Item #1

Taught my first statistics class today.  I had prepared examples of sampling the class to make generalizations about the university population as a whole.  Specifcally, I’d intended to use the class’s sex ratio as an estimator of the sex ratio for the entire campus population.  Then I walked into class… and found a room filled with 120 students, about 6 of whom were men.  Hey, I’m not complaining, but how does one get an almost all-female statistics class?  Weird.

Item #2

Remember this?  And its follow-up?  Weird things seem to happen to me at night.  Two nights ago, I went to bed at 4:AM (as is my wont) and woke up at 9:AM.  I live in a tiny, spotless condo, and I hate and avoid clutter.  So you’ll imagine my surprise when I woke up to find a mysterious object lying on my living room floor.  It was most definitely not there when I went to bed:

The next night, I went to sleep at 5:AM and woke up again at 9:AM. This time, I was greeted with a strange red line on my floor:

(The quarter was added for scale.)

So what’s happening?  Well, after 30 minutes of scratching my head, I figured out that the weird object was in fact part of a clock that had silently exploded overnight.  Mind you, why a clock would just explode is another mystery.

No clue yet about what that red line means.

I’ll let you know in the morning what the aliens do to me tonight.

Item #3

In today’s class, I talked about the revolution of statistics.  About 200-300 years ago, the modern science of statistics was born.  In the subsequent centuries, the science matured very fast indeed.  Since the 1950s, with the advent of computers, a veritable new revolution has occurred, with mass computations and the evolution of subtle new techniques.

And that got me thinking about other revolutions.  So I ended up congitating on the evolution and revolution of the martial arts.

Quite a segue, no?

As has been well established, I’m a huge MMA (mixed martial arts) fan.  For those not in the know, MMA arose only about 2 decades ago, with the rise of the UFC as a going concern.  The UFC was itself created by Brazil’s Gracie family as a showcase for their style of Jiujitsu (now called Brazilian Jiujitsu, or BJJ), showing how it can be used to defeat any other style of unarmed combat, in a no-rules tournament format.  What the Gracies did not anticipate was that they would inadvertently create a whole new sport, and possibly even a whole new martial art.

The history of what we consider to be the martial arts goes back many centuries.  Legend has it that the Buddhist Indian monk Bodhidharma was the first to combine spiritual moving meditation with the physical act of boxing for fitness, and thus created the first Oriental martial art.  Of course, fighting systems have probably existed literally for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years.

The modern arts evolved as Bodhidharma’s teachings spread from India to China, then to Korea and Japan, and eventually to Europe and the Americas.  At the same time, in parallel, each nation was developing its own indigenous arts; for example, savate in France and Capoeira in Brazil.  Wars spawned masters who had to refine their skills to simply survive.  In those climates, different schools arose to embrace different fighting philosophies and technologies.  The arts splintered into disparate styles.  The most obvious break was between the stand-up striking arts, like karate, and the ground and grappling arts, like judo.

Literally, centuries of refinement passed, which allowed some techniques to be perfected, and others to become arcane and wrapped in obfuscating nonsense.

But since the rise of MMA 20 years ago, the revolution of practicality has transformed the martial arts yet again.  What took centuries to do originally has been recreated in mere decades, a single lifetime.

Some say it began with Mitsuyo Maeda, the so-called “Count Combat”, a Japanese judo expert who made his home in Brazil.  Maeda was among the first to point out the different phases of a fight: the striking phase, the grappling phase, etc.  Most notably, Maeda taught Carlos Gracie, stressing a philosophy of practicality: do what works.  Carlos and his younger brother Helio would go on to found Brazilian Jiujitsu, which became the bedrock of the UFC and thus triggered the revolution of MMA.

But others say it began with none other than Bruce Lee himself.  Lee famously founded Jeet Kune Do, “the way of the intercepting fist”, which was an expression of his interpretation of the writings of Krishnamurti and others through combat.  Lee always insisted that JKD was not a martial art, but a fighting system.  Its philosophy was simply to do what worked, what ended the fight the fastest, and what maximized your own body’s abilities.

This was a philosophical revolution in the martial arts.  It essentially stated that one should ignore centuries of dogma and embrace modern training techniques, the lessons of competing arts, and to embrace most fully those techniques best suited to one’s personal situation.  JKD was the first organized attempt to bring together the best of karate, kung-fu, jiujitsu, American boxing, wrestling, etc., into one combat system.

This approach seems obvious to us today, but at the time –the early 1970s– it was both revolutionary and heretical.  The masters of the status quo were quite offended by it.  Indeed, even in my own youth, my first masters would be violently offended if I introduced a technique I had picked up in the gym or from sparring with practitioners of other arts.

JKD is convincingly the precursor to MMA, and as thus represents a dramatic paradigm shift in the way we view the martial arts.  The rate at which its refinement has occurred these past 20 years has been simply phenomenal.  Today’s fighters are generations beyond those who fought in the first UFC tournament.  It’s sort of frightening to consider what amazing skills sets await us fans in just 2 or 3 years.

Today the Space Shuttle Atlantis completed its final mission.  There will be no more US shuttle missions.  It’s worth noting that most of my hardcore space friends did not bother to watch the landing live on TV, and neither did I.  That’s where we are.

See, I actually remember watching Apollo launches.  They were big deals.  They’re why I even once applied to be an astronaut! As a kid, I re-read that one issue of National Geographic about Skylab perhaps a hundred times.  I got up early to watch the very first shuttle launch –the Columbia– on April 12, 1981.  It was crewed by John Young, a veteran of the moonwalks, and Robert Crippen on his very first mission.  It makes me feel old that Crippen is now retired and Young is 80.

That first launch was such a media circus.  It was uncertain whether some of the re-entry tiles had been sloughed off during launch, so the military had to reveal that they had telescopes powerful enough to inspect the shuttle’s underside from Earth.  It was a bit of a minor sensation.

What burns hottest in my memory is a version of Willie Nelson’s “On The Road Again”, renamed “Columbia”.  They played it ad nauseam and it is now more familiar to me than the original.

I also remember, prior to the shuttle era, administrators harping on about how they hoped the shuttle would make space travel routine.  As a kid, I found this prospect quite exciting.  However, I hope you can see the problem.  NASA sort of succeeded.  And in that success, they lost the public imagination.  When something becomes routine, it becomes easier to cut its budget ’cause no one’s going to notice.

The end of US manned space travel is indicative of so many things.  I hardly know where to begin.  I’ve written about the affordability of manned space travel quite often in this space, most recently here, and with respect to unmanned missions here.    But on a geopolitical level, America’s decision to rely upon other countries to ferry her Astronauts to orbit and beyond reflects a nation resigned to its role as a declining empire.

It’s also indicative of a strange set of priorities.  Could the money be better spent on social programs?  Of course.  But the cost is equivalent to a few aircraft carriers.  Why not curtail military spending to sustain a world class space program that employs hundreds of thousands, assures American presence at the forefront of materials and space science, invests in a score of spin-off technologies and therefore industries, and whose product is peace, not death?

With the cancellation of the Crew Exploration Vehicle, also called the Orion, America (and thus its associated agencies, including the Canadian Space Agency) intends to rely on Russian and, eventually, private launches.

The other geopolitical element here is that both China and India are frantically developing space programs.  Both intend on being on the Moon by 2020, and China has already put men into space.

Are any of you still in doubt about the power shift to Asia?  One day, Neil Armstrong’s landing site might be a curious museum in the middle of a sprawling Chinese lunar colony.  Given China’s penchant for longterm policy planning, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Greetings from Vienna, where I just visited the Esperanto Museum.  Know what I learned there?  Well, I learned a little about this guy, a Flemish physician and scientist named Jan Baptiste van Helmont (whom the Austrians call “Johann”).

Johann is our Obscure Historical Figure of the Day.  You’ll recall our first installment of this service was Edmond Albius.

Johann’s incredible contribution to history was his invention, in 1652, of the word “gas”.  In a book written in Latin, he described the vaporous state of matter this way: “Hence I name this spirit, unknown till now, with the new word gas.”

“Gas” has become the standard term for that state of matter in almost every human language.  It also now refers to fuel and to that bloated, post-meal feeling, characterized by stinkiness down under.

What is less known is that Johann intended for two distinct but related words to enter the canon.  “Gas” was to be partnered with “blas”.

“Blas” was a theorized cosmic substance that Johann thought might influence the thoughts and actions of men.  Clearly, “blas” never took hold.

Now don’t you feel all warm, fuzzy and educated?

I leave you with this:

It’s 4:30AM and I’m re-watching my favourite rock documentary, Julien Temple’s The Filth and the Fury, about the rise and fall of the Sex Pistols.  It got me feeling uncharacteristically nostalgic about the 70s, a decade whose entirety I lived through, but of which I have only sporadic memories, at least of its early years.

Now, it’s not the first time I’ve found myself thinking of the 70s.  Remember this?

Some of you young’uns may get a kick out of the following instrumental by Syrinx called “Tillicum”, because it was the theme of a late 60s CBC series called Here Come The Seventies.  I’ve been trying to find episodes of that show online, but so far to no avail.

But what I find really interesting right now –in my sleep deprived state– is that I have two competing iconic musical memories of the 70s presently in my head, and they are both sooo different. The first is the New York Dolls (who pre-dated punk) from the early 70s. Here they are doing “Jet Boy“:

And the second is by Blondie, from 1979:

Okay, bed beckons…

Edmond Albius (image from Wikipedia)

I’m adding a new feature on this site: obscure historical figures of the day!

Today’s Obscure Historical Figure is Edmond Albius who, as a 12 year old African slave, developed a process for hand-pollinating the vanilla plant, thus breaking the Mexican monopoly on the spice and transforming the world’s economy.

In Other News…

As I posted on Facebook today, Tits are Bouncing Back! This gives me the excuse to post the following animated GIF of bouncing tits:

Bouncing Tits

In Other Other News…

I’m getting tired of crotchety old commentators criticizing the fashion choices of tribal peoples.  I’m talking about choices like this dude’s:

Yeah, it might look weird to us.  But you know what else looks weird?  This chick:

Here name is Priscilla Caputo and she is one of many North Americans addicted to plastic surgery. And she used to look like this:

Priscilla Caputo

So there’s plenty of weirdness to go about, people.

This Sunday will mark the 43rd anniversary of the death of one of my heroes –one of the bravest men of the 20th century– Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space.

Here’s a rare pic of Gagarin with Fidel Castro:

In 1968, he was killed at the age of 34 in a mysterious airplane crash, but not before performing a feat so terrifying it would stultify most other people.  Atop a ballistic missile 7 years earlier, he had been hurtled into Earth orbit, an environment whose hostility and survivability had been a total unknown at the time.  He never lived to see men walk on the moon, a mere 8 years after he pioneered our entry into outer space.

What few realize is that the USA was only months away from putting their own man in space (he ended up being Alan Shepard Jr) and were shocked to have been scooped by the USSR.  But it’s important to note that the Americans were, at that point, unable to put a man into orbit; Shepard’s flight had been suborbital, straight up and down.  Gagarin, on the other hand, soared around the world in awe and astonishment.

To their credit, and near the height of the Cold War space race, NASA presented the Soviets with a plaque commemorating Gagarin’s feat:

Mind you, there was never a video taken of Gagarin’s historic flight.  We don’t know what he saw.  Until know.  The crew of the International Space Station will recreate Gagarin’s trajectory to create a Youtube clip for all the world to experience.  Linger on this magnificent photo of an astronaut observing the Earth through the ISS’s window:

Much of the world, dominated as it is by American media, has forgotten Yuri Gagarin.  Every year I ask my students who the fellow on my T-shirt is, and few (if any) ever know, even though his name is emblazoned in large type below his head (not visible in the following photo):

I think it’s about time someone made a feature film about the first flight of Yuri Gagarin, one of the bravest men of the 20th century.

Our excellent office administrator shared the following list of sobriquets for famous revolutions.  I thought you’d enjoy them, too.  And she’s Francophone, which is why the list is in French:

-      Révolution orange – Ukraine 2004

-      Révolution des roses – Géorgie 2003

-      Révolution des œillets – Portugal 1974

-      Révolution velours ou révolution douce – Tchécoslovaquie 1989

-      Révolution des tulipes – Kirghizstan 2005

-      Révolution des cèdres – Liban 2005

-      Révolution bleue – Koweït 2005

-      Révolution glorieuse – Angleterre 1688-1689

-      Révolution du jasmin – Tunisie 2011

-      Révolution du papyrus – Égypte 2011

Interesting, no?

Meanwhile, my sister sent me the following graphs, clearly stolen from GraphJam.com, which describe all aspects of our lives:

Yes, Dick Tater is my new porn name.  It has replaced “David Cop-a-Feel”.  Of course, once you choose a porn name, you must also have an image to go with it.  I choose this one:

I posted this on Facebook and got the regular comments.  Dr Barry W from down south, however, upped the ante with this limerick:

“There was a potato named Ray

Who was shaped in a specific way

If you gave him a prick

In his tater-shaped dick

You could bake him in less than a day.”

You’re welcome, Barry.

In Other News…

As history continues to be made in Egypt today, looting has spread to the Cairo museum.  Soldiers were sent in to protect the antiquities.  Al Jazeera had interesting video of kitted soldiers patrolling the museum, surrounded by sarcophagi and mummies et al, but sadly I can’t find an image to post here.  See, it looks so much like a scene out of Stargate!

Clyde Tombaugh, circa 1930

As we are all now aware, the former 9th planet in the system of Sol, Pluto, has been demoted to “dwarf planet” or large Kuiper belt object.  Pluto was discovered by a jovial and very young astronomer in 1930, named Clyde Tombaugh, using an exhausting tecnique of visually appraising telescope plates for minute and almost imperceptible changes upon serial exposures.

Only the truly geeky amongst you will also be aware that in 2006 NASA launched a spacecraft called “New Horizons“, which is scheduled for a rendezvous with Pluto in the summer of 2015.  This is a terribly exciting mission for a number of reasons.  First, it will be the first time we’ve ever had any sort of reliable visual image of Pluto.  Even with the Hubble space telescope, Pluto appears as a blurry mess of pixels.  Who knows what it really looks like?

Second, this will be our first view of the mysterious Kuiper belt, this vast stretch of matter at the outskirts of the solar system which may nonetheless be the source of the organic materials from which all life on Earth was formed.

And third, the New Horizons spacecraft contains a special cargo: the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, who died in the late 90s, mercifully before his discovery was demoted.  It’s not the first time human remains have ended up in space. Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, was among the first to have his remains blasted into orbit, in something now called “space burial“.  And one of the discoverers of the Shoemaker-Levy comet, Eugene Shoemaker, actually has his ashes scattered on the surface of the Moon!  It was dropped by the Lunar Prospector probe in 1999.

Tombaugh’s burial, though, really is a remarkable thought.  What would he have thought if we had told his 23 year old self in 1930 that this impossibly distant, almost theoretical “planet” that he had just discovered would one day be the location of his mortal remains?  What a heady idea.

Actually, New Horizons will not be dropping Tombaugh’s remains on Pluto.  Instead, it will keep them as the probe swings out to penetrate the Oort cloud and, eventually, emerge into interstellar space.  So Clyde Tombaugh will be the first human being to have an aspect of his physical body transported to the stars.

It will be thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years before the probe ever gets anywhere near another solar system, though.  By then, humanity may be long extinct.  But imagine for a second if an advanced alien technology finds the probe in the very distant future.  Maybe they have a way of extracting long destroyed genetic material from cremated ashes.  And maybe they can reconstitute a whole person from this material.

Clyde Tombaugh will then be the real Buck Rogers: born in 1907, yet the last surviving human being, living hundreds of thousands of years in the future with space aliens light years away.  Interestingly, Tombaugh was a lifelong UFO buff, and while alive was one of the most prominent astronomers to have publicly claimed to have seen UFOs.

If indeed he ends up being humanity’s sole representative in the galactic commons, from what I’ve read about the man, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer fellow.

I don’t like getting older, but I do appreciate having lived in, now, six decades (whew!) including the historic moments of both 1960s and 1970s.  Yes, I was a toddler in the 60s, but I have very vivid memories of the early 70s, as early as 1971.  And one of the advantages of being the youngest of many children is that I was rarely exposed to childish things and often to adult things, even as a very young child.

I remember, for example, the Watergate hearings, though I was 5 or 6 at the time.  Mind you, my recollection of Watergate is that it was a bad TV show.  But the memories are nonetheless vivid.

Similarly, I recall quite clearly the immediate fallout of the Beatles having broken up, and the full expectation that they would be reuniting any day.  And, of course, I remember the space race.

We didn’t have a TV set in the early 70s, so my memories of watching the Apollo launches are situated in a series of relatives’ homes.  It was a strange and exciting time for space exploration.  Everyone expected the first mission to Mars to be scheduled for sometime in the 1980s.  By the mid-70s, moon missions had become so common that most people just assumed that there was already a moon base, and that both Soviet cosmonauts and American astronauts were all over the moon, all the time.  This misconception was fueled by TV shows like The Six Million Dollar Man, which featured episodes such as one in which Steve Austin travels to the moon twice, and the asteroid belt once, in a single day.

My love of space exploration is well documented.  I once applied to be an astronaut, after all.  And on the 40th anniversary of the first moonwalk, this blog post became a feature article in a California magazine.  And people always disappoint me by not knowing who the man on my T-shirt is:

Why do I bring all this up?  Because right now I’m watching a documentary made in 1969 during the Apollo 11 mission.  It was finally released in 1972 and is called Moonwalk One.  The tone, feel and sound of the documentary capture well the sentiment of the time.  Space travel back then was literally otherworldly and mystical.  Today, a comparable documentary would be chock full of computer animation, lots of wide-eyed children looking into the sky, and other Disney-esque nonsense. Moonwalk One shows the conquest of the moon as a serious adult affair that was truly the culmination of 2500 years of human ambition.

If you haven’t seen it, and that era in history interests you, I heartily recommend it.  I just can’t believe that it all happened over 40 years ago.

In Other News

Took a walk on the frozen canal today.  Took this picture of the base of the Pretoria bridge:

Let’s zoom in on that weird sign:

What the frack is that supposed to mean?  No sine waves allowed?