The FEMA you have ...

The Houston Chronicle notes with some incredulity today the "new career as a disaster preparedness consultant" of Michael Brown, who "unchastened ... explained why clients should hire a failed disaster manager to provide advice on handling future emergencies."

Later they point out that

U.S. Rep. Gene Green, D-Houston, says he can't imagine who would be willing to pay Brown for advice. Green notes that FEMA performed well here following Tropical Storm Allison.

Allison came through in June of 2001, shortly after Bush took office. Presumably FEMA, as a considerable federal agency, had some inertia and whatever it was at that time was due more to the Clinton White House than due to changes that the Bush administration had made. With respect to another government institution, Mr. Cheney has famously said something like you fight your war with the army of the previous administration. Surely after only six months in office the FEMA Gene Green speaks so highly of was primarily a child of the Clinton administration. Whereas, nearly five years later the FEMA of "Brownie" was immensely more a product of the business friendly and government atagonistic Bush administration.

Memorial to 2000 Dead

Heights Blvd & 11 St, Houston, TX
Oct 29 - Nov 6, 2005

Hypocrisy rather than heresy is the cause of spiritual decay. -- A. J. Heschel

Passages from God In Search of Man, A Philosophy of Judaism, by Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Religious thinking, believing, feeling are among the most deceptive activities of the human spirit. We often assume it is God we believe in, but in reality it may be a symbol of personal interests that we dwell upon. We may assume that we feel drawn to God, but in reality it may be a power within the world that is the object of our adoration. We may assume that it is God we care for, but it may be our own ego we are concerned with. To examine our religious experience is, therefore, a task to be performed constantly.

To understand what we mean is the task of philosophy. We think in words, but to employ words is not the same as to understand what they mean. Moreover, the relation between words and their meaning is elastic. Words remain, while meanings are subject to change. The expression “our father in heaven” may evoke in some a mental picture of a bodily figure sitting on a throne, and may mean to others the maximum of all majesty, used as a figure of speech, to indicate Him who is beyond all expression.

Such self-understanding is necessary for many reasons. Original teachings of religion are not given in rational, dogmatic terms but in indicative expressions. It is therefore necessary to explicate their meanings. Moreover, since they have been expressed in an ancient language, one must carefully penetrate the genuine intent of the Biblical authors. – p9

Criticism of religion must extend not only to its basic claims but to all of its statements. Religion is liable to distortion from without and to corruption from within. Since it frequently absorbs ideas not indigenous to its spirit, it is necessary to distinguish between the authentic and the spurious. Furthermore, superstition, pride, self-righteousness, bias, and vulgarity, may defile the finest traditions. Faith in its zeal tends to become bigotry. The criticism of reason, the challenge, and the doubts of the unbeliever may, therefore, be more helpful to the integrity of faith than the simple reliance on one’s own faith. – p10

Intellectual honesty is one of the supreme goals of the philosophy of religion, just as self-deception is the chief source of corruption in religious thinking, more deadly than error. Hypocrisy rather than heresy is the cause of spiritual decay. “Thou desirest truth in the inwardness” of man (Psalm 51:8).

Rabbi Bunam of Przyscha used to give the following definition of a hasid. According to medieval sources, a hasid is he who does more than the law requires. Now, this is the law: Thou shalt not deceive thy fellow-man (Leviticus 25:17). A hasid goes beyond the law; he will not even deceive his own self.

Every king has a seal which, when attached to a document, is a guarantee of authenticity. The seal contains a symbol signifying the power and majesty of the king. What symbol is engraved on the seal of the King of Kings? “The seal of God is truth,” and truth is our only test. A flatterer cannot come before him (Job 13:16). – P10-11

This is the way to go.

Plug in hybrids.

Hybrids, as everyone should know, are vehicles that are powered by exclusively or mainly by electric motors, but that have gasoline engines that run a generator to charge the batteries that run the electric engine. They are more efficient than cars powered exclusively by internal combustion engines because when the engine runs to power the generator, it can do so at its most efficient RPM (whereas regular cars must run their engines over a wide range of speeds), and when the car slows, it can run the motors "in reverse", converting the kinetic energy of the car back into electricity which then goes back into the batteries. When traffic is stop and go, these cars don't idle during the stop; they don't run at all (unless one is using AC or listening to the CD player). For CIVIC sized cars, 45-55 MPG is routinely obtained.

Shade-tree mechanics and other tinkerers are now taking these cars and adding a feature that allows them to plug into the wall socket at night and recharge their batteries. Thus, in addition to getting more efficiency from their gasoline, they also get much cheaper energy from the socket in their garage. For commuters who drive 30 - 50 miles per day, this provides the possibility of being able to do most or all of one's driving using energy from power outlets. Because the car can run using the gasoline engine to charge the batteries, one is never stranded -- at least not until one runs out of gas.

I think this is the short, intermediate, and possibly long term answer to the issue of transportation in this country.

A little religion and a lot of astrophysics

What happened with COBE. COBE is a satellite whose purpose was to measure the microwave background from above the atmosphere. When I was a kid, there were two competing theories about the origin of the universe: the "Steady State" theory, which was designed to save the idea of a universe that had been here forever; and the "Big Bang" theory, which was based on the fact that observations of the galaxies showed they were moving away from the earth in a fashion consistent with the idea that the universe was expanding from a singularity, or single point it had occupied in the distant past.

At the time, the Big Bang seemed to be favored by religious people, since it was consistent with the notion that things began sometime, like the Bible said, rather than having been here forever. Steady state was favored by the "atheists", and people who prefered the idea that the age of the universe was infinite, that it has always been around. Ironically, now that it has won the controversy, the Big Bang is poo-pooed by the religionists. This is, presumably, because measurements lead to the conclusion that the expansion of the universe has been going on for nearly 14 billion years, and that is a lot longer than some religionists have been able to handle.

Anway, the following discussion tries to explain the profound significance of the picture that is at the first of this post. The Steady State theory said that the universe has alway been there. I learned about the theory from a book by Fred Hoyle, an astronomer who advocated it. At the time (this was in the late 1950s) it was also known that the universe was expanding. The expansion was a problem for an infinitely old universe, since if it had been expanding for an infinitely long time, then everything should be infinitely far apart, and humans shouldn't be able to see anything in the sky -- it should be dark. The explanation for this was that the expansion was occurring, but matter was being spontaneously created to fill in the space that was left by the expansion. If this sounds weird, it was, but the rate that matter would have to be created was so small that its creation couldn't be measured by the technology of the time (it probably couldn't be measured with today's technology either, for that matter).

The Big Bang theory, on the other hand, said that there was an event in which the universe began, and that event was actually the greatest explosion that has ever been seen (with accurate measurements the consensus now is that this event occurred about 13.7 billion years ago, give or take a few minutes). In other words, God said, "Let there be light," and he wasn't kidding.

Hoyle preferred the Steady State theory, and he seemed to do so because the Big Bang was consistent with the idea of a creator. Although I loved the book -- so much in fact that nearly 50 years later I credit it with influencing me the most in my choice of career -- I preferred the Big Bang for the same reason. The question was, how do you decide which theory is correct (or for that matter if they were both wrong? There's no rule that says when people have come up with two ideas to explain something, that at least one of the ideas is right. They could both be wrong, no one is has been smart enough to imagine yet what the right answer is).

The decision between the theories went something like this -- If you look at the physics of any explosion you find that radiation (heat, light) is produced. For the Big Bang, this heat and light expands to fill the universe that is created with the explosion. As the heat and light of the Big Bang explosion expand, physicists also know that the wave lengths of the radiation get longer and longer, because the universe that was created at the explosion is expanding. But while it continues to expand, it turns out this radiation -- a form of energy -- should never go away or disappear. Its wavelengths just get longer and longer (longer and longer wavelengths correspond to cooler and cooler temperatures). This radiation, it was then known in the 1950s and 60s, should still be around 13.7 billion years later.

On the other hand, if the universe had always been here as the Steady State postulated, then there was no reason for this radiation to exist. Therefore, if it could be detected then that would be strong evidence in favor of the Big Bang. Otherwise, scientists were inclined to go with the Steady State theory.

Furthermore, the radiation should have a non-uniform distribution according to wavelength ... that is, there should be more energy at some wavelengths than at others. Specifiically there should be a lot at very long wavelengths and not much at all at much shorter wavelengths. The shape of this distribution, or spectrum, is also well known, and is predicted very precisely by an equation which is derived in undergraduate physics courses. I learned the derivation the first time in a junior level course at Baylor University in 1966.

It's often called a "black body spectrum" because it is the distribution of radiation that it emitted from an object purely by virtue of the objects temperature. Everything that has a temperature -- and everything in the universe has a temperature, there is nothing at absolute zero although some things are close -- emits radiation. The radiation that is emitted has a spectrum or distribution of wavelengths, and this distribution depends on the temperature of the object. The lower the temperature, the longer most of the wavelengths are that are emitted. Scientists knew that the universe must be billions of years old (they could figure this out by seeing how fast the universe was expanding and how far away things were, and caculating how long it must have taken at that speed for the universe to get as big as it was), so they were able to estimate from what they already knew about "black body" radiation about where in the range of possible wavelengths the spectrum of radiation left over from the big bang ought to lie.

The problem was, if the universe was as old as they thought, the wavelengths of this radiation would now be very long (early on when the universe was hot, the wavelengths were very short, but now when it is larger and cold, the wavelengths should be very long). A lot of these long wavelengths turn out to be absorbed by the atmosphere, although some get through. The first detection of them was by accident, even. Later detectors were sent into the atmosphere with balloons to get better measurements, but the bottom line was that while the radiation was detected at certain wavelengths, and most scientists believed that it was there, and hence that the Big Bang was right, nevertheless, the interference of the atmosphere prevented them from seeing the whole, complete spectrum that they new must be there.

So, when we started sending satellites into orbit, one of the things that became possible was putting a satellite into orbit above the atmosphere to more precisely measure the complete spectrum. That is what COBE is ... the COsmic Background Explorer. Its purpose was to measure the spectrum of the black body radiastion left over from the birth of the universe.

The picture is a graph of those first results. I'm a physicist myself, but when it comes to cosmology I'm much more of an interested (and awed) bystander. If cosmology were baseball, I wouldn't be on a team; but I'd be a fan who watches a lot of games and has a pretty good grasp of the stats of at least some of the players. So it turns out that when I saw the picture above for the first time, I was amazed. I don't remember what I did exactly, other than point it out to others who could appreciate it, but in my mind it was awesome. COBE measured some thirty or more points all along the range of the spectrum. The solid curve is the graph of the fairly simple equation generated by the theory that I studied in college. The points cannot be seen because they are covered/obscured by the curve. That is, the measurement was very precise (the "error bars" are less than the thickness of the curve that is drawn on the graph), and the points almost exactly fit the theory. What variation they have from the theory again is so small that they are within the thickness of the line on the graph.

For someone who has experience in the comparision of theory to measurement, the degree of agreement is astounding, stunning. When one considers the greater meaning and significance of the measurement, it can be a very emotional experience. The link at the first of this post is a narrative which contains a description of the response of a scientific audience that was one of the earliest to see this spectrum 25 years ago. A lot of work has been done since then. For example, scientists have already spent years studying the slight variations of the data from the theory -- that is, those variations that are within the thickness of the line that is in the graph -- because these variations contain information about why the universe looks today the way it does. But the simple, beautiful spectrum still marks a defining moment.

By their fruits ye shall know them ...

An excellent blogger and commentator from the Christian point of view is public theologian. He also contributes to Christian Alliance for Progress.

His most recent essay anticipates "Justice" Sunday II in the light of Abu Ghraib. The contradictions and moral poverty of the "Christian" right are summarized in this paragraph:

These [fundamentalists] are the people that want to outlaw a couple of lesbians living together quietly in suburbia but can’t find their voices to criticize the sodomizing of children at Abu Ghraib, according to Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, the videos of which the Pentagon is keeping from the American people under the guise of “national security.” They will sue every government body in the land in order to see to it that a high school valedictorian can preach a sermon rather than give an address at his high school graduation, but they don’t have anything to say about the muzzling of prisoners who have been held now for years without an attorney or any contact with their families. They complain about the smut in our culture but had no comment when it was revealed to the world that female US interrogators were questioning devout Muslim prisoners clad in bras and panties, during which they would smear fake menstrual blood on detainees’ faces. The fundamentalists are outraged over the mistreatment of Christians in nations around the world, and rightly so I might add, but don’t seem to have much of a problem with the beatings and murders of Muslims in our own care, such as the murder of an Iraqi General detailed in the Washington Post last week, who was zipped up inside a sleeping bag and beaten to death.

Comes to mind what anyone with reasonable Southern Baptist Sunday School experience is familiar: "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are ... Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. ... You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel."

Hendrik Hertzberg

I saw a book signing on CSpan2 last night with HH. He's an editor with The New Yorker Magazine, and he appears maybe 30% of the issues in "Talk of the Town". His columns are consistently stimulating. Hertzberg is, as nearly as I can tell, a secular kind of guy; however, he worked in the White House during the Carter administration, and at one point during the program he responded to a question about Carter by saying that he was always impressed by the integrity of Carter, but partcularly by him in the years following the Carter administration.

At another point he was commenting on the general state of affairs in the country, and whether the United States could retrieve what it has lost during the Bush years so far. He was hopeful, I think, but on the other hand he was also pessimistic. Then he said something which I found particularly striking -- it was something like he was most discouraged about what he felt was a "moral collapse" of the country (he definitely used those two words). This collapse, he said, was epitomized in three ways: first, by the acceptance of a fraudulent or stolen 2000 election (I'm not sure which of those words he used or if he used another word to describe the election, but I remember the intent of his statement); second, by the war in Iraq; and third, by the economic changes in the U.S., notably the subsidies of the rich as epitomized by the movement to eliminate the inheritance tax.

It is refreshing to me to hear someone talk about real "values" -- at least the values that are most relevant to the life of the country as such.

New Yorker articles on climate change

The New Yorker magazine published a series of articles on climate change earlier this year. They are now on line and provide excellent reading. Along with some recent articles in the Scientific American, which are not on line, these provide enough information to show that a) humans are indeed affecting the climate, and that b) it is reasonable to do something about it, even though it is probably true that severe effects in the next couple of generations are likely to be unavoidable.

New Yorker Part 1

New Yorker Part 2

New Yorker Part 3

What I Did In Italy This Summer

These are my reminiscences about the family vacation. A trip to Italy. For a family of four. $$$. Of course that last three character sentence is not that important in the long run. The two children are young adults, one having graduated from college and the other within a year of doing so. Years ago we had promised that, if we were able, we would give them a trip to Europe sometime near the end of college.

This is the way it went. The daughter, Jenny, is majoring in Italian and near the end of May she went to Italy to spend a month in an "immersion" program. At the end of her term there the mom/wife, Jill, and I the husband/father joined her. The son, Jeff, had gone to France a little more than a week before. The family trip turned out to be convenient for him, because he was able to leave early to attend the wedding of one of his best friends from college in a small town in Provence. Jeff left early, attended the wedding, fully participated in all the celebretory imbibing associated therewith, and then spent a week in Nice with some members of the wedding party while he awaited our arrival in Italy about a week later.

Jill & I arrived in the Venice airport where, emerging from the baggage claim area, we met our daughter who we hadn't seen for a month. Bongiorno, signorina. To understand our activities for the next three days it's useful to consult a map of Venice (nothing I've found on the internet is that great, but the link is better than nothing). From the railway station we had to get across the Grand Canal to the San Toma area, which is on the north side of the Grand Canal, on a line drawn southeast from the railway station. The first trip was by water taxi around the grand canal, but we found later that we could do just as well by walking -- Venice is not that big, and walking is an adventure.

There are no cars. Goods, food, bricks for construction, are all carried in on boats, barges, and/or hand drawn carts. There's the Grand Canal, roughly fifty yards across, which snakes its way through Venice in a kind of lazy, backward "S". Then there are smaller canals criss-crossing the island, and there are even smaller canals. The streets, calle, vary in width from 20 or 25 feet to breadths so narrow that two people can hardly pass without bumping shoulders. Straightaways of more than 50 feet within the neighborhoods don't seem to exist. There is some canal or other beyond every third corner, with of course an arched bridge for crossing. Houses will exit onto the calle or the canals, and in the latter case, the bottom step or two is more than likely underwater.

Another thing that is true for Venice, as well as the rest of Italy it would seem, is that every fifth or sixth building is a church. One heads down a calle in the general direction of the Academia Bridge, intending to get the the famous Piazza San Marco, and in the process runs into multiple smaller piazzas, each with their own sidwalk cafes, gelaterias (Italian translation of Marble Slab Ice Cream), and more often than not a parish church.

We toured Piazza San Marco, which is just marvelous, along with the palace of the Doge of Venice. Jill had to see the Murano Island where there are extensive glass works. And each day we had a two hour dinner (really the minimal time required to enjoy that sort of thing) at a sidewalk cafe. Everywhere we went, by the way, the cafes were small, service was slow and deliberate, the food and the wines were good. For reasons I'll describe later, we have no pictures of the first few days, which include Venice and our next stop, but there are some great images on the internet.

After three days we took the train to Vernazza, one of the towns in the Cinque Terre, a scenic, national park type region on the northwest Italian coast (this link to images of the Cinque Terre has several images of Vernazza, where we stayed). The journey to Vernazza was one of the two main downsides to our trip -- under normal circumstances a train ride requiring most of the day, we didn't arrive until around 10 p.m. becuase of weather related cancellations and delays. Vernazza, a small town on the northwest coast of Italy, was the place I enjoyed the most. It is very scenic, but during the day it was flooded with tourists -- although this may have been because of the season and because we were there on the weekend.

The Cinque Terre is actually a string of five small towns built on the rocky, cliffy, coast of Italy on the Ligurian Sea. The are connected by a railroad, by foot paths (some of which seem to have a vertical component at least as great as their horizontal one), and possibly by roads, but I can't be sure of the latter. The hillsides around Vernazza are terraced -- these are indeed spectacular, with the successive terraces appearing to be at least the height of a human above the previous. I saw ladders placed so one could ascend or descend from one level to another. And the level parts of the terraces -- again their horizontal dimensions seemed significantly less than their vertical -- were covered in grape vines. Some of the literature said that the wine industry in the area was struggling because of the difficulty of tending these vineyards and it was easy to see why. I walked about half the distance along a trail to Montorossa, the next town north from Vernazza, and it was a serious climb.

I took a number of pictures of the area that I thought were really great, but as I'll describe, I don't have these.

Arriving late in the evening of our scheduled arrival day, we only spent one full day in Vernazza. Jeff actually arrived later in the afternoon of that day, having managed to find his way via train from Nice through Genoa and catch the "milk run" train which ran through the five towns of the Cinque Terre. This was my main concern for the whole trip, that he would arrive on time, and not have to spend his time chasing us through Italy. Jill & Jenny explored the some of the other towns of the Cinque Terre by boat, train, and foot. I stayed, climbed, took pictures, did laundry, and met Jeff. That evening we climbed the hill a Vernazza to a "castle" restaurant and shared a wonderful meal with marvelous wine, savouring the moments as the sun dropped behind the mountains of Montorrosa, the next town north, which could be seen across the water.

The next day, a Sunday, we traveled to Florence, stopping for a few hours in Pisa to see the leaning tower there. The leaning tower is part of a combination that is common in Italy -- three separate structures consisting of a church, a baptistry, and a bell tower.

Late in the day we went on to Florence, the site of the Renaissance, and of the three major cities we experienced, the one we all agreed we enjoyed the most. Our B&B was the Hotel Scaletta, with four terraces, the highest of which allowed us a panoramic view of the city. Staying in Florence for three nights and two full days, we explored museums and churches. Florence has many churches, including its own Duomo with bell tower and baptistry. If the bell tower were leaning, it would surely be as famous as the Pisa version, because the architecture and beauty are clearly rivals.

Although I try never to pass up an opportunity to visit a European art gallery, the most interesting visit in Florence was to the Academia Science Museum, containing amazing instrumentation from over the years. Among other items it contains Galileo's telescopes, as well as his middle finger. When my children expressed amazement at the presence of this relic, I immediately had an explanation. Now I haven't read this in a book, but that in no way renders me less certain of its truth.

Galileo, as everyone familiar with the history of science knows, was called before the Inquisition for his assertions that the earth -- heretofore thought to be the motionless, center of the universe -- actually moves, and goes around the sun. Threatened with loss of freedom and even his life by the church, he recanted. However, even as he recanted, the legend says that he muttered under his breath, "Nevertheless, it moves." Having seen the finger in the cabinet in the Academia, it is obvious that at the same time he was making a gesture in keeping with his respect for the Catholic magesterium ... although I am sure that the gesture was made surreptitiously, otherwise we would have heard more about it. Even though this gesture was meant to be secret, known only to Galileo and God, nevertheless the pope or one of his apparatchiks saw Galileo's subtle act of defiance. Realizing they had their victory with Signore Galilei's official recantation, they did not make a public issue of it, even while it was duly noted. Thus, when he died, or knowing the church of the time possibly even before, they extracted their ounce or two of revenge by removing the appendage with which Galileo had expressed his defiance of the church. So, Galileo "flipped off" the pope, shot him the bird, and you can see the finger with which he did so, in an upright, defiant pose even today, in the Academia in Florence.

On Wednesday we went to Rome. Initially this was a bit of a disappointment to me. Our B&B was within a couple of blocks of the train station -- this turned out to be very convenient in the long run -- and my first impressions of the neighborhood were less than stellar. However, we managed, with the Metro, to get around Rome quite handily. We explored the old Roman ruins, including the Paletine Hill and the Colesseum. Another day we spend in the Vatican Museum and St. Peter's and the Sistine Chapel. It was expensive to do all this, but I don't regret it one bit. The last day we did something a little different and that was to take the train to the ancient Roman city of Ostia Antiqua, which 2000 years ago was on the Italian coast at the mouth of the Tiber. Thanks to the river and the marvels of silt, it is now more than a mile away from the sea. Unlike the ruins within Rome, the remains of Ostia are in the countryside, and exploring can be done in the presence of clean air and natural background noises rather than traffic of the city. Again, I lost my pictures of Ostia, but there are some excellent ones here and here.

Finally, on the way back from Ostia, as we got off the Metro at the last stop, I let my guard down. Pickpockets are bad on the Metro -- this is a well advertised fact -- and I had relaxed, carrying Jeff's backpack in one hand and leisurely keeping my camera -- a pretty good cybershot model -- in the pocket of my shorts. As we were to get off the train the classic pickpocket event occured: A couple of guys hemmed me in, moving with me as I tried to move around them. Irritated, I moved my attention from guarding my possession to getting around them, and only seconds after getting off the train I realized my camera was gone. It all happened so fast. The worst of the deal was that the largest memory stick we had was in the camera, with about two-thirds of the images for the trip on it -- Venice, probably Florence, and the images of the last day at Ostia Antiqua (At the time of this writing I still have not obtained a reader for the remaining memory sticks, which are also full of images, but which are much smaller than the one in the camera). That was the absolute worst thing that happened on the trip. I would gladly have given the camera away to keep my pictures, which are images of exotic places, but which contain images of my family and the kernels of memories that will be cherished as long as I live.

But I'm ready to return, with another camera, a bigger memory stick, and, of course, my family.

First Post

This is where I put things that I want to say. Rather than be obnoxious and "force" people to read them by sending an obnoxious email, where they will consciously have to make a decision to ignore me, it seems nicer to put my rantings here and where people can decide to come over and take a look, or ignore me and pass by on the other side of the road.

Qualifications: I'm alive with a brain and an open mouth. I have training in physics. I also know something about religion. I read. I'm nearly 60 years old. I consider myself a moderate politically -- more conservative on fiscal matters, and maybe more liberal on social matters.

I thoroughly despise George W. Bush and his handlers.