Bush, Arroyo, Carrots, Sticks

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President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was in town yesterday to pay a visit to our neighbor at 16th and Penn NW (funny guy from Texas, you should meet him sometime). Now, much has been made of a supposedly offensive statement he made — “I am reminded of the great talent of the- of our Philippine-Americans when I eat dinner at the White House” — but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t meant to be an insult or insensitive quip about second-class citizens doing menial labor. He was referring to Executive Chef Cristeta Comerford, a US-naturalized Filipina and the first female White House Executive Chef.

Much, much more fascinating to me was this fuzzily generic statement on Filipino counterterrorism measures:

The President has been very strong in having a carrots-and-sticks approach — “sticks,” of course, say we’re not going to allow for people to terrorize our citizens; the “carrot” approach is that there’s peace available.

I took that to be a misunderstanding of what I thought was the accepted symbolism of “carrot-and-stick” — that of a carrot dangling from a stick held in front of a donkey to keep it moving forward — but it turns out that the definition of this phrase is part of an ongoing controversy: old references take “carrot and stick” to mean classic reward/punishment discipline, while the dangling “carrot on a stick” is actually a more recent metaphor with little direct relation to “carrot and stick.” So hey, Bush got it right. Sort of.

More on PGMA’s visit.

Various Debunks

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“Lost” tribe not so lost after all. The key word here is “uncontacted”; the government had known about isolated native tribes such as this one for decades, and partitioned off that land as an Indian preserve. The man responsible for the pictures played up the “lost natives” angle to draw attention to the problem of logging. He sure drew attention to something.

No, it wasn’t a “pregnancy pact.” The school principal who told Time Magazine that “seven or eight” of the girls had planned to get pregnant together might have meant that they had decided to band together to provide mutual support after becoming pregnant.

We already knew there was water ice on Mars. The real significance of the find is that the water ice is intact at that time of year, at a shallow level beneath the surface, widespread and easily accessible without immediately sublimating. It would be an even greater breakthrough to find liquid water at greater depths, especially if it aids in the evolution of Martian life.

A new school year is starting in the Philippines (it runs from June to March there) and I’m getting a bunch of visits from searches for “Eduardo San Juan,” no doubt due to references from error-filled textbooks. To summarize, he didn’t invent the “moon buggy,” but he did conceptualize a lunar exploration system for a NASA contractor, but the proposal didn’t push through, and it was another contractor that did the job. I should probably make a summary post to attract all those search engine hits before someone uses out-of-context quotes from earlier, less-informed entries to do a paper.

Lamp Post and Clouds

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Lamppost and Clouds
(Lamppost and Clouds uploaded by brownpau.)

Half-lit lamp post across from the Watergate under dark, thundery storm clouds on a Monday afternoon. Hopefully this will be my last photo of storm clouds over DC for a while.

Jan and Angie

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Congrats go out to Jan and Angie, old friends from school who were just married last week. I’ve known the groom since third grade, and the bride all through college, and they’re the second couple I know consisting of a grade school and college friend of mine to get married (the first being Mike and Rowie). It’s awesome and uncanny.

Toni has more photos, and Angie’s Epic Journey out of Puerto Princesa chronicles a Palawan post-honeymoon travel misadventure that, I’m happy to say, ends well.

Faint Rainbow Over DC

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Faint Rainbow over DC Faint Rainbow and Capitol

I was feeling well and non-swollen enough tonight to go with Amy to the National Gallery, where we viewed some new acquisitions and listened to the Washington Bach Consort perform a free concert of vocal and organ works by various members of the Bach family. On our way back home we were rained on by a passing twilight thunderstorm, and spotted a faint rainbow in the clouds over the Capitol, opposite a lovely golden sunset.

False Alarm

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Firetruck Outside Apartment Saturday evening, we were eating dinner (cream of broccoli soup for my healing gums) and watching “The Hunted” when the fire alarm started ringing. After a bit of debate as to whether should actually pay it attention, we paused the episode and got our keys, wallets, cellphones, and cat (in carrier) and hurried calmly out, locking the door behind us. En route, we found the first-floor fire alarm glass broken and lever pulled — and no smoke or any other evidence of fire.

We live right beside a fire house and two engines were already out front with firemen gearing up outside as other tenants gathered. It all turned out to be a false alarm, of course; I suspect some of the local whippersnappers thought they could entertain themselves with some hijinks — or perhaps were hoping that the panic would leave a few doors unlocked for some easy access to valuables. In any case, the alarm was reset, the annoyed tenants flowed back into the building, the cat calmed down, and we finished our dinner and Star Trek in peace.

Not the first time.

Wisdom Teeth

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I’m getting my wisdom teeth extracted today. I’ve been putting it off for years, believing that my mostly-erupted wisdoms would provide extra chewing power while posing little inconvenience; but after much on-and-off pain and swelling, a few cavities, an operculectomy, and futile brushing at foul debris trapped in the gums of my off-margin lower third molars, it’s definitely time for these vestigial chompers to take a hike.

So I’m off to the oral surgeon in Downtown DC. The procedure should take an hour or two, and I asked to be knocked out under general anesthesia by IV — might as well get some sleep, right? I will request the remnants of the teeth in a bag when the surgery is done. Expect photos. For the not-squeamish, video of a similar procedure. There will be blood.

Update: All done. Home now. Hydrocodone-APAP is sleepymaking. More later.

Update: I am back and now it is time for photos of bloody extracted teeth! Here are the three that survived the procedure intact; I’m not sure what happened to the fourth. Check out the bent root on the middle one. I’m so glad that one’s out:

Three Wisdoms

The operation started promptly at 9AM, with me sitting in a chair getting probes on my arms and listening to the beeps that indicated heartbeat. I concentrated on relaxing and hearing the beeps slow down while the surgeon stuck the IV for anesthesia in my arm. Funny thing: the dental chair faces a wall covered with diplomas, awards, and certificates, so scared patients can be comforted by numerous symbols of decades of dental achievement.

I remember that I started seeing a bit double and thinking, “Ah, that must be the anesthesia taking effect now oh hey the light’s different and there’s gauze in my mouth.” No memory at all of passing out, or of the procedure; just a blink and a change. Within five minutes of waking up I was feeling well enough to collect my post-op docs, walk with Amy to CVS to get my prescriptions and a cane to steady myself, and take a taxi home to collapse into bed. My lower right jaw was numb the rest of the afternoon, probably due to a bump to the inferior alveolar nerve, but feeling was restored by evening, and it was not bothersome at all. Pain so far has been tolerable.

So now I’m looking forward to a weekend of applesauce, pudding, ice cream, yogurt, mashed potatoes, non-chunky cream soups, and hydrocodone. I’ve got four jelly-like clots filling the spaces where my wisdom teeth used to be, and am hoping very much to avoid dry socket. Will sleep.

Water on Mars

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I wonder if the history books will mention how the first public announcement of this discovery went up on Twitter before anywhere else: The Phoenix Lander has found water ice on Mars.

At left, the animation which serves as evidence, two photos of a trench dug by the lander, taken four days apart. Note the little bits of material in the shadowy lower left trench which disappear; this is behavior consistent with frozen water ice sublimating to vapor in the low-pressure Martian atmosphere. The temperature is too far above the boiling point of CO2 at this time of the Martian year, and clods of salt would not disappear like that on a clear day without wind. More study is needed, of course, and Phoenix will continue to dig and test soil samples for water and organic chemicals, but the Phoenix team seems to be pretty sure.

If that is indeed water, then it has massive implications for Mars’ past and future — a liquid water past may have facilitated the evolution of life similar to Earth’s, and easily accessible water will be important to future manned missions to Mars. This has been theorized, and its secondhand effects observed in the past, but now there is evidence — literal solid evidence — that there is water underground at Mars’ polar regions.

Comment Bugs and Coming Upgrades

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I’ve been informed by a few people that posting a comment to my site is nearly impossible nowadays, usually resulting in Movable Type timing out, throwing an Error 500, and dumping core. I can’t trace the problem, but I hope it’s something that gets fixed when I can finally move the site to a more reliable web host and upgrade to Movable Type 4.

That move probably won’t happen for a bit longer, as I’m bogged down in all sorts of extra-curricular coding work, and when it happens I’ll be taking the opportunity to pull a massive reboot of site design and code, so I’m taking it slow and careful. For now, if commenting fails, drop me a line and I’ll see if I can’t add your comment myself.

Other stuff on my to-do list for this site:

  • Upgrade to Open Source Movable Type (when MTOS 4.2 comes out).
  • Forward current feed URLs to Feedburner.
  • Make ads less annoying, or possibly remove them altogether.
  • Use Action Streams or some similar aggregation plugin to better consolidate mobile, linklog, and other external content into the main weblog, with less reliance on javascript badges and local API.
  • Dynamic blogroll based on scheduled Google Reader OPML fetch.
  • Code and design reboot.

All in good time.