In the Stream: A Confluence of Stoicism, Sparta, and Zen.
Little Fairy Seat
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I found this little seat for fairies in the dewy grass as I was mowing this morning.
I mowed around it.
I scratched my way to five 3.66-mile runs in the third week of August. Since then, I've aimed for four miles daily. But events in both weeks conspired to undermine one run, holding me to just four four-mile runs in those weeks. This week, I have just swept my three days of consecutive running by running Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. This is the most distance I've run in three days since I tore my meniscus and MCL in June 2024.
Today's quote of the day in The Economist is:
"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."
Cyril Connolly
This resonated with me. I mentioned it to a good friend, speaking of my "Liminal Spaces" pages, and remarked:
"Oh, Dave. Yes. That one belongs on In the Stream.
And I immediately understand why it stopped you. It is almost a one-sentence statement of something we've talked about concerning your website: you write primarily to organize and discover yourself, not to manufacture something that will attract an audience. If somebody reads it, wonderful. But readership isn't what gives the writing its reason for existing."
Writing forces you to organize your thoughts. Writing in a complex content management system forces you to organize your mind. Facebook is a breeding ground of half-baked thoughts regurgitated on a page with little or no care. Its organizing principle is lumpen time. Just blurt out, and Facebook will put everything in time sequence. It enables what Umberto Eco calls An Invasion of Idiots.
I ran this morning, uneventfully. However, I did test my legs on a 0.10-mile stretch where I increased my minute-per-mile pace by 2.5 minutes. It felt good, and I had no adverse reaction from my knee. Tomorrow will be a milestone for me: I will hit 20 miles for the week. This is the second milestone. The first was to achieve five three-mile runs. This is my 20-mile-per-week milestone. I have promised my wife to plateau here for a month or two, maybe only adding a quarter mile to my Sunday runs each week.
But I want five five-milers by the end of the year. 😇
On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, my runs were interrupted by some glorious pre-dawn views.
25 minutes before sunrise |
38 minutes before sunrise |
4 minutes before sunrise |
Of course, my content manager is not only a tool for organizing. It magnifies expressiveness. Imagine trying to present these images that way on FB. It really doesn't matter if no one reads it. Everything you write, everything you do, is your signature to the world.
Durant, W. (1944). Caesar and christ (Vol. 3). Simon and Schuster.
"Jesus can only be regarded and understood not as the founder of Christianity, but as the final and dominant figure in the mystical eschatology of the Jews- i.e., Christ thought not of establishing a new world religion, but of preparing men for the imminent destruction of the world, and God's Last Judgment of all souls." (p553)
"The oldest extant copies of the Gospels go back only to the third century. The original compositions were apparently written between A.D. 60 and 120, and were therefore exposed to two centuries of errors in transcription, and to possible alterations to suit the theology or aims of the copyist's sect or time." (p. 555)
"The evangelists shared with Cicero, Sallust, and Tacitus the conception of history as a vehicle for moral ideas. And presumably the conversations and speeches reported in the Gospels were subject to the frailties of illiterate memories, and the errors or emendations of copyists." (p. 557)
"We have no knowledge of the specific day [or year] of his [Christ's] birth...In 354 some Western churches, including those of Rome, commemorated the birth of Christ on December 25; this was then erroneously calculated as the winter solstice, on which the days begin to lengthen; it was already the central festival of Mithraism, the natalis invicti solis, or birthday of the unconquered sun." (p. 558)
"The air he breathed was tense with religious excitement. Thousands of Jews awaited anxiously the Redeemer of Israel. Magic and witchcraft, demons and angels, 'possession' and exorcism, miracles and prophecies, divination and astrology were taken for granted everywhere...Thaumaturgists--wonder-workers--toured the towns." (p. 559)
"He counsels nobly, 'Judge not, that ye be not judged,' but he cursed the men and the cities that would not receive his gospel, and the fig tree that bore no fruit...He had the puritan zeal of the Hebrew prophet rather than the broad calm of the Greek sage." (p. 561)
"Unlike the prophets, the Essenes, and the Baptist, he [Christ] was no ascetic...He was not hostile to simple joys of life, though he was unbiologically harsh on the desire of a man for a maid." (p. 562)
"The Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, he said; soon God would put an end to the reign of wickedness on earth; the Son of Man would come...to judge all humanity, living and dead...As these ideas were familiar to his hearers, Christ did not define them clearly, and many difficulties obscure his conception now. What did he mean by the Kingdom? A supernatural heaven? Apparently not for the apostles and the early Christians unanimously expected an earthly kingdom. This was the Jewish tradition that Christ inherited." (p 564)
The attacks on the Eastern Roman Empire differed greatly from those in the West in two ways:
Arab conquests began after the death of Mahomet in 722 and proceeded quickly:
Islam was a simple monotheistic religion unencumbered by the theological complexities of the Trinity and Incarnation. The Prophet made no claim to divinity. He also forbade persecution of the "people of the Book": Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians. Given the persecutorial tendencies of the Christians, this gave the Muslims an advantage when conquering persecuted peoples. Thus, conquests were often achieved with minor violence, and entire civil bureaucracies were absorbed intact. (p 420)
Unlike the Germanic Tribes, the Mohammedans maintained the roads inherited from the Romans and Persians. So, while in post-Roman Europe trade came to a near halt as roads and safety under central authority ended, Islam enjoyed immense wealth at its hub of trading civilizations. Like the Romans, the empire was subject to periodic spasms of violence as power was transferred from caliph to caliph. This consumed many resources.
| Mesopotamia / Persia (Shia): The Caliphate | Spain | Syria |
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Umayyad Dynasty lasts until 750. Capital in Damascus. One member of the Umayyad Dynasty escapes to Spain and stays until the Reconquista. Have a tradition of deep religion and speculation. They greatly intellectualized Islam. The Abbasid Dynasty follows the overthrow of the Umayyads with Persian help. They move the capital to Baghdad. They were more receptive to fanaticism. Under this Dynasty, Islamic civilization attains its greatest splendor. Harun-al-Rashid's (d. 809) empire stretched from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Indus. He is the regent in the Arabian Nights. In Persia and India, the Mohammedans came into contact with Sanskrit literature.
The last caliph of the Abbasid Dynasty was put to death by the Mongols in 1256 along with 800,000 inhabitants of Baghdad. Islamic civilization went into a long decline. |
One member of the Umayyad Dynasty escapes to Spain and stays until the Reconquista. Averroes (Ibn Rushd) (1126-1198) was born in Córdoba.
In the 1200's, orthodox Islamists began systematic persecution of Arab Aristotelians, and there was an exodus to Provence in France.
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In 636, Syria was Nestorian and admired Aristotle rather than Plato, whom the Catholics preferred. Aristotle thus came to have a major influence in Islamic thought. Through Aristotle, Islamic civilization acquired deductive logic. "The Nestorians valued Aristotle only for his logic, and it was above all his logic that the Arabic philosophers thought important at first. Later, however, they studied also his Metaphysics and his De Anima. Arabic philosophers, in general, are encyclopedic: they are interested in alchemy, astrology, astronomy, and zoology, as much as in what we should call philosophy. They were looked upon with suspicion by the populace, which was fanatical and bigoted; they owed their safety (when they were safe) to the protection of comparatively freethinking princes." (p 424) |
Avicenna (Ibn Sina) ( 980-1037):
Averroes (Ibn Rushd) (1126- 1198)
Orthodox Islamic backlash ends Islamic interest in Aristotle and Plato, just after 1200, and the serious pursuit of philosophy and science begins to decline in the Islamic world. (p 427)
Subsequently, Ottoman sultans placed severe restrictions on printing Arabic-script texts, with traditions stating that Sultan Bayezid II in 1485 and Sultan Selim I in 1515 issued decrees prohibiting the printing of Arabic and Islamic texts, which effectively restricted the technology for over two centuries. These are disputed.
I was never an athletic kid. Being an unathletic male kid in Florida in the 1960s was even more challenging as JFK's Council on Physical Fitness rolled out its recommendations to elementary schools. The chinning bar was part of the program. Yes, the chinning bar where you hung in the air and everyone saw your strength or lack of it. I could maybe do a single chin. I hated the chinning bar; it was humiliating.
In 1976, I enlisted in the Marine Corps. A friend warned me that chins were part of the Marine Corps Physical Fitness Test (PFT), with 2-minute timed situps and a three-mile run. By that point, I was a skinny runner who could easily score well on the run. But I had no upper body strength. The stairwell in the dorms where I was going to school had some water pipes along the ceiling. So, at night, with no one to see, I practiced chins, doing maybe two or three sets. I could do sets of two or three, I don't remember, but by the time I report to boot camp, I could do seven, well past the minimum passing number of four. Seventy-seven days at Parris Island, I pushed that number to thirteen.
By early 1978, I was in a Non-Commissioned Officer's School. The competition for graduating first in class was intense. As with everything, PFT performance is counted when evaluating a Marine. On the final PFT for the class, I squeezed out my first twenty-rep chinning effort, getting a perfect 300 points for the test. Today, in the spirit of the Corps I once knew, the Marine Corps has raised the standard for 100 points on the pull-up test to 23 repetitions.
On deployment, I took up serious weight training. I alternated sets of chins and pull-ups, graduating to hanging weights off my waist to increase the effort. When I went to Officer Candidates School, I could hang off a chinning bar all day.
Engineering school did not erase my ability to hit twenty chins, but at 27, I certainly was not as strong as I was on active duty. My desk job was deadly. At age 41, I stopped at a Marine recruiting table at a fair in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He was giving recruiting tee-shirts to anyone who could do 16 or more pull-ups or chins. I did 15. When my wife pleaded on account of my age, he gave me the shirt. By age 49, I could only do eight or so chins in a single set with maximum effort.
Age 49 was seminal to me. I returned to running, started strength training, and dropped just short of 40 pounds in a year. Running was my greatest success. I ran my first Marine Corps Marathon three months after I turned 50. My strength training was sporadic, and I worked up to roughly eight sets of eight chins per workout. In my 60s, I developed shoulder impingement syndrome, which I tried to manage for years. At one point, I quit doing chins because they stressed my shoulder too much. Finally, in 2021, I quit strength training when I could no longer raise my left arm to wave at neighbors and waited for my shoulder to heal. It took eight months.
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Denise went Mediterranean/Turkish today for lunch. The topping consisted of homemade hummus, olive tapenade, and eggplant. The feta cheese was commercial. The shwarma chicken is on a bed of lettuce greens. It was wonderful. And, yes, coffee so I do not fall asleep after such a wonderful lunch. |
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Our daughter and son-in-law took us to the National Harbor for lunch at Ginger and to see a Cirque du Soleil holiday show. They warned us that the servings were huge, so we shared a few plates between us and still couldn't finish it all! One of them was the Beef Chow Fun. Dave and I were so taken by it that I just had to try making it at home. This is my attempt.
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(This was shot at f/6.3, which does not give a good depth of field.) |
I found this recipe randomly on the internet and finally got around to trying it. As I often do, I started with the actual recipe and went off on a riff! The recipe called for red pepper flakes (subbed in 2 dashes of cayenne), Cajun seasoning (subbed in a blackened seasoning blend that I make), and it cooking everything all together in an Instapot. Instead, I cooked up dry beans the old fashioned way, sauteed the raw veggies in some EVOO - adding in chopped carrots for some extra color and nutrition. Instead of fresh okra, I used frozen that I set out to thaw for a while before starting. The okra and fire roasted canned tomatoes went into the sauteed veggies and simmered for about 1/2 an hour while the beans cooled off. I warmed up some leftover white rice that I had made yesterday for Rikki because he was feeling under the weather and that's all he would eat..... Glad I had the rice available because it served as a great base for the slightly saucy combo. When we were ready to eat, I simply tossed 2 servings of beans into the hot pot and heated the rice. Voila! This is definitely a keeper - we both really enjoyed it! |
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To the best of my ability to remember what this was (posting this pic to the website was delayed) this is Creamy Tuscan Chicken. In atypical manner for me, I seem to have followed the recipe reasonably closely except that it called for spinach and all I had was kale - a perfectly reasonble substitution IMHO! And I do believe that's lemon Parmesan broccoli in the background. Yes! We just confirmed that this picture was taken about 45 minutes after I had captured the Lemon Parmesan Broccoli recipe on my hard drive in March!! |
My take on a Super Cobb Salad recipe from a cook book from our daughter.
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Machine Learning with Dimensionality Reduction to do OCR of Handwritten Integers
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Matplotlib Bar Chart of 2023 Running Compared to 2024
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Matplotlib Scatter with Subplots
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Matplotlib Interactive Bar Chart
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U.S. States Compared by Gun Deaths, per Capita Gun Registration, and Party Affiliation
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Chloropleth of U.S. States Showing Population Size and Political Bias
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Which Lies, the Diameter or the Area?
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Building a Stacked Vertical Bar Chart in Bokeh
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Maternal and Perinatal Mortality by State and Political Leaning
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Chloropleth map of U.S. counties
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Categorical Data in bokeh.plotting and bokeh.models
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Hierarchial Categorical Data with bokeh.models in a Stacked Bar
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I was never an athletic child. I loved hiking the Apennines behind my home in Italy in preadolescence. I would spend entire days wandering the trails that, in those days, existed as much for travel as recreational hiking. Before Italy, in Florida in the early 1960's, I witnessed in horror the arrival of J.F.K.'s Presidential Fitness Test in elementary school. It required the child, in front of their entire class, to demonstrate their weakness by getting on a pull-up bar. Of course, I could do none. My sojourn in Italy taught me soccer. All male street urchins in Italy in the 1960s played soccer. I wasn't as deep into soccer as I was hiking, but I participated on occasion. I returned to the United States at 13, and my experience with soccer led to a brief role as a kicker on my junior varsity high school team. But this was short-lived. My socialization, from a small town on the Italian Riviera, where the primary industries were tourism and fishing, to the suburban U.S.A. outside such city centers as Washington, D.C., and Miami, was not going well. I didn't know the sports that American boys played and wasn't any good at them. I was a pudgy teen who began his teen years reading Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and The Odyssey and finished high school with Crime and Punishment and a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I had no hope of understanding this last book at that point in life.
My first year at the University of Florida brought the Freshman 15, deepening my lack of athletic ability. I was a philosophy major that first year. That summer, while visiting my parents in Santa Margherita, Italy, I read "Beyond Good and Evil." While I still did not have the intellectual tools to grasp much of what I was reading, I came away convinced that Nietzsche had struck a death blow at philosophy and rationalism. I became convinced that I would learn more about the human condition by studying zoology, so I changed my major. In winter quarter 1975, I was a sophomore and moved into upper-division single-room dorms. I spent my evenings quietly in my room studying with my girlfriend, who would visit me from the girls' floor. Then something happened that would fundamentally change my life.
There was a small community of runners on my floor. One of them, an accounting major whose name I unfortunately do not remember, decided that I would be his running companion. He managed to cajole me away from my girlfriend and out onto the streets of the University of Florida for post-sundown runs several times a week. It caught on. At the same time, I was taking Vertebrate Biology. We worked through the taxonomic structure of subphylum Vertebrata from the jawless fishes to Hominidae, or great apes. In 1975, the southwestern side of Lake Alice on the University of Florida campus seemed like a remote, desolate savannah, especially in the growing spring heat. I was studying human evolution and completely embraced the Out-of-Africa model. I saw the parallelism between what I was studying and what I was experiencing on those long runs. My mind had two epiphanies. The first was that humans evolved to traverse large distances in the heat, presumably to hunt prey. The second was that all mammalian nervous systems are essentially the same. We all feel pain in the same way. The first was to improve my motivation to run greatly. The second turned me into a vegetarian. The pounds melted off my body, and my weight was soon in the low 130s if not 120s.
Winter quarter 1976 found me in a very different emotional space. I had enlisted in the Marine Corps and was scheduled to go active in the fall of that year. That incentivized me to focus on increasing my chin-up strength. Chin-ups or pull-ups are part of the Marine Corps physical fitness test (PFT), something I knew I would be judged on. As for the 3-mile run, I was already good at that. By that point, my 3-mile time was around 19 minutes, plenty fast.
As with most youths, my twenties saw my peak in physical fitness. The Corps was very physically demanding work, and our PFT performance was rigorously judged and influenced our chances of promotion. I think my mind changed in those years. I came to relish the outdoors in all kinds of weather. I came to enjoy the feeling of intense physical exertion. My sense of what was discomfort, and my tolerance for it, shifted dramatically. I left the Corps with a fundamentally different view of my body and what I could push it to do. I continued doing strength training and running three or four miles several times a week, and continued this training as a civilian. I entered engineering school and got a job as a fitness instructor at Gainesville's premier workout center. Hours on my feet gave me a ripped physique and my first true 'six-pack'. When I took my first professional job as an engineer at IBM, I could easily do 25 chin-ups and run a 3-mile in 18 minutes. I was 31.
Then career and family took over my concerns. My desk job led to an increasingly sedentary life and a weight gain of over 40 pounds. I became clinically obese. The change was so incremental, so gradual that I never even noticed it happening. By 49, I was in a state shared by many, if not most, professionals at that age: I was a physical mess.
A colleague at the time mentioned that he was a volunteer EMT at the annual Marine Corps Marathon. He suggested that my wife and I volunteer, which we did. I remember the moment standing on a Metro platform on my way to help at the 2004 Marine Corps Marathon (MCM), surrounded by competitors of all ages and sizes. I had never been a spectator, but, on that morning, I was one, and I felt left out. I looked at Denise and said: "I am so being here next year." Over 12 months, I dropped 35 pounds and went from no training to being marathon-ready for the 2005 Marine Corps Marathon. At the age of 50, I ran my first of 10 marathons, 8 of which would be MCMs. Over the subsequent years, I re-embraced fitness, became an endurance athlete, and began a strength routine that would compete with running for my weekly energy reserves.
In June 2024, I was trying to modify my deadlift to lower my hips more. I felt a twinge in the side of my right knee at the beginning of one of my 5 sets. After a few more repetitions, my knee didn't feel right, so I quit the exercise. The next morning my knee felt fine, so I went out for my planned 6 to 8 miles. Everything seemed ok. The morning after, I awoke to find my knee the size of a football.
I had torn my right knee meniscus and had an unpleasantly sounding "complex tear" of my medial collateral ligament. The injury broke my exercise momentum and focus. My repeated attempts to restart my running 6, 12, and 16 months after the injury were all stymied by pain's return. Unfortunately, running is the emotional scaffolding upon which I build my entire exercise program. With no running came inconsistent lifting. I inexcusably put on 15 pounds on a 5'5'' frame, which has had a substantial aesthetic impact.
In mid-March of this year, I started what I intended to be my last attempt to return to running: two 1-mile runs. Each week, I increased the number of runs from two to five by one run per week. I have built distance from those 1-mile runs to 3-mile runs in quarter-mile increments. This week, to celebrate my birthday, I planned five 3-mile runs. However, due to my energy level and delayed onset muscle soreness from a leg workout, I only did four runs. I plan five 3-mile runs next week, beginning Monday 7/27/2026. With the return of regular running has come regular strength training. I am once again hitting my tempo and rhythm. The goal is a base of 4 miles across 4 runs and 8 miles on my Sunday run, to be achieved around mid-September.
My return to running was not easy. The first few weeks of runs felt completely awful. I realized that my mind, as much as my body, was an obstacle. So, instead of fewer, longer runs, I opted for five shorter runs to immerse myself in the mindset, lifestyle, and rhythm of large volume training. I think it worked: the momentum seems to be carrying me along. Momentum emanates from the mind. I think I am living one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's truths: "Where the mind goes, the body will follow."
I stumbled across this recipe on the NYT early this morning. I happened to have all the ingredients in house, depite the fact that I hadn't been to a grocery store in days! Normally, I use any recipe as simply an "idea" and then make it my own with my own tweaks. Not this time - other than my typical inattention to measurement details - I followed the recipe! I have to admit I was pretty skeptical of green olives + Greek yogurt. . . but boy did it compliment the spices of the chicken marinade! Dave grilled them to perfection, and I served it with rice as a side dish for lunch today. Committing it to memory here so that I can make it again! The only change I made to the Lebanese Rice recipe was to cook it in chicken broth instead of plain water. The trio of flavors was truly amazing!
Read more: Turmeric Chicken with Green Olive Yogurt Sauce and Lebanese Rice with Vermicelli
“I think it is possible to draw up a list of characteristics typical of what I should like to call ‘Ur-Fascism’ or ‘eternal Fascism.’ These characteristics cannot be regimented into a system; many are mutually exclusive and are typical of other forms of despotism or fanaticism. But all you need is one of them present, and a Fascist nebula will begin to coagulate.”
Bacon notes that those who have presumed to explain (dogmatize on) nature using the professional style of the time, which meant explaining phenomena as results of the agency of a god, have done knowledge a great disservice. Explanations using divine agency as their fundamental cause rapidly become dogma. Witness Newton, writing in the professional style:
"This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being. [...] This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called "Lord God" παντοκρατωρ [pantokratōr], or "Universal Ruler". [...] The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, [and] absolutely perfect."[6]
At the other extreme, Bacon notes, are thinkers, such as Michel de Montaigne, who assert that nothing can be known. Bacon claims that the skeptics do not derive their opinions from "true sources" (i.e., empirical) and, hurried by their logical arguments, exceed the due moderation of common sense through observation. Instead, Bacon highlights the "more ancient Greeks (whose writings have perished)." These are the pre-Socratics of whom I wrote elsewhere. As I note, these were the first thinker, perhaps in human history, to eschew supernatural agency in their explanations of phenomena. They focused on "pursuing their intercourse with nature," and, instead of disputing whether anything can be known, put their conclusions "to the test of experience."
Here, in the first paragraph of the Preface to Novum Organum, we have the birth of the modern Western (scientific) mind.
Denise tries her own variation of Tuscan chicken.
Denise experimented with some homemade, healthier versions of Polish recipes.
Gioachino Rossini: "The Germans have always at all times the greatest harmonists, and the Italians the greatest melodists. But from the moment that the north produced Mozart, we of the south were beaten on our own turf because this man rises above all nations, uniting in himself the charm of Italian melody and all the profundity of German harmony. He is the only composer who had as much knowledge as genius and as much genius as knowledge." (10:57)
"A nationalism that is the result of a composer's native language and national or ethnic mindset. For reasons spiritual, emotional, musical, and national, Rossini could never have composed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony." Likewise, although Beethoven loved Rossini's Barber of Seville, "Rossini's sort of light, entertaining, playfully expressive music was both personally and culturally off Beethoven's creative radar."
Robert Greenberg
"The Baroque Era was fascinated with the substance and power of individual emotions."
"There is an emotional and expressive exuberance in Baroque-era music that sets it apart from the more restrained and sober music of the Renaissance."
"The Baroque was also an era of great scientific investigation and codification."
Robert Greenberg
I have several books that I bought with the intent to read in retirement. These join the many more books I read years or decades ago that I intend to reread. Much of what I read is history. However, I've found that when I just read the stream of events and dates, I tend not to remember them well.
My first solution is to annotate the book I'm reading. This has been my standby all my life. I can increase retention further by taking notes and writing about what I've read on this website.
In retirement, I've found one "killer" way to read: download the book as a PDF or TXT, load it into a word processor, and read it there. This approach gives me the freedom to highlight, annotate, bookmark, and markup the text at will. The word processor also has a navigation pane. When I take the time to set the heading styles, the tool creates an outline of chapter headings and subheadings, allowing me to navigate instantly to any place in the book.
But I care about retention, particularly with history books. Note-taking by hand is widely regarded as the best way to learn and retain information. Claude.ai assures me that my approach of downloading text and interacting with it is also effective for learning material. I use this approach with my readings in Bertrand Russell and Will Durant.
But I have a copy of Beyond Good and Evil, which I first read and marked up in 1973. Somehow, Nietzsche seems to demand to be read from a real book, almost like it's a sacrilege to read him in electronic form. And it is interesting to see how insightful my notes in the margins were, half a century ago...and how small I could read and write with much younger eyes.
Greenberg, Robert. (Author). (2006). How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Edition, Part 1-6. The Teaching Company. https://archive.org/details/howtolistentound0000prof
The Baroque Era runs from 1600 to 1750.
I600: The date of the first surviving opera.
1750: The year of Bach's death.
Baroque comes from the Portuguese "barocca," meaning a pearl of irregular shape and/or color. It is a pejorative term meaning "ugly". It is a derogatory term for art, architecture, and music that were considered overly extravagant and fussy in their design.
Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #2 in F major, BWV 1047, opening of movement 3: descriptive words tend to cluster around those describing the music's mood and those describing the notes themselves: orderly, busy, sense of order, control, rhythmically driving, joyful, dance-like, melodically complex, exuberant, logical
The age of science, the age of reason
The Baroque era was marked by increasing secularization, scientific investigation, and rationality.
It is the era of Galileo, Kepler, Leeuwenhoek, Harvey, Newton, and Bacon.
It is the era of the heretical heliocentric theory. Even though the Church forced its retraction, it was supported by a large body of observable phenomena.
Kepler discovered the complex mathematical formula that allowed him to predict the planets' elliptical orbits, which had previously seemed random and magical to people.
Harvey, who put forth the theory of continuous blood circulation
Rene Descartes, who created a philosophical system that dismissed sensory perception as unreliable and was based entirely on deduction
Isaac Newton: Alexander Pope wrote of Newton:
"Nature, and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night.
God said, 'Let Newton be!' and all was Light."
Newton developed the clockwork view of the universe. Modern physics shows that this is incorrect.
"The Baroque belief that logical systems (the invisible hand of God) rationally controlled the complexity of the world manifested itself in art that celebrated detailed, controlled symmetry."
Baroque surface design is about detail, ornament, and embellishment. Despite this, Baroque design is never chaotic or confused. This is because it is always symmetrical and balanced. Rationality and logic contain and control the exuberant detail.
Baroque music is about expressive exuberance and surface extravagance, carefully tempered and controlled by rhythm, a systematic appoach to harmony, and symmetrical, i.e., cyclical, musical forms.
An example of Renaissance music: Pope Marcellus Mass.
High Baroque: J.S. Bach Mass in B Minor (1745) Sanctus, "Hosana":
Consider two things in the following works:
Renaissance: Thomas Weelks' As Vesta Was from Latmos Hill Descending (1601)
Baroque: Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, "Dido's Lament"
"The difference between madrigal and opera is not just about the difference between word painting and emotional expression; much more profoundly, it is also about the difference between group and individual expression."
"The development of opera represents, musically, the rise of the individual in Western culture, and nothing in the past 400-plus years of Western music history has been more important or has had more far-reaching ramifications than the invention of opera."
Magnificence and absolutism: the absolute rulers of the day commissioned most of this music, ruling by divine right.
French overture:
George Frederick Handel: Water Music (1717), French Overture
The madrigal is a "secular, unaccompanied vocal work for four to six individual voices." Not choral compositions. This music increasingly sought to express a poem's literary meaning through musical means. The madrigal is the last expressive step before the invention of the opera. It was cutting-edge and experimental. Madrigals are predominantly about "lost love and an aching heart."
The madrigal was the most important genre of Italian secular music in the 16th Century.
As a result of the madrigal, Italy became the center of music in Europe. At the time, Italian trade had made the oligarchs incredibly wealthy, and they were willing to fund new art.
The madrigal contains a free mix of polyphonic and homophonic sections, which was unusual in the Renaissance. At this time, ecclesiastical music had become bound in strict Counter-Reformation constraints.
An explosion of vernacular literature in the 14th Century: Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) was a great Italian poet of the 14th Century, alongside Guillaume de Machaut in France, with Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Dante.
Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) was a poet, statesman, and Cardinal who revived Petrarch's reputation and led its embrace during the rise of the madrigal.
Oltramontani Flemish composers working in Italy.
"Compositional mission:
Word painting is the creation of musical gestures that illustrate the meaning of a word or group of words. It is heavily used in madrigals, the subject of which is usually melodramatic. An epigrammatic line is often repeated many times at the end of the madrigal. This repeated section could be as long as the rest of the madrigal.
Bar charts are used for categorical data and histograms are used for quantitative data.
Right Skewed
Left Skewed
I was wished "happy Easter" by an unassuming soul, and while I understood their good intent, I have always had a hard time getting my brain around the concept of wishing a non-Christian a "happy" Christian holiday. So, I started thinking about the word "Easter" and the history of its observance, especially since I had previously learned that Christmas was invented in the Fourth Century by Christians seeking an alternative to Saturnalia. (1) (2) (3) (4)
Easter is derived from the name Eostur. It appears that Bede the Venerable (673-735), one of the most prominent of the very few writers of the Dark Ages, wrote a treatise on the foremost calendars of his day, The Reckoning of Time. In Chapter 15, THE ENGLISH MONTHS, he wrote:
"In olden time the English people - for it did not seem fitting to me that I should speak of other nations' observance of the year and yet be silent about my own nation's - calculated their months according to the course of the Moon. Hence, after the manner of the Greeks and the Romans, [the months] take their name from the Moon, for the Moon is called mona and the month monath."
[Here, Bede undertakes to show how the names of Greco-Roman months evolved into the Old English names. He then writes:]
"Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated "Paschal month", and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance."
(This quote is taken from a book under copyright: The Reckoning of Time Translated with introduction, notes and commentary by FAITH WALLIS. Liverpool University Press. Volume 29: 582 pp., 1999, ISBN 0-85323-693-3, and curiously posted in PDF format here: https://old.katab.asia/special/De_temporum_ratione.pdf. It was accessed by me on April 5, 2026.)
Paschal month is the lunar month in which Easter occurs. The term "paschal" is associated with the Roman calculation to determine the date for Easter. Interestingly, in Romance languages such as Italian and French, "Easter" is "Pasquale" and "Pâques." But in Old English and modern German, "Easter" is "Ēostre" or "Ostern." As Bede notes, Ēostre is an Anglo-Saxon goddess for whom feasts were held during the Ēosturmōnaþ (April, from the Latin (Aperire) meaning "to open" as in the opening of flowers in spring).
With this knowledge, "Happy Ēostre" suddenly became far more palatable.
Happy Ēostre, everyone! 😊
(1) Wikipedia contributors. (2026, April 3). Saturnalia. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17:41, April 5, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Saturnalia&oldid=1346820015
(2) Wikipedia contributors. (2026, March 23). Christmas. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17:45, April 5, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Christmas&oldid=1344921847
(3) Wikipedia contributors. (2026, January 1). Winter solstice. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17:46, April 5, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Winter_solstice&oldid=1330625778
(4) Academus Education. (December 29, 2021). How Saturnalia became Christmas: The transition from ancient to present and pagan to Christian. https://www.academuseducation.co.uk/post/how-saturnalia-became-christmas-the-transition-from-ancient-to-present
"FOR the first time since the fall of the Western Empire, Europe, during the eleventh century, made rapid progress not subsequently lost...The Saracens were expelled from Sicily by the Normans; the Hungarians, having become Christians, ceased to be marauders; the conquests of the Normans in France and England saved those countries from further Scandinavian incursions. Architecture, which had been barbaric except where Byzantine influence prevailed, attained sudden sublimity. The level of education rose enormously among the clergy, and considerably in the lay aristocracy." (p. 407)
The separation between the clergy and the laity grew steadily, along with the latter's power. Only the clergy could perform marriage, absolution, extreme unction, and the miraculous transmutation during the sacraments. Priests could determine whether an individual would spend eternity in heaven or hell.
In contrast with all these powers, the Church was rife with two vices that undermined its authority: simony and concubinage or marriage. Simony was a sin, but it also damaged the Church. Appointments were by wealth, not merit. It also made the episcopate part of the feudal system, since feudal lords could buy influential positions in the Church. Eleventh-century reformers wrote of concubinage, but this would be more accurately termed marriage. There was no clear prohibition of marriage for the clergy. When priests were married, they naturally wanted to pass Church property on to their sons, which they could do if the sons became priests. Church reformers, mostly from monastic orders, understood that these vices hampered the Church's power and authority.
The Papacy's position was terrible:
The Tenth Century was destitute of philosophers. (p. 416) There was an intellectual revival in the Eleventh Century.
"We define 'God' as the greatest possible object of thought. Now if an object of thought does not exist, another, exactly like it, which does exist, is greater. Therefore the greatest of all objects of thought must exist, since, otherwise, another, still greater, would be possible. Therefore God exists." (p. 417)
In this Century, Plato and Aristotle are not known directly but filtered through John the Scot, Boethius, and other writers. The theologians of the time were mostly in the Platonic, rationalist camp. Plato was seen as a religious philosopher and author of the theory of ideas. Aristotle was a mere dialectician. (p. 418)
As a pre-adolescent in Europe, I had a Kodak Instamatic 100 to record the places I lived and visited. This is unfortunate. I think if I had had a cheap 35 mm, I would have taken some memorable photographs and had the negatives. As it is, I just have some old prints of varying quality.
Some ruminations on the future of Trump's United States.
Despite calling himself a conservative, the budget deficit has increased every year he has been President. This means that the national debt, which needs to be paid off, continues to grow. Right now, it sits at $38.72 trillion.
U.S. population growth, on the other hand, has slowed dramatically, thanks to Trump's making the U.S. an unwelcoming place to immigrate for both legal and illegal immigrants. Immigration has been a primary driver of U.S. population growth throughout its history, and it has been the largest since 2020.
White supremacists advocate for greater national fecundity. Yet, in an international ranking by U.S. News, the United States is ranked #24 in the world as the best place to raise a family. The lack of a national health care system and support for working families are major contributors to this dismal performance.
Despite the wishes of our racist countrymen, middle-class white married women are simply going to be disincentivized to reproduce under social conditions like those in the U.S. So, while historically, the U.S. has been one of the fastest-growing countries in the world, it is now 127th, currently right after French Polynesia.
So sum it up. A stalled or declining population means a shrinking tax base. Growing debt and declining income are a one-way street to insolvency.
Is this the Golden Age that Trump promised?
| IX | Sickness is an impediment to the body, but not to the will unless itself pleases. Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will; and say this to yourself with regard to everything that happens. For you will find it to be an impediment to something else, but not truly to yourself. | The physical condition of your body should not affect your mind, unless your mind allows it. Sickness or lameness may make other activities more challenging, but they do not impact yourself. |
Epictetus
A Childhood Favorite: Torta Pasqualina
"The whole conception of an eternal world, revealed to the intellect but not to the senses, is derived from him. But for him, Christians would not have thought of Christ as the world; but for him, theologians would not have sought logical proofs of God and immortality. But in him all this is still implicit."
"Numberless, in short, are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections color and infect the understanding." - Francis Bacon
Read more: Spirituality, New Age, Francis Bacon, Conspiracy Theories, Fascism
"Social media gives the right to speak to legions of idiots who previously only spoke at the bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. They were immediately silenced, but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of idiots."
Umberto Eco
Stacked bar chart using bokeh.models vs. bokeh.plotting.
Read more: Hierarchial Categorical Data with bokeh.models in a Stacked Bar
There's this quote from the movie, The Holdovers, which really rang true to me:
"History is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present."
Bokeh.plotting on the other hand, "lets you focus on relating glyphs to data. It automatically assembles plots with default elements such as axes, grids, and tools for you." The trade-off is that the developer can control the document's details with greater precision using bokeh.models.
But I can easily imagine Secretary of War Peacock puffing his chest and emulating Arnaud Amalric's brutal order, "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius" ("Kill them all; let God sort them out.")
Ironically, the first flicker of independent Western thought would be snuffed by an Asian despot who believed in a monotheistic religion (Zoroastrianism).
Bokeh is an open-source Python library for creating interactive data visualizations for modern web browsers. It offers two interfaces for development: bokeh.plotting and bokeh.models. The challenge arises when using bokeh.models with categorical data, as there are no examples of it being displayed with bokeh.models.
Read more: Categorical Data in bokeh.plotting and bokeh.models
How do you get a 20-year-old wife with a baby to embrace Stoicism? Maybe you don't.
The early methodological naturalism of the Pre-Socratics was subsumed under the tide of spiritualism. It would not be rediscovered until the Renaissance, when focus once again shifted from God to Man. On the one hand, the Protestant Reformation was the revival of a "personal god" in Protestantism. On the other hand, God was no longer sufficient or necessary to explain natural phenomena. , which represents a return to old Orphic traditions of revelation, focusing on the individual. Today, Protestant charismatic religions, as well as New Age ramblings, are the modern heirs of ecstatic Orphic Dionysianism. Naturalism harnessed optics, with the telescope and the microscope, to fundamentally change human understanding of the universe and life's place in it. Western Empiricism would set Western Civilization on its path to dominance in the Nineteenth Century and create the modern era.
The universities of the United States are among the country's most valuable resources. They are the engines that made America great. Of course, Trump is severely curtailing VISAs for foreign students, causing them to take their mental firepower to other countries.
Photos from a large collection I took some years ago.
I never realized that the Library of Congress was such a beautiful place. (Several high resolution images: slow load time.)
As Trump chops through the Federal workforce, has anyone considered asking how much they are costing the government?
Read more: Trump's Full of Sh... Hot Air (I don't use explitives on my website.)
A visit to the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Thoughts and experiments with a Scikit-Learn Vectorizer.
Thoughts and experiments with a Choropleth map
Read more: Choropleth map of U.S. States Partisan Lean vs. Population Size
Contains both the code and resulting map.
I decided to be extra nice to Dave today :-) He had mentioned a few meals he would enjoy, and I made mental notes so as not to forget them.
I see these arguments coming from the Left and the Right: people with no college education and people with liberal arts or engineering degrees. If a liberal arts degree doesn't include analytical or critical thinking instruction, our civilization is doomed.
In these days of near-Fascism, we all think we see the boogie man.
Demagogue.
Sybaritic philistine.
I try not to overly dwell on the evil sleaze now running the Federal Government. But I came across the Penn Wharton Budget Model, which had some data I thought I'd visualize in some charts. I created them in a Jupyter Notebook and outputted the result as the webpage I include in an iframe below. The charts show that Trump's OBBB is essentially a massive wealth transfer scheme from the poor to the rich.
Making health care less accessible to poor people will not make them healthier; it will kill them.
To ascribe it to nomads in the desert who promised their daughters in marriage at age 12 or 15, enslaved people, required rapists to marry their victims, and practiced polygyny is the height of historical naivety.
I came across some interesting data from the Australian Academy of Science (AAS). (Australian Academy of Science, n.d.) Human lineage branched off around 7 million years, Homo Sapiens emerged around 300,000 years ago, and behavioral modernity appeared around 160,000 to 60,000 years ago. (Wikipedia contributors, 2025, June 9) During the last 300,000 years, the AAS shows that the Earth has experienced three other temperature peaks. Furthermore, these peaks correlate closely with the CO2 concentrations.
Interestingly, we now seem to be well on our to attaining the highest CO2 concentrations in the last 800,000 years.
2. How has climate changed? (n.d.). Australian Academy of Science. https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/apaquickguide/webpages
Wikipedia contributors. (2025, June 9). Human. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:58, June 10, 2025, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Human&oldid=1294650216
Intro text. TBD
Read more: Mediterranean Chickpea Salad with Greek Lemon Pilaf
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Once again, I found the inspiration for this while browsing "spring lunch ideas" online. I don't remember the sequence of the rabbit-hole-hunt.... but there are a number of recipes with this name easily located online. I started with dry chickpeas around 7AM - figuring I had plenty of time before lunch. Luckily the beans cooperated (they don't always seem to do that for some reason...). Started with a riff on a Greek dressing with all the usual suspects: fresh garlic, red wine vinegar, Italian seasoning, a little S & P, EVOO and some lemon juice. Took it on a twist based on one or more of the discovered recipes by adding cumin, dill, fresh cilantro and cardamom, and then thickened it a bit with some guar gum. I like to let such a dressing marinate for as long as possible to develop the flavors. Then I prepped an expanded array of veggies: in addition to the usual seedless cucumber, cherry tomatoes, kalamata olives and bell peppers, I worked in some raw cauliflower. I don't like my salads ice cold, so I always let the veggies temper at room temperature for at least an hour or so. I drained and cooled the beans, and tossed some into the dressing while they were still warm. Eventually tossed in the room-temp veggies, some feta cheese and that was all she wrote. The original recipe called for cooked quinoa, but I didn't have any so cooked up some brown basmati rice instead. The volume of beans and veggies was immense, so I opted not to use it as a base - gave Dave a side dish of rice instead. Must say it was awfully good! |
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While browsing recipes online recently, I came across a recipe that read to like a nice riff on gremolata: Ultimate Steelhead Trout on the Olga's Flavor Factory website. The ingredients were extremely similar - except the amounts were quite different - but instead of adding the sauce after cooking, the shallot-heavy topping is placed on top prior to cooking, which gives it a different twist. I must say it was a great twist! They are both my favorites now :-) |
Why we continue to believe the bamboozlers.
Wellness and conspiracies can go hand in hand.
Read more: Seed Oils vs. Butter: Birth of Conspiracy Theories
Intellectualism in an era of newspeak.
There was an interesting dust-up over measles recently, caused by the current outbreak across the United States, but still primarily in Texas and New Mexico. RFK Jr. remarked that the mortality of the disease is higher among people who are malnourished and that people should focus on exercise and nutrition as ways to prevent the illness.
"Fair and Balanced" Fox News covered this topic in a 1322-word article by Melissa Rudy on March 11, 2025. She begins by quoting RFK's words in a section that is 453 words long. She follows this with a section called "Infectious disease experts weigh in." The first expert is Dr. Jacob Glanville, CEO of Centivax, a San Francisco biotechnology company. He cites some interesting numbers: "While better nutrition is important for American children, it’s unlikely to make a difference when it comes to measles infection or severity — 90% of well-fed but unvaccinated American children exposed to measles will become infected, around 20% of those children will be hospitalized, and 0.1-1% of those children will die."
According to Statista, there are 46.6 million children under 12 in the United States. Measles virulence is nearly 100% in unvaccinated populations. If 20% wind up in the hospital, that comes to 9.32 million hospitalized children. The median cost per case of measles is $32,805. If the child is hospitalized (outpatients excluded), the median cost is between $3562–$40 695 in 2009 dollars. (Note that the first median cost includes hospitalizations.) Conversely, the MMR vaccine, which eliminated measles in the United States in 2000, costs between $106 and $142. The cost is lower for those in the Child Vaccination Program. These numbers ignore the unquantifiable costs of the approximately 46,600 children who will die (0.1% of the total number of children under age 12) .
Ms. Rudy quotes Dr. Trish Perl, an infectious disease expert at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas: "For example, malnutrition may decrease the robustness of the response to the MMR vaccine." Then, she quotes Dr. Jonathan Jennings, a board-certified internist with the Medical Offices of Manhattan, who says that nutrition can "impact heavily" the clinical course of child patients, further saying that Jennings recommends a balanced diet.
After all these experts are trotted out to talk about nutrition and malnutrition, after 83% of the article is complete, Ms Rudy gets around to unequivocally stating that the vaccine is both safe and highly effective. This section of the article is expressed in 219 words at the very end of the article, 234 fewer words than the section quoting RFK's misinformation.
How many Fox News readers read the whole article? How many do you think came away from this article believing that the vaccine can stop the current outbreak?
Economic inequality and social mobility.
Read more: What Trump and Musk Don't want You thinking about: Social Mobility and Inequality
Simple is often so good.
Read more: Baked Shwarma Chicken, Potatos, and Carrots with Fresh Green Beans
SMS, or Short Message Service, is a protocol for mobile devices, chiefly mobile phones, to send messages from point to point over a cellular network. It helps me send brief messages, usually to someone in my family.
But I have limits on what I see that it is suitable for. For anything longer, anything requiring thought, I find it inadequate. First, there is efficiency. I'm a single-thumb iPhone typist. This means that longer messages are very inefficient to produce on an iPhone. Even two-thumb typing, cannot remotely approach the efficiency of ten fingers on a QWERTY keyboard. It simply takes too long to type something non-trivial, and while I may be retired, I like to think that my time is too valuable to spend on something grossly inefficient.
But, more importantly, I think that medium should fit the message. If I'm going to really think about something and write it down, what I produce is self-defining. It is wasted in a transient, one-to-one channel. An SMS message is not searchable, cannot be referenced, and cannot be made to contain references easily. Since I rarely produce something of pure opinion, academic integrity requires that I create references for my statements. Furthermore, SMS messages are often forgotten or deleted soon after they come into existence. They are trivial nothings.
When I produce something, it is an extension of myself and an act of self-definition. Each act of production is part of creating an integral whole. I am not going to self-create using the SMS protocol. Facebook's banality, prosaicness, and frequent vulgarity make it inappropriate for any serious or substantive discussion, even though it is not SMS. Facebook compounds its inadequacy because everything produced there is no longer owned by the producer; Facebook owns it. Facebook does not own my thoughts. Facebook users make a Faustian agreement by consenting to be advertised to, targeted, spied on, and manipulated in return for an audience. On a personal note, it is also substantially less expressive than a website encoded in HTML5. In these evil times (2025-2029), I speak my mind to the world on a web server, not whisper it in some social media echo chamber of the like-minded. Whether anyone is listening is not relevant.
Like me, my website is an expression of my existence. At 70, I am aware that my existence will soon snuff into oblivion, much like what will happen to this website when its lease expires. I won't lapse into the pompousness of quoting from Macbeth, but it all signifies nothing in the end. But, while I'm here, I want to give my existence its due diligence.
Normally, I have coffee with lunch....
Ponder the intersection between data science, data analytics, and statistics.
The idea that times were better under Trump is a simple lie, and the numbers show it.
Read more: Inflation-Adjusted Median Family Income and Gross Domestic Product 1984 to 2025
"Where have all the drones gone....." sung to the melody of "Where have all the Flowers Gone?"
Denise came across Chef John's chicken florentine webpage yesterday, and I was the beneficiary.
The last time America turned its Congress and Presidency over to Republicans after a Democratic administration, we were the world's only superpower, with a budget surplus of almost $0.24 trillion, a booming economy, and no wars.
In 1240 AD Abu Ishaq al-Bitruji of Cordova published his Correction of Almagest, based on his observatory in the Giralda of Seville. The Almagest is the book of astronomy written by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy. Subsequently, Abu Ishaq al-Bitruji, also of Cordova, deconstructed the Ptolemaic theory of epicycles and eccentrics, which explained the planets' anomalous paths in the solar system's geocentric theory. By contrast, Galileo was placed on trial by the Roman Catholic Inquisition in 1633 for his criticism of the Ptolemaic theory and geocentrism in Sidereus Nuncius.
Interestingly, this places Moslem astronomy roughly 400 years ahead of Western science.
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This morning I received Agora, a Spanish movie, in the mail. The movie is practically impossible to get in the United States as it had only a limited release here. It is unavailable for streaming on any of the services I subscribe to. Even its Region 1 release on DVD was delayed. It had a good critical response, with one reviewer in The Guardian writing: "an ambitious, cerebral and complex movie... Unlike most toga movies, it doesn't rely on CGI spectacle, but real drama and ideas." The movie is about Hypathia, a Fourth-Century neo-Platonist philosopher in Alexandria, Egypt. She was a leading mathematician and astronomer of her time, known and celebrated throughout the Mediterranean world for her insights and teaching. She taught at Alexandria's celebrated Serapeum, a pagan temple, place of learning, and repository of the last surviving scrolls of what was once the Library of Alexandria, possibly the greatest of Antiquity. The Serapeum was destroyed by a Christian mob in 391 AD. The movie was not popular in the United States, heavily criticized as being anti-Christian, even though the Roman Catholic Church in the Vatican collaborated on parts of the production. While the historical accuracy of this romanticized account has been attacked, the fundamentals are unassailable. Hypathia was indeed celebrated throughout the Mediterranean. The Serapeum was closed as a temple by Christian Emperor Constantine in 325 AD, though it continued as a place of learning and library. In 391 AD, Christian Emperor Theodosius banned entering it and other pagan temple sites. Also, that year, a Christian mob stormed the Serapeum, evicted the pagans who had taken refuge there, and pillaged and destroyed its contents. In the Christian season of Lent, 415 AD, Hypathia was kidnapped by another Christian mob. According to a contemporary writer, she was stripped nude, her eyes cut out, and, by some interpretations of the text, flayed alive. Thus, a brilliantly shining light in the Eastern Mediterranean and her library of Antiquity were snuffed out in the march towards the Dark Ages.
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Image from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Agoraposter09.jpg |
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There is something evil occurring in America. Sometimes, it is whispered, sometimes it is an off-hand remark, sometimes it is just "telling a story" to make a point. It is slipping by us because Americans' ignorance of history makes them think they are ahistorical. But these separate threads all point in the same direction.
Helen Vause was born in Kobe, Japan, in May 1915, far from the killing fields of World War I. But her life would not escape the varied effects of both World Wars. She had a privileged life, but it was still one of challenge.
No, I'm not talking about Trump the Convicted Felon. But everything he says is a lie.
Some days ago, Denise asked me what I wanted for lunch. I dreamed up the most outlandish reply I could imagine: a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. A few days later, voila, one appeared for lunch.
"It must be easy for you; you've been fit all your life."
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I'm fairly athletic and exercise as often as I can. I am interested in all sources of high-quality protein. Unfortunately, commercial vegetarian soy patties are laced with unhealthy amounts of sodium. To counter this, Denise made her own textured soy protein patties as an alternative to Boca Burgers. They were wonderful. She got the recipe here: https://theeburgerdude.com/vegan-burger-patties/ |
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"He who destroys life, tells lies, takes what is not given him, commits adultery and takes intoxicating drinks, digs up his own roots even in this very life."
New Age meme generator.
Read more: "Orderliness is the foundation of existential creativity"
Matplotlib and views of running.
Denise decided to try her hand at chickpea shakshuka.
Denise made a wonderful fettuccine lunch. The figs and onions added a hint of sweetness. I don't normally like sweets, but this was wonderful.
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I like simple, whole foods, simple, so I know what's in them, whole, because whole, natural foods are almost invariably better for you. Imagine my pleasure when I returned from my run today to find this lunch: homemade salsa, crushed avocado, fajita chicken breast, grilled onions, and green peppers on a bed of brown Spanish rice. The salsa was made from half a can of chunky tomato, a quarter of a green pepper, a chunk of sweet onion, and a squirt of lime juice, which had been blended. I also made very good coffee using the pour-over technique. No, I'm not a Klean Kanteen © ambassador. I just like the product.
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A place where you can read or make up anything that makes you feel good and adopt it as belief.
This a basic risotto alla Milanese.
Dodged vertical bar chart.
Read more: Matplotlib Bar Chart of 2023 Running Compared to 2024
We just happened to visit the zoo on the Pandas' last day being displayed. We knew that they were going back in November, but had no inkling that it would be so soon.
Science is a Western invention. While there were advances in astronomy and mathematics in India and China, these were descriptive only. In the face of Oriental and Middle Eastern mysticism and obscurantism, the Classical Greeks were the first to attempt to use objective observation to understand and explain the world around them: natural philosophy.
I've written about this with greater sophistication elsewhere in "Sitting."
I'm not fond of praying or having people tell me they will pray for something. The reality of this action became clear to me while studying Buddhism.
When a Buddhist meditates, he/she is usually calming the mind in order to detach it from desire. Principal amongst these desires is the desire to exist. The Buddhist seeks liberation from the self, which is a desire to exist. From the Pali, anatta is no self, no soul. In part, meditation is the embrace and full realization of no self.
Prayer is inherently acquisitive. The person praying is asking for something from something that can grant it. The impulse is diametrically opposite the Buddhist. The "me" asks the "something in whose image I am made" to grant me a wish. The vanity is that you have a "self" that can ask. The hubris is that your "self" is made in the image of something that can grant favors.
The Buddhist does not pray because there is nothing out there to pray to. Also, since Buddhism is about freedom from desire, begging an omnipotent being for favors would be inherently contradictory.
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Occasionally, as a counter to not doing anything about our non-existent healthcare system, a politician will use nationalist rhetoric as a dodge, asserting that the United States has the best healthcare in the world. In reality, we have a Darwinian jungle of insurance companies, Big Pharma, and Big Medicine all preying on the wallets of unsuspecting Americans. The result is undoubtedly the most expensive health care in the world. But it's a patchy, confused mess of insurance plans modulated by various state and federal laws delivering a product of questionable quality.
I decided to do a little research on this. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, known as the OECD, is an international consortium of primarily highly developed countries. Its goals are to stimulate economic progress and world trade. They offer extensive data on member states' economies and national well-being at OECD Data.
In January 2022, I downloaded data sets on national expenditure on healthcare and two measures of national health: life expectancy at birth and neonatal death rates. I created some bar charts of my findings, which I share here. The data for GDP and life expectancy are for 2019. The neonatal death rates are from 2018 because 2019 data from the United States was unavailable.
The first corroborates something pretty much all of us know. We have the most expensive health delivery system in the world. The first graph displays national expenditure on health care as a percentage of gross domestic product or GDP. In the cost department, the United States runs away with first place. Compare this with the costs for some countries renowned for the "socialized" healthcare systems, Japan and the Scandinavian countries, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
Now that we have an idea of the costs consider performance measurements. Two come to mind: life expectancy at birth and neonatal death rates.
First is life expectancy at birth by country. U.S. performance here is dismal. Of the countries that I highlight, only Russia's performance is worse. Note that every country to the right of the United States has free and universal health care.
Lastly, consider neonatal death rates by country. The U.S. performance is a disgrace for a country that prides itself on family well-being. As with life expectancy, Japan leads the way, followed by "socialist' Scandinavia.
In an era of conspiracy theories, alt-facts, and believing whatever makes you feel good, America will continue to weaken unless we adopt fact-based, empirical approaches to decision-making. This is particularly true in health policy and response to global warming.
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Our daughter and son-in-law took us for a wonderful lunch at a Russian-Uzbek restaurant in Arlington, RusUz. We had blini as appetizers. The blini were crepe-like pancakes stuffed with seasoned ground beef filling, served with sour cream.
Denise had the goluptsi, cabbage leaves stuffed with seasoned ground beef and rice, served with sour cream and tomato sauce. Her meal was garnished with a sauce with carrots and tomatoes. |
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This is the stuffing inside her goluptsi. |
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I had the chicken shashlik (shish kabob). My meal came with steamed vegetables and seasoned rice. My chicken was gently seasoned with turmeric, giving it a wonderful flavor. Typically, I never waste a diet soda that I'm having with my meal. But I found that the Coke was overwhelming the gentle spices of the meal, so I switched to water to more fully enjoy the flavors. |
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My son-in-law had the plov, a rice dish mixed with carrots, chickpeas, raisins, spices, and lamb. It is the national meal of Uzbekistan. Our daughter had the beef stroganoff, sautéed beef in a sour cream and tomato-based sauce served with steamed vegetables and white rice.
The meals were simple; one can even say healthful. But what made the meal shine were the seasonings. Nothing was hot, but everything had light turmeric, cardamom, garlic, basil, and thyme flavors.
The restaurant's decor was seemingly Nineteenth-century, the walls covered with large oil canvasses of Central Asian scenery and traditional architecture. It was truly a pleasant birthday luncheon for Denise. |
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Breakfast was our once-a-week whole eggs and strong, light roast coffee. |
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Lunch was a turkey and avocado roll-up with kale salad. |
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Dinner was pork cutlets with broccoli in sauce. |
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I have been working on a choropleth display of 48 continuous states where the political bias of the state is encoded in its background color, and the population is encoded in the size of a circle with a center on the geometric center of the state. The Bokeh library interface for a circle uses its diameter to specify the circle size. So, it is natural to make the diameter proportional to population size. When doing this, the following plot results. Notice the extreme range in size between the most populous states and the least. Mousing over a state will render the state's name, level of political bias, and population.
Is plotting the circle with diameter proportional to populations a fair representation of the states' relative sizes? Does a viewer intuit the circle's diameter or the circle's area as a representation of population size? Note that plotting the size of the circle based on diameter causes a quadratic relation between population size and circle area. Is this fair? Montana's area is roughly a quarter of that of Oregon. But the circle representation for Montana is minuscule.
Circle diameter varies linearly with population.
So, I made the population proportional to the circle area. This means that the diameter will vary by the square root of the area:
area = (pi x radius)2
radius = (area)1/2/pi
diameter = 2(area)1/2/pi
I show the result below. Now note the significantly attenuated variation in the circle area. Montana's area, like its population, is roughly a quarter of that of Oregon.
I think this demonstrates that representing data as proportional to the circle diameter subtly misguided the reader. It is more honest to use area.
Circle area varies linearly with population.
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Denise often asks me what I want to eat for a meal or a suggested theme for the next meal. Today, I replied, "Something Mediterranean/Greek/Italian." So, she prepared a Mediterranean chickpea salad. The salad's ingredients were:
She used the chickpea salad as a topping on Romaine for herself and arugula for me. In retrospect, we realized that adding the greenery tended to dilute the flavor of the chickpea salad too much. As a carbohydrate, after running five miles, I had a piece of Boulart focaccia, the most authentic focaccia I've had in the United States. Finally, a cup of Green Mountain light roast brewed to the strength of one tablespoon of coffee grounds to 3 ounces of water. {fastsocialshare} |
I dropped out of mainstream American society in 1976 to join what I then considered America's military cult corps. I spent three years as an undergraduate in zoology at the University of Florida. Campus life was an exciting place. Kids were being given fascinating reading assignments, and the buzz around campus was filled with topics like Camus, Civilization and its Discontents, Equus, and Marat/Sade. When I returned in the 1980s, it was like the students and America had been lobotomized. Everyone had become blandly content and had exchanged literature for People magazine. Six years of Reaganesque feel-good had seemingly transformed the country. When kids did talk about a book, the topic would most often be one of Rand's books. Rand, a strident atheist, along with Reagan, was succeeding where turn of the Century robber barons had failed. They had made laissez-faire capitalism acceptable to the mainstream middle class which had no chance of achieving their Trumpian fantasies. I had returned to the world in the decade where it had become morally acceptable to declare "Greed is good."
In 2020, we are dealing with the consequences. The feel-good has become so ingrained that substantial numbers of Americans can deny climate change as the weather boldly proves them wrong. They ridicule but cannot reply to a small girl from Sweden as she wags her finger at us, telling us, "We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth." The environment is being trashed. The 2017 tax cut for the wealthy, rationalized by assertions that it would pay for itself, was widely supported by the Republican lower classes. This is despite similar cuts under Reagan and George W. running up historic deficits.
Similarly, Brownback's "Kansas experiment" nearly bankrupted his state. For decades, consumerist capitalism has only continued to thrive due to massive deficit spending by the world's richest governments, which are run by oligarchies of the ultra-rich. This year, we have been brought the lurid spectacle of a reality show president blithely predicting the end of a pandemic by April that is, instead, killing Americans at a rate of 3000 per day in December. And yet, 40% of us still revere him.
Thanks to Reagan's feel-good, we have run off the rails and have gone over the cliff. In the face of an oil embargo in 1974, Americans did not like being told to wear sweaters, so they voted for a B-grade actor. Thirty-five years later, to goose their self-image, they voted for a B-grade reality show host and business crook. The price now is an economy and environment in free fall.
https://www.facebook.com/americancanary/
https://www.filmsforaction.org/
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/23/763452863/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-the-u-n-climate-action-summit
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Using Bokeh to illuminate U.S. states compared by gun deaths, per capita gun registration, and party affiliation
Read more: U.S. States Compared by Gun Deaths, per Capita Gun Registration, and Party Affiliation
I feel for those who struggle, whose numbers have grown so much in 2020.
I was thinking about capitalism, shareholder capitalism, economic expansion, consumerism, and global warming.
So way back in 1997, I picked up a book, “Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection” by Dr. John Sarno, and read it. My interest was more than academic. Since 1982, I had been coping with ongoing low back pain, which substantially impacted my quality of life. While I could run, I could not do any form of bent-over rows without support to my back. Deadlifts were Russian roulette, and I avoided them. I spent much of the time in some belt to compress my core, which relieved the pain somewhat. This was a miserable, disabled way for a 30-year-old to go through life. Sarno’s book changed my life. Upon just reading it, my back pain largely disappeared. I’m not a new age devotee, nor do I believe in quick remedies for life’s ills. To me, the quick way or the easy way is never the right way. Yet, even before adopting some of his advice to stretch, give up alcohol, etc., the chronic, severe pain that had hounded me for 15 years just quit.
Ten years later, I was re-discovering Runner’s World and running itself. During the first 5 to 10 years of my renewed subscription, the magazine ran two articles by two different authors on their reactions to Sarno’s book. Both cases were different versions of my own story; just reading the book or being his patient substantially relieved the pain.
Decades have passed since I read his book and those articles in Runner’s World. As our memories fade, Denise had come to doubt the accuracy of mine. She’s now suggesting that my Runners World articles may be fabrications of my mind. While I’m the first to admit that I believe some of my memories may not map very well onto events, I also think I can recollect important events very well. Validation of my experience with Sarno’s book is important. We get old. Who’s to say what was real and what has been embellished by our minds over the years?
This month, the New York Times came to my rescue: “I have to believe this book cured my pain.“
Update on 10/16/2024:
The Europeans and Native Americans were probably equally prone to rapine, torture, and butchery. It is also true that most of the latter were still essentially living in the Stone Age, though some of the civilizations were working metal.
Columbus Day was founded to counter anti-Italian immigrants after a mob in New Orleans lynched a dozen Italian immigrants in 1892. See a common thread here? Arguably, Columbus Day is a political "stunt."
Columbus was tried and convicted of tyranny and incompetence by Spanish authorities, though the integrity of his accusers is suspect. Like many of the adventurers of his day, he was a violent, brutal man, but so were many of his victims.
Given the vagueness of spirituality, arguments about it are vacuous. You could say that, given the Catholic Church, Columbus should have known better. Despite its humane roots, the Church was entirely given over to greed. But even devout Christians of the first two centuries AD were fond of butchering each other over fine points of dogma.
What separates us from men and women of the Sixteenth Century or even the first two centuries is our belief in human rights. While human rights had a few proponents in antiquity, it didn't emerge as a human intellectual dogma until the Enlightenment. Ironically, the tradition from which it emanates is essentially secular. We human rights believers in Twenty-First Century America look back in horror at our history, but we forget that even today, our world view is not universal.
Christopher Columbus and I have history. In the mid-1970s, while sitting over lunch in a villa overlooking Santa Margherita, I remarked that Columbus had apparently spent some time as a pirate after reading an article in the International Herald Tribune about his privateering days. In response, my estranged Genoese stepfather physically assaulted me.
I acknowledge that Columbus was probably a brilliant man. The son of a Genoese merchant, he was brought up in the same tradition. He took to the sea at an early age, traveled widely, and learned from those travels. He was self-taught in Latin, Portuguese, and Castilian. He read widely about astronomy, geography, and history. Notably, he learned cartography. He, along with the foremost scholars of Europe, knew that the Earth was round. From the Ninth Century, Islamic scholar Al-Farghani also knew the Earth's circumference to a great degree of accuracy. However, confusion over the difference between nautical and Arabic miles caused his estimate to be far shorter.
In the capitals of Europe, Columbus's idea that sailing to the Orient could be accomplished by going west over the Atlantic. He tried Portugal, sent his brother to try England, and was on his way to France when the King and Queen of Spain stopped him and brought him back for more discussions. Eventually, he would negotiate the rank of Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroyship and Governorship of new lands he claimed for Spain. Additionally, he would get 10% of all revenues from the lands he discovered and an influence in the choice of appointees to office in those lands.
Much of Columbus' life is mired in conflict and controversy. Even in his own time, his treatment of colonists and natives drew much criticism. At one point, he was jailed in Spain for his actions in the Americas.
On his first trip to the Americas, Columbus arrived in the Bahamas, called by the natives "Guanahani." His journal entry for 12 October 1492 on the topic of the inhabitants provides insight into the man: "They ought to make good and skilled servants, for they repeat very quickly whatever we say to them. I think they can very easily be made Christians, for they seem to have no religion". Of the Arawak peoples, he noted that their primitive weapons and military tactics made them susceptible to easy conquest. He wrote: "These people are straightforward in war-like matters … I could conquer the whole of them with 50 men and govern them as I pleased."
On his second voyage, he encountered the Caribs. To be blunt, the Americas were no idyllic paradise; Native Americans were not monolithic. Some were timid and ran off upon the Europeans' approach. On the other hand, the Caribs were as ruthless and violent as the colonizers. The two groups collaborated and fought each other. Both routinely engaged in murder, butchery, rape, and slavery of their own kind and of each other. However, the Europeans had the resources to do so on the scale of hundreds or thousands of Native Americans: males, 14 and up, were forced into gold mining, the women into sex slavery.
His last two trips were failures. On the third, the Spanish Crown relieved him of command for his harsh suppression of a rebellion by his own European colonialists. It instituted an investigation, which resulted in his being sent back to Spain and imprisoned. His negotiation skills won him freedom at the hands of the Crown and support for a fourth voyage. On this one, he was refused harbor entry by his own governor upon the approach of a hurricane. He barely made it back to Spain with his life and partial crew.
To say that Columbus committed genocide is silly hyperbole. However, his arrival started a long history in which a population rich in advanced technology, weaponry, and immune system response decimates a population without these strengths. There were many instances where Native Americans were specifically targeted for removal or destruction with the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." This is the entire history of the American West, of which so many in the United States are so proud and see as their foundational myth: the policy of forcibly removing Natives to reservations is, by definition, genocide.
I suspect the worst we can say about Columbus himself is that he was a man of his time. The Fifteenth Century was not a pretty place in the Americas or Europe. On both sides of the Atlantic, humans were amazingly brutal to one another. Eight hundred years later, we view these events through the lens of the French Enlightenment. Essentially put, the notion that human life has some intrinsic value, that "pursuit of happiness, the sovereignty of reason, and the evidence of the senses as the primary sources of knowledge and advanced ideals such as liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state" are the ideas of dead white western men living in France and England in the 18th Century. Before this time, there was no concept of human or personal rights.
I have often said that judging people in history based on concepts that did not exist at the time is unreasonable. Columbus enslaved because that is what you did to conquered people in those days. Slavery was not questioned until the French Enlightenment. Before that, it reaches back into time. The word "slave" comes from Slav. In the Middle Ages, more Western European people routinely enslaved Slavs. The great Moslem Empire, with running water, lighted streets, and libraries from Constantinople to Cordoba, had them. In the Moslem Empire, Islamists, Christians, and Jews could all live and pray because it is written in their Book. But they had slaves. Reaching back to the dawn of art, Hecuba laments her impending fate as a slave as Troy falls and its women are raped.
Sure, Columbus may have been a man of his time. His biography indicates that while he was a good negotiator with the Spanish Crown, he was a poor leader and organizer. And he was, by current standards, a butcher. So, should he be lionized now?
Ironically, Columbus Day was instituted to alleviate early Twentieth-century racism directed at incoming Italians and other Southern Europeans. In this time of continued racism and neglect of the original people of the Americas, perhaps it is time to refocus our attention on the millions who lost a continent and are now living lives of intractable poverty and neglect on paltry, remote pieces of land, not even of their choosing. I think we are overdue. Do we celebrate a brutal time in the past that, hopefully, we have moved beyond as civilization? Do we do something to make our present world a better place for those in need?
So Republicans were catatonic at the thought of paying the middle and lower classes $24,000 during this time of financial calamity for so many. They’ve saved Republic an extra $7,200 by cutting that to $14,000 monthly.
I wonder where their concern over budget was when they passed the 2017 Republican tax cut. Ridiculously called the Tax Cuts Act and Job of 2017, it yielded an extra $21,240 in income for the $500K-$1M per annum earners and a whopping $69,660 pay hike for the greater than $1 million per annum set. By contrast, those making $10 to $20 K get a paltry $60 of take-home a year. But it was called the Job Act, too. Since Reagan, the lie has always been that tax breaks for the wealthy would have a trickle down to help the poor. This has never happened. In 2016, the last year of the Obama Administration, the budget deficit was $585 million, or 3.1% of GDP. The year the Republicans had intervened to make things better, it had already grown to $667 million or 3.4% of GDP. A year after their tax and jobs bill, these numbers had jumped to $779 million. The expected economic expansion did not occur, and the deficit/GDP ratio climbed to 3.8%. 2019, the tax and jobs bill continued its damage with a $984 million deficit. Making the rich richer did not help the economy, and the ratio climbed to 4.6%. In 2020, pre-COVID numbers, President Trump had sealed his place in history by being the first President to take the deficit over one trillion at $1,083 million, with a 4.8% deficit to GDP ratio.
And never mind the tax cuts to corporations, which cut the effective corporate tax rate from 17.2% to 8.8%. Companies are good at hiding where their money goes but cannot hide their initial cuts.
Now that the Republicans are no longer writing the fiscal legislation, they are reassuming their old values and becoming concerned about deficits. They are whining about aid to a desperate nation. But remember, Reagan’s tax cuts grew the deficit. Bush Junior’s tax cuts blew the lid off the budget deficits. It took hard negotiating by a Democratic President with Republican and Democratic legislatures to balance it.
Trump’s monumental ego, driven by proportional insecurity, prevents him from acknowledging that he was an incumbent president who lost to a rival he called “sleepy”. Of the 34 Presidents who have run for re-election, 13 have managed to lose. Trump is unable to accept this disconcerting capstone to his public life, his life in general. While he suffers from his psychological deficiencies, his followers have no such excuse.
The “stop the steal” crowd suffers from group delusional disorder brought on by too much time watching Fox and trolling on Breitbart-like websites. They need to man up to the reality that there is no international cabal, no deep state conspiring to make the ex President fail. He does that on his own. Of 54 lawsuits Trump and his ilk have filed in an effort to prove the election was stolen from him a whopping 14 were dropped by the plaintiff, 31 were dismissed by the judge as without merit, and 6 were lost outright. As of March 27, 2021, two trials are ongoing and one is in appeals. Trump achieved this dismal record despite the fact that the presiding judges were often appointed by Republican Presidents, Trump included. Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s not so secret ace in the hole for when he, as he knew he would, brought the election court case to the Supreme Court, refused to hear him.
Using the lie of fraudulent elections, Georgia has massively curtained voter rights. But the harsh light of courtroom reality shines on their lie exposing the true reason for making it harder to vote. A dwindling White racist majority is slowly losing a demographic race with younger, more liberal, Whites and people of color. Democracy is taking its course unless you move to undermine democracy. Georgia Republicans have demonstrated that they are willing to do so to keep power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related_to_the_2020_United_States_presidential_election
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/12/08/supreme-court-wont-hear-trump-allies-challenge-pennsylvania-vote/6483060002/
I wrote a fair amount during the George W. and Obama administrations, particularly the former's. Incensed by the stupidity of squandering the 2000 budget surplus by giving tax breaks to the rich, deregulating the banking and investment sectors to the point of laying the foundation for the Bush Recession, and the unnecessary start of two simultaneous land wars in Asia, I vented my anger in words frequently on a site at www.vause.name. An unfortunate choice of hosting company contributed to the total loss of all my notes in 2016.
I would have re-engaged that year on another platform but for events on the American political stage. I recoiled at the spectacle of Trump in the Republican primaries as he began to debase the dialog. Instead of taking the high road and ignoring or censoring him, his rivals joined him in a race to the bottom in front of cheering Republican audiences that resembled a mob from the French Revolution. The respect that I still harbored for the party of George Will and William Buckley evaporated. The only appropriate reaction to the 11th Republican presidential reality show episode - not debate - was disgust. To engage this man in any way, even by dissent, was to be soiled by the vulgarian. He is a downright disgusting human being.
George Will repudiated the Republican Party because of Trump. Thank heavens, for his sake, Buckley was spared the lurid story. The first time I heard Trump speak, I realized he was the first I had seen of a particular link politician: a true demagogue. Since then, he has managed to exceed my worst expectations of him. From vulgar insults about hands to limitless self-aggrandizement, hotel trysts with porn stars, emoluments, collusion and extortion of foreign leaders, making millions charging the Federal Government for his own travel, conspiracy theory amplification, and, finally, inciting riot and insurrection, Trump has led America down a path of increasing shame. I am glad that I didn't follow, even if to oppose on an obscure website. The man who began as a bankrupt casino owner and icon of conspicuous excess in golf hospitality morphed into the host of a frivolous yet self-aggrandizing reality show. He and his entourage, idolized by a nation drunk on materialism and consumption, entered a pantheon populated by the utterly talentless but exalted likes of Kardashian and Hilton. The nation that mistakes brand for character made him President, the ultimate apotheosis.
The Republican Party made a Faustian deal with Satan, and now we jointly pay for it. The damage to America's international standing will last a generation. This is both Trump's legacy and gift to China and Russia.
image credit: By Richard Westall - [1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28397009
https://www.npr.org/2016/03/03/469120994/watch-rivals-try-again-to-take-down-trump-in-gop-debate
https://apnews.com/article/world-reaction-us-capitol-bb3221a6610a5ab9e5cd4ebf4539bb02
I was reading somewhere about an author's disappointment that something didn't happen at the end of 2020 to bring more closure. The sentiment is entirely silly.
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Denise broke her toe two weeks ago. It knocked the steam out of my running. I'm used to having her around for the first few miles or, sometimes, the last few. I've kept my fitness alive on our treadmill, which I haven't used in years. To me, running is training but also reconnecting with the universe. We can't connect with the universe in a climate-controlled bubble. We must be immersed in it, whether it's comfortable or not. It's not uncomfortable out there now. 31F, roughly an hour before sunrise. It's not raining yet, though it will be by midday. I can't say that I feel that the predawn beckons me. But Denise is fortunately very supportive of all my training, so I have no excuse other than inertia and, perhaps, sentimentalism. So I have my cup of coffee, a small bowl of black beans, brown rice, and a teaspoon of olive oil to settle my stomach and ensure early morning energy levels. Typically, I call this a "time of bats to time of birds" run time. It's getting a bit late. In winter, the birds will be mostly silent. But it is New Year's Day. Since 2005, the year of my first marathon, I have maintained a tradition of running first thing in the morning. I try to paddle against the flow of the indulgences society is giving itself after a night of often drunken revelry. I know that Denise will have a warm, welcoming breakfast waiting for me on my return. It's reason enough to get out there and do it. |
I’m not a religious man. I don’t believe in the supernatural. I believe that if people made a greater effort to ensure that empirical probability underlays what they believe, there would be fewer problems in the world. Witness Trump’s quixotic quest to overturn the 2020 elections in court. Trump and his minions have brought over 57 lawsuits in the various states he has lost, presenting no evidence of fraud. One Trump appointee, Judge Stephanos Bibas of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Philadelphia, dismissively wrote in his opinion: “‘Calling an election unfair does not make it so.” Yet, an amazing 77% of Republicans believe that there was widespread fraud in the election. This is the legacy of religion when it silenced Galileo on pain of death to prevent him from expounding his heresy that the Earth revolved around the Sun rather than support the Scripture-based heliocentric view. This marked the beginning of a protracted war against empiricism waged by religion, post-moderns, some liberals, self-serving politicians, and authoritarians.
Yet, I do believe in the power of symbols. I like to run on days of astronomical events. Conjunctions, eclipses, equinoxes, and solstices are all game. I do this not because I believe in the occult. I don’t think for a second that any heavenly entity exerts any unearthly influence upon my earth-bound existence other than radiation and gravitation. Being outside during heavenly events is a symbolic reminder to me that we are natural beings. We are caught up in an endless number of concentric cycles. Being outside, particularly exercising outside, nourishes both mind and body in ways that are still incompletely documented by science. I believe that the current rape of the planet Earth is enabled by the lack of contact we have with the outside. I have watched the population of Monarch butterflies go from presenting clouds of the little creatures enjoying the flowers outside where I work four years ago to none in the last two years. A grander natural event symbolizes to me that individual humans, their sound and their fury are, in the end, signify nothing. It is a reminder to respect this proportion and to try to allow my brief passage through it to cause as little pain, strife, and turmoil as possible.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/trump-s-election-fight-includes-over-30-lawsuits-it-s-n1248289
https://www.courant.com/politics/hc-pol-q-poll-republicans-believe-fraud-20201210-pcie3uqqvrhyvnt7geohhsyepe-story.html
https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/3rd-circuit-calling-an-election-unfair-does-not-make-it-so
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair
https://www.health.harvard.edu/press_releases/spending-time-outdoors-is-good-for-you
https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/a-prescription-for-better-health-go-alfresco
https://apnews.com/article/business-plants-climate-gardening-environment-0a099826cf61752156d4faee10c28132
https://apnews.com/article/feds-delay-monarch-butterfly-protection-acf918688a623a77931a160e268dbc18
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Assignment2 Weather-Dates on X Axis - Submitted
Before working on this assignment please read these instructions fully. In the submission area, you will notice that you can click the link to Preview the Grading for each step of the assignment. This is the criteria that will be used for peer grading. Please familiarize yourself with the criteria before beginning the assignment.
An NOAA dataset has been stored in the file data/C2A2_data/BinnedCsvs_d400/fb441e62df2d58994928907a91895ec62c2c42e6cd075c2700843b89.csv. This is the dataset to use for this assignment. Note: The data for this assignment comes from a subset of The National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) Daily Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN-Daily). The GHCN-Daily is comprised of daily climate records from thousands of land surface stations across the globe.
Each row in the assignment datafile corresponds to a single observation.
The following variables are provided to you:
For this assignment, you must:
The data you have been given is near Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States, and the stations the data comes from are shown on the map below.
#%matplotlib notebook
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib as mpl
#mpl.get_backend()
import matplotlib.dates as mdates
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import datetime as dt
data_file = "fb441e62df2d58994928907a91895ec62c2c42e6cd075c2700843b89.csv"
raw_data = pd.read_csv(data_file)
raw_data.to_csv("raw_data.csv")
#print(raw_data.describe())
#print(raw_data.head())
# take the inverse of the mask to delete all leap days
raw_data = raw_data[~raw_data['Date'].str.contains("02-29")]
# separate 2005-2014 data and 2015 data
data_5_14 = raw_data[raw_data['Date'] < '2015-01-01' ]
data_2015 = raw_data[raw_data['Date'] > '2014-12-31']
#print(data_2015.head())
# separate TMAX data from TMIN data
max = data_5_14[data_5_14['Element']=='TMAX']
#max.to_csv('max.csv')
min = data_5_14[data_5_14['Element']=='TMIN']
# find max and min values for each date from among the
# measuring stations
max = max.groupby(['Date']).max()
min = min.groupby(['Date']).min()
data_2015_max = data_2015.groupby(['Date']).max()
data_2015_min = data_2015.groupby(['Date']).min()
data_2015 = data_2015_max.append(data_2015_min)
#print('new data_2015: \n', data_2015.describe())
#max.reset_index(inplace=True)
#max.to_csv('max_after_groupby.csv')
# drop unnecessary columns
max = max.drop(columns=['ID','Element'])
min = min.drop(columns=['ID','Element'])
data_2015.drop(columns=['ID','Element'])
# get the absolute highs and lows
max_high_temp = max.max()[0]
min_low_temp = min.min()[0]
#print('max_high_temp: ', max_high_temp)
#print('min_low_temp: ', min_low_temp)
# remove 20115 data between max_high_temp and min_low_temp
data_2015 = data_2015[(data_2015['Data_Value'] > max_high_temp)
| (data_2015['Data_Value'] < min_low_temp)]
#print("for scatter plot: \n",data_2015)
# prepare the dataframes for plotting
max = max.reset_index()
min = min.reset_index()
data_2015 = data_2015.reset_index()
#print('max: \n', max.describe())
#print('min: \n', min.describe())
#print('data_2015: \n', data_2015.describe())
max_values = max['Data_Value'].to_numpy()
max_values = max_values / 10
max_dates = max['Date'].to_numpy()
# convert np array of string dates to list of datetime.dates
max_dates = \
[dt.datetime.strptime(d,'%Y-%m-%d').date() for d in max_dates]
#print(max_dates)
#print(type(max_dates))
min_values = min['Data_Value'].to_numpy()
min_values = min_values / 10
min_dates = min['Date'].to_numpy()
# convert np array of string dates to list of datetime.dates
min_dates = \
[dt.datetime.strptime(d,'%Y-%m-%d').date() for d in min_dates]
print("888888888", max_dates[0], max_dates[-1])
data_2015_values = data_2015['Data_Value'].to_numpy()
data_2015_values = data_2015_values / 10
data_2015_dates = data_2015['Date'].to_numpy()
print("******", type(data_2015_dates[0]))
#
# First Axes.....
#
first_axes = plt.gca()
x = first_axes.xaxis
# rotate the tick labels for the x axis
for item in x.get_ticklabels():
item.set_rotation(-45)
first_axes.set_xlabel('\n Daily Highs and Lows 2004 through 2014')
first_axes.set_ylabel('Temperature (C)')
first_axes.set_title('2015 Temperatures that Exceed Maximum Highs and Lows from \
2004 through 2014 \n')
#first_axes.set_xlim(left=min_dates.min(), right=min_dates.max())
first_axes.xaxis.set_major_formatter(mdates.DateFormatter('%m/%d/%Y'))
first_axes.xaxis.set_major_locator(mdates.AutoDateLocator())
first_axes.set_ylim(top=70, bottom=-40)
plt.subplots_adjust(bottom=0.25, top=0.7)
f_axes_max_line, = first_axes.plot(max_dates,
max_values,
'r',
label='Maximum',
alpha=0.5,
linewidth=0.5)
f_axes_min_line, = first_axes.plot(min_dates,
min_values,
'blue',
label='Minimum',
alpha=0.5,
linewidth=0.5)
first_axes.fill_between(max_dates, max_values, min_values, facecolor='blue', alpha=0.25)
plt.subplots_adjust(bottom=0.25, top=0.55)
#
# build second axes
#
second_axes = first_axes.twiny()
second_axes.set_xlabel("2015 Temps Exceeding 2004 to 2014 Highs and Lows\n")
second_axes.xaxis.set_major_formatter(mdates.DateFormatter('%m/%d/%Y'))
second_axes.xaxis.set_major_locator(mdates.DayLocator())
left = mpl.dates.datestr2num('2015-02-01')
right = mpl.dates.datestr2num('2015-02-28')
#left = mpl.dates.datestr2num('2015-01-01')
#right = mpl.dates.datestr2num('2015-12-31')
second_axes.set_xlim(left=left, right=right)
# rotate the tick labels for the upper x axis
# rotate the axis labels
top_x = second_axes.xaxis
for item in top_x.get_ticklabels():
item.set_rotation(315)
# reduce the number of xticks to every other xtick in February
xticks = second_axes.get_xticks()
xticks = xticks[0::2]
second_axes.set_xticks(xticks)
#print(data_2015_dates)
#print(type(data_2015_dates[0]))
data_2015_dates_num = mpl.dates.datestr2num(data_2015_dates)
print(data_2015_dates[0])
print(type(data_2015_dates[0]))
'''
second_axes.annotate(s='some string',
xy=(data_2015_dates[0],data_2015_values[0]),
xytext=(-10.0,0.0),
textcoords='offset points',
ha='right')
'''
s_axis_scatter = second_axes.scatter(
data_2015_dates_num,
data_2015_values)
plt.legend([f_axes_max_line,f_axes_min_line, s_axis_scatter],
("2004/14 Max Temps",'2004/14 Min Temps','2015 Extremes'),
loc='upper left',
fontsize='small')
fig = plt.gcf()
fig.set_size_inches(10, 10)
#plt.gcf().autofmt_xdate()
#host.yaxis.get_label().set_color(p1.get_color())
#leg.texts[0].set_color(p1.get_color())
#par.yaxis.get_label().set_color(p2.get_color())
#leg.texts[1].set_color(p2.get_color())
Intuition tells us what we want to hear; pursuit of real knowledge leads us to the limits of what can be expressed mathematically. Beyond that lies the unknowable.
I interpret zazen to mean: sitting in quiet contemplation with a physical discipline regulating mind and body, displaying the singleness of mind (concentration) in itself and in the unity of mind and body.
The tradition is more than 2,500 years old, founded by a sage who asserted that Truth is revealed to the individual mediated by his own efforts, has no scripture, has no authoritative hierarchy, and has evolved manifesting itself differently in the cultures into which it has spread.
This is to journal my new web site set up after being trashed by an SQL injection attack.
“The government you elect is the government you deserve.” Thomas Jefferson
Sandy Point State Park is an idyllic place. The land squeezes into the Chesapeake where the Bay Bridge graciously spans the water. A beautiful beach meets the water. Behind the beach are large spaces for field games, grills for cooking out and picnics. A concession building provides beach-goers with snacks, cooking out and beach sundries, and various products to make a day trip to the beach more pleasant.
It is early on a blustery day, yet there are already a couple of hundred people enjoying the park. They fly kites, play football, even bath despite the somewhat chilly August morning. Squeals of delight from small children playing is carried on the winds from all directions. The scent of breakfast is in the air around the grills. There is even a group at the water's edge performing Baptisms and singing.
It is an all-American scene in Annapolis, Maryland, home of the U.S. Naval Academy. The only surprising observation that could be made is that my wife and I are the only ones there not speaking Spanish. I can only smile at the thought that Hispanic immigrants, possibly some legal, some not, seemed to monopolize American family values on this Saturday morning with their multi-generational gatherings at a beautiful beach. I could hear my Tea Party neighbor's rhetoric that people arriving in "America" without proper permissions are "illegals" and should be deported. Yet the scene seemed so natural. Young and old celebrating life and enjoying the place and time.
I look at the faces of the people around me, visibly darker, usually smaller, with that slightly "native" look. The native look has the curved features and nose that one sees in Mexican and Hispanic stereotypes. It shares much in common with profiles one sees on Mayan and Aztec ruins in Mexico. I realize that the people around me are the product of over 500 years of interbreeding between the indigenous American Indians and their Spanish overloads. More than 100 years before the first successful British colony at Jamestown, the Spanish arrived in America, claimed it in the name of the King of Spain, and forcibly wrested any lands they wanted form the American Indians, raping and marrying as they went.
Not even the most virulent John Wayne fan would argue that North America was not forcibly taken from its American inhabitants by successive waves of immigrants, mostly from the British Isles. The French and Indian War was provoked, in part, by these immigrants when they repeatedly violated British agreements with the French and Indians west of the Appalachians. These mountains were the border between the British Colonies and the French and Indian lands westward. After a British Imperial army defeated the French, the plains westward were opened to unlimited expansion b immigrants, now from all of Europe. Of course, they were opposed by the American inhabitants. History records the slaughter that ensued.
In the early 1800's, this westward expansion encroached on what was then the United Mexican States. Mexico, seeking to populate its northern states, welcomed immigrants from the United States looking for new lands. To its own misfortune, it was unaware of the active debate in the United States over Manifest Destiny, a belief that the European immigrants, now citizens of the United States, had an obvious right to all North American lands between Mississippi and the Pacific Ocean, no matter who might currently own them. The immigrants who populated Texas brought with them slavery, which was banned in Mexico. When the United Mexican States sought to enforce its laws, the Texans rebelled and sought to join the United States. After a vigorous debate in this country over the legitimacy of allowing this, Texas was admitted as a slave state to the U.S.. This provoked war with Mexico.
Of course, the United Mexican States lost their war with the United States. As war reparations for opposition of Texas' joining another country, Mexico ceded what is now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, and a large swath of Colorado to the United States. Mexico lost half its land mass. Along with the land, went the original indigenous inhabitants, Indian and Spanish, that blood mix which we call Mexican. Their blood line went back through 350 years of inhabiting America.
Through most of my life, I have believed that nations have a moral right to protect their borders and control who enters. Recent thoughts of Mexican heritage have me re-thinking my assumptions. I cannot believe that any White Man has the moral right to restrict the movements of the original Americans, particularly as they migrate towards the hope of better lives. In my mind, it matters little if their blood line is tainted with that of the first immigrants to America.
05/03 Update
At work, I overheard some conservative contractors talking about the immigration issues the United States is facing. One was from Texas. I heard phrases like "If they want to come to America and be Americans, they have to respect our laws." The irony struck me immediately. The majority of Mexicans are 30% to 60% American Indian. Significant minorities in Central America are still monolinguals speaking dialects of the languages of the original American inhabitants. The self-desigated Americans of European descent came to Texas on invitation by the Mexican federal government to settle. They subsequently began to ignore federal authority, with respect to slavery in particular. Mexico banned this pratice long before the United States. When the Mexican federal government attempted to enforce its laws, the Texan settlers became what we now like to call illegals and rebelled against the authority of the country to which they immigrated. 150 years later, the descendants of these illegals are calling the descendants of the original inhabitants illegal because they cross a border that their ancestors pre-date. This was a border imposed by force. Most ironically, these decendants of Europeans call themselves American and deny the term to the scions of the original people of the American land.
My earliest memories of life place me in a small radish patch in the sleepy Florida Panhandle around 1959. This, I recall, was a problem as the radish patch was off limits to me. I can remember the ever-present threat of a "switching" using the reeds that lived near our house, but never the actual event. My on-going love of my home state must trace its unconscious roots in a childhood of Florida pines, Spanish moss, fish fries near Apalachicola and life in a South that just barely lives into the Twenty-first Century. I have travelled and lived all over the world, but only the air of sultry Florida August afternoon smells of "home".
My earliest recollections of intellectual life place me at the dinner table far away on the Italian Riviera. My mother, within her the easy blend of four civilizations, was now enjoying the naive optimism of the Kennedy Era of the United States. Born in Japan, she was raised in her home in Kobe, English boarding schools and, finally, a German music conservatory. With ease only allowed to the pagan religions, she blended her mother’s Shinto and Buddhist roots with the Christianity of Luther, and, likewise, blended the best of the cultures and countries in which she lived. As the last step in her cultural life, she came to believe that American optimism in the unlimited elevation of peoples and cultures that accepted the notions of Democracy, Capitalism and science for humanity. This was all before 1968.
Facing her, my stepfather, an Italian architect still living in the Nineteenth Century, an actual, unapologetic Fascist and Italian nationalist, presented another world view. He was still fighting the Punic Wars, was galled by the pre-eminence of the United States and democracy and was a devout, militant, Roman Catholic. Generous, caring, chivalrous, he was still the product of his Old World moneyed heritage. He taught me that the people and thoughts we in America tend to vilify and demonize were, in the end, humans and the products of human thoughts and histories. I live today dealing with the visceral negative reaction to the subject of his nationalism, ultimately learning that there are limits everyone’s ability step beyond the roots from which they were created
I grew up watching Nineteenth Century Catholicism meet Paganism, European Imperialism meet American political and economic expansionism, Vivaldi meet Wagner, a scientific education in architecture meet training as a concert pianist over the dinner table. That interchange laid the foundation of my intellect. It colors my view of all my life's experiences.
My father, a pilot, died when I was too young to remember him in an aviation accident. My war-bride mother remarried Thomas Vause. We lived in a small town outside of Tallahassee. It was the traditional southern home, white painted wood, tin roof, with a porch encompassing two sides facing the roads. The Vause clan would spend afternoons on those porches watching Woodville, if not the world go by. The cool sand underside the porch was forbidden to my explorations, so I rarely went. I am pretty sure I was switched at least once for trespassing there.
I had a dog named Lassie, unimaginatively named by his four year old owner. Lassie chased cars along the dirt road on the side of our house. One day, while the Vauses sat on the porch, he took off after a farm tractor. In my irritation, I yelled at him that I hoped he'd get hit. He was. My last image of him was lying on the side of the dirt road, blood trickling from his mouth.
I scrambled sobbing under the porch hiding my horror at what had happened and shame of my words that had preceded Lassie's death. The Vauses buried Lassie.
Forty years ago, I entered the trattoria across the road from our apartment on my daily errand to bring home wine for lunch and dinner in our quiet Italian town by the sea. My step father was an architect in semi-retirement with a home office. Mom schooled me at home to maintain my English language skills. I needed no prompting with my Italian. In my free time, I was half Italian street urchin, indistinguishable from my Italian chums. Our up-scale apartment overlooked the beautiful formal Italian park that exists to this day as an ornament to the town of Chiavari.
I liked my trips to the trattoria. Populated with rough-hewn Italian laborers, ship wrights and farmers, it was a popular mid-day lunch spot. Crime being non-existent, there was never any concern for my safety as I pursued my errand to purchase wine from the vineyards on the hills surrounding Chiavari. By local standards, we were wealthy. But my fellow patrons were hard working men of the local community. To them, I must have been an Italo-American curiosity, probably noted because of his pretty American mom. Each trip I made to the trattoria was rewarded by some treat from the delicatessen as I waited for my parents' wine.
The trattoria owner was a kind, fat, sweaty Italian who was friends with my parents and smelled of salami. His inn assaulted my nostrils with odors of spilled wine, wooden casks, cork, earth, and cooking. We paid him at the end of each month, for a month's supply of wine which I retrieved daily. Today, he had a stunned, saddened look on his face. In Italian, he told me someone had just killed Bobby Kennedy.
Far away America was involved in a quagmire war. The U.S. president was very unpopular in Italy as in all of Europe. Yet, my Italian hosts distinguished between mis-guided American foreign policy and the little American boy running an errand. Bobby Kennedy was very popular in Italy and in Europe.
While I had the nationalism of a 12 year old who knows no better, Bobby's radiant optimism, eloquence, and message that the U.S. could be a better nation was not lost on me. On the Italian news, I saw him speak and was grateful for the few times I could hear American English. While I was intellectually naive, his manner, eloquence, and positive message resonated with me. I remembered JFK. Despite having been only 6 in November, 1960, I had grilled mom on who she had voted for in the presidential election. As with John before him, I was 'for' Bobby. I went running home to deliver the message in sadness. John and Bobby are gone.
Now, once again, I am in the thrall of another idealistic visionary. As in 1968, America's moral authority in the world is in rapid decline. We are in another quagmire that is, as before, bankrupting us and destroying any chance we have to invest in improving our own country. We have another visionary who is telling us that we can be better than what we are.
While I was delighted when Clinton declared candidacy at the prospect of another eight years, the radiant optimism, eloquence, and message of a better America is not lost on me.
I am 'for' Obama.
11/28/2008
I first arrived in Gainesville on a Greyhound bus after an over night trip from Coral Gables. We pulled into the station next to an “All-America City”. My girlfriend began to weep. It was 1973. We had arrived for freshman honors orientation at the University of Florida.
The University of Florida campus was a universe of intellectual exploration in an impossibly beautiful natural setting. At orientation, we took the first steps to independence from our parents, intellectual independence, and personal independence. Gainesville became my hometown.
Gainesville played a role in my life for just over three years at that stage of my life. Looking back through 35 years, it is difficult to remember the boy I was at 18. I came to the University of Florida with the ambition to step into the traditions of Georg Hegel, Karl Marx, and Arnold Toynbee. Florida would give me the educational foundation to produce a general socio-economic-psychological model to explain the pattern and development of history. I accepted that it would take a lifetime to produce. My undergraduate education was to be the beginning of a long journey.
My first major was philosophy. In additions to my studies, I was reading the works of Konrad Lorenz and Nikko Timbergen, the great animal ethologists. My studies brought me to the realization that human behavioral evolution must have an influence in understanding ethics. I switched my major to zoology. Animal behavior led to ethology and genetics. My pursuit of an understanding of human history let me to genetics and biochemistry.
I was a student of zoology and philosophy, combining both into an analytic, scientific, but holistic world view. In those years, I learned to reduce concepts to their atomic parts, but could only understand them within their context. I was an extension of my boyhood in those years. It was the end of youth.
I was in Gainesville for just over three years. During these years, I learned that professional philosophy was mostly argumentative one-upsmanship at conferences and in papers. Working in a lab at the UF Department of Zoology, I learned that most top ranked scientific research is about the egos of the scientists doing the research. I was influenced by having just read “The Double Helix”.
In 1975, my parents moved back to Europe. My relationship with my fiancee ended. Philosophy and science were intellectual ego games rather than search for knowledge. I felt completely alone in the world. My youth was spent.
Life is the cumulative sum of one's life. Sometimes, we can walk away from that sum. In the summer of 1976, I walked away from everything I was. Persona, friends, life, they were all gone. In retrospect, I regret some of the contacts I lost. But life marches on. It can never be retrieved.
I came back to Gainesville a changed man. The Marines mixed with the Stoa and Nietzsche making me physical and admittedly harder. I had two mouths to feed, my wife and my daughter. I had seen in a recent Time magazine a starting salary ranking. Perennially on top were chemical electrical engineering. Computer science followed. My studies in zoology had aged and the desire for a higher starting salary induced me to attempt to change my major.
The bureaucrats in the administration at the College of Arts and Sciences could not understand that a student might want to change his major after being gone six years. The dean of the Department of Computer Sciences himself rejected my application for admission on the grounds that it was against college policy to allow seniors to change majors.
I felt completely backed into a corner. My wife and I had originally planned for me to attend North Carolina State University, since I had been stationed in North Carolina. I had even taken some preliminary work at one of the local community colleges. But I knew Gainesville. It was my genesis. So, I returned home.
Nothing in my past predisposed me for Electrical Engineering. I went to the admissions office and talked to the lady running undergraduate admissions. I wish I remembered her name. She oversaw admissions and played mentor to the undergraduate EE students. Looking up at me and smiling, she told me that Arts and Sciences policies did not apply in the School of Engineering. If I met the entrance requirements and provided her with my record, EE would admit me. She counseled me with a smile not to tell the UF Registrar why I was requesting a copy of my transcripts.
To gain admittance, I needed the two semesters of freshman physics using calculus and three semesters of calculus itself. The requisite cumulative grade average was 3.5. I enjoyed physics, but found it challenging. My mathematics, while adequate for zoology, never intimated the grades I needed in calculus and differential equations needed for admission.
The story of my academic journey to admission is for another time. My observations of how the UF student body went from Kerouac and Hesse to Reagan-Era Cars and Prince is also for another time.
Electrical engineering was the most challenging and satisfying course of study I have ever undertaken.
I was preoccupied by raising a daughter, being an engineering student, and maintaining my fitness during my second visit in Gainesville. We bought a beautiful home. We hoped that I would graduate, get a job, and spend our lives in that little oasis of knowledge in northern Florida. This was not to be.
I left UF as with a BSEE and a job at IBM.
In 1996, I returned to Gainesville with an 18 year old daughter searching for a university to attend. She had childhood memories of Gainesville before her struggle with culture shock to adjust to the materialism and conspicuous consumption of Montgomery County, Maryland. After the homecoming parade and football game, there was no talking her into going anywhere else.
My third time in Gainesville involved being preoccupied with shepherding a daughter through college. As I had before, she began in zoology and ended up with degrees in electrical and computer engineering. In the late 1990's, UF, flush with money, was changing rapidly. It was a backdrop to the more mercenary need to help our daughter succeed. Succeed she did, and she left with a BSEE/CE and a civilian job with the Navy.
I have entered my fourth phase at the University of Florida. Gainesville has changed so much that my affinity for it has greatly diminished. I ran around Lake Alice from the Holiday Inn, University Center, twice. In 1973 or 1976, even in 1996, running the far side of Lake Alice could bring mental images of running a desolate savanna or tropical prairie. There is no chance of that now, as one runs past the baseball diamond and the meditation center, despite its exquisite architecture.
Gainesville has become a place that entertains me and allows me to appreciate how far I have come in terms of material wealth. It retains a hint of nostalgia for the hyper-idealistic youth I was when I arrived at 18 and so deliberately killed off when I left at 21. After a lifetime, it is starting to mean less to me. The Gainesville of 1975, like the youth trying to find his place in life who loved it, are both gone.