Thawing (and) turkeys

As Vermont slowly emerges from underneath the wintery hellscape we've all been sleepwalking through for the last 4 months, I would like to take a moment to commemorate the finest nature-related moment of this time-period: the discovery of a turkey neighborhood on a winding shortcut road thereafter named "The Turkey Run" (by me). And as anyone who has spotted this rare and beautiful creature in the wild knows, he is a glorious sight to behold. Audacious and proud, but never haughty, just as many of us see the U.S. (ideally at least).

For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him.

With all this Injustice, he is never in good Case but like those among Men who live by Sharping & Robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides he is a rank Coward: The little King Bird not bigger than a Sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the District. He is therefore by no means a proper Emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America who have driven all the King birds from our Country*...

I am on this account not displeased that the Figure is not known as a Bald Eagle, but looks more like a Turkey. For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America... He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.

If nothing else, he should at least be the national bird of Turkey.

[*Note that the author is here referring to Americans acting in the manner of Cincinnatus, the early Roman consul and dictator, and not the city named in his honor. This is what an education in the classics gets you, writing worthless footnotes to entries about turkeys.]

I am thinking Potato

A thoughtless and unprofound post.

-One of the smartest plays in baseball, The Decoy Potato:

Carlton Fisk’s game-winning home run in game six of the 1975 World Series. Reggie Jackson’s three straight homers in the Fall Classic. Joe Carter’s ninth-inning, championship-clinching smash to end the ’93 campaign. All great moments in baseball history.
...Bresnahan says he casually mentioned to his teammates the possibility of throwing "something other than a baseball" into the outfield to entice a runner on third to come home and be tagged out. "Everybody laughed and said "Why don’t you do it?" Bresnahan recalls. "It started out as a dare, became a challenge, and I eventually did it."
...
The perfect opportunity presented itself in the fifth inning of game one. With a Reading runner on third, Bresnahan called timeout, told the home plate umpire something was wrong with this catchers mitt, and ambled over to the dugout to retrieve another mitt. Only this mitt contained the infamous potato.

"When I picked up the potato glove that was the cue for everybody on the Bills that it was going to happen," Bresnahan says. "I called for a slider away, so the batter wouldn’t hit the ball. During the pitch, I had to move the potato from my glove to my bare hand. After catching the ball, I rifled the potato over the head of the third baseman in to the left field."

The runner on third jogged home thinking he was going to score an easy run. But Bresnahan had a surprise as the rest of his teammates put their snickering faces in their gloves. "I tagged the guy out, "Bresnahan laughs.

"It (the potato) looked like a ball," confirms Williamsport Sun-Gazette Sports Editor Jim Carpenter, who was sitting along the third base line that night with his son Keith. "It had a good likeness to a baseball. Thinks just happened so fast. I was not thinking potato."

Neither was Scott Potter, the home plate umpire.

-Mexico once had an Emperor. WTF?
It is true. Two actually, during non-consecutive terms. But unlike Grover Cleveland, neither attempt went well. The first sort of rose up the ranks of the military and was eventually selected to be Emperor, like Napoleon I. He lasted a year. But the second guy was an Austrian who was just randomly appointed to the "Mexican Throne" (if they had one) by the conservadores and managed to be so lousy that he was executed within several years. Still, there is a crown collecting dust somewhere in Mexico right now. Waiting perhaps...

-Slate's Explainer, as it often does, led me to an article on cannibalism. If you scroll down about halfway to you will find a shockingly lucid account of what people taste like. The site name is "Food Resource" so you know it is worth checking out. William Seabrook's tale (about 60% of the way down the page) is especially worth reading. Anthropologists are rarely good for anything, so I for one found the story both refreshing and morbid. You cannot deny that you have always wanted to know. I won't give it away beyond mentioning that much like spiders, each one of us consumes, on average, roughly twelve human beings in a year.

Google (book) maps

Speaking of representations of the planet, this clever fellow at the Google booksearch blog decided to compile the geographical settings of books for the past 200 years (or at least the place names mentioned in them). Decade-by-decade maps also show the western migration in the early 19th century.

Mostly these points trace where people live, but there are so many cool things you could do with this data. I would like to see the difference between novel settings and actual population density. Britain especially, seems pretty over-represented. Different maps for different genres would be fairly interesting as well. Get on it google!

Starting Time

Edgerton photos are glorious. I recommend Stopping Time, a compilation, in particular.

Also amazing is this video of things being shot in slow motion. I am however, left to wonder: what do these people have against fruit? Apple, banana, egg, bottled water, canned beverages. Was this movie made to tease starving children in 3rd World countries?

Sapphire bullets of pure love

I was planning on putting up an unadorned link to this spectacular view of iron projectiles piecing through a nebula from Scientific American (photo by Gemini). But the Astronomy Picture of the Day stole my thunder so now I'm going to use their explanation and then add an insightful complaint about something completely different in the post below this one.

Why are bullets of gas shooting out of the Orion Nebula? Nobody is yet sure. First discovered in 1983, each bullet is actually about the size of our Solar System, and moving at about 400 km/sec from a central source dubbed IRc2. The age of the bullets, which can be found from their speed and distance from IRc2, is very young -- typically less than 1,000 years. As the bullets rip through the interior of the Orion Nebula, a small percentage of iron gas causes the tip of each bullet to glow blue, while each bullet leaves a tubular pillar that glows by the light of heated hydrogen gas.

Earthset

Unrelated complaint (this is not going to make me popular): I am sick of The Blue Marble. I have never liked this picture for three main reasons:
1. Everyone acts like it is the greatest and most important photograph in the history of the world,
2. It features only one continent, much too conspicuously. The Southern Hemisphere also happens to be lamer hemisphere.
3. Ubiquity.
#3 is definitely the worst. This page documents some tacky examples of Marble's misuse during its tenure as World's Only Photograph. I find it most annoying when the picture turns up in some inappropriate context, particularly instances when the photo is supposed to represent a current view of Earth from space, but it is obviously the stock image. The clouds always give it away.

Can't we move on already and start using another Earth photo? 35 years are enough. Here are some of the shots from Galileo (1, 2, 3, 4). Any of them are acceptable. The composite generated photo on the right is even better. I would also be ok with NASA funding some kind of Earth photographing mission just so we get rid of this god-forsaken shot. There are surprisingly few photos of the planet taken from space.

Earthrise has always been a favorite actually. Making the planet appear small is much more interesting than forcing us to memorize that stupid cloud pattern.


Far better.

The Eephus Chronicles

"Live by the slow curve, die by the slow curve."

Such were the words of pitcher and raconteur Bill Lee following Game 7 of the 1975 World Series, wherein he gave up a game-losing 2-run homer on the riskiest pitch in baseball: The Eephus. A pitch with nothing on it; no spin, no lack of spin, no motion, no speed. Since the previously mentioned Top 100 Red Sox blog finally got around to naming Mr. Lee the 35th greatest player in team history, now seems as good a time as any to write about his famed junk pitch.

Despite the outcome of the 1975 WS, the Eephus is probably baseball's most cunning psychological weapon. Other than perhaps the steal of home, there is no more audacious thing to do than to reach back and chuck an arching 40 mph nothing-ball in there. The pitch is both an insult and a dare. Since the Eephus is so wildly off-speed, power hitters swing and miss by a mile. Then, for the rest of the game, all that they and their teammates can think about is the possibility of its re-occurrence. In fact, the success of the pitch is based by the frequency of its use. Throw it too often, and your risk giving up an embarrassing home run; too little and the batter will stop thinking about it. Spaceman Lee's mistake in game 7 was getting greedy. He used it to twice dispatch Tony Perez earlier in the game, but the third time he tried it Perez was unimpressed and launched a towering homer that was gone so fast that Yaz didn't bother to turn around in left field.

Rip Sewell, father of the Eephus, never endured this indignity. Only Ted Williams ever hit a home run off his signature pitch. A bogus home run in the 1946 All-Star game, which Williams later admitted stepping out of the batters box to reach. Sewell is said to have invented the "bloop curve" after an injury restricted his ability to throw hard for extended periods and forced him to resort to mind games. But this never hindered him, as he managed 9 winning seasons out of 13 and nearly 400 games.

Sometimes, the ball dropped down into the strike zone while the suddenly emasculated hitter flailed. More often they managed some kind of contact, yet for some reason (perhaps arc of the pitch was too severe) they couldn’t knock it out of the park. And that’s all they wanted to do. As a hitter, you don’t see an outrageous pitch like the Eephus and think, Single. The Eephus pitch was an insult: they wanted to pulverize it, kill it, crush it. They’d get so worked up waiting for it they couldn’t see it straight, and they’d ground out, or pop out, or miss altogether. They risked injury -- the swings they took where that hard. And then they were embarrassed, angry. Give it to me again, you son-of-a-bitch! But ... no. Probably not, not for you. Not any time soon. Batters would wish for another chance they might not get for a year, but the pitch would be in their minds every time they faced Sewell -- that big looping marshmallow of a pitch. It was galling, an itch they couldn’t reach, an ache. Sewell was careful not to throw the Eephus too much -- he tried to keep it around 10 times per game. He wanted hitters to hope for it, but he wanted its arrival to be unexpected, every time. This made all of Sewell’s other pitches look a little bit better, because any pitch, any pitch at all, looks fantastic when compared to to the Eephus. [Link]

I love baseball oddities, especially those whose practitioners can be counted on both hands. The junk ball is one such oddity. Unfortunately, we haven't seen one thrown since 2004, but I think the Space Ball is poised for a comeback. A slow, galling, unexpected comeback.

Prodigious Science Cartoonary

Sidney Harris, illustrious science cartoonist has posted his prodigious science cartoonary online. There is not a lot of competition for the title of "best physics cartoonist," but if there was, Harris would probably win. I can't date this one, but I hope that it secretly inspired my all-time favorite diagram, from Kolb & Turner's The Early Universe, page 86:

When the revolution comes, I want to be in the Politburo

As reprehensible and willfully misinformed ordinary global warming "deniers" are, they can't hold a deluded candle to the people who think the whole issue is some kind of conspiracy. I could see where someone who is deeply mistaken or scientifically illiterate would consider his pro-science opponents to be alarmists, or naïve and overcautious. I could imagine simply thinking that they were wrong, and that they were willing to believe anything pessimistic that their crunchy friends told them. But when it comes to the sorting out why every scientist who knows actually knows something about it disagrees, I can't imagine anyone settling on "conspiracy." Conspiracies are an inherently silly concept, but when you apply it to a situation involving a bunch of professors who don't know each other or get anything out of it, it makes even less sense. If that is possible.

Moreso for the politicians who make a big deal out of it; how would you think that they stand to gain by pointing out that there is going to be a world-wide catastrophe unless industry undergoes drastic changes? The polluter people obviously have a lot to gain by stopping you, but it isn't like Al Gore hates cars. A few nutty people might dislike technology for stupid whacked-out reasons, but the vast majority of environmentalists get absolutely nothing for holding this view, other than a deep feeling of unease. Anti-scientific charlatans get the support of these fantastically rich companies, the politicians who shill for those companies, and they also get to feel good about the fact that the world isn't going to end.

This is what I never get about climate change deniers, just what do they think is the point of the supposed conspiracy? Executed somehow by these scientists are so capable of coming to a secret but world-wide consensus to deceive everyone (because if academics are known for anything, it is agreeing), so that they can get...more funding? I don't know. Or what they thing Gore was up to in the 80's when he was the only person who was pointing this out. How is talking about complicated scientific issues cloaked in a message of gloom and despair supposed to make you popular? What is the demographic that is going to love hearing about that? "Vote Gore: Harbinger of inevitable disaster." Yes, that is an uplifting message.

I just don't understand what they think their opponents motives are. They cannot honestly say scientists hate the idea of car ownership or electricity. I figured the charlatans were just sort of in denial and that they assumed their opponents were misguided, or that the climate predictions would turn out to be wrong, even as that became increasingly unlikely. I have just never been able to see, from their point of view, how environmentalists could be perceived to have sinister motives. Even if they were wrong, they would have to be sincere--there is absolutely no reward.

But I finally saw something Friday that cleared up for me what some of these folks are thinking. They believe, at least the more obtuse ones, that global warming is being used as a cover to secretly establish a world-wide totalitarian communist government. Yes, you read that correctly. Of global warming this [successful right-wing blogger] says:

They want to use it to create a world government that subjugates individual nations and people to the irrefutable ideal of preserving the planet. In other, simpler words, their objective is communism -- the replacement of individual free choice and free markets with a collective that has the power to exterminate anyone and anything on behalf of a rational government model that justifies all actions without resort to bourgeois notions of morality.

Once the precedent has been set that there is a planetary cause which trumps human-centric morality, they will be free to rule everyone as they -- and their chosen experts -- see fit. It's important to recognize that modern liberalism has nothing whatever to do with traditional liberalism, which values the individual above all other principles. The real desire of contemporary "liberals" is to establish a ruling class with absolute power over all us ordinary slobs who don't share their peculiar perspectives on social justice.

A scientific cause is the perfect instrument for achieving this objective. The definition of science is that it consists of what has been proven factually true. It cannot therefore be rebutted by faith, values, esthetics, or aspiration. Its status as irrevocable truth empowers the enlightened (i.e., those in power) to censor, punish, obliterate, and overturn pre-existing values without any philosophical backchat. Science allows the substitution of facts for truth, however conceived. If he were alive today, the amoral keepers of the Global Warming faith could wring obedience from Jesus Christ on the subject of recycling and secondhand smoke -- without uttering a single word about divinity, faith, or sin. In the preferred "liberal" model, power belongs not to the good but to the smart. You will learn, despite three centuries of disrespect and rebellion, to genuflect to Yale.

That's why ducking the questions about Global Warming -- "I don't know," "I'm not sure," "I don't disagree in principle," "I don't see the harm in going along," -- is a suicide pact with totalitarianism.

These people are nuts. And they're also winning the battle over what the politics of the future will look like. Global Warming is not a sideshow. It's the incredibly ponderous first step of an assault that intends to remove all individual free will from life. That's why it's imperative that all of us quit making jokes about Global Warming and go to war for the purpose of debunking it.

...Study. And then spread the word. Not laughingly, but as seriously as if your life depended on it. Because it does.

Somehow I am having trouble picturing Commissar Gore delivering a vociferous invocation to the assembled multitudes of Red Square at the installment of his one-world Peoples' Government. The long-awaited fruition of decades of work, patiently making power point presentations and boring speeches, dreaming wistfully of the glorious Workers' Revolution. Climatologists of the world, Unite!

(I don't want to give this creep traffic, so email me [or roll your cursor over this text] if you are interested in the link.)

Photon Allergy

Woman claims skin reaction to wireless internet:

For most people talking on a mobile phone, cooking dinner in the microwave or driving in a car is simply part of modern living in 21st century Britain.

But completing any such tasks is impossible for Debbie Bird - because she is allergic to modern technology.
...
The 39-year-old is so sensitive to the electromagnetic field (emf) or 'smog' created by computers, mobile phones, microwave ovens and even some cars, that she develops a painful skin rash and her eyelids swell to three times their size if she goes near them.

As a consequence, Mrs Bird, a health spa manager, has transformed her home into an EMF-free zone to try and stay healthy.

The walls are all covered in special carbon paint, the windows have a protective film on them and she and her husband, Tony, 45, even sleep under a silver-plated mosquito net to deflect the radiowaves.

'I can no longer do things that I used to take for granted,' Mrs Bird said last night. 'My day-to-day life has been seriously affected by EMF.

'I don't own a microwave. I don't use mobile phones at all. I can't even use a cordless phone. We have a plasma screen TV because the old style one gave out gamma rays, which brought on my reaction.

'I can't even get in my friend's BMW. If I do I immediately start getting a headache and my head starts tingling.

Perhaps I am too skeptical, but I find this hard to believe. Psychosomatic illnesses have been extensively documented, but EMF-based ones? I don't think so. There are people who have a skin reaction to bright sunlight, but that is a very different type of problem and it begins at birth. In fact, allergies in general almost never spring up that late in life, unless some unusual situation brings it about.

Plus, she is all over the place about what she claims to be allergic to. Wi-Fi, microwave ovens, cell and cordless phones are indeed all around the same waveband (UHF and SHF). But there are plenty of other things around there that she does not claim an allergy to, particularly different kinds of broadcast radio and TV. And the proposition that cars are somehow emitting anything around that part of the spectrum makes no sense.

The worst part is definitely "the old style [TV] gave out gamma rays, which brought on my reaction." First of all, no it didn't. Second of all, that is soooo far from microwave radiation. And third of all, televisions emit very little radiation, being a receiver doesn't somehow cause that device to be a "hub" for some wavelength. And if it did, it would never be gamma rays.

It is unfortunate that in a story about a rather dubious medical/science issue the newspaper hardly managed any degree of skepticism. They added one sentence saying that practically all doctors doubt the veracity of "Electro-sensitivity" and then immediately counter it with some pseudo-scientist. Textbook false balance.

Terrible job.

Dippin' Dots

I wish there was something physics-related about this game so that I could justify my quest to beat it more than once. It involves chain reactions. Let's just say that-- I like it because it reminds me of nuclear physics. Yes, that makes it alright to play flash games...

The music also heals my jangled nerves.

Scientific trading routes

This chart is an immensely complex map of the interconnections between the different scientific disciplines. It was made by comparing the citations of nearly a million articles and assigning a little dot to each distinct area of research. It is basically the same as the sort of continuum I always imagined between them, (though the one I always saw wasn't 2-dimensional). I am surprised that earth science/ecology leads into biology instead of organic chemistry, and did not expect computer science to bridge a gap between physics and social science of all things. I suppose though that there is a difference between the way the different subjects are related content-wise and citation-wise. Even so, it is interesting that the latter almost gives you the former.

They certainly got one thing right: putting astrophysics on top.

Link

Rare Political Post (sort of)

Remember how in 2000 the running trope about Bush was that he would be a huge boon to comedy if elected? I was thinking about that prediction recently and realized that it turned out to be exactly true, but in a totally different way than we all expected.

The common belief at the time would be that he would spend at least 4 years amusing us with gaffes and basic lack of knowledge about the world, and we could all have some harmless fun at his expense.

But he has done nothing for traditional stand-up comedians and late-night talk show hosts. If anything he has made their jobs much harder. Aside from the steady stream of grim and depressing news resulting from his policies, the past 6 years have been a time of extreme polarization. Talk-show hosts who would be normally inclined to point out the obvious absurdities in the President's rhetoric became too timid at the prospect of offending their FoxNews-emboldened red-state viewers to call a spade a spade. Look what happened to the most spade-calling comedian of the pre-terror era: Bill Maher, thrown to the jackals at the first possible opportunity for doing just that. Then, once everyone started to "watch what they say, watch what they do," the whole comedy business ground to a halt for about 2 years while everyone was too freaked out to make jokes about anything.

Into that vacuum steps the Daily Show. [Insert generic paragraph about show's impact on the real news media/political scene here.] We've all heard the canonical story about the effect of Jon Stewart on the liberal media which is still struggling to groggily awake from its coma and recover from that ball injury. There are plenty of those essays already, we don't need another. Instead, I will observe that it and the Colbert Report have accomplished an entirely different mission, the fulfillment of that Bush=comedy-gold prophecy from 2000. He did give humorists plenty of fodder, it just happened to be different humorists (satirists rather than network hacks) and different fodder (jingoism rather than faux pas).

When you think about it, you realize that it was specific things that the past few presidents had done and said that made them funny. But with Bush the actual things he has done are pretty scary or controversial, and instead what makes him funny is what he, and the people who vehemently strive to prop him up in the eyes of the public, are: phonies. But if you are some Jay Leno type with a huge diverse audience, you can't be alienating half of your viewers by making jokes about the essence of their beloved leader every night, so you are forced to stick to these innocuous observations that skirt the substance of what actually makes the president hilarious (or terrifying). Conan, who used to be one of the most sharp and intelligent, is still doing Bush-can't-read jokes, seven years on. Get with it-- the joke isn't that he can't read, it's that he chooses not to.

Instead, the only way to appropriately mock (or even point out) this kind of vast trend of frightening dishonesty is by satirizing it. And to do that you have to be pointed, and partisan, and too cruel to please everyone. You also have to play to an audience who understands irony, and who will recognize the type of rhetorical patterns being ridiculed. So while ordinary comics have languished in the never-ending flood of scandals and terrible news, the only decent product of the administration, humor-wise, have been the ironists like Colbert who sprung up to the acknowledge the absurdity of it all.

So all of those smart-asses who thought they were being so clever back at the turn of the century predicting Bush as a boon to comedy ended up being right, but in a completely different way. It takes a special kind of absurdity to actually create satirists to mock you. If we're lucky, it could end up being one of his most enduring legacies.