My Readers

This blog is more likely to be read by someone from the San Francisco area than from, say, El Paso. That red dot is Atlanta, I think.

We're all gonna die!!

Well, we're maybe all gonna die.

On April 13, 2029, the near-Earth asteroid Apophis stands a 1 in 50 chance of coming close enough to Earth's gravity field to be pulled down into our atmosphere and slamming into Earth with the violent force of thousands of thermonuclear warheads, probably ending life as we know it.

If you go to page 18 of this PDF document on NASA's website, you'll see the exact trajectory of the asteroid's path of destruction, slaughtering tens of millions of souls across the Eastern Hemisphere (Wait, Eastern Hemisphere? Phew! I was gettin' worried there for a second!)

That trajectory, for those of you who don't like PDF files, runs across Hadrian's wall in northern Britain, across central Europe, the Black Sea, the Caucasus Mountains, over south central Asia, and finally over the northern tier of Southeast Asia. Any one of the countries along that line of impact could become ground zero for the point of impact of the wayward asteroid that will scorch the ground, rip out the atmospheric barrier between the planet's biosphere and the cold vacuum of space, flood the world's shores, and spell the end of human civilization.

Of course, I'll be like 66 years old by then, so if I'm not dead by then, I'll at least be too old to really care. But anyway, that's what I learned today.

Two percent chance. Whatever.

One man, two shoes, and a very, very small measure of justice

My first reaction to the shoe thrower was: "I get his anger, but that's really not too cool". I also worried about the secret service not getting the jump on a violently angry man not 4 yards from the president of the United States.

In the last two days, I have done a 180 on all these thoughts.

1- The Secret Service can only stop shoe throwers if they keep all human beings away from the president. If the guy had anything more dangerous on him, he doubtlessly would have never got past security. His attack was not life threatening or even injury threatening. The NRA tells us that a well armed society is a polite society. I guess now I'd make the same argument about a well-heeled society.

2- It really was a cool thing to do. Again, Mr Bush was in no real danger of anything more than a scratch on his noggin. Compared to the violence visited upon the innocent people of Iraq, compared to the dead and the displaced and the kids with their arms and legs blown off and the women scared to leave their homes and the families torn apart and the communities irreparably divided along sectarian lines by death squads and kidnap squads and the weight of destruction and humiliation brought down on that nation, trying to bean the architect of that chaos with a pair of docksiders is a fitting (and culturally significant) symbol of the scorn of the world.

but my most important reversal of all is...

3- Actually, no, I do not "get" his anger. I live a good life. I drive to work without fear. I pay my bills without fear. I go shopping without worrying about a bomb blowing up the marketplace. If I lose my job, I can be sure I'll soon enough find another job. I spent two weeks without electricity because of a hurricane, but I never doubted I'd get it back; I never worried that terrorists would blow up the generator after that. I send my kid to college halfway across the continent and can worry only that she'll miss her flight back next week. I have not been kidnapped, as Muntadhar al-Zeidi was. I have not been beaten. My sister hasn't been raped; my father has not been murdered; my cousins have not been seduced into joining a ethnic cleansing militia; my mother's door hasn't been kicked down in the middle of the night by foreign troops. I have not seen hell unleashed on my community because some ideological thinktank in another hemisphere thinks it has an intriguing theory for global domination.

So I cannot in any sense get Muntadhar al-Zeidi and what made this man in the truth business flip out on President Bush. More importantly, I cannot judge him. I do not have that right. He has every right to judge us, however. When you look at what has happened in our name, I can only stand amazed that, having judged us, he sentenced us to so light a punishment.

I am a Jones

For years I've not known what I am--not generationally speaking, that is. At times I've been known to even say, with some pontification, that I was born on the cusp of the Baby Boom generation and Generation X. I joined the race in 1963, at the tag end of the post-WW2 baby explosion, but just at the start of the post modern zeitgeist. I'm too young to have protested Vietnam, but too old to get anything more than my ears pierced.

I was an American without a convenient marketing tag.

It turns out, I was not alone. I was part of a lost half generation--Generation Jones. Born between 1956 and 1965, we were the target audience for the first run of Schoolhouse Rock, but got out of college before dudes with pony tails was cool. We knew driving a VW was crunchy, but didn't get tattoos unless we joined the navy or had a midlife crisis after the first divorce. We have a dim recollection of Hef once being relevant, but still can't get used to the fact that he's so freakishly old. Hippies were passe before we got to high school, but the whole grunge scene came too late to get us dirty.

We're Generation Jones, though our years don't quite add up to a whole generation. Up till now, we didn't have a stereotype, or even a sense of being part of a real generational shift in history. We just had a vague 80s sense of not being able to keep up with feeding our empty, hungering Joneses. But that was before. Now we not only have a marketing tag, we even have our own president. And he's a lot cooler than yours.

Demonym

It's the name for the people from a place. I already knew the concept existed (Glaswegians are from Glasgow, Michiganders are from Michigan, outlanders are from a country besides yours, carnies are from carnivals, aggies are from Texas A&M, etc), but I didn't know that there was a name for it. Two actually: demonym is the noun version and gentilic is the adjective.

Also, geographers say demonym, if anybody ever says it. Professors of linguistics alone use the word gentilic.

When Horus Met Setty

I recently discovered that the overspun claim that the story of Jesus was derived from the myth of Horus is about 80% bunk. Claims of alleged parallels between the stories of Horus, the falcon headed Egyptian god of the lower Nile, and Jesus, the hippy headed rabbi who started Christianity, are either exaggerated or entirely false.

The erroneous parallels include Horus's mother being the virgin Meri (his mom was Isis and she was a freaked out necrophiliac), both Horus & Jesus getting three visitors after being born (neither the Bible nor Egyptian mythology makes any claim to getting three visitors; the story of the wise men never gives a specific head count), Horus's baptism by Anup the Baptiser (no such being exists in Egyptian mythology), and several other complete fabrications. The full debunking is aqui.

But that's not what I'm writing about tonight. What I learned today, in looking up this little diversion just now is the full story of Horus's knock down drag out with his upriver archnemisis, Set.

I can do nothing to improve on the story of this North vs South beat down as told by the anonymous Wikipedia author who, regardless of his/her expertise or truthful reportong on the matter, sure can spin one hell of a yarn.

Here's how it goes:

After Set killed Osiris, Horus had many battles with Set, not only to avenge his father, but to choose the rightful ruler of Egypt. One scene stated how Horus was on the verge of killing Set; but his mother (and Set's sister), Isis, stopped him. Isis injured Horus, but eventually healed him.

By the Nineteenth dynasty, the enmity between Set and Horus, in which Horus had ripped off one of Set's testicles, was represented as a separate tale. According to Papyrus Chester-Beatty I, Set is depicted as trying to prove his dominance by seducing Horus and then having intercourse with him. However, Horus places his hand between his thighs and catches Set's semen, then subsequently throws it in the river, so that he may not be said to have been inseminated by Set. Horus then deliberately spreads his own semen on some lettuce, which was Set's favorite food (the Egyptians thought that lettuce was phallic). After Set has eaten the lettuce, they go to the gods to try to settle the argument over the rule of Egypt. The gods first listen to Set's claim of dominance over Horus, and call his semen forth, but it answers from the river, invalidating his claim. Then, the gods listen to Horus' claim of having dominated Set, and call his semen forth, and it answers from inside Set.

It's going to take me about a week to wrap my head around that one little factoid: Egyptians thought that lettuce was phallic.

Lettuce.




Really.





Lettuce. Phallic.







I'm just not seeing this.






Lettuce.


No.

.

Monkey Waiters

In Japan, of course.

Not everything ironic is funny

I try not to be too snarky, but in this goal I am a spectacular failure. I think, however, I might be getting better at distinguishing between the truly funny and somebody else's painful karmic feedback. Among my friends in the liberal onlineliness, there's a great deal of joy at the news that conservative screech monkey Ann Coulter has broken her jaw and that her recuperation involves getting her mouth wired shut.

Keith Olbermann found that funny--he totally mugged it upon his show Monday night upon hearing the news. I hope it's not just the fact that I'm right now in post-operative pain myself (got my ACL surgery Tuesday morning and I'm experiencing worse and more sustained pain than when I first tore up the ligament in August) causing me to think some rightwing nutjob's horrible pain is still undeserved horrible pain. Yes, it's ironic that a hatemonger can't talk. But she can still type and, frankly, there's just no humor in a fractured mandible.

On the other hand, as terror rips through Mumbai and the death toll from the attacks Islamic extremists reaches triple digits, there are still things about terrorists that I can still get an honest laugh from.

For instance, when al-Qaeda borrows a page from Sean Hannity's book and starts kvetching about the left wing media bias in favor of Barack Obama. See, Obama truly is a uniter: he's already brought al-Qaeda and Little Green Footballs together in common cause.

I am wrong about something

Today I learned I am (probably) wrong about something. I am an anti-multiverser. Don't get me wrong, I totally love the idea of multiple alternative universes where the Confederates won the Civil War and therefor Leonard Nimoy wears a goatee. That would be awesome.

But what hangs me up about the concept of multiple realities is this: what could possibly caus a multiverse to come into being? I've argued this around and around with people, both, live and on the internet till I was blue in my Atlantean gills. The basis for most of these arguments is the theory that there are all sorts of real alternate realities "out there," each reflecting possible different historical outcomes that might result from humanity making different historical choices--so that there's one history where the Nazis nuked London in 1943 and another universe where zeppelins replaced the luxury liner in the 1930s and yet another where alpacas have taken the place of the common house cat.

For me this notion breaks down at the point where you start asking how big a change, or how big a choice, is required to create a new universe... and by logical extension by what mechanism is an entirely new universe split off from the molecules of this universe every time some kid on Betelgeuse chooses between chocolate and vanilla ice cream with his birthday cake. (I know--trick question: Betelgeusean kids have to choose between asparagus and onion-flavored ice cream).

I just can't picture how a human choice made here, or a cat choice in Albuquerque, or a Rigelian blubber-rat choice made in the swamps of Rigel 17-B could cause all the molecules in the universe to split up into separate realities, creating quite definitively an infinitude of parallel universes. I don't see a causative link between a mental process and the resulting physical outcome. I can't even imagine where all that energy would go to once it split reality in half (or for that matter where all that energy would be created from--since Einstein among others tells me energy can't be created).

Of course I'm not a scientist, so most of what I say in this post is bullshit.

Of course, serious scientists think about bearded Vulcans when speculating on what dark matter and wormholes are and what they could mean for the parts of the universe that seem to be in places where we can't see or measure. What these bearded labcoats think about, instead, is truly different realities: universes with different physical laws, universes without planets or gravity, universes where the relationships between mass, space, and velocity might be entirely renegotiated. Shit that would blow your mind, man.

The evidence for there being more reality than Horatio's philosophy can imagine has to do with dark matter and the strange ease with which the universe creates life. Blame it on carbon molecules, I say, but given the bigness of the vacuum and the relative smallness of earth's surface (the only place where life is known to exist), obviously the phrase "the universe's basic properties are uncannily suited for life" should be seen in relative terms.

The argument pro comes from physicist Andrei Linde:

If... protons were just 0.2 percent more massive than they actually are, they would be unstable and would decay into simpler particles. Atoms wouldn’t exist; neither would we. If gravity were slightly more powerful, the consequences would be nearly as grave. A beefed-up gravitational force would compress stars more tightly, making them smaller, hotter, and denser. Rather than surviving for billions of years, stars would burn through their fuel in a few million years, sputtering out long before life had a chance to evolve.

There's also a lot of "dark matter" out there that scientists can't account for and apparently some strings tying it all together in ways my mind simply can't understand. Taken all together, Linde and likeminded theorists conclude there's more to it all than meets the electron telescope. The best accounting for it they can come up with, so far, is that there's other realities, or maybe blindspots in our reality, where the physics that we know and love don't fully explain how molecules and their sundry subatomic particles behave.

Just no soul-sucking lizardmen so far.

As Evolution Blogger Jason Rosenhouse phrases it: "The hypothesis of a multiverse explains a lot of data, and is strongly suggested by the best physical theories we have." Still, Rosenhouse adds, "I can understand why it is a bit frustrating as an hypothesis, since the best we can hope for is indirect evidence that it is correct."

So maybe I am wrong. And maybe I am right, although if I am right about there being no alternative realities, it's entirely by accident.

I Know What I Learned Last Summer

Yeah, this is technically something I learned during summer reading, but I was reminded of it by the lesson I was teaching at Che High School today. Fernando Magellan (not his real name) survived the debilitating attacks of scurvy that incapacitated his men because he liked jelly on his toast.

Well, actually, it wasn't jelly, it was preserves. He took it along to sweeten up the hardened biscuits that served as the crew's mainstay in the two year journey around the globe. The vitamin C content in quinces is low, but it was enough to hold off the bleeding gum disease that beset just about everyone else. The only other source of the scurvy preventing nutrient on board's Magellan's five-ship armada was was rats--rats apparently produce their own vitamin C, so if you eat them, you can at least slow down the progress of disease as well.

But let's call that Plan B.

"God damn you"

There's a great, if that's the word I want, tradition of poisoning monarchs. Napoleon was snuffed at St Helena with arsenic. George V of England muttered "God damn you" to his attending physician in 1936 when the monarch's attendants, unable to endure a prolonged deathbed scene from his majesty, ordered their lord and liege hurried along to death with a fatal short of morphine and cocaine.

Welp, now another royal can be added definitively to list of poisoned potentates. Apparently Qing Dynasty China's Guangxu Emperor was also rushed toward a very different Mandate of Heaven in 1908 at the tender age of 38. His own beloved step mama, the Empress Dowager Cixi, she who wink-nudged the Boxer Rebellion into fruition, ordered the deed done on her late hubby's heir, sending one of her attendants over to give the last adult Qing emperor a bowl of yogurt laced with arsenic. She knew was dying and I guess the old gal wanted company in Heaven.

More significantly, she knew that if the lad got out from under her thumb he would want to reinstitute reforms in China, moving it away from an antiquated feudalistic sleeping giant. Being the sentimental type, Cixi decided the best way to prevent reforms would be to knock off the young emperor and install Puyi as the tragic "Last Emperor" of the Celestial Kingdom.

Her plan worked for about four years... until Puyi was himself dethroned by Sun Yat-sen. Of course, none of this should come as a surprise; don't all our problems usually begin with family?

dumbest site ever

Draw a House.com is the dumbest website ever. Today I learned that. But it took me a minute.

My bigotry

I know I have bigotries -- things that make me simply intolerant of my fellow human beings. I just recently quit posting on Democratic Underground because I simply lost my manners on that online community from my own intolerance of other people's stupidity.

I thought sometimes it was kinda fun to do a form of intellectual jiu jitsu there, making as little and as unoffensive post that would still trigger other peoples' irrational rages. The last post I did there yesterday was an example of this. I see now that I was just trying to piss people off--which is uncool. My need to trip others up is mean and simply had no place on that board. I'm not the boss of other people's manners.

This is not my worst bigotry, of course. My worst, impulsive, misanthropic hatred is my gut level loathing of people who've had cosmetic surgery. That shit is just gross. I don't need to make amends for that prejudice.

----

Update: (ten minutes later) I also think people who write "G-d" instead of "God" are being unnecessarily squeamish. I really don't think you're gonna be struck by lightning if you write down the letter oh there, kids.

René Descartes was a nice guy, but...

René Descartes may have been the "first modern thinker" in his belief that everything should be doubted and everything asserted must be proved, but he wasn't perfectly modern in his personal conduct. In his regard for the sanctity of nonhuman life, he was every bit a renaissance man.

He believed that the human soul was located in the pineal gland because (he thought) animals didn't have them. And so, because they didn't have souls, René concluded, they couldn't feel pain. And that made it perfectly okay in the brilliant scientific, enlightened mind of René Descartes to gash open animals like dogs and monkeys in living vivisection session, ignoring the plaintive cries of torment wailing from the mouths of the poor dying beasts.

Good on ya, René--make those critter suffer.

Poppycock

"Poppycock," the dismissal of frivolous or shallow ideas, has nothing to do with feathers, like I used to think. It comes from the Dutch words papi kak. It means "soft dung." It's a rather strong image.

Pierce Brosnan

The man can't sing. Really, it's bizarre he got cast in a movie in which he is required to sing. Because he can't. At all.

Based on Brosnan's performance alone, I am forced to conclude that Mama Mia! is a parody.

Beemer

There's a very important rule that professionals should include into their operating procedures at all organizational meetings. It's called the "no BMWs" rule. Now, mind you, I'm a teacher by profession, so this rule becomes even more important when I get in a group with my esteemed colleagues.

No bitching, moaning, or whining.

The amount of time lost to these three utterly useless activities is stunning. Without them, the average 30 minute meeting might actually run only 30 minutes long.

ACL Recovery Blog

There actually is a blog dedicated to being "The story of one man’s ACL Surgery and Recovery."

God, and I thought I was a loser.

Yesterday

I learned that I can finally climb up the flight of stairs to my second floor classroom. It takes me about four minutes to cover the 22 steps. So maybe I should call it the flight of stares. Except for the "flight" part. I'm not doing a lot of flying these days... at least not in a downwardly direction.

I also learned how annoying it is to answer the question "What happened to you?" over and over.

Two Days Ago

I learned what an ACL ligament is. Basically, it's the ligament that holds your patella onto the front of your leg. If you rip it completely, like, say, in a fall off a desk at school, there're really nothing there but skin and blue jeans to keep your knee cap from popping off and rolling down the hallway, only to be used by a coterie of pestiferous 9th graders as a hockey puck, with Mr Millweed's door as the goal.

Most of this stuff about the rolling knee cap is just conjecture on my part. The thing about the ACL is all too painfully real.

Three Days Ago

I learned what a marvelous modern miracle this whole "Workman's Comp" arrangement is. From the moment I splatted flat on the hard linoleum floor of my classroom to the second I limped pathetically into the ER at St. Joseph's Hospital, all the financial worries that go with destroying one's leg on the job are magically whisked away by the Workman's Comp fairy. If you're going to suffer a painful, life-altering injury, I highly recommend doing so at work!

Four Days Ago

I learned that standing up on a desk at school to fix a ceiling-mounted Smart Board projector can lead to a terribly painful fall.