Vine Eaten Tomatoes

For the past few summers we have planted a few things in the sunny spot in our back yard. I do tomatoes and Marc does pepper plants. We have learned to encase our 4' x 6' plot in deer proof netting. I have also installed a foot or so of chicken wire to keep out the rabbits. But I still get burrowing animals, especially when the tomatoes are about to ripen. I've seen squirrels stuck in there and I've seen chipmunks come and go as they please through their tunnels. As a result, we have vine eaten tomatoes!

Butterflies and Caterpillars

An exquisite hairstreak butterfly. It is about 1 cm long and actually stood still on the sunflower leaf long enough to be photographed. If you click on the picture, you can get a closer look.








I kept a pair of these, gave them a green tomato which one devoured while the other formed a chrysalis. Then I waited for them to emerge.
Only one did. I have the pictures but they made a mess while eating, the picture is yucky.





This is called a tomato hornworm caterpillar.
I think the white spikes are parasites, they sure look like it and I've only seen this caterpillar with them. Maybe they are the horns. But they aren't on the other pictures I've seen of hornworms http://insects.tamu.edu/fieldguide/cimg308.html. I don't believe this guy eats anything but leaves. They are too big and juicy for me to capture and watch develop into a moth. See the link above for the outcome of that. If it were to morph into a creature of beauty I probably would have tried.

Tuesday Sept. 23, 2008 Its the economy still

Last night the political pundit that I watched on TV (I usually don't watch TV in the evening),
felt as I did, though he was more expansive about the risks of giving sweeping powers to the Secretary of the Treasury. As I was driving home and hearing that Paulson was calling on Congress to move quickly, I felt very uneasy. I was talking to the radio. It is probably true, that the economy is collapsing very rapidly, but moving quickly on the government's purchasing flaky and flimsy financial products? Why should the American people be as stupid and reckless as everyone in investment banking? When I got home, I learned that Marc had called his Congressmen, and he hadn't done that since the Viet Nam war, he noted.

Then there was commentary about how the situation was difficult for McCain and Obama. They are both Senators, by the way. They have a job to do and we will be able to watch them. All they have to do is their job, that will tell us a lot.

Some opinions:
Congress shouldn't go home at the end of the week.

Everyone in investment banking should go out into the homes of mortgage owners who are facing foreclosure and they should renegotiate their mortgages with them face-to-face....with their own resources.

Investment Banking, the economy and you and me.

I can't start the week without commenting on the events in the news. While Houston Texas, the 4th largest city in the U.S. is significantly without power and spent the week cleaning up from hurricane Ike, the largest investment banking firms in the world (I think) were being bailed out by us, the U.S. taxpayers. I continually ask myself if and how this will propagate down to every day people. Is this a calamitous event that will bring food shortages, massive job losses and an overall decline to our standard of living? It is hard to follow what is going on. There was mention of a plan by the Secretary of Treasury in Saturday's NYTimes and then a lead article about it on Sunday. But it took me all morning and most of the day to realize that another big government bail out was being proposed to Congress by Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson. It is 100 times larger than previous ones, a 700 billion dollar bailout! What alarms me is that the plan comes with giving the Secretary of Treasury sweeping powers. I don't know what those sweeping powers are, but I don't like the sounds of it, what about the concept of balance of powers.

Meanwhile, on Saturday, after inviting people for dinner, Marc and I went for a hike to Sugar Loaf Mountain. There is a winery at the base of the hill (it is all of 1200 ft, so its hardly a mountain) and we stopped in for a glass of wine. I looked around and we were really being decadent. It was a clear, crisp fall day, we were sitting under umbrellas, there were beautiful people with dogs and families. No one had a worried look on their face, least of all the retired Washington lawyer, now proprietor of the vineyard. Marc enjoyed his glass of cabernet, mine was a merlot. I asked Marc if he wanted to buy a bottle of the Cab, he shook his head, no. I mentioned that the Merlot was really great and that I'd like to have a bottle. We waited in line, and discussed whether we were going to get one or two bottles. Then we looked at the chalk board and saw that cases of Cab and Chardonnay were on sale. Before we knew it we were talking about a case. If we were to get a case, we would have to put it up for 3-4 years. Marc agreed and said we'd drink it in September, 2011. He asked about the Cab and I said that I preferred the Merlot. So we walked out of there with a $200 case of wine. On our way to the parking lot, I asked Marc what we usually pay for a case of wine. He said, about $100. That's the McFadden-Allen's being decadent.

Does this ever happen to you? After lounging around and enjoying breakfast and the newspaper, it comes time to decide what to do for the luxurious weekend day, the day that is all yours. After a little thought, the optional to do list is made and even prioritized. O.K. I'm going to do one task that is work related and get it out of the way. I'll feel good about myself and then we can go on to do some household chores. Then the day will be free for complete recreational activities.
So I set about my task, which involves setting up my work computer. On the way, I stop at the washing machine and start a load of weekly laundry. O.K. to my desk. But I have to clear off a space, and I pick up the MIT alumni journal and notice a student I know, so I have to read about her. I should drop her a line and tell her what a good picture it is. Back to setting up my computer, but I am thirsty so I go down stairs for a glass of water, and notice that I didn't put the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher. I put in a few and then took myself back upstairs to my office. Now I will get down to work. Plugging in my work computer. But first, I decided I had to blog about this. Isn't this what happens in meditation? It is just task meditation.

Unwritten book reviews

Ghengis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford, Three Rivers Press, 2004. A readable history about a part of the world that was never mentioned in my school years, and I'm learning also not mentioned in the school years of many other educated people in my cohort.

Kristin Lavransdatter 1: The Wreath by Sigrid Undset, Penguin books, originally published in Norwegian, 1920. Basically a romance novel set in the 13th century.

Mothers of Invention by Drew Gilpin Faust. A history of women and the changes that the Civil War imposed on the life of women. Interesting perspectives on the lives of southern women in the upper classes.

Founding Mothers, Cokie Roberts, 2005. About the women in the lives of our founding fathers. I'll have things to say about this if I have the guts to put it in writing.

Rosetta's Asteroid Steins Flyby

The European Space Agency has a spacecraft heading to orbit a comet a number of years off. On their way, they are flying by an asteroid named Steins. I am interested in this asteroid because it is a type that has never been studied up close, and it will tell us something about the early Solar System. The spacecraft had only a few minutes to collect data as it flew by at 8.6 km/s, that is almost 20,000 m/hr.

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMNMYO4KKF_index_0.html contains their press report and first images.

We have established a consortium of scientists to study the meteorites that are most similar to Steins. We will study these meteorites, called aubrites, in the laboratory to look for similarities between the asteroid and the meteorite and thus expand our knowledge of the properties of the asteroid. If we can show links between asteroid Steins and the aubrites, which are iron-free meteorites that formed in highly reduced (hydrogen-rich) reservoirs, we can extend our knowledge of the E-type asteroids of which Steins is an example. I know this doesn't make much sense so I will continue to work on expressing myself......later. Take a look at the link above.

I found a preparatory short quicktime piece giving a bit of background on the flyby that
I might ask my students to comment on. Is it accurate? How might you modify it to make it scientifically more accurate both visually and by way of the commentary? see the quicktime movie.

Between Conventions

I haven't been this excited about a presidential election since I walked through the streets of the Republican dominated town of New Canaan, Connecticut in 1964 carrying Lyndon Johnson placards and chanting "Lyndon, Lyndon" as a twelve year old. His running mate was also an Arizona Senator, Barry Goldwater. I'm not sure why I was so hyped up about Lyndon Johnson, but it was fun marching with a few of my friends and exercising my right to protest against the status quo both at home and in my home town.

I'm now making my way through David Leonhardt's article on Obamanomics from last week's NYTimes magazine just to be sure that I still think about the candidate and vote with my head and not my excitement over the fact that the government might make an historic move reflecting the many changes in this country. The thought that the election of McCain and Palin would also reflect the changes in our country, is scarey.
I'm looking forward to comparing and contrasting next week's Republican convention with last week's historic Democratic one.
I saw a bumper sticker that read, "Scientists for Obama", and I almost followed it to find out where it came from. Maybe I'll calm down and get back to the work of science.