Musings

Sometimes there’s no way to know the backstory. Saturday morning about 9.

The tendency to see bias in the news—now the raison d’etre of much of the blogosphere—is such a reliable indicator of partisan thinking that researchers coined a term, “hostile media effect,�? to describe the sincere belief among partisans that news reports are painting them in the worst possible light.

—writes Shankar Vedantam in today’s WashPost. Later Vedantam notes that two researchers working separately found fundamental differences between partisans, offering further insights when paired with observations I have noted previously regarding authoritarian conservatives.

Ross and Perloff both found that what partisans worry about the most is the impact of the news on neutral observers. But the data suggest such worry is misplaced. Neutral observers are better than partisans at seeing flaws and virtues on both sides. Partisans, it turns out, are particularly susceptible to the general human belief that other people are susceptible to propaganda.

Over in the NYT, Robert Pear notes that even the fairly conservative ABA is worried about certain behaviors of the current administration:

The American Bar Association said Sunday that President Bush was flouting the Constitution and undermining the rule of law by claiming the power to disregard selected provisions of bills that he signed.

Sounds like a combo of the authoritarianism and partisan paranoia that’s near-toxic for most of us residing in this republic—hell, maybe even across the globe….

Posted at 5:03 PM | Comments Off on Bias recognition

Each summer when I’m staying at the Green Cottage, I await The Day, the morning when the meteorological conditions conspire to leave heavy dew on the orchard grasses, with a bright sunrise. I try and arise and view the spectacle camera in hand (or stuck to my face!), and obtain at least a few photos, because the potential for an outstanding one is high. The dew outlines the spider webs and the asparagus tops, not to mention the grasses, all in all creating a breathtaking perspective to the east.

This image gives some idea of how dramatic the backlit dew can be, and of the brilliant pink blotches the sweet pea blooms provide.

So The Day was yesterday. Today has been a total surprise, meteorologically! We awoke before five to a fresh breeze from the south and west, the vanguard for a coming rainstorm, that after blowing and blustering, has brought us, for now, an all-day rain—the kind that when I was little would have had all us kids banished to the front porch with decks of cards and stacks of board games and puzzles, told to keep ourselves occupied while the door remained closed!

Apologies for entries referring to the day before—hazards of travel and irregular access to the internet…. This should change soon!

Posted at 11:31 AM | 2 Comments »

Most of the time we don’t see the sunsets because our snug little cottage is protected by a hill and lots of shrubs from the great northwest winds that zoom down from the Arctic. JCB and I caught this view out walking—the usually hidden western sky.

Posted at 3:47 PM | Comments Off on Sunset fence

From the first SD card of images (room for only five at full pixel-potential). And yes, a new 1 gig card is in our immediate future!

JCB and I took a dive the other day and ordered a Canon Powershot A700, which enables us to return to the point-and-shoot photography world. Brown delivered it on schedule this afternoon, and, wheeooo!, life is good!

Well, probably the bigger boost to positive energy in this household today is from the now completely installed tankless water heater. I know it’s mundane, but after being without hot showers for a week, we’re glad to have little Mr. Bosch down in the basement hanging out waiting for the summons to generate some heat!

Generally, JCB and I do a poor job of being consumers compared to the average, but this week we’re measuring up. Should I be sad? Embarrassed? Proud?

Posted at 6:33 PM | Comments Off on New camera!

Seattle sign, courtesy jcb.

Sometimes I check out Arts and Letters Daily, which is a digest of essays, reviews, and the like, some well-written and moderately interesting. Today I found a link to a John Cornwell review of Peter Woit’s new book, Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics, in which he argues against string theory, which is a big deal these days in physics research. Cornwell says

String theory, he avers, has become a form of science fiction. Hence his book’s title, Not Even Wrong: an epithet created by Wolfgang Pauli, an irascible early 20th-century German physicist. Pauli had three escalating levels of insult for colleagues he deemed to be talking nonsense: “Wrong!�?, “Completely wrong!�? and finally “Not even wrong!�?. By which he meant that a proposal was so completely outside the scientific ballpark as not to merit the least consideration.

I had never encountered Pauli’s three levels of incorrect, mistaken, in error, erroneous, inaccurate, inexact, imprecise, fallacious, wide of the mark, off target, unsound, and faulty (list courtesy of Apple’s built-in dictionary), but I am ready to use them!

I hate to say that the extent of knowledge that many students get from high school means my friends who are teaching undergraduates have reams of their students’ answers to test questions that are easy to deem “not even wrong.�? Note that many are “graduating literate” and prepared for college, and I think life, see Mouse’s blahg.

Posted at 5:56 PM | Comments Off on Three wrongs

Nostalgia sign (me), courtesy jcb.

Sometimes I poke around on the web and find something really useful. Yesterday it was a list of Latin phrases, with translations courtesy of Wikipedia. The bad side of this info is that once again my ignorance is revealed….

Then you find a phrase like sesquipedalia verba (words a foot and a half long) and you start wondering how you can work it into a conversation.

Posted at 8:59 PM | 2 Comments »

Sorry I didn’t note the name of the photog who made this wonderful shot of crewing at the Olympics—reminds me of a water strider!

Today’s NY Times reports great news for fans of the nearly absent American chestnut tree—a stand near Albany (say Al-benny, like two guys names), in South Georgia, that appears to be resistant to the blight that’s killed off most of their relatives. Our Southern oak forests used to have a huge component of chestnuts, most of which were killed off in the early 20th c. Some chestnuts do sprout, but are usually dead before they are 20 yrs old, still from the blight. Up in the mountains, loggers as late as the 1960s were removing fallen chestnut logs, because the demand for the wood was so high.

Apologies for repeating myself about the chestnut blight, but I had to pass along this good news….

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Chestnut victory?

Superintendent’s house, Fayette, Michigan, a ghost town.

Looking back at my overall impressions of fiction published in English over the last hundred years or so, I keep thinking most stories are best in the first third, and weakest in the last third. Few, however, achieve the elegance Jim Harrison invests in the opening lines of The Beast that God Forgot to Invent:

The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense. The discounted sociologist Jared Schmitz, who was packed off from Harvard to a minor religious college in Missouri befoe earning tenure when a portion of his doctoral dissertation was proven fraudulent, stated that in a culture in the seventh stage of rabid consumerism the peripheral alwyas subsumes the core, and the core disappears to the point that very few of the citizenry can recall its precise nature. Schmitz had stupidly confided to his lover, a graduate student, that he had in fact invented certain French and German data, and when he abandoned her for a Boston toe dancer this graduate student ratted on him. This is neither specifically here nor there to our story other than to present an amusing anecdote on the true nature of academic life. Also, of course, the poignant message of a culture spending its time as it spends its money; springing well beyond the elements of food, clothes, and shelter into the suffocating welter of the unnecessary that has become necessary.

Not only is this fine fiction, but it is provocative. After all, is rabid consumerism really a foregone conclusion in civilizations? Do you in fact spend your time as you do your money, or are you more parsimonious in one than the other?

What among the unnecessary has become necessary for you? Beyond the internet, I mean….

Read a longer excerpt of Harrison’s story here. Or make the tale “necessary” and dig it up at your local library or bookstore….

Posted at 4:50 PM | Comments Off on Lace curtains

Today, we voyaged to north Georgia to hike with our wonderful neighbors. In the woods, we saw huge rainbow trout circling in unfished pools, freshly leafed out poison ivy, some one-inch salamander youngsters, and the tails of a pair of disappearing deer, but the most blahgable was the tenderly maintained graves at the cemetery attached to the churchyard where we ate our picnic lunch.

At this grave, note Santa driving a motorcar in the front left, hopefully taking care to avoid the immense praying hands in front of his bumper. I have no idea what the take-away message is of the deer with the nice rack in the back near the gravestone.

Is this a new pattern of on-going ritualization, adopted since locals started to imitate the Latin habit of erecting small commemorative monuments along the roadside where loved ones have died in car accidents? Or, is this a long-standing tradition I’ve just never noticed before?

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Cemetery art

Remember when you had to have muscles in your fingers to type well? (TY JCB for this image!)

Random facts of note:

• The Bravos got rained out—two games!—this weekend.
• Dinner tonight was crabcakes (not carbcakes; watch those typos!), recipe posted on this site.
• I didn’t get outdoors enough today; the weather’s superb and I didn’t get farther than the tomato plants that are already threatening to be leggy and skip blooming ’cause the backyard’s so shaded.
• Walter Mosely really can write!
• Google Earth (download it; it’s free!) is a wonderful program, incredibly illuminating!

Disclaimer: this list in no way competes with Anne’s periodic listing of “things attached to the ‘fridge.”

Posted at 9:10 PM | Comments Off on To-do list?