A Slightly Sick Weekend Day

January 18, 2014

I've dropped off of the Facebook world for as long as possible.  I do need to interact with it from time to time and I do miss reading my family's posts but all in all I consider it a net win.  I do, however, miss posting my own status.  There is something oddly comforting about having other people "like" my status or comment on some event, and reciprocating in kind.  I suppose because we are social animals this fulfills some kind of instinctive need, but I find the remote and monitored version of what were once a closer circle of intimacies and supports to be a little overly taxing in terms of both time and energy, and a distraction from spending time with my immediate family.  How many times had I tried to get my son to get out of my arms or personal space so I could catch up on gossip?  The answer was simply too often. 

So, back to the more intimate, thoughtful online diary, the blog.  Does anyone read it?  Doesn't matter.  What is important is the writing of it, the time to put my thoughts into words, to vomit out the inner concerns, thoughts, observations, force the subconscious to emerge as Helvetica or Courier, or even as Times New Roman (which appears to be the current setting; note to self- is this better for typing and Helvetica for reading?  It might be!)

Looking back on 2013 there are two things that changed my home life more than any other (at least as far as objects are concerned and their impacts on lifestyle- people are quite a different matter).  First, the garden shed.  With the porch open and bike stowed, we got proper patio furniture, lighting, and a ceiling fan and a gas grill.  Oh how we lounged, and I can hardly wait to get back out there.  The second thing was the record player.  We've had music, but there is something about the limitations of vinyl, the album-centric as opposed to song-centric nature of the format, the need to attend to it, that makes it so much more engaging than more convenient digital formats.  If something is too easy to use and access that cheapens the experience of it, and so music in a completely digestible format, one when you can jump from track to track across composers and albums at the slide of a finger, the experience becomes meaningless, an exercise in vanity rather than an experience.  Going to a concert you are going to be played for, and the option to select is not present.  So you sit back and let the sound wash over you- you have nothing to attend to as it is beyond the scope of your control, and so letting an LP spin on a turntable sets in motion a space of time in which you need not interact, nor even consider the need for it.  And 22 minutes later you repeat. 



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2007 - The Year So Far, Prior to Fatherhood

It's been quite a year thus far. Danine is getting big- hormones are running all through her system, she's getting some non-trivial pains, and she looks just radiant and lovely. Yesterday, April the 28th, we hosted a wonderful dinner party. We had Danines Project manager from work and her husband, one of my coworkers (at least for a brief time- he came and went very quickly of his own volition) and his wife and his 2 very adorable girls from a prior marriage came, my chiropractor and his wife (I hope to be seeing a lot of them- he plays guitar, chess, and lives literally a block away). Danine's friend Melanie and her husband Ben brought her kids (they have adopted 2 kids) so we had a full house. We played duck-duck-goose, tag, and then I read to Dag's kids (I read them the Tom books- how Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen, and then A Near Thing For Captain Najork). Danine cooked a marvelous dinner and I grilled skewered chicken, people brought loads of dessert and wine, and all had a lovely time.

Anyway, yesterday was great, although it was tiring. Slept like a rock.

March was probaly the toughest month for me. I was sick for weeks with an incessant buzzing in my brain, like a 60 Hz buzz from a cheap fluorescent bulb. Then just as I got over that I had a crippling back pain from gardening. On the upside that’s how I met my friend Joe the chiropractor, and I consider it a worth while injury. It certainly has made me wary of staying in shape, so I've been doing lots of time of the elliptical and doing lots of pull ups. I finally wised up and put tape on the chin up bar to make it more graspable- that's made an enormous difference!

Oh, and then at the end of the month the f***ing IRA billed me over $800 for taxes from 2 years ago. A company I forgot I'd worked with never sent me 1099 that year so I underpaid. It has set me back a bit, but thank goodness I've become an aggressive saver! That would have wiped me out a few years ago, but now its just a bank-to-bank transfer from my savings account away. Still, with the baby coming (Ms. Emily Helen!) and putting in new vinyl windows on the upper floor to replace the original 1965 hardware, its a real pinch.

I need to call everyone in the family. I need to get birthday cards for Uncle Matt and Uncle Dan- seeing that their b-days are a and 2 days prior to mine I have no excuse for forgetting them! I need to see if Matt and Irene would like to double with Danine and me, and Matt and i can get sloshed together. Except Danine is preggers so I can't. sigh...


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Dead Bee, No Snow

Bees in February.  We had them in January, too.

I woke up hoping to find a landscape blanketed in snow. Not a huge dumper, but just an inch or two, but some. Over a year and a half of drought makes an inch or two matter incredibly; cover the grass, stop the evaporation loss of the soil, rebuilt the moisture level with a steady drip from melt. Please. The storm came from the west, over the mountains, not pushing up against it, so it was hard to expect much. Hopefully the mountain snow pack has been been pulled up from these near record lows. 

Yesterday I came hope from walking the dog to find a bee frozen and starved to death, clinging to the screen on the porch. It had landed there sometime during the day while it had been out in a fruitless search for nectar and pollen. he trees keep trying to provide some only to have another minor frost come in and kill the buds. Everything should just be asleep, not waking up, exhausting itself, the returning briefly to a troubled and soon to be interrupted torpor. We were finding bees in January. The food supply of the hives must be in terrible shape; instead of sleeping, conserving through a long winter and awakening to a verdant spring the bees awaken in 50, 60 degree temperatures and head out looking for food. The food isn't there, and the hives lose their workers in the next snap of cold, their reserves of honey and food drawn down to replace workers and feed sorties into a barren landscape. 

This is the future coming. I remember the Rocky Mountains as a child. There always seemed to be a mist about them. Last summer we didn't go camping because of the fires; from my office in Boulder I watched one spring from nothing to hundreds of acres in the span of a brief walk. Had we been in a park with one exit could we have escaped? I rather think not.


It's looking like the start of another very hot, very dry year. I just hope the fires aren't as bad.





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Mystery Chinese desert image may show enormous soil erosion study

There has been a great deal of speculation lately about a number of areas in the western Chinese desert. Some of these are clearly military (the one with concentric circles and swept wing aircraft in the center) others appear to be large scale infrastructure for some kind of space telescope (similar to the VLA in New Mexico), but with many smaller (but still substantial) devices for collection, and then there is the one below. This one, I believe, is an attempt to monitor soil erosion patterns from space.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=40.452107,93.742118&hl=de&ll=40.447764,93.744299&spn=0.005201,0.010107&num=1&t=h&vpsrc=6&z=17

These patterns below generally follow the layout of the area's drainage pattern. Other are more linear, and likely an attempt to get detailed information by cutting orthogonally across. One question which leaps to mind in this scenario is what justifies such a complex pattern? Why not just lay these wide bright lines across the drainage basin in a more rectilinear fashion? Or cover the whole area?

First lets step back a bit. If you are going to perform a study of desert erosion and drainage from space, then a nice big, visible transect line is probably a good starting point. The stripes have been cut through by rivulets from occasional rains. It may be possible to see depositions of lighter colored material where the bright material had been washed and accumulated. A few things would not be so useful. If you painted a stream bed from stern to stem, though, would you not be able to see more detail s and get more information? Possibly yes, but every one knows that water flows downstream and you don't need a desert river bed you can monitor from space to tell you that. It has been suggested that the formation below was created as a targeting system for satellites, perhaps as a location calibration system- part of a ground truth system for imaging satellites. The image below, though, doesn't seem appropriate. It is allowed to weather, it has no firm “edges”, and its pattern appears more for highlighting the local terrain. The shape, though, is generally rectilinear and has a clear alignment to the cardinal directions.

The general direction of the streams appears to be north to south. Here is the northern edge of the study area (image 2). Clearly each of the lines coincides with either a boundary of a stream bed, its presumed center or a transect of high ground presumably showing the division of drainage basins. The north eastern corner appears to have been very heavily eroded, although it may be the case that the difficulty of the terrain made it impractical to apply the bright material. It appears that the main beds have not been “painted” for the most part, aside from an occasional transect.

I suggest that the overall rectangular shape and compass line orientation serves a very specific purpose. It would allow a print out to fit almost perfectly on a standard 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. If you are collecting a time series and wish to do side by side comparison with a minimum of fuss in an office setting and you have the funding to paint a remote piece of desert that you want to monitor, why not paint it in such a way that you can snag an image out of your browser and paste it into a document and print it?

Obviously this is a guess, but I think we are looking at an enormous academic project. The demand for images of the area are likely from two sources- people who know exactly what this is (probably working on a dissertation or government study at a Chinese university) and those who have no idea what it is but are fascinated by it or worried about it.

Push on a string or pull on a rope.

The Fed is not going to save us from this economic contraction. It can't. It has done everything conceivable to prevent things from getting worse by buying government debt and at one point backing essentially the entire commercial paper market (might still be for all we know). If the economy was going to spring to life from monetary action it would be sprinting and tap dancing.

UNLESS...

the economy is in a different mode from what it has been in since the end of World War II. Which it is. An economy operates in two different modes. Normally, when things are going well, the intent is to maximize profits (if you are a company) by expanding production or utility (if you are a consumer) by buying and taking on consumer debt in the form of credit and loans.

But there is another mode- instead of maximizing profit/utility the current mode (not seen in the US previously since the Great Depression) is to minimize debt. This insight, made by Richard Koo from his analysis of the Japanese economy and the Great Depression, aligns perfectly with the behavior we are seeing now. The Fed, now as in the 30's is in a position where it can make the situation worse by forcing further contraction, but cannot drive expansion. like a string, you can pull on it, but can not push against it.

The reason is simple- if you are leveraged to the hilt as a consumer, and someone offers you another loan the only reason you would take it (sensibly) is if you could refinance an existing loan at a lower interest rate. And if you are unemployed then your options are even more limited. Businesses are in the same boat, particularly in the banking sector. Bank of America is hesitant to make loans because it needs all the cash it can hold on to, after all, the bad loans it made (or Countrywide made) need to be written down, and the last thing it needs on its books is more risk. So companies and households hoard cash.

What sector is left to push the economy forward? You guessed it- government. And here's the most infuriating part of that- all through the '00s the government should have been battening down the hatches against debt and instead it fanned the flames with regressive tax cuts, two wars, and deregulating the finance industry to allow it to expand leverage (debt) by using peoples savings as collateral.

Its no wonder that trust in government is so low, but here is another grain of salt to rub into the mood. In this day and age if you don't have the backing and protection of a strong central government then you are going to lose on the global stage. If you think small government is better and no government is best, then take a look at Somalia. If you think bigger stronger government is worse then look at China.

I know, I know- every Tea Party whiner will cry about "government spending" and "wasteful spending". You think the private sector isn't wasteful? I think HP just blew billions of dollars on its WebOS investment. I've worked at firms where rivers of money flow off cliffs, so it is foolish to pretend that governments are always wasteful and the private sector isn't.

Finally, there is a difference, and a crucial difference, between spending and INVESTING. Instead of an economy where people buy trinkets and cheap imported shoes and too much sugary snacks at the level of the retail environment (buying imported crap) there is an alternative. Is is perfectly viable to have an economy driven by spending on infrastructure investment that promotes a virtuous cycle of domestic spending on steel and concrete to repair and replace our crumbling highways and bridges, make trains and rail lines, high density housing and water and sewage systems, fiber optic cable for improved telecom, and the jobs and worker skills needed for all of that.

Its our collective choice, America- a third world lifestyle buying someone else's cheesy exports or get a decent tax structure in place, control the waste in our healthcare system (socialize it) and rebuild the country our grandparents built that made this country great. And if you DO need a new BluRay player you might pay a little more, but at least you are more likely to have a job to pay for it in the first place.

We need a new Bowl game

Have you tried to count the number of college "bowl" games lately? Good luck. I have two complaints and a suggestion to make on the subject. Actually two suggestions.

The first complaint is that the reason a "Bowl game" is called a "Bowl" game is that the original "Bowl game" involved a "bowl". A "bowl" is a roughly hemispherical, convex object used to "contain" something. Sometimes that something is cereal, often it is soup. However the original football game that involved a "bowl" held "roses". These "roses" were put into a large "bowl" that would then be awarded to the "winner" of the football game. They called this game the "Rose Bowl". Now because this event became widely recognized as both popular and highly profitable other football games have emerged that have borrowed the "bowl" terminology. However, when you think of the origins of the usage of the term "bowl" this makes some of these games sound really infuriatingly stupid. The "Fiesta Bowl" is not actually a large crystal bowl full of parties. Maybe it is full of Tostitos, which makes a semblance of sense. "Orange Bowl"- that makes sense. "Cotton Bowl"- yum! "Sugar Bowl"- chow down! But how about "Gator Bowl"? Live or dead gators? If alive, who gets it- the winner or the loser? If dead, would you want a bowl full of putrid 500 pound scaly reptiles? The "Maaco Bowl Las Vegas". Yeah- try and envision a bowl full of Maaco. I dare you. The "Emerald Bowl". Ok- I'd dive into that sucker. Except "emerald" in this usage is a company that makes flavored buts. Not great, but hey, its edible. The "Armed Forces Bowl". Serve your country by becoming part of a trophy for a football game. "So, how many tours have you served?" "Technically I'm on my first- I came out of boot camp and was stationed in a large chalice for a year until I was relieved. Then I came here to Afghanistan to look for land mines." The award for loser names goes to "Papajohns.com Bowl", though. A bowl full of web site. Yeah. Share and enjoy. A web site run by a guy so lame he shelled out an unreal sum for a car he owned way back when- a freaking Camaro. Class. And he's so proud of this POS-mobile he features himself delivering pizza in it to a sorority house and referring to himself in the third person as "pappa". I've got news for you Jonny- you are headed for a fall and I hope I'm the one who pushes you over the ledge. In fact I hope you drive over the ledge. Oh, and as for the football game you are sponsoring, I feel deeply for the teams whose staff must stoop down to raise their hands and say "Yes, please select us to play for the Papjohns.com Bowl", thereby committing their hardworking student athletes who sweat and risk injuries while playing their hearts out to play for a flabby self-indulgent loser who refers to himself as "papa" in the third person.

After that lengthy little venting I'm having trouble remembering my second complaint so in the meantime here's my suggestion. Someone needs to sponsor a "championship" game (the term championship is preferred to "bowl" since, as amply demonstrated above "bowl" is misused 99% of the time and also because, "championship" is ironic for the following reason) between the two worst teams in college football. "0-13 Butt-Cheek U. takes on 0-12 Sphincter State in this years Super Delux Pedro's Taco Stand Championship Game- someone HAS to win at least 1 game this year!" That's what I want to see- if we are stooping to the level where all you need to do to get into a "bowl" game is to have a 5-7 record then lets drop the pretension of these games being anything other than financial and advertising opportunities for anyone willing to stick their name on a stadium for a day.

My second suggestion is to get everyone who wants to see a playoff in college sports to remember that you are talking about a bunch of unpaid student athletes who are trying to get out of college and into either professional sports or out into the real world selling used cars without suffering concussions for the benefit of people who sit on sofas yelling "WE WON!".


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Aging Parent

Yesterday Danine and I called in a baby sitter for the first time while we went out to a movie together. It was quite an emotional movie and afterwards I just wanted to get home to Emily. When I got home she was very glad to see us and she collapsed in my arms and laid on my chest when I laid down on the living room floor. We put her to bed and put on the PBS saturday night movie, which was Big, the Tom Hanks movie. No commercials, quality programming. It struck me though that Josh Baskin was a 13 year old, about my age when the movie came out (15, actually) and now I was the age of the Big Josh Baskin. Well, that's about as much emotion as a man can take in one day. How dear children are, and our childhood is, made me think of aging in a such a new light. I think of those old couples Danine and I would see out at restraunts, nothing to say to one another. I used to think perhaps they are boring, or maybe out of love. Now with a child and knowing how I felt being away for just a few hours and how difficult it was to think about anything else or talk for want of that subject (which we promised we would not discuss while we were out) now I imagine something different. That old, quiet couple is stuck in the heartache of children grown up and out, and childhood past and gone, and the pain and suddenness of it stuns even a great love and a busy and active mind.

This morning I spent much of the time plaing with Emily. Out in the yard, in the living room. She spent the time picking up her Bumbo chair and hoisint it around a few steps, the same with a wicker basket. I feld her upside down by her feet and she laughed as I swept her fingers back and forth over the cushion under her. I sat down to watch Wimbledon and as I did she laid on her back and discovered she could inch her way along the floor and this was enormous fun. I laughed as hard as I have in weeks, and I think the last time was something else she had figured out, new and exciting, and fun. She is discovering her body and her strength and is enjoying how she can find new ways to band and move and put her will onto the world around her. Of course, the best thing still is, and hopefully for a good long time will remain, siezing daddy's fingers and holding them as suppots while running everywhere she wants to go.

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The Minotaur

The Minotaur

The murderous beast haunts these corridors.
Its days must be closed, and its name reserved for stories.
Peering around every corned my breath is stilled and quiet,
for to hunt it one must fear it first.

Long have I stalked these pathways on the hunt.
I find its sign, see its leavings and victims, but yet it eludes me.
Is it as lost as I find myself?
Or does it stay just out of sight?

These endless walls of stone keep out light and rain.
Day and night are long since blended,
and sleep is too dangerous to be welcomed.
Can it hear my breathing in the dark?

I forget why it must die, I can only remember that it must.
We circle each other by stealth and sign and guess and instinct.
I learn its ways and make them my own.
Is it doing the same?

Rain and light splash into a pool on the floor.
The danger of being blinded by the brightness
is overwhelmed by thirst.
I listen and search the area for sign, for safety.

Breath stilled, I inch closer to the pool.
Looking up, sunlight cascades through a hole in the ceiling, far out of reach.
I crouch to the pool to drink,
And with my reflection see that my hunt is over.





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