Higher Dimensions

Looking forward to reading Harvard physicist Lisa Randall's new book called WARPED PASSAGES.       It's about gravity and string theory. 

I doubt if I will understand much of it--I didn't her first--but I do remember one thing about the first.  She argued for the possibility that some of the unperceived dimensions as per string theory might actually be rather "large"--instead of being tiny and coiled up, which is how they are usually posited by them such as make such theories.  Hers is the one I want to believe since it seems to invite the possibility that perhaps one day we will really have "warp speed" a la Star Trek, and intergalactic civilizations & stuff as per the science fiction of my youth.  

I particularly like the universe as envisioned by James Schmitz.  See the WITCHES OF KARRES and his short story, "The Second Night of Summer" which for some reason is my favorite sci fi short story of all time. 

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Sympathy for the Tea Party

I don't like the Tea Party and I don't like Wal-Mart,  and it is a good turn of phrase (below) but having the Tea Partiers dissed by effete, snobby pseudo-intellectual  David Brooks is one thing that gives me a little tingle of sympathy for the Tea Party folks...

David Brooks: Tea Partiers are 'Wal-Mart hippies'

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks assailed the Tea Party and the extreme nature of today's Republican Party Tuesday on ComedyCentral's The Colbert Report.
"The Tea Party is where the money is at, baby," said Stephen Colbert. "Why aren't you saying crazy stuff your in columns and if you pardon the expression, put some asses in the seats?"
"Well, the Tea Parties they're like the hippies," Brooks responded. "The hippies wanted to stick it to the man and they were anti-establishment. So the Tea Parties are like the Wal-Mart hippies."

Colbert jested that Brooks should be less moderate and shun news organizations that aren't sufficiently conservative.

"You go on PBS," noted Colbert. "That's the enemy camp. You cannot be friends with these people. Okay?"

 
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SC Lt Gov. Andre Bauer--A Personal Note

In Fall of 1961 I was quixotically enrolled as a freshman at the University of St Thomas in Houston, TX.  My father was stricken with lung cancer and I wound up dropping out.  My father had exhausted all his vacation time and sick leave and had to go on Leave-Without-Pay.   Fortunately, the tiny apartment we lived in was provided for by the City of Houston rent-free, so that was not an issue.  My mother's energies were completely absorbed in caring for my father and in any case I doubt she would have been able to get a job if her life depended on it. (Not a slam against my mother--it was the times and our class situation).    My father survived the operation and managed to live on to damn near the five-year survival mark.   I managed to get on with the U.S. Post Office in January of 1961, but there was a month or two hiatus between becoming employed and actually receiving a check.  It was during this time that we went on the Federal
Commodities program.  Think government cheese and huge generic tins of peanut butter.   I don't know if my parents were ashamed or not--I strongly suspect they were--I was, although not cripplingly so.  (Discussion of feelings was something generally Not Done).
 
Now here is Gov. Bauer's argument for ending government assistance to the poor:
 
"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed," he said. "They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better."
 
Well, then.  
 
A number of rejoinders spring to mind.  Perhaps it could be argued that if anyone was guilty of wrongful breeding, it was Gov. Bauer's parents, leastways with respect to him.   I also entertained the thought that Gov. Bauer is not worthy of the dirt beneath the shoes of the poorest welfare mother in South Carolina. 
 
I also took a dark pleasure in contemplating these lines from the Prologue to Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale in connection with Bauer:
 
"I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond
In stide of relikes or of seintuarie.
Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie;
They shul be shryned in an hogges toord."
 
But nah. I'm not serious.  I wouldn't want anything that good to happen to him.
 
R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

The Value of Nothing

Can't wait to read Raj Patel's THE VALUE OF NOTHING.  i gather it's the ultimate take-down of Milton Friedman and free market fundamentalism...

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Unbelievable turdery...

I just read where Gov. Perry (*ss*ole, TX) refused $700 million in federal grants for Texas schools. 

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Comets and the Origin of Life

Latest post from What's New in Cosmic Ancestry website includes a link to a New Scientist review of the book with the subject name. 

The strong version of panspermia touted by the website maintains that life is a fundamental feature of the universe, as basic as space, time, matter, energy & gravitation.

The review in New Scientist is neutral in tone but open-minded...

I'm pretty sure that somewhere there's something like a Pandora.  Assuming humanity exists long enough to get there, I imagine that greedy corporations themselves will be extinct by then...

We can hope they're not replaced by something worse...

R.
http://www.panspermia.org/whatsnew58.htm

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"MoDo Wants a Daddy"

I couldn't agree more with  
Tristero, writing in Digby's Blog--

 
MoDo Wants A Daddy

by tristero

Maureen Dowd
No Drama Obama is reticent about displays of emotion. The Spock in him needs to exert mental and emotional control. That is why he stubbornly insists on staying aloof and setting his own deliberate pace for responding — whether it's in a debate or after a debacle."Mental and emotional control."

That sounds like an extraordinary set of virtues to have in a United States president. But they are nothing but problems for the emotionally-troubled NY Times op-ed columnist. Her very next sentence:
But it's not O.K. to be cool about national security when Americans are scared.In fact, being "cool about national security" or other potential emergencies (say, huge, city-wrecking hurricanes) is exactly what I want my government to be. I want - expect - reasoned, intelligent responses from my government to the problems we face. That's what I voted for, not hysteria or phony displays of emotional connection.

The ghastly attack by that double agent in Afghanistan, let alone exploding underpants, really didn't scare me. Here's an example of what does:
He's so sure of himself and his actions that he fails to see that he misses the moment to be president — to be the strong father who protects the home from invaders, who reassures and instructs the public at traumatic moments.I simply can't believe that anyone would need the president of the United States to be their Daddy. I simply can't believe that anyone would write that they need the president of the United States to be their Daddy. I simply can't believe that the New York Times would publish an op-ed columnist who would write that she needs the president of the United States to be her Daddy. I simply can't believe that our public discourse is so debased that someone as unstable as MoDo has regular access to a wide public - not to rise above her psychological problems and inform us, or provide us with sensible opinions, but merely to trot out her deeply weird neuroses because she apparently thinks everyone shares them.

And that - the abysmal level of our public discourse - scares the daylights out of me.
 
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