Born By Bits

over-reaction

2009-05-09T05:30:00.002-05:00

In the wake of March's school shooting in Winnenden, Germany, the government is considering outlawing paintball and laser tag on the principle that participants become desensitized to shooting people. Perhaps the hypothesis has some merit, but from my point of view over here in the good ol' U. S. of A., it seems ridiculous. Can you imagine trying to pass this legislation here? You'd be laughed out of Congress.

Happy Holidays

2008-12-21T14:25:00.003-06:00

Compared to recent years, this one was pretty dull. We're still living in West Virginia, in a bungalow rented from the college where I work. I'm still teaching physics to premeds, education majors and engineering technology students. Josh is still working from home, contributing to Hardball Times on a weekly basis, as well as their annual. He's also been picking up hours working for Trackman, a Danish company specializing in golf analysis machines. The company is trying to port their product to baseball, but being Danish, they know very little about baseball, so they've brought Josh on board.

Our kittens have grown. Olive is a hefty 11 1/2 pounds and Celie--who we call "little one" and "baby-girl" because of her small size--is actually a hefty 9 pounds. No matter how big she gets, though, Celie will undoubtedly always be the little sister. She behaves just like a little sister, following Olive around and irritating her. She eats when Olive eats, and out of the same bowl (even though there are two), when Olive sleeps Celie will often bat at her trying to get her to play, and whatever toy Olive has is unfailingly the one that is most interesting to Celie.

Olive likes the outside. In the summer, we'd leave the porch door cracked most of the day, and she'd divide her time between exploring outside and sleeping on our bed. (When I say "our" bed, I mean it belongs to all four of us--Celie and Olive clearly think that they have as much right to it as Josh and I do.) Being confined for the winter isn't making Olive happy at all.

Celie, much like a human 15-month-old, has begun to learn to speak. For her first year she was pretty much mute. Even when she opened her mouth and looked like she was trying to make noise, she didn't. Since a post-natal upper respiratory infection is the suspected culprit of her scarred left eye, we wondered if her vocal chords were damaged. Then she just seemed to figure it out. All of a sudden, when she opens her mouth, sound tends to come out. It's only soft, high-pitched mews like a newborn kitten, but it's cute.

With Josh working in baseball, summer is his busy time, and of course the school year is my busy time, so we don't find a lot of time to get away. We spent a weekend in Cleveland at the expense of the Indians, who were interviewing Josh for a job. I had been to Cleveland before, visiting my sister who was doing an REU at Case Western University, and I liked it just as much (if not more) this time around. I think Cleveland would be a great place to live, but unfortunately, the Indians decided "to go in a different direction."

We spent a couple days at my aunt and uncle's in Pennsylvania. My parents were staying with them, so we made the (relatively) short trip to make it a family gathering. It was also the first time I met my cousin's son. I was really impressed with how responsible a parent my cousin seems to be.

We also made a "working" trip to Washington D.C. and stayed with my sister Christine. The "working" part of the trip was meeting up with some of Josh's internet baseball buddies at the Nationals game. We saw a lot of baseball this summer. As fun as it was, Josh was always kind of in "work" mode, which seems to have paid off with some notoriety.

I was able to traipse after Josh because I wasn't teaching over the summer. I spent a lot of time at the computer--a little bit at work, a lot at play--and in the garden. Gardening here has been a real challenge. With permission from our landlord, we began digging, and found a mixture of rock, clay and broken glass. Buckets of broken glass. Also a yo-yo, the stiletto heel off a woman's shoe, and a hydraulic screen door closer, among other things. Somebody clearly kept a trash heap out there.

After digging out as much trash and clay as we could, we began to replace it with organic matter. Kilos and kilos of organic matter. And unlike our garden at Fermilab, where the piles of horse manure were replenished for free, this was a lot of purchasing bags and hauling them from the home store. When we finally got a mix resembling soil, we planted. Watering, though, was a problem, as it all tended to just run down the hill, taking our expensive soil with it. We did have some successes, though, particularly with the flowers. I repeat the gardener's mantra, "it will be better next year." And with professional grow lights my husband got me for my birthday, I'm sure it will be.

Like I said, nothing too exciting for us this year. Just daily life. But daily life has been good, and we're happy. We hope that this holiday season and new year find you happy and healthy as well.

welcome to ... 1985?

2008-07-31T07:09:00.002-05:00

In 1985, the intrepid young (15-18 years old!) geeks at "Pacific Tech" built a megawatt chemical laser that "could vaporize a human target from space" in the cult classic Real Genius. If you've never seen the film, you're truly missing out. It was back when Val Kilmer could actually act.

Well, it seems that 22 years later, reality has finally caught up with fantasy. The US Air Force is currently testing the "Airborne Laser", a megawatt chemical laser mounted in a Boeing 747, the ostensible purpose of which is to intercept and destroy ICBMs. Even though the system isn't designed to eliminate military dictators and foreign oil barons as they take their morning coffee on the veranda (or so we're told), the similarities are striking.

how's it growing?

2008-07-14T06:47:00.011-05:00

If you've been following along this summer, you may have been surprised that I haven't talked more about my garden. I do have a garden--of sorts. I was given permission to plant "as long as it doesn't interfere with the guys coming to do landscaping". I was going to make a snide remark about the frequency and quality of the "landscapers'" visits, but figured it wouldn't help matters.

First, I defined and expanded the flower beds next to the side porch. I planted dahlia tubers and dwarf sunflowers, calendula, and nasturtium from seed. Later on I added some gerbera daisies I bought at Lowes, but even though they're now beginning a post-transplant bloom, I don't really feel like I've "grown" them, since they came to me fairly mature.

Most of the dahlias have grown up quite nicely, and one of the "neon splendor" plants is opening its first bloom. The nasturtium have thrown a couple of blooms, and the sunflowers and calendula are bushy and green, even though they're short and bloomless.

I've also carved out a nice flower bed in the corner of the yard.The centerpiece is another dahlia, "nick's pick". The bushy plants in front are escholzia--california poppy. Behind that are more calendula. The coneflowers are another pick-up from Lowe's, but these I feel a little more attached to because I bought them from the "reduced for quick sale" bin, and though they were cheap, they weren't particularly healthy. On the left there are some lavender plants, also purchased. The purple stuff on the right is russian sage. I was at Lowe's and they had this display where they had different rows of plants and it was really clear which plants the bees liked. I'm not a huge fan of the plants (though I think they'd look cool blooming en masse) but the bees are, so I picked up a few. We want to do everything we can to encourage the reproduction of bees. (In case you haven't heard, the bee population in the US--and increasingly in the rest of the world--is collapsing.) The rug over the fence is the neighbor lady's. For some reason she leaves it there all summer and then brings it in for the winter. I talked to her about it, and she doesn't mind if it gets wet when I water (which makes sense since she leaves it out in all kinds of rain).

Since we have the chain-link fence along the sunny sides of the property, I decided to plant some climbers. I planted peas and pole beans, cucumbers and squash. The peas are doing great. They've reached the top of the fence and we've been eating them for about a week. I was actually a little surprised about how well they were doing, as I started them kind of late, and everybody knows they're a cool-weather crop. But they seem to not mind that they're on the sunny north slope. Which is why it was (is) all the more perplexing that the pole beans, planted right next to the peas, did so poorly. Beans love sun, don't they? The beans started out gangbusters, green and vigorous, but by the time they got their second set of leaves, they were showing signs of sun stress, and many died. A second planting exhibited the same progression. When the cucumbers and squash started to exhibit the same symptoms, I panicked. Not knowing what to do, I began intensive watering--even though the clay-laden soil seemed quite moist--and things seemed to stabilize. I still lost my entire first planting of squash, and about 40% of the cucumbers, but I'm hoping that vigilant watering will be the answer. I'm optimistic; enough so that I've completed a third planting of beans.

In addition to the climbers, I've planted tomatoes and peppers. The Seed Savers' Exchange out of Iowa has such a variety of heirloom tomatoes and peppers that I like to start them from seed. Since my husband doesn't like tomatoes, I decided to stick to two varieties, one for eating and one for canning. I also ordered some pepper seeds. I started them all indoors, with very poor results. I think a 20% success rate might be an over-estimate. So I supplemented my planting with some immature plants from the nursery. As the picture shows, I haven't had much success keeping them alive either. This roma plant is about a quarter the size it was when I bought it!

Overall, I've had mixed results. Most of the flowers (that is, the ones that grew--the celosia, amaranth, strawflower, and false sunflower were total busts, either never emerging or dying off before setting true leaves) seem to be doing well, and most of the vegetables are struggling. Maybe the flowers can feel my love. Whatever it is, I'm more than a little worried about leaving everything to itself for a week. So, I'm going to leave the soaker hose on at a trickle and hope for the best.

no permit required

2008-07-13T15:10:00.004-05:00

We live in a house rented from the college. While it's a spacious little bungalow, it's been around for a while and needs more than it's fair share of repairs. For example, in the picture I posted in the fall, you can see where chunks of concrete have fallen out of the front steps. The winter did us no favors, and in the spring I asked maintenance to come patch up some holes. They decided it was unpatchable (which was really the right decision, since we were losing concrete in chunks the size of basketballs) and decided to replace it. Since the house is owned by the state, that meant putting out for bids, etc.

When the bid came back at half the value of the house, they went to plan B and built us a deck. They did a generally good job. My biggest complaint is that they put the railing spindles on upside down (with the points up, rising over the railing) such that it seems like we're living in a piked fortress. Also, it's quite big--the main part is about 15' x 20'--but as you can see from the pictures below, when you're coming up the drive, all you can see is deck, which also means that when someone comes up the drive, we can't see them from the window. The best part about the deck is that they wrapped it around the side of the house and connected it to our side porch. We use that side porch a lot, since it's covered and cool, and it's nice that they're all connected.

It took them about two weeks to do it--from coming in with the bulldozer to putting on the finishing touches--and it was all done without a single building permit.

monsoon season

2008-07-12T14:00:00.002-05:00

In the last month, we've had one day without rain. You'd think that as a gardener, I would be happy to get so much water. Really it's a problem, and not just because the rain keeps me inside and breeds bugs. As you can hopefully see from the crappy video (it was taken with our camera, so it's better than I might have expected) water just washes away, taking the dirt with it. Those brown streaks are muddy currents in the river that is our street. I still have to water constantly, and when I say constantly, I mean about eight out of every 24 hours. We're going away this week and are planning on simply leaving the water on. We've got a soaker hose, and so all of that water goes directly into the ground, but after a while it comes running out the side of the mountain and our plants wilt. It's been tough being a gardener here, but hopefully when we get back from our trip this week, the dahlia will have begun to bloom. Then I'll be happier.

unrecognizable

2008-07-11T15:22:00.000-05:00

After a week of speculation, Chris Mortensen has reported that Brett Favre has asked the Packers to release him. While the announcement has seemed to have put a damper on the yammering of pundits, the fact that he's asked to be released--not simply moved back to the active roster--has started a whole new kind of speculation in our house: if he's not going to be a Packer, what might he be?

So, for shits and giggles and because I couldn't find one already on the web, I photoshopped a Vikings uniform onto Brett. It doesn't really look like him anymore, does it?

dilemma

2008-07-07T06:47:00.002-05:00

I got an email from an old friend this morning, announcing the birth of her baby. Congratulations, Linnea and Curtis, on the arrival of little Rowan. In her email there was a link to the i'm Initiative. I had never heard of it (like I've said before, I can be pretty out of it as far as web trends go) and was interested enough to follow the link.

The basic idea is that when you IM or email, a donation gets made to charity. The charities are good ones, ones I'd consider writing out a check to. In fact, one of them is the Red Cross, to which I made a donation just this weekend. The catch is, this initiative is sponsored by Microsoft, and you have to use their products to participate.

Now, I've never used Messenger or Hotmail, but if Microsoft's other products are anything to go by, I expect they're pretty crappy. So I guess if you can't get people to use your product based on its merits, develop a value-added scheme that plays on peoples' desire to be benevolent.

Microsoft certainly isn't the first one to play this game. Walk through a grocery store during May, and the aisles are packed with pink packages advertising that proceeds will go to Susan G. Komen for the Cure (incidentally, this is one of the charities supported by the Microsoft initiative). The difference I see is that the pink packages exclusively dress name-brand products, which are usually a little better quality than their store-brand counterparts, but also more expensive. So, if you're a store-brand shopper, maybe each May you upgrade to the name brand and soothe your conscience. You capitulate to the value-added scheme, and spend an extra 20 cents on that can of tuna, but what you get is higher quality tuna AND the "added value" of a penny going to charity.

On the other hand, Microsoft's products are free to the user. So in my original decision to NOT use these products, I wasn't balancing cost and quality, but making a selection among available products based solely on their merits. To switch to the Microsoft products would be to sacrifice product quality in the interest of supporting the initiative, and the "added value" isn't really "added" at all, but is merely a feature of the product that allows it to now be competitive with whatever alternate product I had been using.

I will concede that for people already using the software, the initiative is probably a bonus. For me, the idea that for every ten emails I send, half a cent gets donated to charity isn't enough to make up for the evil Microsoft has perpetrated on the world. (Okay, maybe not evil, but have you tried to use Vista? Or open one of Microsoft's "OpenXML" file formats with something other than Office?)

live donor

2008-07-06T09:01:00.002-05:00

My husband is very proud of his history as a blood donor. He was a regular donor in college, passing the gallon mark in his early twenties. He fell out of the habit for a while, but when we lived in St. Cloud, he picked up again, and even became a volunteer at the local Red Cross donation center. It made me feel guilty that I'd never donated, but because he went to the center every week, I didn't really keep tabs on when he donated, so the guilt didn't hit me hard enough to do anything about it.

When we moved to Bluefield, Josh was disappointed to learn there wasn't a local donation center. So in the spring, when a drive was being held at my school, he was ready to donate. I decided it was finally time for me to "man up" and donate. As I waited in chairs, I joked about getting off the hook by having low iron. They poked me and I "just passed" the cut; I wasn't sure if I was glad or not. The techs had a heck of a time getting a vein, and when they did it was such a flaky insert that the tech had to stand there and hold the needle in my arm to maintain a slow dribble into the bag. Half a pint or so into the donation, the needle site clotted, and they stopped the procedure. When I asked they confirmed that my partial donation would be discarded.

It was disheartening, to go through all of that--especially the bad poke, and them wiggling the needle around in my arm trying to get the flow started--just to have my efforts washed down the drain. (Well, they probably incinerated the blood, but you get my point.) So when they called to let us know that there was another drive in our area, I was a little wary. I decided that I should give it another shot, but that if it went badly a second time, then I would be off the hook in the future. Too bad I didn't clarify to myself what "badly" meant.

Things started off much better--I had some red meat the day before so my iron came out fine. Even though the same techs that bungled my first donation were present, the tech that placed my needle did great, and I was bleeding like a rock star. I had finished the actual donation and the tech was taking test vials when I started to feel woozy. I said, "I'm starting to feel a little dizzy," expecting--well, I don't know what, but not the reaction I got. She called for help and pretty soon every tech in the room was gathered around, lowering my head, raising my feet, feeding me sugar, having me breathe into a bag. It worked--I felt much better very quickly, and while this was going on my tech finished taking the samples, so this time around my donation didn't go into the dustbin (YAY!), but I was horribly embarrassed. Everybody was fawning all over me, while four or five other people were quietly, successfully giving their pint.

So what's my verdict? Did this donation go "badly"? Will I try to donate again? Well, this is not the first time I've gone ill from having blood taken. I was once in a doctor's office having samples taken for testing--a much smaller amount than a pint--and went dizzy. (BTW, their response to my sickness--smelling salts--was much less pleasant and much less effective than the techs' at the donation site. Go Red Cross!) So my response was not unprecedented, and I'm wondering if it will be persistent. Am I just the kind of person that gets woozy after bleeding a pint or so? (I'm kind of confused by this, as I'm a big girl and so a pint is a smaller percent of my total blood volume than it is for lots of people.) If I am, does that mean I should stay away from donating, or is a pint of blood (which will "save 3 adults or 5 babies") worth the complications--both to me and the techs? I mean, would the techs rather have me stay home, or come anyway, fully understanding that I will probably get sick and need extra attention? How much trouble is a pint of blood worth?

I don't know the answers. I guess though that I've got 8 weeks to think about it.

how paternalistic

2008-07-04T07:07:00.002-05:00

Having spent my entire life in the upper mid-west, I knew that moving to West Virginia would be a cultural shift. Food, speech, tempo, I expected all these things to differ from what I was used to. One thing I didn't anticipate was differences in medical treatment. Whereas I had been used to collaborative treatment: my doctor would give me as much information as possible, and then I would make a decision, here the attitude is very much "Doctor knows best," which leads to the assumption that "Doctor's time is more valuable."

When choosing an internist, I carefully examined the profiles of many of the area doctors. I chose a female, educated at Michigan State. Yet rather than tell me what my cholesterol and blood pressure values were, explaining what was normal, and then suggesting a course of treatment, she simply handed me a couple of scrips. When I had the audacity to ask what the numbers were, she mumbled some numbers and told me to take the medicine. Never mind that previous to that day, I had never had a high blood pressure reading in my life. Never mind that I might want to try alternative means, like reduced sodium intake, to control it. When I went back and my blood pressure was normal, she was very pleased--until she learned I hadn't taken the medication. She seemed quite offended that I didn't blindly follow her direction, and more than a little put out that it seemed I had been right.

Around here it is clear that the patient's time is worthless. They don't schedule appointments, they GIVE you appointments. Yesterday I was at the doctor and he wanted to do a follow-up in six months. I was paying my bill and the receptionist handed me a card with the day and time of my next appointment. No, "What will work for you?" or even, "Will this work for you?" Just, "This is when we are available, so it's what you'll take."

Even then, the chances that he'll actually be available are slim. More than once I've gotten letters in the mail saying "The doctor can't make your appointment. Come this other day instead." Again, no concern that it might not work for me. And there's the chance that when you show up for your appointment the doctor won't even be there. Yesterday, I had a noon appointment, and when I got to the clinic, they weren't even open. No doctor, no support staff, doors locked up. By the time someone finally showed up at 12:30, there were eight of us waiting--all with 12:00 appointments. I got in quite quickly (this being a relative term), but by the time I got out at 1:30, some of the people that were there with me at noon hadn't yet been moved to an exam room, much less seen by the doctor. The waiting room was jammed full--every seat was taken and 4 or 5 people were standing, and that's not even counting the guy laid out on the medical stretcher.

The previous time I had been to see this doctor (I'll call him Dr. V), it had been nearly as bad: I waited in the lobby for an hour past my appointment, growing increasingly angry as it became clear that the doctor was interviewing for a receptionist, but instead of making appointments for the candidates, he had told them to "stop by around..." They were taken to see the doctor quite quickly, even though they had no appointment. When I confronted Dr. V. about being made to wait, explaining to him that I, too, have an advanced degree, and my time was at least on par with his in value, he simply said, "Well, we do better than a lot of places around here." Even if it were true (and I'm not convinced it is, because even though I've only been here a year, I've seen quite a few doctors and he has been hands-down the worst), since when is being better than the worst acceptable?

I will not be going back to see Dr. V., and if I can find someone better than my internist, I will drop her too. The question is, can I find someone better than her? She was at least educated in the upper-mid-west. I can only imagine what someone raised and educated around here would be like. (Dr. V. doesn't give a hint, as he grew up in India and was educated in New Jersey--plus, he's one of those guys that's an ass no matter what culture he lives in.)

I would have never thought of that

2008-06-25T06:27:00.002-05:00

Fashion is an industry that suffers from history: within the parameters of producing clothing, pretty much everything has been done before. Sure, designers can create stunning one-off gowns that have more sequins or a puffier skirt or a lower-cut bodice. They can spice up their runway shows by trading traditional fabrics for carbon fiber, recycled rubber, decommissioned dollars and nanotubes. But it's virtually impossible to be truly innovative in a way that filters down to the racks of JCPenney and Wal-mart and into everyman's everyday wardrobe.

Architecture, I think, suffers from much the same problem. Though advances in engineering and materials science do have a continuing effect on how buildings are built, we have general expectations about how a building should function, and there are only so many different facades you can put on a box with floors and windows. You can arrange the windows to let in more natural light, or arrange the rooms so the building is more energy efficient, but it's difficult to come up with a genuinely new concept in architecture. But some do. Like David Fischer, who has designed a morphing skyscraper to be built in Dubai. Innovative? Yes. Technological marvel? Hell yeah. Will it work? I can only remember that the first year of Miller Park was plagued with problems opening and closing the 12000 ton roof. I can only imagine what will happen when they try to independently rotate 80 floors (on wind turbine power). But, the Space Needle has been rotating for years, so maybe they can do it (and maybe this idea isn't as innovative as I had led you to believe).

an orangutan for Celie

2008-06-21T08:50:00.005-05:00

I had always thought orangutans were horribly ugly creatures--until I saw Growing Up Orangutan on Animal Planet. Most infant primates are cute, but I really fell in love with these buggers.

I began to joke about how I wanted a baby orangutan as a pet. And when Olive started to mellow out and leave Celie without a playmate, Josh began to joke about getting Celie a playful little baby orangutan.

We were out shopping, and I came across a little stuffed cat toy. It was marked "monkey", but it's clearly a great ape as it has no tail. Its round head and protruding lips and ears lead me to believe it is an orangutan. I can't tell the difference between Bornean and Sumatran orangs, and I don't see anything in the toy to distinguish either, so we're just going to go with the genus. (See the table below for images of the seven living species of great apes.)

So now Celie has an orangutan. I've named her Mei Mei. "Mei" because that's the only vocalization Celie can make and "mei" again because many of the orangutans at the Nyaru Menteng Rehabilitation Center have double names: Cha Cha, Chen Chen, and Oyoy, to name the ones that have appeared on Orangutan Island.

Species	Image	Where to send your money to help.
Human, Homo sapiens sapiens		UNICEF
Bornean Orangutan, Pongo pygmaeus		Bornean Orangutan Survival International
Sumatran Orangutan, Pongo abelii		Sumatran Orangutan Society
Western Gorilla, Gorilla gorilla		World Wildlife Fund
Eastern Gorilla, Gorilla beringei		World Wildlife Fund
Common Chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes		The Jane Goodall Institute
Bonobo, Pan paniscus		Bonobo Conservation Initiative

great things about my dad

2008-06-15T05:48:00.002-05:00

It's Father's Day, and even though I made it clear yesterday that it's not my favorite celebration, I have a great dad and I want to spend this day honoring him. So, some great things about my dad, in no particular order.

He loves me.
He's smart.
He loves me even though I'm a godless liberal.
He considers user's manuals "leisure reading."
He has a habit of watching the local evening news.
He loves my husband (I think).
He devotedly cares for his aging mother.
He loves and respects my mother
He knows the price of scrap steel.
He can fix lots of different kinds of stuff.
He asks me about my cats, even though he doesn't really understand my attachment to them.
He's a "lifer" on the volunteer fire department.
He's got a deeply receded hairline, but you'd never know it because his comb-forward is thick and bushy.
He drinks Miller High Life: "A good beer at an honest price."
He doesn't own a gun.
When he grows them himself, he calls tomatoes "tamaters".
Even though he's allergic, he pets the shop cat.
On Wednesdays he treats the staff with burger night at the American Legion restaurant.
He's scrupulous.

"Remember Your Responsibilities" Day

2008-06-14T06:30:00.004-05:00

Father's Day is tomorrow, and while I love my Dad, the whole concept of Father's Day--and Mother's Day too, kind of bothers me.

No doubt about it, parenting is hard work. I can barely handle being responsible for the lives of two felines, so I can't imagine the stress involved with being entirely responsible for another person. But here's the deal: there's no "Dog Keeper's Day" or "Cat Keeper's Day", not only because dogs and cats don't have a lot of disposable income to spend at "Keeper's Day" sales, but because pets are considered a lifestyle choice. But in this day and age, kids are a lifestyle choice as well.

Some might argue that we don't really need people to raise dogs and cats, but we need people to raise children. Once the child exists, it certainly needs caring for, but it's also true that once a cat or dog exists, society would prefer that they're adopted, rather than running around the streets. But while humans make a conscious choice to reproduce--there are few humans of reproductive age that don't understand where babies come from--dogs and cats are following a biological impulse that they don't have the cognitive resources to override.

Others argue that society does indeed need children to support aging generations, and that somebody must produce these children, positing parenthood as an altruistic endeavor. There is no doubt that reduced reproduction rates wreak havoc on the economies of industrialized societies. Japan, Italy and Australia (to name three off the top of my head) are all facing severe economic problems due to declining birth rates. Yet instead of opening up their labor market to foreign workers and offering incentives like expedited citizenship, these countries incentivize reproduction.

The irony of the situation is that measures like this mortgage the future of these very children in order to support today's economies: the child that is born to support today's economy without a thought as to what that child's future will bring is an economic product not unlike livestock or grain. And we aren't thinking ahead. The planet can't support the ~6.5 billion people alive today, much less more. In Paul Simon's words, "the planet groans/ every time it registers/ another birth."

The "altruistic endeavor" of parenthood is never that. In industrialized societies, it's about making one's self happy--by having a plaything, a miniature self, a fashion accessory. This statement is not meant to minimize the love that parents feel for their children, nor the value of the child as a person. But you ask people why they had children, and they never talk about the child*, they talk how they imagined it would effect their lives. Either that, or they admit that they didn't think about it at all, which is somehow worse. Just as ignorance of the law can't be claimed as a defense, "I didn't really think about it" can't be claimed as a reason for having kids.

In developing societies, people often have children for personal economic stability. While on the individual level, this seems to be more a necessity than a choice, increasing population for personal economic stability suffers from the same problem that increasing population for national economic stability does: as economic resources go, population is a pyramid scheme. In order to get a decent cut there have to be more people below you than next to you. And while this was a manageable paradigm three billion people ago, when one kid could farm one acre, and two kids could farm three acres and five kids could farm fifteen acres, today there aren't fifteen acres to be had, and now there are five kids trying to support their families on an acre or two.

Which brings us to the "why me?" Why should it be me that forgoes what I want, when the rest of the world isn't? If an Indian farmer is going to have six kids, why can't I have one? (Never mind that your one American kid will likely consume 1.41 times** more resources than the five Indian kids put together.) Why shouldn't I have someone to care for me when I'm old? (Consider how well you take care of your parents, then consider all the money you could save if you didn't have kids, and what a nice, caring retirement community you could live in with all that cash.) What if my kid grows up to solve AIDS and global warming, or be the next Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi? (What if your kid grows up to be the next Thabo Mbeki or George W. Bush? Or Kim Il Sung or Mohammed Suharto? There are a lot more ways that a kid can go wrong than there are ways a kid can go right.)

So, why you? And why me? Because sometimes you have to do what is right because it is right not because it is easy or popular. Because not having that kid may not seem to contribute much to the solution, but having that kid will certainly contribute to the problem. Besides, if you really feel that you have so much to offer a child, or feel that the only way you could be happy is caring for a child, there are plenty of unwanted children (and here I mean children, not infants) that need to be cared for.

I, of course, have family and friends that have recently had children. I don't stop loving them, even though I don't have a lot of respect for their decision to have children. While I find most children supremely annoying--that's kind of the nature of being a kid (especially when you mix in a dose of inadequate parenting)--I have, in the past, found myself enjoying other peoples' children. I'm sure that if someday I find myself on the traumatic side of a birth control failure (a 1% failure rate seems pretty small until you're in that 1%) I would love that child. And, no, I haven't forgotten that I was once a kid myself, and I required just as much parenting as any other kid. Which is how this article got started in the first place, with me thinking about Father's Day. I love my parents, and I respect them, and I have no real problem reserving one day a year to tell them this. But maybe we should also reserve a day each year to honor the children, who, without any say in the matter were dragged into the world as someone else's "lifestyle choice."

*Once the child is born, they will talk about how wonderful the child is and how wonderful being a parent is for as long as you let them. And while it's great that Tina made the waitress at Bob Evans laugh by singing to her chicken nuggets, unless they say, "we felt the world would be a better place if we had a kid, because that kid would make waitresses laugh by singing to food," that's not a reason for having a kid. Return to article.

**Data from The Epoch Times. "It is often stated that the United States consumes about 25 percent of world's resources while only making up 4.5% of the world's population." That means an American percent of population consumes 5.56% of the world's resources, and a non-American percent consumes 0.785% of the world's resources. Five non-American percent consumes 3.93% of the world's resources, or 70.6% of what one American does. Or, the American consumes 141% of what the non-American does.Return to article.

lmao

2008-06-09T07:23:00.000-05:00

I have mixed feelings toward The Soup. Joel McHale is freakin' hilarious, but a lot of the clips are simply painful to watch. My husband loves it, so it's high in our Tivo season pass list.

Every once in a while, though, a clip comes along that sends me into fits--of laughter, that is. While we had previously chuckled at Yo Gabba Gabba's Nathaniel and Seth and what the Soup editors did with the video, that response seems sedate compared to the raging laughter inspired by this. Now laughing at a chubby girl named Julia gave me a couple of personal pangs in addition to the same sense of schadenfruede that I frequently get when watching The Soup, but I'll deal.

Note that neither of these links go directly to the E! website. While they're available there, they make you watch a commercial to see the video. While watching the commercial to get to this video is totally worth it, I thought I'd save you the trouble. Plus, my husband first found the Julia clip online at Hulu. This site is probably well-known, and I'm just telling you stuff you already know, but it's a pretty cool site with lots of TV shows and movies that are offered for "free" with "limited commercial interruption." They've got a lot of recent shows, but they've also got some older, more obscure stuff--like Airwolf, Doogie Howser, and the Sam Raimi late night pair Jack of All Trades and Cleopatra 2525. We've watched episodes of Firefly, Sliders and a bunch of Cleopatra. The video is streaming, so it's not the best, and the audio is kinda quiet, but as Tivo spends the summer capturing reruns of shows we've already seen, we've got stuff to watch.

out of touch

2008-06-08T06:21:00.002-05:00

I got an email from a friend I hadn't heard from in a while...clearly she was emailing everyone in her address book with "big news." Apparently this news was more important to her than having kids, because it was clear from the email that she now has three of them, and last I'd heard from her she had just had her first.

It's not really her fault--I'm horrible at keeping in touch. It got me thinking about all the friends that I only talk to (and hear from) at Christmas. Some of those friends are too cool/sophisticated/whatever to include a summary letter, so I really don't know what they're up to. I'm sure they're all leading lives that are a lot more interesting than mine, as I occasionally get info about trips they've taken or people they've socialized with. I tend to feel like the "country cousin" to their "city sophisticate". But even though it makes me a little (or more than a little) jealous, I'd like to know what they're up to.

Again, it's not their fault--I'm just as culpable, if not more so, as I'm the one with all the free time as I lead my quiet country life. And I can resolve to do better--I do resolve to do better, but you don't have to look far (try here) to see how I do with resolutions.

across the Mason-Dixon

2008-05-27T08:32:00.002-05:00

My parents were visiting my Aunt Deb and Uncle Mark in Pennsylvania, so Josh and I went up there to hang out with them. My husband was particularly happy to be back on the blue side of the Mason-Dixon line. He also took great joy in "crossing the Potomac."

I had never been to Mark and Deb's before, but I was under the impression (I don't know why) that the home was a modest rambler. So when we pulled in to the estate at 443 Plum, I was a bit confused. The house is massive. At first look, it's at least twice as big as our "little" rental house--and that's not counting the 2-car attached garage or the 3-car detached garage.

Step inside, though, and it's a different story. This massive home has little more livable space than our bungalow. Tons of space wasted in high ceilings, balcony staircases and odd angles, just like every other McMansion I've been in. Not that it wasn't a nice house--a little "designer generic" with wood floors and granite countertops, etc--but I much prefer a cottage or foursquare that keeps the ratio of floorspace to volume high.

It was a nice visit. Short--which I was kind of glad for--but nice. I'm not the kind of person that can "do stuff" with people all day. I need a little down time. We played cards, cooked, and had lots of interesting talks. I look forward to doing it again.

cat power nap

2008-05-18T07:37:00.003-05:00

The girls are getting along a lot better than they were immediately after Celie's bath. There is still the occasional hiss, and I'm worried that Olive might be preventing Celie from using the cat boxes, or might be ramping up the territorial marking as the problem of finding poop outside the box has been renewed. However they've definitely renewed their friendship, as evidenced by this sequence of photos, taken approximately one per hour over the course of an afternoon.

make 'em pay

2008-05-17T05:42:00.003-05:00

There's not much about the American system of government that I would recommend to other countries. Despite having an irrational attachment to our constitution--we're brought up to believe that it is the only thing keeping this country from degenerating into lawlessness and helotry--a critical look at the document makes me think we could do a lot better. I mean, the Bill of Rights was a great idea (though even that could use some updating), but the bulk of the constitution, the part that dictates how government operates, could use some real work. And even that doesn't really address the day-to-day operations of the government. The federal legislation that does that is in a sorrier state.

Still, we have one idea that I'm surprised hasn't caught on in other countries--withholding tax. I was unable to determine which countries withhold wages toward income tax, but after hearing for weeks about Italy's trouble collecting tax (to the tune of 27% of its $2 trillion GDP, or $540 billion) I can't help but think that a program of withholding tax would seriously curb this problem. Granted, a significant portion of this estimated underpayment is attributed to the "shadow economy" (read: mafia) in Italy, and this would not be recovered by a payroll deduction. Granted, such a system would take additional infrastructure. But said infrastructure would be, at minimum, self-funding. And then they wouldn't have to publish every Italian's reported income and tax payments.

the "terrible towels" we got in Cleveland are now "dirty jobs" rags

2008-05-15T07:41:00.002-05:00

After a long wait and a lot of prodding, the CEO of Baseball Operations for the Cleveland Indians called and informed Josh that he did not get the internship. Sometimes people (and their organizations with them) can be so stupid. I mean, there is simply no one better for the job than Josh. And even though this is specifically PITCHf/x job, and Josh is the PITCHf/x guru (google PITCHf/x and Josh's site is the third hit, right below Sportvision, the producer of the technology), they hired someone else, someone who hasn't worked with the data, and probably doesn't have an advanced degree in physics or experience coding with the ROOT statistical analysis program.

Needless to say, we're quite disappointed. Sure, it makes me short-term happy that my husband and I will get to spend the summer together, but this job was a step forward for our long-term goals, and now that's not happening.

My reliably optimistic husband has taken it well. He's still working hard, doing new and wonderful things with the data. He's optimistic about working with MLB teams as a consultant. Here's to hope.

cats may have good eyesight

2008-05-13T07:02:00.002-05:00

but they clearly recognize each other by scent.

Sunday night I decided that Celie's fur was just too stinky, and to give her a bath. I knew she wouldn't like this, but I did it anyway. She actually took it pretty well, once the shock of being doused subsided. She ended up smelling much better...to me, anyway.

Olive clearly felt differently. She sniffed at Celie and then hissed. It was as if a complete stranger had been let into the house. Two days on, and Olive still hasn't accepted Celie. They were such good playmates...I hope I haven't screwed that up for good.

broken promises

2008-05-11T06:03:00.003-05:00

I was hoping that resolving "out loud" to blog would guilt me into keeping up with it. That was clearly not the case. I can't even complain that I haven't had time for it. Spring semester was much easier on me, and I did have a lot more time, so I have only apathy to explain it. Spring semester is now over, so I guess now is as good a time as any to try to pick up on my promise of more blogging.

Last night one of my students and his friends prepared dinner for me and Josh. They are from Saudi Arabia, and wanted to share their tradition of cooking with us. The food was good--if surprisingly familiar. I don't know if they toned it down because they were serving Americans, but it just didn't have the "exotic" flavor I anticipated. They served us arabic coffee (milder and nuttier than "European" coffee), "sugar" dates (dates so sweet that when they are dried a crust of natural sugars forms on the outside), a pineapple drink (very good and sweet), a salad, pita, hummus, baba ganoush (or baba-khalid after the chef's special recipe) carrots, broccoli, and okra in a mild tomatoey sauce, pasta, and baked chicken.

After dinner we sat and drank tea and talked. We started out talking about computers, as they are all in the computer science program here at BSC. Somehow this led to them trying to convince us that we should try to get jobs at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which is being built in King Abdullah (Economic) City, which is being built near Jeddah on the Red Sea. Never mind that neither the city nor the university exist yet. Never mind that, according to the promotional materials, the university's emphasis will be on research, which neither Josh nor I have done for a couple of years. "If there is a will, there is a way," they say, "move to Saudi Arabia and live in our wonderful new city! It will be cheap and beautiful and you will learn to love to wear the 'Abayah'."

See, that's where I have a big problem. I don't want to wear the abayah, the traditional black robe that covers a woman from her neck to her feet when she goes out in public. "You don't have to wear it, you can do whatever you want! (But people will look at you and you will feel embarrassed and be asking for bad things to happen.)" Um, yeah. That's a problem for me. They went on to give examples of all the western women that have come to wear and love the abayah.

When I tried to explain that I see the abayah as merely a symptom of a much bigger problem--the overall attitude of the culture toward women, they did exactly what expected, and assured me that they revere women, that their religion (or culture--two of the men seemed to disagree about where these attitudes originate) requires that the husband takes care of his wife, such that she never has a need for money. What if it isn't about the money? What if a woman wants to work for the sake of being fulfilled? "She can do that! And whatever money she makes she keeps! She doesn't have to give it to her husband because her husband still has to take care of her!" A woman can be a teacher (in a girls' school), a banker (in a women's bank), a doctor (in a women's hospital).

Saudi women are restricted from being in the company of unrelated males. Neither can they go out in public alone or by car (Saudi Arabia does not issue driving permits to women). They are discouraged from pursuing careers as it might put them in contact with unrelated males. Apparently everything is built twice in Saudi Arabia--one for the males and one for the females--only sometimes the female one never gets built (as in the case of soccer arenas). I've even read that some rooms have two entrances--one for each gender.

These Saudi men echo the same platitudes I've always heard: we treat women in this way because we respect them. But the legal system belies this claim and betrays Saudis' true attitude toward women: women are not allowed to testify in court unless it is a personal matter that was not witnessed by men. Even then, the woman's testimony is not taken to be fact, as a man's is but is considered as merely providing a reasonable basis for belief or acceptance. Therefore, if any man contradicts her testimony, it is nullified. You can imagine the difficulty this presents to women who have been harmed by men.

I should note that these particular men seem to have no issue with having a woman as their teacher, and so when I say "the Saudis," I do not necessarily mean these men specifically, even though they are voicing the same dogma. I find it more than a bit ironic that these men can cry injustice at the way that Saudi Arabia is propagandized in the American media, when they seem to have been so taken in by their own propaganda.

In the end, I felt the same way that I feel whenever I talk to zealots--and with the use of the word zealot I don't mean to imply religious zealotry, but anyone who is fanatically committed to an idea. Anyone who not only refuses to entertain the opposing site of view, but seems intellectually and sometimes physically incapable doing so. I felt that no matter how adept, reasonable, and eloquent my argument, I was simply not being heard.

what's up bbc?

2008-01-23T13:45:00.001-06:00

Last October the BBC announced that it would be responding to budget shortfalls with severe layoffs and programming cuts. According to their PR, online products would be hardest hit, though they would strive to cut volume before quality.

With today's posting of Mystery image of 'life on Mars', the BBC has officially failed this goal. C'mon, BBC, quoting some nutjob's theory that a Martian rock formation is a statue "obviously built by an ancient civilisation that later departed Mars and settled Denmark", and then attributing it to "Madurobob" on "the internet" isn't quite journalism. Actually, it isn't anywhere near journalism. What isn't quite journalism is Web worries after suicide spate.

The nutjob in this story is an MP blaming the internet for an uptick in suicides. Now it is an MP (and not some screen name off the internet) with the nutty theory, so even though the theory is nutty, the BBC has a legitimate reason, or maybe even an obligation, to publish it. As a voter, I believe that when CNN learns Dennis Kucinich believes he saw a UFO, they have an obligation to tell me. The news is that Kucinich or the MP or whomever believes the nutty theory--the theory itself should be treated with some incredulity.

This MP seems to have formed her opinion completely without evidence. There's a bunch of suicides. There's an internet. Surely they're related. Even though local law enforcement says that "while some of the seven young people knew each other, there was nothing to link them all," and that even this gives no indication that the ones that did know each other knew each other from the internet. Later in the story it is revealed that some of the boys knew each other--from school. The MP neither seems to acknowledge the well-established phenomenon of suicide contagion, nor does she seem worried that the schools could be the cause of the uptick. She fusses that "memorial walls" on social networking sites romanticize suicide, but doesn't seem to make the connection that these internet "memorial walls" are just reflections of the real-life memorials that spring up after all well-publicized tragedies. Clearly this is just another case of a public figure pointing the finger at society's latest Big Bad: Big Bad wolf, Big Bad rock-n-roll, Big Bad MTV--all have given way to Big Bad internet (and Big Bad video games played on the Big Bad internet). And while the BBC shouldn't be held responsible for the MP's crappy reasoning skills, they should have made the same observations I just did.

another trainwreck on TLC

2008-01-21T15:13:00.000-06:00

Since we've had TiVo, we don't do a lot of channel surfing. For various reasons, I found myself flipping through live TV. I landed on TLC and a program called "Kids by the Dozen". It turns out it's a serial, focusing on a different huge family each time.

They were profiling the Heppner family. Mom and Dad met at Baptist Camp. A year later, she was knocked up and he had run off to--well, I can't remember where he ran off to, but I think it involved a transatlantic flight. Dad came back, they got married, had a son. Their family was now "perfect" and they decided to stop having kids.

According to the Heppners, they were "trying to do the responsible thing," using two forms of birth control (they didn't state which), but they kept on getting pregnant. The worst forms of birth control (even "periodic abstinence") only has a 30% real-life failure rate. That means that any two, used together, has less than a 10% failure rate. That's one failure in ten years of sex. The chance of two failures is less than 1%, or once in 100 years of sex. The odds of 14 failures is 1 in 1 x 10^-14. That's once in 1 x 10¹⁴ years of sex. To put that in perspective, the universe is only about 1 x 10 ¹⁰ years old. Plus, after you've had a couple failures, you might seek out something more reliable (IUDs and surgical methods have a failure rate of less than 1%), especially if, as the mother states, she was so sick with her first six pregnancies that she ended up hospitalized with dehydration. I can't imagine that they were putting any real effort into "trying to do the responsible thing".

As it were, I don't think that having 16 kids is, by definition, an irresponsible thing. If you want 16 children, and have the resources to raise 16 children, I see no reason why you shouldn't have 16 children. The Heppners seem to have failed on both accounts. Mom Heppner was saying that people will often leave boxes of clothing for them, and though sometimes donors are worried that the Heppners may be embarrassed by the charity, they shouldn't, because "that's the way God provides for our family." The show then cut to the kids, who said that it was no big deal to not have the styles and to be wearing cast-offs, because they still dress pretty well. That's when I knew they were home-schooled. I remember middle and secondary school as a constant struggle to keep up with what the cool kids were wearing. I can't imagine how I would have felt showing up in the clothes that those kids had discarded.

This program was probably the first TLC I had watched since I saw the Duggars, and their blatant money grab. The Duggars also have 16 children, and also can't afford them. They started to build a house, but after working on it for three years, and before they finished it, they got evicted from their rental, so they called TLC, who came in and fixed up the house a la "Extreme Home Makeover." (BTW, have you ever noticed that those families ALWAYS have a passel of kids?) Something like 7000 square feet of furnishings, for free. At least the Heppners are making due with their 4-bedroom, 3-bath, 1-kitchen (gasp!) home, and seem to have a legitimate source of income (construction). The primary source of income for the Duggars appears to be selling dvd seminars on how the Bible can make you debt-free. Sure you can be debt free if you're "gifted" everything you need.

Do I even need to say that these children are also homeschooled? And what do I have against homeschooling anyway? Again, I have no problem with it--if it's done because the schools are crappy and the parents are well-educated. What I do have a problem with is homeschooling in the hope that it will prevent their children being exposed to ideas. If those ideas--of which I expect evolution, tolerance, acceptance and contraception are among the most feared--were so horrible, they wouldn't stand up to the light of scrutiny. In fact, one would think that in addition to the obvious benefits of having the kids out of the house, they could become "beacons of the lord" in the schools.

Not that the schools need more beacons. On Friday, I made the mistake of asking my class, all of whom intend to be science teachers, which of them believe in evolution. Not a twitch among them. Not one of them. It made me want to pack up and move somewhere else. Anywhere else.

snow days

2008-01-17T06:34:00.000-06:00

So, my new year's resolution has started out pretty crappy--that's why I don't make resolutions. But I'm sitting at work and it comes down the wire that school is closed today, so technically, my time is my own. I say "technically" because I don't really gain anything: I don't have any class meetings today, so I was just going to spend the day catching up and preparing for the coming days--which I still have to do, even though my suspicion is we won't be coming for class tomorrow, either.

Today is the third day school has been closed this calendar year. Not just canceled (no classes), but closed (staff stays home). At the beginning of the year we were closed for two days and on inclement weather schedule (2 hours late) for a third. First of all, classes hadn't started yet, so it wasn't concern for the safety of commuting students. Furthermore, weather.com says that the total precipitation over those three days was 0.06 in. Factor in January 1, which was closed for holiday anyway, and the sum rises to 0.17 in. Add in the entire week before the closure, and the total rises to just over an inch, 1.02 in. Two and a half days off for an inch of snow arriving over the course of a week. Seriously, it didn't even obscure the grass on our yard, and by the time school finally reopened, all of it had melted away.

Today's snowfall is already heavier than that, and the forecast says 3-5 inches, so I'm anticipating another snow day tomorrow. Factor in the fact that things shut down pretty early on Friday anyway (they don't even serve lunch at the cafeteria), and Monday is another off day (MLK Jr. Day, and this is a historically black college) and I'll put the chance of having class tomorrow in the single digits.

While there is some instant gratification in having a snow day, in the long run it's just a steaming sack of trouble. Snow days are truly lost days. We don't have make up days, so I have to cram 15 weeks of material into 14.5 weeks (or whatever). I have enough trouble staying on schedule the way it is.