Happy Birthday, Ivan

Іван Степанович Мазепа - Ivan Mazepa - was born today, in what is now called Mazepyntsy, near Bila Tserkva in Ukraine around 1640. The usual English spelling of his name is Mazeppa, which is from the Russian.

Mazepa was an ambitious Kozak (Cossack) officer who rose quickly through the ranks in the post-Pereyaslavl Left Bank Hetmanate (the 1653 Treaty of Pereyaslavl between Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytskyy and Tsar Alexey I of Muscovy was fraught with misunderstandings from the beginning). Mazepa began as a loyal ally of Russia (as Muscovy was now called under Peter I, the Great), and became hetman in 1687 after accusing his predecessor, Samoylovych, of planning to break the treaty and secede from Muscovy. In 1702 Mazepa crossed the Dnipro (Dneiper) and annexed large portions of Right-Bank Ukraine after Semen Paliy's failed uprising against the Poles, establishing him as a wealthy and powerful ruler.

But the Great Northern War wasn't good to Russia - the Swedes and Lithuanians were a serious force back then - and Peter I decided to take steps - steps Mazepa saw as threatening the Hetmanate's autonomy. Peter I began sending Kozaks to fight in foreign wars, instead of leaving them to defend Ukraine against Tatars and Poles (as the treaty stipulated). Kozak soldiers were neither equipped nor trained for modern warfare, and they were often commanded by Russians and Germans who often did not much value their lives. They suffered loss of morale, and heavy casualties, while at home a Russian force became an oppressive occupier.

In 1708, Polish King Stanislaus Leszczynski, an ally of Charles XII of Sweden, threatened to attack the Hetmanate. Peter I refused to defend Ukraine, expecting an attack on Russia proper by Charles XII. In Mazepa's opinion, this blatantly violated the Treaty of Pereyaslav, since Russia refused to protect Ukraine's territory and left it to fare on its own. As the Swedish and Polish armies advanced towards Ukraine, Mazepa allied himself with them on October 28, 1708.

The Russian army responded by razing the Kozak capital Baturyn, killing the defending garrison and all of its population. The Russian army was ordered to tie up the dead Kozaks to crosses, and float them down the Dnieper River all the way to the Black Sea with the goal of scaring all the people loyal to Mazepa who lived along the river.

The Battle of Poltava, June 29, 1709, was won by the Russians (a victory which shook Europe and established Russia as a true imperial force and power player in European politics), and this destroyed Mazepa's hope for an independent Ukraine. He fled along with Charles to refuge in Bendery, among the Turks, where he died soon afterwards. The tsars began to dismantle the Hetmanate, and by 1764 the largely puppet remains of it were abolished.

Mazepa's legacy during Russian rule of Ukraine, and Soviet rule thereafter, was one of treason and revilement. He was excommunicated by the Orthodox Church, Tchaikovsky's opera "Mazeppa" casts him as the villain, and any positive view of him was "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism", a serious crime in Soviet days. But since Ukrainian independence the hetman's memory has enjoyed a resurgence, and he is recognized as a national hero.


He's even on the money.

Hyphenation: NOT random

So, I bought the Subterranean Press edition of Charles de Lint's new/old novel, Eyes Like Leaves. New, because it hasn't been published before; old, because he actually wrote it in 1980. It wasn't published because when he was going to offer it to the publisher who'd taken Moonheart and The Riddle of the Wren, his agent, who knew of Yarrow and Mulengro (one finished, one in progress), warned him that if he got three "secondary-world" fantasies in print so quickly, that would be his brand, and his unpublished contemporary fantasies wouldn't sell. Since Yarrow had shown him he wanted to write contemporary fantasies, he never published Eyes Like Leaves.

I like it well enough. I found myself thinking that the story wasn't catching me, probably because I haven't read much high, or secondary-world, fantasy in a while (like 25 years, probably, always excepting Terry Pratchett - who is radically different from de Lint!), but on second thought, I probably reversed the causation arrow there: I don't read much of this sort of fantasy because the stories don't catch me any longer...

Anyway, my actual reason for this post is different. Here's a quote from the book (p 197):

He felt, as well, the fine webs of the weavers
drawing closer, binding, finishing off the tapes-
tried tale that had begun so many longyears before.

You have no idea how long I tried to make "tapes-tried" make sense. In a book with words like "stormkin, longyear, deepseeing, stonewood, tree-wizard, sea-sleep," you learn to accept odd compounds. But "tapes-tried"?

Oh. Finally, I realized what had happened. Some damned automated typesetting program had hyphenated "tapestried" in the wrong place. Russian newspapers have long done this, just slapping in a hyphen when they reached the end of the line, no matter where in the word it fell. But English-language presses have generally tried to hyphenate on syllable breaks, even if it meant futzing a little with the spacing...

You know, I don't mind paying Subterranean's prices for their attractive special editions of hard-to-find books, especially when they're signed copies. But this particular book has several typos in it... and this, which completely jolted me out the (tenuous) hold the story had on me.

I think I'll be waiting for de Lint's next contemporary book.

Happy Birthday, Earl

Born this day in 1891 in Los Angeles, Earl Warren, one of our greatest Chief Justices. In 1953, President Eisenhower appointed him, expecting a conservative; Eisenhower later called the appointment "the biggest damn-fool mistake I ever made." But the country is much the better for it.

Warren led the Supreme Court to many landmark decisions, including Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which banned segregation in public schools; Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), which ruled that poor people are entitled to a free lawyer in all criminal cases; Miranda v. Arizona (1966), which required that a person being arrested be read his or her rights; and Loving v. Virginia (1967), which made interracial marriage legal across the country.

Although he died in 1974, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981 by President Carter.

Sky Watch: Here Comes the Sun

more Sky Watchers here

Happy Birthday, Nikolai

Nikolai Andreevich Rimsky-Korsakov (Николай Андреевич Римский-Корсаков) was born today in Tikhvin, Russia, in 1844. As one of The Five - along with Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, and Alexander Borodin (Милий Алексеевич Балакирев, Цезарий-Вениамин Антонович Кюи, Модест Петрович Мусоргский,and Александр Порфирьевич Бородин) - he strove to write music that was Russian rather than European. In Russian they're called the Mighty Pack (or Group) - Могучая кучка. He's best known in the West for his symphonies and especially his Scheherazade suite, and for his operas, especially Sadko and The Snow Maiden, in Russia.

In 1905 Rimsky-Korsakov sided with the hundred students expelled from the St Petersburg Conservatory, where he taught, for taking part in the February Revolution. He was fired, and students put on his Kaschei the Immortal (or Kaschei the Deathless) and followed it with a demonstration. His works were subsequently banned. Riots and resignations followed in support until he was reinstated, but his next opera, The Golden Cockerel, was critical of monarchy, imperialism, and by implication the on-going Russo-Japanese War, and it only exacerbated his troubles with the tsarist police and wasn't produced until 1909, a year after his death - and then in an edited format.

This was his teaching philosophy:

Сейчас я буду очень много говорить, а вы будете очень внимательно слушать. Потом я буду говорить меньше, а вы будете слушать и думать, и, наконец, я совсем не буду говорить, и вы будете думать своей головой и работать самостоятельно, потому что моя задача как учителя - стать вам ненужным...

"Now I will speak a great deal, and you will listen very attentively. Then I will speak less, and you will listen and think, and finally I will not speak at all, and you will think to yourselves and work on your own, because my task as a teacher is to become unnecessary to you."

Happy Birthday, Christian

Today in 1690 Christain Goldbach was born, in Königsberg, part of Brandenburg-Prussia.

His famous conjecture:

Every even integer greater than 3 can be written as the sum of two primes

remains unproved (though intuitively obvious), but he's also remembered for the the Goldbach–Euler theorem (also known as Goldbach's theorem), which states that the sum of 1/(p − 1) over the set of perfect powers p, excluding 1 and omitting repetitions, converges to 1. (The perfect powers are 4, 8, 9, 16, 25, 27 - whole numbers which are other whole numbers raised to a power (squared, cubed, etc).) So the theorem is that 1/3 + 1/7 + 1/8 + 1/15 + 1/24 ... = 1.

Whoo! Math! It kills me, but I love it (abstractly).

Guest: Would Health Care Reform Help You?

I've never been asked this before, but Barbara O'Brien wanted to write a guest post. Who's she? Well, she blogs at The Mahablog, Crooks and Liars, AlterNet, and elsewhere on the progressive political and health blogophere, which has earned her the notoriety of being a panelist at the Yearly Kos Convention and a featured guest blogger at the Take Back America Conference in Washington, DC. Here's what she had to say:

Would Health Care Reform Help You?

Many obstacles and stumbling blocks remain in the way of health care reform. The House and Senate bills will have to be merged, and then the House and Senate both will vote on the final bill. We don’t yet know what will be in the final bill, or if the final bill will be passed into law. Passage will be especially difficult in the Senate, where it will need 60 votes to pass. It is still possible that after all this angst, just one grandstanding senator could kill the whole thing.

But just for fun, let’s look at what conventional wisdom says will be in the final bill and see if there is anything in it that will be an immediate benefit to people with mesothelioma cancer and other asbestos-related disease.

It is likely that the final bill will provide additional funding for state high-risk insurance pools. Currently more than 30 states run such pools, which are nonprofit, state-sponsored health insurance plans for people who can’t buy insurance because of pre-existing conditions. The biggest problem with such pools is that, often, the insurance they offer is too expensive for many who might need it. Both the Senate and House bills provide $5 billion in subsidies for state high-risk pools to make the insurance more affordable.

Under the Senate bill, beginning in 2014, private companies would no longer be able to deny coverage to adults with pre-existing conditions, nor could they charge higher premiums for people with pre-existing conditions. Until then, the state high-risk pools could provide some help.

Closing the Medicare Part D coverage gap — also called the “doughnut hole” — is another potential provision that could help some patients with asbestos-related disease. The “doughnut hole” is the gap between the coverage for yearly out-of-pocket expenses provided by Medicare Part D and Medicare’s “catastrophic coverage” threshold.

For example, in 2009 Medicare Part D paid at least 75 percent of what patients paid for prescription drugs up to $2,700. After that, patients must pay for all of their prescription medications until what they have paid exceeds $6,154. At that point, the catastrophic coverage takes over, and Medicare pays for all but 5 percent of the patient’s drug bills. The final health care reform bill probably will provide for paying at least 50 percent of out-of-pocket costs in the doughnut hole.

You may have heard the bills include budget cuts to the Medicare program, and this has been a big concern to many people. Proponents of the bill insist that savings can be found to pay for the cuts, and that people who depend on Medicare won’t face reduced services. But this is a complex issue that I want to address in a later post.

The long-term provisions probably will include many other provisions that would benefit patients with asbestos-related disease, including increased funding for medical research. Although there are many complaints about the bill coming from all parts of the political spectrum, on the whole it would be a huge benefit to many people.

— Barbara O’Brien
March 16, 2010

Happy Birthday, James

Today in 1751 James Madison was born. Father of the Constitution, I hate to think what he'd be saying now... but here's some of what he said back then:

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

The people of the U.S. owe their independence & liberty to the wisdom of descrying in the minute tax of 3 pence on tea, the magnitude of the evil comprised in the precedent. Let them exert the same wisdom in watching against every evil lurking under plausible disguises, and growing up from small beginnings.

There are more instances of abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation.

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

Nubbins felt confused

I wanted to put this cartoon in my post on "looking ridiculously" but didn't have it at home. Here it is: enjoy!

Happy Birthday, Maxim

Алексей Максимович Пешков - Alexei Maksimovich Peshkov, best known as Maxim Gorky (the Bitter), was born today in Nizhny Novgorod - once called Gorky after him - in 1868.

День - это маленькая жизнь, и надо прожить ее так, будто ты должен умереть сейчас, а тебе неожиданно подарили еще сутки. (A day is a small life, and it must be lived as though you were meant to die right now, but you've unexpectedly been given another 24 hours.)

Лишь бы люди начали думать, до правды они всегда додумаются. (If only people start thinking, they'll always get to the truth.)

Когда труд - удовольствие, жизнь - хороша! Когда труд - обязанность, жизнь - рабство! (When work is a pleasure, then life is wonderful! When work is an obligation, then life is slavery!)

In these pictures he's at Yasnaya Polyana with Tolstoy in 1900 (right), then in Yalta with Anton Chekhov in the same year, and then with Voroshilov and Stalin in 1931... Yeah. A complicated guy, Maxim Gorky.

Here is Gorky in Russian and here in English.

Happy Birthday, Ruth!

Today in 1933 Ruth Bader was born in Brooklyn. She's now on the Supreme Court of the United States. "Associate Justice Ginsburg, who was once denied a Supreme Court clerkship because she was a woman, co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the ACLU and has been a stalwart defender of civil rights on the court."

Read a tribute here

Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• The always-funny bec at Save Your Breath for Running, Ponies spins a tale of an assassin bug who's not very good: Now this is all very elaborate and apparently successful, but we all know spiders are not that stupid. Lord knows if one asked me to do something, I sure as hell wouldn’t refuse, so they’ve definitely got something there. Plus we all know spiders talk,* which could make life pretty difficult for those assassin bugs I’d imagine. Because you can’t be an assassin if your victims can see you and your wide-open bag of tricks coming, right? So poor Assassin Bug would finally get an assignment, which is awesome because he’s just been sitting at home doing fuck-all for months because the pickings are slim when there are so many other assassin bugs around. It’s like, “Hey, so I heard an Achaearanea extridium moved in down town?” “Yeah, Lindsay already picked him off last week.”


• John McKay at archy tells the tale of the Wellington avalanche: One hundred years ago, it was snowing in the North Cascade Mountains. By itself, there was nothing unusual about that fact. It always snows in the Cascades around this time of year. We depend on it. The ski resorts need snow to stay open. The cities of Puget Sound rely on the snowpack laid down during the late winter for their water supply during the summer. Farms and orchards on the east side of the mountains depend on that same melting snowpack to water their crops. The salmon who have been spawning in Cascade streams since the end of the last ice age need that same meltwater to make their final journey. But the late February storms of 1910 were something different.
  


• Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy blogs on two galaxies seen by WISE: NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, only launched a couple of months ago, and has already done spectacular work. Gulping down huge tracts of sky every day, it has already discovered over 2000 asteroids — not seen, but actually discovered — including several that pass near the Earth (none on track to hit us, happily). It’s discovered four comets, too, and by the end of the mission in a few months will see far more. But since it’s a survey instrument, and it sees in the far infrared, the views it gets are nothing short of spectacular! Like this one... There is a lot to see here! First, the colors: all of this is far infrared, with blue being the IR wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns combined (5 and 6.5 times the wavelength the human eye sees), green is 12 microns, and red 22. Green is dominated by warm dust and big organic molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The glowing gassy stuff is part of the Heart Nebula, which I’ve posted about before (guess what date). But take a look a bit to the left of all that gas, and look much, much farther in distance...


• At Skulls in the Stars, a post on perpetual motion: With that in mind, it is worth pointing out that perpetual motion has been considered impossible — and treated with scorn — for a long, long time. When I dug up the first volume of The Harmsworth Magazine, dated 1899, to seek out a story by Winston Churchill, I also found a popular article on perpetual motion. It is not kind to the concept, or the people who pursue it.


• Ed Young at Not Exactly Rocket Science posts on the the weirdness that is chicken sex genetics: The animal on the right is no ordinary chicken. Its right half looks like a hen but its left half (with a larger wattle, bigger breast, whiter colour and leg spur) is that of a cockerel. The bird is a 'gynandromorph', a rare sexual chimera. Thanks to three of these oddities, Debiao Zhao and Derek McBride from the University of Edinburgh have discovered a truly amazing secret about these most familiar of birds - every single cell in a chicken's body is either male or female. Each one has its own sexual identity. It seems that becoming male or female is a very different process for birds than it is for mammals.

Enjoy!

Is she serious? (pragmatics post)

The Middletons' resident old lady (his mother, but I can't remember their names) is crazy. Who yells at a ref with that stress?



I confess to first thinking it should be "ump," anyway, but then I realized that it must be for March Madness, even with that distracting "spring training"... Either that, or this strip is totally messed up.

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Scarecrow and Mrs King - the first half of the first season. Watching the show was a bit odd - Reagan and Latin America... things look different now, looking back. And the whole time the Christmas episode was on, I kept waiting for someone to point out that it wasn't Christmas in Russia. Assuming the KGB guys actually cared, they wouldn't be caring until January 7! But it never came up... And Yakov Smirnov - what a hoot to see that guy again.

TV: So, last week I said we didn't know what they watch on The Middle. Now we know some of it, anyway: Grey's Anatomy and Sean Penn movies. And seriously: The Thundering Hens? I love that. And Modern Family: Mitchell's pet's names - too funny. Fliza Minnelli the bird, Zsa-Zsa Gaboa the snake. "How did I not know the kid was gay?" House was okay - the peripheral stuff was great, actually. I loved the speed dating, and Chase's re-evaluation of his life, and the porno Wilson was in was hilariously bad. The Mentalist was a really good episode. I'm sad that Psych is over for the season, but at least it got picked up for another one. Poor Shawn. And Lassie sacrificed his gun for Juliet! Wow! And Numb3rs: if this is the end, and it had that feel to it, at least they tied up all the strands. It's been a fine series, and this was a fine episode. I have to admit that I laughed hardest at Otto's reaction to Charlie's saying "Amita and I have been offered visiting professorships at Cambridge, so we decided to move the wedding to today": he boggled, he laughed, he hugged Charlie, and he said, wistfully, "I wish I had a visiting professorship." Larry's definition of love made me cry, seriously.

Read: The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostovo. Entirely different from The Historian except also very long and very good.

Some "rules" just won't die

Rex Parker (of Rex Parker Does the NY Times Crossword) says of today's puzzle:

I did not care for NORW. (42D: Neighbor of Swed.) — both clue and answer abbrevs. look ridiculously with that fourth letter on them — or ON TWO (145A: How a call may be picked up at the office), mainly because I don't really get it. "

Look ridiculously"?

No.

They look ridiculous.

Verbs of perception and sensing are like linking verbs; they take adjectives as their complements, because that adjective is modifying the subject.

DST

Котоматрица

Every year in the spring they put the clocks ahead by an hour. Every year this upsets everyone. And yet it would be so simple to make everyone happy! All you have to do is put the clocks ahead, not in the middle of Saturday night, but in the middle of the work day on Friday.


Смотреть ещё! (see more!)

Why did the ducks cross the road?

Happy Birthday, Albert

Yep. Today in 1879, in Ulm, Germany, Albert Einstein was born.


What else is there to say? Albert Einstein was born, and lived, and worked...



There's a nice poem here at Physics Buzz,

Young Albert E. and the Miracle Year
By James Riordon:

Well molecules and atoms at last were confirmed,
And solid state texts were rewritten or burned.
'Twas a wondrous discovery, though not without peer,
And it's hardly enough for a miracle year.

(It's hyperlinked and everything!)
(Hat tip Jen at Cocktail Party Physics)

Red Bird in the Dawn

Still slightly gray from winter, this cardinal catches the morning light and positively glows.

Happy Birthday, Percival

And speaking of Pluto ... today in 1855, Percival Lowell was born. He didn't discover Pluto, but his belief that Planet X lay beyond Neptune and Uranus and perturbed their orbits led to its discovery. Pluto of course isn't big enough to be "Planet X" - in fact, the whole "Planet X" thing was due to a mistake in measuring the mass of Neptune.

When you couple that with Pluto's subsequent reclassification; Lowell's mass building of observatories and funding programs; his enormous popularization efforts; and his obsessive drawings of canals and oases on Mars, the remnants of a desperate and dying ancient civilization ... well, you do have to admit that maybe Lowell had more money than sense.

Still, he contributed an enormous amount to astronomy and science fiction, and so we should be grateful. Let's raise a glass and pull out our Wells or our Bradbury and wish Percival Lowell a happy birthday!

Nuthatch

Spotted this little white-breasted nuthatch Wednesday morning

Happy Birthday, James

James Taylor was born today in 1948, in Boston, Massachusetts, although he grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Last year I gave you Circles Around the Sun, and before that Fire and Rain. This year, another of my favorites.


My Traveling Star

Watch my back and light my way
My traveling star, my traveling star
Watch over all of those born St. Christopher's Day
Old road dog, young runaway
They hunger for home but they cannot stay
They wait by the door
They stand and they stare
They're already out of there
They're already out of there

My daddy used to ride the rails
So they say, so they say
Soft as smoke and as tough as nails
Boxcar Jones, old walking man
Coming back home was like going to jail
The sheets and the blankets and babies and all
No he never did come back home
Never that I recall

Nevermind the wind
Nevermind the rain
Nevermind the road leading home again
Never asking why
Never knowing when
Every now and then
There he goes again

She had a cat and a dog named Blue
My traveling star, my traveling star
A big old stove and a fireplace, too
Old road dog, young runaway
She told me loved me like it was true
I knew I should stay
I knew I would go
Run run run away
Run run run away, boy

Run before the wind
Run before the rain
Over yonder hill
Just around the bend
Never asking why
Never knowing when
Every now and then
There you go again

Tie me up and hold me down
Oh, my traveling star
Bury my feet down in the ground
Oh, old road dog
Claim my name from the lost and found
And let me believe this is where I belong
Shame on me for sure
For one more highway song

My traveling star
My traveling star

Sky Watch: Red in the Morning II

This sky was over Laurel on Monday. The day was beautiful, though.




more Sky Watchers here (and I'm promising you that you really want to click through and see this week's feature: it'll stun you)

tangled skein

You know those neat Vs geese travel in? Most of them don't seem to last very long...

Hmmmm... I wonder.....

A friend sent around a list of 10 Reasons Gay Marriage is wrong. Here is #3:

Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

Another friend sent this back:

Re #3: Now that the Supreme Court says corporations are legally people...

Happy Birthday, Douglas

Today in 1952 in Cambridge, England, Douglas Adams was born.

Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox, Trillian, Marvin ... the mice and Slartibartfast and Deep Thought.

Dirk Gently.

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

Gone too soon, he is deeply missed.

Douglas Adams . com

Disconnect

So Pastor Scott Lively says (on the ABC Evening News tonight) that gays are attempting "to overthrow family-based society and replace it with sexual anarchy."

Then why the hell doesn't he support gay marriage?

Studios Have Tax Breaks?

From an email flyer:

Truth Wins Out condemned a shortsighted and terribly misguided Florida bill (CS/HB 697) that aims to reward movie studios with tax breaks that promote "family values' and punish those that do not fit the narrow definition of "traditional families".

I'm guessing they're not really rewarding movie studios that have tax breaks that promote and punish, or even rewarding movie studios that have tax breaks that promote and punishing those that don't fit... but rather that the bill aims to reward with tax breaks studios that promote, and punish those that don't.

Happy Birthday, PZ

Today is the birthday of the godless cracker-abusing cephalopodophiliac blogger lord we call PZed...


Head on over to Pharyngula and wish him many more.

Monday Science Links

This week's sciency goodness:

• Michael at Paleoblog posts on the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs: Responding to challenges to the hypothesis that an asteroid impact caused a mass extinction on Earth 65 million years, a panel of 41 scientists re-analyzed data and provided new evidence, concluding that an impact in Mexico was indeed the cause of the mass extinction. Thirty years ago, Luis Alvarez, Jan Smit and their coworkers suggested a large meteorite slammed into Earth 65 million years ago and caused one of the most severe mass extinctions in Earth's history, ending the age of the dinosaurs. In 1991, a more than 200-kilometer-wide impact crater was discovered in Yucatan, Mexico, that coincided with the extinctions. Since then, the impact hypothesis has gained overwhelming acceptance within the scientific community.
  


• At Skulls in the Stars, a post on an optical illusion: One of the wonderful things about having a career in science is that a deeper understanding of the science leads to a greater appreciation of its beauty. In physics, this usually requires a nontrivial amount of mathematics, but there are some phenomena that are self-evidently beautiful; unfortunately, many of these are also not very well known! In working on my textbook on optics, I delved rather deeply into one of these phenomena, known as the optical Talbot effect. First observed in 1836 by Henry Fox Talbot, the effect went unnoticed for nearly fifty years before being rediscovered by the great Lord Rayleigh in 1881. The true subtlety of the phenomenon was still not understood, however, for another hundred years!
  


• Jessica at Magma Cum Laude posts on her recent fieldwork (with photos!): I suppose I've left you all hanging long enough, so now it's time to show off the first batch of photos from Guatemala. The trip started out in Guatemala City, where we loaded up our rental car and drove to Quetzaltenango (known as Xela or Xelaju to most people). From Xela we drove to a finca, or farm/plantation, and then spent three hours hiking through jungle, over landslide scars and down rocky riverbeds. It was a tough, messy hike, although we were lucky enough to have porters go first and cut a path through the brush with machetes. (This did have its drawbacks, though, since the average Guatemalan is shorter than me, and we had some pretty tall people in the group. There was a lot of stooping and some crawling, which isn't all that fun when the foliage is covered in volcanic ash.)
  


• Erik at Eruptions posts on a possible Icelandic eruption: We talked a few weeks ago of signs that there were increasing signs that an eruption could occur on Iceland - increased seismicity on the Reykjanes Ridge suggested that magma might be on the move. Now, we have two pieces of evidence that we might see activity at Eyjafjallajökull, on the southern side of the island nation.
  


• Ed at Not Exactly Rocket Science posts on dinosaur-eating snakes: Snakes have been around for nearly 100 million years and scientists have found many fossils of extinct species. But this astonishing specimen is different. This serpent is Sanajeh indicus. It is sitting in a dinosaur nest and its coils surround three eggs and the body of a hatchling. There are many reasons to think that this prehistoric tableau represented a predator caught in the act of hunting, rather than a mash-up of unconnected players thrown together by chance. The snake is perfectly posed, with its head resting atop a coil and its body encircling a crushed egg. All the pieces are very well preserved and very little of the snake, the dinosaur or the crushed egg have been deformed. All of this suggests that the animals were caught unawares and quickly buried in sediment.
  

Enjoy!

Happy Birthday, Kenneth

Today in 1859 Kenneth Grahame was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. His best- known book is, of course, The Wind in the Willows, but it took around ten years and the intervention of Teddy Roosevelt before anyone would publish it (talking animals were considered very bad for children - by publishers at least). He retired from his job and moved to the country, living for another 25 years on the sales of that one book, and never wrote another.

The Wind in the Willows was based on a number of stories Grahame told his son, so it's not surprising that it's really two very different novellas and one short story cobbled together. You're either a Toad fan or a Mole-and-Ratty fan (I'm the latter, I don't even read the Toad chapters when I go back to the River (though I am fond of Badger)). But "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" is my favorite chapter of all.

All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

Find the complete text at Project Gutenberg

The Week in Entertainment

Film: A wonderful Danish film - Terribly Happy (Frygtelig lykkelig). Frankly I didn't know the Danes made such ... depressing isn't the right word, but it's certainly not a happy ending. Or maybe it is... for some values of happy. (Robert may well have found his ideal niche.) Nonetheless, it's a riveting film, well worth your time.

DVD: Some of The Sarah Jane Adventures season 2. A new girl to add a bit more diversity (she's Indian), and a scary, scary clown.

TV: Nova: The Pluto Files, an engaging look (with Neil deGrasse Tyson) about the 'demotion' of Pluto. Modern Family with a very funny look at Phil's spider phobia and Mitchell and Cameron's heartbreak at Lily's first word. Yes, their heartbreak was funny, at least by the end of the show. Psych - a great "I know who the killer is ... We're On His Boat!!!". And you know one thing I love about this show? That they're kind of real people. I mean, on a show like The Middle you may get existential horror if the TV stops working, but you never actually know what they like to watch. On this show, though - they watch The Mentalist, and Gus likes Leverage. Numb3rs, grim case, happy news that sort of presages an end to the series, which is too bad if true. I guess we'll find out. Parenthood - the movie, which I do love (I did try the tv show but it was awful).

Read: Medicine Road by Charles de Lint - gorgeous. Finished A Primate's Memoirs, which has a sad but beautiful ending.

sleeping in a row

today's Issa haiku, from 1821

sleeping in a row--
little butterfly, cat
priest

Never???

Wow. The uniqueness keeps diminishing. Cameron Diaz in a commercial for The Box:

"It's an incredibly unique concept. You're not going to ever see another movie with this concept ... laid out this way ... by this filmmaker."

Happy Birthday, Gabriel

Gabriel José García Márquez (Gabo, he's called) was born today in 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia. His books are brilliant.

Find his his works here

Happy Birthday, Elizabeth

Born today in Durham, England, in 1806, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.




We cannot live, except thus mutually
We alternate, aware or unaware,
The reflex act of life: and when we bear
Our virtue onward most impulsively,
Most full of invocation, and to be
Most instantly compellant, certes, there
We live most life, whoever breathes most air
And counts his dying years by sun and sea.
But when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth
Throw out her full force on another soul,
The conscience and the concentration both make
mere life, Love. For Life in perfect whole
And aim consummated, is Love in sooth,
As nature's magnet-heat rounds pole with pole.

Looie, Looie ...

Alex Trebek just said Mencken's name was "Henry Louis" - Looie, he said (lu:i).

But it's "lewis (lu:ɪs)", Alex. You have really got to stop with the Frenchifying already!

This also cracks me up

Got a piece of junk email with the subject line:

They tried to kill me to learn my secret

This cracks me up

Happy Birthday, Howard

Today is the birthday of the man who introduced Robin Hood in a single, coherent story to all Americans: Howard Pyle. A skilled illustrator as well, Pyle brought tales of pirates and robber barons to his young audiences and enthralled them (and us).

Happy Birthday, Vasily

Today in 1703 Vasily Kirillovich Trediakovsky was born. Although he was not of noble birth, he attended the Sorbonne (the first non-noble Russian to do so), and on his return to Russia he became an influential writer and poet, one of the group who transformed Russian poetry into the European style. In fact, his seminal work Новый и краткий способъ къ сложенью российскихъ стиховъ ("A new and brief way for composing of Russian verses") was the first discussion of Russian sonnets, madrigals, odes, and so on.

Here are two of his shorter pieces, with my rough translations. The first is his take on a well-known fable (Ivan Krylov did the best-known Russian version.)

ВОРОН И ЛИСИЦА

(Басня)

Негде Ворону унесть сыра часть случилось;
На дерево с тем взлетел, кое полюбилось.
Оного Лисице захотелось вот поесть;
Для того, домочься б, вздумала такую лесть:
Воронову красоту, перья цвет почтивши,
И его вещбу еще также похваливши,
"Прямо,- говорила,- птицею почту тебя
Зевсовою впредки, буде глас твой для себя,
И услышу песнь, доброт всех твоих достойну".
Ворон похвалой надмен, мня себе пристойну,
Начал, сколько можно громче, кракать и кричать,
Чтоб похвал последню получить себе печать;
Но тем самым из его носа растворенна
Выпал на землю тот сыр. Лиска, ободренна
Оною корыстью, говорит тому на смех:
"Всем ты добр, мой Ворон; только ты без сердца мех".

<1752>

Я уж ныне не люблю, как похвальбу красну;
Она токмо заняла мою душу власну.
    Я из памяти изгнал
    Всех моих ныне Филис,
  И якобы я не знал
      Ни Аминт, ниже Ирис.

Я насладился потех любовных премного,
При любви сердце было мое неубого.
    А что ж она иногда
    В муках меня держала,
  Тем наибольшу мне всегда
      Утеху умножала.

То мне поминать мило, и о том не каюсь;
Но навсегда с любовью ныне я прощаюсь.
    Похвальбу токмо красну,
    Чрез все мои обеты,
  За богиню мне власну
      Признаю во вся леты.

<1730>

The Raven and the Fox

(Fable)

Somewhere a Raven got hold of a piece of cheese;
He flew to his favorite tree carrying it.
But a Fox desired to eat it; and in aid of that goal
He came up with some flattery like this,
Praising the Raven's beauty, the color of his feathers,
And praising as well his wisdom:
"Truthfully," he said, "I revere you as the bird
Who's descended from the Great Thunder Eagle;
If only I could hear your voice for myself,
And hear your song, I could know all your virtues."
The Raven swelled with the praise, imagining himself worthy of it,
And began, as loud as he could, to caw and call,
So that he might receive the last bit of honor;
But in so doing, what he carried was lost,
And down to ground fell his cheese. Foxy,
Having gained his prize, said with a laugh:
"All the best to you, my Raven; you're a stuffed bird after all."


<1752>

I do not love the present, that vainglorious beauty,
It has merely taken hold of my soul.
    I've driven from my memory
    All my Phyllises of today,
  And it's as if I never knew
      Either Amint or Iris.

I enjoyed myself with larks a-plenty,
In love my heart never did too badly.
    But still sometimes
    Love tormented me more
  With the joys it always
      Multiplied for me.

It's pleasing to remember, and I repent nothing;
But always I bid my current love farewell.
    It's only vain beauty
    Through all of my vows,
  And my own private goddess
       My whole life I'll profess.


<1730>

More (in Russian) here

It's NGD. Yay?

Yep, it's National Grammar Day. This year, the people running it seem to be making an effort to stop it being a celebration of taking people to task, which is good, though I'm not sure it will catch on. But even they have ... um, errors on their site. Like this:

6. Passive voice is always wrong. Wrong! Passive voice is when you don't name the person who's responsible for the action. An example is the sentence "Mistakes were made," because it doesn't say who made the mistakes. If you don't know who is responsible for an action, passive voice can be the best choice.

No. You can totally name "person responsible" in passive. To use their sentence, "Mistakes were made by them." And you can totally avoid naming the responsible people and still be in active voice, as in "The bus blew up" or the more obvious "somebody made a mistake and blew up the bus." Not naming the "person responsible" is not what the passive is about. (The virtues of the passive voice are covered in this old post of mine.)

I got asked a "grammar question" at work. It was about how to punctuate these sentences:

Have you ever said "My name is John!"?
Have you ever asked, "Is your name John?"
I asked, "Is your name John?" and all I got was a dirty look.

The third one can, according to some style guides, have a comma after the question, or, according to others, no comma at all.

See, that's the thing ... that's not grammar. That's style. It varies depending on which guide you use (this is Chicago). Grammar's a fascinating thing, but with very few exceptions punctuation isn't part of it. Nor is whether or not you say "Hopefully" as a sentence adverb, or split an infinitive, or use "only" with wide scope. Most of the people who carry on about "grammar" don't even know what it really is; to them, it's a cover term for, at best, "using Standard Modern English," and at worst "following all the little 'rules' I was taught, no matter how groundless or contradictory." Forgive me if I don't join in...

If you want some good grammar-related linguistics to celebrate the day, though, allow me to point you at Gabe Doyle's post, and Neal Whitman's set of posts.

Which SF writer are you?

I am: Gregory Benford A master literary stylist who is also a working scientist.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Sky Watch: Pastel Morn

Morning in College Park - not a blazing dawn, but a quiet, pastel sky.



more Sky Watchers here

Happy Birthday, Thomas

Today in 1840, Thomas Sturge Moore was born in England. Sturge Moore was a poet, critic, and writer. Most of his poems are too long to post here, but here's the beginning of one of his best known.

The Gazelles

When the sheen on tall summer grass is pale,
Across blue skies white clouds float on
In shoals, or disperse and singly sail,
Till, the sun being set, they all are gone:

Yet, as long as they may shine bright in the sun,
They flock or stray in the daylight bland,
While their stealthy shadows like foxes run
Beneath where the grass is dry and tanned:

And the waste, in hills that swell and fall,
Goes heaving into yet dreamier haze
And a wonder of silence is over all
Where the eye feeds long like a lover's gaze:

Then, cleaving the grass, gazelles appear
(The gentler dolphins of kindlier waves)
With sensitive heads alert of ear;
Frail crowds that a delicate hearing saves

That rely on the nostrils keenest power
And are governed from trance-like distances
By hopes and fears, and, hour by hour,
Sagacious of safety, snuff the breeze.

They keep together, the timid hearts,
And each one's fear with a panic thrill
Is passed to a hundred; and if one starts
In three seconds all are over the hill.

(This poem, and more Moore, here)

Today's the Day

Today is the first day that same-sex couples can apply for marriage licenses in the District. The Post describes the day:

The two women [who were the first couple to apply ] left their Southeast Washington home two hours before the bureau opened, standing in line in a light cold rain for about an hour before they, along with some 20 other couples mostly dressed in jeans, jackets and sweaters, were allowed inside the courthouse. The number of applicants grew slowly throughout the morning. By midafternoon, 124 couples had filed to be married, far surpassing the dozen applications the bureau typically collects on a single day.

Many of the couples wore HRC buttons on their lapels; most were from the District, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, and the line appeared to be made up of more women than men. Some couples brought their children or spoke of the importance to their sons and daughters. ...

There were congratulatory hugs, commemorative pens and chocolate cupcakes to mark the historic moment. But it was also a somewhat-subdued scene of quiet anticipation as applicants drank coffee, checked their BlackBerrys and prepared to head to work after filing their forms and paying $45 in fees.

This makes me feel good about the District:

Court officials had called extra security officers to monitor the halls for protesters. But the celebration largely overshadowed a group of four opponents from a church in Kansas who gathered outside the courthouse, chanting and carrying signs in protest, one of which read: "Mourn for your sins."

There were also local religious leaders in the crowd, who showed up to demonstrate their support for same-sex marriage, and dozens of college students, who cheered as couples emerged hand in hand from the courthouse. Representatives from the Hyatt Regency handed out roses and offered discounts on catering and accommodations for same-sex weddings held before the end of the year.

Warm and fuzzy...

Photos from Talking Points Memo's gallery

(Two quick notes: That "church in Kansas"? Yeah, it's who you think. And for those who argue that all the benefits can be obtained by powers of attorney, etc - note the price of a marriage license.)

Pluto, again

Nova had The Pluto Files on, with Neil deGrasse Tyson defending the de-planetization of Pluto. He's professing to not quite understand why people are fond of Pluto.

Personally, I'm not particularly fond of it, but I do think that if it's round, orbits the sun, and has its own moons, how can it not be a planet? But then, nobody asked me...

(Of course, there are bigger things than Pluto out there, like Eris, but I don't quite see why we can't have lots of planets. That's a goofy reason. Of course, on the other hand, I do see the "clearing space" argument, too... )

Of course they did

Catholic Charities - who tried to blackmail the city of Washington by threatening to stop administering charities if the District recognized gay marriage - has now gone even further. Rather than give any benefits to a gay employee's family, they have elected to

not offer benefits to spouses of new employees or to spouses of current employees who are not already enrolled in the plan.

They employ 850 people. Fewer than 100 use the spousal benefit option, and none of them were given advance notice of the new policy, nor will they be able to add a spouse (because the most recent open enrollment period ended in November).

Their president says (my emphasis):

"We looked at all the options and implications. This allows us to continue providing services, comply with the city's new requirements and remain faithful to the church's teaching."

The new law gave the church two options. One (what the Archdiocese of San Francisco chose "years ago") "expand the definition of domestic partner, as the Archdiocese in San Francisco did years ago, to include a parent, sibling or someone else in the household." The other was "eliminate benefits for all spouses." That's the one they chose.

And here's the money quote, from Robert Tuttle, a George Washington University professor who studies the relationship between church and state:

"For decades, the church has been at the forefront of worker benefits, so this move cuts against their understanding of social justice and health benefits to all possible. But obviously, you can see they felt there was a real conflict between those values. They feel they weren't left with much of a choice."

Between "those values"? "Those" being "worker benefits [and] social justice"? Of course not. "Those" being "social justice" and "homophobia".

So - of course - they picked the one that hurts people who don't deserve it, rather than the one that helps people who don't deserve it.

At what point did that become a core Christian principle?

Happy Birthday, Ted

	Today in 1904 in Springfield, Massachusetts Ted Geisel, who wrote as Dr Seuss, was born. "I had trouble in getting to Solla-Sollew On the banks of the beautiful river Wah-Hoo, Where they never have troubles. At least, very few." I think the tag expresses things perfectly.
	Details about the the Seuss Memorial is here.

Monday Science Links

This week's science

• Greg at Laelaps blogs on baboon frienships: For years primatologists have been puzzling over "friendship" in baboons. Across baboon species lactating females keep up close social relationships with unrelated adult males. The females are not reproductively available, and by devoting much of their attention to these females the males significantly reduce their opportunities to mate with other females, so why are these males so concerned with mothers and infants? What is the function of this behavior?


• Ethan at Starts With A Bang explains how tides work:The reason we have any tides at all are twofold: the Earth is pretty big and gravity cares how far away you are. The farther away you are from something, the weaker gravity's pull is on you. If you were to take a look at our Solar System, and you were to move the Earth out to where Pluto is, you'd find that the force of gravity from the Sun on the Earth would be an astounding 1,600 times weaker than it is today, as Pluto is 40 times as far away as Earth is from the Sun!


• Carl at The Loom explains why humans are living with dinosaurs: It would not be true to say that humans walk with other species of dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus rex or Velociraptor. But birds are dinosaurs, too. That is, they belong to the group of species defined as dinosaurs by paleontologists, based on their shared common ancestry. The statement “humans walk with dinosaurs” is not analogous to “humans descended from chimpanzees.” That would be like saying “birds descended from Tyrannosaurus rex.” Birds are dinosaurs in the same way humans are mammals.
  


• Judith at Zenobia Empress of the East talks about the excavation of Palmyra: Until this very year, there was a great unexplored chunk of ancient Palmyra right outside the central city (marked reddish-brown on the aerial photograph, below). Despite the monuments on all sides of the area -- the Agora to the east, Diocletian's walls on the south, the Transverse Colonnaded Street on the west and, for the whole of its northern length, the Great Colonnade -- this quarter of Palmyra has been an archaeological blank. Not any more.


• Jason at The Thoughtful Animal blogs on how dogs got so smart: Domesticated dogs seem to have an uncanny ability to understand human communicative gestures. If you point to something the dog zeroes in on the object or location you’re pointing to (whether it’s a toy, or food, or to get his in-need-of-a-bath butt off your damn bed and back onto his damn bed). Put another way, if your attention is on something, or if your attention is directed to somewhere, dogs seem to be able to turn their attention onto that thing or location as well. Amazingly, dogs seem to be better at this than primates (including our nearest cousins, the chimpanzees) and better than their nearest cousins, wild wolves. And so it was that biological anthropologist Brian Hare, director of the of Duke University Canine Cognition Center wondered: did dogs get so smart because of direct selection for this ability during the domestication of dogs, or did this apparent intelligence evolve, in a sense, by accident, because of selection against fear and aggression?
  

Enjoy!

Dydd Dewi Sant

It's Saint David's Day - Saint David, known is Wales as Dewi Sant. Unlike some saints, this one is pretty well pinned down in history - a monk whose father was the king of Ceredigion (Sandde or Sant some call him, but that seems to have been a call-name, or nick-name, meaning "holy" and his actual name to have been Usai). He founded a monastic order of a pretty austere nature, and later became a bishop. His best-known miracle was to create a hill under his feet when people at the back of the crowd complained they couldn't see (the historian John Davies considers it difficult to "conceive of any miracle more superfluous" in mountainous Wales, but there it is.) He went on pilgrimages to Rome and Jerusalem both, returning home to govern the Church in Wales. On his deathbed, he passed on a saying which has become proverbial, and which is good advice to this day: Gwnewch y pethau bychain, Do the little things. (GOO-nayookh uh PE-thai BUHkhain)

Dydd Dewi Sant became somewhat of a national holiday in Wales in the 18th century and continues so today, featuring much singing (this is Wales) and a meal, the flying of the Y Ddraig Goch, the Red Dragon, and the wearing - and sometimes eating - of leeks (or daffodils, of late). Here's a nice video of the Hen Wlad Fy Nhadiau, The Old Land of My Fathers, the Welsh National Anthem: