Glenn McDavid

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http://edithosb.blogspot.com/2008/05/first-hour-of-life.html

I made a trip to the Minnesota Zoo on Friday after dropping one of our sisters at the Twin Cities airport - it seemed a waste to burn all that fuel and not do anything else.

It was a warm and sunny day; the zoo was filled with school groups and families with young children. As I approached the the camels' area, I heard a girl say, in that insistent voice only children use, "Mom! What is that camel DOING??!!!" As I got to the fence, I saw a camel lying on its side, kicking its legs wildly and rolling around on the ground. Another camel was standing nearby - watching but neither doing anything nor seeming distressed. (Of course, how would I know what distress looks like in the camel world?)

A few minutes later, the bactrian camel stood up - with the head of a baby camel emerging, followed in a minute by the forelegs and, with the help of gravity, the entire calf slipped out and onto the ground. I heard later this "baby" weighed more than 100 lbs.

The birth of a calf is something of a community event among camels. The watching camel. Not only the watching father but others in the group of camels gathered to help clean both the baby and the mom.

Although I waited and watched for over an hour, Junior was not quite up to walking - I see on a web site that they may walk a couple of hours after birth. But if that seems quick, think of the 13 months the mom has been pregnant and the 1.5 years of nursing it.

I'm always inspired by a trip to a zoo - I can't help but marvel at the variety of creatures, and the close adaptation they have with their native habitats. Seeing a new member of an endangered species enter the world - now that was a real treat!

http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/to/~3/292601415/article.pl

Had a good time, the wife was in bed before 8:30 pm, but between fighting an infection for the last week and a half (horse antibiotics), and working at least 50-hour work weeks, a day in the fresh air was good for her, but probably a little exhausting. Since Feast of the Hunters' Moon doesn't compete with Big Island this year we might make at least a day trip down to play with Clann (although it might be fun to camp out for a weekend and not worry about having to sell stuff).

It was fun to have a chance to do a little interpreting of something other than games history and wood turning again (although I did bring my lathe), and I would have liked a chance to do some more if the crowds in the encampment had be larger.

It was also great to see Clann wauking wool, I remember talking about experimenting with it back when we first found a resource for some wauking songs. I also liked the copper pans I saw on the fire. I remember suggesting at one time maybe we should have some copper or brass pots for certain things rather than cast iron.

Jacob Robbins; NIH Scientist Known for Thyroid Research (From The Washington Post, May 16, 2008.)

Jacob Robbins first set foot on the eighth floor of the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health in 1954. Claiming one of only two working labs available to him in the year-old hospital, he immediately launched what would become groundbreaking work on the function of the thyroid and the treatment of thyroid cancer, particularly cancer caused by exposure to radioactivity.

On May 12, Dr. Robbins died of cardiac arrest -- at the Clinical Center, not far from where his NIH work had begun 54 years earlier. He was 85.

"He died surrounded by the work he treasured," said Griffin P. Rodgers, director of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, or NIDDK.

I'll miss him.

http://althouse.blogspot.com/2008/05/gays-mills-wisconsin.html

Seen — through the fisheye lens — from the overlook as you drive into town from the east on Route 171:


(Enlarge to see the town.)

There is a historical marker right there telling you about the establishment of the apple orchards in this valley alongside the Kickapoo River. The landscape is so dramatic because it's driftless — the glaciers didn't make it this far. I drove all the way out here today because the cabbie who picked me up at the airport on Thursday told me that the apple trees will be in bloom along Route 171, and it's a great drive. (We'd been talking about flowering trees in Madison.) Go out past Gotham and Boaz to Gays Mills. He was right about the trees and the drive. There were great curvy roads for my Audi TT Coupe to get some exercise after all these long months sitting in my driveway when I was living in New York. There were almost no other cars out on Route 171 — mostly motorcycles. You could tell that everyone driving there was driving to drive. Propitiously, the radio played "Radar Love."

And here are the mills:



I was out traipsing about on the bank of the Kickapoo, trying to get a good shot of the water rolling over the dam. Took a picture of this sign that I didn't bother to read.



Because these things can't apply to me. I'm lucky. A cabdriver tells me about where to find flowers. And — also last Thursday — as I hoisted my two big bags off the luggage carousel at the airport, I was talking to a nun and, when I turned to leave, she said, "God bless you." I was reentering Wisconsin, and everything seemed propitious.

It occurred to me rather suddenly last night that here I am, a 61-year-old, notoriously reclusive and socially inept computer nerd, attempting to dispense avuncular advice on relationships, marriage, and psychology over the internet. And in person, I might add.

This strikes me as highly improbable, totally out of character, mildly amusing, and more than a little mind-boggling. I feel a little as though, after many years of playing an assortment of jesters and other fools, I have finally moved up to playing Polonius.

http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/to/~3/292571572/article.pl

http://althouse.blogspot.com/2008/05/douch.html

DouChé.

http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/to/~3/292543548/article.pl

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http://althouse.blogspot.com/2008/05/sooo-theyre-like-hippies-right.html

Only more annoying?

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http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/BadAstronomyBlog/~3/292469280/

http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2008/05/17/you-go-girls-part-ii/

Last year, the prestigious Siemens science competition was swept by girls, and now girls have swept the top tiers at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.

Very cool.

Engineering has always been a place where there are more men than women, and it’s great to see girls doing so well in the field. I happened to be at a picnic last night for an engineering department, and it occurs to me that I saw just about as many women as men there, at least as far as grad students go. It’s possible there was a selection effect going on: maybe a bunch of men didn’t show up — but that seems unlikely, as there was free food, so I would expect all the grad students were there.

Not to hammer the obvious, but clearly the all-XX chromosome win for the Intel fair shows that women and men, boys and girls, can both excel in science and engineering. And because I can, I’ll also point out that any society that relegates women to an underclass is, at the very least, throwing away half their brain trust. Not to mention just being stupid.

Tip o’ the soldering iron to Rebecca, who’s doubled up on the X chromosome herself.

(I'm posting this one because it looks as though several people on my flist could use it. I'm doing fine right now, thanks.)

There are two links here, and they're related only because they both touch on the way a relationship can change after it's over.

The first is this review of a book called Death Benefits: How Losing a Parent Can Change an Adults Life--For the Better.

Death Benefits demonstrates through powerful stories (including the author's own revelatory experience) how parent loss is the most potent catalyst for change in middle age and can actually offer us our last, best chance to become our truest, deepest selves. Safer challenges the conventional wisdom that fundamental change is only for the young; and that loss must simply be endured or overcome.

I probably ought to get this one, but I don't really need to: I can easily believe it. Sometimes you need a whack on the side of the head with a very big cluestick, and that's about the biggest one you can get. That cancer screening you've been putting off? Do it now.

 

The second is a little more problematic: The Emotions of Grief During A Breakup (via Wikipedia). In particular,

When the person is alive and there was a breakup, this is often when people will try to open up communications with the ex. Recognize that the urge to search is part of the grieving process and you should not act on it. When you are pining and searching, you are in a temporary state and anything you say now can and will be held against you at a later date.

(Emphasis mine) This is probably good advice, sometimes. If you want or need to make a clean break of it, if there's pain or anger or hatred on one side or the other, if you've broken up before and can't seem to stay away from one another, yeah: I can see it.

But if the objective is to stay friends, to cool a too-intense relationship down to a level that you're both comfortable with, it's probably best to keep talking. In many cases, you'll both be grieving, though perhaps to different degrees. Help one another work through it. As friends.

(I'll note as an aside that you'll need to give one another space and time. Call or IM when you have news, or to congratulate your friend when they post happy news in their LJ. Not every day. Maybe not even every week. Drop back to email, perhaps, and the occasional LJ comment. Don't go for dinner and a movie -- that's really courting disaster. Meet for lunch on a weekday when you both have things to get back to at 1:00 sharp.)

As a friend, realize that you want your friend to be happy. Not with you as their lover, apparently, but happy. Stay interested in their life. Help one another through it, as best you can. Be glad you're still friends.

 

(Added 17:00) Let me just restate something from the last post on grieving: "getting over" your loss does not mean "forgetting about it". Your goal is to come to terms with it, whatever those terms happen to be; to "get over it" in the sense of getting over a challenging obstacle, so that it's safely behind you and doesn't keep getting in the way of your life.

So, I'm at work on a Saturday, cataloging this book when I have one of those moments of odd emotionalism just creep into what is pretty much a totally objective process.  This book is just a novel, nothing much, written in Yiddish*, from the Harold Leventhal collection.  David Pinski's Dos hoyz fun Noaḥ Edon. (ot The House of Noah Edon).  The English translation of this book was published first in 1929, and this is a printing of the first Yiddish edition (Yes, the translation was printed ten years before the original).

So, one of the first things to do in cataloging is to "look for copy", which means find if someone else has cataloged the book already so you can "adapt" their cataloging (yes, library cataloging thrives on plagiarism).  Normally it takes me about 10 seconds to be able to definitively say whether a given item has copy for it.  Not today -- this took me ten minutes, and then I could copy for someone who had microfilmed the copy, that that was only held by Stanford.  Then it occurred to me what I was looking for - a book published in Yiddish in Warsaw in 1938.  It's not surprising that I'm having trouble finding other people who own it.

*And yes, thursday63, I've figured out a sneaky librarian trick to try and catalog at least some of these things.

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