"That lame duck status"

Oldish news, but what better time to contemplate this statement from Sara Palin:

"Many just accept that lame duck status, and they hit that road. They draw a paycheck. They kind of milk it. And I'm not going to put Alaskans through that."

And I'm not talking about her idiosyncratic use of demonstrative pronouns, either.

Many governors with two years to go don't abandon their states. Even if they've decided not to run again, they continue to do the job they were elected for instead of quitting half-way. Why, some of them even embrace "that lame duck status" and use the freedom of not running again to accomplish things they couldn't, wouldn't even dream of accomplishing, with one eye on the next election campaign.

But then, some governors actually care about their states.

Which is Rat's?

In today's Pearls Before Swine, the rat challenges the pig to guess which quote is his:



Are you guessing the second one? Well, the first is from Epicurus. But the second one isn't Rat's, either; it belongs to Leo Getz, Joe Pesci's character in Lethal Weapon 2. Oh, that Rat!

Carnival of the Liberals

The Independence Day edition of the Carnival of the Liberals is up at Submitted to a Candid World

Happy Fourth of July!

Happy Fourth of July!

the two words

I had to changed my LJ password today in order to leave a comment somewhere (obnoxious sites, those that demand you have some sort of master account somewhere - I only have an LJ account so I can comment a few places...). Anyway, I was presented with this:


The "two" words?

I put in all four.

Ah, youth!

This bird was photographed in College Park, Maryland, on June 24. You will be stunned to learn that I figured out what it is. Too bad the book I've got doesn't show juvenile plumage - but the Internet does, if you can begin to guess. Since this was robin-sized, roughly, and acting like a robin, I looked up juvenile robin - and bingo! What a remarkable difference between this guy and his parents... You can certainly tell they're thrushes, though, with the eye-stripe and speckled breast.

Sky Watch: Fourth of July Sky

Well, Sky for the Fourth, anyway... actually it's a June sky. But gorgeous, I think.



more Sky Watchers here

A marriage made in heaven

There's been a lot of talk around the science blogs (again) about accommodation - science and religion getting along with each other. Over at the always excellent Jesus and Mo, Moses has the solution:

Chickadee on a feeder

My father's neighbors have a feeder in the back yard and Monday there was a chickadee on it. I love these little guys!

pretty brown bird

Here's a pretty brown bird. I'm not quite sure what it is (I know... I don't know too many of them!) - I thought when I snapped it it was the phoebe, but the eyestripe says no, and it's too brown, too.

Senator Franken Through the Eyes of Fox et al.

Over at Talking Points Memo is a nice round-up of the Murdoch press's reaction to Al Franken's victory.

Here's a fun dose of schadenfreude.

Sen.-elect Al Franken's (D-MN) long-awaited victory in the 2008 Minnesota Senate race seems to have caused quite a lot of stress in the Murdoch-owned press. Remember, this is the same corporation that sued him for his Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them book back in 2003, with the unintended consequence of giving him tons of free publicity to sell books -- and elevating him into being a hero of liberal activists, without which he might never have become a politician!

See Glen Beck be "quite alarmed"! See Brian Kilmeade be "very upset"! Read about the Wall Street Journal's essay "that is so full of factual errors and distortions about what happened, it can drive you nuts if you'd spent countless hours following all the gritty details like [Eric] did".

Go on ... you know you want to.

Happy Birthday, Thurgood

Today is the birthday of Thurgood Marshall, one of the seminal civil rights figures of this country. As Juan Williams shows in his biography, American Revolution,

as a lawyer, he "won Supreme Court victories breaking the color line in housing, transportation and voting, all of which overturned the 'Separate-but-Equal' apartheid of American life in the first half of the century. It was Marshall who won the most important legal case of the century, Brown v. Board of Education, ending the legal separation of black and white children in public schools... Marshall, as the nation's first African-American Supreme Court justice, who promoted affirmative action -- preferences, set-asides and other race conscious policies -- as the remedy for the damage remaining from the nation's history of slavery and racial bias. Justice Marshall gave a clear signal that while legal discrimination had ended, there was more to be done to advance educational opportunity for people who had been locked out and to bridge the wide canyon of economic inequity between blacks and whites."

After some of the more recent Supreme Court decisions, Marshall is missed more than ever...

Happy Birthday, Thomas

Thomas Cranmer, born this day 1489, true architect of the Anglican service - author of the Book of the Common Prayer.

Even a freethinker can admire his genius...

...and hold up his death as a horrible example what happens when religious affiliation is a political weapon.



Admire Cranmer!
Stevie Smith

Admire the old man, admire him, admire him,
Mocked by the priests of Mary Tudor, given to the flames,
Flinching and overcoming the flinching, Cranmer.

Admire the martyrs of Bloody Mary's reign
In the shocking arithmetic of cruel average, ninety
A year, three-hundred; admire them.

But still I cry: Admire the Archbishop,
The old man, the scholar, admire him.
Not simply, for flinching and overcoming simply,
But for his genius, admire him,
His delicate feelings of genius, admire him,

That wrote the Prayer Book
(Admire him!)
And made the flames burn crueller. Admire Cranmer!

Territorial

Mockingbirds have a remarkable territorial display. They find someplace tall, and they sing, dozens of calls - and then they leap. And repeat...

Mockingbird in flight

(I'm surprised Deborah didn't point out the picture wasn't a mockingbird! Updated to have the right picture...)

Happy Birthday, Ray!

Over at Skulls in the Stars I learn that this is Ray Harryhausen's birthday.

His movies were technical marvels of storytelling wonder. It Came From Beneath the Sea, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Clash of the Titans, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, and even The Valley of Gwangi: maybe they didn't always make sense, but they made you watch and say "oooooo". What more can we ask?

Wacky bird behavior

This little brown bird (I'm not sure what it is, either! not a sparrow anyway) sat briefly on the railing of the deck, then abruptly hurled itself onto the deck and lay there, spread-eagled and unmoving. It stayed there long enough for me to fetch my camera and take a couple of shots (the camera focused on the rail, not the bird, unfortunately) and then just as abruptly leapt up and flew away.

I have no idea what that was about.

Happy Birthday, John

Today John Gay was born in Barnstaple, England, in 1685 - he wrote The Beggar's Opera. Although its sequel, Polly, was banned by then Prime Minister Walpole from being performed, sales of it made Gay rich. Unfortunately he then lost everything in the South Seas Bubble. He died in 1732 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His epitaph, written by Alexander Pope, is followed by two lines that Gay himself composed: "Life is a jest, and all things show it. I thought so once, and now I know it."

LOVE in her eyes sits playing,
And sheds delicious death;
Love in her lips is straying,
And warbling in her breath;
Love on her breast sits panting,
And swells with soft desire:
Nor grace, nor charm, is wanting
To set the heart on fire.

Redwing Courtship

This lovely pair of redwinged blackbirds lives in the little park near my work building in College Park.

Mystery Bird Phoebe!

The East is full of mystery ... East Tennessee, that is. First the tree, and now a bird. Two birds - a pair, probably. They're smallish - a little bigger than a sparrow. My father says they - or one of them - repeatedly tried to fly through the window back when his Easter cactus was blooming. Now they just flit around and perch on rails and branches. They aren't in the bird book... Any ideas?

update: Deborah says Eastern Phoebe - and I'm pretty sure I heard one this morning. And yes, looking in the bird guide, that's what it looks like. Except the guide has the phoebe in with the green birds. I would never (did never) think of looking under green for this one!

Thanks, Deborah!

Mystery Tree

Anybody out there have any idea what kind of tree this is? Several years ago I noticed them growing along the Pellissipi Parkway, but no one I've asked has any idea what they are - something not native to East Tennessee, apparently. Recently my brother spotted these specific trees in the Cedar Bluff area of Knoxville, the only place either of us has seen them. The tree id sites don't have it (clearly it's not common), and it's driving us crazy!

updated: I should point out the size of it - Those are telephone wires in the foreground and the tree is pretty far back from them. It's at least thirty feet tall.

updated again: My brother thinks it's Ailanthus altissima (tree of heaven). Looking at the pictures in WikimediaCommons, especially this one, I think he's right...

Melancholy anniversary

My mother died three years ago. This picture was taken on her 50th wedding anniversary, eight years before her death. The other one is her in Alaska, on a cruise to look at glaciers.

I miss her.

Happy Birthday, Antoine

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,

author of The Little Prince,

was born today in 1900

Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• ERV at her self-named blog (or is she the eponymous ERV?) blogs on unbalanced bird ovaries and RNA: Weird science fact of the day Girl birds only have a left ovary. The right one kinda develops, and then regresses. Left ovary is the only one that works. All birds. Wait... what? What the hell? What kind of evolutionary weirdness led to this absurdity? I bet you guessed an ERV is involved :D


• Frank at The Sciencepunk Blog posts a video telling us that the world won't end in 2012: I quite like this science smackdown from astrophysicist Neil deGrasse. The world needs more robust, funny, scientists on TV.


• Over at Skulls in the Stars is a defense of 'dull' scientists: The article suggests that modern scientists are appreciably less intelligent — “dull” — than their predecessors, producing only mediocre and “incremental” science. The reason for this, Charlton suggests, is that the lengthy educational process required to become a research scientist deters smart and creative people from pursuing the career and instead encourages people who are not easily deterred (”conscientious”) and who tend not to make waves (”agreeable”). Since, the argument goes, creative people is opposed to agreeableness, the educational system churns out people who just want to get along and don’t want to do good science. Chad already did a nice job pointing out that, in physics at least, there are plenty of genius scientists who were also very easy to get along with. I thought I’d start by taking a stab at criticizing the central thesis of the article: modern scientists are “dull”. (And don't miss Chad's post at Uncertain Principles, mentioned above, either.)


• Revere at Effect Measure wonders what killed people in the 1918 flu epidemic: A curious paper on the 1918 flu pandemic appeared this month in CDC's journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases. It seemed provocative, at least on the surface. It claimed that the conventional wisdom underlying pandemic flu preparations was wrong. It's not the flu virus we should be defending ourselves against but the common bugs of the upper respiratory tract that take advantage of new fertile ground to grow in after the flu virus invades.


• Phil at Bad Astronomy dissects a photo from the ISS: Oh how I love this picture.Of course I love shots of the Moon, but this speaks volumes. Note the Earth just below the Moon; the ISS was seeing the Moon through the top of Earth’s atmosphere. As you may know, light bends when it passes from one medium to another, like from water to air, which is why a spoon in a glass looks bent. The same is true when light passes from a vacuum through air; it bends. In fact, the amount the light bends depends on the angle it intercepts the boundary; so that light coming in from one direction may get bent more than if it comes in from another.

Enjoy!

Star Trek - the Ebert version

ps - What is it with Ebert?

"The logic is also a little puzzling when Scotty can beam people into another ship in outer space, but they have to physically parachute to land on a platform in the air from which the Romulans are drilling a hole to the Earth’s core."

Didn't he pay attention? A) Scotty hadn't figured out how to do that yet - in fact, he wasn't even there yet, and B) while the drill was operating no one could transport anywhere. That was like a major plot point, and a set-up for the end.

And then there's this:

Young Spock is deliberately taunted in hopes he will, as a Vulcan, betray emotion. Because Zachary Quinto plays him as a bit of a self-righteous prig, it’s satisfying to see him lose it. ....Chris Pine, as James Tiberius Kirk, appears first as a hot-rodding rebel who has found a Corvette in the 23rd century and drives it into the Grand Canyon. A few years after he’s put on suspension by the Academy and smuggled on board the Enterprise by Bones McCoy Karl Urban), he becomes the ship’s captain.

Ummm. No. Again, wasn't he paying attention? In order: Quinto wasn't the "young Spock" - that was Jacob Kogan. It wasn't Pine playing the Kirk who deliberately destroyed his step-father's car - and if people can have classic cars now, why not in the 23rd century? - that was Jimmy Bennet. And he becomes the ship's captain probably only days after being put on suspension. That was years after he crashed the car, but that's not what Ebert wrote.

He also complains about warp drive:

This method of transportation prevents any sense of wonder at the immensity of outer space and is a convenience not only for the starship but also for the screenwriters, who can push a button and zap to the next scene. The concept of using warp speed to escape the clutches of a black hole seems like a recycling of the ancient dilemma of the rock and the hard place. [Whatever that's supposed to mean, I add.] ... Consider, at light warp speeds, how imprecise it would be to say “At my command ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...” Between “2” and “1,” you could jump a million galaxies.

Look, light travels about 300,000 km/sec, which is around 186,411 miles. That's pretty fast, but not by galactic standards. In that 1 second, even at 10 times the speed of light, you'd go 2 million miles. Even at a thousand times the speed of light, that's 200 million miles. That's not "a million galaxies" by any stretch of the imagination - our galaxy is around 100,000 light-years in diameter, and one light-year is around 5,878,630,000,000 miles. Space is, as the Hitchhiker's Guide says, mind-boggingly big. Bigger than Ebert realizes. Too big to do stories in without that "convenience"...

But the worst thing is this:

Eric Bana’s Nero destroys whole planets on the basis of faulty intelligence, but the character is played straight and is effective.

No, no, and hell no. Nero destroys whole planets to prevent something from happening which hasn't happened yet; just because Pike tells him that he's in error, that Romulus hasn't been destroyed, doesn't mean that Nero actually is. And this was like the whole driver of the plot.

There's a reason I don't read him until after I've seen a movie!

The Week in Entertainment

Movie: Star Trek. Man, that was fun. They could make a movie with that cast every year and I'd watch it. Zach Quinto was wonderful, and the rest were great, too. Sure, they inherited and expanded on Roddenberry's complete lack of comprehension on how the military works ("We don't have a captain, and we don't have a first officer to replace him"? So, without a first officer the ship sits there helpless? I don't think so...), but that wasn't their fault. I loved the Uhura-Spock relationship, and can't help but wonder if this Spock will say, "I am, and pretty nearly always have been, your friend..." Bottom line? It was fun again. Night at the Museum 2: Not as good as the first one, but entertaining enough.

DVD: Some more Morse.

Read: Halfway through Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book, which I'm enjoying even though it's a bit (deliberately) confusing. I'd just about got it sorted that Galip's runaway wife Rüya and his cousin Celâl were half-brother and -sister, but Galip's just told the newspaper staff that they're step-siblings. Of couse, nearly everything Galip has told anyone about Rüya so far is a lie, so this probably is too...