Goats Reading Books

Green Libertarianism?

2012-01-22T23:20:00.001-05:00

When I used to work at UCS, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about environmental regulations and the forever war waged against them by conservatives, libertarians and business groups. Since the start of the Great Recession, the conservative line against EPA regulations is that they supposedly kill jobs (even though they don't really) without mentioning that pollution actually kills people and that maybe we should do something about that. (Warning: long and wonky ahead.)

Cuyahoga River Fire, 1969

As a progressive (slash lefty slash liberal) the concept of environmental protection is pretty much a no-brainer. A clean and healthy environment is a common good and something that all humans benefit from. Environmental degradation therefore arises as a result of some variant of the tragedy of the commons (as described in Garrett Hardin's 1968 essay) where we are all, to some extent, the culprits of pollution as well as its victims. (Although the environmental justice movement has also shown that environmental burdens and benefits are never shared equally in society.)

At any rate, it makes sense that conserving and protecting the environment should be a collective responsibility -- something worked out through the democratic process with an eye toward fairness and effectiveness. And while it might be true that "free markets" are occasionally quite good at providing certain goods at a low price (iPods and blue jeans and whatnot), there's no reason to think that a healthy environment is one of them.

But of course, conservatives and libertarians don't really truck with the whole idea of "common" goods, instead preferring to talk about private property rights. Indeed the typical conservative response to the tragedy of the commons is to say that the commons should simply be privatized. Voilá! Tragedy solved! However, we don't actually need to invoke the idea of the commons to see that environmental degradation is harmful. For one, pollution directly harms the health and private property of people who live downstream or downwind.

In the language of economics, pollution is a negative externality. If pollution only affected the buyer or the seller in an economic transaction, it wouldn't be as big a deal since the seller would decide if the environmental risk was worth the price she was paying. But of course, pollution affects third-parties too, people living half a world away who had no involvement with whatever that factory was selling anyway. To give just one example, read this article about the outrageous harm done to our health and economy by coal power alone.

So you might think that the property rights issue might attract the attention of at least a few C/Ls, right? Don't Bangladeshi farmers have property rights too? Don't they deserve compensation when their land gets submerged? Or home-owners living next to the oil refinerey? Or is it just rich, politically-connected capitalists who get property rights? (Don't answer that one.)

As it turns out, the vast majority of conservative opinion on the subject is focused on minimizing and downplaying the problem, if not outright denying its existence. Which is kind of weird. Libertarians who think all taxes are a form of theft (or even partial slavery) should really be up in arms about this sort of thing. Past libertarian thinkers like Hayek understood that this was a problem that required government intervention, but it doesn't seem to be much on the radar these days.

Actually there is a traditional libertarian answer to these sort of questions, but it's not very good. The idea is that, instead of "burdensome" government regulation, people harmed by pollution should sue polluters in the court system ("courts and torts"). This makes a certain sort of sense until you think about it in detail. For one thing, the harm from pollution is usually statistical. We may know that exposure to, say, a carcinogen causes an excess of 100 cancer deaths in a population in a year, but cancer has a lot of different causes and it is well-nigh impossible to win a tort claim that cancer Y is directly caused by chemical X.

Even harder are situations like automobile pollution or electricity generation where we are all polluting and all suffering the consequences. Are we then all financially liable for the harm done (to ourselves)? What does that mean? Our clean, elegant solution has turned into a horrible mess. Why not just have the government set some science-based limits and be done with it?

All of which is an overly-long introduction to this post by James K over at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen. He makes the case that libertarians should care about the environment and even advocate for (limited) government action (see also here and here for similar thoughts):

"In many ways environmental issues are “ideologically inconvenient” for libertarians – life would be easier if they didn’t exist. Of course that’s not sufficient reason to actually act as if they didn’t exist, something I don’t think enough libertarians are willing to recognise."

After a brief discussion, James winds-up proposing a tax on pollution "equal to the marginal cost to society of the pollution." So, on the one hand it's bold of him to use the t-word and it's great that he's even talking about the subject. On the other it's interesting that he's come around to an idea (a pollution tax) that progressives and environmentalists have been pushing for several decades now.

I think it goes to show that some form of government regulation or taxation is really the only way of dealing with the problem of pollution. Sure it would be nice if some less intrusive fix was available, but it doesn't seem to be. It's worth the effort to make these regulations as simple as possible and its worth asking what the balance of costs and benefits might be. But it's always going to be cheaper to dump waste on your neighbor than to dispose of it properly, so there will basically always have to be some sort of cop there to prevent that.

DC Metro Ads, Part 3

2012-01-22T19:59:00.000-05:00

One of my occasional blog obsessions (see here and here) have been the absurd advertisements in the DC Metro system, which entice you to buy helicopters and troop transport planes and whatnot:

"At first my mind was boggled that a defense contractor would spend so much money just to subliminally pry the brains of (literally) a handful of people -- presumably congressional appropriation and DOD procurement staffers -- but then I realized that I have no conception of the type of money defense contractors routinely deal with."

Anyway, Kevin Drum passes along a chart showing exactly what type of money we're talking about here -- an ad campaign two to four times more expensive than usual if you're shooting for either the Pentagon or the Capitol South metro stations.

Quinn meets jellyfish

2011-12-28T21:55:00.000-05:00

at the Monterrey Bay Aquarium, November 2011

Climategate Was a Hoax

2011-11-01T01:50:00.000-04:00

My hometown paper the other morning published an op-ed from Victor Davis Hanson crowing about how climate change was now a dead issue. Hanson is supposed to be this well-respected academic (Fresno State classics scholar, Hoover Institution, etc.) but this was amateur hour. Naturally he dredged up the canard about the earth cooling over the past ten years, which I ranted about previously. We also got complaints about how Al Gore has a big house. (Note to skeptics: no one cares about Al Gore. He's not the king of climate change.)

I wouldn't've commented on it except that Prof. Hanson also felt no qualms about continuing to slander honest scientists. Referencing Climategate, he claims that climate scientists were "manipulating scientific evidence" -- fighting words, basically, in the scientific community. But he makes no mention of the six (6!) independent investigations that cleared the scientists of any scientific misconduct. (Check out this extremely informative page from UCS which explains exactly what Climategate was all about and what the investigations found.)

Sometimes it seems like these fact-free memes will just continue to circle the globe for decades and we'll be reading the same thing in 2037. But this op-ed came out shortly after the Berkeley group's highly publicized re-analysis of the surface temperature records, one of the key pieces of evidence for global warming that had been under question thanks to the Climategate emails. For added drama the group's leader, Richard Muller, had been a pretty vocal skeptic of some parts of climate science. But clearly he let the data speak for themselves and reported a finding almost exactly identical to the previous 3 data reconstructions (NASA, NOAA, HadCRU).

It was a pretty big black eye for climate skeptics and anyone who really thinks that scientists were "manipulating" the data. Bad luck for Prof. Hanson, I guess, although I doubt he cares. The money quote from Dr. Muller: "the biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK." And the money graph (via the BBC), comparing the new results with the older three:

The four curves are remarkably similar and they all go up. Maybe this will mark a turning point regarding the media's coverage of Climategate -- a talkingpoint of equal and opposite weight, as it were. We can only hope.

Fashionable Cynicism Never Won Us A Public Option

2011-09-30T13:49:00.000-04:00

These Occupy Wall Street protests are cool, and they tie into a couple of interesting posts from Yglesias and TNC making the point that it is far more effective to organize for change rather than sit back and gripe about Obama. This is, I think, the main fact of our current political moment.

Prior to the 2008 election there was a ton of energy on the left, first in the anti-war movement and then channeled into Obama's election campaign. My perception is that after the election that energy largely dissipated when it really needed to keep surging forward. Some of that was simple exhaustion and a false belief that the battle had been won and that Obama could wave his magic Congress wand and pass his agenda. Partly it is psychologically easier to be fiercely unified against something than to be for something, particularly if that something (stimulus, health care bill, cap-and-trade, etc.) is the product of political compromises and not 100% to your liking. Human nature, I guess.

As an example, I think the Occupy Wall Street protests have been awesome and inspiring, but if they had taken place in early 2009 during the bailouts and (especially) during the Congressional debate over the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, I think we would have ended up both with better policies and a more accurate media narrative that put the blame for the Great Recession on the true culprits rather than the bizarre claims we now get about how the school teachers and cops are are to blame for high deficits (or whatever story it is this week). Same thing with the health-care bill.

I write this not to absolve Obama or the Dems from the mistakes they did make. Right this second I'm pretty peeved about Obama's recent cave on ozone regulations (bad policy, bad politics) and the fact that he may have just offed a U.S. citizen without any due process (a scary scary precedent). Still. The media loves to build narratives around the personage of the President, but in a democracy the buck ultimately stops with the people. We need to work to move public opinion in a progressive direction. The politicians will follow.

The energy just wasn't there in early 2009, and things were moving so fast that it was hard to get a bead on where to best apply popular pressure. But still, this is what we're supposed to be good at, and the sad fact is that post-2008 the left has simply been out-organized by the tea party -- a bunch of people who as a matter of principle don't really believe in collective action! Embarrassing!

Yglesias gives a couple recommendations of things to do apart from complaining about Obama on the internet. I would say it mainly comes down to grassroots organizing in a way that opens up space to Obama's left, and it is nice to see that some of the old energy is starting to return. I hope it continues.

Maya

2011-09-15T19:15:00.000-04:00

Maya Rowan Torgerson Donaghy -- welcome to the planet! Born 1:40am on 9/12/2011, 3600 grams, 51 cm. More here.

What Work Is

2011-08-14T13:11:00.001-04:00

I see that Fresno's Phillip Levine was just named Poet Laureate. He's always been one of my favorites because his poems are really short stories about interesting people in difficult situations. He seems like the right poet for a time of 9 percent unemployment, although not one to help us forget our economic troubles. Andrew Sullivan excerpts one of his best poems -- "What Work Is":

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who's not beside you or behind or
ahead because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.

Tech Rant

2011-07-12T21:42:00.001-04:00

I tend to use my email inbox a lot differently than most people I know. Looking over the shoulders of friends and family and coworkers I see a lot of people with 2000, 3000, 10000 messages in their inbox. Frankly this gives me the howling fantods. If I have more than 20 messages in my inbox I start to feel stressed and if the list goes beyond the first page: no good. No good at all.

My general operating procedure is to read, and then delete or archive most of which comes through my inbox. What remains sitting there are only important messages that I need to respond to or do something about: a to-do list of sorts.

I am aware that this marks me as more than a little OCD ... but let's leave that aside for the moment! I was looking for a way to send daily or periodic reminders to my email account as a way of automatically adding things to my de facto to-do list. I was mostly looking for a daily or weekly reminder to do push-ups, practice Spanish, go for a run, etc. Seems like a simple problem, right? Almost simple enough that I might think of coding it myself if I had a server to play with. Sadly no.

[On the theory that no topic is too small for a blog post, consider this a mini tech-review for anyone else who has this same sort of problem. For others who are looking for something a little more entertaining, I recommend this. Or this. Or this.]

My first idea was that it would be nice to get reminders in my RSS feed. And it turns out that such a service exists: ReminderFeed. Unfortunately, the site seems to have been coded back in 2005 and mostly abandoned since then. Every time I tried to fill out their form to create a feed I got an error message saying I had entered the start date in the wrong format. Which I hadn't. After futzing with it a bit, I gave up and figured it might be a browser problem (it didn't work in Safari or FF4/5). Nice idea, but FAIL.
Second try was an email reminder service called RememberTheMilk. It seemed like basically the right idea. You can set up periodically recurring tasks that send reminders to you via email. The deal-breaker was that each time you "completed" as task you had to log-in to their website to "check it off" your to-do list there. Otherwise it didn't send you the next reminder. Sorry. No. Way too much work. I just want the vanilla reminder, thanks. FAIL.
Third, a service called MyEmailReminders. This one was nice. A clean intuitive interface with lots of clearly described options. No unnecessary bells-and-whistles. The only problem was it didn't work. Or rather, it delivered my daily reminders about half the time. The rest of the time: nothing. It was kind of amusing guessing if the daily reminder would come. Amusing, but not useful: FAIL.
Fourth time's a charm, I guess. The free service that seems to work is MyMemorizer. Very similar to #3, with a clean interface and nothing too complicated. And, you know, it works too. So that's nice. SUCCEED!

I should also mention that Google Calendar will do this for you, but I kind of wanted something separate so as to not clutter up my calendar too much. I guess the moral of the story is that you get what you pay for.

Comparative R.E.M. Studies

2011-06-13T23:29:00.001-04:00

Apropos of my last post complaining that there's no good music these days and that those durn kids better get off my lawn, Marty helpfully suggested that perhaps I might find agreeable the new Decemberists album, The King Is Dead. And she's totally right (thanks Marty!), it's a really great bunch of songs. Not quite as quirky or showy as some of their earlier stuff, but catchy and well-written and emotionally direct. For example, here's the first single

So here's the thing: I thought the jangly guitar sounded really familiar, and after a few listens I realized that the song is almost totally identical to R.E.M.'s "The One I Love" -- both the guitar and the vocal melody. Compare and contrast...Turns out that the guy playing the jangly guitar part is Peter Buck, so I guess he's allowed to swipe some of his earlier riffs. And if they keep turning out songs this good I'm certainly not going to complain about it. There's a couple other R.E.M.-y tracks on the album, but a lot of it is roots-ier and more down homey like this one, "Rox in the Box." They also have Gillian Welch and David Rawlings backing them up on some songs too. Awesome!

Mixtape 2010

2011-05-11T00:26:00.001-04:00

Once Quinn was born my music listening habits changed overnight. There's that first year of parenthood which is just a blur of diapers and sleep-deprivation. You can't really blast stuff out of the speakers because the baby's sleeping. And then there's dishes and laundry and trying to figure out the shape of your new life. Honestly, who has time to sit down and listen (really listen) to a CD anyway -- much less obsess over the lyrics and let the songs sink in they way they did when you were 14 and taping songs off the radio because you had all the time in the world, but no money.

After that first year life relaxed again, but I kind of just... got out of the habit? We'd listen to kids CDs rather than the new new thing, and then Quinn went through a phase where she didn't want anyone else to play music. For a while I listened to music while commuting on the train, but since we've been down in Nicaragua I've barely touched my iPod.

And at the same time, the horizons of available music have become nearly infinite. I've started following a few mp3 blogs like fluxblog or club fonograma (a quite-excellent english-language blog that covers latin american pop music), but it all flows by so fast I feel like I'm only hearing a small fraction of the stuff I might like and really, truly absorbing even less than that.

I hope it's not just a symptom of becoming an old fuddy-duddy. I'd really like to get to know some new music that clicks the way it did back when. So if anyone has any really good recommendations, please let me know. Anyway, to celebrate the shards of good music that have been whizzing by me over the last year, here's a mixtape.

Favorite Movies 2010

2011-02-22T10:20:00.002-05:00

Annnnd, here are some of the movies that I saw over the past year that I liked.

Fitzcarraldo (dir. Werner Herzog) -- A gorgeous, mesmerizing, problematic and deeply weird story about an opera-fanatic with a bizarre scheme to move a steamship over a mountain. If that sentence doesn't make any sense, well, I guess you have to see it.
Z (dir. Costa-Gavras) -- A tense, old-school political thriller from the '60s about the overthrow of a dictatorship in Greece, now with newly added relevance due to the wave of revolutions in the Middle East.
Inception (dir. Christopher Nolan) -- Loved it, but need to see this one again...
Moon (dir. Duncan Jones)
Fantastic Mr. Fox (dir. Wes Anderson)
Avatar (dir. James Cameron)
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (dir. Edgar Wright) -- Fun and cute.
Rachel Getting Married (dir. Jonathan Demme)
The Devil's Backbone (dir. Guillermo del Toro)
The Kids Are Alright (dir. Lisa Cholodenko)

Other: In Bruges, Sherlock Holmes, A Serious Man, Inglorious Basterds, True Grit, Tropic Thunder, Broken Embraces

Favorite Books 2010

2011-01-24T19:46:00.002-05:00

Here are some of my favorite books from last year -- click to read my reviews on goodreads!

Hands down the best book I read this year was Stephen Kinzer's journalistic history of Nicaragua -- Blood of Brothers. Obviously not everyone is going to nerd out on this topic the way I did, but it really is a terrific book and I definitely recommend it to anyone even vaguely interested in Latin America or Cold War history. It's also a story more Americans should know and understand since Nicaragua is Case File #1 in American Interventionism Gone Bad.
The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The Magicians, by Lev Grossman
Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
Manhood for Amateurs, by Michael Chabon
Little, Big, by ~~Michael~~ John Crowley
Kraken, by China Miéville
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace
Halting State, by Charles Stross

Central Valley

2010-11-27T18:48:00.001-05:00

Here's a post to keep the lights on here while we're blogging about Nicaragua over here.
This picture was painted on the day I was born in 1976 by Rollin Pickford, a Fresno artist who died earlier this year and who is sometimes referred to as the "painter laureate of the San Joaquin Valley." My mom found and scanned this painting and sent it to me as a very cool birthday gift. If you drive around the central valley you'll see dozens of old farms like this one, very often draped in that late-summer yellow -- for me it's a neat vision of home. And Pickford's luminous water color paintings are definitely worth checking out.

Tech and Travel

2010-08-21T22:21:00.002-04:00

So Laura Jean just published a very cool essay in a women's clergy e-zine that you can read here. The topic is (unsurprisingly) our upcoming trip abroad and how we're hoping to use skype and other technology to keep in touch with our family and friends, despite the distance. Take a look!

Nica Blog

2010-08-21T22:11:00.000-04:00

So we are off to Managua on Monday morning -- very exciting! Laura Jean and I will be doing a joint blog during our time in Nicaragua titled On A Journey. The plan is for that blog to be our main space for posting stories and pictures about our time there. I'll still be posting here on Goats Reading Books on non-Nicaragua themed stuff, but I expect the volume will be reduced.

Anyway, if you're reading this, I hope you'll check out the new blog. (RSS feed here, or you can do the google Follower thing by clicking on the link on the right-hand side.)

Unplugging

2010-08-07T10:06:00.000-04:00

After having striped our earthly possessions down to the bare essentials, packed them into a truck, cleaned our house, sold our car and flew to California, we are now decompressing in Fresno. After a very stressful and hectic few weeks it feels great to relax and make time for watching movies, swimming, running, hanging out, playing with Quinn. Next week we are off to the mountains for some serious porch-sitting, beer-drinking and possible hiking. Soon enough we'll be pitched back into the uncertainty of moving and change, but for now life is calm.

Relatedly, I am also taking this opportunity to simplify my inbox, under the assumption that my life over the next few months won't have me chained to a computer screen at all times. Over the years I seem to have accumulated a large number of email listservs and rss feeds and it has been quite liberating to let some (if not all) of them go. The ratio of wheat to chaff in my inbox has gone way up. Part of the issue is that for my previous job I served as a kind of human aggregator for a large number of blogs, news sources, activist groups and other information flows.

I will confess to finding information somewhat addicting, and with the internet there will always be more and more and more interesting and important things to read. But no one yet has invented more hours in the day in which to read it all. So it is nice to step back and simplify a bit, before the inevitable information creep starts back up again.

Eating Animals

2010-07-25T20:07:00.001-04:00

No, not the book by Jonathan Safran Foer. Rather, over the past six months or so, I've started eating meat again after 15 or so years of being vegetarian.

The impetus, as you might guess, is moving to Nicaragua. The way we figure it, eating a strict vegetarian diet may end up being harder in Nicaragua than it is here. I expect we'll continue to be largely veggie when cooking at home, but if we're eating out there may be a lack of options and if we're guests in someone's house we don't want to be rude. Hence, we are starting to eat a little meat a few times a week ... basically to prep the stomach for the transition.

It's a pragmatic choice, although honestly I've been slowly reassessing my food philosophy for a few years now and I'm not entirely sure what I think these days. Basically, my central reason for being vegetarian has been that meat in the U.S. is often not produced sustainably (e.g. overuse of antibiotics, gigantic lagoons of cow sh*t, etc) and requires a tremendous amount of resources (water, land acreage, fossil fuels) in comparison to other foods. Also, it has probably kept me a little healthier than otherwise.

But the problem is that I've replaced meat in my diet with other things--like fish (not always sustainably fished) or processed foods--that makes me wonder if I'm not really thinking consistently about the big picture. There are other ways of thinking about these issues, such as eating locally or eating less meat or simply enacting smart national policies so we're not all wasting time calculating carbon miles in the grocery store aisle.

So anyway. I expect Central America will give me a different take on this stuff--in addition to a different cuisine. A lot of the first-world problems I mentioned above just aren't as pertinent (or are very different) in a developing country. So we'll see. But for now: meat! At times, it does seem very ... strange, to be eating meat after so long abstaining. But also (more often than not) delicious.

Oil Spill Scenarios

2010-07-03T09:14:00.005-04:00

This week NOAA released the results of some modeling (based on historical wind and water currents) that show where the oil is likely to end up. The average of all 500 scenarios looks like this:

Their models show that with some medium-ish probability some of the oil will enter the loop current and head up the east coast. For example, if the oil spill had occurred on April 17, 1997 that would have been the result, as this animation shows. Of course, other scenarios depict different results and NOAA says that currently "the Loop Current does not appear to be a major source of transport of Deepwater Horizon oil to the Florida Straits or Gulf Stream." But of course that could change if the thing keeps gushing.

Anyway, I thought they were interesting, if depressing, results. I also recommend this pretty cool website that lets you visualize the size of the oil spill by moving it to your hometown in Google Maps. Apparently, the oil slick now dwarfs the state of Maryland in size. Totally crazy.

Also, because if you have to cry you might as well also laugh...

New Look

2010-06-30T21:33:00.003-04:00

The old blog theme seemed kinda stale, a bit 2005-y, shall we say. Plus, blogger has some fancy new templates and features, so it seemed like time for an upgrade. What do you think?

Nicaragua

2010-06-06T20:45:00.000-04:00

So we have one of those big, life change-type announcements - which is that we'll be moving to Nicaragua in August to live and work there for a few years. (Not that its been that much of a secret, but I haven't mentioned it on the blog before.)

Living abroad has been a long-term goal of ours for many years and a great opportunity knocked so we decided to take it. We'll be working down there through the auspices of Global Ministries, which is the joint overseas division of the UCC and the DOC (Laura Jean's denomination).

Our local partner in Nicaragua will be the Christian Mission Church of Nicaragua. Laura Jean will be working with them to set up a kind of traveling seminary for the church's ministers and doing other forms of theological education. I'll be working on whatever environmental/development projects the community has in mind as well as teaching something math/science/environment-y at the Universidad Evangelica Nicaragüense (UENIC).

Or something! The situation may look different once we get down there. At any rate, we're pretty excited and are frantically learning Spanish and figuring out how to move ourselves and toddler down to Managua in just a few months. It is going to be a crazy adjustment so wish us luck, and please do let us know if you know anyone down there we should get in touch with (we've been continually amazed by the number of connections we've made already...)

And -- as this is an imminently blog-worthy topic -- I'm sure we'll have a lot more to say as the day draws near. Stay tuned.

The Mathematics of Music

2010-05-12T21:54:00.004-04:00

OK, here's something I've always wondered about: why 12? That is to say, I've played music for many years now and I've never understood why, exactly, our musical scale is composed of twelve semitones. Probably my music teachers explained this to me at some point, but it must have not sunk in.

As any guitar player will tell you, the concept of an octave is intuitive and grounded in physics. An octave is what you get when you shorten the length of a plucked string by half thus doubling the frequency of the sound. But in principle you should be able to divide up the frequency space in an octave into any number of intervals, not just twelve.

(As it happens, there are two recent articles on the math of music that are worth reading: a Physics Today article about Richard Feynman's interest in piano tuning (pdf) and this one from Slate.)

The historical meaning of 12 is that the Greek philosopher Pythagoras had some strong religious beliefs about pure numbers and constructed the early version of our musical scale out of 3/2 intervals (i.e. out of the next simplest whole number fraction after the octave). As the Slate article explains, constructing a twelve-note scale out of 3/2 intervals doesn't quite bring you back round to an octave. The Pythagorean system works because the quantity (3/2)^12 * (1/2)^6 = 2.0273 is approximately equal to two -- a quantity known as the Pythagorean comma.

But this caused some problems for musicians. For example, the octave sounded perceptibly out of tune and you had to re-tune your instrument in order to play songs in different keys. So during the Renaissance, musicians came up with the concept of equal temperament, where the octave was divided into twelve logarithmically equal intervals of 2^(1/12) and each Pythagorean interval was thus re-tuned by a tiny amount. Bach was so psyched by this innovation that he went out and wrote the Well-Tempered Clavier in celebration.

So far, so good, but this still doesn't quite answer the question of why twelve? Clearly you can create equal tempered scales with any number of intervals, but is it possible to create a Pythagorean system with different numbers of intervals?

The algorithm to find out is pretty simple.

Start with a base frequency of A=440 Hz.
Step upwards by factors of 3/2 ... so 440, 660, 990, etc.
If we go above an octave (880) then we need to divide by 2 to bring it back into the same octave range. So 990 becomes 495, and then we step upwards again by 3/2.
The goal is to get as close as possible (either high or low) to 880 and then stop.

Twelve steps gets us to a frequency of 892.006 Hz, but it is easy to extend the series. Here's a plot out to N=100, with the red line representing 880 Hz.

So for most N, it is not really possible to craft a Pythagorean scale - either you don't land close enough to an octave or else you have oddly spaced intervals - but for a few N, the formula seems to work. N=5 (pentatonic scale) is not too bad and old, familiar N=12 works better.

But the winner is definitely N=53 which falls almost exactly on the red line - much more exactly than the familiar twelve tone scale. This scale, with 53 (barely distinguishable) intervals, is virtually equal tempered to begin with. Apparently this very bizarre musical system was first discovered by the Chinese mathematician Ching Fang thousands of years ago and was later rediscovered by various westerners (including Newton). And people have allegedly written music for it! Go figure.

So: a fairly interesting answer to the question posed. And if you're interested in spending time on wikipedia be warned that there are a truly ridiculous number of baroque music theory articles lurking there.

Disaster Capitalism

2010-05-11T18:49:00.002-04:00

This interesting Mother Jones article takes a look at how global warming is already changing the business climate, both by pushing some businesses to the brink and by creating new opportunities for others. The author also praises the 'bracing' clarity that a bottom line tends to bring to political debates:

If a firm's bottom line is going to be affected by a changing climate—say, when its supply chains dry up because of drought, or its real estate gets swamped by sea-level rise—then it doesn't particularly matter whether or not the executives want to believe in climate change. Railing at scientists for massaging tree-ring statistics won't stop the globe from warming if the globe is actually, you know, warming.

The article focuses on three fairly intuitive examples--arctic shipping, the ski industry and disaster insurance--but it seems likely that there will be others in the future.

The obvious corollary to this is that there are big investment opportunities here for climate skeptics. I mean, if you really thought that climate change is a hoax (as does Sen. Inhofe) and that everyone else is simply over-reacting, then there is clearly a lot of money to be made selling things like beachfront property or cheap storm insurance.

Cool Logo

2010-05-10T22:33:00.004-04:00

This graphic - apparently designed for the recent May Day immigration rights/anti-SB1070 demonstrations - is a really fantastic design. (Photo from this photoset.)
I'm not entirely sure who designed or distributed the signs, but I saw the image recently on the side of a building while driving and immediately knew what they were conveying. Tells a story, communicates a strong emotion, catches the eye -- nicely done.

Building A Better City

2010-05-07T21:40:00.003-04:00

Spring is here in DC and the city has seen fit to build a fantastic new bike path--called the Metropolitan Branch Trail--that runs about 2 miles, virtually from our house to downtown DC. It's lined with spiffy solar-powered street lights and they have grand plans to extend it all the way from Union Station to Silver Spring. The path has made my bike commute immeasurably more pleasant, not just because the trail avoids busy streets and buses and taxis, but also because it seems to have avoided all the steep hills.

I should back up. Our current house is nestled among a clutch of modest sized hills (DC is surprisingly hilly!) meaning that any reasonable path to work inevitably involved a sweaty uphill slog. (Yes, I'm lazy. But in my defense I'm usually biking before having coffee.) I even went so far as to consult topographic maps to find some sort of minimally vertical route to work, but it turned out that the optimal path actually ran right along the train tracks that snake through Northeast DC leading into Union Station. But then, cleverly, the city decided to route the new bike trail right alongside those tracks. Nice job DC!

Bike trails are one of those things that aren't super-expensive but that you can imagine stressed-out budget cutters eying skeptically. So yay for DC deciding to invest in a small thing that makes the city better, greener, safer, healthier, friendlier. (OK, obviously I'm selfishly invested in this one, but little by little the path is getting more and more use. You can see it from the metro tracks and I bet a lot of people crushed into a 9am train are thinking about buying a bike now.)

In that same vein, I should probably say something about the new gay marriage law. DC has now joined 5 states (and one Indian tribe!) in granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Our church scheduled its first such ceremony for the first available Sunday after the law went into effect. The two grooms in question were both pillars of the church community who had been together for three decades, and they chose a Sunday service to make it 'official.'

Church was packed and everyone was extremely psyched for the couple -- the pastor quipped that the turnout was even higher than Easter. In addition to wedding joyfulness I also remember feeling a distinct (and quite spring/Easter-like) sense of possibility. After all the struggle and frustration and gridlock of modern life, it is in fact possible for progress to happen. Usually change is so slow that it seems like it will never happen, but then all of a sudden, it is there. We can do things.

UCS on CSI

2010-04-29T20:23:00.003-04:00

In which UCS pops up on an episode of CSI -- here's our nine (awesome) seconds of pop culture fame. You bet I'm concerned!

DC Metro Ads, Cont

2010-04-19T17:50:00.000-04:00

I've blogged about the DC Metro's unusual advertising before, but I was still pretty amazed to see this specimen (click for picture) -- spotted by middle-east expert Andrew Exum in the Capitol South Metro stop.

I am, like, 98% sure this is a picture of the southern suburbs of Beirut during or immediately after the July War of 2006. [...] Should the destruction of civilian infrastructure -- civilian housing, civilian businesses, etc. -- really be something we should be slapping each other's backs about, even when the military necessity of such operations is 100% clear? I think you all know the answer is no. [...] But because this is a neighborhood populated by Shia Muslim Arabs it's somehow okay for Northrop Grumman to take pride in its destruction. Gross.

Again, maybe this sort of imagery really appeals to the 0.001% of Metro riders who are their target audience, but it seems pretty remarkably insensitive to me.

Quinn on the Piano

2010-04-18T15:20:00.005-04:00

Here's a video of Quinn singing and playing on the piano (split into two parts)... cute! Am I right?

Random Thoughts

2010-04-09T22:26:00.001-04:00

Ezra Klein has a righteous rant about the universal crappiness of the "grilled vegetable plate" vegetarian option.

"No. The grilled vegetable plate is not acceptable. Do you have pasta? Or pizza? Or salads? Or an employee trained in the art of putting different kinds of foods together on a plate in order to create a satisfying dining experience for customers? Because if not, my party and I will go elsewhere."

Seriously amen to that! We are always joking bitterly about how meat-eaters at catered events get roast chicken with a side of undercooked squash and zucchini and we get ... a plate-full of that same squash and zucchini with the chicken scraped off. Yum!

Elsewhere: this week's xkcd makes a joke about twitter and earthquakes.

Which reminds me of watching the 1989 World Series between the A's and the Giants and seeing the earthquake hit San Francisco on the TV screen and then feeling it in Fresno several minutes later. I suppose it is only a matter of time before the evil geniuses think of using these twitter feeds to trigger giant piledrivers (or something) that use wave interference to cancel out (or augment) the earthquake.

Dance up on them Haters

2010-04-08T21:22:00.007-04:00

I'm totally loving this Janelle Monae video.
Alyssa Rosenberg has an interesting essay about how Monae is a kind of hip-hop Ziggy Stardust, with her James Brown pompadour and her Michael Jackson dance moves. But the thing I love about the video is her unusual screen presence and how she bugs her eyes out when she starts singing. Very unusual, but fun to watch.

10K

2010-04-03T16:35:00.004-04:00

Laura Jean, Jamie and I ran in a 10K (6.2 mile) race this morning. The race was down at Hain's Point, which is a public park jutting out into the Potomac River, right near the Tidal Basin. This meant that the entire race course was lined by cherry trees in full blossom - in many places the branches met in the middle and formed a tunnel of flowers and green leaves. (Today is actually the end of the Cherry Blossom Festival and so there were tons of people milling around and taking pictures). At any rate, a totally gorgeous place for a run.

The race was totally fun too -- a small, informal affair (about 300 runners, no t-shirt) put on by these guys. Jamie was nice enough to slow down and run with me for the first few miles before zooming off. I kept up a decent 8:30 pace and finished in 53:20. Laura Jean posted a totally awesome time as well.

[Results here.]

Reading Joyce 2

2010-03-27T16:12:00.002-04:00

With Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, stage two in my evil plan to read all of James Joyce is complete! My review cross-posted from goodreads. I should also add that you can read this for free on Google Books.

---
There are some books that really ought to be read in the context of a literature class, with a professor to provide context and interpretation and the fear of a final paper to instill motivation. For me at least, Portrait was that kind of a book. It rewards intense study much more so than casual reading, and the somewhat irritating character of Stephen Dedalus becomes far more interesting when seen in a broader context. So it was slow going for me, especially the beginning, but several extended sections were simply fantastic (the priest's description of hell, the beach scene, the final conversation with Cranly).

Portrait is clearly the work of an older writer looking back on his youth with a bit of embarrassment and a lot of brutal honesty. We see Stephen caught in that universal phase of adolescence marked by pretentiousness, self-righteousness and snobbery. So he's a bit of a jerk, but also clearly idealistic, perceptive and sensitive to others. Definitely relatable, and not entirely unlikeable.

The arc of Stephen's story involves him casting off every piece of received wisdom or cultural expectation he encounters -- the lifestyle of his father, English imperialism, Irish nationalism, the Irish cultural revival, Roman Catholicism, his college friends, his country and even his hope for love and companionship -- in a quest for artistic freedom. Mirroring this journey, Joyce places Stephen in the midst of a blizzard of quotations and obscure references (the endnotes in my version were essential in deciphering these) until the final six pages where Stephen finally cuts through the noise and speaks in a first-person voice as he makes his choice.

Stephen's struggle should be instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever tried to create something (be it a story, a piece of music, a scientific argument) -- namely the sinking feeling that it has all been said before and that your contribution is only a derivation, a minor rearrangement of the obvious. It won't truly be original, so why bother?

Unfortunately, his solution to this dilemma is literally exile and isolation. It all seems a bit harsh and more than a little melodramatic, although Joyce himself left Ireland as a young man and never returned. And perhaps it is true that great artists are in some ways outsiders to their community, never hewing to any party line.

The Immediate Benefits of HCR

2010-03-23T21:09:00.003-04:00

Here's a list of the top 10 health care reforms that kick in this year with Obama's signature--no waiting until 2014 or whatnot. (Via.)

Adult children may remain as dependents on their parents’ policy until their 27th birthday
Children under age 19 may not be excluded for pre-existing conditions
No more lifetime or annual caps on coverage
Free preventative care for all
Adults with pre-existing conditions may buy into a national high-risk pool until the exchanges come online. While these will not be cheap, they’re still better than total exclusion and get some benefit from a wider pool of insureds.
Small businesses will be entitled to a tax credit for 2009 and 2010, which could be as much as 50% of what they pay for employees’ health insurance.
The “donut hole” closes for Medicare patients, making prescription medications more affordable for seniors.
Requirement that all insurers must post their balance sheets on the Internet and fully disclose administrative costs, executive compensation packages, and benefit payments.
Authorizes early funding of community health centers in all 50 states (Bernie Sanders’ amendment). Community health centers provide primary, dental and vision services to people in the community, based on a sliding scale for payment according to ability to pay.
AND no more rescissions. Effective immediately, you can't lose your insurance because you get sick.

To toss out a few additional thoughts on HCR, I think Jon Chait makes a good case that ObamaCare is actually based on a bunch of moderate-to-conservative ideas that Republicans would probably support if it had been proposed by their side.

Obama's plan closely mirrors three proposals that have attracted the support of Republicans who reside within their party's mainstream: The first is the 1993 Senate Republican health plan, which is compared with Obama's plan here, with the similarity endorsed by former Republican Senator Dave Durenberger here. The second is the Bipartisan Policy Center plan, endorsed by Bob Dole, Howard Baker, George Mitchell and Tom Daschle, which is compared to Obama's plan here. And the third, of course, is Mitt Romney's Massachusetts plan, which was crafted by the same economist who helped create Obama's plan, and which is rhetorically indistinguishable from Obama's.

Socialism!

And finally, a lot has been written in the past few days about how instrumental Obama and Nancy Pelosi were in getting this passed, but I think big credit is due to Harry Reid also. When I first came to DC, I remember hearing some crusty old political reporter talk about how the Senate Majority Leader is by far the hardest and most under-appreciated job in town because they are responsible for dealing with the 100 biggest egos in the country. As a result most Majority Leaders come off as slightly bumbling and Reid is no exception. But still. Dude got 60 votes on health care reform. Not to shabby.

HCR FTW

2010-03-22T21:41:00.002-04:00

Well the Democrats managed to pass comprehensive health care reform, and I have to say I am pleasantly surprised. I basically figured they were going to screw it up somehow, but they managed to snatch victory from the jaws of the defeat which had been previously snatched from victory's jaws. Or something like that.

Anyway, I'm glad to see Congress take a few baby steps toward a truly workable health care system. The truly important thing here is that Congress established the principle that everyone should have access to affordable health insurance. That is the new status quo and once people learn about it they won't want to give it up. The moving parts will be tinkered with and strengthened by politicians of both parties for years to come, but I don't think that core principle will ever be revoked.

I would personally prefer a more comprehensive "Medicare-for-all" system, but this is a decent step forward. My rough understanding is that the health insurance industry is a kind of natural monopoly, making it hard for small mom-and-pop companies to enter the market. Insurance companies don't really compete on the basis of service or quality of product so much as on the respective magnitude of the medical "risk" they carry. Without proper regulation, this leads to inhumane practices where the sick are excluded up front or dropped after paying premiums for years.

But once you make those practices illegal (as this law does) it makes more sense to pool medical risk as broadly as possible, to have everyone pay into the system when we're healthy and pay out when we (inevitably) get sick. And that starts to look at lot like Medicare-for-all. And perhaps we will evolve toward that system over sooner rather than later -- a public option would certainly speed up that process.

Beyond the policy, yesterday's vote signaled that Washington can actually do things and address big problems that seem impossible. People are already talking about how the HCR vote may actually revive the climate change discussions. If it had gone the other way the media narrative of failure, gridlock and impotence would have become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

33.3 repeating

2010-03-17T18:08:00.002-04:00

Apparently at 6:08 pm today I will be one-third of a century old -- 33 and 1/3 years. That doesn't happen every day, you know, and on St. Pats to boot. Old!

Visualize

2010-03-16T16:52:00.001-04:00

Here is a really cool video that takes crowd-sourced data about the movement of dollar bills around the country and deduces some interesting things about communities of people (apparently no embedding but click here). I thought the bit about how geographical boundaries (and even "straight-line" political boundaries) actually divide groups of people was totally fascinating.

Anyway, I saw this video in Science magazine's annual Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge 2009, which collects nifty visualizations of science concepts and subjects (link requires registration). Their winners are typically pretty neat, like this winner from last year that graphed every cross-reference in the Bible (there are a lot).

Visual and information design seems to be a field that has really flourished in recent years -- visually appealing information seems to be popping up a lot on the web. Some of my recent favorites include:

This really useful widget that lets you focus your attention on only one level of giant hierarchical tree structures.
Global Warming Art, which collects (naturally) images and graphics about climate change (some better than others).
This map of the White House visitor logs, which lets you see who the POTUS (and others) is meeting with.
These simple line graphs that show the actual size of many of the world's subway systems all at the same scale (nice job Berlin, London, NYC and Seoul!)
A map of the (approximate) travel-time to every point on the globe.

AND this awesome mash-up of time-travel plotlines from TV and movies -- apparently Marty McFly, the Star Trek crew and the Terminator all met (will meet?) sometime in 1985. (From the always interesting visual-blog Information is Beautiful.)

Cool stuff!

No More Princesses

2010-03-10T21:12:00.008-05:00

Elise tagged this blog post about how after a dozen (uniformly excellent) films Pixar is finally making one with a young girl protagonist ... who is unfortunately a princess.

Dear Pixar,

This is not an angry letter. It is especially not an angry letter about Up, which I adored. I could have sat in the theater and watched it two more times in a row. I cried, but I also laughed so hard in places that it wore me out.

So I'm not complaining; I'm asking. I'm asking because I think so highly of you.

Please make a movie about a girl who is not a princess.

Amen. The rest of the post is totally on target too. This is not to discount the attraction of a frouffy pink ball gown every once in a while, but I definitely agree it would be great to have more movies based around characters like Up's Ellie.

In fairness, while Pixar is unabashedly boyish and the trad Disney movies have bought into the "Princess" marketing juggernaut, basically every single Miyazaki film is centered around a tough and awesome girl hero, knee band-aids and all. So not to let Pixar off the hook, but there is good stuff out there -- Spirited Away, Kiki's Delivery Service, Nausicaa, etc.

Anyway, after becoming a father I have definitely become more attuned to portrayals of girls and women in the (small number of) shows that Quinn watches. We're big fans of the Dora the Explorer episode where Dora saves the prince trapped in the tall tower and I cheer inwardly every time she pretends to be a scary monster.

So the "Princess" hegemony is pretty irritating. I know we won't be able to filter it out of Quinn's cultural intake forever and undoubtedly she'll go through a princess phase and we'll roll with it. Still, every time I see one of the Disney princesses I get a lyric from my favorite Coup song -- Wear Clean Draws -- going through my head:

You know you're my cookie baby and you're too smart
I can see it in the lines of your school art
True heart, I mean courage, expressed with care
Go on draw them superheroes with the curly hair.

You're my daughter, my love, more than kin to me
This for you and the woman that you finna be
Tell that boy he's wrong, girls are strong
Next time at show and tell play him our song.
Tell your teacher I said princesses are evil
How they got all they money was they killed people.

If somebody hits you, hit 'em back
Then negotiate a peace contract.
Life is a challenge and you gotta team up
If you play house pretend that the man clean up.
You too busy with the other things you gotta do
If you start something, now, remember, follow through.

Buses are Bosons

2010-03-05T22:49:00.002-05:00

Dan over at Cosmic Variance has a fun post explaining the mechanism for why, when buses are running late they tend to cluster (much to everyone's irritation). I confess that I once worked out the exact same problem while waiting for a bus in the freezing cold in Chicago -- although in my case it was the #55, not the #6. I distinctly remember waiting about an hour for a bus that was supposed to come every 15 minutes, and when it finally arrived there were 4 in a row.

The mechanism for bunching is pretty intuitive, but I wonder if there might be solutions to prevent the problem. Someone suggested faster loading of passengers, but it also seems like having the (empty, faster) trailing bus simply pass the (full, slower) front bus would help a little. The full bus could also start skipping stops (assuming no one wants to get off) knowing there was an empty bus right behind.

Obligatory OK Go Post

2010-03-02T22:18:00.005-05:00

So this music video is the raging viral internet thing du jour, but it's still pretty awesome.
I don't even care if they faked the timing or edited multiple takes together, I'm just happy that it exists. They also have a marching-band video version of this song which is somehow even cooler.

[Check out this interview to learn a bit about how they did it. Apparently they did several full takes, but none was perfect so there is one splice in the video. Also apparently the timing wasn't faked, although they did speed up and slow down the video by small amounts in places.]

Same-Sex Marriage in DC

2010-02-20T12:47:00.004-05:00

The DC city government is in the last stages of finalizing a law allowing same-sex marriage in the district and that has brought the city into conflict with local Catholic groups. On Wednesday, the Washington archdiocese "ended its 80-year-old foster-care program in the District rather than license same-sex couples."

Apparently Catholic Charities -- which receives $20 million in funding from the city to run programs serving homeless families and victims of domestic violence -- is looking to find a way to re-structure their benefits and hiring to comply with the DC law but not officially "recognize" the marriages. But foster care was an insurmountable disagreement.

I have a lot of respect for the work the Catholic church does in the world and not being Catholic, it is really none of my business what they decide to do. But I simply do not understand how gay marriage is the issue that trumps all the others. How does that make any sense? Even if you truly believe that same-sex marriage is wrong, what is moral calculation at work here? Is it really better for these kids to be wards of the state than to live in a loving home with two foster parents of the same gender?

To be clear, the DC law does not force the church to recognize or perform same-sex marriages (how could it?) - it just asks contractors who receive tax dollars to comply with the city's non-discrimination laws.

Anyway, Andrew Sullivan (who is both devoutly Catholic and openly gay) uncorks a bit of righteous irritation at the double standards here:

A simple parallel: does the Washington diocese's charities employ any people who have been civilly divorced and are now re-married under DC law? If so, how are these individuals less offensive to the teachings of the Church on the institution of marriage than a member of a gay couple provided civil marriage licenses?

Catholic doctrine is very clear: a remarried person is not remarried in the eyes of the Church, and for the Church to employ such a person would be to recognize a civil marriage that violates one of its core principles. There are infinitely more of these individuals than there are gay Catholics or gay non-Catholics who might want to help the homeless or serve the poor or provide foster care for an abandoned child. Catholic Charities might - Heaven forfend - have to provide spousal benefits to a member of a heterosexual couple violating Church doctrine about matrimony in exactly the same way. And almost certainly, they already do all the time.

Good question. Also interesting are the words of this anonymous employee of Catholic Charities who writes in with the view from inside the organization.

Goodreads and Iran

2010-02-19T00:18:00.000-05:00

My sister Jessica blogs about how the book-social-networking site she works for -- Goodreads -- was apparently blocked by the Iranian government last week.

Last Friday, February 5, 2010, we were saddened to see Goodreads traffic in Iran plummet, which can only mean that Goodreads has joined the ranks of sites blocked by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime. One Iranian Goodreads member wrote to us and confirmed the news: "your site is recently been filtered by our horrible govrnmt. pls help us! spread it...books make no harm."

It is a sad reminder that living in a repressive society is, well, repressive and horrible - more so than many of us in the U.S. probably even realize. Until the cutoff, goodreads had attracted a sizable online community of Iranians - now hopefully they can find their way to proxy servers and back out onto the internet. And just maybe pressure from within and without will lead (peacefully) to a more representative government for the Iranian people.

Anyway, the story has been picked up by the Guardian, the New Yorker and a few other places so far.

Hurling in the Snow

2010-02-18T19:52:00.003-05:00

So this was going on in Farragut Square at lunch yesterday.
This being, apparently, an impromptu game of hurling - a traditional Irish version of field hockey - arranged by a couple of Irish theater and arts groups. A pretty amusing diversion for the lunch hour, plus I feel that my awareness of Irish culture has been suitably raised. Nice work, performance artists!

Snowpocalypse II

2010-02-07T20:08:00.002-05:00

For the second time this year, DC got clobbered with double-digit snowfalls, again basically shutting down the city. This storm apparently set records across the area and was 4th on the all-time snowfall list at National Airport. It was pretty exciting for a California boy.

The fun thing about these storms is the sense of shared catastrophe. People are just friendlier both before and after the big snow, more likely to say hi on the street, more likely to strike up a conversation, more helpful. Plus, you've got your giant flashmob snowball fights and funny websites, too. I think it's a gentle reminder that we're not that far removed from the state of nature and that we do actually rely on other people.

When the storm passed yesterday there was an hour of blue skies before the sunset and our street was bathed in a beautiful evening glow - even caught a glimpse of a cardinal.
Apart from shoveling the walk and doing the dishes, I passed part of the time by watching Werner Herzog's infamous 1982 film Fitzcarraldo--the story of a would-be rubber baron trying to move a steamship over a mountain as part of a scheme to build an opera house in the middle of the amazon. (It makes a little more sense in context.)

The scenes of madman Klaus Kinski steaming deep into the rainforest blasting Caruso out of his gramophone were an impressive contrast to the quiet, white blanket coming down outside the windows. Anyway, it's a good movie, a fascinating addition to the genre of crazy white people who go to the jungle and do crazy things -- and the crazy filmmakers who risk life and limb to make crazy movies about them (see also, Apocalypse Now).

Tall Towers

2010-02-05T14:26:00.004-05:00

The other day Quinn managed to build a tower of blocks taller than herself. The version caught on video is only slightly less impressive.
Quinn has also reached the age where she doesn't want us to take pictures (or video) of her - she would rather play with the camera and take pictures of us. That means we have a lot of recent shots of her reaching toward the camera. Laura Jean thinks it's time to get her a sturdy and cheap digital camera for her to play with and see what she comes up with.

Headline of the Day

2010-01-20T21:25:00.006-05:00

...comes from the always funny Roy Edroso:
Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate
And that pretty much sums up the Congressional Democrats' embarrassing flailing over the past 24 hours. Yes, it's a bummer that they lost Teddy Kennedy's seat, but the panicked overreaction has been much worse. They need to take a few days and a few deep breaths and realize that they still have the largest House and Senate majorities in decades. They are on the cusp of passing health care reform, if they want it.

Anyway, who knows how this will play out, but Ezra Klein sees signs that they are stepping back from the brink and realize that passing nothing is "electorally unthinkable." And of course, none of this is to say there aren't huge, huge problems with the Senate Bill (or that the Dems aren't headed for big losses in November) but I still think the best way to improve the bill is to pass it now, create a political constituency for it and improve it year after year.

The next step is for Obama to make the case for how exactly this will benefit people. He's done a lousy job of that so far, but no one doubts that he has a talent for this sort of thing.

Fourth and Inches

2010-01-19T21:22:00.002-05:00

Ugh. What a colossal unforced error the Coakley campaign turned out to be. Following this whole health care debate has been like watching the last two minutes of a damn redskins game. They're up by like 20 and although you can't quite see how they can lose, you know somehow they will find a way. This makes all those months of dithering look pretty dumb. Remember when Obama said he wanted a Senate bill before the August recess? August!

If they're smart the House Dems will just pass the Senate bill as is, send it to Obama, work out the kinks in reconciliation and move on to a jobs bill. No more sending it back to the Senate for another round of hand-wringing and hostage-taking from Nelson and Lieberman. We'll see if they've got the guts to stick up for a bill they already voted for.

And find some better candidates for the midterms.

Climate Change and Your Health

2010-01-18T21:56:00.002-05:00

Here's a great video of my friend Ari talking on the teevee about how climate change will affect your health. (Sorry, no embedding, as far as I can tell.) I think he does a great job (talking on live TV is hard stuff) and I think it just might hit home for some people that, yes, we should do something about climate change now.

Top 9 in '09: Movies

2010-01-12T20:44:00.001-05:00

Some good movies from the past year, now with sporadic footnotes!

The Wire¹
Wall-E / Up²
District 9³
Coraline
Milk
Be Kind, Rewind
Where The Wild Things Are
Crude
Star Trek

Also worth watching: Synecdoche NY⁴, Blood Simple, Away We Go⁵, Hellboy 2, Harry Potter 6, Let The Right One In, Man On Wire, Pineapple Express, In Bruges

I would also note, in passing, that this NYT interactive graphic showing the ranking of movies in people's netflix queues by zip code is really fascinating.

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¹ OK ... not technically a movie. We spent most of this year watching all five seasons of the HBO TV series, but it's been a long time since I've seen a movie this well conceived, written and acted.
² I can't choose - they're both terrific. And I'm not just saying that because I'm especially attuned to kids movies these days -- LJ and I went to see Up on our date night. Pixar can (apparently) do no wrong.
³ If you can overlook one glaring plot-hole this movie just works on every level, from insightful political criticism to blood-pumping action.
⁴ Typically brilliant and mind-bending directorial debut from Charlie Kaufman. Too bad it's such a downer.
⁵ I'll admit this is not the greatest movie ever. The first act is pretty ham-handed, but it finds its rhythm by the end. Basically I just can't resist a movie that is so exactly tuned into where my life is at this moment in time...

Tastes Like Fresno

2010-01-10T13:10:00.004-05:00

Heh. Via youTube, here's the opening scene and credits of Fresno: the Miniseries.

The show was a spoof of Dallas and other nighttime soaps. On the theory that no publicity is bad publicity (and a healthy ability to laugh at ourselves) I think it was actually pretty popular in Fresno. I was ten at the time it aired so I wasn't allowed to watch it, but I seem to remember it generated some buzz. At least the phrase "tastes like fresno" has stuck around.

Sadly not available on DVD (although bootleg copies can be found, allegedly...)

Dept. of Vapid Greenwashing

2010-01-06T20:19:00.003-05:00

This week all the adspace at my metro stop was taken up by an oil corporation trying to convince people that it is thinking about the "new energy future" -- presumably to ensure that future still has a lot of oil consumption. For example.
So ... which type of energy should we unlock? Oh right, the energy that's locked away. No doubt Shell will get right on that. Nice work, marketing geniuses!

Still, on the balance, this batch is less objectionable than the last. For several months, this same metro stop was plastered with ads from Chevron (!!!) featuring attractive people gazing soulfully out of the frame and talking about how they were trying real hard to buy less of Chevron's product. Gah.

The advertising space in the DC Metro system provides amusements like these on a regular basis. My stop gets a lot of traffic from K Street lobbyists and other so-called thought leaders, and as a result we get a lot of "think piece" advertising. Last year we had dueling ads between the "clean coal" lobby and the "clean coal is a myth" lobby. Save the oceans. Fund the CDC. Stuff like that.

On the Orange/Blue line (which connects Capitol Hill and the Pentagon) you will occasionally see actual advertisements for armored troop transport planes, attack helicopters or like, bullet-proof laptops. Crazy stuff. At first my mind was boggled that a defense contractor would spend so much money just to subliminally pry the brains of (literally) a handful of people -- presumably congressional appropriation and DOD procurement staffers -- but then I realized that I have no conception of the type of money defense contractors routinely deal with.

DC, man.

Big Snow

2009-12-29T22:00:00.005-05:00

Last weekend we got walloped by almost 2 feet of snow - the most snow DC had seen in decades and the city basically shut down for a few days. Anyway, here's a cute clip of Quinn playing in the snow and helping us shovel the steps.

The next day, the sun came out and we all dug out our cars.

Top 9 in '09: Books

2009-12-21T11:23:00.002-05:00

It seems like I spent half the year reading Infinite Jest (it's really long!), but I actually did get to a few other books too. Here are my favorites from the past year. Click to read my mini-reviews on goodreads.

Infinite Jest :: by David Foster Wallace
Doubt is Their Product :: by David Michaels
The Name of the Wind :: by Patrick Rothfuss
Anathem :: by Neal Stephenson
The City & the City :: by China Miéville
Globalization and its Discontents :: by Joseph Stiglitz
Watchmen :: by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Road Dogs :: by Elmore Leonard
Michael Collins :: by Tim Pat Coogan

I lived on the moon

2009-12-20T17:14:00.003-05:00

Awesomely trippy music video from a band called Kwoon - definitely watch until the 2-minute mark, where the gentle acoustic vibe upshifts into Pink Floyd territory. (Via.)

DC Driving

2009-12-16T21:06:00.002-05:00

Yglesias nominates for "Worst Intersection in DC" this one, at the confluence of RI, FL, NJ avenues, S street and 4th street NW. Its funny since I used to live two blocks away from this and it still features prominently in my bike route to work. The tangle is exacerbated by DC's overly-restrictive traffic laws - for example there are no guarantees that you'll be able to (legally) turn the direction you want to at any given light.

In fact, it's better not to drive anywhere new in DC without having google-mapped it first. Between the diagonal streets, the circles, the one-ways, the bridges, the Mall, the Park and other distortions, it's not a very fault tolerant city for driving.

It's not so bad on a bike, but could stand to have a lot more bike lanes.

Climate Psychology

2009-12-07T19:50:00.005-05:00

I've been thinking about the SwiftHack scandal, that frothy souffle of messenger-shooting that has been whipped up on the eve of the Copenhagen climate negotiations. As I'm sure everyone has read, the computers of the University of East Anglia were hacked and many years of e-mails between the world's top climate scientists were posted on the internet to great hullaballoo.

The intertubes are clogged with analysis of the incident so I won't add more, but scientifically speaking, there doesn't seem to be a smoking gun here (although some of the FOIA-related e-mails are troubling from an open-government perspective). Yet, as a media-driven political scandal, it seems to have legs. Chris Mooney is even worried that it will seriously damage the credibility of climate science.

Part of this persistence is undoubtedly due to the widening partisan gap in perceptions on climate change science. But the fact that climate science is tough for your average layperson to viscerally relate to is undoubtedly a key underlying factor. Global warming is a slow-moving crisis that you can't really understand without wading into scientific studies -- and that requires "trusting" experts rather than your own eyes. For example, Matt Yglesias makes a good point:

The choice of a Scandinavian capital in December is in some ways unfortunate since it’s bound to give rise to some scenario in which it’s very cold one day and this “proves” to Matt Drudge that climate change is fake.

And not just Drudge! I would guess that many well-meaning people are honestly convinced, one way or other, by a particularly memorable hot day or extended cold snap, or their own local experiences. This instinct is totally natural, but of course the whole idea of science is to move beyond supposedly "obvious" first impressions.

One interesting result that might feel more "real" came last month from Meehl et al. at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. They studied record high and low temperatures across the U.S. and found that, over the past decade, record highs were twice as common as record low temperatures. And that ratio has been growing over the past 50 years.Might be worth mentioning next time someone recalls a cold day as evidence of global cooling.

Is the decade over already?

2009-12-04T23:05:00.004-05:00

The AV Club has been pulling together its "best of decade" lists for (among other things) books, music and movies. (Jackie blogged about the best books list here.)

There are so many sub-genres in music and books and the sheer volume of artistic production making any "best of" list somewhat idiosyncratic and provincial. For example, the AV Club music writers specialize in hipster indie rock, with a smattering of other genres (hip hop, metal, alt-country) dropped into the mix. Which is great, but it makes you wonder what you're missing.

But there are only so many movies made each year, such that a dedicated film critic can actually see a fair fraction of them. That makes the inevitable movie lists somewhat more canonical.

The AVC movie list doesn't disappoint. In particular, I really can't argue with their choice for Best Movie of the Aughts -- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Every time I see the film it looms larger - wholly original and oddly comforting for a movie that deals with the fading of love and memory reprogramming. It dazzles you with its cleverness and intricacy but ultimately wins your heart (or at least mine) by tapping into more primal feelings of rebirth and possibility. It is not often that movies hit both of those notes as clearly as this one.

I was pleasantly surprised to see Spike Lee's 25th Hour clock in at #2. I liked it a lot when I first saw it, but it would be interesting to see if it holds up. Edward Norton rocks. I was also happy to see some love shown for:

Spirited Away (#6)
Children of Men (#10)
Y Tu Mamá También (#15)
Mulholland Drive (#18)
United 93 (#22)
The Incredibles (#26)
A.I. (#32) [*]
Pan's Labyrinth (#36)
The Prestige (#39)
City of God (#40)
The Dark Knight (#41)

The rest of the list is rounded out by excellent films. Of the films I had seen, the only one I scratched my head at was The Man Who Wasn't There, a lesser Coen Bros. effort that I remember finding fairly dull at the time. Totally on board with No Country For Old Men at #4, however.

[* Laura Jean mocks me for liking this one. She thinks it is pretentious crap.]

Bhopal

2009-12-04T22:22:00.003-05:00

Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster -- a massive chemical release at a Union Carbide plant in India that killed between 4 and 10,000 people in the first few days and more than 20,000 people in the years since. The Big Picture devotes its daily photo essay to the tragedy, which can be seen here.

Justice for the victims has been elusive and the company (naturally) claims its innocence. Union Carbide (now owned by Dow Chemical) settled with the Indian government for a pathetically small sum in 1989 and the actual victims saw very little of the cash. Furthermore, the company never cleaned up the site, chemicals from which are apparently still leaking into the local groundwater. There is apparently a warrant out for the arrest of the former CEO, should he ever set foot in India.

So yeah, a pretty crappy situation. If you're interested in learning more check out Students for Bhopal, who recently helped organize a series of actions to mark the anniversary.

Return Journey

2009-11-28T20:10:00.004-05:00

Bittersweetly, our time in the East Bay is coming to an end, and we're heading back to DC this week. It has been a ton of fun being out in California again, and seeing family and friends on a regular basis. It's hard to believe 3 months is already over. Still, it will be good to be back in DC, and I'm sure we'll be back west sometime in the not-too-distant future.

At any rate, here's a geographically appropriate Rancid song...

The Wire

2009-11-18T19:03:00.000-05:00

This video of the 100 best quotes from The Wire has been making the rounds. It's pretty cool if you're familiar with the show - although maybe not the best introduction if you're new to it. (Warning: quite a large amount of obscenity contained therein. Via OTB.)

We just finished netflixing our way through all five seasons of The Wire this year. It has become a bit of a joke to point out that it is the best show on television, but hey, it's really true.

For starters, by now it totally owns the crime drama genre. I'm generally a fan of Law and Order and other such shows, but at this point I mostly feel kind of embarrassed for them. Their cops look like they just came from a shampoo commercial and their robbers look like they're waiting for a call from their agent. The self-contained 40 minute plots seem cliche in comparison to The Wire's highly addictive, sprawling, season-long story arcs.

Of course, the show isn't aiming to build a better crime procedural - it's aiming to illustrate the life of an American city (Baltimore), the people who live there and the institutions they create. The core story revolves around the city's drug trade, both the dealers and the cops who try to catch them. But each season tackles a major public institution -- the unions, the school system, the media, the political machines -- and describes how, more often than not, they fail the people they aim to serve.

Very much worth the time to watch it all, IMHO.

Happy Birthday Quinn

2009-11-17T18:22:00.004-05:00

Happy 2nd Birthday Quinn! We love you very much!

We also cannot believe how time has flown and how much you've grown. Click below to see a bunch of pictures of Quinn over the past 24 months. (You can really see when the hair finally kicked in - whoosh!

Four days

December 2007

March 2008

July 2008

October 2008

December 2008

March 2009

April 2009

July 2009

October 2009

Bay View

2009-11-09T21:34:00.004-05:00

The view of San Francisco from up in the Berkeley hills (from here actually)

The zoom in looks a little smoggy, but actually the day was pretty clear.

Universal Health Care Now

2009-11-06T20:46:00.005-05:00

If you are so lucky as to have a congressional representative and you think that everyone should have access to affordable health care, now might be a good time to give them a call. Tell them to support the strongest possible health bill and ensure that it passes. [Update: It passed.]

Of course, there's a lot not to like about this bill: (a) It's not single-payer, (b) if it does end up including a public option it may be so weak as to not be worth it, (c) it doesn't do anything to break the link between employment and insurance, and (d) it probably doesn't do enough to control costs. [Update: (e) odious amendment from Stupak.]

Still, Ezra Klein and Jon Cohn seem to think it will be better than the status quo. Plus a bad law is likely to be improved, but if reform doesn't happen this year, it may be another 15 years before the political system garners the courage to try again.

There's been a lot written on this topic, but here's a tab dump of some articles I thought were worth-reading:

Our current system is ridiculously expensive. Why the hell do we pay four times more than Canada for basic medication?

Ezra Klein has lots more charts like this one and he got them from an insurance CEO so they're not some pinko commie plot. There's a similar report by McKinsey Consulting that comes to the same conclusion -- Americans overpay for healthcare something like $1,600 per person a year. This New Yorker article by Atul Gawande tries to explain why things cost so much more in the U.S.
Despite all that cash, we don't really have better health outcomes. This report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation concludes: "the evidence for American superiority in quality of care (or lack thereof) is a mixed bag, with the nation doing relatively well in some areas—such as cancer care—and less well in others—such as mortality from treatable and preventable conditions."
The system is inhumane. This interview with Wendell Potter--a former health exec who had something of a conversion experience after witnessing low-income Americans waiting in line overnight for a free health clinic in Tennessee--is very revealing.
Reform should be good for small businesses. Well, not as good as single-payer would be, but if you believe the White House -- it should be better than what we've got.

Chemistry from the Future

2009-11-05T21:13:00.003-05:00

Here's an interesting Wikipedia nugget I stumbled across yesterday. Currently, scientists have discovered and confirmed 117 elements and arranged them into the iconic periodic table of the elements, which helpfully groups elements according to their atomic structure and chemical properties.

The element with the most protons discovered so far is ununoctium (Uuo, z=118) which is all the way over on the right side of the seventh period (a noble gas). So the natural question arises: what will the table look like when (if?) further elements are discovered? Wikipedia visualizes one possibility for an extended table (click to see larger version):

There are apparently a ton of caveats about this: (a) no one is sure in what order the orbitals are filled, and (b) the very concept of orbitals starts to breakdown above z=137 (Feynmanium) or z=173 (if you realistically model the nuclear force). To say nothing of that fact that these future elements may not be stable long enough to be observed (although many predict an Island of Stability around z=126).

Apparently the extended periodic table was first sketched out by Glenn Seaborg, and this talk shows a more familiar 'stacked' version of the extended table. Anyway, cool stuff I hadn't seen before.

(Apropos: I stumbled across this topic while researching Maria Goeppert-Mayer for work. MGM is the only other female Physics Nobel Prize winner, after Marie Curie. She did ground-breaking work on the shell model of the atomic nucleus while a researcher at Argonne National Lab. Like most pioneering female scientists she encountered just a stupid amount of sexism during the start of her career. Thankfully she stuck it out.)

Trick-or-Treat

2009-10-31T01:13:00.003-04:00

Here are some photos from Quinn's first (real) Halloween.

Helping carve pumpkins...

Quinn went as a ladybug - which she seemed to enjoy

She was excited about the whole "trick-or-treat" phenomenon, at least in theory. Once we actually knocked on a door she got a little weirded out, so we ended up only hitting 2 houses before heading off to a party.

And she definitely liked the whole candy angle! We dressed up as (naturally) ladybug groupies.

Violence in the Amazon

2009-10-28T01:35:00.003-04:00

I meant to blog about this when it occurred, but in June tensions between amazonian indigenous tribes and the Peruvian government boiled over into violence that left dozens of policemen and indigenous protesters dead. The conflict was about oil exploration: the government is pushing for it, the indigenous groups are fighting it.

The incident itself is a little murky, with both sides claiming different stories of "who shot first." Tragically it seems possible that early, inflated reports of the indigenous death count may have led to revenge killings of captured policemen. The fallout does not seem to have resolved the underlying issues at all. You can find good round-ups of news coverage from Amazon Watch and Climate Science Watch.

A few weeks ago, a similar indigenous protest in Ecuador--this time over a new law governing mining and water rights--also turned violent, leading to scores of injuries and at least one death. The fallout from this confrontation seems to be more constructive than in Peru, with the left-wing Correa government accepting talks with the protesters and apparently agreeing to some of their demands. Again, Amazon Watch has the news round-up.

In Ecuador at least, the indigenous people are very well organized, very interested in protecting their sovereignty and (at 35% of the population) a voting bloc to be reckoned with. They are also on the cutting edge of movements for environmental protection. I am less familiar with the situation in Peru, but it is an issue I'm hoping to learn more about.

Stone River

2009-10-25T23:15:00.003-04:00

Stone River, by Andy Goldsworthy
I was at Stanford over the weekend for my class reunion and made a point to go see this Andy Goldsworthy installation outside the art museum. The curving stone wall is constructed in a shallow excavation, giving the impression of an archaeological dig or a vein of rock coursing through the earth's crust.

If you're not familiar with him, Goldsworthy is a British artist who uses the natural world -- sticks, leaves, stones, ice, landscapes -- as his canvas. A lot of his work is fleeting, captured only by camera, but lately he has been undertaking these massive curving wall installations.

I always have the same reaction to his work. At first I am wowed by the beauty of nature depicted in his photos, but then I realize that it is not really nature that I'm seeing -- at least not in the way that an Ansel Adams photograph is about nature. There is too much human ingenuity and manipulation out front and in your face; you just don't see patterns like these in the real world. Rather his art is almost a form of abstract design, using "nature" both as the medium and the topic.

Anyway, he's fantastic. There are any number of places to see his work online, such as here or here or here.

A fun side note is that Andy Goldsworthy seems to be the inspiration for a lot of the visual design of Spike Jonze's adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are (which was really good, by the way). For example, see this photo or the structure glimpsed fleetingly at 1:30 in the movie trailer.

Old Crow Medicine Show

2009-10-19T22:31:00.004-04:00

A few weeks ago we expeditioned ourselves across the bay to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, a gigantic free concert in Golden Gate Park. The goal was to hear Neko Case play and then meetup with some friends for the closing show. But due to a titanic public transit fail (involving a very slow, very crowded bus and a surprisingly large number of drunken Brits), we missed Neko.

Argh. Very sad. (But of course no show is ever truly missed when you have youTube).

Anyway, we did find friends and we did catch Old Crow Medicine Show -- a string/bluegrass band from Nashville. They were pretty fun - lots of whoopin and hollerin and instrument-swappin. They crowded together in a tight cluster in the center of a big stage, like they were used to playing in elevators and unfamiliar with all that space. (Much of that night's set is up on YT, including this.)

Good songs too. The song that caught my ear during the show was Methamphetamine. Apparently their big signature song is Wagon Wheel, which was written by OCMS based on a Bob Dylan outtake. Anyway, it's nice to discover a new band - I'll have to keep an eye out for them in the future.

Crude

2009-10-17T18:56:00.004-04:00

I just saw the new documentary, Crude, directed by Joe Berlinger about the lawsuit brought against Chevron on behalf of 30,000 indigenous Ecuadoreans over contamination from oil exploration. The film is quite good, probably the best and most accessible introduction to the issue that you will find, although I'm not sure in how many theaters it can be found.

The film focuses on the lawyers, particularly the American Stephen Donziger who has been pushing the suit for decades pro bono (although he stands to make a hefty sum if they win) and the Ecuadoreans Pablo Fajardo and Luis Yanza. Fajardo is the star, self-effacing but quietly charismatic -- he grew up impoverished in the oil fields, putting himself through law school at night to finally lead the legal team, in the process winning international environmental awards and getting profiled in glossy magazines. Donziger comes off as your stereotypical bossy American, although you have to admire the guy's tenacity and street smarts.

The filmmakers are clearly on the side of the locals, although they give Chevron plenty of space to (attempt to) defend their record and don't hesitate to question the motives and tactics of the plaintiffs. Their overall take on the situation is pretty similar to what we learned when we visited the region earlier this year, namely: Chevron is guilty as hell (although PetroEcuador is no angel either) and the prospect of a $27 billion payout has prompted them to pull every trick in the book to avoid it.

The highlight of the film are the on-site inspections of the waste oil pits performed by the court-appointed expert, which serve as a forum for the lawyers to go toe-to-toe. Fajardo presses his case amplified by testimony from a band of local residents, while Chevron is represented by a lawyer who might as well be straight from central casting. Great courtroom drama from the middle of a rainforest.

Anyway, well worth seeing. Here's the trailer.

Blog Action Day!

2009-10-15T23:39:00.003-04:00

Today is Blog Action Day and the focus is on climate change. At this very instant I don't have anything deep to say about global warming except this: the U.S. is contemplating a complete restructuring of our energy system to address a very serious, but slow-moving, problem. On the crazy off-chance that the science is wrong and climate change isn't really a big deal what is the downside to having restructured our energy system away from fossil fuels and toward renewables? Not so much, really.

UCS's latest report -- Climate 2030 -- finds that policies that transition the country to a clean energy economy will end up saving people and businesses a lot of money through lower electricity bills, energy efficiency, green jobs and the like.

For those of us who live in areas with crappy air quality, reducing conventional air pollution (a potential side benefit of greenhouse gas reductions) could save tens of thousands of lives annually. Yes, that disgusting brown air actually does kill people, mostly via heart attacks and respiratory illnesses. And if you're worried about our dependence on foreign oil or happen to live near a mountain-top removal coal operation, this one is a no-brainer too.

Anyway, for more climate blogging I suggest checking out Dave Roberts, Joe Romm and Andy Revkin. Or check out this really interesting post on the climate impact of your wardrobe.

Not infinite, but without end

2009-09-27T11:12:00.013-04:00

I finally finished Infinite Jest, all 1079 densely-packed pages of it. Here's my review, cross-posted from goodreads. Some abstract, mild SPOILERS below - nothing specific that would ruin the book for someone (but avoid clicking the links).

--
Lo in the distant past, my cousin gave me David Foster Wallace's mondo-opus Infinite Jest for xmas. Since then it has lived on my shelf intimidating the other, littler books and taking their lunch money. I started to read it once and got through about 100 pages before my head of steam ran out. Pretty sure I've moved 10 apartments since and lugged IJ with me each time. So when I saw a bunch of folks were organizing an online reading group called Infinite Summer I figured, well, now or never.

Now having finished I think I can say I loved it. Not everything works, but when it does it is pretty memorable. The book demands a lot: the first 200 or so pages are pretty rough going and I found I could only read it when my wits were sharp or else the page-long sentences started blurring together. But once you're acclimated to DFW's strange little world and full-court-press writing style the cumulative whoosh of the plot and the words and the spiderweb of allusions becomes exhilarating.

It helps that the book is funny as hell and full of clever set-pieces (Eschaton!) that beat back the tedium. And yeah, it is tempting to call b.s. on some of his more over-written passages, but for the most part DFW uses his powers for good, not evil. He employs all his post-modern trickery in the service of a big-hearted, painfully sincere (even, sappy) story. The numerous tales of addicts bottoming-out are sometimes quite grim and desperately sad, but that only makes their slow climb to sobriety all the more compelling.

IJ is difficult, but I truly believe he meant it to be as entertaining and as humanly meaningful as possible. (As an aside, I will say that some of DFW's linguistic inventions are so good I've started using them unconsciously -- particularly the howling fantods and de-mapping.)

Finally, I hope it is not too much of a spoiler to say that the plot cuts off quite literally in the middle of the action. The novel is not infinite but it does literally have no end. The feel is of something massive and ornate--a chandelier or a grand piano--snapping its tether and falling. At first there is virtually no discernible movement, then it begins to gain a terrible speed. It glitters ominously as it rushes downward, anticipating a clamorous transformation. But the video reel cuts off just before the crash and noise.

DFW stated that the story's end "can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame." Which is true, if you carefully track the clues strewn through the book, but also a major "what the hell" moment once you turn that final page. (SPOILER-laden theorizing found here and here, among other places.)

The big idea, presumably, is that the novel's form recapitulates its themes of addiction and entertainment -- broadly, the pursuit of happiness. The abrupt ending conveys that same sense of incompleteness that returns once the buzz wears off, a longing for just one more hit. Indeed, as deeply frustrating as it is to read, a 'traditional' ending with a sense of closure would feel wrong for the novel and the protagonists. Addicts never get closure on their addictions, it is always day-to-day with the possibility of relapse.

Ultimately, I feel like I should give this like 17 stars or something. Not because it is perfect or necessarily the best novel I've ever read, but I can't but help feel tremendous respect for the story he tried to tell. Even the books flaws seem like triumphs.

Music Downloads

2009-09-26T01:05:00.003-04:00

Here are a few youTube tabs that have been left open in my browser for the last few weeks.

Together with Simon & Garfunkel and the John Denver Christmas album, PP&M were a big part of the sonic background to my childhood (especially Puff the Magic Dragon!) R.I.P. Mary.

Of more recent vintage, the new Mos Def album seems really strong, which is good to hear since his past two albums got such miserable reviews that I didn't have the heart to listen. Glad he's back to form.

Similarly, I haven't really listened to Pearl Jam since the mid-90s, but their new single rocks pretty damn hard I have to say.

Half Dome views

2009-09-12T22:01:00.002-04:00

Speaking of high sierra photography. Many years ago I visited Lick Observatory, an astronomical observatory run by the UC, just south of San Jose in the Coastal Ranges. In the lobby they had an enormous panorama of the Sierra Nevadas taken by the big telescope during the daytime. The mountains were some 150-200 miles away across the central valley, and Half Dome was easily recognizable in the center. The only online version of this image I could find was from this website, where the author had helpfully annotated the view.

In the course of searching, I also came across this amazing shot, also of Half Dome, but taken from Turlock in the central valley. Like most commenters, I wouldn't have guessed you could see Half Dome from the floor of the valley, let alone so dramatically.

Interestingly, the photo seems to have sparked a lot of accusations of fakery (for example, here and here and on flickr), prompting others to bust out the Google Earth proofs that, yes, this view is possible (although unlikely due to the constant air pollution and crappy visibility). Part of the confusion is stems from the fact that this photo was taken using a serious, pro-grade telephoto lens, so the scene is highly magnified.

At any rate, two examples of what can be done with serious optical systems.

Mount Whitney panorama

2009-09-12T00:40:00.004-04:00

The Astronomy Picture of the Day a few weeks ago was this gorgeous astro-photo panorama taken from the top of Mount Whitney -- at 14,495 feet, the highest peak in the lower 48 states. Click the photo for the full-size version (photo credit: Park Service Night Sky Program).

We climbed Whitney in summer 2000 and for years I had this same (daytime) panorama up on my wall, taped together on a cardboard backing (this was pre-digital camera).

The trail to Whitney is possibly the single most crowded backcountry trail I have ever experienced, particularly given that it is 22 miles round-trip with 6,000 feet elevation gain. I'm sure we encountered over 100 people that day. The lack of oxygen at the top is fierce - I felt like I was taking 3 breaths for each step. Still, a fantastic hike!

Circum-estuarial exercise

2009-09-11T00:37:00.004-04:00

Today's run took me all the way around Lake Merritt, pushing a grumpy Quinn in the jogging stroller.
I have to say it is awesome to have the lake -- and its running paths -- so close to our place. After 3 years of urban running in DC it feels good to break free from the stoplights and traffic and constant hazards and really run. It is too bad the lake is far too disgusting to actually swim in, but it's a pretty great city park.

Apparently the Lake Merritt Joggers and Striders Club hosts monthly fun runs with 5K, 10K and 15K options (i.e. 1, 2 and 3 laps around the lake) which I may have to check out.

The City & the City

2009-09-10T01:34:00.002-04:00

Here's my brief review of China Miéville's latest novel, The City & the City, cross-posted from goodreads. (In an effort to avoid spoilers, I suspect this will seem a little vague. But much of the fun of the novel is in figuring out what he's talking about, so hopefully the vagueness will not put you off reading it.)

--
It is nice to see China Miéville stretch himself a bit with his new novel, The City & the City. I enjoyed Perdido Street Station quite a lot, and while he's touching on some of the same ideas here, this is no repeat.

In some ways the detective genre has disciplined his writing. His canvas is much smaller here than with PSS, his socialist politics pushed to the background and his ornate prose streamlined. He has given himself another rich urban setting--two cities in fact, bizarrely intertwined, the setting for a murder.

And yet I am reminded of a review I once read of Jose Saramago's great novel, Blindness. The reviewer was puzzled as to what, exactly, the plague of blindness in that book represented. He concluded that Blindness was ultimately a novel about "not being able to see." I took that to mean that the book was powerfully resonant of all the horrors of the 20th century - war, genocide, etc. - but in the end abstracted beyond all specifics.

Something similar is happening with TC&TC. Miéville is careful not to make his allegory too ham-fisted. Instead he makes it a puzzle to solve - and a hook on which to hang our political obsessions. Certainly, it seems, he must be talking about the status of immigrants, or minorities, or the invisibility of the poor. Bilingual nations, multicultural cities. Or all of the above. Or something.

Like PSS, the ending is unsatisfying, but for the opposite reason. Here Miéville isn't stuck piling useless subplots atop one another, rather he has over-corrected and cuts his plot short with an ending that left me wanting more more, and not in a good way.

At any rate, I never got bored with this one, and I continue to be impressed with Miéville as a writer. I'm just waiting for him to hit one out of the park.

IJ Quote of the Day

2009-09-08T23:50:00.003-04:00

"Stice, oblivious, bites into his sandwich like it's the wrist of an assailant." -- Infinite Jest, p. 627

New Town

2009-08-31T00:49:00.001-04:00

Hey, so we live in California now! Go figure! We had a gorgeous West-coast-style sunset this evening to mark the event...

Completism

2009-08-23T20:35:00.007-04:00

Someone at Netflix apparently cleaned behind the refrigerator and found their long-missing copy of the Coen Brothers' debut film Blood Simple. Which means that I got to see it the other night. Which means (I think) I have officially seen all of their films. Check!

For what it's worth here's my ranking.

The Big Lebowski -- A+
Barton Fink -- A
Fargo -- A
No Country for Old Men -- A
Miller's Crossing -- A-
Raising Arizona -- A-
[update 2] True Grit -- B+
O Brother, Where Art Thou? -- B
Blood Simple -- B
[update] A Serious Man -- B
The Hudsucker Proxy -- B-
The Man Who Wasn't There -- B-
Burn After Reading -- C+
Intolerable Cruelty -- C
The Ladykillers -- C-

Not to say that this was such an onerous task. I mean, it's a pretty damn high level of quality, so it's not like you have to slog through many stinkers just to say you've seen them all. Blood Simple goes in the middle of the pack because it's essentially a rough draft for Fargo and a little emotionally removed, but still a great movie.

The trailer for the new one (A Serious Man) looks reasonably interesting, but mainly I am waiting on tip-toes to see what they'll do with Michael Chabon's Yiddish Policeman's Union.

[Update Dec 2010: Chris Orr posts his Coen-list here. I liked but but wasn't blown away by A Serious Man, and hope to see their remake of True Grit soon.]

Not even wrong

2009-08-11T20:43:00.004-04:00

I vividly remember the following conversation from high school:

Female friend: Someday a woman will be president.

Male friend: No. Women aren't capable of leading an entire nation.

Female friend: But Margaret Thatcher was prime minister of Great Britain for many years!

Male friend: Oh yeah. Well, everyone knows that it's really the Queen who runs things over there.

Female friend: ...

For some reason I am reminded of this whenever I read about the bizarre things people are saying about health care reform. Such as the notion that if Stephen Hawking were British he "wouldn't have a chance" under the National Health Service. Or Medicare recipients protesting against "socialized medicine." Or Sarah Palin talking crazy talk about "death panels" that don't exist. Sigh.

Water Treatment

2009-08-07T22:12:00.003-04:00

This row of obsolete water treatment towers is one of the weirder corners in DC - not far from where we live. Covered in vines, trees sprouting from the roof. In the light of a setting sun they can look downright Tolkien-esque -- like a string of abandoned elvish castles. In addition to the towers, the green grass covers over extensive catacombs which housed the guts of the treatment process. Very epic.
From 1902 to 1985, McMillan Reservoir was one of the primary water treatment facilities in the city. Now it is largely abandoned and falling to bits. The city keeps trying to find a way to develop this (extremely valuable) mid-city property (a not uncontroversial plan of action). But no ground appears to have been broken yet.

I was curious about the purpose of the towers. Apparently the process used here was slow sand filtration, and so the towers basically stored the sand. But here's the weird thing about sand filtration: all of the purification work is done not by the sand, but by a thin layer of biological organisms (bacteria, protozoa, etc.) living on the top layer of the sand. To keep the filter working efficiently you have to continually maintain this crust of organisms. The somewhat bizarre term for this biofilm is schmutzdecke (German, naturally, for "dirt cover").

Learn something new every day.

DC mixtape

2009-08-05T21:11:00.003-04:00

Now that we're leaving town, it seems like a good time to put together a DC mix! Suggestions always welcome, leave 'em in the comments.

Postal Service, The District Sleeps Alone Tonight
DC is a transitory place. Many people come here for jobs and internships, put in their time and then go back to where they come from. This Postal Service song nicely captures that loneliness and dislocation--and how the brightly lit, but deserted, downtown feels after dark.
Chuck Brown, Block Party
Until recently, DC hasn't been known for its hip-hop, but you can't talk about the city without mentioning go-go. Go-go is the legendary local music subculture (with the eponymous boots) that never quite hit the bigtime. It's basically a descendant of '70s funk but with a unique backbeat to it. Chuck Brown is the guy generally credited with creating the sound.

Junk Yard Band (Live 1994)
The Junk Yard Band was apparently formed in the '80s by a bunch of 10-year-old kids from the Barry Farms projects banging on hubcaps and plastic tubs.

Fugazi, Turnover (Live 1991)
The other DC music subculture that never hit it big (mostly by design) was the DC hardcore scene of which Fugazi is probably the most widely revered.

The Magnetic Fields, Washington D.C.
I'm partial to this Magnetic Fields song, but I was only able to find this cover version (which is kinda cute anyway but lacks the cheerleader shouting of the original).

Duke Ellington, Take the 'A' Train
Ellington was born in D.C. in 1899 and launched his career here.

-- update! --

Wale, Chillin
Speaking of hip-hop, Wale is the local MC who's been getting some attention lately. He's got an album out next month and this single ft. Lady Gaga. Decent. Plus he's got a lot of DC pride. (No embedding, but you can listen here.)

Advice of the Day

2009-08-01T11:53:00.003-04:00

From sci-fi author John Scalzi, something to ponder:

Because one hears of writers who have made great sacrifices in order to work on their writing, including giving up jobs, friends and spouses in order to put their words into being. Does one have to be willing to put that all on the line for one’s art?

Nah. What you really need to do is cut an hour of TV watching out of your day. Seriously, now: Keep your job, keep your marriage, keep your friends, keep the kids. Just drop an hour of TV.

Because, look: If you’ve got an hour a day to write uninterrupted, you can probably manage between 250 and 500 words a day. Do that five days a week, and in the course of a year that’s between 65,250 and 130,500 words; i.e., hey, you’ve gone and written a novel. All while keeping your day job and not turning into a hermit. This is not complicated.

Hmmmmm. Might have to try that (not that I generally watch that much TV, but still...)

Going Back To Cali

2009-07-28T23:00:00.003-04:00

So our big announcement is that we'll be moving to Oakland for three months starting in September. I know I've been talking about this for a while, but it is finally officially official. Laura Jean will be the interim pastor at the First Christian Church of Oakland and I'll be working out of UCS's Berkeley office. Yay!

It is hard to believe its been nine years since I moved away from the Golden State. It feels good to be going back and I'm definitely looking forward to being 3 hours from my parents and reconnecting with CA friends. (I'm also glad we're not closing the ~~book~~ chapter on DC just yet--I'm just starting to feel like I know the town and we have a bunch of friends who we will miss.) Plus, apparently they need some advice on how to govern the state. Always happy to help!

Shoreline

2009-07-25T22:40:00.001-04:00

Quinn playing on the shore of Huntington Lake. Reminds me of this excerpt from Tagore (again):

"On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.
The infinite sky is motionless overhead
and the restless water is boisterous.
On the seashore of endless worlds
the children meet with shouts and dances. "

-- "Seashore" from Gitanjali

Very postmodern

2009-07-25T13:54:00.003-04:00

Another thought on Infinite Jest. There is sometimes a soulless tendency in postmodern art. If the artist is not careful, all their philosophizing and meta-this-and-that can lead them into the twin blind alleys of nihilism and/or smugness. Clever enough to deconstruct and poke holes, but not clever enough to build anything back up after tearing it down. It's that sterile art-gallery feel.

This is why I really love the sections of IJ that deal with Alcoholics Anonymous and the Ennet halfway house. These sections (so far) have a big beating heart. The vibe is not "there is no truth!" but rather, "truth is everywhere, and it is messy and doesn't make sense, but you can find it somehow." The section I just read (p. 343, not really a spoiler) was making the point that AA works even for addicts who don't believe in god and who think AA itself is a bunch of cliched b.s. The whole thing was charmingly meta, and also kind of old-fashioned.

It reminded me (tangentially) of Charlie Kaufman's movies (primarily Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine) where he uses all manner of narrative and digital trickery to elevate plots that are not so different than 100 cookie-cutter romantic comedies when you get right down to it.

The Entertainment

2009-07-21T14:46:00.000-04:00

Lo in the distant past, my cousin gave me David Foster Wallace's mondo-opus Infinite Jest for xmas. Since then it has lived on my shelf intimidating the other, littler books and taking their lunch money. I started to read it once and got through about 100 pages before my head of steam ran out. Pretty sure I've moved 10 apartments since and lugged IJ with me each time.

So when I saw a bunch of folks were organizing an online reading group called Infinite Summer I figured, well, now or never. I'm now on page 331 (=30.7% finished). My experience so far has been approximately thus:

Pages 0-100: Difficult language and sentence structure.¹ Very very confusing plot. Slightly pretentious, occasionally uncomfortable, intermittently funny. The ideas he bats about are interesting, but mostly... huh?
Pages 100-200: Starting to make more sense even as the full, overwhelming scope of it starts to come into view. I start to realize that IJ is actually quite funny, and a lot of the humor arises out of his unconventional use of language.
Pages 200-330: Wow - this book is fantastic! The emotions get bigger: unbearable sadness, wild hilarity, impending doom. Crucial information is revealed that helps you make sense of everything. The storyline(s) click into place. But beware: there are a lot of bizarre ideas and topics here (herds of feral hamsters, not the least).

We will see if the trend continues upward for the next 600 pages, but clearly the with-it-sticking was well rewarded. Once you get past the first 150 or so (which are the literary form of hazing) and acclimate to DFW's style and worldview, the book is fun and actually "surprisingly readable" (as the carefully selected laudatory quote on the cover points out).

DFW's default style is primarily one of overwhelming force applied to everything within sight cf. pp. 44-5:

And no matter how many times he has the Terminex people out, there are still the enormous roaches that come out of the bathroom drains. Sewer roaches, according to Terminex. Blattaria implacablus or something. Really huge roaches. Armored-vehicle-type bugs. Totally black, with Kevlar-type cases, the works. And fearless, raised in the Hobbesian sewers down there. Boston's and New Orleans's little brown roaches were bad enough, but you could at least come in and turn on a light and they'd run for their lives. These Southwest roaches you turn on the light and they just look up at you from the tile like: 'You got a problem?' Orin stomped on one of them, only once, that had come hellishly up out of the drain in the shower when he was in there, showering, going out naked and putting shoes on and coming in and trying to conventionally squash it, and the result was explosive. There's still material from that one time in the tile-grouting. It seems unremovable. Roach-innards. Sickening. Throwing the shoes away was preferable to looking at the sole to clean it.

And it goes on about the roaches. That was me, laughing like a maniac on the metro after reading that passage. He dares to be funny in ways that are sometimes a little juvenile or obvious, but combined with deep philosophical musings and close observation of his characters. And then, strung through the narrative, are extended passages dealing with addiction and depression that are just gut-punchingly sad, that make you realize the full scope of his talent.

So far so good. A final note: the online reading group is great. They post helpful summaries, give useful advice and link to other resources that are useful in making sense of it all. The comment threads are encouraging and thoughtful, rather than the cesspools of snark and one-upmanship you might expect to find.

¹ And lots of endnotes. A hundred pages of 'em in tiny font. Similarly, all written discussions of IJ or DFW are basically required to have endnotes also.

The words she knows, the tune she hums

2009-07-18T14:15:00.003-04:00

I've totally had this song (and correspondingly famous scene) in my head for days now. I stumbled on the melody while tinkering on the piano and then out of nowhere a friend at work made a joke about the lyrics ("Hold me closer Tony Danza!") ... must be something in the air.

lizard!

2009-07-17T23:00:00.000-04:00

Health Care Stat of the Day

2009-07-16T19:18:00.002-04:00

The National Academy of Sciences (in a 2004 report) says:

Lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States. Although America leads the world in spending on health care, it is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not ensure that all citizens have coverage.

18,000 unnecessary deaths every year is a pretty crazy number if you think about it. I feel like we always hear from the media about the 40-50 million uninsured (which is also a scandal), but not this stat, which lays out the stakes for health care reform pretty clearly. 18,000 unnecessary deaths.

I've also been idly mulling about in my head about why exactly the 'free market' fails so spectacularly in this case. In theory, it is supposed to work out that some enterprising young entrepreneur will look at those 40-50 million people and see an opportunity to profit by selling them a lean, mean insurance plan. But of course it doesn't work out like that -- there is apparently no money to be made off the pool of currently uninsured people (or someone would have made it already).

Nate Silver suggests part of the reason it doesn't work this way is because the insurance game is largely about volume.

The reason the insurers are staying in business, though, is because barriers to entry in the health insurance industry are in practice quite high. Insurers benefit from pooling risk. The larger the pool, the better in terms of the insurer's ability to hedge its risk and build negotiating leverage with its providers. That makes it very difficult for a Five Guys or a JetBlue type of start-up to compete: they'll have trouble getting together enough customers to pool their risk adequately, and even if they do, they won't have as much negotiating leverage as the big guys.

Interesting! But a lack of competition means that there is no real penalty for dumping sick or otherwise unprofitable patients by any means necessary. (Read this article by Jonathan Cohn if you want to get really really angry about the inhumanity of the current system.) Which is a roundabout way of saying: we need a public option in the health care bill in order to reinject some needed competition into the market.

Baby's First Backpacking Trip

2009-07-14T20:23:00.001-04:00

We took Quinn on her first overnight camping trip the other weekend up in the Sierra Nevadas. It went really well (apart from the voracious, pigeon-sized mosquitoes) and Quinn seemed to have a great time. We went with my Dad, my sister Jessica and my cousin, Casey.

We got a nifty baby-carrier. Q was a little grumpy about it ...

... but the motion rocked her to sleep pretty quickly.

The big occasion for the hike was my Dad's 60th and my sister's 30th birthdays. Since we were bringing the baby, we chose a pretty easy trip, about 8 miles round trip. I confess I was a little apprehensive about taking the baby, envisioning all the bad things that could go wrong and mentally calculating how fast I could run the four miles back to the car in the middle of the night. But everything went awesomely.

We started near Huntington Lake and headed over Potter Pass.

Sadly even a short hike doesn't really reduce the amount of stuff you have to carry. You still need tents and sleeping bags, etc.

There is a beautiful view of the Sierra backcountry (looking north toward Yosemite) from the top of Potter Pass.

On the other side of the pass, our final destination was Twin Lakes. Here Quinn dips her toes in the lower twin.

We eventually found a nice campsite at the upper twin with a really great log for Quinn to play on. Quinn had a lot of fun splashing in the lake, picking up rocks and pine cones, tramping around the campsite and shouting the word 'chip munk!' Sleeping in the tent was just about the most exciting thing ever -- so much so that we had a hard time getting her to sleep.

Casey and Quinn.

Mmmm, camp food! (Actually, my Dad cooked a typically delicious meal of real pasta with feta, tomatoes and cookies for dessert -- he doesn't go in for any of that freeze-dried stuff.)

Upper Twin Lake, with island, as sunset nears. Interestingly, the stream flowing out of this lake travels underground for quite a distance.

Happy Birthday Dad and Jess!

Breaking camp the next morning.

Oscar Top 10

2009-07-11T10:57:00.000-04:00

Apparently the Oscars will start nominating 10 films for Best Picture. Weird. But on second thought, maybe not such a bad idea. It all depends on what the additional five nominees are, I guess.

Mainly the Oscars need to get outside the "prestige film" box. Would it kill them to nominate a comedy every once in a while? It is much harder to make a truly funny movie than to piece together your standard historical drama, but they get no love. By my count over the past decade only 4 (out of 50) Best Picture nominees were comedies (and only one winner) ... versus like 8 or 9 biopics and a whole raft of tasteful dramas.

Also, more genre films would be welcome. Most of my favorite films of the past few years have been sci-fi or fantasy tinged--Dark Knight, Eternal Sunshine, Children of Men, the Prestige, anything by Pixar--Best Picture nominees, not a one.

Time Series Rant

2009-07-10T17:22:00.005-04:00

For work, I often check in on the latest from the climate change skeptic/denier/contrarian camps. Since I spent several hours this week reading blogs and reports of that ilk, you will now be subjected to a rant. Sorry bout that.

<rant>
I'm not a climate scientist by any stretch, but I've become pretty familiar with most of the climate skeptic talking points -- and why they're wrong (or technically correct but off-point). I know about the sunspots and the water vapor and the Urban Heat Island effect. I've read a bit on the hockey stick and the British vineyards. For the most part this is all kind of annoying but basically OK -- healthy skepticism yadda yadda yadda -- so long as it doesn't slow down meaningful policies (which, unfortunately, it is).

Anyway the dumbest skeptic meme by far has got to be the whole "global cooling since 1998" thing. I mean, honestly? Tamino at Open Mind has a great breakdown of why this is just insane. The key plot showing the global average temperature trend (GISS data) is stolen from that post.
On one level, it's an honest mistake. In all these temperature series the year 1998 is either the first or second hottest year on record (sometimes following 2005, as it does with this data) thanks to an unusually strong El Niño that year. So if you look at 1998 and the latest data point, you might think, whoa, its gotten a tad chillier in the last decade!

But if you think about it for a second, you see that the average temperature varies quite a bit from year to year -- and yet the trend over many years is consistently and significantly upward. This is because the climate responds to increased CO2 on a comparatively long timescale, but short term weather variations will drive the temperature slightly up or slightly down year to year. Next year, random noise will likely drive the average temperature back up again. If global warming had actually leveled off or declined, it would be at least a few decades before we could say so with confidence.

In any scientific field, over-interpreting a noisy data set is a big no-no. If instead you add in a little cherry picking by taking the hottest year as your starting point then you've got yourself some industrial grade misinformation.

Which is why I always respond to this argument as a red-flag of bad-faith argumentation, particularly when it is made by people from a technical background. Stop fooling yourself: show the whole data set, fit a curve to it and figure out the error bars on your parameters. And yet... you see it all over the place. Here (Watt). And here (Pielke Sr). And here (George Will).
</rant>

Sigh. I guess this one irks me particularly since I was over-exposed to noisy time-series data sets as a child. OK. I'm done now.

Tree and Sky

2009-07-07T14:49:00.001-04:00

Dead tree, amazing clouds -- snapped on our hike to Twin Lakes (more on which forthcoming).

Metro Accident

2009-06-22T20:08:00.003-04:00

There's been a terrible accident on the DC Metro today. The Post is reporting at least ~~four~~ six people dead and many more wounded -- the deadliest crash in the system's history. The crash, which was apparently a high-speed rear-ending, happened during rush hour at the next stop out on the Red Line from where we live.

I've been thinking about the families of the victims--who thinks their daily commute is life threatening?--and am feeling very grateful that no one we know was involved (apart from some inconvenience getting home).

Quinn Photos

2009-06-14T11:43:00.004-04:00

Here are some Q highlights from the past several months.
Quinn at the Race for the Cure last weekend...

The hair is starting to come in little by little...

Quinn has decided that she loooooves dogs!

Quinn looking intent and strangely fierce.

Exploring the National Botanical Garden.

At the National Museum of the American Indian.

Automatic Baby

2009-06-07T21:20:00.002-04:00

We just did an all-R.E.M. service at church today - pretty fun. Anyway, while I was poking around on YouTube for inspiration, I came across this:

This being one-half of U2 (bass and drums) plus one-half of R.E.M. (singer and guitar) doing a pretty great live version of U2's song 'One.' A few years ago I actually spent several hours trying to track down a mp3 of this performance somewhere online. I should have known just to check youTube.

I really like Michael Stipe's vocal here and the very R.E.M.-y harmonies he does with Mike Mills. But still: this is really Bono's song - it's hard to beat the original.

Best Street Sign in DC

2009-06-02T20:38:00.003-04:00

No one is sure what the name of this street is, but it sure starts with 'H'

Globalization and Its Discontents

2009-05-31T12:56:00.002-04:00

My review of Joseph Stiglitz's book, cross-posted from goodreads.com. (See also.)

---
I'm a dope when it comes to economics, but my impression is that this book has been hugely influential among the anti-corporate globalization crowd. It came out shortly after the Seattle WTO protests and soon popped up on the bookshelves many of my development-minded friends.

It's easy to see why: Stiglitz is about as prestigious a development economist as you are likely to find--Nobel Prize winner, former chief economist at the World Bank, by some metrics the most cited economist working today. So if he says something has gone wrong with globalization, people listen.

His message here is very reform-minded--he thinks globalization is here to stay--but his arguments should resonate with anyone concerned about poverty in the developing world, or about jobs here in the U.S. His basic thesis is that the IMF has drifted from its Keynesian roots and been hijacked by a narrow economic orthodoxy that rabidly pursues privatization, market liberalization and low inflation to the detriment of all other social and economic goals. The attack of the market fundamentalists!

He notes that this prescription for economic growth, dubbed the 'Washington Consensus', is far from the consensus position among economists. Indeed, it seems as if the IMF's policies are designed for the benefit of the financial elite, rather than with the goal of achieving broadly-shared prosperity in the targeted countries. Hence the IMF's focus on inflation rather than unemployment, and their relentless drive to open up markets to foreign investors rather than fostering local entrepreneurship.

The results have been disastrous for developing nations from Russia to East Asia to Africa. Indeed, he makes the point that globalization has been a net loser for sub-Saharan Africa and that countries who have resisted the IMF have been more successful on average than those who didn't. (Interestingly, he mostly lets his former employers at the World Bank off the hook.)

If you are looking for a popular introduction to macroeconomics, look elsewhere. This is more like an extended, wide-ranging hallway conversation with an eminent professor. Still, I learned a ton about how these institutions work and how they might be made accountable to the billions of people impacted by their decisions. The general discussion about nurturing and building economies are also hugely relevant given the recent economic collapse.

Sotomayor

2009-05-30T12:47:00.004-04:00

I highly recommend reading this terrific post by Julian Sanchez on Sonia Sotomayor and the opposition to her nomination coming from Limbaugh, Gingrich and a swarm of lesser pundits.

Look, it’s not racist to oppose a Latina judicial nominee, or to oppose affirmative action, or to point out genuine evidence of ethnic bias on the part of minorities. What we’re seeing here, though, is people clinging to the belief that Sotomayor has to be some mediocrity who struck the ethnic jackpot, that whatever benefit she got from affirmative action must be vastly more significant than her own qualities, that she’s got to be a harpy boiling with hatred for whitey, however overwhelming the evidence against all these propositions is. This is really profoundly ugly. Like Yglesias, I don’t think I’m especially sensitive to stuff like this, or particularly easily moved to anger, but I’m angry.

Many conservatives argue, now that we have ended segregation, we also need to end affirmative action and strive for a race-neutral society. On this level playing field, the claim goes, qualified women and minorities will be able to successfully compete with white dudes. I think there is still a need for affirmative action, but I think the vast majority of conservatives make this argument in good faith.

But here's the thing: when an obviously superlative Latina is tapped for the nomination she still -- still! -- has to put up with crap like this. Comments about how she only advanced thanks to affirmative action, that she's unqualified, that she's not very bright -- always presented without a scrap of real evidence. I mean, how much more brilliant or qualified do you need to be to be judged on your merits?

This is the continuing power of racism in our society. And it's not just crazy folks on the internet -- this is coming from the grand poobahs of the Republican Party and movement conservatism. There is a lot that's fair game with Sotomayor: call her a liberal, call her a judicial activist, bash her rulings, whatever. But, just as with Roberts and Alito, that's not going to be enough to sink her nomination.

Ecuador tidbits

2009-05-24T09:29:00.000-04:00

Just to write them down before they fade (amazing how quickly that happens), some final thoughts on our trip to Ecuador.

Southern Stars. It being my first trip to the southern hemisphere (albeit, barely) I was looking forward to seeing the southern stars. Unfortunately, the only nights spent outside of Quito were spent in the rain forest, where (it turns out) it rains a lot. We could see the stars one night while we were driving, and it was definitely neat to see Orion in the northern sky, but no primo star-gazing opportunities. Reason to go back, I guess.
Volcán. The Andes mountains are really cool and we got to see several active-ish volcanoes. In addition to Guagua Pichincha--which looms over Quito and erupted spectacularly in 1999--we also spied El Reventador and Sumaco from the air on our flight to Coca and we drove right past the base of Tungurahua en route to Baños (which owes its thermal hot springs to the volcano's proximity).
Chevron. In this week's Economist you can read the basic pro-corporate defense of Chevron. The authors do not seem to have bothered to interview anyone from the other side of the lawsuit and several of their assertions do not pass the smell test IMHO. In particular, the idea that Ecuador made tens of billions from oil exploration while poor, pitiful Texaco only made $500 million is laughable and inconsistent with other facts presented in the article. Chevron Pit has the full rebuttal here.
Organize! We heard an interesting bit of history from Yury, our guide, about Monseñor Leonidas Proaño. Before the land reform laws of the 1960s, Ecuador's poor were essentially serfs, bound to the large haciendas. When Proaño became bishop of Riobamba in 1954, a region that was poor and mostly Quichua-speaking, he began to preach liberation and agitate for social justice. He even convinced parts of the Church to give up their large land-holdings. He also founded something called the Popular Radiophonic Schools, which trained leaders and community organizers. According to Yury many of young volunteers from the Radiophonic School are now leaders of the national indigenous rights organizations or are making policy in the national assembly and the Correa government.

(V)OTE

2009-05-20T21:14:00.003-04:00

Giant version of one of those ubiquitous Shepard Fairey HOPE posters - overseen at the corner of Kenyon and Georgia here in DC. This last weekend, my sis and I visited the National Portrait Gallery where we saw the "official" portrait version hanging there too.