OmegaMom

I’ve been busy, because two and a half weeks ago OmegaDad suddenly discovered he had a (very typical) middle-aged man’s problem that needed “routine” surgery.  My last blogpost was written while we were waiting for the “routine” surgery.  Need I say that the phrase “routine surgery” has become somewhat…um…tainted for me after the past year?  After all, my mom had “routine” pacemaker surgery, and my dog had “routine” abdominal surgery, and both died.

So it was amazing how the tension went out of my shoulders as soon as I got OmegaDad back home from the outpatient surgery and things went swimmingly well.

Okay, they went swimmingly well from my point of view, not his.  He is still not happy, because the healing is taking longer than a day or two, and thus he can’t do all his normal activities, nor can he sit for very long and veg out at the computer, wandering the twisty, turny passages of the Intartubes.

The nice thing about the whole affair for me is that it has kept me busy.  I’ve been cooking, schlepping out to the chicken coops, mowing the lawn, reminding about pain meds, washing dishes, in addition to handling the dotter’s affairs—all of which is normally split between the two of us (mostly on his end; OmegaDotter’s schedule keeps me plenty busy normally).  The busy-ness has made it so that mom’s death has been pushed into the background of my mind.  Oh, it’s still there, and easily ramps back up when anyone wants to talk about it, but it’s been pleasant not to be constantly feeling like there’s that black hole in the pit of my stomach.

In the meantime, there are two stories I want to mention here that have caught my attention in the past week.

First off, there’s the press-and-blogger viewing of “Wo Ai Ni, Mommy”, a documentary that follows an 8-year-old from China who is adopted by a family from the U.S.  The film will be premiering on PBS in August; this is the trailer:

When I first watched that trailer, many months ago, it broke my heart.  I imagined OmegaDotter—also 8 years old—in that situation, being taken from her family of four years in the U.S. (Faith was living with a foster family for 4 years) to be adopted by a family from China.  I thought about how she would feel, what it would be like for her, and watching Faith cry that she wants to go home to China just…well…words can’t say how much that hurt.

Two bloggers—Malinda and Peach—were invited to the preview.  While I think that the original plan of the documentary was to be a feel-good happy-happy adoption story, they got a different feel from it.  Read their reviews (linked on their names) and see what you think.

The second story is that of the hoo-rah at ScienceBlogs.  The gist:  ScienceBlogs is a collective blog about (surprise!) science, with a stable of about 70 bloggers from all walks of science, including science journalists, medicos, physiologists, professors, physicists, biologists, archeologists, mathematicians, etc.  It started in 2004 2006 and has gained quite a reputation as the go-to place for science on the web.  This week, however, a blog was introduced called “Food Frontiers”, which was an “outreach” of PepsiCo.  It was given the same prominence as all the other blogs (all invited to join), but was obviously a corporate thing bought and paid for, though not explicitly labeled as such.  And, interestingly enough, while previous semi-corporate-linked blogs had been introduced beforehand, this one hit the SB front page with no warning whatsoever.

Well.  The shit hit the fan.  The question of the firewall between editorial and advertising was debated far and wide.  A subset of the bloggers left the site in response, with pretty candid “farewell” posts explaining why.  A number of other bloggers said they were dubious, at best, and were considering leaving.  One blogger sniffed that it was all a bunch of hysteria over nothing in a very disparaging way.  The management (and, probably, PepsiCo) decided that this was a Bad Scene All Around, and removed the corporate blog in question.  All that’s left is the post mortems.

I watched this with great interest.  My immediate response upon reading the original “hi, there!” post on Food Frontiers was, WTF?!  This is an advertorial, damn it!  What’s it doing not being marked as such?!?!  Ewwwwwww!!!!

For those who don’t know, an "advertorial” is what publishing calls advertising posing as editorial.  In the journalism world, such things are (alas) often necessary to pay the bills, but definitely clearly marked as advertising, usually done in a totally different design than the remainder of the magazine.  Including an advertorial in the midst of the magazine, using the same design, giving it the same editorial weight as writing by the staff, and not marking it (clearly, plainly, obviously) as advertising is a big no-no.  I mean, it’s taboo.  Really, truly.  As someone who spent 10 years writing and editing in business journalism, I can tell you (and those bloggers and commenters who think the whole uproar is a tempest in a teapot) that no matter how you feel about journalists and the ethics of mainstream media, when I say “taboo”, I mean totally, utterly, absolutely, no doubt about it, this is a line in the sand, TABOO.  You do not do this.  And if you do this, and someone finds out, and you are called out about it, you lose serious credibility as a journalistic source.

Period.

It’s like, say, having sex with your sister, that’s how taboo it’s considered.

I was appalled, myself.  I guess I have that verboten written upon my subconscious in letters of fire or some such thing; it was such a visceral response.

(Interestingly enough, I think mom’s response would not have been that emotional.  She was very pragmatic and less likely to imbue the journalism biz with idealism.  However, she would definitely have thought it was a sincerely bad idea, and rolled her eyes at how stupid it was for the management at ScienceBlogs to take that approach.)

Anyway, here’s a round-up of all the ScienceBlogger’s takes on the subject, and various commenting from other sources, courtesy of BoraZ (one of the bloggers at SB).  Alas, it’s not in chronological order; every search I’ve done on various search sites hasn’t produced one, so…start at anything dated July 7 and work your way forward.

Science fairs will be in late March, so OmegaDad decided to get started with some experiments with the dotter.  Unfortunately, the experiments are daddy’s ideas, but, hey, get the kid used to doing it, right?

Firstly, she was very possessive about “MY lab!”  In other words, I had to explain to her that real scientists these days were very open about their research (see PLOS) and, if they’re excited about their experiments, they’re very happy to have people in, show them around, tell them what the experiment is about, etc.

Anyway.  Since OmegaDad has been Doing Bread this past year (and very nicely, too!), and trying out sourdough starters with wild yeast, he thought it might be fun to see if you could get a sourdough starter from varying fruits.  He selected grapes and blueberries because both fruits have a blush on them; apples, because they don’t have a blush; and then we had a control of just plain ol’ flour and water.  Herewith the ingredients:

Then there’s the scientist herself:

Note that she is wearing “goggles”.  She was very concerned that everyone in her lab wear goggles, because, as she explained, “You never know when you’re going to get an explosion!”  Then she demonstrated how things would blow up:

Please note the “lab coat”.  Folks!  Let me tell you about this amazing new costume for your kids!  It’s a chef’s coat!  It’s a lab coat!  It’s two—two!—two coats in one!  OmegaDotter received a chef outfit for herself plus a matching chef outfit for her Karito Kids Ling doll, and has since taken to wearing the pink striped black pants as pajama pants or loungewear ever since, and when time came to do the experiment set-up, she decided it would make a fine lab coat.

What followed:  Placing one cup of blueberries into a Mason jar:

Mushing grapes before putting them into a Mason jar (an action shot!):

Explaining what comes next, and how you need to be careful (note the goggles again!):

Adding flour (we got a lot of flour all over everything, including the floor.  There were also a grape or blueberry or two on the floor, sigh.  Not that I really want you to look at our floor; please edit those shots mentally.):

Adding water:

Stirring (please note that we used different spoons for each jar, so that we had no intermixing):

She has the Evil Scientist pose down perfectly—“I have created LIFE!!!  Bwahahaha!”

And then, the finale, a “Ta-da!” pose:

And then she signed off with, “Thanks for watching Weird Science!”

If you can see me, you will see me waving a little white flag of surrender.

We none of us had the flu–officially.  Luckily, the dotter’s pediatrician eyeballed the accuracy rate of the rapid flu tests as determined by the CDC (40% to 70% accurate–almost as good as tossing a coin) and her history of pneumonia, and prescribed Tamiflu. 

Alas, the same did not happen for OmegaDad and me.  OmegaDotter started feeling sick on Sunday (with a bang!), OmegaDad and I started feeling sick on Monday.  We are now eyeing Day 8 of fever and/or general illness.  The dotter, who started one day earlier, and got Tamiflu, has been fever-free for three days, and had energy enough to do cartwheels, handstands, and walkovers today.

I, on the other hand, managed to do dishes and check the chickens in a fit of woohoo-I’m-over-it! energy, which promptly depleted any vestige of fuel my body still contained and I collapsed for the rest of the day in bed feeling like death warmed over.

This is seriously nasty stuff.  At the height, I was running a fever of 103.5F.  The one good thing about the Not-Flu?  I had no hot flashes, ‘cuz I was hot all the time!  Har.  (There was another good thing about the Not-Flu that I thought of, but it has vanished into the mists of vagueness that surround my brain these days.)

You may have noted that I am very dubious about the claim of Not-Flu.  You betcha.  Reading that the flu tests are essentially no better than flipping a coin is enough to tilt my skeptical eyebrow up, sure ’nuff.

In my quest for mindless entertainment, I searched Twitter for H1N1.  (For reference, it’s actually 2009 (a)H1N1.)  Oh, boy.  The woo is strong on this subject.  Let’s see:

• Various claims that a “friend” got the H1N1 vaccine, then promptly came down with it and died.  Let’s just avoid the issue that the vaccine is just now being delivered across the U.S.  There’s a little timeline problem there.
• A person saying she wouldn’t get the H1N1 vaccine because a little kid died of H1N1 around here the other day!!!!  Folks.  That’s what the vaccine is supposed to help prevent.
• People saying they would get the seasonal flu vaccine, but not the H1N1 because it’s too “new” and hasn’t been tested enough.  Okay, this one requires two sub-points:
• FIRST:  Take a look at CDC data.  Ninety-nine percent of the flu cases that are being diagnosed are H1N1.  One percent is “seasonal” flu.  If you were asking me, I’d go for the H1N1 vaccine, not the seasonal flu vaccine.
• SECOND:  Okay, this takes a little longer.  Flu vaccines in general have been around since World War II.  The way the vaccine is developed each year is that WHO epidemiologists take an educated guess as to which flu strains will be prevalent in the upcoming flu season.  This happens around January.  Then it takes the manufacturers of flu vaccines about six to eight months to create a vaccine and get the production rolling on it in time for seasonal flu shots.  This time around, H1N1 showed up in April–months after the regular seasonal flu vaccine process gets going.  However, they had plenty of good virus samples very quickly, and epidemiologists from across the world were rapidly made aware of how novel this one was (like within weeks).  So, the only difference between the H1N1 vaccine and the “normal” seasonal flu vaccine is that (a) they knew exactly what flu they wanted to vaccinate against, rather than a crap shoot of three guesses, and (b) it was a few months later than normal.  But there were a lot of scared governments that pulled strings to get some of the production switched over to H1N1 rather than the seasonal flu.
• Why were they scared?  Because this is a “novel” flu, meaning there are very, very few people who have any immunity to it.  Apparently there was a similar flu in the mid-1950s, so people who are older than that may have native immunity.  But everyone younger than that?  None.  Nada.  Zilch.  The seasonal flu that we normally contend with is usually similar to a flu from the previous year or before, so that most people have had some exposure to it.  This time, a similar flu hasn’t been around for more than sixty years.  To get an idea of how it’s affecting people now, take a look at this chart of “influenza-like illnesses” reported to the CDC within the past few weeks.  I look at the down-tick at the very end of the red line and am hoping it continues, but the kind of upswing shown in the past few weeks is what normally happens in December/January, not September.  So far it seems about as virulent as normal seasonal flu (this is good!), but given the possible numbers of people who could get it at once, the end result could be bad.  Imagine all the hospital ICUs filled with folks on ventilators from the H1N1, and then, oh, a school bus crashes into a tour bus and those people need ventilation and the ICU…where do they go?
• OMG, it contains SQUALENE!!!  It causes CANCER!!!  It kills people!!!!  It has mercury!!!!  And on and on.  Sigh.  Oh, yes, and it’s all a PLOT by the NEW WORLD ORDER…I can’t address them all.  A good resource is EffectMeasure, on ScienceBlogs.

The end result:  the Internet is a marvelous tool.  But if you’ve got no ability to sort B.S. from real information, you’re a sitting duck for the more scary memes out there.

I personally think we all had the flu.  Given the percentages, if we had the flu, we all had Teh Swiney FLOO.  But when that vaccine comes around, I am dragging the dotter in to get it first, and then myself and DH when we’re in the ranks of those who can get it.  (It seems that they’re going to be giving it to kids and pregnant women first, as those are the folks who are most susceptible.)

Anyway, this is just a lot of rambling.  It’s taken me about six hours to write this post, because I have to keep stopping to rest.  Hah!

Hopefully, OmegaDad and I will also soon be feeling better, and no longer like a pair of old damp washrags that have been wrung out and hung out to dry. 

So there you are, an astronaut on the International Space Station, just motoring along, doing your job, and you get a call from Ground Control.

“Say, dudes!  Lissen up!  There’s this Russian volcano blowing its top, and you dudes are scheduled to be somewhere nearby overhead today…can  y’all take a picture for us?  Dude, that would be sweet.”

So as time approaches the rendezvous with this volcano, from a few miles overhead, you fish out your handy-dandy HD camera and point it out the porthole (or whatever astronauts really do when they’re taking photographs manually, which I know they can do)…and you grab this photo, very early on in a big eruption:

Which then proceeds to absolutely wow various folk around the world, including volcanologists.

And including me.  I immediately tweeted it, but just in case my faithful blog subscribers aren’t also Twitter followers, I thought I’d better mention it here.  It’s just too, too cool for words.  (For those who are interested, a bigger version of this picture is available at NASA’s Earth Observatory website.)

Andy Warhol famously said everyone is world-famous for 15 minutes.  Ah, fleeting celebrity!  I have touched upon it.  Yes, me–your very own OmegaMom–I have been mentioned by pseudonym in the New York Times.

Okay, it’s not like I was interviewed or anything (thank the Kozmik All!), and in context it sounds like the dude writing the article assumed that I was some type of epidemiologist or physician or something (I don’t even play a doctor on the Internet, folks!), and it was merely cribbing a comment I wrote on someone else’s blog.

How-some-ever.  It’s pretty cromulently KEWL to see my very own ‘nym on the pages (hey, a web page is, technically speaking, a “page”, right?) of The Gray Lady herself.

The context:  Towards the beginning of the whole swine flu H1N1 pandemic, one of my Twitterers asked if it made sense to deliberately expose oneself and offspring to the new flu now, since it seemed like a mild flu here in the U.S.  At the time, I thought it was a totally, absolutely, horribly lousy idea.  Now I just think it’s a lousy idea.  Anyway, knowing that Revere at Effect Measure was a Good Source of epidemiological answers, I asked in a comment if he’d speak to the “insanity” of doing such.  I got a bunch of responses that boiled down to “NO!  DON’T DO IT!”

Apparently, now that the swine flu H1N1 pandemic is really seeming to be a generally mild virus (so far) (cross your fingers, knock on wood, throw some salt over your shoulder, and maybe even pray to the Kozmik All), the whole “flu party” idea is spreading, enough so that the NYT got wind of it and decided to check it out with The Experts.

Being a modest sort, I didn’t find this thing on my own; however, Effect Measure got a trackback link out of it, so decided to check it out and report on it.  So here’s his take on the question, in more depth.

There it is:  My brush with fame.  Excuse me while I go hide from the paparazzi.

Ah, spring!  When the pussywillows start popping, when the temperature hits 60 degrees, when yours truly spends days upon days upon days raking the yard to remove last fall’s dump of dead leaves and a winter’s worth of dawg poop.  What?  Surprised about us not picking up the poop during the winter?  Hey!  YOU try spending the extra few minutes to pick up dawg poop when it’s 20 below zero, there’s snow on the ground, and the dawg poop sinks into the snow because it’s so warm in comparison and it suddenly becomes a major excavation project to pick up the poop.

Just sayin’.

Anyway, I have been raking and soaking in the sunlight and warmth (we almost broke into the top ten highest temps for April today!), and loving it.  Oooh, yeah, gimme that Vitamin D, bay-bee!

OmegaDad, on the other hand, has rediscovered the one bad side to spring/summer in Alaska.

The Gloaming.

Last night, the dotter needed to snuggle with me in bed because she had watched something ER-esque on the TV at the neighbor’s house.  Apparently, there was lots of surgery, requiring lots of blood, lots of shouting, and generally unnerving stuff for her.  So I settled into bed with her and a book, and then fell asleep.

This left poor OmegaDad seeking another place to sleep.  (The dotter is too big now for all three of us to sleep well if she sneaks or is invited into bed with us.)

So he trotted out to the living room, blankie and pillow in hand, and snuggled up on the sofa.

Only to get all of about four hours’ of sleep last night, because of The Gloaming.

Yes, we have entered the time of year when we have lost all deep darkness at night; the time when the sunrise/sunset calculators that display twilight times now show “light” for astronomical twilight.  In two weeks, the calendar suddenly displays “light” instead of twilight times for nautical twilight.  Then, in the first weeks of June, civil twilight suddenly disappears and the calendars display “light” for that interval.

So The Gloaming is just beginning.  (Ooooh, a cute little itty-bitty baby Gloaming!)  It doesn’t bother me one bit; I can sleep through just about anything.  But any hints of light around OmegaDad make him sleep poorly; it’s just the way he’s built.  Our bedroom curtains block a certain amount of light, so it won’t bother him there for another month, but in the living room/kitchen area, we have three windows that have no coverings at all, and The Gloaming creeps in on crepuscular feet.

(Isn’t that a great word?  “Crepuscular”.  It, and “gloaming”, are actual real live words that are actually applied to this exact situation.  One thing I have loved about living in Alaska is that I get to use these words to refer to Real Live Environmental Conditions!  Woot!)

We spent the weekend doing weekend-ish types of things, including OmegaDad replacing the tree swing out front (it had an untimely demise due to rotting rope, which resulted in OmegaDotter being dumped and getting a small rope burn on her fingers).  And while this was going on (and laundry and cleaning and luvvin’ on chickens and stuff like that), I was watching the flood of information on swine flu on the Internet blossom and spread like fungus spores.

Watching the Twitter feed on the search term “swine flu” has been fascinating. 

Some utterly baseless rumors and misunderstandings (these are all things I have personally read on Twitter):

• Since this new version contains elements of avian influenza, swine influenza, and human influenza, it can’t possibly be natural; it’s been cooked up as a biowarfare weapon.  (Flu viruses swap DNA all the time, it’s why they mutate and we need new vaccines every year.)
• It’s a plot by Barack Obama to take attention off of the economy.
• It’s a plot by Barack Obama to force through his national health care agenda.
• It’s a plot by the libruls and Barack Obama to extend government control.
• The meeting between Barack Obama and Felipe Solis, director of Mexico’s National Anthropology Museum (Solis died the next day) was an attempt to assassinate the President.
• Sasha Obama has the swine flu.
• The reason the swine flu has shown up in the U.S. is because of illegal immigrants.  (Let’s just ignore the fact that the majority of the cases identified so far have been due to–eek, gasp!–tourists returning from Mexico.)
• It’s a plot by Big Pharma to drive up medicine sales.
• It’s the result of a slow news week and all media hype.
• It’s the END OF THE WORLD!!!!!!
• You can get swine flu by (eating/fucking/looking at/smelling) pork.
• The governments of the world are overreacting.
• The governments of the world are underreacting.
• It’s the fault of big, bad factory farms.
• I am sick–it must be swine flu!
• I am sick–I wish everyone would stop saying it’s swine flu!
• OMG, I am afraid to leave the house because of swine flu!
• Dudes, just chill out–x people die each year because of ordinary flu/because of car accidents/because of poorly prepared medications/choose your pet issue–so we don’t need to worry.
• Fifty kazillion riffs on the xkcd web comic related to swine flu and Twitter.
• Another fifty kazillion bad swine flu jokes (oinkment, kids kissing pigs, when pigs fly, etc.).

The psychology of the Internet rumor mill is just amazing to me.

Now, I have been reading the blogs of people who are actually involved with epidemiology (in particular, Effect Measure and H5N1), and they are confronted with two choices:  Either react now, or react later.  If they react later and the flu fizzles, hey, it’s okay.  But if they react later, and the flu doesn’t fizzle but turns into a pandemic akin to the 1918 flu, we’re all in deep kimchee.  If they react now, and the flu fizzles, well, it’s like the boy who cried wolf.  Do it too many times, and the one time it’s needed is the time that everyone will yawn, go “Ho hum, another flu panic…”  React now and the flu is a baddie?  Then everything is in place to stage quarantines, border closings, flu meds, and more when and where it is needed.

Right now, it’s really too early to tell.  The reports from Mexico are not good.  What I’ve read is 1600+ sick, with 150-200 deaths so far.  (Actually, what I’ve read in some places is 1600+ hospitalized, which is a major difference.)  By the end of this week, there should be much better data, including how fast it is spreading outside Mexico.

And, of course, maybe by the end of the week, they can figure out just what the major differences are that are causing fatalities in Mexico, but mild cases elsewhere.

While I recuperate from the dread Wading Through Of Documents for the taxes (only to discover that this year we made out better with the standard deduction!), compose a mental post about Empowerment and another about tea parties, I have been reading blogs and what-not.  On one of those blogs, SciCurious’s Neurotopia, I encountered a music video that made me remember that I have been collecting science rap and pop music videos.  What better time to dump them all on you at once than now?

I do this for your own good, so that you can learn obscure scientific trivia the same way I did when I was young…I still remember the difference between a meteor and a meteorite from this:

A shooting star is not a star
It’s not a star at all
A shooting star’s a meteor
That’s heading for a fall

A shooting star is not a star
Why does it shine so bright?
The friction as it falls through air
Produces heat and light

A shooting star, or meteor
Whichever name you like
The minute it comes down to Earth
It’s called a meteorite

Alas, the friction part is apparently a fiction; the latest explanation is that it is the shock-wave compression of the air in the atmosphere that causes the heating and light.

So, without further ado, let us explore the wonderful world of modern science music.

First up–The awesome rap “Regulatin’ Genes”, complete with subtitles, which teaches you all about HOX genes:

Regulatin’ Genes is the product of a Stanford biology instructor; read about it here.

Next up, mathematics–Harm N Phirm talkin’ ’bout Pi.  If you listen to it often enough, it is rumored you will learn Pi to 200 decimal places:

This is supposed to be a parody of Kate Bush’s song p. 

We move on to the world of high-energy physics, with the “Large Hadron Rap”:

Yeah, it’s a little long, but, hey, this is high-energy physics we’re talking ’bout here.  It takes a while to get into all the nuances; remember, folks study for years to understand this stuff!

My next three are produced by manufacturers of biological scientific equipment that happen to be corporate possessors of a sense of humor.  First, a soulful rendition of “The PCR Song”, from Bio-Rad:

I particularly like the guy who sounds like Bob Dylan…Alas, I can’t figure out whether these are real scientists or not; I think so, but am not sure.

Then we’ve got “It’s Called The EpiMotion”, a paean to avoiding carpal tunnel syndrome while using pipettes to do…well, whatever you need to use thousands of pipettes for…from Eppendorf:

To wrap things up, another entry from Bio-Rad, a lovely take-off of The Village People’s YMCA, “GTCA”:

I hope you’ve enjoyed this foray into –>SCIENCE!!!<– as much as I did.

I am no longer “forty-mumble” years old.  Today I hit the official half-century mark.

I can remember years ago, when I hit twenty-five, having a phone conversation with my dad.  I told him I didn’t feel like it was possible that I was twenty-five.  At the time, it seemed “old”…He told me that he couldn’t imagine being in his fifties, and that all the time he felt like he was still in his 20s or 30s.  Now I know how he felt.

What has gone on in those years?

In no real particular order:  Sputnik.  The JFK assassination.  Martin Luther King Jr. being shot.  The Civil Rights movement.  The Apollo program and the moon landing.  The Summer of Love.  Riots.  Woodstock.  Kent State.  Watergate.  Gas lines.  Jimmy Carter sitting in the White House wearing a cardigan sweater.  Huge computer rooms filled with spinning tapes morphing into 8-1/4″ floppy drives morphing into boxy 10-MB hard drives morphing into the first Apples and PCs morphing into desktops and laptops and netbooks; cabling turning into wi-fi.  IBM Selectrics being perfected and then *poof* disappearing into the mists of time.  Reagan being shot.  The first shuttle take-off and landing.  Saturday Night Live.  The Iran hostage crisis.  Northwestern University, Loyola University, community college in Arizona, California State University.  The Blue Angels performing in Chicago, and San Francisco.  Three loves and one husband.  MTV.  A shuttle exploding.  Another shuttle exploding.  The Loma Prieta earthquake.  The Oakland Firestorm.  Usenet.  Mosaic.  Netscape Navigator.  The Internet.  Bulletin boards.  YouTube, Twitter, blogs.  The dot-com crash.  Bush I.  Dubya.  Clinton.  9/11.  Weddings.  Births.  Funerals.  Amazon.com.  Chicago, Arizona, the Bay Area, Lubbock, Arizona, Alaska.  The invention of in-vitro fertilization.  The Beatles, the Who, Jefferson Starship.  Heavy metal.  Punk.  Rap.  Hip-hop.  Grunge.  Us trying IVF.  Adoption from Korea fading, adoption from China growing.  Us adopting from China.  Gay rights.  The first black president of the U.S.  The Segway.  Hybrid automobiles.  Hubble telescope.  Katrina.  Glasses, contacts, LASIK.  Mini skirts, maxi skirts, the Marcia Brady look, tunic sweaters with legwarmers and straight-leg jeans.  Star Wars.  Cell phones as a status symbol turning into cell phones in the grocery store checkout line.  Mix tapes turning into Walkmen turning into iPods.  Sushi, tapas bars, Pop-Tarts and GoGurt.  The Food Network, Bobby Flay, Rachel Ray.  Congresscritters Twittering.  Three hundred and forty four extra-solar planets known so far.

It’s a weird, wonderful world.  I wonder what the next 50 years will bring?

My mom blasted me with a series of “happy birthday” YouTubes in my email today.  She was born shortly after TV was invented.  I have a seven-year-old; who knows what she will see in the years to come?

Fifty years ago, a long-distance phone call was expensive.  Yesterday, I was able to share a scary moment with friends across the world, and they were able to reply to me in seconds, minutes, hours. 

Dudes.  What is with our culture?!  Seriously.  Isn’t it good enough to be invited to participate in the state science fair?  Does every damned thing kids participate in require that every tender ego be protected from negative vibes?

All the kids at the State Science Fair got “participant” ribbons and a certificate.

Ah, well, it’s all for the chiiiiillllldrrrruuuuunnnn.  We must spare them any and all psychic harm, dontchaknow?

Bah.

That said…OmegaDotter came home with an official second-place ribbon, and we’re as pleased as punch with that.

The venue was a brand-new middle school in Big City.  A really pretty brand-new school.  With two art studios!  And a dance studio!  And an atrium filled with dangling glass mosaics in rainbow colors!  Holy cow, it looked like the set from High School Musical–there were balconies and swathes of glass and the principal’s office was a two-story high-ceilinged affair!  Man, we felt like we were in Swank City while we were there.

Friday evening was filled with standing in lines.  There was the line to check in to get a project number.  There was the “media release” line.  There was the line for the free T-shirt.  There was the line to pay for registration.  There was the line for the judging information and time selection for judging (for elementary students–older students had to be there for a full four hours).  There was the line for the FAQs (really–why on earth didn’t they just hand it out with the project number?!).  There was the line for the Safety Check, which in essence said that if you brought anything that could possibly, in any way, harm someone by giving them a boo-boo, it was out.  THEN, when all those lines were visited (older students also had the line-to-submit-abstracts and the line-for-human-research-protocol-checks), then you could visit the line where they told you where to put the project.

But even with all the lines, it only took us an hour.  Then we went off to dinner at a local Korean restaurant, overate, and went home, to return again this a.m.

These are the hanging mosaics at Very Bright Shiny New Middle School:

This was part of the scene in the gymnasium where the exhibits were displayed:

OmegaDotter talking with the judge.  We had walked her through various questions and answers beforehand, but were not allowed to be anywhere near her during the judging.  The gymnasium had an upper-level track around the periphery, so we went up there and spied from above.  Yes, it’s a bad picture; I zoomed too far and things pixilated.

Madame Scientista posing in front of her project:

One of the middle schoolers on the other side of the gymnasium also had a dissolving-egg-shells project; theirs was much more complex and involved measuring the thickness of the egg shells using calipers after four days of immersion, and they used Sprite instead of Dr Pepper and Pepsi.  The dotter was very interested in seeing their project, and they had to ask her if she bounced the nekkid eggs–which, of course, we had done.

Then we had five hours to kill before we could pick up the projects, so we drove down the coast of the inlet to Ski Resort Town, which we had never visited before.  I was astonished at how much snow they got there; OmegaDad kept telling me that this was the Rain Shadow Effect In Action.  Thank you very much, Herr Professor My Love!

We were intrigued by the effect of tides on ice in the inlet; there were many small iceberg-lets stranded on the mudflats at high tide, and the ice was not a solid sheet, but carved into canyons and mesas by the action of the tides (we assume).  Nothing like the ice on Lake Michigan in winter, which I remember very distinctly as a solid mass, with excellent frozen wave action on the edges (no waves in the inlet, so none of that here).

As we drove back, there was this large grey cloud to our left.  OmegaDad and I kept eyeing it, and we finally decided it must be an ash cloud from the volcano.  Note the brownish tinge to the bottom of the cloud layer at the top of the image below:

When we arrived home and checked the Alaska Volcano Observatory, sure enough, there had been yet another eruption (another day, another eruption; this is becoming almost routine by now), with an ash fall advisory in Big City.  Another eruption occurred after we got home, and this time the ash fall advisory is right here in Suburban Alaska.  So OmegaDad is outside taping up the cracks around the chicken coop.  Ah, life in Alaska…

As an aside:  last year, there were pictures of way kewl lightning around the eruption of Chaiten volcano in Chile.  Tonight, I am able to provide links to similar pictures of our very own volcano!

Oh, and greetings to any Mudflatters who are visiting.  Look around, kick the tires, see if you want to stay a while!

Once upon a time at the dotter’s elementary school, the science fair was an “official” science fair, with formal judging.  But then, Fifth Grade Teacher (name unknown) informs me, things just got too…unpleasant.  It seems that there were parents who were doing most of the work for some of the kids, and that some of the parents were competitive and/or defensive, and things got Ugly.  So the elementary school just ditched the idea of formal judging entirely.

Which is why our cruisin’ and perusin’ of the science fair last night, during “public viewing” hours, revealed to us that it was yet another instance where everyone gets a ribbon.

There were some cool projects–like the one where the kid tested his dog’s intelligence by freezing vinegar, water, and beef mush into ice cube trays, then presenting the dog with one of each arrayed at a random distance.  Alas, the boy reports, his dog just went for whichever one was closest, whether it was (ew!) vinegar or (yum!) beef mush.  Then there was the project where the kid experimented with whether listening to rock and roll or classical music would help her do homework better.

But we also had pretty lame projects.  The kid whose mummy poster session was printed out direct from the internet, for instance.  Or the poster project where the thing was done in PowerPoint printed on high-gloss paper, using words that no third-grader would use.

And hanging off each one was the little blue ribbon…

I left feeling somewhat grumpy that our culture requires everyone to get a trophy.

But then, when I picked up the dotter this afternoon, she was all aglow:  she not only got the “participation” ribbon–she got the honkin’ big “Master Scientist” ribbon (woot!) plus a recommendation that she enter her project in the state science fair in Big City this weekend (double woot!).

And then, as she was leaving her gymnastics class this evening, her coach was handing out packets to selected kiddos in the class, and one was handed to her, too:  an invitation to join the Level 3 Pre-Team.

And then, at family night at the school book fair this evening, OmegaDad managed to put in the highest bid in the silent auction on a huge stuffed horse, which is now ensconced on the dotter’s bed and graced with the name of Zoe.

A big day for the dotter.  I am fairly bustin’ with pride.  She done good.

In other news, the volcano blew up again and sent up a big plume this morning.  The ash fall went south, instead of north like last time; so far, we have been blessedly free of ash fall here in Suburban Alaska.  OmegaDad’s agency closed the Homer office for the afternoon, as one of the guys phoned in and said it was raining ash there.  This is a groovy cool satellite picture of the ash plume extending out into the edges of the atmosphere, and this is just a purty picture of the volcano smoking.

Sunday I spent with the dotter, pulling teeth interviewing her so we could get the egg-speriment down in (pretty much) her own words.  At one point, I had her doing her own typing, but that swiftly became a case of flibbertigibbet-ness wherein she was typing gobbledegook while I was backspacing over it and we were having a race and it kept going and she was giggling wildly and I was giggling and getting frustrated…

So I ended up typing it up.  But still, most of it, as I said above, is in her own words.  After I gave her very pointed questions.

And then I printed the typing out carefully overlaid on a large egg shape.  She cut out the typing eggs.  I traced and cut out bigger egg shapes of various colored construction paper.  We searched (in vain) for glue sticks.  We found old Elmer’s Glue containers.  She tried de-booger-ifying them, but we still couldn’t squeeze out glue.  She located some paintbrushes.  We had a grand old time painting glue on various pieces and pasting them down.

There was glue everywhere.

There was enough glue to soak through the pictures, so that you could see the carefully looped streams of glue that had dribbled off her paintbrush in the middle of the backs of the pictures.

At some point I gave up, drove off for glue sticks, and returned; this also served the purpose of giving her a break.  We then attacked things with glue sticks.

Glue sticks, if you don’t know, don’t stick as well as dribbled-on Elmer’s glue.

Anyway, here’s the finished project:

We trekked off to school with this behemoth this a.m., and encountered many other kiddlies bringing in their science projects.  There were many clay volcanoes being hefted by parental units; very timely, given our neighboring smoking mountain’s antics this weekend.

And there was the kiddo lugging in the poster board with a great big artsy “TNT SODA!!!” banner slashing diagonally across his project.  I am assuming that this is evidence of what is the science project du jour:  Sodas and Mentos, mixed explosively.

The science fair is Wednesday evening.  I informed the dotter that people would be asking her questions about her project.  She blinked at me in a panic, and asked me, “Can you give me the answers?!”  I further informed her that she should be able to answer the questions about her project.  She promptly called me a meanie.

Yup.  That’s me:  Mean Mommy.  Har.

This afternoon, the dotter and I went swimming.  When we went to the pool, the sky above us was grey and cloudy, but the mountains in the distance were beginning to reflect some sunlight.  When we left, though…oh, how beautiful the mountains were!  Snow covered, reflecting the afternoon sunlight, with bands of lifting fog floating in front of them here and there, and banners of wind-blown snow drifting off the peaks in other places.

Of course, I didn’t have my camera.  And even if I did, the batteries are dead, because I was taking documentary pics of Important Stuffed Animal Surgery.

But this is what always happens:  I see a really kewl pic opportunity, and I don’t have my camera, and I want to smack myself on the head.  It happens to OmegaDad, too.  So what we should be doing is carrying the damned camera with us everywhere.  In our hands.  At the ready.  So we can capture those lost opportunities–like when your kid does something unutterably cute, and the next instant is standing there looking dour and grumpy.

Right?

OmegaDad and I have taken to joking that what we need is a RetinaCam™ for all those instances, a camera embedded in our eyeballs that we can point and, say, tap our cheekbones, and we’d get a picture.

Now, people have been experimenting with cameras embedded in eyeglass frames, which is getting close.  But I’d think such a contraption would be somewhat lopsided feeling, and obtrusive.  We want something akin to what the Six Million Dollar Man had–something in the eye that has zoom capability and more.

Guess what?

Someone is working on that right now.

Yes!  OmegaDad was listening to NPR on the way home from work the other day, and heard an interview with a filmmaker who has only one eye, plus a prosthetic eye in the other socket.  This filmmaker is trying to develop an embedded, wireless camera in his prosthetic eye.  This is his website.  And this is a video of where his project is at right now:

EYEBORG– The Two Week Trial from eyeborg on Vimeo.

This is just too cool for words.

Do me a favor?

Go outside.  Right now.  Look to the west, down by the horizon.  See if you can see the slender crescent moon with Venus (at its brightest!) right next to it.  Don’t wait, don’t read the rest of this post, go check it out, then come back.

Do it for me.  I don’t think we’ll be able to see it tonight, because the sky is filled with milky clouds.  Wah!

I was able to get some (very bad) pics last night, but the two weren’t really close together.  They are tonight.  Last chance:  Venus is swinging into place so that it will be a morning star.  This was the best shot I got last night:

Check out some of these Flickr pics.

Go!  Don’t sit around!  You might miss it!

OmegaDad is a great believer in Darcy’s Law; he can find applications of Darcy’s Law everywhere.

What is Darcy’s Law?  Hm.  Well, think of lots of snow melting on a mountain.  What makes it sink into the ground and disseminate to other places?  Darcy’s Law.  In simplest terms, the movement of water through various materials is a function of pressure gradients.  (I’m sure I’m getting this wrong, and OmegaDad–or some other True Believer–will correct me.)

While doing a follow-up on yesterday’s eggsperiment, I found another site that described some things you can do with the resulting nekkid eggs.  The one experiment that caught my attention was to have two nekkid eggs; dump one in a container of water, the other in a container of corn syrup.  Seal them up and wait a few days.  The nekkid egg in the water will look pretty much the same; the one in the corn syrup will have shriveled up.  (Yes, this has something to do with the previous two paragraphs.)

So.  Last night I snuggled up with OmegaDad, and first drove him out of bed in a fit of worry that we had left our clothes shopping behind in Big City by merely asking him where the shopping bag was.  Once that was done, and we were nicely spooned once again, I started whispering sweet nothings in his ear; to wit:  A summary of the additional egg experiment.  Now, I had read the explanation of the final result, and was curious as to OmegaDad’s response.  So I waited a beat.

“Of course!” quoth OmegaDad.  “Darcy’s Law!”

Wanting to be just that extra touch sure, I coyly asked him, “How so?”

“The water inside the egg will migrate outward into the corn syrup; in the water container, there will be water migrating inwards.”

Kewl:  it was just as the explanation on the ‘net had said.  My very own snuggling science explainer.

Then he went on:  “And of course it would, because that’s how cell walls work anyway.”

“So, what–are eggs just one great big cell?!” I asked.

He turned over, and I could see him giving me an old-fashioned look in the dark, even if I couldn’t see him.

“Think.  Eggs.  Sperm.  Cells.  Think.”

“Oh.  Duh.”  Yes, indeedy-oh:  a chicken egg is one great big cell.  Duh.

There ya have it:  Mushy romantic goings-on in the Omega Parental Bed.  Sweet nothings.  Deep emotional conversations.  Darcy’s Law, cell membranes, and science experiments, all in one fell swoop.

While getting ideas for science projects, I chanced upon a mention somewhere on the Intertubes of using [some item] to dissolve an eggshell while leaving the remainder of the egg intact.  I mentioned this in passing to OmegaDad, with [some item] replaced by “baking soda”.  He scoffed at the baking soda, but thought vinegar might do.  He thought it was a really nifty idea.

He and the dotter set up two mason jars on the kitchen counter, one filled with vinegar, the other with Dr Pepper (there is no period after the “r”), thinking that soda pop might be just as acidic, and dumped two uncooked eggs, shells intact, into the jars.

This evening, I was called into the kitchen by a very excited dotter.  “Omigosh, you have to see it!  Come see the egg, mommy!  It’s all squishy!”  So I wandered into the kitchen and found OmegaDad rinsing the remainder of the shell off the egg that had sat in the vinegar…and then we played with it.  It was very pearlescent, not as fragile as I thought it might be, and very cool.

Here’s OmegaDad squeezing the egg:

Then we grabbed my itty bitty book light (not the type of trademark fame, but even itty-bittier), turned it on, placed it next to the egg membrane, and turned off the kitchen light:

Does that, or does that not, seem like something that belongs in a fantasy novel?!  “G’kark held the glowing orb in his hands with breathless awe, waiting for the Gzrk to respond to his silent call…”

OmegaDad and OmegaDotter took turns bouncing it:

Then we poked a hole in it, which was like poking a hole in a water balloon.  I have it up on YouTube, but YouTube keeps telling me it’s still being processed.  Harrumph.  I will try again in a few hours, and edit this post then.

The whole family is entranced; it is so very interesting. The dotter is going to check out water (our control), vinegar, Dr Pepper, Pepsi, Coca Cola, and orange juice. The write-ups all say cola drinks should do it; however, the Dr Pepper we tried doesn’t seem to have done anything.

Every day, the dotter’s backpack-cum-horsie-decorated-duffel bag contains her homework folder.  Tucked into the homework folder on irregular occasions there are notes from school: 

• The official memo on what to do when the volcano blows (the Twitter feed for the volcano continually says “Volcano has not erupted. Elevated seismicity continues.”  It is interspersed with such highly notable pieces of info as “The web camera is dark”, when it’s 10:36 out on February 18.)
• The notice for the Sock Hop.
• The notice for parent-teacher conferences (the last one had the “your child is working at or above grade level, so Ms. Nicely thinks there is no need for a PT conference.  If you still wish to arrange one, the following time has been scheduled…”
• Monthly calendar and monthly foodservice calendar.
• Hockey and wrestling sign-up info.  Har.
• The science fair project packet.
• An occasional school newsletter.

Whoa.  Back up there a minnit, pardners!

“Science fair project packet”?!

Whoa.

Yes, folks, we have reached that childhood milestone:  the science fair.

This necessitated an explanation of what a science fair project is like, and a definition of the word “hypothesis”.  Oh, boyo.

So yours truly has spent the last hour exploring Teh Google to see what the Intertubes have to say about “first grade science project”.

The science fair is March 25.

We shall see.  I will keep all posted.  Any grand ideas for simple science fair projects?  Any good/bad experiences?  What have been your experiences with kiddo’s science fairs?

I won’t suggest project ideas directly; I will only give indirect ideas.  OmegaDad has already suggested a “where do eggs come from” poster board, which has its distinct merits.  There are also some neat and easy experiments with eggs online.

Whenever I visit my mom, she sheds a few pounds of books on me, typically science fiction of the more “hard” variety.  I am, frankly, always amazed at what she collects, because I never see these books on the bookshelves in the stores I frequent.  Or at least, so it seems; this may be a case of selection bias: I may not “see” them because I’m not interested in them until my mom brings them to my attention.

She also often has some modern classic science fiction, which I resist purchasing for myself.  It’s akin to the “why would I want to join a club that would want me as a member??” attitude, but in reverse:  OmegaDad and I find ourselves actively turned off from bestsellers of any type when they’re on the bestseller lists.  An elitism of sorts, in that we think that any book that so many people like probably has Something Wrong With It.

All of this is preface to the fact that I finally read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash because it was in the stack of books that mom handed off to me as soon as I walked in her door.

Those of you who have already read it–like, maybe, fifteen years ago when it first came out (whoa I’m on the bleeding edge here!)–don’t need to read further.

When I pulled it out of the heap, mom said to me, “You may find it amusing; I liked it.”

Har.  “Amusing”.  Har.

Snarky?  Hilarious?  Witty?  Cutting?  Frightening?  Silly?  Breathless?  Breathtaking?  Sucked in, wound around, turned upside down, and spit out laughing and thinking at the same time, maybe?

The world of Snow Crash is some indeterminate time in the future, not to far distant, where the U.S. and all other countries have splintered into a crazy mish-mosh of franchised corporate states crammed one up against the other.  The Mafia is a corporation that runs a national pizza franchise whose guarantee of 30 minute delivery time is backed up by an occasional hit on the failing delivery person.  Our Hero, Hiro Protagonist (har!), is a jaded hacker who has dropped out of hacking and programming to be a pizza delivery person and spends his free time in the Metaverse, the online virtual reality world that he helped program.  A buddy of his, another hacker, is tricked into viewing a computer virus called “Snow Crash” in the Metaverse, and in the real world he collapses into a coma, his consciousness wiped.

From there it’s a grand romp through this Brave New World and a trail of clues leading to the attempted global power grab of a corporate giant hiding behind a (long-since purchased) Evangelical Christian franchise that features people speaking in tongues.  The speaking in tongues is actually related to what Snow Crash is:  a meme from ancient Sumeria that plunges people back into a pre-conscious state where their actions are controlled by the priesthood.

There’s the aircraft carrier Enterprise which has been turned into a luxury yacht.  There’s a raft of global refugees.  There are secret trapdoors in the Metaverse.  There’s swordplay.  There’s an Inuit kayaker world-class assassin.  There are skateboarding message couriers.  There’s an ancient spell which is really a consciousness virus which also happens to have started all biological viruses…

This Sumerian thing/meme/virus really grabbed me, because it jogged my memory of a (relatively) recent theory of the beginnings of human consciousness.  So I consulted Teh Google and discovered I was oh-so-right.  Stephenson was quite happily playing with the ideas of Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.  Jaynes’ theory was that human consciousness, as we know it, didn’t really develop until about 1,300 B.C., and that prior to that time humankind lived in a world of gods giving commands–which were actually auditory hallucinations produced by the right side of the brain, based on a synthesis of an individual’s experiences.  The development of consciousness was, in this theory, an evolutionary adaptation to the mental, physical, and emotional stresses encountered by humans as the population density increased and the chances of encountering a novel situation (one which would not produce a God Voice explaining it and what to do) grew exponentially.

(Wikipedia has a succinct discussion of bicameralism, and a write-up on Jaynes himself.)

Anyway, I thought the book was a hoot and quite thought-provoking, and highly recommend it to anyone who is willing to let go within the first few pages and just be swept along into a totally new world.

TeenDoc, at Welcome To the Dollhouse, posted an interesting challenge:  Write your life in 100 words, no more, no less.

I thought I’d take it on.  Now, having re-read TeenDoc’s paragraph, I feel mine doesn’t have “flavor” or “depth” or something (in other words, I liked her approach much better).  But, nonetheless, here goes:

Born in Chicago to Beatnik parents.  Father intense, musical, mathematical, gifted.  Mother calm, artsy, pragmatic writer.  Lonely, awkward geek through my teens.  In college, ignored programming in favor of writing historical romances. Dropped out to work on magazine; returned to college and dropped out again two more times. Moved to Arizona, then California. Returned to college and decided programming was okay after all. Applied to national labs internship for the hell of it. Met OmegaDad there. Moved to Lubbock. Started trying for a baby. Moved to Arizona. Endured infertility and failed IVFs, then healed emotionally and adopted OmegaDotter. What’s next?

So, it’s your turn.  Do your version in the comments here, or post on your blog and link back here.

In the meantime, some notes:

In the “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth” department, OmegaUnk commented on our record-breaking string of below zero days by mentioning it was 95F in his neck of the woods that day.  My response:  Ppbbbbttttttt!

In the “Gee, thanks, that really helped a lot!” department, Kate of High Altitude Gardening commiserated with me on my recent hidden-object games addiction, asked me to start a support group, and then told me to download Madame Fate.  Which I promptly did.  Ahem.

In the “I know it doesn’t make sense, just trust me” department, Pretzel told me where to find humidifiers.  So:  Yes, it doesn’t make sense, because all my life I’ve needed humidifiers during the icy cold months just like you suggested, but in this house, we need a dehumidifier.  Currently what’s happening is that any time we bathe or run the dishwasher or boil water, more moisture enters the air, and the house is so well sealed that it congeals on the windows and around the doorjambs, and it’s cold enough outside so that what congeals on the windows and doorjambs freezes.  This is Not Good for the house.  And frustrating for us.  In fact, it’s mighty damned embarrassing to have to thump and whack on the door from the inside when there’s a cold Pizza Hut employee with (supposedly) hot pizzas waiting on the outside, just because the door is iced shut and it’s the only way to shake loose the ice and open the door…

In the “Mem’ries” department (from two respects–first off, I should have answered this weeks ago, and secondly, it’s about our trip to China to adopt the dotter):  Yes, Elaine, I did, indeed, belong to the September 2001 DTC email list, and I do think it was me and OmegaDad you met on the bridge on Shamian Island!

In the “oh, just go check her out!” department:  I’ve been meaning to write up something about women in science, sexism, and displays of femininity, prompted by a series of posts by Dr. Isis, with associated incredibly thoughtful commentary.  But finally, my brain still frozen, I’ve decided to just point you to her blog to say “Go Forth And Read!”  She’s snarky, funny, and a rollicking good read who enjoys being a scientist and a fashionista.  Enjoy.

Today, two separate sets of astonomers released news that they had photographed planets in other solar systems.

Of course, one’s immediate thought is of Apollo- or shuttle-style photos of big blue marbles.  Alas, no; that’s a long way off.  What we have is one real-light image of a large planet circling Fomalhaut (nicknamed “The Eye of Sauron” because of its lovely red ring surrounding an unblinking bright pinprick pupil), looking like just another dot, and not one, not two, but three planets circling a star gracefully named HR8799 (which sounds like one of the multitudes of operating procedures put out by, say, a university human resources department), photographed in infrared.

Oh, man.  It is just so kewl, even if they are still just dots.  We’ve come a long way; astronomers are finding evidence of planets everywhere they look, it seems, whereas just a few decades ago there was serious discussion that planets might be a rarity in the universe.

From the sublime to the wonderfully ridiculous:  Last year, some scientists arranged something called “Dance Your Ph.D.”, in which scientists were asked to do an interpretive dance of the subject of their Ph.D. thesis.  This resulted in some splendid dances (which you can see here).  The winner was a stylized primitive hunt of antelope, followed by the hunter sharing the feast afterwards, illustrating his thesis titled “Refitting repasts: a spatial exploration of food processing, sharing, cooking, and disposal at the Dunefield Midden campsite, South Africa.”  The contest was such a success that this year the AAAS is sponsoring the 2009 Dance Your Ph.D. contest.  Go visit and watch the videos; there’s a tango about electrons and lattices, some mice sharing pheromones, marine animals being caught in nets and dying, insulin growth factors binding proteins, and more!

All of which makes me want to remind you:  Science is Fun(damental)!

As a young lass, I lived in Chicago and had numerous relatives around and about (or at least what I considered “numerous” relatives).  It so happened that Grandpa and Grandma W lived in Evanston, in a lovely, large, rambling duplex on a quiet tree-lined street; I spent a great deal of time there, weekends on and off, a Saturday or Sunday afternoon once I was fluent with the El, holiday dinners, Halloween trick-or-treating.

It was an interesting house; two stories with a finished attic and a dim, dismal basement, a large, open stairway to the second floor in the front, with a secret “servants’” staircase in the back, hidden away by doors at the top and bottom, the brass dinner bell hung in the entry hall at the bottom of the stairway, the old safe stashed away in the walk-in coat closet.  There were books in various spots all around that house.  There was the complete collection of Dickens up in the glass-front bookcase in the attic (both of which are now in my possession).  There was the set of lawyers’ bookcases that was endlessly fascinating to me, solid and heavy, which now graces OmegaBro’s home.

There was great-grandfather W’s steamer trunk up in the attic, from when he was in the merchant marines.  It was filled to the brim with old Halloween costumes and party dresses from when my father and his sisters were young, and even from the childhoods of earlier relatives.

The house was heated with forced air that emanated from elaborate foot-square (or larger; it’s hard to tell looking back) cast iron grates in all the rooms.  The grate in the living room was one of the most excellent places to stand on cold winter mornings as the house was heating up; the grates in the attic, alas, gave mere wisps of heat, anemic from the air’s journey from the basement up to the third floor.  This made the row of windows in the large main attic room a splendid place to examine frost, because every winter there was a 1/4-inch layer of frost on the insides of the windows, and you could add to it by breathing on the glass, and watch the feathers of frost swirl outward from where you breathed.

Tucked away in a small bookcase on the second floor, next to the doorway to the stairs to the attic, was a collection of Time-Life books.

They were fabulous books, with titles like “The Planets”, “The Oceans”, “The Human Body”, “The Mind”, “Mathematics”, “The Atom”, “The Universe”.  I spent many a quiet hour with those books, leafing through them, admiring the illustrations, reading the captions, and rarely (if ever) reading any of the essays that started each chapter.

The one that sticks in my mind the most is, coincidentally enough, “The Mind”.  There were chapters on madness, on illusions, on perception, on how the brain works, on what the brain looks like.  It fascinated me, and I kept returning to that one, over and over again.

On chapter that arrested my attention was the chapter on madness.  The illustrations for this chapter opened up with this illustration by Hieronymus Bosch, “The Extraction of the Stone of Madness”, which was quite delightfully gruesome and scary.  It proceeded through Munch’s “The Scream“, equally lurid in a different manner.  Then, when discussing schizophrenia, it examined the paintings of a man named Louis Wain, who had made a quite pleasant living providing rich bourgeoisie with paintings of cats, both portraits and fanciful situations, until he started to go insane later in life (which is suspected, these days, to be the result of toxoplasmosis).  The paintings featured started with a relatively ordinary looking cat, then a cat with somewhat unnerving large green eyes, then to a cat with demonic red eyes and fur outlined in jaggedy red paint, until he ended up with “cats” that were–essentially–just an abstract, neon notion of “catness”.

The books on space and the planets were filled with wonders, too:  glorious color photographs of stars–the Pleiades as a smoky glimmering nursery of stars, the Crab Nebula, the rings of Saturn, Jupiter’s red spot, the sun, the moon, the Ring Nebula.  There was a chapter on the development of rocket ships.  There was a diagram of the varying sizes of suns, the life cycle of stars, eerie illustrations of what the origins of the solar system might have looked like.  There were medieval outlines of the constellations.  There were cutaway diagrams of the sun, and the earth.

These memories are smatterings of what was in the books, but they leaped full-force into my mind prompted by one of the commenters on the science books thread that I tabulated; he wrote that the Time-Life book series had instilled in him a love for science from a very early age.  A few nights ago, OmegaDad and I were talking about it, and he wondered just how many grown scientists were originally prompted by books like those, or specifically that one series.  He remembered it as well, and how wondrous those books were to him as a child.

So we’ve decided to scour the used bookstores in our area to see if we can find some of those books, so we can put them on the bookshelves in our house for the dotter to wander through, now and then.

My stupid machine keeps bombing on me and I don’t know why; I’ve already lost this post twice.  Grrr.

So there you have it:  the Top 10.  Go forth, buy, read, and be blinded by science!

(P.S.  If this shows up as horribly formatted, I apologize; the left-right-left approach to the pics may not work very well.  Also, it occurs to me that my NaBloPoMo problem–which apparently showed up earlier than I thought–may have to do with the fact that my blog software still thinks I live in Arizona.  Both the “skipped a day” posts were posted here before midnight.  Harrumph.)

A few days ago, Pharyngula (PZ Myers) asked his readers “What science books ought a bookstore stock?”

In my cold-bedimmed fog, I have been tabulating the answers from the 438 responses that question got, carefully entering them into Excel.  I have finally listed them all and tabulated the results, but now I am just tired, tired, tired and I have x’s in my eyes, like a cartoon character.

So you get the Top 10 tomorrow.  It’s an interesting list.

I’m just posting this so I get in under the wire for NaBloPoMo, and to tease you all.

(ETA:  Well, damn.  I didn’t get in under the wire after all.  So *poof* goes my attempt at NaBloPoMo.  Bah.)

(First off, I think Fluff had, indeed, bonked her head while riding in the box; she’s been walking and clucking up a storm today.  Looks like Marek’s Disease was a false alarm.  Whew!  As for the crossed beak, the vet recommends a Dreml tool.  Yes.)

Shortly before my mom left Alaska to return to warmer and sunnier climes, we noticed a few yellow leaves in the birch trees beside the kitchen porch.  Remember, this was around August 15.

I scoffed at yellow leaves.  Hey!  It’s August, I said to myself.  OmegaDad sagely pointed out that the clumps of yellow leaves we were seeing on some trees here and there must be insect damage.

The thing was…the number of yellow leaves kept increasing, slowly but surely.

At the same time, we noticed it was becoming dark at night.  Like, actual, can’t-see-in-it darkness.  No more of the continual twilight gloaming.

This week, various blogs and parenting sites have been all about returning to school, and how this means fall is on the way!

I look outside and have to admit, somewhat sadly, that fall, in all it’s glory, has arrived in Alaska; in fact, it arrived a week or so ago.  That would be–in case you can’t recall–before September.  The temperature is hovering around the same levels it was while GrannyJ was here, but the winds have started coming down the mountains, so it feels very different.  The leaves on the trees–those yellowing leaves–have suddenly become crispy, and the sound of the wind in the trees is distinctly different.  There’s a rustling and a rattling that wasn’t there a month ago.  And with every small gust, leaves patter down, slipping this way and that through the air before they settle gently on the grass.

The path of the sun has shifted noticeably in the sky.  Of course, this vivid shift in the lighting shows up everywhere I’ve lived in the fall, and I always notice it suddenly one day as it proclaims, Yes!  Autumn is here!  But right now, the sun is at its zenith at 35 degrees at 1 p.m.; my subconscious, having grown up in Chicago, tells me that this kind of light is most often seen in mid-October.  So my body thinks it’s mid-October already.

The sun is coming up at 7 a.m. tomorrow.  It’s setting at 8:58 p.m. tonight.  We’re losing almost six minutes per day; in twenty days, come the equinox, the sun will be rising at 7:45 a.m. and setting at 7:57 p.m.

In a month, I will be walking the dotter off to the school bus stop in the dawn light at a quarter to nine.

It changes so very quickly up here. 

Zooillogix today featured Martin Amm’s fabulous macro photos of bugs in nature, specifically the “wet bugs” pictures.  You have got to see these photographs.

There was a partial lunar eclipse on last Saturday, and the Astronomy Picture of the Day featured a way-kewl time-lapse photograph of the event this week which shows just how big the earth’s shadow really is.

Read all about the work, devotion, trials, and tribulations of a state-fair champion pumpkin grower working to grow this year’s entry.

Remember my parable about vakseens?  Respectful Insolence takes notice of today’s news about how the number of measles cases in the U.S. so far this year is the highest since 1997.

A compare-and-contrast duo:  Back in April, Lenore Skenazy was taken severely to task by NY Times readers for her story of allowing her 9-year-old son to ride the NYC subway all by himself!  Oh, the horrors.  So she created the website FreeRangeKids, posted the column again, and now has 440+ comments.  Today, in a weird sense of deja-vu, I read the post “Riding the subway–to school?” on ParentDish, all about kids 8, 9, and up riding the…wait for it…NYC subway all by themselves to go to and from school.  The semi-approving post has had all-of-three semi-approving comments.  Where’s the outrage there was for Skenazy’s column?  Ironic.

Speaking of judging others’ parenting styles, check out CrabMommy’s tale of being dressed down for dressing down her tot in public.  I am so glad I was able to wrassle OmegaDotter out of various stores while in full tantrum mode without anything like that happening to me.  I seem to recall one time when I hauled her out of Costco under my arm, plopped her into the carseat in the car, slammed the door, and sat out on the hood of the car while she completed her tantrum, and got actually applauded by a few passersby who had seen the whole scene erupt.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen very often, and is now a thing of the past.  I seem to recall it being closer to her fourth birthday than her third, but that was long ago.  Yay!

Readership:  I probably won’t futz with the RSS feed, mainly because I’m too lazy.  Har!  But also because, if even one of my readers finds partial feeds inconvenient, it’s not worth it to me.  (Ahem.  See my halo?  I think I’ve shown it off before.  It glitters, y’know!)  Of course, the same day I was lamenting low readership stats in a half-concealed plea for people to please visit my blooooog (and so many of you took pity, thank you!) someone “Stumbled Upon” me, and I immediately got a big boost for the day.  Isn’t that ironic?

OmegaMom drifts off, humming Alanis Morisette to herself.

Once upon a time, there was a great land called Acirema, ruled by scholars and politicians and wizards.  For many years, there was were plagues upon the land that swept through on a regular basis, killing children and the elderly and infirm, and occasionally leaving the people that they attacked disabled–blind or deaf or having miscarriages or brain damage or inability to breathe or paralysis.  The people kept on keeping on–they were sorrowful, but used to losing children at an early age, and tended to those who were damaged as best they could. 

But the wizards of the country decided to join with other wizards around the world to study the plagues and see what they could do.

They learned that by using a magical potion of soap and water, they could fend off many diseases.  They discovered that clean water and clean houses helped.  For some diseases, like the grey marrow, they invented magical machines that helped those who were paralyzed walk, and helped those who could not breathe to breathe again.  But that was after the fact, and the wizards delved deeper and studied harder, and soon discovered the little creatures that caused the plagues, and came up with magical potions called vakseens to keep the plagues from…er…plaguing the children.

The people rejoiced.  No longer would their children die from the wheezles.  No longer would they have to fear the summer months, when the grey marrow flourished.  Now they didn’t have to worry about their older children being unable to have children of their own after having the lumps. 

Before the wizards developed their magical potion, for instance, 5.7 million people around the world would die each year from the wheezles.  Even in the magical country of Acirema (which was very advanced, and had the money to keep the water clean and educate people about the soap and water combination) before the potions saw thousands of children dying from the wheezles annually.  But after the potions were developed and spread around, the wheezle creatures fled, and the number of children dying from the wheezles diminished to NONE each year, and on average only 50 or 60 cases were reported by the medical wizards each year.

The people, being people, soon stopped rejoicing, had their kids take the magical potions as a matter of course, and forgot that the wheezles (and the grey marrow and the lumps and the malign influence and the cough-alot) were actually killers.  They got used to thinking of them as “childhood diseases” that were No Big Deal, just something you worked through if your kid caught it, because the wizards took care of any serious cases.

Life went on.

Children were born who had never even known someone who had one of the horrible plagues.

They grew up.

They started to have children of their own.

Some of those children had odd behaviors, where they turned away from others, and the wizards called this “self-turning”.  This was very rare–twenty years prior to this story, only 5,000+ children in Acirema’s schools were diagnosed with self-turning by the wizards.  But the number of children who had this issue kept growing, and by five years prior to this story, there were 118,000+ children in the schools who were self-turning.

The parents of these children were scared.  The wizards were studying this problem, too, but the wizards weren’t finding answers fast enough.  After all, they had worked miracles before!  Surely they knew what was causing this horrible problem!  Maybe…Maybe it was even something the wizards had done!

Some people began to spread the word that it was, indeed, something the wizards had done…and that something was the magical vakseen against the wheezles.  The parents cried out, “Don’t use that horrible vakseen!  It will give your children the self-turning!  It has Bad Things in it, especially liquid silver!”  The wizards studied this, and found no connection, but just in case, they took the liquid silver out of the vakseens.  But the number of children who were self-turning did not decrease after the liquid silver was taken out of the vakseens.  The parents, still scared, said there must be something else in the vakseens.  The wizards, who knew about the need for children to get vakseens because of something called “herd protection” (if more than a certain percentage of the children were to get the vakseens, all children would be protected, because the horrible wheezle creatures wouldn’t be able to find hosts to grow in, but if less than that percentage got the vakseens, the wheezles would come back each year, bigger and stronger), kept protesting that children needed the vakseens.

But more people listened to the scared parents.  And more people began to doubt the wizards.  And in Brittannia, for instance, the percentage of children who got the vakseen went from 92% down to 80% over the course of 10 years, and the number of children who got the wheezles rose to 917 in 2007.

All of which leads us to today.  Or at least, the past few weeks.  A few weeks ago, a lady named Amanda Peet, who stars in the latest X-Files movie, caused a flap at Cookie Magazine by saying in an interview that she thought that people who don’t vaccinate are “parasites”.  One of my regular blog stops, CrabMommy, said something similar when cheering Amanda Peet on. 

Oh, the wails and gnashing of teeth!  The cries of “tell me that when you’ve held your screaming, thrashing child down as they have a seizure!”!  The uproar about the horrible, awful, nasty vaccines that cause autism caused Peet and CrabMommy to have to apologize.  CrabMommy apologized in her own personal blog, as well.  And I am left…aghast?  Speechless?  Angry?  Frustrated?

Folks, this disease kills children.  An estimated 242,000 children died from measles worldwide in 2006.  Every year prior to the introduction of the MMR vaccine, children in the U.S. died from measles, mumps, rubella.  Not just one or two.  THOUSANDS.  And after the introduction of the vaccine, these days, how many children DIE from these diseases in the U.S. today?

NONE.

Chew on that for a while.

(In more personal news, today–the day before OmegaGranny arrives–has been sunny and glorious.  Isn’t that just the way of things?!)

(Thanks to Jeb for the word!)

This is how I feel about moose right now:

Yes, the moose returned, as Jean said it would.  Even with the PlantSkydd.  It’s time for the recommended moth balls, Irish Spring, marigolds, maybe a bazooka or a nuclear warhead.  OmegaDad, when we were wakened at 4:30 a.m. by the howling dawg, barreled down the back stairs (this time wearing shorts, rather than just tighty whities), lit the fuse on one of our leftover fireworks, and sent it flying.  The moose ran, most satisfyingly.  But not before it had eaten the broccoli, win win choi, mei tsin tei choi, and goodness knows what else.

My boss, when I signed into IM and messaged that I was going to do Something To The Moose, suggested “moose burgers…”  We back-and-forthed for a while with:

Moose kebabs.

Moose steak.

Ground moose.

Moose sausage.

Moose a l’orange.

Moose fricassee.

Moose a la king.

I can think of more.  Give me half a chance.

Let’s just say that it was bad enough being roused at 4:30 a.m. by the dawg, let alone the firework (only one!), let alone the realization that our SuperSized not-a-Pet had chowed down on our veggies yet again.

In other news:  The dotter’s feet have grown six inches in the past two weeks.  Okay, that may be a bit of an exaggeration.  Maybe she’s grown six inches taller in the past two weeks?!  Whatevs.  The end result:  a dotter whose shoes are suddenly too tight throwing a mini-fit at having to wear them to Bike Day at summer camp, no matter how much OmegaDad and I reiterated that the folks at summer camp–no liability fools, they!–would insist on the shoes in addition to the helmet, and that all of her other shoes were too tight, and no, she could not wear the flip-flops.

Oh, yes, and she’s no longer an inch beneath the midline of my bust, but an inch above the midline of my bust.  (Okay, let’s be vulgar:  She’s an inch above the nipples.)  Now she’s showing large amounts of ankle and shin when wearing her pants that fit her just fine about four weeks ago.  I am left contemplating some big time shopping for basics, so she is not razzed for flood-waders when first grade starts.

In the wide world Outside:  President Bush says the “Banking system is basically sound.”  Given his track record, that’s not exactly confidence-inspiring.  Nor is the contrasting testimony of Bernanke before Congress.  Nor is the fact that IndyMac bank was taken over by the FDIC this last weekend–the second largest bank in U.S. history to get that honor–and that the government also had to prop up Fannie May and Freddie Mac at the same time.  Rumors are a-swirlin’, as is the SEC, which has subpoenaed more than 50 hedge-fund managers and analysts, looking for evidence of market manipulation.  Good luck with that; from my reading, the rumors are popping up like mushrooms, and not (seemingly) as manipulation, but as frantic “OMG, is my stock going to tank?!” as the Dow Jones keeps deflating, one step forward, two steps back.

In political news, Chez asks whether the Left has lost its sense of humor.  Or, actually, he asked a month or so ago, and now feels that he has confirmation.  I’m with Chez on this one.  I mean, c’mon, folks, one look at that New Yorker cover and you can tell it’s a cartoon, right?!  And, um, correct me if I’m wrong, but cartoons are supposed to be…um…funny, right?  I thought it was hilarious–it was a perfect send-up of all the fear-mongering.  You might also check out his dissection of the recent Jezebel.com hoorah.  Chez is interesting; very New York, very acerbic (sometimes too much so), often narcissistic, and a good source of new or obscure music.

On the science front, Scienceblogs has a concerted pre-release review fest of the new “mockumentary” about global warming, Sizzle.  The reviews are quite mixed.  There’s a certain amount of backstory here, wherein communications specialists say scientists need to “frame” issues properly to get their concerns/ideas/beliefs before the public in a persuasive manner.  In the old days, we used to call this “PR”.  The “framing”, I mean, not the review fest.  Even these days, people would call the review fest “PR”.

In the meantime, I’m going away to find me a guar-an-damn-teed method of moose eradication.  Ya, you betcha!

ETA:  Well, dayum.  I totally forgot about this one:  Disgruntled S.F. city IT dude locks entire IT administration out of computer system, and is currently in jail for this.  I’m trying very hard to ascertain whether it’s just the IT admins who are locked out, or if everyone is locked out–the story doesn’t quite make that clear.

The scientific method, that is.  Theories?  We don’t need no steenkin’ theories, man!  Hypotheses?  Pish-tush!  Soooo 20th century!  Experimentation?  Observation?  Oh, puh-leeze!  Who needs that stuff?  ‘Cause we’ve got data.

Gigabytes of data.  Terrabytes of data.  Petabytes.  Hexadeca-bytes.  Google-bytes, even!  (But not Google™ type bytes.)  Infini-bytes!  We have data pouring out our ears these days, thanks to the Intertubes, and so Wired Magazine has declared The End Of The Scientific Method.

‘Cause, y’see, we can take all that data, put it in a big Magic Data Mangler, shake it, stir it, decant it, and ta-da!  New science!  All these nifty correlations will spill out, neat science-y goodness just spread in front of us like a field of diamonds, sparkling and glittering and making us gasp at the magic of it all.  Kozmik All knows it’s much easier to do that than to, say, oh…think.  Who needs to look at the world and wonder "why?" or "how?" or "what would happen if we did x?"

I’m sure OmegaBro will be glad to know he doesn’t need to go traipsing off to all his field sites any more.  Why bother to investigate what happens to sawfly galls on southwestern stream willows in flood years versus in dry years?  Why spend your time counting galls on specific trees at specific sites each year?  I’m sure that information is out there in the interwebs cloud, just floating around, waiting for dear OmegaBro to write the proper program to collect it, stir, shake, and spill, and voila, he will have his community ecology interactions down to a "T".

Of course, there’s that silly little thing like, oh, deciding what to mine from the vast cloud of info out there.  And why.

As someone commented on the essay, "garbage in, garbage out"–that grand old saying about computers and data–applies here.  Given how infested the web is with spam and commercialism and outright crankery, using the "just grab all the data out there and whirl it around in some big-ass computers" approach might deposit a lovely fewmet of, say, colonics cleansing being effective at removing years-old parasites from poor haggard human bodies.  Or someone might use it to prove that Indigo Children really are an increasing influence on world politics today.

Lots of other folks have said it, but I’ll say it, too:  Theory is not dead.  The scientific method is not passe.  The Wired essay is waving its hand at statistical correlation being science, all gee-gosh-golly-wow charts-n-graphs.  But that’s not science.  It’s cool, yes, I’ll grant that.  And lots of interesting information is coming out of the expanding ability to correlate disparate groups of data and seeing what patterns emerge.  But science is asking "why?", trying to figure out the natural world, trying to understand underlying laws that drive the universe, delving into genetics and fossils and tokamaks and outer space and multi-dimensional math and gravity and thermonuclear processes that make stars burn bright…

All that kind of stuff.

Y’see, the information mining that Wired is going gaga over has–as its very basis–human beings who explored the world and teased out important basics based on theories, based on thousands of years of human beings asking questions, posing hypotheses, testing them out, deciding what works and what doesn’t, and why it works that way and not another, and how to harness the way it works to make life easier (or more complex) for humanity.  And it requires humans asking "why?" and wanting to know the answer to even decide to make the Magic Data Manglers look at one particular set of data in particular, before the MDM spills out its oh-so-pretty correlations.

So I have to say, the scientific method–theory, hypotheses, testing, experimentation, revision–is not dead yet; it’s not the red-shirted Away-Team member who always bites the dust in any Star Trek episode.

For a few years, my running gag with OmegaDad was that there were Martians, and they just didn’t want us bothering them.

Now that we’ve had a few years of Spirit and Opportunity exploring the red planet, for a much longer period than originally planned (yay!), and now that the Phoenix has landed, I guess I have to say a sad farewell to that little joke.

Aside from that, we had Ballet Recital Madness–The Preview (aka the production run-through of the recital).  Some lovely dancing, some extremely tired but very well-behaved three- to six-year-olds, a few glitches, and some laughs.  Next up is Thursday, dress rehearsal.

I may actually have real content here tomorrow, but can’t promise anything on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday.

Blogging will lead you to an early death!

No!  Wait a minute!  Blogging is good for you!

Wait.  Really.  Here’s the scoop:  If you’re a popular blogger, you’ll get tabbed for a Big Internet Site Job, get hooked on exposing too much of yourself, ruin your personal relationships, have a nervous breakdown, think about leaving blogging entirely, and end up pretty much where you were to begin with, except (maybe) older and wiser.

Of course, we all know blogging isn’t real writing.

So much for blogging.

On a different subject entirely, can someone explain to me why everyone is (gasp!) shocked and horrified that Clinton, while discussing the ins and outs of primaries, mentioned Bobby Kennedy’s assassination?  I mean, she also mentioned a few other situations where the nomination wasn’t set until after the convention.  Dudes, she isn’t advocating assassinating Obama.  Really.  She may have been stupid to say such a thing, given how tender and delicate everyone’s sensitivities are these days about any perceived slight or threat or…whatever it was.  I swear, these days people just need to keep their yaps shut about everything, because someone is going to be (gasp!) shocked and horrified. 

The Chinese adoption community has been rocked by the news that Steven Curtis Chapman’s youngest daughter was accidentally run over by one of their sons.  I read the story and my heart froze; his daughter was five years old.  Once again, motherhood has changed my outlook–I would have read it and sympathized before, but now I read it and the hair on the back of my neck rises because OmegaDotter is six years old and scatterbrained and I could so easily see her paying attention to something else and running right behind the car as OmegaDad pulls out of the driveway.

The Chapman family is accepting donations to the Shaohannah’s Hope Foundation in Maria’s name.

Science-y stuff:

Jupiter has given birth to a brand new bouncing baby Red Spot.

I want to give one of these T-shirts to OmegaBro.  Or OmegaDad.  Or both.  Or maybe one for myself.  Go check ‘em out.

This is the night sky I miss from Small Mountain University Town.

Lisa got it first:  Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Karn Evil 9.