Almost Paradise

Twenty years ago I was an environmental sciences major at UC Berkeley. In the spring of 1986, I was taking Energy & Resources 102 from John Holdren and Mark Christensen. I loved that class. We used John Harte’s Consider a Spherical Cow: A Course in Environmental Problem Solving, which was all about doing order-of-magnitude calculations to quantify environmental questions. It turned out to be one of my favorite textbooks. Although I don’t often have a need these days to do Spherical Cow’s kind of back-of-the-envelope figuring, I still keep it on my shelf at work as a reminder that I can if I have to.

April 26, 1986, was a Saturday. The next class meeting was the following Tuesday. Professor Holdren strode into the lecture hall with a gleam in his eye. “I was going to put off covering pollution dispersion and atmospheric plume modeling for a few more weeks,” he said. “But considering current events, I decided to move it up a bit in the schedule. This is too good an opportunity to pass up.”

There had been a big release of radioactives at a nuclear reactor in the Ukraine, at a place called Chernobyl. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but it sounded bad.

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No you can’t.

Yes I can.

No you can’t.

Yes I can.

No you can’t.

Yes I can, yes I can!

Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery Of The Brain — and How It Changed The World, by Carl Zimmer.

I really enjoyed Zimmer’s earlier book about parasitology, Parasite Rex, and the short articles at his web site The Loom are very cool. So I figured I’d like Soul Made Flesh, too. But alas, I neglected to take into account exactly what this book was about. It’s not a book about science, really; it’s a book about the history of science — specifically, the origins of modern neurology.

And like most history-of-science books, it necessarily spends a lot of time on… history. In this case, since Zimmer is focusing on a guy named Thomas Willis, of the Royal Society of London, we’re talking about 17th century English history. Oliver Cromwell, Charles II, etc. Never my favorite subject. Even when Neal Stephenson tarted it up in his Baroque Cycle novels, I really couldn’t get excited about that period. About halfway through Soul Made Flesh, I found myself skimming over all the politics and world events and slowing down only for the brief sections of actual science.

Overall it was a worthwhile read, but for his next book I hope Zimmer goes back to writing about present-day science.

Ooooooooh.

Aaaaaaaah.

See, now that’s a cameraphone I could be happy with.

Ryan Ozawa, webmaster of HawaiiStories.com, has been going around upgrading all of us HawaiiStories tenants from WordPress 1.5 to WordPress 2.0.1. Today it was my turn.

WordPress is the blog publishing tool that I use here at HawaiiStories to produce Almost Paradise. Using it is quick and painless and fairly flexible. Upgrading was the same. The new version has a WYSIWYG editor, much better than the plain-text HTML editor in the old version, with page previews and built-in file uploading tools. It’s super cool.

You folks may not notice a difference, but behind the scenes here at Almost Paradise, things look a lot nicer. Thanks Ryan!

I learned something new the other day. For years I have seen these little insects flying around, and never knew what they were:

They’re quite distinctive-looking when they land on a wall, because their abdomens bob up and down rapidly and almost continuously. What the hell were they? And those little bobbing backsides look rather ominous; do they sting? Should I be worried?

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Maybe it’s just me, but when I look at the Kāhala Mall logo…

…it makes me think of some kind of weird alien tripartite mitosis, like from a biology textbook:

The boys and I went to the UH Mānoa SOEST Open House last weekend. I forgot to bring a camera, otherwise I’d post a few pictures. All the SOEST researchers had displays and presentations of one sort or another. They ranged from play-doh and paint activities for little kids all the way up to posters that were obviously re-used from the presenter’s last academic conferences, and lots in between. It was cool seeing the diversity of research topics that were being covered.

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I mentioned this blog to someone recently, and was told that my pictures were too big and didn’t fit nicely in the pages. What? I wondered. They looked fine to me. But then it occurred to me that the other person was using Internet Explorer, which I almost never use. I switched to IE to take a look and was aghast. In IE, my photos were being displayed at full size rather than being resized on the fly as happens in Firefox and Netscape. But thanks to this tip that I found, I was able to resolve the problem. Turns out that it had to do with IE and its noncompliance with CSS standards. Yay! for the web, and boo! for noncompliant browsers.

The rivers of Titan, as seen from 10 miles up by the Huygens probe.

First photo from Huygens on the surface of Titan. Those round things (ice boulders, whatever) sure look like river rocks, don’t they? Worn smooth by… liquid methane, maybe?

Wow!