Beautiful night under the Stars

Last Friday I went out in the cold to the Science Museum of Virginia, along with other Richmond Astronomical Society members to show the public the stars. It was the best night for stargazing in years. Despite the light
pollution of Richmond, we were able to see lots of stars with the naked
eye, down to about 3rd magnitude, and solar system bodies and stars both were spectacular. Saturn produced its usual assemblage of rings that are the highlight for many visitors, and the Moon was in an especially good phase. The alignment on my telescope on Vega and Capella was especially good, perhaps because I was able to get Polaris in the guide scope, and because Vega and Capella were near the horizon and far apart. Objects stayed in my telescope reasonably well, despite non-fresh batteries. It was the first time that I can remember that I was able to get the Andromeda Galaxy in my telescope at a Skywatch. It showed a rather unexciting fuzzy light ball. I got the Orion Nebula in the telescope as well, and with my light pollution filter, the details of the nebula really stood out. And to top it off, a -5 magnitude bolide, brighter than Venus, shot through the constellation Gemini.

We tried looking at the street with the light pollution filter. The bright yellow hat of Arby's became a dull red, and McDonald's yellow arches also turned a dull red. The peachy streetlights turned much dimmer, as the filter was especially aimed at stopping that light. If streets were like that, we could see more stars. People need to stop blaring their lights.

Yuletide fantasy run

I made my Yuletide fantasy run through my development on Saturday night, 2004 December 18. This year some brilliant displays of the past few years were gone. But there were some others to replace them. None of them showed that much originality. One showed an outline Texas on their lawn. Another used red candles instead of blue ones. But we use red candles, three at a time in our windows. The prize this year goes to the end of my street. There it was. The Great Walking Stickman of Yuletide. Somone put lights way up the trunk and some of the branches of a tall, thin tree, and the entire thing was five stories high and looked like a gigantic stalk of a man with stick arms outreached. I have never seen anything like that before. What did I have this year? I switched my white and red lights, to show a red bush out on our lawn. I don't mean the one in the White House. I mean a bush bush with red bulbs lighting it up. And I constructed a huge triangle in a large bush, about two stories high. If I put another triangle into this design, I can come up with a Virginia. Maybe I'll try that.

Injured Bird on Thanksgiving: Followup

I will not be going to a rehab center today. Unfortunately, the bird died overnight.

Injured Bird on Thanksgiving

Today is Thanksgiving. What is Thanksgiving? It is where we thank ourselves for all that we have gotten throughout the year. We feast out and take a holiday. But things happen even on holidays, and not every being is blessed on Thanksgiving. Perhaps instead of thanking, we need to go out and make a being thankful of us.

Today something like that happened. Late in the afternoon, as the sun was about to set, I saw a northern or slate-colored junco (also called a snowbird) waddling around the feeding pole, picking up food. I wondered if it was OK. It seemed to have something sticking out of its side, maybe a feather. So I went outside to see if it would fly away. It didn't. It ran away from me, and it could not go that fast either. So now I had an injured bird to take care of.

I called Anne up at work - she is a nurse who has to work at Thanksgiving working hard to give thanks to others - and she said to put it in a box and put it on the freezer in the garage. So I did, poking holes in the box and not giving it food or water, as some web sites recommend that I don't. I called up some people from the local Audubon society. Late at night, someone gave me the name of rehab center counselors that I can call tomorrow. But I don't think they would do anything tonight. Why lose sleep and ruin a Thanksgiving because of a small bird? But this bird was in need of help and not getting it because we are celebrating our own thanks. We need to stop thinking about thanking, especially thanking some supposed Creator or God up above, and start thinking about giving thanks. This bird needed it.

So I will call tomorrow and find somewhere to take the bird, and hope it can be nursed to health. I heard that birds are hard to take care of. What could have caused the injury? One theory is that it was on the feeder getting food when a squirrel tried to get on it. It was one of these feeders that spin around and whop a squirrel off if it gets on. It could have spun the junco off and slammed it into something. It could have flown into our window or the feeder pole. I think the most likely cause was a cat. The neighbors let their cats wander all over the place. In so doing, they destroy many songbirds a year. Many authorities say that cats are destructive and should be kept inside. I chase them off, but maybe a talking to the owners would be good - mention the injured bird.

Tomorrow we will take the bird to a rehab place and hope for the best.

Halloween 2004

This year's Halloween had a few unusual features. The first is that the first trick-or-treaters (3 of them) came at 17:41 (5:41 pm), beating the previous record of 17:48, and were followed only a few minutes later by another group of 3 trick-or-treaters. So they started coming early. There were fewer of them this year, 54 compared to last year's 70. I have come up with a combined graph of these trick-or-treaters, and they indicate two peaks over the past 8 years of trick-or-treaters. One of these is at 18:22 and another is at 19:27. Apparently they like to come during dinner time. One interesting characteristic of this year's trick-or-treaters: an abnormally large number of them were adolescent males, between 11 and 16 years old. I don't know why this age group wants to go around trick-or-treating, unless they are out roving around getting their kicks or something. Or maybe these kids just don't want to grow up. Numbers of trick-or-treaters have definitely gone down since 2001, the year of Planeattack. Apparently people are more afraid and security-conscious and the result is fewer trick-or-treaters. Maybe they go to organized Halloween parties instead. It doesn't matter. It's just a tradition.

K-Mart and Sears

It came as a blockbuster early today. K-Mart and Sears were going to merge. No, actually, little old nearly bankrupt K-Mart was going to buy Goliath Sears. This really seemed weird. But the two companies apparently complement each other. The new corporation will have K-Mart's real estate in places away from malls and Sears' tradition of quality. They are going to call the company Sears Holdings. Holdings? That seems trite to me. Is the CEO of Sears going to pick up and hold the CEO of K-Mart?

I think they deserve a better name than that. One immediate idea is K-Sears, but that seems too ordinary. Perhaps S-Mart would be better because that would be smart. S-mart, don't you get it? Shop Smart at S-Mart! But maybe that seems too much like PetSmart. Or how about K-Sears? Or K-Mart, Roebuck and Co.? Or K-Mart, Sears, Roebuck and Co.? Or maybe KSR corporation? Uh-uh. That is getting a little hackneyed again. How about Mart-K-Sears, as in The Three Mart-K-Sears? Or maybe Mouse-K-Sears? Em-Aye-Cee, Kay-Ee-Wye… Uh-oh. I see another merger coming.

But if not the name, maybe this merger will come with interesting subnames. For example, K-Mart sells Martha Stewart products, and Sears recently purchased Land's End. So combine these two together and the result is Martha's End. Or maybe we will fix our houses with Martha Stewart Craftsman tools or wash our clothes in our Martha Kenmore washer. Or maybe call the store K'Mart in honor of Apostrophe, one of Sear's product lines. Or how about the Sears Tower? Paint that blue and get The Blue Tower, or the Blue Light Tower. That won't work. The tallest building in the US is the Great Tower of Chicago, not the Sears Tower, because Sears no longer owns it, and so Sears can't paint it blue.

Of course none of this will happen. We will go to our Sears and K-Marts as always, although we may see Craftsman Tools in K-Mart or Martha Stewart products in Sears, and we may see a host of Sears outside the malls. But remember that a titanic merger occurred today between two retail giants. Let's hope that's titanic as in colossal instead of as in blub, blub, blub.

Flipping Digits

Yesterday my van's mileage was 99982 or something. I drove to work, and then when I went out to go home at night, the van's odometer stared me in the face with 100000. Yes, the van's odometer flipped from 9s to 0s, and the reading added a digit. I have seen the flip occur on a couple of other cars that I have owned.

Flipping digits happen because of our system of enumeration. Before the flip, everything was at 9s because 9 is the greatest digit, one less than ten. It is one less than the base. When that happens all that has been built up to that point gets cashed in for the raise of a digit on the left, or in this case, an additional digit. In a sense, it is a moment of achievement.

In 2003 I achieved three different Toastmasters awards, namely an Advanced Toastmasters Bronze (ATM-B), a Competent Leader (CL) award, and a Competent Toastmaster (CTM) award. This happened because I had two or three manuals each with about two or three speeches to do. I completed all of these that year, and like the 9s on the odometer, I flipped a huge collection of achievements.

Now I am at all zeroes, trying to start all over again. That is what life is all about. Reach an achievement or group of achievements, then start all over again on your next journey. When was the last time you flipped zeroes in your life?

Sitting Next to your Preferred One

I recently came up with an interesting mathematical puzzle today. It is based on some of these conventions and dinner parties that I go to. The problem is this. There is a big banquet at the end of the convention. There is a special someone that you want to sit next to. Perhaps you're in love with this person. Perhaps this person has the key to your next job. Perhaps this person is simply someone you like to sit next to. We will call this person Connie (for "convention").

Most typical banquets feature some 10-20 tables seating 10 each, for a total of 100-200 banqueters. You know that Connie is going to appear at this banquet. So when do you sit down? You don't want to be the first to sit down, as then you have no control over who sits next to you. It's whoever wants to sit next to you, and that might not be Connie. You don't want to be the last person, either. Then there will only one seat left, and that is then yours, and you have no control over who is sitting there either.

The optimal solution is to sit somewhere in the middle, but where? I will measure this by the percentage of people who have seated by the time you choose your seat.

To illustrate this problem, I will assume that everyone is seated in one big circle instead, arbitrarily large. Then you want to get into one of the two seats next to Connie. Suppose you choose time x to sit down. Then the probability is x that Connie is already seated. In that case, the probability that you can sit next to her is 1-x², as x² is the probability that both seats are occupied (for an infinite circle - for a finite set, replacement needs to be taken into account). So this makes a term x(1-x²). In the 1-x chance that Connie is not seated, the probability is near zero that she will sit next to you (unless she is attracted to you, in which case it is certain she will sit next to you, but I am not assuming that is the case; also this assumes an infinite circle or strip of seats). Therefore the probability of getting a seat next to her is x(1-x²). The method here is to differentiate and set equal to zero, and solve for x. When you do that, you get the optimal x to be the square root of 1/3, which is about 0.577. So this mean you will wait until 57% of the people are seated, then you will go in and sit down.

This would make for an interesting problem to work out. I have assumed an infinite strip, but what happens in finite cases? The size of the tables makes a difference; if there are 10 to a table, then Connie can sit anywhere at that table and you can still get to her table. Some seats may be more valuable than others; e.g., next to her rather than across the table from her. And what if you want to sit next to a group of people, and what if the people them cluster into groups or cliques? And once someone works out all those cases, are they prepared to use it at a real banquet?

Stay tuned.

Northwestern beats Ohio State

I am not much of a fan on football, and regard it as irritating when it bombs out news and other programs on TV. But I am a graduate alumnus of Northwestern University, back in a day when I attended all the football games in the early 1970s. So I always follow the exploits of Northwestern's football team every year. To me they are one of the most exciting teams to watch. They have been involved in more cliffhangers and heartstoppers than any other team I can think of in any sport. Their cliffhangers include a rallying 17-16 victory over Michigan in which the winning field goal was scored with only a minute and a half to play, and where the first attempt at this field goal was ruled invalid by a referee, and a game where Wisconsin led by 30-27 near the end, and, for some reason trying to extend that score in the final few minutes, instead fumbled and allowed Northwestern to score and win. They would have been better off running out the clock.

This weekend's game with Ohio State, the big bad bucks (eyes) from Columbus, was one such example. I did not expect it. This was one of Ohio State's better years. They were Number 7 in the nation. This was not one of Northwestern's better years, having lost a bunch of games. I expected a slaughter. Instead, Northwestern kept up with Ohio State, not letting them score and scoring themselves on occasion, and even built up a lead early in the fourth quarter. Then Ohio State scored a touchdown and a field goal to tie it. Maybe they were going to win after all. The game ended with a tie, however.

So a sudden death overtime was played. Here is a summary of the plays, because I think they are brief and almost poetic:

Ohio State rushes 3 yards to the NW 21.
Ohio State incomplete pass to the left.
Ohio State incomplete pass to the right.
Ohio State tries field goal: FAILED.

Northwestern rushes 1 yard to OS 24.
Northwestern rushes 21 yards to OS 3.
Northwestern rushes 2 yards to OS 1.
Northwestern rushes 1 yard: TOUCHDOWN!

And that's the way the ball bounces. Maybe Northwestern will win a few more like that this season.

Google Test

Sooner or later, I will retire from my present job and so will want to get another job, as I am not ready to sit outside every day watching the leaves flutter. So I will make out job applications and write resumes. Well today I saw what could be the most interesting job application of them all, Google's. It wa in my copy of Communications, the primary periodical of the Association of Computing Machinery, of which I am a member. OK, Google, you can spider this and everyone can Google what I say all over the place. But Google has really stepped out of the box. In fact, they have stepped out of a googol boxes. They have constructed the Google Labs Aptitude Test, or GLAT. It is a series of math and word puzzles, along with some essay and pictorial questions concering Google the company itself. It finally concludes by asking what the applicant would do if he applied to Google.

A most interesting test. If job applications had looked like this earlier in my life, I would have gotten more job offers than I have had, since this was the thing I was really good at. But wouldn't this deny to the Google people things they really need to know such as work history? Do they really need to know that? What of the work history? What does that say about whether the applicant will do in the present job? Perhaps this thing could come out more in the interview, when the applicant is given the opportunity to provide details. But I don't really think a work history on an application really helps the interviewers. However, a test like Google's may very well pick out those people who would work well at Google. Something good's going on with Google. Over and over again, they have come up with things that have really improved the worth of the web: language translating (although this is somewhat faulty), search news, search newsgroups, and search places to shop. Every one is a blockbuster success. So they must have some brainy guys and gals working for them, and I think Google is trying to get more such people. However, this test is amenable to cheating, but I still think it is a step in the right direction. Other employers, take note. Change your job search procedures, and watch your profits soar!

Woops! - Ladies Chain

Today I looked at the mathematical structure of contra dancing. That link to "mathematical structure" refers to an article I wrote for my mathematics page. It shows how the mathematical structure of contra dancing is like the mathematical structure of changing a mattress, and it ends with a quilt based on contra dancing patterns.

One of the moves of contra dancing is "ladies chain". This is a step where the two ladies in a foursome come to the center and allemande around, going to the opposite side, whereupon the opposite man twirls them around 360 degrees. The result is that the two ladies have switched position, while the two men stay the same. I found an error, or at least a questionable point, in my paper, which makes for an interesting conundrum or paradox.

The part of mathematics that I relate contra dancing to is group theory. A group is a set with an operation (as plus or times) such that the group is closed (adding or multiplying group elements always results in group elements, is associative ( (x*y)*z=x*(y*z) ), has an identity element, as 1, where 1 times anything is that same thing again, and inverses, so that for each a there is an a' such that a*a' = 1. Some operations are easily seen to be associative. For example, let x, y, and z be moves on a Rubik's Cube. then (x*y)*z and x*(y*z) both mean do x, then do y, and then do z, with the only difference being a trivial linguistic difference. So therefore the Rubik's cube group is associative.

So I thought surely contra dancing moves are associative. After all, (x*y)*z and x*(y*z) both mean dance x, then dance y, then dance z. So the two should be the same. No. They are not. It turns out that if y is ladies chain, and x switches the men and women around, then the two are different!

I will explain this in a sequel to my contra dance article, but the idea is this. Imagine a foursome in a square, and from left to right top, then from left to right on the bottom, label the dancers A, B, C, and D, in positions 1, 2, 3, and 4. Then A and D are ladies, and B and C are men. If they do a ladies chain, then A and D trade places. These are in places 1 and 4. But suppose they quarter turn left first. Then the women are in 2 and 3, and ladies chain trades 2 and 3 instead. This means that in (x*y)*z, then y trades 1 and 4, while in x*(y*z), y trades 2 and 3. The definition of y depends on the grouping of the terms. This results in the non-associativity.

I emailed a colleague about this, Larry Copes. He told me that a ladies chain when the ladies are in positions 2 and 3 is not often seen. I thought about it. It is a mirror image of the usual one! It violates the principle of "lady on the right". So most contra dances seen on dance floors do not have such ladies chains. So as far as movements on the dance floor are concerned, they are associative. But that is not good enough for a mathematical group. There one should be able to take any two elements and multiply them. I suppose the way to handle this is to regard ladies chain and gypsy once-and-a-half (which switches ladies 2 and 3) as the same mathematical group element. Then the group of contra dancing is D4, as I say in my article.

Hurricanes Hurricanes and more Hurricanes

I have not talked too much about hurricanes lately, but this has been some season. Since early July, I have been tracking down some hurricane or tropical storm somewhere, even if it is only in modelspace, such as the infamous SUUSI Hurricane that ruined SUUSI this year by striking Virginia Tech with 10 inch rains and 50 mph winds on its third day, and also that did not exist at all. It was a mere figment of modelspace. Some runs of the Global Forecasting System (GFS) showed this hurricane striking Charleston, SC and hitting western Virginia, but after two or three days, it completely disappeared from the runs and we had beautiful weather for SUUSI.

But most of the other storms I have been tracking have been real storms that have caused some real trouble. Charley and Frances X-ed out Florida with their tracks, and now the Gulf Coast is being hit by Ivan the Terrible as I speak. It's hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, Alex, Bonnie, Charley, Frances, Gaston, Ivan, and Jeanne, plus Karl and Lisa in modelspace. Gaston already has given us the second worst storm that I can remember here, and it was a mere tropical storm.

So the question is, will Ivan and Jeanne strike here? A Virginia DOT meteorologist says no. Neither will affect us. The forecaster at WxRisk.com also says that both will miss. He says Jeanne will be a Florida hurricane. Certainly I don't think Ivan will strike here. He is going straight for the Great Smoky Mountains, and there he will die. He may give us some flung-out spiral arm rain, as Frances did. But that's all. But what about Jeanne? Although WxRisk thinks this is a Gulf hurricane, MillenniumWeather thinks it's headed for the Carolinas. What do the models say?

No model goes out far enough to see where it will strike, except GFS. They do show her approaching North Carolina, but no farther than that. GFS does show what happens to her, and this is really peculiar, almost comical. GFS says that Jeanne will hit Florida twice. After Charley, Francis, and Ivan, this will make for five hurricane strikes this season for the beleaguered state, out of only four storms. It shows Jeanne going out in to the Atlantic, approaching the Outer Banks, but then a huge H of a High bombs out of Canada (the season's first cold snap) and stands right in front of Jeanne and says "STOP!". The big H then pushes Jeanne back to where she came from, and then towards the southern tip of Florida. Not only that, but the 18Z run of it shows it being pushed farther than that, into the Gulf of Mexico, where it hits the Yucatan. The idea of a hurricane going backwards seems comical to me. But then when this big beautiful Autumn High finally leaves, the hurricane then turns around and heads east northeast, hitting Florida a second time and then going out to sea in the Atlantic to spend its last days spinning fish. In my opinion, I don't think GFS knows what to make of this tremendous battle between a strong high ridge and a hurricane. I think the strong high will force Jeanne to move west northwest and hit Florida and go into the Gulf, as WxRisk says. But I am still going to watch this storm.

Funny Hurricanes

Well now what is left of Frances is supposed to strike to the west of Richmond, Virginia, after devastating practically the entire state of Florida. Here's the situation now. There is another storm, Ivan, which is about to cross the Leeward Islands and has made a mess out of Grenada. The models all seem to say that the storm will turn to the north and head towards southern Florida. Not again. Only one model goes beyond this, the GFS, and that one says that the hurricane will follow a trough out into the Atlantic, then when a high goes out past it, it suddenly makes a left turn and plows into, well, at 00Z and 12Z into North Carolina, at 06Z into Nova Scotia, and at 18Z into extreme southeastern Virginia. So this is one to keep a watch of, to see if it will actually do this.

In the meantime I picked up these interesting tidbits about hurricanes from the various message boards and other places:

Ivan is going the wrong way. Russia is east.

Can we just put yellow caution tape along the entire state of Florida?

Hey, when Ivan makes that left turn out in the Atlantic into Virginia or North Carolina, it should put on its turn signal.

There goes the Florida economy for two years.

The Florida State Seminoles at Miami Hurricanes football team got postponed because of a hurricane. That's like a Tampa Bay game being postponed because of raids by buccaneers, a Green Bay game being postponed because the city sent them packing, or a Dallas game being postponed because a bunch of cowboys with their cattle ran onto the field dropping plops. I don't think Frances had any interest in joining the Miami football team.

The funniest of all that I met was when someone reported that NOAA had spotted an area of disturbed weather, a large wave, between the Azores and the Leeward islands, and that there is a chance of this developing into a tropical system. The first reaction of readers to this was "FISH!!!". And then someone displayed a cartoon of a boat with a fisherman on it, reeling in a fish over and over again. The idea of throwing the epithet "FISH" at tropical weather strikes me as being really funny. Of course it is short for "fishspinner", which means a storm that stays out at sea and does little more than spin fish around in circles.

Nevertheless, after experiencing Isabel last year, I never want to encounter any of these storms again.

Tough Hurricane Names

Ray McAllister of the Richmond Times-Dispatch came up with an interesting point about hurricane names. They're too nice for things that destroy buildings and lives with wind and rain. He says we don't need a Hurricane Frances, because Frances sounds like someone you would have tea with. This Frances, he says, is coming for no tea. Perhaps people would listen if it were Hurricane Fidel instead. Ray also suggests Hitler, Genghis Khan, and Godzilla for hurricane names. His article is at the Times-Dispatch web site. This link may become dead in a couple of weeks. Another blogger, A perfectly Cromulent Blog, also suggests using names like Hitler and Attila.

I note that I have been using names like this for decades to describe storms, but not hurricanes. I use them for snowstorms instead, for the very reasons that Cromulent and McAllister mention - nasty things do not deserve nice names. Here is a list of names I am using. The next snowstorm to strike the Richmond, Virginia area will be Snowstorm Warlock. Here are the previous ones:

Ares
Bluto (Massive winter storm of 1993 March 12)
Crimester
Devil
Evil
Fiend (Ice Storm of 1994)
Gargoyle (Blizzard of 1996)
Hades
Infidel
Jabba
King Cobra (Major Ice Storm of 1998)
Loki
Malo (Blizzard of 2000)
Nix
Ogre
Pouncer
Quagmire
Rat
Snake
Tarantula
Ungodly
Vixen (last 2-inch snowstorm we had)

And here is what's coming up this year:

Warlock (for the first snowstorm of 2004-2005)
X-Outer
Yuk
Zorra

These names should satisfy the criteria of McAllister and Cromulent! I am just hoping that Warlock does not hit us too badly.

Ivan is in the act

There are now two storms out there: Frances and Ivan. Frances has nearly, but not quite, stalled just before hitting Fort Pierce, Florida. It now is forecast to go out into the Gulf of Mexico, reenter at Apalachicola, and come up Alabama and Tennessee, going by Memphis, Nashville, and Indianapolis. It has stalled so much now that some of the models, notably GFS, UKMET, and CMC have gone to the east, threatening to hit the western Virginia mountains. If that happens, Richmond will get massive river flooding, and it is already recovering from flooding from 11 inches of rain from a mere tropical storm Gaston. So we will have to wait for that.

But Frances has so occupied the attention of broadcasters and weather people that not a one is mentioning Ivan at all. Gary Gray does not mention it at all, and some of the models are suggesting this could be another Frances. So I will give my Ivan analysis after looking at the models.

Several models are calling for Ivan to go to the north, and follow the same track as Frances, including UKMET, NOGAPS, and GFDL. However, they take it only to the Bahamas before quitting. The only model that goes further is GFS, which goes to 16 days, but this model poofs the storm. After it gets to Puerto Rico, it just simply dissolves into a mess of other clouds. So what do you do when the models strongly suggest one thing, but the only model that will tell the full story is telling something different? I looked at the high pressure systems. There is a big one to the north. That's the one giving us the good weather this week. It is supposed to move off the coast, allowing Frances to take a more northeasterly track. Another high will come in from the US Midwest. In between will be a trough established by Francis and a couple of other non-tropical storms, and I am afraid that Ivan will go up this trough. In other words, it will come up to Florida, then veer off to the north and east and possibly hit the Carolinas and Virginia. It may not be as strong as Francis, but I certainly don't want that to happen. I will have to wait until the time gets to where the short models will pick up landfall, or GFS decided to realize the storm and tell us how it is going to go.

Hurricane Frances Update

Hurricane Frances has turned into a real cliffhanger, like a 13-inning 7th game of a World Series or the 2000 Presidential election. It has even been a little weird. The Global Forecasting System (GFS) showed the storm coming into Brunswick, Georgia, or thereabouts, continuing to the northwest, and then splitting up into two storms! One of them heads for Kentucky and Ohio, west of the Appalachians, and the other goes east of the Appalachians, into western Virginia. In Richmond, it gives us a glancing blow, much like Hugo did. The storm reunites somewhere in the Great Lakes.

The hurricane has stayed on a westerly course, with the longitude increasing about 3-4 times as fast as the latitude, and south of the course predicted by the National Hurricane Center. That course was going to go to Jacksonville, FL, but then it moved to Daytona Beach, and then to the Kennedy Space Center, and now back more towards Daytona again. However, the GFS and GFDL models have indicated all day long a hit at Hardeeville, SC, and then a track to the north northeast towards Richmond. Of course I don't want this to happen. I am not too concerned about the wind, since the NHC reports indicate that although the storm is producing140 mph winds, they quickly go down to about 80 mph at 60 miles inland and 12 hours all the way down to 30 mph. But it would throw about 2-10 inches of rain here in Richmond, and we already had 4-14 inches from upstart Gaston, which was "only" a measly little tropical storm.

Now tonight the GFS and GFDL has been joined by all of the BAM models, including BAM-H and BAM-G, so now the computer models graph on Weather Underground looks like a split, with some models heading to the Kennedy Space Center and some heading towards Savannah, GA and Hardeeville, SC. This is making this storm a cliffhanger. Which way is it going to go? Will it follow GFS, or will it follow UKMET, which up to now has been pretty steady? I of course hope that the UKMET and NOGAPS are right. I imagine that the people in Florida hope that GFS is right. We will have to watch the high and the storm really closely the next few days. The people from Fort Pierce to Jacksonville, FL need to keep a close eye on the storm, and so do the people near the Carolina and Virginia coasts. The next two days will tell the story.

Monkey Tale

Today when I went running, I found on the locker room door before I went running at lunchtime a posted notice. The notice told a tale of five monkeys. It goes something like this, although you can get a narrative by searching, say for "monkeys banana attack".

Put five monkeys in a cage. Put a stairs there and a banana so that a monkey, standing on stairs, can reach and get the banana. Then watch. Sooner or later, a monkey will go up to get the banana. At that time, spray the other four monkeys hard with a hose. After that, continue to look (replace the banana). Sooner or later, a monkey will go after the banana. When that happens, spray the other four monkeys. Do this several times. At about this time, when a monkey goes up to get the banana, the other four monkeys will attack it, because this brings water on them. This happens, even after you stop dousing them.

Call the monkeys 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Now take Monkey 5 out and replace him with Monkey 6. Monkey 6 does not know of the situation. He goes for the banana. At that time the other monkeys attack him. After a couple of times of this, he does not climb the stairs any more. Take Monkey 4 out and replace her with Monkey 7. For the same reason, Monkey 7 will try to get the banana and will be attacked by the other monkeys (including Monkey 6!). In turn like this take Monkey 3 out and replace him with Monkey 8, and watch him get attacked upon trying to get the banana. Do the same with Monkeys 2 and 1, replacing them with Monkeys 9 and 10.

Now look. There are now five completely different monkeys in there, numbers 6-10. Monkeys 1-5, who got doused, are not there anymore. None of 6 through 10 ever got doused. But if any of those goes for the banana, he gets attacked! What is this phenomenon? It is POLICY, that is what it is.

This had me really thinking, especially since my workplace went through a 100% turnover a year ago (except for me). Apparently there are two levels of monkey thinking. Level 0 is the monkey who is new to the situation. Everything is fresh, yet to be discovered, including that tasty banana hanging from the ceiling. So he goes for the banana. Not so Level 1. This is a monkey that has learned that going up to the banana gets dousing from others, and gets one attacked by the others. So the monkey does not go up stairs. Now these monkeys, having nothing to do with the original situation, are still stuck with the original Level 1 situation.

To get above this, a monkey in the cage needs to go to Level 2. Why should I be attacked for doing what comes naturally, getting a banana to eat? There is no point to it. There was a point once, but it now has been lost. So the Level 2 monkey would want to get the banana, and would try to get it without getting attacked. Maybe a quick snipe. Maybe even better yet, find out what causes the attacks in the first place. There's a hose in the wall? Maybe take that banana and plug the hole with it?

This reminds me of the world situation. Soon we are going to run out of oil. But no one mentions it. Why not? Because a politician would lose votes, and a hypermediac would lose his job with the network. The hypermedia and the politicians are the other monkeys who would attack you. So what do you do? You need to get something going to get us ready for the oil shortage, but you need to do something about all the Level 1 monkeys out there that would attack you. So you need to attend to world defense, as well as move to a more sustainable economy. This would be taking the world view, according to Spiral Dynamic's Yellow Meme. It would be a courageous action, but it needs to be taken soon. If we remain trapped like monkeys in a cage, that may mean the end.

Gaston Surprise

Last night I was concerned about Frances, because it could come up our way in Richmond, Virginia. I am still concerned about that, but recent paths show it going away towards places farther west, so I am still monitoring that storm.

But tonight we had a surprise from what's left of Tropical Storm Gaston. I am still going to call it Tropical Storm Gaston, and in fact, it may regenerate into a hurricane when it gets out into the Atlantic. This is because the storm held together as a whole. We can't call it "remnants" because the storm is still a unified whole. It came up through South Carolina and North Carolina, where it caused tremendous flooding in Raleigh. Then it came here to Richmond where it literally dumped everything it had, and even produced some gale-force winds.

I got home OK but I was wondering about my wife's evening job. I examined all the reports coming in. I-95 was closed between Belvidere and Boulevard. Semmes and Commerce Avenue were closed. There were huge traffic jams on I-95 north south of the James River. There were floods on Brander's Bridge Road, Lewis Road at Ironbridge Road, Ironbridge Road at Newby's Bridge Road, I-195 between Douglasdale and Broad, Midlothian Turnpike in several places, and on Route 5 near Osborne to our east. I concluded that there was no way she could get to work. All the roads either had traffic jams or high water. So she didn't go in.

Richmond north of the city had 10-14 inches of rain. So far here we have had 4.6 inches, so it isn't the top storm here but it comes close. But it has caused some serious situations, more so than with some storms that were Class 3 hurricanes. Shockoe Bottom is flooded with people trapped on higher floors of buildings. The water on I-95 is so deep at one point that rescuers are having to get people by dragging them up from an overpass. A whole bunch of people are mandatorily evacuated because authorities are concerned about a dam break. Fortunately the center is going off shore, but unfortunately the western half of the storm seems to be strengthening. It will probably move off the coast tonight.

Among storms we have had, it ranks with Fran and Floyd, but in terms of rainfall, it tops them all. Last year was the Windstorm Isabel. This year it is Rainstorm Gaston. So I am hoping that Frances and her companions stay away. Latest guidance now suggests a landfall in Florida, so that may be good news, especially since it then is supposed to go out to the northwest. One storm like this in a year is enough.

Hurricane Party

It's hurricane time again, and sure enough the Great Den of Hurricanes, namely the Atlantic Ocean, is brewing trouble. Now it is Hurricane Francis, following a course somewhat similar to Isabel last year and to Floyd in 1999. Further, there are two more. Gaston just landed in South Carolina, and is supposed to make this area of Virginia diluvian, with several inches of rain. Hermine is out in the Atlantic but the Global Forecasting System (GFS) does not show it much; I think it will simply disappear.

Francis is the one I am concerned about. I have been following this storm for about a week or maybe even longer, before it even existed! The GFS makes it possible to follow a storm up to 16 days in advance. Some of the previous runs had it turning around in Florida and heading up here to Virginia, and that had me concerned. This past weekend, they started to head Francis into the GOM (i.e., Gulf of Mexico) after striking southern Florida, which sure does not need such a hurricane. It then would hit the Gulf Coast somewhere and head to the north northwest, perhaps affecting Indiana or Michigan.

As of late, the GFS started to move it to the east. The 12Z run today was really scary. It showed it going into Savannah, GA, and then heading into western Virginia after clobbering Charlotte like Hugo did in 1989. Not only that, but then after that a long train of hurricanes was following in its path, ready to strike the Carolinas in turn: Ivan, Jeanne, and Karl. I got the 18Z run today and it shows a more southerly path, hitting Fort Pierce, Florida, and then into Georgia and Kentucky. We would just get a little rain. And the traffic jam of hurricanes in the Atlantic is gone: just one little storm (Ivan) that turns away long before hitting the East Coast.

The runs are consistent enough to show clearly that someone is going to get 'caned. It is probably in Florida, but I hope we don't have another Isabel. So I am going to keep a watch of this storm, and also Ivan.

Everything's a Goat

I ran into an amusing site today, Goatism, in which the author maintains that the main principle of the life, the universe, and everything is that everything is a goat. That's right, a goat. You're a goat, I'm a goat. Ba-a-a-a. Bleat, bleat. The whole world's a goat. He has devoted some pages to the consequences of this. But his most interesting parts are when he proves that everything is a goat. His first proof has some obvious non-sequitors in it, so I will present a revision of his proof, and show that indeed, everything is a goat:

Theorem: Everything's a goat.

Lemma: If a set X contains a goat, then all elements of X are goats.

Proof: by induction on X = n. If n = 1, then if X contains a goat, then the only x in X is a goat, and since x is the only element of X, all elements of X are goats.

Suppose that for all Y with Y <= n, that if Y contains a goat, then all y in Y are goats. Let Zbe an n+1-element set with at least one goat g. Pick an h in Z<> g, and pull it out; i.e., consider Z- {h}. This set has n elements and it has g in it, so all elements of Z- {h} are goats.Remove another element k from the set, not g, and replace it with h. That is, consider Z - {k} union {h}. This set also has n elements, and contains g, so all elements in it are goats. This means that h is a goat also, so all elements of Z are goats.

There exists a goat g. I can take you to the zoo and prove that for you, or click here. Let a be anything, and consider {a,g}. This set has at least one goat in it, so it is all goats. Hence a is a goat. So anything is a goat. This completes the proof.

Note that I can also use this proof to prove everything is a leprechaun, since leprechauns do exist. I can use it to prove everyone's an orange, everyone's a genius, and everyone's anything. So where is the flaw in the proof? I say to remove another element k from the set, and that it can't be g. Of course not, since then I could not guarantee that there is a goat in the resulting set. But it also isn't h, since h has been pulled out. So the set out of which I pull my k has two elements less than the overall set, so it has number n - 1. However, when n+ 1 = 2, then n - 1 = 0. So the set out of which I have to pull my k has nothing in it, so I can't pull anything out of it. That destroys the entire proof, since we can't even proceed to n = 2 in the induction.

There are lots of neat little tricks on the site, such as a proof that if there is a goat, then there are not two goats, so the Entire Universe is One Big Goat. It's good for a laugh, but watch the math. There are traps ahead that will get your goat.

Hurricanes and the Coyote

This has been an active hurricane year, and already we have had A, B, and C storms come by our way in Virginia. I want to know about these monsters well in advance, so I go to the Internet to find information on upcoming hurricanes, such as Weather Underground, the Weather Channel, Terrapin, and others. But this is information processed either by news organizations or by NOAA. The Internet provides raw data now, so you can look at it and make up your mind. This data consists of results of weather simulations such as NOGAPS, ETA, GEM (a Canadian model), and GFS. The last one stands for Global Forecasting System and is an amalgam of the former MRF (Medium Range Forecast) and AVN (Aviation) models. As of late, GFS has been somewhat of a clown on the hurricane scene. In fact, it has been a trickster, the Coyote of weather models.

In early July, GFS models suggested that a hurricane would strike the Carolinas in the week of July 18-24, which for me is SUUSI week. The worst thing that could happen at SUUSI is a hurricane. Even though it is inland, a sufficiently powerful one would produce another Isabel. The fun and renewal that we would get at SUUSI would have ended abruptly with the first power outage. But a few runs after the one suggesting such a SUUSI hurricane, the hurricane simply vanished. Poof. Gone. No trace of it any more and we had good weather for SUUSI with only one rainy day.

GFS could not track Alex until he became a fully-grown hurricane. It had some problems with Bonnie and Charley, too, although eventually it got on track. But it is now that it is clowning around. First of all, it said that Tropical Depression 5, then Tropical Storm Earl, would not do much of anything. It would peter out in the Gulf of Mexico. The meteorologists said that it was wrong, that it would intensify instead and become a major storm, and one run of NOGAPS suggested a monster storm striking Louisiana, causing oil prices to hit the roof before the hurricane could blow it off. But guess what? It petered out and became a mere tropical wave. GFS was right, and the meteorologists were wrong!

Then there was Danielle. It looped to the north and east well before it could get close to North America. But one run of GFS suggested it would escape from the Bermuda high and head for the Canadian Maritimes. It is clear now that this won't happen. And now there is Frances. Yesterday evening, GFS was calling for Frances (now an unnamed wave in the eastern Atlantic) to strike the Carolinas and go up to SUUSI land, just like the SUUSI hurricane threatened to do. Then it showed it wimping out near Florida today So now they are all saying this wave won't amount to much. But the latest run (2004 Aug 17 18Z) shows that it's back now, and it is turning away from land in the western Atlantic. So it's off again, on again with this storm, and it says another one may be following it, either Gaston or Hermine.

So keep a watch of the hurricane and weather reports, and also the GFS (which now has loops or movies, which are interesting to watch at high speed), NOGAPS, and other computer models, brought to you courtesy of the Internet.

Hurricane Coincidences

This hurricane season is producing a number of interesting coincidences, including some that are nostalgic. This week two hurricanes hit the US mainland. Their names were Bonnie and Clyde. Yes, it's just like in the movies. Except that Clyde was Charley, instead. Sorry, Charley. Only the best hurricanes … er, we don't want the best hurricanes here. These hurricanes arrived on or about my 58th birthday, 2004 August 13.

On this date 49 years ago, I celebrated my 9th birthday. There was a hurricane that day too, Hurricane Connie. That's right, in 1955, it was Connie, and in 2004, it was Bonnie. Connie and Bonnie. I was in Rochester, New York then, and I remember that it poured rain and was windy all day long. My father took me to swimming lessons at the Y in the morning. Both Bonnie and Connie had devastating follow-on storms after them. In Connie's case, it was Hurricane Diane, which caused major flooding all over the Northeast, when it poured its rain on soil that was saturated with Connie. In Bonnie's case, it was Charley, which pounded Punta Gorda and other Florida communities into the ground.

And yet another storm is coming. This is Tropical Storm Earl. The Global Forecasting System (GFS) shows it fizzling out, or maybe wimping into Mexico, but the Navy Operational Global Atmospheric Prediction System (NOGAPS) shows it increasing in strength and headed towards the oil platforms of Louisiana. If that occurs, the price of crude oil will skyrocket. In fact, it will probably top $50/barrel. It's interesting that this storm will do that, because Earl sounds like Oil. Hurricane Oil. In fact, Earl is pronounced almost the same as the German Öl, which means oil. Let's hope Hurricane Oil stays away from the oil.

Bonnie and Charley

Well this week it's Bonnie and Clyde! A pair of outlaw storms on the run from the meteorological law. Well actually it's Bonnie and Charley. Talk about hurricanes. This one's a 1-2 punch. They are calling for Bonnie to come up to Richmond, VA, on Friday, and then the very next day, Charlie arrives. Both will have the wind pounded out of them by the time they get here (hopefully! Hope they don't get a refresher in the Atlantic.) but they will still pour all kinds of rain here. It will be raining. It will be raining. It will be raining. And this is no ordinary rain. It will rain cats, dogs, pitchforks, potatoes, oil, kitchen sinks, condoms, SUV carburetors, terror alert levels, political campaigns, and ordinary differential equations, as well as all kinds of strangled salamanders and frogs. A total of 4 inches will fall here, and when that's over, I will need a canoe to go to work. If you live on the East Coast, better outfit your ark now. The Great Deluge is coming. And not only that. After Bonnie and Charley, the Global Forecasting System's runs suggests that there are two or three more tropical storms or hurricanes coming. Fortunately, a cold front will push Danielle and her buddies out to sea.

But yes, it's time to prepare for hurricanes again. These two storms will not harm Richmond too much, although they will give trouble to two areas in Florida. They are forecasting more hurricanes than usual this year. Let's just hope we don't have another Isabel.

The Green Flower

During SUUSI on 2004 July 18-24, I wrote a song about a green flower. I have not completed the song and have not settled on a melody except that it is probably going to contain major 7ths. But it is interesting to look at the ideas which led me to write a song about a green flower.

My workshop leader, singer johnsmith, asked us all to do a free-association exerecise to come up with some kind of song that involved compassion. I thought about this and came up with the idea of giving my love something for her birthday. Right away I thought of a flower. But this was too conventional. All men give their significant women flowers of some sort at times. What's so special about giving her a flower? What's so special about giving her a purple iris, or a red rose, or a yellow daisy? I thought of all the different colors of flowers, then I found one that almost no one gives; in fact, there are hardly any flowers of this color, namely a green flower.

And so I wrote the song about trying to get a gift for my beloved. I said that I could give her an iris, but I have already given her the iris of love. I could give her a daisy, but I have already given her the daisy of happiness. And so forth. Then I concluded by giving her the green flower, because that is not any of those, but it expresses my love for her that is beyond rose passion, happy daisies, and serene bluebells. I give her a flower that is so rare that it expresses my rare love for her.

And that brings us to the concept of a green flower in the first place. When I mentioned the green flower to my group, they said that flowers aren't green. They were being literal. johnsmith said that it was a left-brain concept. I thought about that a moment, and realized that to some extent it was. I mentally listed all the flowers there were and found that there were no green flowers.

And why aren't there green flowers? The purpose of a flower is to attract bees, butterflies, hummingbirds and other animals to them so that the pollen from one flower can pollinate another. It is nature's aboriginal advertising gaud. The flower therefore has to stand out from the green vegetation, so it has to be a bright color that isn't green. A green flower would not attract insects because it would be indistinguishable from the leaves. If there was a green flower, the leaves would be some other color, such as orange or red.

So the flower is built to stand out beyond mere vegetation. Well, I created the green flower to stand out among flowers. It is the one unique gift that I had not given yet. And as such it represents the concept of "beyond"; that is, one can go beyond any concept that that one conceives. The green flower is beyond flowers. So the green flower represents the ability to go beyond where one happens to be in life to go to the next stage, as in the memes of Ken Wilber's theories (e.g., the Theory of Everything).

There is one other color of flower that I never see, and that is the black flower. To me, the black flower represents either sexy sophistication or the mourning of the loss of a loved one, depending on the context. But I was looking for neither sexiness or mourning in looking for my flower beyond flowers.

So to this woman in my life, I give her the green flower. I will have the song written soon.

A Blogellation of Bloglets

Here are a few bloglets that I have come up recently. It's been busy and I haven't had the chance to blog much.

Last week I went to SUUSI, that wonderful Unitarian Universalist camp and conference in the Blue Ridge mountains, in Hokieland, where anything seems possible. I wrote a song about giving my love a green flower, in a songwriting workshop given by singer johnsmith. I have not finished it yet, but like "Dancing under the Rainbow", this one is about a woman friend of mine, and like with Rainbow, I will let you guess who it is, except that the two women are different. The service on Friday with its dancing Jewish rabbi was one of the best I have attended. I feel that you need to move around to feel religious or spiritual things; there is more religion in dancing to "Brick House" than in all of the Catholic liturgies in the world.

My most favorite quote from SUUSI 2004: "The God that I am talking about is not the God that you don't believe in." This indicates that the speaker, when he says "God", is not referring to the Jehovah or God of the Christian Bible, but to a higher-order concept. To me this is a miscommunication on the part of both speaker and listener. The speaker makes the unwarranted assumption that he knows what the God of the listener is like. The listener makes the unwarranted assumption that the God that the speaker is talking about is the Christian God, which I sometimes now call the Blue God, after Ken Wilber's hierarchy. (The Allah of Islam is also the Blue God.)  What Unitarian Universalists need is a course in interpersonal communication.

Ouch! I know that mirages can be deceiving,  but sometimes they can be smashing, as some pelicans in the Arizona desert found.

Fawn among the Lies

Every once in a while I look at What Really Happened to find alternative stories about current events, things that never appear on ABC, NBC, the Washington Post and so forth. The site claims that it is anti-war and anti-lie. Over and over again, it features articles on the Web that claim that the Bush administration and others have lied to us about what has been going on; they claim to know what really happened. I realize that as I read these stories that there could be as many lies in these sites as there are in our current administration, and the entire site has a subversive, melancholy feel to it; it is definitely depressing.

So I find among the storm on the site a pretty flower, or rather, fawn. Featured on the site is a reference a site called Fawn and Dog . If you want to have your friends and associates go "awww…" and say how cute these creatures are, show them a printout of this site. My wife and the people at my church really liked the three pictures of the dog taking care of the fawn. This to me is a rare find. Not always do you find a Fawn among the Lies.

Some weather anomalies

I got alarmed a number of days ago when I looked at the Global Forecasting System (GFS) model runs. This weather prediction run goes the farthest of any of them, 16 days, but is not notoriously accurate past about day 7. I was surprised by what I saw. It clearly showed a storm now over Sierra Leone, Africa, moving off the African coast, moving and strengthening across the Atlantic ocean, riding up Puerto Rico to the Bahamas, then crashing into Myrtle Beach, heading to Charlotte, then hooking to the right towards Richmond, on 2004 July 21, Wednesday evening. It then hooks back to the left and hits Washington, DC. In other words, it calls for a hurricane to strike the US East Coast two weeks from now, and I figured it would be called Alex.

I thought, maybe this was a fluke of this run of the GFS. After all, this is two weeks away, and the next run of the model may show something different. So I looked at the 12Z run, one run before this one. That one shows Alex heading straight up the peninsula of Florida, then whipping around to hit Charlotte, finally exiting to sea somewhere near the Outer Banks. So there may be some reality to this one. I looked back one more, and there it nicked the Florida keys and hit Louisiana. The one before that had it turning north out to sea long before it approaches the mainland. Each run seems to get worse as far as the East Coast was concerned.

I am going to SUUSI that week, and so I got concerned that Alex (or Bonnie; a storm is developing southeast of Bermuda) would either strike SUUSI or strike my home.So I looked at subsequent runs. One of these showed it missing the coast and going out to sea, but the last two runs don't show any hurricane much at all; what there is peters out over the open waters of the Atlantic and don't show much motion at all. So much for this storm.

In fact, the weather is going to be great the next few days in central Virginia. Here a local TV station, WWBT-TV, Channel 12, predicts that there will be a chance of storms each day, and showed a 7-day pictorial forecast with a rain symbol on each day of the week. However, the official NOAA forecast, as seen for example on Weather Underground, does not show any rain at all. In fact, after two days, it gets monotonous in predicting partly cloudy with high of 90 and low of 70 each day. One or the other of these two contradictory forecasts is right and one is wrong. We will see the next few days which it is.

Goes to show that weather sometimes plays a fickle tune.

Saturn and Titan

1991 was the year for eclipses. 2001 was Meteor Shower Year. 2003 was the Year of Mars, with its close approach and the two Rovers. It looks like now that 2004 will be the Year of Saturn, for the Cassini spacecraft has just arrived.

As usual, it gives its host of interesting images. The rings show up as a set of parallel lines etched in space, closer than we have ever seen them. The biggest interest point for me now is Titan. The probe is not supposed to eject a probe onto the Titanian surface until this (Northern) winter, but already Titan has given us some interesting images. Finally the surface of Titan has been seen! I remember long ago, in 1981 or something, when Pioneer 11 approached Saturn. It was to take a temperature of the cloud tops of Titan, but a Soviet satellite interfered. I immediately printed out a headline: "The Temperature of Titan is Sputnik." Since then astronomers have been wondering about the surface of Titan. It gives a solid orange to optical telescopes. But with an infrared and other cameras and some photo work, pictures showing the features of Titan have just come out; check out the NASA web site, which, by the way, frequently throws 404s in your face. But once in a while you get the site and you can check out the Titan photos.

The surface, like anything else, is raising more questions than answering them. The features look like Mars' canyons, but what kind of oceans could produce these? Water? Too cold. How about carbon dioxide or nitrogen? But it has a nitrogen atmosphere. So we await the answers and look with awe at Saturn's image in a telescope.

Fireworks 2004

Yesterday I went out to see the fireworks, and saw one of the best fireworks displays of my life. Usually I go out running on July 4, running to all the fireworks displays that I can find. Last year I did not see much in my neighborhood. But yesterday, I saw three good displays, including one that would have rivaled the local community's official display, and further, the displays were enhanced by lightning flashing in the distance.

I walked this year rather than ran, because Anne was with me. We went down one street to a dead end bulb, and saw some sparklers and some shooting fireworks, which fizzled when they exploded. But then we went to another display that shot sets of fireworks three or four times. These fireworks produced colorful and bright bursts in the sky, causing the ground to seem like it was lit by a strobe light. This effect was enhanced from lightning strobing up the sky from about 30-40 miles away. The combination of flashing and bright colored lights was one of the most impressive I have seen, and it beats battling huge traffic jams to go to a public display. There were even a few fireflies around. We also went to a third display, which featured two fireworks trees and several high-flying fireworks with bursts.

Later on that evening, the storm producing the lightning struck and gave us some rain and thunder. It was fortunate that the clouds and rain cleared enough for all the fireworks displays to go on OK. An excellent display, which will be tough for 2005 to beat.

Summer's Flashing Lights

A Table Topic at a Toastmasters meeting that I went to tonight asked the speaker what is a prominent sign of summer was to him. She thought that bugs were the most prominent feature of summer. Yes, summer has a lot of bugs, but to me summer means blinking or flickering light. These come from various sources.

Fireworks characterize summer. They come on July 4, the American day of independence. Fireworks come in many forms, including spinning pinwheels of light, sparklers, roman candles, and rockets exploding high above into sparkling floral designs that fade out and fall to the ground. I usually don't go to public fireworks displays because of the enormous traffic jams they cause, but I do run at night on July 4 to try to find private fireworks parties near my house. Every year I find something.

Fireflies are another light of summer. When the late, mild summer nights come, the blinking bugs show up under our trees and around our yard. They signal summer to me and are somewhat nostalgic, as they remind me of the summer of 1960, when my family, passing through Virginia, stopped one night there and my brother and I caught two jars of fireflies.

Summer brings thunderstorms with their own blinking lights - lightning. Lightning is frightful, but I like to lie in bed at night when a storm comes, flashing its lightning in my window, blinking all the windows on and off. Distant lightning in an otherwise warm clear night is definitely a sign of summer for me, as are majestic thunderheads in the sunset.

There are also the stars of summer. The Summer Triangle of Vega, Deneb, and Altair rise overhead on late summer nights, and Antares and the Scorpion dangle their stinger to the horizon in the south. It's too bad we can't see many of the stars on these short, warm nights because humankind has chosen to light up the night with lights of its own, most of which are unattractive: blaring auto dealership and ballpark metal halide lights, garish high pressure sodium peaches on stalks along the highway, and neighbors who are so inconsiderate that they light up your house with their lights. These prevent me from seeing the Ultimate Lights in the Sky. So please turn off your lights. I want to see the lights of summer instead.

A workplace gone weird

Today was a wacky day at my workplace. It featured visitors from Finland, lightning with eyes, email in stereo, and some of the people becoming all of the people.

I ran at lunchtime, like I usually do. When I came back to the exercise room, with its shower room for changing and bathing, I noticed a sign that said "If you clean up the shower room after you are finnished, the locker room will stay clean for the next time.", or something like that. Someone scribbled underneath it, "Are we all Finnish?" I would have liked to answer that one with "Yes.", or maybe even "Kyllä".

Later in the day, my computer thundered. Then it thundered again. This may sound like Alice in Wonderland, but I instructed my Outlook to sound thunder.wav whenever an email is received with "weather" or "lightning" or even "lightening" or "lighting" in the subject. There was an approaching storm, and our local operations center sent us all an email saying that the lightning watch has turned into a lightning warning, because lighting was sighting. Weird. This meant that instead of someone looking at the lightning stroke, instead the lightning stroke sprouted eyes and was looking at that someone instead. I stayed inside. I did not want to be stared at in the face by a lightning bolt. The second bolt was caused by my local division secretary resending that email out to all of us.

Which brings me to the next topic, duplicate emails. No less than eight times today, I got the same emails twice. An agency at my site would send out a message to everyone, including high level chiefs and secretaries, and including individual analysts like me. Then the secretary would send it out again, so that I got two emails. It's like emails in stereo. Next time it happens, I may tell the second sender that I have already seen it. There is a problem with the mailing or distribution lists.

Then finally was the ruling that all soldiers where I work (which is an Army post) must see a certain safety video or movie. It got emailed all over the place, and by the time it got to me, it read that everyone must see it. Somehow "all soldiers" transmogrified into "everyone". Further, we were asked to go to a certain computer server and find the tape of the movie there. Since when do you find tapes in a computer directory, unless perhaps they are backup tapes. Watch a movie on a backup tape? Not likely.

Then I attended a Toastmasters meeting in which Distinguished Toastmasters called a lectern a podium. A podium is a raised area for the feet (pod- means foot). A lectern is a stand on which you can place notes on.

And so ended a weird, weird day.

The Transit of Venus

On 2004 June 8, an event so rare that it occurs at most twice in a lifetime occurred. The planet Venus crossed directly in front of the Sun. I had first read about it in the 1950s in a library book that I checked out from the grammar school that I was going to as a boy. During this transit, which lasts six hours, Venus appears as a dot in front of the Sun. I went to the Science Museum of Virginia to observe the event, which was televised on Channel 12. It was one of the most ethereal events I have seen. There was fog that morning, heavy enough to interfere with driving in some places. The sun rose, husklike and dull, above a building in the distance. We could see the sun and notice with the naked eye a dot on one side, but I could not get it in the telescope, because that requires a filter so dark that it renders the brightness of the Sun viewable through a telescope. Later, it began to shine after the fog and clouds cleared a bit and I was able to get it into the telescope. It was quite a sight. I took pictures of it, one of which is on my Astronomy Scrapbook web page. We observed it until Venus reached the edge of the Sun. Then the clouds became so thick that we could not see the Sun at all. By the time my neighbor got it back in his telescope, Venus was gone.

If you missed it the past week, you have another chance in 2012, at about the same date, June 6. This is 8 Earth years or 13 Venus years from now, almost exactly. Therefore, Venus and Earth are nearly back to where they were, but this time the planet crosses the top of the disk, not the bottom. They come back in 2020, but by this time Venus' orbit has wandered so much that it does not cross the Sun any more, so no transit occurs. Then we have to wait until December of 2117. So this is truly a rare event, and I was glad that I saw it.

Smarty Horse meets his Birdstone

Today, 2004 June 5, was a sad day for fans of the wonderful race horse Smarty Jones. So many people expected him to win that he had odds of 1-5, meaning that there was an 80% chance of winning. His winning by 10 horse lengths in the Kentucky Derby may be a reason for this. So I watched what happened. Smarty also won the Preakness, so if he could win the Belmont Stakes today, he wins something called the "Triple Crown", which no horse has won since 1976 or so.

The race prebegan with a conniption on the part of Rock Hard Ten. He refused to get into the starting gate, delaying the race and causing the other horses to chafe at their bits. But he eventually got into the stall and then the race began. Smarty took a huge lead, but he quickly lost it to a combination of Purge, Eddington, Rock Hard Ten, and maybe another horse. Purge took the lead briefly. But these other horses tired out and Smarty was able to eke out another lead. Then I saw it on the TV set. A horse with a yellow number pad came up fourth, and seemed to go faster than the others. I wondered if this horse was going to win it. I wonder who he was. I found out soon he was number 4, Birdstone. There were heavy odds against him before the race, a real dark horse. Smarty extended his lead as Eddington and the other horses started to tire and go back. Then I saw number 4 gaining on him. It was an exciting and interesting finish as Birdstone kept on coming and eventually nosed out Smarty for the win. Many people were disappointed. No triple crown.

But then again, what does a Triple Crown mean? It means the same horse wins over and over again. It is like the same thing happening in your life over and over again. Do you have a Triple Crown in your life? Neuro-Linguistic Programming teaches us that if something does not work, try something else. Birdstone was something else. He was an unknown until today, and he seemed fresh, whereas all the other horses tired, including Smarty Jones. It also means that maybe the best path to success is not to try to fight the Smarty Jones pyramid. Don't try to keep up with the Smarty Joneses. Go around and establish your own Birdstone. Perhaps you may win your own personal Belmont if you do.

Blogtrek will now be facts and impressions

Today I started a new blog, for I was mixing opinions, say of the Bush-Kerry campaign or of the Pledge of Allegiance, with experiental things such as firefly counts and skywatches. So today I started a new blog, Beyond Opinion for these opinions. Visit the site to see what it's like. From now on, I will post current event issues and opinions to the new Beyond Opinion blog, and the other, usually more pleasant and enjoyable things, will go into Blogtrek.

Hopefully, this will create a better pair of blogs for all you blog readers out there.

The Upcoming Oil Crisis

I am going to start a new series of blogs on this subject and may even start a new blog on it. I am really getting concerned to the point of having it shadow everything else to do. Our civilization is slowly running out of oil. I just hope that this current runup of gasoline prices is not the start of what the oil experts call the "Big Rollover", the point at which demand for oil exceeds supply.

Today I will summarize the problem and show a scale from 0-10 on which people who talk about the oil situation can be rated in terms of optimism and pessimism. The first thing to note is that there is only a finite amount of oil on this planet, and that it is not renewable, since it takes a million times as long for this planet to develop oil as it takes for humans to use it up at our current rates. Further, the development of our current standard of living seems to be mainly a product of oil; so much so that we may want to call the period from 1900-2050 the Oil Age. This age will contain my entire lifetime.

Now for some figures. According to the World Almanac, which gets its figures from oil companies and oil-producing nations, there are one trillion barrels of oil on this planet right now; a barrel is 42 gallons. The world is currently using oil at the rate of 80,000,000 barrels of oil per day, or 30,000,000,000 barrels per year. A simple division yields 33 years. It's not that simple. As oil is taken out of the ground it gets harder and harder to get the remaining oil. The amount of oil that a well is capable of getting out in fact goes down exponentially with time. For this reason, production of oil can increase only to a certain point, and then it must decline, even with plenty of oil in the ground. The point at which this is reached is called "Hubbert's Peak". The United States reached its Hubbert's Peak in 1970, and after that we had to import oil. At the same time, demand is rising exponentially, currently at about 2 percent a year. Sooner or later, supply will fall behind demand, and then prices will go up hyperbolically, an event called the Big Rollover. This will cause a severe jolt to our civilization, and the pessimists are predicting no more driving, political upheavals including possible catastrophic wars, starvation, blackouts, and possibly up to 4 billion people dying off.

So we go to other fuels. The problem is that this may be difficult or expensive, despite the fact that more energy hits the Earth from the Sun each day than is in all the oil that ever was, is, or shall be on this planet. Natural gas will peak shortly after oil. Coal will last a while but its use will seriously pollute the planet. Going nuclear will increase the chances of nuclear weapons getting into the hands of terrorists. Hydrogen seems a way out. It is like fossil fuels such as gasoline, but without the carbon. Already we can make a hydrogen or fuel-cell powered vehicle. But where do you get the hydrogen? Getting it from a fossil fuel would defeat the purpose of using hydrogen. It will have to be obtained from water by electrolysis, and that requires energy, which will need to come from the Sun. Already there are solar-powered electrolysis plants built, but this still remains a method with a lot of problems. The optimists are saying that we will convert to these and this will ease our transition from oil. The pessimists are saying that all of these will fail.

So which is it? I will write about this for a few days, but I am going to provide here a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being the most pessimistic and 10 the most optimistic. Here are my guidelines:

10 - Oil is a renewable resource.
9 - We will run out of cheap oil well after 2050 and we should be on other fuels by then
8 - We will run out of cheap oil around 2035 or so and with some effort we should get through OK
7- We will run out of cheap oil around 2015-2020 and this will cause a serious crisis, but we will get through OK with other fuels
6 - We will run out of cheap oil next decade, causing a serious crisis, and it is probable, but not certain, that we can develop other fuels
5 - We will run out of cheap oil next decade, causing a serious crisis, and it is not certain if we will get through it.
4. - We will run out of cheap oil within about 10 years or so, causing a severe crisis, and it's probable that we will not be able to get through it.
3 - We will run out of cheap oil in about 10 years, and we will probably wind up with a serious deterioration of our style of living
2 - We will run out of cheap oil in about 10 years, and this will cause many calamities, such as famines, wars, and blackouts.
1 - We will run out of cheap oil in about ten years, bringing us back to the 1700s and causing 4 billion people to starve or be destroyed by nuclear war.
0 - We will run out of cheap oil soon, causing the human species to become extinct.

I feel that I am a 6 on this scale. So I think we are headed for a serious crisis. One thing working in our favor is that we will be entering a Fourth Turning, the time in which people take on crises and solve them. Here is how I rate other authors: Vijay Vaithyswaran, 8; Kenneth Deffeyes, 3; Colin Campbell, 2; www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net , 1; http://www.dieoff.org , 1; Paul Roberts, 5; Jeremy Rifkin, 7 (although he sounds like 3 in the beginning of Hydrogen Economy), Goodstein ("The Party's Over"), 4; Heinberg, 2; the US Government, 8; Kiplinger (letter and magazine), 8. In future blogs, I will go in to more detail on these items. What I would like to empathise, though, is that this will be a crisis, and like the Chinese ideogram for this word says, it will be a time of danger and opportunity.

It is now too close to call

Up to now I have been saying that Bush will probably win election this fall because he has lost only 4 Lichtman keys. A while back I said that Bush may lose Key 9 (Scandal) but he probably would still be re-elected, since he still will have lost only 5 keys.

I now say the election is too close to call. It has been behaving that way for a while. A look at Rasmussen Reports shows that for the past few months, Bush and Kerry have been running neck and neck. The graphs of their percentages intertwine with each other like a braid. But it is not the polls primarily that make me say that it is too close to call; they are almost meaningless at this time anyway. No, what's happened is that three of the keys are so shaky that is probable that one or more of them will fall by Election Day, and if two or three of them fall, Bush will be defeated. These are the Short Term Economy Key 5; the Scandal Key 9; and the Foreign or Military Success Key 11.

Short Term Economy. The economy has been perking up as of late. The stock market has been going up and companies are earning more on their bottom lines up front. It seems now that the employment rates are picking up. However, a Rasmussen poll shows that a substantial portion of the American electorate think that we are in or about to head into a recession. If that's the case, the key falls, since what people perceive, not what is in some table of statistics, is what matters with respect to the economics keys. Further, there are trouble signs ahead. The price of gasoline keeps going up and up and up, and I feel that it will go up until people stop demanding it. Since people feel they have to go to work and so forth, and since they feel that $2 and $3 /gallon gasoline won't bother them, the price is likely to exceed $4/gallon. That will certainly hurt the economy. And there is the threat of higher interest rates and the ballooning federal deficit. To me this points to a possible setback in the economy, one which may cause Key 5 to fail.

Scandal. The pictures keep coming and coming and coming. Each new prison abuse scandal picture raises questions and keeps the scandal alive like twigs being added to a fire. A few down the line are being punished, but it seems to me that this scandal is going to affect the higher-ups. Sen. McCain says that the administration should not let it dribble out like this and should come clean with it all. But the clincher is Lichtman himself saying in El País that "Rumsfeld…is a political corpse." I.e., we may have bi-partisan criticism of the scandal and high officials about to leave. This would constitute scandal as far as Key 9 is concerned and would cause the key to fall. I said earlier that it has fallen, but I now see that people need to perceive of it as a major scandal, and this may not have happened yet. But if things continue like they are, it will.

Foreign or Military Success. It seemed at first that Bush earned this. He got rid of a cruel dictator and was going to make it easier for 112 billion Iraqi barrels of oil to get onto the market. But now the perception is that we have gotten into a quagmire instead. This together with the prison scandal may take away this key; Lichtman has expressed some hesitation now as to whether he has this key.

In summary, all three of these keys are shaky indeed, and it seems probable that Key 9 will fall. To me it now seems possible, but not certain, that two or three of these keys will have fallen by Election Day, and if that happens, Bush will lose. Of course if only one of these keys fall, Bush will win. So it is my opinion now that the election is too close to call. Further deterioration of these key's positions may lead to my calling the election for Kerry.

A comet and the International Space Station

It is not publicized much except in astronomical circles but there are two fairly bright comets out there, NEAT and LINEAR. They are named after satellites. It does not mean that they are nice clean easy-to-understand bodies. I went out to try to find comet NEAT tonight at about 2004 May 13 2132. I could not find it at first (a Sky and Tel map suggests it is at the intersection of parallel lines drawn through the Gemini twins and Procyon), but then I caught onto something else: a moving yellow star in the west. I thought plane at first, but the light was steady, yellow, and moving steady with no noise or huge increase in brightness. So I thought this was the International Space Station. I followed it across the sky, going through the bowl of the Big Dipper, and then it disappeared in trees to the east of Ursa Major. I looked it up in http://www.heavens-above.com and found this line:

Date Mag Starts Max. Altitude Ends
Time Alt. Az. Time Alt. Az. Time Alt. Az.
13 May -0.6 21:31:23 10 SW 21:34:20 74 NW 21:37:21 10 NE

Sure enough, this was the International Space Station pass. I looked at the diagram at this site,
and it matched what I saw perfectly. So I saw the Station tonight, and what made it interesting was that I was not specially planning on looking for it; I just happened to see it serendipitously when I was looking for something else.

Oh, yes. I looked a little harder and I did find a smidgeon of light which I believe was the comet. Interesting but not as spectacular as Hyakutake or Hale-Bopp.

By the way, be CAREFUL when going to the Heavens Above website. I superaccented the hyphen above. It is important. If you omit it and/or get the extension wrong, you may wind up with a window in your face asking if you would like to change your default web page to such and such, and then it may start doing other evil things. Apparently someone has set up a trap to some spyware. I took care of the problem by killing every browser window on the screen with the Task Manager. So be careful and make sure that hyphen is in there!

Disturbing phone call from the Kerry camp?

Today at 2004 May 12 1915 EDT, I received a call from "unavailable" and answered it, so I could get off the phone list of this varmint telemarketer. It turned out to be purportedly from the John Kerry for President campaign. I hope this is not the real Kerry for President campaign doing this, for I find the technique unacceptable. I routinely vote against candidates who throw computer solicitation calls on my telephone. In this case, I can't say that I would vote against Kerry, because I feel that his opponent, Bush, needs to leave office this January, and up to now, I had been supportive of the Kerry campaign. It is quite possible that this is not from the Kerry campaign; after all, it does not end with "I am John Kerry, and I approve of this computer solicitation call". If I had heard that, I would be seriously considering a vote for Ralph Nader instead, and further, urging my Democratic and liberal friends to vote for Nader as well. But no such comment was in the call. I was given the option of 1 for contributing money, 2 for volunteering time, and 3 for neither but willing to vote for Kerry. My response was none of these; I was going to tell them I am now seriously considering voting for Nader. I tried pressing 4, and it said that it was an invalid response. Sorry, call. You are an invalid call, as far as I am concerned. I waited instead and eventually it said goodbye. I then emailed this to the Kerry campaign:

Just now, at 2004 May 12 1915, I received a computer call saying it was from your campaign. It was from an "unavailable" telephone number. It asked if I wanted to contribute, volunteer, or just simply vote for Kerry. I am in favor of Kerry for this election; in fact, I want Bush out of the White House after this year. However, this campaign tactic was unacceptable to me. It is the behavior of a telemarketer; especially disturbing to me was that it came from an unavailable number. I hope that it was not from your campaign, and that it was a telephone spammer purporting to come from your campaign. Please confirm or deny to me that it was not from your campaign. For if it was from your campaign, and I continue to receive such calls, I may very well vote for Nader instead and urge my friends to do so also.

Of course the election campaign is still early, and the Bush camp may also throw computer calls on my telephone, as may Nader. I will keep score on this and report it on this blog. Right now, it is Kerry 1, Bush 0. If Bush leads this score in November, I will certainly vote against him, as I would anyway. If Kerry leads it instead, and Nader hasn't been throwing computer calls on my telephone, I will seriously consider voting for Nader instead. I hope I don't have to do this, but campaigners need to understand that it is not OK for them to put computer calls on my telephone. I just hope it was a spammer instead.

Carly Simon again

On 2003 August 5, I posted a blog about Carly Simon, as the identity of her mystery lover in "You're So Vain" was going to be revealed for $50,000. At that time the speculaion was on Warren Beatty, Mick Jagger, Kris Kristofferson, and Cat Stevens. She has had affairs with all of these. In the song "You're So Vain", Carly says that this man was dressed in an apricot scarf and was looking around to see all the women admire him. Then she describes how he goes gavotting all over the place and how he has affairs with the wife of a close friend. In 30 years, she has never disclosed the identity of this vain man.

The question came about again recently, when a compendium album of her works came out recently, within the week, followed by a CNN story about her. The story said she grew up in difficult circumstances as the youngest child, and described her marriage and divorce to James and later, her struggle with breast cancer. During the program she gave a hint. There is an "e" in his last name. Great help that is. All four possibilities have an "e" in his last name. Then she gave another clue. There is an "a" in his name. This is beginning to sound like Jeopardy now. That does eliminate Kris Kristofferson. and probably Cat Stevens, although I don't know whether she said "last" or not. That leaves Warren Beatty and Mick Jagger. Apparently neither of these two people want to reveal who it is. Maybe he is just a figment of her imagination.

It still is the case that the song is as contradictory as "This sentence is false", saying of itself that it is about this mystery man, but indicating that the man is so vain that he thinks it is about him, indicating that it isn't, causing a contradiction. It is a good background song for mathematics talks, especially those dealing with logic and foundations, because of its antinomy. It is also a good one for astronomy talks, because she sings about an eclipse. So every once in a while I play it.

Back in 2003 I also mentioned that I wrote a song, of which some of the lyrics are at jimvb.home.mindspring.com/music2002.htm . The song refers to meeting a woman between a fire and a storm under a rainbow. I said at that time that it is about someone, and I will tell when Carly Simon tells. That still holds.

Has the Scandal Key fallen?

Who will win the Presidential Election this fall? Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University, came up with a list of 13 criteria for determining the winner of a presidential election. His method works for all elections from 1860-2000, although it does predict the popular vote winner, as Gore in 2000, instead of the electoral vote winner, and it does not work for elections before 1856. It does not work for 1856, in particular, suggesting that Fremont won that election. The reference above says that for 2004, 8 of the keys are standing for the incumbent candidate (Bush), 4 of the keys have fallen (become false), and one was shaky (the short term economy key).

Up to now that still seems to be the case. Bush clinched Key 2 when he got enough delegates to win 2/3 of the votes for the Republican nomination. He won Key 13 when Tom Edwards, possibly charismatic, gave up his quest for the Presidency. Five keys are still in play: 4, Third Party; 8, social unrest; 9, scandal; 11, foreign or military success, and 5, short-term economy. Bush seemed to have these, although Key 5 is shaky because of high gasoline prices and expectation of rising interest rates, and Key 11 is shaky because of the increasing GI deaths and violence in Iraq. But has the Scandal Key fallen?

I am talking about those pictures from Al Gharib Prison in Baghdad. They have really caused a furor, including calls for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to resign. They are really horrible. We send our troops to free the Iraqis from atrocities committed by the Saddam regime, and then we commit atrocities ourselves. If a man were to abduct a bunch of women and pile them up in stacks, put them in sexual positions, and drag them on the floor on a leash, we would say that he was a sexual predator, we would post him on web sites and we would get all flustered if such a predator were to move into our neighborhood. Yet here are female GIs doing the same to male prisoners at the prison. It seems that we have one standard for Americans and one for Iraqis. The Arab world is in uproar about it, terror attacks have become more likely, and our European allies do not respect us as much. So this is a major scandal. Will it cost Bush the scandal key?

I think it will. Compare the scandal with other scandals. The comparisons are that the Iran-Contra scandal during Reagan's administration was not a Key 9 Scandal, whereas Lewinsky was for Gore (Clinton), and Watergate was for Ford (Nixon). So how does Prison Abuse compare with these? It is worse than Iran-Contra, since abusing people is worse than bilking them out of money or giving a rebel group the money. Furthermore, there is the hypocrisy of saying that we are freeing Iraqis, and then giving them torture just like Saddam did. It is definitely worse than Lewinsky, since that was a consensual sexual dalliance, whereas what happened in the prison was sexual harassment and assault. It is even worse than Watergate, since mistreating people is worse than breaking and entering to bug a headquarters. So this would certainly qualify. But it will only if people think it will. From what I have heard from people, apparently it will. One person says that if the sides were reversed, we would be squawking about the Iraqis and demanding retribution.

It remains to be seen if this scandal will worsen to Key 9 extent, although certainly it will affect our relations with Arab regimes for years to come. But from what I have seen, I think if the key has not fallen, it will shortly. This means that Bush now has lost five keys. I still predict Bush will win but he is hanging right on the borderline; it is far more uncertain now. If Bush loses another key (most likely Key 5, economy, or Key 11, foreign success), Kerry will be our next President. And with rising gasoline prices and a worsening situation in Iraq, this could very well happen. The contest is now much closer now than it has been only a few weeks ago.

Boycott Disney

In the past two months Disney has made two severe transgressions, and for that reason, I call for a boycott of Disney. I am not going to go to any Disney movies, buy any Disney products, or go to any Disney theme park.

The first of these is that Disney is a junk mailer. I got a piece of mail from them recently, with the letters ATMG in the address. Those letters mean Advanced Toastmaster Gold, which is solely a Toastmasters term, and in fact is trademarked by Toastmasters. Apparently Disney got a hold of a list of Toastmasters and started sending out mass mail to the people on this list. This is a direct violation of Toastmasters policy, which states that lists of Toastmasters and clubs are to be used only for Toastmasters purposes. Disney Enterprises has violated this policy.

The second concerns Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, a film critical of Bush since Planeattack in 2001. I have heard that Disney will not produce the film. Thereby they have proclaimed that they do not believe in freedom of speech. Disney wants to suppress free speech, evidently. I know they are a private corporation, but movies, for instance, are produced only by corporations, and so this denies people the right to see the movies they want. I watched Moore's Bowling for Columbine, about the gunhappiness of America, and found it to be one of the best films I have ever seen. I want to see Fahrenheit 9/11 as well. That does not mean that I necessarily agree with Moore; in fact, I suspect that there is some material of questionable validity in the film. But I still want to see the film itself, and regardless of the content, I expect it to be as good as Bowling for Columbine.

For these two reasons I am boycotting Disney until it stops sending out unwanted material and until it starts producing wanted material.

Torture in Iraq and other places caused by a word

The latest thing out of Iraq is the torture of Iraqi prisoners by US military servicepeople and by civilian contractors. This has really dented America's image. The Arabs are incensed by this. We harp all over the place about sexual harassment and sexual crime, and then the Army does it to prisoners in Iraq. This country still holds 500 prisoners or so without charges in Guantanamo, and there are other places where our country is possibly mistreating prisoners. What's the cause of this? I think I know. It's a word.

Oppression of others is in our history. First the Eastern Native Americans, who were forced to march out of their territory, causing many to die. Then came the Confederates. Their cause was flawed by their practice of slavery, but that still did not justify the brutality of Sherman's March, which in some cases wiped out entire towns. Then Sherman showed his brutality again to the Native Americans, this time to the Plains tribes of Lakota and Cheyenne during the late 19th century, culminating in the Battle of Wounded Knee. There were the My Lai massacre and numerous other incidents. What justifies most of these incidents? A word.

Most of us would be appalled at these acts. Killing is forbidden in our laws and carries a heavy penalty. Forcing sex on someone, robbing them, injuring or torturing them are all serious felonies carrying long prison sentences. No one would think of doing these things except where a certain word is used. What is that word? F--k? NO.

WAR.

Union forces justified their acts by saying that it is a war, the Civil War. If it is a war, you can go ahead and kill and torture the enemy or even commit sex crimes against them. We justify it as bravery, and keep score of how many enemy fighters we have shot down. Soldiers kill enemy, and then they are praised as heroes. Now sometimes war may be justified, but these may be precious few. Certainly the events of the past three years do not qualify.

The reason why these acts are rationalized by those who do them is that they say it is a war. We hear this all the time. This nation is at war. That isn't even the case. The hunt for Al Qaeda is a police manhunt, not a war. The US action in Iraq may have been a war at first, but since then it has been an occupation, not a war. Calling these a war is what I feel has caused these wanton acts which would not be tolerated in a peaceful American community. It is time to start acting more civilized. There are major problems out there that require cooperation. Most of all, it is time to stop saying "War on Terror" and War in Iraq". Stop saying "WAR".