In 1893, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes – a character he had been writing about with great success since 1887′s A STUDY IN SCARLET – in a story called “The Adventure of the Final Problem.” Conan Doyle reportedly felt that the Holmes stories were keeping him from accomplishing more important work, so his solution (ironically) was “The Final Problem.”

As it turned out, though, Conan Doyle had a problem beyond “The Final Problem”:  Namely, that Holmes wouldn’t stay dead.

Readers loved Holmes. So did Conan Doyle’s publishers. In other words, nobody wanted Sherlock Holmes dead except the man who’d created him.

So after eight years of pressure, Conan Doyle responded with 1901′s THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, but set the story an unspecified number of years before the events of “The Final Problem.” That way, he could give his publishers and his public a little more Holmes, but still make sure that the arrogant old cokehead stayed dead.

In other words, Conan Doyle would control Holmes. Holmes wouldn’t control him.

Yeah. Right. Good luck with that, Art.

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Okay, so I was listening to the BBC Download and they did a story on the Diagram Prize, a special book prize awarded yearly for the oddest book title.

Last year’s winner was:

People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves To Unsuspecting bystanders and what to do about it

I’m just thrilled to know there is a book out there with this title. I didn’t want to know anything about it, but, unfortunately, when I went out to verify the title, I saw at a glance — TMI, TMI!

Instead of clicking on this link and finding out what this book is about, you could just continue on your way, repleat with the knowledge that the book you imagine from this title is probably far more entertaining and respectable than the one that was actually written.

Fortunately, the judges of this contest don’t have to consider the contents, only the title.

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It’s been vet week at the manse. Both dogs have been in and out of the vet’s for the last week and a half. First, The Big Dog went in for her annual blood tests and something weird came back which required her to be tested for Cushings Disease. It turned out she was fine. But then The Little Dog’s ears developed some sort of rash and this has led to tests for endrocinological malfunction.

When The Big Dog was young, one day I was stomping through the woods in an oversized and ragged green barn coat that I had stolen from Bob, and I realized had Bob not married me, I would be a Dog Lady. Dog Ladies are marginally less appalling that Cat Ladies only because we get out more. After all, the dogs need to walk. However, I would rapidly become a person who likes dogs better than people. A lot of times, I already do. I could see me, aging, make-up less, hair in a tangle, grumpy, with two dogs who slept on the furniture and basically ran the house.

Okay. I am aging, I don’t wear make-up, I’m lucky if I bother with the blow dryer once a week, and the dogs sleep on the furniture.

But dog ownership raises all sorts of weird conundrums. Read More »

On an email list I belong to, Janice Gelb talks about a quote she got from a friend of hers, Moshe Yudkowsky:

I’ve run across a quote that absolutely amazes and delights me. During the heyday of Athenian democracy, the citizens could vote on an annual basis to expel, for a period of ten years, a single individual who they believed would best serve the city by a prolonged absence. The name of the individual was written on an ostraka, a shard of pottery, and cast as a ballot.

And thus do we get the concept and word ostracize.

Moshe continues:

Megacles managed to attain the distinction of being ostracized not once, but twice; the first time in 467 BCE and the second time at some unknown later date. We know of this from records and from ostraka that were recovered from Athens. In 1994 we saw the first publication of one of these ancient ballots:

For Megacles, son of Hippocrates and his horse as well…

In other words, Megacles and the horse he rode in on. Two thousand five hundred years later, and some curses have never changed.

Hi, guys! I just got in from the Ortho doc. It was a good news and semi-sucky news kind of appointment.

They cut off my cast with the chainsaw. This was great, as the novelty of it all has worn extremely thin by now. There was no huge black semi-sentient fungus covering my lower leg, as I’d anticipated. Just looked like a pale, wrinkly old-man leg, with my foot still distressingly swollen. Doc says that will go down soon.

That place where most people have calf-muscle, I now have a jello-filled sack of skin. Ick. Ick. Ick.

Actually, there may be some muscle still in there. But it’s going to need a lot of encouragement to get it out in public again.

They took a bunch of bone-pics. The doc looked at them and said I can keep my cast off. The breaks have healed in proper alignment.

Which was the double-plus good part of the appointment.

The semi-sucky part — I don’t get to put any weight on the leg, as the healed bone is fragile still. Will have to live in the wheel-chairs and on crutches, for probably another month. And worse, there’s then another month of muscle rehab before I can safely ride my scooter again. Grunt.

In case I haven’t made it clear yet — Don’t break a leg, kids.

But now I can finally see my leg, and start stretching those ankle muscles out again, because they’ve contracted to where there is almost no range of motion.

I’m gonna get it all back, though, the flex and the strength, and the road bike, before summer is over, if I have my way.

Wait! I just realized — I can take a bath now! Like a real boy! For the last month and a half, it’s been the occasional sponge-wipe, and once every ten days or so, I cautiously crab into the tub with an over-turned wastebasket, and prop my leg up while I very uncomfortably wash off.

Tonight, I get to soak for hours, read a book, maybe take a nap or two. I won’t smell bad when I go to bed tonight. I’ll be clean for the first time since February 4, 2007.

You can’t see it, but I’m doing the one-legged Happy Dance now.

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Addendum:  In my moments of narcissistic joy, I forgot to mention this — I’m extremely grateful to Martha for taking me to my appointment and patiently waiting for me to finish up, then chauffering me to get the celebratory ice cream. Without her and Megan, I wouldn’t have made it so far through this episode in my life.

Younger Girl is, among other things, on a synchronized skating team, one of three run from the local skating rink. I was watching her yesterday; she had her regular lesson at 3:30, and team practice at 5:25 (with recreational/ practice skating in between). She started skating in December of 05; she broke her wrist three weeks in and was benched for a month. So she’s had roughly 15 months of skating experience, during which she has moved up from pre-Alpha (the beginner class) to Delta, and the synch team. Mostly when she goes to the rink I read, or talk to other parents. But yesterday I really watched her.

It’s kind of awe-inspiring. She’s not the kind of kid who took ballet and played princess and is naturally full of gestural grace. When she took dance lessons they were hip-hop. She prefers romantic comedy movies and books about being in middle school to tea parties and dress-up. But when I watch her on the ice, YG has a kind of effortlessness of line and gesture. I watch her skate up to some of her team mates, do a 180 turn to stop, throwing her arms around their shoulders. Or chattering excitedly while skating backward (backward! yikes!) with another girl. She’s still a neo–her shoot-the-duck is wobbly, and her spins can be erratic; she loves to skate, but doesn’t seem interested in doing solo figure skating competition. But sync skating, with its social aspect, allows her to be skate competitively without getting too girly about it.

To skate well is to acquire a series of skills; in the earlier classes there are kids on skates so tiny that they use walkers on the ice to keep themselves upright. But I also see kids not much older who are landing doubles and salchows (okay, not with the height and verve of Sacha Cohen, but even so). And for a lot of kids, including my own, the time between staggering on ice and soaring around with no apparent effort is really brief. How long did it take YG to get onto her feet and walk? How long before she could run reliably? And now her muscles know how to move her on the ice, not only how to turn her around or stop her, but how to do it gracefully.

So I sit in the “parents’ room” (which is marginally warmer than sitting out on the benches with hoi polloi) and watch my hip hop girl soaring, giving in to the g-force of line turns remembering to turn her head at the same moment the girls on either side of her do. She’s still working on graceful hands, though. Graceful hands, those princessy ballet hands, aren’t yet in her physical vocabulary. They’ll come. If she can shoot-the-duck, she can acquire graceful hands.

I’ve blogged about the Australian Broadcast Corporation Radio National program All In the Mind before. That time I was talking about a show they did on and during brain surgery, specifically to remove an AVM (arterial venous malformation) similar to the one Democratic Senator Tim Johnson had removed.

Not only is the show fascinating but the show’s host, Natasha Mitchell is brilliant and hot. (It is an Australian show and that accent just does things to me. )

The episode I’m pushing today explores a different facet of the mind.

Transhumanists are hell-bent on extending their lives beyond the current limits of the flesh, by exploiting cutting-edge genomics, stem-cell research, robotics and nanotechnology. Engineering evolution is their goal. But can they re-engineer our Darwinian mind? Leda Cosmides, renowned pioneer of the controversial field evolutionary psychology, asks, ‘Are We Already Transhuman?’

It is a podcast but for you people who read really fast there’s a transcript, too.

Leda Cosmides doesn’t have an Australian accent, but she’s well worth listening to. She is co-director and founder of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. What is Evolutionary Psychology? From the CEP website:

Evolutionary psychology is based on the recognition that the human brain consists of a large collection of functionally specialized computational devices that evolved to solve the adaptive problems regularly encountered by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Because humans share a universal evolved architecture, all ordinary individuals reliably develop a distinctively human set of preferences, motives, shared conceptual frameworks, emotion programs, content-specific reasoning procedures, and specialized interpretation systems–programs that operate beneath the surface of expressed cultural variability, and whose designs constitute a precise definition of human nature.

Like most things “evolutionary” this discipline takes a lot of guff from the anti-Darwin crowd but it just makes sense.

(I just tried the transcript and my eyes glazed over. As an audible speech, this is very accessible but as a transcript, it looks much drier and inaccessible than it sounds. Part of it is there are appropriate pauses and emphasis as she is speaking that are not in the transcript. Reccomend the audio.)

I turned on the radio and came in on an interview with, I think Paul Kantner. He was talking about Jefferson Airplane (of course) and in particular about “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love” and he talked about how Grace Slick could sing aggressively–that she could really get in your face but still not feel strident. He said that there was a little gentleness about her. I don’t know if I agree with that. It’s hard to associate the word ‘gentle’ with Grace Slick. But it got me to thinking and yeah, that quality seems pretty rare to me. Janis Joplin was aggressive and for me, she could be strident.

I was thinking about the kind of breathy style that a lot of women use when they sing, and I was trying to think if there were many singers that combined that powerful but still immediate and aggressive style today. I couldn’t think of any. So I came here to ask you guys.

Click on Grace to hear the song.

“I warned him about sending more troops to Iraq, but would he listen? Noooooooooooo.”

For the past week, I’ve been falling asleep between four and six a.m., and getting up around noon’ish. That’s partly because of the evil ‘Spring-forward’ part of the Daylight Savings Time conspiracy, which was designed specifically to break my spirit.

I’ve been off from work since last Wednesday, in honor of all the students who are getting drunk and laid at various Texas beaches. Yes, when you work for a University, you also get the dregs of Spring Break. Without the drunk and laid part. At least, not in my case.

However, Spring Break does mean that I sleep and wake when I damn well please. I’ll pay for this self-indulgence starting tomorrow morning, when I return to getting up for work at seven a.m. Not that I’ll actually be conscious before ten.

I learned recently that it’s not just that I like to stay up all night and sleep all day.

I have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome.

It’s a diagnosable medical disorder. However, unlike Brad, I don’t get a cool Darth Vader machine for it. There is no operation that will cure DSPS, and medication is generally ineffective. There are a few treatments, such as light therapy, but most people like me will have DSPS all of our lives.

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I’d like to briefly depart from my usual Sunday post traditon. We seem to have had our share of chat about drugs and Rock ‘n Roll lately. It’s time to complete the holy menage a trois. Know what I mean, nudge nudge?

I’m finding myself wanting — no, needing — to make two comments about this post, without being able to logically justify them.

First, don’t click on the pic if you’re at work. Or around children. I can’t exactly explain why, even to myself. I think there’s a metaphor or something like that, sneaking around inside this short film. Y’all know that I have problems with interpeting the delicate subtexts sometime. Whatever. It strikes me as being the naughtiest film I’ve ever seen.

Second, this post must be dedicated to Erin O’Brien. Inexplicably, her spirit suffuses the entire clip.

The main site, The First Post, has lots of other cool films, too. Some of them NSFW. I haven’t watched them all yet, but about two-thirds of the ones I’ve seen so far have made me laugh out loud.

Here’s one that might entertain my nice friend Bradley: Amateur Drummer.

And, one for The Dude: Angry Pixels.

Last, we have the web site of the creator of ‘Roof Sex’. More good, twisted stuff there.

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I don’t remember for sure, but I think I first got the link to this site from Rachael, Who Is Awesome.

South by Southwest is running in Austin right now. It’s an “everyone into the pool” kinda event. If you live here, you can’t avoid being touched by it in some way.

So, The Dude got this invitation to a reception being thrown by The Center for American History at The University of Texas as part of the SXSW festivities. He’s been working with CAH to establish an archive for video games. (Stop sniggering, you over there. Ten years from now this archive will be the shit – and I’ll have all that stuff out of my house.)

Anyway, we got an invitation to this reception for Tom Wright, whose collection of 500,000 photos was acquired by UT in 1990.

Tom Wright was the official photographer for The Who starting in 1967. I didn’t know this right off, as I know bupkis about photography and photographers. However, I do know what I like. And I like Tom Wright’s stuff. A lot.

His photography is documentary and fluid. He doesn’t take static pictures. They’re full of motion and action. You can almost hear the crashing of Keith’s drums, Daltry’s wail, and Townshend’s riffing. The only person who doesn’t seem to be in motion is John Entwistle. (And that’s as it should be.) He also took loads of photos of, well, everyone. From the Stones, to Ike and Tina Turner, to Rod Stewart, to Elvis Costello, Tom Wright has been at the epicenter of coolness and music for forty years.

So, we get to the reception and start milling about, talking to the people we know, checking out the other guests who we don’t know. At one of the reserved tables, I see a young guy asking a middle-aged guy if he’ll take a picture with him. The young guy’s buddy takes the photo as the older guy looks mildly amused and just a smidge put out. I’m thinking to myself, “Who is that guy? Dammit, he looks so familiar.” Later, I realize it’s Joe Walsh.

We mill around some more, looking at enlargements of Wright’s terrific pictures and the slide show they’ve got running on monitors scattered about the club. The Dude and I grab a seat and nibble some of the appetizers. We’re trying to act cool because we’re both insanely excited about seeing SXSW’s keynote speaker, who is also going to be at this reception: Pete Townshend.

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She Who Is Awesome just called to let me know that she woke up at about nine this morning to the sound and sight of Ninja, the pregnant cat belonging to one of her suite-mates, giving birth next to her in bed. She got to see #2 through #4 greet the new day.

Two of the kittens are orange and have markings much like those of Texas, who is Rachael’s cat. He was fixed, so it theoretically can’t be his offspring, but, as we learned in ‘Jurassic Park’ — Nature Finds a Way.

According to her, the one who is tucked under mamma-cat’s chin in the pic, is already showing signs of being extremely feisty. Rach is urging me to adopt. I’m thinkin’ about it.

Here’s a pic of Tex when he was little. Rach and I both instantly fell in love with him, tiny T-Rex kitty that he was:

I’m hoping I’ll be able to drive up to Austin in time to see if the kitten is as irresistible as I fear, before it gets adopted out to somebody else. It may be a moot point, as Rach is threatening to keep it for herself.

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Pic credits to Rachael Harper, unsurprisingly.

Here is a graph of world population from 1000 AD to the present:

Here is a graph of carbon dioxide emissions from 1000 AD to present:

Here is temperature from 1000 AD to present:

Here is a thought experiment:

Posit a lily pond. On day one, it has one lily pad. The number of lily pads doubles each day. On day thirty, the pond is completely full of lily pads. On what day is the pond half full?

If you guessed day fifteen, you guessed wrong. The correct answer is day twenty-nine.

All of the above are examples of exponential growth. This is why those of us who have been following the science closely for a while are so worried.

The experts tell us that there is still time to avert the worst of what might lie ahead—but only just. They tell us that there is still room for discussion about exactly what the causes and outcomes will be—but that they aren’t good.

In other words, it’s only alarmist to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theatre if there is, in fact, no fire.

(Note, I couldn’t find the graph I wanted of species extinction rate, but it shows the same trend.)

you might want to visit this site:

More high culture from me to you today. It looks like sometimes, randomly, you have to click through an entry ad page to get to the actual DeviantArt destination page.

I just now wasted 20 precious minutes out of my life, jiggling my mouse around and clicking it to change the shape of the lines, and clicking the little round dots on the bottom edge of the screen to make further changes.

Yes, I’m pretty easily entertained. Yes, I know there are other things like it out there. This one felt particularly psychedelic because of the evanescent mandalas that you can make with it.

Props to Clicked for the link that originally led me to this charming trifle.