Pills; Graphic and Living History - Uncle Orson Reviews Everything

Taking pills is easy for some people -- they can do it dry. Others can hardly gag them down. I used to be in the second group. There is a trick to make it easier.

The older I get, the more pills I take. At first it was supplements, then mild medications like daily aspirin. After my first bout with atrial fibrillation, my doctor upped my dosage of omega fish oil.

My heart doctor put me on a blood thinner that required constant testing, which meant heedless medical people stabbing me in the tips of my fingers, leaving them sore for days -- not a good thing for someone who makes a living by typing. So I resigned from that medication and upped my dosage of aspirin.

As my hospitalist told me after my stroke, "You failed aspirin," so now I'm on Plavix and another tablet to bring down my blood pressure. (There are working bicycle tires with lower pressure than I had in my arteries at the time of my stroke.)

Looking into the future (I need only look at what my parents do now!), I can see that the number of meds I take, and the number of times a day I take them, will only increase. There was a time in my life when this would have horrified me, because the only thing I hated worse than trying to gag down large pills was getting injected.

But there are actually tricks to enduring both. A dentist in Orem, Utah, back in 1980 taught me that the novocaine injection wouldn't bother me much if I simply wiggled my toes as the needle approached.

This works incredibly well. Before, my whole concentration was focused on the spot where the needle would go, and the moment it touched me I tensed up and it was excruciating. But wiggling my toes moved my concentration elsewhere.

I was certainly aware of the needle's entry, but now I felt only the slight pain that was actually there, without any of the magnification that comes from dread and tension.

Toe-wiggling works for putting an IV in the back of my hand and for the endless piercings during hospitalization, where they seem to have missed the memo about how doctors don't cure by blood-letting anymore.

You know, we have that gag reflex for a reason -- to keep us from swallowing things that are likely to get stuck and suffocate us because we can't get them down and can't get them back out. The gag reflex makes us eject items before they're close to the getting-stuck region.

But even when tablets or capsules try to go down sideways, they aren't going to choke us (unless we actually inhale them -- which is not advised). Still, the gag reflex can stymie us.

Here's the thing to realize: Not all pills behave the same way when we swallow them with water. That's because some pills are less dense than water, and some are more dense. That means that some of them float and some of them sink in water.

Think about how you take pills. Maybe you tilt your chin up after you have filled your mouth with water. That's great for the denser-than-water tablets and gelcaps, because they sink right to the back of your throat and at the first swallowing action, they're down -- before the gag reflex can kick in.

But the less-dense-than-water powder-filled capsules (and a few very light tablets) rise in water, so if you tilt your chin up, these capsules will rise toward the front of your mouth, and they only get to the gag-reflex region fairly late in the swallow.

By then they're moving slowly; much or most of the water is gone; you can feel them there and you gag.

The trick is to put the floater pills in your mouth, take your mouthful of water, close your lips tightly, and then tilt your head sharply down.

Now the rising action of these lightweight capsules and tablets takes them to the back of your throat, and when you swallow, they are gone instantly, in the first copious rush of water, and you barely feel them.

These days I take three large but less-dense powder-filled capsules at the same time, with a single two-ounce mouthful of water. I hardly notice them. They used to gag me a little when I took them one at a time ... with my head tilted back.

So here's the rule: If it's a powder-filled capsule or a very lightweight tablet, you tilt your head down before you swallow. If it's a gelcap or a heavy-for-its-size tablet, you tilt your chin up (or tilt your head back, whichever way you think of it) before you swallow.

You don't have to test them in water first, wasting an expensive medication. Just put the pill in your mouth, take your mouthful of water, and then, without swallowing, tilt your head down and feel where the pill goes. (Make sure you haven't got it pinned down somewhere with your tongue or cheek.)

If it's not in easy swallowing position, tilt your head the other way; when the pill is in position at the back of your throat, swallow it.

As long as you don't try to swallow a sinker at the same time as a floater, you'll know how to tilt your head with each pill or pair of pills.

Maybe I'm the only person who didn't already know this. But in case you've had trouble with pills -- especially the big ones -- this might help.

History is the single most important thing we can learn, once we've acquired literacy itself.

In a way, all the other fields of study can be considered as branches of history -- when you study mathematics, you merely recapitulate the history of mathematics; when you study any science, you must first learn all that has already been learned.

Only when you have mastered the previous accomplishments of your branch of history can you begin to make original contributions.

But the most important history as we move forward through time is the history of human societies -- and not just so we can avoid making the same mistakes.

After all, nothing ever happens twice in exactly the same way. So if people are grimly determined to make the same idiotic mistakes as their forebears (and they usually are) they can always find reasons to say, "This time it will be different."

So when someone points out that Barack Obama is being handed everything necessary to repeat Bill Clinton's reelection strategy from 1996, I can hear Republicans saying, "Barack Obama is no Bill Clinton!" Well, that's true -- he's faithful to his wife, he keeps a higher percentage of his promises.

But in vain does one point out to Republicans that they are preparing to do to themselves in 2012 what they did to themselves in 1996 -- hand the nomination to a candidate with no ability to reach out to the independents who are vital to every presidential election victory.

("But we reached out to independents with McCain, and that failed!" cry the rightwing purists. To which the answer is, With the media in lockstep behind Obama, with the appealing milestone of "first black president," with the economy tanking, and with Bush's unpopularity, the miracle of 2008 was that the Republicans weren't crushed into dust. McCain did far better than Dole, than McGovern, than Goldwater -- the three ideologically purist candidates without crossover appeal in my lifetime.)

The point is that even though many people refuse to learn from history, you can't even begin to plan for the future unless you know the past. For instance, in science, it has always been meaningless to talk about "global warming" unless we had some idea of what the cycles of global temperature were in the past.

But the past is often very hard to grasp. Large trends can be talked about but rarely seen. So when someone finds a way to represent history graphically, it can be very helpful.

For instance, I once created a program for the IBM PCjr that showed all the Presidential election results on maps of the United States. You could flip from map to map and see the electoral votes represented clearly at a glance.

Unfortunately, the PCjr was a commercial flop (as it deserved to be), and so my book about how to program its BASIC language died unpublished. For years since then I've waited for someone to do the same job for PC, Mac, or the Web ... and finally I've found one.

http://www.100bestwebsites.org/alt/evmaps/electoral-maps.htm has an array of all the past presidential elections. (I tried to create a shortened version of this address, but SnipURL.com refused because apparently this website has been used to generate spam. But looking at the maps doesn't generate anything except, perhaps, some clarity about the past.)

History is not just about the quadrennial horseraces we call "presidential elections." Swedish medical doctor, researcher, and teacher Hans Rosling has generated an absolutely brilliant animated graphic showing the relative rise of life expectancies in 200 countries since 1800.

This is graphic history at its best. The video takes four minutes, and you will be fascinated the entire time. Not only does Rosling show how all nations have greatly increased their life expectancies, he also shows how their populations have grown.

If all we had were his graphics, that would be enough to recommend the video, but he does more. He himself is present to point things out, clarify, explain. Then he breaks some of the national stats into regions and cities so you can see the internal differences within some nations.

Most of history cannot be graphically represented, however. We need to have the most complete story possible. But there are so many ways to be "complete."

For instance, Susan Wise Bauer's The History of the Medieval World: from the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade attempts to achieve completeness by including the whole world -- including China and India, the Muslim world, American civilizations, and as many "barbarians" as we have records enough to track during that period.

This makes for a wonderful tour, as we are able to see what was going on far beyond the boundaries of the normal eurocentric view.

In another way, though, it is too complete and therefore not complete enough. What was happening in Japan and among the Mayas, for instance, had little impact on the history that led to the rise of Western Europe and the eventual American experiment.

Because she covers everywhere, Bauer can't cover anywhere with thoroughness. She aims for and achieves breadth, but it costs her depth.

Chris Wickham's brilliant achievement with The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000 is that while he works in a narrower range of time and space, he is guided by a specific question:

How did the institutions and practices that had kept the Roman Empire vibrant for a thousand years continue to influence and shape the successor-states?

The result is a history that manages to be broad and deep as pertains to the relevant matters -- and every page is relevant to our understanding of how governments form, how nations achieve unity, how institutions endure through time.

I have read thick history books on all the major nations and civilizations Wickham covers, and yet none of them achieved his level of understanding, his depth, his completeness.

It helps that Wickham has access to far more evidence, both literary and archaeological, than most of his predecessors.

It helps just as much that Wickham resists any kind of ideological entrapment. I have been aware for most of my life of many different strains of "fall of Rome" theories, including most recently the sadly self-indulgent theory that Rome did not really fall, because the barbarians continued Roman institutions.

That kind of oversimplistic theorizing leads historians into folly -- I remember one recent book in which the author became quite energetic in his condemnation of Justinian the Great and blamed him for actually destroying the Western Empire in his misguided effort to reconquer it and return it to unity with Byzantium.

But Wickham simply presents the evidence and only then reaches conclusions -- which are never sweeping and never moralistic. He picks no "bad guys" or "good guys," he simply reports on what happened, and why certain invasions led to nothing and others created civilizations that spread and lasted.

It's fascinating to see, for instance, how Alfred the Great of England seemed to learn the lessons of Charlemagne's empire better than Charlemagne's own succesors did, so that Anglo-Saxon England actually had the institutional stability and national unity that France and Germany took centuries to recover.

Wickham also takes the time to give us in great detail things that are usually skipped over or summarized. Thus we can trace the development of the Visigothic kingdoms of Iberia into the seeds of the nations that became Spain; we get a pretty clear idea of what the Vikings actually were in relation to the institutions and culture of Medieval Scandinavia.

Along the way, Wickham creates for us a virtual textbook in nation-building. The Muslim conquests succeeded precisely because they made no attempt to proselytize (at first); the first Caliphate preserved the pre-existing governing class and only gradually Islamized the culture. Roman and Persian institutions thus served the new Muslim overlords.

Yet the Muslims also were not swallowed up as so many conquerors of China were, or as the Vikings were absorbed into the languages and cultures of the lands they conquered (in Sicily, Normandy, and, to a slightly lesser degree, the Danelaw of England).

I also could not help but compare (though Wickham never does, as he shouldn't) the Vikings to the Islamist terrorists and Somali pirates of today. Their motives are wildly different, but their effects are similar: All consist of raiders who kill, destroy, steal, and create terror without regard to borders, who are nevertheless sheltered in "home countries" that lack the resources, the will, and the national strength to control them.

Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome is definitely the best medieval history I've ever read; it may be the single best book of history I've read, and it can serve as a model for the thoroughness, rigor, and transparency all historians should strive for.

Bauer and Wickham are both fine, clear writers, but because of the breadth and depth they strive to achieve, they can leave your head spinning if you're not already thoroughly grounded in the major events of the histories of the periods they work with.

So "completeness" can also take another form. The War of 1812 was vitally important in American history, but it ended inconclusively. America lost all its land battles except the last one -- after the peace treaty was signed. And the peace treaty essentially gave in to England on the very points that the war had been fought over -- Britain's insistence on the right to stop American ships and impress, or seize, whatever sailors it pleased them to call "British subjects."

The war was also messy inside the U.S. The regions that suffered most from British practices were most opposed to the war. The party that supported what could only be a naval war (the "Republicans," though it was the party that evolved into today's Democrats) absolutely refused to create a navy to fight it!

And Jefferson -- the most over-rated President in American history, morally, intellectually, and politically -- had just crippled the American economy with an absurdly self-destructive embargo, while leaving us without a fleet.

Yet at the end of the War of 1812 left the United States as a recognized world power, and despite the peace treaty that allowed Britain to continue impressment, the Brits never stopped another American ship to impress sailors.

In short, we won, and big time; yet almost no one realized it at the time, thinking of the war as disastrous and, if not a failure, then certainly not a success.

Thus I doubt most people think they want or need Stephen Budiansky's thorough -- nay, "complete" -- history of the America's naval campaigns in the War of 1812.

And yet I can tell you that you will never read a clearer, more fascinating account of a war than Budiansky's Perilous Fight: America's Intrepid War with Britain on the High Seas, 1812-1815.

Do you like swashbuckling sea stories, like the Horatio Hornblower series? Then you'll love this book -- particularly because everything in it actually happened.

I loved the heroic struggle of the Secretary of the Navy who ended up, for a period of time, as just about the only functioning official in the U.S. government, running not just the Navy but the Treasury. And since the Navy was almost non-existent when the war began, he not only led the Navy, he virtually created it.

The American fleet consisted of a handful of frigates -- but they were first rate, far more maneuverable than any comparable ship in the British fleet, which had hundreds of ships of the line which were capable of blowing any American ship out of the water.

What made the American naval war so successful was the brilliant strategy that the desk jockeys insisted on.

American captains were ordered not to engage in ship-to-ship combat with any British vessel on an equal basis; instead of shooting it out with dangerous British ships, the Americans were ordered to flee (which they could all do, because of superior American ship designs and materials).

Instead, the American strategy was to harass the merchant shipping that Great Britain was absolutely dependent on.

The Brits were spending most of their energy bottling up the French fleet and trying to maintain a blockade that was mostly permeated by British merchants. (One could argue that Britain financed its war with Napoleon on the profits from running its own blockade.)

So when American naval vessels -- joined by hundreds of legal pirates called "privateers" -- attacked British merchant shipping, it was potentially devastating.

The American privateers were not terribly effective -- their goal was to capture British merchant ships and sail them to a friendly port, which meant that many of their captures were captured back again. The privateers themselves were usually caught and imprisoned before doing much damage.

The U.S. Navy, however, soon learned that instead of taking merchant ships captive -- which required putting a skeleton crew on board to sail it home -- they achieved far more by taking the crews captive and sinking the merchant vessels.

A sunken ship can't be taken back by the enemy; an undivided crew remains on board to keep it effective at both fighting and fleeing.

The result is that each American ship did far more damage than their numbers would have suggested. And the British navy, crewed by dispirited, undertrained, and disloyal impressees, was so ineffective in battle (except when fighting the even worse French) that they failed almost entirely in their efforts to blockade American ports.

It was a war that Britain provoked out of sheer arrogance and incompetence, but which -- out of partisan fervor and utter stupidity -- America was hopelessly unprepared to fight.

Yet there were heroic captains who trained their loyal volunteer crews to be the best navy afloat. Most American frigates were defeated only when their captains disobeyed the order not to fight and instead, as a point of foolish honor, fought a British ship of roughly equal gunnage in a duel.

A duel? Exactly. It was an age of dueling, and nobody was quicker to duel than naval officers. Even when a duel meant slaughter and maiming among both crews, they joined in enthusiastically. The American victory at sea would have been far more decisive, the campaigns more effective, except for that insistence that honor required, from time to time, a suicidal duel.

From beginning to end, Perilous Fight is a brilliant history, with all the detail needed to bring the stories to life and make the ebb and flow of the war clear -- and not a speck more.

I read it straight through like a Hornblower novel, but at the end I felt as if I had actually learned something about what makes American military practices so effective -- when they are effective.

In America we're all voters -- but nobody checks to make sure we have any sense at all about how we vote. I urge every American to regard history as the first and most important study of our lives -- the minimum requirement to be a good citizen.

And instead of relying on our castrated and/or politicized textbooks (by Left and Right), which grossly under- and mis-educate our young, we should be reading independent histories every chance we get.

There are some great writers of history and biography, whose work can be read with as much pleasure as good fiction. And the more you read, the more expert you'll become at seeing when someone is grinding an ideological axe. You'll get a sense of which historians you can trust and which you must sift for truth.

It's like watching football or baseball. Both games can be confusing and boring if you truly don't know anything about the game. What are they doing now? This makes no sense!

But the more you watch, and the more people explain it to you, the more you come to understand what the game actually means. Eventually, you are able to recognize good strategies and fine individual achievements for yourself. Things make sense.

Let history be a game you take seriously and watch closely. Because unlike sports, which have nothing riding on them but the salaries of a few athletes and coaches and the bets of fools, every aspect of our lives is affected by history as it unfolds, and if we can get to understand that game as deeply as possible, we might actually cast more intelligent votes.

Instead of most of us vote with "teams" like Republican and Democrat, Left and Right, which are as arbitrary and meaningless as saying the Steelers are "from" Pittsburgh, when almost none of the players have any ties to the city.

The parties are about winning; most of the good historians, however, keep their team loyalties out of their books; and even when they slip in some of their bias, the profession of historian still has high standards of accuracy.

Historians are usually ashamed to be sloppy, biased, or inaccurate, and the result is that with a very little effort you can have far more understanding of history, and make far better judgments about what would be good for America, for our home state and home town, and for the world than any but a handful of the politicians we elect to make decisions for us.

Every Day Is Special

First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC.

Deep Blue, Light Bulbs, Darwin, Galileo

Thursday, February 10^th -- Highest Priority Day

On this day in 1942, civilian automobile production in America was halted. Period. No civilian cars.

Why? Because automobile manufacturing plants were retooled and were being used exclusively to build tanks, jeeps, and aircraft, until World War II ended in 1945.

Imagine that -- Americans so committed to winning a war that they forgo buying any new cars for years. Do you know what that's called? Commitment. Sacrifice. Making victory the highest priority for the nation.

That's the thing about our wars from Vietnam on. They were declared officially worth fighting, but we were told that instead of sacrificing anything ourselves, we who stayed home should just go about our business and keep the economy strong.

I'm sure that's right. A strong economy makes war affordable. But making the war a relatively low priority -- doesn't that interfere with making a war winnable? It's not that World War II had worse enemies: The Islamicists of Afghanistan and the Baathists and terrorist insurgents of Iraq were and are every bit as fascist, every bit as cruel, every bit as committed to crimes and atrocities against the helpless as the Nazis and the Japanese imperialists. The issues of good and evil are at least as clear.

But America doesn't care that leaving Afghanistan prematurely -- with our departure date announced in advance -- will result in the murders of everyone who worked with us, and the reenslavement of women under a worse regime than before. And why don't we care? Because we've never been asked to sacrifice anything, as a people, for this war. It's as if invading other countries to put a stop to their crimes against us and against civilization were a hobby that we play at now and then, instead of the most terrible and solemn undertaking of any nation.

In 1996, IBM's chess-playing Deep Blue program on an RS/6000 supercomputer, defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 34 moves. Kasparov went on to win the tournament, defeating the computer three times (the other two matches were draws.)

In 1997, in a six-game rematch, Deep Blue emerged the overall victor. But it did not win by playing like a human or even better than a human. Because Deep Blue could evaluate 200 million chess positions a second, it could play out the consequences of every possible choice to see the results. Kasparov could not do this because his data analysis goes at biological speeds.

Humans, however, don't need to play out all the consequences of a move. We make intuitive leaps. We learn from past experience. No one has come close to inventing a computer that can do what even toddlers do: make intuitive leaps and associations, metaphors and analogies, and empathic evaluations of the behavior of others.

In the March 2011 Atlantic Monthly, Brian Christian writes about his experience in a contest to see whether sophisticated computer programs could imitate human conversation so well that human judges could not tell the difference. Christian was one of the humans whose job was to be human -- to make it clear to the judges that he thought and conversed like a person. In the past, some computers have come pretty close to meeting the challenge, but in Christian's opinion that was only because their human competitors were conversing in a boring, machinelike way.

It's quite a delightful story -- along with being a piercing analysis of what we humans do with our minds that no digital computer can match. And it won't even spoil the fun for me to say that Christian beats his computer competitor -- and all the others humans, to be marked as the most human of humans. Not a bad title, that.

Russian poet and novelist Boris Pasternak, who wrote Doctor Zhivago, was born on this day in 1890. He won the 1958 Nobel Prize for literature -- but the Communist masters of Russia forced him to refuse the award. There is speculation that only the influence of Jawarlal Nehru of India kept the Soviet tyrants from imprisoning or exiling Pasternak. He is regarded as the inspiration for the dissenters and truth-speakers inside Russia in the years that followed.

In those days in Russia, if you expressed unapproved opinions, even if you could prove your views to be correct, you would be punished by losing your job, being unable to publish your work, and being expelled from professional associations. Just the way scientists, writers, teachers, and others who question dogmas are treated in America today by the tyrannical puritans of environmentalism, Darwinism, and political correctness, who are so keenly aware of the inadequacy of their own arguments that they know the only way they can prevail is to silence and punish all who dissent.

Friday, February 11^th -- Light Bulb Day

Nelson Mandela was released from prison in South Africa on this day in 1990, after serving more than 27 years of a life sentence. He was convicted along with eight others of "sabotage" and "conspiracy to overthrow the government"). Mandela, aged 71 at the time of his release, went on to become the leader of a freely elected majority government in South Africa, and set the example of not seeking vengeance against those who imprisoned him. Instead, whites and blacks now live alongside each other in a fairly prosperous economy.

To see what South Africa could have been like if Mandela had not been the great man that he is, one need only look at Robert Mugabe's unspeakable dictatorship in Zimbabwe, where he has wrecked a once-prosperous land.

American inventor Thomas Alva Edison was born on this day in 1847. Edison's more than 1,200 patents include the incandescent electric light, the phonograph, the electric dynamo, and key parts of many now-familiar devices such as the movie camera and telephone transmitter. Edison famously said, "Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration," because his inventions came from methodical testing of idea after idea until something worked.

The light bulb, as its design improved, became by far the cheapest source of illumination, and extending electricity to every corner of America was quite properly the object of public policy until it was accomplished. Now, however, in the name of environmentalism, a 2007 energy act that bans the familiar incandescent bulb.

In Mark Binker's story for the Greensboro News and Record on 12 January, he says that Congressman Howard Coble is a "co-sponsor of a bill to repeal what some refer to -- erroneously -- as the incandescent light bulb ban." This is a perfect example of biased reporting. In fact the law makes it illegal to sell incandescent bulbs. That's a ban. Binker's claim that this is "erroneous" is apparently based on the fact that the law doesn't say it's banning incandescent bulbs; rather it sets a standard of energy efficiency that cheap incandescent bulbs cannot meet.

In fact, Binker's entire article, paragraph by paragraph, is slanted to try to refute every claim of the opponents of the ban, so that it is not a news story, but propaganda. The fact is that all the replacement technology is much more expensive and many replacements -- fluorescents, which contain mercury, and halogens, which have a way of exploding now and then -- are less safe as well as being more costly. Or, like LEDs, they simply don't give off enough light.

But the puritans of environmentalism have decided that instead of letting people weigh the pros and cons and make their own decisions, we will simply lose the ability to buy the safest and brightest source of indoor illumination, despite the fact that the change in lighting technology will lead to relatively trivial changes in our national energy consumption. It's a story that could have been presented factually and evenhandedly -- but Binker and his editors chose not to.

So on Light Bulb Day, why not write to Howard Coble and express your views on his efforts to block the ban on the sale of incandescent bulbs? Let there be (cheap, safe) light!

The Yalta Agreement, in which the West sold out Eastern Europe to the Communists, was signed on this day in 1945. What was not publicized were the private agreements between the dying Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin, shutting Winston Churchill out. The Russians were given carte blanche to occupy the once-independent countries of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and others, making free elections impossible, thus putting them under the thumb of Communist dictatorship for generations.

The Yalta Agreement also set the stage for creating the United Nations, whose first Secretary General, when it met in San Francisco, was American state department official and Russian spy Alger Hiss, who was also Roosevelt's right-hand aide in the meetings at Yalta.

Saturday, February 12^th -- Darwin Day

On this day in 1809, both Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born. Since Lincoln's birthday is now vaguely remembered under the rubric of "Presidents Day," it's really now only Darwin's birthday that remains.

Presidents Day -- does that also include Bill Clinton? For this is his great day, when the Senate voted to acquit him in his impeachment trial. That's right, today in 1999, admitted perjurer Bill Clinton, who lied in order to keep one of the women he harassed from prevailing in her lawsuit, was declared by the Senate to be worthy to continue as President. So it's official. Lying under oath to gain advantage in a court proceeding doesn't disqualify you to be President.

It is hard to underestimate the importance of Darwin's theories on evolution to biological science. While the fact of evolution was already obvious and widely talked about, what Darwin offered was a mechanism to explain evolution in ways that could be examined scientifically.

It is unfortunate that in the turmoil of the argument between biblical purists and Darwinists, somebody misplaced the real issue: Science can't use religious doctrines in its exploration of the material world. Religion and faith simply cannot be addressed by the scientific tool set. Darwin provided a means of looking at biological mechanisms that continues to be productive today. The facts of genetic relatedness among and between species are simply indisputable.

Yet the "creation war" continues -- needlessly -- because of fanatical puritanism on both sides. Neither extreme is willing to admit that there is a vast middle ground where the real science goes on; instead, each wants to force the other side into silence.

Silence is the enemy of both science and religion -- to try to silence the other side, or deceive people about their arguments, is to admit the poverty of your own beliefs.

Neither team is willing to trust that intelligent people who examine the evidence and arguments will reach rational, useful conclusions. Nothing in Darwin's theory forbids faith in a divine purpose for creation -- indeed, issues of "purpose" are simply outside the realm of scientific examination. Meanwhile, Darwin's theory should be no more immune to questioning than the theories of Newton, Copernicus, or Einstein, and serious questions about the adequacy of Darwin's theory are no threat to science, only to the dogmas of those who have turned Darwinism into a religion.

Darwin's theories don't explain everything in the fossil record; those inadequacies don't mean that Creationism or Intelligent Design are right, they merely mean that we need to devise and test variations, alterations, and augmentations in the theory. That process will open doors to new understanding; and that's the business of science, to open doors, not lock them.

Right now, fanatical atheists cling to Darwin the way medieval "scientists" clung to Ptolemaic astronomy. As various corners of Darwin's theory start to look like "epicycles," it's time to improve the model, and the serious scientists are doing that. But the fanatics are using all the tools of repression to keep any such questions from being asked.

Why don't they recognize that America's schoolchildren and college students, once they get all the evidence, are perfectly capable of reaching intelligent decisions. It's only when people hold a theory to be immutable and unquestionable that science freezes up and dies.

Science is over until there comes a thaw so that people can say whatever they want and the worst thing that happens to them is being publicly embarrassed by the superiority of someone else's evidence and reasoning.

Wyoming Territory gave women the vote in 1869, and carried the policy forward into statehood. Neighboring Utah Territory became the second to give women the vote on this day in 1870, but Congress, in the Edmunds-Tucker antipolygamy act of 1887, repealed woman suffrage in Utah Territory. Women didn't get the vote again in Utah until statehood in 1896, when Utah's constitution was approved with woman suffrage included. By then Wyoming and Colorado had already become states -- with woman suffrage. Utah became the third state where women could vote.

Sunday, February 13^th -- Magazine Day

The first magazine in America was published on this day in 1741. Andrew Bradford published The American Magazine just three days ahead of Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine. Magazines (as opposed to newspapers) were still quite a new idea -- the first magazine in England, The Gentleman's Magazine, had been launched only ten years before.

The word magazine meant "storehouse," and it continued to have that meaning in military usage, where a "powder magazine" held explosives in one place, where it could be protected, not just from theft, but from accidental detonation. But at the time printed magazines were introduced, the word magazine was much more general. The idea was that each issue of a magazine was a storehouse of valuable knowledge and ideas.

Cheaper than a book, but meant to have more lasting value than newspapers, magazines continue to be valuable and profitable; the Internet is causing magazines less harm than newspapers (or, conversely, we might say that Internet magazines are much less successful at winning public attention than Internet news sources are).

The strength of magazines comes from several sources: First, they can provide in-depth information in a form briefer, cheaper, and more timely than books; second, magazines can gain the trust of readers by establishing a reputation for accuracy and reliability. There's also a matter of style -- some magazines thrive on being deliberately stodgy, others on being hip or cool, some on being outrageous, others on giving a feeling of safety and familiarity.

The 53^rd annual Grammy Awards are held tonight. Since most of the music is designed to repel people like me (i.e., old, and experienced with great music of the past), I will honor the success of contemporary pop music by spending not a single moment watching the awards show or caring who wins.

American artist Grant Wood was born on this day in 1892. He brought an exaggerated realism to the canvas; his depictions of rounded hilltops and schematic plantings captured the spirit of the American landscape, while his portraits captured the grim expressions of old-time photographs in paintings with a faintly cartoonish style.

His American Gothic, picturing a pitchfork-holding farmer beside his sister in front of their farmhouse, is second only to the Mona Lisa in the number of parodies that have depended on its being an image completely familiar to the general public. But my favorites of his work are "Stone City, Iowa," "Fall Plowing," "The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover," "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere," "Daughters of Revolution," "Arbor Day," "Death on Ridge Road," and the lush "Haying."

To me, Grant Wood is the quintessential American painter the way Aaron Copland is the quintessential American composer. Both of them show, in their work, an understanding of American dreams and ideals as well as a longing for a better fulfilment of those ideals than we have yet achieved. Thus both were creators of new idioms and the American people immediately recognized and embraced, even as they also satirized the flaws in American life and pointed to a better way. One can disagree with their particular ideas, but not with their talent or the magnitude of their achievement.

You can see a gallery of Grant Wood's work at http://sn.im/grantwoodgallery . (Full URL: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma98/haven/wood/gallery4.html )

Monday, February 14^th --Ferris Wheel Day

OK, yes, right, it's Valentine's Day, and if you're married to or in a relationship with someone, or would like to be, this is the day and you ignore it at your peril. The most important rule is: Never break up with somebody on Valentine's Day.

This is not so that you can avoid being alone on Valentine's. No, it's so that you don't poison someone else's life by forever associating the "day of love" with heartbreak, disappointment, or betrayal. Even if you're only coasting on the fumes of love, Valentine's Day needs to be an occasion where someone you love (or once loved) is treated gently and tenderly. If you can't bring that off, you aren't ready for real love.

Civil engineer George Ferris was born on this day in 1859. He built a lot of practical and beautiful things, but what we remember him for is the 250-foot diameter vertical wheel he built for the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago, Illinois, in 1893. The wheel lifted up 36 coaches, each holding 40 passengers, to exhilarating heights and then brought the riders down again with a bit of a thrill.

It was America's answer to the Eiffel Tower in the Paris International Exposition of 1889. The French achievement became a monument -- it's still standing. But the American Ferris Wheel actually did something instead of just standing there -- and while the original is gone, a thousand imitations have whisked millions of people up and down effortlessly for 117 years.

President James Polk became the first U.S. President to be photographed while in office on this day in 1849.

Now we can hardly avoid seeing the image of our President, which is fine when we like the dude, but not so cool when we loathe him. It was to avoid seeing Bill Clinton's smarmy, simpering, smug face that I stopped watching television news in 1992.

What I need is a bit of software that automatically replaces the face of politicians and other celebrities that I find disgusting with some more neutral face -- like, for instance, the farmer from Grant Wood's "American Gothic," or Elizabeth Taylor in her Cleopatra makeup, or Shirley Temple with her "Good Ship Lollipop" smile.

Picture someone you're sick of in the news or on TV with one of those faces pasted on and suddenly the news is more fun to watch, don't you think? David Letterman with Red Skelton's face. Joe Biden with the face of Johnny Depp from Pirates of the Caribbean. Lady Gaga with the face of Susan B. Anthony. Oh, the pleasure it would give me!

Or -- and maybe I like this better -- replace everybody's faces with Lego heads.

I'll buy the television or tuner that offers this feature.

Tuesday, February 15^th -- Galileo Day

American composer and songwriter Harold Arlen was born on this day in 1905. He wrote "Over the Rainbow" for The Wizard of Oz, along with such classics as "That Old Black Magic," "Stormy Weather," "Down with Love," "Get Happy," and "Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home."

Noted American feminist Susan B. Anthony was born on this day in 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts. Here are a few quotations from her:

"Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less."

"The women of this nation in 1876 have greater cause for discontent, rebellion, and revolution than the men of 1776."

"Bicycling has done more to emancipate women than any one thing in the world. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat; and away she goes, the picture of untrammelled womanhood."

"Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these."

"I have worked 40 years to make the Woman Suffrage platform broad enough for Atheists and Agnostics to stand upon, and now if need be I will fight the next 40 to keep it Catholic enough to permit the straightest Orthodox religionist to speak or pray and count her beads upon."

(If only this last quote had anything to do with today's "feminism," I would still be a feminist.)

Transformative physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei was born on this day in 1564. Galileo proved that all bodies, large and small, fall at equal speed, and gathered evidence to support Copernicus's theory that Earth and other planets revolve around the sun. Wisely, he recanted his astronomical declarations in order to be spared the punishment of the Inquisition; after all, when something is simply true, what you say about it doesn't change the facts. You don't have to die for science, you just have to wait.

Wednesday, February 16^th -- Dummy Day

Ventriloquist Edgar Bergen was born on this day in 1903. Besides fathering actress Candace Bergen, he created the voices of characters like Charlie McCarthy, Mortimer Snerd, and Effie Klinker. However, it's worth noting that he created these characters (though not his daughter) on radio, which allowed him to conceal the fact that his lips moved constantly when he was providing voices for his dummies.

Of course, we no longer call them "dummies." They are "vocally substituted nonmetabolizing persons." And ventriloquists are now called "oral assistants."

The tomb of King Tutankhamen, which had been discovered in 1922, was opened on this day in 1923. Outer chambers of the tomb had long before been stripped of their valuables, like almost all the tombs of Egypt, either by looters in ancient times or Egyptologists after Europeans arrived to give looting a good name. But Egyptology was actually a science by the time "King Tut's" tomb was opened, so instead of being sold on the open market, the contents were put on display. I'm not sure this was the afterlife that the Egyptian Book of the Dead had promised Tutankhamen, but so far he hasn't complained.

Fidel Castro became the leader of Cuba on this day in 1959, after having ousted corrupt dictator Fulgencio Batista. Largely subsidized by Russia for many years, Castro's repressive Communist government nevertheless bettered the lives of the common people in many ways. However, a large number of Cubans have decided they value freedom more than government health care and fled to the United States at risk of life and limb. Some people just aren't grateful for the gifts that their all-controlling government gives them ...

The country's first 911 emergency-response phone system went into service in Haleyville, Alabama, on this day in 1968.

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