Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

In an internal e-mail I received this morning, the Tea Party Nation corporation has announced the practice of censoring, banning and ejecting its own members for the sins of “antagonism” against Tea Party Nation leadership, consorting “with liberal media outlets”, and sharing information with other Americans about the Tea Party Nation’s workings…

… because it’s all about freedom! The kind of freedom a corporation like TPN can exercise to stamp out heresy.

Well, that and charging $360 a plate for dinner. So very much of the people.

Barry C. Black the government-appointed, tax-paid high priest of the United States Senate, spoke yesterday of the evils of self-sufficiency. Praying to his Christian deity, which he wrongly presumes is the deity of every American, he preached, “Deliver us from the self-sufficiency that will not recognize our need of You.”

In these times of record-braking budget defecits and general economic disarray, is a message against self-sufficiency really what our nation needs to hear? Has the problem with Wall Street been that it was too self-sufficient? Do we need more corporate dependence on taxpayer bailouts?

Is corporate welfare the message Barry C. Black intended to communicate, or does he merely want the United States to become dependent upon his religion?

Barack Obama angered many environmentalists this week when he promised to promote the coal industry fraud of clean coal. Why would he do such a thing, when there’s never been a single viable commercial use of supposedly clean coal technology, when the technology doesn’t even really eliminate most of the pollution and waste from the process of gaining energy from coal anyway?

Well, there’s a lot of money in that coal. One of the coal giants, Alliance Resource Partners, just announced record profits for 2009. What did they do with all that money? $12,500 of it went to the Central Executive Committee of the Kentucky Democratic Party.

And what did Kentucky’s representatives in Congress do this week? They joined together to reconstitute the Congressional Coal Caucus, which includes Nick Rahall, the Democratic Chair of the House Natural Resources Committee.

Coal dust is settling all over the Democratic Party these days.

There’s a new logo for the Blue Dog Democrats being used by U.S. Representative Jim Costa, and others from the right wing coalition.

It’s got an extra squiggle to it: “Conservative”, it reads. That’s just in case you hadn’t paid attention to the way that U.S. Representatives like Costa have sabotaged the Democratic majority in Congress over the last year.

It’s a not very subtle hint for Republican voters. This Democrat won’t support any of that progressive stuff. Democratic voters, on the other hand, are just supposed to see the word “Democrat” and fall in line.

Hint, hint: There’s no “fiscal” in front of “conservative”. These Blue Dogs are just plain conservative.

During the hours leading up to Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address 2010, his aides were promising a “feisty” speech. However, what I saw was President Obama spending a lot of time practically begging Republicans not to be so mean to him.

Did these pleas gain Obama any breathing room, or were they like a wimpy kid’s cries for help – a magnet for bullies?

For a long time, we’ve been reminded that, though we see paintings and sculptures of dinosaurs in particular colors, nobody really knows what colors the dinosaurs were. Now, in the case of one dinosaur, that’s not at all true.

Scientists have examined small structures in the feathers of the dinosaur Sinosauropteryx in order to explore an evolutionary connection between birds and dinosaurs. Particular types of these structures, melanosomes, are associated with particular colors in modern day birds. So, by identifying the melanosomes in fossilized feathers of Sinosauropteryx, researchers can tell which parts of the creature had feathers of which colors.

The results indicate bands of light and dark orange along the tail of the dinosaur. Read more about it.

I remember the class asking my high school geometry teacher, “Why do we need to know about sines and cosines? How will we use this in real life?” He didn’t give us much of an answer, and at least in my life the answer was that I didn’t need trigonometry, not until now. I finally figured out what it’s good for in my life.

I’m looking at the Maine state legislature and would like my computer to put icons for each member of a legislative committee on a circle, equidistant from one another. Why? Well, later on, I intend to draw lines between the members’ icons in order to express something about the relationships between them. But for now my problem is to get a nice, neat circle of dots, each representing a legislator. For committees with size X, the dots should be placed (360/X) degrees away from one another on the circle. For a committee of 12 people, then, there should be dots placed at 0 degrees, 30 degrees, 60 degrees, 90 degrees, 120 degrees … and so on, all around the circle.

That’s all well and good, but what are the x,y coordinates for a point 30 degrees along in a circle? Trig!

The center point of a circle and a point along the edge of a circle mark two points of a right triangle; the third point in the example to our left forms a right angle along the horizontal axis of the circle.

For an image of width W and height H, the center point of the circle will be (W/2),(H/2). The radius r of the circle is W/2, and it is also the hypotenuse of the right triangle. The location to place our dot on the edge of the circle will be (W/2)+b,(H/2)-a. We can set the values of the width W and height H of the image. All we need to do is figure out the values of a and b for angle A. Those values are

a = r * Sin(A)
b = r * Cos(A)

What’s A? It’s whatever we want it to be. To find a series of 12 dots for 12 legislators, we can draw a series of right triangles all the way around the circle, each anchored at the circle’s center point and at the edge of the circle, with angles in increasing increments of 30 degrees. For each triangle, we can use the sine and cosine of A to find out how where to place our dots.

Here’s the Maine state legislature’s Appropriations Committee, drawn by a computer using the GD graphics commands in the language PHP. Republicans are pinkish, Democrats are bluish.

This process can be used for any number of dots representing any number of committee members.

There’s how I’ll use trigonometry in real life, Mr. Sobieraski.

Sunday night, the first of two parts of a new version of Jane Austen’s classic story Emma was shown on PBS Masterpiece. An informal poll about the new version shows that a majority of people loved the production. As for myself, I’ll have to wait and see.

My quick reactions:

- The actress playing Emma didn’t carry the upper class snobbishness of the main character very well. Everything from her posture to her expressions communicated too much enthusiasm for what other people were doing. She was almost servile in her approach – not what Emma would do.
- Mr. Woodhouse, Emma’s father, was the most sympathetic of any version I’ve seen – not just a doddering old idiot, but a person with a reason to be preoccupied with people going away.
- Mr. Knightly didn’t fill his boots. He delivered all the lines, but didn’t seem like much of a grownup.
- The introduction told us too much without showing us as much as it should have.
- Mr. Elton was done very well, and Harriet Smith was believable.
- Miss Bates was the most subtle portrayal of that character that I’ve seen yet, setting up Emma for a particularly hard fall in her snobbish dismissal.
- This Emma focuses more on issues of class injustice than other versions I’ve seen.

This is the first time I’ve ever watched a new production of a Jane Austen movie and fallen asleep in the middle. Nonetheless, I’ll be tuning in again next Sunday night to see if the show can turn it around by the time Emma gets married.

Last year, our irregular writer Green Man had a fun time teasing wealthy heir David de Rothschild for hanging around in a San Francisco garage, playing with plastics, and expecting to get fawning media attention, calling himself an “Adventure Ecologist”. De Rothschild has spent the last several years promising that, one of these days, he’s going to take his yacht, the Plastiki, on a cruise across Pacific Ocean. The most he’s accomplished, however, is to take his craft on a few fun little day trips. He calls them “sea trials” to give a sense of drama to his little skitterings about.

Why on earth can’t a wealthy heir to the Rothschild fortune, who doesn’t have the distraction of having to work for a living, or go to school, get out of port? Abby Sunderland is getting out to sea just fine, without most of the huge resources that David de Rothschild commands. Sunderland is a 16 year-old girl, and she’s not just going to be crossing the Pacific Ocean. She will be circumnavigating the globe in her boat without any assistance.

David de Rothschild, beaten by a teenage girl. I guess what they say is true: Money isn’t everything.

Maybe you felt really sad when you saw Avatar: How could we humans attack those blue people… on that planet that doesn’t exist?

If you’re looking for something powerful, and blue, and real, take a look at some of the videos and photographs over at the Extreme Ice Survey. Deep blue ice from the bottom of glaciers is rising up and melting into our seas, and with some very powerful results, aesthetically and ecologically.

It’s a story about what we’re doing to our own planet, right now. The best part is that the story is actually all around you – in 3D.