60 bar steep rise 29.80 3mph WNW dew-point 51 Beltane, cloudy
Waning Gibbous Hare Moon
This amazing shot shows Phoenix as its chute brakes entry velocity on its descent. A camera aboard the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter took the shot.
A muggy day, cool enough, but I’m tired. Wore myself out getting down on myself in my dreams. Need a nap. Things go better with sleep.
Amended soil around the one juniper stump I pulled and worked on a second one. No joy yet. I’ll get it, just takes patience.
66 bar falls 29.88 1mph W dew-point 43 Beltane, night
Waning Gibbous Hare Moon
Tomorrow: the 500. And a few hours after, Phoenix Lander arrives at its destination. The following information is from the NASA website about the lander.
“With three days and 3 million miles left to fly before arriving at Mars, NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft is on track for its destination in the Martian arctic.
The spacecraft is closing in on the scariest seven minutes of the mission.
On Sunday, shortly after the annual 500-mile race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Phoenix will be approaching Mars at about 12,750 miles per hour, a speed that could cover 500 miles in 2 minutes and 22 seconds. After it enters the top of the Martian atmosphere at that velocity, it must use superheated friction with the atmosphere, a strong parachute and a set of pulsing retrorockets to achieve a safe, three-legged standstill touchdown on the surface in just seven minutes.
The earliest possible time when mission controllers could get confirmation from Phoenix indicating it has survived landing will be at 4:53 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday (7:53 p.m. Eastern Time). Of 11 previous attempts that various nations have made to land spacecraft on Mars, only five have succeeded.”
Geez, 3 days and 3 million miles to go. That’s what I would call rapid transit. 1 million miles a day. At that speed, in 93 days, you’d be roasting at Club Sun. It’s taken Phoenix 10 months to reach Mars. 10 months.
So, automobile racing in the early afternoon, a Mars landing around 7:30PM. What more could a guy ask for on a holiday?
58 bar steep fall 30.12 7mpn ENE dew-point 41 Beltane, Sunny
Waning Gibbous Hare Moon
“The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wittegenstein is a notoriously opaque, but very influential philosopher. His Tractatus is a seminal work of 20th century philosophy, amazing for its brevity. In this quote, though, I grasp his line of thought. How often do you consider the solidity of a table, for example? The beating of your heart? The exquisite elegance of your hands? The comfort of darkness? The revelation in sunlight?
Have you ever considered, I mean really considered, the wonder of life itself? We are animate, moving through the world with intention. So are dogs, mosquitoes and groundhogs. The seed listens to its own voice, expresses itself and its genome through time and space. Alive. But. What is life? We see the results of life around us all the time; we experience it within ourselves, but what is it? What is the difference between the elements in my body–the same as those in a rock or in soil, or in the air–and their inanimate counter parts still locked in the fiery cauldron of a star or the massif of a mountain range?
A book I purchased recently, but have not yet read, argues against what the author calls the Gallilean conspiracy. I’ve forgotten why he calls it that, something about Gallileo’s approach to science, but the point is this: even if we knew all the laws of particles and quantum mechanics and could apply them with precision to all the matter in the universe, we could still not predict the future, though there is strong element of what he calls scientistic thinking that suggests just this possibility.
Why can’t we predict the future based on fundamental laws of nature? Because of complexity. As things grow more complex, the complexity itself inserts a new dimension, something that does not obey the fundamental laws: intention. Intention and complexity reach an apex in the phenomenon of life. You could not analyze the physical elements within my body, apply the laws of relativity and Newtonian physics to them, and predict what I will choose to have for breakfast. Why? Because consciousness adds intention, guided by will, and none of these added realities of complexity follow the laws of thermodynamics, say. Is the action of complex entities constrained and guided by laws of nature? Of course. Entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, will snuff out the complexity that I am. But not right now. While I’m upright and consciousness, and yes, you, too, I can choose to defy entropy by taking my blood pressure medication and staying on that good cholestrol lowering drug. Exercising. Good diet. None of these, nor my decision to go to the grocery store this morning have a necessary predicate in my constituent parts.
In part this all boils down to a divide which remains an abyss between, say, the Richard Dawkins and Sam Harrises of the world, and those of us who insist on considering the divine: vitalist or mechanist? That is, is any organism merely the sum of its parts–mechanist, or, is it the whole more than the sum of its parts–vitalist. I side with the vitalists.
64 bar steady 29.74 10mph NNE dewpoint 31 Beltane
Waxing Crescent Hare Moon
The internet continues to amaze me. A woman from Alabama finds this website and writes to tell of her journey with her son, Tristan, 2 years old and also diagnosed with hemophilia. In the world BWWW, before the World Wide Web, the probability of our connecting would have been infinitesimal, now it happens within hours of my post about Gabe coming home. This is a world changing aspect of the cyber-universe, creating links with people, real connections, that were not possible in a less connected world. It’s the upside of the samed connectedness, of course, that brings our friends the %$#@ hackers into our lives, but, like most of life, blessing and curse travel together, often on the same road and often arrive through the same door.
The guys from NOW fitness installed the new Landice. Whoa. I hadn’t seen it, since their only remaining one of this model was in a box. Geez, this thing is big. It has a control panel Captain Picard would love, though it still won’t do the exercising for you. The only problem is that the TV will have to go up about 2 feet or so in the air because the dashboard of this thing is big enough to serve as a small desk. I went from the treadmill stoneage to the bleeding edge in one day.
I’m glad it’s here. Not having the aerobics aspect of my workout leaves me feeling guilty and my day unfinished. Now, I can get back to it. In fact, I’m going to do that right now.
75 bar falls 29.75 1mph WSW dewpoint 41 Beltane
New Moon (Hare Moon)
I chose the English medieval name for the moon this month because of a wonderful incense burner in the Weber Collection. It is a bronze bunny, eyes lifted toward the moon, ears erect. There are holes where the ears meet the head and at the mouth. The label copy says this rabbit watches the moon to see her sister, a white rabbit, who, according to Taoist thought, lives on the moon. There she brews up an elixir of immortality.
This focus on immortality is typical of religious Taoism, not philosophical. My interest is in the latter. Religious Taoism grew from the intersection I mentioned a few posts ago between Buddhism and Taoism. Going in the Buddhist direction one outcome of this convergence created Chan Buddhism (Zen in Japan). Going in the Taoist direction Taoists began to create anthropomorphic gods in emulation of the Mahayana form of Buddhism that came into China. Mahayana picked up deities and demons and guardians from the Hindu and Bon (Tibetan native religion) religious pantheons.
The focus on immortality occurred at some point along the way, though I’m not sure when since I have not studied religious Taoism. Another way to gain immortality involved a peach tree that bloomed once every 3,000 years. If you were around when it bloomed and ate a peach, presto Immortalito! I’ve hunted for places to by a 2,999 year old tree, but so far no joy.
Our generator is online and ready to rock. Jim, the service guy who explained it all to us, said, “Now you’ll never have another outage.” Sounds about right. But, at least we’re ready if it happens.
58 bar steady 29.81 1mpn SW dewpoint 20 Beltane
New Moon (Hare Moon)
Waiting on the service guy from Allied Generator to fill us in on how our generator works and what we need to do with it. We went ahead and bought it, now it remains to learn how to use it.
Another work outside day. Cleaning up continues, though I imagine today I’ll expand the clean up to the garden bed. Kate may get started on the pruning. 9 days or so until the average date of the last frost, May 15th, so planting annuals is still not a good idea. Transplanting though can proceed apace and I plan to remove day lilies from one bed completely and move them to other sites along the edge of our woods. The peonies, large now, will get divided and move to the front.
It is the most distressing or reassuring reality, the fact that life proceeds in its ordinary way no matter what the drama in your own life. I find it reassuring for the most part, though at times it seems cruel, unspeakably cruel. Sometimes it seems that the pain my life should cause the whole world to stop spinning, to pause for a moment while I adjust, solve or resolve the dilemma, then someone can push play.
43 bar steady 29.47 11mph NNE dewpoint 42 Beltane
Waning Crescent Moon of Growing
Well, ok then. The reader who wondered about my hydroponics is not a Fed. LOL they said.
It is a weirdness about the Web that we can connect directly with people, yet know nothing about them. The weirdness compounds when we realize the people with whom we come in contact in this way, we don’t know at all beyond a few words on a computer screen. In the case of comments on a website or a blog like this one the stakes are, for the most part, low, but when you consider the apparent number of people who meet up in person after such interactions.
All this reminds me of Alvin Toffler and his book, Future Shock. I still remember many ideas from that book because he was a good phrase maker. High tech, high touch is the one that comes to mind here, but in a slightly different vein than Toffler’s. His version was that the more we connect through technology, the more we will want to see each other in person. I believe that’s true, but I’m on another tack here. High tech, high touch heightens the need, the desire for personal interaction, yes. It produces that desire–the original sense of eros in the Greek, the desire for human contact–in a situation we have not evolved to understand.
We are animals wired over hundreds of thousands of years to read the language in another person’s eyes, the way they hold their hands, the set of their neck, the wrinkles and twitches of the mouth. Though we are often wrong even with those cues, at least in face-to-face encounters we have a chance to assess, to ponder. Words on a page are not the same. Not even close. It may be that we have a sophisticated reader’s intution about how language reveals the author, but that’s a game often got wrong by critics, so how good can we be?
The point is this, words without flesh, disembodied words put us at a disadvantage. We can’t judge the intent of a phrase, the reason behind a conjecture. This has led to the all too familiar problem of flaming where some unhappy soul takes this anonymity and uses it to vent, often just to vent.
Toffler also described Over Choice, a situation where we face more decisions about more matters than we can handle with anything approaching wisdom. This applies to people we meet through the electronic ether, too. The reader interested in hydroponics might be a valuable interlocutor, one whose journey with indoor gardening might supplement and enhance my own. And vice versa. Or, they could be, as I speculated, a law enforcement officer hiding behind the web’s anonymity. Because it is my nature to trust first and question later, I accept the response to my speculation at face value; but, I have no face. Therein lies the dilemma.
We must evolve some method, some means of reading people we meet on the web. I suppose that’s what Facebook, Youtube, Myspace propose to accomplish, but there it is often meeting people to be meeting people. And those social networking sites get gamed, too. An endless loop.
Enough on this. I have to get to work writing my piece for the Muse. It’s taken an odd turn. Wonder how it will finish?
41 bar steady 29.96 0mph ESE dewpoint 24 Spring
Last Quarter Moon of Growing
Spent a good part of the afternoon on mechanical and electronic stuff. It was time for the first changing out of the nutrient reservoirs in the hydroponics.
I first tried the way the setup suggested, that is, drain the reservoirs onto the plastic shelf on which they both sit. This is not as crazy as it may sound since the shelf has grooves pressed in to carry used nutrient mix and water toward a drain plug at the end of the shelf. So, I hooked up some plastic tubing by cutting a small hole in the end of the cap and opened the taps. This is slow. The drain hose is not too big. It’s also messy since the hole in end of the plug allowed a bit of the liquid to drain around the tubing and drip on the lights (electric!) and the floor.
Hmmm. Had to be a better way. Then I thought of all those car thieves hard at work stealing gas. Siphon! By chance I had one hundred feet of plastic tubing and it fit inside the drain tubing quite neatly. I pushed this tube through the hole in the drain cap, sucked on it a bit and voila! Both of them drained all by themselves. Still took a while, but it is a handsoff operation.
As I read somewhere, I took the used nutrient mix out and poured on the garlic, garlic is a heavy feeder and impervious to the cold weather we’ve had. That’s important because you can’t encourage growth in most plants when the temperature can still go below freezing. That possibility exists here until May 15th. I also poured it on some daffodils about to bloom.
Then I made 9 gallons of fresh nutrient mix and poured it back into the reservoirs through the pots holding the lettuce, tomato plants, three kinds of beet and morning glories. A tip I read in the hydroponic bible (according to the folks at Interior Gardens) suggested swapping out the nutrient every three rather than four. So, I did. This is fun.
The treadmill still has some hiccups. I had to rewire it again this afternoon. Landice apparently thinks they may have sent me a bad rheostat. If so, that means I swapped a bad one for a bad one rather than a good one for a good one. More work ahead there.
I also put away all the material from the Weber tours and the bronze tour I have a month or so ago. The library is neat. (in a manner of speaking. That is, my manner.) I have a file to read for the three hour bronze session I have for Family Day on the 11th. I also have a number of articles and objects to use as reference while I write something about Urania visiting the MIA.
Kate called today, too. Ruthie ran out of the kitchen yesterday, into the dining room and tripped, falling on the corner of the coffee table. Big cut. Lots of angst. But super grandma was there to be calm. She and Jon took Ruthie to urgent care for stitches. This is a busman’s holiday for urgent care doc, Kate Olson, but it gave her a feel for the other side of the examining table. As she often does, she felt guilty. Not her fault. Ruth is a puppy, running and playing and trying out the world. There are hazards in that learning process and none of us escape.
She comes home tomorrow and I’m glad. The bris has been delayed because Gabriel still has not decided to eat enough and he’s still on some oxygen. Until he can eat and breathe on his own, he’ll remain in the level 2 nursery.
And. No snow!
41 bar steady 30.16 1mph SSW dewpoint 26 Spring
Last Quarter Moon of Growing
Charles Darwin was and is a remarkable man. Newton, Darwin, Einstein–an enlightenment trinity. An old paradigm physicist, a new paradigm physicist and the first student of complexity, a biological pioneer. These three have direct influence on so much of our world: calculus, atomic energy, genetic sciences, conservation biology, space travel, orbital mechanics. So much. To know the work of just these three and still deny the reality and power of ideas. Impossible.
Darwin has influenced my own thinking. A constant question I bring to the biological world is, “How is that adaptative?” “What adaptative advantage does that confer?” These two questions alone encourage speculation about fever, pollen, phototropism, the color of plant leaves, the place where birds nest, bipedal locomotion and so on ad infinitum.
I have multiple reading projects that will happen when I have time. One of them is to read through Darwin’s work, at least the important books. Why? To separate what Darwin was about from the muddled and often inaccurate picture offered by his acolytes. Here’s an example. An instructor at the arboretum’s symposium I attended on Saturday used the term survival of the fittest. Not Darwin. Herbert Spencer. Spencer used Darwin’s ideas to speculate about the succession of civilizations. He invented the now long ago discredited notion of social darwinism. Oswald Spengler brought the idea into its zenith of disrepute during the Nazi era.
Darwin’s idea is natural selection. It is not only the fittest, that is the strongest and most competitive, that survive. Those also survive who have a protected niche (think islands and deep valleys), a winning reproductive strategy (seeds versus spore mats) and great defense (lion fish, poison ivy). The long sweep of evolutionary time favors those whose characteristics favor survival, whether the organism is the fittest in their niche or in their species or not. Thus, the many endemic birds of Hawai’i may well not survive in some other environment.
Here’s a brief paragraph from Wikipedia that says this better than I can:
“An interpretation of the phrase to mean “only the fittest organisms will prevail” (a view common in social Darwinism) is not consistent with the actual theory of evolution. Any organism which is capable of reproducing itself on an ongoing basis will survive as a species, not just the “fittest” ones. A more accurate characterization of evolution would be “survival of the fit enough”, although this is sometimes regarded as a tautology.[3][4]”
I have added a link to the Digitial Darwin Library on the right side here. Allison Theil turned me on to the Darwin exhibition at the Brooklyn Botancial Garden. They had the link to this library. In 2009 we will celebrate the 150th year of the publication of Origin of the Species. Much sturm und drang can be expected. I stand with Darwin.
58 bar falls 29.68 0mph E dewpoint 57 Spring rain
Waning Gibbous Moon of Growing
I have crossed a threshold today. A while back my treadmill started to not shut off when I turned it off. The treadmill kept going at a speed of 1.0 to 1.5 mph. After calling NOW Sports in Arden Hills, where, it turns out, I bought the machine (when they were in Maplewood), Mike the repair guy called Landice. They recommended replacing a harness that connects the dial to a rheostat and the computer board that controls the displays. I looked at it, and it didn’t look too difficult, so I ordered the $100 part.
It came.
Last night I took off the old harness and installed the new one. No joy. It didn’t work at all. That was a step backward, but, it was not an unusual outcome when I set out to repair things, so I called Mike. He said he’d call Landice and see if replacing the whole panel was the way to go. After I hung up, I started to go upstairs and I noticed lights on the display panel. Electricity!
That meant I might not be as far off as I thought. I went back at it, jiggling wires. It went off again. Jiggled and moved some more wires. A click. A good sign. Then, I found the right position for everything, turned the treadmill to on and it worked. The elevation worked. I turned it off. It still ran. At this point you might think I was unhappy, but I wasn’t. This just meant that I had replaced the old harness with a new one and both were good. The important thing here is that I replaced the old one with a new one and the damned thing still worked. If that had been the solution, it would have worked. As it is, I spent $100 to prove to myself that I can work on things electronic. A cheap lesson overall.