Spell Check Fail

I guess spell checking isn’t part of “Fringe Science”…

Replace “Government” by “Corporation”

One benefit of the whole US health care debate (debacle?) is that I finally realized one key difference between the United States and Europe (or at least France). A debate works a bit like “Capture the Flag” – the debaters try to claim some concepts or keywords, which will give them a dominant position, and remove the need to produce any reasonable argument. One extreme example of such a battle for the flag is Godwin’s Law: the first party who manages to assimilate the other side to Nazis gains dominant ground, and you can bet any rational (or simply civil) discussion is over after that point.

I realized that in the political debate on both sides of the Atlantic, “Government” and “Corporations” play the role of such flags – but the roles are reversed. If you manage to claim that the other party’s solution gives more responsibility to the Government in the US, you are on solid ground – because Government’s intentions are suspect, whereas a market-based, free-enterprise solution, is by default virtuous, and what is good for Corporations, is good for the general public. In Europe, a solution that shifts responsibilities from Government to Corporations is suspect, because Corporations don’t serve the public interest: they will do anything for a buck to please the shareholders.

You can see this at play in the Health Care debate in the US: while most Americans seem to actually support the components of the bill, its approval (and the whole debate with it) has sunk, dragged down by questions around whether pharmaceutical and insurance companies will suffer from it, and whether the bill means that the government will have Death Panels to decide whether to pull the plug on Grand’ma. Conversely, a sure way to get the French striking and marching in the streets is to propose any form of involvement of private Corporations in the education system (medical works, too).

What I find interesting is that it wasn’t obvious to me earlier; probably because on the surface, the debate looks identical, and revolves around the same concepts – but the underlying value system is reversed.

More fusing & slumping

Some more stuff I did at the Crucible glass fusing & slumping class. The body of the bird is done with slim glass rods which I bent by heating them, and the wing is a very quick mosaic. The body of the crocodile is very coarse frit (chunks of broken glass) – I did it for my favorite niece, who has an intriguing fascination for these animals. And for my favorite sister, I did 9 buttons (hope that’s enough), was lots of work, but pretty fun!

Slumping

The second class at the Crucible was focused on slumping. The idea behind slumping is to heat the glass so that it softens and slumps, adopting the shape of whatever it is laying on. I focused again mostly on experimenting, to get a sense of what to expect, and produced two pieces:

The two pictures below illustrate how the technique works. The 3 layers of waves under the boat have been created by stacking up 3 layers of thick fiber under the transparent glass pane, and the outline of the snail uses the same technique.

Fusing, session 1

I took my first class in glass fusing & slumping last week, at the Crucible. The 3 pieces below are the result – they are all metal inclusions (copper) between sheets of glass. It’s a totally new material for me, so I wanted to try different textures, to see how each came out, and if there were differences.

One aspect of the process I am not used to yet is the lack of immediacy. We create our pieces, and put them in the kiln, where they cook up and cool down for the next day or so – so I really don’t know how things will play out, at all, until the week after, when I come for the next class. It’s a long delay to get a sense for what works and what doesn’t.