http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/User:BaronW

Police Brutality at UC Davis

This piece about police brutality at the Occupy protests at UC Davis is a sad reminder of how lightly many in the US hold the values of free expression that our country was founded on. The opening photo in the story below reminds me of Hannah Arendt’s comments about “the banality of evil.”

You wonder whether these people think when they look at the photos and videos of their actions, and what they think about the judgment of history. I remember 30 years ago, we all watched Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi and wondered how the British could have committed the atrocities they did. (The memory of the scene in which the protesters march up to the factory gate two by two, expecting and enduring the moment when they will be clubbed down, still brings a lump to my throat.) Now we know.

As +Keith Fahlgren (@abdelazer) said on Twitter: “YouTube sure makes it easy to hate the police.” And that’s a terrible thing for a society, when those whose job it is to protect the values of our society turn against it.

There’s a moving and courageous denunciation of the actions by the UC Davis administration by an assistant professor there that is well worth a read:

http://bicyclebarricade.wordpress.com/2011/11/19/open-letter-to-chancellor-linda-p-b-katehi/

After a detailed description of what happened, Nathan Brown focuses on the cognitive dissonance between the statements of the university and its actions:

“On Wednesday November 16, you issued a letter by email to the campus community. In this letter, you discussed a hate crime which occurred at UC Davis on Sunday November 13. In this letter, you express concern about the safety of our students. You write, “it is particularly disturbing that such an act of intolerance should occur at a time when the campus community is working to create a safe and inviting space for all our students.” You write, “while these are turbulent economic times, as a campus community, we must all be committed to a safe, welcoming environment that advances our efforts to diversity and excellence at UC Davis.”

“I will leave it to my colleagues and every reader of this letter to decide what poses a greater threat to “a safe and inviting space for all our students” or “a safe, welcoming environment” at UC Davis: 1) Setting up tents on the quad in solidarity with faculty and students brutalized by police at UC Berkeley? or 2) Sending in riot police to disperse students with batons, pepper-spray, and tear-gas guns, while those students sit peacefully on the ground with their arms linked? Is this what you have in mind when you refer to creating “a safe and inviting space?” Is this what you have in mind when you express commitment to “a safe, welcoming environment?”

“I am writing to tell you in no uncertain terms that there must be space for protest on our campus. There must be space for political dissent on our campus. There must be space for civil disobedience on our campus. There must be space for students to assert their right to decide on the form of their protest, their dissent, and their civil disobedience—including the simple act of setting up tents in solidarity with other students who have done so. There must be space for protest and dissent, especially, when the object of protest and dissent is police brutality itself. You may not order police to forcefully disperse student protesters peacefully protesting police brutality. You may not do so. It is not an option available to you as the Chancellor of a UC campus. That is why I am calling for your immediate resignation.”

http://storify.com/adbusters/police-brutality

USB Stick Contains Dual-Core Computer, Turns Any Screen Into an Android Station

Laptop – “Is that a USB key in your pocket or a dual-core computer? Today, Norwegian company FXI technologies showed off a USB stick-sized portable computer prototype, complete with a dual-core 1.2-GHz Samsung Exynos ARM CPU (same as in the Galaxy S II), 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, HDMI-out and a microSD card slot for memory. Codenamed Cotton Candy because its 21 gram weight is the same as a bag of the confection, the tiny PC enables what its inventor calls “Any Screen Computing,” the ability to turn any TV, laptop, phone, tablet, or set-top box into a dumb terminal for its Android operating system. …”

more: http://blog.laptopmag.com/usb-stick-contains-dual-core-computer-turns-any-screen-into-an-android-station

A picture is worth how many words, now?

http://spkent.tumblr.com/post/13004183064/this-is-all-you-need-to-know-about-what-is

SHAME ON YOU!

I demand the arrest and fullest prosecution under the law of UC Davis Campus Police Lieutenant John Pike for the unprovoked assault of at least 15 people. according to the following:

Title 18, U.S.C., Section 242
Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law

This statute makes it a crime for any person acting under color of law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom to willfully deprive or cause to be deprived from any person those rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution and laws of the U.S.

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/civilrights/federal-statutes

United States of America Constitution
Article I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

UC Davis Police http://police.ucdavis.edu/contact-info
Link to Video: http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/11/uc-davis-cops-pepper-spray-protesters?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed
Facebook Page UC-Davis: https://www.facebook.com/UCDavis
UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi: http://chancellor.ucdavis.edu/contact.php

If you agree please act and share.

http://teddziuba.com/2011/11/dirty-words.html

From Randall Munroe, what map projections say about you.

I type in Dvorak and am wearing a pair of Vibram FiveFingers right now, so I guess I should prefer the Dymaxion. (And indeed, I’ve always had a soft spot for all things Buckminster Fuller.)

Someone asked me why Google Maps and Google Earth use “such stupid” map projections. Well, they don’t, actually—for their purposes, they both use exactly the right projection. Google Maps uses Mercator (or close enough); yeah, it’s not a very good projection for comparing the relative size of tropical and polar areas on global maps (“it makes Greenland look bigger than Africa!”, people like to point out), but most people don’t use Google Maps that way.

For what most people use it for—navigation and getting bearings for places they’re going to—the “conformal” aspect of Mercator, such that an angle on the map matches an angle in real life, is much more important than having equal areas at a continental scale. It’s hard to find city-level maps, especially in higher latitudes, in any global projection other than Mercator (because it looks so wrong!), but if you can find one of, say, Anchorage, and do a comparison, you’ll see what I mean—the perpendicular intersections of the street grid are shown as askew.

Google Earth, on the other hand, uses two projections—internally it uses an equirectangular format (a “plate carrée”) that has the nice feature of a pixel in the digital map being directly translatable to a latitude and longitude. For displaying to the user, it uses perspective projection, which is what you learned in art class—it uses sight lines extended to a vanishing point to translate the 3D object of the globe into the 2D canvas of the screen. This projection fails in virtually every category cartography geeks like to compare projections by; but it looks like what you’d actually see if you were floating in a balloon or in orbit, so for the purpose—exploration of our Earth—it’s the right choice, too. (One thing it can’t do is show the entire Earth at once; a hemisphere is all you get.)

(I’m not speaking for the Maps or Earth teams, officially or un-.)

http://xkcd.com/977/

As I was riding in this morning, I heard that #ows had been re-forming at 6th Ave. and Canal, which is Albert Capsouto park (though the much larger St. John’s Park is just a block away). I rode over and had a quick chat with some people, from which I learned:

There are rumors going around that Zuccotti Park is being re-opened, and that a judge ruled last night’s forcible eviction of the Occupation illegal. This is mostly true, and the injunction explicitly allows people to return with tents and other equipment, but as of this morning the Police are not allowing anyone in.

People are relieved to see their friends, but very worried about all the people who they haven’t been able to find; That they might be hurt or in jail.

Nobody I talked to knew that the NYPD closed the airspace to all non-official traffic last night, or that there was a near-total media blackout.

People are happy to that you support them, and though not everyone can be physically present, that they’re not alone in what they’re trying to accomplish.

Paris 2011 Album

First time share the whole album – I will continuously add more here.