What The Future Sounds Like

Compare & Contrast

Guys used to write this sort of lyrics:

It is the springtime of my loving-the second season I am to know
You are the sunlight in my growing - so little warmth I've felt before.
It isn't hard to feel me glowing - I watched the fire that grew so low.

It is the summer of my smiles - flee from me Keepers of the Gloom.
Speak to me only with your eyes. It is to you I give this tune.
Ain't so hard to recognize - These things are clear to all from time to time.

Talk Talk Talk Talk - I've felt the coldness of my winter
I never thought it would ever go. I cursed the gloom that set upon us...
But I know that I love you so

These are the seasons of emotion and like the winds they rise and fall

This is the wonder of devotion - I seek the torch we all must hold.
This is the mystery of the quotient - Upon us all, upon us all a little rain must fall...It's just a little rain...

Two decades later (1992), pop lyrics were met with this unrelated song:

What happened? Where did all that rage come from? What harshed the mellow? It couldn't have been Bush II. I blame bad parenting. Have I pointed out how Tom Morello and Barack Obama had nearly the same pedigree?

The Posh, Posh Traveling Life For Me!

My kids are very close in age (16 months apart). When they were little, they were small enough to fit together inside a wicker laundry basket and we'd always play a little game together before bedtime. I'd hoist them in the basket high up in the air over my head and give them a "balloon ride" and sing that Lionel Jeffries song from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  They knew the song because that movie was on a seemingly endless loop at our house.  Kids love routines--especially when they're so little. It was just all part of the safe little bubble that fathers create in families. My dad did similar things. He had a white canvas mail sack with a rope closure. My brother and I would fit inside (one-at-a time) and he'd whirl us around outside in the yard before he went off to work at night. When we got too big for the sack, he'd hold us by one arm and leg and spin us around so we could pretend we were airplanes. It was something moms wouldn't do then--not because it took physical strength--but because what if you banged into a tree with a kid or something?

Today, I'm flying the kids back to Wisconsin to visit my mom in Madison and my brother who lives up near La Crosse. I had a whole slew of half-finished things to post here but they'll have to wait. I'm working on some new sketches too.

The Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge

Last month my wife and I took the kids on a crazy road trip adventure to retrace the history of water conservation in the Great American Southwest. The trip was inspired by our reading Colossus, which retells the story of taming the Colorado River and building the Hoover Dam.

First stop was the Salton Sea which is only 100 years old and was created by accident when an irrigation canal went awry in 1906. I traced down the exact spot where the accident happened which was right outside of Yuma, Arizona. There wasn't much to see. We drove on a levee alongside the old Colorado River bed, following an old 1906 map and Google Earth. Two Border Patrol agents' trucks were parked nose-to-nose on the levee as we peered into Mexico. We drove the Chevy to the levee but the levee was bone dry. The Border Patrol guys gave us such mean looks that I was afraid to even take a photo.

We stayed overnight in Yuma which is a very old and dusty town bisected by what's left of the Colorado River. I took some high-res ("artsy") photos of an old hotel there which I'll post separately. Heading further upriver, we reached the Hoover Dam:

Hoover Dam taken from Tillman Bridge

The last time I was at Hoover Dam was pre-9/11. In the old days, the main route between Phoenix and Vegas still passed over the dam. We did that journey then with one kid and one in the oven while driving our glorious 1963 Thunderbird (that car deserves more that passing mention so I won't mention it further). There was something new this time that wasn't there in 1999--the new Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge:*

Tillman Bridge taken from Hoover Dam

The bridge is stunningly gorgeous and just opened a year or so ago. It's part of the main road now between Vegas and Phoenix, but you can park and walk it too for no charge. I felt a little acrophobic as I took that photo of the dam from the bridge.

____________________

*I dedicate this blog post to Corporal Patrick Daniel "Pat" Tillman (November 6, 1976 – April 22, 2004).

Added:  A 1930's artist captured the same view of Hoover Dam from an imaginary bridge:

Buried At Sea

I took my son to Pearl Harbor last summer. My family was on vacation, staying on the Big Island, but I insisted on flying over to Honolulu for a day trip and he wanted to go too. It was an expensive side trip, but I just couldn't get that close without paying my respects.

We got there early in the morning after all the morning tickets for the USS Arizona Memorial were already gone (I think they give the early ones to package tours--not to walk on visitors like us). Anyways, we got tickets for later the same day which gave us plenty of time to visit the nearby USS Missouri.

The guns of the USS Missouri point out over the sunken remains of the USS Arizona

Japan surrendered onboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, less than four years after Pearl Harbor. I already wrote a bit about that ship back here. The Mighty Mo (BB 63) keeps vigil over the sunken remains of the USS Arizona (BB 39); the two ships are poised, bow-to-bow, symbolizing the beginning and the end of the Pacific War. The Missouri is worth a self-guided tour, much like the USS Midway in San Diego is.

Back at the Arizona, the US Park Service shows a great short documentary film narrated by Stockard Channing. I found a snippet of it here (wish I could find the whole thing):

The movie is well-made and teaches the whole inevitability of Pearl Harbor. It's emotionally moving too and softened me up before the boat ride over to the memorial perched over the wreckage. That's really all that's left on the surface--a memorial. A turret base still protrudes, amazingly, given that all iron needs to rust is water, salt, and oxygen. I credit the turret's longevity to the chromium and nickel mixed into the steel--Kruppstahl--but that's just me.

Underwater, the Arizona is remarkably intact.^link Of course you can't dive her, but the Park Service does regular underwater inspections--but I found this cool model of the wreck back onshore:

After paying our respects, we returned to the museum exhibits and various grounds and memorials.

This plaque touched me:

What a comfort to know where one's final remains belong!  That sentiment, along with the shipwreck aspect, reminded me of the last scene in James Cameron's Titanic where the fictional Rose Dawson rejoins her erstwhile lover in death:

Link

Tijuana Taxi

Friday drives to the middle school are Cash Cab Friday, but Monday through Thursday mornings have become Spanish lessons!  We (me, son, daughter, and the neighbor kid) are learning to speak Español using the Pimsleur method which involves talking back to cued questions.  So far so good.  The neighbor kid already took some Spanish, but my two blondini are pretty clueless.  Their middle school is 57% Hispanic and I figure that being bilingual will be a useful tool in the future. Their electives are already filled with Art and Shop. Hell, it might even help me if I find myself out of a job.

[Added: special shout out to Freeman Hunt for first telling me about the Pimsleur methods and kids]

Cash Cab Fridays

The fall school semester started yesterday and I resumed what we call Cash Cab Friday today.  I drive my two kids to the local middle school along with a neighbor kid in the mornings.  The drive is short--10 minutes tops-- but just long enough to pick their little brains. 

I ask them questions as a group and they have to formulate the answer together just like on the TV show.  Each correct answer is worth a quarter which I pay out in cash. Last year I tried to formulate themes for the inquisitions like math, history, geography, but usually tilted towards things that I think they should know.  I also try to challenge them too with unusual practical things that strike me as interesting.  Believe me, I learn a lot too just formulating the questions in a straight forward way.

Today's questions included:

What are a skunk's two natural means of defense?

Correct answer is of course the odor gland but also the distinct white stripe: no other mammal has this and baby skunks have them at birth.  The stripe is a visual defense cue "hey, leave me alone I'm a skunk." A challenge question was "what is the skunk's natural predator? " The answer is large birds of prey that  mostly lack a sense of smell.

Another question was: "what's the last day of summer called?"  Fall equinox. "What is the significance of the fall equinox?" The answer I was looking for of course was the day on which day and night are equal.  They missed that one. That cued me into a little mini lesson of equinoxes, and solstices. 

Another question was: "name three common household appliances that heat water".  Water heater, stove, microwave were all accepted as answers. Dishwasher was not because it uses household hot water and heats inside to dry.

"Name three common household appliances which heat air." Answers accepted were clothes dryer, dishwasher, hairdryer.

I'm also trying to get them to distinguish between appliances that use electricity and those which use natural gas.

It turns out that I have two budding math geniuses along for the ride.  The neighbor boy, in 7th grade, is skipping 7th grade math and going to 8th grade math. My daughter, just starting 6th grade, pegged the standardized math test last year and so we're hoping she continues her interest.

The Herd Instinct

Once upon a time in a previous career I saw an eminent biochemist give a seminar on how enzymes work.  Enzymes are those little catalytic dynamos that do the heavy chemical processing in biological systems. Our livers and guts, for example host many enzymes and their job is to neutralize any foreign substances that we consume as well as to breakdown foodstuffs to give us energy.

The guy was well past retirement age, but he had only recently turned to computer modeling to solve some questions that had nagged him his entire career.  What he had turned to relatively late was the modelling of reactions in silico, a term meant to distinguish it from experiments in vitro and in vivo.  Modelling complex things in silico (like the weather for example) has taken a hit in the public eye lately,  but this guy was smart enough to know the pitfalls of his own techniques.

Now I don't have the time to explain how enzymes work but part of the theory is the so-called lock and key model:

Original

The multicolored molecule on the right is a substrate (the key) and the thing under it is an enzyme (lock). The lock and key metaphor comes from the very specific fit between the substrate and enzyme so that other keys can't fit the lock.  There are very specific reasons why we wouldn't want other keys to fit. Getting back to the seminar, the general topic was how to model the lock and key model for a particular enzyme and substrate.

A typical substrate molecule is not a very static thing.  If I could animate the cartoon above, the substrate would be flip-flopping and rotating, and generally moving every which way. So how does an enzyme get a substrate molecule to fit the lock?  The stock answer is that the substrate is held in place and then induced to react by a mixture of different chemical "forces" available to the enzyme: electrostatic, hydrophobic, hydrogen bonding, etc.  These little cumulative forces "pin down" a substrate. But the gist of the speaker's news was that it's not a matter of making sure that the substrate orients or lines up in preferred conformation; rather, it's a matter of expending enough energy to prevent a substrate from doing many motions and gyrations that it would otherwise do in the absence of the enzyme. That might be a subtle point but I grasped it immediately because it struck a chord with work I had previously done.

After the lecture I approached the older man at a wine & cheese mixer, introduced myself, and explained how I had worked with some very special kinds of solvents (called liquid crystals) which are able to get much smaller molecules dissolved in them to line up. Turns out that the orientation occurs not because the smaller molecules are attracted to the larger molecule but rather because they are prevented from adopting certain conformations- i.e., their freedoms are restricted (but not completely of course). The old man smiled and told me that I may have been the only other person in the room who "got" what he had been trying to say earlier.

Later on I thought about a non-technical way to explain the same thing. Being the father of a toddler, I  likened it to how a parent watches over a toddler, preventing the child from doing certain things which it might otherwise do given limitless options. Watching over a small child is often not instilling in the child to do the right things but rather restricting its choices--herding if you will.

Father and Son

Hollywood Homeschooling

I've begun something I'm dubbing "Hollywood Homeschooling." The idea involves influencing my 10 year old son's weekend movie viewing choices (he only watches TV on weekends, and prefers to read during the week). And don't think I'm encouraging couch potato habits- he does have sports activities.

We don't have expanded cable, which seems to have swallowed up most of the movies I saw as a kid. However, Netflix offers many of them for rent. I've been picking one movie a week, and so far he has been very receptive.

Movies watched so far:

The Great Escape (1963)
The Guns Of Navarone (1961)

Movies in queue:

The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957)
Where Eagles Dare (1968)
The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Zulu (1964
The Blue Max (1966) BTW, can anybody recommend a good DVD educational series on WW I?

You can tell I have a little theme going, and I'm reaching back into my memory, recalling what I watched in TV reruns when I was that old.

Which movies do you remember watching as a kid?