[99] Lift Balloons

Okay, I made the 99 part up -- but seriously, a balloon carrying a solar telescope reached an altitude of almost 23 miles above the earth:*

The Sunrise project has presented engineers with a number of extraordinary challenges. The balloon is designed to carry 6,000 pounds of equipment, including a 1-meter (39-inch) solar telescope, additional observing instruments, communications equipment, computers and disk drives, solar panels, and roll cages and crush pads to protect the payload on landing. The equipment must be able to withstand dramatic changes in temperature, and the steel and aluminum gondola cannot vibrate in ways that could interfere with the operation of the telescope.

6,000 pounds! This is the future of space travel.

Who needs rocket science?

*I found this via Sci Fi Tech.

Privacy Threats Video (and lawful access legislation)

Update: To get a feel for the direction in which lawful access legislation points us, watch PBS Frontline's "Cheney's Law." (Synopsis here.)

Michael Geist, author of the weekly column 'Law Bytes,' made the concluding remarks at the recent (end of September, 2007) International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioner's conference in Montreal. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has posted a video of those remarks on youtube.



Geist has been following the efforts of the Harper "government" [sarcastic quote marks inserted by me] to introduce "lawful access" legislation to Canada. The aim of lawful access appears to be to eradicate any notion or illusion of privacy we hold as citizens by giving law enforcement agencies to listen to any phone call and to requisition any and all data on the activities any ISP's subscribers with one phone call to the ISP. Here is a partial list of entries on Geist's site which deal with lawful access.

Watch the video, read up on lawful access. Help find a way to stop this erosion of our rights as Canadian citizens. Booting Harper and his Bush-licking conservatives out of office would be a good way to start.

Why Does God Hate Amputees?

And why won't he heal them? Any believer in the christian god as a supreme being is helpless to answer that last question without resorting to self-delusion and intellectual dishonesty.

A Short Pier at Baltimore

JC Bradbury of Sabernomics looks at the Baltimore Orioles' firing of manager Sam Perlozzo.

Bradbury makes some good points. Personally, I think that the best thing that could happen to the Orioles would be for owner Peter Angelos to take a long walk off a short Baltimore pier, or at least sell the club to someone who is interested in fielding a winning team.

Why pick on Angelos?

Well, first of all he's a lawyer. Beyond that, Angelos is responsible for hiring the mismanagement team who put together the overpriced "major league team" that currently constitutes the Orioles. A glance at some of the contracts that comprise the poorly constructed roster can be found here. Until top-level management begins to make sensible (don't even hope for inspired) roster decsions, the O's will continue to lose no matter how many field managers they fire.

Update: It appears there's also been an upper-management shakeup in Baltimore. The Baltimore Sun reports that the Orioles have hired Andy MacPhail as their new Chief Operating Officer. Looks good on paper, as MacPhail presided over two World Series winners in Minnesota (1987 and 1991). However, it should be pointed out that MacPhail inherited the '87 Twins team and that the '91 Twins might reasonably be called a fluke.

MacPhail also spent much of the past 10 years as president of the Chicago Cubs during which time the Cubs' roster construction and player management has been questionable to say the least. How much of the blame for the above is on MacPhail's head is not clear.

Looks like Angelos is actually trying to do something to get the O's moving in the right direction. We'll have to wait and see how MacPhail pans out, though I'm not optimistic about his ability. Off the top of my head I'd have to say that with this hiring Peter Angelos is in the right church, but the wrong pew.

Frost-Damaged Sonnet (near the end of a long, cold May)

Here's a poem I wrote last Friday. Anyone who is familiar with my stuff will probably notice that this one tumbles among my apparent obsessions like a pebble in a streambed.


Frost-Damaged Sonnet (near the end of a long, cold May)


Some June when lilacs aren't in bloom
and willows are bare of bark,
when there's no chickadee, no bumblebee,
no baseball’s parabolic arc,
when lips and tongues aren't among
the universe's graces,
and gravity and entropy
finally erase us

may this mind of mine be left to find
the equations of her beauty
in echoes of her hands’ and thighs’ collapse to singularity —
all curvature of Space defined
in the ache of eyes
for the sway her hips impart to Time.

Picking Up (the) Pieces

A month into the 2007 baseball season the most interesting story to me is that of the injury-wracked Oakland Athletics team. So far this year, they've suffered injuries of various sorts to Rich Harden (their best starting pitcher), Mark Kotsay (their best center fielder), Milton Bradley (their best right fielder), Dan Johnson (their second-best first baseman -- though he's back now), Nick Swisher (their best left fielder and best first baseman), Mike Piazza (their best designated hitter and back-up catcher), Esteban Loaiza (their #4 starting pitcher) Adam Melhuse (another back-up catcher), Bobby Kielty (fourth outfielder) and Travis Buck (a Triple A outfielder) who performed well as an emergency call-up pressed into everyday duty.

In spite of all this, the A's have a 13-14 record and are holding down third in the AL West, a mere 2 games back of the division-leading Angels.

How are they doing it? Well, Dan Haren and Joe Blanton have looked great leading the rotation in the absence of Harden, and Chad Gaudin has done everything that was expected from Loaiza while Joe Kennedy has been serviceable at the back of the rotation (fortunately the schedule through April left little need for a fifth starter). And the bullpen has been strong. Yep, they've been doing it with pitching.

Their bats have sucked. It's been all ass-bats (a fine word coined by BatGirl) all the time. Which isn't surprizing considering the line-up flux -- must be tough to get an offense going when the components change on an almost nightly basis.

Through all this, Billy Beane, Oakland's GM, has never stopped trying to improve his team, for now and for the future. In the last few weeks, he's traded minor leaguers for Chris Denorfia (a fourth outfielder type who's out for the season -- and was at the time of the trade, he's a player for next year), and Ryan Langerhans, a good defensive outfielder and league-average hitter who can play all 3 OF positions well. Then Beane turned around and traded Langerhans to Washington for Chris "Doyle" Snelling, a good hitter and better than average defensive outfielder with a reputation for being injury-prone who was languishing on the Nationals' bench while lesser players started everyday (don't ask why he was sitting -- you can't know the mind of a squid). After the Snelling trade and the Piazza injury, Beane traded a player-to-be-named later (or cash) to the Orioles for minor league walking fiend, Jack Cust, a classic three-true-outcomes hitter with no defensive upside -- he's fit only for DHing.

I don't expect Snelling or Cust to be in the A's lineup all season, but I do think they'll be useful parts when they do play.

At The Hardball Times, Jeff Sackmann has an interesting article on Billy Beane and whether he's discovered a new baseball inefficiency to exploit. Whether or not Beane has found a new strategy is a fascinating question -- certainly most of his recent signings and trades seem to point that way. Other interesting (though perhaps moot) questions if the strategy exists are whether or not Beane consciously developed and pursued it, or if it is something he stumbled into while dealing with his team's injuries over the last few seasons and found a way to make work for him. Two things do seem certain to me: Beane shows no fear, and he is the most fascinating GM in sports.

Found Poem

Bouncing around today, I found How To Catch a Lion in the Sahara Desert.

I'd call its original form an unintentional prose poem, but I've taken the liberty of inserting line breaks and doing some editing to turn it into the following (which I may attempt to record sometime in the next few days):

Found Poem (How To Catch a Lion in the Sahara Desert)


1. Theoretical Physics Methods


The Dirac method

Assert that wild lions can
ipso facto not be observed
in the Sahara desert.

Therefore,
if there are any lions at all
in the desert, they are tame.

The capture of a tame lion is left
as an exercise for the reader.


The Schrödinger method

At every instant there is
a non-zero probability
of the lion being in the cage.

Sit and wait.


The Quantum Measurement method

Assume that the sex of the lion
is ab initio indeterminate.

The wave function for the lion
is hence a superposition

of the gender eigenstate
for a lion and that for a lioness.

Lay these eigenstates out flat
on the ground and orthogonal

to each other. Since the (male)
lion has a distinctive mane,

the measurement of sex can
safely be made from a distance,

using binoculars. Because the observer
affects the observed the lion then collapses

into one of the eigenstates, which
is rolled up and placed inside the cage.


The Nuclear Physics method

Insert a tame lion into the cage
and apply a Majorana exchange
operator on it and a wild lion.

As a variant assume
you would like to catch
(for argument's sake) a male lion:

Insert a tame female lion
into the cage and apply the
Heisenberg exchange operator,
exchanging spins.


The Newton method

Cage and lion attract each other
with gravitational force.

Forget the friction. The lion will
arrive in the cage sooner or later.


The Special Relativistic method

Move over the desert
at light velocity.

The relativistic length contraction
makes the lion flat as paper.

Take the lion, roll it up,
and put a rubber band around it.


The General Relativistic method

All over the desert distribute
lion bait containing large amounts
of the companion star of Sirius.

After enough of the bait has been eaten,
send a beam of light through the desert.

This will curl around the lion,
confusing it completely.
The lion may then be approached
without danger.


The Heisenberg method

Position and velocity
of a moving lion can not be measured
at the same time.

As moving lions
have no physically meaningful position
in the desert, they cannot be caught.

The lion hunt can therefore
be limited to lions at rest.

The capture of a lion at rest
is left as an exercise for the reader.



2. Experimental Physics Methods


The Thermodynamics method

Construct a semi-permeable
membrane which lets everything
but lions pass through.
Drag this across the desert.


The Atomic Fission method

Irradiate the desert with slow neutrons.
The lion becomes radioactive
and begins to disintegrate.

Once the disintegration process
is far enough along
the lion will be unable to resist.


The Magneto-Optical method

Plant a large, lens shaped field
with cat mint (nepeta cataria)
so that its axis is parallel
to the direction of the horizontal
component of the earth's magnetic field.

Put the cage in one of the field's foci.
Throughout the desert, distribute
large amounts of magnetized spinach
(spinacia oleracea) which has,
as everyone knows, a high iron content.

The spinach is eaten by vegetarian
desert inhabitants which in turn are
eaten by the lions.

Afterwards the lions are oriented parallel
to the earth's magnetic field
and the resulting lion beam may then be
focused on the cage by the cat mint lens.

Them Irish Are Some Keeners, Wha?

Always in the vanguard where death is concerned. An Irish funeral parlour now offers, um, live streaming of funerals for people unable to attend in, er, body. They do seem to be using a tasteful and considerate approach (which is more than can be said for me)

Just last week, he said, the funeral home negotiated with an internet service provider in New Zealand to upgrade one woman's connection temporarily to high-speed broadband so that she could see her sister's funeral without freezing screens or dropped audio.

Not just anybody can log on to eavesdrop on the grief. The service requires special software downloads and password access controlled by Clarke & Son [sic].

S. Clarke & Sons, funeral directors. Est. 1918.

How To Make A SteamPunk Keyboard

Call me a geek if you like, but I think this is a seriously cool DIY project. Though if I were to attempt it, I'd probably not even bother looking for an old typewriter to salvage keys from. I'd simply go with the brass-edged buttons for all the keys. Also, while it would be much more work (all those holes!), I think I might at least attempt to make a thin brass or wooden face to lay over or in place of the felt.

The Chicago Homer

Even before I found the Chicago Homer tonight (more on it below, with a link) there were many things to like about Chicago — even for me, who has never been there. And probably never will be.

For instance, in the middle of the 19th-century she became the livestock centre of America, butchering and shipping delicious beef and pork all over the USA.

There is Wrigley Field, which opened in 1914.

And there was Chicago Stadium, with its awesome Barton organ, demolished in 1995 to my utter horror and dismay and eternal resentment (I have not watched hockey since).

There is the old "Abby" — the icebreaker MV Abegweit, which carried passengers and freight between Borden, Prince Edward Island and Cape Tormentine, New Brunswick until she was retired in 1982 — now serving as the headquarters of the Columbia Yacht Club (picture of the Abby) in Chicago.

There is humble servant, a somewhat frequent and very thoughtful commenter on this blog.

And now there is The Chicago Homer, a great resource for anyone interested in ancient Greek Literature

"The Chicago Homer is a bilingual database that uses the search and display capabilities of electronic texts to make the distinctive features of Early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek. Its component parts are

1. Standard electronic editions of the texts, revised for maximum utility in a searchable database, and translations by Richmond Lattimore and Daryl Hine that closely observe the line structure of the originals and lend themselves to interlinear display.

2. A set of database tables that support lexical, phrasal, morphological, and narratological searches.

3. A Web-based user interface that gives access to the texts and supports queries to the database.

The most salient feature of the Chicago Homer is its ability to make visible the network of phrasal repetition that is so distinctive a feature of Homeric poetry. We reserve the rest of this introduction to a brief discussion of repetitions before turning to a detailed account of the texts and translation, the database and its parts, and the user interface."

I believe I will be making some use of The Chicago Homer in both the near and the distant future.