2010-07-28 0830: I was sorry to read the obituary in the New York Times of the cartoonist John Callahan. Callahan was alcoholic and quadraplegic, and he drew cartoons showing an acid humor about disability and other sensitive topics. The article reproduced one of my favorites: a posse on horseback in the desert having found an empty wheelchair: "He won't get far on foot!" But they didn't mention another of my favorites: Jesus on the cross, thinking "T. G. I. F.!"
2010-07-25 2015: Andrew Sullivan has had two charming "mental health breaks" on his blog this weekend: One of them is a wonderfully brain-damaged Flash animation by a British artist named Cyriak: "Cows & cows & cows." The title animals start nodding and then dancing to a simple pop riff, but they start mutating in bizarre ways, all in rhythm to the music. This is available at his site, http://cyriak.co.uk/. The other mental health break was a video of the popular singer-songwriter Jewel Kilcher, who participated in a wonderful prank. She had professional makeup artists disguise her as a business woman, and she and several associates pretended to be conventioneers at the local karaoke bar, so she could sing her own songs. The results can be seen at Sullivan's blog (Undercover Karaoke with Jewel).
2010-07-25 2000: Yesterday, I ran 14 miles. I've never run that far. This was in the hilly Cherokee and Seneca parks in Louisville. I ran 10 miles before my running group friends appeared at 9 a.m., then ran the usual 4 mile route with them. The weather was warm and humid (on its way to a high of 96°F. Today, I'm a bit sore and tired, but not too bad; I was afraid that as I ran longer distances I might start having knee or foot problems. Fortunately, I haven't had any problems. More experienced runners tell me that I'm not too far from being able to run a marathon; people typically work their way up to 20 mile training runs before trying a marathon. One friend said he'd only run 14 miles before tackling a marathon. That strikes me as a bit crazy; he did this when he was young, and I wouldn't think of trying it at my age.
2010-07-19 2145: The New York Times had a very disturbing aticle this morning about the psychological toll on the people who make a living screening vile and illegal images posted by people on social networking web sites (Brad Stone, Policing the Web's Lurid Precincts). The first paragraph mentions cruelty to animals, graphic killings, and an image showing "two teenage boys gleefully pointing guns at another boy, who is crying." I had a sharp emotional reaction just reading about this; I can hardly imagine actually seeing the images eight hours a day. It is even worse to think of the people who posted these images in the first place.
2010-07-18 0815: Maureen Dowd has a devastating column (Rome fiddles, we burn) this morning on the Roman Catholic Church's response to the pedophilia crisis. Before noting that the Church "[s]tupifyingly…links raping children with ordaining women as priests, deeming both 'graviora delicta,' or grave offenses," Dowd makes the brutal observation: "If Roman Polanski were a priest, he'd still be working here."
2010-07-16 2145: This morning, while mowing my lawn, I surprised a rabbit, which ran across my yard to my neighbor's front yard. This evening, I saw what I suppose was the same animal, resting in the shade under the pine tree in the northwest corner of my backyard. I'm glad to see such a harmless creature in my lawn.
2010-07-16 2130: I've managed to install Linux on my computer. I've been meaning to obtain a machine running Linux, because there is a certain program I need to run for my research that isn't available for Windows (see my post below marked 2010-05-14 1845). But I was fortunate to be able to install Linux without damaging my Windows operating system (I now have Windows on one hard drive, and Linux on a second hard drive; my system is dual-boot). What enabled me to accomplish this was the July issue of the magazine Linux Format, which had an article "Dual boot made easy." I had to interpolate their instructions a little, but they did work as promised. (The magazine also included a free DVD containing Linux, Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx," which was handy.)
The other thing I've accomplished lately is that I've learned how to program something called wxWidgets. This is a graphical user interface library that enables a programmer to build applications with visual controls such as menus and buttons. wxWidgets is "cross-platform," meaning (at least in theory) you can write one program and make it run on different operating systems—Windows, Linux and Macintosh. I wrote a simple program that lets the user open a certain kind of earthquake data file, and graph the quakes; first under Windows, and today, with essentially no changes, on Linux. I must thank my friend Jeff H.; I mentioned to him that I was interested in learning a GUI library that wasn't tied to Windows, and he suggested wxWidgets.
2010-07-02 1145: This morning I learned the dreadful news that the writer Christopher Hitchens has esophageal cancer; he has cut short the tour for his latest book (his memoir Hitch-22) to undergo chemotherapy. The fact that he is being given chemotherapy is ominous: this morning, I read that chemotherapy for esophageal cancer is only a palliative treatment. Hitchens has little regard for religion (I have read his book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything) but I pray for him and those close to him.
There are two main kinds of esophageal cancer: squamous cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma. The former is strongly associated with heavy drinking and smoking (more than 80% of that kind of esophageal cancer can be attributed to alcohol and tobacco use; the relative risk for this cancer in persons who drink and smoke is 35 or more). It's not reported what kind of esophageal cancer Hitchens has, but given that he has been a heavy drinker as well as a smoker, it's very sad to consider the possibility that his illness is the result of these behaviors. (He had reduced his intake of alcohol, and he quit smoking in 2008, but unfortunately this has little affect on the risk of getting this kind of cancer in persons with a long history of alcohol use and smoking.)
(I got the numbers I quote above from an interesting article that details the risks of certain cancers from alcohol and tobacco use: Cancer Risk Associated With Alcohol and Tobacco Use: Focus on Upper Aero-Digestive Tract and Liver, by Perucchi et al. This is part of a publication of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Alcohol and Tobacco: An Update, Volume 29, Number 3, 2006.)