machine project

Science Fiction Mini Festival
8pm April 20th 2007

Mark von Schlegell, author of VENUSIA (M. I. T./Semiotext(e)), performs “Marc Martin in Angleterre” — the intermezzo short story centerpiece to his new science fiction novel FONDEST REGARDS, MERCURY STATION — with ambient space sounds by Ambient Force 3000.

Before the reading we will be screening Kelly Sears’s new film about mutinous astronauts, and listening to Anthony McCann read poems on the topic of the moon. Come join us, we’ve picked up some astronaut ice cream for the occasion.

By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News, Preston

Immense coils of hot, electrified gas in the Sun’s atmosphere behave like a musical instrument, scientists say.

These “coronal loops” carry acoustic waves in much the same way that sound is carried through a pipe organ.

Solar explosions called micro-flares generate sound booms which are then propagated along the coronal loops.

“The effect is much like plucking a guitar string,” Professor Robert von Fay-Siebenbuergen told BBC News at the National Astronomy Meeting in Preston.

The corona is an atmosphere of hot, electrically-charged gas – or plasma – that surrounds the Sun. The temperature of the corona should drop the further one moves from the Sun.

But, in fact, the coronal temperature is up to 300 times hotter than the Sun’s visible surface, or photosphere. And no one can explain why.

Fiery fountains

The coronal loops arch hundreds of thousands of kilometres above the Sun’s surface like huge fiery fountains, and are generated by the Sun’s magnetic field.

As solar plasma travels from the photosphere into the loops, it is heated from about 6,000 Kelvin (5,700C) to upwards of one million Kelvin.

Solar explosions called micro-flares can release energy equivalent to millions of hydrogen bombs.

These blasts can send immensely powerful acoustic waves hurtling through the loops at tens of kilometres per second, creating cosmic “organ music.”

“These loops can be up to 100 million kilometres long and guide waves and oscillations in a similar way to a pipe organ,” said Dr Youra Taroyan, from the Solar Physics and Space Plasma Research Centre (SP2RC) at the University of Sheffield.

The sound booms decay in less than an hour and dissipate in the very hot solar corona.

The Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Preston runs from 16-20 April.

above: From Ivan Brunetti’s SCHIZO #1, reprinted in the forthcoming MISERY LOVES COMEDY collection from Fantagraphics.

Young People and the War in Iraq

By JANET ELDER
April 17, 2007 New York Times

The younger generation is opposed to the war in Iraq, right? Wrong. Actually, they’re divided on the war, far more so than their grandparents, according to a New York Times/CBS News Poll in March. Seems younger people are more supportive of the war and the president than any other age group.

Forty-eight percent of Americans 18 to 29 years old said the United States did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, while 45 percent said the United States should have stayed out. That is in sharp contrast to the opinions of those 65 and older, who have lived through many other wars. Twenty eight percent of that age group said the United States did the right thing, while 67 percent said the United States should have stayed out.

This is nothing new, said John Mueller, author of “War, Presidents and Public Opinion,” and a professor of political science at Ohio State University. “This is a pattern that is identical to what we saw in Korea and Vietnam, younger people are more likely to support what the president is doing,” he said.

A review of the March poll suggests Mr. Mueller has a point. Overall, 34 percent of Americans said they approved of the way the president was handling his job, and 58 percent disapproved. But younger Americans were more approving than older Americans. Forty percent of 18-29 year olds said Mr. Bush was doing a good job, while 56 percent said he was not. While 29 percent of people 65 and older said they approved of the way Mr. Bush was handling his job as president, 62 percent said they did not.

The nationwide telephone poll was conducted March 7-11 with 1,362 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

A look back at the Vietnam years showed a similar divide between young and old. Older Americans were defined as 50 and older, but the comparison is still apt. In October 1968, when Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon and George Wallace were running for president, a Gallup poll found that about half, 52 percent, of people under the age of 30 supported the war in Vietnam. But among those 50 and older, 26 percent supported the war.

Some of the respondents to the March poll were called back to talk about the differences between the young and the not so young. “Experience,” “the draft,” “other wars,” were mentioned by respondents on both sides of the generational divide.

Mildred Jenkins, 68, a retired telephone operator from Somerville Tennessee, said: “We’ve experienced more than the younger people. Older people are wiser. We’ve seen war and we know.” Ms. Jenkins said she usually votes Republican but “may go Democratic this time.”

More than one person who lived through the Vietnam war mentioned the draft and the absence of one for this war. “It’s because of life experience,” said Jimmie Powell, 73, a bartender and factory worker from El Reno, Oklahoma. “I don’t think younger people really know a whole lot about anything. They don’t care because there is no draft. If there were a draft, we’d finally have the revolution we need.”

Mr. Powell describes himself as a political independent.

Some of the younger respondents said they were more aggressive than their elders by virtue of age.

“I think old people tend to want to solve things more diplomatically than younger, more gung ho types,” said Mary Jackson, 28, a homemaker from Brewton, Alabama. “Younger people are more combative.”

Younger people are also more optimistic. Forty-nine percent of them said the United States was either very likely or somewhat likely to succeed in Iraq, while only 34 percent of older people said the same thing.

Janet Elder is The Times’s editor of news surveys and election analysis.

The Independent, 10 December 2006

Carlo Petrini: The slow food tsar

The man who first campaigned against a McDonald’s in Rome now heads a global movement to promote the unhurried pleasures of the table. He tells Alison Roberts why Britain lags behind in joining the feast

Call it what you will – a shrewd adoption of eco-activist credentials or shameless bandwagon-jumping – but when David Cameron shared a platform at a London press conference recently with Carlo Petrini, the Italian founder and president of the Slow Food movement, he was joining an increasingly fashionable camp.

Petrini, who coined the term “eco-gastronomy” to describe his vision of good food sustainably produced, has little time for most celebrity TV cooks and the British fascination with them.

“These chefs should get out of their golden cages, let loose their media chains,” he says. “They have to become more a part of society. They should cook for a village, teach children, feed old people in [care] homes, prepare food in hospitals. The cook is a social being. Now we have an overdose of recipes, recipes, recipes – this television bombardment is pornographic. Traditionally making food is an act of love, and there is a difference between pornography and making love.”

This is how Petrini talks – poetically, charismatically, in terms of grand concepts, like a true European. Earlier this week, he launched the UK’s first Slow Food office in Ludlow, Shropshire, but we meet at Raymond Blanc’s fêted restaurant Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, where Slow Food UK is holding a fundraising dinner.

The Slow Food philosophy is not just about taking more time to cook and enjoy a meal, he says. It was born 20 years ago in opposition to the concept of fast food, and specifically to the prospect of McDonald’s opening a branch near the Spanish Steps in Rome.

However, the bulk of its work today lies in the promotion of local networks of small farmers and artisan food producers whose products either face extinction or whose agricultural methods are less damaging to the environment.

In practice this comes down to saving Cornish pilchards, protecting Bario rice in Malaysia and promoting Polish oscypek cheese. It’s in these interlinked local networks, says Petrini, that lie the foundations of what he calls “virtuous globalisation” – an antidote to the hegemony of the multinational food producers and the “capitalist concept of globalisation”.

“The network of small local economies is stronger than the multinationals because it has its feet in the soil,” he says. “The global market economy is destroying the Earth. We give more strength to local economies and we have better sustainability, better human relations and no need to fly food halfway around the world.”

If you love food but aren’t environmentally aware, he goes on, you’re at best naïve, and at worst, stupid. “But an ecologist who is not a gourmet is …” – Petrini laughs – “well, he’s just boring.”

The fact that the UK’s Slow Food office has only just opened is symptomatic, he acknowledges, of the UK’s peculiar problems with food. Britain has its fair share of thoughtless gourmets and boring ecologists, but most of us still eat poorly, expect cheap food and barely know how to cook. We are living, still, in Bad Food Britain.

“In the past 50 years, food has gone out of your daily life,” says Petrini. “An agricultural society has become a post-industrial society.” This has brought about double-thinking: ” I eat, but I don’t know what I’m eating. I don’t know how it was made or where it has come from.”

Slow Food’s roots exist in pleasure – in reclaiming the conviviality of sharing good food. And it’s this that we’ve specifically lost in Britain. “If cooking is seen as a chore – something you do mechanically – then it becomes alienating,” he says.

“Eating is no longer about love, but about consuming fuel. A woman cooks some food, and no one smiles at her or says thank you. Neither is there any fascination with food. In Mediterranean Europe, there is still that fascination, still the conviviality, the ritual. The most important thing about eating is to enjoy the moment of affection between family members, or friends or work colleagues. A civilisation that loses this ritual becomes very poor. It’s especially important for children to learn again how to experience communal eating.”

Few could really disagree with this, nor with Slow Food’s central mantra “Good, Clean, Fair” – an ideal of good food produced in ways that don’t harm the planet and don’t exploit workers. Slow Food gets more controversial, however, on the issues of paying more for food and on shunning the big supermarkets. In the UK, food produced to a Slow Food ideal is still largely the preserve of pricey farmers’ markets and upmarket delicatessens, and thus very much the preserve of the middle class. It’s a common charge that Slow Food here is élitist.

Petrini, of course, disagrees strongly. “It’s not only in England, but in Italy, too, and other parts of the world, that we associate the right to leisure, the right to enjoyment, with élitism, as though it is an élitist concept in itself. But excellent food does not need to be complicated or expensive. It can be very simple…. It is true we will have to pay a bit more for our food. Food is too cheap now. We cannot expect such cheap food in the future.”

Slow Food UK now plans to promote a number of traditional “at risk” foods (Three Counties Perry and Artisan Somerset Cheddar, for example) while building those local networks of production upon which, according to Petrini, rest the very “future of the global economy”.

But can it ever have a far-reaching impact here? Will we ever give up our tasteless ready meals, as David Cameron urged last week, or, worse, our December strawberries flown in from Kenya?

Petrini says consumers can embrace Slow Food by learning about food production and, if possible, getting to know local producers, as well as supporting farmers’ markets. “I don’t want to be a fundamentalist,” he says. “It has to be a cultural development and it has to be lived, not dictated by someone else. A process has started in the UK, however, and it is hard to stop it now because it comes from a real need in British society – a need for a better relationship with food and with the people who make it.”

Recipe: Turkey with ‘carpione’

Ingredients

Four turkey escalopes:

Two eggs, flour, breadcrumbs, one onion, a single clove of garlic, one sprig of sage, 1/2 glass white wine vinegar, olive oil, salt; pepper.

Beat out the turkey escalopes and cut into pieces. Beat the eggs and season with salt and pepper. Dip the pieces first in the flour, then in the beaten egg, and finally in the breadcrumbs. Fry in the olive oil. To prepare the marinade, chop the onion and garlic and fry gently. Pour in the vinegar and, once cooked, add the sage, salt and a tbsp of flour dissolved in half a glass of water. Arrange the turkey pieces in a bowl and pour over the warm “carpione” marinade. Leave to rest for 12 hours before serving.