cedar sprig's blog

Enough with the Danish cartoons. What we have here, as one movie character would say, is a failure to communicate. But it might be more than that too. Enough parallels exist between the current rioting and history to make a few hypotheses:

1. The cartoons are the spark that lit the gasoline. There's been plenty of tension, to be sure, but if the cartoons were the heart of the matter, wouldn't the fury have broken out when they were published last year, months ago? The historical parallel: Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. It was a reflection of turmoil in the Balkan states, a political skirmish, but it precipitated World War I.  Read More »

It takes nine hours to separate a simple protein from milk, and that's not even counting the time spent later in analyzing the thing to figure out how it works and what it's made of. DNA is even trickier to deal with, since people want to see what the nucleotide bases are. That's really tiny stuff, so complex it looks simple. How cool, then, is automatic sequencing? (Bear with me, there's a point coming up...)  Read More »

How many times today have you lambasted a politician? What good did it do? Think about it: people like to complain and politicians could almost be made for the express purpose of supplying material. People have complained for hundreds of years and there's been no appreciable improvement in the quality of our government figureheads.

 I'm not saying that it's a lost cause. I'm all for thorough scrutiny with a skeptical eye. But don't be so surprised about the stupid actions of politicians that you label them ultimate evil. They're not. Pretty darn evil, sure, but in the grand scope of things they're more just greedy and short sighted.  Read More »

Groundbreaking is an appropriate topic for a first blog, isn't it? Especially since I don't have quite enough time to think out something formidable, I'll just slip into a bit of description.

Biking when the roads are not covered with snow is marvelous. The land glides past and you can stop any time to look at the trees, or the river, or the farms. It's not like in a car, where you have to find a shoulder of road not too precipitous and then endure the stares of other motorists, who wonder if you're in trouble and whether they really have to stop and see what's wrong. The valley I discovered last fall is still pretty as ever. The stone ridge rises like a wall just beyond the river. It's grey with years of rain and dust, fallen stones and brambles. The rocks tumbled at the base of the bridge, on the other hand, are yellow and fresh broken. The bridge itself is an imposing cement and steel construct, very solid and very tall.  Read More »