Padma Gopalan, assistant professor of Materials Science and Engineering at my graduate alma mater, University of Wisconsin has received a coveted NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award.

The awards are granted on the basis of creative career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education. Gopalan will receive a $445,000, five-year grant for research, education and outreach on nanostructured polymer composites with electroactive molecular subunits. [Her] work investigates the structure-property relationship in electro-optic materials, which can control the speed of light through electric-field-induced changes in their index of refraction … As part of the project, Gopalan will create an educational and outreach program that will incorporate her work into the undergraduate instructional laboratories.

Congratulations, Professor Gopalan! This made me think of poor, misinformed Larry Summers. Wait for it, Summers, this is just the tip of the glacier. There’s a lot more coal raking coming your way.

Why do I look for solace on my computer when beauty is there for the taking if I simply turn my head to the right and look out the window?

New Orleans at 5:25PM looks simply gorgeous in all of its rain-washed splendor. The middle of my window coincides with the far-off horizon nicely demarcating the contrast between street and sky. Dark city buildings rise into a blue and yellow evening, all while white streaks of clouds make their way across the river to the treacherous Gulf. A mighty wind, indeed.

Neck strain turns my face back to the monitor.

*cough* What’s wrong with staring at a blank wall, between shots of DayQuil for a lingering cough, wondering which one of my prints will look good up there? What’s wrong with staring at a blank wall, I ask you? *sniff*

On Saturday, while not single-handedly driving up the stock value of Procter & Gamble, I attended a crawfish boil in honor of my friend’s daughter, who was in NOLA from the far reaches of New Brunswick (that’s an eastern-Canadian province for you geographically-disinclined). If you want to know what I did for a good portion of the time, please check out Instructions On Eating Crawfish And Passing A Good Time. Notice that we don’t have a good time down here, we pass one.

BTW, this study is complete bollocks. *achoo*

“Extraordinary rendition,” indeed. We’re sending North American citizens (of Arab descent) off to Arab countries; in other words, we are turning on our own and outsourcing our dirty work. It’s called torture and Bob Herbert proclaims it in a great NYT opinion article. I’m going to save the full text somewhere before this article, like all others, get lost in the Only If You Have Money And Give It To Us Can You See This archives.

President Bush spent much of last week lecturing other nations about freedom, democracy and the rule of law. It was a breathtaking display of chutzpah. He seemed to me like a judge who starves his children and then sits on the bench to hear child abuse cases. In Brussels Mr. Bush said he planned to remind Russian President Vladimir Putin that democracies are based on, among other things, “the rule of law and the respect for human rights and human dignity.”

… A Massachusetts congressman, Edward Markey, has taken the eminently sensible step of introducing legislation that would ban this utterly reprehensible practice. In a speech on the floor of the House, Mr. Markey, a Democrat, said: “Torture is morally repugnant whether we do it or whether we ask another country to do it for us. It is morally wrong whether it is captured on film or whether it goes on behind closed doors unannounced to the American people.”

… the [office of the Speaker of the House] does not understand this issue, and has not even bothered to take it seriously.

Please support Markey’s bill and make it see daylight. It is our moral responsibility to follow the golden rule and to take care of all of our fellow human beings. Looking at others as collateral damage is a very inhumane thought process, regardless of culture, religion or background. It WILL be you some day, somehow, some time, some life.