Go ‘Topes

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The embankment beyond the outfield fence at the old Albuquerque Sports Stadium was covered with lava rock, and “lava” became synonymous with the long ball. One of my
great baseball moments was when Daryl Strawberry, then with the Dodgers, was down at Albuquerque on a rehab assignment. Whoever was pitching had gotten behind in the count to Strawberry, and I leaned over to my friend Chuck right before the pitch and said, “Lava.” Bang. Strawberry hit a rope into the lava.

The Dodgers” farm club, the Dukes, left us two years ago, and we’ve been out of baseball ever since. But tonight I am listening on the radio to Albuquerque Isotopes baseball, playing their season opening series in Memphis.

Lissa, Nora and I were among the 6,000 (how do they know that?) who made the pilgrimage today to an open house at Isotopes Park today, the beautifully rebuilt ballpark. We’ll have to pay more for tickets, and the food prices are exhorbitant, as befits a modern ballpark. But the grass is green, the basepaths are red and they put some lava beyond the center field fence.

Public Discourse

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I despair of the state of public discourse.

It’s a long-standing concern, but the debate over the war in Iraq has cast it in sharp relief. I have sampled talk radio of late, and have been reading in the letters to the editor and blogging world. Much is the same, discourse directed at demonizing those with whom the speaker disagrees

The talk radio case is egregious. Rather than thinking about the serious and important implications of war, callers’ energy (for talk radio is invariably of the right) is focused on complaining about anti-war protesters. The issue here is Iraq and the war, not the protesters. There are serious, reasonable and important reasons that one can oppose this war, involving moral imperatives and evaluations of our national interest. But hating liberals is such sport, and more fun than thinking about the serious and complex issues posed by this war.

On the left, the “no blood for oil” billboard is a caricature of those who believe in the rightness of this war. There are serious, reasonable and important reasons that one can support this war, involving moral imperatives and evaluations of our national interest. But hating conservatives is such sport, and more fun than thinking about the serious and complex issues posed by this war.

Those intelligent enough to devote their energy to really deeply understanding why their opponent is sincere and reasonable are far better debaters in the long run than those who erect and then demolish one straw man after another.

Murky Pond

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This was fun:

SOCORRO ? Chris Carilli’s task is like trying to see what grows at the bottom of a murky pond.
The pond, in this case, is the universe. At the murky bottom, barely visible through the muck of space and time, is the birth of a thousand suns.
With a combination of persistence, technology and luck, Carilli and his colleagues have for the first time seen baby stars swirling around a massive black hole.
The stars are so far away, and it has therefore taken their light so long to get here, that the astronomers are effectively seeing back near the dawn of time.
There, in the early universe, the first galaxies were forming, and Carilli and his colleagues are struggling to understand how. How did the dust and gas of the early universe coalesce to form the planets, stars and galaxies we see around us today?

Tipping Point

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TV commentator, on the possible impending collapse of the Iraqi government:

“We may be reaching a tipping point.” (emphasis added)

Methinks tipping point has passed a tipping point. Will it be robbed of its meaning in the process?

The Lone Hacker

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There’s this archetypal moment at the end of Lone Ranger episodes where the masked man and his trusty sidekick have ridden out of town after saving the day. One townsperson says to another, “Who was that masked man?”
“I don’t know, but he left this silver bullet,” says a second.
“Why don’t you know,” says a third. “That’s the Lone Ranger”.
MUSIC UP AND OUT
That’s the way I feel this week with the maintenance of the stylesheets for GNOME’s Yelp help browser. Mikael Hallendal posted a note looking for someone to take over their care and feeding. They need a lot of more love than they’re getting, and none of us are particularly fluent in XSLT. From out of the night came this, from Shaun McCance. And then, in a flurry of late-night hacking (you can tell by the time stamps on his patches) he tore through the bug list, metaphorically mowing down the bad guys with a clear eye and a sharp aim – clean shots, killing no one, just blasting the guns from their hands.

We do not know who Shaun McCance is, but he is a free software hero.

Python

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I’ve been spending free time over the last several days tinkering with Python, and I like it. I tried it because Daniel Veillard has written nice Python bindings to libxml, and it seemed like a simpler way to quickly hack out xml solutions as long as the learning curve isn’t too steep. Turns out its not, takes just a few lines of code to do basic xml tasks. Handy.

John is my Copilot

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John Coltrane accompanied me on the long drive to Socorro this morning, with Lee Morgan on trumpet and the echoes of geology in my head as I followed the Rio Grande Rift, a deceptively simple feature on the landscape of New Mexico. Most rivers cut their own way, making the valleys and canyons they use to get along. But the Rio Grande is an opportunist, following a gentle slow rift in the Earth’s crust. This is appropros of nothing in particular, except it was a beautiful day for a drive, all spring on the high desert and John Coltrane today earned my trust (if he didn’t have it already).

Smallpox

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Smallpox is tough to grasp, but here’s a helpful point of comparison. We don’t have a very precise picture of the death toll of either smallpox or World War II, but in rough terms it is reasonable to estimate that smallpox killed ten times as many people in the 20th century as died in World War II.

Think for a minute, let that sink in. Smallpox killed an order of magnitude more people than the event that we (that I, at least) generally think of as the ultimate horror.

For your Monday morning reading, I offer the tale of smallpox in Aralsk, a Russian city on the edge of the Aral Sea, the last outbreak of the disease in the then-Soviet Union, a tale of some mystery and intrigue.