… I’m the cat in the hat.

While on vacation in Los Angeles, I received an exciting email from Microsoft informing me that I have been given the 2010 MVP award in Client App Dev.

This is an immense honor and a remarkable vote of confidence from Microsoft which I hope to live up to in the coming year.  Hats off to the members of the Atlanta developer community, my local DE Glen Gordon, friends I have met at conferences and Magenic employees past and present who have challenged and encouraged me to always work towards being a better developer.  Of course, great thanks to my wife for her indulgence and patience those many times I have stayed up all night working through the latest MSDN tutorial, polishing a technology presentation or answering Microsoft forum questions.  I couldn’t have done it without you.

For me, a four day weekend around Thanksgiving is a great opportunity to catch up on work.  On reflection, however, it makes me think that a third section could rewardingly be added to Rousseau’s Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité about our further fall from the mythical natural state and the gentle yokes we place upon ourselves for the sake of both society and financial independence.  Trying to find time to further steal time from my family is clearly a perversion of some sort and I don’t know why it isn’t a pretext for revoking spiritual communion in religious faiths which still take the spiritual realm with a degree of seriousness.

Perhaps it was Hegel (but perhaps it was someone else -- Kierkegaard?) who wrote that the churchmen of today walk around as if God is dead.  No longer in an academic milieu, I’ve lost the habit of striving for accuracy in the archeology of knowledge.  All I know is that someone said it (or perhaps not).  The as if is important. While I was a grad student in philosophy (and before I became a grad school drop out) we often spoke about as if metaphysics, which I took to mean the things we were required to believe in order to have confidence in order and purpose in the physical world.  In truth, however, order and purpose are illusions.  The prevailing philosophy of mind of that time – and currently, as far as I can tell, outside of the brilliant work being done by David Chalmers – holds that consciousness itself is merely an illusion.  That movement in philosophy went back in a revisionist archaeology of knowledge to show that even Descartes never took his arguments for the existence and necessity of God seriously, and so – if one follows this alternative argument read between the lines of the Meditations – neither is the problem of other minds ever resolved nor the ego sum affirmed.

We robots who think we are something more, nevertheless, abide.  I’ll throw in a tentative speculation into the archaeology of knowledge here and remind the reader that robot is a Russian derivative meaning “worker”.

Somewhere in the sediments of unconsciousness that make up our neural pathways we all recognize this Archimedean fixed truth of meaninglessness – we feel it in our bones and experience it in our daily lives.  The secret to success is determined by how we pivot on this truth.

When I was occasionally allowed to teach ethics (so far had academia fallen that we no longer even attempted to teach virtue) I felt a small degree of triumph if I could at least get students to the point of defining ethical behavior as the effort to think about the moral implications of what they were doing before they did something wrong.  It meant they had found the pivot.

So how does one pivot around God – Whom we secretly and sometimes openly suspect to be deceased?  Lucretius the first century B.C. Epicurean posited that the world was made up of chance and freely bouncing atoms – is our modern zeitgeist so different? In a world without order – and consequently without rewards for the good or punishment for the wicked (take the CEOs of our financial institutions as examples if you must have one) – hard work, the cornerstone of Lutheran and Calvinist theology – seems rather pointless.  The common lament of the underachiever is that the bullshitter succeeds while the grunt goes another year without a raise or a promotion.

And so that theology must change.  The theology of election – the notion that there are a set number of souls who will go to heaven – morphed in the 19th century into a doctrine that the elect would be known by their worldly success, for they were blessed by God.  But in a world of pure chance, how does an as if theology make sense of this?

The Atlantic Monthly’s most recent issue posits that mega-churches created the recent economic collapse we are currently all living through.  The argument is that “theology of prosperity” encouraged parishioners to over-extend their credit, to buy homes and cars they couldn’t afford while banks were more than glad to help them do so, because such acts of blind faith in future prosperity constituted faith in God’s goodness.  To act foolishly, and bet one’s future on chance, is as close as we can come to true faith.

I find no immediate reason to excoriate the pastors.  In a world in which we act as if God and rational order are dead and chance rules all, this is sound advice.  Furthermore, for those whom chance blesses, it actually brings souls closer to the absolute.  The recipients of this theologically and fiscally dubious advice were typically the poor, the roboti, looking for ways to improve their stations.  Their pastors used this natural desire to bring them closer to the divine.  As a viewer of reality shows and Lifetime bio-pics as well as a proponent of lottery money as a great source of revenue for education, I have no reason to doubt that this is the future toward which we are all headed.  Why work toward success when all we have to do is wait for it.

Being a software programmer, I have very little sense of history.  I have to look at my resume to discover how long I have worked with a particular language, and I have very little idea where these languages came from.  As an industry, programming always looks to future successes and rarely back at past mistakes.

My spouse, on the other hand, has a rich history she maintains a retells, developing a beautiful tapestry of traditions she freely shares with anyone who enters our lives.  She recently gave several talks at my daughter’s elementary school about the Russian Revolution and its aftermath using her own family narrative as a way to make sense of it.  One great-grandmother was a peasant while the other was an aristocrat.  By chance – and some peculiar contrivance – they knew each other in a private girls school where the poor relative envied the wealthy one for her oranges, which were eaten every day in the gardens of the academy.  Then comes a series of confusing events tied together through rare documents and pictures.  The children of the two schoolmates marry -- there are photos.  The revolution comes.  The poor great-grandmother’s husband is taken away to the gulag – evidenced by a single NKVD document signifying his eventual release after three years servitude.  Letters and a death certificate mark the passage of the relatives who join the White Army as they fight -- and flee -- the Red Army across the broken Russian Empire, eventually surrounded and killed.  The Germans invade the area of Ukraine where the family estates are.  The family leaves Ukraine on the promise of work in Germany, only to end up at a labor camp in Auschwitz for Osterlanders.  They escape when the Red Army liberates the camps and executes the Russians they happen to find there.  They end up at a displaced persons camp (their papers now declare them as apatrie) and eventually make their way to New York, then Washington D.C., where a grandmother works for years at the Voice of America’s Russian Bureau but does not live long enough – none of these émigrés do – to see the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Within the fabric of this narrative there are many more stories, of course, few of which can be verified but all of which are colorful.  There are even more stories lost forever because they were so traumatic no one would speak of them.

The story I want to bring to the fore is of how Baba Neela, the peasant great-grandmother, taught the émigrés the traditions of old Russia which they had either forgotten or never had a chance to learn – how to pray in an Orthodox church, how to pray at home, how to throw a party, how to make traditional meals, how to drink one’s tea, how to enjoy life with one’s family and friends.  Also the lessons embedded in these traditions –that personal rewards only come in the afterlife, while material rewards, in a world dominated by chance, are found in the success and happiness of one’s children.

The problem with long weekends is that it gives one too much time to think.  The aftermath of 9/11 was like a condensed long weekend.  Productivity across the country went down as people realized that there were things more important than work or money.  The roads on Sunday were clogged with people returning to church, realizing that it is the fixed point of consolation in an uncertain world.

We quickly overcame that moment of excited introspection, however.  We returned to more standard patterns of as if theology and as if expectations.

Despite that, my own nagging as if expectations from another time are returning over this holiday.  For the past few months I had been trying to figure out how to get my children into soccer leagues and karate classes, since that is what is expected.  But now I’m stuck on another notion which I imagine to be the traditional education of a well-raised child of the last century.  I want each of my three children to learn a language.  I want them each to learn to play a musical instrument.  And I want them each to be well-versed in poetry and classical literature. 

With languages, they will be able to travel from country to country if required by troubled times.  With music, they will always be welcome at a party.  With literature, they will know how to enjoy their lives.  The public schools, I expect, will get them up to speed on science and mathematics.  And so the XBOX has just been turned off while the TV has been silenced.  I have work to do – promised and as yet undelivered --  but I am picking up a book instead – one by Tim Powers in an attempt to reinvent the lives of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley according to his own peculiar vision of the hidden world.

I have just returned from a private conference in northwest Arkansas hosted by Tyson Foods.  The flight to Arkansas was quite eventful – but more about that later.  It was an extremely successful event on the scale of a district level Code Camp.   There were eight tracks with about 50 presentations throughout the day.  Presenters came in from all over – Georgia, Texas, Ohio, Minnesota are the states I remember – and the presentations were uniformly excellent.  There was also a large Microsoft presence at the event – much larger than we get at the usual Code Camp – which simply added to the fun.  There were approximately 250 attendees – all Tyson employees – and almost every session was recorded, so anyone who missed the event can play them back later.

Special congratulations should be given to Devlin Lyles of Tyson for his central role in organizing this conference and promoting it internally.  He was able to make the business case for the conference to his internal management, arguing that bringing a conference in-house would ensure that everyone at Tyson corporate could participate and, furthermore, exposure to sophisticated conversations about technology will raise the level of software development within the corporation.  I wish more companies were this insightful about, first, the need to raise everyone’s game and, second, that there are easy, non-coercive ways to do this.   Congratulations also to Jay Smith, Jeremy Sharp, Rob Tennyson and all the others who put in long hours to make this conference successful.

I was also happy to have the opportunity to get to know some of the other speakers, in particular Jim Holmes, Phil Japikse, Cory Smith, Tim Rayburn, Robert Boedigheimer, Chris Patterson, Seyed Hashimi, Betty Leudke and Tom Sanchez.

I gave three talks at the TDC: Architecting WPF for Versatility, Intro to WPF, and Advanced C#.  The last talk was mostly code, so I have only attached the slide decks for the first two.

As I said, the flight to the conference was eventful.  I met up with Phil Japikse and Jim Holmes at the airport, recognizing Phil from his MVP profile picture (there aren’t that many MS MVPs with shaved heads and handlebar moustaches).  Our flight kept getting delayed and moved from gate to gate, and we kept emailing Devlin to let him know that we were not confident we would make the speaker dinner.

We finally embarked onto one of the smallest commercial planes I have ever had the pleasure of flying in.  There was one stewardess and one pilot and before we knew it we were off.  About half-way between Atlanta and Northwest Arkansas our stewardess came to the front of the plane and asked – I never thought I would ever hear these words -- “Is there a doctor on the plane?”  It was cliché but effective in getting everyone’s attention.

As if going down a well-rehearsed list, she then asked if there was a nurse on the plane.  Finally, she asked if there was an EMT on the plane and Phil raised his hand.  Two seats behind me, a passenger was having some chest pain.  Over the course of the flight, this passenger proceeded to pass out twice and projectile vomit once.  That familiar smell was with us over most of Arkansas.  Phil had a commanding presence and immediately recruited Jim to be his assistant.  Jim, in turn, helped to calm the other passengers and simply did a great job keeping his head through the emergency (at the conference he presented a session on Leadership which I am glad to hear was very well attended).  As Phil became aware of the seriousness of the troubled passenger’s condition, he told the stewardess to tell the pilot to land the plane immediately and have an ambulance meet us.  We were close enough to our destination that we simply sped up and quickly dropped our altitude (it took hours for my ears to finally adjust after that) and I don’t think I’ve ever landed and been taxied to the airport gate so quickly.

I already knew that Jim and Phil were impressive software people who can quickly debug and deploy applications during software emergencies.  I was quite pleased and impressed to find out that their skills translate so well to emergency situations in the real world.  They were both heroic and I am quite certain that their actions saved a life that day.

Early in Melville’s Moby Dick, Peter Coffin, proprietor of the Spouter Inn, recommends the Try Pots, an inn known for its chowders and run by Peter Coffin’s cousin Hosea Hussey, as a good place for a meal.

Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved its name; for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes. The area before the house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account books bound in superior old shark-skin. There was a fishy flavor to the milk, too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning happening to take a stroll along the beach among some fishermen's boats, I saw Hosea's brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod's decapitated head, looking very slip-shod, I assure ye.

The description of the cod chowder at the Try Pots has always captivated me.  I’m a fan of canned clam chowder and have occasionally had the pleasure of a bowl of clam chowder at Legal Sea Foods next to the Georgia Aquarium – but cod chowder has never made its way to my table.

"Come on, Queequeg," said I, "all right. There's Mrs. Hussey."

And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving Mrs. Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon making known our desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey, postponing further scolding for the present, ushered us into a little room, and seating us at a table spread with the relics of a recently concluded repast, turned round to us and said—"Clam or Cod?"

"What's that about Cods, ma'am?" said I, with much politeness.

"Clam or Cod?" she repeated.

"A clam for supper? a cold clam; is THAT what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?" says I, "but that's a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter time, ain't it, Mrs. Hussey?"

But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple Shirt, who was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing but the word "clam," Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door leading to the kitchen, and bawling out "clam for two," disappeared.

"Queequeg," said I, "do you think that we can make out a supper for us both on one clam?"

However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet friends! hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favourite fishing food before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched it with great expedition: when leaning back a moment and bethinking me of Mrs. Hussey's clam and cod announcement, I thought I would try a little experiment. Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered the word "cod" with great emphasis, and resumed my seat. In a few moments the savoury steam came forth again, but with a different flavor, and in good time a fine cod-chowder was placed before us.

We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks I to myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the head? What's that stultifying saying about chowder-headed people? "But look, Queequeg, ain't that a live eel in your bowl? Where's your harpoon?"

We have a crock pot in our kitchen – a repackaged gift from Christmases past – and I decided to put it to good use this past weekend.  The recipe itself was quite simple:

• 1 cup finely chopped onion
• 1 stick butter
• 4 cups diced potato
• 1 can creamed corn
• 1 1/2 lb Cod
• 1 1/2 cup water
• 1 pint half-and-half
• salt, pepper and thyme to taste
• 1 bay leaf

Cook the onion in the butter until it is transparent.  Throw chopped onion and liquid butter in the crock-pot along with potatoes, creamed corn, water, cod and spices.  Cook on low for 4 1/2 to 5 hours and then add the half-and-half.  Cook for another hour.

I served it with some hushpuppies and an upside-down cake for dessert.  I have heard that crumbled bacon on top is also tasty.  The cod was a bit pricey at around $9 a pound at Kroger, and I imagine that tilapia would make a good replacement – though it wouldn’t fill my literary hunger quite so well.

 

The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has just published David Cole’s update to the entry on The Chinese Room Argument.

The thought problem was posed by John Searle almost 30 years ago and has been a lightening rod for discussions about theories of consciousness and AI ever since.

For those unfamiliar with it, the argument is not against the notion that machines in general can think – Searle believes that minds are built on biological machines, after all – but rather against certain projects in AI that attempt to use computational theories to try to explain consciousness.  Searle’s argument is that computational models are a dead end and that thinking machines must be investigated in a different (apparently “biological”) way.

Of course, if biology can be reduced to the computational model (for instance) then Searle’s argument may be applicable to all machines and we will have to search for consciousness elsewhere.

Here’s the crux of the argument, from the SEP entry:

“The heart of the argument is an imagined human simulation of a computer, similar to Turing's Paper Machine. The human in the Chinese Room follows English instructions for manipulating Chinese symbols, where a computer “follows” a program written in a computing language. The human produces the appearance of understanding Chinese by following the symbol manipulating instructions, but does not thereby come to understand Chinese. Since a computer just does what the human does—manipulate symbols on the basis of their syntax alone—no computer, merely by following a program, comes to genuinely understand Chinese.”

If this sort of problem excites you, as it does me, then you may want to examine some of the articles about and around consciousness collected on David Chalmers’ website: http://consc.net/online .

I’m often curious about how people pronounce their names.

There is a scene from the 1939 version of Goodbye, Mr. Chips in which Robert Donat accedes to the growing trend to pronounce Latin according to scientific rather than poetic principles – Kikero, with a hard ‘c’ rather than a soft one.

The controversy over the conventional pronunciation of Latin is captured in this 1916 article from the New York Times in which a defender of the Italianized pronunciation frames it in terms of Germanic (for it was German philologists who researched and then championed the original pronunciation of Latin) scholarship versus (wer-sus) the pronunciation of the Roman Curia. 

“The Germans, representative of the real and uneffete Romans, have a passion for uniformity and discipline.  Why should two sounds of c be uttered in concillium?  The Latin consonants must march goosestep.  What has made France, England, Italy, decadent and degenerate?  Soften the sound of your c’s and g’s, and you soften the character of the people so abasing them.”

Sometimes, of course, people really don’t care how their names are pronounced.  In exceptional instances, however, there is always a chance that one risks giving offense – Fran-ken-STEEN, as Gene Wilder insisted, not Fran-ken-STAHYN.

As an opportunity to have dinner with Tim Heuer of the Microsoft Silverlight Team approached this week, the correct pronunciation of his name became a small source of anxiety.

When a colleague asked me about it, I suggested that it was pronounced like howitzer without the itz.

Immediately afterwards, I became concerned that it actually was pronounced in the German fashion, HOY-er.

It turned out that both are incorrect.  After consulting with a Microsoft Evangelist, Glen GOHR-dun,  I discovered that Tim’s name is pronounced HYEW-er.

Shawn Wildermuth called me out over the weekend for pronouncing Rocky Lhotka’s name with a long O rather than a short one.  Again the anxiety of pronunciation struck.  Rocky’s last name is actually pronounced LAHT-ka, like the character from Taxi.

Shawn’s last name, in turn, is pronounced with a short rather than a long U – as in MOTHER and not like VERMOUTH.  His first name is not Irish, but instead is derived from the Shawnee Indian nation – such strange things we discuss in the backrooms of conferences.

Since some Wintellect consultants were also with me lounging in the speaker’s room during the Silverlight Firestarter, I inquired into the pronunciation of Jeff Prosise’s name.  The I in his last name turns out to be long, while the stress is on the penultimate syllable: PROH-sahys, like precise but more emphatic.

On Wednesday, June 3rd, The Decemberists performed at the Tabernacle in Atlanta.  It’s taken me about the intervening two weeks to fully digest it all.

My friend and colleague, Tim Price-Williams, is a big fan of the Tabernacle and drew out a diagram for me and my wife on where to sit and how to get those seats.  First, we needed to arrive two hours before the doors opened at 7.  Then we were to sit outside the left (not the right, or the far right VIP entrance) doors.  As the doors opened, we needed to proceed to the left and up the stairs to the first balcony.  Tim drew a map of the second balcony and then pointed out the four seats he deemed acceptable, just to the left and the right of center stage and flushed against the forward railing.  Wait an hour for the opening band.  Then wait another hour for the main show.

We messed up Tim’s well laid plans from the get go when I forgot to pick up the baby sitter on the way home from work.  After that we were stuck in remarkably heavy traffic and didn’t find parking until about 6 o’clock.  As we waited in line I made a quick trip across the street to pick up a chicken sandwich at Ted’s Montana Grill for dinner.  I’ve been habituated to fast-food chicken sandwiches for years and was pleasantly surprised to find that the basic recipe can indeed be improved upon.  The line started moving at 6:45 so Tamara and I had to eat quickly.

This is where Tim’s advice came in very handy.  He recommended that we each have our tickets in our hands to be scanned – if one of us fell along the way the other could continue on to the prized seats on the balcony.  Everyone else apparently wanted to stand in front of the stage, so we had no problem getting to the second balcony (we didn’t even realize that there was a first balcony above us) and managed to get two seats a row back from the ones we had coveted. 

The opening band was Blind Pilot (we joked that they were composed of the injured members of Stone Temple Pilots) but it turned out that they are another band from the pacific northwest with an eclectic instrumentation and a folksy/rock feel.  They were really good.  But we were there to hear The Hazards of Love.

The Hazards of Love is a concept album by The Decemberists.  Based on an apparently original Welsh mythology cycle, it was written by lead singer Colin Meloy while in Paris.  It’s received some mixed reviews while the standout songs have been The Rake’s Song and The Wanting Comes in Waves.  Part of the difficulty follows from trying to understand what the songs are about, which is particularly difficult for me since I generally don’t hear lyrics.  Tamara has made some progress in untangling the characters and the events of the songs, however, and during the break between Blind Pilots and The Decemberists she explained quite a bit of it to me.

The Tabernacle, by the way, is a renovated classic movie theater that looks much better with the lights out than with them on.  It is an amazing venue.  The backdrop for the show – gigantic gauze sheets hanging from the ceiling – along with impressive lighting made it even more so.

We didn’t know exactly what to expect since concept albums are typically something done in a studio.  We thought that this would be a modified presentation of some highlights from the album.  Instead it was a full performance of Hazards of Love straight through and faultless.

As the performance progressed, I came to realize that I had fundamentally misunderstood the relationship between the album and the concert.  Normally a concert tour is meant to reproduce an album for fans.  In this case, I slowly realized, the album is just a memento of the concert itself.  I don’t go to that many rock concerts, so it doesn’t mean much when I say it was the best one I’ve seen.  It was, nevertheless, an event that has left a deep impression on me and still stays with me after these weeks.

The core members of The Decemberists were dressed in formal suits for the performance of Hazards.  Shara Worden and Becky Stark, who sing on the album as the Forest Queen and the heroine Margaret, respectively, were dressed in renaissance fair costumes appropriate to the theme.  Shara Worden has the attitude of Joan Jett and the voice of Grace Slick.  Becky Stark was simply ethereal waving her arms about like Elfine Starkadder the whole time.

Again, I have trouble what actually happened during the performance of Hazards itself.  There are large portions of it I can’t even quite remember, and all I have is the strong impression that something amazing occurred.

I do remember that after The Decemberists, Ms. Worden and Ms. Stark finished with Hazards of Love, and after a half-hour intermission, The Decemberists came back out and performed some songs from their previous four albums.  Then Shara Warden and Becky Stark closed the show with a cover of Heart’s “Crazy On You” which I still can’t get out of my head.  For an encore, Colin Meloy constructed a story about the building of the trans-American railway with audience participation while the rest of The Decemberist led a conga-line through the hall.  I also vaguely recall singing Sixteen Military Wives as a round with the floor, the first balcony and the second balcony performing the parts.  The second balcony was clearly the best.

On the drive home I fell into a melancholic mood; I had the sense that some part of me had been sleeping for a long time and that after waking it up I had left it behind at the Tabernacle.  I now find myself replaying The Hazards of Love again and again on my iPod trying to recapture how that lovely night felt.

The Decemberists are coming out with a new album, The Hazards of Love, later this week.  A preview of the album is available through NPR, which recorded a live performance of the album at Stubb's Bar-B-Q in Austin, Texas. 

They will also be coming to the Tabernacle in Atlanta on June 3rd.

My wife and I performed a small experiment this weekend when we took our three children to the symphony.  According to Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's book, Freakonomics, children who are taken to concerts and art museums are not statistically advantaged by this activity.  However, in an interesting twist on the theological debate between justification by faith and justification by works, the authors claim that children who are parented by the sort of people who take their progeny to cultural events and fill their homes with books are indeed statistically advantaged.  Taking this to mean that good intentions are at least of equal value to good works (and what more can you ask of the parents of three children), we exercised our good intentions at the ASO's performance with Jennifer Koh.

Sasha, the oldest (10), found the whole performance to be a waste of time.  Paul (8) and Sophia (6) were quite taken with Wagner's Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde.  They found Jennifer Higdon's The Singing Rooms to be considerably more challenging, however, as did their father. 

Ms. Koh's performance was magnificent, of course, but the center of attraction for us was the Stradivarius on which she played.  I've never heard one live before.  Paul kept asking why it was so special and all I could think to say was that the ex-General Dupont is almost three hundred years old.  This duly impressed my son.  What speaks more on culture's behalf, after all, than it's gray-haired hoariness.

Perhaps it is an indication of my low-tastes, but as I watched this performance I kept thinking about how much I enjoyed the last performance I had seen at Atlanta Symphony Hall, Cirque de la Symphonie.  The music at that concert tended towards the romantic, from Saint-Saëns to Ravel.  While the orchestra performed on their instruments, the acrobats plied their art on their bodies by defying gravity in the air as well as defying basic physiology through acts of contortion.  Two acts stood out especially. 

Jaroslaw Marciniak and Dariusz Wronski entered the stage bald, in loin-cloths, and painted gold from head to toe.  They proceeded to lift, pin and balance off of each other in what I took to be an extended demonstration of Euclid's 47th proposition, with each brief suspension being a prelude to the final revelation. 

Even more impressive was Elena Tsarkova's contortion and balancing act.  All of it was remarkable, but at one point she stood on her head with her legs extended upward.  She then spread her legs out to be almost perfectly perpendicular to the rest of her body.  At this point something uncanny happened, but so quickly that I had to ask my wife if she had just seen something.  We couldn't quite put words to what we had witnessed, and the best I could come up with was "ululation".  There was an ululation in her legs which looked like the small wave some people can make with their shoulders.  It was breathtaking.

Following the Higdon performance came the intermission.  We took advantage of this natural break to sneak out and hunt for a decent milkshake in Atlanta.  The kids had earned it.  They behaved extremely well at the symphony.

 

According to rumor, Alec Baldwin ad-libbed this scene for the movie adaptation of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, although I've also heard that Mamet created the monologue especially for Baldwin's character, Blake, who does not appear in the original Pulitzer Prize winning play.  A transcription of the monologue can be found here. 

Blake strikes me as the ur-Father of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, speaking to the id-driven sales force.  In good times, Blake comes across as a parody of all bad managers with his A-B-C rules -- he is Stephen Covey's evil twin.   In a bad business climate, however, he is the bearer of profound Hobbesean truths, and one feels obliged to internalize him and let him whisper in the back of one's mind, for his is the voice that drives industry.

My employer disperses interesting technical gifts every Christmas, and this year it was to be the Kindle.  However the endorsement of the Kindle by Ms. Oprah Winfrey had apparently caused a run on the digital reader (thank goodness she did not endorse the American banking system) and so, now in mid-February, we are still not in possession of the item.  Fortunately, the Kindle 2 has been announced and our original order of several hundred Kindles has automatically been upgraded, with a release date at the end of the month.

I enjoy reading and disposing of books, which has led me to be a avid user of the local public library system.  At the same time, I rather enjoying collecting -- on a modest budget -- titles that I can display on my bookshelves, often unread, sadly.   Browsing my own books, which bring back memories of the periods in my life when I was inclined to peculiar interests -- I have a shelf full of Husserl with titles like Ideas I, Ideas V, Ideas VI, etc. ! -- is a source of great pleasure. 

Whenever I open one of my books I am uncertain of what will fall out.  Sometimes its orange peels, sometimes the whiff of stale cigarettes from college, sometimes money I thought I had cleverly hidden from robbers.  The other day I opened up a dog-eared paperback copy Benjamin's Illuminations and naturally came across his essay on unpacking his books. 

My basement is currently filled with crates of Russian books and journals, inherited by my father-in-law from a distant relative and emigre historian of the Russian imperial family living in Prague.  The books this distant relative chose to collect reveal a thoroughly different world in which an interest in the newest theories of evolution existed side-by-side with an interest in how best to uplift one's serfs.

The digital revolution has made many of these books now generally available, especially with the ubiquity of one-off printing.  But what mind could gather this particular collection together, with its hidden references made through the course of a life, entangling interests into an ultimate statement of a man's life pursuit.  Absent the fact that a certain man, our distant relative, found something valuable in each of these books, and that by handling each of them we can to some degree reconstruct his life -- would any computer program be able to generate this particular collection based on algorithms of selection and indexing?

While I look forward to receiving my Kindle, I find myself secretly believing that books possess an élan vital that Kindles, by their nature, lack.

My friend Mr. Conrad Roth blogged a few months ago about his less ambivalent attitude toward e-books at the Varieties here and here -- which I highly recommend to anyone considering the Kindle.  Another friend, Bill Ryan, blogged about his own very positive reaction to the Kindle a few months back, as well as his attitude towards the most common criticisms of the Kindle. 

Always interested in bringing my friends together, I just wanted to take advantage of an opportunity to link both of them in one page.

No college freshman in America is able to escape his courses without encountering Kant's Categorical Imperative in some form or other.  Drawing on a Medieval moral tradition that held that God has placed in each man's heart, whether Catholic, pagan, or apostate, the knowledge of right and wrong, Kant held that each person has an inherent rational knowledge of the Moral Law, or the pure form of moral action, which is commonly known as the Golden Rule.  Behind the Golden Rule is, furthermore, an impulse to act according to the Moral Law which Kant dubbed the Categorical Imperative -- a concept which Freud later took up and reinterpreted as an irrational force: the Super Ego.

For Kant, however, the Categorical Imperative was always a rational impulse which revealed our transcendent selves.  How, then, to explain the not infrequent impulse to not fulfill one's duty to the Moral law?  According to Kant:

"We are not, then, to call the depravity of human nature wickedness taking the word in its strict sense as a disposition (the subjective principle of the maxims) to adopt evil as evil into our maxim as our incentives (for that is diabolical); we should rather term it the perversity of the heart, which, then, because of what follows from it, is also called an evil heart. Such a heart may coexist with a will which in general is good: it arises from the frailty of human nature, the lack of sufficient strength to follow out the principles it has chosen for itself..." -- Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone

Edgar Allan Poe made a point of exploring that which Kant would rather leave aside as pointless and empty of content.  In an 1850 short story, he wrote:

"Induction, a posteriori, would have brought phrenology to admit, as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term. In the sense I intend, it is, in fact, a mobile without motive, a motive not motivirt. Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object; or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition as to say, that through its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not.

...

"There lives no man who at some period has not been tormented, for example, by an earnest desire to tantalize a listener by circumlocution. The speaker is aware that he displeases; he has every intention to please, he is usually curt, precise, and clear, the most laconic and luminous language is struggling for utterance upon his tongue, it is only with difficulty that he restrains himself from giving it flow; he dreads and deprecates the anger of him whom he addresses; yet, the thought strikes him, that by certain involutions and parentheses this anger may be engendered. That single thought is enough. The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, and the longing (to the deep regret and mortification of the speaker, and in defiance of all consequences) is indulged.

...

"We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay... We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow, and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle." -- The Imp of the Perverse

The tendency which Poe calls perversity -- the tendency to say the wrong thing, to zig when one should zag, to procrastinate merely to see what will happen next -- seems to be more ubiquitous in software programming than in other occupations.  I've known programmers who not only say things they shouldn't, but seem to take a particular joy in doing so.  They do not simply lack an internal censor that would keep them from saying certain things, but seem to actually be possessed by some sort of Socratic daimon who eggs them on.

Yet sometimes I think it is not the programmers who are especially possessed of this imp, but simply they who are not able to mask it behind other, more acceptable, modes of behavior.   We often hear of the disgruntled chef who spits in a difficult customer's food, or the unhygienic bartender who slips unsanitary items in a customer's drink.  The same impulse, I think, takes over middle-managers at times.  They, who are forced to do unpleasant tasks by their direct managers, and who in the end are blamed by both the people under them as well as those over them when things go wrong, are always suspected of taking a particular pleasure -- dare I say a perverse pleasure -- when unpleasant things, such as dressing down an employee or on occasion firing one, must be done.  What is more perverse, after all, than actually taking pleasure in performing unpleasant tasks, and who could blame them if they did?

Similar to Poe's "mobile without motive," Robert Herrick captured the mood as one of Delight in Disorder (1648):

A SWEET disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness :
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction :
An erring lace which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher :
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbons to flow confusedly :
A winning wave (deserving note)
In the tempestuous petticoat :
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility :
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.

The sexual element that is implicit in Herrick's understanding of the imp of perversity is remarkably absent from Poe's, just as the element of danger, pervasive in Poe, is absent in Herrick.  Our contemporary notion of the perverse tends to span both elements, and is generally accessorized with leather where Herrick has petticoats, and piercings where Poe envisions only murder.  Yet even in our own times perversity has started to lose some of its perverse luster.  The Christian Coalition may decry the slipping of moral standards as a slow slouching towards the Rapture, but I see the problem, rather, as one in which we've denied ourselves the real pleasures of perversity.  When even leather and piercings have lost their power to outrage as well as titillate, where shall we turn?

I've recently been enjoying pulp novels from the 40's with a certain amount of furtive excitement that those authors are writing things they would never get away with writing today.  For instance, from Mickey Spillane's 1948 I, The Jury (for those unfamiliar with the series, Mike Hammer is a tough detective, while Velda is his faithful secretary):

"Here's one you'll like, chum," Velda grinned at me.  She pulled out a full-length photo of a gorgeous blonde.  My heart jumped when I saw it.  The picture was taken at a beach, and she stood there tall and languid-looking in a white bathing suit.  Long solid legs.  A little heavier than the movie experts consider good form, but the kind that make you drool to look at.  Under the suit I could see the muscles of her stomach.  Incredibly wide shoulders for a woman, framing breasts that jutted out, seeking freedom from the restraining fabric of the suit.  Her hair looked white in the picture, but I could tell that it was a natural blonde.  Lovely, lovely yellow hair.  But her face was what got me.  I thought Velda was a good looker, but this one was even lovelier.  I felt like whistling.

"Who is she?"

"Maybe I shouldn't tell you.  That leer on your face could get you into trouble..."

And so on and so forth.  I, The Jury was a runaway bestseller and made Mickey Spillane's career.  This was due in no small part to the racy writing and tight plot, but something should also be said for the cover art.  Here's the cover of the original 1948 edition:

And here's the cover redone for a later edition:

Finally, here's the poster art for a film version:

Do you notice a common theme?  A man with a gun pointed at a woman undressing.  Is he holding the pistol in order to force her to undress?  Or is she undressing in order to compel him to drop the pistol?  Thousands of readers in the 40's and 50's felt compelled to read the book in order to find out what was behind this juxtaposition of sex and violence, drawn by the imp of the perverse. 

We have two in the house.  Passed down through the generations in my wife's family, they currently sit in our living room as decorations, whispering to us of bygone times.

They once played a central role in the cultural life of the Russian emigre intelligentsia.  Alexandra Kropotkin evokes images of this bygone world in her wonderful book on Russian Cooking:

Among Russians who have gone away to dwell in other countries, it is easy enough to arouse mild attacks of homesick longing for Russian life and Russian flavors.  But to launch the expatriate Russian soul on a really unbridled jag of nostalgia, try mentioning our vechernyi t'chai, our evening tea.

There is the magic phrase that reawakens all out dearest memories of home!

When the samovar goes on the dining-room table, usually about 10 o'clock in the evening, the entire family gathers for the most intimate kind of get-together.  This is the hour of comfortable relaxation, with old and young meeting as equals in talk, drinking innumerable glasses and cups of tea while wandering conversationally into all fields of anecdote and gossip, of thought and speculation.

The babies and younger children are in bed.  The adolescents feel grown up.  The oldsters are sure of an audience.  And guests always drop in.  It is perfectly correct for friends to drop in, uninvited, for evening tea at any time between 10 P.M. and midnight.  The lady of the house is not expected to set out anything special for company.  There is no fuss or formality.  The scene is cozy and homelike.  When you come for evening tea, you take potluck with the family.

The dining-room table is covered with an embroidered tablecloth.  Beside the lady of the house, at her right hand, the steaming samovar stands on a little table of its own.  Or if there is no side table, the samovar will be standing directly on the dining-room table, with the hostess peeking around it to see and take part in whatever is going on.

A small china teapot fits into a metal fixture on top of the samovar.  The hostess herself has measured tea leaves into the china teapot, has brewed the tea with boiling water from the samovar, and has set the pot of tea on top of the samovar to keep on brewing.

The tea is made as strong as household supplies permit.  A few drops of this strong tea from the small china pot will be poured into each cup or glass, which will then be filled with hot water from the samovar.

Tea glasses in metal or silver holders that have handles, like American ice-cream-soda glasses, are set out for the men.  In Russia the men drink tea from glasses, adn the women drink tea from cups.

...

On our evening tea table are plates of cold cuts and plates of sliced cheese.  We don't serve fish at evening tea unless the season is Lent, or when times are particularly hard.  The bread basket offers slices of black bread and slices of white.  Unsalted butter is on the table in a pretty dish ... Plenty of sweet things will be arrayed in front of us in any case.  There will be homemade preserves, crystallized fruits, fruit confections known as pastilla, and the semi-jellied fruit candies that Russians call marmelade ...

At vechernyi t'chai, it seemed that the tea was consumed endlessly, most Russians taking it with thin slices of lemon.  The hostess always sliced the lemon herself with a special silver knife.  After cutting the lemon she always held the knife for a moment in the steam from the samovar to prevent the knife from tarnishing.

Everyone at the tea table had a plate and a small saucer, usually of cut glass.  The saucer was for preserves, which you either ate with a spoon or put into your tea.  Many Russians like preserves better than sugar as a sweetening for their tea.  After years in America it still irks me not to be able to find saucers of the right size for preserves to go with Russian tea.  We call these saucers blewdichki dlia vareniya.  They are about 3 inches across.  Very few Russians take milk or cream in their evening tea.  They take it that way on for breakfast.

The best breakfast in the world, of course, is a hot bowl of pho, which is a part of my cultural heritage.  My mother makes it for us whenever she visits, and I generally have it for lunch at least two or three times a month.  Nevertheless, the best time of day for ph? is the morning.  It includes a strong beef broth for protein, noodles for carbs, and spices to help you wake up as well as a variety of herbs, bean sprouts and citrus. 

Andrea Nguyen has written an excellent series of articles about pho for the Mercury News which covers the history and the rituals surrounding the flavorful soup.  She even provides a recipe, though it is a bit of a lark since few people will have the patience to actually try it out.  It requires some unusual herbs as well as long hours of boiling bones and meat for the broth.  My mother typically boils two chickens (either Vietnamese or Thai chickens, since she says American chickens have no flavor) as well as a large beef bone for about 8 hours until the meat has practically disintegrated into the broth.

Garnishing pho is like putting together your own hamburger -- you can have it your way. So, before putting any pho into your mouth, add your own finishing touches. Then dive in with a two-handed approach: chopsticks in one hand to pick up the noodles, the soup spoon in the other to scoop up broth and other goodies.

Your pho ritual may include:

Bean sprouts: Add them raw for crunch or blanch them first.

Chiles: Dip and wiggle thin slices of hot chile in the hot broth to release the oil. Leave them in if you dare. For best fragrance and taste, try Southeast Asian chiles such as Thai bird or dragon rather than jalapeños. Serranos are better than jalapeños.

Herbs: Strip fresh herb leaves from their stems, tear up the leaves and drop them into your bowl. Available at Viet markets, pricey ngo gai (culantro, thorny cilantro, saw-leaf herb) imparts heady cilantro notes. The ubiquitous purple-stemmed Asian/Thai basil (hung que) contributes sweet anise-like flavors. Spearmint (hung lui), popular in the north, adds zip. [For details, see Essential Viet herb page on this site.]

Lime: A squeeze of lime gives the broth a tart edge, especially nice if the broth is too sweet or bland.

Sauces: Many people squirt hoisin (tuong) or Sriracha hot sauce directly into the bowl. I don't favor this practice because it obliterates a well-prepared, nuanced broth. But I do reach for the hoisin and Sriracha bottles to make a dipping sauce for the beef meatballs (bo vien).

I typically do put both hoisin and Sriracha in my soup because this is the way my mother has always made it for me.  Additionally, I squirt some of each into a dipping bowl, pick out thin slices of rare beef out of my soup bowl with chopsticks and alternate between dipping the slices in the chile sauce and the sweet hoisin.

Unlike the Russian tea ritual, the Vietnamese pho ritual is no time to talk about politics or religion.  Eating soup is a serious business, and involves the constant motion of chewing on noodles and preparing carefully for the moment when one swallows one's noodles by synchronized hand motions, with the chopstick hand picking out pieces of meat from the bowl and dipping them in the sauce dish, while the soup spoon hand gathers more noodles to chase the slices of beef.

Talking generally resumes after the meal, as all participants look with satisfaction at the empty soup bowls and the pieces of discarded herbs and sprouts strewn across the table.

The Vietnamese are a coffee rather than a tea people, having been colonized by the French rather than the English.  For breakfast I like a strong cup of coffee with my pho, and I like to sweeten it with condensed milk.  A meal like this generally leaves me full well into the dinner hour.

Nancy Davolio was a fictitious employee in the Microsoft Access 97 Northwind sample database. Many office workers became smitten with her furtive smile and stylish hair, and while she continued to exist as an employee in later releases of the Northwind database, her employee photo changed, leading many to suspect that something untoward had happened to the real Nancy. As most people know, "Nancy Davolio" is an anagram for "A Navy Cod Loin" ...

By way of Slashdot, here is a paper from Newcastle University suggesting that big cash prizes can drive technological breakthroughs.  Among successful examples of cash prizes driving innovation are the X-Prize Foundation's fomenting of research into space rockets, space elevators, and moon landers.   Other competitions have driven innovations from breakthroughs in designing intelligent cars that navigate complex terrains to the successful construction of a half-scale model of an X-Wing that can actually take down a half-scale model of the Death Star.  In the same vein, the James Randy Educational Foundation has a standing one million dollar prize for anyone who can demonstrate, under "proper observing conditions", any paranormal or occult powers (restrictions may apply).

The notion that money can be a motivator is certainly an interesting one.   I myself once wrote an article on software interoperability in order to win an XBOX 360, and can testify to the power of electronics as a motivator for great endeavors.  Is it such a great leap from there to the idea that greenbacks can inspire similar feats of mental strength?

According to the synopsis for the article on cash prizes, the purpose of cash prizes is to drive "revolutionary" scientific breakthroughs, rather than typical scientific breakthroughs, for which the admiration of one's peers is often sufficient compensation:

Given that revolutionary science is a high risk endeavor which usually fails; it is likely to thrive only when the incentives rewarding the rare instances of success are greater than for normal science. Therefore we would argue that it is insufficient for successful revolutionary scientists merely to get the usual rewards of prestigious professorships, respect from within the scientific profession, and a modestly high level of reasonably secure income. Something more is needed: lots of money.

The pluripotent possibilities boggle the mind.  Here are some of my own humble suggestions for achievable scientific goals and the cash prizes, in today's dollars, that should be assigned to them.  Feel free to add your own prize suggestions in the comments.

• A mass-producible flying car -- $2 million
• Pills that have the taste and nutritional qualities of real food -- $3 million
• A rocket to Mars -- $5 million
• A rocket to Saturn -- $5.5 million
• A rocket to Pluto -- $1 million
• Trained apes who will take over our menial tasks, freeing humans to live the good life -- $5.5 million
• Flying monkeys -- $6 million
• Disposable rocket packs (for daily commutes) - $6.5 million
• Successful cloning of great thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Lincoln -- $7.5 million
• Successful cloning of B, C and D-list thinkers like Suetonius, Duns Scotus, and Ayn Rand -- $1.5 million
• Successful cloning of deceased pets -- $2.5 million
• Universal cure for cancer -- $10 million
• Teleportation devices -- $11 million
• Time Travel -- $13 million
• Worm Hole technology -- $15 million
• Hyperspace engines -- $25 million
• Mind-reading devices -- $15 million
• Robot sex-slaves -- YMMV
• Holodecks -- $25 million
• A computer that can defeat all chess grand masters -- $1 million
• Skynet -- YMMV
• A self-aware computer intelligence that will defend us against ape-slave uprisings -- $25 million
• Star Trek Replicators -- $26 million
• A working lightsaber -- $27 million

As the paper suggests, if we haven't achieved any of these goals so far, it may be because we have yet to offer the right incentives.

Perhaps it happened with the advent of sound in movies -- or perhaps with the mass reproduction of music -- but it is not uncommon for people to feel an attachment towards a certain piece of music which, over time, becomes the soundtrack for their lives.  In my case, the soundtrack is Curtis Mayfield's Superfly, though Isaac Hayes's Shaft will do in a pinch.  (I will defer the topic of my desire to be a powerful and confident black man for another post, but surely I am not the only one...) 

The pertinent point here is that music is one of the modern world's most prevalent therapeutic techniques for controlling and guiding emotions.  To use more archaic concepts, it is a modern tool for building character -- or even spirit.  In his second critique, Kant lauds the reading of Roman histories as a way to build the moral sensibilities of young boys.  And in later times poetry seems to have served the same purpose.  Perhaps it is revealing too much, but before every interview or important meeting, I like to recite to myself the immortal words of Wallace Stevens:

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Actually, what I recite to myself is "I am the emperor of ice-cream, I am the emperor of ice-cream ..." which after a few repetitions fills me to bloating with confidence.  Why this is, I cannot say.

 

The moon -- once worshipped by pagans across the world; to whom the ancient Egyptians are said to have offered human sacrifices -- provided a wonderful display this past Wednesday.  The last full lunar eclipse visible from Earth until 2010, it was the occasion for a party in our household.  We invited some friends from down the street to peer at the moon through our Edmund Scientific Astroscan Newtonian reflector telescope, for which we recently acquired a tripod and a 100X magnification lens.  This eclipse was noteworthy in that the moon was positioned in proximity to Saturn, whose rings we could finally see with the new lens. 

This recent party was not as formal an affair as the one we threw for the March 3rd, 2007 lunar eclipse.  That one involved many more guests, and moon inspired refreshments.  Moon pies, moon cakes, Blue Moon beer, naturally, and mojitos, a cocktail said to have been favored by the older Hemingway and, for our purposes, beginning with the same letters as "moon."  It was also a bit different from the way I saw a lunar eclipse as a child in the early seventies from Southeast Asia, where we placed a mirror in a shallow bowl of water in order to view the astronomical event. 

To this day I do not know whether this was meant to enhance the viewing in some way, or whether it was the result of some local superstition about not looking directly at the moon.  In Greek mythology, Actaeon was transformed into a stag and killed by his own hounds when he happened to espy Artemis, twin to Apollo and goddess of the moon, bathing in a pool.  As mentioned above, we used a reflector telescope rather than a refractor telescope to view the moon, and so are unlikely to suffer a similar fate.

If you've never seen a lunar eclipse, I encourage you to leave your houses in 2010 to see this strange phenomenon.  Over a period of about an hour, the moon is slowly consumed by a black shadow.  And as parts of it disappear the remaining part, shrinking like the evaporating smile of the Cheshire Cat, seems to shine even brighter.  Just as the moon looks like it will disappear completely, a sudden transformation occurs, and instead of looking at a dark sky, the shadow covering the moon becomes semi-transparent, and one instead sees a tinted moon.  In the most recent eclipse, the moon was tinged with a coppery hue for about half an hour.  Then slowly, a bright light proceeds across the moon's face, until she is restored to her original fullness.

Just as we might each have a personal soundtrack, the moon also deserves her own.  This is the music I compiled for the 2007 party, and brought out again for the 2008 affair (should you have any suggestions for enhancing this playlist, I would enjoy hearing from you):

• Debussey's Clair de lune -- performed by Yakov Flier
• Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata -- performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy
• Rusalka: O Silver Moon -- performed by Renee Fleming
• That's Amore -- Dean Martin
• Shine On Harvest Moon -- Leon Redbone
• Mountains of the Moon -- Grateful Dead
• Catch the Moon -- Lisa Loeb and Elizabeth Mitchell
• Bad Moon Rising -- Creedence Clearwater Revival
• Shoot the Moon -- Nora Jones
• By the Light of the Silvery Moon -- Ray Noble
• Moon Over Bourbon Street -- Sting
• Harvest Moon -- Neil Young
• Fly Me to the Moon -- Astrud Gilberto
• Old Devil Moon -- Frank Sinatra
• Blue Moon -- Cowboy Junkies
• Pink Moon -- Nick Drake
• Moondance -- Van Morrison
• Reaching for the Moon -- Ella Fitzgerald
• Oh You Crazy Moon -- Chet Baker
• Moonage Daydream -- David Bowie
• It's Only a Paper Moon -- Benny Goodman and his Orchestra

The pictures above, by the way, were taken of the February 20th lunar eclipse from our backyard, somewhere in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia.  The third picture was taken by pressing the lens of a digital camera against the view lens of our telescope.  It was then photoshopped to correct for the inversion that the reflector telescope inevitably causes.