tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-354143012024-03-21T21:23:58.520-04:00Standing Here Beside MyselfAn avant-garde performance artist once told his audience, "I had to suffer for my art. Now it's your turn."
--Bill Cavnar (a.k.a. Wile E. Quixote)Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.comBlogger46125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-44197821743776555922019-10-30T16:00:00.000-04:002019-10-30T16:00:09.444-04:00How Faith Is Like Special Relativity<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This morning I read in the <i>Magnificat</i> a whole passage from Psalm 97, but the particular phrase that struck me was this:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Clouds and thick darkness are round about him; righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I had just been looking at the heavy, gray, low-hanging rainclouds outside which are usually so depressing for me. So, it was surprising and helpful to realize that, rather than being a sign of God's absence, those very clouds signified His presence. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A little later on in today's readings, I saw a familiar passage from Romans 8, particularly these verses:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words... We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">--Romans 8:26-28</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I always think of this passage as St. Paul's encouragement to Christians who find themselves overwhelmed with their circumstances. First, he says that the Holy Spirit Himself is with us, and helping us to pray, especially when our fatigue and perplexity leave us without words. Then, St. Paul reminds us that <b>all things </b>... not some things, and not most things, but <b>all things</b> work together for our good.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Later on in today's readings in <i>Magnificat</i> is a short exhortation written by Pope Benedict XVI, which I thought was especially on point for me:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The first thing should be that God is present in our life. The sums of human life don’t work out if God is left out: all that remains then is nothing but contradiction. So we mustn’t just believe in some theoretical way that God exists: we must consider him to be the most important and real thing in our life. As Scripture says, he must penetrate every layer of our life and fill it completely: our heart must know about him and let itself be moved by him; our soul; the power of our will and decision; our intelligence. He must be everywhere. And our fundamental attitude towards him, our fundamental relationship to him, must be called love.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Often this can be very difficult…. Often assent to God seems almost impossible. But those who abandon themselves to this rebellion poison their lives. The poison of negation, of anger against God and against the world, eats them away from within. <b><span style="color: #6aa84f;">But God wants from us as it were a down-payment of trust. He says to us: “I know you don’t understand me yet. But trust me: believe me when I tell you I am good and dare to live on the basis of this trust. Then you will discover that behind your suffering, behind the difficulties of your life, a love is hiding. Then you will know that precisely in this way I have done something good for you.”</span></b> There are many examples of saints and great people who have dared to have this trust and who have thus found true happiness—for themselves and for many others—precisely in the greatest darkness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I was particularly struck, moved even, by the sentences that I highlighted, and especially by the notion that God is asking of us a 'down-payment of trust'.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Here's the weird analogy that came to mind this morning. As you may know, Einstein derived all of Special Relativity from two postulates:</span></div>
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<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The laws of physics are the same in all inertial reference frames.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The speed of light is the same in all inertial reference frames and is not affected by the speed of its source.</span></li>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In a way, St. Paul and Pope Benedict offer us a view of reality that is just as unexpected as Special Relativity was, and like it, is derived from a handful of postulates, namely:</span></div>
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<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">God is all good, and desires only our good.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Our ability to receive the good which God intends for us depends on us always being ready to make another act of trust in Him and His ability to act.</span></li>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The second point means that all circumstances, whether they are the result of our choices or of the choices of others or from 'acts of God', can still lead to our good if we entrust those circumstances and ourselves to God.It seems to me that if we can embrace these postulates through an act of faith, then they enable us to respond to God's graces, and eventually to understand what He is doing in our lives.</span></div>
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Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-10600925995593133562019-02-09T11:18:00.000-05:002019-02-09T11:20:04.491-05:00Being nourished by doing God's will<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In today's <i>Magnificat </i>morning prayers, there is a passage from <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+119%3A17-24&version=NRSV">Psalm 119:17-24</a> which speaks of the psalmist's desire to know God's commands and to do God's will. The preface for this passage introduces this reading with another brief passage from John 4, which is part of the story of Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Meanwhile the disciples besought him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat of which you do not know.” So the disciples said to one another, “Has any one brought him food?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish his work...."</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That got me thinking about the difference between the way Jesus experienced doing his Father's will, and our own experience, which often is much less enthusiastic about doing the Father's will. For some reason, I then thought of a very interesting comment that I heard many years ago in a talk by, I believe, Ralph Martin. In this talk, the speaker was recounting his experience in learning to ski. He had basically taught himself to ski, but then later in life had the opportunity to get a lesson from a genuine skiing instructor. He was amazed at how difficult this was. The problem was that he had taught himself a number of incorrect techniques, which were quite limited in what they could accomplish. If he wanted to learn the right way to do those things (such as the proper way to turn), then he had to <b>un-learn</b> all of the bad techniques, and replace them with mastery of good techniques. He was also amazed at what a difference learning the proper way to ski made, and how much easier it was to ski faster and more flexibly.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What I heard the Lord say at this point is that our response to doing the Father's will is much like that. Growing up in a broken, fallen world, learning from broken, fallen parents and other teachers, we have learned to do a lot of things, but we have learned bad ways of doing them, based on fear and selfish impulses. Because of that, when we finally hear what the Father's will is, it seems painful and hard, and counter to what we naturally want to do. But if we had learned from the beginning the proper way to respond, then we too would experience doing God's will as being nourishing and energizing. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">May we all come to experience what Jesus did, that our food is to do the will of Him who sent us, and to accomplish His work! And may the Father give us the courage to unlearn the old ways we have of living, and learn the new ways that Jesus came to teach us.</span><br />
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Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-55688673124947857222019-01-04T13:58:00.000-05:002019-01-04T13:58:40.158-05:00On the Crookes Radiometer as a metaphor for our relationship with God<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsheQNnehyf2Qs93DfGLuvgU7pHxeUtpeGkMi-V-Lfk4vt4EhdN36nIXxzLEGS-vbe1VdULDJpDIKTe3lzM4WH5JlQq2PWF3K457_F1kkRCHHxiQZdj1ehFZeG5XE-r0UbNmKW/s1600/Crookes+Radiometer+-+Arbor+Scientific+-+P3-8105Web.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="299" data-original-width="202" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsheQNnehyf2Qs93DfGLuvgU7pHxeUtpeGkMi-V-Lfk4vt4EhdN36nIXxzLEGS-vbe1VdULDJpDIKTe3lzM4WH5JlQq2PWF3K457_F1kkRCHHxiQZdj1ehFZeG5XE-r0UbNmKW/s1600/Crookes+Radiometer+-+Arbor+Scientific+-+P3-8105Web.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This is a typical example of a Crookes Radiometer. Inside a partially evacuated glass bulb is a needle, on which rests a set of vanes mounted on a very low friction hub. The vanes are white or shiny on one side, and black on the other. When you place this device so that it is illuminated by bright light, particularly the light of the sun, then the set of vanes spins merrily away, in the direction of the white or shiny sides.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crookes_radiometer&source=gmail&ust=1543612526012000&usg=AFQjCNEEHaqEbq5vQ_K6pUZZ06nFB8GS1w" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crookes_radiometer" style="color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">This Wikipedia page</a><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">explains the origin of the device, and lists several different possible explanations of how it works. The short explanation is that each of the vanes acts as a tiny heat engine, converting incoming electromagnetic radiation (primarily infrared and visible light) into motion through subtle thermodynamic phenomena occurring right at the surface of the black side of each vane.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I have always been fascinated by these devices, and all the more so as I have gotten older. Besides the intriguing and unexpected physics of these devices, I have also found them very cheering to have around, especially on a sunny day in winter. It is strangely satisfying and uplifting to watch the vanes of a radiometer spinning furiously in bright sunlight. It can be, however, a bit subduing to watch the vanes spinning very slowly on a hazy day or very late in the day as the sun goes down, and even depressing to see them sit motionless on a gloomy day or in a room this is only moderately illuminated. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">About 6 years ago Mary and I decided to replace all of the windows in our house with top-of-the-line Anderson windows. The new windows greatly reduced our energy bill, both in winter and summer, which was what we were looking for. One of the primary ways the windows achieve these savings is through a slight tint, which allows very little infrared and ultraviolet to pass in either direction. However, one unintended and unwanted side effect of this blockage of light was that all of our plants began to get sickly. Although the diminution of light was so slight as to not be noticeable to the eye, it nonetheless had a big impact on our plants. It took Mary a while to find out how to position the plants so that they could still get enough light to thrive. Another side effect that perplexed and depressed me was that the new windows also blocked so much incoming solar energy that the radiometer spun very listlessly even on an apparently bright sunny day. You can visibly see the difference that the glass makes by simply sliding a window open so that direct sunlight passes into the room through the window screen alone. As soon as you do this on a bright day, the light instantly stokes up the radiometer vanes into a blur of motion. But the vanes go back to their half-hearted spin when you close the windows again.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One of my quirky predilections is an obsession with analogies and metaphors. (This is a very old interest, and it would take a while to explain how I got this way.) As a result of this obsessive tendency, I often notice analogical parallels between physical phenomena and more abstract ideas. It is surprising the turns this can take. All of the above is a long-winded prologue to an explanation about why a Crookes Radiometer makes me think about being a disciple of Jesus.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Recently, I have been thinking a great deal about being a disciple of Jesus, and about how one becomes a disciple, and especially how one helps others to become disciples. Jesus of course also used analogies a lot in His teaching, with the best known bits being His many parables. The use of these analogies is yet another dimension of why Jesus was such a powerful and effective teacher. By telling stories that tapped into people's everyday experience and understanding, He communicated His message about the Kingdom of God in a memorable and thought-provoking way. Everyone knew what a king or a shepherd or other character in one of His parables did, so it was easy to grasp at least some of what He was saying. The stories often had dramatic or exaggerated elements (the good Samaritan caring for the man set upon by robbers, or the king who compelled guests to come to his son's wedding feast) that made them easy to remember, but there were also puzzling elements which provoked the hearers to remember and ponder the parables later, and to ask questions.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Our highly secular and material age has lost a lot of this ability to grasp things on many levels at once. We look at the world, and we just see the world. We typically do not see the many layers of implied meaning that are available in what we are looking at. So I believe that there is a work to be done by believing Christians to find new parables and new metaphors that help communicate the timeless truth of the Gospel in the situations that we find ourselves today.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Let me draw out some of the many parallels between the ingenious and unappreciated Crookes radiometer and what it means to be a believing Christian living as an child of God.</span></div>
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<li style="margin-left: 15px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The radiometer is designed to work on light alone. In the same way, our souls are designed by God to work on the light of His grace.</span></li>
<li style="margin-left: 15px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The radiometer works best when sitting in bright, unfiltered sunlight. In a similar way, our souls are healthiest, happiest, and most responsive when they are exposed to and filled with the fullness of the light of God available through a relationship with Jesus. </span></li>
<li style="margin-left: 15px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The radiometer works because the vanes are very thin and have little mass, so that it takes relatively little force to set them in motion. The device would not work if the vanes had more mass. Similarly, if our souls are weighed down with self-concern, it is hard for them to respond to the gentle touches of God's grace.</span></li>
<li style="margin-left: 15px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The hub that holds the vanes must be free to turn with little friction. Likewise, if we are plagued with sinful tendencies that we cannot break free from, those also impede our soul's ability to respond to the light of God's grace.</span></li>
<li style="margin-left: 15px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The radiometer's operation requires that the vanes be placed in a partial vacuum inside a glass bulb. If the air inside the bulb is denser, then the thermodynamic phenomenon that provides the thrust to the vanes will be swamped by all kinds of random motions in that air, and again the vanes will not turn. In the same way, if our minds are overactive, and densely packed with the sheer number of things we trying to pay attention to, then the grace that God wants to pour out on us is drowned out.</span></li>
<li style="margin-left: 15px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The radiometer worked poorly even in apparently bright light if some of the most important wavelengths of that light had been filtered out. In a very similar way, if we are operating in an environment where God's graces have been excluded by custom or law ("Don't mention God at our Thanksgiving dinner. It will set off your Uncle Frank." "Explicit vocal prayer in schools in our district is not allowed.") or where we simply cannot spend explicitly Christian time with other believers on a regular basis, we will find ourselves slowly starved of the graces that God dispenses through each other.</span></li>
<li style="margin-left: 15px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Even on a dark and gloomy day, a small flashlight held close can make a radiometer's vanes spin. Similarly, even if one is not feeling God's presence, experiencing grace through the love and friendship of another believer can be enough to awaken our soul's response to grace. That friend's light is not the same as the fullness of God's light, of course, but it is the provision that God has made for you to receive some of His light when you need it.</span></li>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So, it seemed to me that a radiometer might be an interesting gift for a friend who is a Christian, particularly one who is in need of encouragement, and who is also appreciative of geeky science toys. But when you give it to your friend, explain the things that I mentioned above and tell them to look at the radiometer from time to time and to remember how much one's soul is like the radiometer. Practically speaking, that translates at least to these suggestions:</span></div>
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<li style="margin-left: 15px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Try to make time to expose yourself in every possible way to the brightness of God's love and grace.</span></li>
<li style="margin-left: 15px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Ask the Lord to help you unburden yourself of self-concern by explicitly and repeatedly entrusting your life to God's care.</span></li>
<li style="margin-left: 15px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Don't let sinful tendencies, even little ones, linger.</span></li>
<li style="margin-left: 15px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Try to attend to only one thing at a time, and don't let your mental air get too "dense" by multi-tasking (which is really multi-worrying).</span></li>
<li style="margin-left: 15px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pay attention to the ways that your working and living environments invisibly filter out the graces that God would otherwise be showering into your life, and try to compensate for the missing elements.</span></li>
<li style="margin-left: 15px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Ask a friend to share a little light with you, if you are going through a "dark" spell, and your spiritual radiometer is spinning very listlessly, or has even stopped.</span></li>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">However, also tell your friend "Think of your soul like a radiometer. And if it stops spinning, see what you need to do to get it spinning again."</span></div>
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Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-87093848777868849842018-10-20T13:44:00.000-04:002018-10-20T14:25:52.025-04:00On Rest, Refreshment, and Recreation<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This weekend I am focusing on getting the rest and refreshment that everyone needs, but which I find difficult to manage. I have to work really hard to rest and refresh myself. I wrote about this recently in a private posting, when I said:<br /></span><blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We have been reading another book about "discipleship", i.e., about being a better disciple and helping others do the same. One of the topics that rang very true for us was the idea "work out of your rest -- don't rest out of your work". In other words, rest is not the antidote for work, but rather, work is the fruit of adequate rest. If you are not truly rested, you cannot do good work.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This morning I was listening to a podcast by Taylor Marshall, another Catholic scholar and writer to whom I have been listening a lot. In the podcast, Marshall touched on the importance of 'recreation', which of course comes from the Latin recreatus, literally, being re-created, a word that is normally used in the sense of being 'restored' or 'revived'. Marshall also quoted a proverb from Sirach:<br /></span><blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Do not deprive yourself of a happy day;</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">let not your share of desired good pass by you.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">--Sirach 14:14</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This command (and it is a command!) struck me as something aimed squarely at me. Marshall went on to talk about the vital importance of finding time regularly to lay aside work, and turn our hearts to the things that can strengthen and refresh us: God, of course, but also family and friends, as well as activities and things which we take pleasure in.<br /><br />I find this work/rest balance very challenging. My entire psychology has been based on doing, on accomplishment, on ticking off tasks from a list. I have never been good at taking time with family and friends for the sake of refreshing myself. Whenever I do take that time with others, I often manage to turn it into a duty, and I completely miss the fact that this is what I am doing. Moreover, I miss the benefit that taking this time should provide to me. However, it is exceptionally easy for me to see others making this same mistake, and for me to pontificate on these other people's need to recreate and spend time with family and friends. This of course is a classic case of a guy with a log in his eye trying to remove bits of dust from the eyes of others. As Mary and I learn more about what discipleship in Christ really entails, the more convinced I am about the importance of all of these little aspects of discipleship (such as proper rest and recreation) that I have previously dismissed as of secondary importance. Despite my evident hypocrisy in saying this, let me strongly urge all of my readers: Allow yourself time for recreation, for enjoying activities that you delight in.<br /><br /> It seems to me that sports-lovers have a kind of advantage in this regard. In our Western culture, there are many well-developed patterns for how people can engage with sports, both to participate in them and to watch them. Unfortunately, I never allowed myself the opportunity to enjoy sports. I think that this is in part because I always did so poorly at sports when I was young, and more recently because I am afraid of wasting time. The value of sharing an enjoyable experience with others never really crossed my mind until very recently.<br /><br /> As it happens, as I write this the annual big football contest between UM and MSU is underway in East Lansing. I am not in a position to watch this game today, but now that I am thinking about recreation as a shared experience, I am experiencing a bit of regret about missing the game.<br /><br /> BTW, there was a funny thing related to the UM/MSU game at work yesterday. We have about 20 software developers there in our building, including both UM and MSU graduates. An important part of our software development process is a huge suite of automatic tests that get run daily. We also have these two giant TV screens set up in a prominent place in the office, which continuously display a graphical representation of the status of these tests. If a test fails (usually because one of the developers made a mistake in their recent changes) then the box representing that test changes from green to red. Yesterday I noticed that the color scheme had changed for these test displays. One of the displays showed the test boxes as white text on a green background (for MSU) and the other showed maize text on a blue background (for UM). On a related note, I have several kids and a son-in-law who went to MSU, and several kids (plus the same son-in-law) who also went to UM. So any sports contest between the two schools inevitably results in a good deal of trash talk between the two groups.<br /><br />Anyway: rest, recreation, refreshment - these are not optional for Christians. Our Lord commands them in several ways for our own good. I want to do better at understanding these activities, at making proper use of them in my life, and at encouraging the same in the lives of people I am close to.</span></div>
Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-25595984132592786382018-10-20T13:08:00.002-04:002018-10-20T14:27:20.434-04:00Making another attempt on Mt. Blogger<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I love to write, and I find myself taking much time every day composing and polishing bits of text. Often this is for work, but I also write emails to friends, longish documents related to my Catholic faith or to work at our church, and private journal postings for my own use. Back when I was recovering from cancer, I used to post some of my musings here at Standing Here Beside Myself somewhat regularly, but I fell out of the habit when I started working again. I made a couple of attempts at restarting the blog since then, but I guess it was not the time. Now as I approach retirement, I find that the urge to write is constant and growing. A couple of friends have noted that a lot of what I have been writing lately would make good blog fodder. So, I am going to make another attempt at restarting this blog. Here goes.</span>Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-34275150781988777772012-10-13T13:10:00.000-04:002012-10-13T13:11:44.545-04:00Requiescat in pace<div style="text-align: center;">
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<i>Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Et lux perpetua luceat ei.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Requiescat in pace. Amen.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Eternal rest grant
unto her, O Lord.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And let perpetual
light shine upon her.<o:p></o:p></div>
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May she rest in
peace. Amen.</div>
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A little over two weeks ago (Sept. 26, 2012), my mother, Bennye Ruth (Bucy) Cavnar died in Texas after several years of declining health. On Tuesday of last week (Oct. 2, 2012), my family came together for a funeral and a celebration of her life. As a result of these two events and all that happened afterwards, my heart has been at times full to overflowing with feelings and memories. This has been a period of intense reflection on what it means to have lived a full life.</div>
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In her final years, my mother underwent a continuous and undeniable physical decline. All of us, including she herself, could see what was happening. Consequently, I had months and years to prepare myself emotionally for what the end of her life might be like. Nonetheless, when that time finally came, I was surprised by both the intensity of my feelings at times and by the odd numbness I experienced at other times. Balancing these more painful feelings, I have also been pleased, and even deeply moved, by the way my family has come together since her death.<br />
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So much has happened in these past few weeks, and I did not want my memories of this events to slowly vanish into the haze of the past. It became clear that I needed to write down as much as I could about everything that has happened. My usual approach to writing anything is to turn it into an <i>opus magnum</i>, giving full rein to my long-winded tendencies. Fortunately, I realized that this time I did <b>not</b> need to write a novel-length treatment that would take weeks and months to finish. Instead, I saw that I (and any possible readers) would be better served by my approaching this writing as a blog. Using this format would let me write about individual feelings or memories as they came to me, without worrying about trying to organize them all into a coherent whole.<br />
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The particular trigger for re-starting my blog was an emotional jolt that hit me two days ago. I received an email from one of the "family service counselors" at the cemetery where we buried my mother. There was something in that email I had not expected, although in hindsight I perhaps should have.<br />
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When my father died back in 1985, the memorial headstone over his grave had been engraved with both of my parents' names, their birth years, and the year of my father's death. However, for the last 27 years the stone has remained incomplete. All that was missing was the year of my mother's death.<br />
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The image I received two days ago in that email message showed that the stone's inscription is now complete.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG5FlA8snO9hmXLUzxpcW4SCnPze8uKUwggwziwmxtgdvTOZFdfTL3w8VJlwb4Z1ZLTe1Em15d-WMj9i7-64Mm11UWGoiLoNVvJMu-0rAlCZWL8jEjR-vKBJoGt7MfJZe6tyil/s1600/BPC+++BRC+Gravestone+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG5FlA8snO9hmXLUzxpcW4SCnPze8uKUwggwziwmxtgdvTOZFdfTL3w8VJlwb4Z1ZLTe1Em15d-WMj9i7-64Mm11UWGoiLoNVvJMu-0rAlCZWL8jEjR-vKBJoGt7MfJZe6tyil/s400/BPC+++BRC+Gravestone+3.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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When I first opened the email, it took me several seconds to recognize what I was looking at. But then I felt an almost-electric shock when I realized it was a picture of my parent's memorial headstone. As I stared at the image, I experienced a peculiar emotion that is difficult to articulate. It was the feeling you might get when you are by yourself at night, and you try to walk across a very large unlit room, such as a church sanctuary. It was the feeling you get when you hear the dark, hollow sounds of a big place that had once been bustling and full of life, but that is now abandoned. It was the feeling that a night watchman in a big museum must feel every night.<br />
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I am in no way despairing over the loss of my mother. She was more than ready to go, and I am convinced that she is even more full of life now than ever. After someone's death, people often glibly say "She is in a better place now." The fact that this statement seems glib makes it no less true. On the other hand, my mother has in fact moved on now, and she has left a very large and very empty place behind her.<br />
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The above is a serious, and heart-felt record of a startling and moving experience. However, I must confess something else about the experience that shows what a nerd I am. The feeling I described above was not the absolute first thing I felt when I saw the headstone image. Rather, in an amazing leap of irrelevant free association, the very first thing I thought of when I saw the picture of the memorial stone was that the dry red soil of north Texas looks a lot like <a href="http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/31100000/surface-of-mars-space-31154982-990-660.jpg">the surface of Mars</a>. As the old saying has it, the problem with free association is that you get what you pay for.<br />
<br />Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-62090466421556801252012-10-11T22:45:00.000-04:002012-10-11T23:06:37.995-04:00Blog Re-Initialization Complete in 3 - 2 - 1 ....I started this blog on 10/2/2006, and continued to post to it through most of 2007. <a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=35414301#editor/target=post;postID=7452671076185358160;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=2;src=postname">My last entry</a> was on 11/24/2007, almost 5 years ago. Throughout that period, I had posted semi-regularly. This was easy to do, since I was on medical leave fighting off cancer. But there were issues with keeping my medical insurance (which I obviously still needed). So, early in 2007, I was able to start work part-time with a friend's company, specifically so that I could get that insurance coverage. Sadly, because of how limited my energy and stamina became, I could not devote much time to non-essentials, like blogging. My posts grew less frequent, and eventually stopped.<br />
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Today, I am in a somewhat better situation. I have been in remission for over 5 years. Even better, I have been able to drop off almost all of the medications that I had been taking during that entire time. Although these drugs had been necessary to my recovery, they also took a physical toll on me. Frankly, I am relieved to be off of them. I have also gotten a little better at conserving my energy so that I don't burn out as often as I used to. I do have to be careful, because it is easy for me to overdo it.<br />
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Because of the above changes, I feel like I can now afford to take time to blog at least a little bit. More importantly, there have been some recent events that have had a big emotional and practical impact on me and my family. I believe it will be helpful, at least to me, to blog about these different changes in our life. Also, the topics I hope to touch on may be of interest to my family and friends, at least for a while.<br />
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Let's see if I can turn a good intention into a good habit.<br />
<br />Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-74526710761853581602007-11-24T19:25:00.000-05:002007-11-24T19:30:34.566-05:00On Stonehenge's LocationA friend on Facebook who read my <a href="http://wileequixote.blogspot.com/2007/03/re-purposing-stonehenge.html">earlier post on Stonehenge</a> asked this question:<br /><blockquote>You hinted at it, but do we have any idea why this location was selected for the building of Stonehenge?</blockquote>Since Facebook's message system limits the message length, I am replying here.<br /><br />If memory serves, it so happens that there is a subtle astronomical relationship between the 'standstills' (extreme rising/setting points of the sun and moon) at Stonehenge's latitude. There are 4 particular spots around Stonehenge where there are or have been markers of some kind, such as standing stones. One could use these markers to observe the standstills. The curious thing is that these spots form a rectangle. If Stonehenge had been built a few miles north or south of the spot it is on, i.e., at a different latitude, these markers would not have formed a rectangle but a non-rectangular parallelogram. Thus it appears that the original builders chose that particular latitude in order to take advantage of that fact. The amazing thing is that archaeological evidence indicates that the very first structure at Stonehenge was erected around 8000 B.C., which is basically at the end of the last ice age. So the shaman types who were running the show back then apparently already had enough astronomical smarts to figure that out.<br /><br />Another factor in the choice of location is that on the Salisbury plains where Stonehenge sits has a relatively clear view of the horizon all the way around. Other places have too many trees, hills, etc. Even so, the ground is not exactly level at the site. Nonetheless, the final architect who designed the actual henge (hanging stone) structure, managed to do so in a way that the upper surface of the megalith ring is within about 6 inches of being level across its whole diameter. This is also amazing given that the builders had only the crudest of stone tools to shape the stones.<br /><br />There are lots of amazing things about Stonehenge. I'm sure there are more we have not learned yet, and some we may never learn.Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-65201972680508777042007-03-04T15:10:00.000-05:002007-03-04T20:26:50.742-05:00Re-Purposing StonehengeSome months ago, I posted an <a href="http://wileequixote.blogspot.com/2006/12/diy-stonehenge.html">article</a> about a Michigan man who had worked out a set of techniques that Neolithic people could have used to erect megalithic monuments like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge">Stonehenge</a>. That iconic ring of stone has been the subject of the wildest and most bizarre kinds of speculations for years:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df9806/df980611.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGpopmgeWK10JH-ECMM7dZViTXNBcKRcJACR8rPefMlcnOFOc1dlqZQbCmHcq9wDzP1mfcsy5i2G_ODLXI_vtdAa_390hbHWzEk8gDB63Oj_KdRFABeMxjZ5BzuWJ0WK6Mkunr/s400/purpose_of_stonehenge.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5038182679773883330" border="0" /></a><br />The Wikipedia article <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge">referenced above</a> provides a good overview of many of these wilder ideas, so I won't bother with trying to include any here. However, a few minutes of Googling and link-chasing will produce a dismaying number of other sites with views at least as bizarre as those suggested in the cartoon. (I found a totally new one just today, a suggestion that Stonehenge and other megalithic monuments were actually <a href="http://www.morien-institute.org/taurid.html">cosmic impact early warning systems</a>.)<br /><br />Still, the serious question remains: "Who built Stonehenge, and why?" Over the last decade or so I have occasionally spent a little time looking into this. The most comprehensive and sensible explanation I have found is given in archaeoastronomer John North's book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Stonehenge-New-Interpretation-Prehistoric-Cosmos/dp/0788160710/ref=sr_1_1/102-4947045-9550544?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1173047806&sr=8-1"><span style="font-style: italic;">Stonehenge: A New Interpretation of Prehistoric Man and the Cosmos</span></a>. Prof. North (and doubtless several generations of trusty grad students) have done an enormous amount of research reconstructing orientations and alignments of hundreds of Neolithic stone and earthen monuments thoughout northwestern Europe. Briefly, North's research confirms that these monuments reflect the development of several different religious practices over the course of millennia:<br /><ul><li>a star-oriented cult that placed emphasis on the ceremonial observance of star risings and settings that occurred daily<br /></li><li>a moon-oriented cult that placed emphasis on ceremonial observance of the complicated pattern of lunar risings and settings that repeats itself over an 18.6 year period</li><li>a sun-oriented cult that placed emphasis on ceremonial observance of the rising and setting sun at soltices and equinoxes that occurred annually</li></ul>The many earthen barrow and ditch structures in England and surrounding countries mostly reflect the first cult. The megalithic structures reflect the second two cults. Stonehenge, in its final form, is best suited for sun ceremonies, but has strong features associated with the lunar cult as well. Of course, both cults might have been active co-temporaneously at different points, as well as a few star cults as well.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVS2oUcQPo3hl7OyFIZLqO2RGAKt8HJ3drkbuagFpwJ5_5lCovz46mlmBag7fQGyweQHn7_D1tGDXyW-et86VUA5RXkUWzW2NSb46BZ6fGjTbokRj6nah9SLa4ykJpsH8-koWo/s1600-h/stonehenge_avenue.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVS2oUcQPo3hl7OyFIZLqO2RGAKt8HJ3drkbuagFpwJ5_5lCovz46mlmBag7fQGyweQHn7_D1tGDXyW-et86VUA5RXkUWzW2NSb46BZ6fGjTbokRj6nah9SLa4ykJpsH8-koWo/s400/stonehenge_avenue.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5038214849078930418" border="0" /></a>Some years ago English astronomer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Hawkins">Gerald Hawkins</a> caused a great stir with his well-publicized books claiming that Stonehenge was an astronomical observatory or 'calculator', used to predict astronomical events. Although there is certainly an aspect of prediction associated with the monument, North's interpretation points more to its religious uses. This can perhaps best be seen by considering the basic alignment of Stonehenge, which is oriented along a very precise northeast-southwest axis. You can see in the photo to the right the so-called 'avenue', outlined by ditches, leading in a southwesterly direction toward the center of the monument. Hawkins claimed, and supposedly demonstrated, that Stonehenge was oriented towards the rising sun on the day of the summer solstice. If you stand at the right spot in the ring at dawn on that day looking down the avenue, you can in fact see the sun rising over the 'heel stone'.<br /><br />However, there are some problems with this claim in being the principal way to use Stonehenge for observations. One is that the avenue slopes <span style="font-style: italic;">downhill</span> towards the northeast. Seeing the sun rise at a particular spot on the horizon is totally dependent on whether there are trees at the horizon line, and how tall they are. A change in height of these trees would cause the apparent point of first visibility of the sun to shift left or right.<br /><br />An even more serious objection to this theory is that only a very small number of people could stand at the appropriate viewing spot to see this supposedly important event. While there are certainly antecedents in various world religions for events that only the high priests can observe, from a believer's point of view, it is much more satisfying to see the event for oneself.<br /><br />Prof. North noted that one can turn the orientation around 180°. Standing on the avenue, looking southwest, uphill <span style="font-style: italic;">toward</span> the monument, one can also see the <span style="font-style: italic;">setting</span> sun at the <span style="font-style: italic;">winter</span> solstice. This claim has a number of advantages. The first is that, since you are looking uphill, the stone ring forms an 'artificial horizon' which precisely defines the moment of sun's last visibility. There is no vagary depending on the presence, absence or height of distant trees. Moreover, there is room on the avenue for literally <span style="font-style: italic;">thousands</span> of observers, all of whom could participate in watching this event. Finally, based on other archaeological evidence at many other sites, it was much more important for this ancient cult to pay attention to the setting sun at the winter solstice, because it effectively defines the end of the solar year. Sunrise on the next day begins a new year, with each day growing longer and more alive, as it were.<br /><br />Stonehenge was built in stages, from 3100BC to 1930BC, with some evidence of wooden structures being used on the site as early as 8000BC. The builders were pre-literate, although obviously energetic and well-organized. Other sites in the general area show settlements big enough to house thousands of inhabitants, as well as many large farms. Although theses people lacked metal-working and writing skills, they must have had a robust social structure and a high culture. Building these monuments was important to them, considering how much work it took to cut and move the stones, and to dig the huge amounts of earth involved, all with stone handtools.<br /><br />By the way, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druid">Druids</a> had nothing to do with building Stonehenge. They didn't show up until 300BC, over a thousand years after the last addition to the monument. And the 'neo-Druids' who dress up and do weird things in the stone circle on Mid-summer's Day are sadly mistaken, or just silly. Real druids tended to shun flat open spaces like the Salisbury Plain where Stonehenge is, and performed their rituals in groves or hilltops. Still, they might have used the monument some, since they were concerned with solar events like solstices.Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-8493033956686264292007-02-15T21:13:00.000-05:002007-02-25T16:39:45.662-05:00Nothing New Under The Sun vs. You Can't Teach An Old Dog New TricksI mentioned in an <a href="http://wileequixote.blogspot.com/2007/01/thawed-out-but-still-behind.html">earlier post</a> that I'm doing a bit of 'remedial software engineering' at my new job. This project involves taking a large bit of legacy code, and re-organizing it. After talking about it with several of my colleagues, it occurred to me that the proper way to do this was to split the functionality up into <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_%28Unix%29">Unix-like filters that can be piped together</a>.<br /><br />Filters and pipes are just one of the reasons that programmers tend to fall in love with Unix. In general, a program that acts like a filter reads data from a standard input, performs some operation on it (select part of it, change part of it, sort it, etc.), and then writes the result to the standard output. A pipe (or pipeline) consists of a string of filters, each of whose output becomes the input for the next filter in the pipeline.<br /><br />This is an extraordinarily powerful idea. It allows the programmer to concentrate on having a program do just one thing (e.g., select all of the lines in a file that contain a given string), yet be able to use that program in conjunction with other programs to achieve some more complicated results.<br /><br />Consider a simple example. Here are some commands that work on my Linux machines here at home:<br /><ul><li>'ps -e' = list all of the processes currently running, showing their process IDs and their names</li><li>'grep <string>' = read all of the input coming into the program one line at a time, but only write out those lines that contain <string>.</string></string></li><li>'wc -l' = read all of the input coming into the program one line at a time, but only write out how many lines were input</li></ul>By themselves, these program are certainly useful, but using the pipeline notion, I can quickly combine them to do something very useful. Suppose I wanted to know how many processes my webserver had running, ready to answer web requests from outside. Since I know that the webserver processes are named 'httpd', I can then answer my question like this:<br /><blockquote>ps -e | grep httpd | wc -l<br /></blockquote>(The vertical bar symbol is called, appropriately enough, the 'pipe' symbol.) The above command line first executes 'ps -e' to get a list of all the running processes, then puts the resulting list through 'grep httpd' to select only those lines in the list that contain the string 'httpd', and then counts those. Of course, I could have written a program to answer this question. However, since I have these filter-type programs, and pipes, I didn't need to write anything new, but could simply string together the functions that I needed to solve my immediate problem.<br /><br />The filter/pipe idea is so powerful and useful that even competing operating systems, like Microsoft Windows, have borrowed it. Microsoft's DOS, which Windows sits on top of, implemented a very similar kind of idea years ago (but of course long after Unix had it). Neither Unix nor DOS, nor any other operating system that I know of, has come up with an approach that really matches the power and simplicity of this idea for organizing computation.<br /><br />All of the above was just to explain the notion of filters and pipes so that you could understand what I wanted to do with the legacy code I inherited. My idea has two key parts. First, re-group the existing code into discrete, well-defined chunks, each of which takes some standard kind of input, performs a single operation, and then returns a standardized kind of output. Second, implement some sort of framework that allows the user to choose these well-defined chunks, and string them into a desired sequence. With this scheme, one can quickly put together a system to solve a particular problem without having to write a customized piece of code to do it.<br /><br />All of that seemed like the obvious way to go. Then I began having second thoughts. Perhaps one of the (dis)advantages of growing older is that the absolute certainty of youth slowly gives way to the gray-colored ambiguities of middle age. Was a pipe/filter scheme really the best way to handle this design? Would a more integrated platform be a better approach? Was I so stuck in a particular mindset that I could not see a better way to do it? Is there a better new trick that this old dog just can't learn?<br /><br />I sometimes fear that is so. When I bump into new software development approaches (Java and its menagerie of associated folderol comes to mind), there are times when I just can't make myself buy into it. In fact, I find myself making excuses to avoid having to use the new approach. It feels like the costs of learning the new system far outweigh any visible benefits of doing so. However, if I am honest with myself, that might simply be because of an old-dog syndrome.<br /><br />I don't have an answer to this particular question with regard to the task at hand. So, I guess I'll proceed along the path that I can see. Unfortunately, it can be demotivating not be sure of the wisdom of one's approach.Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-43403602659557006922007-02-01T21:26:00.000-05:002007-02-11T18:03:37.663-05:00Multiple DesktopsIt's no secret or surprise that I greatly prefer Linux to Windows for a working environment. However, reality being the stubborn and uncompromising force that it is, I've found myself increasingly having to use Windows just to decrease the amount of friction in my life. Ideology is for the young.<br /><br />That said, there are some things that Linux provides that I have sorely missed in Windows. One of those is the ability to have multiple desktops. That is, under Linux, I can have, say, four desktops active at the same time, with different windows open on each of them. Moreover, I can switch back and forth between them with a keyboard shortcut, or a mouse click in a special widget on the taskbar.<br /><br />People who have only used Windows are always puzzled by this concept. "Why would you want to do that?" they ask me, with genuine befuddlement evident in their faces. The reason for having multiple desktops is that it allows me to separate my concerns, to organize my work into distinct places that help me keep my tasks straight.<br /><br />Here's another way to think about it. Would you want to live in a house with only one room, where your refrigerator, your toilet and your bed were all within the same four walls? Unless you are pathological in some way, the answer would clearly be "No way!". However, that is precisely the predicament that Windows users are in every day.<br /><br />Using four desktops, on the other hand, I can put email on one, iTunes and other media players on another, my current major task on a third, and still have a fourth desktop available if another important task pops up later in the day. When that second task pops up, I don't have to futz around minimizing windows and such to clear things away so that I can work on the new problem. I just switch to a new desktop, do whatever is needed to, then go back to my previous task's desktop. In the meantime, I can also handle a bit of email, and fiddle with iTunes to pick another playlist. And one is not limited to four desktops. There were occasions a few years ago when I made regular use of eight desktops, although that was really more a symptom of a problem with the way my job was defined (or rather, not defined).<br /><br />Sure Windows let's you minimize and maximize individual windows easily. However, that does not really address the fact that a working context almost always involves two or more windows. For example, when I'm programming, I have at least one window running a code editor, and another where I can test the code. When I'm composing an email message or working on a document, I am usually looking at other email messages, documents, or web pages someplace else. When I'm updating my calendar, I'm looking at email, to-do lists, and the like.<br /><br />Each of these sets of windows constitutes a working context. You use <span style="font-style: italic;">all</span> of the windows in a given context, shifting your attention quickly back and forth between them. Having to minimize/maximize or shuffle windows around with mouse clicks is a big impediment to productivity. It is this problem that has made the use of multiple monitors more popular lately. However, multiple monitors are not really feasible for the laptop user, or for the budget-constrained.<br /><br />The real problem arises when I want to go back to an earlier context that I was working in. With a single desktop, I would have to bring several windows back into view at one time, either by maximizing windows that I had previously minimized, or by riffling through all the windows open on the screen to get the ones I wanted back "on top", that is, in view. That is simply too much bother most of the time, so my productivity slowly drops as I lose track of where I am. In fact, I often found that I have had to open the same window two or even three times because I could not find it when I need it.<br /><br />So, given the need to have multiple desktops in Windows, what are the choices? Lately I have taken to checking out the ever-growing pile of well-done posts at <a href="http://www.lifehacker.com/">Lifehacker.com</a>, which is an outstanding multi-author blog devoted to <a href="http://www.lifehacker.com/about/">personal productivity</a>. They have done several posts over the last year or so about tools for multiple desktops, or as they refer to them, <a href="http://www.lifehacker.com/software/virtual%20desktops/">virtual desktops</a>.<br /><br />The first of these tools that I tried was <a href="http://lifehacker.com/software/windows/download-of-the-day--virtual-desktop-manager-113810.php">Virtual Desktop Manager</a>, which was one of Microsoft's <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx">PowerToys</a>. These are apps that you can find on Microsoft's website, but which come with this proviso:<br /><blockquote>We take great care to ensure that PowerToys work as they should, but they are not part of Windows and are not supported by Microsoft. For this reason, Microsoft Technical Support is unable to answer questions about PowerToys. PowerToys are for Windows XP only and will not work with Windows Vista.</blockquote>Given that ringing endorsement, I thought it only fair to give it a try. Although the Virtual Desktop Manager did in fact more or less provide multiple desktops, it was flat-out buggy. In particular, it kept losing windows. I would open a window on one desktop, switch to a different desktop, and then later switch back, only to find that the window was gone, or at least invisible. I could see from the Windows Task Manager that the application was still running, but there was no way to access the window. I suffered through this for a few days, and then uninstalled it and went looking for something else.<br /><br />Next I tried <a href="http://lifehacker.com/software/virtual-desktops/download-of-the-day-virtual-dimension-170054.php">Virtual Dimension</a>, which Lifehacker listed as a 'Download of the Day' for 4/27/2006. It worked pretty well, and was nicely configurable. The basic application worked well enough that I never even got around to checking out a lot of the options that it had. Sadly though, it began to really annoy me. Once in a while it would simply close down a window. This seemed to happen most often with Windows Explorer, so there was no real harm done. Also, it had an odd penchant for opening new windows on the wrong desktop. This happened most often with Internet Explorer. When I was using Microsoft's Outlook Web Access in IE to access email for my new employer's mail, Virtual Dimension would sometimes open windows for new mail messages on the current desktop. However, most of the time it would open them on some other desktop, usually one where I had previously moved a mail message so that I could work with it. It took me a while to figure this out, because of course there was no indication that the window I wanted was already open somewhere else. One of the most annoying things was that for some applications (such as MS Access, which my new employer uses to track our time), Virtual Dimension would show the same window on every desktop, thus defeating the <span style="font-style: italic;">raison d'etre</span> for multiple desktops.<br /><br />My annoyance level got high enough that today I decided to try out another multiple desktop tool. I went back to Lifehacker and found another package called <a href="http://lifehacker.com/software/virtual-desktops/download-of-the-day-dexpot-windows-224671.php">Dexpot</a>, which was the Download of the Day for Dec. 28, 2006. It also had good reviews from other Lifehacker readers. Other good signs are that (1) it was produced by a German software company, who (2) gives away the product for free to individuals, but charges for companies. If they expect to charge for it, you'd hope that they would have spent at least a little bit of effort with software quality.<br /><br />Dexpot installed easily. It has lots of configurable features that I've only begun to check out. The biggest thing for me, though, will be that it not lose windows, nor put them in the wrong spot. So far, so good.<br /><br />Of course, I wouldn't have to mess around with any of this in Linux, whose window manager software works reliably, and which doesn't drop windows, move them around spontaneously, or make them show up in multiple places unexpectedly. Microsoft is still trailing behind, not providing features that other operating systems had years ago. I guess I should be grateful that the folks in Redmond haven't made it altogether impossible for third-party software vendors to at least attempt writing applications to make up those deficiencies in Windows.Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-15706304020333317462007-01-28T18:19:00.001-05:002009-11-05T03:15:29.659-05:00Radioactive Non-Superheroes<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_four" alt="Fantastic Four">Numerous</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man">comic</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daredevil_%28Marvel_Comics%29">book</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_Man_%28The_Simpsons_character%29">superheroes</a> start their careers by being exposed to radiation or radioactive substances of some sort. In those (fictional) cases, the effects are sometimes bizarre (not to mention <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulk_%28comics%29">unsightly</a>), but our erstwhile heroes always find a way to turn their new situations to some advantage.<br /><br />It turns out that exposure to radioactive substances happens in our much more boring reality, too. Unfortunately, it never confers superpowers. If anything, it tends to produce occasions for great annoyance. This <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070128/hl_nm/usa_radioactive_dc_1&printer=1;_ylt=AlkrRcwsgDIbCbhdBOTgPQcR.3QA;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE-">Reuters report</a> describes the rising incidence of innocent civilians triggering radiation detectors at security checkpoints because of the presence of medical radioisotopes in their bodies. The article tells how six people triggered the radiation detectors at this past year's Christmas tree-lighting party at NYC's Rockefeller Center.<br /><blockquote>"All six had recently had medical treatments with radioisotopes in their bodies," Richard Falkenrath, the city's deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, told a Republican governors' meeting in Miami recently. "That happens all the time."<br /></blockquote>The article also tells of an even more humiliating incident:<br /><p></p><blockquote style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><p>In August, the British Medical Journal described the case of a very embarrassed 46-year-old Briton who set off the sensors at Orlando airport in Florida six weeks after having radioiodine treatment for a thyroid condition.</p> <p>He was detained, strip-searched and sniffed by police dogs before eventually being released, the journal said in its "Lesson of the Week" section.</p></blockquote><br />Something like this happened to a friend of mine a couple of years ago. Ermanno is an Italian-born naturalized citizen. At the time of this incident he was living in upstate New York, but working a lot in Ann Arbor. As a cost-saving measure, he actually drove back and forth between the two locations. He began having back problems, which became increasingly severe. One night they were so severe, he ended up in the ER at the University of Michigan Hospital. He had a whole battery of tests. They finally determined that his back pain was caused largely by the fact that he was sitting on his rather out-sized wallet for those ten-hour drives back and forth to New York.<br /><br />The good news was that this diagnosis showed him how to eliminate his back pain immediately, namely, always take out his wallet before he went on long drives. The bad news occurred a day or so later, when he drove back to New York. He always took the most direct route, which went from Ann Arbor, to Detroit, through Canada, and back into New York at Niagra Falls. All went well until he tried to cross back into the States. To his mystified dismay, he triggered the radiation detector at the security checkpoint.<br /><br />The border guards didn't put him through a strip-search, but they did turn his car inside out, searched his luggage, etc. It didn't look good: here he was, a foreign national, driving a rental car, triggering a radiation alarm as he crossed into U.S. territory. (Remember, this was only a year or two after 9/11.)<br /><br />Finally, after questioning Ermanno about his recent activities, one of the more intelligent border people had the bright idea that the radioactivity might be due to one of medical procedures he had been through. They called UM Hospital's ER and found that, sure enough, one of the tests he had been through involved injecting a radioisotope. If had waited another day or so, the natural decay of the radioactive material would have reduced it to below detectable levels. But alas ...<br /><br />The Reuters article speculates that it might be wise to start carrying a note from your doctor describing the reason you seem radioactive. This problem is probably just going to get worse, as detectors become more sensitive, and able to pick up radioisotope traces even weeks after their use. It isn't entirely far-fetched to worry that eventually we may all have to start carrying not only our identification papers at all times, but our medical records, too.Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-35722334595546743082007-01-28T17:09:00.000-05:002007-01-28T18:18:18.328-05:00Thawed Out But Still BehindOnce you get behind, it certainly is hard to get caught up again. The power outage of <a href="http://wileequixote.blogspot.com/2007/01/low-power-blues.html">two weeks ago</a> took a big toll in almost every part of our life here, my writing included. As I <a href="http://wileequixote.blogspot.com/2007/01/thawing-out.html">described a few days later</a>, we eventually got our power back and began to put everything back in place.<br /><br />However, I was not really able to get back into my normal pace once power returned. I'm not complaining, though, since the reason was that I started a new part-time job, something that my family and I are very happy about.<br /><br />I haven't worked since March 11, 2005 when I went on medical leave to deal with <a href="http://wileequixote.blogspot.com/2006/10/its-about-time.html">multiple myeloma</a>. During the intervening months since then, my employer decided that they didn't need my position any more and terminated me <span style="font-style: italic;">in absentia</span>. Their reasoning in that decision was quite faulty, in my opinion, but perhaps it's just as well. The company has continued to do poorly under that same management, and it doesn't look like it will survive long anyway.<br /><br />Since I was terminated, I have been able to continue my family's healthcare coverage using a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Omnibus_Budget_Reconciliation_Act_of_1985">COBRA</a> extension. This allowed us to get the same coverage by paying the insurance premiums ourselves. However, doing so is almost prohibitively expensive. Our coverage currently costs over $11oo/month. Worse, one can use a COBRA extension for only 18 months. One way or the other, I knew that I was working with a limited amount of time to find an alternate means to provide healthcare insurance.<br /><br />My new employer made me a very generous offer that allows me to work at a reduced pace, yet maintain decent healthcare insurance. Moreover, the work itself will be quite interesting, and I should be able to make a useful contribution. Another bonus is that I'll be working with some old friends, whom I have collaborated with a number of times over the past 15 years or so.<br /><br />I started this new position on January 22, 2007, and I have been quite busy ever since then. There has been the usual bit of administrivia, filling out a seemingly endless number of forms, all asking for slightly different variations of the same information. There has also been a fair amount of computer setup, trying to get my laptop properly configured to work both inside the corporate firewall, and through a VPN connection from home. And of course, I've been trying to learn more about the tasks at hand.<br /><br />My first project involves my becoming very conversant with a scientific programming language called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDL_programming_language">Interactive Data Language</a> (IDL), which is a quasi-descendant of the venerable <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran">Fortran</a> (a language I first used in 1968). My new employer has built up a large body of legacy IDL code that needs to be re-organized and cast into a more readily usable form. I've always said that I'm really a frustrated librarian, so I expect that I'll be able to do some good here.<br /><br />I find blogging to be therapeutic, so I have really missed my regular writing times. I'll be trying to re-balance my schedule so that I can get back to those. I'm glad that I'm only working part-time. One of my frustrations these past few months is the realization at how much more 'inefficient' my life is now. Everything I do seems to take longer than it used to. Although I am in <a href="http://wileequixote.blogspot.com/2006/12/vgpr.html">remission</a>, I still have a large number of medically related tasks that take up significant parts of the day. Also, I need more sleep than I used to be able to get by with. Finally, I am just plain slower than I used to be. Every activity, from eating to walking down a hall, I now have to do at half the speed I used to be able to manage. On off days, I'm even slower than that. I guess I'm supposed to learn patience from this. So will everyone else, if they are waiting on me. My brain still seems to be working at close to normal speed most of the time, so I'm hoping that I can learn a style of working that makes better use of thinking and less of moving.Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-2066622588706404552007-01-20T12:28:00.000-05:002007-01-20T13:01:27.728-05:00More On Thawing OutI just read over <a href="http://wileequixote.blogspot.com/2007/01/thawing-out.html">yesterday's post</a> about our various low-power and no-power woes of the past few days. I realized that I sounded pretty whiny, especially when I consider that there were some unfortunate folks who were completely without power from Monday through at least yesterday. I heard from several sources that there were still whole neighborhoods in the western part of Ann Arbor that had been without power since the ice storm. And it's been cold here, well below freezing for a great part of that time.<br /><br />I should point out that all of these troubles just re-affirm my contention that <a href="http://wileequixote.blogspot.com/2006/11/contra-ancoralia.html">wires and cables are nothing but trouble.</a>Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-5623299912807642432007-01-19T16:32:00.000-05:002007-01-19T23:41:51.929-05:00Thawing OutI mentioned before that we had low voltage power in the house after an ice-laden tree branch hit the power line coming into the house, and pulled it partially away from the pole. The line itself was hanging low over the back yard, maybe 7 feet off the ground, much lower than it should. We had what looked like low voltage. Every time we turned on anything with a sizable current draw, the lights would brighten and/or dim. If this went on for more than a few seconds, then the UPS on our main server would start honking out its low-voltage warning.<br /><br />I reported this on Monday morning to DTE, our local power company. And again Monday evening. And again Tuesday morning. And again Tuesday evening. (Are you seeing a pattern?) And several times on Wednesday. They were always "unable to give an estimate at this time". Eventually, though, I began hearing that someone would look at our power by 6pm Wednesday. No-one came. Later that evening when I called, I was surprised to hear the automated system tell me that my problem should now be resolved. I quickly got hold of a customer service representative and disabused them of that notion. They allegedly made sure that my problem report was indeed still open, and that someone would be out to check on Thursday.<br /><br />I called multiple times on Thursday, finally getting the promise that someone would come out around 4pm. Sure enough, a DTE tech did show up about then. She poked around for about twenty minutes measuring things, and determined that the problem was an 'open neutral'. The wires bringing the two phases of current into the house were intact, but the main tension cable, which is also the neutral conductor, had snapped up near the pole. This was an unsafe situation, so she completely cut our power, and said that she would report this. Since we now had no power, she said that we would be moved higher in the priority queue for problem resolution. Right. It must have really sucked to be low priority.<br /><br />I kept calling every few hours, as the house got colder. Thursday evening, Mary, Tim and I went out for pizza, and came back to a cold, dark house. We sat around reading by candlelight in the living room. Finally, around 9:30 or so, another DTE tech came. He had the bright idea (actually, it seemed like a pretty good idea) to see if he could get us hooked back up by using a good ground in place of the neutral connection. He tried valiantly to make our ground connection work, but alas it just wouldn't for some reason. (There were some strange things about the way our house ground was set up, but fixing those didn't fix the grounding problem.) So, he left around 10pm. We were still very dark, and getting colder.<br /><br />Thursday morning brought no change except slowly dropping temperatures in the house. I kept calling DTE. <span style="font-style: italic;">Finally</span>, around 12:30pm a team of three workers from some electrical contractor in Detroit showed up. (They were not DTE employees.) They restrung the cable, reconnected the neutral, and turned our power back on. It was a good thing, too. The temperature inside had gotten down to 41° before they got us turned on again.<br /><br />Joy of joys, we had power. I went around turning on computers and network gear, while Mary got a load of laundry going and reset all the clocks. The house ever so slowly warmed up. Some. Well, only a little. After a while, Mary pointed out that the heating zone which covered the living room and dining room was <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> getting heat. Sigh. I called our regular HVAC repair place, and they sent out one of their guys. He found the problem (apparently a pocket of air had formed in the problematic zone of our hot water heating system during the long inactivity) and fixed it. He left around 5:30pm. Right now it's 6:39pm and the house is up to 51°.<br /><br />I just took a break for dinner. Mary's sister Karen is here visiting for her birthday. Now I see that the temperature is about 60°, although it is colder than that in the bedrooms still. Here in my office I turned on both my laptop and the big noisy desktop machine to help warm up the place. (I also had some picture editing to do on the big machine, so that wasn't a big waste.)<br /><br />After we got power back this afternoon, Mary told me "<span style="font-style: italic;">Little House On The Prairie</span> isn't all it's cracked up to be." I'm glad she is seeing it that way now. I've always thought that. My idea of a recreational vehicle is the <span style="font-style: italic;">Starship Enterprise</span>. That's 1701-D (the <span style="font-style: italic;">Next Generation</span> ship), mind you, a real home away from home. Come to think of it, though, at least 10% of their episodes involve losing power. Never mind. I would like a Honda home power generator, though.Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-9650375100069270962007-01-15T14:30:00.000-05:002007-01-15T15:53:54.634-05:00Low Power BluesThe nasty ice storm that trashed its way across the middle of the continent has made its way to Michigan. It left about a quarter of an inch of ice on all the tree branches. In particular, it weighed down the branches of a tall white pine tree in our back yard so much that all of them bent way down and some of them broke off. Unfortunately, the tree has grown into the path of the power line and two phone lines that come from the pole in the corner of the yard all the way to our house. So a lot of the bent and broken branches ended up on these lines.<br /><br />Although none of the lines broke, it was obvious that something was wrong. My first clue was when I turned on the toaster oven in the kitchen early this morning, and all of the lights dimmed to half intensity. A few other experiments confirmed that we were facing a low-voltage situation. Mary and I went around turning off and disconnecting what we could. I powered down Tex, the new server that I'm setting up as our new cavnar.com host. I also turned off several other bits of always-on hardware. I left Tesla, our old server, up, since it provides some services to people besides me. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to draw very much power.<br /><br />Our power supplier, DTE, is swamped with calls from all over the area. When I called the trouble reporting line this morning, I was informed by a cheerful automated voice that I had to wait approximately 167 minutes to talk to a customer representative. I went back down to the dark workshop in the basement where Tesla lives to see if I could eke out enough bandwidth to contact DTE's web-based trouble reporting. I was successful, I guess. The choices for the kind of problem I was experiencing seemed inadequate. The line wasn't down, so I had to settle for checking the box that indicated that our power was intermittent. I've gone back to the site a few times to look at our status, but their system is still unable "at this time" to give an estimate of when they can look at the problem.<br /><br />I called the phone company, but they won't come out unless a phone line is actually down. I finally managed to call the tree trimming service that did a bunch of work for us about a year and half ago. One of their guys came out about an hour ago. He was able to get all the branches off the wires using just his long pruning pole. However, once all of the branches were out of the way, I was able to see the real problem: the power line, although not broken, has pulled partially away from the pole. I can't tell for sure, but I'm guessing we've lost one of the two incoming phases for our power. So, we're still stuck until DTE graces us with an on-site presence.<br /><br />Mary and Tim seem to be taking this a lot more cheerfully than I am. Mary has always been much more prepared to go low-tech. (My old joke is that I don't really know how we got together in the first place, because she wants to live in the 19th century, and I'm still mad because it's not already the 24th.) Our son Tim, who spends a lot of time practicing on his electric and acoustic guitars, is off from school because of Martin Luther King Day. When I told him, he immediately replied "I guess this means it's an acoustic sort of day". He knows what to do and isn't whining about it (yet). But old geek that I am, I feel significantly disoriented. It took some soothing talk from my wife and a bit of creative re-prioritizing with her to find a way to use the day effectively without being online continuously. Even so, here I am, sitting in the dark, typing on an old keyboard by candle light (seriously!) just so I can get my blogging fix. In a way, it might have been easier (or at least simpler) if it had been a complete outage.<br /><br />I hope it is warm, dry and well-powered where you are.Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-39059849740852174692007-01-13T21:16:00.000-05:002007-01-13T21:45:13.104-05:00Weather BonkIn one of my recent forays into somewhere or other, I ran across <a href="http://weatherbonk.com/weather">Weather Bonk</a>, a very cool mashup of Google maps, regular weather forecasting, amateur weather stations, and webcams. You can enter a city name or a zip code, and then you'll get a page with a bunch of weather and geographically related information. The most interesting part is a Google map of the selected region, but showing temperatures from all of the amateur weather stations in that area. (These are private stations which publish their data to the U.S. Weather Service.) If you position your cursor over one of the temperatures, you get a semi-transparent box showing more detail about that station. Likewise, there may be little camera icons on the map. These represent webcams at those locations. If you position the cursor over those, it shows a small window containing the most recent image. Very cool.Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-77147730005931537522007-01-13T20:22:00.000-05:002007-01-13T21:11:22.484-05:00Controlled AvalanchesI recently ran across <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070107/ap_on_re_us/colorado_avalanche_33">this article</a> in Yahoo News about the serious problems that Colorado has been having with avalanches crossing over highways. Several vehicles have even been knocked off the road and carried hundreds of feet. The article starts off with this attention-grabbing statement:<br /><blockquote>Crews fired artillery shells Sunday to safely trigger avalanches before they could pose a threat to traffic on a mountain highway...<br /></blockquote>I was struck (sorry, I just had to put it that way) with the cleverness and the directness of this approach. Although I had never heard of it, I figured this idea had been around for awhile. A Google search amply proved that, but I was floored by <a href="http://www.weathernotebook.org/transcripts/2001/02/22.html">this claim</a> that there are over 100K explosions per year just for triggering avalanches, in the Western U.S. alone.<br /><br />Perhaps you half-remember, as I do, various action movies where the heroes or villains deliberately trigger an avalanche by making a loud sound, such as a gunshot. Apparently that is yet another <a href="http://www.avalanche.org/%7Euac/ed-faq.htm">myth</a>, or at least an exaggeration. In almost every case, the avalanche is triggered by a direct force, such as the weight of a person or the concussion of an explosion. According to <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070107/ap_on_re_us/colorado_avalanche_33">the page</a> I mentioned above, the preferred triggering technique is for a skier to approach the area from above, light a dynamite stick with a two-minute fuse, heave it down onto the potential avalanche site, and then ski like crazy to get away. If it is too difficult to get to the area from above, the other approach is to fire at the area from a distance with heavy artillery, as was done in Colorado.<br /><br />I still think it's pretty cheeky to refer to these as 'controlled avalanches', though. It makes it sound like an overly confident military policy of some sort.Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-21426752251247470902007-01-08T20:52:00.000-05:002007-01-09T21:06:46.399-05:00Shilling For Google And NetflixOver the holidays, I had a number of occasions to chat with family and friends. Toward the end of the break, I began to realize how often I ended up evangelizing for Google and Netflix. This was disturbing to recognize, because in the past I myself had often been critical of people who were overly laudatory about some company's products.<br /><br />For example, back in the early 1990s, I worked for a large contract research house. One of my fellow employees, otherwise a fine individual, was a monomaniac about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Notes">Lotus Notes</a>. His basic view was that it was good for whatever problem you had, so he brought it up in every meeting he attended. This greatly irritated me, because (1) I thought the product was over-priced, (2) regardless of what my friend thought, Lotus Notes was not the <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/magic%20bullet">magic bullet</a> that would cure all our ills, and (3) I wanted to develop such systems myself, and there was no way I would be able to do that if the company spent a lot of money buying one. I needn't have worried. The product was too expensive, and I left the company anyway.<br /><br />Then there are Microsoft zombies. These are people for whom the answer to any problem is a Microsoft product. There are not anywhere nearly as many nowadays as there were, say, ten to fifteen years ago. Back then Microsoft was the only acceptable desktop application vendor for a large corporation. A Microsoft zombie in a management position was every bit as repressive as any party official in a totalitarian state. Of course, the synergistic interplay of the Internet and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source">open source software</a> has taken a lot of the wind out of Microsoft's sails.<br /><br />Like Microsoft in the 1980s and 1990s, other companies have had their own <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dittohead">dittoheads</a>. Both IBM and Oracle won my disdain early on because of this, although it seems they both have lost the adoring crowds that once followed them.<br /><br />Since the late 1990s, I have mostly been plumping for open source stuff. There are lots of reasons for this, including lower costs, usually higher quality for the things I cared about, and more diversity. Nearly all of my geek friends felt the same way. There was something really gratifying about endorsing and using software that was free to download and install. I didn't mind at all telling people about it, and I argued with commercial software dittoheads on more than one occasion about why open source made sense for commercial companies.<br /><br />Then Google came along. They are not an open source organization by any means, although they make heavy use of an open source infrastructure. Somehow Google managed to establish a pretty lofty reputation among geeks even though they were a commercial outfit. Part of this reputation came from their "Don't be evil" slogan. Probably an even bigger part was the fact that their most useful service, namely searching, was <span style="font-style: italic;">free</span>. Google found a non-offensive way to present relevant ads along with search results, and users gladly accepted that as the cost of getting such a great service. For a good long while, about the only people critical of Google were competitors.<br /><br />Google began branching out into <a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/">other products</a>, including the ones that I regularly use: Gmail, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Video, Google Reader, Google Chat, Blogger and Picasa. These are all 100% free, and they have changed the way I do things every day. It has gotten to the point that if Google rolls out a new product, I almost never bother to look at what competitors have to offer. Even worse, I evangelize for these products. I tell people <a href="http://wileequixote.blogspot.com/2006/11/google-reader.html">what great things they are</a>. I have become just like my Lotus-Notes-loving friend. I am a Google shill.<br /><br />As if that weren't bad enough, I found myself doing the same thing for <a href="http://www.netflix.com/">Netflix</a>. In case you don't know about that (I was surprised that some of my non-geek friends had never heard of it), Netflix provides an extremely easy-to-use DVD rental-by-mail service. For a relatively small monthly fee, you can request DVDs online, and they are mailed to you as they become available (usually there is no waiting). You keep them as long as you want, but you can only have a certain number out at a time. When you are done with a DVD, you mail it back in, and then Netflix will send you the next one you requested. The best part of Netflix, in my view, is the incredible range and variety of material that they have available: old classics, whole TV series, rare and seldom seen masterpieces, etc. Searching and requesting are very easy.<br /><br />So, here I am . The only thing that keeps me from being a true shill is that I don't get anything out of my evangelizing, at least not in a monetary sense. But then, neither did my Lotus-Notes-loving friend. The real question is whether this change is because I am growing morally weaker, or just mellower.Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-76725579994162466672006-12-30T17:19:00.000-05:002007-01-15T19:34:28.198-05:00Showing Their True ColorsMy hometown is Fort Worth TX. It was not exactly at the bleeding edge of <span style="font-style: italic;">avant-garde</span> architecture or design, especially in the 1950s. Thus, when I was growing up, all I ever saw was the most plain, vanilla styles of homes imaginable. They were all earth tones or pale off-white colors, occasionally tinted with very light pastel blues, greens or yellows. It wasn't quite as gray as the Kansas depicted in Frank Baum's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_of_Oz_%281939_film%29"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Wizard of Oz</span></a>, but it was getting there.<br /><br />I've lived in Ann Arbor MI since 1975. It is rather a different kind of place from my home town. For example, it is very much a college town, being the home of the University of Michigan. One grows used to seeing somewhat wild bits of external 'ornamentation' with student housing. Certainly, college students typically show a great deal less inhibition when it comes to the choice of the paint colors that they use.<br /><br />However, I live over a mile from the nearest concentration of off-campus housing. Almost everything around my house for a number of blocks is ordinary, single-family dwellings. Still, these homes are not uniformly bland. In fact, they sometimes manifest a kind of ... daring? creativity? damaged sense of the aesthetic? Whatever it is, here in my supposedly more conventional part of town one can find some very interesting choices for exterior color.<br /><br />I drove around for about twenty minutes a few days ago, taking photos of some of these unusual paint choices. I didn't go further than about ten blocks from my house. These photos do not do justice to the sharp oddity of the color choices I'm talking about. In bright sunlight they are especially striking. Unfortunately we here in Michigan have now entered into that season of the year that is more akin to the climate of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordor">Mordor</a>, i.e., cold and perpetually gray and gloomy. My poor digital camera simply cannot bring out the richness of the colors. You'll just have to take my word for it.<br /><br />Nevertheless, it is with great pleasure that I present to you ... [drumroll] ...<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0); font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0); font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">The</span><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"> </span><span style="color: rgb(255, 204, 51); font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">True</span><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"> </span><span style="color: rgb(204, 153, 51); font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Colors</span><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"> </span> <span style="color: rgb(51, 204, 0); font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Of <span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">Ann</span></span><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; color: rgb(51, 51, 255);"> </span><span style="color: rgb(204, 51, 204); font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Arbor</span>!<br /></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZuGil5pQAOaLdPiZ8Uvg0MwwcoHPxGAFT_qTQlGR0C74ek0SCgGzqHP0ikWVGulwxQ2zEU5qoihYC5LyVI7oFL6NzZu6IGD9j_1XvX9N6tEF4_ulgtSQYxwdnk8ngR2qyNmns/s1600-h/DSCN1244.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZuGil5pQAOaLdPiZ8Uvg0MwwcoHPxGAFT_qTQlGR0C74ek0SCgGzqHP0ikWVGulwxQ2zEU5qoihYC5LyVI7oFL6NzZu6IGD9j_1XvX9N6tEF4_ulgtSQYxwdnk8ngR2qyNmns/s200/DSCN1244.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5014453132134988082" border="0" /></a>The lady who owned this house wanted to know why I was taking a picture of it. I told her that I loved the color. She looked doubtful but let me go without further comment.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkgV6bwaYESxstAo2IHjS2nsoGlt27tRARX7vFOA5CdzkovzmQzq9MVPK7ade7o5f-qt7evR40q-wcTg17P3cIJwqHbARH5yOBmUW7eOReaEYffzULC2LpTyyGrg_FsvTC0dAR/s1600-h/DSCN1245.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkgV6bwaYESxstAo2IHjS2nsoGlt27tRARX7vFOA5CdzkovzmQzq9MVPK7ade7o5f-qt7evR40q-wcTg17P3cIJwqHbARH5yOBmUW7eOReaEYffzULC2LpTyyGrg_FsvTC0dAR/s200/DSCN1245.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5014453136429955394" border="0" /></a>This house is what one is compelled to call 'mustard plug yellow'. That is, it is exactly the color of the dried mustard one finds on a squeeze-type mustard bottle that has been sitting out all day at a hot-dog stand.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhYAZkypeMKGwi0e7327An3MEbMG4j5Vnlmvpi-DsLudRtSaYihqxsXXXAstSMVDGtw_pTLxDocGpJNKuTt2fSDD9DCvRk1HUgkWzUz5GMYGGlMgcydpG67X9TsdP0YkteDrzK/s1600-h/DSCN1241.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhYAZkypeMKGwi0e7327An3MEbMG4j5Vnlmvpi-DsLudRtSaYihqxsXXXAstSMVDGtw_pTLxDocGpJNKuTt2fSDD9DCvRk1HUgkWzUz5GMYGGlMgcydpG67X9TsdP0YkteDrzK/s200/DSCN1241.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5014836389246679538" border="0" /></a>The purple color this photo really has a kind of electric (shocking?) quality in the bright sun.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVc0h32L6eJGocEwdQQxZMN0OQUTmqbwROugXb4R3LUJQaVuHhdO7FOTLcgItuAb-OHKWlWIcwiGgjHQHpfHMq1o4Up-jTJGHqI5Suc1ZM_3XO1xKUR6OTjZbRi5ZjV06dl4l4/s1600-h/DSCN1247.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVc0h32L6eJGocEwdQQxZMN0OQUTmqbwROugXb4R3LUJQaVuHhdO7FOTLcgItuAb-OHKWlWIcwiGgjHQHpfHMq1o4Up-jTJGHqI5Suc1ZM_3XO1xKUR6OTjZbRi5ZjV06dl4l4/s200/DSCN1247.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5014453145019890018" border="0" /></a>This place is sort of a bright, little girl pink. (By that comparison, of course, I do not in any way want to disparage the color choices of little girls. It's just non-typical, if not downright odd.)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRgUqKwW0Jde_8dWVv8bmgr7vaye7dezNdiGBs5SnRtmQYrGjnodByhr9q-amMTrGyoClUnHiuCeJSngpuz-An1KBrQvKprhziG6lEfxVRW6-gMIBVlDUoPgCGr8_gH5QHzyaP/s1600-h/DSCN1246.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRgUqKwW0Jde_8dWVv8bmgr7vaye7dezNdiGBs5SnRtmQYrGjnodByhr9q-amMTrGyoClUnHiuCeJSngpuz-An1KBrQvKprhziG6lEfxVRW6-gMIBVlDUoPgCGr8_gH5QHzyaP/s200/DSCN1246.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5014480748774701458" border="0" /></a>The oddness of this teal color, or whatever it is, doesn't come through here at all. However, it is enough to make you do a double-take when you drive by.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwkkgs1ryadiUfHFymVyR6gJTSxXo2SzWXHUvG6bZxbtaPohIiKrHpa3i8i_Uaji4lIppUG5EbXSVKj1ZydvUNcrk43un2eMQL5x84HBpz3w88BgjjNSq-cVTcOGQTpTzGxAVz/s1600-h/DSCN1242.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwkkgs1ryadiUfHFymVyR6gJTSxXo2SzWXHUvG6bZxbtaPohIiKrHpa3i8i_Uaji4lIppUG5EbXSVKj1ZydvUNcrk43un2eMQL5x84HBpz3w88BgjjNSq-cVTcOGQTpTzGxAVz/s200/DSCN1242.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5015255764694956226" border="0" /></a>This is another head-turner, and it's on the same street, if memory serves. It's not quite a fire-engine red, but more of a Faygo Red Pop kind of red.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLgVubMjaqpA8kTzjjCSSnxbM6RjaD2PMOXGaCsAzA0VwVGNuFG8HXUCqsOaDd6rrbBL_h5tae9O433FaVfgijfKKTq-3OeTRgPe61V1-t1Jznc5XDvhnFJmpDLNmMo5uQLyI5/s1600-h/DSCN1249.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLgVubMjaqpA8kTzjjCSSnxbM6RjaD2PMOXGaCsAzA0VwVGNuFG8HXUCqsOaDd6rrbBL_h5tae9O433FaVfgijfKKTq-3OeTRgPe61V1-t1Jznc5XDvhnFJmpDLNmMo5uQLyI5/s200/DSCN1249.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5014480757364636082" border="0" /></a>My son Dave worked last summer for one of those 'College Pro Painter' kinds of outfits. This is one of the houses they did. Dave and his fellow painters were much amused by the owner's choice of colors, which they characterized as Christmas red and green.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu4_RwJMMmSizEDM9yXHHTL4VzTnLwWm_BmKTunRYCScoYeGe8RcF5aEpgSFwcbaALxszcKaJyjoJ_bO2MuSqjiD4Vj1e-__vvw6u_yz2wOTudzIsnVKjCCv2uK_HLklTMlYFe/s1600-h/DSCN1250.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu4_RwJMMmSizEDM9yXHHTL4VzTnLwWm_BmKTunRYCScoYeGe8RcF5aEpgSFwcbaALxszcKaJyjoJ_bO2MuSqjiD4Vj1e-__vvw6u_yz2wOTudzIsnVKjCCv2uK_HLklTMlYFe/s200/DSCN1250.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5014480761659603394" border="0" /></a>Near our house is a path leading through some woods to an adjoining neighborhood. When you come out of the woods, this is what you see. It is sometimes enough to make you wonder whether you should turn around and go back.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_EekMG1l7RicCYTTGkmYZQog4j0zhKQtdJ3X04VyVJjAOS4aFGW8EeSlpAqsX3cW8e-JFXGgcxsiqvbyQHU-4JspmksaJ2Sc5iyLAI9Pi0o3e7EJwBQrshSr6hJrj3e-vxE-A/s1600-h/DSCN1251.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_EekMG1l7RicCYTTGkmYZQog4j0zhKQtdJ3X04VyVJjAOS4aFGW8EeSlpAqsX3cW8e-JFXGgcxsiqvbyQHU-4JspmksaJ2Sc5iyLAI9Pi0o3e7EJwBQrshSr6hJrj3e-vxE-A/s200/DSCN1251.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5014828576701168082" border="0" /></a>We pass this house very frequently, since it is on one of the two routes into our neighborhood. It's hard to say exactly what color it is. It's not quite salmon, nor is it quite peach. I asked my daughter what color she thought it was. She looked at it, and immediately said "Ugly."<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7dQW8FdHPFCzl4KGxDxleDAruf81qziexyKC1R4f3AYTCWx9k7mx1DV4sllwQnoK4XsoPB7ZjEjQOq2CG5b2b63lwFqQZ0ILLErSxGPhfZxDPNXWUEbGc6tdN50_-ftPe6xWF/s1600-h/DSCN1252.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7dQW8FdHPFCzl4KGxDxleDAruf81qziexyKC1R4f3AYTCWx9k7mx1DV4sllwQnoK4XsoPB7ZjEjQOq2CG5b2b63lwFqQZ0ILLErSxGPhfZxDPNXWUEbGc6tdN50_-ftPe6xWF/s200/DSCN1252.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5014828580996135394" border="0" /></a>This house is actually not easily visible much of the year because of foliage. However, once the trees and bushes drop their leaves, you can see it from Pontiac Trail, which is one of the thoroughfares leading through our part of town. I guess you'd call it a kind of light purple. Sort of. Maybe not.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnK6VJrB7pCcx9mrPKQ3ZDEA76Cf4xhihoB8T7NhQdwKuop9CeThd4GXwgzbxcReg6eeWDcSb8IGjNcmm0bqP2Ubjt9J1mWuN0ZHd8BfKNheXXJls267a0DSCD5dVbanrgTU5-/s1600-h/DSCN1243.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnK6VJrB7pCcx9mrPKQ3ZDEA76Cf4xhihoB8T7NhQdwKuop9CeThd4GXwgzbxcReg6eeWDcSb8IGjNcmm0bqP2Ubjt9J1mWuN0ZHd8BfKNheXXJls267a0DSCD5dVbanrgTU5-/s200/DSCN1243.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5015255287953586354" border="0" /></a>My wife said this was 'green apple'. Maybe, but none of the green apples I've ever seen were fluorescent.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />One has to wonder why people chose colors like these. Perhaps they feel that they are expressing their individuality or their non-conformity. Maybe they got a really good deal on the color at the paint store. Of course, they could simply be trying to make their house unmistakeable ("You, can't miss my house. It glows in the dark.") We will probably never know.<br /><br />This is America. Apart from whatever limits local zoning ordinances may mandate, you are free to paint your house whatever color you want. However, the rest of us are free to marvel at your choice, and maybe snicker, at least to ourselves.Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-30825563438134860862006-12-30T13:28:00.000-05:002007-01-15T19:36:26.959-05:00Dreams Of Flight Or Switched-On DaedalusMost people have had dreams in which they find themselves flying. Usually it seems effortless, and even exhilarating (unlike dreams of falling, which are another matter altogether). Several days ago, the UK's <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/">Daily Mail</a> had an article about Yves Rossy, who managed to do it for real <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/technology/technology.html?in_article_id=425452&in_page_id=1965">in a very convincing way</a>.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT4tzirm23lXErAIgw9CCFu2dJn4j9uc99YQK6uiSttnGeodKrdUJyqlVOr3u275uM3WNVXpRXhSY2wG56IRirlph6tI2OZgXVUy8dvBPPXx-pnSZmcZ9MsV5reuNUoqu8DcCy/s1600-h/jet-man2.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT4tzirm23lXErAIgw9CCFu2dJn4j9uc99YQK6uiSttnGeodKrdUJyqlVOr3u275uM3WNVXpRXhSY2wG56IRirlph6tI2OZgXVUy8dvBPPXx-pnSZmcZ9MsV5reuNUoqu8DcCy/s400/jet-man2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5014435647323126002" border="0" /></a><br />There is a semi-slick <a class="user" href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=SHYXrqoS08o">music video version</a> of Rossy's feat. There is also a <a class="user" href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=bEXxkWXncuo">more technical version</a> (still has a music track for the flying scenes). Sadly for non-Francophones, the explanations are in French. His flight looked as good as or better than any dream I've ever had of flying. I never left a contrail in my dreams, either. On the other hand, I didn't need kerosene. But those are just details.<br /><br />By the way, I suspect that Rossy's flight must have happened some weeks ago. Unless global warming is having a bigger effect in Switzerland than I know about, I doubt if anyone would be wearing shorts at this time of year, as one of Rossy's ground crew was.<br /><br />There was of course a <a href="http://digg.com/general_sciences/Man_flies_without_a_plane">Digg posting about Rossy's free flying adventure</a>. I was amused to note a nasty comment there, by someone who basically claimed that others have done similar things before, and that Rossy is just engaged in self-promotion. Perhaps so, since he does have his own <a href="http://jet-man.com/index_eng.html">website</a> (English language version). However, I couldn't help thinking to myself that this particular critic was suffering from severe wingspan envy.Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-5205299491720290982006-12-26T20:16:00.000-05:002006-12-30T13:28:06.416-05:00Hiding In Plain SightI have a vision problem. Unfortunately, it's not one that can be remedied with an optometric prescription, laser surgery or medication. The heart of the difficulty is that sometimes I don't see what is right in front of me.<br /><br />It seems to happen in any number of purely domestic situations. For example, my wife Mary tells me that there is a certain food container in the refrigerator with something in it which I will like. I go stand in front of the refrigerator for long minutes, peering high and low, moving things around, but, alas, I don't see it. I call Mary. She walks up, opens the refrigerator, immediately puts her hand directly on the invisible item (without moving anything), picks it up, and hands it to me. The same thing happens with some regularity for clothes in my closet, almost any kitchen item smaller than a gallon milk jug, and most items in our office. It also happens with tools and materials in my workshop.<br /><br />A couple of days ago, I had a somewhat more serious episode of this selective blindness that troubled me. Because of the <a href="http://wileequixote.blogspot.com/search/label/cancer">cancer I am recovering from</a>, I take a number of drugs and supplements. Naturally, these come in bottles of various sizes, which run out at different rates. We try to keep ahead of that by periodically checking the levels, and then calling in refills to the pharmacy. After we pick up those medicine containers at the pharmacy, we put them in a special place so that we will be ready to switch quickly when the current nearly-empty containers run out.<br /><br />On the Friday before Christmas, I went through this level-checking drill and realized that one of the meds I take, which comes in liquid form, was going to run out before the weekend was over. I called in a refill as usual. Later in the afternoon, when I went to pick up this refill, the pharmacist told me that the insurance company had rejected the refill request because it was too soon by at least a week. In other words, according to them, I shouldn't have run out yet. I explained that, whatever the insurance company thought, I would be out of that particular medicine in one or two days.<br /><br />The people at the University of Michigan Cancer & Geriatrics Center Pharmacy have become great friends, and they always go out of their way to help us. The person there who handles the phone and the insurance went right to work, and somehow bludgeoned the insurance company into accepting the claim. It took twenty minutes or so, but I was glad to wait for it. I thanked my pharmacy friends profusely, tooks the meds, and headed home.<br /><br />Mary, who had not been involved in this particular refill request, put the new containers in the appropriate spot when I got home. A couple of days later, when I finally exhausted the current bottle, I went to get the next one. The refill bottle I had just picked up was there, but to my surprise I saw that there was also one <span style="font-style: italic;">more</span> bottle. This was the one that the insurance company must have thought that I had. I swear that I looked in the refill spot before I called in the order. And it's not like it was one of a dozen identical little pill bottles, either. It was a relatively big container, roughly the size of a typical cough medicine bottle.<br /><br />How could I have missed it? Why does this keep happening? How can I miss seeing items that are obviously right in front of me? Certainly it has to do with focus of attention, but what does that really mean here?<br /><br />One could speculate that perhaps this selective vision has to do with how much one likes or desires the thing looked for. In other words, I would more readily see something I desire and less readily see something I did not desire. However, that doesn't really explain it. When I stand in front of the refrigerator, I am hungry and I desire food. In fact I desire the particular food I am looking for. Why cannot I see it? Similarly, I want to get dressed, so why can't I see the shirt I want hanging in front of me? I want to take the medicine because it is necessary for my health, so how could I possibly miss seeing it there on the shelf?<br /><br />Upon reflection, I think this kind of vision error has to do with the degree of affinity or liking, not for the item looked for, but rather for the activity which the seeing is part of. I like food, for sure, but I dislike food preparation. It is almost as if, in my juvenile way, I'm still wanting someone to prepare all my meals for me. Mary in fact does the bulk of the food prep here and does a wonderful job of it without complaint. However, she does not and should not have to prepare absolutely <span style="font-style: italic;">everything</span> I eat. I can manage at least a sandwich or bowl of soup without spousal assistance. The thing is, I don't <span style="font-style: italic;">like</span> spending my time this way. I hate putting in more time preparing the food than it takes to eat it. My guess is that this dislike somehow negatively <a href="http://alanlnelson.typepad.com/seat_1a/2006/01/psychological_p.html">primes</a> my visual recognition ability.<br /><br />Mary, on the other hand, gets great satisfaction out of doing those very things I dislike so much. She has very little problem seeing things in the kitchen, the closet, or pretty much anywhere else in the house. Now that I think about it, our kids often suffered from the same kind of blindness while growing up, and likewise had to depend on her (e.g., "Mom, where are my shoes?" "You left them under the coffee table.")<br /><br />However, Mary does have her vision problems, too. I realized this while helping her over the last number of weeks as she learns how to use Windows XP. She does not like computers, but she realizes that she has to be able to use them to some degree given the prevalence and usefulness of email, web browsing, etc. It turns out that Mary has this same kind of selective blindness when it comes to looking at the Windows desktop. I'll say something like "OK, see the little box to the right of the cursor?" or "Now click on the 'Move File' link in the left hand column", but those location descriptions are not useful for her. When Mary looks at the screen, she sees a confusing mass of text and icons. She does not see things that are right in front of her. Needless to say, this has been a continual source of difficulty for her in getting comfortable with Windows.<br /><br />On the other hand, when I look at a computer screen, I take in the whole thing almost instantly, identifying all the points of interest without trying. I very rarely miss any important detail. In fact, at times I've been able to diagnose colleague's bugs or find typos in their prose with no more than a passing glance at a screen-full of text. You might say, "Ah, but perhaps it is just a matter of practice." Maybe, but I've always been that way with computers, all the way back to when I did my first programming in 1967 in a high school summer program. I took to computers like a bee to a field full of honeysuckle -- I needed no encouragement and no instruction. Obviously, I <span style="font-style: italic;">liked</span> computers. I suspect that preference primed my visual recognition so that I always spotted salient details on a screen or printout very quickly.<br /><br />So, perhaps one's ability to see things in a given context is modulated by how much one likes the activity that the seeing is part of. If so, what do you do when faced with an activity that you don't like to do, but that you have to do? The kind of seeing or blindness I've been talking about is an unconscious thing. Willpower will avail you little in fighting the unconscious. I'm not sure how I should approach my own issue in this regard. Now that I recognize this performance shortcoming in myself in certain domains, I can at least try to take it into account. For example, I suspect that slowing down will help. I am naturally inclined to hurry through activities I dislike, which aggravates the blindness problem. If I slow down so that I truly look, I'll bet I'll see more than I have been seeing. Also, "no man is an island" (<a href="http://www.lyricsfreak.com/s/simon+and+garfunkel/i+am+a+rock_20124809.html">Paul Simon notwithstanding</a>), so I should also just accept the fact that my blind spots and Mary's blind spots are at least complementary.Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-27188457751855078692006-12-25T11:26:00.000-05:002006-12-25T12:13:24.810-05:00Merry Something-Or-OtherI have been wanting to wish all my readers a <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merry_christmas">Merry Christmas</a><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span></span></span>for several days, but I've been wondering how I should do it. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politically_correct">PC</a> notion of a <a href="http://people.cornell.edu/pages/bs16/Christmas/another_politically_correct_holiday_greeting.txt">completely neutral seasonal greeting</a> still irks me, although I know perfectly well why people feel that is necessary. Of course, I don't want to offend anyone deliberately, or attempt to manifest my allegiance to a Christian American cultural hegemony. Still, it seems obvious to me that, if someone gives me a greeting or blessing or good wish or whatever that is pecular to their particular culture or group, they are doing so with a good intention. If someone is doing something from a good intention, and it doesn't actually harm me, why should I do anything except gratefully receive it? After all, they aren't cursing me or saying bad things about my ancestry.<br /><br />A number of years ago, my employer sent me to an affiliate company's site in Paris. While there, I was often caught off-guard when people would wish me a pleasant <span style="font-style: italic;">Bon Jour</span> as I passed them in the halls or on the streets. It was the appropriate greeting for them, and they clearly meant it well. Only an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugly_American">Ugly American</a> would have taken offense. Instead, I took some small delight in the greeting and its novelty to me, and did my best to return the greeting (although doubtless my American accent immediately gave me away).<br /><br />Given all that, let me wish you a very Merry Christmas, and express my hope that you find this day and the whole season a happy time for yourselves and for those close to you.Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-85650054519392988482006-12-20T21:16:00.000-05:002006-12-23T23:12:10.783-05:00Reflections On A Red Cross Donor Card<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYLjuaADyYq39jOyNtHIqBXcg7IRYzJzrXpV3tA_VYm4BHxj9ACeTwwY52nARknxscsyk4plSHKtTUKjUjQV6F-r6Mdm_MHBRG5u4EX4m8JF8gT0_bhQLbacMZTOXU5q65EWmg/s1600-h/red_cross_card.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYLjuaADyYq39jOyNtHIqBXcg7IRYzJzrXpV3tA_VYm4BHxj9ACeTwwY52nARknxscsyk4plSHKtTUKjUjQV6F-r6Mdm_MHBRG5u4EX4m8JF8gT0_bhQLbacMZTOXU5q65EWmg/s320/red_cross_card.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5011542733446199410" border="0" /></a>A few days ago, I was cleaning out my wallet, removing some of the detritus of the past year. It's almost embarrassing to see how much useless stuff that I have been carrying around. Anyway, among the items I found was my <a href="http://www.redcross.org/donate/give/">Red Cross Blood Donor</a> ID card. I've been an RC donor since the early 70s. According to the RC records, in the 31 years or so that I have lived in Michigan I have donated 80 units of whole blood. I have always donated several times a year, and in recent years I have often hit the legal limit of five donations a year.<br /><br />One of the reasons that I donated so regularly (besides the fact that it's just a good thing to do) was that I have an O Negative <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type">blood type</a>. Only about 8% of the population is O Negative, but the really valuable thing about that type is that it makes me a 'universal donor'. That is, pretty much anyone needing blood could take my O Negative blood regardless of what their type was. Every time I donated, I would be reminded of my 'specialness'. Frequently, the RC would also send snail-mail reminders, which always mentioned the need for O Negative blood.<br /><br />I really didn't mind donating at all. Unlike some of my fellow donors who became faint or dizzy after a donation, I never had any trouble at all. Instead, I always looked forward to the cookies and juice they provided in the 'recovery' area after a donation. Even more valuable to me was the fact that donating presented a good excuse to get out of the office.<br /><br />This happy situation lasted until about two years ago, when I began having serious health problems. Around Thanksgiving 2004, I contracted a nasty cold/flu of some sort that I just couldn't shake. The RC rules are that if you have an active infection, you aren't supposed to donate. Unhappily, this infection lasted for many weeks, frustrating several scheduled attempts to go donate.<br /><br />In a <a href="http://wileequixote.blogspot.com/2006/12/vgpr.html">previous post</a>, I warned that I might get tiresome talking about the following subject, so don't say I didn't tell you. Going into 2005, the cold/flu thing continued, but I also started developing other unpleasant symptoms. This prompted a number of rounds of doctor's visits to figure out what was happening. Finally, on March 10, 2005, I learned that I had contracted <a href="http://www.multiplemyeloma.org/about_myeloma/">multiple myeloma</a>, a serious bone marrow cancer. The day after I got the diagnosis, I started some heavy chemotherapy, which then continued for a number of months. Later I had a couple of bone marrow stem cell transplants. All of this high-intensity medical activity undoubtedly saved my life, but it also meant that I would never again be able to donate blood.<br /><br />Rather, over the course of the months following the initial diagnosis, it turned out that I needed to <span style="font-style: italic;">receive</span> a number of blood transfusions. Although I don't think I have received 80 units back, I know I have put a good dent in that number.<br /><br />There were several reasons I needed the blood. At first, I was suffering anemia simply because my bone marrow was full of cancer cells instead of normal tissue, and so I was not producing enough red blood cells. At the time of my diagnosis, my bone marrow consisted of 70% cancer cells. It was no wonder that I felt tired and out of breath all the time.<br /><br />As I mentioned, I went through a lot of chemotherapy, which killed a lot of the cancer cells. Then, in preparation for my first stem cell transplant in August 2005, I received a massive dose of a chemotherapy agent called melphelan. This drug killed even more of the remaining cancer cells. However, it also killed off most of the healthy cells in my bone marrow. (This was actually part of the plan for the transplant.) After that treatment, I then received an infusion of my own previously harvested bone marrow stem cells. From those cells, I regrew new bone marrow tissue. Naturally, that took some time, so I needed a few transfusions to bolster my red blood cell supply before my newly regenerated bone marrow could get back on the job.<br /><br />Finally, in October 2005 I received a second stem cell transplant, using stem cells donated by my sister Bliss. This time there was no preliminary 'conditioning' or 'induction therapy' (kinder, gentler terms for chemotherapy). I simply received an infusion of her stem cells. Over the course of some days, those cells found their way into my bone marrow and set up shop.<br /><br />It took many months, but eventually my sister's stem cells, which were healthy and vigorous, supplanted my own weakened cells. I don't remember exactly when it happened, but after a number of months the DNA tests the lab did on my blood showed that I was '100% donor cells'. Even more interesting, and perhaps amusing, was the wording in a July 7, 2006 cytogenetic analysis report:<br /><blockquote>The presence of a normal female karyotype in this sample is consistent with the engraftment of cells from a female donor following peripheral blood stem cell transplantation.<br /></blockquote>In other words, the transplant had been a complete success. My bone marrow was a clone of my sister's, and the blood cells it made were just like hers. It almost looks like a sex-change operation for blood cells. I like to joke that if I ever commit a crime, and leave some blood at the scene, the cops will be looking for a woman. (Someone else pointed out that this would make an interesting plot device for a <a href="http://www.cbs.com/primetime/csi/">CSI</a> episode. But I digress.)<br /><br />There was one niggling detail to spoil this medical success story. My sister was a perfect tissue match for me, as measured by the usual way that one does such matching. However, she had an A Positive blood type. I mentioned earlier that having O Negative blood made me a universal donor. Unfortunately, given the way blood type matching worked, that also meant that I could only receive O Negative blood. This more stringent matching requirement also included new blood cells generated in my own body.<br /><br />So, while my new bone marrow was busily making new A Positive red blood cells, what was left of my old immune system was promptly <span style="font-style: italic;">killing them off</span> because they were not O Negative. The left hand giveth, while the right hand taketh away, and all that. My new bone marrow was apparently producing plenty of new blood cells, but they never got a chance to do much good before they got wiped out. That meant that I had to keep getting O Negative blood transfusions.<br /><br />This problem started right after the transplant in October 2005 and went on for a number of months. I received several treatments aimed at correcting the mismatch, but they took a long time to have an effect. Frankly, I was beginning to wonder if I was going to have a permanent problem with this internal blood type mis-match. The prospect of needing blood transfusions <span style="font-style: italic;">in perpetuum</span> was not a happy one for me (or our insurer, I'd bet).<br /><br />However, right around the end of May 2006, the old immune system finally gave up the ghost, and stopped killing off my new blood cells. When that happened, my hemoglobin level, which had been hovering in the 6-8 range for months, shot up to the 14-16 range, which is normal for an adult male.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgudLccT13NglPwOPglvkV3NzBeh4iff3WMNapJK7_8P_EGzfM98KIFC9aukcwiL0ag2RSld1fDn_QcukwZXTWk2msR2jcGgmtcR8Hw61nxXZUj_u3M_chDY9WOe79Q4FOHd_cR/s1600-h/hemoglobin.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgudLccT13NglPwOPglvkV3NzBeh4iff3WMNapJK7_8P_EGzfM98KIFC9aukcwiL0ag2RSld1fDn_QcukwZXTWk2msR2jcGgmtcR8Hw61nxXZUj_u3M_chDY9WOe79Q4FOHd_cR/s400/hemoglobin.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5011561751561386210" border="0" /></a><br />(Perhaps you can't quite make out the numbers and dates on the axes of this graph, but hopefully you can see the sharp rise from late May to early July.) Needless to say, we were pleased. In fact, we were overjoyed. I haven't needed a transfusion since that rise. (The graph also shows a little bump around mid-October, but that's a different story.)<br /><br />This brings me to the insight that flashed through my mind when I pulled out my RC donor card. Ever since the ABO blood typing system was first figured out by medical researchers, a person's blood type was thought to be immutable. Yet, now we know that under the right circumstances, it can change. What other characteristics of a person that we think of as fixed and unchanging are actually mutable, given the right conditions?<br /><br />I have a friend, a very successful businessman, who fits the classic profile for a Republican supporter. He in fact was a Republican, as evidenced by his financial donations and his participation in party events. Yet, in the years since Bush's election, he has done a complete 180° politically. He now actively (and financially) supports various Democratic candidates, and debates his still-Republican pals in a friendly, but vigorous way. Knowing him as long as I have, I was rather surprised by the switch. Yet for him, the change was necessary, even unavoidable. He was repeatedly and increasingly distressed by the actions of the current Administration, as well as by numerous Republican misdeeds in his own state. As <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popeye">Popeye</a> put it, "That's alls I can stands, 'cause I can't stands no more".<br /><br />We have all been surprised by people we thought we knew well who did something completely unexpected. A confirmed bachelor finally gets married. A couple we thought had been happily married for decades gets a divorce. A well-known religious figure who had railed against immorality turns out to be a pedophile and porn addict. A hard-core atheist becomes a fervent believer and evangelist.<br /><br />We may view some of these changes as unfortunate, or even tragic. Other changes, particularly those of a religious or ideological nature, are often viewed with suspicion. Those who disagree with a person's new views are likely to see him as a traitor or a 'flip-flopper'. However, it seems to me that the very notion of free will doesn't mean very much unless it allows the possibility of a person making this kind of deep, fundamental change. And you have to admit that resisting obviously needed change is just self-destructive: staying the course was definitely a bad idea for Captain Ahab.<br /><br />In many things I am a conservative, in the older sense of being predisposed to limiting change. However, as I grow older, I am coming to appreciate the value, even the necessity, of allowing and accepting change in others, and especially in myself. After all, if I can change blood types, then who knows what other kinds of changes I have in my future?Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35414301.post-77756197958857644442006-12-16T19:42:00.000-05:002006-12-26T16:50:51.355-05:00Wikipedia Über AllesOver the past year or so I've noticed a significant change in what <a href="http://www.google.com/">Google </a>shows in the top matches for most queries. I have not done any kind of systematic study of this, but it seems to me that I almost always get a match from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a> in the top five matches. What's more, that Wikipedia page usually provides the answer I want. Perhaps this has more to do with the kinds of things I look up, but I don't think so.<br /><br />Wikipedia of course is one of the great success stories for collaboration software. A few months ago there was a report that compared Wikipedia and <a href="http://www.britannica.com/">Enclopedia Brittanica</a>, and found them roughly equal in terms of depth and accuracy. That is a pretty remarkable finding, considering that Brittanica is a well-established commercial organization with over 200 years experience in collecting and organizing information, whereas Wikipedia is mostly a volunteer organization going back a decade or so.<br /><br />Of course, Wikipedia is not without its flaws. As do most <a href="http://www.wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki">Wikis</a>, Wikipedia has an open update policy. That means that anyone can update pretty much anything at any time. The Wikipedia staff have had to modify that policy for certain pages. Wiki pages on topics which produce <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_controversial_issues">controversy </a>and strong emotion, such as abortion, evolution, Islam, Palestinian independence, Scientology, and the like, became textual battlegrounds, where warring ideologues spent their days deleting each others' corrections. For those pages, the Wikipedia staff have had to step in and lock the pages, and then try to provide some sort of editorial oversight so as to attain to their idea of a '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NPOV_dispute">Neutral Point Of View</a>'. No doubt this is a painfully time-consuming process, but the end result is more likely to represent the different sides of an issue more accurately and completely. I'm glad someone is doing that.<br /><br />Apart from these more vigorous kinds of disputes, Wikipedia is pretty accurate. Every now and then, however, one does run across an error that no-one recognized, but which later seems to have been a pretty pointed attack by someone. For example, prominent journalist John Seigenthaler recently discovered that he is mentioned by name as "a longtime suspect in the assassinations of president John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert". That kind of thing can ruin your whole day. He got that one fixed.<br /><br />Happily, those kinds of problems are rare. I mentioned the comparison with Encyclopedia Brittanica. On Dec. 15, <a href="http://www.wired.com/">Wired News</a> published an <a href="http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,69844-0.html">article summarizing the current state of things</a>. With four million pretty good articles already, it's not so surprising that Google finds those pages so readily.<br /><br />Update 12/26/2006:<br />Scoble also notes how <a href="http://scobleizer.com/2006/12/26/google-not-pointing-to-best-in-their-class-says-blake/trackback/">WikiPedia often has a better, more focused answer than Google does</a>.Wile E Quixotehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01245551784397007503noreply@blogger.com0