I see where I am wrong

Once again, I've let my blog go too long without an entry. But I'm starting to see what I'm doing wrong. One thing I found out a while ago was that I should never say what my next entry will be about. This would be fine for a real writer who can write on demand. But I'm a poor writer who needs to think about things too long in order to write about them. Realizing this mistake doesn't keep me from making it. I will try to just write what I want to as often as I can. I will try not to limit myself by saying beforehand what I'm going to write about next.

Today I realized another problem - I'm trying to write great, profound pieces each time I write. Again, that would be fine for a good writer but it doesn't work for me. I need to take a cue from my wife's blog and write more often about every day things. She has an entertaining blog and sometimes it is really profound. But she doesn't try to make every entry an opinion piece worthy of The Atlantic. It is nice to be able to look back at her blog and be reminded about something we did. It also helps us remember when we did certain things.

So, paraphrasing something we used to say in the 70's, this is the first blog entry of the rest of my life.

My idea to increase voting rates

Well, this election is over and we voted in very high numbers. Some say it was the highest voter turnout in 40 years and others say it was the highest percentage in 100 years. But this was an especially compelling election with big problems to fix and with a big backlash against a very unpopular President. How do we keep these numbers up?

As I was watching the election coverage last night, I thought about how we divide up the electoral votes for each state and how we divide up the number of representatives each state can send to the House of Representatives. They are both based on the relative populations of the states. That's why the Census is very important that we run every ten years. Each state goes to great lengths to make sure all of its people are counted. But I was thinking that, even with the great turnout we had in this election (about 64% according to some), that means we are dividing up our representation by including 36% of the people who don't even vote. And that's on a record breaking year! If they don't care enough to vote, why should they count in deciding representation? Just because someone is sitting there taking up space shouldn't be a reason to give one state more representation than another. How do we get more people to vote?

My idea is to divide up electoral votes and Representatives to the House based on the number of people that voted in the last national election. Then it would be in everyone's interest to go out and vote. The states would do a much better job of encouraging people to vote and to make voting an easier and more pleasant experience. Another advantage to this would be that the representation would be recalculated more often and be closer to the real number. Right now we're working from data that was calculated during the last census in 2000.

One problem with this would be voting fraud. It would be much more important to guard against this and it would be tougher because the state government might be tempted to encourage it or at least not try as hard to stop it. There would have to be better ways to prevent voting fraud. But I think that is a problem that could be overcome. My idea is kind of like when Major League Baseball decided to make the All Star Game mean something by giving the league that won the game the home field advantage for the World Series. Now the players have an additional reason for playing hard in the game.

Anyway - congratulations Mr. Obama. I think you make a fine President and I will be praying for you and your cabinet.

A quick story

Yes, yes yes - I know- I've been lazy about my blog. I've got some great stories to tell but there just isn't time. But I just reminded myself of a story that I have to write down before I forget it again.

One of my (minor) responsibilities at work is to handle the installer for our software product for the Apple Macintosh. Whenever we release a new version, I have to make sure we can install it on OS X - the operating system for the Macs. One day, we were having trouble with the installer on a certain version of OS X and we had one test machine with that version. I hadn't used that computer before so I had to create an account for myself. I noticed that two of the other guys in our group already had accounts on this machine and they had small pictures by their name in the start-up screen to help identify their accounts. I liked that and thought I'd add a picture to my account when I was ready.

I went through the set-up procedure and when it was done, it offered a picture for me to use for my account. It was the picture of a not very nice looking old man who seemed to be in a bad mood. "Why in the world would they offer me that picture?", I fumed. Then it dawned on me - this nice, new Mac monitor had a built-in camera and, while I was setting up the new account, it had taken a picture of me setting up the account! It offered my picture as the one to identify the new account.

I shifted from admiration for Apple's software for setting up a new account to disgust for what I've come to look like in unguarded moments. When did I become an old man?

My Train Trip

We usually go to visit my mother once a year. It is a long trip, over 600 miles by car, and the kids don't handle it well. My wife doesn't like it much, either. We often convince my mother-in-law to come with us, too. She helps keep everyone happy and keeps the kids occupied but sometimes even she can't help when we're stuck in miles of traffic waiting for construction work to clear. So, this year, we decided that I would go visit "The One Grandma" by myself. An aside: My son gave her that name (he was very young then) when he realized that she had no one living with her (my father died the year before Cindy and I were married) and she was alone.

I thought about driving or flying but with the price of gas so high and the airlines raising prices and charging for everything from check-on luggage to pillows, I decided to try something different. The bus is less expensive but is cramped. So, I thought about taking my first long train trip since I was eleven. The price was amazing. The round-trip fare from Providence, Rhode Island to Pittsburgh was only $120 (with a small discount because we belong to AAA). The amount of time I would be on the train would be a little longer than if I drove - but I wouldn't be driving. I'd be sitting back, looking at the scenery, walking around, eating food from the train's snack bar and reading. Could it really be this good?

There used to be many more trains stopping at Pittsburgh. Now, there are only three - one to Chicago, one to Washington DC and one to New York City. But the timing was good for the New York City train. I would have to leave Providence at 7:30 AM and would get to Pittsburgh around 8 PM. We had to leave our house at 6 AM to get to Providence in time and I'd still have to take a bus from Pittsburgh to my old home town about 45 minutes south of Pittsburgh but, as I remembered from 33 years ago when I still lived near Pittsburgh, the bus station was right across the street from the train station. This was going to be so much more convenient than the airplane! The picture on the left shows the roomy seat I had from New York to Pittsburgh. There was room to stretch out. The meals I bought in the snack bar were not expensive and I had a seat to myself most of the trip. If you have the time, I highly recommend taking the train. The conductors and the the folks working in the snack car were very friendly. The announcements of stations were clear and timely. And when we got to interesting sights along the way, for instance, this picture shows Horse Shoe Bend near Altoona, PA, the conductor even gave a little talk about its history and significance. Did you know that it was considered significant enough in the transportation of troops and goods during World War 2 that the Germans sent saboteurs to destroy it?

This is the first of at least two articles about my trip. The next one will be about what happens when things change in a place you thought you knew.

My "bug" collecting story

A while ago, I said I was going to write a funny story (to me at least) about how I tried to get more insects for the collection that was due before the end of the semester. Well, here goes:

This first part is boring and not funny at all.
I was taking a course in Invertebrate Zoology. This is the study of all animals without a backbone. That's the huge majority of animals in the world. It includes everything from single-celled animals like the amoeba and paramecium to the mollusks like the clam and octopus. It includes the insects and many others. It's kind of like dividing all the people of the world into two groups - the citizens of the state of Massachusetts and NOT the citizens of the state of Massachusetts!

Our professor, Dr. Daniel Hoffman, had lowered the number of families we needed to have in our collection from 100 to 50. Family is the name given to a level of classification in biology (here is a Wikipedia article on the hierarchies of classification in biology). For instance, all the bees are in one family - Apidae. So, you couldn't have a bumblebee and a honeybee in your collection. They are both in the same Family. The size of the collection was reduced early in the semester so, of course, I assumed that since we only had to do half the work it would be a piece of cake. I didn't rush right out and get a bunch of specimens. I had all semester. If only I had thought for a minute. This was the fall semester. It got colder as the semester progressed. Insects don't like the cold. How many insects have you seen in penguin or polar bear movies? It didn't take too long for me to panic. It was October and I had less than half the specimens I needed. I was looking everywhere. I was digging under the bark of decaying trees, I was scouring the basements of all the labs, I was searching through the botany lab's greenhouse. I was running out of time and was nowhere near the end. The funny thing about panic is that it caused me to miss a lot of good places where I would go in later years for non-panicked insect collecting.

Every day after dinner, I'd climb on my bicycle and go for a long ride that ran along the river. There were a lot of low, wet areas and one particular day I had to ride through clouds of various kinds of insects. So, I came up with the great idea to attach some sort of bag to the front of my car and drive along this same road at night. I'd get more specimens in an hour than a student could hope for! So, I got a coat hanger and my laundry bag, slid the hanger through the place where the draw-string went to close the bag and wired the bag to my front bumper. That didn't work because the bag had nowhere to open - it bumped into the grill of the car. So, then I moved it up and attached it under the hood so that the bag was above the hood. I put it on the passenger side of the car so it wouldn't block my view but I had to keep looking over at it to see if I was getting anything and that was as bad for my driving as a blocked view. So, then I moved it to the driver's side of the car. This way I could "aim" the car at promising things that showed up in the headlights. There didn't seem to be many insects that night, though. I kept pulling over to check the bag and I saw nothing. Talk about panic. I was wasting my best chance here. So, after checking the bag once more, I stopped to think for a minute. In the headlights I could see that I seemed to be on the edge of a large grassy field. I had this vision of thousands of insects laying low in the grass. From what I could see (not very far - you idiot), it looked flat so I got into the car, pulled off the road and started driving through the field. The results didn't match my imagination. There was no cloud of insects rising from the grass as I plowed through it but I could have been missing it because I couldn't see well over or around the bag that was flying in front of me. So, on I drove hoping to hit the spot where all of the insects must surly be hiding.

As I craned my head to try to see around the collection bag ballooning out in front of me, I noticed the grass getting higher and I could feel the ride getting rougher. Now, the grass had become high weeds that were higher than the hood of my car. Now I had no idea where it was or how far I was from the road. I thought I'd better turn left and head back for where I thought the road must be. Still the weeds grew higher and higher. Now I was really having trouble controlling the car. Finally, I came out on the road. The last 20 yards or so I couldn't see where I was going because the weeds had gotten so high. I stopped on a wide part of the shoulder to inspect my collection bag. Nothing! I was devastated. As I stood there next to my car, I looked over at the field I'd been driving through. I could see a barn off in the distance and the glow of lights in the house next to it. Then, as my eyes adjusted to the night after turning off my headlights, I saw that I'd been driving through the edges of a corn field. I couldn't believe how lucky I was that I didn't run into a fence or a ditch as I had driven. It didn't look like I'd gone through the main part of the field but just on the edges that weren't tended. Perhaps seed was carried there by animals or scattered by the wind. I must have turned off just in time.

I did finish the insect collection but just barely. I was a day or so late as I looked for one more specimen to fill out the collection to 50. I expanded my search and finally one day, when I had the hood of my car up to check the oil, I noticed a horrible, mangled grasshopper-like insect stuck in the radiator of the car. I did a cursory classification and stuck it in the collection. The funny thing is that it was probably there from my drive through the field and was the only specimen I got from that adventure.

Cows facing north?

I was reading a news item on the CNN website (it can be found other places, too) that has the headline, "Cows' compass is pure animal magnetism". One of the quotes in the article, though, has the scientists saying, "The magnetic field of the Earth has to be considered as a factor." So, in other words, the cows' sensing and reacting to the Earth's magnetic field is just one of the possibilities. Other possibilities that are mentioned are that the cows are just trying to stay cool by exposing a smaller dimension to the sun. Another possibility mentioned in the article is that perhaps the cows are aligning to the fences which may tend to be aligned north and south. But the editors just couldn't resist all the puns that go along with cows lining up with the compass.

It reminds me of a story I heard at our college. Supposedly a guy at our school, who was an avid outdoors man, always slept with his head oriented North. He supposedly did this to "tune" his body to the Earth's magnetic field so that someday he might be able to sense North if he was lost, without a compass and unable to see the Sun or the stars. It is probably just a story but it's fun to think about.

Well, we enjoyed "The Clone Wars"

My son, Evan, and I had been very excited about the new Star Wars: The Clone Wars movie after seeing previews for it. We are big Star Wars fans and we're big animation fans so it seemed a natural for us. When it was finally released last week (August 15), we went to see it the next day. I decided to read a few reviews before we went so I could help Evan figure things that that might be confusing. I will never learn. If the reviews are glowing and build my hopes up too high, I can be disappointed by the movie because it doesn't meet my expectations. But if the reviewers pan the movie, I may not go to see the movie or just wait for it to come out on DVD where it is never as exciting as in the theater. But, in this case, we were going to see it no matter what. As Evan said, "I'm so excited. This is my first chance to see a Star Wars movie in the theater." He's had to see all the others at home on our standard definition 27" TV.

So we went on a Saturday afternoon and Evan got his usual small popcorn and a small drink. We settled back, enjoyed the previews and waited for the movie to begin. I was so worried that he wouldn't like it. The reviews talked about how this movie was too complex ("Where", they said, "was the simple joy of the first Star Wars.") or the animation was not as good as other recent movies (we'd just seen WALL-E) and some reviewers were complaining about the fact the animation director had been influenced by the old Thunderbirds marionettes. With the movie starting, I was very tense. Would this be a big disappointment for my son?

I didn't need to worry. The action started at the very beginning and rarely stopped. And yes, that was another complaint of the reviewers. Too much action? That sounds like the famous complaint from Amadeus where Mozart's rival complains, "Too many notes." These movies are all full of action and this one just has more of it. And, in my view, the action here is much better explained. They actually take the time to explain what they are trying to do and what they need to do to counter the enemy's moves. It makes the weapons they have seem more real - the weapons have advantages and limitations. Also, you learn much more about the Clone Troopers. We learn about the selfless devotion and the duty they feel. They are human but they are brave beyond measure (as opposed to the 'droids they are fighting who are just mindlessly following orders and programming). The plot is very intricate but my 12-year old son was able to follow it. While it didn't have the simple story of the original Episode 4 Star Wars, it was no more complex than the Episode 3 Star Wars. And how could this have been a complaint (and it was) of the reviewers? How many times have you heard reviewers complaining that movies today are too simplistic? How many times have you heard reviewers complaining that animation is just cartoons - that serious animations are lacking? As far as we're concerned, this is a fine movie and a really fine example of modern animation.