More Bragging About My Niece(s and Nephews)

Back in January I did a little bragging about Jenna, my brother Jim's eldest. She's a swimmer, and a good one.

This week, she was exhibiting some of her art work at the Arts Festival at Walt Whitman High School. It looks like she's a pretty good artist too.

Jenna's Mom is an artist and Jim, who now makes his living as a writer, was also a pretty good graphics guy in high school. I have a memory of going to see his work at the same school some 25 years ago.

Most of my large family was able to attend the arts festival this week (I'm the only one who has moved out of state). My mother tells me that a friend of Jenna's asked her the other night if she had much family at the festival. Jenna reportedly just gestured at the large crowd that was gathered around.

Jenna is part of the latest generation of Mahaffies on the east coast. There are 17 of them, ranging in age from 4 to 32 years old. They are talented baseball players, lacrosse players and swimmers, musicians and singers, writers, horse riders, and dancers. The few that are already adults are a writer, an actor, an activist and a museum curator.

My brother-in-law Lou took this picture (I'd asked Jenna to send us a photo). I'm hoping Jenna will share some of her titles with us in the comments.

Examples of Grace #32

I saw a note on-line about a woman who has died and who wanted no funeral or memorial service. She asked only that her obituary should suggest that people "take a friend to lunch."

Millsboro's Quiet Place

I found a peaceful spot in downtown Millsboro this evening. St. Mark's Episcopal Church, at State and Ellis Streets, has a lovely labyrinth and garden.

It is a nice spot. Just off the main drag through town and quiet enough, but with a hint of the sound of kids playing a block or so away at the Little League park.

I've also walked the labyrinth at Old Christ Church, in Dover. I think that St. Peter's, here in Lewes, has a portable labyrinth that they put out from time to time. I'm sure there are others.

A labyrinth is a fine aid to meditation and prayer. It helps focus the mind. I was impressed by the surrounding garden at St Mark's, which added a touch of natural reverence to the experience.

For Karen, Mom, Baba, My Sisters, My Sisters-in-Law and Moms Everywhere

Happy Mother's Day!

I was trying to think what to do for a Mother's Day post. I toyed with presenting facts for the day from the US Census Bureau. Or a collection of photos tagged with "mom" from flickr. But it seems best to simply talk about some of the moms I know.

My mom is Judy Mahaffie. She was born Judith Farrar, one of three children of Roberta Farrar, the daughter of Susan Becker.

I never knew Susan Becker. But I remember my Granny, as we knew Roberta Farrar, teaching me card games as a child. She moved to live near us towards the end of her life and was a part of activities with my mother when we were small.

I also remember being taken to lunch by both of my grandmothers at that time. I remember my brother Matt and I riding in the back of Granny's car with Grandma, my father's mother, in the passenger seat.

Grandma was born Isabel Cooper, daughter of James Cooper and Honora Cooper (born Honora Henry) in Seattle Washington. She was raised in New York City and worked as an artist starting in the 1920s (or maybe earlier). She traveled with scientific expeditions painting watercolor pictures of their finds. This was before color photography.

My father has collected and published her letters to and from my Grandfather, who lived in Washington DC, over the several years of their courtship. But that's a story for another day.

Grandma was known in our neighborhood as "Groovy Granny." She always had cool cars and dressed with style. Her home was filled with art and inspiration. Her baby grand piano now sits here in my home.

The mom at the center of my life now, of course, is the lovely Karen, mother of my daughters and sometimes den mother to the younger teachers she works with. Karen is patient and inspiring. Though neither she nor they will readily admit it, she is doing a wonderful job raising two delightful, bright and creative young ladies.

Karen's mom is Christina Hudack. She raised three girls and serves as Baba to six grandchildren. She was born Christina Stongosky, daughter of another Christina Strongosky, who came to this country from eastern Europe and made a strong impression on her grandchildren as a determined little woman.

She also left us a smattering of Slavic language that still crops up in this otherwise Irish household.

Moms are important. They are the strongest links in the chains of parenting that connect us with our past.

A Boat Rowed Around It

A fellow affiliated with the Delaware Museum of Natural History is about to start on an intriguing adventure. John Wik plans to row a small rowboat around the Delmarva Peninsula as an educational adventure and to raise awareness about the museum.

It is called A Delmarva Odyssey (WARNING: embedded and apparently unstoppable video).

Mr. Wik will leave from the City of New Castle this week and row down the Delaware River, through the Delaware Bay, around Cape Henlopen, down the Atlantic Coast, around Cape Charles, up the Chesapeake Bay, through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, and back to New Castle.

Not all in one go. He plans to do a few days a week, stopping along the way to record video lessons about the region and its ecology for school children. The Delmarva Odyssey site already has a few videos up detailing plans for the trip, the equipment, and some basic information about the region.

I'm ashamed to say I missed Molly Murray's story on this trip from a few days ago (A Delmarva trek, from bay to bay). I learned about the Odyssey from the Delmarva blog Shore Things (which I only just discovered).

According to Molly's story, the trip was to have started tomorrow, Mother's Day. The Odyssey web site, however, gives Tuesday, May 15 as the starting date. I imagine it may have been changed for various logistical reasons in the nearly two weeks since Molly's story came out. I know the last thing I would want to do on Mother's Day is start a major me-centric adventure. Better to wait a few days.

I hope to track this trip. The News Journal appears poised to offer regular updates, and I will return to the Odyssey web site from time to time. It would be helpful if there were regular text updates from the Odyssey site, and not just the collections of videos that appear planned. An RSS feed would be helpful, as would a schedule of whens and wheres so those of us inclined to could go on-site for a look.

When, for example, will Mr. Wik be passing my town of Lewes?

Sometimes I Like to Join the Crowd

I joined in a worldwide "all take a photo at the same time" event today.

The project, ShutterClock, was the brainchild of Ronan Murphy, who is finishing his college career (I think somewhere in the UK).

That's Ronan on the left there, in his entry into his own project, which he describes fairly simply:

We want people to come together as a simple community divided only by distance to globally capture their world at an organised time. In return we will see galleries of images from all over the world, taken at the same moment but from their point of view.

I learned about this idea from the flickr blog this morning. It sounded like fun. All I really had to do was keep my camera by me at the end of the afternoon and keep an eye on the clock. The project was set for people to take their photos at 8:00 p.m. GMT (4:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time).

As it turned out, my photo was of a prosaic "afternoon in the office" sort of moment.

That's my keyboard and screen, with the agenda for a meeting I'm hosting on Monday morning on the left.

I uploaded my photo to the ShutterClock group at flickr. Some folks sent pictures directly to the ShutterClock site, where there are a selection of the photos. There was even a phone number to facilitate submission directly from camera phones.

Sometimes it's fun to be a small part of something larger.

A Simple Rule

Two stories on the News Journal web site this morning crystallized a thought that's been taking shape in my mind for a while now: Don't be a Jackass.

In the first story, a group of University of Delaware students are in some trouble for dressing up in costumes for a Cinco de Mayo party that seem to have been inspired by the worst possible racist stereotypes of Latinos. Photographs ended up, as they tend to do, on-line. Local Latino groups were not amused.

To their credit, the students appear to realize that they were being jerks, and have apologized.

The second story is that of attorney Richard Abbott, who has been reprimanded by the Delaware Supreme Court for "undignified or discourteous conduct." He submitted a brief in one of his many lawsuits comparing a board of appointed citizens to a group of monkeys:

"A citizen board does not mean that its members are given license to ignore the legal standards which govern their decisions. Otherwise the county would be permitted to appoint a group of monkeys . . . and simply allow the [county] attorney to interpret the grunts and groans of the ape members." (This quote from Mr. Abbott's brief is from the excellent Delaware Grapevine coverage of this story)

Attorney Abbott is loudly complaining the reprimand is a product of political correctness and violates his free speech rights. He says he broke no laws.

That's true, but he was being a jerk and I think that the court is within its rights to reprimand a member of the bar for being a jerk.

My new golden rule comes from a novel I read recently. I read widely and shallowly, for sheer pleasure, and so can't recall what the novel was, nor who the author. But I do remember that the novel was set in a small town that a sheriff had successfully policed for decades by holding everyone to one simple rule: Don't be a Jackass.

We all have free speech rights. But we also have a responsibility to not be jerks about it. We're not five-year olds, though we often sound like it.

There are, as I write this, about 100 reader comments on the UD/Cinco de Mayo story on the News Journal web site. I sampled a few earlier in the day. Based on the comments left on the News Journal web site -- on this story and on others I've read lately -- the readers of that paper, at least on-line, are mean, racist, xenophobic, and largely anonymous.

And, being anonymous, they feel free to violate that first principle of civilized society: Don't be a Jackass.

Now, That's an Alumnus

John Miner turned 100 years old this past Sunday. The Calais, Maine, resident is a retired dentist. He graduated from Colby College in 1929, two years before my father was born and 55 years before I graduated from Colby.

Dr. Miner was already wicked old (as we used to say) when I was a student at the small college in central Maine. Think of the changes he's seen.

As a boy he played with the young Prince who would some day be the King of Siam. He knew Roy Rogers. He only ever bought General Motors cars, starting with one he bought from one of the first auto dealerships in the state of Maine.

Right now he owns his 63rd and 64th GM cars.

What is his secret to long life?

"I never ever went on a diet in my life. I eat anything. I joke about it that it has to stand still long enough for me to take a bite, and as far as exercise, the only kind of exercise was when I had to attend gym classes at Colby College."

Karen Was Right

When we're out on the road, and some other driver is being an aggressive jerk, Karen always warns me against going macho/testosteronial with the admonition "you don't know; he may have a gun."

As it turns out, she is right. An aggressive jerk driver was arrested by state police today.

A loaded handgun and prescription drugs were found in his car, according to police.

The drugs were Valium. If only he'd had a few, he might not have been so aggressive.

Another Delaware Blogger in the News

Justin Kates, who blogs from the University of Delaware and about his avocation -- combining amateur radio and homeland security work -- is a subject of a story in the News Journal this morning.

The story, 19-year-old heads state's ham radio emergency corps, is part of a News Journal investigative series on Delaware's use of federal Homeland Security grants.

I am interested in this series. I do a fair amount of work with the state's Homeland Security agencies. Geospatial data is a key element in the information systems that support crime prevention and investigation, emergency management and Homeland Security. And it is the case that some of the federal grant funding that Delaware receives is helping to support the maintenance of important geospatial data sets.

In my view not enough federal Homeland Security grant funding is being used for geospatial data, of course, but that will be the subject for another day.

I was also interested in the story because I know Justin, not only as a fellow blogger but as a skinny, bright kid several years ahead of my eldest in school. I used to see him at school events and I still see his sister, who is between my two girls in age.

The News Journal questions why we have a 19-year old in charge of the Delaware Communications Corps. That may be a fair question. It is true that Justin Cates is a mature young man, and I have no doubt about his passion and intelligence. But it does seem unusual.

On the other hand, we do have a tradition of organizing ourselves on an ad-hoc basis. Our fire protection is handled (and very well) by a large number of mostly volunteer fire companies who carefully guard their autonomy, but generally work well together to help protect our safety.

My own Delaware Geographic Data Committee owes its existence in part to legislation that enables it, but more to the fact that I say, and a sufficient number of GIS leaders in state and local agencies say, that it exists.

This isn't necessarily a bad way to do some things. An informal, collegial organization can be quite effective. There does come a point, however, where that organization must become more formal in order to continue to be effective.

The question is: what parts of the Homeland Security effort have reached that point?

A Road Runs Through It

There's a new study published in the journal Science that looks at roadless space in the continental United States. It finds the remarkable fact that no point in the continental US is more than 22 miles from some sort of road.

The Science magazine website is by subscription, but the abstract of the study, Roadless Space of the Conterminous United States, notes that the authors have created a new way to measure roadlessness:

We introduce a metric, roadless volume (RV), which is derived from the calculated distance to the nearest road. RV is useful and integrable over scales ranging from local to national. The 2.1 million cubic kilometers of RV in the conterminous United States are distributed with extreme inhomogeneity among its counties.

The map image above shows RV by County. The scale ranges from high RV areas, shown in blue, where there are more areas without roads, to low RV areas, in red, where there are more roads.

Discovery News presents a longer overview of the study (Roadless Space Uneven Across U.S.) which discusses the relationship between this new measure of roadlessness and habitat fragmentation, and notes that the study found that, in some areas, we seem to build roads in the wrong places:

And when the scientists compared the roadless space with the number of people in a given area, they sometimes found a mismatch: that is, too many roads for too few people.

The study's abstract, by the way, offers a lovely example of scientific obfuscation. That poetic phrase "distributed with extreme inhomogeneity" means, I think, "not in any regular way that this highly trained scientist can see."

Tom's Dark Epiphany

Shortly after inventing his Edison Recording Machine, Tom sat listening to a wax cylinder of music.

All of a sudden, the years opened before him. He heard generations of recorded music: symphonic, impressionist, minstrel singers and crooners, blues both country and urban, worksongs, jazz, rock and roll, country pop, jam-bands and hiphop.

He heard and saw a musical future enabled by his own inspiration and work.

Then he saw a singing contest, judged by a strange trio: a clownish bear, a trained seal, and a dyspeptic clergyman. He saw democracy harnessed to this contest; its voter participation outstripping any actual election.

A title appeared in his mind's eye: American Idol. And he wept.

The Title Should Be Ours....

There is a National Chicken Cooking Contest. Delaware's entry is the author of the Wilmington food blog The Shell Pot; she is also a part of the life of Richard Koehler, our own Honest Hypocrite.

Watch Rich's blog for regular updates.

It seems evident to me that, if there is a national contest around the cooking of chicken, Delaware should always win. Otherwise, why am I eating chicken at every statewide event I attend?

Statewide GIS Conference

We are hosting a statewide conference for the users of GIS tools and geospatial data in Delaware this week. It is called Delaware GIS 2007: Serving Communities.

I should probably take a moment to explain GIS. The acronym stands for Geographic Information System, the combination of the map and the database. We use information about where things are to create what we refer to as "geospatially intelligent" information.

My job is to encourage the use and sharing of geospatial information in Delaware. The annual GIS conference is a big part of that.

Most of the credit for putting on this show, this year and every year, is due to the other folks on the Conference Planning Committee; but I get to play EmCee each year to all the state, local, academic, and private sector GIS folks in Delaware. It's a job I love.

The Conference started today with a series of technical workshops. While those were going on, we were getting ready for the main day of the conference and helping our exhibitors get set up. This evening, we hosted a social as a way of getting our exhibitors a bit more face-time with local GIS users.

Tomorrow we'll have about 200 attendees at the Dover Sheraton Inn. We start with a main session featuring awards and a Keynote address. We'll have workshops and presentations, a big lunch, more workshops and presentations, time with our exhibitors, and a closing session featuring another keynote and door prizes.

It will be exhausting, but during a long, long day I'll have a chance to catch-up with lots of folks doing great work. I'll see some of them honored by their peers. We'll inspire each other. We'll laugh and have fun.

I love my job sometimes.

Watching the Words They Use

I did not watch the debate of Democratic candidates for president the other night. It really does seem too early. But I am interested and was pleased to discover a tag-cloud analysis of what the candidates had to say over at pollster.com.

A tag-cloud is a weighted list of words presented graphically to show frequency of use. I use two on this site (down in the left-hand sidebar), one of tags I've used to categorize my blog posts and one of the tags I use on del.icio.us.

In this case, the tag-cloud is made up of the top 50 words used by each of the candidates (less the common connector words like "and," or, and "the"). They are arranged alphabetically and presented in different sized fonts, depending on the frequency of the use of that word.


I note that our own Joe Biden's tag-cloud shows that many words got similar attention from the Senator. Other candidates showed a marked preference for specific words. Senator Clinton, for example, was clearly focused on the word "president."

Commenters on the pollster.com site have pointed out, correctly, that our focus should be more on the ideas that the candidates espouse than on the words they use to present them. But I am interested in words and language and I find this sort of analysis interesting.

A commenter also pointed, helpfully, to a tag-cloud of Attorney General Gonzales' recent Senate testimony.

And I was interested to find a link from pollster.com to a tool for making this sort of word-visualization: TagCrowd. Perhaps I should use this analyze my own writing from time to time.

"Light Green." Makes a Certain Amount of Sense

John Mayer has an interesting thought on global warming:

It seems to me that when it comes to this issue, we've been given only two sides to pick from: side one says the future of global warming does not present a doomsday scenario, almost chuckling the matter aside. Side two says it is a dire issue (which it is), and then goes on to inundate side one with so many separate nakedly-scientific points that they make naivete' seem cozy by comparison.

Mayer presents another approach. He calls it "Light Green."

Rather than try to change the world all at once -- or waiting for the world to change -- he argues that we should just take small steps, as individuals.

Pick one thing to change this year, and keep the rest of your life the same. After all, the only message the charts with escalating red lines are meant to send is that the red lines have to stop escalating, not that they have to drop to the bottom of the graph by next Tuesday.

Good point. Why not take small, positive, realistic steps?

I am reminded of Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Mayer promises to report back on his efforts in this regard over the next few months. I plan to keep an eye on his blog to see where this leads.

Some Things Never Change

Please forgive me for returning one more time to the Lewis Wickes Hine collection of early 20th-century photography, as posted on the photo-blog Shorpy.

I found this picture of girl factory workers in Cleveland in 1910 utterly charming; these could very easily be fourth-grade students at any school in Delaware today.

Little girls will always be little girls.

Please, Tell Me That This is a Joke

A letter to the editor published earlier this month in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette takes a closer look at the concept of global "warming" (though I prefer "climate change"). After an introduction noting that March of this year was a particularly warm one, writer Connie Meskimen continues:

This should come as no surprise to any reasonable person. As you know, Daylight Saving Time started almost a month early this year. You would think that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate. Or did they? Perhaps this is another plot by a liberal Congress to make us believe that global warming is a real threat.

Oh dear. He's onto us.

There's a lively debate on-line about whether this is a genuine letter or a deeply closeted, Onion-like parody. A commenter from Arkansas taking part in the discussion on this letter on MetaFilter, where I picked it up, votes with the "this is satire" crowd, noting:

...this particular newspaper swings pretty far to the right and regularly publishes letters that demonstrate weapons grade ignorance. Something like this letter does not look out of place to the regular readers of the Demizette.

I'm not sure. But I do plan to adopt the phrase "weapons-grade ignorance."

Second Golf Game of 2007

I was back on the golf course at The Rookery this afternoon. Andy and I were paired by the starter with a husband and wife golfing twosome. They were very nice.

We started at a bit past three. The course was crowded and things were moving slowly. We didn't finish until about 7:30. It was a beautiful afternoon; warm, not a lot of wind, plenty of sunshine.

My game is still not great. I had a few good shots, but my putting is still a mess and I had several "blow-up" holes. I shot 116. Again.

But I had fun.