GLOBADOM

My former boss Joe Kissell runs the Interesting Thing of the Day site, a wonderful little concept.

Today’s article just happens to be on the Kepler Mission, yet another big-science space-shot that barely registers in the popular culture except among nerds and geeks.

Even I get pretty ho-hum about this sort of thing, but Joe’s article is a concise explanation of what Kepler and its interesting successor, the Terrestrial Planet Finder, are supposed to do. Go read the article; I’ll wait.

Right. So it’s pretty esoteric stuff. Snooping on interstellar neighbours to find out what the neighbourhood is like, and if we might someday want to drop by for a visit to check out the sights. But I just finished reading [WARNING: COMPLETELY CRAP FLASH SITE AHEAD!] Quicksilver a historic-science-fiction novel (a surprisingly popular subgenre), but one that documents with some combination of veracity and poetic license the early days of The Royal Society and Isaac Newton (it’s part of a trilogy, so don’t blame me if you go reading it only to find out nothing bigger than a kidney stone gets tied up at the end of this volume).

Quicksilver was very good at setting up a sense of wonder at how far into the depths of human understanding the Royal Society (and especially Newton) were able to push into the realm of pure science. You get the impression of a group of pioneers who were figuring out bits and pieces of knowledge that wouldn’t really be exploited in any practical fashion for another hundred years, and all in an era when financial concepts we take for granted (loans, banking, reliable currency) were only just forming, and when having a kidney stone meant the devilish choice between an incredibly painful death or an incredibly painful operation that might well lead to death regardless.

Back to the Terrestrial Planet Finder. This little mission doesn’t propose the merely insane-making task of detecting Earth-sized planets that orbit distant stars, it intends to check on atmospheric composition.

Perhaps I’m just easily amazed. But I think this is the kind of amazing science that tends to bear fruit in a hundred years. But it’s worth doing now: the chain of scientific discovery is such that yesterday’s peeking-at-cells tends to lead to today’s gene therapy and tomorrow’s who-knows-what.

* * *

Oh, but more importantly: my father-in-law has a fruit crusher as well as a wine press! We’re making crab apple wine!

One hundred posts. And I thought I would have nothing to write about tonight. So far, the week has been the usual: chasing down computer problems at work and at home, 80 km of riding on Tuesday just for fun (did okay in the race, merely finishing with the pack), and The Lovely One got a new job (it’s sort of meta: she’s teaching people how to be ESL teachers).

Now, one funny link. I’ll let you decide if that means it’s humorous or strange: A Russian expedition to the Tunguska meteorite site in Siberia claims it found an extra-terrestrial device that was responsible for the 1908 explosion. I’m not quite convinced.

Now, one un-funny link. Psychiatrists fear hero copycats.

First, let me be charitable here: the psychologist and psychiatrist quoted in that article seem most concerned that teenagers, who are not known (and pardon the generalization) for the best judgment out there, will rashly copy these examples.

But even so. If teens learn that stopping the life-threatening peril of innocents is a good thing, I’m okay with the risks of that.

I have a suspicion that the reporter (one Amy Carmichael) knew the (excitingly counterfactual) angle she was going for when she wrote this piece, and either teased the relevant quotes out of relatively innocent sources, or had the names of a few tame experts who could be relied on to supply the missing quotes with minimal prompting.

But now to the specific critiques. Here’s the advice of forensic psychiatrist Kulwant Riar:

Riar urged authorities to caution people to stand back and instead make a phone call right away.

Hm. One can never know for sure, but the people rescued from the burning building? The woman in Port Moody? I’m thinking that whatever help can come from the other end of a phone call would have arrived a little too late.

Never mind the boilerplate bloviation about how people should be more involved, care about their neighbours, and so forth. Let’s just think about the accidental lesson suggested by this article: there is no cause worth risking your life for.

I think there is. I think that it is the better part of discretion to put yourself out for people in grave danger. There is a risk you’ll get killed. But being willing to take that risk for another is a decent thing to do.

In the long run, we are all dead. But in the long run, society also benefits from being composed of people willing to risk their lives to come to the aid of strangers in need. In the long run, such a society ends up being one in which there is less cause for strangers to risk their lives for people in need.

EDIT: several changes made mostly so that the article actually made sense. D’oh.

Gregg Easterbrook’s “Tuesday Morning Quarterback”, the football column so good that it started me watching NFL games, is back for another season.

I don’t know yet if my crab apple wine project (tentatively titled Project Cana, since these are St. Joseph’s Parish crab apples, and I plan to turn them from nasty crab apple juice into tasty crab apple wine) is a go, but I’m only an efficient way of crushing crab apples (and several kilos of sugar) away from making a few batches. That’s one way to deal with the surplus of apples, and a delicious way.

Surprisingly, making apple cider would be more work than wine. Too much fussing around, though the finished product would probably be ready in weeks rather than months.

And tonight is a big-ride night. I go to my race after a 30 km warm-up. Fun!

Jelly jelly jelly jelly. Three more batches of it today, making about 15 jars of jelly in various fairly large sizes. And that hasn’t even used up all of the juice, and has hardly touched the stock of ripe apples still available on Fr. Joseph’s tree. And today he begged me to pick the pear tree, too.

My mother-in-law tells me pear-ginger jam is excellent. Oh noooo! Save me from the jelly!

By now, I’m not exactly sick of crab apple jelly, but I have licked enough bowls to be able to move on to something else for a while. But it’s a great jelly.

I did some semi-successful experiments with savoury crab apple jellies as well: lavender, thyme, tarragon, mint, bay leaf, and rosemary. they look quite pretty, since I floated a sample herb in each jar. BTW, preparatory taste-tests confirmed one thing: chive-crab apple jelly is not a good idea.

Much jam-making (and frenzied kitchen-cleaning) meant no riding this weekend. Not even once. Sucks. But I did assemble The Lovely One’s anniversary present to me, a nifty gas barbeque. Very nice. The box trumpets a five-step toolless assembly. The toolless part was true (but considering my tool collection, just meant using nasty wingnuts when I wanted to put a wrench on things), but the five steps were a big lie. Never mind that each step was multiple operations, there were also steps 2a, 2b, and 2c. Eh?

That said, the assembly was uneventful, until I got to the gas burner shield, which simply had no place to go. Oops, here’s the helpful errata sheet, showing the two crossbars I have to put in so it will have some place to go. And all is well. It’s a really sweet-looking grill, so I hope to fire it up Monday night.

Sunday dinner was a nice little picnic in the park: some chicken and salad bought from a nearby grocery store, and a little spot just off the Skytrain bike path near Edmonds station. Ah.

And now it’s past midnight, and I’m next door with my in-laws, installing a cable internet connection. Everything went nicely until I plugged in the ethernet cable, and instantly found out that the computer was vulnerable to Sasser. a scan and patch later, and I’m writing this from the laptop over the wireless connection while I wait for several megs of Windows updates to slooowly install.

Sleep. I need sleep.

On August 5, 2000, I married The Lovely One. It has been four great years. I don’t want to wax rhapsodic about what being married to my lovely bride has meant to me; such thoughts are hard to express well (which is why romantic poets are so highly paid) and likely to bore or nauseate readers who are not me or TLO. So personal to The Lovely One: nee nee nee nee. You know what I mean.

In celebration of our fourth anniversary, I finished making the first batch of crab apple jelly last night. It’s gorgeous and tasty. As well it should be; for me, the most amazing thing about jam and jelly is how much sugar is involved: the ingredients in the batch of jelly I made yesterday: 5 cups of crab apple juice, 2 tbsp of lemon juice, one pouch of pectin, and 7.5 cups of sugar. Diabetics need not apply.

The jam has this wonderful ruby-pink colour. It looks rosy red in the jars, but spread thin, it’s pink. Tasted, it’s sweet deliciousness, a nice sweet-and-sour-and-sweet apple taste. It was so good that if I wasn’t already burning the candle at both ends, I would have baked up some scones to put the jelly on last night. As it was, I cleaned out the cooking pot with a spoon and tried some on a piece of toast. The jam worked!

For my next trick, I am going to try to get the preparation time down for the next batch (I still have a couple of gallons of crab apples to do…something…with, and there’s lots more on Fr. Joseph’s tree). The devil last time was in the cutting up of the apples in preparation. I am suspicious that this isn’t that important with crab apples, which are already rather smaller than normal apples. Ideally, I’d like a big blade array that just did a quick-and-dirty dice on the apples before I toss them into the pot. Maybe that’s just dreaming. Using a food processor was both inconsistent and rather violent. The juicer, quite reaonably, made the crab apples into juice (which caused an interesting inversion: I liked the sorta-sour juice, The Lovely One, who adores sour foods and especially crab apples, hated it). My next trick will be to try not processing the apples at all, except for a vigorous mashing once they’ve spent some time simmering. Since I later pile the apples into a cheesecloth jam bag anyways, I think it will work out just fine.

Making jam is wonderfully domestic work, of the sort that, like barbecuing or making your own bread, seems fun because we have the option of not doing it. Our houselet was built in the 1930s; I suspect that for the first 20-30 years of its existence, not gathering fruits and turning them into preserves would have been considered a foolish waste of food. Nowadays, I can get one or two dozen kinds of jam at the local supermarket, and considering how much I’ve invested so far in time and supplies, pretty cheaply at that. Of course, crab apple jelly from Fr. Joseph’s tree isn’t one of the things they have, and there’s some strongly moral streak (must be some latent Protestant blood) in me that can’t abide letting good fruit just fall to the ground and rot.

So, going to see La Dolce Vita tonight. Tomorrow night should be free, so my exciting Friday night will probably feature more jelly-making! Oh the wild life I lead. And I wouldn’t trade it for another.

Apologies if this doesn’t work right: I’m testing the e-mail interface to my weblog again, something that has had disastrous results in the past.

During a party this weekend, a very dear and longstanding friend was rather shocked that I wasn’t interested in seeing a certain very important film. I think she thought I was joking when I explained that my bike shed was in dire need of reorganizing.

I wasn’t! It is! But of course, I was joking a little bit. And I am hardly the kind of person who is good enough at time-management to make any sort of claim of being fully booked (otherwise, I might not have watched half of a rather sappy film on TV last night as I tried to lapse into a coma on the couch). Nonetheless, I lead a pretty full life, albeit a rather domestic one. Since that party on the weekend, I have picked more than three gallons of crab apples, prepped and strained them to make jelly juice. I did about 75 km of riding yesterday, including my weekly bike race, which went according to expectations (about 8th place, a competitive showing). I did a fairly fruitless scouting job at my favourite out-of-town bike parts repository, and I tentatively sold a bicycle.

Crab apple jelly is busy work. So far, chopping up the apples for rendering has been the most time-consuming part, so I’m working on a little process management, or to put it another way, a lazier, better way of preparing apples for jellification.

The mad part is that I don’t even know if I like crab apple jelly. I guess I’ll find out.

So, having covered myself in glory two weeks ago, I decided to ride the Cat 4 race tonight, a one-category upgrade from my previous work.

It was okay! Even on the fairly tough course we use, I was not adrift amongst the pack. Instead, I could keep up with it easily, and even made a pretty good job of staying close to the front. Though not ideal: I didn’t over-work, but I didn’t do a good job of going where I could move up when I had to (to wit, the last two laps).

The end result was a perfectly competent mid-pack finish, but it was much more educational than any number of rides off the front of the much smaller Cat 5 pack would be, and at this point I am quite clearly capable of riding off the front of the Cat 5 pack any time.

I’m not particularly happy with my fitness, but I have only myself to blame. Instead of going for a training ride today, when I had a whole morning to myself, I surfed the web and farted away a couple of hours. Bad habit of my flex days.

This evening, I went to see NASCAR 3D, an IMAX 3-D movie. I was going to direct you to the Flash-ridden website, but instead, how about a direct link to the Word-format production notes instead? That’s better, right keith?

The film was a marvel, and especially worthwhile since the 5-story-high 3D IMAX yadda yadda was definitely something that is hard to reproduce on a DVD. I went with my father and brothers, in a nice manly male-bonding experience (The Lovely One wisely sat this one out; more on what we did today later).

Interestingly, as good as the racing footage was, we all agreed that the film’s best bits were the early part, which concentrated on the technical elements of the cars themselves. Now, part of this is because we are all car geeks and motorheads, but the nature of 3D filming is such that only subjects close enough to give you a sense of depth perception really pop nicely, and that means that a shot that’s close on an engine as a technician disassembles it gives you a really good sense of 3D, and looks pretty when projected 5 stories high.

None of us are hardcore NASCAR fans; me and Mike, the two serious watch-it-when-we-can race fans in the family, are pretty cold on oval racing in general when compared to road course stuff, and NASCAR’s road course races look pretty lonely on the calendar these days (the movie refers to them exactly never, even as it visits short tracks and several super speedways), and yet you can’t switch on a sports channel most weekends without seeing a NASCAR race, so we have a certain familiarity with the sport, its heroes, its major events, and the general race-day spectacle, which is covered in loving 5-story 3D glory.

But you rarely get to see the stuff in the garages, and the detailed film-work showing the behind-the-scenes (and not so behind-the-scenes: one revelation was how much the major teams have transformed their working garages into spectacles, starting with fabulous “halls of honor” where you can check out great cars and trophies, all the way to viewing galleries looking over actual race-prep garages where actual race cars are being prepped by actual mechanics) prep of building a race car from the ground up was lovingly executed, and we ate it up like spilled soup in front of hungry dogs.

Speaking of soup, that was the second-best part of a trip to the Vancouver Art Gallery with The Lovely One. Their showpiece right now is an Andy Warhol show.

The show features a lot of Warhol’s sketches, so once again one gets a sort of behind-the-scenes look at the prep work. In this case what impresses is that Warhol may have had less technical ability than any major artist before him. He can’t apparently draw much better than I can, and worse than The Lovely One. At best, he can manage some charming primitivism, and I saw a few well-executed cat sketches in the gift shop.

Perhaps that explains why his favourite subjects were recast silkscreens of photos and commercial art. But most of that isn’t pretty.

The two pieces I responded best to were his camouflage series (though that probably had to do with my obsessive joy with pattern-matching: once I figured out that all the pieces depicted the same pattern at different scales, I whiled away several minutes figuring out where the close-up prints fit within the pattern as seen on the prints showing the full pattern . . . maybe I’m not the best of art critics), and the set of large-format soup cans. These were the “classic” prints, the ones that were color-perfect reproductions of the original cans–though, as the exhibit copy cannily pointed out, reproductions of the representational way these cans would be shown in an advertisement, not of a can of soup itself. A subtle but interesting point.

I was feeling quite the smarty pants as I trashed all over Warhol to my patient spouse afterwards, and asked the rhetorical question “if what I liked best in that exhibit was the really nice soup can prints, does that mean I liked the work of Warhol, or the work of the commercial artist who originally designed the soup can label?” She sagely pointed out that if it wasn’t for Warhol, maybe I wouldn’t be looking so admiringly at soup cans, but I think I still prefer the originals, that is, actual soup cans.

One fun thing about the Art Gallery is it has a fairly consistent layout: big popular headline exhibition on the first floor, weirder or more locally-based exhibitions on the second and third floors, and the soothing balm of the permanent Emily Carr exhibition on the fourth floor as a reward for enduring floors two and three.

About floors two and three (look up the details at the VAG site if you care), I will say only this: the best piece was the full-size green-and-white “Now Entering the City of Vancouver” freeway sign that looked like it was straight from the city’s Engineering yard. Okay, that’s a little unfair. A few pieces had merit, at least for being better visual jokes than usual, but there were whole rooms of utter crap, even descending to that superb realm of design/art hell, a display of artsy but uncomfortable chairs. Well, perhaps some were comfortable; you weren’t allowed to sit in ’em, so I can’t say for sure. Actually, there was even a room that was crap (metaphorically; you have to specify that with modern art), a badly-built construction that both housed a few pieces of crappy art, and itself was really crappy, shoddily-built art with low ceilings. I assume there was some deeper message; you may assume I wasn’t interested in figuring it out, as I had a good guess that doing so would be so much apophenia.

Ah, Emily Carr. Worth the trip to the fourth floor. Worth the price of admission. Always worth a trip to the VAG. Even when she surmounts three floors of Salieri’s disciples.

This weekend was so hectic I don’t even remember what I did on Saturday.

But Sunday was a morning spent rattling around in the back of a Passat, trading bicycle wheels through the side window with a guy on the back of a motorcycle, as we chased some seriously masochistic cyclists through the streets of White Rock. Yep. I was a volunteer mechanic in the Tour de White Rock, the third part of BC’s Superweek (Tour de Delta, Tour de Gastown, and then my event). What fun! Got ride around with local cycling legend Jim Cooper, known for fathering some of the best local riders around (son Marsh is part of Symmetrics and was in the race; his daughter was in LA preparing for the World Junior Track Championships). Entertainingly, people cheered for Jim almost every lap as we went around.

The afternoon was three hours of grunty work with teammates in preparation for an upcoming team time trial. It was a good practice, but we need more.

Last night I mostly just slept.

In other news? There is no other news.

Today’s stage was a mostly flat nothing, and a breakaway of GC no-hopers got away early. That’s the kind of thing the GC leaders (Armstrong, Basso, Kloden, Ullrich) want to see, as it makes the stage safe for them (why? The short answer is that the escape can’t do any harm because they can’t gain enough time to affect the top riders, and additional escapes by anyone else are discouraged, because they would have to do the hard work of getting all the way to the lead group just to have a chance at anything useful like a stage win or a time gain).

But then one more rider, Filippo Simeoni (a classic GC no-hoper: almost 3 hours behind Armstrong!) made an attempt to catch the break, and something strange happened. Lance chased him down and they both joined the breakaway.

From any on-the-road perspective, this is insanity tactics, the kind of thing that doesn’t happen in a race like this. Armstrong’s presence effectively poisoned the break, because the GC hopefuls couldn’t let it succeed (one suspects as much on general principles as anything else) lest Armstrong gain another 10 minutes. So Lance has now done the hard work of catching a breakaway even though the break is meaningless, the rider he is chasing is meaningless, and nobody (not even Lance) really wants to see him in this break.

Ah, but sometimes the rest of the world can intrude even upon the Tour. In this case, Armstrong was exacting petty vengeance for a feud between him and Simeoni involving doping allegations and a mutual connection to the controversial Dr. Michele Ferrari.

Eventually, a resolution was found, one straight out of the schoolyard: the break asked Armstrong to leave so they could, you know, go for the stage win, and Armstrong said he would gladly do so, as long as Simeoni left too. So the break asked Filippo, and recoginizing the essential hopelessness of his situation, he did. I don’t think he was very happy with Lance.

I recommend that Velonews article for the details of this story, but a few background details deserve to be added:

Ferrari, surrounded by controversy (which is to say, accusations he helped riders dope), really is one of the sharper minds analyzing cycling right now, and he has been keeping an online diary that is one of the most insightful assessments of the tour going.

Lance Armstrong seems to get incredibly motivated by anger or any hint that others are trying to thwart him. He is famously both very loyal to those who support him, and very vindictive towards those who have burned him in the past (he has an ongoing feud with the Cofidis cycling team, which signed him right before he found out he had cancer, but dropped him before he ever raced for them when the cancer was discovered). My armchair psychological assessment is that it’s not even that he’s thin-skinned so much as he needs some anger as a motivating force. And I think that like virtually all elite athletes, he really, really hates losing.

Hey, did you notice that the Canadian downhill mountain bike championships just took place? The top ten men were separated by 13 seconds. The winner on the women’s side, however, was Michelle Dumaresq. The gap between her and the next-best woman? 14 seconds and a Y-chromosome. Some caveats: women’s bike fields, and especially downhill racing, are always much less competitive than the men’s side. The time gaps get awfully big very fast. But 2-3-4 in the women’s race were separated by less than three seconds. Dumaresq has raced some World Cup events too, and she’s a top-ten rider on a good day, but not the world champion. So there are women who beat her.

But here’s a little photo that sorta kinda suggests to me that not everything masculine about Michelle was removed by surgery. Michelle is 5’9″, 170-180 pounds, and as you can see, built rather muscularly.

There are XX women out there who have similar stats. But they’re extreme outliers. On the other hand, there are lots of men in this morphological range.

Dumaresq wanted [Edit: this used to read “fought long and hard for,” but there really wasn’t so much a fight, as scattered protests and a few women who quit racing in disgust] the right to compete as a woman. And well she might: she’d be well out of the top ten in the men’s race. But one must ask why we have a women’s race, if not because of the in-born differences between men and women. True, Dumaresq has taken enough estrogen that it’s a major reason why she can’t cut it with the boys, but I think that’s her problem, and the right solution doesn’t seem to be throwing her in with the women.

I think this is a case where common sense is not being allowed to run its course. The potential mess is that if one or more transgendered athletes start dominating their sports, there will be a discouraging effect for female athletes. It’s just a silly tiff effecting Canadian mountain biking right now (though Dumaresq has won a berth in the World Championships via this win), but wait until the first transgendered golfer or tennis player appears. That will be . . . interesting.