Category Archives: GeekWorld

Art and Culture, Dogs, GeekWorld

The Grand Tour

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Imbolc                                      Waxing Wild Moon

Met the Grout Doctor today.  Turns out he wears a yellow weatherproof  jacket, very new jeans and rubber duckies.  Allan came by to give us an estimate on what it would take to rehabilitate some aching tiles and bring that new installation gleam back to the steam bath.  More than I’d imagined, but less than we were willing to pay, so Allan will return on Thursday to get started.  Gonna give the whole shebang an acid bath.  Sounds very Hannibal Lecter to me.

Fiddled with the new Panasonic camera we got today, too.  The number of things it can do amaze me.  It can focus on an object and then retain focus on that object as it moves.  How can it do that?  If you turn a little switch, it will shoot HD quality video using any of the settings it has for still photography.  How can do it that?  The twelve megapixels it shoots my buddy Jim Johnson tells me is just at the minimal range of what magazines expect in photos.  Well, at least the camera’s good enough for the pro mags.  I haven’t shot any images with it yet.  I want to devote a day or so to using all the various gadgets, learn how it performs.

Also put together an 8 object tour for next Friday, the public tour  Highlights:  Art from 1600-1850.  My theme is the Grand Tour, which was popular in that time frame.  In my Grand Tour though we will visit all but the Australian continent, while retaining the traditional focus on European art of France, Italy and the Low Countries.  I’ve begun to use the new Grove Dictionary of Art.  It has depth and breadth.  It taught me today about the Grand Tour and the various phases through which it passed before finally dying out as the middle-class began to travel more.  Just wasn’t the same with all those shopkeepers in the Uffizi.

Put in more words to the Unmaking.  I’m close to the middle, maybe a bit passed it.  We’ll see how it is after I finish and it sits on the shelf for a while.  Then I’ll have a better view of it.  Right now it’s so close to me, I can’t tell anything.

And Vega came inside limping tonight.  Limping makes us take deep breaths, because it can mean the onset of cancer, has meant the onset of cancer in at least three of our dogs.  On the other hand it might be an injury.  We hope.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Wheel

A Bit On Science

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Imbolc                                      Waxing Wild Moon

As the Great Wheel turns, as the earth flies in its unimaginably long ellipse around the sun, we go on pretending in a terra-centric universe.  The sun rises?  The constellations rotate through the sky?  The moon rises and sets?

It’s no wonder the Catholic church was so reluctant to buy it.  I mean, who was this guy Galileo and this other guy Copernicus compared to the Church Fathers?

Woolly Buddy Tom Crane surprised me at our recent retreat on a matter related to this.  I’d read a New Yorker article about the execution of a man in Texas convicted of arson in the death of his children.  The point of the article was to demonstrate that an innocent man had died as a result of our use of capital punishment.  It did this by using a renowned arson investigator who critiqued the arson investigators who sealed the man’s fate.  (I just did a quick look and I can’t find the article right now.  If I find it, I’ll post a link here.)

Anyhow, I mentioned it to Tom, a forensic engineer, and he said, “Oh, yeah.  Evidence-based science.  That’s we talk about all the time.”  He went on to say that it was a great tragedy.

What struck me though was this notion of evidence-based science.  My first reaction was, is there any other kind?  Then, I realized:  intelligent design, climate change deniers, any time ideology substitutes conviction for evidence, we risk non-evidence based science.

It was Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum who made the wonderful analogy about method.  If, he said, your method chose the wrong path for you on which to run, running faster would only take you further from your goal.  He proposed that method was all and that the empirical method was the right one for science.  This idea did not catch on overnight and there are still realms it has not penetrated, most notably of late of course, the GW Bush Whitehouse.

GeekWorld

The Ordinary Is Extraordinary

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Winter                            Waning Moon of Long Nights

I went on the great errand run this morning.  To the pharmacy for drugs.  To the jewelers for two watch batteries and to leave a pocket watch for repair.  Then over to the Spectacle Shoppe to have them repair the glasses that Vega bit.  Mildly unsatisfactory, but workable.  After that spectacle, all the way over to Lights on Broadway to buy unusually sized bulbs for this and that.  A completed circle then brought me back home.  Maybe 40 miles or so.  Strange.

There were the small oblong pills, tan in color, containing a chemical the somehow regulates the uptake of serotonin in my brain, a pill that I read recently doesn’t help me.  Not sure about that, so I’ll keep on taking them.  Tiny batteries, smaller than the nail on my little finger, power watches for years, a triumph of miniaturization; yet, the watch I sent off for repair, made a hundred years ago or so, works, as watches had for centuries by quick tweaks of the thumb and forefinger.  These glasses, plastic frames and round, cost almost as much as the lenses within them, lenses that correct my vision so I can read highway signs before I’m on top of them.  Then the small lamps that light my workspace, halogen bulbs, but special and difficult to find, fan lights also difficult to find.  These items replace the candles or gas light or kerosene lanterns of not that long ago.

The length of the journey seemed outsized to me until I began to realize the stunning technological distance each separate product represented.  That they are available to me in so small an ambit is the amazing thing.  That they are available at all depends on the brain and its mysterious companion, consciousness.  Every day is a wonder, even the mundane.

Art and Culture, GeekWorld

connections

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 examiningdieback091 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

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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?