July 25, 2005
Nice NYT article on the Millau Viaduct
Book (in French) Les Ponts, Le Diable et Le Viaduc" ("Bridges, the Devil and the Viaduct")
Murder runs in families
From the San Jose Mercury News a week ago.
I was a juror in the trial of Roy Garcia, Sr, about five years ago.
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Posted on Sun, Jul. 17, 2005 **
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Tangled web surrounds Gilroy death
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*By Scott Herhold*
*Mercury News*
In the superb Paul Haggis movie ''Crash,'' all our stereotypes are upended: The racist cop becomes a hero. The sensitive cop becomes a killer. The cranky district attorney's wife learns the meaning of friendship with a Mexican-American maid. Nobody is all good. Nobody is all bad.
I thought of that film as I researched the killing of 25-year-old Jeffrey Garner of Gilroy, who sheriff's deputies say was clubbed to death with a lead pipe two weeks ago by a friend, Rogelio ''Roy'' Garcia Jr.
Straightforward? Hardly. For starters, there's the paternal issue. Five years ago, Garcia's father, Rogelio ''Roy'' Garcia Sr., was convicted of murder in a celebrated case, the shooting of a female neighbor with whom he quarreled.
Then there was the victim, Garner, a man with both a police record and a conscience. Though he had problems with drugs and alcohol and brandishing a knife, he could rise to heroism. He once helped Gilroy police solve a triple homicide.
Finally, there's the girl, Lydia Mollett, 15, a one-time Garner girlfriend. The victim's family claims she lured him to his death. She told deputies Garner was beating her when Roy Garcia intervened.
*Alcohol and drugs*
Nobody is all good, nobody is all bad. One man is dead. A friend is in jail. An un-indicted co-conspirator, a wicked mix of methamphetamine and alcohol, sits silently on the side.
More than most killings, this one had a prologue. In November 1998, not too far from the finished barn where Jeff Garner died, the Garcia family's neighbor, Deborah Gregg, was shot to death as she was building a fence. Sheriff's deputies arrested Roy Garcia Sr., a carpet business owner who had quarreled with Gregg over property lines.
The senior Garcia is now serving a life sentence without possibility of parole. His case is being appealed to the California Supreme Court on an odd issue in keeping with this odd saga: whether the judge erred in taking a deliberating jury back to the crime scene without the lawyers.
I couldn't reach the Garcia family to ask the key question: How did the fate of his father influence Roy Garcia Jr.? Court records show the younger Garcia, 25, had his own brushes with the law, violating a restraining order to keep away from his mother. Did the father's murder arrest somehow foreshadow his son's? It remains unclear.
Sheriff's investigators say Roy and his younger brother picked up Lydia and Jeff that Saturday, July 2, and -- after a stop at Taco Bell -- drove to the Garcia barn on Duke Drive.
*A quarrel erupts*
According to what Lydia later told investigators, everyone in the barn that evening smoked meth. And Jeff, Lydia and Roy drank Campari. So it wasn't surprising that Lydia and Jeff quarreled: Their friends say she could make him violently jealous.
The most reliable witness that night was a young man named Hasan Qaddura, who says he neither smoked meth nor drank. Hasan told deputies that Lydia and Jeff went into a bedroom, where they began to fight.
When a choking noise came from the room, Hasan said, Roy got a ''crazed'' look in his face and grabbed a 3 1/2-foot-long lead pipe. Hasan told deputies that Roy barged into the bedroom and struck Jeff from behind on the head, adding two more blows after Jeff collapsed. Lydia, he said, told Roy, ''Thank you.''
The circumstances might offer a Good Samaritan defense. But both Roy and Lydia initially told stories to investigators that didn't square with Jeff's injuries. ''If it was done in defense, why did he hit him from behind?'' asks Jeff's sister, Angela.
Jeff Garner had his own sadly prophetic prologue. Four years ago, he wrote a judge, ''I am sorry for my mistakes. I feel like I have been a failure all of my life at nearly everything I have done, and without change, I surely will not survive.''
From "Fingertips store personal information"
via laputan logic, at physicsweb:
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Secure optical data storage could soon literally be at your fingertips thanks to work being carried out in Japan. Yoshio Hayasaki of Tokushima University and colleagues have discovered that data can be written into a human fingernail by irradiating it with femtosecond laser pulses. Capacities are said to be up to 5 mega bits and the stored data lasts for 6 months -- the length of time it takes a fingernail to be completely replaced (Optics Express 13 4560).
"I don't like carrying around a large number of cards, money and papers," says Hayasaki. "I think that a key application will be personal authentication. Data stored in a fingernail can be used with biometrics, such as fingerprint authentication and intravenous authentication of the finger...."
The Zohar: Pritzker Edition
Ever since it emerged mysteriously in Castile, Spain toward the end of the 13th century, the Zohar has enthralled, confounded, challenged, and enraptured readers. Composed mostly in lyrical Aramaic, the Zohar is a mosaic of Bible, medieval homily, spiritual fantasy, and imaginative commentary, or midrash, on the Torah written in the form of a mystical novel. In it a group of rabbis wander through the hills of Galilee, discovering and sharing secrets of Torah: at times they interpret the actions of biblical figures, and at other times, they take center stage themselves through their adventures on the road and their encounters with various astonishing characters...
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