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Elizabeth Hoff is one of my favorite modern fashion photographers and just might have kicked David LaChapelle off of the top spot. She’s very accomplished for her age (35) and reminds me that I need to kick my ass into gear. She’s had an interesting life as well, this from her website

Our calendar system has all the planned proficiency of urban sprawl. Accuracy will be thrown on the grinding wheel of path dependency. How many days should there be in a month? fuck it, lets just say somewhere between 28 and 31! Should there be an order? Kinda, but not really. Honestly, I’m probably just bitter because I’ve always secretly had trouble learning the months. I have to convert between month numbers and month names using my fingers (tricky around sept).

I guess this is the time when people look back at the preceding year and try to draw useful lessons and alter behavior. This was a grand year for creativity. I made a name for myself as an “artist” and feel creatively fulfilled for the first time. It’s been a horrid year for school. I’ve never been so gratingly bored in my life, and I’m an expert in making things interesting. Working at google has been one of the sweetest, most surreal things ever largely because there is not a single douchebag in my working group. All of my coworkers are incredible human beings and I am constantly taking awesome lessons from everyone. Like all people, I operate with a fair amount of fear based emotion. This year was my biggest onslaught against it yet. There were some notable victories and a couple terribly painful failures. I’m not a big fan of the gregorian calendar, it doesn’t make sense to me and it never will. I generally divide my year by burning man so this is like April for me.

And while I’m whining about time, it’s really stupid when people make flyers for events that mention the date it will occur but not the day. Quick >> what day of the week is 1/19/07? congratulations, someone just didn’t go to your event because they didn’t feel like looking up the day of the event and then mentally cross referencing it with their schedule to see if they could attend. Every time I see a group of flyers at least one of them makes that mistake. Usability is about making things take as few steps as possible and designing things for people who aren’t you.

people are always whining about information overload.

if properly organized, too much information becomes not enough information!

From an excellent article in the New York Times Magazine
:: Desperately Seeking A Kidney via Email (thanks Wex!) ::

ps DONATE YOUR ORGANS!

:: via latimes blog ::

Wow, she’s not even taking questions that she planted. ZING!

:: via the beeb ::

I support legalization and regulation of prostitution. I would argue that the current trafficking problem is a result of a black market that emerges as a result of illegalization. I definitely support this guy going to a prostitute and taking his friends, but what if it scales?

:: via Associated Content ::

Here’s a quote from EscortsForTheDisabled.com

This struck a note with me. It’s obvious that the rights defined in the constitution are not the sum cannon of what people in a just society are entitled to. Given that, I’m interested in thinking about what rights haven’t been fully defined and maybe consensual sex is one of them.

So if consenting sex is a right, and it scales does the government have an obligation to provide/facilitate it?

:: via LifeSite::

AND if you’re a Deaf Lesbian, there is a website just for you http://www.deaflesbian.net/

I’d just like to close this blog post by reminding people that in our country we are busy debating if we should give out condoms in schools. Simultaneously, many people are baffled by our teen pregnancy rate. AND we have one of the highest infant mortality rates in the industrialized world.

Thinking about this a bit further:
-Given the current socioeconomic status of most prostitutes, I’m dubious that true consent in terms of prostitution actually exists.
-Over the years I’ve known 5 women who were “sex workers,” 4 of them were doing it to fund a coke habit. Were they being exploited? I say yes.
-Consensual Sex may already be covered in the constitution under the right to privacy. So this might not be an issue of defining new rights but actually making sure that current rights are actually implemented.

Somewhat brutally? I guess this isn’t strictly true but the word “brutal” strikes me as a binary identifier, ie it doesn’t really lend itself to shades of grey. I mean chimpanzees speared some mammal, that’s clearly brutal.

:: via Wireds Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 07 ::
:: via Flickr ::

emolument noun emol·u·ment \i-ˈmäl-yə-mənt\
1: the returns arising from office or employment usually in the form of compensation or perquisites
Etymology: (we <3 etymology)
Middle English, from Latin emolumentum advantage, from emolere to produce by grinding, from e- + molere to grind — more at meal. 15th century.

but wait...what does perquisites mean?

per·qui·site /ˈpɜrkwəzɪt/ [pur-kwuh-zit]
–noun
1. an incidental payment, benefit, privilege, or advantage over and above regular income, salary, or wages: Among the president’s perquisites were free use of a company car and paid membership in a country club.
2. a gratuity or tip.

These words discovered in the course of reading up on Michael Ledeen.

So most of the GSF Board (Harmony, Vanessa, Eric and I) just met and wanted to send out an update of where things are with our second school, our plans for next year (including building our last classroom!) as well as ask for your support, if you are so inspired. (Your money goes a long way: for ex. $60 pays a teacher’s salary for a month, see below for more)

The Goma Student Fund (GSF):
For those of you who I haven’t shared this with before, GSF is an organization I started in 2002, after a trip to Goma as it was beginning to recover from a volcanic eruption. Add in 12 year civil war, aftermath of Rwandan refugee camps, and incredible poverty and you have thousands of kids orphaned or impoverished and needing education. NE Congo is still designated as a relief area, so very little development work is, or can, happen here. GSF is a small nonprofit, born primarily out of the interest and support of our friends and loved ones, that works with communities to start schools, both K-12 and vocational.
Read more about Goma and our work at: http://www.gomastudentfund.org/

GSF efforts this year:
With the first school running self-sufficiently at this point, our attention is on our second school in the refugee area of Mugunga. In its second year, this school gives educational opportunities and hope to a population that has been displaced for over a decade and whose needs are rarely addressed by aid organizations in Goma.

The next step for GSF is to improve the quality of education in this area to bring it up to the standards of schools in Goma. To date, the investments of friends and family have allowed us to build five classrooms and enroll 250 students. Each class is full beyond capacity, with children sharing notebooks and pens and sitting four to a desk. Even then, more students the school cannot accommodate line up at the windows to watch lessons.

Providing quality education in this refugee area demands greater financial support. Families are not able to pay enough in school fees to cover even the basic operational costs. Teachers must be paid to travel from Goma daily. There are greater infrastructural needs of the location, including the need for a water collection system and more-secure cement buildings, rather than wooden.

As a result, the GSF is shifting its approach from developing its first, self-sustaining school in Goma proper to committing to yearly financial support for the operations of this second school in Mugunga. We recognize that we have a unique role to play in helping this refugee community meet its needs, beyond those of immediate survival, by giving their children opportunities through education that will support the entire community in moving towards a new future.

How you can help:
Many other organizations and programs will not support development in a refugee area, so the vast majority of our funding comes from individual donors. GSF is a labor of love by the entirely volunteer staff and each of you is in some way personally connected to one of us. All funds donated will be directed 100% to the program. We are fortunate in that money goes very far in Goma.

To give you an idea:
$30 - Pairs of uniforms for five students
$60 - Teacher’s Salary for a month
$100 - One year’s tuition and supplies for two students
$300 - Furniture for an entire classroom

If you can help, please donate today; the needs of the Mugunga children are immediate, and it is such an easy thing to forget to do.

http://www.gomastudentfund.org/

Personal Thanks:
Many of you have donated in the past and I’m always reminded, when I sit down to do this yearly fundraising drive, of how much your words of encouragement, willingness to help or discuss, and overall vote of confidence through your donations keep me going when I’m far away from the kids and families over there that we are all working to help.

It was a conversation with a friend, this morning, that reminded me what a special opportunity this organization offers to me. For me, it is always easier to want to work with people and issues that are right in front of me. And, for now at least, I’m not willing to move longterm to Congo, or a similar place, because I miss the amazing community of friends and loved ones I have here. But I also can’t go through my days thinking I am only contributing to folks here in the US, which is why I’m grateful to have an easy pathway to reach out to folks a world away, and especially a part of the world where many cannot or choose not to work, to help them move themselves forward, by creating a new generation of literate, critical thinking, and empowered young people. Without a basic primary school education, they are unable to take advantage of so many other opportunities, from being able to read when to take their medication, to show up for a vaccination, or replace their water filter to voting in an election, reading a piece of news, managing their money, or reading a land deed.

Both parents and kids know it, and it’s what motivates parents to eat a meal only every other day to save the $1/month to send their kid to our school or kids to steal backpacks to try and get into the classroom. I wish you guys could meet them. No one I know who has gone to Goma, doesn’t plan to go back. But it does feel very far away from here, and I am so grateful for all of you who have made this organization something you care about. It started because of that care and wouldn’t exist any other way.

Thank you.
Devon

Question
Will someone, ANYONE, please tell me what the difference is between he Democratic Party and the Republican Party? I can’t tell the difference anymore.

Answer
If you’re for gay rights, you’re a Democrat. If you’re for gay sex, you’re Republican.

Occasionally there is thought-provoking material on Reddit.

Coffee - Word of the Day

Today, clean up begins on South Korea’s worst oil spill ever. It spilled yesterday and already there are widespread uncertainty campaigns about the threats.

Today, Al Gore accepts the Nobel Peace Prize for countering uncertainty campaigns by conservatives who suggest suspending judgement on global warming.

Today, Togo gets a new Prime Minister and nobody knows or cares.

Good morning.

Consider for a minute the concept of uncertainty. Doubt. Ignorance.

Today, many people still believe oil spills can be cleaned, man-made global warming is debatable, and Togo does not exist. They’re not necessarily wrong. Doubt is important - and the study of ignorance is a serious discipline. So it should be no surprise that the word of the day, today, is agnotology.

Gnosos is Greek for knowledge. A-Gnosos means the absence of knowledge (like asymmetry, or anecrophilia - both of which I’ve been diagnosed with). Agnotology is the study of ignorance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology

So how much knowledge can we have about ignorance? Consider this.

Answer one: there is enough knowledge about ignorance to merit the some five hundred doctorates and some thirty books that exist in the field.

Answer two: there is enough knowledge about ignorance, at least, to make a serious discipline of it.

Answer three: the term is itself a hoax invented earlier this week by Sean McGowan, who doctored a small number of open-source websites to engineer the term enough for others to reference it, thus creating the illusion of legitimacy and establishment. Outside of the claims in this email and the Wikipedia article, no proof exists that the word is even real.

What do you think?

This week work on trusting more of what you actually see. Build more confidence in your sense of smell and touch. Consider that, while your thoughts may not be the greatest in the history of mankind, they are probably better than something you read in a book.

And certainly more accurate than an email.

Good Morning,

Sean McGowan (http://sean.mcgowan.be)

——

Sean is a gifted writer and old friend. He just published his first book, Click Click Snap which is quite delightful. I purchased it after reading the excerpt that he put online for free. I’m still busy but forever feel the whirring pull of your rss feeds.

So here’s my big secret to blogging. Basically my friends just send me cool stuff and then I post it here. I kind of view this blog as my friends all kinda being friends with each other. Anyway, I’ve been studying all week and I have finals all this week, which means that I haven’t really been checking email. no email = no blog. I think I’ll be back to things around thursday after my last final.

Colour reading and contexture
Malmö Konsthall 2005 Sweden
Size: 1100×1100x200 cm
wood, tiles, chocolat, carpets, plastic, isolation and a lot more
photo: Vegar Moen

:: More Photos from Different Angles ::

Wall painting for staircase, Poznan Poland 2001

See more in commissioned works

A reader writes:
Dear Abram Lincoln,

There has been much hoo-ha in the media about an impending financial disaster, is it all hype?

Dear Reader,

shit bitches, liquidity is fuuuucked. Alan Wrinklespan be clownin on Eddie Gramliche’s subprime mortgage advice. C.D.O.’s and S.I.V.’s, R.M.B.S. and A.B.C.P. the weakest asset backed securities out there! Ben Bernanke a baby gangsta who gotsta get help from the big boys at the hedge.

Stay up,
‘Bramy5

Reading an article in Rollingstone and these lines really caught my attention

…

:: How America Lost the War on Drugs, an Anatomy of a Failure ::

One of the key reasons that I’ve become so disenchanted with studying economics in school is that it’s simply not true. The most frustrating part is that I have to regurgitate inaccurate theories despite the fact that they are obviously and demonstrably wrong. This is only one of a vast majority of *countless* examples where World Bank and IMF policy have actually made poor countries worse off. Economics is little more than extremist free market fundamentalism thinly disguised as academically verified truth.

The whole article is pretty short but definitely instructive in a broader context. Subsidies, when not horribly corrupt, are extremely effective.

::Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts via the NYTimes ::