"This was the voice of moderation until 13 Sept, 2025"
This NYTimes piece about the Chinese student killed in the Boston Marathon bombing brings to mind this: The Diameter Of The Bomb by Yehuda Amichai The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimetersand the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,with four dead and eleven wounded.And around these, in a larger circleof pain and … Read more
by Doctor Science Well, today has certainly sucked. I’m not going to write about the Boston Marathon bombing specifically, though if you Bostonites use the comments to check in we’d all appreciate it. Spring is proceeding apace here in central NJ, with visible changes every day. Driving with Sprog the Elder today, I said that … Read more
by Doctor Science
Part I was New Jersey to Ithaca, NY.
We stayed overnight in Ithaca, visited Cornell the next day, then left in the afternoon to drive to my parents’ place in eastern Connecticut. We drove back on NY 79, then took NY 206 east.
by Doctor Science The aurora borealis may be visible from New Jersey tonight! Also New York, Philadelphia, DC, and much of Ohio! From Accuweather. Graphic by Al Blasko. A solar flare that occurred around 2 a.m. Thursday morning may create a spectacular display of northern lights Saturday evening. The midlevel flare had a long duration … Read more
by liberal japonicus With Ugh coming onboard, it is probably a good time to do a cleanup of the right sidebar and the blogs. The iconoclast in me wants to suggest we do away with the blog roll, as I think no one uses it and the whole thing about exchanging blog links has this … Read more
A commenter asks "What are the chances of any kind of meaningful simplification (never mind reform) of the tax code any time soon?" The answer is: slim to none on both. "Tax simplification" is everyone'ssecond choice here in DC, which is to say that everyone (individuals, the Congress, companies, etc.) has their preferred tax favors that are much more important … Read more
by Doctor Science
Sprog the Younger is a junior in high school, which means Spring Break was for the two of us to do The College Tour, New England Division.
It’s been years since I’ve been on an American Road Trip to places I haven’t been before, and I found myself paying a lot of attention to the landscape: the shape of the terrain, the vegetation, the types of houses and farms. This is something I learned from reading and re-reading Tolkien in my youth, so it soaked into my brain (I once calculated that I’d read the trilogy around 30 times by the time I was 20). The Lord of the Rings has many passages like this one:
Mist lay behind them among the trees below, and brooded on the pale margins of the Anduin, but the sky was clear. The waxing moon was riding in the West, and the shadows of the rocks were black. They had come to the feet of stony hills, and their pace was slower, for the trail was no longer easy to follow. Here the highlands of the Emyn Muil ran from North to South in two long tumbled ridges. The western side of each ridge was steep and difficult, but the eastward slopes were gentler, furrowed with many gullies and narrow ravines. [TT p13]
Being primed by Tolkien to look at landscape, I’m constantly disappointed because most books don’t give me that sense of physical setting at a more-than-human scale. The only exception I found in a haphazard walk through the literary canon was Thomas Hardy.
Movies and TV are much worse. Literature may fail to describe landscape, but movies and TV show you a landscape that doesn’t correspond to the stated setting, and which moves around capriciously. I think that by watching movies and TV, we get used to landscape not meaning anything, they train our vision to be sloppy.
So I’m trying to train my vision to be *not* sloppy, to see what’s out there beyond the shoulders of the highway. These are my notes.
by Ugh Hi All - Ugh here (just in case you missed the byline), as LJ notes below, he and the other ObWi bloggerati invited me to post here and I accepted (thanks all!). Although, now I'm having the same kind of nervousness I get when I do public speaking. Strange. Anyway, simple introduction: … Read more
by liberal japonicus The things you find when you check stuff. The idea of this was on what I thought was Thomas Paine's quotation about refreshing the tree of liberty, but was actually Jefferson's, which was "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." It … Read more