Ruminations, Haunts, and Errors

Time to release some thoughts peskily bouncing around my head so I can do something else…

• On southbound I-94 south of Milwaukee there’s a billboard for The Fish radio station that reads ‘Safe for the Whole Family’. Umm, tell me, how can radio (or for that matter TV or any media outlet) be safe or unsafe? Inappropriate? Disturbing? Infuriating? Annoying? Sure. But barring volume excessive enough to cause hearing damage, radio simply conveys ideas and concepts which by their very nature can’t be safe or unsafe. (I won’t even bring up the issues of what defines ‘family’ and how one defines a single standard of family-safe anything.)
• Bulls hosting the opener of a playoff series…and winning. Been a while since those concepts were legitimately strung together! And to think for the better part of decade that was the norm, even during Jordan’s great Birmingham (mis)adventure.
• The weather tonight is certainly an improvement over the chilly weekend, but I still don’t understand why the Cubs scheduled–months in advance–night games for tonight and tomorrow. Sitting outside at night is generally unpleasant in these parts during April and most of May. If it were to help acclimate the team after a road trip, okay…but this is the middle of a homestand! Night games still constitute less than a third of the Cubs home schedule, save ‘em for July and August when they’re most useful for players and fans alike!
• Recently reported was a possible HIV-eating bacterium that works by attaching to certain sugars on the virus coating, discovered by a UIC dentist no less. Ain’t biochemistry grand?
• A Blue state with a Red governor managed to enact a reasonably non-contentious civil-unions law through the good old-fashioned legislative process. Hard-liners on both sides of the gay-marriage issue are probably disappointed in the end result, but maybe that means it struck a balanced compromise. Think whatever juju that led to such productive use of the political process can make it’s way down I-95 to enlighten those inside the Beltway? Nah, I didn’t think so either. Sigh.

In his remarks following today’s surprise postponement of the Senate committee vote on John Bolton’s nomination, Sen. Lincoln Chaffee (R-RI) uttered a sad commentary on the state of political debate in America and the Congress in particular:

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen, in a setting like this, a senator changing his mind as a result of what other senators said. The process worked. It’s kind of refreshing.

This from the self-proclaimed Greatest Deliberative Body in the World? Seems rather to bolster the conclusions put forth in the Atlantic’s 2005 state of the union issue (particularly
here and here) that real debate and dialogue have given way to partisan games of chicken.

But maybe, just maybe, that at least one senator notes the problem then there’s hope for a return to something more civil and productive. Quick, where’s Miracle Max?!?

In a George Will column on Greg Maddux comes this nugget from former World Series of Poker champ Amarillo Slim:

The results of one particular game doesn’t mean a damn thing, and that’s why one of my mantras has always been ‘decisions, not results.’ Do the right thing enough times and the results will take care of themselves in the long run.

That’s a nice Taoist take on the ends not justifying the means: no moralism is needed, just recognition that while doing things the proper, legitmate way isn’t always the most expedient method to obtain desirable results it is sure the most sustainable one. Hmm, why can’t politicians, intelligence analysts, economists, and business types heed this?

(Oh, right, because most people are too easily distracted by the shininess of the latest Big News to seriously consider its legitimacy or consequences…)

More neato stuff from Cassini at Saturn. Another nice writeup of this image is over at APOD.

(Okay, I guess the composition is more of a dot-slash, but it could still be the basis for the next icon…)

This morning there was some hullabaloo under the Kennedy, as some claimed a holy sight:

From ink blots to constellations to salt-water stains under expressways, the ability of the human mind to construct patterns from random data is quite amazing.

(Gotta love what’s written to the, uh, image’s immediate left…)

Both main papers and their red-headed stepchildren screamed out headlines today: Doomsday for the CTA! Draconian cuts in service and hikes in fares, all the result of internal mismanagement (is there anyone competent involved with the Brown Line rehab?) and certainly not helped by quirks of the 22-year-old RTA funding-allocation formula.

As a daily commuter I should be worked up about this, what with the prospect of extended waits for overcrowded trains during rush hour come July…but I’m not. To me this just seems like a scare tactic aimed at the General Assembly, yet one that seems a bit ham-handed. In business they talk about companies that are ‘too big to fail’ (see Citibank a few years ago), and I think the same general sensibility holds here: the social, economic, and (especially in this case) political costs of letting the Doomsday Scenario play out would seem greater than the costs of fixing things. The brunt of the inconvenience is likely to fall on the affluent residents of the North Side corridor–from downtown through Lincoln Park, Lakeview, and the near north suburbs–whose happiness means a lot to politicians. (Hmm, at first I thought the decision to axe service in affluent areas where it would be merely annoying rather than in poor areas where it would be devastating was a rare example of politicos doing the right thing, but maybe it was another sneaky way of applying political pressure.)

The media will be having a field day as the drop-dead date approaches, and us yuppies will be voicing extreme displeasure after a full workweek of Sunday schedules. As Eric and I discussed over morning coffee recently, the deafening silence of His Honor the Mayor has been interesting: unless he’s developed a tin ear (which I find unlikely), it probably means he knows the solution is out there but that it’s too early to call in the political chits necessary to solve it now–like other mayors, maybe Daley feels that the solution won’t really become obvious until the crisis lies heavily upon everybody. My prediction is that the funding gap will be filled either by the end of June or after only one to two weeks of the Doomsday schedule, probably with some eleventh-hour maneuvering by Daley and some state legislators (Emil Jones, most likely) that might include some heads rolling over at the CTA leadership.

Of course that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong…

A House committee today inserted language into an energy bill to extend daylight savings time by two months in a questionable attempt to enable energy conservation. Never mind proposing legislation to fund alternative-energy research or establish incentives and penalties to encourage consumption, let’s tinker with the clocks! Couldn’t they at least pay a modicum of attention to the seasonal cycle and make the start and end times at least symmetric about the shortest days of the year (i.e. have DST run from mid-February to mid-November)?

What really caught my attention was this quote from Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA):

The more daylight we have, the less electricity we use.

Wow! After 19 years of skygazing and 5 years of college- and graduate-level astronomy courses, I was pretty certain that the length of each day was a function of our orbital position and planetary inclination, and further that significant changes in either would require massive amounts of energy and engineering. Silly me, I never considered that such laws in effect for billions of years were no match for the power of the United States Congress.

With that kind of authority, why don’t they just create new energy sources, fuel efficiencies, and technologies via legislation, those would be much more effective than changing time zones…

Various outlets today posted stories–some straight up, others with a more appropriate edginess–about a recent trend to ban red pens from American schoolteachers’ grading arsenals. Too jarring they say, makes kids feel bad. Simply astounding! Funny, I always thought the mission of our schools should be to educate children, but apparently many parents believe that maintainting a 70s-style I’m-OK-you’re-OK feel-good sensibility in our youngsters is paramount. If the objection to grading methods was that the commentary was too negative and prescriptive, I’d be fine with it: criticism works best when it is constructive whenever possible. But sometimes the best way for a point to be driven home is simply to be confronted with the bare, ugly fact that one messed up or didn’t try hard enough–people usually learn more quickly and effectively from mistakes than from successes.

Besides, this is a case of parents fixating on a cosmetic issue (never mind the content, how will this look to the Joneses?) and overworked, underpaid educators simply caving in. What kind of lesson is this for the kiddies?

Ah, theorists, they are an entertaining lot–especially the particle-physics types who have morphed into astronomers. Now, there’s no doubt that their approach has yielded important advances (especially when combined with actual observed data), but the veracity of their pronouncements based on hunches and gaps sometimes vies with that of politicians and religious zealots for its pure huh? factor. Quoth George Chapline of LLLNL recently
in Nature:

It’s a near certainty that black holes don’t exist.

Okay, black holes as currently conceived are certainly problematic: general relativity predicts a runaway collapse that results in an entity–a spacetime singularity–that GR is completely unable to describe, while out at its encloaking event horizon quantum mechanics predicts an entirely different and incompatible set of circumstances. Chapline’s answer to all this? Neither, it must be ‘dark energy’! Hmm…never mind that dark energy is itself an intellectual black hole, er, black-box placeholder that has only existed since about 1998 to explain the apparent accelerating expansion of the universe. (Okay, maybe you can trace its origins to Einstein’s cosmological constant, but the connection is tenuous and only gives it a little more historic rigor yet no further observational heft.) Could this dark energy be a factor in inflation, accelerating expansion, dark matter, and large-structure formation? Absolutely. But six years of study hardly allows for anything approaching certainty.

Besides, lurking in numerous double-star systems and at the hearts of galaxies lie enormous mass concentrations in very small volumes that cause very severe spacetime (or quantum-field) distorsions. Such nasty places would seem to fit the moniker of ‘black hole’ regardless of whether they are generated by singularities, or dark-energy concentrations, or whatnot. To suggest that they do not exist is ludicrous.

Roger Powell couldn’t establish an inside presence. James Augustine didn’t play long enough to begin to help. Too many bad shots in the first half. Too many good shots that simply didn’t fall in the second (hell, just the last 90 seconds!). Play by the Williams-Brown-Head tandem that wasn’t as crisp and smart as usual.

Yet with all that, the Illini managed to roar back from 15 down to tie it late, and made the Tar Heels play hard for 39:57 to earn their victory.

A disappointing end leaves a somewhat bitter taste, but that doesn’t completely erase what a wonderful season this has been. There’s no shame in defeat that happens in the last few seconds of the last possible game. Hail to the orange, hail to the blue!

First time ever in the national championship game. Tied the all-time NCAA mens’ record for victories in a season–and obviously the chance to set a new one. Three (Deron Williams, Dee Brown, Luther Head) of the five players on the all-Big 10 team. Astounding ratios of assists to turnovers (709/420) and field goals (709/1065). Loud statement games against Wake Forest, Wisconsin, and Michigan State… not to mention the comeback in the regional final against Arizona. Yep, it’s been quite a special season for Illinois basketball, no matter what happens against the Tar Heels.

Louisville coach Rick Pitino gave a very succinct summary of what has made this team such a joy to watch this season (apart from all the winning, of course):

I don’t know if they necessarily had the greatest talent I’ve seen at a Final Four, but they’re the best team I’ve seen in some time.

And, if there needed to be any more proof of what an amazing season this has been…tomorrow I will view the Cubs’ season opener as an event of only secondary importance for the first time that I can remember!