Seattle Providing Space for Occupy Seattle

Space Needle, Seattle, Washington State, USA, a photo by Tomasito.! on Flickr.

My staff has been reaching out to and communicating with members of Occupy Seattle. Here’s how we are proceeding:

We are providing a permit for protest activities at Westlake Park which will allow them to have an organizing tent that can remain overnight. As a condition of the permit, protestors will have to allow for cleaning of the park, protect park property, accommodate the other existing permitted events, and protect access to businesses.

We are making City Hall Plaza available for those that wish to stay overnight, with reasonable restrictions on the tents so as to allow free use of the plaza during the day. Unlike Westlake, City Hall also has restroom facilities available. Both the permit and the ability to set up tents at City Hall Plaza would last for two weeks, at which point we can assess whether the arrangement is meeting everyone’s needs and should be extended.

These are extraordinary times. We have seen the Occupy Wall Street movement take off in cities across the country, and there’s a reason for it. There is real anger about the unprecedented concentration of wealth and power in this country and the inequality it has produced. I share the values and the message of the Occupy Wall Street movement. We want to provide the opportunity for the people of Seattle to express their views. And we are.

This is how you balance the right to assemble freely and the right to go about your day. Mayor Bloomberg should take note.

Loss

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The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces – William H. Whyte

Places I Want to go: Alang Shipbreaking Yard

ships being broken at Alang, a photo by ReefRaff on Flickr.

I’m trying to find a way to get to Alang, Gujarat to photograph the Alang Ship breaking yards:

ALANG is a wonder of the world. It may be a necessity, too. When ships grow old and expensive to run, after about twenty-five years of use, their owners do not pay to dispose of them but, rather, the opposite — they sell them on the international scrap market, where a typical vessel like the Pioneer may bring a million dollars for the weight of its steel. Selling old ships for scrap is considered to be a basic financial requirement by the shipping industry — a business that has long suffered from small profits and cutthroat competition. No one denies that what happens afterward is a dangerous and polluting process.

Anyone know how I can gain access?

Occupy Wall Street: A Village Forms

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.

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.

Autorickshaw says, “Don’t Touch Me”

Two Floppy Disc Drives play the Imperial March

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

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.