Superhero Science

Researchers in Germany (Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle, Germany to be precise) have performed atomic layer deposition of metals (titanium, aluminum, etc.) onto spider silk! Making super strong spider silk.

The technique may be useful for manufacturing super-tough textiles and high-tech medical materials, including artificial bones and tendons.

Is this an advertising campaign for the new Wolverine movie coming out next week!?! You know, because Wolverine has an adamantium-laced skeleton!

My First CouchSurfer

This is Brook nursing her sore knee and ankle. She has the distinctive honor of being my first ever couchsurfing guest¹. Brook is currently biking across the US and stopped in Rochester. She was a treat to host. You can follow her progress across the US at her blog:

where she details the interesting people, places, and things she comes across.

Two Dreams

Okay okay, telling people your dreams is like, well, its like beating people over the head with a blunt object. That does sound like a good idea, please, read on:

i.

The owner/designer of a new nature conservatory was giving me a tour. We were walking through the well manicured landscape, which was integrated with an art book store, a small cafe, and a green house nursery. The striking features of the conservatory were sycamore trees suspended upside down from the glass ceiling. I asked my guide, “Did you hang the sycamores to alleviate the loss of lower limbs?” to which he replied with silence and a puzzled look, so I expounded, “…because sycamores are notorious for losing lower limbs… so instead of growing up, they are growing down, which is up, with respect to the roots, giving them more structural support?” and, still silent, he took my by the arm and lead me to the bookstore area where he started skimming through a book on architecture.

At this time, two men behind me were chatting about Japanese filmmaker Ozu. One fellow was stating something along the lines of, “although I’ve never watched his films, Ozu was…” and I immediately thought to myself, “Stop right there. You don’t know like I know from Ozu.” And it was as I turned around to address the two gentlemen that I awoke to find my alarm clock, directly behind me, broadcasting the second hour of the April 22nd show of The Diane Rehm Show about Muriel Barbery’s book entitled The Elegance of the Hedgehog. This fact is significant because in this book, the character Renée Michel likes Ozu’s films, and the folks on the program were talking about this, and one of them uttered the sentence that infiltrated my dream.

ii.

I am in the backyard I grew up in, in San Antonio. For some unexplainable reason, the ground is covered with white sand. I am barefoot, and I say to my mom, where did all this sand come from? She looks at me like if I am on drugs, because, apparently, there was nothing wrong with the ground from her standpoint. Indeed, looking in the neighbors’ yards shows me that everyone has sand covering the ground. However, every yard has a different color sand, all shades of brown, yellow, and white, but each one different. A phone in the house started ringing, I started running to answer it, but my mom was hollering at me to be careful, I looked back at her, then looked forward, puzzled. But then it came into view, the largest spider web I’d ever seen. I stopped in my tracks, but the slippery sand made me slide onto the ground. I was directly below the spider web. Spiders, that’s right, multiple spiders, started crawling towards me, they were above me, and I was trying desperately to get up but couldn’t stand up in the sand. I was terrified and awoke in this state.

Nostalgia for the Sake of Nostalgia

A few days ago, driving home from school, I witnessed a sight that put me on the verge of tears. It was the creation of the following moment: a young, 8-10 year old boy, standing in the doorway, donning full karate gear and a broad smile as his mother took a picture of him. From the looks of it, he was on his way to a karate event, a meet perhaps? Is my reaction to the sentiment? Or to nostalgia? I suspect none of the above. It is something else. Upon witnessing such moments, I quickly imagine the potential future for the child, a whole series of events unfolding, good and bad, but all leading to his/her death. And with this girth of pseudo information in my head, the immensity of that moment, the one frozen in the picture, becomes overwhelming. I want to tell the kid to soak it up like a sponge… so maybe there is a little bit of nostalgia, but not my own, a general nostalgia; nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia. It is a rather silly way to react but it is what I do.

Piracy

There are two fellows sitting next to me at the cafe. They look intelligent enough, but their discussion of the Somali pirates quickly proves otherwise. They quickly find themselves at a loss of words to explain/understand what would drive a person or group of persons to attack a ship that towers over them. They can’t seem to reflect on the origin of the problem. It is the same as it always is, poverty, but more specifically, the illegal mass fishing, mostly by developed nations, which has crippled the Somali fishermen’s livelihood pushing them to piracy. Can I blame the two gents’ inability to grasp this? They are merely regurgitating the farce comedy that is the news media. I.e. when the ambassador talks about solving the problem, the news outlets echo that sound bite but don’t dig deeper into what he actually means. They completely miss the point and blow a monumental and effective opportunity to put a face on the underlying injustice. Which, when considering their uncanny ability to put the face on the most banal injustices, is simply dumbfounding.

I should just get used to this, but what kind of life is that? Who said complacency is the greatest threat to democracy, because I think they also said something about an informed electorate? Consider complacency towards the primary informing medium of a democracy and you have a powerful one-two punch landing square on the chins of the founding fathers.