A walk in the woods

No, this is not a reference to Bill Bryson's interesting book on the Appalachian trail (AT).  Speaking of which, our bridge friend Bob McCaw is out hiking the AT again (!).  You can keep track of his progress with his Trail Journal.

View Estabrook Woods in a larger map.

No, my title refers to a four-mile walk we did in Estabrook Woods (see map). Kim had asked me to plan a four-mile walk and when we got back to the car the GPS was showing 4.00 miles!  Total luck of course. Especially as the track shown here claims to be 4.33 miles. Strange -- it may be something to do with the conversion between formats.  My entire lifetime has been spent marveling at the way computer people (myself excepted, obviously) care nothing about the error bounds of measurements.  So, a point on the map is presumed to be exact, even though that makes the track appear jagged.  And if you look carefully, you'll notice that our return up the main track appears about 10m to the right of the way we came down it.  And also that the car had dropped a couple of hundred feet since we set out.  This should all be handled properly by the software, but of course it isn't.

But the dogs don't care about the precision of the GPS either.  They had a wonderful time, especially Jimmy who met some new friends (and tried to go home with them).  There was still snow on the ground and of course some wet patches to negotiate, but all in all a beautiful day.  We could feel virtuous when we got back.

Switching tack now... I've never been a fan of the humble parsnip.  I've always loved its relative the carrot but there's something about the taste of parsnips that disagrees with me.  But the good news is that I'm getting over it.  Like so many veggies, parsnips are health-giving in several ways.  Did you know that parsnips and carrots are part of a large family of flowers, the Apiaceae (also known as the Umbellifers), which contains many of the herbs with which we are so familiar?  However, it also includes the hemlock (that's to say Socrates' C.O.D., rather than the North American tree).

While this winter started out with lots of snow and while our garden in the backyard has had a blanket of snow all winter long, it turns out that we've ended (assuming no more, April Fools day notwithstanding) with just over 80", far short the record, set in the year (1995-6) Ella and David decided to try a New England winter for a change, of 108".  I'm expecting that in a day or two, we'll again be able to see the vegetable garden.

Spring

Spring is here, also known as mud season.  We spent a lot of time out with the dogs this weekend.  Today we met up in a field with Spenser (a previous foster dog we called Cooper), his two big brothers (Phineas and Boo) and his parents Brad and Michelle.  Jimmy (on right in photo above) and Spenser (left) got along very well.  Jimmy also got along with about 40 other mainly large dogs.  At one point, he set off into the woods with a new friend.  I had to go and get him back.  We also took all four dogs to Greenough.  Yesterday, Jimmy went with us to the Cummings School in Grafton to romp around their 5-acre fenced in field (about 10 other dogs were there).  It's truly amazing how well all the dogs get along.  These dogs are mostly strangers to each other and you might expect a lot of aggro.  There's none.  There's some doggie roughhousing but that's the extent of it.

On Saturday evening, we went out to see the full moon rise over the Concord River and discovered an American Woodcock looking for a mate.  It was a little too dark to see clearly but we could hear them quite distinctly.  I didn't realize they'd be here so early but one of my Carlisle birding friends assures me that early March is normal.

On a related theme, the phoebes are back.  I was in the office all week with meetings so they might have been around earlier in the week, but I didn't see them.  It always makes me happy to see them back.

Miranda has flown the coop so to speak.  She's gone to Arizona to do a week of rural vet services on an Indian reservation and the following two weeks will be in New Mexico doing a rotation at a vet clinic.  Then she's off to treat horses in Mexico.

Lots of chest-beating re: Nuclear power this week in the wake of the Japan tragedy.  Many people seem to have missed the point that it was the tsunami rather than the earthquake itself which knocked out the electrical pumps.  Yes, nuclear power can be dangerous (we already knew that, didn't we?).  And yes it's not easy to clean up afterwards.  It's also questionable whether it's much cheaper than burning fossil fuels.  But it is somewhat more renewable as an energy source than fossil fuels and it seems to me that we should be willing to pay to build more nuclear power stations, with as much safety built in as we can manage.  Or let's bite the bullet and do something about truly renewable energy sources.  Otherwise, we're going to be in a pickle in a few years time.

A horse with no name

I'm surprised.  I was quite sure that the stuff that other people like to put on roast beef sandwiches was hoarseradish and the name of the tree from which we get conkers the hoarse chestnut.  I thought the use of the spelling horse was just a lazy Americanism.  But Kew gardens spells the name of the tree aesculus hippocastanum as the horse chestnut (and in any case, note the specific part of the binomial name: hippo-castanum: horse-chestnut).  I was sure that the name came from the word hoarse, as in shouting oneself hoarse, used in the sense of not sweet.  But I'm wrong.  Still there are a few miscreants like myself who add the extra "a" in the name.  And what about this: what is small, red and whispers?  a hoarse radish.

Today was unseasonably warm (51F, 10.5C) and this generated a high sublimation vapor pressure (crystals of ice in snow passing directly into the vapor phase, without passing through water).  And this in turn generated quite a fog.  But it was a welcome break from the cold weather.  Now, instead of having a tunnel two feet wide and three and one half feet tall, through which we passed to get to our front door, the snow banks are not much more than 18" with plenty horizontal space to pass through.

This handsome chap, left, is Jimmy who we are fostering at present.  He comes from the same rescue organization in Tennessee that Puga comes from.  He's friendly and very affectionate.  Sometimes his presence is a little too much for our smaller dogs but he generally means well.

I've recently been appreciating more than ever the music from Handel's oratorio "Solomon".  In addition to the wonderful chorus From the censer curling rise (the piece which has the fun bassoon part which earned yours truly a compliment from the Lord Major of London, Sir Gilbert Inglefield, 43 years ago), there is a wealth of marvelous music.  The poetry of the libretto is so good that it is hard to believe that we aren't 100% sure who wrote it.  It's generally held to be by Newburgh Hamilton who wrote several of Handel's other libretti.  Take this verse of Solomon's for instance which is beautifully set by the composer:

What though I trace each herb and flow'r,
That drink the morning dew,
Did I not own Jehovah's pow'r,
How vain were all I knew. Of course you might find it surprising that I should find this so good given my views on religion and science.  But this describes the essence of the problem that Charles Darwin, who began life as a devout believer, faced as he readied his manuscript for publication.  It is easier to deal with, as Darwin ultimately did, by abandoning the image (for Jehovah) of a white-bearded old guy directing the lives of everyone on earth and replacing it with the concept of  the wonders of the natural world and marvels of evolution.

Isn't the grammar just great?  Whether this is a present or past subjunctive, I'm not quite sure.  But it fits so perfectly.  Incidentally, it drives me nuts that most people (especially on this side of the pond) don't know how to form a conditional and pluperfect subjunctive.  For instance I hear sort of thing all time this: if I would have looked down the street, I would not be here in this hospital (instead of: if I had looked down the street, etc.).

Here's another very poetic aria, again sung by Solomon who must have had quite a generous libido (he had 700 wives and 300 concubines) as he suggests to his queen that they go out for a little alfresco tête à tête*:

Haste, haste to the cedar grove,
Where fragrant spices bloom,
And am'rous turtles love,
Beneath the pleasing gloom.

While tinkling down the hill,
Avoiding hateful day,
The little murm'ring rill
In whispers glides away. The turtles here are of course turtle doves, birds rather than reptiles [and yes I do know that birds are reptiles, cladistically speaking], a common mistranslation of the bible.

* it's also quite possible that in this section he is suggesting to the Queen that they travel to Lebanon for a little vacation -- but in that case, why the hurry?

High Speed Rail

It's easy to get distracted with Wikipedia.  Today's article on Battersea Bridge in London ended up with me watching videos of high speed trains like this video of the record run between Paris and London (in 2 hr, 3 mins) at the impressive speed of around 200 mph.  Much more impressive is the following where the TGV set a new world speed record for a "conventional" train at 574.8kph (357.16mph): TGV record breaking run.

The world's fastest train of any type is an experimental "maglev" train (magnetic levitation) in Japan of just over 360 mph.  I have to say that, impressive as all of this undoubtedly is, they were talking about maglev trains and how they would revolutionize travel around 40 years ago.  There is still no maglev train in regular service anywhere.

But the big disappointment of course is here in the United States.  Just take a look at this table of high speed rail networks (by this definition, a high speed rail line operates at greater than 250 kph (just under 160 mph).  China is by far the leader, with Spain a somewhat distant second.  The United Kingdom is a distant 13th and the United States holds on to its 7th place only by relaxing the speed criterion to include the Acela which has a top speed of 240 kph (150 mph).  But the Acela doesn't really live up to its billed speed.

The Eurostar has a scheduled non-stop journey time of 2h 15m between London and Paris for a distance of 492 km (an average speed of 219 kph).  The Acela achieves a scheduled time of 2h 48m for the 362 km between Washington and New York (average speed: 129 kph).  Indeed the only sections of the track which are cleared for top speed work (240 kph) are in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.  However, between New Haven and New York, the speeds are so low that the Boston/New York trip is even slower on average than the Washington/New York.  So, as you can see the Acela is a high-speed train in name only.

Unfortunately, the governments of the United States have been very short-sighted in transportation policy.  They have consistently squandered the opportunity to increase the gasoline tax which would have had two very positive outcomes: greater fuel efficiency (the market would have demanded more efficient designs many years ago); and money for building alternative infrastructure to help us out when the oil runs out.  When gas gets to $10 a gallon, we are going to find it very expensive to get, say, from New York to Chicago.  The corresponding European, Japanese or Chinese business person will have a much easier time getting from Berlin to Madrid, Tokyo to Osaka, or Beijing to Shanghai!

It was hard to decide which blog to put this in: Railroads or Letter from Europa.  But, I hope you found it interesting.

Life in the freezer

We're experiencing an unusually cold, snowy winter here in the Boston area, the worst (or best, depending on your point of view) since 1995-96.  The last few nights have been down in the low digits, or even below 0F (yes, we still use Fahrenheit here).  The snow is piling up everywhere and there is nowhere to put it.  Every few days we seem to get more.  Tomorrow, we may have to miss orchestra rehearsal on account of yet more snow.  We'll see.

Speaking of which, I am enjoying preparing this concert very much.  Two outstanding pieces: Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto (with George Li as soloist) and Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. I have written the program notes and I will be giving talks before the two concerts.  Our two soloists are outstanding and with all the extra players, the orchestra is sounding really good.  We didn't have to miss the rehearsal although the weather was not good and then overnight we got another 8 to 9" of snow.  The snow is piled high outside and we have no more room.  Let's hope we don't get too much more.

The temperature outdoors has actually warmed up quite a bit and that's helped a lot.  The house just couldn't keep warm the last few days (something's up - I suspect a need to bleed the pipes).

I've never been a huge fan of fiction and what fiction I read tends to be adventure, mystery, and that sort of thing.  I'm behind in reading many of the "classics", although in recent years I've read some non-English classics like Moby Dick, Les Miserables, and the Count of Monte Cristo.  And, while the Aubrey/Maturin canon isn't exactly one of the classics, Patrick O'Brian's prose style is exceptionally good, especially for an adventure writer.

But nothing had really prepared me for Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.  Well, I'd seen the mini-series and the recent movie and liked them a lot.  So I knew that the story and the characters were interesting.  But as I got started listening to the CDs (read by none other than Jeremy Irons), it dawned on me that this was writing of a type I'd never known.  It's not that he uses long words or short words or any other particular type of words.  It's just that the way they're put together is simply brilliant.  I imagined that he probably wrote the book very slowly, spending long periods of time finding just the right word.  Au contraire!  He wrote the book, by any standards a lengthy novel, in less than six months.

I didn't know much about him, although it wouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's read the book or seen it on the screen that he went to Oxford, Hertford College in fact.  He was also gay, in the modern sense, at least during his time at Oxford.  Nevertheless, he ended up marrying (for a year anyway) another Evelyn (a woman) and again later to Laura, this time more permanently and with two children.  All this didn't stop him creating perhaps his most colorful character in the book, Anthony (or Antoine) Blanche, as an over-the-top pansy (his word). 

Yet the book, which I had initially thought was a literary condemnation of Catholicism turns out to be just the opposite.  He himself converted when he was in his late twenties (about fifteen years before writing the book) and was not in the least critical of the church.  And whereas I had assumed that it was largely autobiographical, and indeed I'm still sure that it is, he and Charles clearly have very different opinions about the Catholic church.

Now, it's back to Mahler and Beethoven for me: a pleasure but requiring inspiration which doesn't always come easily.

Freedom of speech

The NFL playoffs are back on and New England (at home) is scheduled to play the New York Jets on Sunday at 4:30pm after earning a bye for the first week and home-field advantage throughout.  In fact, the Patriots are favorites to win the Superbowl this year, having won 14 of 16 games, including the last eight.  One of those was a 45-3 drubbing of the Jets just over a month ago.  So you'd expect that the Jets would be quietly and respectfully planning their revenge.  But no, this is the land of free speech, where everyone has the right to put their foot in their mouth.  From the head coach on down, they are trash-talking the Patriots, targeting especially Tom Brady, the greatest quarterback ever to have played the game (and I've seen some good ones before!).

But all this is protected by the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution, perhaps the most sweeping and liberating piece of legislation ever.  You don't find too many people opposed to that!  Not so, its successor, the second amendment.  It is surely one of the most controversial pieces of legislation.  What did the framers actually mean?  Did they really want to allow everyone to go about their business "packing"?  We have no way way of asking them – the Supreme Court must study the words, perhaps making allowance for the different manner of construction of legal language from then to now and make their decisions based on that.  Unfortunately, when you combine the first and second amendments of the constitution, and extrapolate quite a bit, it gives anyone the right to disagree with political figures (including bystanders) by firing an automatic weapon at them, as happened last week in Arizona.

At the time the constitution was drafted, the state of the art was the musket, a large (the barrel alone was three to four feet long) and inherently non-concealable piece of weaponry which took about 20 seconds for a well-trained musketeer to load and fire.  Today's Glock 19, the gun used by the assailant, can empty the standard 15-round clip in less than 15 seconds!  In Arizona, anyone who is 21 years or older can walk into a gun store and, after a quick check that he or she isn't a convicted felon or known lunatic, can walk out with a gun that can legally be concealed and taken into most buildings (not schools and certain other places).  No permit is required.  Amazing!  The surprising thing really is that this kind of thing doesn't happen more often!  Much has been made of the intensity of the political rhetoric coming from the most recently unsuccessful Vice-Presidential candidate.  Just take a look at the map she created (since removed from her own web site) with Giffords' name and district, among others, clearly marked with a bulls eye.

Meanwhile, closer to home, a long-term violent criminal who had been released on parole in 2008, while serving three (!) concurrent life sentences, shot and killed a Woburn police officer (who was shortly due to retire) while in the execution of an armed robbery of a jewelery store on December 26th, 2010. The fact that this felon was also killed during the exchange was not a lot of comfort to the family of the police officer, nor to the people and government of Massachusetts.  Questions of how come this scumbag was released on parole have been answered by a commission set up by the governor.  Guess what!  It turns out to have been a software error!  Middlesex county was not informed of the hearing at all (they had opposed parole three years earlier) and Suffolk county (ditto) was given an incorrect description of the crimes committed so were also absent from the hearing.  Didn't anyone on the parole board stop to wonder why the D.A.'s office in these two counties seemed to have lost interest in the intervening three years?  In any case, nine people have been fired so maybe cock-ups (as we Brits would put it) like this may be less likely to occur in the future.

We are currently without a working TV, our 10-year-old plasma TV having gone (literally) puff! last week.  In its day, the Sony TV was pretty much unique and very expensive.  In the intervening years, Sony has stopped making plasma TVs but there are many plasma and LCD units to choose from at a fraction of the old price.  And the quality, power-consumption, longevity, etc. have all improved dramatically.  And additionally, these new units all have new features like 3D, internet connectivity, etc.  It's amazing.  So it didn't seem worth fixing the old one.  Hopefully, we'll have the replacement before the Patriots play on Sunday!