James Clerk Maxwell

I've been rereading Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed for what may be the 15th or so time. The main character is an alien physicist in a relatively far future who is on the verge of developing the theoretical framework needed for transilience, the technology of communicating across space instantaneously.  

It felt like an odd juxtaposition when I saw a post this morning about James Clerk Maxwell, a 19th century Scottish physicist who I don't remember ever hearing of, given my deficient science education.

From his Wikipedia page, I learned that in his short 48 years of life right in the middle of the century, Maxwell was the first to describe how light, electricity, and magnetism are all different aspects of the same thing. He created equations for electromagnetism that are considered the second great unification of physics (Newton is credited with the first great unification). 

Based on that work, Maxwell predicted that radio waves exist. He figured out that color (in light) can be reproduced with just red, green, and blue, and "presented the first durable colour photograph in 1861..." 

He did work in several areas not related to his main fields, like structural engineering, and "was the first to recognize chaos, and the first to emphasize the butterfly effect." He worked in a number of scientific areas I can't even explain. 

He's considered to be the founder of electrical engineering. He introduced the terms relativity and quantum mechanics to the field of physics. 

All of that is from the introduction to his Wikipedia page. I almost didn't read the full version because the introduction seemed pretty thorough. But here's one notable fact from the longer text: Maxwell almost died from smallpox in 1860, before he had published any of what became his best-known work.

The post I saw this morning, which started me on this topic, was about a fundraising effort in the UK to buy the church where Maxwell is buried in Parton, Scotland.  

The community needs 70,000 pounds to buy Parton Kirk from the Church of Scotland and do some immediate repairs. As I understand it, if they do not acquire it, the land (or the building? I'm not sure) will be sold to a storage business. Why the Church of Scotland can't donate the building for such a measly amount of money, I don't know. 

They have until November 1, 2026, to raise the money, and as of this writing the campaign is at just under 45,000 pounds. 

Inverted Priorities

I had one of those moments of juxtaposition today. 

A local person commented on BlueSky about how U.S. policy encourages drunk driving by requiring parking near bars, while in contrast Canada has a mandatory minimum sentence of 30 days for a second impaired driving offense, and a 120-day minimum for the third. 

The post right after that told of a toddler who nearly died at the Dilley concentration camp near El Paso. After treatment in intensive care, she was sent back to Dilley where she grew sick again and wasn't given the care she needed. Her parents, asylum seekers from Venezuela, were also locked up there. 

The parents had been going through the proper asylum process since 2024, but — of course — had the rug pulled out from under them under the Mass Deportation Now policies of Stephen Miller and Donald Trump.

These two posts created a perfect moment of clarity about the priorities of our country. One priority existed long before the current regime, and the other is of the current moment. "We" want drunk drivers and we don't want immigrants. 

About 12, 000 people died from drunk-driving-related crashes in the U.S. in 2024, according to NHTSA stats (and that does not include the much higher number of severe and life-altering injuries that always accompanies any fatality number). 

While immigrant workers provide a huge percentage of this country's health care workforce: who knows how many lives immigrants have saved and improved by being here just through that work, let alone all the other ways they contribute to society. 

What a country.

Curious Sound

Sometimes social media presents you with humor unintentionally:

Though the screenshot of these two unrelated posts was much harder to capture than I want to describe.

Education and Opinions, a Table

Faine Greenwood posted this comment about a graph posted by another person on BlueSky yesterday:

it turns out that women do in fact get uppity and strange ideas about equality when you expose them to education, which is why MAGAs hate educated women so much

This is the graph:

Later in the day, I saw another comment on the graph, by Micah @rincewind.run:

why the fascists want to completely destroy higher education, in table form

And while I don't think it's the only reason the right wants to destroy higher education, it certainly fits with their main reason: undermining their control of ways of thinking.

Make Sure You're Yelling at the Right Guy

One of the Republican Congress members who's been confronted by his constituents at a town hall in recent days is named Chuck Edwards. He represents North Carolina's 11th District, which is in the far west of the state and includes Asheville and other areas devastated by last fall's hurricane. Edwards is the guy who beat the reprehensible Madison Cawthorn in the Republican primary in 2022.

I was blissfully unaware of Edwards until I saw news about his townhall. His constituents, like those at all the others, were unhappy with Trump, Musk, and — consequently — Edwards's answers to their questions about Trump and Musk.

But the thing I keep thinking about when I see coverage of Edwards is this:

Which of these men is Chuck Edwards, and which is the Nazi Trump advisor Seb Gorka? Have they ever been seen in a room together at the same time?

Am I the only one who thinks Edwards is a dead ringer for a slightly thinner Gorka?

Five Years Ago

In the midst of our current national conflagration, I forgot that it was five years ago this week that we began entering into the covid lockdown.

I looked back at my calendar for this week and I see a lot of emergency meetings for the large spring event I help organize. We ended up canceling it, of course, with huge financial cost.

My calendar also shows the last city council meeting I attended in person. And the morning the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul announced they were lowering speed limits on their side streets to 20 mph, and city arterial streets were decreased to 25 mph. A small crowd gathered outside next to one of the streets that connects the two cities as Public Works employees changed the speed limit sign. That was the last time I saw something like a crowd of people for quite a long time.

I did two last things in person. One (on Sunday, March 15!) was to help Daughter Number Three-Point-One and her partner move into the house they had bought earlier in the month. Several of her friends were also there. We all felt a little hinky about it, but it was fine. And the very last thing I did, on March 17, was get a haircut — just me and my stylist, alone in her shop.

I was the only person I knew who didn't need a haircut as the next several months wore on.

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These are my posts from March 2020... for posterity. As I reread them and looked at the dates of the posts compared to this recollection, it amused me to see how impossible it is to tell what I was doing on the various days.

Another Face

It was right there in my back hall:

I know this example of pareidolia is a bit less obvious than many of the other ones I've posted, but the sun shining through the bottle makes a smile to go with the eyes, which are the bottoms of some battery-powered tea lights. 

Both are objects waiting to go down to the basement for storage. Some day they'll get there.

Little Buddy

A week or so ago, I decided to get one of those electronic forehead-swipe thermometers. This morning, I noticed that when it's lying horizontal on a surface, it looks like a tightly wrapped mummy wearing a hat:

In case a face is helpful to get the idea across, here it is, modified:

Aw, little buddy. You look so snug.

Makes You Think

Via Twitter:

94% of Parisians live within a 5-minute walk of a bakery.
Jonathan Berk @berkie1

90% of Seattle residents live within a 5-minute walk of a truck route or highway.
Mike Eliason @holz_bau

I'm willing to bet money that 90% of residents in Saint Paul also live the same distance from a highway or a truck route.

Bumping Headlines

Sometimes there's a page in the newspaper with two headlines near each other and you have to think the editors created the juxtaposition on purpose.

This one definitely was purposeful:

On the right, a normal candidate with some policy proposals; on the left, a wannabe dictator (with some tariffs thrown in). They didn't mention the "vermin" quote in this story. 

This one, where the two stories were not quite as closely juxtaposed, was a bit more subtle in its spacing:

But not subtle in its effect.

Not Spring in Minnesota

It's almost the end of March, but you wouldn't know it around here. There's a big weather system coming to the middle of the country, and it may take the form of snow here tomorrow. 

But even without that, we've been below normal temperatures for this month. The ambient temperature last night was in the single digits, and tonight it's supposed to be 14°F. The daily highs, at least, have been above freezing most days, but we haven't had an overnight low above freezing for a while, and I don't see one in the forecast through the next 10 days.... well into April.

If we get another 3.5" of snow some time before the end of this winter, we'll be in the top five all-time seasonal snowfalls in the Twin Cities. It seems as though we will make it.

Here are some non-spring photos. 

First, this is the last chance to prune fruit trees, so I was out pruning my cherry tree. While doing that, I saw twig ends that had been gnawed off on an angle, which is a sign that it was done by rabbits:

That would not be noteworthy, since rabbits are rampant in these parts, but these twigs are more than 6 feet off the ground. Yes, the snow around the tree was that tall, and the rabbits were able to hang around on top of it and nibble the branches to their hearts' content. 

Second, my backyard path is in deep shade cast by a building, so it's several inches thick with ice that formed from packed snow. I was fascinated to see that when leaves later settled on the ice, the dark color of the leaves caused them to melt into the ice, even though they, like the ice, are in full shade:

It was hard to photograph the leaves in ways that show how deep they are in the ice, but it's at least an inch. 

I don't understand why the leaves would become warmer and melt into the ice, since they're also in shade, but clearly, they did.

And Now, a Break for a Camel Bite

There's a page in most editions of the Star Tribune, located at the back of the Minnesota section. It's the last odd-numbered page, and it's the place where they run all of the short crime and car crash stories. Stories that would probably be major news in a small media market if such places still had newspapers. But here, it's just small enough of a market that they get a few inches of copy in the paper.

Generally, the page is a mash-up of the worst of the Twin Cities and rural areas of Minnesota. Drunk drivers killing people, minor shootings (even homicides), domestic violence. And run-of-the-mill car crashes that happen for no good reason, too.

And then there are stories like this one:

When I saw this headline, I laughed out loud. It was such a relief from the usual content of the page, and so absurd.

I wonder if the reporter and editors thought the same thing?

 

Time Is Running Out, and the Clock Is Running Backwards

I didn't see these headlines juxtaposed on the New York Times site myself...

...Instead, I saw this as a screen snapshot on this Twitter account. But I got the same impression from my own media consumption this morning.

The Supreme Court story was in the Star Tribune. I read it just as I was seeing multiple updates on the IPCC report. 

It had the same effect.

Solar Power

Who says there are no reds in this year's fall color?

After I took this photo it occurred to me that it captures two kinds of solar power. 

Tina Smith, Doing the Work

Having a celebrity for a U.S. senator means many people know who that person is. It's an unfair advantage when running, though being a celebrity can bring its own baggage, as Al Franken found when he was first running in Minnesota. He overcame that and managed to get elected, then did a good job, before we found out he had hoisted himself on his own petard.

When he resigned in early 2018, he was replaced by our highly regarded Lieutenant Governor, Tina Smith, who had a long track record of effective work behind the scenes before she became LG. I personally knew little about Smith except that many people I respected thought a lot of her, and that she had been in an executive position at our regional Planned Parenthood at some point (a plus in my book). She has since been elected to a full term.

As one of our senators, she has represented us well, aside from not standing up to stop Line 3. Currently she is leading the national charge for the Clean Electricity Standard that you may have heard about, if you follow climate change policy. This is one of the most important national efforts underway, and it's not something that Franken would have been doing, so it annoys me when I see people whining about how they wish he would run again. (What? Against who, Amy Klobuchar in 2024?) They're all people who don't actually pay attention to what's happening, but tuned in when there was a Judiciary Committee hearing where Franken could show off. 

Anyway. Tina Smith has been doing the work, especially for a new member of the Senate.

So that's why I was perplexed and annoyed by the way her hometown newspaper covered that work in today's edition:

The story and all of the words are fine, but think about their juxtaposition to that photo, which takes up close to half the page.

What is the photo editor trying to say in selecting that image? Was it supposed to mean Smith is thoughtful? Because if that's the intent, I don't think that's what the average reader will get from it. Instead, Smith will be seen as dejected or hesitant. Maybe praying? Does she look like she's "leaning in"? Does she look like she's "pushing"?

Can you imagine a male politician being portrayed this way in a story where they're leading? Sure, maybe in a story about their misdeeds or something, but in a generally positive story about them, even if it's one that has some element of conflict?

I just can't make heads or tails of what editorial process could have led to this selection. 

Oh geez, I just looked up the photographer's name, Cheryl Diaz Meyer, and found out she's also the senior photo editor and a Pulitzer Prize winner. What the hell. This is making less and less sense.

Check this out, here's the Diaz Meyer photo of Smith that's used in the online version of this story, which uses the secondary headline from the print edition (there's no "leaning in" for online readers):

This photo is more typical for politicians, and in that sense more boring, but also not misleading. 

And just for reference, here are other photos Diaz Meyer has taken of Minnesota Congressional representatives that have run in the Strib online:

Dean Phillips, looking like he came over from central casting, as TFG would say.

Pete Stauber, speaking (fairly equivalent to the online Tina Smith photo).

This Betty McCollum photo, while nice as a portrait, is a bit on the soft side for a story whose headline and content are about her increasing influence on defense spending, don't you think?

It's a small sample, but I'm tending to think this divergence comes from some internalized sexism combined with a lack of editorial oversight, since Diaz Meyer is both the photographer and the editor.

But Tina Smith deserves better from you, Star Tribune.

(Now let's stop Line 3, Senator Smith!)

 

Average Compared to What?

The average temperatures — "normal" temperatures — we hear about are a moving target. NOAA and other national weather institutions update what's considered normal every 10 years, based on the previous 30 years' temperatures. Normal is not a permanent thing.

These two images, shared on Twitter by Scottish meteorologist Scott Duncan, make that divergence of reality in temperature data visually obvious:

That's summer 2021 compared to the last three summers. 

When you look at that graphic, it's easy to think, Well, it was hotter this summer in a lot of places, but there were places where it was cooler, too.

But then you see this graphic, which compares summer 2021 to an average summer between 1951–1980:

And you realize it wasn't cooler much of anywhere except the middle of Antarctica, and even the rest of Antarctica was a lot hotter.

Those graphics put our current temperatures more in perspective. I'd say "red alert," but it seems unncessary.

In Which I Show How Little I Know About the British Press, But Still...

The other day, I saw this British tabloid cover shared on social media (maybe retweeted by Billy Bragg, though I'm not sure):

The conversation was about the contradiction (and hypocrisy) of the lower left headline, juxtaposed with the one at lower right. The young tennis play being celebrated, it turns out, is herself the child of recent immigrants (from China and Canada).

However, I couldn't help noticing that the two headlines at the top also made quite a pair. Those "hated traffic light travel rules," while not clearly described, are most likely rules that make it harder for drivers to get places as fast as they'd like. And that headline is juxtaposed with one about new research showing that living near noisy roads — which get noisier the faster cars go — raise the risk of dementia. Too bad, so sad — the roads must roll!

And just as a final point... does the Daily Express really use a crusader as it logo? Yes, yes it does. I don't know how long they've used that image with their name, but according to their Wikipedia page, they literally carried out a "Crusade for Freedom" on behalf of Brexit, so possibly it started then.

Stronger Together, Not

St. Stephen's is one of my many favored local nonprofit organizations, well known to most people in the core of the Twin Cities for their good services to homeless folks and the fact that they work on the continuum from the obvious to the less obvious. 

They recently announced that they will be merging with another basic services organization I don't know, named House of Charity. Right off, I'm not a fan of that name, but I'm willing to withhold judgment because sometimes names exist for historical purposes and organizations rise above them. 

But I have to say that this recent merger announcement graphic does not give me faith:

I sincerely hope that bunch of stuff in the center, where the arrows are pointing, is not supposed to be a logo for the new merged organization. 

Neither of the original organizations had a great logo (though of the two, I guess I prefer the House of Hope logo, since the St. Stephen's logo has always made me wonder what it meant).

But this new thing is just... what?

First of all, the type: ugly and incompetent. It's the same cheap Century Gothic as the House of Charity logo, so that's not great to start, but it's set really unevenly and too tightly, and with fake small capital letters, so the S and T are heavier than the other letters. 

Second, those images. I guess they represent food, housing, and... brains? Cauliflower? Thought bubbles? What? But the clip art styles is in three completely different styles, so there's no unity among them—not that they make any sense together in the first place, so it was probably asking too much for graphic unity to bring them together. 

It's a funny juxtaposition, now that I think of it: "stronger together," but with nothing in common visually.

I hope it's just a temporary graphic while they're working on the real name and logo.

RBG and MOM

My mother was born in February 1932 in Oneonta, New York. Joan Ruth Bader was born in March 1933 in Brooklyn. As I said in a 2018 post after seeing the documentary RBG, when I had spent half the film in tears,

Another reason the movie touched me so deeply is that Ginsburg is only a year younger than my mother. They were both smart young women attending college in small upstate New York cities at around the same time. While life took them along different paths, that similarity made me feel even closer to Ginsburg than I would just from her achievements.

Ruth's parents and my grandparents had less in common.

Nathan Bader was a Jewish immigrant from Odessa in then-Russia, now-Ukraine, while Cecelia Amster was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Austria. There doesn't seem to be a lot of information online about how they met. Cecelia had graduated from high school at 15, but didn't go to college because her family could only send her brother. Nathan was a furrier and a haberdasher; I couldn't find anything about his education level, but it seems unlikely it was even at the high school level, given his immigration status.

My mother's father's family went back many generations in the U.S., though he also had only a high school education. He was a WWI veteran and owned a small, unsuccessful green-grocery store. My grandmother was the daughter of an Irish immigrant mother and a second-generation Bavarian father, but her family owned a successful tailoring business, including at least one commercial building, and she graduated from a state teachers college.

My grandparents had six children between 1926 and 1934; my mother was the fourth one. All but one of the surviving five kids went to college.

I try to imagine how Ruth got from James Madison High School in Brooklyn to Cornell University up in Ithaca in 1950, when not that many women went to that Ivy League school at all, let alone from working-class, first-generation families. I imagine the teachers or guidance counselors had a lot to do with it.

My mom went to college, too, but she stayed a lot closer to home. She wanted to go to Russell Sage College, which is about 90 miles away near Albany, but despite her grades, her family couldn't put together enough money to send her there. Instead, she used a local scholarship to attend a tiny private college in the small city where she grew up and lived at home for most of her college years.

Maybe that difference in access was partly because my mom came from a larger family than Ruth, who had lost her older and only sister when Ruth was a toddler? (She also lost her mother to cancer just before graduating from high school. My goodness.) Where did the money come from to send her to Cornell? I wish I knew. It was well spent, obviously.

And then during college... their paths diverged even more. I'm not saying my mom was as brilliant as RBG, but she was very sharp. And I can believe she was a shyer person, I can see that, so that's a part of it. Maybe, like me, she never quite knew what she wanted to do, while Ruth seems to have found the law as an undergrad (or maybe even in high school, given the emphasis at James Madison) and headed toward it.

Ruth also met the man who became her husband during her first year at Cornell, and I don't think it's sexist — I think it's realistic — to say the fact that Martin Ginsburg wasn't a jerk had a lot to do with her success. The documentary makes it clear he had a great sense of humor, and as former solicitor general Neal Katyal said on MSNBC Friday night, he also reveled in Ruth's success and commitment to her career.

They had two kids together, not always at convenient times. Martin did the cooking. I'm sure they used their incomes and the upper class privilege they developed to help take care of their kids and a lot of other things that made it possible for both of them to work, her as a law professor and advocate and later a judge, and him as a tax attorney and later a law professor.

But the equity of their relationship was an important part of giving us this brilliant woman's work and contributions, which surround us and made many aspects of our lives what they are today. Because she had to do it backwards and in heels, as the Ann Richards saying goes about Ginger Rogers' dancing compared to Fred Astaire's.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg opened the door of equality just a bit wider so more women could do what they wanted, even though we are still saddled with patriarchy and its intersecting forms of oppression. I thank her for that, and marvel that she began the work when she did, given what I know of another woman who was almost her exact age.


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Side note: In addition to Ruth Bader, James Madison High School also graduated Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, Mad magazine founder William Gaines, and comedian Chris Rock. New York City and its public schools have given this country so much.

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Update: An interesting footnote to RBG's thoughts on the role luck (and probably Martin's supportiveness) played in her ability to do what she did.

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Another update: Another writer, this time for Vogue, comparing her own family's history to RBG's. She mentions that Ruth's mother left behind a college fund for her before she died. No mention of where that money came from, though (did her mom work, and if so, doing what? it doesn't say). She calls Martin a "proto-feminist unicorn." And she quotes writer Caitlin Moran: "All too often, women are marrying their glass ceilings."

Three More from the Bulletin Board

In this age of Zoom calls, it's hard not to become self-conscious about the background behind your head. In my case, there are two wooden doors, a bit of wall, and three bulletin boards full of stuff I've posted over the years because it meant something to me.

I've posted about a few of the items over the years (here, here, and here), but it doesn't look like I've shown these three before, so here goes:


A Jenny Holzer T-shirt promo clipping from a Walker Art Center newsletter. This is pretty old... probably from the early 1990s.


A sample of four-color chromatic type printed by Paul Akin, which he gave out at the Hamilton Wood Type Museum's Wayzgoose in 2010.


A small but meaningful tagboard print by Amos Paul Kennedy of Kennedy Prints! One of the newer pieces on the bulletin board, probably from 2017.

I also have quite an array of nametags from various conferences, but Daughter Number Three is not the name on any of them so I can't share them here.