Author name: Rod

Retrodictive analysis of “metadata” implicates Paul Revere as a suspicious person of interest.

Brilliant, darkly amusing, tragically relevant.

Hat Tip: Popehat Blog

To kill it’s wise to approach slowly and then strike swiftly with something large and flat. Skewed blows or partial contact won’t do it. Some won’t die right away, others not at all. They will flee. These you will have to pursue again and again, and up your game if you’re going to kill them. You’ll feel justified when you see the blood splatter, not their own. In one room and then another, the walls run red. Helter Skelter. Cleanup can be messy. Oven mitts I have found are practical weapons for murder. Not ideal, but I believe it was Donald Rumsfeld who said, “You go to war with the army you have, not the one you may wish you had.”

Murder Victim:

BIGGER.

The checker at the Safeway asked me if I wanted to round up for prostate cancer.

I considered this.

“You know what,” I said, “round up and take another dollar, it’s terrible the number of women suffering from this wretched disease, don’t you think?”

She never even looked up, her attention fixed on the cash register, “Riight.”

It was like years ago when some smart aleck went to Padua Academy (an all-girls catholic high school) and walked about the campus conducting a survey, asking young girls if they would sign a petition to end women’s suffrage. The vast majority did, enthusiastically.

If there’s a connection here, between the Safeway cashier and Pandas, I cannot say.

What a week and weekend it’s been! 70s and bluesky from Anchorage to Seward and beyond. I laid the entire faux wood floor in the beach house last weekend and pretended I didn’t. All week I’d been fibbing to Happy Wife, “Not looking forward to a weekend of work, but I thought it best if you helped me with the floor instead of tackling it alone.” The look on her face when we walked inside late Friday afternoon — priceless.

So instead of working we hiked with the dogs to Tonsina Point.

Gratuitous family photo:

BIGGER.

After dawdling on the beach a while we turned and followed a path into the woods beneath a moss-laden canopy, roughly the same place we saw a bear retreat to several years ago when my family was up visiting and we took this same hike with my brother:

BIGGER.

Imagine a movie or a book where the main character lives his entire life one whole day behind everybody else in the world. Call it: Dude, That is soo Yesterday. Consider the weirdness if this were you. Your friends are talking early one morning recalling the gruesome horror of the previous afternoon and you’ve not witnessed it yet. Or they ask you how your day’s going and you reply, “Just ducky. It’s a beautiful Sunday isn’t it!” And they’re like, “Uh, dude, like it’s Monday with sideways rain?”

Or your wife calls you early one morning to wish you Happy Anniversary.

Oops.

Really, I know our anniversary is June 3rd — seriously! — but when I woke this morning I thought it was June 2nd.

Such a movie would probably work best as a chick flick, or possibly a vampire trilogy where you’re the only one in the world who’s immune from the bite and so your quest is to save others, except your problem is you lack credibility. People don’t want to know what has happened, they already know the past, they want to know the future. Oh well, surely a talented storyteller could make the plot compelling somehow.

Late last week Happy Wife and I enjoyed dinner at the Crow’s Nest, a fancy schmancy restaurant on the top floor of the Captain Cook Hotel. It felt like an anniversary celebration. Why Crow’s Nest and not Raven’s Nest I can’t imagine, given the Raven is an infinitely more fascinating bird than a common crow. Anyhoo, we went there because I had recently redeemed 10,000 points on my OpenTable account for a $100 dinner cheque, and we reasoned that spending it on expensive food would maximize the value somehow.

Happy Wife had the New Zealand Elk in some cherry-infused something or other:

BIGGER.

While I opted for the Alaskan Black Cod w/gnocchi and chorizo:

BIGGER.

Paired with a scrumptious bottle of Antinori Pian delle Vigne (2007).

 

Guess who’s never met a lawn sprinkler before?

BIGGER.

He reminded me of the joy of running through a sprinkler on a hot summer day. He was totally enthralled by it, transfixed on the motion of the oscillator, periodically lashing out to bite the water. Just look at that big black nose. Lucy beheld this oddity as well. She looked up at me with a most quizzical expression: “Not the brightest bulb on the string that one.”

What a day! 75, bluesky, and nary a breeze.

The trees have leaves, the grass is greening and growing, and our neighbor finished putting in three raised beds on his vacant lot on the south side of our house. One of them is for us. Fresh onions, broccoli, cauliflower, peas, chard, arugula, lettuce, chives and cilantro are only weeks away. If I have a say carrots, beets, and potatoes too. Our contribution to the project is water. I’m extending a second hose line under the deck and through the fence and connecting to a sprinkler. Out of reach of Harry, of course, who nevertheless remains fascinated by these myriad deployments of water.

…

Certain comments to a post at Derk Lowe’s blog the other day pushed one of my hot buttons. The gist of the post concerned an article published in Nature magazine that contradicted the widely held belief that pushing kids hard into science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers is wise. Derek agreed with the author that this is really a fool’s errand. I generally agree as well, a position you may find odd — given both Derek and I are scientists you would think we would agree with such an initiative.

But what really got me started was this tangential comment to that post:

#1: Well said. The problem is not fewer scientists, it’s the increasingly dwindling number of citizens who can’t tell a meson from a melon. Re-routing some of that STEM funding into public outreach programs might get you a bigger bang for your buck in the long term.

I replied that not understanding, for example, the theory of evolution or anything about particle physics doesn’t hinder in the least tens of thousands (I should’ve said millions) of people from leading satisfying and productive lives. Another commenter responded and claimed that encouraging children toward STEM isn’t about living a fulfilling life, but rather that scientific literacy is essential (his word) to intelligent decision making in a technological democracy.

A claim, I pointed out, that happens to be false. I provided an example.

Worse, another person chimed in and disagreed with another commenter who said, correctly I think, that a lack of scientific literacy is no big deal for many people. The person disagreeing evidently thought this was nonsense, and offered an example of geology, claiming that without a fundamental basis in theory one couldn’t, for instance, successfully explore for oil and gas, an industry I happen to have been employed in for over twenty years.

I pointed out that his claim was also false, saying he may be interested to know that the largest oil field on the North American continent was found by serendipity, in a formation where the prevailing geologic theory at the time predicted oil would not be found.

I see this a lot, people bemoaning the state of scientific literacy in this country, offering only the flimsiest of arguments for why it should be improved, and worse, when these claims come from scientists, having no basis in fact.

Before:

After:

 

It’s Green Energy. From the brochure:

Firewood is a renewable resource like wind, solar and hydroelectric power.

When wood is burned as a substitute for fossil fuels, the result is a net reduction in CO₂ emissions.

And the motivating reason:

Firewood costs a lot less than the alternatives for people who live outside large urban areas.

I’m in the middle — working my way through the “H'” stack presently — of copying our CD collection to the computer. An apparently asymptotic task; the stacks get shorter but so slowly you feel you’ll never see the end. I wondered out loud at Lileks blog what to do with the original disks once I’m finished: 1) store them in the crawl space for posterity, or 2) get what I can for them at our local used music outlet. A commenter pointed out, correctly I think, that option 2 would, technically speaking, put me in copyright violation. Happy Wife suggested we salve our conscience and give them away for nothing, maybe to some charitable organization. This seemingly endless task is making me pretty nostalgic. All the invisible pits and lands on these discs represent rock ‘n roll, derivatives thereof, music that over the years has been there for me like a good friend when I needed one most. Call me silly but giving all these discs away would feel like betrayal.

Into the crawl space they go, at least for now.

Harry the Kelp Hunter!

BIGGER.

I assume you all know by now that I frequently place a BIGGER link below images. Clicking said link will enlarge the image and greatly increase the awe and splendor of your visualization experience! It must be a terrible thing for people who have lost their eyesight. I can’t even imagine.

See that notch of blue in the clouds? Veteran Alaskans have a special name for that (even though technically speaking this is not really an example of this thing). We call it a sucker hole. Because only suckers think it means the clouds are beginning to break and the sun will shine soon. When spotting such a hole Alaskan newbies, aka Cheechakos, have been known to run screaming and yelling from their office cubicle, rush outside and cheer, “The sun is coming out! The sun is coming out!” A caring Sourdough will quickly come to console this person, wrap an arm around her shoulders, pat her warmly and escort the sucker back inside, “There there, honey, everything is going to be alright.”

The reason this ain’t a real sucker hole is because the clouds were the anomaly today, momentarily drifting through an otherwise bluesky day!

Met a man from Indiana on the beach. None of that twenty insipid questions about Alaska stuff from this guy, no sir. He simply said he’d been to many places in the west but had never seen anything like the grandeur in Alaska. I liked him. We talked for a while. As he petted Harry I pointed to two bald eagles perched high in an evergreen, squawking at each other and carrying on. Out came the iPhone faster than a kid showing off his decoder ring, “I promised my friend I’d get him a picture of an eagle in Alaska.” I grinned and watched him click away. I told him I thought eagles were cool, for sure, but in my opinion the most impressive bird in Alaska is the Raven.

He said he and others had climbed to the top of Mt. Marathon the day before. Impressive, I thought, especially with all the snow still at the top. Even snow free in July it’s a pretty arduous climb. I told him about the man who died last year during the famous annual foot race up and down that mountain. He was familiar with the race but hadn’t heard somebody died during it. Yup, and despite lots of searching the man was never found. This cast a pall on our otherwise cheery conversation.

We talked a bit more, said our glad to meetchyas, and parted ways.

“But empathy will have to yield to reason if humanity is to have a future.”

A sentence you might expect was penned by the Russian Radical, but in fact it was the last sentence in an interesting essay on empathy by Paul Bloom in the New Yorker, subtitled The Case Against Empathy.

The last time this happened this late in May, it was midday and I was standing in the living room of a second floor rental, having recently moved to Alaska and waiting on a house to close, looking out the window while talking on the phone with a woman in California who would years later become my ex-wife. The problem with portents is we rarely recognize them for what they are, very often it is only in retrospect we recall seeing the sign, Bridge Out.

Cliche but true, that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.

That was May 17th, 1989.

As expected, I’ve become increasingly stronger with each passing day, and thank my lucky stars that eventually I met Happy Wife, who zapped the chill out of this frosty May morn with her scrumptious preparation of Huevos Rancheros (w/ Hatch Chilies from the Land of Enchantment):

BIGGER.

60 by Tuesday; go figure.