Airport Security

Posted on by
Reply

This is what happened to me on the way home from Florida Monday:

 
I put my suitcase, my backpack, a tray containing my computer and the liquids baggy, and a tray containing my shoes and my dinner onto the belt and stepped through the personal scanning device, which I passed with no problem. As I went to wait for my stuff, the security guy asked me the dreaded question: “Is this your bag?” It was indeed my suitcase. My suitcase crammed full to bursting not only with everything I wanted to take for a week and a half in Florida but also several layers of sweaters, vests, and a jacket for arrival in chilly Massachusetts. “We’d like to just take a look inside,” he said. 
 
I got my shoes on and my backpack repacked with all the other stuff, and watched as the security guy undid the zipper of my suitcase. He undid the bands that keep my clothes folded neatly and began folding them all back to one side as he dug down toward the bottom.
 
I absolutely could not imagine what he might have seen in there, so I asked, “What are you looking for?”
 
He was vague, but asked if maybe I had a pack of spare batteries. Okay, batteries. “I have an iPod and a couple of spare batteries for it.” He dug that out and put it aside. 
 
“I also have a tape player, and there’s a couple of spare batteries for that, too.” That was in the other side of the suitcase, so after more rummaging around through all the clothes piled on top (further unfolding things, though he was very polite and did try hard not to) he pulled out the running belt with the tape player and spare batteries and put that aside. 
 
Then he found my night table kit, which, it turns out has in it a flashlight, along with (you guessed it) a couple of spare batteries. More rummaging, and he brought out my medicine/toiletries kit. Nope, no batteries there, but he added it to the growing pile beside the suitcase. Then he found the little box that had a little folding booklight in it. I’d forgotten about that, and it has, in fact, a very weird little battery. He added it to the pile. 
 
“We’re just going to run this through again,” said the security man, taking my suitcase minus the pile of suspicious objects and minus also a couple of books that had fallen out. 
 
And I’m thinking, thank heavens I allowed some extra time at the airport! (Yes, thanks, Mom; that came in handy!)
 
The security man returned shortly with my suitcase and announced, “Those weren’t it.” He began digging all the way to the bottom, and now I knew I was never going to get it all back together again. 
 
In a few moments, he pulled out a flat cardboard box (maybe only 3/4″ high by 4″ wide by 10″ long). “What’s this?” he asked.
 
What that was, was a set of twelve lovely antique crystal knife rests from Austria, a part of a place setting for a formal dinner in a bygone elegant era. They were a gift from a friend of my mother’s. “They’re crystal,” I told the security guy as he cautiously opened the box. 
 
He laughed, his relief evident. “Oh, crystal!” he said. “You know, that scans black.” And I thought, Like metal. Like batteries. Like explosives.
 
I guess it really *is* LEAD crystal!
 
So be warned, if you ever happened to be carrying any crystal through the airport, take it out of your bag in advance. I never did get all that stuff back into the suitcase right. 
 

No Parking

Posted on by
Reply

 Two signs in Lake Park, Florida, one above the other, are fastened to a signpost in the middle of a swale between the street and the sidewaik. “NO PARKING ANY TIME” declares the top sign. Below it, the second sign adds, “NO PARKING IN SWALE”.

From Riviera Beach & Lake Park, Florida

Were these signs posted by the town’s Department of Redundancy Department?

Given the opportunity, the clever (or perverse) reader could interpret these signs any of three ways:

  1. NO PARKING IN SWALE AT ANY TIME. WE JUST COULDN’T FIT THIS ALL IN ONE SIGN.
  2. IN GENERAL, NO PARKING AT ANY TIME ANYWHERE IN LAKE PARK. ESPECIALLY NOT HERE IN THE SWALE.
  3. NO PARKING AT ANY TIME. NOT EVEN IN THE SWALE, RIGHT HERE, WHERE THE SIGN IS POSTED! YOU BLOCKHEAD!

Personally, I’d bet on number 3. But it won’t help. Right in front of the sign, a truck is parked. In the swale.

From Riviera Beach & Lake Park, Florida

So who owns this truck, anyway? Yes, that’s right: the Town of Lake Park!

Neighboring Riviera Beach has a kinder, gentler approach to the problem of parking in swales. “Please,” they ask politely, “do not park on swales.”

From Riviera Beach & Lake Park, Florida

I wonder which is more effective.

Observed in today’s science/technology news

Posted on by
Reply

Google News top four Sci/Tech headlines for this morning, or… “One of these things is not like the others”:

Oppenheimer downgrades Apple to perform [from “outperform”, a stock rating]

Microsoft plans quick fix for IE [please be sure to download and install the patch to keep your passwords and other personal data safe]

Yahoo to scrub personal data after three months [glad to know that…]

and, oh yes…

Scientists say universe is expanding

Okay, let’s assume that we all guessed correctly that #4 is the one not like the others. The timescale of this item far outlasts the timescale of the other three. And let’s look more in depth at this breaking news.

Haven’t we in fact known that the universe is expanding for, well, years now, if not decades? But the big news here is that we now have added evidence that the expansion is accelerating. And you know what that means… Sometime in the future we will not be able to see any other galaxies but our own, even with the most powerful telescope because they will all be past the event horizon — farther away than the speed of light can carry their image to us. And we will be isolated in a lonely universe.

The implication of this discovery is that we (well, at least some of us) now believe that so-called empty space is not really empty at all; rather, it’s full of energy. And this energy also prevents the further “clumping” of stars into galaxies and galaxies into larger and larger galaxies, which our current mathematical modeling of the universe would predict but which we do not observe.

On a personal-interest sidenote, Einstein has also been vindicated. When he developed the General Theory of Relativity, people (including him) believed that the universe was static (not expanding). According to Einstein’s original theory, the measured effects of gravity should have been stronger than they actually were. And so Einstein introduced a kind of fudge factor into his equations known as the “cosmological constant”, set to -1. The purpose of the cosmological constant was to reconcile the mathematics of the general theory with observed phenomena. But with an expanding universe, the cosmological fudge factor–er, constant–was no longer needed. At one point, Einstein called the introduction of the cosmological constant his greatest error. But it turned out that the measured expansion of the universe did not sufficiently account for the discrepancy, and this set scientists looking for dark matter, and later for dark energy. And now, this measurement of distant galaxy-clusters reported in the news today may finally account for the discrepancy and explain the need for the cosmological constant by proving the existence of dark energy in otherwise empty space.

And where does all this leave string theory, the ten-dimensional universe, parallel universes, and other approaches not yet  considered mainstream physics? They are not disproved. Quantum field theory predicts that the energy of a vacuum should be 120 orders of magnitude (yes, ten to the 120th power) higher than those observed. So we still have a way to go.

One step leads to another (in Washington Park, Portland)

Posted on by
Reply

 

I had to go to the Japanese Gardens in Portland, Oregon. This little bit of unfinished business from my last trip here thirty years ago was the one item firmly established on my agenda for this trip. But there is no easy way to get there; this is probably why I never made it on the last trip.

Given my planned departure time, the Portland public transit Web site recommends that I take the light rail and then walk somewhere to connect to a bus that runs only once an hour. A bit more research on this Web site reveals that I could leave later, walk a little farther south downtown, and with careful time coordination hop the bus to begin with, thereby avoiding the transfer.

The return is a bit trickier because the bus will wind all through the very large Washington Park and take half an hour longer to get back downtown than it took coming out. Also, I again have to worry about the timing. Or perhaps I could walk from the Japanese Gardens to the light rail station on the other side of the park. This doesn’t look close, but it’s hard to tell from the map on the transit Web site just how far it is and what would be involved. I decide to deal with the return trip later. I time my departure so that after only a short wait I board the bus for Washington Park.

The Japanese Gardens are truly wonderful (see my previous blog post). As I leave, I ask the admissions attendant whether it’s possible to walk from there to the light rail station. Yes, she answers, sounding a bit surprised. This is apparently not a common question. There’s a dirt hiking trail, she tells me. It starts right by their driveway and winds for two miles through the woods, ending near the station. She offers me a trail map.

Two miles! Alone in the woods! And clearly these are very rough and hilly woods at that. I’m not sure about this, but I thank her and take the map. While visiting the Rose Gardens down the hill, I mull over my options. Even at this time of year, many of the roses are in bloom. They are very pretty, but visiting this garden doesn’t take much time.

Return trip decision time is now at hand. I climb up as far as the bus stop. The next bus should come by in just ten or twelve minutes. But, having gone to all the trouble to get here, it seems a shame to leave so quickly, so… definitively.

I opt for the two-mile hike.

I climb back up to the Japanese garden and find the start of the trail. Five minutes into the walk I begin to worry. Should I be afraid of encountering strangers along the way? I have no idea whether this park is infamous for muggings and worse, or not. Or should I be afraid of *not* encountering anyone? What if I slip and fall, all alone? What if I get lost?

It takes another five minutes to dismiss these considerations. The woods are beautiful. I am competent. A few people do come by, just a few, and they are as friendly as other Oregonians have been. I relax into the rhythm of walking. The trail is well marked. Not only am I not lost but I can actually follow my progress on the trail map.

Forty minutes into my hike the territory that has come to feel familiar to me explodes into surprise: Here is a trail branching off that is not on the map! And just down the trail, a sign: I have entered an arboretum! The sign recommends visiting the “Maple Grove” in autumn, and so I do.

I sketch the maple grove onto its blank area on my trail map, and I draw in the trails through the arboretum as well.

In the maple grove, two women are coming up the trail toward me. “Excuse me,” one of them asks, “is this the way toward the Japanese Gardens?”

I am pleased to be able to tell them that it is, and exactly which trails and turns they should follow, and how long it will take. I have been transformed into an expert.

In less than ten minutes, I reach the light rail station. I am a different person than the one who set out this morning. I have become a competent old-hand solo Washington-Park hiker.

The Portland Japanese Gardens

Posted on by
Reply

The Japanese gardens in Portland, Oregon are strikingly beautiful, even off-season in mid-November.

The size, texture, color, and location of every plant, stone, timber, waterway, bench, building, and lantern have been selected to give the visitor pleasure. Each angle of each pathway is arranged for the best view of the garden or the most harmonious sound of a quiet waterfall. Each bench is in the most restful location. Every bush has been pruned to its best shape, one that will most complement the surrounding plants and structures. Tree limbs are carefully trained to follow the most desirable lines.

Even in the so-called Natural Garden nothing, but nothing, has been left to chance.

In the autumn garden, I have begun to suspect that every morning the staff arranges even the fallen leaves on the pathways in patterns of perfect and only-apparently-random beauty.

Blown Glass

Posted on by
Reply

I have always had a weakness for the beauty of blown glass, but never, until this weekend, have I seen it actually being blown. So everything going on at the Icefire Glassworks in Cannon Beach, Oregon was new to me: how many layers of glass and color; how many times the work in process goes in and out of the fire; how many different fires are used; how many different ways the color can be applied; how many times the glass is blown and blown again before it is finished.

How like a dance the process is! The molten glass is always in motion, and the creators work together in choreographed teamwork.

The process is elemental; in days of fantasy and yore, glassblowers would have been mages and sorcerers, combining in their secret rhythms the glass and powders and grains of the earth, the air of their breath, the fire of three forges. And—yes—water, essential for shaping the glass and insulating the tools. Steam so hot that it is invisible and does not burn.


Verbage

Posted on by
Reply

While reading this article in The New Yorker, I experienced a pang of angst as sharp as a knife. How much I love words has overwhelmed me. I know what Luddites are, but this is the first time I have come to understand in an immediate and personal way that they are attacking me, that all the stuff they are against, that stuff is the air that I breathe. Words are, to use Rilke’s phrase, the “rind, rondure, and leaf” of my being. The beauty of a turning phrase. How the tongue delights on the rhythm of words, and the mind on their improbably origins.

So, what shall we make of this:

“The most revealing moment happened earlier, when she was asked about Obama’s attack on McCain’s claim that the fundamentals of the economy are sound. ‘Well,’ Palin said, ‘it was an unfair attack on the verbage that Senator McCain chose to use, because the fundamentals, as he was having to explain afterwards, he means our workforce, he means the ingenuity of the American people. And of course that is strong, and that is the foundation of our economy. So that was an unfair attack there, again, based on verbage that John McCain used.’ This is certainly doing rather than mere talking, and what is being done is the coinage of ‘verbage.’ It would be hard to find a better example of the Republican disdain for words than that remarkable term, so close to garbage, so far from language. ”

I think I want to cry.

World of Wonders: Cosmology Explained

Posted on by
3

Thank you, Becky, for the blog party! Happy 115th post! Visit all the participants at Wonders Never Cease. May I bring something to the party? How about—a universe?

This may or may not be true, but it’s a fair description of opinions that a number of respectable scientists seriously appear to hold. And it really gets me.

It’s not just that all the stars and galaxies without number in our universe all came out of what can only be described as nothing much. When you look out into the darkness of night between the stars, you are actually seeing the distant past from before the stars were born. And the universe is still expanding. Some say it will continue expanding indefinitely, so that eventually all of our far and eventually even our near neighbors will be beyond the event horizon and therefore invisible to us in an increasingly dark and lonely world.

It’s not just that we have unobservably tiny particles with adorable names like muons and charmed quarks. And best of all are the strings—one-dimensional particles tinier than can be detected even in theory, miniscule units of resonant, vibrating energy out of which all matter is made.

It’s not even that they’re now saying that the universe comprises not four dimensions (three of space plus time) as we perceive it but actually ten dimensions. Or maybe eleven, depending on which set of mathematics you buy into. And where are the other dimensions, you might ask? It’s a reasonable question. They’re all very, very tiny and curled in around themselves at every infinitesimal point of intersection of the three dimensions we perceive. There. I’m glad I could answer that question for you.

And speaking of sets of mathematics, there are now a number of alternate theories explaining what’s going on in the domains of the very tiny, the very distant, and the very long ago and far away. The mathematics behind these theories is so complex that only a computer system can reconcile them. The theory behind this reconciliation, M-theory, holds that each individual version of string theory encapsulates a part of the truth, a viewpoint about the cosmos. The truth is: Human beings invented this stuff, but we can no longer comprehend it. At least not yet.

But what really gets me are the branes. A brane (short for “membrane”) is a surface of any number of dimensions that forms an elemental unit or building block of the cosmos. At its smallest, a brane might be a string (tiny vibrating unit of matter/energy too small to be measured; see above). At its largest, well… Some scientists think that the entire universe as we know it is just one brane in a larger structure of multiple universes. Some scientists have speculated that our universe (brane) is connected by a single string (brane) to another entire universe (brane) from which it was sundered during the Big Bang. The connecting brane is stretching and stretching as the two universes drift farther and farther apart, but some day, zillions of years from now, the connecting brane will grow so taut that it will begin to pull the two universes back together again. Zillions more years later the universes will collide and all matter and energy will collapse into, well, nothing much, until the next Big Bang comes along.

Until we can find out what substance the physicists are on and get some for ourselves, how can science fiction writers possibly hope to come up with anything this good?

Thunder

Posted on by
Reply

A thunderstorm is passing overhead. A flash of lightning, mostly obscured by the trees is closely followed by a loud crack and a persistent roll of thunder. Amber, who the moment before had been sleeping by my side, is instantly alert. His head jerks up. His eyes are wide; his pupils, dark. His ears antenna in all directions. The sound passes. Amber rests his head on his paws again.

I suddenly understand that wherever we get this fear of lightning and thunder from, it’s very deep and very ancient.

Experiencing a place

Posted on by
2

Recently, I put up a Web site about Dan’s and my trip to Turkey and Greece (http://www.songless.com/greece/). That site contains a (large) number of photographs, perhaps 150 of them, distilled down from the 650 or so that we took on the trip. By “we” in the previous sentence, what I mean is almost entirely “I”.

“There aren’t any photographs of you,” noted my friend Karen.

I too noticed the lack of pictures of me when I was editing the pictures, and believe me, I went through all 650 of them. What there was, was a lot of pictures showing the back of Dan in the forward distance just as he was about to vanish around some corner. There were also a lot of pictures showing streets and places empty of people where Dan had vanished around that corner just a moment or two before.

I spent many a happy hour in Turkey and Greece trailing behind Dan. We like the same kind of places and enjoy exploring them together (well, almost together) for hours on end. I explore with camera in hand, stopping to see if there is a picture in this place and if so to frame it and take it. I view places in two dimensions delineated by a frame. I have to stop and look. I have to stop and digest what I’m seeing and compose the shot to capture the essence of the place. I have to stand still to experience a place.

And Dan has to come back and get me when he’s gotten too far ahead of me and I get lost and don’t know where he went. Because Dan doesn’t experience places the way I do. He experiences places in glorious three dimensions by moving through them. He is restless. He wants to explore everything, map in hand, never pausing. Because for him, that’s the essence of the experience.

And here I thought we had both gone on the same vacation.