Category: General

Occupy Wall Street: A Village Forms

Straw Poll on Direct Action

Even though the New York Times coverage of Occupy Wall Street has been negative, basically calling protestors uninformed patchouli-smelling hippies, the latest dispatch from Occupy Wall Street talks about how the protesters have formed a village in Zuccotti Park:

There are information stations, a recycling center, a media center where a gasoline generator powers computers. At the east end sits the library, labeled cardboard boxes brimming with donated books: nonfiction, fiction, poetry, legal. There is a lost and found.

A medical station was outfitted with bins holding a broad array of remedies: cough drops, Maalox Maximum Strength, Clorox wipes, bee pollen granules. The main issues have been blisters, including some from handcuffs, and abrasions.

There are also a few therapists. Some out-of-work protesters are depressed. They need someone’s ear.

Elsewhere is a sanitation station, with designated sanitation workers who sweep the park. The park is without toilets, a problem that many of the protesters address by visiting a nearby McDonald’s.

The encampment even has a post-office box, established at a U.P.S. store, and has been receiving a steady flow of supportive letters and packages. Someone from Texas sent a bunch of red bandanas, now draped on the necks of demonstrators. Others have sent camera batteries, granola bars and toothbrushes.

Two General Assembly meetings are held each day to conduct organizational business and work on objectives. “We meet every day to decide what our demands are,” said Hero Vincent, 21, an artist and singer from Charlotte, N.C., who has been here from the beginning.

Not allowed to use amplified sound, the protesters have devised their own means of communication. Each speaker says a sentence, and then everyone else repeats it, so it ripples outward. Decisions must be by consensus. Hand signals convey responses. For instance, holding your palms upward and wiggling your fingers means approval, while holding them downward means disapproval. Level hands mean uncertainty.

United/Continental pilots march on Wall Street

Yet words such as hodgepodge and granola pepper descriptions of the protestors. Yet when the Tea Party was chanting racist slurs nary a word was said. Perhaps something about the lily-white and middle-aged nature of the Tea Party made that protest acceptable, but the diverse and young crowd at Occupy Wall Street deserve scorn.

And now they have a newspaper: The Occupied Wall Street Journal.

About that Microbe which subsists on arsenic: Felisa Wolfe-Simon’s Personal Maelstrom

Water on Mars by shadowfilm
Water on Mars, a photo by shadowfilm on Flickr.

Facinating article behind the scenes of last year’s story about finding a bacteria which can live off of arsenic instead of phosphorous. Catapulted to fame by NASA’s PR team, the paper in SCIENCE immediately touched off a flurry of negative response from the science blogosphere.

Scientist in a Strange Land:

In June, Science reported that Wolfe-Simon had left Oremland’s USGS laboratory to look for a location with better molecular and genetic research facilities. “Actually,” Wolfe-Simon says, “I didn’t leave out of choice. Ron basically evicted me from the group. It was a political decision on his part that I don’t understand, and I didn’t see it coming.” Although she received a NASA fellowship in 2010 that provides support through 2013, she is still seeking a new home for her work.

I find it hard not to feel sympathy for her. In a matter of weeks she was catapulted to fame, then singled out and assaulted with professional and personal criticism, some of which resulted from missteps beyond her control. Wolfe-Simon is an early-career researcher in a field dominated by older men. Few scientists, no matter how established, would have the skills to navigate the situation that she found herself in. What made the level of criticism so extraordinary is that the paper, in itself, is not so flawed that it should not have been published. The argument was compelling, the conclusions were measured, the data was thorough, and the paper made it through the same peer-review process as other articles in Science.

Coming Soon: Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey

Elmo by plemeljr
Elmo, a photo by plemeljr on Flickr.

Opening October 21st is Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey about Kevin Clash, who dreamed of working with his idol, master puppeteer Jim Henson. I met Kevin, very briefly, at the STS-135 Tweetup when he and Elmo talked with Astronauts Mike Massimino and Doug Wheelock. I showed him photos of Elmo and the astronauts and he was so excited that I was putting them online right away – Kevin’s childlike grace was inspiring.

I for one want to see this film, hopefully when I get back to the States. The trailer is below.

The Last Single-Space Parking Meters Removed from Manhattan Today

Park Meter by kevinmccauley
Park Meter, a photo by kevinmccauley on Flickr.

The Last Days of the Old Parking Meter:

The city will remove its last decommissioned single-space parking meter in Manhattan on Monday, transportation officials said, the start of a yearlong process that will eventually eliminate all the steel-and-sludge-hued meters in the city.

A few stragglers will still remain in Manhattan, in areas like the Upper West Side, but their brains will be removed and the inert pole repurposed for a new use: a bicycle rack.

A silent fixture of the streetscape that became an improbable icon of a car-choked metropolis, the Manhattan meter would have turned 60 on the day of its demise. The cause of death, officials said, was an acute case of obsolescence.

The old-fashioned, pole-mounted meter will now yield to the robotlike Meter of Tomorrow: a solar-powered box, equipped with Wi-Fi, that can handle eight parking spaces at once and can shut itself down on free-parking Sundays.
…
On Monday, only a few blocks from that historic site, the final meter, No. 101-0655, will be lifted from its perch on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, just north of 125th Street. Down the block, a sparkling new Muni-Meter has already been installed.