Sciencedebate 2008

The world is a really, really complicated contraption, replete with moving parts that can malfunction at any time. You can make a pretty good case that the United States President, along with his science and technology advisers, is in a position of trust, responsible in part for keeping that contraption going. That’s why I support this week’s call for a debate among presidential candidates on technology and science issues. The open letter to the candidates has been signed by Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve, Steven Pinker of Harvard, and other notables. I don’t begrudge the candidates their sniping at one another over minor points of religious doctrine, as for instance, the Romney-Huckabee flap about Satan’s paternity (link via Wired). But people, please, let’s have a forum for the issues that affect our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, living right here on earth.

The Green 500

Wu-Chun Feng and Kirk W. Cameron of Virginia Tech have initiated a new system of league tables for supercomputers based on energy efficiency, The Green500 List. They introduce the rankings in an article in the December, 2007 issue of Computer. The article abstract:

The performance-at-any-cost design mentality ignores supercomputers’ excessive power consumption and need for heat dissipation and will ultimately limit their performance. Without fundamental change in the design of supercomputing systems, the performance advances common over the past two decades won’t continue.

As the methodology is still new, and requires some apples-to-oranges comparisons, it’s not surprising that the listings are dominated by one vendor’s architecture. IBM’s Blue Gene takes the top 26 spots in the table, with energy consumption of 204 to 357 megaFLOPS per watt. Slot #500 comes in 2 orders of magnitude lower, at 3.65 megaFLOPS per watt.

False cognates

I am not that guy.

In my occasional ego-surfing, I have come across the following people with the same first and last name as me. If you’re looking for one of these guys, I’m not the one you’re looking for. I have not met any of them, and I’m sure that each one is a fine person in his own right. He’s just not me.

There’s no problem, no one is stalking me. I just like setting the record straight. Although, in truth, this pileup of David Gorslines will raise all sorts of heck with the primitive social/semantic web crawlers out there.

Day by day

Louis Menand reviews recently published diaries, reviews the rationales behind keeping a diary, and makes a distinction, in passing:

“Never discriminate, never omit” is one of the unstated rules of diary-keeping. The rule is perverse, because all writing is about control, and writing a diary is a way to control the day—to have, as it were, the last word. But diaries are composed under the fiction that the day is in control, that you are simply a passive recorder of circumstance, and so everything has to go in whether it mattered or not—as though deciding when it didn’t were somehow not your business. In a diary, the trivial and inconsequential—the “woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head” pieces—are not trivial and inconsequential at all; they are defining features of the genre. If it doesn’t contain a lot of dross, it’s not a diary. It’s something else—a journal, or a writer’s notebook, or a blog (blather is not the same as dross).

Time to go

I like to say that the D.C. metro area, up out of the floodplain at least, is optimal for avoiding natural disasters: hurricanes and tornadoes are infrequent, earthquakes almost nonexistent, heat, cold, and water are in moderation. Of course there’s that whole being a national capital and being a political target. Ah, well.

So I’ve been thinking again about disaster planning, sparked by Leta’s post and the unpleasantnesses in arid California this fall. We have a plan to drive west, over the mountains, to her father’s place. If the threat is coming from the west, or we don’t have time to meet up… well, we haven’t worked that one out. I guess we would take Alberta the Explorer, ’cause there’s room to sleep in the back if need be—unless access to fuel would be a problem.

I have a pretty good checklist for pulling things out of the house that we would need. It’s organized by room, so I’m not running up and downstairs a lot, and it’s got a rough priority ordering (the food and supplies bins and my passport go first, my briefcase and the carrier of hand tools are optional). And I’ve got some notes about things that would be good to pick up one of these days: two-way radios, a hand-cranked battery charger, fluorescent spray paint (this one suggested by the experience of Katrina). Fortunately I’m not dependent on medications that have to be kept cool. So I think I’m equipped to load up the car and be on the road with fifteen minutes’ notice.

And I wondered what I would take if I had one more trip that I could make back into the house. Nonessentials, but things I would want with me if the place was pancaked. And I settled on this short list:

  • the 20-odd books that are on my essential reading list; these are the ones that I would re-read multiple times if nothing else were available;
  • something to hang on the wall: a small box construction by Graceann Warn with a stylized painting of a blackbird;
  • a pot with one of the cuttings from a dracena that I’ve been growing for 20 years; Jenny hacked off a piece from a plant in the office back when I got my first apartment alone in Reston and gave it to me with a “here, you need a plant for your new place;” I stuck it in water and it rooted.

Everything else can be replaced. Like Roma says in Glengarry Glen Ross, “All it is is things that happen to you.”

Rogers Peet

Rogers Peet Co.I was rereading J.D. Salinger’s “Hapworth 16, 1924,” which Sally had graciously printed from her copy of the New Yorker archives (19 June 1965), and there on page 111 was further evidence of Sarah and Adelaide’s favorite haberdasher. Jeez Louise, if their idea of fashion on the mid-1960s was the “Eton-style cap of Arnel triacetate and cotton blend in Oxford weave” (the ugly helmet on the right), they deserved to go out of business.

No hangers

Storing baseballs in a humidor may have reduced the number of home runs in Coors Field, home of the Colorado Rockies, but not for the conventionally-assumed reason, argue Edmund Meyer and John Bohn of the University of Colorado at Boulder in a pre-print article. The soggier balls would actually travel farther; but this effect is overmatched by the enhanced grippiness of the balls’ surfaces, which would give the edge to pitchers.

More wheat and birds

The Birding Community E-Bulletin points to a press release by Ducks Unlimited Canada (DUC) that reports evidence of nesting activity by Long-billed Curlews (Numenius americanus) in fields of winter wheat.

Winter wheat acres have been increasing with continued success in Prairie Canada. Reduced pesticide input costs, the ability to spread the workload and improved marketing opportunities are factors in the crop’s expansion. These factors have contributed toward winter wheat providing superior financial returns compared to spring wheat alternatives. Producers involved in a recent DUC winter wheat program made $27/ac more on winter wheat than they did on spring wheat. The crop is of specific interest to DUC since it is seeded in the fall and remains generally undisturbed through the following growing season when most birds are nesting. It also provides a more attractive nesting habitat for ducks than spring-seeded cropland.

The Bulletin comments:

When the nesting-season starts for many species, winter wheat has already had a head start growing, and is ready to provide nesting cover for grassland birds early in the season. By the time winter wheat harvest begins, in mid-July in the Dakotas, for example, young birds nesting in the wheat fields are either developed enough to avoid harvest combines, or else have already fledged from the fields. In contrast, alfalfa, which reaches harvest height in May, is typically cut within the first 10 days of June – a dismal predicament for nesting birds and young in areas like the Dakotas….

U.S. farmers annually plant about 40 million acres in winter wheat. Across Canada, more than 1.2 million acres of winter wheat is grown. Is this great for birds? No, it’s a monoculture. Nevertheless, it is a somewhat attractive crop , and one that usually reaches a suitable height at the right time of year to benefit breeding birds. It is a crop that won’t be harvested until most nesting birds safely fledged their young. Winter wheat will never be a substitute for idled grassland, like CRP (Conservation Reserve Program) land, but if cropland goes into a rotation with winter wheat, there may actually be some benefits for certain ground-nesting birds. (It should also be noted that farmers usually don’t plant winter wheat in the same field in consecutive years.)

304 and counting

David Pogue calls the editors of Consumer Reports on the carpet for the factitious practice of citing search result hit counts to make a point.

“A Yahoo search for ‘cheap Gucci handbags’ returned almost 1 million results,” says an article about fake goods.
Dudes, let’s get this straight: you’ll get a staggering number of hits from ANY Internet search at all!

On Google, “chicken armadillo” gets 595,000 hits. “Banana carburetor” gets 132,000 hits. “Liquefy purple warthogs” is just about the most ridiculous improbable phrase I could come up with, and even that one gets 303 results, for crying out loud.

Philanthropic graffiti

Charles Isherwood visits the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s newly-opened Harman Hall and is bemused by the tagging of every possible amenity in the place with the name of a corporate benefactor. For pity’s sake, the elevators and the coat check room have an underwriter.

Whatever happened to Anonymous?

…what became of those wealthy philanthropists who used to support arts organizations and other not-for-profit and charitable institutions without requiring that their names be slapped somewhere — anywhere, it sometimes seems — on a building?

He then turns to a favorable development at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A group of anonymous donors contributed $85 million so that the business school would not bear a brand name. At least for the next 20 years.

Meanwhile, since I was graduated in 1977, my alma mater has sold the naming rights to its liberal arts, engineering, medical, and business schools like a cash-strapped city scrounging for ways to pay for its new baseball stadium.

Kit Marlowe

Rorschach Theatre turns in a gritty, muscular production of David Grimm’s tale of political intrigue and misplaced loyalty. The play elaborates upon the speculation that Christopher Marlowe, Elizabethan playwright renowned in his own time but fated to be eclipsed in posterity by William Shakespeare, was a secret agent to the Queen, acting under orders from Sir Francis Walsingham. Grimm offers an explanation for Marlowe’s murder, namely that it was an assassination entailed by the plotting of Protestant against Catholic in the late sixteenth century. Grimm’s script, set in modern English and by turns bawdy, fantastical, and contemplative, combines prose passages with sections set in verse (there’s nothing quite like a heroic couplet to let you know that a scene is over).

Adam Jonas Segaller attacks the title role with naked gusto, and shows us an interesting selection of vocal timbres. He leads a foursquare supporting cast of nine men. The rough-hewn two-level set by Eric Grims has the right feeling of precarious doom, but is perhaps not well matched with the various fluids that are spilled onstage in the course of the evening. The rich yet subtle sound design is by Veronica Lancaster. Costumes by Emily Dere are generally suggestive rather than in-period, maybe boots and a close-fitting jacket, but the on-a-budget approach works, and doesn’t get in the way of the swordplay (of two kinds).

  • Kit Marlowe, by David Grimm, directed by Jessie R. Gallogly, Rorschach Theatre, Washington

But that’s just me

Arnold Zwickly produces two rants after my own heart. First:

Why are people so incompetent at finding e-addresses and web addresses? The hypothesis I’ve developed is that the InterWeb—the conglomeration of the Internet and the World Wide Web—makes people lazy and stupid. Here’s this amazing resource, which allows people to track down all sorts of arcane information within (at most) minutes, yet the users have come to expect that sites will be designed to offer them a single-click route to whatever they want. That’s just lazy. And they seem to have lost the ability to search things out for themselves. The InterWeb has made them stupid.

But, in a subsequent parenthesis, he backs off a bit. Give ’em hell, Arnold! Contrariwise, but making the same point: earlier this week I watched a training video (basically a spoken narration over screenshots of a developer writing code) that involved a side trip to a popular download site. We watched the coder-narrator type the name of the download site into a search box and then click through the search results. Oy vey! Bookmarks and URLs are your friends, people!

Next, Zwickly talks more moderately about the bleed-through of technical language into general use, and the repurposing of common words like normal and mass for technical purposes. He uses a favorite bête noire of mine as an example:

The fact is that ordinary language is pressed into service in a number of ways to provide technical vocabulary, which then has a very specialized meaning in certain contexts, and at the same time technical vocabulary “leaks out” into ordinary language. People get the general drift of the technical vocabulary, but (usually not knowing either the etymology OR the context of its technical use) do their best to interpret what they hear.

And they get a lot of it wrong, from the point of view of people in the technical fields. Epicenter obviously refers to a location (of an earthquake)—to, in some sense, the central point where the earthquake took place. Besides center, there’s an extra element epi-, which clearly must contribute something. So the epi- adds extra stuff, probably something emphatic: the epicenter is, people reason, the EXACT center. (Technically, it’s the location on the earth’s surface OVER the place where the earthquake event happened, underground.) Now, getting all enraged about the common-language use of epicenter for the central point of an event—it seems to be standard now—is just as silly as getting all enraged about the common-language use of vegetables to refer to tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, eggplants, etc., all of which are technically fruits in one scheme of biological terminology.

I take his point, that it’s a question of degree. I don’t get bent about the proper use of fruit the way my agronomist ex probably does, but I haven’t given up on epicenter yet. When epi- changes its meaning from “upon” to “exactly,” something is lost: the ability to make sense of a related word like epidermis (“the layer above the dermis”) or epidemic (“a scourge upon the people”).

Tom Stoppard’s Henry says in Scene 5 of The Real Thing:

[Words are] innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so that if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more…. [Words] deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.

Current Nobody

Melissa James Gibson’s modern-dress retelling of the Odyssey puts the emphasis on the war at home and leaves the violence offstage. In a gender reversal, it’s house husband Od who stays at home with baby daughter Tel while his photojournalist Pen (Christina Kirk) trots off to cover the war in Troy and takes 20 years to return home. Jesse Lenat does good work in the opening scene, sliding from supportive to slouch as the years drag on and it appears his wife is lost forever—the man can keen! Pen’s travels through the Mediterranean are digested into a slide show for a press conference, the archaic place names of her narration clanging incongruously. Back at home, Od’s “suitors” are an indie documentary film crew who come to film the reunion and seriously overstay their welcome. There’s perhaps a message about the corrupting influence of the camera’s eye in here somewhere, but it’s not well-developed. An understated Michael Willis as Bill the Delivery Guy (and doorman) does his best not to steal the show (“Less is more, Tel,” he deadpans). The one-act evening closes with a nice moment between Od and Tel, now a young women (Casie Platt) who leaves to pursue her own destiny.

  • Current Nobody, by Melissa James Gibson, directed by Daniel Aukin, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Thinking about choices

Wyatt Mason reviews John Updike’s collection of book reviews and other essays, Due Considerations, for the December, 2007 number of Harper’s (I’m not sure how long this article will live outside the paywall):

Without coyness, Updike renders a stern judgment [a review of J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey] based on telling quotation. He builds toward his findings in plain sight, earning him an authority that is based on his presentation of a plausible case. Rather than caring about books per se, which Heidi Julavits described as the central requirement for a book reviewer, Updike may be seen here caring about doing his job. The job in this case demanded that he point out flaws in the work of a fellow fiction writer and corroborate those points with evidence.

Although some readers are uneasy, a priori, with negativity, Salinger’s reputation has weathered Updike’s high-profile critique for a very simple reason: a text is not exhausted by a work of criticism, only informed by it. We leave Updike’s review thinking not about negativity, nor about Updike, but thinking, as good criticism makes us, about a writer’s choices. That we ultimately do or do not agree with Updike’s assessment is of no importance. That the assessment is clear and well-founded allows us to engage a point of view with which we can also, if we are so disposed, argue privately.