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I forgot that I grabbed some awesome photos after a rain storm on the way home from the wedding last weekend. Love this one:

Big rays, teeny tiny farm

Of all the conditions we experience, solitude is perhaps the most misunderstood. To choose it is regarded as irresponsible or a failure. To most it should be avoided, like an illness.

–Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man

I don’t trust people who can’t be by themselves. They are less likely to know themselves, more likely to be conventional, and more likely to be the type that will talk about banal things rather than enjoy a companionable silence if there are people about.

All the interesting people I know embrace solitude.

As I’m typing on my laptop, which, oddly enough, is on my lap, I look to my side and see a remote control, a cordless phone, a Blackberry and an iPod trailing down the couch.

Hello, first world!

The great thing about ferrety eyes was they never changed from being ferrety, so you couldn’t read much there.

– Bill James, Pix

of a woman walking down the street wearing a heavy brown dress, patent  black boots and a fir-trimmed hat on a 32-degree day.

Not poetic, just crazy.

“One woman’s airport bookstore,” Tipsy scowled, “is another woman’s beautifully paneled library.”
Windward Passage, Jim Nisbet

On the way back from Scotland, I was in need of some additional reading material, so I bought Alison Weir’s examination of the fall of Anne Boleyn. Melle commented later that I don’t really get the principle of airport book shopping.

Watched Stephen Hawking’s lecture – “My life in physics” on TVO last Sunday night. It’s incredibly exciting that he’s here in Waterloo, though I’m not quite over my tantrum in Perimeter’s direction for not having a public lecture where we could see him in person. Cuz half the people in the “invite only audience” were clearly a) not understanding a damn thing he was saying b) bored c) a politician of some sort.

The night started off with a series of speeches from PI dignitaries (Mike, Turok), politicians (Uncle Dalton, Clement), business people (VP from BMO) and the requisite bilingual Mistress of Ceremonies (which sounds kinkier than it is). Mike was good – he emphasized why theory leads to pragmatic benefits and made sure to emphasize how important private funding is to the program (since Uncle Dalton was in the room). Turok was his usual self – unpolished, happy to have his friend Hawking there, and such a breath of fresh air after the Howard Burton era.

Where it got interesting though was in the political speeches. Beside the fact that Tony Clement can’t do public speaking (or French) to save his life, both he and McGuinty were at pains to reference God in the context of physics – i.e. that the pursuit of cosmology and quarks and the like are pursuits within or of the wonders of God.  McGuinty even went so far as to compare Hawking to Sir Thomas More, of all people, via a quote from Man For All Seasons. Now, I was wondering what Hawking would have said at that point if he could fire off a quick comeback without having to peck it out on his voice machine.

Yes – Hawking also mentioned God in his speech. He argued that, back in the day, when the Big Bang was a theory in competition with the solid state theory of the universe, it was objected to because people thought it was appealing to a Genesis view of the birth of the universe. Of course, time, brilliant minds and “luck” have given us more answers about how this might have occurred through the evolution of the universe and more mystery in that we still don’t have all of the answers.

Nonetheless, it felt like a size 10 foot in a size 5 shoe, at least to me. And the only reason I can think of for the references to be so heavy-handed was appeasement. They are politicians, after all, and how dare we spend money on that godless science stuff.

Hawking’s speech itself was both a history of the field’s big names, and a brief walk through the many important areas of discovery that he’s been involved with. Some of the audience got his jokes, but it looked like many of them weren’t even aware when one was being made. I’m sure some were disappointed he didn’t touch on aliens or anything controversial.

New Scientist Review

He did put in a plug for his support of Perimeter at the end – as he should, now that he has his own wing. As he says, just bringing together all these minds from all over the world has got to be a step in the right direction.

For someone who doesn’t much like films, I’ve been very active in the last week with 2 viewing experiences that were both uncomfortable and affecting.

First, I finally got around to seeing The Road. Very glad I watched it myself. This book was one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read. In the quiet despair, and in McCarthy’s ability to really show and not tell. I wasn’t sure what to expect of the movie, but it was pretty damn close in tone and visual vocabulary to what was in my head. The dialogue was perfect and delivered without a lot of emotion – I was particularly affected by the wife’s summation of her fears and decision: they will find us and they will rape me and then they will kill us (delivered without inflection and hysteronics). Theron is a supporting actor, but when she’s there she’s good.

There are moments in this film where I literally couldn’t bear to watch – not because of shocking violence really, nor over-the-top blood and gore, but in the emotions that a scene evoked. For most of the movie, I really felt that humans are assholes. All of us. And then there’s that moment at the end where it’s not a fairytale ending, but a smallest glimmer of hope, and we move from tragedy to comedy. And I can breath again.

Then on Friday night, the street gang went to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (and I walked home, in April, in a t-shirt!). Definitely recommend seeing this one before Hollywood gets hold of it. You know what’s great about “foreign films”? Actors that look like real people. Performances that aren’t overacted. Lighting that is sometimes dark. Dirt.

The screenwriters made some very good editing choices, with the result that this move is somehow less melodramatic than the book. And since so much hangs on Lisbeth, it was a relief to watch Noomi Rapace deliver her to us. She’s the right combination of vulnerable young girl and sociopath.

Of course, the scenes between Lisbeth and Bjurman were really hard to watch. The audience was absolutely still and absolutely quiet. But the scenes are so crucial to our understanding of Lisbeth, it’s good that they were in there.

Another one I’d definitely recommend.

Beauty, eh?

After a far-t00-long hiatus, Melle & Andrew and I made it to a Perimeter lecture. This month’s was “The Science of Galaxy Zoo” with Chris Lintott, Oxford. It was teh awesome!

Lintott is most definitely a practical physicist. Lintott is one of c o-authors of Bang: The Complete History of the Universe, along with Patrick Moore and Brian May (\m/) of Queen fame. But at the lecture, he was here to talk about the Galaxy Zoo.

What is it? Basically, with all of the telescopes taking pictures out there, we ended up with about 1 MILLION galaxy picture that hadn’t been catalogued. And the average physics student could do only several thousand, and the average physics prof would spend a lifetime studying about 100 of them. So they went to the rabble.

The Galaxy Zoo is a fun game where anyone who passes the test can get in there and classify galaxies – it’s like a cool video game but with spirals and discs! They calculated that it might take 5 years for the public to get through the pictures – but thanks to a fortuitous mention on the Beeb, it took about 3 weeks to get most of them done :) And in the new version, you can also classify supernovae.

Lintott has an irreverent attitude toward all things stodgy, but more importantly, he also has a populist view toward science. Because just like we have a gazillion pictures of galaxies that haven’t been viewed by humans, there are the supernovae and will be other scientific data from the oceans, from the deserts, from… and Lintott believes we’ll see more of this populist integration into scientific research. Other than the fact that this means geeks and grandmas the world over will get repetitive stress injuries in their contributions to science, it is a pretty awesome concept.

The humans can carry the heavy load on sorting, and then if something interesting comes up, an alert can go to the geeks at the telescopes for follow-up and if it’s interestinger, one guy will call another guy who will just happen to take a picture of the galaxy in question… or maybe get Hubble pointed at that baby. It’s the integration of the human perspective and the automated and powerful talents of the computers that will really propel the science forward.

No worries that the computers will ever overtake what humans can do. Lintott says one of the joys of zoos is that public observers have been able to uncover some interesting anomalies. Case in point: The Zoo project got an email from Hanny, a schoolteacher in the Netherlands, reporting on something called Hanny’s Voorwerp – a gaseous cloud near a galaxy that looks like, well, a cosmic frog:

See - Cosmic Frog

She wanted to know what the hell the cosmic green from was, and so did the physicists. She got Hubble time, man. It was only after they had published in the journals that the physicists figured out that Voorwerp roughly translates to “thingy”, but it’s official now: http://www.hannysvoorwerp.com/

We were totally waiting for Lintott to comment on Hubble taking a look at Hanny’s thingy, but he didn’t go there. At least in public.

I’m off to classify me some galaxies. You should too.

The street gang minus Melissa went to see “It’s a Kind of Magic” – which is, yes, a Queen tribute band. Tuesday night. The players are 2 Aussies, a Kiwi and a South African. This is their full-time gig – touring the world doing Queen stuff. And I gotta say, it was very entertaining. Weirdly enough, the singers higher range was a good match for Freddie, but his lower range sounded less convincing – one would think it would be other way around.

The program covered most of the songs you’d think they’d cover, and a few lesser known ones which was good to see. They like to brag that there isn’t a Queen song in the catalogue that they don’t know. We were hoping for drama, strutting, costume changes, shirtlessness and shrieking cougars, and we actually got most of them. Including a drag set wherein an accounting type (still in business suit, prematurely balding, joined by his wife who was wearing “slacks”) experienced the joy of a good fake boob head rub. This being Kitchener, he blushed and cooed a bit then went back to sitting primly in his seat. However, it was a HUGE disappointment when we discovered the singer’s stache to be NOTHING MORE THAN PAINT. I’m sorry, but Freddie deserves better than a fake stache, sir, even if you got the call & answer intro to “Under Pressure” just right.

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News of the World was my first full Queen experience – if it wasn’t my first album purchase, it was the second. 1977. I was 10 years old and listened to the album over and over again on a portable record player in my room. Once in a while I listened to it on the living room stereo and that was better cuz the bass was much louder.

One day, my classmates and I got our teacher to run out of the room in tears because we wouldn’t stop stomping and clapping to a silent version of “We Will Rock You” while she tried to teach us Algebra. After that stellar result, we did it again for about a week until Mr M from next door came in and yelled at us.

This was also when I got into a shouting match with Nolan S  - I said Freddie was gay and he said he absolutely wasn’t. He offered to beat the crap out of me to prove it. None of us thought he was gay like Eddy T was though. Eddy was a real live limpy wristed, lispy guy who liked to play skip with the girls at recess. But Eddy had it sweet, via the terrifying capabilities of his older sister (banned from our school for excessive bullying), who would show up after school to lay a beating on anyone who gave Eddy a hassle during the day about being “light in the loafers”.  Eddy originated the shorts and muscle shirt combo that Richard Simmons would later become famous for. Eddy was awesome in a time when it still wasn’t that common to be that awesome.

Nolan and I fought about lots of things when we hung out, but that was okay. Our friendship lasted right through junior high and into high school, but we kind of drifted apart by Grade 10. Then in Grade 11, he was driving, and probably had a few drinks in him, and he took a turn quickly, went off the road and died.

So when I think of News of the World, I think of Nolan and Grade 5 and Eddy T.