The South Side of Saturn

College-bound

2011-06-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

Joey has had 3 days of calculus at Colorado College and is having a great time.

I am working on a NASA proposal due in 15 days with friends and colleagues.

Christine and our friend Jenna, who just graduated from high school, are getting rid of my junk in the basement. It's OK as long as I don't look or ask what they recycled or threw out.

First world problems ...

My dad's house

2010-01-24T21:01:00.000-08:00

I went to Texas last month to get things moving so I can sell my dad's house. He died at age 85 on October 30, 2005, about a month after he fell in the house. He broke his neck and lay there for some time before he was discovered. My dad didn't have a valid will. I hired a lawyer, chosen pretty much out of the blue, in Kerrville. He discovered that the previous owners of the house, Mr. and Mrs. X, had failed to transfer the deed after the house was paid off. Furthermore, Mr. X had died and Mrs. X had moved to another state. So, even though I'm my dad's sole heir, I had no clear right to the house. I also didn't have much time to deal with it, because Christine, Joey and I were preparing to spend most of 2006 on a sabbatical in London. So the only thing that got done in 2006 was that my cousin Julie and her husband Jesse helped me go through the house, and I drove back to Colorado in my dad's car with stuff that had sentimental or possible financial value. The latter category included some jewelry, a few paintings, and the car itself.
My dad was a doctor and should have been able to retire comfortably, but he was bad with money. Getting divorced from his second wife when he was in his 80s didn't help.

I've been ignoring the house for years because dealing with it involves paying the lawyer, and what I'll get back is not clear. The house is a mobile home that wasn't in great shape when my dad died. In the last year, kids have broken windows on two occasions, and the place is really moldy. There were personal papers in the house that I wanted to go through, but I couldn't stand to be in there for much more than an hour at a time, so in the end I only took a few photo albums. The best thing that happened was that a couple with a store where they sell antiques and junk gave me $600 for the stuff remaining in the house. That includes clearing out everything except trash and a decrepit refrigerator. I'm so grateful to be rid of the house that I almost hope they make a big profit.

How can I force myself to write?

2008-10-06T17:49:00.000-07:00

Great thread on Ask Metafilter

October 6 2008

2008-10-06T16:47:00.000-07:00

It's Donkey Day. Today in history.

I've taken a couple of days off work since Christine got home on Thursday from the hospital. Her total knee replacement surgery, performed a week ago today, though she still has to take pain meds. She left the house today for the first time since Thursday. I took her to Longmont Clinic to get her blood drawn (she's on warfarin, aka coumadin), then to Lowe's. Our neighbor Ray the Handyman started painting our house today - just in time, as we're expecting our first frost tonight, and possibly our first snow next weekend.

This afternoon I read Planet Migration through a Self-Gravitating Planetesimal Disk, a preprint by a group at the University of Rochester. The main interest of the paper is that they performed N-body simulations on a GPU. We've talked about doing this at SwRI. It sounds like Moore, Quillen, and Edgar have figured out how to do it, using a C development environment from NVIDIA called CUDA. There's no connection with Sarah Palin, so far as I know.

Fixing Climate, Part 2

2008-09-14T16:25:00.000-07:00

Phil Orr took Broecker to Pyramid Lake in Nevada, which is a remnant of Lake Lahontan, one of the largest lakes in North America during the last Ice Age. Orr had found human and animal bones in Fishbone Cave on the eastern shore of the dry bed of nearby Lake Winnemucca. Orr believed that man had entered North America during the Ice Age, and suspected that the bones dated to that time. In 1955, "scholars" favored a more recent date. Orr was interested in having Broecker perform carbon-14 dating on the human bones and artifacts that he had found. Broecker also took samples of tufa, a form of calcium carbonate, from Pyramid Lake. Broecker and Orr collaborated for the rest of the 1950s. Orr's intuition proved to be correct, and the rises and falls of the lakes in the Great Basin got Broecker interested in climate.

Fixing Climate, Episode 1

2008-09-06T17:16:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I read Fixing Climate, by Wallace S. Broecker and Robert Kunzig. Broecker is a scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who is known for his work on the ocean conveyer belt and rapid climate change. Kunzig is a terrific science writer. I liked the book so much that I’m going to write about it here for a while.

Episode 1 (text from the book is given in italics):

Broecker gave his first scientific talk, as a graduate student, at an archeology meeting in Los Angeles on September 1, 1955. It was the hottest day ever to that point in LA – 110 degrees. He had been asked to give the talk by J. Laurence Kulp, who was a pioneer in the newly developed field of Carbon-14 dating. The archeologists were arguing about when people first arrived in the New World. After Broecker’s talk, Phil Orr of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History came up to him:

Phil Orr … was clearly more of a digger than a scholar; although he smoked a pipe, it had a cigar butt in it. He was a short man with a potbelly stuffed into jeans and cowboy boots. His face was shaped like an interstate highway shield – a wide forehead, uncluttered by hair, narrowing to a pointy, straggly bearded chin. That forehead overhung deep-set eyes that seemed made to squint. Orr eyeballed Broecker.

“Kid,” he said, for he was plenty old to be Broecker’s father. “I can see that you know a lot about physics and math. But I also see that you don’t know a goddamned thing about the earth.”

He paused to let that sink in, and to relight the cigar butt.

“Come with me for three weeks and I’ll change your life.”

Words That Make Me Stop Reading

2008-09-02T20:31:00.000-07:00

sheeple
blood and treasure
boots on the ground
speak truth to power
maverick
muscular foreign policy
chattering classes
executive experience
quick study
leverage
world-class

However, I do like the Educational Jargon Generator and the Automatic Computer Science Paper Generator.

2008 DDA meeting, Part 2

2008-05-07T19:18:00.000-07:00

Monday, April 28, 2008
Session 2: The Yarkovsky and YORP Effects
Invited Talk: Analytic Theory of the YORP Effect for Near-Spherical Objects

David Nesvorný, Southwest Research Institute

SwRI's own David gave a nice invited talk on YORP, a thermal effect that changes the spins of small bodies. The YORP effect was confirmed for two Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) in 2007, resulting in fame, fortune, and papers in Nature and Science for two groups. YORP may be the main mechanism that forms binaries among the NEAs. Most modeling of YORP has been done numerically, but David and David derived an expansion of the YORP torque in spherical harmonics that agrees well with numerical results for reasonably round bodies such as 1998 KY26.

In the same session, Steve Chesley of JPL gave a talk describing his work with David on a clever approach to look for the Yarkovsky effect in NEAs by modeling it as a transverse acceleration (a_t), just as he does to model nongravitational forces in comets. The model value of a_t translates into a drift rate in semi-major axis, which is the key effect he's looking for. As I recall, he has tentative detections for over a dozen NEAs. It just goes to show how prescient I was a decade ago when I got a proposal to review on how Yarkovsky might affect the orbits of asteroids. Many years before, I had learned of the Yarkovsky effect in a course taught by Joe Burns while he was on sabbatical in Berkeley. I had Yarkovsky pigeonholed as one of those strange radiation effects like Poynting-Robertson that applies to dust and rocks, but certainly not to mountains in space. Now there's a veritable Yarkovsky industry. If you want to read all about it, here's a review paper by Bill Bottke and the Davids. As Bill likes to say, with two Davids we can Czech and re-Czech our results.

Non-liveblogging the 2008 DDA meeting, part 1

2008-05-05T17:16:00.000-07:00

This year's Division on Dynamical Astronomy meeting seems to have been a success. Now that the meeting is over, I'm going to free-associate about one talk each day. We'll see how far I get!

Monday, April 28, 2008
Session 1: Stars and Galaxies
Invited Talk: Telling Tales with Tidal Tails

Kathryn V. Johnston, Columbia University

From Kathryn's abstract: In the last decade, the stellar halos of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies have been mapped in exquisite detail, revealing that they are actually richly substructured in phase-space due to the presence of debris from tidally disrupted satellites.

The Local Group consists of Andromeda, the Milky Way, and at least 33 smaller galaxies, which is appropriate since M33 is the largest of the nieces and nephews. As the eons pass, Andromeda and the Milky Way are engaging in galactic cannibalism, with the Clash of the Titans likely to occur in about 3 billion years. Until that large meal, we must subsist on snacks such as the Sagittarius stream. Streams are produced by tidal disruption of dwarf galaxies; similar tails are seen in simulations of the Moon-forming impact. The structure of the streams provides a sensitive probe of the Galactic potential at large distances. Ultimately, we will be able to compare aspects of the outer Galaxy, such as the shape of the halo, with that predicted by cosmological N-body simulations, some of which now follow over 10¹⁰ particles, i.e., more than one for every man, woman, and child on Earth. One of the key projects of NASA's planned Space Interferometry Mission telescope will be to determine Galactic structure out to hundreds of kiloparsecs, a region containing a number of tidal tails.

astro-ph search for papers about tidal streams and tidal tails

Lance Melting, 1968-2008

2008-04-20T19:49:00.000-07:00

Our friend Lance Melting, a special education teacher in Longmont, died in a car crash on I-70 just west of the Eisenhower Tunnel on Monday, March 31, 2008. April 5 would have been his 40th birthday. On that Monday, we had flown to Chicago to spend spring break with Christine's family. We had just enjoyed a lovely dinner with Christine's sister Cathy and her boyfriend Ron when I got a phone call from a friend in Longmont. She told me that Lance had died in a car accident that day, and that they might not know for days exactly what had happened. We looked on the Internet and found that there had been a fatality on Vail Pass. We knew it must be Lance, but couldn't imagine why he would have been driving in snowy conditions. Eventually we learned that he was driving his wife Jamie and their four kids to a vacation in Disneyland. Apparently the weather worsened abruptly on the west side of the tunnel. Lance was the only fatality in a series of three pileups that involved at least 60 cars. Jamie was released from the hospital five days after the accident. She faces a long recovery, but I think she will recover fully. Fortunately, the children only suffered bruises and scratches.

Lance worked with our son Joey, who has Asperger Syndrome, at Rocky Mountain Elementary School from kindergarten through 6th grade. Lance had amazing patience and empathy. Lance had to work with many kids, some with disabilities far more severe than Joey's, and yet we always felt that Joey got all the time he needed with Lance. I think Lance deserves a lot of the credit for the way Joey has turned into a kind, calm, thoughtful 14-year-old.

Yesterday Christine, Joey, and I went to Lance's memorial service at Skyline High School. About 1,000 people attended. There was a performance of martial arts by students, including two of his sons, from a school in Boulder at which Lance had been a student since 1993. A number of family members and friends spoke. I hadn't realized what a jock Lance had been! I hadn't figured him to be a football or rugby player. Finally, there was a slide show of Lance and his family. He always had a smile on his face, even though he had an incredibly difficult job that requires an amount of dedication I can't fathom.

Lance is survived by his wife Jamie Lathrop and their children Aaron, Andrew, Alex, and Abby. Contributions to the Lathrop-Melting Scholarship Fund, for the four children, can be sent in care of Ahlberg Funeral Chapel, 326 Terry St., Longmont, CO 80501.

Lance was born one day after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. I am consoled by the hope that somewhere in the world, a child was born this month who will do as much good as Lance did. He was one of the greatest people I have ever met.

Sputnik 1 Was Launched 50 Years Ago Today

2007-10-04T06:33:00.001-07:00

Fortunately, Harvard professors had the situation covered. That's a good thing, since the satellite was launched in haste when a Soviet plan to develop a rocket that could strike the US with a hydrogen bomb ran into trouble.

In other news, the head of NASA thinks that China will land people on the Moon sooner than the US will.

Superblast!

2007-10-03T21:11:00.000-07:00

Thanks to this post on Metafilter, I got a kick out of watching the Lush video of Superblast! Spooky was one of my fave cassettes of the 90s. It's ironic that the music of Lush et al. was called 'shoegazer' in the UK, since that makes it sound like they were mumbling Finnish folk songs. Superblast! sounds just what you would expect from the title.

Lots more at Andy von Pip's Miki Berenyi site.

50 Years Ago Today

2007-09-24T20:32:00.000-07:00

.. I was born, but I'll get to that another time. On the same day, September 24, 1957, President Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas, to end a crisis that had dragged on through September as nine black students attempted to enter Central High School. The next day, September 25,

Staring straight ahead the youngsters formed a single file and, surrounded by some of America's best soldiers carrying rifles with bayonets fixed, they marched through a jeering crowd into the school to begin the fall term after two previous failed attempts. As the nation and much of the world watched, Central High School became desegregated. The 14th amendment to the United States Constitution, which mandates that no American will be deprived of the equal protection of the laws, had been upheld.

I'm proud to have been born on this historic day.

Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil

2007-09-02T18:54:00.000-07:00

This summer I've read a couple of books about oil and the countries that supply it. Both were excellent. The first was Untapped, by John Ghazvinian, a freelance journalist with a Ph.D. in history from Oxford. Untapped primarily focuses on sub-Saharan Africa. Ghazvinian visited twelve countries, including Nigeria, Angola, Equatorial Guinea, and Chad. To get a flavor of Untapped, see the excerpts that appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review and Slate.

Ghazvinian provides a balanced, slightly hopeful account of the shifting political landscape. Although oil companies, western governments, and African governments are all guilty of malfeasance, I don't think the flat or declining standard of living in most African oil-exporting countries is due to a First World conspiracy. The curse of oil - a special case of the resource curse - is a thorny problem with no known solution, especially in countries without accountable governments. Interestingly, Ghazvinian is sympathetic to the Chinese approach [Times Select], which avoids 'micromanaging' of the nations in which they invest. I don't think he has a political axe to grind. Rather, he's just saying that the western approach hasn't delivered. In the last chapter of Untapped, Ghazvinian writes

China has forgiven literally billions of dollars of bilateral debt from African countries in recent years - something Western debt-relief campaigners have tried for years to get their governments to do. It has also set up scholarships allowing some 10,000 African students to be educated in China, and sent hundreds of doctors and teachers to the continent. In 2005 even agreed to build that desperately needed road between Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire [Congo-Brazzaville's port city], something no amount of Western aid has ever accomplished.

I'm not sure I buy this, but I don't have a good counterexample. And while China's tacit approval of human rights abuses in the Sudan and Zimbabwe is appalling, I'm glad to see that they've reached their limit in Zimbabwe. A Chinese official recently told the UK's Foreign Office Minister that in view of the crisis in Zimbabwe, China now will only provide humanitarian aid.

Doomsday machine

2007-09-01T19:51:00.000-07:00

Ron Rosenbaum has an article in Slate about the possibility that the Russians have a Doomsday Machine. However, now that the active Russian strategic arsenal is only 3,300 warheads, I should learn to stop worrying. After all, President Putin is very straightforward and trustworthy. I think I should focus on the Axis of Evil. I hear they're seeking weapons of mass destruction. If there's one thing we don't want, it's for the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

When bad things happen to good solar systems

2007-06-27T15:39:00.000-07:00

Two preprints discuss a new scenario for the first 100 million to 1 billion years of solar systems with more than one giant planet. In brief:

1. Giant planets form in a gas disk. The planets are spaced more closely than in our own solar system.
2. The planets migrate due to torques from the disk.
3. The planets are captured into mean-motion resonances with each other.
4. The gas disk dissipates.
5. The planets' orbits spread because of gravitational interactions with the remnant disk of solid bodies (planetesimals).
6. The migration causes the planets to cross strong resonances which destabilize the system.

In the "mild" case, most of the planetesimals (i.e., a massive primordial Kuiper belt) are ejected from the system, but most or all of the planets survive. After the instability occurs, the planets eventually settle into well-separated, nearly circular orbits, as in the Nice model. While the planetesimals are flying through the system, a Late Heavy Bombardment of the planets takes place.

In the "wild" case, planets can be ejected, and the final orbits of the surviving planets can be eccentric, as is the case for many of the known extrasolar planets.

I'm back ...

2007-03-07T20:05:00.000-08:00

... though I don't know if I'm better than ever. I caught a cold from Joey and have been in bed since Monday afternoon. I've slept a lot, interspersed with reading A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power and a year-old article in Harper's by Bryan Mealer, "Congo's Daily Blood". (The link only gives you part of the article for free; the Harper's website is pretty useless.) You can download an mp3 of Mealer talking to Leonard Lopate at WNYC shortly after the events in 2005 that he reported in Harper's here. Lopate also did a segment on "girl soldiers" in the Congo last week.

And in today's news:

KINSHASA, March 7 (Reuters) - Democratic Republic of Congo's top nuclear research official has been arrested, the government said on Wednesday, after a Kinshasa newspaper reported uranium had gone missing from an atomic institute in the city....

Last year diplomatic and intelligence sources told Reuters that countries suspected of seeking nuclear arms might have exploited lax security in Congo to obtain uranium.

Great, just great.

White (but Not Nerdy) Dwarfs

2007-01-16T20:32:00.001-08:00

I heard a cool talk today by Ted von Hippel from the University of Texas. His seminar dealt with disks around white dwarfs. This subject began twenty years ago with a paper by Zuckerman and Becklin titled Excess infrared radiation from a white dwarf - an orbiting brown dwarf? The answer was no - the IR emission appears to arise from a dusty ring around G29-38. Five such dust disks around white dwarfs are now known. More tomorrow!

Winter

2007-01-08T15:03:00.000-08:00

Though we haven't had an avalanche in Longmont, our Toyota Sienna got stuck in the snow in our neighborhood twice last Friday. I'll take that over rolling 10 or 15 times before slamming into a tree. This is the first time in the 12-year history of our office that snow has hung around on the plains week after week, even with some warm weather between storms. More snow is expected around Thursday, with several frigid days to follow.

Happy 3 x 3 x 223

2007-01-01T05:52:00.000-08:00

We're home! This isn't a prime year, but 20070101 is a prime day. Joey and I walked to Safeway yesterday to get groceries. Christine shoveled. Leo watched. Friends helped us out. Happy New Year to everyone!

Chilly olde London

2006-12-19T09:22:00.000-08:00

Last weekend's fair in honor of the years when the Thames froze seemed an exercise in nostalgia, since the river last froze in 1814. This week, with the Sun keeping bankers' hours, the temperature hovering around freezing, and constant fog, the conditions in Dickens' classic story are easier to imagine.

Paper of the week

2006-12-18T05:05:00.001-08:00

Evolution of the Obliquities of the Giant Planets in Encounters during Migration

Authors: Man Hoi Lee (UCSB), S. J. Peale (UCSB), Eric Pfahl (KITP), William R. Ward (SwRI)

Comments: 13 pages, including 2 figures; uses AASTeX; submitted to Icarus

Tsiganis et al. (2005) have proposed that the current orbital architecture of the outer solar system could have been established if it was initially compact and Jupiter and Saturn crossed the 2:1 orbital resonance by divergent migration. The crossing led to close encounters among the giant planets, but the orbital eccentricities and inclinations were damped to their current values by interactions with planetesimals. Brunini (2006) has presented widely publicized numerical results showing that the close encounters led to the current obliquities of the giant planets. We present a simple analytic argument which shows that the change in the spin direction of a planet relative to an inertial frame during an encounter between the planets is very small and that the change in the obliquity (which is measured from the orbit normal) is due to the change in the orbital inclination. Since the inclinations are damped by planetesimal interactions on timescales much shorter than the timescales on which the spins precess due to the torques from the Sun, especially for Uranus and Neptune, the obliquities should return to small values if they are small before the encounters. We have performed simulations using the symplectic integrator SyMBA, modified to include spin evolution due to the torques from the Sun and mutual planetary interactions. Our numerical results are consistent with the analytic argument for no significant remnant obliquities.

Letter
Nature 443, 1013 (26 October 2006) | doi:10.1038/nature05298
Retraction: Origin of the obliquities of the giant planets in mutual interactions in the early Solar System
Adrián Brunini
Nature 440, 1163–1165 (2006)
When a new, independent code is used for the calculations on which the conclusions of this Letter were based, the results reported for the evolution of obliquity cannot be reproduced. This code was written in the inertial frame and is more reliable than the one used in the Letter. In most runs, the obliquities can change by only a few degrees and attain large values in only a very few cases. In addition, the obliquity variation shown in the Supplementary Information, although correct, originates from changes in the orbital inclination of the planet, and close encounters are not effective in causing large obliquities.

This was a strange episode. I can't recall another case in my field in which a paper in Nature or Science was retracted, not because of malfeasance, but just because the calculations were completely wrong. I feel bad for Brunini.

... but I will miss the silly British names

2006-12-15T02:57:00.000-08:00

Princess Diana believed that Prince Charles wanted to bump her off so that he could marry, not Camilla, but William and Harry's former nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke. Ms. Legge-Bourke, now Mrs. Alexandra Pettifer, was once related through her sister's marriage to the family of Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, KCB, DSO, JP, DL.

More silly names of people and places.

Home with the armadillo

2006-12-15T00:19:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we returned from Paris, where we had a great time. Today brings a terrific post on Londonist, my source of all information. Pickering Place, the smallest square in London, was not only the home of the Texas diplomatic corps, but also the place where the last duel in England was fought. In the meantime, to fend off London's short, grey winter days, let's all sing the song written while Texas' Official Ambassador to the World was stranded and broke in 1973.

LONDON HOMESICK BLUES
(Gary P. Nunn)

Well, when you're down on your luck,
and you ain't got a buck,
in London you're a goner.
Even London Bridge has fallen down,
and moved to Arizona,
now I know why.
And I'll substantiate the rumor
that the English sense of humor
is drier than the Texas sand.
You can put up your dukes,
and you can bet your boots,
that I'm leavin' just as fast as I can.

Chorus;
I wanna go home with the armadillo.
Good country music from Amarillo and Abilene.
The friendliest people and the prettiest women
you've ever seen.

Well it's cold over here, and I swear,
I wish they'd turn the heat on.
And where in the world is that English girl,
I promised I would meet on the third floor.
And of the whole damn lot, the only friend I got,
is a smoke and a cheap guitar.
My mind keeps roamin', my heart keeps longin'
to be home in a Texas bar.

Chorus

Well, I decided that, I'd get my cowboy hat
and go down to Marble Arch Station.
'Cause when a Texan fancies, he'll take his chances,
and chances will be takin, now that's for sure.
And them Limey eyes, they were eyein' a prize,
that some people call manly footwear.
And they said you're from down South,
and when you open your mouth,
you always seem to put your foot there.

Chorus
Chorus

Faith-based forecasts

2006-12-07T13:06:00.000-08:00

Today I took a walk to Whitechapel during my lunch break. The headline of The World's Greatest Newspaper caught my eye. The article raised the prospect of millions being unable to travel home during the holidays and quoted "Piers Corbyn, director of Weather Action long-range forecasters":

We are going to see two main waves of storms, with three serious bursts in total. They will all be worse than last weekend, but we will see a steady deterioration. By the end of the month things are going to be really bad.

That caught my attention, since we're supposed to fly home to Colorado on December 30. The article quoted Corbyn saying that three storms would take place between the 13th-15th, 18th-20th and 27th-29th of December. That level of detail up to three weeks from now sounded, well, impossible, since a 2004 News Focus by Dick Kerr in Science cited Anthony Hollingsworth at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts as stating that in its nearly 25-year history, work on medium-range forecasting by computer models has extended the length of high-quality forecasts from about 2 days to about 4 days. "I hope we'll see useful 10-day forecasts by the end of this decade, in the winter at least," said Hollingsworth.

However, when I get back to my office, I read about the tornado in London. Aha - maybe that Corbyn guy is on to something! At home tonight I looked up the Daily Express article, which went on to say

Mr Corbyn said the new storms were being caused by unusual activity on the Sun, which he said influences the Earth’s weather patterns. He explained: “We are seeing extra magnetic activity from the Sun and extra particles in the solar wind.

“The strength of the Earth’s magnetic connection with the Sun determines our weather to a large extent, so we will see solar storms mirrored here on Earth.”

Oh, right, I remembered. It's this guy! More power to him if he can invent a better mouse trap, but I think I'll take my chances with my eyes being all aglow for Christmas on British Airways.

Today's 11 AM London weather: Cloudy with a chance of being snatched by gobblers

2006-12-07T07:28:00.000-08:00

from Bloomberg: The strongest tornado to hit London in more than half a century touched down in Kensal Rise, a neighborhood in the U.K. capital's northwest, injuring at least six people and damaging buildings with winds of as much as 130 miles an hour (210 kilometers).

The tornado was ``severe'' said Terence Meaden, deputy director of the U.K.'s Tornado and Storm Research Organization. Witnesses said the sky went dark, lightning flashed and a powerful blast of wind tore through the area at about 11 a.m. local time today.

The tornado was classified T4 on an intensity scale that runs from T0 to T10, said Meaden.... Judging by television footage, today's tornado appeared to have been in contact with the ground for about two minutes, causing damage across a pathway as long as a mile and as wide as 200 yards, he said.

Plots within plots

2006-12-06T05:03:00.000-08:00

The terrific Anne Applebaum summarizes the Litvinenko case.

A stonking good Christmas to you all

2006-12-05T00:20:00.000-08:00

Last night, workers set up a 15-foot Christmas tree outside a nearby dorm while we drank mulled wine, ate mince pie, and sang carols. It was lovely. Unfortunately, by midnight high winds had knocked the tree over.

If I go to heaven, I hope I can watch the ten least successful holiday specials of all time, even if they were never actually made.

This post is just a quick hack

2006-12-02T12:04:00.000-08:00

Today we walked from our flat through Bethnal Green to Hackney. On the way, we walked by Überhaus, which, despite its ludicrous name, may become London's answer to Rat Wharf. I finally found out how the term "hackneyed" arose: In the middle ages, Hackney was rural, and became famous for its horses. World Wide Words goes on:

Horses of the hackney type were often worked heavily, in the nature of things that were hired out to all and sundry. So the word evolved in parallel with the previous sense to refer figuratively to something that was overused to the point of drudgery. By the middle of the sixteenth century, hackney was being applied to people in just this sense, and was abbreviated about the start of the eighteenth century to hack, as in hack work; it was applied in particular to literary drudges who dashed off poor-quality writing to order—hence its modern pejorative application to journalists.

Hackney horses were also widely available and commonly seen, to the extent that they became commonplace and unremarkable. So yet another sense evolved—for something used so frequently and indiscriminately as to have lost its freshness and interest, hence something stale, unoriginal or trite. The adjective hackneyed communicated this idea from about the middle of the eighteenth century on.

Panteau(laimon)

2006-12-02T03:16:00.000-08:00

Last night we attended the last performance of the Queen Mary Players' performance of The Three Musketeers, Le Panteau. It was a pantomime, which, does not, as you might think, involve white-faced mutes. I knew nothing about pantomime before the show. I thought it would be a short play for kids. In fact, it was a 3-hour cavalcade of bad puns, cross-dressing, off-color jokes, and French-bashing. In other words, a microcosm of life in England. I now understand the roots of Monty Python.

Rogue elements

2006-12-01T02:04:00.000-08:00

Today's Guardian says that "'rogue elements' within the Russian state" are now suspected in Litvinenko's death. I assume that "rogue element" refers to the perpetrator, not the polonium. I've long been puzzled by the use of the word "rogue," as in "rogue states". A rogue state seems to be a country that we deem irrational, so we don't need to talk to its rulers. The first two definitions of rogue in dictionary.com are

1. a dishonest, knavish person; scoundrel.
2. a playfully mischievous person; scamp: The youngest boys are little rogues.

Now, while I don't think for a minute that Litvinenko's killers are lovable scamps, I do think that these definitions contain an element of truth. After this summer's airline plot was announced, Marina Hyde wrote a wonderful column:

... for the past few years suspected terrorists have been mounting training exercises in the national parks of England and Wales, notably in the Lakes, Yorkshire Dales and Brecon Beacons. In many ways, this is unsurprising. As you will doubtless be aware, there is an unwritten British bylaw that decrees all residential improvement courses must take place in the Lake District. Cordon bleu cooking, watercolour painting (intermediate level), and now jihad - nowhere can these disciplines be better absorbed than in Wordsworth country...

Soon after last year's London bombings, a photograph emerged that featured two of the perpetrators whitewater rafting in North Wales. Apparently this was the leisure activity during some kind of al-Qaida bonding weekend...

It does not belittle murder to admit that that murder is being planned by a bunch of intense, lost, silly boys. But it should absolutely affect our response. Is it truly worthy of us to dismantle long-cherished legal freedoms for this lot? Quite how we will explain the decision to the proverbial grandchildren is hard to say....

This should not for a moment suggest that the danger from such people is not real. But being unable to laugh at it is a danger itself. It implies a critical lack of self-belief, suggesting virtues and values to be so tenuous that they can be shaken by Mittyish socio- or psychopaths, when the reality is that we will never be able to fully protect ourselves against some kinds of ingenuity.

Polonium on a plane

2006-11-29T12:46:00.000-08:00

"Small traces of radiation" have been found on two British Airways planes.

"The airline now faces a logistical nightmare tracking down 33,000 passengers who used more than 200 affected flights over the past month, as well as 3,000 staff."

The connection to the death of Alexander Litvinenko isn't clear yet.

Update (November 30, 2006): Now we're up to five "planes of interest".

The persistence of Polonium

2006-11-27T12:52:00.000-08:00

I remain shocked, nine days after the story broke in the western media, that an ex-Russian spy was killed with Polonium-210. Steinn Sigurðsson, Derek Lowe and Paul Revere have excellent posts. In Colorado, where we usually live, radon levels in homes are generally high. When we bought a house, testing showed high Rn levels within, so the sellers had to install a system to pump out radon. The danger is actually from polonium:

If inhaled, radon decay products (polonium-218 and polonium-214, solid form), unattached or attached to the surface of aerosols, dusts, and smoke particles, become deeply lodged or trapped in the lungs, where they can radiate and penetrate the cells of mucous membranes, bronchi, and other pulmonary tissues. The ionizing radiation energy affecting the bronchial epithelial cells is believed to initiate the process of carcinogenesis. Although radon-related lung cancers are mainly seen in the upper airways, radon increases the incidence of all histological types of lung cancer.... (from the US Environmental Protection Agency).

Of course, we're talking about modest increases in risk in homes with radon above the federal standard, not death within a month as in Litvinenko's case. The health risks of polonium are discussed here.

And if you have anything left after reading Pynchon's book ...

2006-11-21T10:09:00.000-08:00

From a Guardian article, "For those about to rock, Kim Jong-il salutes you" about a proposed music festival next May:

Rock For Peace, which takes place next May in North Korea's capital, Pyongyang, "will be the 2007 version of Woodstock rock festival in 1969 but in a different location and with different goals".

Though not a place historically associated with free love and hippy wig-outs, all that is about to change, with organisers embracing "capitalist popular music" for the first time. And, in keeping with the laissez-faire spirit of rock festivals, there are few restrictions: "Lyrics should not contain admirations on war, sex, violence, murder, drug, rape, non-governmental society, imperialism, colonialism, racism, anti-DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea), and anti-socialism."

Update (November 29, 2006): U.S. tailors sanctions to annoy N. Korea's Kim: Ban on iPods, plasma TVs, jet skis targets leader's swanky lifestyle

No word yet on how this will affect Rock for Peace.

Pretty much everything you need

2006-11-21T03:25:00.000-08:00

The headline of Bloomberg's review of Against the Day:

Pynchon's First Novel in 10 Years Has Sex, Math, Explosives.

Keep your 40, I'll just have an Earl Grey tea

2006-11-20T14:50:00.000-08:00

Only 40 days are left of our 9 months in London.

I installed Fedora Core 6 on my laptop. NTFS-3G seems to work; i.e., I can write to my Windows XP partition from Linux. These truly are the end times.

Our ally in the War on Terror

2006-11-20T05:06:00.000-08:00

A defector from the KGB, Alexander Litvinenko, was poisoned with thallium in London. He was investigating the death of Anna Politkovskaya. Eastern bloc dissidents have been targeted before in London. The Kremlin has dismissed claims of its involvement in the poisoning as "sheer nonsense".

Beyond belief

2006-11-19T12:47:00.000-08:00

Some of the best minds of our generation met in La Jolla a week ago to discuss replacing religion with science. I can see the appeal - I'd rather live in the 21st century than the 9th - but I have little confidence that scientists are wiser than priests, rabbis, or imams. I'm sympathetic to the views of Lawrence Krauss:

"The presumption here was that any effort to respect the existence of faith is a bad thing," he told New Scientist. "Philosophically I'm in complete agreement, but it's not a scientific statement, and I've seen how offensive it is when scientists say 'I can tell you what you have to think'. They make people more afraid of science. It's inappropriate, and it's certainly not effective."

Where we live

2006-11-19T10:09:00.000-08:00

From Trainspotting:
Mile End by Blur:

We didn't have nowhere to live,
we didn't have nowhere to go
til someone said
"I know this place off Burdett Road."

It was on the fifteenth floor,
it had a board across the door.
It took an hour
to prise it off and get inside.
It smelt as if someone had died;
the living room was full of flies,
the kitchen sink was blocked,
the bathroom sink not there at all.

Ooh, it's a mess alright,
yes it's
Mile End.

And now we're living in the sky
I never thought I'd live so high,
just like Heaven,
if it didn't look like Hell.
The lift is always full of piss,
the fifth floor landing smells of fish
not just on Friday,
every single other day.
Below the kids come out tonight,
they kick a ball and have a fight
and maybe shoot somebody if they lose their cool.
Ooh,
it's a mess alright,
yes it's
Mile End.

Nobody wants to be your friend
cos you're not from round here, ooh
as if that was
something to be proud about.
The pearly king of the Isle of Dogs
feels up children in the bogs.
Down by the playing fields,
someone sets a car on fire
I guess you have to go right down
before you understand just how,
how low,
how low a human being can go.

Ooh,
it's a mess alright,
yes it's
Mile End.

Actually, it's not that bad except for having to evacuate our building at least once a week because someone has taken a shower with the door open a femtometer, setting off the fire alarm and causing several trucks from the London fire brigade to converge on our building. As Joey points out, the evacuations are the main form of social gathering in the dorms.

This post was inspired by Londonist.

A holocaust archive in Germany is going public next year

2006-11-19T09:54:00.000-08:00

The Associated Press has published the first article in a series about the largest archive of Nazi prison records.

This vast archive — 16 miles of files in six nondescript buildings in [Bad Arolsen], a German spa town — contains the fullest records of Nazi persecutions in existence. But because of concerns about the victims’ privacy, the ITS has kept the files closed to the public for half a century, doling out information in minimal amounts to survivors or their descendants on a strict need-to-know basis....

... the files occupy a former barracks of the Waffen-SS, the Nazi Party’s elite force. They are stored in long corridors of drab cabinets and neatly stenciled binders packed into floor-to-ceiling metal shelves. Their index cards alone fill three large rooms....

Another subject is the sheer scope of the Holocaust system. The files will support new research from other sources showing that the network of concentration camps, ghettos and labor camps was nearly three times more extensive than previously thought.

Postwar historians estimated about 5,000 to 7,000 detention sites. But after the Cold War ended, records began pouring out of the former communist nations of East Europe. More sites were disclosed in the last six years in claims by 1.6 million people for slave labor reparations from a $6.6 billion fund financed by the German government and some 3,000 industries.

“We have identified somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 camps and ghettos of various categories,” said Geoffrey Megargee of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, who is compiling a seven-volume encyclopedia of these detention centers.

Laid back (with my mind on my money and my money on my mind)

2006-11-15T08:44:00.000-08:00

I just saw a talk by Igor Aleksander on "Conscious Machines: Fiction or Fact". Aleksander has worked on "conscious machines" for 45 years. A review of his recent book World in My Mind, My Mind in the World is here. Nice talk by a charming guy, but right now the answer is fiction. More later....

In the meantime, I just heard on the BBC World Service that global warming may force French winemakers to consider the "nightmare scenario" of growing their grapes in England. Sacre bleu!

Emily Yoffe does it again

2006-11-15T05:35:00.000-08:00

Emily Yoffe tries to learn enough math to help her daughter with sixth-grade homework:

Now that I had it memorized through 10, it was liberating to know how much 8 x 7 was. But my homework, which I used to toss off in 10 minutes, was taking me an hour to complete ....

One night, my husband asked to see the packet I was working on.

He flipped the pages and asked, "This is hard for you?"

"Yes," I replied.

"Seriously?" he said, eyes widening. When I assured him it was, I realized I was looking at the face of a man staring into the evolutionary abyss. I could see he was regretting that he had allowed his DNA to be carried into the future merged with mine. Luckily, our daughter is good at math.

Brodsky on Sunday

2006-11-14T13:25:00.000-08:00

On Sunday Christine and I saw the Brodsky Quartet at Wigmore Hall, which is "justifiably regarded as one of the world's great recital halls." (I'd never heard of it until recently.) It's a small venue that hosts over 400 concerts a year and keeps prices low. The acoustics were terrific, and we had fourth-row seats. Brodsky played three interesting string quartets - Mozart's no. 17, Shostakovich's no. 3, and Schumann's no. 3. plus an encore of Liszt's Liebesträume. The Shostakovich piece, which he wrote in 1946 in between denunciations by Stalin, was the highlight.

Fair and balanced

2006-11-08T07:49:00.000-08:00

Brian at Iowa Voice explains what the election results mean:

aid and comfort to the enemy

amnesty

defeat and retreat

economy into the crapper

extreme political correctness

inevitable recession

massive investigations

multi-culturalism

obstruct everything

open borders beyond belief

pandering to Islamic extremists

socialized medicine

Yup, that's pretty much everything we Democrats are hoping for, although he forgot fetus harvesting for spare parts.

[Links from Daou Report]

UPDATE: Here's our real agenda. Don't say we didn't warn you.

San Francisco values

2006-11-08T04:40:00.000-08:00

Amazingly, the Democrats held on and won the House. The Senate is still in reach, with the Virginia and Montana races too close to call. I'm still not clear on why Jim Webb is running as a Democrat, although I do like the term Redneck Bar Mitzvah for the ritual of sending your teenaged son off to war.

In other news, Bitch Ph.D. has the best post of the month. I really thought I was coming to a better land when we headed to London for nine months, but, although the grass is greener here, I'll be happy to return to the USA.

Midnght at L'Oasis

2006-11-07T13:16:00.000-08:00

Last night I attended a fun dinner. I thought we'd be doing this a lot, but we've found it hard to meet people on campus. The dinner was for the "planet builder" candidates for a junior faculty job. I know three of the candidates. I got to hang out with one of them and his girlfriend before dinner, and sat next to another during the meal. The university paid for dinner and the head of school and his assistant plied us with drinks. I thought it was about 10 pm when we left, so I was shocked that it was 11:40 when I walked in the door of our flat. Christine and Joey were faithfully awaiting me.

Snakes on a Plane(t)

2006-08-20T10:11:00.000-07:00

Some of my esteemed colleagues are in Prague at the IAU General Assembly debating what a planet is. To Pluto or not to Pluto, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler to suffer the plucky underdog to stay in the club, or by opposing, kill our kids' favorite planet. A week ago, it appeared that Pluto would retain its title, and that Ceres, Charon, and 2003 UB313 would be late-season callups, with other hunks of ice and rock waiting in the wings. However, the home team is now staging a spirited rally. The upshot of the counterargument is that Pluto is too small to clear its "zone" of the Solar System.

I have some modest suggestions to break this logjam.

(1) Let Pluto remain the 9th planet, but give it an asterisk like Roger Maris' home run record. (Apparently Maris' record never had an asterisk, but never mind.)

(2) Call the planets known to the ancients (Mercury through Saturn, Earth excluded) "classical planets"; Uranus and Neptune "European planets", in honor of their discoverers Herschel, Le Verrier, and (maybe) Adams; and Pluto the "American planet" for Tombaugh. Any new ones can be "e-planets".

(3) Same as #2, except adopt the Star Trek planet classification.

(4) Punt until 2014 when the planet-dissolving dust cloud wipes out the Solar System.

British Spies in the USA, 1940-1945

2006-08-20T09:23:00.000-07:00

The Saturday Guardian has a fascinating article by William Boyd about British Security Coordination, a covert operation in the US whose goal was to get America to enter the war.

... at the nadir of Britain's fortunes, polls in the US still showed that 80% of Americans were against joining the war in Europe. Anglophobia was widespread and the US Congress was violently opposed to any form of intervention. After the fall of France in June 1940, Britain's position became even weaker - it was assumed that British capitulation was simply a matter of time; why join the side of a doomed loser, ran the argument in the US. Roosevelt's hands were therefore thoroughly tied.

Hundreds or thousands of people worked for BSC, which was run from Rockefeller Center in New York by William Stevenson, a Canadian World War I flying ace and businessman. BSC operations included "denigration [of] those organisations perceived to be pro-Nazi or virulently isolationist"; planting stories on radio and in the press; the creation of booklets listing "up to 500 ways of harassing and annoying Nazi sympathisers" such as putting dead rats in water tanks; and, apparently, forging a map showing that Hitler planned to invade South America and Panama. Franklin Roosevelt announced the existence of the map in a speech on October 27, 1941:

"Hitler has often protested that his plans for conquest do not extend across the Atlantic Ocean. I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler's government - by the planners of the new world order. It is a map of South America and a part of Central America as Hitler proposes to reorganize it." This map, the President explained, showed South America, as well as "our great life line, the Panama Canal," divided into five vassal states under German domination. "That map, my friends, makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States as well."

Tower Hamlets Fair

2006-08-05T05:50:00.000-07:00

We live in the London borough of Tower Hamlets in the area of Mile End. Last Saturday we spent an hour at the Tower Hamlets Community Fair in Mile End Park, ten minutes' walk from our flat at Queen Mary College. The fair was, for the most part, a Muslim event, which I hadn't expected. We felt welcome enough, but Joey was outraged when Christine had to stand in a women-only line to buy food. I was just bemused that she was willing to do it.

Civil Twilight: 3:56 AM, 10:10 PM BST

2006-06-21T03:57:00.000-07:00

Happy Midsummer! There's an awesome free music festival in South Kensington, where the Natural History, Victoria and Albert, and lots of other museums are located. Christine and Joey just stopped by my office on their way there, and I'm joining them at 7 pm.

Yesterday Christine got her backpack stolen from underneath her nose at a Starbucks by Buckingham Palace. The thief only got fruit and veg, so it was no big loss. Christine and Joey were celebrating because she has now lost over 4 stone on Weight Watchers, and Joey and I have lost weight too. Walking in London is great for us.

I keep waking up at 4:45 because the Sun has risen :-)

Feelin' hotte! hotte! hotte!

2006-05-04T06:06:00.000-07:00

We've been in London since March 31, when two ladies from UK Immigration at Heathrow admitted us after taking our passports and wrinkling their brows. We didn't have entry clearance, so we were admitted for 6 months with no recourse to public funds, instead of 9 as planned. At this point I probably will have to fly to Los Angeles to get the right visa.

It was surprisingly cold for most of our first month, but right now it's 79 degrees. The students, who were on holiday for much of April, have reappeared and are drinking beer in the plaza between the Maths building and the Student Center. On my way back from the library, I was delighted to see an ice cream truck selling Emmie's Super Soft. To my surprise, I was able to put together a pound from 5, 10, and 20p coins, and enjoyed the cone 'with sauce' immensely.

My officemate has a visitor from Oxford today, and I had a telecon with my awesome French colleagues this morning. This is by far the most activity this office has seen during my stay. As I was warned it would be, it's unbearably hot in the office, so I turned on the small, noisy fan. It is sitting on an archaic workstation, which has finally found a use.

Christine finally got to see a play last night - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, with Kathleen Turner as Martha and Bill Irwin as George. Christine said they were both great, with Irwin being particularly mesmerizing.

Be sure to check out Geoffrey Chaucer's pickup lines.

This will play in Peoria

2006-03-19T14:27:00.000-08:00

There was Baltrow, Baniston, and now Bolie. Now, in a March Madness stunner, BRAD upset PITT and is going to the Sweet 16, even though Tony Bennett missed his shots.

Geoffrey Chaucer's blog

2006-03-18T16:56:00.000-08:00

Chaucer knows enough acronyms to work at NASA

abbreviaciouns

KRBMA: Kynge Richarde II buggynge me againe

AOMSHJDOTBD: anothere of myne servauntes hath just dyede of the blacke death

EISBYMIWATCHDNSTHD: eftsoon I shall be ycleped mad if worke atte the customes house doth not settle the helle downe

(via Metafilter)

Emily Yoffe is awesome

2006-03-18T09:26:00.000-08:00

You would think a bill to prevent French people from eating Mr. Ed would have unanimous support

... but you'd be wrong.

Bitch 'n' moan

2006-03-17T17:22:00.000-08:00

I try not to be a whiner, but here I go ...

(1) This morning I got an email from NASA HQ that stated

In your planning for next year, assume that you will get cut by 15%.

A little later I got an email from NSPIRES (they really need to change the name to XSPIRES) that listed a scad of grant programs that are being cancelled, delayed indefinitely, or reduced. The guy who convinced me to come to Colorado said that half of his funding will disappear if this goes through. He is a very well-respected scientist.

(2) Yesterday my wife got an email from the doctor who will treat her rheumatoid arthritis in London stating that maybe she should try an experimental drug instead of Remicade. This was right after the story broke about six healthy guys in a Phase 1 Trial in London screaming like their heads were going to explode immediately after taking a drug for, among other things, rheumatoid arthritis. This, by the way, was right after I dismissed The Constant Gardener for engaging in implausible conspiracy theorizing.

(3) The bit rates between Colorado, Texas, and the UK trying to arrange the simplest things for my sabbatical have been ... very ... slow ....

(4) Our house is full of crap we don't need.

(5) My father's house is full of crap that nobody needs, despite my best efforts to go through it last week.

(6) I still have untreated sleep apnea.

(7) Our son's school needs to raise tuition a lot for next year, and I don't know how we can afford this.

(8) My wife has a cold.

(9) My cat throws up all the time.

(10) The dog ate my homework.

OK, I'm done now.

Stagnant North, Recede!

2006-03-16T13:03:00.000-08:00

We saw Fernando Meirelles' film of The Constant Gardener last night. I was sure I'd love it, since I'm a big fan of City of God, but I thought it was awful - entertaining, but really superficial. This reviewer nailed it, mostly.

WMD, kitty litter, or Playboy: you make the call

2006-03-16T07:07:00.000-08:00

... the radiation in cat litter comes from trace amounts of uranium, thorium, and potassium-40. Glossy magazines and brazil nuts are also culprits. A guy at Oak Ridge measured the gamma-ray spectrum of Playboy magazine.

Scientists at NIST in Boulder have developed a new gamma-ray detector that, they hope, will be able to distinguish highly-enriched uranium from kitty litter.

There's no 'I' in team, but there is a 'U' in hunt

2006-03-08T13:58:00.000-08:00

... hunting provides an opportunity to garner social attention and increase one's mating prospects, also known as the "showoff hypothesis."

Snow business like show business

2006-03-08T12:08:00.000-08:00

I'm at DIA, looking at the wet snow fall. Because my dad died without a will, I'm heading to SA to appear in probate court in Kerrville tomorrow. Naturally, this is the first time it has snowed in weeks.

We leave for London three weeks from tomorrow. My passport turned up this morning. I had taken it to Texas and stuck it in a binder with information for executors.

I'm still waiting for our ship to come in. Setting up the nine months in London has been vexing.

People Who Died:

2006:
Ali Farka Toure
Dana Reeve
Kirby Puckett
Shelley Winters

2005:
Richard Pryor
My dad's ex-wife, Betty
My dad
Shirley Horn
Shelby Foote
Philip Morrison
Marla Ruzicka
Hans Bethe
Sandra Dee

World Health Report, 2005:

Around 10.6 million children still die every year before reaching their fifth birthday. Almost all of these deaths occur in low-income and middle-income countries.

Most deaths among under-fives are still attributable to just a handful of conditions and are avoidable through existing interventions. These are: acute lower respiratory infections, mostly pneumonia (19% of all deaths), diarrhoea (18%), malaria (8%), measles (4%), HIV/AIDS (3%), and neonatal conditions, mainly preterm birth, birth asphyxia, and infections (37%).

Drs. James McKerrow and Paul Farmer are my heroes, because they're doing something about this.

Rush Limbaugh: Über the top

2006-02-23T19:35:00.000-08:00

Rush comments on the resignation of Harvard president Larry Summers with his usual understated wit.

Big Rip?

2006-01-26T13:16:00.000-08:00

Sean Carroll contemplates the future of the Universe. It's not your mother's Big Bang.

Gifted, but still a teenager, alas

2006-01-18T20:44:00.000-08:00

The January 16, 2006 New Yorker has an excellent, sad article by Eric Konigsberg about Brandenn Bremmer, a gifted 14-year-old from western Nebraska who committed suicide in March 2005. The strange twist is that his friends and sister were comforted by emails Brandenn wrote that suggested it was the usual adolescent issues that led him to kill himself. Brandenn's parents took solace that the donation of Branden's organs helped many people. A psychologist who worked with Brandenn, on the other hand, tends more to the Indigo Child interpretation of his life. The psychologist's husband says after Brandenn's death:

"I'm talking to him right now," he said. "He's become a teacher. He says right now he's actually being taught how to help those people who experience suicide for much messier reasons. Before Brandenn was born, this was planned. And he did it the way he did so that others would have use for his body. Everything worked out in the end."

To me, this is just creepy.

The New Yorker doesn't have the article on their web site, as usual, but there is discussion of the article there.

Other blogs on Branden Bremmer's suicide (Technorati)

The coal is running out? No problem!

2006-01-18T20:29:00.000-08:00

Things I learned on NPR this week, part 2:

The MASH surgeon who made Trinidad, Colorado the 'sex change capital of the world' died yesterday. His practice helped keep the local hospital open during the lean times of the 1970s and 1980s.

Brings a new meaning to 'Bethnal Green and Bow'

2006-01-18T19:58:00.000-08:00

Things I learned on NPR this week, Part 1:

Our future Member of Parliament in London is a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother.

George Galloway plumbed new depths when he pretended to be a cat as part of a task set for him during his appearance ...

The Repect Party MP, who last year lambasted the United States Senate over the war in Iraq, crouched on all fours, purring and licking imaginary milk from the hands of the actress Rula Lenska.

He further angered conservative Muslims, who make up the bulk of his support, when he told his housemates, including glamour models, entertainers and minor pop stars, that his favourite pursuits were sex and sunbathing.

Scientists in bunny suits make rabbit ears

2006-01-18T19:33:00.000-08:00

NASA Stardust canister opens to reveal "wonderful samples" (from BoingBoing)
More at the Stardust NASA page

Cosmocomics

2006-01-11T21:25:00.000-08:00

NPR's excellent science reporter Richard Harris did a entertaining story today from the American Astronomical Society meeting in DC. It dealt with an effort by Brad Schaefer of LSU to use gamma-ray bursts as standard candles in order to determine whether the cosmological "constant" is really constant. This is a promising approach, but the systematics aren't well-understood. "Heavyweight" pundit Michael Turner was quoted:

"It's very intriguing," says Turner, "but I don't think it rises to the level of me being able to issue Schaefer a ticket to Sweden."

Schaefer presents details here.
More at Cosmic Variance, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.

Mirror neurons

2006-01-10T08:04:00.000-08:00

Humans, it turns out, have mirror neurons that are far smarter, more flexible and more highly evolved than any of those found in monkeys, a fact that scientists say reflects the evolution of humans' sophisticated social abilities.

The human brain has multiple mirror neuron systems that specialize in carrying out and understanding not just the actions of others but their intentions, the social meaning of their behavior and their emotions.

"We are exquisitely social creatures," Dr. Rizzolatti said. "Our survival depends on understanding the actions, intentions and emotions of others."

He continued, "Mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking."

The discovery is shaking up numerous scientific disciplines, shifting the understanding of culture, empathy, philosophy, language, imitation, autism, and psychotherapy.

(from The New York Times and 3 Quarks Daily)

Also see this Nova broadcast.

Too bad this was an April Fools' joke

2006-01-08T11:01:00.000-08:00

BLACK ARK OAKEN SAW
Welcome To The Washboard Jungle (Hydra Head) cd 13.98

It was only a matter of time. There's been rap metal, and there's been funk metal, but as far as we know, nobody has combined black metal and dub, at least in a way that was at all palatable (we're definitely not counting the Bill Laswell produced Cradle Of Filth remix record or that abominable Tolkien-dub Prince Far Isengard record from a few years back). But now we've got the brilliantly monickered Black Ark Oaken Saw, a grim troupe of ganja smoking, washboard stroking, corpse painted Dandys in tight trousers. Huge swaths of murky buzzsaw guitars, howled demonic David Lee Roth-like vocals, wrapped in loads of reverb and delay, but instead of blast beats, or precise triggered drums, the dark abyss is framed by spare super blissed out, dubbed out echoplexed dub rhythms, snares crack and then repeat endlessly into the blackened void, while shrieks are snipped mid phrase and then recycled into haunting otherworldy echoes of blackened dub. Weird weird weird, it seems like this sort of thing wouldn't work at all, but surprisingly it's an absolutely perfect fit. Imagine Emperor with Sly and Robbie occupying the rhythm section or Lee Perry fronting Lugubrum. And we can't forget the un-named frontman who indeed plays the amplified washboard, but it too is run through a bank of effects and emerges a totally dubbed out barely recognizable version of itself. Hopefully, Hydra Head's interest in the fringes of black metal will continue to unearth more unholy treasures like the mighty Black Ark Oaken Saw!

(from rockcritics.com)

The father of LSD turns 100

2006-01-08T08:49:00.000-08:00

Rounding a century, Mr. Hofmann is physically reduced but mentally clear. He is prone to digressions, ambling with pleasure through memories of his boyhood, but his bright eyes flash with the recollection of a mystical experience he had on a forest path more than 90 years ago in the hills above Baden, Switzerland. The experience left him longing for a similar glimpse of what he calls "a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality."

"I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature," he said, laying a slightly gnarled finger alongside his nose, his longish white hair swept back from his temples and the crown of his head. He said any natural scientist who was not a mystic was not a real natural scientist. "Outside is pure energy and colorless substance," he said. "All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings."

Let us now praise famous men

2006-01-07T20:37:00.000-08:00

1/5/06: Get Out of Your Own Way at Work ... and Help Others Do The Same by Mark Goulston, M.D. It's not a bad book, with 40 bite-sized chapters about how to overcome procrastination, impulsiveness, and so forth. The author's a psychiatrist, so I'm sure he knows which buttons to push. Still, if I were he, I don't think I'd mention that I advised the prosecution in the O.J. Simpson trial.

1/6/06: David Denby's profile of James Agee in The New Yorker.

Agee was impressed by the notion that other human beings idiosyncratically are what they are, in every ornery fibre. Flesh, bone, desire, consciousness — in almost every way, the farmers were different from him and therefore obdurate in their singleness and as capable of pleasure and misery as he. A young couple sitting on a porch and staring at Agee had in their eyes “so quiet and ultimate a quality of hatred, and contempt, and anger, toward every creature in existence beyond themselves, and toward the damages they sustained, as shone scarcely short of a state of beatitude.”

Momo reading

2006-01-05T21:27:00.000-08:00

1/4/06: An article in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert about butterflies in England, wet socks, and global warming. A mite twee even for me.

Mo' reading

2006-01-05T21:09:00.000-08:00

1/3/06: The Art of Demotivation (Manager Edition)

I can barely keep up with my wife, son, and cat

2006-01-05T15:10:00.000-08:00

The Milky Way Makes 7 Stars Each Year and 2 Supernovae Each Century (via Robot Wisdom)

Of course, I'm just jealous that The Edge hasn't asked for my deep thoughts

2006-01-04T22:38:00.000-08:00

Is this list compiled by the guitarist for U2?
The Most Dangerous[ly Banal] Ideas Of 2006
I also like to live dangerously.

We're number one

2006-01-04T21:27:00.000-08:00

Well, UT is, anyway :-)
The last time Texas won, I was younger than Joey is now. I have fond memories of watching the Arkansas game with my dad in 1969.

I don't know where Vince Young comes from, but it's not planet Earth.

Today's science headlines

2006-01-04T14:39:00.000-08:00

Moon veterans go back to the future

Mooning deemed 'disgusting' but legal in Md.

Extremism in the exploration of the Kuiper belt is no vice

2006-01-03T20:37:00.000-08:00

Les Is More ...

Think about that, ladies and gentlemen – 380 degrees below zero and we are spending $650 million of our taxpayers dollars so we can fly by Pluto at 30,000 miles per hour!

And if this seems to you to be a ultimate folly of colossal waste, consider the following additional opportunity for NASA extremist exploration:

If the New Horizons spacecraft remains in good condition and additional funding becomes available, the spacecraft will be aimed toward one or two "Kuiper Belt objects," mysterious icy worlds which can barely be seen in the largest Earth-based telescopes. Mr. Stern called the Kuiper Belt "the largest structure in our solar system, dotted with almost a half-million worlds and worldlets that are 4 billion years old."

Think about that, too! And multiply 500,000 worlds (and worldlets) times $650,000,000. That equals $325 trillion!

Shouldn't that be $650 million x 500,000 worlds x -380 degrees x 30,000 miles per hour, equaling -$3705000000000000000000 degrees miles worlds/hour? That's an even bigger number!

That much money simply doesn't exist. I don't think 100 billion is even a number. It's like saying I want a kajillion bajillion dollars.

Bedtime reading

2006-01-03T19:34:00.000-08:00

1/1/06: After Iraq invaded Iran in 1980
... Iraq's aggression resulted in a surge of patriotism in Iran ... Instead of being welcomed as liberators by Khuzistani Arabs [in Iran] ... as the Iraqi forces had been made to believe, they found themselves facing spirited resistance.
The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military Conflict by Dilip Hiro.

1/2/06: Read album reviews in the 25th anniversary issue of The Big Takeover. It's good to know that Gang of Four is better than ever. I don't know how the editor manages to write all those incisive, snarkless pieces. Even though we've never met, I'm proud of him because our best friends in California are his sister and her family.

"Hello Mum. It was wicked."

2006-01-01T22:37:00.000-08:00

We saw the inspiring My Shakespeare on PBS tonight.

Outstanding in their field

2006-01-01T13:27:00.000-08:00

Can you feel it? Electricity running through your body
Powerline Induction, a photograph by Marcus Shirley from an installation by Richard Box (from Harper's, September 2005).

The first story of 2006

2006-01-01T13:00:00.000-08:00

Last night Christine suggested we make lists for 2005 and 2006 - books read, movies seen, favorite memories, our hopes for the coming year. With my middle-aged memory, I could only recall two great books I'd read in '05 off the top of my head - Persepolis (and Persepolis 2) by Marjane Satrapi and Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux - even though I read all the time. So I'm going to post things I read in 2006 to help those shiftless neurons. Last night's bedtime reading: Bulldog by Arthur Miller, from the short-story collection Telling Tales. Short, bittersweet. 9 out of 10.

US secret war plan to invade Canada

2005-12-30T22:18:00.000-08:00

The US cunningly declassified he invasion plan in 1974 to lull the perfidious Canucks into a false sense of security. The Washington Post knows better: "...it's only a matter of time before we bring these Molson-swigging, maple-mongering Zamboni drivers to their knees!"

One day left in 2005

2005-12-30T21:45:00.000-08:00

In April I was diagnosed with sleep apnea. Christine went to the ER on July 4 and was hospitalized twice, for pneumonia, shingles, and pleurisy. On September 22 my dad was found on the floor of his home in Texas by a kind neighbor. My dad had a broken neck and pneumonia. He was taken off life support on October 30 and died within the hour.

During my dad's hospitalization, my mother-in-law had a stroke. Thankfully she is recovering.

On the good side, I was very happy to get back in touch with my father's side of the family. My family and my dad's neighbors helped me a great deal.

The Cassini mission to Saturn is going great, as predicted by The Onion.

I am trying to overcome my packrat tendencies. Going through the junk in my dad's house with my cousin and her husband was a good reality check.

I'm trying to learn to breathe.

Christine, Joey, and I are looking forward to a sabbatical in London April-December 2006.

I wish you all a Happy New Year.

This pretty much sums it up

2005-10-28T09:52:00.000-07:00

My dad turned 85 last week. He is still in critical condition, albeit in a new hospital. When I called last night to check on him, his nurse (a guy) chuckled and said "Well, he's stable."

Critical condition

2005-10-01T21:20:00.000-07:00

My 84-year-old dad has been in intensive care in a hospital in San Antonio since Thursday, September 22, when a neighbor found him lying on the floor in his kitchen. He was helicoptered to SA, where he was found to have a broken neck and a pneumothorax. Fortunately, he is not paralyzed, but he still is using a breathing tube. He was extubated on September 27. Thankfully, he was able to talk to me for about five minutes before he became too exhausted to talk further. Because he was having great difficulty breathing, he was reintubated the following day, and My best friend, who is a doctor in San Antonio, estimated about one chance in three of my dad making it.

There'll always be an England

2005-07-08T16:45:00.000-07:00

from waxy.org:
London Stands

from Metafilter:
The Emanation of the Giant Albion
"Whatever you do... you will fail"
A Letter To The Terrorists, From London

from BoingBoing:
"DURING EMERGENCY Please Feel Free To Come In And Stay As Long As You Like."

from Get Your War On:
Moral Bankruptcy

Aggie Science

2005-06-15T21:40:00.000-07:00

Ex-Bush Labor Head Says Planes Didn't Level WTC. I'll stick with Michael Shermer.

Stop working so hard.

2005-06-07T21:13:00.000-07:00

8 > 9

Outer Planets Assessment Group Meets Thursday and Friday

2005-06-07T20:57:00.000-07:00

Well, we can't compete with this:

the Origins Subcommittee and the Structure and Evolution of the Universe Subcommittee, soon to be combined into a single Universe Subcommittee (from American Astronomical Society Informational Email 2005-01),

but OPAG has its second meeting in Boulder on Thursday and Friday this week. I'm sure the outer planets will do just fine whether or not we assess them, but since I work in Boulder I'll be listening in. We'll be hearing about the recently selected Juno mission to Jupiter and other possible missions to infinity and beyond. I hope a little science sneaks in.

O Canada!

2005-06-06T22:18:00.000-07:00

I got back from a meeting at the University of British Columbia Saturday night. It was my first trip to Vancouver. It was green and beautiful. I was in the meeting most of the time, but we did get to hike down from campus to Wreck Beach. Ironically, after not having been to Canada in years, Christine, Joey & I are going to Toronto next week, so that will be two trips to Canada in a two-week span. I still miss it, 13 years after leaving CITA.

2003-11-14T21:21:00.000-08:00

Number of known natural satellites in the Solar System from Scott Sheppard's web site: 136
An article in the International Herald Tribune on August 12, 2003 contains quotes from some of the discoverers.

When I was in high school, the number known was 31. Most of the 136 are irregular satellites discovered from the Earth within the last few years. On June 11, 2004, Saturn's moon Phoebe
will be the first irregular satellite to be observed during a close flyby by the Cassini spacecraft about three weeks before it goes into orbit around Saturn. David Seal did some cool paintings of what Saturn might look like from four of its moons, including Phoebe.

2003-11-14T20:59:00.000-08:00

Joey is next to me doing computer. He's looking at the Rokenbok web site. They are really neat, but they cost a fortune.

2003-11-14T20:55:00.000-08:00

I was just down in the Basement of Doom of our house. It is filled with boxes and boxes of magazines - Nature, Science, computer magazines, random magazines I picked up at the Longmont library, probably a thousand books, Joey's trains, an air hockey table covered with junk, a scanner and printer that have never come out of their box .... In my next life, I hope I'm not a packrat. Sometimes I feel like throwing everything away, but in the middle of the mess I found my mother's high school diploma- Wausau High '52. She would have been 69 years old tomorrow.

2003-11-14T20:52:00.000-08:00

Boy, it's been a long time! Yesterday I finished revising a review article on the dynamics and formation of the Oort cloud for the Comets 2 book. The editors originally wanted this article a year ago. I will send in the final version next week.

2001-01-12T23:11:00.000-08:00

An article about a week-long slog in the jungle south of Iquitos, Perú appears in the January 2001 issue of Outside magazine. The author and his guide didn't pack in any food, so the tastiest meal they had consisted of a single grub. "O Sting, where is thy death?" reflected author Robert Earle Howells as he regretted the romantic view of the rainforest promulgated by the publicity-hound former frontman of the Police.

2001-01-12T22:38:00.000-08:00

11 new distant satellites of Jupiter were found by David Jewitt's group in 2000. One was actually a rediscovery of a moon glimpsed in 1975. The IAU Circular describing the 10 new new moons is here. Spacewatch found another jovian irregular in 1999.

The current count of known natural satellites of the planets:

Mercury: 0
Venus: 0
Earth: 1
Mars: 2
Jupiter: 28
Saturn: 30
Uranus: 21
Neptune: 8
Pluto: 1

TOTAL: 91

2001-01-01T08:05:00.000-08:00

A total of 12 irregular satellites of Saturn were discovered by Gladman et al. in 2000, giving Saturn a total of 30 known moons! The orbits for the first 10 are here. The Minor Planet is keeping a running total here (scroll down to the Natural Satellites heading).

2000-10-26T23:03:00.000-07:00

Here's what we've been working on, out where the Sun is just a very bright dot.

2000-10-25T23:58:00.000-07:00

I'm reading The Hacienda: A Memoir by Lisa St. Aubin de Terán. It takes place in the Venezuelan Andes. In 1997, I took a wonderful 9-day trip to Manu Biosphere Reserve in Perú. I hope to return to the rain forest some day....

2000-10-25T23:17:00.000-07:00

A team led by Brett Gladman has discovered 4 new distant satellites of Saturn. See the
Cornell press release.

Saturn successfully completed the 2-point conversion, giving it a 22-21 lead over Uranus.

A possible future NASA mission that would image a lot of little moons is described in a poster talk at this week's Division of Planetary Sciences meeting in Pasadena.