Ryan Cooper

Spock, Captain Kirk, and Ke$ha team up to give you an awesome track for the party.

A reader writes: In the short amount of time since I arrived in South Africa, the Peace Corps Medical Officers have changed my medicine about 5 or 6 different times. Last week I was told to come to Pretoria for a day to chat with some psychologist. I thought that they might actually be trying to do something to fix all their mistakes. Well, that didn’t end up being the case. I met with a random Afrikaner (who knows nothing about me, my situation, my history, or my countries of origin) psychologist a single time for a grand total of about 30 minutes and he thought they maybe they should change a diagnosis. The protocol that the Peace Corps has in place is to medically separate me and send me back to DC for a while; and then I can apply for reinstatement. Well, a “change of diagnosis” is theoretically the reason they are trying this, but a diagnosis can obviously not be reached with one 30 minute meeting with someone I have never met... I am normally a pretty relaxed and laid bac...

Here you can see my host mom brewing the local hooch, which will soon be making its way through the digestive tracts of a dozen stumbling drunks.  Ah, life in the village. She calls it kaffir bier . Her words, not mine.

So this Christmas we decided to get a tree anyway,the first in years. Recently, within an interminable month, Grandpa's passed on, Grandma's gone off a cliff with clinical debilitating anxiety and I'm suddenly chronically, critically ill. Every day is a new day - though I might probably have opted for the previous one. So we unload the boxes out of the attic, all the lights and ornaments, all the dust and memories, and pick through the lot. It's not a big tree, on purpose, and there's a lot more ornaments than can be hung on it, so we can be selective, and only hang the best; the tiny saxophone, the exquisite blown glass bells, an exact replica of the Wright brothers first plane.  When the kids had two sets of Grandparents, both sets got them each a commorarative ornament every year and the collection is out of hand.  We barely make a dent in it. One year we had great big tree and we got every darn orament on there and in the middle of the night the thing fell ove...

I hope everyone is happy, safe, and warm (or cool, as the occasion merits). My gift to you, loyal reader, is some knots I've been working on in the recent past. Here we have a Celtic heart knot, a sailor's cross, and a somewhat-bungled ocean plait.  Merry Christmas, Mr. Potter! They even come in festive colors!

Here's a picture of the map I recently helped my neighbor paint on the side of her school.  I think it looks pretty good, especially considering the surface is about as flat as the Hindu Kush. California's behind is a little pooched out though.

1) A profile of the soul of Nintendo. 2) A profile of Julian Assange and Wikileaks. 3) A profile of Richard Holbrooke, the recently deceased diplomat .  His last words were, "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan." 4) An essay by Tyler Cowen about income inequality. 5) Kevin Drum responds with some good points.

At GTOT we witnessed some improvements being done at the Peace Corps office.  Here you can see a gigantic tree that they cut down—it gave some nice shade, but the parking is cramped already and it just took up too much room.  For reasons I couldn't understand, they cut down the tree fairly far from ground level and then spent the better part of three days chopping out the stump with a single axe. Timber!

A reader writes: During PST I came down with a UTI. I knew it was a UTI because I have had them before. I told [Nurse A] about the UTI. [A] said [they] would talk to me more about it the next day. The next day [they] did not come to PST. When I called, [A] said [they] would bring me medication the next day. So by the next day I was four days into the UTI. I was peeing blood. Again, [A] did not bring me medication and said [they] would bring it to me the next day. I was urinating blood: urinating blood usually means kidney infection. So, in the end, I had a major kidney infection with blood, fever, chills, and horrific pain. [A] didn't seem to think it was urgent. Eventually I put up a big enough fuss that [A] sent someone to Bela Bela and I got the medication that night. Had I got the medication the day after I discussed it with him initially, life would have been much better along with my kidneys, bladder, and mindset. From then on, I had little trust in the quality of PC healt...

I got nothin.

1. Do cell phones cause cancer?  Michael Shermer takes a hard look . 2. Beijing Egg House . 3. A look at the Wikileaks hacker battles . 4. Can Mormons be recognized just from appearance ? 5. A skeptical look at the GM bailout , at least in terms of the miraculous Wall Street magic.  Seems like they were on pretty solid footing anyway, but the money was probably well-spent. 6. Afrikaans swearing dictionary .  My favorite: Jou fokken kakhuiskriek!

"But ultimately, what one thinks of Manning's alleged acts is irrelevant to the issue here.  The U.S. ought at least to abide by minimal standards of humane treatment in how it detains him.  That's true for every prisoner, at all times.  But departures from such standards are particularly egregious where, as here, the detainee has merely been accused, but never convicted , of wrongdoing.  These inhumane conditions make a mockery of Barack Obama's repeated pledge to end detainee abuse and torture, as prolonged isolation -- exacerbated by these other deprivations -- is at least as damaging, as violative of international legal standards, and almost as reviled around the world, as the waterboard, hypothermia and other Bush-era tactics that caused so much controversy."  -- Glenn Greenwald .  Bradley Manning is the person who allegedly leaked diplomatic cables to Julian Assange.

Today I'm making my way to Pretoria again, this time for a holiday up to the Botswana/Zambia/Zimbabwe region.  I've queued up a decent number of posts for the next few weeks, but they won't be more than every couple days or so.  I've invited my dad and sister to guest blog; hopefully they can keep the flame alive while I'm away.  I hope everyone has a great holiday season!  I'll see you soon.

Trying to use up my over-large data bundle for the month I've acquired a few albums that looked promising off Metacritic's best of 2010 list .  Here they are, in no particular order: 1) Swim , by Caribou.  Decent blend of indie electronic with some club flavor.  Recommended. 2) Tron Legacy Soundtrack , by Daft Punk.  If you liked the Inception soundtrack, you'll like this one.  Recommended. 3) Cosmogramma , by Flying Lotus.  Meh. 4) My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy , by Kanye West.  Sort of a weird one, almost avant-garde.  Recommended. 5) Spiral Shadow , by Kylesa.  The best of the bunch for my money.  Highly recommended if you like hard rock or metal. 6) High Violet , by The National.  Good for indie rock.  Mostly avoids the dullness and dragging that turns me off the genre.  Recommended.

They just keep getting better and better.

Apparently there's a good meteor shower going about now .  I went looking last night, but the dadgum clouds were in the way.  If you don't know how to find Gemini, it's above Orion's right (from his perspective) shoulder, the red giant Betelgeuse.  Both Castor and Pollux (the twin stars of Gemini) are part of the Winter Hexagon .  The moon should set about midnight or so.

A Pew poll recently found that only 6% of scientists identify as Republicans, while 55% identify as Democrats and 32% as independents.  I find that totally unsurprising, but it has sparked some discussion.  Daniel Sarewitz, in a boneheaded article for Slate , argues it's the Democrats' fault, and we should produce more Republican scientists (how? are they going to pass through a membrane from an alternate reality?).  Chris Mooney provides the requisite takedown .  Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey pines for the good old days: No, seriously. Remember Republicans? Sober men in suits, pipes, who'd nod thoughtfully over their latest tract on market-driven fiscal conservatism while grinding out the numbers on rocket science. Remember those serious-looking 1950's-1960's science guys in the movies -- Republican to a one. They were the grown-ups. They were the realists. Sure they were a bummer, maaaaan, but on the way to La Revolution you need somebody to remember where yo...

Last night we had one of the classic summer thunderstorms.  Lightning flashing more than once per second, a cannonade of thunder, rain coming down so hard it sounded like a battalion of carpenters armed with ball-peen hammers were assaulting my roof.  The strange part was that during these several hours of storming, the power didn't go out once .  Crazy, huh? This was taken from a frame of video.

After years of wrangling, the gigantic wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod has been finally approved : After more than eight years of federal review by the U.S. Department of the Interior through two administrations, Cape Wind was finally approved last spring by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. More lawsuits were filed, but on Aug. 31 a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled against community opposition and granted the Cape Wind energy project the permits to begin construction. Many community members have pledged to keep fighting, suggesting that the wind farm sets a dangerous precedent for private developers who want to open the area to drilling rigs or nuclear power plants. The wind farm is anticipated to be fully operational by late 2012 and is estimated to cost at least $2 billion. It will have the capacity to power about three-quarters of Cape Cod’s residents — many of whom continue to fight Cape Wind Associates. In a surprising twist, though, Texas has been quietly building m...

1. A profile of Eric Holder . 2. Assembling the global baby . 3. When Larison mentions "liberalism's characteristic indifference to institutions," this is what he's talking about . 4. Carina, Puppis, Vela, and Pyxis used to part of one massive constellation called Argo Navis. I like the original better . 5. Shakespeare's sonnets ! So far I like 18 the best. 6. An interview with a vacuum cleaner salesman .

Online advertising is famously ineffective.  Studies show that the "click through" rates, or how many people actually click on an advertisement out of those that see it, are minuscule.  On the other hand, this is a kind of study that was simply impossible before the advent of the internet.  Yglesias :  To those of us on the editorial side of online media this is a very frustrating dynamic. It’s hard to make money writing online because the advertising rates are pathetic compared to what was historically available in print. And the rates are pathetic because the utilization rates are pathetic. But what kind of click-throughs did those glossy magazine ads get? Something here doesn’t add up. Ezra Klein chimes in : At the beginning of Ken Auletta's " Googled ," Auletta talks with Mel Karmazin, then the CEO of Viacom. Karmazin is aghast at Google's campaign to measure the effectiveness of advertising by tallying clicks. "I want a sales person in the proces...

This from a week or so back. Who's been combing the sky?

I've been plowing through books on my kindle and on paper, so the backlog of ones I wanted to mention is getting insurmountable.  Here's some short takes on them anyway. 1) Mother Tongue , by Bill Bryson.  An amusing and surprising pop history of the world's most important language.  Highly recommended. 2) Losing Mum and Pup , by Christopher Buckley.  Poignant and surprisingly hilarious.  I miss WFB, the old scoundrel.  Highly recommended. 3) Blackwater , by Jeremy Scahill.  The subject is important and the research exhaustive, but the preening moralizing is irritating.  Mildly recommended. 4) The Years of Rice and Salt , by Kim Stanley Robinson.  Insanely ambitious yet rather whimsical, for Robinson anyway.  Fun for nerds.  Recommended. 5) Mother Night , by Kurt Vonnegut.  One of the last Vonneguts I hadn't read, and among his best.  Highly recommended. 6) Free Culture , by Lawrence Lessig.  If you think ...

Rise Up Coffee is a company founded by a returned Peace Corps volunteer, and they have decided that they will send a free sample to any currently serving volunteer who asks. Delicious.  Morning coffee is usually my favorite part of the day. I asked for mine a few weeks back, and here it is! I'm excited to try it out in my French press. For other volunteers, to get some for yourself, just go to their Facebook page , like them, and put your address on their wall.  Lovely.  For those of you back home, I encourage you to patronize this remarkable company. Apparently they're on the cutting edge of organic, free-trade business. (Send me free stuff and I'll stump for your company too.)

Trolling the nets I found some choice phrases in Afrikaans.  Be warned, this gets vulgar fast. 1. Jou ma is so besig om te naai, jy's uit haar gat gebore . Your mother engages in such copious amounts of intercourse that it necessitated your being born out of her anus, as her vagina was otherwise occupied. 2. Afrikaners call English-descent South Africans soutpiel , which translates to saltcock, implying they have one leg in South Africa, one leg in England, and their dicks are dangling in the ocean. 3. Piele vleg = braiding penises, meaning to engage in male bonding. 4. Jou mammie naai vir bakstene om jou sissie se hoerhuis te bou . Your mother shags for bricks to build your sister's whorehouse. 5. Hy sal die kak uit jou maag gesteel . He'd steal the shit from your stomach, meaning he's untrustworthy. Via reddit .  Probably my favorite out of them all is referring to Afrikaans as Loldutch.

I've edited out names of specific staff, replacing them with Nurse A and Nurse B, and at the expense of some grammatical awkwardness, removed all references to gender.  (Why doesn't English have a neuter pronoun?)  A reader writes: This winter I came down with the flu, although at the time I didn't realize it was the flu because it came on so suddenly. I left school early with a stomach ache, took a warm bath because I was getting chills, and when I got out of the bath was super dizzy and had the feeling I was going to pass out and puke, although I had never passed out in my life.  I remember trying to puke with no luck and the next thing I knew I was waking up on the bathroom floor in a puddle of my own vomit. So I was quite shaken because I didn't know what was wrong with me so logically, I called the duty phone. [Nurse A] answered, asked me a few questions, and said [they]'d call me back in a few minutes once [A] was back at the office. [A] called me ...

Here in South Africa "china" is a common slang term for "friend." I hadn't the slightest idea where that came from, but today I learned that it comes from Cockney rhyming slang ! For the unaware, CRS works by taking a word, choosing a rhyming phrase, then (in most cases) discarding the actual rhyme. Example: tiddly = tiddlywinks = drinks. Barney = Barney Rubble = trouble. For china, we have china = china plate = mate. Anyway, that's your etymology for the day.

I've been at another site helping another volunteer paint his roof. I should be back home tomorrow when regularly scheduled programming can resume. Stay tuned.

1. Yglesias on the difference between accounting ledgers and a country's budget . 2. The latest Wikileaks dump is worth a perusal, regardless how you feel about it . 3. Wall Street does almost nothing of social utility . 4. Too much security in the airports even before 9/11 ? 5. 20,000 Sacrificed In Annual Blood Offering To Corporate America . 6. The Weekly Standard on Sarah Palin's TV show .

NASA has uncovered something truly amazing: NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living on planet Earth. This changes everything. At its conference today , NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe-Simon will announce that NASA has found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic . All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, shares the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same. But not this one. This one is completely different. Discovered in poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible. While Wolfe-Simon and other scientists theorized that this could be possible, this is the first discovery. The implications of this discovery are en...

The response to my previous post has been large even so far.  Before I actually share anything, I want to make clear that I am not doing this out of a desire for publicity or to poke Peace Corps in the eye.  It would be great if I never had this opportunity—if medical care here were efficient and effective, or even just okay.  From firsthand stories I have heard about a great deal of incompetence on the part of PCMOs (Peace Corps Medical Officers), the worst of which led to a medical survey on from VSN, the Volunteer Support Network, some months ago.  But recent events have made it crystal clear that whatever the PC administration is doing to address the issue, it is not working .  Already three volunteers that I know of have left or been sent home based on such foolishness, things that very often do not even rise to the level of medical mistakes.  Rather they are secretarial mistakes like failing to make appointments, know policies, or call sick volunteer...

The past few months have seen some truly epic failures on the part of the Peace Corps medical staff here in South Africa, ranging from unprofessional to petty to sheer bloody-minded stupidity. The kind of failures that—and this is no exaggeration—could be easily avoided by an intelligent twelve-year-old.  I have been thankfully free of such experiences, mainly because I haven't gotten seriously ill since arriving here.  But I think the scale of the problem is such that the normal avenues for correction are not working. Thus I've come up with the idea of doing a series on medical horror stories.  So long as you are comfortable with sharing, anything you regard as a failure of the Peace Corps South Africa medical staff, no matter how short, long, or silly, send them to me!  (My email is on the right sidebar.)  I'll collate them into reasonable chunks to be published here anonymously. Note: basically all the problems I'm aware of have to do with the medical s...

Noah has the goods .  It's a bit hard to tell from the video, but the dune was actually really steep, at the angle of repose for sand, which seemed about 45 degrees or so.  At a dead run it was all I could do to keep my feet under me.  Pure unadulterated joy.