Cop Car's Beat

More books

These are the books (photo, below) that will go back to the library this afternoon.

Divining Women, Kay Gibbons - I enjoyed this novel that provided character studies of a few people who lived during the Spanish influenza pandemic of about 100 years ago. Imagine "Little Women" as written by Stephen King.

Dead or Alive, Tom Clancy with Grant Blackwood - I put this book down, after 160 pages, as not being worth my time to finish. I don't know who is to blame - Mr Clancy, Mr Blackwood, or the publisher; but, this was blood and guts and dogma with no redeeming qualities in sight.

The Memory Collector, Meg Gardiner - As this was my first exposure to Ms Gardiner, I didn't really know what to expect. On the back cover was a sentence written by Stephen King about the book, "If you read Sue Grafton, Lee Child, Janet Evanovich, Michael Connelly, or Nelson DeMille, you're going to think Meg Gardiner is a gift from heaven."

Although Evanovich is the only author in Mr King's listing whose work I have read, and although I don't believe in heaven, Mr King was not getting carried away. This book is really that good! This is the sort of gripping thriller that Mr Clancy is normally credited with writing - but with a much lower body count. The protagonist is a forensic psychiatrist (she is also a climber in her spare time) who helps track down a suspected killer - a man who, it turns out, suffers from a brain malfunction that prevents his forming new memories. I will look for more books by Ms Gardiner!

People of Darkness, Tony Hillerman - This is a Jim Chee tale that doesn't disappoint this Hillerman fan. When someone bothers to murder a dying man - and then steals his body - one has to wonder what is going on! There is also a treat, for those who enjoy wordplay, in a tombstone that is erected by a white man for the grave of a peyote chief, "He Didn't Remember When He Was Born: Died December 11, 1953: A Good Indian".

Rest in peace, Sally Ride, PhD

Odds & Ends

Odds

My reading occurs in spurts and stops: sometimes I read a lot...at other times I read little beyond the daily paper and The New Yorker. When I was single, I usually had two or three books that I was reading - none of which was likely to be fiction. However, as I've grown older (I was single for all of my 40s), I find myself reading fiction. In the period of mid-2004 to mid-2005, I checked out (and read 99% of) more than 110 books from the local public library. Astoundingly, about 60% of the books were fiction. Since becoming an active volunteer, my reading has become, as I mentioned above, a matter of spurts and stops - and it has become 90% fiction. [Please note that in discussing "reading", I am only including the reading of books - printed on paper. My internet reading is, aside from blog reading, confined to non-fiction.]

Having finished a rather large project in my Volunteer Endeavors, last Thursday, I stopped in at the library on my way home. The photo (below) shows the books that I picked up in the few minutes when I was there. (BTW: the title of the Tom Clancy book is Against All Enemies. I would have taken another photo, hopefully without the glare, but the battery needed charging.)

Tony Hillerman has written some of my favorite books of fiction. They are interesting enough, and gripping enough, that I nearly always gulp them down in one day - two, tops! Unfortunately, I did not discover Mr Hillerman's work until 2007, only one year before his death. I was surprised, Thursday, to find one of his books that I had not already read in our library's collection.

Until The Fly on the Wall, all of the Hillerman books that I had read were mysteries centered in my beloved New Mexico, rife with details of the locale and Native American traditions and life. Delicious! However, The Fly on the Wall is a mystery centered in a fictional mid-western state's capital city where the Democratic Party holds sway - during the approach to a primary election. (Well, one "act" was thrown in from the San Juan Mountains and Santa Fe. I could smell the piñon smoke from the hotel's fireplace!) The protagonist is a political reporter who is assigned to the capitol.

This book did not in the least disappoint me. Please note that one of the pleasures of reading the book is that, not once is a cell phone, or iPad, or PC mentioned. The book was published in 1971!

I present a few paragraphs from The Fly on the Wall, The paragraphs contain dialogue between the protagonist (John Cottan) and one of his cronies (Hall) from another newspaper.

"The great electorate," Hall said. "The citizenry of the state. You think, Give 'em the facts and they'll make the right decisions. But they're not reading past the headlines. They're watching I Love Lucy and getting their instant political wisdom from some former disc jockey with a sincere smile on the ten-o'clock news. The bastard couldn't name the National Committeeman for you, but he's got credibility because they like his teeth."

Cotton said nothing.

"Cousin John, we've sold ourselves a bill of goods, you and Junior and I, and Volney and all of us. We buy this business of give them the facts and man decides in his enlightened self-interest. How about changing it--being realistic? Deciding that sometimes they're not going to digest the facts and come to the enlightened conclusion. You know it's true. You've seen it, time after time." Hall looked up, his eyes on Cotton's eyes. "How about making a selection sometimes of what facts they can handle--giving them what's good for them?"

"You feel like playing God? Cotton laughed. "I'm not ready for it."

"O.K.," Hall said. "Forget it."

Ends

Yesterday, while reading an article in The New Yorker, I (heretofore an atheist) became a believer.¹          ; -¶

The article, included in the Annals of Science department is The Mosquito Solution: Can genetic modification eliminate a deadly tropical disease? by Michael Specter (The New Yorker, July 9 & 16, 2012). Writing on one theory of controlling, if not eradicating, dengue - caused by a pathogen transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, Mr Specter wrote the following:

"There is no vaccine or cure for dengue, or even a useful treatment. The only way to fight the disease has been to poison the insects that carry it. That means bathing yards, roads, and public parks in a fog of insecticide. Now there is another approach, promising but experimental: a British biotechnology company called Oxitec has developed a method to modify the genetic structure of the male Aedes mosquito, essentially transforming it into a mutant capable of destroying its own species."

From the above fragement of a paragraph, I immediately formed a mental picture of the male mosquitoes - out there with their machetes, destroying their own offspring.² This led me to think that there really is a god who has genetically engineered people to destroy themselves. How else to explain our inability to, as Rodney King would have had us do, "...all just get along." Our aggressions - leading to wars, mass killings, environmental degredations - are killing us. How better to explain it than genetic modification?

________________________________________________________________

¹     ; -¶          An emoticon to indicate "tongue-in-cheek"

²     The mechanism is actually that, "Eggs fertilized by...genetically modified males will hatch normally, but soon after, and well before the new mosquitoes can fly, the fatal genes will prevail, killing them all." Previously cited article from The New Yorker

 

Remembering ME Hall

From a posting of four years ago [with added asides]:

This year, recalling how drought tolerant they were, I planted two planters with California
poppy seeds.  The first bloom appeared, Thursday.  Here 'tis (to the right).

My Grandmother H [Mary Etta Hall who always signed "M.E. Hall"]* always had a bed of rose moss [Portulaca grandiflora].  For some reason, I didn't think it [could be grown here] until, two or three years ago, I planted a couple of planters with rose moss seed.  They not only reseeded within the planters, but have come up as volunteers across the double driveway from the planters and in our strawberry & cherry bed (strawberries fill 1/2 of the bed while a cherry tree and some cherry bushes fill the other 1/2.).  This (to the left) is a photo of a golden one--nearly the color of the California poppies--that grows in the edge of the cherry bed, overhanging the apron to the garage.

 

 

 

From today, more photos of volunteer rose moss plant blossoms:

      

Rose moss, as you can tell by looking at the leaves and stems, is a succulent - a distant relative to the ice plant (below).

       
  
*Because Xtreme English signs herself as "M.E." at times, she and I have traded private communications on this. I always think of my grandmother when I see XE's comments.

How old?

I'm surprised that the media haven't jumped all over this. On the other hand, perhaps they have done so and (being somewhat "weird" in my media tracking habits) I missed it. Will those who have not previously been exposed to the above image care to guess in what year the garment was manufactured?

No rainbows, but grayscale vision for those with faulty retinas

It is always pleasing to read of progress in the field of medicine. Today's item comes from Slashdot.org.

Implant Gives Grayscale Vision To the Blind Using Lasers164

Posted by Unknown Lameron Tuesday July 17, @05:50PM
from the not-safe-for-mcdonald's dept.

MrSeb writes with a bit from Extreme Tech: "After a lot of theorizing, posturing, and non-human trials, it looks like bionic eye implants are finally hitting the market — first in Europe, and hopefully soon in the U.S. These implants can restore sight to completely blind patients — though only if the blindness is caused by a faulty retina, as in macular degeneration (which millions of old people suffer from), diabetic retinopathy, or other degenerative eye diseases. ... The Bio-Retina, developed by Nano Retina, is a whole lot more exciting. The Bio-Retina costs ... around the $60,000 [and] the 576-pixel vision-restoring sensor is actually placed inside the eye, on top of the retina. The operation only takes 30 minutes and can be performed under local anesthetic. Once installed, 576 electrodes on the back of the sensor implant themselves into your optic nerve. The best bit, though, is how the the sensor is powered: The Bio-Retina system comes with a standard pair of corrective lenses that are modified so that they can fire a near-infrared laser beam through your iris to the sensor at the back of your eye. On the sensor there is a photovoltaic cell that produces up to three milliwatts — not a lot, but more than enough."

Fun and Games with CERN

Many of you have already been exposed, at this blog, to more postings concerning CERN and the progress that physicists have made at the HLC than you cared to read. This posting aims merely at having fun with CERN.

ITEM: Did you know that the World Wide Web was developed at CERN? No? In 1989, "...Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN launched the first webpages that connected to one another via hyperlinks." [The Web Is Not the Internet (You're Probably Getting That Wrong) - Posted by Abraham_Riesman on Tuesday, Jul 17, 2012]

The WWW was used exclusively by physicists until sometime around 1993. (It had been introduced to the public in 1991.) (Crossdressing, Compression and Colliders: The First Photo on the Web - Posted by Abraham_Riesman on Tuesday, Jul 10, 2012)

Here (video, below) are Les Horribles Cernettes doing "Collider". BTW: The blue with yellow "props" look suspiciously like Cray supercomputers.

The group invites Mr Higgs to do the twist:

 

And now, a show closer, "Good Night Sweet CERN":

 

For some interesting info on the genesis of the Internet, please see,  The Web Is Not the Internet (You're Probably Getting That Wrong) Posted by Abraham_Riesman on Tuesday, Jul 17, 2012.

Take it away!

If you haven't heard me grumbling and gnashing my teeth for the past couple of years, your ears have been plugged and your eyes covered. This heat crap has got to go! *grumble, grumble* It was too darned hot/humid for me to take a walk, today, as it never got below 80 degrees. I thought about going swimming; but, it's been so long since I've put in my laps that I'm out of that habit. The thought of driving 10 miles (one way) in order to use the pool wearies me. Yesterday morning and this morning I've spent considerable time watering things. In addition, my volunteer endeavors have kept me plenty busy this year, and my blog friends have kept up their posting (yes, that means you!) or I would probably be in a deep funk by now.

Hunky Husband takes care of the lawn. We have an irrigation system that is set to water the grass every two days in this heat/drought - about 30 minutes per station which probably equates to 1/3 - 1/2 inch of water. The plantings, I care for - weeding, mulching, watering.

Most of the plantings are bushes (coniferous and deciduous) or ground cover (mostly sedums and, thanks to Bogie, creeping phlox); but, there are food-bearing plants, too (strawberries, dill, fennel, coriander, tomatoes, peppers, onions, Rosemary, thyme - no parsley). The food-bearing plants get coddled. I try to water them at least 1/2" per week (I'm picking the blossoms off of the strawberries to conserve their energies, having lost about 1/4 of our plants to the drought last fall.) Other plants don't get that much water.

Established plants get about 1" of water every third or fourth week, while the things planted within the past year (I try to remember so that they) get two or three gallons, each, every week or 10 days. As you might guess - the amount of water that anything under my care gets is dependent upon my thinking about it. My plants must have a will to live!

Here are a couple of the trees that I transplanted a couple of months ago. I think they are both black walnuts; but, the one on the left (which I planted in the partial shade of chard plants that have gone to seed) looks really peculiar - and - most of it has died back. We shall see. The other tree, on the right, I transplanted into a nice spot in the woods.

 

There are also three other black walnut and oak trees that I've transplanted into the woods, of which there are no photos.

Next are the only two bushes that are less than a year old. On the left is a little euonymous that I planted last fall. On the right is a purple leaf sand plum that I set out in March 2012. The bright green, thriving little plant to the left of the sand plum is a sprout (one among millions - well - tens) from the neighbor's bugle vine that has been attempting to take over the world for the past 10 years. You can tell by the darkness of the mulch around the bushes (and around the above trees) that they were watered this morning.

 

Lastly, below are a couple of shots of ice plant - the one on the right showing the beautiful California Poppies growing nearby. The ice plants were planted in March or April while the poppies sprouted from seeds that I don't recall planting. I must have spread the seeds last fall. Actually, I don't water the one on the left since the neighbor's (different neighbor) newly installed irrigation system oversprays it.

 

Ice plant blossoms close, at night. For a view of one that is blooming (it was planted a year ago, so doesn't get watered as "frequently"), please see Obligatory Fall Photos from late last October. Forty or fifty years ago, no one would have thought of planting ice plant in this part of the world; but, as they are succulents, they are well suited to the hot, dry weather we've been having for the past couple of decades.

While I'm at it, I'll tell you that our bluebird nesting box (which I had not checked for at least two weeks) has a nest with five bluebird eggs in it. We had earlier been disappointed that the bluebirds did not choose to use the bluebird nesting box this spring. I will keep watch, but I don't believe the eggs are being tended. I did not even hear a bluebird this morning. Not a good sign. The Carolina wrens have not (wisely, I believe) chosen to establish another clutch of eggs in the nest on our front porch.

I don't know where our family of Carolina wrens went, but I don't catch sight of them - although - I do hear adults scolding at times. We do enjoy watching the families of Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice, and turkeys that fledged this spring. The turkey family started out with nine chicks; but, it has been stable at seven for two or three weeks, now. The "chicks" are nearly adult size.

 

 

The media oversimplify - again!

While we were being kept awake by firecrackers and fireworks set off by people in our neighborhoods, the scientists at CERN were celebrating, themselves. However, they were not (repeat: NOT) celebrating the finding of the Higgs boson as has been reported through many of the media. They were celebrating the detection of a particle that is consistent with (and may, in fact, turn out to be) the Higgs. Below are a couple of articles from CERN's own website. Please note the careful wording that is used.

4 July 2012:

 

Proton-proton collision in the CMS experiment producing four high-energy muons (red lines). The event shows characteristics expected from the decay of a Higgs boson but it is also consistent with background Standard Model physics processes (Image: CMS)

At a seminar on 4 July, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN presented their latest results in the search for the long-sought Higgs boson. Both experiments see strong indications for the presence of a new particle, which could be the Higgs boson, in the mass region around 126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).        

Both ATLAS and CMS gave the level of significance of the result as 5 sigma on the scale that particle physicists use to describe the certainty of a discovery. One sigma means the results could be random fluctuations in the data, 3 sigma counts as an observation and a 5-sigma result is a discovery. The results presented today are preliminary, as the data from 2012 is still under analysis. The complete analysis is expected to be published around the end of July.

13 July 2012:

The ATLAS detector at the LHC (Image: CERN)

An important piece of news that almost got lost in the excitement of the Higgs update seminar on 4 July is that the 2012 Large Hadron Collider (LHC) proton run is to be extended.

....

The current LHC schedule foresees proton running reaching a conclusion on 16 October, with a proton-ion run scheduled for November. In the preliminary new schedule, proton running is planned to continue until 16 December, with the proton-ion run starting after the Christmas stop on 18 January and continuing until 10 February. With a final Higgs update for 2012 scheduled to be given to Council during the week of 10 December, an early Christmas present in the form of new insights into the discovery announced last week could be on the cards.

Reason enough to run the above posting is the beauty of the photos that CERN released!

DEFINITIONS:

ATLAS -  A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS

CERN - Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (French for European Council for Nuclear Research)

CMS - Compact Muon Solenoid

LHC - Large Hadron Collider

Dark matter filament found

From Slashdot.org:

Dark Matter Filament Finally Found65

Posted by samzenpuson Thursday July 05, @08:14PM
from the there-it-is dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Everyone is talking about the recent Higgs boson announcement by the scientists at CERN, but another significant scientific discovery was revealed this week as well. In a study published online in the journal Nature on Wednesday, scientists show that they have successfully found the first dark matter filament."

 

From the linked BostonHerald.com:

Dark matter, identified in the 1930s, cannot be detected directly because it doesn’t seem to emit or absorb light. But astronomers know it must be there because they see its gravitational effect on the light and visible matter around it. And since there’s about five times more dark matter than normal matter, its gravitational pull has a profound effect on the shape of the universe.

The above is for Xtreme English (ME) - to keep her updated on breakthroughs in physics (note her comment on the previous posting concerning tomatoes.) I'm chuckling because she had to ask about the discovery of the theoretically postulated (in the 1960s) Higgs particle. Had ME followed a little bit different path in life, she might well have turned into one of the experimental physicists involved in tracking down the Higgs!

If anyone wants to know more about the Higgs particle and its discovery, I direct you to Starts With a Bang! a blog by Ethan Siegel, PhD. Professor Siegel's posting today, Explaining the Higgs: on TV last night!, not only includes written/graphic information on particles; but has a video of Professor Siegel's appearance on television, yesterday. He's an engaging speaker, giving a layman's view of particles.