Annual Review Of My Eyeballs

If it's April, it's time for the annual Opto-Map!

Here's the retina of the right eye, showing the gray patch in the upper left corner where they spot-welded the retina with a laser back in 1994 in order to give it some integrity and strength.

Here's the retina of the left eye, showing the dramatic grey arc along the bottom. After the retina detached in 1994, they put a silicone band around the eyeball and applied liquid nitrogen onto the outside, in order to freeze-tack the retina back onto the back of the eyeball. Eighteen years later, the silicone band is still there! And eighteen years later, I can still see with my left eye!

Drunk Makeup Tutorial

Matt Dunn shared this on Facebook.

An Engineer's Guide To Cats

A 2006 Video Regarding Huygens' 2005 Landing On Titan

Titan's Ontario Lacus Is Like A Salt Pan

Caption: The lake known as Ontario Lacus on Titan (left) bears striking similarity to a salt pan on Earth known as the Etosha Pan (right).


Lately, I've become interested, once again, in the state of science regarding Saturn's moon, Titan. (I saw a TV special on Titan recently that fired up my curiosity again.)

One surprising result of the Huygens mission was that Titan appeared to be 'drier' (less hydrocarbon liquid on the surface) than people expected. People made analogies between Titan and desert areas like Arizona. The evidence for liquids was everywhere to be seen, but the liquids themselves were not in immediate sight.

Here is another result in the same vein. We have salt pans in the Southwest too. Searles Lake in the Mojave Desert, near China Lake, would be a close analogy:

A new study analyzing data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft suggests that the lake, known as Ontario Lacus, behaves most similarly to what we call a salt pan on Earth.

A group led by Thomas Cornet of the Université de Nantes, France, a Cassini associate, found evidence for long-standing channels etched into the lake bed within the southern boundary of the depression. This suggests that Ontario Lacus, previously thought to be completely filled with liquid hydrocarbons, could actually be a depression that drains and refills from below, exposing liquid areas ringed by materials like saturated sand or mudflats.

...These characteristics make Ontario Lacus very similar to the Etosha salt pan on Earth, which is a lake bed that fills with a shallow layer of water from groundwater levels that rise during the rainy season. This layer then evaporates and leaves sediments like tide marks showing the previous extent of the water.

...While the liquid on Titan is methane, ethane and propane rather than water, the cycle appears to work in a very similar fashion to the water cycle on Earth. Beyond Earth, Titan is the only other world known to bear stable liquids on its surface.

Another Shot At The Rain Faucet

Thank goodness for cutoff lows! Wednesday looks like it will be wet; not just in northern California, but southern California too!

The initial forecasts last week were suggesting the storm would come in on Wednesday night, but the newer forecasts advanced the schedule. The movement of cutoff lows tends to be a bit erratic and unpredictable, so it's no surprise the schedule has had to be jiggered to accomodate reality.

I just hope we get more drinks from the rain faucet. This is the time of year when we generally lose access to more drinks.

Saw "The Hunger Games" A Second Time

I wanted to see if my initial good impression of "The Hunger Games" lasted upon a second viewing.

Yes, it's still a good movie. I'm reminded even more strongly this time of Frank Herbert's novel "Dune". Both movies feature the problems of worthy youth, but from different perspectives.

In "Dune", young Paul Muad'Dib, worthy scion of a dynasty under threat, has to flee assassins and vanish onto the desert world Arrakis, where he goes through a difficult apprenticeship featuring secret knowledge, before reemerging as a Messiah to lead a rebellion against the Empire.

In contrast, in "The Hunger Games", Katniss Everdeen, a worthy woman from humble origins, has to undergo a rigorous crash course, but suffer no particular apprenticeship, and gain no secret knowledge (with the exception of a little gained from Rue), before demonstrating gladitorial personal valor in a vast arena. Her apprenticeship, such as it is, is ordinary life: hunting squirrels, enduring hunger, and the like.

"Dune" seems to show an Asian (specifically Chinese) influence, with its emphasis on master-student relationships - like a kung-fu movie - but with a feminine edge and a messianic addendum. With its desert backdrop, the Jewish/Muslim past isn't far away either. In contrast, "The Hunger Games" displays a Roman influence throughout. Katniss' travails reminds one of 'American Idol': personal valor in a vast arena.

In our technological age, we live under circumstances where the Jewish/Chinese approach actually works better to stay abreast of the digital tsunami we are all experiencing, but Americans betray our cultural inheritance from the Romans with our enduring impatience with long educations.

We resist long educations, but we know deep in our heart of hearts that the Jewish/Chinese approach is better. Just sayin'!

Will Durst Compares the GOP Nomination Battle To 'Angry Birds'

And Will Durst's analogies last longer than Stonehenge.

At Davis' Cowell Blvd. Safeway At Midnight On The Eve Of Picnic Day

All day long on Friday, there were all kinds of dramatic events on the highways near Davis. There was the big chase with multiple hijackings that forced the cops to close the Yolo Causeway for six incredibly-inconvenient hours. Once they reopened the freeway, there was some kind of traffic accident on Chiles Road east of Mace that forced bystanders to bust out a car's windows in order to save a passenger from being roasted alive (or, at least that's what they said on KFBK radio). Nevertheless, my schedule was such that all these dramatic events did not delay my particular schedule.

Nevertheless, after House Managing for "Titanic - the Musical" at DMTC Friday evening, I thought I'd pick up just a few groceries at the Safeway.

Big mistake. My luck ran out. Just two checkout lanes open, and everyone in Davis was trying to fit through them!

Leaving Safeway, I was startled to encounter Young Fiona waiting near the exit. She explained she was heading to a sleepover, but her friend's mom was still trapped in line (like a bug in amber).

People who have been through a shipwreck deserve better!

Light Years - Kylie Minogue (Live In Sydney DVD)

Still my favorite Kylie performance (from 2000)!

Eating Tacos At Midnight On Del Paso Boulevard

Still nervous about even being here at midnight....

My High School Report On Albuquerque City Planning

I built lots of cities as a little kid, using old bricks and blocks of leftover lumber as buildings, and toy cars for transportation. Some of these projects became quite involved, with different cultures for different cities, fluctuating borders, and noble histories.

Starting in junior high school, I became more and more interested in the problem of pollution, and in urban planning. Good planning can mitigate a lot of problems, and with my hometown of Albuquerque growing so rapidly, we had lots of problems, and we needed a lot of planning! So many developers, and so little time!

In high school, in response to the imperative of a school assignment, I went down to the Albuquerque City Planning Department, plus the offices of several land developers, and gathered materials for an opus regarding these issues.

My City Planning Report (dated April 29, 1973) was probably the most-important report I ever prepared in high school. It forecasts the trajectory of my entire life! It was even more important than my ginormous 7th-grade junior-high-school report on Nicaragua. I can't believe I got a "D" on it! Nevertheless, from a 21st-Century perspective, this high school report makes for interesting reading!

Left: A picture from page 16 of "Albuquerque Community Renewal Program - Summary Report", prepared by the Albuquerque Planning Department (June, 1970).


I like this picture. What kind of community do you want? You can have the first kind of community - a kind of Southwestern version of Pottersville. A proletarian Volkswagen crossing a dirt thoroughfare with no sidewalks and lined with crappy-looking salt cedar, rendered dusty by winds blowing a huge tumbleweed across it. Or you can have a Bedford Falls kind of place, like in the second picture. Well-watered, lots of cottonwood trees, with amenities like sidewalks and twittering birds. It's all about the planning!

In "Breaking Bad" terms, the first neighborhood is similar to where Combo lives, and the second is (literally) the neighborhood where Jesse Pinkman lives.

This document leaves out a few historical details, like why the second neighborhood is so nice. I don't know the facts myself, but if I had to guess, I'd say it wasn't because of the Albuquerque Planning Department's works, but because of the looming influence of Franz Huning on the second neighborhood's early development. Huning was determined not to live in a bad neighborhood, and he had the swag to push aside anything that didn't look like it fit. Huning's absence is keenly felt: Jesse Pinkman would have been drummed out of the neighborhood in minutes, back in the day! The role of bureaucratic structures like the Albuquerque Planning Department, of course, is to substitute for the beneficent influences of hard-driving patrons of the sort that used to prevail in the 19th Century.

I'm not sure what the folks at the Albuquerque Planning Department made of the owl-eyed kid who showed up at their door one day, but they helpfully provided some glossy documents with impressive-looking flow charts (I particularly like the lush "Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Comprhensive Plan - Metropolitan Environmental Framework": April, 1972). I had the impression that, despite their title, they weren't really in the driver's seat when it came to urban planning in Albuquerque. The real urban planners, the people with the money, and the connections, and that vision thing, were the real estate developers: Falls Land and Development Corporation, Horizon Corporation, and OMIGOD!, the AMREP folks representing the Monstrosity on the Mesa, Rio Rancho! Already, by 1973, Rio Rancho was out-of-control, the land-eating equivalent of last year's Wallow Wildfire, but the documents show the Albuquerque Planning Department was curiously out-of-touch with those contemporary events, and barely-aware Rio Rancho even existed.

Left: Two different estimates of future Albuquerque population. The bullish Kirschner Report (January, 1968: 'Bernalillo County Total Population Projections'), and the more-cautious UNM-COG (University of New Mexico - Middle Rio Grande Council of Governments) Special Report (April, 1973: APJ-1 District, medium population estimate). I wonder who won this particular contest?

Here are the results, using U.S. Census data! APJ-1 District 1 incorporates urban Albuquerque, Bernalillo, Los Lunas, and Belen, so its population is roughly-equivalent to that of Bernalillo County. Census figures (from Wikipedia) are compared to the past estimates. Even though the UNM-COG medium population estimate looks slightly-low, it is still far better than the overly-optimistic Kirschner report's estimate. UNM-COG rules!

I think a lot of people in the 1960's were bedazzled by the growth of Southern California, and Phoenix, and figured the same thing would happen in Albuquerque too. But as I've written elsewhere, Albuquerque is a place that tends to attract impractical dreamers, who start can't-fail businesses that nevertheless fail, or who plan to have lots of kids who somehow never materialize. So, I can't be too hard on the Kirschner folks for their erroneous optimism!

There are number of interesting figures in "The Development Potential of Albuquerque", Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Planning Department, October, 1972. Here is Figure 9, showing the degree of Health Planning. Zone 1 shows where "Health Service Generally Accessible To Population". Zone 2 shows "Inaccessible Or Ineffective Utilization Of Health Services". In Zone 1, people eat three square meals a day, get their vaccinations, and work out regularly. In contrast, Zone 2 is a place of medieval chaos, where diseased children squabble with pigs and dogs over scraps of bread in squalid, filthy courtyards. (Guess which zone I hail from?).

Here is Figure 11 in "The Development Potential of Albuquerque", showing the degree of Emergency Preparedness. Zone 1 is the most adequately prepared. Zone 2 isn't so bad. Zone 3, you're gonna die! (Guess which zone I hail from?)

Here is Figure 66 from the Albuquerque Transportation Study, Wilbur Smith and Associates (May, 1965) showing their idea of where the major roads would be placed in the future.

Interestingly, most of these projections came to pass: Montano Road's expansion, in particular, which I felt was an affront to my sense of how the city should be run when I was a teenager. The forecast missed the full importance of the El Pueblo (Paseo del Norte) and 98th/Ouray corridors, and gave too much weight to the Wyoming Boulevard corridor, and brought El Pueblo in contact with Eubank instead of Tramway (which they call Panorama), and they missed the Rio Rancho connections entirely (per usual for the planners in the 60's), but, by and large, these forecasts came to pass.

There are other hints of the future in these reports. In the "Albuquerque Community Renewal Program - Summary Report" there are recommendations made by Architect and Urban Planner David A. Crane of Philadelphia recommending that Albuquerque expand its number of "collective environments". Two of these three recommendations - a technical-vocational center, together with a sub-regional shopping center, at Osuna and I-25, and a recreational/cultural center near Tingley Park and the Zoo, came to pass. The third: an educational/public services complex in the Model Neighborhood area doesn't seem to have come to fruition, but similar complexes are nearby.

Just as the Albuquerque of 2012 is hazily visible in the planning documents of 1973, the Albuquerque of 2050 is likely hazily visible in the planning documents of today!

This is a great report I wrote! Why did I get a "D"?

Interestingly enough, I wrote some revealing information into the report:

This report was written under bad circumstances. We had three weeks to complete it, but I was unable to get information on it until the last week. It was necessary to get an extension to complete it to my satisfaction(?) The haste in which it was written and the bad lighting conditions under which it was written have caused terminal writer's cramp and nearly illegible handwriting, as you may have noticed (hee-hee!)

Well, that explains it, I guess. No wonder I got a "D"! That's the science training in me: compulsively-honest, even when it did me no good. If this report was done for Humanities class it was completely at odds with the instructor's wishes: data-driven, when he was looking for feelings instead. Getting indulgences and extensions from the teacher worked in the 7th-grade, but 11th grade was different.

Still, it's a great report! I can't believe I got a "D" on it!

Coaxing The Hoarder

(Deep in the basement)


M.: So, it's OK if I take this monitor to the E-Waste recyclers?

E.: Well, hmmmmm, OK. Here, let me dust it off first. It is of the highest quality!

M.: Right! (Maybe highest-quality monitor for 1980...). What about this reel-to-reel tape recorder? Boy, it's so heavy!

E.: I don't think you should take it. Look at it: it's beautiful! It's a collector's item!

M.: I remember seeing tapes around here somewhere in one of these boxes....

E.: No, THIS is the highest-quality tape recorder! It's worth a lot of money!

M.: Right! (Maybe Confederate money....)

One Day At A Time

E.: MMMMMMAAAAARRRRRRCCCCC! Listen!:

I'm only human, I'm just a woman
Help me believe in what I could be
And all that I am
Show me the stairway I have to climb
Lord for my sake, help me to take
One day at a time

MMMMMMAAAAARRRRRRCCCCC! That's so TRUE TO LIFE! Do you know what I mean?

M.: (distracted by Sudoku puzzle) Sounds good!

E.: Chris says it's my best song! But last weekend at the VFW someone else took it. He dresses just like Willie Nelson!

M.: Sounds good!

E.: I said 'hey wait, that's my song!' But he just laughed.

M.: Sounds good!

Jetta Got An Armband In San Francisco Today

M.: So, with the armband, you get entry into the San Francisco X-Factor auditions on Friday?

J.: Yes, but it's a pain in the ass to have to go all the way down to the Cow Palace just to get the armband, and come all the way back. I wish they didn't do it like this, where you have to get the armband in advance!

M.: But it's always fun to go to San Francisco!

J.: Hmmmppphhh. Some fun. You try it. But I ran into people who had seen me on TV. They say they'll get in touch, but they never seem to. Maybe it'll be different this time?

This Is How I Spend My Mornings

But with pigeons instead of chickens.

Blinded By The Science

Sorry I haven't posted much lately. I was looking at a technical presentation regarding the chemical composition of wintertime Fairbanks, Alaska aerosol particles, when I realized their behavior closely fits a standard textbook presentation of the ammonia - nitric acid - sulfuric acid - water system (in its ammonia-poor mode). Blows my socks off! They've been working on this project for years, but no one seems to have really noticed this angle before. Exciting!

So, When Did FOX News Turn Against Newt Gingrich?

So I guess you'll have to talk to the hand for even posing a question:

During a private campaign event at Wesley College in Delaware last week, the former House Speaker had asserted that News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch had personally turned Fox News against him.

“I think Fox has been for Romney all the way through,” Gingrich opined. “In our experience, Callista and I both believe CNN is less biased than FOX this year. We are more likely to get neutral coverage out of CNN than we are of Fox, and we’re more likely to get distortion out of Fox. That’s just a fact.”

Fox News chief Roger Ailes later told an audience at the University of North Carolina (UNC) that Gingrich was “trying to get a job at CNN because he knows he isn’t going to get to come back to Fox News.”

The Daily Tarheel’s Memet Walker hoped to get a reaction from the candidate when he sat down with him in Greensboro, North Carolina on Saturday.

“His aide gave no preconditions; no topics were off limits,” Walker wrote. “That’s why I was so surprised when, before I had finished asking my first question, that same aide cut the interview short and prompted Secret Service to grab and briefly detain me as the former speaker was led away.”

The reporter explained that he had been detained after questioning the candidate about Ailes.

“But before I even had a chance on Saturday to relay Ailes’ comments, his aide pressed his hands against me, and several Secret Service agents stopped me in my tracks,” Walker recalled.

“You’re not asking that,” the aide reportedly said. “You’re done.”

Yet, as I recall last October, while Rick Perry and Herman Cain cratered, the only reason Gingrich had a candidacy going was because he had critical support from FOX News:

Fox is the preeminent political information source for Republican primary voters, and while its reputation for partisanship is well understood, it also sets the terms of debate within the Republican Party.

Fox’s treatment of Ron Paul is an extreme example of how this works. In 2008, after he netted a surprisingly respectable 10 percent in the Iowa caucuses, Paul was barred from Fox’s pivotal pre-New Hampshire debate – even as Rudy Giuliani, who had finished with just four percent in Iowa, was allowed in. And when Paul was threatening to win this year’s caucuses, Fox went after him hard. Presumably, it was his unorthodox views on foreign policy and national security that made Paul unacceptable.

By comparison, Fox’s disses of Gingrich have been less blunt, but the overall effect of the coverage – sympathetic to Romney and hostile to the former speaker – hasn’t been hard to pick up on if you’ve watched Fox much these past few months. The best way to understand this is probably to go back and re-read Gabriel Sherman’s New York magazine piece on Roger Ailes from last May. Sherman detailed how the Fox News chairman had been determined to use his channel to develop potential Obama challengers for 2012 only to grow dismayed by the results:

All the 2012 candidates know that Ailes is a crucial constituency. “You can’t run for the Republican nomination without talking to Roger,” one GOPer told me. “Every single candidate has consulted with Roger.” But he hasn’t found any of them, including the adults in the room—Jon Huntsman, Mitch Daniels, Mitt Romney—compelling. “He finds flaws in every one,” says a person familiar with his thinking.

“He thinks things are going in a bad direction,” another Republican close to Ailes told me. “Roger is worried about the future of the country. He thinks the election of Obama is a disaster. He thinks Palin is an idiot. He thinks she’s stupid. He helped boost her up. People like Sarah Palin haven’t elevated the conservative movement.”

Ailes apparently saw great potential in Chris Christie, and spent much of 2011 trying to persuade him to run. But when Christie, after flirting with a late-starting bid, decided once and for all in October not to run, it became clear that the GOP field was set – and that Romney, for all of his flaws, was the party’s most (and probably only) bankable general election option. This helps explain Fox’s generally helpful coverage of his campaign. And it explains why Fox’s coverage helped to deflate the Gingrich bubble in early December and again after the January 21 South Carolina primary, the two occasions when he seemed like a real threat to steal the nomination.

So, what happened? Did Gingrich get too arrogant? Did Murdoch and Ailes change their minds? Why? And when? Early December?

Secret Service now wants to wrestle ME to the ground!

What's New Over At Badtux?

Badtux wonders if this is the world's youngest drummer? I don't know, but I wish I could play as well as her.

The age gaps between the kids is the same as in the family I grew up in. I wish I had thought of this when I was ten years old!

Badtux adds:

Okay, this is just friggin' awesome. The little girl is five years old and has some righteous beats. The other two kids are 8 and 10 years old and handle their instruments quite well. This is a cover of industrial metal band Rammstein's song "Sonne", mostly in the original German. Happy to do my part to make this video go viral ;).

Worried About This Embedding Thing

I don't know how seriously to worry about this thing, but it has the potential to completely-unhinge how bloggers work:

At Ars Technica, Tim Lee has the report on a disturbing lawsuit, now joined by the Motion Picture Association of America, which would make simply embedding videos—not hosting them—a copyright infringement. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals is considering appeals by Google, Facebook, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge of a decision made by a federal judge last year that it is "possible to directly infringe copyright by embedding an image or video hosted by a third party."

Of course, I embed videos on this blog almost every day, many of which I have no clue regarding their copyright status.

If they are after monetization efforts, why don't they go after those? (That's among the reasons I never monetize anything on this blog - money just causes troubles.) But if they go after embedding, then it's off to Gitmo with everyone, I suppose! But they'll have to drag me there the entire way. I won't give up readily!