With Trembing Fingers

This is a good article by Hal Crowther, With Trembling Fingers on the Bush administrations failures and lack of shame about those failures.

A guerrilla who opposes an invading army on his own soil is not a terrorist, he’s a resistance fighter. In Iraq we’re not fighting enemies but making enemies. As Richard Clarke and others have observed, every dollar, bullet and American life that we spend in Iraq is one that’s not being spent in the war on terrorism. Every Iraqi, every Muslim we kill or torture or humiliate is a precious shot of adrenaline for Osama and al Qaeda.

I absolutely agree — the war in Iraq was not waged in response to terrorism; terrorism was just a great excuse to get the American people behind the war. The whole thing has become one huge clusterfuck, and no one in a position to change things is willing to admit it.

On the near side of my haystack, among hundreds of quotes circled and statistics underlined, just one thing leaped out at me. A quote I had underlined was from the testimony of Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg trials, not long before Hitler’s vice-fuhrer poisoned himself in his jail cell:

“It is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”

Doesn’t that sound familiar? Anyone who does not lock-step with Bush on his Iraq policies is branded anti-patriotic by the leadership.

I’m so tired. I’m angry any time I see another story on Iraq. It’s time for the leaders in this country to step up, admit things are going badly, and correct those mistakes. I fear this won’t happen until we have someone new in the White House. I fear that it might not happen with this election — the polls are still too close for comfort, and we need more people to see the light.

(Found this article through Pharyngula.)

Withdrawl

Monday afternoon my long-standing headache^* got really bad. I couldn’t think of anything that might have caused it to accelerate. Then I remember that the iced tea I’d made on Sunday was caffeine-free, and we didn’t have any diet pop left in the house, so there had been on caffeine consumption since Saturday afternoon. Since I was working from home, I really needed to get the headache down to a manageable level, so I grabbed a couple Excedrin (with the added bonus of caffeine) and a regular Coke (my first non-diet pop in about two months). Wouldn’t you know that I felt much better within half an hour.

I don’t like the idea of being that dependent on a chemical, so I’ve decided to cut out caffeine for the next week or two, just to get it out of my system and hopefully cut my dependence. Tuesday was bad, with a horrible headache in the afternoon. Yesterday was better. (I suspect that the chai I drink in the morning has a bit of caffeine, though not much. Maybe it was just enough to keep my body satisfied.)

^* I’ve had a headache for over a year now — I wake up with it and fall asleep with it. I visited a neurologist, and she believes that it’s from grinding my teeth at night. I did get a mouth guard from my dentist, but that doesn’t stop the clenching and grinding, it just prevents that clenching and grinding from damaging my teeth. The neurologist refused to give me any muscle relaxers, which might have helped, because my blood pressure was high when I visited her (it’s always high in the doctor’s office, but normal at home — white-coat syndrome). I won’t see that neurologist again, and my primary care physician has since left my HMO. Sadly the primary care physician was the only doctor at my clinic that I’ve seen that I got along with, so I’m now waiting until open enrollment this fall when I will change health plans. Until then, I’m resigned to having a headache.

Lesson 05/19/2004

Good lesson! We played through Gigue, Tamburin, and Minuetto.

The Minuetto has four different sections that are repeated, and since I’m trying to build up my stamina, we’ve been playing all the repeats lately. After playing through the last section the first time, I went in for the repeat, which starts with a measure with just my part playing, and I hear Fred playing the beginning of the piece (it has a D.C al Fine). We stop for a second, and I look at him, “We’re playing the repeats.”

“I though we already repeated that part,” he says.

“No, we repeated the first part of the Trio, but not that second part.”

“Well look at you. You’re all on top of this and wondering where I am. Okay, let’s play through that, but we’ll say it’s the last repeat, and then go back to the beginning.”

Heh heh heh.

Of course, then we tried some sight reading of some Bach pieces that Fred had, and then I was put back in my place. For some reason I just can’t sight-read.

Next week we’re going to have an hour-long lesson to make up for some of the ones I’ve missed. I better practice like a maniac this week.

The June bug story

Since seeing my first cicada this weekend, I’ve been thinking a lot about the June bug story. Let me just preface this by saying that I don’t deal well with bugs. I’m okay with a small ant or two, but anything larger sets my body shivering.

Several years ago, I was in Minnesota visiting my parents for the summer. I was out in the garage with my brother, Dave, and almost-sister-in-law, Jen, when I noticed a weird feeling under my arm. I reached my hand around to see what it was, and lo’ and behold, there was a June bug in my bra under my arm.

The first question that might come to mind is How on Earth did a June bug get there? Mind you, that was not my first question, but I’ll address that here nonetheless. First, I was wearing a sports bra — the kind that can gap in the cleavage-area, leaving ample opportunity for the bug to enter my bra. Now, as to how it got from my cleavage to under my arm is still somewhat of a mystery. I would have thought that a June bug crawling along sensitive parts of my female anatomy would have raised a flag sooner. Perhaps I moved in such a way that other gaps in the bra were produced, easing the path of the June bug.

My first reaction to feeling the June bug under my bra was to start jumping around and yelling, “Get it out, get it out, get it out.” I had to calm down enough to get a few explanatory words to my brother. I probably muttered something like, “June bug. Bra. There. Get it!.”

My brother, being a loving, kind and considerate brother, looked at me and said, “But you’re my sister.”

“I don’t care. Get it out.”

But he wouldn’t. I continued the heebie-jeebie-dance, and turned to Jen. Sadly, she has just as much of a bad reaction to bugs as I do.

Someone, I think Dave, went into the house and grabbed Mom. She came out, and even though I’m sure she hates bugs every bit as much as Jen and I, her Mom-instinct took over, and she flipped the June bug out of my bra. Yay Mom!

But I still get the willies whenever I think about it.

The Vagina Monologues

4.5/5 stars

I wanted to go to this when it came through town, but just didn’t feel like I could go alone (nor did I want to drag Andrew along). If/when it comes through again, I’ll definately get tickets.

This reminded me a bit of a one-woman show I saw several years ago called Whistling Girls and Crowing Hens. In both, I laughed, I cried, I laughed til I cried. Whistling Girls was a collection of stories about women in general — from one monologue on wanting the Dream Date game, complete with zits for not doing a dare, to a monologue about a woman being raped to a monologue about the old Girl Scout manual (teaching girls how to keep up a home).

Vagina Monologues had the same range of subjects, but all relating somehow to a woman’s vagina — from reclaiming the word ‘cunt’ to a gang rape survivor describing her vagina before as a village and after as a village plundered, destroyed. At times moving, at times funny, always captivating. Strongly recommended.

All the Pretty Horses

by Cormac McCarthy

I’m not sure why I picked this book up — it’s not my usual type of book; though I may have wondered if I should bother seeing the movie. I’m even less sure why I finished reading it. The writing style grated on my nerves the whole time. McCarthy doesn’t believe in proper punctuation (like putting quotes around what someone says), and while some (like the folks who choose the recipients of the National Book Award) might see this as an artistic choice adding to the flavor of the book, I found it distracting.

This is the story of John Grady who has been around horses on his parents’ ranch for his entire 16 years. Shortly after his grandfather dies, though, his parents split up officially, and his mother decides to sell the ranch to persue an acting career. John is not ready to leave the world of horses and ranches, so leaves with is horse and his best friend, and heads south into Mexico to see where their fortunes take them.

I had a difficult time figuring out when this story was taking place until I was about 75% finished. I did find that I cared about the characters, and wanted to know how the story ended, but I’m not sure it was worth the work it took to get there.

My first cicada

There’s been a lot of buzz in the area about the 17-year cicadas, but I hadn’t seen one yet. Until this morning.

I went out to get the paper, when something bounced off my head and onto the front stoop. It was a cicada. I have no idea where it came from, perhaps the door jam. Let me just say that it was ugly, and I’m not looking forward to the full infestation.

Ford Dealership

Andrew got this puzzle for me for Christmas. It’s an old-time Ford dealership, and there is a Model-T in the lower left corner. Have I mentioned my Model-T yet? I don’t think so…I’ll need to do an entry on that.

Red Planet

2/5 stars

I was ready to put all the bad science behind me and just enjoy a good sf movie, but there were so many other holes in the plot that I just couldn’t do it. For example, at one point, the surface navigation robot, AMEE, gets switched into “military mode” from “navigation mode,” and overhears the team members saying that they need to “kill” her to get the power they need for something (I already forget). Instead of killing them outright, she just maims one and runs off. Gallagher, Val Kilmer’s character, explains that she’s playing war games, and will come back and kill them one by one. Huh? She was clearly having no trouble with the three of them, so there would be no reason not to just kill them then and there. Come on.

So, since it was so bad in other respects, let’s chronicle the bad science that I can remember:

• Enough green algae on Mars will produce oxygen. Bloody unlikely — the green algae would die first.
• Where there is oxygen and water, life will follow. Well, maybe, but it’s highly unlikely that the life will go from green algae to insane omnivorous bugs. Way more likely to be some variation on the green algae, and a long, painful path from plant-life to animal-life.
• Mars will produce a breathable atmosphere in just a few decades (or less). Even with enough green algae alive and some kind of super bug, there ain’t going to be enough oxygen to have a viable atmosphere on Mars anytime soon.
• Astronauts could survive on the surface of Mars for a day without protective gear. Even if I could believe that Mars could have a breathable atmosphere, there is virtually no protection on Mars from the harmful radiation of the Sun. On Earth, we have the upper atmosphere to protect us from the harmful radiation of the Sun (gamma-rays, X-rays, UV) On Mars, there would not yet be a complex-enough atmosphere for such protection. Even if the astronauts did survive a day without their helmets, they would have severe radiation poisoning.

That’s all I can remember for now. I’m not going to re-watch it just to find bad science.

Perhaps I could have enjoyed this movie if there had only been plot holes and no bad science or no plot holes with bad science, but I just couldn’t look beyond both.

Another Paper!

As part of my work, I’ve helped out on several conference proceedings and science papers. The latest one now appears in the astro-ph archive. The paper will appear in The Astrophysical Journal in August.

The paper describes an upcoming NASA mission (along with collaborators from other organizations and countries) designed to study gamma-ray bursts (GRBs).

GRBs were discovered in the 1960s when the Vela satellites observed bright flashes of gamma-rays. The Vela satellites were designed to watch for violations of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and were watching the Earth for gamma-rays, since nuclear explosions emit strongly in gamma-rays. Instead, they observed cosmic flashes of gamma-rays (known to come from outside the Earth by triangulation of signals recieved from the different satellites).

Since then, GRBs have been largely a mystery. In 1997, BeppoSAX, an Italian X-ray astronomy mission, discovered X-ray afterglow from a GRB. From the afterglow observations, we now know that at least one class of GRBs is cosmological in distance (i.e. they do not come from our solar system or even our galaxy — they originate at distances halfway across the known Universe).

Afterglow has now been observed in X-ray, optical, and radio wavelengths (and everything in between). The key to understanding what causes GRBs is in using multiwavelength observations to map the evolution of radiation from a GRB.

That’s where the Swift mission comes into the picture. It is a satellite that will carry a gamma-ray all-sky telescope that will watch for a GRB to take place. As soon as it detects a GRB, the satellite will autonomously slew to bring the burst into the fields-of-view of its X-ray and optical telescopes. Within about a minute, the burst will be observed by three different wavebands simulateously.

In the past year, GRBs have been tied to supernovae in distant galaxies, but there are still several mysteries to solve about GRBs. For example, there is another class of GRBs whose origin has not been explained, though may be related to two orbitting neutron stars that collide. Also, since GRBs lie at cosmological distances, they might be useful for studying the Universe at high redshift, when it was much, much younger than it is now.