2010-01-30 0930: Snow arrived overnight as forecasted, about two and a half inches (6 cm). A bit more than I expected, but enough to be pretty, and enough to keep me from going on my usual Saturday morning run and brunch with my running group. Thankfully, it didn't interfere with my plans to see the Verdi Requiem yesterday evening, and thankfully, it was a light snow rather than the heavy snow and ice storm that hit to our south.
2010-01-29 2350: I saw the Verdi Requiem performed this evening by the Louisville Orchestra and a 150-voice chorus. My seat was 21 B, two rows from stage center; I looked up at the four soloists. Being so close to the orchestra meant that some parts of the orchestra were much louder than the rest; I didn't hear the chorus as well as I heard the soloists. But the music was overwhelming. The music reflected the text, a lengthy litany asking for forgiveness and salvation from the eternal damnation. The lengthy Sequence section, 40 minutes long, began with bass drum and orchestra pounding out at maximum force for the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath); this was soon followed by the Tuba mirum, trumpets calling across the auditorium from the second balcony for the Day of Judgment, a moment of music that I found to be particularly frightening and thrilling. Grief and regret pervade the rest of the Requiem, which ends with a beautiful choral fugue in the Libera Me (Deliver Me). I was grateful to be able to hear this amazing music and to see it so well performed, particularly since earlier the forecast was for snow this evening (now expected after midnight).
2010-01-26 2015: Gottfried Leibniz was a philosopher, mathematician, diplomat, and spy, who lived in the late 17th century. He is best known for his co-discovery (with Isaac Newton) of calculus. His hope was to construct a logical system that would in effect enable solutions of philosophical problems to be calculated. This program was tremendously successful, at least in subjects such as physics. Leibniz is also known for the philosophical system known as "optimism," which was savagely parodied by Voltaire in his novel Candide.
Anyway, I was charmed to read that there is a popular German 'butter biscuit' cookie brand named after Leibniz. Apparently, Leibniz was the most famous citizen of the town where the cookies were made. I wondered how to get my hands on some of these cookies. Naturally, there are web sites that sell German treats, but a colleague told me that she found them at Kroger. So this evening, I bought some. The package has an inscription explaining that they are indeed named after Leibniz. They turn out to be pleasant to eat; they're mildly sweet, about like Graham crackers or shortbread.
2010-01-21 0840: The New York Times has an interesting obituary today, by Nicholas Wade: Marshall Nirenberg, Biologist Who Untangled Genetic Code, Dies at 82. Nirenburg identified the proteins each of the 64 'codons' (DNA base pair triplets) code for.
2010-01-19 2145: It's now being reported that Scott Brown has defeated Martha Coakley to take Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. This probably will doom health care legislation when it appeared to be on the verge of passing. The vote in Massachusetts appears to have turned on the health care reform, with the public there and elsewhere souring on the legislation. Perhaps the legislation was too flawed, compromised by the need to get it pass conservative Democratic senators and representatives. Or perhaps the structure of the reform, which involved subsidies to enable people to afford insurance they would be required to buy, enabled Republicans to characterize the legislation as a bail out for big insurance companies. This rhetoric is clever, because it reminds voters of the bank bailouts that Obama supported, but which are highly unpopular. But apparently, the real winner in this battle are the health insurance companies: The DJIA went up 115 points today, as investors bought health insurance stocks.
As an old died-in-the-wool liberal, I am naturally heart sick at the apparent defeat of health care reform. I fear that if it couldn't be passed now, after the Democrats held a supermajority in the Senate for an entire year, it will never be passed, not in my lifetime at least. But I think it is clear that the Democrats need to find an entirely different approach from either the complex reforms of the present system, or the mythical single payer system that can never be attained. I think health care reform will never succeed as long as the public thinks it's either a form of welfare (where their tax money is given to people who do not deserve it), or a form of socialism where massive government incompentence would ruin health care. Instead, I think a more modest reform might be successful, and might ameliorate the truly reprehensible features of the current system. This would entail prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage based on medical status (pre-existing conditions or illness), and regulate insurance so that insurance at a fair (and affordable) price is available to working people. This reform would emphasize personal responsibility to maintain coverage.
2010-01-17 2330: This evening, I was lucky enough to get to see the Pandora Productions performance of the musical comedy "Oh My Godmother!" (Much thanks to a friend who had an extra ticket—by this weekend, they added extra shows but were completely sold out.) This is a version of Cinderella, set in a "kingdom by the bay": San Francisco. One of the guys in my running group did a wonderful job singing the role of the Fairy Godmother. The show was silly, clever, cute, and good-hearted; the company did a marvelous job. The songs were very catchy, and I was delighted to be able to buy a copy of the original (San Francisco) cast recording at intermission.
2010-01-17 2315: The Very Reverend Mark Bourlakas, Dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Louisville, gave a sermon this morning that made a deep impression on me. He began by mentioning a photograph he keeps on his desk, of a church in Haiti, showing a girl with a broad smile; a girl he met in his mission work there. He then tied the terrible suffering, hope and challenges of the people in Haiti to the lesson this morning from Isaiah, where God promises his people that they will be restored and their land healed.
It's now been reported, by a reporter for Britain's Channel 4, that 25,000 bodies have already been recovered, and the death toll will be between 100,000 and 200,000.
2010-01-14 0815: The New York Times has a terrifying column today by an Op-Ed contributor, Pooja Bahtia: Haiti’s Angry God. She describes a deeply religious country praying desperately to a God who seems to be in hiding.
The Times also has an interesting letter to the editor, by a physicist named Michael Pravica, who asks that we "support more research aimed at predicting earthquakes and improving construction and retrofitting methods to make old and new buildings better able to withstand the incredible forces experienced during an earthquake." (This reminds me of the old engineers' saying 'earthquakes don't kill people—buildings kill people.') Of course, even before the earthquake, this would have been a forlorn hope for Haitians, who were far too poor to afford anything of the kind. Nature has subjected Haiti to a cruel version of the words of Jesus: "To he that has, much more will be given; to he who has little, it will be taken away."
2010-01-13 2130: Today I made donations to two organizations working in Haiti, Partners in Health and Doctors Without Borders (USA). Both of these organizations were already in Haiti trying to bring medical care to the poor, and both of them are already active in bringing medical care to victims of the earthquake.
I learned about Partners in Health from reading the Tracy Kidder book Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (Random House, 2004). Tracy tells a compelling story of how Farmer sought, against conventional wisdom, to bring aggressive treatments for multiple-drug-resistant TB to the poor in Haiti, and showed that these therapies can be made successful under very adverse social and economic conditions.
(The picture above is a button that is an active link to the Doctors Without Borders donation site. The code for this button can be found at the Doctors Without Borders web site, to add to web pages: spread the word.)
2010-01-12 2215: Prayers for Haiti: The deeply impoverished nation appears to have suffered catastrophic damage and major loss of life from the earthquake today. This was magnitude 7.0, epicenter just 10 miles from Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti and a 2.5 million population center.
2010-01-11 2130: Yesterday, I read somewhere that this month marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo's discovery of what are now referred to as the Galilean Moons of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto). These are visible through small telescopes or binoculars as star-like points of light near Jupiter, which appears in small telescopes as a small beige disk. Galileo observed that these orbit Jupiter, each satellite taking several days to orbit Jupiter (less than 2 days for Io, the closest of the four moons to Jupiter; about 16 days for Callisto, the furthest of the four from Jupiter). This gave Galileo powerful evidence in favor of a heliocentric solar system. Later he overplayed his hand with a pope he thought would be sympathetic; the pope was under political pressure from conservative elements in the Church, and in 1633 Galileo was tried for heresy. Galileo recanted and was confined to house arrest after his conviction. Of course, his view prevailed (in 1820, the Church dropped his writings from the Index of Forbidden Books, according to Wikipedia). Galileo has been called the man who overthrew Heaven because his work vindicated the heliocentric model of the solar system and therefore placed the Earth as just one planet in the solar system; no longer was it possible to view astronomical objects as perfect or made of a different substance than the Earth. (Unfortunately, I can't find the source of the line about Galileo overthrowing Heaven. I might have heard that on public radio late last night.) The Vatican has long since made amends, by supporting an astronomical observatory noted for its scientific contributions in subjects such as classification of steller spectral types. But I am reminded of the rascally science fiction short story The Star (1955), by Arthur C. Clarke, where a Jesuit astronomer from the Vatican Observatory discovers that an alien civilization was destroyed by a supernova that was seen on Earth as the Star of Bethlehem.
2010-01-08 2045: This afternoon, I saw Avatar in 3D. New York Times columnist David Brooks correctly criticizes the movie for its condescending (if not racist) "White Messiah" plot (think Dances With Wolves meets Star Wars). And the movie deserves its Black Lung rating—a sympathetic character, played by Sigourney Weaver, is shown smoking a cigarette. (Will people really still smoke cigarettes in 2154?) But the movie was tremendously entertaining, and it really is a dramatic advance in special effects technology. (The effects were done by WETA, the company behind the Lord of the Ring movies.) The 3D effect worked well for me; the sense of depth was often convincing. The ending of the movie was hardly a surprise to me, but when I got to the end of the movie, my attitude was not "no surprise there" but instead "wow! they really did it!"
2010-01-07 1730: The cold front has definitely arrived: it has gone from 27° at about 3 pm down to 19° at 5:30 pm here.
2010-01-07 1500: As forecast, we had about 2 to 3 inches of snow today (depending on where you measured it).
I took the above picture just as the last band of snow was ending. A few minutes later, the wind picked up as the forecast cold front came through, as the view below (out my back door) shows. The snow itself was gentle, but the forecast is for gusty winds (to 35 mph) and much colder temperatures—a low of 5° on Saturday morning.
2010-01-07 0900: The New York Times had an interesting obituary today: feminist theologian Mary Daly. I have never read anything by her, but I recall she visited Reed College circa 1980. At this point, I can't remember if I saw her speak. But I remember the controversy—she caused a great deal of consternation by refusing to take questions from men. As I understood her logic, she did not want to entertain men who wanted to best her in verbal sparring; she wanted to allow women to ask questions without intimidation. I recall thinking that at such a progressive and feminist campus as Reed, she shouldn't have worried about hostile questions from men. But many at Reed were angered by her refusal to take questions from men, because Reed had always had a culture of open debate and free discussion.
2010-01-02 1345: I managed to get 8 of 11 questions correct in Gail Collin's Year-End Quiz.
2010-01-02 1340: I ran my first run of the new year: five miles in southeast Portland, Oregon, to Mount Tabor park. It was 50 degrees and cloudy, fine weather for a run. I am not looking forward to the weather in southern Indiana: the forecast low tomorrow is 9 degrees.