Hmmmmmmmmm

One of my students turned in a paper in Comic Sans.

I wonder if he's trying to tell me something?

Monday Science Links

This week's sciencey goodness:

• Mike at Mike Brown's Planets has discovered there's fog on Titan!: Look! Titan has fog at the south pole! All of those bright sparkly reddish white patches are fog banks hanging out at the surface in Titan's late southern summer. I first realized this a year ago, but it took me until now to finally have the time to be able to put all of the pieces together into a scientific paper that is convincing enough that I can now go up to any person in the street and say: Titan has fog at the south pole! I will admit that the average person in the street is likely to say hmph. Or yawn. Or ask where Titan is. So let me tell you why finding fog at the south pole of Titan has been the scientific highlight of my summer.


• At archy John has a post with pictures on the disappearing Aral Sea: The Aral Sea (actually a lake) was a landlocked body of water in Central Asia. A half century ago, it was the world's fourth largest inland sea. It was fed by two rivers, the Syr Daria and the Amu Daria (the ancient Oxus). Beginning in 1959, the Soviet Union began a series of large irrigation projects aimed at increasing amount the amount of commercial crops, mostly cotton, grown in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. As less and less water reached the sea, it began to dry up. As the shoreline receded, fishing villages became landlocked. Soon, that ceased to be a problem as increasing salinity killed most of the fish in the sea. Dust blowing off the lake bed, carrying with it salt and various pollutants, has become a public health hazzard. With the loss of the moderating effect of a large body of water, the summers have been getting hotter and the winters colder in that part of Central Asia.


• At the Tet Zoo, Darren talks about ducks, especially the Madagascar pochard: The recent article about Meller's duck Anas melleri inspired me to recycle my ver 1 article about another of Madagascar's endemic ducks, the Madagascar pochard Aythya innotata [male shown below]. Meller's duck is endangered, with a global population of between 3000 and 5000, but the Madagascar pochard is in an even worse position: in fact, it was regarded as extinct until 2006, when a small group of less than 20 was discovered. In fact, just last month a joint group representing the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, The Peregrine Fund, and Ministry of L'Environement et Forêts went in quest of this population: you can read about their expedition at The Dodo Blog. Anyway, here's the 2006 article... So by now the cat is out of the bag, and the news isn't news anymore anyway: the Madagascar pochard Aythya innotata, supposed extinct since 1992 (when the 'last' specimen died in captivity), has been rediscovered. Ducks are another of those tetrapod groups that we take for granted and regard as mundane, yet they're actually a-maz-ing. Before getting into pochards into any detail, let's remind ourselves how amazing ducks are.


• At Bad Astronomy, Phil shows us cool moon photo: OMFSM. I love this picture. Love love love. Love. Is it a ring of fire on Mercury? A look into the gateway of hell? A promo for Halo 3? Nope. It’s far cooler: it’s the rim of the lunar crater Erlanger poking into the sunlight.


• And at John Hawks' Anthropology Website there is a look at late Miocene African apes: Time for some attention to the Miocene apes. I've neglected them for the last few years, and there have been some interesting finds. I don't mean the stuff that most people find interesting -- near-complete skeletons, or discovery of rare postcranial elements. There've been some of those, but they're European. No, I mean interesting as in African, which means potential ancestors of humans, gorillas or chimpanzees. Or all three. This is a part of the fossil record that potentially can confirm (or disconfirm) details of the genetic comparisons between living apes. We have an increasingly detailed model for the speciation of humans and chimpanzees from their chuman ancestors. That model has been built from the complete genomes of humans, chimpanzees and macaques, and the partial genomes of the other apes. But there are potential reasons for uncertainty in the timing and duration of speciations among these living hominoids. What we need is a fossil record. And now we have just a tiny bit of one.

Enjoy!

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: The Bourne Trilogy, which is quite the suspenseful ride. The camera work ratchets the experience up several levels, and Matt Damon makes Bourne someone you genuinely care about. The special features about how they made these movies (especially for filming the chases) are fascinating.

TV: Psych - Shawn meets the Exorcist, and hilarity ensues. This program consistently delivers. Warehouse 13 - not bad, the program hasn't really reached beyond the cliches yet. But it has promise. Leverage - the team against a better team - or are they? Again, a cliche, but the delivery saves it. At the urging of PZ I watched SyFy's Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, which is everything you'd expect from a movie with that name from that channel - especially one that starts out with an admiral broadcasting a radio message saying "Remember, lieutenant, this mission is classified. Should there be any trouble, the government will deny its existence." Oy. But I will say that the scene where the shark leapt out of the water to eat a 747 on the wing was high-lariously bad (and almost as senseless as the scene where it bit the Golden Gate Bridge. I mean: why?). But on a brighter note, Lewis series 2 is on Masterpiece Mystery! I do love Kevin Whately's portrayal, and the writing is consistently excellent. I've seen these (on dvd) but that doesn't stop me watching them again.

Read: My Life in France by Julia Child. France, and Germany, and Norway, and the US... conversational and witty, the book's a fast, pleasant read. Finished Hazards, which is amusing in most places and hilarious in the rest.

What a nice curtain

I hate pan-and-scan.

(see the comments)

Happy Birthday, Molly

Today, in Monterey, California, in 1944 Molly Ivins was born.

The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.

What stuns me most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money. It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the bozos do in Washington and our state capitols.

The United States of America is still run by its citizens. The government works for us. Rank imperialism and warmongering are not American traditions or values. We do not need to dominate the world. We want and need to work with other nations. We want to find solutions other than killing people. Not in our name, not with our money, not with our children's blood.

from her last column, January 11, 2007: We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there.

more of her words here

Happy Birthday, Mary

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, born today in 1797 and married to Percy; she's best known for Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus although The Last Man (about the end of humanity due to a plague) is probably a better book.

Happy Birthday, Ernest

Today in 1871 in Spring Grove, New Zealand, Ernest Rutherford - who famously said: "All science is either physics or stamp collecting."

His work took place in the early days of nuclear physics - he discovered the structure of the atom the cause of radioactivity (atomic decay), and alpha and beta radiation. He was the first person to transmute matter (nitrogen into oxygen) and he figured out the principle of half-lives and radioactive dating. But when he won the Nobel Prize - in 1908 - it was categorized as Chemistry - just going to show how very much a creature of its time that famous quote was...

9/11 didn't really change everything

On the special features for The Bourne Identity, Frank Marshall, the producer, announces that

"We all had to take a step back and reconsider everything, and I think everyone in the movie business did."

Tony Gilroy, screenwriter, adds,

"Everyone pretty much accepted that explosions in movies were over, that there would probably never be another film that had an explosion in it."

It's kind of amazing to look back at those days and see how much we thought (many of us, at rate) had been "changed forever".

Marshall started by saying,

"One of the things that you can never anticipate are (sic) world events. And certainly one of the most major world events that occurred ever was the 9/11 tragedy."

Turns out, not so much, really... They themselves are blowing shit up just two years later.

(ps - that was all to explain why they made a new beginning and ending to make the film "relevant" to the "different world" - though they didn't use them. They made the film much worse, if you ask me; good thing no audiences agreed with them.)

For the textbooks

In today's entry in his diary (for 1939, of course) George Orwell wrote:

Japanese Cabinet has resigned as result of Russo-German pact. Evident that Japanese policy will now become pro-British.

Wow. That's pretty wrong.

No on 1: Protect Equality in Maine

Maine is having a referendum on marriage equality. You probably don't live there, but you can help Maine become the first state with voter-chosen equality, a huge talking point. Remember the fate of California's Prop 8: don't let the only only-of-state money come from the haters.



Protect Maine Equality.

Happy Birthday, Preston

Preston Sturges was born today in Chicago in 1898. The first man ever to write and direct a film (the same film) - and omg, what films. Classics still funny today:

The Great McGinty
Christmas in July
The Palm Beach Story
The Lady Eve
Sullivan's Travels
Hail the Conquering Hero
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek

Sky Watch: Dawn and Dark

Monday morning, 7:30 am: just after dawn.




more Sky Watchers here

Happy Birthday, Robertson

Born today in Thamesville, Ontario, back in 1913 - a great Canadian writer, Robertson Davies. His four trilogies are enthralling, complex observations of life. And he gave me one of those little shocks that happen when your world-view is challenged: it was in one of his books that I read of Americans fleeing to Canada during the Revolution to escape political persecution. I knew, of course, that Tories (in our sense of the word) had existed, but this was the first book I'd ever read that cast one as the hero. I love his books - Fifth Business and The Lyre of Orpheus especially.

Some or other

I read The Orwell Prize's online posting of George Orwell's diary, and today's entry had something I found linguistically interesting.

Hitler has proposed some or other kind of plan which was flown across by N. Henderson & has been discussed at several Cabinet meetings including one yesterday (Sunday) afternoon, but no statement has been made by the gov.t as to the Nature° of Hitler’s communication. H. is to fly back today with the Brit. Gov.t’s reply, but even so there is no sure indication that either H.’s proposal or the gov.t’s reply will be communicated to the public. Various papers have published statements, all of which are officially declared to be unfounded.

No, it's not that Orwell uses which in an integrated (resstrictive) relative clause. It's this bit:

Hitler has proposed some or other kind of plan

That sounds odd to me. I'd have said "some kind of plan or other". Yet Google tells me there are over 7,000 hits on "some or other kind of" (over 13,000 for "some or other kind"). My choice is more numerous (321,000 for "some kind of * or other"), but clearly Orwell's variation is pretty well attested, too.

But: even better attested is "some kind or other of", with half a million hits.

Precocious Alex

I'm reading Julia Child's My Life In France, which she wrote with Alex Prud'Homme. In the introduction is this sentence, which isn't exactly a garden path but did baffle me mightily till I was halfway through it:

Alex was born in 1961, the year that our first book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which I wrote with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, was published.

The problem is that "our", of course; I wanted it to mean "Alex and I", which is pragmatically impossible. Its actual antecedent comes after it (how wacky is it we still call it the antecedent? But why multiply names without reason, as Occam almost said), and once you hit it, the sentence is clear. I think I'd have written "my book" - maybe I'm not as modest as Julia. Or even just dropped the possessive determiner entirely and said "the first book I wrote with ..."

Kennedy video

Here's a tribute video to Ted Kennedy. (Every politician and organization whose mailing list I'm on has sent something. Bob Menendez of the DSCC sent this.)

Happy Birhtday, Master Kung

K'ung-fu-tzu, or Kǒng Fūzǐ - Confucius to the West (his name was Latinised by Matteo Ricci when his teachings were introduced to Europe - everybody's name was; think of Copernicus) - was born today in 551 BCE

The man who in view of gain thinks of righteousness; who in the view of danger is prepared to give up his life; and who does not forget an old agreement however far back it extends - such a man may be reckoned a complete man.

Yeah. Me, too

John McIntyre observes in passing:

When I see the plaint “I want my America back” at rallies against health care reform, I tend to think that it is the Fifties the loss of which is so keenly felt — that blessed age when blacks were at the back of the bus, gays in the closet, women in the kitchen, and white men in the White House.

No respect

In the Writer's Almanac today they celebrate the birthday of Will Shortz, and end with this:

Here are a couple of the many brain-teasers that Will Shortz has come up with:

1) What part of the body can be spelled by rearranging the letters of the word "ELATION"?
2) Change one letter of the word SHUFFLE to make something to eat.

1) Answer: Toenail
2) Answer: Soufflé

Sigh.

I could have accepted it if they hadn't printed the accent. But they did. Diacritics are not there to make the page look prettier. E and É are not same letter.

The Lion Is Dead

Ted Kennedy 1932-2009

He will be missed.

Tech Support Cheat Sheet

xkcd wins again... (the mouseover is the best part)

I knows me my science!

I got 100% on the Pew Research Science Knowledge Quiz - Take it yourself.

Hat tip archy.

Happy Birthday, Robert

Robert Herrick, the great Cavalier poet, born today in 1591 in London
Some of his verse is here, and a few short ones here:


WHENAS in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
The liquefaction of her clothes!

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free,
—O how that glittering taketh me!

To Daffodils

FAIR Daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon:
As yet the early-rising Sun
Has not attain'd his noon.
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the even-song;
And, having pray'd together, we
Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a Spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay
As you, or any thing.
We die,
As your hours do, and dry
Away
Like to the Summer's rain;
Or as the pearls of morning's dew
Ne'er to be found again.

Monday Science

This week's science:

• First, over at Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed talks about how pterosaurs landed: Several million years ago, at a time when dinosaurs walked the earth, a flying reptile - a pterosaur - came in for a landing. As it approached, it used its powerful wings to slow itself down and hit the ground feet first. It took a short hopping step before landing a second time. On solid ground, it leant forward, put its arms down and walked away on all fours. The landing made quite an impression on the underlying limestone mud and in the following millennia, the creature's tracks became fossilised. Now, they have been unearthed by Jean-Michel Mazin from the University of Lyon at a site near Crayssac in southwestern France.


• At Pharyngula, PZ surveys pre-Darwin geology, or how people already knew the earth was really old before the Theory of Evolution: I actually spend a fair amount of lecture time on the early history of geology in my introductory biology course. One reason is that, if you talk to most people, you will discover this fallacious belief that evolution leapt fully-formed from the brain of Charles Darwin, and there's an anachronistic idea that ideas about the age of the earth, which are built on independent evidence from geology and astronomy, are somehow rooted in biology. It's not so! Darwin's antecedents had already laid the foundations in working out that the earth was old, that life had undergone many transitions, and that maybe species were mutable. Evolution was an inevitable conclusion of the evidence; Darwin and Wallace were just the clever fellows who managed to pull the whole story together. I find it very useful to give students a quick overview of 18th and 19th century geology before we talk about Darwin, since the creationists in the classroom usually have this image of Darwin as Satan who foisted a false belief on the world because he hated god (hey, sounds like Terry Mortenson!). It's very useful to be able to show how views of the world evolved, not by ideology, but by the growth of a body of evidence.


• At Starts With A Bang, Ethan shows us how we know the Big Bang really happened: Recently, a discussion started in one of my comment threads about whether the Big Bang was necessarily valid or not, and whether there were any reasonable alternatives. The answer is that not only is the Big Bang the best theory to explain the start and evolution of the Universe, it's the only one that doesn't make incorrect predictions. Let's see this in action.


• At Bad Astronomy Phil hosts a movie from Christopher Go (follow the link back once you're there) showing Io passing over Ganymede: All this together means that when we look at Jupiter, the moons appear to orbit the giant planet on a line, too. They swing back and forth, moving "left to right" and "right to left" over time. In fact, if you watch Jupiter for long enough you’ll certainly see a moon pass directly over the planet’s face, and sometimes you can see the moon’s shadow as well. It’s very cool. It’s much less common to catch the shadow of one moon falling on another; the moons are small and it’s a rare thing to see such an event. But amateur astronomer Christopher Go caught exactly that on August 16, 2009: the shadow of the moon Io going right over the moon Ganymede. That. Is. So. Cool. You can see the shadow of Io (which is roughly the size of our own Moon) pass over Ganymede (as big as Mercury!), then Io itself pass directly between us and the giant moon.


• At Mike Brown's Planets, Mike shows us the solar system in scale: With the third-year anniversary of the demotion of Pluto having just occurred, I’ve been thinking a lot about planets again (or perhaps I should just say “still”). But rather than worrying about planet classification anymore, which I think is on pretty solid ground these days, I’ve been wondering about the people who simply can’t give up on the concept that Pluto simply has to be a planet. Why are they so attached to the 18th largest object in the solar system when they probably can’t even name all of the 17 larger things? (try this at home: can you without looking it up?) Lilah’s placemat drove home a likely part of the problem. Most people have absolutely no idea what the solar system actually looks like. They see pictures of planets of placemats, on lunch boxes, on walls at school, but none get the scale of the solar system even remotely correct. Why? First: it’s boring. The solar system is mostly empty space. How much empty space? If you were to draw a top-down view of the solar system from the center out to the edge of the Kuiper belt, it would be 99.999999% (that’s 8 nines, if you’re counting) empty. And 99% of that non-empty fraction is taken by the sun. Making a placemat with that much empty space is pretty dull (though presumably you would save on printing costs). I would show you here what it would look like, except that you would need to view it on a monitor with 12,000 pixels across (about 10 times your typical laptop screen). The sun would occupy only one pixel in the center. You’d see nothing else. If you had grown up with a picture of the real solar system on your placemat, you would be forgiven for thinking the number of planets was precisely zero.

Enjoy!

The week in entertainment

Film: Ponyo (Gake no ue no Ponyo) - Miyazaki-sensei's latest movie isn't aimed at little kids, but if you have some, take 'em. Judging by the audience I was in, they'll love it. You will, too - Ponyo genuinely appeals to everyone, in a magical experience I can't speak too highly of. The underwater scenes - the riding in the boat and looking into the water scenes - the storm scenes: all the water scenes! so beautiful. The story is both accessible and engaging - he had me on the edge of my seat several times. It's a wonderful movie.

DVD: Some more Remember WENN, and the rest of The Fantastic Journey (too bad it was so short). Race to Witch Mountain - and I love that they got in a Winnebago! Dwayne Johnson has become quite an engaging action star, too.

TV: Leverage - hey, it wasn't about hedge funds or evil bankers! Warehouse 13 - great. A Nemesis for Artie. It's Roger Rees, so there's potential there. Psych - funny still.

Read: Finished Get Real. It's as if he knew it would be his last one: Dortmunder makes money from a theft! Started Hazards, the new Lucifer Jones from Mike Resnick, who can write just about anything, can't he?

Thistles

Last week I was taking a training course and Monday afternoon I walked past a little artificial wetland - you know, the kind that pops up in the drainage area around a commerce park. Anyway, it has water and cattails and lots of wildflowers, including thistles. Monday afternoon when I passed by it on the way to the bus it was swarming with goldfinches. Of course, I didn't have my camera with me. I took it the rest of the week and although there weren't lots of finches, there were a couple.

They are such tiny birds! Hardly bigger than the thistle heads they're eating from.

Happy Birthday, Dorothy

Today in West End, New Jersey, Dorothy Parker was born.

A Very Short Song

Once, when I was young and true,
Someone left me sad-
Broke my brittle heart in two;
And that is very bad.

Love is for unlucky folk,
Love is but a curse.
Once there was a heart I broke;
And that, I think, is worse.

Indian Summer

In youth, it was a way I had
To do my best to please,
And change, with every passing lad,
To suit his theories.

But now I know the things I know,
And do the things I do;
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you!

More here

Happy Birthday, Ray

Ray Bradbury is 88!

"I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it."

"We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts."

"First of all, I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see? That's the reason it's going to be around a long time—because it's a Greek myth, and myths have staying power."

"Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future."

The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, and (my favorite) Something Wicked This Way Comes, and all those wonderful short stories. Thank you, Ray, and have a wonderful day!

Too correct, Hilary

I'm watching an episode of Remember WENN. They're broadcasting "Crimebreakers!" with ex-Broadway star Hilary Booth, her husband Jeff Singer, and character actress Maple Lamarsh. Hilary is playing a Brooklyn gun moll - but she can't handle the dialog:

Hilary: I tell you, dis goil is gonna knock off that bank again or I'll scream bloody moider.
Jeff: Says who?
Hilary: Says me. (little laugh) I mean, say I! Me and dese other guys is goin' after dat moolah. Dat's how we do tings in Brooklyn.
Maple: A goilfriend of mine knows one of the bank tellers and he'll help us crack the bank safe.
Hilary: -ly. Oh. The bank safe! Yeah.

The way to answer

I know you've seen the video of Barney Frank and the LaRouchie at the town hall. Here's a slightly longer clip, featuring her entire question. My favorite part, I think, is that Barney gets the applause.



This is how to handle this sort of lie. Riduicule it and shut it down. Don't engage it: that only leads to debating things like how similar the policies are, or don't you think all lives are worth saving. There's no truth in it, and it shouldn't be given any serious response.

As Hubert Humphrey once said: The right to speak does not entail the right to be taken seriously.

Democrats: take notes.

Sky Watch: Cloud's Edge

A cloud may block the sun, but at its edges it's unequal to the task; one last blaze before the grayness...





more Sky Watchers here

Doctor Who and Cho

So, you've all seen that thing about being able to read any word as long as the first and last letter are in the right place, right?

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

Of course, it's not really true. Your brain doesn't really do a Jumble-style descramble; instead it uses context and the clue of first-last letters to guess the right word. The paragraph is full of pretty short words, to start with, and it's coherent. Trying something like unnniiivtg or eeemnnnraittt - or Uvrtsneiiy, or even oedrr. Not so easy...

More interesting, the same process your brain uses to "un- scramble" such words can result in reading the wrong word altogether, even when the original word isn't scrambled, or even misspelled - just unexpected.

So yesterday, I read that "Doctor Who lost Cho's records..." I wasn't quite sure why that was page 2 news (is the show that popular?), and then the rest of the sentence tripped me and I saw the relative clause, but I was still thinking doctor from my first misread.

(source: Washington Post)

I and the Bird

I have got to put I and the Bird back on my calendar; I keep forgetting to submit in time!

Oh well - this carnival lifts my spirits even when I'm not in it. Check out a free-verse edition at the Egret's Nest; you won't regret it.

Happy Birthday, Ogden

Born this day in 1902... Ogden Nash

Everybody knows his funny stuff, but he also wrote more poignant things. These are a few of my favorites - shorter ones, some are very long, like Isabel and Custard the dragon - (and there are a few more here (and lots more here)):

Old Men

People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when...
People watch with unshocked eyes;
But the old men know when an old man dies.

Kipling's Vermont

The summer like a rajah dies,
And every widowed tree
Kindles for Congregationalist eyes
An alien suttee.


On A Good Dog

O, my little pup ten years ago
was arrogant and spry,
Her backbone was a bended bow
for arrows in her eye.
Her step was proud, her bark was loud,
her nose was in the sky,
But she was ten years younger then,
And so, by God, was I.

Small birds on stilts along the beach
rose up with piping cry.
And as they rose beyond her reach
I thought to see her fly.
If natural law refused her wings,
that law she would defy,
for she could do unheard-of things,
and so, at times, could I.

Ten years ago she split the air
to seize what she could spy;
Tonight she bumps against a chair,
betrayed by milky eye!
She seems to pant, Time up, time up!
My little dog must die,
And lie in dust with Hector's pup;
So, presently, must I.

Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• On Language Log, a guest post by Professor Jamie Pennebaker, Dept of Psychology at the University of Texas, on the use of "I" in conversation: In the last few months, a number of pundits have been analyzing the language of Barack Obama in an attempt to uncover who he really is. The words that are attracting the most attention is his use of first person singular pronouns, or I-words. As Mark Liberman and many others have noted, surprisingly few people have actually counted Obama’s use of 1st person singular pronouns and even fewer have stopped to think what “I” means.


• Jessica at Magma Cum Laude talks about some things she saw in Italy: One of my favorite features of the pyroclastic deposits that I saw in Italy were degassing structures. A good field description of these features would be "fines-depleted pipes", since it doesn't make any assumptions about their origins (something to be avoided in the description section of your field notes!) These pipes are formed when gases trapped in freshly-deposited pyroclastic material rise to the surface of the deposit as overlying material settles and compacts. The gases usually take fines (ash and small lapilli) with them, leaving behind tubes where clast size is larger than the surrounding deposit, and forming fumaroles on the surface of the pyroclastic deposit. The pipes can branch and join, and the ones I've seen range in size from a centimeter or two across to almost half a meter.


• Ed at Not Exactly Rocket Science tells us that ants rescue their own: In a French laboratory, a team of ants is attempting a daring rescue. One of their colony-mates is trapped in a snare - a nylon thread that dastardly researchers have looped around its waist and half-buried in some sand. Thankfully, help is at hand. A crack squad of rescuers work together to dig away at the sand, expose the snare, and bite at the threads until their colleague is liberated.


• Mike at Mike's Brown's Planets posts on a storm on Titan: Look in your newspaper this Saturday, and you may see a paragraph about Saturn’s moon Titan and a giant storm that moved across the surface last May and what that means. With luck they’ll even print it with a tiny little picture of Titan to catch your eye. Your response, if you have one, will likely be “huh.” It’s OK. I’m not offended. It’s hard to distill the richness of a full scientific paper into a paragraph. And it’s even harder, still, to distill the richness of a decade of scientific inquiry into a short scientific paper. But if you’re curious about what that little paragraph means, and how it came to be in your newspaper, and what we’ve been doing for the past decade, read on. It’s a long story, but that’s somewhat of the point.


• Stefan at Back Reaction talks about news from other worlds: This week, I came across some quite amazing news about planets at other stars in our galaxy. But it's not just the stories of planetary collisions and retrograde orbits that have fascinated me: It's also how all this has been learned, by closely analyzing light curves and spectra. So, here are a the plots behind the news.

Enjoy!

The Week in Entertainment

Film: Julie and Julia (and on Julia Child's birthday, too!) I enjoyed the movie a lot, particularly because I knew virtually nothing about Julia Child. Meryl Streep is fantastic (so what's new) and Stanley Tucci matches her well as Paul Child. In the other story, the one many critics hated, Amy Adams does a fine job as the Julia fan/blogger who turns her life around by cooking her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Yes, the stories are unequal in weight, and a genuine biopick of Child would be fascinating (assuming they get Streep and Tucci!), but the inspiration for the thing was the fan's story, not the idol's. It works. It works well.

DVD: Remember WENN on what is almost certainly a somebody's-burned-from-VHS-recordings box set. But when they don't have an official one, what are you gonna do? I loved this show when it was on, and I'm loving it now, in two episode doses. One of which I don't remember having seen when it was on originally, starring Howard Rollins as a black actor who found his home on the radio - until the press wanted a picture of the new romantic lead. Also a similar set of The Fantastic Voyage, a short-lived 1977 series about travelers lost in a weird zone inside the Bermuda Triangle. It's not great, but it's not bad, and it does have Roddy McDowell!

TV: Psych. Sweet - another new season. The dig at The Mentalist was cute, and Shawn's abortive attempts to get his (er, Gus's) money's worth out of the big romantic date he set up before he asked Abigail were funny. And Ted! In fact, two Teds! "We love Nature - even when it's being mean." And that presentation! "Not having a product wasn't slowing us down at all!" And the second episode, when Phil got beaten up: "No, it was a good thing. He saw me as a threat. I am a scientist, Lem. I have been a threat to humanity, the environment, even Jupiter. Once. But never to a hot girl's boyfriend!" Leverage - well, I'd sort of thought they were going to concentrate on bankers, but this one was about sleazy, destructive "journalists" (Monica Hunter is in the fear business), and it was fun. Warehouse 13 - Still not spectacular, but entertaining enough. And I finally watched the series finale of Pushing Daisies (oh, I'm going to miss this show! Seeing Kristen Chenowith beside Chi McBride is hilarious just by itself, let alone the great Jim Dale's narration, Emerson's perfect lines and "Oh hell no"s, and Ellen Greene and Swoosie Kurtz... sigh. I really am going to miss this show.) How perfect: going out with a jumping shark! And wrapping things up so nicely into "events that should never be considered an ending, for endings, as we know, are where we begin."

Read: Painter of Battles by Pérez-Reverte. Excellent, fascinating, and unlike anything else of his I've read. Finished The Wish Maker, which was also very good, a look at modern Pakistani history with an intense undercurrenty love story and a wonderful last line. Began Bend Sinister by Nabokov.

Sky Watch: The Shining

more Sky Watchers here

Sanctuary?

The woman on Get It Sold is having the homeowners clean the lamp on their front porch because it's caked in dead bugs and isn't all that attractive. The thing is, she says:

The lamp out front was a bug sanctuary.

Not exactly the right word.

Happy Birthday, Walter

Born today in College Wynd in the Old Town of Edinburgh in 1771, Walter (later Sir Walter) Scott, one of the English language's most influential novelists. Best known for Ivanhoe and the other Waverly novels, he also gave us a number of well-known pieces of poetry, including these:

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!


Oh! what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive!


But the lost bride of Netherby ne'er did they see.
So daring in love and so dauntless in war,
Have ye e'er heard of gallant like young Lochinvar?

More of Scott's poetry here

One of these is not like the others...

I find it very funny that the Moscow Times feels it necessary to tell us which of these men is Khodorkovsky:
Their caption: "Former Yukos CEO and oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, second from right, is escorted into a courtroom in Moscow, Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2009."

Happy Birthday, Alfred

Today in 1899 in London Alfred Hitchcock was born.

Enough said, surely?

Awk, awk, awk!

Oh, okay: Jeff, you know if someone came in here, they wouldn't believe what they'd see? You and me with long faces, plunged into despair because we find out a man didn't kill his wife. We're two of the most frightening ghouls I've ever known.

Happy Birthday, William

Today in Kent, in 1422, William Caxton was born. He did not invent printing, of course, but he brought it to England and made it popular and profitable - to the point that, for a while, a printed book was called "a caxton".

He helped standardize English spelling, though he did predate the Great Vowel Shift, and so didn't standardize what we might think of as a "rational" orthography; still, considering what he had to deal with, he ruled.

In the late fifteenth century, the printer William Caxton, who greatly influenced what is now Standard Written English complained about the changes in the language since earlier times and its diverse dialects:

[I] took an old book and read therein, and certainly the English was so rude and broad that I could not well understand it. And also my lord Abbot of Westminster had shown to me recently certain evidences written in old English for to translate it into our English now used. And certainly it was written in such a manner that it was more like Dutch than English. I could not translate it nor bring it to be understood.

And certainly our language now used varies far from that which was used and spoken when I was born. For we Englishmen are born under the dominination of the Moon, which is never steadfast but ever wavering, waxing one season, and wanes and decreases another season.

And that common English that is spoken in one shire varies from another. Insomuch that in my days happened that certain merchants were in a ship in the Thames, for to have sailed over the sea into Zeeland, and for lack of wind they tarried at foreland and went to land for to refresh themselves. And one of them named Sheffelde, a mercer, came into a house and asked for food; and especially he asked for eggs. And the good wife answered that she could speak no French.

And the merchant was angry, for he also could speak no French, but wanted to have had eggs, and she understood him not. And then at last another said that he would have "eyren." Then the good wife understood him well.

Lo, what should a man in these days now write, "eggs" or "eyren"?

[Tr. from the preface to Enydos Caxton's Eneydos, 1490. Englisht from the French Liure des Eneydes, 1483. Ed. by the late W. [read M.] T. Culley ... and F.J. Furnivall, London, a EETS, 1890 [Widener: 11473.57].

Source: The Geoffrey Chaucer Website

http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/

Toys-R-Us transliteration

Over on Language Log, Victor Mair posted on a "transliteration" of the blog name Сухуми (in Cyrillic: СУХУМИ) coming out as Cyxymu (in Latin CYXYMU) (instead of Sukhumi) . He was asking if "transliteration" was the right term for this process. Commenters offered their examples from other languages as well as other Cyrillic-using ones. Here's one I meant to post on myself, but had never gotten around to.

Mohymehtajibhar Nponarahia

That's how the title of a Russian novel translated into English was rendered by the publisher (Knopf) on the copyright page, as "originally published as…".

The book? Монументальная пропаганда, more usually transliterated as Monumental'naya Propaganda.

The Cyrillic Н (N) becoming H is simple, same for the P (R) becoming a P, and the Я (YA or JA) becoming R is commonplace, but the Г (G) also becoming R is neat. I think my favorite touch of it is the Cyrillic Л (L) becoming JI, but the Д (D) losing its curved downstroke (which can be quite thin in some fonts) to become I is also nice.

For comparison:

Mohymehtajibhar nponarahia
Монументальная пропаганда

"That's how they dress"

Odd things happen in the dog days... Yesterday evening - 97 under a high white sky - at the bus stop in Laurel (the main one, at the Mall), I was waiting for the B bus amid a crowd of people waiting for all the buses. Suddenly, a police car pulled up and a woman with a pull suitcase went up to it. I couldn't hear what she was saying, but she quickly made it clear that her agitation was due to someone who'd been on the bus she'd just been on. Two someones, actually, who were standing next to the bus shelter I was sitting in.

"They're prostitutes!" she declaimed and walked toward us. "That's how they dress."

"They" were a couple of college-age women (don't know if they were students or not) dressed ... fairly normally. One was in a finger-tip-length short-sleeved tunic over knee-length leggings, the other in a sleeveless sundress, both in sandals.

Two more cops pulled up and now we have three of them trying to calm the woman down. One of them has walked over to talk to a driver, who shakes his head. The cop walks back. The woman is gesturing wildly. "I felt threatened!" she says loudly. The girls are ignoring the whole thing. Finally I hear a cop say, "Ma'am, you just can't pull the cord all the time."

"I felt threatened!" she says again. The cops are doing nothing except talking to her, and after a while she walks away. The cops just stand there, chatting, and the buses pull up. The girls get on the G for College Park and the Metro, the woman gets on the D for Whiskey Bottom, I get on the B, and the cops chat away while all the buses leave.

I'm not sure what was going on. I do sincerely doubt the girls were hookers, and even if they were, surely they'd have better things to do than surreptitiously menace a middle-aged woman. Even one who has no clue how younger women dress in the summer nowadays.

"Health care" "debate"

So, let me get this straight. There are actually people out there who think that their friends (okay, acquaintances), neighbors, and political representatives want to (a) set up death panels to kill babies and grandmas, (b) give the government unfettered access to bank accounts, (c) ration toilet paper, and (d) I've lost track?

How? How can they believe that? I'm truly baffled.

Of course I realize that some (many?) of the people screaming at the meetings don't - but many do. And I just don't understand how.

Monday Science Links

This week's yummy science:

• Ed at Not Exactly Rocket Science talks about the intelligence of corvids: Aesop's fable "The Crow and the Pitcher" has been confirmed in a wonderful experiment. In the classic tale, a thirsty crow uses stones to raise the level of water in a pitcher until it rises within reach of its beak. This is no mere fiction - rooks, close relatives of crows, have the brains to actually do this.


• Mo at Neurophilosophy has more on corvids - video of crows and the rooks: Not so long ago, the idea that birds might possess some form of what we call intelligence seemed quite ridiculous.Yet in recent years, this view has changed dramatically, with numerous studies showing that some bird species are capable of complex cognition. Members of one family of birds in particular - the Corvidae, which includes crows, rooks and ravens - have an ability to make and use tools which is at least as sophisticated as that of chimpanzees. Two new studies, published this week, provide yet more demonstrations of the remarkable cognitive abilities of this group of birds. One shows that Caledonian crows can use up to three tools in sequence to obtain food, the other that rooks can use stones to raise the level of water in a vessel in order to bring a floating worm into reach.


• Judith at Zenobia: Empress of the East talks about the dog days of summer: The Dog Days originally were the days when Sirius, the Dog Star, rose just before or at the same time as sunrise -- which no longer happens due to the procession of the equinoxes. But it is still the hottest, driest time of year in most of the northern hemisphere, a time of torrid, sultry weather, when bloggers slow down or even stop blogging. Sirius is the brightest star in Canis Major and rose and set with the sun in summer, roughly from 20th July to mid-August. The star is so bright that, under the right conditions, it can be seen by the naked eye even in daylight. The Greeks believed that the heat of late summer was actually caused by the appearance of Sirius and called this period the days 'under [the] Dog' (hupò Kúna). To Hesiod (Works & Days, 8th C BC), the star brought the enervating heat that led to inactivity and lethargy in men (when men are feeblest) but women -- ever devious -- were at their most wanton and ran riot. Four hundred years later, the Latin poet Aratus (ca. 310-260 BC), depicted Sirius as bringing a dangerous scorching heat that burns and wilts the crops. It was bad for humans, too. Sirius produced 'emanations', you see, which placed people and animals in dire danger. The star shot out flaming tongues of fire and deadly fevers. People who suffered from its heat were said to be 'struck by the star' (astrobóletus). The Romans believed that Sirius was adding heat along with the sun to make it super-hot, thus scorching the earth. And thus, Sirius and the "Big Dog" constellation (Canis Major) came together with the hottest summer days, called the caniculares dies, the days of the dog star (in Latin Canicula), and we still use the same phrase. But Sirius was not a nice doggy.


• Jennifer at Twisted Physics talks about an often-overlooked side of the Moon landing Can everyone stomach one last moon landing post after the media deluge of last month? I hope so, because I've just stumbled on this most excellent bloggy rumination by Carlos Hotta of Brazillion Thoughts, a recent addition to the SEED Science Blogs family. Hotta muses on the difficulties we mere humans face in grasping the sheer distance and dimensions of our moon, and translates the size scale into an unusual metric: pixels. But then he moves on to ponder the terrible loneliness of one Michael Collins, better known as the forgotten astronaut in that historical moon landing 40 years ago. Collins was the unlucky dude who had to stay behind on the spacecraft while Armstrong and Aldrin made history -- orbiting around and around all by himself until the moon walk mission was completed. Collins produced a written record of his isolation.


• Ethan at Starts With A Bang on just how old dirt is, anyway: Every once in awhile, a question makes it to my inbox that's too good to ignore. 'A friend and I were joking about being "older than dirt" and he asked a question I thought you might enjoy: "Hey, ask Ethan how old dirt is and how it got here."' You did the smart thing by coming to me, because the alternative is to ask yahoo. (Shudder!) Well, right away, we've got an upper limit, because the entire Solar System is only about 4.5 billion years old.

Enjoy!

The Week in Entertainment

Film: Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg which was a fascinating documentary of somebody I'd never heard of despite being ranked #2 on the Most Important Women in America list (after Eleanor Roosevelt).

DVD: Some more Morse and Doctor Who: Planet of the Dead, quite engaging.

TV: Ahhh... returning home to a 98%-full DVR. Of course, much of it I could delete (all the Primeval, for instance, since I just got the DVDs). And I quite frankly don't know if I'm going to watch Torchwood: Children of Earth because I've heard things about it that make me feel that I'm going to be sad... Oh, who am I kidding? I'll watch it pretty soon... maybe not all that soon, though. But then - Better Off Ted - Medieval Fight Club! Yay! And I caught up on Leverage, still fun. I checked out Warehouse 13 - the pilot was cheesy, but it picked up in later episodes. I'll watch it. And Push, which was an interesting caper... no, too violent for a "caper" flick, but like that ... with psychics, and Dakota Fanning and Chris Evans. I enjoyed it; wheels within wheels.

Read: Began The Wish Maker by Ali Sethi. Quite good so far - nice use of language, and a fascinating story. The Eye in the Forest, a good entry in PB Kerr's Children of the Lamp series.

Happy Birthday, Rocket

Today 1938, in Rockhampton, Australia, Rod Laver was born. The only man to win the Grand Slam tournaments in a single year twice, Rocket Rod was the first tennis player I ever followed. I loved to watch him play. That left-handed serve, that devastating backhand, those light dropping volleys - and those vicious smashes on the rare occasions someone made him run out of the court: Rocket indeed. Back when the Australians dominated tennis, he, Ken Rosewall(whom I also adored), and John Newcombe were such marvelous players...

Happy Birthday, Rocket; may you have many more.

(the mind is an odd thing - I just typed "Ken Singleton", another athlete I like to watch play, but a very different man, and sport!)

Two odd things...

I just came back from seeing Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg. It was fascinating - I'd never heard of Gertrude Berg, or The Goldbergs as either a TV or radio show. But there were a couple of odd moments.

The first thing is the insistence that Phillip Loeb wasn't a communist, and that therefor his blacklisting was a rank injustice. Yes, that's certainly true, and yet ... There's a certain feeling that if he had been a communist, it wouldn't have been so bad. Surely, that's not true? Surely we can agree that whether he was a communist should have had no bearing on his right to hold a job as an actor? That he wouldn't have deserved blacklisting if he had been one?

The other is another subtle thing. When Loeb was blacklisted, Gertrude Berg tried to find someone to help. She was told that Cardinal Spellman had helped others (such as Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte, at Ed Sullivan's request), so she went to him. He told her he probably could do something, on one condition: that she convert to Roman Catholicism.

When that line was spoken, most of the audience laughed.

I don't find that funny. I find it appalling, and for a couple of reasons. The first is that Spellman would make such a bargain - an innocent man's life (Loeb killed himself) or at least livelihood for what had to be a propaganda coup: the most famous Jewish woman in America converts! Next, that he would be willing to accept such a conversion as viable, at least for publication. You don't convert under duress and really convert. I'd thought the RCC's days of "convert or else" were over longer than half a century ago. Or is it that Spellman believee in the magic of saying the right words?

Folding or Unfolding? And weird nonspecifity

Over at the Comic Curmudgeon Josh is always ragging on the "weird nonspecifity" of Herb and Jamaal, in which they never use anything but vague, generic references. For instance, "Wow, check out the latest on the hotel socialite!" or "Last night my wife forced me to see that sappy chick flick." (As Josh remarked, "Ah, yes, “that sappy chick flick.” Thank God US law only allows one of those to be in theaters at any given time so that we don’t have to sully our lips with its name.")

Whether this is an attempt to remain timeless or just lawsuit-free, it is weird. But this sentence from The Eye of the Forest by P.B. Kerr has that sort of thing in it ...

He folded the computer open, attached it to a satellite phone, switched it on, logged on to a popular Web site featuring lots of videos, and then turned it toward John.

A "popular Web site featuring lots of videos"? Oh, whatever can he be referring to?

Plus - "folded it open"? That's weird to me. There are only 50 or so hits for it on Google, so he didn't make it up, but ... why not "unfolded it"?

Happy Birthday, Sara

Today in 1884, in St Louis, Missouri, Sara Teasdale was born.

In the Train

Fields beneath a quilt of snow
   From which the rocks and stubble peep,
And in the west a shy white star
   That shivers as it wakes from sleep.

The restless rumble of the train,
   The drowsy people in the car,
Steel blue twilight in the world,
   And in my heart a timid star.


The Fountain

On in the deep blue night
   The fountain sang alone;
It sang to the drowsy heart
   Of the satyr carved in stone.

The fountain sang and sang
   But the satyr never stirred--
Only the great white moon
   In the empty heaven heard.

The fountain sang and sang
   And on the marble rim
The milk-white peacocks slept,
   Their dreams were strange and dim.


A Winter Bluejay

Crisply the bright snow whispered,
Crunching beneath our feet;
Behind us as we walked along the parkway,
Our shadows danced,
Fantastic shapes in vivid blue.
Across the lake the skaters
Flew to and fro,
With sharp turns weaving
A frail invisible net.
In ecstasy the earth
Drank the silver sunlight;
In ecstasy the skaters
Drank the wine of speed;
In ecstasy we laughed
Drinking the wine of love.
Had not the music of our joy
Sounded its highest note?
But no,
For suddenly, with lifted eyes you said,
"Oh look!"
There, on the black bough of a snow flecked maple,
Fearless and gay as our love,
A bluejay cocked his crest!
Oh who can tell the range of joy
Or set the bounds of beauty?

I and the Bird

I and the Bird is celebrating its fourth! anniversary. Fittingly, it's at 10,000 Birds, and it's a truly stupendous edition. It begins like this:

So here we are, we bird bloggers, four years after the inaugural I and the Bird (well, four years and one month…we seem to have forgotten to celebrate on time). Four years is a long time in the real world: in the blogosphere it is an eternity! Like many of the folks who contributed a post to this I and the Bird I wasn’t even blogging four years ago (heck, I had pretty much just started birding!). Nonetheless, this I and the Bird will serve as a portal back in time four years, to 2005, a more less innocent era, when George W Bush was still in the White House, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated New Orleans, the London subways were bombed, a tsunami struck the Indian Ocean, and the pope died. While all of those stories were and are important what we will be focusing on is the state of the birding (and bird blogging) world back in 2005, a far less depressing and far more relevant topic. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this visit to the world of birding, 2005!

You will definitely enjoy it.

Frost on the Old House

Another Kobayashi Issa haiku from the daily Issa:

heavy frost
on the old house, its owner
in the ground

Sheep herding as you've (probably) never seen it..

... or even imagined it. This is astonishing. Those dogs are brilliant.

Happy Birthday, Alfred

Born today in 1809 in Somersby in Lincolnshire, England, Alfred Tennyson, later (at 75 and for his poetry!!!) Baron Tennyson. The most popular and best-selling poet of his day (or any, probably), he outsold even Dickens.


All Things Will Die

Clearly the blue river chimes in its flowing
Under my eye;
Warmly and broadly the south winds are blowing
Over the sky.
One after another the white clouds are fleeting;
Every heart this May morning in joyance is beating
Full merrily;
Yet all things must die.
The stream will cease to flow;
The wind will cease to blow;
The clouds will cease to fleet;
The heart will cease to beat;
For all things must die.

All things must die.
Spring will come never more.
Oh! vanity!
Death waits at the door.
See! our friends are all forsaking
The wine and the merrymaking.
We are called--we must go.
Laid low, very low,
In the dark we must lie.
The merry glees are still;
The voice of the bird
Shall no more be heard,
Nor the wind on the hill.
Oh! misery!
Hark! death is calling
While I speak to ye,
The jaw is falling,
The red cheek paling,
The strong limbs failing;
Ice with the warm blood mixing;
The eyeballs fixing.
Nine times goes the passing bell:
Ye merry souls, farewell.
The old earth
Had a birth,
As all men know,
Long ago.
And the old earth must die.
So let the warm winds range,
And the blue wave beat the shore;
For even and morn
Ye will never see
Through eternity.
All things were born.
Ye will come never more,
For all things must die.

Nothing Will Die

When will the stream be aweary of flowing
Under my eye?
When will the wind be aweary of blowing
Over the sky?
When will the clouds be aweary of fleeting?
When will the heart be aweary of beating?
And nature die?
Never, oh! never, nothing will die?
The stream flows,
The wind blows,
The cloud fleets,
The heart beats,
Nothing will die.

Nothing will die;
All things will change
Through eternity.
'Tis the world's winter;
Autumn and summer
Are gone long ago;
Earth is dry to the centre,
But spring, a new comer,
A spring rich and strange,
Shall make the winds blow
Round and round,
Through and through,
Here and there,
Till the air
And the ground
Shall be filled with life anew.

The world was never made;
It will change, but it will not fade.
So let the wind range;
For even and morn
Ever will be
Through eternity.
Nothing was born;
Nothing will die;
All things will change.

Wolfs

On the first episode of this season's Leverage, "There are wolfs in the world," Zoë says. Nate looks at her quizzically. "That's what Dad says," she elaborates. "'Be careful, Zoë: there are wolfs in the world'."

I listened to it three times. The actress definitely said "wolfs" instead of "wolves".

I don't believe I've ever heard that before. "Wolf" is not common any more - the grey one has gone from being a taboo word to a storybook, not quite real, creature. Is it on its way to regularization from disuse?

Kenyan Birth Certificate

Want your own? Go get it!

Happy Birthday, Conrad

Today in 1889 in Savannah, Georgia, Conrad Aiken was born. His poems won a Pulitzer, but he was never wildly popular, which is a shame. Many of them are too long to post here, but this one isn't:

The Room

Through that window—all else being extinct
Except itself and me—I saw the struggle
Of darkness against darkness. Within the room
It turned and turned, dived downward. Then I saw
How order might—if chaos wished—become:
And saw the darkness crush upon itself,
Contracting powerfully; it was as if
It killed itself, slowly: and with much pain.
Pain. The scene was pain, and nothing but pain.
What else, when chaos draws all forces inward
To shape a single leaf? . . .
For the leaf came
Alone and shining in the empty room;
After a while the twig shot downward from it;
And from the twig a bough; and then the trunk,
Massive and coarse; and last the one black root.
The black root cracked the walls. Boughs burst the window:
The great tree took possession.
Tree of trees!
Remember (when time comes) how chaos died
To shape the shining leaf. Then turn, have courage,
Wrap arms and roots together, be convulsed
With grief, and bring back chaos out of shape.
I will be watching then as I watch now.
I will praise darkness now, but then the leaf.

Or your insurance company?

Paul Krugman has an interesting question (my emphasis):

Art Laffer (why is he, of all people, on my TV?) asks what it will be like when the government runs Medicare and Medicaid.

But I’d raise a further question: he warns that when the government takes over these, um, government programs, they’ll be like the Post Office and the DMV. Why, exactly, are these public functions unquestioned bywords for “something bad”?

Maybe I’m living a sheltered life here in central New Jersey, but I don’t find the Post Office a terrible experience — no worse than Fedex or UPS. (Full disclosure: I worked as a temp mailman when in college.) And nobody likes going to the DMV, but the one on Rt. 1 I go to always seems fairly well managed.

And in general: is dealing with these government agencies any worse than, say, dealing with the cable company?

Happy Birthday, Percy

Percy Bysshe Shelley, born this day 1792. He drowned while sailing, in 1822, before his thirtieth birthday, but still managed to produce many poetic masterpieces. He was twice married, the second time to Mary (neè Godwin), who wrote Frankenstein.

He spent one year at Oxford University, but in 1811 he and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg published their pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, which resulted in their immediate expulsion from the university. Many of his poems are not only lyrical, but progressive, even revolutionary, in their politics.

But here's one that's only (only!) lyric:

Love's Philosophy

The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle—
Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdain'd its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea—
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?

Happy Birthday, Louis

Louis Armstrong, great jazz trumpeter and no mean singer, either, born today in 1901. His recordings with Ella Fitzgerald are classics. His Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings practically created modern jazz.

Happy Birthday, Helen

Today in Winchester, Kentucky, in 1920 Helen Thomas was born. An Arab-American and a woman, she's forged a path few of any ethnicity or gender have followed. The longest-serving White House reporter, she has covered every president since Kennedy, first for UP and then UPI (until 2000), and then as a columnist. For 45 years she has covered them with "respect for the office but no awe for the man" - which, as you can imagine, has earned her the dislike of more than one of them. The current previous president felt "blindsided" by her first question ("Why don't you respect the wall of separation between church and state?") and their relationship didn't improve; he simply didn't call on her for a question for more than three years. When he finally did (in 2006), this is what she asked him: "Your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is, why did you really want to go to war?" He didn't answer, saying only that he didn't accept the "premise" of the question.

But since the election, she hasn't been afraid to call Obama on what she perceives to be his failings: secrecy and "controlling" the press, a reluctance to fight hard for things like universal healthcare ("no stomach for the political battle," she says), and turning a blind eye to Israel's conduct in Gaza.

She's nobody's lap dog, this lady.

Happy Birthday, Clifford

It was today in 1904, in Millville, Wisconsin, that Clifford Simak was born. A practicing journalist for most of his life - in Minneapolis - he also wrote brilliant and award-winning science fiction, earning three Hugos and a Nebula and being named a Grand Master (given to a living author for lifetime achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy). His best known novel (sort of) is probably City, which is very good, but my favorite - one of my all-time favorite novels by anyone, for that matter - is the wonderful Way Station.