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conuly
Alas, my mother (who had taken Veteran's Day off as it's Bonne-maman's birthday) was sick with some terrible throwing up and pooing disease - and I sincerely hope I didn't catch it.
So, you know, it was a miserable day all around. But I did eventually find an ace bandage.
Let's post some articles.
David Narcomey, a business owner and member of the Seminole Nation, said he sees dangers beyond just the religious issues at stake over the controversial Sharia law state question.
For the curious, this is the anti-sodium push mentioned in the New Yorkers comm. Spending less than $400k on this is... well, sure, that money could go elsewhere, but the city budget is MASSIVE. It has room for an ad campaign here and there.
How cats drink water
For Cats, a Big Gulp With a Touch of the Tongue
By NICHOLAS WADE
It has taken four highly qualified engineers and a bunch of integral equations to figure it out, but we now know how cats drink. The answer is: very elegantly, and not at all the way you might suppose.
Cats lap water so fast that the human eye cannot follow what is happening, which is why the trick had apparently escaped attention until now. With the use of high-speed photography, the neatness of the feline solution has been captured.
The act of drinking may seem like no big deal for anyone who can fully close his mouth to create suction, as people can. But the various species that cannot do so — and that includes most adult carnivores — must resort to some other mechanism.
Dog owners are familiar with the unseemly lapping noises that ensue when their thirsty pet meets a bowl of water. The dog is thrusting its tongue into the water, forming a crude cup with it and hauling the liquid back into the muzzle.
Cats, both big and little, are so much classier, according to new research by Pedro M. Reis and Roman Stocker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joined by Sunghwan Jung of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Jeffrey M. Aristoff of Princeton.
Writing in the Thursday issue of Science, the four engineers report that the cat’s lapping method depends on its instinctive ability to calculate the balance between opposing gravitational and inertial forces.
What happens is that the cat darts its tongue, curving the upper side downward so that the tip lightly touches the surface of the water.
The tongue is then pulled upward at high speed, drawing a column of water behind it.
Just at the moment that gravity finally overcomes the rush of the water and starts to pull the column down — snap! The cat’s jaws have closed over the jet of water and swallowed it.
The cat laps four times a second — too fast for the human eye to see anything but a blur — and its tongue moves at a speed of one meter per second.
Being engineers, the cat-lapping team next tested its findings with a machine that mimicked a cat’s tongue, using a glass disk at the end of a piston to serve as the tip. After calculating things like the Froude number and the aspect ratio, they were able to figure out how fast a cat should lap to get the greatest amount of water into its mouth. The cats, it turns out, were way ahead of them — they lap at just that speed.
To the scientific mind, the next obvious question is whether bigger cats should lap at different speeds.
The engineers worked out a formula: the lapping frequency should be the weight of the cat species, raised to the power of minus one-sixth and multiplied by 4.6. They then made friends with a curator at Zoo New England, the nonprofit group that operates the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston and the Stone Zoo in Stoneham, Mass., who let them videotape his big cats. Lions, leopards, jaguars and ocelots turned out to lap at the speeds predicted by the engineers.
The animal who inspired this exercise of the engineer’s art is a black cat named Cutta Cutta, who belongs to Dr. Stocker and his family. Cutta Cutta’s name comes from the word for “many stars” in Jawoyn, a language of the Australian aborigines.
Dr. Stocker’s day job at M.I.T. is applying physics to biological problems, like how plankton move in the ocean. “Three and a half years ago, I was watching Cutta Cutta lap over breakfast,” Dr. Stocker said. Naturally, he wondered what hydrodynamic problems the cat might be solving. He consulted Dr. Reis, an expert in fluid mechanics, and the study was under way.
At first, Dr. Stocker and his colleagues assumed that the raspy hairs on a cat’s tongue, so useful for grooming, must also be involved in drawing water into its mouth. But the tip of the tongue, which is smooth, turned out to be all that was needed.
The project required no financing. The robot that mimicked the cat’s tongue was built for an experiment on the International Space Station, and the engineers simply borrowed it from a neighboring lab.
Police Arrest 20 Who Tried to Sneak Into Unused Subway Station Filled With Art
The New York City police have arrested 20 people for trying to enter an abandoned subway station housing the formerly secret guerrilla exhibition of underground street art that was revealed to the public this month.
The clandestine gallery has attracted urban explorers eager to catch a glimpse of dozens of provocative, large-scale installations created by more than 100 street artists who sneaked into the station over the course of a year.
Several of these spelunkers, however, have encountered something else: a team of police officers, some in plainclothes, assigned by the city to monitor the site. Most of those arrested were charged with trespassing and a few were caught carrying spray cans and other graffiti paraphernalia, the authorities said.
While the police are taking a hard line on keeping people away — “This is not an art gallery; this is completely illegal,” one officer said — the paintings in what the artists called the Underbelly Project are likely to live on. Subway officials said they had no plans to paint over the artwork, even if they sincerely hoped nobody ever got to see it again.
“We have no intention of disturbing the works,” said Deirdre Parker, a spokeswoman for New York City Transit.
Ms. Parker noted that the fiscally challenged transit agency would not want to devote resources to restoring a space almost entirely unseen by the riding public. “It’s in complete darkness and not really at all visible to anyone,” she said.
The organizers of the project, who did not return a request for comment on Wednesday, have refused to disclose its location. So have transit officials. But first-person accounts, photographs and speculation around the Internet focus squarely on an abandoned station built in the 1930s atop the existing Broadway stop on the G line, near South Fourth Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The exhibition was the subject of an article in The New York Times on Nov. 1, but without specifying the location.
A comparison of current and historical photographs makes a convincing case for the Williamsburg station, and a spokesman for the police acknowledged that the site is in Brooklyn. But subway officials would not divulge the exact spot. “There are some bloggers who can pinpoint these places because they eat and sleep transit lore,” Ms. Parker said, “but officially, no, we’re not confirming anything.”
So far, efforts by the authorities to secure the space appear to have been only partly successful. Evidence of recent visits to the site has been published on the Internet, including photographs that suggest some of the artwork has been defaced by graffiti.
One blogger from Brooklyn, who said he explored the site in the early hours a week ago, posted photographs on his Web site that appeared to show vandalized works. “It does seem to only have been tagged by one person, and it’s actually kind of sad since some of the works are so amazing,” the blogger wrote in an e-mail. (He requested anonymity to avoid drawing attention from the authorities.)
The blogger said part of a chain-link fence put up by the police had already been peeled open. “If you are industrious enough, you can still get up there,” he wrote.
The South Fourth Street station was intended as a primary transfer point for subway lines that would have stretched from Lower Manhattan into Brooklyn and Queens, part of an ambitious expansion of the subway system planned by the city in 1929. The Great Depression forced officials to abandon the proposal, but not before bits and pieces of the proposed network had been built.
Transit officials reiterated this week that getting to the site could be dangerous.
“We really don’t want to encourage anyone to go near these places,” Ms. Parker said. She said the Police Department and transit officials were “working closely together to come up with short- and long-term solutions to the security problem.”
Detectives have been looking into the project’s origins, a Police Department spokesman said, but the police often find it difficult to link individuals to cases of illegal street art.
At Some Nail Salons, Feeling Pretty and Green
The bottles of nail polish at the Nova Nail Spa include Sky Sparkle blue, Hot Blooded pink and I Feel The Earth Move brown. But the predominant color at Kim Pham’s chic salon is health-conscious green.
“My husband made the decision he wants everything to be natural and healthy for myself,” Ms. Pham said of the couple’s decision to open a “green” nail salon out of a growing concern about the adverse effects from chemicals used in some polishes, removers, top coats and other products. “I always like to search for something new,” she added. “Healthy is different for the customer.”
Ms. Pham is in the nail vanguard: the city has just passed the country’s first Healthy Nail Salon Recognition ordinance. It is intended to address occupational health hazards among the city’s more than 200 nail salons and 1,800 nail technicians, many of Vietnamese descent. Under the ordinance, the city will publicly identify establishments that use polishes (including top and base coats) free of the chemicals toluene, dibutyl phthalate (DBP) and formaldehyde — the so-called toxic trio. The three are on the hit list of the California Safe Cosmetics Act as causing cancer or birth defects.
DBP, which reduces polish brittleness and cracking, is associated with the potential for reproduction harm and is especially hazardous for pregnant women (its use in cosmetics is banned by the European Union). The solvent toluene, found in nail glues, can cause headaches, dizziness and nausea, and is linked to short-term memory loss and other neurological issues. Formaldehyde, used as a hardener and preservative, is a known carcinogen and can cause asthma.
Like many in her trade, Ms. Pham a grew up in a Vietnamese family and frequently works 10-hour days. The rapid expansion of nail salons from a luxury business to an inexpensive popular indulgence coincided with an influx of Asian immigrants, particularly Vietnamese women, who make up an estimated 60 percent to 80 percent of the state’s 85,000 nail technicians (many of them of child-bearing age). A large percentage have limited English proficiency; nationally, 24 percent of workers make $150 a week or less, according to Nails Magazine, an industry publication.
Cora Roelofs, an occupational health researcher at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, who conducted a health survey of Vietnamese-American nail salon workers, said prolonged exposure to chemicals was often exacerbated by poor ventilation. Her study, published in 2007, suggested a greater prevalence of respiratory and skin problems and headaches compared with the general population. Nail technicians, she noted, “are generally young immigrant women, a vulnerable population. Rarely is attention paid to the experience of new immigrants and the jobs they hold.”
Julia Liou, a public health administrator with Asian Health Services in Oakland and co-founder of the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, a policy-advocacy group for salon safety, said, “So many workers are women of reproductive age we have great concern.”
Doug Schoon, an industry consultant and chemist who is co-chairman of the Nail Manufacturers Council’s working group, said that major manufacturers had already eliminated the toxic trio. “In my estimation, it’s a dead issue,” he said. Polishes by OPI, a popular brand, for example, no longer use dibutyl phthalate and toluene, according to the company Web site, though some nail hardeners do contain formaldehyde. “I have never heard of anyone getting sick,” he said.
Uyen Nguyen, the proprietor of the Isabella Nail Bar in Oakland, said that when her sister-in-law, who applied acrylic nails to clients’ fingers for 17 years, miscarried, her doctor suggested a link (she sold her business shortly thereafter). Though Ms. Nguyen pays salaries, she said that nail workers in many salons worked on commission. “They don’t complain because they don’t have any job security,” she said. Ms. Nguyen studied chemistry and worked as an engineer for a semiconductor company before opening her dream salon, a bright, modern space with a nail bar resembling a sushi bar so that “clients can mingle.”
Ms. Nguyen’s and Ms. Pham’s salons carry a polish line marketed as vegan, which elicited at least one skeptical response. “If I don’t eat vegan, why would I paint my nails vegan?” Eileen Horan, a 28-year-old mortgage banker, asked while having a ginger-lime pedicure at Nova, lime slices floating around her feet.
Dr. Julia Quint, a toxicologist and public health scientist, said that it would be necessary to test every polish line to determine “whether companies have substituted one toxic chemical for another.” She added, “There is a lot of green-washing going on.”
Dr. Thu Quach, an epidemiologist with the Cancer Prevention Institute of California who has studied Vietnamese nail workers, said that a complicating factor was that “a lot of the workers have been exposed to chemical warfare, especially dioxins, she said. “We don’t know if it makes them more vulnerable to chronic health problems.”
This year, New York State passed a law requiring salon owners to provide workers with masks and gloves on request. Assemblywoman Linda B. Rosenthal, who represents the Upper West Side, sponsored the bill because “many bosses think masks send a bad message to the customer,” she said.
In Washington State, King County hazardous waste officials teamed up with environmentalists to send a Vietnamese-American educator to salons to talk about safety — including storing acetone-soaked cotton balls in metal containers, rather than plastic, so that volatile organic compounds, known as V.O.C.’s, “aren’t gassing into the salon,” said Laurie Foster, a county environmental investigator.
But for Jenny Ban, manager of Love Nails, a boisterous salon in Oakland, the idea of a green salon is a foreign concept. “I just work,” she said, surrounded by Totally Tangerine, Pompeii Purple and other polishes. “I don’t really know about the chemicals.”
IPad Opens World to a Disabled Boy
OWEN CAIN depends on a respirator and struggles to make even the slightest movements — he has had a debilitating motor-neuron disease since infancy.
Owen, 7, does not have the strength to maneuver a computer mouse, but when a nurse propped her boyfriend’s iPad within reach in June, he did something his mother had never seen before.
He aimed his left pointer finger at an icon on the screen, touched it — just barely — and opened the application Gravitarium, which plays music as users create landscapes of stars on the screen. Over the years, Owen’s parents had tried several computerized communications contraptions to give him an escape from his disability, but the iPad was the first that worked on the first try.
“We have spent all this time keeping him alive, and now we owe him more than that,” said his mother, Ellen Goldstein, a vice president at the Times Square Alliance business association. “I see his ability to communicate and to learn as a big part of that challenge — not all of it, but a big part of it. And so, that’s my responsibility.”
Since its debut in April, the iPad has become a popular therapeutic tool for people with disabilities of all kinds, though no one keeps track of how many are used this way, and studies are just getting under way to test its effectiveness, which varies widely depending on diagnosis.
A speech pathologist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center uses text-to-speech applications to give patients a voice. Christopher Bulger, a 16-year-old in Chicago who injured his spine in a car accident, used an iPad to surf the Internet during the early stages of his rehabilitation, when his hands were clenched into fists. “It was nice because you progressed from the knuckle to the finger to using more than one knuckle on the screen,” he said.
Parents of autistic children are using applications to teach them basic skills, like brushing teeth and communicating better.
For a mainstream technological device like the iPad to have been instantly embraced by the disabled is unusual. It is far more common for items designed for disabled people to be adapted for general use, like closed-captioning on televisions in gyms or GPS devices in cars that announce directions. Also, most mainstream devices do not come with built-ins like the iPad’s closed-captioning, magnification and audible readout functions — which were intended to keep it simple for all users, but also help disabled people.
“Making things less complicated can actually make a lot of money,” said Gregg C. Vanderheiden, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has worked on accessibility issues for decades.
Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, who wrote recently enacted legislation that will require mobile devices to be more accessible to users with disabilities, said approximately three-fourths of communications and video devices need to be adapted for blind and deaf people. “Apple,” he said in a statement, “is an outlier when it comes to devices that are accessible out of the box.”
The iPad is also, generally speaking, less expensive than computers and other gadgets specifically designed to help disabled people speak, read or write. While insurers usually do not cover the cost of mobile devices like the iPad because they are not medical equipment, in some cases they will pay for the applications that run on them.
In Owen’s case, his grandmother bought him a $600 iPad in August, and his parents have invested about $200 more in software. One day this summer, his finger dangled over the title page of “Alice in Wonderland” on his iPad while his mother hovered over his shoulder in their Brooklyn home. Then, with the tiniest of movements, and thanks to the sensitivity of the iPad’s touch screen, Owen began to turn the pages of the book. “You are reading a book on your own, Owen!” Ms. Goldstein, 44, exclaimed. “That is completely wonderful.”
But while the sensitivity of the iPad’s touch screen makes it promising for Owen, it can be problematic for others, like Glenda Watson Hyatt, a blogger in Surrey, British Columbia, who has cerebral palsy. “When ‘flipping’ screens, sometimes I flip more than one screen,” Ms. Hyatt wrote in an interview conducted by e-mail. “Or I touch what I didn’t intend to.”
Still, Ms. Hyatt said that when she was having trouble chatting with friends at a bar recently, she pulled out her iPad to help communicate and felt normal. “People were drawn to it because it was a ‘recognized’ or ‘known’ piece of technology,” she wrote in a blog post reviewing the device.
At the Shepherd Center, a spinal cord rehabilitation clinic in Atlanta, some teenage quadriplegics have received iPads as gifts, but they do not work well for those who rely on a mouse stick — basically a long pen controlled by mouth.
“It wants to see a finger,” said John Anschutz, the manager of the assistive technology program at Shepherd. “It really requires the quality of skin and body mass to operate.”
For Owen Cain, whose disease is physical, not mental, the iPad has limitations, too. Moving his finger all the way across the keypad remains a challenge, and makes writing difficult. Ms. Goldstein said its versatility and affordability, though, were a boon. He has been experimenting with a variety of applications — Proloquo2Go, which allows him to touch an icon that prompts the device to speak things like, “I need to go to the bathroom”; Math Magic, which helps him practice arithmetic; and Animal Match, a memory game.
“If all you’re worrying about is ‘I can try this program, or I can try that program, I can buy that app or I can buy this app,’ and the investment is so much lower,” his mother said, “then our ability to explore or experiment with different things is so much bigger.”
When Owen was about 8 weeks old, his mother noticed his right arm drooping. It led to a crushing diagnosis: the motor-neuron disease known as spinal muscular atrophy Type 1. A 2003 New York Times article about spinal muscular atrophy said his parents had been told Owen would be “paralyzed for his life, which doctors predicted would last no more than about two years.”
Owen will turn 8 on Nov. 11. While his condition is not expected to worsen, he is extremely sensitive to infection and once nearly died of pneumonia; three specialized therapists and a nurse help keep him alive.
Though he cannot speak, his parents have taught him to read, write and do math. He has an impish sense of humor and a love of “Star Wars.” “He’s a normal child trapped in a not normal body,” said his father, Hamilton Cain, 45, a book editor.
Since he received the iPad, Owen has been trying to read books, and playing around with apps like Air Guitar. And, one day, he typed out on the keypad, “I want to be Han Solo for Halloween.”
For Some Bushmen, a Homeland Worth the Fight
They were on the move beneath an unyielding sun, and for a while their approaching shapes seemed just another part of the desert, their tattered clothes bleached like the thorny scrub around them. These weary Bushmen — four men, three women and an infant — were nearing the end of a two-day journey, walking their way toward water.
The leader was Gana Taoxaga. He was a tenacious old man, one of the few who had withstood the government’s efforts to move his people from this Botswanan game reserve, their ancestral land. He carried a spear, and slung across his shoulder was a hunting satchel with a digging stick, an ax, a bow and several arrows tipped with a poison made from beetle larvae.
Mr. Taoxaga was thirsty, and it angered and baffled him that he had to walk so far. Closer by was a borehole, the wellspring to underground water. But the government had sealed it up, and he supposed this was just another way to drive the Bushmen from the sandy home they had occupied for millenniums.
“The government says we are bad for the animals, but I was born here and the animals were born here, and we have lived together very well,” he said.
However humble their lives, the Bushmen of Botswana’s central Kalahari are well known to the world, the subject of books, films and anthropological studies. They are frequently portrayed — or, as many say, romanticized — as classic hunter-gatherers, a living link to humankind’s collective beginnings.
But for decades, they have been entrenched in a tug of war over their fate that has often gone unnoticed, a saga now replete with edicts and court cases, with alcohol abuse and sundered families, with an aboriginal people despairing about the uncertainty of their future.
Since the 1980s, Botswana, a landlocked nation of two million people, has both coaxed and hounded the Bushmen to leave the game reserve, intending to restrict the area to what its name implies, a wildlife refuge empty of human residents. Withholding water is one tactic, and in July a High Court ruled that the government had every right to deny use of that modern oasis, the borehole. An appeal was filed in September.
These days, only a few hundred Bushmen live within the reserve, and a few, like Mr. Taoxaga, still survive largely through their inherited knowledge, the hunters pursuing antelope and spring hares, the gatherers collecting tubers and wild melons, tapping into the water concealed in buried plants.
But most of the Bushmen have moved to dreary resettlement areas on the outskirts, where they wait in line for water, wait on benches at the clinic, wait around for something to do, wait for the taverns to open so they can douse their troubles with sorghum beer. Once among the most self-sufficient people on earth, many of them now live on the dole, waiting for handouts.
“If there was only some magic to free me into the past, that’s where I would go,” said Pihelo Phetlhadipuo, an elderly Bushman living in a resettlement area called Kaudwane. “I once was a free man, and now I am not.”
Touched by Civilization
In Southern Africa, there are perhaps 100,000 indigenous people commonly referred to as Bushmen or San — terms typically used by outsiders and, though sometimes considered demeaning, often by the people themselves. About half are in Botswana, and the 3,000 or so who have historically lived in this grassy, undulating part of the desert are mostly of the Gwi and Gana subgroups, each speaking a language employing click sounds as extra consonants. With one another, they ordinarily identify themselves by subgroup; among outsiders, they also reluctantly use the Tswana word Basarwa.
They are hardly untouched by civilization. The “myth of the last Bushmen” has been untrue for a century or more, said Dr. Jeffress Ramsay, a historian and a government spokesman. “Outside myths don’t help those of us inside to solve problems,” and the Bushmen’s biggest difficulty, he said, is poverty.
The Central Kalahari Game Reserve, bigger than Vermont and New Hampshire combined, was established by the British colonial administration in 1961. The intention was not only to protect wildlife, but the viability of the people living there. At the time, some wondered if this was in the Bushmen’s best interests: were they being preserved as primitives in something like a petting zoo for anthropologists?
George Silberbauer, the colonial officer then in charge, argued that many Bushmen already had extensive contact with people outside the reserve. Rather than being “museum curiosities,” he wrote, they would be able to come and go as they pleased, holding on to however much of the past they wanted.
Botswana became independent in 1966, and the government’s eventual view was that the Bushmen were an impoverished minority living in rugged terrain that made them hard to help. Already, many were moving to Xade, a settlement within the reserve where a borehole had been drilled years before.
The Bushmen were pragmatists. Liberated from the strenuous pursuit of water, people began keeping goats and chickens while also scratching away at the sandy soil to grow gardens. The government provided a mobile health clinic, occasional food rations, a school.
Later on, these activities were commonly mentioned as reasons for removing the Bushmen. They “were abandoning their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle,” and even hunting with guns and horses, the government argued in a written explanation of its rationale.
A Modernizing Nation
Besides, government officials said, Botswana wanted to be a modern nation. The discovery of gem-quality diamonds had made it one of the wealthiest countries in Africa. It was unfair to leave the Bushmen suffering in underdeveloped conditions, the officials said, to use preservation of their ancient culture as a pretext for ignoring their need.
People living in the reserve soon were referred to as Remote Area Dwellers, and by 2002, all but a few dozen Bushmen had left the ancestral land, many of them lured by a small compensation of cash and cattle, others insisting they were threatened into submission. People worried about being arrested; they complained of assaults by wildlife officers; they speculated that the government had loosed a pride of lions on their few donkeys and horses.
In deciding whether to go, fissures opened, family against family. Some were deemed betrayers. Kuela Kiema, one young leader, decided it was best to resettle, a decision he later regretted. “The spirits of our ancestors hover over our tribal territories, looking for their children,” he wrote in a lyrical memoir, adding, “Many followed me, and we lost our land.”
A group of Bushmen sued the government in 2002, asking that they be allowed to return to the game reserve. The case stumbled through the legal system for four years before yielding a result that fully satisfied no one: a High Court ruled that the Bushmen could go back to their homes while also concluding that Botswana was under no obligation to provide them services. Afterward, the government interpreted the decision to mean that only the 189 surviving plaintiffs in the lawsuit were entitled to live in the reserve without permission. It remained unclear what those Bushmen would be allowed to do. Could they hunt? Reopen the boreholes?
Many more Bushmen have said they want to move back. Dr. Ramsay, the government spokesman, said negotiations were going on that might allow them to do that but Botswana had strict conditions: it does not want the Bushmen hunting wildlife and raising animals. “It’s a game reserve, and that’s been the issue from the start,” he said.
By now, many of the Bushmen have been away from the reserve for a decade or more; they are a disparate group, unequally educated, unequally employed, with internal frictions.
For its part, the government is stinging from the reproach of interloping foreigners, especially Survival International, an advocacy group based in Britain, which claims the Bushmen were rousted to make way for diamond prospecting and tourism.
Diamond exploration has begun in the reserve, though no mine is presently functioning. There is one small, high-end tourist camp with a swimming pool and 10 en-suite canvas units. Its Web site mentions the frill of “an interpretive ‘Bushman walk’ ” where “guests gain life-changing insights into the unique culture of this fascinating people.”
Destitution and Dependency
In the resettlement areas, the “unique culture” of the Bushmen mingles with the familiar culture of the displaced. The destitute rarely hunt or gather, instead awaiting a monthly parcel of cornmeal, beans, sorghum, sugar, tea and cooking oil. People are angry that they are dependent; people are angry they cannot depend on getting more. “We have been dumped here, and when we try to go back, they stop us at the gate,” complained Moscow Galatshipe, a 43-year-old man in Kaudwane. “There are no jobs. We will all end up in prison for stealing goats.”
A place called New Xade is the biggest of the resettlement areas, with many of its dirt streets plotted on a grid and an occasional stop sign for the occasional car. Most of the houses are small one-room boxes of brick, but the Bushmen also have erected round huts with thatched roofs.
By midafternoon, the shebeens — tiny bars — open for business, and the surrounding ground is quickly littered with empty cartons of chibuku, a beer cheaper than brands sold in bottles. In conversations, few people blame diamonds or tourism for their troubles. Rather, they say their countrymen, the dominating Tswana, have always treated them as inferiors. “You can say it is something like racism,” said Galomphete Gakelekgolele, a college-educated 26-year-old and an example of a younger generation trying to find equilibrium between their heritage and ambitions.
He said he wanted a good job in a town. He also said he wanted to live inside the reserve, where “my forefathers are buried,” and where “if maybe I am sick, I can say a little prayer in their graveyard and then collect certain herbs, boil them and drink them, and my problems will be gone.”
Families have come apart, most often with grandparents or a father staying in the reserve and a mother and children living in a resettlement area, near a school and a reliable supply of water. Gana Taoxaga, the old man who was among the last holdouts, the one completing his two-day walk, has six children and seven grandchildren in Kaudwane. “I miss them and they miss me,” he said.
Mr. Taoxaga did not know his own age. His brown coat was missing half its fabric. His leather shoes had no laces. Beside him on the journey, a younger man, Matsipane Mosethlanyane, led some donkeys with empty water jugs strapped across their backs. He said he was proud to be a Bushman and, boasting of his resourcefulness, he described how he had sometimes squeezed the moisture from animal dung to slake his thirst. Animals eat the flowers off the small trees, he said. The moisture from the dung was nutritious.
“But I don’t want to drink the dirty water any more,” he said. “That’s why we are walking today. I am used now to the new water, the modern water.”
Rapper Finds Order in Orthodox Judaism in Israel
The tall man in the velvet fedora and knee-length black jacket with ritual fringes peeking out takes long, swift strides toward the Western Wall. It’s late in the day, and he does not want to miss afternoon prayers at Judaism’s holiest site.
“We have to get there before the sun goes down,” he says, his stare fixed behind a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, the first clue that this is no ordinary Jerusalem man of God. It’s the rapper Shyne, the Sean Combs protégé who served almost nine years in New York prisons for opening fire in a nightclub in 1999 during an evening out with Mr. Combs and his girlfriend at the time, Jennifer Lopez.
“My entire life screams that I have a Jewish neshama,” he said, using the Hebrew word for soul.
Living as Moses Levi, an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem (he legally changed his name from Jamaal Barrow), he shuttles between sessions of Talmud study with some of the most religiously stringent rabbis in the city and preparations for a musical comeback.
His transition from troubled adolescent in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, shot at the age of 15, to celebrity gangster rapper turned prisoner turned frequenter of yeshivas, is the latest chapter in a bizarre journey that began with his birth in Belize 32 years ago. He is the son of a lawyer who is now that country’s prime minister and a mother who brought him to the United States and cleaned houses for a living.
“The science of Judaism” as Mr. Levi refers to it, has become his system for living, a lifeline that connects him to God and becoming a better human being. He sees no conflict fusing the hip-hop world with the life of a Torah-observant Jew.
Mr. Levi speaks in the style of the urban streets but combines his slang with Yiddish-accented Hebrew words and references to the “Chumash” (the bound version of the Torah, pronounced khoo-MASH) and “Halacha” (Jewish law, pronounced ha-la-KHAH).
As in: “There’s nothing in the Chumash that says I can’t drive a Lamborghini,” and “nothing in the Halacha about driving the cars I like, about the lifestyle I live.” As a teenager he started reading the Bible, relating to the stories of King David and Moses that he had first heard from his grandmother. At 13 (bar mitzvah age, he notes) he began to identify himself as “an Israelite,” a sensibility reinforced after finding out his great-grandmother was Ethiopian; he likes to wonder aloud whether she might have been Jewish.
He was already praying daily and engaged in his own study of Judaism at the time of his arrest but only became a practicing Jew, celebrating the holidays, keeping kosher and observing the Sabbath under the tutelage of prison rabbis. In Israel, he said, he had undergone a type of pro forma conversion known as “giyur lechumra” (pronounced ghee-YUR le-kchoom-RAH).
On the December night in 1999 that Mr. Levi walked into a Times Square nightclub, he was a 19-year-old enjoying the fruits of his first record deal and the hip-hop high life. The details of what happened inside remain muddled, but after an argument broke out between Mr. Combs, then known as Puff Daddy, and a group in the club, shots were fired, and three people were hurt.
Mr. Combs was charged with gun possession but later cleared in a highly publicized trial. Mr. Levi was sentenced to 10 years in prison for assault, gun possession and reckless endangerment. The police said he fired into the crowd. He maintains he shot in the air to break up the dispute. He would not say whether he took a fall for his former mentor.
“That’s the past, I got so much going on,” he said. “We move on.”
What Mr. Levi has moved on to since being released from prison last year is a life in which he is often up at daybreak, wrapping his arms with the leather straps of tefillin, the ritual boxes containing Torah verses worn by observant Jews for morning prayers. Throughout the day he studies with various strictly Orthodox rabbis.
“What are the laws?” he said, explaining his decision to adhere to the Orthodox level of observance. “I want to know the laws. I don’t want to know the leniencies. I never look for the leniencies because of all of the terrible things I’ve done in my life, all of the mistakes I’ve made.”
On the sprawling stone plaza of the Western Wall, crowded with tourists and worshipers, he clutches a worn prayer book whose leather cover was torn off by prison officials for security reasons.
Here he encounters a group of young Ethiopians singing in Hebrew and Amharic about Jerusalem. For a moment he links arms with them, and together they spin, dancing in concentric circles at dizzying speed.
With him is his local sidekick, a burly and bearded 30-year-old named Eli Goldsmith who used to run nightclubs in London (his uncle is a prominent music promoter) before he too became religious.
Later, with Mr. Goldsmith in the rental car he uses to get around, Mr. Levi sampled tracks from two new albums, “Messiah” and “Gangland,” that are to be released in a joint venture with Def Jam Records. The deal suggests the clout he holds despite not having released an album since 2004. He put the volume on high as he drove through the traffic-clogged roads of an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood.
In songs like “Am I a Sinner?” he casts his spiritual quest as an escape from prison life and pain, with lyrics like, “Look in your soul and you will find vision that you can’t see through the eye.”
Three more albums are scheduled to follow. Touring in the United States remains uncertain; he was deported after his prison release as a felon who does not have citizenship, a ruling he is appealing.
Arriving at a small hummus restaurant, he recited the blessing for bread over a piece of warm pita. With him were two rabbis. Jeffrey Seidel, one of the rabbis, said he been moved by the depth of Mr. Levi’s intellectual curiosity and dedication to Judaism.
Their current focus of study together: Sabbath laws. For Mr. Levi they help explain his attraction to Judaism.
“What I do get is boundaries,” he said. “Definition and form. And that is what Shabbat is. You can’t just do whatever you want to do. You have to set limits for yourself.
“All these rules, rules, rules,” he said with his hand on an open page of the Talmud. “But you know what you have if you don’t have rules? You end up with a bunch of pills in your stomach. When you don’t know when to say when and no one tells you no, you go off the deep.”
Bubbles of Energy Are Found in Galaxy
Something big is going on at the center of the galaxy, and astronomers are happy to say they don’t know what it is.
A group of scientists working with data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope said Tuesday that they had discovered two bubbles of energy erupting from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The bubbles, they said at a news conference and in a paper to be published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal, extend 25,000 light years up and down from each side of the galaxy and contain the energy equivalent to 100,000 supernova explosions.
“They’re big,” said Doug Finkbeiner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, leader of the team that discovered them.
The source of the bubbles is a mystery. One possibility is that they are fueled by a wave of star births and deaths at the center of the galaxy. Another option is a gigantic belch from the black hole known to reside, like Jabba the Hutt, at the center of the Milky Way. What it is apparently not is dark matter, the mysterious something that astronomers say makes up a quarter of the universe and holds galaxies together.
“Wow,” said David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton who was not involved in the work.
“And we think we know a lot about our own galaxy,” Dr. Spergel added, noting that the bubbles were almost as big as the galaxy and yet unsuspected until now.
Jon Morse, head of astrophysics at NASA headquarters, said, “This shows again that the universe is full of surprises.”
One of the most surprised was Dr. Finkbeiner. A year ago he was part of a group led by Gregory Dobler of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., that said it had discerned the existence of a mysterious fog of high-energy particles buzzing around the center of the Milky Way. The particles manifested themselves as a haze of extra energy after all the known sources of gamma rays — the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation — had been subtracted from Fermi data that had recently been made public.
At the time, Dr. Finkbeiner and his colleagues speculated that the haze was produced by dark matter. The center of the galaxy is home to all manner of wild and woolly high-energy phenomena, including a gigantic black hole and violently spinning pulsars, but cosmological theories also suggest that dark matter would be concentrated there. Collisions of dark matter particles, the theory goes, could produce showers of gamma rays.
But in the follow-up analysis, the haze — besides being bigger than Dr. Finkbeiner and his colleagues had thought — turned out to have sharp boundaries, like, well, a bubble. Dark matter, according to the prevailing theory, should be more diffuse.
“Dark matter has been there billions of years,” Dr. Finkbeiner explained. “If something has been going on for billions of years, you wouldn’t expect a sharp edge.”
He and the other scientists said this did not mean that dark matter was not there clogging the center of the galaxy, but that it would be harder to see.
So, you know, it was a miserable day all around. But I did eventually find an ace bandage.
Let's post some articles.
David Narcomey, a business owner and member of the Seminole Nation, said he sees dangers beyond just the religious issues at stake over the controversial Sharia law state question.
For the curious, this is the anti-sodium push mentioned in the New Yorkers comm. Spending less than $400k on this is... well, sure, that money could go elsewhere, but the city budget is MASSIVE. It has room for an ad campaign here and there.
How cats drink water
For Cats, a Big Gulp With a Touch of the Tongue
By NICHOLAS WADE
It has taken four highly qualified engineers and a bunch of integral equations to figure it out, but we now know how cats drink. The answer is: very elegantly, and not at all the way you might suppose.
Cats lap water so fast that the human eye cannot follow what is happening, which is why the trick had apparently escaped attention until now. With the use of high-speed photography, the neatness of the feline solution has been captured.
The act of drinking may seem like no big deal for anyone who can fully close his mouth to create suction, as people can. But the various species that cannot do so — and that includes most adult carnivores — must resort to some other mechanism.
Dog owners are familiar with the unseemly lapping noises that ensue when their thirsty pet meets a bowl of water. The dog is thrusting its tongue into the water, forming a crude cup with it and hauling the liquid back into the muzzle.
Cats, both big and little, are so much classier, according to new research by Pedro M. Reis and Roman Stocker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joined by Sunghwan Jung of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Jeffrey M. Aristoff of Princeton.
Writing in the Thursday issue of Science, the four engineers report that the cat’s lapping method depends on its instinctive ability to calculate the balance between opposing gravitational and inertial forces.
What happens is that the cat darts its tongue, curving the upper side downward so that the tip lightly touches the surface of the water.
The tongue is then pulled upward at high speed, drawing a column of water behind it.
Just at the moment that gravity finally overcomes the rush of the water and starts to pull the column down — snap! The cat’s jaws have closed over the jet of water and swallowed it.
The cat laps four times a second — too fast for the human eye to see anything but a blur — and its tongue moves at a speed of one meter per second.
Being engineers, the cat-lapping team next tested its findings with a machine that mimicked a cat’s tongue, using a glass disk at the end of a piston to serve as the tip. After calculating things like the Froude number and the aspect ratio, they were able to figure out how fast a cat should lap to get the greatest amount of water into its mouth. The cats, it turns out, were way ahead of them — they lap at just that speed.
To the scientific mind, the next obvious question is whether bigger cats should lap at different speeds.
The engineers worked out a formula: the lapping frequency should be the weight of the cat species, raised to the power of minus one-sixth and multiplied by 4.6. They then made friends with a curator at Zoo New England, the nonprofit group that operates the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston and the Stone Zoo in Stoneham, Mass., who let them videotape his big cats. Lions, leopards, jaguars and ocelots turned out to lap at the speeds predicted by the engineers.
The animal who inspired this exercise of the engineer’s art is a black cat named Cutta Cutta, who belongs to Dr. Stocker and his family. Cutta Cutta’s name comes from the word for “many stars” in Jawoyn, a language of the Australian aborigines.
Dr. Stocker’s day job at M.I.T. is applying physics to biological problems, like how plankton move in the ocean. “Three and a half years ago, I was watching Cutta Cutta lap over breakfast,” Dr. Stocker said. Naturally, he wondered what hydrodynamic problems the cat might be solving. He consulted Dr. Reis, an expert in fluid mechanics, and the study was under way.
At first, Dr. Stocker and his colleagues assumed that the raspy hairs on a cat’s tongue, so useful for grooming, must also be involved in drawing water into its mouth. But the tip of the tongue, which is smooth, turned out to be all that was needed.
The project required no financing. The robot that mimicked the cat’s tongue was built for an experiment on the International Space Station, and the engineers simply borrowed it from a neighboring lab.
Police Arrest 20 Who Tried to Sneak Into Unused Subway Station Filled With Art
The New York City police have arrested 20 people for trying to enter an abandoned subway station housing the formerly secret guerrilla exhibition of underground street art that was revealed to the public this month.
The clandestine gallery has attracted urban explorers eager to catch a glimpse of dozens of provocative, large-scale installations created by more than 100 street artists who sneaked into the station over the course of a year.
Several of these spelunkers, however, have encountered something else: a team of police officers, some in plainclothes, assigned by the city to monitor the site. Most of those arrested were charged with trespassing and a few were caught carrying spray cans and other graffiti paraphernalia, the authorities said.
While the police are taking a hard line on keeping people away — “This is not an art gallery; this is completely illegal,” one officer said — the paintings in what the artists called the Underbelly Project are likely to live on. Subway officials said they had no plans to paint over the artwork, even if they sincerely hoped nobody ever got to see it again.
“We have no intention of disturbing the works,” said Deirdre Parker, a spokeswoman for New York City Transit.
Ms. Parker noted that the fiscally challenged transit agency would not want to devote resources to restoring a space almost entirely unseen by the riding public. “It’s in complete darkness and not really at all visible to anyone,” she said.
The organizers of the project, who did not return a request for comment on Wednesday, have refused to disclose its location. So have transit officials. But first-person accounts, photographs and speculation around the Internet focus squarely on an abandoned station built in the 1930s atop the existing Broadway stop on the G line, near South Fourth Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The exhibition was the subject of an article in The New York Times on Nov. 1, but without specifying the location.
A comparison of current and historical photographs makes a convincing case for the Williamsburg station, and a spokesman for the police acknowledged that the site is in Brooklyn. But subway officials would not divulge the exact spot. “There are some bloggers who can pinpoint these places because they eat and sleep transit lore,” Ms. Parker said, “but officially, no, we’re not confirming anything.”
So far, efforts by the authorities to secure the space appear to have been only partly successful. Evidence of recent visits to the site has been published on the Internet, including photographs that suggest some of the artwork has been defaced by graffiti.
One blogger from Brooklyn, who said he explored the site in the early hours a week ago, posted photographs on his Web site that appeared to show vandalized works. “It does seem to only have been tagged by one person, and it’s actually kind of sad since some of the works are so amazing,” the blogger wrote in an e-mail. (He requested anonymity to avoid drawing attention from the authorities.)
The blogger said part of a chain-link fence put up by the police had already been peeled open. “If you are industrious enough, you can still get up there,” he wrote.
The South Fourth Street station was intended as a primary transfer point for subway lines that would have stretched from Lower Manhattan into Brooklyn and Queens, part of an ambitious expansion of the subway system planned by the city in 1929. The Great Depression forced officials to abandon the proposal, but not before bits and pieces of the proposed network had been built.
Transit officials reiterated this week that getting to the site could be dangerous.
“We really don’t want to encourage anyone to go near these places,” Ms. Parker said. She said the Police Department and transit officials were “working closely together to come up with short- and long-term solutions to the security problem.”
Detectives have been looking into the project’s origins, a Police Department spokesman said, but the police often find it difficult to link individuals to cases of illegal street art.
At Some Nail Salons, Feeling Pretty and Green
The bottles of nail polish at the Nova Nail Spa include Sky Sparkle blue, Hot Blooded pink and I Feel The Earth Move brown. But the predominant color at Kim Pham’s chic salon is health-conscious green.
“My husband made the decision he wants everything to be natural and healthy for myself,” Ms. Pham said of the couple’s decision to open a “green” nail salon out of a growing concern about the adverse effects from chemicals used in some polishes, removers, top coats and other products. “I always like to search for something new,” she added. “Healthy is different for the customer.”
Ms. Pham is in the nail vanguard: the city has just passed the country’s first Healthy Nail Salon Recognition ordinance. It is intended to address occupational health hazards among the city’s more than 200 nail salons and 1,800 nail technicians, many of Vietnamese descent. Under the ordinance, the city will publicly identify establishments that use polishes (including top and base coats) free of the chemicals toluene, dibutyl phthalate (DBP) and formaldehyde — the so-called toxic trio. The three are on the hit list of the California Safe Cosmetics Act as causing cancer or birth defects.
DBP, which reduces polish brittleness and cracking, is associated with the potential for reproduction harm and is especially hazardous for pregnant women (its use in cosmetics is banned by the European Union). The solvent toluene, found in nail glues, can cause headaches, dizziness and nausea, and is linked to short-term memory loss and other neurological issues. Formaldehyde, used as a hardener and preservative, is a known carcinogen and can cause asthma.
Like many in her trade, Ms. Pham a grew up in a Vietnamese family and frequently works 10-hour days. The rapid expansion of nail salons from a luxury business to an inexpensive popular indulgence coincided with an influx of Asian immigrants, particularly Vietnamese women, who make up an estimated 60 percent to 80 percent of the state’s 85,000 nail technicians (many of them of child-bearing age). A large percentage have limited English proficiency; nationally, 24 percent of workers make $150 a week or less, according to Nails Magazine, an industry publication.
Cora Roelofs, an occupational health researcher at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, who conducted a health survey of Vietnamese-American nail salon workers, said prolonged exposure to chemicals was often exacerbated by poor ventilation. Her study, published in 2007, suggested a greater prevalence of respiratory and skin problems and headaches compared with the general population. Nail technicians, she noted, “are generally young immigrant women, a vulnerable population. Rarely is attention paid to the experience of new immigrants and the jobs they hold.”
Julia Liou, a public health administrator with Asian Health Services in Oakland and co-founder of the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, a policy-advocacy group for salon safety, said, “So many workers are women of reproductive age we have great concern.”
Doug Schoon, an industry consultant and chemist who is co-chairman of the Nail Manufacturers Council’s working group, said that major manufacturers had already eliminated the toxic trio. “In my estimation, it’s a dead issue,” he said. Polishes by OPI, a popular brand, for example, no longer use dibutyl phthalate and toluene, according to the company Web site, though some nail hardeners do contain formaldehyde. “I have never heard of anyone getting sick,” he said.
Uyen Nguyen, the proprietor of the Isabella Nail Bar in Oakland, said that when her sister-in-law, who applied acrylic nails to clients’ fingers for 17 years, miscarried, her doctor suggested a link (she sold her business shortly thereafter). Though Ms. Nguyen pays salaries, she said that nail workers in many salons worked on commission. “They don’t complain because they don’t have any job security,” she said. Ms. Nguyen studied chemistry and worked as an engineer for a semiconductor company before opening her dream salon, a bright, modern space with a nail bar resembling a sushi bar so that “clients can mingle.”
Ms. Nguyen’s and Ms. Pham’s salons carry a polish line marketed as vegan, which elicited at least one skeptical response. “If I don’t eat vegan, why would I paint my nails vegan?” Eileen Horan, a 28-year-old mortgage banker, asked while having a ginger-lime pedicure at Nova, lime slices floating around her feet.
Dr. Julia Quint, a toxicologist and public health scientist, said that it would be necessary to test every polish line to determine “whether companies have substituted one toxic chemical for another.” She added, “There is a lot of green-washing going on.”
Dr. Thu Quach, an epidemiologist with the Cancer Prevention Institute of California who has studied Vietnamese nail workers, said that a complicating factor was that “a lot of the workers have been exposed to chemical warfare, especially dioxins, she said. “We don’t know if it makes them more vulnerable to chronic health problems.”
This year, New York State passed a law requiring salon owners to provide workers with masks and gloves on request. Assemblywoman Linda B. Rosenthal, who represents the Upper West Side, sponsored the bill because “many bosses think masks send a bad message to the customer,” she said.
In Washington State, King County hazardous waste officials teamed up with environmentalists to send a Vietnamese-American educator to salons to talk about safety — including storing acetone-soaked cotton balls in metal containers, rather than plastic, so that volatile organic compounds, known as V.O.C.’s, “aren’t gassing into the salon,” said Laurie Foster, a county environmental investigator.
But for Jenny Ban, manager of Love Nails, a boisterous salon in Oakland, the idea of a green salon is a foreign concept. “I just work,” she said, surrounded by Totally Tangerine, Pompeii Purple and other polishes. “I don’t really know about the chemicals.”
IPad Opens World to a Disabled Boy
OWEN CAIN depends on a respirator and struggles to make even the slightest movements — he has had a debilitating motor-neuron disease since infancy.
Owen, 7, does not have the strength to maneuver a computer mouse, but when a nurse propped her boyfriend’s iPad within reach in June, he did something his mother had never seen before.
He aimed his left pointer finger at an icon on the screen, touched it — just barely — and opened the application Gravitarium, which plays music as users create landscapes of stars on the screen. Over the years, Owen’s parents had tried several computerized communications contraptions to give him an escape from his disability, but the iPad was the first that worked on the first try.
“We have spent all this time keeping him alive, and now we owe him more than that,” said his mother, Ellen Goldstein, a vice president at the Times Square Alliance business association. “I see his ability to communicate and to learn as a big part of that challenge — not all of it, but a big part of it. And so, that’s my responsibility.”
Since its debut in April, the iPad has become a popular therapeutic tool for people with disabilities of all kinds, though no one keeps track of how many are used this way, and studies are just getting under way to test its effectiveness, which varies widely depending on diagnosis.
A speech pathologist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center uses text-to-speech applications to give patients a voice. Christopher Bulger, a 16-year-old in Chicago who injured his spine in a car accident, used an iPad to surf the Internet during the early stages of his rehabilitation, when his hands were clenched into fists. “It was nice because you progressed from the knuckle to the finger to using more than one knuckle on the screen,” he said.
Parents of autistic children are using applications to teach them basic skills, like brushing teeth and communicating better.
For a mainstream technological device like the iPad to have been instantly embraced by the disabled is unusual. It is far more common for items designed for disabled people to be adapted for general use, like closed-captioning on televisions in gyms or GPS devices in cars that announce directions. Also, most mainstream devices do not come with built-ins like the iPad’s closed-captioning, magnification and audible readout functions — which were intended to keep it simple for all users, but also help disabled people.
“Making things less complicated can actually make a lot of money,” said Gregg C. Vanderheiden, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has worked on accessibility issues for decades.
Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, who wrote recently enacted legislation that will require mobile devices to be more accessible to users with disabilities, said approximately three-fourths of communications and video devices need to be adapted for blind and deaf people. “Apple,” he said in a statement, “is an outlier when it comes to devices that are accessible out of the box.”
The iPad is also, generally speaking, less expensive than computers and other gadgets specifically designed to help disabled people speak, read or write. While insurers usually do not cover the cost of mobile devices like the iPad because they are not medical equipment, in some cases they will pay for the applications that run on them.
In Owen’s case, his grandmother bought him a $600 iPad in August, and his parents have invested about $200 more in software. One day this summer, his finger dangled over the title page of “Alice in Wonderland” on his iPad while his mother hovered over his shoulder in their Brooklyn home. Then, with the tiniest of movements, and thanks to the sensitivity of the iPad’s touch screen, Owen began to turn the pages of the book. “You are reading a book on your own, Owen!” Ms. Goldstein, 44, exclaimed. “That is completely wonderful.”
But while the sensitivity of the iPad’s touch screen makes it promising for Owen, it can be problematic for others, like Glenda Watson Hyatt, a blogger in Surrey, British Columbia, who has cerebral palsy. “When ‘flipping’ screens, sometimes I flip more than one screen,” Ms. Hyatt wrote in an interview conducted by e-mail. “Or I touch what I didn’t intend to.”
Still, Ms. Hyatt said that when she was having trouble chatting with friends at a bar recently, she pulled out her iPad to help communicate and felt normal. “People were drawn to it because it was a ‘recognized’ or ‘known’ piece of technology,” she wrote in a blog post reviewing the device.
At the Shepherd Center, a spinal cord rehabilitation clinic in Atlanta, some teenage quadriplegics have received iPads as gifts, but they do not work well for those who rely on a mouse stick — basically a long pen controlled by mouth.
“It wants to see a finger,” said John Anschutz, the manager of the assistive technology program at Shepherd. “It really requires the quality of skin and body mass to operate.”
For Owen Cain, whose disease is physical, not mental, the iPad has limitations, too. Moving his finger all the way across the keypad remains a challenge, and makes writing difficult. Ms. Goldstein said its versatility and affordability, though, were a boon. He has been experimenting with a variety of applications — Proloquo2Go, which allows him to touch an icon that prompts the device to speak things like, “I need to go to the bathroom”; Math Magic, which helps him practice arithmetic; and Animal Match, a memory game.
“If all you’re worrying about is ‘I can try this program, or I can try that program, I can buy that app or I can buy this app,’ and the investment is so much lower,” his mother said, “then our ability to explore or experiment with different things is so much bigger.”
When Owen was about 8 weeks old, his mother noticed his right arm drooping. It led to a crushing diagnosis: the motor-neuron disease known as spinal muscular atrophy Type 1. A 2003 New York Times article about spinal muscular atrophy said his parents had been told Owen would be “paralyzed for his life, which doctors predicted would last no more than about two years.”
Owen will turn 8 on Nov. 11. While his condition is not expected to worsen, he is extremely sensitive to infection and once nearly died of pneumonia; three specialized therapists and a nurse help keep him alive.
Though he cannot speak, his parents have taught him to read, write and do math. He has an impish sense of humor and a love of “Star Wars.” “He’s a normal child trapped in a not normal body,” said his father, Hamilton Cain, 45, a book editor.
Since he received the iPad, Owen has been trying to read books, and playing around with apps like Air Guitar. And, one day, he typed out on the keypad, “I want to be Han Solo for Halloween.”
For Some Bushmen, a Homeland Worth the Fight
They were on the move beneath an unyielding sun, and for a while their approaching shapes seemed just another part of the desert, their tattered clothes bleached like the thorny scrub around them. These weary Bushmen — four men, three women and an infant — were nearing the end of a two-day journey, walking their way toward water.
The leader was Gana Taoxaga. He was a tenacious old man, one of the few who had withstood the government’s efforts to move his people from this Botswanan game reserve, their ancestral land. He carried a spear, and slung across his shoulder was a hunting satchel with a digging stick, an ax, a bow and several arrows tipped with a poison made from beetle larvae.
Mr. Taoxaga was thirsty, and it angered and baffled him that he had to walk so far. Closer by was a borehole, the wellspring to underground water. But the government had sealed it up, and he supposed this was just another way to drive the Bushmen from the sandy home they had occupied for millenniums.
“The government says we are bad for the animals, but I was born here and the animals were born here, and we have lived together very well,” he said.
However humble their lives, the Bushmen of Botswana’s central Kalahari are well known to the world, the subject of books, films and anthropological studies. They are frequently portrayed — or, as many say, romanticized — as classic hunter-gatherers, a living link to humankind’s collective beginnings.
But for decades, they have been entrenched in a tug of war over their fate that has often gone unnoticed, a saga now replete with edicts and court cases, with alcohol abuse and sundered families, with an aboriginal people despairing about the uncertainty of their future.
Since the 1980s, Botswana, a landlocked nation of two million people, has both coaxed and hounded the Bushmen to leave the game reserve, intending to restrict the area to what its name implies, a wildlife refuge empty of human residents. Withholding water is one tactic, and in July a High Court ruled that the government had every right to deny use of that modern oasis, the borehole. An appeal was filed in September.
These days, only a few hundred Bushmen live within the reserve, and a few, like Mr. Taoxaga, still survive largely through their inherited knowledge, the hunters pursuing antelope and spring hares, the gatherers collecting tubers and wild melons, tapping into the water concealed in buried plants.
But most of the Bushmen have moved to dreary resettlement areas on the outskirts, where they wait in line for water, wait on benches at the clinic, wait around for something to do, wait for the taverns to open so they can douse their troubles with sorghum beer. Once among the most self-sufficient people on earth, many of them now live on the dole, waiting for handouts.
“If there was only some magic to free me into the past, that’s where I would go,” said Pihelo Phetlhadipuo, an elderly Bushman living in a resettlement area called Kaudwane. “I once was a free man, and now I am not.”
Touched by Civilization
In Southern Africa, there are perhaps 100,000 indigenous people commonly referred to as Bushmen or San — terms typically used by outsiders and, though sometimes considered demeaning, often by the people themselves. About half are in Botswana, and the 3,000 or so who have historically lived in this grassy, undulating part of the desert are mostly of the Gwi and Gana subgroups, each speaking a language employing click sounds as extra consonants. With one another, they ordinarily identify themselves by subgroup; among outsiders, they also reluctantly use the Tswana word Basarwa.
They are hardly untouched by civilization. The “myth of the last Bushmen” has been untrue for a century or more, said Dr. Jeffress Ramsay, a historian and a government spokesman. “Outside myths don’t help those of us inside to solve problems,” and the Bushmen’s biggest difficulty, he said, is poverty.
The Central Kalahari Game Reserve, bigger than Vermont and New Hampshire combined, was established by the British colonial administration in 1961. The intention was not only to protect wildlife, but the viability of the people living there. At the time, some wondered if this was in the Bushmen’s best interests: were they being preserved as primitives in something like a petting zoo for anthropologists?
George Silberbauer, the colonial officer then in charge, argued that many Bushmen already had extensive contact with people outside the reserve. Rather than being “museum curiosities,” he wrote, they would be able to come and go as they pleased, holding on to however much of the past they wanted.
Botswana became independent in 1966, and the government’s eventual view was that the Bushmen were an impoverished minority living in rugged terrain that made them hard to help. Already, many were moving to Xade, a settlement within the reserve where a borehole had been drilled years before.
The Bushmen were pragmatists. Liberated from the strenuous pursuit of water, people began keeping goats and chickens while also scratching away at the sandy soil to grow gardens. The government provided a mobile health clinic, occasional food rations, a school.
Later on, these activities were commonly mentioned as reasons for removing the Bushmen. They “were abandoning their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle,” and even hunting with guns and horses, the government argued in a written explanation of its rationale.
A Modernizing Nation
Besides, government officials said, Botswana wanted to be a modern nation. The discovery of gem-quality diamonds had made it one of the wealthiest countries in Africa. It was unfair to leave the Bushmen suffering in underdeveloped conditions, the officials said, to use preservation of their ancient culture as a pretext for ignoring their need.
People living in the reserve soon were referred to as Remote Area Dwellers, and by 2002, all but a few dozen Bushmen had left the ancestral land, many of them lured by a small compensation of cash and cattle, others insisting they were threatened into submission. People worried about being arrested; they complained of assaults by wildlife officers; they speculated that the government had loosed a pride of lions on their few donkeys and horses.
In deciding whether to go, fissures opened, family against family. Some were deemed betrayers. Kuela Kiema, one young leader, decided it was best to resettle, a decision he later regretted. “The spirits of our ancestors hover over our tribal territories, looking for their children,” he wrote in a lyrical memoir, adding, “Many followed me, and we lost our land.”
A group of Bushmen sued the government in 2002, asking that they be allowed to return to the game reserve. The case stumbled through the legal system for four years before yielding a result that fully satisfied no one: a High Court ruled that the Bushmen could go back to their homes while also concluding that Botswana was under no obligation to provide them services. Afterward, the government interpreted the decision to mean that only the 189 surviving plaintiffs in the lawsuit were entitled to live in the reserve without permission. It remained unclear what those Bushmen would be allowed to do. Could they hunt? Reopen the boreholes?
Many more Bushmen have said they want to move back. Dr. Ramsay, the government spokesman, said negotiations were going on that might allow them to do that but Botswana had strict conditions: it does not want the Bushmen hunting wildlife and raising animals. “It’s a game reserve, and that’s been the issue from the start,” he said.
By now, many of the Bushmen have been away from the reserve for a decade or more; they are a disparate group, unequally educated, unequally employed, with internal frictions.
For its part, the government is stinging from the reproach of interloping foreigners, especially Survival International, an advocacy group based in Britain, which claims the Bushmen were rousted to make way for diamond prospecting and tourism.
Diamond exploration has begun in the reserve, though no mine is presently functioning. There is one small, high-end tourist camp with a swimming pool and 10 en-suite canvas units. Its Web site mentions the frill of “an interpretive ‘Bushman walk’ ” where “guests gain life-changing insights into the unique culture of this fascinating people.”
Destitution and Dependency
In the resettlement areas, the “unique culture” of the Bushmen mingles with the familiar culture of the displaced. The destitute rarely hunt or gather, instead awaiting a monthly parcel of cornmeal, beans, sorghum, sugar, tea and cooking oil. People are angry that they are dependent; people are angry they cannot depend on getting more. “We have been dumped here, and when we try to go back, they stop us at the gate,” complained Moscow Galatshipe, a 43-year-old man in Kaudwane. “There are no jobs. We will all end up in prison for stealing goats.”
A place called New Xade is the biggest of the resettlement areas, with many of its dirt streets plotted on a grid and an occasional stop sign for the occasional car. Most of the houses are small one-room boxes of brick, but the Bushmen also have erected round huts with thatched roofs.
By midafternoon, the shebeens — tiny bars — open for business, and the surrounding ground is quickly littered with empty cartons of chibuku, a beer cheaper than brands sold in bottles. In conversations, few people blame diamonds or tourism for their troubles. Rather, they say their countrymen, the dominating Tswana, have always treated them as inferiors. “You can say it is something like racism,” said Galomphete Gakelekgolele, a college-educated 26-year-old and an example of a younger generation trying to find equilibrium between their heritage and ambitions.
He said he wanted a good job in a town. He also said he wanted to live inside the reserve, where “my forefathers are buried,” and where “if maybe I am sick, I can say a little prayer in their graveyard and then collect certain herbs, boil them and drink them, and my problems will be gone.”
Families have come apart, most often with grandparents or a father staying in the reserve and a mother and children living in a resettlement area, near a school and a reliable supply of water. Gana Taoxaga, the old man who was among the last holdouts, the one completing his two-day walk, has six children and seven grandchildren in Kaudwane. “I miss them and they miss me,” he said.
Mr. Taoxaga did not know his own age. His brown coat was missing half its fabric. His leather shoes had no laces. Beside him on the journey, a younger man, Matsipane Mosethlanyane, led some donkeys with empty water jugs strapped across their backs. He said he was proud to be a Bushman and, boasting of his resourcefulness, he described how he had sometimes squeezed the moisture from animal dung to slake his thirst. Animals eat the flowers off the small trees, he said. The moisture from the dung was nutritious.
“But I don’t want to drink the dirty water any more,” he said. “That’s why we are walking today. I am used now to the new water, the modern water.”
Rapper Finds Order in Orthodox Judaism in Israel
The tall man in the velvet fedora and knee-length black jacket with ritual fringes peeking out takes long, swift strides toward the Western Wall. It’s late in the day, and he does not want to miss afternoon prayers at Judaism’s holiest site.
“We have to get there before the sun goes down,” he says, his stare fixed behind a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, the first clue that this is no ordinary Jerusalem man of God. It’s the rapper Shyne, the Sean Combs protégé who served almost nine years in New York prisons for opening fire in a nightclub in 1999 during an evening out with Mr. Combs and his girlfriend at the time, Jennifer Lopez.
“My entire life screams that I have a Jewish neshama,” he said, using the Hebrew word for soul.
Living as Moses Levi, an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem (he legally changed his name from Jamaal Barrow), he shuttles between sessions of Talmud study with some of the most religiously stringent rabbis in the city and preparations for a musical comeback.
His transition from troubled adolescent in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, shot at the age of 15, to celebrity gangster rapper turned prisoner turned frequenter of yeshivas, is the latest chapter in a bizarre journey that began with his birth in Belize 32 years ago. He is the son of a lawyer who is now that country’s prime minister and a mother who brought him to the United States and cleaned houses for a living.
“The science of Judaism” as Mr. Levi refers to it, has become his system for living, a lifeline that connects him to God and becoming a better human being. He sees no conflict fusing the hip-hop world with the life of a Torah-observant Jew.
Mr. Levi speaks in the style of the urban streets but combines his slang with Yiddish-accented Hebrew words and references to the “Chumash” (the bound version of the Torah, pronounced khoo-MASH) and “Halacha” (Jewish law, pronounced ha-la-KHAH).
As in: “There’s nothing in the Chumash that says I can’t drive a Lamborghini,” and “nothing in the Halacha about driving the cars I like, about the lifestyle I live.” As a teenager he started reading the Bible, relating to the stories of King David and Moses that he had first heard from his grandmother. At 13 (bar mitzvah age, he notes) he began to identify himself as “an Israelite,” a sensibility reinforced after finding out his great-grandmother was Ethiopian; he likes to wonder aloud whether she might have been Jewish.
He was already praying daily and engaged in his own study of Judaism at the time of his arrest but only became a practicing Jew, celebrating the holidays, keeping kosher and observing the Sabbath under the tutelage of prison rabbis. In Israel, he said, he had undergone a type of pro forma conversion known as “giyur lechumra” (pronounced ghee-YUR le-kchoom-RAH).
On the December night in 1999 that Mr. Levi walked into a Times Square nightclub, he was a 19-year-old enjoying the fruits of his first record deal and the hip-hop high life. The details of what happened inside remain muddled, but after an argument broke out between Mr. Combs, then known as Puff Daddy, and a group in the club, shots were fired, and three people were hurt.
Mr. Combs was charged with gun possession but later cleared in a highly publicized trial. Mr. Levi was sentenced to 10 years in prison for assault, gun possession and reckless endangerment. The police said he fired into the crowd. He maintains he shot in the air to break up the dispute. He would not say whether he took a fall for his former mentor.
“That’s the past, I got so much going on,” he said. “We move on.”
What Mr. Levi has moved on to since being released from prison last year is a life in which he is often up at daybreak, wrapping his arms with the leather straps of tefillin, the ritual boxes containing Torah verses worn by observant Jews for morning prayers. Throughout the day he studies with various strictly Orthodox rabbis.
“What are the laws?” he said, explaining his decision to adhere to the Orthodox level of observance. “I want to know the laws. I don’t want to know the leniencies. I never look for the leniencies because of all of the terrible things I’ve done in my life, all of the mistakes I’ve made.”
On the sprawling stone plaza of the Western Wall, crowded with tourists and worshipers, he clutches a worn prayer book whose leather cover was torn off by prison officials for security reasons.
Here he encounters a group of young Ethiopians singing in Hebrew and Amharic about Jerusalem. For a moment he links arms with them, and together they spin, dancing in concentric circles at dizzying speed.
With him is his local sidekick, a burly and bearded 30-year-old named Eli Goldsmith who used to run nightclubs in London (his uncle is a prominent music promoter) before he too became religious.
Later, with Mr. Goldsmith in the rental car he uses to get around, Mr. Levi sampled tracks from two new albums, “Messiah” and “Gangland,” that are to be released in a joint venture with Def Jam Records. The deal suggests the clout he holds despite not having released an album since 2004. He put the volume on high as he drove through the traffic-clogged roads of an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood.
In songs like “Am I a Sinner?” he casts his spiritual quest as an escape from prison life and pain, with lyrics like, “Look in your soul and you will find vision that you can’t see through the eye.”
Three more albums are scheduled to follow. Touring in the United States remains uncertain; he was deported after his prison release as a felon who does not have citizenship, a ruling he is appealing.
Arriving at a small hummus restaurant, he recited the blessing for bread over a piece of warm pita. With him were two rabbis. Jeffrey Seidel, one of the rabbis, said he been moved by the depth of Mr. Levi’s intellectual curiosity and dedication to Judaism.
Their current focus of study together: Sabbath laws. For Mr. Levi they help explain his attraction to Judaism.
“What I do get is boundaries,” he said. “Definition and form. And that is what Shabbat is. You can’t just do whatever you want to do. You have to set limits for yourself.
“All these rules, rules, rules,” he said with his hand on an open page of the Talmud. “But you know what you have if you don’t have rules? You end up with a bunch of pills in your stomach. When you don’t know when to say when and no one tells you no, you go off the deep.”
Bubbles of Energy Are Found in Galaxy
Something big is going on at the center of the galaxy, and astronomers are happy to say they don’t know what it is.
A group of scientists working with data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope said Tuesday that they had discovered two bubbles of energy erupting from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The bubbles, they said at a news conference and in a paper to be published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal, extend 25,000 light years up and down from each side of the galaxy and contain the energy equivalent to 100,000 supernova explosions.
“They’re big,” said Doug Finkbeiner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, leader of the team that discovered them.
The source of the bubbles is a mystery. One possibility is that they are fueled by a wave of star births and deaths at the center of the galaxy. Another option is a gigantic belch from the black hole known to reside, like Jabba the Hutt, at the center of the Milky Way. What it is apparently not is dark matter, the mysterious something that astronomers say makes up a quarter of the universe and holds galaxies together.
“Wow,” said David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton who was not involved in the work.
“And we think we know a lot about our own galaxy,” Dr. Spergel added, noting that the bubbles were almost as big as the galaxy and yet unsuspected until now.
Jon Morse, head of astrophysics at NASA headquarters, said, “This shows again that the universe is full of surprises.”
One of the most surprised was Dr. Finkbeiner. A year ago he was part of a group led by Gregory Dobler of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., that said it had discerned the existence of a mysterious fog of high-energy particles buzzing around the center of the Milky Way. The particles manifested themselves as a haze of extra energy after all the known sources of gamma rays — the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation — had been subtracted from Fermi data that had recently been made public.
At the time, Dr. Finkbeiner and his colleagues speculated that the haze was produced by dark matter. The center of the galaxy is home to all manner of wild and woolly high-energy phenomena, including a gigantic black hole and violently spinning pulsars, but cosmological theories also suggest that dark matter would be concentrated there. Collisions of dark matter particles, the theory goes, could produce showers of gamma rays.
But in the follow-up analysis, the haze — besides being bigger than Dr. Finkbeiner and his colleagues had thought — turned out to have sharp boundaries, like, well, a bubble. Dark matter, according to the prevailing theory, should be more diffuse.
“Dark matter has been there billions of years,” Dr. Finkbeiner explained. “If something has been going on for billions of years, you wouldn’t expect a sharp edge.”
He and the other scientists said this did not mean that dark matter was not there clogging the center of the galaxy, but that it would be harder to see.
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no subject
Date: 2010-11-12 07:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-12 09:42 pm (UTC)First meow at bowl for a while. I dump contents and replace with fresh water.
Stare at bowl for a while. Sometimes repeat step one.
Sometimes lap like normal cat. Other times drag paw through water to make the water move, splash the water around the floor. As a kitten, he would move the water bowl entirely down a hallway.
If feeling finicky, scoop up water with paw, drink from paw.
Repeat paw maneuver over and over, because it is slow, awkward, splashes water around, and doesn't get him much water.
Have me walk over and hold the bowl up to him at an easy drinking height to try to convince him to just drink the water.
He takes two very eager laps as if he is incredibly thirsty and this gets him water so much more effectively, then tries to stick his paw into it, but finds the height inconvenient.
Hit the water bowl anyway.
Realize water bowl has cut fur in it and meow at water bowl for fresh water.
... this is the cat that when adopted, did not know how to drink water. My friends had to give him watered, mushy food so he would consume enough fluid to stay alive until they adopted another cat and he figured it out from watching her.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-13 01:51 am (UTC)A lot of cats do the drinking from a paw trick.
We had one who became accustomed to drinking from the drippy faucet in the bathroom. When we got it fixed, he sat there and whined until we got in the habit of just turning it back on for him when he was thirsty. He no longer wanted bowl water now that he'd discovered the concept of fresh.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-13 01:54 am (UTC)Also, last night for reasons I am not quite clear on, he managed to dunk one side of his face in his water bowl.
Mainly, I just am not sure if what they are doing is all that elegant.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-13 02:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-13 04:22 am (UTC)