polymania

For a good time just run your favorite straight-laced web site URL through Da Shizzolator for a pleasing comic effect. I tried this with www.whitehouse.gov, which was pretty fun, although I suppose other sites may be even better. The possibilities are vast.

Sure, it doesn't take long to reach saturation, but I love the fact that there are still people in this webworld thinking this stuff up.

Cindy had a mid-week trip to Colorado for a meeting of climate modelers in Breckenridge. It sounds like it was a productive meeting, but in the past couple days since her return, she gets occasional nosebleeds. It's a tricky proposition, having someone go from sea level to 10,000 feet for just a three-day confab...

I found out that the business unit I'm in at Yahoo is moving again, for the second time in three months. This time to a new building still undergoing the finishing touches, catty-corner to our current campus location. I was none too pleased, especially since our engineering group only recently began to enjoy the excellent location at the north end of the campus, with an unhindered view of the east-bay hills (and for me, a view of all the birds that frequent the marshes and salt evaporators)...

Cindy will be making another trip to Colorado toward the end of July, for two weeks. But for once I will likely be joining her, at least for one weekend. That weekend will be that of our aforementioned BU move, so maybe this trip will distract me from my disgruntled state of mind...

Now I get to don my concert promoter hat and listen to demo CDs for various ensembles to play at our wedding ceremony. Sometimes I wonder about how this perhaps would have been my destiny - that is, being a wedding performer - if I'd pursued a career in music. I'm sometimes wistful about my choice long ago to make music a hobby and science my career, but then I wonder how happy I'd really be if I'd reversed that decision...

I'm still trying to find the authoritative reference, but the basic fact is that my Kansas City Royals haven't been in sole possession of first place this late in the season since at least before the strike....and perhaps not since the mid 1980s. It's remarkable to me - I figured this team would do well to win as many as 75 games this year, and more likely win 72, and finish 3rd or 4th again. But now there's a real chance they could not only contend for the division, but win it outright. That would make for an amazing "worst to first"story, considering how awful they were in 2002 with their first-ever 100-loss season.

I'm stunned. But thrilled.

It's not always easy to define, but I think we all have an ingrained sense of when something is on its last legs. This certainly applies to TV shows, while recently plowing through others' blogs of late, I've come across the term "jumping the shark", a term that's defined more clearly here. I've seen the term in the context of when our current president may be on his downward slide in approval, and when he may finally become accountable for his actions. Still, even just in the pop culture context, it's an interesting and amusing read.

Stupid me, I've been forgetting to keep up with the more recent developments in the effort to reintroduce the California Condor to the Ventana Wilderness region, which is just a few dozen miles from where I live. If nothing else, that would be a pretty nifty bird to add to the life list.

What I find especially interesting is the following from that link above:

More than half of the Big Sur flock are in southern California and spending valuable time with condors from the southern flock. The mixing of the Big Sur and southern flocks is beneficial to both subpopulations. A great exchange of social information occurs among the two groups as well as the potential formation of new condor pairs. The two subpopulations are now essentially becoming one California population with a current range very similar to the historic range prior to 1980, which is one of the goals of the condor restoration effort.

People generally don't think of animals as passing collective knowledge or tribal wisdom from one generation to the next - we prefer to believe that that behavior is uniquely within the province of human experience. And although I would agree that it's not easy to demonstrate, I do think the evidence is mounting that many of our feathered counterparts do exactly this, and certainly benefit from it.

So whatever happened to the budding space tourism industry? I remember being told a few years ago that some company was already taking advance orders for tickets on a prototype space plane that was just a year or two away from being viable. And yet, there is no news or buzz about such a thing these days.

This doesn't surprise me in the least. Space tourism may someday actually become a real enterprise, but we're nowhere near that now. There is such an underappreciation for just how difficult and expensive space travel is, and the various successes of the (manned) space program make it seem to the casual observer that private industry is ready to fulfill the "demand" for passenger service to space or even just through it. But this notion reeks of the same vapid blue-sky optimism which asserts that scientific and technological progress will always occur at the same rapid pace infinitely into the future. This is not to say that new technologies won't arise or that nothing remains to be discovered. But I think the linear application of the idea of progress to something like commercial space flight is extremely naïve.

Analogies to the advent of commercial air flight are common, but misplaced. Space flight is more like a thrill ride for humans and not a necessity for traveling from A to B. Even Gertrude Stein would see the similarity between space and Oakland - "There's no there there." A thrill ride, and an expensive one at that.

So how do we create a place in space for people to go? That's where the mind-boggling expense and the years - nay, decades - required to colonize areas of space become significant. Wherever you go, there are none of the requirements for human existence. And that is an emphatic none. There's no food - you have to bring it all with you, or learn how to create your own mini-ecosystem from scratch to sustain it. There's no ready source of drinking water - if you want to imbibe that life-giving substance, you'll have to bring it all with you, recycle every drop you have, and/or mine it and convert into a drinkable form. And of course, there's nothing to breath. You have to bring all the air with you and somehow recycle it, or ensure that the mini-ecosystem you created to grow your food can also create the oxygen you so desperately crave but conveniently never think twice about as you spend your entire life here within the comfortable confines of planet Earth.

Any analogies between the future of regular travel into space (or to the moon or Mars) and travel to other continents are made wholly irrelevant by these considerations. Space isn't some especially far off desert island - space is cold lifeless UV-radiated vacuum, requiring far more resources, intelligence and technology to habitate than anything ever undertaken before in the history of nomadic humanity. It is certainly something that can be achieved technically, but with tremendous societal and economic demands that its strongest proponents seem to neglect in their rosy sales pitches. (For example, think of how many thousands of people have to work millions of man-hours just to support a one-week long flight for a crew of seven on the space shuttle. Now extrapolate that ten- or hundred-fold.) The aforementioned naïvété that believes we are already on the cusp of that migration is in total denial of reality. And each passing day where you never hear about the incubating space tourism industry is another affirmation of that reality.

In case you haven't noticed (and if you only ever pay attention to the major news media, you probably wouldn't), over 50 American soldiers have died in Iraq since President Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" on the aircraft carrier Lincoln just a few weeks ago. That seems like a pretty substantial amount, and yet it registers very low on the media Richter scale. You'd think that the story of brave American troops dying in Iraq would merit more than the scant coverage and attention it seems to get, but I guess it's outweighed by the steady drone of secondary news stories hyped up into capital letters and full-length cable news programs in order to fill time and sell copy.

It all seems like media conspiracy, but you have to remember that it really goes back to human nature. It's not so much that we as Americans don't care about our troops anymore (although there's a case to be made that they don't), but rather that we no longer perceive a threat where before we had. I'm in no way excusing our adventure into Iraq at the behest of the PNAC cabal -- far from it. Even before the war I had serious doubts about the urgency of the threat from Iraq as well as the extremely tenuous Al-Qaeda connection that the administration had attempted to portray. But when it comes to understanding the president's popularity (or at least the general acceptance of his policies), you don't really have to look much further than the issue of how humans perceive threats and respond to them.

Whether or not it was realistic or logical - and the evidence is now strongly suggesting that it was neither - Americans perceived a threat from Iraq. In most people's minds, the Iraqi military threatened America with weapons that could kill us in numbers and in a fashion akin to what we saw on 9/11. And with the blessing that comes from a populace desiring to be protected from what it thinks is imminent danger, this administration ordered our military into battle, destroying much of Iraq's physical and societal infrastructure in the process. And with a compliant media in tow, the administration was able to declare victory and allow the Iraqi occupation story to move onto the inside pages of the major newspapers and push it into the now-ignored crawl on the likes of CNN, MSNBC and Faux News.

But many of us who opposed this war understood that the real struggle wasn't going to be the open and direct military confrontation between the US and Iraq, but rather the low-intensity guerrilla war and aftermath that would complicate the US control of the region in the subsequent weeks, months, and probably years. The question now is, what will it take to raise the general awareness of the American people that their soldiers are still dying in Iraq? That they are dying now merely for the benefit of an increasingly disenchanted Iraqi population, and no longer for protecting us against weapons that either did not exist, or not in any amount that truly threatened us. How is it that a president who campaigned against nation-building and against overstretching our military now has engaged them in both endeavors, in striking and seemingly open-ended fashion, with no remaining clearly defined objective?

It will succeed as long as the death toll of American soldiers is on the order of 1 or 2 per day. That's acceptable to people, even if it means 30-50 a month, 500 a year. But it would be a very different story if it were 30-50 in one attack, followed by several quiet days, and then another large engagement killing say 10-15, followed by more quiet, and so on. People don't see the single digit death counts as threatening to themselves (and by extension, the Nation) - but when the death tolls enter the double digits in a single battle, then Americans begin to see the situation as more threatening. After all, if that many soldiers or civilians die at once, then Iraq as a whole will be seen as more dangerous, and the price being paid in blood will begin to seem excessive considering the lack of any WMD threat. But if they're only picking off one or two at a time, most Americans seem to consider that acceptable background noise, in defense of some vague concept of "freedom". The reasoning seems to be, "It's only one person - at that rate it will be a long time before I'll be affected, so I can ignore it and move on with my life."

Me, I find that a rather disquieting calculus, but I don't see any other reasonable explanation for the widespread American tolerance for the killing of their own soldiers in a cause that was falsely advertised by our own government. Our human nature has been shaped over thousands of generations to recognize chronic problems as secondary to acute ones*, and that's precisely the logic at work here. I personally wish it were not so, because I believe this whole war and occupation is the result of a disastrous political agenda that ultimately weakens this country and the good things it stands for. But I can't deny that such logic prevails.

*By the way, I highly recommend Why Things Bite Back, by Edward Tenner. Although the book is a bit repetitious, it makes an excellent point and offers great insights into the whole topic of the acute vs. the chronic, and of unintended consequences.

My, we've come a long way from Waco, or even 1999 haven't we. I guess it's ok for the big nasty federal government to destroy your property as long as a Republican is in charge, eh?

1.) Just Don't Do It

Part of what motivates me to maintain this blog is merely knowing that it is here and regarding it as a conscience-lever for prying thoughts from my head. However, at the same time I find myself fearful that I'll end up not really saying much of substance, but rather writing more about the process (especially the difficulty) of writing. Metawriting, if you will. It's not so much that I don't think of anything else worthwhile in the course of a day, nor come across something worth emphasizing or illustrating. I suppose it comes down to my ingrained habit of rationing my time, and deciding that I will only budget a certain amount of time for expressing a thought. And so, when I do express that thought, the desire is that I get it "right" the first time, hastily if need be, since I don't want to waste time editing, rephrasing, rejiggering, and worst of all, deleting chunks of text that may take several precious minutes to write.

At that point the realist (or pessimist?) in me comes out, and says, "You're not going to be able to say anything all that intricate, cogent or eloquent in 20-25 minutes, so just cough up some more self-deprecating patter and move on to the next distraction." OK, so that sounds a bit harsher than what I'm really thinking, but you get the idea: that my inner critic is already forcing me into writing something I'm not all that happy about, just for the sake of getting it out on the site.

Very well then. As Dieter would say, this conversation has become tedious.

2.) Kicked Out

Cindy had her women's group meeting tonight at our house. She's hosted a few of these meetings, and when she does, I as a male am not allowed in. On other occasions that hasn't been much of a problem since I don't get home from work until late-ish anyway, and the meeting usually wraps up by that time. But today I worked from home, so when 6pm rolled around I had to make myself scarce and find someplace else to go on a weeknight. That turned out to be a blessing, and I spent a fair amount of time strolling around downtown Santa Cruz. It made me realize I should do that far more often than just for women's group meetings. Yep, I determined that I need some of that much-talked-about "me time".

I stopped at Bookshop Santa Cruz and picked up a couple new books, one on writing (The Writer's Mentor) and a humor book by Mike Nelson (Mind Over Matters). I'll update here on how these read, but the writing book is unique for me in that it is the first book I've bought (and hopefully the last) on the very topic of writing. I really hope I don't need to buy and read many books on writing, since that topic strays way too close to "metawriting", which I promised myself I would neither need nor desire to spend time doing. Sure, I can use some instruction and guidance, and when talking amongst writers the topic is inevitable; but I would hope that I spend more time actually writing instead of reading about writing, or even writing about writing.

Years ago I made the same observation about myself with regard to climbing, my obsession of old. I came to notice how many times I bought books on climbing, or renewed my climbing mag subscriptions. It seemed silly for someone like me to spend so much time thinking or reading about climbing, when actually going to the gym or out to the boulders was so much more satisfying. The memory of that experience stays with me even now, and I can easily see how that habit of vicarious enthrallment could carry over into writing. This blogging exercise is about flexing that cognitive muscle that I've let atrophy for so many years -- and keeping me away from whiling the hours at messageboards, where I spend too much time merely marveling at the expressiveness of others' instead of honing my own ability. I'm not sure I really move towards that stated end if I also gaze too long into the writer's mirror.

After much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth, I finally launched our wedding website yesterday. The rending and gnashing arose from the fact that I built this thing using Geocities' really lousy web development tool.

So why did I use the thing in the first place? It all started innocently enough. At the outset I had a rough idea of what this page was going to look like, although my experience at web design is pretty minimal. Even with all my years at Yahoo I figured I could at least get a better looking page more quickly using one of their "idiot tools" - you know, one of those GUI things that assumes you neither know HTML nor want to.

And initially, the tool in question (called Pagebuilder) worked fine for my purposes. Although I was a little annoyed about the Java dependency, and the fact that it didn't really work with IE6, I let stand the mystery of how it translates your graphical placement of a text block or a photo into real HTML. The problem came after I had set up the basic template for what I wanted the half-dozen or so pages to look like, and had built out one or two of the actual pages. I had read the warnings about how a page built with Pagebuilder should not be opened with a different editor, if you ever intended to go back to Pagebuilder later. Perhaps foolishly I took that as a challenge, especially after I "viewed source" and saw how trashy and absurd an HTML document this was making. All sorts of empty rows and table cells, with weird colspan and width settings (which of course is how the graphics get translated).

With a little experimentation in Netscape Composer, I then realized that manually adjusting this HTML into something more sane and sensible was going to be a monumental task. I had to make a decision then - to abandon all my work up to that point and start over, or bite the bullet and stick with this clunky system to the end. I figured that I wasn't all that far from being done, and since I had other demands on my time, the latter choice, as unpleasant as it was, seemed the wisest. Still, it's hard not to feel misgivings about that choice now when I browse to my Q & A page and see how crummy it looks, especially in IE. Part of that is due, as it turns out, to my having opened that file in that "other editor". So yes, Pagebuilder has punished me for my wayward attentions.

Lesson learned - Pagebuilder totally blows. Avoid it like the plague. Use Composer for your simple web design, because in the end you'll have more flexibility for editing. If you don't believe me, view source on the aforementioned pages (caution: not for the faint of heart). Trust me, having a page with only one table, but 39 rows of weird td offsets was NOT my idea.

If I get nothing else out of my years of employment in the corporate realm, I'm certainly picking up a lot of buzzwords.

What an odd feeling. I'm listening to the Royals-Giants game on mlb.com gameday audio - the first ever meeting between these two teams, which happen to be my two favorites. Although I suppose I'm deep-down more of a Royals fan, I feel simultaneous pain and pleasure when anything happens on the field. Randa parks it? Awesome, except he did it off Schmidt. Tucker knocks another one off him? Sweet - damn!

I paid my latest credit card bill this morning, and I noticed this offer at the bottom of the slip:

ORDER 6 - 6 OZ. OMAHA STEAKS TOP SIRLONGS AT THE SPECIAL PRICE OF $29.99 (A $23 SAVINGS) AND RECEIVE 6 - 4 OZ. OMAHA STEAKS BURGERS FREE! CALL 1-800-228-XXXX AND ASK FOR ITEM 4505XXX. ADD $9.99 STANDARD SHIPPING AND HANDLING PER ADDRESS.

Maybe I'm just out of it, but do people regularly order beef in the mail? I mean, I know all about the holiday hams and things like that, but I just view that as a special, once-a-year case. This makes it seem like ordinary practice.

So I'm a little tardy in jumping on the blog bandwagon. I figure it's time that I spend less time posting messages to various newsgroups and messageboards and more time sharing my thoughts systematically, in a place that I have total control over. Well, as much control as you can have over freely available software, anyway.

Not that I have gobs of free time to spend in the first place, but one thing I've learned about myself is that I gravitate toward doing whatever it is I'm not supposed to be doing. That's practically the story of my life, and the very name of this blog reflects that odd mix of short attention span and deep-seated fascination toward anything which inspires me. So what better way to christen this place with an entry being written in the wee hours of the morning when I really should be heading off to bed, resting up for another full day at the office (and the 50-minute highway commute each way that accompanies it).