• I was just about to start writing when I looked up at the title I chose and realized that the word many looks awfully strange on its own. Doesn't it?
• The pictures from Nawlins are no less daunting than the shots from the tsunami. This one's going to hurt for a long time. And with those warm gulf waters, it could happen again, and again, and again. Hopefully someone brilliant will find a way to defuse hurricanes, limiting their development into destructive giants. Hey, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in nineteen sixty-fuggin-nine, led by a guidance computer that had 2K of 16-bit RAM, a puny fraction of the computing power of your home computer. So there has to be a way.
• If you don't think we've gone too far yet in the lowering of our educational and performance standards, maybe a school that allows students to tell their teachers to fuck off five times per day (not six, mind you) will do it for ya. Yes, it's a U.K. school, but still—it matters.
• It's been a rough go for Bret Favre lately. First his father dies suddenly, then his wife is diagnosed with cancer, and now his family home is completely destroyed by that bitch Katrina. He'll probably throw ten extra touchdowns this season.
• Two weeks ago I had a vivid dream about a town underwater. I told Nikki and a couple other people about it. There was just something about the dream that made me want to talk about it. No, I don't think it was a premonition of the hurricane; if I believed that, I wouldn't have brought it up. I have never been to Nawlins and have no family or interests there. It was synchronicity at best, and most likely a simple coincidence. Apparently, flood dreams a pretty common archetype in dream analysis, usually associated with a sense of being overwhelmed or inundated. I don't quite feel overwhelmed or inundated by anything, but maybe my subconscious mind would like to disagree with me there.
• A few weeks ago I trashed Burger King's decision-makers for their ill-concieved rock band mascot, "CoqRoq". I thought it missed their mark utterly, and I must have been right, because all traces of that gimmick were erased from their website by the end of that week. Ironically, I think their most recent commercial is one of the very best I've seen in a long time. If you haven't seen it you can catch—for a limited time only, I'm sure—an abridged version right here. They took a broken play from the 2004 Buffalo Bills season and turned it into a clever piece of advertising. Drew Bledsoe—who has absolutely no touch on the easy throws—overthrows Willis McGahee, who pops it up...and the Burger King guy takes it the other way for a touchdown. I saw that very play happen live. I was pissed. My Bills were getting beat by an inferior team. I especially hated that Deion Sanders made the play. F Deion. But I'm glad that I can laugh about it now. And they did a great job digitally superimposing the BK guy over Sanders. If you didn't know better, you might think it actually happend that way. Oh, if only.
• This Onion article cracked me up. It's simple and juvenile and you've basically read the entire thing once you've read the headline, but please: read the whole thing anyway and tell me you didn't laugh out loud. The key is, you have to look back at the picture of the author after every paragraph. That really did it for me. Oh, the article: Here it is.
• As if we needed a reason to love coffee more, "they" have discovered that it's the best source of antioxidants that we know of. Ahhh, good to the last drop. If they had told me it was the worst source, I'd still have two cups every morning. I think I might have to go long SBUX and PEET, huh?
• Okay, this one REALLY made my eyes pop. I was browsing for articles on Brookhaven National Laboratory's RHIC collider and got what looked like an interesting result at IndiaDaily.com. So I read the article, la de da...and then checked out some of the other headlines on their site. The one titled Advanced extraterrestrial alien civilization protecting the earth by systematically neutralizing incoming asteroids and comets with radiation energy tapped through Fermions sorta jumped out at me. Then I noticed that there are quite a few similar articles. This is an interesting site, this IndiaDaily.com. Either it deliberately combines real science with paranormal hypotheses, or paranormal hypotheses are considered just as newsworthy as actual scientific findings in that culture, or they're really on to something. No matter what, I think it's highly unusual.

Labels: ponderage

With all the talk of "Intelligent Design" around here and in the general media lately, a wee light shined somewhere in my neocortex last night as I tossed and turned my way into a sloppy sleep of fits and starts. For starters, I've always believed in some form of higher power(s) or intelligence(s) but I've never been particularly interested in trying to define the God concept. I've never been comfortable with the way that most people treat the divine unknown. When beliefs form in people a self-righteous platform that they claim others must adhere to, or else...you have a dangerous situation in one way or another.

However, I personally don't know anyone who is strong in their religious beliefs and also a fanatic, let alone a deluded fool like Bin Laden. The people I know who are strong in their faith do not ask others to stare down the barrel of their beliefs. They live their lives as best they can according to their faith and they don't ask anyone to copy them. I respect that. For me...if there's one thing that I truly believe, it's that some things are unknowable. And I'm okay with that.

That being said, the debate over teaching the notion of "intelligent design" deserves to be controversial; it shouldn't be easy to jump onto one side of the fence or the other. It should be immensely difficult, and where you stand should be the product of heavy introspection, investigation, and open mindedness. It shouldn't come from one's own indoctrination, but that's another debate.

So...my watch implies a watchmaker. Does the world imply a worldmaker? One thing that does lend credibility, in my mind, to the notion of intelligent design is 1.618, or the golden ratio—also referred to as phi. Good ol' Euclid defined it way back in some year or other B.C. It's "the only number whose square can be produced simply by adding 1 and whose reciprocal can be produced by subtracting 1." Was that a yawn? Fair enough.

How about this: "If you take a golden rectangle—one whose length-to-breadth is in the golden ratio—and snip out a square, what remains is another, smaller golden rectangle. The golden ratio is also difficult to pin down: it's the most difficult to express as any kind of fraction, and its digits—10 million of which were computed in 1996—never repeat....It was this elusive nature that led the 15th-century Italian friar and mathematician Luca Pacioli to equate the golden ratio with the incomprehensibility of God." (Quote culled from an article in The Guardian.)

But in my opinion, it's not the math anecdotes (mathecdotes?) that make it interesting. It's that the number shows up everywhere in nature. It's in the patterns of leaves, the honeycombs of bees, the physics of black holes, the chambers of a nautilus, the shape of galaxies...it even shows up in some crop circles. It's everywhere.

You can even find an awareness of the golden ratio in the Parthenon, the Great Pyramid, in DaVinci's Vitruvian Man, and the musical compositions of Debussy and others. Even "a cross-sectional view of the top of the DNA double helix forms a 10-sided figure, made up of two five-sided figures, which have diagonal ratios of 1:1.618." The more you read about 1.618, the creepier—and the more exciting—it becomes.

Need a better explanation? Try this. It won't disappoint.

So, is phi a grand mathematical accident that just so happens to bind everything in the universe together? Or, could it be what the folks in encryption call a primer, a key that unlocks the door to greater truths...a key that allows us to understand and solve greater problems...? That's the question I asked myself and it kept me up all night. It just feels right.

I don't think of God as a dude with a white beard sitting on a golden throne with angels floating around him playing harps. I'd be more inclined to think of god as an unseeable thing; something without form as we know it, the same way math itself has no form. But maybe God, whatever that means, left 1.618 out there for mankind to find as evidence of intelligent design. Or maybe 1.618 existed before, or independent of God, and God merely used it to create the universe. Or maybe we created God out of a need to understand why these constants of nature exist. Or maybe nature itself is God, and vice versa, and we see it every day.

I have no idea. And that really, really works for me.

Labels: neat-o, ponderage

• So Christopher Walken has started a feeling-out period for a run at the Presidency. It won't last, of course, but it's interesting. I like Christopher Walken as an actor, even though he's always so Christopher Walken, and I agree with all three of this published policy stances, even though they're too brief. The problem is, he only has three of them. He'll need about thirty more, at least. And that Web site needs A LOTTA work—if you can even get it to load. I'm just looking forward to seeing Christopher Walken portray Christopher Walken, the Candidate, on SNL.
• Are we a step closer to cold fusion?
• This is pretty cool, but it's just so...so...Japanese.
• Those who think that the U.N. can do no wrong—major newspaper editors included—never investigated or reported the oil-for-food scandal with due zeal. Shit, I talked about it here more than the local Rochester D & C. But finally, the light has shined on the corruption. And Saddam's role in it is interesting, considering the stealing of billions of dollars in U.S. aid would have been enough justification to take him out.
• So there's a black hole headed our way. They say we're safe. Good enough. But I wish they had used more definitive language than "it will probably never get close enough to affect our solar system."
• Cheers to Salman Rushdie for saying what no muslim leaders have yet been willing to say. It's a drop in the bucket, though. Militant Islam is the biggest threat to world peace and global stability, and if for some reason you disagree, you should at least read some excerpts from their life manual.
• This will attract whiners, but I agree that this would be a good, and justified, start.
• I hate seeing articles like this, about strange species die-offs and disruptions in the food chain. Clearly, the Earth is undergoing change. Clearly, the Earth always has and always will undergo change, with or without a human presence. But oceanic changes can have devastating consequences, and I just don't see enough attention paid to these things.
• The ACLU is complaining about the increase of hidden cameras in NYC. That ACLU, always fighting the wrong battles for all the wrong reasons. They might even use the word "Orwellian" to make people think it's a government watching your every move sorta deal. Maybe they should consider the fact that the hidden cameras in London allowed them to identify and nab those terrorist bombers. They've proven to be effective. Maybe, must maybe, the knowledge of many hidden cameras everywhere will also help stem the tide of general crime and violence as well.
• It's hard to believe, but it's true. In Texas, whites are now a minority. Is it time to start legislating hiring advantages for them?
• This "open letter" to the Kansas school board is pretty funny. Thanks, Todd.
• When I read this Onion headline, I laughed nearly to the point of tears.
• If you don't follow NFL football, ignore this item. If you do, check out Gregg Easterbrook's brilliant take on the hold-out trend that has marred the 2005 preseason.

Labels: ponderage

I often get to talking about movies with my friend Adam, a bigtime movie aficionado. It just comes up, as certain as the sun. And every time, I'm reminded that there are a shitload of movies that I should have gone out of my way to see by now. Each time a new one is revealed, I get a look of disbelief, a double-check query ("You've never seen Citizen Kane?"), and an emphatic assertion that I need to see it. I'd love it. These are the classics, the greats, how can I have missed them? I'm not sure. I just did. Adam's one of maybe a handful of people whose taste in movies I trust 100%. I've known Adam for about ten years, so I've accumulated quite a Reluctant To Admit I Haven't Seen It movie list. You have your list, too. Everyone does, don't they? Here's mine, although I'm sure it's incomplete:

1. Citizen Kane
2. Casablanca
3. Chinatown
4. On The Waterfront
5. The Manchurian Candidate
6. Raging Bull
7. North By Northwest
8. Lawrence of Arabia
9. The Maltese Falcon
10. Vertigo
11. Blue Velvet
12. Dr. Strangelove
13. Midnight Cowboy
14. Doctor Zhivago
15. Amadeus
16. West Side Story
17. Rear Window

While I'm on the subject of movies...the other day I was trying to think of some old DVDs that I'd like to own. For whatever reason, I historically avoid buying comedies, as much as I love them. I'm not sure why. For example, I'll likely buy Dead Poet's Society, one of my favorite films of all time, but I know I'll never buy Raising Arizona or Airplane, two classic riots that I would never turn away from if they were to show up on teevee. It's as if dramas or adventure films have some kind of intrinsic value that comedies don't. I don't think they do, but yea. It's as if. Anyway I started jotting down a list on the back of an old yellow receipt. (Lists. How they help you buy things.) Here it is:

Ten great movies that I haven't seen in at least ten years and would like to see again: (And no, I didn't write out this heading)

1. Dead Poet's Society
2. Raising Arizona
3. Stand By Me
4. 2001: A Space Odyssey
5. Spaceballs
6. Dazed and Confused
7. The Fisher King
8. Airplane
9. Scent of a Woman
10. The Brothers McMullen

And while typing this, I figure I might as well list half as many that I haven't seen in half as many years:

1. The Shawshank Redemption
2. The Usual Suspects
3. L.A. Confidential
4. Sling Blade
5. Fargo

I'm gonna try to prioritize the movies on my List of Shame. Am I forgetting any?

Since my seed done found purchase some time ago, I've been in three situations where I'm asked by old aquaintances if I have any kids. "No, but we have one on the way", I've said all three times. A pre-paternal automaton I am.

To "have one on the way" sounds so storkey, so FedEx.

Yet out it comes, making hash of my verbal filter. I suspect this is only the beginning of such things. Transformational things. I'm not sure who is going to do the most changing, the baby or me. Note the double entendre there; Nikki has already told me that I have to take a class in diapering. A CLASS? Can't YOU just show me in the comfort of our own home? I've been an uncle since the age of 15 but I've never changed a diaper in my life.

And I don't like baby talk. I realize I'll probably slip into some semblance of baby talk, but I will NOT talk with that super-inflected Ultra Baby Gaga Tone. For example, I will never say:

I will never do this. That's where I draw the line. Nikki knows this. Nikki thinks I'll eventually back away from this and hope nobody hears me and calls me on it. Nikki is wrong.

And I have found myself observing other parents out of the corner of my eye—in the store, in restaurants, wherever. Not to judge or appreciate...just to sort of give an everyday context to my imaginings of what it'll be like. It's also nice to have many friends with that new parent smell.

And we get these congratulatory cards in the mail. I've been so out of the baby loop that I didn't know that you're supposed to send friends congratulatory cards after they announce their oven bun. I also just learned that Nikki has been taking care of that aspect of our friend etiquette for some time, without my knowledge. She's a good egg, keeping that sorta thing out of my concern. I'm not a big card guy.

Anyway, these cards have babies on them. You know, stock stranger babies. Perfect little Gerber pupae. He could be John A. Smith of Bangor, Maine, the first child of Edna and Steve Smith, or it could be Annie Kruger of Huntsville, Alabama, third daughter of Bob and Betty Kruger. I understand the sentiment, and thanks and all, but the Stranger Baby thing strikes me as strange—strange in an interesting sense—because it's like a tacit suggestion that newborns aren't people, but templates. It's not the baby on the picture that matters, it's the babiness. It makes these cards suitable for countertops, but not the refrigerator, where real babies—babies we know—reside. Know what I mean? No? Oh come on.

We just heard the hearbeat for the second time. They say fast heartbeats tend to indicate a girl, but our doctor said that "they" are old wives and their tales are merely tales. Nik thinks it's a girl because of a dream she had. I'll wait for the science. I've never been too interested in looking at ultrasound photographs, but that's the next step. I'd like it if he/she would smile back at us and give us a thumbs-up. An emphatic two thumbs up and a wink would be even better. Come on, kid. Do it for daddy.

Labels: at home

• Thanks, Eliot. Thanks for being the first public servant, to my knowledge, bold and principled enough to go after the music industry for filling people's ears with tripe, year after year after year. I wonder if it's too late. This isn't so much about the artless wonders who have made it big; the britneys and n'syncs and the thousands of other manufactured artists out there. It's about the real talents whose music has gone unheard because a few people have decided to make aesthetic choices on behalf of millions. Best case in point that I can think of: XTC. The fact that their albums since 1990 have not received ANY playtime is just about criminal. XTC IS pop. They should be included in the e.g. in any definition of pop.
• A big FU to Judith Regan and her publisher for agreeing to publish the "runaway bride's" story. If you care about her story, please turn to the person next to you and demand to be slapped. A real slap—nice and handprint-hard. Do it now.
• Competitive eating? Come ON, ESPN. I watched fifteen minutes of it, and witnessed a 130 pound Japanese kid named Kobayashi shove 53 hot dogs, with buns, into his gut in 12 minutes. Then there's the 19 pounds of spaghetti, messily devoured in an amazing 3 minutes or something like that. This is freak show stuff, but it's not a sport, ESPN. It's not a sport just because the contestants wear sponsor shirts (Alka-Selzer, of course) and receive trophies and cash. Is it? Give me the national spelling bee. Fine. That was great. I can watch brainiac ten year olds who can outspell anyone I know. But I can't watch an obese guy eat 7 pounds of cow brains in 15 minutes. I just can't. And I think ESPN oughta know the majority of people probably can't either. Stick to sports, will ya?
• Best bunch of Onion sidebar items I've seen in a while. The cat killed me.
• Got an email from some guy who offered only this: "Writing about Burger King ads probably isn't going to produce traffic." Thanks for the tip, m11maven. You could have said that in a comment. Sheesh, write about BK ads once and you're labeled for life. And traffic isn't a big concern. Not selling anything. But if I was, it would be at a low low price that can't be beat and I'd throw in this set of steak knives and what would you expect to pay? Not $39.99, not $29.99, not even $19.99. That's right, for the incredible price of $9.99 you'll get this, that, and the other thingy, plus the special thingy, the bonus thingy, and of course the special bonus thingy. But wait there's more...
• No matter what your political leaning might be, you have to admit this is pretty damn funny. I haven't cackled out loud in a couple weeks, so this was a nice treat.
• Ah, New York taxes. If you've ever wondered how it has gotten so bad, start with fraud and corruption. When will someone in government have the balls to say enough is enough, and finally start enforcing laws and assigning devastating penalties for things like this?
• Yea, it's just perspective distortion, but I saw this picture of Paris Hilton and had a good laugh at her giant man hand.
• Of the biased pundits in D.C., I used to think Paul Begala was pretty good at his line of work, no matter if I agreed or disagreed with him. But quotes like this make me think he's gone completely 'round the bend. Take a vacation, Paul.
• The paranoia about RFID is getting out of control. Most of the anti-RFID arguments reflect a complete misunderstanding of the technology. RFID is a *good thing*, for improvements in both corporate efficiencies and national security. Google is more of a threat to personal privacy than RFID, but only a few people are talking about that so far.