Category: Uncategorized

Most plants appear to us to remain still or at worst move very slowly as they follow the sun. Plants that move quickly are considered novelties with the best example being the Venus Flytrap, with its gaping mouth and scary looking “teeth”.

In Singapore and many other tropical places we would find a type of plant called “sleepy grass” or the less common scientific name Mimosa Pudica. The kids would always be amazed at such small miracles and would play with them for hours. Well the closing up part; they take 15 minutes or so to open back up and this exceeds a child’s attention span by 11,000 percent. I found this animated GIF file which shows the effect. Hypnotic, no?

The exact point of this “sleeping” is not fully understood, since it extracts a fairly large energy penalty on the plant. It may be done to reduce the desirability of the plant to herbivores or perhaps to dislodge voracious ants or caterpillars.

 

As you grow closer 
you sense its power,
A kind of gravity
that bends the air and light
like a bow stretched taut
across a newborn sky.

You know the sea in pictures,
A distant frozen horizon,
the eager waves in ragged lines,
Exhausted runners race and lunge
To finally rest
Prone upon the jagged shore.

But reality transcends
Mere words and film;
Assaulting every sense-
Fickle sun uneasy glints
Off a reckless surface;
The sound of waves
Pummel the sand
As gulls wheel and cry above,
Cautious in courting rare refuge,
knowing their time in the sky
Will end now and then.

The wind comes
With ripples and swells,
perhaps jealous of unrelenting tides;
The same air surrounds and holds you;
A mother caressing her child
Lost upon the land
Now found.

But for me 
The rich smell of salt
Most defines the sea,
Primordial, wild and free,
Braced upon the sand
With bleached air all around
We are forever changed, 
Even in the stillness
Of far mountains
And forgotten shores.

We are drawn you and I
To remember the place we began
And will one day surely return,
The salt clings to us as we sleep
And dream of sand and sea
And home.

 

The turns are relentless, requiring absolute attention lest you, your car, and your passengers take an exciting — albeit short – trip to the Pacific Ocean.  Thus, driving to Hana, Maui from Kahului is not for the faint of heart, but like most memorable trips the overused phrase, “the journey is the destination”, seems to have been invented for Hana.  

The 50-mile trip can be a physical grind with its over 600 hairpin turns along the cliffs, so the best way to approach it is to block a day and stop frequently.  The scenery is a visual wonder, and history awaits around every curve, full of slack key surprises, hidden paths and secret pools rumored to contain magic.

For me the memory of the blue sky above and bluer ocean below exists like a dream, evoking what we must imagine Heaven to be like.  The Hana Highway turns 90 this year, a grand old journey worth experiencing at least once in your life — to a place that time has remembered and you will never forget.

 

If you asked me to describe the taste of molasses right this minute I would be hard-pressed. Yet as a child this form of sugar was common on pancakes and other, um, things. Yet if you gave me some right now and I tasted it, all the memories would come flooding back — yet the description of the flavor would remain elusive — it is one of those things that tastes only like itself. It is deathly sticky too, and once on your fingers you will be instinctively compelled to seek water and soap, specifically Boraxo, a hand soap designed by shadowy soap scientists capable of removing any substance from your hands, including the first few layers of epidermal material.

Molasses is thick and as it cools it gets thicker and thicker which gives rise to the phrase “slow as molasses in January”.  I have nominated this as descriptive phrase of the year, along with “I was born at night, just not last night”, and “If it was a snake it woulda bit yah”. Glub, God of Phrases, will cast the tie breaker.

I used to imagine that molasses was pumped directly from the ground and transported across the dry plains of the Serengeti in great metal flasks as tall as a man. Then I woke to the fading sound of heavy hooves on cobblestones and the scent of lilac in the air. A dream?  I think not.

Look, I get it. Most people don’t walk around thinking about surface tension. Yet it exists wherever there is a boundary condition. It enforces shape upon the world and is basically cool. I remember this little experiment we would do as kids, betting each other that we could make a steel needle float on water. Place a small strip of Kleenex in a bowl of water. On this floating piece of paper carefully place the needle. The paper soon saturates and falls away yet the needle continues to float all by its lonesome, held up by the force known as surface tension.

Raindrops on a leaf display this magic as well, as they form flattened spheroids held together by a kind of “skin”. They are flattened because of Earth’s gravity, otherwise they would form spheres. A very important question is whether the water droplets *roll* off the leaf or *slide* off the leaf. You will be happy to know that they in fact *roll*. Those of you in the “slide” camp will just have to plot your revenge. By the way I note in passing that WaterSkins would be a good name for a rock band.

And life itself has found a way, he says, stealing a line from Jurassic Park. Insects called water-striders glide across the surface of streams and lakes, quite literally walking on water. The pads on their legs and feet are perfectly shaped to balance their weight with the force of surface tension. They clearly read ahead in their physics textbook and anticipated the ol’ floating needle trick. I can imagine an awful lot of water-striders met a watery fate until those smart folks back in the evolution lab came up with the perfect foot design.

Call it “surface intention”. Heh.

 

Baseball is a story. We want it to be just a game where we catch and throw and hit and run. Grab a bat and ball and glove and maybe a hat creased to look like your favorite player. The field is level and might only be an open pasture where that line of bushes is a home run and the old oak is the foul pole. But baseball grows on you and works its magic because everyone can play everywhere.

A kid in Panama uses a tattered ball wrapped in tape and a cardboard box for a glove. He makes it to America and for 20 years throws one pitch, The Cutter, that no one can hit. Mariano Rivera is one greatest players to every play the game, yet somehow grows to be an even better person.

A shy kid from the hardscrabble plains of Oklahoma is thrust into the limelight of New York at age 19 sustained by pure natural ability. Mickey Mantle earns the harsh lights of fame but it costs him, and everyone who watched him play wonders how good he could have been without the booze and the 24/7 party life.

Pedro Martinez was a small man with an arm so quick no one could hit him for 10 years.

Ernie Banks missed seeing his Cubs win the Series, but somewhere he’s playin’ two.

The Jeter flip. Say Hey Willie Mays and The Catch. Ichiro and The Throw.

Stan The Man. Ty Cobb with spikes up high. Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, where have you gone? Ted Williams sees the stitches on a curve ball before launching it over the Green Monster. The Babe calls his shot, and Lou Gehrig is the luckiest man alive.

Our world may not be so grandiose. Thousands do not not cheer our every move or live vicariously through us. But out there in the early Spring with the air full of promise and passion, the baseball stories we make, make us.

I have long been intrigued by the advancements in computer graphics over the years. Extremely high resolution animations are commonplace on PCs today. Immersive 3D is moving from a curiosity to a useful tool.

As image resolution has approached and exceeded that of the human retina, animations involving human-like characters has uncovered some heretofore unknown phenomena with respect to human perception. As human facial characteristics and images move from the cartoonish to the ultra-realistic, we undergo a kind of discomfort when viewing faces that are close to real, yet slightly off. This is called the “uncanny valley”.

It is not clear why these close approximations are disturbing – perhaps we sense there is something untrustworthy afoot and we do not like to be fooled, as we might feel if we see a painted clown smile on a person who may not be happy at all.

I await the day that we will be able to accurately render a realistic avatar on screen, an actor who exists entirely as images and algorithms, but who has never known life as we understand it. This “person” may also someday be infused with the ability to behave autonomously with an understanding and access to the enormity of the connected world. And then I wonder if, as it gazes out at us through its high-res lenses, it experiences a momentary pang of uncertainty and questions whether we are in fact “real”?

At our core we are all collectors. I remember in the second or third grade being asked what hobbies I had. I told the class I was a numismatist, only to watch in horror as the class lapsed into a somnambulant state, barely sentient yet watchful and aware. “I collect coins!”, I burst out in a wild attempt to avoid childhood trauma and return to my normal state of being merely weird. I want to believe there was an audible gasp at this revelation, but I suspect everyone simply returned to their crayons and compasses.

I saved up my money to buy, well, money; but not just any money — rare coins worth possibly dozens of cents. We would buy shiny, mirror-like proof sets hermetically sealed in plastic boxes and announce to the world, “untouched by human hands”, as if these were a kind of peculiar circus act. Millions of years from now they will be found by alien explorers, who will wonder what odd people produced these carvings and their purpose.

Back on Earth, my brothers and I would read about actual rare coins created in error at the mint. These misshapen coins would be released into the wild to appear like Easter eggs in a strawberry field. They shouldn’t be there but hey, eggs. Key elements of coin metrics include the type of coin, the date minted and the location of the Mint; “D” for Denver; “S” for San Francisco. No mint mark meant Philadelphia obviously, as the “P” is silent. Because so few of these mistakes were produced they became extremely valuable, approaching the stuff of legend.  This penny for example, sold for $210,000 at auction in 2010.

 

We still collect things, you and I, looking for that unique coin or concept. We hold these in memory, anchors to the past, bridges to the future.

In my mind’s eye I see these medieval minstrels carrying their songs with them, walking through the town square. I see folks looking up from their busy day and smiling, hearing the banjo, guitar, lute and mandolin weaving their lyrical stories like audible histories passed from generation to generation. The word ‘troubadour’ has been around since at least the 12th century, but I wonder if the first music made by the earliest humans did not owe its appearance to groups of impatient musicians who decided to set off down the wooded path. Today our electronics brings the music to us wherever we may be, but there is still something essential about the troubadours coming to your town, riding the notes of the mandolin and the song of the lyre.

In life they are quicksilver
Astonishing and sudden
One moment rippling color
To disappear in inky clouds;
Protective and shy
Like a book
with a perfect ending.

Secret inner chambers
Spiral down ever smaller
The nautilus studies
Ancient harmonies
There in the deep
And the dark,
Reflecting the golden symmetry
Of galaxies and ferns.