100 Years Ago: 29-Aug-1913
You’ve probably familiar with August, 1914…  You may even have read the book of the same name, or the other famous one, “The Guns of August”.  As we draw closer to the centennial anniversary of those times, I find myself wondering what life looked like to people 100 years ago…

In August, 1913, radio and airplanes were new, and there were no such things as television, computers, or jet engines.  Electrons had only been identified as particles 16 years before.  Woodrow Wilson was President (the 28^th), and the Panama Canal was almost done.  Many countries were still ruled by monarchs; that was still pretty much the norm.  (Tsar Nicholas II in Russia and Kaiser WIlhelm II in Germany.)

Many high-ranking officers of the British Royal Navy were still men who had started their careers on wooden sailing ships with muzzle-loading guns, even if the new ships of the day were steel, powered with steam.  And 100 years ago yesterday, the Imperial Japanese Navy battlecruiser “Kongo” put to sea from Portsmouth, England for the first time, bound for her home in Japan -- 36,000 tons, and 8 12-inch guns, top speed 30 knots.

She would ultimately have a long and notorious career, before being sunk by a torpedo from a submarine 31 years later… but at the time she put to sea, nobody would have known any of that.  She was bright and shiny and no doubt magnificent; the lead ship of her class, and one of the mightiest warships in existence on that day; and nobody knew what would happen...

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Mr. Brownie is gone to The Bridge
Brownie the pig lived with us for four years, with his two brothers.  He was good pig, and we loved him dearly, and when he got sick, we did the best we could for him, but of course in the end we lost him anyway.

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Current Mood: sad

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Literary Tidbit...
"At Dawn We Slept", published in 1981, was primarily based on 37 year's worth of investigation by Gordon Prange into the attack on Pearl Harbor, although ultimately completed by his colleagues after his death.  At the time of the attack, the commander of the US fleet at anchor was Admiral Husband E. Kimmel; afterward, Kimmel was accused of dereliction of duty, but responded by claiming that Washington withheld vital information from him.

In the concluding chapter, "The Verdict of History", Prange et al review all of the arguments regarding Kimmel's degree of responsibility, and ultimately summarize their verdict in the following words:

"For years, Kimmel had worked, planned, and studied with one end in view: When and if war came, he would be on the bridge of his flagship speeding to engage the enemy.  So he did not recognize the voice of opportunity when it murmured in his ear, "This is your hour," for that hour demanded of him that for the moment, he cease polishing the sword and pick up the shield.  He lacked the perception to read the meaning of the warnings and events of those last ten days before the disaster and the flexibility to adjust his orientation from training to defense."

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Things That Concern Me (in no particular order) #1: Rick Perry
Not believing in Global Warming is one thing; I can imagine an intelligent person who isn't convinced (but avoids polluting anyway, hopefully, just because it's the right thing to do).

Rick Perry, though, claims that it's a theory that was manufactured by data manipulation, and portrays it as something that more and more scientists are abandoning -- which is of course wildly out of whack with what reputable sources indicate.

Two aspects of this disturb me -- beyond the obvious, that he might wind up leading the country, and continue telling people this twisted version of the facts, and making executive decisions on that basis.

For one thing, it's the product of an overall attitude of distrust toward science and scientists that strikes me as deeply ominous. For another, I suspect that it's almost entirely self-serving; "My career and my fortune will prosper if I profess to disbelieve in X; guess what? I disbelieve in X." I guess the truth goes by the wayside if your meal-ticket is threatened...

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Not actually a Mastercard ad...
Asics Gel Kayano running shoes: $135.00
Tights, socks, hat, gloves, and other gear: about $200.00
Magic Brooks running jacket, that keeps you warm in wind,
rain, and snow, while weighing absolutely nothing: $95.00
Very patient wife who waits for you: Sorry, no idea how I wound
up so lucky...
4,870 miles on the road training: "Free", if you want to call it that
4 packets of disgusting, sticky, revolting, indispensable GU energy gel: $8.00
...
Finally finished the route you've been beating your head against -- all 22.8 miles of it -- priceless.

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Book Recommendation...
...If you're into that sort of thing, I recommend Robert K. Massie's "Dreadnought", a study of the naval arms race between Germany and Britain in the run-up to WWI. He's a biographer, not an engineer, so there's more personal profile thumbnails than hard engineering stats, but it's a fascinating book none the less. One gets a sense of how much the phrases "Industrial Revolution" and "Arms Race" have been watered down through over-use, so that they no longer give a fair sense of the anxiety and turbulence generated by the real thing. Compared to the long evolution of the wooden sailing naval vessel, the change-over to turbine-driven, all-steel, turret-gunned battleships was almost meteoric...

BTW, although it's a great book, I don't need to own it forever, and my copy is now up for grabs.

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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
I. Do. Not. Get. People.

I had a conversation today, while waiting for a bus, with a woman who is a neighbor, and with whom I have chatted before and found friendly and reasonable. Today, we were talking about the weather, and the snow, and how odd it was. I know a lot of the people I talk to from day to day are not walking around with Global Warming Anxiety, the way I am, but, when I made reference to the fact that we might be beyond the point of being able to avert catastrophe, the conversation went something like this:

Me: ...so, who knows; in 20 years, we may well be all paddling around in rubber boats, wondering what happened.
Her: Well, I won't be here in 20 years, so it's not like it really matters.
Me: (after a pause) Well, but... surely it's got to matter some? What we leave behind?
Her: Nope! I deliberately didn't have kids, so whatever happens, I'm off the hook!
Me: (after another, longer pause) But... How would it be if everybody thought like that, that it didn't matter what happened to anybody else, after they were gone? Surely, some people... Child molesters... Robbers... How would it be to tell them it doesn't matter what they did to anybody, once they're dead?
Her: (after a pause of her own) I try not to think about things too hard. I just take one day at a time.

Now, I'm probably not recalling the conversation properly... And I didn't put my side of it especially well... And she may really be a perfectly nice woman, or I may have misunderstood, but if you have any moral obligation to your fellow human beings, that burden lies on you NOW, doesn't it?? Even if the impact wouldn't be felt by them until after your death? Can people really, really not see that?!?!?!

Conversations like that make me sad. Especially the part about "I try not to think too hard..."

Current Mood: gloomy

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Contemplating Happiness and Unhappiness
I've found recently that my thinking vis-a-vis happiness is evolving...

The mysterious character of happiness has irked me for years -- the way it's possible to be happy in the middle of a catastrophe, or miserable in the midst of calm and plenty -- and I thought of it as an issue of understanding happiness. (I used to often quip that I was sure there were hermits living in caves who were happier than I was.)

A wise woman once defined happiness to me as "accepting where you are", and I think there's a lot to that -- but it also opens the door on a problem with happiness: when people are too accepting of their present condition, does this leave us with insufficient incentive to work for changes that would actually be worthwhile?

I started to think of it like particles in physics: sometimes they have forces on them, sometimes they don't. When a particle has no net force on it, it doesn't move; when there's a net force, it moves in that direction. (Particles have it easy; humans are forever worrying that they're not where they're "supposed to be"; particles are always where they're supposed to be. Even when something bumps them toward a new location, they're not really "supposed" to be already at the new location -- they're supposed to be right on the trajectory to it...)

Is unhappiness a better guide than happiness? They're always saying, in football, that they learn more from the games they lose...

Of course, philosophical musings like this can turn around and bite you; there I was, getting ready to go running, this morning, finding my shoes and so on. I wasn't really in the mood for it; in fact, I was distinctly unenthused. And I'm thinking to myself, "I'm not very happy, just at the moment, you know..." and a snarky little voice answered back: "Unhappiness is a better guide than happiness..." ("Shut up" I answered back.)

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Ice where it doesn't belong...
...So, I went out running today. 26 degrees; crazy, right? Actually, it wasn't bad. I have a new running jacket from Brooks, which is just totally cool. It weighs just about nothing, but it keeps you really warm -- if you keep moving. I went 11.9 miles in 114'13", which is far from superb, but at this point in the season, I'm just trying to keep putting in the miles and I'm not really worrying about times.

Now, I know you lose water even when it's cold out -- heavens I know it; all my gear comes back wet. I've learned to keep drinking from my waterbottle as I run on a distance that long, even though the water gets so darned cold.

But today was a new one... When I got back to the house and started taking stuff off, I felt something odd on the back of my neck, and it was ICE. Mind you this was before the snow started or anything; as cold as it was outside, at least it had been totally dry weather. This ice was from sweat that had been hot enough to sweat out of my head and run down my hair, and then before it could drip off or evaporate it FROZE INTO ICE.

Maybe I need a new hobby...

(At least I figured out how to keep my eyeballs from freezing, which was my problem last week: the trick is to close them for a few seconds every once in a while when the route is flat and straight... Keeps them warm, sort of.)

Current Mood: amused

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Odd Thought in re Condensation...
So, if you have a closed box with some water in it at a certain temperature, any liquid water will evaporate until the vapor pressure is reached - trying to maintain equilibrium. Once the partial pressure of water vapor reaches the equilibrium vapor pressure, if we have an open container of water in the box, even though some water molecules will evaporate from the liquid, an equal number will recondense, and there's no net evaporation.

If you raise the temperature of just the pot of liquid water, more will evaporate, increasing the pressure beyond the equilibrium, and some of the water will condense out on the walls of the box. If we cool the pot, vapor will condense out from the atmosphere of the box onto the sides of the pot, the same way it does on an iced drink on a humid summer day.

But the surface of the liquid is also cold, and we know water molecules hit there and condense all the time, only now the rate of evaporation doesn't keep up with it any more.. Does this mean that on a humid summer day, there's water condensing out of the air in the room INTO my iced tea??

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Iraq: Irreconcilable Differences...
...SO I was listening to something on NPR about the latest bombings in Iraq; apparently there were 4 car bombings up north, in villages of some tribe or group particularly friendly to the US. They believe the fact that these folks were friendly to us drew the hostile attention -- just like all those times people shot at and tried to blow up the police and military units friendly to us and working with us, etc.

And it got me thinking... Our government isn't ever going to support a government in Iraq that isn't modeled along lines WE think are right, or that isn't friendly to US. Stands to reason, right? Go in, take over, find some dudes who'll do what we want, put them in charge. So we have constraints on what we'll allow as far as a permanent government in Iraq to exist.

But THEY have constraints too; many of them don't seem to like us very much, and lots of the don't seem to see a lot of appeal in political institutions structured along the lines that Western culture dictates. And those constraints matter: it seems to be pretty hard to ram a government down the throats of an indigenous people and think that it will stick very long after you go home, if they don't buy into it.

Now in math, if you pile on too many constraints, pretty soon you find that there's no solution. It may be that that's what were facing; it may be that there will never be a permanent stable government in Iraq as long as we're in charge, because there won't ever be a government that meets the requirements on both sides.

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A Moral Hypothesis...
So, I have this... concept, this... principle, that came to me once upon a time, and (naturally, being mine) I rather like it:

"Harm no other living thing except in need."

Slightly tongue-in-cheek, I tend to refer to this as the "Prime Directive". As fond as I am of this principle, I am certainly sensitive to the question: can it be justified? ( See me try...Collapse )

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Bouncing Pigs
So, Mr. Butterscotch and Mr. Mike are on pig-safari... And Mike is clearly just very, very happy to be here. He just went into a little almost sort of fit, where his hind-quarters would try to jump up into the air, pretty much as though they had a mind of their own. It looks like a form of what guinea pig owners call "popcorning", except that instead of the whole pig going into the air, it looked for all the world like his back-end was trying to play leapfrog with his front end...

...Only he did it about twice (and for those of you who think there might be something wrong with him, really, he only does it when he's excited, and we're pretty sure it's when he's having a good time) but then, it was like he got embarassed or something, and he went and burrowed under the towel that I have draped over his pigloo, and he did it again about 20 more times in rapid succession, under the towel. Oh, it was silly looking. Huge hunks of towel suddenly hopping up into the air...

Oh well. Back to reality.

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Interesting Climate-Related Lecture..
So I just got back from a lecture hosted by MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; Richard Alley (Pennsylvania State University) on “Fraying at the edges: ice sheets, climate and sea levels.”

Quite interesting. His context is basically that there is global warming, that models support the idea that it has both natural and human-induced contributions, that the warming so far is slight compared to what will come, and that it will continue, with some uncertainties as to rate, through at least about 2100.

He studies ice. (Actually, what he said was something very much like: “We do ice. We have more fun doing ice than you have doing whatever it is you do, and you should come and do ice with us.”) He is concerned with the melting of large ice sheets such as those over Greenland and Antarctica, and he basically had three points to make:

1. Movement of ice sheets may be more sensitive to warming than has been previously understood. As ice spreads and thins, it melts more quickly; the melt-water kind of lubricates it, and then it spreads and thins in an accelerating way. While it would take a long time for the ice sheets to melt in place, previous models have not taken into account the positive feedback that might act if their motion is enhanced.

2. They have found that the motion of ice sheets is actually strongly affected by conditions at the perimeters; the rising of the tide can slow the motion of a glacier at its face by a factor of 2, and the effect of the slow-down can be see up to 80 km inland. Where floating ice forms ice shelves at the margins of ice sheets, those ice shelves slow down the spreading of the ice upstream on the land.

3. These floating ice shelves seem to be much more sensitive to temperature changes than the ice sheets they border; they are in a warmer environment, being floating on the liquid seas, and therefore much closer to state change. The Larsen B ice shelf, off Antarctica, which was 220 meters thick, basically disintegrated over the course of a few weeks in early 2002.

The summarized predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as of 2001 did not anticipate extensive ice loss from the major ice sheets as a result of the expected levels of global warming; increased snowfall was expected to make up for increased rate of melting. It would be easy to project from his remarks that he felt that this view was incorrect, and that slight changes in temperature could cause collapse of the ice shelves, leading to higher motion of the ice sheets, leading to more melting of them in turn, BUT Professor Alley was cautious to advise that his work raises more questions than it answers. Models based on the new observations and measurements are still in preliminary development, and not able to make any predictions useful for policy-making at this point.

I strongly recommend the Synthesis Report (Summary of Policymakers) of the “Third Assessment Report” of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), available on line.

Current Mood: thoughtful

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Full Moon Tonight
Once a month the moon is full... Once a month, the moon is at perigee (closest to the earth). These two things do not always line up the same, but when the moon is at perigee, it appears to be 14% larger in diameter, or about 30% larger in area.

The only reason I bring it up is that the moon is almost full, and this is the time of year when full moons and perigees line up.. The full moon this month is only about 13 hours different from the point of perigee, which I believe puts us at about 99% of the maximum size. And the full moon is at 3:13 on the 7th, in "Universal Time", which I believe puts it at about 10 PM tonight.

So if the weather clears, and you're up, and you look up at the moon and think, "Gee, it looks particularly large and impressive tonight", it might NOT be your imagination!

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NPR Good....
Wow.

Randomly driving to work, listening to radio; severe boredom w/ country music station; randomly flip to NPR... Oh, listen, it's Noam Chomsky vs. Alan Dershowitz... How cool is that!?!

Sound-bite version: Both very critical of Bush administration, deeply concerned about structural problems with american process, influence of big business on politics, etc. Differences: Alan thinks Noam loses the audience by making the message too extreme; Noam says "Hey, I'm just calling a spade a spade." (OK, not an exact quote.)

I can see it; it's a dilemma. If you soft-sell the message ("We've got issues, but they're not so bad..") then people won't think it's really vital that they act, but if you amp it up ("It's the end of democracy as we know it!") then you look extremest - not to mention alarming - and people will tend to find excuses to discount you, because they prefer denial.

Sigh. Back to work.

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Weather grokking...
So, I was reading a book about weather, and some of it finally started to make sense... So I am going to write parts of it down to try to cement it in my memory.

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Well, I guess that's a feature of LJ my wife perhaps appreciates more than I do, most of the time: if you have a burning desire to explain something, you can do it without anybody having to suffer...

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Another furry friend lost...
It is with great sadness that I must announce that Mr. Clover, guinea pig, has gone to the Rainbow Bridge. He died at about 8:30 PM, Tuesday, August 15, 2006. His passing was assisted by the very kind veterinary staff of the VCA Wakefield, MA, and we are grateful for all of their help with his care. He was attended at the last by his daddy-slave, Steve, and his brother-pig, Butterscotch. His mommy-slave and his auntie were away traveling, but we told him that they loved him too. He had been ill, with respiratory impairment which was not responding to treatment, and which was ultimately found by X-ray to be the result of a large mass in his lungs, probably a tumor; results of biopsy are pending. He was only about 3 years old. He was a shy pig, calico with rich reddish brown and bristly fur on his nose, and fond of his carrots and parsley, and he loved to snuggle into my armpit between my shirt and undershirt on a cold winter evening after salad time. He was a good pig, much loved, and he will be sorely missed.

Good-bye, Clover...

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To Max, wherever you are...
Today I met a man who called himself Max.

He was walking by our house, and stopped to talk. He gave me flowers for my wife - told that if we dried them and planted them, we could grow them - and a pair of small stones. From Mexico.

Max looked for all the world like he was carrying everything he owned in the world in the pack on his back, and he said he hadn't been here for 40 years and he was looking for his family, but they were gone.

I offered him water, but he declined; he asked me if there was a restaurant around, and I pointed him up toward Main St.

A couple of minutes later, I felt bad about letting him go; he looked like he really, really needed someone or something good to happen to him. I went after him, and I actually managed to catch up to him. He was still looking for his restaurant - but he also mentioned that he only had 4 dollars.

I told him he could come back with me if he wanted, but he was reluctant. He was embarrassed about the way he was dressed, the way he looked. I said he should come back if he changed his mind, if he had nowhere else to go. I don't know what the chances are I'll ever see him again.

The thing is, we could easily have let him into our home, let him shower, wash his clothes, give him food, water, money - more than his 4 dollars, anyway - now I wonder, why didn't I try harder to convince him to come back?

Yes, it's possible that would have been a hideous mistake, but I don't think so. Yes, it was at least in part up to him to decide, and I left the door open for him, so "it's not my fault".

But I think he knew that even as I was offering to help him, I was nervous about it, nervous about him...

Why is it so hard to give with both hands, with your whole heart?

Foo.

Current Mood: sad

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Astronomy Tidbit: Algol, the Demon Star...
If you don't know about the star Algol, the thing that makes it interesting is that it is basically the only star in the sky that "winks". It is normally magnitude 2.3 or so, a medium-bright star in the constellation Perseus, near Cassiopeia - but about ever 3 days, it goes through a cycle where it gets progressively dimmer over the course of about 5 hours, down to about magnitude 3.5, and then brightens back up. Since many of the stars in the neighborhood are about that same magnitude, when it is at its dimmest, it seems to fade into the background, and virtually disappears.

It's actually 2 stars, and the dimmer one sometimes moves in front and blocks the brighter one. There are lots of other variable stars - but most of the others are either varying much to fast or much to slowly or much to slightly or are too dim to start with for anybody to ever notice that they're varying with the naked eye. As far as I know, Algol is the only one.

Now to actually see it is not so simple; sometimes Algol isn't up when it happens, or it's up, but it's daytime then, or it's cloudy.. But it is pretty neat to see if you're patient enough to actually catch it at it.

The ancients were sufficiently impressed that they named it based on its demonic character; apparently the name Algol comes from arabic Al Gul, where Gul is from the same origin as the English word ghoul, and means "the demon" or something similar.

This all is fine, and if you didn't know about Algol, now you do.

The thing is, my customary handy reference in re the stars, H. A. Rey's "The Stars", actually has been doing me a disservice; in Rey's book, he helpfully tries to simplify people's mental pictures of what the constellations look like and how the various stars match up with the parts of the picture they're supposed to form. In this vein, as he draws Perseus, he puts Algol basically in the hero's left foot. Why would anybody create a constellation with a winking demonic star in the left foot? Who knows.

But then, for no particular reason, I was reading a book of collected essays by Isaac Azimov recently, and he happened to mention Algol. (The rest of the book is about his predictions, circa 1960, about how life would be in the year 2000... interesting, but he was WAY off. Didn't quite picture the computer catching on the way it did, or speculate about global warming, or AIDS.... Was pretty sure we'd have hover cars and pneumatic communicating tubes between our office buildings and horrible famines due to overpopulation...)

And he mentions off-hand that Algol is supposed to be the EYE in the head of MEDUSA, that Perseus is dragging around with him!!! And it was like "Ohhhh!!! That makes so much more SENSE!!!!"

Which just goes to show you... something. There's a lesson there, but I'm not quite sure what it is...

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