That's weird!

I posted a note just a second ago to clarify a couple pictures and...it said I did it yesterday. I could see that if I still had control of what time stamp happened to be on the post, but...oh well...weird is all I have to say.

Wednesday Baby Pictures

Who Is That Other Baby?!

That would be Avrora's maternal cousin, Vsevolod. He was born on December 24, 2004 and resides, currently, in Gorlovka, Ukraine. My family, even married family it seems, tends to have clusters of children.

Frex, Theo, my brother's son, was born in October of 2005. That makes Vsevolod, Avrora, and Theo all less than a year of difference between them despite their fathers ranging between 31 to 22 when they were born. Also, frex, the eldest of the Baird grandchildren, Marissa and Alloura, were born two weeks apart in October of 1997. Mikayla and Cody were the outliers so far in the family having been born in May and March respectively.

This phenomenon is not restricted to this particular generation: my sister Tessa and our cousin Rachel were born within months of each other. My brother Ted and our cousin James were born within weeks of each other too.

It will be interesting to see if the trend holds true in the future too.

New Mexico Lost

Sheesh, I need some content here. I've been insanely busy and I've not written up some promised posts. The first of which is that commentary about the trip to New Mexico. Others are the reviews of some of the books I've read lately: even the smallest cursory reviews that I mostly do.

As I said, life has been hectic. Lyuda, Avrora and I went to northern New Mexico on January 20th and were there for a week and change. Upon returning, I had to prep for another work related trip to Austin, Texas. Upon returning, we were prepping for a centerwide shutdown and maintenance. In addition to that, V Day is today and I've been plotting some fun, romantic, and silly things to do to my wife: it's tradition to give her a gag gift along with romantic ones. Furthermore, we have Avrora's first BDay coming up at the end of the month. arrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!

That said, I will give a quick discussion of somethings that I saw on our trip to New Mexico. it really underlined why I don't go back more frequently to Los Alamos. I love the town. It holds a place in my heart that I cannot explain to others. It was unique and wonderful and fun place to grow up. It was an extremely intellectually stimulating place to be...back then. When was back then? That would be in the late 1980s and early 1990s at the tail end of the Cold War.

Los Alamos was in a bit of an anxious, triumpantal stage then. The whole purpose of Los Alamos had born out, from our POV, and we'd won! Without firing a shot! Peace through superior tech and firepower, huzzah! The Soviet Union melted away like a wax facade and we were left standing largely unscathed - except for Boomer Generational Group Psychoses. Except...then...wtf was Los Alamos supposed to do from then on?

Star Wars was a bust. Bush the Elder began winding everything down and LANL was out of the loop. Nuclear technologies were politically verboten: forget about doing anything even related. However, even so, there was a burst of creativity that pervaded the air in Los Alamos at the time. Participation in the Human Genome Project was on the uptick (some of my HS friends even wrote some HPC code for helping that project out). Astrophysics people were doing some of the very first work on extrasolar planets (which I was lucky enough to have participated in). Supercomputing was looking into new and interesting technologies (for then) back then for unclassified work. The fruit of that time that were ripening looked sweet and delicious.

Then stuff happened, mostly in the latter half of the 1990s, that embarassed LANL, almost destroyed Los Alamos (physically), and even took a huge swipe at the self image of the people there. It impacted and hurt people I knew and loved. All of the events ended up producing one of the most farcical and weird bidding processes and awards for who would run the Lab.

Our trip out was actually fun. Lyuda spent three days skiing at Taos: one the second day we were there and two mid way through when we stayed a lodge there. She also skied Sipapu. I spent two of those days with my brother and dad with my daughter and two days I hung out with my daughter. We spent a day in the Jemez Mountains and a day in Santa Fe. We also spent time in Los Alamos proper. The remainder of that time we spent with my family.

Some things were really heart breaking about that visit to Los Alamos. One, the recovery from the great fire that nearly consumed Los Alamos hasn't really happened. Oh, the town ahs largely rebuilt, but the forest above town in the Jemez - and many of my favorite hiking spots - have not. There are almost no trees growing there. The formerly lush Jemez of my childhood looks more like the barren Organ Mountains of my college years. There are miles upon miles of trees standing upright and dead, scarred and zombielike, and almost nothing to replace them beyond some scrub. Certainly, it didn't look like trees were there.

The second heart break was that the pinon pines are dying. Some articles I've read online have stated that this is a consequence of gloal warming. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Something like this happens every century. it is climate related, but its not what people think. Every century there is a drought. Some centuries its worse than others. It typically lasts a decade. It really screws with low tech civilizations in the area. It started in 1994 and everyone thought that it had broken in 2005 when there was tons of snow and rain like the wettest years of decades before. Except, this year, the drought seems to have returned full force. Peoplea re quick to blame global warming for the return toe the drought. I'm agnostic there as yet. Some of the droughts in the past have been two decades in length. Because the pinon trees have been so weak from the drought, the bark beetles have run amok and killed what looks like 80% of them. The junipers are just fine. It's just the pinons and some of the lower evalation Ponderosas, but not even half of those. Looking out across some of my favorite childhood hiking areas, it looked like a grave yard, more corpses than libing pinon trees. That too was heart wrenching.

Finally, some of the more heart wrenching bits was there were areas we used to hike in. There were Lab Land or Indian Land, but not off limits to the public if you were respectful of the ruins and things there. That is no longer the case. Deer Trap, frex, was an amazingingly beautiful and fun hike at the bottom of the Los Alamos truck route. It's now closed to the public. For that matter Parajito Road is closed to the public after 9-11 (not without reason, since it went past the plutonium processing plant there) and thus all the hiking areas there were closed as well. *sighs*

As you can tell, I spent a lot of my time in High school and after out hiking. It was hiking, role play gaming (or wargaming), car racing (the truck route was our favorite timed race), swimming, playing my violin, or some such trouble. Or homework. Oy!

LANL was interested in me at SC05 for a job and my wife, while we were touring my old high school (LAHS), asked if we should move to Los Alamos to allow Avrora (and any other kids we have) to go to the schools there (they're excellent), but it's really true, you can never go home. :S

AIDS/HIV Killing Drug Found?

Researchers, including a BYU scientist, believe they have found a new compound that could finally kill the HIV/AIDS virus, not just slow it down as current treatments do.

And, unlike the expensive, drug cocktails 25 years of research have produced for those with the deadly virus, the compound invented by Paul D. Savage of Brigham Young University appears to hunt down and kill HIV.

Although so far limited to early test tube studies, CSA-54, one of a family of compounds called Ceragenins (or CSAs), mimics the disease-fighting characteristics of anti-microbial and anti-viral agents produced naturally by a healthy human immune system.

Under a study sponsored by Ceragenix Pharmaceuticals, Savage and his colleagues developed and synthesized the compound for Vanderbilt University's School of Medicine. In his Nashville, Tenn., laboratories, Derya Unutmaz, an associate professor of Microbiology and Immunology, tested several CSAs for their ability to kill HIV.

While issuing a cautious caveat about his early results, Unutmaz acknowledged Monday that CSAs could be the breakthrough HIV/AIDS researchers have sought for so long.

Read the rest here.

Wow. We'll see if its true. It's very encouraging that they are seeking peer review first rather than hyping it. If there's a cure for it...talk about changes demographically in, oh, say, Africa?

NASA Challenges

Read them here.

The one that has me excited is...

The Station-Keeping Solar Sail Challenge

A solar sail pushed through space by the force of the Sun's photons to a target could earn $2.5 million with an equal amount available for keeping a solar sail for 90 days at a fixed point in space.

Russo-Ukrainian Relations Worsen...again

Ukraine intends to raise the rent for the Black Sea ports and facilities used by the Russian fleet from the current $93 million annually to the market-based figure that could run into $1.8 billion, a senior official said Thursday.

Against the backdrop of a dispute over a lighthouse and other facilities on the Ukrainian Crimean peninsula, Anatoliy Kinakh, the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, said he had instructed relevant agencies Wednesday to calculate the rent for the Russian Black Sea Fleet according to modern market conditions.

From here.

Ukrainian authorities indicated on Wednesday, Feb. 8, that they are ready to denounce a natural gas agreement with Russia that was signed last month amid persistent differences in the way Moscow and Kiev believe the agreement should be implemented.

Prime Minister Yuri Yekhanurov, opening a government meeting on Wednesday, suggested that Russia has been apparently growing unhappy and persistently opposing some parts of the agreement. “We told the Russian side: We are ready to denounce the agreement or certain clauses in the agreement if it doesn’t satisfy the Russian side, and to prepare the new one,” Yekhanurov said, quoted by the UkrainianJournal.com.

Yekhanurov didn’t disclose what the differences were, but the development comes amid deadlock in talks between the two governments as Russia has been apparently refusing to guarantee steady gas prices during the next five years.

This is the first time Ukraine officially mentioned an option of denouncing the agreement, which was signed on Jan. 4 to end a natural gas dispute that had resulted in disruptions of Russian gas supplies to Europe.

From here.

Russia's defense minister said Thursday that Ukraine could destabilize its domestic situation by joining NATO.

"Ukraine's possible accession to NATO is a very sensitive issue. Attempts to drastically reorient [itself] towards western values could prove a major destabilization factor, above all for Ukrainian society, since a year of democratic reform has not yielded noticeable results," Sergei Ivanov, who is also a deputy prime minister, told La Stampa newspaper ahead of his visit to Rome where he is expected to take part in a Russia-NATO Council meeting, which will take place on the sidelines of the informal meeting of NATO defense ministers.

From here.

This is rather alarming, actually. The Ukrainians are going to renounce the agreement and stop the gas again, point one. They are also going to start charging Russia for the Sebastopol base at a rate that is 20 times what it is now. Then, after the Russians made such an interesting comment before, the Russian Defense Minister goes on the record saying that Ukraine will probably destablize. After Russia's funny little comment I have to wonder if that is a threat to induce seperatism on the model of Georgia's problems. Crimea might be ripe for this or perhaps, but lesser so, the Donbass Region. IDK. I think we're just going to fish out the family and make an end to all this mess.

T Rex's Oldest Known Relative

Scientists say the 160-million-year-old animal, which had simple feathers and an elaborate head crest, is the oldest known tyrannosaur—a group of swift, flesh-eating dinos that culminated in T. rex some 90 million years later.


Two specimens of the previously unknown dinosaur have been found in the fossil-rich badlands of Xinjiang province in northwest China (map).

The primitive tyrannosaurs were discovered together. They appeared to have become fatally trapped in a prehistoric mud pit, according to Xing Xu, professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, China. The carnivores were possibly lured to their deaths by other mud-stricken animals, which also left behind fossil remains.

"This is an unbelievable discovery with tremendous new information on the evolution of the tyrannosaurs," Xu said.

Read more here.

In Austin

I'm in Austin.

I'd pretty sure that I don't like Austin.

I really miss my family too.

Sheesh.

I'm whining.

Off Again

This time to Austin for work. Sunday through late Tuesday. Be back then. Little chance of blogging between now and then.

Books for this Month

1. Terrestrial Ecosystems Through Time : Evolutionary Paleoecology of Terrestrial Plants and Animals

2. Chavin: And the Origins of the Andean Civilization

3. Catastrophes and Lesser Calamities : The Causes of Mass Extinctions

4. Mass Extinctions and Their Aftermath

5. The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850

6. The Olmecs: America's First Civilization

7. Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs

8. Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome

9. Homeward Bound

That last one is just to finish out the whole Lizard saga. Not because I am uberinterested. The first book I blame on Carlos Yu. He got me ubercurious. Four of those books are for the alternate history that I am writing. We'll see how that turns out. I've made progress there, but its not so easy. The introduction has been plotted out and the general arc of the story with the two other interrupting stories, but it's still a work in progress with baby etc.

European UCAV Taxi Tests

The Germans and Spanisha re experimenting with an UCAV of their own. They're behind the US quite a bit, but making some obvious progress, Apparently, the UCAV program, called Barrakuda, has been going on for a bit, but with a light shroud of secrecy. They took it out for some taxiing tests recently according to Jane's.

Duckbills were Vocal

Duckbilled dinosaurs of about 90 million years ago had huge crests with complex nasal passages, and used them to honk sexual and social messages, according to a new study in the journal Paleobiology.

"The crest likely evolved to play a role in behavior of both vocal and visual display -- to call to attract a mate or warn of predators or something like that," said David Evans, a researcher at the University of Toronto.

Read the rest here.

Lincoln's Words...from Unlikely Sources!

"The world has never had a good definition of the word 'liberty.' The American people just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty. But in using the same word, we do not all mean the same thing.

"What constitutes the bulwark of our liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling seacoasts -- these are not our reliance against tyranny. Our reliance is in the love of liberty, which God has planted in our bosom. Our defence is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own door.

"At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow?

"Never.

"All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, could not, by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer that if it ever reach us, it must spring from amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be the authors and finishers.

"As a nation of free men, we must live through our times or die by suicide. Let reverence for the law be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap; let it be taught in the schools, in the seminaries and in the colleges; let it be written in primers, in spelling books and almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls and enforced in courts of justice; and in short, let it become the political religion of the nation. And let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly at its altar. And let us strive to deserve, as far as mortals may, the continued care of Divine Providence, trusting that in future national emergencies, He will not fail to provide us the instruments of safety and security.

"Let us not be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government, nor of dungeons to ourselves.

"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

-- Abraham Lincoln

I lifted that from Ron Moore's Battlestar blog! He lifted it from an old amalgam of various Lincoln quotes that were used by Disney(!!!) for their speech that they stuck in their animatronic Lincoln at Disney land. Even so, that speech, if a bit manufactured, it's actually damned good. IMAAO.

Jovian Trojans Really a Comet Collection?

Two objects lurking near Jupiter and once considered rocky asteroids have turned out to be comets made up mostly of ice and dirt.

Using the Keck II Laser Telescope in Hawaii, astronomers found that the two objects, 617 Patroclus and its companion, Menoetius, had a density of only 0.8 grams per cubic centimeters -- only a third that of rock.

Most likely, the researchers say, Patroclus and Menoetius are comets, which are typically composed mainly of water ice and therefore much less dense than asteroids.

The finding could mean that many or most of the asteroid-like objects hovering around Jupiter and known as Trojans are actually comets that originated much farther from the sun and which were captured by the giant gas planet when the solar system was still young.

Read the rest here.

Perhaps that ought to have been expected. The Jovian Trojans are in the right area for comets to collect and not suddenly evaporate. I'll have to check on the energy requirements for a mission to there...seems like a great place to deliver a probe that can go from Trojan to Trojan and study...

Pictures from New Mexico

New Planet(?) Larger than Pluto?

German astrophysicists have concluded a space body located in the outer reaches of the solar system is 435 miles (700 kilometers) larger than Pluto, the smallest planet.

Their research puts more pressure on the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to classify the object as the 10th planet in our solar system.

"UB313 is decidedly larger than Pluto," said University of Bonn Professor Frank Bertoldi, whose team's findings will be published in Thursday's journal Nature.

The object, tentatively named 2003 UB313, is an icy body that lies beyond the planet Neptune.

2003 UB313 was first photographed in October 2003 by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology's Palomar Observatory, north of San Diego. Astronomers announced last summer that it was large enough to be a planet and was likely much larger than Pluto.

Wow.

Read the rest here.

The Cold and a Personal Gas War

About 589 people died from the cold in Ukraine over a 15-day period of record-breaking low temperatures last month, the Health Ministry said Wednesday.

The deaths occurred between January 16 and 31, the ministry said in a statement.

Nearly 7,000 Ukrainians asked for medical help as temperatures dipped to around -25 C (-13 F), but only about half required hospitalization. The ministry said the victims were mostly homeless and intoxicated people. The majority were from the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.

Meanwhile, President Viktor Yushchenko ordered his government Wednesday to end an 11-day-long heating outage in a Ukrainian city by February 11 and said those responsible for the unprecedented long breakdown must be held responsible.

Some 60,000 people have been shivering in unheated apartments in Alchevsk since January 22, when the eastern city's heating system failed during the cold spell.

Read the rest at CNN.

Right now, my in-laws are not living in their normally cosy home. You see, back in the end of November/beginning of December, we helped them to transition warming their home from coal to natural gas. It's far cheaper, even after the assinine Gas War. The piping was done on a reasonable schedule given it was Ukraine as were the structural changes and installation of the water heater (they use a form of radiant heat for the house). All that remained was to get the certificate (of some sort) from the local government that said everything was a-ok (basically the last inspection). erm. It didn't happen. The cost of the brive to make it happen in a timely manner was prohibitive. I might have even been willing to make it happen despite my personal abhorrence because my nephew, sister-in-law, and mother-in-law were all quite, quite cold. They didn't ask us to help because they were already very embarassed that we'd helped them at all with this. So, it didn't happen before the cold snap that has been killing people...and then all the pipes in the house broke spilling water and sewage everywhere. From what they have told my wife, the house is a complete loss now and there's no home owner's insurance. We're at a loss as to what to do.

The only reason we helped at all in the first place, and we did insist, was because a neighbor who ahd some kind of grudge had been bribing the local utility company to not let my in-laws to put in the gas pipes. We had to pay extra just to get the work done. My in-laws couldn't afford that. There looked like an oppurtunity that they could have avoided all the corruption last summer, but for some reason they didn't exploit it.

So, in the end, their house is a sodden, frozen mess, and everyone is out money. And it's very, very cold. And we feel horrible because we were just off skiing and having fun in New Mexico. We didn't hear about it until we returned and called to talk to Lyuda's sister. :( *sighs*

Ukraine Wants to Join NATO in 2008

Ukraine is aiming to join NATO in 2008, a deputy Ukrainian foreign minister said Wednesday. "An extended NATO summit will take place in 2008, which is expected to bring in a wave of new members to the organization. We hope the wave will bring us to NATO too," Volodymyr Khandohiy told journalists.

Read the rest here.

This may be wishful thinking. There are a lot of nontrivial reforms that Ukraine has yet to implement and needs to if they are hoping to join the Alliance. It's not to say that it's impossible, but based on what we are hearing from the eastern part of Ukraine through friends and relatives, the corruption that had been driven, at least temporarily out, has returned with a vengeance. I'll touch on that in the next post. It actually ties in to the cold snap that Ukraine is experiencing right now. Unfortunately.

Oy!

I'll be posting more today. I have to get back into the swing of things.

First, there will be another interruption for next week. I came back and my boss stated I am going on a business trip to Austin, TX for the IBM Quarterly.

Second, there will be baby pictures later tonight. Check back after 6 pm Pacific.

Third, I'll be writing up about the trip, both good and bad tonight and tomorrow.

Until then...I'll try to get some of the news I cover up here again.