Botanic Gardens - Friday Walk

Today I went to the Botanic Gardens for my walk. Lots of good stuff in bloom.


Natural  prairie around Chicago is hard to find. When found, it usually looks like an unkempt mess of weeds. I guess that is why it is hard to find.




The gardens were full of people enjoying the heat. April in Chicago has been unusual - it started and ended with temperatures near the 80s.


This bridge is one of my favorites. The view from it is best captured by a wide angle lens - today, I could not go wide enough.


Who needs a garden at home?


Little lost flower.


This picture is for Julia.


Grass with a bad case of eruptions.

A walk in the Chicago spring

Spring in the mid-west is very strange - unless you grew up here, in which case it is what you always thought it was. Yesterday it was cold and breezy (at least it felt cold).
Today it was breezy, but in the high 70s. That's mid 20s in the rest of the world.
I crossed the street and found these flowers.

These would be called weeds in some parts of the world, and maybe tea in others. They are dandelions.

Our local city hall in Highland Park, Illinois - the place where the government intrudes on the freedom of the individual, according to the tea-party movement. Some of them probably drink or smoke dandelions.

I went for a stroll on the beach. I found myself between here

and here

wondering why a person of my age is jumping across rocks holding a camera.

I guess it is because I like seeing my footsteps in the sand.

At the end of my beach walk, I came to the scene that I can never believe is in a suburb in the mid-west.
It is always worth the sweat, and rock jumping. Of course I could always come at it from the other direction - but that would break the drama.

Alzheimer's, Memories, the Afterlife, and the Internet

This week our Melton class discussed Jewish concepts of the afterlife. On my walk today, I listened to a discussion of Ahlzeimer's disease. Part of the discussion covered a group of Alzheimers's patients who were encouraged to write down their memories - which would subsequently be forgotten.

This coincidence led me to think about the meaning of being alive, and what an afterlife is or could be. The concept of what life is is critical to understanding of an afterlife. In order to talk about living on after death, we should be clear on what we mean by living.

There are two aspects to living - an inner-life, and a life as experienced by others.  Regarding the inner-life - I have no expectation that it will continue after death any more than the physical body will remain intact. It will be gone.

The echoes that a life leaves in the world, however, continue forever.

There is a trite sense in which this is true - the mere act of living and eating changes the universe an irreversibly. Having children multiplies theses changes, but not in any fundamentally way.

Living is more than the inner life of thought and feeling. To the extent that one does not communicate thought and feeling to others - to interact with and change others and be changed in response - there is no life in the highest sense of the word. We call microbes and plants "living" - but only in a cold, biological sense. We reserve the term "living" in the higher sense for entities that communicate with us - that share their inner lives with us. We revere the life of  those entities that most communicate with us and give the semblance of understanding us - dogs, cats, and primates for example. We squash insects underfoot with barely a second thought.

So, by "living" I mean "exchanging thought and feelings with others."

A thought or feeling or memory that is not communicated dies instantly. It is as though it was never thought. If a person does not communicate any thoughts or feelings at all, that person is as good as dead for all practical purposes. As an aside, it is around this idea that the controversy both about the "Right to Life" and the point at which life ends revolves. When an infant in the womb kicks its mother, life has begun. When near the end of life, the mere fluttering of an eyelid is taken as communication, and terminating the life is called murder. When no communication is possible - the controversy begins.

One's life continues as long as thoughts and feelings that create a response in the person receiving the communication continue. It does not matter  that one's body has long since decayed.

Blogs, Tweets, and the like live on after the death of the Blogger or Tweeter. To the extent that people read the posts, respond to them and are moved by them, it is as if the original poster is still alive. To the extent that they engender new conversations, it is as if the originator of the thought is still living.

I blog, therefore I am immortal.

I tweet, therefore I am immortal.

Comment on my blogs, Retweet my Tweets, and you keep me alive.

Start your own blog, start tweeting, and start your afterlife.

I don't believe these thoughts are necessarily original - but this is not an academic thesis, nor a peer reviewed paper. I don't even know if anyone else will read them. It does not matter.

This is the start of my conversation with my own afterlife.

Fox News is News?

If you watch Fox News and you think you are getting news, not propaganda, you are a little confused.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
A Farewell to Arms
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Last night we saw "Moses in Egypt" - an opera by Rossini produced by the Chicago Opera Theater

Spoiler Alert - if you don't want to know the real reason Pharaoh kept changing his mid, stop reading here.
Otherwise, I will spill the beans. The reason is
FANFARE
The Pharaoh's son was romantically entangled with a young Hebrew girl. Every time Pharaoh decided to let the Hebrews leave, the Prince intervened and made Pharaoh change his mind so he could keep his affair going.
So now you know.

The whole shady deal was discovered when Moses and the Pharaoh's wife stumbled on the loving couple in a hide-away. What is left undiscussed is the question of what Moses and the Queen of Eqypt were doing together in a hidden place!

The set was in the usual minimalist style of the COT. The set and did not work very well, and the staging was a little stilted - set pieces of the chorus, mostly. Overall, not one of Rossini's best, but the COT does a valuable job in producing less well known works.



For an informed review of the performance, see Lawrence Johnson's review

Prodigy->Gopher->Mosaic->Netscape->IE->Opera->Firefox->Safari->Chrome->Firefox

Being a masochist, I recently started switching over to Google's Chrome browser.  I switch often.
Why? I tried new browsers out of curiosity and if something grabs me, I switch for a while.

I noticed that it only had one "box" which replaces the two boxes on other browsers. Gimmick, I thought.
Turns out it is very useful. It is an all purpose search box. As I start typing, it drops down suggestions from several sources:

• A Google search for whatever you enter 
• URLs containing your string
• Common searches starting with whatever you have just entered
• Your bookmarks containing that string
• An offer to search the pages in your history containing that string

This is amazingly useful.

However,  I Have just switched back to Firefox.
Why? Firstly - my password manager does not yet work with Chrome. It's a pain.
Secondly, the ecology of add-ons for Chrome is much less well develped.
And turdly, some websites do not play nicely with Chrome.

Poor Chrome - its tough being the new kid on the block. 

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing - George Orwell - 1946

Unfortunately, nothing has changed since 1946, when Orwell thunk this thought and wrote these words.

In 2010, replace the word "writing" with "speechifying", we have:

• Palin and the lunatics of Fox radio and TV for whom writing is anathema, and literacy is a signifier of the liberal elite.
• Moslem fundamentalists who want to impose shariah law on civil society
• Christian fundamentalists who interpret the Torah literally (but only in the often inaccurate but elegant King James Version), except when they want to eat pork, or a cheeseburger, or when it is otherwise inconvenient, and want to impose their inconsistent vision on American society

This motley collection of lunatics and their Republican fellow travelers in the USA and their allies or opponents in other countries, have managed to make both "liberal" and "elite" negative terms.

Liberal:

 

• S: (adj) liberal (having political or social views favoring reform and progress)
• S: (adj) liberal (tolerant of change; not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or tradition)

Elite:

• S: (adj) elect, elite (selected as the best)

For all of  them, "liberal elite" appears to be a bad thing - they are against reform and progress, intolerant of change, and bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, and tradition, and not do not wish to become one of the best. This is the mantra of the self-styled "Libertarian" and "Conservative" movements - American, Christian, and Muslim.

As an American by choice, I hope that the spirit of America can prevail against all of these lunacies.

To break into political writing - GMAFB.

Julia in London over Skype

From MacBook to MacBook to iPhone to Blogger.

Welcome Back, Jura

After over 5000 cups of coffee our coffee maker ground to a halt. Off it went to the manufacturer for refurbishment, and it came back today - just eight days after we UPSed it to them in NJ.

Spring at the Botanic Gardens

Abigail (on left) contemplates the move to London

Test from blogpress

Spring

Julia says goodbye to Sheba

I lost some images this morning...

... But fortunately I had backups. All is well again.

Blog and Counterblog

Lisa, Andy, Jacob, Julia and Abigail are leaving for London tonight. We expect that they will live there until the end of this year.  Lisa is an outstanding writer (she should be, after a journalism degree and a stint as a crime reporter in Rockport.) She has started a blog of her journey. This has shamed me into restarting my blog in earnest. Recently I have neglected my blog in favor of short Facebook status updates and even shorter Tweets.

Tonight we take Lisa et al to the airport.

I well remember the mix of excited anticipation and fear that we experienced when we first brought the family to the Poughkeepsie from South Africa almost forty years ago, when we moved to Chicago three years later, when we moved to Japan two years later for a year, when Hilda and I moved to Boston in 1990, and when we retired back to Chicago on 2003.

With each move, the level of excitement went down, and the level of fear went up - but the excitement always outweighed the fear.

Lisa's blog can be found at http://bokorelo.blogspot.com/