Goodbye, Wayne

One of my classmates from high school was buried today. He died of COVID, the first of our class to do so, as far as we know. I didn't go to the funeral, or the memorial.

I did go grocery shopping this afternoon. About half the shoppers and all of the employees were wearing masks, which is a big improvement over the last time I was there. I wanted to grab the unmasked people and say "We buried someone I knew in high school today. He died of COVID. Do you think you're safe? Do you think this is over?" I didn't. Instead I got my groceries and got the hell out of there as fast as I could.

COVID deaths in Pennsylvania, as in all of the U.S., continue to climb. This isn't slowing down. This isn't over. Get vaccinated. Wear a mask.

*********************************

The Omicron variant continues to make hay of all previous graphs. This variant is allegedly "milder" than previous versions, but can also walk through walls - vaccinations provide very little protection against getting it, but they do minimize its effects, allegedly. Even masks and social distancing seem to offer little protection. The official line is "everybody is going to get Omicron," which means that we've basically entered the "Fuck it, whatever" stage of the pandemic. (And the new catchphrase now is "It's no longer a pandemic, the disease is now endemic," which is a distinction meaningless to most of the people uttering it.) Schools are open, while at the same time many local (and state, and federal) offices are closed. Many people are being ordered to return to the workplace, where it's impossible to avoid being exposed to infected coworkers. These are the same schools and workplaces that closed in March 2020, when COVID cases and deaths were so low they don't even show up on current graphs.

The other view is "Not to worry, if you've been vaccinated and aren't disabled or have other comorbidities, you'll be fine, so everything is OK," which is not at all comforting to those who are disabled, have those comorbidities, are immune compromised, or are unable to get the vaccine for medical reasons. It feels like they're being written off as an acceptable loss.

Sometime soon this graph will be unreadable without a logarithmic y-axis.

The logarithmic version. I first started using this when it looked like cases were going to drop so low that the day-to-day variation would be unreadable. Now new cases are rising so high that the previous variation may soon be unreadable with a linear y-axis, much like the March 2020 data is now.

Far more cases of a less deadly variant have resulted in a fairly steady rate of deaths. It's math.

There was an upturn to the slope from December 2020-March 2021, and a downturn from March 2021-August 2021, but overall this has been a fairly straight line since April 2020. Assuming the dynamics continue as they are, we'll hit one million deaths by June 2022.
But it's not a safe bet that the dynamics will continue as they are.

First post-apocalyptic grocery run of 2022

Something seemed off as soon as I left the house.

I hadn't meant to go shopping today. Sure, sometime this week - I had a coupon worth $5 off a $25 order that needed to be used within two weeks of December 23 - but I still had half of a half gallon of milk left, and really didn't need much else. But my mom told me she needed bananas, and a refill for hand soap, and large Band-Aids, latex-free, so the hunt had begun. I drew up a list of a few other things we needed, geared up, and set out.

I heard a commotion in the distance as I walked to the car. It sounded like a crowd of people all shouting and arguing at the same time. The sound seemed to be approaching, and gradually took on the tone of a great many dogs barking excitedly.  I looked up and scanned the sky. Soon I located the lopsided V of geese high overhead, flying south. On January 2nd. Better late than never, I suppose.

The parking lot at the supermarket was crowded, but less so than on recent trips. I strapped on my mask, grabbed a cart, and headed in. I immediately started seeing faces - unmasked faces, customers and employees alike. As if there were no pandemic going on. As if Pennsylvania were not having its highest infection rates ever.

Pennsylvania is having its highest COVID-19 infection rates ever.

But that wasn't the weird thing. Not wearing masks has been the standard around here since the summer, when it looked like maybe we were about to beat this thing and the state dropped the mask mandate. No, what was weird was what I saw as I made my way past the pastries and baked goods, past the fried and rotisserie chicken, to the fruit displays - the empty fruit displays. Not all empty, just some. Maybe some fruit was now out of season, even for import, and the displays were being changed over for whatever would take its place? No big deal. All I needed were the bananas my mom had asked for. I headed for the banana display in the back.

No bananas.

No onions or potatoes, either. The whole area was empty, as if some accident had happened requiring everything to be thrown away.

Not to worry. There was another grocery store about a mile away. I could get bananas there. Maybe.

I ran through my list. I found almost everything on it. Store brand hand soap refills were nowhere do be found, but I was able to get a more expensive jug of the Softsoap brand. Still, among things I didn't need, there seemed to be random shortages. No frozen chicken, or so I heard. No My-T-Fine lemon pudding and pie filling. No Reddi-Wip whipped cream. No canned cat food, or almost none. I had promised my cats as I was leaving the house that I would get them something from the store, so I went to the cat toy section where I had just been the day after Christmas. The same things that were missing that day were missing today, including the catnip satchels that the cats had gone nuts for on Christmas. I remembered I wanted to pick up potato sandwich rolls. There were none. Well, none of the brand I usually buy, or my first or second alternate brands, or anything other than a lone orphan pack of generics that had apparently been rejected by everyone else. I decided I would look for them when I went to the other store for bananas. 

As I headed to the checkouts, I heard a vaguely familiar song on the piped-in music. It gradually resolved into "Hot Hot Hot!!!" by The Cure, from 1988's "Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me," a song I hadn't heard in about twenty years.

I hit the other store and picked up Reddi-Wip - which I had decided I actually needed -, bananas, cat toys, and potato sandwich buns.  (I found the brand I liked there, but only in slider-sized. I took them.) 

I got home and found out one of my high school classmates had died of COVID.  The first, as far as I know. Probably not the last.

********************************

Small changes to the national COVID graphs since December 31, 2021:

Tomorrow, much of the country goes back to work, with many back in their offices. Many children will go back to in-person learning at school. Meanwhile, airlines continue to cancel flights due to weather - and COVID. Police in New York City are calling off sick en masse (well, nearly so) with COVID, which continues to be a major cop-killer, in part because of resistance to getting vaccinated by many members of the police. Expect to see infection rates in the next four weeks to soar well above where they are now. Expect to see deaths continue to climb, too.

Kai-Fu Lee, thirty-five years later

My grandmother used to love the news magazine program 60 Minutes. I found it mostly uninteresting, but sometimes I would watch it with her. Decades later I sometimes watch it on my own and think of her. Sometimes I find some of the segments interesting.

Today I heard a familiar name mentioned in the opening, just before I had a chance to change the channel: Kai-Fu Lee. Kai-Fu Lee, they said, is currently the biggest name in artificial intelligence, and they would be interviewing him at length.

Kai-Fu Lee? My computer science professor from Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences?

In the summer of 1984 I was one of eighty students from across Pennsylvania - one from each Intermediate Unit - selected to participate in the annual program known as Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences, held at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. I've written about it before. For five weeks we took intensive courses in Discrete Mathematics, Computer Science, Organic Chemistry, Molecular Biology, and Physics. Our computer science class focused on a programming language called LISP, and was taught by a young professor named Kai-Fu Lee.

I really haven't thought about him much in the intervening thirty-five years. My main interest turned out to be in Physics. I double-majored in Physics and Philosophy from 1985 through 1989, and briefly pursued graduate studies in Physics after getting my bachelor's degree. I haven't kept in touch with many of my PGSS classmates, but I do reminisce about my time there every once in a while.

Kai-Fu Lee has been busy those past thirty-five years.

http://time100.time.com/2013/04/18/time-100/slide/kai-fu-lee/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/09/24/artificial-intelligence-2/


Here's his Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai-Fu_Lee


Hereis his Twitter page, currently with 1.61 million followers:
https://twitter.com/kaifulee


And here is tonight's 60 Minutes segment on Kai-Fu Lee:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-ai-facial-and-emotional-recognition-how-one-man-is-advancing-artificial-intelligence/


Like I said, he's been busy.

Harlan, part 1

Harlan Ellison died today.

I'm not sure how I first came to know Harlan Ellison. Perhaps I first encountered his work in The Hugo Winners, Volumes 1 and 2, one of my introductory books from when I first joined the Science Fiction Book Club back in 1981 or so. (He has at least three stories there, "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," "The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World," and "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.") Maybe it was his famous interview on Merv Griffin, a show I used to watch regularly as a kid.

I loved his writing style. I loved his stories. The first piece I presented for Speech and Debate Team was an excerpt from "When Auld's Acquaintance is Forgot," a story that first appeared in OMNI magazine and heavily influenced my own recently-published story "Cathedral." I own several anthologies of his work, one of which I have misplaced and been looking for for several years.

I will write more later.

Love Day

You should always carry personal holidays with you.

We already do, mostly: birthdays, anniversaries, days that we remember a friend or relative who died. What about other personal holidays? Some friends celebrate "Gotcha Day," the day that they adopted each of their rescue dogs.

For me, I remember the first time I fell in love.  It was 1984, and I was sixteen. I'm older now, and maybe so is she, if she's made it so far. We kept in touch for a few years, but I lost track of her eventually. She probably doesn't wear her hair so long anymore, or wear berets quite as often, but I doubt she's any taller than she was back then. I'm good at finding people, but she happens to have a ridiculously common name - so common that when a movie about a girl with her name came out in 2009, the producers held a publicity event that gathered together dozens of women with that same name.

In retrospect, maybe it was just a teenage infatuation with a girl who flirted with me at a Model United Nations. But it was a life-changing event, and the feelings it generated have provided the standard by which I have measured such things since then. Every year since then, I have commemorated the day I met and fell in love with Beth Cooper. Wherever she is, whatever she's doing, I wish her well.

What personal holidays do you carry with you?

You are my friend, you are special - Part 2

A friend once argued to me that if you treat everybody as special, then nobody is special.

I disagreed. Maybe that came from being raised, in part, on a diet of Mister Rogers. He taught inclusion and acceptance - "I like you just for being you." His signature song - one of them, anyway - had a beautiful message, and a beautiful structure:

You are my friend, you are special
you are my friend
you're special to me

There is nobody else like you
like you, my friend
I like you.

********

Like so many things from this show, this song stuck with me.

When my cat Scooter was dying two years ago, I found myself doing anything I could to soothe him, comfort him, keep him relaxed and calm. I would tell him stores, sing him songs, anything I could think of. One was a slightly modified version of the Mister Rogers song: "You are my cat, you are special, you are my cat..." I sang it to him in the last minutes of his life.

We have another cat dying now. Joey, our oldest. He has been with us nearly eighteen years, and he has been fading slowly for the last year or so. We didn't think he would make it to Christmas, so this is bonus time. But he is still able to eat, drink, poop, pee, and decide where he wants to be. We think he is blind, or mostly blind; his eyes have been widely dilated for months, with no response to light, but if he is blind he navigates the house pretty well. I have been sleeping near him for the last few weeks, so I can respond quickly if he begins to cry if he is hungry or lost or in distress. Lately I have found that the easiest way to stop his crying is to scoop him up and put him next to me. He will immediately stop crying and begin purring, and after a few minutes he will get up and walk away.

Last night, thinking of this post, I began to sing "You Are My Cat" to Joey as he lay beside me. I noticed Romeo and Peaches looking on somewhat jealously. I quickly pluralized the song to "You Are My Cats," and they seemed satisfied.

********

For five weeks in the summer of 1984, I lived in Mister Rogers' neighborhood.

I was selected to represent my Intermediate Unit at the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences. Eighty of us went out to Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh to get intensive training in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and computer science. It was a grueling, exhausting program, but an experience I will always treasure.

We had been told that Mister Rogers lived in a high-security apartment building not far from campus. People would sometimes see him driving past or through the campus in his two-toned Cadillac. On at least one occasion he had been swarmed by a crowd of over-enthusiastic fans.

One day - it was probably a Saturday, because we did not have classes that day, and I was probably heading to the library to do some research on my chosen lab topic of non-classical femtochemistry - I was walking across the campus. The path from Hamerschlag House, where we were staying, to the rest of the campus cut across several lightly-traveled streets. As I approached the crosswalk on one of these streets a car rolled up to the stop sign, a two-toned black-and-gray Cadillac. Remembering the stories, I looked up to see Fred Rogers at the wheel. My eyes got huge with surprise, and he turned to me with an equally surprised look. For a moment, our eyes locked.

And then he drove off. He had somewhere to go, and so did I. But I would always remember how I had sort-of met Mister Rogers, right in his own neighborhood.

National Poetry Month: Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd Astonomer

A decade and a half or so ago, I worked at a DVD Compression / Encoding / Authoring facility. We would get the various bits and pieces that would go onto a DVD as raw video and audio assets, subtitle files, image files to be transformed into menus, and so forth. We would process them - compressing video, encoding audio - and then "author" them into a finished, assembled DVD project to be sent on to the next stage of production . (I was the guy who calculated how the video would be compressed, and then figured out how all the pieces would have to fit together onto the finite space of a DVD.) One Fall day in 1999 or 2000, I was getting ready to head home. We had some large windows that looked west, over the rooftops of our neighbors in Olyphant, and gave a great view of the setting sun. The sunset that day was spectacular, magnificent, a symphony of colors and textures, layer after layer of clouds in gold, red, orange, and yellow. (My synesthesia kicked in and I was also hearing the sunset, a Wagnerian orchestra playing sweeping crescendos and booming fanfares.)

I stopped dead in my tracks. Two of my co-workers saw me looking out the window and stopped to see what was going on. I pulled out my cell phone and called my mom, thirty-five miles away, to tell her to look out her window and see if she was seeing the same thing.

I have a degree in Physics, with a second major in Philosophy. I have studied the physics of rainbows and sunsets. One of my favorite books is Light and Color in the Outdoors by Marcel Minnaert, in which amazing optical phenomena of the natural world are discussed and analyzed in loving detail. As I looked at the sunset I was awash in the physics of it all: photons generated by the sun through thermonuclear fusion, traveling tens of millions of miles to Earth's atmosphere, being refracted just so, the red and yellow and orange and yellow being bent down, down into the layers of clouds, great masses of water vapor floating in the air, drifting gently in the currents, buoyed up by temperature and pressure differences, and...

"How can anyone look at this and doubt the hand of God?", one of my co-workers said.

I was knocked out of my reverie. Yes, of course. God. Why is the sunset so beautiful? God wants it that way. Why does it rain? God. Why does the wind blow? God. Why do the birds sing? God. God. God is the answer to everything. Forget science, that's for the nonbelievers. God. End of discussion.

I've never been a big fan of Whitman. I hear he's good. Bram Stoker was impressed enough by him to model Dracula on him. I haven't read much by him, but one thing that stuck with me was a poem I read in high school. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
by Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, 
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, 
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, 
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, 
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, 
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, 
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, 
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Was Whitman expressing his contempt for science? Was he just saying "Math is hard"? It seems to me that he got it exactly wrong. Or maybe Whitman was in desperate need of an interlocutor, someone who could bridge the gap between the learn'd astronomer and the not-so-learn'd layman audience member. Maybe he needed a Carl Sagan or a Stephen Hawking, a Bill Nye, a Richard Feynman, a Neil DeGrasse Tyson, a Marcel Minnaert, someone to let him know how amazing and wonderful and beautiful science is, and how much more deeply an understanding of science would have allowed him to appreciate the wonders of the world, and the universe.

Check out "A Glorious Dawn," the first video from "Symphony of Science" - a project that turns the words of scientists into music, and scientists into rock stars.



Epilogue: I had a bit of a crisis at the March 29, 2017 Be Daring Open Mic at Adezzo in Scranton. The International Space Station was scheduled to pass over the area that night, and I wanted to see it, but I didn't want to miss the open mic. My set ended just a little before the flyover time, so I stepped outside as the next act set up. Adezzo is located in the middle of a block, at the intersection of two alleys, and the buildings surrounding it are surprisingly tall. But thanks to the predicted timings and location from Heavens Above, I was able to watch the ISS pass over, almost as bright as it could get, its solar panels reflecting the Sun which was now well beneath the local horizon. Thanks to a bunch of learn'd and dedicated astronomers, I was able to see this glorious phenomenon - and then step back into the open mic to enjoy the rest of the evening.

Not much opportunity to observe the ISS as it passes over - unless you know just where to look.

National Poetry Month: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

When I was a kid in the early 1970's, we had these things called "encyclopedias," a sort of printed version of Wikipedia, only with fewer entries. These entries were written (in theory) by people with special knowledge of specific topics. Every family of means had a set, especially those with children, and some people made a decent living as door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen. Supermarkets would often hold promotions where during one week for this amount of money you could get Volume 1 of an encyclopedia, next week you could get Volume 2, and then after that you could buy the rest as a set. These would sometimes be specialized encyclopedias geared towards children, covering science or animals or the world in general. My parents bought a set of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias - my mom still gets their annual supplemental yearbooks, after more than fifty years - but my sister, my brother, and I managed to convince them to get us volumes 1 and 2 of a lot of specialized sets.

One of those was the International Wildlife Encyclopedia. I ate those up. I learned all about axolotls and aye-ayes, anemones and acorn worms, anoles and aphids. The pictures were especially appealing, photographs and paintings and even microscopic images for "amoeba" (or possibly "ameba.") One illustration in particular stuck in my head, an ink sketch (actually a Gustave Dore woodcut) of a bedraggled man, a huge dead bird hanging around his neck. This was in the entry for "albatross."

The image had a bit of text beneath it:

And I had done a hellish thing, 

And it would work 'em woe: 

For all averred, I had killed the bird 

That made the breeze to blow. 

OK, that was weird. What the hell did it mean? I read further and I learned that the lines were from a poem called "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I filed that away.

I wouldn't encounter the poem itself until high school. It is long, brutally long, but it is filled with enough images of death and horror and misery to catch a teenager's attention. It is, as they say, totally metal. Iron Maiden thought so when they abridged and adapted it into a song on their album Powerslave in 1984.

Clocking in at over 13 minutes in length, the song is epic, and includes a central interlude that features a direct recitation of a passage. Iron Maiden's version is a faithful adaptation of Coleridge's work, to the point that, when we began to cover this in my senior year English class, several metalheads perked up and said "Hey!! I know this one!" and paid attention for the first time all year.

So, thanks to Iron Maiden, a lot of people are familiar with "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" who might otherwise have paid no attention to it.

(Because of the immense length of the poem, I have put it beyond the cut. You can also find it here.)

National Poetry Month: E.E. Cummings, All in green went my love riding

I was first exposed to E.E. Cummings in high school. His poems were radical - the nonstandard capitalization! The rhythm without rhyme! I had never heard such a thing before, and it made me realize that poems didn't have to rhyme - or play by the rules.

Garrison Keillor read this poem on The Writer's Almanac on October 12, 2012. His reading begins at about 2:40.


All in green went my love riding
by E. E. Cummings

All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the merry deer ran before.

Fleeter be they than dappled dreams
the swift sweet deer
the red rare deer.

Four red roebuck at a white water
the cruel bugle sang before.

Horn at hip went my love riding
riding the echo down
into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the level meadows ran before.

Softer be they than slippered sleep
the lean lithe deer
the fleet flown deer.

Four fleet does at a gold valley
the famished arrow sang before.

Bow at belt went my love riding
riding the mountain down
into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the sheer peaks ran before.

Paler be they than daunting death
the sleek slim deer
the tall tense deer. 

Four tall stags at the green mountain
the lucky hunter sang before. 

All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn. 

Four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
my heart fell dead before.

Unillustrated Instructional 1: How to use a notebook

For years I've wanted to share some of the hard-learned lessons in my life with my blog readers. I figured I would write up a series of simple instructional posts to cover hints, tips, and solutions to everyday annoyances. Why, I could even illustrate them with photos! All I had to do was get around to taking the photos.


And so I waited...and waited...and waited...


...and finally I thought, Fine, I'll go without the photos!


Which brings us to here.

My first instructional is on something most of us have probably been doing, off and on, since first grade: How to use a notebook. I've spent the last few weeks in a training course for a new job (yes, amazingly enough, some employers are still willing to train new employees for their jobs - and pay them during the training, too!) and have filled several notebooks with notes. That's a lot of notes, covering a lot of subjects, taken over a lot of days. By observing how other people have been taking notes. I've developed some new notebook management skills that have been very useful.

1. Put the date on every page. In grade school I got into the habit of putting the date at the beginning of each day's notes. This made it easy to flip back and see what information was covered on which day, and to review information from a specific day. But after observing a fellow trainee putting the date on the upper outside top line of each page, I realized how much easier it would be to locate a specific day's notes, or to tell which day each page of notes was from, if the date was included on every page.

2. Use the top margin space on every page for broad subject headers. As in a textbook, this makes it easy to flip through the notebook and find which topic was being covered on each day.

3. Use the outer margin areas on every page for specific topic guides. This is the left-hand margin on the left pages, and the right-hand margin on the right pages. You could also use this space for the broad subject headers, but that might be redundant. Instead, focus on what's specifically being covered on that page. Write this information however it works for you. I find it most effective to write it so it can be read when the book is held sideways. I write the words so they are all properly aligned, regardless of what page they are on, when the notebook is held sideways with the spine at the top.

4. Leave plenty of room for future notes. I used to like to fill in notebooks very neatly, or cram them full of information. But you should allow for the possibility that you will be adding notes to your notes somewhere down the line. Maybe this will be an expansion of the notes you have taken, maybe a clarification, or maybe just notes about the notes. Whatever the reason, you may find yourself adding notes to your notes.

And that's that. Whether you're filling a notebook with information for a class, or are just writing poems and stories for your own amusement, following these steps may help make your notebook more useful to you.

Do you have any hints and tips on using a notebook? Let me know in the comments, and maybe I'll add them to this post!

Let me tell you what I've done. (part 1)

A few months ago this was going around the blogosphere as an honest-to-goodness meme: people were spontaneously writing out their work histories, like resumés in essay form. Nobody seemed to be saying "I saw so-and-so do this, so I thought I would, too." The odd thing was, I had been planning to do the same thing myself for some time.

Yesterday I had an opportunity to review my resumé and I found myself thinking, "Dammit, I've had some great jobs." It was depressing, really. But maybe I should take hope knowing where I've been.

So here it is. It turned out to be so long that I've had to break it up into multiple parts.


I didn't have very many jobs in High School. I really wasn't working towards buying a car or having beer money, so I tended to focus on my schoolwork all through the school year and play all Summer long. My only significant job was in the Summer after my (I think) Junior* Sophomore year and consisted of dogsitting for a neighbor family while they were away on a multi-week vacation. They kept the dog cooped up in a small room in their basement, lined with papers, and they wanted me to let the dog out and clean the papers twice a day. But Skippy was a young, energetic dog, and it seemed cruel to keep him cooped up in a stuffy room for so long. So I visited him multiple times each day, and took him out for extended romps. He and I developed a bond that Summer. They moved away later that year, and I heard that Skippy was hit by a car and killed soon after.

The only other jobs I had in High School were actually after graduation and before the start of college. One was an inventory job at a store at the Wyoming Valley Mall. It was me and about two dozen other temporary employees, hired specifically for a big inventory count. Each of us was assigned to an area, and we were paid something around minimum wage for our efforts. I completed my count quickly, efficiently, and accurately, turned in my numbers, and was paid for the time I had worked. Other people who were working more slowly and less efficiently were still on the job, earning money, when I was sent on my way. I learned a lesson about doing a timely and efficient job that day.

I searched the mall for other job opportunities and found one as a stock boy at a women's clothing store. That was interesting, for the few weeks that it lasted.

In college my main job was maintaining my GPA to maintain the merit-based scholarships that were paying for my education. Without them I would not have been able to attend college, or would have had to go into debt so deeply that I might still be trying to pay off my loans.

Between semesters I worked at Owens-Illinois, later OI-NEG, later Techneglas. This was a glass factory that manufactured TV faceplates. (The NEG stood for "Nippon Electric Glass", a Japanese manufacturer that bought, and eventually closed, the factory.) For three summers I worked there, handling heavy faceplates for eight hours at a time. My fingers are still curled from the carpal tunnel I developed there, and I have learned to ignore the hisssss of tinnitus that came from being exposed to the industrial sounds all day.

During my time in grad school I was a "teaching assistant" in Introduction to Physics labs at the University of Delaware. What this meant was that I was the teacher for the lab, responsible for introducing upwards of eighty non-science students to the wonders of Physics in action, and designing, administering, and grading exams. This lasted as long as my graduate career, one semester.

After I left grad school I made the decision to stick it out in Delaware for at least the rest of the term of my lease and find employment somewhere in the area. Newark, Delaware is an area full of industry of all sorts, so this didn't seem like such an unlikely proposition. With the guidance of one of my former graduate professors I was able to get a job at a solar cell manufacturer called AstroPower. I started off assisting in the testing and evaluation of incoming silicon substrates that would be turned into solar cells. I took to the work, and was fascinated by the place, and at the end of the first year of my lease I signed on for a second. Changes came to the place, including my first experience with a Reduction In Force, or RIF; I survived it, but my supervisor did not. I assumed his job while maintaining my current pay, which was barely above minimum wage. As the second year of my lease began to draw to a close I observed that I had taken on more and more responsibilities, including the management of several employees, but was barely making enough money to pay the rent. With some regret, I informed my manager that I would be leaving when August rolled around. And I did, with a heavy heart.

I came back to Nanticoke feeling like a failure. I began a half-hearted job search, but shortly thereafter my grandmother was felled by sciatica. She needed around-the clock assistance just to get around the house - my mom's house, since it was the only house of a local family member where my grandmother would be able to get around without needing to climb stairs. Getting a nurse to watch over her would be prohibitively expensive. Since I wasn't doing anything else at that moment, I was the obvious choice to be her caretaker.

She gradually regained her strength and mobility. I took her out on the occasional outings, including shopping trips. By the Spring of 1992 she was able to live on her own again. Which was fortunate, because shortly after that I received a call that there was a job available for me at a place I had been trying repeatedly to get into - Specialty Records, a local record, tape, and CD manufacturer.


To be continued. Part 2 will cover the various jobs I have held at Specialty Records and its successor companies.

*The Summer after my Junior year I was at Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences.

OMD: If You Leave

My nephew was inducted into the Junior National Honor Society today. After the ceremony, standing with my family in the cafeteria of the Junior/Senior High School that he attends, surrounded by tweens and teens, breathing in the peculiar biochemistry exuded by humans of that age, I had this song press itself into my mind: Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's "If You Leave", from the Pretty in Pink soundtrack.

Even though this movie came out during the second semester of my first year of college, I still associate this song with my high school experience.

I never was in the National Honor Society, myself. My school district didn't have a chapter until a few years after I graduated.

YouTube Weekend: Men at Work, "Overkill"

There are at least three or four stories behind the reason I'm posting this song. I think. Maybe I'll explain someday. It's hard to focus right now as I am fading away towards unconsciousness, having just completed one-quarter of my work rotation. Hopefully my internal alarm clock will wake me up at 3:00 tomorrow morning (two minutes before my first alarm clock), as it should, rather than at 12:30, 1:00, 1:30, 2:00, and 2:30, as it did this morning. (Which is half of one of the stories. I couldn't get to sleep last night, and this song came to mind. I do not think I will have that same problem tonight.)

Ghosts appear and fade away
come back another day

Fun fact: that's PAL timecode running along the top, with a 25 frames per second standard. (The last number goes from 0 to 24.) This is used in Europe and (I think) Australia. NTSC is used in the U.S., Central America, Japan, and a few other places and uses a 29.97 fps standard (30 frames per second on video.)

Nkechi

Of all of us who made up the 80 of '84, Nkechi was the one I found the most interesting.

Others smoldered with obvious scientific talent; a few had been tapped by the D.o.D. to work on special projects in the coming year. Everybody in the group was well above average intelligence, near the upper percentiles of any such measurement. Our games of Trivial Pursuit were something to see. Many of us were exhilarated to be in the company of 79 other people we could relate to completely, to be able to express ourselves without the constant self-censoring we needed to do to get along in our High Schools. Some people were more socially awkward than others, but there was not a dullard in the bunch.

But Nkechi stood out. She carried with her more than just the superior intelligence which was common to our group, more than just all the beauty that could be stuffed into the body of a sixteen-year-old girl. She had a grace, a charm, an elegance, an exuberance. She was more wildly alive than most of us, and more expressive by far; she clearly embraced both the artistic and the scientific, the creative and the analytical. I made sure I got her phone number before we split up in August of 1984.

I spoke to her once afterwards, later that Summer or maybe in the following school year. I don't think she was at our reunion in the Summer of 1985, the only reunion we have had as far as I know. I thought about her from time to time but never put my people-finding skills to work finding her, not until a few years ago when I chanced upon her name about three layers down on a multiply-forwarded e-mail that had been sent to me by a major new client, finalizing their specifications. Her name was there as a name only, no e-mail address attached. I mentioned her in one of our getting-to-know-you conference calls, but the lead person at the other end thought it was very unlikely that she would have been at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1984 - the person she knew of by that name would have only been about seventeen. "Sixteen, actually," I replied, but let it go. The climate was not conducive to pursuing it further.

I tried looking her up online, the first time I had ever thought to do this. This was three or four years ago. I didn't find many definite hits, though it did look like she had provided a voice for a video game. Not much to go on. Was she perhaps a video game designer?

The other day, inspired by the events described here, I decided to look her up again. I found her Facebook site. I looked further.

Bingo.

Yes, it's her. I've verified her identity several different ways. She has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, but it looks like after that she pursued studies in more artistic fields. It looks like she's based out of San Francisco now, which is a hell of a lot farther away than her old hometown of Philadelphia.

I still haven't gotten in touch with her. She has a bunch of ways of getting in touch with her, but I haven't done any of them yet. What would I say? I suppose I could start with "Hello."

Here are some links to her site. I'll leave you with some videos of Nkechi performing.

NKECHI
http://www.nkechi.com/

Nkechi's blog

Videos from her site:

"In Its Entirety"


Jam: "We Beauty"


So I wonder what the rest of the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences Class of 1984 is up to?

The 80 of '84

Twenty-four years ago I was living in Mr. Rogers' neighborhood.

Actually I was living in Hamerschlag House on the campus of Carnegie-Mellon University, not far from Fred Rogers' maximum-security condo. (I made eye contact with him, once, as he was driving past me on the access road to his place.) For five weeks - was it July 5th through August 5th? - I was one of eighty students selected from the Intermediate Units across the state of Pennsylvania to participate in Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences. This was an intense, grueling, gut-wrenching boot camp for what I might modestly refer to as the best and the brightest science students from across the state. For five weeks we studied Physics, Organic Chemistry, Discrete Mathematics, Lisp, and Genetics Molecular Biology, along with special concentrations selected by each student, as well as labs and free-standing lectures.

I've written about this before, here and here. It was a great time. Hard, but exhilarating. It made me feel that with enough hard work, I could accomplish great things.

I just looked up the names of the 80 of '84 and am really shocked by the number of people who I simply can't recall. Sadly, I haven't kept in touch with any of them, not really. One I contacted in the Summer of 1985; I had had a crush on her, but nothing developed, and she probably didn't even notice.* I got in touch with another in 1988 shortly after the Flight 103 incident, in which several of her classmates were killed - but, fortunately, not her. I ran into another PGSS alum when I was at the University of Delaware in 1989-1990, and found out he was rooming with another PGSS-er - the former boyfriend of the second girl I mentioned.

A few years ago - more than that, in 1996 or 1998 - I was reading one of the two big popular Astronomy magazines, Astronomy or Sky & Telescope (I subscribe to both) and I came across the name of another PGSS '84 alum. Julianne Dalcanton had written an article on "Ghost Galaxies", galaxies so dim that they are nearly impossible to detect. A while back I decided to look her up online, and found her website. But that was about it, until yesterday.

Yesterday I was going through the comments on Phil Plait's "Ghosts in the Light" post and I came across a link to this cartoon.**

It's funny. You should read it. Though if you don't know what the Large Hadron Collider is, or the pseudocontroversy around it, or who Wil Wheaton is, or who Wesley Crusher is, you might be a little lost.

I have the strange and useful ability to read upside-down text at about the same speed that an average reader reads right-side-up text. Which is to say, I see letters forming words which string together into phrases and sentences, rather than the gestalt chunk-at-once reading that I normally do. It's slow, for me, but it's useful. It's also pretty involuntary. So upon seeing the second panel of that cartoon...

I immediately spotted a familiar name. Well, other than Stephen Hawking.

I didn't recognize the other names, but a few minutes of research revealed that several of them co-blog with Julianne at a site called Cosmic Variance. I'll have to add that to my list of regular reads. Maybe eventually add it to the sidebar.

So what have the rest of the 80 of '84 been up to? I have no idea. Some of them, I trust, have gone on to pursue careers in science, and maybe some have entered academia. Others, I am sure, have taken more pedestrian paths - like me.

Heck, next Summer it will have been twenty-five years. Someone may be thinking of a reunion. In that case, I had better start making something of myself, quickly!


*I nearly encountered her again a few years ago, when I saw her name on an e-mail distribution list from a company my company was doing business with. I made some discreet inquiries, but none of the people I spoke with were very helpful. Had that business relationship lasted longer, I probably would have been able to pursue this further...

...but of course, she has a Facebook entry. I need to jump on this bandwagon soon.

** I totally missed the Real Genius reference in the 14th panel. Michelle Meyrink's Jordan is my ideal girl. Well, her and Jane Lane.

Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan is always on my mind this time of year. I've been planning on writing a piece about him for some time. As it turns out, today is the tenth anniversary of his death. Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy has called his readers' attention to Joel Schlosberg's plan to have a Carl Sagan Memorial Blog-A-Thon to commemorate his life and influence. So what better time to write this post than now?

Carl Sagan's Cosmos came onto the scene when I was twelve years old, at the same time as a great many other influential events in my life. Star Wars had exploded onto movie screens just a few years before. The Viking missions had shown us Mars, and the Voyager missions were sending back amazing images of Jupiter and Saturn and their many moons. The Space Shuttle had been tested and was being readied for flight. Jupiter and Saturn were engaging in a long, complicated series of maneuvers in the evening sky. The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy was hitting the airwaves in America for the first time. I had discovered Dungeons & Dragons (with the polyhedral dice so well explained in the back of the Cosmos book) and begun reading Tolkien and Niven and Ellison and OMNI magazine.

And there was Carl Sagan on the cover of TIME magazine, standing on the shore of the cosmic ocean. There was Carl Sagan on television every Sunday night, showing us the beauty and wonder of the cosmos and saying "Look at this! Isn't it amazing?" To us. To me. He didn't just bring the beauty and wonder of the cosmos to the general public. He brought it to me, and that was infinitely more valuable - in my mind, anyway.

(A side note: Carl Sagan appeared on the cover of TIME magazine on October 20, 1980. But I associate Sagan with Advent, the four weeks before Christmas, the lighting of the Advent Wreath in the upstairs hallway of my school, a chorus of children's voices singing "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel". Why? Because my grandmother was my one source for TIME magazines, and she would get them from my uncle in Maryland, who had a subscription. He would gather up his old magazines and bring them up to my grandmother when he would visit throughout the year. He would have brought the October 20, 1980 issue to her when he came in to visit at Thanksgiving. So I would not have seen this issue until after the start of Advent.)

I graduated from Catholic grade school in 1981 and survived four years of High School. When I started college in 1985 I double-majored in Physics and Philosophy - perhaps more influenced by a certain pointy-eared Vulcan than by Carl Sagan and Cosmos. But as I neared the end of college I began to formulate a plan: I would become the next Carl Sagan.

No, I would not become brilliant or influential or directly involved in planetary exploration. But when I entered graduate school at age 21 my goal was to have a Ph.D. by age 27 and to have published my first book by age 30. Carl Sagan had brought the wonder of the Cosmos to the people. I would carry on what he had started. I would use my unique blend of knowledge, experience, and skills to write books on advanced topics in science that would appeal to and be comprehendible by the common layman.

It didn't work out that way. Graduate school was the single most horrible and humiliating event in my life. I have compared it to being mugged while drowning. Maybe at another school, in another program, things might have been different. Maybe not. Maybe I just wasn't up to the challenge.

Besides, there already was a Carl Sagan.

He's gone now. Dead these past ten years. This blog is the closest I've come to my dream of being a writer who would share his love of the universe with the rest of the world. But Carl Sagan's work lives on. He touched and influenced many, many lives. Maybe no one of us will ever be the next Carl Sagan, but maybe, just maybe, each of us can carry a small spark of the flame that he touched us with. And somewhere along the line, we can share that spark with others.

Now that you've got it

I used to wrestle in High School. I wasn't very good. I was big and fat and slow and uncoordinated. But joining the wrestling team was part of a process of reinventing myself in the afterglow of having fallen in love for the first time, and it was something I stuck with.

Late in the wrestling season we had a joint practice with another school. It was supposed to be a friendly practice - no crippling injuries or anything like that. We paired off with their wrestlers for a few minutes at a time and then moved around. As I was in the Heavyweight class, there weren't all that many wrestlers in my same weight class that I could practice against. At one point I wound up wrestling with their coach.

One thing I was - am - good at is leg work. A wrestler uses his legs like a second set of arms. Being heavy is an advantage here, since the simple act of walking around builds up your leg muscles tremendously. I wrestled hard and fast against the other team's coach, and after some hard fighting eventually got my legs into a grotesque pretzel twist around his in a position that didn't seem to make any sense. I had one arm under him and one arm free.

When we both realized I had gotten my legs into whatever the hell position I was trying to get them in, the coach spoke to me. "Now that you've got it," he said, "what are you going to do with it?"

As of this morning it looks like Democrats have managed to take both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The House was almost a given in the days leading up to the election, but no one was sure which way the Senate would go. Even now the 51-49 razor-thin majority is a little misleading, since at least one of the Democrats has been voting like a Republican for the past few years, and was in fact only elected on the basis of massive Republican support.

But now that the Democrats have it, what are they going to do with it?

It would be easy to take the Republican-majority path to the dark side of self-serving behavior, where political considerations outweigh the good of the people and protection of party members and adherence to party doctrine are paramount. Democrats will almost certainly be held responsible for every bad thing that happens in the country from this moment on - but that's nothing new, and is to be expected. Remember, President Clinton got the blame for both the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (which happened a few weeks after he took office after 12 years of Republicans in the White House) and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks (which happened after George W. Bush had been in office for 234 days.)

Democrats have to be proactive, responsive, and decisive. They have to rally the support of the American people. There's so much that needs fixing. The biggest question is going to be: "Where do we start?" And they have to get started right away, as soon as they are sworn in.

"Now that you've got it, what are you going to do with it?" the other team's coach asked me.

I unfolded and untwisted my legs like an origami sculpture in reverse. Inexorably, his body twisted around on the mat. I reached out with my free arm and pressed his shoulders to the mat. He couldn't move. He was pinned.

"This," I said.

Death of a teacher

Well, so much for not blogging about death.

I was on the phone with a friend from across the country this past Sunday when a call came through: Dan Distasio had been found dead in his yard that morning.

Mr. Distasio was a classmate of my mother. He was a High School teacher (retired for several years now, I think) and was my homeroom teacher for at least one year. I had him as a teacher twenty-two years ago for Problems Of Democracy, an advanced elective Social Studies class. (Every time I hear about the band P.O.D., that's what I automatically think of.)

He was a big man with a booming voice and a gentle demeanor. He was a coach - track and field, I think. As a teacher he encouraged critical thinking, not simply the mindless regurgitation of facts phrased in a manner that was pleasing to him. He was also a good friend to my mom.

I stopped at the viewing on my way home from work. It was scheduled to go from 5:00 to 8:00. I left work at 6:30 and got into town forty minutes later to see the line stretched out the front door of the funeral home and down the street for nearly a block. I decided that this would be a good time to stop at my house to check the mail, the phone messages, and take a pit stop.

I got back to the funeral home around 7:30 and the line was just as long. I parked in the nearest spot, a block away, and took my place at the back of the line. By 8:00 I was standing near the open door of the funeral home, bathing in the welcome warmth coming from within. It was then that I discovered that the line inside the funeral home was as long as the line outside; it snaked its way through an unused parlor where memorial displays had been set up. (The picture of Mr. Distasio as a bare-assed baby made me laugh.)

After another twenty minutes or so I finally wound my way to the casket. I said a prayer and took my leave. I've never been one for chit-chat, especially not at funerals where the only person in the family that I know is the one in the casket. Besides, there were plenty of people willing to make chit-chat, and I was occupying valuable real estate where other mourners and friends and old students wanted to pay their respects. So I left.

The funeral is tomorrow.

Obituary:

Daniel J. Distasio, 73, of Phillips Street, Nanticoke, passed away Sunday (October 22, 2006) at Geisinger South Wilkes-Barre.
Born on November 9, 1932, in Nanticoke, he was a son of the late Daniel and Helen Stankiewicz Distasio.
Dan served two years in the Navy and two years in the Marines. After attaining his bachelor’s degree from King’s College, he continued on to earn his master’s degree equivalency.
Daniel was a teacher for 33 years at Nanticoke High School and was a former football coach for 12 years. He also coached girls volleyball, track and Wilkes Linebackers. He was an avid Yankee, Wilkes-Barre Penguins, Nanticoke Area Trojans and Crestwood Comets sports fan.
He was preceded in death by his brother Raymond.
Surviving are his wife of 49 years, the former Gertrude Piepon; daughter Deborah Disabatino, Mountain Top; sons Daniel Jr., Mountain Top; Jeff, Rochester, NY; Steven, Mountain Top; brother Richard, North Carolina; and grandchildren Dominick, Cassie, Jenna, Nico, Maddie, Danny III, Katie, Devon, Raegan, Stephanie and Derek.
Funeral services will be held Wednesday at 9 a.m. from the Earl W. Lohman Funeral Home, 14 W. Green St., Nanticoke, with a Mass of Christian Burial at 9:30 a.m. in Holy Trinity Church, with the Rev. James Nash officiating.
Interment will be in the Chapel Lawn Cemetery, Dallas. Friends may call this evening from 5 to 8 p.m.
In lieu of flowers, the Daniel J. Distasio Memorial Scholarship Fund is being created to provide an athletic/academic scholarship to a deserving senior student from both Nanticoke Area and Crestwood Area High Schools. Donations are to be made to the Daniel J. Distasio Memorial Fund, c/o Luzerne Foundation, 613 Baltimore Dr., Wilkes-Barre, PA 18702.

Space is big. Really big.

Pennsylvania State Capitol building

August 26, 2006

The planetarium show currently running at the State Museum in Harrisburg is called "Big". The point of the show is to give viewers a sense of the enormous scale of the universe. Narrated by Richard Attenborough,who played John Hammond in the Jurassic Park movies, it is a combination of whiz-bang images (including a dancing caveman who appears to be roasting his 'nads) and solid science, all presented in an entertaining and educational package.

Perhaps the most impressive image - well, the one that impressed me the most - was the image of what you would see if you were to travel outside of the familiar confines of our galaxy. Because it was then that the planetarium dome simply went black.

If you go outside on a clear, cloudless night under dark skies, you will be able to make out thousands of objects of varying brightness: planets, stars, nebulas, globular clusters, the dim glow of the billions of stars in the Milky Way stretching across the sky - our own galaxy, seen from within. All of these objects are located within (or in the case of the globular clusters, in orbit around) our galaxy. With the naked eye, you might be able to pick out a faint patch of light in Andromeda, not far from the big M of Cassiopea. This is the Andromeda Galaxy, the farthest object visible with the unaided eye. Oh, there are plenty of other galaxies that you can see, but you will need a telescope to find them, and you will probably need the brighter stars in the neighborhood to help you zero in on their locations. There are also "ghost galaxies", low-surface-brightness galaxies (studied by my fellow member of the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences Class of '84 Julianne Dalcanton) that can be much closer and almost impossible to see.

Move outside of our galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy will still be a faint smudge. And all those other galaxies will be much harder to find, because now you'll no longer have nearby stars to help you locate them - you left those behind when you left the Milky Way Galaxy behind. Move far enough away and even the Milky Way will be hard to see. You will be surrounded by empty darkness on all sides.

The space between galaxies is vast, and empty, and dark. I never really had a good sense of that until yesterday. It left me feeling a bit chilled. I was only too glad to step back out into the warm embrace of our galaxy, our star system, our planet, and my little corner of it.

A new show starts in November, based on Hubble Space Telescope photos. I'm going to try to see that one. You should catch "Big" if you can!

IF YOU GO: Tickets are purchased on the lowest level of the Museum. The Planetarium is on the top floor. So make sure you buy your tickets in advance, and be sure to be in the theater before the doors close! Check here for more information and a link to the planetarium's schedule.

Welcome to the Presidency. Now learn English!

From White House Press Secretary Tony Snow's "Press Gaggle" of May 19, 2006:

So the answer is the administration -- as the President has said, one of the things that you want to make sure is that when at the end of a path, people who wish to become American citizens are ready for that, that they have a command of the English language.

It's unfortunate that a command of the English language isn't a requirement for the Office of the President.

Has anybody really thought this through? My grandmother was the daughter of Polish immigrants, and she spoke fluent Polish and unaccented English. (Not even a Nanticoke accent. At best she had an "accent" that consisted of words and phrases that she had picked up over 60 years before I was born.) She and my mother, who also speaks Polish, were able to hold conversations in Polish in front of me and I had no idea what they were saying.

I took two years of Spanish in High School and one semester of Scientific German in college, and am fluent in neither language. Thanks to my job I can distinguish written Spanish from written Portuguese, and written Icelandic from written Danish or Norwegian. I can also distinguish Norwegian from Danish some of the time (the "jag" vs. "jeg" rule - or is that Swedish?), and I can distinguish written Finnish from pretty much any other language on Earth. But I don't have a command of any other language but English. Like most Americans, I am monolingual.

So here we are, telling people that if they want to become U.S. citizens and do not already speak English, they have to become bilingual. What a terrible idea! Suddenly bilingual immigrants-turned-citizens will have a huge advantage over monolingual citizens-by-birth. They will be able to speak two languages, while the rest of us will know only one. And why should they stop there? Once they've learned a second language, how do we stop them from learning a third or a fourth? Next thing you'll know, somebody will be expecting us to stretch our minds by learning stuff. And learning stuff is hard!

Well, best to get started. I found some stuff on the Internets about Latin. "Orge-Geay Ush-bay is an oron-may." Hey, I might just get the hang of this second language thing!