Housekeeping…

29 Dec 2009, 18:31

I made some behind-the-scenes changes to the way this site is run. Please let me know if you see anything broken.

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Thankfulness…

26 Nov 2009, 20:49

Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday. It’s often filled with heaping doses of good things like friends, family, and food. It’s the least commercialized of the major American holidays. And the theme, thankfulness, is one worth spending more than one day a year on.

(The lamest thing that I saw on the internet all day was someone who said that T’giving didn’t mean much to him because he lived every day in a spirit of thankfulness.  Give me a break.  We could all use an extra helping of gratitude.)

I’m thankful for my family.  For two kids that are wonderous in so many ways: healthy, clever, generous, loving, kind, and beautiful.  For their love for each other — more than I ever would have thought possible between a three year old and an eighteen month old.  For a wife who takes good care of them and of me and keeps us all on track.

So many other things to be thankful for, too: A job that provides both autonomy and security.  Friends across the miles and years.  A church family that nurtures and supports us.

I asked Charlie what he was thankful for today.  (They talked about it at preschool this week.)  He said, “My house, my toys, and the playground.  And books.”

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On a Parent’s Love

25 Nov 2009, 20:50

I encountered this quote in the September 2009 issue of The Atlantic.  The quote was almost a throw away line starting mid-sentence in a (rather strange, not entirely agreeable) essay by Caitlin Flanagan titled “Sex and the Married Man.”

“[U]ntil you’ve [had a child of your own] you’re just guessing about love, gesturing toward it, assuming that it’s the right name for a feeling you’ve had.”

Now, let me immediately backpedal from what Flanagan herself is saying here and not presume to tell childless people what they have or have not felt.  But this quote captures, better than almost anything else I’ve read, my experience of love as a father.

When we were expecting our first child, dozens of people, many that I barely knew, told me that it was going to “change my life.”  I found this extremely annoying, almost enraging, because none of them were at all specific about what they meant. What changed, for me, is what Flanagan describes.  The love that I felt for my children from the first moments of their lives was incomparable to anything that I had felt before.

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Bruce Schneier is Not Afraid

23 Nov 2009, 21:34

Really enjoying John Gruber’s new Tumblr, Fraidy Cats, logging the (mostly stupid) things that many of our so-called leaders are saying about terrorists and terrorism.  And he mixes in some quotes from those who are not afraid.  Like this great quote from security expert Bruce Schneier.

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn’t make us any safer.

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New Orleans

15 Nov 2009, 20:56

I thought this was a really interesting description of New Orleans, in “Houses of the Future” by Wayne Curtis, an article in the November 2009 issue of The Atlantic. I will further note that this quote is in service of an argument with which I don’t really agree, but it’s an accurate description of the city of my recollection, anyway.

“When I originally thought of New Orleans, I was conditioned by the press to think of it as an extremely ill-governed city, full of ill-educated people, with a great deal of crime, a great deal of dirt, a great deal of poverty.  And when I arrived, I did indeed find it to be all of those things.  Then one day I was walking down the street and I had this kind of brain thing, and I thought I was in Cuba.  Weird!  And then I realized at that moment that New Orleans was not an American city, it was a Caribbean city.  Once you recalibrate, it becomes the best-governed, cleanest, most efficient, and best-educated city in the Caribbean.  New Orleans is actually the Geneva of the Caribbean.” – Andres Duany, quoted by Wayne Curtis

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Sagan Ramblings…

13 Oct 2009, 19:58

I should, almost surely, be doing something other than writing a blog post — specifically, at this very moment I should probably be plowing through the email inbox.  But I can’t seem to summon the courage, and this blog post has been knocking around in my head for the last few days.

About 10 days ago, I encountered this crazy video on the internets.  Essentially, the creator (John Boswell) distilled the primary message of Cosmos, Carl Sagan’s epic PBS television series, released in 1980, into a three and a half minute music video.  Sagan is made to “sing” using Auto-Tune, over background music created by Boswell and background video from the Cosmos series itself.  (Stephen Hawking makes an appearance in one verse, too.)  It’s pretty amazing, if you ask me.

Part of the intrigue for me, though, may come from my past exposure to Cosmos.  In eighth grade, I participated in a special science class known as Science Seminar.  A key component of this class was the study of three books: Cosmos, The Ascent of Man, and Six Great Ideas.  I think we watched some of the Cosmos television series, but we principally read the book.  In retrospect, it is quite amazing that a public school science teacher in Tennessee (a member of a conservative evangelical church, no less) could get away with teaching Cosmos (which contains a hefty dose of atheism with some evolution thrown in for good measure) and The Ascent of Man (also heavy on evolution, though much of it cultural evolution).  (Also, only just now did I remember that The Ascent of Man was also a 13-part television series, with some of the same creators as Cosmos.  Apparently, my eighth grade science teacher had a thing for the book versions of 13-part television series about science.)

In any case, the video has inspired me to go back and watch the whole television series, which is now available on Hulu.  I’ve been watching a few minutes every morning with my daughter, and we’re loving it.  (Well, I’m loving it.  And she at least tolerates it.  With cheerios and milk.)  The content is terrific — so much great stuff that I once knew but had mostly forgotten about biology and astronomy.  Much of the imagery is terrific, although some of the sets (especially the spaceship) are laughably dated.  (Although, it appears that the spaceship has a multitouch user interface.  Hmm…)  And Sagan’s 1980 hairdo is pretty funny, too.

I was particularly struck by the last twenty minutes of Episode 4: Heaven and Hell, which sounds a warning about the environment and global warming that almost sounds contemporary.

Also in Episode 4 (or possibly it was Episode 3), Sagan makes a brief comment, almost an aside, about the fact that in nearly all models of the solar system, the size of the planets is on a vastly different scale than the distances between them.  The reason is simple: If you used the same scale, then the model would either be too big to fit into a reasonably sized room, or the planets would be too small to see.  This reminded me of the terrific tribute to Carl Sagan in Ithaca, New York, where he was a professor at Cornell University for many years: The Sagan Planet Walk.  It is a model of the solar system, with the planets and the distances between them to the same scale.  The radius of the sun is 28 cm (11 in); the radius of the earth is 2.5 mm (1/10 in).  The distance from the sun to the earth? 30 m (100 ft).  The distance from the earth to Pluto?  1.2 km (3/4 mile).  It was, to my mind, one of the cooler unique features of the town, and I would often tour the solar system when I went on a run through town.  (It helped that we lived in a building right beside the sun.  Our apartment was in the building seen behind the sun monument in the photo.)

Since we moved away, the Sciencenter in Ithaca (which maintains the Sagan Planet Walk) has created an audio tour of the walk narrated by Bill Nye, The Science Guy.  At first, this audio tour was available by cell phone; now, you can download it as a podcast.  The next time I make it to Ithaca, I’ll have to give it a whirl.  (I have no plans to return any time soon, but I expect to pass through again sooner or later.)

And, furthermore, they are contemplating an addition to the Sagan Planet Walk.  Namely, they are considering adding a station representing the star nearest our sun, Alpha Centauri.  The location of this new station?  Hawaii.

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