It Wasn't Pretty

Finally biked this morning. 11 miles in 50 minutes, much huffing and puffing, much use of low gears. And forgot to take water, which definitely doesn't help with the alcohol / dehydration.

Anti-grackle strategy seems somewhat successful. Removed bulk seed feeders, bulk feed available on a squirrel-proof feeder with small holes only, no sunflower seeds. They're still around, using the birdbaths, but, at least I ain't feeding them much. We have cardinals, sparrows in the small-hole feeder, finches, goldfinches, chickadees. We also have up to a dozen doves, who unfortunately like the safflower seed just fine.

Impulse bought a new guitar -- a baritone guitar! I did not know there was such a thing, so the purchase was clearly justified. It came in with light baritone strings tuned down a step to D. I tuned it down further to C and it sounded great. I have ordered standard baritone strings and want to tune it down to an A -- a fifth down.

Unfortunately, after consulting with two (clueless) support people, I sent it back, because the side dots on the neck don't match up with the main dots on the fretboard -- and just an hour ago, read an article saying this was by design. Hopefully I will get it back before too long. Here's a picture.

Music-in, I've been all over the place:

• "I.O.U" (1982) and "Atavachon" (1986), by Allen Holdsworth. From Guitar Player magazine, "the greatest prog-rock guitarist of the 80's and 90's". Pretty prog-jazzy stuff, 3 stars.
• "Shine" (2008), by Estelle, and her earlier effort "The 18th Day" (2005). She was one of 4 I brought home from London on my "check it out" list. Kind of reminiscent of Lauryn Hill, 4 stars.
• Sam Cook, "Keep On Movin", 1963. 23 tracks, pretty much none of his big hits, but some good stuff nonetheless. 3 stars.
• Mississippi John Hurt, "Library of Congress Recordings, Vol 2, Disk 2". I was looking for a version of "See See Rider" for the jam, really struck by his laid back voice. 3 stars.
• Portishead, "Third". Very aggressively innovative, just got today, needs more listen. I'm guessing 3.5 stars.

I downloaded all the colliding galaxy pictures mentioned in the last post. My favorite was this one. It reminds me of this picture of NGC 1275, my favorite galaxy, at the center of the Perseus cluster, Abell 426, 100Mpc distant and still the bright extragalactic X-ray source in the sky. I am seeing both of these as: an existing large elliptical galaxy with a large (10^5 or 6 solar masses) central black hole is being plowed into by a spiral galaxy whose plane intersects the black hole. As the spiral rotates, it feeds its spiral arms into the black hole. I'm wondering if there's any way this can cause the spiral's progress get seriously impeded, such that it is trapped and eaten more than you would expect. The NGC 1275 picture tho shows much less sign of the elliptical target -- but, it seems like something has to be there triggering the stuff to the west of the spiral shape -- so maybe the spiral is proportionately larger.

Astronomy Alert

A great set of 59 images of interacting galaxies has been posted by the European Hubble group:

http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/html/heic0810.html

Galaxy wars!!! They shred each other, in many different configurations, until nothing is left of the original galaxies!!!

Finally

I finally finished "Sixty Days and Counting" by Kim Stanley Robinson. Very positive stuff, that to fix the earth we have to fix everything -- health care, economics, etc. Clearly a best of all possible outcomes scenario.

So, why did it take me so long to finish this book (540 pages)? I started it on my way home from England. I guess my time is being spent instead on:

• My project to enter the Abell Catalog of clusters of galaxies into google sky. The latest post is here -- it has links to the other ones. I'm now out to around 250 Mpc, so the numbers are going way up. My value add was to set the viewport to include the whole cluster. For the hundreds of more distant clusters, I will instead be writing some perl scripts to convert raw lists into the XML that Google Sky accepts.
  Google sky has some great images of clusters out to around 1000 Mpc, amazing. I'm looking forward to finishing my 1st pass and then coming back and doing a "best of" list -- all the ones with dozens of galaxies, and with the viewports set to emphasize the populous central regions of the cluster, rather than the whole cluster.
• Answering posts to the google sky message boards. I don't know how much longer I can keep this up. The clueless factor is so high -- "look, it's a spaceship", or "this looks like the firefox logo". And as my son says, they always win in the end. Still, you hope that maybe you can help get a young person interested in Astronomy.
• Playing the stock market. Don't ask ...
• Playing music. Jams have been generally going well, my 4 piece band is doing OK, but needs a lot more work. We are to the point tho where we are trying to come up with some more unique arrangements, to make the material our own. I'm getting busted at the jams tho, for the old black man growl. I had thought it was working ...
• Spending quality time with my wife, when the good doctor is not working.

I'm two months behind on the magazine stack. I need to make more time to read. I have now decided I will retire at 62, five years from my birthday in June. I think I have enough going on to keep me busy.

Music-in wise, I am right now listening to a new pandora radio station I created from Man Man. Four songs by groups I have never heard of, and all quirky and good. Pandora kind of scares me. All the time I have spent collecting, collating, classifying music, unnecessary? This is only the 2nd station I have created there. The 1st was based on The Band, and it performed admirably.

Other new music I have gotten lately:

• Cosas en Común, by Juanito Pascual. He's a flamence guitarist out of Boston, we saw him at Woodsongs, show 479. He totally blew the other two (very excellent) guitarists away. 3.5 stars.
• This Is What Is, by Daniel Lanois. A studio pedal player, an interesting mix of music, 3.5 stars. I was pointed at this by the blog of the local music critic Walter Tunis. It seemed to me like he has been doing this forever, and per the profile, he's been the Herald Leader critic since 1980, we got here in 1981, so I guess that the local forever is true.
• Keep It Simple, by Van Morrison. Van The Man totally succeeds here by keeping it simple, there's not a bad song on the album. 3 stars.
• Life, by The Cardigans. Guilty as charged, 3 stars.

The blackbirds we have are common grackles. They are totally dominating the yard now, need to figure out a plan to maybe get rid of them. Maybe real restrictive small bird feeders, and safflower seed, which they don't like.

My oldest daughter says I should use this picture for my blog profile. I don't think so.

I am also undecided about putting my flying spaghetti monster car emblem on the black prius, which I now have back. There are currently no fish emblems in the parking lot at work, why should I cast the first stone?

Happy Zombie Jebus Day!

That was the subject of the e-mail I got from my younger brother the author this past Sunday. I liked it. And, it's shorter than "The First Sunday After The First Full Moon After The Vernal Equinox!"

In London I finished "Musicophilia : Tales of Music and the Brain" by Oliver Sacks, of "Awakenings" and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat", blogged earlier. I think I'm getting somewhat tired of reading this kind of stuff -- "The Singing Neanderthals" might have to wait awhile. FFTKAT:

• The brain of a musician is easily discernable in an autopsy?!?!? Enlarged corpus callosum (the large fiber that connects the two hemispheres of the brain) and fine motor control areas.
• Music has proven to be an effective therapy for stroke-induced aphasia (lack of speech) -- the music survives, patients who cannot speak can sing lyrics, which seems to help their speech recover.
• A couple of chapters talked about musical hallucinations -- people hearing music all the time. I think it's not like my hit parade -- or maybe it is, and they just don't have sufficient cycles to listen to the music and think or perform other mental activities.
• There as numerous documented cases of musical people with severe dementia who still retain most or all of their musical skills. So, my vision of ending life as "the human jukebox" has already been realized many, many times.

So I finished this shortly after starting the 8 hour flight from Bristol to Newark. I pulled out the other book I had to read, Kim Stanley Robinson's "Sixty Days and Counting". Looking through the intro pages, I realized I had read the 1st book of this trilogy, "Forty Signs of Rain", blogged September 16, 2004 -- but had not read the 2nd book, "Fifty Degrees Below Zero".

Crisis. Seven hours left on a transatlantic flight, and if I want to read something, I must skip a volume in a trilogy. I refuse to watch movies on airplanes, it has to be the worst imaginable movie-watching experience. So, I said, whatever, and started the book. I'm somewhat bogged around halfway through. There have been enough back-references to figure out what the plot of the 2nd book was, so I think it's burned. This one is good, but somewhat annoying in that the protagonist is a middle-aged man who in his spare time from the plot is juggling three girlfriends. Grrr, yeah right. I guess KSR is getting to that age.

I did get a good musical reference from it: Astor Piazzolla, who was apparently the god of tango music from around 1960 on. I'm listening "Piazzolla En Suite" now, pretty good stuff, 3 stars.

Jams have been going well. The Monday night jam at Goshin's Tavern appears to be dying out -- too annoying to the pool players. I've been up at least twice at the last two Wednesday O'Neill jams, playing and singing pretty well. Last week the jam overall was kind of off, some country people there, and a gay guy doing "At Last", "Summertime", and "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" in a very high voice. He's not bad, but I don't think it's an appropriate venue for his material.

The Blackbirds Are Back

The blackbirds came back two weekends ago, at least a dozen of them. We currently also have doves, sparrows, goldfinches, house finches, juncos, chickadees (3) and a pair of cardinals. Over the winter, we also had titmouse (3), starlings, a downy woodpecker, and a carolina wren. I saw the cooper's hawk flying around a couple of blocks away a couple of days ago.

England Swings

Flew to England (London Heathrow) on March 9, leaving at 2pm and arriving in London at 11am on Monday. We were supposed to have had a 6-1/2 hour layover in Newark, and as planned, I took a taxi with my coworker/traveller to Landmarc restaurant in Tribecca in Manhattan for dinner with my oldest daughter. This place was only about 4 blocks from the Holland Tunnel exit, and the cab ride from Newark airport was still $80 each way, woo-hoo! Dinner was excellent, and it was great to see Erica. They had as an appetizer "Roasted Bone Marrow" -- I had to see it. Umbeeleebabul -- 3 pieces of bone on end, some caramelized onions, with bread to spread the greasy, marrowy mess on -- yum!

So we get back to the airport and our 10:30pm Virgin Atlantic flight has been delayed until 4:00am :-( They gave us an option to give us a voucher to take a cab to JFK for a 12 midnight flight on American -- which we did. It wound up leaving at 1am. But, in changing our tickets, Virgin managed to cancel our homeward leg from Newark to Lexington. So coming home on the 14th, we get to Newark and have no ticket to Lexington. By the time they straigtened it out we missed our connection and had to come home through Cleveland, getting in at 11:15pm rather than 6:00pm. Given that I'd been up since 1:40am, it was a long day. I am hoping my lower back is going to forgive me soon and stop hurting. I had a great massage Friday, she really did a great job on the lower back -- it still hurts but at least I could stand up straight.

So England was fun, my 1st time there, only my 2nd time in Europe. I was at the Hotel Russell on Russell Square from Monday through Thursday morning. Tuesday through Thursday, I got up at 7:00am, walked over to Russell Square and ate breakfast there, with a large cup of coffee, and then took a few laps around the square, then went back and showered. In the evenings I drank enough to fall asleep at 11:00p every night. They were only 4 hours ahead of us (not on daylight savings yet), so the jet lag was really minimal.

My meetings for Tuesday and Wednesday got cancelled so I spent both days sightseeing. Tuesday I took The Big Bus 4 hour tour of London. Wednesday I spent 3-4 hours in The British Museum (just off of Russell Square) -- man, did they score a bunch of loot. Many many mummies and cases, and 60% of the statuary from the Parthenon ("protecting it from acid rain and vandalism"). I think I'm getting too old for museums tho.

Then I walked north around 6 blocks to The British National Library. Saw the magna carta and lots of other old books. Didn't do too much for me -- it didn't help that the lights were real dim, making it hard to see. I did like that their central glass cage with the fire walls that drop down from which the air can be evacuated was 10 stories tall. I think the one we saw at the Princeton library (which had the really cool 1/4 inch thick white marble walls instead of windows) was only 5 stories.

I then walked about 12 blocks south to Aldwyck, then west to Strand, past the Savoy Theatre and the Coal Hole Pub (out of the Gilbert & Sullivan movie "Topsy-Turvy" that my wife and I love) to Tralfagar Square. The bus tour the day before had shown me, the touristy parts of London, from Kensington Park in the west through Hyde Park, by Buckingham Palace, parliament, Big Ben, and finishing up with the financial district and the Tower of London, is only about 2 miles, very walkable.

Then Thursday morning we took the train west to Bristol, which is almost in Wales, I think around 1.5 hours. The English countryside was suitably quaint. The houses are all small, lots of tudor (shocker). I liked their streams with little boats and lots of swans.

I felt very comfortable there. I think that having a fondness for BBC series and English movies over the years helped make it feel relatively familiar. My coworker/traveller, who had lived in England, did me the solid of warning me about stepping off the curb -- the wrong-way traffic only almost ran me over once. They also have "Look Left" and "Look Right" on most pedestrian crosswalks through most of London. They also impede jaywalking where they don't want it by putting fences between the sidewalk and street.

It was also weird, the mimic in me so wanted to try a British accent. I was really conscious of the fact that anytime I opened my mouth anyone could tell I was an American. But, I never did. Two or three times, they spoke quickly and used terminology different from American English, I couldn't understand it at all.

I liked a lot of their different usages. I should have kept a list there, there were dozens of them:

• "brilliant", shortened to "brill", for "cool" or "outstanding"
• "way out" for "exit"

So anyway, after a meeting on Thursday in Bristol, home (interminably) on Friday. Food (pub, italian, chinese, indian) was generally OK -- except for a lambburger at "Mabel's Tavern" near the National Library where the "meat" patty was ???

Right now listening to "Here Is What Is", by Daniel Lanois, who is apparently a British pedal steel player studio musician. Very nice and quirky, 3.5 stars. I got it from Walter Tunis's blog. Walter is the Lexington Herald-Leader music critic, who I have pretty much always thought does a pretty good job. I have thought several times that it seems like he has been their critic pretty much forever. His blog says he started in 1980, and since we moved here April 1, 1981, I guess that makes sense.

Theocracy Sucks Even Worse Than Theism

All this foo going on in Tibet reminded me of this piece on Tibet when it was under the control of the monks, from Charlie Stross's blog. Here's a shocker: it ain't pretty.

http://www.swans.com/library/art9/mparen01.html

A Waking Dream? A Psychotic Break?

This happened when we were flying to St. Martin. I meant to blog it earlier and forgot.

Anyway, we're in the Lexington airport to leave, and as I'm walking to the gate, the standard security announcement comes on:

The Department of Homeland Security has raised the alert level to orange. Please blah blah blah ...

But then, after the standard announcement finished, the same voice continued on:

And when you're done with your traveling, why not unwind and relax at Blah resort? They know how to get rid of the stress of travelling.

??? Holy shit, I thought ... commercials on airport security announcements? As my friend David says, is irony dead? I couldn't believe I had heard it. I asked an airline employee how long they had been doing that, she said a couple of months. I sat down and remarked on it to my wife and another woman seated by us. I don't particularly remember their reaction, but I don't think they acted as if I was crazy.

But, that was around 5 weeks ago, I have been in airports 4-5 times since then, and I have not heard this again. And, when I think about it, I just can't believe that they would do that. So was this a dream, or what? I guess I will ask my wife what she remembers about it.

Putting my shoes back on at security a week ago on my way to London (more later), I asked a TSA guy if there were commercials attached to the security announcements. He kind of ignored the question -- maybe not the sharpest pencil in the box -- shocker -- but did comment on the fact that "the level has been raised to orange" for around 18 months. Maybe time to change from the past participle to the past tense ...

HNS

The official rating of the week in St. Martin was Highly Non-Suckish. Mostly just walking the beach, enjoying the panoramic views to the horizon and the many shades of blue in the ocean. We did hike to the top of Pic Paradis, the highest point on the island. I did learn a lesson tho. I did way too much gloating before we left and was punished by the laws of karma -- a smallish ice storm canceled our flight out on 2/12, so we were only there for 6 days rather than 7.

Got lots of reading in. I'm feeling lazy, I'm not going to hyperlink these, cut and paste to google please:

• "The Android's Dream", by John Scalzi. Nicely written and diverting, 3 stars.
• "Yhe Dog Said Bow-Wow", by Michael Swanwick. A good collection of stories, and not much evidence of Swanwick's sometime misogynism, 3 stars.
• "Rewired, the post-cyberpunk anthology", edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel. A very good collection of stories. Unfortunately I had already read 3/4 of them. Still, 4 stars.
• "The Lightstone", by David Zindell. My friend Jon really liked Zindell's Neverness novels. I did too, enough to read them twice. Here he does high fantasy. I was kind of freaked, the thing just kind of ended. Wikipedia says there are 3 more in the series. I guess I have to read them now. 3 stars.
• "The Tin Roof Blowdown", by James Lee Burke. A Dave Robicheaux novel. Seemed appropriate to be reading the cajun cheap detective series in French St. Martin. This is set in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina, and is very disturbing. 3 stars.
• "Quirkology -- How We Discover Big Truths In Small Things", by Richard Wiseman, Ph.D. Kind of a bible of Fun Facts To Know And Tell. A very fast and easy read on real-life experiments in social psychology, uncovering numerous quirks of human nature. 3 stars.

I took my ukulele to St. Martin, but it's not the same, I missed my guitars. Blues jam tonight, I'm ready.

Just upgraded my Apple TV. They really changed the UI, I guess we've gone from around v0.8 to v1.5. Kind of refreshing to see them hacking and burning -- agile software development rules, yeah!!!

Four Versions

So, I'm listening to the Oscar Peterson and Stephane Grappelli recommended by indogout (thanks again) -- 6 tracks, so far most excellent, 4 stars, and for jazz even! Track 3 is "Someone To Watch Over Me" -- and I noticed, I have 4 versions in 3 genres of this track in my iTunes:

• Art Tatum, jazz
• Frank Sinatra, pop
• Oscar Peterson and Stephane Grappelli, jazz
• Rickie Lee Jones, chick pop

Ain't life grand? (St. Martin in 5 days ...)

Evolution

Finished reading a Gardner Dozois short story collection "One Million A.D.", which (duh) had the theme of the far future. The 1st and last stories I had already read in The Year's Best. The rest were all pretty readable. But, the Charles Stross story "Missile Gap" made me realize what the others were missing: evolution as a major part of their theme. I've mentioned before, Frank Herbert was always one of my favorites because his stories wound up being about evolution. As our knowledge of evolution progresses, it is good that science fiction continues to stretch it, as in the Stross story, or in Stephen Baxter's "Coalescent" (blogged 2/26/5), which touched on the same topic as the Stross story.

Accompanied keyboard man extraordinaire Bob Hopps at his Clay's Steakhouse gig last night from 6-9. I took Black Beauty out in public for the 1st time. The owner of Clay's commented on its beauty -- "A class guitar for a class joint" I told him. It was fun, played pretty well, but both thumbs hurt this morning.

Re music in, I have been listening to:

• Delbert McClinton, various albums. An interesting musician who's been around since 1962 (harmonica on "Hey Baby") playing blues, rock, country, honky-tonk, etc. My favorite is the song "You Were Never Mine" off of "One of the Fortunate Few", 1997.
• John Legend, "Get Lifted". West Coast R&B, could be a little catchier, 3 stars.
• The Jefferson Airplane, "After Bathing at Baxter's", 1967 -- I think this is the best psychedelic album made, 4 stars; 5 stars for "Watch Her Ride", maybe others.
• Tinariwen, "Aman Iman: Water Is Life" -- a Tuareg (North African nomad) group. Nicely odd, 3 stars. This came from a college friend/keyboard player Del, who spent his high school years in Tangier, Morocco. He set up this Virtual Tangier Web Site.
• Various blues (John Lee Hooker, Albert King) from eMusic.com, checking out songs for the Wednesday night blues jam. Last two weeks have been good. Getting to do 6 songs, numerous folks from Exstream have come out.

Speaking of Exstream, on Jan 22 it was announced that HP was acquiring it. Closing will be next month, April 1 is supposed to be Day One as an HP employee. Finally made the front page of the Herald-Leader, but no coverage in InfoWorld or Computer world -- of a > $500M acquisition?!?!?

My baby sister sent me a link to a fabulous collection of anti-Intelligent Design cartoons. I posted to KASES, and it was well received there, and everyone I have sent it too has really enjoyed it.

We had a mockingbird eating suet today. We used to have mockingbirds around all the time, but hadn't for the last few years, so I was glad to see one.

In 9 days at this time, I will be on St. Martin, woo-hoo!

Happy New Year

Holidays went well, good family visits and good loafing and reading.

But, have had a cold for the last 6 days. Not a bad one, but enough to make me spend all weekend under a blanket on the couch with football on reading. Missed music last week, probably will skip this week as well.

I was filing some of my youngest's textbooks on the basement and came across "The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution", by Luigi Luca and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, 1995. A lot of stuff I already knew -- I thought about not reading it when I saw the 1995 publishing date, but, "diaspora" is such a great word, I went on and read it. There were some points interestingly presented:

• The Basques seem to be the last remnants of hunter-gatherer Cro-Magnons who were left as the rest of Europe was settled by farmers moving out from the Fertile Crescent;
• The evolution of language and genes follow similar paths across the globe;
• The words that tend to evolve most slowly are: the numbers 1, 2, and 3 and the names of parts of the body.
• Some of these are close to being the same in languages all around the world.

Still having fun with Google Sky and answering questions there. Had a scare when my local settings seemed to get screwed up, but I recovered from it OK. Still need to figure out how to post some of this stuff, if for nothing else but to get it backed up.

Got some cool stuff for christmas. Many new bird feeders. Somehow I think my wife prefers me watching birds out the kitchen windows to playing guitar in various bars and dives. Go figure. There was a hawk sitting in one of the arbor vitae on the left of the yard a week or so ago. It flew off, it had 3 dark bars across its tail. I think it's a Cooper's hawk. The bird book says they like to stake out bird feeders. Still getting juncos, sparrows, finches, chickadees, and doves, and still occasionally see the Carolina wren.

My in-laws gave me Apple TV for xmas. So, the iPod for your home entertainment system. It's pretty cool, can view the pictures on my hard drive, listen to my iTunes, watch YouTube videos (?!?!?). Not sure how to proceed with films tho. I bought "Tombstone" (of course) from iTunes for $9.95 to have something to play with. Quality is lovely, but an hour or so to download and then sync to the Apple TV seems highly non- spur-of-the-moment. I thought I would rip my few existing DVDs, but, you have to buy some third party software to do that and so far it doesn't work well: pixelation, slight pauses, vague slow-motion. Their (automated) tech support sent some suggestions, I need to play with it some more. But, at an hour a pop, it's an easy thing to put off.

So, not sure how to handle movies. We had started renting more movies OnDemand from the cable: $4, starts immediately, very convenient. But, not HD. They are offering a few HD movies, but for $6. The upsampling on my DVD player works great, so renting DVDs still seems the best way to go -- $4 for near HD quality.

I don't want to fool with NetFlix. I think iTunes is going to offer movie rentals. If they do that, and then will let you buy for an upcharge for a movie you really like, that might be the way to go.

I also for xmas got a beautiful nickel flute. I was pleased to find that I could blow about 2-1/3 of the 3 octaves available on a flute -- for about 5 minutes before my lips gave out. So, no problem, I figured I'd play for 5-10 minutes every day until my embouchure came back. Then, after around 5 days, tragedy. My left thumb is now screwed up from bending it back, on the neck of a guitar. Guess what you use to support a flute? Two bent back thumbs. I got a spot in the 2nd joint of my right thumb on the palm side that produces excruciating pain when pressed. And it seems to be spreading to the 1st and 3rd joints.

It ain't fair, getting old sucks!!!

Billions and Billions

I have been having great fun with Google Sky. It's amazing, some of the views of deep sky objects, particularly galaxies and clusters, that are there. I have been going through the nearest objects in the Abell catalog of clusters, sometimes the detail as you zoom in is breathtaking. But you also find that Abell is definitely not the greatest. It came out in 1957. The distance class I think was determined based on brightness, not redshift, and some of them definitely seem off. Also, I've run across some clusters you would think should be there are but not. I need to start noting those. You can query the Abell catalog here. You can also query the Zwicky catalog online here. I've also been putting in galaxies, groups, globular clusters, and supernova remnants (only 3). I then started on the Arp Atlas of Pecular Galaxies. These have a lot of interacting and otherwise interesting galaxies. (Halton Arp was somewhat of a heretic in the 1970's, positing that some large galaxy redshifts were non-cosmological in origin -- the result of a galaxy being spit out by another galaxy, rather than reflecting the expansion of the universe. He wound up moving to Europe.)

So, I was looking at Arp 280 (NGC 3769) and noticed the beautiful spiral NGC 3726 nearby -- with a comet headed straight for it (joke)!!! So I went to the Google Sky forums to see if anyone else had noticed it -- maybe I'd discovered a comet! But, others in the forums had seen it, but no one had identified it. So, I googled "NGC 3726 comet" and this was the 1st link. This says that the comet is Comet C/2001 RX14 (LINEAR) -- it was only discovered in 2001, pretty cool. The comet is here: 11:31:54.06 47:07:51.11

So I posted that to the forum and got kudoed by the moderator. Ooh, ahh, praise. I then answered another post about a Herbig-Haro object, and then posted the following to someone asking about clusters of galaxies:

Clusters of galaxies are the brightest extragalactic objects in X-ray astronomy. Here's a few of my favorites that google sky gives a wonderful view of:

• Abell 426, the Perseus cluster, at 3:19:48 41.5117. This is the brightest extragalactic X-ray source in the sky. It's fairly close to us ( 76 Mpc; Mpc = megaparsec = 3.262 million light years -- this (and kpc Kiloparsecs) is the unit astronomers use for extragalactic distances). The central galaxy NGC 1275, radio source Perseus A, is crazy energetic. It looks like there's a spiral in there tearing into something else. Unfortunately, google sky's picture of the whole cluster is not the best. Note also, it's somewhat near the plane of our galaxy (the Milky Way), so there's a fair number of foreground stars obscuring the galaxies.
• Abell 1656, the Coma cluster, at 13:00:08 27.9765 -- the richest cluster close to us (97 Mpc). The google sky view is beautiful, two giant cD galaxies (100 times as big as a normal large galaxy) in the middle. The bright spots in them are smaller galaxies in the process of being digested -- that's how the cD's get so big.
• Abell 2151, the Hercules cluster, at 16:05:08 17.7293. This almost looks like 2 or 3 clusters merging. There are several galaxies that look like they are trying to be cD's. There are 3 pairs of interacting spirals. The google sky picture is wonderful.
• Abell 2199, at 16:28:38 39.5513. This has a single central cD galaxy busily gobbling up smaller galaxies. The google sky picture has wonderful detail.

A426 is kind of disappointing -- in some parts of the sky the galaxies are detailed and full colored, others they are just blobs -- A426 is the latter. But the inlaid Hubble picture of NGC 1275, when I first saw it, blew me away. I spent over a year studying on this galaxy back in the day, suddenly you get to see a close-up!

I think I am going to donate some of my cycles to this particular group mind. The forums seem to have a fair amount of interest in astronomy and not a lot of knowledge.

Read the 4th book of Charles Stross' "Merchant Prince" series, "The Merchants' War. This was a very enjoyable read. This series now has several interesting threads running, I think he would write a dozen of these if he wanted to. The 330 pages doesn't seem like enough for the increasing number of threads tho.

Then read his latest near future novel "Halting State". This has some of the elements of the "Atrocity Archives" world stories -- geeky hero, spy thriller stuff, but only a passing reference to H.P. Lovecraft. This novel has some great concepts and bon mots, but for some reason didn't suck me in as it should have -- I put it down for several days twice.

Music goes well. Wednesdays at O'Neill's I've been getting to sing a few, play and sing backup on a few more. "Let the Good Times Roll" by B.B.King is working out, as is my reggae version of "All Along The Watchtower". I got drafted to sing the lead on "Roadhouse Blues" by the Doors. No one knew any more words than I did (the 3rd verse), so I did the 3rd verse, made up a verse, the 3rd and 4th lines of the bridge (that someone shouted at me -- "Save our city", "Right now"), then the 3rd verse. It was fun to do, I've got the words now, have to try it again.

Listening to Albert King live at Montreaux Jazz in 1973 now. After wanting to track down "Where or When" (Rodgers & Hart 1937), I wound up downloading Frank Sinatra "The Best of the Columbia Years 1943-1952" from iTunes. 97 tracks for $9.95, quelle bargain.

Last weekend went to Cornell for the graduation of my last child from college, woo-hoo!!!!! No more tuition payments!!!!! Drove back from Ithaca NY to Columbus OH in a nice snowstorm, but it only took 2 extra hours. It could have been much worse. Only saw 5 cars, 0 semis in the ditch.

I Don't Know

So, "I Don't Know" was going to be the title of the song I wrote. But, my youngest's album was "I Don't Know Yet", so I thought "Agnostia", that sounds cool, probably pretty much means "I Don't Know", sold. Hence the title of the last post.

Then, 2 hours later, the Google moment. Man, the days of stoner wisdom are so far behind us now -- "You know, no one's ever thought of this before". Self-deception of this sort is now pretty much right out. So, googling "agnostia" comes up with:

• A punk/experimental/black metal/christian(???) rock & roll band out of Ft. Walton FL that existed 2000-2003. They have a skull and X-bones in the O of Agnostia.
• A 20-something's blog posting on Dating Agnostia.
• A species of orc in WarcraftRealms.com.

"There is nothing new under the sun." With 6.5 billion of us, this is true 99.999% of the time.

I think though, that "the google check" is a feature rather than a bug. Cause for the .001% of the time that you do come up with something original, you can know it.

Given, of course, that you googled the right term. Re some earlier posts, I was excited when googling "folk ontology" came up with nothing -- because everyone was using the term "folksonomy" instead :-(

Just finished the 4th book of The Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross, "The Merchants' War". This series is totally working, numerous interesting threads, the 336 pages seems way too short. This series is generally considered to be patterned after Roger Zelazny's "Amber" stories -- which after maybe 3 200 page novels was hopelessly confused in its narrative direction. Stross's series is the antithesis of this, at this point I think it could go on for a dozen books and still be coherent. Stross is definitely one of the strongest science fiction/fantasy writers out there now.

Agnostia

So, I wrote a song! Woo-hoo! Left a sample on my youngest's cell phone (from the band room in the basement) so I wouldn't forget it -- then managed to make it upstairs and record it on the pc, with much more suitable lyrics. Very existentially angsty, totally suitable for a 14 year old, just what I was looking for!

Here's a great antitheist site: http://www.evilbible.com/. Putting numbers to it -- the site states: "In total God kills 371,186 people directly and orders another 1,862,265 people murdered." -- nice!

In other minor antitheist activity, I took exception to an article by a contributing columnist in the Herald-Leader, "Christians should lead fight against global warming". But based on "the enemy of my enemy", I e-mailed the author rather than writing a letter to the editor. I protested the presumption of moral superiority it implied and the exclusivism. We went through about 6 e-mails back and forth before mutually agreeing to a draw. He was a young guy with much more energy than me.

I noticed he chose not to comment on this interesting statistic, from a post at KASES forum: while the percentage of unbelievers in the US is now around 14%, of 74731 inmates in federal prisons listed a religious preference, only 156 or 0.209% were atheist.

Oops, just looking at this again, 18381 out of the total population of 93112 did not answer -- maybe something a non-believer would do? That is 19.7% -- which I think ruins this stat -- oh well.

I thought my birds had all deserted me. Last weekend, I saw only our pair of cardinals -- and a hawk/falcon that swooped overhead early in the morning. So I'm wondering, has the hawk scared everything off? (see prior post). But raking leaves yesterday (all done as of a few minutes ago -- only 45 bags as opposed to 60 last year -- the 3 trees we removed seems to have helped) I saw: purple finches, doves, sparrows, a starling, and juncos. So, the birds are still around. I also got a new feeder, and a metal birdbath to replace our ceramic one for the winter.

Music-out-wise, O'Neil's was a little weird Wednesday. The alpha guitarist Lindsay Olive and keyboardist Bob Hopps were backing Paul Hinberg (sp?) at John Michael's "Battle of the Bands". Plus harpist Dave Harrod was out of town. So, I was offered the principal guitarist role on Tuesday, but I had to go to my wife's xmas dinner. My bass player Ron wound up as principal guitar, and he and Harmonica Red were in charge.

Weirdness comes in when young turk Thaddeus showed up and got to play. I wound up backing him. The music wasn't too bad (compared to times in the past when I've gotten stuck playing with this guy), he gave up the guitar he was playing after 1 song (he perceived it as being out of tune, but I don't think it was the guitar). So his next 2 songs, he was jumping around, screaming, acting crazy, and used some obscenities. I was next to him on stage, I finally found a safe spot with the steps between us. But, this did not go over well with the management -- the guy was pretty scary, very much either naturally or chemically deranged -- and we were told to close down at 10 instead of 11.

Hopefully Thaddeus will find a more suitable venue for his performances. When Dave Harrod and some of the others told him he couldn't play at Lynagh's, he got real nasty and wound up being ejected by one of the bouncers very forcibly. That was pretty ugly, hopefully it won't come to that again.

Notice I have been remiss on music in. Hmmm, going into my iTunes to see what's been added lately, it looks like 3441 of my 6408 tracks have had their "Date Added" set to 11/9/2007 10:37pm. I guess that this was some upgrade activity? Too bad, I wouldn't mind having had that data retained. Anyway, new stuff (cut and pasted from an e-mail reply to my most excellent nephew Greg):

• New Pornographers, Challengers -- reasonably catchy, 3 stars
• Levon Helm, Dirt Farmer -- the drummer from The Band, a rock icon, 3 stars
• A Girl Called Eddy, eponymous -- more chick pop, 3 stars.
• Mike Bloomfield, If you Love these Blues, Play 'Em as You Please (1976) -- the greatest Jewish blues jazz guitarist of the 70s and 80s; interesting, lots of genres with descriptions of the type and instruments used. 3 stars.
• Radiohead, In Rainbows -- I decided to pay 5 pounds. 4 stars, great work. If you want this for free, get it quick, I got an e-mail they are closing down the download site.
• Prefuse 73, Preparations & Interregnums -- very interesting, orchestral hip-hop / electronica -- the star of my NYC techo cruise (blogged here), 3.5 stars.
• Sunset Rubdown, Random Spirit Lover -- very catchy alterna-pop, 3 stars
• We Versus The Shark, Ruin Everything! --- ditto.
• Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, Safe as Milk -- 1967 conceptual music (it's almost music ...). Surprisingly more conventional than the classic "Trout Mask Replica", 3 stars.
• Carl Perkins, Sun Recordings -- the king of 50's rockabilly (he wrote "Blue Suede Shoes") -- I want the band to do "Her Love Rubbed Off", 3 stars.
• Django Reinhardt, Crazy Rhythm vol 1&2 -- the greatest jazz guitarist of the 1930's (a Belgian gypsy) playing with his quintet (3 guitars, bass & violin), and with various small jazz bands, including Coleman Hawkins. 3 stars, with a half dozen 4 star tracks.
• The Stella-Vees, Come Round Baby. A Lexington blues band who won some "best blues bands" in Memphis and Louisville last year. I have played with their drummer Steve and their harpist Fuzzy many times, and their guitarist Jason once or twice. Very nice production values, very well done. 3 stars.

Finally off the magazine stack, woo-hoo! Reading a new Charlie Stross, clear to read from now to the new year!

Death From Above

So, it's early afternoon on Thanksgiving Day, I'm watching the birds out the kitchen window as I do food prep for the big dinner, I've turned to talk to my wife, and we both hear a loud thump from the back. We look out the window and on the ground right in front of me, below the bird feeders, is a ~16-20" hawk with a starling in its talons. It sat there about 30 seconds before flying off -- and I turned my head just as it did, so I didn't see much of it then (loser). Checking the bird book, I don't think it was one of the red-tails that we normally have around. I think it was possibly a Cooper's Hawk, but more likely a peregrine falcon -- we have those in Lexington.

Earlier I had counted a dozen juncos -- confirmed as juncos because they like to feed on the ground, and have white on the outside of their tails. Also around a dozen purple finches, which like the normal birdseed rather than thistle that the goldfinches like. Also saw a couple of titmice at my in-laws in Louisville.

A new TOE! A new TOE! Had some fun a couple of days ago attempting to help these links go viral:

• The original story.
• Background info on the E8 Lie (pronounced Lee) Group.
• The paper (so pretty!).
• And of course, the movie version!

Way cool stuff, this is almost like the quintessence of elegance.

Music-wise, had a good time playing at O'Neill's last Wednesday, my youngest daughter sang "No Ordinary Love", my oldest daughter sang "Crazy". They had fun.

New Bird

I can't help it, a new bird is just so exciting ... And the new bird is ... a tufted titmouse. Sparrow sized, gray on top, white underneath, a crested head like a cardinal. Plus, we have two carolina wrens now, and around 4 juncos.

Interesting, to hear evolutionary psychology coming out of another mouth. My wife said "I keep getting these tunes stuck in my head and can't get rid of them. Surely there could never have been any evolutionary advantage in that." -- how wonderfully put!

I of course immediately thought of TOOCITBOTBM. The bicameral mind carried out its programs to the accompaniment of chanting. So according to Jaynes, the tune that you can't get out you head was what helped you get your days work done, prior to 3400 years ago.

The music thing seems to be taking way more of my time. I'm still 2 months behind on the magazine stack. And my iTunes has 242 songs in the "unrated" smart playlist, need to get those processed.

Meanwhile, kind of having a band going has got me back working up more songs, arranging playlists, etc. Our young bass player I don't know about tho. Definitely have to figure out how to get him to play less. He missed Sunday before last and I played bass the whole time. Did better than I expected with playing bass and singing -- the vocals only decided they needed to be in unison with the bass line a couple of times. And, with having to do both at once, I definitely kept the bass lines nice and simple.

Meanwhile, my friend Patrick, who is drumming, and who is almost the archetype of jacks of all trades, that same Sunday revealed another superpower -- he has perfect pitch!

I read something a couple of weeks ago, perfect pitch is a lot more common amongst speakers of tonal languages such as Chinese. Makes sense.

"Nuns -- No Sense of Humor"

So after calling for jokes to combat theism, I find it odd to have made the following post to the KASES forum, in response to a post about an article claiming that Japanese researchers had found a bacteria which was the true cause of global warming -- which was a clever spoof, that conservative pundits including RL (sorry, I can't put the name here) of course quoted incessantly:

I think we all find such spoofs amusing, and get some good schadenfreude from having the stupidity of conservative pundits prominently displayed.

However, I think we already knew that these guys were stupid. And, a year from now, chances are that the spoof origin will be forgotten and the herd mind will remember only that there was a Japanese study refuting human caused global warming.

"A lie, repeated often enough, will end up as truth." -- Dr Paul Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, inventor of The Big Lie.

My point is, I don't think that the spoofers are helping us out. We should use all available bandwidth for facts, intelligent discussion, etc, rather than for misinformation, no matter how amusing.

"Nuns -- no sense of humor" -- The Kargan (the 1st Highlander movie).

Man, how soon can we get rid of our current moronic government and try to salvage our country? The euro is at almost $1.50. Well, maybe the world will be a better place when the United States is a Former Superpower.

Interesting tho, the power of speaking a name, which now includes writing it. Kind of like the Wizard of Earthsea and other fantasy stories, where magic is based on knowing the true names of things, and you don't speak the names of things you want to leave you alone. If I had used the full name of RL, I would at some level validating him -- at a minimum, by the Google search algorithm.

We all remark at work on how, you have a problem you can't seem to figure out, you get someone to come look at it with you, in explaining the problem to the other person verbally, a large percentage of the time you figure the problem out. Our theory is that the verbalization brings more of your brain to bear on the problem.

New Birds, New Birds!

So the dark-eyed juncos from the last post are confirmed from the bird book. Today:

1. The juncos were back;
2. The downy woodpecker was back -- he definitely likes the suet;
3. A new bird! A carolina wren -- orangish color, teardrop-shaped wren body, a white racing stripe on its head with dark above and below, kind of like a chipmunk. I have seen common house wrens before, identifiable by their 4-note song, A-E-G-C. I noticed the carolina wren in the back trees by his song, a cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep on the same note I had not heard before. Then it came to the feeders several times.
4. We have at least 3 chickadees. I thought we only had 2, but there were clearly 3 visible at the same time today. Probably two males, as 1 was chasing another. Maybe the offspring? I heard the chickadees song today, it is still really hard for me to capture bird songs such that I can recognize them. The chickadees seem to be very used to human presence, they were coming to the main old feeder as I was working on the new one 3 feet away.

My wife seems to approve of my birding interest, she has bought me a feeder pole, now with 6 places for feeders and 2 suet cages attached. Need to find some more feeders, preferably eclectic. That's what I do now when my wife drags me to arts/crafts fairs, shop for bird feeders.

Our neighbor 2 doors down has 3 cats tho, and they are definitely staking out the feeders and birdbath. Need to google up cat frustration strategies ...

As of tomorrow, we may have officially have achieved Basement Band. I invited a nice young guitarist (he runs his own software company) from the blues jam to come over tomorrow -- if he would agree to play bass. He accepted, so today I went out our most excellent local guitar shop Willcutt Guitars and got a 5-string Fender Jazz bass (Mexican) and an Ampeg BA115 bass amp, 100 watts, 1-15" speaker. Sounds pretty jammin'. So tomorrow, 2-4, we will have Achieved Band -- drums, bass, 2 guitars, woo-hoo!

So at 1st I'm thinking, "Got the bass, I'm done", then I start thinking, "Wait a minute, what about a PA and mikes?" That has classically always been the real determiner of the existence of A Band -- that someone has sprung for a PA system. Oops. I think I'm going to wait at least a few months on that.

Need to come up with different tags for "Music I am listening to" vs. "Playing music". Suggestions?

"Where Does The Time Go"

The quote is from, of course, "Uncle John's Band", by the Grateful Dead.

Worked Saturday after 3 weekends off, was dragging at work this morning. I get a couple more things done, I think I will try to dispense with working weekends altogether.

My new computer came in, finally got everything transferred over to it, including my Outlook Express e-mail and contacts and my Firefox favorites. System is way fast, most noticable is ripping CDs, 20-25x. It has 3 groups of 4 LED's that you can set to different colors, or to strobe, etc. Apparently the Dell XPS 720 I got is their top of the line gaming computer, and the gamers like this stuff??? I got it because it was the only system Dell sold with 10000 RPM WD Raptor drives. So I have two of those in a 300GB RAID 0 (striped) array, and another 600GB of 7200 RPM drives for content storage. Seems pretty jammin'.

I have spent hours playing with Google Earth in Sky mode. I seems you can only do lookup on extragalactic objects by Messier #, NGC #, common name (Andromeda Galaxy, maybe a dozen or so), and the first dozen or so of radio source names (Perseus A). I've been putting in Abell clusters of galaxies. Sometimes, when it flies into a rich cluster and suddenly dozens of beautiful galaxies come into focus, it's like, holy shit, that's so cool. Finally, surfing the galaxies like the Silver Surfer. I will start checking out if there's a better way to import stuff (more clusters, radio sources, x-ray sources) before I do much more. Also noticed that Wikipedia has only maybe 6-7 articles on clusters of galaxies. That also would be something to pass the time. So maybe I can add being a dilettante astronomer to being a dilettante musician and a dillettante software developer for retirement.

Speaking of which, last Wednesday at the LBJ, only 3 guitarists showed up, and only 3 singers, until about 10:15. So I was playing and singing a bunch, got close to running out of material. Next morning, those songs were really running through my mind strongly. The last two Sundays, 2-4: band practice. Patrick is drumming well, we've got King William singing too!

Listening-wise, "Once" soundtrack is very listenable. Also got some more Ray Charles and Django Reinhardt. The Mike Bloomfield "If you love these blues, play'em as you please" is very interesting. I also have the new Joni Mitchell, the new Prince, and a new Suzanne Vega, after a couple of listens not making much of an impression.

Biked last weekend for probably the last time this year, 31 miles in 2h24m, 1 stop.

Two new birds in the backyard:

• a downy woodpecker;
• 3 dark-eyed juncos (I think, still have to check the bird book).

I looked at bird baths for the winter, they look like a pain. Vaguely thinking about ways to keep a bird bath going over the winter ...

Too Much

-- as in the Dave Matthews song. I think I am suffering from some existential / consumerism indigestion.

So, as background, I have recently replaced:

• My 24 year old 27" console TV with a 52" Sharp Aquos LC52D64U. Under 3" thick, it worked out great, my son was in for his birthday 2 weeks ago and he and his buds hung it for me.
• My 15 year old Sony tuner for a Sony 5300 tuner with 5 HDMI inputs, plus old stuff like phono. Nice piece of gear, but 3x $ I was expecting to spend. But, I do keep things a long time.
• My April 99 Dell 2x500Mhz home computer with a 4x2.4Ghz Dell workstation, due in this week.

Then a few weekends ago visited my friend David in Columbus OH -- of the 4000 bottle wine cellar, the gourmet cooking, the 1Ghz ethernet home computing setup (plus 2.1 terabytes of RAID disks for his 100000 pictures -- he is a wonderful photographer and a photoshop wizard) and the house wired for cable AND satellite. 48 years old, he and his wife have no children and are consumers' consumers.

Then the next weekend had lunch with an old high school friend of mine in Louisville who is 3rd generation president of the family company. He has done a great job with it, diversifying and training his son to take over for him. He and his wife, empty nesters like us, recently moved into a huge, beautiful house across the street from Cherokee Park.

So, it's just been nagging at me. I was brought up lower middle class in a family of 7 kids, I just don't think I'm cut out to be nouveau rich. It just doesn't feel right. Goddamned catholic upbringing, you never get to enjoy anything.

Still, you look at our resource/carbon footprint, and despite the prius and recycling and keeping things for 10s of years, my footprint is still 1000x a third worlder's. And, my wife astutely pointed out, if you add in our 4 grown kids, our total footprint is much larger than our childless friends in Columbus.

Looked at vacation lake homes in Tennessee last weekend. Saw some nice stuff. The 2nd house will definitely help our footprint!

Well, I guess I'll just hope for Real Good Tech to fix all this up.

Haven't biked for 2 weeks. Biking will be over soon.

Meanwhile, I've gotten to drinking probably 1-5 oz alcohol per day, probably averaging around 3. I am my own science fair project, what fun! I think that once I got over averaging 2 oz/day, I could no longer drink enough water to rehydrate myself. So I think I am permanently dehydrated. The back of my throat/postnasal region is always scratchy -- but a few drinks in the evening and I won't notice it! My legs want to cramp all the time too. I sleep more and exercise and read less.

So, I'm going to have to consciously cut back to weekends and Wednesdays (LBJ), see if that helps the dehydration. Seems like I want to be addicted to something. I quit smoking so colds wouldn't last so long, the one I caught in Quebec still lasted 2 weeks, I thought, I should go back to smoking.

Plus, I think the alcohol is depressing me, to where the christians and other dumbasses who have always been there are getting me down more than they should. I guess we'll see.

Delusionary Thinking

Not sure what got into me yesterday, biked 43 miles to Spring Station on the other side of Midway, 3h 18 minutes, 2 stops. Quads were talking to me at the end, but I wasn't dying like a couple of weeks ago. I think it's because it wasn't near as humid, although it was near 90 when I got back at ~12:15, and I came back on Parker's Mill, which had a lot of shade -- when I was dying I was on Delaney Ferry, which has very little shade -- and, there were some clouds.

Re the ingenuity and persistence of squirrels (last post), my oldest daughter sends this LOL video.

Music-wise, a couple of weeks ago, I found out that I could get an annual couples pass to The Woodsongs Old-time Radio Hour, which is recorded most Mondays at the Kentucky Theater downtown, for $95. Individual shows are $10 a head, seemed like a good entertainment value. Last week we saw Chris Hillman, original bass player of The Byrds, and Herb Pederson, playing mandolin and guitar, very laid back, very enjoyable. This week was 2 cajun bands, Ann Savoy, and The Red Stick Ramblers. Great Texas swing overtones, you can't go wrong with 2 fiddlers, and some really high energy rockabilly stuff. In the encore they had the setup of the Django Reinhardt Quintet (3 guitars, bass and violin) -- plus a drummer. This is a great entertainment value. The shows are archived here, you can watch them whenever you want. The host Michael Jonathan is kind of a dork, but you have to respect what he's accomplished, they get some really good, varied talent into Lexington.

Saturday we went to the Art House cinemas and saw "Once". Very interesting. It was basically a long form (~90 minute) music video. Filmed on a shoestring in Dublin -- bystanders are looking at the cameramen throughout the movie, and at one point some kids on bicycles are following them gawking. But, it was charming, it worked. My youngest daughter was with us, at one point she said "The songs aren't bad." My reply was, "Since the whole movie is about them writing and recording the songs, it would really suck if the songs were lousy." I could only find the soundtrack at amazon (no iTunes or eMusic), so it is of course on order, which I think was pretty much the point of the movie.

Lexington Blues Jam last week went OK. The end got a little rough. Some bad vocal harmony on "The Weight", and then the main guitarist and the bass player, both of whom I think probably should have played a little more and drank a little less, were clashing both in their playing, and I think in their neurotransmitters.

This week I might wind up mostly singing, with a guitar as a prop. I was cutting carrots longitudinally for grilling yesterday and cut the crap out of the tip of the ring finger on my left hand. That's a serious guitar finger -- I'll have to play leads with 2 fingers like Django Reinhardt, he had 2 of is fingers damaged in a fire. I think chords might be right out tho. We'll see, I guess.

So, re the title: I guess that the thing that is scaring me overall is that there are so many forms of delusional thinking that seem to be socially accepted, or even encouraged, in the US now. Just a few examples:

• an omnipotent, omnipresent, etc being, aka God, exists;
• we don't die when we die, i.e., there is life after death;
• the world is 6000 years old;
• driving a big SUV keeps me safer in a wreck (it doesn't).

I had some more telling ones a while ago, but they seem to have senior-momented themselves away :-(

I was thinking about the Creation Museum and it's exhibit of Noah's Ark. It's so pathethic, crying is probably more appropriate than laughing. For instance:

• Were there jaguars (south america) on the ark? How did they get there?
• Were there dire wolves (australia) on the ark?
• Were there polar bears (arctic) on the ark? Were they grumpy from being so warm?
• Were there penguins (antarctic) on the ark?
• How did they keep track of the ~350,000 species of beetles without a computer?

Sigh.

But, I think that we need to distinguish between delusions and emergent, higher-order mental entities, which share some characteristics of cognitive illusions, as explored recently by Hofstadter in "I am a Strange Loop", blogged here. So referring to a "soul" or a "self" is not delusionary -- as long as you don't think that either is immortal, or can exist without some kind of physical substrate. This was first mused on early in this blog here

On another piece of follow-up, re the jehovah "wanted" poster, I went and looked in Exodus for documentation of the actual involvement of this jehovah character in the murder of an entire generation of Egyptian children over a political squabble (the Feast of the Murdered Children, aka Passover). The evidence is inarguable, his own voice convicts him:

Exodus ch 12 v 12

For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the LORD.

Exodus ch 12 v 29,30

And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle.

And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead.

"For there was not a house where there was not one dead." Holy crap, what a monster. Guilty, guilty, guilty. It really is a good thing that he doesn't exist, it would be quite a job for us to track down the genocidal maniac and bring him to justice ...

Reductio ad Hitlerum

I am officially a sissy, biked only 26.7 miles this morning in 2h6m, 1 stop, through downtown Versailles. But, mowed the back grass and raked the 1st 20 pounds of the estimated 150 pounds of acorns that the 30 foot tall red oak in our front yard will drop this fall. I left about 10 pounds of them in the back corner of our yard as an offering to the squirrels, maybe they will eat less from the bird feeders.

My wife for our 32nd wedding anniversary got me a squirrel-proof bird feeder. It has 2 shells, with 6 aligned openings cut in them. The outer shell is on springs, and anything as big as a squirrel will cause the outer shell to drop such that the holes are closed. We'll see how that does. I have great respect for the ingenuity and persistence of squirrels.

Musicwise, LBJ (Lexington Blues Jam, I have decided sounds better than the Old Fart's Jam) went well Wednesday. Lindsay and Eric were on the road with Harmonica Red, Richard was the designated guitarist, and the wonderful Sheri McGee was the drummer. I think Sheri is the best of the drummers who plays there, she is great to watch and I realized, whenever we have gotten a really great "Who Do You Love" jam going, Sheri has been drumming. She changes tempo and mixes it up, really fun to play with. My songs went well, got to play twice, no bass. We had 6 people from Exstream out, I am going to try to get the LBJEA (Lexington Blues Jam Exstream Auxiliary) going, O'Neils is by far the nicest place we have played, I'd like to keep it a while.

Music-aquisition wise, I am listening to:

• Chick Corea and Bela Fleck, "The Enchantment", very listenable jazz piano and banjo, 3 stars.
• Dan Hicks and The Hot Licks, "Beatin' the Heat" -- his 1st studio album since the '70s, with Ricki Lee Jones, Elvis Costello, Bette Midler, and Tom Waits sitting in on tracks. 3 stars, with maybe a few 4 star tracks.
• The Kinks, "Preservation Act 2". Act 1 got 4 stars, this one I don't think so. Plus some annoying Announcements that will get 2 stars so they don't go on the iPod.

Speaking of which, for the 2nd time my iPod froze, listening to it outside while grilling (carrots, red peppers, portabello, tuna). Plugged it into the sync station, it's still froze. I guess I'll try to google up what to do to it.

So, I was thinking about, why would 61% of people not vote for an atheist? I think it winds up being a "Reductio ad Hitlerum" instinct. Theists intuitively think that atheists, without an imaginary superfriend keeping an eye on them, are amoral with no respect for human life, like Hitler -- who actually was a devout Roman Catholic, which was probably why the vatican was silent about Nazi atrocities. Instead of imaginary superfriends and old obsolete books, atheists have logical ethics. The golden rule and the silver rule ("Don't do unto others what you wouldn't want done unto you") are pretty obvious to anyone who wants to live in human society ...

Antitheism Followup

The Lexington Herald-Leader had an article saying that 25% of those surveyed would not vote for Romney based on his Mormonism -- yay!

Of course, the same article stated that 61% of those surveyed would not vote for an atheist -- the highest of any "religious" group :-(

Mormons Attack!

No biking today, a stationary front / line of rain from New Mexico to New England -- except for a 100 mile gap centered on Lexington, KY. We did finally get some drizzle, but we are still in severe drought. I walked the dog instead of biking, about half the yards look like science fair projects in "Natural Selection of Drought-Resistant Weeds".

This will be a special post, dedicated to one of everyone's favorite topics, antitheism.

So around a month ago, we went to the wedding of an old friend's daughter. She was only around 20, still had a year to go in college, we'd never heard of the boy, we're kind of wondering, what's up?

So, at the ceremony, there's two god dudes, one with official god dude clothes (robe and stole, a Lutheran I think), and one in a suit. They're kind of tag-teaming the ceremony, I'd never seen that before. Then the suit guy says "by the power invested in me as an elder in the church of jesus christ of the latter day saints, I pronounce you man and wife". Uh-oh, Mormons!!!

I work with a mormon or 2, as individuals I have no problem with them, they don't partitularly present as being any more delusional than your average religious person, but, in groups, they really creep me out.

Like the two old guys on the groom's side -- you start wondering how many teenage slave wives they have back in Utah. Mormonism is a young and virulent strain of christianity -- I think in general, the younger the religion, the more virulent the strain. The downwards trends in church-going in, what, pretty much the whole civilized world except for the bible-belt of the USA, indicate that the mind can learn to immunize itself from viruses -- but, Mormonism is I think a new antibiotic-resistant strain. It is very well engineered, with directions on how to live many parts of your life that religions normally stay out of. And, it has the normal (for virulent young religions) harsh treatment of apostasy -- I think your family is expected to pretty much disown you.

After being told by a gorgeous young woman now she had been heavily involved in the bride's conversion, and how wonderful it was, and how she was leaving on her mission soon, we beat a hasty retreat. I talked to the father later (the Lutheran), he said that he considered Mormonism a cult because the Mormons had told him that they believe in current-day prophets ("latter day saints") who are receiving orders directly from god, and if one of these guys tells you to machine-gun children, you do it. Pretty scary.

Then, like 3 days later, I'm having lunch at Arby's and two 15-16 year old boys ride up on bikes, come in, get food, sit down at the table next to me, and ask me if I have heard of the church of jesus christ of the latter day saints. Grrr -- "I'm trying to eat". "Do you work around here?" "No." Grrr.

Sending children out to prosteletyze to strangers is Wrong, and a mark of religious fanaticism. If that ever happens again, I'm going to go on and go for the mind-fuck. "Your parents were well intentioned, but they have infected you with an extremely virulent mind virus. Just remember: when you turn 18, you can tell your parents that you still love them, and you forgive them for infecting you, but you don't want your brain infested by such a parasite anymore."

Yesterday want to the memorial service for my old friend / WRA slaphead, in a babtist church. Very moving, got to sing "Morning has Broken", I had no idea it was a hymn, not too offensive. As the thing went on, and her siblings all talked about how she was now watching them, and how they would be reunited in heaven, I am feeling increasingly alienated from the people there. I understand, it's an accepted part of our culture, but, it still seems delusional to me. Dead is dead. We live on in memories, our works and our genes.

But, I found myself asking myself, "Does believing that an emotional bond is going to last for all eternity (how long is that, anyway) increase the strength of the emotional bond?" I suspect the answer to that question may be Yes.

All antitheism, all the time. My boss last weekend took his #2 son (engineering major at Ga Tech) and #3 son (computer science major at Purdue) and some of his Purdue classmates to our Kentucky pride and joy, the Creationism (anti-)Museum. The word he kept coming back to to describe it was "scary" -- very professionally done, full of children being told by their parents about how things were before/after The Fall of Adam and Noah's Ark; the parking lot packed; and Kentucky State Troopers providing traffic and security services -- that doesn't seem right. Ooh, I'm going to post something about that to the KASES forum, and maybe see if I can get the Kentucky ACLU interested -- using tax dollars for a religious program.

Finally, antitheism item #4. I got to thinking about a "Wanted Dead or Alive" poster for Jehovah, aka Yahweh, God, God the Father, Allah, Adonai. For Murder and Mass Infanticide, with the quote from Exodus where he orders the execution of every first-born child in Egypt (the Passover, or the Feast of the Murdered Children) and some other places where Jehovah personally orders the death of children. So, googling "wanted poster template" located this site, and googling "michelangelo god" gave me some nice pictures to choose from, and here's the preliminary result.

Not bad, but I wanted a little more detail than this. Still, it's a start. Now, need to enlist a small army of skater alternakids to put it up everywhere ;->

Old Farts' Blues Jam

The Old Farts' Blues Jam has moved to O'Neils Irish Pub in Idlehour Shopping Center on Richmond Road, Wednesday from 5-9. Happy hour is 4-7. I got there about 6:40, got to play a ton, maybe 5 singing 4, then a short break, then played bass for around 5, then played guitar for a few more and sang a couple more. Very roomy stage, nice dance floor, you could really hear well. If we can keep this one as long as we did Lynagh's, we'll be doing great.

Evolution in Action

Found the 3rd dead bird of the summer in the area by the main bird feeder. It joins another sparrow and a robin as suspected avicide vicims of the blackbirds. We seem to be up to around a dozen blackbirds, and that many sparrows. Still a pair of cardinals, and the chickadees, and lots of mourning doves. Haven't seen any bluejays lately (strong-beaked by the blackbirds?), and the goldfinchs seem to be pretty much gone as well. But, have been seeing a lot of the hummingbirds -- I think at least 2 males, since one keeps driving the other off. Just a while ago I saw the 1st ever red-winged blackbird at the bird bath. Also noticed a chipmonk jump 2 feet straight up to get a drink in the bird bath.

Also this morning, saw a blue heron in the creek that runs alongside Paul's Mill Road, south of Troy KY in southern Woodford county. That creek is 90% dry, even the places where one of the horse farms dammed it. Drought here is definitely severe.

Biked 30 miles in 2h34m this morning, thought I was going to die. I got started at 9:08, I was 10 miles from home on Delaney Ferry Rd and walked the bike up the end of a hill, and was going to call someone to come get me, I was totally hurting. Cramping in my left hip and lower stomach, both calves hurting, not a cloud in the sky. I think I made a mistake , I ate ~1 hour before I left, pecan swirl danish, I will go back to not eating before I bike. But, I took about a 10 minute break and then struggled home. I got home totally overheated and sweat-soaked, I spread a dirty towel on the floor and passed out on it for an hour before I showered.

My youngest daughter, who I am proud to say is now a 3rd grade teacher, was over for supper last night. I was telling her I had worked up "Lay Lady Lay" on the pedal steel, she had never heard the song! (I got called out for insisting that we had to immediately rectify that situation -- "I thought you liked to tell us youngsters to not obsess on old music"). So, downloaded Bob Dylan "Nashville Skyline", 1969. What a great album, what nice songs, including the wonderfully raw (unrehearsed?) duet with Johnny Cash on "Girl from the North Country".

Speaking of pedal steel, I think I have found where the current best pedal steels are coming from: ZumSteel. Looks like you can get a custom-made, top-of-the-line ZumSteel for around $4500. If my left thumb gets worse to where I really have trouble playing guitar, I think I will go for one of these. I was afraid that I would really have trouble figuring out how to play a real pedal steel, but John Hughey of Time Jumpers, and the immortal Buddy Emmons both have extensive training materials out, so I think I can transition from my 6 string open E instument to a real one.

Interestingly, I think I read it at the steel guitar forum that the pedal steel guitar player population is totally aging -- average age in Nashville around 60??? Maybe it's another one of those hard things (requires practice) that the "Guitar Hero" generation doesn't have the time/patience/discipline/whatever to acquire. That book on music I reviewed recently ("This is Your Brain on Music") I think said that to become an expert on anything takes ~10000 hours (2 hrs a day for 10 years?). That seems like a lot ...

I also have a mental note to get a new flute this year, and see how the bad thumbs do with that. Looks like I can get one for around $350.

Listening to "Speak for Yourself", by Imogen Heap, who was Frou Frou. Nice chick pop, 3 stars.

Phew

Seems to have cooled off here. Grilled out this evening, cooked salmon on one of the cedar planks my youngest got me for my birthday. Had 2 pieces from a half salmon that wouldn't fit on the plank that I cooked directly on the grill like normal (fresh squeezed lemon juice and dill -- but Kroger was out of fresh dill, I had to use dried dill weed!). The normal was good as usual, some brown on the outside, and you could taste some black -- the good stuff. The salmon off the plank literally melted in your mouth and tasted wonderful -- both were excellent, damn cooking is fun!

Currently listening Spacehog's first, "Resident Alien", which went gold in 1995. WRFL played "In The Meantime" the other morning, I called the DJ to ask what that wonderfully catchy tune I had not heard in years was, went and got the album thereafter. They had 2 more albums before they broke up, and the lead singer married Liv Tyler, not sure I will check them out -- but nice that it's measurable how much more there is to exhaust Spacehog.

Went in to work for 5 hours today, I've been refactoring since 8/2, need to get something done ... Was thinking about working Monday (Labor Day), think I will not. My wife is getting off of 3rd shift -- and going to Cincinatti tomorrow with one of her girlfriends. But, I have ribeyes to cook tomorrow, and a chicken for Monday. Damn, cooking is fun!

Technology Review last month had a very upbeat article from their environmental columnist, re, aquaculture in the oceans has great potential to produce totally mass quantities of food (sushi!). This could overcome "the tragedy of the commons" (blogged here) that threatens the fish harvests of the world's oceans.

Last time I visited my older brother in Maine, he was telling me that Maine lobster harvests are at all time highs, and show no problem in increasing. The main food of Maine lobsters is ... lobster bait, from the lobster traps. The traps are constructed such that small lobsters get in and out without problem. Some larger, but undersized, lobsters will get caught in the traps, but they are thrown back by the lobstermen. So Maine lobsters are an example of successful aquaculture. Hopefully many more will follow.

Took a break to put the ribeyes on to marinate overnight. Someone told me you should never marinade for more than 30 minutes -- yeah, right. Last month I grilled for 30 (the cookout that got busted), cooked 20 ribeyes that had marinated overnight. My grill fit the 1st 16, set it on high, put them all on, opened after 3 minutes, "show me fire" -- and fire there was. I ate one of them, the 1st bite I put in my mouth melted there, "ohmigod" I said. Damn, cooking is fun!

My last post, I was so proud of "proprioceptive illusion" -- I thought I had made the concept up, I am so cool -- but then, google it, there are numbers of proprioceptive illusions being researched. I am such a loser -- old and slow :-(

A couple of months ago, I was reading in one of the local weekly newspapers ("Southsider" I think) about someone in Lexington publishing a science fiction digest. I read it, and saw the guy's name, and thought "Wait a minute -- he works at Exstream!". And sure enough, Jason Sizemore, the editor of Apex Digest, was a buildmaster at Exstream. Apparently he had also worked at RenLar in the past. He quit last month to do the magazine full-time. He gave me a sample issue, the quality of the stories was very good. As you would expect, some simplistic stuff ("no one ever expects the spanish inquisition"), but mostly enjoyable. Their big mainstream author for the issue was Kevin J. Anderson, of the Dune sequels and the interminable "seven suns" series I am trapped into reading. This guy is such a hack, the intro to the story said he produces 750K words of literature a year -- I believe it, and I am sure that it all aspires to the same high level of triteness. The guy needs to just focus on writing bodice-rippers, or Anne Rice vampire novels ...

Aside from that tho, Apex Digest was very readable, and had a continued story that made me go on and buy a subscription -- 4 issues/year, $20.

After a month off from heat/vacation, biked last Sunday with the wife, 20.5 miles in 1h50m, 1 stop. Walked the dog this morning, will bike Monday.

Proprioceptive Illusion

The Lexington Herald-Leader ran a story last Thursday or Friday on an article in Nature in which an out-of-body experience was induced in test subjects by showing them images of themselves on VR goggles and touching the subject's back with a stick. The subjects reported they felt that their consciousness was in the image they were looking at. Out-of-body experiences had previously been induced by electrodes in the brain.

We have known about optical illusions for years. More recently we have added cognitive illusions (see for example "Inevitable Illusions", Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, blogged here); and moral illusions (see "The Blank Slate", Stephen Pinker, blogged here).

I think we can now characterize the "out-of-body experience" as a proprioceptive illusion (not sure if that is the correct adjectival form of the noun proprioception, our sense of where our body is) -- and not as evidence for the existence of a soul separate from the body, as is often done.

BTW, last blog I mentioned playing at the last Old Farts' Jam at Lynagh's. I meant to meantion that one of our young developers who hangs out at Lynagh's regularly sent an e-mail to most of development trying to get people out for my final performance there. Attendees showing up, 0. :-(

Played last night (softly) at Coffee Island, in the former sight of The Kentucky Arcade, my son's erstwhile favorite video game hangout. It was fun, very laid back.

Next week, we start up at O'Neil's Irish Pub, Wednesdays from 5-9. Nice place, nice stage, medium sized dance floor. Haven't decided yet how early I want to try and get out there.

Reading the latest Year's Best. Just read a great story by Benjamin Rosenbaum, "The House Beyond Your Sky". Per his web site, it's up for Hugo. Great computational cosmology, great stuff, one to keep an eye on.

A Trip to the Great North

So, we vacated to Canada, le Provence de Quebec to be exact, from 8/12 to 8/19. Flew from Louisville to Montreal on Sunday, stayed there until Thursday. Mostly did tourist foo, Botanical Garden very nice, the Olympic stadium tower. Ate lots of good french food -- sweetbreads and a rack of lamb rubbed in rosemary the 1st night, magnifique. Thursday our oldest daughter flew in from NYC and we took the train to Quebec City (3 hours), stayed there until Saturday, took the train back, then flew home Monday after our Sunday flight was cancelled (thanks United). Quebec City we didn't like as well, pretty much solid tourists, with the big historical point of interest that they seemed obsessed with being the loss of the city to the British in 1759.

So our summer vacation to the north to escape the heat was successful again. I think it may have gotten to 80 1 day in Montreal, and Quebec didn't get over 75, while it was close to 100 down here. So of course, we got rained on in Quebec Friday evening when the temperature was around 60 and I caught a cold, that I am just now about completely over. Hoisted on my own petard.

On the way to Montreal, I finished "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession", by Daniel J. Levitin. He is a former record producer/engineer who is now a researcher at McGill U (in Montreal!) into the cognitive science of music. An OK book, good analysis of the components and evolutionary basis of music, lots of fun factiods (FFTKAT) re why the music of some modern pop artists such as The Beatles, Steely Dan, and Joni Mitchell are so appealing. The web site for the book has song samples and other stuff. One interesting thing that I will research further was his statement that starting times of sounds/notes are discernable by the brain at the level of a few milliseconds. Everything I have seen prior to this has said that the lowest level of time that the brain/consciousness can process is 50 milliseconds / 20 hertz (movies run at 24 frames/second) -- so an interval an order of magnitude below that is definitely worth investigating.

This is the third book on music/mind I have read, much better than the other two, but still, I was glad when this book was over -- not really that much new there. 3 stars.

After that read "Thirteen" by Richard K. Morgan, his 5th novel. Aside from some pacing problems in its 550 pages, a very good read. But, very depressing. Morgan is a Scot. The novel is set in ~2105. The northeast states and the west coast have split from the US in the mid 21st century, leaving the rest as a country known popularly as Jesusland. It's main characteristics are its poor education system, legislated morality, and its willingness to do dirty jobs for cheap, and its suspension of the rule of law, habeus corpus, etc. The truth hurts, don't it? 4 stars.

I never watch The Daily Show any more. It's just not funny any more, the idiocy has gone on far too long. And even with the Bushies in increasingly severe disarray, the democrats seem to remain clueless. Sigh ...

After that I read the new William Gibson, "Spook Country", very good, very much in the vein of "Pattern Recognition", which I thought was his best book since "Neuromancer" in 1984, 4 stars.

Last Wednesday was the last blues jam at Lynagh's, they were ready for a change after 15 months of the Old Farts Blues Jam. Many guitarists there, they were kind of rushing people through, my 3 went OK, considering I still had the damn cold. I'm supposed to be taking the pedal steel to some coffee place for some low volume acoustic type stuff this Wednesday, we'll see how that goes.

My old friend Slaphead, aka Diana Probus, whose blog I linked to recently, died yesterday morning, apparently of complications/side effects of chemotherapy. Her blog went silent June 16, and one of her online friends was kind enough to give me the news. She was 50.

The End of Hippiedom

So got back from my walk, it is so damn muggy. I forgot to take a hat and the sun came out half way through, probably have a red nose tomorrow, hopefully not a red scalp. I took my shirt off. Not too many people out, hopefully no young children were traumatized by The Great White Whale ("Big as a mountain and white as the show, it's Moby Dick!"). I still tan on my trunk, but the 1st thing that happens after exposure to sun is that the hair on my chest all turns bright shiny white. I don't seem to tan at all from the knees down, I think from my 12 years of refereeing soccer and having a soccer tan from wearing knee socks.

So got home, needed to cool off before showering so I did another post (2 in 1 day!), somehow got my Blogger cookies/state screwed up by changing a setting, lost the post. Grrr. I've cooled off enough to shower now, but will try to recreate this while it's still fresh in my mind.

Anyway, there are some of my raps that I have been forgetting for years to add to this blog. Some have made it, like My Greatest Blasphemies, others haven't. So I had a good idea to help me remember these. Whenever I think of one, I e-mail it to myself at my home account, where I blog from. I have for years used the inbox of my e-mail as my todo list, both at work and at home. An e-mail that requires action, a response, or more thought stays in the inbox until it is processed (or it times out), at which point it is filed in an appropriate folder or deleted/archived. Crazy that I just thought to send e-mails to myself when I need to remember to do something. But, ain't having an exocortex great!

During most of my Cambridge/Boston years 1968-1974 I was a hippie. In high school, I had a friend, who was generally regarded as our token beatnik, who turned me on to Herman Hesse, "Steppenwolf", "Siddhartha", "The Bead Game" and other similar literature, and to Mississippi Delta blues. He also wanted to turn me on to smoking pot, but in the stupefying naivete of my youth ("the weenie factor" -- I graduated high school just before I turned 17), I didn't realize this until years later. He later was a Louisville blues singer for years.

I started playing music in around 1965. When I got to MIT in the fall of 1968, I had a great collection of psychedelic music and my heros were Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, and The Grateful Dead. It took a very short time for the hippie contingent of my living group and me to realize we were kindred spirits. So I lived various aspects of the hippie lifestyle until I moved back to Jeffersonville in 1974 (but city hippie rather than country hippie).

So my contention is that Woodstock, in the summer of 1969, was the beginning of the end of the hippie movement. My bass player at the time went, I was working as a welder at JeffBoat to make money for college, I didn't go.

Woodstock was three days of great music, great drugs, and great fellowship, with lots of free love going around -- and Nothing Happened. Back then, we really thought that we could Change Things, in potentially magical ways. So with all the great vibes of Woodstock, Something should have happened:

• the mother ship should have landed and taken on some passengers, or
• a group mind should have formed, or
• superpowers like telepathy and levitation should have manifested.

But, aside from the usual births, deaths, and dancing, Nothing Happened. And this was the beginning of the end of hippiedom.

I think that the one lasting legacy of the hippie movement was the birth of the environmental movement. Hippies were its parents.

Rainy Day, Dream Away

Looks like I am rained out from biking again -- it just started raining pretty steady, around 9am. Checked the radar, it should last 30-60 minutes. So I'll go for a walk when it's done. Meanwhile, might as well blog.

I wasn't going to bike far anyway, maybe 30 miles. We're back to low 90s and humid as hell. We were at a party last night, sitting on a deck at 10:30pm and sweat is rolling off me.

Actual title of this entry was going to be "The Birds and the Bees". Main point re the birds is, they fight all the time, as long as they are within 1 size class of the other bird. So robins, cardinals, and mockingbirds get territorial on each other, both within and without of their species, but ignore sparrows. Blackbirds will gang up and try to drive a crow away. And when there's a hawk around, both crows and blackbirds will put 1-3 sentries keeping tabs on the hawk. They will also mess with it when it's in flight.

I enjoy watching my bird bath and 3 bird feeders. Here's some anecdotes / natural science.

• Of the birds that use the main bird feeder, the pecking order is: blackbirds, bluejays, cardinals. Doves eat but don't seem to get involved. We also have a lovely pair of chickadees that the other birds seem to ignore. They fly almost like hummingbirds.
• I had thought robins didn't use the feeder (worm eaters), but there was one eating there yesterday.
• The main feeder and bath are between an aristocrat pear and a crabapple tree near the house. I cut most of a branch on the crabapple that the squirrels (3) were using for fast access to the main bird feeder. Our hummingbird feeder (none this year or last) hangs from it and the vibration of the squirrels' passing sloshes the liquid out of the hummingbird feeder. After I cut it, I noticed a chipmunk (chipmunks climb trees!) going up the pear over to the crabapple, all around the crabapple, back to the pear -- I had destroyed his access to the bird feeder. So then he climbs the pole the feeder's on -- the squirrels do this and then just swarm over the lip of 6 x 12 inch base of the feeder -- and leaps backwards along the long dimension of the base; attempts to grab the edge; fails and falls to the ground (5 feet). Then back up the pole again, another leap in the direction 180 degrees from the first, with the same result. Then back up the pole, reach the edge in the shorter direction directly, without leaping, and easily pulls itself over. So why did it try twice leaping 6 inches before reaching 3? Almost like its route searching algorithm was random, which I wouldn't think was the case ...
• The birds don't mess with the the squirrels on the feeder. I thought maybe rodents got a pass, but a bluejay got territorial with the chipmunk when it was in the tree, so it's probably the size thing.
• Cardinals seem to be fairly timid, but I did see a female cardinal dominating a bluejay briefly. I also saw a male cardinal fly up and side with a female when a bluejay was dominating the female.
• The bluejays and chickadees fly to the feeder, get a piece of food, and fly back to a branch to eat it. The doves, blackbirds, cardinals, and robins eat at the feeder.
• The goldfinches currently have the thistle seed feeder to themselves. I guess that shows the advantage of have an unusual food be part of the definition of your ecological niche.

BTW, I am adding another blog link: that of an old friend/WRA of mine. She was affectionately known as "slaphead" when she worked for me ~15 years ago because she was such a smartass you wanted to slap her upside the head -- my kind of person.

Politically Incorrect?

Subtitle, sometimes I just can't tell anymore.

Anyway, I'm coming home from Lynagh's (Wednesday jam is every other week now, this is the off week, but I seem compelled to go nonetheless -- old fart's jam has been replaced by the internationally renowned guitarist, the inimitable Ben Lacy). I'm stopped at the corner of Huguelet and Limestone, coming out of the UK campus. I particularly noticed tonight what I notice whenever I'm stopped there: the pedestrian (don't)walk traffic signals talk continuously (walk now, don't walk, but maybe much more???). I had presumed that this was for the visually impaired. But, if there are no visually impaired around, this amounts to:

1. noise pollution;
2. a waste of the energy to generate the sound (love the earth, at least sound is much cheaper than light);
3. a waste of information (I have always wondered, if you put your turn signal on when no one is behind you, does it really blink?).

So here's the politically incorrect part -- or maybe this is just a good idea. How about if all the manufacturers of visually-impaired people's canes and seeing-eye-dog harnesses started implanting an RFID chip in their product that says, "Anonymous blind person approaching". Then the damned traffic signal could shut the fuck up unless its vocal services were actually useful.

This of course raises privacy and security issues. A predator (or government) who enjoyed preying on the visually impaired could build a locator that would find victims. 'Course, the cane and/or dog might have already given them away.

Speaking of the mark of the beast, I have for the last 5-10 years been saying that as soon as I can get my cell phone / PDA / PC implanted behind my left ear, I'm going for it. But, these devices need an absolute physical on/off switch so you can go dark if you need to.

Hmmm, probably can't work. The RAM would probably need at least a trickle of bio-electricity to keep functioning, and that would certainly be traceable. Oh well ... who needs privacy anyway? The MySpace generation sure doesn't worry about it. I think it was the Wired article 2 months ago on Go Naked that said something to the effect that the MySpace generation would never trust anyone who wasn't willing to bare their innermost secrets on their page.

Still driving home from Lynaghs, on S. Broadway, I have in the left lane motorcyclists. 1st 2, serious "Outlaws KY" colors and serious tats, scary motorcycle dudes. A group of motorcycles has been the wolf pack of the automotive world ever since Marlon Brando and "The Wild One".

Next a big guy with good tats and a big biker woman riding behind him.

Next a big guy with no tats or colors and big not-so-biker woman riding behind him.

Next a big woman driving herself.

I thought that was the end of it, I thought, man, how the biker gangs have fallen, that group looked like it was nearing the end of its life cycle. But then, after 3-4 cars, another 4 bikers, basically average joes, average tats, standard tee-shirts. So the "Outlaws KY" will lead the way but now basically ride with anyone? Some kind of sociobiology going on here, I have no idea what.