, and illegality in government when the flow of information has been stifled through other channels. In fact, virtually every unconstitutional action by the government over the last decade was initially uncovered by a leak to the press.
Yet when WikiLeaks was operating a submission system three years ago and published secret government information in the public interest, they were attacked by government officials, pundits, and sometimes even journalists. This, despite the fact, their actions were protected by the First Amendment, just like when the New York Times or Washington Post receives classified information from a government source in the physical world.
Hopefully this project will remind people that these types of WikiLeaks-like submission systems should proliferate, not wither away.
A New Yorker graphic maps out how Strongbox is designed to work: "Multiple computers, thumb drives, encryption, and Tor are all involved."
(via Trevor Timm)
Prince Charles has joined with Formula One and CNN in supporting the torturing, murderous dictatorial regime in Bahrain. His Prince's Foundation for Building Community and the UK Foreign Office have signed a deal to advise the regime on housing policy, an area of particular contention (Bahrain's persecuted Shia minority majority are systematically discriminated against in the southern territory where Charles's project is sited; they say housing goes instead to imported guard labor from abroad).
News of the deal came as the House of Commons foreign affairs select committee heard warnings from the campaign group Human Rights Watch that the UK government has overplayed the progress of democracy in Bahrain and has underestimated the severity of human rights abuses.
"Credible allegations of torture have been made in the last month," David Mepham, UK director of HRW, told the Guardian. "The UK should be pressing the Bahrainis to investigate those abuses and hold those people to account."
Asked why it had chosen to work with a regime that has a poor human rights record, a spokesman for Prince Charles's charity said: "This project aims to help all the communities that live in Bahrain and is in line with the objectives of the British government. The homes will be for local communities who will be consulted during the design process."
Prince Charles criticised over Bahrain housing deal [Robert Booth/The Guardian]
The (awful and not usually very trustworthy) New York Post reports that rich New Yorkers pay thousands of dollars to an Orlando area service that rents out disabled people to accompany them to Walt Disney World in order to jump the lines. The article says that there's a word-of-mouth underground in New York's priciest private schools, in which parents pass on the details of the service, which is allegedly called Dream Tours Florida:
Passing around the rogue guide service’s phone number recently became a shameless ritual among Manhattan’s private-school set during spring break. The service asks who referred you before they even take your call.
“It’s insider knowledge that very few have and share carefully,” said social anthropologist Dr. Wednesday Martin, who caught wind of the underground network while doing research for her upcoming book “Primates of Park Avenue.”
“Who wants a speed pass when you can use your black-market handicapped guide to circumvent the lines all together?” she said.
“So when you’re doing it, you’re affirming that you are one of the privileged insiders who has and shares this information.”
Rich Manhattan moms hire handicapped tour guides so kids can cut lines at Disney World [Tara Palmeri/New York Post]
Cecil Castellucci and Sara Varon have a new picture-book/kids' comic out from FirstSecond today called Odd Duck, and it's a delight (no surprise there, I never met a Cecil Castellucci project I didn't like).
Odd Duck is the story of Theodora, "a perfectly normal duck" who likes her routine -- swimming, stretching, taking books out of the library, buying duck kibble, doing craft projects (with duck burlap, naturally) and star-gazing. When Chad moves in next door, Theodora can tell she's not going to get along with him. He makes weird abstract sculptures, dyes his feathers funny colors, and talks a mile a minute.
When both of them are stuck together overwinter (Theodora never manages to migrate, and Chad breaks his wing making abstract sculpture) they discover a shared love of the stars, and become best friends. But when they overhear a mean duck in town say, "Look at that odd duck!" they both assume she's talking about the other one, and that kicks off a rotten fight, and a lot of soul-searching.
This is a beautiful parable about eccentricity, friendship, self-awareness, the majesty of the night sky, and the benefits of balancing a cup of tea on your head (for posture!). The artwork is gorgeous (thanks to FirstSecond for supplying the first chapter excerpt below), and the writing is absolutely charming. When I got my advance copy, my five-year old demanded nightly readings of this one for a solid week.
At The Atlantic, Joe Fassler votes for an infamous passage from Cormac McCarthy's The Road:
He started down the rough wooden steps. He ducked his head and then flicked the lighter and swung the flame out over the darkness like an offering. Coldness and damp. An ungodly stench. He could see part of a stone wall. Clay floor. An old mattress darkly stained. He crouched and stepped down again and held out the light. Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous.
Jesus, he whispered.
Then one by one they turned and blinked in the pitiful light. Help us, they whispered. Please help us.
The key, he adds: "What is revealed is even more terrifying that what I could have imagined."
This bloody cleaver purse -- which hides the handbag cavity in the cleaver bag -- is $33 at Vampire Freaks. No idea if it's remotely practical, but it does look like a giant, bloody cleaver.
Bloody Cleaver Clutch Purse (Thanks, Neha!)
John Roderick's less inclined to play the role of the cross country troubadour in the heady days, but the indie rock elder statesman has slipped quite comfortably into the role of podcast philosopher. Come sit with us, on his leather couch.
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Earlier this year I purchased a Parker Jotter stainless steel pen based purely on its cool factor as being the pen that James Bond used in the 1995 film Goldeneye, as I had seen on the Bond Lifestyle web page. I searched for it online and ended up purchasing one from my local office and art supply store. I appreciated its sleek design and modest price coupled with the cool factor instantly… but the more I used the pen during my work days the more I came to appreciate it, for you see this pen ultimately changed my life.
As a teacher I am called upon to sign documents on a near daily basis — sign this attendance report, sign this behavior report, write a tardy slip, sign this check out form, etc. It seems never ending. I found myself constantly fumbling for a pen, having to borrow pens that had bits of tape on them or had been turned into paper-mache flowers to make sure they didn’t “walk away” in someones pocket. It was humiliating, but what is one to do when operating on a modest teacher’s salary? Plastic pens were pedestrian and forgettable, clicking gel pens with oversized rubbery cushioned grips were tedious when removing or inserting into the standard pen-socket that my button up shirts provided. Only the Parker Jotter was suitable for my needs! Its slippery profile glides into my shirt pocket, the light weight barely noticeable. It is easily retrieved and the polished components in the pen cap provide the authoritarian click that I need to sign these endless cascades of documents with prudence. Its smooth writing allows my own graceful chicken scratch to be properly rendered, with little hand cramping during extended grading sessions. At a modest price of between $10 to $15 for the stainless steel model, this classic writing implement should be owned by all. When I rise at the ungodly hour required and begin my daily rituals of preparing for my work life, I experience a sense of satisfaction when I pick up my Jotter and realize there is one more thing to look forward to.
Compared to similarly priced models the Parker Jotter provides value. I have a Zebra F-301 that I carry as a backup and find the design to be over wrought, with a useless and slippery plastic grip. It feels like I am scratching the paper compared to the Jotter. Anyone that appreciates the classic slip stream design of the 60s will fall in love with the Jotter, just as I have. -- Seth Wilson
Parker Stainless Steel Jotter Pen $11
Here's a beautiful gallery of publicity shots of the Canberra Skywhale, a lighter-than-air sculpture created by Patricia Piccinini to celebrate the centenary of the capital city of Australia. The Skywhale is a fanciful, breast-studded creature from a contrafactual alternate history:
"My question is what if evolution went a different way and instead of going back into the sea, from which they came originally, they went into the air and we evolved a nature that could fly instead of swim. In fact coming from a place like Canberra where it's a planned city that's really tried to integrate and blend in with the natural environment, it makes a lot of sense to make this sort of huge, gigantic, but artificial and natural-looking creature".[8]
ABC News: "An American Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing when a female passenger refused to stop singing Whitney Houston songs."
Come for the rendition of "I will always love you", stay for the bogus and futile "DO NOT TAKE PICTURES ON THE AIRPLANE!" demands from the flight crew. [Thanks, Michelle Fox!]
Torgo's parody of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven is a particularly well-done example of the genre, which has many entrants (it's the Harlem Shake of poetry!):
Turning back, I saw them seated; feeling injured and defeated
I approached and wanly greeted them: "Sylvester! Ms. Lenore!
I sincerely hope you're thriving - had I known you were arriving
I'd have sent out for reviving frappuccinos from the store;
Frappuccinos, danish pastries, and spring water from the store -
Next time, why not call before?"
The actor sat there, massive, with his craggy face impassive,
And it seemed that I'd established neither good will nor rapport.
The signs were not propitious; I thought it certainly suspicious
That he came in train with vicious, feared and cynical Lenore -
Still I leaned across the table and began to speak - "Lenore-"
Quoth the agent: "Rambo IV!"
Photo: Clayton Cubitt.
A beautiful and thoughtful essay by Clayton Cubitt on the changing nature of the art of photography. Snip: Henri Cartier-Bresson believed that the photographer is like a hunter, going forth into the wild, armed with quick reflexes and a finely-honed eye, in search of that one moment that most distills the time before him. In this instant the photographer reacts, snatching truth from the timestream in the snare of his shutter. The Decisive Moment is Gestalt psychology married to reflexive performance art in the blink of a mechanical eye. It is the creation of art through the curation of time.
