2009-05-24 1430: I took some pictures at the Rhododendron Gardens in Portland. I was there with my friend Ken. The rhodos were a bit past their peak but there were still many in full bloom. The gardens are adjacent to the campus of Reed College, and Ken and I walked through campus a bit.
2009-05-23 1215: On the airplane, I read Jesus Was a Liberal: Reclaiming Christianity for All by Rev. Scotty McLennan. This proved to be a pleasant read. McLennan, who is the chaplain at Stanford University, describes liberal Christianity as standing between conservative Christianity and the secular left or New Atheism. He discusses contemporary issues from a liberal Christian perspective. This includes a direct justification of the morality of abortion (he distinguishes between potential for human life and personhood, and argues that personhood does not begin at conception but instead much later in the pregnancy). He is strongly in favor of same-sex marriage, but in contrast to his discussion about abortion, he does not give a direct argument for the morality of homosexuality but instead shows how similar the language used by opponents of same-sex marriage is to the language used 40 years ago by the opponents of mixed-race marriages. (This was a particularly disturbing discussion: the arguements he quotes are appallingly racist, but these date to as late as the 1960s, when I was a child.) One interesting passage in the book is his discussion about Christian ethics towards war; he outlines a piece he published in the San Francisco Chronicle before the Iraq war, explaining why that war met none of the criteria for a just war.
Much of the book is a gentle introduction to Christianity, for a liberal audience. He explains how liberal Christians handle the Bible: as literature rather than a book to be taken literally, yet with many extraordinarily beautiful and valuable stories and lessons. McLennan does however take it for granted that Jesus existed, and his life was at least roughly as described by the Gospels. He seems to believe in the spiritual resurrection theory (the resurrection of Jesus wasn't something that could be filmed with a camcorder, but his disciples did have experiences with the risen Jesus). He talks about Christian worship (the Eucharist) and the church calendar (Christmas and Easter) and what they mean to Christians, and he discusses contemplation and prayer.
2009-05-23 1200: I saw another interesting documentary: Helvetica, about the typeface. It was really about graphic design since the 1950s; the movement to a clean, modern and highly-legible look in the 1950s that included the introduction of this typeface, and reactions by subsequent designers to this now-standard look. Helvetica or the similar Ariel font are ubiquitous to this day; the movie showed many familiar examples, including the American Airlines logo, which is unchanged since the 1960s. One graphic design movement in reaction to the Helvetica look was the cluttered, visually confusing design using antique fonts that was popular in the late 1980s. They showed examples including a Pixies rock album cover which I happen to have on my shelf. The documentary had many intriguing and surprising images, such as a brief look at a company (in Holland, I think) that makes shoulder bags out of old billboards. (Apparently, billboard ads consist of a cloth-like material that is glued to the billboard. This company launders these in very large washing machines, and then cuts them into squares for their shoulder bags. I think the material is some kind of vinyl.) I saw the documentary in high definition (on blu-ray), which was ideal for the subject matter.
2009-05-18 1500: This is the 29th anniversary of the Mt. St. Helens eruption (May 18, 1980). This happened a couple of weeks after the end of my junior year at Reed College; I was at my parents' home in suburban Portland. This was a Sunday morning, which was mild and cloudy. We watched the news coverage on television throughout the day, as the incredible story developed. The mountain caused enormous destruction through a Pompeii-like pyroclastic flow that destroyed hundreds of square kilometers of forest, and a lahar (a mud and debris flow) down the Toutle River valley. Nearly 60 people died, most outside of the restricted hazard zones (the eruption was much more powerful than anticipated). At mid afternoon, it cleared, and we could see the volcanic plume from my parents' house. This was extremely impressive—it looked like a dark brownish grey thundercloud (lightning was visible through my binoculars), that stretched an indeterminate distance to the east. It was as tall as 10 miles (16 kilometers). This ash fell in Portland two or three times later that summer. I missed the heaviest falls of the ash in Portland (I was at Brookhaven Lab in New York for most of the summer), but I found deposits of it here and there, in gutters and the like. It was heavier than I expected, with the consistency of fine sand; it must have been a drag for homeowners to deal with.
Later in the summer and fall, the mountain erupted several more times. I was able to get a good view of the plume and the mountain from campus at Reed College, from exactly one location: a window in the Library tower. The following summer, my grandfather drove us to St. Helens. We drove, during dry summer weather, through a pine forest until entering without any warning a lunar wasteland—ash and fallen trees all the way to the horizon, 15 miles away.
Last year, a colleague of mine surprised me by giving me a peanut butter jar filled with St. Helen's ash. This delighted me, since I didn't keep any as a souvenir when the eruption happened. The jar bears a price label of under one dollar, a charming reminder of three decades of inflation (and a reminder of a world before bar codes).
Another legacy of the eruption bears mentioning: the Mount St. Helens Symphony of Alan Hovhaness. This is a beautiful and dramatic piece of music. The second movement is a marvelous evocation of the beauty of Spirit Lake (a popular recreation area in the St. Helens wilderness before the eruption), but this is interrupted by drums and brass announcing the eruption. Hovahness was a prolific composer whose work was influenced by Asian music and Western sacred music. Another well-known piece by Hovhaness is his Symphony No. 2, Mysterious Mountain; in that piece, the mountain is an imaginary location, where the mundane and the spiritual meet. Another Hovhaness composition I enjoy is And God Created Great Whales (1970), which combines orchestra and organ with recorded humpback whale song.
2009-05-15 1900: We just had an unusually intense severe thunderstorm. When it was over, I found 3.5" inches of rain in my rain guage (9 cm), which had fallen in less than an hour! We also had some 1/2 inch hail (12 mm). The cul-de-sac a couple of houses down the street from me was flooded, and my backyard had a good stream running across it. The creek near my house (Blackstone Run) was a torrent, several feet deep. Usually, there's hardly any water there; it's a pretty stream because it flows over slabs of New Albany slate.
(2009-05-18) Update: The following morning (Saturday May 16), I found 0.7" more of rain in my guage, making more than 4" within 12 hours. This was from a line of thunderstorms came through before dawn.
2009-05-08 1300: This morning, I finally got rid of the ziggurat of cardboard in my garage. I cut it up and took it to the large recycling operation next to the waste water treatment plant in New Albany. As I drove into their receiving area, I happened to be listening to the soundtrack to Star Wars, and totally by coincidence, I was listening to the trash compactor scene. And indeed, I saw a breathtaking amount of aluminum and cardboard being compacted, or already in large bales. Now this company, Riverside Recycling, pays $5 a ton for cardboard. They paid me 19¢.
2009-05-07 2315: I saw the movie Worldplay this evening, a clever and charming documentary on New York Times crossword puzzles and the people who create and solve them. The movie focuses on the annual crossword puzzle tournament, introducing several contestants and showing them in their intense but friendly competition. But the movie also has some surprising interview clips of famous personalities who happen to be avid crossword puzzle fans, including baseball pitcher Mike Mussina and William Jefferson Clinton (as the former president is referred to in the credits).
Of course, I am a fan of New York Times crossword puzzles; I subscribe to the puzzles online ($39/year). I'm not very good at the puzzles, certainly compared to the people in the movie! I can usually do Monday and Tuesday puzzles (the puzzles get harder later in the week) without looking things up on the internet, but by Thursday, I often have trouble solving them with the internet. (The tournament rules of course allow no such aid, but the rules as given in the New York Times say "it's your puzzle, work it however you like" in response to the question as to whether that's cheating.) I don't do Friday or Saturday; they're too hard. Sunday puzzles are often the most fun—they're Thursday-difficult, but they are big. They often involve particularly devious wordplay, such as having to put more than one letter in a square. Last year, before Christmas, Santa's hearty laugh ran through a puzzle in the form of the two letters 'HO' in single squares, in many words. But one of my favorite puzzles had four long phrases in it (going across the entire width of the puzzle), with the clues: INK, IN, I, —. These turned out to be: CEPHALAPODSPRAY, SOCIALADVANTAGE, PERSONALPRONOUN, and DISAPPEARINGINK.
I should mention I did the Thursday puzzle this evening right after I watched the movie. It took me 46 minutes (even looking up a few clues, such as "Casablanca co-star" [LORRE]). And I missed two letters.
Added 2009-05-09: I found out that when you have to enter more than one letter in a square, this is referred to as a 'rebus.' I was reading the NY Times crossword puzzle blog (Wordplay), and it turns out the puzzle of April 26, 2009 had a record number of rebus entries: 35. These all took the form of 'ER' or 'UM'. The puzzle was called "Speaking Roughly." By the way, the DISAPPEARING INK puzzle appeared on April 16 of last year.
2009-05-03 0815: The New York Times has an interesting article (Brookhaven Finds Its Star on the Rise) about Bookhaven National Laboratory, highlighting its research effort on solar energy and electric batteries. This brought back memories of my summer internship (in the summer of 1980) at that lab, in the applied mathematics department. I programmed Fortran subroutines to solve systems of linear equations, as part of a much larger project to mathematically model magnetic fields in a proposed atom smasher (which, as memory serves, was later cancelled).
2009-05-01 2045: The physicist Bob Park offers a follow-up to the cold fusion story as presented by 60 Minutes on April 19. 60 Minutes said they'd been referred to a physicist by the American Physical Society to evaluate the claims of a cold fusion lab. But it turns out, according to Bob Park, the APS denies this and denies endorsing cold fusion, and CBS has now removed this from the story. Park offers other sharp comments on this matter in his columns of April 24 and May 1 (see What's New, by Bob Park). After reading his take on the subject, I become much more skeptical that anything will come of cold fusion; it sounds like CBS might have been taken in by a manufactured story.
Bob Park, by the way, is a University of Maryland physicist known for his tireless efforts against fraudulant science. Some years ago, I read his book Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud (2000), which I thought was outstanding. His targets included cold fusion, homeopathy, and the manned space program (a surprising target, but he argues it is of minimal scientific value, unlike the unmanned space program, which has had spectacular scientific success). His writing is wonderfully tart, and he provides remarkably detailed and damning information about the pathological science, pseudoscience, junk science and outright fraud he examines.