Filling the Unforgiving Minute

Uncrossable Barriers

2011-12-30T07:30:00.001-08:00

I do not get dance.

I don't hate every dance I see, and I've successfully not hated some dance performances, but I am dumfounded that it exists in such abundance and in so many forms.

I love music, and over the years I've been introduced to music I didn't like, or didn't get, but mostly with the venerable forms I come to appreciate or even love it. I definitely didn't get opera when I was a kid, but over the years and with my mother's influence, I have seen the light. I have a favorite opera singer, even. One of the great birthday presents of recent years was when my wife got me tickets to my favorite opera singer at Ravinia.

I've gone through such transformations with various forms of classical, jazz in a few forms, cubist paintings, and many others.

But not dance. I have seen the Bolshoi ballet, the Bolshoi academy, and the Hubbard Street Dance group. I have tried, and I can appreciate the athleticism for sure, and occasionally there's a bit of a dance, or an individual performance that is just amazing, but unless it's essentially tap dancing from the 1940s or '50s, I just get so bored so fast.

I kind of want to love dance as much as I love most other art... I just don't seem to be able to.

Dear Gen, Bolden

2011-03-30T04:20:00.000-07:00

I wrote the following to General Bolden, NASA's current administrator:

3/28/2011

General Charles F. Bolden, Jr.
Administrator
NASA
300 E Street SW
Washington D.C., 20546-0001

Gen. Bolden,

My family and I are members of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, IL. As I’m sure you know, the museum is one of the great institutions in the city of Chicago, and also holds a special place as one of the United States’ great museums dedicated to space exploration.

My family would love to see one of the shuttle orbiters retired to the care of the Adler. It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate place in the country. Adler houses the oldest piece of space exploration equipment outside of Europe—an Italian telescope from the early 1600s. I imagine taking my daughter, an 11 year-old space enthusiast, to visit this telescope at the same time she can see the most important tool for 20^th century space exploration, and I quite literally get chills.

Please consider the Adler’s bid to house a retired shuttle, you won’t find a more fitting or caring institution.

Regards,

Matt Dick

---

The unstated PS to this letter:

Seeing a shuttle on the shore of Lake Michigan would be so cool!

Baldness

2011-03-24T04:22:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I was planning for a St. Baldrick's even and told the group I was working in at the time, "In a few weeks, I'm going to go bald."

My very bald manager paused, then said, "Matt, I don't think you understand how this works."

A few weeks ago I went bald, as most of you know. Here's my beautiful scalp in all its glory.

When all donations are in, I will have raised over $4,000 and you all have helped raise more than $30,000 in my time with St. Baldricks.

But the big number is what our team, Nathan's Network has raised. This year we topped $25,000, which is spectacular!

Since 2005 we have raised $127,724 largely thanks to you who are reading this.

I can't thank you enough.

NPR and Public Insanity

2011-03-15T05:06:00.001-07:00

I have this issue. I don't care for NPR (National Public Radio). My issues with it are on a number of fronts, and here's a partial list:

1) It's boring. I know people just love "car talk". I have never heard it, but almost nothing interests me less than talking about cars. There are things I'm sure I'd like, but there are whole sections of it that just can't possibly be worth anyone's time.

2) It's sooooooooo Liberal Correct. It obviously makes people feel good to say they listen to NPR. Maybe it does and maybe it is good to listen to NPR, but it definitely makes people feel good to say it. That bugs me.

3) It's partially federally funded and it's obviously liberal in it's bent. Not the worst offense, but hardly objective.

4) My libertarian feelings are bothered by funding a radio station. I just think the government needs to fund things that aren't public luxuries.

Okay. So that all having been said, I'm hearing lots of conversation about defunding NPR because of, and I (almost) quote a real, honest to goodness smart guy Howie Kurtz, "I don't know that we need to fund this during this time of real economic hardship."

Maybe I got the words wrong, but this was his message, and the message of at least two or three other pundits I've heard on the subject.

Really?!

Here is what the federal budget spent in 2010:

$3,552,000,000,000

Here is what NPR cost the federal government in 2010:

$25,440,000

Not kidding, that's the actual number.

If you subtract the entire NPR budget from the US spending, US spending will be relieved of 0.0007% of its budget.

Whew! Let's get right on that!

Seriously, is NPR even worth the conversation? The federal deficit last year was 49% of revenue.

49%

Killing NPR would make that number:

48.9993%

I am not advocating that we waste $25 million, I do have libertarian leanings. But I'm also a realist. Do we really need to waste time talking about 0.0007% of the federal budget in this time of real economic hardship?

And the circle is closed...

2011-02-16T07:34:00.001-08:00

As of last night, humans are unnecessary in my house.

Margot found a song clip on her phone to use as a ringtone. She liked it enough that she wanted to get the full song to put on her iPod. Typing the lyrics into google didn't seem to be doing any good, so I used an app on my Droid (Shazam), to listen to the clip and identify it.

It didn't work... Shazam didn't correctly identify that clip, but as Margot and I stood over our phones, I was struck by the fabulous realization that my phone was listening to her phone and Margot and I were something less than strictly necessary.

Disgusting

2011-02-16T05:37:00.000-08:00

So we have people in Mississippi who want to put Nathan Bedford Forrest on a license plate that people can buy.

In this CNN video clip we have a Greg Stewart arguing that Forrest was a brilliant Confederate general and so deserves this honor on some level.

There is so much to say about this kind of thing, but I'll confine myself to just a few points. In this clip the men debated whether or not Forrest was the first grand wizard of the KKK. Of course if he was, even Stewart would have to back off the endorsement of the license plate. What wasn't in dispute is that Forest was a slave trader and owner. This, apparently, is not a deal-breaker for the reprehensible Mr. Stewart.

But what wasn't really touched on was why Gen. Forrest should be honored at all. If he was an undisputed slave trader, what is the actual point behind honoring him? I agree that not every confederate soldier should be condemned for his part in that revolt, but why go out of our way to honor them? What good did any of them perform? It is an obvious attempt at glorifying a racially divisive figure. And that glorification is horrid and disgusting at worst, and stupid and ignorant at best.

Albion

2011-01-21T07:23:00.001-08:00

2/14/1994 - 1/20/2011

We brought Albion home as a 6-week old rescue. She was being nursed along with a dozen other kittens--her mother having had a litter of her own, and also having saved another motherless litter. We bought her and her litter-mate, a pure black cat we named Baghira.

Albion was chosen out of a pile of siblings, she broke off from the group and found my coat and climbed the inside lining to the collar. She was a climber all her life, even climbing the ladder (hand-over-hand, human-style) to the loft in our daughter's room.

She had a hyperactive thyroid and the medication sent her into renal failure. We had her put down last night. It was good timing, there wasn't much suffering, really.

I didn't realize I would love cats so much. Baghira is still doing fine. She also has a bad thyroid, but is holding out and is as hale and hearty as a 17 year-old cat is likely to be.

This Gouda is too Damned Cold

2010-11-19T05:31:00.001-08:00

I was searching for something, a solution for a problem, at work. I am using google, of course. So I started to type:

"Can you move document stores in Confluence"

When I's just gotten through "Can you" google's auto complete turned on and showed me the top searches that start with "Can you". Good feature, I've found.

The top choices under "Can you" in google, which I imagine is a *very* common way to begin a search, are:

"can you run it"
"can you feel the love tonight lyrics"
"can you get mono twice"
"can you freeze cheese"

I really don't know what "can you run it" might refer to, but when I click it, I see lots of questions about whether browsers can run things like flash or stuff. So now I get that as the number one choice.

Lyrics to a really popular song, I get that.

The thing about mono is interesting, it's hard to imagine it's *that* big a concern on earth, but I do know that medical questions now out rank porn for google searches, and teenagers dominate the internet, so on some level I get it.

"can you freeze cheese"--really?! This is the fourth most popular search starting with "can you"?! That is just bizarre. Prior to this morning I would have laid money down that "can you blow up an earthworm in a microwave" would have outranked "can you freeze cheese". How often does that come up?

Generations

2010-11-11T05:08:00.001-08:00

"Two ways to produce electric power without greenhouse gasses."
(caption provided by Barton Nuclear Consulting Services)

Hitch on Beck

2010-08-31T08:28:00.001-07:00

As usual, Christopher Hitchens is smart, funny and incisive. Regarding the Glenn Beck affront to intelligence and human decency, he writes:

And these [various] insinuations [of Obama as Muslim or illegitimate] are perfectly emblematic of the two main fears of the old majority: that it will be submerged by an influx from beyond the borders and that it will be challenged in its traditional ways and faiths by an alien and largely Third World religion.

Which is exactly why I have been unwilling to call it plain racism. It's more about losing power than fearing foreigners for the leaders like Beck.

And of course you get a Hitchens insult, which for my money are the best insults being peddled today:

The numbers were impressive enough on their own, but the overall effect was large, vague, moist, and undirected: the Waterworld of white self-pity.

I just don't think anyone's doing it as well right now.

I'll recommend that you go read the article, it's more than worth it.

When Worlds Collide

2010-06-22T11:17:00.001-07:00

Two South Asian co-workers just passed my desk, chatting breezily. One of them was riffing from the old "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" lyric: "What does it matter? 'tomato', 'tomato'..."

Which is perfectly common except that neither of his two pronunciations of "tomato" were particularly close to two canonical pronunciations from the song.

They were different from each other, so the point would be clear to anyone listening I guess, but it kind of bent my brain a little bit.

Strangeness in NYC

2010-06-05T21:31:00.001-07:00

So how did it become okay to make fun of a blind person *for being blind* in the one and only case of the Governor of New York? I mean in no other venue and for no other person do we, the politically correct haven of understanding and intolerance of abusive humor, accept debasing humor of a person's disability. But for Paterson it's perfectly fine to make blind-guy-bumping-into-stuff jokes.

Seems so strange.

Answering a puzzle

2010-05-27T07:03:00.001-07:00

Recently in a mailing list I belong to, a friend proposed the following puzzle, which I will reproduce in its entirety (minus the friend's identifying details). I answered him at enough length that I wanted to preserve the discussion.

Here's a puzzle I have yet to get valid answer for.

The suppositions first...

1) All life requires DNA. (RNA viral snippets we will not considered to be alive as they have to corrupt a functioning cell to reproduce themselves. For this puzzle they are moot)

2) DNA is an incredible information strand that outlines how proteins are to be built.

3) DNA can do nothing on its own, as its just information encoded.

4) DNA requires a relatively complex decoding sequence to unravel it (it's in a special compressed double helix form), read it, and then build the proteins it describes. I.E. quite a number of intricate molecular machines need to be running to access the DNA and do this work to use the DNA for something.

5) This unraveling, reading and building needs to take place where its not interrupted or spread out. I.e. in a shell of some sort like a cell wall.

6) The original life form which all life is hypothesized to evolved from, had to have DNA, the complex decoder and a shell to keep it all together. Or the unraveled, decoder, and builder parts etc would all drift apart.

Now the puzzle.

If things evolved as hypothesized, where did the first DNA come from? More importantly where did the cell wall, the first decoder that reads DNA and the molecular machinery to act on what is says come from also?

I will start with the disclaimer that I am not a biologist, let alone an evolutionary biologist, let more alone an evolutionary biologist specializing on origin-of-life studies, so this is all from recent research (and I'll get into the philosophy of science a bit as well).

You asked a cascade of interesting questions about the origin of life. It in indeed a puzzle and one of the most complicated and interesting puzzles we have about the natural world. Life is complicated, and at first blush it's obvious that some things are alive and some things are not. I will continue to harp on this fact: in biology, the boundaries are fuzzy--almost all of them. Sofia Vergara is alive (gloriously alive), and a rock is not alive. That's clear. But just because we can usefully and correctly categorize these two things into these two categories doesn't mean there isn't a fuzzy boundary. When you look very closely at that boundary, as you do with premise #1, you have to start qualifying things. Sofia Vergara and rocks are both collections of atoms that form a sort-of unit with a boundary (again, a fuzzy boundary, but a boundary). As such they are on a continuum. You say it well:

1) All life requires DNA. (RNA viral snippets we will not considered to be alive as they have to corrupt a functioning cell to reproduce themselves. For this puzzle they are moot)

So that's perfectly fair. RNA snippets are often excluded when talking about what is alive and what is not alive. Yeasts are often excluded from the life discussion as well.

But that doesn't mean that in reality they are not on the continuum. By most definitions an RNA snippet is not alive, and that makes some conversation and study into life much easier, because you can talk about "all life is made up of cells". But saying that an RNA snippet is not life is just that, a statement that makes the study of most of life much easier. But reality stubbornly continues to be reality. We call things "alive" or "not alive" but those definitions are our invention. At the boundaries it is nearly impossible to distinguish between the simplest alive thing and the most complicated not-alive thing.

We often talk about species the same way. Sofia Vergara (look her up, she is really super-alive--in this case research can be fun!) is a human (Homo Sapiens). A broccoli plant (less fun to research than Jessica Alba, but sacrifices must be made) is a different species (Brassica Oleracea). That they are different species is true, in the sense that we invented the term "species" exactly so we could have conversations about divisions of life. Again, at the borders it is fuzzy. Cauliflower, for instance, is also Brassica Oleracea. Cauliflower is mostly a different species than broccoli, or at least it is kind of a different species, or it's useful in some contexts to call them different species, and in some others it's more useful to call them the same species. At the boundaries it's fuzzy.

This is true not just of plants, but also of complicated higher animals. I haven't looked it up recently but I think it's true that there are enough dolphin species on Earth that there are lots of what we call dolphin species that have really fuzzy boundaries.

So I'm all behind disqualifying RNA snippets as life for the purposes of this discussion, but it's a false dichotomy to say that there is "life" and "not life" as perfectly disjoint sets.

2) DNA is an incredible information strand that outlines how proteins are to be built.

No question. "Incredible" hardly does it justice.

3) DNA can do nothing on its own, as its just information encoded.

I agree in the sense that Shakespeare's written plays also "do nothing" on their own. If all humans died tomorrow and the Earth and all its artifacts remained undiscovered by any alien intelligence until the heat death of the universe, a book of those plays would be indistinguishable from any other collection of matter. This whole premise #3 presupposes that "function" has some objective meaning. This is not sophistry, I mean it as a serious part of this discussion. What is a rock "for"? Out in space by itself or rolling down a mountain side--which condition fulfills the rock's purpose? Shakespeare's plays have meaning because we all (as intelligent agents) agree on some common definition of their purpose.

I think you mean that DNA cannot go about the business of being life on its own. Again, for the purposes of this discussion I agree that it makes sense to say that DNA does nothing.

4) DNA requires a relatively complex decoding sequence to unravel it (it's in a special compressed double helix form), read it, and then build the proteins it describes. I.E. quite a number of intricate molecular machines need to be running to access the DNA and do this work to use the DNA for something.

I think I object the word "special" to describe the form of DNA, but it is certainly a particular shape and structure. I only make this point because I think "special" kind of pre-answers the whole puzzle... it reveals what your answer to the puzzle is. Unsurprising to you, I'm sure, is that I think I'm going to answer this puzzle differently than you will, ultimately.

Like the Shakespeare's Plays example I used above "use the DNA for something" presupposes that it has an objective use. The plays (in a book form) could be used to fly through space and re-enter an alien planet to be observed by some aliens looking for shooting stars. Does that book of plays have a purpose beyond its physical interaction with other matter in the universe? Only because a collection of humans agree that it does. I agree, however, that DNA's business of acting as a blueprint for copying units of life cannot be carried on without a bunch of other pieces in place.

5) This unraveling, reading and building needs to take place where its not interrupted or spread out. I.e. in a shell of some sort like a cell wall.

True, this process, in order to continue and do the thing that we think of as its purpose, needs to be proximate and protected.

6) The original life form which all life is hypothesized to evolved from, had to have DNA, the complex decoder and a shell to keep it all together. Or the unraveled, decoder, and builder parts etc would all drift apart.

I disagree with this as a premise, and I think most biologists would, too. Here's an example:

We can create machines that make copies of themselves, much like life at the cellular level recapitulates itself. But in order to kick the whole thing off, there is not infinite regress, something else assembles the first machine. I suspect that this statement argues for some other point you imply, but it ultimately argues for both of us.

Now the puzzle.

If things evolved as hypothesized, where did the first DNA come from?

I don't know.

More importantly where did the cell wall, the first decoder that reads DNA and the molecular machinery to act on what is says come from also?

I'll want to say that the cell wall, while interesting and amazing, does not belong in this discussion. It's very valuable, but it's not impossible for life to proceed without it... higher-lever, organized living creatures need them (Sofia Vergara, for instance, would be far less compelling without the her cell walls), but there's no reason to think that life in its basic form can't get along without cell walls, it needs protection and some proximity, but not necessarily cell walls.

As to the rest of the mechanisms, there are theories. None of them are definitive... like a lot of the very basic science, we will probably never know the answer to a perfect level of confidence. One thing that science is is provisional. Every understanding we have about the natural world (that science has about the natural world) is provisional to some other contradictory evidence disproving our theories.

That having been said, some things are more well known than others, and certain facts about the universe are simply more amenable to answering than others.

Some point of discussion:

The laws of planetary motion are really well understood. They were not initially. There was also a time when the question about how the planets moved may have seemed unanswerable, we lacked the knowledge of what they were, how the solar system was physically arranged, how gravity worked and we even lacked the mathematics to describe it. Slowly and with effort and a lot of years (centuries, in fact) we slowly brought our understanding into focus and it turns out that planetary motion is pretty amenable to understanding. We do not believe that we completely understand planetary motion, it is not 100% sure, but it is, say, 99.999% sure that we do.

How life began is exactly as factual as how planets move. In other words there is an answer to the question. On a theoretical basis it is 100% knowable. It is a harder problem than planetary motion to get at the facts that could answer the question. As a practical matter our assurance that we know the answer of how life began will always have a lower percentage of assurance than for planetary motion.

In a general sense, science is all about developing better and better theories about the natural world. These are often called "models". Our model of planetary motion is really good (we don't know of anything right now that proves our model is not 100%, but science is always provisional). Our model of the large structure of the universe is less good. It's still pretty good, really good in fact, but there are outstanding facts we know about the universe that don't fit the model (dark energy and dark matter are two issues that prove our model is not 100% accurate).

So where do current theories of origin-of-life sit in terms of this "model assurance" discussion? Well pretty far below the others I've discussed.

But that doesn't mean the answers are unknowable. Just that they unknown today. Anything unknown today might remain unknown forever. The origin of things before our direct observation are always more hampered at getting to that 100% model assurance than things we can test more readily.

I suspect that your question is meant to lead the reader toward the conclusion that because we can't answer the final question that the theory of evolution is therefore untenable. I'll address that point directly:

First, we actually agreed more than we disagreed on your premises.

Second, how life began is a fundamentally different question than whether or not evolution is happening, and whether or not evolution drives speciation. (the diversity of species of life)

Third, not knowing how something is happening, or how it began, is not the same as knowing that it happens. Evolution is happening, more and more we understand the mechanism for it, but it is happening.

Fourth, the fuzziness of the boundaries of definition is the key to understanding that evolution drives speciation. Broccoli and Cauliflower are different species... kind of and almost and almost-not and all of that. They are certainly on a continuum that includes broccoli, cauliflower, mustard plants, oak trees, and even animals and humans. Because it's hard to find the boundaries at the most granular level doesn't mean it's not meaningful to talk about the difference between species; conversely, talking about the (working) definitions of species doesn't imply that these things don't lie on a continuum.

Cheers!

[As a point of reference, my discussion of the false dichotomy and continuum of speciation owes a great deal to Dr. Stephen Novella who, to my knowledge, first phrased in the way I've presented it.]

Why not a National Day of Oppression?

2010-05-06T09:39:00.001-07:00

This is one of those things that I really, really don't get. Some things I hate and disagree with but I understand. For instance, I think bailing out the banks was a really, really bad idea. I think it only adds to the problem that we are divorcing increasingly large proportions of our economy from any moral hazard. It can't end well. But I do understand why people would think otherwise and why they would advocate for action.

But CNN reports that a U.S. Judge has finally noticed that a National Day of Prayer violates the Constitution. I do not get how such a law can pass even the most casual test of Constitutionality. CNN reports:

The injunction against the National Day of Prayer will not take effect until the defendants in the case, President Obama and White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, exhaust their appeals, according to the decision.

So our president, the person we elect who is most responsible for protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States will appeal and fight to keep a law which says:

The President shall issue each year a proclamation designating the first Thursday in May as a National Day
of Prayer on which the people of the United States may turn to God in prayer and meditation at churches, in
groups, and as individuals.

And this does not cause him pause when the Constitution he is sworn to protect says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

I know the argument is that designating a day to be a day on which the people of the United States may turn to God is not establishing a religion. But being able to articulate an argument doesn't mean the argument is defensible on any level.

The really baffling thing in all of this is that the text of the law makes it clear that the authors know it's a violation. The law says that people "may" turn to God. If you have a law that says what a person "may" do with regard to religion, when your constitution prohibits the Congress from prohbiting the free exercise of religion, well then you don't need that law.

How can a wrong number be so right?

2010-04-22T12:58:00.001-07:00

This morning I got a call from a phone number with a San Antonio area code.

The conversation went like this:

Matt: Hello, this is Matt Dick

Slow, Slurred-Speech Guy: Hello?

Matt: Hello, this is Matt Dick

SSSG: <silence>

Matt: Hello?

Someone in the same room as SSSG: <something loud and unintelligible>

SSSG: Is this Mesario?

Matt: No.

SiSraSSSG: <something loud, unintelligible that is clearly a question>

SSSG (to SiSraSSSG): Mother fucker! No, this is my friend's phone
number but some
little bitch answered! What the fuck!?

SiSraSSSG: <much louder and unintelligible>

Matt: <hung up>

I *really* made a mistake and didn't string this along. I'm thinking
of calling back and re-engaging...

The Land of the Free

2010-04-20T13:34:00.001-07:00

It's hard for me to imagine how any of the actual human beings in this circumstance went about making their decisions. I read this and initially shook my head in sadness. But then as I considered it, it became more and more deeply disturbing to me. I tend to think that "The State of California" did this monstrous thing. But it didn't. A series of human beings made and kept making one monstrous decision after another.

Consider this:

Ignoring Clay’s significant role in Harold’s life, the county continued to treat Harold like he had no family and went to court seeking the power to make financial decisions on his behalf.

This is a habit of journalism. No county made this decision, people did. They were guided by their laws and culture, but a human being looked Clay in the face and made the decision that because he and his partner were both males, that their previous, clear and written commitment to work for each other's well-being was invalid. Who on Earth did that person think they were? What drove them to that moment of evil? Even if he or she thinks that homosexuality is wrong or unnatural or something else, what, at that moment, made them choose what they thought was right over the suffering of these two people?

Three months after he was hospitalized, Harold died in the nursing home. Because of the county’s actions, Clay missed the final months he should have had with his partner of 20 years.

Imagine yourself in a position of authority here... the hospital administrator, the judge, some police officer... you. You deciding that Clay and Harold were so wrong that mediating their suffering for those three months was not as important as following the rules about visiting family members at the hospital. You say, "I know you and he spent 20 years together, but since you are gay, your suffering is..." What? Now finish that. There are only two options from what I can see. If you conclude that statement to your satisfaction then it is inescapable that you think Clay and Harold do not suffer as much as straight people do, or you think that it doesn't matter that they suffer as much as straight people do.

Introducing Your NIH

2010-03-24T07:32:00.001-07:00

The National Institutes of Health, as a part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services is "the nation’s medical research agency - making important medical discoveries that improve health and save lives."¹

The NIH is made up of 27 institutes. Some examples are:

The National Cancer Institute: "NCI leads a national effort to eliminate the suffering and death due to cancer."²

The National Eye Institute: "NEI conducts and supports research that helps prevent and treat eye diseases and other disorders of vision."³

So far so good. I can get behind my tax dollars going towards the research of cancer and vision.

There are also seven "centers" under the umbrella of the NIH. These include such organizations as:

Center for Information Technology: "CIT incorporates the power of modern computers into the biomedical programs and administrative procedures of the NIH..."⁴

National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities: "The mission of NCMHD is to promote minority health and to lead, coordinate, support, and assess the NIH effort to reduce and ultimately eliminate health disparities."⁵

Awesome... if we're going to fund an NIH, let's do it right... let's apply the latest in science and technology and let's make sure we address some really key and fundamental problems like the health disparities among different groups of Americans. Most of the other centers have similar missions.

And now to the punchline. There is a center in the NIH called the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine⁶: "NCCAM is dedicated to exploring complementary and alternative medical (CAM) practices in the context of rigorous science; training CAM researchers and disseminating authoritative information."

I have to admit to being skeptical to start with when it comes to complimentary and alternative medicines. Things like ear candling and therapeutic touch are silly on the face of their claims and there is no one who has ever articulated any mechanism for how these modalities might work that shows even an ounce of understanding about how the natural world actually works. But some stuff, like acupuncture and chiropractic, while born of superstitious nonsense, actually do things to the body, so it is not literally physically impossible that those modalities could affect the human body and health. So I can understand the value of studying those things.

Let's explore the NCCAM a bit.

In the "About" page, the NCCAM tells us:

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) is the Federal Government's lead agency for scientific research on the diverse medical and health care systems, practices, and products that are not generally considered part of conventional medicine.

It has been said by smarter people than I that if any of these things worked, they would start to become conventional medicine. I have several friends who are medical doctors. I guarantee that if homeopathic pills were shown to work, they'd prescribe them as gladly as they currently prescribe any other pill.

The thing is, the most of these things don't show a lot of efficacy. But let's read more about NCCAM.

In their introduction on Traditional Chinese Medicine they say:

Although TCM is used by the American public, scientific evidence of its effectiveness is, for the most part, limited. Acupuncture has the largest body of evidence and is considered safe if practiced correctly. Some Chinese herbal remedies may be safe, but others may not be.

and:

* Yin-yang theory—the concept of two opposing, yet complementary, forces that shape the world and all life—is central to TCM.
* In the TCM view, a vital energy or life force called qi circulates in the body through a system of pathways called meridians. Health is an ongoing process of maintaining balance and harmony in the circulation of qi.
* The TCM approach uses eight principles to analyze symptoms and categorize conditions: cold/heat, interior/exterior, excess/deficiency, and yin/yang (the chief principles). TCM also uses the theory of five elements—fire, earth, metal, water, and wood—to explain how the body works; these elements correspond to particular organs and tissues in the body.

Nothing above has any basis in anything even vaguely scientific. Nothing about it is proven, or indeed even hinted about, in any rigorous study of the natural world. Vital life forces or energies are unknown, undiscovered and undescribed by science. "Meridians" have never been found by any doctor, scientist or anatomist. There is no coherent theory explaining why any of this should work.

The explain about acupuncture:

Acupuncture. By stimulating specific points on the body, most often by inserting thin metal needles through the skin, practitioners seek to remove blockages in the flow of qi.

So they are trying to unblock the flow of something they can't adequately describe and which has never been demonstrated or measured in any way.

In the NCCAM's section on "If You Are Thinking About Using TCM" they advise"

"Do not use TCM as a replacement for effective conventional care or as a reason to postpone seeing a doctor about a medical problem."

In discussing more CAM modalities, NCCAM discusses "Energy Medicine thusly:

Energy medicine uses energy fields with the intent to affect health. Some fields, such as magnetic fields, have been measured. Others, such as biofields, have not. Therapies involving biofields are based on the idea that people have a subtle form of energy; energy medicine practitioners believe that illness results from disturbances of these subtle energies.

and

Examples of energy medicine include magnet therapy, healing touch, and Reiki (pronounced "ray-kee").

Magnet therapy uses magnets or magnetic devices to treat or ease the symptoms of various diseases and conditions, including pain.

Healing touch practitioners pass their hands over or gently touch a person's body to try to identify imbalances in the body's energy field.

Reiki is based on the idea that there is a universal (or source) energy that supports the body's innate healing abilities. Practitioners seek to access the energy and allow it to flow to the body to help with healing. In a Reiki session, the practitioner's hands are placed lightly on or just above the client's body.

In other words, "Someone had some concept of 'energy fields' and named them, no one has ever measured those energy fields or proven them to exist, but someone will not touch you in order to manipulate those fields, and that will heal you."

I defy you to find a more coherent description of healing touch than what I have just supplied.

So what do we know? We know that nearly $3 Billion has gone into the NCCAM over the last 10 or 11 years, and it is apparently using that money to study whether not touching a patient might effect a cure. If not touching me might cure disease, why aren't all shut-ins 100% healthy all of the time?

1. NIH's Mission
2. NCI
3. NEI
4. CIT
5. NCMHD
6. NCCAM

Dying Old

2010-03-23T21:00:00.000-07:00

What you're looking at is a graph depicting the death rates in different eras.

Take the low blue line. This is the 1900-1902 line, showing what befell the people in the United States, base on a per-100,000 live birth rate. At the left you can see that since this is live births, everyone survived to birth. There is a steep decline showing that only 89% of Americans survived to 1 year old. The next data point along that line shows another decline and only 82% of the original group survived to 5 years old. And so on.

What does this show? Well we're getting better and better at surviving to the elbow of the curve... no line shows a lower survival at any point than a previous era except in one spot. Between 1919-1921, humans in the United States survived to five years old in a lower percentage than between 1909-1911. I think that must be related to the 1917/1918 flu epidemic. It shows what a real pandemic actually looks like... imagine what it was like when children were dying at such a rate....

The other curious thing it shows is that the advantages over our very recent forebears is still holding up... in 2004 we still see the same advantage over 1989-1991 as 1909-1911 saw over 1900-1902. I would have thought we'd be compressing more than we are.

Also, while the data stops at 100, it's clear that we converge at the extreme old age... we aren't getting a greater percentage of people beyond about 95 than we ever have.

At the big bulge we can see how well we're getting people into their 50s. For Americans born in 1850 we were getting about 54% into their 50s. 94% of Americans born in 1954 were still alive in 2004.

That's pretty amazing, and shows that we seem to have gotten people over the childhood disease rate... the curve is flat until heart attacks take people out in their 50s and 60s. I suspect that cancer is killing us at the far right, and we clearly are making great strides there as well. Born in 1920? Only 14% of people made it into their 80s. Born in 1920? 54%. In 100 years we now are as good at getting people into their 80s as we used to be at getting them into their 50s.

Still, we need to crack the top end before I relax.

96 ways to kill a good thing

2010-03-16T10:06:00.001-07:00

So we're going to get 96 teams.

I will gripe only once in a general sense: John Feinstein had it right when he pointed out that the NCAA is so stupid it's literally doing the exact opposite of what makes sense--they refuse to address their football championship system which is clearly the worst champion-picking exercise of any major sporting season, college or pro. At the same time they are messing with arguably the greatest sporting spectacle EVER DEVISED. I don't even mean that facetiously, it's possible that March Madness is more fun for the serious-down-to-casual fan of anything yet devised in sports.

And now they are going to add tons of mediocre-to-bad teams. But my main reason for bringing this up is an aspect to this travesty that I haven't seen discussed yet: what does this do to filling out brackets? 64 teams is hard to bracketize as it is, but it can be done with a single piece of 11.5 x 8 inch paper if you write small. It can be integrated into a website form if it's done well. When you make it one round bigger it's going to be harder to manage. Not impossible, but you aren't going to carry around your bracket in as pleasant a way anymore.

If that's the case, does it make the 96-team tournament really unfriendly to the casual fan? Is my mother, who has actually filled out brackets before, ever going to sit down long enough to decide if the 8th place Big-Ten team might beat the third best Mountain West school? No way. A 96-team bracket makes the obscure match-ups just that much more abstract to people on the margins of caring.

The office pool goes from something fun for $5 to an annoyance to deal with... that will be as hard on the popularity of the event as anything.

Giving Way to Hating

2010-03-09T07:22:00.001-08:00

Are we reaching the point where a legislator being actively anti-gay will make us all believe the legislator himself is gay? It's becoming too common to be a joke anymore, and is just a sad reality. How much does a man have to hate himself to spend the first 55 years of his life actively denying rights to those of his own sexuality.

[Mr. Ashburn] also voted in the statehouse against efforts to expand anti-discrimination laws...

As a kind-of meta comment on this episode, does anyone else find it sad to read a statement like "voted... against efforts to expand anti-discrimination laws..."? I am a pretty libertarian guy. If I am radical politically, it is along the lines of believing the government has no place in my personal life. How can there be laws governing behavior that doesn't affect anyone but the primary actor? But general libertarianism aside, I can't imagine a better use of extraneous laws than to be anti-discrimination.

*sigh*

If there is any value to the fact that humans have to get old and die, perhaps it's so that this generation can leave and let the rest of us get on with more important things that the previous generation's hang-ups. Note that I know people like this do not represent everyone, and I am aware that I must have hang-ups that my children will abhor. So maybe it's good that someday I'll die so that they can get on with whatever terrible thing it is that they think is more important.

The Right Way

2010-01-11T10:49:00.000-08:00

I love Fareed Zakaria. I agree with him about half the time, but he's always on-point. As far as I know, he's never advocated for the United States' Congress to spend time talking about the NCAA Bowl Championship selection.

In a recent WaPo column Zakaria references the recent al-Qaeda crotch bomber and our response to that event:

Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission and later a senior State Department official in the Bush administration, suggests that we should try to analyze failures in homeland security the way we do airplane catastrophes. When an airliner suffers an accident, major or minor, the National Transportation Safety Board convenes a group of nonpartisan experts who methodically examine what went wrong and then issue recommendations to improve the situation. "We approach airline security with the understanding that it's a complex problem, that we have a pretty good system, but that there will be failures -- caused by human beings, technology, or other factors. The point is to constantly fix what's broken and keep improving the design and execution," says Zelikow.

It's hard to argue that terrorism is designed to change what we do. The crotch bomber was successful because we've talked about him. Can't we just measure James Carville's penis* and get on with our lives?

* Speaking of Mr Carville, I have for years maintained that he is the most entertaining person on TV. I firmly stand by that position.

There Are No Hangovers in Heaven

2009-12-23T08:04:00.000-08:00

I just got my PCS orders for Heaven. I called my sponsor and he said:

"Bill Dick, in Heaven, all your dogs are there; and all your cousins' dogs are there; and all the dogs you ever loved are there.

"Right out your front door are the Arizona mountains and every day you hike all day long. You work up a terrific thirst, but that's okay because the Hofbrau Haus is right down the block and all your friends are there. You listen to oompah music and sing.

"You wander home around 3am. You sleep well and in the morning you feel great... because there are no hangovers in heaven."

Fair play?

2009-12-08T11:02:00.000-08:00

Alberto Contador will stay with Astana. This is pretty interesting, because with the team falling apart it was widely suspected that Contador, despite having a contract through 2010, would sign with another team and deal with whatever legal battles would ensue.

The announcement made me do a double take, and it's so revealing of a sport that is so screwed up. For the agreement to be binding, Astana must, among other things "strictly comply with the code of ethics and internal doping control system that will be implemented by the new leadership of the team."

Has anyone else ever heard of an athlete holding his team to an ethics clause instead of the other way around?

Cycling is so great and so troubled at the same time.

Loving the Monster

2009-12-06T19:54:00.000-08:00

The geniuses in New Mexico have been reintroducing the Mexican Gray Wolf to certain areas along the New Mexico/Arizona border. And now they are surprised that things have gone a little astray.

So I hardly know where to begin here. How about this: humans have spent quite literally thousands of years trying to rid the world of the things that kill us. In Europe, wolves were the predator that did the job of killing humans best. You don't get to be the star of essentially all of a culture's fairy tales if you aren't the thing of nightmares. They are, quite literally, monsters.

From the LA Times article:

Environmentalists argue that grazing practices are part of the problem and the wolf reintroduction program has failed because of mismanagement by the federal government.

Here's why the program has failed: they're wolves. They eat stuff that we don't want them to, like cows and small human beings. Ranchers are going out of business because, surprising to no one but "Bud Fazio, coordinator of the Mexican gray wolf reintroduction program", wolves are really good at killing cows. What?! Millions of years of selective pressure optimizing large predators made wolves good at what? Killing what? Yes, killing cows, you idiot.

Fazio says:

"One thing about wolves is they bring out extreme emotions..."

Yes... fearing for one's livelihood tends to do that. I am pretty sympathetic to the idea of protecting endangered species. I'm soft-hearted about it, and I hate the idea that we kill entire species for non-critical activities. But I consider ranching pretty critical.

I want to protect wildlife, but we can't be stupid about this... wolves are enormously dangerous and we can't pretend they are not.

Junior

2009-11-19T07:10:00.000-08:00

The question was asked by Steve Salerno over at ShamBlog, exactly how much has Ken Griffey, Jr. hurt his lifetime batting average by hanging on over the last 10 years. Steve guessed it was about 10 points. Thanks to the greatest website in the history of the entire world, Baseball-Reference.com, any guy like me can find the answer with Excel and about 10 minutes.

Here is what I found. I plotted Junior's year-by-year BA, the lifetime cumulative BA, and then for fun I plotted that against the MLB average over the same period to see how he compared against his contemporaries.

As you can see, Junior the league average was a distant thing for the first 11 years of his career, but for his year-by-year and his lifetime average. These last 10 years he's flirted with, and failed to meet, mediocrity most years.

The specific answer to Steve's question is, Griffey, Jr. was a lifetime .299 hitter after the 1998, his first ten seasons. He is now sitting at .285. He's taken a 14-point hit, so the damage is worse than Steve thought.

As is my wont, I have shown the dividing line between the modern and steroid eras of baseball, the start of which, and I propose a universal adoption of this standard, is the season Brady Anderson first hit 50 home runs. I don't think Anderson ever tested positive for steroids, but look at his lifetime power numbers and I think you'll agree that this is the demarcation point.

perspectives

2009-11-03T17:56:00.000-08:00

Today I clicked on a CNNMoney article with the headline "Mac share grew after Windows 7 debut". Okay, I'm thinking that's an interesting topic. So I clicked.

Turns out it's a regular column titled "Mac news from outside the reality distortion field." So now I'm thinking that this is very interesting because I have Mac friends. You know who you are. I know who you are. You and I both know that you are not rational. So I figure I'll get the alternative viewpoint. You know, the one that's an alternative to "Steve Jobs is like God, only perfecter."

Before I being reading, I see the headshot of the column's author, Philip Elmer-DeWitt. In the blurb about Mr. Elmer-DeWitt it says:

Philip Elmer-DeWitt believes that an ounce of skepticism never hurts when writing about the company. He should know. He's been covering Apple – and watching Steve Jobs operate — since 1982.

And now I'm thinking, "Whoa! We're finally going to see rational news about Apple, how fun!"

The article begins:

If Microsoft (MSFT) was hoping that the launch of Windows 7 would halt the erosion of its operating system market share — and curb further inroads by Apple (AAPL) — there is no evidence that it's working yet.

I don't follow the OS wars very closely, so I'm thinking that this sounds reasonable. I know MSFT has had as high as 90% of the OS market, but I figure that this mus be slipping. I wait for the next paragraph. I see:

...preliminary data released overnight Sunday by Net Applications show Mac OS X's Internet share growing by 2.73% in October, from 5.12% to 5.26%.

And then:

Windows' Internet presence, meanwhile, fell from 92.77% to 92.54%

Seriously? This is from "outside the reality distortion field"? And he's written an article about "eroding market share" and "curb[ing] further inroads".

For reference, Dell is the #1 seller of PC's with a 13.9% market share.

Nokia is the #1 cell phone company with about 38% market share.

Coke, the #1 beverage company in the world, has about 43% maket share.

MSFT? 92.54%

Mr. Elmer-DeWitt, you are firmly within the distortion field.

Why we love good writing

2009-10-08T10:33:00.000-07:00

I consider John Feinstein the best non-fiction author today. I know I'll get disagreement about that, but it's my opinion and I'm sticking to it. Today on his blog he noted that he was struggling this morning because his coffeemaker broke and he is going to have missed his morning routine today. He finishes the introduction with:

I know I can go and buy coffee--or a new coffee maker after I drop my son off at school. Not the same.... I feel like Miss Clavelle in Madeleine

I feel the same way when I miss my routine coffee in the morning, but I am not clever enough to reference the great children's book Madeline while whining about it.

Thoughts on Art for the Day

2009-09-11T22:06:00.001-07:00

One thing Picasso might have considered is naming his works something other than exactly what they are about.

"Woman in Blue"

Thanks, Pablo, I got that one on my own since it was, essentially, a photorealistic painting of a woman. In blue.

Indoctrinating our Children

2009-09-04T07:05:00.001-07:00

My local school system has gotten dozens of calls about Obama's speech to our nation's school children. I can't imagine what is on their minds. The objection is that he is going to send a political message to our kids? I don't buy it for a lot of reasons.

From the Indianapolis Examiner, Samuel Bruce says, "The problem with the direct to the school speech is it not filtered through parents and guardians."

What on Earth is he talking about. Everything message given at school is essentially unfiltered through me, and Disney has unfiltered access to tens of millions of American kids every day, and who thinks they have the children's interests at heart?

Second, in what universe do the people objecting to this live in? He's going to talk about the importance of education and public service and how the power of a single dream is blah, blah, blah. He's going to bore school children of America for 20 minutes. Since when is this a new event in school?

Ryan Witt, also from the Examiner brings some actual information to the "controversy" by reminding us that "Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush did in fact speak to school children in national addresses...". Check out the embedded video in his article to see the elder Bush boring school children in the 1980s.

I do agree with George Will, who was referencing an entirely different topic when he said Barack Obama is eventually going to have to realize that some things are not the president's business. I think this is a waste of *his* time and an over-reaching of why he was elected, but in a minor way that I don't think it particularly damaging to the Republic.

Like it or not, the President of the United States is a role model, the most visible and important role model we have. It's crazy to think this is the worst message our kids will receive at school this year... or this week.

Palinism

2009-08-18T06:38:00.001-07:00

I like the term, coined as far as I know by Richard Cohen in an Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post. He points out the similarities between Palin's ability to drive the debate on health care as a death panel scare to MacCarthy's ability to drive the debate in Washington as a whole as a red scare.

He's right, in that both debates are trumped up, baseless lies, and are beside any kind of actual point.

He's also right in a way he didn't intend. The red scare was fear mongering and insane, but there was legitimate cause to at least investigate a few people in the State Department and to oust a few sympathizers. What it became--McCarthyism--was a crazy caricature of responsible security.

I am not comfortable with the current direction of Democratic health care reform. The problem is that the only real opposition to their proposals is a crazy caricature of responsible debate.

What to do when the enemies of my enemies are insane?

Possible Lifting?

2009-08-11T08:30:00.001-07:00

In searching for the Jesse Jackson quote comparing Michael Vick to Jackie Robinson, I ran across this commentary from Mason Lerner of "The Faster Times".

Looking further I found this piece from James Causey of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Does anyone else think that Causey's piece (10 August) sounds an awful lot like Mason's (9 August)?

They both comment on the NY Times piece on Jackon's comments, as did I, but the pieces seem more than coincidentally similar to my ear.

Jackson on Everything

2009-08-11T08:24:00.001-07:00

Jesse Jackson has recently weight in on Michael Vick's potential career in the NFL. Seriously.

Whatever credibility Jackson had left is now completely gone in my mind. What on Earth does he have to add to this? Well the New York Times reports that he says:

“I want to make it an issue,” Jackson said Thursday in a telephone interview. “I want teams to explain why they have a quarterback who has less skills but is playing or at least is on the taxi squad, and a guy with more skills can’t get into training camp.”

So this is crazy for two reasons.

Jackson wants teams to explain why they have quarterbacks who aren't as skilled? In whose opinion? Jackson's? He knows who's better than whom?
He knows that the Bills *must* choose the more skilled backup quarterback? And why? They have *no* other considerations? Like maybe is he the kind of guy who kills dogs for fun?

Where was Jackson when I was laid off? Why didn't he require Motorola to explain why other, less skilled, project managers were being kept while I was let go?

And this is another quote from the reverend:

"Democracy does not guarantee success. Democracy guarantees an opportunity. It’s not fair to de facto try to lock him out of his right to compete."

What?! This makes no sense at all. Democracy is our form of government, not our form of running football leagues. If he'd said this runs counter to our collective ethic of fairness... well okay. He'd then have gotten off crazy and elevated himself to just being wrong.

The NY Times also had this to say:

Jackson, born in 1941, has been a civil rights activist for most of his adult life. He said that in some ways, Vick’s attempt to re-enter the N.F.L. was similar to Jackie Robinson’s entering Major League Baseball.

Now unfortunately they don't give us the quote and I've looked and can't find it, which I think is criminally negligent journalism. Apparently it was confined to saying that Vick and Robinson both had to find courageous owners willing to make a controversial signing. Could anything be crazier in the context of sports than to compare a criminal attempting to convince NFL teams he can still play to Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier? Really, I need to see what Jackson said because while I think the NY Times is generally trustworthy, it doesn't seem possible that even Jesse Jackson is this crazy.

Daddy

2009-06-26T12:15:00.001-07:00

Daddy
by Ethan

Daddy
You are the one that puts me together every day.
I wish you were home.
Daddy,
you put me together.

Jelly Beans

2009-06-24T07:01:00.000-07:00

This morning, on the free food table in the break room there sits an unopened bag of Jelly Belly jelly beans.

They were labeled Jelly Belly Sours. I looked at the front of the bag which was labeled "Sours" but which did not show the actual individual flavors. So being a reasonable person I looked at the back of the bag, which also contained not one hint as to the flavors the bag contains.

Now look, I seriously do not care how much riboflavin is in Jelly Bellies. But there on the back of the bag, taking up important Jelly Belly flavor information real estate, is a line telling me that one serving of Jelly Bellies contain some amount of whatever riboflavin is. But what I want to know, what is important to me as a consumer, is what flavors are in that bag.

Jelly Belly needs to be legally bound to label their beans with the flavors they contain... and in fact there needs to be consumer protection legislation about making it easier for me, the consumer, to distinguish banana from lemon from vanilla pudding.

Lindsay Graham and Chris Dodd spend a whole heck of a lot of time talking about things that they have no business talking about when they have a pretty clear obligation as the senior lawmakers of our land.

There ought to be a law.

There Ought to be a Law

2009-06-24T06:56:00.000-07:00

So maybe this is the beginning of a series.

I'm a pretty fierce Libertarian: I really think that government has no business regulating things like whether or not a person wears a motorcycle helmet. Whose business is it how dangerous it is? My wife, my kids, my parents, my brother maybe. But it seems hard to make a convincing case to me that the Governor of Illinois needs to have an opinion on this.

But I'm not a crazy person, I recognize that there are things the government should and can do better than individuals, or the market, or private initiative. So this occasional series of posts will cover those areas where I think there is actually a need for new laws...

Vigilance

2009-06-17T15:08:00.001-07:00

In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, Colbert King writes:

The Anti-Defamation League reports that John de Nugent, a white supremacist,
Holocaust denier and von Brunn acquaintance, conjectured in a media interview
that von Brunn was driven to action as a result of the election of Barack Obama,
which de Nugent described as a "tremendous signal of alarm for" von Brunn.

So here's my conjecture: there is casual racism in this country. Non-violent, but insidious, a sort of passing assumption on the parts of some people that a certain class of minority or foreigner is just not up to the task of managing, or leading, or having a certain kind of life. These are the kinds of racists that having a president like Obama is going to help. I think a term or two of a sober, intelligent, well-spoken black man will educate these kinds of racists--as this is the racism of ignorance. So many white Americans have never had a great amount of experience with a black mayor, or boss at work, or what have you. They just assumed. This assumption goes away when Obama is on TV so often and at the end of 4 or 8 years the country is still here, in (probably) better shape than it was when he took office, and life is going on like it always has.

Then there is the racism of anger, hatred and frustration. Born of angry young men who need to find a home for their impotence. This is not an ignorance that can be taught, it's a hatred. This kind of racism will not go away, and even worse, will only be inflamed by a sober, intelligent, well-spoken black man as our ultimate authority figure. These violent racists are a fact of the human condition and we can never be rid of them. I think we need to shine a light on them and stomp them down when they rise up. You can't educate or exterminate them away. All we can do is never rest, and never stand by without opposing it. As Wendell Phillips said in exactly this context, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

Eat Fresh

2009-06-14T15:41:00.000-07:00

I have the same problem with every Subway restaurant when I'm ordering more than one sandwich. The "sandwich artist" insists, even after being denied once, that I tell them up front what all my sandwiches are. Like they really need this to start out with.

Inevitable I consult my paper and say, "Okay, I'll take one six-inch on white..." and they immediately interrupt me and say, "What other sandwiches do you want?" I make a semi-show of being annoyed with being interrupted, and I say, "All right, two six-inch ham & cheese one white, one foot-long southwest chicken salad on whole wheat, and one plain tuna on ginger sesame."

And now this next thing, always, always, always happens, and is the reason I am so mad at having to list them all at the beginning. My sandwich artist then makes the first one, slides my sandwich along to the next artist and looks back at me and says, "and what was the next one?"

What. The. Hell?

Seriously, you needed me to list them all just so you could forget them, like we both knew you would, and have to ask again? If you need to know how many sandwiches I need so you can plan ahead to slide that first one along and get back to the bag of bread, fine, ask me how many I plan to be ordering. Which is also stupid, because my bread-retrieval artist always asks, "Is that all?" So we don't need this charade in the beginning when you interrupt my train of thought to pretend that your sandwich artistry is served by my upfront Declaration of Sandwiches.

So I'm not done. That is definitely frustrating all on its own, but then how they deal with the multiple sandwich order gets even more annoying and difficult. It's like when the bread-retrieval artist has to ask each and every time what sandwich I wanted, after she insisted on hearing every one in a leap of incredible optimism at her own memory, she and her artist of a husband now need to punish me for revealing them to have normal human memories.

So then this little dance ensues. I follow my first sandwich as the sandwich-assembly artist takes my order for what accouterments I want with it. I am some portion between 25 and 50% of the way through that operation when the bread-retrieval artist interrupts me to ask what I want to add to the second sandwich. Now unlike my personal sandwich artists, I am not laboring under the false impression that I am of super-human sandwich-making abilities. After all, I have not gone to sandwich-artist school to get my multi-threaded, interlaced super sandwich memory training.

So I have to stop thinking about sandwich #1 to now address sandwich #2, which has a different set of stuff on it. So I repeat that to the first artist and turn back to the second artist and try to remember where I was. This is clearly wrong, and bad, and leads to errors and this madness must be stopped.

Subway. Eat fresh.

The Long History of Now

2009-06-08T16:06:00.000-07:00

I wrote the following to the historian Dan Carlin, whose podcast I thoroughly enjoy. In fact his is the first podcast I have ever been moved to pay for. It's free but he asks for you to feel guilty until you pay for it. Chris, specifically his Hardcore History Podcast is something I think you'd particularly enjoy. I wrote Dan the following:

I was reading Henry Kissinger's recent Op-Ed in the Washington Post (what a mind to still have in his 80s!).

It strikes me that the "multi-polar" world of today is not so unlike the world dominated by European powers 100 years ago. That multi-polarity, the world of semi-equals, perhaps was an important factor in the conflicts that raged in the first-half of the last century. Are we seeing the world cycle back to such times as America loses its grip as a super power to become simply the most powerful, but not the only power of consequence?

I am so tempted to look at history as an inexorable march toward the static now... but obviously that's childish and the fact is that human history from the earliest culture on into the future to the very end of human civilization is all the long history of now.

I think we need to see the emerging equality of many Asian nuclear powers as another period of continental pressure and stress. I'd be interested in your thoughts.

Simon Singh and the English libel laws

2009-06-08T07:52:00.000-07:00

Simon Singh is a British science writer who has been embroiled in a libel lawsuit for the last year. This case raises a few interesting issues and highlights something very wrong in the English legal system.

About a year ago (In April of 2008), Singh wrote an article in one of Britain's largest daily newspapers about chiropractic and its basis in one man's 19th century misunderstanding of medicine, science, and the cause of disease. In it, he criticized the British Chiropractic Association by saying (among other things):

The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help
treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear
infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot
of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the
chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

For American readers, this seems like a fairly tame criticism, and it is, given that chiropractic is more than bogus, it's a flat lie. It's based in nonsense, and has no place in the legitimate medical standard of care. Some subset of chiropractors have abandoned the crazy origins of their discipline and now largely provide a service which is similar to (though less rigorously regulated than) physical therapy, centered around the relief of back pain. Those chiropractors would be well-served to drop the name "chiropractic" and devote themselves to straight physical therapy, but these are not the men and women who are doing harm. It's the other chiropractors who are doing the harm. These are the chiropractors who still subscribe to the theory that there is a mysterious, unmeasurable energy that can make you totally healthy all the time but that is blocked by "subluxations" in your spine and only they, from the delusions of a 19th century beekeeper can properly re-align you.

There has been a long history of chiropractic with almost no evidence suggesting it has any efficacy at all. The pattern that has emerged is that the better you design your study, the less of an effect you have on someone's help by using chiropractic on them. The exception is lower back pain where manipulating a person's back with chiropractic techniques seems to be about as effective in treating their pain as traditional massage. This is fine as far as it goes, but the various chiropractic organizations, including the British Chiropractic Association, maintain that they can cure a wide variety of disease by manipulating your spine. This is what Singh called "bogus".

Now Singh has been sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association. In the United States, we are innocent of libel until proven by the prosecution of having said something both false and reckless and harmful. In England (not strictly Britain), an assertion of libel places the burden of proof on the defendant. Singh, simply by being sued, must now prove that what he said is true. The problem, of course, is that he is forced to prove that the British Chiropractic Association "...happily prmotes bogus treatments."

Singh is doing what so many peoplw who are accused of libel in an English court do not do, he is fighting. This is costing him a great deal of money and may cost him quite a bit more. The problem of structuring libel in this way, backward from the American legal perspective, is that that the very structure of the laws of libel suppresses speech. It creates a chilling effect on journalism that even the threat of a lawsuit can result in being put in an expensive defensive position. In this case the British Chiropractic Association is suing Singh personally, and not The Guardian. Singh is on the hook for all of his defense expenses.

The latest setback for Singh is that an English judge has ruled that the use of the word "happily" means that Singh was arguing that the British Chiropractic Association knows that their treatments don't work. This, and the fact that the defendant must prove his case in England, means that Singh, to avoid losing the case, must prove that the British Chiropractic Association knew their treatments were ineffective.

Think that through... it means that in England it is essentially impossible to criticize someone who is honestly wrong about something.

I have not intorduced anything here that isn't covered in other venues, but I think it is incumbant upon concerned people to do what they can, and so I am putting out my own public call. We need to shine a light on this particular injustice and on England's misguided libel laws which have no place in a free society.

Bad Guys

2009-05-29T19:42:00.000-07:00

There was some TV show on tonight as I was flipping around about the list of sexiest men in movie history. I love lists like that and in talking through similar lists I got onto best bad guys of all time (sticking to TV and movies).

I submit the following list and ask anyone who wants to add their own as I'm sure I'm missing some really good ones:

Honorable Mentions: Khan Noonien Singh (Wrath of Khan), Maleficent (Sleeping Beauty), Evil Queen (Snow White), Baltar (Original Battlestar Galactica), Clubber Lang (Rocky III), Boba Fett (Star Wars), Predator (Predator), The Kurgan (Highlander)

10. Norman Bates: The original psycho. Scary because he is so mild mannered, until his mother shows up. But don't worry, he wouldn't hurt a fly.

9. Annie Wilkes: You hear Annie and you don't tremble in your boots, but when she's standing over your bead with a sledge hammer, you come around. Kathy Bates nailed it, although her character was allowed to use a chainsaw in the book.

8. Brad Whitewood, Sr.: This is maybe an obscure pick, but Christopher Walken played Sean Penn's evil father in the most intense movie I've ever watched. This is worth seeing for the later seens between Penn and Walken. This is Walken's finest bad guy.

7. Nagina: The entire short special of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi had a manacing air about it (Orson Wells sure can set a mood), and by the time Rikki follows Nagina down her hole, I had to get behind the couch to watch the rest. I still get the creeps when I hear her voice in my head talking about getting the boy when he gets into the bath.

6. Alex Forrest: Glenn Close wasn't known as a bad guy for the first half of her career, and probably still isn't thought of that way... but you boil one pet rabbit and look what happens. Fatal Attraction was horrendously scary and Alex Forrest is why.

5. The Terminator: He got campy in the later movies, but the first time he is blown out of the plate glass window and gets back up, you know you're in for a ride. He later delivers the same thrills as he removes his eye with a scalpel, and later when he rises up from the wreckage of a blown-up truck. As Kyle Reese sums it up, "You still don't get it, do you? He'll find her! That's what he does! It's *all* he does!"

4. The Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow: The Johnny Depp movie was horrible and not even the HH could make anyone scared in that movie. But the Bing Crosby-narrated animated short film scared me no end as a kid. When Ichabod looks back over his shoulder and the flaming jack-o-lantern looks back--well it hardly gets scarier than that.

3. Hannibal Lecter: Lecter is utterly great, lovable while being as scary as a bad guy can be. He isn't higher because seeing him first as an adult, I just don't think he *can* be as scary to me as the next two. But the first scene you seem where he's standing so still in the middle of his cell--you've got to be kidding me.

T1. Darth Vader and The Wicked Witch of the West: I just could not find any way to put even a little separation between these two. Darth could strangle a man from afar, ruled the Galaxy, and commanded giant armies of Stormtroopers. The WWotW rode a fiery broomstick, ruled from the creepiest dark castle in the history of movies and commanded the flying monkeys--easily the scariest army of minions in history. And they both had great, great theme songs. Darth's one weakness as a bad guy is that he was ultimately redeemed while WWotW never was, but she also never really actually turned anyone into a toad. Darth blew up an entire planet, but WWotW stole a cute little dog from a distraught girl. WWotW creepily clawed her crystal ball while sending her monkeys out into the steel-grey sky... solidifying her extreme awfulness.

What death penalty?

2009-05-28T21:54:00.001-07:00

From CNN:

A U.S. soldier convicted of murdering an Iraqi family issuing a public apology on Thursday for his crimes. Steven Green, who escaped the death penalty this month, told relatives of the victims that he is "truly sorry for what I did in Iraq." Green was found guilty in U.S. District Court in Kentucky of raping a 14-year-old girl and murdering her, her parents and her 6-year-old sister in the town of Yusufiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad...

So isn't this the same thing as this U.S. District Court of Kentucky issuing the opinion that the death penalty is wrong?

ASP

2009-05-27T18:49:00.001-07:00

Look, I like a good case statement as much as the next guy, but that is NO F-ING EXCUSE for your language not having an "else if" construct.

Forging Old Paths

2009-05-26T07:26:00.000-07:00

If the first few sentences are impossible for you to understand, stick with it, I think it will be readable after that:

I was a software engineer in my early professional life. I did hard-core real-time programming using vanilla C in Unix for proprietary embedded systems. I primarily used vi (say the letters, it's pronounced "vee-eye". I could let you read that any way at all and it shouldn't matter to me because you are not even near me right now, but I can not let it go.) to write my code--this was before fancy development environments were developed. In vi if you want to save your document you hit the 'esc' key and type ":w". So save and close you hit 'esc' and ":wq". After ten to twelve years of this it was very, very hard to start using a mouse to do things like save documents.

I stopped programming much at all in about 2003 in favor of program management where you do everything in Windows tools. I spent perhaps two years having to delete ":wq" from the bottom of my word documents because when I was ready to close a document, that's what my fingers did. It was a muscle memory that was very hard to shake.

So for maybe the last 5 years I have done no appreciable programming and am quite over my vi training. In my new job I am programming again. For about two months I was doing some VB scripting in Excel and then in asp pages. I am using a new editor: Microsoft Visual Studio and nothing odd has been happening.

This past Friday I realized I should back up and start again in javascript (for reasons that are unimportant). So this morning I came in and wrote my first javascript program. Javascript is entirely new to me, but it uses a syntax just like C, from what I can tell. I have spent the morning trying to run scripts that fail because ":w"s are sprinkled all over the code. The muscle memory is back with a vengence--out of nowhere and it's a total regression.

It's like typing "{}" and ";" has awakened something in my brain. It's very, very cool in a freaky way. I mean it's not like you always type a semicolon before saving your file. In fact mostly you don't, because you see stuff you want to change in the middle of the line, for instance. So it's not like it's a key sequence like ";:w" that is from a long time ago and the semicolons just kick off the sequence. And further strangeness is that being a grammar nerd, I actually use semicolons when I write English (I use them appropriately, of course).

So something about addressing an editor int he C syntaxy way has made this come back from the depths of 5 years ago.

My Fun Guy

2009-05-23T20:19:00.001-07:00

Ethan and I went walking in the woods today. These were fabulous, dinner plate-sized fungi extending from the trunk of this tree. We also made it to a Northern League baseball game where he got *two* baseballs.

The Rise of the Machines

2009-05-21T07:36:00.000-07:00

I fear the rise of the machines, I just don't fear it like other paranoiacs fear it. Your average nut buys a roomba and watches it make decisions about vacuuming the floor and then sees Terminator or Alien and figures someday roomba will come with a machine gun and the desire to enslave him.

But that's like worrying that your biggest threat from Ford is that someday they'll make nothing but tanks and inter-suburban warfare will claim you as its victim: it's one direction a thought experiment about cars can take you, but that conclusion is not a result of assessing the arc of greatest probability given what you know about Ford and cars.

No, the real threat from the rise of the machines is not that they will rise up and enslave us, the real threat is that some future robot's internet-connected janitorial thread is going to eat up 85% of the world's CPU capacity so it can clean an airport bathroom.

Idiocy is the world's real problem, and there's no power like a nearly omnipotent, infinitely patient idiot who is also a CPU-hog.

Bienvenido al mundo real, Mexico

2009-05-20T13:44:00.000-07:00

The problem with the real world is that proof is impossible. The swine flu may still get us in a big way in the fall, but for now it looks like it's under control, with almost no damage. Compared to seasonal flu it was essentially completely harmless.

But we don't know why. Maybe it is just a toothless virus. Maybe Mexico just spent 20 billion dollars and saved the planet from total disaster. We'll never know. What we do know is that Mexico spent 20 billion dollars and the flu did not spread. If it's a random correlation the 20 billion was wasted. If it was causal, then Mexico just took a bullet for the human race, and that's not over-stating the case.

Our response needs to be clear, and President Obama needs to say this the next time he's at a podium:

"The recent swine flu outbreak did not kill 50 million human beings. It is entirely possible that without Mexico having gone to tremendous expenditure and inconvenience the swine flu might have done just that. The world owes Mexico a debt of gratitude for that sacrifice, and we will repay them. We will not repay them in dollars or pesos, we will repay them by not interpreting this episode as an over-reaction, but as an appropriate reaction to a potential threat. We will repay them by doing the same thing the next time the outbreak is within our borders. I call on all nations to pledge similar action."

It sends the right message to Mexico, to American citizens, to the world, to WHO, to the CDC and it sets the table for continuing to do the right thing. To not learn this lesson is to be Jenny McCarthy who is calling for us not to vaccinate our children because we've forgotten what a nightmare smallpox is.

Oprah is about to kill people

2009-05-18T14:56:00.000-07:00

She is. When Jenny McCarthy gets a show edorsing the discontinuation of vaccines, her immunity will drop and people will die. All for a scare that isn't based in any supported fact at all. Shirly Wu hits it right on:

You reach millions of people everyday and your words and
endorsements carry an incredible amount of weight. If you say to buy a
certain book, people will buy it. If you do a segment on a certain
charity, people will contribute. And if you say that what Jenny
McCarthy is saying has merit, people will believe you.

Living in the Shadows

2009-05-14T14:46:00.000-07:00

Everything on my computer has shadows now. Well... either shadows or the subtle two-tone 3-d button effect, or semi-transparent window borders.

And my computer is very slow.

I'm not saying vista is definitely slow on my computer because it's constantly rendering graphic effects, but just like a company that's laying people off shouldn't be planting flowers, a computer that is running really slowly shouldn't be producing cutesy graphics effects. It's bad form.

You can be drawing cutesy graphics all the time or you can be a slow computer, both are excusable at times, but you can't do both.

And why doesn't Windows offer a "work installation" that does away with all of this cute crap? I mean I just can't deal with windows drawing crap all the time. I can see it slowing way down and laboriously laying all of these window effects. Again, I'm not sure what's making it slow, but it being slow gives me time to reflect on the fact that I have a computer that can barely squeeze out a reasonable search through 100 source files that spends some amount of time primping for me. I want a check box on my control panel that says, "I don't need my computer to act like I'm dating it."

Establishment of a religion

2009-05-13T12:25:00.000-07:00

In this bill, the House Republicans are proposing that 2010 be designated "The National Year of the Bible".

And I quote:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Is there an argument to be made that this bill is not "respecting an establishment of religion"?

No.

Pushing Up

2009-04-28T17:03:00.001-07:00

I'm not saying that push-ups are the most important thing, or even that they are the greatest desert ever, but why on Earth do they make push-ups in a flavor other than orange?

The only reason to anyone would eat a red push-up is because there wasn't an orange push-up available. So why not make more orange push-ups?

And don't even get me started on purple-flavored push-ups.

I have so much to say

2009-04-27T22:11:00.001-07:00

It's hard to fathom how a benevolent creator might have dreamed this up. This parasite attaches itself to the base of its host's tongue, cutting off the blood supply. Once the tongue atrophies and dies, the parasite becomes the host's tongue.

Stephen King has nothing on nature.

Alternative Engineering

2009-04-20T13:29:00.001-07:00

Engineering, in a broad sense, can be defined as the application of science to solve problems.

We have all sorts of engineering, mechanical, electrical, software, civil, etc. Each of these disciplines can be used to solve problems and to keep people safe, to save lives and to perform mission critical applications. It would be hard to imagine accepting "alternative engineering". If a company answered a request for quote from a state government by saying that they were using an alternative form of engineering, developed by ancient Chinese engineers, it really couldn't get through the process. If the company made the claim that all of the engineering firms that normally pitch and win contracts are actually conspiring to keep bridge prices high, and to keep bridges constantly in danger of failing just to perpetuate the need for engineering bridge-building companies, the state government would most likely think of the company as cranks and would throw away their business cards. But if they believed the company's claims, even a little, they might ask that company for evidence of those claims, and they'd certainly require a pilot study and proof of these better, cheaper bridges before they (the government) would allow their voting constituents to drive their cars on these new bridges.

The same is true for any kind of engineering that is important, like air traffic control software, medical equipment for hospitals, airframe manufacturing, etc, etc, etc. We demand these engineers, organizations, and companies use the best practices which have been proven by science. Stepping away from the long-standing traditional, tried-and-true path of building these things happens, but only after the process is thoroughly vetted against the traditional methods with plenty of science and testing behind it. Again, this is for mission critical or life-supporting applications.

Medicine is a kind of engineering in this sense. It is the application of basic science to solve a life-saving or life-supporting function. It is certainly more directly critical to those clients who seeks its services. Why are we so much more willing to accept "alternative medicine" than we are to accept "alternative engineering"?

Strange Consequences

2009-04-02T07:36:00.000-07:00
On the problem that it's easier for a resident of Peoria to find the best restaurant in Manhattan than for that resident to find the best restaurant in Peoria:

The problem is the googlization of information. Google taught us that the masses -- en masse have something valuable for us: information on the collective mind. The problem is that when you diverge from the center, the fidelity of that information to your needs is exponentially eroded at the square of the distance

Newish Idea

2009-04-02T07:35:00.000-07:00
I think I'll use this blog going forward to do a little something more than just pictures. I think I'll start posting thoughts as well--which will be new. We'll see how it goes.

Derby!

2009-02-08T13:43:00.000-08:00

Ethan's car took 5th place in speed and 3rd place in design in the Boy Scouts' pinewood derby!

Mr. Squirrel

2009-01-22T15:24:00.000-08:00

Obviously squirrels eat well in our backyard.

When good faeries go bad...

2008-11-01T12:31:00.000-07:00

There are some pretty shots, too, but I like this one the best.

Aftrer the Laser

2008-10-13T14:38:00.000-07:00

After the laser shot Ethan's chin, this is what he looked like.

ESD Beat Down

2008-10-10T18:17:00.001-07:00

And here's my boy after he fought the playground and lost.

the great pop-sci book project

2008-08-28T07:22:00.000-07:00
Jennifer Ouellette has proposed a project by which all her readership list the top 100 science books of all time and she will compile a moderated list. I offer my list, and I note that she included science fiction in her list, so I will do so as well.

1. The Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin
2. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman
3. Phantoms in the Brain, V. S. Ramachandran
4. The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks
5. A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
6. *Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter
7. The Physics of Star Trek, Lawrence Krauss
8. The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg
9. Neuromancer, William Gibson
10. The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan
11. *The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins
12. Wonderful Life, Stephen J. Gould
13. The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
14. The Astonishing Hypothesis, Francis Crick
15. The Physics of the Buffyverse, Jennifer Oeullette

New Flower

2008-08-13T22:32:00.001-07:00

From the front bushes of a house I will paint on September 5th. I missed the bumble bees, but the flowers stayed nice and still.

Baby Bunnies

2008-07-07T17:55:00.000-07:00

What you're looking at is the top-most baby bunny from the nest of baby bunnies we discovered this evening in the kids' sandbox.

They are cute on a scale nearly unimaginable.

The Homestead

2008-06-01T19:03:00.001-07:00

My parents-in-law's house, a beauty out in the woods of Northern Illinois.

Go cats!

2008-05-17T12:04:00.000-07:00

Forgive the cell-phone shot.

This picture is the top-seeded NU Wildcats women celebrating their 12th goal against 8th seeded Princeton in their quarterfinal game. I got to see the first half, which included several goals by the 'cats including an over-the-shoulder shot near the end of the half.

Into the Woods

2008-05-10T19:30:00.001-07:00

Run Away!

My children tear off into the woods, as fun a time as we've had for months.

Lamium?Vinca

2008-05-10T19:28:00.000-07:00

~~I think this is lamium.~~Turns out it's Vinca It's a pretty little ground-cover flower that my father-in-law is partial to.

Snowy Fields

2008-02-20T21:17:00.001-08:00

In the forest preserve near the house. The tracks are all animal tracks.

A Harsh Mistress

2008-02-20T21:15:00.000-08:00

Great eclipse experience tonight. The best and most complete eclipse of my life.

This is hand-held with my zoom.

Beautiful Girl

2008-02-08T19:02:00.001-08:00

Sometimes Margot takes a picture that takes my breath away.

Back Court Madness

2008-01-09T04:21:00.000-08:00

I've been away for far too long, my apologies.

My daughter is in basketball this winter -- the first game was a lot of fun. She's one of the guards this year.

These are her shoes.

Are you ready for some?

2007-09-12T18:33:00.000-07:00

The boy began soccer a few weeks ago. He had his first game. Here he is breaking away from the pack. Looks like fun.

Full size here.

Ethan's gallery, which includes this and some other new soccer pictures is here.

Look into my eye

2007-08-27T18:37:00.000-07:00

I have been wondering why I can't ever get a really sharp photo of dragon flies' eyes. This extreme closeup (200%) shows why -- they aren't faceted, they are pebbled!

If you don't stop...

2007-08-12T18:27:00.000-07:00

... you'll break your neck. I have no idea how Grey Pelicans don't break their necks every time they dive. I'll put up some more later, but this sequence shows a Grey Pelican going in for a kill. It is impressive to watch them skim inches above the water only to rise up and plunge into the water for a catch.

They were pretty far off from the beach, so these aren't as impressively up close as I would have liked.

As always, full size here.

Bodie Island Lighthouse

2007-08-12T18:02:00.000-07:00

It's pronounced "Body", which leads to all sorts of cool speculation about the origin. We stayed a few minutes from this lighthouse, which is my favorite of the Carolina lighthouses. I took it from the porch of the lighthouse keeper's cottage.

Full size here.

A Day at the Beach

2007-08-12T17:19:00.000-07:00

... or an evening, really. Courtesy of my parents-in-law, we spent the week in a rented house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It was an absolutely great vacation.

The two small black spots in the sky on the right and left are not specks on the lens, they are both dragonflies, which filled the skies in the evenings. A look at the full-size of the picture will show that they are indeed insects.

Ready, set, bake!

2007-06-25T07:39:00.001-07:00

Fun for a Sunday. This is a white hearth loaf that took me (with the rising cycles) all of Sunday. It starts with a sponge which is always fun because the risen size is always dramatic. The kids enjoyed looking at it, but weren't as blown away by the rising as I expected.

The full gallery, including a few pictures showing the various stages is here.

HereThere Be Dragons

2007-06-22T04:39:00.000-07:00

I came home from work to find Beth taking pictures of this guy on the bushes in the yard. I couldn't resist trying one myself. Full-sized here.

Humming Past the Graveyard

2007-06-16T19:28:00.000-07:00

So this guy comes and goes from my parents-in-law's feeder. I got two pretty good shots of him here.

Reds

2007-06-03T06:44:00.000-07:00

Same feeder, different day. A red-bellied woodpecker talks to a red-winged blackbird. Full-sized here.

Silhouette

2007-05-06T16:03:00.000-07:00

Margot looking very solemn from a party this afternoon. Full-size photo here.

Just before

2007-04-24T20:38:00.000-07:00

This is just prior to the picture below. Original.

Back at the feeder

2007-04-22T15:12:00.000-07:00

The grackle is the one with the iridescent head, the one flying is a red-winged blackbird. The great variety of blackbirds in Northern Illinois is awfully fun. Grackles fly in large packs and are very smart and efficient at emptying feeders. They also attract a lot of brown-headed cowbirds, which lay their eggs in the grackles nests, and the grackles raise the cowbird babies -- opportunism at its best.

If you look closely at the full-sized original, you can see the grackle has a seed in its mouth.

Mourning Meal

2007-04-09T20:09:00.000-07:00

From my parents-in-law's feeder. I love my 30 year-old 200mm zoom and the rapid-fire shutter release!

The full-sized image is here.

Time for a quiz

2007-04-04T20:33:00.000-07:00

No hints, can you guess what the item above is? Full sized version here.

St. Baldrick's

2007-02-15T14:41:00.000-08:00

Most of you already know what St. Baldrick's is.

For those who need an introduction, every year I participate in a charity event which raises money for childhood cancerresearch. The event is called St. Baldrick's. Shavees, as we're called, volunteer to have our heads shaved for donations from nice people like you all.

From now until March 16th I raise money from everyone I can. And then on the event day I go into downtown Chicago to Fado's Irish Pub at a big, fantastically fun event and my donators can see me get my head shaved, can bid on auction items, and can have a few beers, free bar food and just hang out. We've had an enormous amount of fun the last few years.

The standard donation is $50, but I've been pleased to receivedonations as low as $1 and as high as $1,000. My largest donator gets the added benefit of taking the first swipe at my head with the shaver. Last year I exceeded my goal of $5,000! This year I'm increasing my goal to $7,500.

My employer, Motorola, matched contributions last year, so check with your employer for matching contributions.

For a little background, my cousin Nathan was diagnosed with Neuroblastoma on April 1, 2003. He is now 6 years old and still fighting. You can read about his fight at his website:

My page is located here, you can find a "Donate On-line" button which is secure and about as easy as buying a book from Amazon. It's fully tax deductable and instructions are on-line. You can also print a donation form and use the normal U.S. Post.

If you have any questions, please contact me

Go Bears!

2007-01-31T17:56:00.000-08:00

Turn your back on your little Bears fan and look what happens!

Defensive Wizardry

2007-01-10T20:12:00.000-08:00

Here's Margot boxing this poor kid out under the boards. In fact she really does play pretty tenacious defense. She doesn't ever look up for the ball, but she's a good defender.

By Request

2007-01-08T19:12:00.000-08:00

Okay Jim, you ask, I deliver. Blue tongues, complete with matching Christmas-themed pajamas.

Luna

2007-01-03T17:51:00.000-08:00

Margot's new telescope is utterly fantastic. We are having a ton of fun with it, having looked at Saturn and Titan a few nights ago. I tried a photograph through the eyepiece (hand held) last night. The result is better than I expected. You can click on the image to see the full-sized image.

Adler

2006-12-30T21:34:00.000-08:00

The family went down to the Adler Planetarium today. Lots of fun. Outside, as an intriguing haze hung over the city, I got a good shot of Beth and the kids. We bought a yearly pass, so we plan to go back for the regular shows, the Friday telescope time, and hopefully for the other fun stuff they do.

:%s/Et/Nat/g

2006-12-26T21:52:00.000-08:00

So on my last blog, astute readers will have noted that I wrote "Ethan" when I should have written "Nathan". In my defense I submit that they are of similar age, one is my son and one is my cousin, they have similar names and we even wanted to name Ethan "Nathan" at one point. I also submit this composite photograph...

More from MSKCC

2006-12-21T08:44:00.000-08:00

I have never seen the HESS vehicles before. Every year the company issues a toy for Christmas, and in the New York City area at least it is very big. Ethan had a few at the hospital from various years (and got *two* more toward the end of his stay) and I'm not exaggerating when I say 90% of the hospital staff had some memory of collecting them, their brothers or sons collecting them or perhaps just remembred neighborhood boys being excited every year as HESS advertised the new vehicle. They are indeed very, very cool. I believe Nathan has the 2001, 2004, and 2006 models now.

Visting Nathan

2006-12-14T18:52:00.000-08:00

I spent the week visiting Nathan and Luke in the hospital. It was really super to see Nathan and to spend some time talking with Luke and giving him a break from time to time. One of the things Nathan and I did while Luke was out of the hospital was build a crayon forest. Here is the forest, and you can see Nathan through the trees!

Get out the vote

2006-12-12T21:49:00.000-08:00

I voted for the Bad Astronomer; really I did, and you should, too. I mean if you really hate squids.

what a coincidence

2006-11-16T17:57:00.000-08:00

pyxl, it's funny, I actually took that photograph from the time when Ethan was starring for The Little Rascals.

Or that?!?

2006-11-15T19:19:00.000-08:00

And the boy turned 5 today. Here he is with his own blue tongue.

What on Earth is that?

2006-10-07T19:50:00.000-07:00

Margot had soccer goalie-camp today. The boy and I sat and watched it. After a bit he and I wandered over to the snack counter and I bought him some candy. When the camp was done, Margot wanted a Blue Raspberry candy ring. It did this to her tongue -- she was most excited.

Boy at Run

2006-09-24T21:02:00.000-07:00

Ethan and I went out to a local Nature Preserve. It was a great time. We saw birds, frogs, snail shells, pond scum, large flowers and tall grass. He threw rocks, apples, nuts, dirt. He broke sticks and ran and ran and ran. We talked about all sorts of stuff as we walked into a out of deep woods, long, sunny praries and such. We travelled over a mile or two and he never flagged. In the end we had to run back to the car since he could hear pirates coming to get us.

A blossom by any other name...

2006-08-31T05:51:00.000-07:00

... would taste as sweet?

On the advice of a friend, and because we planted pumpkins this year, I plucked some pumpkin blossoms and fried them last night.

They were very good. Now let me disclaim at this point that they were bathed in milk and eggs and dredged in crackers and fried in butter, so I suppose it was inevitable that I'd like them.

So I guess fried pumpkin blossoms do indeed have my endorsement, another mild culinary surprise for me. A darned tasty one, to be sure.

well and truly hurled

2006-08-23T21:29:00.000-07:00

I have recently begun playing vintage baseball. This is a league that plays baseball by the rules established inteh 19th century (1858 for our league to be exact). the picture above is an amalgam from a set of pictures taken by my friend Kyle who came to the last game. Click on the photo for the larger version.

Fun stuff, and more pictures and links will follow.