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Archive for November, 2004

Order to Chaos

November 23, 2004 2 comments

If anyone out there is exceptionally bored and is trying to figure out the “scheme” to my links and subject categories, forget it: there isn’t any. 

That’s two taxonomies needed: posts and links.  ***Dave wrestled with the same thing a while back but as far as I know, nobody’s come up with the grandly wonderful, obvious, supercalifragilistic category scheme.  But I will need something pretty soon.

Maybe I’ll ponder it this afternoon while sitting in the dentist chair waiting to find out if I get to keep my left upper canine tooth.

POSTSCRIPT: 3:00 pm, same day… My miraculous dentist, Dr. Beer (Yes, that is his name…  imagine when people think when they see that on your Meeting Maker schedule) was able to save the tooth, using his amazing ceramic milling machine. 

Picture this… you go in with a tooth that had been broken off once by bruxism, below the gum line.  The dentist designs a crown on his computer, and using a computer-guided milling machine, makes you a new tooth out of ceramic.  6 months later, you have a bicycle accident, and crack the crown.  Three months after that, the crown fails.  Your dentist calls up the digital file of the ceramic crown, pops a blank into the milling machine, and 15 minutes later has a replacement part for your tooth.  He removes the failed crown, installs the new one (setting the adhesive with ultraviolet light) and you walk out with a perfect tooth.

I’m still working on a set of categories for my blog, though.  Dr. Beer worked so fast there wasn’t time to come up with anything.

Categories: Blogging, Geeky

X-rays prove I still have a shoulder

November 22, 2004 1 comment

Had the 3-month x-rays of my broken scapula from the accident in August, and it has knit together just fine.  So now I have the OK to start weight-training again, plus physical therapy to “stabilize” the joint, which has become very weak from non-use.

My knees have degraded significantly from 3 months of no bicycling, but since my balance has not recovered, it isn’t safe for me ride.  (The other day I turned in the kitchen and lost my balance completely.)  So I will be adding a stationary bike component to my PT routine.  There are also some new range-of-motion exercises.

Got to adding up the number of concussions in my life, and the number is higher than I thought.  There was the shot-put incident in 3’d grade, the fall from the horse in 5th grade, getting thrown from a dune buggy in 9th grade, slipping on the ice once after high school and once again in 1983.  Walking into the low pipe 2 years ago and then the accident this summer.  This exercise in addition was prompted by an article on post-concussion syndrome.  Maybe I should just wear a helmet all the time. 

I’ll be seeing the audiologist soon to see about the balance problem, and with new PT routines, I’ll be improving steadily.  Right now I’m tired and going to bed.

Categories: Uncategorized

Everyday Miracles

November 22, 2004 1 comment

I wrote this originally for my old website, and thought Thanksgiving ‘04 would be a good time to transplant it to my new blog.

Everyday Miracles

Usually when a person says something is miraculous, they mean that it is “unexplainable by the laws of nature and so is supernatural in origin or an act of God.”

While this usage is common, I don’t use it, because I believe the laws of nature are never violated. (Occasionally our understanding of them is incomplete.)

Once a religious believer told me he felt sorry for me, having to live in a “world without miracles.”

But wait – there is another definition of “miracle,” as “a person, thing, or event that excites wonder or admiring awe.” This is closer to the Latin miraculum “to wonder at,” or mirum “wonderful.”

By this definition I can never get to the end of miracles all around me. Like the favorite poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay that begins “Oh, world, I cannot hold thee close enough,” I constantly embrace things that fill me with wonder and awe. The walk from parking garage to office in the morning can be a rapture, along with the unexpected delight of favorite music or even swirls in a coffee cup. Living creatures, the sky, the endless expanse of the universe, the hydrodynamics of raindrops are all in their own way, miraculous.

Which leads me to the unexpected joy of even remembering some of my favorite music at 4:00 this morning when sleep would not return to me. I wondered: who would have predicted, while listening to a ludicrous boy-band singing “I wanna hold your hand,” that the same group would later produce the stirring “Let It Be” or the transcendently beautiful “Blackbird?”

No one can produce a solidly documented “miracle” by the first definition – let them try! But the other kind of miracle, the kind that happens all the time everywhere, goes begging for appreciation while we chase spirits. And who is poorer for that?

- George Wiman, April 2003

Postscript: 05 December ‘04: I just ran across this quote:

“Men talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head.”
- Henry David Thoreau

Categories: Personal

Jobs for out-of-work snipers

November 21, 2004 3 comments

I see this all the time on campus, and very few solutions come to mind.  Maybe… a sniper up on top of the parking garage.  It would give those special-ops guys something to do when the war is over.

Try to imagine: you’re a student at a state university.  You are not rich: that’s why you have a cheap bicycle that you depend on to get across campus to your morning class or your afternoon job.  One morning, you’re running late – everything seems to go wrong.  Finally you burst out the revolving door in front of your dorm and – ! – some drunken jerk has bent the wheel of your bicycle just for fun.  Your bike cannot be used and it would cost more than it’s worth to fix it.

(There were five bikes on that one rack with severely bent wheels.  And several more on the rack next to it.  It’s nothing new – I’ve been walking through the campus for 20 years and it happens every semester.)

I hope I never see anyone do it.

Categories: Personal

Tinkering with complicated machinery

November 20, 2004 Comments off

I’m used to the innards of mechanical and electrical things.  As a child I used to watch my dad restoring antique clocks and guns, fixing the car, and plumbing the house.  I used to repair cameras before it just became impossible in a small shop.  I’m restoring a 37-year-old car and I did computer repair full-time for five years.  So when I get a shiny new machine, I can’t resist pulling off the cover plates and looking inside.  All my adult life I’ve made a living doing that.

Expression engine is alien to me.  There are obviously new concepts to grasp;  I love that.  I change one little thing, save the change, and see what it does.  A picture is developing in my mind – still a bit hazy but it will come clearer as I go.  Today I got “extended text” working, so I can make my home page entries shorter and let those who care click on “Read more…” 

I just ordered The CSS Anthology, 101 essential tips, tricks, and hacks by Rachel Andrew.  Rachel is a skinny, urban web-designer chick with orange hair the color of fall leaves.  Why they put her picture on the book page, I don’t know.  Do they not want any readers over 30?  Then again, after reading the sample chapters, I bought the book, and I’m… over 30.   

Categories: Blogging, Geeky

Imagine the moment in Falluja

November 20, 2004 6 comments

You know the story by now: a US Marine in Falluja encounters a wounded Iraqi in a room.  Someone asks “Is he dead?”  He shoots the wounded man in the face, and says; “He’s dead now.”  An NBC camera man gets it on tape.  Now everyone in the Arab world watches the brutal scene, over and over…

The US is “investigating” to “determine if the Marine violated the rules of war.” 

My heart goes out to that soldier.  Try to imagine: you’re in a battle that lasts for days.  Utterly exhausted, you survive only because your adrenalin-ravaged autonomic nervous system still functions on some level.  One day, you’re wounded in the face, and on the same day, one of your fellow soldiers is killed as a wounded insurgent turns out to be booby-trapped.  The next day, you stand in that dead soldier’s place, examining a wounded insurgent who …might… be booby-trapped. 

Drained of emotion, not expecting to live to see home ever again, you elect to survive another hour: you shoot him.  You report factually: “He’s dead now.”  The room falls quiet for a moment as gunfire and explosions continue outside.  The CBS reporter puts down his camera, a shocked look on his face.

The soldier has been “removed from battle pending an investigation.”  People in nice clean clothes, who had plenty of sleep the night before, a choice of breakfast, coffee, and time to read the morning paper,will decide if he was guilty of “violating the rules of battle” in the one or two seconds he had to make his decision.

Imagine being in that soldier’s place then

Good discussion on Mostly Cajun here and here

Categories: News

Moral issues held for ransom

November 19, 2004 1 comment


I’m not picking on Prickly City here, because I like the comic, but it’s as good an example as any of how the notion of “moral issues” has been distorted by the Republican party … as if they’re the only ones who ever think about right and wrong. 

I probably don’t qualify as a real “Hollywood liberal” but I voted for Kerry expressly on moral issues.  The kind of screwing that gets my moral attention is the kind that Enron did to old ladies’ pensions.  There were environmental, constitutional, economic and war-related issues – all part of my understanding of public morality.  The Republicans did a good job pretending they “owned” morality by focusing on wedge issues like gay marriage and “The Pledge,” but “morality” is a bigger subject than that.

(By the way, Prickly City, I agree that most of the people on that list are total nitwits, with the exception of Rob Reiner, Steven Spielberg, and George Soros.  That’s a big problem the Democratic party has… it lets anyone near a microphone.)

Extended Text:

Moral Issue: Weakening environmental issues: we have to hand this planet over to our kids someday.

Moral Issue: The deficit: we have to hand this economy ober to our kids someday.
Moral Issue: Security: we’re less secure because our president insisted on tying up our military attacking the wrong country.  Iraq was not a threat to us.  We do not have the resources to take out every bad guy in the world – have to pick our battles more carefully.  We might need that military for real threats.
Moral Issue: Security II – we have not finished the job in Afghanistan.  And we have the support of the world on that one!
Moral Issue: Energy policy: Cheney wouldn’t say who helped him write it – is he willing to deny it was his cronies from Enron?
Moral Issue: Constitutional freedoms, especially the first amendment.  The Bush administration has suppressed free speech even to the extent of having people wearing Kerry buttons at Bush rallies arrested.  And if theocracies are so great, why don’t they go live in one?  They can deny it all they want, but that’s the direction we’re headed.
Moral Issue: Drug policy.  Our inner cities are turned into war zones, and crime cartels made rich and powerful by the misguided “war on drugs.”  Let’s grow up, shall we?  At the very least, can we agree that if smoking weed makes a terminally ill person feel better, we should let him?
Moral Issue: Right to die.  What right does the government have to decide this for me?
Moral Issue: Gay rights.  People who want to form stable partnerships are by definition, decent people.  What is so terrible about letting them?
Moral Issue: stem cell research.  Once more, a “wedge issue” without real substance.  The embroyos that would be used to find new stem cell lines are frozen leftovers.  They will be flushed down the drain if they are not used.  They will never be born in any case.

Across the red/blue fence, what do we have in common?  Belief in the promise of America?  Devotion to the constitution? (I hope!)  The connections of our economy?  (Many essays have been written by people in red and blue states about how the other state couldn’t survive without them.  Hello!  We need each other! 

With all that going for us, it must be possible to find a connection.

Categories: News

Multiple choice certainty and the failure of imagination

November 16, 2004 1 comment

I often know that I’m right.  That is, when it’s SO obvious that the only way to proceed is “X,” I just don’t understand why anyone would disagree.  Then I get slapped in the face by a different concept that I just… didn’t… imagine. 

See, I’ve known for a long time that the only, completely obvious thing to do with nuclear waste is to bury it in Yucca mountain.  Sure, it isn’t a perfect option, and we might wind up saying that whole valley’s off-limits to living things someday, but leaving all that junk where it is would be madness, right?  Terrorists would steal it, or fly planes into it.  Besides, we can’t just leave it for our children or grandchildren to solve, can we?

It turns out we can.  In fact, we should.

This month’s MIT Technology Review features the cover story, The best option for nuclear waste: We don’t know how to store it forever – let’s leave the solution to a generation that will. 

  • In 50 to 100 years it will be thermally much cooler (and more amenable for dense storage or processing)
  • Materials technology and the science of geology might be much improved by then
  • The junk might even be economically useful in the energy-intensive future
  • Nuclear fuel processing techniques are still improving, becoming cleaner and more economical
  • Apparently Yucca mountain’s problems as a storage location are worse than I’d realized.  Burying the stuff might make the problem much harder for our children and grandchildren to manage
  • A central location would be pretty easy to defend and a heck of a lot cheaper than Yucca mountain.

Doh!  (slaps forehead)  This stunningly simple and worthwhile solution comes courtesy of imagination, not multiple-choice certainty.  Someone had to get around the rhetoric, past the orthodox solutions, and “think outside the mountain.”  This example has implications far outside the highly politicized issue of nuclear waste.  It also bears on how we teach kids to think. In a rapidly changing society, conventional thinking could literally be disastrous.

In a broader, everyday context, how many good solutions remain forever hidden from us because we can’t see through our certainty?  And does that question have any bearing on how education should be done?  Because… we’re focusing pretty hard on teaching kids to value “the right answer” above all else.  We’re not giving them much opportunity to imagine that the best solution might not be listed among the answers.

Categories: News, Science & Technology

How did I miss this?

November 16, 2004 Comments off

Are you using Firefox?  Then you know how cool, how fast and time-saving tabbed browsing is.  But here’s a feature I didn’t know about: click on a link using your mouse wheel as a button and the link automatically opens up in a new tab.  Or if your mouse doesn’t have a wheel, hold down the Ctrl key while you click to get the same effect.  Faster than right-clicking and choosing “Open link in new tab”

OK, I’m probably the last Firefox user to figure that one out.  Slow on the draw…

Categories: Uncategorized

Cats are people, too

November 15, 2004 Comments off

I don’t know why I do this to myself… this evening I went to a town council meeting.  Now, I really hate meetings so there had to be a really, really good reason for me to subject myself to such a thing.  Here it is: the Town of Normal was considering a cat-leash-law.  And they passed it, with no public discussion allowed.

It seems that feral cats had become a nuisance, so personally owned, well-fed, vaccinated, neutered cats are now required to be kept indoors.  It was long and complicated, with lots of side issues, but here’s the kicker… they swore up and down that the ordinance would not be enforced unless there was a complaint!  I can see the headline now:  “Normal residents invited to get back at their neighbors by filing complaints against their outdoor cats.”

The representative from “Sterile Feral” said that if pet owners really cared about their pets, they’d keep them indoors.  This is the argument that people use when they want to control you: “If you really cared about ‘X’, you’d (do what I think is best!)”  There’s never any room for the way you see the problem, or for your priorities.  If you don’t agree with them, it’s obvious you just don’t care about… whatever it is.

See, as much as I can’t stand animal rights nutballs, they do have a point about pets, and it is this: animals are sentient and they do have preferences.  Since I don’t personally know any chickens (and have not liked the ones I did know) I don’t have a problem with the chicken sandwich I ate for lunch today.  But I do know my cats and I respect their preferences.

I like to go outside, and when I do, I create a lot of noise and even more pollution with all my engine-powered monstrosities.  Generally, this is thought to be OK.  But if my cat goes outside, and creates a little noise and a little (biodegradable) pollution, that’s not acceptable.

I happen to know beyond reasonable doubt that my cats like to go outdoors.  They sit on the porch railing and doze in the sun, waking to watch the world go by.  Clearly they’re having a good time.  Yes, I can force them to stay inside until they become accustomed to imprisonment, but that would be wrong.

I’m also aware that cats kill other animals, and it’s their business!  Frankly I just don’t care.  I’ve indirectly killed a lot more animals than my cats ever have – they eat dry cat food.  Hell, they’re practically vegetarians next to me.

A lot of noise is made about the fact that cats defecate outdoors; but so do birds, squirrels, rabbits, mice, coons, possum, bats, deer – all successful urban animals.  Even I’ve been known to water the plants on occasion.  But if my cat ever “goes” in someone’s garden, I’ll gladly pay for cat repellent to make them happy.

I had a neighbor who openly hated cats.  The moral defective so-and-so threatened to get his rifle “and take care of it” referring to my cat.

Humans have been around animals for a long time and it hasn’t killed us yet.  But there’s something missing from a human who can’t stand the sight of somebody’s pet.

Categories: News