Check out PartiallyClips for a rockin’ good cartoon.
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"Take my viola. Please!"
The NY Times, in their emailed morning news articles, had the story of a pair of players in a former string Quartet who are being forced to give up their instruments to settle a bankruptcy debt. They declared bankruptcy after they lost a legal battle against a former quartet member. Their instruments (and bows) are valued at $166,o00.
From the NY Times article:
“I don’t have words for this,” said Clyde Shaw, the quartet’s cellist. “The letters and notes I’m getting from around the country – the musicians in this country are shocked. They are floored by this decision. It upsets the world that we live in.”
I don’t pretent to be an expert in bankruptcy law. It’s my understanding that the agent in charge of bankruptcy liquidation may not seize the tools necessary for a person to continue their livelihood. That being said, is it really that critical to downgrade from a $166,000 set of instruments to ones rated at (say) $40,000?
In a lot of respects, I’m a musical moron, and this is probably one of them. How much of a cellist’s livelihood comes from people who pay to hear them, yet cannot distguish the difference between a one hundred thousand dollar instrument and a five thousand dollar one? If it’s a high ratio of people like them to people who really hear the difference, then who cares, really?
I guess the thing that jumped me most from this article was the implied difference between these people’s musical instruments and another person’s house, which might be seized in a bankruptcy case. Class warfare, anyone?
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The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
We saw Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe last Saturday. Quick review: Good. Go see it. Excellent scenery and CGI graphics. It didn’t depart very much from the book, which we appreciated (although there were a few supporting characters that were entirely new). Good flick.
However, this post concerns accents and possible subtext.
The actors were all English, or at least did a credible english accent, with one glaring exception. The Wolf who was the Queen of Narnia’s secret police enforcer had an American accent.
Coincidence? Possibly. Subliminal subtext? You make the call!
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Argument by Incredulity
A British philosopher was quoted in the Atlanta Journal Constitution today saying, “A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature.” This philosopher, Antony Flew, has been a devout atheist (if that is not an oxymoron) for a good while now. Check out his wikipedia entry for more information.
Deeper in the article comes what makes me wonder what the heck this guy is doing? If he is as respectable and educated as he apparently is, why is he making this “Argument from Incredulity” as quoted here? “‘It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism.”
The Argument from Incredulity is defined is several locations: Talk Origins, EvoWiki, and others. The one I like the best is from Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, which I will briefly paraphrase.
The example of the polar bear being white has been used as an argument against natural selection. The argument goes, “Polar bears have no need to be white because they don’t need to hide from anything. I find it hard to believe they evolved that way therefore they must have been designed.” Whereas what they really mean is, “I, sitting here in my chair, with no experience concerning polar bears or the arctic, can think of no reason off the top of my head for polar bears to be white.” Mr. Dawkins uses one example of a selective pressure on polar bears to indicate there are perfectly good reasons for polar bears to be able to blend into the arctic landscape: the prey they hunt will run if they see a big ravenous bear coming, so it makes good sense for polar bears to be white.
I won’t get deeper into the quote, particularly concerning “…evolution of that first reproducing organism,” because I’m not qualified to discuss it, but a renowned philospher who says he has “scientific” reasons for acknowledging the existence of a divine designer should know better than to use this argument.
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How do you Code that?
Without trying to minimize the depth of tragedy concerning the death of a six-year-old boy when a Southwest jet slid off the runway in Chicago, (stories here, here, and here), the traffic engineer in me wonders how an investigator would code that crash?
There are the obvious codes for collisions with vehicles, deer, lamp posts, guardrail, ditches, mailboxes, etc., but with a quick check of the Georgia Department of Transportation’s coding scheme (which is in the only one I have immediately available), the only categories that might apply are “Other Object (Not Fixed)” or “Motor Vehicle in Motion – In Other Roadway.” The next obstacle would be that the vehicle at fault is the one that is used to categorize the collision, which in this case would be the aircraft striking another “Motor Vehicle in Motion – In Other Roadway.” Again, trying to convert the police report to the collision database will be a fun task for whomever gets it, I’m sure. Without specifically requesting the crash report, someone (like me) who happens to look at the collision data for that roadway would have no idea that a 100 ton aircraft caused this wreck.
Arguably, and I’m willing to be the arguer, this collision should be entirely disregarded when analyzing the traffic safety of this road section. Yes, it’s a fatality, but the circumstances are not ones which are within the bounds of the traffic engineer to solve (I’m sure the airport and airlines would object to a 20′ wall across the end of their runway). However, it would be difficult to disregard this fatality if you were merely analyzing the crash data because you would have no idea (without special knowledge) that an aircraft was involved. Fatalities get an awful lot of attention when collision analyses are conducted so this one wreck could disproportionately affect the amount and kinds of money spent on this roadway.
My Two Cents. This isn’t something earth-shaking in the traffic community, it is merely interesting. And tragic, from the point of view of the family of the deceased.
Post script: In my experience, in cases similar to this one where weather is a factor, some police officers would tend to cite the driver of the out-of-control vehicle for failure to drive safely according to conditions. I wonder if the airline pilot received one? That is done by the officer on the scene to firmly establish which driver was at fault. This incident messes with some of the nice boundaries that traffic and safety engineers are usually safely ensconsed behind.
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Time Lapse with WebCams
I got turned on to this link a day or so ago. It is a man stitching together webcam jpgs to create time lapse footage of various things. I had a grand time watching the two Panama Canal videos, and the Mexican Volcano is right cool.
The great thing about this is that you can download his software and do it yourself! Makes me want to go get a webcam and try it out.
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Tangled Bank
For those of you not yet familiar with the concept of the blog carnivals, I’m not going to tell you about them. Instead, I’ll let you follow the links and discover for yourself.
Instead of reading about blog carnivals, you can go to one and experience it! Try Tangled Bank on for size which is a carnival with a Science/Medicine theme.
Here is the latest Tangled Bank, #42, hosted by Dogged Blog (some of my friends might be interested in following this blog for its dog focus). It has some fascinating articles about veterinary work, and one wholly scary one about variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human version of bovine spongiform encephelopathy (mad cow disease).
This item was the main reason for this post. Of all the diseases I’m aware of, I think vCJD scares me the most. Cancer sucks, yes. Malaria kills millons, yes. But, vCJD infects you with a protein that can’t be killed by standard sterilization processes and then you slowly develop depression, dementia, and coordination problems followed relatively quickly by death. No cure exists.
This article briefly talks about spontaneous prion formation that might lead to vCJD in humans, but experts think that infected nervous system tissue from cattle causes most human cases. If you follow the link above, or from Tangled Bank, you will find a researcher who reports that prions have been detected in sheep mammary glands. You know, those things that produce milk for all us milk drinkers. I’m going to be depressed if I have to give up drinking milk for fear of getting this disease.
This is all very irrational on my part, as I voluntarily commute alongside 20,000 other deadly weapons twice a day. I know that my chances of being killed by vCJD are lower than my chances of being hit by a falling jetliner, but that doesn’t effect how I feel.
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Aeon Flux
Another week, another movie. This time it was Aeon Flux, starring Charlize Theron and other people I’ve never heard of.
What to say… If you want to see Charlize Theron strutting around in a tight body suit, two thumbs up. If you want to see nifty neato futuristic stuff, one thumb plus a digit. If you want story and acting, I’d go for about three-quarter thumb. If you are a nit-picker who loves looking for holes in a movie plot, three thumbs up! If you’re a biologist, dont’ go, it will only piss you off.
But, the tight body suit part of it makes up for a lot of discrepancies
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Mapping the World
This website contains some interesting articles concerning the mapping of the world by the USSR. The first line in the first article sums it up quite amusingly. “Every Soviet president from Stalin to Gorbachev, and all their high-ranking officers, knew not only where you lived, but how to get there by tank.”
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Pride & Prejudice
We went to see Pride and Prejudice last Saturday. Unfortunately it was at the local theater that makes my legs hurt! I wish the theater with the good seats would start getting the movies I want to see. Harry Potter, Star Wars, they’ve all been at the other theater. Argh. I need to write a letter.
But, that’s not what the blog is about. Here is wholly detailed commentary regarding the film, but let me add a few wrinkles:
- Keira Knightley’s smile is way to weird to have been in Edwardian England. She would have been burned as a witch or something
- The woman who played Jane is the same woman who played the blond double-agent in Die Another Day, and the closeups on her DARK brown eyebrows with the blond hair were very distracting
- There is a beautiful marble bust featured in the film (when Elizabeth is visting Darcy’s manor) which is a carving of a woman with a veil. It was difficult to tell if the veil was part of the carving or if it was actually a silk veil. Very neat
- Make sure you bring tissues to give to the woman next to you during this film. “Are you crying? There’s no crying in Jane Austen!”
The Evil Eyebrow
There is no knowing the Evil Eyebrow
Twenty Twenty-Five
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