My reading material this evening is The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, a wonderful children’s science book published in 1960.
((Hat-tip to Boing-Boing.)) Of course it’s been out of print since the mid-60s, and no-one would publish such a volume in these litigious days. Fortunately, somebody has scanned it, and a BitTorrent PDF is a couple of mouse-clicks away. ((I’m using Transmission these days – a very nice BitTorrent for the Mac.))
The writing is wonderful – clear, accurate, and never condescending. And the experiments take me back over 40 years: preparing hydrogen from HCl and zinc (and “popping” it, of course); ranking various acids and bases; preparing plastic sulphur (sorry, “sulfur”); preparing and testing ferrous chloride and ferric chloride; and so forth. Happy days…..
Porcupine Tree in Seattle
I just got back from seeing Porcupine Tree at a downtown club. This is the first gig in a US tour promoting their new album, Fear of a Blank Planet. The band were a bit jet-lagged, and ran into some problems with the computer that sequences the video clips on the projector; while the drummer was rebooting the computer, Steven launched into a wonderful, unscheduled performance of Trains from In Absentia. More hardware problems, please! They actually played two other tracks from that album – Blackest Eyes and Gravity Eyelids – and it seemed as if they were carefully including a few familiar, heavy pieces to balance the relatively mellow sounds of the new songs.
So how did the new album go over? They played all six tracks, accompanied by powerful – but occasionally repetitive – video sequences. (I actually expect Steven Wilson to turn his hand to film direction before too long.) I really like the album – I’ve been listening to it a lot over the last week, and I don’t think there’s a single weak track. However, not everything that sounds good on CD translates well to a concert setting, and neither Anesthetize nor Sentimental worked as well as I’d hoped, for quite different reasons. Anesthetize is really a 17:42 suite, and while the recorded version flows nicely from segment to segment, the live performance sounded somewhat disorganized. More seriously, the subtle vocals for Sentimental were lost in the live mix, and it’s not clear how to retrieve them.
Apart from these two issues, it was a great concert. The other new songs were really strong, and they were accompanied by a good mix of older numbers, some obscure (Half-Light, from the Lazarus single), and some instantly recognized (Lightbulb Sun, Sever and Open Car, for instance). The crowd was appreciative, patient during the technical glitches, and seemed to have a good time.
The opening act was 3, a new band to me. The first few tracks left me cold (terribly derivative – Tool does this stuff so much better), but later on they seemed to find their groove and displayed some impressive musicianship.
The moral cost of the war
Powerful cri de coeur from Andrew Sullivan on the moral cost of the war in Iraq. It’s prompted by a U.S. Army report which included the finding that “Less than half of Soldiers and Marines believed that non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect.”
This is how we win hearts and minds? […] Over a third of U.S. soldiers, taking the lead from their pro-torture commander-in-chief, see nothing wrong with [torture], even in a war clearly under Geneva guidelines. Two-thirds won’t report it. One in ten say they have abused Iraqi civilians just for the hell of it. Imagine what we don’t know and will never know about the rest.
[…]
In reassessing the war, in other words, the moral cost to America must come into the equation. The Iraq war has removed for a generation the concept of the U.S. military being an unimpeachable source of national honor. It has infringed civil liberties. It has legalized and institutionalized torture as a government tool – and helped abuse and brutality metastasize throughout the field of conflict. To be sure, abuse of captives always happens in wartime. What’s different now is that the commander-in-chief has authorized and legitimized it, and so the contagion has spread like wildfire. ((Aided and abetted by TV shows like 24, of course.)) The tragedy is that none of this will help us actually win this war.
Photos from the Cinquo de Mayo weekend
I’ve uploaded 94 pics from my trip to the San Francisco area last weekend. They include:
- flying down to San Francisco (I got some nice en route shots)
- Steve and Wendy’s wedding
- visiting the USS Hornet, the WW2 aircraft carrier that also handled space capsule recovery
- going to the Phillies v. Giants game
A few highlights:
"Bye, bye bitter Anglican pie"
Father Jake adapts Don McLean on the subject of this week’s Nigerian takeover of bits of the Episcopal Church:
Now for two hundred years we’ve been on our own
And moss grows fat on a rollin’ stone,
But that’s not how it used to be.
When Cantaur spoke from the Primates’ floor,
In a cope he borrowed from John Moore
And a voice that left out you and me,
Oh, and while Cantuar was looking down,
Nigeria stole his pointy crown.
The meeting was adjourned;
A harsh verdict was returned.
And while Katharine offered words of grace,
The bishops gathered in one place,
And they said “No!” to Cantuar’s face
The day the Communion died.
So why do I care about this internecine squabble? I guess any time a group of bigots stands up and insists that hating people is more important than accepting (or at least tolerating) them, the world gets a little nastier, a little colder. We should all regret that.
Bug report
Today’s xkcd is just about perfect.
First time on the BART
In all my travels to the San Francisco area I’ve never had occasion to ride the BART rail system until now. I’m heading with Chris and Celeste into San Francisco to watch this afternoon’s Giants baseball game. Earlier we visited the WW2 aircraft carrier USS Hornet, which is a floating museum moored at Alameda; then we had lunch at the New Zealander – excellent food and drink (and rugby on TV). Lots of photos to upload when I get the opportunity…
UPDATE: Top of the 5th, the Phillies leading the Giants 4-3. This is a very nice new ballpark, though it wouldn’t be too much fun if I was sitting on the other side of the ground with the sun in my eyes.
FINAL: Well, the Phillies’ pitchers kept throwing strikes, and the Giants folded up, and the final was 8-5 to Philadelphia. So now I’m on the BART heading back to Berkeley, and then I’ll pick up my car and drive back out to Livermore. (Yeah, false economy.) And then tomorrow I’ll check out early and drive to Palo Alto (along what is reputed to be one of the worst commuting highways in the area). Ah, well.
Congratulations, Wendy and Steve!
Once a geek, always a geek: I’m posting this from Steve and Wendy’s reception. Style: California eclectic. Mood: elated
UPDATED: It’s now Sunday morning; Wendy and Steve are heading off on their honeymoon, which means that Steve will not be able to watch Arsenal drawing with Chelsea, thereby ensuring that his beloved Manchester United has won the championship again!
I’ll post some wedding photos when I get back to Seattle – I travelled light, and didn’t bring my camera docking station with me. It was a delightful wedding, with nicely quirky vows — “for richer, for poorer” morphed into a reference to the value of Sun stock options! It was very nice to finally meet so many of the people from the grommit blog-roll, especially Steve Chu. (Good luck in Philly, Steve!) For dinner, I was at a table with Sun folks, which was a nice opportunity to catch up. (So when is Nevada going to be ready to ship, anyway?! I know that the journey is more interesting than the destination, but really….)
Why the "establishment clause" matters
There’s an appalling case documented in The Guardian:
A Muslim woman forcibly separated from her Hindu husband by Malaysia’s Islamic authorities after 21 years of happy marriage wept inconsolably yesterday after a judge endorsed her decision to hand custody of six of her seven children to her former spouse.
In an unprecedented move for Malaysia – where Islamic religious laws are strictly enforced – the children, aged four to 14, will be raised as Hindus despite being born to a Muslim mother. Last month Selangor state’s Islamic authorities took Raimah Bibi Noordin, 39, and her children away for “rehabilitation” and religious counselling after belatedly declaring that her marriage was illegal.
In a recent comment, Conskeptical pointed out “you can’t effectively, or informedly, change something you’re not part of”. And he’s right, of course. But there are several things we can do:
As Conskeptical also said, “When in Rome, behave as the Romans do.” When people arrive in the US or Western Europe, we have to emphasize that we’re not going to compromise our legal and cultural principles to accommodate what they may have been used to. There will be no sharia law in Bradford or Oslo, and spousal abuse will not be condoned. We should make sure that this is never repeated:
[T]he woman, as a Muslim, should have “expected” it, the judge explained. She read out passages from the Koran to show that Muslim husbands have the “right to use corporal punishment”. Look at Sura 4, verse 34, she said to Nishal, where the Koran says he can hammer you.
This was in Germany, not in Malaysia or Saudi Arabia.
We also need to be vigilant about the way in which religious bigotry can creep into our Western political and legal fabric. Andrew Sullivan has a good summary of the way in which the right is fighting to prevent homosexuals being added to the groups that are covered by hate crime legislation. Anyone who believes that this isn’t about pandering to religious fundamentalism need to get out more. Just like the C of E bishops in England, the message is same: we want our bigotry to be exempt from legal sanction. That slippery slope leads to forcing women to the back of the bus, busting up families based on their choice of mythology, and worse. Just say no….
Recent connections….
You may notice a few additions to the side-bar of this blog. While I don’t want to add any advertising, I do want to promote the causes I believe in. So there are now links to Stop Honour Killings, and the Richard Dawkins Foundation.
I’m also linking this blog into the atheist blogosphere. Geoffarnold.com is now part of planetatheism.com and the Atheist Blogroll. We actually need a better visualization approach to clusters of related blogs – planet-style aggregators don’t scale, because stuff scrolls off too quickly, and linear blogrolls definitely don’t scale beyond a couple of hundred. Something like a tag cloud with AJAX might be the answer.