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ALZHEIMER’S IS a state of mind, of brain, that some people fear more than death itself – whether for themselves or family, partners. It puts a barrier between what we know of a person and our way of getting to know more of them. It confounds communication, blurs memory, sows confusion, produces apparently inexplicable outbursts, nonsensical pieces of expression. Pieces of seemingly unconnected life experience are tossed the way of the caregivers, lovers, friends. It is, in a bizarre way, the poetry of the mind taken to Dadaism.

So why not use poetry as conduit, bridge, translator?

The Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, founded by New York poet Gary Glazner, is not built on the traditional, stand-at-the-podium-and-read poetry recital. Rather, it uses the simple rhymes typically learned in childhood or whimsical works created on the spot with audience participation. The facilitator moves among the seniors, holding their hands, touching their shoulders, gently prodding them to share their thoughts, reawakening long-ago memories.

IN WORLD WAR II, America’s women pilots took to the air for the US army, but they received little in the way of either compensation or recognition.

The Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) pilots each already had a pilot’s license and were trained in military aviation at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas. More than 25,000 women applied for WASP service; fewer than 1,900 were accepted and those who were, paid their own way to Texas for the months of rigorous military training.

Some 1,078 women earned their wings becoming the first women in history to fly American military aircraft — but for $250 a month. They were not officially part of the military. They received no benefits. They were not honored — until now:

President Obama on Wednesday signed a measure awarding the 300 surviving Women Airforce Service Pilots from World War II the Congressional Gold Medal. [...]

FRMB2U has mentioned the Mothers of the Disappeared (also called Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) in previous posts: the women in white headscarves who quietly and desperately staged their walking protest for decades every Thursday in the Plaza de Mayo, until the Argentine government had admitted culpability for the Dirty War missing and set about attempting reparative actions.

However these mothers and other women have taken on human rights and other social issues in the stead of the Dirty War and their protests in the Plaza de Mayo have continued. The latest focus is the epidemic of a type of crack cocaine which has swept the streets of Argentina:

A group of women are taking on police and drug dealers with equanimity here, risking all to save their drug-addled children from “Paco” — a cocaine derivative sweeping Argentina with alarming ferocity.

IS THERE life after sex, drugs and rock n’n roll? Is there music after rehab? What do you do for fun after you’ve given up your best vices?

And after you’re all cleaned up, where the hell do you find the muse you once brought to your shoulder with the aid of controlled substances?

Breeders Kelley and Kim Deal are out there, showing us how it’s done:

Kim and Kelley Deal, the very ordinary twins behind the extraordinary music of the Breeders, are not your typical rock stars.

Yet at 48, they are more active than ever. Following the critical success of last year’s comeback album, Mountain Battles, they have just released a new EP, “Fate to Fatal”, and they have curated the sold-out weekend festival for All Tomorrow’s Parties [UK] that takes place later this month. [...]

THERE IS a patience in Africa which confounds foreigners. A biding of time that allows a slow burn to build to a boil, and bubble over finally. Governments rise and fall under that kind of persistence.

So today (already nearly over in the southern hemisphere) the hours some will wait in lines that curl and stretch — air full of singing or chatter, arguments and laughter — are inconceivable to a nation which wolfs breakfast at traffic lights, devours lunch between errands, all sandwiched into a half-hour.

So, there will probably be a good voter turnout in South Africa, despite the threat of storms according to a Guardian headline, which declares the weather will scare voters off.

KUMARI MAYAWATI (Chandawati Devi) is a Dalit. To be Dalit used to mean — to some, still means — you are part of the untouchable world, an outcaste, a person of so little consideration as to be invisible according to Indian caste system.

Although officially abolished under the Indian constitution, the system has a long presence. It will take more than a few generations to wreak change.

And change is here: Mayawati, unmarried woman, with two degrees, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and aspirations to be the prime minister of India:

LUCKNOW, India (AP) — Her father was a low-level government clerk from a caste so poor and uneducated it was shunned for centuries as “untouchable.” Her mother was illiterate.

But the daughter they named Mayawati sought a different destiny. She wanted political power, diamonds and — she’ll tell you — a chance to help India’s forgotten people. She wanted to build monuments to her heroes, memorials that would swallow up acres of this ancient city. Eventually, she got all that.

SEVENTY YEARS ago, Marian Anderson would not have imagined there would be a Black First Family in the Whitehouse. Then, although she could and did sing for “the crowned heads of Europe”, she wasn’t permitted to perform in many American venues because she was black.

It was the efforts of and Eleanor Roosevelt (and Franklin D. Roosevelt) that saw Anderson perform an open-air concert on Easter Sunday, 1939 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. to a crowd of more than 75,000 people and a radio audience in the millions.

In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused permission for Anderson to sing to an integrated audience in Constitution Hall. Washington, D.C. at the time was a segregated city and when black artists would perform at Constitution Hall, black patrons were upset that black artists could be onstage, but black patrons had to sit it the back. The DAR has never been a political organization, and to avoid this conflict, declined to schedule black artists.

FOR THOSE of us who are fundamentally challenged in our decision-making capabilities, Flickr Co-founder Caterina Fake (and she is anything but) is coming to our rescue. Again. In fewer than 10 questions this cool little tool will make up your mind for you.

Does this mean that one day we will have devolved to the point of being unable to make even basic decisions? Or will this tool teach us how to think more effectively about how to make decisions?

Personally, I think it depends on what kind of a mind you have to start with — if you want to hand power over to others (people or machines), you will. If you constantly look at ways of optimizing things that suck up your time, when you’d rather they didn’t, then you’ll learn the tricks of the optimizing trade.

We can’t blame the tool for the actions of the user.

TODAY IS Ada Lovelace day. Today, 1,980 people pledged to write a blog post about Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, Byron’s daughter and the first recorded programmer, known simply as Ada Lovelace.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day. This is a truly magnificent enterprise, organised by Suw Charman-Anderson, in which more than 1,000 people have signed up to write a blog post about a woman in technology whom they admire. Suw [Charman-Anderson] was inspired to found Ada Lovelace Day after hearing female friends in technology say that they felt disempowered and invisible.

Ada Lovelace herself is widely recognised as the world’s first computer programmer; born in 1815, her friendship with Charles Babbage and her understanding of his difference engine and analytical engine have given her a lasting legacy.

From the Guardian technology blog

THE FIRST woman in the United States to be awarded a PhD in Computer Science — from Stanford University in 1968 — Barbara Liskov was awarded the coveted Turing Award on Tuesday, and with it $250,000. She is the second woman to receive the prize.

“It’s a great honor; it’s very exciting,” Liskov said. “It recognizes my contributions and their importance to the field.” Professor Liskov will be presented with the award in June.

Liskov’s most significant impact stems from her influential contributions to the use of data abstraction, a valuable method for organizing complex programs. [...]

Her most recent research focuses on techniques that enable a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of some of its components. Her work on practical Byzantine fault tolerance demonstrated that there were more efficient ways of dealing with arbitrary (Byzantine) failures than had been previously known. [...]

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