Month: December 2006

Last, quick post before I head off for Times Square.

A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to ring in the new year with …

ONE MILLION PEOPLE.

1. I’m standing at the Long Island Rail Road station in Jamaica, Queens, New York, having arrived in the tri-state area via airplane about an hour previous. It’s about 8:30 PM. I’m waiting for my connection to Glen Head, New York. I’m tired and out of sorts. I’ve only been in New York once before in my life. I’ve got a messenger bag (with the logo of a Seattle radio station on it) and a giant piece of luggage.

   And a guy, tall, dark chocolate skin, sweater and jeans, walks up to me, ticket in hand, staring at the signs, obviously lost and confused. He spots me and approaches. “Is this the train to West Hempstead?” he asks me.

   I shrug. “Dunno. Sorry.”

2. I”m in Greenwich Village, crossing Houston (which is pronounced locally as “HOW-stun”, hands tucked in my pockets, my eyes hooded by my baseball cap, scarf wrapped around my face against the wind. It’s 9:30 PM or so, dark and cold, but this neighborhood is filled with people. The odors from dozens of restaurants fill the air and delight my nose, overpowering the smell of car exhaust.

   I’ve heard people call Portland’s NW 21st Street “Portland’s Greenwich Village” but now that I’ve seen the real thing, the comparison is not appropriate. The real neighborhood is much much more interesting. Maybe in another 100 years Portland’s will approach it.

   A couple pauses, he tall and blandly handsome, she short, thin, dark-haired, Roman nose, crossing the opposite direction from me. I glance up, smile softly, keep walking. She pauses and turns to me. “Is Bleeker Street this way?” she asks, pointing in the direction I’ve just come.

   “Yeah,” I say, in my best New Yorkian accent, “It’s one blawk up.” I surprise myself with how easily the accent, and the directions, come. And they’re both accurate.

   “OK, thanks!” And they scamper off like puppies.

3. Later that same night, I’m walking west along Canal Street, having tried, and failed, to find Ground Zero (I just didn’t go far enough). I guess I should have asked for directions…

   Another generic hip urban couple in their black wool coats, male and female, are walking in the direction from which I came. She looks at me and asks, “Is Little Italy this way?” The boy tugs on her arm and avoids looking at me, his masculinity threatened by having to ask, even by proxy.

   “Sorry, I got nothin’. I’m a tourist, too!” I say with a smile. They walk away.

4. I’m scrambling down the stairs at Penn Station, Saturday afternoon, trying to catch the New Jersey Transit train that will take me back to the airport, and eventually my hotel. It’s the New York Coastal train (I believe) and all I know is that it stops at Newark International Airport, where I can catch a shuttle to the Hilton.

   An older lady, in her late 50s or early 60s, bottle-blonde hair, coming down the stairs with me, looks at me. “Is this the train to Secaucus?” She pronounces it with the accent on the first syllable.

   “Uh, I’m not sure. I’m just taking it to Newark. Sorry.”

   She nods and looks around for a porter or conductor as we reach the bottom of the stairs and the train platform. I hustle onboard and stand near the door.

   The first stop after Penn Station was Secaucus. I saw her get off there. After all the directions I’ve given it’s nice to see that some folks do reach where they’re going, after all.

Up ’til now I’ve been staying at David and Jackie’s house in Glen Head, NY, as I mentioned before.

From here on out, though, I’ll be spending lots of time in Manhattan. My plan from here on out is this:

• Friday night: Spend as much time in Manhattan as possible.
• Saturday pre-dawn: take last train back to Long Island and crash in David’s basement. Sleep ’til noon.
• Saturday noon: Pack. Say goodbyes to David and Jackie and their kids.
• Saturday afternoon: Leave David and Jackie’s place with baggage. Take the train to Newark, NJ and check in to the airport Hilton. Leave baggage in room.
• Saturday afternoon and night: Take train to Manhattan and do everything I can (no specific plans)
• Sunday pre-dawn: Take train back to hotel. Sleep and rest up for another night of partying.
• Sunday afternoon: Go back to downtown with just my cell phone, some cash, and my camera.
• Sunday 5:00 PM: Arrive in Times Square for the New Year’s Eve party. Get checked through the police barricades into “The Pen” (the blocked-off area at 45th and Broadway).
• Sunday 5:00 PM – Past Midnight: Be locked into one spot for over 7 hours as part of a crowd of a million people. Watch the musical acts and watch the ball drop at midnight.
• Sunday around midnight: text and call everyone I know to scream “Happy New Year” at them.
• Sunday until 4:00 or 5:00 AM – wander around the City if I can, staying awake all night long.
• Sunday around 5:00 AM – take the train back to the hotel and check out.
• Sunday 7:45 AM – My flight leaves EWR – Newark International Airport for SEA – Seattle and the end of an awesome trip.

Watch for me on the teevee… I’ll be dressed in black (duh!).

Hello, from Glen Head, New York. I’m currently using the computers at the hotel my sister is staying at, the Glen Cove Mansion, which was apparently an Army hospital during World War II (that’s what my brother-in-law claims).

I hadn’t realized how far Glen Head is from the City. I’d planned on spending most of my time in the City, thinking it was a short train ride away. It’s actually about a 45-minute train ride, and a $13.50 round trip ticket on the weekends. About double that during the week. So I’ve only spent one day wandering around Manhattan.

I’d post more details and pictures, but I’m not using my computer and it’s like using someone else’s hands. I’m frustrated and hungry and there’s only the vending machines here for food. This morning I ran 5-6 miles, then went back to the house I’m staying at (my friends David and Jackie, who are the perfect hosts), intending to walk to this hotel to join up with the rest of the family, but either I didn’t listen or my sister didn’t tell me how far away it was. On the way there, I’d decided I was going to find a coffee shop along the way and park my butt and surf and blog a little. Also I needed food – all I’ve eaten today was a muffin and a small handful of chocolate-covered almonds.

But just as I found a coffee shop (a Starbucks, actually) my brother-in-law showed up to pick me up and take me to the hotel. He was trying to be nice, but he was basically foiling my desire to use my own computer and to eat. Argh. He meant well, but still…

Tomorrow we’re going in to the city to see a show; the plan is to see Spamalot, the Monty Python-inspired musical. For that, I will be able to endure my family (I say that with love!).

Happy Holidays to all of my readers…

Had to go to the DMV to renew my driver’s license. Pick a number and wait until you’re called.

I got the best number ever.

When the lady finally called the number out, I was watching. Her expression was priceless. It was the polar opposite of mine; she looked as though she’d lost some game that DMV clerks play. She hated that number and was loathe to call it out, but she had to. After watching this brief resignation and fear play out across her face and in her body language, she forced herself to look bored and to say the number as though it was just another number, and not a number whose unique properties gave it a whole ‘nother meaning.

Since I had been flirting with the cute blonde sitting across from me, with my secret knowledge of the number resting in my pocket, I knew that a braver man would have played up having gotten this number, out of all possible numbers.

I wanted to hold the number aloft, and shout as though I had won some lottery (as, indeed, in a small way, I had), and strut, boldly, saying with pride and enthusiasm the number over and over again. “Yes, yes, that’s me. I’m the one. I’m next. You, the awesome girl with the curly hair, have you heard? I have this number. If you’d like to share in my good fortune, perhaps after our sojourn in this dreary place of paperwork and bureaucrats, we could escape to another place to discuss luck, and numbers, and how they interact.”

Alas, I only approached the counter as I normally do, with a half-grin on my face, as if I knew many things but could not share them lest I break through to the other side.

Because this license is good for eight years, when next I renew it I will be a half-century old.

Which connects with the fact that for the past six months I’ve been growing my hair as long as possible – so that I may immortalize this look, this full head of hair look, for the next 2922-some days.

This clip, from “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage”, Carl Sagan’s amazing series, still makes me weep at what was lost.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MsF8JhkRIk]

Not the loss of Sagan himself, although that is part of it. But the loss of knowledge, and history that he is speaking about.

I know that knowledge of the roots of Christianity will not sway modern-day Christians, but how can anyone hear of Cyril’s conflicts with Hypatia, and the later destruction of the Library of Alexandria and not feel the lesser for supporting “faith” over reason?

It seems to me that Christianity, like the other fundamentalist religions, are only supported in the present, by denying their past.

Carl Sagan said, on the topic of religion:

“The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying… it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”

From this page, #7, and widely reproduced across the internets, although I cannot find a proper reference for it. I’ll update this post once I do.

My first post on Carl Sagan today will be a listing of all the memories I had of him.

When I was a kid, like many kids, I suppose, I read comic books and sci-fi books and books about UFOs or Bigfoot. From those, I learned a little science, most of it junk science, but there was still a certain vocabulary, a certain mindset, that came out, even in those fictional, flawed ways. Over and over again, I read about The Scientific Method, almost always capitalized, and presented as the basis for all rational thought. The idea of a Method for doing amazing things, making weapons for any foe, ships and equipment for exploration, or machines for helping feed, shelter and entertain all humans, appealed to me. It was a way to organize the world; it was a way to separate fact from fiction; it was a guide for creativity and a spur for adventure.

As I learned more, though, I began to see a difference between the things I saw on TV that were real, and really happening, like the Apollo missions to the Moon (with which I shared a last name), and the almost-magical creature supposedly living in the bottom of a deep, dark Scottish loch, or the black-eyed, large-headed, spindly-armed alien Grays.

Reading science fiction authors like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov led me to read those authors’ non-fiction essays and stories. Asimov, in particular, wrote on nearly every topic, from humor, to the Bible and Shakespeare, to lasers and physics and chemistry.

And since I always wanted more to read, once I started browsing in the Popular Science section of the library and bookstores, I saw another name: Carl Sagan.

I believe that the first strictly non-fiction science book I bought with my allowance was “The Dragons of Eden” by Carl Sagan. It strictly explored the idea of intelligence, from a scientific, and not mystical, point of view. Dr. Sagan discussed the many weird and non-intuitive things that happen when the brain is damaged; people lose the ability to recognize human faces, for example, but otherwise can function normally. Or they become unable to speak the names of objects, but can gesture to the words themselves, or pick up a similar item, demonstrating that they know what it is – but something in them is unable to speak the words.

It was my first exposure to the idea that the brain really is the “mind” – that our personalities aren’t some immaterial substance that is magically immortal, but a process that arises out of the functioning of our physical bodies.

That book, and Dr. Sagan’s gentle and patient educational tone, also began to show me how the Scientific Method was applied to the actual, dirty, messy, chaotic world. Sagan, unlike Asimov and Clarke, weren’t just writers who spoke a scientific language. Sagan was a scientist first, and an author last.

More than that, he was a Rocket Scientist.

When I went to find more books by him and learn more about him, I found that Sagan worked for NASA, the very essence of applied science to me. He had helped to design and launch probes to the other worlds in our solar system: Viking 1 & 2, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, and Voyager 1 and 2, probes that were millions of miles from Earth, sending back pictures and data about the asteroids, Jupiter, and Saturn and all their little moons.

I watched and absorbed every episode of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, hosted by Carl Sagan, on local channel 10, in 1980. I knew that the special effects were cheesy and even lame, no match for “Star Wars” or their ilk, but I also knew that “Cosmos” was talking about real things, and that made all the difference in the world.

I remember, when I was in high school, going to OMSI, Portland’s science museum, back when it was up on the hill by the Zoo, with a friend, Jeff Schenk. I don’t remember which one, but one of the Voyager probes was set to send pictures back from Saturn, the ringed planet. My friend and I were going to OMSI to see the pictures, “live”. There were several rooms set up at OMSI, with big-screen projection TVs, that were connected via satellite to NASA, showing image after image of Saturn and it’s many moons. This must have been in 1981. I remember that Carl Sagan was one of many voices and faces explaining in detail what we were seeing, and again, his playful voice showed the joy of discovery, of real discovery and exploration. All of us in that room, and everyone across the nation and around the world watching those images were seeing things that had never been seen before by anyone else, and all because of a machine built by human hands. Carl Sagan was greedy for knowledge, like any scientist, as were we all; but he didn’t hoard the knowledge. He wanted to share it with everyone.

That little space robot, controlled from millions of miles away, had travelled farther than Leif Ericson, Magellan, and Lewis and Clark combined and many times over, but the people who built and launched it were no less of explorers than those early sailors and travelers. And for me, at that moment, Carl Sagan was the voice and face for them.

Carl Sagan led me to understand what it is to be a skeptic, when he talked about the reality of searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence, as contrasted with the stories of alien abductions and saucer-shaped flying vehicles. He led me to wonder about the self-destructive impulse in humanity, when he talked about the possibility of nuclear war causing an all-too-real nuclear winter.

He even demonstrated, by example, the honor in admitting one’s own mistakes, when he publicly listed the errors he had made in his lifetime, including a prediction he had made during the first Gulf War. He had claimed, on national TV, that the oil fires burning in Kuwait would cause a chilling effect that would be global and catastrophic. It takes a real man, in my view, to admit one is wrong. The world would be a better place if more people could do the same.

I believe I’ve read every book that Carl Sagan has written; and he has written several, but not enough, never enough. Because, in December 1996, just 10 short years ago, Carl Sagan died. Death is not easy to deal with for people, and there are as many ways of coming to terms with death as there are cultures and people. It is not a surprise to me that many people try to deny death and believe in a literal immortality for themselves and the ones they love.

It can be difficult to realize that everything that made Carl Sagan the towering intellect, gentle teacher to humanity, and stubborn explorer of the universe that he was, disappeared from the Cosmos 10 years ago today. He left behind words, and pictures, and work; he left behind a family, and children. But he, himself, is gone, never to reoccur. I am glad that I got to know who he was during his lifetime. I am glad that I became the person I am today in some part because of who he was, even though he and I never met.

I’m glad that the Cosmos still produces people like Carl Sagan. May it continue to produce intelligences of such caliber for a long, long time.

Tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of Carl Sagan’s death.

Joel Schlossberg has proposed a Blog-a-thon to celebrate Carl Sagan’s life and beliefs.

The Blog-a-thon has the approval of Nick Sagan, Carl’s son. Not that that is why I’m participating tomorrow.

I just think that Carl Sagan was one of my earliest real-life heroes.

Funny how most of my heroes are scientists, thinkers, philosophers, dreamers, and authors. Yes, they are almost always all of those in the same person. Do you find that surprising? The stereotype of scientists is that they’re socially-awkward, inept at communication except on the most technical level, and shallow, materialistic people.

And yet I find the amazing awestruck writings of my heroes to be deeply moving and heartfelt. All the more so because the things of which they write are grounded in things we can actually observe, measure, and predict.

It does not destroy the beauty of the rainbow to know how it comes about.

Plus, if these guys are so socially inept, why do they marry hot wives? Richard Dawkin’s wife, Lalla Ward, actress? Carl Sagan’s wife, Ann Druyan? Rowr. Chicks dig the big brains, baby.

Tracy, when I mentioned the Blog-a-Thon to her, said that she had no idea who Carl Sagan was.

Join me tomorrow as I turn my meager skills towards explaining that for her, and anyone else who wants to know.

PS: Ix-nay on the “Billions and billions” comments. C’mon. He never said that.

“I never said it. Honest. Oh, I said there are maybe 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion stars. It’s hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers. I said ‘billion’ many times on the Cosmos television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said ‘billions and billions.’ For one thing, it’s imprecise. How many billions are ‘billions and billions’? A few billion? Twenty billion? A hundred billion? ‘Billions and billions’ is pretty vague… For a while, out of childish pique, I wouldn’t utter the phrase, even when asked to. But I’ve gotten over that. So, for the record, here it goes: ‘Billions and billions.'”

In an interesting (to me) discussion over at Jack Bog’s place, a commenter named “Sheef” posted the following:

The Blogtown post raises an interesting hypothetical. Imagine an industrious blogger nobly opining away at a local coffee shop on a laptop. A thief snatches the laptop and bolts out the door. A cop witnesses the theft and gives chase, but returns to the coffee shop empty handed. The cop tells the blogger, “I’m sorry, but the only way I could have stopped him was by pushing him down, and he could have been hurt. So he got away.”

Does the blogger:

a. Commend the cop for his restraint – it was only a laptop, after all;

b. Commend the cop for his restraint and, upon obtaining a replacement laptop, blog about the virtue of PDX cops;

c. Scream epithets at the cop for not shoving the thief down and stomping on his head in order to get the laptop back; or

d. Throw scalding espresso into the cop’s eyes while screaming epithets and, upon obtaining a replacement laptop, blog incessantly about the lazy PDX police who have no respect for private property?

Discuss.

Note: “The Blogtown post” that Sheef refers to can be found here.

Just taking the question at face value, without considering the presumptions Sheef may be making, is a bit difficult for me. I think that Sheef was trying to personalize the situation being discussed (a police officer injured in the line of duty while chasing down a suspect). If I can guess from Sheef’s tone, I think he may be assuming that I, or another commenter, would call for a different response from the cop for “someone else”, versus the response I (or another person) would call for myself (or themselves). I could be wrong, though, and I hope to hear from Sheef, or that he at least reads my post.

Obviously I had a first, gut reaction to Sheef’s post. But then I thought about it some more, carefully considered my underlying assumptions, and then realized (or, possibly, rationalized) my initial reaction was the correct one for me.

The answer, for me, both on first reaction and after considered thought, is B. I would thank the cop for his effort and commend him on his restraint, and upon getting to another computer, I would probably blog about it. I blog about everything else, after all…

My reasons for this are several, and just taking the situation as Sheef presents it without adding any new assumptions, the basics for me start with the fact that no laptop is worth someone, cop or thief, getting injured over it; and end with the fact that, in my view of police work, they serve the public, including some guy who snatched a laptop off a table. I’m just as uncomfortable with the idea of a cop who views a property theft as an excuse for violence, as I am with the assumption that I see in Sheef’s question that a suspect “deserves” a little roughing up.

You can argue that if the cop saw the guy take my laptop, that the suspect’s guilt is not a question. But I would argue that it’s not the cop’s place to make that determination. Our system of justice separates the judgement of guilt from those who enact the laws for a reason, and I see no reason to question that.

And to add a bit to the question (my assumption that Sheef was trying to personalize the situation, so bear with me while I picture myself in the scenario, with all that that entails), since my laptop is an Apple MacBook Pro, my chances of getting it back in one piece are greater if I report it stolen, the thief takes it, sells it for quick cash, and it eventually turns up in an Apple Store for service.

Compare that scenario with the idea of a cop knocking the suspect to the ground. What are the odds a fragile laptop is going to survive that?

Granted, that comparison might not hold for any other crap laptop (heh)… which is why I considered that separately from the basic, no-added-assumptions question. Just sayin’.