Winter Beach Walk

Noel

For Devotion or Diversion

Candles are timeless, much like a fire in the fireplace.

A Christmas Carol

Barry Blitt ~ The New Yorker

John Klossner ~ The New Yorker

Ex Libris

Spent the better part of this afternoon at the Martha's Vineyard Film Center, watching Frederick Wiseman's latest documentary, Ex Libris, about the New York Public Library. My last Wiseman film was National Gallery.

Like Wiseman's other documentaries, Ex Libris is an immersive if not exhausting experience at three hours and seventeen minutes long. The challenges our public libraries face - financial and technological - are epic, and portrayed so well and thoroughly by Wiseman.

My favorite and local branch, the Jefferson Market Library, was a footnote, but accurately and playfully depicted.

Shoe tossing? How about buoy tossing?

The good folks in Woods Hole, Massachusetts do things their own way.

Jonathan Haidt: The Age of Outrage

"Intersectionality is like NATO for social justice activists."

"Let's return to Jefferson's vision: 'For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error as long as reason is left free to combat it.' Well, if Jefferson were to return today and tour our nation's top universities, he would be shocked at the culture of fear, the tolerance of error, and the shackles placed on reason."

The Umbrella Man and Neville Chamberlain

Truth is stranger than fiction, especially assassination conspiracy theories.

The Bloom is off the Rose

Cartoonist Barry Blitt captures the zeitgeist with his latest New Yorker cover, titled "Nowhere to Hide."

Barry Blitt ~ The New Yorker

da Vinci's Salvator Mundi

Leonardo da Vinci ~ Salvator Mundi

Titled Salvator Mundi, Saviour of the World, aka Jesus Christ, now fully restored and attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, and to be auctioned this evening at Christie's in New York City.

Postscript! A private buyer's successful bid was $450,312,500.00.

MLB AL Rookie of the Year

All 30 votes.

First unanimous decision in 21 years . . . since Derek Jeter.

All rise . . . Aaron Judge:

• 52 home runs
• 128 runs
• 127 walks
• 114 RBIs
• And, yes, 208 strikeouts.

Stratford Point Lighthouse

Trick, Treat or Trump

October Surprise - The New Yorker ~ Carter Goodrich

The New Yorker ~ Brendan Loper

Sail Away

Last sail of the season.

Yanks for the Memories

Halloween Costumes

There was a time when Halloween costumes were variations on a few themes like witches, ghosts, mummies, vampires, princesses, and hobos. Then came comic book superheroes like Superman, Batman, and Robin.

Most were homemade, often with a little help from Mom. It was the innocent province of children, traveling in neighborhood packs, with pillow cases to collect treats. Starting in the 1950s, social causes crept in with small orange cardboard boxes supplied at schools to solicit coins for those less fortunate by saying "Trick or treat for UNICEF."

Today, college students and adults buy trendy, expensive costumes, and go to Halloween parades and parties to make statements about identity and politics, increasingly at their own peril. Many colleges now restrict "ethnic" costumes that some say inflame feelings of cultural appropriation.

Vogue magazine researched the most Googled costumes for women by state this year. The winner by a landslide . . . Wonder Woman.

And then there's this costume. I hope it's bulletproof.

Red MAGA hat sold separately.

The Wall ~ PartyCity

Last Day of the 72nd Annual MV Derby

Caught and released these albies this morning using Hogy Epoxy jigs off Cape Higgon in Chilmark. Thanks to Captain Peter C.

Hypocrisy

Mike Lester ~ The Washington Post

The Calm Before the Storm

Eminem jumps the shark.

How Seinfeld Constructs a Joke

A few months ago a YouTube video explained how the comic Louie CK tells a joke. I was surprised by the precision and discipline. I guess it's because he makes it look so natural and easy.

Now Netflix is getting into act with its Jerry Before Seinfeld special.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Seinfeld has been writing his jokes with a pen on a yellow legal pad for decades. He saves them all, in alphabetical order.

Seinfeld said, "I don't want people to know how much work I put into it. I just think it's more fun when it seems off the cuff."

Silly me, I thought it was about nothing.

We're Having a Baby!

Well, that's what Amazon said yesterday.

And then we received this email apology. Is confusion the right word here? Of course, Amazon's "technical glitch" went viral.

The Sky is Falling

Or maybe it's not.

The Wall Street Journal reports there are millions of pieces of space junk from past space missions and satellites orbiting the earth. The Air Force tracks more than 23,000 of them, many traveling at speeds up to 17,000 miles per hour, where an "aluminum pellet 1-centimeter wide packs the the kinetic equivalent of a 400-pound safe moving at 60 miles per hour."

In the movie Gravity, space debris sets in motion catastrophic mission failure. No surprise, Hollywood blamed the Russians.

Today, with advances in rocket delivery the physical and financial hurdles to launch things into orbit are lower than ever. More than 35 companies are now launching hundreds of small CubeSats into low earth orbits every year.

How serious a problem is this? According to The Wall Street Journal:

"No company has more direct experience with the hazards of space junk than Iridium Communications Inc., which operates a network of 66 large communications satellites in an orbit about 480 miles above Earth to link up satellite phones and data systems. When launched in 1997, the network was the world's biggest deployment of low-earth-orbit satellites.

In 2009, an abandoned Russian military communications satellite slammed into an Iridium satellite, with a closing speed of about 26,000 miles per hour.

The satellites broke into 2,300 pieces of high-speed shrapnel large enough to track. Some burned up in the atmosphere, but most are expected to orbit Earth for decades to come. It was the first time an active satellite was destroyed by an accidental impact with another satellite.

All told, Iridium has lost nine satellites in orbit over the years. The company declines to say how." 

As the old pilot maxim goes, "Altitude is your friend." Most manned missions, including the International Space Station, travel in low-earth-orbits below altitudes of 1,200 miles where it takes between 84 and 127 minutes to orbit the Earth. Most large LEO satellites are expected to de-orbit over time due to the Earth's gravity and orbital decay.  There is another band of satellites that are in stationary, geosynchronous equatorial orbits (GEO) of altitudes of 22,236 miles. The smaller stuff, especially debris, seem to stay in orbit.

And you thought man-made climate change was a problem.

It's just one more reason intelligent life from other galaxies take detours past Earth.

The Dance

The Dance ~ Jay Lagemann

Warhead

The New Yorker, the progressive news and arts weekly, has been obsessed the last two years reporting on Donald Trump, first the candidate, then the president.

Trump has inspired more than a dozen covers, which usually infantilize him, satirize his hair, and often both.

Once in a while, The New Yorker finds other prey.

Eric Drooker - Warhead ~ The New Yorker

Anita Kunz - New Toys ~ The New Yorker

Go Fly A Kite

Lots of wind today from the northwest. Hope it holds up for next week's Martha's Vineyard Wind Festival.

The Day After the Solar Eclipse

Wasn't the eclipse a welcome astronomical diversion?

Except at The New Yorker. They didn't miss a beat.

The New Yorker ~ Kim Warp

The New Yorker ~ Ellis Rosen

Solar Eclipse Hysteria

Solar eclipse hysteria is upon us with news reports about profiteers selling fake safety glasses and Amazon giving refunds, and the American Academy of Ophthalmology and American Astronomical Society warning about the risks of eye damage.

Google Trends illustrates that searches about the eclipse, especially "interest by region," mirrors the path of totality.

Google Trends

The Wall Street Journal reports that Jackson, Wyoming, will be swarmed with crowds as it falls right in the path: Oh No, Here Come the Solar Eclipse Hordes.

Even the 1st Interstate Motel nearly 300 miles away in Casper, Wyoming has gotten into act, commanding well over $1,000 per night for rooms that usually book for under $100.

Easily the most witless and ridiculed example of eclipse hysteria was the article by Matt Rocheleau at the Boston Globe that strained much too hard to connect the path of totality to Trump voters: The Solar Eclipse Path Will Overwhelmingly Pass Over Trump Country.

Boston Globe

For better or worse, the 70-mile-wide swath of eclipse totality could be anywhere and still overwhelmingly pass over Trump Country. Something tells me the Sun and Moon have always risen above politics.

Washington Post ~ 2016 Election Results by Precinct

More here: Coming Soon to the Sky Near You.

Learn to Love

Automatic Congressman

Yep, our kleptocracy at work.

Tom Chitty ~ The New Yorker

Crispr-Cas9

Remember Mr. DNA, the cartoon character in the movie Jurassic Park, who explains how the park's scientists extract and edit DNA from mosquitoes trapped in amber millions of years ago to bring extinct dinosaurs back to life? Remember chaos theory?



Well, gene editing is now quite real where not a day goes by when something new is reported about the advances - - and moral and ethical issues - - of gene editing.

I first learned about the gene editing tool Crispr, short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, last May when Wired published a video with biologist Neville Sanjana. Sanjana explained the tool, first to a seven-year-old, followed by a fourteen-year-old, a college student, a grad student, and finally a Crispr expert. It's fascinating technology with far-ranging implications and consequences for the human race.


Gene editing holds great promise for preventing the heritability of many diseases caused by DNA mutations, such as autism, diabetes, and cancer.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday on the latest breakthroughs in gene editing in viable human embryos, as well as the race to patent and profit from the market opportunities ahead.

"The technology has sparked a rush of investment into companies poised to take advantage of Crispr. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in for-profit startups founded by scientists whose academic institutions are now warring with each other over the patent."

The moral and ethical issues center on "germ-line" editing of the genes in sperm, eggs and embryos. Such editing not only alters the DNA of an individual, but its offspring and future generations, creating legal issues around consent of the unborn. It also presents the future of "designer babies" where physical attributes like hair and eye color, and height and strength, become genetic choices.

Laws governing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration prohibit the funding and testing of "germ-line" editing, but other countries are not bound by American laws or ethical standards.

Wealth will drive the new world of privilege and access to gene editing and embryo modification.

Welcome to Gattaca.

Sunkissed

Upper Makonikey, Bildad's Roost ~ Martha's Vineyard

Internet Magazine

Kinda sums up the online DailyMail.com experience, and that of so many other internet news and social media sites.

The New Yorker ~ Roz Chast

35 Going On 25

A marvel.

Shaun Botterill ~ Getty Images

Orphaned

My mother died on Father's Day. She was 85 and had been in hospice care for 15 months. She was usually alert but bed-ridden and heavily medicated with Fentanyl and Lidocaine patches for assorted musculoskeletal pain.

My father, her husband for 59 years, died in 2013. She lost much of her will to live after that, but soldiered on for nearly four more years in her stoic Maine Yankee fashion. As her mobility and body declined, she kept in reasonably good spirits, reading, and listening to music and books on her iPod. On rare occasions when pain and frustrations overcame her she'd make melancholic and pointed remarks like "Where's the gas pipe?"

Losing my surviving parent has been less about grief and more about the finality of death. No more visits or phone conversations, stories and remembrances, questions asked and answered, and weekly notes mailed in between the visits and calls. She's gone.

I'm an orphan now but certainly not in the Dickensian sense one fears when young. It's also the realization and acceptance of generational rhythms and the natural order of things, and the fact that my new place as an elder and patriarch has moved closer to the end of that line. My wife's mother died in 1987 and her father in 1995. She's experienced these feelings for some time.

I walked by a Pottery Barn store this morning and saw this pillow on a couch. It stopped me in my tracks. I sat down and thought long and well about her, and said aloud "I love you Mom." She didn't answer back. I got up and left, alone in my thoughts.

Runyonesque

Nathan Detroit, Sorrowful Jones, and Sam the Gonoph have it all over these guys and dolls, one and all.

The New Yorker ~ Tom Chitty

The METI Debate

The New York Times ~ Paul Sahre

Since 1960, NASA has funded and supported efforts to search for extraterrestrial life. NASA's SETI, short for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is now a privately funded group that continues to look for signals. Some of its latest searches are guided by scientist Stephen Hawking and funded by the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner.

A newer and related group, METI, for Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, also known as Active SETI, goes beyond passive searching and actively targets radio messages to known star systems that fit the Goldilocks zone profile of planets presumed capable of supporting life.

Recent transmissions of prime numbers and other visual and tonal mathematical data known as exosemiotics have stirred debate about the wisdom and consequences of advertising life here on Earth. Proponents say these "Hey, here we are!" messages are the continuum of man's existential search for meaning. Opponents warn that evolution pits species against one another and mankind's track record of exploration and colonialism is ample proof of the potential for "extinction-level risk."

As reported last week in The New York Times, Greetings E.T., Please Don't Murder Us:

"There is something about the METI question that forces the mind to stretch beyond its usual limits. You have to imagine some radically different form of intelligence, using only your human intelligence. You have to imagine time scales on which a decision made in 2017 might trigger momentous consequences 10,000 years from now. The sheer magnitude of those consequences challenges our usual measures of cause and effect. Whether you believe that the aliens are likely to be warriors or Zen masters, if you think that METI has a reasonable chance of making contact with another intelligent organism somewhere in the Milky Way, then you have to accept that this small group of astronomers and science fiction authors and billionaire patrons debating semi-prime numbers and the ubiquity of visual intelligence may in fact be wrestling with a decision that could be the most transformative one in the history of human civilization."

Calvin & Hobbes ~ Bill Watterson

An observation. Nowhere in this long and thoughtful article, or in as far as I got in the Comments section, did I find the word God. Is intelligent design purely a terrestrial notion? Cognitive scientists advance the ideas of teleological naturalism and Panpsychism that claim a universal proto-consciousness. Isn't that why are we searching for intelligent life beyond Earth?