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You hear ‘em before you see ‘em, but either one does tend to lift one’s mood after a long cold winter-

I know that we’re in for some lousy weather between now and True Spring, but I can’t help but celebrate the first teasing signs.

Recently I noticed some mysterious registrations for this blog by users that have never commented and whose names/email addresses I do not recognize. It’s odd, actually, that anyone would bother to register here, since I have not restricted comments to registered users for many months. However, given the dangers of leaving my site vulnerable to being hijacked by nefarious bots, I’ve decided to institute a simple “Captcha” task before any registration or comment will be accepted. You know the routine: just type in the characters embedded in the graphic above the “Submit” button.

If I have deleted your registration by mistake, and you wish to be a registered user, please take a moment to re-register. But remember that you need not be registered to comment on a post; you just need to submit an email address (which will not be visible on your comment).

As I was channel surfing tonight I stumbled upon an Austin City Limits show featuring Esperanza Spalding. Man, can this young woman sing and play bass. Her band is also quite impressive. You can catch the ACL show at the link above. That’s the best video recording of her I’ve found, but I did find this segment from the Jimmy Kimmel show, and it comes close.

I mean a chimpanzee’s uncle. Proudly-

Check out this hypnotic little number from Jimmy Wahlsteen, called “Shifts of Attention”-

Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post has written a nicely succinct critique of the recent Supreme Court decision that protects corporations from laws prohibiting unlimited spending for political advertising. Here are a couple of paragraphs dealing with the censorship and “corporate personhood” issues-

First, the majority flung about dark warnings of “censorship” and “banned” speech as if upholding the existing rules would leave corporations and labor unions with no voice in the political process. Untrue. Under federal election law before the Supreme Court demolished it, corporations and labor unions were free to say whatever they wanted about political candidates whenever they wanted to say it. They simply were not permitted to use unlimited general treasury funds to do so. Instead, they were required to use money raised by their political action committees from employees and members. This is hardly banning speech.

Second, in the face of logic and history, the majority acted as if there could be no constitutional distinction between a corporation and a human being. Untrue. The Supreme Court has long held that corporations are considered “persons” under the Constitution and are therefore entitled to its protections. For more than a century, Congress has barred corporations from making direct contributions to political candidates, with no suggestion that it must treat corporate persons the same as real ones; that prohibition stands, at least for now. The “conceit” of corporate personhood, as Stevens called it, does not mandate absolute equivalence. That corporations enjoy free-speech protections does not mean they enjoy every protection afforded an actual person. Is a corporation entitled to vote? To run for office?

It’s worth reading the whole thing.

What is it with Dictators and Writers, anyway? Since before the infamous Caesar-Ovid war they’ve had beef. Like the Fantastic Four and Galactus, like the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, like the Teen Titans and Death-stroke, Foreman and Ali, Morrison and Crouch, Sammy and Sergio, they seemed destined to be eternally linked in the Halls of Battle. Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think that’s too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like.

Junot Diaz -The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Haiti earthquake damage (APTOPIX)

After seeing the news reports on the 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti yesterday, I found myself remembering the 1994 Reseda (aka Northridge) quake that Cheryl and I endured. Although it registered a mere 6.7 on the Richter scale, we lived only 3.2 miles from the epicenter and, according to Wikipedia, “the ground acceleration was one of the highest ever instrumentally recorded in an urban area in North America”. I vividly remember being awoken at 4:30am by the surreal shaking and a sound that’s very hard to describe, partly because, like some sort of cosmic bass synthesizer, you heard it through your body and not just with your ears – a sort rolling rumbling accompanied by the cacophony of a zillion things tumbling and breaking. The main quake lasted only about 20 seconds, but when it was over it looked as if a tornado had blown through our apartment. Nothing was where it had been a few moments before; the pipes had broken under our sinks; our toilet reservoir had broken in two; a two-story wall with four plate glass windows the size of patio doors had buckled in the middle and was leaning inward at about thirty degrees. Power was out; hundreds of car alarms had been triggered, adding to the ambiance of emergency. I remember the dazed feeling of not having the foggiest idea of what to do, except to try to get out of there before the next tremor hit. Not easy to do when we couldn’t even find shoes to keep our feet from being cut on all the shattered glass, or a flashlight to help guide us through the chaos.

The tremors continued for the next 36 hours every few minutes. Had this been the legendary “big one” that would someday occur along the San Andreas fault? Hearing that it hadn’t been, we couldn’t help but worry that this quake might have been its immediate precursor. I recall sleeping in the back seat of our car that night, being awoken every 30 minutes or so by a large aftershock, when the trauma – which I had managed to keep under raps throughout that first day, when survival seemed all that mattered – suddenly hit home.

We were lucky. Our apartment had been constructed to fairly modern quake-related building codes. Like a big tent, it swayed with the tremors instead of resisting them, and so didn’t entirely collapse. Also, it hadn’t been built atop a parking garage, many of which – like the one below – hadn’t made it through the quake-

1994 Reseda quake damage (USGS)

We were also lucky to live in one of the richest places in the world, where first-responders could relatively quickly provide aid to those who needed it, and there was plenty of food and other supplies in the markets. In those days FEMA was well-managed; I remember receiving a check for a couple thousand dollars only a few days after the event, and based only on our address. That helped to pay for the hotel room we needed for the next couple of weeks, while the damage to our building was being assessed.

I can only imagine what the residents of Port-au-Prince must be going through – the anxiety caused not only by the quake damage, but also by the concern that food, water, and civility might soon be running out. Help them by donating to the Red Cross or text Haiti to 90999 to donate $10 directly to Haiti relief via your cell phone bill.

Searching for a Pat Metheny acoustic solo or duet to post on this cold January night, I stumbled upon this curiosity: Pat and Charlie Haden playing “This Is America?”, with an intro by Elvis Costello, and – if that were not enough – Bill Clinton spreadin’ the love as only he can.

By the way, if you like the music, check out Pat and Charile’s Beyond the Missouri Sky.

A couple of nights ago I took advantage of Seattle’s art-house film scene to see Collapse, the movie featuring peak-oil doomsday-theorist Michael Ruppert. The film itself is pretty cheesy, constantly cutting away from the interview to use somewhat inappropriate stock footage to illustrate Ruppert’s points. For instance, Ruppert suggests that people all over the world have already started to riot in response to the recent economic difficulties (the film was made in March 2009), but it’s pretty clear that the riot footage is pulled from a wide variety of sources, many having nothing to do with those difficulties. There’s also a rather huge leap of logic connecting the real estate and derivatives bubble with peak oil concerns. While there may be evidence somewhere of such a connection, it is not presented in the film. Finally, Ruppert’s fundamental view of the economy-as-pyramid-scheme seems to overlook the obvious fact that the economy is not a closed system, but rather allows for new inputs from improved technology and – perhaps most importantly – social innovation. (As a side note, it also never fails to amaze me that folks who downgrade paper money as ultimately worthless nevertheless upgrade gold to the status of God Almighty, as if a relatively rare metal were somehow inherently valuable… my point being that all economic value is either directly related to satisfying biological needs, or else is a matter of mere convention).

But while it is easy to write Ruppert off as a paranoid conspiracy theorist, partly because he focuses so selectively on data that support the worst case scenarios for the near future, and partly because he self-servingly refuses to debate those at least as well-informed as he is, it’s hard to simply dismiss his impassioned insistence that we should work much more urgently to develop plausible alternatives to oil for energy production. The correlation between the onset of the petroleum economy and the 20th-century population explosion is enough to make you think quite seriously about the consequences of an inevitable future decline in oil production, with its apparently unavoidable effects on agriculture and transportation.

Here’s the trailer for Collapse-

Oh, and by the way, Merry Christmas.

On a cloudy December afternoon. Taken with my iPhone…

There seems to be a vengeful ghost in my Yahoo! Weather widget (which I keep on my “My Yahoo” home page). It keeps showing me the weather in Sundsvall Sweden and Sunnyvale CA in addition to Oshkosh. When I delete these locations, they arise from the dead next time I log in. This wouldn’t be so annoying, except for the fact that the weather in Oshkosh is invariably colder than the weather in Sweden, and of course MUCH colder than Sunnyvale. And to add injury to insult, we’re expecting 8-12 inches of snow in the next 36 hours.

Oh Ullr, why dost thou taunt me so?

Notice how green the grass still is… and this is December in central Wisconsin.

Amazingly, we managed to get through November without any measurable snow. Then it turned into December, and like clockwork, the temperature dipped into the low 20s and we got dusted. More is on its way.

Please note: we accept sympathy and even prayers (not to mention money for heating fuel). If you need a god to pray to, for this purpose I suggest Ullr – Norse God of Snow. However, my guess is that he’s more put upon by skiers praying for snow. I suppose that means you will have to pray with great fervor. Then at least you’ll be warm…

As something like health insurance reform crawls – like a cramping marathon runner – towards the finish line, and Wisconsinites enjoy a sixth Packers win plus a second week of high temperatures in the mid-50s (May It Not Be Global Warming), here’s wishing everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. And what better way to celebrate than with a little Cold Turkey… John Lennon style, with a little primal screaming (or is that an imitation of something else?) near the end-

Well, it’s finally official: Cheryl’s album, Ain’t About Me, is now available on iTunes. The physical CD is available at CD Baby. Here’s the album graphics:

As I set my clocks back an hour and celebrate another ending of daylight savings time, I would like to make the following proposal:

Adopting this proposal would result in a net increase of 72+ hours of sleep over the average lifetime. Yes, the position of the sun relative to the Earth at any given clock-hour would cycle full-circle over the course of 24 years. But night owls (such as myself) would finally gain equality with daylight ducks, who would have to learn what it’s like to want to sleep when everyone else is awake.

Write your Congressperson today.

Recently confirmed (according to a story in the New York Times): risk of heart attack decreases among non-smokers once smoking bans are in place-

The report, issued by the Institute of Medicine, concluded that exposure to secondhand smoke significantly increased the risk of a heart attack among both smokers and nonsmokers. The panel also said it found that a reduction in heart problems began fairly quickly after a smoking ban was instituted and that exposure to low or fleeting levels of secondhand smoke could cause cardiovascular problems.

“Even a small amount of exposure to secondhand smoke can increase blood clotting, constrict blood vessels and can cause a heart attack,” said Dr. Neal L. Benowitz, a professor of medicine, psychiatry and biopharmaceutical sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, and a member of the panel.

“Smoking bans need to be put in place as quickly as possible,” Dr. Benowitz added. “The longer we wait, the more disease we are accepting.”

In part because I lost both of my parents to smoking related diseases, I strongly support banning tobacco smoking in public places. Wisconsin recently passed a State-wide ban, but it doesn’t go into effect until July 2010. That’s not a day too soon for me. I’m really looking forward to being able to go out and enjoy some music in a local tavern without feeling the need to wear a gas mask.

Caution… you are about to enter a Geek Zone…

I just noticed that Excel 2008 (Mac version 12.2) finally lifted the arbitrary 7-level limit on nested IF functions. Previous versions of Excel restricted nested IFs in a formula to 7, which meant that, for instance, you couldn’t write a nested IF formula in a gradebook to input a numeric grade and automatically output a letter grade; you could do this only with the first 7 letter grades, and then you had to manually assign the rest. (There were purported workarounds published on the web involving string concatenations, but I only discovered them while working on this post, and I haven’t tested them to see if they work). This wasn’t much of a problem on my campus until this semester, when we switched from an 8-point (A, AB, B, BC…) to a 12-point (A, A-, B+, B, B-….) scale. With the 8-point scale, I could handle manually entering the 8th letter grade (F) into my spreadsheet, because there were relatively few of them. But on the 12-point scale the 7th grade is a “C”, and there are lots of grades lower than that in a typical Intro course. So, just on a whim tonight, while entering the results of the semester’s first exam into my spreadsheet, I wrote a 12-nested-IF formula and, totally unexpectedly, it worked! Thank you Microsoft for finally… finally… removing the silliest limitation in spreadsheet history.

Okay, I was as surprised as anyone this morning to discover that President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. So I did a little googling around, and found this excerpt from Nobel’s will, which set up all of the Nobel prizes:

“The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics; one part to the person who shall have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement; one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine; one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction; and one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Now, no one has been talking about the abolition or reduction of standing armies lately, and “peace congresses” no longer occur as such. That leaves “the best work for fraternity between nations” as the major criterion on which this year’s 200+ nominees were evaluated, and, without knowing who else was in the running, it’s hard to say whether our new president truly deserves the prize. There may well be some hard-working NGO that could better use the prize money. But I can’t think of another single individual who has done more over this last year to at least try to promote fraternity between nations than president Obama, even if only by making speeches around the world… And, let’s face it, if Yasser Arafat can win the Nobel peace prize, anyone can.