I found this image on Harvard’s Web site. The project it is part of involves a concept known as gravitational lenses. Understanding the effects of gravity on light is essential for accurate calculations in deep space astronomy.

As the program’s site explains, this image contains two renderings of the same subject–one inside the other. The image is built on a computer, simulating the changes that the gravity of something like a black hole would effect.

What interests me in this kind of picture is the forced reinterpretation of what we are viewing. The image is difficult to process in many ways. The probable reason is that our everyday lives do not involve cosmic events on the order of a black hole. If Harvard can be believed, (and the jury’s still out) if we managed to be alive in the presence of a black hole our lives would be incredibly confusing.

Eating would be terrifying, as a simple meal could quickly resemble light-speed travel. Your baked potato would be the center of a force that was shifting your surroundings in such a way as to disrupt your ideas about matter.

Stepping off of a typical city bus would land you on a church steeple, but if you rubbed your eyes you would be standing next to a bench plastered with urine-soaked newspapers and could probably navigate to a phone booth or bar.

Dancing would almost certainly land you in jail, and if your boss heard about it you’d get fired.

We call the glass in our doors’ peepholes a “fisheye” lens, but our humaneye lenses are generally taken for granted. However, we do give the eyes a special place in our physiology, alongside the heart and the ass in terms of recurrence within collocations.

While some people rely heavily on their asses to accomplish many things, perhaps a greater number trust their own perception to see them through difficult situations. Our own experience is our most valuable guide, but it is becoming more apparent that we’re only getting half the story even from ourselves.

I say the time is right for an eyeball that works as hard as I do. In a world where I may well after all be going the speed of light because there’s nothing not moving for me to measure against, I’d like to believe that at least my own personal visual perception isn’t hung up on something like gravity.

It makes perfect sense that it is, but it kind of takes the spring out of my step.

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Apologies about my Wednesday post… As romantic an idea guerilla reports from the jungles of SF may be the reality is ditching something in the middle because your bladder has swelled and your nervous quaking is disturbing those around you… Must think of a better operation!

-B

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From 1955 to 1958 Polish director Andrzej Wajda fiilmed and presented a series of three movies, all based on contemporary Polish books, concerning the rise of the WWII resistance movement under Nazi occupation: A Generation, Kanal, Ashes and Diamonds… The fatalism of the primary characters, particularly during the second film, stoked the smouldering coals in my heart… A ragtag collection of people crawled through the ruins of Warsaw and the sewers underneath fighting a loser’s battle… Rifles and pistols, scavanged mortars and moonshine, dark humour and bitterness flung from every paneless window and doorless frame at German tanks slowly edging their way into the city… The children who had been absorbed by the Home Army, the women who ran messages through the city’s sewer system and the beaten and worn men in homemade uniforms and cub-scout merit badges knew they would be killed and yet they continued to defend the ruins… Their lives had been narrowed and honed into one solitary existence and had, for better or worse, found their entire purpose…

By the third movie the war was ending– Germany surrenders and the Red Army has yet to claim Poland as its own… Suddenly the soldiers have lost their clearly defined purpose just as they’ve lost their clearly defined enemy… Factionalization occurs but in the political struggle between left and right wing ideologies everything has become grey, people lose their focus and their identities… The world has opened up and a million different paths spread out across the horizon– people collapse unable to take a step…

Sitting in the grey area, paralyzed by too many choices… We sat discussing Sisyphus and wondered whether he was happy or miserable struggling with the boulder… I latched on the the purpose he’d been given, the complete submission of your existence to one goal… People travel to far-flung places to dedicate their life to monoastic life, David Bowie dedicated himself entirely to being David Bowie– so clear and so defined and so complete…

Meanwhile the world carries on while you practice your koan or compose your next alien opera– a gray world of war and corruption, death and guilt and avenues of capitalizing or fighting against… Most seem paralyzed unable to take a step in any direction…

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Have you had a machine curse at you lately? I’m sure a few people remember reports of malfunctioning Tickle Me Elmos who some parents claimed were corrupting their children, and there’s also the Smurf toy who apparently says, “I like it when you cut me,” but these are probably nothing more than really, really funny figments of Middle American breeders’ imaginations. After all, major toymakers undoubtedly spend millions on testing and quality control to make sure their fun products are wholesome and safe… well, mostly safe.

But, I digress. This is not about kids’ toys, but rather the adult playthings of democracy: voting machines. I work in the Department of Elections of a major American city – let’s call it Fran Sancisco – and recently have been put to work testing our new voting machines. To conform to federal standards, the Department is placing an accessible voting machine at every polling place for the upcoming June 6 primaries.

“Accessible” in this case means the machines are made for use by voters with disabilities, i.e., mobility problems or impaired vision – voters who would otherwise have trouble marking a ballot by hand. You can see one here, but the thing is basically an oversized O.G. Nintendo without the fun of Duck Hunt or Hudson’s Adventure Island. However, unlike the beloved Japanese video game system of the 80’s, our new voting machines come up with non sequiturs worthy of David Duke at a NAACP benefit dinner – sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself.

The machine works like this: you (the disabled voter) – or a friendly and helpful poll worker – feed your party-specific paper ballot into a slot in the front, and the thing then processes the info on this sheet. Upon reading the ballot (supposing it doesn’t freak out, jam, or reject it, as it often does) the machine produces a touch-screen read-out of the contents of the ballot, first with an instruction screen, then the consecutive contests, one-by-one. Imagine an ATM where you choose “Nancy Pelosi” instead of “$40 Quick Cash from Checking.”

Other than the touch-screen function, the machine also has an interface for various devices used by the disabled, like a “sip puff,” and an audio script for the blind. In our recent days of testing, it has been the computer-voiced script that has provided the most entertainment, shock, and awe.

Fran Sancisco, as some may know, is located in the great state of California. Our governor is pretty well-known; the man is a (correctly pronounced) household name in American places where they can’t say “tortilla” right. I would imagine this includes Omaha, Nebraska, home of the company that provides our voting machines. I was the first of our small staff to proof a Republican ballot for the upcoming election and found otherwise.

The damn thing said the n-word at me. And my coworkers. And boss. Even the Director of Elections. In a tinny little vocoder staccato:

“Ar-nold Sch-war-zuh- n*****”

I thought I was completely desensitized to the word (and most other things) by now, but hearing it in that dinky See n’ Say voice was pretty startling. Imagine how a blind voter would react. Imagine how a blind black voter would react.

Voting machines are controversial because people are afraid of them being tampered with. Although these machines keep a paper trail on a visible little receipt-sized roll, I believe voter fraud is plausible. It’s happened before, and not so far from this fair city. But what I’m worried about now is sheer incompetence.

The one racial slur in the audio script isn’t the sole problem with these machines. They are also supposed to function in Chinese and Spanish, as Fran San has sizeable numbers of Cantonese and Latino voters. However, the Chinese is sprayed across the screen like confetti, and the Spanish audio comes out so slow and slurred we’ve name the voice “Juan Borracho.” When navigating this mess, the picture that emerges is a system whose vendors did zilch to check for operability. There was simply no quality control.

As far as I can figure, the argument for privatizing government functions, like providing electricity or elections, is that market competition improves quality and discourages fiscal waste. The city has spent millions on a contract for hundreds of voting machines that, in their current state, will (maybe) offend blind Republicans, and disenfranchise any disabled voters dependent on second language. In outsourcing elections into the private sector, it seems to have created even less accountability.

So, to all those conspiracy theorists out there: have no fear of highly organized corporate cabals handing their rich benefactors elected office. Not in this town, anyway. Instead worry about the omnipresent modern menace of the half-assed job.

And racist trilingual Nintendos.

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I recently have become interested in poetry. Before, I thought it was an ineffective way to put an opinon across. Yet, now I consider poetics more effective than standard descriptive writing.

For this week’s posting I attempted to write a poem. However, during the week I realized something about myself: I’m a really bad poet. Nevertheless, I’d like to share a piece of writing.

SAN FRANCISCO

This poem was found written on a paper bag
by Richard Brautigan in a laundromat in San
Francisco. The author is unknown.

By accident, you put
Your money in my
Machine (#4)
By accident, I put
My money in another
Machine (#6)
On purpose, I put
Your clothes in the
Empty machine full
Of water and no
Clothes

It was lonely.

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