February
2009
2009
Event Schedule
Feb 25 7-8:15pm Bd Meeting
Mar 25 7-8:15pm Bd Meeting
Apr 18 9am-3pm Plant & Bk
Sale
Apr 22 7-8:15pm Bd Meeting
Jun 21 12-4pm Salmon Bake
Sep 12 9am-3pm Book
Nov 14 9am-3pm Book
Annual Election Scheduled
The annual election of officers and directors will
be held at the February meeting; per the bylaws, voting members may include all
those who actively participate in monthly meetings, fund raising events, and
other library events. Candidates, as announced at the January meeting, are:
President: Eric Cisney
V President: Gigi Weixler
Secretary: John Winslow
Treasurer: Carol Campbell
Director # 3: Connie Ferguson
Additional nominations may be made at the February
meeting.
Remodeling Underway
The first stage of the planned remodel and
expansion is finished: the new meeting room door and sidewalk were installed in
December. The north-side sidewalk has been jackhammered
out, and the site awaits scheduling of the foundation
cement pour. Dale Lyman is volunteering his services as contractor, and we’re
excited to have his support for the library’s project. We’ve also had great,
consistent support from long-time library supporter Jim Strode. As the schedule
develops we’ll keep you informed, probably through notices at the library.
We’ll be looking for volunteers to help pack up
the used books when they all need to be moved out of the way. Call Carol
Campbell 871-7820 to offer your time!
Plant
{ It’s time to pot up your
surplus and divided plants for the annual plant sale. Plan to deliver them to
the library between 3 and 5 pm on April 17 so we can get them priced for the
sale. If you need to get them to us earlier, call Ron Rada
at 871-5439.
{ Volunteers are needed! If
you’re willing to spend two hours weeding someone’s garden, we can sell your
services to benefit the library. Let Ron know how many two hour work-units you
can donate to the cause.
{ If you have surplus
interesting or decorative flower pots to donate, we’ll either sell them or fill
them with plants to sell.
{ We can use volunteers the
day of the sale too, to help sell plants (or books, inside the library).
The schedule for weeding the library’s gardens
will be the same as last year: the second Friday of each month, April through
October. We hope to have more help this year, so there will be sign up sheets
in the library for each month’s work party. Please call Carol Campbell 871-7820
with any questions. Many thanks to the Long Lake Garden Club for their
continued work to keep the gardens looking great!
A Winter Walk in the
Garden with Norma
- by
Norma Brady
The first day after the snow melted I had to get
out of the house and see some green grass and brown soil. While walking through
my neighbor’s yard I was surprised to see so much in bloom even though their
garden had suffered downed limbs and brutal storm damage like the rest of us.
What first caught my eye was the old witch hazel (hamamelis
mollis or intermedia) which
had been in their yard for years. It was doing its best to outshine any
competition with its brilliant yellow and red flowers on the bare branches. Off
in the corner were two sasanqua camelias
heavily laden with white and pink blooms. The deer had
trimmed the lower limbs giving the camelias an
interesting shape. Up and down the driveway were tows of heath (erica) and hebe.
Some of the heath was in bloom and gave a nice contrast with the grayish green hebe. I saw some hardy cyclamen
hiding under shrubs and trees and they were showing signs of bloom. Their
leaves are so beautifully formed that even if they aren’t blooming they add a
lot to a winter walk. Stopping me in my tracks were cement troughs bursting
with pansies and sedums. The combination was especially pleasant as there were
so many varieties and textures of sedums. The snow and wind apparently hadn’t
slowed their growth as they were thriving in those troughs. Tucked into areas
between rhododendrons (which didn’t look all that healthy after the storms)
were plantings of darling aconite and snow drops. I was jealous of this as I’ve
never had any luck with aconite (eranthis hyemalis) and suspect the deer are responsible. I wandered
back into our yard and climbed over debris to search out what survived and may
be putting on a show. The helleborus looked great.
I’m hoping the gorgeous deep purple one will put out more plants this year.
I’ve spread them around and they seem happy wherever they land. Some of the rhodies are going to bloom in just a few weeks. Carnubia is a rich dark red, and is our first so it often
gets frost blasted. The best surprise was seeing the huge primroses with lemon
yellow flowers. So far they haven’t been on the deer’s menu. I looked at the
fruit trees and realized it was that time of year again (unless we decided to
prune our trees in summer as some do). Before I went back inside I checked the
hummingbird feeders to be sure they were full. The Anna hummingbirds are
everywhere this year. Joan Carson, the Bird Lady, has written that we’ve been
invaded by them. Hooray!
Ancient Books Online
- O. Ray Pardo
During the PBS series “Story of India” the author/ narrator refers
to a guidebook of sea travel between
http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/periplus/periplus.html
I was enthralled! After a little reading I realized that 1900
years ago someone had written a gunkholing survey of
the Red Sea and northwest Indian Ocean in much the same fashion that Jo Bailey
and Carl Nyberg write about gunkholing around
This book is an example of one of hundreds (if not thousands) of
translations of original ancient texts that you can find online. Another is the
Travels of the Chinese Monk Fa-Hsien (A.D. 399 - 414)
based on his diary, translated by James Legge and
available at http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/f/fa-hien/f15l/
Many of these can be found simply by googling
(www.google.com or your favorite search engine site) the author’s name or book
title when you find it referenced; or by looking at the references in the
associated Wikipedia article.
However, many are organized under general collections. One of the best is the Perseus
Collection
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
Part of Tufts University, it provides multiple languages and
cross-references to works of Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, Herodotus, Homer, Plato as
well as cross-references and examples of art, coins, and sculpture. However, no one collection is complete. Two other collections are at
http://eawc.evansville.edu/index.htm
and http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
There are also a couple of sites that try to act as collections of
the collections -- providing cross-references to the others. One of the most
ambitious is LATO -- Library of Ancient Texts Online
http://sites.google.com/site/ancienttexts/
To get started, look up “Periplus” in
Wikipedia and see if you get “history wanderlust” as you follow the “blue
links”.
Brian Greene and 21st
Century Physics
- Bill Lounsbery
In ‘The Elegant Universe’
and ‘The Fabric of the Cosmos’ Brian Greene attempts to explain modern physics
to us. At one point he places 6-dimensional Calabi-Yau
boxes at the interstices of Einstein’s 4-dimensional space-time continuum and
adds another dimension for good measure to produce an 11-dimensional universe
and string theory. (Some question string theory. I know I always have, but
that’s the beauty of being a theoretical physicist: Who can prove you wrong?)
Already having some difficulty with Einstein’s regime, I invited my son – who’s
no dumb bunny: he entered UW at age 12 – to explain Calabi-Yau
boxes. He asked if I could feature three dimensions. I replied yes, since I
walk around in three dimensions all the time. He told me to double them and I’d
have a Calabi-Yau box, adding, “Simply
understand the basics of quantum theory and Einstein’s general theory of
relativity and you’ll have a grasp of everything there is to know about the
world we live in.”
“Oh,” I replied.
Modern physics began about
the time Galileo argued (unconvincingly as far as the Church was concerned)
that the sun was at the center of our solar system. Shortly afterward, Isaac
Newton theorized that everything could be reduced to fundamental interactions.
For awhile physicists were happy – well, mildly content. Then in 1905 Albert
Einstein, working in a Swiss patent office (apparently with little to do)
published three separate papers showing that (1) E=mc2, (2)
electromagnetic radiation (e.g., light) occurs in teeny energy packets called
photons, and (3) time (heretofore considered sacrosanct) decreases with
increasing velocity. Physicists (who normally pay scant attention to Swiss
patent clerks) found to their chagrin that Einstein’s equations held under all
conditions whereas
They also threw some
probability into the game. Suddenly the world was not only murky, but also
counter-intuitive. I mean it’s one thing to learn that
a photon has the properties of both a wave and a particle; it’s quite another
to hear that an atom can be in two places at once! (Frankly, it all smacks of
schizophrenia.) And as modern physicists press for a grant unified proposal to
govern all conditions, they keep adding other theories. There’s entanglement for example, which
mysteriously links nuclear particles light years apart; and branes, the notion that thin
membranes occupy higher dimensional space. It seems that sub-atomic particles
stick to branes much like 3-dimensional water
droplets stick to a 2-dimensional shower curtain. (Don’t worry if you can’t
follow these theories, which are getting beyond weird. I can’t either. Even the
experts don’t have a complete handle on them.)
Scientists sought the mind
of God in outer space and instead found gas and dust. And in doing so, they
discovered that the universe is held together by the gravitational forces of
black matter while being accelerated by black energy. It turns out that visible
matter (e.g., galaxies) is only a small percentage of the cosmos. If we go back
in time far enough things really get wacko. Some astrophysicists have the gall
to tell us that the universe began with infinite density and zero volume.
Stephen Hawking substitutes ‘imaginary time’ (i.e., incorporate the square root
of minus one) into his equations and transforms this singularity into a smooth
surface. Hawking says that if we travel back in time past the Big Bang we begin
to move forward again. My own opinion? I think we’re a
bunch of fragile, intellectually challenged creatures that – through sheer luck
– have evolved on an insignificant speck in the cosmos. In the meantime, have a
good day.