Over at Tower of Babel blog, Janelle Renée — a Californian living in Italy — writes touching essays about life in Siena:

Siena offers free Italian lessons to immigrants. The classes are excellent, because the teachers are top-notch. The second best thing I like about the school is that it is truly multicultural. In my classes I’ve met two Ethiopians, a Senegalese, a Turk, some Romanians, a Brit, an Uzbek, two Russians, an Indian, and two Martians. (Martians are NOT to be trusted! If you don’t believe me, you must watch Mars Attacks! Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

Anyway, most everybody at the school speaks English as their second language, so it is fairly easy to communicate when our Italian fails us. What sets me apart from the group, other than the fact that Italian is my second-ish language (I briefly studied French some time back), is that I’m the only person who came to Italy simply because. Everybody else came to Italy for a better life: for work, for economic stability, and/or to send money back home to the loved ones they’ve left behind.

- Janelle Renée @ Tower of Babel: Link.

Wilderbeest 3

Full size image

My latest graphic design. I started with a photograph of wilderbeest –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wilderbeest.jpg

– and then inflicted various transformations on the image.

I’m reminded of a song:

An old cowpoke went riding out
One dark and windy day,
Upon a ridge he rested as
He went along his way,
When all at once a mighty herd
Of red eyed cows he saw,
A-plowin’ through the ragged skies
And up a cloudy draw.

Yippee-yi-ya, yippee-yi-yo,
Ghost herd in the sky.

Their brands were still on fire and
Their hooves were made of steel,
Their horns were black and shiny and
Their hot breath he could feel,
A bolt of fear shot through him as
He looked up in the sky,
For he saw the riders comin’ hard
And he heard their mournful cry:

Yippee-yi-ya, yippee-yi-yo,
Ghost riders in the sky ….

- Ghost Riders in the Sky: Link

Album: Space Car Driver
Release Date: May 09, 2008
Genre: Alternative
Copyright 2008 Space Car Driver

Space Car Driver recently released their first album.

I attended their CD Release show [May 9, 2008]. Excellent show — solid grooves, interesting arrangements, wide range of dynamics, good chemistry between the musicians.

• Home page: spacecardriver.com
• Space Car Driver @ iTunes - (download iTunes)
• Space Car Driver @ MySpace
• Space Car Driver @ Minniwiki: “Dancy, improvisational jam-rock”
• MP3’s available by request

Special Bonus Download — I got permission from bassist Adam Lutz to sponsor an MP3 download here at karljones.com:

• Minus Ten by Space Car Driver

Enjoy!

Thought for today:

“Fate has decreed for each person the immutable working out of events, surrounding him with many occasions for good or bad… Two self-begotten gods, Hope and Fortune, the assistants of Fate, control man’s life and make him bear Fate’s decrees by using their compulsion and deception… Fortune raises some high only to cast them down and degrades others only to raise them to glory… Hope moves everywhere in secret, smiling like and flatterer, and she displays many attractive prospects which cannot be attained. By deceiving men, she controls most of them… Those ignorant of the prognostic art led away and enslaved by these gods. They endure all blows and suffer punishments with pleasure. Some partially attain what they hoped for; their confidence begins to increase, and they await a permanently favorable outcome–not realizing how precarious and slippery are these accidents of Fortune. Others are disappointed in their expectations, not just once but always… But those who have trained themselves in the prognostic art and in the truth keep their minds free and out of bondage. They despise Fortune, do not persist in Hope, do not fear death and live undisturbed… They are alien to all pleasury or flattery and stand firm as soldiers of Fate.”

- Vettius Valens , “Anthology”

Vettius Valens @ Wikipedia.

Thx, EB.

Canoe trip notes - updated May 23, 2008

Suggested rivers:

• Namekagon in northwest Wisconsin near Trego and Spooner
• Root River in southeast Minnesota
• Zumbro in southeast Minnesota - Too shallow?
• Flambeau in northwest Wisconsin near Ladysmith
• Upper St. Croix
  • Rush City to Sunrise landing (about 11 miles)
  • Sunrise landing to Wild river park (about 11 miles)
  • Taylors Falls to Osceola or Copas
• Cannon River from Welch to Red Wing
• Red Cedar River from Menomenie going south
• St. Louis - above Cloquet

Links:

• Saint Croix and Namekagon @ National Park Service
  • Outfitters
• Canoeing the Namekagon River - Hunt Fish Camp Wisconsin
• Namekagon Trip Finder -
• Namekagon - “River at the place abundant with sturgeons”
• Washburn county canoe map - St. Croix, Namekagon

Further notes to follow, check back for updates.

~ Karl

(more…)

Mothership 9

My newest graphic design.

Full size image

Scattering 2 - Full size image

My latest graphic design.

Something new, an experiment.

Most of my other designs start with either photographs or scanned sketches.

I created Scattering using digital tools exclusively, out of a desire to try something different. It’s a study in radial fills and their transformation.

My latest wallpaper design — it started life as a photograph of coral, and mutated into …

Space Coral 3

Full sized image: Link.

“… Fuel for international travel and transport of goods, including food, is exempt from taxes, unlike trucks, cars and buses. There is also no tax on fuel used by ocean freighters.”

Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale. Argentine lemons fill supermarket shelves on the Citrus Coast of Spain, as local lemons rot on the ground. Half of Europe’s peas are grown and packaged in Kenya.

… Under longstanding trade agreements, fuel for international freight carried by sea and air is not taxed. Now, many economists, environmental advocates and politicians say it is time to make shippers and shoppers pay for the pollution, through taxes or other measures.

… Proponents say ending these breaks could help ensure that producers and consumers pay the environmental cost of increasingly well-traveled food.

The food and transport industries say the issue is more complicated.

- Elisabeth Rosenthal @ New York Times: April 26, 2008: Link.

Via Jon Taplin’s blog: Link.

Small Is beautiful.

Wired.com recently published some beautiful nanophotography — finalists in the Materials Research Society’s semi-annual collection of images as art:

… This image shows the magnetic domains of a thin iron film sitting atop a crystal made from magnesium and gallium arsenate. Souliman el Moussaoui, a researcher at the ELETTRA Synchrotron Light Laboratory in Italy, used X-ray magnetic circular dichroism with photoelectron-emission microscopy to create the striking picture …. el Moussaoui shot the sample with two oppositely polarized beams of powerful X-rays — and then subtracted the data points in one file from the other.

- Aaron Rowe @ Wired.com: 04.25.08: Link.

Via Slashdot: Link.

ELETTRA

ELETTRA Synchrotron Light Laboratory is a national synchrotron laboratory located in Basovizza on the outskirts of Trieste, Italy.

The facility, available for use by the Italian and international scientific communities, houses several ultrabright light sources, which use the sychrotron and free electron laser (FEL) sources to produce light ranging from ultraviolet to X-rays.

The centre also houses the European Storage Ring FEL Project (EUFELE).

• ELETTRA Synchrotron Light Laboratory website
• Lightsources.org: ELETTRA Synchrotron Light Laboratory

- Wikipedia: Link.

“A new study provides the first inventories of microbial capabilities in nine very different types of ecosystems, ranging from coral reefs to deep mines.”

The microbial study produced … evidence that viruses — which are known to be ten times more abundant than even microbes — serve as gene banks for ecosystems. This evidence includes observations that viruses in the nine ecosystems carried large loads of DNA without using such DNA themselves …. The viruses probably transfer such excess DNA to bacteria during infections, and thereby pass on “new genetic tricks” to their microbial hosts. The study also indicates that by transporting the DNA to new locations, viruses may serve as important agents in the evolution of microbes.

- Science Daily: Mar. 14, 2008: Link.

Thought for today:

“To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size. “

To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size. The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern. I do not suppose that Henry Ford would find much difficulty in running Andorra or Luxembourg on a socialistic basis. He has already more men on his pay-roll than their population. It is conceivable that a syndicate of Fords, if we could find them, would make Belgium Ltd. or Denmark Inc. pay their way. But while nationalization of certain industries is an obvious possibility in the largest of states, I find it no easier to picture a completely socialized British Empire or United States than an elephant turning somersaults or a hippopotamus jumping a hedge.

- J.B.S. Haldane
“On Being the Right Size” in the (1928) book “Possible Worlds”
Link @ Wikiquote

“John Burdon Sanderson Haldane FRS (November 5, 1892 – December 1, 1964), known as Jack (but who used ‘J.B.S.’ in his printed works), was a British geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He was one of the founders (along with Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright) of population genetics.”

- Wikipedia: Link.

Thought for Today:

We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

- Woodrow Wilson
From an address to The New York City High School Teachers Association
Jan. 9th, 1909: Link.

“In one shoot-out, the KGB found themselves up against men from the interior ministry, as the security services were effectively privatised, each arm guarding a different client.”

Toby Clements reviews McMafia: Crime without Frontiers by Misha Glenny –

By the Mafia, Misha Glenny means any group of organised criminals, not just those with their roots in Sicily. Balkan cigarette smugglers, Nigerian internet phishers, Russian oligarchs, Chinese snakehead people-traffickers, South African drug lords, Bombay extortion-racketeers, Israeli money-launderers and Brazilian cyber-thieves are among the many who play their part in a complex network of links that the author estimates makes up nearly 20 per cent of global trade.

… Where did all this money come from? In a word, Russia.

… Stark differences in wealth is one thing that typically excites criminal activity, but as … traders grew luridly wealthy, the state institutions collapsed around them, and services such as the KGB found themselves without prestige, money or purpose.

A supply of bored young men with guns is the other stimulus to crime, and soon the oligarchs needed bodyguards. In one shoot-out, the KGB found themselves up against men from the interior ministry, as the security services were effectively privatised, each arm guarding a different client.

Toby Clements @ The Telegraph : Link.

Via The Day They Tried to Kill Me: Link.

McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers, by Misha Glenny: Amazon: Link.

Bus with a systems error message:

Via The Daily WTF: Link.