March 2011
“The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again.”
—Field of Dreams (via wisconsinforward)
Moon and Venus side by side before sunrise April 1 →
earthsky.org
Our sky chart shows the thin waning crescent moon and the planet Venus for about an hour before sunrise tomorrow (Friday, April 1, 2011), as seen from middle latitudes in North America….
Mar. 30, 2011: The Writer's Almanac →
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Wednesday’s Poem: “Homicide Detective: A Film Noir” by Dorianne Laux, from The Book of Men. Wednesday’s Literary Notes: On this day in 1858, Hymen Lipman of Philadelphia patented the first pencil to…
“Let all sorrows ripen in me.”
—Shantideva, quoted in Joanna Macy, “Taking Heart: Spiritual Exercises for Social Activists,” Fellowship, July/August 1982: 4
Mar. 29, 2011: The Writer's Almanac →
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Tuesday’s Poem: “Chicory” by John Updike, from Americana and Other Poems. Tuesday’s Literary Notes: Oscar Wilde wrote, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, “A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect…
Moon and Venus low in east at dawn March 30 →
earthsky.org
As seen from mid-northern latitudes on Wednesday, March 30, the waning crescent moon and the blazing planet Venus will be sitting low over the eastern horizon, starting around an hour…
Play
“What’s at stake here, in other words, is whether we’re going to have an open national discourse in which scholars feel free to go wherever the evidence takes them, and to contribute to public understanding. Republicans, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, are trying to shut that kind of discourse down. It’s up to the rest of us to see that they don’t succeed.”
—
Paul Krugman “William Cronon and the American Thought Police” - NYTimes.com 3/28/11
“…RED FLAG WARNING IN EFFECT FROM 11 AM THIS MORNING TO 7 PM EDT THIS EVENING…
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN TAUNTON HAS ISSUED A RED FLAG WARNING FOR NORTHERN CONNECTICUT…RHODE ISLAND…AND MOST OF MASSACHUSETTS…WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 11 AM THIS MORNING TO 7 PM EDT THIS EVENING.
DRY NORTHWEST WINDS GUSTING TO 25 TO 30 MPH WILL CONTINUE TO AFFECT MUCH OF SOUTHERN NEW ENGLAND TODAY. SINGLE DIGIT DEWPOINTS WILL RESULT IN MINIMUM RELATIVE HUMIDITIES BETWEEN 20 AND 25 PERCENT. THESE CONDITIONS WILL RESULT IN AN ELEVATED FIRE SPREAD POTENTIAL IN SNOW FREE LOCATIONS.
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS…
A RED FLAG WARNING MEANS THAT CRITICAL FIRE WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE EITHER OCCURRING NOW…OR WILL SHORTLY. A COMBINATION OF STRONG WINDS…LOW RELATIVE HUMIDITY…AND WARM TEMPERATURES WILL CREATE EXPLOSIVE FIRE GROWTH POTENTIAL.
&&” —
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN TAUNTON HAS ISSUED A RED FLAG WARNING FOR NORTHERN CONNECTICUT…RHODE ISLAND…AND MOST OF MASSACHUSETTS…WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 11 AM THIS MORNING TO 7 PM EDT THIS EVENING.
DRY NORTHWEST WINDS GUSTING TO 25 TO 30 MPH WILL CONTINUE TO AFFECT MUCH OF SOUTHERN NEW ENGLAND TODAY. SINGLE DIGIT DEWPOINTS WILL RESULT IN MINIMUM RELATIVE HUMIDITIES BETWEEN 20 AND 25 PERCENT. THESE CONDITIONS WILL RESULT IN AN ELEVATED FIRE SPREAD POTENTIAL IN SNOW FREE LOCATIONS.
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS…
A RED FLAG WARNING MEANS THAT CRITICAL FIRE WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE EITHER OCCURRING NOW…OR WILL SHORTLY. A COMBINATION OF STRONG WINDS…LOW RELATIVE HUMIDITY…AND WARM TEMPERATURES WILL CREATE EXPLOSIVE FIRE GROWTH POTENTIAL.
&&” —
AccuWeather.com - Lowell Weather Advisories - Weather Warnings & Watches for Lowell, MA
Though I wish the NWS forecasts would not shout so—it’s about them being in ALL CAPS—I’m relieved in this case they are.
It’s a cold, dry early spring here, folks, and we thirst for warm rains.
Colds and flu like dry, too friends, so forewarned is forearmed (heh). Take precautions.
Mar. 28, 2011: The Writer's Almanac →
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Monday’s Poem: “Awake” by Michael Heffernan, from At The Bureau of Divine Music. Monday’s Literary Notes: Today is the birthday of writer and teacher Christianne Meneses Jacobs. Born in Managua,…
Tangle of stars in Berenice’s Hair →
earthsky.org
What we’re about to describe requires a dark sky to be seen: a faraway cluster of stars known as Coma Berenices.
How can you spot it? One way is to use the famous constellation Leo the…
The Twelfth Post – Existential Courage | The Considered Kula →
consideredkula.wordpress.com
My latest effort is an attempt to live the dialectic between my intellectual and spiritual paths.
This is the twelfth post of The Considered Kula and the one in which I take the blog live. It’s high time. To many of you this will appear as the first post, but for that look here, “Open to Grace: Launching the Considered Kula.” It appears to you as the first because up until now, it has been a private blog, open only to a few friends while I hitched up my britches and screwed up the courage to “go for it.”
Use the Big Dipper to locate the Hunting Dogs →
earthsky.org
You can easily locate the Big Dipper in the northeast sky on these early springtime evenings. The Big Dipper is part of the constellation Ursa Major, the Greater Bear.
And, if you can find…
Mar. 27, 2011: The Writer's Almanac →
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Sunday’s Poem: “His Good Felt Hat” by Bruce Taylor, from Pity the World. Sunday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of poet Louis Simpson, born in Jamaica, West Indies (1923). He’s published more…
Is Sirius the most luminous star in the sky? →
earthsky.org
Look southward at dusk and nightfall, and you can’t miss Sirius, the brightest star in the nighttime sky. Mia asks, “Isn’t there a brighter star in absolute magnitude which appears dimmer…
Mar. 26, 2011: The Writer's Almanac →
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Saturday’s Poem: “Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost, from The Poetry of Robert Frost. Saturday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of Robert Frost, born in San Francisco (1874). He…
“Today marks the centennial anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the deadliest workplace accident in New York City’s history and a seminal moment for American labor. On March 25, 1911, 146 garment workers, mostly young immigrant women, died after a fire broke out at the factory. Many of them leaped to their deaths when they tried to escape and found the emergency exits locked. “I saw people throwing themselves from the window. As soon as we went down, we could not get out because the bodies were coming down” says the last survivor of the fire in a 1986 interview with Amy Goodman. Denied any collective bargaining rights, the Triangle workers were powerless to change the abysmal conditions in their factory: inadequate ventilation, lack of safety precautions and fire drills—and locked doors.”
—
100th Anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire via DemocracyNow!
Growing up as I did in New York, not far from “the City” as we used to call it, we learned about this in history class. How could conditions have been so bad in the ole USA, which we also were taught to think of as so grand? Eventually we learned that the country only got that way by effort and attention to what was just.
Mar. 25, 2011: The Writer's Almanac →
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Friday’s Poem: “Lenten Dissent” by Cherie Lashway. Friday’s Literary Notes: It was on this day in 1811, exactly 200 years ago, that 18-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from Oxford…
iTunes Ping is Now Available on iPad
I don’t own an iPad, but I do use Ping. It’s good to know this facility now exists on this breakthrough, hybrid device.
Source: Apple Inside iTunes
You can now directly follow the activity of the artists, friends, and others you’re following in Ping on your iPad. Tap the Ping button in the middle of the iTunes button bar across the bottom, then tap Activity, People or Profile across the top to navigate the trails of likes, posts and purchases from the people whose talent and tastes interest you. Tap albums along the way, tap songs to hear the samples, move fluidly among the musical possibilities. A delight that feels as good as it sounds.
“
Portugal’s government has just fallen in a dispute over austerity proposals. Irish bond yields have topped 10 percent for the first time. And the British government has just marked its economic forecast down and its deficit forecast up.
What do these events have in common? They’re all evidence that slashing spending in the face of high unemployment is a mistake. Austerity advocates predicted that spending cuts would bring quick dividends in the form of rising confidence, and that there would be few, if any, adverse effects on growth and jobs; but they were wrong.
It’s too bad, then, that these days you’re not considered serious in Washington unless you profess allegiance to the same doctrine that’s failing so dismally in Europe.
[…]
Why not slash deficits immediately? Because tax increases and cuts in government spending would depress economies further, worsening unemployment. And cutting spending in a deeply depressed economy is largely self-defeating even in purely fiscal terms: any savings achieved at the front end are partly offset by lower revenue, as the economy shrinks.
[…]
A serious fiscal plan for America would address the long-run drivers of spending, above all health care costs, and it would almost certainly include some kind of tax increase. But we’re not serious: any talk of using Medicare funds effectively is met with shrieks of “death panels,” and the official G.O.P. position — barely challenged by Democrats — appears to be that nobody should ever pay higher taxes. Instead, all the talk is about short-run spending cuts.
In short, we have a political climate in which self-styled deficit hawks want to punish the unemployed even as they oppose any action that would address our long-run budget problems. And here’s what we know from experience abroad: The confidence fairy won’t save us from the consequences of our folly.
” —Paul Krugman “The Austerity Delusion” - NYTimes.com 3/24/11
I’ll read Kruggie, paywall or no.
The westward shift of Orion and all the stars →
earthsky.org
We got this question: Orion seems to have moved and turned considerably in the last two weeks. Will Orion disappear before summer?
The answer is that all the stars and constellations shift…
Predawn moon near the Scorpion’s Stinger on March 25 →
earthsky.org
On the morning of Friday, March 25, 2011, the waning gibbous moon helps you to locate the two “tail-end” stars of the constellation Scorpius the Scorpion. These two very noticeable stars –…
Mar. 23, 2011: The Writer's Almanac →
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Wednesday’s Poem: “MAP” by Julie Cadwallader-Staub. Wednesday’s Literary Notes: It was on this day in 1775 that Patrick Henry gave a famous speech and probably delivered the line: “Give me liberty or…
Moon near red star Antares before dawn on March 24 →
earthsky.org
If you’re an early riser, look out a south-facing window before dawn on March 24, 2011 – Thursday morning – to see a lovely waning gibbous moon in front of the constellation Scorpius the…
Deepening Inequality
NYTimes asks Twitter to plug paywall loophole →
newser.com
The Times has asked Twitter to shut down a feed that tweeted links to every single story on the website, and the newspaper says it plans similar action against other paywall-dodging spots, Forbes reports.
The Social Context of a Natural Disaster: The Economics, Politics, and Culture of the Earthquake in Japan « This Week in Sociology →
thisweekinsociology.com
I’m reblogging something I posted over at my course blog, in turn reblogged from This Week in Sociology. It’s worth considering the broader social context of societal resilience.
Here is an early post from a new blog, This Week in Sociology, founded by Corey Dolgan, PhD, director of Stonehill College’s new Office of Community-Based learning.
A 9.0 earthquake, a 33-foot tsunami, a series of crises at their battered nuclear plants: The people of Japan have withstood the last week with admirable tenacity. There’s no shortage of lessons the rest of the world can learn from what we’ve been seeing. Here are three of them.
1. People are resilient.
[…]
2. A society’s resilience increases with its wealth.
[…]
3. Resilient policies evolve; brittle policies are imposed.
[…]
“Once again an American president summons the passions of a human rights crusade against a reprehensible ruler whose crimes, while considerable, are not significantly different from those of dictators the U.S routinely protects.”
—Robert Scheer: “Be Consistent—Invade Saudi Arabia” - Robert Scheer’s Columns - Truthdig 3/22/11
Marco.org: Bag of hurt →
marco.org
In 2008, Steve Jobs was asked1 if and when Macs would play Blu-ray movies. He responded candidly:
Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. It’s great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we’re waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace.
The implication is that Apple doesn’t believe that Blu-ray will
What a difference a day makes
Yesterday I was trudging across campus through snow, and today I managed to catch sight of willow branches, gone all yellow because of Spring, shining in the morning sun. It was absolutely worth trying to stay open–hearted for. Moreover, I wouldn’t have had this sight had I not been taking the backroads to avoid some annoying traffic. So this was a double delight.
