Ideas!

Tonight after supper, 10-year-old Sarah and I designed an exploration mission to Jupiter that would involve hundreds or thousands of tiny weather balloons fitted out with cameras and instruments to report data back to a few orbiting satellites, which would send the data back to Earth.

Then we fleshed out a story idea involving Girl Scouts on Mars - third-generation Martian girls whose grandparents had been among the first settlers of Mars later this century. The story might involve a trip to Earth, like current-day American scout trips to Europe.

I love being a Daddy :-)

Sub tuum

Take a moment to visit Sub Tuum, a very well-written blog by a Cistercian novice at the Abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank in Wisconsin (they're also known as the Laser Monks). Today, instead of studying moral theology, he's going through delightful old photographs that belonged to Dom Blaise Fuez, O.Cist., who died recently.

Why aren't I dozing in front of a football game on the teevee? Because we're doing our family Thanksgiving get-together Saturday with our parents here in Small Town, Illinois.

Theodore Dalrymple is one of us

See his latest article in the New English Review: Of Bibliophilia and Biblioclasm. Via Neoneocon, who is also one of us.

My favorite used bookstore is gone these few years now - it was on the campus of the University of Illinois in the YMCA basement, which always smelled of a little Indian restaurant down there. The white-haired proprietor of the bookstore had been a student at the U of I in the early 1960s and had picked up a large collection of original Doubleday Image paperbacks at the Newman Center back then (back when Image was a reliable Catholic publisher). Many of those good old books ended up on my bookshelves.

Hanson's jeremiad

Ahh... that was satisfying. Good stuff that needs to be said.

ISI's civic literacy quiz

I'm taking it now; it gets more difficult as it goes along...

Submitting my answers...

31 of 33 correct! Here's how politicians did, compared to normal people, and here is ISI's homepage. Wasn't Russell Kirk affiliated with them back in the 80s?

I was wrong on questions 31 and 33:

31) International trade and specialization most often lead to which of the following?
A. an increase in a nation’s productivity
B. a decrease in a nation’s economic growth in the long term
C. an increase in a nation’s import tariffs
D. a decrease in a nation’s standard of living

33) If taxes equal government spending, then:
A. government debt is zero
B. printing money no longer causes inflation
C. government is not helping anybody
D. tax per person equals government spending per person
E. tax loopholes and special-interest spending are absent

Mathematica version 7 released

And there was much rejoicing! Here's an overview from the boss, Stephen Wolfram.

Do sties make pigs?

Why architecture really matters; or, the teleology of public housing, from Theodore Dalrymple. An excerpt you can verify in person:

What do the tenants think of their apartment blocks? They vote with their urine. The public spaces and elevators of all public housing blocks I know are so deeply impregnated with urine that the odor is ineradicable. And anything smashable has been smashed.

The people who inhabit these apartments are utterly isolated. All that connects them is the noise they make, often considerable, which permeates the flimsy walls, ceilings, and floors. They are likely to be unemployed and poorly educated, socialized neither by work nor by pastimes. Single mothers are housed here, guaranteeing the impoverishment of their children's social environment: and in Britain we are now into the second generation of children who know no other environment.

They shall not grow old

As usual, Andrew Cusack celebrates magnanimity better than anyone else.

magnanimity: The quality of being magnanimous; greatness of mind; elevation or dignity of soul; that quality or combination of qualities, in character, which enables one to encounter danger and trouble with tranquility and firmness, to disdain injustice, meanness and revenge, and to act and sacrifice for noble objects.

That explains the floods

Our basement flooded twice this year; here's why:

A new record yearly rainfall has been established at Lincoln IL. As of 1150 am Tue Nov 11... 51.01 inches of rain has fallen so far in 2008 at the Lincoln NWS office. This surpasses the old record of 50.84 inches set in 1927. Climatological records began in 1905 at Lincoln.

Marriage as a natural right

Here's an interesting look at marriage as a natural right rather than a benefit to be received from the state.

Badge seminar

Here's 11-year-old Christopher's story of his first Boy Scout badge seminar.

Me and Mommy left Small Town on Saturday. It was October 25th, the day after Ghost Train in Monticello. When we reached the county seat, I got to ride in a German car for the first time; A black BMW! We soon got to Champaign. After a while, me and my new friend Terran headed to Space Exploration. The badge counseler, whose last name was Washburn, showed us a video of the Eagle landing on the Moon in '69!

Next, we designed our own unmanned missions and bases. I can't remember, but I think someone's base looked like a staircase!

My unmanned mission had an unmanned spacecraft called Rhea. Over Saturn, Rhea would launch a probe to collect samples frome the gas giant's rings. The probe was hexagon-shaped and had retractable landing struts, a grabber, and a shovel. When finished, the probe would return to Rhea, which would head back for Earth.

My base was named after the Dodge Stratus, which, as a coincidence, was the same model as the car Mr. Washburn drove! It showed the USS Enterprise docked near a building. Various droids were wandering around the base. An alien vessel based on a ship from a game John's played called Star Wings was battling the USS Federation.

Next, we built model rockets, with some difficulty. Then we went outside. Mr. Washburn set up a launch pad for the rockets. My first attempt was unsuccesfull, with the rocket making some smoke, but not going up. Then came the funny part. The nosecone popped off, activating the recovery system! Kind of like that last rocket failure in The Right Stuff. [see below. -Daddy] Terran had trouble too. His rocket didn't even smoke. We waited for a few minutes, but nothing happened. When my turn came again, the results were disastrous. My rocket took off. For a moment, I thought I'd get as good a landing as my SE class-mate Joshua. But only for a moment. When the pop-off came, the Wicked Streak promptly blew up! I was humiliated at first, but soon joined in the laughter. During the search for rocket pieces, I touched what I thought was the engine, but it turned to be a mushroom. Thinking it might be a poisonous one, I whizzed inside and washed my hands. The engine cap is still missing! That's the second thing I've lost at Boy Scouts. The first was a stocking cap at Ghost Train. Me and Terran were waiting for lunch later. At last, Mr. Crawford and Cole came from golf class. Cole got some stuff from a vehicle, a truck apparently, and shortly arrived. After a delicous lunch, I went to coin collecting. I was the only one in Troop 490 who didn't go to art. After the seminar, I had coins from Japan, Germany, Holland, Sweden, and Ireland. Bye.

Seven Steps to Heaven has lyrics?!

So there I was a minute ago, going through my email while listening to Chet Baker's 1987 concert in Tokyo (meh - okay if you like ensemble work more than Chet's perfect tone). Chet had been doing a great job with Seven Steps to Heaven, from the Miles album of the same name, when suddenly in the middle of things a women started singing something in a foreign language. "It has lyrics? Is that Japanese? Chet didn't introduced a singer, what the heck is going on?"

The singing sort of fit with the song in some obscure free jazz way, then it hit me: it's the damned website I just visited, playing some 14th-century Breton chant or somesuch. The idiots running the thing have set it to play music when you visit, no matter what the hell else you might be listening to. And now I've written a whole damn blog post about it. Grr...

More books to read again

An amusing bit from Neil Peart in his latest installment of Bubba's Book Club:

Robertson Davies would certainly rank in my top handful of Canadian authors, and high on any international list, too. I first read these three novels thirty years ago, and in memory - looking at their faded spines on my bookshelves - their titles rang with an echo of deep enchantment.

That's how I remembered those books, and that's how they feel now, too. Reading them again was as enjoyable, as absorbing, and as impressive, as the first time, but was enhanced by a greater level of understanding from the reader. Elsewhere, Robertson Davies offered a perfect quote for that experience:

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity, and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon, and by moonlight.

(So I guess I have to read an awful lot of books at least one more time - and many more twice. Ah, life.)

A hearty laugh

That's what Lisa and I shared last night when we realized Joe Biden is going to be the Vice-President.

Coffee on my keyboard

and my desk and my shirt, when John McCain explained what a true Republican maverick he is. He's really good at this:

The danger of checks