Sights

I thought about trying to load low-res versions of some of these into this post but couldn't narrow down my favorites. So check out some of the finalists for the 15th Annual Smithsonian Photo Contest. Even though I'm not posting them here, I'm partial to "Rain," "Joy," "Ray of Zeus" and "Sardines in the Sun."

I'm also kind of impressed with what the eclipse watchers in the last photo on the page, "Summit Eclipse," had to do to reach their viewing point: Two days of backpacking, one day with 12 hours of climbing and crossing two glaciers. That's dedication.

Sundry

-- Paging Mr. Hitchcock, Mr. Alfred Hitchcock...

-- Then there was that time that the satirical religious and social commentary site The Babylon Bee just reported a story instead of having to make one up.

-- When TV weather forecasters get it wrong -- with or without the apocalyptic rhetoric their ratings-driven profession demands they offer -- we just gripe at them. Or about them. Josef Stalin had them arrested and sent to the Solovetsky Islands before eventually executing them. Let any Venezuelan or North Korean meteorologists who might read this blog take heed.

What Are the Odds?

If you learned that the city of Las Vegas had asked a scientific association never to return to its premises for a convention, you might suppose a couple of things might have happened.

Perhaps the labcoat set went whole-hog for hedonism, awash in entertainment and opportunities supposedly not available to them ordinarily. That's probably the way the movies would have it, anyway, offering plenty of opportunities for shy guys with taped glasses to find beautiful dancers who saw past the unexciting exteriors to the sensitive, devoted and caring guy beneath them. Scenes of unbridled licentiousness and a happy ending with a knockout you could take home to meet mom?  Throw in a wacky madcap sequence where some of the more lovable of the misfits get lost, wind up in Reno where prostitution is legal and completely misunderstand what kind of hotel they've stopped at for the night? Box office, baby!

Another possibility is that the geniuses -- geniusi? -- brought their formidable gray matter to bear on things like probabilities and odds and such and cleaned out the casino coffers down to the last cheap plastic chip. Scorning mechanical aids, they rapidly computed in their own brilliant heads the chances of winning and the best bets to make and all of those winners almost bankrupted the hotel. That might be the scenario for a more modern and woke movie, especially the convention was made up of people under-represented in the STEM fields. It would be even better if the casino/hotel was a Trump property or at the very least owned by a wealthy white bigot who secretly referred to all of the scientists by racist and sexist slurs.

Alas, neither of those stories is the actual reason why Las Vegas bid a final adieu to the American Physical Society after the group's convention back in 1986. The APS had settled on Vegas after its initial site in San Diego fell through because of a hotel scheduling mixup. Staying at the MGM Grand, they did indeed cause a record-low take for the hotel, but not by playing the games and beating the house. They did something even smarter.

They didn't even play.

Casino hotels offer lower room rates and lots more freebies like food, drink and other comp items because they expect to make it back and more at the table. Plus, the lower rates help visitors think they're getting a deal even though they blew the difference in rates shooting craps. A big group of people who just stay at the hotel and take the freebies cost them big money.

Physics Central's "Buzz" blog offers a couple of reasons why the APS attendees didn't play, such as the weird idea that the convention-goers actually went to their convention. The lack of ready cash common to most graduate students played a role. But, the writer notes, there's also the significant likelihood that scientists did recognize the odds of the different games, remembered that casinos aren't in business to lose and decided they had better causes to which they could give their money away.

Whatever the cause, the MGM Grand and apparently some association representing the entertainment and hospitality took revenge on the nerds by asking the APS not to come back. It's easy to understand why, of course. It's not just the financial loss. What if all of the other guests took a look at the smartest people in the room and noticed them not playing casino games and gambling?

You don't want that kind of bad example getting around.

The Right Words

The good folk at Mental Floss have published a list of 10 Oscar winner speeches that were 10 words or less in length.

I'm willing to bet viewers wouldn't hear very many of those tonight.

Spy Games

Former CIA operative Jason Matthews sold the movie rights and a contract for a sequel to his debut novel, Red Sparrow, before it even hit the stands in 2013. The movie stars Jennifer Lawrence, who's gotten moderate-to-high praise for her work, and Lawrence Edgerton, who could not have been more miscast as Nate Nash. Matthews won an Edgar award for best first novel by an American in 2014. Palace of Treason was released in 2015 and the third book of the trilogy beat the movie to the punch by a few weeks, coming out in February 2018.

The "Sparrow" of the title is Dominika Egorova, a world-class ballerina whose career was cut short by an injury. Since her mother requires expensive medical care that the average Russian citizen can't pay for, Dominika goes to work for her uncle in Russian intelligence. He maneuvers her into the Sparrow School, where male and female operatives are trained to seduce targeted foreigners and provide blackmail material used to get them to provide information on their own countries. On assignment, she begins a recruitment of Nathaniel Nash, a young CIA officer. They realize their mutual attraction and Nate eventually convinces Dominika to serve Russia by betraying its corrupt leaders and spying for the United States.

By the time of The Kremlin's Candidate, Dominika and Nate's affair is a poorly-hidden secret to his superiors. But since she has begun rising in the Russian intelligence hierarchy, they do not stop the pair from occasional meetings. The problem now is that with the recent passing of the CIA director, a weak president is narrowing his list of choices for a successor, and one of them is a longtime Russian mole. Should that person get the job, Dominika would be immediately exposed and arrested.

Red Sparrow was a great debut novel, even mining Dominika and Nate's respective attempts to recruit each other for humor as neither of them were aware that the other was working on them for that purpose. Through it and Palace of Treason, Dominika began to rebuild the humanity crushed out of her at the Sparrow School and in the brutally sexist ranks of Russian intelligence services. Candidate is still good but a much weaker ending than it should have been. Matthews has produced some 1,400 pages of book, but he doesn't really have 1,400 pages of story, and Candidate is where that shows the clearest. There's a pointless sojourn in Macao and a horrendously complicated final act in a Vladimir Putin-owned villa when the jaws of the trap seem ready to close on Dominika and Nate. For whatever reason, Putin alone among real-world characters is not replaced with a stand-in and his weaving into Dominika's plotline seems lumpy and badly stitched together. The flow of the first two books is not present, with uninteresting retreads in the role of villains and coincidental plot elements that do not fit well together.

The "Red Sparrow" trilogy is a good one because Matthews writes well and knows his tradecraft from time in the field, and because in Dominika, Nate and some of their immediate circle he's created some great characters a reader wants to root for. But ending their story after Red Sparrow alone or trimming the three books into two would have strengthened it significantly.

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Kyra Stryker first joined the "Red Cell," the CIA's quirky think tank, in the 2012 novel of that name. She was a rookie agent hung out to dry for the mistakes of her superiors, but managed with the help of Red Cell curmudgeon Jonathan Burke to demonstrate considerable talent for the work. By the time of 2018's The Last Man in Tehran, Burke has retired and Stryker is the chief of the Cell. But she'll need her old colleague's help -- and no small amount of luck -- to prevent a deadly confrontation between Israel and Iran that's on high boil. Clues following a devastating attack on an Israeli port point to the Islamic Republic, but Kyra and others have heard whispers that things are not as they seem. A mole hunt by the FBI leaves far too many in the Agency unwilling to risk drawing attention to themselves by making decisions or taking risks. Will Kyra and Jonathan be able to head off a war that could leave the entire Middle East a wasteland? Can elements within the clandestine services of the two antagonists walk their nations back from the brink?

Henshaw is a former CIA analyst himself and has a good handle on the "office work" side of intelligence gathering -- after all, the purpose of gathering intelligence is to know what is going on so someone can do something about it. He also gives the bureaucratic side of things solid authenticity. Your office may have politics, but combine imagine what it would be with people whose very business is sneaking out secrets and hiding their own and who've been trained to do so. There's a little less fieldwork than the earlier Red Cell novels, at least by our principals. Still, Kyra travels to Iran to meet with a British asset who might be able to help her learn the source of the attack on Israel.

Henshaw has a handy hand with an action scene and doesn't take the easy routes with his different characters even if they walk some familiar ground. Rather than pulling stock character quirks off the shelf to differentiate them from each other, he takes the time to explore their backgrounds and give them some depth.

Crediting

On March 2, 1791, the Rev. John Wesley, founder of the branch of the company for which I labor, passed away at 87. Finally feeling old age after an illness the year before, he spent the last several months of his life in one place, the exact opposite of how he had spent most of the previous six decades.

He took to his bed in late February and weakened over the course of the five days leading up to March 2. On that day, he was said to have sung hymns and recited scripture with a weakening voice as his strength continued to fail. Among his last words were "The best of all, God is with us" and "Farewell."

His tomb in London has a brief recounting of his extensive preaching, traveling and organizing the revival movement that would be come the Methodist church. But immediately after it admonishes those who might pay credit to the wrong actor in that drama: "Reader, if thou art constrain’d to bless the instrument, give God the glory."

I would think a similar sentiment would come from the more recently departed mass evangelist of his time, Rev. Billy Graham. And I suspect the two gentlemen will be sharing stories when they happen to encounter one another in the hereafter they both proclaimed to such great effect.

Give It a Whirl

You might be forgiven for thinking the Earth's rotation sped up considerably for this picture to be taken, but it's just a combined picture made up of many long-exposure images of stars. Still pretty cool.