The inquisitive mind wants to know

I have always wondered why toilets in the US universally have a space under the door whereas toilets in every other country (that I myself have personal knowledge of) do not. For me this ranks up there with quantum entanglement and the Higgs boson. Is there a national urge to be able to see the feet of the poor person trying to pretend he is not there? Or is it due to our national obsession with not allowing hanky panky in the bathroom? Or is it just that this is what American contractors learn at contractor’s school?

It reminds me of my undergraduate days at Princeton University (pre-coed) where Woodrow Wilson had once ruled that a true democracy does not have doors on toilet stalls. This of course made for interesting conversations and made it easy to request a roll of paper when necessary. But it was still sort of gross.

I hope that one of you anonymous readers can enlighten me on this important cultural institution.

The die has been cast.

I always knew this was coming, and it will get worse. This country never got over slavery and the myth of the West with its guns and frontier justice. The Tea Party people are no better than the Klu Klux Klan and the Southerners who lynched black men and attacked the black children trying to enter all white schools. Except now the Southerners have become us. Racism and religious fundamentalism are a dangerous mixture.

Religion itself is a dangerous phenomenon, as evidenced over history by the witch drownings, the Inquisition tortures, and now the Catholic priests raping little boys. And the combination is many times more lethal.
Now the crazies and their multinational company friends and benefactors are in political power, and have essentially taken over our military as shown by the influence of the evangelicals in places like our Air Force Academy.

But perhaps the most dangerous aspect is the fact that the crazies refuse to believe science except  when it provides them with better weapons of mass destruction. This could be either true ignorance or, worse, an intentional deception in order to maintain power and achieve short term benefits, but it is likely a combination of both factors. But this does not matter since the problems of political and ideological violence, and worst of all, the coming world-wide disaster of climate change will affect everyone, even the crazies' families and children. Racism, violence  and religious fundamentalism will matter little when coastal cities around the world and even entire countries and are flooded, when millions of displaced Bangladesh start a forced migration to find refuge, when millions of Mexicans unable to find food due to the drought enter the United States only to find that it cannot even provide food for its own people and that its entire financial system is collapsing and martial law has been imposed. Countries that have nuclear weapons will begin to use them out of fright and impotence.

I fear for the future and see no cause for optimism. The die has  been cast.

Ode to the Cheese Steak

 I grew up in Philadelphia where the major culinary achievement is the "Cheese Steak" - a huge mound of finely sliced well browned meat cooked on a grill with fried onions and served on a long bun dripping with grease.

The chefs are usually bulky Italian guys with a few tattoes wearing white T shirts.










Cheese is actually optional but if desired, "the sine qua non of cheesesteak connoisseurs" is actually Cheese Whiz. If you want a steak with onions and cheese, you say in true Philly accent "Whiz, Wit". 

Cheese steaks are not just for the common man. President Obama visited Reading Terminal just to get a real cheese steak.

Cheese steaks were developed in the 1930's in South Philadelphia and South Philly is still the promised land. I lived on cheese steaks for my entire misspent youth. Unfortunately this cuisine does not travel well, and when I left Philadelphia to make my  mark in the world, a lingering nostalgia was all I had left. I once tried ordering Fedexed steaks from Pat's in South Philly for a "Philadelphia brunch" with some old friends now living in LA. But alas, the magic had passed and all that is left is a salivating memory.

M27 or Dumbell Nebula

Images were taken on October 28, 2010, from my back yard observatory with an RCX400 10 inch telescope using an SBIG ST2000XCM single shot color CCD. Two 8 min images were processed and stacked. M27 is a gas bubble ejected from a star at the end of its life. The gas is glowing from UV light emitted by the star. M27 is around 1000 light years distant.

The End of Things

The two dolphins swam side by side and carried on a lively discussion using the high pitched sounds known as the Pacific Dolphin language.  

“Why do you think the humans became extinct in the 21^st century? They had so much going for them – intelligence, ambition, technical abilities. I  know that the environment became degraded and that was the ultimate reason, but what were the real reasons?"

“ Well, they just could not stop breeding and the billions of humans did some pretty bad things – both knowingly and unknowingly. For example, in the early years of the 21^st century, their climate scientists discovered that the production of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” was trapping heat from the sun and causing the temperature of the atmosphere and even the ocean to rise. They predicted with a high level of probability the consequences of this “runaway”  greenhouse effect as increased intensity of storms, changes in weather patterns resulting in the loss of regions suitable for agriculture, extinction of animal species such as the coral reefs in the ocean which we used to enjoy visiting, melting of the world’s glaciers that produced most of the fresh water for the billions of humans, and  in rising in world-wide ocean levels resulting in flooding of coastal regions and cities and in migrations of millions of people who would be displaced by flooding and loss of fresh water. However, there were people throughout the world, and especially in the United States, who believed more in their crazy religions than in science and their religions told them that Armageddon was coming and they could do nothing about it.  These "climate change deniers" in the United States were known as “Republicans”, and they convinced many people and had an enormous amount of power in determining how the country would respond to this crisis. They just closed their minds and let the changes occur, and this behavior had an enormous effect on the rest of the world.”

 “In fact the only people who actually understood what was happening and why were the military. They could see that these changes would affect the security of their nations. In a  few countries the militaries actually took over the governments and tried to force changes in behavior, but it was already too late.  The changes were irreversible.  Even the imposition of martial law in the “rich” countries to prevent unwanted immigration simply led to wars with their neighbor countries over the vanishing resources."

“And closely tied in with these changes was the major problem that humans were innately aggressive and loved to fight each other, instead of helping each other as we do. Again, in the United States, there was actually an organization known as the “National Rifle Association” that essentially financially owned or frightened the ruling politicians into believing that guns were not instruments to kill but toys to play with and that everyone should have a gun.  This of course, combined with all the disintegration of society that was occurring,  led to a vast amount of bloodshed, and this mentality of aggression and selfish nationalism actually led countries to use nuclear weapons before it was  impossible to do so, which caused even more environmental degradation and loss of life.” 

“Very rapidly the environment became almost uninhabitable due to the lack of water and food and the radioactive destruction of the cities. Cities were abandoned and millions of people migrated northward, destroying other cities and other regions. Even the resulting great kill-off of humans did not solve the problems, and eventually the earth began to look like  the hot house planet, Venus.  I believe that the last humans died off by the end of the 21^stcentury, at least as far as we could tell."

“We dolphins also suffered greatly but the ocean mitigated many of the worst problems and our ancestors eventually evolved to be able to live in the warm water and began our rapid climb to becoming the next great intelligent tool-using species.”

“Do you think that this sort of thing will happen to the dolphin civilization?”

“It is always possible, but I believe that we have learned some important lessons from the extinction of humans”.

I Felt a Blog Coming On

I woke up this morning and felt a blog coming on. I told my wife, "Wife, I feel a blog coming on." She said "Take a Tums and you will feel better". But after a rousing “Danny Boy” on my violin, the feeling went away and I went to the lab. I spent the day revising my undergraduate course web site
(http://dna.kdna.ucla.edu/168-2010/Default.aspx) and redoing all the links. I even inserted a few edifying secret links for the students to find.

Looks like the University may have me to kick around for another three years as I explore the structure of the RNA editing core complex. The NIH renewal is not yet in hand but it looks good. Life is good but retirement always has that sparkling attractiveness of novelty.

I have been spending evenings out in my telescope shed trying to get everything working together so I can begin imaging again. I can easily recognize almost every star in the visible night sky. But I was put in my place when I went to a “dark site” outside LA and saw the real thing. There were so many stars that I could not even identify a single one.  That is what cockiness will get you!

Recommendation

I just read a great blog that eloquently expresses many of my own thoughts.
It is called "The Secret Life of White-Wing Conservatives" and is at http://deaniemills.com/.
Check it out.