Author: Jeff Tabaco

Earlier this month I got around to reading E=mc²: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis, which I borrowed from Adam ages ago and can finally return. It’s supposed to be sort of a layman’s book, and I enjoyed it for what that’s worth, but I found myself wishing it had gotten even deeper into the science. I suppose the book did its job, since it made me want to read more about the topic. By the way, at the end there’s an appendix which follows up on all the people mentioned in the book, and I came across the following bit, which I found kind of touching:

Using material from [Ernest] Lawrence’s lab, Emilio Segrè had become the first person to create the element technetium … At the reduced salary Lawrence gave him, there had been no chance of bribing any consular officers to get his elderly parents out of Italy. His mother was captured during a Nazi manhunt in October 1943, and murdered soon after that; his father, who had been safely hidden in a papal palace, died of natural causes the next year.

When the war was over Segrè went to his father’s tomb, scattering a small sample of technetium from Lawrence’s lab over it: “The radioactivity was miniscule, but its half-life of hundreds of thousands of years will last longer than any other monument I could offer.”

Aside: An episode of PBS’ NOVA called “Einstein’s Big Idea” will air on Tuesday, Oct. 11; the companion website is pretty comprehensive.

We’re in the home stretch of raising funds for AIDS Walk Washington, which is this Saturday, Oct. 1. Thom and I have raised a total of $620 so far, and our team (Arlington Gay and Lesbian Alliance) has surpassed its goal of $2,500. That’s awesome! The generous and enthusiastic response to the fundraising has been greater than I anticipated. As I mentioned previously, the AIDS Walk benefits the Whitman-Walker Clinic, which provides important health care, especially HIV/AIDS services, in the D.C. area.

Thanks so much to those of you who have already given. If you haven’t, it’s not too late: please consider joining us in support of a great cause by making a donation. Every little bit helps!

I actually followed up on my plan to do some blog renovation. On Friday night I put aside my old templates, and brought in the default Movable Type 3.2 templates, along with one of the styles from the MT library. The one I’ve chosen for now is named “Powell Street.” (In homage to San Francisco? Ah, I just realized: I remember that the walls of the Powell Street BART station are covered in white hexagonal tiles, mimicked by the background on these pages. A further “duh” moment: I just now viewed the complete image used in the banner, and it’s of a BART train going by in a blur.)

So yeah, things do look a little different, if you’re reading this on my site and not in a news reader, of course. I also switched to publishing individual entry (instead of daily) archives. Hopefully that will make for more targeted search results and linking. I used to rely on anchor-tagged entries within daily archives, and since there’s no way to redirect those anchors to the new individual pages — a .htaccess file ignores pound-signs as comments — I’ll just leave the old dailies up so as not to break any incoming links.

[Addendum (Sept. 30): If my site looks all wonky, your browser is probably loading an old version of the stylesheet, in which case you may try to reload/refresh the page, or force your browser to completely bypass the cache, by holding down Shift (or Ctrl) and clicking on the reload/refresh button.]

Restaurants for Relief will take place on Tuesday, Sept. 27, in which participating restaurants will donate a portion of their sales to Share Our Strength’s Hurricane Katrina Relief Fund. At their website you can find more information about the event, including a list of participating restaurants, some of which offer reservations through OpenTable.

[Addendum (Oct. 4): A similar restaurant event called Dine for America will take place on Wednesday, Oct. 5, with proceeds supporting the American Red Cross relief efforts for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.]

Last night as I was talking to my parents on the phone, they asked me if I had heard the breaking news about a JetBlue airplane that was preparing to make an emergency landing at LAX. As you know I’m an airline nut, so after we got off the phone, I followed the story and was later relieved to find out that flight 292 had landed safely.

Apparently, not only was the landing gear not retracting, but the front wheel had become stuck sideways 90 degrees. After circling for a few hours to burn off fuel–what’s sort of surreal is that via the in-seat satellite TV, passengers were able to watch TV news coverage of their flight up until a few minutes before landing–the pilot guided the plane to a perfect landing, and though there were some intermittent flames and smoke as the front wheel scraped along the runway, all the passengers and crew are all right.

It got me to trying to remember if I have been in any kind of airline emergency. I’ve had my share of turbulence and delays, but no emergencies, fortunately. There was this one very minor incident a few years ago, which I can now look back upon with amusement, on a Continental wide-body jet from Houston to LAX: having been upgraded, I was sitting in what was essentially “BusinessFirst” class, and as the plane touched down at LAX and continued down the runway, the rumbling caused a panel above me to dislodge. So there it was hanging over my head. I rang the call button, and a flight attendant came and popped it back into place. There was not a word from him or any of the other passengers, as if nothing happened. I wanted to be like, “Did anyone else just see that?”

Anyone have any interesting inflight stories to share?

Last weekend I started to tinker under the hood of my blog, and I upgraded to Movable Type 3.2, which went pretty smoothly. While I was at it, I also upgraded MTLJPost, which seems to be cross-posting successfully to my LiveJournal mirror, but using an incorrect time zone for the dateline. Hmm. And well, once you start making one change, you think of even more possible changes, so sometime this weekend I will be working on (a) switching from daily to individual entry archives (and maybe setting up redirects), and (b) tweaking the layout, or at the very least changing the colors to something pumpkin-y and autumnal. Mmm, pumpkin.

I’ve been lucky in winning free passes to advance movie screenings lately. Last week we saw Just Like Heaven, starring Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo. It’s kind of a zany but cute movie (if you don’t think too hard) about a guy who moves into a San Francisco apartment and finds he has an other-worldly roommate. (The premise is a bit more complicated than that, but I’m not going to detail the whole thing here.) What keeps it from being pure fluff is Ruffalo, whose understated style I like. He’s not the type you might immediately cast in a romantic comedy, and yet his sincerity and charm make it work. Of course I love the San Francisco locales, and the to-die-for Russian Hill house in which much of the movie is set has gorgeous views of the Golden Gate Bridge on one side and downtown on the other. Other scenes take place around Mission Dolores and North Beach. See also Thom’s blog.

On Tuesday night I saw Proof, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, and Jake Gyllenhaal. It’s about a daughter coming to terms with the death of her father, a brilliant but mentally disturbed mathematician, and also dealing with two other people in her life: her father’s former student advisee (Gyllenhaal), and her sister (Hope Davis). I haven’t read or seen the acclaimed play on which this is based, so I can’t compare it to the original. I really wanted to like this movie, and while it does have its moments, it just didn’t grab me. Only until well into the movie does it seem to gather some momentum and interest. (Still the mathematic and academic themes of the movie make me want to dig up my old high-school calculus textbook and see if any of my brain cells remember how to make sense of it.)

Both movies open today, Sept. 16, with Proof in limited release.

In other entertainment news, tomorrow night we’re seeing Brian Stokes Mitchell give a concert with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. In 2002 I caught his turn as The Man of La Mancha here in D.C., and I can’t wait to see him and hear his lovely voice again.

Yesterday Thom’s mom, nephew, and some other relatives, along with their church group, came to D.C. on a day trip to visit the monuments. They spent the morning and early afternoon on the Mall, and Thom and I had planned to meet up with them to tour Arlington National Cemetery, which is close to where we live. We had arrived there a bit early, so with some time on our hands before meeting up with the group, he and I looked around the Women in Service to America Memorial. I’ve been to the cemetery once before, but neither of us had been to this particular memorial. (The photo above shows Thom on the rooftop terrace.) It’s a neat work of architecture, blending an existing historic facade with a modern building behind it. Neither of us was prepared for what was inside.

Currently on view is an exhibit called “Faces of the Fallen,” made up of over 1,300 portraits by several artists honoring U.S. servicepeople who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq. These portraits, which vary in style and medium from simple drawings to elaborate carvings, line one entire wall along the vast semi-circular building. It is a really moving experience, looking at all of these faces, and at one point I started to cry. Like not just mist up, but break down and cry. That so many have died (and continue to die), especially so young, in this uncertain war, and that others have expressed their memory in art so beautiful and creative. Many of the portraits have notes, flags, and other items left by loved ones.

Later on Thom’s mom and the others arrived (it felt like all of Covington had come along to visit our neck of the woods), and we took the Tourmobile tour of the cemetery. It was definitely heart-warming to see Thom’s folks again. My photo set, which also includes photos from Aug. 2004, is up on Flickr.