Narj

Science Friday, speech decoding

2012-02-10T05:20:00.000-07:00

On Science Friday Ira had one of his occasional fantastic guests. He was exploring the brain, recording and playing back words. On the radio, you'd hear the actual spoken word, then you'd hear the consequent brainwave. It was intelligible, barely. While the research was really cool, on reflection it didn't seem so strange that there's an electrical signal running around in your head that sounds like "chair" when I say "chair."

Then I started to think, "what will it sound like as they go deeper in?"

Following the signal chain from that word to the muscle commands that make you sit down, I'm expecting a more and more pulse-like burst of signal, less of a chair, and more of a databit. What are the internal symbolic representations of words, the things with meaning? Are they still vaguely "chair-sounding?" Or are they structurally encoded, just a data bit, but WHICH data bit, which networks activated that matter.

Writing it now it still sounds prosaic but I was really enthralled at the time. Maybe worth a listen.

Diamond vs Tainter

2012-02-03T03:49:00.005-07:00

@Adam: I'm also very interested in the Tainter/Diamond comparison.

Diamond sez Tainter sez "how could you not anticipate a problem & fix it?" It's a fair assessment of some quotes from The Collapse of Complex Societies. (I linked my review.) From that conundrum Tainter goes on to describe a dynamic (this oft mis-used word fits precisely here)wherein the society enjoys a benefit of technological progress, grows to consume the benefits, & thereby becomes irrevocably committed to it. Tainter adds that more technology, our only solution (eg to world hunger) may actually not work because of diminishing returns.

This is a fancy way of saying "didn't see it coming" so when Diamond cites that cause, he's agreeing with Tainter. Diamond divides and enumerates while Tainter tries to understand why. Both are forms of analysis, but not equally good. Diamond is exceedingly thorough, but fundamentally shallow. While both latch on to human self interest as impediment to doing the right thing, Diamond has only "didn't see it coming" and "tragedy of the commons" for rationale, though he takes a dozen pages to say it. Maybe I should say he takes 500 pages to say it! Tainter’s cause is far more nuanced, and complex enough to be the rationale for not foreseeing or effectively mitigating a problem, even if you wanted to.

Tainter’s approach is so tricky that he himself cannot explain it succinctly and instead has to spend much of the book illustrating the problem, carving away around the edges to indirectly describe it’s core. Thus, I’m sorely challenged to pack it in a nutshell! Here’s a try...

Tainter draws an arc of diminishing returns from technological investment that eventually flattens out entirely and then slopes downward! How could this be? Adam, I think you’ll like my answer that it’s essentially because of externalities. The accurate cost/benefit analysis in determining whether to buy the latest fertilizer is miscomputed by the farmer because the numerator is misquoted to him in the form of an incomplete accounting behind the price tag. Somewhere the last island of bat guano is being strip mined to make that cheap fertilizer, which lets Iowa support a larger population which intrinsically requires the higher crop yield. The people have to eat. The tractor has to eat. The people move off the farm and build iPods and strip mining machinery Then one day the fertilizer runs out. Not so different from the last tree on easter island, but you can more easily see how it could sneak up on you. It's just the tragedy of the commons again, made indirect, far away and invisible.

Tainter would probably amplify on my example by describing interconnected webs of dependency, more fragile and less obvious than the fertilizer one. Have you heard Greenspan’s stump speech about the latte? (worth googling) A latte for a couple bucks is a triumph of technological society. Not so long ago, only royalty could aspire to such a concoction and now we all can, but it’s supporting infrastructure is not robust to challenge. A big steel boat is efficient, but fragile. Put a hole in your wooden dinghy and at least it will still float and you with it.

Why do we go over the cliff? Why can’t we retrench to sustainable levels when something complicated gives way? Why are crisis and collapse required?

Momentum.

When more children are born in Greenland and more outfield flayed to make their houses. You could go back, but some of those children would have to starve. I think Tainter would say the technology itself comprises the momentum, not just the bellies, but I can’t quite defend that part. Can’t I un-commit to technology?

You can’t just rescale us without a nonlinearity. There's this thing, the "back side" of the power curve. There's a minimum drag point, fly faster or slower and you need MORE thrust. Fly a little slower, add a little thrust, do that for a bit and you're in a tough spot because now it's unstable: if the thrust drops even just a little you can't get back to the normal linear range but instead will slow down until the nonlinearity: stall. There's a solution in the airplane example just as there is in real life, but it's painful: you have to give in to the inevitable, dive and lose altitude (lose luxury, sacrifice population) to slide down to a sustainable situation. This is a pretty good analogy, and the Lift-Drag curves even match Tainter's curves in the book.

Maybe Tainter is wrong about a crystalline web or a house of cards: these are compelling images but are they apt? What if the rubber supply for my espresso machine’s gasket fails? An alternative silicon gasket can get designed and produced in no time. Hell I’ve already got one. (a spare, actually. I can’t survive an espresso interruption, and after these doomsday books, I’ve taken steps.) Maybe our web of interdependence is resilient like a spiderweb, not fragile like ice, and surely it’s organic and self healing in the sense of trying to grow new bonds where there’s a need. Technology is our religion, a groundless belief that some nerd will invent a new kind of fertilizer and we’ll all be fine. Even this example isn’t notional. Goog the story of the “Haber Process,” wherein a smart boy invents a machine to make bat guano. So maybe Tainter is wrong. Maybe this time. But that machine of Habers? It makes bat guano out of oil.

I like Diamond’s points, a lot. I agree with him. But I never read a book before and said “duh” so many times. Analysis by dissection is a tool but it’s too ponderous and just cutting stuff up into little bits doesn’t ADD anything. Tainter made me think & I’m still thinking.

School

2012-01-27T06:09:00.000-07:00

School is going well, teaching "ASEN3128" at CU.

I'm writing this mostly for myself, so apologies if you're a reader and find this post boring. Somehow writing for publication makes this seem easier than just scribbling it down somewhere. Or maybe it's because it's so easy, I don't know.

Anyway, I am developing a...

Lecture Style or Pattern

It has several parts: First there's a review. This is just repeating what happened in the last lecture.
Second, a hook. To get them interested, calmed down, and foreshadowing the day's topic. Sometimes I use the hook as part of the summary so I guess I'm not rigorous about it pertaining to the new material.
Next of course is the body of the lecture. There are lots of sub-topics here. Last is the crescendo. It's supposed to be a surprise opening up a new area to think about. Some examples will clarify.

Lecture 1: Hook: picture of an airplane window: nothing seems to be happening. It is as if there is no motion, and this is balance, this is trim. Course outline. Discuss longitudinal trim, CMa and CMq and CMde. The many dichotomies of this course: trim vs perturbations. s vs z, Laplace vs integration, TF vs SS, Block Diagram Algebra vs Matrix notation, roots vs bode, decay vs oscillatory, Euler vs Quat. Numerical simulation of low pass, and hints of chaos. Of course these were discrete simulations, F(z), but we didn't touch on that much.

Lecture 2: The review was the stability derivatives & dichotomies. Hook was the chaos simulation, showing how its nonlinearity makes it insoluble. Direction Cosines, and the network diagram method of deriving them instantly. Crescendo: Quaternion is that one vector which is unchanged by a DCM. Stability Axes

Lecture 3: Hook = Close your eyes and imagine you're on a beach, running for the frisbee. Invert the scene with a rolling dive. Here the hook was actually part of the review of DCM. Meat was roll subsidence and stability axes. Stability derivatives with units of 1/t, and normalizations to get there. Introduction to block diagrams. Introduction to [A]x = sx as an eigenvalue problem: find eigenvalues of [sI-A]=0

Lecture 4: Hook = throwing tennis ball. Experts just catch it. Experts can guess the right answer. We will guess the answer is exp(at) or exp(st). Metapor for a match, which is a useful tool that separates us from the animals. We need to be good match (Laplace method) users. Body of the class to discuss roll subsidence from two perspectives: Laplace method (d/dt --> s, crack the poly, then "just know" the pattern from roots to dynamics) and formal integration of the differential equation (much harder) required an integrating factor, integration by parts, homogeneous and particular solutions. Showed the root::dynamics correlations, speed for real roots, frequency & damping for imag ones. The crescendo was discussing rolling a tennis ball across the floor: it would go forever. That was a *very* slow/large/long time constant, zero in fact. 1/(s+a) with a going to 0. We did NOT get to Laplace Transforms, which is another method, requiring convolution and inverse-Laplace{F(s)}. We did not get into numerical simulation but we certainly will.

Lecture 5: Bigger review 'since quiz next time. Homework review: what does a matrix [Cib] do to an eigenvector? Nothning; lambda was 1. How about a matrix [A] (multiply, to attenuate, but not to change). The bulk of the lecture will be on stability derivatives, and more trim, lateral this time.

Lecture 6: Quiz.

Lecture 7: Laplace transforms: computing some. 1, t, exp(at) sin?, L{f(t)}Using Lspecifically convolution of impulse response with step. LPF (something you might do explicitly in code)

Lecture 8: Pitch Short Period. Weathervane without a wing. Surprise, q integrates to give alpha (as well as theta). Without a wing that's clear. It's a demonstration of Euler's equation, too. Full EOM (pitch)

Lecture 9: Rocket is not am inverted pendulum. Aircraft is not a pendulum. The force does not produce a feedback that changes the orientation & hence the force, as it does in the pendulum.

I need to do this for office hours a little bit too, because there's the one-on-one Q&A which is ineffective, but maybe necessary if students are afraid / embarrassed. Just general Q&A about the homework is a good forum to explore confusions, but I'd like it if that were classroom-wide

Review of "Collapse"

2012-01-18T05:38:00.006-07:00

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Jared Diamond starts off with one star and an uphill battle since I thought GG&S was shameless profiteering from a pamphlet sized idea. That's prejudice for ya, folks! Don't worry though, my convictions are just as ductile as they are forceful. I'll be happy to eat these words later, like always.

Ok it's later...

I have warmed to Diamond's presentation somewhat, though I still think it a flaw to expand this idea to 500 page format. Lots of the details are fun if you're not in a hurry so I was going to let that cricicism go until late in the book we were treated to a comprehensive list of every baseball player from the Dominican Republic ever to make it in the big leagues. To no useful end, it is surely superfluous to add? Really, Jared? This book requires more skimming than anything, ever.

Tainter's Collapse is a great foil for this book. Here, I'd like to consider Greenland only, just as a case study, sort of comparing Tainter & Diamond's themes. While Diamond describes a panoply of factors and their various interactions, the short story is: they starved to death. My question is why the settlements collapsed catastrophically instead of finding a lower equilibrium within the carrying capacity of their environment?

As with Tainter, "control systems" provide an interesting insight that instability requires some kind of net "bad" feedback in order to run away out of control. Development of such instability is abetted by delays and momentum. There are fancy terms for these that I'll eschew, but you can imagine the effects of delay in noticing the trees are running out: you get "surprised" by a challenging problem. The basic question is how, in the face of diminishing returns on (technological) investment, population doesn't level off instead of collapsing? In microcosm of Greenland, I think Diamond makes a pretty good case for a terminal crisis.

In some good expansion years, population could rise while an insidious debt is being incurred, "flaying the outfield" for sod homes faster than it can be renewed, clear cutting timber, and raising sheep and cows that further degrade the turf. The population, their homes, their animals all represent the momentum needed to carry the economic balance between the Vikings and their environment from "challenging" over into "desperate." I describe it as "momentum" because you NEED those animals for cheese & meat, turf is NEEDED for fodder and homes, and so these are commitments from which you can't easily turn aside if the grass runs out. So, in the space of a couple of bad years, maybe precipitated by an atypical snowstorm, a crisis arises, the stock get gobbled and everybody dies.

Why did the Greenland Norse not see trouble coming and reduce their demands on the environment? Did they have no foresight at all? Here's a three part answer to that.

(a) tragedy of the commons (selfishness trumps global foresight),

(b) foresight's actually difficult to come by. (hey does America operate on a balanced budget, reducing the debt in "sunny" years? We STILL have no foresight, or at least don't act on it.) and

(c) well, no actually they really didn't see it coming: they didn't understand carrying capacity or soil erosion & so would have more vague ideas of impending environmental crisis.

He titled the book "how societies CHOOSE to fail or succeed," but I don't think it was all that conscious a choice.

Another thesis one could explore in this book is: "Religion takes the cheese, even if everybody starves." This is perhaps a more understandable root of the Mayans' more prolonged wilting, and draws attention to the joining of church and state. It's not religion per-se but the chiefs, which two groups in those days were nearly indistinguishable, that ruled, and continued to demand fealty shiny trinkets and big stone houses whatever the cost.

Last and scariest, what if it's (drum roll) CHAOS?! Not to go all Jurassic park on you, but we certainly don't understand all the ways life interacts and it's not written in stone anywhere that things are guaranteed to come out ok or behave in stable fashion. Maybe societies collapse for reasons that are essentially ineffable, or at least so complex and nonlinearly coupled as makes no difference. It's certainly possible the Norse didn't see it coming. The Easter Islanders? That's harder to excuse, isn't it? Chopping down the last tree and all. I'm tempted to blame them for a Onceler-ian selfishness & failure to cooperate; tragedy of the commons sort of collapse.

For us, for all of modern 21st century society, arguably doomed to stand or fall together, maybe it's gonna be Chaos (and chaos, too) since we can't so far agree on what the problems are and what to do about them.

But I am working hard to find some cohesion, some theme. Diamond makes no such attempt, beyond listing five factors which go beyond pedantic: warfare, trade, environment, I can't even be bothered to enumerate them. Environmental mismanagement is surely the core idea, though he won't quite come out and say it that clearly. Indeed his fifth cornerstone is actually made of three more minicornerstones, and they themselves vague and broad enough to support many fractal recursions thereupon, as "fleas hath smaller fleas... and so on ad-infinitum." Sigh.

A closing note, Tainter said something about us ALL not being able to collapse together as a unit, because he felt you had to collapse in relationship to something. So if human society is now one big monolith, then we can't formally undergo a collapse by Tainter's definition. (Interesting. I need to go back and reread that bit.) Yet, Diamond's cautionary tales of history surely seem to suggest something bad may happen. Let's just call it "severe, comprehensive involuntary lifestyle retrenchment. heh.

Last, to be unambiguous: this book deserves 3 stars for being thought provoking, not for itself containing cogent thoughts. Instead it's a compendium of factors. As for synthesis, Diamond just leaves us hanging in a maelstrom of minutae.

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Tribal Economy

2012-01-11T08:29:00.007-07:00

Just listened to NPR's Planet Money on "the Past and Future of American Manufacturing." It was quite a distressing podcast lamenting the loss of manufacturing jobs, wondering how good but unskilled laborers would fare in the future where manufacturing is about finesse and programming, not stamina. The host, right after being told he would never be hired to program NC milling machines, wondered how the show's protagonist, a hard working aggressive young mom named Matty, could ever get uptrained. The fearful conclusion was she wouldn't.

It's ironic how Adam Davidson worried about Matty's future, right after being told he himself also had no chance at that job either. I don't think getting everybody "trained up" to operate an NC mill is either needed or practical. We really do need only 1/100 as many combine drivers as scythe swingers. What an astounding efficiency gain! As they poignantly illustrated, there's tragedy here, because the machines have CREATED value, so overall life for everyone should be easier,, not tougher. Nor do I believe is it as simple as, "well there're are more of us now so the times are just as tough as ever." Here's an illustrative fable.

--------

Thor paused, sweating. His log was the biggest and he was in front, but he didn't need to rest. The stop was because Ting the chief had just showed up on the crest of the next rise leading 4 of those strange new animals, "horses." What would happen now?

The tribe was half way through their annual migration. Each year, the women built travois' and hauled the family's tent and few goods some 200 miles from the rich timberlands up north down to the arid grasslands. The men hauled timber. These logs were prized material to make bows & tentstakes among the hunter gatherer tribes of the south, and they'd trade food and furs that made the trip a productive annual event for the Ting tribe. Some rich chiefs even had astounding "tents" made entirely of tree slabs stacked close, to keep out every whisper of icy wind. They were luxuriously comfortable: the demand for the tribe's product seemed limitless.

Now old Ting had horses. He was even riding one.

"Thor," he said, looking down at his strongest haulsman while the others came up , variously puffing or wheezing according to their exertions and the ambition of their load, "things are gonna change around here."

"How, lord Ting?"

"We've got horses now. We don't need all you men pulling. A horse can haul as much as 3 men, and feeds itself along the way, so your job ends right here, on this hilltop. From now on, your wife will ride, you can pull her travois with the tent on it."

"I can go twice as fast pulling that little thing. Who'll keep up with me?"

"Well," Ting said, "the horses will be heavily loaded, so we won't go faster, but instead we'll just have more logs to sell. If you get too far ahead each day, maybe you can do a little fishing, or nap. Whatever."

~ ~ So, that's how it COULD have gone. But as you know, on that day, Ting instead left most of his tribe to fend for themselves, and pretty much set the pattern for the rest of history.

Why doesn't the largess of our technological advance translate into a more idyllic lifestyle for everyone?

It's easy to do the "energy balance" and see that tools, animals, machines and oil have each multiplied our ability to get things done. These should have the effect increasing the potential leisure and comfort, supporting a greater population, or some combination of those. That we always choose option #2 seems like a problem in our programming.

If ancient Norse beer technology advancements doubled yield, why couldn't everyone just have two? It seems a simple calculation, but maybe it's the problem as well. First of all, everybody has to increase their consumption to keep full employment or, in the case of items with intrinsically limited demand (ok so not beer, but there must be something...) the technological advancement, whether the horse or the automated brewery, brings a reduction in employment as a nominal consequence.

The benefit is the commodity price drops thanks to lower labor, but what's the laborer supposed to do? You obviously can't put the reduced price genie back in the bottle. Is a requirement for growth the consequence of advancement? Cold bloodedly, in the absence of consumption growth, starvation will eventually balance the labor market to the need. More hopefully though, assuming constant GDP (same number of logs dragged) a pair of hands has been idled, that's potential to create more wealth for us all to share. That's if we can gracefully repurpose and retask the displaced individuals, but why not? Humans are flexible creatures. Maybe now Thor will carve totem poles the plainsmen can afford to buy since logs are cheaper. This is growth.Is there a problem? Well, maybe. Another stable balance would involve MORE plainsmen consuming all the logs that could be supplied even with horses. Everybody's still pulling for all they're worth. Subsistence, only more of it. This scenario need only arise if we wastefully expend every technological windfall in the name of more human mass until (see Collapse of Complex Societies) we are dependent on all the latest gizmos just to get by. Problematically, it seems the natural outcome.

2012-01-08T08:10:00.001-07:00

Good day brewing yesterday. Hoping for a pilsner. It came out very strong: O.G. 1.059!

Flavor

2011-12-16T07:43:00.002-07:00

Palmer suggests a 2-dimensional flavor spectrum of fruity/malty bitter/sweet to characterize beer styles. Eg pilsner is malty-bitter, while IPA is fruity bitter Weisen is fruity-sweet and dark beers are malty-sweet. Kolsch, he put right in the center. Lots of this is from his gospel, too.

Hops: Certainly I associate hoppy with bitter, but cold hopping (eg after the fermentation break) is a favorite of mine because it gives fruity smell without as much bitterness. This means in flavor space, the hop vector is a diagonal from [malty sweet] downward towards [fruity bitter] with some variation in proportion based on when you add the hops. Boil the hops to extract bitterness but lose the aroma, & conversely.

Tannins: astringent. come from hops, grain husks, wood. High pH and high temp, canonically > 170 encourage them. They can precipitate out (hence the benefit of lagering). In brewing pilseners and lagers, low buffering capability of the malt makes tannins a risk. Distilled water is recommended (but we have pretty good water here on the front range.)

Sweet: comes from high temperature mashing, when alpha enzymes randomly chop carbohydrates into indigestible lengths (& beta is deactivated), or especially from caramelized malts. So for example, to avoid sweetness in pilseners, mash cool and don't use any caramel malts.

Fuseols: taste like "hot" alcohols or solvents. I once had a beer that tasted like turpentine. Further conditioning cleaned it up though, as the yeast digested the alcohols. Caused by exuberant early fermentation, eg overly warm temperatures.

Body: comes from proteins. Oatmeal (with a protein rest) or from most grains, keep the protein rest short so you don't break down what's left in the grain.

Fruity: comes from esters, from yeast. Ale yeast & warmer fermentation tends to fruity, lager yeast and cold fermentation leans more to "clean"

Vinegar: Bacteria.

Energy to Burn

2011-12-13T11:51:00.002-07:00

A coal train just went by. I've been wondering about some power factoids, so finally looked them up.

Boulder consumed 1,160 million kWhr (in Y2k)
91% from coal power. I don't know if it's mostly all generated in that one plant or not.
Coal -> steam turbines -> electric generation runs about 35% efficiency.
42 million kWhr from hydro, by the way.
we pay $114 million/yr (that's 10c/kWhr? Sounds high...)
100 tons of coal in a RR car, and 1 lb coal/kwHr (nice neat numbers, eh?)

Therefore, Boulder burns 1 RR Car of coal every 90 minutes.
- various sources

stuff to read someday

2011-12-07T03:04:00.003-07:00

Stiglitz on economy

Internet Manifesto

2011-12-06T08:10:00.004-07:00

Some of my online goals are broad and socially oriented. That means I like to "discuss" things forcefully. By way of introduction, and admonition to myself, here are the principles behind all this arguing. there’s some righteously impossible stuff in here but hey, it’s a mission statement: you gotta aim high.

Mission: Change things for the better by winning people over to and through reason and empathy, and make life fun and interesting doing it.

Themes:

Improve the quality of discourse here and in RL. Be sure to listen. Be welcoming to all but pay more attention to my friends.
Try to address issues as they deserve, atomically vs as an indivisible federated system. (Plank by plank, not monolithic political platform.) A favorite tack is to introduce the schism between a Christian (or secular humanist, take your pick) approach to people, and Darwinistic economics.
Language is a tricky sword. We have to communicate in meaning, but we use words. Words carry context, deep and precise, but not the same ones for everyone. Further, you can assert one meaning and access another, sometimes invidiously. I aim to clarify these mistakes of argument, flush them out.
Understand confirmation bias and media and social “tribe” participation in that phenomenon. Watch for it in myself and proselytize against it.
Attempt to discover “righteous” economic policies, those being ones that are generally good for everyone, long term, and abusive to none.
Brew fine quality beers with minimal investment in ingredients, obscene devotion to equipment, slavish investment of time, and barely sufficient patience.
Productionize disruptive argumentative technique to improve the reasoning and decisionmaking of all my customers, with the effect of multiplying stockholder equity with justice and improved gas mileage for all.
Continually improve this mission statement until it stands as a shining paragon of truth and beauty, with rhetoric surpassing Newt Gingrich, poetry to shame Johnnie Cochran, principle outshining the Constitution, permanance outlasting the Hyundai warranty, moves like Jagger and acumen that breaks the very Speed of Light. Amen.

Some notes from the "all-grain" mash

2011-12-05T03:08:00.001-07:00

I just made another beer, and it was a long-hard haul. Let's start with Cliff's notes for the ADD, regarding the mash:

Wait to let temp equalize before adjusting,
stir lots (dough balls),
Mash at LEAST an hour,
have a good reserve of sparge water (mash calcs don't attempt to estimate the water absorbed by the mash).

I'll clean up the post below later,( maybe.) It's pretty rough right now. I'm just trying to get it all down while fresh in my mind...

Why? Haven't I got this process wired by now? Well, yes & no. Some things did go very well, most notably (since the last few) I didn't get tied up by any air lock problems or siphoning failures, or spill over the whole carboy or pop the hose out of a vessel it was trying to fill.

One problem was the temperature of the mash. With 12lb of grain, the cooler was more than half full! How much water could it hold, could it get and stay hot enough? It was a bitterly cold day outside, well 20, anyway. This was a big problem for my burner. Fortunately I had another propane tank because I needed to swap them to get the wort boiling. The first tank wasn't empty just low enough to reduce the flame a little. I had dressed the pot in aluminum drapes, but a lot more effort would be needed to really cut down the heat loss. I may just be unable to brew on colder days.

Before that though, the tun worked great. I needn't have worried about the cold weather, because it held temperature very well. Also, (this is a lesson I'm trying to archive) it's really important to stir the mash: I did an ok job of that but got some "dough balls" which I noticed later, when discarding the grain. The other thing I need to do is WAIT for the temperature to equalize, including some good stirring. I ended up thinking it was too cold, too hot, adding snow and boiling water to fix it, and getting a totally full cooler along the way. I wanted a three step mash (125, 150, 155) but who knows what I did really? Quantitative planning went out the window. Sigh.

Later, lautering too was a small junk show with me playing musical pots. I had just the tun, the boil pot / hot liquor tank (double duty) and my old 4 gal boil pot. Surely enough? Yes, but only if used correctly. I got the 4 pot bucket 2/3 full before topping off the tun and then discarding the rest of the hot water (so I could move the wort to the boil pot and resume lautering). I should have really filled it because later I had to use perhaps 6L of hot tap water because I wanted to sparge more. My grain filled the tun about 2/3 up and it held a lot of water! So I may need a third pot or something to "gracefully" get all the sparging done. At the end I squeezed the grainbed and got some more wort out, several cups. I wanted a lot because I figured I'd have to boil a lot & that was pretty true. After 1:30 of desultory boil (all I could manage) my OG was 40. A good outcome but not an efficient mash.

Still confused about Lovibond (darkness) and Lintner (diastatic power). I used 10lb Colorado 2 row (Lovibond=2) and 2Lb CaraRed. Northern Brewer

Hoist with his own petard

2011-12-02T08:57:00.003-07:00

What a great phrase. I've pretty much used it correctly, though I'll always wonder how one (i.e. me) absorbs such colloquialisms. Here's a good link to explication I hope you'll read but basically a petard's a bomb. And another, in redoubtable wikipedia. It's so excellent an engineer's revenge; somehow playing my heartstrings today.

Cleopatra, a Life

2011-12-02T02:31:00.005-07:00

Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Eighty pages in, Cleopatra's secured Egypt's position as a protectorate of Rome. Perhaps not much else was possible, but who would rule Egypt was at issue, as she and her brother were fighting over it when Caesar arrived with an inadequate advance force and in need of an ally. That Cleopatra initiated negotiations by smuggling herself into the palace like Austin Powers to save the day is described as the masterstroke it was. Indeed, political dynamics dominate the book, and one is left only to imagine the daily ebb and flow of court intrigue. Schiff has "tried to pluck the gauze and melodrama" from the story, thusly: "In defiance of the male imagination, five centuries of art history, and two of the greatest plays in English literature, she would have been fully clothed, in a formfitting sleeveless long linen tunic."

Awww...

Put away your libidos everybody, that's a different book. That Caesar got a child in her is mentioned once, about that abruptly, and all detail of the developing relationship is avoided, even deprecated. Oh, the stage is set well enough; with riotous skirmishes in the streets, the opulent barricaded palace sweltering with incense, ships afire in the docks, the brother and nominal consort walking the same halls playing a game of polite diplomacy while his engineers undermine the water supply, one can easily imagine a fantastic screenplay! But the script is absent and Schiff does not stoop to fabricate one. This is not historical fiction.

I sort of wish it were! Unfamiliar with the story, I'm finding enough drama in the bare historical facts to make up a pretty good soap opera in my head. There are vast differences between us and them. It's strange and wonderful to imagine a world so empty that a single city, Alexandria, held the keys to a nation. The Roman legions gouging the world, kings made before they're 20. This is Edgar Rice Burroughs steamy imagination, only for real. (...and you have to BYO lurid details. Maybe I should have another go at Salammbô?)

I think Schiff is working hard to overcome a stereogype of Cleopatra made of nothing BUT sex. Understandable but maybe unnecessary? I like to think that, with all the cultual, scientific & technological differences between us, history played out then with the same raw materials as now, and we are creatures of passion. If anything our modern world seems TOO sterile. On to act II we go!

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The invisible hand fucks up:

2011-11-05T11:41:00.002-06:00

Politics and human nature create bubbles of instability in pricing, causing serious harm and specious profits. Worldwide the rice price spiked one summer in the ninties. Boring but important to think about.

It just needs damping! What if we had big stockpiles of key materials, oil and grain and copper, and these had programmed demand elasticity? They'd be thereby automatically rigged to foil speculative trading.
http://www.npr.org/planetmoney (#320)

Essential equipment.

2011-10-27T11:49:00.015-06:00

What are the most important parts of fancier brewing system? Well I guess the next step is to get some actual experience doing all grain brewing, to learn what would be good. Meanwhile I'm thinking about how to make it work well and be slick. By slick I mean visually appealing (steampunk German submarine is the look, I think) smooth to use & easy to clean. I've been looking online, but I'm not sure about the canonical 3-keg approach. It still seems too complex and gadgety to me. Also overkill. With a 5 gal bucket I can make more beer than I can ever drink, so a certain amount of minimalism appeals to me.

So, what's really needed? Here goes, in the order they're needed.

Mash Tun: I really like the idea of using a drink cooler for a mash tun. All the big boys have fancy temperature control with burners and commensurately necessary recirc pumps. But a cooler holds the temp really well without supervision or gizmos! What the heck do I want a fancy contraption for? Well, one answer is that calculating the necessary water infusions to hit your desired temperatures is tricky. OTOH, plumbing frightens me, but calculations, not so much: so I vote for the system with less pipes and maintenance. Maybe I'll get the 10gal version, depending on how tricky the sparging is with the smaller one.
Gravity gauge and thermometer. These are needed at the mash stage, so I list them here.
Pump? I'd like to keep everything gravity fed. I think we can get away with no pumps here, as long as the kettle's mounted high enough to drain into a mash tun or fermentor that's sitting on the ground. (For 15 gal equipment, lifting the weight would start to become a problem.) As mentioned above, using a big steel pot that requires heat and recirculation really drives the need for a pump. With the insulated Tun, we can eschew the pump.
Next, the brew kettle. Ok you need that. Why, though, do there have to be two of these? Why not instead use one pot to heat the mashing water, and that same pot to boil the wort? Ok, you'll need a bucket to hold some water for an intermediate moment. Duh. My outdoor grill has a burner, but it can barely achieve a boil: in the winter it'll be tough. I wrapped Al foil around mine so it doesn't lose so much heat to the environment. I think this is a piece of equipment to spend a little more on, most importantly a drain valve, so you don't have to siphon. I've bought this now and like it. I'll add that the spigot's got an internal filter as well, which prevents hops & other debris from plugging the (below described) chiller: very key. One trouble with it, the mesh is fine enough that it traps air! Siphoning type problems recur when you can't get air out. I think bending it upwards may fix that.
Spoon marked in gallons for the brew kettle. This is a great piece of simple technology. The kettle's got fittings and filters that make it nonlinear, too. Another thing for the boil phase is a fine screened strainer, if you want to remove sediment before encanting (?? what word do I want here, for going into the fermenter?)
Classic wort chiller? Nothing wrong with that concept. However, as soon as the kettle's got a valve, I like Bobby's plans for a counterflow chiller of a garden hose wrapped around a copper pipe though. That seems easy to clean and use. Ok update: I got the materials to make it. So hopefully ...yep, it's operational! It's more important with all grain brewing because it's a big boil, and you can't dilute the hot wort later with cold water so some kind of chiller is really mandatory. Note: oxygenation will be MORE important, 'cause it will all have been boiled. Yet another update, I no longer like the counterflow chiller. Makes sense in continuous circulation systems with pumps, but when gravity feed from my kettle (with a pretty fine screen filter) gets very low flow and is susceptible to leaks breaking the pressure head. An ordinary immersion wort chiller just made from a piece of copper pipe doesn't have that problem.
Fermentor. Well, you certainly need that, with an airlock. Seems to me that except that it doesn't come apart for cleaning very well,a big carboy is an excellent fermentor. I'll stick with that for the near term. It's worth noting that a 5gal "flow rate" through the brewery (tun, boil, ferment, secondary, bottle) seems like plenty. Doing that on 2 week centers paced by the fermentation is producing a beer flow I probably can't keep up with, and doesn't mandate a huge equipment inventory. Keeping the weight to man-handleable limits will simplify things, too. A thing about the airlock, in the first days so much scum may come out that just a hose plumbed to a water trap is the way to go.
Secondary Fermentor. I'll say yes. I'm a fan because I can make more beer that way. Otherwise the fermentor really controls the pace of the brewery. Less particulates in the beer, too, and some say the primary can damage the flavor after a while. I've heard a lot about oxidizing the beer lately, so plan to use a few dry ice chips to seal O2 away from the beer during the transfer.
Some bottling accessories include... High pressure bottle washer (thanks, Jm!) long straight plastic extension with a clip to hold the siphon in place, pressure activated filling valve, capper.
CO2 and fermentor caps. These caps have dual "udders" on top of them and that makes a possibility of a pressure assisted siphon. I do this to move beer from fermenter to secondary, with a pingpong ball's worth of dry ice in each jug, the secondary vented and the fermenter pressurized. This starts and aids the siphon.
Fermentor carrier: I've dropped mine once. Sheesh, for a couple bucks, this is a must have.

Zymurgy

2011-10-21T08:20:00.026-06:00

This will be a long boring post but useful to me. It's going to be a homebrewing "manual" of sorts, shamelessly copied from various sources, most expecially (so far) Charlie Papazian's Zymurgy teachings and John Palmer's How to Brew site and one more good one. Also Adam's sort of led this charge with a recipe document (available only to those with whom the doc's been shared, though.)

So, here are some key topics:

Steep about 1lb/batch when making an extract beer..Steeped grains will add from 10-20 gravity points /(lb/gal) Don't get them over 170F or tannins will be extracted.
Mashed grains OTOH will reach about 0.03/lb/gal gravity change. Theoretical max around 38. So far I'm getting about 0.023 though. This "mash calcs" spreadsheet describes the temps and H2O quantities needed.
Sparging has the potential to generate tannins, especially as temp goes up and pH as well, as the diluted wort loses it's buffering ability. We have good water, so the buffering is far less of a concern here in Colorado.
"Degrees Lintner" is the measure of diastatic power (enzymatic concentration). You need > 30L on average for the mash to complete in an hour. (This is the opposite of Lovibond which basically means darkness from roasting and you need 20 Lovibond or Less to mash.) Anyway, the "grain bill" listing type and quantity of grain to be mashed needs to average out to 30 Lintner, eg 2lb 120L "two row" and 6lb of carmelized specialty grain (denatured by the hot malting).
The "Original (specific) Gravity" you ferment dare not be too high. The incremental specific gravity for added dry malt extract (DME) is about 0.041/(lb/gal) (about10% less for liquid malt extract) and one to 1.5 lb(DME)/gal is a pretty good quantity. OG above 1.06 is very high. You can expect to yield 30"points"/lb in mashing, (including the sparge). That's dogma: I certainly haven't achieved it, got perhaps 20 points, on my 3rd try.
Palmer specifies "...standard mash conditions for most homebrewers: a mash ratio of about 1.5 quarts of water per pound grain, pH of 5.3, temperature of 150-155°F and a time of about one hour." there are multiple temps with different purposes, and higher temps destroy low temp enzymes, so you have to raise the temperature over time. Some good temps and their relevant enzyme are: protease at 130F, then beta amylase at 145F, & alpha amylase at 157F. An insulated mash tun (drink cooler) will easily hold temp for 45 minutes with just a degree of drop. (Here're two a nice mashing summary videos from BobbyNJ, who seems pretty expert, and here is linked John Palmer's mash enzyme chart.
Sparge with another .5qt/lb to .75qt/lb, probably shooting for about 7gal of wort altogether. Doing this at 170F denatures all the enzymes & fixes the sugar mix. If you went hot (for alpha amylase) then it's important because otherwise the complex sugars will keep getting cut up until the boil starts. Since that's right away, this doesn't seem a big deal to me but maybe the time variability thus introduced is the problem. Doesn't seem like there's a big difference between English (batch) or German (continuous) sparging. German reputed to have higher yields, which matters 'cause it reduces the boil volume... Avoiding temp above 170 requires some attention. Calculate the quarts of H2O to reach 170F and thereafter dilute the sparge water down to 170F.
A starting gravity measurement is good now. Shoot for 7 gal to boil down to 5, thus the gravity is only 5/7 (71%) what it will be after the boil. Elevated temperature also makes the wort seem weak: at 90F, the hydrometer will read 0.0042 light, 006(100F), 008(110F), 01(120F) and 0.02 light at 160F. Tabulated. This measurement could motivate some LME addition if deemed necessary (eg if something went wrong with the mash.)
Boil for an hour to extract hops bitterness. Hops in after the break. No lid: want aromatics to escape. Insulate the pot somehow? (A little Al foil works.) I'm thinking of straining the break out (not tasty) right before adding hops, and straining the hops out right before the fermenter (plugs the kettle filter).
CP recommends boiling all the water because chlorine will mess with the beer. Using pre-boiled and cooled water to speed wort chilling is a good idea though. This is for extract beers that can be boiled in concentrated form. Grain beers though, have to be boiled down to desired gravity, so dilution cooling's not possible.
Oxygen contact with the fermentation will create vinegar or solvent tastes, so prevent that. (dry ice chips in the bottom of the secondary?) Oxygenate before pitching, only! (...but do it very thoroughly then.)
you can't pitch the yeast until the wort is truly cooled: I've killed the yeast in the past.
Hydrate first, & then grow the yeast in a dilute solution: too much sugar can make it hard for yeast to hydrate and get started.
Add airlock and darkness, and wait.
Pitch aroma hops after the blow off, or in the secondary. Here again prevent O2 contact, filling the secondary with sterile water, perhaps? ...using CO2.

Brewery Upgrade!

2011-10-15T11:34:00.020-06:00

Now
sporting the 5 gallon secondary full of "Norse God," Igloo fermenter (filled right now with fresh "Fizzin' Red Ichor") and storage for 25 liters of bottles, in this case about half that much "Bohagrius Strong Ale," festival pig keg, secret recipe file and not least its iconic namesake, the Pig Stein Brewery is approaching maximum capacity in preparation for the holidays!

This is set up in the back of the house where it's cool. I'm way too psyched about what's really just a shelf full of crap. I need some help with the airlock: I've had three batches blow the lid off the cooler, probably because the little airlock gets plugged up when it has a lot of sticky foam (maybe with hops mixed in) trying to squeeze through the tiny pinholes on top.

And, here's the next beer: It should be done around the mid November. Fun label. Obviously the labels are going to be a lot more collectible than the beer. This is the wikipedia etching for Odin, or something like that. Obviously the woman must be Frigga, "foremost among godesses" and she's simultaneously swooning, and working on leverage to pry his hand OFF by breaking his thumb. For his part, Odin's used to getting his way and he's not gonna notice a little thing like a broken thumb, not when his shaft is so hot it can set fire to granite! Plus, in the end she's bound to fall for the way cool helmet, which I bet he doesn't even take off. Wikipedia's last word on Frigga is that it comes from Icelandic Frja, "to love" so there's the root of your primary cuss word, folks. All this embodied in a simple beer, you ask? But of course! What could be more elemental?

Gunnlöd , meaning "war foam"

A quick review shows she could also be Gunnlöd, (pictured below). Apparently Gunnlöd traded Odin three nights of passion for three sips of mead, so that's how good this beer is! Or wait: I got it wrong! She had the mead, which she traded for three nights of Odin, so that's how good HE was. Why would he make the trade? Because this mead imbues you with the berzerker rage of poetry or something. The Vikings were a wee unclear or perhaps casual about the difference between these? (I'm not making this stuff up folks, it's all just a click away in wikipedia.) Anyway the mead was made from honey and Kvasir's blood (hence the red color) and if you drink it you will become intelligent. I've known this about myself and beer for a long time.

Ocean.

2011-10-06T15:15:00.001-06:00

Just turn the lights off, & watch this.

Fancy Fly-ing!

2011-10-05T19:53:00.011-06:00

Mosquito Haltere (from wikipedia)

Fantastic talk today, by Itai Cohen, from Cornell's Physics department. He's studied the flight of bugs to distraction, and perfection. This ties into a favorite site of mine, sodaplay, which opines that biological movements can be made, can emerge from simple parts.

The fruit fly wing, it turns out, operates with nothing but the main oscillatory flight muscles, a lightly damped (stable) pitching moment coefficient and an adjustable bias for the unloaded incidence angle. Those characteristics make it sweep like a fish's fin: the wing inverts on every back stroke. For me it was reminiscent of helicopter cyclic control.

Even more fun, the prof was able to demonstrate basic lift, propulsion and orientation with his very own home-made man sized fruitfly wings, which he was able (with the studied focus of his enTIRE cerebral cortex) to articulate just as does the bug, thereby spinning himself around on a lazy susan. Here's the fly doing it. I find it interesting that I had a hard time visualizing the motions, too. There's another way I can do it though, and easily: think of reorienting yourself while treading water! If you've spent some time on that, you'll realize you use the same technique, except sculling, meaning you exchange the leading and trailing edges of your hands on the alternate forward and back-beats of your arms. Once I realized that difference, it clicked. I was almost ready to be a fruit fly! But wait, there's more!

It gets better: vestigial hind wings (called halteres) wobble and somehow are gyros! "And how does the insect use them in the control loop," you ask? Why, by driving the GYRO with lead integral loop, of course. Then the attitude control, being servoed to null the gyro, just follows along. Why am I the last person to find this out? It is SO old school: AMRAAM, anyone? I remember Dan and Dick Olerich 'splainin this stuff to me back in the day. (Ok, not Dick, this was way below the sort of problem I dared take to the master.) That's still not even the coolest thing!

The coolest thing was that they glued a tiny piece of iron wire to the back of the bug and then zapped it with a magnetic field to knock it off course. It's a form of insect spectrometer. Way too much fun.

* Wizard of Earthsea *

2011-10-03T06:36:00.001-06:00

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is certainly good. As usual I'll begin this review when I'm halfway through, and that's now so here goes.

I've read this before, some years ago, but could not remember any of it. It's funny how things come flooding back, like the next bar in a song, you can't imagine it until it's time and then there it is. The islands, the invaders, fog, getting sent off to wizard's school, friends met there and trouble gotten into, it is all as familiar as an old song.

The second time around, like a bike ride, it seems shorter!

This time though, I notice what a rip off the Harry Potter concept is! Or maybe there are only so many thoughts in the world so you're necessarily gonna reuse some if you try to produce anything. You can at least say the UKLeG has foreshadowed much of what we commonly think of as modern culture surrounding wizards and such. She in turn borrowed heavily from the Hobbit of course. And you thought it all came from JK Rowling! (No, of course you didn't. I know.)

Yet Le Guin's vision is much scarier than the cartoons they serve us up now days in kidlit and movies. The tone of the writing somehow takes itself more seriously, allowing you to empathize with, and fear for, the people in this book. Fantasy should take itself seriously. All fiction is fantastical after all: the events described didn't really happen, those places aren't like that, these people are imaginary. Sticking a dragon in it doesn't make that any different, it just represents the tiger stalking the village, taken to its logical extremity. As such it's a cop out to make it too playful and silly: "just joshing: remember it's all fake" these books seem to say, as when for instance the key protagonists are teens. I think I've found my dividing line between serious fantasy fiction and inane (even irritating) pablum. It's when the author dares to say, "I want you to take this seriously."

Le Guin is not kidding.

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Economics of Tariffs?

2011-10-01T07:03:00.008-06:00

...a link to a g+ post. Meanwhile, the graphs show how we used to make more substantial use of tariffs, and below that, the impact, in consumer cost.

Book Review: The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange get Engineered Away

2011-09-30T19:51:00.007-06:00

Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories by John Joseph Adams

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

First I must tell you of Kwai-Chang Caine, because you do not know him. You have to be like this humble traveler, ancient and wise. Kwai-Chang you see, is from before, not just from before now, but also from far away. He was trained in Shangri-La, by Bruce Lee and Ghandi to be the world's gentlest and most badass man. He walked the earth, through California's blistering gold rush, and he carried a flute.

Now, The Man ran the railroad, and the saloon, and the ranches, and he did weigh heavy on the souls of little people, of whom gentle Kwai-Chang was one, but his (K-C's) heart was light, and he could bear any oppression, because that sadistic little monk who still reappeared in visions, called our man Caine "glashoppah" and made him lift a brazier of burning hot coals with his lily white forearms. After that, pain don't hurt.

But sometimes ye Man would oppress an innocent and Kwai-Chang Caine's spirit would be roused to soulful sadness, "good sirs, must you not unhand the lady, so that she can give her lame dog some of that tepid water?"

"Get lost, chinaman!"

"But sirs, the mountain cannot stand against the water...?"

"I kin see I'm-a gonna teach you some manners, slant-o!" (swings rifle butt, aiming to maim.)

But here gentle Kwai-Chang acts unconsciously and with fluid ease of one thousand such attacks, lifting his shin (which is harder than the rifle barrel) to snap the gun in half, whilst pivoting and gently crushing the man's nose with his palm, simultaneously buckling the whole saloon porch onto the slow-moving ruffian gang by kicking the (8" diameter spruce) supporting timber into matchsticks with his bare foot. Next he helps up poor bloody-nose and gently brushes the cowshit from his lapels.

"I am sorry, you are truly a mountain amongst men."
and
"Maam, allow your dog to drink my water, for I can go a few more days without."
and walks into the sunset.

So you see, this was a TV show to give heart to downtrodden nerds everywhere and we never missed an episode.

Finally, to Brave New Worlds. Around page 200 by Cory Doctorow is "The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away" wherein the story of Kwai-Chang Caine is reprised. It is exact. You have the joy of the simple nerd made hard unto invulnerability by years of training which in this case consists of extreme programming and handball. Like Caine, he transcends his training and is sent out into the big ugly world of which he has no experience, but he, and the Man who oppresseth him, will find out that a decade of monk's training goes a long way when the fisticuffs start. It's Jesus meets Hiro Protagonist and I'm cheering all the way.

Then, to fit in the dystopia theme (& you had ta' see it coming,) some reality sets in. Our guy does not win, quite, but he does not forsake the Holy Order, either. Caine would be proud. It's a great story.

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A nice autopilot commendation.

2011-09-29T09:50:00.002-06:00

Couldn't help myself. This post was so positive, I want to save it. Forever.
------------------------------------------------------
Cirrus repair guy & test pilot:

"Ok... I keep my head down and try to do certification work. I do first flights on new experimental stuff. Xxx Xxx is our production test pilot and does most of our routine return to service flights. He is really good. Masters Mechanical Engineering, Rice. Former NASA engineer. Lots of flight experience.

But he is on vacation !

So . . . I get to pitch in and do some flying.

First aircraft up that needs a "return to service" flight is a Cirrus. Here at TAT for some wastegate work and some tweaks.

goes out and straps in and about half way to the runup area notices the DFC90.

Neat! I had never flown one. And, I had never read the manual. But, I don't need the AP for this trip.

So off we go.

About 1000 AGL I get bored. Decided to try the new auto pilot.

Played with it all the way to 17,500 feet and back down - - and around a few times.

Here is the deal: I get to try out lots of neat new stuff.

My reaction to a lot of it is - - "OK" . "That's nice."

But this was different. This autopilot was so obviously superior to the one it replaced - - and so obviously superior in so many ways - - that I was seriously impressed.

It was intuitive. Several of the enhancements are so transparent to the pilot that they fit like an old soft glove.

There are clear and obvious safety benefits in some of the features. Real ones. Not just talking points.

I kept having a conversation with myself. "How on earth could S-tec have failed to upgrade their hardware - - and left the door so wide open for someone like Avidyne to walk in with a vastly superior product? "

In the grand scheme of upgrades available for your Avidyne Cirrus - - this is one you need to move up your priority list.

I do not "want" much for our Cirrus. But this I do "want."

Regards, xxxx

-----------------------------
Next guy:

I couldn't agree more. I have been absolutely thrilled with my DFC90, not only from the operational aspects you noted but also because it solved several problems that I thought were due to other stuff in the airplane. For example, when I used to de-couple my S-Tec I had to grip the controls tightly because it was often way out of (pitch) trim and would "jump" when it was disengaged. I thought it was due to the limit switches on the servo being out of adjustment, but just by installing the DFC90 this problem was GONE. I also used to get porpoising in some conditions when I had the S-TEc and it was GONE when I installed the DFC90.

You didn't mention doing an approach with it, but shortly after I got mine I tried it on a GPS approach with a T intercept where I had 50 knots of crosswind going into the turn. The S-Tec in these conditions would have put me in the next state (or not, since it was placarded as incapable of such a crosswind), but I let the DFC90 fly that 90-degree intercept and it friggin' NAILED it. I was amazed. With the S-Tec, I hand-flew 3 out of 4 approaches because I got fed up with what it was doing, but with the DFC90 it is the opposite; I let it fly 3 out of 4, and I only hand fly some because I enjoy it and I like to stay proficient, not because I have to to avoid screaming at the AP like I did with the S-Tec.

Reacting to a philosophy podcast

2011-09-16T08:55:00.005-06:00

Foggy morning drive, and foggy thinking. Today on Philosophy Bites, "consequentialism," which is the same (to my limited powers of discernment) as utilitarianism, namely a judgement that you should do that which creates the best net outcome. Greatest good for the greatest number, ends justify the means, that sort of thing. Now at the other extreme, there's also "primum non nocere," (first, do no harm) and all the way over, "fiat justitia ruat caelum" (let justice be done though the heavens fall). So, what's right?

Illustrative thought experiments include torturing a man who's certain to know where the bomb is, scapegoating an innocent to protect the many, high value human vivisection, pushing the fat guy on the trolley tracks, and Kant's truthfulness to a murderer looking for your friend.

The basic question is truth at all costs or ends justify the means?

The darn guest Philip Pettit took the utilitarian approach, generally, but with exceptions to cover special cases which turned out to be a complete cop-out in my view. It allows him to decide whatever he wanted. whenever "a red light goes off in my head." That's rationale I could get behind, that everything could be a special case, except that's really just a smoke screen covering up a fundamental rule of "my (personal) judgement shall prevail." Of course, such a philosophy is no help at all: can we or can we not propose some general principles of behavior to guide us? That's the business we need to be in here as "philosophers" if we have any business being in business at all. Some of you will stop there (ahh, my friends, I know you write off philosophy as so much mental self stimulation, and this podcast certainly skirts that territory) but I hate to just Give Up!

So, I think this: We are individuals, not ants, and the solitary difference there is that we should each have some meaning as entities. Inalienable rights, if you want.

This leads me towards the chivalrous side of the spectrum wherein you might do something glorious and stupid, like charge an overwhelming force to succor one captive knight. This sounds silly to say, but it's basic military ethos and, if unlikely to be implemented in big serious confrontations, nevertheless a powerful idea. Another example would be NOT torturing the bomber as a matter of principle, though many will die. The rationale would be "if we are unprincipled, we have saved nothing." Typing this, I feel a childish shame at how it pulls at my heart. I just want this to be true. Ants meanwhile are pragmatic utilitarians, "true believers" who will die for their hive, but not each other.

That is my weak rebuttal to rigorous utilitarianism. If I understand Pettit correctly, all that's been thought of and bundled under the aegis "respect." Pettit would say "respect unless a red light starts flashing" which seems too big a loophole to me.

Pimpin' my radio show

2011-09-15T07:41:00.001-06:00

This American Life needs no introduction, but every so often a reminder, in case you don't have podcasts automatically pouring into your phone... (and man what a neat feature that is, IYI. Here are droid and iToy recommendations.)

This week, it's a 9-11 retrospective, something you might be tired of, as I am, and yet they did a good job, in interviewing a few people. The first story in particular will resonate with Afghanistan policy wonks (Dad, Emilie) and is the main reason for this post. Here's a link.

In there, an altruistic Ivy League grad answers the call & returns to the homeland to set things right, but youth is lost and even a little despair begins to harden as the country unwinds. Powerful stuff.

It's the dopamine, stupid!

2011-09-15T05:08:00.002-06:00

Lately I like this thought that my emotion is the flavor of a chemical soup in my head. All those hormones and whatnot are released by the lizard brain and glands and organs in response to what I see and eat and smell and think. A big interconnected machine. The usefulness of the metaphor is the unity of the singular soup tureen. My brain can think about different things, but all those thoughts are going to be inappropriately related because they're floating in the same sauce. It's got to be fundamentally hard to be dispassionate about an equation if I'm angry with a broken sprinkler in my yard, or hard to be angry at a frustrating coworker if I just had a great run.

Thus our perspective on all aspects of life is skewed by the singular emotive state. Real separation of thoughts is not possible. It should be no surprise that my daughter might be yelling at me about something OTHER than the dishes yet somehow it is. Revelatory I mean, to make it explicit.

How slowly I learn, to be figuring this out now!

Latest beer

2011-09-09T16:30:00.001-06:00

Shooting for a light pilsner, I think I succeeded. This is a real home-made recipe: pretty proud of it.

Berry Picker

2011-08-28T16:09:00.001-06:00

Awesome day at the Berry Picker. 1:02, 3.2 mi 2300' vert. Beautiful day and a fun time.

That's right, it's a "nurse shark."

2011-08-27T15:32:00.002-06:00

We went to "Kinetics" competition which was at Union Reservoir this year. There were about 20 of these vehicles which have to work on land and water. Everybody has a different theme & I thought this one was best.

Favorite Quotes

2011-08-26T08:57:00.017-06:00

These are fun.

"They never 'go bad.' They start that way." -Mom, talking about springerle cookies.

"Life's about doing things both unwise and exciting ... making a child just to watch it run." - Gina

"Yes, Fiats are just like women. They look great from a distance, but just wait until you are married to one..." - Marc

"'Quaternion' was, I think, defined by an American schoolgirl to be 'an ancient religious ceremony.' This was, however, a complete mistake. The ancients - unlike Professor Tait - knew not , and did not worship, quaternions. The quaternion and its laws were discovered by that extraordinary genius Sir William Rowan Hamilton. A quaternion is neither a scalar, nor a vector, but a sort of combination of both. It has no physical representatives, but is a highly abstract mathematical concept..." - English physicist Sir Oliver Heaviside

"Obnoxious in victory, bitter in defeat." -Pete Mohler

"If the glove does not fit, you must acquit." Wizard Johnnie Cochran, demonstrating that we are automata, manipulable through namb-shub.

"7:00's not a Time. Go ahead, say that out loud. Hear how crazy?" - Miles

"Ranchers clear up the Amazon Rain forests trees to have enough space to race there cattle." -Anon.

The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap. -Eric Hoffer.

"Or Kevin's proof of (the) perfect girlfriend. She must exist, otherwise she wouldn't perfect. Also, she must be my girlfriend, otherwise she wouldn't be perfect. Oddly enough, I'm married to my perfect girlfriend, so clearly the logic works." -Kevin

"if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe!" - Carl Sagan

"Tide goes in, tide goes out... you can't explain that." - O'Reilly

"Obnoxious in victory, bitter in defeat!" ...Pete Mohler (humorously)

Betting against Stephen Hawking "...is like criticizing the Princess Diana" - Peter Higgs, lamenting the lose lose proposition of standing up to Hawking's prediction that the Higgs boson would not be found. (The Higgs has so far not been found & is "95% certain" not to exist where expected.)

"People don't create value, machines create value. Sunshine creates value. People decide how to spread it around." - me

Here below is a lesser category, from literature, movies, what have you. That makes these quotes artificial, (since they're fabricated) and calculated instead of extemporaneous, but still excellent. Here are some more book quotes from my friends.

"A rocker rose like Poseidon and flexed his knuckles." -Cloud Atlas I laughed for hours, till I cried. The quote can't stand on its own, obviously, but this will serve as a happy reminder to those who've read it.

From the Baroque Cycle...
"He's rich," Jack muttered to Eliza...."
"Yes—the clothes, the coins ..."
"All fakeable."
"How do you know him to be rich, then?"
"In the wilderness, only the most terrible beasts of prey cavort and gambol. Deer and rabbits play no games." - 'Halfcocked' Jack Shaftoe

Italo Calvino's From If on a Winter's Night, a Traveler... “He was staring hard, not at his wife and me but at his daughter watching us. In his cold pupil, in the firm twist of his lips, was reflected Madame Miyagi's orgasm reflected in her daughter's gaze.”
(Now, gentle reader, you must understand that this is equal parts erotica and joke. Maybe more joke: picture the impossible billiards shot that's going on here, how tiny the reflections would be (which he means literally to be implying, trust me). This is the solitary moment of brilliance in an acclaimed but IMO only cute/tricky, not actually good, book.

As Futurama has proved, removing Al Gore's head doesn't stop him from making his point. -Ben. I don't really know what he means by this, but I'm sure you agree this quote makes the list on imagery alone.

Philosophy

2011-08-19T08:33:00.005-06:00

You (and I mean our whole society) are either doomed, jaded, or simulated. So goes the following argument...

Today on the philosophy bites podcast, they discussed the "Simulation Hypothesis." It proposes that if we don't wipe ourselves out, and don't get bored of video games, then we'll eventually start simulating our ancestors with fidelity sufficient to prevent their apprehending the matrix is there at all. Their world (ours?) will be seamlessly believable, with perfect CGI & so forth.

I'm perpetually intrigued by consciousness. While they were discussing the simulation hypothesis, I was in the car yelling, "but what if simulation can't create consciousness?" To my pleased surprise, they did raise that point, dismissing it almost immediately: "pretty much everyone agrees consciousness is an emergent side effect of the neural activity, substrate independent."

I'm not sure *I* agree with that but it's a cool thought. Do I HAVE to agree, else believe in my soul? I do want to think there's something special about me. I DON'T want to believe I'm a simulaion, but rather want to believe that's impossible!

Do you like it?
...one more post to follow.

---------------------------------------
Ok, here's the end of it.

If you buy into the arguments, then, since simulations will outnumber reality, the probability that you're a simulation is overwhelming, and thus there's a bored guy somewhere watching our Sim with ctl-alt-del power over your life and in fact our whole universe. So behave, and maybe you'll get invisibility or wings or something.

Gina offered a solution to this, saying it's all just as unfalsifiable as any number of other fantastic hypotheses, so why bother, when there's nothing to choose between them. The unsatisfying part of that, for me, is that philosophy gets again reduced to irrelevancy. That's happening to me more and more.

Optimists have to be...

2011-08-19T08:10:00.003-06:00

If you'll indulge me today, I have a fun post, in about three parts, that should be fun for you to read and think about.

It all begins with WoW, as in "World of Warcraft." That's the videogame where you operate a magical warrior in the colorful alternate past, either first person or more typically from a position of close "chase." I eventually got bored which, combined with the collosal waste of time and monthly $15, helped me wean myself, but I do still miss the world of Azeroth.

My toon was "Yobiche" an industrious elf priest (druid, actually) who worked her way into a pretty high position in society. I attribute her/my success to selfless courage, skill, my friends of course, and countless hours of mind numbing murder, often of dumb creatures. (That's how you get ahead in the (alternate) world.) Anyway, thanks to all that, Yobiche is "up there" in society. She/I can do the usual things powerful people can do: fly, turn invisible, breathe underwater, have somebody hit by a meteorite, bring loved ones back to life, or in an extremity, buy her way out of a sticky situation. Not so different from here.

So howcome I'm bored? Well, with all that power, what's left to do, frankly? Sometimes She/I (maybe henceforth I'll just call us shi?) would go back to shmy hometown and impress the natives. The same people work in the same stores, and there are new kids everywhere, who are impressed with my prowess at everything. Somehow though I think the old folks don't really care and the kids are just sucking up to get help with their homework: "Thou must bring the scalps of 10 timberwolves." ...shi can do that as easy as pointing hermy finger 10 times, so it's a quick way to superficial stardom. You can imagine it didn't last and so I quit, & my RL mile times are better for it.

Now though, I have for Blizzard a suggestion that ought to reinvigorate the game. The problem is that one-ness, the merging of our characters. My toon should show some initiative! You know: spunk. Proof that she's not just a computer robot or empty automaton. it wouldn't be too hard to program up an occasional surprise crazy action, like picking an ill advised fight, or getting drunk and clumsy just when I need her to be on her game, or falling for the wrong guy against My Will. Things like that would enliven the feel.

Oh, and while we're at it, how about some respect? I CREATED Yobiche, she could occasionally turn to the screen, make eye contact and say "thank you." Or even, "Thank you, lord, forever and ever. Amen." I might like that, especially if she was kneeling when she did it. So, off you go Blizzard: for your next upgrade, make me a God.

...more to follow.

Bitcoin, and other monies.

2011-07-15T09:36:00.007-06:00

Bitcoin is internet currency. It is...

distributed: There's no centralized authority (extant or needed!)
free: no transaction costs. However, using regular cash offers the possibility of exchanges without transaction costs, too. So just as with "real" money, people may offer you financial services in exchange for fees, and you might pay them. It seems possible the whole parasitic credit industry could arise, phoenix-like, around bitcoin.
Transactions are all visible, but users are anonymous: this is seemingly problematic, but the transactions happen over the internet though, so should be traceable with some effort, given just cause to compel the internet companies to relinquish e-mail records.
Safe? Should be. It's based on the public cryptography (public key encryption, started by Philip Zimmerman is the technology underpinning it.) Zimmerman was the real deal. There is now a very thick layer of corporate bullshit over pgp, cut if you look hard enough you can still get the excellent personal pgp application I think this link works. A public key allows somebody to "sign" a payment. The SW system is under public control (caveat emptor: I don't know this, it's popular hearsay)
Stable. This is the key thing. the total quantity of bitcoin is more stable than even gold. There's a known quantity, and a known (and decreasing) rate of minting. This happens through a bizarre, nerdy and somehow quaint process of "mining" which is just setting your computer grinding away at a hard problem of some kind. If this doesn't seem like a "fair" way to create the new money, well, just ask how the US government gives out the new money: I think they basically just give it to bankers! This could also be a key problem. If bitcoins get scarce, they will acquire collector value, and nobody will spend them for fear of losing out on future value.
Available on your Android or i- phones.
Here's an Incite video.

Woooo! I'm a Bitcoin miner! See below for proof of my riches:

Coin Generations:
Total payouts generated: 1

Coin Generation List
From To Amount Date Message Status View
Coin generation Me 0.00003102 BTC Jul 15, 2011 11:46 AM MDT Complete

DFC-182

2011-07-09T10:25:00.002-06:00

So this is our autopilot flying an old Cessna. It's that wire going into the instrument panel: everything else you see is (very) aged avionics doing something else. Our stuff is in a little pallet of new gear back in the luggage compartment! It flies great. Someday we'll make this available for everybody to use, in these old airplanes.

Red!

2011-07-09T10:19:00.001-06:00

View from the porch.

2011-07-04T21:59:00.000-06:00

So, this is the view from the porch at Betty Bear hut. Drive to Leadville, Independence pass, Aspen, Basalt, then back east & then up. We made bows, practiced archery (with real bows, mostly) had pound cake and Brussels' sprouts and pork in adobo. Mark and Miles had an adventure

Bow Design

2011-06-28T20:59:00.007-06:00

This is a fast index of information from various browsing of websites.

Beautiful bows, and discussion of some design strictures at Ballistik.
This guy Dave Canterbury at the pathfinder school shows how to shoot, teaches how to make a bow, and has pretty good physics (in addition to great technique) and beautiful craftsmanship as shown in these quivers and arrows.. Highly recommended, and there's a whole series of them.

Some terminology follows, not so much for the sake of the words, but the ideas behind them.

The "shelf" is to rest the arrow on. It's cut out so that the string travel is coaxial with the arrow. If you think about it, a bow without a cutout to pass the arrow simply can't have the string move in the same straight line as the arrow. The rightward translation of the arrow's nock during the thrust phase sets up a flexure that affects trajectory.

"Center Shot" refers to carving away the center of the riser so the arrow can rest directly in front of the string's direction of travel. This is funny because of the mis-use of that term in the movie Deliverance.

Brace height is the distance between the shelf of the strung bow and the string. Needs to be ~6", dunno why. Far enough to let the fletching fit, anyway. Not too far though because a longer stroke through the draw means more energy to put into the arrow. On recurves, brace height will be smaller for the same length bow & preload. We'll see why bigger is better later, in discussing springs and stacking.

Stacking is the term to describe increased draw weight through the length of the draw. Minimal stacking is best. A compound bow uses complex geometry to make the force actually go down towards the end of the draw. (I think you could even call that negative stacking, but the terminology is a bit fuzzy, IMO. I think they call negative stacking "let-off" on compounds.) A recurve bow, by flexing to change the virtual attach point, has less stacking than a traditional longbow and will therefore store more energy (for the same max draw weight). With less stacking, the preload can be higher, so the integral through the draw will be, too.

(I was going to post a link to the definitive comparative bow design site, but haven't found it! Wow, there is a lot of bullshit on the internet about bow design & how to get energy into the arrow. Of course it's an (almost) simple integral of the draw force x length. Only "almost" because the limbs are also being accelerated, so light limbs helps. Considering a compound makes clear the main elegant idea: there has to be force to deflect the string back, but it needn't be linear and indeed that's bad because your max force capability is at the beginning of the draw. (...and there's an accuracy cost to holding a heavy weight at the extremity of the draw.) How then to proportionately increase the load early in the draw? The obvious way is to make the spring physically BIG, so the fractional spring deflection & hence force change through your (fixed) draw length is small. Then biasing the load up is possible: if your draw weight goes from 40lb to 50lb through the stroke, that's a lot more energy than if it goes from 25lb to 50lb.

We can probably imagine bows as linear springs with regards to bending vs force. How does recurve geometry make this linear spring behave differently? One way to think of the tip of the limb of the recurve is like a sort of big wheel (or cam!) off which the string rolls. This has a tendency, through the early part of the draw, to raise the contact point and thus retard the decrease of the angle between the string and the direction of the arrow. In the limit, you could imagine the string geometry at (say) 4" and 5" of draw being parallel. If you then provide the same force over a longer lever arm, hence greater bending moment, you're doing what's necessary to have deflected the limbs more. Viola, zero "stacking" which is the benefit we're looking for!. Also at the beginning of the draw you are not bending the terminal few inches of the limb: it's purely in compression. That offers the possibility of variable spring constant as different parts of the wood are successively loaded. They're all tapered, likely mostly for reasons of bending moment (builds towards center) and speed (heavy limbs absorb energy) but as a possible consideration, softer tips would again reduce stacking if geometry keeps them out of play until late in the draw. This is all just reasoning so far. As noted, I'm finding zip on the internet. I've got to think more about this though, to describe it better: maybe later. (comments solicited).

Fletching needs to pass the bow without strongly disturbing the tail of the arrow. Feathers are designed to collapse when this happens. I like the idea of removing one feather entirely. Per Marv Clyncke, "you can't shoot rubber off the shelf. Has to be elevated." Clyncke by the way is a fantastic guy, local, who sold Kevin & I bows from his phenomenal stockpile of traditional equipment. Here's a short video to give a sense of the guy.

Cross section (my term) should be rectangular, or even I-beam in shape. Idea is to preclude limb flex in any direction but where you want, towards the arrow's nock. You can imagine a recurve bow is mechanically "unstable" in that it'd like to twist around & unload into it's unstrung shape.

Finally, this.

Shop Class as Soulcraft

2011-06-27T06:04:00.001-06:00

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Gonna be a good book.
I've hardly started but lots of positive reaction to this book already.

Early on we find the thesis, that processs optimization reduces work, especially white collar intellectual work, to mere clerking, removing the brains and the joy from it. This really strikes a chord with me because I've seen it come and go at various times in my career. A fellow described it to me late in my first job, that nobody should be deviating from the process. I was secretly revolted: I used my mind to advance the project: the company benefited from my thinking! I thought to myself. He was a monster. At another job I wrote in my notebook that people were knights, and I knew my boss believed it too. The monster's back. There is a tendency to worship process because it is the thing you can codify and rely on: safer than requiring great men & women to do heroic deeds. As a manager you can predict things better that way. Such managers will want fixed price contracts, whatever the cost, so there are no surprises.

I could take issue with parts of the book too. One example is the revelation that, with the industrial revolution well along, all manufacturing done on production lines, next brain work is being turned into clerking. Really? Hasn't it always been so? Crawford's choice of the noun "clerk" is strong enough to conjure up archetype Bob Cratchit, an example from the deep past, and it is by abstracting upward and compressing earlier knowledge into processable chunks that we make progress after all. I think we've always been doing that. Is Crawford's lament just one of finding himself on the supporting trunk of the forest rather than the vital growing tip of the tree's leafy extremity? We will not all get to be at the top.

Still I won't complain much. I can imagine a rewarding smithy, and an unrewarding investment fund boiler room, and I reacted with horror, this very week, when a human inadequacy, instead of being traced to it's responsible perpetrator, was ascribed automatically to imperfect adherence to the supposedly omniscient process, as though that could save us! Highlighting it's massive shortcomings is certain to launch a round of process improvement, instead of demoting the nincompoop who perpetrated the error. I need to think a little bit about how to turn this interaction, and this paragraph, into some more positive outcome.

I really liked an anecdote on p43 wherein he describes people, doing subsistence piece work at home, were counter-intuitively motivated to work less by increasing the unit price; pre-modern consumers, they didn't want more stuff as much as more leisure. Marketing soon fixed that, haha!

There's an undercurrent of political tension. On p 45, He notes "liberals" want to reduce teaching to standardized testing; "liberalism is by design a politics of irresponsibility." So there is some partisanship, unworthy of the book, and in this case I'd say just wrong. Political argument is so polarizing and contentious that it risks the thesis to introduce it like this (and there are several examples already.)

View all my reviews

Shooting the bow.

2011-06-25T16:51:00.005-06:00

I've started letting the string inside (left) of my shooting eye. Subjectively or instinctively keeping the arrow pointed at the target seems to work; I'm doing ok, laterally. I expected some kind of right/left bias depend on a "strong" eye but maybe not, or maybe I'm just scattering them so much I can't tell yet. Here's a recommendation to draw it to your nose! After watching some examples on youtube, a lot of the good shooters seem to do it that way, and anchor under their chins, too. Centering the string on my eye was irritating and was a distracting effort.

Paying careful attention to the strength of my draw, I notice I tend to let off a little: I could draw more. When I do, it seems worth a foot of drop & I often overshoot the target. Either way I hit my wrist with the bowstring pretty much every time. As far as range goes, that pretty much eludes me so far.

Here's another guy shooting with the nock well above his hand, looking right down the arrow.

Here's me, shooting. This guy at witchery of archery talks about instinctive shooting a little.

2011-06-19T13:31:00.004-06:00

As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Terrific. Compelling. True. Sad.

I'll recommend you try not to read reviews, or even the jacket, because they give away too much. In particular, some of the early vocabulary sets the scene nicely but, armed with unwanted foreknowledge injected by reviews & such, somewhat obviously to me.

I suppose I will have an interesting conversation with Ben about whether this was scifi or not. I'll say it is because my only prerequisite is a scientifically grounded premise. After that a book can be and this one is, all about people. It's a sad, earnest love story and I read it without stopping.

... Spoilers below ...

Regarding the last pages, I anticipated an alternate ending I'd have liked better, where Philip crawls back OUT, and then the Lack closes with him the only person to claim ever to have crossed over, and even THAT could just be part of his hangover. Thereafter Alice hates him for killing her b/f and it's a sad ending. A stray damp cat footprint could be used to sway our reader's understanding of what really happened one way or another.

Oh, and under the great quotes section... Italian Physicist Braxia becomes my hero in the book when, quizzed on the metaphysics of the phenomenon, he simply says, "there are no metaphysics."

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Why I like "half-cocked" Jack Shaftoe

2011-06-17T08:32:00.003-06:00

Here's an excerpt from the King of the Vagabonds. The scientist-mastermind is talking, just going off on some tangent, in a public square.

"Dyadic, or binary numbers,... ...But what I take away from the Chinese method of fortune-telling is the notion of producing random numbers by the dyadic technique, and by this Winkins's system could be incomprably strengthened." All of which was like the baying of hounds to Jack.
"He's rich," Jack muttered to Eliza...
"Yes - the clothes, the coins..."
"All fakeable."
"How do you know him to be rich, then?"
"In the wilderness, only the most terrible beasts of prey cavort and gambol. Deer and rabbits play no games."

The thing I love here is not only the last line (which is most excellent!), but how endearingly Stephenson makes us like the protagonist. He's all boy, straightforward to a fault: seeming almost a simpleton at times, unconsciously brave, impatient, and deeply perceptive. The guy is admirable, and all the more so because he does not think himself worthy of anything like that. He is earnestly self deprecatory, because he's unconscious of his merits. It's cute.

2011-06-16T08:31:00.002-06:00

King of the Vagabonds by Neal Stephenson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To do justice to Neal Stephenson at his best is inevitably doomed to some form of stylistic copying or more ponderously yet, outright quotation. Instead I'll try to be brief. This book is very well written, in a tone I'll describe as Pratchett-Wallaceian, with humor you'll laugh over, poetic description you'll admire and innumerable sly historical tie-ins you'll catch delightfully, but only you're a nerd and that makes it even better.

Yes history: it's historical fiction, although the emphasis is on the fiction. Suffice it to say there is somehow, in reformation-era Europe, a dose of science, and even heroes thereof, and love and swashbuckling and fantastical romps through labyrinths. You can't beat it, really. Can I even describe it? Here goes:

Elizabethan era 007 makes reluctant rescues and demonstrates unintentional heroism, saving the future we now know as the past and vanishing without a trace, but he gets the girl so who needs a legacy?

Well, Stephenson has now given Jack Shaftoe that too. A fantastic read, and no, you needn't complete the somewhat ponderous precursor "Quicksilver" as prerequisite to your enjoyment.

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Backup for Kaigun: Chickens ARE Dinosaurs.

2011-06-15T03:07:00.002-06:00

I've mentioned that Documentary Heaven is a good website, of movies worth watching. On that site, this show is an hour's archaeological examination of a single fossil. The main point, for my purposes, is the very likely fact that tyrannosaurs had feathers. As a secondary matter, they spent some time solving a mystery with a wind tunnel, using the foregone conclusion that the dinosaur must have flown (this fossil was very much chicken sized, not a t-rex) to ascertain how it's body must have been laid out. That was fun: a paleontological mystery with aerospace engineers cast as Sherlock Holmes.

The Grand Design

2011-06-13T08:19:00.002-06:00

The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

First, to my physics friends, apologies for the likely sophomoric butchery that follows.

The book's about quantum mechanics, some relativity, some cosmology with lots of frosting and little cake. Nonetheless it's very filling and satisfying. That's because this book is written at a good level for me, namely simplistic, lots of analogies, smells of over-simplistic explanations.

Reading this, I'm made to think that my preferred mechanism for learning is successive passes through material, with ever greater granularity or "pressure" leaving big voids and bumps at first, but eventually smashing everything into flat comprehensibility at the end. Will I ever get there with quantum mechanics? Doubtful, frankly.

Re-cracking this book (just because I had nothing else to read last night) coincided with a SciAm article on string theory that drew inductive conclusions from linear, imaginary and then quaternion mathematics, citing 16 dimensional numbers as the next step, and infinite universes as a consequence if it's true.

Since I believe in the manifest and miraculous fact that mathematics actually works to describe the universe in which we find ourselves, I accept the inference, and expect & hope that someday we'll prove these universes are out there. That's really cool.

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Kaigun: Steampunk chapter 6

2011-06-11T16:08:00.003-06:00

The Curator, 2017, Novosibirsk

In a dark corner of Kamchatka, in a dark corner of the Museum of Victory Against the Ravening Hun, Sergei Andropov worked alone. Deep in the “Cold War” against the lucky Americans, nobody had money for a vacation to visit the frozen pimple on the bum of Nowheresibirsk. Sergei smiled at his private joke. Nobody would get it but him. Nobody would understand an American pun.

He sighed. Realistically, he knew nobody would even come, ever. That there was a museum of any kind here was a testament to the grant writing prowess of some long dead overambitious apparatchik, a bureaucrat with a golden tongue and probably good party connections to boot. Not only was Novosibirsk out of the way, but civilization itself seemed to be falling into disrepair. Now his town had a large, bunker-like (as all buildings) unvisited equipment mausoleum which, truth be told, mothballed rather than displayed all these artifacts of earlier wars.

Quite an exotic collection! Dr. Andropov had trained in history and foreign languages, and had lead the museum’s procurement efforts during it’s heyday in the 1980’s. With a charter to specialize in warfare, and incisive understanding of European cultures, he’d tried to identify things uniquely Russian in design for the museum, an in consequence the collection tended to hyperbolic overdesign, simplicity, impracticality, and a complete lack of any concession to human frailties. There were insanely overpowered piston fighter planes sprouting propellers from both ends, lean ground to air missiles that could suss out the body heat of a chicken, and something describable only as a blunt copy of an American Jeep, over-heavy but with an undoubtedly deadly gatling gun mounted to its rollbar. Sergei was familiar with the American TV show that surely spawned this fighting vehicle.

There was a beautiful T-58 tank, squat and teardropped, impossibly heavy, like a fat tic the size of a cafe, only it could roll at 50km/hour, and had an elephant’s trunk of a weapon that could fire a radar homing missile or vomit a meteoric slug of spent plutonium a dozen miles into a target the size of a pretty girl’s backside. Mostly of milled titanium, the tank gave off a gray sheen of permanence like fine jewelry, and Sergei worked to keep it that way.

There was a six pack of suicide submarines, diesel powered with prehensile siphons that featured a flanged cutting bit that could twist and plunge, slowly reaming upward through polar ice pack. Sergei imagined their frozen hypoxic 3 man crews, working the manually actuated mechanism, thrusting at levers and springs in dark desperation, erecting a tube through which life would flow, the very existence of their heirs, the whole line of unborn progeny hanging in the balance, although success would only mean a chance to breathe another day and maybe glorious immolation on an unremarked beach by a Seattle Navy base. Somehow these subs didn’t catch Sergei’s attention here, 200 miles from ocean they seemed out of place and useless; he let them rust, just a little.

A modern version of one of those subs had actually succeeded, beginning the cataclysm, a war the Americans didn’t really think Russia would want, but they underestimated both desperation and fatalism of a people used to winning wars by starving and freezing slower than the other guys. Russia had lost the war’s first hot round in a sparkle of evaporating cities, but this round would be decades long, bullet-less, and fought each night when, in ramshackle cabins dotted across taiga not worth bombing, lonely farmers, trappers and museum curators boiled tea made from pine needles and roasted marmot over open flames rather than merely laying down to die.

His grandfather from the infantry would have been proud to see that Sergei continued to do his duty years after the paychecks stopped, the electricity was turned off, and the trains quit coming. He could chop wood, pluck a chicken, keep the museum’s machinery oiled, and had a tiny stash of real tea secreted away in a heavy brass canister, just in case a party official should visit, or maybe a woman.

Sergei always came to work but he’d stopped doing housekeeping and begin putting his efforts into preservation. The machines liked it better, he felt sure. Growing older and with a wet cough that bothered on cold nights, Sergei spent most evenings amongst his charges, though their cold iron bellies, unfired, gave no actual warmth, he’d sleep inside one or another, on a bed of stiff heavy canvas, his tools at hand, a doctor on call for patients in need only of admiration and rustproofing.

Tonight he lit a candle and gently patted the curved flank of his favorite, the Sovetski Kaigun. Conceived just before the first war, but then somehow bypassed in popularity by the whining airplane, she was intended to be invulnerable, first of a class of prairie dreadnoughts meant to evoke the Motherland’s supremacy on tundra just as Japan’s seagoing navy laid claim to the ocean. Ten meters wide and more than twice as long, made of walnut, oak and iron, she carried a locomotive’s heart slung low between double rows of overlapping iron wheels two meters tall. A swollen cathedral of timber enclosed it all , protecting the control bridge forward, the captains room in the back, and mess & bunk house for her crew of 20 amidships. Armor plate was fastened over every vulnerable surface with bulbous inch-wide rivets. Below, on either side of the boiler, firemen would feed her maw, consuming in just a few days all the bunker’s store of coal or wood, but, train-like, she could pull a sledge carrying another barn load of fuel, and her natural element, this vast chill forest, would always provide more.

Left and right in sponsons were the great guns, steam powered rifles he had named Leviathian and Ineluctable, their names stenciled lovingly on the barrels. Each would fire an enormous javelin, a seven foot long cylinder of birch or aspen, 2” across and tipped with a 12km slug of polished bronze or iron. The manual called them “bolts” for some reason Sergei’s mostly encyclopedic knowledge didn’t encompass. Breech loaded, each of the two big rifles could be charged in a few seconds by one man, while another cranked the aiming gears and a third operated the steam launching valves. On firing, the pressure would splinter and swell the last foot or two of the bolt, sealing the barrel and making the launch all the harder and deadly straight. It could shoot 7 miles and sounded like what it was, the bursting exhalation of a mighty steam piston.. With a blunt tip, one of these missiles could make a charging cavalry horse disappear in a red cloud or explode an ancient spruce. With a sharpened iron tip it would pierce a foot of battleship plate armor leaving a head sized hole that looked vaguely molten. (Sergei had learned this in an illicit test he’d allowed himself during the riots after the collapse, before his curator’s urge had reasserted.)

He loved Kaigun best of all and traced his fingers sensually over her armor plate, checking to assure the red grease covered every inch. She smelled of oil and glistened in the candlelight waiting for him, like a woman coiled around her champagne. Except for the greased decolletage of her armor swelling, she was a prude, this one, draped in oiled canvas with undergarments of waxed butcher paper to keep out prying eyes, moisture, bugs and dust. Wherever it showed, her wooden skin had been slathered with teak oil and then massaged with beeswax until it gleamed. Inside the rich wood and polished brass looked warm and inviting, as though a feast would soon be served. Starving just a little bit, Sergei imagined it. Thick smoked glass covered round plates of steaming salmon and tureens of borscht which during the day ensconsed only steam gauges. Overhead, entrails of copper piping warned “chaud” in black Cyrillic, just as they would on the espresso machine in a trendy St. Petersburg cafe. Sergei thought he could hear the orchestra warming up, and smelled Gruyere and tarragon bubbling on top of a Vichy onion broth. He hiked up the collar of his felted wool shirt, loosened his boots and sat down to make an entry in the Captain’s Log before his candle finally guttered out.

“May 30th. Machinery checked. No steam or mission orders. Crew, absent, will face strictest discipline.”

Sergei worried his irony would someday be mistaken for frank insanity, but figured he was safe, nobody would ever read this.

“Checked the munitions stores, 224 rounds total, 75 flechette, 75 wooden, and 74 iron tipped. 900 javelin blanks and 300 tips also stored in the trailer. Coal bunker topped off. I have copied the manuals against the chance they’ll be needed by new crew. Bound these each in waxed leather and hung close to hand in each crewman’s station, clipped to brass chains to prevent misplacement. The boiler’s been drained to preclude rot, and the captain’s store of wine moved to the firebox, against summer heat. I have sharpened and greased the onceler as well, should be quite serviceable. [“Onceler “was a reciprocating steam saw that hung low just ahead of the front grille, the name another of Sergei’s private jokes.] I have completed all the preparations I can here, and for what? Will she ever make steam? A shame.”

Kaigun: Steampunk chapter 5

2011-06-08T21:49:00.008-06:00

Outskirts of Novosibirsk
Walking cautiously, some two dozen people probed the outskirts of town, like a trickle of smoke seeking entry. Three days forced walking had left everyone exhausted.

Andreii still followed in the back, alone now as the minor excitement of discovering the town pulled people forward. The loss of Anjin had bent something inside him beyond yielding. Nobody could talk to him, about her, or anything else. Mostly he thought about how to beat the chickens, weapons, tactics, defenses to allow towns to be rebuilt.

Another young man, Dmitri, agreed. He was one of those who’d been captured by the pirates and then released and he said they should fight back against the giant birds; after all, the land sailors did. It was an example! Man couldn’t just be beaten by a bunch of stupid birds, however big they were. So now Michal had an ally, someone older with a little influence. At night after securing the perimeter, they would draw plans in the dust, mostly whimsical schemes for underground hydroponic gardens, or cannon, or fortified schools.

It was important, Michal said, to keep teaching the kids, especially reading and math. There were too many temptations to focus on brute power, swordsmanship or stamina.

“A chickenosaurus has more strength than any man. If we forget our intelligence, we could lose everything in one generation, all the leverage civilization gave us!”

People nodded, he’d carried the argument that time, but then late that same night the one eyed rooster came again. It tore through the camp, killing the last two horses, eating one and leaving the other for carrion, as if it knew horses were the key to mobility. After that, there was no more talk of schools, the books were left along with everything else that couldn’t be eaten or used to keep warm, and the people had fled the last 60 miles to Novosibirsk like a panicked herd of meat animals, harried by invisible predators.

Now, it was evening and dispirited people looked through the broken buildings, for survivors, salvage and a place to sleep.

“There’s nobody here any more,” someone said, “This place is just ruins.”

Dmitri, though, was still optimistic, “Let’s just find some place defensible to hold up. There will be people somewhere, and we can plan tomorrow.”

At the North end of the street was a less ramschackle building, larger than the abandoned homes and shops. The door had been forced, but inside was nothing of value. It had been a museum and contained mostly dusty fossils of the aerospace age, hanging from iron rafters like giant tin plated birds. There was no food, but the entrance was too small for a chicken and the building too sturdy for it to easily tear down. Gratefully, the people built a small fire on the marble lobby floor, kindling it with museum brochures and telling wistful jokes about how the Motherland’s Air Force could do battle with chickensaurii, if only it still existed. An impossibly inert figherplane hulked heavily in the corner, like a boxer past his prime, reminiscing over former days of potency.

Andrei Michal paged through a brochure wistfully.

“See, kids could come here, just a dozen years ago, and see how great our country was. Look there, that’s a spaceship!” He held up the captioned picture and pointed to the real thing hanging from the ceiling.

“Nothing will every fly again Michal, unless we live through this night, and the next one. Why don’t you take a turn at watch and keep this fire going.” It was more of an order than a question, and the popular boy spoke for them all. It was a day for perseverance, not exploring.

“We’ll look at your museum in the morning.”

Soon everyone was bunked down near the fire, and Michal thumbed the brochure. Computers and Spaceflight, Architecture and Public Works, Anthropology and Archaeology, Rocks and Minerals, the World at War.

Andrei stared at the words for a moment, then stood and checked the braces on the door. Secure. He flipped to the back of the brochure, the museum floorplan, and spun it around so the “you are here” pointer aligned with the marble foyer where his village now slept. Taking a small torch to light the way through the dusty iron and concrete building, Andrei MIchal began following the map to the "World at War" exhibit.

Kaigun: Steampunk Chapter 4

2011-06-07T08:49:00.006-06:00

Pirates

Anjin listened to a low wind-moaning and tossed another pine twig into the snapping fire. Meat smelled good, roasting; it would be done soon. The sun was just down and so that wind was almost done for the day. As usual, it would blow softly all night, imperceptible in this sheltered lee of a little granite outcropping. Imperceptible that is, except for the sound, as it wound through the tops of pine trees higher up the hill.

Ahead beyond the grove of aspens, beyond the fire, endless waves of tall grass held secret schools of antelope, floated solitary ships of elk, but none to be seen now. A curling smoke of birds puffed up, cycloned upwards, feinted and settled again, like dust from some huge invisible footfall. Evening’s first bats zigged exploringly through accumulating gloom as the rivers of air finally relaxed to a sluggish evening pace. A sprinkling of hulking black rocks in the distance must be a herd of bison. This was a great land, she thought, even better now without all the commerce and smoke and paperwork. Hard to believe there was danger out there

A jabber arose as the boys returned from the creek. There, clay urns lagered beer and they’d carried a big one up to go with the roast and potatoes tonight. It was comfortable, but maybe too familiar and she did not join in the conversation, but smiled and poked at the fire. Soon, she’d have to pick one of these boys, and she was not looking forward to it. Less than fifty villagers all together meant there were a half dozen interested older boys to choose from and most left her thinking of something else. Nothing wrong with them! Good strong reliable men, they’d turn out to be, which was the problem. There was nothing not to like and soon would be no excuse when they started asking in earnest. Anjin knew was attractive and would be asked soon enough. Desire pulled at her, too, but that only encouraged them so she mostly held back to avoid entanglement. Maybe she should aspire to a little cottage, children, and a cow . Yes, she should, and it could happen, too. When they stopped travelling, a family would begin for her.

She liked Michal, the smart one, but he had no idea she existed. Anjii worried, too, that he was damaged goods. Not the arm, the hook did not repulse her or keep him from working, but he’d taken the loss of his family so hard, and was not recovering. Even now, he sat at the edge of the fire, scanning the horizon for trouble. It was enough for Anjin to be quick, have a bolt hold picked out, and be otherwise fatalistic about the monsters. Dinosaurs, she thought. ...may as well call them that. They are dinosaurs and we are their prey. She could think of them like lightning, dangerous, sudden, partly avoidable but to be regarded with some fatalism. Russians were good at that, but not Michal. He called them by some disparaging chicken name which fit the picture but failed to acknowledge the new hierarchy in the food chain.

“Michal, when we stop, will you build a house?”

“Yah, a stone one, big enough for everybody.” He lowered his gaze from the horizon to the fire. “With cannons.”

Anjin was hoping for a more personal vision but he was thinking of the whole town. “That sounds great! We can have a moat just like the old days, and I’ll ride a charger with a lance, and dogs, and we’ll hunt dragons for sport. You can build me a drawbridge!”

“I’ll build a goddamn gatling gun for the chickensaurii and we’ll stay inside the fortress and raise normal chickens and We’ll eat Them for a change, just like the old days.”

“Sounds kinda boring.”

“Safe, though.”

Too boring. Could she make him into a man before summer’s end when they would have to settle down for winter, before she would have to accept some boy’s claim? Maybe she should try more direct techniques...

Such as fucking. Anjin tried a sideways glance but he didn’t notice. She looked to the horizon, a day’s walk away and it still seemed like a fence to her.

Under her breath, Anjin mumbled, “I need to get over that, I guess.” She shielded her eyes from the sunset’s last gleam, realized she wasn’t sure whether she was mumbling about sex, or adventure generally.

While Anjin watched the sun sink under the edge of the world, a triangular black silhouette rose from the distant prairie, surged across the boiling red glow and then slipped back down into the gloom like a shark’s fin. Her blood ran cold.

“Oh no! There: a landship!” ...pointing. “Everyone!”
“You’re crazy, where?”
“Somebody smother the fire.”
Anjii collected herself, “I just saw it far off, but I’m sure, ...I think. It looked big. It was going from left to right.”
“That’s not possible, it’s practically upwind: they can’t DO that,” said Sylvie, an older girl.
“Some can, if they’re schooner rigged, what did it look like?”

Conversation continued, but Anjin didn’t really know anything for sure, except that it had been a tall triangle, and moving too fast, at that distance, to be anything else. Even in this light breeze, a landship could outrun a horse, so they said. And a ship meant trouble. Loss of some cattle at best, piracy at worst: rape and burning and men would die. Someone was already running uphill to warn everyone, the fire out, the roast forgotten. Probably they would have seen lights though. Everything depended on what they wanted.

Probably nothing, because after a tense night of waiting high up the hill in a disused cave, the men gripping bows white knuckled and unsleeping at the verge, nothing happened and the ship did not reappear, if indeed it was not an apparition Anjin imagined. By dawn, nobody was worried, but not allowed to ride anywhere either. Two men set out riding for the horizon to look for tracks. A landship would leave tracks for a year, grooves torn through the turf by immense weight, iron wheels in a line supporting a wooden city with a hundred men, and cannons and fire and purpose. But their purpose must have been elsewhere because Geoff and Halse came back in the late morning, reporting tracks that went straight on North forever, coming from equally forever to the south.

Everyone decided they should move on just in case, the next morning, heading West for Novosibirsk.

Already packed, Anjin decided she’d walk out and see the tracks for herself, and talked Michal into it too. He wanted to take a couple of goats too,

“Chickenfeed, just in case” he’d said though she thought it paranoia.

Sylvie and her boyfriend Dmitri wanted to come too, so it was shaping up into a date. They set off before noon and walked three miles before coming to the tracks.

They were unmistakable. It looked as though a giant plow had cut a single straight furrow all the way around the earth. The cut was three feet wide and half as deep. Somehow it seemed wrong that there was nothing else. Men were here, still made machines do their bidding, but they were gone. Already not even an echo, it felt like the distant past, notwithstanding the wet groove. Unconsciously they’d bent their tracks to follow the landship’s course and one wanted to catch up, to run and wave and be picked up, hear iron wheels screeching, sails cracking and wooden timbers groaning under load.

Instead there was only wind susurrating through grass around her waist.

“Let’s eat and then go back, or are we gonna follow this ditch to the North pole?” Sylvie asked. “Who knows, they’re probably a hundred miles away by now.”

Exactly, thought Anjin, “More like 200, I’d guess.” She’d been doing the math, and it beat walking. “I wonder where they are now?”

“Anywhere.”

“Nope,” it was Michal, always watching, who saw. “They’re right there! North.”

Coming back along their course, impossibly fast, it looked like a small forest of white trees, oddly still but growing.
“We’ve gotta run!”
“No, we have to hide: they can’t have seen us.” Dmitri said that.
“But they will, and they might run us over!”

Michal thought a second. “Look, they’re obviously retracing their tracks, let’s run a little then hide. This way! They’ll be looking into the sun” He started West, holding back his hand to beckon.

Everybody ran, but there was not much time. Already Anjin could see the sails nodding as the landship surged over unseen swales. They couldn’t see the hull yet, but soon. “We’ve got to get Down!”

“A little further, come on!” After about 200m Dmitri plopped down and so did they all. You couldn’t resist poking your head up to see it go by, like a ship but with giant spindly arms reaching out to either side for stability like a trimaran. They’d been seen: people on the deck were pointing, sails were flapping, and the whole giant beast was rearing around towards them and slowing down.

“Oh God! Run!”

Anjin stood, and stood her ground. “Like that’ll do any good? We’re in the manure now.” Her heart was pounding. They’d all heard stories.

Men were jumping off now, two and three at a time as it circled, laying a net of people around the small group of captives. The ship finally came to rest pointed almost into the wind, sails roaring as they flailed loose while the men approached, smiling but armed and watchful.

Kaigun: Steampunk chapter 3

2011-06-06T20:53:00.004-06:00

Journey

Andreii trudged through pine needles. Though not the deciduous forests of his youth, it was good to be back amongst trees, after walking most of the summer across the howling prarie. He and his sister had stumbled into the little village and been largely ignored: Borsven must not have acted rightly, or drunk too much. That's what everyone thought. No bird could face the whole village and, while the tracks and damage were undeniable, Andreii felt they didn’t even quite believe him, somehow. He knew this was never had lived up to the standards for manliness that now pertained. Before the fall, he’d been the class intellectual and now as a cripple, they treated him as only half a man. Everyone was quite sure it couldn’t happen to them.

They had left the village in less than a week though. That wasn’t because of his warning, but simply because the chicken came back. I came into the street one wet knight, doing some gigantic satisfied representation of clucking and ate a pig and a woman, notwithstanding the assault (ineffectual) of three village toughs and not a few carefully hoarded rifle rounds which, frankly, it appeared not to notice, except as interesting sounds. As before, the giant monster showed neither pity, nor anger or even interest in the scurrying bugs it pecked at, only a brief impersonal hunger. The town met that night in the little church and decided to move West to civilization, leaving everything.

Now the summer had almost passed, and by most reckoning they were a little North and East of lake Baikal. Mostly they had passed refugees moving East, or satisfied hardy people like themselves who, like themselves, couldn’t be frightened by chickens of any size. Everyone began to feel foolish, and some wanted to join up with one of the bigger towns and go back to farming, but then they were overtaken by people they’d passed a week ago, whose village had been raided and destroyed by a band of the monsters, two hens and one enormous red rooster with one eye. There were no more suggestions to stop after that.

Andreii was guarding the rear of the column. The men and bigger boys were in front, scouting trail while Andreii and the old men followed behind. In the middle were the horses and wagons (nobody had gas any more) and the women, the value of the community. At the back were the tacitly expendable rear guard, canaries to sound the alarm if an attack came from behind. Andrei's wooden wrist itched, well below the elbow where the arm had come off; scratching it wouldn't cure the illusion, he knew. He kicked a rock and tried to distract his mind.

Why everyone expected the chickensaurii (he thought of them such) to lay ahead in ambush like Mongol cavalry was a mystery to him, the monsters hadn’t given a hint of any improvement in brainpower: they were just bigger. He spent a lot of time thinking about them, thinking about how to kill them. Around the fire at night, his ideas of giant crossbows or pits with lances at the bottom were laughed off. They would find some vestiges of the authorities, report the problem, and a division would be sent, or a fast attack jet. This turned quickly to bluster though because everyone knew if there wasn’t electricity or gas, or television (and there had been none of these things since the day after the first day of the war, 8 years ago), then there was no government, no fast attack jets, no authorities. No one had even seen a contrail since that first and last day of fighting. The good news was that society had returned to normal immediately - well, normal for 100 years ago, but hardly the bickering rapacious collapse predicted in lurid science fiction apocalypse scenarios. In rural Russia it was the same as always, only horse powered and without train service. There was some hunger in the far west, where once metropolises stood, but bombing had reduced population as well as municipal infrastructure.

Iris

2011-06-05T17:50:00.001-06:00

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Kaigun: Steampunk Chapter 2

2011-06-03T14:55:00.009-06:00

The Woodcutter’s Homestead, Yakutsk, 2050

Andreii Michal was dreaming. He always liked the hour before waking up , when hi sdreams seemed most vidid and because, sometimes, he could control how they worked out. This dream had a redhead.

From swarthy mongolian stock, Michal had never even seen a redhead except in pictures. He had a magazine...

She was impossibly tall, this redhead, tall, friendly and yet under-dressed for the Siberian peninsula, in a flippy skirt that allowed the wind to ripple it, and to allow Michal to imagine it might blow up to reveal matching fuzz down below. Her soft muscles flashed when she walked. She was not even wearing any boots! Instead cream colored slippers just like the girl from the magazine.

“What are you looking at Michal?” she crooned, suddenly coming in close, much much too close! Her eye looked mischievous, staring right into his as though reading all the dirty intentions off the afterimages on his retina. He could almost see down the dress, he surely could see if he only glanced down, she was so close, but he dared not break her gaze. Somehow he knew that to flinch would be to lose her, to excite her ire.

Suddenly she reared back, looking somewhere else as though bored with him now, tisking with a hiss to show disapproval. As she tossed her head that beautiful fall of merlot hair coruscated across the whole view. It was the color of stained cherry wood, or old roses, or clotting blood, iridescent like feathers and just as soft. Transfixed he reached to touch it.

“Come, turn back to me little bird,” and she did again suddenly, close enough now to kiss, her eye seemed the size of a grapefruit. Michal reached out, with his tongue too, wondering if she would taste like grapefruit, but he felt himself waking. The horror of losing the dream, this dream of the milky, freckled girl and her garnet hair. No!

But the pull of waking reality was calling him strongly. She winked at him, one time, a deliberate, reptilian action the lid translucent so that even then she could see his soul quake. He touched the beautiful hair, feather soft... She cocked her head to regard his impudent hand. Abashed and awake now he would snatch it back, but she was gone and instead the bird’s razor beak, snipped his hand off cleanly below the elbow, a gush of red blood smearing her perfect, soft auburn feathers. She was a bird after all, 9 feet tall and 4000 pounds of carnivorous predator.

“Raaaaaaauuk!” Screeched the hunter, and rammed its head into the window, though only half way, it was too small.

Screaming, everyone else in the cabin ran in circles, crazy with fear. Sonja, her mother Eeinut, and the father Borsven all lurched and yelled. Borsven grabbed for an axe and began hewing. Michael stumbled back a step, dazed and losing consciousness. Eeinut began tying something around his arm. Something grew heavy, wet and warm. “It feels comfortable,” was his last thought.

Father Borsven managed to lodge the axe in an eye socket, and the monster reared away, jerking the tool from his hands. A talon battered at the window, one foetid razor claw bursting through the heavy wooden windowsill like an awl through paper, clutching and tearing away timbers as it left. Another exploring grasp and it impaled Borsven by luck and he was pulled from the cabin in company with the next log. His screams cut short by crackling sounds. Eeinut saw her husband’s rib cage splintered by the hooked bill, saw the bird stretch its throat up like gargling to swallow the awkward shape of half a man. She flew out in a hopeless rage and also was eaten.

Sated then, and confused by it’s injury, the chicken wandered off, ducking to rub its ruined eye on the ground as though to scrape away the blindness. Then it thought of a hen and dashed off in a crash through underbrush.

Kaigun: Steampunk Chapter 1

2011-06-03T14:39:00.004-06:00

The Poultry Farm

(Fukushima, 2012)

CarolynYamasaki threw chickenfeed to the winds, watching the birds scamper and squawk. Her family wasn’t wealthy enough to pay for soil processing, so their farm was placarded. A sign at the driveway reminded them all that their livlihood was at an end. No produce, fowl or dairy from the farm could be sold, not for human or even animal consumption. It was ridiculous. After 7 months, they could not keep the family away from their own land, but apparently they could prohibit anyone making a fair living.

Carolyn’s stubborn father Takenori would not be cowed. He did give up and slaughter most of the dairy herd, pouring out the milk was just too disappointing, but vegetables, pork and chickens continued to breed and it was a rich, if boring life for the family. Carolyn at least had the escape of school 10 months out of the year. Takenori planned to make a grand reentrance when the soil tested clean, and he invested his corn surpluses in the bellies of surpluses of chickens, breeding them for size. Carolyn had to admit to herself that after a dozen generations of culling, the flock was starting to show some real progress; while she watched, their prize rooster ”Rex,” big as a turkey and twice as mean, chased a pig across the pen.

Walking back to the house, she saw her father sitting on his little porch stool, head in hands. Mother was like a still life of the supportive wife, hand on his shoulder.

Let the animals go, Peach Blossom, let them all go.”

“Father, why would you say such a thing?” Carolyn asked, bewildered.

“The government. They say even we may not eat them.” dismayed, shaking his head. “Look how healthy I am!” Mr. Yamasaki stood up and shook his fists feebly at the sky.

“I told the government man this, but they said we have to slaughter them, and we will be given government papers for food. I will not do this. You will let them go Carolyn. Release them all and scare them into the country where they at least can make a living, not like a poor farmer.”

----

In the wild, Rex had no trouble foraging. His chicken brain drew him to other chickens, and he found them always easy to dominate. Soon he was literally cock of the walk, though vaguely conscious that his sons were growing heavier even than he. It didn’t matter. There were hens and food, and chickenlike, he was hungry, always hungry.

Rex was 3 feet tall now. Deep in his belly, radioactive thorium still fired alpha particle bullets through his gonads. Some had pierced the sex cells and they’d split and split again, cancerously spreading fundamental damage to the ageless recipe for chickens. An inhibitory gene sequence shared by all birds since they first shrank to avoid the notice of their terrible monstrous cousins, was now a shambles. The sequence prevented unbounded growth, or it had, until now.

Base cello rock ballad!

2011-06-01T09:02:00.003-06:00

This link takes you to the song, ctsy KEXP.
Nat Baldwin - A Little Lost

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steampunk zeppelins

2011-06-01T06:49:00.004-06:00

Mainspring by Jay Lake
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The blurb on the jacket says "an astounding work of creation" and I have to agree. Wow and wow again. If you spent sleepless nights thinking up zeppelins, this book is for you. It is something I could have written (if I had the stamina to write a whole "thing") meaning well imagined, jam packed with WAY cool what-if technology, but basically falls somewhat flat in characterization or any human story. The plot, though, is a roller coaster ride that would make Avatar fans howl in delight and lose their lunch. I mean that in a good way: floating mountains and rideable telepathic pterodactyls got nuthin' on Jay Lake's world. Oh, and he had a digging engine in book #2. It's got everything you want from (the lamentable) Boneshaker, and nothing you don't.

I want some of what he's smoking!

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Holy talking bats, Batman!

2011-06-01T06:35:00.000-06:00

Silverwing by Kenneth Oppel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Maybe a stretch to give it 4 stars, but something that's clearly intended as kidlit to hold your attention is pretty special. I'll offer a comparison that I bet others also have made, to Watership Down. There's a story with pathos, ability to completely forget these aren't people, and a deep dive into a well imagined foreign culture. The history museum of echoes in the bottom of their roost is a special gem.

The story was just a little too childish for me, but I'm pretty jaded. I read several of these, & they're pretty much all good.

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Pellucidar is Science Fiction.

2011-05-30T04:50:00.001-06:00

There's a reason sci-fi and fantasy occupy adjacent aisles at the bookstore: they're very closely related! In both cases we're asked to adopt an unlikelyu or impossible premise. "Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away," to mix the two quintessential opening gambits. The "science" in science fiction is really magic with an extra patina of believability. Back when science WAS very nearly magic, when engineering exceeded the grasp of most of the population and more miracles were wrought every day, there was more science fiction. We've a better grasp now, and miracles are a bit harder to imagine, and we have to allow a little more artistic license in judging whether the science in the fiction is hard enough.

What's the definition of the genre to be then? My favorite is a typical one: you begin by saying "what if..." What if we had one crucial interesting keystone upon which to build our setting, a hollow earth, (we discover with a zeppelin or bone shaking tunneling machine), FTL spaceships (cause the pilots do drugs?), a world-spanning internet game world you could lose yourself in (don't we already?), or a submarine that could stay underwater indefinitely (thanks to a magic power source), or shrink to the size of a dot (thanks to a shrink ray, duh.) I tried to squeeze several ideas into that sentence, mainly that the science has nothing do to with it: it's a quick handwaving to cover where the author needs to access a quick miracle, and you're supposed to look away and say, "ok" because it's science. So I'm introducing Pellucidar to the list today, under the protection of "science enabled this discovery" ...it's no different than Alien.

This thesis makes fantasy a little more hardcore than science fiction. Both reader and author of a book about talking rabbits, their civilization and pilgrim's progress are showing more guts than those who need a radioactive spider bite to unlimber the permissive half of their imagination. A new reality, launched with a "what if?" That's as close as I can get to a truly necessary definition. You may legitimately add that science has to provide the what if, but my thesis is that that part is gratuitous, and accounts for why we see the presence of science in such varying degrees. It's really just imagination, sugar coated so that it goes down easier.

2011-05-29T08:21:00.002-06:00

Genghis: Lords of the Bow by Conn Iggulden
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Somehow not quite as good as the first in the series. Here, Genghis invades China, eventually taking Beijing. There's a difficulty telling fact from fiction, certainly allowable, but I realize I wish there was more fact. As an example of something that strained credulity, nobody hits an egg at 100 yards, or has a bow with 300yard range, do they? Apparently, they did. Wow. Other mind boggling anecdotes probably were facts, too. As in Birth of an Empire, there's a little postscript distinguishing some areas of artistic license from actual history, but it was not thorough enough to satisfy.

Anyway, this book was fun fast and easy, and left me wondering what REALLY went down.

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2011-05-22T12:19:00.001-06:00

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Archery fail...

2011-05-21T12:42:00.001-06:00

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Macro

2011-05-21T05:57:00.001-06:00

That's what we called it in school, just that one word, "Macro." It meant macro-economics and was famously difficult, especially so because economics would presumptively be "naturally" easier than engineering.

I don't think that any more!

Economics uses nonlinear devices (people) and has a seemingly unbounded system running just once through history, so like history or global weather, prognostications are based upon subscale models, and trying it again isn't possible: you only live through history once.

This allows people to make statements like "taxes kill jobs" and with some simple reasoning, you can see why. But the reasoning is OVER simplified and that's always dangerous to an analysis. Let's have a quick review. Business compares ROI for a $ invested vs placed in the bank. The bank's nominally surer, so the investment has to pay more. If my calculation imagines 50% cost of manufacturing, 20% shipping, 10% warranty and 20% taxes, I probably won't build the factory just to break even. With a 10% tax break it's looking pretty good though and in-between is, well, in-between. It's easy to see that changes in the factors will influence the decision. The partial derivative of factories built / d(tax rate) is a clear trigger to investment and unarguable.

But the world's a big system, and these things feed into each other. What if the decision IS literally marginal? Suppose 15% taxes and 5% long term savings yield. Then the investment's a wash, right? Well remember, long term, the return on savings is created by those business investments. Each time you decide not to build a factory, there ends up being more money in savings accounts looking for return, and thus lower rates of return and when the savings bond yields 4%, I'll pick the factory. So there's a closed loop process, where one thing affects another, indirectly and maybe slowly, but unambiguously and powerfully, I say. More proof? Chinese savings dollars continue to prop up t-bills. That's money looking for an investment.

So that fact directly contradicts the premise that taxes kill jobs, though only over the long term. A better mantra would be "sudden tax give-aways will stimulate spikes in investment." The whole short time horizon thing explains why it would be appealing to people, but maybe not good policy. I think I've made an argument that over the long term, the first order effects of taxation are nil. A second point comes from the consequences of the tax.

Taxes get spent. The government redistributes the money (I know that's a bad word, connoting robbery, but it's not fair to dodge it here.) in ways that get it into the system: people who need to buy groceries, teachers on the state payroll, and defense contractors who make bombers. (That the bomber is a product that is itself a tax is a tertiary issue* My point here is that it's not just poor people who benefit from the flow of tax dollars, but also well heeled aerospace engineers.) So taxes create jobs. They may directly fund them (teachers) or create economic pull through spending that creates jobs. This route is no more indirect than the analysis of taxes removing investment from the private sector.

I have peeled away one layer of the onion. Doubtless my "analysis" is sophomoric. it's frustrating though, that our mainline political discourse in the country never even gets this deep! It's as though, discussing sailing, somebody says "well, you can't sail into the wind!" and wins the argument, because our patience doesn't allow for a discussion of tacking and how you can work to windward that way. How can the system use the cogs of sound bites to make an engine that considers more complex thoughts, draws more intelligent conclusions? Returning to the first argument, remember that IT yields immediate observable results.

.

Steel

2011-05-18T13:56:00.000-06:00

So you can make beer, run a mile, throw a punch, fix a motorcycle. Whatever. Are you a real man?

No.

Real men make steel.

Who's in?

Most successful man, ever.

2011-05-17T08:32:00.006-06:00

Genghis: Birth of an Empire by Conn Iggulden
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This morning, with spring coming on and a little warm egg yolk dripping onto crispy toast and a mug of hot coffee, I read about thin, determined boys shivering in Mongolia and refusing to die. I felt pretty spoiled, let me tell you. Iggulden's a good enough story teller to bring you into the scene, make you feel you could ride and shoot, be a Khan if the chance came. Vanity! Yet exciting. My blood runs hot enough to be engaged.

I've read one of these before, so I expected it to go down easy like a light beer, perhaps unsophisticated, but refreshing and good for you. That was about exactly right. Not a complicated book and more fiction than historical, but it's true enough! There was just such a man, real, and he lived an exceptional life, and if it was not exactly as told, then near enough as makes no difference. I enjoyed this a lot, admittedly more than I expected.

For a comparison, those who know Bernard Cornwell's series of infantryman Sharpe will not be disappointed: they're very similar authors.

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The cool airplane...

2011-05-16T12:47:00.003-06:00

The cool part is that the central dorsal "rudder" provides Clb, the canard's carefully balanced vs cg and it sorta-kinda doesn't need the aft rudder.

First day of school, 2006?

2011-05-16T09:32:00.003-06:00

Kid pic from a couple years back. Actually meant this to go to the family site: getting my tools figured out...

Chauvet Caves

2011-05-15T05:50:00.001-06:00

Werner Herzog's at it again, making movies about someplace I want to visit. I don't plan to see the movie; his last, nominally about Antarctica with beautiful photography to match, was really about the loons that inhabit McMurdo station. That was fun in its own way, and maybe that's a hint about this one too. Anyway, the but the trailer at least, is eerie and beautiful, and as you can see, it's worth googling up the paintings.

boneshaker review

2011-05-14T21:20:00.001-06:00

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I read somewhere on here that "steampunk" epitomizes "genre" and I think that's cute. If so, this book may exemplify steampunk. Every paragraph clangs with heavy iron, slaps brown, oiled leather and cracked rubber, smells of coal dust and sulphur. I liked the description. By the way, I'm interested in the genre and was sensitive to how hard it must be to write "in character" like that: she does a good job. The cover too, does a good job of conveying the atmosphere. Like Jay Lake's Mainspring, Gilliam's movie Brazil (especially), and somehow, the movie Inception, (note so self: why is that?) we're taken into a world where everything's 10x overbuilt, where things get fixed with wrench as big as your forearm. The singular metaphor that defines this whole sort of thing is of course, "Locomotive," capitalized, because you should always capitalize that word. It's big, magical, ineluctable, hot and smelling of heavy grease. It's impossible NOT to focus on the imagery, even now when writing a book review, eh? But what about the book?

The book is faintly ridiculous, an adolescent cartoon. It'd make a great graphic novel except that it'll be hard to make the clothes sexy. As a book, there are shortcomings, unless you're fifteen and believe a boy and a mother's love can take on the mob, a natural disaster and a ravening herd of zombies. This short paragraph is actually my main criticism. I am bothered almost to the point of insulte by that childish premise. Maybe it's from reading too many of my daughter's gushing teen fantasies, I don't know.

Now, back to the camp!

What's with the zombies exactly? Thats sort of busts the genre bubble, though perhaps she works them in well enough; they do match the rest of the scenery in color, clanking and decrepitude I guess. Maybe it's just ME, because I never went for zombies in any setting. Let's face it, they're silly.

One more thing, the whole zeppelin thing is the posterchild for the need to set your reality distortion field to 11. They're steam powered, knock over masonry buildings with a rending tear of iron and fly away from it? Those are some tough "physics" for engineers to deal with. I've dealt with plenty of fantasy in my life, from warp drive to Will Smith's superhero "Hancock," (which was awesome) but I've never had quite the trouble suspending disbelief as I did during this book.

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Track

2011-05-14T21:09:00.001-06:00

Had a great time at track on Friday, followed by indian food and the Shining. The workout was a very hard 5x [4,(3),2,1 rest 5'] (on the 300s, you go easy) descending through 1:40, 1:30, 1:25, 1:20, 1:15(!) -that's the 400 pace. That last one was at 204 heartrate, though Bernardo said I must've counted wrong. I was out of AIR. Devo breathes same as me going hard (on 3) but two in and one out. Duh! I breathe in on 1 and 2 out, which is stupid since exhaling's easier. This could help me I think. (pic's from last fall.)

Strength of your heart

2011-01-29T12:29:00.002-07:00

I like cool numerical facts, the magical numbers that underpin the universe, and one I stumbled across while training for a Sanitas time trial is the vertical climb rate you achieve at various heart rates. Just writing down the numbers a strange correlation jumped out, and it calculates out to four inches. That's the height through which my heart can lift me, 4" with every stroke. There are ~73 ml pumped per beat (a standard number) and somewhere between 45 and 80 ml/kg/min O2 transported. That's the VO2 max statistic you sometimes hear: and what a huge variation. Isn't the heart number a neat statistic though? Maybe with some extra work, if I try really hard, my heart can grow strong enough to lift me an extra inch with each beat. Of course it's not all and only about your heart, and yet...

"What a wonderful machine," I thought, and wondered what could do for my heart in return. That led me next to the obvious metaphor between your heart and love, and joy. Something my heart would like, eh? ...and thence quickly to the idea that try as I may, I cannot lift my own heart.

For that, you need someone else.

2010-10-18T08:47:00.000-06:00

cool movie: mandelbrot

Vocabulary

2010-09-19T05:01:00.003-06:00

Just making notes of words I don't know.

brouse: paper mulberry (atree)
apocryphal: questionable veracity
chiaroscuro: monochrome, of different shades
afflatus: inspiration
aleatory: dependent on chance
elision: omission of sounds to make it easier to pronounce
flensed - to strip the blubber or the skin from
ichor: is the golden ethereal fluid that is the Greek gods' blood, ambrosia or nectar.palimpset: writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased.
perterite: past
surbated: bruised/battered from overuse (as in hooves)

2009-12-03T05:38:00.001-07:00

This is a continuing journal to try to understand the rudiments of cosmology. I'm not organized, so ti may be jumpy: no apologies, this blog is my scratchpad! (Maybe I should use google docs for this instead.)

Anyway.

1/Ho =13e9yr, they say.

Cephid variable stars pulse in proportion to their luminosity (so the latter is easily known). These luminosities then can be used to calculate range. Velocity of course is known from redshift, and thus we can correlate one to the other. Range x Ho = V. A good (terse and childish) explanation of the universe's age is here, at the WMAP satellite site. WMAP calls the universe 13.7b yrs old.

Nucleosynthesis in the early universe considers the relative expected proportions of elements as a function of how hot it was. ("Hot" being the relative proportion of energy to mass in the early universe.) This plot, from about 3 minutes? shows the ratio of He to other elements eg Li, we find now, & thus calibrates the early energy density. They believe all the heavy elements were formed in stars or supernovae.

The Inflaton Field Theory supposes something more violently expanding happened right at first, as an answer to the problem of relics (where are the magnetic monopoles a hot cosmic soup would have created?) and the problem of flatness (some stars look older than 1/Ho)

Just some numbers...

Critical density is 5 protons / m^3, and we are nowhere near that: where is it all? This is the motivation for the search for dark (unseen) matter & energy.
Planck density = 10^93gm/cm^3
Age of universe 13.7b yr
Age of transparency 350,000 yr. (? ...from memory)
Black hole density= (1.8x10¹⁶ g/cm³) x (M_sun / M)²,usually M is 10x solar masses.
Schwarzchild radius= (3x10⁵ cm) x (M / M_sun), this, from here.

THE horizon.

2009-11-08T11:59:00.001-07:00

This is going to be a cosmology post. It will take a while to get up.
First some credit to Ned Wright, prof of Cosmology at UCLA. I'm mostly just trying to understand and interpret his excellent tutorial web site.

Ok, here we go. Beginning with a picture from the tutorial...

What we see above is a pitcure of the universe! Time is the up-down dimension and distance is the right left dimension. Each of the (almost) straight black lines is for a different observer, at a different place in the universe. Each of the different observers is moving away at a different speed, harking back to the big bang at the bottom when they were all colocated.

"Moving away from where?" you can ask, and the answer is "From me!" ...or from anyone. All viewpoints in the regularly expanding universe are equivalent. He shows that by skewing the frame of reference in this picture. The observer at "A" feels he is unmoving, so his line of position over time is straight, whereas the line showing "us" has relative motion.

There's a lot more to say by way of explaining this diagram, and I will try to get to it soon, but want to get my questions down first.

1) If it's the same for all observers, then everyone should see the same thing, right? That means both we and A should see the same CMB radiation, though we have dramatically different velocity. It is tempting here to say different absolute velocity but is there such a thing? If there's absolute velocity vs CMB, then there's a center: a preferred location in the universe and the point of this diagram is that that's not so. But (here's the question at last) if there is no preferred center, then there is no absolute velocity, and then seemingly none should be measured, by anyone, vs the CMB. Yet there is a dipole! Why? I think this has to be due to a recent velocity, an acceleration that has us moving relative to our local chunk of space. If it were secular (for all time) then we'd be in a different chunk of space (and seeing uniform CMB).

2) The picture shows "light cones" as little triangles along everyone's timeline. That's how fast a signal would travel if you emitted it. You could imagine adjacent societies communicating by radio, with delays for their successive messages (light cones) to reach each other. This elegant picture shows how the light from the big bang can reach us, after a long journey and an uphill race against the expanding universe wherein it actually loses ground before finally approaching us. That's the red pear shape. This explanation makes perfect sense to me if I think of it as an explosion in air. Everywhere, sound moves at the speed of sound, but the air through which it travels moves at different velocities depending on which part of the explosion each pocket of air is located in. As such the sound speeds up or slows down (in a coordinate frame fixed to the location of the original explosion). This all works perfectly for air, but air is the aether through which sound moves. Is there then aether for light? What if there is nobody there to measure the light as it travels from its source to us, through the intervening universe? Is it still doppler shifted along the way, or is it meaningless to talk about a doppler without an observer? Does it arrive along the same trajectory, covering the same distance in the same time?

I think the answers are: the light behaves the same whether there's someone there to see it or not, there is no way to define redshift without an observer to be shifted "relative to" and so, yes, it covers the same trajectory. This is clearly about relativity, wherein the photons, and their speed, are invariant. The doppler changes depending on who (at what velocity vs the emitter) is observing at any given time. Again I'll mention the sound analogy works well (for me at least), so long as you assume that each timeline on the picture represents a different hunk of air.

Another way to learn something from the sound metaphor is to picture the interaction from the transmitter's perspective. We can speak (continuously!) to a nearby observer who, at the bang, suddenly begins travelling away at a huge speed. Thereafter, they and we hear each other with a huge redshift. We would both be speaking in ordinary time at ordinary rates but not just pitch but (consequently!) the time of arrival of words and sentences would be greatly stretched out. To each observer, the other appears to have slowed down. We can know this 'cause we can observe everyone's lips move at the speed of light. However in space, when the redshift is itself that of light, there is no meaning to the idea of the 3rd party observer in absolute or unmoving space. Also, I can be moving far faster than the speed of sound vs the transmitter, but the sound waves speed up as they refract through intervening blocks of atmosphere, each of which is successively travelling faster, with it's local bits of embedded shrapnel & flotsam. From the listener's perspective (measuring the sound pulse approaching via some kind of laser rangefinder) the sound is speeding up: you may think of the doppler as being applied incrementally and it IS, by the incremental delta velocities by all the air pockets. In space we don't know anything about the intervening observers (they may not be there!), but we "see" the light's redshift (as we would hear the doppler shift of sound) and so time at the observer seems to have been slowed down.

2009-11-08T11:06:00.000-07:00

Ok, I love this song. "Furr" by Blitzen Trapper

2009-11-01T05:28:00.000-07:00

Everybody seen this show on NOVA? Surpassing Newton & Einstein with 11 dimensions, gravity radio between alternate universal branes (excellent, we can TALK to them by shaking an apple!) and the long struggle to squeeze the universe into one set of equations. I'm a little uncomfortable about how badly we seem to want the un...iverse to unify itself "just" to fit OUR need for order. The freaky-cool thing is that bits of pond scum can actually begin to understand the heartbeat of the big implacable pond. Gives me chills. Gotta look past the glossy popularization though: it takes a LOT of "dumbing down" to render these ideas for TV, and boy do they ever.

track, and bike crash

2009-10-04T06:04:00.001-06:00

Well, I'm really enjoying track right now. Once a week for sure, maybe a bit more, and working on about a 1:15 pace (for 400m). This is a speed I can maintain for 6 or8 laps on long rest intervals, like 3 minutes. I can string together 1:30s and will shoot for a 6 minute mile soon. Long term goal is to get more comfortable at 1:15, where I'm very badly out of air, right now.

But, I realized after starting this, now it the right time to write something about the bike crash, so I can remember it later.

It was three weeks ago today, the CU Buffalo Bicycle Classic, a 100 mile ride to Ft. Collins & back. Steve and I were going to do it. I couldn't believe he could just pick up cycling and do 100 mile days, and I was a little apprehensive! Then Steve's knee got worse, or an order not to make it worse maybe, and I was gonna do this race alone. I almost didn't go, just out of boredom, but it is a great course and I thought it looked like good weather so I went. I cruised out of town in the chilly morning, gradually picking up speed as I warmed up. It's all uphill out of Boulder along Hwy 36 until you get to St Vrain road which is a downhill tear all the way to Hygiene. By now I was going pretty fast and had caught up with a pack made up of about 3 really strong guys and a bunch of hangers-on. I took a couple of pulls sort of to show I was able to keep up, and generally settled in towards the front of this group. The pack kept breaking up when someone would fall off the front few guys so I would have to pull back up which was no problem, just explaining that it wasn't a pace line so much as a few of us taking turns and a bunch of people barely sucking along. I remember thinking I'd have to be careful because these guys were not all that experienced, and getting tired. It would be a very different group after another hour, I thought. How true. We were approaching Hygiene.

The ambulance had a guy in it, sitting at my left, asking me impossible questions like what day was it, and where was I going and so forth. I don't remember much more than thinking it was hard and I wasn't answering his questions very well, and that it didn't hurt much.

Next is the hospital, same drill, except it's a couple of ladies asking the questions and Sue and the kids are there and I got two CAT scans and some very fluffy bandages on my knees. Then I was done, we drove to CU to get my bike and I rode it down to McGuckin's, loaded the car and drove home.

I told it that way because that's how I experienced it: in a couple of flashes with a ton of missing time. On the phone a week later, some dean from CU (who's responsible for the race, perhaps) offered condolences and a free entry next year and said he saw me laid out on the side of the road. I should've hit him up for a couple of jerseys! Steve & I didn't even get t-shirts out of it. So anyway, I learned I was unconscious for a while. It's interesting how the memories are gone, even from BEFORE the crash. Near as I can guess, there was from 5 sec to a half minute before the crash where I have no memories. Can't visualize the rear wheel that (I imagine) swiped across my front tire and wiped me out, or the tumble, or the asphalt, or laying there. Nothing.

The next remarkable thing was all the gyro failures. I couldn't call it dizziness, but that's the nearest thing I guess. Sometimes I'd turn my head, and the world would turn but then Just Keep Turning, never stopping. ...as though I'd gotten off a merry-go-round. So I guess that is dizziness. Anyway that kept up for weeks. It became a morning phenomenon. Monday, 15 days after, was the first time I woke up and could walk without lights on or holding on to something. Then yesterday (20 days after) the last of the saucer sized scabs on my knees peeled off. Those hurt a lot & still do. My knees continue to weep blood and pus and I can't wear long pants because of it. That's irrelevant though. My wrist feels sprained, or lower part of my arm maybe, so there are some things like dips and pullups and pushups I can't do yet, but that'll all heal soon enough I suppose. It is good to have it over with. I haven't gone back to "full" workouts yet, mostly because I'm daunted about starting up swimming again: even a 3 day layoff makes swimming hard again. As far as the bike? Well, I haven't had the urge.

Utopia

2009-09-16T19:21:00.000-06:00

The loudspeaker blared, “All hands for Ves-3 please report to the cafeteria deck for final briefing at 14:00.”

It was the usual pre-drop announcement, Cindra had heard it a before, three times, but never before like this. This time it was for her. Tomorrow at 14:00 some 6 dozen colonists would be jam packed into reentry capsules along with 5x their mass of support gear (just about anything anybody wanted, subject to the weight limits) the mothership would drop out of hyperspace, and they would be dumped into a hyperbolic orbit guaranteed only to impact the atmosphere at just thus and such an angle. They would all de-orbit together, or perhaps go up in smoke together, if the lander didn't work.

Meanwhile, there would be one final briefing, half review, half goodbye, half ceremony. Sometimes Cindra thought it was how the rest of the crew got to closure on what was basically the same thing as losing 20% of all the people they knew, forever. There had been three groups dropped already, and there would be three more, before this ship continued, empty, on whatever irrelevant ballistic trajectory remained to it before it plowed into some gravity well out there.

The USS Niven was a colonization "seed ship," launced from earth along with 8 others in the last extremity, in the twilight of civilization, and they, Cindra and her peers, were the seeds. People all over the earth could tell that the clocks were running down: out of fuel, out of air, out of ozone and clean water and arable land and trees to cut for shelter and oil, there was nothing left but solar power and the foamed concrete eeked slowly thereby, as though from the sun's very furnace. Precious fuels and metals were squandered on these 9 colonization birds, each the same, each with about 450 souls aboard, and 5 to 8 stops to make seeding hopeful star systems before beginning a final irrelevant leg of their endless journeys. Each ship was named after a fanciful sci-fi author.

Tomorrow they would go down. Cindra's group had drawn a very fertile, friendly planet. It might have fauna and certainly there were a lot of plants: that much was apparent from the telescope surveys conducted from earth. Not much would be needed to eke out a living on the surface. But there was more: long studies had been held to try to give the 60 new societies the best possible toehold in their new worlds, to create, as much as possible, a new world in the image of but better than, the old one. The group would have some special advantages, she thought hopefully of these while drifting off to sleep.

Next day passed quickly, checking and rechecking hear she'd stowed and made sure of a dozen times already. In no time it was 2:00PM and time for the meeting. All the colonists sat together in the front of the caffeteria, wearing dark green acceleration suits they'd not take off until they had landed, while most of the rest of the crew clustered around to hear the last speeches.

First there were the obligatory goodbyes and pronouncements of high hopes and expectations. Soon, their leader, Captain Thomas, took the podium, wearing her own green jumpsuit, and began announcing a private catechism Cindra and her peers already mostly knew.

“As you know," she said, "our group of colonists is not taking piles of lasers and microcomputers with us to the surface. We have the lowest gear mass allotment of any group on the ship, something I expect you all to thank us for while you're eating that extra ration of chocolate ice cream you got budgeted into YOUR drop shipment!” A pause here for applause was effective, though sardonic: groups with higher mass allotments generally had harsher planets to deal with, such as those without oxygen, or worse: nobody was actually dropping with chocolate ice cream, although there was plenty shipboard, and Thomas took a healthy lick as she said this, to dramatize it the fact.

“Instead, we are taking something special, something that will make us only marginally human, really, a tiny improvement.” Thomas was on a roll now. People settled down to hear the rest of her talk.

“The whole idea came from studying Neanderthals, our distant distant dumb stepbrothers. Or so we like to think. Archaeological evidence actually seems to suggest that they were bigger, stronger AND smarter than we were. That's something you may not all know. Why then, (our scientists put themselves this question, I'm told...) were WE the evolutionary winners instead of the Neanderthals? Well the more recent evidence has given us some exciting clues to ponder about this.”

You could've heard a pin drop as Thomas paused to emphasize her grip on the audience.

“The Neanderthals, it turns out had a disadvantage, and it was one you wouldn't thinkof very highly: they were fertile.”

“Fertile? How does THAT get to be a disadvantage, you want to ask! Well consider this: we have a species that is getting successful, and one of its key characteristics is how it cares for its offspring, how WE raise and nurture our young, to make them all they can be, help them even at our own expense. The Neanderthals were this way too. Take this burgeoning success and this devotion to offspring, combine them with fecundity, and what do you get? Overpopulation, that's what. A characteristic that's helpful to a butterfly who simply leaves her young behind becomes an actual burden to a cavemother who absolutely won't. Put it together, imagine having babies every nine months like clockwork, and trying to get all those kids fed, and sheltered, and moved to the new hunting grounds! You get the picture. Add to that that half the people, the women would be incapacitated half the time and nursing the other half, and you get a species competing at half power. Maybe it would work if you lost two of every three kids to the dinosaurs, but add successful nurturing to the recipe, and you've got hardship resulting from success. That's the unfair catch-22 the Neanderthals struggled with.”

“Meanwhile, our ancestors had a relative advantage: sparse fecundity. As you all know all too well, we (well those of us who are female) are fertile just a few days each month and noone can tell (without very close inpection indeed) whether we are or not. A baby's not certain every time you dive under the bearskins, and if you're nursing it's highly unlikely. This fact has not only made it quite easy to tame the less intelligent portion of the species (plenty of guffaws here) pretty handily through sexual manipulation, but reduced the popluation pressure our tribes felt when we were a young species. The low birth rates also equalized a physical disadvantage, and made us really partners with our men. I'd like to think that partnership had something to do with beating the Neanderthals, but the reproductive dissimilarity certainly did. With less kids to take care of, we did better as a species.”

“You could argue the whole thing played out again in the 21st century back home, only cultural preferences and birth control created the advantage when even LESS fecundity was needed in the face of longer lifetimes, greater educational burden and more population pressure. That social pressure worked against those who felt it most though, because others of the same species were meanwhile breeding to beat the band, and that put pressure on us all, arguably the very reason for these seed ships we're riding in now. How can we break that cycle in our next try? This was the problem our planning group chose to focus on.”

“The solution is clear with hindsight: we will take our advantage over the Neanderthals and multiply it. In particular, we will genetically alter ourselves, in fact HAVE already altered ourselves to bear less children. Each of the women you see before you is reproductively fertile only for a few days a year, and only she knows approximately when. This change makes us (we women) more nearly equal in our ability to contribute, we've been chosen for size and strength too, but most importantly, we should bring our tribe an immeasurable benefit, that of not facing an overpopulation problem of our own making!” There were some shocked gasps: this aspect of the fourth drop team's mission had not been overtly known.

“Now you may ask 'why now, in the fragile first stages of colonization?' and my answer would be that you are right: there's no place in the first several generations for limited growth, and in fact for just that reason we have thousands of doses of fertility drugs, which WE must take in order to approach the monthly fertility YOU all take for granted. But those drugs will run out in a few generations, and then we will have our new, utopian society to nurture. Then too, like all of our groups we are preponderantly women, for obvious reasons: we want to breed successfully and often at first (Thomas paused here for lusty cheering from the men and boys) but generations hence our growth will taper. Our computer simulations promise good outcomes from this strategy. Now is the time for you to wish us the same, as we take our turn to try to establish a beachhead for humanity on this new earth, here around the star, our Sun, the star known back home only as VES-3!”

Cheers all around, some light drinking, and Cindra went to bed to await the drop.

at Camp Dick, 2009

2009-08-30T17:03:00.001-06:00

pic Miles took.

be still

2009-07-31T20:28:00.002-06:00

A month. That is a long enough time, in summer, to grow a healthy plant. I write to remind you, (you know who you are), that you are alive just like one of those plants, and the sun is out, and you should get out there and sweat under it, smell the air and the dirt.
Be still. Feel pain and sun both. Grow towards good things.
Time will whorl scars into hard knots and burls that can endure
...or not; we shall see.

Sad.

2009-06-30T15:50:00.001-06:00

Remember this day: worst ever.
Now what?

Workout

2009-05-25T14:07:00.001-06:00

I'm off for a risky ride: weather's dicey.

Slashes of sunshine spray my neighborhood, but the sky is hunkered off to the West, growling. Still, if there is to be any time for a ride today, this is it.

Saddled up I head for the mountains, chatting with a couple at the intersection, then I'm gone, alone. The bike is very smooth, I am going uphill towards 36 and there's a tiny headwind but I feel good, have to keep a lid on it so that I won't get tired before the Bolder Boulder tomorrow. Everything is gray-green, and it is raining, but not enough to stick. The road's dry although I feel a drop now and then, and the air feels thick and chill. I turn up the power half a notch to stay warm. How fast, I can't say, the speedo still needs a new battery, but today at least, I'm passing everybody. Feels good.

Turning onto 36 to go N, I'll ride up to the house, then home on Nelson or something, but it is starting to rain lightly now, and there is a big peal of thunder. I turn up towards West Fork, but another belt of thunder, more rain and a thought that "there's probably nobody there anyway" combine to turn me around. I would have stayed though, if it were me, after moving my stuff in, to watch the rain and lightning. I would have a bottle of wine and sit under the shelter of the upper deck, and watch the patterns of light on the fields: I always loved that. Then, because it's on a hill overlooking the plains, you can see sometimes oceans of clouds and the whole world is gone, just you in the incredible sunlight and yellow-white waves breaking against the prow of the hillside.

But not today. Today it will be clammy and uncomfortable, so I turn around.

Grinding up the shallow hill to Nelson, I roll over a lone rider, and then overhaul a faster tandem, barely. Going uphill they cannot match me but now we will descend and I will get my ass kicked. I taunt jokingly with something like, "I'll never stay ahead of you now!" as I go by, and sure enough in a minute I feel them coming over my shoulder, impossibly fast. I put on a surge and catch his wheel. We are probably doing over 30, but with his draft, I rarely have to pedal.

The hill flattens, maybe even ascends for a moment, and I can lead now. I power by, coast for a few beats so he can gear up, and then pull like hell, knowing he'll be doubly fast when drafting. We trade pulls the whole way along Nelson, never dropping out of top gear, me taking my pulls on the uphill, and the tandem on the downs, when their ballistic coefficient makes them more than a match for me. Awesome. I'm stroking in the 160s and realize I'm singing, Born on the Cusp to myself, which somehow matches my breathing pattern though it's a slow song. Eventually they peel off and I continue on 75th, headed home, rocketing through hard rain now, hunched over the bars and feeling like blasting.

There's a peal of thunder. It growls all the way from South to North, then turns behind me, circling around, and back to the South, like a RING of lightning must have just discharged up there in the clouds. I think of humpback whales, of nets they make from bubbles, rising in a silvery ring to trap the fish. Am I a fish trapped in a gray ring of rain, the water falling down instead of the air falling up? That thunder will split the clouds. Why do I think that? Anyway, I do. I am safe from lightning though. Or maybe not. Does it matter? I look down, my legs are shiny-wet, pumping over the midnight river of smooth road. Featureless, it glides blackly by so fast as to appear not to move at all, mocking my hammer pulse. I love this road. Every step I travel how far - a dozen yards? More? It's like running on the moon. Now, saffron highlights run up and down my calves with every stroke; a car's coming and it's headlights throw a yellow cast.

They saw me and so I'm safe, again. Turning now to the last climb up Niwot road, I decide to stay on the big ring and stand the whole way. I have no heart left, but my legs are good. I realize I'm smiling. If I keep doing these simple things, I should be ok.

postscript: Thankfully, my daughter had an off day and I got to coast the BB on a 10' pace with her.

Rip in Heaven

2009-04-27T03:12:00.001-06:00

This is the beginning of our Boulder CD Mix Exchange.

I got April by default, by taking the longest to join in, yet I am hardly a pathfinder in this very musaical group. So, what can I bring you? I have decided to go with a particular genre and epoch, namely, "Songs by which you were conceived" ...implying, not to put too fine a point on it, that THIS is the kind of music I was listening to at the college party when everyone (else) was - well, you know, looking for a couch.

So, like a deadly frozen space alien, or an ancient French wine, I will hope these artifacts will come out of hibernation as potent as they were when new, and will serve their purpose again!

Moreover, I can go back even further. Reaching all the way back to the misty past, to my mom's beehive hairdoo, cateye glasses, and avocado polyester miniskirt, I see an orb of obsidian spinning in an oaken coffin I'm not allowed to touch. Sounds come out, primitive pulsing compulsion, and somehow I know the singer is talking about my Mom and Dad and I'm uncomfortable because something inappropriate is going on, but I don't know what 'cause I can't translate the entendre's! That was me, hearing what could have been the soundtrack of my own creation! Eeww. So, you got THAT track coming to you, as well as many other artifacts. It's supposed to be like a party tape, happy overall with a beginning warmup, a frenetic dance phase in the middle, a sexy hookup phase after that, and some soft music for cuddling at the end, or walking around at 2:00 AM cleaning up, depending on which group you find yourself in.

Happy listening.

Matt has kindly provided a link to sample my retro mix, and also the path to the google doc that forms our manifesto, I guess.

Here's the track list. The idea is supposed to match a party, going from soft (preparation phase) to very happy, to frenetic, to silly, to love songs, then sad ones, and finally something quiet for falling asleep. The last track is a little out of character, an acoustic piano cover of the best song ever, the cure's Just Like Heaven. Done slow with heavy percussion, it loses it's joy and becomes the after-party musing.

Diplomacy

2009-04-15T18:02:00.000-06:00

Diplomacy is a board game involving dealmaking, surprise, treachery, and world domination: in short, the techniques of Diplomacy. In anticipation of a dinner party, here is the short version of the rules (according to me) as well as a stern recommendation to get out there on the internet and read up: this is not a trivial game. However, with some effort, the rules can be condensed as follows:

Just one unit (Army or Fleet) in any province at a time.
Some regions, equipped with a star are supply centers, and will support (feed and equip) an army or fleet. You pick. Obviously, control lots of these to have lots of armies.
Armies or Fleets can occupy coastal land, but ONLY armies inland or fleets at sea (duh).
Game sequence is a) diplomacy -> b) write orders -> c) reveal & resolve. During diplomacy you make deals with each other. Writing orders is done by secretly specifying, for every unit that is to act, if & where it will go, and what it will do. Then everybody throws down at once and all work together to figure out what happened.
Bad or illegal orders devolve into orders to Hold position.
Orders you can give are Hold, Move(& thereby possibly Attack), Support or (if you're a fleet) Convoy. These are your only "verbs" in orders.
In all engagements, might prevails: the most units wins. If equal forces meet it's a standoff, and everyone holds.
Even friendly units can't swap position: borders between regions can "handle" only one unit across their borders per turn. A Convoy operation can literally circumvent this stricture.
To win a battle, Support either a Hold or an Attack (and you must specify which you intended.)
You cannot successfully Support if you find yourself Attacked from the flank.
Losers are dislodged, (after rendering any support they may have been called on to provide).
Fleets in ocean (not coastal zones) can convoy 1 Army across the water, and with multiple fleets, any oceanic distance may be traversed in a single turn.
A standoff occurs when equal forces attack/support a single (possibly empty) province.
Dislodgement of any unit conducting a Convoy operation causes the transport to fail.
After losing, dislodgement means you must write a retreat order and carry it out immediately, and you may not retreat to (a) your attacker's land (b) any occupied territory (duh) or (c) empty region that experienced a standoff.
Every two turns (winter and summer are the metaphor here) you disband or add units according to the starred provinces you control.

There are some other rules, one of my favorite being, An army with at least one successful convoy route will cut the support given by a unit in the destination province that is trying to support an attack on a fleet in an alternate route of that convoy. Bone up on that one before the game, please, because it comes up kind of a lot.

Chicks Rule

2009-04-13T18:53:00.000-06:00

A minimal ruleset was sought. We got it down to 10.

1) Play with a Tarot deck, and 4 or 6 players, in teams of 2, with partners sitting opposite one another.

2) Deal all the cards down, with the extras left as a "kitty."

3) Play for tricks, where the high card of the suit led (or trump card) wins each hand, and the winner leads the next hand.

4) If (and only if) you cannot follow the suit led, you may play any card in your hand.

5) A Tarot deck has a fifth suit ordinarily called trump. (...or the "major arcana," if you're majorly into Tarot) Chicks Rule has a variable trump suit that changes from hand to hand, so for clarity we simply renamed the fifth suit "bettys" to distinguish it from trump.

6) Before play begins, players bid, naming the quantity of tricks, and the suit they'd declare as trump. Suits are (in order) bettys, spades hearts, diamonds, clubs and "no trump." There is a suit order (only) to distinguish between two numerically equivalent bids: 5 no trump is an incrementally higher bid than 5 clubs.

7) The bid winner picks up the kitty, and discards an equal number of cards from her hand. No one else sees these cards.

8) Chicks rule. (Meaning, in this game, the Dame or Queen card outranks the Rex or King)

9) A Tarot deck has a card called the "fool." In this game, it is renamed the Nymph, and is the top trump: the most powerful card in the deck. If the hand is being played with "no trump," the Nymph reverts to a betty, albeit the highest one. (If your deck has a "universe" card and it has a chick on it, you can use that one for the Nymph instead of the Fool.)

10) If the team that won the bidding takes as many tricks as they proposed to, they score that many points. More tricks don't add points, (so it pays to bid all you can) but if too few tricks are taken, the opposing team accrues the value of the contract. To save time, teams on the defense can confer openly and elect to simply concede the balance of a hand.

---------------------------------
History of the Game

"Chicks Rule!" was developed in a single night of extreme frustration in Los Barilles, Baja California. With no wind, numerous injuries and too much alcohol, a small team of engineers turned to nonstop cards to pass the time. After Bridge, Tarot, Rook, Hearts and War were exhausted, we tried to come up with a game that did not contain arbitrary rule baloney of Tarot, or the scoring complexity of Bridge, but retained team play and complex bidding strategy. Additional commentary on the rules is solicited (mailto: markkrebs@bluespruce.net) but please keep in mind our intent to keep the rules very simple. Chess has simple rules with complex and interesting consequences, we hope this game does, too, and will try to keep it that way. This is the only legitimate source of adjudication for Chicks Rule, and all changes are subject to editorial review by the founding team of Marc, Guy, Trina, Peter, Robert and Mark. If you like Chicks Rule!, please send $10,000.00 to Mark, c/o Blue Spruce Designs.

Some simple notes on the Tarot deck for the uninitiated:

a) There's no Ace. There's a one, but it's low.

b) The "face cards" sometimes have letters to identify them: V,C,R,D (Standing for the words Val-yea, Cheval-yea, Rex and Dame, with aplogies to whatever the actual French pronunciation is supposed to be. Or, in the vernacular of the game, chump, chump on a horse, dude and Chick.)

c) Keep in mind the major arcana suit (the one with all the pictures) has 21 cards in it, instead of 13, so if that suit ends up trump, it's a long one.

d) It's easier to play if you write the numbers on the upper left corner of each card. Or, buy a more "conventional" looking deck that's laid out that way. (Impossible in Boulder.)

Nationalize It?

2009-03-11T03:55:00.000-06:00

Two industries came up for nationalization last week, one was banking. The interesting and kind of scary thing about bank nationalization was that some guy from the IMF was on the radio being interviewed and it was his JOB to provide infusions of cash for failed foreign economies, in exchange for which gift they basically took the ill managed banks of these countries, recapitalized them, fired all the executives, nationalized them. It's precisely the same medicine he prescribed for US banks, but said we couldn't do it because the entrenched power structure had too much to lose. In marking bad assets to market value, the presumptive capital of the banks is wiped out, so the supposedly wealthy shareholders take a bath. That's too unpleasant for them to contemplate: certainly nobody can be expected to bring that kind of lightning down upon themselves, eh? Such a move would have to happen suddenly (this guy said) 'cause else all the OTHER bankers would pull their alleged capital OUT in fearful anticipation they'd be next. This would leave the bank balance sheet even more impoverished.

I think it's interesting to try to assign "blame" and ask, in the wake of that, whether the bank or the homeowner should be recapitalized. In the latter case, at least we (the taxpayers saddled with this) have a paying tenant, right?

Housing Bailout

2009-02-19T07:02:00.001-07:00

Is the Obama housing bailout a good idea?

First what is it? I heard it's a plan to incentivize loan rate reductions, half a % to be paid by the bank and half a % + the documentation fees paid by the government. Clearly this plan will "work" in that it will have takers. People want to refinance (heck, I did) so if it gets easier to do so, more will. If the Govt were to just pay the 1/2%, I would expect market forces would drive housing interest rates down that much, right? It is a little hard to see how the bank is motivated to kick in thier 1/2%. Maybe I'm missing something? (There are other disjoint parts of the plan, but I want to think just about this single factor for a bit.)

Also, I had a little bit of "isn't this how we got into this mess?" reaction to the plan. The lower the interest rate, the more you can borrow. But maybe the problem isn't the principal but rather the fixed expense the loan introduces into the family's budget. People need to get themselves into less trouble, by aiming lower, not accepting high payments. Maybe the loan criteria should be stricter: payments =20% of monthly income, instead of 30%. THAT way you'd be giving out loans with less risk, right? More later, sorry for the half baked thought.

Also, how can we enforce bank participation? They're supposed to contribute 1/2% but in the ongoing re-evaluation of market demand and setting loan rates so they can cover their risks and make a profit, it seems the 1/2% will just vanish in the bookkeeping.

Finally, lets remember, as a transition to and motivation for my proposal (following) that this is essentially America (meaning you and me) taking on additional debt liability in the form of T-bills, to pay for somebody else's mortgage. I think the guys who got in too deep should participate personally in the solution. Here's how:

Consider solving the problem by lowering everybody's payment 10%, and extending their loan commennsurately in duration. It would immediately alleviate the homeowner's cash crunch, and shouldn't cost us (taxpayers) anything other than the additional risk of covering the defaulters. Of course there would be some of that, but this does not amount to a free giveaway, so it's a tiny fraction of the loss. How could it work? Well, this thought stemmed from a discussion about the spread between Tbills and home loans. Currently I understand that to be about 5%. I pay 5% for my home loan (about the best you can get) and I heard our debt is being snapped up for ZERO percent interest right now. Parenthetically, that means that in these hard times, US currency is still viewed by the rest ofthe world as a great deal. Why is that spread so big? Hey, I wannna sell a T-bill to china for 0% and finance my house for nothing! Where does the money go? The answer is middlemen's profits (salaries for the bankers) and to cover the risk of defaulting. Well, let's eliminate the middlemen and since we (the Govt) are forced to cover this risk anyway, let's not let somebody ELSE (the bank) book it as risk and bank it as profit. Essentially we are self insuring, for better or worse, across the spectrum of these loans.

Mechanically it works like this: Say you're in a dire cash crunch annd considering bankruptcy and defaulting on your house loan. You'd have an option where the government pays off 10% of your principal, and your payment drops about the same amount. I'll add some specific numerical examples later. You don't get the money for free though, it's a loan from America, a second lien on your house. When you finish paying off your home loan, your govt subsidy loan comes due, and you start paying that. All the while it's been accruing at the same low rate (ZERO!) the government had to pay to borrow the money from China. Maybe we can even add a point or two: it will still be a great deal (compared to a 5% bank loan) and, while you have to work longer to get out from under your house, so to, do I, to pay off all the additional debt the nation is incurring to fund Chrysler's bailouot, and Citibank's bailout and etc. This is an appropriate shared liability.

Further, anybody could take advantage of it. Heck I might! Since I can make my present house payment, the reduced principal would let me pay the house down faster, and I'd finish off the whole loan with less total outlay. It's like my house got busted into two loans, one still at 5% and the other fraction of the principal at 0%! Of course I pay off the expensive one first. Good deal for everybody.

Some security strings could be attached to this funding. Since a key problem is our propensity to get too deep in debt, perhaps in exchange for access to this money, you must agree not to increase your debt to income ratio. So you can't take the extra $100/month and run out and get a car (loan). The idea here is to become more like the Chinese and LESS like, well, ourselves!

What do you say?

Bankrupt Arguments

2009-01-16T06:58:00.000-07:00

I have heard three times in as many days, expressions of grave dissapointment and dismay at the proposed financial recovery plans coming out of the democrats. This has driven me to a real anger, to the point that I feel it's unhealthy to politely pretend there is no such thing as politics, just for the sake of maintaining a nice friendly exterior. Our friendships, I hope, can withstand some frank conversations.

Here are the three arguments.

"Oh my God, he thinks he can borrow and spend our way out of this." This congressman expressed absolute horror at the concept of the (second half) of the bailout, after voting for the first half of it.
"I've been burned by this, err, by the current administration once, <> so now I can't be fooled a second time <>"
And finally, this last a very loose paraphrase, but as accurate as I can make it, an argument that we shouldn't select infrastructure projects as a way to apply stimulus because "that's thesame thing we did in Iraq with Halliburton and look at all the corruption and opportunities for fraud we have uncovered there!"

In reverse order, my rebuttals are...
3) Isn't it a little late for the pot to point at itself and say "you're black as sin!" and, does Cheney's pet company and the money wasted thereupon necessarily imply or even suggest that some other companies would be equally guilty? Fundamentally, the solution is to carve out the rot. It is logically corrupt to visit the sins of the father upon the son. Furthermore, the gentleman entirely misses the point that money spent on Halliburton ends up in their corporate accounts or Iraqui infrastructure, often employing foreigners. From our perspective, it is money destroyed, entropy. A school or road built HERE has lasting benefit. A bomb exploded in the desert is eventually filled in again with sand, a complete and utter waste of the sweat that built that. It's the fundamental difference between destructino and construction. I understand Halliburton is not directly involved in the exploding part of the Iraqui enterprise, but inasmuch as they reconstruct infrastructure we priorly disassembled with explosives, it is part of the overall equation, which, let's not forget, has been > $100B/yr

2) The senator's Freudian gaffe at the beginning almost makes my case for me. Again, we have a very clear case of simply turning the argument around because of political partisanship. It couldn't be any clearer. Sir, I've been burned once before too; I used to be a republican.

1) Let's ignore for a moment the recurring theme of immediately changing one's mind about policies the very day the presidency changes political parties, although that alone should destroy this guy's credibility. Lowering taxes is the form of borrowing cited here, and tax relief is a very big part of the bailout plan. (ok I guess we have to ignore that the diatribe was always tax and spend," right? It's Republicans who borrow and spend, right.) It changes the budget balance. The essential question each year is how much defecit to accrue, and where to spend the money. In lowering taxes (and that's proposed, for pete's sake!) you elect to broaden the defecit in hopes of alleviating the individual financial pressures that constrain spending. There is the further distinction of where in the income histogram (down at the subsistence level, up in the wealthy level) to apply the benefits or extract the tolls, and that is a fundamental republican/democrat schism lately. As one of the wealthy ones, and in particular a principal at a corporation strapped for credit and at risk, I feel qualified to offer that I think I have more than enough money, and less than enough security. Those of you secure in your wealth had better not offer that the rich are being taxed too much, and had better remember that families making under $200k will receive tax cuts. If you are making more than that, and you want to complain, I have no ears for you.

I am very interested, and will not delete, your arguments. If you want to reply privately, I will honor that privacy. But I will not spare you the full force of whatever arguments I have. I am very very sick of this shit, and not interested in another fatcat trying to win arguments with tricky emotional arguments. I understand English very very well, unfortunately for some of you senators. My main hope is to educate enough children to a clear and concise method of parsing what is said rather than listening to the jeering and snorting, to run you bastards out of office forever.

Mark

Politics

2009-01-06T08:02:00.000-07:00

Politics

Democrats are more fiscally conservative than republicans. I was carefully raised to think otherwise, and probably it wasn't always so, but here is an astounding summary: From 1946 to today, Democratic presidents pushed the deficit up by 3.2 percent per year. Meanwhile, Republican presidents increased the budget deficit by 9.7 percent. In other words, since 1946, Republican presidents have outspent Democratic presidents by almost 3 to 1. The reference needs validation, and I will try to find some. Subjectively, I think NAFTA is the largest conservative activity of our time and as we recall, that's Clinton's. Meanwhile, the Fed housing give-away/bubble is a consequence of Republican policy years. How does pundit thinking assess the connection between low interest rates and high home prices: surely they are coupled. Was that good policy?
In partial support of the above, Gina provided this link which identifies numerous economic indicators such as GDP, disposable income & deficit, including assessments assuming various lag times (assuming a president doesn't instantly affect the economy). It's well supported in terms of identifying references (which look good to me) and critiques. In summary, I believe the "tax and spend" mantra is propaganda, and insupportable.
Besides just spending, and possibly way more important, is what you spend it on. Military (and space, I gotta admit) investments (beyond those needed to stay sovreign) reduce money to entropy, while school, infrastructure, technology investments leave something tangible in their wake. Both stimulate the economy. In the long run, the military method is worse.
We should lower military pay until we're short of soldiers, then start a draft. Our mercenary army removes the compulsion to be damn sure we really really want to have a war. (Obviously we need very strong legal setup to avoid a silver spoon draft: preventing people at the top (like me) from finding a nice safe field hospital for their special progeny. My suggestion is that the decisionmakers in our society must have their progeny at risk. I do not say we should drift to a mostly conscript army: our military is the most professional, humane, effective because of professional soldiers, but there should be an element of conscripts, just to force us to remember we all must share their risks in a very real way.
Income is unequally distributed (no surprise, and I am not suggesting inequity). The wikipedia article has a pretty good graph used to showing a growing spread, but the importance is not the time trend so much as the vertical distribution: roughly half the income is distributed amongst the top quarter of the households. While your reaction to the data is your own, the information is not good or bad, it is just unvarnished fact. Do we want it that way? What, if anything, should we do about this? Again, the trend is growing. Economic and taxation policies affect the curve: income EARNED is not the same as income KEPT after taxes & you should properly imagine that factor flattening the curve. I suggest, (and this is not a new argument) that where the government takes action, it should inject stimulus near the bottom. Living with less margins, those people will have to spend. Bubble up instead of trickle down.

Unusual workouts

2009-01-06T07:31:00.000-07:00

I want to come up with a bunch of unique & fun training events for this coming year. Here are some ideas I haven't done yet.

Funny walks: lunges & such.
NCAR repeats.
Water running? Vertical kicking, certainly.

Well, that's a lame start. gonna be a challenge...

Here are ones I did...

Backwards! Running, bike trainer, hills & stairs.
Ergometer with the aft end elevated a few inches (to work hamstrings).
Snowboarding (counts 'cause of extreme unusual pain: that's the criteria after all.)
towing loaded snowboard.
Running up Scott Carpenter hill (sometimes backwards) at a dead sprint. (30 reps).

New Year's Resolutions

2009-01-05T12:53:00.001-07:00

This is a little more private than facebook, so I want to put the resolutions here. I'm going to be terse...

Never lose my temper. This is especially true at work.
Expand workout scope significantly, and time in small ways. This means ~7hr to 10hr/week, and (this is the fun part) at least one hour should be unique or different, make some new muscle group hurt. I'm not going to do Tri, but will keep the big 3 in high abundance. Also strength and some cross training though. 178 lb average, touching 175. (Today, was 185, but have averaged 181 over December, so that's my "real" starting point.)
Organize the HELL out of my HDD. I think this is a form of gardening: good for the soul and produces a nice liveable environment.
Write, write, write. On paper and on the computer. A novel, and a daily log. (like, a half a page a day on actual papyrus!)
Solve relationship problems.
Speak less, so as to be less boring.

2009-01-05T05:11:00.000-07:00

Facebook? E-mail? Blog? Too many modalities. Bear with me. This (the blog) is obviously more ego centric: my input goes on the top, you only get to comment. It's a place for me to write publicly. Who knows if I will, or how much? Recent new year's resolutions now stipulate that I must, but most of that will private. (I said I'd write a book, not let anyone read it!)

Meanwhile, I like the egalitarian, synapse like stew of facebook: it is very immediate. That is it's benefit and downfall all at once. Somebody wrote me (within the facebook context) something like "what's up lately?" which on facebook should be an oxymoron on par with sending an e-mail reading, "sorry I missed you, e-mail me back," this harking to the voice mail of equivalent content I get all the time. Clearly social patterns outlive their usefulness: we execute them automatically.

So here is a "blog" and doubtless the letter format, which I have consciously slipped into, is not the best or most natural use of a blog format. I am going to be experimental about all this, and see if something "optimal" arises. Certainly the rules of the site form the skeletal architecture that controls how these beasts move and heave, eg again Facebook seems to encourage bursty sound bite stuff, the scrim and froth floating at the top, the last 10 minutes of life. Silly stuff, SO relevant now, and equally irrelevant next week. Thus, I am conscious of the pace or permanence of these different tools as something that at least 'feels' different from one tool to another. The blog feels like a longer timeframe, that it should contain something of more intrinsic worth than, "what's going on this weekend?" We shall see.

Most of this I've thought before, and am writing now just because I'm fresh from the resolution and Must write SOMEthing, however stupid. Perhaps one more simple modification to the promise: I won't bother the whole planet with my next vapid outburst: the writing helps me, helps me think, is fun, etc etc. But it is mostly stupid and would spare you the time spent getting this far and me some embarrassment if I keep it mostly to myself!

Well. That post rerquires one of these, I believe: :) ...they're used to erase whatever significance the reader may have mistakenly placed in the foregoing, right? Hahahaha!

Thank you, George

2008-12-23T17:32:00.001-07:00

The other night I was putting away the food. William was around, being useless.

"Fridge this!" I commanded the boy.

"Fridgificate!" he answered, affirmatively.

"...and this." (handing him another tupperware full)

"Fridgify aye aye!" sayeth the boy.

Whatever other legacy survives, only history will tell, but this much is sure: Mr. Bush has given us new language, the slang of the next decade or more, I'll wager.

We owe him huge.

Namue

2008-12-07T16:05:00.003-07:00

Memory was filling in, a satisfying feeling. “My brain is growing bigger all the time. Mostly I add to the map: can feel 75 thrums out and about twice that down, further when Father pings.” Namue thought these things, one after another in sequence. There was a precision in thinking sequentially, timing the thoughts. Each one flashed into being with a thrum of her heart, pushed up into consciousness with plenty of time to linger over the idea, watch it soak into memory, indelible, before the next stroke. All was sequence and rhythm, beginning with the heart. She had a mighty heart.

They all did, and one pulse from it would typically be enough to power two flukebeats, both up and down. Of course that could be varied, but it wasn't something you changed without conscious decision. It wasn't something you didn't think about, with a part of your self, with every single thrum, because each one had a cost, in time, energy, oxygen, trading for speed, distance, depth. Thrums measure life.

Every cost had it's accounting and the mighty machine of her body ran smoother faster deeper than those of the fishes because of the mind that drove it, the careful accounting that always balanced precisely every use of blood and sinew and air. She swam without ripples, breathed without splashing, left no vortex to swirl away energy.

“Yesterday, could NOT feel the bottom, had to dive 41 thrums to ping it from yet so far that 5 thrums could expire before the soft echo, squishy gooey mud all the way, barely changing from water to earth at all.” No need to go there. But remember that place, as all places are memorized.

Everything counted by thrums. Thrums divide into flukebeats, and flukebeats into distance and distance into time, which is hundredths or thousandths of heartbeats. “Live two million thrums, stroke a million flukebeats, eat 100 thousand fish, and love 10 thousand times, once for every sunrise.” That was the saying, though she did not understand all of it.

The lesson was first taught with tuna, fastest fish in the sea. Six moons old and her father, Enkei, told her at last to catch one, her own. Joyfully Namue dove to the task, anticipated for long dozens of sunrises.

“Where?” she had chirped softly back and, Father rolled and arced slightly so that his deeper thrum, focused down and forward naturally through his sternum, washed a dim blood red pulse of sound over the distant school, barely audible even to Namue and imperceptible to the stupid, skittish fish, some of whom must have heard the blood rush through the chamber, the valve snap shut, but in that case, thought it just another sound from the deep, because none of them bolted. An actual ping of course, would have scattered them.

Bubbles burst from her head at the excitement, she tripled her thrumbeat and accelerated in 7 or 8 swift strokes to her ultimate speed, near 28 knots, faster than all but the largest tuna could match, and then only for seconds, while she could hold it until the air ran out, some minutes hence.

Perhaps a thrum too early, she loosed a shock beam at the center of the school. They panicked, tuna darted in every direction. A cacophony of bubbles spinning off from cold spiny flukes as the school sought to save itself, stroking so hard the water boiled at their fintips. Namue followed her killing beam with a wider ping, to bring back the picture of the few broken fish caught in it's focus, from which she'd choose the fattest.
But nothing was there, only doppler-striped echoes from the fleeing fish each of which she had unconsciously tracked from their cavitation, 17 reformed there and doing most of her knots down and away, 3 there, regrouping and two others still zigging alone now lost from their school and, stupid fish, unable to find one another until dawn's light made them optically visible. Namue snorted at their incompetence. And yet they might win! Expecting to coast up on incapacitated prey, she had shut down propulsion and was now moving at barely 18 knots, obliquely away from the school. Angry and shamed, she switched to actively spraying pings every two thrums, fish darting when each death-foretelling click crackled their scales, but their turns only cut her distance and swimming for their lives, only a few of the school were holding their distance. The school calved and calved again, splintering to make her choose, and every time pride made her choose the faster until, 70 thrums into the chase, with oxygen beginning to wane, Namue was scant meters from the pack. One last wide blast, too unfocuesed to kill but equally untrackable so they couldn't know which way to flee gave her final targeting. She could hear their hearts now, count their ribs in her echo. With 8 more strokes she simply overhauled the 4th fastest fish in the school, a huge, two meter long male. She could feel him over the last chase, swimming up his frantic wake, tracking his vortex until it washed over her tongue and then was stilled.
Air-starved and hot, Namue coasted joyfully to the surface, holding the fish so father could see it, and because swallowing would use energy she didn't have, wouldn't, until the air was changed out, from her lungs, blood, and meat. Inexplicably he sulked out of sight as she wallowed, recharging with 5 deep breaths in as many minutes, barely diving a few dozen meters to coast blissfully out of the swell, finally gulping down the beautiful sashimi without the joy of sharing it with Father. He would know anyway, having seen all the echoes... Finally when he would not come her she coasted over, pup-like to be congratulated.

That's when she heard the saying first, as he sang it to her softly, a love song. It was so beautiful, she rolled smoothly in delight, between him and Mother, fluketips osculating so briefly with their bellies as they swam in perfect speed sync, and the first rays of green-gold dawn licked at the crests above.
“I will do all those things Father, but what do they mean?” Namue cooed back, as slowly as she could articulate, a labor some minutes long.

But he did not sing, he turned and addressed her with his killing beam, turned high enough to hurt, paced so that it was over fast as the slap of a wave. It was no caress but a blow, a blast of anger. She had to slow it down 10fold and play it back to hear: “For you, today it means this: you have killed a fish, Namue, at the cost of losing the school for your tribe, burning the fat out of them all, and the cost of a hundred thrums of your own. It will barely suffice you to kill another, and another and you will grow gaunt until you cannot outrun them at all and what shall they eat now?”

After his lecture, Father had rolled leftwards so that his thrumfocus painted the pod, lurking politely off to the side while the lesson was given. They looked variously curious and embarrassed for her in the echo she heard. But mother forcibly drove her into the center of the pod, where there were gentle congratulations, eager questions from her cohort, and she heard Father gurgle out a few happy wasteful bubbles as he coasted effortlessly back to the prow of the pod. He WAS proud, after all!

Namue glowed inside, and thought carefully on his words, ignoring all the incoming echoes, and even her own thrum, making sure the lesson was burned deep and promising herself, as only a whale can, that she would obey it forever.

Father surfaced and blew twice, unusually. He was now supercharged. What had befallen? Father threw a grunt-click backwards, alerting all to attend, but he meant her, and dove vertically in a smooth arc, too silent to follow. All tracked him by his thrum only which he was clearly arranging to be focused on the pod as a beacon. Then four things happened, timed fast as his thrums. First he surged to impossible speed, next a broad ping-ping illuminated the school which had flashed right after the first strike, then a faint echo of what had to be a killing beam, focused schoolward of course, and last, strokes of impossible speed and a crunch. Father gulped the second largest tuna and somersaulted to reverse course, coasting up to the focus of the beam, which he casually illuminated so everyone could see the biggest tuna imaginable lay precisely there, still imobile after a dozen thrums and possibly even broken by the strike. Gently holding it between tongue and the ivory banana-fangs of his upper maw, he brought it up, releasing it ahead of Mother so precisely that she, Shenishui, need only open her mouth to coast over her dinner.
As he rolled away, Namue chirped a question, but Enkei just continued his slow roll towards the surface, indulging in another breath, entirely unnecessary after the spectacular efficiency of the hunt. Namue could hear his thrum deep and slow as though still asleep, barely enough to power his body. Namue turned to Mother, questing.
“It is not joy, small thing. He is proud of you, and thus, of himself, as are we all.” Shenishui sang this slowly, relishing it, and followed to caress Enkei as he descended, enormous, unstoppable.

Energy to Move

2008-12-01T12:11:00.001-07:00

Here's some neat stuff from Wikipedia. The fuel efficiency of everything can be compared in terms of passenger seat miles: how much gas to move one passenger (the seat) for one mile. On wikipedia, they reduced it to mega-Joules and kilometers, but you can put it all together. So here you go, in order from best to worst (with some surprises in there...) are all the energy quantities burned, to move you one kilometer

heavy rail (long haul freight, flat ground, no stopping) 0.5 ml Wow!
Ocean liner: 1.7ml
bicycle, 4mL Nothing biological can touch a human on a bike.
walking, 10mL Still good, but not close to a bike.
regenerating diesel-bus 10mL (but only if it's full of people)
supercar: 20ml (next gen VW tandem diesel, @ 870mpg with 2 pax)
Jetliner (no kidding!) 30ml
hybrid (prius) 40ml
luxury ocean liner, 170ml

Couple of caveats, the speed really, really matters! Cars lose half their thrust to drag (and airplanes lose ALL their thrust to drag). What that means is that that VW supercar could probably beat a bike, running at similar speeds, but you're not likely to use it that way. Another thing you're not likely to use full is a diesel bus, which gets 5-6 MPG if it doesn't stop too much, so that thing is an environmental disaster if it's not at least half full. That's why we have to subsidize busses: they don't make sense.

Wikipedia declined to discuss pure electric or hydrogen cars because they are hard to compare: there are sequences of losses in the generation, distribution, charge and discharge of the electricity, (or Hydrogen) and it's all powered by the worst fuel known (coal. Hydrogen and electricity are not energy sources, they're converted coal (or nuclear) energy) but on a basis of raw cost to you, it's pretty cheap. I'll try to figure it out and post it, converting coal to gas on the basis of $, and on the basis of energy (which will be two dramatically different numbers).

Finally, the shot glass? That's 30ml, enough to move you one kilometer at Mach .6. Only it's drambuie, not Jet-a, so I drank it.

Wow, a really great training log

2008-12-01T11:00:00.000-07:00

Http://www.buckeyeoutdoors.com Check it out.

Thanksgiving

2008-11-27T21:22:00.000-07:00

Loads of food. My sister mentions the rule in their house is 10x your age in situps, after thanksgiving dinner. I'm halfway (240) as I finish this sentence. Holy crap. My friend (B) has already done his. He's *far* younger, but also stacked, so situps are tougher for him: haha!

Chicks Rule

2008-11-27T20:11:00.000-07:00

A card game:

Chicks Rule!

A game to play with Tarot cards.

A minimal ruleset was sought. We got it down to 10.

1) Play with a Tarot deck, and 4 or 6 players, in teams of 2, with partners sitting opposite one another.

2) Deal all the cards down, with the extras left as a "kitty."

3) Play for tricks, where the high card of the suit led (or trump card) wins each hand, and the winner leads the next hand.

4) If (and only if) you cannot follow the suit led, you may play any card in your hand.

5) A Tarot deck has a fifth suit ordinarily called trump. (...or the "major arcana," if you're majorly into Tarot) Chicks Rule has a variable trump suit that changes from hand to hand, so for clarity we simply renamed the fifth suit "bettys" to distinguish it from trump.

6) Before play begins, players bid, naming the quantity of tricks, and the suit they'd declare as trump. Suits are (in order) bettys, spades hearts, diamonds, clubs and "no trump." There is a suit order (only) to distinguish between two numerically equivalent bids: 5 no trump is an incrementally higher bid than 5 clubs.

7) The bid winner picks up the kitty, and discards an equal number of cards from his/her hand. No one else sees these cards.

8) Chicks rule. (Meaning, in this game, the Dame or Queen card outranks the Rex or King)

9) A Tarot deck has a card called the "fool." In this game, it is renamed the Nymph, and is the top trump: the most powerful card in the deck. If the hand is being played with "no trump," the Nymph reverts to a betty, albeit the highest one. (If your deck has a "universe" card and it has a chick on it, you can use that one for the Nymph instead of the Fool.)

10) If the team that won the bidding takes as many tricks as they proposed to, they score that many points. More tricks don't add points, (so it pays to bid all you can) but if too few tricks are taken, the opposing team accrues the value of the contract. To save time, teams on the defense can confer openly and elect to simply concede the balance of a hand.

History of the Game

"Chicks Rule!" was developed in a single night of extreme frustration in Los Barilles, Baja California. With no wind, numerous injuries and too much alcohol, a small team of engineers turned to nonstop cards to pass the time. After Bridge, Tarot, Rook, Hearts and War were exhausted, we tried to come up with a game that did not contain arbitrary rule baloney of Tarot, or the scoring complexity of Bridge, but retained team play and complex bidding strategy. Additional commentary on the rules is solicited but please keep in mind our intent to keep the rules very simple. Chess has simple rules with complex and interesting consequences, we hope this game does, too, and will try to keep it that way. This is the only legitimate source of adjudication for Chicks Rule, and all changes are subject to editorial review by the founding team of Marc, Guy, Trina, Peter, Robert and Mark. If you like Chicks Rule!, please send us lots of money.

Some simple notes on the Tarot deck for the uninitiated:

a) There's no Ace. There's a one, but it's low.

b) The "face cards" sometimes have letters to identify them: V,C,R,D (Standing for the words Val-yea, Cheval-yea, Rex and Dame, with aplogies to whatever the actual French pronunciation is supposed to be. Or, in the vernacular of the game, chump, chump on a horse, dude and Chick.)

c) Keep in mind the major arcana suit (the one with all the pictures) has 21 cards in it, instead of 13, so if that suit ends up trump, it's a long one.

d) It's easier to play if you write the numbers on the upper left corner of each card. Or, buy a more "conventional" looking deck that's laid out that way. (Impossible in Boulder.)

2007-11-15T12:38:00.000-07:00

Gotta come up with a blog to go with this cool picture.

Stargazing

2007-11-15T07:00:00.002-07:00

We went to a stargazing festival of some kind. There was hot chocolate, and the macho men had brignt green lasers to use as pointers. Aimed at infinity, they would seem to illuminate every dust particle. Like an infinite light saber, you could imagine it illuminating, rather than pointing out, a star.

The biggest telescope was 8' long, had a custom homemade wooden base to hold it's heavy base mirror. Varnished to a creamy yellow, it screamed of pride and retro-tech. (length to width ratio approximates a familiar object nicley: Freud, anyone?) There were a dozen such telescopes, aimed into the unknown with icy distain. Kids wandered with hot chocolate. Cheerful conversation. Braggadocio when two telescope people talked, simplistic paternal enumeration of the constellations when one spoke to a civilian at the head of his little line. Ask the right question and you might get to see the laser in operation!

Then the moment of truth. Patiently waiting, hearing four times over that "it's actually a triple star, very rare," I reach the front of the line and peer into the little tube. Hard at first to hold my eye still, & waiting for the lissajous figures to hold still after I bumped it. There they are! Dots. Just two. But I know, 'cause I've heard the patter 4x: "the last one's at 2:00 o'clock from the upper one, very close, and very dim." Ok! there it is! Three dots. Ok, who's next?

That's the trouble with skygazing, for me. Still just dots.

We saw a globular cluster (bunch a dots so far and close together they were blurry) and a comet (same blur, different object, this one 2 miles wide and hurtling straight at us, or was it a smudge.)

I actually had one very cool astronomical observance, For two weeks, comet something or other (Not Kouhoutek, that one always disappointed, maybe it was Hale-Bopp?) approached Virginia at Christmas time. Do you remember it? Just a smudge, really, 2" long between your fingers, it was so much less light than everything else manmade, it was hard to get excited. But it was there every night, and if you were in a dark place, it really was something. It gave off an aura of motion and speed somehow, though it held perfectly slow, it's motion against the starfield had to be measured overnight. You got the feeling this strange alien was implacable, enormous. And alien is a bad choice: there was no sense of aliveness. This was the clockwork of the galaxy, on display, operating wtihout transistors or unleaded gasoline. It would come by again, later, when all we protoplasm are reduced to the next cold sticky layer of black oil buried deep somewhere and the earth's a frozen rock. It wouldn't notice us, then ...or now.

There was a sense of wonder.

I often wanted a telescope. It was a cool instrument. But even then, as a kid, I realized that after saturn, and the orion nebula, what you had up there was mostly just dots. A sophomoric view but I hold it still