Reflections on 2008

Looking back on 2008, for me personally:

On the negative side, I did no writing (fiction or poetry). I lost touch with several people I wish I hadn't. And I got so wrapped up in the election I find my blog posts were almost entirely that, photos, or birthdays.

On the plus side, I think I've got the hang of the new job - I know how to schedule my classes now so that I'm not overworked. I went to a great set of workshops in the summer. And I got a promotion.

For 2009, I intend to stay in touch with those folks (I've written them all over the holidays), and I promise to start writing again - I'll get submissions into blog carnivals that want more than a photo, and I'll finish the stuff I've left hanging. On the work front, I've got several nice trips in store, but I've managed to make sure I'm not teaching two classroom classes (I'm talking all day twice a week) at the same time - just the on-line seminars at the same time as a traditional course.

And maybe having this post out here will help me focus.

Why?

I was reading something at Literal Minded (Neal talking about misinterpreting a question as a speech act) and I went back to an older post he referenced (on where the 'front' of a line is). On that post he had a comment in which he was faux-politely chided for writing "whether or not":

Surely you didn’t really mean to write “whether or not….” A literal-minded fellow like you doubtless meant to write “whether…,” as the “or not” is superfluous in the context of that sentence. I refer you to the excellent article titled “Avoiding the Curse of Whetherornot” at page 41 of “The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing,” vol. 6 (1996 - 1997).

"Curse" seemed a bit strong. Yes, in that sentence it wasn't strictly necessary to have an "or not", but it didn't seem worth fretting over. Some redundancy is always with us, after all. But I was curious, so, since I don't have have that book, I glanced at Google ... and the very first hit on this curse was something called Writer's Block, which offered four situations in which "or not" should never be used. Two of them are clearly okay - one is like Neal's, with only two options and one in fact is clearly an error (Whether or not you drive or take the bus) - but the other two puzzle me.

1. Where the alternatives are immaterial:

* Whether or not literature is available on computer, readers are likely to continue to cherish books.

Prefer:
* Regardless of whether literature is available on computer, readers are likely to continue to cherish books.

3. Where emphasis on both alternatives is desired:

* Whether or not Canadians agree, tax revenues must increase.

Prefer:
* Whether Canadians agree or [whether] they don't, tax revenues must increase.

Can someone out there give me an actual reason (other than peeveology) that Regardless of whether, or Whether Canadians agree or they don't, is is better than whether or not? Either example? Especially that second one, which simply shoehorns in "they do" between the whether and the not?

Sweet Schadenfreude

A pleasing little fact in Frank Rich's column on Obama and Warren today:

It’s not a coincidence that Dobson’s Focus on the Family, which spent more than $500,000 promoting Proposition 8, has now had to lay off 20 percent of its work force in Colorado Springs.

How nice. Really.

I hope those employees are happy that all that money went to stop gays from being able to marry instead of their salaries. Unemployment will be easier to take, knowing they've stopped teh gays from thinking they're equal to RTCs...

Madoff spinoff damage

I got this email today.

As Director of Administration and Finance, it’s my job to make sure that that preparation includes prudently managing our organization’s resources. So, as you and other ACLU Foundation supporters expect, we’ve been carefully monitoring and responding to the severe financial crisis enveloping America and its impact on our ability to defend fundamental freedoms.

In the last couple of weeks, however, we’ve been hit hard in a way that no one could forecast. You have, no doubt, heard about the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme in which investors have been horribly defrauded of up to $50 billion. What you may not know is that two foundations that have been incredibly generous and longstanding supporters of our national security and reproductive freedom work have been victimized by the Madoff scandal -- forced to close their doors and terminate their grants.

That means that $850,000 in support we were counting on from these foundations in 2009 simply won’t exist. We’re dealing with that reality and remain committed to continuing our critical work in these areas. But, as you can imagine, the year-end donations of you and other key ACLU Foundation supporters are now more important than ever.

Please help the ACLU Foundation meet critical civil liberties needs in early 2009. Make a tax-deductible year-end donation now.

There's no way, of course, I (or any of us) can individually make up $850,000. But if enough of us give what we can (8,500 giving $100, 85,000 giving $10 - you get the idea), we can help the ACLU weather this unexpected blow.

I did. Won't you?

Santas - 11

Happy Birthday, Li

Today in 1965, in Shenyang, Liaoning, China, Gong Li was born. Star of a number of films including Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, The Story of Qiu Ju, Farewell My Concubine. and Curse of the Golden Flower, Gong is a stunning and brilliant actress.

Best of 2008

Jon Swift has put up a listing of the best posts of 2008:

The bloggers represented below run the political gamut, from conservative to anti-America, but in addition to politics, they also write about movies, music, television, books, dance, education, fashion, travel, food, economics, health care, science, technology, religion and history and share personal stories, poetry and fiction. There is surely something here that will interest you and probably something to offend you, as well, but that at least might make you think.

Definitely go and bookmark the page - it'll keep you busy for a while.

Santas - 10

They're baaaack

Today - about an hour ago - the cedar waxwings came back. Since it wasn't freezing, I had gone outside to get a picture of three fluffed out, drowsing mourning doves (included below) and was still there when the cedar waxwings arrived. They didn't seem to care that I was right there, and I got some very nice shots, I think.

Happy Birthday, Bo

Born today, in 1928 in McComb, Mississippi, The Originator, Bo Diddley.

He died this year, just shy of 80, and he is already missed.

Happy Birthday, Rudyard

Today, in Bombay in 1865, Rudyard Kipling was born. His parents sent him "back" to England to avoid the typhoid and cholera, and he used his school experiences in several of his works, the horrifying 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' and the delightful Stalky and Co. particularly. After school he went back to India and became a reporter, writing fiction and poetry in his spare time. Celebrity came after six years, and he returned to England. But he didn't like living there, and after a few years spent traveling the world, he settled in Vermont - and it was there he wrote The Jungle Book, probably his most well-known work.

THE FLOWERS

To our private taste, there is always something a little exotic, almost artificial, in songs which, under an English aspect and dress, are yet so manifestly the product of other skies. They affect us like translations; the very fauna and flora are alien, remote; the dog's-tooth violet is but an ill substitute for the rathe primrose, nor can we ever believe that the wood-robin sings as sweetly in April as the English thrush. -- THE ATHENAEUM.

  Buy my English posies!
    Kent and Surrey may --
  Violets of the Undercliff
    Wet with Channel spray;
  Cowslips from a Devon combe --
    Midland furze afire --
  Buy my English posies
    And I'll sell your heart's desire!
       
  Buy my English posies!
    You that scorn the May,
  Won't you greet a friend from home
    Half the world away?
  Green against the draggled drift,
    Faint and frail and first --
  Buy my Northern blood-root
    And I'll know where you were nursed:
Robin down the logging-road whistles, "Come to me!"
Spring has found the maple-grove, the sap is running free;
All the winds of Canada call the ploughing-rain.
Take the flower and turn the hour, and kiss your love again!
       
  Buy my English posies!
    Here's to match your need --
  Buy a tuft of royal heath,
    Buy a bunch of weed
  White as sand of Muysenberg
    Spun before the gale --
  Buy my heath and lilies
    And I'll tell you whence you hail!
Under hot Constantia broad the vineyards lie --
Throned and thorned the aching berg props the speckless sky --
Slow below the Wynberg firs trails the tilted wain --
Take the flower and turn the hour, and kiss your love again!
       
  Buy my English posies!
    You that will not turn --
  Buy my hot-wood clematis,
    Buy a frond o' fern
  Gathered where the Erskine leaps
    Down the road to Lorne --
  Buy my Christmas creeper
    And I'll say where you were born!
West away from Melbourne dust holidays begin --
They that mock at Paradise woo at Cora Lynn --
Through the great South Otway gums sings the great South Main --
Take the flower and turn the hour, and kiss your love again!
       
  Buy my English posies!
    Here's your choice unsold!
  Buy a blood-red myrtle-bloom,
    Buy the kowhai's gold
  Flung for gift on Taupo's face,
    Sign that spring is come --
  Buy my clinging myrtle
    And I'll give you back your home!
Broom behind the windy town; pollen o' the pine --
Bell-bird in the leafy deep where the ratas twine --
Fern above the sddle-bow, flax upon the plain --
Take the flower and turn the hour, and kiss your love again!
       
  Buy my English posies!
    Ye that have your own
  Buy them for a brother's sake
    Overseas, alone.
  Weed ye trample underfoot
    Floods his heart abrim --
  Bird ye never heeded,
    Oh, she calls his dead to him!
Far and far our homes are set round the Seven Seas;
Woe for us if we forget, we that hold by these!
Unto each his mother-beach, bloom and bird and land --
Masters of the Seven Seas, oh, love and understand.

A pack every 2.5 days...

You know, quitting isn't easy, says the woman in the "mytimetoquit.com" commercial.

But you know what? Everyone I know who has actually struggled to quit smoking hates that woman. Her whining about her struggle and addiction - at about 7 cigarettes a day. Seriously. One when she wakes up, one on her way to work, one at "10 on the dot, like clockwork", and "another after lunch"... My father was on two packs a day when he quit, my younger sister (one month since a cigarette) ditto.

I'm not sure if this is a message saying "mytimetoquite.com" only works for moderate smokers, or if they really think this woman represents heavy smokers...

Santas - 9

Like a plague, sort of, but so pretty

Four days now - two days apart - cedar waxwings have come by in the early morning, swarming the dogwood and the pear in the front, and the berry bushes in the back. So early is it usually that the pictures are just silhouettes (like the last one), or too dark and grainy to keep. But today they came later.

My sister told me of seeing a huge flock swarm a cherry tree in the fall, stripping it of every fruit in a seething mass of tawny with yellow and red and black accents. This flock is much smaller, about a dozen, and they leave a lot behind them when they go - which is why they keep coming back, I suppose. (In fact, they came back Tuesday and I got better shots!)

Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• Jennifer at Cocktail Party Physics on Michael Faraday: I've always had a soft spot for Michael Faraday, for any number of reasons, but one of those reasons is that he was a brilliant experimentalist with world-class instincts for investigating the behavior of this strange new phenomenon, and yet he possessed only rudimentary mathematical skills -- something that hampered the broad acceptance of his concept of how electromagnetism worked. And then there was his inveterate bookishness. He came from working class origins: he was the son of an English blacksmith, apprenticed to a bookbinder at 14. Some might have considered this a sucky job, but the young Faraday took advantage of access to all that knowledge, and read voraciously (I was one of those kids who started reading very early, and would compulsively read a cereal box if that's all that was available to me). Faraday was especially fond of reading about the natural sciences. Serendipitously, as his apprenticeship was ending, a friend gave him a ticket to a lecture on electrochemistry by the eminent scientist Humphrey Davey, at the Royal Institution -- not a venue where the young humble-born Faraday would normally be welcomed. Faraday was entranced, and asked Davy for a job. There wasn't a position available, Davy gently told the young man, but shortly thereafter he sacked his assistant for brawling and hired Faraday in his stead. It has famously been said that Michael Faraday was Davy's greatest discovery; considering that Davy discovered the elements barium, strontium, sodium, potassium, calcium and magnesium, that is no mean compliment.

• Sean at Cosmic Variance writes about the physics of Benjamin Button: The important event this Dec. 25 isn’t celebrating the birthday of Isaac Newton or other historical figures, it’s the release of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a David Fincher film starring Brad Pitt and based on the story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. As you all know, it’s a story based on the device of incompatible arrows of time: Benjamin is born old and ages backwards into youth (physically, not mentally), while the rest of the world behaves normally. Some have pretended that scientific interest in the movie centers on issues of aging and longevity, but of course it’s thermodynamics and entropy that take center stage. While entropy increases and the Second Law is respected in the rest of the world, Benjamin Button’s body seems to be magically decreasing in entropy. (Which does not, strictly speaking, violate the Second Law, since his body isn’t a closed system, but it sure is weird.)


• Sam at Sorting Out Science has a "Scientific Tourist" post on Gigantopithecus blacki - a cautionary tale: Gigantopithecus has an interesting history in the scientific world. It was first described by the German paleontologist Ralph von Koenigswald based on a single tooth found at a Chinese apothecary’s shop in 1935. Many more fossilized bits and pieces of this creature have since been found — but still, the sum total of Gigantopithecus remains consists of three jaw bones (a.k.a. mandibles), and hundreds of teeth. As such things go, these are slim pickings. Still, it’s been enough for people to propose detailed hypotheses on Gigantopithecus' place in the ape family tree, as well as on its diet, behavior, and general size and description (as is the case for the Museum of Man’s reconstruction). The fact that these are all based on thin evidence doesn’t seem to bother a number of people, some of whom even go on to postulate that encounters with early humans led to the extinction of Gigantopithecus — unless, of course, some remnant populations remain to be the source of Sasquatch / Big Foot / Yeti stories


• Judith at Zenobia: Empress of the East finishes up (I think) her series on Stone-Age Venuses: A Palaeolithic man needed a woman who would bear him lots of children. Not a pretty face but a “faceless fertile being" with a strongly emphasized vulva to produce a continuing supply of young humans. And, if she got too fat in the process, well, there's just more of her to impregnate. So men carved desirable images of obese, passive, child-bearing nurturers -- another weapon in the armoury of Palaeolithic magic. Perhaps these ladies were divine in some sense, but, if so, that was restricted to a place in cults of fertility acted out by men and for men. This was the early 20th century prehistorians' view -- and there may well be a certain amount of truth in it. But not enough to carry the weight of the theory. For it should have been obvious (even at the time) that this could not have been the whole story. Some Venuses didn't fit the model. Someone may have unkindly pointed out, too, that there are no carved children. If Palaeolithic Tarzans were obsessed with the need for abundant offspring, they (literally) didn't show it.


• And the eponymous Skulls in the Stars has another, and detailed, pos on Michael Faraday's excellent researches: Michael Faraday (1791 - 1867) was a master of electricity. His researches established may important results in electromagnetic theory, including some which are now so taken for granted that Faraday’s name is unfortunately not even thought of in connection with them. I started to investigate Faraday’s writings while working on a post about Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Coming Race, which quotes Faraday to justify B-L’s fictional source of energy, vril. This led me back through Faraday’s monumental collection of researches on electricity, a collection of over 25 articles published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society under the blanket title, “Experimental researches in electricity.” Faraday, though apparently not very sophisticated theoretically, was an amazing experimentalist. Though I was originally looking for only a single quotation from his articles, I eventually downloaded a half-dozen of his works and I thought I’d discuss their details and their historical import.

Enjoy!

The Week in Entertainment

Film: The Day the Earth Stood Still - I liked it. It wasn't perfect, of course, but it was pretty good. There was a lot of story left to tell, but it wasn't the story they chose - what happened next, would be grim. They wanted to end on a bit of hope. Also Marley and Me at which I (we all) cried like a baby.

DVD: Topsy Turvy which was excellent, if a bit full of detail. Blazing Saddles - almost as funny as I remembered, and probably that's because I'm now a bit too old for some of the humor and some of it's just dated.

Read: Nothing, which is extremely unusual!

Carnival of Maryland

The latest edition of the Carnival of Maryland is up at Inside Charm City. Enjoy!

Sky Watch: Sun in Tree

I took this Christmas morning, meaning to post it, and then forgot in all the excitement. So here it is, a bit late - a day of sun amidst a week of rain.



more Sky Watchers here

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Retaliation

In a reminder that not "all the world*" is celebrating this time of year, Israel has attacked Gaza, killing scores - possibly as many as 195.

The Israeli Air Force on Saturday launched a massive attack on Hamas targets throughout Gaza in retaliation for the recent heavy rocket fire from the area, hitting mostly security headquarters, training compounds and weapons storage facilities, the Israeli military and witnesses said. Dr. Muawiya Hassanein, the head of emergency services at the Gaza Ministry of Health, said that at least 195 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli air strikes.

Of late, the words "asymmetric response" have been thrown about, usually condemned, and usually in reference to Russia's reactions to Georgian aggression and NATO expansion. But this is the dictionary illustration (my emphasis):

On Wednesday alone, more than 60 rockets and mortars were fired, some reaching further than previously. While the rockets are meant to be deadly, and several houses and a factory were hit, sowing widespread panic, no Israelis were killed or seriously injured in the recent attacks.

And nothing is going to change.

For its part, Israel said the strikes would not only continue, but that they would be intensified.In a statement issued immediately after the raid, the Israeli military warned that “This operation will be continued, expanded and intensified as much as will be required.”

This is the face of Israel's "retalition":

At Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, scores of dead bodies were laid out in front of the morgue waiting for family members to identify them. Many were dismembered.

Inside the hospital, relatives carried a five-month old baby who had suffered a serious head wound from shrapnel. Overwhelmed, the hospital staff seemed unable to offer help.

At the Gaza City police station, at least 15 traffic police who had been training in a courtyard were killed on the spot.

Tamer Kahrouf, 24, a civilian who had been working on a construction site in Jabaliya, north of Gaza City, said he saw his two brothers and uncle killed before his eyes when the Israeli planes bombed a security post nearby. Mr. Kharouf was wounded and bleeding from the head.

Shouldn't Hamas stop firing rockets? Shouldn't Israel stop treating Gaza like a giant camp?

* You know, it's not even all the Christians in the world... for the Eastern Churches, Christmas isn't until Jan 6...

Happy Birthday, Johannes

Today in 1571 Johannes Kepler was born in Wurttemberg, Germany. Kepler was born to Lutheran parents, but never subscribed fully to the doctrine of "the real presence" and refused to sign the Formula of Concord; therefor he was excluded from the sacrament. Being unaccepted by the Lutherans and not a Catholic, either, Kepler had no refuge during the Thirty Years War and the counter-reformation, which meant he was forced to move over and over again to stay alive.

I quote from the biography of Kepler on NASA's Kepler Mission page, where you can go for more details on his work and his three laws (my emphasis):

Kepler was forced to leave his teaching post at Graz due to the counter Reformation because he was Lutheran and moved to Prague to work with the renowned Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe. He inherited Tycho's post as Imperial Mathematician when Tycho died in 1601. Using the precise data that Tycho had collected, Kepler discovered that the orbit of Mars was an ellipse. In 1609 he published Astronomia Nova, delineating his discoveries, which are now called Kepler's first two laws of planetary motion. And what is just as important about this work, "it is the first published account wherein a scientist documents how he has coped with the multitude of imperfect data to forge a theory of surpassing accuracy" (O. Gingerich in forward to Johannes Kepler New Astronomy translated by W. Donahue, Cambridge Univ Press, 1992), a fundamental law of nature. Today we call this the scientific method.

In 1612 Lutherans were forced out of Prague, so Kepler moved on to Linz. His wife and two sons had recently died. He remarried happily, but had many personal and financial troubles. Two infant daughters died and Kepler had to return to Württemburg where he successfully defended his mother against charges of witchcraft. In 1619 he published Harmonices Mundi, in which he describes his "third law."

In spite of more forced relocations, Kepler published the seven-volume Epitome Astronomiae in 1621. This was his most influential work and discussed all of heliocentric astronomy in a systematic way. He then went on to complete the Rudolphine Tables that Tycho had started long ago. These included calculations using logarithms, which he developed, and provided perpetual tables for calculating planetary positions for any past or future date. Kepler used the tables to predict a pair of transits by Mercury and Venus of the Sun, although he did not live to witness the events.

Johannes Kepler died in Regensburg in 1630, while on a journey from his home in Sagan to collect a debt. His grave was demolished within two years because of the Thirty Years War. Frail of body, but robust in mind and spirit, Kepler was scrupulously honest to the data.

What a tremendous epitaph that is.

Happy Birthday, Louis

Born today in 1822 in Dole, France - Louis Pasteur.

If you're like me, you think of pasteurized milk, and maybe beer ... but the man was a workhorse of applied science. Louis Pasteur brought about a veritable revolution in the 19th-century scientific method. By abandoning his laboratory and by tackling the agents of disease in their natural environments, he was able through his investigations to supply the complete solution to a given question, not only identifying the agent responsible for a disease but also indicating the remedy.

When in 1881 he had perfected a technique for reducing the virulence of various disease-producing microorganisms, he succeeded in vaccinating a herd of sheep against the disease known as anthrax. Likewise, he was able to protect fowl from chicken cholera, for he had observed that once animals stricken with certain diseases had recovered they were later immune to a fresh attack. Thus, by isolating the germ of the disease and by cultivating an attenuated, or weakened, form of the germ and inoculating fowl with the culture, he could immunize the animals against the malady. In this he was following the example of the English physician Edward Jenner in his method for vaccinating animals against cowpox. On April 27, 1882, Pasteur was elected a member of the Académie Française, at which point he undertook research that proved to be the most spectacular of all—the preventive treatment of rabies. Having detected the rabies virus by its effects on the nervous system and attenuated its virulence, he applied his procedure to man; on July 6, 1885, he saved the life of a nine-year-old boy, Joseph Meister, who had been bitten by a rabid dog.

Among his other discoveries - the theory of molecular asymmetry, showing that the biological properties of chemical substances depend not only on the nature of the atoms constituting their molecules but also on the manner in which these atoms are arranged in space. By means of simple and precise experiments, including the filtration of air and the exposure of unfermented liquids to the air of the high Alps, he proved that food decomposes when placed in contact with germs present in the air, which cause its putrefaction, and that it does not undergo transformation or putrefy in such a way as to spontaneously generate new organisms within itself.

He showed that milk could be soured by injecting a number of organisms from buttermilk or beer but could be kept unchanged if such organisms were excluded. After laying the theoretical groundwork, Pasteur proceeded to apply his findings to the study of vinegar and wine, two commodities of great importance in the economy of France; his pasteurization process, the destruction of harmful germs by heat, made it possible to produce, preserve, and transport these products without their undergoing deterioration. In 1870 Pasteur devoted himself to the problem of beer. Following an investigation conducted both in France and among the brewers in London, he devised, as he had done for vinegar and wine, a procedure for manufacturing beer that would prevent its deterioration with time. British exporters, whose ships had to sail entirely around the African continent, were thus able to send British beer as far as India without fear of its deteriorating.

In 1865 he undertook a government mission to investigate the diseases of the silkworm, which were about to put an end to the production of silk at a time when it comprised a major section of France's economy. To carry out the investigation, he moved to the south of France, the centre of silkworm breeding. Three years later he announced that he had isolated the bacilli of two distinct diseases and had found methods of preventing contagion and of detecting diseased stock.

In 1854 Pasteur became dean of the new science faculty at the University of Lille, where he initiated a highly modern educational concept: by instituting evening classes for the many young workmen of the industrial city, conducting his regular students around large factories in the area, and organizing supervised practical courses, he demonstrated the relationship that he believed should exist between theory and practice, between university and industry. A skillful experimenter endowed with great curiosity and a remarkable gift of observation, Pasteur devoted himself with immense enthusiasm to science and its applications to medicine, agriculture, and industry.

"Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence."

info and many sentences from: "Pasteur, Louis." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2006. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 27 Dec. 2006 < http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-12562 >.

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Santas - 5

Good Yule!

Three for the day!

Happy Holidays

There are two holidays in the Western world, both of them falling on December 25th and both of them now called Christmas. There's the Christian festival, the Feast of the Nativity - the one with the creche and Baby Jesus and sacred songs; and there's the other one, the secular Yule - the holiday with the tree and the presents and Santa Claus, the holiday Irving Berlin wrote secular songs for. The holiday with holly and turkey and trimmings, the one with snow and tinsel and old fashioned Father Christmases, the lights and ornaments and reindeer... Most people in this country may keep them both, but precious few keep only The Nativity. Many more than that keep Yule...

There is certainly a religious component to Christmas - but which religion? Christmas as it is practiced in the US at least, and I expect around the European-origin world at large, isn't really about Baby Jesus® anymore.

So I celebrate - and say "Merry Christmas".

And now, to all my readers:

Season's Greetings - and Happy New Year!

Whatever you want those words to mean.

Rejoice with the return of the Sun and the lengthening of days. Be well, be happy, be kind to one another. This is our life: live it well together.

Santas - 4

A-type B-thing and B-type A-thing

So, I went to see The Day the Earth Stood Still, which was not a bad movie, despite the howls from many of the bloggers I read - and their commenters. De gustibas, and all that.

But I feel compelled to defend the movie against one accusation:

Many people say a variation on this: John Cleese got a Nobel for "altruistic biology" ...

No. He got it "for his work on biological altruism". Which is something entirely different.

Santas - 3

Another winter bird

On a very cold winter morning in my father's next-door neighbor's yard, a rufous-sided towhee.

Santas - 2

Happy Birthday, Edwin

Today in Head Tide, Maine, in 1869, Edwin Arlington Robinson was born. His poetry was unsuccessful to begin with, and he lived on the brink of starvation. Then one day Kermit Roosevelt read some of the poems and gave them to his father, Theodore Roosevelt. TR gave him a cushy job in a Customs House, saying, "I expect you to think poetry first and customs second." All Robinson had to do was show up, read the morning newspaper, and leave it on his chair to prove he had been in. In 1922, the first year the Pulitzer Prize for poetry was awarded, he won - and again in 1925 and 1928.

This poem is very long - 314 lines, too long to post it all - but it's my favorite of his. Select the title to read it all.

The Man Against the Sky

BETWEEN me and the sunset, like a dome
Against the glory of a world on fire,
Now burned a sudden hill,
Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made higher,
With nothing on it for the flame to kill
Save one who moved and was alone up there
To loom before the chaos and the glare
As if he were the last god going home
Unto his last desire.

Dark, marvelous, and inscrutable he moved on
Till down the fiery distance he was gone,
Like one of those eternal, remote things
That range across a man’s imaginings
When a sure music fills him and he knows
What he may say thereafter to few men,—
The touch of ages having wrought
An echo and a glimpse of what he thought
A phantom or a legend until then;
For whether lighted over ways that save,
Or lured from all repose,
If he go on too far to find a grave,
Mostly alone he goes.

Monday Science Links

This week's sciency goodness:Blogger: The Greenbelt - Edit Post "Monday Science Links"

• Well, in case you didn't read Four Stone Hearth, Judith at has Part two of her look at Stone Age Venuses - and Hottentots ine Europe: Although Venus buttocks rarely stand at right angles, they are unarguably ample. As these figurines began to appear in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they first stunned, then titillated Europeans. That voluptuous body shape was quickly linked to the steatopygia found among some African women and interpreted as evidence of an African influence on the Cro-Magnon (whitish) European cultureZenobia: Empress of the East.


• Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy explains why meteors don't start fires: In Auckland, New Zealand recently a warehouse was set ablaze. It was quite the inferno, needing a huge effort to quell it. No one knows what started it… but rumors are spreading that it was a meteorite that did the damage. Several people saw a fireball in the sky, and it happened around 10:00, around the time the fire started. Case closed, right? Bzzzzt. Nope. I will almost guarantee a meteorite did not start this fire! Why not?


• Grrlscientist at Living the Scientific Life blogs about honey-eaters that aren't: Every once in awhile, I will read a scientific paper that astonishes and delights me so much that I can hardly wait to tell you all about it. Such is the situation with a newly published paper about the Hawai'ian Honeyeaters. In short, due to the remarkable power of convergent evolution, Hawai'ian Honeyeaters have thoroughly deceived taxonomists and ornithologists as to their true origin and identity for more than 200 years.


• Mo at Neurophilosophia tells us that they're on the verge making prosthetic hands feel real: Earlier this month, cognitive neuroscientist Henrik Ehrsson and his colleagues at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm described the body swap illusion. They first made their participants view a mannequin's body, or that of another person, from the first-person perspective, using video cameras and head-mounted visual displays. When the participants' bodies were stroked with a short rod, in the same way and at the same time as the body of the mannequin or the other person, they reported experiencing the other body as their own. In the current study, a similar phenomenon, called the rubber hand illusion, was used. The study involved 18 participants, all of whom have had one of their arms amputated somewhere between the wrist and elbow. The participants sat with the stump of their amputated arm hidden from view, and with a life-sized rubber hand in full view on the table in front of them. An experimenter then simultaneously touched the stump and the index finger of the rubber hand with soft paintbrushes. .


• At over at Tetrapod Zoology, Darren goes over the Atlas mountains and brings back musings and gorgeous pics of birds, lizards, and fennecs: More musings from the Morocco trip. So, we travelled over the Atlas Mountains and were soon up at the snowline. We joked about seeing lions and bears, but did see a Barbary partridge Alectoris barbara (another first) and a representative of the strikingly blue Blue tit subspecies Cyanistes caeruleus ultramarinus. If you've been keeping up with parid taxonomy you'll know that some workers now regard this blue tit of north-west Africa and the Canaries as a distinct species, the Ultramarine or Afrocanarian tit C. ultramarinus (but note that not all the blue tits of the Canaries belong to this species: another four or five are recognised from the islands... by some authors at least). Black redstart Phoenicurus ochruros and loads of Red-billed choughs Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax were also present (but no Alpine choughs P. graculus) [adjacent photos by Richard Hing].

Enjoy!

Welcome, Yule

The Shortest Day by Susan Cooper

So the shortest day came, and the year died,
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive,
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - Listen!!
All the long echoes sing the same delight,
This shortest day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, fest, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!!

The Week in Entertainment

TV: House. Oh, yecchh. Urg. Foreman and Hadley? Maybe she's gonna die like real soon. Numb3rs - I'm not crazy about the Penfield character, so this wasn't one of my favorite. Pushing Daisies - the Norwegians! "Svedes!" Ned's father is George Hamilton! I cannot believe this show has been cancelled. The Mentalist - a nice episode.

Read: Frozen Tracks by Åke Edwardson - not the first in the series, and all the characters are well-drawn with complex backstories - well-plotted and fascinating.

UT vs Stanford

In what is sort of a rematch of last year's championship game - sort of because UT lost five seniors and Stanford only one - the Lady Vols and the Cardinal squared off tonight in Knoxville. To be honest, I thought this young UT team was going to get smacked down by Stanford, but it didn't happen. In fact, at the half UT led by 9 and had never been behind. Stanford managed a 2-pt lead twice, but pretty much it was UT until the Cardinal tied it up with 58 seconds to go. Argh. Johnson drives, misses, and is called for charging! Argh! 68 all with 23 seconds to go!

Overtime!

Stricklen hitting threes like crazy... Oh, man. Glory Johnson down hard - right knee really hurting her. She has to go out...

And now down by 7 with 26 seconds to go. It's "foul time!" Pointless. Worse than. Alex Fuller stands there and waits for someone to find her - and then hits her two. So Stanford is down by nine with 23 seconds to go. They took 19 seconds to shoot - and missed. 4.5 seconds and Alicia Manning hits one.

Tennessee wins #300 in Thompson-Bolling Arena (to 19 losses), 79-69. W00t!

(Just hoping Johnson is okay.)

The Season is the Reason

Happy Winter Solstice to my Northern Hemisphere readers...


And happy Summer Solstice to my Southerners...

possibly related ...

I'm reading George Orwell's diary online. "Currently" he's in Morocco, recovering from TB and writing, so the entries are often sparse - in fact, often it's nothing but how many eggs his hens laid that day - but just as often fascinating.

They're using Wordpress to host it, and the software has some sort of algorithm wherewith it generates "possibly related" posts on other Wordpress hosts. (It also has a startingly prosaic "keyword" generator.) Often, those posts are barely related at all - possibly they also have the word "rain" or "eggs" in them.

Today's entry raised the absurdity of the "possibly related posts (automatically generated)" to genuinely capital-A heights (select the image for a larger version, or see below):



The diary entry reads:

Two eggs.

Finer, cool, a few spots of rain.

One of the pigeons is dead – cause unknown.

And the "possibly related posts":

* Seven Found Dead In Duplex; Cause Unknown
* The UK is quite hot enough
* August Rains

Santas - 1

Both Sides Now

One of those loud pings rang through the cabin and I awoke. My first thought was: Why are we over the ocean?! A small green island with a lighthouse was just to the right of the plane, lapped by pale water in the early dawn.

But we should have been close to Charlotte, NC, and our flight path should never have gotten nearer the Atlantic than we were in Baltimore, where we started. So - What the---? Why the ocean?

And then I realized: not an island with water and a lighthouse, but a hilltop with fog and a microwave tower. The captain announced our approach, saying the weather in Charlotte was "overcast at 900 feet". We're either not nearly to Charlotte yet, I thought as I leaned to peer over the sleeping soldier in the window seat, or else we're flying very low indeed, because the view to the ground was obstructed only by the fog - and only at the very lowest points. It almost looked like snow, except backwards. It wasn't the peaks that were white with dark lower ground; the valleys were white, dark hills rising above the mist and fog that filled all the lowlands, lapping them like milk.

And then quite suddenly we were approaching a massive bank of clouds - under us, but solid, a wall reaching vertically as though the edge had been cut off and stretching horizontally as far as I could see - and then we were over it. Here was our "overcast at 900 feet" - massive white clouds piled up like, yes, for all the world like angel hair. Or cotton batting. From a distance, perhaps, clouds look like ice cream, but from close up, no. It's impossible to think of them as not having at least some substance when you're on top like that. Inside them, they're just fog - all grey and insubstantial - but from on above they look quite solid, though soft. Feathery and wispy, they filled the sky below us; above was pale grey turning blue, and orange and gold burned all along the left side of the sky where the sun was just coming up.

And then all was gray as we descended into the clouds, dropping down to Charlotte.

Winter

Of course, the camera picked the wrong thing to focus on in this shot, but I actually rather like the way it turned out.

Trust your money with us

Just saw a Bank of America ad which concludes "... no wonder Americans trust more of their hard-earned money with us."

Wait, what?

Trust their money with us?

That's not how "trust" works - the verb, I mean. You "trust your money to BOA" (and usually that's "entrust"), or you "trust BOA with your money."

The ad sounds like Americans either think their money might do something naughty to the bank, or possibly misbehave in other banks' company...

There are five hits for "trust it with us" against eighty-one "trust us with it", by the way.

Vols vs. Monarchs

Tennessee played ODU this evening, and it was quite a game. ODU is a great team, and it was neck and neck the whole time. Angie Bjorklund hit seven three-pointers, 29 for the night, and Briana Bass (Mighty Mouse), a great little point guard in the making, hit every free shot she got and ran the floor well. A couple of UT players went out with injuries, but UT is a deep team... 81-76, a hard-earned victory for UT.

One thing kind of cute - they did an ad for ODU's men's team, and finished with the appropriate "Monarchs Rule!"

Sky Watch: Winter Sunrise and Clouds

I wasn't sure what I was going to put up this week, but this sunrise greeted me yesterday, and I got a picture I really like. Hope you do, too.




more Sky Watchers here

He's worse, so we're okay?

There was an editorial in the NY Times Tuesday (read it here) about al-Zaidi and the thrown shoes. What strikes me is the large number of commenters who say some version of "What if he'd have tried that under Saddam!"

So the argument is, Saddam was so horrible that George Bush is not bad - not as bad is "okay"?

Honestly.

Four Stone Hearth #26

Welcome to Four Stone Hearth, the premiere anthro-blogging carnival on the web! This edition - the 54th - is a day late (I had emergency dental work done and nothing, nothing, got posted yesterday!), but I hope you'll find the posts intriguing enough to forgive me for that.

Physical anthropology:

Corvus at moneduloides looks at a problem unique to hominids, plantar fasciitis, and how long the foot structure that causes it has been around.

Anthropology:

In Our Blessed Lady of the Cerebellum, posted by Greg at Neuroanthropology, there's a rather different take on the "Virgin Mary in the MRI" story. As Greg says, "This story would be unmitigated fun, a chance to spin out all sorts of jokes about which parts of the brain ‘light up’ when we see a pattern of the Holy Mary in our brain images, except for the fact that, if you read a bit further in the TCPalm, you learn why Ms. Latrimore was getting brain scans in the first place, and perhaps why she and her relatives are searching for signs of any divine intervention."

And his blogmate Daniel gives us The Encultured Brain, a look at their San Francisco anthropology conference session.

Archaeology:

Martin at Aardvarkaelogy give us a cool new Dark Ages find from Denmark: the thirteenth gold foil figure die known to scholarship.

Terry Toohill, guest posting at Remote Central, looks at human evolution on trial: technology, a fascinating overview of stone tools and their development.

Declan Moore at the Moore Groups Blog offers us a look at an assemblage of shoe leather from an excavation carried out in Galway in the West of Ireland.

And finally, two posts spanning disciplines:

First, Judith at Zenobia: Empress of the East offers us a two-part look at Stone Age Venuses from all around Europe - and modern Hottentots, and the cultural outlook that extrapolated savagery and sex from a differing appearance.

And the the Digital Cuttlefish offers us a few pics and thoughts from Greece, the Sanctuary of Isis to be precise.

That wraps up this edition. The next edition will be on December 31 at Testimony of the Spade. Hosts are always welcome and, as you can tell, you don't have to actively blog in the field to do it. Just head over and give Martin a shout. See you next time!