Final Four

So, we're set. Stanford plays UConn, and Oklahoma plays Louisville.

I should take a hint: the only team I've rooted for since the early rounds that has won has been Stanford. So, Go Cardinal!

Go Sun Devils!

13 minutes into the first half and UConn is only 1 point up.

C'mon, Sun Devils. Kill them Huskies.

8:54........... Oh, well. I didn't really think it was going to happen.

But Stanford? That could.

Singers

The mockingbird can make the area seem filled with birds. The song sparrow sings in a voice twice as loud as his body. Both of them frequent the park.

Life on Planet Fox

Over at headsup: the blog, Fred has another insightful look at what Fox is doing when they say they're reporting. This time, Michiganistan and its threat to All We Hold Dear:

Dearborn is a Muslim dominated community, replete with mosques in every section of town and traditional foods from places like Pakistan and Syria. [ZOMG head for the hills they're coming for our cheerleaders!!!!! Our reporter needs to breathe deeply and visit -- oh, Dearborn's homepage! Wherein one can find a mayor named O'Reilly (a common Muslim terrorist name, as anybody at Fox ought to know), a city council populated by the likes of Tafelski, Hubbard, Thomas, Sareini, Shooshanian, Abraham and Darany, and a bunch of judges named Hultgren, Somers and Wygonik. True, the police chief is a Haddad, which is pretty scary, but we're going to get a lot of Schmidts and Herreras* in the dragnet if we bring him in for questioning. I think you'd have to be genuinely, massively delusional** to think of Dearborn as "Muslim-dominated," but it's a great place to eat. As long as you don't find the Arabic alphabet inherently terrifying.]

It's part of Fred's long look at Fox and its agenda...

All that sort of suggests the point: This isn't journalism that's meant to inform, or to round up the current state of knowledge, or to set out a few sets of opposing viewpoints. It's journalism that's meant to scare.

Good stuff, as always.

Happy Birthday, Nikolai

Today (March 19, OldStyle) in 1809, in Sorochintsy, a town near Poltava, Ukraine, in what was then the Russian Empire Николай Васильевич Гоголь, Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol, or Микола Васильович Гоголь, Mykola Vasylyovich Hohol as he is in Ukrainian, was born. His deft touch with characters, linguistic playfulness, and keen sense of what a professor of mine insisted on calling "the Russian absurd, not the English one!" make him one of the most distinctive voices in all Russian literature.

Or, to put it another way, he's funny. Oh, my word, he's funny.


A number of his works are available on line, such as The Inspector General, The Overcoat, Dead Souls, and a collection featuring The Diary of a Madman, The Nose, and Taras Bulba among others.

Works in Russian are here.

Happy Birthday, Ewan

Today in 1971 Ewan McGregor was born in Perth, Scotland (he grew up in Crieff), and what a wonderful thing that is.

Oh my

Stanford just blew out Iowa State - Jayne Appel got 46 points. 16 rebounds, too. Woof. I sure hope she plays like that against UConn (though really I hope UConn loses tomorrow against Arizona State). That was a clinic, ladies and gentlemen, that was a show.

So, two are in: Stanford and Louisville (hmmm Cardinal and Cardinals...). Tomorrow we fill it out. My hope? Purdue and Arizona State. My prediction? Purdue and UConn.

ABC

Well, Louisville took down Maryland. I must say I'm surprised, especially after the Vanderbilt game.

So. Gosh. Ummm, well, ABC* of course, but maybe I'm for Purdue now? Stanford would be okay, though - I do like Jane Appel. She's a helluva player.

*Anybody but Connecticut... So Stanford would be sweet. Yeah. Go Cardinal.

AU

Tonight Jeopardy! had a category called "First Lady Rhyme Time". The last clue: Julia Dent's Mother's Sisters

Anne rang in and began her answer: "What are--" She paused and laughed, then finished: "Grant's Awnts? That doesn't rhyme for me!"

It does rhyme for me, but it's funny: that's the only word with AU that I pronounce that way (well, except laugh, as Wishydig points out.). Why aunt rhymes with ant and not taunt or daunt, I truly don't know.

Halley's Comet

Today marks the first day that Halley's Comet was reliably recorded in history... in 240 BCE. It wasn't, of course, called that - or even so identified until Halley worked out its periodicity, but nonetheless a notation recorded in the Chinese chronicle Records of the Grand Historian, or Shiji, of a comet that appeared in the east is certainly this comet. (It might have been mentioned in even older Chinese records, but this is the earliest certain mention.)

Happy Birthday, Countée

Countée Cullen was born today in 1903, probably in New York City. Abandoned by his parents, he was at first raised by his grandmother but then adopted by a Methodist minister. He was a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, but unlike others his upbringing had been primarily in a white community and his poetry lacks much of the personal experience or popular black themes other members of that movement show.

Though this is not to say there isn't any...

Incident

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee;
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.


The Wise

Dead men are wisest, for they know
How far the roots of flowers go,
How long a seed must rot to grow.

Dead men alone bear frost and rain
On throbless heart and heatless brain,
And feel no stir of joy or pain.

Dead men alone are satiate;
They sleep and dream and have no weight,
To curb their rest, of love or hate.

Strange, men should flee their company,
Or think me strange who long to be
Wrapped in their cool immunity.


Youth Sings a Song of Rosebuds

Since men grow diffident at last,
And care no whit at all,
If spring be come, or the fall be past,
Or how the cool rains fall,

I come to no flower but I pluck,
I raise no cup but I sip,
For a mouth is the best of sweets to suck;
The oldest wine's on the lip.

If I grow old in a year or two,
And come to the querulous song
Of "Alack and aday" and "This was true,
And that, when I was young,"

I must have sweets to remember by,
Some blossom saved from the mire,
Some death-rebellious ember I
Can fan into a fire.

(info here and poems here)

Monday Science Links

This week's heaping helping of sciency goodness:

• Jake at Pure Pedantry on Natasha Richards and epidural hematomas: Unfortunately, epidural hematomas can have a much more insidious presentation -- which explains why Natasha Richardson was walking around after she got one. Epidural hematomas are usually caused by trauma. Often, you get a blow to the side of your head and rupture an artery. (The middle meningeal artery is quite common.) However, rather that immediately causing a headache or bursting through the dura, the blood pools outside the dura pressing on the brain.


• Carl Zimmer at The Loom blogs on bats: life in motion, with video: When the evenings get particularly thick with mosquitoes where I live, I sometimes sit out in the yard with my daughters and look up at the fading sky. Before too long, a single bat will usually flit out of the nearby trees and start flying circles around the house, scooping up bugs along the way. We can barely make out the bat’s wings as it takes its laps, a flicker of membranes. And so it was a revelation to spend some time earlier this week with two Brown University biologists, Dan Riskin and Sharon Swartz, watching slow-motion movies of bats in flight. There’s a lot going on up there. Bats evolved about 50 million years ago from squirrel-like ancestors. They probably made their first forays into the air as gliders. Like living gliders, they used flaps of skin to increase their surface area, letting them glide further. Their hands evolved long spindly fingers that were joined by membranes. Some early bat fossils suggest that they may have shifted from gliding to alternating between gliding and bursts of fluttering. Eventually bats evolved sustained powered flight. Bats evolved a way to take advantage of the same laws of physics birds use to fly. And many scientists who have studied bat flight in the past have basically treated bats like leathery birds. Yet there’s no reason to assume that this should be so.


• Mo at Neurophilosophy blogs on body integrity and identity disorder: If someone told you that they wanted to have a perfectly good leg amputated, or that they have three arms, when they clearly do not, you would probably be inclined to think that they are mentally disturbed. Psychiatrists, too, considered such conditions to be psychological in origin. Voluntary amputation, for example, was regarded as a fetish, perhaps arising because an amputee's stump resembles a phallus, whereas imaginary extra limbs were likely to be dismissed as the products of delusions or hallucinations. These bizarre conditions - body integrity and identity disorder (BIID) and supernumerary phantom limb - are now widely believed to have a neurological basis. Two forthcoming studies confirm this, by providing strong evidence that both conditions occur as a result of abnormal activity in a part of the brain which is known to be involved in constructing a mental representation of the body, or body image.


• Darren at Tetrapod Zoology gives us thunder beasts in pictures and thunder beasts of New York: No time for a proper article: all I've done here is to take screen-shots of various powerpoint slides (from a perissodactyl lecture I give), and throw in a few words where appropriate...and This incredible skeleton, easily the best known brontothere specimen in the world, is AMNH 518, collected from White River, South Dakota, in 1892. You can gauge its size from the adjacent person...


• Jess at Magma Cum Laude is at a volcano (though not Redoubt): Santiaguito is a strange place. The first of the lava domes in the complex, Caliente (the one erupting in the first photo, and the farthest to the right in the one above) began extruding from the 1902 eruption crater in Santa Maria in 1922. By 1929, the year that a 3 million cubic meter collapse and pyroclastic surge occurred, the dome had grown to about half a cubic kilometer in size. In the next 80 or so years, the other three domes - La Mitad, El Monje, and El Brujo - formed as the active vent migrated westward. Then, after a brief period when both Caliente and El Brujo were active, everything shifted back to Caliente. Currently, Caliente is looking more and more like a mini-stratovolcano - the old rubbly dome has long since been covered over by talus slopes and lava flows. At the summit, however, is a very strange situation.
  

Enjoy!

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: I got a nice set of Quatermass - the first one has only two extant episodes (oh, it's painful to think of the amount of great television just wiped away) but they included copies of the scripts for the missing ones.

TV: Better Off Ted - two episodes (one dvr'd from last week). This show is actually quite funny - strange, but I laugh. A lot. And the Veridian Dynamics commercials they show at the beginning - hysterical. "We can even make radishes so hot people can't eat them. But we don't. Because (video changes from radishes to crying baby) people can't eat. Veridian Dynamics. Food. Yum." Scrubs - a nice ep about the three new interns. The Mentalist - there are, of course, only so many things you can do with the fake-serial-killer plot, so I did guess the killer, but it was a well-done episode. Also NCAAW basketball - one disappointment after another this year...

Read: Finished up Scalzi's Old Man's War and went right into The Ghost Brigades and The Last Colony. And then topped it off with the stand-alone The Android's Dream. There was a lot of comparing him to Heinlein and King on the covers - King, I don't understand, there's no similarity, and Heinlein? I can see that, but Scalzi is way better. Way better.

Legacy X

Over at Language Log Roger Shuy has a post (comments not allowed) which begins:

Daniel Gross has a nice article in Slate called “Bubblespeak,” describing the way economists and politicians extend themselves, as Orwell put it, “to make lies sound truthful." Leading the list is “legacy loans,” “legacy securities,” and “legacy costs,” referring to those badly collateralized loans, mortgages, and problems of auto companies that we are hearing so much about in reports of the recent Federal Bank Rescue Plan. Linguist George Lakoff says “legacy” typically means something positive, while positive these financial instruments are not.

All I can say is, legacy used this way - as a noun modifier, not as a standalone - doesn't have a positive connotation to me.

"My diamond ring is a legacy from my mother" - yes; that's a positive thing. But I would never call it "a legacy diamond ring". An "heirloom ring", but not a "legacy one".

More to the point, perhaps, at work, every time someone refers to a "legacy system" or a "legacy database", it always means "old piece of junk we have to get rid of". Mind, the term gets applied to plenty of things that work much better than their sexy new replacments, but "legacy X" isn't positive, whatever Lakoff may say.

Religion is like underwear...

Here's a wonderful analogy from a commenter named Indigo over at Slactivist (on the latest Left Behind post):

It boils down to a cultural difference. Although I didn't come up with it at the time, I've since clued in to the perfect analogy for the way Canadians (generally speaking - there are of course exceptions) think about religion. We treat it like underwear. We acknowledge that it exists and plays a role in the life of most people; we believe people should be able to obtain whatever kind of it they are comfortable in; we are even beginning to recognise that some people don't have much use for it and that's okay. But we are really not comfortable with people who run around showing theirs off in public and get a little freaked out about people who exhibit an interest in other people's, especially complete strangers'. To drag the analogy to the breaking point, relative to the Canadian political landscape, American politicians walk around without trousers on quite frequently.

Happy Birthday, Gene

Today in Watkins, Minnesota, in 1921, Eugene McCarthy was born. I should have been for him in the '68 election, but I was young and I hated him for being alive when Bobby was dead... Older, I appreciated him more. We need men like him now.

He was also a poet.

BICYCLE RIDER (To Mary)

Teeth bare to the wind
Knuckle white grip on handle bars
You push the pedals of no return,
Let loose new motion and speed.
The earth turns with the multiplied
Force of your wheels.
Do not look back.
Feet light on the brake
Ride the bicycle of your will
Down the spine of the world,
Ahead of your time, into life.
I will not say--
Go slow.

QUIET WATERS

There are quiet waters
where a berry dropped
by a bird flying
starts ripples that
from the center of the pond
spread in concentrics, dying
in silence at the feet of the blue reeds.
I now know where these waters are.

WILLOW IN A TAMARACK SWAMP

There in the savage orange of autumn Tamarack
rusted spikes reeling the slanted, last
of the northern day, down
into the black
root waters,
among the least trees in that least land
in the darkened death camp
of the tribe of trees
I saw you.
green gold willow, arched and graced,
among spines and angled limbs.
captive? queen?
all lost light from the smothering swamp,
alone, you bear back.



KILROY

Kilroy is gone,
the word is out,
absent without leave
from Vietnam.

Kilroy
who wrote his name
in every can
from Poland to Japan
and places in between
like Sheboygan and Racine
is gone
absent without leave
from Vietnam.

Kilroy
who kept the dice
and stole the ice
out of the BOQ
Kilroy
whose name was good
on every IOU
in World War II
and even in Korea
is gone
absent without leave
from Vietnam.

Kilroy
the unknown soldier
who was the first to land
the last to leave,
with his own hand
has taken his good name
from all the walls
and toilet stalls.
Kilroy
whose name around the world
was like the flag unfurled
has run it down
and left Saigon
and the Mekong
without a hero or a song
and gone
absent without leave
from Vietnam.

Happy Birthday, Mario

Today in 1936, in Arequipa, Peru, Mario Vargas Llosa was born. One of the great writers in the Latin American Boom, author of several brilliant novels (especially The Green House), Varga Llosa ran for the presidency of Peru, winning the first round but losing the run-off to Alberto Fujimori. He lives in London most of the time, returning to Peru for several months each year, and continues to write - his latest novel is 2006's The Bad Girl.

His semi-autobiographical account of his courtship and marriage, Aunt Julie and the Scriptwriter (it's only fair to say that Julie wrote her own book, What Little Vargas Didn't Say, in response) was made into one of my favorite movies, the quirky (and fairly unknown) Tune in Tomorrow.

Happy (Belated) Birthday, Robert

Yesterday in 1874 Robert Frost was born in San Francisco.

The Need of Being Versed in Country Things

The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place’s name.

No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.

More Frost here

Sky Watch: Curves

A waning spring crescent moon poised in branches just beginning to bud.





more Sky Watchers here

Blizzard in Colorado...

My brother recently moved from Denver, Colorado, to Zebulon, Georgia. I just sent him email asking if he was glad he had. His response?

yes!!! yes!!! yes!!!

I reckon so...

Happy Birthday, AE

Today in 1859 Alfred Edward Housman was born in Worcestershire, England.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

more Housman here

Happy Birthday, Joseph

Today in 1904 Joseph Campbell was born in New York City.

Luke fulfills a number of the characteristics that you see in mythic heroes: A royal lineage that he grows up ignorant about in a simple, obscure way, and he has special powers and abilities that are brought out by a series of teachers.

In classic mythology, the hero reluctantly leaves the homeland (in Luke's case, the planet Tatooine) on a quest that takes him over a supernatural threshold into a strange land. A helper/co-hero such as space jockey Han Solo lends a steady hand through a series of ordeals. Comic relief is provided by tricksters such as the Greek muse Thalia or C3PO and R2-D2.

Ultimately, the hero must stand on his own, face the darkness and conquer it before returning to reality, stronger and wiser.

For Luke, the darkness was the evil side of the Force, a cosmic spiritualism that Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda taught him to harness for good purposes, another element of the Hero Cycle. Luke and Han, by association with the Force, both evolve from self-centered people into crusaders with a grand purpose. (source Steve Persall, St Petersburg Times Film Critic

Happy Birthday, Christopher

Christopher Clavius was born today in 1538 or maybe 1537, depending on when you count the year beginning, which was not Jan 1 back then. That's not the only thing we don't know for sure about this astronomer and mathematician - his surname may have been Klau, Clau, or even Schlüssel.

But he gave the world the Gregorian calendar - named after the pope who used it, not the man who created it. So goes the world, doesn't it?

Happy Birthday, Patrick

Patrick Troughton was born on 25 March, 1920 in Mill Hill, Middlesex. He had a long and varied career, but to me (and millions) he will always be The Second Doctor...

Dover and Just Wars

Just in case you don't already read Fred Clark's Slactivist regularly (which you should, and not just for his tour-de-force marathon dissection of Left Behind, either), head over and look at this:

Appreciate that Franks' notion of the "Dover effect" only makes sense if one believes that war is an option -- a choice that a supposedly fickle and weak-willed public may choose to stop choosing.

If this were actually the case -- if a given war really were optional, then it would also be a war that we should not have been fighting in the first place. It would be, in other words, an unjust war. And, therefore, it would be a war that a just nation cannot win -- a war for which "victory" is not one of the possible outcomes.

This is true regardless of public opinion. No amount of public support can make an unjust war winnable.

And just as an unjust war is unsustainable, with or without public support, so too protest against a just war tends to be unsustainable, with or without success on the battlefield.

Indeed amazing

From David Morgan-Mar's Irregular Webcomic!:

Trees are indeed amazing.

Next time you're standing next to a large tree, think about the fact that the brown wrinkly cylinder next to you is pumping vast amounts of water from the ground, up to the tips of every single branch and twig and leaf, right to the very top of its height. And is doing so in utter silence, with no moving parts, non-stop, every day of the year, for what might be several hundred years, while standing exposed to everything the elements can throw at it, without breaking down or requiring maintenance of any sort.

Things we take for granted because they are so common can be amazing when you stop to think about them.

Happy Birthday, Harry

Harry Houdini born today, 1874, in Budapest. Houdini (born Ehrich Weiss) began his career as a magician and became an escapologist - perhaps the escapologist. He certainly pioneered the PR-tie in and brought more than a little sex appeal to the trade as well. But in his later years he devoted his energy to investigating spiritualists - and debunking them. The Randi of his time, he used his knowledge of stage magic to unmask the tricks such frauds used to deceived their audiences. Since his death, yearly seances have been held (he'd told his wife, Bess, how to recognize a genuine message from beyond so that she would not be taken in, and she steadfastly refused to fall for those who claimed to have received one) - but to date, Houdini has not escaped from death. As he predicted...

Isn't that a girl's name?

The admin at my office is pregnant. Last week she found out it's a girl.

One of the guys in the office, by the way, argued quite passionately with her over that. She "shouldn't", he said; she "should" "wait and find out" when it was born. That was the "right" and "best" way. Why do people feel the need to impose their own emotional choices on others? Just for validation? But I digress.

She told me that she was glad it was a girl because naming a girl would be so much easier. The problem is that her husband wanted to name a boy Cameron.

And the problem with Cameron? She thinks it's a girl's name. Like Cameron Diaz. And so do most of her friends - she was surprised I didn't think so (of course, I am thirty years older); her husband's cluelessness is apparently to be expected...

Now we all know that you can give a boy's name to a girl - though probably, Miss Michael Learned notwithstanding, not Michael or Jeffery or Richard (though my boss once worked for a woman named Brian) - and it's okay. But you can't give even an odd girl's name to a boy. Once enough girls get the name, it's off-limits for boys. In the USA, Evelyn is forever a girl's name. Robin, too, despite Robin Hood and Robin Masters - I had someone seriously argue that that character was supposed to be like Sarah Caudwell's Hilary Tamar, of always unspecified gender, despite the actual frequent use of "he, him, his" by others referring to Masters (and, of course, Hilary (one or two L's) is a girl's name here). And the classic example is, I suppose, Florence: once Miss Florence Nightingale became world famous, Flo Ziegfield and Flurry Knox were things of the past.

So "Cameron" has now hit that magic percentile - at least for some people.

The Humanists & the Godless

The Humanist Symposium is up at the Atheist Revolution. vjack's put together a good selection. As he says,

This is why I am finding my excitement for The Humanist Symposium renewed. This blog carnival is not about critiquing religion or mocking the superstitious, although my regular readers will know that I occasionally indulge in both. No, this carnival is about promoting humanism. With humanism, we have something that can be celebrated and promoted. Think of it as the yin to atheism's yang. We need both.

Head over and celebrate.

And the Carnival of the Godless is up at Daylight Atheism, where Ebon says

I last hosted this gathering of the godless all the way back in July 2006, for its 44th edition, and nearly three years later, we're still going strong. In fact, the carnival has grown considerably - so much so that I decided to feature only one submission from each entrant, for the sake of brevity - but even so, the sheer scope of this post is a welcome testament to the growing outspokenness and influence of atheism in the First World.

Definitely worth your time.

First time ever, Lady Vols don't

Oh, dear. I'm kinda recovered from Saturday, but... wow.

I was kind of surprised they were seeded as high as 5, but I never expected them to go out in the first round. This is their first ever tournament not getting to at least the third round. I know they're young, but still ... losing so badly to Ball State? Ball State?

They did set a record (not the good kind): first defending champion to lose their opening game in the women's tourney. (Not the worst showing for a defending champion, though; Old Dominion won the title in 1985 and failed to make the tournament the following year.)

And Maryland and Vanderbilt are almost certainly going to go up against each other in the Sweet Sixteen.

Robins

It's not really a sign of spring, since they're here all year, but still - robins and March

Monday Science Links

This week's sciency goodness:

• Brian at Laelaps looks at horse evolution: As I have mentioned previously many late 19th and early 20th century paleontologists were reluctant to accept natural selection as the primary mechanism of evolution. Competing mechanisms like neo-Lamarckism and orthogenesis were more popular. This was at least partially due to the sparse nature of the fossil record; there were gaps between groups that seemed to require some sort of jump or mechanism more able to produce rapid change than selection on variation. These competing mechanisms were also more easily squared with religious views, for evolution seemed less threatening if it had a direction (i.e. fore-ordained end points various lineages were striving towards).


• Darren at Tetrapod Zoology ends his month of dinosaurs with a look at pterosaurs and birds: It has often been suggested that pterosaur disparity was correlated with the rise of birds. Perhaps, as birds began moving into habitats previously occupied by pterosaurs, pterosaurs were forced to adapt or die. Unwin (2006) proposed that, during the Cretaceous, the niches left vacant as pterosaur species went extinct were not occupied by new pterosaur species, as they were before, but (opportunistically) by birds instead: 'Ultimately, the effect of this process was to leave pterosaurs adapted to a relatively narrow range of specialist lifestyles' (Unwin 2006, p. 264)... Dyke et al. (2009) set out to test this model of waning pterosaur diversity. They report that Cretaceous pterosaurs are more morphologically disparate than older forms, not less so. This suggests, they conclude, that Cretaceous pterosaur evolution was not constrained by birds, and that new morphologies were appearing among pterosaurs during this time.


• PZ at Pharyngula posts on some stunning octopods from the Cretaceous: Several new and spectacular cephalopod fossils from 95 million years ago have been found in Lebanon. "Spectacular" is not hyperbole — these specimens have wonderfully well-preserved soft parts, mineralized in fine-grained calcium phosphate, and you can see…well, take a look. The arms (all eight of them) are intact, right down to the suckers; muscles and gills are preserved; the animal has an ink sac; there is a shell gland a chitinous chunk of vestigial shell called the gladius. In some of the specimens, even membranous fins can be found on the mantle. This stuff is amazing — I've seen some other fossil cephalopods before, but usually they're a squid-shaped smudge of a dark smear on rock. These are detailed.


• Brian at Laelaps again (it's a good week for him) on a hyptothesis that spiny-backs showed dinosaurs were on the way out (?): Perhaps the concept of evolutionary senescence was attractive because it appeared to be useful in identifying patterns of evolution and extinction in the fossil record. As a summary of the "Decline and Senescence of Groups" in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica noted "Periods of gradual evolution and of efflorescence may be followed by stationary or senescent conditions." Why should this be so? Why did fossil groups seem to undergo quick periods of evolution but then undergo little change or fail to generate further disparity in form? Evolutionary senescence appeared to be as good an explanation as any, even if its mechanism was impossible to know for certain .


• An underwater volcano erupts near Tonga, and the Big Picture has it: Scientists sailed out to have a closer look at the eruptions of an undersea volcano off the coast of Tonga in the South Pacific Ocean today. Tonga's head geologist, Kelepi Mafi, said there was no apparent danger to residents of Nuku'alofa and others living on the main island of Tongatapu. Officials also said it may be related to a quake with a magnitude of 4.4 which struck last March 13 around 35 kilometers from the capital at a depth of nearly 150 kilometres. (I know this is an off-day posting, but really, thought the images were worth it.

Enjoy!

The Week in Entertainment

Film: The Great Buck Howard - I saw some lukewarm reviews, but I'm recommending it. Malkovich is weird (what's new?), Colin Hanks is low-key (ditto), and the story is both predictable (mostly) and sweet. But it made me smile - a lot. I like it.

DVD: Wallander - a BBC series (three shows) with Kenneth Branagh as Henning Mankell's Swedish detective. So very good.

TV: House - a good episode, though that man's wife was really dumb. Ashes to Ashes - a very good episode. The Mentalist - still fun. I do love this show. And Jane talking about how his other senses were "enhanced" and then walking into something - it's just plain fun without being goofy.

Read: Finished Crack in the Edge of the World. Excellent. Began Old Man's War by John Scalzi.

Eagle Cam

This is cool. WVEC in Hampton Roads has an eagle cam from Norfolk Botanic Garden - two chicks hatched, one still in the shell (as of right now). While I was grabbing these screen shots, dad showed up with a fish.

A woman and another man

I just finished Simon Winchester's A Crack in the Edge of the World, about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and all the geology underneath it. In the main - overwhelmingly so - it's his usual wonderful job, masterfully written and engaging. There were, however, two moments that gave me pause.

The first is just that Winchester thinks "data" is a count plural, while I don't. I've gotten used to "the data are", but this sentence just sounds bizarre to me:

However questionable some of the data might have been, Bolt had a very great deal of them

Part of it is also that "very great deal", too...

But it's this that really made me stop reading and go back. He's describing the Tejon Pass earthquake of 1857, an 8.25 magnitude earthquake that took place in such an empty part of California that its destruction was minimal for its size (p. 193):

Witnesses speak of huge wavelike shakings of the earth; and though some speak of up to three full minutes of shaking, an unprecedented duration, most agree that it was just some forty or fifty seconds' worth of nightmarish movement that wrecked all the army huts, tore most of the trees from the earth, and killed a woman at the nearby Reed's Ranch. The local Kern River ran backward; fish were thrown hundreds of yards from where they swam in Tulare Lake; long zigzag cracks appeared in the ground at San Bernardino; massive ridges, five feet high and fifteen feet across, rose and started to snake through fields; the Los Angeles River was hurled out of its bed and began, if only briefly, to flow along another channel; and up on the Carrizo Plain the fault jerked so dramatically that many of the rivers coursing down from the Temblors were thrown off course by as much as thirty feet in a matter of microseconds.

The event was felt across all Southern California. It was not felt at all north of Parkfield, because of the more lubricated nature of the ever-moving fault up there. Had it struck in modern times, it would have caused dreadful damage forty miles away in Los Angeles. But, as it was, only two people (the rancher and one other man in a village plaza) were killed; and the 4,000 people who lived in the sprawling village that was Los Angeles got little more than a jostling.

Did you catch it? As I said, I stopped at went back to see if I'd misread the first time. It "killed a woman" at the ranch, but "only two people (the rancher and one other man...)" were killed.

That's just weird. Surely "and one other person" would have been more usual?

Happy Birthday, Edith

Today in 1936, Edith Grossman was born today in Philadelphia. She's one of the great translators from Spanish - her Don Quixote, which came out in 2003, is considered one of the, if not the, best translations (Carlos Fuentes called it "truly masterly") and was a best-seller, and Gabriel García Márquez calls her "my voice in English". She has also translated Mario Vargas Llosa, Mayra Montero, Augusto Monterroso, Jaime Manrique, Julián Ríos, and Álvaro Mutis. In 2003, at the PEN Tribute to Gabriel García Márquez, she said:

"Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable."

Or, as she put it in an interview with Guernica:

Yes, I think we have to be faithful to the context. But it’s very important to differentiate between fidelity and literalness. Because you can’t be faithful to words, words are different in different languages. You can’t be faithful to syntax, because that changes from one language to the other. But you can be faithful to intention and context. Borges allegedly said to one of his translators, “Don’t translate what I said. Translate what I meant to say.” That is, in fact, what a translator does. Because languages are very resonant and various levels of diction and styles of discourse echo in the mind of the native reader and native speaker. I always think that my job is to find the English that will resonate like the original Spanish for the English speaking reader.

And here's a bit about translating García Márquez for the first time, from a piece in Criticas:

“I knew this Colombian writer was eccentric when he wrote me saying that he doesn’t use adverbs ending with -mente in Spanish and would like to avoid adverbs ending in -ly in English.” She remembers thinking, what do you say in English except slowly? “Well, I came up with all types of things, like without haste.”

Signs of Spring

A faint sign of purple under the trees near the creek. Spring on the way.

Happy Birthday, Johann

Today in 1865 1685 in Eisenach, Germany, Johann Sebastian Bach was born. The world would be a poorer place without him.

One of my favorite CDs for the office is The Goldberg Variations, scored for a string quartet. But it's hard to go wrong picking something of his.

He spent a large part of his life as a playing musician - an organist, mostly - and much of his composed music was considered too old-fashioned or too ornamental. He changed jobs a lot, until 1723, when he became a choirmaster in Leipzig where he remained until his death in 1750. Most of his jobs were for one church or another, in fact, but he happily wrote secular music when he worked for Prince Leopold of Cothen - until his wife (the prince's) disapproved of such a frivolous expense as chamber music. But whatever kind of music Bach wrote, he did it gloriously.

Spring Equinox Sunrise Sequence

Same dawn, a few minutes from one to three on the walk in to work Friday.

I used to think he was always right

Alex just pronounced Caiaphas with two syllables - kaɪ'-fəs (KYE-fas).

It's keɪ'ə-fəs, or kaɪ'ə-fəs (KAY-uh-fas or KYE-uh-fas). Three syllables either way.

I have to doubt every pronunciation he uses - of a word or in a language I don't know- now.

Ahhh, it's kind of melancholy when the clay feet start showing.

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.

Sky Watch: Gray Day

Spring weather fluctuates. Snow one day, 60s two days later, and cool rainy days the week after that. Today the sky was gray as far as the eye could see. (Unlike the host photo, which you really must see - use link below)





more Sky Watchers here

(Which hawk is this?) Cooper's

Late this afternoon as I was taking some pictures of juncos in the grass, they suddenly scattered, shrieking in alarm. Overhead, a hawk sailed past, landing in a tree near the paved courtyard. He (she?) shifted from tree to tree around the area before sailing off again. I'm not sure what kind it was, though: the book says Sharpies are "blue-jay sized" and Cooper's are "crow sized", and this was bigger than a blue jay for sure. Also, his neck seems pale, like the picture of the Cooper's. On the other hand, in the (not terribly good) shot of him spreading his wings and tail as he takes off, they look like a Sharpie's: broad tail, pale wings. Anybody out there have a definitive answer?

Survey says: Cooper's!

I and the Bird

A cool I and the Bird is up at The Birdchaser. It's a treasure hunt! My "Birds on a snowy day" is there (yay! I remembered!) and plenty of other wonderful things, so check it out.

Errrrr

Another wacky crossword clue: 4 letters, "Gull friend?"

So I was thinking "tern" ... but no. They want "erne".

Gulls might scavenge after eagles, but they might just as easily be the meal somebody else scavenges. They mob eagles (like crows and jays do).

Ernes aren't gull friends.

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.

Word

David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo:

You Know It's Bad When ...

Insurance companies say they have no choice but to honor contracts, and banks are pleading that their assets will be worth more if you just give them a little time.

For anyone, especially in business, who has tried to make those same arguments to insurers and bankers, to no avail, it's painfully rich.

original here

Climate change and bird overwintering

For birds, a change in flight plans was, bizarrely, in the KidsPost section of the Washington Post today.

(As an aside, I've noticed the past week or so the Post has had some good science article every day. Are they reacting to the whole George Will flap by saying "See, our reporters do science! We print it! We're not like him! Really!"? Even if 'our reporters' really work for AP, which is why no quotes.)

Anyway, it was a very nice article about the winter range of many birds being much farther north now than just a decade ago. It's shortish; go on and check it out.

Canada geese aren't on their chart, but I've noticed far more of them around this winter... granted I wasn't noticing them particularly before, but I think I would have, flocks this size. Anecdote, but still...


The map and photos aren't in the on-line version, so pardon the quality of these scans.

Close but not quite...

Oy. Doing the crossword - the clue is "She played both Anna Christie and Anna Karenina".

So I confidently filled in the answer: GABOR.

Dysgraphia does NOT help you do crosswords.

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 for his symphonies in the West 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).

Fray-mon, Fray-, oh never mind.

Oh, this is too funny. A category on Jeopardy! tonight is "The John C. Frémont Experience". Alex started off calling him "Fray-mon" but after three contestants and a taped clue-giver said "Free-mont" Alex started saying it that way, too.

(oh, I know: there is an É there, but still, it's /fri:ma:nt/ not /frɛːmɔ̃/ ... He wasn't from France, after all.)

Ánd she's a pro - in a "good" magazine!

Nancy Franklin writes in the March 23d New Yorker (I love how magazines are dated, don't you?) about Bernie Madoff's guilty plea. Unfortunately, she betrays not only her contempt for Madoff but her ignorance of English:

Two sentences later, Madoff said, “When I began the Ponzi scheme, I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme.” As he read this, he betrayed no sense of how absurd it was to use the passive voice in regard to his scheme, as if it were a spell of bad weather that had descended on him. Still, he had faith—he “believed”!—that it would soon be over. Yes, “soon.” In most of the rest of the statement, one not only heard the aggrieved passive voice but felt the hand of a lawyer: “To the best of my recollection, my fraud began in the early nineteen-nineties.”

Passive? Aggrieved or not, she hasn't actually quoted any passive voice sentences here. There's nothing passive about "it would end shortly" or "my fraud began". Lawyers may have helped him write it, but nobody put in any passive voice. And for crying out loud, he's not even indulging in obscuring the agent here: "I began the Ponzi scheme" is about as clear to agency as you can get, and "my fraud" ditto - unless you think frauds have a life of their own, so "my fraud" is like "my dog"...

Granted, he doesn't say "I could end it shortly", but he's not hiding the "I" - it's right there in the previous clause.

Don't they have editors at the New Yorker any more?

Happy Belated Birthday, James!

Yesterday (and how did I miss it???) 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.

No chucks here, Alex

This one's for Deborah.

Alex just put a spin on Leonid Kuchma and Leonid Kravchuk - the wrong spin. He got through Leonid (lay-oh-NEED) and Kuchma (KOOCHma), but he foundered on KRAHV-chuck. No no no, Alex. It's kraw-CHUKE (or, if you're Russian or East Ukrainian, as - to be fair - Kravchuk was, krahv-CHUKE). Not chuck. Chuke.

I shouldn't pick on him, but he asks for it, the way he exaggerates his French (RRRAM-bo for Rimbaud).

Monday Science Links

This week's science (a tad late, sorry):

• Lee at Cocktail Party Physics asks measles, mumps, rubella - or autism?: Yes, that's a deliberately provocative headline. I chose it because that's what the media would like you to think your choices are. You can vaccinate your kids and risk giving them autism, or protect them against a number of dangerous, miserable, and potentially crippling communicable diseases. Does that protection cause autism? Is that really the choice? Or is it a false hypothesis hyped by the media and unsupported by real research? Is the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine a commercial conspiracy by pharmaceutical companies to make money, or are vaccines an actual health benefit?


• Jenifer at Mind the Gap comes late to talking about Darwin and DNA: Isolation is satisfying: you wash off the medium, pluck up a sterile glass cloning cylinder with a forceps, dip one end in high vacuum grease and press it down around one of the colonies to form a water-tight seal. A tiny amount of the enzyme trypsin will loosen the colony (consisting of anywhere from twenty to a thousand cells) and the cells can be replated into a small-welled vessel to begin the laborious process of nurturing, expansion and validation. I usually take about twelve colonies to ensure that I get at least one cell line that is healthy and that expresses both markers to sufficient levels, but for the next week or so I’ll have my hands full transferring my new babies to increasingly larger vessels, freezing down samples as back-ups and running tests to decide which will be ultimately be chosen — and which will be flushed.


• JR Haas at The Planetologist reminds us that A Habitable Zone by any other name…: … Is still not guaranteed to support life That’s one thing that people need to keep in mind, as NASA’s Kepler Mission begins its long vigil. Kepler will examine around 100,000 stars in one region of the sky continuously for at least three and a half years, and using that accumulated data astronomers will get a much better sense of what solar systems are really like in this part of our Galaxy. Kepler data help settle a major question in astronomy and geology… how common are Earth-like planets? Right now we’d simply don’t know, because most extrasolar systems found so far are not like ours. Not even remotely. Many have hot gas giants the mass of Jupiter or greater orbiting very close to their sun. Many have gas giants that spiral in long, elliptical orbits that would have long since thrown any inner Earth-like planets into their sun or into deep space. A few systems have smallish, probably rocky planets orbiting dim, feeble suns where the Habitable Zone - the region around the star that receives enough light for liquid water to exist on a planet’s surface - almost grazes the tiny sun’s surface.


• And Judith at Zenobia: Empress of the East gives us too fascinating looks at Egyptian tombs, leading with the god's wife of Amun: But, before we talk about her mummy, let's first go back to roughly the time she was born -- perhaps 30 years before her lamentably early death (and she died somewhere around the year 800 BCE). That was a tough time to have entered the world, as she did, in the city of Thebes in Egypt. For, give or take a few years, around 840-835, the crown prince of Egypt -- whose name was Osorkon -- consulted the ram-headed god Herishaf (right) on a potentially catastrophic matter of state.


• Next, she looks at the tomb beneath the tomb: Back in 2002, a Spanish-Egyptian archaeological team working in Thebes reopened the tomb of Djehuty, overseer of the treasury -- and holder of a slew of other major titles -- during the extraordinary years when Queen Hatshepsut became pharaoh and ruled Egypt as its king. Now they have discovered an Unknown Tomb beneath that tomb, and it is filled with surprises.

Enjoy!

Sandhill crane cam

A friend sent me this, labelled only " you NEED to see this".

He was right.

Rowe Sanctuary's Sandhill Crane Cam is totally cool.



And they pan and zoom, too...





This doesn't give you the sound. I had no idea cranes sounded like this...

You need to see this, too. Dawn and dusk, Central, is apparently the best time to watch.