Binoculars

I'm not much of an observational astronomer. I like thinking about the big questions of cosmology and cosmogony (not deeply or incisively, but I still think about them) but I find peering through a telescope damned frustrating. There's always something something wrong. The eyepiece is wrong and I have to rest my actual cornea on it. Or the eyepiece is in the wrong place and I have to bend myself up like a paperclip to get my eye to it. Or the mirror is covered with dew. Or it's hot. Or it's cold. Or there's a huge flying bug plaguing me. Or I can't see the star chart. Or I can't Hercules with both hands and radar.

I'm more the binocular type. I go out with the binoculars, I have a look around, I see star clusters and globular clusters, I go back inside. Neat, clean, tidy, uplifting, and just about as much astronomy as I care to do on any given night. (Not that there's anything wrong with telescopes, or astronomy as a serious hobby, but I've dabbled enough to know that binoculars are about my speed.)

Only I can't find my binoculars. They were good ones too. I paid a small fortune for them and they featured lenses about the size of dinner plates (well, small dinner plates). They were designed for backyard astronomy, and they were good at it. But I fear that right now, they're serving as traction for a Caterpillar D9N dozer at the local landfill. I must have thrown them away, though I have no memory of doing so, and can't imagine that I ever would have in my right mind.

Ah, my right mind. That explains that.

So the other day I did a little on-line browsing for binoculars, thinking I would perhaps replace the missing pair with something new, shiny, and optically perfect. Then I laughed. Here I am, functioning with one eye, buying binoculars? I'd have more luck taping a smallish refractor to my head. To be monocular in a binocular world - it sounds like a song, or an epic poem, or the lament of a dude with shingles in his eye.

But today my eye just started working again, just like that. No double vision, reasonably clear eyesight! What a pleasure to drive with both eyes! And what a pleasure to once again be able to think about binoculars again. Heaven knows what happened last night. Did my eye swelling go down to the point that my brain could make sense of the information again? Or what? Either way, it's greatly heartening to have two eyes again, even if it does take my right eye about four seconds to change major focus, and another second or two to track in so the double vision resolves. The fact that there's been improvement seems to argue that there'll be more improvement.

I actually do have a telescope. It's an antique 4.5-inch refractor and it's a lovely instrument to look at, all varnished wood and polished brass. It looks like the kind of beautiful hand-made instrument an 18th Century astronomer would have used, and it works about as well too. There's no focusing rack; you focus it by sliding a brass tube in and out of the back of the thing. Looking at any kind of reasonably bright source produces an orgy of colored auras. It's big, and the solid brass equitorial mount alone weighs about 40 pounds, and even mounted on the sturdiest pipe I could find (cast iron sewer pipe embedded in about three feet of concrete) the thing jiggles and shivers uncontrollably.

I took the old eyepiece to an astronomy shop and not even The Guy Behind The Counter could identify it. He eventually decided that it was a Fossl, a play on Plossl. So I bought a new eyepiece, a relatively low-power Plossl. I got to the point I could see stuff through it, but the endless vibration and the difficulty in focusing the thing finally convinced me that it was best suited as a piece of novel indoor decor.

Anyhow. The telescope remains in my office, and meantime, now that my eyes work, I'm going to go look for binoculars.

Slow Recovery

My shingles situation is slowly improving. Most of the crusty scabs fell off my forehead, leaving substantial pits behind. My eye now opens and stays open, but it's still swollen, red, and doesn't work very well. My eyesight at close range is pretty good, but beyond about two or three feet my eyes don't seem to agree on which direction they're looking and I suffer from wild double vision.

But it IS getting better. The cloudiness is going away, and there are moments when I suddenly realize that my eyes have "clicked" and are working together. Such moments don't last long, but they're becoming more and more common. Maybe one of these days I'll be out of these woods.

I desire some slack. I'm tired of being sick.

I'm No Expert

I'm not an expert. I'm not a scientist. But I like to think that I'm about as smart as the people who make science shows for the Science Channel, and I like to think that I've thought about matters at least as much as they have. So here are my totally unscientific views on matters that seem to excite the TV show producers.

1. Is time travel possible? Yes - but only into the future, and through mechanisms described by relativity (that is, relativistic velocities or really deep and steep gravity wells).

2. Are there alternate universes? I don't think so, but even if there are, we'll never detect them, so we'll never know. I'm wary of the "alternate universes" interpretations of superstring theory and tend to reject the pop culture gosh-wow alternate theory nonsense that grows up like weeds in the cracks of the sidewalk.

3. Are there more than three spatial dimensions? I don't know. And I don't know how to detect them if they exist. 3+N dimensional space continuums seem to always flow out of attempts to reconcile gravity with quantum mechanics (superstring theory, loop quantum gravity and so forth) and I'm always tempted to say these are cases where elegant mathematical models lead us to inelegant physical models, but in the end I'm basically agnostic on multiple dimensions.

4. What are the constituents of dark matter? I think WIMPs (Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles) are a reasonable hypothesis.

5. What is the basis of dark energy? I wish I knew! I confess I'm not entirely convinced that expansion is really accelerating - I have a sneaking suspicion we're seeing an artifact of measurement and assumption. But people way smarter than me think it really is happening, so I guess I should too. But what's causing it? Dunno.

6. Regarding the huge disagreement about the value of the cosmological constant, who's right, quantum mechanics or relativity? I side with relativity - it's hard to argue with observational evidence.

7. Are there a lot of Earth-like planets out in the universe? I don't know what "a lot" means, but I think they're going to turn out to be reasonably plentiful. And I'm confident that there is life out there somewhere, and that it is also reasonably plentiful. Is there intelligent life out there? Probably.

8. Why hasn't SETI detected signals from other stars? Given that I think life is common in the universe, and intelligent life not uncommon, why haven't we heard it? My personal guess is that most of the observable universe lies beyond the "life-radio horizon", as it were - we've only been sending out radio signals for about a hundred years, after all, and a civilization in the Andromeda galaxy would have to be millions of years old for us to hear it.

9. Do wormholes exist? Probably, but I doubt that they can be created artificially, or used as a transit system (or even a communications system). But the science fiction fan in me likes to think that some hitherto-unsuspected property of hitherto-undiscovered exotic matter might make such things possible.

10. Is supersymmetry real? I'm dubious, and as the energy of particle accelerators increases and supersymmetrical partners continue to not be found, I grow increasingly dubious.

11. Is superstring theory right? I'm dubious. It seems too convenient to me that the theory can be reformulated as required to justify its lack of experimental evidence, and I'm wary of efforts to define this as a new way of doing science.

12. What is the origin of the Pioneer Anomaly? The engineer in me thinks it's some subtle real-world effect we aren't taking into account and not something fundamentally wrong with our theories of gravity. I'm not sure what real-world effect we're missing - drag from the spacecraft colliding with dust particles, maybe - but I prefer that over the alternative.

13. Does the Higgs Particle really exist? Hell if I know! It's in danger of being dismissed as too convenient, just like supersymmetrical partner particles. Strange, isn't it, that every time we fail to discover the Higgs Particle, someone recalculates its mass so it's just slightly too heavy to appear? But if it doesn't exist, there are ominous implications for quantum theory...

And now, I think I'm going to think about cooking a sausage for lunch.

Herpes Zoster

Ever wondered what shingles looks like when it's on your face and in your eye? It looks like this. I look for all the world like I've been involved in some good-natured but extremely violent Dudesons stunt, except that so many of their good-natured but extremely violent stunts seem to involve horrific testicular disasters (the "Stairway to Hell" being prototypical and cringeworthy).

Earlier the dark thing on my eyelid finally crusted up and fell off. I hoped this would represent some sort of progress, but it didn't. My eye is as swollen and painful as ever, and the crusty bits on my forehead have begun to bleed.

On the whole it doesn't hurt as much as it did last weekend, when it seemed that some large and important cranio-facial nerve was freaking out about every five seconds. Now it just feels about like it looks like it should, like I got hit in the eye with a softball or a rocket-propelled stuffed reindeer (to keep the Dudeson reference alive).

Hipsters I Have No Use For

Today I went (against my better judgment) to read stuff on "Stuff Hipsters Hate". I saw them on CNN the other day and couldn't believe that such irrelevancy was given space on the CNN website. But it was, and I was curious if their blog was as irrelevant, so I went to go see for myself. And yes, by cracky, it's at least as irrelevant, if not more so, and just as stupid.*

Normally I don't waste much time criticizing hipsters or uber-hipsters. What they do doesn't matter to me, and what they think is irrelevant to me.

But after I got out of the shower after scrubbing the oily self-satisfied residue off my person, I came to this realization: I don't know what hipsters hate, and I don't care. But I do know what hipsters I have no use for.

After almost dying twice and going through 18 months of chemotherapy and two bone marrow transplants, there's no room left in me for hate. If these irrelevant twits want to hate everything that they don't like, I don't much care. If they want to hate me, I don't much care. But I can say that it'll be a cold day in hell before I ever go back to their site.

(What I find particularly unamusing about their site is that despite their literary pretensions, they can't seem to go a paragraph without saying "fuck". Does that make you feel like a grown-up, talking like that? Good for you. Now go find a poetry slam or something to infest; I have more important things to think about.)

*Their CNN bit was something about snazzing up Tweets so you sound suitably status-conscious and ironically hipsterish. You can't say "I ate lunch"; you have to say "Had an ironically hip wrap at [insert oppressively hip-for-the-moment watering hole here] in Manhattan." Yeah? Well, what if I had two tacos at Filiberto's in Phoenix? Only 99 cents, and just as tasty at four times the price, and I didn't have to put up with any buffoonish hipsters while I was eating. But having said all that, the only appropriate answer to the question of how one makes a Tweet "more acceptable" is to say that as a first approximation, no Tweet is acceptable. It's only when you get down to the fourth or fifth approximation that any of them start to serve any useful purpose at all.

Jacques

I spent most of yesterday watching big chunks of a Jacques Cousteau marathon on Turner Classic Movies.

First, permit me to thank TCM for the effort. I can't even log on to check my email without being involuntarily exposed to crap about Kate Gosselin, Lindsey Lohan or other celebutards, and sometimes I forget that there really ARE people out there who give a shit. Thanks, guys, I needed that!

Jacques Cousteau was a big hero of mine back in the 1970s. I suspect he was to a lot of people. My heroes at the time were Neil Armstrong, Jacques Cousteau, and Roger DeCoster, a Belgian motocross racer - you can't be a boy without having at least one sports hero, I guess, even though I remain torn to this day on whether racing is really a sport or not.

So I watched the Cousteau specials, many of them narrated by Rod Serling, and couldn't help but feel that we'd lost something over the years. Imagine it - a TV documentary that doesn't insult the intelligence of the viewer! That doesn't rely on irritating camera tricks to conceal a basic lack of content!

But I will say this - sometimes I saw just a little too much flesh in them. I'm no prude, but I don't really need to see a French scientist wearing a swimsuit the size of a piece of toast. Really.

Alas, the marathon is over, and the world moves on and sinks back into its trough of celebutard dissipation and irrelevance.

Sigh.

Still, I draw some solace from the fact that in a hundred years, more people will remember Jacques Cousteau than Kate Gosselin.

Dear Blogger

Dear Blogger,

When do you propose to do anything about this recent epidemic of chuckleheads posting bullshit comments that are nothing more than deceitful links to what appear to be Asian porn sites? I seem to spend more time killing these bullshit comments than I do posting, and it's getting really irritating.

I tried to "Notify Blogger" but I ended up tattling on myself!

This is crazy. All I ask is that you turn off links in comments - I don't care what they say in the comments, I just don't like all those hidden links lurking like time bombs in my blog.

Failing that, I may have to shut off comments altogether, which would be unfortunate, but I do so hate my blog being violated by a bunch of 14-year-old knuckleheads. And if that doesn't work, I can go somewhere else.

Thanks for nothing, because I know you won't do anything about it.

It's Shingles

I haven't written much lately. On the one hand, I've been trying to work more hours, and by the time I get home, I'm usually pretty pooped. Given the choice between writing and sleeping, I seem to settle for the latter more often than not. On the other hand, I've developed shingles on my face and in my eye, which is highly inconvenient, not to mention really quite painful. Given the choice between writing and bleating softly in pain, I seem to to settle for the latter.

I didn't even know you could get shingles in your eye. I went to the doctor when it first started and they thought it was blepheritis, and they gave me some ointment. It did no good and it kept getting worse, to the next week I had my oncologist look at it, and he went "eeek!" By then the crusty shingles rash had spread over half my face and up my forehead, and the diagnosis was easy. So I'm back on acyclovir and Neurontin, and it seems to be moderating a bit. It's still a crusty, oozy mess, and it still hurts quite a bit, but it doesn't seem as bad. At least the pain has stopped radiating all the way around to the back of my head and down into my jaw; now it's just in my eye and temple.

But having bitched about all that, it has to be said that radiation treatments continue to work. My swelling in my leg is steadily decreasing. I gauge it by whether I can see wrinkles in the sole of my foot, and whether I can see veins in the top of my foot. Both tests are once again positive; I have wrinkles and veins, and every day the swelling is less.

So what do we conclude? The cancer is being beaten back and (hopefully) killed, and the shingles is actually kind of a relief. I was worried for a while that some horrible tumor was growing behind my eye, and finding out that it was really "just" shingles was a relief. Shingles will eventually go away, though I may end up with some dandy pockmark scars on my eye and forehead. But the bottom line is that shingles isn't cancer.

I have one more week of radiation to go, then I'll have a PET scan in early July. I'm really expecting it to be good news. I can't feel any nodes anywhere, and it's obvious that the cancerous nodes in my groin are, if not dead, then very nearly dead (my radiation oncologist decided to lay on about twice the normal total dose of radiation "just to be sure", and I'm heartily in favor of being sure).

Okay. Eye hurts. Lying down.