Chicken soup for the universe.

We may have been taught that the universe is 99.99...% hard vacuum, but according to this New Scientist article, which I found through a link in Alan Boyle's ever-helpful Cosmic Log, some physicists at Stanford, MIT and Harvard believe that "vacuum" may be a "string-net liquid" that could be analogized to noodles in chicken broth.

What's particularly interesting about this article is how it shows the interplay among theoretical, experimental* and applied physics, as well as geology. It has been proposed that a mineral called herbertsmithite, found in the Chilean Andes, may be an example of a string-net liquid. The possible application, being explored by a group at MIT, is to quantum computers, which would be much faster and more capacious than silicon-based ones.
__________

*The late Nobel physics laureate Richard Feynman explained the difference between theoretical physicists, like himself, and experimental physicists with this anecdote: He was giving a lecture at one of the Lawrence laboratories in California, where his audience consisted mostly of experimentalists. He referred to a fairly recently discovered particle, and said, "Let's assume its spin is two and one half." He was immediately interrupted by a voice from the audience with a heavy Brooklyn accent, saying, "Hey, it ain't two and a half, it's tree. Dey measured it."

It's looking grim for the Mets.

OK, they were split squad games, but losing to the Nats 13-1 and the Orioles 9-0 looks awful in any event. I'm not so worried about Park and Sele getting hammered; neither is likely to make the starting rotation. What's really scary is that Messrs. Beltran and Delgado, more than halfway through spring training, sport batting averages of .216 and .227, respectively.

Silly science Saturday redux.

Bad Astronomy links to a "snarky celebrity site" (and I link to Bad Astro linking thus; so does the Great Chain of Being advance by another link).

Anyway, it's good to know that Eva Longoria is not a gnome, and that Marcia Cross and I are exactly the same height.

Someone in Alameda, California asks ...

... "how to get along with a self-absorbed man".

I'm sure s/he left this site just as perplexed as when s/he arrived.

A Dutch subject, but in a French style.

This photo of Holland America Lines' Noordam, making her way at twilight past Staten Island towards the Narrows and the ocean, taken from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and severely cropped, brings to mind the pontillism of Georges Seurat (click on the photo to enlarge and get the full effect).

Sal's retired, but the Erie Canal still hauls freight.

I've got a mule, and her name is Sal,
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal.
She's a good ol' worker an' a good ol' pal,
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal.
We've hauled some barges in our day,
Filled with lumber, coal, and hay,
And we know every inch of the way
From Albany to Buffalo.

(Lyrics courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Social Studies - "A More Perfect Union")

Last year I posted a piece about Red Hook, Brooklyn, in which I explained how the Erie Basin, an artificial harbor there, got its name from its use in the nineteenth century as a transshipment point for grain from the Midwest that had been carried by barge from the Great Lakes, across the Erie Canal, then down the Hudson to Brooklyn, where it was loaded onto oceangoing ships for far away destinations. I had assumed (yes, I know the derivation) that railroads and trucks had long ago put an end to any carriage of goods on the New York State canal system, and that these historic waterways were now used only by pleasure craft, including the tourist boat on which my wife, daughter and I made our way through the locks at Lockport, New York (see photo below, as the gates of Lock 34 open and the World's Widest Bridge looms ahead) the summer before last.


So, I was delighted to find this NPR piece, which shows that there is still cargo traffic on the canal system, and that it is increasing. Note: I've updated this link to replace one from 2007 that had expired.

The headline is comforting ...

... but the story beneath it is a bit unsettling.

Consider how fortunate was the Tunguska event. If the most likely thing had happened, that is, the asteroid had landed in an ocean, there might have been catastrophic tsunamis. If it landed in a populated area, thousands or even millions of people could have died from the force of the impact. Instead, it landed in a vast, largely unpopulated land area.

Postscript to "Silly science Saturday"

As a follow-up to my earlier post about the Fair Education Foundation and its argument concerning the "Kabbalistic" foundations of evolution, I strongly recommend this entry from Niles Eldredge's blog, in which Dr. Eldredge imagines a very amusing correspondence between himself and Darwin on this subject.

Update: While we're on the subject of state legislators meddling in scientific matters, there's this news from New Mexico. (Not for nothing do they call it the "Land of Enchantment".)

And yet more: Bad Astronomy gets their dig in at FEF's anti-Copernican campaign.

Does the spring training record matter?

The conventional wisdom seems to be, "Not much." But, here I am, just shy of a week into the Grapefruit League season, pondering the Mets' 2-4 record so far like a shaman inspecting a sheep's entrails. The team's official site puts on a brave face, duly noting "Perez solid in Mets' loss to Indians" (young Oliver having been shaky in the opener against Detroit).

In the comfort department, both wins so far have come at the expense of the defending MLB champs.

Update: Twiffer, with typical acuity, comments:

[I] think of spring training as a sound check. [I]f the band doesn't play brilliantly in the sound check, doesn't mean one will get a bad concert.

True enough; nevertheless, I reply: If, in the sound check, the band seems on the verge of replicating Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, there's a much better than even chance that you're in for a very unpleasant time.

Anyway, the Mets improved their record to 3-4 by thrashing the Astros 7-2 this (March 6) afternoon, with Glavine pitching three scoreless innings. Five other pitchers, including Wagner, combined for six innings with no runs allowed, and the only two given up were by Adkins in the eighth. The Mets got ten hits, with the only homer coming in the ninth, by Gomez pinch-hitting for LoDuca.

Highly recommended reading.

In my immediately previous post, I touched on a particular hobby-horse of mine, which is how the terms "liberal" and "conservative" have become unmoored from their earlier definitions and have come to encompass differing and sometimes contradictory meanings. It turns out that El Cabrero, at The Goat Rope, has been thinking along the same lines, especially as regards conservatism. His reflections on Burke, here, are especially good, but it's well worth going back to the beginning of his series of posts on this subject (they start on February 26) and reading them through.

Is corporate greenery undemocratic?

Since the news about the TXU deal came out, I've been waiting for the "conservative" reaction. It came on February 28 in this article, by Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute, on the op-ed page of the New York Sun.

TXU, the holding company controlling the largest electric utility in Texas, is being acquired by a group of investors that includes Goldman Sachs, KKR and Texas Pacific Group. Most of TXU's generating capacity consists of plants that burn the relatively low quality lignite coal that is plentiful and cheaply surface-mined in Texas. Coal burning power plants are a major source of carbon dioxide emissions; lignite burning plants are especially so because more of it must be burned to produce a BTU of energy than of higher quality coal. Lignite is also "dirtier" in other respects, producing more particulate matter, mercury and NOx emissions than other kinds of coal (see here).

Before the deal was negotiated, TXU had announced an ambitious expansion program, based on its projections of demand growth, which would include building eleven new coal-fired generating plants. Not surprisingly, this program was opposed by environmentalist groups, as well as by the neighboring state of Oklahoma. The investor group seeking to buy TXU decided to negotiate with these groups before completing the terms of the purchase, hoping to avoid efforts to derail the deal that would be expensive and time-consuming for the buyers. They reached an agreement under which they promised that, if they acquired TXU, they would build only three of the eleven planned new plants, and would cooperate with efforts to develop federal and state legislation governing carbon emissions and energy efficiency.

So, from a "conservative", free-market perspective, what's not to like about this deal? It's the result of negotiations freely entered into between private parties, with those on one side of the table evidently believing that it will maximize the value of a very large investment. It could even be said to be a demonstration of the Coase Theorem, beloved of free market theorists, in action.

Mr. Husock makes a clever move; a bit of intellectual JuJitsu. He frames the issue in such a way as to make the deal appear suspect from a left-of-center perspective. Note the headline on his article: "Privatization of Politics". Privatization is an off-color word in left-liberal* circles, while politics is celebrated as the arena in which the people's will can be made manifest. Privatization of politics therefore connotes a double whammy. The substance of Mr. Husock's argument is this: the question whether the public interest is better served by building eleven power plants to meet projected demand growth or by reducing carbon dioxide and other pollutant emissions while promoting energy efficiency and alternative sources is a question of public policy. Decisions on such matters "should not be made in the private arena, but in the public realm by elected officials."

Mr. Husock then notes in dismay the particular vulnerability of consumer products manufacturers and distributors to the influence of advocacy organizations that may threaten or incite consumer boycotts to force the companies to modify their practices. He specifically mentions pressure brought on Home Depot by the Rainforest Coalition to deal only with suppliers who engage in "eco-friendly logging practices", on Wal-Mart by Wal-Mart Watch to provide health insurance for employees, and on Nike by Vietnam Labor Watch to enforce standards concerning the treatment of its suppliers' workers. Mr. Husock carefully states that he doesn't mean to imply that reducing carbon emissions, protecting rain forests or providing health care coverage and other benefits to workers is in each instance the wrong policy choice. He only objects to the "undemocratic" way the choices are, or might be, made.

But, in each instance, hasn't a choice been made, opposition or not, pressure or not? To consider the case of TXU, a decision to build eleven power plants is as much a public policy decision, by which I mean simply a policy decision that affects the public, as one to forego building eight of them while pursuing alternatives. Mr. Husock might argue that TXU's directors, in deciding to pursue the building program, did not consider issues of public policy but only sought to do what their fiduciary duty to shareholders requires them to do: maximize share value. Might they, however, guided by the same principle, have decided otherwise? Utilities have, in the past, erred in projecting demand by simply extrapolating existing trends, and, as a result, built excessive capacity which caused them to incur unnecessary costs. Might the directors also have concluded, even absent active opposition by environmentalists to the expansion program, that in view of present uncertainties a more cautious approach was in the company's best interests? Are shareholder interests always best served by directors and managers who take the most aggressive possible position on all questions concerning expansion, environmental matters, employee relations, product safety and the like? Efforts by government to circumscribe the discretion of corporate boards and management, even when ostensibly meant to protect shareholders, have been regarded very skeptically by conservatives.

In any event, the private equity investors seeking to buy TXU from its shareholders had no fiduciary duty to those shareholders. It was the duty of TXU's directors to protect the shareholders by evaluating the offer and advising shareholders if they considered it fair, which they did.

"Yes," Mr. Husock might say, "but if it weren't for those pesky environmentalists, the investors would likely have gone ahead with the program as planned, instead of gutting it. In any event, the Governor of Texas evidently wanted those plants built, and built fast, because he directed a state agency to expedite the process of approving them." Nevertheless, the government of Texas, like that of all other states and the federal government, has a tripartite structure characterized by separation of powers and "checks and balances". As Mr. Husock notes in his article, "America has elaborate political and regulatory arenas in which to referee disputes about costs, benefits, and values." All the environmentalists (and the state of Oklahoma, itself a political entity) have done in this instance is to enter those "arenas" to state their case, as is their right under the "redress of grievances" provisions of both the U.S. and Texas constitutions, as well as the "freedom of speech" clause of the First Amendment. If this is "undemocratic", it is so only to the extent that constitutional bills of rights limit the powers of democratically elected governments to oppress or silence individuals or groups.

Groups such as the Rainforest Coalition and Wal-Mart Watch, which seek to mobilize consumers or investors to influence business decisions, also have the constitutional protection of speech afforded by the First Amendment. Mr. Husock might respond that he is not advocating the abridgment of these groups' rights, just arguing that directors, managers and investors should always ignore them. Perhaps he has in mind the well-known observation by Adam Smith about "those who affect to trade for the public good." Nevertheless, might it not be possible that a business decision that happens to comport with the goals of an advocacy organization would also be in the best interests of the owners of the business, and not an affectation?

Addendum: Keifus (see "comments" below) notes his disagreement with the conclusions drawn in the article to which I linked above for the Adam Smith quote. I linked to that article just because it was the only source for that quote that I found in my Google search that had the quote up in the first sentence. I haven't read the whole article, but I suspect I would agree with Keifus.

Second addendum: I'm having second thoughts about my claim that the TXU deal may represent an application of the Coase Theorem, at least to the extent that the opponents of the expansion program use statutes such as the Clean Air Act, or state analogues thereto, as grounds for their opposition, because such statutes or regulations may be considered an ex ante allocation of property rights. I don't think this does serious damage to my basic argument.

**********
*I've used the hyphenated term "left-liberal" here to mean what "liberal" has come to mean in present day American political discourse with respect to economic issues, i.e. one who believes that government should intervene in the working of markets to pursue objectives of safety and fairness. This is as opposed to the classical definition of liberal, which now has given way to "libertarian", a political category that is generally considered "conservative" (although there are those who call themselves "left libertarians"), despite the differences libertarians have with classical, or "Burkean" conservatives and with the more radical social conservatives found on the "religious right". This is why I put "conservative" in quotation marks in the first and fourth paragraphs of this post.

I think the authors of the Political Compass have it correctly: political positions cannot be described on a linear left-right axis. Instead, they should be measured on two axes. One measures attitudes on social issues, with extreme authoritarianism ("fascism") at one end and rampant libertarianism ("anarchism") at the other. The other measures economic views, with communism at the extreme left and "neo-liberalism" (basically laisser-faire) at the extreme right. As a result, the political position of any individual or party can be shown as a pair of Cartesian coordinates falling into one of four quadrants defined by the two axes. An example, plotting the positions of British political parties in the most recent election, is here. I chose this example because it includes examples in all four quadrants. My own position is in the lower right quadrant. I'm about as far down on the social axis, i.e. tending towards anarchism, as the British Greens, and slightly to the right on the economic axis, a bit to the left of the Liberal Democrats.

Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?

We haven't had much snow in Gotham this winter; mostly evanescent dustings that tantalize kids but don't leave enough to make decent snowballs. There was a respectable fall a week ago Friday, but, as is wont to happen here on the coast, the precipitation changed to sleet, then rain, melting most of the snow and leaving an ice-crusted, dirty remainder that was gone in another couple of days.

Last night, it came down good and heavy. This morning, I pocketed my camera and headed to Manhattan with my daughter, she to resume school after a week's break and me to take a walk along the Battery Park City Promenade, as I often do after dropping her off. I was approaching the Promenade as a Coast Guard bouy tender sailed by.


The building in the background is the former Jersey City passenger terminus of the Central Rail Road of New Jersey, where travelers and commuters would change from trains to ferries to reach New York City.

Below is a view looking south along the Battery Park City Promenade.


Looking across South Cove, I saw this striking view of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, with an evergreen grove in the foreground and the Liberty Crown belvedere, my favorite substitute for a Stairmaster, to the left.


On reaching Battery Park, I couldn't resist taking another shot of the Merchant Marine Memorial, looking stark under snow.


This was partly inspired by elbo ruum's post on WikiFray, which ought, in my opinion, to be retitled "Living in the Suburbs and Driving SUVs Turns People Into Assholes" (no, this isn't a message for you, Rudie - after all, it isn't even clear that you have an SUV - it's about those fuckwits you describe). Here in the City, the threat of snow isn't such a big deal (pace John V. Lindsay, whose mayoralty may have foundered because of his cavalier response to an impending blizzard); partly because we don't get that much of it most of the time, and also because the things you need are close at hand and involve a walk, or perhaps a short subway ride, to get. Of course, if you're affluent enough to own your house (but not affluent enough, or too parsimonious, to hire staff), you have to shovel the sidewalk and scatter some salt.

I've never outgrown liking snow. Maybe it's because I spent much of my childhood and youth in Florida. Or, maybe it's because, unlike Rudie, I never really "came of age". One of my Christmas presents from my wife was a t-shirt with the legend, "Still plays with trains". This isn't strictly true; our apartment doesn't have room for a layout. But, if we ever do move to the suburbs ...

More Florida weirdness.

Whenever I go there, I get the feeling I'm going back to the Mesozoic, where an encounter with Allosaurus fragilis in the thin forest scrub (as here, in the Naples Botanical Garden) isn't unthinkable (photo courtesy of news-press.com, via dinosaurnews).

Update: For a cautionary (pre-dino replicas) tale about the Naples Botanical Garden, see this.

Lenten stuff.

Yesterday, I did something I hadn't ever before. I went to an Ash Wednesday service at my (Episcopalian, though it's now questionable how much longer Anglican) church, heard the invitation to the observance of a holy Lent, recited the Litany of Penitence, and submitted my forehead to the imposition of ashes, gently applied by our Assistant to the Rector, The Rev. Sonia Waters, as she softly reminded me, "Dust you are, and to dust you shall return."

I have no issue with that statement; it's the question of resurrection and afterlife, among others, that I find a challenge. For some time, I've been a practicing, though not necessarily a believing, Christian. I did get a grin from our Rector, The Rev. Stephen Muncie, at a dinner some weeks ago when he said he was tired of hearing people say, "I'm not religious, but I am very spiritual", and I replied, "I'm just the opposite." His smile didn't fade when I went on to say that I'd never had a "spiritual" experience, and that I had serious issues with what most Christians consider essential beliefs. It broadened a bit when I said I got great satisfaction from practicing "religion"; that is, from participation in liturgy and in the life of the church community. He did wince when I said that I entertained the idea that there is no transcendent God, but simply a human construct that has taken on a life of its own and become essential.

I have decided, this year, to take my commitment to practice to the extent of undertaking a Lenten discipline. Traditionally, this is seen as giving something up; usually meat and alcohol (more recently, just the latter). I'm abstaining from ardent spirits (but not from wine or beer with meals, both of which I consider food) and the ice cream bars that I usually have with a snifter or two of Cognac after dinner, often as I work on this blog. This is likely to improve my waistline; it may even improve the quality of my posting. Whether it will improve me in other ways is questionable. But, as Steve said in his Ash Wednesday homily, Lent isn't primarily about abstemiousness, it's about concentration on essentials.

In that respect, I hope I can use this time of reflection to become more thoughtful about my work, my relationships, and, yes, even my blogging. We'll see.

Eye of the beholder.

A friend and I were browsing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art gift shop when he said, "Publishing this was sure a risk." He was holding a coffee-table book of photographs of tugboats in New York harbor.

"You mean, because the market for tugboat photographs is likely to be very small?", I said.

"Uh, huh. I mean, it's basically just an engine room mounted on a hull."

I told him I might buy the book. (I still may.)

(The photo above is of two members of New York's largest tug fleets, Moran (foreground) and McAllister, in what appears to be an impromptu race at the entrance to the East River. I took this from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.)

Silly science Saturday.

Going through today's New York Times, I saw two items that led to the caption of this post. The first takes us, once again, to the Texas legislature. Lest it appear that I'm being unduly harsh to the Lone Star State, though, please note that the mischief here originated in the state of Georgia, with an organization called The Fair Education Foundation, Inc. (see here). What FEF is about is trying to get evolution banned from classrooms because it is based on religion; therefore, teaching it violates the constitutional separation of church and state. Others have made similar arguments, claiming that "scientism", "evolutionism" or "Darwinism" constitutes a "religion" because it rests upon unproven dogma that can only be affirmed through an act of faith. FEF, however, argues that the religious foundations of evolution are in the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. FEF doesn't cite any Kabbalistic underpinnings for Darwinian natural selection beyond the fact that rabbinical "sages" who contributed to the Kabbalah tradition, in their exegeses of Torah texts, made calculations of the time elapsed since the beginning of creation that anticipated, and are in striking accord with, estimates by modern cosmologists of time elapsed since the "big bang". By positing that the universe has been around for billions of years, instead of the mere six thousand it is constrained to by the exegesis of Genesis that FEF prefers, the Kabbalists and their cosmologist heirs allow sufficient time for evolution to have produced the flora and fauna we have today. Unstated in this argument, but hinted at because he is mentioned in the FEF text, is that Arno Penzias, a co-discoverer, along with his co-worker Robert Wilson, with whom he shared a Nobel Prize, of the cosmic background microwave radiation that evidences the big bang, is an observant Jew.

Incidentally, FEF doesn't stop at seeking to bar the teaching of evolution. They also want to throw out Copernicus. One thing you can say for them is that they have no use for dispensational millenialism, or, if you prefer, pre-millenialism (see here), so they give the back of the hand to Tim LaHaye fans. Unfortunately, they also are Holocaust deniers. Update: when I posted this nine years ago I had links to pages of the FEF website citing Kabbalah and denying Copernicus and the Holocaust. I see now that those pages are no longer accessible, although the one about pre-millenialism is still there.

Anyway, Ben Bridges, a member of the Georgia legislature, produced a one page memorandum summarizing FEF's constitutional argument against the teaching of evolution and distributed it to his colleagues. He also sent a copy to Warren Chisum, the second most powerful member of the Texas House of Representatives, who had it copied and distributed to his fellow legislators. When some of them complained about its substance, Mr. Chisum distanced himself from it, saying that the memo "does not reflect my opinion", and also that he regretted having "hurt or offended some groups including some of my dear friends." He also retained a former legislative colleague, Steven Wolens, who is Jewish, to help with damage control.

Making fun of FEF and its ilk has a fish-in-a-barrel quality (though it's sometimes irresistable), and it's hard to give any credence to the notion that such groups pose any serious threat, especially when we consider recent developments in Kansas. However, the other item that got my attention this morning is, I think, a real and insidious threat, having been endorsed by perhaps the pre-eminent figure in American pop culture. It's described in Maureen Dowd's column, which has the irresistable title, "A Giant Doom Magnet".

The column is about Oprah's latest fave rave: an Australian TV producer named Rhonda Byrne's book, The Secret. If you guessed (you being part of that infinitesimal minority of people who don't watch Oprah) that this is a text that gives you a simple principle by virtue of which you can transform your presently dreary life for the better, bingo. All one need do, saith Ms. Byrne, is to think positive thoughts, and good things will follow. If you're sufficiently into geezerdom, like me, this may strike a mystic chord of memory reaching back to a 1952 opus by The Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, as Dowd notes. If you're a student of modern European intellectual history, it may remind you of this worthy thinker.

According to Ms. Byrne, the converse also holds: negative thoughts beget negative results. Ms. Dowd's title for her column refelects her realization that her negative thoughts about the Bush administration's actions in Iraq serve to amplify the negativity of those actions.

According to Ms. Byrne's acolyte James Arthur Ray, interviewed by Oprah, this is all "very, very scientific." So was phrenology considered, in its time.

"Um, Claude," I can almost hear you, my faithful reader, saying, "what about that 'snark-free' guarantee you proffered in your last post?" What can I say? So sue me.

Addendum: I hate to take issue with a friend, but Rundeep's comment on this post compels me to say this: I love Texas. Yes, I love it in spite of its perhaps greater than average quotient of jingoistic and ultra-fundamentalist nutjobs. I love it for the likes of Ann Richards (see here), Barbara Jordan, and Molly Ivins (see here), as well as for having gotten drunk a few times with Kinky Friedman (see here) (who could sometimes be an asshole, but was always interesting) and Jim Hightower (see here) (who was always a gentleman, but never dull), and for having (at a fundraiser for Jim at the old Lone Star Cafe on 5th Avenue, when he was running for Chair of the Texas Railroad Commission) danced the "Cotton-Eyed Joe" with Cissy Farenthold (see here) and twenty or so other of her nearest and dearest friends. I love it for Terry Allen, Archie Bell and the Drells, Asleep at the Wheel, the Austin Lounge Lizards, the Big Bopper, Guy Clark, Alvin Crow and the Pleasant Valley Boys, Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, Freddy Fender, Nanci Griffith, Carolyn Hester, Adolph Hofner, Buddy Holly, Lightnin' Hopkins, Flaco Jimenez, Janis Joplin, the Light Crust Doughboys (especially John "Knocky" Parker), Augie Meyer, Mouse and the Traps, Doug Sahm, Joe Tex, the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, Townes Van Zandt, Willie and Waylon and Jerry Jeff, and Bob Wills. I love it for Larry McMurtry. I love it for having spent a couple of formative years in San Antonio when my dad was stationed there in the Air Force, where my Pennsylvania bred mom learned to buy fresh tamales, wrapped in cornhusks, and serve them to us for dinner once a week, and where my fourth birthday present was a Billy the Kid outfit from Joske's.

Readme, John McWhorter

(See his column in yesterday's New York Sun.)

No "recreational hostility" here. This blog guaranteed 100% snark-free.

Addendum: Mickey Kaus has a different take (scroll down to February 15): bloggers are too "elite".

Check this installment of Bloggingheads TV. Kaus looks and sounds much less like a schoolyard bully (he even admits to being "out of shape") than he did here, and Wright less like a schoolyard bully's victim.

Is anyone up to taking Kaus's Dinesh d'Souza challenge?

Another hat tip to the right: Nice piece here by Jonah Goldberg.

And another: Amity Shlaes (again in yesterday's Sun) has good things to say about "new Democrats".

We are being engulfed in a veritable tsunami of civility.

Caveat: In response to Keifus, I must point out that my "snark-free" guarantee does not extend to comments others may post hereon.

Sauron's eye?

This is the Helix Nebula, in Aquarius, photographed by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (named for the late astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer, Jr. - see here - not for New York's new governor). The Helix is the visible evidence (though this image was made at x-ray frequency) of the death throes of a star similar to, but about three times larger than, our sun.

The image was downloaded from Discovery News.

I have blogger's block.

I'll get over it. Two recent deaths, one of them the subject of the post immediately below, and other matters, have put me in an introspective, not-very-communicative mood for the present. There are many things I want to write about, including my long-threatened contribution to the "just society" discussion begun by El Cabrero and taken up by Hipparchia, and my promised attempt at midrash on Keifus' piece concerning nostalgia (see here).

For now, I'll leave you with this image of yet another sunset seen from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.

Requiescat.

Isonomist's son (see here) died yesterday afternoon.

May light eternal shine upon him, O Lord,
in the company of Thy saints forever, for Thou art merciful.
Rest eternal grant to him, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon him
Eternal light shine upon him, O Lord.
Eternal rest grant to him, O Lord.

(These words are a slight paraphrase - substituting "him" for "them" - of the words from the Requiem Mass as used in Greg Newsome's Lux Aeterna - see here and scroll down.)

Continental collision zone.

Kudos to Twiffer for referring me to another NASA site, Visible Earth, which features images of earth made by satellites or by astronauts on shuttles. This image is of a portion of northern Sudan, taken with a radar instrument carried aboard the shuttle Endeavour. The radar exposes hidden sub-surface features, such as, in this instance, rock formations covered by desert sand. The curving green band on the left side of the image is the Nile and its flood plain. To the right of the Nile is a nearly straight line separating reddish from yellowish portions of the image. This is a fault line that delineates a collision between two ancient continents which happened 600 million years ago. Further details can be found here.

Angry Sol?

This image, made by the SOHO observatory (see here), which orbits the Sun at a point inside the earth's orbit, shows a coronal mass ejection. Events like this, in which the Sun violently expels some mass, occur from time to time, with the frequency varying cyclically. When bubbles of magnetic plasma ejected in these events reach the earth, they can interfere with many forms of electromagnetic data transmission.

This image was taken from Astronomy Picture of the Day.

A warming thought on a chilly day.

Only ten days until Mets pitchers and catchers report for training.

Addendum: Sorry, Twiffer. You have to wait an extra day. Red Sox pitchers and catchers don't start until the 18th (spring training starting dates can be found here).

Two oranges.

On a clear morning, a Coast Guard helicopter banks into a turn over the Hudson River, in front of New Jersey's tallest building.



On a hazy morning, a Staten Island ferry approaches its Manhattan terminal.

Bears or Colts?

I don't need to decide. I could just watch The Game as a purely aesthetic propositon. In any event, I was leaning toward the Bears, for the folowing reasons:

1. I've never forgiven the Irsays for the slimy way they ravaged the Baltimore franchise, then snuck the Colts out of town at night like the two-bit bunco artists they are. I especially loathe Irsay Jr. for having memorialized this despicable act in the lyrics of a song that included something like: Spent some time around Baltimore,/ Folks down there don't want me no more/ Movin' on ... (OK, so Baltimore now has the Ravens, thanks to the trashing of another legendary franchise, the old Cleveland Browns, by Art Modell, and Cleveland has a new set of Browns, and Indy has a team where there was none before, which all adds up to a net gain in social utility. But I still hate the Colts for what the Irsays did.)

2. Those great Satuday Night Live skits about "da Bearsss."

3. Rex Grossman, the Bears' QB, was a Florida Gator.

But then my mother says, "Please root for the Colts. Tony Dungy is such a fine man." By way of background, Mom has lived almost half of her ninety years in Tampa, and spent the past thirty or so of those loathing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, with two exceptions: Steve Young, when he was their quarterback, and Tony Dungy, who was their coach for several seasons. Well, I like Tony, too, even if he works for a franchise I despise.

So, I'll relax and enjoy the game.

"Where is Lady Lake?", I asked myself.

Yesterday evening my sitemeter showed a visit from someone in Lady Lake, Florida. Since I spent much of my childhood and youth in the Sunshine State, I'm pretty familiar with the geography. Still, because of the tremendous amount of development that has happened there since I left at the end of the 1960s, I will often see the name of a place that is unfamiliar. So it was with Lady Lake.

Then I checked this morning's news, and learned that Lady Lake is a community in Lake County, roughly west of Daytona Beach.

Whoever you are, my reader in Lady Lake, I hope you're well and your house is still standing.

To Fray friends.

Demos called me the night before last with the news about Isonomist's son. I sent Iso an e-mail yesterday; as usual, words couldn't convey anything sufficient.

If you haven't gotten the news, Iso's nineteen year old son, who has been struggling with leukemia, suffered a massive brain hemorrhage. He is now in a "medically induced" coma. His odds of survival are rated low; even if he does live, he is considered certain to have incurred massive cerebral damage.

If you believe in prayer, pray for him. If not, do what you can.

Addendum: If you haven't already, please read TenaciousK's eloquent post.

Meet my maker, Maddy Martini.

As I suspect is true of most mediocre bloggers , I've installed a site meter that keeps track of the visits to my blog, and, in some instances, can tell me from what other site the visitor was referred to mine (some non-mediocre bloggers have these as well; what gives my game up is that I obsessively check mine). A couple of days ago, I followed one of these links back to a site that hosts a fantasy stock market on which one may trade "shares" in blogs using virtual play money, and was amazed to find this blog listed twelfth on a "top 100" roster of best buys. It also showed no one having bought any shares in my blog.

Today, I checked it again and discovered that someone called Maddy Martini had bought 1,250 shares, making up 25% of the equity in Self-Absorbed Boomer (see here, and scroll down to "Shares Owners"). Presumably, the remainder of the shares lie in some limbo for the unsold.

Maddy's purchase, by driving the price per share up to a stunning 46 play cents, seems to have caused SAB to fall off of the top 100 list. What's worrying to me, though, is what Maddy may intend to do with this investment. Will she (I'm assuming Maddy is female) threaten to dump her shares unless I stop posting about ships or college football? Will she demand to know why my output is so much less than that of PiercePenniless, both on quantitative and qualitative bases?

Of course, I could register myself on the fantasy market and buy the remainder of the available shares, thereby assuring myself of outvoting Maddy at the next shareholders' meeting (Good God! Do I have to hold those, now?). But I'm inclined just to lie back and see what happens. If other people want to back my blog, even with play money, I guess I shouldn't complain.

Uh-oh! Maddy now owns fifty percent. How high would you like me to jump?

Good news: share value has almost doubled, to 88 play pennies.

Update: Maddy has increased her holding to 75%, but the noble Homer Fink, of Brooklyn Heights Blog, has bought five per cent, and, in doing so, has driven the share price up to an astronomical $4.13.

Homer, if I make your investment pay off, will you teach me how to play bocce?

Rant of the day.

I'm getting sick unto death of the word "edgy".

Goodbye, Molly.

I recently had occasion to quote from an article by Molly Ivins. Today, she lost her fight with breast cancer.

Texas has now lost two great women in the space of six months.