Off for a couple of days to Tucson, where I hope to spend at least a portion of Greenery Day looking at cactus.
Paaaarty!
Those Romans apparently knew how to party. Perhaps that was the key to their rise and fall. In this case, they honored the goddess Flora with "excessive merriment, drinking, and lascivious games". They said it was about protecting the blossoms from hail etc., but it sounds to me like an excuse for proto-spring break.
Hunting the bookshelf Saturday evening for something different to read, I stumbled across the translated correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem.
Benjamin and Scholem were Jewish scholars, and their collected correspondence is apparently something of an epistolary classic.
The two were Jewish intellectuals of some prominence, and the correspondence documents their lives in the decade before World War II. Sholem had moved to Palestine, while Benjamin lived a life of itinerant, scholarly poverty, wandering Europe in those dark days - especially dark for a Jew - leading up to World War II. From a Benjamin letter, written from Berlin in February 1933 (this is a month after Hitler became chancellor).
The little composure that people in my circles were able to muster in the face of the new regime was rapidly spent, and one realizes that the air is hardly fit to breathe anymore - a condition which of course loses significance as one is being strangled anyway.
I know little about their scholarship, but the discussions of the rise of Naziism - often made with chilling subtlety - are deeply moving. There's also a bit of dark comedy, as Benjamin spends significant time in almost every letter complaining about his impecunious state:
I sit here with dark thoughts indeed as I watch all my attempts even to scratch together the bare minimum - at the very least to settle my bill - go awry, because events at Berlin Radio have completely robbed me of the income I could always rely on.
Must learn more about Kabbalah and the work Benjamin and Scholem were doing.
"Only in Albuquerque," Lissa said.
The local outlet for Lafarge, the international rock, concrete and aggregate vendor, had an open house this afternoon. It was a delight. They were barbecueing hamburgers and hot dogs, and had some guy making balloon animals for the kids. One of the local radio stations was doing remotes. From a rock and gravel yard. We wandered the yard, checking out the crushed stone for L's latest garden project, and L got a free soda. Such a deal! And they'll likely have sold us some rock, though that would have happened anyway. We like their rock.
Mark April 25 as the Day of First Robin, spotted in the bit of garden out front we call the "mountain meadow". He didn't seem to mind my presence, just hopped around as I walked up the drive past him. Must procure digital camera to better document events such as this.
Happy Anzac Day to all my antipodean readers. (Though given the Gallipoli angle, "happy" may not quite strike the right note).
Two sitings yesterday of old bird friends.
The first was on the bike path, along the flood control channel next to the freeway interchange. It's about the least natural setting you can imagine, pretty much concrete as far as the eye can see, speeding cars and parking lots. But because of people wasting water when they water their lawns or whatever, there's a steady flow of water in the concrete-lined channel, and soil tries to build up down at the bottom, and grasses relentlessly grow, creating a little wetland until they come by with the heavy equipment to "clean it up" every year. And every spring the killdeers return to this little stretch of bike path. Saw my first one yesterday morning. The killdeer looks very much to me like a shore bird, and I always see it on the concrete slopes above my lttle wetland, though Sibley tells me it's a plover "found in upland habitats often far from water."
The second siting was the first of our returning hummers, which Lissa quickly and authoritatively identified as the male black-chinned. Lissa is much better at the naming of these things because she is a much more visual person, and a better observer. I'm fascinated by knowing the names, but I need her to keep pointing out which is which. In this case, the black-chinned has, well, a black chin, though that would not help distinguish him from the male Ruby-throated, which also has a blackish chin. That distinction is pure geography - we're not likely to have the ruby-throated here.
We know it's the same hummer, because after returning all the way from Central America, he heads straight for our obscurely hidden feeder on the front porch. Though whether it's really one or many I can't tell. They all look alike to me, especially without my glasses.
By a complication of her incredibly busy life, Nora was not able to make it to the awarding of her freshman year academic letter, which she had earned by virtue of her being smart and working hard in school and all.
It was a tricky parental moment. We really wanted her to go, so we could bust with pride while she walked across the gym floor. Lissa really wanted it. But Nora's on the stage crew for their performance of Othello, and tonight was the final dress rehearsal. That was for her a no-brainer - of course she would go to the theater. So Lissa and I went and sat in the audience while Nora did not walk up to accept her academic letter. We were still busting proud, and got to applaud a bunch of her friends. And afterwards we went up and grabbed her letter for her and it was all fine.
The seniors who had earned an academic letter all four years got to pick their most influential teacher. They each gave a little speech explaining their choice, and they had little gifts and flowers for the teachers, and it was about the sweetest thing I've ever seen.
Hmmm. I thought a glider was sorta, by definition, a flying thing without a motor.
Tried riding my bike to work today. It worked fine.
My main worry was that I would stink and offend my coworkers, but that problem seems alleviated by just riding gently on the way in. No sweat.
I've wanted for a while to ride to work. My morning ride often takes me out a trail that ends up about half a mile from my office. Then I turn around, ride home, and drdive a car back to the office. Showers were always the holdup. But there were too many positives not to try it, most significantly the time not lost to sitting in my car. It's never been a bad commute, just 15 minutes each way, but it always seems like 15 wasted minutes. Time in the car traded for time on the bike seems like a good deal.
I didn't take my go-fast bike, opting instead to put town tires on my old mountain bike. I didn't fancy worrying about the nice bike out on the bike rack in the parking lot at work. I also invested in a good lock. By my calculation, I'll have to ride 30 or 40 times this year to amortize the money I sunk into the tires and lock. (Of course I sprung for the nice armadillo kevlar thorn-proof tires and slime tubes. This is Goathead City.)
I can't do it every day. Some days I need my car for work. But on days when I don't riding seems like an option.
The folks at Debian-legal are having a discussion of the GNU Free Documentation License. At least some members think the license does not meet their "free" test. At issue is the ability to use the license to declare portions of a doc "invariant", meaning they cannot be modified down the line. From the FSF explanation:
The idea of invariant sections is that they give you a way to express nontechnical personal opinions about the topic.The classical example of an invariant nontechnical section in a free manual is the GNU Manifesto, which is included in the GNU Emacs Manual. The GNU Manifesto says nothing about how to edit with Emacs, but it explains the reason why I wrote GNU Emacs--to be an essential part of the GNU operating system, which would give computer users freedom to cooperate in a community. Since the GNU Manifesto presents the principles of the GNU Project, rather than features of GNU Emacs, we decided that others should not remove or change it when redistributing the Emacs Manual.
At least some in the Debian community believe this conflcts with their definition of "free". If the Debian community acts on this, it would essentially mean that all of GNOME would no longer be considered free software in the eyes of the Debian community. This would be a great bother. I would prefer that they accede to the wishes of those who believe a doc meets their tests if it includes no invariant sections, but whatever. I believe the license ensures freedom, so I'm fine with it.
I'm facing a hard problem right now in my free software life. It all goes back to an observation Dave Mason made some long time ago that I always have remembered - "I don't want to be a hacker." Being a hacker takes a huge amount of time and energy, is profoundly alluring, but is fundamentally different than being a free software contributor. I want to be a free software contributor. But lately, in order to do that, I need to be a hacker, which I really don't want to do.
I have a limited amount of time for GNOME. It's a lot of time, often an hour or more a day, but it is not expandable. Right now, there's a great deal of important work that needs to be done in preparing for the GNOME 2.4 release, especially working out some issues associated with building the docs, and understanding some issues involving the help browser and its relationship with Scrollkeeper. All of that is predicated on my being able to build the 2.3.x stuff. Which I can't do. In a perfect world, I just fire up the build scripts and let them run. But both of them stop short, at different places under different conditions, I spend the limited amount of time I have trying to fix get them fixed and working, I fail, and then I've used up the time I have for the day. And I accomplish effectively zero.
The result, of course, is that you've got to be a hacker in order to contribute in the way I need to. And I don't want to be a hacker.
Leave it to the Icelanders to make the call so early. While the rest of us wait patiently, it apparently is tradition in Iceland to call the first Thursday past April 20 the "first day of summer". Another testament to the power of naming stuff.
As per the usual, gifts are involved.
Lissa and I spent a good bit of time yesterday just sort of wandering - lunch downtown, then an exhibit tracing the history of plastics at the University of New Mexico library, then coffee and a stop in the food co-op. Just idle wandering.
This evening, we killed two hours walking up and down the aisles of Home Depot, looking at stuff- picking which bathroom fixture we liked best, fondling tile, looking at paint chips, picking out a 4x4 in the lumber aisle.
After 18 years of marriage, that's the time that matters most. Never mind the fancy dinner date stuff, it's the idle wandering that's best. I treasure our time together in Home Depot.
While we're on rituals of spring, consider the grounds crew laying out the clean chalk baselines down first and third, their geometry interrupted only by batters boxes on one end and infinity on the other. Consider the clean white uniforms of the boys of spring. Consider Myron Noodleman. Consider the linescore:
| team | runs | hits | errors |
| Sky Sox | 2 | 6 | 3 |
| Isotopes | 11 | 11 | 0 |
All is again right with the world.
Lissa and I went to the new Isotopes Field Friday night for our first ballgame since the Dukes left our great city bereft of baseball. It was cold and windy (April games always surprise us, but we've long learned to ignore our optimism and bring blanket and coats.), but perfect.
As it happens, I did forget today's holiday until now, but luckily ate cereal anyway.
The festival of "Cerialia" ("Cerealia"? The spelling seems several.) is a particularly entertaining one, what with the exchange of hospitality among the common people and the letting loose of foxes with burning torches tied to their tails[1]. What a sight! We'll have to see if we can hunt down a fox today that we might try it!
Today is also St. Alphege's day. He seems to be the chap who persuaded Svend Tyggeskaeg (aka "Forkbeard" - geez those Vikings knew how to slap a nickname on their marauders) to stop raiding England. So today we eat cereal and celebrate St. Alphege's stand for peace and, if we can find a fox, we'll tie a torch to her tail this evening. (Hmm, wonder if Sadie would go for it.)
[1] Blackburn et. al., Oxford Book of Days, p. 160
Playing hooky from work today, cool morning (but not cold), a little wind but not so's to be too much trouble. Just me and my bike. The perfect ride.
Our story begins on Wednesday, when I had what I can only describe as a shitty ride. I wanted to do intervals, so I set my heart monitor, warmed up well, and started cranking. It's a workout I've been doing variations on for the last couple of months - warm up well, then do repeats cranking up to a sprint until I hit my anaerobic threshhold (167 - my max is 185 - 190), slowing down to low heart rate recovery (128) - lather, rinse, repeat.
Wednesday I just didn't have it. It was hard to get the heart rate up, it hurt, I had to really struggle to get the heart rate up over 167 (my usual break point), recovery took forever. But like a dumbshit, I listened to the heart monitor and not my body, and kept banging away at it.
It wasn't until I got home after an unpleasant hour of this that I figured out why. I was wheezing. Just a touch, but enough to impair my lung function. I was going into oxygen debt sooner. My anaerobic threshhold was probably five or 10 beats lower than normal.
I've never been seriously asthmatic, but as a child I had occasional serious attacks, and I grew up in one of America's smoggiest cities, before the air pollution efforts of the late '60s and 1970s really took hold. The results were apparent on a doctor's visit a few years ago. I was there to talk to him about sleep apnea, but he's a pulmonary guy, so (I think out of habit) he gave me a lung function test. Two tests, one normal and then a second after using an inhaler. I was amazed. I felt fine, no difficulty breathing, just normal. But after the inhaler, my lung capacity was about 15 percent greater. That means when my lungs start to shut down with asthma (pollen or exercise-induced or both) the numbers must have gone south in a hurry.
I found some exercise physiology charts that suggest what may be going on here. I don't think my case is as extreme as those diagrammed there, but I get the idea.
Today, I warmed up 10 minutes, stopped and took a couple of shots from my inhaler. Bang. My lungs felt clear, my legs were spinning, my heart rate easy, I was able to crank it up whenever I wanted without the pain. I rolled easily at a pretty high aerobic rate out to the river and through the bosque, with a nice easy climb back up out of the valley and home, a bit less than two hours, perfect start to my day off. There's for sure something to be said for a day of rest, but I clearly need to spend some time sorting through and understanding better this pulmonary function issue.
If you have a spare $15, you score a genuine John Fleck autograph! This is apparently not me. (And thanks to David Harris for the idea.)
Telsa observes what must be a defining difference between her European mind and my oh-so-New World way of thinking - the question of how one dresses for the weather:
In America once, Alan grabbed his coat and got a strange look. "It's sunny. It's not going to rain." "Just in case.." "No, you don't understand. It won't change today." It's not like that here. In cold weather you still make sure you have something you can take off in case it brightens up. And in bright weather you still carry along a jumper or a coat or a hat or something. Just in case.
One wonders what other false confidence, what ill-advised certainty, we might project unto the world. Arrogance in the face of weather may be ill-advised, humility a good thing.
Joel Spolsky wonders:
Why does every technical manual and book include a section at the beginning on "conventions used in this document," full of ridiculous and useless tips like, "Tips are indicated by a lightbulb icon in the margin"? Is it because you're paid by the word?
We aren't (paid by the word) and we don't (begin our docs that way). Go free software!
April 19, just four short days away, is the festival of Cerealia, a celebration in reverence to Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture.
I plan to eat cereal for breakfast that day in celebration. Lissa notes that I eat cereal every day. This is true, and a good thing, for I'm somewhat absent-minded and am likely to forget the holiday.
This comes to mind because it's the season of spring festivals, rooted in a time when our religious celebrations served as practical markers of stuff we needed to do, like planting. Today is the Fordicia. We're apparently supposed to sacrifice two dozen pregnant cows in the temples in honor of Tellus, Roman god of the Earth. This seems impractical, so I ate cereal this morning as well.
It is said that on this day (ah, sweet harbingers of spring!) the cuckoo makes its appearance. But careful what one wishes for, eh? For "cuckoo", the bird that lays its eggs in the nest of another, is the root of "cuckold":
Cuckoo, cuckoo - O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear.
(Thanks to the Book of Days.)
Thomas Jefferson, born on this day 260 years ago, was one of America's first meteorologists, identifying the phenomenon of temperature inversion. He also became president.
I've added a new blog to my blogroll, that of David Harris, a physicist who works with the American Physical Society. He's got a lot of good science, mixed with a range of literary discussion that fills the blog with useful surprises.
One imagines a bridge here between The Two Cultures, with literary types unexpectedly exposed to nuclear fusion and the like while the scientists dabble in haikus or David's discussions of Herman Hesse.
I've been reading him for a while, but his work is especially on my mind after a fascinating talk yesterday by Tim Moy that touched on C.P. Snow's famous lectures/book on "The Two Cultures". Snow was a poet and physicist who spoke famously in 1959 about the divide between humanities and science, neither understanding the other's world. If anything, the divide has widened in the years since, with the postmodern critique of science creating a chasm that seems at times unbridgeable.
The context of Moy's talk was a global climate change workshop (the one I've been yarmmering about of late - fascinating stuff in other ways too numerous to blog completely). Moy broadened the two cultures to three in a perceptively useful way - science, humanities, and "the public". He pointed out an issue I've thought about a lot - the relative distrust on the intellectual left of the idea of a consensus of science - this is at the heart of the postmodern critique. Here the left, if I may overgeneralize, is a hypocrite. On the issue of global warming, it demands we accept and act on the scientific consensus. But on issues that do not suit it - the risks of low-dose radiation, or genetically modified foods, to cite my two favorite examples - the left rejects the scientific consensus and demands we listen to the scientific outliers with whom it agrees. Tricky business, this intersection between science and politics. (I would point out that the intellectual right labors under the same hypocrisy, mocking the left and hewing to consensus on GMO's and radiation while picking its contrarian darlings on global warming.)
Perhaps in spring one's thoughts should turn to the flowers of the field, as Longfellow:
I open wide the portals of the Spring
To welcome the procession of the flowers
With their gay banners, and the birds that sing.
Which is why the 18th-century British naturalist Gilbert White is all the more remarkable in this instance, musing as he did on snail and slug:
The shell-less snails, called slugs, are in motion all the winter in mild weather, and commit great depredations on garden-plants, and much injure the green wheat....; while the shelled snail ... does not come forth 'til April the tenth.... Why the naked slug should be so much more able to endure cold than it's housed congener, I cannot pretend to say.
(Inspiration and quotes from the Oxford Book of Days)
Some thoughts on issues associated with communicating with the public about climate change, triggered by reading I've been doing to prepare for “Heating Up: Coming to Terms with Climate Change in the Southwest" this weekend at the University of New Mexico:
I started with the naive premise that the U.S. public's ignorance of science was a central problem, realized my premise was probably wrong in the case of global climate change, but ultimately concluded that my original premise, accompanied with some carefully subtlety, was probably more right than I realize.
The PowerPointIsh Bullets:
- The general public in the United States does not doubt the reality of global warming.
- The general public in the United States generally trusts the scientific consensus that the warming is significantly human-caused.
- The general public in the United States doesn't distinguish between settled "textbook" science and the cutting edge of research, where stuff is hard and uncertain.
- Global climate change research is very hard and very, very uncertain.
Data on U.S. understanding of and attitudes toward global climate change comes from the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes [1]:
Virtually all polls taken have found a very strong majority believes that global warming is a real problem. Only a very small minority -- less than a quarter of the public -- doubts the reality of global warming.
A "strong majority" believes humans are behind the warming, and "a strong majority believes that there is consensus among scientists as to the reality of global warming."
This undercuts a working hypothesis I started out with (I love it when my preconceived notions are wrong!). I had expected the U.S. public was more divided on the question than the data suggests.
But if you dive deeper into the Maryland data, you find a lack of consensus on what action, if any, is called for. People arent' sure what, if any, action should be taken because they don't seem to be quite sure what global climate change means.
And global climate change science cannot yet tell them. It's one of those research areas out on the cutting edge where much remains uncertain. On a global scale, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, current models suggest surface temperature warming of 2.5 to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century.[2]
That range of uncertainty is hard for folks to get their hands around. "This range, which many consider to be too wide to guide policy making, is due to gaps in understanding of climate science and the socio-economic drivers of climate change," concluded a recent National Research Council report.[3]
The uncertainty grows when the research community starts talking about the specific effects at regional or local scales, or when the issue of abrupt and dramatic change enters the picture.
This is where the public's understanding of science, or lack thereof, enters the picture. The polls may suggest some understanding of global climate change, but it's not very deep, because people in general are not familiar enough with cutting edge science to understand the contingent and shifting nature of the research enterprise.
The National Science Foundation's "Science and Engineering Indicators," [4] published every two years, provides a useful benchmark on the public's understanding of scientific facts and scientific process. To people in the scientific community, the results can seem abysmal - just half the adults surveyed, for example, know that electrons are smaller than atoms. But scientists must remember - that's the cultural water in which they're swimming. Most importantly, when the NSF's researchers asked folks being surveyed questions to plumb their knowledge about scientific process, they bombed. Which means they are ill-equipped to understand the contingency and undertainty and complex statistical issues associated with global climate change research.
Notes:
[1] http://www.americans-world.org/digest/global_issues/global_warming/gw1.cfm
[2] Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
[3] Planning Climate and Global Change Research: A Review of the Draft U.S. Climate Change Science Program Strategic Plan
[4] Science and Engineering Indicators
Giving blood sucks. They poke me, sometimes painfully, and I feel crappy afterwards. There is no amount of money they could pay me to make it worth my while. But that's the point.
I went in today to donate, and for not the first time they screwed up getting the needle in my arm. It hurt, of course, but moreso because they were using a new system that extracts more blood, centrifuges out the red blood cells and returns the liquid along with some saline for good measure. This gives them more usable blood and, in theory, leaves the donor less dehydrated, which is one of the main pains of blood donation. The problem was when the gizmo started pumping liquid back into my arm, I felt a burning pain, and I could see a lump growing under the needle. They had missed my vein.
So why do I donate? My friend Scott Smallwood turned me on to a writer called David Bollier, who writes about the gift economy and the commons. It's stuff that applies real obviously to free software, but also to blood donation:
One of the most vivid case studies comparing the performance of market and gift economies is Richard Titmuss’s examination of British and American blood banks in the 1960s. Drawing upon extensive empirical data, Titmuss concluded that commercial blood systems generally produce blood supplies of less safety, purity, and potency than volunteer systems; are more hazardous to the health of donors; and over the long run produce greater shortages of blood.What can possibly account for these counter- intuitive deviations from market theory, which holds that the price system produces the most efficient outcomes and highest quality product? It turns out that the introduction of money into the blood transaction encourages doctors to skirt prescribed safety rules and tends to attract more drug addicts, alcoholics, prisoners, and derelicts than altruistic appeals do.
According to Titmuss, Britain’s National Blood Transfusion Service “has allowed and encouraged sentiments of altruism, reciprocity, and societal duty to express themselves; to be made explicit and identifiable in measurable patterns of behavior by all social groups and classes.” In this context, the gift economy regime is not simply “nice.” It is actually more efficient, cheaper, and safer.
So I donate blood because it's the right thing to do, because Lissa and my Dad did but can no longer. And because they don't pay me.
Call me weakling. I am an aching mass of quivering arm muscles. Lissa and I spent hours this weekend breaking concrete. We cut a strip several inches wide out of our driveway, to get a new water line to our garden.
I admit now I thought it was a bad idea. But Lissa wanted to do it, and she is my betrothed beloved, so I went a long without complaint. This is an important lesson of marriage I have learned. Sometimes one just goes along without complaint. (Plus it's not like I had a better idea.) And of course, what I thought would be nigh impossible worked quite well once Lissa got a diamond blade for her saw, and neighbor Bud loaned us a steel pry bar and an extra sledge hammer.
Lissa, of course, is the muscular and competent one. I whacked with the hammers all I could, but I'm a skinny weakling, so I feel like I accomplished little, mostly cheering her on and pulling weeds while I "rested". The weeds are under control, and we've now got room for a nice new water line for our timer-driven drip irrigation system. But damn I slept lousy. My arms ache.
As is my wont, I calculate pi. It's considerably more efficient than my last effort, though that's to be expected given the methodology.
As I mentioned earlier, I've been playing with Python, and I've a long-standing tradition, dating back to high school, of calculating pi when I'm starting to learn a new computer language.
That ugly-looking
d = math.sqrt((c*c) + pow((1 - math.sqrt(1-(c*c))),2))
just applies the Pythagorean theorem to ever-smaller triangular slices of a circle, until the outer hypotenuses very closely match the perimeter of the circle. I never quite remember the details, so I've always got to work out the geometry again when I try this, but it's pretty straightforward once I get over the lazies.
The embankment beyond the outfield fence at the old Albuquerque Sports Stadium was covered with lava rock, and "lava" became synonymous with the long ball. One of my
great baseball moments was when Daryl Strawberry, then with the Dodgers, was down at Albuquerque on a rehab assignment. Whoever was pitching had gotten behind in the count to Strawberry, and I leaned over to my friend Chuck right before the pitch and said, "Lava." Bang. Strawberry hit a rope into the lava.
The Dodgers'' farm club, the Dukes, left us two years ago, and we've been out of baseball ever since. But tonight I am listening on the radio to Albuquerque Isotopes baseball, playing their season opening series in Memphis.
Lissa, Nora and I were among the 6,000 (how do they know that?) who made the pilgrimage today to an open house at Isotopes Park today, the beautifully rebuilt ballpark. We'll have to pay more for tickets, and the food prices are exhorbitant, as befits a modern ballpark. But the grass is green, the basepaths are red and they put some lava beyond the center field fence.
I despair of the state of public discourse.
It's a long-standing concern, but the debate over the war in Iraq has cast it in sharp relief. I have sampled talk radio of late, and have been reading in the letters to the editor and blogging world. Much is the same, discourse directed at demonizing those with whom the speaker disagrees
The talk radio case is egregious. Rather than thinking about the serious and important implications of war, callers' energy (for talk radio is invariably of the right) is focused on complaining about anti-war protesters. The issue here is Iraq and the war, not the protesters. There are serious, reasonable and important reasons that one can oppose this war, involving moral imperatives and evaluations of our national interest. But hating liberals is such sport, and more fun than thinking about the serious and complex issues posed by this war.
On the left, the "no blood for oil" billboard is a caricature of those who believe in the rightness of this war. There are serious, reasonable and important reasons that one can support this war, involving moral imperatives and evaluations of our national interest. But hating conservatives is such sport, and more fun than thinking about the serious and complex issues posed by this war.
Those intelligent enough to devote their energy to really deeply understanding why their opponent is sincere and reasonable are far better debaters in the long run than those who erect and then demolish one straw man after another.
This was fun:
SOCORRO — Chris Carilli's task is like trying to see what grows at the bottom of a murky pond.
The pond, in this case, is the universe. At the murky bottom, barely visible through the muck of space and time, is the birth of a thousand suns.
With a combination of persistence, technology and luck, Carilli and his colleagues have for the first time seen baby stars swirling around a massive black hole.
The stars are so far away, and it has therefore taken their light so long to get here, that the astronomers are effectively seeing back near the dawn of time.
There, in the early universe, the first galaxies were forming, and Carilli and his colleagues are struggling to understand how. How did the dust and gas of the early universe coalesce to form the planets, stars and galaxies we see around us today?
TV commentator, on the possible impending collapse of the Iraqi government:
"We may be reaching a tipping point." (emphasis added)
Methinks tipping point has passed a tipping point. Will it be robbed of its meaning in the process?
There's this archetypal moment at the end of Lone Ranger episodes where the masked man and his trusty sidekick have ridden out of town after saving the day. One townsperson says to another, "Who was that masked man?"
"I don't know, but he left this silver bullet," says a second.
"Why don't you know," says a third. "That's the Lone Ranger".
MUSIC UP AND OUT
That's the way I feel this week with the maintenance of the stylesheets for GNOME's Yelp help browser. Mikael Hallendal posted a note looking for someone to take over their care and feeding. They need a lot of more love than they're getting, and none of us are particularly fluent in XSLT. From out of the night came this, from Shaun McCance. And then, in a flurry of late-night hacking (you can tell by the time stamps on his patches) he tore through the bug list, metaphorically mowing down the bad guys with a clear eye and a sharp aim - clean shots, killing no one, just blasting the guns from their hands.
We do not know who Shaun McCance is, but he is a free software hero.
I've been spending free time over the last several days tinkering with Python, and I like it. I tried it because Daniel Veillard has written nice Python bindings to libxml, and it seemed like a simpler way to quickly hack out xml solutions as long as the learning curve isn't too steep. Turns out its not, takes just a few lines of code to do basic xml tasks. Handy.
John Coltrane accompanied me on the long drive to Socorro this morning, with Lee Morgan on trumpet and the echoes of geology in my head as I followed the Rio Grande Rift, a deceptively simple feature on the landscape of New Mexico. Most rivers cut their own way, making the valleys and canyons they use to get along. But the Rio Grande is an opportunist, following a gentle slow rift in the Earth's crust. This is appropros of nothing in particular, except it was a beautiful day for a drive, all spring on the high desert and John Coltrane today earned my trust (if he didn't have it already).
A man standing on his front walk, quietly watching his lawn burn.