Easter Sunday
. . . and a very happy Easter Sunday, too, to all my non-Jewish, non-heathen friends. I’d say non-Muslim, too, except my only Muslim friend follows me on Facebook but doesn’t read my blog.
On this Easter Sunday, I’d like to offer a toast to all the less successful messiahs, including Simon Bar Kokhba, whose transiently successful revolt led to he formation of a second century Jewish state, which required 12 Roman legions plus auxiliaries to put down;
Spanish Kabbalist Moses Botarel, sorcerer, philosopher, and master of the Jewish art of self-promotion; he
stated that the prophet Elijah had appeared to him and appointed him as Messiah. In this role he addressed a circular letter to all the rabbis, asserting that he was able to solve all perplexities, and asking them to send all doubtful questions to him. In this letter (printed by Dukes in Orient, Lit. 1850, p. 825) Botarel refers to himself as a well-known and prominent rabbi, a saint, and the most pious of the pious.
Simon Magus, a first century proto-Gnostic Christian heretic who might have been able to levitate — at least, that’s what his enemies said about him — and who was played by Jack Palance in The Silver Chalice;
90-year-old Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon, whose followers invite impressionable undergrads to dinner parties only to meet new and interesting people and learn from them — no, really!
And my personal favorite, Moses of Crete, who in the 5th century convinced other Cretan Jews to attempt a trans-Mediterranean journey to the Promised Land by foot; many of his followers drowned, some were rescued, and Moses himself was never seen nor heard from again.
D.
Cosmo jumps the shark
It’s true. I haven’t done a Cosmo 13 in a very long time, because eventually the mag’s self-satire undermined my own feeble attempts at humor. After the third or hundredth headline promised, Twenty-four New Ways To Make Her Beg For More! and delivered,
1. Give her a sensuous massage at 1 AM.
2. Give her a sensuous massage at 2 AM.
3. Give her a sensuous massage . . .
. . . I decided to call it quits. For several years, I had wondered who made up Cosmo’s target audience. I came to the conclusion it was composed of young women who find titillation in French words like frottage yet blanch at anatomically accurate descriptions (thus, Grip his member firmly, and don’t forget to fondle his two little friends). Women who, for thrills, like to put sprinkles and chocolate chips on their vanilla ice cream.
Naturally, this month’s cover grabbed my attention. (Cosmo covers often do. Who wouldn’t want to learn Ten Ways to Make him Pass Out from Ecstacy?) I mean, really: what topic could be so racy Cosmo couldn’t talk about it on the cover?
Take a moment to think about it. Come up with your best guess and then join me below the fold.
Received from NetFlix . . .
Allegro non Troppo, one of my favorite films from the 70s. Here’s one small bit.
D.
Time to make your peace
Approximately 48 hours ago, the CERN Large Hadron Collider broke a record for high-energy particle collisions, with proton beams colliding with a remarkable combined energy of 7 tera-electron volts. Yes, I know, “collison,” “colliding,” sloppy writing, hopeless repetition. But I’m having a hard time finding the motivation to craft clean, crisp journalistic prose.
Excuse me. I’ve got to compose myself.
A lot of us joked about the LHC bringing on the end of the world — mechanism usually being the creation of an Earth-consuming black hole. Cute in-joke because those of us in-the-know were well aware that a microscopic black hole would evaporate before it ever got out of the collider’s vacuum chamber. Funny us. Too bad our apocalyptic scenarios were limited by a distinct failure of imagination.
First some background. The fine structure constant, α, numerical value roughly 1/137, is (per Wikipedia) “a fundamental physical constant, namely the coupling constant characterizing the strength of the electromagnetic interaction.” One way of measuring α is with the Quantum Hall effect, which specifies among other things that electrical resistance in a supercooled wire is precisely quantized. Supercolliders rely heavily on supercooling, of course, so alterations of the Quantum Hall effect — if such a thing were possible — would show up as anomalous readings by the LHC’s internal circuitry.
For the rest of the story, I’ll quote from today’s interview of CERN spokesman Jurgen Schukraft by PBS reporter Dwayne Myers:
JS: Something was playing havoc with our oscilloscopes. A simple AC sinusoid looked slanted as if blown by a stiff wind. At first we thought of magnetic leakage. Anyone who has held a strong magnet near a cathode ray tube — a television, for example — knows what it can do to an electron beam. This was quickly ruled out, yet we had no explanation for our oscilloscopes.
DM: I understand [California Institute of Technology Professor of Physics] Curtis Schramm was the first to check Hall effect readings from your liquid helium cables.
JS: Yes, with the finding that they were off. Way off, close to 6%, but systematically deviant. And since the quantized resistance values were consistently aberrant, it was a simple matter to discern that [fine structure constant] alpha was off by the same degree.
DM: So the fine structure constant, one of the fundamental constants of the universe, had somehow shifted within the central cavity of the collider.
JS: And subsequent measurements at our remote sites first in Sadigny, then in Le Cannelet, indicate the change is propagating outward.
DM: Like a wave?
JS: Sadly, no. The change moves outward radially from CERN, but it’s picking up speed and magnitude. This morning, [Professor of Nuclear Physics] Bartolomeo Galvez at Universidad Carlos III of Madrid recorded the alteration of alpha as the “wave,” as you call it, propagated through his laboratory. The change had increased to just over 6%.
DM: So physicists around the world will soon have to alter many of their textbooks.
JS: This would be true, if it were worth the effort.
DM: Excuse me?
JS: At the present rate, when the “wave” reaches our sun in 2012, alpha will measure 0.121. At that value, stellar fusion will be quite impossible.
DM: So our sun will —
JS: Snuff it, yes.
From Science News.
Me? I’m going to spend my remaining months eating deep-fried Snickers bars and Twinkies.
D.
Too tired to think
Not sure why. I’m not on call this week . . . should be sleeping like a baby.
The talk went well. I was hoping a “Here, let me share some wisdom-gained-from-experience with you” talk would be appreciated, and it was.
Here. This one’s for the writers/authors in my audience.
This intrigued me:
But what I really wanted to do was steal this from Noxcat.
D.
It ain’t rocket surgery
I’m giving a talk tomorrow on ENT Urgencies. Needless to say, I should have narrowed my topic somewhat. I have a bad feeling that my talk will sprawl hopelessly, lacking as it does nearly any sense of focus. Oy. And to make matters worse, I checked an email today wherein the doc running these Wednesday talks specified what he wanted me to cover. Um . . . different urgencies. Not a complete lack of overlap, but now I have to tack on a “loose ends” powerpoint presentation. Like I have time for this? Yes, it’s a two-hour talk (and yes, it amazes me that anyone can sit still for a two-hour talk), but I have a million different urgencies to cover.
I should have picked something narrower, like cockroaches in the ear canal, or fish bones in the throat.
Hey! This is cool:
Wish me luck.
D.
A Doug by any other name
Yes, I know Starbuck’s is evil, but we don’t have Peet’s coffee in Bako. The bags, yes, but not the coffee shops. So today while Jake was doing his community service thing (a requirement of his high school — kind of cool, really), I popped down to SB for some iced tea. You know how they like to write your name on the cup? “Doug,” I said, and was passingly dismayed to find in black marker on perspiring plastic, “Dud.”
I’ve been worse over the years. When my friend Stan took me to an auto auction to buy my first car, the guy whose job it was to fill out name tags for visitors wrote “Dug.” Which tickled Stan to no end, of course, and he still tells the story.
But the worst was long ago, waaay back in Hebrew school, which I’ll remind you was a torment I asked for. And you know, despite the various annoyances — my snooty classmates, all of whom acted like their dads made a lot more than mine, which they probably did but how did they KNOW that; the incredibly crappy textbooks, which taught vocabulary but no grammar whatsoever; the complete lack of theological instruction, which is what I’d hoped I’d be getting — the experience was worthwhile. Worthwhile, despite annoyance #4: Israeli teachers who could not for the life of them pronounce the schwa that links my “D” to my “G”. For all my years in Hebrew school, I was forever “Dog.”
Eventually they gave us Hebrew names. Mine was David. A D name is a D name, I suppose, and David suited me fine. For many years, I wanted to change my name to David. And then I had my Bar Mitzvah, no one ever called me Dog again, and I forgot about the whole thing.
I’m too old to change now. But wouldn’t it be cool if we could choose our own names, at our 21st birthday, for example?
D.
Your typical seder
Passover approaches. No one invited me to a seder, and I doubt I’d go if I were invited. I haven’t been to a seder since the 1970s, back when both my grandparents were still alive.
Is your name Eliahu? Funny, you LOOK like a Peter to me.
It’s traditional to set out a plate of food for Eliahu (who might be the same as Elijah, I can never remember), and my crazy uncle would invariably eat that food as well as his own. This would always lead to a screaming fight between my grandparents and my uncle. We never had a seder without screaming. I’m not sure what it would look like.
There were certain things I liked and looked forward to with every seder. I liked the taste of matzoh dipped in saltwater, and I liked matzoh with red beet horseradish. Celery dipped in saltwater, that was good, too. Did my grandmother make tzimmes for Passover? If she did, I don’t remember it. And I suppose she made lamb, too, since that’s traditional. But I don’t recall the lamb, either.
My grandfather always hid the afikomen (a bit of matzoh — if you found it, you got a dollar) under the same cushion every year. Once I had been debriefed by my siblings, I had no trouble finding it.
And then there was my grandfather’s continual state of exasperation. He was only trying to work his way through the ritual, trying to read through the Haggadah like you’re supposed to, yet he was subjected to one interruption after another from my grandmother or my uncle. I think the whole thing made him very sad, or perhaps disgusted.
My grandmother never sat down to eat. She spent 90% of the seder in the kitchen, reserving the remaining 10% for serving food and screaming at my uncle. Considering that most of the food can be prepared well in advance, I have no idea what she was doing in the kitchen. Watering down the RC Cola, I suspect.
All in all, not a happy holiday. But then, I’ve never liked Passover, ever since I came to understand the story itself. No one (and that includes at least one rabbi and one orthodox Jew) has been able to explain to me why it’s okay for God to kill all the firstborn. They can’t all deserve to die. There are children, infants in that group, no? And after the first few plagues, God doesn’t even give Pharoah a chance to relent. God “hardened his heart.” As if God had a desired outcome in mind, and damned if Pharoah was going to screw it up by developing a conscience.
Maybe I’ll make a kugel, just for old time’s sake. And I’ll make it using butter, just so I can get some juicy hate mail.
Hey, Sis, anything to add?
D.
Expressive me
Last two days I’ve participated in a workshop for training Unit Based Team co-leaders. I am now a trained co-leader. We will be using something called RIM, Rapid Improvement Model, to affect rapid improvements in our day-to-day processes in the office. RIM is big, I’m told. Tiger Woods used RIM to improve his golf game, and no doubt also to improve his ability to score floozy ass.
You must know that I have a low tolerance for WUABATs (Wanton Use of Acronyms By Administrator Types) so of course I had to grab my diversion where I could. And they’re not even administrators, these people who run these workshops. They’re . . . I don’t know what they are. Process Improvement Experts, I suppose. PIEs.
So when I had to answer the question, How will your team make decisions? I of course said, “Magic 8-Ball,” and when I had to answer the question, How will you provide feedback to your team members? I said, “With a flaming paper bag full of dog poop.”
That’ll get my message across!
We had to take a quiz to assess our “working style.” It’s a five question quiz. For example, in the following question, you’re supposed to assign a number 1 to 4, 1 being “most correct” and 4 being “least correct.”
1. When performing a job, it is most important to me to
a. do it correctly, regardless of the time involved
b. set deadlines and get it done
c. work as a team, cooperatively with others
d. demonstrate my talents and enthusiasm
You do this for five questions. After totaling your points for each of the a, b, c, and d responses, you look to see which has the lowest value (the ‘a’ answers, the ‘b’ answers, etc.) and that determines your working style.
Mine is expressive.
D — Expressive
*Spontaneous actions and decisions, risk-taker
*Likes involvement
*Generates new & innovative ideas
*Tends to dream and get others caught up on the dream
*Jumps from one activity to another
*Works quickly and excitingly with others
*Not good with follow-through
Then, like a horoscope, we have a little grid that shows how we’re going to get along with our co-leaders, depending upon their working style. My co-leader is a Driver.
Be patient and try to work with a flip chart to harness creative spirits. Emphasize time lines and due dates. Build in flexibility to allow the free reign of creativity.
Alternatively, I could have saved fifteen minutes of my life and consulted Astrology.com.
You feel better able to handle your people today — in fact, you may decide that the best thing for you to do is to let them wander off on their own while you take care of the stuff that’s better done alone.
Granted, I am indeed Expressive. When asked the question, How would you like to receive recognition? I responded, “From Salma Hayek.”
A fellow Expressive.
How’s that for a new and innovative idea? Or does Salma fall under “tends to dream”? Hmm.
D.