Category Archives: GeekWorld

connections

January 7, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Winter Waning Moon of Long Nights

One of the reasons the web continues to fascinate me, and it does, lies in its capacity to surprise me. I read an article in the Economist about Internet Archives. This is an astonishing effort spearheaded by one man to make the worlds information available on the web. You may have heard of the Wayback machine, a way of finding lost or neglected websites, but this project has so much more. It has a lot of live music, an especially active Grateful Dead collection. It has moving images, including commercials, a quick entre to marketing and cultural cues of the near past. It also has an incredible number of texts, complete and free. Worth a look.

I’ve not had a tour since mid-December. While I enjoy the down time, I do feel disconnected from the museum. There’s a tendency, living this far out, to hunker down, particularly in bad weather. I’m not as comfortable as I used to be heading out in snowy, icy conditions and that contributes to the hibernation. As I’ve written before, this all helps the writing, getting into a rhythm, focus. That’s true, but I miss the connection with both the art and my fellow docents. They have become an important part of my life, one of the social pillars for me. So, I look forward to getting back at it in February.

GeekWorld

Apophis

January 1, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Winter New Year’s Day Full Moon of Long Nights -11

Russia to Plan Deflection of Asteroid From Earth asteroid-apophis-625x450

(Apophis* the meteor Russia plans to deflect)

I read about the Russian’s plan the other day and a bizarre thought crossed my mind. I’ve watched several different asteroid approaches the earth movies and brave scientists or working class astronauts save the day.

Here’s the crazy idea: what if an intended deflection does not work and has the unintended consequence of pushing an asteroid closer to us rather than further away. In other words what if the big asteroid strike comes from human error not bad like orbital mechanics?

As these things move from science fiction movie into tomorrow’s news, we have to face our fallibility. Just sayin’

*Known in scientific circles as both 2004 MN4 and 99942 Apophis, this 885-foot-long space rock has a fairly good chance of impacting the Earth within a quarter century..

After making a breathtakingly close pass on Friday the 13th in April 2029 — less than 10 percent of the distance between Earth and the moon — Apophis will have about a 1 in 45,000 chance of hitting Earth in 2036 when it swings back around.

To better understand Apophis’ danger to Earth, some scientists advocate sending a transmitter to the asteroid’s surface to better track its movement.

GeekWorld

Once in A Blue Moon, But Only Ten Years in a Decade

December 31, 2009 Charles Leave a comment

Winter Full Moon of Long Nights

“Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.” – Benjamin Franklin

I want to weigh in on two critical debates germane to today and tomorrow. First, the blue moon. Current definition says a blue moon is the second full moon in the same month. Since we had the full Wolf Moon at the beginning of December and now have the full Moon of Long Nights, this is a blue moon. Therefore, anything you do over the next three days can be once in a. (astronomically speaking the moon is full for only a second, but the human eye can’t distinguish the difference among the night before, the night of, and the night after, so I say three days.)

Yes, Virginia, there is a second and older definition of a blue moon.* I agree with the infoplease folks, however, that it is fussy for contemporary purposes and not as applicable to current life. So, I agree that this is a blue moon. Go for it.

Second debate I noticed in the newspaper letters to the editor. A man claimed that decades receive their designation from multiples of the number 10: 2010, 2020 and so on. Therefore, he claims our decade will not end this year, but a year from today. He has forgotten two things. First, the first decade is ’00–pronounced to rhyme with naughty. That decade runs from 2000-2009. Why? Well, as the dictionary definition says, a decade is ten years. Count’em up. Now the question is, at the end of the century, will we have an extra year? Nope. The 90’s will end in 2099 since December 31st, 2099 marks the day before 2100. Doesn’t matter to me since time will have a much different quality for me then anyhow.

*The Other Kind of Blue Moon

May 2008’s blue moon qualified as such under an older definition, which is recorded in early issues of the Maine Farmer’s Almanac. According to this definition, the blue moon is the third full moon in a season that has four full moons. Why would one want to identify the third full moon in a season of four full moons? The answer is complex, and has to do with the Christian ecclesiastical calendar.

Some years have an extra full moon—13 instead of 12. Since the identity of the moons was important in the ecclesiastical calendar (the Paschal Moon, for example, used to be crucial for determining the date of Easter), a year with a thirteenth moon skewed the calendar, since there were names for only 12 moons. By identifying the extra, thirteenth moon as a blue moon, the ecclesiastical calendar was able to stay on track.

Aging, Dogs, GeekWorld, Great Work, Politics

Fencing

October 28, 2009 Charles 1 Comment

Fall Waxing Dark Moon

Dan the fence guy came and measured the fenceline for our garden. He hopes to finish by tomorrow and I hope he does. Rigel will then be relegated to digging holes in the woods and the backyard rather than the garden and the orchard. This home’s most expensive dog greeted Dan with a lot of energy.

Kate’s doing a bit more each day, though she still tires easily. She walks without her walker for short distances and stood up for a good bit last night to cook the Danish pancakes. Her recovery is a testimony to Viking pillaging genes, I think. No Viking would let a bad back stop them from raiding a monastery or sacking a castle.

Dan has had back troubles, too. In fact, he goes in to see the top spine surgeon at the U on Monday. He had surgery on L-5/S-1 twelve years ago and now has trouble there again and in his neck. He keeps telling Jake, his cousin, that he can have the fence business, but that he needs to protect his back.

After burning through the majority of the new toys I bought yesterday, Rigel and Vega seem enchanted with the frozen peanut butter Kongs. A good sign.

Here’s a link to a fascinating Scientific American article on economics titled Does Economic Violate the Laws of Physics? It raises issues I would put in the conceptual arena of the commons. It makes a ton of sense to me.

Aging, Family, GeekWorld

Understanding the Anxious Mind

October 6, 2009 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Waning Blood Moon

Finally, a city criteria list worth paying attention to: The Daily Beast has ranked America’s Smartest Cities. The Twin Cities come in 4th after, in order, Raleigh-Durham, San Francisco and Boston. Denver is 5th. Las Vegas and Fresno, California bring up the rear at 54th and 55th. It’s an interesting read.

Kate’s surgery happens on October 19th and the surgeon requires that she stop taking her nsaid. That means she has less pain control on board so her pain level has begun to ramp up. This is only the first day without it. Ouch. We’ve also begun to reconnoiter what changes we’ll have to make in the house for her recovery period. Move a comfy chair in front of the TV in place of the couch. Things like that. thedress625

Kate’s sewing a lot. She’s finished a butterfly costume complete with antennas and wings as well as a purple jumper for granddaughter Ruth. She wants to get all this stuff done before she’s post-op.

If you have an anxious bone in your body, well, better, if you have an anxiety prone amygdala, then reading this article might interest you: The Anxious Mind. It recounts the work of Jerome Kagan who established the genetic imprint on reactivity. His work undergirded the notion of a fixed temperament.

As a high reactive myself, I found the notion of a genetic imprint for anxiety strangely liberating. It made me feel that my state was not a character flaw, but part of the package. The article makes all the nuancing you might want related to nurture, triggers and coping skills, but the clear fact remains that people like me are the way we are because we have a hypervigilant amygdala.

When I finish sermons a week ahead of time, investigate the costs of medicare drug and health care plans now, a year or two early, and plan my tours at least a week in advance, I display a learned strategy for managing my anxiety. That’s why I’m not good in a crisis or under a crushing deadline. I need time to prepare, to think things through. I bring sufficient pressure to bear on myself. I don’t need external stimuli.

After I got done reading this article and realizing that I was on one end of the bell curve–again, I began to wonder–again–what it must be like to have a normal, stable reaction to the work, a calm feeling in the pit of your stomach instead of a roiling mess.

It also became clear to me that I had a trigger that moved my anxiety from genetic inheritance to personality dilemma. When my mother died, I was 17 years old. My brain had not finished maturing. It took years for me to integrate the confusion and insecurity that her sudden death created.

Even though previous analysis has surfaced some of this before, this particular slant, a genetic proclivity, is new to me. It helps.

Bees, Garden, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Great Work, permaculture

Fall Clean-up

September 29, 2009 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Waxing Blood Moon

Out in the garden this morning taking down plants that have finished their labors. Large cruciform vegetable plants grew from the seeds I started inside, but they never developed any fruits. They’re in the compost now. All the tomato vines save one have come down. The last tomato harvest went inside today, too. A few straggling yellow and orange tomatoes and a cluster of green tomatoes for a last fried green tomatoes.

A new crop of lettuce, beets and beans are well underway, lending an air of spring to the dying garden. While examining dieback091 carrots I have in the ground awaiting the frost, I discovered golden raspberries large as my thumb. A real treat at this late stage in the year. They await the vanilla ice cream I’m going to buy when I go to the grocery store.

The 49 degree weather made doing these choirs a pleasure. Odd as it may seem, I like the fall clean-up part of gardening as well as I do any other part, perhaps a little bit more. Most of these plants I started as seeds in February, March or April and they have matured under my care, borne their fruits and run through their life cycle. From some of them I have collected seeds to plant for next year. The clean up then represents a completion that goes one step beyond the harvest. It honors these living entities by caring for their spent forms in the most full way possible: helping them return their remaining nutrients back to the soil. I want no less for myself.

Got a new toaster and a new ladder in the mail yesterday from Amazon. Boy, shopping has changed. I rarely go to a big box store anymore, once in a while to Best Buy to check out DVD’s or for some computer accessory. I still go to hardware stores and grocery stores, the things you need weekly or right now or fresh, but everything else I buy online.

The bee guy, Mark Nordeen, had to cancel again today. His wife, Kate’s colleague, got kicked in the head by her brand new black mare. E.R. and a concussion later she’s home off work. Guess I’m gonna have to figure out how to over winter my bees all by myself.

GeekWorld, Politics

The Internet and Personal Exposure

September 17, 2009 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa New Moon

Every once in a while the internet jumps out and bites me. I lost a potential job because I talked about the process on my blog and the congregation thought I had violated their privacy. Last year on the Sierra Club blog I posted what I thought was obvious information about how our lobbyists planned to work a committee only to discover that it was supposed to be in house. Monday I posted about the MEP, the Minnesota Environmental Partnership, meeting I attended. They found it and called Margaret at the Sierra Club. There was no problem with what I wrote, they said. Except, they said there was no problem. Of course, confidential material (which the lobbyist last year felt I had disclosed) is just that, confidential. In order to retain trust we agree not to break confidence.

This capacity of people to troll the web for whatever they want, especially things that concern them, is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing when it allows a person or organization to track matters of importance to them. It’s a curse in that it can have a chilling effect on communication.

Margaret has a legitimate issue. She wonders if I will be quoted or misquoted from my blog and then identified as a Sierra Club leader. In that sense there is a persona management concern for the organization. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.

On a related matter, tomorrow I will install an electric fence, a device for making our dogs respect the boundaries we have established for them. That’s what all this is about: boundaries. Boundaries are fluid, shifting from one person’s perception to another’s. Respect for boundaries is an important aspect of living in community.

Interestingly, it is at just this juncture that liberalism, with its focus on individualism, can run into problems. Those of us on the bleeding edge of the liberal boundary can tilt toward too much emphasis on liberty, the negative kind that insists only on the right to do what we want, or, contradictorily, toward restrictions on individual liberty to achieve some other virtue, like justice. This is also the precise intersection where equality, as fundamental an aspect of liberalism as individualism, can create social tension.

In fact if we decide on economic equality as a necessary part of our political program we may move across the line from liberal to socialist, a communitarian model for economic justice.

Actions for or on behalf of the environment demand human action and these demands often create the perception of curtailed liberty. Why can’t I hunt whales? Why can’t I build a dam where the salmon run? Why can’t I shoot the wolf I believe killed my livestock? Why can’t I drive my Hummer?

Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld

Look. In the Sky. It’s A Woodpecker. And a Moon!

September 2, 2009 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Full Harvest Moon

What a beauty! This moon blazes its soft light, a gentle luminosity, inviting us to look. It does not make us turn away or shade our eyes, no, this moon says come on, look at me! That big planet Jupiter puts a sparkle in the sky at about 4 0’clock beneath the harvest moon, for me and my gal.

Right now I wonder why I would ever do anything more than write about woodpeckers and the moon. They require no historical research, no elaborate mental gymnastics. They are. Woodpecker. Moon. As I experience them, they have no past and no future. There is the woodpecker and the moon.

They are part of my world and I part of theirs. I’m more aware of them (I imagine.) than they are of me, but it does not matter because there is me, the woodpecker and the moon. We three, a trio of quite different entities, all unique and occupying a never again to be occupied spot in the vast web of spacetime. A wonder. A true and unmediated miracle.

This would be a good time for Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

Aging, GeekWorld

Declutter, Week 2

August 8, 2009 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Waning Green Corn Moon

The declutter project has legs. In addition to the potting bench moved outside last week, we have now cleared out the new food storage/work bench area. In it we have a six shelf rack for storing such garden items as garlic, onions, apples, pears, squash. We also have a Swedish shelving system, wood, that will hold additional food storage, perhaps canned and dried foods along with vegetables or fruits that the rack cannot handle.

Just outside the food storage we have a small cupboard that now holds power tools underneath and on top our food dryer. We need a sand storage container, too, for root crops like potatoes, carrots, turnips and parsnips. Kate worked very hard today, as she always does.

We had an old, non-functional television that needed to get removed from the area. I could not lift it. It was too heavy and too wide for a good grip. So, I took it apart. It felt like sacrilege, cracking the circuit boards, cutting wires and lifting a heavy copper electrical device off the cathode ray tube. After the television was in pieces I picked up the tube and stumbled up the stairs with it. It was heavy, but at least I could cradle it in my arms.

At one point my balance got wonky and I almost teetered over backward with the tube then ready to land on me. When the guy at the recycling picked it up and put it on the scale, I asked him how much it weighed, “78 pounds.” “Geez,” I said, “It seemed heavier than that when I carried up the stairs.” “Yeah,” he said, “I’m tired and it felt heavier than that to me, too.” It cost $32 to have them take the tv off our hands.

Aging, GeekWorld, Memories

The Declutter Genie

August 1, 2009 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Waxing Green Corn Moon

This morning a few more items got moved out of the computer room and a space for not currently needed electronic accessories created. I’m still not sure why the declutter genie has landed on me, but she’s buzzing me pretty hard.

I remember, long time ago, in the early 1970’s, a hoarder. Community Involvement Programs had hired me as a week-end and night time staff person. In return I received a minimal salary and an apartment. C.I.P. provided independent living training to recently deinstitutionalized persons. This was a time when states all across the country began to shut down their state hospitals.

C.I.P. got mostly developmentally delayed adults though some of our clients also had an M.I. diagnosis. This guy, whose name I don’t recall, never threw anything away. He lived in one of the apartments in the Mauna Loa building, one the same as the one I had. In his he kept grocery sacks, magazines, food wrappers, junk mail, gift wrap. While wondering what to do about him, I read an article on overloading therapy. In this case instead of insisting on the hoarder cleaning things up you give them more and more things to hoard. The idea is similar to desensitization therapy.

It may be that I’ve hit my overload point. I’m a hoarder of a certain kind. I buy books, lots of books. I keep them; I keep almost all of them. I’m reluctant to throw out magazines. In both instances I think, what if I want to look something up. Then, there are the files and research, gathered over many years. And, too, the computers. On this desk right I have three desktop computers, each a different generation.

I also hoard knowledge, stuffing it in, stuffing it in until it feels like my head could not hold anymore. Then I add something else. In all these cases I operate from the just in case principle. Just in case I ever need to know more about the pre-Raphaelites, Chinese history, linguistics, American political philosophy, water politics, philosophy, the Renaissance, the middle ages, Taoism, Chinese literature, poetry I read and learn. I also watch movies in the same way, television programs, too.

Now the upside is that I gain a broad knowledge base and have a few areas where I have some real depth: biblical studies, theology, certain areas of history, gardening, perhaps some aspects of art history, politics. It has always been my dream that at some point a gestalt would appear, a synthesis of all this learning. Some insight, some new understanding. Maybe they’ve come and I didn’t recognize them.

A long time ago I took a test to see what my strengths are. My top strength was curiosity and interest in the world. My second was love of learning. So, you might say that this is not hoarding at all, rather it is an expression of my core personality. Whatever it is, in terms of books, papers, stuff, I’ve got too much and before Kate retires next year I’m gonna get rid of a lot of it.