Goodbye 2010

2010 zoomed by in a hot Texan blur. Tony's visiting for a few days, which is cool, and my night job is going to be busy as hell. People need their starches before they fill their bellies with alcohol.

Happy New Year to all my loved ones. I hope it brings what you want it to.

Happy Winter Solstice

In the northern hemisphere today we celebrate the Winter Solstice; the day where the sun hits the lowest point in the sky, and stays there for a few days. December 25th is the day when the sun begins it's ascent (here in the northern hemisphere), an ascent that takes exactly six months to reach it's apex, on June 21st. The sun hit's the bottom spot on 12/21, has no movement for three days, and is resurrected--eh, returns--on 12/25, a kind of "birthing" day.

A theme that has repeated itself throughout the millennia of human religious thought is that of the death and the return three days later. In today's epoch the "controlling" narrative has split up the resurrection and the 12/25 significance, but we still get to celebrate the 25th. (Go spend money!) I'm ripping off Strong Bad and calling it Decemberween.

But, in any case, it has been posited that this year, 2010, a solstice has occurred on the same day as a total lunar eclipse (in certain areas), and that this is the first time that's happened since 1638.

After work at the night job some of us went up to the top level of the parking garage to check out the show, but a quick moving low-lying foggy business was obstructing the view most of the time. Sporadically an eclipsing moon would show up and we'd cheer, but it was gone as fast as it arrived.

Lunar eclipses happen twice a year, every year, and are the result of the way the moon rotates around the earth. I've seen a few, and they're pretty cool...the moon looks obfuscated, and then, at near total eclipse, it turns red, and stays that way until moving out of the way. The red is the result of the moon reflecting the sun's corona.

Since the "sol" part of the word solstice means "sun", I'd like to leave you with an image on this Winter Solstice of Amaterasu, the Japanese sun god, a lady who's been spooked into hiding by the behavior of her brother, only to emerge and return the day to all the other creatures:

Local Free Theater

Our apartment complex in Austin has a movie theater room with exactly 21 seats and a big(ish) screen. There is one catch to using the room: while it is free, you can only use it when the management's office is open.

Because of my love of cinema, it was a big draw for me when we were scoping out apartments. Once we moved in I realized that it would be frustrating--having a "toy" like that so close--since I'm pretty much always busy with two jobs. But...

We finally made it on a day I had off from both jobs (and it wasn't Sunday). Alone, we viewed:



It's been so long since we'd watched it that I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed the film, especially viewing it on a big screen. I remember thinking, once it's over, Inception-like, how much of this story is reliable?

Corrie went out of town to have a Decemberween celebration with her family (our 12/25 will be with my fam in California), and I went down to the theater by myself to watch one of my original two suggestions. (My other suggestion was Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira). Alone, I watched:



I have more to say about this movie later. The acting, the makeup, the cinematography, the sets, and the music are all stupidly good, have withstood the test of time, and are almost cliched by their repeated copying in the years since. I saw scenes from The Simpsons that I hadn't realized were from this before this viewing (sure, there are obvious ones, some were less obvious). The poster is correct: it's terrific.

Smart White-Guy Mecca

Have you ever wanted to make a pilgrimage to a place that has churned out some of the smartest white guys in white-guy history? ("White-guy history" is, in America, regular history.)

Well, if wanting to pay your respects to a mecca of pale-skinned-yet-great-functioning-gray-matter-guys look no further than Edinburgh, Scotland. Sean Connery is form there, but doesn't make my list of Smarty McSmarts.

Edinburgh gave the world Alexander Graham Bell, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Charles Darwin.

Leipzig, in Deutuschland, can claim Leibniz (co-founder of calculus) and almost Nietzsche, who was from a village called Roecken, which was absorbed by Luetzen, which is about twelve miles from Leipzig (is Davis part of Sacramento?). Even so, it's still just two. (Apologies for the "oe" and "ue"...no umlauts.)

In a similar, yet somehow bizarrely different vein, if you had to choose the best left-handed outfielder born on November 21st from the city of Donora, Pennsylvania, and you picked Ken Griffey Jr, a future Hall of Famer and one of the game's best, you'd be wrong. Forty-eight years to the day prior, Stan Musial was born in Donora.

Building a Mirror World

Chirality is the phenomena where a molecule can have the same number of atoms, but be aligned in a mirror image of itself. This has effects on how the molecule can be used and turned into amino acids. The easiest example of chirality is seen in human hands, where one is the exact mirror opposite of the other.

Properly constructed amino acids are key to life: DNA is the recipe book or book of blue prints of all the important proteins our cells need and use for life functions; RNA goes to the proper section of DNA and makes the copy of a specific protein, then takes it to the ribosome; the ribosome builds the protein using amino acids.

LUCA, or the Last Universal Common Ancestor, for some reason developed using only one of the dual orientations. Pretty wild stuff. Every specie alive today and every one of the billions of species extinct today had the DNA-RNA to ribosome-built protein using only that same one orientation.

If there were so-called "mirror" cellular life, could it be a bacteria that could harm us? Could it be a virus? The answer to that would be, if those things do exist, they pose us no threats. The way those entities attack other cells would be useless on our opposite-handed structure, like the wrong key for a door.

Some scientists are trying to create mirror protozoa and the like. Into tiny fat droplets that mimic tiny lipid-filled cellular structure, the scientists are placing mirror proteins made from a mirror ribosome. One scientists says that just by placing these things together doesn't make it work. Another says that if it does kick start, you better hope it doesn't get some chlorophyl and escape the petrie dish and make it to the ocean. In that doomsday scenario, after six hundred years we'd be in an ice age and humans wouldn't really be around to mess things up.

Would you be surprised if there turned out to be some colossally huge amount of money in the discovery/harnessing of mirror particles?

No, Honey, It's a Sequel

The "honey" in the title of this post is not my wife, but her youngest sister, Stephanie, who thought the film Tron: Legacy was some fancy original computer film. I guess you can't blame her, since she was born eight years after the original came out, in 1982.

Disney funded the original because it was trying to harness the new phenomena of the Summer Blockbuster. 1982 was a great year for movie geeks, but what made it such a great year--besides Tron, the world got ET, Blade Runner, and The Wrath of Khan--made the bizarre blueish Disney film suffer at the box office.

I showed Stephanie the original Tron preview on YouTube, and she got excited when they showed a quick scene with the light cycles, adding a perky ,"That's on my phone!" Sure enough, she has a video game on her iPhone that is the exact light-cycle game from Tron. I played for a while, and it was fun.

It's probably not unfair to ask why the cinema event of the holiday season is a $170 million sequel to a twenty-eight year old film that most people agree wasn't that great?

The answer is that Tron did what very few science fiction movies ever do: it successfully predicted the future. The story about trying to find exonerating evidence inside a memory bank was original at the time, but has been obscured by the powder-white-on-blue memories. The metaphor that inside a computer you, or a piece of you, could exist and be active on a certain level has not only endured, but come to pass.

When the honchos got together to make the sequel, they decided to do a test like had been done with the first installment. In the early '80s the test "preview" they produced was for selling their idea--it had a similar look to what they wanted to do for the whole movie. Since they'd decided that any sequel would have to have three things: 1) Jeff Bridges; 2) light cycles; 3) to not look like any other movie before it, they figured they'd need all three things in their test.

They'd been working with their story and universe long enough to know how it would look, and they knew it would have light cycles, but they still hadn't gotten Jeff Bridges aboard. They planned a meeting with him at his property in California, knowing that he if he turned them down the project was finished. They weren't sure how he would feel about basically a B-move from before he was famous. He was, after all, going on to win the Oscar for Crazy Heart.

In Bridges living room they started to pitch, "Okay, so the old you is the good-guy, and the young version of you is the villain, and you have a son who--" and at this point the Dude got up from his spot on the couch, excused himself, and left the room a little tense. He returned with the helmet he wore from the first film. They spent the rest of the time walking around his property taking pictures with everyone wearing the helmet. He was definitely in.

When they first showed the test at the (big, original) Comic Con (in San Diego), they hadn't actually been given the green-light to make the movie. They thought that if the reaction was positive enough, there'd be no going back. The crowd cheered upon seeing Jeff Bridges, both young and old, in that test, and the rest is history.

Possibly only in circles of old-school digital film effect gurus can the specter of Tron be fully remembered. Computer rendering in films, for characters, effects, backgrounds, and sounds, was seen as a threat to actors, to traditional effects people, and to traditional animators. I don't think that's ever been gotten over, that fear. It seems like people have simply embraced the tool that is the computer.

My Apologies to Mr. Shockley

Jim Shockley is a good friend of ours who, while we lived in Brooklyn, lived upstate a tiny ways, and at whose house we'd go when we needed a weekend out of town. He taught me to love the Jets, the younger and usually more hapless of New York's two football teams.

There was a shirt that he had purchased, a New York Titans t-shirt, signifying when the Jets were originally called the Titans, that didn't fit him but did fit me, so it became my shirt. (I don't believe I've paid for it yet...)

Well, being a silly superstitious fan (usually only with the Jets), yesterday when our broadcaster switched over from the Patriots blowing out the Bears in the Chicago snow to the Jets and Dolphins, I asked Corrie if I'd worn it the last time the Jets had played, or the last time I watched them win. See, if you wear the shirt and they win, you have to wear it again the next week, but if you wear it and they lose, you can't wear it until after they win again--at least that's my understanding. Corrie rolled her eyes at me and put out another tray of food, since yesterday (Sunday) was our little housewarming/holiday party.

I changed into the shirt. The Jets lost, and I remembered that the last time I wore it while watching Gang Green was when they got shut-out against the Packers. Dammit.

So, my apologies to by buddy Jim, for screwing up the shirt rotation.

Vic, Alex, and Jules

Another post in my (apparent) "First Name Basis" series.

Jules was the youngest of the three. He was off at university, studying law, which he hated, when he quietly left law school and began trying to get published. Once his strict, abusive father found out, he cut him off financially, forcing Jules to support himself as a stockbroker, another profession he loathed. Jules found a couple of older writers, Vic and Alex, who gave him advice and support.

Alex and Jules would become pretty good friends over the long hall. Alex was a witty and erudite older gentleman who, having a mulatto mother and black grandfather, had experienced quite a bit of history's negativity towards people of color. His father had been a general, so his life hadn't been all bad. He'd become rather famous through writing, and his novels, when collected, were quite long for the time, as they'd been serialized.

Vic, also from a militarily aristocratic background, had parents that became radicals--his father was an atheist republican in the time of a divine emperor--and his outlook was shaped as a rebellion to that. Eventually he was exiled, and is known outside his home country for works that are less important inside his country than his poetry, verse that is not usually conversed about away from home. A few months older than Alex, he lived fifteen years longer.

It's safe to say that Jules has proven to be the most famous with the general population of today's age.

Here're some pictures:


Victor Hugo is best known outside of France for The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables, and less so for his poetry, which is considered pre-eminent in France. He lived from 1802 until 1885.



Alexandre Dumas is remembered for Three Musketeers series of books, as well as The Count of Monte Cristo, among others. Born in 1802, he entertained and helped folks like Jules until his death in 1870.



Jules Verne, along with England's HG Wells, basically created what we call science-fiction, and some of his stories conceive of some of today's technologies; automobiles, space travel, rocketry, telecommunications, submersible technology et al. Known best for From the Earth to the Moon, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jules lived from 1828 until 1905.

I love discovering the interconnectedness of some of history's famous writer's, scientists, and other people of importance in the realms of art and politics. I guess that's the motivation behind this "First Name basis" idea. Expect a few more of these on occasion in the future.

"Taxi" is Latin

I made a conjecture at the end of my most recent post about certain words, and I have proven that conjecture false. "Taxi" is a shortening of "taxicab", which itself is an English contraction of "taximeter cabriolet", which itself is based on the French "taximetre", taken from an old German word "taxameter". "Taxameter" was coined by the combination of the Latin "taxa", to charge, and the Greek "metron", measure.

Thus concludes our brief etymological lesson for this morning.

Native Place Names

While overlooking the genocide committed upon the aboriginal folks of the Americas, we can notice that in North America the French and Spanish named things after their kings, queens, and princes, while the English, for the most part (New York, New Jersey, and New Hampshire notwithstanding), asked a local what they called something.

Earlier this evening I noticed that out of the ten Canadian provinces, exactly four have names that have Aboriginal-American origins: Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. Also, of the three Canadian territories, two have native names: Yukon and Nunavut. Pretty cool, I thought.

America? Well, obviously Massachusetts and Connecticut, Manhattan, the Allegheny and the Mississippi, Minnesota, Chicago...

I looked a little deeper. Does anybody remember this song: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas...all native terms. How about a few others: Chesapeake, Illinois (with a French transliteration), Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Malibu...

Milwaukee and Wisconsin, Nebraska and Missouri, Ohio and Oklahoma, even Wyoming is a word meaning "rolling mountains" from the Delaware Indians. Tahoe, from "Lake Tahoe" fame, is Washo for "big water". While the true meaning of Tennessee is unknown, the fact that it's native is.

Even Texas..."texas" is Craddo for "friend" or "ally", a name given by Spaniards to the Craddo and the area they inhabited (guess where it is today).

Tuxedo, while not a place, is also an aboriginal word, leading me to conjecture that any word beginning with a t and having an x involved will come from a native origin. New task: find etymology of "taxi".

Sunday Night at the Laser Tag Emporium

This past Sunday Corrie and I spent a small portion of the evening at Blazer Tag, a re-constituted movie theater (that Corrie remembers visiting as a youngster) in southern Austin that has an arena(?) for the activity of laser-tag.

It was my first time, and while I did understand the fundamentals, actually doing it was pretty cool. The theater area, being quite cavernous, had a multi-level structure built with ramps up and down spiraling to a peak of probably four stories. The lights were basically off, save for a disco apparatus with colored strobe effects, and accompanied by loud techno music.

Participants strap on the electronic vest--this will buzz when you're "hit"--and attached to the vest is the laser gun. Inside the arena were "mines" that would get tripped when you came too close, a sound would begin to emit from it while a timer zoomed down, and you either had to shoot it with your gun to stop the mine, or get out of range of the "blast". Being tagged by it was similar to being tagged by an opponent: your gun won't work for ten seconds or so, which is actually quite long when your chasing an opponent or fleeing from one.

Corrie and I lagged, had coupons, and got two matches each. Each match lasts for 20 minutes, which is long enough, but since we lagged, we got the 9 pm game and the 9:40 game. Also, since it was Sunday, we blasted and chased only each other both times. It was one-on-one for both rounds. Silly, but still fun.

The first round I walked around like the Terminator, looking for the red-glowing orbs on Corrie's electronic vest, and was sniped plenty more times than I got her. She won that round handily. The second round I was much more stealth about my actions, and we had plenty of good fire-fights; both popping out of corners or making nice duck-and-cover-and-pop-and-shoot moves. I was leading for majority of the round, but then I got physically wiped out, and instead of hiding in a corner to preserve my win, I started walking around. I was done, and lost my lead before the time was up.

The activity is, even for a solitary married couple, a blast, and it could be that much cooler to play with friends, or even strangers...this place had fifty or so gun-and-vest combos, so it could get crazy with some team battles.

Smirk-Worthy Logos

There are entire corners of the Internet dedicated to bad logos, poorly conceived and/or poorly executed entries, but I have a few I'd like to share.

The first is known as the "One Day Logo", since after they unveiled it it stirred up such loathing in fans that it lasted for just that press conference. I don't need to say anything else:



Here is another one from the football world, one that, according to a website, was actually used for a season in 1975, before switching to the one I remember watching as a kid.



Here is the funniest logo I can remember. It was for some Oriental Society of Brazil (not the exact title of the organization).

Daniel and Anders

As an American traveling in Europe, a person will hear the temperature given in degrees Celsius, and a member of my family has the best mnemonic for remembering the conversion: double the number you're given, and then add thirty. 25 becomes 80, 19 becomes 68...since the actual conversion is to multiply the Celsius number by 9/5 (which is slightly smaller than doubling) and then adding 32 (slightly larger than 30) this technique is quite accurate for every day use.

The fraction 9/5, out of all fractions, is used since it's the reduced form of 180/100. Worked into this multiplicand is the basic difference between the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales. If you have a ruler in front of you and one end represents water freezing and the other represents water boiling, if you divide that ruler into 100 marks, you'll get degrees Celsius; divide it into 180 marks, you get degrees Fahrenheit. As Americans who use the Fahrenheit scale, we're used to 32 as the freezing point of water, and 212 as the boiling point of water, a difference of 180 degrees. This wasn't originally on purpose...

Until the seventeenth century cold, or rather "cold", was a scary entity that came about every year and lasted half of it, a life threatening obstacle, part of nature's wrath. Eventually Italian glassblowers got skilled enough to blow rather uniform tubes, and scientists began trying to construct devices that could reliably gauge temperature. One problem was the solution inside the gauge was such that when it expanded it needed lot's of room, so a "thermometer" as we'd call it could be many meters long, coiled up like a spring, quite beautiful and fragile, it would work but not be very practical.

Another problem was that there was no universally agreed upon system for actually gauging the measurements. Most thermometer makers would paint marks on their tubes denoting things people universally understood; ice melting/water freezing; candle wax melting; water boiling.

One man who was busy working with this was Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit. His innovation was to use mercury, which was much denser than the other alcohol solutions being used, which shrank his gauge down to writing-instrument size. He made zero the point at which the solution of ammonium chloride melted, and made where the gauge would reach when his wife held it under her tongue, ie body temperature, 100. He noticed that ice melted/water froze around 32, and water boiled around 212. Daniel refined the system to fix those numbers, 32 and 212, which changed the body-temp to what we understand as 98.6.

His system spread all over the world mainly because it had practical sized gauges. In Sweden, using a mercury gauged thermometer, Anders Celsius devised a measuring system that was based on a 100-unit breakdown. He originally had 0 degrees the point at which water boiled, and 100 degrees as the point where water froze, and the scale heading off into cold depths that at the time were unbounded; the idea that an absolute bottom was quite radical (and came later).

After Anders death, which came quickly after his system was developed, Carl Linnaeus, the botanist who developed the still-used-today naming nomenclature for living things on earth--kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, specie--ended the insanity and reversed Anders' scale, making zero the freezing point and 100 the boiling point.

The Celsius scale has been adopted my most countries around the world, while America, Belize and Jamaica still use the Fahrenheit scale. In Canada, they use the Celsius scale for television and books, but thermometers outdoors, mounted on walls, tend to have both written on them.

I think I prefer the Fahrenheit scale, but not because I grew up using it. I like the fact that one degree Fahrenheit is smaller than one degree Celsius, making more accurate whole degree measurements possible.

2 Sports Things: Over It? (and) Qatar?

A) Over It?

Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert has stated repeatedly that he is over the defection of LeBron James to the Miami Heat. He's stated that he let it all out in the first twenty-four hours after LeBron's televised address about "taking his talents to South Beach." Within hours after that telecast things got ugly with Gilbert's scathing "Open Letter to Cavalier Fans", for which he was fined $100k by the commissioner.

So now there's a report that Gilbert has hired a midwestern law firm to investigate tampering between the Heat and James. Tampering, as a technical NBA infraction, is something that happens when a team contacts a player before the designated time. True tampering, when proven, usually results in a fine (ooh!) and/or a draft pick awarded to the jilted team. The word on the street is that it's not about the fine or the draft pick, but, for Gilbert, it's about embarrassing the Heat and the commissioner, David Stern.

When asked to comment on the story, Gilbert, in denying comment, replied, "I'm over it."

B) Qatar?

The US Soccer Federation, as well as most of the world, was shocked when the announcement over the host nation for the 2022 World Cup came out as Qatar. The tiny oil and natural gas rich country will be the first Middle East nation to host the world's largest tournament. The prospect of growing the sport and having the showcase event in the Middle East must have been very important.

That same idea, of growing the sport, must have played into the decision to name Russia host of the 2018 World Cup tournament, beating out heavily favored England. This, added with the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, should be a boon for Russia. Neither Russia nor any Middle Eastern country had hosted the tournament. This year's tournament in South Africa was the second one outside of Europe or the Americas, the first being 2002's Japan/Korea.

The US had the best presentation for the 2022, and, like England for 2018, were the favorites. England lost in the first round of voting, and the US made it to the last round, but came up short.

Qatar gained independence in 1971, is smaller than Connecticut, and has less people than Brooklyn (by a half-million). In the summer the scorching heat reaches 130 degrees, and, with the projections of global fan travel, the amount of fans coming to the small nation would double the population. They apparently have technology to air condition open air stadiums, which would be interesting and, at worst, an incredible waste of energy.

Extra energy resources won't be hard to come by in Qatar, though.

Congratulations to both Russia and Qatar.

Rabble-Rouser Ends Up on Interpol's Most Wanted List

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, a website that as of twenty minutes ago has been shut down, has made Interpol's most wanted list in regards to a double-rape accusation. Two Swedish ladies are claiming Julian Assange raped them separately on different days, a charge Assange denies vehemently. He claims the sex had been consensual, and that false charges were made when the ladies found out about each other.

Could this have anything to do with Wikileaks publishing thousands of pages of documents from the US State Department that had been classified as secret? I wonder who unleashed a cyber attack two days ago, hours before those documents were to be posted? I wonder is the yanking of the actual website, wikileaks.org, from Amazon's server could be connected as well? Any bets on who's not getting a free Kindle for Christmas this year?

I went to Wikileaks months ago after reading an article about Julian Assange in the New Yorker. Julian is a skinny Aussie, living on the run in Nordic Europe. Wikileaks gained notoriety for posting a video from Iraq showing civilians and journalists being gunned down. Most everything else on the site was crushingly boring. State Department documents, secret or not, don't make for exciting reading. Neither do the US Army Intelligence documents Wikileaks posted a few years back.

There are no papers saying, "At this address under the fake name this, we believe an evil plotter to be living," or, "Our spy such and such is using this fake name has their sights set on assassinating this person". I'd hope by now we'd all lose this sense of intrigue behind "classified" and "secret" documents, like real life is like James Bonds movies. I imagine, as far as films go, life's probably closer to J.K. Simmons' CIA-boss-man character from Burn After Reading when he says, baffled and disinterested, "Uh, well, report back...when it makes sense...I guess."