My Heart Has Left for San Francisco

I took Ali to the airport a little while ago; he’s on the 7:15 flight to San Francisco. The sky was overcast and gray, but then we saw a ghostly half-rainbow. No sun, just the rainbow. Looked like it was being projected against the clouds.
It’s been a year since Katrina hit New Orleans and reduced the Crescent City to a smear on the coast. But the Bush Administration is still doing a heckuva job there. Harry Shearer's been keeping track every week on Le Show.
UoA’s on mid-term break and the weather’s been great, so I’ve been playing hooky. Tuesday we tried to go snorkelling at Goat Island. My wetsuit’s thick enough to get me through a Chicago winter, so I waded in up to my chest and was fine. Then plunged my face in the water and – Omigoditsfreezing! My jaw muscles cramped all the way up to my ears.
The big news here this week: Olaf Wiig – the Fox cameraman kidnapped in Gaza – was finally released. My favorite quote:

"They were accusing both of us of being Americans and I stood up and said, 'Dude, I'm not American, I'm a New Zealander.'" When his captors looked puzzled Wigg drew the map and said: "This tiny country at the bottom with no ties to anything, that's New Zealand and we're a different sort of people altogether."

It was such a nice day that we warmed up again in no time and went exploring. The beach turns rocky after a little while, but if you keep going there’s a perfect little patch of pink sand. Gazillions of broken seashells, rubbed into soft little pebbles. It’s at the base of some pretty steep hills where a couple of sheep were grazing. There was also a trickle of waterfall; above it in the distance we could see where it started in the hills above. (I don’t think this comes through in the picture though – a shame, it was lovely.)
There was yet another shocking story in the NYT this week: the Feds are blocking a father and son from returning to California; they won’t be allowed to return home until they agree to be interrogated by the FBI. (It appears they’re also being denied their right to counsel.) The men are related to someone who’s been convicted of supporting terrorists by attending a training camp in Pakistan. They’re also American citizens, and there aren’t any charges against them. but that doesn't seem to count for much anymore.
After my last class on Friday, when mid-term break began, we went to Piha. There was just enough time for a little hike before sunset. We took a trail up a cliff, then found a little patch of sand that was nearly cut off from the ocean. Except for a hole in the cliff. The sound of the surf echoing against the walls was totally cool.

I’ve had trouble focusing all day, but I’ll be ok tomorrow. It's only 4 months 'til Christmas. Not long at all.


Air NZ’s website says the SF flight left at 7:32.


Cheers,
Sandie

I ♥ Pluto

I know the world has many more important things to fuss over than Pluto's planetary status. But I thought this piece in today's New York Times caputured the essence of the problem.

I ♥ Pluto by Tim Kreider

MY love for our picked-on ninth planet is deeply, perhaps embarrassingly, personal.

I took my first public stand on Pluto’s taxonomical fate when I addressed the Forum on Outer Planetary Exploration in 2001 (don’t ask why a cartoonist was addressing astronomers — it’s a long story).

I informed the assembled scientists that, first of all, no way was I or anyone else about to un-memorize anything we’d already been forced to learn in elementary school. More important, I felt sure that, as former children, we all instinctively respected the principle: no do-overs.

Planets, like Supreme Court justices, are appointed for life, and you can’t blithely oust them no matter how eccentric, skewed or unqualified they may prove to be. If they could kick out Pluto, I warned, they could do it to anything, or anyone.

I admit: it’s a highly emotional issue and maybe I got carried away in the heat of debate.

Even I was a little abashed last week when the International Astronomical Union tried to protect Pluto’s status by proposing an absurdly broad definition of planethood that encompasses moons, asteroids and trans-Neptunian objects — in other words, pretty much any half-formed hunk of frozen crud that can pull itself together into a ball long enough to get photographed by the Hubble.

For longtime Pluto partisans, there was something almost punitive about this proposal: happy now?

I guess I always knew, in my heart, that Pluto didn’t “belong.” Pluto is idiosyncratic — neither a dull, domestic terrestrial planet nor a surly, vainglorious gas giant. It’s mostly ice. It’s smaller than our own Moon, and has an orbit so eccentric that it spends 20 years of its 248-year revolutionary period inside Neptune’s orbit. It’s tilted at a crazy 17-degree angle to the ecliptic, and its satellite, Charon, is so disproportionately large that it’s been called a double planet.

Pluto is what my old astronomy textbook rather judgmentally called a “deviant,” and I’ve always felt a little defensive on its behalf.

I’ve long regarded Saturn’s misty tantalizing moon Titan as the Homecoming Queen of the solar system, courted and fawned over, stringing us along with teasing glimpses under her atmosphere, while Pluto was more like the chubby Goth chick who wrote weird poems about dead birds and never talked to anybody. Still, I just can’t stand by and watch as the solar system’s Fat Girl gets pushed down into ever-more ignominious substrata of social ostracism.

All I really wanted was a little velvet-rope treatment for Pluto. I didn’t expect them to throw open the doors to all this Kuiper Belt riffraff.

It’s like that point when your party’s grown out of control and you look around and ask: Who are these people? Sedna? Xena? Ceres? Ceres is an asteroid, for God’s sake. Why not just make 1997 XF11 or Greenland or Harriet Meiers a planet?

And I am second to no one in my respect for Charon, but come on: it’s obviously Pluto’s moon.

Now they’re proposing to designate it a “large companion,” which sounds like the sort of euphemistic legal status the court might grant to Oliver Hardy and can’t be doing Charon’s self-esteem one bit of good. “Longtime companion” would have been more dignified and validating.

The solar system is a mess.

The situation this seems most similar to is the inextricably tangled social nightmare that is inviting people to your wedding. You truly want to invite your distant and eccentric but dear old friend Pluto, but this necessarily means inviting his horrible girlfriend, too, plus then maybe you’re obliged to invite all the other people you were both friends with in college, friends he’s still in contact with who will be offended if he’s invited and they’re not but who, frankly, are now boring people with whom you no longer have anything in common.

Some would suggest we just have to be harsh about this and not invite any of them, Pluto included. But these people are forgetting that we already sent Pluto an invitation, 76 years ago. Pluto has rented a tuxedo.

The astronomical union is to vote on Pluto tomorrow. But even as astronomers squabble, I remain confident that this whole wonky state of affairs will not be permanent. Eventually we’ll get it all sorted out.

For the record, I would accept a separate (but equal!) class of dwarves or planetoids, including Sedna and Xena. After all, the childhood mnemonic is easily amended: My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas, Sans Xenophobia.

But what I really wish is that we’d just grandfather Pluto in and then close all the loopholes. Let’s do it, not for scientific reasons, but for sentimental ones.

As a friend of mine at NASA said, “It would prove our humanity to let Pluto stay in.” It would be like that moment when the doorman is about to escort you out of a private party where you don’t, arguably, belong, but then someone who knows you taps him on the shoulder and says, “Wait a minute, I know this guy. He’s O.K..”

Cheers,
Sandie

More fun and games

I thought this was totally hilarious.

Fun and Games

A week ago Saturday, Ali and I celebrated our 12th anniversary. The plan was to go hiking near KareKare, but the weather turned from sort-of-cloudy to serious rain by the time we got there, so we wound up grocery shopping instead. Ah, the romance.

My first Investment Law lectures were this week and, all in all, they went ok. Three hours – 1 on Thursday, 2 on Friday – about the history of securities regulation. I know students generally think it’s a dull topic, but I’ve always loved history. I recently found out why European stock exchanges are called “bourses.” It’s from the Van Der Beurse family – prominent innkeepers-cum-bankers in early 14th century Bruges. The family crest was three money pouches – or purses; beurse or bourse in Latin. I think that’s pretty cool; Ali’s started calling me a geek.

I tried to make it lively – my last chance to make a good impression, since next week we start on stock exchange listing rules. The last hour on Friday I introduced them to game theory. I started by auctioning off a $1 coin, and got the bidding up to $2.30 for it. (And I know I could have got them to go higher if I’d just known their faces better.) Next we played variations on Prisoners Dilemma, which everybody seemed to enjoy. It’s good for sorting out the wolves from the sheep, but I also think it provides a good illustration of how challenging it is to get human beings to cooperate.

The Iranian Ambassador to NZ spoke at an international relations forum on campus recently. I wasn’t expecting him to say much more than the “party line,” but it turned out to be a very interesting evening. He was an articulate defender of Iran’s right to develop nuclear technology, which I expected. But he also spoke quite eloquently about his own hopes and beliefs for the country’s future – particularly regarding social progress. Nice to think people like that are able to reach – and keep - fairly high level positions. It also made me realize that Ahmadinejad may be just another nutty head of state - not necessarily a good representative of the people simply because he won an election.

It’s been over a month now, and the UN has finally passed a watered-down sort of cease fire resolution. The parties are supposed to adopt it in the next couple days, but, in the meantime, Israel and Hezbollah are continuing to pound Lebanon.

Of course the latest big news story was the foiled plot to blow up a dozen planes with liquid explosives. It was announced the day after Joe Lieberman lost the primary.

Cheers,
Sandie