Police Beat, Pepper-Spray Students at UC Berkeley

I woke up this morning to reports that police who were called in to disperse demonstrators on the UC Davis campus on November 18 sprayed pepper spray into the faces of University students who were sitting in protest on the campus quad. At least one student was hospitalized for chemical burns following the raid.

An assistant professor at the University, Nathan Brown, wrote an open letter to UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi, demanding her resignation. Chancellor Davis, meanwhile, posted a response on the University web site that more or less placed the blame on the protesters. Her reasoning was that they had ignored her written request to remove their tents from the quad.

If those were the only facts of this case I might feel differently about this. I might believe the Chancellor was only acting to resolve what she thought could turn into a dangerous situation. After all, as she says in her response, it's her responsibility to protect the health and welfare of the students at US Davis.

The problem lies in what happened at UC Berkeley just days before. On November 9, police were brought in to disperse protesters on that campus as well. During their operation, several students and faculty were beaten, dragged by their hair, and pinned to the ground by several officers. One photo I've seen of that event shows five police officers in riot gear who appear to be kneeling on, punching, and kicking a student.

Chancellor Katehi, living a few thousand miles closer to that event than I do, could not have been unaware of what happened at UC Berkeley. And yet she still felt justified in ordering police to do the same thing, for pretty much the same reasons, on her campus. With that in mind, I have a much harder time believing the Chancellor was acting with the best interests of the students at heart.

After reading Assistant Professor Brown's and Chancellor Katehi's letters and reading some of the news accounts of the event, I felt that I needed to tell the Chancellor directly how I feel about things. Luckily, someone had posted a link to a page on the University web site that allows people to send messages directly to the Chancellor.

Here's what I sent:

Ms. Katehi,

I read with interest both your explanation of the horrible events that occurred when police assaulted a group of protesters on your campus, as well as the the open letter written by Asst. Prof. Brown. calling for your resignation.

I won't claim to fully understand all the details here. But I felt you should know, if you do not already, that this is an incident that now has national attention. I hope that you were sincere in your promise to investigate what went wrong on Friday.

As it stands now, your response seems to be an attempt to rationalize the actions of the police that places the blame for their brutality on the protesters. Taking that position will, I assure you, only serve to further anger those who are now following the news related to this event.

If the police were justified in the tactics they used to remove the protesters from your campus, then you will need to provide much more evidence of that. To be clear, I am asking for evidence beyond the fact that they ignored your written request to tear down their tents and go home.

I disagree with Asst. Prof. Brown that you should step down immediately. However, given that you were aware that a similar occurrence of police brutality had happened just days before during a similar action at UC Berkeley, I believe you have quite a challenge ahead of you if you wish to defend your decision. And if you cannot provide evidence that the police you ordered onto your campus were fully justified in what currently seems like an excessive use of force to remove the protesters, then I believe an apology and resignation of your position would be in order.

Sincerely,

paul shillinger
Hagerstown, MD

My Favorite Number

Do you have a favorite number? It may seem like a weird question to ask, but think about it a minute. Is it any stranger than asking if you have a favorite color? Or favorite food? It may, at first, and I suspect that's because most of us don't live in a culture that attributes the same amount of pleasure to numbers as that which one derives from, say, a big slice of New York-style pepperoni pizza.

Image is (C) Adam Cole/NPR

Recently, at his blog "Krulwich Wonders" Robert Krulwich (who co-hosts Radiolab, one of my favorite public radio shows) wrote about a "unique experiment" thought up by Alex Bellos. Bellos, who Krulwich describes as, "a writer, math enthusiast, and nut," came up with a deceptively simple idea: to ask the public to tell him their favorite number, and list the reasons why. Krulwich's article explains the experiment and talks about some of the responses Bellos has received so far. You can take a look (and if you haven't listened to Radiolab, grab a podcast while you're at it) but my reason for writing here is to talk about my favorite number, 808.

Here's what I wrote on the Favourite Number site:

808 is my favorite number, because it's a big, round-y, friendly-looking number. Seriously, take a look at 808. Doesn't it look like a guy giving you a double-thumbs-up? 808 thinks you're doing fine! So positive!

In "1337-speak" 808 would translate to "BOB" which is about as friendly a name as I can think of. Remember the funny little robot in Disney's "The Black Hole?" Guess what his name was? It sure wasn't 37.

Also, there's the Roland TR-808 drum machine, which is super-great and still very popular with musicians. Invite 808 to your next party and get ready to get funky!

I posted a copy of my response on my Google+ page and my friend Brian quickly replied that he too was a fan of 808, citing his own reasons:


Might I add that 808 is also my favorite number! Adding to your reasons, which I agree with, here is another reason you might have forgotten: 808 is the area code of Hawaii. 808 State was also an electronic band that loved that number.



He's right, of course, and there are a host of other reasons we love that number. I'd be interested to know if any other readers out there (hi Mom!) have a favorite number of their own. If not, go out and get one! Think of it as doing your share to make maths a more vital part of our culture.

30 Day Song Challege, Day 11 - A Song From Your Favorite Band

I'm calling bullshit on this one, just like I did on Day 1 (Your Favorite Song). Just like I don't have a favorite song, I don't have a favorite band. There are bands I'm really into at the moment (e.g Raconteurs & The Mountain Goats), there are bands I haven't listened to in a long time but would leave on if they came up on shuffle (The Welcome Wagon, Violent Femmes) and there are bands I listened to obsessively for a long time, but then stopped for some reason (Pink Floyd, The Velvet Underground).

So, what constitutes my favorite band? I have no idea, so I'm gonna bend the rules and do a song from all three categories. Take that!

11a - A Song From a Band You're Really Into Right Now: The Crystal Method, "I Know It's You," from Legion of Boom.



I first started listening to The Crystal Method in 1998, during a month-long stay in Greenville, SC. (That's a story for some other time.) Vegas was in heavy rotation, for a year, especially in the car as it makes excellent driving music. But they fell off my playlist for a few years. A friend recently turned me on to Legion of Boom recently though, and it gets played a good bit on my computer at work. "I Know It's You" is one of my favorite tracks, very much reminiscent of their work on Vegas, and Milla Jovovich's spooky vocals work perfectly with their distorted bassline and drums. I am amazed that track hasn't yet been appropriated for an action-movie chase sequence or television commercial, like pretty much every track on Vegas was.

11b - A Song From A Band I Haven't Listened To In A Long Time But Would Leave On If They Came Up On Shuffle: The Cure, "Pictures of You," from Disintegration.



I guess The Cure might also fall into the category of "bands I listened to obsessively." It's hard to tell, really, because I listened to them a lot mostly because people I was around listened to them a lot. I really do like their music, at least everything up to Disintegration, but they haven't made it onto a playlist in a long time.

"Pictures of You," is probably one of my favorite songs; it has great instrumentation and clean, if mopey, vocals from Robert Smith. The video is only so-so, sadly, but stands out as yet another example of the director doing everything he can to make the band miserable. (This was sort of a theme in their videos. For another example, check out the video for "Close To Me.")

11c - A Song From A Band I Listened To Obsessively For A Long Time, But Then Stopped For Some Reason: The Velvet Underground and Nico, "Femme Fatale," from The Velvet Underground and Nico (aka: "the banana album," "peel slowly and see")


velvet underground - femme fatale by erioluk

My friend AJ introduced me to the Velvet Underground in my Junior year of high school. He loaned me his vinyl copy of The Velvet Underground and Nico and by the time I handed it back a week later I'd already made two cassette copies. (I needed one for home and one to live in the Chevette, you see.) From then until 1995 or so I pretty much listened to anything by The Velvets or Lou Reed that I could get my hands on.

And then, I sort of, stopped. I don't know what happened. I know I started getting back into techno around that time, so that might have had something to do with it. Or maybe it was Lou's later albums that put me off. Whatever the reason, I haven't listened to anything by the Velvets in a long time; the closest I've come, in fact, was a brief stint listening to a cover of that first album by Beck's Record Club - something I blogged about here a while ago.

So, there we are. Another "day" finished in this interminable challenge. Look forward to my next entry, when I'll most likely call bullshit on the topic again and then spend entirely too long writing about it. Excelsior!

William GIbson's Idoru Has Arrived

I was out driving with the dog the other night, when a story on Public Radio International's excellent program "The World" caught my attention.

Hatsune Miku, a popular Japanese pop music singer, performed in front of a sold-out crowd last weekend at the the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles. The LA show was billed as the first stop on her "Mikunopolis" tour (although I'm having difficulty finding any listings for other concert dates). Last weekend's concert was part of the 2011 Anime Expo, and Expo head Marc Perez had a hand in organizing the show.

Here's the part of the story that caught my cyberpunk's attention: Hatsune Miku is not actually a person; she's a computer program. To be more accurate, she's a voice library application developed by Crypton Future Media for Vocaloid, a voice synthesizer program made by Yamaha.

She's sort of like the different voices you can select for your GPS's turn-by-turn directions mode - except younger, perkier, and with an implausible amount of turquoise hair. Yet the fact that Miku's not an actual flesh-and-blood person doesn't seem to faze her fans, some of whom drove for hours just to see a 3D hologram of her performing "live" on stage.


Dang, man. Every time I forget just how frighteningly prescient William Gibson's novels can be something like this happens. The last time was in the early 2000's, when augmented reality, which he first wrote about in his 1994 novel Virtual Light became the hot new thing.

Now it seems that Rei Toei, the holographic pop star from Gibson's 1996 novel Idoru has come to life in the person of Hatsune Miku. (Idoru is the follow-up novel to Virtual Light, and the second book of his so-called "Bridge Trilogy.") I can only hope that, like Rei, Miku will go on to build a legion of tween girl followers, marry someone who sort of reminds us of Bono, and have all sorts of crazy adventures.


In the meantime, technology, I'm still waiting for my mirrorshade implants and Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 deck. Oh, and a cure for AIDS would be nice, too. (Oh, wait, it looks like you're on that one already.)

Maybe It's Time to Start Blogging Here Again

I am convinced that Facebook's Mark Zuckerburg gets up every morning, swims a few laps in his giant pile of gold coins, eats a hearty breakfast of caviar and hundred-dollar bills, and then starts brainstorming new ways to piss off his users.

Pissing me off today is the arbitrary 420-character limit to status updates. This is not a new thing; some quick research online tells me the limit was imposed sometime in early 2010. I may not have noticed it until now because, like many Facebook users, my status updates are often just short messages to my friends or comments about what goes on in my daily life.

Lately, though, I've been creating longer posts about the music I'm listening to, books & comics I've read, and news articles I find interesting. Creating a thoughtful message about these things, even using all the concise-writing skills I've developed over at Twitter, yields updates that are typically in the 600- to 800-character range, and I'm presented with this stern reminder:

Status updates must be less than 420 characters. You have entered [xxx] characters here. Notes can be much longer. Would you like to edit and post your update as a Note instead?

No, Facebook, I would not like to edit and post my update as a Note. If I wanted to create a note, I would have clicked on my profile link, and then clicked the "notes" link, and then clicked the "write a note" button. You see? If I wanted to write a Note, I would have taken all of those other needless and awkward steps to do just that.

Obviously, Facebook doesn't want its users treating their status updates as in-site blogs. Fair enough. It is, after all, Mark's sandbox; we just gave up most of our privacy to targeted-advertising companies for the privilege of playing in it. But if I'm going to have to take extra steps to create the sort of posts I want, I'll just move that content over here where I can also easily add links, tags, images, and embedded video.

So hello again, old blog, it looks like we'll be spending a lot more time together now.

Six Months Later, I finally finish a comic.

Back in September 2010, I got to meet one of my all-time favorite webcomics artists: Jeffrey Rowland. If you don't know Jeff, stop looking at this horrible picture and go RIGHT NOW to www.wigucomics.com. You've got a few years worth of strips to catch up on. You're welcome.

Anyway, I was super-nervous about meeting Jeff. I wanted to say how much I'd enjoyed reading his comics over the years and how nice he'd been the few times we'd communicated and how much that meant to me. I wanted to say all those things, but I also didn't want to seem, you know, creepy. As a result, I didn't really say much of anything.

I started drawing this comic on the train home from SPX, but it got shuffled to the back of my notebook, as things do; and then onto the bookshelf when I started a new notebook; but I never really forgot about it.

Lately, I've been pushing myself to draw more, and to upload what I draw on a regular basis. When I don't have any ideas, I draw things from podcasts I've listened to, or fan art for comics I like. I think that's what jogged my memory about this unfinished comic. So I dug out my notebook from SPX, re-drew the panels (because the whole point of all this is to practice drawing more), scanned everything in, and finished it all off in the Gimp.

About this strip: Panel 1 is more or less a verbatim transcript of what Jeff later told me via Twitter our exchange might have been. Panel 2 is also pretty much a verbatim transcript. I really did ask them what Andrew W.K. was like, and they really did seem, well, resigned about the fact that he is, always, a party. (Tallahassee also stated that he was "the best at Twitter," and so he is. You can find out for yourself if you follow him.) Panel 3 is actually how I expect most of my interactions with people to go. And I really was afraid I'd try to walk away without paying for the books I bought.

I'm really glad I finally finished this comic and posted it. Not only for the practice it gave me at drawing and editing on the computer, but also because it reminds me that things are usually never as bad as you fear, and sometimes they might have been even better than you'd hoped.

If you're reading this, Jeffrey, I hope you got a smile from the comic. I promise to try to tell you who I am if we meet up again somewhere.