Saturday, August 28, 2004

264 cycle protesters arrested in New York. (The more pedestrian accounting, by way of CNN.) [NewsIsFree: Popular Items] 10:02:58 PM    comment []

Barlow: Around the Capital of Magic with the Bikemob. I had a truly exhilarating experience last night. The beautiful Juliette Powell and I biked over to Union Square and connected up with roughly 5000 bicyclists for tour of the city. In a sense, it was no more organized than a BarlowFrenzy. No one was in charge. There were no speeches. We we independent operators, each of us asserting his belief that the streets belong to us as well. All we had was a place and time to begin. In this, the ride was simply something that Critical Mass has been fomenting for the last 12 years. On the last Friday of every month, bicyclists in over 300 cities world-wide pack up and roam the streets together. Generally, these gatherings are fairly small and have no larger political implications than the assertion of bike rights. Last night was different. For one thing, 5000 bicycles is a lot of bicycles. More, in fact, than it sounds. Moreover, the relationship between this particular Critical Mass ride and the RNC was on everybody's mind. Since a measure of civil disobedience was involved, it was an excellent opportunity to assay the current state of constabulary edginess. I'm pleased to report that everybody behaved gracefully and with restraint. While we did routinely run red lights - YOU try to get 5000 bicycles to stop suddenly - the police were chill and even, it seemed, mildly supportive. Observers on the sidewalks cheered and clapped as we rode past, though there was the very occasional taunt. (My favorite cultural assertion was the guy who yelled at us, "Get a car, you fukkin' tree-huggin' fucks.") The bikers yelled, whooped, and whistled a lot. One guy even had a kind of drum kit on his handlebars that he whacked away on throughout the ride. Occasionally we broke into various chants, most commonly a refrain where some folks would shout, "Bush Sucks," and the larger mass would reply, "FUCK BUSH!" Not terribly intelligent, I admit, but shouted with apparent heartfelt conviction. I couldn't get the grin off my face, and neither, it seemed, could anyone else, biker or spectator. There appeared to be no planned route. We turned an arbitrary new direction whenever we encountered resistance, giving the route a very fractal quality. We ended up riding south to Houston, up 6th to 30th or so, over to Madison and north, across to Broadway on some street in the 50's, and back down Broadway through Times Square, down 7th past Madison Square Garden and then over to the East Village. Finally, after about two hours, the police decided that it was time to put a stop to it, which they did with efficiency and dispassion. Mobilizing suddenly and in force around St. Mark's Place, they created a box canyon of blue, let it fill with about 250 bicyclists and then methodically, if arbitrarily, arrested them all and hauled them off. They were doing their jobs just as, in a sense, we we were doing ours. When one engages in civil disobedience, arrest is a natural consequence that he should expect. I'm just glad they didn't trap me in their noose. And, even if they had, it would have been worth the moment when we cascaded down the long slope of Broadway into the incandescent canyon of Times Square. We felt like an irresistible river of anarchic order. The air was cool and perfect. For a moment, all things seemed possible. It occurred to me that a Bike to The Polls movement would be a useful thing to start...... [BarlowFriendz] 10:00:39 PM    comment []

RNC protests predicted by Bruce Sterling story [bOing bOing] 4:49:09 PM    comment []

(comparatively) stupid white men at Harvard and Yale. A friend was asking me about some of her colleagues who had joined Mensa and I said that anyone who hangs around a decent college is already effectively a member because you only need a fairly low SAT score to get admitted to Mensa (turned out to be 1250 if you took the pre-1995 test and the new wimpy test for today's youth is not accepted at all; see http://members.shaw.ca/delajara/criteria.html).  Then I tried to figure out what average SAT scores prevailed at colleges today and the Web search brought up this interesting page from a 1998 Brookings Institution report.  What I found most striking was the discrimination against Asian-Americans at the elite old-line universities.  Harvard is the 2nd worst offender in this regard.  An Asian kid has to have an SAT score 65 point higher than a white kid to get into Harvard.  Maybe this explains George W's illustrious career at Yale?  (not listed in the table but presumably similar to Harvard) [Page 438 of the same study is also interesting.  It concludes that being black or hispanic rather than white at the "most selective colleges" is "comparable to the effect of having ... a total SAT score of 1400 rather than 1000".  So if you are a generic white family and want to get your kids into college it might be time to go down to the courthouse and change your last name to "Hernandez".  The college admissions staff don't get deeply into geneaology, do they?  Just learn enough Spanish to say "Here is a check for $40,000 to cover the first year of tuition, room, and board."] [Philip Greenspun Weblog] 10:36:32 AM    comment []

Moore Guevara shirts The good people at Designed by Monkeys are selling this spiffy Michael Moore/Che Guevara mashup t-shirt for fifteen bucks cheap. Link (via A Copyfighter's Musings) [bOing bOing] 9:03:10 AM    comment []