Winter wonderland blogging

So the day went pretty much as expected. Much shovelling of snow, building of snowmen, hauling the little one over to the coffee shop on her sled.

Photos to the right are just a few glimpses of the prettiness.

It's looking pretty seasonal 'round here of late. We've already got our ancient pagan symbol of rebirth up in the living room--a lovely Fraser Fir dressed to the nines in lights and the ever-expanding collection of ornaments my lovely wife now maintains. Raised Moslem, Christmas trees were forbidden fruit of a sort for her; she's gotten into collecting ornaments with gusto the last several years. We've now a sizeable and gorgeous collection of dragonflies (several, from several shops; it's a recurring theme), moons, stars, tiny glittering biplanes--it's a bit incredible, really, but no question, it's pretty.

I can get why folk might have been awfully impressed with conifers, in the day. Everything else gives up its leaves, gives the impression it's packed it in for the winter, and the pines, spruces, cedars and firs of the world just keep on keepin' on (though the ornamental varieties in the front gardens, clearly not used to climates quite like this, do need to have the snow shaken off them now and then--particularly after falls like the twenty-odd centimetres we just got) in temperatures you'd think nothing living should be able to put up with.

Well, that, and they smell so nice.

A boy and his Bodum

So it's a gorgeous wintry morning in Ottawa. Twenty-five centimetres (or so) of snow will do that. And (to borrow from the old song) "...Since we've no place to go/Let it snow, let it snow &c."

Right now it's just me and a steaming hot mug poured out of a french press, looking at it all. Shortly, it'll be me strolling about shaking the snow off the shrubs more threatened by the load (some of them are now bent almost to the ground, and looking none too thrilled about it). And then the little one is insisting on a snow man.

After which, I s'pose, there will be a near epic quantity of shovelling. After which, I expect, another load of beans and boiling water will have to be loaded into the Bodum.

Guess the rest of the morning's planned.

Extrasolar Sedna

From the cool things in Nature file (yes, there will be more of these now that I've got my lovely digital subscription)--One Scott Kenyon of the SAO and Benjamin Bromley at the University of Utah have sent correspondence regarding Sedna, the Kuiper belt, and a buncha computer simulations they'd done in attempts to explain the orbital mechanics involved in the frequently inclined and eccentric orbits you usually find way out there in the burbs of the solar system. The two findings that got my attention: (1) they find the fly-by of a neighbouring star (in all probability a star formed in the same cluster as the Sun, as encounters with other stars are extremely unlikely) a plausible explanation for the peculiar shape of Sedna's orbit (such encounters had already been regarded as probable explanations for the shape and size of the Kuiper belt), and (2) they find a substantial probability (approx. 10 per cent) that Sedna was actually captured from the outer disk of the passing star:

...Although influences from passing stars could have created the Kuiper belt's outer edge and could have scattered objects into large, eccentric orbits, no model currently explains the properties of Sedna. Here we show that a passing star probably scattered Sedna from the Kuiper belt into its observed orbit. The likelihood that a planet at 60-80 AU can be scattered into Sedna's orbit is about 50 per cent; this estimate depends critically on the geometry of the fly-by. Even more interesting is the ~10 per cent chance that Sedna was captured from the outer disk of the passing star...

-- Kenyon and Bromley, "Stellar encounters as the origin of distant Solar System objects in highly eccentric orbits", Nature, December 2, 2004

Jes' think--adopted extrasolar planets in our own backyard. Relatively speaking.

Another day, another query

Okay, actually it's a bit more like 'another two weeks, another query', but I did get another one out the other day. As I do rather like to research prospective agents with some rigour and craft queries specifically for that agent, it does take a bitta time. Probably, so far, I've actually only contacted something like a dozen agents in the entire time I've been flogging this thing.

Speaks volumes, I suppose, as to why I actually need an agent. Let's face it: I just don't do promotion.

Can't take his grog

So I poured myself a sizeable quantity o' latte yestereve around 6:00 pm, figuring as I had some errands to run and the streets were greasy with freezing rain and suchlike trouble that it wouldn't be a bad idea to get myself a bit more alert...

Bad idea, apparently. I realize it may shatter some of your images of me out there, but in the past few months I've actually been getting a lot more sane about my caffeine consumption--down in a typical day to two cups--one in the morning, one early afternoon, with the latter somewhat optional, and the former likely to be or to contain a demitasse of espresso.

This is mostly probably a good thing (and nine out of ten cardiologists would probably agree), but it does seem to mean I'm now a bit more sensitive to caffeine consumed at foolhardy hours of the evening. As I concluded around 3:00 am, still awake, lying there thinking 'this is not a healthy time for anyone to be awake, let alone someone with a lingering chest cold'.

Sigh. Decaf here we come, I guess.

Electronic Nature

So in a rare case in which online marketing copy actually turns out to be worth reading, I've managed to score a free one-year subscription to the electronic version of Nature. It was the usual deal--answer a survey (Do you subscribe? Why not? Oh... Too expensive? Yeah, we get that a lot...) for the privilege.

This makes me happy. I used to have a subscription to the print edition, but let it lapse a while ago. It's not cheap, and I really only had so much time to read it, so it started seeming like a waste after a while--money better spent on baby's new shoes and so on.

The first issue to which I have access arrived today. I can report that the electronic edition downloads page by page on demand in impressive resolution and bit depth, using a custom reader which is kinda Acrobat-like (it's the NewsStand service, if any of you have seen this--believe you can also get The Times this way). And it's every page of the print edition, in the same layout.

No, you can't quite leaf through it as conveniently as you can a real-live magazine, but at the low, low price of free, I'm down with this.

In which our hero embraces unhip headgear

So it's another rather chilly winter (in Ottawa, modifying 'winter' with 'rather chilly' is very nearly redundant--when it isn't actually an almost criminal understatement). And, in the same fashion as recent years (and I use the term 'fashion' loosely), I've again cheerfully embraced profoundly unhip headgear as a matter of survival.

This year, in fact, I think I've even managed to outdo myself. Whereas in recent years I've happily gotten with chunky felt toques of various descriptions (perhaps cool, just possibly, in certain corners of the snowboarder world--if you're actually on a snowboard at the time you're wearing them), this year I've graduated to a little black number by Windstopper which looks, more than a little, like a condom for your head.

I make no apologies. In this town, in winter, the population divides into two essential groupings: the unhip and the dead.

That was but a prologue

Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher Verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menchen.

(That was but a prologue, there where books are burnt, ultimately people are burnt.)

-- Heinrich Heine, Almansor

I bring the much-quoted old bon mot up in the context of this article:

MONTGOMERY--An Alabama lawmaker who sought to ban gay marriages now wants to ban novels with gay characters from public libraries, including university libraries...

"...Our culture, how we know it today, is under attack from every angle," Allen said in a press conference Tuesday.

Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed.

"I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them," he said.

-- "Gay book ban goal of state lawmaker", The Birmingham News

Reading this guy just fills me with thoughts of Heine--and, in particular, this rather lucid, even lyrical description:

...false revolutionaries who bawled much about love and faith but whose love was nothing but hate of everything foreign, whose faith consisted of nothing but unreason, and whose ignorance knew nothing better than to invent the burning of books...

-- Heinrich Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany

Heine would have, I think, sadly recognized much from our times.