techyum ::

You encounter some fascinating stuff reading the New England Journal of Medicine. Take NEJM’s Image of the Week this week — yes, yes in fact that is a bag of purple urine. Since you asked:

Purple discoloration can occur in alkaline urine as a result of the degradation of indoxyl sulfate (indican), a metabolite of dietary tryptophan, into indigo (which is blue) and indirubin (which is red) by bacteria such as Providencia stuartii, Klebsiella pneumoniae, P. aeruginosa, Escherichia coli, and enterococcus species. The clinical course is benign, and the urine typically clears with resolution of the bacteriuria and acidification of the urine.

Who knew?
Link and image via NEJM.

In case you haven’t noticed yet, at least one Techyum contributor has been making a pig of himself with the excellent selection of films at the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, which opens this Saturday at the Roxie Cinema in SF.
Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa is the most thought provoking of the dozen or so films I’ve screened for the festival. It concerns a group of people living on “The Mesa,” a remote section of northern New Mexico where there’s no power grid, no land lines, no mobile phone service, no internet, no water, no police force — nothing except a few hundred residents who have chosen to live in the middle of nowhere, the serious middle of nowhere — my San Francisco friends’ cracks about Oakland notwithstanding.
The Mesa’s residents truck in everything and truck out their waste; they fight extremes of weather, an acute shortage of drinking water and a total lack of bathing water. They make their own laws: as Mesa resident Dreadie Jeff puts it: “Out here we don’t dial 911, we dial .357.” So who the hell lives there? A bewitching assemblage of die-hard gun-nut rednecks, radical libertarians, haunted veterans, homeless teens, punks and hardcore hippies. They live there for a variety of reasons, but what they have in common is a willingness to give up all, or almost all, of the typical conveniences of modern life in return for what they consider to be freedom, as close to absolute as you can get nowadays.
For some, it’s politically motivated: For instance, a crazed Dreadie Jeff, an ex military dude, stirringly recites his military oath to protect THE CONSTITUTION of these United States against all enemies foreign AND DOMESTIC!!! as part of a screed against the Bush Administration. For others, it’s about living in concert with the land, or getting the hell away from the noise and bustle of modern life. Insofar as documentaries have plots, Off the Grid has a thick one — things get very interesting when a group of punks called the Nowhere Kids are accused of — and then confess to — breaking into Mesa residents’ houses to steal food and other goods. Viewers get to find out firsthand: How does law get enforced on the Mesa? You’d be surprised.
Much more tragic is the terrifying assault on the Mesa by law enforcement, which seeks to disable the one indigenous industry out there — the growing of marijuana. On the Mesa, weed is currency, traded for food, water, diesel, and just about anything else one might need. The feds don’t like this, and one longtime Mesa resident, Dean Maher is the victim of a bust where his house ended up catching fire — some sources say he lit his pot plants on fire in a panic, and the flames got out of control. Regardless, as Maher and the other Mesa residents tell it, he was arrested and held without warrant while the cops prevented him from rescuing his 12 dogs locked inside. Particularly telling are the local news reports that tell an improbable alternate version: Maher lit his home on fire in a drug craze, not caring that his beloved dogs were inside. Robbed of his family, Maher picks up and starts over, and his story becomes a mournful Mesa legend, his bravery inspirational and his troubles a cautionary tale.
Off the Grid lets the Mesa residents tell their own stories; the dignity, insight and power they show is nothing short of stunning. It’s an amazing flick, and not to be missed if you’re interested in the many and challenging alternative ways of living modern life.
Evening shows of Off the Grid at the Roxie in San Francisco are Monday, October 1 and Sunday, October 7, with a matinee on Saturday October 6.
Link.
Image courtesy of the Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa MySpace page.

American Scary is a fun, fascinating, wacky new documentary about the all-American tradition of horror movie hosting. From my review:

That’s right, horror hosting — you know, the guy named “Professor Heewill Dismemberus” with the top hat and fangs who hits WITF-TV in Oklahoma City round about midnight on a Saturday, amid the crash and flash of lightning & thunder; he’s got a scantily-clad fortysomething assistant called Devouria and maybe one named Freako the Killer Dwarf, and together they introduce the worst f!##!*!!!ing horror movies you’ve ever seen, the perfect accompaniment for a couple of hours of hardcore vegging and/or laughing your ass off, with or without any combination of friends, bonghits and/or tequila.

I watched this flick as a screener from San Francisco Documentary Film Festival and can’t recommend it highly enough not only for fans of freaky horror, but for anyone who loves the fucked-up behind-the-scenes story of local television, particularly late-night television, from the ’50s through the present day. It’s a fascinating snapshot of how the trainwreck of commercial demands and Vaudevillian innovation can spawn hybrid creations that would make Dr. Frank-N-Furter piss his pants.
Recently there’s been a resurgence in horror hosting, from horror conventions to Public Access TV, where a new generation of hosts is creating its own bizarre homage to the Dr. Satanases and Professor Torments of years past.
American Scary plays at San Francisco’s Roxie Cinema Saturday, September 29 as a mantinee and Thursday, October 4 at 9:15pm. A number of San Francisco horror notables will be at the Thursday screening.
Link.
Images courtesy of sfindie.com.

In her Livejournal, anthology editor Ellen Datlow links to this Centripetal Notion gallery (which Cory Doctorow also blogged at BoingBoing) of the works of Brian Dettmer, who takes old books and carves them open to reveal artwork and (less commonly) text inside. The result is an amazing three-dimensional sculpture that to my eyes completely deconstructs the idea of books, text, and reading.
Ellen and many of the commenters at Centripetal Notion confess to having very mixed feelings about Dettmer’s work, since obviously he “destroys” the old books, or at least renders them into a new form. “I feel badly about the books he defaces — which include a book of Rembrandt’s Paintings,” says Datlow.
For better or for worse, I am far from in love with books. I want to take a razor to most of the books I read, so I feel it’s better that Dettmer do it with magnificent skill and creativity, rather than the random drunken rage someone like me might aim at Mickey Spillane late on a Saturday night, screaming “You’re a hack!!” as I go after Kiss Me, Deadly with a samurai sword. Things are much better this way.
Link, image also via Centripetal Notion.

Reuters reports that The Forbidden City coffee shop has opened in the former Chinese imperial palace in Beijing. It replaces a Starbucks.
According to Reuters:

The Starbucks outlet opened in 2000 prompting a media backlash so severe that museum authorities considered revoking its lease after a couple of months. In recent years it had operated without the usual outdoor corporate Starbucks bunting.
A campaign for its closure began building early this year, when a television anchor complained that the U.S. chain’s presence at the symbolic heart of the Chinese nation was trampling on Chinese culture. It finally closed in July.

The new cafe is managed by the Museum authority, and, according to a spokesperson, carries traditional Chinese beverages like tea, in addition to coffee.
Link.
Image via Wikipedia.

BBC News reports that for a limited time the One Laptop Per Child Project will be selling the “$100 laptop” to US consumers in pairs for $399 in order to generate support for the project. With each purchase, the consumer gets to keep one laptop and the other goes to a child in a developing country.
The offer starts on the 12th of November, considerably earlier than any previously announced plans to offer the laptops for sale. BBC said that this program is being offered because “[Project founder Nicholas Negroponte] admitted that concrete orders from the governments of developing nations had not always followed verbal agreements.”
Engineered to reach the $100 mark due to economy of scale, the laptops have yet to reach that point, now going for about $188. The OLPC project has the goal of providing low-cost laptops to children in developing nations, supported by governments, grants, and donations.
In addition to its ambitious social justice and education goals, the project provides an interesting machine: According to the BBC article and the Wikipedia article on the topic, the $188 “$100 laptop” eliminates moving parts by omitting a hard drive; it runs on flash memory and Linux.
The BBC says the waterproof machine “can be powered by solar, foot-pump or pull-string powered chargers,” though Negroponte said in 2006 that the hand crank originally planned was later eliminated from the design. As a result, the laptops are now merely astonishingly steampunk, rather than being steampunker-than-f@!k.
Link.
Image via Wikipedia.

It’s called “open source” software for a reason. But it looks like one company might not be paying attention to even the most basic definitions of the term — and according to PC World, “In what may be the first action of its kind in the U.S., the Software Freedom Law Center has filed a lawsuit to enforce an open-source license.” There’s also a drier, more info-heavy writeup at Ars Technica (from last friday), snippy:

The Software Freedom Law Center announced yesterday that it is filing a copyright infringement lawsuit against Monsoon Multimedia on behalf of the open-source BusyBox project, which is distributed under the Free Software Foundation’s General Public License (GPL).
This is the first time that a company has been sued in the United States for failing to fulfill the copyleft obligations imposed by the license. Monsoon is accused of including BusyBox in the firmware for a video streaming device that is distributed under a proprietary license that isn’t compatible with the terms of the GPL. The GPL grants end users the right to modify and redistribute licensed code and requires that derivatives are distributed under the same license. Distributors who provide GPL software in binary form must also make the source code available to the public.
BusyBox is a collection of essential Linux command-line utilities bundled together in a single executable. It is widely used in mobile and embedded Linux solutions, like several routers, handheld computers, and network storage devices, because it’s designed to be highly compact and portable. A number of prominent companies that use BusyBox, including HP, IBM, and Nokia, comply with the licensing requirements stipulated by the GPL.
The BusyBox developers decided to pursue legal action after Monsoon confirmed last month that BusyBox is indeed included in one of its products but declined numerous requests to comply with the GPL.

Link.

There’s a bit of blogging going on about Naomi Klein‘s new book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” and her website features tons of info, including video. I think the best and most interesting piece about what she’s revealing regarding human rights and disasters is in her own words in this excellent Salon interview, snip:

(…) Unafraid of controversy, Klein goes one step further in her new book than most progressive economists. She contends that in the aftermath of these various disasters, not only democracy but also human rights fall by the wayside — all in the name of freedom and the free market. Klein compares economic shock therapy to the horrific experiments conducted on psychiatric patients in the mid-’50s by a CIA-sponsored Canadian doctor, in which patients were subjected to drugs, electroconvulsive therapy and sensory deprivation in an effort to replace their problem behaviors with a more compliant personality. If a personality can be remade, so, too, a nation. The film, with its stark images of ECT, excerpts from CIA torture manuals, footage of Nobel economist and shock-doctrine promoter Milton Friedman glad-handing Pinochet, Thatcher and Reagan, and images of natural disasters (the Asian tsunami, 9/11) makes her message visceral: Be informed, be shock-resistant.
(…) In New Orleans the disaster was being used to finish the project of transforming the Gulf Coast into a “tax-free enterprise zone,” as the Heritage Foundation called it.
In this book you talk about how certain businesses thrive after disasters like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina. What are the most lucrative businesses?
One of the things that really struck me is how the stock market responds to hurricanes and terrorist attacks. The most significant change in recent years is that the stock market now responds favorably to terrorist attacks or narrowly averted attacks. A whole class of stocks jump — disaster stocks, like surveillance companies. Homeland security is now a $200 billion industry.
There is a new level of integration between homeland security companies and media companies. General Electric, which owns NBC, has been in the weapons industry for some time but has become very active in the homeland security business. They recently purchased InVision, which provides bomb detection for airports. Since 9/11 InVision has received $15 billion in contracts from the Department of Homeland Security — more such contracts than any other company. A company like that gains from the atmosphere of crisis and fear that is spread through media outlets. It’s war against evil everywhere with no end. That’s a war that can’t be won, and you couldn’t ask for a more profitable business plan. The only thing that threatens it is peace.

Link.
(Image via)

The following is from Fangoria… oh, how I wish I lived in NYC sometimes.

Halloween kicks off early this year on the New York City stage scene when 59E59 Theaters (59 East 59th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues) premieres THE H.G. WELLS SCIENCE FICTION FESTIVAL, featuring adaptations of four of Wells’ classic novels. The performances run for a limited engagement beginning Thursday, October 11 and ending Sunday, November 4 (the official opening night is Wednesday, October 17).

The four plays being performed are (predictably enough) the Big 4: The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The Invisible Man. All are directed by a fellow named Dan Bianchi, who “has written and directed over 50 plays and musicals and has been nominated for numerous awards, both for stage and screen work,” whatever the hell that means.
I care not: it’s H.G. Wells; it rocks. You can visit the group’s site to spend your valuable time poring over some not very helpful marketing information about how great some abstractly-named theatre foundation is, or you can go straight to Ticket Central to buy tix to individual shows (by performance name).
Link.
Image of H.G. Wells via Wikipedia.

The BBC reports that nine more cases of Ebola have been confirmed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; 174 people have died so far from this outbreak of what is often called the world’s most deadly disease (so far).
The BBC still does not discuss what strain of Ebola we’re talking about. Ebola Zaire is the deadliest strain of the virus, proving fatal to 80-90% of those who contract it, whereas pussyass pantywaist Ebola Sudan only kills about 57% of its victims.
What’s even more interesting, however, is something else the BBC chose to report, as general interest, without documentation to this specific outbreak.

The virus is thought to be transmitted through the consumption of infected bush meat and can also be spread by contact with the blood secretions of infected people.

“Bush meat,” in African usage, is most commonly a euphemism for the eating of great apes — gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos. Worldwide, the bushmeat trade includes the illicit hunting or sale of any wild animal, but in Africa it’s usually used to indicate dining on the flesh of our primate cousins.
In December of last year, the BBC reported on a study that found more than 5,000 gorillas had been killed by Ebola in Central Africa (the DRC and Gabon). The scientists, from the University of Barcelona, expressed concern that coupled with the commercial hunting of gorillas, the outbreak might be enough to push the western gorilla to extinction.
Link.
Image via cia.gov.