All posts by Zachary

Art, Resources

All Smiles with the Ghost Notes

If you ever need have a moment with someone who has infectious energy, great grooves, and will make you smile and laugh with delight, look no further than the amazingly talented Bernard “Pretty” Purdie.

The talent Bernard has is amazing and has affected music for decades.

Check out this video of him recalling his first drum solo. Simply amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3Uw8XBztIs

As a percussionist, you only wish you had found someone like Bernard early in your musical pursuits. But now is better than never.

You can read more about Bernard “Pretty” Purdie on Wikipedia.

Art, Coronavirus

Language is a virus from Outer Space that can help us Understand other Viruses

I came across this paper, Learning the language of viral evolution and escape, and I immediately thought of William S. Burrough’s concept that language is a virus from outer space.

Which was turned into a lovely piece by Laurie Anderson with the same name.

The abstract from the paper is fascinating:

The ability for viruses to mutate and evade the human immune system and cause infection, called viral escape, remains an obstacle to antiviral and vaccine development. Understanding the complex rules that govern escape could inform therapeutic design. We modeled viral escape with machine learning algorithms originally developed for human natural language. We identified escape mutations as those that preserve viral infectivity but cause a virus to look different to the immune system, akin to word changes that preserve a sentence’s grammaticality but change its meaning. With this approach, language models of influenza hemagglutinin, HIV-1 envelope glycoprotein (HIV Env), and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Spike viral proteins can accurately predict structural escape patterns using sequence data alone. Our study represents a promising conceptual bridge between natural language and viral evolution.

So perhaps Burroughs (in 1962) and Anderson (in 1986) were really on to something that could change our thinking of viruses.

And as always, there are more questions than answers.

Participatory Culture, Politics

Snow Emergency Notifications in West Lafayette Indiana

This morning, we awoke to a snow plow barrelling down a street.

“It must have snowed last night.”

Hieronymus and I drank some water and I heated up a cup of yesterday’s coffee before launching into my morning routine of checking my personal e-mail.

I saw a notification about this post on Nextdoor:

Having attended the November and December City Council meetings, I recalled the discussion around the communication component of Ordinance 32-19, An Ordinance For The Removal Of Vehicles, Trailers, And/Or Other Equipment Parked On The Street During The Clearing Of Snow On Emergency Snow Routes. Here are the minutes from the November 6th, 2019 and the December 9th, 2019 meeting that contained the on-record remarks.

If Nixle is the only method of communication, the majority of the community will be left out. To that end, I wrote Mayor Dennis, Street Commissioner Anderson, and Tonya Vanaman (who was listed on the Snow Plow page for the City), the City Council, and the Clerk (for the records request portion). Mutual knowledge is key to creating change.

Good morning Mayor Dennis and Street Commissioner Anderson,

How are you and yours today?  I hope you had a good start to the new year.

I still haven’t received any correspondence (my e-mail was sent December 4th) on the Police or Financial Transparency portal. Have you all given up on that effort?

I also wrote on Twitter and tagged a few councilors as well.  Can someone from the City, appointed or elected, share the process/policy that clarifies the declaration of the snow emergency will be published electronically section of Ordinance 32-19?  I have attached a Public Records Request in anticipation of one being requested.

I remember that there was a lively discussion about the new Snow Emergency ordinance updates, in particular, how would the Public be notified when such an event occurred.  The ordinance states that they will be published electronically.

Whenever there is an accumulation of two inches or more of snow and/or ice, a snow emergency will be declared.All vehicles, trailers, and/or equipment parked on all emergency snow routes in the area bounded,as described in this subsection,shall be removed by the owner until the road has been cleared. A declaration of the snow emergency will be published electronically. The emergency snow routes are as follows:

At present, I have only seen a notification from a neighbor on Nextdoor.  I do not use Nixle on my phone for a variety of reasons.  What other channels did the City use to make sure the community was aware of this declaration?

The City’s website, Twitter, and Facebook pages are silent.  As a constituent, I am happy to help volunteer with designing this process.  Please let me know.

Thank you again for all that you do and the service you provide our community.

May you and yours be safe, well, and at peace.

Take care,
–Zachary Baiel