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! possibly the phoebe) 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...

Msing the Point

Bought tickets online for a movie tonight in my home town. The theater is kind of missing the point of "Ms":

Sheesh. We get it. You're too cool to care

Okay. I've officially had it.

This is the latest example...

Bob Parks writes in What's New (well, it's in the newsletter, but that's still last week's on the website - maybe he'll get it up later today):

4. DEATH: MYSTERIOUS INTERNATIONAL NEWS BLACKOUT.As I have done every Friday morning for 25 years, I arose at 5 AM this morning to scan newspapers and television channels to find out what was happening in my world that I should be aware of in composing WN. Alas, there was no news on television. ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN were all dolefully mourning Michael Jackson's unexpected death. Damn! It was international; even BBC and Al Jazeera. They said he was a singer, but I don't recall ever hearing him sing.

Look. I'm not saying you have to like Michael Jackson. I'm not even saying his death should have been the main headline, or that it should have had three-quarters of the Post's front page, or that even in the doldrums of summer programming he and Farrah Fawcett between them deserved every minute of ABC's prime time last night.

But what's the point in pretending you never heard him sing, or don't know who he is? As I tell a friend of mine who claimed (while living in Alexandria) not to know what the Washington Redskins even are: if you're that detached from the culture you live in, why should I trust your perceptions of reality?

Find some other way to indicate your lofty, above-it-all status. KTHXBAI

Vacation!

By the way, I'm on vacation. Updating may be somewhat sporadic (as you can tell, it's been that way for a while: May especially, but April and June too were hectic...)

Happy Birthday, Krzysztof

Krzysztof Kieślowski was born today in Warsaw, in 1941. He wanted to direct in the theatre but there wasn't room at school, so he went into film as an intermidate step. Of course, he never went "further", but what an intermediate! The Decalogue and Three Colors are world-famous, and rightly so...

His grave in Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw bears the classic 'framing hands' - the view through which he showed us so much.

Happy Birthday, Walter

Born today in Syracuse, New York, in 1916, Walter Farley ... Wow. That name brings back a lot of memories. In elementary school and junior high I read a lot of his books. The Black Stallion of course, and its sequels about him and his offspring - I still remember the one where Alec gets involved in harness racing and everything he "knows" is wrong - and The Island Stallion, and the long awaited match-up of The Black and Flame...

Put GrrlScientist on Ice

GrrlScientist of Living the Scientific Life wants to go to Antartica - and you can help! Quark Expeditions is sponsoring a contest to send a blogger there for a month. Head over and vote for Grrl, why don't you?

Sky Watch: The Oncoming Storm

Even when there was blue sky the last couple of weeks, it didn't last. Here, a storm moves in from the northwest...



more Sky Watchers here

Happy Birthday, George

Born today in 1903, Orwell wrote Animal Farm and 1984 from his experiences in Spain with Stalinism - which taught him that any idealism carried too far became corrupt.

The Orwell Prize is putting his diary on line - day by day. Since he's been back from Morocco, it's mostly about the countryside and how many eggs his hens are laying, but it's June 1939... things are bound to get more exciting.

Appalachians, Argentina ...

You know that Solstice post I made a couple of days ago? In Argentina, it's mid-winter.

Mark Sanford went to a city of 15 million people with a 2-mile coastline to "be alone" and to "drive along the coast"? Okay, those people probably didn't recognize him, and I guess he could have driven up and down... but somehow, I don't think this story's any truer than that whole "hiking the Appalachian Trail" thing was.

Could you make up a GOP more inept and self-destructing than this one?

Update 4:29 p.m.: So, actually he went there to break up with his mistress. That's more credible ... though not better news for the GOP.

Though Fox has a solution for that:



(hat tip TPM and Media Matters)

Reich on the public option

Check out Robert Reich's explanation of the need for a public option in health care reform. As always, it's cogent and clear.

update: Paul Krugman agrees.

Happy Birthday, Ambrose

Ambrose Bierce, born this day in 1842.

He left us

An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge,

The Devil's Dictionary,

an opinionated style manual called Write it Right which is more fun than Strunk's "horrid little book",

several fantastic short stories,

and the abiding legacy of a mysterious disappearance...

(Are you still out there, somewhere, Old Gringo?)

"a situation"

I ride the DC Metro to work - the Green Line. This morning they were making a repeated announcement (6:55 a.m. at Greenbelt). "Red Line service has been disrupted due to a situation outside the Fort Totten Station. There are no trains running between Rhode Island Avenue and Silver Spring. Shuttle buses have been provided" and they named all the stations "but customers should add an hour to their commute time."

Two things struck me about that. First, that about how much longer it will take to get to Silver Spring today. Yes, you need to know that, but if I had been going there, finding out as I stand on the platform at Greenbelt wouldn't really help me: I wouldn't have left an hour earlier. Of course, this is all they can do. I mean, I imagine the commuter news and radio were warning people of major delays on the Red Line, but not everyone listens to those - and yet, what's the alternative? Metro doesn't exactly have the phone number of every one of the thousands that ride the Red Line... It was unavoidable, but (as it always does when I hear those announcements) it was also too late.

The other was the phrase "due to a situation". Situation. As the guy standing next to me observed, that's a helluvan understatement.

And yet, I can't imagine what else they could have said. "Due to the catastrophic accident outside Fort Totten last night"? "Until we can get the rails clear of the twisted wreckage of two trains"? Most of us already knew what had happened last night - well, yeterday, 5-ish, height of evening rush - at least in the broadest strokes. One train hit another, hard enough to ride up over the standing train. Fifty people people injured, sixty - seventy. Six dead - no, I heard nine... Metro's worst crash (though to put that in perspective, it's only the second with a fatality). Those who didn't - tourists (assuming any of them are up at 6:55) might not, or people who don't watch the news or look at their free Metro paper until they're on board - wouldn't have been in any way reassured to hear it. So I'm not sure what they could have said besides "situation"...

I'll add that there weren't noticeably fewer people there this morning. I had thought there might be. But I guess it'll take more than one such crash to keep people off the trains - more people die on the roads every year by a factor of four just in the District, but people keep on driving.

Happy Birthday, Joss

Joss Whedon was born today in New York City in 1964.

Buffy, Angel, Firefly & Serenity the movie ... even Dollhouse. And not forgetting Dr Horrible! Wonderful, wonderful stories.

Many happy returns of the day, Joss!

Happy Birthday, Alan

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS, was born today in Maida Vale, London, in 1912. Every person reading this owes a debt to Turing. As Time put it, naming Turing one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century: "The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine."

Turing was also an important figure at Bletchley Park, Britain's WWII code-breaking center, and was for a time head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. (If this interests you, check the National Cryptologic Museum's working Enigma the next time you're in the DC area.)

Turing was also gay, living in an era when homosexuality was still both illegal and officially considered a mental illness. After he was outed (in the course of an investigation into his house's being burgled), he was criminally prosecuted - on the same charge as Oscar Wilde had been - and this ended his career, and his life. Offered the choice between prison and probation plus chemical castration, he opted for the latter, but his clearance had been revoked. The next year he died from what was officially declared self-induced cyanide poisoning.

Here's a website maintained by his biographer, Andrew Hodges.

Happy Birthday, Anna

Anna Akhmatova (Анна Ахматова) was born today in 1889 in Odesa, Ukraine. That was her pen name; she was born Anna Andreevna Gorenko (Russian: Анна Андреевна Горенко; Ukrainian: Ганна Андріївна Горенко). She wrote under her grandfather's Tatar surname because her father didn't wish her to embarrass him by publishing verse using the family's honorable name...

One of Russia's greatest poets. Once, long years ago (1974 in fact), one of my Russian professors (Russian by birth) was talking about gendered nouns to a first-year class. One of his examples of professions: поэт and поэтесса (poet and poetess). All women were "poetesses", not poets, he said, and something in the way he said it evoked Victorians and their "lady authoresses". So I asked him, Even Akhmatova?

And he said: Аг! Ахматова! Она настоящий поэт! (Ah, Akhmatova! She is a genuine poet!)

Подушка уже горяча
С обеих сторон.
Вот и вторая свеча
Гаснет, и крик ворон
Становится все слышней.
Я эту ночь не спала,
Поздно думать о сне...
Как нестерпимо бела
Штора на белом окне.
Здравствуй!

And as translated by Andrey Kneller:

The pillow is already hot
On both its sides.
The second candle’s at
Its end, and ravens’ cries
Are now resounding near.
I didn’t sleep this night,
Too late for sleep I fear,
Oh, how unbearably white
Is this curtain here.
Welcome!

Find her in Russian and English here. And her Poets.org page.
And her Requiem in Russian and English.

Congrats, Lucas!

The USGA release puts it like this:

Lucas Glover is the 2009 U.S. Open champion, overcoming a week of challenging weather and outlasting a host of contenders in a thrilling Monday finish at Bethpage State Park's Black Course. Glover shot a final-round 73 to finish at 4-under-par 276, two strokes ahead of Phil Mickelson, David Duval and Ricky Barnes.

The 29-year-old native of Greenville, S.C., played collegiate golf at Clemson and turned professional after competing in the 2001 U.S. Amateur. He has one victory in five seasons on the PGA Tour victory, the 2005 Funai Classic at Walt Disney World Resort, and played on the 2001 Walker Cup and 2007 Presidents Cup teams. Glover, who had not made the cut in three previous U.S. Opens (2002, 2006, 2007), earned a place in the final field of the 2009 U.S. Open through sectional qualifying.

Note well that last sentence ... People around the country are saying "Lucas WHO?"

Bethpage Black is a bear of a course (my father played it once and stopped even keeping track of his score; he said he often couldn't even reach the fairway) and the weekend's weather was more than just "challenging". Having to play the final round on Monday - that doesn't happen very often. (A Monday final round and Tiger out of it: you know the tv people were cursing...) For Glover to overcome all that is a triumph indeed.

Monday Science Links

This week's Science!

• Erik at Eruptions tells about Sarychev Peak: The eruption as Sarychev Peak seems to be waning a bit, at least according to some of the latest images from the NASA Earth Observatory's collection of MODIS shots. The ash plume is less prominent - and strikingly more grey than before, possibly if it contains a higher proportion of water vapor than the earlier plumes. However, it isn't these brand new shots that captured my attention but rather one of the possibly most stunning volcano images I've seen in years (above). This captures Sarychev Peak as a rare clear view appeared to the volcano through the clouds and we can see the ash column and pyroclastic flows moving down the flanks of the volcano. The image was taken from the ISS by one of the astronauts currently on the station and really, I am almost at a loss for words about how amazing this picture is.


• Over at Skulls in the Stars is a post about cloaking devices: When the first papers on the idea of a “cloaking” device came out in 2006, lots of people were immediately worried that the CIA would soon be peering right over their shoulder from the shelter of invisibility cloaks. Many scientists, including myself, pointed out the flaw in that reasoning: a “perfect” cloak would direct all light around the outside of the cloak. This meant that, although the spy couldn’t be seen in the cloak, he couldn’t see anything from inside! A recent paper in Physical Review Letters, however, suggests that this “mutual invisibility” can be overcome. The research described suggests that a different type of cloaking device could be used to enclose a sensing device, and that the sensor would not only be (almost) invisible, but it would be able to detect radiation just as well as when outside the cloak! The research is intriguing (though it still won’t help the CIA quite yet), and it illustrates a different, earlier, technique for making something “not be seen”.


• PZ over at Pharyngula posts on bird fingers: My previous repost was made to give the background on a recent discovery of Jurassic ceratosaur, Limusaurus inextricabilis, and what it tells us about digit evolution. Here's Limusaurus—beautiful little beastie, isn't it? What's especially interesting about it is that it catches an evolutionary hypothesis in the act, and is another genuine transitional fossil. The hypothesis is about how fingers were modified over time to produce the patterns we see in dinosaurs and birds. Birds have greatly reduced digits, but when we examine them embryologically, we can see precisely what has happened: they've lost the outermost digits, the thumb (I) and pinky (V), and retain the forefinger, middle finger, and ring finger (II-IV), which have been reduced and fused together. This is called Bilateral Digit Reduction, BDR, because they've lost digits from the medial and lateral sides, leaving the middle set intact.


• John Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts posts on news on apes and evolution: So there are a couple of interesting developments about fossil apes. One is the retraction by the author of the claim 14 years ago to have found a jaw bone that was evidence of Homo habilis, a precursor species (arguably) of H erectus, in a recent Nature. Previously he and his coauthor had claimed that erectus may have evolved in Asia and then returned back to Africa. On a re-examination of the evidence, Russell Ciochon now thinks that there is a “mystery ape”, around chimpanzee size, in the Asian forests, a possible precursor to orangutans. In the light of Homo floresiensis in the Indonesian Archipelago, however, it is clear that there had to be another hominid in South East Asia apart from erectus, as it is not likely to have evolved from an erectus precursor. If I recall a talk given by Colin Groves, of the ANU, he thinks that it is likely to have been a descendent of H habilis. So what is going on around 4-1 million years ago in Asia? There has long been a debate over two competing hypotheses: the Out of Africa hypothesis, and the Multiregional Hypothesis, for H sapiens, but this is independent of sapiens‘ evolution.


• Ethan at Starts With A Bang posts on the Herschel telescope's first picture: First light is one of the most important tests of any new telescope. It allows you to look at a well-known object, see if there are any problems with your telescope, and to get a small glimpse of how good your telescope is going to be.

Enjoy!

The Week in Entertainment

Film: Okuribito (Departures). It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film this year, and despite the grumblings of AO Scott it deserved to. It's the best movie I've seen in years. I laughed and I cried - really. I can't remember the last time a movie made me cry several times when it wasn't a dog dying (yes, Marley: you cheated). A very Japanese movie, about a very Japanese thing - a ceremony for preparing the dead for cremation - that reaches across cultural boundaries to touch anyone who has ever lost a loved one. This movie is brilliant.

DVD: I got the complete Morse and have begun watching them. I've only seen a comparative handful, actually... episode 1 was weird. Morse was ... happy and even flirty. How odd. (Also odd: Patrick Troughton as a peeping tom!) And oh my, Lewis is young! This program holds up well - a bit of oddities (where are the cell phones??) but the plotting and acting is still good.

Read: Finished The Fortress of Solitude. I think the first half is better than the second, but the second is - taken as a second half - still excellent. The thing with this book is, it's not about what you think it's about, but when you finish it, you see that what it is about was the right thing for it to be about... I prefer Motherless Brooklyn and Gun With Occasional Music, but this one's definitely worth reading.

My Cyborg Name

It's interesting, isn't it, how different the emphasis is here!

Get Your Cyborg Name

or, possibly,

Get Your Cyborg Name

Hat tip Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts

Happy Solstice!

It's the Solstice! Summer solstice here in the northern hemisphere - nearly Midsummer Day - and winter solstice in the southern, nearly midwinter.

(That's last year's picture; it's gray here again...)

Longest day or longest night: may it find - and leave - you happy.

Happy Birthday, Billy

Billy Wilder was born today in Sucha (now Poland, then Austria) in 1906. It always - always - startles me to hear him speak. He gave us the incomparable Some Like It Hot... which alone would have been enough. But of course it isn't alone - there are also Sabrina, Stalag 17, Lost Weekend, Witness for the Prosecution, Sunset Boulevard... Thanks!

Dove's Nest

Here's a mourning dove nesting in a cherry tree.

This seems a precarious place to put a nest you're going to sit on for two weeks, and then spend another two weeks feeding two nestlings. They must be quiet.

The Cornell Lab website says they are "unbothered by nesting near humans" - I should say so.

Happy Birthday, Blaise

Today in 1623 Blaise Pascal was born in Clermont, France. He was a mathematician and physicist, and made a lot of contributions to both areas of study, especially in probability theory. He had some kind of mystical experience at the age of thirty, and spent the next nine years - the last of his short life - attempting to convert skeptics to Christianity. He's the author of a much-quoted gambit that bears his name, Pascal's wager, which essentially says that if there is no god, you lose nothing by believing, but if there is, you lose all by not. (The wager is, of course, fatally flawed in several places, but you still hear it...)

But he also said, "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."

Happy Birthday, Salman!

Today is the birthday of Salman Rushdie, born in Bombay (now Mumbai). His novel Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize. His novel The Satanic Verses won him a death sentence from the Ayatollah Khomeini (which was revoked in 1998) - and got his Japanese translator killed, his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher wounded, and the hotel of his Turkish translator set on fire - a fire which killed forty others staying there. Then his knighting the year before last brought the crazies out again (and yes, they're crazies, those who claim killing the author is the only response to a book they don't like - you didn't see any Christians calling for the death of Robert Graves or rioting over The Last Temptation of Christ, blasphemous though those may have been. Even those protesting DaVinci Code restricted themselves to saying "Don't watch this blasphemous film!", not "Kill Tom Hanks!").

So another birthday arrives for Salman Rushdie, who still writes: last year he published The Enchantress of Florence.

May he enjoy many more.

Sky Watch: Gray Morning White Sun

A wet and gray week, but the sun still rises - even if we can but barely see it, a shining white disk in the clouds.






more Sky Watchers here

Happy Birthday, Ivan Aleskandrovich

Today in 1812, in Simbirsk (now called Ulyanovsk), Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov (Иван Александрович Гончаров) was born. He's best known for writing the classic novel Oblomov (Обломов). No other novel has been used to describe the "Russian mentality" or "Russian soul" as frequently as this one, first published in 1859 - by Russians as often as anyone else. You can find it in English here or in Russian here.

ps - the picture is a USSR 4 kopek stamp

"Looks like a news story" but isn't

And this is why Fox News is a fundamentally dishonest - not just bad-at-it - "news" organization:

Carter to Obama: Remove Hamas From Terror List

Former President Jimmy Carter says he will ask the Obama administration to remove the militant Palestinian group from the U.S.-designated terror list, just as Hamas says it foiled a bomb plot against Carter.

Pretty damning stuff, eh? Except ... as Fred over at Headsup: the blog notes, apparently it's just, well, made up. You can read the whole story and, well, the subject just doesn't come up again. The lede is

Former President Jimmy Carter will urge the Obama administration to remove Hamas from the terrorist list, FOX News has learned.

but buried down at the end is

Yousef responded to the online report telling WND he is not aware Carter will specifically make such a request.

He said, however, Carter communicated to Hamas that "one way or another" the Islamist group must do its best to meet the three conditions previously set out by the U.S. for the opening of dialogue.

(Yeah. That's World News Daily, there, that's Fox's source for a quote. And even they don't say what Fox's hed and lede said. As Fred puts it,

Here you've got yourself an exclusive about Barack Hussein Osama ruining the world again with the aid of the Only Worser President In History, and the only people who try to check it out are the ones who think the missing birth certificate is the story of the century, and they manage to knock a hole in your lede with one phone call.

As he sums it up:

What's genuinely interesting from the editor's perspective, again, is how much the thing looks like a news story -- until you go to the trouble of reading it... Just another reminder that we need to avoid confusing Fox with people who actually want you to learn stuff about the world. You know, people who actually report so you can actually decide.

Head over to Headsup and read his analysis of the whole "story"; you won't regret it.

Happy Birthday, MC!

Today in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, in 1898, M.C. (Maurits Cornelis) Escher was born. His works featuring regular divisions of planes (Symmetry) or impossible spaces are the most famous, but he also did wonderful realistic drawings as well. Here's one that sort of combines themes, "Snakes":



(official website with many, many more)

Okay ... looks like DHS was right

First, in April, Richard Poplawski, a budding white supremacist afraid for his guns, shoots three policemen in Pittsburgh.

Then in May, George Tiller was murdered while attending church services, apparently by a right wing anti-abortion zealot named Scott Roeder.

Then, in June, a white supremacist and Obama-birth-certificate-conspiracy theorist named James W. von Brunn entered the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with a shotgun and opened fire, killing one guard.

Now 'Minutemen' border patrollers assault a family, apparently in order to "kill the family, steal the money and take the drugs which would then be sold for more money. A fringe benefit, it seems, was that the mass murder could be pointed to as another example of mayhem on the border caused by an influx of illegals."

It's starting to look like that report the DHS put out, warning that right-wing abortion rights supporters, gun nuts, and white supremacists were dangerous, might have been right on the money.

Bet they're wishing they hadn't let themselves be cowed into apologizing for it.

But I doubt those like (of course) Michele Bachman, who did the screaming, are going to admit there might have been some truth to it...

Happy Birthday, Barbara

It's the birthday of one of the most distinguished scientists of the 20th century, Barbara McClintock, born in Hartford, Connecticut (1902). She grew up in the semi-rural Flatbush section of Brooklyn, and, growing up, she was much more interested in playing sports with the boys of her neighborhood than she was in studying.

Unfortunately, McClintock's mother refused to let her attend college. So McClintock got a job at an employment agency and spent all her free time at the library. Her parents eventually realized that she wasn't going to come to her senses and get married any time soon, so they relented and let her study biology at Cornell University.

She became interested in the study of maize, or Indian corn, because its multicolored kernels showed visible evidence of genetic changes from one generation to the next. She became one of the first scientists to show that the visible traits of a plant were directly linked to the structure of its chromosomes.

Despite her revolutionary work, Cornell would not give her a faculty appointment, because she was a woman. A friend eventually got her a permanent research position at another school, and she was elected president of the Genetics Society of America, but her research into genetics was so radical that it was ignored by other scientists. Nobody accepted her theories. She eventually stopped publishing her work altogether.

It wasn't until the 1970s that molecular biologists with more sophisticated tools began to prove that Barbara McClintock's theories about genetics were correct, and suddenly she was seen as a visionary. In 1983, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for the work that she had first published in 1951.

She said, "I know my corn plants intimately, and I find it a great pleasure to know them."
---
This is taken from The Writer's Alamanac

Happy Birthday, Issa

Today is the birthday of Kobayashi Issa, a master of haiku. He was born in Kashiwa- bara, Japan, in 1763.



One of his most well-known:

little snail
inch by inch, climb
Mount Fuji!

This is the one Issa wrote and illustrated, above:

niwa no chō
ko ga haeba tobi
haeba tobu

garden butterfly
as the baby crawls, it flies―
crawls close, flutters on

And a few more:

evening's fall colors--
the rainbow in the valley
fades away

the woodpecker returns
to the pine...
now I'm old

a cold moon
facing the cold
mountain temple

(more, and image from contemporary haiga)

Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• Mark Liberman at Language Log takes on the claim that Obama uses "I" too much by (gasp!) actually counting: The trouble with this idea, as often with the insights of the punditocracy, is that there's no evidence that it's true. Worse, evidence is easily available to disconfirm it. In yesterday's post ("Fact-checking George F. Will"), I counted, and discovered that in that "speech delivered last week" — the one about the auto bailout — President Obama used forms of the first-person pronoun at a rate of 1.7% (i.e. 42 instances in 2423 words). Compared to Obama's press conference of 2/9/2009 — before the 2/24/2009 date that Prof. Fish identifies as the pronominal turning-point — this is a lower rate, not a higher one: the 2/29/2009 press conference exhibited a rate of 2.6% (205 of 7,775).
  
• A nice piece in Scientific American online on the evolution (and taming) of the domestic cat: Scholars long believed that the ancient Egyptians were the first to keep cats as pets, starting around 3,600 years ago. But genetic and archaeological discoveries made over the past five years have revised this scenario—and have generated fresh insights into both the ancestry of the house cat and how its relationship with humans evolved.


• Stefan at Backreaction tells us that Betelgeuse is shrinking: This is news I can't let go uncommented, after all my recent posts about interferometry: In a recent Astrophysical Journal Letter, a team of astronomers lead by Charles H. Townes, Nobel laureate for his contribution to the development of the laser, report "A Systematic Change with Time in the Size of Betelgeuse". Betelgeuse, or α Orionis, is the bright red star in the shoulder of the constellation Orion. In 1921, Albert Michelson and Francis Pease succeeded in measuring its diameter as about 50 milliarcseconds (mas), using an interferometer mounted onto the main telescope of Mount Wilson observatory. This was the first time the diameter of a star could be measured. 50 milliarcseconds is a tiny angle, corresponding roughly to the apparent size of an object 100 metres big on the Moon. But given the distance to Betelgeuse, this means the star, when put in the place of the Sun, would fill the solar system up to the orbit of Jupiter.


• Erik at Eruptions looks at the possibility that Mt St Helens is becoming a supervolcano:There has been a lot of chatter in my inbox and on the comments here at Eruptions about the study/press release from Graham Hill's research group talking about the potential for a supervolcano forming at Mt. Saint Helens. This study (presented at the AGU Spring Meeting) was based on a magnetotelluric study of the area around (and below) Saint Helens. For those of you unfamiliar with magnetotellurics, it uses instruments that measure the magnetism and electrical conductivity of the earth to infer the composition of the crust. This is possible because different materials in different physical states have different magnetic properties and/or electrical conductivity. So, this study took magnetic field readings near the modern Saint Helens and interpreted it to try to determine the composition and state of the crust below the volcano. The authors of the paper write that the patterns of electrical conductivity under Saint Helens suggest a large volume of melt underneath the volcano, thus it has the potential to form a supervolcano. And that is where things might have gotten a little carried away.


• Phil at Bad Astronomy looks at Daphnis and what it does to Saturn's rings: The first thing you should know is that Saturn’s rings are incredibly flat. If you scaled them down to the size of a piece of paper, they’d actually be far thinner than a single sheet of that paper. In fact, even though they’re about 200,000 kilometers across, they are only at most a few dozen meters thick! But not everywhere. Daphnis is a teeny tiny moon, just 8 km (5 miles) across. It orbits Saturn inside the broad A ring, and it’s carved a gap in the rings called the Keeler Gap. The gap is about 45 km (25 miles) across. As it happens, Daphnis has an orbit that is not perfectly circular, so sometimes it’s in the middle of the gap, and sometimes near the inner edge. Not only that, but the orbit of the little moon is tipped a bit, so sometimes it’s a bit above the ring plane, sometimes a bit below. When it’s near the inner edge and also above the ring plane, it pulls the nearby ring particles up out of the ring plane with it. When it’s below the plane it pulls the particles down. When the elliptical motion of the moon is combined with the tilt, the gravitational interaction on the ring particles produces vertical ripples in the ring. These ripples have been predicted in the past, but now Cassini has clearly imaged them for the first time.

Enjoy!

The Week in Entertainment

Film: Goodbye, Solo - a very interesting movie by Ramin Bahrani, starring an almost effervescent Souleymane Sy Savane and Red West, wound tight and repressed ... one man rejoices in life no matter what - not because he doesn't understand but because he can't help it, because life is fundamentally about loving and helping; the other man ... to be honest, we never really know. We watch him, William, but we never learn about him. While Solo offers himself openly, William resists. Solo wants to help - just why maybe even he doesn't know - and William wants not to be helped. The movie is shot in Bahrani's not-quite native Winston-Salem (he grew up there) and the small-city ambience is as much a character as the men, or Solo's step-daughter (more so than his wife)... It's a brilliant movie, genuninely so.

TV: Primeval continues to be quite watchable, though the competing forces are a bit confusing. I have the series finale of Pushing Daisies on my DVR but am not quite ready to say goodbye to it...

Read: Finished Death With Interuptions by José Saramago, and it's excellent. Halfway through Fortress of Solitude, which is rather different from the other things by Lethem I've read, but it's well-written and very engaging.

Really?

"Poker has been called 'the gentleman's game'."

WTF?

Cricket, yes. Polo, certainly. Even golf.

But poker?

Game Show Network needs another way to imply that "it's no game for the ladies..."

Happy Birthday, William

Born today in 1865, in Dublin, Willam Butler Yeats.

An Old Song Resung

DOWN by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

A Coat

I MADE my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.

(more here)

Sky Watch: Fountains Abbey

A hot May afternoon, an achingly blue sky over a ruined abbey, and not a cloud in the sky anywhere... Not the way I picture England, I must say - but I'm glad it's the way England was.





more Sky Watchers here - and this week's host picture is truly gorgeous

Happy Birthday, Ben

Ben Jonson, born June 11 in 1573, a contemporary and in his day peer of Shakespeare and John Donne... An orphan, victim of religious persecution (his Protestant father was executed by Mary), a soldier for the Protestant cause in Holland and by all repute a formidable swordsman, a man of fiery temper who killed another playwright in a duel and nearly hanged for it (his dramatic genius was his salvation (the play Every Man In His Humor is said to have freed him)), who lost several children to childhood deaths (including the son he called 'his best piece of poetry'), an immensely popular poet and playwright who courted prison for his political views and yet was a poet at the Stuart court, who reigned supreme among English writers long after Shakespeare had died until his own death at the age of 64...

"Drink today, and drown all sorrow;
You shall perhaps not do it tomorrow;
Best, while you have it, use your breath;
There is no drinking after death."

The Triumph

SEE the Chariot at hand here of Love,
Wherein my Lady rideth!
Each that draws is a swan or a dove,
And well the car Love guideth.
As she goes, all hearts do duty
Unto her beauty;
And enamour'd do wish, so they might
But enjoy such a sight,
That they still were to run by her side,
Through swords, through seas, whither she would ride.

Do but look on her eyes, they do light
All that Love's world compriseth!
Do but look on her hair, it is bright
As Love's star when it riseth!
Do but mark, her forehead's smoother
Than words that soothe her;
And from her arch'd brows such a grace
Sheds itself through the face,
As alone there triumphs to the life
All the gain, all the good, of the elements' strife.

Have you seen but a bright lily grow
Before rude hands have touch'd it?
Have you mark'd but the fall of the snow
Before the soil hath smutch'd it?
Have you felt the wool of beaver,
Or swan's down ever?
Or have smelt o' the bud o' the brier,
Or the nard in the fire?
Or have tasted the bag of the bee?
O so white, O so soft, O so sweet is she!


(more here)

Storms

Weird weather today! The temperature has dropped almost twenty degrees F (10 C) in the last half-hour - from 83 to 65 (28 to 18). A major thunderstorm is passing through. We could see it coming on the way home from work, and as I walked across the quad the wind came up so strong the tree were leaning. Lightning was flashing - no thunder - but within five minutes the sky, which had been very painterly with silver clouds and shafts of sunlight, turned iron gray. Lightning continues, and thunder too. (12,000 already without power; fortunately here only my microwave clock needs resetting...) Rain is sheeting in hard from the northwest...

All in all, a typical summer afternoon in Maryland.

What wasn't typical was this morning. A thunderstorm worse than this one drove through at 6:30 am. AM.

That's just not right.

Happy Birthday, Cole

Today in 1891, in Peru, Indiana, Cole Porter was born.

Anything Fred Astaire sang by him is timeless - like Night and Day:

Like the beat beat beat of the tom-tom
When the jungle shadows fall
Like the tick tick tock of the stately clock
As it stands against the wall

Like the drip drip drip of the raindrops
When the summer shower is through
So a voice within me keeps repeating
You, you, you

Night and day, you are the one
Only you beneath the moon and under the sun
Whether near to me, or far
It's no matter darling where you are
I think of you night and day.

Day and night, why is it so
That this longing for you follows wherever I go
In the roaring traffic's boom
In the silence of my lonely room
I think of you
Night and day

Night and day, under the hide of me
There's an oh such a hungry yearning burning inside of me
And this torment won't be through
Till you let me spend my life making love to you
Day and night, night and day


I really enjoy Rod Stewart's cover of Every Time We Say Goodbye:

Every time we say goodbye, I die a little,
Every time we say goodbye, I wonder why a little:
Why the Gods above me, who must be in the know,
Think so little of me, they allow you to go.
When you're near, there's such an air of spring about it,
I can hear a lark somewhere begin to sing about it,
There's no love song finer,
But how strange the change from major to minor
Every time we say goodbye.

And I'm enormously fond of Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons' cover of (I've Got You) Under My Skin - if you haven't heard it, look it up and give it a listen.

I've got you under my skin.
I've got you deep in the heart of me.
So deep in my heart you're really a part of me.
I've got you under my skin.
I'd tried so not to give in.
I said to myself: this affair never will go so well.
But why should I try to resist when, darling, I know so well
I've got you under my skin?

I'd sacrifice anything come what might
For the sake of having you near
In spite of a warning voice that comes in the night
And repeats and repeats in my ear:
Don't you know, little fool, you never can win?
Use your mentality, wake up to reality.
But each time I do just the thought of you
Makes me stop before I begin
I've got you under my skin.

And Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong's cover of I Get A Kick (Out of You) is fabulous!

My story is much too sad to be told,
But practically everything leaves me totally cold.
The only exception I know is the case
When I'm out on a quiet spree
Fighting vainly the old ennui
And I suddenly turn and see
Your fabulous face.

I get no kick from champagne.
Mere alcohol doesn't thrill me at all,
So tell me why should it be true,
That I get a kick out of you?

Some get a kick from cocaine.
I'm sure that if I took even one sniff
That would bore me terrific'ly too
Yet I get a kick out of you.

I get a kick ev'ry time I see
You're standing there before me.
I get a kick though it's clear to me
You obviously don't adore me.

I get no kick in a plane.
Flying too high with some guy in the sky
Is my idea of nothing to do,
Yet I get a kick out of you.

One syllable...

Double Jeopardy. Category: Poetry in Early America. Clue: An anonymous poet addressed this man as "Great patron of the sailing crew / Who gav'st us weed to smoke and chew."

Contestant finally guessed "Scott - Scott??? - but it was Sir Walter Raleigh (of course).

Thing is - Alex pronounced "gav'st" with two syllables. "Gavest us weed..."

Alex ... that's why that apostrophe is there! To make it scan! One syllable, man...

(As Jonathan Swift griped, to no avail except losing the apostrophe:

There is another set of men who have contributed very much to the spoiling of the English tongue; I mean the poets from the time of the Restoration. These gentlemen, although they could not be insensible how much our language was already overstocked with monosyllables, yet, to save time and pains, introduced that barbarous custom of abbreviating words to fit them to the measure of their verses; and this they have frequently done so very injudiciously, as to form such harsh unharmonious sounds, that none but a northern ear could endure. They have joined the most obdurate consonants without one intervening vowel, only to shorten a syllable; and their taste in time became so depraved, that what was a first a poetical license not to be justified, they made their choice, alleging that the words pronounced at length sounded faint and languid. This was a pretence to take up the same custom in prose; so that most of the books we see now a-days are full of those manglings and abbreviations. Instances of this abuse are innumerable: what does your lordship think of the words drudg'd, disturb'd, rebuk'd, fledg'd, and a thousand others everywhere to be met in prose as well as verse? where, by leaving out a vowel to save a syllable, we form so jarring a sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondered how it could ever obtain.

)

Monday Science Links

This week's science! (Sorry about last week - my trip to the UK was screwed up by US Airways and the whole thing became much more stressful than it should have been - plus twice as long.)

• Dave at Cognitive Daily blogs on learning to judge size: If we can be so easily fooled, it might make you wonder: What, exactly, are we learning about the sizes of distant objects as we grow older? The prevailing notion for decades has been that we gradually learn cues to the size of objects and how far away they are. By the time they are ten, most kids are about as good at judging the size of distant objects as adults -- they are said to have achieved "size constancy." But recently Carl Granrud has begun to challenge that notion. Even in normal perceptual circumstances (in an open field, say, rather than an Ames room), adults make systematic errors, overestimating the size of distant objects. Granrud believes that the perceptual system simply doesn't give us enough information to accurately judge the size of distant objects, and so we develop a system of compensation. While young kids undercompensate, adults often overcompensate.


• Dr Brazen Hussy at What the hell is wrong with you? is catching birds - for science, and then releasing them! She's posting a picture a day - so go check out the angry birds.


• Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science posts on spiders posing as ants: The animal world is full of harmless liars, who mimic species more dangerous than themselves in order to avoid the attention of predators. But none do it quite like the dark-footed ant-spider Myrmarachne melanotarsa. As its name suggests, this small species of jumping spider, discovered just nine years ago, impersonates ants. In itself, that's nothing special - ants are so aggressive that many predators give them a wide berth and lots of species do well by imitating them. The list includes over 100 spiders but among them, M.melanotarsa's impression is unusually strong. It doesn't just mimic the bodies of ants, but their large groups too. Unlike all of its relatives, the spider lives in silken apartment complexes, consisting of many individual nests connected by silk. These blocks can house hundreds of individuals and while moving about them, the spiders usually travel in groups. Now, Ximena Nelson and Robert Jackson from the University of Canterbury have found evidence that this social streak is all part of the spiders' deception.


• Erik at Eruptions warns us that Redoubt might not be done: In other words, the dome continues to extrude and part of it roll down the volcano. The lava dome is still growing (lots of impressive images on the AVO website), mostly extending slowly down the steep north slope of the volcano (see image below). There is still the strong possibly that the dome will catastrophically collapse causing a pyroclastic flow and potentially a plinian eruption to follow as the pressure is released, but so far, nothing of the sort has occurred. However, the dome is unstable (says Allison Payne of AVO), so a collapse might happen at any moment. Until then, most Alaskans just hope that Redoubt behaves itself during the lucrative tourist season in the state after the lost revenue from the Cook Inlet oil production.


• Anne Jefferson guest blogs at Highly Allochthonous on where rocks, water, and history intertwine: "Ten thousand rocks and grassy islets meet the traveler's eye, ten thousand murmuring streams meander through them. During low water the cattle delight to graze upon the islets...at such times they furnish a curious spectacle in the midst of a mighty river." So wrote architect Robert Mills in 1826, describing an outcrop of ~550 million year old diorite in the Catawba River south of Rock Hill, South Carolina. The Catawba River is one of the principal rivers of the Carolinas, with an annual average flow of 4018 cubic feet per second (114 m3/s) just upstream of our diorite outcrop. The outcrop is about 2.6 km long, and changes the single-thread river into a substantially wider, multi-thread anabranching river (Figures 1 and 2). This cattle-friendly piece of rock then represents a major obstacle to flow of the river, and that has ensured it a place in the region's history.

Enjoy!

The Week in Entertainment

Film: Up, which is better than excellent. That silent montage towards the beginning is genuinely touching and filled with more heart than many full-length features, and the characters are all well-developed and good, even the crazy villain. The color palette is wonderful, and the storyline captivating. I will say, based on the audience reactions, it's not for the youngsters - say, 9 or below? - but adults will love it. (Squirrel!)

DVD: Lewis, series 3. Four very well-done episodes. Lovely. Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder. If this is the end, it's a well-made one.

TV: Pushing Daisies!!! Sigh - I know it's just ABC finishing what it had already ordered, but how wonderful to have this show back. And with Richard Benjamin and George Segal guest starring! And Kristin Chenowith singing Lionel Richie! And Emerson and the coroner! (Coroner: "I'll make a mental note on that." Emerson: "Don't be making no mental notes on me." Coroner: "At a crime scene, I'll make notes on whatever I feel needs note-makin'. Mentally.") And another one on Saturday - with Penny finally showing up. I love this show so much... these little extra episodes are so sadly sweet. Primeval - I should have known they'd bring in that cop, but Danny's a poor replacement for Cutter. If it helps Connor to stop being quite so much the comic relief, though, I'm for it.

Read: My Soul to Take by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. This one was better than the first (Last Rituals). Got through most of Death With Interuptions by José Saramago, but had to buy a replacment today because I left it on the plane. Argh. It's quite fascinating - I can't wait to see how it ends.

Another little detail...

Ebert, again, from his review for Up:

Muntz, who must be a centenarian by now, is hale, hearty and mean, his solitary life shared only by robotic dogs.

No. They are not.

Happy Birthday, Orhan

Today in 1952, Ferit Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul.

In February 2005 Pamuk gave an interview to the Swiss publication Das Magazin, a weekly supplement to a number of Swiss daily newspapers (like Parade, for you Americans). In the interview, Pamuk stated, "Thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here, and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to mention that. So I do." In June 2005 Turkey introduced a new penal code including Article 301, which states: "A person who, being a Turk, explicitly insults the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly, shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months to three years." Pamuk was charged under this law for what he'd said four months earlier.

Because it was a retroactive charge, the Ministry of Justice needed to approve the prosecution. The case was eventually dropped on the technicality that the MoJ had not done so. There was a lot of international outcry - Amnesty International, for one, and eight world-renowned authors (José Saramago, Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, Umberto Eco, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, John Updike and Mario Vargas Llosa) who issued a joint statement - and doubts were raised about Turkey's fitness to enter the EU (which may, or may not, have influenced the MoJ and judge's decisions...)

Pamuk now lives in the US, where he teaches at Columbia. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. In his acceptance speech, he said:

What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity's basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears; the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kin ... Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know they touch on a darkness inside me. We have often witnessed peoples, societies and nations outside the Western world–and I can identify with them easily–succumbing to fears that sometimes lead them to commit stupidities, all because of their fears of humiliation and their sensitivities. I also know that in the West–a world with which I can identify with the same ease–nations and peoples taking an excessive pride in their wealth, and in their having brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to a self-satisfaction that is almost as stupid.