All In Perspective
From a report about Exxon's latest record earnings*, this extraordinary statement
For the full year, net income surged to $5.71 per share from $3.89 per share in 2004. Annual revenue grew to $371 billion from $298.04 billion.
To put that into perspective, Exxon's revenue for the year exceeded Saudi Arabia's estimated 2005 gross domestic product of $340.5 billion, according to statistics maintained by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Now, I'm not talking about the statement about Exxon's revenues, which is extraordinary, but about the helpful "putting into perspective" that the revenues were about the same as the GDP of Saudi Arabia.
Does the average reader know more — or have more perspective on that number — knowing that it's comparable to the GDP of a country whose economics are not terribly familiar? Please! That's about as helpful as saying the earnings in dollars is about the same as the number of miles in a light-week, or the number of sperm the average man produces in a year (about 390 billion). Even saying that it's nearly 5% of the US national debt is more revealing. (It is, however, only about 50% greater than Wal*Mart's yearly revenues.)
How about something that really gives a sense of how big such a number is. Something like: imagine that you were able to spend $10,000/hour, 24/7, 365.25 days a year, a pretty breathtaking pace — for perspective, that's over 4 new Hummer H2s each day (use the surplus to buy the gas) . It would take you over 42 thousand years to spend Exxon's yearly revenue.
Or, suppose we were to use the money to pay out to people an amount equal to the median US income in 2004: $44.4 thousand. Exxon's yearly revenues would pay the median income to 8.3 million workers. For perspective, that's about 11 workers for every mile between Earth and the Sun.
To my mind, either of these comparisons gives quite a bit more "perspective" than the GDP of Saudia Arabia
———-
* Steve Quinn, "Exxon Mobil Posts Record Profit for 2005", Associated Press / Yahoo! News, 30 January 2006.
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Splenetics
Sequences of Integers
While I was doing a bit of personal research on sudoku puzzles today, I tripped over the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, maintained by Neil J. A. Sloane, an AT&T Fellow.
You might wonder for a moment what an "on-line encyclopedia of integer sequences" might be, but the answer is indeed as obvious as it sounds. The database, at the moment that I'm writing, contains 114873 integer sequences, series of numbers that arise in some mathematical context or another, generally where there's some formula or recipe for generating the next number in the sequence given one or more of the numbers that will precede it.
The results of a sequence search arrive with a gratifying amount of information packed onto the page: generating functions, algorithms for use with math packages, some history of the sequence, references to literature about the sequences. Oh, it appeals mightily to my archivist-type obsession for gathering up complete information about things, usually totally unimportant things.
Well, suppose that it sounds too good not to investigate, but you can't think of a sequence to try. No fear! Mr. Sloane has provided a "demo", a sequence of pages that show off aspects of the database and give plenty of ideas for one's own searches.
Why am I mentioning it? Well, because it's cool, and I needed to make a note of it someplace, and because I know there are some others like me who can be mesmerized by the patterns of infiinite variety (and infinite interest) one can make from whole numbers.
[4 April 2006 Update: I've added the "e" to Dr. Sloane's name, per the comment. Ooops! As one whose name is frequently misspelled, I extend my humble apologies to Dr. Sloane for my error.]
In: All, Curious Stuff, The Art of Conversation
Washington State on Gay Rights
We got the news last Friday that the State of Washington finally passed some gay-rights legislation that has been pending since forever. This is the same bill that lost last year by one vote, which loss was thought to be spurred by Microsoft's taking its support away from the bill — and that action was laid at the feet of a few wacko bible-thumpers and the advice of Ralph Reed, who was being paid an enormous retainer at the time to give bad advice to Microsoft. Fortunately, there was a mini-scandal and Reed was cut loose for reasons claimed at the time to have absolutely nothing to do with the mini-scandal. How interesting it is now, at this remove, to see that Jack Abramoff was mentioned in the same news story that talked about the Reed situation.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer article has a good account of the lone Republican who changed his vote between last year and this year to make the win possible. He'd finally realized that perhaps beating up on gay and lesbian people because of who they love might not be all that great an idea. He was not praised, of course, by his fellow Republicans who offered their own opinions about how the bible says it's all wrong and — you just wait and see! — it's the first step on a slipperly slope to something. Why, soon gays and lesbians will start to feel like full citizens or something.
Intellectually, I'd really like to feel motivated to cheer and hoot for this little crumb of equality, but I find myself feeling very much in the "it's about time" camp instead. Perhaps I'm finally of an age where I just don't feel like waiting for obviously right things any more.
In: All, Plus Ca Change..., Splenetics
The Gay Boyfriend
We spent the evening at some friends' house — they were hosting a party for another friend, who turned 50 today. I was hoping to pick up some pointers on crossing the 50s threshold since I'm going to be doing it myself in just a few months.
Anyway, late in the evening I was having some conversation with the hosts' son, who is himself turning 5 tomorrow. I usually understand most of what he tells me, although sometimes it takes a bit of warming up to tune my ear to his particular youthful dialect.
At one point he asked "Do you know what I got for Christmas?"
"Why no, what did you get?"
"Mommy and Daddy gave me a gay boyfriend!"
I will admit that this announcement nearly took my breath away. His parents are certainly progressive, but this struck me as even too progressive for them. I did my best to show no reaction on my face and maintain a neutral tone of voice.
"Oh — how nice! Would you tell me more about it?"
As he related more details, it gradually became clear that what he'd actually received was a "game boy".
That realization came as a bit of a relief. Of course, it provided a few moments of great amusement when I related the story later, after all the kids had gone to bed. We all agreed that the gay boyfriend might be nice, but probably in a few years when he could enjoy it more.
Cottonmouth Water Moccasins
Continuing the path started in a previous small but informative posting ("Clam Names") towards sorting out common names for common objects, today I discovered in reading the latest New Yorker that the "water moccasin" and "cottonmouth" snake are one and the same. Ever since my youth, when we'd visit my maternal grandparents on their farm and scare ourselves by spotting huge cottonmouths — or water moccasins! — in their pond, I've been confused on this issue.
But no more! From the letters to the editor:
Frazier's interesting piece on wild hogs ["Hogs Wild", 12 December issue] includes some common misinformation when it refers to protecting oneself from "the water moccasins and cottonmouths that inhabit the swamp." In fact, there is but one species of venomous water snake native to North America, Agkistrodon piscivorus, known in some parts of its range as the cottonmouth, in others as the water moccasin, and in some as both. The term "water moccasin" is also used in some locales in reference to nonvenomous water snakes of the genus Natrix, but one would not need snake boots for protection from these.
Douglas J. McReynolds
Fayette, Iowa[The New Yorker, 23 & 30 January 2006, p. 9.]
Bush "Bracing for Impeachment"
According to an article ("Impeachment hearings: The White House prepares for the worst", Insight, 23–29 January 2006) published by the conservative publisher of The Washington Times:
The Bush administration is bracing for impeachment hearings in Congress.
The article — surprisingly — makes it sound quite plausible, in fact, that
The Bush administration is bracing for impeachment hearings in Congress.
Regardless, it just seemed to me that, in this day of Google bombs and the Bush League's own belief that saying something enough makes it true, it might be worth mentioning a few times that
The Bush administration is bracing for impeachment hearings in Congress.
At any rate, for those of us who think that the Iraq war, Katrina, and domestic surveillance (to name only a very few) are rather more serious than a blow-job, it would seem quite reasonable that
The Bush administration is bracing for impeachment hearings in Congress.
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Leadership & Conviction
Molly Ivins is a bit ticked* off with the Democrats, but then, who isn't?
What kind of courage does it take, for mercy's sake? The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush's tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes.
The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do "whatever it takes" to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. WHO ARE YOU AFRAID OF?
One reaction I had to these paragraphs was the shock of discovering that I — an old-fart homosexual white boy — am mainstream. Tarnation! After spending all these years thinking I'm a social outlaw, I end up discovering that I and most of my fellow Americans actually think the same way on most important social issues. I am shocked.
Ms. Ivins point, of course, is that the Democrats 1) are spineless non-leaders, who 2) have bought into the fundamentalist Republican rhetoric about where the much-beloved "center" is to be found in American society that they are missing the point altogether. Winess
…people like Rahm Emanuel superciliously explaining elementary politics to us clueless naifs outside the Beltway ("First, you have to win elections"). Can't you even read the damn polls?
She is, of course, correct. The real heartland center of America is far, far away from the oily, smelly blob that the Republicans keep pointing to. Trust me, I'm from Kansas, I know these things.
But there's more to my mind. Democrats should be espousing these principles not because the majority support them. Good heavens! I'm gay and I'm never going to suggest blindly following the majority opinion. However, the positions that she mentions above, all approved of by the majority, also happen to be the correct positions. "Correct", you might wonder? Sure, I believe that they have behind them the full force of a sensible, coherent, liberal philosophy, and I'm arrogant enough to call them "correct".
Even so, there's more. People seem to want leadership even more than they want correct leadership. So, in this case where the ideas to support are even "correct", strong leadership from conviction is even more important — and winning (pace Mr. Emanuel) than ever.
I guess this means that I agree with Ms. Ivins. Vehemently agree. What kind of courage does it take?
__________
*Molly Ivins, "I will not support Hillary Clinton for president", The Free Press, 20 January 2006.
Two Physics Questions
Angry Professor at "A Gentleman's C" asked two questions that caught my attention:
- Is there a difference between an electromagnetic field and an electromagnetic wave?
- Why does the addition of particle detectors in the two-slit experiment cause the collapse of the wavefunction?
Good, physics type questions. Naturally I started thinking about answers. I was finally provoked to write the answers down, though, through irritation. My irritation was at the willingness of the people in her comments to provide "answers" who didn't really understand at all what they were talking about. It reminded me of my early days with Usenet newsgroups when (and this is still prevalent, of course) person A would ask a question and persons B-ZY would say that, although the didn't know anything about the subject and had no idea about the answer, they'd be happy to offer their ill-informed opinions anyway. Person ZZ would invariably point out to person A that person A should really be interested in an entirely different question and was wasting time asking this one.
So, on the off chance that anyone might be intereted, here are my answers as I wrote them in Angry's comments:
EM fields and EM waves are really two distinct, but intimately related concepts. A field in general is just a mathematical concept that assigns numbers to every point in space. They may be scalar fields or M-dimensional vector fields, continuous or not, static or time varying. Hydrodynamic fields specify a fluid's velocity throughout space. EM fields specify the EM force as a function of spatial variables and time.
Stationary electric charges are the sources of static electric fields. Electric currents (steadily flowing electric charge) are the sources of magnetic fields. This connection between E and M is why they're called EM fields. EM fields are completely described by Maxwell's equations: four, first-order partial differential equations.
EM waves are time-dependent, propagating disturbances in the EM field, if you want to think of them that way. Propagating means that they travel in some direction and carry energy in the direction of travel. They are created by accelerating electric charges and are solutions of the second-order, partial differential equation, the "wave equation", which is impicit in Maxwell's equations. In modern thought, EM waves are identified with photons (just as "gravitons" are identified with the waves that presumably propagate through gravitational fields when masses accelerate).
The results of the double-slit experiment have nothing to do with interactions with photons from the detectors — this is some sort of mistaken impression [that was mentioned in the original question, but I cut it out]. It is an entirely quantum-identified effect. In short, the surprising result was that with one slit there was no interference effect; with two slits there was. This was thought to demonstrate the unequivocal wave-nature of light because how could a particle "know" which slit to go through? Waves, having spatial extent, can sense the presence of the second slit, provided the spacing of the slits is near the wavelength of the waves. The experiment was first done with light, but it can also be done with particles with suitable "slits".
The answer to the conundrum from quatum mechanics is that the "particle" is really a "probability wave" that can sense both slits when they are present. According to the "Copenhagen Interpretation" of QM, the probability wavefunction has physical reality while the "particle" it represents has none until the act of observation, which instantaneously "collapses" the wavefunction and localizes the particle (in accordance with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle) due to the act of detection itself. However, this result has nothing to do with the nature of the detector, and certainly nothing to do with interacting photons.
The Copenhagen Interpretation is not part of QM; the mathematical formalism works fine without it. It is, indeed, an interpretation of physical processes, and not everyone who uses QM believe the CI. It is claimed as the source of all those new-age ideas about how our minds alter the universe by "observing it", ideas that demonstrate more clearly a lack of understanding of QM than an understanding of the universe.
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science
Christian Tyranny & Original Intent
I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
(Jefferson discussing the fight over the establishment of one form of Christianity in the U.S. to Dr. Benjamin Rush, September 23, 1800. Peterson, Merrill, ed. Jefferson: Writings. New York: Literary Classics of the U.S.: Distributed to the trade in the U.S. and Canada by the Viking Press, c1984, p. 1082.)
In: All, Common-Place Book
Who Owns What in America
Nancy Pelosi, current Democratic leader of the House of Representatives, published an op-ed this weekend in The Washington Post, calling for wider sharing of classified information between the White House and Congress as a means to better oversight by the Congress of intelligence-gathering activities understaken by the White House. This, of course, in light of the president's authorizing the National Intelligence Agency to go ahead with likely illegal — and certainly undemocratic — electronic surveillance of Americans.
I won't argue with her proposal or with her rather tepid accusation of presidential abuses of power, which abuses have become overt and egregious. However, I will take her to task for a bit of her rhetoric. When she wrote
The products of our intelligence agencies belong to the government, of which Congress is an equal branch. The executive branch operates intelligence programs and activities, and Congress oversees and pays for them — and thus has a responsibility to ensure that they are effective and carried out in a manner consistent with the Constitution, our laws and our values.
[Nancy Pelosi, "The Gap in Intelligence Oversight", The Washington Post, 15 January 2005.]
I feel certain that what she meant to say was that the "products of our intelligence agencies belong to the American People", that "Congress oversees intelligence gathering as representatives of the American People", and that "the American People pay for intelligence activities".
Undoubtely it was just an oversight, a slight slip of the finger in her word processor as she prepared her remarks.
In: All, Plus Ca Change..., Splenetics
The Religious Lifestyle
Via Misty at Shakespeare's Sister, I've read the interesting news that the University of California is denying credit for some courses taught at a "Christian" High School. Skipping entirely over whatever merits there may be to the suit brought by the high school — for my money they're a bunch of cry-baby fundamentalists — I was interested by this bit of the story:
The civil rights lawsuit filed by Calvary Chapel ["Christian" School] alleges that the 10-campus University of California is trampling the freedom of "a religious school to be religious." UC rejected the content of courses such as "Christianity's Influence in American History" and "Christianity and Morality in American Literature."
In court documents, UC says the free-speech clause of the First Amendment gives it the right to set admission standards. "What we're looking for is this: Is the course academic in nature, or is it there to promote a specific religious lifestyle?" UC spokeswoman Ravi Poorsina says.
Maybe it's only because I'm gay, hence living an alternative "lifestyle", but I'm quite interested to see that this school may be promoting a "religious lifestyle". Tsk, tsk. I think we should follow the lead of the forward looking UC and henceforth always refer to fundamentalists as having succumbed to the "religious lifestyle".
Worried to Death
A few nights ago I finished reading the book Buried Alive*, which I found fascinating and informative and generally easy to read. One should note that it is, in addition, a comprehensive and credible work concerning the topic. Anyway, some things continue to puzzle me after closing the book on the last page. These are puzzlements not about the book, but about the human behavior it describes.
The most puzzling that I found occurred during the height of the fear-of-premature-burial anxiety that siezed Germany and France (mostly) roughly between 1750–1850. It was a time that saw a great deal of development in two main areas: "safety caskets" designed with various additions like breathing tubes, little bells to ring, hammers to break them open, or extra food, all just in case the unthinkable should happen; and "waiting mortuaries", mostly in Germany, buildings where corpses were put for a few days until putrefaction+ became obvious and death assured. Those in the waiting mortuaries usually had strings attached to toes and fingers so that bells would ring should they twitch so that assistance might rush in. Neither of these, though, is what troubles me.
Many people, fearing premature burial, put special provisions in their wills, thereby hoping to avoid a ghastly and terrifying fate. What surprised me was the nature of these provisions and what they said about the specific fear. I would have thought the fear would be fear of death, of being buried when one still had days left. However, it seems that the real fear was waking up inside a buried coffin and "dying again".
The distinction? Rather than specifying that their presumed corpses should be kept safely above ground until it was clear that they were actually corpses, many people specified things like:
- opening their arteries so that all blood might drain out;
- plunging a long needle into their heart; and/or
- cutting off their heads.
In other words, they asked that steps be taken that would make it absolutely certain that they were dead, rather than possibly alive and merely suffering from der Scheintod (the "death trance"). In other words: they were so afraid of being buried alive that they insisted on being definitively killed before burial.
I find that incomprehensible, but maybe not so surprising.
———-
* Jan Bondeson, Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2001).
+At the time, the onset of decay was considered the most reliable — really, the only reliable sign of death. Figuring out when someone is dead is not so easy as it sounds. This period saw several prizes offered on the continent for someone to come up with a reliable, quick indicator of death. The first crude stethescopes were just appearing and the winning idea was the lack of a heartbeat, although this was not always unambiguous and took some time to win over adherents.
These days, brain-death is taken as the point of death, which leaves organ-donors in a better position (as it were) for their organs to be "collected" (the word used to be "harvested", but apparently it's considered too insensitive these days). For an account of this aspect, I can recommend: Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 2004).
Curiously, I had just finished Stiff before taking up Buried Alive, which seemed a suitable successor.
In: All, Books, Curious Stuff
Indescribable Gay Sex
Pam at Pam's House Blend ("Out Mag: "Is Alabama really the worst place to be a gay person in Bush's America?") quoted Out Magazine quoting former-judge Roy Moore, the Ten-Commandment-Lover of Alabama:
Alabama’s highest judicial officer declared homosexuality “abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature.” Gay sex, he wrote, is “an act so heinous that it defies one’s ability to describe it,” an “inherent evil” that “should never be tolerated.”
As I mentioned a few posts back, December and the wee hours of its morning were rather productive for me in that I finished five short stories. Recall that I write stories of the adult persuasion, in fact of the gay-adult persuasion; more details via the Jay Neal link above or right.
All I wanted to point out, to former-judge Moore and those like him who are also persuaded that gay sex is so "heinous that it defies one's ability to describe it", is that it's not all that difficult to describe, actually. In fact, I managed it several times, in several interesting variants, in December alone! If they don't believe me, I can recommend several enlightening anthologies.
I mean, it's not like it's rocket science or anything.
Feeling a Little Derivative
I knew a mathematician who had a recurrent dream. He dreamt that he was a partial derivative.
[Jeremy Bernstein, A Theory for Everything (Singer-Verlag, New York, 1996), p. 263.]
This quotation no doubt tells you more about me than I expect, but when I read it I found it terribly funny. I also have the strong conviction that it's saying "partial derivative" that makes it so funny; "He dreamt he was a derivative" barely provokes a smile. I doubt, though, that it would be at all funny to someone who has no idea what a partial derivative is.
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Laughing Matters
Nixon-Like Quagmires
I am rather enjoying reading accounts of the unravelling of the Bush Felonious Wiretapping Scandal, and find myself wondering, of the following, which is the more invidious comparison to become current for the administration:
- Calling the elective war in Iraq "another Vietnam quagmire"; or
- Callig Bush's escapades "Nixon-like"?
Either would seem to me to be a political kiss-of-death, although it's true that Republicans these days seem nearly as impervious to destruction as cockroaches.
Beginning One's Life Story
One of [Philip] Pullman's* beliefs is that your life begins when you are born, but your life story begins when you realize that you were delivered into the wrong family by mistake.
[From: Laura Miller, "Far From Narnia", The New Yorker, 26 December 2005 & 2 January 2006 (double issue), p. 58.]
———-
* Philip Pullman is the author of a cycle of "children's" books known collectively as His Dark Materials.
In: All, Common-Place Book, The Art of Conversation
Glenn Dale Azaleas
History of Glenn Dale Azaleas
Ben Morrison, the first director of The National Arborteum, began a project which lasted from 1920-1953, to develop a broad range of evergreen azaleas which were hardy in the Washington area. He did the bulk of his hybridizing at the Plant Introduction Center, here in Glenn Dale. Over four hundred and fifty cultivars were introduced and sent to nurseries and gardens throughout the country. Glenn Dale Azaleas are featured in the National Arboretum and are planted around the United States Capitol.
Boxlee [Azalea Farm] was one of 10 Nationwide Nurseries selected to reintroduce name-true Glenn Dale Azaleas as part of the "10 Oaks Project" in conjunction with the American Azalea Society. The Glenn Dale Azalea is the Prince George's County Shrub.
Boxlee is home to two Historic Sites in Prince George's County and sits on 10 acres.
[From a brochure: "Planting and Care of Azaleas", published by The Boxlee Azalea Farm, 6106 Hillmeade Road, Glenn Dale, Maryland.]
The history of the Glenn Dale Azaleas is of some interest to us here at The Bearcastle*, since — although our postal address is Bowie, MD — we actually live in the unincorporated area of Pince George's Country called Glenn Dale, birthplace of these azaleas. The Plant Introduction Center where they were hybridized is long gone now, but its site is only a few miles from us, and the Boxlee Azalea Farm mentioned above is just on the next major street over from ours, a rather unexpected resident in the midst of all the housing developments that surround us.
For our part, we also have some Glenn Dale azaleas that we acquired a couple of years ago from Boxlee; four have survived so far. Glenn Dales are often recognizable because their flowers tend towards more pastel shades than other azaleas. Also, the flowers often are larger than others, and frequently show a characteristic pattern of dark dots in the troat. Many varieties have "hose-in-hose" blooms (i.e., a flower with two trumpets, one in the throat of the other).
———–
*I don't know that I've ever explained why this blog, and our domain, is named "Bearcastle". Almost tautologically, the simple reason is that when we built our current house in 1997, after great deliberation we chose to name it "Björnslottet", which translates from the Swedish as "The Bear Castle". (N.B. The definite article "the" is part of the one-word name.)
Why that name? I'm afraid the answer is not very deep: our previous house Isaac had taken to calling "The Bear House" and, sometimes, "Björnhusset", the same in Swedish. So, when we were looking for a new name, that was our starting point. Why Swedish? No terribly good reason beyond choosing it to honor some very good friends of ours who live in Sweden.
Break a Leg!
Ecce homo!
To my four regular readers, and to anyone else who might have noticed and wondered, I have now an explanation for my sudden and total silence in this space since 4 November.
Put simply: in the late morning of that day, I slipped in our bathroom and landed on the little protuberance at the hip that, in my imagination at least, says "Push Here to Break Leg". It was as simple and unromantic as that. It surprised me how quickly one can go from an upright position to lying on one's back saying "Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!"
To relieve possible worry at the outset: the break was small, at the top of my right femur, and far from life threatening, just not far enough from painful, unfortunately. But let's keep the long story short. An ambulance was involved; x-rays at the emergency room; a decision for surgical intervention; a metal plate screwed to the top of my femur with five fierce looking screws (I mean, looking like 5-inch wood screws with serious threads); 19 staples in my thigh; lying in hospital for a week (total before and after surgery); five days in a rehab place; then home, where I've been restricted to the first floor of our house which, fortunately, has a bathroom with a shower and a very comfortable couch, long enough to accommodate all of me and deep enough to sleep on comfortably.
For several weeks I moved with the aid of a walker, graduating this past week to a cane. Two days ago was the first time I attempted the stairs — it went rather easily, actually — and the first time I've seen the second floor of our house in eight weeks. It looked oddly new and strangely familiar. It also meant a return to computer access, since my computer is on the second floor, and. alas, not portable with wireless network access.
It all seems like returning normalcy (such as possible in our household), which is mostly a good thing, although I had developed some new habits during my time downstairs that were also good things that I hate to abandon. In particular, I used some of the new-found time to return — at long last! — to writing short stories, a routine that I had slipped out of after my heart attack in January, 2004. I can't tell you how pleased I am that in just a couple of weeks the muse visited regularly in the wee hours and I have finished five stories so far, rivalling my usual yearly output. I'll now have to find a way to re-integrate that activity back into the other routines that developed this year.
There you go: my broken leg, the short form. There may or may not be more as, in my usual way, I slowly process the events in search of amusing and telling anecdotes. Anyway, it's nice to see everyone again, in a manner of speaking.
Lunar Abundance
Not so long ago, people were getting all excited about whether there might be a new planet for the solar system*, and now it seems that there are to be a new moon or two for Pluto. A NASA press release# (which has accompanying photographs showing the moons) describes things this way:
Pluto was discovered in 1930. The planet resides 3 billion miles from the sun in the heart of the Kuiper Belt, a vast region of icy, rocky bodies beyond Neptune's orbit. In 1978, astronomers discovered Charon, Pluto's only confirmed moon.
"If, as our new Hubble images indicate, Pluto has not one, but two or three moons, it will become the first body in the Kuiper Belt known to have more than one satellite," said Hal Weaver of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md. He is co-leader of the team that made the discovery.
The candidate moons, provisionally designated S/2005 P1 and S/2005 P2, are approximately 27,000 miles (44,000 kilometers) away from Pluto–in other words, two to three times as far from Pluto as Charon.
The moons are thought to be between "64 and 200 kilometers" in diameter, which is pretty small, about 1/15th to 1/20th the diameter of Earth's moon. Pluto itself has only 65% of our moon's diameter.
The discovery was made using the Hubble Space Telesecope by a team of scientists from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (in Laurel, Maryland), the Lowell Observatory (Flagstaff, Arizona), and the Southwest Research Institute (Boulder, Colorado).
—–
*And showing their excitement, therefore, by arguing about what a "planet" really is.
#"New Moons of Pluto: Astronomers may have found two new moons orbiting Pluto.", 1 November 2005.
In: All, Curious Stuff, It's Only Rocket Science
History Near and Far
I'm beginning to realize that I may never be an A-list blogger, and I notice that I just failed another test.
Namely, I forgot to celebrate the start of my blog. It was one year ago, on 18 October 2004, that I wrote my first posting. Tsk. It's an occasion that calls for creating an excuse to mention the fact with mock surprise and false modesty, but now that I'm within 6 months of being 50, I've given up on — more or less — on emotional guile. I also get to decide whether I want a birthday party or not.
But anyway, I've been a bit busy with other distractions and not posting so frequently at the moment, so the anniversary slipped by me. One distraction was our amateur theatre group's latest production: "Sister Amnesia's Country Western Nunsense Jamboree" (aka "Nunsense 3"). I did the choreography, rehearsed stuff, and served as official watcher at the performances, so I've seen it at least 13 times in the last 3 weeks. Many of the songs were fine, but most weren't meant to be heard that much in a single lifetime.
During the days, I've been concentrating quite a bit on writing articles for "Science Besieged", an online collection of short and long pieces on that general topic that I'm working on for Ars Hermeneutica, Limited, the nonprofit scientific research and science education corporation that Isaac and I started just about a year ago.
It's a big enough topic that I should write some more later about it. Meanwhile, I welcome y'all to stop by and visit a spell and we can talk about while we set on the porch and sip some ice tea.