Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

The thing I hate about Mother’s Day, and in fact every holiday, is that everybody on facebook is posting the exact same thing: Here is a picture of my mother, best person in the world ever.  I can’t complain too much.  I do share the sentiment.  But, when you have 1,500 facebook friends, it gets awfully boring.  I can’t complain about that, either.  It’s my own fault for adding a ton of people I don’t even know.

Usually, I like having lots of facebook friends, in far flung corners of the world.  A lot of them are writers and, out of the several hundred writers on my page, 4 or 5 of them are actually pretty good (I won’t give names, so everybody reading this can assume they’re on the list).  I love people’s comments on local weather, politics, art, music, food, travel and whatever.  But, on Mother’s Day, it’s all platitudes and that’s the least interesting part.

Anyway, I had a quiet day.  I taught my 3 Iranian kids this morning, and they are always good for a laugh.  Helena actually had to work because they had a Mothers Day Program which she was in charge of, and she took the kids with her and did a lot of shopping.  I did a bit of work on the novel I should be working on a little bit every day but am not.  Wrote a poem I’m fairly pleased with.  The Czechs lost an extremely disappointing hockey match against Sweden, 4-3.  We were ahead almost the whole game, and it had started off spectacularly, with a goal at 8 seconds, but they just couldn’t hold on.

It was the end of a fairly uneventful 4 day weekend, except I have a new student, which is good, because the Iranian School is over for the year.  Tomorrow  it’s back to work, and I’m actually looking forward to it.

It would be a darned shame if, after having established a permanent human population on Mars, having built a space elevator that will transport new solar panels up into space  at a rate of hundreds per week until we have all the power we need, which will take up all the parts for a gravity-free shipyard  supplying the new mining colonies springing up on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter and throughout the asteroid belt, after having done all that, if we on Earth are still driving gas burning cars around, mucking up the air, crashing into each other, stressing out over parking spaces, and paying through the nose for the privilege.

It Would Tie the Whole World Together

Fortunately for all of us, the age of the automobile is almost at an end, and a new golden age of trains is upon us.  The Chinese are planning (this is not official yet) to build a train line from Beijing to Seattle!  Of course, construction on the North American side would probably be the responsibility of the Canadian and American governments (Seattle was not specified by the Chinese, but it strikes me as the logical terminus), but the Chinese think they can pull off the hard part, which is that 200 kilometer tunnel under the Bering Strait.  That’s about 4 times as long as the Chunnel, which is already a major miracle of modernity.

The comments that followed this article, and the one over at Yahoo, were mostly from Americans.  They were filled with cheap Chinese jokes, actual paranoia about a Chinese invasion, and lots and lots of people saying it couldn’t be done.

Fuck all y’all.  This is wicked cool.  The trains will be slick looking bullet trains and the tunnel will also connect to the Trans-Siberian railway making it possible to travel by train from New York (for instance) to Paris, even though it’s the long way round and the hard part would be getting across the U.S.

Sure, it will take more time than air travel but that’s O.K.  Getting there is  half the  fun, you can meet people on a train, there is a restaurant car on the train.  And, just as trains pollute less than automobiles, they also pollute less than airplanes.  So, there’s that.

As for those questioning whether it can be done or not, I would like to point out that China has been doing a lot of ‘impossible’ stuff lately.  Longest bridges, fastest trains, biggest dams, airports on artificial islands, and a truly impressive Olympics in 2008.

If China does, by this act, establish itself as the world’s economic center, so be it.  If other countries are worried about that, they’d better start laying track.

Normally, when I see a caption on a facebook link which says “this will amaze  you!,” turns out it doesn’t.  This, however, amazed me.  It seems that not all tears are the same.  Somebody finally got around to putting them under a microscope and discovered that tears of laughter are not the same as tears of pain, tears of grief are not the same as tears from onions, and so on.

What does it mean?

I am amazed partly because it is so cool.  This is art meeting science.  This is the universe exposing itself to be a thing of beauty, this is science discovering that things are, after all,  exactly as they should be.

One aspect of this that knocks me back is that this is something out of the blue.  Not only didn’t I know this, I didn’t even know that I didn’t know this.  The thought had never occurred to me.  Apparently, not to anybody else, either.

I don’t know how this will influence our lives.  This knowledge does not create energy, or make space travel easier.  It will not cure cancer, or reverse global warming.  But, wow.

The most amazing thing about this, to me, is how it was found.  Rose-Lynn Fisher, the discoverer of this fun phenomenon, is not a scientist at all.  She is a photographer, who specializes in taking pictures of really small stuff, like bees.  We’ve reached that point.

We have cameras in outer space, and microscopes which can see things in a way no mortal can.  We have instant communication between all of the minds of the world.   We do a quick survey and we can find out that Aries and Sagittarians are the most likely to commit murder.  You can go to YouTube and watch streaming video of the Earth from Space.  Scientists are discovering new exoplanets every day, and millions of private computers around the world are hooked up to SETI, so it might well be a total amateur who first makes contact with aliens.

The research  is happening so fast it is starting to write itself, and it is going  in directions we never  expected.

(Actually, a quick glance at Wikipedia lets me know the Rose-Lynn Fisher is not the discoverer of this phenomenon, which scientists have understood for awhile.  So, my bad for overeager journalism.  But, it’s the first I’ve heard about it and she’s got the coolest pictures.)

Well, that’s a little bit strange, and I’ll consult my IT expert when she wakes up in the morning, but apparently Word Press seems to be randomly rearranging my blogs.  According to my site the way it looks now, I wrote two blogs on May 1st and none on May 6th, which is nonsense.  Also, the blog I wrote on the 6th (which is now one of the two that appear under May 1st) had to  be written on the 6th, because I wrote about my birthday, which takes place on that day, and I know that for a fact.

69 Years Ago

I had a very nice day today.  My 7 a.m. was canceled, and the German kindergarten at 11, because today is a holiday, V-E day, which means no school tomorrow and long weekends for everybody.  They do that a lot here.  I did have to go teach at the Iranian school, because they’ve got a whole different set of holidays.  Can’t complain, because we recently got two weeks off for Nowruz, and I don’t know many other people who get that.

I woke up a bit groggy to “Good Luck Charlie” (not the worst Disney program out there) cranked up to a totally unacceptable level.  It was 7:30, which was about average, but Sam had a football tournament, and Helena and Isabel were going to an event at Isabel’s school.  So, they all took off and I had time to have a cup of coffee or two  and take my time waking up before heading off to Sam’s tournament.  I only had time to watch one game, which was fine by me, because I don’t really care about the game that much, and only like to watch when Sam is playing.  I had my kindle along.  I’m still reading Les Miserables, as I have been for about 3 months now, with a  couple of breaks for shorter books.  The thing is, I almost only ever read books on public transportation any more, because if I’m at home I’m on facebook.

It was a lovely day for outdoor reading, cloudy but not raining, cool enough to be comfortable and with a light breeze. Had a hot dog with Sam after the game but hurriedly because I was worried if I would get to the  Iranian school on time, which was particularly important because today was their last day.  Summer’s coming on.  Coming from a different direction, I didn’t really know how much time to leave.

In the end, I was actually early, sat on a park bench with the other teacher and had a nice chat, then the students all went nuts because it was their last day, everybody was taking pictures, parents and younger siblings were coming in and going out, and a couple of the younger kids were standing on their chairs and on the tables, but they sometimes do that on a normal day, too.

They  are a wild bunch.

Fountain of Youth

Of course, this is still just something that’s been seen in a lab, with mice, and there are physiological differences between mice and humans, but still…Wow!  This is fountain of youth  stuff.

Basically, they’ve noticed that  if you give old mice transfusions of young mouse blood, they act a lot perkier and even, in some ways, seem to get younger.  One cool thing about  doing this research with mice is their relatively short life span.  If a mouse lives to the age of 3, they send them to the Old Mouse’s Home and their great-grandmouslings never come to visit.  So, if any of these mice live to be 5 or 6, we’ll know that they’ve had a second life.  My suspicion is that this is not quite the fountain of youth  and more like a mouse version of Red Bull, but I’d love to be proven wrong.  I think.

Where is all that blood going to come from?  I doubt very much that young mouse blood would work on humans, and in any event, you’d need a lot of it.  A young mouse probably doesn’t have more than a teaspoonful of blood in  its whole body.

If human blood is required, and old people need massive transfusions of blood from young people, that’s going to lead to all sorts of horrors.  The people who kidnap people to steal a kidney will not have any moral objection to kidnapping someone and keeping them strapped to a gurney for months, or even years, while they drain their blood.  Or killing them outright, a la Elizabeth Bathory, and taking all their blood at once, although I doubt if that would be the most cost-effective method.  Or it could  just perpetuate the inequalities of our current society, with rich elderly people paying unemployed youth for their blood.

In the best case scenario, scientists could figure out what it is in the juvenile mouse blood that is creating this effect and synthesize it, like the Vampire scientists in True Blood.  Then we could all live forever and the world would become incredibly overpopulated, but that’s the way it works.

As technology advances, we trade one set of problems for another, and I’m all for that – just as long as we keep trading up.