Shayna Moves In

NEARLY WORDLESS WEDNESDAY

Addendum: I had this set to post yesterday, or so I thought . . .

But Academic Crunch Time has the ability to turn even the most straightforward operation into something more sinister.

Two months have passed since we brought Shayna home from the Albuquerque Animal Shelter.

She is still shy, and when someone comes to the house she runs to the master bedroom; but she can't contain herself.
She peers around corner, and whines, as if an invisible force field is keeping her from coming out.












She is still shy when there are loud kitchen noises. She has a mannerism by which she shows deference and submission. She will come up to the Pack Leader present, turn her head sideways, and place her paw on the nearest presentable body part. Although it is usually someone's thigh, her it is the Engineering Geeks hand.


We found out a little more about our Shy Shayna Sunshine. When we had our first 9-12 book club meeting a few weeks ago, one of the members, a dog person extraordinaire, said she had seen Shayna hanging around Highway 14 North two times, three weeks apart. One was in a snowstorm. L. thought she had been dumped, and was hanging around awaiting the b*****d who did it. L. said she had looked for her several times, and even dreamed about her, but did not see her again.

The last time L. saw her--in the snowstorm, was a few days before the records show that Shayna was brought to the East Side Shelter.




Now that Shayna has a home, and is becoming positively comfortable, all of that is past.

And since the very late spring started last week, which seems to have morphed quickly into early summer, she has been shedding that winter coat she grew while living outside last winter.

She even allowed me to groom her. You can see the tufts and tufts of hair.

After I groomed her for 30 minutes with the loop, Shayna was positively happy!

I have been vacuuming up hair by the bucketful, several times a week. There will be more.

I remember promising myself before Zoey died that I would not get another white dog. I can't wear black, you see.

But that was before I saw Shayna's beautiful face at the Shelter website.

Oh, well. Light colors are happier anyway!

Just like Miss Shayna Sunshine her own self!

. . . And now that the post is finally up, it's back to writing about the two theories of visual perception in ASD. Wish me end-of-the-semester luck.

End of the Semester Crunch Time Squared

Hold my blogging!

We will be dwelling in that end of the semester crunch time for the next several weeks.
(Quantity squared).

The Boychick is finishing up or has just finished up several major freshman projects. He has done his Inquiry Project for Humanities, and he has given his presentation.
He is working on his Big Ideas Project for Science. This project is cool because the project has to be about Big Ideas and their connections for the Scientific Revolution for the big Medieval Faire the school is having this coming week. He has chosen to explore the connections between the Plague (Pestis yersinius), Galileo and Newton. Ought to be interesting! Newton had repaired to his mother's country estate to escape plague infested London, when he was sitting under the apple tree and observing the waning moon, when he had his AHA! moment that the force that caused the apple to fall to the earth was the same force that kept the moon in its orbit. I know that Newton refined Galileo's ideas about motion, particularly falling bodies, but I don't know how Galileo is connected to the plague! Except that the falling bodies he dealt with were not corpses. They were marbles and cannon balls and oranges from Africa.



In the meantime, this was my home today, and I will be spending more time there in the next few days. It is Zimmerman Library at UNM. I work there, because the Lobo lab lets me print journal articles for free and because there is a coffee shop right in the Library. (A tired student can take a cup of joe right into certain areas of the reading room, if it is properly covered). I make occasional forays over to Centennial Science and Engineering Library (CSEL) and even rarer trips to the Health Sciences Library and Infomatics Center (HSLIC). Much of what I need can be obtained electronically from the more centrally located (right next to the duck pond) Zimmerman.


My crunch time involves two papers for courses, and doing organizational work, research and editing for a paper to be published.


Today, I did a lot of work finding imaging studies for my Psych 650 (Neuroimaging Analysis). I am looking at two competing theories on visual processing differences in autism. The studies I was interested in finding are to provide evidence to suppport or discount either of them. For Psych 650, my job is to look at the experimental designs and imaging analysis techniques to determine if differences of opinion are the result of different analytic styles, or problems in the data. Overall, however, my research purpose is to become really knowledgable about the "vageries of visual processing in autism" (as one paper is called), because there is a growing consensus that the "deficits" we see in autism may be the result of a very different way of processing sensory input; a way that does not obligate the brain towards global perception.


My other paper is a lit review for Special Education 695 (Readings). I will place what I learn about the neuroimaging results from the Psych paper into a larger look at the recent literature about cognitive theories of autism, and the structure of intelligence in autism viewed through the lens of visual processing differences. I will looking to find the gap between the science and interventions that is the ground for all good translational research.


I will be probably be lurking a bit on my favorite blogs, old and new. But if I am not commenting, don't feel too lonely. I still owe ChristineMM an answer in a discussion sparked by this blog entry weeks ago!

It is, after all, ACT--Academic Crunch Time! Squared.

Years ago in Russian class, our prof, Boris, taught us a delightful little song: "From session to session, a student's life is fine!" A "sessiya" is exam and paper time.

We made up our little ditty to the tune of Frere Jaques:
Ya niznayu, Ya niznayu, na evo, na evo,
Ya n'panimayu, Ya n'panimayu chorosho!
(I don't know, I don't know, from it, from it! I don't understand, I don't understand, at all!)

It's Academic Crunch Time!

See you Mother's Day.

Why Progressives Don't Understand the Tea Parties

(Edited on April 24 for clarity and spelling. After reading some of the comments, I realized that my definition of certain terms differs from that of others, so I defined some of them).


In the mainstream media and across the Progressive blogosphere, pundits and ideologues on the left shake their heads at the tea-party goers, accusing us of being used for poltical purposes and of racism, all without the slightest evidence garnered from the actual gatherings; after all, progressives need no evidence. In their own minds they are right, and that rightness, far from being only a matter of fact (which would require evidence), transubstantiates into righteousness, a quality of being on a higher moral plane than the benighted tea-partiers. They have what Thomas Sowell calls The Vision of the Annointed.


On the comments to one of my Tea Party blogs, a comment by Mark sums up the progressive attitude toward the tea parties quite well:

"The simple reason is that the "tea party" movement is not about opposition to government policy. It's about opposition to Barack Obama, plain and simple . . . . it's not a real grassroots movement. It's what political junkies call "astroturfing" - fake grassroots activism. In this case, it was instigated and coordinated by right-wing lobbyists, the Republican Party and Fox News as well as the rest of the conservative media as a means of bashing Obama and rallying support to an otherwise floundering GOP."

This engendered quite a bit of discussion by others, most of whom are surprised at such conclusions made without any good evidence. Although Mark does offer some evidence, it is negative* and backward-looking.** Essentially Mark seems to be saying, "Since you did not protest Bush's spending (though he offers no evidence that we didn't), you cannot be serious about protesting now."

Definition of Terms:

*In science, negative evidence is the absence of some indicator. This term is not perjorative, however negative evidence alone is weak, and is best interpreted in the light of positive evidence of a different sort. Thus in a pregnancy test, a negative result--the titer does not indicate the presence of the hormone HCG--may indicate that the woman is not pregnant, but there may be many other reasons for the result. Definitive presence of HCG, however, is a much more reliable indicator of pregnancy (though not foolproof).

**There is a better term for backwards looking, and for the life of me, I cannot think of it. (Lupus brain!) What I mean here is that Mark is using the lack of a specified previous behavior to interpret current behavior. Again, there may be many reasons why people did not do something in the past, but now are doing it. In the absence of any other evidence for his claims, this is another extremely weak argument. I have my own hypotheses about it, but that's another blog entry.

Sorry, Mark, all "astroturfing" aside, the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. (I really wish the public schools taught the rules of rational discourse better, as well as logic and the emprical principles of science! Drat that NCLB).

Although events are coming fast and furious, and so I have blogged about a great many other things, I have been thinking about this, puzzled that progressives, so ready to take up a cause and organize a protest at the drop of a hat, are unable to see those of us they consider to be their enemies as equally passionate about our ideas.

Today, as I was reading through the posts of the Objectivist Roundup over at Rational Jenn, I came across a speech by Dr. John Lewis that clarified my thinking about this wonderfully. At one point in his talk he said:

"This ruling elite, looking down on us right now, cannot understand gatherings such as these, in which free people gather to defend liberty. They think that this must be orchestrated by a vast conspiracy, because they cannot understand how autonomous human beings might gather by their own choice, to affirm their commitment to liberty.
Our so-called leaders think this because they don’t see autonomous moral beings at all. They see only serfs, sniveling and whining, begging their masters for the scraps needed to survive, acting as a collective mob rather than as thinking individuals."

--Dr. John David Lewis, Charlotte, NC, 15 April 2009

That's the problem. Progressives are collectivists* and cannot imagine individuals coming together autonomously, without being "organized" by some greater entity than themselves, and for purposes that the collective directs. Collectivists simply do not think of individuals as free and autonomous human beings, unencumbered by the group.

*Collectivism is a social or moral outlook that emphasizes the group over the individual, gives priority to group goals, and considers the sum of the whole as greater than the parts. Collectivists use phrases like "the good of the whole" and tend to be concerned with equity. Again, I am not using this term perjoratively here. The Progressive movement since the beginning has been about redistribution of wealth and power, and this is not an individualistic goal, nor is it classically liberal.

The whole speech is worth listening to several times. In it, Dr. Lewis discusses the moral basis of the problems we are facing, and gives a coherent moral justification for political Liberty and for Capitalism, the economic system that sustains it. I have embedded the You Tube video of the speech below. A revised text version can be found at Classical Ideals.

Dr. Lewis has given his kind permission "to read this speech in full wherever defenders of Liberty gather."

Trading Freedom and Security on the Border

"The right of the People to be secure in their persons, houses, papers

and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be

violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,

supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the

place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

--Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution (1791)

Over the past few weeks, several stories have come across my computer that were all concerned in one way or another with the Fourth Amendment rights of the Constitution, which is understood to guarrantee the right to personal privacy. The first was about a young activist from the Campaign for Liberty, who was illegally held for questioning at the St. Louis Airport at the end of March on the pretext that he was carrying a large amount of cash. He recorded the harrassment he received from TSA officials on his cell phone, which was later played on Fox News' Freedom Watch. (Hat tip to Rational Jenn). At about 2:47 minutes into the recording, a TSA agent says: "If you have nothing to hide then you you can just tell me what it's for . . ."

In another, unrelated story that I found after being directed from Doc's blog to another, I read about Steven Anderson, a Baptist minister from Tempe Arizona, who was detained at an internal DHS/Border Patrol checkpoint, and when he refused to answer any questions, he was moved to a secondary area, forcibly removed from his car, tazed and beaten prior to being arrested or read his Miranda rights. The entire story is related in five parts on You Tube posts of Freedom Watch. In part 4, a video of the encounter shows the DHS/Border Patrol unable to articulate any probable cause, and in part 5, Judge Napolitano discusses the minimum legal requirement for any search and seizure: articulable probable cause. The assumption that if a person will not answer, he must have something to hide is a feature of this story. At one point, you hear the Border Patrol agent say to Pastor Anderson: "And until we prove you are not guilty . . ."

This is a very worrisome statement, given that US law, which is based on English common law states that a person must be considered innocent until proven guilty.

What was even more alarming to me was that when I took a look at the comments to both of the above stories in newspapers online, at You Tube, and the comments at Doc's about this, many Americans are content to believe that if a person defends his right to be secure in his very person, in his property and personal effects, then that person must be hiding something, because, after all, "if he has nothing to hide, he should cooperate."

This kind of statement is a logical fallacy called a false dichotomy. It puts the person being harrassed in the situation of being considered guilty of something if he does not answer the question or consent to the search. The problem is that there are other options than "innocent means nothing to hide" and "refusal means guilt." By being coerced into a response by the false dichotomy, the individual surrenders the principle that he has the right to that security in his person, property and personal effects. And there is no partial surrendering of rights: it's all or nothing. And once a person surrenders any of his rights, he has placed his power into the hands of government. Our founders understood this to be a very dangerous proposition:

"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms (of government) those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny."

— Thomas Jefferson

Certainly the treatment of American citizens we have witnessed in these incidents is tyrannical. And the reality is that innocent people are harmed by such abuse of power often enough. There are bad cops. There are bored cops. And there are DHS/Border Patrol agents that do not know or understand the law.

Many people also argue that the Supreme Court has ruled that the Border Patrol is allowed to violate the Constitutional right to security in person and possessions, and that there is a certain territory within 100 miles of the international borders of the United States that are effectively "Constitution-Free Zones." (Hat tip: Consent of the Governed).This is an egregious abuse of power that can effectively end our liberty to move freely within our own borders. Here is what the ACLU has to say about the increasing power we have given over to the Federal government to meddle into our affairs:

"If the current generation of Americans does not challenge this creeping (and sometimes galloping) expansion of federal powers over the individual through the rationale of “border protection,” we are not doing our part to keep alive the rights and freedoms that we inherited, and will soon find that we have lost some or all of their right to go about their business, and travel around inside their own country, without interference from the authorities." (grammar problems in the original)

The argument that because the Supreme Court has made a ruling means that the particular behavior is constitutional is also false. The Supreme Court has made unconstitutional rulings in the past. For example, consider the infamous Dred Scott decision, Buck v. Bell., or Plessy v. Ferguson. These unconstitutional rulings can do quite a bit of damage to the lives, liberty and property of citizens before they are reversed by the pressure of determined citizens. We must be those citizens and assert our rights against intimidation by false dichotomy or any other means.

I have experienced these "Constitution Free Zones" repeatedly in my travel within New Mexico, and I have always asserted my rights by stating that I am a citizen traveling freely within the borders of the United States. Since the Border Patrol does not have the legitimate authority to enforce the law, other than immigration law, they do not have the right to receive answers to any other question. On the other hand, since I have been detained unreasonably, often far within the borders of my own country, I always ask for the agent's ID. I have the right to know who this person is who is stopping me, and on what authority. However, I have often been waived through these checkpoints because I am driving while white.

As I wrote a few months ago, being On the Border has become fraught with dangers. However, those dangers should not be exacerbated by our government, our peace officers, or federal agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security, which was established by the unconstitutional Patriot Act.

I stand with Benjamin Franklin, who wrote:

"He who would trade freedom for security deserves neither . . ."

. . . and he ends up with neither.

Occultation

MORE NEARLY WORDLESS WEDNESDAY

This morning, as I went out to get the newspaper, I looked up to see the beginning of an occultation of Venus with the waning crescent moon. I was quite surprised, because I didn't know it was going to happen. Usually, the Engineering Geek, who is quite the amateur astronomer, keeps me apprised of these things!
I dropped the paper on the porch and ran in to grab the EG, shaving lather all over his face, as well as my camera.

I also got the Boychick up. I have learned never to say, "Hey, Boychick, do you want to see an occultation of Venus and the Moon?"

Instead, I pounded on the door and yelled, "Hey, Boychick! Hurry! You've got to see this!"

He responded, "What?"

I pretended not to hear. I yelled, banging louder, "Hurry up! You'll miss it!"

Pure curiosity thus achieved what an invitation to learning alone would not.

Here is the rare and wonderful sight

just a moment before first contact,

which is when the planet Venus

appears to just touch the bright curve

of the lunar crescent.

April 22, 2009, 6:13 AM MDT

A few minutes later we see the moment of second contact, when the planet Venus seems

to disappear behind the crescent moon!

Unfortunately, we were not able to see the end of the occultation, when Venus would appear to emerge from behind the shadowy dark of the waning moon. The sun was up by 7:05 AM, and we could scarcely see the Crescent, and we could not find Venus at all!

There are more wonders in the natural world than we can imagine. And today! Today, thank goodness I stopped to see this great sight!

For more on the occultation, check out the Sky and Tel' site.

The Jet Stream, Mid-April Snowstorm

NEARLY WORDLESS WEDNESDAY

Usually by this time in the spring, the Jet Stream has moved north to at least the Colorado border, and it has become weaker. April and May and most of June in New Mexico are dry and windy, until the Monsoon arrives in late June or early July. Thus, although April is often a snowy month in the Northern Rockies, the Southern Rockies and the Central Mountians of New Mexico rarely get any precipitation at all.

This year is an unsual one for weather patterns, and the Jet Stream was located down along the Mexican border this past weekend, pulling a wild and woolly snowstorm into the Northern Rockies, the Southern Rockies, the Colorado Plateau and the Central Mountain chains of New Mexico.

It was beautiful, but we are looking for SPRING! On Sunday morning I put the snow shovel away until October, I hope!

Friday morning, April 17, 2009.

Friday afternoon, April 17, 2009.

Friday evening, April 17, 2009.

Saturday morning, April 18, 2009, Pre-dawn.

Saturday morning walk, April 18, 2009.

Sunday morning, April 19, 2009

After the storm departed during the wee hours Saturday, it became clear and warmer. By Saturday afternoon, the snow was gone and it was hard to remember that it had been there at all. The weather has become warm and sunny. Normal for this time and this place!

Yom Ha Shoah: Ani Ma-Amin (I Believe . . .)

Today is Yom Ha-Shoah, Holocaust Memorial Day.
In Israel today, the sirens wailed and silence for two minutes descended on the land, as people stopped and stood where they were, remembering our nameless, sacred dead; they were murdered for no other reason than that they were Jews.
They died al Kiddush ha-Shem--for the Sanctification of the Name. For their graves, if they had them, were unmarked. Many of their names have been lost. Most were turned to smoke, the molecules that once composed them taking to the air, to spread over the earth. An offering by the Nazis to the gods they bowed to: death and destruction.

But they went to their deaths singing:

Ani ma-Amin--I believe

b'emunah shleimah--with complete reliance

b'viat ha-Mashiach--that the Messiah will come . . .

Here is a setting of Ani-Ma-amin with an Israeli song that tells the story of the Death Camp Treblinka, and beyond. There is hope, even though the Mashiach tarries and does not come, for od am yisrael chai--the People Israel yet Lives! And the survivors had their coming into the land.

This was posted to You-Tube by an Israeli woman who shares my name.
Our name means "G-d is my oath!"

Never forget!
Never again!