[PHOTO] Greenery behind the towers, Hayden near Church

Walking east on Hayden towards Church last week, I was heartened by the sight of these trees coming out in beautiful green leaf.

[LINK] "The Near-Impossible Challenge of Designing the 9/11 Museum"

Cliff Kuang's Wired article exploring the challenges surrounding the construction of the new museum in New York City dedicated to the September 11th attacks was compelling and worrisome. How do you memorialize a recent terrible event with ongoing consequences?

You descend into the museum on a long ramp, sloped so gradually that you barely feel your steps gathering momentum. It’s as if you’re gently being pulled into orbit. Then you walk out onto an underground balcony overlooking the museum floor, some 40 feet below, and gaze out into a vast, nearly empty space punctuated by the Last Column—the final piece of steel hauled away from Ground Zero during cleanup. Weighing 60 tons and standing nearly 40 feet high, it’s still covered in spray-painted messages, tributes to the dead left by those who did the work. (“My brothers, you ran into hell,” one reads.) You get an overwhelming sense of absence and awe. There may be no public space more cavernous in New York City, and the vista was designed to preserve the dizzying experience of looking into the gaping pit left when the cleanup was complete in the spring of 2002.

To your left is the Slurry Wall, a 3-foot-thick concrete barrier studded with iron pilings that once girded the foundations of the site and managed to hold even after the towers fell. The wall still seems both immovable and ­fragile. It’s what keeps the Hudson River from drowning this space, which is an unprecedented hybrid of archaeological site, cathedral, and tourist attraction.

As you keep walking downward, the ramp switches back, and you pass by a quote rendered in metal letters 15 inches high and cast from steel recovered from the original Twin Towers: NO DAY SHALL ERASE YOU FROM THE MEMORY OF TIME. It’s a line by Virgil, who, in the Inferno, serves as Dante’s guide through hell. Stepping off the ramp and passing down a flight of stairs and a hallway, you are now 70 feet belowground, standing on the bedrock that rooted the Twin Towers.

Twenty feet above your head hangs a piece of steel more than 35 feet long and weighing nearly 5 tons. It’s positioned vertically on the side of a massive silvery cube that marks the outline of where the North Tower once stood. Twisted like a ribbon blown in the wind, it has a ter­rible beauty. This and a counterpart down the hall are the “impact steel,” the columns hit by the first passenger jet when it slammed into the North Tower almost 13 years ago. You pass under one of the steel pieces and through a pair of plain glass doors to enter the main exhibits of the National September 11 Memorial Museum.

Historical museums typically serve as a way to tell the official story of something that happened and what it means. This one is different. “It is a story that has no end,” says Paula Grant Berry, a ­museum-­planning-­committee member whose husband died in the South Tower. The events of 9/11 are still raw in our memories and alive in our political and cultural climate.

For the museum’s designers and curators, that tension led to a ­tangle of quandaries: How can you present a lasting memorial to an event whose impact is still unspooling through developments such as the Edward Snowden leaks and the Senate’s torture report? How can you speak to 9/11’s polarizing effects, such as the ­bungled search for WMD, without alienating some significant portion of your audience? How can you create a meaningful tribute that will resonate with every visitor: the school­children who know almost nothing of what happened, survivors who ran from the buildings covered in ash, and all those—more than a billion worldwide—who experienced the attack live on TV? “Conventional narrative wouldn’t cut it,” says Alice Green­wald, director of the museum, which opens in May.

[LINK] "The Library of Congress Wants to Destroy Your Old CDs (For Science)"

Adrienne Lafrance's article in The Atlantic makes me think that I should back up my compact disc library immediately. The fragility of such a once-ubiquitous medium says worrisome things about the future of our cherished information. (Apparently, read/write discs are much worse.)

"All of the modern formats weren't really made to last a long period of time," said Fenella France, chief of preservation research and testing at the Library of Congress. "They were really more developed for mass production."

France and her colleagues are trying to figure out how CDs age so that we can better understand how to save them. This is a tricky business, in large part because manufacturers have changed their processes over the years but won't say how. And so: we know a CD's basic composition—there's a plastic polycarbonate layer, a metal reflective layer with all the data in it, and then the coating on top—but it's impossible to tell just from looking at a disc how it will age.

"We're trying to predict, in terms of collections, which of the types of CDs are the discs most at risk," France said. "The problem is, different manufacturers have different formulations so it's quite complex in trying to figure out what exactly is happening because they've changed the formulation along the way and it's proprietary information."

Even CDs made by the same company in the same year and wrapped in identical packaging might have totally different lifespans. That's what Library of Congress researchers found when they tested twin copies of Paul Winter's Grammy-nominated 1987 album Earthbeat.

The two seemingly identical discs were exposed to extreme heat and humidity in an accelerated-aging machine. They cooked for about 500 hours at 175 degrees and in relative humidity of 70 percent—about what you'd expect on a sweltering July day in New York City, but not quite as humid as a rain forest. One of the CDs emerged relatively unscathed. The other was zapped of its musical data, completely destroyed by oxidation.

[LINK] "Vietnam Will Be the Loser in the Anti-China Riots"

Bruce Einhorn's Bloomberg BusinessWeek article makes the point that recent riots in Vietnam targeting ethnic Chinese and their businesses will certainly not help the country's economic prospects.

The latest round in the territorial dispute between China and Vietnam has had its first casualties. Anti-Chinese demonstrations have swept Vietnam since the two countries’ ships attacked one another in the South China Sea last week, and yesterday Vietnamese protesters targeted a steel mill in the central province of Ha Tinh, leaving at least one Chinese person dead and 90 injured. The mob went after the factory even though its owner, the Formosa Plastics Group (1301:TT), is not even from mainland China. It’s Taiwanese. But no matter: Hailing from a Chinese-speaking place and employing Chinese workers are crimes enough.

The Vietnamese government has only itself to blame for this disaster. After a Chinese state-owned company started drilling for oil in waters that Vietnam claims as its exclusive economic zone in the South China Sea, the leaders in Hanoi couldn’t figure out a way to respond, according to Jonathan London, a City University of Hong Kong professor and Vietnam expert. One easy option was to encourage a nationalistic fervor among Vietnamese. “The Vietnamese ‘street’ is extremely upset by these most recent developments,” he said Friday. “Vietnamese cyberspace is on fire.”

Sure enough, nationalist fervor quickly got out of hand. “The riots appear to be the result of carelessly planned small-scale protests initiated by state-run or state-invested foreign ventures which then quickly exploded,” London writes on his blog today. Making things worse, the leadership in Hanoi hasn’t been able to agree on a strategy. With the leadership paralyzed about what to do, “the absence of a clear, coherent voice from Hanoi is doing great harm,” he argues. “Instead of communicating with the world with the confidence it should, Hanoi is on the brink of a public-relations meltdown that would make even Malaysian aviation officials blush.”

China is trying to take the moral high ground, saying Vietnam’s government is at fault for the escalation of tensions. China has accused its neighbor of creating a media circus by arranging for reporters to cover the confrontation at sea between Vietnamese and Chinese ships. “This was all done for show in an attempt to present a false picture and deceive the public,” said Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying, who called on the government in Hanoi “to immediately take effective steps to stop and punish these crimes, and to ensure the safety of Chinese citizens and institutions in Vietnam.”

[. . .]

No matter which side wins control of the disputed area, Vietnam seems certain to be the economic loser from this fight. Even factories untouched by the protesters have closed temporarily. For instance, most of the Vietnamese suppliers to Li & Fung (494:HK), the huge Hong Kong company that is the world’s biggest supplier of clothes and toys, are closed. Its chief executive, Bruce Rockowitz, said today after a shareholder meeting in Hong Kong that the shutdown in production could last a week. Yue Yuen Industrial (551:HK), the Hong Kong supplier of athletic shoes to Nike (NKE) and Adidas (ADS:GR), has shut its factories in Vietnam, which last year accounted for one-third of Yue Yuen’s total production.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• The Dragon's Gaze links to one paper examining the search for exomoons and links to another looking for very widely-separated exoplanets.


• Far Outliers' Joel shows some unusual Japanese words.


• The Financial Times' The World blog notes, in the context of recent riots, that Vietnam is an important player in global supply chains.


• Joe. My. God. notes the opening of a museum in New York City dedicated to the September 11th terrorist attacks. Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly can't bear to visit.


• Language Hat notes the new Russian laws banning profanity.


• At his blog, Peter Watts discusses his experience speaking at a conference about the origins of revenge.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla notes that comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, target of the ESA's Rosetta probe, is now growing a coma.


• Towleroad notes that the Centers for Disease Control in the United States have released guidelines for the use of truvada to prevent HIV infections.


• The Transit Toronto blog notes that there's a TTC subway car ravaged by Godzilla down on Yonge Street.


• The Volokh Conspiracy deals with the complex copyright case of a man who killed himself after a nasty divorce and whose ex-wife is trying to remove his writings critical of her from the Internet.