The Unseen

I seem to have entered into a period of days in which my urban deer are invisible.

That sentence, of course, contains a couple of falsehoods: Not only are the mule deer not "mine," but they aren't invisible, but simply are showing up at times I am not watching.

But, because of recent snowfalls, their tracks tell their stories.

For instance, there is the highly disrupted patch of snow that reveals snouting for grass, or at least grass roots. There are hoof-prints, together with the long, gliding marks that indicate a leisurely stroll across my yard. Then, there are the tracks that lead directly up to my back fence - and then disappear.

Of course, there also are the little piles of dark-brown pellets, chocolate sprinkles on a white landscape.

Those signs aside, the deer have been out of sight. It's a condition that I've been thinking about a lot recently. First, I watched a movie about Bengali immigrants in England called "Brick Lane." Then, today, I watched a yarn about immigrants to America from India (and their offspring) called "The Namesake." In each case, the humanity of those newcomers went unnoticed - uncared about - discarded like trash - by all those patriotic Brits and all those true-blue Americans of Italian, Irish, German, Scandinavian, and English descent. I'll stop now.

No sense in busting a gasket. Those long, gliding tracks of the mule deer need another look.

cool movie

As kids, we always really get off on certain movies. For instance, take "Rebel Without A Cause" starring James Dean .(How many kids started smoking because of it? That cigarette pack stuck up the tee-shirt sleeve - hey, who could resist?) Skip a generation or so, and we're talking Jedi light swords. Today, I watched a movie called "Brick Road," and I was blown away.

Blown away, because, after the fall of the twin towers, a real Muslim story is so important.

"Brick Lane" is such a story. It is about a young Muslim girl from Bangladesh sent to England for an arranged marriage. Some twenty years later, with two daughters, (and a deceased boy), unhappy and lost, she has an affair with a younger guy. The movie is about her life - growing to love her husband for the first time, yet needing to make her own way in a new world for herself and her (nearly grown) children. One of the better movies I've had the pleasure of watching recently.

James Dean has become sort of ... history. And Jedis have become sort of, well, chiched. But I'm not sure a movie like "Brick Lane" is going to get old anytime soon. (But wouldn't it be cool if it did?)

Goodbye, stars

For me, reading a book on a scientific subject is not only an intellectual process, but an almost visceral one as well. At some gut level, I really, really want to get it. In the end, I think that's what makes it so much fun.

A case in point is the current book I'm reading - I'm about a third through the one about an ultimate theory of time, "From Eternity to Here" by Sean Carroll - which is light on equations (thankfully) but quite a bit deeper than many a popular-science effort. It is well-written, smart, clever and lucid about some really important mysteries that today's scientists are struggling to understand. It is slow-going for me, but only because most of its hundreds of end-notes are just as interesting as the text. Lots of paging back the forth.

But, for this reader, a lack of mathematical savvy still can bewilder. For instance, we all know that science has pretty much pinpointed the age of the (observable) universe at about 13.7 billion years. So that means that with even the perfect telescope, the farthest we could see is 13.7 billion light years. Turning the telescope around 180 degrees, we could see 13.7 billion light years in the opposite direction. So - the book uses the shorthand of 14 billion years - the greatest extent of the universe we will ever be able to see of the observable universe should be 28 billion light years across.

But, darn it, the universe is expanding. Particularly, Carroll notes (literally, in an end-note), it is being accelerated by dark energy. (Which apparently is really hard to talk about without recourse to mathematical equations.) (Metaphors involving rubber bands really don't cut it.) Anyway, according to this same end-note, "the farthest point that was ever within our observational patch of universe is now 46 billion light years distant."

OK. But what about some galaxy that sometime in the past - say 4.5 billion years ago, when our sun and planets formed - was just about to move out of our sight - irrevocably and forever beyond light's ability to reach us? Presumably that last light has been traveling toward us ever since, and will reach us, when it does, whenever it does. And then, it will wink out.

Presumably, stars and their galaxies are winking out all the time. We just can't see them pass beyond our view because we can't see far enough. But shouldn't a stream of light from a soon-to-disappear star, much like a finite rope, come to an end in our view as well? Or does the light not make it here, the distance being too far to go past the gas and black holes and whatever in between? Or what?

If I could handle the math, maybe I could handle a star's passing better. Or, at least, sort of understand it. (Hey, just a gut feeling.)

Arrow of Time

What fun! That nice Mr. Amazon sent me a cool new book called "From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time." (I'm not sure what that does to the 1953 movie of the inverted name - put Deborah Kerr on top of Burt Lancaster in that beach scene?)

Anyway, I was eager to get into the book, written by Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, but first I paced around the house a little, thinking about stuff. Like entropy, which of course would have to be a big part of the story. I started pondering how best to explain it to someone - what do you do with a term that not only freaked out 19th Century scientists with the idea of the "heat death" of the universe but also is all-too-well understood by poker players demanding a thorough card shuffle?

I came up with an idea that has to work, at least for oldsters: Think of yourself: low entropy as a baby, quickly growing entropy as you get older and older. (And, of course, when you die, the entropy of your corpse really takes off!)

Imagine my satisfaction when I began reading the prologue and found Carroll explaining entropy not only in terms of the egg-omelet and the cream in the coffee ideas, but also "people are born, grow older, and die."

The author mentioned that as part of his research he would ask people randomly to define "time." He got answers like: "Time is what moves us through life," "Time is what separates the past from the future," etc. Had he asked me, I'd have said that "time is what is necessary to make the other three dimensions work."

OK, so I'll never be a physicist. Hey, I still think it's probably turtles all the way down! You can dispense with a lot of equations that way.

Befuddled

I am watching the long Ken Burns film on jazz - specifically the part about one of America's absolutely top musicians: Louis Armstrong. The narrator mentioned that Armstrong, back in the 1920s, used to blow his audience away by hitting as many as 50 high Cs in a row.

Yikes. I paused the DVD. Fifty trumpet screeches in a row? What Am I Missing?

As though circling down a drain, my memory descended back to the mid-1950s in Eau Claire, when the choral director of that town's Congregational Church, a rather large and imposing man with a deep bass voice, was browbeaten by my mother into auditioning my 8- or 9-year-old self for the youth choir. The imposing fellow took out his little harmonica-shaped pitch-finder, blew a middle C, and followed up by singing that note. Hearing it, a bass note so low it seemed to come from the very depths of the earth, I responded with a squawk as low as my young voice box could produce.

"Middle C" it was not. More like the distressed moo of a cow. I flunked the audition, big time. I sensed my failure then, but my reprieve was only confirmed for sure when my mother never brought up the issue again.

So why do I like music so much? Call me bewitched, bothered and befuddled.

Falling down

This early evening in Montana, while the Saints and Vikings have fought to a 14-14 tie by halftime, I am enjoying a blissful silence. It's called a "mute." Hey, I can sit in the bleachers and watch a football game without some idiot announcers blaring. Not to mention the commercials blaring between plays. Sheesh: Do I need commercials? Don't think so.

I should like the Vikings to win - I grew up 80 miles west of them in Eau Claire - but in Wisconsin in my youth the Packers floated over the state like the perfect piece of cheese. But then, there's the Viking QB - a cheese-head who in Wisconsin cannot remove his crown of chedder!

But then again, there is New Orleans - if ever a city needed a Superball - or bowl, or something - this city needs it.

So I'm ambivalent, and ready to watch the second half, silently. Always thinking, unable not to, of my "maiden aunt" - people called unmarried middle-age woman that "slur" back in my youth - who once when I was a kid described football as "they huddle, they line up, and they all fall down. Big deal."

Out of the mouths of maiden aunts, perhaps, comes something to think about. Whatever, I'm going down to watch the second half. Silently. Silence is a beautiful thing. Although maybe a little jazz to accompany the football might be cool.

---

But I thought I'd wait until the end of the game to post this. So I did.

It was a great game. Some team won. Trust me on this.

Learning stuff

I really like to open a good dictionary to almost any page and find a cool word. This time, it took me all the way to the end of the page to find it: "feculent." From now on, we must not tell fools that they are "full of #%$@." Oh, no. We are way tool cool for that. Now, enlightened as we are, we shall just suggest that such fools are "feculent."

Heh. Don't you love Middle English via the Latin "faeculentus" and the French "faec-" or "faex?" (Feculent, if you haven't figured it out, means "foul with impurities: Fecal.")

Warning, kids: Don't open a dictionary or your parents might freak. I can remember when one of my grade-school classmates found "ain't" in a dictionary. Shocked, but giggling a whole lot, we spread the news across the playground like wildfire through a California drought. Were we misbehaving? Ain't no way. We were learning stuff.