No one disagreed that our beautiful planet was round.  The fact was well established by the Greeks – Pythagoras and Plato had had a glimmer of this fact but their inquisitive successors found more and more evidence.  By the time of Alexander, no educated Greek or Roman would deny a spherical Earth.
In holy Alexandria, scholars in tunics desperately went through the heaps of scrolls and they paced as they desperately pondered along the beaches of Egypt as the lapping Mediterranean taunted them.  Furrowing their brows, they were trying to figure out just how big this gosh darn sphere actually is.  Many of them put up excellent attempts.  Eratosthanes created an experiment using two men on different latitudes – one in Alexandria and the other in a town to the south on the Tropic of Cancer.  They would measure the angle of the sun on the summer solstice and compare the results.  Doing this, Eratosthenes concluded the world was 252,000 stadia which, depending on whether he was using Greek Stadia or Egyptian Stadia, made the world either about 46,620km or 39,690km.
When Islam conquered all of those Hellenistic lands, the muslems, most of whom had previously believed in a flat Earth, ravenously absorbed the Greek learning.   They produced some remarkable mathematicians and pushed our knowledge of the earth and the stars. Of these muslem scholars, the one who did the most remarkable work on the size of our Earth is the Persian, Abu Rayhan Biruni. He built on the Greek work about the size of the Earth and added the use of trigonometry to triangulate the distance between objects of known height and distance in relation to the sun to come to a stunningly close measure of the Earth – just a couple hundred kilometers short of the actual figure of 40,068km.

Enter to this world a brave bonehead named Cristoffa Corombo. This sailor had read all of the books by the Greeks and the Arabs and the keen intellect, through a scientific process of chicken-picking parts of theories that worked out best for his hypothesis and through confusing Italian statute miles with Arab ones, advanced the theory that the Earth’s circumference was around 25,000km.
Oy Vey!

He went all over Europe being laughed at by right-thinking people who thought he’d be committing suicide by undertaking a voyage of over 20,000km.  The determined Columbus and his brother went to every king in Europe and tried to play on their jealousy of each other.  He finally found a sympathetic ear from the Spanish monarchs who were desperate to find new revenue and edge out Portugal for trade routes to the East.  They took a risk and funded his trip.
The lucky schmuck happened to find an undiscovered continent where he thought Asia was.  And for this we in the United States have a holiday that I don’t get a day off for.
THEREFORE, I support those who want to abandon the Columbus Day holiday.  Although he can’t be blamed for what the people who followed him achieved in brutality and slavery, he himself adored brutality and slavery, often to the shock of his crew.  Columbus also sort of seems like a sad figure to me.  He spent most of his life begging for the chance to go on this voyage, only to be laughed at.  When he finally got the chance to do it, he discovered these amazing new lands only to be stripped of all his power and arrested on his return to Spain.  He died wealthy but bitter, still thinking he had discovered a route to Asia.  I don’t know why, but I imagine him really frustrated and sad.
I propose a holiday to honor Abu Rayhan Biruni and Eratosthenes and mathematicians everywhere and through all time.  Ahh, it will be the best holiday ever.  Brilliant parties can be held with guests wearing festive pocket protectors will toast their favorites “TO THE BANU MUSA!!!!” “TO SIR ISAAC NEWTON!!!” “TO EUCLID!!!!”  ”TO PIERRE de FERMAT!!!” each and everyone one responded to with a resounding “HURRAH!!!!!” “HURRAH” and a third time “HURRAH!!” from the jubilant party goers – of course Chocoleibniz, Fig Newtons and Apple Pi would be served.
But until then we fête Mr. Columbus  - we celebrate the creation of New Spains, New Englands, New Portugals, New Netherlands and New Frances in the Americas, we celebrate the destruction of civilizations, we celebrate the unfortunate spread of disease, and worst of all – we celebrate BAD MATHEMATICS.  Oh what a world, what a big round world it is after all…

In June I went to see the new Star Trek movie.  When I left the movie theater I went to a roof party in Williamsburg as a thunderstorm was ending.  The sky opened up in all sorts of brilliant colors with terrifying mammatus clouds forming overhead.  The city skyline was cast in shadows as the sun was setting just past the line of clouds.  With those clouds overhead, lightning to the east and the sun to the west there was a real otherworldly sense to the evening – the clouds seemed so unusual and beautiful and the city looked so massive and metallic.  It felt like I could have been on some alien planet but it was just Earth, our beautiful turbulent little pod in the vacuum of space.

Since that day – I’ve been thinking a lot about space, both as a near fictional place where I can project my dreams for myself and humankind but also as the very real wasteland that is at once fantastic radiant gold and cold, dark and airless.  There have been numerous things to keep my interest peeked – the anniversary of the moon landings, the solar eclipse in Asia and a lunar eclipse, the discovery of a comet impact on Jupiter’s surface and the launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour.  I have space fever.
Much of this fascination is in part nostalgia.  When I was a child space was a constant source of amazement.  I was obsessed with aviation and spaceflight.  I had a mini-planetarium in my room and I loved reading about the space shuttles.  I am sort of reclaiming that wonder but now with the perspective of an adult.  I can sit down and seriously read about the heavens and have a chance at comprehending the vastness and strangeness.  The most strange thing to realize is that WE ARE IN SPACE! Earth is a small point within space and we are not at the center of space.  Reality is infinite and humanity is on some random (if awesome) planet.  It’s very exciting to think about.

I have a copy of the National Audobon Society’s Field Guide to the Night Sky. I’ve moved this book from apartment to apartment and always thought it was a useless task.  Reading it now makes me yearn for an unpolluted night sky to be able to gaze out at the stars.  I was thinking how strange it is to be in this position unable to see the stars.  Our ancestors couldn’t avoid them and often needed them as a means of navigation and of discerning the passing of months and the seasons.  Hopefully our ancestors will be out amongst them.  But we’re in this middle ground, too modern to see stars like our ancestors did and too primitive to really know them.
So I read read read my maps and try to figure out this night sky that I can’t see and pray to whatever’s out that that we make it out there. Our future lies up there in that vault above us – there’s just too much to do and explore up there for us to stay put forever.

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In the 1970s the U.S. Congress and the Nixon/Ford Whitehouse proposed a plan for the metrification of the United States.  The plan for a “voluntary push” to metric, mostly implemented during the Carter Administration was a public failure.  The cartoons that were produced to hype kids and make what would become Generation X the first metric generation and the general campaign was mocked and scorned by the public who had no intention on doing anything it didn’t have to.  The public laughed at metric’s pretension’s for being a more perfect system and derided it as unamerican.  Many think that the only remnants of the metrication push today are a few road signs that show distance in kilometers and two liter bottles of soda, but that’s not the whole story.
Metrication in the United States has actually been going strong – but real quietlike – since the ’70s.  In a globalized world, private industry has more and more incentive to convert to metric in order to keep with international standards.  All branches of the U.S. military use metric for all measurements in accordance with NATO guidelines and government science agencies have also adopted metric.
So right now we’re living in a confused jumble of worlds.  We’re use metric for some things, like soda, alcohol, cocaine, and athletics but imperial standards for others like milk, deli meats and pot.  Most importantly we still use imperial standards to describe ourselves.  I am 6′4″ tall and weigh just under 190 pounds.  I live about a mile from Prospect Park.
This is where real change must occur.  If the government cannot or will not mandate a conversion to metric then it is up to right thinking citizens around the country to adopt it in our private lives and use it in conversation.  “hey how far is your Dad’s house in Suffolk?”  “oh, around 80km, depending on which way you go.” I am 194cm tall and weigh 85 kilograms. Prospect Park is about 1.5km from my house.

PROBLEM! Sounding real pretentious!
I haven’t worked out a solution to this, and yet it is totally crucial to my program.  The biggest problem with metric in the United States is that it has been successfully labeled by certain elements of society as a foreign system (even though the United States was one of the earliest official adopters) and effete and utopian.  A conservative commentator for CNN warned that we might get the metric system again if the Democrats took a senate supermajority.

If I were running a PR campaign I’d try to rebrand it as all-American.  “The troops use it, so do I.”  Get motorcyclists (motorcycles generally have metric measures) to campaign for it.  This wouldn’t be to push for government action of any kind, this would be entirely to get people using metric for their day-to-day.  Complete conversion would follow once a large number of actual Americans – no matter how small a percentage of population as total – start using it.
And then one day, one fine beatiful day I can have the following interaction…
“Number 157!??! 157???? OKAY!158?!?!”
“Oh hi, that’s me! Can I get a quarter of a kilo of the Boarshead Salsalito Turkey, half a kilo of the Applegate Farm bacon – cut thick please – and, hmm, I guess a tenth of a kilo of the Land-o-Lakes Yellow American???”
and the deli-guy will say….
“Heyyyy! Comin’ right up!!!!”

I have been interested in mixing cocktails for about a year now and have a trusty bar guide that provides recipes and good advice on drink preparation.  One interesting thing I learned in the book was that the original martini had equal parts gin and vermouth.  Over the years the, martinis became more and more dry and vermouth was demonized as a necessary burden and the martini became little more than chilled gin or vodka.  I was at a bar a few months ago and an old regular claimed that vermouth on the rocks was a pleasant drink and nobody believed him.

So when I was in France recently a friend of mine raved about the French martini cocktails that she had had. I was eager to try it out as I’ve never tasted any beverage that the French didn’t do perfectly.  She ordered one and got a glass of clear liquid with ice cubes and a lemon peal.  I had my sip and immediately recognized a familiar herb taste.  This was certainly our old friend Vermouth.  When I suggested that it was vermouth my friend had trouble believing that a drink that we have all been trained to sneer at and think was disgusting could be so delicious by itself on the rocks. But it was certainly vermouth (the drink was called martini because of the vermouth brand Martini & Rossi).

There was a good blog posting on the New York Times website about a writer talking about how important drink choices are for building characters in fiction.  Her personal favorite drink is the strawberry daiquiri but she feels too old to drink it seriously and she finds herself forced in to drinking “more serious” drinks that befit her age.  She asks readers what their signature cocktails are and what that says about us.  I think mine used to be a Presbyterian which is whiskey with equal parts soda and ginger, but now I think it might be vermouth on the rocks.  I like how it tastes – especially in the summer it will be quite refreshing – but it also unique and shows that I don’t follow the conventional wisdom about a delicious but maligned drink.  It’s unsophisticated (ordering a dry martini is ultra-sophisticated right?) and classy at the same time.  I love it.

update:
The best martini?  the Knickerbocker.
2 part gin
1 part dry vermouth
1/2 part sweet vermouth

My favorite song the past week or so has been the Tajik national anthem from the Soviet years (the tune is still used today but with different lyrics).  I have no idea what those poor people are singing about.  I tried doing a google translation of the lyrics and there’s a lot about Lenin’s call and flags illuminated by crimson lightning and fighting enemies.  Whatever it is, the song sound very dramatic and just slightly sad.

I’ve gotten to listening to a bunch of anthems.  The Armenian one is good and so is Russian one.  The Germans have a very dignified song and the Japanese have an extremely solemn one that’s about the emperor. I think the French have the best national anthem, it really ignites a franco-fire in my soul.

I’ve also been listening to the Star Spangled Banner a lot since Obama became president.  Here are my thoughts about our national song.  1) As it is popularly sung it is a terrifying noise, everything is drawn out – the song was once a bar song and it needs to be snappy and fun.  2) Singers who especially draw out the end of the song (the land of the free and home of the brave part) are terrible people. TERRIBLE TERRIBLE AMERICAN PEOPLE 3) The song should always be sung in its full form – or the final verse only should be sung.  That verse is genuinely rousing, especially when it comes as a crescendo at the end of the entire song.

O! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Also stirring is Oliver Wendell Holmes’s lyrics written during the Civil War…

When our land is illumined with liberty’s smile,
If a foe from within strikes a blow at her glory,
Down, down with the traitor that tries to defile
The flag of the stars, and the page of her story!
By the millions unchained,
Who their birthright have gained
We will keep her bright blazon forever unstained;
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave,
While the land of the free is the home of the brave.

When I listen to the Star Spangled Banner in its full form (as sung by the Robert Shaw Chorale) I genuinely get goosebumps (it might also be because I’m thinking of Obama).  I have never gotten goosebumps from the Star Spangled Banner before hearing it in its entirety – I’ve always felt that it fetishized the flag and didn’t really say much about our country.  The Marseillaise, by contrast, is about the birth pangs of their Republic and in the right situation can make earnest French people cry.

That’s what I think is the true mark of a great anthem – the ability to stir up such feelings about a country that at a crucial moment can bring its listeners to patriotic tears.   It’s nice that we have songs to sing about our country for when we feel inclined to sing about it and that new Americans can learn the tune and the words and thus automatically be members.  The same goes for clubs and groups, sharing songs seems like a great lost art-form, schools had songs that students actually knew how to sing.  Did Masons have a song like the Stonecutters song in the Simpsons?