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The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018)

The literary mainstream once relegated her work to the margins. Then she transformed the mainstream. by Julie Phillips The New Yorker Magazine

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/the-fantastic-ursula-k-le-guin?mbid=social_twitter

Politics has been obsessing a lot of people lately, and Ursula K. Le Guin is far from immune to bouts of political anger. In an e-mail to me last winter, she wrote that she felt “eaten up” with frustration at the ongoing occupation of an eastern Oregon wildlife refuge by an armed band of antigovernment agitators led by the brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy. She was distressed by the damage they had done to scientific programs and to historical artifacts belonging to the local Paiute tribe, and critical of the F.B.I. for being so slow to remove these “hairy gunslinging fake cowboys” from public property. She had been mildly cheered up, she added, by following a Twitter feed with the hashtag #BundyEroticFanFic.

The high desert of eastern Oregon is one of Le Guin’s places. She often goes there in the summer with her husband, Charles, a professor emeritus of history at Portland State University, to a ranch on the stony ridge of Steens Mountain, overlooking the refuge. She has led writing workshops at the Malheur Field Station, a group of weather-beaten buildings used mainly by biologists and birders, and published a book of poems and sketches of the area, with photographs by Roger Dorband, called “Out Here.” She likes the awareness the desert gives her of distance, emptiness, and geological time. In a poem, “A Meditation in the Desert,” she imagines a stone being “full / of slower, longer thoughts than mind can have.”

She has roots in eastern Oregon that go back to the early days of white settlement. Not long ago, she told me excitedly that she’d rediscovered records in the attic of her grandmother’s childhood: “My great-grandfather, with my grandmother age eleven, moved from California to Oregon in 1873. . . . They drove three hundred and fifty head of cattle up through Nevada and built a stone house on the back side of Steens Mountain. I don’t think he made a claim; there was nowhere to make it. He was one of the very first ranchers in what is still very desolate country.” The family stayed there for five years before they moved on, in search of new grass or less isolation—her grandmother didn’t say. The story gives hints of what Le Guin already knew: that the empty spaces of America have a past, and that loneliness and loss are mixed up with the glory.

The history of America is one of conflicting fantasies: clashes over what stories are told and who gets to tell them. If the Bundy brothers were in love with one side of the American dream—stories of wars fought and won, land taken and tamed—Le Guin has spent a career exploring another, distinctly less triumphalist side. She sees herself as a Western writer, though her work has had a wide range of settings, from the Oregon coast to an anarchist utopia and a California that exists in the future but resembles the past. Keeping an ambivalent distance from the centers of literary power, she makes room in her work for other voices. She has always defended the fantastic, by which she means not formulaic fantasy or “McMagic” but the imagination as a subversive force. “Imagination, working at full strength, can shake us out of our fatal, adoring self-absorption,” she has written, “and make us look up and see—with terror or with relief—that the world does not in fact belong to us at all.”

When I met Le Guin at her house in Portland this summer, she was in a happier mood. Coming out onto the back porch, where I was sitting with Charles in the late-afternoon sun, to offer us a bourbon-and-ice, she was positively cheerful, her deeply lined, expressive face bright under a cap of short white hair, her low, warm woodwind voice rising into an easy laugh. The bourbon is part of the couple’s evening ritual: when they don’t have company, they have a drink before dinner and take turns reading to each other. On the hillside below us, two scrub jays traded remarks through the trees.

The cheerfulness was relative, she told me: it was partly because a conference call set for earlier that day, with the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman and some film people who had a project to propose, had been postponed, leaving her with enough energy for a conversation. Her back is bent now with age—she’ll be eighty-seven this month—and she has to be careful with a resource she once had in abundance. “My stamina gives out so damn fast these days,” she said.

The house where Le Guin has lived for more than fifty years has, in certain respects, come to resemble its owner. Past the barriers at the entrance—Charles’s menacingly thorny roses, the lion’s-head knocker that guards the door—the dark-panelled Craftsman living room, with its Victorian feel, might stand for her books set in Europe, or for the great nineteenth-century novels she has always loved, with their warmth, humanity, and moral concern. The front hall is surveyed by a row of British Museum reproductions of the Lewis chessmen, souvenirs of the Le Guins’ two sabbatical years in London, when their three children were small. Some of her awards are in the attic, but she keeps several, notably her first Hugo, from 1970, discreetly displayed in the hall on the way to the kitchen. A place of honor at the right of the fireplace is given to a portrait of Virginia Woolf, a hand-colored print that is a treasured gift from a writer friend.

Later, I went with her into the kitchen, where it’s easy to end up in the Le Guin household. It’s a homey room with white appliances, cream cabinets, and no sign of steel or marble, as indifferent to fashion as its owners. Le Guin dresses well, but casually, favoring T-shirts, and wears little jewelry, though occasionally she puts on earrings fastened with clips or magnets. “You put the stone in front and a tiny magnet behind your earlobe,” she explains. “The trouble is that if you bend down near the stove, for instance, all of a sudden your earrings go wham!—and hit the stove. It’s kind of exciting.”

Europe ends and the West begins outside the windows, on the back porch, with its view stretching over the Willamette River, past the city, to three volcanoes of the Cascade Range: the white peak of Mt. Adams, distant Mt. Rainier, and the sullen ash heap of Mt. St. Helens. The span of it evokes the feeling of distance and isolation that runs through her work, and the awareness, more often found in science than in fiction, that what we can comprehend is a small part of everything there is to know. Imaginative literature, she has written, asks us “to allow that our perception of reality may be incomplete, our interpretation of it arbitrary or mistaken.” Michael Chabon, a friend and admirer, sees her as “untiringly opening her work up to a perspective, to a nature that feels somehow beyond human, and yet fully human and recognizable. She gives us a view from the other side.”

To talk to Le Guin is to encounter alternatives. At her house, the writer is present, but so is Le Guin the mother of three, the faculty wife: the woman writing fantasy in tandem with her daily life. I asked her recently about a particularly violent story that she wrote in her early thirties, in two days, while organizing a fifth-birthday party for her elder daughter. “It’s funny how you can live on several planes, isn’t it?” she said. She resists attempts to separate her more mainstream work from her science fiction. She is a genre author who is also a literary author, not one or the other but indivisibly both.

Le Guin can be polemical, prone to what one close friend calls “tirades” on questions she feels strongly about. I once watched her participate in a panel discussion on gender and literature at WisCon, an annual gathering of feminist science-fiction writers, readers, and academics in Madison, Wisconsin. Scowling like a snapping turtle, she sat waiting for illogical remarks, which she then gently but firmly tore to bits. Yet a conversation with Le Guin is often full of comic asides, laughter, and—a particularly Le Guin trait—good-natured snorts. Humor seems to be her way of taking the edge off the polemic, as well as an introvert’s channel of communication. Behind even the lightest remarks, one is aware of a keen intelligence and a lifetime of thought, held back for the purposes of casual conversation.

She has never felt at home temperamentally with establishments of any kind. But now she finds the establishment wanting to hear what she has to say. Her criticism of the economics of publishing—objections to Amazon, a fight with Google over its digitization of copyrighted books—is widely reported in the news. Earlier this year, a Kickstarter campaign for a documentary about Le Guin, by the filmmaker Arwen Curry, raised more than two hundred thousand dollars, nearly three times the requested amount. In 2000, the Library of Congress declared her a “living legend,” a designation that has made its way into many introductions to her readings. Last month, her “Orsinian Tales” and the novel “Malafrena” appeared as a volume in the Library of America. (She and Philip Roth are the only living novelists included in the series.) “I am getting really sick of being referred to as ‘the legendary,’ ” she protests, laughing. “I’m right here. I have gravity. A body and all that.”

In the late nineteen-thirties, in a tall house in Berkeley, California, a girl climbs out the attic window onto the roof in search of solitude. If she scrambles far enough up the redwood shingles, she can reach her own Mt. Olympus, the roof’s peak. From here, she can gaze out over the rough blue of the bay to the city of San Francisco, row upon row of white houses climbing the hills above the water. The city is strange to her—she rarely ventures so far from home—but the view is hers, and splendid. Beyond it she knows there are islands with a magical name: the Farallons. She imagines them as “the loneliest place, the farthest west you could go.

Meanwhile, inside the house, the girl’s father is at work, thinking about myths, magic, songs, cultural patterns—the proper territory of a professor of anthropology. From him she will take a model for creative work in the midst of a rich family life, as well as the belief that the real room of one’s own is in the writer’s mind. Years later, she tells a friend that if she ended up writing about wizards “perhaps it’s because I grew up with one.”

Ursula Kroeber was born in Berkeley, in 1929, into a family busy with the reading, recording, telling, and inventing of stories. She grew up listening to her aunt Betsy’s memories of a pioneer childhood and to California Indian legends retold by her father. One legend of the Yurok people says that, far out in the Pacific Ocean but not farther than a canoe can paddle, the rim of the sky makes waves by beating on the surface of the water. On every twelfth upswing, the sky moves a little more slowly, so that a skilled navigator has enough time to slip beneath its rim, reach the outer ocean, and dance all night on the shore of another world.

Ursula absorbed these stories, together with the books she read: children’s classics, Norse myths, Irish folktales, the Iliad. In her father’s library, she discovered Romantic poetry and Eastern philosophy, especially the Tao Te Ching. She and her brother Karl supplemented these with science-fiction magazines. With Karl, the closest to her in age of her three brothers, she played King Arthur’s knights, in armor made of cardboard boxes. The two also made up tales of political intrigue and exploration set in a stuffed-toy world called the Animal Kingdom. This storytelling later gave her a feeling of kinship with the Brontës, whose Gondal and Angria, she says, were “the ‘genius version’ of what Karl and I did.”

Her father was Alfred L. Kroeber, one of the most influential cultural anthropologists of the past century. A New Yorker from a prosperous German immigrant family, he went west in 1900, when he was twenty-four, and did field work among the Indians of Northern California. Throughout his career, he learned about cultures that were rapidly being transformed or destroyed from men and women who were among the last survivors of their people. At a time when the dominant story of America was one of European conquest, Ursula was aware, through her father and his Indian friends who came to the house, that there were other stories to tell and other judgments that might be made.

“With the money we’ll save by shutting down quality control, we can issue some truly spectacular apologies.”

Ursula’s mother was Theodora Kracaw Kroeber, born in Denver in 1897 and raised in the mining town of Telluride. A friend of Le Guin’s recalls seeing her, at the house in Berkeley, “coming down the long staircase, a majestic-looking woman with a long gown and a great big Indian silver and turquoise necklace. She was very stately.” Theodora took to writing in her late fifties, and produced “Ishi in Two Worlds,” a nonfiction account of the last survivor of the Yahi people. Le Guin loved her mother and admired her psychological gifts. But she says that their relationship also contained “something darker and stranger” that she has never quite understood. “We were very lucky, because we never had to act that out. But if I see daughters and mothers act it out toward each other it doesn’t shock me or surprise me. It’s there.”

The Kroeber household was full of voices as well as stories. Alfred liked to pose philosophical questions or puzzles over the dinner table and ask his four children about anything that interested them. The kids were encouraged to take an active part in the conversation, but, as the little sister, Ursula rarely got a word in: “There were too many people, and I was outshouted by everybody else.” Learning how to be heard taught her persistence and gave her a tendency to appear fiercer than she is. “People think I mean everything I say and am full of conviction, often, when I’m actually just floating balloons and ready for a discussion or argument or further pursuit of the subject. It’s my fault—I speak so passionately. Probably because, as the youngest and shrillest child of an extraordinarily articulate and passionate family, I could only be heard by charging over the top, shouting, ‘Marchons, marchons! Qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!’ every time I entertained a passing opinion.”

Le Guin’s work combines a Berkeleyite’s love of alternative thought with a strong scientific bent that she sees as an inheritance from her father. In her fiction, she has tried to balance the analytical and the intuitive. “Both directions strike me as becoming more and more sterile the farther you follow them,” she says. “It’s when they can combine that you get something fertile and living and leading forward. Mysticism—which is a word my father held in contempt, basically—and scientific factualism, need for evidence, and so on . . . I do try to juggle them, quite consciously.”

If it was difficult to be the youngest and most precocious of the Kroeber children, leaving the house to enter the world made Ursula feel like “an exile in a Siberia of adolescent social mores.” In the fall of 1944, at fourteen, small for her age, disguised in the sweater, skirt, and loafers of a “bobby-soxer” (a term that still makes her shudder), she began her first year at Berkeley High School, a huge, impersonal institution where popularity mattered more than learning, and fitting in was the ideal. When Le Guin speaks of her teen-age years, she speaks of loneliness, confusion, and the pain of being among people who have no use for one’s gifts. “You’re just dropped into this dreadful place, and there are no explanations why and no directions what to do.”

She found a refuge in the public library, reading Austen and the Brontës, Turgenev and Shelley. In fiction, she could satisfy her deep romantic streak: she fell in love with Prince Andrei in “War and Peace” and once, at thirteen, defaced a library book by cutting out a still of Laurence Olivier’s Mr. Darcy and taking it home to look at in private, guilty rapture. From Thomas Hardy she learned to handle strong feelings in fiction by pouring them into landscapes, letting the settings carry part of the emotional charge. “There’s a patronizing word for that: the ‘pathetic fallacy,’ ” she says. “It’s not a fallacy; it’s art.”

As a child, she was painfully shy, and she still alludes to anxieties that she keeps hidden from the world. I caught a glimpse of that when she asked me, cautiously, “Wouldn’t you say that anybody who thought as much about balance as I do in my work probably felt some threat to their balance?” After a long pause, she added, “Of course all adolescents are out of balance, and very aware of it. To become adult can certainly feel like walking a high wire, can’t it? If my foot slips, I’m gone. I’m dead.”

Equilibrium is a central metaphor in Le Guin’s great works about adolescence, the six-volume Earthsea series, which began in 1968 with “A Wizard of Earthsea.” That book follows Ged, a lonely teen-ager with a gift for magic, who at wizards’ school learns a painful lesson in achieving balance rather than forcing change. There’s little resemblance between the school on Roke Island, with its Taoist magic (a mage is taught to “do by not doing”), and Harry Potter’s Hogwarts. There is some resemblance between Ged, the provincial boy with a chip on his shoulder, and Ursula Kroeber, the Californian in jeans arriving at Radcliffe College in 1947, all books and opinions, never before out of her home state, eager to prove herself as a poet. Her Radcliffe friend Jean Taylor Kroeber, who became her sister-in-law, recalls that, before she and Ursula bonded over Russian literature, jokes, and music, she found her “a little frightening. It’s not that she meant to be, but that’s the way it came across . . . that there was a good chance that she was ahead of you, in wherever the conversation was going. And one rather brief acute remark could set you back on your heels.”

Ursula had her first clash with the literary establishment when she and a friend signed up to read submissions for a new Radcliffe literary magazine, Signature. Rona Jaffe worked on the magazine, and its undergraduate contributors included Edward Gorey, Harold Brodkey, and Adrienne Rich, whose poem “Storm Warnings” was published there. The magazine accepted nothing of Ursula’s, and she found those fellow-students “cliquish and unfriendly”: “Their comments on what we submitted ourselves, even the comments on our comments, were often remarkably savage and dismissive. We got out again and gratefully went back to our invisibility.” When Rich won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in her senior year, Le Guin, still unpublished, felt pangs of envy.

On top of that, Radcliffe women were given a double message, receiving an excellent education while knowing, in Rich’s words, that “the real power (and money) were invested in Harvard’s institutions, from which we were excluded.” Though Radcliffe has long since become part of Harvard, Cambridge remains a place of mixed emotions for Le Guin. She has told me both that her college years were wonderful and that she has come to dislike the institution; the two emotions shadow each other. Her senior year was marred by a handsome and arrogant Harvard student, an accidental pregnancy, a broken heart, and an illegal abortion. “I’m often startled at the depth of my anger at Harvard,” she told me. “I know some of the reasons for it, but it wouldn’t be so immediate and uncontrollable if it were accessible to reason. I did get a splendid education there—there was wonderful Widener, the Fogg, the elmy campus, which I remember fondly. But the anger’s there like a mine, ready to go off at a quiver of the ground.”

Le Guin graduated from Radcliffe with a degree in French, in 1951. Over the decade that followed, she wrote poems, short stories, and at least four novels. She submitted them to publishers; they came back with encouraging rejections. She felt her way tentatively forward, unsure of her direction, lacking models. American literature was still under the spell of Hemingway, Faulkner, Richard Wright; realism held sway, and there was little interest in play or fantasy. “I was going in another

Please refer to url at top of page for the rest of this wonderful story...

Happy Birthday Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Moody Blues Ray Thomas ': 12 essential moments from the last legend

https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/8093245/moody-blues-ray-thomas-12-best-moments


The Moody Blues' Ray Thomas passed away January 4, 2018. 

He will be dearly missed by his devoted followers and fans.


Billboard's 12 Essential Moments From the Late Legend, Ray Thomas

The MTA just hired a transit mastermind to fix the subway

https://www.timeout.com/newyorkrk/blog/the-mta-just-hired-a-transit-mastermind-to-fix-the-subway-112217 TimeOutNewYork

The MTA has hired one of the world's most renowned transit experts to be the new president of New York City Transit.

English-born, Andy Byford who has managed rapid transit systems on three continents, is now tasked with bringing Gotham's subways, buses, and paratransit services into the 21st century. The announcement comes on Tuesday, just days after The Times published a scathing expose detailing how short-sighted decisions by politicians and transit leaders have allowed the city's subway system to fall into disrepair.

"We are thrilled that Andy is going to lead NYC Transit during this time of great change," MTA chairman Joseph Lhota said in a statement. "Our transit system is the backbone of the world's greatest city, and having someone of (Byford's) caliber to lead it will help immensely, particularly when it comes to implementing the Subway Action Plan that we launched this summer."

That Subway Action Plan will cost upward of $800 million, and Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio are still quibbling where the bulk of that funding will come from. The plan is broken up into two phases: The first aims to address "the key drivers of 79% of major incidents on the subway"; the second is more vague but promises to incorporate winning ideas from this summer's MTA's Genius Transit Challenge, where Byford was a panel member.

Byford's job will not only require him to oversee implementation of actionable fixes for the subway and managing nearly 50,000 NYC Transit employees but also to navigate the personalities, interests, and politics that surround the nation's largest rapid transit network.

But that task is nothing new for Byford. He's a 14-year veteran of the London Underground, where he became the general manager of three of the network's busiest lines. He then went on to be the Chief Operating Officer of Sydney's transit system. He comes to New York from Toronto where he spent 5 years as CEO of the Toronto Transit Commission (TCC). During his time there, the city's subway system saw reductions in delays and record-high customer

satisfaction. His work garnered the attention of the American Public Transportation Association which named the TCC the Outstanding Transit System of the Year for 2017.

"New York City's public transit system has driven New York City to become the bustling, successful metropolis that it is, and it's an honor to be trusted with the huge responsibility to modernize the system and bring it to the high levels of performance and customer service that New Yorkers truly deserve and rightfully expect," Byford said. "I look forward to working with my new colleagues and all the employees of New York City Transit and the MTA, and, most importantly, our customers."

Byford's hiring hopes to be a major step towards re-establishing New York City's subway as one of the best in the world. Expectations are high, and New Yorkers are a notoriously unforgiving bunch. But if he manages to pull it off, Byford will be a name worth remembering for decades to come.

A Sketch for Autumn by Grant Snider

http://www.incidentalcomics.com
https://twitter.com/grantdraws

Happy Fall !

Check out the new glowing art installation coming to Madison Square Park: TIME OUT New York

Public art installations at Madison Square Park do not mess around.

This summer, renowned artist Josiah McElheny brought a trio of glass sculptures to the space for his Prismatic Park installation. Last year, a set of life-size gingerbread houses set up shop there during the holiday season. Heck, even a giant inflatable banana that was more of an advertisement for Chiquita than a work of art had the internet buzzing about the park last month.

This fall, a new installation from Erwin Redl will head to the park's Oval Lawn. Titled Whiteout, the piece looks like something straight out of Star Wars. The project is made up of hundreds of white, transparent spheres that encapsulate white LED lights, which will be suspended from a grid of poles and cabling. The “orbs” will dangle two feet off of the ground, swaying with the wind. Redl is also programming the spheres to light up in a trippy pattern, producing a wave-like visual across the lawn. 

The exhibit will be on view from November 16 through April 15, 2018.

Madison Square Park:

This public space was a highly desirable address when it opened in 1847, and is now a verdant oasis. It hosts art installations, food festivals and a popular series of summer concerts. The destination is also home to Shake Shack, a summer favorite (as evidenced by the shockingly long lines) for burgers, fries and, of course, shakes.

SEEING WITH YOUR TONGUE: Sensory-substitution devices help blind and deaf people, but that’s just the beginning.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/15/seeing-with-your-tongue?mbid=social_twitter
by Nicola Twilley

According to one scientist, "You don't see with your eyes, you see with your brain."

The climbers at Earth Treks gym, in Golden, Colorado, were warming up: stretching, strapping themselves into harnesses, and chalking their hands as they prepared to scale walls stippled with multicolored plastic holds. Seated off to one side, with a slim gray plastic band wrapped around his brow, Erik Weihenmayer was warming up, too—by reading flash cards. “I see an ‘E’ at the end,” he said, sweeping his head over the top card, from side to side and up and down. “It’s definitely popping—is it ‘please’?” he asked me. It was. Weihenmayer moved triumphantly on to the next card.

Erik Weihenmayer is the only blind person to have climbed Mt. Everest. He was born with juvenile retinoschisis, an inherited condition that caused his retinas to disintegrate completely by his freshman year of high school. Unable to play the ball games at which his father and his brothers excelled, he took to climbing after being introduced to it at a summer camp for the blind. He learned to pat the rock face with his hands or tap it with an ice axe to find his next hold, following the sound of a small bell worn by a guide, who also described the terrain ahead. With this technique, he has summited the tallest peaks on all seven continents.

A decade ago, Weihenmayer began using the BrainPort, a device that enables him to “see” the rock face using his tongue. The BrainPort consists of two parts: the band on his brow supports a tiny video camera; connected to this by a cable is a postage-stamp-size white plastic lollipop, which he holds in his mouth. The camera feed is reduced in resolution to a grid of four hundred gray-scale pixels, transmitted to his tongue via a corresponding grid of four hundred tiny electrodes on the lollipop. Dark pixels provide a strong shock; lighter pixels merely tingle. The resulting vision is a sensation that Weihenmayer describes as “pictures being painted with tiny bubbles.”

Reading the cards before his climb helped Weihenmayer calibrate the intensity of the electrical stimulation and make sure that the camera was pointing where he thought it was pointing. When he was done, he tied himself into his harness and set off up Mad Dog, a difficult route marked by small blue plastic holds set far apart on the wall. Without the BrainPort, Weihenmayer’s climbing style is inelegant but astonishingly fast—a spidery scramble with arms and feet sweeping like windshield wipers across the wall in front of him in order to feel out the next hold. With the device on his tongue, he is much slower, but more deliberate. After each move, he leans away from the wall, surveys the cliff face, and then carefully reaches his hand out into midair, where it hovers for a split second before lunging toward a hold several feet away. “You have to do the hand thing, because it’s hard to know where, exactly, things are in space,” Weihenmayer explained, as I prepared to tackle Cry Baby, a much simpler route. “Once my hand blocks the hold, I know I’m in front of it, and then I just kind of go in there.”

Weihenmayer told me that he wouldn’t take the BrainPort up Everest—relying on fallible electronics in such extreme conditions would be foolhardy. But he has used it on challenging outdoor climbs in Utah and around Colorado, and he loves the way that it restores his lost hand-eye coördination. “I can see the hold, I reach up, and I’m, like, ‘Pow!’ ” he said. “It’s in space, and I just grabbed it in space. It sounds so simple when you have eyes, but that’s a really cool feeling.”,

The BrainPort, which uses the sense of touch as a substitute for sight, is one of a growing number of so-called sensory-substitution devices. Another, the vOICe, turns visual information into sound. Others translate auditory information into tactile sensation for the deaf or use sounds to supply missing haptic information for burn victims and leprosy patients. While these devices were design,d with the goal of restoring lost sensation, in the past decade they have begun to revise our understanding of brain organization and development. The idea that underlies sensory substitution is a radical one: that the brain is capable of processing perceptual information in much the same way, no matter which organ delivers it. As the BrainPort's inventor, the neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita put it, "You don't see with your eyes, you see with your brain."

Bach-y-Rita, who died in 2006, is known as the "father of sensory substitution," although as he liked to point out, both Braille and white canes are essentially sensory-substitution systems, replacing information that is typically visual -- words on a page, objects at a distance -- with tactile sensation. He even argued that writing ought to be the original precursor, because it enabled the previously auditory experience of the spoken word to be presented visually......

~~~~~~~~

NOTE: Since the article is pages long, I thought I'd stop here. If you are interested in the rest, please click on the link at the top of page which will take you to the original.

It's fascinating, isn't it?

I noticed after having yogurt for breakfast that even while eating, I was taken at how diluted it was compared to the same yogurt 20 years ago. Wholeheartedly agree with this concept.

Incredible the blind and deaf will be able to enjoy all that the planet and its inhabitants have to offer.

This Tiny Device Could Provide Clean Water for 663 Million People

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/tiny-water-purifier-clean-technology/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_content=global&utm_campaign=general-content&linkId=35744078

by Brandon Blackburn-Dwyer

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University

A tiny, black rectangular device could be the world’s long-term solution for clean water.  The gadget is solar-powered, half the size of a postage stamp, and it disinfects water.

“Our device looks like a little rectangle of black glass,” said Chong Liu, lead author of a paper on the device published in Nature Nanotechnology. “We just dropped it into the water and put everything under the sun, and the sun did all the work,” she said.

With 663 million people in the world not having access to clean water, a device this efficient stands to significantly change many lives. Roughly 800 children die a day due to lack of access to clean water.

The purifier, developed by researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator and Stanford University, contains microscopic layers of “nanoflakes.” When exposed to water and sunlight, they produce hydrogen peroxide, a natural disinfectant. In early testing, the disinfectant killed 99.999% of bacteria before dissipating and leaving behind safe-to-drink water.

“When you see there’s no bacteria growing, it’s really exciting,” said Liu in the report published on Monday. “We didn’t expect it to work that well at first.”

The new device is a substantial improvement over previous solar-powered water cleaning systems. The nanoflakes, which contain industrial lubricant molybdenum disulfide, absorb more than just UV light. Absorbing a wider band of the light spectrum means the nanoflakes utilize 50% of the incoming sunlight’s energy, whereas standard purifiers harness 4%.

Image: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

The solar-powered reaction should leave the device completely reusable.

Researchers tested the tiny tablet in 25-milliliter vessels containing E. Coli and lactic acid bacteria Enterococcus. It took less than 20 minutes for the water in the container to be cleaned. Larger water tanks can be purified by scaling up the number of tablets used.

For the moment, the still-unnamed device’s ability to clean chemical pollutants like lead is unknown.
Despite the potential limitation, the small rectangle of nanoflakes is a major step forward to providing everyone in water-contaminated areas with a clean source of refreshment.

“As a researcher it’s really exciting for us to see that by developing technologies you have the potential to help a lot of people,” Liu said.

The device will next be tested in real world settings before, researchers hope, being put into commercial production at a price less than $30.

Written by Brandon Blackburn-Dwyer

Brandon is the Managing Editor of Global Citizen. He has lived and worked on 4 different continents and travelled to nearly 60 countries. His first job was with Seton Hall University’s School of Diplomacy, and he has been working in international affairs ever since. From academia (he was a professor!) to development work to business to work on radio and television he has always been focused on global issues. He also loves college basketball.

THE TELEPHONE NUMBER - Happy Valentine's Day!

FADE IN:

INT. BEDROOM. APARTMENT - NIGHT

MIKE frantically fingers the contents of his wallet.

MIKE
Where is that business card?

He holds his wallet upside down, watching the waterfall of its contents cascade to his unmade bed.

MIKE
It was blue.

For the next half hour he inspects each item, discarding the unnecessary. Still, no blue business card. Despondent, he falls onto his bed; the loss of the card summing up his chaotic life.

MIKE
Think, Mike. Think.

He closes his eyes and concentrates. The first three numbers lept before him as he'd studied her telephone number countless times. But the last four...as a child repeats the alphabet to reach an elusive letter, so he tried with numbers.

MIKE
One, two, three... Three!

Scrambling for a notepad, he proceeds until seven digits stared back at him; the telephone number he could swear he'd had all along. His digital clock blares eleven o'clock.

MIKE
It's pretty late.
(pumping himself)
It's now or never!

As he dials, he visualizes the tall, slender blonde in her slinky, red dress, flirting over a martini.

MIKE
But I'm not in her league.

While the phone rings, he reminds himself that he wasn't half bad looking, and women even commented on how his glasses made him look just as adorable as Clark Kent.

MIKE
Just as clumsy, too.

A woman answers the phone.

WOMAN (OFFSCREEN)
Hello?

MIKE
Hello? Danielle?

DANIELLE (OS)
Yes?

MIKE
Um. This is Mike. You may not remember...

DANIELLE (OS)
(surprised)
I didn't think you'd ever call, Mike.

MIKE
(spirits soaring)
Would you like to go out for dinner?
You would? I mean, Saturday? Seven thirty?
Sure, I know where it is. Terrific! See you
then. Good night, Danielle.

He dances victoriously around the bedroom, then collapses onto his bed, soon falling asleep.

SEVERAL DAYS LATER

Mike rushes haphazardly, changing his Hanes underwear at least a dozen times. He would be late if he didn't step up his already frenetic pace.

INT. RESTAURANT - NIGHT

Mike follows the maitre d' who escorts him to a cozy table in the dimly lit corner at which sits a lovely, bespectacled young woman.

DANIELLE
(adjusting her glasses)
Mike?

MIKE
(mimics her)
Danielle?

While the excitement and anticipation hisses from his ego, Danielle grins.

DANIELLE
Seems there's been a little mistake.

Her embracing smile emphasizes her gentleness and sweet face.

DANIELLE
It doesn't mean we can't make the best of it.
What do you think?

MIKE
(grins sheepishly)
Sure.

After ordering, then pouring the wine, he slowly shares what had happened. Danielle's LAUGHTER, both comforting and lilting, eases his self-consciousness. The hours fly by. When they realize they're the last couple in the restaurant, they exchange warm glances.

MIKE
I'd love to see you again.

DANIELLE
I would too, Mike, but under one condition.

MIKE
What's that?

DANIELLE
(holding his hands)
You give me your telephone number.

MIKE
(chuckles)
Agreed.

INT./EXT. RESTAURANT - NIGHT

As they walk into the crisp spring night, DANIELLE's tresses bounce in sync with Mike's newfound spring in his step.

MIKE
(to himself, glancing at the stars)
Am I glad I lost that business card!

FADE TO BLACK

**written by petra michelle (2/16/08)**

http://whoseroleisitany.blogspot.com/

5 Things That Can't Be Copyrighted

https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2010/01/08/5-things-that-cant-be-copyrighted/
https://www.plagiarismtoday.com

Modern copyright law can feel extremely broad at times. Every creative work made, whether it is a doodle on a napkin, a photograph or a poem, once it is fixed into a tangible medium of expression, the creator holds the copyright to it. No notice nor any further action is required (though registration with the U.S. Copyright Office has many added benefits).

Still, there are many things that can not be copyrighted. They either don’t fall under the jurisdiction of copyright or don’t qualify for its protection. There are also exemptions and that place some content immediately into the public domain.

So if you’ve ever wondered about the things you can’t copyright, here is a short list of five of the more important ones.

1. Titles and Names

Copyright protection does not extend to titles, names, slogans or short phrases, the Copyright Office has made that much very clear. You can not copyright your name, the title of your post or any short phrase that you use to identify a work.

The reason is that copyright is designed to protect works of creative authorship, it is not designed to protect how that work is identified in the marketplace, the same goes for people and places. Furthermore, such short phrases rarely meet the requisite level of creativity to be considered for copyright protection.

Caveat: Titles may not be copyrighted, but if they are used to identify a business, good or service in the marketplace, they can be given trademark protection. If you use a title in a way that might cause confusion in the marketplace, there could be trademark issues. However, if you want to make a post entitled “5 Things That Can’t Be Copyrighted”, you are free to do so.

2. Ideas

Ideas can not be copyrighted because they are not fixed into a tangible medium of expression. For a work to be copyrighted, it has to be written down, saved to a hard drive or somehow otherwise fixed.

For example, if you give a speech but fail to write it down first and it isn’t recorded, there is no copyright protection. Likewise, if you tell an idea to a friend, you don’t receive copyright protection if they run with it and use it for themselves, that is, unless you write it down.

However, even ideas that are fixed do not receive protection in and of themselves. Rather, it is the expression of the idea that is protected. My “5 Things That Can’t Be Copyrighted” post is fixed, but you can certainly write your own post with the same title and idea. However, you can not use my exact words, unless, of course, you follow my CC license.

Caveat: When it comes to derivative works, there can be a lot of gray area between an uncopyrightable idea and an infringing derivative. You can, for example, write your own book about a boy wizard and a wizard school, but you can’t use any of the characters from Harry Potter. Where the line is drawn is often murky and usually decided on a case-by-case basis. Also, in many cases ideas can be patented, such as inventions, but that enters into another area of intellectual property.

3. Works By the U.S. Federal Government

Works by the U.S. Government are placed directly into the public domain as the Federal government is barred from holding copyright in its work. This is why NASA’s images, which are very popular on the Web, can be freely copied and shared and also why laws and statutes can be posted anywhere online.

There are many reasons for this, the first being that taxpayer money is spent on creating the works so it is fair they should be given back to the populace. Also, it’s a freedom of speech issue as the government can not use copyright to stifle criticism.

Caveat: This is not true in all countries. Australia, Canada and the UK all have crown copyright, that enables the government to hold copyright protection to certain works. Also, the U.S. government can hold copyrights in works if they transferred to it, for example by contractors. Also, the government has other laws, such as state secrecy laws, to prevent the distribution of information.

4. Works Without Authorship/Facts

Though the photos that come with your calendar are probably copyright-protected, the calendar itself is not. Likewise, you can’t copyright the lines on a notebook-ruled paper or, sadly for the phone companies, even telephone directories are not protected.

The reason is that a work has to have a requisite level of creativity in order to qualify for copyright protection and if a work is just a repetition of facts without any creativity, it isn’t protected. This is true even if a great deal of effort went into making the product, as with a phone book.

Likewise, facts and information can’t be copyrighted though the expression of those facts often can be.

Caveat: The level of requisite creativity is actually fairly low. A phone book may not be copyright protected, but a top ten list of the funniest names in the phone book might be. Also, other countries, including the UK and Australia, follow a “sweat of the brow” doctrine that says a collection of facts can be copyrighted if the collector underwent a great deal of effort to compile them (and didn’t merely copy from another source).

5. Fashion

This may surprise many, but fashion designers, currently, enjoy no copyright protection in their work. Their designs are not covered under the current code even though architectural and even vessel hulls are protected.

The reason is because fahion pieces are considered useful articles and, as such, only enjoy copyright protection for certain elements and “only if, and only to the extent that, such design incorporates pictorial, graphic, or sculptural features that can be identified separately from, and are capable of existing independently of, the utilitarian aspects of the article.”

In short, a pattern on a shirt might be copyrightable, but the shirt itself is not. Likewise, an intricate belt buckle design might qualify for protection but not the belt itself.

However, the overall cut, colors and style do not enjoy any protection at all.

Caveat: Fashion designers can, if they wish to go through the time and expense, paten their designs. Also, as mentioned above, elements of a useful article may qualify for copyright protection separate from the work itself. Finally, this is not universally true and legislation is almost constantly being circulated to weigh the possibility of expanding copyright protection to cover fashion. Finally, do note that trademark still protects the names of the companies that make and distribute the clothing.

Bottom Line

Copyright is everywhere. Every video, every picture, every written piece, every audio file, every sculpture, every building design created this year will be copyright protected, at least initially and at least to some degree.

However, there are places that copyright’s protection does not reach and those places are worth noting just as strongly as what it does protect.

Regardless, the next time someone says that everything is copyrighted these days, here are five examples of things that aren’t and, in most cases, likely never will be.

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