storyvilletowneship

The Problem with Modern News Media

2011-03-30T10:45:00.000-07:00

the problem with the NY Times (and lots of news media).

two paragraphs below, taken from this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html?_r=1

#1 is a direct pull. in #2, i simply removed non-essential adjectives.

1. "Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore. G.E.’s giant tax department, led by a bow-tied former Treasury official named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world’s best tax law firm. Indeed, the company’s slogan “Imagination at Work” fits this department well. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress."

2.(G.E's tax status) "is based on a strategy that mixes lobbying for tax breaks and accounting that concentrates its profits offshore. G.E.’s tax department is led by former Treasury official. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress."

"extraordinary success", "aggressive", "fierce", "innovative", "giant", "bow-tied", "world's best", "imagination at work"!.

All 'positive' adjectives. or at least, not strictly "negative". do we need these words colouring the facts? NO. These ARE the droids we are looking for.

The Gentle Eye

2011-03-10T09:57:00.000-08:00

For those just joining us from a 15 year coma, a brief rundown:

2019- satellite launches become commonplace daily events.

2023-surveillance cameras gain 310% saturation in urban areas

2025- the uplink program is launched. Emitime goes public.

Within 2 decades, our planet begins to record itself. Not in the well worn narrative sense of a Ulysses or a Julius Caesar, or books about World Wars. Not even in the fashion of the modern news media, or documentarians. All of these are subjective.
In 2025 the recording will be factual/ non-commentary (unless one desires an accompanying editorial track) and dimensional. The Emitime Corporation is the first, and thus far, only, company on the market in this field.

Here is an article printed in the year 2032:

The Gentle Eye

The Gentle Eye has been open for just over 7 years now. Most of us did not become aware of its impact until 2030, and even then saw it only as a novelty. That of course all changed last fall. In all the commotion and flurry of ensuing media stories following the day, most seem to have lost sight of the two largest questions.

What is its purpose? How does it work?

By combining multiple angle exposures of every inch of the earth with superheat topology, MRI technology, and virtual 3-D generating software, a 3d temporal “map” is extrapolated and stored in massive memory banks located in various offshore ‘warehouse servers’, and is radioed forward, in a five prong relay, on a continuous random chain, to other warehouses --to ensure that no data is ever lost due to natural disasters at any one of the warehouses.

“I think of it as Google earth. Remember that? Google Earth. Hologram-ized. And moving. “ -Mark Lanier.

There is no public outcry. Part of the public support is due to the superb ‘safety’ features built into the recording process. The company is privately held, global, and is therefore above any nations laws. Curiously, the WTO is siding with civil rights for the first time. It will not hand over any of it’s recordings to any governing bodies, even when those recordings are of thefts or violent crimes. And Perhaps surprisingly, the public seems to trust them.

Why does the public put such trust in them? It is only partly due to the fact that they have seen no evidence of bad intent in the company’s numerous public proposals. It only partly due to the fact that all have been granted immunity from any crimes they commit where evidence from the system is used against them.
In reality, most experts agree it is largely due to the fact that they all receive small checks from the company each year, as a thank you for adding to ‘the history of the earth’. This last addition, or scheme, turned into a 1.3 billion dollar bonus for the accountant (See “Howard Winegrass: Marketing Lighting Rod”- page 129) who came up with it. Winegrass aggregated his information and realized that the few hundred dollars each person would receive at years end would be massively turned around in the form of public support and subsequent advertising revenue.

This easily garnered public support is not wholly without merit either, nor is it entirely short sighted or self serving. By giving out the same amount to each recorded person, hundreds of thousands of poor are able to get enough money from which to buy months worth of food. Others are able to pay for badly need medical treatment. While poverty is not solved by any means, it is curbed. People feel better.

SECURITY IS THE NAME OF THE GAME

And Emitime’s encryption is top notch. One block…one house…one room from a street in Philadelphia is stored next to a room from a government building in Berlin. Faces are scrambled. Events are looped and woven a random number of times. To anyone who tries to break into the system-even the best covert programmers- what they extract is a stuttering 3-d mess of movement. People passing through bridges. Chairs the size of skyscrapers. Men with faces on their stomachs. And moments replayed 8,000 times before proceeding to the next, sometimes even reversing. A woman leaving her house one day might take 4 viewable hours to reach the doorknob. (See “The films of Martin Arnold: Prescient Avante Gardist?”, published by Knopf books, for an interesting take on this phenomenon).

Still, Local and National intelligence hacks are hired, at first, to get into the system. But even when they are able to clean up events into a somewhat discernable and useful reality, their evidence is summarily thrown out of court, as is any real physical evidence gathered as a result of initial hack findings, so this practice is quickly abandoned.

Curiously, even though law enforcement had been furious at the start — after all, their local and state governments were handing over their security source feeds to Emitime, but they were getting no rights to the compiled data in return (only financial compensation) — they soon discovered a curious thing.
While crime did not go away by any means, violent crimes dropped 9% the first year, 23 % the following. So in time, law enforcement stopped knocking on Emitime’s front door with court orders.

** * * * * * * * **

Just as police interest in Emitime waned, one of the most interesting applications of this technology began. The death nodes.

Initially, it was both a financial and government project, and only later blossomed into the thing we are all always talking about. I saw nine stories on the matter zoom across my eyes while taking the super-T this morning. 3 more when I got off at Lexington and hit streetside. I’m sure it was no different for you.

Here is the timeline:

December 9th, 2026.
For census reasons, and thanks to the financial input of the conglomerate of insurance agencies, Emitime is approached. The groups’ proposal is that all moments of death were given top priority in both security and sculpting protocols. As the insurance agencies stipulated, accidental deaths are to be regarded with the highest importance among that subset.

December 24th, 2026.
Emitime leases out all end moments to contributing agencies. These moments are then cleaned up, scanned for temperature anomalies, and stored on separate elite set of servers, and forwarded on a triple penta-forking relay.

Jan 29th, 2027. Hearing of this development, artist Mark Lanier applies to the GEA for a grant to study the results of this undertaking. Due to his relationship with the daughter of Met-Life CEO John Phillip Hodges, and a strong lobbying committee, his proposal is granted.

Jan 18th, 2028.
Death is now mapped in a coldly artistic light. Lanier begins to create an overlapping temporal quilt of all points of death on the globe. It can be viewed by color-coded long distance projection. 1/10,000th scale, on any projector.. “Hospitals generally being the brightest”, Lanier says.
Why did he choose brighter colors for death as opposed to the tradition black? “It’s easier to discern subtle tonal shifts with brighter colors.”
“And” he laughs, “I just like green”.

It can also be viewed by medium zoom, on any new model projector at about 1/14 scale.

But perhaps the most common way the nodes are viewed (…or does it only seem that way because it is public?) is on site, with a viewing amlet like the emod60 or i90.

LITTLE MOVING SNAPSHOTS

The original amlets were devices that called up only a singular given moment- and only worked when in close enough proximity to the origination site, to project it where it ‘really’ happened.. They were one-use pieces, often viewed as disposable (although many creative hacks were found, and the items are still traded on E-bay at high values).
Nowadays, an algorithm is used so that a moment call can be programmed in on-site. An amlet can request any moment for which it has the hailing code. Most amlets cannot exceed (the more appropriate term is “hold”) hailing codes for more than 12 minutes, although some higher end models can stay inline for up to 36 hours. And most interestingly, some of the newer models can play two or more temporal hailing codes simultaneously, provided the spatial codes are close enough together.

This was Lanier’s idea all along, he says.
“I wanted to find out if there were any unrealized ‘power points’, or nodes. When a person leaves this world, I believe there is a great amount of energy released. You may call it a soul, I don’t. But i still believe similarly.
Where are these nodes strongest? Does death have fault lines? Does it echo tectonic plate formation in any way? Are there any other correlations? I wanted to see if there was, say, a corner block in Idaho where more than twelve people would die over a 15 year period.
What do these nodes look like? When aggregated, overlapped, how do they change? That’s what I’m trying to find out. I’m trying to see the unseeable. Like Einstein.”.

The boutiquing of this industry has been of much interest as well. Offshoot companies, many employing ex-Emitime employees, have been working at re-creating moments before the uplink occurred,. Historical events, War reenactments, etc. All are based not only on firsthand accounts, but also on DNA reconstitutions and archeological evidence. Life time moments, historic first meetings, all have and are being developed. But death has seemed to win out most of all. Religious groups have jumped on the bandwagon, reconstituting Christ’s last Walk, All Of the Previous Pope’s last moments, Mother Theresa, and others. Religion currently makes for 60% of the reenactment market, and has sparked a resurgence in Church attendance and a national debate of such vigor as has not seen in three decades. Pope John Paul the 5th is said to have been working on a response to this phenomenon for the past 7 months.

So the death nodes, in addition to their purely utilitarian features, appear to have theosophical underpinnings as well.

One note. The term ‘Death node’, was, at its inception, slightly misleading. For legal and decency reasons, Emitime initially would not release the actual moments in which a person expired, but rather the moment previous to that. So what Lanier received was a mass of 3d images of suicides jumpers hovering just an inch above the sidewalk, of car crash victims thrown forward, beginning to smash through their windshields.
However, after five months, the corporation relented, and released the final seconds as well. In certain cases. For an added fee. 9 months in, it released all of them.

Now, the process is not perfect. Even with the support of global national census takers and the full force of the Insurance industry, the maps are not full.
This has been the problem from the beginning. In underdeveloped areas of the Earth, especially in those areas where electricity is still not commonplace, there are not enough cameras to reconfigure the deaths in close up. Satellite’s top down imagery is not enough to complete the picture.

I have been shown some of these moments. The bottom halves of faces are formless. Often hands have no fingers, and in some untouched moments the arms or legs of the person will appear fused to the ground, like a low relief sculpture (see “Pillars Of Salt?”, page 44).
One-time Emit employee, now expatriate Steven Long ( and director of the new stilm ‘Everyone’s Inside’ review in next month’s issue ) had this to say, “that was the first thing I told them. I didn’t like it and I tried to see if we could move more cameras in to these areas, or even just apply normalizing loops, we might be able to at least get the anatomy right- even if the features are blurred. There response? 2043. 2043. I didn’t feel like waiting around for 12 years to have them find out the project had been doubling in complexity every day.”
“That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. One little stilm at a time. I can’t solve the bigger problem, so I’m trying to introduce some small measure of dignity.”

** * * * * * * *

DEATH BECOMES US

Then of course, came the Node-out. The near disaster that happened last year. It’s now been fixed and according to official press releases, can never occur again.

Just two days after the new amlets were released Death watching was happening all over the globe.

And one thing hadn’t been taken into account. The satellites, cameras, and MRI’s were now going to be recording these new “old” deaths side by side with real ones. The result? Everyone started dying all over again. Somehow, this obvious fact was overlooked. There had been blips in the past, caused by massive replays of events on various (often historical) sites. But error correction had taken care of those without fail, normalized the recordings after the fact by airbrushing out the anomalies (see “Reflecting The Genuine Moment”, sidebar).

This, on the other hand, was new- and massive. Ed Albers, technician, said this: “The problem was in the launch hype. This wasn’t a case of a device being released and a niche use developing organically a few months after. In this case the intention, and even a supporting infrastructure for that intention, was already in place.”

So almost immediately after the new amlets hit the market, there were too many moments to airbrush. Three EC correction centers went down within the first two hours. Within eight all servers on the grid started reporting heavy usage and some were already reporting failures. Census death tolls were through the roof. Apparently, the whole world was dying. Overview software showed entire cities blanketed over in death times. Some newscasts, filming from a distance, even reported old deaths in replay as new (See “The Fox Pandemic?” Time, April 23rd ,2031).

Spiking hit uncontrollable levels by day three. Due to the various automation processes and the various brown outs at Recording centers, no one really knew what was hitting them till the early hours of Tuesday morning, and were unable to get the word out. Official press releases claim this was solely due to power outages. Critics claim it was due to a corporate edict. Bad press was worse than no press at all, it seemed. Those who didn’t realize what was happening caused mass panic. 13 hours into day four the servers shut down completely.

Said Ed, “We almost lost everything.”

Interestingly though, in that moment, the entire planet was briefly recorded as the most alive it had ever been. Census software recorded zero deaths for over 9 days. There was a stillness all around that reached into every corner of the earth. “I felt it” said Susan Lamais, of Grenoble, France. “It almost felt like the whole world was breathless.” This lack of death was of course a set of false positives, and was later corrected.

What does Mark Lanier have to say about it all?
“It’s kind of beautiful, don’t you think? I’m surprised we didn’t see it coming.” Then he laughs, and returns to replaying the scene from those days on his projector.

For three months after, the project went offline to the public. No replays, although it was still doing some internal recording for statistical purposes. During this time amlet protocols were rewritten. They’ve now been fixed, and you can see their orange lights glowing in most tourists’ hands.
Ed Albers- “the solution was to shift them to a slightly different light frequency, and only broadcast at close range. On our gathering end, we mute the faint out-shifted frequencies. Its sort of like a reverse of the old Hollywood chroma-key system.”

The recording is back on track, although demand for some services seems on the wane. Still, Emitime has already made a kings ransom in its first few years, and in a way they have seen all of this as a plus, because it took a lot of long term stress off the error correction department. Now only events from the original disposable amlets still need airbrushing. E-Bay is keeping Reflectors like John Neville business. And while death watching has declined 32% in the last quarter (and industry insiders predict that drop will continue), Emitime already has 6 new projects in the works to compensate for the lost earnings. Expect an announcement mid-April.

Ed Albers- “It was kind of morbid, I suppose. I feel a lot better about Beta-wave. It’s going to be good. I think it’ll be very popular.”

** * * * * * * *

This article has spent the bulk of its time answering the second of the first two proposed questions. Now let us return to the first. What is the purpose of the Emitime project?

We’ve been in it, all of us, for over five years now. We’ve seen an unheard of drop in crime rates, learned more about other cultures, and with a greater verisimilitude, than ever before, and seen a general ‘bettering’ of our planet. Who knew? A Corporation can do some good on this planet, and still turn massive profits. But what’s it all about, ultimately? What was their initial goal? This company started with backing in the billions (one report even tips it over into the trillions). They must have had ten, twenty, fifty year sets of business projections in order to garner such financial confidence. So where is Emitime going to be taking this?

There is talk of turning some of the satellites outward. Industry insiders have stated that a launch of 3,000 class 9 telescopes (the great grand-children of the Hubble) is due in 2035. Emitime was unavailable for comment on this front, but I talked with expat Steven Long and he told me he’d heard of it. He summed up the project this way: “we already see who we are, now they want to find out where.” [ ]

(sidebars follow on next pageà)

Sidebar one: Expedient piece of mind is the latest impulse buy. And a Luxury item at that.
Do people really want to spend into the hundreds of dollars instead of a few extra minutes? According to Emitime’s earnings figures, they do.

I once paid $1,245 dollars to find my car keys.” Says John Fields of Indiana.
“It was my fault though- I could’ve sworn I’d had them the night before, so I only purchased a ten minute scene. For the first one I even forgot to turn off the feature filter. But according to the scene, I hadn’t put them anywhere. Well I went on like that, going back in ten minute increments, for almost half a days worth.”
Did he ever find them?
“Yeah, I’m an idiot. Finally found them- I’d put them by the fridge and they fell behind it. It cost me a fortune…but y’know? it almost felt worth it to me at that moment.” He says his friends still kid them about it to this day. But he need not be embarrassed. He isn’t alone. Emitime estimates that 23% of its direct sales revenues come from such ‘helper/finder’ scenes, and of those 9% make multiple purchases before their search is ended. The total average cost to find the book you misplaced, or your glasses? $150.

Sidebar 2: Reflecting the genuine moment
5 year veteran editor Michael Neville (now of Time-Brushers LLC, a subsidiary of Emitime) explains “It’s called reflecting because what you’re doing is picking up on the differences in light from the big now and the little then. Usually it’s fairly obvious. A night-time scene being replayed in the afternoon will be covered in ink— totally different shade. Same in day-at-night cases, just reversed.
But sometimes, rarely, such as if the replay and original happened at the same time of day, it gets a bit messier. By far, the most common trick then is just to wait till a cloud goes by. Anything not genuine gets revealed and swiped. That takes care of about 95% of the overlaps”.
But what do the editors do when they encounter a cloudless day?
“we wait” Neville replied.

-Dennis Argo is a journalist who covers new-media and history topics for Ti-fe Magazine. He lives in New York.

Mystery Song - Lost Bowie?

2006-12-07T09:44:00.000-08:00

Here's a musical challenge.

This has been bugging me for a while now.
I downloaded this song over four years ago. It was labeled "jobriath-bowie (unreleased album, 2000). I heard it, thought it was great, but also thought something wasn't quite right with the track label. I did some comparisons, and some research, and i'm pretty certain it's neither Jobriath or David Bowie, thought it does sound a bit like Bowie (and also a bit like lots of other folks, Scott Walker maybe).

It seems to've been produced in the last 6 or 8 years from the sampled sounds used, and i suppose it could've been produced out of someone's bedroom, though to me it sounds a bit too polished.

http://media.putfile.com/mystery-song-13

SO...does anyone out there have any idea what this mystery song might be?

know that every few months i've tried googling bits of lyrics from the song- so far all have come up with zero search returns. below are the lyrics as best as i can make out:

blacked out by the time you had arrived
drifting on a sea without a tide
and no one is persuaded there to drown
behind the veil of colourless clouds

its only life i tell you
maybe tomorrow
its only (h)ours to break through
you've stolen a shadow

you're robbing me to hold on for the ride
i've watched all the sweetness slowly die
and the scumbags still walk off with the prize
you scoff it off but you always wonder why

oh its just life
nobody knew - from glitter to sorrow
its always (h)ours to break through
you've stolen a shadow

catching all the roses as best you can
when every mothers joe says he's your man
and past all the glass towers your stroll
from the valley back to new york its all been sold

its only life,
i told you - the smiles (and the)* sorrow *(in with?)
its only (h)ours to break through
you've stolen a shadow

is there still time to tell you?
maybe tomorrow
its only (h)ours to break through
stolen a shadow

who is your pride?
no one knew
glitter and sorrow
its only hours to break through
its only hours to break on through
its always ours to break it through

...and that's it. please...help. or soon i will be driven insane.

UPDATE! Friday, July 20th, 2007: MYSTERY SOLVED! :
http://www.balconymusic.com/ (this song is from the newer album.)

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=75190783

Thanks to Paul for writing in :up:

update to the update December-01-07:
just in case anyone is planning on it- i ordered the albums from the Balcony site a few months ago but never received the albums.

FALL

2006-07-18T18:33:00.000-07:00

FALL

So it’s autumn. You're working for Niels Bohr and you find yourself annoyed by the way he leaves apple cores lying on your desk. Every time you turn your head another seems to appear. It started with just the local, the Cox’s Orange Pippin, which at least lasted a while before the rot set in. Now it’s Macintosh, Cortland- he’s been having them shipped in from America for the past ten days. They arrive in a small wooden crate and He rubs his hands together and claps twice, softly. This expensive delivery, it’s an eccentricity that the Institute is glad to pay for, and one that you reassure yourself will pass.

But see, Look! His desk remains clean; the common workspace remains clean. There are no apple cores by the test tubes or burners, none in the lip of the chalkboard. Only on your own desk, the one in the corner, does the discarded fruit go. Macintosh, Red Delicious; Tooth-whittled down to a set of columns that droop at the middle. They are always turning brown and releasing sugars into the air.

And yet- you never see him set them down. When he comes over to your desk to ask you a question or to beg your assistance, his hands are always spotless and empty. But then, walking away with him, you glance over your shoulder. Look, there are two new apple cores cluttering your corner! And his hands are still clean. It is a bit like bad magic. It is a bit like some strange sort of gravity at work. It is a bit tiresome. Flies have begun crawling on your stack of typing paper. Your fingers get sticky when you place a fresh sheet of it in your typewriter and the bits of oozing syrup are gumming up your keys.

You asked Heisenberg when he was around one afternoon and he only laughed and patted you on the back. You’ve asked others but they were all too busy to reply. You mean to ask Niels about this but the moment never seems to arrive. Your patience is growing short, but he is a nice, depressed man in many respects. And the thought of reprimanding an elder horrifies you quietly, in moments when you find the apple cores jamming your own personal train of thoughts.

So what's to be done? You go outside, walk down the cobble stone street from the university and underneath a tree that you always call an elm but in reality looks nothing like one. You know this, but you continue calling it an 'elm'. From the street you can still see Niels sitting by the window and writing- His silhouette takes a bite out of another Macintosh.
And across the street you go to ask the paper man if he has any chips delivered yet. It's rained out here sometime but you didn't notice.

It is 5:00 A.M.- and a darker 5:00 A.M. than when you started working for the university. 5:00 A.M. is your midnight. And this is the time for your stroll and your snack. You catch yourself in the middle of the street, step back as a taxi rushes past. Drunken revelers wave at you from the window. They seem less joyous here than they did in London. You wave back. And then you’re across.

"Hello Mr. Lolland- any chips?"
"nah sir, no. truck won't be round for another fi'teen minutes- you kin wait if you like-" He gets his produce fresh every morning- from a lorry truck with green fringe letters that spell out something unintelligible. There’s too much dirt covering the print to see.

Mr. Lolland looks at you while he sets up shop. Can you wait? You consider, weighing the time in your pocket. Over your shoulder the university is methodically buzzing with quantum business. There's a slight fog between you and it- always is at five in the morning.

"’think I might just do that- hand me a paper Mr. Lolland" you ask politely, and reach out of your pocket with some change. It’s cold and clammy and you feel almost guilty as it drops into his clean dry hand.

But Mr. Lolland doesn’t notice. He hands you the morning news.

On the front page of the paper is a picture of a man in boots- he has just bought some land a quarter mile from here and is saying that on the property he will be building a theatre for motion pictures- the fourth in town now- but there is something quite serious in his tone- and in the blur of print his eyes seem to tell you something about he kind of man he is. There is no joy there. Only process. Turning light into information. And profit.

The truck pulls up- you are reading your paper as your friend the storeowner conducts his morning purchase. The driver gets out and steps around the corner. Mr. Lolland has opened his back door. They exchange secret pleasantries around the corner in back. You can hear the general shape of their voices, the rises and the falls, but the wind and echoes muddle the distinctions.

‘They are unloading the truck’ you think, informed by the shortness of their breathing.
After a while, their volume increases suddenly and you hear a slap on the back, or a handshake. You hear Mr. Lolland open his back door again and cart his goods in, and you hear the start of the driver’s engine. As it’s driving away you notice that it must have recently been washed- but damn if it isn’t just out of eyeshot when you try to read the green letters.

You hear Mr. Lolland lugging his products back to the kitchen, followed by the splattering of oil pop pop popping electrically all over the kitchen. It settles down and the aroma of potatoes fills the shop.

On page ten there Is a story about a killing in America. On twelve they talk about sports. And now you can hear Mr. Lolland coming out from the kitchen, right behind your newsprint curtain. Time to stop reading.

When you let the paper drop you find yourself staring. In front of you is not a shuffled basket but a single wedged piece of fried potato. It is gigantic. It measures nearly four feet across and is sagging over the edges of the counter- Mr. Lolland has placed several sheets of butcher paper below it. You poke it with your finger and it does not budge.

“…well”- and you let the paper drop, look down at your woefully inadequate fork and knife- and the now miniature paper cup of mayonnaise to its side.

"tha's a, …that's quite a chip here you have, Mr. Lolland."
He seems distracted- he's cleaning some glasses.

"ye' they grow'em that way now. It's the new ones!"
He nods and smiles politely then continues scrubbing at the glass with his piece of steel wool.
You stare it at it for quite some time- picking up your fork and putting it down again.
“Not enjoying your chip sir?”
You can think of nothing to say but Mr. Lolland nods in secret confidence.
"I unnerstand. Too much for you sir.” He says quietly. He tosses it in the trash- or at least the bottom of it- as he removes his hand the entire rubbish bin tips over on its side. A loud whoomp puffs into the air, sound waves scattering toward your ears. Scratching his head he glances back at you and again laughs politely.
…“Too much for anyone I'd say. Nice morning sir" he says –propping the rubbish bin up again, and he heads to the back kitchen.

You think of telling him that he could just simply cut the large potato down to a facsimile of normal sized chips. You suppose he hasn’t figured out this next step. You mean to ask him about the farm where they come from, about the truck that delivers then and so on. But you don’t want to embarrass him, so you decide to keep quiet and pick up your paper.

The rubbish bin slides and then drops over again. Whoomp. Mr. Lolland comes out.
He shrugs his shoulders cartoonishly, turns to look at you-shoulders still up- and exclaims
“Eh! Potatoes!” in a vaudevillian way. He is smiling a defeated smile as he goes back to the kitchen.

5:30.
It seems darker than when you left the lab. You are taking the long way around when it happens. There are three of them.
“Copenhagen”. Is all you think as your cheek hits down hard onto a particularly large, smooth cobble stone. On the other side of flesh you feel two teeth shatter. One cuts deep into your tongue.

When you wake up seconds later- and can hear three voices shouting raucously many blocks away - you cannot recall if it was a fist or a foot that struck you down. But they were young. Had they been older you would probably have a broken bone or two. You listen as their voices add distance. They own the morning. And then they bounce out of earshot. You stand up and, patting yourself down, you remark aloud that your wallet is still there and, as you open it, that only half the cash has been removed from the billkeep. You spit; Listen to the porcelain jingle of teeth against stone in the dark.
A police van sirens by as you walk along.
“Never when you need them” you think. The van slow a bit after passing you but you wave it on. The blood is still running inside your mouth. You need to get to a mirror and don’t wish to speak with anyone until you have done so. It is discomforting to speak with someone when you don’t know what they are seeing when they respond to you; having to imagine your new face through their concerned tone of voice. But the police are gone now. It is peaceful here, again, in Copenhagen, at 5:30 in the morning.

You walk across campus with solid steps.
There is one in the third floor, a bathroom, with two mirrors facing each other on opposite walls. You can feel wetness on the back of your head and know this bathroom will provide you with a more complete view of your physical situation.
You reach the door and push it open- for the first time noticing that you knuckles are scraped pink and red. Inside, upstairs, you let your eyes slowly meet up to your reflected face. It is not as bad as you thought. And the teeth you felt – neither were completely shattered; only a corner from each. You will call the dentist in a few hours and by dinner, when you bite down into the pot roast, it will feel just right.
And as you bob your head this way and that- you see the corridor of you stretching back and disappearing only because you block part of its passage. You bob your head this way or that trying to see around yourself but it’s no use- so you begin counting- how many reflections back do I go in here? At 15 it begins to get hard to tell what’s what.
If only you could remove yourself you would see your reflection go on forever- and you laugh-you wash up and continue drinking and spitting water till the blood has stopped.
You finish cleaning up without looking in the mirror.

Walking down the hall you think of Mr. Lolland. How will he fit into the ‘world of tomorrow’ you are helping to create? Atoms and the shape of everything in between us? He doesn’t even know to cut the chips down to a normal size. You slide down the banister to the second floor and your feet hit too quick at the bottom. Walking down the linoleum hall, you feel a pain in your ankle.

When you get back to the lab, Niels is still there. He has just completed a letter to his brother Harald, home with the flu.
Niels is crying. He is crying over his father. You know this. You can tell by the silent shaking of his profile in the dark. It is as familiar to you as the smell of potatoes.
Outside it is still quiet and the soft quiet is reflected perfectly here in the lab, until he speaks.

“His heart attack has affected me. And this research is in its honour.”
“his “ you think- “his”. Not ‘its”. “his”.
That was years ago- the dedication. Back in 1911 when he completed his thesis. And he makes this statement once in awhile- just before the sun rises. You aren’t sure if he realizes his grammatical error. You chalk it up to emotional grief.
Niels looks over at you and meagerly composes himself.
“I trust you, you know”, he says. He then removes himself politely from the room. He has not noticed your condition. You glance down at the letter he’s left on the desk:

… Don't talk about it to anyone, for otherwise I couldn't write to you about it so soon. ... You understand that I may yet be wrong; for it hasn't been worked out fully yet (but I don't think its wrong). ... Believe me, I am eager to finish it in a hurry, and to do so I have taken a couple of days off from the laboratory (this is also a secret).

You know of a file cabinet in the back of Niels Bohr’s office. You have heard that inside it are dozens, maybe hundreds, of copies of this letter. You know he first wrote this letter several years ago, and that, like the previous statement about his father’s heart attack, rewriting it is a comfort to him in difficult times. The file cabinet must be nearly full by now.

No one has ever seen this cabinet drawer open, however, so it’s contents remains a mystery to you; just so much scientific gossip to others. You drop a number of apple cores into your receptacle, shoo flies away, and sit down. Back to work, there are numbers to be taken down. It is 6:30 A.M., and Copenhagen is waking up.