Monday, November 16, 2009

Giant Blobs of Doom

I've always liked jellyfish—at least to look at. Whenever I'm at an aquarium, especially the fantastic one at Monterey Bay, I seek out the jellyfish and proceed to stare at them for as long as I can. They move in such interesting ways and come in so many different shapes and sizes. Now, I know they can be dangerous and there are numerous horror stories of beach goers being stung by them, but they are also popular as a food item.

After reading this AP article today, however, I'm starting to move them more into the bad/dangerous category and less in the good/pretty/edible category. Certainly we've all heard about the effects global warming is having on the oceans, but until now I'd not heard about the damage ever-increasing jellyfish territories are having on fisheries. I also didn't know that the Nomura, which is the largest and most poisonous species, can get up to 6 feet in diameter!

I guess this might also explain the hundreds (thousands?) of dead jellyfish I found here at the beach last week. Fortunately, they were only about 1/60th the size of the Nomura.

Have you had any memorable encounters with jellyfish? Eaten them? Been stung by them?

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Orion's back

I've always loved the constellation Orion and I can't tell you how happy I was to find it in the sky last night. I remember learning a bit about it in eighth grade when we did an astronomy unit, but I decided to learn more about this figure.

Betelgeuse is a red supergiant that's very bright and very close to the end of its life. According to Wikipedia, when it dies, the supernova will be visible from Earth during the day! In the constellation, this is the star at the top left, or what would be Orion's right shoulder.

I basically knew all that about Betelgeuse, but I certainly didn't know/remember that Rigel, Orion's left foot, is even brighter—it's the sixth brightest star in the night sky (Bet. is 12th). It's a blue supergiant and is also at the end of its life.




I think my favorite fact about Orion is that you can see M42 (the Orion nebula) without the aid of a telescope. If you find Orion's belt, there are a few bright spots that appear to hang down from it; the middle one is M42. When I learned this at age 13 I thought this was so cool—and I've never gotten over that.

Finally, I just learned that the stars that make up Orion have been in this configuration for 1.5 million years and will likely be there for another 1-2 million years more. This makes it one of the longest observable constellations.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Jury Duty

This week I'm doing my civic duty by showing up to jury duty. I've never been selected for a prospective jury pool, let alone an actual jury. When I arrived at the courthouse this morning it only took about an hour for them to call my group up to a courtroom and another hour of instructions and dismissals for them to call me and 23 other people to the jury box for voir dire. Rather than try to explain that one, just click the link.

I left after the first day thinking that I'd likely be on the jury. I was pretty excited actually. It was a criminal case with a very contentious issue involved and I was looking forward to seeing it all play out. Unfortunately for me, I was one of the first people to be excused the next day.

The process led me to think about our justice system in a way I've never had reason to before. I realized that it allows for both the defense and prosecution to find the jurors they think best suit the case, even if it takes a few days. The judge had said the trial would only last about two weeks—relatively short for a criminal case—but that had no effect on the efforts the attorneys made. I realized they would have tried that hard no matter what the case, and that was pretty reassuring. I don't plan on ever ending up in court, but it's nice to know the system would take care of me—at least during jury selection.

Have you ever served on a jury?

Friday, October 23, 2009

Free Speech - Part 2

My boss just sent me a link to a YouTube video that was made from footage shot on someone's iPhone last night. I'm in pretty much the entire thing, as most of the protesters were right around me. According to the video, 22 people were arrested, but it sure seemed like more than that. This video was uploaded by someone calling himself "ElectronicIntifada" and it is definitely not pro-Israel.





Free Speech

This is a contentious issue for many, but I've never been so overwhelmed by the implications of that two-word phrase as I was last night. As part of my internship, I attended a "conversation" between Ehud Olmert, the former Prime Minister of Israel, and our CEO Jane Wales. It was held in a fancy hotel ballroom in the middle of downtown San Francisco and general admission tickets were $35. Security was tight to get in, as one might imagine, and there were tons of police officers—both in uniform and plain-clothes—all around the hotel.

Just walking into the hotel was interesting, given the cops all over, the fact that both sides of the street had been barricaded, and the "Free Palestine" demonstrators across the street. When I got into the ballroom, however, everything seemed pretty calm. There were lots of people (about 400 tickets were sold) and they all seemed engaged and eager for the program to start.

However, as soon as Olmert was brought on stage (in the company of two bodyguards who remained on stage with him all evening), a dozen or so people started chanting things like "You're a murderer!" and "You should be in a jail not a ballroom!" and holding up Free Palestine banners and making speeches about how he's a war criminal. While it is true that he has been indicted by the Israeli government on three counts of corruption, they did not have anything to do with war crimes. The police acted swiftly, and removed the demonstrators, many of whom were literally sitting next to me.

Little naïve me thought that would be the end of it, but over the course of the next half hour, another 30 people (roughly) stood up and let their anti-Olmert feelings be known and were arrested, including one who had been sitting a few seats down from me who had to be dragged out of the row on his back and eventually carried out with one policeman holding his feet and the other his arms. Both Olmert and Jane Wales were very poised throughout the disruptions, often continuing to speak over the din. Occasionally Olmert would make comments about them, noting that eventually all of the protesters would be outside and then we could have a civil conversation. He also said that he thinks everyone has the right to free speech and finds it odd that the protesters seemed to think they should be able to talk and that he shouldn't.

The last 30 minutes of the program did go uninterrupted; however, I left feeling unsettled. I've never been somewhere where there was so much hate and vitriol in one room. I also left wondering if something else Olmert had said about the protesters was true: he'd said most of them were likely professional protesters who really didn't know what they were talking about. Certainly, most were non-Arab looking (most looked like your typically Bay Area extreme leftists), but maybe some of them were Palestinian, who knows?

If you're curious, you can read more about last night's events in an article from the San Jose Mercury News.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

"The Other Story"

Today I went to San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum to see the new exhibit, "There's a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak." It's a great exhibit, with all sorts of drawings, paintings, and writings from Maurice Sendak (you know, the author of Where the Wild Things Are. I learned about tons of books he illustrated as well as a few he wrote, but was most interested in what he calls "the other story." For Sendak, it has always been important for him to illustrate the text as well as the ideas he finds behind it. Since he was born in 1928 to Polish-Jewish immigrants, the Depression and the Holocaust played a large part in his life and he chooses to allude to them in many of his books and drawings. One room in the exhibit focused on the idea of "the other story" and pointed out that there were a few books, such as Moby Dick, that he felt he could never illustrate because there was just too much already in the book for him to add his own interpretation.

This all prompted me to think about my problems with searching beyond the obvious story in a text. I had great issues with this in school, especially when it came to poetry, because I didn't want to think about all the meanings, for example, of the word red in a poem. Maybe the poet said her dress was red because he likes the color—does it have to mean he was a Communist, an insomniac, or Chinese? However, I would now like to go back and look at Sendak's books and see what I find as an adult. I know I read some of his books as a kid, but surely there was much that I didn't see because I just didn't know any better.

What do you think? Do you like to look for subtext or do you take things at face value?

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

What Makes a Reader?

Today I've been thinking a lot about what makes someone a "reader." This is something parents used to ask me when I was teaching and I never had a good answer. Is it nature? Nurture? Like many subjects to which those questions are posed, it's probably some of both. Sure, my parents are big readers and I grew up with a lot of reading material around, so there was probably a good chance that I would end up reading a lot as well. However, I know many people who grew up in similar environments but just never really got into reading.

NPR's Fresh Air did a story today about the release of the new "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" book. Apparently, like Harry Potter, this is a series that has gotten kids' attention and has made many kids interested in reading who weren't before. The book critic spoke about her daughter who has never really been interested in books, despite her mother's career. Wimpy Kid is different apparently.

Later, when I was on the bus going downtown, I watched as the guy across from me pulled a book out of his bag. He was about my age so I was curious to see what he was reading (oh hell, I'm always curious about what people are reading, no matter their age). It turns out that it's a book that I own but have never read and, just yesterday, had pulled off of the shelf to decide whether or not to keep it. I elected to keep it and now, having seen someone else reading it, perhaps I'll have to read it too.

Are you a reader? If so, what do you think made you that way? If not, why not?

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Political Borders

If you've read any of my other blogs and/or have known me for a while, you know that I have always liked studying maps. I spent many hours after (elementary) school with my dad looking at our atlas and globe. Both were made prior to 1989, so by the time I could actually read, many borders had changed. The USSR had broken up, some of the last parts of Africa to become independent had done so, and Yugoslavia was being divided. Then, for many years, not a lot changed. The borders that were added or subtracted were short and I got it in my head that the world was probably pretty close to its final political divisions. I was so optimistic — I figured the world was a pretty stable place, so why would the borders change further?

Although my view had changed a bit in the last few years, as I watched wars, governments, and global warming change the shapes of a number of countries, it wasn't until I watched this video on TED.com that I realized how many more border changes are likely to come.

Friday, October 9, 2009

Uighurs—Remember them?

This past summer, China decided to stir up trouble in its far-Western province of Xinjiang. For many, this was the first time they'd heard of Xinjiang and its people, the Uighurs, and the only time, for after a week or two, the fighting and rioting died down and the media turned to other stories.

Today as I was going through an old issue of The Economist I came across a link to a photo essay about the Uighurs. Intrigued, I made a point of watching it. The photos are of the people and the region and truly convey what it's like to live in China and yet be so different from the image of China one normally conjures. Watch it here:

The Reason

Why another blog? I created this one as an outlet for all of the interesting/nerdy/dorky things I come across everyday and want to share with my friends but don't necessarily want to send as e-mail/Facebook spam.

The title comes from a question my last boyfriend used to ask me in the evening: "Tell me one nerdy thing you did or thought about today." The answers were varied, but gave an indication of my mood or the political situation or the weather.

So, I present to you: One Nerdy Thing.