My By Pass

Dear Blogosphere, 

For those of you who are worried about me because I haven't blogged in a few weeks ... and my last entry was about my heart attack and upcoming by pass ... ta-da ... I survived. Worry no more. 

My surgery was delayed about a week, rescheduled three times, but it eventually happened. The first two delays were because my blood being too thin for surgery. The last time it was delayed, one day more, due to another patient whose needs were more urgent than mine. I was bumped. I was in the hospital for 13 days waiting. It was like being in a hotel, if the staff came into your room several times a day to stab you. That is what it felt like. They drew my blood everyday. I had an IV attached to a pole and I took it with me around the room as well as when I walked laps with around the ward. I had an awful view from my room so I enjoyed walking down the hall to see the outside world. I am grateful for internet connection because the television was pretty bad; why watch a movie if every tenth word is bleeped and ever ten minutes it is interrupted with a commercial? I made best of the situation with Hulu and HBO-Max on my IPad. I even got in a Zoom job interview.

Not being a people-person, I am more inclined to complain about a group of people than not. That being said, I can't really find anything to complain about the nurses. They poked me with their IVs, shots, woke me to give me drugs etc. They did all this while being very professional and quite pleasant. There were a couple of annoying incidences, but nothing worth repeating. I tried to remember all their names but there were so many of them and they all wore masks, so this was difficult.

I was shaved the night before the surgery  ... my chest because it was opened to get to the heart, my legs for the veins they were going to take from them and my beard for the anesthesia. This is the first time I have been without a beard in over 30 years. They had already shaved me once before so there was only a week and a half of growth to deal with. The first time, it took about two hours. I am a hairy guy. I also had to wash my entire body with some some sterile pads and clean my nostrils with a Q-tip to make sure I didn't have the MRSA virus present. This was the 24th of January. I slept well and awoke the next morning to find a bunch of nurses in my room, doing what nurses do. My wife showed up shortly after. I was heading to surgery. 

During a coronary artery bypass surgery, the surgeon removes a piece of blood vessel from the patient's leg, chest, arm, or belly. In my case it was both my legs. They had problems finding a good vessel in one of my legs so they had to take one from my arm. Then the surgeon uses that piece of blood vessel (called a "graft") to reroute blood around the blocked artery. The surgery is called "bypass surgery" because it bypasses the blockage. This surgery has a 1% fatality rate and a 1% chance of causing a stroke in the patient. These numbers scared me, one in a hundred is too high when I could easily be that one. But that 1% is usually someone very old and sickly and I was the second youngest patient in the cardiology ward and still reasonably healthy. So I felt good about it. This didn't stop me thinking about my death and how I'd be leaving my wife and son. There must have been about 20 people in the Operating Room buzzing around me. So much activity prevented me from thinking about it too much. They scooped me onto a metal table and connected me to the machines. I was asleep shortly thereafter.

I awoke at about three the next morning in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). I was on a lot of drugs, but still in some pain. I could feel a stinging pain in the incisions in my legs, arm and chest. I had a tube in my chest as well, a catheter and two IVs in my arm. It was pretty awful. I am amazed that by 6AM I was able to stand up (with nursing assistance) and walked a step over to a recliner that was next to the bed. By early afternoon I was out of the ICU and in a regular room. This was amazing because I remember back in the 1980's when my father had his first bypass, he was in very rough shape for a few days. The progress they've made is stunning.  

One of things that changed is that they wake the patient as soon as possible now. They find that the healing is quicker when you are awake. Also, the incisions in the arms and legs are much smaller than they used to be. One of the nurses told me that patients used to complain that most of the post-surgery pain was coming from the arms not the chest. It may be because the surface area is much smaller in the arms and legs than on the chest. Also, the arms and legs are used much more than the chest. So they make very small incisions now in the extremities because the large incisions are just not needed and patients are more comfortable. I have not researched any of this information. This is all from the many conversations I have had with many of the medical professionals that came into my room.

The stay in the hospital, post-surgery, was surprisingly not that long. I spent more time pre-surgery than post. I had surgery on Wednesday and I was home by Sunday. I was walking around the ward again alone just a couple days after surgery. The hospital food was surprisingly pretty good. I learned, after being there for almost three weeks, what to avoid on the menu. When I ordered, the person on the phone would tell me if I was over my carb or sugar limit for the meal. This was good practice for my new life. My post-heart attack life means keeping close track of calories, carbs and sugar. I have an app on my phone that tells me when I am over or approaching my limit.  

We had a long list of things to go over to get out of the hospital. I was not allowed to lift anything over a ten pounds for a month. That is about the weight of a gallon of milk. I am also not allowed to sit in the front seat of the car when I travel. Of course, this means no driving.  These rules are because my chest is not completely healed. I also had a pile of meds that have to take for a variety of reasons. I have to walk  for five minutes several times a day which is very tedious when you can't leave the house. My yard, driveway and road are very icy/snowy and it's 13 degrees today ... hence, I don't leave the house. 

I guess if you have a heart attack in Vermont, January is the best month because there isn't a lot you can do here anyway this time of year. It has been a month since the surgery. I've been outside the house only a few times, mostly for doctor's appointments. I've taken walks to the front yard to meet the boy at the bus stop. I've walked to the compost bin and the wilderness camera on my land. My big trip this past weekend was to our town's annual Winter Fest where I enjoyed some good company and the chili cook off.  I'm hoping by the Spring I will be running again and most of this is behind me. 

Texas, Government Power and Hurricane Harvey

The state of Texas is the land of weak government. I don't mean this as demeaning at all, it is merely a statement of fact that most Texans would agree with. They like their government weak. Their state legislators are part-time and are paid very little. They usually have other means of employment, because you couldn't live on what they make. The Governorship is not officially part-time, but as designed, they have very little power. Unlike the President and other executors like Governors in others state, the cabinet does not report to him/her. They work in conjunction with the Governor not at the Governor's pleasure. The strongest power the Texas governor has is the bully pulpit. This is something to consider the next time a Texas governor runs for President. When someone says "they run the second most populous state," you can say, "um not really." This isn't necessarily a problem, just an observation. The state seems to be run well. It has low corruption and a high standard of living. I spent a week there and I liked it. They might be the best drivers I've seen anywhere in the US. San Antonio was gorgeous, Austin was funky and they have great bacon.

Their approach of low government spending and involvement is extended into local government and urban planning. The city of Houston was built on a bogs and prairies 80 feet above sea level. They have no centralized zoning or urban planning, but they have unfettered development and capitalism which has resulted in unprecedented growth in the last 50 years. If you are looking for a good example of why Libertarianism is joke, look no further. They paved over their pastures and floodplains, which are the sponges that absorb rainwater, to build tenements and parking lots. Their success has been based on unchecked growth to the point where they are the fourth largest city in the country. Over 4,000 residential and commercial structures have been built in their 100 year floodplain since 2010. Both of their hypocritical US Senators have voted against relief for Sandy victims a few years ago. It devastated New Jersey and other parts of the East Coast calling it pork. They also supported cutting funding for FEMA for the same reason, now have their hands out for Federal funds to support their people after Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston. The people in Texas voted for them. I realize not everyone in Texas voted for them, yet it still makes me a little bitter when my Federal tax dollars are going to a city that has done all the wrong things based on a outdated ideology and greed. Poor planning on their part doesn't constitute an emergency on mine. You want Federal relief, Texas? Stop voting for out of touch whack jobs like Ted Cruz.

This flood isn't an anomaly. It is much larger than their earlier floods, but they have had three 500 year floods in the last three years. So expect another next year and the year after etc. The water temperature of the Gulf of Mexico did not go below 73 degrees this winter which causes more storms in the area. This is a new record. Imagine that, a new records in the era of global warming, but yet the people of Texas keep electing global warming deniers into congress. Both Cruz and John Cornyn were among the 22 senators to urge Trump to pull out of the Paris Accord. They also consistently support the political party, Republicans, that hasn't made global climate change a priority. Most of their representatives in Congress are Republicans. They have 32 Congressional districts, and all but 11 of their Representative are deniers. Even those 11, the Democrats included, have awful environmental records. They have no interest in resolving their flood problem.

Since President Obama was elected in 2008, a steady rise of anti-government militia groups around the country has been apparent. The number of these groups in Texas, as reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is 17. Texas is second only to Michigan in this category. Since they hate government so much, why must we send billions of our Federal tax dollar to them? I won't be donating any money to the relief since I have already given with my taxes. I know this sounds harsh, but to me this seems like a financial sink hole. I see nothing that tells me they will rebuild in a responsible way. Since they hate government so much, lets see how well they rebuild without Federal tax payer money.

The War on Science ... From the Left

I've considered myself a liberal most of my adult life. As soon as I knew the difference, I have leaned left. Most of the stuff I see going on with the right wing of American politics is difficult to take, stomach or comprehend. The right wing assault on science, in the forms of creationism or climate change denial, is particularly alarming. But I find this far more alarming when the assault on science comes from the left. The idea that the progressive left is the friend to science is a myth. Many of them are as anti-science as the conservatives and an argument could be made that they have been more effective in squashing science because they do it from within (as teachers, bloggers or journalists) as opposed from above (politicians and businessmen).

1) Genetically Modified Foods (GMOs) are safe. Here in Vermont genetically modified foods have to be labeled even though there is no proof that they are dangerous in any way. Labeling it is harmless and, I guess, people have a right to know what is in their food, but many people assume that it must be bad if it is labeled. My friends on the left often refer to it as "franken-food," yet genetically modifying food has been going on for thousands of years by selective breeding. The strawberries you buy in the supermarket look and taste nothing like wild strawberries. Now that we do such selective breeding in a laboratory by altering plants on a genetic level, it is scary to some. It is a common trope among my liberal friends that anything natural is safe and mad-made is not, but there is no science behind this. Because GMOs are still reasonable new, research continues. If you don't eat them because you think that they need more research that is fair. But to outright claim that they are dangerous is pure conjecture and not science, and sometimes it is just paranoia.

2) Vaccines don't cause autism and are overwhelmingly safe. In all, vaccines have brought seven major human diseases under some degree of control: smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus, yellow fever, whopping cough, polio and measles. They have saved millions of lives. In 1998 a study was published in Great Britain that claimed a link between autism and vaccinations. It involved only 12 children and not only contained falsified data but severe conflicts of interest. It has been discredited and its main author lost his license, but this idea is still around and endorsed by some very famous people, most of them on the left. In 2017 already, ten states have reported measles outbreaks with over 60 deaths. The majority of the people affected were unvaccinated. The measles vaccine is not 100% effective, so some vaccinated will die if they are surrounded by the unvaccinated. Even as the evidence of vaccine safety piles up, so does the number of non-vaccinated. According to a number of articles I have read in the Washington Post and Mother Jones, this belief isn't higher among liberals but has broad belief across the political spectrum. I find this hard to believe. This week alone, I have had seen three of my friends on Facebook post something stupid about vaccines. So perhaps it is just me. I've never see any such thing from anyone that I'd consider conservative. Creationism and global warming denying yes, but my conservative friends have vaccinated all their children.

There was once a time in this country where the American university was a bastion of free speech. This time is over. When places like Middlebury College (here in Vermont) or UC Berkley erupt in violence over speakers visiting, we have to start asking the question: Is the left any better than the right? We used to be the adults in the room!  You don't fight bad ideas by squashing speech. You fight bad ideas with good ideas. If there is bad science in Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve," you prove it with good science.

If you only listen to speech that you agree with, then you are just guilty of confirmation bias as an anti-vaxer or global warming denier that scours the Internet looking for articles that justifies their beliefs. Liberals are supposed to know better. Having an open mind means letting it all in (within reason), evaluating, culling ... embracing the good stuff and rejecting the bad ... repeat repeat repeat.

The President Who Cried Wolf - Tяump log #15

Trump and his minions tell so many lies, you cannot respond to all of them. It is seems to act like a smoke screen. You are so busy fighting the lies that you have little time and energy to do anything else. They lie about everything big and small: the crowd size at the inauguration, crime stats, voter fraud, media coverage and terrorist attacks. Autocrats attack truth because they don't want to be accountable. If you cannot trust anyone, then you might as well trust the one in charge.

This is terrifying because at some point, we will have to trust him. Something big will happen, like a terrorist attack or a disease outbreak, and we will all have difficulty believing him.

2/21/17 - Trump's anti-science outlook is emboldening the anti-vaccine movement which is threat to public health. (Source: Washington Post)

2/20/17 - Trump's recent comments about Sweden only show that he gets his information from really bad sources ... like his followers. Is he a liar or is he is simply out of touch with reality? (Source: Washington Post)

2/19/17 - Much of Trump's deputy cabinet positions have gone unfilled because he refuses to hire anyone that has ever said anything negative about him. This severely limits the pool of qualified people. (Source: New York Times)

2/18/17 - Trump's budget could axe some very popular government programs that really don't cost a lot. They include Public Broadcasting, National Endowment for the Arts and ArmeriCorps among others. (Source: New York Times)

2/17/17 - During the 2.5 years prior to the election, Trump retweeted white supremacists 75 times. He now has a white supremacist as a top advisor. He also has ties to an organization called ACT for America, a group categorized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. (Source: Washington Post)

2/16/17 - Trump's nominee for Labor Secretary, Andrew Puzder, steps down due to the fact that his nomination was going to be rejected by the Senate. He had a ton of problems like a history of domestic violence, having an illegal alien as a maid and ... oh ya ... the fact that he hates labor. (Source: Washington Post)

2/15/17 - Trump campaign aides were in contact with Russia a year before the election. This amidst the fact the allegations that Russia hacked the DNC around the same time is very troubling.  Meanwhile Russia tests a land missile violating an international treaty and the White House is quiet about it.  His buddy, Putin, can do no wrong. (Source: New York Times)

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Prior Trump Logs:
Issue # 1 - posted November 15th, 2016
Issue # 2 - posted November 22nd, 2016
Issue # 3 - posted November 29th, 2016
Issue # 4 - posted December 6, 2016
Issue # 5 - posted December 12, 2016
Issue # 6 - posted December 19, 2016
Issue # 7 - posted December 26, 2016
Issue # 8 - posted January 3, 2017
Issue # 9 - posted January 10, 2017
Issue #10 - posted January 17, 2017
Issue #11 - posted January 24, 2017
Issue #12 - posted January 31, 2017
Issue #13 - posted February 7, 2017
Issue #14 - posted February 14, 2017

Week One AKA Hell Week: Trump Log #12

I once had this naive idea that once Trump became President, I'd have difficulty finding my daily links for my Trump Log. The opposite has happened. I find so much each day, it is difficult to choose which link to go with.

I can't seem to get away from it. I listen to an interview with Journalist Evan Osnos on NPR's Fresh Air that seemed to have nothing to do with Trump and yet I hear terrifying news on this show as well (NPR's Fresh Air - show from January 25th - "Survival of the Richest"). Towards the end of the interview, he talks about Trump's insistence on using the one China policy as a bargaining chip. His observations are very scary. This is one policy that China deems non-negotiable and will go to war over it. Trump has already violated it and offended them by calling Taiwan. Trump is unhinged and he has a nuclear arsenal at his disposal. He needs to removed from office, not later, but now.

1/31/17 - The number of travelers affected by Trump's Muslim-ban is much higher than the administration says. They continue to lie to us on an unprecedented scale. (Source: Washington Post)

1/30/17 - Trump's first week sets the bar very low. Sean Spicer and he have lied so much that it will be difficult to believe them in the weeks to come. When something really important comes up, how will we know we can trust them or that we are hearing the truth? (Source: The Atlantic)

1/29/17 - The director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were removed from the National Security Council. They will sit in on meetings only when their specific roles are discussed. In their place Trump added white supremacist Steve Bannon who has no experience in such matters. This elevates the founder of fake news site Breibart News to a role beyond politics but into policy. (Source: Washington Post)

1/28/17 - Trump signed an executive order banning immigration from seven majority Muslim countries, yet three countries left off the list (Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia) happen to be countries where Trump is doing business. His conflict of interest couldn't be more blatant. (Source: Bloomberg News)

1/27/17 - Four of the State Department's senior diplomats have been forced to resign. These are posts that usually have longevity spanning across administrations and decades. This means that Trump's state department, with the President and Secretary of State with no experience, has very little institutional memory. (Source: Washington Post)

1/26/17 - As we plummet toward peak oil, we need to move away from oil production and towards more renewable resources. Our prior President understood this, but Trump and his oil rich cabinet want to move us backward. It has nothing to do with jobs, it has to do with greed. (Source: New York Times)

1/25/17 - Trump institutes a gag order on the EPA. Under this order none of the employees can communicate with the media, no press releases, no blog posts, nothing. So much for transparency. This is something governments do when they are doing something that they shouldn't. What are they doing? Are they converting our Environmental Protection Agency to be a branch of the Energy Department? Who knows! (Source: Reuters)

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Prior Trump Logs:
Issue # 1 - posted November 15th, 2016
Issue # 2 - posted November 22nd, 2016
Issue # 3 - posted November 29th, 2016
Issue # 4 - posted December 6, 2016
Issue # 5 - posted December 12, 2016
Issue # 6 - posted December 19, 2016
Issue # 7 - posted December 26, 2016
Issue # 8 - posted January 3, 2017
Issue # 9 - posted January 10, 2017
Issue #10 - posted January 17, 2017
Issue #11 - posted January 25, 2017

A Cabinet of Deplorables - Trump Log #3

I told myself that I would limit myself to one link per day on these Trump logs, but there is so much wrong with our President-elect. His incessant tweeting, the acts of hate in his name, his potential Cuban policy, the return of water boarding, threats to the ACA, Medicare and Medicaid, conflict of interests, climate change denial and a cabinet of deplorables, the guy isn't even president yet and I'm already sick of him. I can't get them all in this log. I only have so much time. I have a full time job.  

11/29/16 -Trump threatens to throw people expressing the First Amendments rights of freedom of speech in jail.  (Source: Slate)

11/28/16 - Trump wants to keep some parts of the Affordable Care Act, the good stuff, and do away with other stuff. The problem with this is that what he wants to do away with actually pays for the good stuff. (Source: New York Times)

11/27/16 - Trump continues his tirades on Twitter, acting more like a teenage troll than the future leader of the free world. Clinton and Stein are in their right especially in races that were so close: Wisconsin he won by 0.8 percent, Michigan by 0.2 percent and Pennsylvania by 1.1 percent .... especially, when Russian hacking is expected. (Source: Slate)

11/26/16 - The pile of conflicting interests are piling up. The president may be exempt from conflict of interest laws, but this is more of a question of ethics than it is of law. (Source: New York Times)

11/25/16 - Trump offered Ben Carson the position of Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).  Carson has no experience in government nor in housing. In his own admission, he is not qualified for a job in the federal government even though he ran for president. (Source: New York Times)

11/24/16 - Happy Thanksgiving 

11/23/16 - Trump will eliminate NASA's climate change research. (Source: The Guardian)

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Past Trump logs:
Issue # 1 - posted November 15th, 2016
Issue # 2 - posted November 22nd, 2016

Star Trek and Physics

Whenever you watch a show like Star Trek, you have to suspend disbelief for the duration of the show, like when you watch a musical. You have to get yourself in a state out of your mind that some impossible or unlikely stuff is going to happen and you have accept them in the parameters of the story. In reality people don't spontaneously break out in song and warp drive will probably never be possible. But there are other things that Star Trek just gets wrong about science and if you know anything about physics watching the show will just bother you. You have to teach yourself to ignore it and enjoy yourself.  The most obvious example is the explosions that go boom, big loud booms. We all know that there is no sound in space. "In space, no one can hear you scream" because sound waves have nothing to bounce off of, there are no molecules to vibrate. Star Trek is good television but mostly bad science so we accept the big booms after the ship explodes because it looks cool and spaceships exploding quietly is just plain boring. Another obvious example is the fact that they never loose gravitational control. Their ships are running out of power and barely enough for life-support and yet, they are not losing gravity. They sometimes find dead ships floating through space that never seem to have lost gravity.  What? I could imagine that the portrayal of our beloved characters floating through the corridors of the Enterprise would be very expensive for a television show, but they should at least be consistent or mention gravitational control once in a while.  They seem to pull gravity out from hiding, like an unwanted step-child, only using it when it is convenient to their plot. When the ship gets hit with a torpedo, they all stumble (sometimes in different directions). But if they have artificial gravity, would this even happen? If so, then wouldn't they also all end up flying to the back of the ship when it goes into warp? I don't know, comment if you do.

These things usually don't bother me with Star Trek. I am not a scientist, I am only moderately knowledgeable about science and I realize Star Trek is, again, just good entertainment but not good science.  But the most recent installment of the franchise pushed me over of the limit. The creators of Star Trek: In the Darkness obviously didn't put believability high on their list of priorities. If a non-scientist like me can verify the wrongness of your physics with 5 minutes on Google then your writers are just damn lazy. The biggest problem is again, gravity. The Enterprise is orbiting the moon when it losing power. It gets pulled into the Earth's gravitational pull and starts plummeting. This actually makes sense because the Earth does pull objects, like the moon, into its gravity. The problem here is that in film it took about 10 minutes to reach the Earth. It took Apollo 11 over three days to cover the same distance, 238,900 miles. A ship with no power, plummeting this distance in minutes ... um ... no! This was distracting to say the least. I had to watch this scene again after the film was done just to see if I had missed something. The reentry into the Earth's atmosphere was also anti-climatic. We were set up for it by Sulu saying, "if we don't get power and shields back on-line we are going to get incinerated on re-entry." A minute or so later, we see the ship burning a little. No one on the ship seems hot or even phased by the re-entry at all.  No incineration, just a few burnt panels. Darn you young Mr. Sulu, I'll never believe any of your hyperbole ever again.

This film was more Star Wars than Star Trek. It was very little adventure but mostly explosions and action. This is not what Star Trek fans signed up for. We want interesting alien cultures, intrigue, a seemingly insurmountable problem, a last minute resolution, some social commentary and a little bit of action. In looking for a wider audience, they lost their base of fans. This is the Mitt Romney of Star Trek movies. The one thing they did right, the opening scene was really cool. It had an alien race, the social commentary and a volcano, but even this had its science problems.  Sulu (again Sulu!) says that the ship's shields can't sustain the heat of a volcano. Really? So a ship designed for deep space travel and entry into planets atmospheres (like it did to the Earth's without its shields later in this same film), can't sustain the heat from a volcano. I beg to differ. Lava is around 2200 degrees F while the temperature of the space shuttle recorded on re-entry in 1981 was 2500 degrees.  (Thank you Google). If you can handle re-entry into in the atmosphere, you can handle a freakin' volcano eruption.

This film is also plagued by something that plagues many prequels. This is supposed to be take place a few years before the original series and yet, they seem to have technology that even the later shows don't have. Apparently, you can transport to Kronus from Earth, you can call someone on Earth on your communicator while orbiting Kronus and they have some really cool automatic seat belts that come in really handy when that selective grativy starts to act up. I would imagine writing for a prequel has its challenges. It must be hard to resist showing new gadgets, but these are very challenging to swallow. I agree that the Star Trek franchise needed a reboot. The actors in this reboot are fantastic (except for Benedict Cumberbatch's portrayal of Khan) and the special effects couldn't be better. After the travesty of Star Trek:Voyager series and the failure of Star Trek: Enterprise, the show needed new ideas and a new approach, but they needed to become more visionary not digress into an average action film. If this continues, I half expect to see Bruce Willis or Sly Stallone in the next film. I am glad to see JJ Abrams move onto the Star Wars franchise and leave this one alone. Star Wars fans like things-that-go-boom and shitty dialogue. He should feel welcome there.

Hawaiian Mongoose

If I ever moved to Hawaii, one thing I would miss is the lack of large mammals. The largest mammal (other than the human) is a wild pig. There are no deer, moose or bear like we have here in Vermont. One of our first wild life sightings, while vacationing in HI, was of a tiny creature that looked like a fuzzy ground squirrel.  

On second sight, it looked like a mink or an ermine, but it was actually a mongoose. Mongooses are not native to Hawaii, but are from Asia.

In 1800's the Pacific Islands had a huge rat problem.  The booming sugar cane crop attracted vermin without enough natural predators on the island to control their population.  The rats were destroying crops at such a rate that something needed to be done to control them. In 1883, 73 Indian mongooses were introduced to the island of Hawai'i. The problem here is that not only doesn't the mongoose have any natural predators but mongoose hunt during the day while rats are nocturnal. Mongoose did eventually control the rat population but it took a very long time. In the meantime, mongoose became a pest rivaling the rats. A male mongoose reaches puberty in four months and the female has litters of two to five a year. The mongoose also feeds, among other things, on goose eggs.  The Hawaiian state bird, the nene, is now driven to the edge of extinction mostly due to the mongoose.

Human beings are the only predators of the mongoose in Hawaii. Residence are urged to trap them. One interesting way of killing a mongoose ... beeping your horn at it while it is in the road in front of you. In order to turn their heads and look, they have stop. I think I would have a hard time doing this, but in the long run, it seems like the right things to do.

Hawai'i

Since arriving in Kona for vacation, I have been joking about how strung out on vowels I am. Place names in Hawaii have an exorbitant amount of vowels and I have been told that all of them get pronounced. There will be no merging of vowel sounds on this island. When the language was originally written down, using English letters, in the 19th century, it had less consonants than the standard 20 we use (B, D, R, T, V, H, K, L, M, N P & W). When a consonant is used, it has be followed by a vowel and all words have to end in a vowel. So place names like Honaunau-Napoopoo are a real challenge for native English speakers like myself.

This place holds many fascinations other than the language. Regardless of what Congressman Johnson thinks, islands don't float, but are the clumps of land that are above sea level. The Hawaiian islands are tops of a huge volcanic mountain chain. The largest of these is Mauna Loa which, if measured from its base at ocean floor, is larger than Everest.  Both of Hawaii's active volcanoes are on Hawai'i, aka the Big Island, Mauna Loa and Kilauea.  The Big Island is basically five volcanoes that are so close together that they form an island, half of the island is covered by Mauna Loa.  The planet Earth has 13 climate zones, all but two of them (arctic and sahara) are on the Big Island and yet the difference between the average temperature between winter and summer is four to eight degrees. The hottest temperature ever recorded on this island is 97 (F).  Even my home state of Vermont gets hotter than that sometimes.

Tourists, like myself, usually stay in the Kona district of the island. In my time here, the temperature has been around high 70's to low 80's (F). We drove to Hilo yesterday, a two hour drive. Kona (the west side of the island) gets an average of 3 inches of rain each year while Hilo (the east) gets 113 inches a year (12 feet).  We left the tropical seaside of Kona among the surfers and sunbathers, drove through coffee plantations, mountain dessert, cactus, rainforest, saw some snow and/or frost, eventually into the more working class town of Hilo. The temperature dropped as low as 34 (F) on our drive. While Kona's main industry is tourism, Hilo is where the bananas, macadamia nuts and orchids grow.

Our big event yesterday was touring the Kilauea from a helicopter.  The picture above is of the Pu`u `O`o vent that has been erupting continually since January 3rd, 1983.  In that time, it has claimed 189 buildings (100 private homes), almost 9 miles of highway and not a single life.  Lava moves so slowly, people have plenty of time to get out of the way. Below you will see a highway that is mostly covered by a lava field (now cooled and hardened into volcanic rock).

One square mile of land (640 acres) is created every 20 years on Hawai'i due to hot lava reaching the ocean.  It took two years for the lava to eventually reach the coast line. Here is a picture I took of a newest land on Earth being created:

While most islands are losing acreage due to global climate change, Hawai'i is growing.  I am glad to hear this because I love it here. 

Other People's Beliefs

When I was a kid, there always seemed to be the same group of kids in my science classes that sat in the back and slept. I am willing to bet that most of those people are registered Republicans now. The Republican Party's (selective or otherwise) ignorance of basic science is scary.  I am not a scientist, not even a computer scientist.  Most of my knowledge of science comes from my high school classes, a few college electives and many years of listening to and watching science programs.  But when I see Republicans resisting simple scientific concepts like climate change and evolution, I have to wonder were they paying attention in high school?  And what do their high school science teachers think?  Does Republican Senate candidate and Representative Todd Akin really believe that the bodies of rape victims "shut down" and prevent pregnancies?  Or is this something he said just to get publicity?  I don't purport to be all knowing or a genius. I am woefully ignorant of many aspects of life. I am simply amazed when I get exposed to the things that other people believe.  With the Republican Party's National Convention starting this week, I brace myself.

I don't consider myself a Democrat.  I am more of an Anti-Republican.  I have voted for Republicans in the past, but since the late 1980's, the Republican Party has taken such a turn to the right that I can't, in clear conscience, vote for any of them.  Since the Bush (43rd) Administration I decided not to vote for any Republican on any level whatsoever.  I won't vote (R) for school counsel or town auditor, not until they get a clue.  People can believe what they want and I won't care until it affects public policy.  Once it does, it very much becomes our business.  They want to teach Creationism in science class, they want to talk about global climate change like it is a myth ... then I stop being quiet about it.

It is with great dismay that I point out that the stupidest thing I have ever seen, in regards to ignorance of science, is not by a Republican but by a Democrat.  This link from Youtube is of a Democratic Congressman from Georgia, Hank Johnson, who thinks that the island of Guam is going to tip over if we put too many people on one end of it. When I say that I am amazed by what other people believe, this is a perfect example. This man, an elected official, thinks that islands float. So instead of islands just being a part of the Earth that is above sea level, he thinks they float like logs. Scary indeed.

Congressman Hank Johnson said this in the halls of Congress in March 2010.  Later that year he was reelected. I have to ask, as a Democracy, do we get the government that we deserve? If we demanded excellence of a government officials, would this man have been reelected? Or was his opposition so bad that he was just reelected as the lesser of two evils?  A third option had to exist... like a third party or a write-in candidate. Certainly, we can do better than this.  Right?

Star Party

The second week in August is a week I look forward to every year.  This is when the Perseids Meteor Showers are viewable. What makes this even more interesting is that our local public radio station throws a star party.   They gather on a mountaintop in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont with an astronomer in tow and broadcast for an hour answering questions and just chatting about the night sky.  If it is a clear night, we make a fire in our yard then move our reclining deck chairs and radio out to the fire pit and listen in amazement. 

Here are some of the things I learned at this year's star party:

• Every school kid knows the old folk song "Follow the Drinkin' Gourd."  If you don't know it, I suggest checking out Sweet Honey and the Rock's version.  It describes a route how to find your way north, two of the stars in the Big Dipper (the drinkin' gourd) point toward Polaris (the North star).  If you follow it, you will be heading north.  Apparently, it was popular with conductors of the Underground Railroad.  North meant freedom from slavery. 
• The only real difference between asteroids and meteoroids is size.  The cut off is 33 feet.  If it is larger that 33 feet in diameter, it is an asteroid.  Most meteoroids are much smaller, merely dust that makes a big streak when it brushes across our atmosphere.  
• We could see a lot of satellites running across the sky.  We were viewing at 9pm in the evening.  The reason they are viewable is because it is early and the sun's light is still hitting them.  They don't give off much light so it is the sun's reflection that you are seeing.  If you view the sky later in the evening, you will see a sky without the satellites.  With the exception of an occasional plane going by, it will be the same sky that the natives of the continent saw centuries earlier.

I look forward to next year's star party. 

The Transit of Venus

You won't be able to see it with your naked eye, but this June (the 5th and 6th to be exactly) a rare astronomical event will be happening in our skies.  Venus will be passing between Earth and the Sun.  If you are at an observatory using some of their amazing equipment, you'd be able to see its the path across the face of the Sun.  In North American we will get to see the beginning of it, while Asia, the Middle East and most of Europe will be able to see the end of it.  The rest of the planet is out of luck.  Don't look for it without the equipment, obviously, unless you want to be blind that is.  This particular event will not be happening again until 2117 so for most of us this our last chance.  The best place to view it will be the South Pacific Islands so plan your trip now to Hawaii or Tahiti.

Solar Storms, Now and Then

If you are planning a road trip in May 2013, you might want to consider rescheduling or at least, plan on taking a paper atlas with you rather than depend on your GPS. At some point in mid-2013, our sun will reach solar max, the period of the highest sun spot activity.  It has a nine to 14 year cycle. So the last time when we were in solar max was around the year 2000. The solar activity can knock out satellites, cause us to lose them for a short time and quite possibly cause them to malfunction or disable them indefinitely. We now have a lot more technology dependent on these satellites than we had in 2000.  The solar max expected in 2013 is not expected to be one of the biggest, not even as big as the one in 2000, but some of our worse solar storms have been during smaller solar maxes. Considering how strained our power grid is these days, this could be a time that we could be without power for awhile.  On the flipside, it could be that we don't even notice it.

The biggest solar storm ever on record occurred in 1859.  At the time, ships lost the use of magnetic compasses for a short time. Also, some telegraph towers or telegraph machines had power surges causing fires and explosions.  During that storm, the aurora borealis (aka the Northern Light) were reportedly seen from the equator.  People in New York City could read the newspapers during the mid of the night from this light without a problem.   Other years we had sun storm problems were 1921 and 1960 when widespread radio outages were reported.

A few years ago, I was camping in Gaspé, Quebec.  I was having the worst difficult time making a fire when I noticed the dancing lights in the sky.  We lost interest in the fire and pulled up our chairs and watched the show.  I cannot wait to see them again.  I might not even have to travel this time.

Alien Life Watching the Signing of the Magna Carta

If the Drake Equation is correct, then there are roughly 10,000 planets or other celestial bodies that have intelligent life on them at any given time in our galaxy, the Milky Way.  So roughly, for every 1,000 light years, we should find one of these planets or moons containing intelligent life.  The light (or images) from the closest of these celestial bodies would take 1,000 years (due to the speed of light) to get here even if we are viewing via telescope.  So if we could observe spaceships leaving a planet's atmosphere, that would mean that this is what happened ... oh ... maybe 1,0000 years ago.  The possibility also exists that we could be looking at a planet with intelligent life, that currently is in their space age, but we are looking into their bronze age because the image takes so long to get here.  Mind-boggling once you start thinking about it.

It goes the other way as well.  If an aliens species were watching us at this very minute, they could be watching the signing of the Magna Carta or the rise of the Pueblo civilization. They would not see our current highly advanced societies with our satellites circling the Earth not until the light we are transmitting reaches their telescopes some 1,000 or so years from now.

With this being said, one would think that the chances of a highly advanced technical people contacting each other, with two way communication, is not very likely.  A very large window (time span) would have to be open when their respective civilizations overlapped.  A world like that one portrayed in Star Trek, which is very pleasing and dreamy, is just not going to happen.  We will never travel a short amount of time to meet alien cultures. I love that idea, it is a great plot device.  But make no mistakes, Star Trek is good television, not good science.

Curie and the Prize

Marie Curie is the only person to receive a Nobel Prize in two distinct scientific disciplines.  In 1903 she was awarded the Prize for physics (shared it with her colleague Antoine Henri Becquerel and her husband Pierre) and in 1911 for chemistry.  She was not originally included on the prize in 1903 until her husband, Pierre, complained. He wrote: "If it is true that one is seriously thinking about me [for the Nobel Prize], I very much wish to be considered together with Madame Curie with respect to our research on radioactive bodies." The letter was written to mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler who was an advocate for women in science.  Neither of the Curies showed up in Stockholm for the ceremony citing illness.

In 1911, when Marie accepted the prize alone for her work in chemistry, she was a widow.  Pierre died in a fluke accident involving a horse drawn carriage.  In Paris, in a heavy rain, he was knocked over by the carriage and the wheel crushed his head.  Some think that he may have survived the crash if not for his weakened state due to exposure to radiation.

Marie Curie coined the phrase, "radioactivity" in her theory of radioactivity.  She developed techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes and discovered two elements, polonium and radium.   At the time, it wasn't known how dangerous radiation exposure was to your health.  Much of her work was done without proper protection.  Considering this, it is amazing that she lived until 1934 and died at the age of 66.  She often walked around with test tubes of radioactive isotopes in her pocket, stored then in her desk and sometime took the train with a suitcase full of radioactive material.  She died of aplastic anemia, a result of a long term exposure to radiation, which is a condition where your bone marrow no longer produces new cells anymore.  

Corn People and Corn Cattle

It is that time of year again.  It is corn time.  Not the corn growing season, of course, certainly not here in Vermont.  It is corn season because the Iowa Caucus is approaching and politicians just love corn this time a year.  To survive in Iowa, you have to express your undying love for corn, corn subsidies and ethanol.  Ethanol is a dead-end environmentally, but that doesn't matter to our so-called liberal president, he supports it.  At this point, it seems that only Fox News thinks Obama is a liberal.

In 2008, John McCain was the only major candidate to be honest and come out against corn.  Of course, in the Iowa Caucus that year he came in a distant third to Huckabee and Romney, confessed corn lovers.   More recently, in this year's Republican Primary race, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty promoted "phasing out" corn subsidies.  What happen to him?  He dropped out of the race after a very poor showing in the Iowa Straw Poll.  Why is the Straw Poll so important?  With such a poor showing, donations to his campaign would dry up.  

Newt is crazy about corn subsidies.  He finds it to be a national security issues.  He wants us to wean off oil and pump ethanol in our cars or heat our homes with it but that would require much more land to be farmed than is possible.  This is just another nutty, Newty idea that has little basis in reality.

The US is, by far, the largest producer of corn on the planet, producing almost half of the supply.  The US has 400,000 farms growing 10 billion bushels, using 72.7 million acres for cash receipts of $15.1 billion.  Corn and soy beans are our two biggest crops. Where does all this corn go?  Very little of it is for direct consumption of humans.  32% are exported overseas, 18% of it goes to sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup and then rest goes toward feed stock for cattle.  Most of our overseas corn goes to feeding cattle as well. Corn fed cattle grow faster thus costing less money.   

The digestive systems of cattle aren't exactly equipped for all this grain.  They usually feed on grass, but most cattle in the US have a diet of at least 90% corn feed.  This causes ulcers in the animals among other things.  To combat the illnesses they are given antibiotics.  70% of the antibiotics used in the US are used by the meat industry.   You feeling a hankering for a burger about now?  No, worries, even farmed salmon are fed corn now.  

Neil deGrasse Tyson and the Titanic Sky

James Cameron's Oscar winning film, Titanic, is famous for being accurate.  Everything from the design of the ship, the chandeliers, gown design and plate settings are historically accurate.  The film is supposed to be scientifically accurate as well.  For example, how the ship sank was a painstaking detail that Cameron wrought over ... the angle of the ship as it sank, the speed of the sinking and the affects of the impact.   When you go around claiming how accurate your film is, there are going to be people looking for things that are wrong.  One of those people is Neil deGrasse Tyson (my favorite astrophysicist), the director of the Hayden Planetarium.

The HMS Titanic sank in the Northern Atlantic on the 14th of April, 1912. There is only one set of stars that should have been visible on that night.   Yet this film, that totes scientific and historical accuracy, had the wrong set of stars in the sky.  Not only were they the wrong stars, but that star pattern that hangs over Kate Winslet shoulder at the end of the film, just doesn't exist.  Only half the pattern exists, the rest of the sky is a mirror image of the first half of the sky.  He got lazy here perhaps hoping that no one would notice or care.  

It is nice to have some pull.  In 2012 a revised 3D version Titanic  will be released for the film's 15th anniversary.  The correct sky is in the new release of the film.  James Cameron has bumped into Tyson a number of times.  I think Cameron might just be sick of Tyson bringing it up.

Jefferson's Moose

We hear a lot about Thomas Jefferson the writer, the politician, the philosopher and even the slave owner. But we don't hear a lot about Jefferson the scientist. The natural world was one of his obsessions, so much so that he kept a room in the White Room strictly dedicated to his collection of fossils. Among them were some of the recent fossils and bones of a mammoth. One of the reasons that Jefferson was obsessed is that he wanted to prove the famous French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, wrong. This was such an obsession that it was mentioned in a eulogy at Jefferson's funeral.

Buffon wrote a fairly prominent article about "American degeneracy" where he claimed that natural objects, fauna, wild life and even people, in the New World were inferior to those of Eurorasia. He stated:

"That the animals common both to the old and new world, are smaller in the latter; that those peculiar to the new, are on a smaller scale; that those which have been domesticated in both, have degenerated in America; and that on the whole the New World exhibits fewer species."

He believed that the cold weather and the humidity resulted in smaller and inferior creatures. This probably arose from the fact that most of the French, when visiting the New World, visited Quebec (cold) or New Orelans (humid). He had a very limited dataset so he postulated incorrectly.

Jefferson was so incensed by this that, as President, sent 20 men into the forests of New Hampshire to find a bull moose. He ended up having a carcass shipped to France and Buffon retract his statements, but the idea of New World inferiority lived on for decades if not for centuries.

Teller Ede, Big Science and Operation Chariot

One of my favorite axioms is the one about the hammer and the nail: if your only tool is a hammer then you will tend to perceive every problem as if it were a nail. This is why our congress that is mainly made up of lawyers, think they can solve all our problems by passing laws. Legislation is their hammer. So if you were a nuclear scientist and one of the creators of the hydrogen bomb, the H Bomb could be your hammer and you might have this crazy idea to drop it on Alaska to solve our energy crisis!

It is one of the craziest ideas I have ever heard. Teller Ede (called Edward Teller by some) wanted to drop an H bomb in the north-west coast of Alaska, about of mile off shore of the village of Point Hope, to open up a harbor for the drilling of oil and mining. He was one of the scientists that worked on the Manhattan Project and the H Bomb. In the late 1950's he was a member of Operation Plowshares which was a US government project to try to find new ways to use nuclear energy to solve everyday problems, peaceful uses for nuclear explosions. Under its umbrella, Operation Chariot was formed. It gained support quickly by attracting Alaskan politicians, university presidents, newspaper editors and church groups. All of them were obviously extremely ignorant of the nuclear fallout that such a blast would cause. The opposition to this madness started from a small group of natives, the Iñupiaq people, who gained traction when they got the attention of such national groups as the Sierra Club.

Ede was also a huge advocate of another whacky idea: SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative). He is so notorious that he is one of the people that inspired the Dr. Strangelove from the film of the same name.

Fresh Water Eels Are Born in Salt Water

When I was a kid, we used to go fishing on the Pawcatuck River in Rhode Island. We were fishing for horn pout which is a fresh water catfish that is nocturnal and a bottom feeder. The worse thing that could happen was if an eel got on your line. You could tell it was an eel because they didn't actually tug the line, but the line would go limp in your fingers. This was probably because the eel was wrapped around your line. You felt it in your fingers because we were throw lines not poles (see my January 2010 posting on Catfish Noodling). When we pulled the eel out of the water, often it would wrap itself around your arm. They wiggle all over the place and are quite slimy. It is a real mess. You sometimes have to cut the line to get it off. You not only lose the fish but the tackle as well. It is not a very tasty fish with many bones so we usually were more upset about the loss of the tackle than the fish. It also took a lot of line to set up your tackle and line again. It was common knowledge that if you caught an eel, you were done in that spot for horn pout and had to move your boat. Apparently, they don't get along. I've never had this verified as truth, but it seemed true because if you caught an eel and didn't move, you didn't get another pout for the night.

Fresh water eels are actually spawned in the ocean. The word for this is catadromous. I might have respected them a little more if I had known this as a kid. They take quite a long trip to just end up on the floor of my row boat. The eels I used to catch were probably about 10 to 14 years old. When they are 14 years old, some of them head back to the ocean and spawn where they were born, probably the Sargasso Sea which is south of Bermuda. This is where the eel orgy takes place. Some of them make the trip, not just to my river in Southern Rhode Island but as far away as Norway or Ireland. It could take them close 200 days to get there. I have new found respect for these creatures.

Eel populations are threatened not only because fresh water dams (many without eel ladders) make it difficult for them to make their trip back to the Sargasso, the North American eel are dieing off due to a parasite called nematode. This was introduce to their population when someone in the 1970's or 80's introduce some European eels into the American river system. The parasite attacks their swimbladder which assists them on their journey in the ocean. Since the ocean is too deep for them to feed on the bottom, the swimbladder helps them travel on stored energy. Think of it as a battery cell. So they drowning on the way to spawning. All because of some Euro-trash eels.