The Age of the Pussyfoot

by Frederik Pohl

Pohl’s 26th century is a place where death, at least for those with some money, is a temporary state. Charles Forrester wakes up in 2527, having died in a fire in the 1960s. He had been cryogenically frozen in hopes that someday he could be resuscitated. He was finally thawed, not just because the technology was there, but because his bank account had finally earned enough return to pay for his resuscitation. Forrester finds that things are much different than in the 1960s — one can file papers to legally kill someone else, provided they can pay for resuscitation of the victim, for example. Unfortunately, things are also expensive, and those without money, the Forgotten Men (and women) do not have protection against death. Oh! And Earth is at war with an alien race.

I went into this book expecting it to be fairly cheesy, since it was written in the 60s. However, I found it to be quite good, with some of Pohl’s predictions fun to read. The “joymakers” that everyone carries aren’t too far off from today’s Palm Pilots, though our Palms aren’t yet able to dispense happy drugs…

Overall a fun read.

The Plague Tales

by Ann Benson

Benson weaves together two stories separated by nearly seven hundred years. The first is about Alejandro Caches, a jewish surgeon in Europe during the first outbreak of the plague in the 14th century. Alejandro is chased from his home in Spain to France, and then finds himself shipped off to England to ensure the safety of the royal family. The second story is set in modern times. Janie Crowe, after losing her family to a mysterious outbreak in the US, finds herself starting her life over again. With a third of the population gone, there just isn’t as much call for surgeons anymore. In the course of research for her certification as a forensic archeologist, she goes to London to examine soil samlpes. In the process, a dormant sample of the plague is unleashed.

Benson envisions a present-day Earth that has been overtaken by concern for the transmission of biotoxins and germs after much of the US has been ravaged by random outbreaks. It’s not an unreasonable near-future, and she carries it out qutie well. Her writing style is easy to read, and I enjoyed that she didn’t treat any of her characters as “sacred”.

Pandamania, Trip 4

Yup, that’s right. We went out Panda Hunting again this weekend. My secret goal is to see all of the pandas without completely wearing us down. When the Party Animals were in town a couple years ago, we didn’t go out until late in the summer (September, even?), and we wore ourselves out for two weekends seeing as many as we could. I wanted an earlier start this year, and more manageable trips each time.

I’ve posted pictures on Flickr.

We saw many, many cute and fun ones today. It was refreshing to see some new ways to do Washington landscapes. Most of the landscapes we’ve seen, both in the Pandamania exhibits and the Party Animals, are traditional, which, while nice, get old after you’ve seen a couple. This time we saw a couple neat ones, specifically Panda-a-round town and Phosphroescent Panda.

It was diffucult to pick just a few favorites, but here goes:

Panda van Gogh
Panda-Monet-um
Bearly Discernable	A little lizard on the bear…hee hee hee
China Doll	Detail of her hair decoration

Geeks at a Concert

Andrew and I went to the Weird Al concert last night at the 930 Club in DC. I haven’t seen such a gathering of geeks since…well…since the last Star Trek con I went to years ago. (There are probably that many geeks at work, but they don’t congregate in such large numbers at once.)

Before the concert started, I had fun watching the crowd. The only thing funnier than geeks trying to dress up (see one of my entries from the American Astronomical Society meeting for more on that) is geeks trying to look cool. For example, there was one guy fairly close to where we were standing who looked a bit like Screech from Saved by the Bell (the older Screech, not the gangly young Screech). He wore dark pants and a dark polo-type shirt. That would have been a good look for him. But, he couldn’t stop at looking nice; he had to try for cool. His idea of cool was a Mr. T-type chain — just one, but it was fairly thick. Oh, and the pièce de résistance was his sun glasses…inside a dark club. He kept taking off of the glasses, but still.

The concert itself was great fun. Weird Al knows how to put on a good show. He went off for frequent costume changes, but while he was out they played bits from Al TV, so there wasn’t ever any lulls in the concert. He opened with one of his polka-compilations, which are always fun. They also did a montage of several songs (though there wasn’t a discernible theme — at first I thought TV songs, then food songs, then it seemed anything went, including Jerry Springer, Pretty Fly for a Rabbi, Lasagna, and Gump. Among my favorites of the other songs he played were: Amish Paradise, One More Minute, It’s All About the Pentiums.

Oh, and they also did an encore. I remember when I saw him years ago (late 80s…possibly early 90s), he did an encore of Yoda. That was the song for which my best friend, who accompanied me to the concert, and I had won a lip-synching concert (I played Yoda, and she was Luke). We felt like he played that encore just for us. For the encore last night, he first did The Saga Begins and then Yoda. Ah. That was a great ending to the evening.

A couple notes on the venue: The 930 Club is not a seated venue, meaning that everyone just stands around the stage. While this makes for an intimate-feeling concert, it also made for a painful one. About half-way through, my legs started to cramp up, and I really wanted to stretch them. However, we were surrounded by people, close enough that they were constantly bumping into me, so there was no room to really move at all.

Besides that, the 930 Club is in a really rough part of DC. When Andrew told me which Metro stop we’d have to use to get there, I nearly told him we weren’t going…our $80 investment be damned. Andrew managed to calm me down enough that we went (obviously), but I can safely say that we won’t be back anytime soon. I don’t care who plays there.

More Games More Fun, Week 1

Tonight was our first games class. We signed up for the community education class, More Games, More Fun, taught by the same guy who taught the Beyond Monopoly class we took last fall. (We had actually signed up for his Two Player Games class this spring, but forgot to put it on our calendars, and completely forgot until the weekend after the class.)

The first game we played was La Strada, which reminded me of Through the Desert, which we played last fall. In the game, you are a merchant, and your goal is to build roads to various towns and hamlets to sell your goods. The more towns and hamlets the better, but if another player has a presence in the town, too, your final score is diminished. Fun game — each turn is fairly simple, but you really want to pay attention to what other players are doing so you can plan your moves accordingly.

The second game was High Society. This is an auction game where you try to end up with the most toys. Everyone starts out with the same amount of money, and there are 10 “toy” cards, 3 cards that up your points by twice, a thief card, a card that decreases your points by half, and a card that decreases your points by 5. I’m not great at auction games, but still had some fun with it.

The final game was Coyote, a game somewhat like Polish poker (or Indian poker…neither of which is very politically correct). Each player has a numbered card on their head that everyone but themselves can see. You go around the group, each person bidding on what they think the total of those cards are, but not going over. If you think the person before you is over the total, you challenge them. Whoever was wrong gets a coyote. As players get three coyotes, they are out of the game. This one was quite fun, quick and easy to learn. Though, it got really hard when the game was down to just the last two people…

Another crackpot?

I came across the following paper title while perusing the past week’s submissions to astro-ph:

The accreting neutron stars are quasars, and the universe does not expand

and I thought to myself, I wonder if this author is a crackpot.

The jury is still out. The basic theory is that quasars are not, indeed, cosmological objects, but rather they are local neutron stars with a dirty hydrogen cloud of material that is accreting onto the star. It is this accretion that gives a false redshift, making the star appear to be cosmological in distance.

I haven’t read the paper, and probably don’t know enough about the physics they are proposing to make a good judgement (plus, reports are that the author’s translation from French to English makes the article difficult to decipher). The underlying theory is called the Creil Effect, and briefly, states that photons coming from distant galaxies interacts with intervening atoms in such a way that while they lose energy (i.e. are redshifted), their direction is not affected. This would produce the redshift/distance relationship without invoking an expanding Universe.

There is a thread on the Bad Astronomy web site about Creil, in which several holes in the theory are brought up, such as the Creil Effect’s inability to explain that distant supernova experience time dialation effects that are best explained by relativisitic expansion.

While reading this, I came across a link to an article Why the Big Bang is Wrong by John Kierein. I did not read this article in detail, either, because others have ripped apart some of his arguments already (see this thread for a few arguments). But I laughed outloud when I came to this deficiency in the Big Bang theory:

How do galaxies collide if they are flying away from each other?

The ignorance of that statement is enough to make me discount anything Kierein has to say.

Unsurprisingly, Moret-Bailly (author of the original astro-ph paper that prompted this search) signed the anti-big bang petition, and I suspect that Kierein supports its sentiments (though I did not see his signature on the current petition page). (Preposterous Universe has a couple good posts about this petition: Doubt and dissent are not tolerated and Energy and intelligence)

This is not to say that the Big Bang theory is the end-all and be-all of cosmology. There are still things to be worked out in the theory. And, in working those issues out, parts of the theory may be proven false. That’s what science is all about. But for now, the Big Bang theory seems to be holding up fairly well.

Cramp Relief

I do not recommend this to anyone!

This evening, just after Andrew left for his lesson, I was gearing up to start addressing the wedding invitations. Of course that’s when I started cramping. Not the mild, oh-that’s-a-bit-uncomforatable kind of cramps either. The knock-you-down, kick-your-ass kind of cramps. This is not the best circumstances to be addressing invitations.

Before starting, though, I thought I should have some dinner. I wasn’t exactly hungry, because of the cramps, but one migraine trigger for me is skipping meals, and I frankly didn’t need both cramps and a migraine. So, I popped a frozen dinner into the microwave.

When the dinner was fully heated, I reached into the microwave to pull it out, but steam burned my fingertips just as I had it half-way out of the oven. My body did what it naturally does when it percieves some part of it being burned: I recoiled. This left the dinner unbalanced on the edge of the microwave’s opening. And gravity, being what it is, grabbed the dinner, and pulled it to the ground.

The ground is only about 2.5 feet from the opening of the microwave. However, this was enough acceleration to send the contents spraying all over the kitchen when the tray landed. Part of this spray of searing-hot dinner landed on my leg and my wrist. I tried getting it off of me as quickly as possible, but it was not fast enough to prevent a small blister on my wrist and a larger one on my knee.

The good news is that the pain from the burns on my leg and wrist was enough to drive the pain of my cramps out of my mind. In fact, they did not return all night.

Arlington Oddness

On our way to the Rosslyn Metro Station yesterday, after panda hunting, we saw a couple weird things. First, on the Key Bridge, we saw these faces painted on one of the cement squares:

Andrew commented that it looked like the Sliders guy, Jerry O’Connell. Then, after we crossed the bridge, we saw this:

Andrew realized that the face was the same as what we saw on the bridge (plus, there was another face painted on a concrete pillar on the other side of the sidewalk).

Anyone know what this is about??

Pandamania, Trip 3

We went out for our third trip panda hunting today — the trip we’d planned for Saturday, but had to abort due to back pain. Fortunately, Andrew was back up to par today, so we took advantage of the holiday.

I’ve posted pictures on Flickr, but here are a couple of my favorites from the day’s trip:

Peter Panda, that shows scenes of the story of Peter Pan:

The Pur-r-r-fect Panda:

We stumbled upon another group of panda-hunters at the Pur-r-r-fect Panda, a mother and her two kids. She told us where we could find the official printed map up by Gallery Place. We’ll try to seek that out on our next trip to see the pandas near the Capitol Building.

The Terminal

4/5 stars

This was a fun movie, and probably the best fictional movie Andrew and I have seen in a while. The first several minutes are very frustrating, as Viktor Navorski (Hanks) lands in New York and is taken into custody in customs. His country has undergone a civil revolution, and all travel permits have been suspended for its citizens. Navorski’s passport is no good. But the frustrating part is that Navorski doesn’t speak much English (only what he has in a traveller’s cheat sheet in front of him), so he doesn’t know what’s going on. The movie picks up, after he starts living in the terminal, learning English and interacting with the terminal’s regular employees.

Side note: I think I really embarrassed Andrew. There was a guy two rows back from us that was talking on his cell phone. Andrew looked back, and then I looked back, made direct eye contact (or so I thought), and gave him a dirty look. He continued talking. I turned around again, and said fairly quietly, “Get off your phone.” Apparently it was too quiet to break through his more-interesting-than-the-movie conversation. So, I turned around again, and said again, “Get off your phone.” This time, though, I’m pretty sure that at least half the theater could hear me. Believe it or not, the message got through to him this time. He got off his ^%$#@ phone. What an ass.