Dave Badtke’s Blog

A few articles in the New York Times that might be of interest:

1) The same U.S. agency, DARPA, that initially funded the development of the internet is now offering a half-million dollars, to be awarded on 11/11/11, to an organization that will research stellar exploration. Are you interested?

Unfortunately, since gravity is so weak, some 36 orders of magnitude — 36 powers of 10 — weaker than the atomic force holding atoms together, objects in our Milky Way are very, very far away. Indeed, the nearest star beyond our Sun is Alpha Centauri, approximately 4.3 light years or 25 trillion miles from Earth.

Interstellar travel is a tall order. It would take Voyager 1, humanity’s fastest artifact, now traveling 38,000 miles an hour relative to the Sun, more than 70,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri, if it were headed in that direction.

2) A team of scientists has discovered single-celled fossils that are 3.4 billion years old, which is only a billion years after the formation of Earth. This is surprising for many reasons, not the least of which derives from the modern definition of a planet, which is a body large enough to clear its orbit of debris. This is one of the reasons Pluto, too small to accomplish this, was demoted from its planet status.  But this also means that Earth was being constantly bombarded during the first billion years, a period called the Late Heavy Bombardment, that created an environment so hot that life was not possible.

3) “The Kids Are Not All Right,” Joel Bakan writes, because these times are not like previous times. While each older generation tends to believe that the younger generation doesn’t measure up, the corporate culture that has evolved during the past 30 years is definitely a change from the past. The push to recognize corporations as “people” using legal arguments that have been so effective in the development of human rights has created an ethical dilemma because corporations have ever-increasing power whereas other groups that historically lacked rights — African Americans, women, children — lacked power. And corporations’ power to influence us, as we’ll see in my English 1 class during our discussion of advertisements, has had a profound influence on how our children think and behave.

I don’t mean this as a rhetorical question even though I know you know the answer. But, according to this University of Rochester study, maybe we don’t understand how really, really important Mom is if she was stressed out during her pregnancy, and considering yourself — really — how could she not have been:

Published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, the study represents the first direct human evidence that fetuses exposed to elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol may have trouble paying attention or solving problems later on. But what may be more intriguing is the study’s second finding that this negative link disappears almost entirely if the mother forges a secure connection with her baby.

So the good news for babies to be is that Mom can help repair the damage. On the other hand, if you find yourself unable to concentrate and are forever struggling with insoluble problems, maybe Mom’s handy so that you can blame her for not sufficiently connecting with you when you were a baby. I’m sure she’ll appreciate the feedback, especially if you just moved back home to live with her because you lost your job or are trying to save money to pay off your student loans.

On Chesil Beach is a short book, a novella in four parts with a fifth part, a hurried epilogue driving the implicit moral home, that opens the evening of a couple’s honeymoon during a time in the 50s when some, perhaps many, might discuss much, but not sex. And some 200 short pages later the novel ends this same evening in a heart-rending moment that could have turned out differently, but doesn’t.

While the power of this novel lies in its exquisite exploration of the complex nature of love between two people, what may be most memorable for most readers, myself included, is the story’s focus on a single life-changing moment. That this singularity, this turning down a path not taken or too often taken, makes all the difference in the couple’s life is not new. The plot device of a prideful step taken with insufficient and incorrect information is as necessary for the tragedy of Oedipus as it is for our tragic involvement in Iraq. Yet McEwan manages such a new look at an essential conundrum — each of us in our lifetimes will make decisions we regret — that he may leave you wondering if this might be one of the best novels you’ve read in a long, long time.

Feeling more confident than we probably should have, since Dulcinea, our Corsair 750, sometimes seems more like a sports car than a sailboat, we decided to sail Saturday to San Francisco and beyond. Since we’ve been able to pick Bay Area spots in the past and get there and back without difficulty, why should yesterday have been any different from any other day if the tides were going our way? That’s simple: the winds.

After tacking way out on San Pablo Bay near the entrance to the Petaluma channel, hoping the winds would become westerly as they usually do — I was imagining a beam reach at 15+ knots straight south to San Francisco — we found ourselves instead beating against a strong southerly as we headed toward the Richmond Bridge. And that got tiring, so we changed our minds and headed for San Rafael.

The tide was ebbing and almost at slack when we entered the long, narrow channel where the depth at times was no more than 3.5 feet, which isn’t a problem for us if we remember to pull up the center board and rudder. We motored back into the channel for a couple miles and tied up at the Seafood Peddlers restaurant, where the food was quite good, and it’s a terrific location.

Sailing back with our asymmetrical spinnaker set, I made a movie. We left Glen Cove at 11:40 and were back by about 6:40, with a couple hours for lunch, a total of about 2 1/2 hours in each direction, which is proving to be fairly standard if the winds are reasonable. The rumb line distance is about 18 miles, which we took on the return trip, but going out we sailed more like 22 miles, so our average speed was about 7 knots, which seems about right since we sat for awhile with no wind leaving San Rafael. Regardless, with Dulcinea if there’s any wind at all, we seem to be sailing at 5+ knots, and that’s a lot of fun.

Okay, the good news is that Mina and Joe came to Benicia, and we had a great time together for two weeks, which leads to the bad news that they left for Japan yesterday.

I guess we need to be happy that our boys and their partners are doing really, really interesting things and doing them well, but jeez, they sure live far away.

Yesterday we had the pleasure of visiting with our niece, Katrina, her husband Zimran, and their friend Joel. Katrina, who recently finished her residency in Boston, is an emergency room physician who moved out here to work for a hospital near Los Altos, where she and Zimran live. Joel, who is South African but lived for years in Chicago, just finished his first year at Harvard Law and is heading off to Israel for a summer internship. And Zimran, who works for Creative Good, knows a lot about a lot, by which I mean that I can pretty much ask Zim a question about most anything and then sit back and listen with fascination to his response. (To get a sense of what Zimran knows and has done, check out his blog winterspeak.com.)

For example, there’s a large fish tank in their dining room. I pointed at it and asked Zim about the fish — they were small and, I thought, blue — that were swimming about in the large enclosure, with coral and seaweed and an eerie, ethereal light that seemed to be encouraging the seaweed and stuff growing on the bottom and sides of the tank. Zim told me about the fish, green chromis I think, that like to school and can handle significant changes in the tank environment, though Zim talks fast and was quickly on to the topic of tank filtration, opening up the cabinet below the tank to expose the whirring mechanisms that control temperature and salinity and chemical composition and nitrogen cycles and stuff like that, I think, though my head was spinning with details and I wasn’t taking notes.

I’m sure Zim could have talked on this and any number of other topics for as long as we were willing to listen, since he likes to get deeper and deeper into the details, philosophy, psychology and unintended consequences of whatever he’s thinking about, but then Katrina told us that Zim has a quota for such discussions. While I’m not sure how she measures Zim’s eclectic discursions, it seems that the threat of something like a warning bell urges him to move on to the next interesting idea.

Joel, who met Katrina and Zim when they were all undergraduates at Harvard and who was part of a rather large “family” of students with similar interests that brought them together when they were juniors and seniors, is like Zim in his ability to hold forth at length on subjects as diverse as the political history and future developments of Africa — he worked for the opposition party in South Africa before returning to Harvard — and legal issues. After my wife told him about a case pending before the State Supreme Court tomorrow, Joel was able to summarize its main points and highlight its importance with details, it seemed to me, that my wife hadn’t even told him about. Quite amazing.

So we had a great evening, made even better because Zim likes to cook, and he’s a good cook. After Zim’s grilled chicken and garlic bread and Joel’s salad, we had Bonny Doon Vinyard’s NV Bouteille Call dessert wine, which tastes like raspberries and blueberries and I don’t know what else. Into this sweet drink we dunked brownie edges. Have you ever heard of such a thing? Well, they’re a different kind of biscotti made by Sugardaddy’s Sumptuous Sweeties, famous for round brownies. You’ve got to see this stuff to believe it, and taste it too. The biscotti dipped into the wine was really, really good. Zim told us all about it, Katrina warned us not to leave out the apostrophe when searching for the website or we might be surprised by what we’d find — would I ever do that? — and Joel added color commentary. A great evening of adventure!

We went down with the kids to Monterey and Carmel for a few days, with an excursion to Big Sur. When we’re thinking about going south, we seem to always end up here since over the years it has become such an interesting place. Of course the area has gorgeous geography, but now it also has a small theater that shows art movies, another that shows old movies, at least one good used-book store, BookBuyers, and the Monterey Bay Acquarium where you can see the most amazing sea jellies. But what I couldn’t find, and am now pursuing, is a good book that explains the life cycle and evolution of these amazing creatures that seem to blur the line between plants and animals. Which also brings to mind our cat, Prink, who’s about as fat and sedentary as a black-and-white squash, but that’s another story.

Last Monday we took Dulcinea out on San Pablo Bay, heading towards China Camp. The winds started to pick up, so we heaved-to to put on our foul-weather gear, which of course meant that then the winds began to die. When we got far enough to see the Richmond bridge, we headed back on a broad reach and, because Joe and Mina were our extra crew, we tried out the asymmetrical spinnaker with Joe at the helm. As we approached the Carquinez Bridge, we even managed a couple gybes that weren’t half bad. All in all a slow sail, since we were more often going 5 to 6 knots rather than 10 to 12, but fun.

Yesterday Mina and Joe arrived from Japan via Chicago and New York.

Oh Joy, Hooray!
Some of the children have arrived to stay
for a couple weeks
which is never long enough
to hear all their stories
and to give them enough hugs.

They’ll be with us for two weeks, which will be fantastic, so we decided to celebrate after picking them up at SFO at Mandalay Restaurant , which is near the corner of 4th & California, a Bermese restaurant that we like as much as Burma Superstar, which is usually more crowded and noisy, to be found just a few blocks away near 3rd and Clement. Just across the street is Mia’s Vietnamese Restaurant, which is also terrific, but we were looking for pumpkin chicken and should have ordered more at Mandalay because it’s so, so good. Just writing about it now makes me hungry.

And then after we ate, we thought about going to Green Apple Books, which is always a treat, but not last night. After mango with sticky rice, Joe and Mina were tired — their New York time was three hours later for them — so we headed home.