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I take it that I’m unusual in at least one respect – most people I know seem to like it quiet when they go to bed, but I have always preferred to drift off to music. There are a number of CDs that I like, including things like Andreas Vollenweider’s Down to the Moon and Irish Heartbeat by Van Morrison and the Chieftains. I sometimes play Avalon by Roxy Music and The Lost Patrol’s Midnight Matinee is a good one, as well (to be honest, anything by TLP is soothing and dreamy enough to cue up at bedtime). I spent years flipping this one tape I had every night – on one side was a recording I’d pulled off of Music from the Hearts of Space and on the other I had Mike Oldfield’s Hergest Ridge. The sleepytime playlist has also included Enya, Enigma and Delirium (especially Sematic Spaces and Karma, but really, any of their older stuff works, too). Oh, and Vangelis. Bladerunner soundtrack. Duh. Full story »

Liz and I are moving from Chicago to Bloomington, IN. We are looking forward to spending more time with each other and with family, doing more of our triathlon training outdoors, putzing on the farm we own here, and enjoying the college town atmosphere. Another bonus, I thought, would be leaving the city traffic behind.

Driving in Bloomington today, it occurred to me I might be very wrong about the last one. Bloomington is a town of only 80,000 plus another 40,000 students. It shouldn’t have city traffic. But it does.

The problem is one of those “confluence” things. Full story »

Today was a stunning day in London. I’m sure it was snowing somewhere, probably in the US, but here it was gorgeous the entire day. It was the first day that really felt like spring—the sun shining all day, blue skies without a single cloud, temperatures in the 20s, the girls in their summer dresses, almost, like they just knew, which anyone watching the weather last night would have, eating supper at 7:45 and it still being light out, and a crescent moon just hanging over the rooftops at dusk. All magical. All this gives me a good mood, even more than that. I love autumn, it’s my favorite season, but today was the kind of day that you know just starts off the new part of the year. For the past several weeks we’ve had the flowering trees—the magnolias especially—coming out, and over the past few days we’ve seen this outright explosion of green, with leaves on most of the trees in a race to come out and green the world. And suddenly all the vistas are different–from the windows, from the buses, just looking down the street, everything looks different. It’s lighter later every day, too, noticeably. That’s how we know it’s spring. The world is new again, and life is good.
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Are you kidding me? I got so much rhythm coursing up and down my sexy body I can dance to the sound of a light breeze rustling through tall grass. So let’s let all y’all play. Here’s one of the greatest dance songs in history. If you can’t move to “Party Train” somebody better call 911, because you might be dead.

Kick it, Mr. DJ.

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This hit my email a few minutes ago, and as a proud geek myself, I just had to share.

We are geeks, and we are proud to be.

We are rational; we understand cause and effect; we understand consequences; we understand loosely-coupled distributed self-organizing systems with multiple redundant communication channels. Full story »

Last night’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Game doesn’t get a recap. It gets a post-mortem. I won’t mince words – it was the worst championship game I can recall seeing in my lifetime. Hell, it was one of the worst college basketball games I’ve ever seen, period. That may be because when games get this bad you turn them off. You flip through the channels to see if there’s another game, and failing that, are any Three’s Company reruns on.

I did, in fact, turn the game off. At about the 12:00 mark in the second half UConn had built a seven-point lead that was clearly insurmountable, and life is too short to flush precious minutes on two teams making a mockery of a sport you love above all others. I’m sure Connecticut fans are happy today, but if I were them I might be too embarrassed to celebrate.

And please, let’s not have any silliness about the intensity of the game and how hard the defenses were playing. Full story »

In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry, Dumbledore, and the Order of the Phoenix have to work against Voldmort’s Death Eaters in secret while the Ministry of Magic blinds itself to the needs of the wizarding world. Worse than simply doing nothing, however, the Ministry spreads anti-Potter propaganda in the newspapers, manipulates the law to target Potter and Dumbledore (who know Voldmort has returned), and in their refusal to acknowledge the problem, makes it just that much easier for Voldmort to secretly gain strength.

On March 31, the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology held a hearing on the topic of climate change. It’s clear from the hearing charter, the list of witnesses, and the large number of climate myths uttered that the GOP has become the Ministry of Magic to the Death Eaters of human-caused climate disruption. Full story »

Hell, I know all the words to lots of songs. So let’s pick something fun. Ah – this’ll do (I said excuse me):

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We know (or think we know) who’s representing the blue team in the 2012 presidential race, but have no idea who’s representing the red team. And every day another Republican wannabe is either forming an exploratory committee or issuing an unconvincing denial. Sheesh, this is turning into a game of 43 Man Squamish.

We could wait while the process plays out. But that’s no fun. Instead, let’s find out the answer right now.  Just as the NCAA uses a playoff format to determine the college basketball champion, we’ll use the same methodology to predict the 2012 Republican Presidential Candidate. We will even improve on the NCAA system by creating brackets composed of similar types of candidates. (It is sorta like the NCAA had one bracket for tall teams, one for fast teams, one for teams John Calipari has or will get put on NCAA probation, etc.) Full story »

You can smell that foul odor wafting through the air — presidential politics. Wannabees who won’t say they wannabee are peddling books. Sharply dressed and coiffed “I haven’t decided yet” politicians descend on Iowa and New Hampshire. Explorations of exploratory committees are explored. Websites and Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts multiply like lobbyists at a fundraiser.

And, if it’s the beginning of the presidential campaign season, then it’s the beginning of the presidential polling season as well. Newspapers and broadcast entities partner with polling organizations to tap likely voters’ preferences for candidates. Even though this is early in 2011 and the election is in late 2012, poll respondents are expected to know now whom they’ll pencil onto their ballot.

So the horse race begins. But it’s fixed. All because of one question:

If the election were held today, who would you vote for?
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Verily, it was one of the best days of my entire college career. It was near the end of spring semester of my senior year. That evening my fraternity (Theta Chi, Gamma Omicron chapter) was having its annual Go to Hell Party, which was our big pre-finals blowout. As it happened, the finals of the campus intramural softball tournament were held the same day, and after all those years of futility the Big Red had made it to a championship game (versus a very good team from either the law or business school, can’t recall which). Full story »

The light shining on the safety of nuclear energy as a result of the Japanese nuclear crisis has been of such powerful wattage that it’s even flushing safety issues with nuclear weapons labs and manufacturing facilities out of hiding. Roger Snodgrass reports for the Santa Fe New Mexican.

On Friday, President Barack Obama asked the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission to review the safety of American nuclear power plants. . . . At Los Alamos National Laboratory, nuclear safety issues have been complicated with seismic concerns, as geological studies have uncovered an increasingly precarious underground structure. Full story »

www.Twitter.com/LeeCamp

Where were you the first time you heard Gorillaz?

I was on vacation in Florence. We were relaxing after a relentless day of sightseeing and trying to decide what to do for dinner. We had the TV on a music video station and up came this hip, trippy vid by a band I had never heard of. How cool it was.

Still is.

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Earlier today, in the midst of writing other things, I engaged in a long-running conversation over email about the motivations for our war in Libya. Essentially, the question at heart was this: given that Khaddafy was threatening to massacre tens of thousands of rebels upon his recapture of Benghazi, the rebel capital, how could we not intervene? Could we really stand-by and watch people die, cut down in cold blood?

Let me posit the question in another way.

In the Second Congo War, which lasted from 1998 through, roughly, 2003 – though, really, it’s still going on – over 5.4 million people were killed, in the most horrific, barbarous ways possible. Full story »

I think we’d all love to live every phase of our lives in happy accord with high moral and ethical principles. We’d love it if we were never confronted by logical contradictions and cognitive dissonance, by cases where our walk was at odds with our talk. But the truth is that we live in a society that’s complex, at best, and a cesspool of corruption at worst. It’s just about impossible to get through a day without compromise, and every time we compromise it’s difficult not to feel as though we’ve failed a little.

Some people are better at dealing with the conflict than others, whether through denial or a well-developed, pragmatic knack for keeping things in perspective. Unfortunately, I don’t do denial at all and while I like to think of myself as having a strong pragmatic streak, in practice my principled side tends to dominate my decision-making in ways that occasionally deprive me of convenience and pleasure. Full story »

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She was my first great love, and I have written about her more than any woman I have ever known (here, for instance). I hope she’s happy.

(Sorry there isn’t a real video for this one, but Van Morrison doesn’t really need video, does he?)

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Bella ragazza, I’m sorry.

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