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February 27, 2007
Head south, then southwest, then split the difference
SXSW Interactive is a little over a week away. I’m excited to be leading the first panel of the festival on virtual worlds called Terraforming the Internet. Even happier to announce the confirmed speakers.
Ben Batstone-Cunningham, Alt-Zoom Studios
Jan D’Alessandro, Meez
Eric Rice, Slackstreet Studios
Bill Victor, Halcyon Worlds
Talented, experienced, articulate, all of them. I am told they are mostly well-groomed. But don’t let grooming be an issue. If you’re in town for SXSW don’t let a Friday night hangover be an excuse not to come to our panel Saturday morning. Makes for a better discussion.
If you’ll be in town and want to meet up, drop a line.
And if you won’t be in town, why not? How can you pass up a conference with panels like Web Hacks: Good or Evil (or: Welcome to Web 2.666) and
Game Perverts: A Robot, a DS and a Dot Matrix Printer Menage a Trois?
Or for that matter film screenings for Hostel 2 and Helvetica and music performances by Girl Talk and Hoodoo Gurus. Something for everyone!
Tags: austin, conferences, sxsw
Posted at 3:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Virtual Worlds
February 25, 2007
Move it, sugar!
Remember the Urban scar tissue post? No, of course you don’t.
Well, it was about the way cities have of slowly assimilating unused infrastructure and how this becomes visible when you scale out, looking at the city macroscopically. The earlier post showed the way the buildings have been shaped by the tracks that are no longer there, a ghost-limb of transportation past.
But the very southern edge of the line is still in use. Twice weekly. It is called the Sugar Train and it delivers sugar to a confectionary. The tracks, embedded nearly flush with the pavement sans sleepers, slice through private backyards and parking lots. My gym prohibits parking on the tracks tuesdays and thursdays because of the delivery. Up until last week I had never seen this mythical train.
Turns out this delivery route is a fantastic pain in the ass for everyone involved. There’s a small army of engineers that walks with the engine and single car as it creeps through the north side. Gates have to be unlocked, backyard equipment pushed aside, and — in the case of my gym — owners of cars have to be found. Seems that twice a week the train comes to a stop at the club while the management goes elliptical-to-elliptical asking people if they parked on the tracks.
I stood outside with clearly-irritated trainmen as the massive engine belched and growled, mere inches from a car parked directly across its path. I struck up a conversation and urged them to exercise right-of-way, crushing the pathetic vehicles like matchbox cars. They declined. In fact, they eventually gave up and backed the train down the tracks to who-knows-where.
I love that this throwback train exists, but you have to wonder: wouldn’t it be easier to deliver the sugar by truck at this point? The train basically spends a full day inching through roadblocks that the city inadvertently lays across its way. I’d love to know what the actual story is. Why the train is still a better option for the candy factory.
Posted at 2:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Chicago
February 24, 2007
Impaneled
This week I was selected for a panel. No, not that one. The day after returning from Russia I had to report for jury duty and was selected. Just what one needs to catch back up after two weeks abroad.
The trial was civil. Personal injury. Really the stereotype of an ambulance-chasing lawyer with a plaintiff trying to milk an injury for all it is worth. In July 2000 the plaintiff was riding her bike along a relatively busy road. The defendant was stopped at a stop sign, looking left at oncoming traffic. He let his foot off the brake to idle forward and did not see the biker crossing from the right. They collided. The biker toppled over onto her knee. Ambulance came. Away she went.
The biker wasn’t badly injured. No cuts, a few bruises, clothing completely intact. She hurt her knee the worst and that was the crux of the case. The emergency room sent her home with some pain med after a clear x-ray. The biker never went to see her family doc but went to a couple of orthopedic surgeons and a chiropractor. The former could never find anything wrong with the knee, though they did not doubt that she was in pain — a pain that she described as debilitating, if intermittent, and one that prevented her from biking and other exercise. She undertook physical therapy six weeks after the doctor advised it.
Therapy seemed to help, but for some reason she stopped. Then, three years and nine months later she went back to the doctor. He found water on the knee but at this point could not say whether it was a result of the impact or of non-use.
The plaintiff wanted $6,000 in medical bill compensation, about $1.7k for salary lost, $25k for loss of normal life, and $25k for pain and suffering.
As on the only other jury I’ve been on, the drama and intensity of persuasion that went on in the jury room far exceeded that in the courtroom. The jurors actually elected me foreman — which was just as well; I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible so I got to control the pace of deliberation somewhat.
It came down to the bizarre gap of time between treatments and the sense that if she truly was in debilitating, normal-life-altering pain that she would have done something in the intervening years. That her lawyer was a bumbling slimeball and the defense attorney was sharp and concise didn’t help her case at all. In the end — though there was one initial juror hold out (isn’t there always?) — we arrived at unanimity by agreeing that a sufferer bears some responsibility in the successful outcome of one’s treatment. That is, if you smack me in the head with a bat, you are at fault. But if my doctor insists I need surgery and I refuse, I can’t hold you liable for what happens because I declined surgery. This is what happened with the biker and her strange lapses in treatment and physical therapy.
We awarded her recompense for most of her medical bills up until the gap in treatment. Nothing for salary. Uh, hello, it was a salary not a wage and she testified that the doctor gave her a note for work so that she’d be paid for the missed time. Nothing for pain and suffering. Nothing for loss of normal life. In a sense, a victory for the defense.
One thing we debated a bit in the jury room was the complete absence of mention of insurance. Some jurors really wanted to focus on it. Did insurance decline to cover? But since it wasn’t mentioned we couldn’t debate it. This irritated some jurors.
So, after two days on the Cook County payroll I was $34.40 wealthier and infinitely further behind in work. I will say that it was interesting to spend a week in China then a week in Russia then come back to the USA to engage in one of the only modes of direct civic engagement short of voting or military service. I’m not saying I was humming the national anthem or anything. Just agreeably content to be reminded of something quintessentially American.
Posted at 8:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Topic: America
Extreme meteorology
Sounds so evil. Here’s a bit of background.
FYI, the snow that is coming down is perfectly spherical. Like small hail but with the consistency of snow rather than ice.
Posted at 6:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Chicago
February 20, 2007
Project wisdom from the old NASA
“If a major project is truly innovative, you cannot possibly know its exact cost and its exact schedule at the beginning. And if in fact you do know the exact cost and the exact schedule, chances are that the technology is obsolete.”
— Joseph G. Gavin, Jr., discussing the design of the lunar module* that landed NASA astronauts on the moon.
Yeah, boss. That’s why we’re late and over budget. You don’t want to be obsolete, do you?
[*] The upper half of which is called, ahem, an ascent stage. We’re all about inspirations to innovation around here.
Via SvN.
Tags: NASA, projectmanagement
Posted at 1:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Space | Topic: Work
February 18, 2007
Питер 2.0
I’ve been back in St. Petersburg, Russia this week, my first visit in seven years. Much has changed, nearly all for the better.
The flight over on Lufthansa was pleasant as the snowstorm in Chicago kept most of the passengers at home. Lufthansa has recently overhauled its seats, providing in-seat power without needing any special adapters. The plug universally accepts nearly all global standard plugs. Why can’t more airlines do without the funky connector, I ask? There’s even an in-seat Ethernet port which briefly got my hopes up, but, no, the Boeing Connexion service remains shut-off. You know, it’s not like they de-orbited all the satellites. Why won’t some enterprising soul purchase them and reinstate in-flight connectivity? Please?
St. Petersburg is bustling. In 2003 the city celebrated its 300th anniversary and clearly it got spruced up for the event. The colorful, stuccoed facades of nearly all city buildings, gorgeous even back in the doldrums of the 90’s, are a vibrant pastel confection that contrasts wonderfully with the permagray of the sky and frozen canals. The uptick in the economy is visible nearly everywhere.
I stayed at a relatively new hotel, the Novotel, just off the arterial Nevsky Prospekt. It was adequate, if quaintly backward in its attempt to be a modern western business hotel. Internet connectivity was purchased by the byte, about a rouble per MB. I had no idea what to purchase, though I quickly learned that one eats up 100MB (the default purchase) without even thinking. I actually complained about it, thinking there’s no way I used 100MB over an evening of e-mail checking and web surfing. And yet, I’ve probably purchased close to 3/4 GB of throughput since I’ve been here. (And they raised prices 50% in the middle of my stay!) The hotel gym was pathetic: two flimsy bikes, one treadmill with a tread that slipped dangerously, an elliptical (broken), and two weight machines that looked like Ivan Drago castoffs from the 1980’s. Old-style Russian hotel amenities are still available, of course: prostitutes prowl the lobby bar late into the night offering “company” should you so desire.
Speaking of love for sale, I arrived on Valentine’s Day. This Hallmark holiday seems to have ridden the globalization wave nicely. My colleague and I could find no place to eat due to holiday “specials” at nearly every restaurant. We were actually waved off from a few restaurants before even getting to the host. But still, there’s an abundance of new places to eat. (And not a Starbucks in sight. My colleague drinks decaf coffee and was repeatedly stymied.) Fewer restaurants exhibit the once-standard pole-dancing entertainment, also a plus. No really, it is not so easy to dine with a topless waif sliding up and down a pole to throbbing Russopop. But, replacing vice-for-vice, nearly every restaurant we went to featured hookah pipes. (There’s no such thing as a non-smoking section in practice.) Shisha is amazingly popular here. Not only can you order dozens of flavored tobaccos, but you get options for the liquid in the chamber: water, cognac, wine, juice and even milk.
The beauty of the city is remarkable, given how ugly winter tries to make it. Slushy black snow covers every sidewalk. Dangerous ice slicks mark regular distances between building downspouts that empty right into the public walkways. And yet, the ice can be gorgeous. The Neva river is frozen solid with a small path broken through for the occasional intrepid watercraft. Each morning the path had formed a thin layer of ice on it, a scabbed laceration down the middle of the blindingly white river.
Nightclubs power the evenings here, as they do in Moscow and, according to a Russian pal, in Kiev. (He could simply not say enough about the supermodel-caliber club-life of Kiev these days.) The music seems a touch better than it did back when I first visited. It is still clogged with House-inspired Russian cheese, but I think there’s hope. We returned to an old haunt known to me only as the “Thursday club” because that’s when we’d visit it in years past. I finally asked what the real name of the club was. In passable-English my friend said “it is like a whore’s house.” Ah, I see. And all these years I just liked to drink Baltika beer there and dance. Only later did I learn that he said “like a horse’s house.” The club occupies a former stable, you see. It is right in front of the amazing Church on the Spilled Blood. Bathed in floodlights, the traditional Russian church never fails to strike awe when you stumble from the club in the wee hours.
We had a bit of free time on Saturday so we set out for the Bolshoi Puppet Theater. Everything was in Russian. We had no idea what we were watching. But it was fun to see a full-scale production done with puppets. The skill required was considerable and it was a pleasure to hear the hall full of kids chuckle. (Also a little depressing as both my colleague and I have small children at home. If you want to be instantly homesick, go sit amongst several hundred happy children in a foreign country.) The theater itself was a fire hazard waiting to happen. When the house lights went down it was absolutely pitch black. No aisle lighting, no exit signs. Children wailing. Panic could have ignited quickly. Instead, a puppet show started.
Keeping with the kid theme, we attended the St. Peterburg Circus. This circus is the oldest in Russia. It was in a stunning but dilapidated hall off the Fontanka quay and provided a theater-in-the-round for its one-ring show. I hadn’t been to a circus in many decades and yet the mixture of delight and horror as the entertainers performed death- (or least serious injury-) defying acts came right back to me, like I was eight years old. Everything was just a little bit shabby. The auditorium, the performers’ outfits, the ropes and pulleys that prevented human splattering in the ring — it all seemed a little worse for the wear. One wonders if there is any kind of circus safety review board in Russia. Most depressing of all were the animals. On the one hand it was the most diverse bestiary I’ve ever seen. To the typical circus menagerie were added porcupines, foxes, ostriches, rats, and at least two species of critters I could not identify. (Though no elephants and much to my chagrin no bears. C’mon, aren’t Russian circuses supposed to have bears?) But the big cats, horses, and dogs were all mangy and old and a few of them looked actually injured or arthritic. I’m not saying they were abused — at least not in the ring and at least insofar as being in a ring isn’t taken to be abuse — but clearly they were past their prime, just like the lion-tamer and his assistant, actually.
It is interesting to compare this mini-rebirth with the tempest of development going on in Beijing right now. St. Petersburg seems to be upgrading where Beijing is building an entirely new infrastructure. At least most of Питер was recognizable seven years on. I can hardly get my bearings in Beijing after even a few months away.
Of course, I was in town working with the fantastic Hermitage Museum. It too seems to be on the uptick with long-needed signage enhancements and halls packed with visitors. But more on this topic later.
A small photoset is available.
UPDATE: Yikes, maybe I spoke too soon. Just hours after I wrote this and left town a bomb went off across the street from my hotel, injuring six. Details here.
See also: Return to the Hermitage
Tags: russia, saintpetersburg
Posted at 2:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Travel
February 17, 2007
Imperium
In the past year I’ve visited the seats of power of three empires — the Russian, Chinese Qing, and Turkish Ottoman — that all imploded in the first 25 years of the 20th century. The imperial palaces have become public museums known today as the Hermitage, Forbidden City, and Topkapi Palace, respectively.
All are struggling to make themselves relevant to the public, but almost invariably this comes from trying to make their aesthetic opulence available to a wider audience. Little energy is expended on explaining what the palaces meant in the larger sense of empire. While amazing places to visit, these sites are mostly wunderkammer tableaux, not devices for telling the tale of conquest, governance, and power that they really represent.
In all of them there exists a room with a throne carefully roped off and preserved for curious tourists to admire. Certainly it is interesting to see where heads of state sat, but it may be done for political reasons too. The throne is such a symbol of power — autocratic power — that its vacancy is comforting in a way, a reminder of a past to take some pride in, but not to repeat.
It is a fine line. These cultures don’t necessarily seem to want to glorify the past form of government. The Forbidden City for instance was only saved from destruction during the Cultural Revolution by a forward-thinking Zhou Enlai. But there’s a latent pride. An acknowledgment in the empire-as-museum that theirs was a great country once and perhaps can be again.
Of course, there’s irony in the way each of these countries govern today. Two are democracies with extremely powerful heads of state, one is a communist country with imperial ambitions of a different sort. There’s more continuity between what the palaces represent and how the nations wish to be viewed globally today than you might think, methinks.
Will Capitol Hill one day be subsumed into the Smithsonian megaplex on the mall? A democratic palace-museum ode to a former mode of government?
See also: This is no country for old men and Regeneration
Posted at 9:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Travel
February 16, 2007
No, this is winter
I left town on Tuesday during an apocalyptic snowstorm for St. Petersburg, Russia — one of the few destinations from O’Hare with less clement weather than Chicago. It’s pretty damn cold.
Bungeed-comforter, makeshift paw-mittens, and some green spray-paint on the head just to make it more bizarre.
See also: Now this is winter
Posted at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Travel
February 11, 2007
Eco-friendly, grammatically-moronic
See also: In which I offer a series of exciting thoughts on punctuation in the 21st century
Tags: grammar, advertising
Posted at 6:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Words
February 9, 2007
Austin-powered
So, I’ll be back at the fine SXSW Interactive conference/festival in Austin this year. Last year I spewed forth on convergence (skeptically). This year I get to orchestrate the spewage as I am leading a panel on virtual worlds, one of a handful on the topic in the Gaming/Screenburn category.
The panel’s called “Terraforming the Internet: When 3D Models Meet Business Models.” Saturday, March 10, 10am. Panelists are being finalized, but they’re all brilliant, articulate, laureates-in-waiting.
SXSW is simply an exceptional event and I’m happy to be a part of it. See you there?
See also: South by
Tags: conferences
Posted at 8:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Virtual Worlds
February 8, 2007
In the future we will all levitate to work
I had a chance to ride the world’s only operational magnetic levitation train this week in Shanghai. It was the highlight of an otherwise awful layover. The train itself runs from Pudong airport to the terminus of one of the city subway lines (not exactly downtown Shanghai). There’s some debate about how useful this is to actual travelers, but as a way of killing time it was perfect for me. I purchased a roundtrip ticket.
Actually I purchased a VIP ticket. (They love the designation VIP here. You see it everywhere on special doors, stairways, and parking spaces.) I thought, if I’m going to ride a space-age train I am certainly going to do it in first class. In a future of jet packs, flying cars, and supertrains we’ll all be VIP’s anyway so I better get practicing. The cost difference was $2. The actual difference? Slightly nicer seats and a completely empty car cabin.
There’s a brief shudder as the train shimmies up the half-inch that the magnets levitate it above the track. Then off you go, mostly silently. Since the means of propulsion and power are embedded in the track (the magnets pull you along as well as prop you up) there’s no loud onboard engine. You accelerate quickly. Not unlike an airplane takeoff without the din. Just a few minutes in you’re moving at 430 km/h (270 mph) and you can feel it. The slightest jostle (and it has to be slighter than the half-inch tolerance of the magnetic “cushion”) and the train responds. You could not, for instance, play Jenga successfully on board. Still it is damn smooth for going 270 mph.
But you do wonder what would happen in the event of catastrophe. On an airplane there’s room for error, approximately 30,000 feet of room for error; you can recover. On a train moving at this speed if you depart the track you’re basically done. What happens if someone dumps a large chunk of metal on the track? Or a mini-cyclone blows the train over? Or a power spike into the track torus? (There actually was a fire onboard recently.) All thoughts that have nicely counteracted my recent preoccupation with air disasters.
On the return leg I was in the front car (again alone, the sole VIP of a future society). I staggered to the conductor’s cabin as we hit max speed. Peering in I saw exactly what I expected — computer screens and a panel of buttons — and something I did not — the conductor lounging at the desk reading the newspaper. She’s likely there for show only. Or a robot. In the future, trains are conducted by robots, as you probably know.
As you pass a maglev going the other direction there’s a super-brief concussive moment where too much air is being displaced from too little space. It makes you jump. Unfortunately the eight minute journey is almost half acceleration/deceleration. When you arrive at the destination station and disembark you’re greeted by a strong burning smell. I can only guess it is a byproduct of the magnetism since nothing should be ablated during the journey. Nothing touches anything. This is the future, damnit.
The maglev, officially known as the Shanghai Transrapid, is usually called a demonstration line. It doesn’t go anywhere very useful right now, though there are many ideas for expansion, especially in advance of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. The whole experience, while fascinating and exciting, was a bit depressing. With the small ridership (all in non-VIP class) it all felt like a bit of a show. Sort of like the futuristic people mover underneath the Huangpu River. Fun to take, but how practical? A Disney monorail without the Disney crowds (or high ticket price to offset the cost of running such a novelty).
The future’s always a novelty to the present though, isn’t it?
The full image set is available.
Posted at 2:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Topic: China | Topic: Travel
February 7, 2007
Gathering in the town square
The MIT Technology Review has a short article on one of my main projects, called Meadan, which I’ve not discussed at all on this blog. Mostly this is because we’re still in development, but recently we embarked on a closed alpha test phase so this seems like as good a time as any.
From the article:
The basic idea is simple: it’s a website that brings English and Arabic speakers together around daily postings of news articles, broadcasts, and events that are of common interest, and it gives users a platform to communicate through dialogues, blogs, and other exchanges. All the while, it allows users to pinpoint their location so that people can share views across continents. The hard part is creating a system that allows users to express their ideas in their native tongue.
What’s really interesting about Meadan — apart from its small part in removing barriers to rationale discourse between the West and the Muslim world — is how it uses social networking technologies both to create communities (the “traditional” use of social networking) but also to enlist users to rate, edit, and correct the English-Arabic machine translation. Social networking as language feedback loop. What’s missing from so much machine translation is a sizable corpus of informal conversation (not bizspeak or medical parlance, for instance). This is what helps MT learn grammatical and dialectical nuance and this is precisely the kind of conversation we envision on the Meadan site.
Much more on this in the coming months, of course.
Tags: arabic, english, machinetranslation, socialnetworking
Posted at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Words | Topic: Work
February 6, 2007
Today's forecast in Beijing
Not smog, not haze. Smoke.
Last night on the flight in from Shanghai the flight attendant announced that it was pleasant and sunny in Beijing. It was 10:30 PM.
Tags: weather
Posted at 6:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: China
Caputo's career kaput
Looks like my shout-out last year to the world’s first female Italian-American in orbit will be my last for her. The press just loves the story of Lisa Caputo Nowak’s alleged melting-down over a love triangle — as though astronauts aren’t human. She’s an Italiana, fercrissakes! Of course she’s fiery!
I think it’s fair to say that she’s not going to pass the next pre-flight psych check. My guess.
If you’re catty in space, can anyone hear you growl?
UPDATE: And the whole fascination with wearing diapers for the long drive. C’mon, how do you think they spacewalk for 8 hours? She’s just used to efficiency.
Tags: NASA
Posted at 5:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Topic: Space
February 5, 2007
Now this is winter!
How cold is it in Chicago?
- The midday, sunny high still has a minus sign in front of it.
- I thought my son was bleeding yesterday morning after I kissed him good morning. Only then did I realize that I cracked my freeze-dried lip open and bled on him in doing so.
- The city has a Blade Runner-esque look with every manhole and sewer drain belching steam. So noir!
- Loaning our shower to a friend whose hot water pipes — but not cold, huh? — froze solid.
- My son’s new favorite word is “negative.”
- It is too cold to snow.
- Shit-filled diapers freeze solid on the back deck instantly.
- The Bears have sucked all warmth from our hearts.
That’s how cold it is.
Tags: weather
Posted at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Chicago
February 3, 2007
The (pāt'n) that matters
You know he’s watching. Go Bears!
Posted at 8:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Chicago
“All four engines have failed”
I’ve been obsessed with plane crashes lately. No, obsessed isn’t right. Oppressed, maybe? I seem to be encountering information about air horror wherever I turn. Always nice before a series of trans-oceanic flights.
A few weeks ago I watched Superman Returns. The Man of Steel says to the passengers of a wingless jumbo jet he’s just safely landed, “I hope this incident hasn’t put you off flying. Statistically speaking it is still the safest way to travel.” It is a direct lift of a line Christopher Reeves also uttered in the original Superman from 1978. Certainly true, but for me it fails the truthiness test.
Then, as I babysat my computer during a marathon session of video rendering, aimlessly clicking through Wikipedia, I landed on Aviation accidents and incidents (part of the hell’s-gateway-esque Disasters Portal). Browsing through the air disasters really was like rubbernecking a car accident. I couldn’t turn away. I read every article in there. Airshow accidents, In-flight airliner explosions, Midair airliner crashes, Deliberate airline crashes, Fuel exhaustion on commercial airliners … the subcategories are scarily unique and many.
What you start to realize is: Damn, there are a lot of disasters where we don’t really know what happened. And then, once that’s sunk in: Damn, I’m surprised this doesn’t happen more often. There are some fascinating incidents. The jet that ditched in the Neva River in St. Peterburg, Russia without a single loss of life. The mentally-ill Japanese pilot who deliberately crashed on landing. And the worst of all collision of two 747’s on Tenerife in 1977.
Then — somehow, I wasn’t specifically looking — I stumbled upon this video of Boeing testing the structural limitation of the 777 wing. They found it. (And if I am ever in a plane with a wing bent like that I will have involuntarily evacuated my bowels well before structural failure, yessiree.)
Then yesterday, this story of a 747 that lost all four engines and actually landed safely. It is a terrifying tale. Again, I was not searching. I must be unconsciously sifting these things out of my feed reader or something.
And finally, gallows humor. This artwork/concept for a crash landing pillow that gives you the option of suffocating yourself before crashing. For the true control freak, you may now take charge of your own death, flaming airframe be damned. You know, it’s said that the only reason you’re told to put your head between your knees during a crash is so that your dental records stay as close as possible to the seat number for identification.
Anyway. Not sure what this obsession is all about. It would be one thing if I were actively hunting this information out, but I’m not. I feel like I’m in an M. Night Shyamalan flick.
I depart Monday.
Tags: airplane, crash, disaster
Posted at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Travel
February 2, 2007
Stirring the gene pool with a cello bow
There are days where my job is not much fun. Tuesday last week was not one of those days.
I spent the morning with Yo-Yo Ma and his Silk Road Ensemble paired with Dr. Spencer Wells of the Genographic Project. Actually, so did the student body of the Prosser Career Academy, a Chicago public high school on the west side. And this was all part of the Sister Cities Schools program.
Confused? It was a bit of a you-put-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter event, but it actually worked. Sister Cities is a program that encourages multicultural exchange between the planet’s urban centers. Their new schools program extends this by putting students in contact from around the world. The Silk Road Project is a really interesting endeavor by Yo-Yo Ma to demonstrate the interplay of cultures via music, taking the ancient trans-Eurasia trade route as a metaphor for this journey. The Genographic Project in some ways has the same goals — a greater understanding of human diversity — but comes at it by seeking to more fully understand the patterns of human migration out of Africa by mapping genetic markers from people around the world. IBM’s life science group is providing the computational firepower for the massive amount of data that Wells and his team are collecting from the field.
Yo-Yo Ma is a huge fan of the Genographic project. In fact, I think he has a man-crush on Spencer Wells. Together they spoke to an AP History class and explained the goals of each project. The students were given genography kits to plot their own lineage on the world map and Ma played a short piece for the class, explaining the multiple cultural influences that coalesce in classical music. His specific example was how an African dance was incorporated in a piece he played by J.S. Bach.
The full Silk Road Ensemble then entertained an all-school assembly in between video clips of Spencer Wells traveling to crazy remote places to obtain information and blood samples from indigenes. At times the yoking-together of genetics and music seemed a bit forced, but it clearly can be done and does make some sense conceptually. Genetic proliferation and lingustic variation, for example, are tightly coupled; one offers insight where the other falls short. Will be interesting to see if Ma and Wells can uncover other points of intersection between the projects.
The students loved it all, actually. A teacher remarked that she’s never heard a full school assembly so oddly silent. I suppose everyone wonders where they come from, ultimately. One of life’s meta-questions.
See also: Macro-genealogy and A long walk out of Africa
Tags: chicago, diversity, genographic, mancrush, silkroad, yoyoma
Posted at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Chicago | Topic: Work
