A Series of Tubes

If you haven’t heard yet there have been 2 firebombs set off at 2 UCSC researcher’s houses. The firebombs were set off in order to terrorize anyone doing animal research. One of the two researchers whose house was firebombed was Professor Feldheim who taught a Neuroscience course that I took. The firebomb that was set off at his house was at his front door requiring him, his wife and his child to escape out of some sort of fire ladder from a second story window.

If you have read my blog before you will note that this is not the first act from animal rights activists (I think animal rights terrorists is a more appropriate name) targeting researchers at UCSC . I’ve been pretty busy so I didn’t have the time to post this earlier or write more about it.

Yesterday there was a rally in support of the researchers and currently there is a $50,000 reward for information leading to an arrest of the individuals involved.  I hope that the people behind this are stopped before they make another attempt to attack a researcher or their family.

Update:

NPR forum had a segment on the firebombings.  In it they talk to someone who agrees with the tactics used.  It is both interesting and frustrating:

It is a sad sad day for this series of tubes. The founder of the phrase a series of tubes, Senator Ted Stevens, is being charged with not disclosing gifts he received for things like house renovations and a car. Since it is easier to convict Stevens for not disclosing the “gifts” than it is for bribery, the prosecution is pushing for the easier conviction. Let us all ponder this with a song made up of sound samples from Stevens attempting to explain the internet on the Senate floor:

I’ve been a big fan of Lawrence Lessig’s work with creative commons.  I think I made quite a few people watch his lecture on copyright reform.  His latest work is part of the change congress movement.  Here is one version of his change congress lecture:

So on Barack Obama’s website there are various social networking thingamajigs. Since I am not part of the myspace/facebook/whatever crowd I didn’t really care. Turns out that someone made a group on the obama website that I actually cared about. It’s called Senator Obama Please Vote Against FISA.  As of writing this it is the second largest group on his website with 8952 members.

I don’t really expect Obama to change his position back to what it should be.  I’ll probably write to Obama and Feinstein (I haven’t looked it up but I’m guessing that Feinstein is voting for immunity).  The vote to grant immunity to the telecoms for spying on Americans is going in for a final vote sometime after the July 4th holiday.

I am never driving up to San Francisco again.  This is the second time that someone broke my window, looked through the inside of my car, found out that I don’t keep anything valuable in my car, and left me with a broken window and the contents of my glove compartment spread out on the passenger seat.

I can’t believe that I haven’t posted this yet:

A while back I saw this video and started to tie my shoes this way:

I decided to look up a better way to tie my shoes recently because my shoes would get really tight at the bottom and way too lose at the top.  I would keep adjusting my shoes but it was a never ending battle.  Eventually I found this website that has collected a ton of shoelace information in one site.  I would say that I’m surprised to see how much time someone spent putting up all this shoelace information, but when you consider how many pictures there are of things like kung fu cats you realize that the shoelace site is par for the course on the internet.

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I’ve been listening to some lectures from The Teaching Company.  Some of them are really good and some of them are ok.  I really liked the philosophy of freedom lectures.  Currently I’m listening to ethics and public policy, but the lecturer simply poses a bunch of hypothetical questions and I think has discussion sessions inbetween lectures.  As a teaching sytle that is fine except I’m listening to the lectures on my bus rides to and from campus.

The engineering honor society at UCSC recently became a part of Tau Beta Pi.  I recently joined and went through the initiation ceremony.  It was a little weird and the whole time I was there I kept thinking of the episode of the simpsons where he joins the stonecutters:

I ran into Jono Kinkade recently.  I had originally met him when the tree sit originally got started.  He has writes for the city on a hill press, the student newspaper, and has covered the tree sit and other disputes over the LRDP.  I guess I should help out and plug the fact that city on a hill press is looking for reporters, photographers, copy editors, illustrators, web designers etc. so if you’re a UCSC student and want a 5 credit internship then email them: work4chp@gmail.com.

Well Jono was able to fill me in on the happenings of the tree sit recently.  It has been difficult to find out what exactly has been going on because there used to be an encampment at the base of the tree sit where you could go and get information.  Currently you have to read the signs hung in the trees and those don’t change or tell you what the status of the tree sit is.  Jono has written up a really good recap of the status of the LRDP here but it looks like the webpage is a massive resource hog so I might try to repost it without the crazy background image or whatever it is that is slowing my browser down to a crawl.

It sounds like there is a little bit of a split in the protest.  Read more