YIR

This is the time of year when people work on reviewing the previous year and thinking ahead to the next. I've been on the road, though, and haven't given it a lot of thought.

I'm happy with the amount of writing I did, both here, in my paper journal, and other outlets, but I'd like to do more and put more polish on the pieces I put out for public consumption.

I'd like to write more music, and especially more music with lyrics.

Towards the end of the year I decided that President Obama failed to live up not only to the pre-election expectations that generated so much buzz, but even failed to accomplish the minimal change of direction I'd believed he was capable of and likely to accomplish.

I didn't work at all this year. I managed to do a picture-a-day project through June but fizzled out for the rest of the year.

I read a great deal, and spent a lot of my reading time updating and expanding my knowledge and awareness of Islam. With the spike in Islamophobia generated by the teabaggers and conservative GOP politics, I felt it my duty as a citizen to be substantively informed. Even moreso, I felt it was an area of my religious autodidactism that needed attention. Not surprisingly, learning about what Muslims believe and practice shed considerable light on other traditions I already knew something about.

Really my primary goal for this coming year is to be 10% less lazy and inert, about my writing, my photography, and my music.

Holiday Drinkin'

Just a quick note here for the recipe for the new traditional holiday party punch, Cunningham's London Fog:

1/2 gallon vanilla ice cream 2 cups bourbon 2 cups cold coffee
Put all ingredients in a punchbowl, mix halfheartedly, and pour.

If you happen to run out before the party ends, in a pinch you can pour the coffee straight from the coffee maker into the ice cream and bourbon. It helps melt faster, too.

Lots more holiday drinking recipes from The Portland Mercury's article The Drunken Host.

Skygazing

Tonight is the peak for the 2010 Geminids meteor shower. If you have clear skies where you are, look towards the northeast any time overnight. The moon will set around midnight, and if you happen to be up before dawn tomorrow, you'll have even better viewing with a darker sky, but you'll want to look more westward.

Intelligent Life On Earth?

On Monday a NASA press release promised a news conference to talk about "an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life". The wording of the release made a lot of news outlets run stories speculating about actually finding life on another planet. Officially, the news was supposed to be embargoed until the 11 a.m. PST Thursday press conference, but The Sun, in the UK, broke the embargo early on Wednesday with a story titled NASA researchers find life in poisonous arsenic lake in USA. This lake is Mono Lake, in California, near Yosemite National Park, and the finding about arsenate-reducing bacteria is what the press conference is supposed to be about.

Hooray for overhyping. NASA used to do really cool stuff that was naturally exciting, even to laypeople. Now they are involved in what the masses thing of as boring. Although very important basic research, the PR folks feel the need to hype it up to get the Idiocracy excited. It helps keep the funding and grants flowing, at least. Even sober and conservative news outlets like The Times of London just want to get to the "good stuff" -- is there life on other planets?

I don't personally think this this kind of work is boring, but public interest in science is falling. I really don't support over-dramatizing things to get interest from the Idiocracy, because such interest has a limited attention span and only reinforces the dysfunctional relationship between the media, the public, and researchers.

If journalists were educated the way ABC News Science Editor Jules Bergman was, we'd have meaningful communications of science concepts to the public, but because the standards are so much lower now, every story has the gee-whiz angle hyped, often with egregious errors in fact. This sort of dynamic does nothing to educate laypeople, and for the NASA PR office to play into it serves to bury stories of real advancements among junk like the whole "missile launch" video business.

The punch line? This isn't even really new stuff. This August 2008 article from Chemistry World titled Arsenic-loving bacteria rewrite photosynthesis rules, says pretty much what the Sun article said, although more technically.  Maybe the findings to be announced have some important but technical detail that the mainstream non-scientific press hasn't picked up on, but NASA's PR machine is still in error for pushing the ET angle so prominently.

Fiji Water Goes Under

Fiji water will be shutting down, the owners in mega-flounce mode.

Goodbye to that overpriced, giant-carbon-footprint water. Don't be shocked if the half of Fijians who don't have clean, safe drinking water put their collective foot on the company's head to hold it under.

Privatize the Bad Old TSA?

The ranking Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Rep. John Mica of Florida, is a longtime critic of the Transportation Security Administration

An AP story Airports Consider Congressman's Call To Ditch TSA, carried by NPR, notes "Federal law allows airports to opt for screeners from the private sector instead" and says the Florida congressman is behind a push to have airports ditch TSA screeners altogether. Sounds great, eh?

Watch out, though, Congressman Mica counts among his campaign contributors some of the companies who might take the TSA's place. Could be just another GOP 'privatization' move. Like prisons and Iraqi contractors, the outcome could be bad for everyone except the executives and stockholders in those companies.

The backlash against the TSA's backscatter "porno scanners" and groping patdowns is real, and the very authoritarian-sounding responses by TSA head John Pistole reveal a genuine gap between the measures being imposed on the flying public and implementing real air travel safety measures, along with contempt for what the public expects from their elected government and the institutions created to serve them.

Really, after the things we hear about Blackwater and how Arizona prisons supported the law to criminalize being brown, do you think the private screeners will be any less abusive and oppressive than TSA employees?

progress

It's been two weeks since I had the Melody implanted, the flu is abating enough I feel I can start to test my new limits. So far I've found that I can walk back up the hill to my house from the coffee shop easier.

In other news, I finished Waiting for the Barbarians: A Novel yesterday. Written in 1980 by Nobel Prize winning author J. M. Coetzee, its themes of empire, scapegoating, torture, brutality, and militarization are immediately relevant. Worth a read.

Table Fellowship

The economy is in the dumps. The teabag wing of the GOP just schemed their way into a majority in the House. The deficit hawks and their commission of fools will find ways just to continue the depression for another 2 years at least (just like when Hoover was president and kept the Great Depression going). Pretty bleak. I can hardly stand to read the news any more, even the sources I find sensible must report the facts that show just how indifferent and greedy the folks in charge are. It's too depressing. I can't even read news about the environment and outdoors how, because the climate change deniers have taken over the discourse.

The only news I can read now is food news, and even then I have to skip over the stories detailing how messed up things get with factory farms, patented plant genes, and profit-focused agribusiness.

So what, then, must we do? For the time being, without forgetting that we need to stay engaged, let's focus on each other. You, me, your friends, family, and close associates. I'm going to touch on something from Christian teachings, but please stay with me a bit, I promise I won't preach at you.

One of the central themes of Jesus' ministry in the gospels was something we call "table fellowship" -- eating and drinking together around the same table with the lowly, despised, and outcast of society. In your own experience, maybe you haven't sat down to dinner with lepers, but surely you can remember the times when you've shared an enjoyable meal and companionship around the table.

So starting today, let's focus on something we can do between you, my reader, your friends, and me. Let's have dinner together. Ideally, at home, but eating out will do in a pinch. My ideal is that each of you will take a day to put together a gathering where you will serve food. It doesn't have to be fancy -- remember that Jesus was known for fish, bread, and wine. Just put together something you can share, invite a couple of friends or a multitude, whatever you wish, and focus just on being with each other and what Martin Buber called the "I and Thou": existence in a relationship without bounds.

Just do this, and continue to reciprocate as long as you can, and I believe that we can avoid being buried in the hole that the principalities and powers are digging beneath us.

A Stinking Whale of a Problem

It's Exploding Whale Day!

On this date in 1970


No, it's not an urban myth. It really happened in Lane County, near Florence, Oregon, forty years ago today.

Dominionists Shoot Selves in Foot?

That Oklahoma law that seeks to ban the consideration of shariah in deciding cases in that state (a situation that has never occurred -- even Sen. Rex Duncan, the co-author of the measure, says it was preemptive) comes with possibly unintended consequences.

I may be leaping to conclusions to associate the backers of this law with the Christian dominionists who seek to pass laws declaring the US a Christian nation and basing laws directly on the Christian bible, but it's not a big leap.  Given that there is some commonality of goals between Sen. Sykes and the dominionists it's amusing to me to see an Oklahoma law professor comment that the law could arguably make state courts unable to consider the ten commandments in deciding cases.

And then...

Blah. Flu shot reaction. Got my 2010 flu shot on Thursday on the way out of the hospital and of course combined with the rest of the post-op stuff I got a reaction to it this year.

In other news, guitar lesson yesterday was good.

Post-Op

This is the part of surgical procedures I hate most: immediate post-op out of the hospital. The enforced fasting pre-op fucks with the body. The anesthesia fucks with the body. Of course the trauma of the surgery fucks with the body.  Objectively I feel worse than I did the morning before I went in to the cath lab. Recovery involves the body both returning to its pre-op normality as well as adjusting to the new post-op conditions -- in this case, the new valve where there wasn't one before.

I know I'm getting slowly better, and soon will feel the real benefits. For now, though, at night when I wake up with strange pains, or chills, or when I look at the bruising on my body, I fret some. After a lifetime with my body, I know its quirks, and new and different stuff puts me off my oats.

Justice for Some

I'll just leave this here.

A financial manager for wealthy clients will not face felony charges for a hit-and-run because it could jeopardize his job, prosecutors said Thursday.

HuffPo has the story now, too: Martin Erzinger, Morgan Stanley Wealth Manager, Won't Face Felony Charges For Hit-And-Run

Too bad the Facebook page for Colorado AG John Suthers is gone and replaced by a bland locked-down page. I guess it was too troublesome for him with all folks commenting on his wall suggesting he investigate the DA for corruption.

Melody Valve In Place - Nov 3 2010

On Wednesday, Nov 3rd, I had my heart worked on. Instead of open heart surgery, though, we have new technology -- minimally invasive. The conduit from my right ventricle to my pulmonary artery was narrowed and had a lot of back-pressure into the heart. In the past the repair would have involved opening the chest and going on the heart-lung machine, the whole complicated deal. Not any more.

Today they can go in with a catheter and insert a stent with a valve built into it, without major surgery, and under only a light general anesthetic. I was out of the hospital the next day. The device is called the Melody Transcathether Pulmonary Valve and is newly approved for implantation in the US as of January 2010.

This video was taken during the procedure after the Melody was in place and working. I hope to post some additional videos later. In the mean time, I'm doing good and thankful for my family's support.

roboheart

I'm off to Seattle to have my Melody implanted. When I'm back I'll be robo-heart!

Best. Protein. Name. EVAR.

It's the protein responsible for punching through the walls of infected and cancerous cells and injecting them with destructive enzymes: perforin, "our body’s weapon of cleansing and death,” said project leader Professor James Whisstock from Monash University. And thanks to x-ray crystallography, we have a picture of what it might look like at the molecular level, too.

Deepwater Horizon Explosion

So now the news reports are all about how Halliburton didn't use the right kind of cement for the Macondo well cap before it blew out and caused the fire and explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig, and didn't properly test they stuff they did use to see if it would really work. But didn't we discuss back in April or May how BP put pressure on the well contractors to skimp on safety in order to save time and money? While it's great fun to dogpile on Halliburton because of the company's image of corruption and crimes, there's still plenty to consider when looking at whether or not anyone at BP was paying attention to the conditions and would have taken any action that could have increased costs or delays.

Like most of the software project failures I'm familiar with, there's more finger pointing than root-cause analysis going on right now. But that's just noise and the self-interest of the companies involved. The real root cause of the failure must go back to the regulatory and enforcement oversight environment that allows cheap, shoddy work, and unsafe operations to continue.

United States of Movies

Oregon only gets The Goonies? Why not one of those great Gus Van Sant movies?

Retro blogging

I'll be importing selected entries from my old LJ, going back to late 2003, as I review them. I found a very nice set of blog to blog converters at Google Code. If anyone else is interested in migrating a blog, check it out.

True Self-Nature

Zen is said to be about finding your true self-nature. Through practice, we realize our own Buddha-nature. Stated this way, this is enormously wrong. That "your" and "our" is the ego getting in the way. There is just self-nature, no "my" self-nature. Buddha-nature cannot be owned.

Curiosity, Research, and Formulating Questions

Sometime in the past couple of months I realized that I've started to formulate questions as Google keyword searches. It might be while I'm waking up in the morning, or as I'm reading a book or article, and I'll starting considering how I might go about finding out more about this or that tangent.  To my consternation I often start to compose my question in search terms, rather than thinking about how I'd investigate the topic in a more systematic way.

I've found it's easy to get lazy and just type a word or words into the Google search box and think that the results found that way are whole and final word on the topic.  In reality, though, I'm more and more convinced that this is a profoundly deceptive attitude: To think that reading a few web pages from search results do more than satisfy an impulsive interest. Even if the material doesn't suffer from an unknown bias on the topic, it can't be more than a shallow veneer of data.

I'm trying to break myself of my new-found tendency to think that because I Googled "the answer" I actually know something. Instead, I'm working to recover the atrophied skills in research methods that I picked up in my schooling. Maybe I'll actually learn something.

The Feast of St. Crispin

October 25, Saint Crispin's Day

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

Firefox 4 status bar breakage

Ugh. I just noticed that as of the beta8 milestone, Firefox 4 has removed the status bar. You know, that little bar at the bottom of the window where it shows the URL when you mouse over it?  It's now the AddOn Bar, and it's disable by default. It took me a bit of digging to get my addons back: Under View->Toolbars, check the "Add-on Bar" item. Now about those URLs. When you mouse over a link it shows up in the "Awesome Bar". I guess that's OK, though it really needs to be a few shades darker grey to be readable.

I don't know why they made the change, but I bet some other browser *cough*chrome*cough* did it first and the FF people feel the need to copy it. Bletch.

lapses

Skiffle music shows that even John Lennon could have lapses in musical taste.

It's Monday

I used to be a software developer. Now I'm trying something other things. Sometimes, when interesting things happen to me, or I have random thoughts I want to share, I'll post here. In the meantime, stay warm and dry.