The Kudzu Files

What was the Star?

Other than the Virgin Birth, perhaps the most significant aspect of the Christmas story is the Star of Bethlehem. For many Christians, it's enough to simply believe there was a magical event in the skies. But there is nothing about the story to deny the possibility that this was a natural event, one that was perhaps interpreted by some as having supernatural meaning. And if you look at astronomical happenings in the period around 3-2 BC, there are several possibilities. Maybe the most likely concerns the planets Jupiter and Venus. From August 3BC through the winter and spring of 2BC, Jupiter (known as the King planet) had danced with the star Regulus (as it was known by the Romans, meaning "Regal"), or Sharu as it was known to the Babylonians, meaning "King". Because of the way the outer planets (Mars out to Pluto) move in relation to the Earth, at certain times these planets will appear to move slowly backwards through the sky over a period of several weeks, then move forward again. So over a period of several months, Jupiter caught up to Regulus, passed it, appeared to turn around and pass it going the other way, the passed it again, each time passing very close to the star, and even appearing to merge with it. It would have followed this with a conjunction (conjunction is the apparent meeting of two astronomical objects) with the planet Venus (known as the Mother planet) on June 17, 2BC, also very near the star Regulus, and visible primarily in the Middle East.

Stop for a moment and think about how bright Venus often appears in the morning or evening sky. It shines with a clear, white light, and is the brightest object in the sky except for the Sun and Moon. Jupiter is generally the next brightest object (after Venus). These two appearing to merge would have created an extremely bright evening star, and given that the astrologers (or magi) of the time constantly read the skies for portents of the future, it is easy to imagine this being interpreted as the birth of a king, and it's position in the sky would have steered those in the area we know as Iraq and Iran towards the west. I'm not saying this was definitely the Star of Bethlehem. There were other possible astronomical events in the period from about 6BC until 1 or 2 AD that could also qualify. I'm just pointing out that there were things happening around this time that were fairly rare, and would certainly have been noticed by those who watched the skies. And so I leave you with a simple Merry Christmas, Peace, Goodwill to men and women everywhere.

It's Cold!

It's 9:30 Friday morning, and it's 24F outside. It's been cold for a couple of days now, since the temperature plunged from 55F to 35F in 30 minutes late Wednesday afternoon. Since it went below 32F around 7PM Wednesday night, it hasn't gotten above freezing. OK, I know some of you live in northern states like Illinois and Wisconsin and Utah and Canada, and you guys have cold weather all the time, like from September until June. That's your problem. I can't help that. Here's the deal - it's cold here! And in Mississippi, that creates a bit of a problem. See, we really don't know what to do about it. We have this vague idea we should put on a coat. For most of us, that coat is something akin to a lined windbreaker. So we do that, and we're still cold. Some of us even think a hat should be involved, but for most Mississippians, a hat means a baseball cap with 'Mississippi State' or 'Ole Miss' written on the front, or maybe "John Deere". And so we put that on, and we're still cold. And I'm talking about temperatures of 40 degrees! So, when the temperature goes below freezing, and stays there, the result is a sort of weather anarchy. And two things happen: you go wrap rags around your outdoor water faucet, because mama called and asked if you had done that, and then you go to the grocery store and buy lots of food. It's like a funeral, when Southerners don't know exactly what they should do, they start cooking. We may freeze, but the people who find us will eat well. Beyond that, we're pretty much at a loss. We stop doing anything outside, other than racing to our cars if we do have to go somewhere. We turn the heater up and huddle under blankets, like survivors of some Ice Age catastrophe. And we wonder why anybody in their right mind would live north of Memphis.

Free Trade. Free? Maybe Not. Good? Maybe Not.

Dave's reacting to an article by Matt Yglesias (the link for which, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be working) about free trade. Dave's pointing out a few problems with free trade, and they're good points. I've gone back and forth about free trade - if it can really be done better and cheaper elsewhere, maybe we should let that happen and move on to something we can do better ourselves. But how good is that for our society? Nations are nations because of borders. Not just physical borders, but boundaries that define many different aspects of a political or economic entity. Immigration laws are one type of boundary, an attempt to define a nation in terms of citizenship and residency. The legal system is another such boundary, borders defined in law that establish a set of behaviors that must occur within the physical borders of a nation. Trade laws and regulations are another such boundary. In a sense, these are part of the legal system, but in a larger sense, they represent economic borders, an abstract geography within which business is transacted according to certain rules. Free trade is then equivalent to an open immigration policy, where you are handing over a portion of your sovereignty to another political entity. I have to note here that free trade as I'm using the term may not be, and probably isn't, as unfettered a concept as that actually envisioned by free trade advocates. But in moving towards free trade, as we did with NAFTA, we give up a degree of control over our economy. I'm not saying that is necessarily a bad thing, but it is something to be considered alongside the computation of profits and losses and jobs and tariffs. If South Transylvania is producing most of the wokkawidgets we use, replacing our own wokkawidget manufacturers, then we've abrogated any say on whether environmental standards related to wokkawidget manufacturing are followed. If we don't want iron ore from Yakkabokkastan used in wokkawidget manufacturing, because the Yakkabokkastan is ruled by a non-benevolent despot who puts moldy rice in his subject's oatmeal, we don't really have any control over whether South Transylvania uses Yakkabokka iron ore, unless we have some sort of punitive response in place regarding imports, which, of course, wouldn't be free trade. So free trade isn't really free. It just doesn't always have a calculable cost.

Just Say "Merry Christmas", OK?

I hate to argue with Kevin Drum, but this is something that I've been thinking about lately. And I'm not trying to make this out to be a strident attack on Christianity, like some are doing. But it seems like more and more, businesses and organizations are using "Season's Greetings" or "Happy Holidays", and almost straining to avoid saying "Merry Christmas". Are we, as a society, really so committed to making this into a bland winter break? Yes, Christmas has been over-commercialized. and yes, the Santa Claus Christmas has become almost a separate-but-equal counterpart to the Bethlehem Christmas. But at the root of both is the story of the birth of a little child, an event that, whether or not you choose to ascribe to the beliefs that arose from that birth, has at least partially determined the course of Western civilization since. And so we're left with the spectacle of schools banning religious songs and references from school plays, and towns banning Nativity scenes from Christmas displays. Don't get me wrong, I'm a firm believer in the separation of church and state. But if you're going to observe Christmas, you can't do it without admitting there is a religious aspect to the occasion. Yes, I know that the date of Christmas was probably chosen to coincide with the date of pagan mid-winter holidays. But if you want to claim some "a priori" justification, there's still a religious element. And I wonder if some of those so offended by the inclusion of Christian symbols would be similarly offended by Druidic symbols. It does seem sometimes that the only religious displays that bother people are Christian in nature.

For me, it's pretty simple - if you choose to celebrate Christmas, then part of what you celebrate is the cultural acceptance of the Christian myth - and by myth, I mean John Ruskin's definition: "A myth, in its simplest definition, is a story with a meaning attached to it other than it seems to have at first; and the fact that it has such a meaning is generally marked by some of its circumstances being extraordinary, or, in the common use of the word, unnatural." Without the story of a Jewish boy being born in a small village two millennia ago, there would be no holiday as we know it. That's the one reality of Christmas Day.

In Which Harry Rants About Hummer H1s, H2s, and the SUT

Mark at The Bemusement Park notes an unflattering review of the new Hummer SUT.

I hate the Hummers, H1, H2, SUT. They, to me, represent everything that is worst about contemporary American values - big, heavy, wasteful, inefficient, of poor quality, and as I've said before, something that only an American ad marketer could convince an American consumer to buy. I watched the other day as a woman driving, not a Hummer but a weight-class contender SUV, tried to dock her rolling behemoth in a mall parking lot. She couldn't maneuver the thing well enough to go straight in to the parkingspace, so she went back and forth, back and forth, trying to get the angle down so she could open her door and get out. Meanwhile, carswere stacked up in both directions, and eventually the traffic back-up extended into the cross lanes in the lot. It took her something on the order of 5 minutes to get parked. And the resulting angular position left the car beside her blocked in unless they were willing to scrape their car against her. At that point, I realized the solution - we should require a separate license to drive a vehicle over a certain size and weight. Maybe not a commercial license, but a certified license that required a driving and maneuver test in one of these. And there should be no tax subsidy for these beasts!!

I hate these things.

Working Through College

I was in college a fairly long time, from 1972 until 1979, with a couple of short breaks along the way. I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do, and so changed my major a few times, from accounting to undecided to engineering to physics to math (with a minor in physics, that could have been a double major if I'd taken 2 more physics courses). I finished with 169 undergrad hours. It was fun. I loved college. But, being in that long, I had to work a series of jobs to finance the endeavour. The first few were fairly mundane - driving a delivery truck for a paper company, washing well samples for the state geological survey, working at a pet store - but then the jobs I worked took a more interesting tack. I worked security at a K-Mart for about a year. Part of the job was pretty tedious, calling people who had written bad checks and listening to their excuses. Some of the job was fun - hiding in odd places of the store after hours to see if the overnight stock crew would find me (they were supposed to check the store). Once I found a love nest at the top of an enormous pile of beanbags (the market for beanbags had collapsed not long after we got a huge shipment in), where two amorous store employees had been having their trysts. But actually stopping shoplifters was not so fun, sometimes. Like the time I saw a man from the local stockyard stick a shirt down the back of his pants. Under the rules, we couldn't accost them until they were physically outside the store. Now, I'm not a small guy - at the time I was 6'5", about 225 - but this guy was huge. About as tall, and looked like he benchpressed cows for fun. And I had to stop him. He didn't want to stop, I didn't want him to leave, the situation was beginning to degenerate. You weren't supposed to actually lay hands upon them, you were supposed to convince them to stop, unless of course they attacked you, which was about to happen. The suddenly one of the mechanics (we had an auto shop in the store) came racing out the front door with a crescent wrench the size of Montana. He later told me one of the store employees ran into the auto shop and said "hey everybody, Harry's about to get his a$$ beat!" (the previous security guy quit after a shoplifter pulled a knife and cut his arm up, but nobody told me about that until later either). After Mechanic Guy showed up with the crescent wrench, the stockyard man decided to give up.

After the K-Mart job, you would think a normal job would have sufficed. But no, my next job was even more interesting. Officially, I was Evening Secretary to the evening shift charge nurse at a local hospital.. What I was, was often the only male other than security and lab techs in the hospital on the 3-11 and 11-7 shifts I worked. I got to see and do lots of things - emergency room, OR, ICU - but one of the main jobs I had was to retrieve bodies of patients who had died, take them to the hospital basement, and check them in to the morgue. They called me the Head Nurse of the Morgue. There were plenty of times I would be alone in the basement, in the middle of the night, with several bodies in the cooler. Kind of creepy. Also very creepy is the sensation you get when you roll a body off a hospital on to the gurney. Often, you'll compress the lungs and get a shot of cold, clammy air in the face, or ear. Very creepy. And all of this was done to pay for college.

So, what kinds of jobs did you have during college?

Life With Java, Part 2

In Part 1, I was struggling with Oracle over whether I did or did not have a method in the class. In the end, the problem was pretty basic, and specific to Oracle's implementation of Java within the database: all methods must be declared both public and static. As soon as I'd done that, it worked (Dave, I did use your simplified code). So, I'm on to bigger and better things withing Javadom.

Waving The Flag Of Unreality

From 1972, the year after the last 10-win season at Ole Miss, through 1998, the year before David Cutcliffe arrived at Oxford, Ole Miss football was 145-153-4. I don't have their SEC record at hand but it was a losing record. They had 9 winning seasons during that stretch, 3 of which were 6-5. From 1964 until 1971, the overall record was 58-29. That was the last eight years under the great Johnny Vaught, who is the coach that's caused problems for every Rebel coach since. David Cutcliffe compiled a record of 44-29 during his six seasons. No coach since Johnny Vaught has come close to that mark. But he didn't return Ole Miss to the "glory days", which took place during a short six-year stretch in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Ask a typical Ole Miss fan how many SEC championships the Rebels won during Archie's career, and they'll probably tell you they won a couple. In reality, they weren't even close. Their records were 7-3-1, 8-3, and 7-4. About what Cutcliffe did, except for last season's 10-3 mark, in which they came closer to an SEC title than at any point since 1963. David Cutcliffe's Rebels fell to 4-7 this year. In 1964, after a 7-1-2 mark in 1963, Johnny Vaught's Rebels dropped to 5-5-1. Vaught was kept on; Cutcliffe was fired. Cutcliffe was fired because he couldn't take Ole Miss back to that lofty position that they only occupied once, for a brief period nearly half a century ago.

The topic of the day is "Reality". Here's the reality - over the past 40 years, the average Ole Miss record hovered between 5-6 and 5-5-1. You can blame the coach, you can blame the weather, you can blame slimespreaders from Venus. The reality is that the past 30 years pretty much tells you what you're capable of. And David Cutcliffe exceeded that by a fairly wide margin. "Yes", say some Ole Miss fans, "but it was really Eli Manning, not Cutcliffe, who gave us that record". Really? Eli went 7-5 and 8-4 at Ole Miss while he was still in high school? He went 7-5 in 2000 while completing 16 of 33 passes for 170 yards? Manning only started for 2 seasons at Ole Miss. Ole Miss was 17-9 those two years. The other years, Cutcliffe was 27-20. Still much better than the Ole Miss average since 1971.

So Ole Miss is searching for the coach to take them to that next level. So far, Ron Zook, Bobby Petrino, Ty Willingham, Paul Johnson, and probably several others have said "no thanks". Rick Neuheisel seems to have been deemed not worthy by Ole Miss AD Pete Boone. Now they're talking to former Clevend Browns head coach Butch Davis, who has said he doesn't want to coach again at this time, Southern Cal assistant coach Ed Orgeron, and maybe Miami assistant coach Randy Shannon. Given that Davis left the Browns after a panic attack, the pressure of consistently winning 11 and 12 games each year at Ole Miss, which apparently is all they'll settle for, would seem uninviting to him. Orgeron and Shannon are assistant coaches at major programs, which ironically is where they found Cutcliffe.

Here's the deal: Ole Miss fans are the most unrealistic in college football. I'm not saying Ole Miss isn't capable of winning the SEC. But they're not capable of winning it on a consistent basis. With an exceptional series of recruiting classes, they could reach those heights for a season, maybe two, but just as Mississippi State has discovered, the small schools can't sustain it. But Ole Miss will continue to try, and they'll keep firing coaches every 5-6 years in search of that never-to-be-realized goal. Guys, you had the coach you were looking for. You just dumped him. Hoddy Toddy.

Have You Seen The Frog?

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If anybody has seen it, please return it!!

Life with Java, Part 1

For a variety of reasons, I've been exploring the Java language lately. Officially, and legitimately, with Oracle adding Java stored procedures to the database a couple of releases back, it's pretty much inevitable that I'll have to use it. There's other reasons, too - things have been in a bit of flux (flux is such a great word, don't you think) for a while, and it seems like maybe a good time to do some career reorientation. Or at least lay the groundwork. Once upon a time, I was a damn good developer and software project guy. Much has changed the past few years, while I was embarked on an ill-fated side trip into IT management (surely one of the seven levels of hell) and then back into the technical side as a database administrator. It looks like the theology of development has pretty much divided into two camps, Microsoft's .Net and Sun's Java. I guess my background in Unix made me lean towards Java. So there I am.

So far, I've just been scratching around. I have a bit of working code - working from the DOS, or Unix, command line. But Oracle and I are having a small disagreement about whether it does or does not have a method within the class. I, personally, believe t does:

public class EncodePinUtil {

public java.lang.String encode(java.lang.String args) {
String encodedPin = null;
String pinToEncode = null;
pinToEncode = args;

encodedPin = ueEncodePin(pinToEncode);
return encodedPin;

}

My hypothesis is that encode is, indeed, a method. Oracle's hypothesis is that, while there may be madness in my method, there is no method in my madness. This is, as might be imagined, somewhat frustrating. Perhaps I should resort to RTFM.

December's Night Skies

December begins the period we think of as winter's skies. We talk about how the stars are so much brighter in winter, and we think it's because the skies are clearer, more transparent, in cold weather. The reality is much simpler - there are just more bright stars visible in winter. So, what's up in December?

Start with one of the two most recognized constellations in the skies: Orion. The Belt and Sword of Orion are easily seen this month, almost due south at mid-month. The middle star in the belt looks just a little fuzzy if you're not using telescopes or binoculars. Through binoculars or even a small telescope, it's revealed as the great Orion Nebula. The brightest star in Orion, on the left shoulder, is called Betelgeuse. It's actually a variable star - while it's always bright, it's light varies slightly. So that while it's classified as the brightest star in Orion, Rigel, to the lower right of the Belt and Sword, is sometimes just a bit brighter. Here's a great photo and constellation map of Orion - be sure to move your mouse over the photo!

Below and to the left, or east, of Orion is a very bright star. That's Sirius, the brightest star in our skies. It's in the constellation Canis Major, the "Greater Dog" - Orion is accompanied by two hunting dogs (although Canis Minor is more difficult to find).

One last constellation note - as Christmas approaches, you may notice, fairly low in the northwest, a pattern of stars in the shape of an upright cross. That's Cynus, the Swan. But it's better known as the Northern Cross, and December is it's last bit of visibility until summer. Catch it early in the evening - by 9 PM, it's too low to be seen from most locations.

There's not really much in the way of planets this month - Saturn is rising in the east, but it's better left for January. There is a meteor shower the night of December 13-14, the Geminids - so named because they generally originate from the area near the constellation Gemini, just to the east of Orion. If you want to see meteors, stay up until well after midnight or wake up in the early morning for the best chances. The Moon will reappear on the evening of December 14, low in the west after sunset - although you can see a think sliver of the just-past-New Moon in the late afternoon of the 13th if you have a clear western horizon. So, take a break from Christmas shopping and partying for a few minutes some night, and take look up. And if you have any questions, post them in the comments for this post, and I'll do my best to answer them.

Passings

Dick died a couple of weeks ago. I didn't know him well - a few chance encounters, but mostly escapades related by others. Mostly by one other. Dick was my father-in-law's best friend for nearly 70 years. They went to school together, went off to war together - although they served in different areas, they kept in touch as much as possible - and after the war, went to college together, then settled in the same small town, where they lived for the next 50 years.There was a small group of men in the town that met for coffee for years, but it was always Bill and Dick, and some others. They built sheds and shops and cabins, and a myriad of smaller projects, some times in competition with each other, sometimes them against the world. And they argued about who had more sense, and went on countless road trips around central Mississippi. Just a day or two before he died, they had been working on another project. Dick was fine. Then a couple of days later, he had a cerebral hemorrhage and died within a few hours.

I don't know what you say to someone who's lost their best friend of 70 years. There aren't that many friendships that last that long. There aren't many marriages that last that long. It's one of those ironies of life, that the things that bring the greatest blessings are the things that hurt the most when they're gone. And I know this - my father-in-law's life was richly, richly blessed by his friendship with Dick. And I know that's what he'll remember most, once the shock has worn off. But part of me is thinking, wow, to have a best friend for that long - is something really, really special. Part of what I feel is jealousy, because I think friendships like that are much rarer now than they were for that earlier generation. We've concentrated so hard on making a living that in many cases we've forgotten to make a life. I just know this - in a small town in central Mississippi, there's a man who has some incredibly rich memories, that I hope will comfort him sooner rather than later.

The Treehouse Stays

If you've been reading KF for a while, you may remember posts about the treehouse in Clinton, MS. If not, you can catch up here, here, and here. Now, hopefully, sanity has prevailed once and for all. The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that the city of Clinton had failed to define an "accessory structure", which was what the city had claimed the treehouse constituted. Hopefully, this is the end of an absurd series of actions by a city government that deserves to be voted out of office at the next election. Story of the court victory is here.