Rabbits

We find that it is risky to let rabbits run loose near light cords: they speak tooth to power.

The Press and Obama

A year ago I was predicting that the press would follow the usual model of lionizing Obama, and then, growing jaded, savage him.

We've seen the pattern before: an obscure and unexpected character gets a little attention; and then is "discovered." Reporters like to discover things.

If the "three-story" threshold is hit they assume there is a "buzz" about him, and reporting intensifies. Reporters like to catch the wave and have people read their stories.

When the wave is high and everybody likes the man, reporters start to suspiciously dig for dirt. Reporters dream of the big surprise story, and it is almost always about a hero's clay feet.

The pattern is ugly and painful to the unsuspecting subject, but it is ultimately founded on the reporter's devotion to his craft as he understands it: locate novelties, find out what people want to know, uncover the cover-up and don't let the famous or powerful get too proud.

I'm putting as nice a perspective on it as I can.

I predicted they'd apply the same pattern to Obama, and that by now he'd be in shreds.

I was wrong.

Stage 3 never materialized, despite opportunities. There've been hints of scandal aplenty (mostly probably minor, as usual), but little follow through. Is this because Obama is a Teflon™ candidate with a personality that shakes off any criticism, or is this because journalists have tingles running up their legs? Is it fear, or an enthusiasm so intense they forget their craft?

I don't believe it is because they suddenly turned sensitive: just look at the other news reports to see how low they go.

A Friend Like Henry

by Nuala Gardner

Subtitle: “The remarkable story of an autistic boy and the dog that unlocked his world”

The book is really the story of Dale's mother Nuala.

Dale was an autistic boy. His first reply was at 3, and he had the obsessive actions and headbanging tantrums of the deeply autistic child.

Much of the story is his mother's fight to recognize the problem, then to get the authorities to recognize it, and then (over and over) to get people to help. Henry the golden retriever was a breakthrough part of that effort—and not an accidental part, as Nuala describes how, inspired by Dale's unexpectedly happy reaction to a friend's scotties, she researched what kind of dog would be best. Breeds vary a lot in temperament, and the lavish affection and patience that golden retrievers are famous for seemed ideal for Dale.

And so it proved. Dale and Henry (named after a Thomas the Tank Engine character) bonded famously, and Dale was able to make non-threatening connections with the dog that he could not do with people. Dale could understand the dog's simple needs, and learned to connect them to his own.

This took a lot of prompting by his parents: Dale didn't automatically make the connection between Henry needing to be clean and himself needing a bath. Learning to eat properly took training too:

Dale was also a bad eater, never hungry, whereas goldens, especially our Henry, are the world's greediest dogs. As Henry grew, he quickly learned when his meals were due and would bark at “his” cupboard to remind us it was dinnertime. Each day I would wait for Henry to do this, saying to my son, “Dale, what is Henry wanting at his cupboard? He is hungry.” This evolved to the point where Dale would tell me “Mum, Henry's hungry. It's time for his dinner.” Eventually Dale learned from this the concept of his own hunger and when it was dinnertime for him. I developed the trick of telling Dale that his food was good for him as it would help him grow big, just like Henry.

Another great breakthrough came when Henry found “his” voice. A carom conversation through a lovable dog is far less threatening than eye to eye talk with an adult.

When they aren't communicating, it is very easy to assume they are taking nothing in, but when Dale was ten, for example, he told me “If we hadn't talked through Henry, I would have chosen not to talk to you at all.”

As you can guess from the subtitle, there is a happy ending to Dale's story, as he grew more and more able and I gather is making a career in child care (!). Well, almost happy: dogs do not live forever, but Dale is there for the end.

Nuala showed Dale the book, and he made comments of his own on various chapters.

I found the long description of her efforts to get pregnant again both sad and creepy (IVF has issues), and it would have been good to have sketched “a day in the life” for a few different eras of Dale's development. I know several autistic people, and would have been happy for a few more technical details of what the non-dog-based training was like, but the book is meant for a general audience and that might not have fit well.

Read it.

I was asked to review this book.

We had rabbits instead of dogs, which didn't seem to elicit quite the same sorts of reactions—but then our children were far more communicative and affectionate to begin with.

Who can resist?

You remember Cabbage Patch Kids: ugly as sin. What would you Cauliflower Child?

Serendipity

There is a poster at the pharmacists advertising a memory screening study by a Dr. Breslow at the school of Pharmacy.

The email name (I'll leave off the machine to preserve his inbox) is rmbreslow. rmbreslow

I enjoy the game of trying to figure out what that vanity plate in front of me means.

baseball

Youngest son does not appreciate baseball, not having seen much of it. James does not appreciate baseball, as the closest he comes to sports is doing weights at the club. His idea of recreation is to solve differential equations and matrices on the back of an envelope.

You do not go to a ball game to watch nonstop breathless action. That's soccer or basketball. I cannot enjoy either game; I can't keep my eye on the ball and I don't know what's happening. You go to a ball game to make a day of it: enjoy fresh air, good company, a well played game with a steady pace. Long, gracefully arcing fly balls; a bang-bang double play; a leap worthy of Nureyev to snatch a ball out of the ether; a Texas leaguer blooped to center, hit where they ain't--all that and the chance to relax and have a good klatsch with your friend between plays.

If you're a Brewers Fan, you start with a tailgate party. You either get good brats and cook them on a Coleman stove or a grill, mounted on a milk crate; or you go to the Milwaukee Public Market and pick up Italian or Japanese or Lebanese or seafood takeout--or a little bit of each, with a piece of cheesecake to top it off. Wash it down with a cold bottle of Sprecher's root beer. Bring the lawn chairs and the picnic plates and relax. Inside the park, you holler along with forty thousand other people. Between plays, you can klatsch and watch the replays and read the stats and trivia on the giant scoreboard. You cheer on the racing sausages between the 5th and 6th innings (the guy in the Chorizo costume won last time I went). You sing "Roll Out the Barrel" after "Take Me Out To the Ballgame" during the stretch. After the game, you enjoy the cool night air and truck on home with the postgame show on the radio.

If you're a Cubs fan, you park at one of the CTA lots and ride the El to Wrigley. You enjoy the quick glimpses of color in the rooftop and balcony gardens along the Red Line to Wrigleyville. You munch on a real Chicago hotdog in the stands. You look out at the deep blue of the lake beyond the scoreboard and count sailboats. You holler along with 40 thousand other people. Since the scoreboard is manual, with no electronic anything, you get a break from visual clutter; instead, your instant replay is the discussion you have with your buddy. Usually, the regular PA announcer, Wayne Messmer, sings the National Anthem; so you know that performance will be melodious and thrilling and on key, without any theatrics and broken notes and dramatic pauses that throw off the tempo. Today's guest conductor for "Take Me Out To the Ballgame" may or may not be able to carry a tune in a wheelbarrow; but a lot of the fans can't either so it's not a big deal. Ernie Banks sings it very well. After the game, you take the El back to whatever restaurant you've picked out for your postgame supper.

All that and the plays that make you scream YES! along with Ron Santo, or laugh along with Bob Uecker. Line drives, doubles to the corner, fly balls speared or dropped or caught like a scoop of ice cream on top of a cone. A play at the plate on an Alfonso Soriano bullet thrown from deep left--and it's in there! The timely strikeout. JJ Hardy, Milwaukee shortstop, smothering a grounder and somehow shoveling it to second in time for the force.

I was born during the 1957 World Series, Game 3 (Milwaukee won that one). Baseball is in my blood. I grew up a Cubs fan, and I played Big Ball--Chicago 16 inch softball, which Jake the Neighborhood Guy for Old Style Beer describes as looking "like a leather canteloup". I have two mashed and crooked pinky fingers to prove that I played catcher and outfield in Big Ball. I have the faith of a Cubs fan, and because of this I have no respect for Boston and Mets fans, who walk out of the park if their team's behind in the 5th. I've lived in Brewersville long enough to appreciate the Brewers too (now that they've left that other league with the silly rule about pitchers not batting).

Wait til next year!

Mrs James

Extreme baseball

Youngest Son and I were talking about extreme sports the other day. He is fond of the Japanese "dump em in the mud" approach with mud trenches and large rolling balls, but I think we figured out a better approach.

Teams field 11 players. Each team has a red pitcher, a green pitcher, a red catcher, and a green catcher. The field has the usual 3 bases, plus a red home plate and a green home plate close to each other. There's a red baseball and a green one.

The rules are essentially the same, with a few exceptions:

• Batters don a red or green vest, and face the appropriate red or green pitcher.
• Green batters run bases counterclockwise, but red batters run clockwise.
• Bases are extra-wide, to accommodate two runners going different directions.
• A runner can be forced out only with his color of ball.
• If both balls are in play, either one can be used to tag a runner out.
• The pitcher is on a 5 second clock--he must pitch within 5 seconds or the runner advances automatically. This is to make sure play is rapid. Otherwise you'd have one pitcher pitching at a time, and the other waiting until the play was over just in case his ball would be needed for tagging. There's an obvious exception when there's a play at the other home base.
• The batter is on a clock. After the end of the play for his color ball, he has 10 seconds to get into the box or he takes an automatic strike. Stepping out of the box is similarly timed.

I'd think this would make for lively play, fast innings, and some strategy. Which pitcher will the player face? If he's a good hitter, maybe you want him facing the red pitcher because the green pitcher has loaded his bases. It seems to put extra stress on the pitcher, which is fine because it means more hits and livelier play--but not necessarily higher scores because 3 outs will still end the inning and there are more opportunities for goofs and surprise tags from behind.

Changes

I gave up on index posts a long time ago--they were getting unwieldy, and the Blogger tags were much handier. Unfortunately the template I was using before only put up a single page of tagged posts (some bug in their scripting), and that just wasn't acceptable behavior.

The new template handles these much better, but unfortunately uses a fixed-width format, which is kind of ugly. And I had to fiddle with it a bit to get back some of the things (like email contact!) that I'd had before. Oh well.

Dresser Stripping

The dresser's veneer is chipped all along the bottom, and here and there on the drawers. I can understand why the previous owners painted it, though I fervently wished they hadn't as I scrubbed off paint using a citrus stripper and rolls of paper towels. No doubt they were deceived by an enticing name like "antique gold," but the result is best described as baby-diaper yellow.

The wood under it is actually rather nice, and the veneer is mostly in good shape. The bottom is a mess, so I'll be staining some thin molding to cover it up. I don't think we'll need to paint it.

The instructions on the stripper say to leave it on for 30 minutes and scrape it off with a plastic scraper. That didn't work so well--you need a clean surface to clean the wood with, and the scraper gunked up on the first pass. If you stop to clean it off, the residues on the wood tend to harden up on you. Better to use paper towels and rotate clean surfaces into use with each pass.

Uncharitable Thoughts on Worship Styles

1 Jezebel 19:11-13

11 The LORD said, "Go out and stand in the church in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by."

Then a great and powerful set by the worship team tore the air apart and shattered eardrums before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the band gig. After the band there was a frenetic movie clip, but the LORD was not in the movie. 12 After the movie came a PowerPoint presentation, but the LORD was not in the PowerPoint. And after the service came a gentle whisper. 13 When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

Then a voice said to him, "What are you doing here, Elijah?"

---

29:3-5

3 The voice of the amplifiers is over the waters; the band on stage thunders, the amplifiers thunder over the mighty waters.

4 The voice of the amplifiers is powerful; the voice of the amplifiers is majestic.

5 The voice of the amplifiers breaks the cedars; the amplifiers break in pieces the cedars of Lebanon.

Acts 12:22

---

6:7

7b for they think they will be heard because of their many decibels

Memories

I spent several years living here. I remember eating, studying, playing with friends, playing with the cat, reading, exploring the jungle, burning termite mounds with gasoline, stepping on a mamba, working in the maintenance shop (fruitlessly trying to explain to the manager that he had the hinges wrong on a cabinet), shooting rice birds, watching tree frog tadpoles develop and escape, wandering and wondering--the usual things boys do. I wasn't (and still am not) a crowd person, and there was generally room to be alone.

That was almost two generations ago. Last year's visit was a whirlwind. We couldn't stay--our driver had a son in the hospital and as soon as business was done we could only allot a few minutes for sightseeing. The campus was much smaller now that I was grown, and far more crowded, and much run-down--the war had not been kind and neither had the tropical sun and rain.

I'd had some naive notion of showing my daughters where I'd grown up, but even the roads had shifted. I could have searched out some spot and tried to recollect what had been, and tried to describe to them the vistas now obscured by trees and new buildings and laundry. By the side of a road that doesn't exist anymore I used to watch tadpoles in a puddle, and heaved in the largest chunk of quartz I could find to see how far the splash would go. The pond filled in but left two inches of sharp stub sticking out above the dirt--my little mark on Liberia. It may be there yet, but I doubt it--the road was regraded in a new location before it was abandoned.

Even if there'd been time to explore, to try sightseeing through my memories would have meant trying to ignore the new people and new scenes. That would be a strange way to show Liberia to my kids: "Don't look at what's here, look at what used to be here." Better for us all if it is a completely new country, with a few people I used to know.

Econ

I've no idea if the current plan will help in the short term. The long term moral hazard is obviously extreme, but things are pretty dicey and the European banks are in even worse shape. Apparently (according to the Telegraph) the rules are looser over there.

If we ejected those Senators and Congressmen who abetted Fannie and Freddie, there'd be an awful lot of empty seats--including some of the noisiest complainers.

If you think about it, some problems are inevitable. If you refuse to allow someone to charge rent for the use of his money, you strangle all commerce above the level of barter.

On the other hand, if the system relies heavily on borrowing, then heavily capitalized (read "has enough money to survive moderate reversals") companies become targets and everybody is pulled down to the "have to borrow/repay to keep running" level, and are vulnerable to credit crunches. Good luck trying to mandate a happy medium--Procrustes redux.

So what to do? Mandate transparency and educate about boom/bust cycles and the value of moderation, and hope for the best? But teaching temperance is moral education, which tends to be anathema to educators.

Unless maybe we could say temperance was a "green" virtue? Is it my imagination, or are the only virtues taught these days "social" ones as opposed to personal character virtues?

Something is Looming

The dew froze to the car this morning.

Who can resist

I gather that the Antarctic stations tend not to have penguins wandering up the steps to come in: icy stares make them uncomfortable.

The Church by Hans Kung

I picked this up to fill out a 10 for \$X at a second hand bookstore, and when I offered to lead a few lessons on the church for our Bible study I decided it was time to read it (among other things, of course). Kung is a pretty famous figure in the Catholic church--and a controversial one.

The general approach he uses assumes that the church, being made up of humans, is often in trouble and needs to get back to its roots in every age--and so he emphasizes Scripture more than Tradition. He systematically addresses the various aspects of the nature of the church. He is especially annoyed with those who focus on the true church as the church at the end of time--it isn't a very useful model to apply to the church one finds here and now on the corner.

When he gets to the section on church organization he brings in a lot of detailed history. If we stipulate that his description of the history is correct (I'm in no position to say), then it is quite plain that the hierarchical model of church structure was not only not universal in the early church, it existed only sketchily in places and not at all in others (Corinth, obviously--Paul never addresses himself to church leaders, even in matters of church discipline he assumes that the entire church has a say). Only gradually does one find a single supervisor/bishop instead of a group. He treads more softly with the pope, but the weakness of the claim of primacy, not to mention dominion, is quite clear; and Kung offers advice on how a pope should serve and which titles ought to be abandoned (pontifex maximus was a Roman pagan priest's title, but "servant of the servants of God" conforms with Christian teaching).

I'm Protestant, and he's not goring my ox. Even claims that Scripture does not exclude the possibility of a pope to head the church do not ruffle my feathers--the Bible plainly neither requires nor prohibits a pope. But I can see why he got a lot of Catholics angry.

I gather that English is not his first language. Scholarly prose in translation is thick going, and he has a little tendency towards repetition for emphasis. Quite a few interesting points are skipped over, as he refers you to some other book he wrote or relies on.

He also gives rather more credence than seems reasonable to "higher critical" analyses of the Bible that attempt to dissect which bits came from which era within a single gospel. I've never heard of anyone attempting a double-blind study of the "higher critical" method (obviously using a different book), and absent such verification I class it with homeopathy. His handling of it doesn't injure his orthodoxy, however.

I read the book because I wanted to learn, and was willing to accept the rough sledding of scholarly prose as the price of knowledge. It is an expert's book in a field in which I am not an expert. If you're interested in the church you may find it useful.

Home again

Odd bits from the travel: In O'Hare's "Halstead" restaurants one joint offers Uno's personal pizzas. I like Uno's and figured they couldn't wreck one. I was very very wrong.

When the women's rest rooms in Brussels are closed for cleaning, they have no qualms about using the men's. Neither did I.

At Friday's plenary meeting we heard a description of the quench's aftermath. All the lights were broken for a long section, the region was ODH thanks to the 2 tons of helium, and the alarm systems were also broken. (Did I mention that this is some distance underground?) Result: Until Friday they couldn't legally send in an inspection team. He didn't mention the fact that the hall is now legally, though not really, a radiation area. (They haven't injected enough beam yet to make anything significantly radioactive.) It also appears that someone deleted an online logbook entry about the quench, though it was restored later. This was admitted with profuse apologies: the accelerator division is committed to transparency, the deletion was an emotional reaction...

The Brussels Air flight from Geneva had about as much leg room as a "sept place," but I had exit seats the rest of the way, and all else (even Immigrations in Chicago!) went smoothly. Well, waiting in line in Brussels to get the new boarding passes was interesting. The people in the business class had priority, and so did the passengers trying to get on the New York flight, so those of us headed for Chicago stood in an unmoving line for 15 minutes. It figures, Chicago is the Second City again.

Oh, and the seat lights on a 767 don't click on/off like the driver lights in a car. I pushed mine, because I couldn't see the control button buried beside the cushion. I expect the blister will be gone in a day or so.

Once home I rehung the bathroom door and wound up with the screws on the inside, the hinge pins in the bottom, and the lock core unexpectedly loose. The latter shifted when I tested the door. As a result the door is a little splintered, the jamb is a lot splintered, and the latch is a little bent--but it works now. I'll redo the hinges when I'm less tired.

I'm not sure how useful the trip was. I was fuzzy with lack of sleep during the day, and too tired to sleep at night. I got the package I was working on to handle two simple tests, but instead of trying to get more test cases I started working out the output. That's fuzzy, and it showed when we tried out the package. I was able to give a little instruction on how to monitor the DAQ, but the online cluster went away for over a day while I was trying to show examples. Can't win them all...

CMS Party

Before the LHC quench, CMS had planned to have a celebration party this CMS meeting week, in honor of the culmination of years of preparation. We had it anyway, quench or no quench. There must have been about a thousand people there. I knew a dozen, and remembered the faces of another three dozen.

The party was in the SX5 building above ground, and the acoustics are terrible in that huge work area--and so of course they had a band (the Danglers--a drummer and two other guys; plus a sound man trying to balance the sound in a hall where only the base could be heard). Luckily they kept the volume down for about 3 hours (when I left).

As I wrote this a red ambulance with yellow stripe along the middle drove up to the new hostel. After 10 minutes it left without taking anybody away. Must have been minor. Last time I saw them somebody had collapsed in his car and they were working with him for over an hour.

Virdee gave the welcoming speech, of which we could understand not a single word. Did I mention the terrible acoustics? Pity: he's an articulate and enthusiastic speaker. Posters of the experiment illustrated parts of the detector, projectors cycled through pictures of people and things, and a souvenir table offered hats and shirts and other CERN (and CMS and Atlas) paraphernalia. We used 2/3 of the hall-the other third was cluttered with lifting jigs and spools of cables and supplies. I'd really like to compare before and after pictures of the hall 10 years from now. I predict that what isn't partitioned into small high rise offices will be jammed full of miscellaneous hardware and boxes and stuff. You heard it here first.(*) (BTW there are only a handful of toilets.)

For about an hour we milled around. The beer table was perpetually crowded, and the side tables with a few hors d'oeuvre, juices, and boxed wine were roped off with caution tape. Several restaurants were represented, and eventually served up some Indian dishes, pasta, gyros, and some beef stew (It was ladled by an elegant chef and garnished by a lovely assistant--but it tasted awful.) Tables to seat about 150 were provided, and when desert finger food arrived waiters carried trays about among the crowd milling or waiting in line.

By 8 the band had started again and the volume was cranking up, and I had no enthusiasm for staying until 10. As the only one of the party who'd had no wine I drove back.

---

(*) The big disks are never coming out of the pit again. When the experiment is done the detector will be buried in situ: parts of it will be too radioactive to fool with and nobody wants to bother with salvaging the non-radioactive parts. So the pit lid will move so we can haul small items in and out, but we won't need the assembly area for large assembly work anymore.

LHC update

Everybody knows the LHC is down until next spring, what with the combination of the broken magnets and the mandatory winter shutdown. I really don't know anything much beyond that: I've no idea whether this single point of failure is common to superconducting magnet rings, or how many magnets were damaged (they don't know yet either), or much else about details beyond what's been reported. I know there's been a lot of griping about the publicity clampdown, but given reporters' tastes for the extreme I suppose the management wanted to keep lunatic rumors from getting magnified ("Elvis sighted in black hole that ate the ring!" or "Aliens from flying saucer responsible!"). Sometimes the BBC science reporting differs from the Weekly World News only in degree.

The planning talks are all being rewritten. I read the slides for a couple of talks--one included the original slides for amusement's sake.

At the CMS party last night, I talked with a grad student from Chile who is working on Atlas. (Her CMS boyfriend brought her.) She said they were disappointed since Atlas was ready for beam, but when I answered that at least we could fix the things that weren't quite right yet, she agreed very enthusiastically. I suppose "ready for beam" means the same thing on Atlas as on CMS: "We need more time but if we really have to we can work with what we've got."

In any event, these kind of teething pains happen, and one thing I'm certain of is that the Wall Street mishaps will have a larger impact on the field, and on my career, than a simple set of broken magnets.

Fasting

I’m not sure why fasting is so important in the Bible, but there’s no denying its prominence. Fasting and prayer frequently go together too. And Nehemiah calls on his group to fast and afflict themselves before heading out.

Why go hungry?

• Hunger would seem to be a distraction from prayer, but so is eating; so I guess it’s a wash which is better as far as distractions go, though hunger lasts longer than eating does. I seem to focus better when neither hungry nor stuffed.

• As a means of showing sorrow fasting works very well. If you’re sorry for telling your wife that her new hat looks like a cow pie, her reception will be a little frostier if you apologize while slurping an ice cream cone. It is a bit hard to convince someone that sorrow for your offenses preoccupies your mind if you are simultaneously indulging yourself.

  God shouldn’t really need convincing, though, since He already knows our hearts and knows how sorry we are. Of course that cuts both ways—He also knows just how “un-sorry” we are at the same time. Given that we have mixed motives and divided hearts, fasting and self-denial might then be ways we try to “break the tie” by adding actions to the penitent side. Of course if we get carried away with the idea that our self-denial earns us something, we defeat its purpose. Your wife won’t be moved much by the claim that she has to forgive your ill-chosen description simply because you skipped lunch.

• To what extent does a thought or intention have reality without some kind of action? OK, that’s too huge a question, so let’s bite off smaller ones: How far should someone credit your intentions if you don’t even start to act? Is someone obedient if they are never given a command to obey?

  We can answer by asserting that “God knows everything” and that He will of course know the thoughts and intents of the heart. It is nevertheless possible that the question about obedience is not a well-posed question—that it may not have an answer. If faith without works is dead, then possibly repentance without at least an effort at changing or making amends is likewise dead.

  I’m not saying that our efforts to amend or make amends are adequate, but that the absence of even feeble efforts suggests an absence of intent; and if an intention isn’t intended then I’m not sure what it is, if anything.

  If intention without action is somewhat unreal, then fasting to show sorrow is a way to make sure our sorrow is/becomes real.

• It is also possible that fasting was designed in from the start, and might still exist in the absence of sorrow and sin. I notice that people often seek out contrasts: going camping when they could stay comfortably at home; taking roller coaster rides when they’d have a heart attack if their car did the same things; and so on. Feasts are natural, and their contrast is a fast.

  In addition there’s the evidence of menstruation. The inconvenience and cramps give the husband and wife a regular fast from sex. I can’t speak to the cramps, but it certainly looks as though the inconvenience was part of the human organism from the start, which would suggest that the fast was part of the design from the start.(*)

  Why would there be fasting? Perhaps it serves as a regular reminder that we are more than bodies—a celebration that we transcend our bodies. It is a reminder that we are not self-sufficient or self-sustaining.

  Since by hypothesis this kind of fast is non-sorrowful, it would be a kind of celebration, and therefore ought to have been filled with something to celebrate: every word that proceeds from the mouth of God, perhaps?

For the honor of truth I have to admit—I almost never fast. I sometimes skip lunch at work, but I’ve found that there’s often a price to be paid for this in the work performance that afternoon. I’m not going to inflict my fasts on others, and I’ve been too lazy to devise a workable structure for fasting at home.

Therefore this is all observation and theory, and very little practice: an odd situation for an experimentalist. I suppose I should correct the discrepancy.

---

(*) Which suggests that 365 Nights, while a noble gift, might be slightly misguided.

What's up?

As you could tell from this blog’s description, this was originally supposed to be a group blog for the family. My ambition was to be more of a "content provider" a la Den Beste's model rather than a linker/commenter a la Instapundit. It hasn't quite panned out the way I expected. It became clear pretty quickly that I had to maintain at least a small amount of privacy for the kids' sake, so the reader has missed out on a lot of hilarious misadventures; and I often found that I could make some small comment on events but had nothing hugely profound beyond that.

I didn't enable comments because I don't always have time to review the site, and spammers quickly make a nice site ugly. This lack is unfortunate: many of the sites I read have lucid and valuable regular commenters. I read my email regularly, though.

I thought it might be interesting to look over the weblogs I've been reading fairly regularly, to see what has changed. The short answer is that I read fewer linkers. Some of those I used to read have quit blogging, and some changed tone or had commenters change their tone for them.

Just for laughs, and perhaps for your interest, these are some of the regulars.

Now that Middle Daughter is back from Senegal, I don't read the (no-longer-updated) blogs her friends wrote.

Do I have to say that Opinions expressed by these folks bear no necessary relationship to my own?

• Science
  • Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit: postings on High Energy Physics doings, mostly theory, which are almost entirely general public readable. Not a fan of string theory :-). He wrote a book of the same title about string theory.
  • Resonaances: intermittent postings from a CERN theorist on events and interesting results. Fun to read.
  • John Baez: a mathematical physicist who's been writing about his and other's doings in mathematical physics for years. He has lucid explanations archived of many interesting aspects of the field, some of which I almost understand. Highly recommended.
  • Tomaso Dorigo: an Italian colleague on both CDF and CMS, writing about his experiences, a little about Italian politics (which I seriously don't understand!) and new physics results. Alas, his days as a rumor exposititor are over--some CDF folks complained about him talking about results before the results were blessed as ready, and he agreed to post only about blessed work. He was on shift during the LHC commissioning week, except that on the actual day all shift workers were replaced with "experts." He politely omitted an explanation of why.
  • SciTech Daily: Not exactly a blog, more of an aggregator of science stories, broken down into columns of "real stuff," "new books," and "opinion" (the latter is not generally valuable).
  • Cronaca: Mostly pointers to interesting articles in archaeology, which has always been an interest of mine.
• Religion
  • Internet Monk: A Kentucky Baptist preacher with thoughtful and sometimes very personal postings on evangelicalism and ministry. He neither hides nor glories in his warts or his doubts. Highly recommended.
  • Touchstone Magazine's blog. A meeting place for all sorts, discussing modern religion and society: Catholic, Evangelical, Orthodox, etc. Agree or disagree, you'll find intelligent and knowledgeable commenters.
  • The Anchoress: Postings on religion and society. Recently there's been more about elections than I like, but it is still an interesting window on another part of the landscape.
  • Catholic and Enjoying it: Mark Shea also enjoys pronouncing on all manner of things. He refers to "The Evil Party" and "The Stupid Party" in America :-)
  • Unmedia, the blog of a Shiite physicist, moved and reorganized and I haven't been back to it in quite a while. Evangelical Outpost also moved and reorganized (and he'd been recycling posts and writing about politics a lot), and I've not been back there either.
• Local (Dane County area: what's going on here that I didn't hear about?)
  • Life in the Great Midwest: A group blog writing about personal and general events. Dan is from Madison, and I've learned a few things about the area I live in.
  • Ann Althouse is a law professor at the UW, and one of the better known names in the blogosphere. She is prolific, general, quirky and personal; and popular for good reason.
  • Atomic Trousers: is the blog of a local newsman. He includes more sports than I'm interested in, and I don't watch his clips of him on TV, so I may be dropping this one.
  • There's a big Dane County blog collective, but although I've tried several times I've never found anything very interesting there. I found more interest and amusement in a single comment by "Ghost of a Flea" on Althouse than the whole collective. Your mileage may vary.
• Humor (loosen the bowstring from time to time)
  • Lileks is a very good writer who works for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. His writing is generally personal, and keeps you interested even in things you don't usually think about. He writes on weekdays and I highly recommend him.
  • Stuff White People Like: feels like it is starting to wind down, but it has been hilarious. Look at the archives. You can guess the theme from the title.
  • I Can Has Cheezburger? shows photos (usually of cats) with humorous captions. Fun, and sometimes very good. The ratio of "Honey, come look at this one!" to the total is about 1/12, which is pretty good.
  • Iowahawk: Original satirical works, posted intermittently, generally on political or social topics. Usually good, and sometimes very good.
• Personal Blogs
  • S. Weasel She photoshops things that amuse her and works in an animal refuge. We're amused too.
  • The Philosopher Mom: Raising 9 kids and teaching philosophy. Ever contemplated what a school morning would be like, or negotiating a family-only outing with eleven voices in the mix?
  • Eve Tushnet Literature and society from a woman who says she's "gayer than sunshine." She posts about weekly, but writes for other sites and journals as well.
• Social Comment
  • David Warren: a Canadian columnist writing about society and posting his columns online. I learned a lot about Canada from him.
  • Winds of Change: a group blog covering society and war and events from a variety of interests.
  • Belmont Club: Richard Fernandez is a Philippine writer with a good eye for American trends and a taste for ending his columns with poetry. Thoughtful. I recently carped that he was trying to post too often, but even so he is still better than most of the pros.
  • Hog on Ice: Steve wrote Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man, so some of the blog is devoted to food, some to religion, some to society... He often throws out requests for advice to his faithful readers.
  • Classical Values: a couple of social and political observers with libertarian leanings; literate and knowledgeable. And fond of pit bulls.
  • Assistant Village Idiot: Can you resist a title like that? He works for a hospital in New England.
• News
  • I don't have much time to read Rantburg these days. It is a good news aggregator, but it can take a long time to go through it. You won't find a lot of its news in the usual locations (see below); it pulls from sources around the world. Some of the comments are rather tart and not always friendly.
  • BBC Broad if not deep coverage around the world. Their science editor could be a little more skeptical.
  • NY Times. Their science section is usually pretty interesting, and their world coverage sometimes complements BBC's.
  • Drudge Report Matt Drudge is a famous idiosyncratic news aggregator. I'm told some newspapers spend time trying to figure out how to get him to link to a story--a link from him can generate a half million hits.
  • Wired News Techie-type news; some hard news, some nerdy, and some goofy. If you're nerdy you probably already know about it.
  • Google News. I hear this is the number one news aggregator. I actually don't find it all that useful, and will probably be dropping it soon. Most of their news categories are ones I don't follow, and their algorithm seems to pick secondary reports.

There are quite a few other good sites that I like to look at now and then (Mark Steyn, Instapundit, Chicago Boyz, etc), but who has time?