Heidi's Journal

11/12/2008 19:54 #46667

The Forgotten City - moving showing
Category: movie

The UB Lawyers Guild is proud to present a screening of

THE FORGOTTEN CITY

Wednesday, November 19th
6 p.m
O'Brian 108, UB North Campus (by Flint Loop)

A discussion about race and poverty in the City of Buffalo to follow, lead by Carl Nightingale, Associated Professor of American Studies, and Jim Anderson, Chair of Citizen Action of WNY.

Pizza and pop will be served.

The Forgotten City is a soul stirring documentary taking place in Buffalo, New York, exploring race relations, segregation, crime, and politics.

This film is a personal journey of two young filmmakers who forged an unlikely partnership following a 2001 murder; one a friend of the victim and the other a friend of the murderer. Instead of waging war, they embarked on a documentary film project that would take them into the heart of Buffalo's most dispossessed communities and crime ridden streets. The result of their exploration is a documentary film with a raw, hard-hitting, and unblinking first-hand look at the way some live in America. This film brings to light the racial turmoil and economic hardships that have become the lifestyle of so many living in Buffalo's inner city.

The Forgotten City, however, is not simply a film about the problems that plague Buffalo's inner city; it can easily be the story of any American city and is a film that everyone should see.

All are welcome! ***

imk2 - 11/13/08 08:57
i'm going with Faben.

drew - 11/12/08 23:38
I would love to go.

gardenmama - 11/12/08 23:37
My sister has seen this film and said it is excellent! I'm going to try to attend - would very much like to see it.

paul - 11/12/08 22:22
I think I will go depending on my workload that evening.

tinypliny - 11/12/08 20:40
I wish I could come and see this movie... I have heard a lot about it.

But it may have to wait. Life will have to wait. I have a thesis to defend. I have work to do. :( :(

11/11/2008 18:19 #46650

Hypotheticals
Category: school

In my criminal law class, we read a case from England in 1884 where four guys get shipwrecked and are floating about in the sea. One of them is pretty sick and there's no land or other ships in sight, it's been 10 days or so, so two of the guys decide to kill the sick one and eat him. Four days later they're picked up by a passing ship and stand trial for murder. (The fourth seems to protest the killing but eats the body anyway - he's not charged with murder.)

In the notes that follow the case in my book, this hypothetical is posed:

If three cancer researchers were adrift on a lifeboat with a skid-row drunk, would the researchers be justified in killing the drunk to advance social utility?

I had mentioned the hypothetical in the chatter partly because so many of you are or work with cancer researchers. I talked with (e:janelle) about it later that day and she wanted to know what the class discussion was like. I went to class the next day and the discussion was bizarre... one person said that the utilitarian would say to kill the drunk, a retributivist would say that's infringing on drunk's rights. Someone else said that it depends on who is assigning the values of the various people's lives ... what if it's nazis? what if it's the common US jury? many have suggested that in a survival situation that laws no longer apply.

Somehow an alternate hypothetical comes up - what if you're in the boat with Albert Einstein? Someone responds, "I'm vegetarian, but on this boat, I might be the first one to eat Albert Einstein because I'm so hungry!"

blink*

tinypliny - 11/12/08 20:37
You know, for all the politically correct "nuggets of wisdom" we come up with (like randomizing etc), Nature is NEVER politically correct. Nature is also very systematic - but we think its random because we don't know a majority of interactions that go into determining an outcome (any outcome).

Thus, we assume things are all stochastically happening (by sheer chance) - when in fact, it may all be part of one masterplan. We cannot see the big picture because our minds are thinking tiny. We are tiny. Our minds are limited by our severely limited experiences -as an individual, as a race, as citizens of a country, as members of a culture, as a species.

We hardly accept anything beyond our tiny spheres of knowledge. We are reactionary to new influences and thoughts. We don't like change but sing praises about it. Deep down, we find it easy to accept the dogma rather than the paradox. We don't want to be shoved off our complacent ledges.

To add "insult" (if you think change is superior to complacency) to the "injury" (if you think stasis of thoughts is not desirable), we label people who think out of the box as lunatics and view them with suspicion or even lock them away, supress them with force, block our ears and minds when they speak, sneer and jeer at them and judge them by our own insular thoughts and viewpoints.

But since we are politically correct, we also deny any such insularity actively. We want to tell others in our little society how broad-minded and culturally "rich" we are, how superior we are to that morass of the population that does't have the "polish" enough to project an external image that might be diametrically opposite to what they really think. In short, we are all hypocrites and snobs.

If you think about the various viewpoints, that (e:metalpeter) so creatively has thought about, you see a common thread in all of them - the greater good and selflessness. Sacrifice for greater good is a concept that "conventional" evolution rejects. However, newer research is bringing forth evidence that shows that the "sacrifice for the greater good" exists in some form of the other in natural evolution.

Several questions arise if we propound the greater good hypothesis.
a) Was this sacrifice for the greater good self-initiated?
b) Does it count as self-initiation if you killed/sacrificed yourself but were mentally egged on to that suicide by speech and/or body language/ mental processes/ thoughts conveyed to you by the society as a whole (yeah, the very same society that benefits from you dying).
c) Is it really any different from the weak being eliminated? In this case "selflessness" is a weak characteristic.

Things to think about....

@(e:ajay): Sure. That is why vegetarians universally get less (any form of) disease than carnivores.

heidi - 11/12/08 18:54
I love everyone's comments! The "right" answer is to have some randomizing process, draw straws, roll dice, to pick who gets killed & eaten. Seriously.

metalpeter - 11/12/08 18:29
Very interesting. I didn't read the entire first case from the link but I got the general point. I don't know as I would want to eat someone who was sick and with out cooking the meat that could have been deadly itself. The third guy couldn't have stopped the other two even if he tried and he didn't do anything wrong so I see why he wasn't tried.

In terms of the second case who says that the drunk isn't better then the Cancer Researchers. We hear that and assume they are good, but what if they are not good. Maybe the drunk from skid row stays out of peoples way and doesn't cause any problems, besides why kill the drunk he most likely has a bottle or two with him to use as weapons and besides how much of a drunk can he be if he got onto the boat on his own. I would say kill one of the cancer researchers because you have 3 of them. Hey maybe since they are supposed to be about saving others then one of them selves should give them selves up to save the other 3. That is unless of course some knows how to catch fish then that person can save everyone and stays alive at all cost.

ajay - 11/12/08 13:11
Kill the vegetarian. It's not like he's going to survive....

tinypliny - 11/11/08 19:30
From an evolutionary perspective, the weaker one is always the one to go/or preyed upon. The living species cannot advance without this tenet.

@jbeatty: Remember the hypothetical case of being stranded on an islad with the toothpaste and dal? (FYI, (e:mike) would eat the toothpaste) Well, here you have no choice, either you eat the sick, or die. If you too weasly about the scenario, then techhnically, and mentally, you are the weak one and the others with a different mental make-up would eliminate you.

paul - 11/11/08 19:25
I think I would trick and kill the strongest one. They probably taste way better.

jbeatty - 11/11/08 18:27
Eating the sick one just sounds like a bad idea. When I go to Wegmans I certainly don't look for the piece of beef that looks grey.

11/06/2008 13:51 #46573

Scientific holidays?

The religion & science thread made me want to ask you other science-y folk... do you have a set of holidays?

As a longtime atheist, I get uncomfortable celebrating the traditional set of holidays because of their religious significance. (I still participate in some of them, but it always feels weird, ya know?) So I have my own:

Solstices & equinoxes
3/14
4/20
Memorial Day weekend
my birthday
Labor Day weekend

heidi - 11/11/08 18:20
Duh! How could I forget Halloween???

I'm on the fence about New Years.

tinypliny - 11/06/08 20:49
Yeah, don't mislead poor foreigners.

james - 11/06/08 20:43
Well Jim. The true story of Halloween is known by two pan handlers who accosted me on Halloween night in Albany.

Waiting for a bus the man walked up to me and shouts "HEY! Do you know the true meaning of Halloween?"
"Why, no. No I don't"
"You see, it comes from the word 'Hallow' meaning hallow. And the word 'Ween' meaning ween."

At that point a second drunk pan handler walks up and shouts "HEY! That isn't the true meaning of Halloween."

The two proceed to argue and begin shoving each other while I duck into a disgusting bar to escape their whiskey scented argument.

jim - 11/06/08 19:56
Who here knows the TRUE story of Halloween?

jim - 11/06/08 19:55
Halloween!

metalpeter - 11/06/08 18:18
What no Steak and BJ (blow job)Day and no Sweetest day what is wrong with you?,HA. You need science to know how to cook the steak with out getting food posioning and the same thing for making candy.

The two Holidays I can think of that would fit in are Columbus Day (a day off) So what that he got lost and didn't use his navagation devices correctly. Then that leads Thanksgiving. If the Indians didn't teach "The White Man" how to grow crops here and how to live in our winter they would have died, many times over so I guess you could count those days.

drew - 11/06/08 16:59
Don't forget about mol day. 9/23

I think that memorial day is a religious holiday, but only because I consider American civil religion another religion.

Not that I don't like 3 day weekends.

tinypliny - 11/06/08 14:10
I celebrate every Saturday as the glory of having a weekend is a fairly new thing in my life. Every weekend I have to contemplate in wonder and disbelief at the fact that I don't have to go anywhere. :) I had school/work on all Saturdays (and sometimes Sundays at the hospital) back home. It seems like a sudden liberation after 25 years of lost weekends.

Birthdays aren't a big deal back home. I think I got my first birthday cake three years back when my friend brought it into my office. It was so hilarious, I thought she had gone nuts or something before I realized it was my for my birthday.

I celebrate science moments when I read some extraordinary and then go around the department spreading the news. :D

11/05/2008 21:07 #46565

** Loving **
Category: politics

In a comment to (e:paul,46546) , (e:libertad) wrote

Why don't we put it to vote whether whites and blacks should marry? *hypothetical* This is really not acceptable and neither is anti-gay marriage referendums.

Obama was born in 1961 in Hawaii to an interracial couple but his parents' marriage was not legally recognized in 16 states. In those states it was illegal for a white person and a person of color* to marry or live together as husband and wife. It was a felony punishable by jail time of one to five years. In Loving v. Virginia in 1967, the Supreme Court held that anti-miscegenation laws could no longer be enforced.

In some senses, this has happened before and will happen again.
Remember Romer v. Evans? Colorado voters had passed a state constitutional amendment that prohibited its jurisdictions from passing any ordinances or laws that gave equal protection rights to gays (nondiscrimination in housing, work, etc.). The Supreme Court tossed it. That was 1996.

In Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), the court upheld the constitutionality of sodomy laws but overturned that decision in 2003 with Lawrence v. Texas. That's pretty damned recent. There are still sex-toy bans on the books in some southern states and two federal appeals courts have had different rulings on challenges to those bans, so look for that to be an issue eventually.

Things are changing and will keep changing. Yes, I'm very disappointed in the California Prop 8 ban and sad for my high school friend Jess who got married there last week, but I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years it gets knocked down, either by another proposition or a by a Supreme Court ruling. I think and hope that NYS will be the first to have legislatively enacted marriage rights for same-sex couples, which will provide a solid basis for legal challenges to other things. Eventually the federal Defense of Marriage Act will be knocked down, hopefully on an equal protection basis. The sodomy and sex-toy rulings have been on a right to privacy basis (like Roe v. Wade).

In some states, it was just blacks, in others it was Blacks and certain other racial groups, in some it was all nonwhites.

11/05/2008 14:37 #46559

a little bit of purple
Category: politics

I just checked the election results for my hometown in Pennsylvania. The county went a predictable 62-35% for McCain, but in Blossburg, there were only six votes separating Obama and McCain! 275 McCain, 269 Obama with 5 Nader votes, 3 Bob Barr votes and 5 write-ins. That's so cool!

PS Had lots of fun at the Democratic party HQ party downtown last night with (e:jim), (e:james), (e:drew) & (e:janelle). Saw folks from school, too. I still haven't met (e:Brit), but thanks for the invite!

tinypliny - 11/05/08 19:32
Wasn't it a Zebra suit? *Scratches head*

metalpeter - 11/05/08 18:18
I'm not sure if I got a picture of her but (e:brit) at the halloween party I think was wearing a cow suit and I think (e:mike) might have got the head part on later in the night but can't remember for sure.