The Oxford Project

This evening Judy, Rick, and I went to the Englert Theater in downtown Iowa City for a reading from The Oxford Project, a new book from Peter Feldstein and Stephen Bloom. Peter is a friend of ours, and has been a friend of Judy's for years. The book gives an intimate and honest portrait of the small town of Oxford, Iowa, through photographs of people taken 21 years apart and through candid interviews with them. The reading tonight was in a theatrical style, with individuals reading the things that townspeople have said. Very effective, quite touching, and a wonderful look at small-town America. As Bloom said this evening, when you want to understand the real history of America, you won't get it from Sarah Palin or Barack Obama -- you'll get it from understanding the lives of people like these. A remarkable project about a very real town and the very real people in it.

My spam filter must work

I keep reading about email "whispering" campaigns that spread rumors about the Presidential (and Vice-Presidential) candidates by anonymous or pseudonymous email. Either the spam filters on my Mac or the filters that Stanislaus uses must be doing a good job, because I'm just not seeing them. In any case, I would never believe anything that did not come with full and verifiable citations, because I have never taken anyone else's word for anything like that. Perhaps this is part of my training as a mathematician; perhaps it is a trust in my own ability to discern; perhaps it is too much early exposure to preachers who told me that I must believe only what they told me.

It really doesn't matter anyway, because I got my mail-in ballot in the mail today. There are some local candidates I need to look at, but I expect to return the ballot by Monday. November 4 comes in September this year -- which would probably be a better title for this entry anyway!

Nobody asked me, but...

Interesting watching and listening to the political developments in the last few days. I had a strange thought about the Republican VP situation today. I suggest:

* Johh McCain knows that Palin is not really capabile of being a worthwhile Veep. He'd have to be as dumb as W to believe that, and he isn't.

* When JM is dealing with a real issue, Pailin isn't with JM -- Lieberman is.

So I'll put up the following two-part conjecture:

* Palin was chosen as eye candy and as a frisky distraction, and if JM is elected she'll carry out the public duties of the Veep. But the real contributions that a Veep would make won't come from Palin -- they'll come from Lieberman.

* if JM should become seriously ill, Palin will resign JM will name Lieberman as VP so he can take over.

As I said, nobody asked me, but this just might be plausible. YMMV...

First touches of fall

Fall is here -- it sneaked in while I was being vetted for the jury on Monday -- but it really doesn't feel like it yet. The temperatures are still in the upper 70s and lower 80s, with lows only in the 60s. Not at all fall temperatures in the upper Midwest. But this is good, because corn and soybeans are delayed from the late spring and floods, and this will let farmers get in those crops.

There are ways we can tell that fall is getting here, though. Our bush that turns bright scarlet is starting to get some red highlights, and the first newspaper story about a vehicle hitting a deer appeared the day before yesterday. Time to start slowing down on the roads in our neighborhood that go through the woods; I don't want a repeat of my deer collision a couple of years ago!

Jury duty

I've had jury duty the last couple of days. I was selected yesterday for a criminal jury, and today we heard the prosecution testimony before a recess; after the recess we heard that the defendent had reached a plea agreement and we were released. The details aren't important, but I am comfortable that justice was done for both society and the defendent.

Johnson County has an interesting jury system. The shorthand name is "one day or one trial" -- you come in on Monday and are either selected for a jury that day or released. In either case, this is your jury exposure for four years (or longer). Because of the modest requirements, there are very few exclusions; everyone serves. This is a better system than the one-week exposure in Stanislaus County, California, but even that was better than many other counties. So I'm pleased to have been able to serve, and pleased at the treatment that jurors and potential jurors received. And it doesn't hurt that the jury payment was actually reasonable, given the amount of time I had to give -- much better than the minimal wage.

Our snake

Yesterday Rick and I saw a snake by the retaining wall in front of our house. It was a very small snake, probably just hatched this year, but I didn't recognize it (not that I have such a broad herpetological experience or anything). I took a photo (below) and looked it up online, and it seems to be a brown snake; Rick verified it with a better online reference. As we were looking at it, it crawled into the wall in a very small space between blocks. So now I guess we have a Resident Snake to help protect us from small insects.

Amana artisans studio tour today

There was a tour of artisans' studios in the Amana Colonies this weekend, and Rick went with us today to look around. It was a lovely warm not-quite-fall day, and a great excuse to be out. There were a number of places on the tour, but -- this being the Amanas -- some of them weren't open on Sundays. We ended up visiting a glass studio (mostly layered glass), a tinsmith who was both making new objects and re-creating antique pieces, a broom and basket shop that had some wonderful art baskets, and a coppersmith who mostly made oversized insects and frogs-with-martini-glasses. I really didn't get it on that last one...

At the broom and basket shop we found this hard-working fellow connected to a windmill that kept him going. There was a large woodpile out behind the basket show, so he must have put in a very productive summer. Wind power for the worker, firewood for winter -- sounds like a localized solution to energy problems to me!

Travel and the economy

Over the last couple of weeks I've been exchanging emails with Guido Rößling, my co-chair for a program at a computer science education conference to be held in Paris next summer. Of course, this means that I'm committed to a trip to Paris in early July, and perhaps one in March as well to organize our program. (For any of my non-US friends who cannot read this, that translates to "organise our programme" in the Queen's English.) So we're committed to some travel and to the costs that will go with it. Of course, this week's economic debacle will probably make the USD even more worthless than it already is, so the cartoon below seems appropriate.But it is Paris, after all, and perhaps we'll stay at our tiny hotel just around the corner from the Café Flore and down the street from St. Germain de Prés. Life could be worse, and we'll see a number of good friends at the conference (which is really why we do these things!)

Monarch butterflies

Iowa is on the fall migration route of the Monarch butterfly. There have been butterfly-tagging events here, and we routinely see them flying around. It's a lovely treat.This photo, from Drake University (wish I'd taken it myself!) shows a Monarch on some local wildflowers.

Jet trails

Today was mostly clear with a few clouds, but there must have been some unstable air at flight altitudes because the sky was filled with jet contrails, probably from flights from Chicago to the west coast. The effect was very interesting and I thought I'd share it with you all, though this composite of two photos is pretty crude. Enjoy!

Class reunion

Last weekend we went down to Ft. Madison, Iowa, for Judy's high school reunion. I won't say how many, but if you look closely at the second photo you can figure it out...Ft. Madison is a very nice small river town on the Mississippi, almost on the Missouri border. It has had a consistent set of employers, and the town is in very good shape. The old part of town is particularly nice, with many lovely old homes. One of them has been converted into a B&B, the Victorian Bed and Breakfast, and its photo is above. We had a suite, not just a room, and the biggest and best breakfasts we've ever had at a B&B, and that's going some!Of course, the real function of a class reunion is to catch up with your high-school friends, and Judy saw many friends she hadn't seen in many years. Some of them had gotten old, but some (including us, of course!) hadn't. She had a great time and I was very glad to meet people who had been important to her growing up. (That's Judy in the front row, just about in the center of the photo.)

Teacher's Day

China has an annual Teacher's Day, when people celebrate the teachers who are or were important in their education. It's a wonderful idea, and says a lot about how China has gotten where they are in the world. This year it was September 10, and a friend of ours, Yang Ke, sent us a photo of his teacher, Shi Jiaoying, with himself and some of Prof. Shi's other students. This is doubly wonderful because Jiaoying is one of our best friends and was part of my birthday celebrations this summer. Here's the photo, taken on the new campus of Zhejiang University; it's clear who is being celebrated, and Ke is the young man on the right, who has just finished his PhD and is about to start working with Microsoft Research Shanghai.

I was wrong...

I couple of weeks ago I thought I could distance myself from politics, and I said so in this space. I was wrong. There's no way I can ignore the lies and misrepresentations that are flying around so freely. So, figuring that Seattle is the gateway to Alaska and so a Seattle paper would have some idea of what is really going on in Alaska, I want to share a few cartoons from Horsey, the editorial cartoonist on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Enjoy!

Green jobs

Interesting piece in today's Cedar Rapids Gazette. A new company in Newton has opened a wind turbine blade factory that will employ 500 people. This is the fifth wind energy company in Iowa (two in Newton, one in Cedar Rapids, one in West Branch, and one in Ft. Madison) and is an indication that once we can wean ourselves off oil and the resource-extraction "Drill, baby, drill" mentality, there is an enormous economic potential in new energy sources and other green jobs. If we look at the models of the computing and communications industries, once this starts it's going to grow really quickly, so if I were looking to invest in the future, I'd look at things like algae-based fuels and flexible thin-film solar panels.

The joys of home ownership

As Rick was visiting us last March in preparation to move to Iowa City, we had heavy rains and a heavy melting snowpack -- and we had so much water around that we had water leaking in one corner of the guest bedroom. Pooh. So we had the fill and landscape wall under the back porch reworked, and at the end of the job we had our contractor look at the corner where the leak had happened. It turned out that the leak was anything but new, and there was significant water damage in the corner and under the edges of the window.
The picture shows the damage from the inside; you can see daylight at the corner of the window where the sheathing had rotted from poor window installation, and you might be able to see the damage in the lower left corner. The view from the outside shows the repair of the lower part of the wall, but further damage was found below the upper window and we had to replace sheathing below that window and around the dryer vent. Quite a job, but it feels good to do it right. Next year -- we're going to look at the other windows in the back, because some of them probably have the same problem. Oh, the joys of home ownership...

Anniversary

Today is our third anniversary -- and the first one that we've celebrated at home. Eurographics used to give us a reason to be in Europe, and our first two anniversaries were in Budapest and Prague. But home is good, very good.
The picture, taken this morning, is a very special anniversary plant that blooms each year around our anniversary time. Our friends Sousan Karimi and Mahesh Dodani sent us this lovely orchid as a wedding present. We keep it in the kitchen window, and each fall it sends out several flower stalks.

Fall flowers

We've started to get just a little bit of nip in the air here in Iowa, and some leaves are starting to act as though they really don't see much use in hanging around any longer. I guess fall is in the air. It's time for fall flowers. At the Farmers' Market last Saturday there were some wonderful pots of chrysanthemums for sale, and anyone with allergies will know about goldenrod.

There are also a number of very pretty fall-blooming wildflowers. Here are two photos of flowers out along the path behind the house. I don't know their names -- we have never been properly introduced -- but I enjoy greeting them as I walk by and enjoy their beauty.

Gustav missed us -- almost

Hurricanes do most of their damage on the coast before they go over land and start to weaken. But they linger on for several days as strong storms, and they can be nasty, even several hundred miles from the coast. Yesterday we were in just the edge of the remains of Gustav; just south and east of us they got several inches of rain, and we had a blustery day but we got less than an inch. Today is dawning mostly clear and we're looking forward to a nice day -- there are signs that fall is near, but we're in no hurry...

Training the remote

Over the last eight years we have very carefully trained our TV remote to change channels -- or turn off the TV -- when certain faces appeared on the screen. After last night's round of character assassination at the RNC, we're instituting another round of training so that any Republican face or commercial triggers the same response. It's not that hard -- it's all the same stuff anyway.

Sheesh. Classical politics -- if you don't have anything to say, say something nasty about your opponent. If you don't have anything positive to offer, wrap yourself in the flag. If you don't have any policies to benefit citizens, say that you're for the nation (I suppose that most voters have never read about Mussolini's fascist state and its policies.)

Enough, already. To mis-quote Flower the Skunk in Bambi, "if you can't say anything nice, I'm not going to listen to you at all." And I suppose that means that this blog will become a politics-free zone.

Obama, Biden, and a Rove-free country.

Years of experience?

As we hear politicians talking about years of experience, let's think about the Geiko gecko. You ask whether a humble (or not...) lizard can have years of experience? It's known that the gecko has a long and ancient lineage, but scientists from Oregon State University and the Natural History Museum of London have just found a 100-million-year old gecko, almost doubling the known history of the species. But nobody knows if a gecko were ever the mayor of a small town...

Say what?

Does it strike anyone else as odd that the Republican National Convention starts on Labor Day this year? The irony is so deep...