Planet Case

At office luncheons and gatherings, there is little that an admission counselor enjoys more than a raucous round of "you should have met this applicant..." or "you wouldn't have believed this parent..." The longer you work in admission, the more stories you have to share. And apparently we are not alone, as students swap college tour debacles and guidance counselors recall parent/child conflicts, as highlighted in The Chronicle of Higher Education article, "Bribery Attempts, the Unbearable Pushiness of Parents, and Other Admission Tales."

While out walking my dog recently, I met a neighbor who teaches at our Law School and she was fascinated when I told her where I worked. "What is the craziest story you've read in an application?" I asked her if she wanted to hear the craziest essay I've read or the craziest set of circumstances imparted in an application and she practically squealed with excitement, "Both!" I told her that among the thousands I've read, many essays and situations were remarkable in the moment but faded with time, while others are still unbelievably vivid.

The most distressing essay I recall is one which described a cat being run over and killed by a car - all told from the cat's perspective. There were three significant problems with this writing sample. First, I have a background in counseling and it is well documented that an interest in animal suffering is an early indicator of mental illness. Second, I share my home with two cats. Third and most importantly, what was this student trying to impart to us with such an essay? Our application states "The essay should demonstrate your best possible work and offer insight into you as a person." What type of judgment does such an essay demonstrate? Any "insight" this essay offered was not any I wanted to have. What can you do to avoid the "over the top" writing sample?

Lest you think me a hardened and heartless admission counselor, I have to tell you that I contacted this student's guidance counselor to see if he/she could shed some light on the situation. Unfortunately, that was not the case. The counselor was already concerned about this student and supported my denial of admission.

What about those circumstances I mentioned? Under that topic I have too many to mention just one - real life dramas that are more Morgan Spurlock than TLC. Situations where I had to call the guidance counselor to be certain that the application wasn't some big hoax. Like the time I read about a student who lost a sibling at a young age and whose parents decided to raise their surviving child as if the sibling never existed. Apparently all went well until this applicant was a sophomore in high school and another family member felt that the student should be made aware of this deceased sibling. At which point the student understood that the dim memories were not dreams but actual recollections. The relationship between the parents and student spontaneously combusted as the student felt that everything they had lived had been a lie. A tragedy overall and devastating academically, as the student began a challenging junior year of AP courses and SATs.

We've also had the application that was a big hoax - where the applicant had never attended the reported high school and where the teachers and guidance counselors (though real people) did not write the letters of recommendation included. That application prompted dialogue with the Common Application to alert the folks there and share the knowledge with other colleges where this applicant had sent the fictional credentials. How did we catch that one? There were some inconsistencies and the letters of rec were all very similar in tone and style - every statement was superlative to the extreme - this applicant was the "best in my career" for all four people? Doubtful.

So what's the up side? We admission counselors whisper and giggle like kids when we have a famous (or infamous) student or parent on campus. We swap instant messages and emails late in the night when we're at home reading apps. Here is the text from an email I wrote this year:

Subject: How you know that you've gone over the edge?

When you actually type “Eureka!” in an application review because you are SO excited to read a unique, funny, insightful writing sample from a PPSP (that's Pre Professional Scholars Program) applicant.

The topic? The applicant’s proclivity for canker sores.

I wouldn’t kid you.

My boss gave me the heads up about the ISS flyover in the skies of Cleveland. So, on Wednesday night at about 10:00 pm, I went outside to look. After a false alarm (just an airplane), I saw a bright, steadily moving "star" appear in the predicted region of the sky and travel in an arch until it disappeared again. I had a dinky pair of binoculars, but they didn't help much.

Future sightings can be found at the following NASA link http://spaceflight1.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/. You can select your country and your city for a list of sightings.

A few years ago, I saw the ISS and docked shuttle with a set of high powered binoculars. I was amazed that I could recognize the fuzzy shapes of the station and shuttle. So, if you try any future sightings, bring along the best binoculars you have. Otherwise, the naked eye works well enough.

With the naked eye, you'll see something like this...

Today marks 1 year after the July 7 bombings where suicide bombers killed 52 people.

BBC News: Nation remembers 7 July victims

For me, it is the second time for me being in a city during a terrorist attack. I worked in the London office along Gresham Street, about 15 min walk from Liverpool Station. The first time was in Jersey City during 9/11.

In Memoriam...

Joe Biden steps in it, big time (video here) while schmoozing an Indian:

"In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian Americans, moving from India. You cannot go to a 7/11 or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking."

Joe had better hope that nobody tries to assassinate him, because dollars to donuts (smirk) the surgeon who patches him up will be an Indian-American.

Thanks to Boortz.

The Harford County school system plans to open what will apparently be the nation's first magnet program focused on homeland security, preparing high school students for careers in disaster response, high-level computer science and law enforcement.

Why not? My high school had courses in pig raising too.
(Apologies to The National FFA Organization)

Thanks to Claire Files.

I'm pretty teed over a tax I won't be paying, given that I'm not a smoker and no longer live in Cuyahoga Co. (partly over shenanegans like this, and the commissioners attempts to shut down Dick Walters' gun shows). This actually has a better chance of passing than their last attempt (a sales tax), as in general, those who will benefit from it will not be the ones paying it; it's a transfer tax from the poor to the rich, supported by "the working man's friend", the Democratic Party. How's that for irony?

It might be argued that since "we" already tax smokers to fund professional sports facilities, it's "only fair" to tax them for the arts. But it was also wrong to tax smokers for the stadiums. If it was any more right, it was only because the percentage of sports fans who smoke is probably higher than the percentage of arts patrons who smoke, given that arts appreciation requires a certain degree of intelligence and smoking is a stupid thing to do; as a class they were largely paying for their own amusement rather than making somebody else pay for it.

Then there's the economic development angle. Remember the "28000 Gateway jobs" (i.e., 500 restaurant jobs circulated 56 times as restaurants closed)? It seems to me that the economic benefits of the tax are equally specious. Arts tourism is not that big. And the tax will depress the economic development that would naturally occur from smokers spending the money that is going instead to tax....development for something that somebody actually wants.

My biggest problem with this is that I might be forced to become a beneficiary of it. Not so much as an arts consumer; most arts organizations in town get at least some money from trayf sources (Ohio Arts Council if nothing else), and it's too much work to research that for me to be a purist. But as a composer, I could see Composers Guild going after the money (not when I'm an officer!), filling out long grant applications detailing the sex and ethnicity of each of our members (if we let some rap "artists" in, do we get the swag?). It's even possible that our private funders would expect us to go to the city before asking money from them, which would give us no choice in the matter. At that point, I think I would have to quit submitting scores, which would probably destroy the meager excuse for a career that I have now.

What to make of this? A bunch of big papers propose a gubernatorial debate. Blackwell proposes that the Call and Post (Black paper) be added. Strickland, not wanting to alienate part of his base, agrees. The papers, not wanting to support a competing product, refuse. Thus, no debate. Blackwell brings up an unacceptable proposal, so he gets out of a debate he doesn't want (because he might say something substantive, and you either love or hate Blackwell, which means he could only lose the uncommitted) and makes the papers (which have not been his friend) look like racists.

He's slick. I despise him, but I must give credit where it's due.

Employers boosted payrolls by 121,000 in June! This is higher than last month's reported numbers. How can anyone say that our economy is bad when the unemployment rate is at 4.6% (about as low as it can go), we are creating new jobs every month, and every other economic indicator indicates a growing and stable economy? What does it take for an economy to be "strong" in the eyes of a liberal? I know the answer! When a democrat is in office to take credit for it. Sorry libs... your cover is being blown... our economy is awesome and you can't pretend it isn't anymore.

UPDATE: Here is the Tangled Bank I am hosting.

I will be hosting the Tangled Bank on July 5th. Submit items by email.

As I have said before, I grew up being very religious and actively involved in church and Christian youth activities. I enjoy meeting old and close friends and relatives, many of whom I have known since my early childhood. Growing up, they all had known me as a practicing Christian, even more so than your regular Sunday churchgoer since I was an ordained lay preacher and regularly conducted services that many of them had listened to as members of the congregation.

Most of my relatives and childhood friends are still religious. When I encounter them now, many have heard on the grapevine of my apostasy and start up a conversation about faith, sometimes out of curiosity as to why I renounced my own belief, at other times to try and bring me back into the fold.

This happened again recently and during the discussion, the question was posed to me as to what, as an atheist, I could offer someone whose lot in life was wretched and hopeless. She said that at least religion could promise that person a better life in heaven, something that they could look forward to, and thus make life on Earth, however harsh, at least bearable.

It made me recall an Andy Capp cartoon where he and his wife Flo are stopped by a perspiring man carrying a heavy suitcase who asks them how far it is to the railway station. Flo replies that it is just a short distance away. The man perks up considerably and goes off. Andy then asks her why she said that since the station is a good way away. Flo replies, "The poor man looked so tired that I thought it would cheer him up."

This is probably the main appeal of religion, that it provides hope (even if false) that enables people to face life. Religion provides a strong emotional appeal, providing people with something to look forward to so that they can face the present, however harsh, with a greater degree of equanimity.

It is this feature of religion that Karl Marx described as the "opium of the people." What Marx was objecting to was that such an attitude had the effect of preventing people from protesting the injustice of their situation and seeking to change it. As he said in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (February 1844):

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.

Marx was accurate with his metaphor of opium for religion. It not only takes away pain, it also dulls the will to action. Perhaps religion persists because it is a form of addiction, removing us from the realm of reality just as effectively as heroin or cocaine, and is just as hard to relinquish. What the promise of heaven does is to ease the pressure on us to improve life on Earth. It is the ultimate cop-out.

But if we do not have religion, we are forced to take action. In the Andy Capp cartoon context, that translates into not lying to the person as Flo did in order to help that person feel good in the short run, but to either help him carry his suitcase so that his journey would be easier or to add wheels to the suitcase so that his journey is made easier.

The emotional appeal of religion is strong. It is appealing to think that there is some sense of cosmic justice where good is rewarded and evil punished. It is nice to think that in the afterlife, those who suffered unjustly will be rewarded and that there is a heavenly war trial where all those who have been responsible for willful and major human suffering would face their ultimate comeuppance. I think that it is this emotional appeal that keeps people faithful to religion.

Just yesterday, the news media reported that Ken Lay, the disgraced Enron head, had died of a heart attack just prior to his sentencing. Many people, appalled at the high life he led while swindling thousands of people of their life savings, were hoping to see him brought down from his life of luxury and spend his last days in jail. Some people expressed disappointment at the news of his death, that he had escaped the hardship of jail but expressed hope that he would pay in the afterlife. This is a common enough reaction and presumably gives those feeling aggrieved some consolation.

But atheists know that no such cosmic justice exists. The fate that evil people ultimately face is the same as the fate that anyone else faces, and that is death. Paradoxically, this need not be depressing but actually can serve as a call to action. If this is the one life that we have, it becomes clearer that our obligation to ourselves and to others is to make sure that it is the best it can be, so that everyone had a chance at a decent life.

If we seek justice, then it has to be done by us right here on Earth. That buck cannot be passed. That is the message that atheists have to offer to people. It may not have a soothing effect but is more likely to lead to concrete action.

POST SCRIPT: Minor Milestone

In checking the statistics for this blog, it appears that on June 30, 2006, the one million hit mark since its inception on January 26, 2005 was reached. Thank you very much to all those who visit, read, and comment. It has been a pleasure to write and, I hope, to provoke thought and discussions.

So, did anyone notice that I have not slipped back into anything approaching my old daily posting rhythm, since my return from Switzerland? I have been trying to build some new and healthier habits, which require spending less time with a laptop, and my posting frequency has suffered as a result. I may never return to daily postings, though -- thanks to Jim Eastman at Wine and Politics for posting a link to this entry at MarketingProfs.com about why blog post frequency is no big deal anymore. I find the reasons advanced in the entry for posting only when I have something important to say to my target audiences very persuasive!

It is now being reported that the missle fired by the North Koreans was aimed at Hawaii. It is time for action. China and Russia don’t want to join us in our strong demands… I guarantee it’s because they have some kind of financial stake in North Korea just like they did with Iraq. It is time we gather all the countries we can and give an ultimatum to North Korea. These “talks” are not working only because they are not backed by threats. It is time we stop trying to sweet talk a madman. It won’t work.

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For the Case community, I will be posting announcements and my office hours on my blog.

See the Engineering Reading Room web site for updates as they occur. You may also subscribe to a RSS feed that contains only information related to the Engineering Reading Room.

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Engineering Librarian Office Hours (Nord Hall 510) - Week of July 3rd

• July 3 (Monday): Holiday
  
• July 4 (Tuesday): Holiday
  
• July 5 (Wednesday): None Scheduled
  
• July 6 (Thursday): 1pm-4pm
  
• July 7 (Friday): None Scheduled

* Hours subject to change so watch web site or RSS feed .
* Appointments available for other times, see web site for contact information.

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Engineering Reading Room (Nord Hall 508)

• Open 24x7
  
• Includes computer for searching library resources
  
• Cuurent journal issues for your viewing pleasure
  
• Comfortable furniture available on 5th floor of Nord Hall

So, I'm back from vacation and have managed to catch up on all of my email.

There's been some more interesting discussions happening about bring "Web 2.0" concepts into the "Enterprise" (previously blogged about in my entry Bringing "Web 2.0" Concepts to the "Enterprise").

Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School, has an excellent post Raising the Least Common Denominator:

And one of the main themes of this blog is that this kind of productive collaboration should be easier within Intranets than across the Internet. Enterprise 2.0, in other words, should be at least as powerful as Web 2.0. The informal and formal leaders of a company have an arsenal of tools at their disposal to shape both the processes of collaboration and their outcomes. If the digital collaboration platform turns into a shouting match or a random collection of junk they really have no one to blame but themselves.

If we're indicative of many "Enterprises," the biggest problem is the notion of "collaboration." Most people relate collaboration to email, Word documents, and meetings. So, when thinking of ways to improve "collaboration," the natural thought is to just try and create email++, Word++, and meetings++. This is how you end up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on Web 1.0-style, monolithic collaboration "suites" like Oracle Collaboration Suite instead of turning to disruptive technologies that the Internet has already shown scale to the thousands and facilitate collaboration instead of just wrapping things up in complicated workflows and humdrum, clunky interfaces.

There's a reason Wikipedia doesn't run on Microsoft Dynamics or Oracle Collaboration Suite.

To get Enterprises to move to "Enterprise 2.0" is a huge shift in thinking. It's not email++; it is something entirely different. It's not monolithic software suites that enhance collaboration; rather, it is systems like wiki farms and iTunes that enhance collaboration. Systems that get better and better the more people use them — emergent systems that enable the Read/Write web.

JP Rangaswami has a good follow-up post to Andrew McAfee's piece in Does Social Software help Enterprises Dumb Down? where he describes "enterprise immune systems." I just thought the term was great in describing the avoidance of "Web 2.0" style collaboration tools in many enterprises.

The battle to bring "Web 2.0" style, emergent Read/Write properties, user-centric tools/systems to the enterprise isn't just evangelizing their properties. What is needed is a cultural shift to stop thinking about collaboration in terms of email++ and meeting++.

Free, Legal, and Ignored

June was a busy month. We contacted a number of media outlets and have secured a couple of features. We were featured in The Free Times in Cleveland and the Toledo Free Press. We were also put into the Case Daily a couple of times. We have been told we will be interviewed by the Plain Dealer and WTAM 1100. We have also been partially sponsored by Spin Cycle Shop in Lakewood, OH as well as Case Western Reserve University. We are continuing to train hard for our trek.

We would like to thank everyone who is and has been visiting our website. Please tell anyone you know to visit our website just to check it out. We would like to see more donations to the UNHCR which is recording the donations generated through out site. Remember that this project is not a success without your help.

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, has some interesting things to say on the importance of details in establishing credibility of any knowledge system. In his Reply to a Christian he points out how central it is to religious beliefs that one avoids any kinds of details that might lead to refutation, something that I have also been writing about for some time. His essay is worth quoting at length.

Christians regularly assert that the Bible predicts future historical events. For instance, Deuteronomy 28:64 says, "The Lord will scatter you among the nations from one end of the earth to the other." Jesus says, in Luke 19:43-44, "The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God's coming to you." We are meant to believe that these utterances predict the subsequent history of the Jews with such uncanny specificity so as to admit of only a supernatural explanation. It is on the basis of such reasoning that 44 percent of the American population now believes that Jesus will return to earth to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years.

But just imagine how breathtakingly specific a work of prophecy could be if it were actually the product of omniscience. If the Bible were such a book, it would make specific, falsifiable predictions about human events. You would expect it to contain a passage like, "In the latter half of the twentieth century, humankind will develop a globally linked system of computers-the principles of which I set forth in Leviticus-and this system shall be called the Internet." The Bible contains nothing remotely like this. In fact, it does not contain a single sentence that could not have been written by a man or woman living in the first century.

Take a moment to imagine how good a book could be if it were written by the Creator of the universe. Such a book could contain a chapter on mathematics that, after two thousand years of continuous use, would still be the richest source of mathematical insight the earth has ever seen. Instead, the Bible contains some very obvious mathematical errors. In two places, for instance, the Good Book gives the ratio of a circumference of a circle to its diameter as simply 3 (1 Kings 7: 23-26 and 2 Chronicles 4: 2-5). We now refer to this constant relation with the Greek letter pi. While the decimal expansion of pi runs to infinity-3.1415926535 . . .-we can calculate it to any degree of accuracy we like. Centuries before the oldest books of the Bible were written, both the Egyptians and Babylonians approximated p to a few decimal places. And yet the Bible-whether inerrant or divinely inspired-offers us an approximation that is terrible even by the standards of the ancient world. Needless to say, many religious people have found ingenious ways of rationalizing this. And yet, these rationalizations cannot conceal the obvious deficiency of the Bible as a source of mathematical insight. It is absolutely true to say that, if Archimedes had written a chapter of the Bible, the text would bear much greater evidence of the author's "omniscience."


Why doesn't the Bible say anything about electricity, about DNA, or about the actual age and size of the universe? What about a cure for cancer? Millions of people are dying horribly from cancer at this very moment, many of them children. When we fully understand the biology of cancer, this understanding will surely be reducible to a few pages of text. Why aren't these pages, or anything remotely like them, found in the Bible? The Bible is a very big book. There was room for God to instruct us on how to keep slaves and sacrifice a wide variety of animals. Please appreciate how this looks to one who stands outside the Christian faith. It is genuinely amazing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience. (my italics throughout)

All these are good questions. But as cogently as Harris argues, I do not expect him to convince the believer. This is because, as professor of religion Deepak Sarma pointed out during the panel discussion on the tsunami, all religions contain an MWC ("mysterious ways clause") that can be invoked as a last resort to say that the actions of God are inscrutable and that we simply have to accept the fact that a good explanation exists, though we may not know it. As long as believers are willing to invoke the MWC, there is nothing that can shake their beliefs.

Scientists can and do also hold on to theories in the face of counter evidence. They too often consider unsolved problems to be solvable but yet unknown. The difference is that for them, they do not accept this as the final word. They keep chipping away at the unexplained, generating new evidence as they go. For scientists, there is always a tipping point at which the weight of new evidence is such that it shifts the balance sufficiently that the entire scientific community rejects the old theory. That is why scientific theories keep evolving.

In the case of religion, though, there is no such collective tipping point. There are too many political and economic interests vested in religion for any religious leader (say the Pope) to say something like: "You know, after thinking about it, I've realized that this idea of god does not really make any sense. Maybe we should try to understand how the world works without invoking god."

Religious and political leaders have too much vested interest in maintaining religion, whatever their private views might be. So it is up to individuals to decide for themselves how much counter-evidence they can encounter and still maintain their faith. But we are mistaken in thinking that evidence and reason and logic are the decisive factors in how such decisions are made.

Next: The important role that emotion plays

POST SCRIPT: Keeping people locked up forever without trial

Once again, we have to look for comedy programs to tell us the truth. Stephen Colbert looks at the outrageous scandal that is Guantanamo and the fraudulent arguments that are used to keep people there indefinitely without access to basic legal and human rights.

The Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog shared news that the National Science Foundation of China will provide 3.4 billion yuan (US $425 million) in funding for basic science, and that the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) celebrated the opening of its Beijing office.

This is an excerpt from a very interesting new book, called the Motherhood Manifesto. The particular excerpt can be found here:

"It's Not Just Mothers"
by John de Graaf, National Coordinator of Take Back Your Time

Though working mothers may be the most pressed for time and in need of relief, America’s time poverty crisis affects nearly everyone. American work hours have been climbing slowly, but steadily since the mid-1970s and today, the average American works nine weeks—350 hours—more each year than the average Western European.

Increased working hours threaten our quality of life in many ways: Americans increasingly recognize the impacts of time poverty on their lives. According to a November 28, 2005, Fortune magazine study, even corporate CEOs now want more time outside work (84 percent), even if it means making less money (55 percent). The same article pointed out that many European countries are actually more productive per worker hour than the U.S. is. And a recent report of the World Economic Forum found that several of the world’s most competitive economies are in Scandinavia, where shorter work hours and generous paid leave policies are taken for granted.

Europeans enjoy multiple legal protections of their right to time, including four weeks of paid vacation after a year on the job, paid sick leave, limits on the length of their work weeks, generous paid family leave benefits (which also apply to fathers), and increasingly, the right to choose part-time work, while retaining the same hourly pay, healthcare, opportunities for promotions and other, pro-rated, benefits.

A new campaign, TAKE BACK YOUR TIME, has called for a “Time to Care” legislative agenda for the United States, including paid family leave, paid sick leave, three weeks of paid vacation, limits on compulsory overtime and policies making it easier to choose part-time work with healthcare and other benefits."

So you wanna know how the ol' Seafarer's been meistering, eh?

So basically you all know I've been in summer school the past three weeks, right? Well, if anyone knows how to be a gold-star student, it's me. And I know what to do to get those gold stars, you see. You wanna know my secret? Ok, listen close, rapscallions. You gotta sit down on the first day of class next to some guy you don't know who looks like he might be pretty good with music theory, you see. Then, you gotta put on your serious go-getting-those-A's type of face as you very deliberately switch your phone to vibrate. This shows people that you are serious for some mind expansion. Just as everybody else (the competition) has taken their seats, coolly pull out your textbook and gently set it on your music stand with the air of already knowing everything it contains; you're just taking this course for shits and giggles, basically. But you're humble. Always open to learning something new. Then, ever so swiftly (the timing is crucial in this), steal a glance just through your peripheral vision at the guy next to you to check and see if he noticed the pair of silky black dominatrix underwear lying so candidly atop of your unnecessary text. Keeping all of this in one swift, continuous motion, make the brief eye-contact, roll your eyes to the other side of the room searchingly while scooping up the panties and depositing them back into your bookbag, returning with a pen, head cocked to one side, ready for action. Squint your eyes as you gaze stoicly into the blazing sunset that is the tradition of western music, raise your writing hand ever so slightly from the music stand, gently suspended in air by the zepphyrs of inspiration......

Well, now that you all know the secret of my success, I expect everyone to go out and be fruitful. Fruitful like the sun-gilded vineyards so aptly symbolic of my academic success. Now go, go and glean, my children! Glean all you can!

Smokers are a real engine of economic development. There are all those hospitals to be built, doctors to be paid, cleaners to get the stench out. They even save the federal government money, by dying before they collect their share of Social Security. And Cuyahoga County needs all the economic development it can get.

Therefore I propose that the county commissioners place the following proposal on the ballot: that all admissions to artistic events be taxed at $1.00 per admission. Yes, even the free ones, because why should those Bohemian bums get something for nothing? The proceeds will go to providing free cigarettes of their chosen brand for all smokers who will register as addicts. After all, it's not their fault they were molested by Joe Camel in their impressionable youth. They are victims of nicotine, who just can't help themselves. They are generally poor. And folks who can afford theater and concert tickets (and who are generally not smokers, except for the occasional cigar) have plenty of dough with which to help the less fortunate, and their insatiable desire for Art will cause them to pay regardless of means. And if they do quit Art for more socially acceptable pastimes such as Reality TV, so much the better.

If any of the above seems unjust to you, tell me: how is this any different in principle from the commissioners plan to tax ciggies to support the arts Hezbollah?

how depressing it must be being britney

Ah! Vacation. The balm that soothes the average worker's soul. Lazy days to do with as you please. Oh the joy! Here's how we've spent ours.

Friday-June 23rd.
Freedom!! No more teachers. No more books...err well you get the idea. Tonight we went to a Luau. We had a great time. Ate good food. Chatted with good friends. Drank good adult libations.

Sunday -June 25th
We took the boys to their first Professional Baseball game. I forgot the camera! Darn. They looked so cute in their little Indians shirts. They got free baseball gloves at the gate. Way too big for their little hands but they will grow- or so I've been told! We had Fantastic seats right next to the Reds bull pen. The boys did really well. They sat and watched (the people mostly). We even made it on the jumbo-tron!! We let them play in the kids land for a while before we left. What a mad house! Big kids pushing the boys out of cars they were 1/2 in. And the dirt. Boy did we Purell after that! Yuck!
All in all a fun event- the hardest part was getting the kids from the car to the stadium. That's a long walk for a toddler who wants to walk himself, near busy streets, and pick up all the trash he sees and give it to mom!

Monday- June 26th
Today we went over to a friend's house after our speech therapy session. My friend Angie has 3 children and one is the same age as the boys. Oh my! Having 2 older siblings has made him a talker. I was impressed with his vocabulary. Mean while my children spoke no words at all in his presence. We played for a while with toys we don’t have at our house. Dale learned how to roar like a dinosaur. It’s the cutest little- no aggressiveness to it all all. We ate lunch and then headed to the Outdoor Y. We’ve never been there before but they have a nice sized toddler wading pool and a new splash park that was opening that day. The boys loved the pool. It took them a little while to warm up to the idea but after a few rounds of “Ring around the Rosie” all was good.
We didn’t get our usual nap, which had me worried but it turned out ok because when they did nap- I got time to clean the house and take a nap myself! Naps rule!

Tuesday- June 27th
Well it rained today but we did manage to find time to squeeze in a trip to the park with our friends Pebbles and Bam-Bam, who are also twins. My kids love the slide. Can’t get them off of it. Pebbles is into some dangerous climbing. She’s too little to be that high off the ground and teaching my Chip how to do it too.
We had a nice visit from Elin, our Help Me Grow Lady. And we played outside until bath time.

Let me pause for a moment and discuss bath time. Bath time has now turned into the Shamu and Friends splash show at Sea World. Dale likes to stand up and drop to this bottom- just like the end of Ring Around the Rosie. Recently he has taken to belly flopping like a Pro Wrestler. He does this every evening- water or not.

Wednesday June 28th
Happy Anniversary to us! Dear Hubby and I have been married 9 years today. Wow! 9 years. Who knew time could pass so quickly?

Today is my last day home with the boys by myself. Daddy starts vacation tomorrow. After a rocky start to our morning (the boys were B-A-D! Ugh! Destructive to the max), we went to the zoo with Aunt Jenny, Sandy, and Grandma and some of Aunt Jenny’s friends from work. It was a nice day. We had fun. With grandma there I was able to let the boys out of the stroller to run around a little. They were pooped by the time we left at 2:30. They didn’t wake up from their nap until 6!

3 + hours Bonus Time for Mommy. 5 loads of laundry done- 4 more to go.

We tried to go to Daddy’s softball game with a picnic but half way there the sky opened up and fell. There was lightening too so we went home and had a carpet picnic instead.

Thursday June 29th
We got up early and went to the zoo again-this time with Daddy. We went to areas that we rarely go to because it helps to have a second set of eyes and hands around. We got to go to the Touch Exhibit where we touched sting rays and nurse sharks. Chip ran around and loved it. I’ve got a ton of funny pictures of him making faces with his hands in the water. Dale had a thoughtful/fearful expression on his face as he tried to touch the rays. We also rode the tram. Chip LOVED it! He giggles and waves and smiled the whole way in the 3 mph moving bus. Ah, the job of the simple things!

One of the things I miss the most about my pre-children life is going to the movies. Dear hubby and I would go to the movies almost every weekend prior to the birth of our kids. Now that means getting a babysitter or a strategic planning of events- something akin to the storming of Normandy Beach just to catch the latest summer blockbuster. Well not any more. We took the kids to the drive in! That’s right! The drive in movie theater! Granted it didn’t quit go as I planned but it worked out. I was hoping they’d fall asleep in the car before we got there but they did eventually fall asleep before the movie started (around 9:30). I think this is something we will try again. By the way we saw Superman Returns. It was ok but not nearly as good as Spiderman or X-men or even Batman Begins.

Friday June 30th
When the day dawned we decided to let the boys have some down time. We hung around the house and played outside. We got them back on their nap schedule. When they woke up we went to the Outdoor Y to go swimming. It was a nice sunny day so there were a lot more people there then compared to earlier in the week. Dale loves the pool. He’s such a little fish. He jumped. He splashed. He ran around. He played with water toys. What about Chip you ask? He clung to my legs and wanted up most of the time. He's been my shadow the last few days. Cries when I leave the room. Wants to sit on my lap whenever I sit down. He's going to have a hard time going back to day care.

Saturday July 1st.
We decided we all needed some down time today. Dear Hubby worked on putting our kitchen back together from the painting we did last month. I did more laundry and cleaning. The boys played and took a big nap. We had a cook out in the back yard with our new patio furniture.

Sunday July 2nd
Despite the threat of rain, we decided to take the kids for their first visit to Lake Erie at Mentor Headlands beach. It’s a great beach with tons of sand and dunes, miles of parking, and clean water. The lake really looked like the ocean today with the choppy water and waves crashing. The water was dark and the sky was windy. It was so windy in fact that the sand was blowing so hard it felt like shards of glass. Needless to say we didn’t go down to the water’s edge. Instead we set up in the sand between two dunes out of the way of the wind. The boys LOVED the sand. They got right into digging and running in it. Chip was burying his car and digging it up. Dale liked to pick up all the bigger rocks and throw them around. I was worried they might not like the feel of the sand on their feet. Obviously it was a wasted worry. We watched some guy parasailing on the sand. That’s right-on the sand. He had a sail and he let it drag him across the sand from one end of the beach to another. Before we left I took Chip down to the water’s edge to see how warm the water was. (Not bad but still not the Bahamas. Official water temp is 70). He stood on the shore and held my hand as the water crashed over his feet. He laughed and giggled. He is such a child after my own heart. I could spend the entire day standing on the shore playing in the water. It always makes me happy.
We took off right before lunch and it started to storm on our way home.

Monday July 3rd
We took the boys to Geauga Lake today. Their first trip to an amusement park. The first ride that we rode was the choo-choo train. Chip was in 7th heaven from the moment we got in line. Dale looked apprehensive the whole time. I rode with Chip and Daddy rode with Dale. I got a ton of pictures of them. As I was getting off the ride I got yelled at by a 16 year kid for taking pictures. Well excuse me for wanting to document a first in my children’s lives. This is the second time this week I’ve gotten yelled at by a 16 year old. The other day we got yelled out for feeding the kids on the pool deck. We had to pack up and move with two screaming kids toddling behind us because they didn’t understand why were gave them food and then took it away.

I realized when we were at Geauga Lake that by the time the boys are old enough to ride the good rides at the park, we’ll be in our 40’s and won’t have the stamina to get thrown around like that all day.

Tuesday July 4th- Independence Day
Happy 4th of July! 230 years of the American way. That’s quite a milestone.

I woke up feeling sort of depressed. My time off is coming to an end. I’ve had such fun. Why is our culture set up to work so hard? Why can’t we have summers off like we did in school? It’s too bad we couldn’t just go to work for a few hours each day and leave when we finished our work. I bet people would be a lot more productive. I know I wouldn’t waste as much time wishing I was somewhere else if I knew as soon as I finished X, Y, and Z; I could go. So far this vacation I’ve seen 4 movies, watched my soap every day, read Angels and Demons, and got to cook out nearly every day. All good things in my book!

Anyway, today we hung around the house again. It was raining when we got up and looked like it wanted to rain more. When the boys took their nap- I went and did some shopping for me. I need to get out and do some more. I still need to replace my oversized clothes from when I lost all the weight.

There is one nice thing about where we live- they do a major fireworks display every year about 1 mile from our house. For the last 6 years we’ve just watched the display in our backyard. It’s great. No fighting people to get a good spot on the lawn. No walking miles to your car and waiting forever to move 10 feet once in the car. Yep, definitely will miss that when we move.

Well vacation is over. I’ve got to go get ready to go to work tomorrow. Sigh. Only 354 days until my next summer vacation.

Summer is “high season” for visiting college campuses. Here at Case we offer seniors (and transfers) the opportunity to interview with an admission counselor during visits.

Over the last several weeks I have conducted a good number of interviews. Some students have been prepared, some not and still others that were overly prepared. Here are some observations and thoughts from the admission counselor’s chair…First, I must tell you what I tell everyone I sit down with in the interview room. I think the term “interview” is misleading. This isn’t a job interview. I don’t have a list of questions that I will ask and we don’t make our admission decisions based solely on your answers. Instead of an interview, I see this as a chance for a conversation—a conversation about the student. Their experiences, their challenges, their dreams.

• Be prepared—know what you want to talk about. Have in mind how you want to highlight your activities in and out of the classroom. Let’s talk about things that are deeper than “I took AP Chemistry last year and am taking Honors English next year.” Tell me why you wanted to take AP Chem, tell me about a cool conversation you had in an English course, tell me why you wanted to take Spanish.
• Don’t be OVERLY prepared—don’t have rehearsed statements that you throw at me, but don’t answer the question asked. Remember my earlier point about this being a conversation. Let’s chat. This isn’t the campaign trail with the need for a stump speech.
• Remember that we receive over 7000 applications each year. It’s all black ink on white paper. Sometimes this is all we have as we consider a student’s application, but a twenty minute conversation can add so much color and paint a truer picture of your experiences. An example might be that on the application you list football as an activity, but in our conversation we talk about how football has impacted your growth process because of…….
• Actually tell me something—a pet peeve is when someone throws out that they are an Eagle Scout and expects me to automatically think that he is “a true leader” just because one is an Eagle Scout. That isn’t going to happen. If you are an Eagle Scout tell me about the impact that scouting has had on you. Tell me about what you did with the troop. Tell me about your Eagle Scout project and how that impacted you. The same goes with something like community service—telling me you have done a 100 hours of service is all well and good. Telling me about why you became involved in service and what you learned from the experience is what is important.

Finally, think of this as your chance to get things “on the record.” We can talk about something important to you that might not show up in your application, on your list of activities or in your college essay.

Sometimes great writers reveal truths that are hidden. At other times they reveal truths that are squarely in front of our eyes but which we do not see because we have not asked the right question. Mark Twain's story The War Prayer fits into the latter category.

The idea of the intercessory prayer, where one asks for a favor or blessing for oneself or for a designated group of people, is such a familiar staple of religious life that its basis is unquestioned. But Twain points out what should have been obvious if we had only thought it through. The key section about the nature of such prayers is revealed when he writes:

For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of – except he pause and think.

God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two – one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of His Who hearth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this – keep it in mind. If you beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time.

Twain accurately points out that often such prayers always carry with them a dark underside. Prayers that ask for victory in war always carry with them the wish that god will destroy the other side. The losing side in a war must necessarily suffer death and destruction but prayers never explicitly ask god to do this. That would be too crass. But Twain says that whether we put those sentiments into words or not, that appeal is always present.

Twain carries this argument even further and says that even appeals for seemingly benign help for one person (such as rain for his crops) may prove to be a curse for someone else.

Twain's point seems to be that any prayer that seeks special benefits for any one group is also a request to deny that same benefit to those who do not belong to that group. When people pray asking god's help to help find a cure for cancer, aren't they implicitly also asking him/her to not find a cure for AIDS or Alzheimers or any other of the countless diseases that afflict living things?

And what about the phrase "God bless America" that is now such a staple of political life that politicians routinely end their speeches with it? Fourth of July speeches are full of such appeals. What exactly is being asked for here? That god look out for the interests of Americans and withhold blessings from the people of other countries? What would justify such a request? Do such people really believe that God prefers Americans to other people? What kind of God would check the nationality of people before responding to prayers?

All such intercessory prayers are premised on an authoritarian/subservient model, with god as a kind of despot who has limited rewards at his/her disposal, and whose favors have to be curried by making special appeals, in the manner of kindergarteners with their teacher. Since most religious people also believe in a god who omnipotent and has the capacity to answer any intercessory prayer, and even knows the prayers before they are prayed, it does not make sense to ask for limited rewards benefiting a restricted subset of people. But this obvious contradiction is not perceived. It requires an astute observer like Twain to point it out.

Perhaps the only intercessory prayer that can be justified is the one I saw on a bumper sticker that said "God bless everyone. No exceptions."

It is noteworthy that Mark Twain knew that he was asking for trouble with this story, writing it as he did during a major war, when strong and unthinking appeals to patriotism are used to brush aside any opposition, just as was done in during the preparations for the attack on Iraq.

Twain wrote The War Prayer during the Spanish-American War. It was submitted for publication, but on March 22, 1905, Harper's Bazaar rejected it as "not quite suited to a woman's magazine." Eight days later, Twain wrote to his friend Dan Beard, to whom he had read the story, "I don't think the prayer will be published in my time. None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth." Because he had an exclusive contract with Harper & Brothers, Mark Twain could not publish "The War Prayer" elsewhere and it remained unpublished until 1923.

Mark Twain seems to have had a healthy skepticism towards religion that was not shared by his family and those who were charged with executing his estate.

In later years, Twain's family suppressed some of his work which was especially irreverent toward conventional religion, notably Letters from the Earth, which was not published until 1962. The anti-religious The Mysterious Stranger was published in 1916, although there is some scholarly debate as to whether Twain actually wrote the most familiar version of this story.

Given that Mark Twain had achieved iconic status in his own lifetime and was so well-known and liked, his own apprehensions about whether this story could be published is indicative of how powerful a hold this combination of religion and patriotism has on people. Challenge those twin pillars of dogma and you become an outcast fast.

POST SCRIPT: Hunting endangered animals

Did you know that there is a hunting group that actually seeks as trophies endangered animals? And that one of its members was nominated last year to fill the position of acting director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service?

The organization in question is the Safari Club International (SCI), described as "an extreme trophy hunting organization that advocates the killing of rare species around the world." A press release put out by the Humane Society of the US says:

The Arizona-based SCI has made a name for itself as one of the most extreme and elite trophy hunting organizations, representing some 40,000 wealthy trophy collectors, fostering and promoting competitive trophy hunting of exotic animals on five continents. SCI members shoot prescribed lists of animals to win so-called Grand Slam and Inner Circle titles. There's the Africa Big Five (leopard, elephant, lion, rhino, and buffalo), the North American Twenty Nine (all species of bear, bison, sheep, moose, caribou, and deer), Big Cats of the World, Antlered Game of the Americas, and many other contests.

To complete all 29 award categories, a hunter must kill a minimum of 322 separate species and sub-species—enough to populate a large zoo. This is an extremely expensive and lengthy task, and many SCI members take the quick and easy route to see their names in the record books. They shoot captive animals in canned hunts, both in the United States and overseas, and some engage in other unethical conduct like shooting animals over bait, from vehicles, with spotlights, or on the periphery of national parks.

What is the matter with these people? How can anyone be so competitive that they will actually increase the risk of extinction of rare animals just for the sake of getting a trophy?

Now for a Tangled Bank hosted by an Engineering Librarian...

General science, biology, and medicine are not my typical subject areas as I usually highlight resources in engineering and electronic resources available from my library. I occasionally branch off into medicine and biology as I support faculty and students conducting research in biomedical engineering.

Good science is important for everyone, and I hope this Tangled Bank promotes further discussion and thoughts, as we explore the science in spacecraft, illness, global warming, butterflies, locust, Star Wars, sex, love, and many other topics.

Outfit a spacecraft with a huge but incredibly lightweight mirror, and it can travel indefinitely, without fuel, at speeds that eventually exceed those of conventional rocket-powered craft. Joe Kissell presents Solar Sails - The next big thing in space travel posted at Interesting Thing of the Day.

Explore some of the research findings that suggest that there is an epigenetic basis to the development of lupus, an autoimmune disease that affects nearly 200 million Americans. Trevor Covert at Epigenetics News shares The Epigenetics of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE).

Jeremy Bruno at The Voltage Gate took a closer look at a recent Oprah show that discussed global warming by looking at a few inaccuracies and the shows reliance on propaganda rather than facts.

GrrlScientist presents Another Origin of Species posted at Living the Scientific Life. This essay describes an elegant Nature paper that investigates the role of homoploid hybridization in creating a new species of butterfly. (Homoploid hybridization is when the parent species and their hybrid offspring all have the same number of chromosomes).

The Different River presents Would You Donate Your Virginity to Science. The New England Journal of Medicine just published a paper by a group of researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle studying whether condom use affected the probability of infection with Human Papillomavirus Infection (HPV). The Different River explores the ethics of how the study was conducted as female college virgins were located to record their first sexual experiences.

Rachel Ann presents Locust, Star Wars and Crashing Cars posted at Willow Tree. Explore how Star Wars was used to research the ability of locust to avoid collisions, and how the resulting research can be used to make automobiles safer.

Hsien-Hsien Lei wrote Imprinted Genes Altered in IVF Embryos at Genetics and Health. Scientists reported that mice embryos resulting from in vitro fertilization could have genetic abnormalities due to different culture media and concentrations of oxygen.

Love is one of the most confusing and wonderful parts of life. There is perhaps no subject about which so many stories, songs, and poems have been written. Paul at Paul's Tips presents Scientific proof that we all need love.

Learn how nurse plants help other plants become established in the restoration of degraded ecosystems and what this tells us about ecological communities. Shared by Jane Shevtsov at Perceiving Wholes.

Christopher Birkbeck explores how small man is in this universe at See You at Enceladus.

David Wheat at Science in Action asks "Why is Urine Yellow?".

A tale of scientific discovery - some cases of obesity are likely caused by a virus. Monado presents Obesity is a virus? posted at Science Notes.

Time for a little archaeology with Martin Rundkvist at Salto sobrius. He reports from a recent conference on Roman Period war booty sacrifices in Denmark and Germany.

The Evil Monkey at Neurotopia (version 2.0) suggested two uniques items, so I decided to offer both. First look at "pseudoscientific nonsense" with Of Sweet Potatoes, Social Cognition, and Spiritual Hullabaloo. Next, Evil Monkey explores how PDE-5 Inhibitor Sildenafil Improves Cognition, or Viagra's Good for the Big Head Too.

Ruth Schaffer at The Biotech Weblog shared information on an oral supplement to counteract Celiac Disease. Celiac Disease (CD) is an autoimmune digestive disorder characterized by an immunologically toxic reaction to the ingestion of gluten which can be found in wheat, rye, and barley.

Jacob Tennessen wrote about a foray into the field with a bat ecologist at the Salamander Candy.

David Ng shares a short commentary on the perception of scientists in the photography and film world at The World's Fair.

Carel Brest van Kempen at Rigor Vitae wonders why a recent announcement of the discovery of a color-changing snake by WWF is news when it was first documented in the mid-90's.

Nick Anthis, as someone who regularly performs NMR experiments, he knows that NMR generally involves long hours in a dark basement. If he could instead perform his experiments while also enjoying a day out at the park, it would make the field infinitely more attractive for others. At The Scientific Activist, Anthis highlights a recent study that proves that this may be possible…or does it?

Cathy Davies at the Lab Cat looks at water chemistry and hydrogen bonding. The graphics are great. Davies also puts out a call for chemistry bloggers, specifically food chemists, by introducing people to food chemistry in her post.

Dan Rhoads at Migrations revisits a 2003 essay by Daniel Yankelovich, called Winning Greater Influence for Science, which calls for a greater role for scientists as political advocates, not merely specialized advisors, in the interest of bridging the divide between science and the public in politics.

At the Fight Aging! blog, a post draws a parallel between the current growth in biotechnology and that of computer hobbyists beginning in the 1970's.

PZ Myers at Pharyngula shows us what we can learn from octupus brains.

At Thoughts from Kansas, Josh Rosenau shares the excitement of meteorites found in rural Kansas, and the related festival with its invasion by creationists.

Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock writes about a recent study on the molecular mechanism underlying circadian rhythms in mammals. In addition, A Blog Around the Clock has a guest blogger in Kevin Messenger that is writing about his herpetological field research in remote areas of China.

Jake Young presents Can women generate oocytes late into life? posted at Pure Pedantry.

I found two articles to follow up my previous post on Google's shortcomings. The first is a sixth grader&aposs essay on why Google is great, and the second is a listing of webservices marketshares with commentary comparing Google to MSN.

I found some really sweet Facebook userscripts at facebookWithBenefits. The best are post2faceBook which adds a quick post feature and inYOfaceBook which magnifies user picture thumbnails on mouse over.

Mugshot for Windows still leaves a lot ot be desired. It ignores the users browser prefrence (probably to maintain the login session between the tray icon and the browser) and it only supports iTunes and YME. Digging into the source it looks like it uses two different sets of classes to abstract them.

I made some new mugshot and loudmouth packages for dapper as jdub's mugshot packages are now out of date and the dapper loudmout packages crash on the mugshot out of date notification.

The Gnome desktop has made steady progress lately but sometimes the developers seem so focused on visible changes that they forget about their backend stated goals. For instance they want to migrate from popt to GOption but the patch for gnome-terminal has been sitting for three months now.

They have already recognized patch rot as a barrier to participation. Patch rot means that patches are lees likely to cleanly apply and is also frustrating to patch writers. What they really need is a Patch Marshall to make sure that submitted patches either get accepted or denied in a reasonable amount of time.

Here's my wife, for comparison, in the little patch of Silver King field corn. Even the replants are almost knee high. It's one of the few bright spots...that, and baby summer squash. But the garden is under water again.

Today, being independence day in the US, will see a huge outpouring of patriotic fervor, with parades and bands and flag waving. Coming at a time when the mood of the country is being whipped up to mobilize and support yet another attack on another country (this time Iran) I thought it might be appropriate to read one of Mark Twain's lesser known works.

I came across it during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I was surprised by the fact that I had never even heard of it before, even though I have read quite a lot of Twain's work and about Twain himself. Tomorrow I will look at what Twain is trying to say in this piece and the background to it. For today, I'll let this remarkable piece of writing speak for itself.

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and sputtering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spreads of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country and invoked the God of Battles, beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpouring of fervid eloquence which moved every listener.

It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

Sunday morning came – next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their faces alight with material dreams – visions of a stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! – then home from the war, bronzed heros, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation – "God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest, Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!"

Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory.

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there, waiting.

With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal," Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!"

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside – which the startled minister did – and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said

"I come from the Throne – bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd and grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import – that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of – except he pause and think.

"God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two – one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of His Who hearth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this – keep it in mind. If you beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

"You have heard your servant's prayer – the uttered part of it. I am commissioned by God to put into words the other part of it – that part which the pastor, and also you in your hearts, fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory – must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them, in spirit, we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(After a pause)

"Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits."

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

POST SCRIPT: Strange statues

Take a look at this collection of strange statues from all over the world.

According to a recent article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (June 7, 2006), humanity in the next 3 years will produce more data than in did in the past 1,000 years. Concerns of future data format and degradation are of great concern to many institutions, such as the Council on Library and Information Resources, the National Archives, IBM, and the Library of Congress. See full article for further discussion.

(Full Article VIA: George Mason University's History News Network)

My implements came at around 1:30 yeaterday.

The man who delivered them had helpful hints about maintaining the gearbox on the brush hog, and how and why an 8N drives a tiller (fast 1st gear and no live PTO make for a skimmy job). But the basic stuff seemed just too stupid to ask about, and there's no "Tractors for dummies" book out there. I hitched up the brush hog ... not all the way, because Rusty was out and both PTO shafts were still in her trunk. But I could see I was missing a few things; for one, the implement was only hitched at 2 points. So when she returned, I went to Tractor Supply and got some lynch pins, 2 PTO shaft pins, a bar for the top of the hitch, and a drawbar so I can tow my wagon. After dinner I put it all together...and it wouldn't raise. I finally figured out that the PTO had to be engaged for the hydraulics to work. The problem with that was that I didn't have control figured out and would either take the implement too high or would ground it, either of which would cause the PTO pin to shear and the shaft to dance around like a cobra ready to strike from the inertia of the brush hog blade (a steel bar with steel bars loosely pinned at either end, to club to death anything that gets in its way, sort of a weed whacker on steroids). Having used up my supply of PTO pins, I'm out of business until after the holiday.

I need to order an operators manual for the 8N ($15-$20 online). Given how many were sold to Southerners converting from mules, it should tell me everything I need to know.

University: The Humanist Neighborhood

When Moses Cleaveland founded the city of Cleveland in 1796, he established what would later become downtown, naturally the hotspot of present-day Cleveland. A year after Moses, another surveyor set up shop and home in the Cleveland area and established what would become Cleveland’s second downtown, University Circle.

In 1797 Nathaniel Doan built a log hotel and tavern in a woodland four miles east from the city of Cleveland. Many of Cleveland’s wealthy families moved on to Euclid Avenue in the area and the street earned the name Millionaire’s Row. For decades the neighborhoods from downtown to “Doan’s Corners” thrived. Then, in the late-1800’s families began to move out of the city, to the suburbs now known as Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights to escape the growing population of middle class neighbors.

Some of these families demolished their mansions rather than let them be used by the middle class, but there were other families who donated their homes and thousands of dollars to the city upon leaving it. One of those millionaires, Jeptha H. Wade, donated 75 acres of his old estate to the city of Cleveland for a public park and an art gallery. Amasa Stone donated $500,000 and 43 acres of land for Western Reserve University to move from rural Hudson, Ohio. In 1885 the Case School of Applied Sciences relocated to Doan's Corners from downtown Cleveland. Later on in 1967 these two schools combined into Case Western Reserve University and grew exponentially. As the middle class moved in, a streetcar line was built to serve Euclid Avenue. The circular trolley turnaround at East 107th Street became known as the University Circle stop. As more cultural institutions moved into the area, the University neighborhood was given its distinctive name.

There are four sections of the University neighborhood: University Circle, Little Italy, the historical residential area and the modern residential area. In 1957 the University neighborhood’s largest institutions formed a federation to work on behalf of the best interests of University Circle. This group, University Circle Inc., avidly promotes the Circle’s institutions and manages housing and real estate. University Circle Inc. also collects statistics about the Circle. Currently, more than 75 not-for-profit institutions are in the University neighborhood and half of them are concentrated in University Circle. Little Italy is a concentration of fine ethnic eateries and shops along Mayfield Road and Murry Hill, adjacent to Euclid Avenue. Little Italy is mostly southeast of the RTA Red Line. The historical residential area is north of University Circle and includes Magnolia, Rockefeller Park, Wade Park and Bellflower communities. The modern residential area in southern University is often neglected for not being closer to Euclid Avenue, yet in this area you will find the Cleveland NAACP chapter and the Uqbah Mosque Foundation. The borders of the University neighborhood are Wade Park Avenue to the north, Quincy Avenue and Mount Overlook Avenue to the south, East 105th Street to the west, and Woodland Avenue to the east.
According to University Circle, Inc. more than 30,000 people work in the University neighborhood, making it second only to downtown as an employment center. More than 13,000 students attend CWRU, The Cleveland Institute of Music, The Cleveland Institute of Art, and the Ohio College of Podiatric Medicine. And including patients who come to our important medical facilities, 2.5 million people visit the Circle annually. Besides the students, there live only about 9,500 people. Unfortunately, like most of Northeast Ohio, University is facing an economic downfall as every year more people move away or invest someplace else. In the neighborhood there are 400 vacant properties and 2700 residents living in poverty.

University Circle Incorporated and other community development organizations such as Little Italy 2000 Redevelopment Association are working to improve the economy of University. Charter One Bank recently committed $150 million for economic and community development in the University Circle area via housing loans, grants, and small business loans. It is collaborating with University Circle Inc. and other foundations in this effort.

University is, like most of Cleveland, a remarkable yet unappreciated place that will only grow when people recognize its potential, and better yet, its existence. If University’s communication were to focus on reaching Greater Cleveland citizens, the neighborhood will grow. Case Western Reserve’s The Observer sums up University’s problem in this way: “On one hand Cleveland has a cultural gem and on the other hand it has what seems to be an underused and poorly organized stretch of land.” University will always flaunt Cleveland aesthetics, no matter the era, no matter the regression.

The U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) turns 40 tomorrow, the day we celebrate our independence. This was stated by Jimmy Carter, who write in the opinion column for today's Washington Post issue.

Now I am sure some conservatives would like to see this piece of legislation abolished for the sake of national security, but the uninterrupted flow of information is integral to the survival of democracy. These days, governments are slowly re-classifying documents that were made open to the public several years ago, or even a decade ago. New policies have been issued to prevent many important documents and official actions from being seen by the public.

As stated by Carter -- war, civil rights violations, energy costs, campaign finance and lobbyist scandals -- dictate the need for citizens to have the right to access public documents.

Using the war on terror as an excuse to keep documents hidden from the public is unexcusable. Terrorist attacks have occurred throughout the years, why the urgency to keep everything secret now? Is it really protecting national security or keeping those "politicians" in power forever?

Washington Post - We Need Fewer Secrets

In one of the classic Peanuts cartoons, Linus says that when he grows up he wants to become a great doctor and rid the world of illness. His sister Lucy tells him he can't because he doesn't care enough about humanity. An indignant Linus responds, "I love humanity! It's people I can't stand!"

I remembered that cartoon as I was writing the recent series of posts about the difficulties with believing that the mind/soul is a non-material entity that can exist independently of the material body and brain. I wrote about how Descartes struggled with how to understand the actual working of the model.

The thought struck me that it is often easy for us to accept the big picture as long as we ignore the details. For example, if you ask people whether they believe in a god who is all-powerful and can and will respond to people's prayers, most people will unhesitatingly answer yes. If you ask them whether there is a heaven, they will say yes. If you ask them whether they believe in the existence of an immortal soul, they will say yes. If you ask them if they have free will, they will say yes.

None of these things are really that hard to believe in, as long as you stay solely with the big picture. The problem comes when you try and work out the details. It is when you ask questions like: If God exists, where is he located? How does he act in the world? Why is it that his actions seem to be indistinguishable from random chance or the workings of natural law? Where is heaven? What happens there? What is the relationship of the soul to the brain? How does the soul influence the brain?

Such questions are very difficult to answer and despite the fact that religions have been around for thousands of years, no convincing answers have yet been provided. The religious believer is invariably reduced to saying that such things are impossible for mere mortals to comprehend and that they have to take it on faith that there are answers that will be revealed to people only after they are dead. So believers in religion are essentially told: Believe in the big picture and don't ask questions or expect answers about the details.

As a methodological attitude, this is what makes it hard for religion to be compatible with a scientific approach. Science, like religion, also deals with big questions: How did the universe get created? What is it made of? How did it become the way it is now? Science seeks answers to those questions and in the process creates universal laws and theories such as the conservation of energy or the theory of evolution.

As with religion, it is easy to believe in big picture ideas, even bizarre ones. Multiple and parallel universes? Going backwards and forwards in time? Access to unlimited energy from the quantum fluctuations in the vacuum? All these ideas have their appeal and are believed in by people.

But there the similarity with religion ends. Such broad beliefs do not become part of science if they remain purely at that level of generality. Scientific answers to the big questions and the universal laws themselves are found by looking at the details, at how these things manifest themselves in specific concrete situations which can be studied under controlled conditions. There is no question that is in principle seen to be beyond the scope of investigation or beyond human understanding. Any scientist who proposed a grand scheme and failed to articulate how it would play out in specific concrete isolated situations would not be taken seriously.

If one looks at the history of science, it is the accumulation of answers to questions of detail that have determined which theories of science should be retained and which should be overthrown. The transition from the Ptolemaic geocentric model of the solar system to the Copernican heliocentric system did not occur because the latter model was seen as being clearly better. Conceptually, it is just as easy to believe in a geocentric model as it is in a heliocentric model. The change happened because over time, the detailed working out of the consequences of each model in specific instances (such as the motions of specific planets) seemed to be more compatible with the Copernican model than the Ptolemaic one.

This attention to detail characterizes academic discourse in general. I recall one historian saying that this is why they try to locate original documents, however boring and mundane they might seem. For a historian, a book of receipts and invoices from a store that was in existence three hundred years ago may allow her to piece together and corroborate a more reliable account of life in those times than (say) a book written during that time that seeks to describe life then. This is because books are written with a broad purpose in mind and this can distort its contents. But people doing their daily book-keeping in a store are simply recording actual events for their own use, not with an eye to history. Hence there is less chance of unconscious bias.

This is also why anthropologists and archaeologists focus so much on collecting raw data that to the rest of us seems like it has little value. The work of the people who painstakingly analyzed the layers of pollen and vegetation and bones deep in the soil of Easter Island enabled them to arrive at a more reliable and comprehensive accounting of how that community collapsed than the accounts of travelers to that island. (I will write about the fascinating story of Easter Island in a future posting.)

So while seeking the answers to big questions is the ultimate goal, in science and in most other areas of knowledge we arrive at those answers as a secondary consequence of finding answers to small, detailed questions. In religion, however, we are simply told by authorities the answers to the big questions and told not to expect answers to the detailed ones.

POST SCRIPT: The Mind and the Brain

I wrote recently (here and here) about the relationship of the mind to the brain and how the neuroscience community views this question. In a recent article, Paul Bloom, professor of Psychology at Yale talks about brain studies using fMRI and confirms my belief that the brain is all there is. He says:

But we know, scientifically, that the physical activity of the brain is the source of our mental processes. It's one of the first things the professor says in any intro psych course: The mind is what the brain does, and so every mental event, from falling in love to worrying about your taxes, is going to show up as a brain event. In fact, if anyone were to find an aspect of thought that did not correspond to a brain event, it would be the discovery of the century, as it would be the first ever proof of hardcore Cartesian dualism.

(Thanks to MachinesLikeUS.com.)

TOXNET (TOXicology Data NETwork) is a cluster of databases covering toxicology, hazardous chemicals, environmental health and related areas. It is managed by the Toxicology and Environmental Health Information Program (TEHIP) in the Division of Specialized Information Services (SIS) of the National Library of Medicine (NLM). TOXNET provides free access to and easy searching of the following databases:

• HSDB (Hazardous Substances Data Bank)
• IRIS (Integrated Risk Information System)
• ITER (International Toxicity Estimates for Risk)
• CCRIS (Chemical Carcinogenesis Research Information System)
• GENE-TOX (Genetic Toxicology)
• Tox Town
• Household Products Database
• Haz-Map
• TOXMAP
• LactMed (Drugs and Lactation)
• TOXLINE
• DART/ETIC (Development and Reproductive Toxicology/Environmental Teratology Information Center)
• Toxics Release Inventory (TRI)
• ChemIDplus

See the Factsheet for TOXNET: Toxicology Data Network for detailed descriptions.

NASA's Constellation Program is getting to work on the new spacecraft that will return humans to the moon and blaze a trail to Mars and beyond. Using various Flash animations, Quicktime movies, images, and PDF Fact Sheets learn about this exciting undertaking. View work by assignment, such as the role of Glenn Research Center.

Glenn will manage the work on the CEV's service module, which will provide maneuvering with its propulsion system, generate power using solar arrays, and keep the vehicle cool with heat rejection radiators. Glenn is also the lead for the upper stage of the Crew Launch Vehicle.

(VIA: The Scout Report, June 23, 2006)

This guy's entry won't let me comment, so I'll leave it here.

Cleveland takes time to appreciate. I also lived in the walled garden of University Circle / cleveland heights for 7 years, and did not know Cleveland-proper until I moved to the west side (4 years ago), and then even more after I started looking to buy a home in the city. We basically spent a year driving through neighborhoods, seeing who was out and about and trying to get a feel for them. As friends bought homes in some of these neighborhoods, we explored more. There is so much more to this town than University Circle / Cleveland heights.

Neighborhoods that are worth walking through include Ohio City (beyond the west-side market even), Tremont, E 185. All of them have stuff going on. Detroit-Shoreway is a little rougher around the edges, but has several hidden gems including W Clinton, W 58, and W 61. If you want to live somewhere quieter, there are great streets in West park and in the Northeast Shores (N Collinwood, north of Lakeshore) area. Where else can you get a home on the lake for so cheap? You're right about Strongsville and other suburban sprawl, but the inner ring burbs like Lakewood and Cleveland heights (once you get away from Coventry) are actually great towns with a lot going on beyond just the bars.

Every city has its high and low points. I think that you might have a different view from someone who went to Carnegie Mellon for 5 years.

If you should happen to take a full time position in Cleveland after graduating, do yourself a favor and live on the west side for a year. Then, if you like rec-league sports, Clevelandplays is a good way to discover lots of parks and neighborhood bars. These 2 things would change your perspective.

Oh, and Go Browns!

Societal expectations of mothers have evolved dramatically since the 1930s. Remember the old chestnut that women should be "barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen"? Gone the way of the dodo bird, right? If it were, the Ohio state legislature would not have had any reason to pass a law last year, stating that "a mother is entitled to breast-feed her baby in any location of a place of public accomodation wherein the mother is otherwise permitted." That's why a group of mothers and babies held a nurse-in yesterday at Crocker Park in Westlake. I attended to support their rights to breastfeed in public. The event is covered on page B1 of the July 2 Plain Dealer (which is now available online).

This right has been frequently challenged in recent years. Lots of people still think that mothers with nursing babies should stay home, or go home to feed their babies. Breastpumps, bottles, and artificial baby milk make it possible for anyone to feed a baby, and once that is possible, there's more room to argue that a mother should conform to notions of modesty that have been applied to all women equally in our society. This view privileges the sexual appeal of breasts to men, and argues that mothers should not appear in public when they are using their breasts to feed their babies. It's expressed by comments such as this one, responding to news coverage of a Milwalkee nurse-in:

"Honestly think somethings are done better in a private place and why on earth would anyone want to breast feed in a dressing room, working in retail I can agree with the employees most malls set up family restrooms for this purpose. You take away from business."

Obviously, this is not a view with which I agree. Restrooms are noplace where anyone should be eating. Family restrooms in malls are great places to change diapers, but they do not have a comfortable spot to sit down and nurse.

There's a lot of work still to be done before our society broadly accepts that a breastfeeding mother's place is anywhere...

Here are some other comments on a different news article in Wisconsin which reflect the point of view that breastfeeding in public should not be a right:

"Don't they make pumps anymore? Get real."

"you go into a mall to go shopping not to go see a woman with her boob hanging out trying to feed her child, plus I wouldn't want my child to see that, and ask questions when its not time for him to know that kind of stuff yet."

Comments like this explain why so few babies are breastfed -- if moms are expected to do extra work in order to be completely modest, and children are expected to be protected from the truth about how babies are fed, it's no surprise that only 25 percent of 6-month-olds in Cuyahoga County, are breastfed, even though the US Department of Health and Human Services has set a target rate for 6-month-olds of 50 percent. That means that most babies in our county are exposed to the risks of not breastfeeding.

But why not use a bottle when a baby needs to be fed away from home?

Well, for one thing, using a bottle when your baby is brand-new can sabotage your breastfeeding relationship for the long term. Older babies who are accustomed to breastfeeding will not always take a bottle -- my daughter did until she turned 5 months old, but after that, she went on a bottle strike. I'm not the only one who had a baby who wouldn't take a bottle, either.

For another thing, putting formula in a bottle means accepting the increased health risks that go along with substituting an artificially manufactured substance for the human-produced and human-specific milk that mothers' bodies naturally make. And using formula to feed a breastfed baby can reduce a mother's milk supply, creating a vicious circle when even more formula is used, less milk is produced, and eventually, a mother's milk supply disappears.

And finally, pumping breastmilk to put it in a bottle takes work. Figure at least 15 minutes to pump enough for one feeding. Mothers who skip a feeding at the breast and offer a bottle instead will still have milk in their breasts, and if their babies don't nurse to drink that milk, the mothers are at higher risk of developing plugged ducts and breast infections known as mastitis. Pumping is a useful process when a mother and her baby must be separated, but it's not a good solution when mother and baby are out in public together.

Don't ask moms to do all that work just so you can avoid the inconvenience of looking away if you see more than you are comfortable with. Of course, moms should be offered somewhere private and clean to nurse if they are out and about when their babies get hungry, and they want privacy... but moms who are comfortable with nursing in public should not be made to feel shameful for doing what nature intended. The next time you are out in public, and you see a mom nursing her baby, smile and say "thank you for giving your baby a healthy start in life!"

Obvious enough, the nation of almost 300 million people yawned at the World Cup action that was occurring in Germany. Despite doubling its TV ratings in the first set of matches when the World Cup began, it still fell far below the rest of "American" sports.

ABC recording an average rating of 2.5 for the first eight matches, representing barely 8 million viewers. Only 3.9 million Americans watched the 2002 World Cup final, which had an audience of 1.1 billion worldwide. Of course this has to be underestimated since you got immigrants and US citizens of foreign descent who are probably into the game and are not covered. I still feel that viewership is definitely higher, but not too much. For ESPN, they attracted fewer viewers, averaging around 1.75 million on channels that reach 91 million homes.

Global Market Insite (GMI) found that 11 percent of Americans surveyed were "definitely" interested in the World Cup. Worldwide averages 45 percent. Sadly enough, 56 percent of Americans did not even know that the 2006 World Cup was taking place in Germany. I guess it might be higher if they were asked where the 2010 World Cup is taking place. Also interesting, Americans do not do well with civics too since a good percentage do not know where the location of the nation's capitol or know all clauses of the Bill of Rights, or did not know that the red and white stripes on the flag represented the thirteen colonies when they declared independence.

Well, we are a country that loves sporting isolationism. The 1994 World Cup held in the US could have turned the tide, but despite the largest average crowds in World Cup history and the spawning of the Major League Soccer which now has 12 teams, it is still struggling to find a place in the crowded US sports market.

One sports commentator, Frank Deford, a Sports Illustrated columnist, said there was more interest in the professional basketball and hockey playoffs in America, "the only country where soccer is not important."

Jack Kemp, former Republican presidential candidate, once called soccer "socialistic and collectivist" during a speech in Congress.

USA Today columnist William Mattox Jr. wrote last week, "We love to play the game, or at least to have our children play it. But we hate to watch it."

* * * * *

It is such a shame really. Some may call it boring, but I also say that basketball, hockey, American football, and baseball are also of a boring character. Basketball utilises the same fancy footwork like football (soccer), but I guess we like to see how high the guys can jump to make that dunk shot, but we already seen every shot made. Of course, the stars that get the six or seven figure salary come to the game with their stretched out limos with loads of their entourage. It promotes that individualism and a "me first" attitude. Sadly, I have lost care in knowing if Kobe Bryant did 40+ points in more than X consecutive games. It is not that exciting anymore.

Hockey is only good when a fight breaks out. You're just passing the puck and with all that protective gear, there's no blood unless you starting using the stick or a body-slam would do. Now, if they play the game full contact but with no heavy gear, then that would be interesting.

American football is just commericals, and filled with so much stoppage plays, a game that should last 1 hour, goes at least 3 hours. The half-time show is only meant to get the audience to stay interested, and as for the rest of us, we stay at home seeing what new commerical has been concocted for us. It is much like rugby, but there is no need for helmets, shoulderpads, or knee gear. If you put the England rugby team against the New England Patriots, the rugby players will win outright.

Baseball is just messed up. I would not mind going to a Yankee game from time to time, but it is not the game that is driving me away, it is the prices. You are liable to spend almost $100 on the tickets, food, and drinks, and I bet the break in each half-inning is designed to get the average fan to go to the snack bar to buy a $4 or $5 hot dog, or a $7 dollar beer. While we may appreciate the great double or triple play, the game is just boring unless you have that TV transistor with the commentary going on at your ear.

Somehow I think football (soccer) players are more appreciate of the fans. When we talk about money, they are less demanding. They do get bonuses for getting into the championship or getting qualified for Europe, but compared with American players, they are not that picky. For some baseball and American football players, they have clauses in their contract stating what car they should get, what hotel room or floor, customised meals, a private jet, and whatever special privileges that are stated. That would just turn me off like any other fan.

How can you tell me that football (soccer) is boring, when I see fans at a baseball game reading a book or taking a nap? Perhaps there is something missing that would galvanise the American populace into loving football. Maybe it is the way we are brought up or perhaps the sports commentators and commericals are all geared up to be anti-football.

I would hope that a trip to Europe to see an England football match or a Italian or Spanish or Portuguese match will open your eyes to the "beautiful game." Besides, where else can you find a player that can kick the ball with the speed of almost 140-150 km/hr.

Yahoo News - Beautiful game fails to win over Americans

Movies. this is going to be a helluva year for movies, even if a bunch of the ones i'm stoked about end up getting delayed to next year/spring/summer. regardless, the upcoming six months to year are absolutely loaded with top notch directors, actors, and films. just to give you an idea, the following directors have movies that are already in production coming out in america, at least according to the latest info from IMDB, sometime between now and early 2007: Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith, Shyamalan, Michael Mann, Woody Allen, Oliver Stone, Michel Gondry, Mike Judge, Broken Lizard (collectively), Brian De Palma, Christopher Guest, Scorcese, Darren Aronofsky, Sofia Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Nolan, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Linklater again, Richard Kelly, Steven Soderbergh, Mel Gibson, Robert De Niro, David Lynch, Werner Herzog, David Fincher, Danny Boyle, Soderbergh again, and Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.

the summer blockbuster season consists of fun but mostly mindless movies that don't become lifetime favorites. the true quality flicks start up in the fall and continue into oscar season. even during the summer season, though, some of the biggest directors' films are coming out. while many of the movies i'm excited for will, inevitably, disappoint me and many others, the real question is how much money am i going to be spending to see all of these damn movies...i think i should start saving now.

all of these dates are very tentative and will change so don't quote me, use a reliable source instead

June 23 (??): Pedro Almodovar's Volver
Technically this one doesn't count, since it was released a while back in Spain, but it's new to me so i'll take it. The release date seems incorrect, considering it's yet to play anywhere near me, but I'm still excited about it. After All About My Mother and Bad Education, he's clearly making films that are unlike anything i've seen from a U.S. director, and i haven't even seen what's his apparent masterpiece, Talk to Her.

June 28: Bryan Singer's Superman Returns
Only reason he's on this list is because of The Usual Suspects, still one of my all-time faves with, possibly, one of the greatest endings in movie history. Already saw this one and enjoyed it. I had missed the Superman boat growing up, so I am still relatively new to the character. Singer made me want to learn more about him.

July 7: Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly and Strangers with Candy
Too bad those financial commercials have already been using that style of animation. This looks like an interesting movie, but i'm still unsure about how I feel about the look. Strangers with Candy: I thought the show was funny, which is all i have to base my interest in it on, considering i haven't even seen a trailer.

July 14: The OH in Ohio
I love Parker Posey and I'm in Ohio.

July 21: Kevin Smith's Clerks II and M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water
Kevin Smith: oh how the mighty have fallen. Makes me sad that he has to resort to a sequel on the cult classic.
Shyamalan: Can he make a movie that actually delivers? I disqualify myself from objectively analyzing Sixth Sense since I knew the secret going in, but The Village was a huge disappointment, and Signs failed at the end for me, so his last complete movie in my eyes is Unbreakable, probably his least successful movie overall. Lady in the Water has a damn intriguing trailer, but who knows if it will deliver.

July 28: Michael Mann's Miami Vice and Little Miss Sunshine and Woody Allen's Scoop
Michael Mann has yet to fail me with Collateral, The Insider, Manhunter, and the epic Heat, although Miami Vice is being bashed by everyone, but the trailer looked cool, and I'm a sucker for that. My only introduction to Woody Allen has been Match Point and Melinda and Melinda, both of which I loved, and Scarlett's in this one again, so I will be there. I paid to see The Island because of her, so now i'm pretty much obligated to see everything she's in.

August 4: Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
Oh Will Ferrell, how many quotable lines are you going to be coining in this one?

August 11: Oliver Stone's World Trader Center and Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep
Too soon? Maybe. I don't know if I'm ready to see it; crying for two hours straight doesn't sound that great to me.
After Eternal Sunshine, the production stills I'd seen, and the fact that Gael Garcia Bernal is in it, this could be a keeper.

August 18: The Illusionist and Snakes on a Plane
Edward Norton has yet to fail me.
How can you not be excited, seriously?

August 25: Broken Lizard's Beerfest
I don't want a large Farva, I want a goddamn liter of beer. That line better be in this movie.

September 1: Mike Judge's Idiocracy
Finally follows up Office Space.

September 15: Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia
Once again, Scarlett. and it sounds interesting.

September 22: All the King's Men and Christopher Guest's For Your Consideration
Great book, great cast, delayed nine months though. That's a concern. As my English teacher, the immortal Shirley Ann Lyster, prompted us to consider while reading the book: who is Humpty Dumpty?
Christopher Guest movie, should be good as usual.

September 29: Employee of the Month
Dane Cook.

October 6: Scorcese's The Departed
Leonardo is his new De Niro, which I'm not sure how I feel about yet.

October 11: Running With Scissors

October 13: Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain
one of these dates has to be wrong

October 20: Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette and The Painted Veil and Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers
I heard Marie Antoinette got laughed at in France, which could be trouble.
Edward Norton, once again. and Naomi Watts, mmmmm

October 27: Christopher Nolan's The Prestige and Inarritu's Babel
Damn, this could be a good weekend. Both look great, but Babel is the one I've been looking forward to for a while now. I heard a Stephen Gaghan interview, around the time Syriana came out, about the use of these complex, large cast, interconnected stories to tell stories with a larger scope, and I have to say, I've enjoyed these types of movies. Inarritu did it with Amores Perros and 21 Grams, which were a little too similar, story-wise and stylistically, but Babel has some potential.

October/Novemberish: Richard Kelly's Southland Tales and Linklater's Fast Food Nation
Apparently all of the actors in Southland Tales don't even know what it's about, and it sounds huge, but Donnie Darko was too damn good to not give him the benefit of the doubt.

November 10: Stranger than Fiction
Maggie Gyllenhaal, Will Ferrell, Dustin Hoffman, and Tony Hale (Buster from Arrested Development). This could be very good.

November 17: Casino Royale and Tenacious D
Daniel Craig and, supposedly, a new direction to the character could makes this a good Bond Movie, which I really have not found impressive of late.
And Jack Black, always good.

November 22: Steven Soderbergh's The Good German
The stud George Clooney and post-WWII.

December 1: Bug

December 8: Mel Gibson's Apocalypto
If he hasn't completely lost his mind, this could turn out OK.

December 22: Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd
The CIA, Matt Damon, Robert De Niro, and Angelina Jolie.

End of the year-ish: David Lynch's Inland Empire, Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn, and Little Children

January 7: Steven Soderbergh's Guerrilla

January 12: The Blood Diamond

January 19: David Fincher's Zodiac
Also among my most anticipated, David Fincher and Jake Gyllenhaal.

March 16: Danny Boyle's Sunshine
He keeps changing genres and keeps delivering, so I have no reason to expect otherwise on this one.

April 6: Quentin Tarantino and Frank Rodriguez's Grind House
One of the most intriguing movie ideas I've ever heard of: Each is directing an hour long horror movie, with fake movie previews in between them. I'm imagining From Dusk til Dawn and Sin City on crack. Delicious, delicious crack.

Well, if you're still reading this, I'm amazed, and I hope you're as stoked about the upcoming movies as i am. Oh, and one final movie for next summer's blockbuster season, fresh off the new teaser trailer that's online: Michael Bay's live-action Transformers movie. Yes, I loved the Transformers growing up, and yes, I will probably see this along with all of the other nerds next year. Only 368 days and counting...

The tractor.

That's all you get tonight; this connection is just too slow.

I got out early and began to dig the garden out from the weeds, while Rusty went out for chicken coop supplies. She came back with stair materials plus 5 gallons of Killz 2, tinted PINK. Well, it's her chicken coop. After brunch we went to Chalker's auction...way too early as it turned out, as they didn't get to equipment until well after 1. I bought a 5' Woods tiller and a brushhog. The tiller was $125 more than I was going to pay (though still about $500 less than a new King Kutter) and I'm not even positive the Ford will run it (8N is about 22 hp, KK's 5-ft tiller wants 25-40). If not, I'll have to sell and buy a 4', or none, or sell the tractor. The 'hog is older, painted Deere green (obviously not by Deere). They are to be delivered on Monday. I could have gotten them home myself, maybe. They could get them in the pickup for me, but I doubt I could get them out with my equipment. Or I could drive the tractor the 9 mile round trip, twice, with the stuff on the hitch, at 13 mph tops. It's $30 well spent.

One I got back home, I decided to go to Ravenna to TSC to get the stuff I didn't find. It was all way too much money, and I can wait on a post hole digger and a box blade. Then to Marc's which pissed me off by having NO sugar free ice cream, leading me to the self-limiting sin of Ben and Jerry's. I got home, saw the chick feed and galvanized metal primer, but NO Ford manual or 5W-30. Crap; must have left it in the cart. And their phone was busy. So Rusty and I piled into car and made the longish jaunt to Ravenna again; TSC staff had recovered the bag and were happy to give it to me. By that point it was near 8 and rapidly crashing sugar sent us to Taco Bell, after which I felt human
.

England lost to Portugal on penalties 3-1 after both teams ended the match 0-0 after extra time. It was heartbreak for the England boys since they battled bravely throughout the game, and even with 10 men after Wayne Rooney was unjustly sent off for the foul on Ricardo Carvalho. Even with one man down, England kept Portugal at bay and were even better than them and there were several chances that could put them ahead, but alas it did not happen.

I am somewhat frustrated with the way Portugal played the game. There was a bit of unsportsmanship when kicking the ball out of play when a player gets injured. Also, the theatrics in getting fouled hits a nerve which makes me feel that Portugal got a cheap win for this quarterfinal match. One example had Maniche covering his face in pain after one of the England players stepped near it. Video replays showed no contact, and the Portugal player failed to get booked for his dive.

For Wayne Rooney, he got tangled with Carvalho and Armando Petit and appeared to stamp the Chelsea player's groin. Carvalho made his theatrical face in pain and Cristiano Ronaldo comes running to the Argentine referee Horacio Elizondo, demanding a red card. Rooney, with disgust on his face, after seeing his Manchester United face trying to get the ref to send him off, pushed him away. The referee then went ahead and gave the straight red to Rooney, which even brought Beckham to his feet in anger (he was injured earlier in the game and was taken off). I truly believed that the ref was urged on by the Portuguese players to send Rooney off, and a few of the tv replays suggest that Ronaldo "winked" at the Portugal bench after the red card was issued.

I have to wonder how Rooney and Ronaldo will put up with each other when the English Premier League resumes in August.

Despite being a man down, the England team showed much passion and heart and kept it together until the end of the second half and extra time. It is only unfortunate that Gerrard, Lampard, and Carragher got their penalty shots saved by Portugal's goalkeeper Ricardo.

I am quite proud of their performance in this World Cup, and hope much better progress in Euro 2008 and World Cup 2010 in South Africa. I hope that France will defeat Portugal in the semi-final.

* * * * *

As for Brasil, they lost 1-0 to France in this evening's other quarterfinal after England lost against Portugal. Thierry Henry's superb volley send the cup holders Brasil home. France combined defensive discipline and attacking play which rattled Brasil's usual dancing football.

It was quite a surprise win for France, and most of the fans in the bar in Vienna were rooting for the underdogs. It goes to show that Brasil are also vulnerable to the unexpected.

* * * * *

July 4 - Germany v Italy
July 5 - Portugal v France

July 8 - Loser (4th) v Loser (5th) for 3rd Place

July 9 - Winner (4th) v Winner (5th) for Final Victory

First, the obligatory world cup update. The last few games haven't been quite as exciting as I'd hoped, but the semifinal matchups are doozies: Italy/Germany, France/Portugal. Too bad that Argentina and Brazil had to lose though, they are fun to watch, plus now that i found this website it's lost some of its appeal, although it's still pretty damn fun. variations on my name produce:
1. Danildo (kinda sounds like....)
2. Teca
3. Tson
4. Teta
5. Daniildo (still kinda sounds like....)

The second best internet find of the last week was this gem, the highlight of which is, obviously, the Zack Morris Time-Out power, one whose comedic and practical implications were never truly explored on Saved by the Bell. and as the article points out, Slater tea-bagging Screech is hilarious, which is especially poignant considering Dustin Diamond is soon to be homeless, unless you want to buy one of his crappy t-shirts. Read about it here. Oh, how the mighty have fallen....

Final note for this entry, if you are ever bored, like to read, and can tolerate or enjoy sci-fi absurdity, read John Dies at the End. It's funny, bizarre, unique, and longer than all holy hell. someday i might actually finish it...

Charles Piller (Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2006) explores nanotechnology from safety to future prospects. The related graphic contains quite interesting information. For example, U.S. patents in nanotechnology increased from 1000 in 1990 to over 5000 in 2003. The U.S. also granted approximately 5 times as many patents in nanotechnology than any other country in 2003. The U.S., Europe, and Japan have all contributed over a billion dollars each to nanotechnology research. Make sure to check out the related PDF that describes terminology of various nanostructures.

(VIA: Quick Picks, June 2, 2006)

Some progressive type Christians organized a convention and invited Howard Dean to bloviate:

America needs "a social safety net that will take care of people. That is the mark of true Christianity," Dean said.

Is this to say that a good Christian is the functional equivalent of a good Marxist? (Billy Sunday is a good Christian; Billy Graham is not, though he may become one any day now.)

Yep, Jesus was just a political rabble rouser, agitating for trade unions and the 40 hour work week. That's funny; I thought he wanted US (not U.S.) to take care of the poor, not to stick guns in our neighbor's faces to force THEM to take care of the poor.

While I think that the Democrat's pursuit of "moral values" is mere pandering, on another level, I welcome it. The identification of the Republican party with the Religious Right has done it no good. There are people who would vote Republican, but have been scared into thinking that if they do so, we will all have 7 children and dress like the Amish. Linking the Dems to Christianity will help balance and defuse that, or at least pose a counter-scenario: that we will be forced to join hands in a circle and sing "Kum-bye-ya".

SAN ANTONIO — The library director at the University of the Incarnate Word has canceled the library's subscription to The New York Times to protest articles revealing a covert government program to track terrorist financing.

I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint politically. But you don't jerk your serials around like that. Like them or not (and I don't), the NYT is and is likely to remain the paper of record in this country, and is used constantly as a research tool. Professionally, I think it was a poor decision.

But that's not why librarians annoy me. This is:

Library staff members said they were shocked by Morgan's e-mail.

"The censorship is just unspeakable," staff member Jennifer Romo said. "There is no reason, no matter what your beliefs, to deny a source of information to students."

There's no "censorship" going on here, unless she really thinks that the curatorial function of collection management is censorship, in which case she really needs to get into another business. Since you can't collect everything (not even the Library of Congress can...or keep track of it once collected, according to one of our faculty members), you have to decide what doesn't get collected. And politics plays a role in that. I'm not saying that it should (or shouldn't), but that it does. If Jen Romo collects at all, I could probably find evidence of bias in her collecting. (She probably doesn't; I note the "staff member", and while I deplore the "no MLS=not a librarian" mentality, I suspect from the depth of her analysis that she's some student book-shelver.)

With such confusion about the notion of censorship, it's not surprising that the ALA has been reluctant to slap Castro's wrist over his treatment of private Cuban libraries.

As for the denial of information charge, the NYT is so ubiquitous that nobody who really needs it is going to do without. If that were the intent...

"In the real world, it's an almost futile act on many levels," [Kelly McBride] said. "From what we know about the reading habits of college students, it will not make a difference because they read online."

Thanks to WorldNetDaily.

My apologies to everyone who doesn't get the obscure phish reference. I think only Big Nate and Amy will appreciate it...

Check the Pictures!!

My fifth week working the vines... I believe I said I would be on the North Island soon, back on June 5th. Not so. I still wear my secateurs low and back on my right hip, backpack full of food and water, and loppers hung under my arm. I feel like a cowboy; a "vine-slinger". Ripping through plants at a blinding speed of 20 per hour. Well, its good enough for more than $100 a day.

I've decided this is my last week. I've had some great times and made a bit of money, but my hands are constantly aching and I wake up with useless claws. I've also lost sight of my orignal goal for this trip: to experience life in rural NZ. I've only been on one farm in all this time. I met a great Kiwi and Maori, but really don't know much about the people of this country or the lives they lead.

So what has happened so far... The hangi was great with lots of meat: venison, hogget, chicken, pork, fish in coconut oil. And vegetables like kumera, which is the Kiwi sweet potato. I helped out tending the bonfire and removing the hot irons from the bottom. After cleaning out the pit, we put the irons back and put the baskets of food on top. Cover the whole thing with wet sackcloths, throw on more water, and dump dirt over everything until no more steam escapes. A few games of badminton, a bit of rugby, a quick ride on the very tired looking pony, and four hours later, we dug up our food and feasted. The hangi was at a completely organic farm owned by Grant's Maori friends, Frankie and Linda. Their house was great. Made of mud bricks, built by Frankie and Grant, the inside looked like a big treehouse. Does that make sense? There was no carpet or floorings, or drywall, or a real ceiling besides the bottom of the roof.

Last weekend, I was playing a bit of frisbee with Grant when he thought we should go up to Picton. Apparently, his current employer was stuck on his boat in the harbour. The prop on his sailboat was tied up in a rope and his dingy floated away in a storm. Grant had his diving gear and was going to try getting the prop unstuck. By the way, its the middle of winter, and the water is freezing!

So we get up there and have to commandere someone else's. The old guy was pretty crazy. But Grant put on all his gear (7 mm wetsuit and two hoods) and after 15 minutes of cutting with my knife bought in Te Anau, he freed the prop. We motored in to the fuel station and he dropped us off. The payoff: he offered to take us sailing, seeing as how he doesn't really know how and I do :)

Yesterday, I went with a group of backpackers to the local pub for the first time. There were a few farmers in there that had obviously been drinking since sundown. They were still wearing their work clothes and even had dirty gumboots on. And of course, they all wore their wool winter hats inside. I'll never forget the sight of some old dirty farmer lining up his shot at the pool table with the very inappropriate "Since you've been gone" song playing in the background.

So I'm told that it actually rhymes with "cigar", but its still funny. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, you need to rent Napoleon Dynamite--right now. Don't worry. I'll wait...

...

Got it? Yes, now laugh with me. Good. Moving on!

I finally quit the vineyard on Thursday. I don't know how much I made, but I have over $1200 in the bank and a few hundred in my pocket. I really should have made more, but my hands are big balls of cramped muscle, so I couldn't work as fast as I could for 8 hours straight.

But the real news is that I'm leaving for Port Ligar. It's way out in the sounds, on the northern tip of the South Island. I'm staying on a farm/bed and beakfrast about 2 hours on a windy one-lane road (check out the pics). It's a big family that runs the place and there is also a japanese and kiwi girl working there.

I'm really looking forward to getting back to the quiet life out in the country. Living in a backpacker is NOT what travel should be all about, but so many backpackers think thats all there is. Especially British travellers--many of them just pay Kiwi Experience to bus them around the country and see the sights, then go get pissed in the pubs at night. They don't meet anyone else that's not on their bus or that's not English. And they're everywhere. I joke all the time that I came to a foreign country to see the land, meet the people, and learn about English culture, because that's who dominates the backpackers and travel circuit around here. But why am I complaining about them?

Yesterday, Scott and I were on a mission: to build a bonfire on the beach. Scott is a 17-year-old New Zealander from Upper Hutt, north of Wellington. He came down to the South Island to work on the vineyards and stay out of trouble. I guess he's the all-too typical Kiwi youngster. He and some friends stole some cop cars that were sitting in front of the police station, crashed them into each other, and pulled over random drivers around town. When they heard they'd been found out over the police radio, the drove the cars off cliffs north of the city. He said this "wasn't too bad." Hahaha... That's the best story, and only one of many.

But while he was here, I kept an eye out for him and we kept busy doing mostly harmless juvenile projects, like the bonfire. White's Bay is a nice beach 20 minutes from here, on the east coast. You aren't supposed to have fires there (wouldn't be fun it were legal), but we saw a lot of evidence for other fires, and we were on the beach anyway (no fire danger.) We spent a good part of the afternoon gathering drift wood and kindling and chopping it up. Scott, like all Kiwis, knows how to catch every tasty sea creature you can find on the NZ coast. He gathered some mussels off the rocks along the shore, but promptly fell into the sea and dropped everything he had. If you haven't gathered by now, Scott hurts himself or otherwise gets himself into trouble on a regular basis. It makes for pretty entertaining viewing.

We waited around for everyone to get back from work (he quit the week before because he sprained a muscle in his shoulder) and advertised a big bonfire night with a complementary tour of the glowworm cave nearby. Glowworms spin little webs to catch insects and use little lights on their heads to attract them to their traps. On the cave walls, they look like green stars. Basically, we were envisioning a great evening on the beach with a huge fire to keep us warm. Lots of people expressed interest...

and predictable backed out when it was time to go. I don't know if they thought it was too cold out, or too wet, or they were just lazy, but its really annoying to have a bunch of so-called independent travellers which lack any sense of adventure. They would rather do what they always do on a Friday: sit around and drink. And we also were told the road to the beach is gated off at 7 pm, so all the planning was for nothing.

But I'm not one to roll over and die, so I packed my car full of firewood from the hostel and recruited a fun French couple to come down to a different beach. We still saw glowworms, and we still built a fire, though I wouldn't call it a "bon" fire--just big enough to keep us warm if we were close. I had the prescience to buy marshmallows and Scott and I spent two hours roasting them. We ate an entire bag. Still not as good as US marshmallows though.

And scott hurt himself. Several times.

I took him to Picton today so he could catch the ferry home. He has to go to court on Monday. The law (and outstanding warrants) finally caught up with him and he's hoping he'll get only a home detention. Prison is still a possibility. We went into town early, had some coffee, played a round of putt-putt golf (which I won by 2 strokes... I had the score card :), got some fish and chips, and played a bit of pool before we checked in at the ferry terminal. It was late, as usual, and we played Daytona 500 racing at the terminal with some other friends from the backpackers that drove up to see him off.

I won those games, too.

I haven't even talked about the 9 holes of golf I played on Wednesday (I lost a few balls, and successfully used a 5 wood for the first time) or the wine touring I did just before (maybe the reason I lost those golf balls). But I'll keep those memories for later and remember them fondly as part of the 5 weeks I spent in the southern most wine country in the world.

The Mini-ITX box powering schmonz.com has been limping through hardware trouble for the last year. I just bought a Mac mini to replace it. Like its predecessor, it will run NetBSD.

Installing NetBSD on PowerPC Macs can be tedious. The install instructions, assuming that an Apple partition map and a small Mac OS X boot partition are needed for Open Firmware 3 machines, explain how to get Mac OS X and NetBSD to coexist on a single disk. I found a post by Matt Thomas showing these assumptions to be false, and have installed NetBSD all by itself as follows.

1. From another Unix machine, create a small ISO9660 filesystem containing the bootloader:

   mkisofs -r -apple -o boot.iso ofwboot.xcf
   

2. Get to an Open Firmware prompt, then boot the NetBSD 3.0 install CD:

   boot cd:,\ofwboot.xcf netbsd.macppc
   

3. Escape to a shell and copy boot.iso onto the Mac somehow (I newfs‘d a bit of disk and scp‘d it there).
4. Write it to the internal IDE disk:

   dd if=boot.iso of=/dev/wd0c
   

5. Go back to sysinst and install NetBSD.
6. When writing the disklabel, create a 1MB h partition starting at the beginning of the disk, then adjust the a partition to start after h.
7. Point Open Firmware at the bootloader:

   setenv boot-command " screen" output boot
   setenv boot-device hd:OFWBOOT.XCF;1
   setenv auto-boot? true
   reset-all
   

8. Later, if you need to update the bootloader, run mkisofs over the new ofwboot.xcf, then run the same dd command as before, adding the arguments skip=32 seek=32 (this should avoid scribbling over your disklabel).

Thanks to matt and uwe for their help.

Well, It's been a while since I've updated, and a lot of things have happened. Perhaps the most important event was the awarding of the single most expensive piece of paper I own- my diploma. Alas, I am still not done with school, for I have a thesis to write before I can get my MS. I'm currently working on that from home here in Pittsburgh while working at Pittsburgh Digital part time. I hope to be finished by November or so.

Living in Pittsburgh again has actually been quite enjoyable. Those four years in Cleveland really helped my to appreciate my hometown and all of its eccentricites. Pittsburgh may essentially be a backwoods, redneck town with tall buildings, but at least it has some form of culture. Now, I'm not talking about a high-brow brand of culture like New York or Los Angeles. It's more of an "Um gunna head dahn to thu strip an' grab a Primanni's sanwich, pick up a case of Ahrn City beer at the beer distributor, an' watch the fahrworks from Mount Worshington" kind of culture. Sadly, I didn't see much of that in Cleveland.

Cleveland suffers from suburban sprawl in the worst way. There few neighborhoods in the city that have any form of culture besides "urban", and the suburbs are essentially composed of malls and chain restaurants. There are exceptions like Shaker Heights of course, but towns like Strongsville are generally the rule. Even Coventry, Case's trendy nextdoor-neighborhood, is filled with chain restaurants.

It seems to me that Cleveland tries too hard to have the appearance of "big city" culture, but going into town is such a hassle and perceived risk that I don't believe that it pulls it off all that well. I know a lot of people who are actually afraid of going downtown or anywhere else in the city outside of University Circle. The fact that most native Clevelanders at Case do not actually live in the city probably doesn't help this sentiment, either. I do not mean to imply that Pittsburgh is safer in any way, but those that live here certainly act like it is.

Cleveland does have it's advantages. Chipotle and Swenson's are the first two that come to mind. As much as I hate to admit it, Cedar Point is a superior amusement park to Kennywood. The clubbing scene in Cleveland is also a lot better than that of Pittsburgh, since all Pittsburgh really has is the Matrix (the dance club, not the movie, you nerd!). I just don't like clubbing. I'm sure there are other things, but they really aren't coming to mind right now.

So why do I like Pittsburgh better than Cleveland? For one thing, it doesn't pretend to be something it isn't: a big city and culture center. We Pittsburghers are generally content to grab a cool Yuengling, some pierogies, and watch the Buccos lose to yet another mediocre baseball team. But this lack of culture is a kind of culture all its own. Somebody (I can't find the quote online) once said something along the lines of "Pittsburgh is actually the hippest city in the world, if only because it doesn't care at all about being hip". It's also possible to find more "civilized" things to do if you're into that as well. We have a decent theater district and multiple concert venues, and more community theater groups than a city of any size needs. The local music scene is so-so, with the ubiquitous Clarks being the most famous, but it's not difficult to find live music of the genre of your choice on a weekend. Our college town, Oakland, puts University Circle to shame. Just take a walk down Forbes Ave. and try to tell me that you'd prefer the Triangle building and Wackadoo's. And we have neighborhoods, inside the city limits, that you don't have to be afraid to walk through, such as Squirrel Hill, Shadyside, South Side, and the North Shore. It's a beautiful city, especially from Mt. Washington at night. It also helps that our football team is a hell of a lot better (sorry, I couldn't help myself).

Pittsburgh is not a city for everyone. If you want excitement and culture, you'd be better served in New York City. But its lack of pretentiousness is ever so appealing to me, and the restaurants are generally good, although not world class by any means. If you live in Cleveland and have some free time (like during the long Independence Day weekend), you should drive the 130 miles or so and visit the 'Burgh. I'd be happy to point you in the direction of a good bar or restaurant. Just remember that you can't get beer in convenience stores or grocery stores, so plan accordingly!

From 1836 forward, this digital exhibit documents the contributions of African American Scholars at Case to local and global communities. Images and biographies in the collection are a collaborative effort of KSL, University Archives, and Gwendolyn G. Johnson, Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs (Retired).

KSL's Electronic Resources librarian presents a new Research Spotlight each month. Explore this new digital exhibit on the July Research Spotlight!

Well, the new chicken coop is almost done, and the builder is still working in the dark. It's quite the structure; we could use it for a mother-in-law suite. We'll have to paint it, and wire it if we wish.

And I now have a tractor: a 1950 Ford 8N. I drove it home 3 miles, my first tractor driving ever. It shifts backwards from a car, and it doesn't seem to want to shift while in motion, so it took me a mile to find 4th. I eventually got up to 13 mph, according to Rusty, who was driving behind. No tie on, let alone a suit, but I still had my work clothes on and felt quite Oliver Wendell Douglas-ish. Now all I need are some implements so I can actually DO something with it.

With all this excitement, and the long weekend, I completely forgot that I had a choral rehearsal tonight. I feel so bad...mea culpa, mea maxima culpa....especially because I was conducting part of it.

All this work...I suppose that on some level, I'm just a bit too much like French royalty playing nymphs and shepherds. But I'm sure the Sun King never did anything the slightest bit physically dangerous, though his music director certainly did. As I do. But if it were really the case that this is just an extended fête champêtre, we'd need mzwyndi and airrelic to offer the proper degree of authenticity. BYO sheep.

Pictures when it's daylight, if I get a fast enough dialup connection.

Looking to the Past, for the Future: Kelvin Smith Library hosts 6 Future Connections students in June and July, participating in a UCI program that brings 50 Cleveland high school 10th and 11th grade students to a 9-week study/internship program with Circle institutions and area businesses.

The students get to take advantage of new technologies and research tools as they create a documentary video on Cleveland's Underground Railroad history, including the nearby 1853 Cozad-Bates house.

Days are filled with exposure to experts in digital storytelling, and to sessions with librarians for expert research assistance in learning how to best utilize the riches of the KSL collections. They work with the Head of Special Collections and the Preservation Department, using archival primary material unique to Cleveland's role in the Undergound Railroad. Interviews and visits to local sites are documented with their new skills on digital still and videocameras, with guidance of librarians and staff in the KSL Freedman Center, where the final compilation and editing takes place.

Students also work with the Head of Government Documents to search for and use census data for the Cozad-Bates tract, and then use mapping software in the KSL Center for Statistics and Geospatial Data, overlaying various types of information to produce maps and posters that further tell the story of Cleveland's role in history.

The students also spend time in many areas of library services, and are led by staff in Friday book discussions. Developing research skills, working with primary resources, learning about copyright, and creating a video gives these students a chance to develop unique knowledge and skills that will advance their next learning experiences!

“In order to spur economic growth we need to put the brakes on out of control spending and lower Ohioans tax burden.”

FINALLY, the Republicans have put up a true conservative up for election in Ohio. Ken Blackwell is the most powerful candidate for governor in recent times. He brings to the table Reaganomics as well as all of Reagan's other principals.

Ken Blackwell is essentially a black Ronald Reagan. Ken pulled 40% of the black vote in the last election. While I doubt his numbers will be as high this time around, he could pull a significant percentage. He stands for everything that is beneficial to minorities and the rest of the state of Ohio, family values and a strong economy. Blackwell could continue the process started by Bush of bringing the Black vote towards the Republicans as he can relate to them very well. This is key to the future of conservative politics.

He has an excellent plan to encourage more responsible spending in schools. He has devised a plan that would require schools to spend at least 65% of their budget on the classroom. Research has shown that this will create jobs and improve quality of education without even though it involves no tax increase.

Ken Blackwell WILL LOWER TAXES. The most visible will be reducing the sales tax back to its pre-Taft levels. This 20% increase in sales tax should be repealed for more responsible spending can more than make up for this tax. This along with his THREE other tax decreases will help to jump start the stagnant Ohio economy.

What does Ken Blackwell bring to the table? Blackwell brings true conservative politics that would make the greatest president in recent times, Ronald Reagan, jump for joy. He would continue the conservative movement that has been fairly stagnant recently. He would reduce taxes and bring Ohio's economy into the 21st century. Ken Blackwell’s policies will make the poor AND the rich richer. Ken Blackwell has the political knowledge necessary to make Ohio the greatest state in the union.

Below are excerpts from kenblackwell.com

Blackwell's Plan for education:

In an effort to improve Ohio schools’ classroom performance, Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell joined First Class Education National Advisory Chair Patrick Byrne in announcing the start of an Ohio effort to enact what’s been called “The 65 Cent Solution.” The proposal would require every Ohio school district to spend at least 65 cents of each education dollar on “in the classroom” instruction, increasing classroom spending by more than $1.2 billion statewide without a tax increase.

Research shows classroom expenditures are a five times better indicator of academic improvement than overall spending. By requiring school districts to allocate a minimum of 65% of operational budgets to the classroom, we can increase classroom instruction by over $1.2 billion a year without a tax increase. That’s enough to purchase a new computer for every Ohio student or hire 24,000 additional teachers with a starting salary more than $40,000.

According to a June 2005 report by the National Center for Educational Statistics, the Federal clearing house of education research, Ohio ranks a dismal 47th nationally, with only 57.4% of education money reaching Ohio’s classrooms.

Support for the First Class Education proposal -- dubbed “The 65 Cent Solution” by syndicated columnist George Will – has grown into a national movement in the six months since its February 2005 unveiling. Louisiana and Kansas have both passed “65 cent legislation” and Texas Governor Rick Perry has signed an Executive Order enacting the 65 Cent Solution. Citizen ballot initiatives are in the works in Arizona, Colorado and Washington. Legislative referrals to the ballot are under consideration in more than an additional half-dozen states. According to a study by the Independence Institute of Colorado comparing education spending in all 50 states with National Assessment of Education Progress 4th and 8th grade test scores, the percentage of money reaching the classroom was a five times greater determinant of increased test scores than the total amount of money spent. Blackwell and Byrne will work together over the next several months to create a strategy to give Ohio voters the opportunity to pass the 65 Cent Solution in November 2006, whether by legislative referral or citizen petition. First Class Education estimates that voters in approximately a dozen states will have the opportunity to vote for The 65 Cent Solution on November 2006 ballots. Polls conducted in 10 states consistently showed overwhelming voter approval of the requirement that school districts spend a minimum of 65% of their education operational budgets on classroom instruction, with support ranging from 72% to 92%. This will give students a chance for a better education so they can compete in today’s global marketplace.

Specifics of First Class Education’s “The 65 Cent Solution”
Every school district shall achieve a minimum of 65% of their budget being spent on “classroom instruction” using the National Center for Educational Statistics definitions.
School Districts that currently fall below the 65% goal shall be required to increase that percentage by a minimum of 2% a year until the 65% goal is met.
School Districts would be required to send their annual proposed budgets to the Governor verifying that the 65% goal or 2% annual improvement is being made.
School Districts that believe they can neither meet the 65% goal nor 2% annual improvement may petition the Governor for a renewable one-year waiver along with their proposal of what can be achieved toward reaching the 65% goal.
The Governor shall have 30 days to either deny or grant the one-year waiver or grant a partial one-year waiver short of the 65% goal or 2% annual increase.
The Legislature will have the opportunity to determine what action may be taken if School Districts do not comply with the requirements.
Definition of Classroom Instruction by the National Center for Educational Statistics

“In the Classroom”
Classroom Teachers, Personnel
General Instruction Supplies
Instructional Aides
Activities -- Field Trips, Athletics, Music, Arts
Special Needs Instruction
Tuition Paid to Out-of State Districts & Private Institutions for Special Needs Students

“Outside the Classroom”
Administration
Plant Operations & Maintenance
Food Services
Transportation
Instructional Staff Support
Student Support – Nurses, Therapists, Counselors

Blackwell on the economy:

We need more jobs. Ohio was ranked 47th in job creation in 2005. This is the greatest challenge facing our state today. We need to change the way we do business if we want to spur economic growth.

Government does not create wealth. Entrepreneurs, individuals and families are the ones who take risks, innovate, create, and grow our economy. Ohio needs to create a pro-job, pro-growth, business friendly environment in order to rebuild our economy.

Ronald Reagan once said that the status quo was Latin for "the mess we are in".

The status quo is destroying Ohio’s economy. Out of control tax and spend policies have created the mess we are in.

What the State government has imposed on Ohioans is a travesty.

In the last ten years our state budget has increased by 71% and thrown our economy and its citizens into economic turmoil. Ohio leads the nation in increased government spending.

The current fiscal policies have failed. Ohio has moved from eleventh to the third most tax burdened state in the union. And it’s getting worse! The latest budget raises taxes $4.24 billion and claims to be tax reform because in four years, Ohioans will receive $1.96 billion in tax decreases.

This is not tax reform. This maintains the status quo and we need a change.

A recent state budget, approved by the legislature and Governor Taft, included the second largest tax increase in Ohio’s history. These types of tax and spend policies, which smother job growth, are supported by my Republican challenger.

The out-of-control spending of the state government has to stop.

Blackwell on taxes:

In a restrained and responsible government spending model, these are the tax policies Ken Blackwell is proposing:

First, over a four year period, Ken Blackwell would convert our income tax to a single rate system, with the target rate of 3.25%. This will simplify the tax structure and be a more growth oriented approach. This will also have the added benefit of reducing tax on capital gains, which Ohio treats as regular income.

Second, we will eliminate the stand alone estate tax. In conjunction with this elimination, we will increase the definition of residency for tax purposes from the current 120 days to 180 days or more. This will put Ohio in a much more competitive position.

Third, Ken Blackwell will keep the promise made and repeal the sales tax increase so we return to a 5% sales tax rate. Ken Blackwell has led the charge to repeal the 20% increase in the sales tax while both Ken Blackwell's opponents supported the tax increase. It was sold to the public as temporary tax but a portion is now being made permanent.

Fourth, we must exempt energy consumption from the Commercial Activity Tax (CAT).

I just read my copy of the newsletter for the Gender, Diversity, and Organizations division of the Academy of Management, which mentioned a very interesting new book which is in the development stages. It's called Living Life: Stories of Women, Men and Changing Roles in the 20th Century. The premise of the project is that stories about the progress of gender equity need to be told so that we can both cherish and protect these gains.

Click through on the book title to read more! There is an online survey that you can complete to share your stories with the project directors.

I just saw a remarkable film The Battle of Algiers. Made in black and white (French with English subtitles) in 1966 by the Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, the story is about the Algerian struggle for independence and the battle between the rebels and the French colonial powers in the capital city of Algiers in the period 1954-1960.

In order to deal with the increasing violence during this period, the French government sends in elite paratroopers led by Colonel Mathieu. Mathieu sets about ruthlessly identifying the structure of the insurgent network, capturing and torturing members to get information on others, and killing and blowing up buildings in his pursuit of the rebels even if it contains civilians. And yet, he is not portrayed as a monster. In one great scene where he is giving a press conference, he is asked about his methods of getting information and the allegations of torture. He replies quite frankly that the French people must decide if they want to stay in Algeria or leave, and if they want to halt the violence against them or let it continue. He says that if they want to stay and stop the violence, then they must be prepared to live with the consequences of how that is achieved. It is the French people's choice.

One gets the sense that Mathieu does not torture and kill suspects because he enjoys it. He is simply an amoral man, who has been given a job to do and he will get it done using whatever means he deems necessary. This is the kind of military person that political leaders want. They don't want people who worry about the niceties of human rights and human dignity. But when you train people to deny their normal human feelings, then you get the kind of people who carry out the tortures described in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and who are even surprised when there is an outcry that what they did was wrong.

And Mathieu does succeed in his task, at least in the short run. By his ruthless methods he destroys the rebel network. But all that this buys is some time. After a lull in the violence for a couple of years, a sudden eruption of mass protests results in Algeria becoming independent in 1962. The French win the battle of Algiers but lose the war of independence.

The film gives a remarkably balanced look at the battle, avoiding the temptation to fall into easy clichés about good and evil. It shows the FLN (National Liberation Front) using women and children to carry out its bombing campaign against French civilians living in the French areas of the city. In one memorable sequence, three young Muslim women remove their veils, cut their hair, put on makeup, and dress like French women to enable them to carry bombs in their bags and pass through military checkpoints that surround the Muslim sector of the city (the Casbah). They place those bombs in a dance hall, coffee shop and Air France office, bombs that explode with deadly effect killing scores of civilians who just happen to be there.

In one scene:

Pontecorvo deals with the issue of the killing of innocents by an army vs. such killing by an irregular force. During a press conference, a reporter asks a captured official of the FLN: "Isn’t it a dirty thing to use women’s baskets to carry bombs to kill innocent people?" To which the official answers, "And you? Doesn’t it seem even dirtier to you to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages with thousands of innocent victims? It would be a lot easier for us if we had planes. Give us your bombers, and we’ll give you our baskets."

The parallels of Algeria and Iraq are striking, so much so that it is reported that the US policy makers and military viewed this film with a view to hoping to learn how to combat the Iraq insurgency.

As in Iraq, the rebels are Muslims and the objections they have to being ruled by non-Muslims plays an important role in their motivation to revolt. The French had just humiliatingly lost in Vietnam in 1954 and their military was anxious to rehabilitate their reputations by winning elsewhere. In other words, they had their own 'Vietnam syndrome' to deal with, just like the US.

In the film, you see how the ability of the insurgents to blend in with the urban population enables them to move around and carry out attacks on the French police and citizenry, with women and children playing important roles. We see how the privileged and western lifestyle of the French people in Algeria makes them easy targets for attacks. We see how the attacks on French people and soldiers in Algeria causes great fury amongst the French citizenry, causing them to condone the torture and killing and other brutal methods of the French troops.

One major difference between the French involvement in Algeria and US involvement is Iraq is that Algeria had been occupied by the French for 130 years, since 1830. They had been there for so long that they considered it part of France and refused to consider the possibility of independence. The long occupation also resulted in a significant number of French people living in the city of Algiers, thus making them vulnerable targets. In Iraq, there are very few US civilians and almost all of them are in the heavily fortified so-called 'green zone.'

The film takes a balanced look at what an urban guerilla war looks like and those who wish to see what might be currently happening in cities like Ramadi and Falluja and Baghdad can get a good idea by seeing this film. The scenes of mass protest by huge crowds of Algerians and their suppression by the occupying French forces are so realistic that the filmmakers put a disclaimer at the beginning stating that no documentary or newsreel footage had been used. And amazingly, this realism was achieved with all novice actors, people who were selected off the streets of Algiers. Only the French Colonel Mathieu was played by a professional actor, but you would not believe it from just seeing the film since the actors give such natural and polished performances, surely a sign of a great director.

For a good analysis of the film and background on its director, see here. The film is available at the Kelvin Smith Library.

POST SCRIPT: Documentary about Rajini Rajasingham-Thiranagama

Today at 10:00 pm WVIZ Channel 25 in Cleveland is showing No More Tears Sister. I wrote about this documentary earlier.

CNET News.com on May 25, 2006, took a look at various film cameras following the announcement that Nikon and Canon will no longer be developing film cameras.

Earlier today, I had my first experience using proper web conferencing software. In the past, I used to phone in to lab meetings, but that had various drawbacks and limitations, and I was much more impressed with the solution we used today.

Marratech makes teleconferencing software, and they offer a somewhat restricted free client. The client is unable to handle more than 5 concurrent connections (not an issue for my use), and restricted to only using public 'rooms' on their servers, which could potentially be an issue but so far the people I know who use this haven't had any issues with strangers intruding. Here's what the service offers:

Voice connection

This is much like Skype, with noticeably more background hiss but also one advantage: I find that using Skype with speakers creates a very irritating echo, which is absent on Marratech. For most phone calls this doesn't matter—I prefer to be on headphones anyway and have never liked speakerphones—but when it comes to connecting to lab meetings I would want to be on speaker because I'd be talking to a group of people at once.

Video

I don't have a webcam and am not terribly interested in getting one, but some of colleagues' laptops have them built-in, so we could see how it works. The picture is of OK quality, but motion like the normal way people gesture when they talk gets blurred beyond recognition. What I really appreciate about the video function, however, is the possibility of just pointing the camera at a blackboard so that I can see what someone is drawing out and referring to as they speak. For that, I'm pretty sure the video is good enough.

Application sharing

This is a handy feature that I'd never seen before: the client software can connect to other applications on the user's desktop, and share them [at least their output - I'm not sure about input] with the other users in the conference. The advantage over simply sending documents via email is that everyone sees the same thing, so a user [definitely the owner of the application being shared - I'm not sure about the other users] can control where in the document we all are.

Shared whiteboard

For one-to-one communication, this one is the killer, and a service that just had this would be enough (I can always use Skype simultaneously for a voice connection, or something terribly old-fashioned like the POTS). The people in a conference can share a space in which anyone can draw or type notes. This is the best electronic equivalent I've seen to a physical shared drawing space (be it a whiteboard, flipchart or just some paper on a desk), and until someone does me a favour by inventing teleportation, I think it will be very useful. It's still not quite as easy as having a physical thing to draw on, but on the other hand it allows me to type text, which given the unclarity of my handwriting is probably a good thing.

Amid implication that the economy is not growing anymore, the GDP is up by 5.6%, the biggest gain in 2.5 years. People need to realize that one cannot say the economy is bad because the unemployment level has not dropped. The natural unemployment rate is around 5% in the US. In a healthy US economy, there is an unemployment rate around 5% as there is right now. Basically, there are always people between jobs. Once one dips below the natural unemployment rate, inflation will take over. That is one reason why we are seeing some mild inflation right now. We have reached that threshold of natural unemployment. Everyone is looking for the “boom” of the 90’s. That is not good for the long term. A healthy unemployment rate around 5% will ensure long term economic prosperity.

In the United States, trials have been used to determine whether security detectors can be installed in train and metro stations. These were studied because of an apparent threat of attacks by "terrorist" elements on US' transportation systems, and because of the Madrid and London bombing attacks.

However, in both Madrid and London, extra security and improvements in camera technology have been made, but installing so-called security metal detectors have not been done. One, installing detectors places a huge inconvenience on the populace from using the fastest means of transportation. It would force commuters to utilise the buses or taxis in order to get to their destination rather than waiting in a queue unnecessarily. Oh wait, they did bomb a London bus, so that means in order to preserve security, we should install metal detectors for passengers to walk through while entering the vehicle. Let's see how long that will take. Also, the increased use of taxis would cause an increase in traffic jams and furthering more inconvenience for the traveller.

But wait, this is all done to protect us. But how can you make a system 100% safe. People can still get into fights on a train, or knifed or strangled for example. The train could suffer a derailment or a loss of electrical power due to a downed transformer or loss of signal. These transportation systems were a means of convenience for the populace so they can get to point B from point A without using their personal transportation vehicle. They are also used by millions of commuters in order to work in the city from the suburbs.

Who know if you asked a fellow commuter about installing a metal detector at every train station, would he/she feel safe about it? The most likely answer would be "only if it adds a few minutes to my trip." For a metro system size like New York City and DC, a few minutes is the only thing that can be tolerated, but if you try to get people through a metal detector at busy Union Station, it will take much more than that. People talk about making compromises, but in reality, we all take a risk in our daily lives to get to work. There will always be a chance of getting into an accident, but we take the risk knowing that as long we keep ourselves safe and vigilant, we will survive. This is based on our own personal responsibility. We cannot sacrifice everything convenient for security... imagine security guards and detectors at supermarkets, movie theatres, museums, and restaurants. A security-addict society just because of fear. I thought we were not going down that road, but it seems we are.