Baby's First Backpacking Trip

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

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

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.

[Update 02/03/12: Actually, this animated gif from Skeptical Science is one of the best refutations of this meme that I've seen.  I guess you could "argue" that global warming stopped in 1973, again in 1980, again in 1988, again in 1995, again in 1998.  And yet the temperature keeps going up!]

Tree and Sky

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

Metro Accident

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

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

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

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

Globalization and Its Discontents

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 wo...more 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

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

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

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.

Anathem

I just finished Neal Stephenson's latest novel, Anathem. Quick take: it's great. Here's my review cross-posted from goodreads.com.

---
Mystery writers must strike a careful balance: no one likes a mystery that is too obvious or one that is too obscure. Similarly, science fiction authors have a mandate to bring the science and make it plausible (their readers are, after all, total geeks). But fans are also looking for something new and interesting. So that's the sci fi game: "predict" what the major scientific breakthroughs will look like for the next millennium or so, but make them seem "real" ... or else...more Mystery writers must strike a careful balance: no one likes a mystery that is too obvious or one that is too obscure. Similarly, science fiction authors have a mandate to bring the science and make it plausible (their readers are, after all, total geeks). But fans are also looking for something new and interesting. So that's the sci fi game: "predict" what the major scientific breakthroughs will look like for the next millennium or so, but make them seem "real" ... or else your nerdy fans will turn on you.

Most authors just gloss this over and focus on the plot. Enough about the physics of warp drives ... explosions! After all, it's a lot to expect a mere fiction author to put forth a coherent theory of wormhole dynamics or the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics just as a prerequisite for blasting some aliens.

And yet Neal Stephenson, bless his heart, seems determined to try. He has always reveled in cool ideas themselves and will happily spend pages explaining how public-key encryption works or what nano-bot power sources might look like. With Anathem he has taken this urge to its obsessive extreme and constructed a fully detailed, 7000-year intellectual history as a backdrop for his story.

I can see how this book might not be for everyone. The book starts slow and at first lacks the usual Stephenson pizazz. There are no kitana-wielding pizza-delivery-men here, just a bunch of monks (although some can indeed kick ass). The sheer volume of alternate vocab words can be daunting. (Note: be sure to read past page 200 before giving up -- the plot picks up significantly after that point.)

But in many ways, Anathem is Stephenson's most confident and mature novel. His earlier books have a magpie quality to them (particularly the Baroque Cycle) -- jumping willy-nilly between multiple characters, plotlines and concepts. Here he sticks to a single narrative and builds systematically to a gripping finale. While it is not perfect, I enjoyed it tremendously and would definitely recommend it to anyone who likes a good spec fic speely.

Bike to Work

Today was national Bike To Work Day. I went with some co-workers to the DC event and we got our picture taken with Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu.
Apparently Dr. Chu, in addition to being an enthusiastic proponent of sustainable energy, is an avid biker ... and a good sport about random people wanting to take a picture with him.

60 Minutes on Chevron

Apropos of my earlier post on the Chevron in Ecuador lawsuit, 60 Minutes just did a really nice and informative segment on the issue. Chevron does not come out smelling like roses here and it is great that the issue is getting wider attention. (Video not embedded because of a really annoying ad that automatically starts playing - click the link to watch.)

(Via ChevronToxico.com.)

How The Light Gets In

Our tiny backyard is paved over with concrete, but that hasn't stopped some pretty robust plant growth from poking through.

Co-Ed Co-op

A friend forward me a link about the brouhaha surrounding co-ed rooms at Stanford's co-operative student housing. One parent was surprised to hear her daughter had ended up in a mixed-gender room at one of the co-ops and wrote a fairly outraged article in the National Review. The NRO article got picked up by the NY Times college admissions blog and generated hundreds of comments from all sides (interesting reading, btw).

The daughter later responded stating that she had no problem with her rooming situation and the entire affair is more a conflict between her and her parents, than with Stanford's policies. Her parents have apparently decided not to pay for her final quarter because of it.

The whole thing is funny to me because I lived seven quarters (two years) in Stanford co-ops and four times had at least one female roommate (once was in the context of a 'commune' where we divided four rooms into sleeping and working space for 15-some-odd people). In my experience it really wasn't a big deal at all since the people who participate are pretty much self-selected and do their best to act like, you know, mature adults.

So I can say for certain that this situation has nothing to do with Stanford's recently introduced Gender Neutral Housing Policy -- as is implied and moralized upon by the NRO article -- and everything to do with the fact that Stanford allows the co-ops to run themselves. Mixed gender rooms have been happening for decades.

The co-op residents decide how to divvy up the rooms during the course of a multi-hour, consensus-driven rooming meeting (which is just as painful as it sounds). In no case are students required to partake in mixed-gender rooms, and indeed can hold up the entire rooming meeting if they are not satisfied with their lot. The woman in question (foolishly) missed the rooming meeting, but on the other hand, had no complaints with how it turned out. If she had complained, University housing would have stepped in, no question.

Still, I can sympathize with a parent feeling blind-sided by all this, and certainly Stanford should do more to alert parents to this possibility. Nothing wrong with a little transparency, but also thank god Stanford treats their students like grown-ups (at least in this instance).

How To Make A Baby

Laura Jean forwarded this to me, and I have to say ... hee hee!

Some of my best friends...

Christianity Today has an interview with Joe the Plumber where he says this:

In the last month, same-sex marriage has become legal in Iowa and Vermont. What do you think about same-sex marriage at a state level?

At a state level, it's up to them. I don't want it to be a federal thing. I personally still think it's wrong. People don't understand the dictionary—it's called queer. Queer means strange and unusual. It's not like a slur, like you would call a white person a honky or something like that. You know, God is pretty explicit in what we're supposed to do—what man and woman are for. Now, at the same time, we're supposed to love everybody and accept people, and preach against the sins. I've had some friends that are actually homosexual. And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn't have them anywhere near my children. But at the same time, they're people, and they're going to do their thing.

Classy. Dude, I'm pretty sure you won't have any gay friends after this one.

I guess I can appreciate his consistency on federalism -- plenty of conservatives shout 'states rights!' about civil rights issues and do an about-face when it comes to gay marriage -- but this is pretty obnoxious. The weird thing is, despite the outrageous homophobia, there is still a palpable defensiveness in what he says, as if he knows the wider culture is sliding out from under him. (Via.)

Florida

We were down in Florida a few weeks ago, so Quinn and I hit the beach.

At first she was terrified of the waves, but eventually she detached from my leg and had fun running after the birds and waves.

GRB 090423

Ooooh! Yesterday's APOD shows the afterglow of gamma-ray burst 090423 which has a measured redshift of 8.2 -- making it the most distant GRB detected and (apart from the CMB) the most distant object ever observed. (090423 is also coincidentally our 10-year dating anniversary.)

For non-astronomers, redshift (or z) is the stretching of light-waves by the expansion of the universe; astronomers use it as a convenient shorthand for distance. Until recently you almost never saw anything beyond a z of 5, so a redshift of 8.2 is sort of like hitting 100 home runs in a season -- pretty cool! This burst arose from the death of a massive star back in the very, very early universe.

The rarity of high-z objects is partly because the bulk of the emitted light is shifted into the infrared (which is more of a pain to detect) and partly because neutral hydrogen absorbs much of the visible light past a certain redshift. In theory, objects like this one can tell us a lot about the era of reionization and the formation of structure in the universe. No doubt telescopes with infrared detectors are trying to squeeze every last photon out of this event.

If anyone is interested, you can follow the observation reports for this event -- from the initial detection by Swift to the discovery of the NIR afterglow -- at GRBlog or Jochen Greiner's website.

Specter Defector

D.C. is all a-twitter with today's news that Sen. Arlen Specter has decided to switch parties to avoid a tough Republican primary opponent. In theory this gives the Democrats the 60 votes needed to avoid the omnipresent Republican filibuster (assuming Al Franken ever gets seated). In reality, power still lies in the hands of the same handful of centrist Senators, no matter what letter appears next to their name.

On one level, it's a little bit sad to see the Republicans seemingly driving out their moderate members. Nate Silver has dubbed this the Republican Death Spiral, where moderates lose or leave the party and the increasingly conservative remainder is unable or unwilling to appeal to the mainstream, leading to more losses and more defections, etc. The psychology is pretty easy to understand.

One question is why this didn't happen to the Democrats in '02 and '04 when they were getting trounced at the polls? I think partly it did. There were numerous voices that called for moderating the party's message, but the leadership picked liberal Nancy Pelosi as House minority leader over the moderate Steny Hoyer. The party then nominated two solid liberals -- Kerry and Obama -- as their presidential standard-bearers, rather than reaching for a centrist.

But at the same time as the Dems stuck to their liberal guns, Howard Dean rolled out his 50 state strategy and Obama made a concerted effort to compete in red states like Virginia and North Carolina. A shift to the left, yes, but also reaching out beyond the base. (And of course, the Democrats also got lucky. As 9/11 faded, the Bush administration dragged on and the economy collapsed, the country as a whole seems to have shifted left.)

The key then is not ideology, but outreach and persuasion. Maybe the Republican Party's mistake is not in becoming more conservative, but in writing off large portions of America as unworthy. If you live in a city, the party barely even tries to appeal to your interests. If you are gay or lesbian or have family members who are immigrants, some Republican politicians don't even want your vote and routinely go out of their way to insult you.

As I've ranted before, this is dumb politics on their part. The Democrats, whatever else their faults, seem to have an unshakable belief that the entire middle class is their turf and their natural constituency. Anyway, it will be interesting to see how Specter changes the calculus for health care reform, cap-and-trade, EFCA, etc.

Easter Best

I've been neglectful of my picture posting duties. No more! Here's a few from Easter Sunday.

Quinn amidst nice big purple pile of trouble.

Egg!

This was Quinn's first real Easter egg hunt. I think last year we put some eggs in front of her, but she wasn't really that mobile yet. This year she really enjoyed finding the eggs, saying "egg!" and then putting the eggs into the baskets of another kids. Also, there may have been some shrieking and a lot of running around.

Modest Tax Proposal

As we (well mostly Laura Jean, but I was there for moral support) were paying our taxes last night I was reminded that DC still (!) doesn't have representation in Congress. Totally lame, but probably unlikely to change anytime soon. Sigh.

Eric mentioned to me that some Republicans have proposed exempting DC residents from all federal taxes, rather than finding a compromise that gives us congressional representation. I suppose that would be somewhat fair (not to mention hilarious) -- but also utterly terrifying. I can only imagine DC would soon devolve into some form of Ayn Rand-ian dystopia. Overnight, tea-party types would stream into the District, buying up homes from current residents at hugely inflated prices. Soon they would have a voting majority and demand an end to local taxes too. The police would be replaced with warring private security forces. Anarchy would descend! Bwa ha ha!

I jest - but only a little.

Anyway, happy tax day. Here are some interesting posts from Kevin Drum on how our tax system isn't really all that progressive, from Ezra Klein on who really shoulders the tax burden and this nifty chart from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities about where it all goes.


Also, congrats Mom on making it through!

No (good) news

It's rare that my hometown of Fresno makes the national news for anything positive (see: Kevin Federline). Which is pretty lousy, but I guess no news is good news. Anyway, we popped up in this New York Times article about the sudden increase in shantytowns across the country. Between the housing downturn, the general recession and several years of drought it seems like things are pretty bad in the valley -- 15 to 16 percent unemployment is what I've heard.

The article finds out-of-work electricians and truck drivers living in tents and out of their cars -- more reminders that virtually all the people who can work, want to work, we just need to find ways to make that happen. And in the meantime places like Poverello House do good work to keep the social safety net from tearing away entirely. Places like that always need support, particularly in times like this.

Something to think about for our Passover and Easter (and other) celebrations.

Looking Up

Annoying and persistent illness behind me; California (and Colorado) ahead. And Neko Case has a new album out.

Life is good!

Deserved Mockery

Here's a funny article from the Chicago Maroon about a visit by members of the odious (and utterly irrelevant) Westboro Baptist Church to the U of Chicago campus (apparently to protest Obama).

The counter-protest signs are pretty clever, especially "God (hearts) Internet Porn," "God Hates the New Facebook" and the typically literate "Jesus rebuked the fig as an evil abomination." As the student says, "If you need scanty biblical evidence for anything, we’ve got it." Go Maroons! (Via.)

Pirahã and Universal Grammar

My sister Jessica told me about this fascinating New Yorker article by John Colapinto: "The Interpreter." The article concerns the Pirahã people from the amazon region of Brazil whose language may (or may not) be the only known counter-example to Chomsky's theory about a universal grammar underpinning all human languages.

According to the article, Pirahã is a fiendishly difficult language for English speakers to master. The only outsiders to make the attempt were a handful of Christian missionaries looking to translate the Bible, and apparently only the linguist Dan Everett and his wife Keren have achieved any proficiency in it at all. Dan Everett recently claimed that the Pirahã language does not exhibit recursion -- embeding of clauses within clauses -- a property claimed by Chomsky to exist in all other known languages.

"According to Everett, however, the Pirahã do not use recursion to insert phrases one inside another. Instead, they state thoughts in discrete units. [...] Everett says that the Pirahã have this cognitive trait but that it is absent from their syntax because of cultural constraints."

Other experimenters have claimed that the Pirahã are unable to learn to count:

"Gordon had visited the tribe with Everett in the early nineties, after Everett told him about the Pirahã’s limited “one,” “two,” and “many” counting system. Other tribes, in Australia, the South Sea Islands, Africa, and the Amazon, have a “one-two-many” numerical system, but with an important difference: they are able to learn to count in another language. The Pirahã have never been able to do this, despite concerted efforts by the Everetts to teach them to count to ten in Portuguese.

I asked my linguistics grad student friend about the article and she confirmed that both of these claims are extremely controversial in the linguistics world.

Everett is careful to point out that this does not imply that the Pirahã are any less intelligent than other humans, but he does import an extremely strong role to culture in shaping cognition and linguistic structure. It is interesting to note that while this claim is inspired by the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, it is actually somewhat different. The S-W hypothesis posits that the structure of a language influences cognition (e.g. the long-discredited Eskimo-snow urban legend), but we might just as easily read this evidence as environment and culture influencing both language and cognition.

Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct (p. 66) comments that only one other truly "dramatic" finding in support of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been reported. Alfred Bloom quizzed Chinese and American students on the logical implications of various counterfactual statements (statements of the form, if A, then B). Surprisingly, the Chinese test subjects largely answered incorrectly -- a fact Bloom attributed to the lack of a direct subjunctive construction in their native language. The results did not withstand scrutiny. Later researchers identified serious flaws in Bloom's methods -- from poor translations to ambiguous questions -- and Bloom's results were not reproduced.

Having read the article it is very hard to know what to make of all this, but it certainly is interesting and worth reading the whole thing. Currently, all this speculation is really only based on one researcher, so I'm inclined to be pretty skeptical until these claims are independently reproduced. Even with the best of intentions and the opennest of minds, this sort of stuff seems genuinely hard to tease apart.

Everett has also recently published a scientific memoir about his time with the Pirahã called Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes.

40th Anniversary

Forty years ago today, students and faculty at M.I.T. organized a series of teach-ins to protest "the misuse of scientific and technical knowledge" and to call for the redirection of scientific resources to help solve "pressing environmental and social problems." Out of those teach-ins, the Union of Concerned Scientists was born; a bit more UCS history can be found here.

You don't have to grow up

Despite the fact that a grown-up Calvin is kinda wrong - this is pretty charming.It's true. I am really looking forward to all the neat things Quinn will get to do as she gets older: camping, bike riding, first telescope, etc. (via. more grown-up Calvin found here.)

Top 8 in 08: Music

So, er, I've been slacking on my music listening this past year. This list is really a 'Top 3' plus a few more that I liked but haven't quite absorbed enough to say anything particularly relevant.

Which means: feel free to suggest bands or CDs I should listen to!

1. Cloud Cult, The Meaning of 8 -- Jackie ripped this album for me over a year ago; I listened to it once and was like, meh. This last summer I listened again and it just clicked in my head how awesome it is - I had it on near-exclusive iPod rotation for weeks. Cloud Cult sounds a bit like the Flaming Lips (or maybe the Polyphonic Spree): raspy-voiced singer, colorful sonic palette, ecstatic worldview (compare Chemicals Collide with the Lips' Do you realize??). Here's a live-studio version of "Pretty Voice."
   
   
2. R.E.M., Accelerate -- R.E.M. is one of those beloved bands from my teenage years who pretty much get a free pass from here on out; even their weaker stuff I find myself enjoying. That said, even I didn't buy their last two albums, so it is nice to have them back and rocking out again. The new album is really good: it feels like passionate early R.E.M. but also reminds you of the ways they've evolved.
   
   
3. Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, Hearts of Oak -- I need to spend more time with Ted Leo, because I think I might have to become a huge fan. He's got that jittery-intense Fugazi/hardcore feel but he emotes like a soul singer. He brings the passion. The clip below is with his backing band, but he's pretty compelling solo too.
   
   
4. Utah Phillips and Ani DiFranco, Fellow Workers
5. Gogol Bordello, Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike!
6. Spoon, Girls Can Tell
7. Rhymefest, Blue Collar
8. Andrew Bird and the Mysterious Production of Eggs
   

New Years in Sarayaku (Part 2)

After collapsing into tent we were awoken quite early the next morning by the sound of drums. Apparently in Sarayaku, New Year's Eve is for dancing and New Year's Day is the time for more traditional observances. Some of the men began walking from house to house drumming even before the sun was up.

We spent the next two days talking to several of the local leaders and absorbing the beauty of the jungle. On New Year's Day we relaxed and observed some of the festivities, which were a mix of traditional dancing, speech-making and yet more chicha.

In our discussions we heard about the village's resistance to oil exploration on their land. Around 2003, the Argentine company CGC won the right from the Quito government to begin seismic testing in the area. All fine except that the Sarayacans were adamantly opposed to the project -- they were not interested in repeating what happened to the northern oil fields. Resistance to the oil companies took the form of actively escorting company employees off their land (among other things) as can be seen in the documentary, Soy Defensor de la Selva:
[The film was made by Heriberto Gualinga, a local Sarayacan filmmaker. He was nice enough to meet with us, screen his film and answer questions while we were there. The above clip is about 1/3 of the whole film -- the other two parts can be found here and here.]

The confrontation grew more serious when the Ecuadorean army was called in to back up the oil company (later in the film, you can see the Sarayacan women also confronting and disarming the soldiers). There were allegations that the army kidnapped and tortured 4 young men from the village. But in the end Sarayacu was successful. The NY Times had a decent rundown of the conflict and others like it in this article.

It was clear from talking with people that conflict with the oil companies had radicalized Sarayacu. Except "radical" isn't quite the right word. More like: focused their desire to control they way the interacted with the outside world.

There are some indigenous groups in Ecuador -- most famously some communities of the Huaorani -- who live deep in the rain forest and have voluntarily isolated themselves from outside culture. Sarayacu is most emphatically not one of those. Sarayacu has internet access, an agricultural college, solar and gasoline power, flush toilets, and a website. They have opened up their village to eco-tourists (like us), both to cultivate allies and to replace income that might have come from oil contracts.

We also spoke briefly with Marlon Santi, who is the current president of CONAIE - the largest indigenous organization in Ecuador. He pointed out that this local political savvy mirrors the growing political clout of indigenous communities in the wider Ecuadorean politics. Periodic popular uprisings organized by CONAIE have won indigenous people greater control over their lands and have even helped topple a few governments. The indigenous movement has also been on the cutting edge of environmental activism in Ecuador.

There is a lot more to say about our time in Sarayacu, but primarily I was deeply impressed by their gracious hospitality and by the thoughtfulness with which they negotiated their interactions with the outside world. They had clearly thought hard about how they wanted to "develop" their corner of the world, weighed the pros and cons -- and I definitely got the sense that they are in the driver's seat.

Interesting Reading

Zadie Smith has a fun essay where she decides that Obama is more like William Shakespeare (and Cary Grant) than Eliza Doolittle.

Also: former Weather Underground member Howard Machtinger takes a hard, critical look back at the group's violent activities (unlike say, Bill Ayers).

if the devil equals money equals war

M.I.A. and Blaqstarr do a cover of "Way Down in the Hole" (a.k.a. the theme from The Wire).
So, pretty good. But it can't really hold a candle to the truly demented original...

(via.)

New Years in Sarayaku (Part 1)

The morning we entered the rain forest we stopped first at a vista point to gaze and take pictures. Geographically speaking we were at the far western edge of the Amazon watershed, still in the shadow of the Andes Mountains, some two-thousand miles away from the mouth of the river. I remember being struck by the vast wilderness we could see, and the realization that an even greater vastness stretched on over the horizon. The forest seemed so mighty, and yet we had just seen evidence of its fragility too.
The previous day we had driven from Quito to Puyo (via Banos); today our destination was the village of Sarayaku - a five to seven hour canoe ride from the end of a gravel road. Apart from an airstrip (which was under construction) the Rio Bobonaza is the only road to Sarayaku. We were very privileged to travel on canoes with outboard motors; almost all the people we met traveled via pole-power, which lengthens the trip from five hours to two days.
The canoe ride was long and uncomfortable, but mostly totally amazing. As we went downstream the trees got taller and the forest got denser. There were occasional houses, but mostly just the river, the trees and us. The water-level was fairly low, so the canoe ran aground at most bends in the river and we made slow progress. After about four hours we reached the (largish) village of Pacayaku, and that's where things started to get unusual.

First, we were accosted by new year's eve revelers: two teenage boys dressed in drag and waving naked barbie dolls charged out to greet the boat. They shouted at us to give them some spare change (apparently this is a common Ecuadorian new years tradition) and anyone who didn't got splashed.

Second, we stopped for gasoline at the driver's brother's house and we were invited up to drink some chicha, a (pretty alcoholic) drink made of fermented yuca. A new year's eve party was in full swing - they had a CD player and people made a point to ask the gringas and gringos to dance. At a certain point they turned the CD player off and the whole party walked over to the next house for the next round. The whole thing was fun and pretty raucous (and a little disorienting) and of course, we still hadn't made it to our final destination. So after an hour of dancing and a significant buzz, we piled back into the canoes.

When we finally made it to Sarayacu we heard the news that the other boat (the one with all our bags and our guide) might not make it that night due to a mixup. Despite realizing that we were in the middle of the jungle with only the clothes on our back we weren't stressed, mainly because our hosts were extremely welcoming - they set us up in tents and invited us to join them for the evening's celebrations. (The second boat eventually did arrive shortly after nightfall.)

So we partied and danced and drank chicha and generally had a terrific new year's eve. Once the sun went down it got intensely dark out, and we tromped from house to house (over rusty bridges and down treacherous muddy slopes, etc. etc.) following the music and the crowd. The music was a mix of more mainstream latin dance music with a few CDs worth of Kichwa pop music (which I would love to find a CD of).

At midnight they burned effigies representing bad things from the year past. And then we (exhausted) tumbled into our tent. More to come in another post, but here's the picasa slideshow from this leg of the trip.

Statement of the Problem

This post by Yglesias about the Israel-Palestine conflict made sense to me:

Israel’s Palestinian problem is fairly simple to define—there are millions of Palestinians living in Israeli-controlled territory. To preserve its Jewish character, Israel doesn’t want to give these Palestinians the rights of Israeli citizens. And so the Palestinians live, stateless and without rights, and they’re not happy about it. Exactly what to do about this situation is a somewhat thorny issue, but Israeli leaders have spent a distressing amount of time over the past ten years trying to convince themselves that their Palestinian problem is about something other than this. That it’s “really” about Syria or “really” about Iraq or “really” about Iran.

Yes. Exactly. This is why some form of negotiated two-state solution is really the only road forward. (Apologies to those idealists pushing for a one-state solution: it's a lovely vision but I'm skeptical that it could be negotiated at this point.)

This is also why I've become impatient when people begin discussing the conflict by providing their take on the region's history. There is sufficient (I won't say 'evenly distributed', but 'sufficient') pain and suffering on each side that partisans can construct histories to justify their cause. But the cold hard fact remains that there are roughly equal numbers of arabs and jews living in close quarters in the holy land, and Israel will never have true security without a prosperous, sovereign Palestinian nation as its neighbor. And vice versa.

More and more, the only way to be pro-Israel is to also be pro-Palestinian. That doesn't make it easy, or even possible in the current climate, and I'm leaving out the nasty details (of course) but let's keep our eyes on the prize here, people.

Better E-Government

Rumor has it that Obama will name Vivek Kundra to be his administrator for E-Government. This position (which is different than the long-rumored federal Chief Technology Officer) lives inside OMB and is responsible for coming up with cool ways of using the internet to make the government work better.

Kundra is currently the CTO for the District of Columbia where he recently ran a really nifty contest called Apps for Democracy. The contest allowed regular citizens access to DC's information databases -- everything from real-time information about which parking meters are in use to census and building permit information. The city then gave out prizes for the most innovative web application that makes that information available to the public.

The winners can be found here. The gold-medalist is a website called www.ilive.at that allows you to enter a street address (currently DC only) and it pulls up a ton of information about the surrounding area. It's pretty nicely done and the benefits of doing this sort of thing with federal data would be, of course, enormous. (h/t Emily.)

Coraline

We snuck out to the movies last night and saw Coraline (in 3D!) - directed in stop-motion animation by Henry Selick (who did the Nightmare Before Christmas) and based on a children's novella by Neil Gaiman.

I want to see it again (and re-read the book) but my first impression was that it was great. The original book is slim and has the disarming simplicity of an old fable or fairy-tale, so obviously the movie needed to expand the storyline a bit. There are a few overly-obvious points, but mostly the added material fits well with the spooky tone of the book, and sets the movie up for some great animated set-pieces. For example, the opening scene was new and, I thought, really grabbed your attention.

The movie theater was full of young kids - and for the length of the film they were eerily quiet. No one had to leave the theater in tears that I saw, but the film does maintain the fairly intense creepiness of the story and its almost harsh take on leaving childhood behind and entering the adult world. Of course, kids these days are pretty tough. At any rate: definitely recommended.

ps- the 3D version we saw was very well-done, although I wouldn't say it was a necessary ingredient of the film.

This ain't no disco

Among the awesome things you can find on youtube are almost all the songs from the 1984 Talking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense. Here's Life During Wartime:

You can also find Burning Down the House, Once In A Lifetime, Psycho Killer, etc. etc. Not sure why this hasn't fallen afoul of the lawyers; the whole film is very definitely worth watching since the band is completely on fire.

Top 8 in 08: Movies

Since Quinn was born we've gone to an actual movie theater maybe 3 or 4 times. These days we catch all the hip new movies about a year late via Netflix. By the time she is a teenager I imagine we'll have decoupled entirely from pop culture. Anyway, here are my faves:

1. Dark Knight -- Christopher Nolan's movies keep getting awesomer. In addition to Heath Ledger's trippy performance, I enjoyed the movie's intellectual take on terrorism and how (not) to fight it - plus its literal reenactment of the Prisoner's Dilemma. I prefer it when my supervillains have done some advanced reading in game theory.
   
   
2. The Simpson's Movie -- See here.
   
   
3. Sweeney Todd -- I'm a big Sondheim fan so I was naturally worried that Hollywood might screw this one up somehow. In the end it skips merrily along the fine line between broadway kitsch and horror film dread - grisly, anti-social and highly entertaining. It's nice to have Tim Burton firing on all cylinders again, and hey, Johnny Depp can sing! Someone should file that away for future use.
   
   
4. No Country for Old Men -- It doesn't really need repeating at this point, but the Coen Brothers sure do know how to make them some movies. Javier Bardem's character is so creepy and iconic that he's destined to be a sitcom punchline for decades to come.
   
   
5. Eastern Promises -- David Cronenberg is often obsessed with the messy, fleshy biology of his characters and this movie is no exception: full-body tattoos, corpse disposal, enough slit throats to make Sweeney proud, and some hand-to-hand combat that makes those Bourne movie fight scenes look about as dangerous as beginning judo. Still despite the grimness, the movie has a beating heart and a sharp plot about human trafficking and the London underworld. Viggo Mortensen is terrific in this.
   
   
6. Michael Clayton
   
7. Persepolis
   
8. There Will Be Blood
   

Honorable Mention: Gone Baby Gone, Hellboy, Superbad, Iron Man, Into the Wild, Chung King Express, I'm Not There

Oldies/Goodies: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The French Connection

Python would be proud

I am not too mature to pretend that I didn't laugh my ass bottom off while reading this NYT article about English town names - particularly the accompanying map. (via Scalzi.)

Inauguration

Original photo: NYT

This was our view of Obama's inauguration

We were standing in the freezing cold about 1.5 miles away from the actual swearing-in, watching a jumbotron with a smaller angular diameter than your average iPod - and still it was awesome! From the video you can tell that Obama and Roberts flubbed the actual oath, but at the time I didn't notice, mostly because we couldn't hear all that well.

We bundled up the baby and left the house a little before 10 am. Metro was (of course) having a complete meltdown and train stoppage when we got to the station, but miraculously they cleared it up with not too long a delay (apparently someone fell onto the tracks at Gallery Place, but was uninjured). The train cars were ridiculously crowded.

Our first thought was just to get off at Union Station (which is right by the Capitol), but the Post text bulletins warned us not to try to enter the Mall anywhere east of 14th street because the crowd was already backed up. So we took the train all the way to Farragut and walked down 18th street (i.e. on the other side of the White House) and got pretty close to the Washington Monument with really no trouble at all. People as far as the eye could see.


You could tell the crowd was excited but too freezing cold to relax. Thank god the sun was shining. Everyone had that 'waiting for the bus' look to them - happy, but restless. There were boos and cheers as various politicians filed in. The sound was iffy from where we were standing, which is too bad because I wanted to hear Aretha and the piano quartet.


And then the big moment and the crowd went wild. Very cool.

Quinn was getting cold and cranky so we decided to skip out in the middle of Obama's address, and miss the crowds on the train back home. All in all, pretty painless compared to some of the crazy stories we heard later. One other thought: the Obama memorabilia sector of the economy is pretty strong. Here's the picasa album with some more photos.

Inauguration liveblog 1

Cold but sunny. Standing at the wash mon. Can see a jumbotron, and can sorta hear. Big cheer for Hillary! Quinn is being very good, all things considered. Crowd is backed up this far already.

Long Goodbye, Almost Gone

Well there's less than 24 hours left in President Bush's term. Seems like a good time for one last peek at the good ole Bush approval rating chart, doncha think?
Data compiled by Prof. Pollkatz
A long slow slide with a few punctuation marks here and there. Man, doesn't it seem like Bush has been a lame duck forever? At least since the 2006 elections (and maybe since Katrina) it seems like the country's just been waiting around for someone - anyone! - else to take over. Even Bush himself seems to have a massive case of senioritis.

At any rate: good riddance. Torture, wiretapping, lies about WMD, the Iraq war, Guantanamo, politicizing the Justice Department, the war on science, gutting the Clean Air Act, eight years of nothing on climate change, tax cuts for the rich, and the worst recession since the Great Depression. I hope he enjoys his retirement.

Chevron-Toxico

Our second full day in Ecuador we took a short flight to the town of Coca (known as Puerto Francisco de Orellana on maps) to see firsthand the contamination caused by oil exploration. Before oil was discovered in the 1960s, Ecuador's eastern rain forest was home to indigenous people, a handful of Christian missionaries and not much else. In the northern oriente, oil companies cut down the forest to build roads and towns, and settlers flooded into the area. From what we saw of Coca, oil wealth hasn't brought much prosperity to the people, but has resulted in shocking pollution.

Our guide in Coca was an organizer with the Amazon Defense Front - a community group that has brought a lawsuit against Texaco (now owned by Chevron) to force them to pay for a clean-up. We drove around the area and saw stuff like this:This is a pit where waste oil and produced water were dumped by Texaco in the early '70s. We found this pit about 50 feet behind this family's house. The family relied on a well for water and livestock and fruit trees for food -- it was hard to imagine that all were not horribly contaminated. Apparently they had complained for stomach aches for years (anecdotally we heard a lot about elevated rates of cancer and miscarriage). The Correa government is now paying to clean-up this site.

Starting in the '60s Texaco (in a consortium with Petroecuador) drilled more than 300 oil wells and created more than 1,000 pools like this one. Standard practice in the U.S. at the time was to re-inject the waste products into the well after pumping; in Ecuador (because no one was watching) they just dumped it in the jungle. In 1990 Texaco sold their stake in the oil field to Petroecuador and left the country. A few years later they paid to remediate some of the waste pools and the government of Ecuador agreed to absolve them of all future liability.

Except that the locals didn't think Texaco had done a very good clean-up job and filed a lawsuit in the U.S. courts alleging that Texaco dumped nearly 17 million gallons of oil into the rivers and forests (more than the Exxon Valdez), and left behind hundreds of unlined open waste pits. If you read their website (or their defenders in the WSJ) Chevron's defense seems to be something along these lines:

• the jungle really isn't contaminated at all, we cleaned it up in the 90s
• if it seems like the jungle is contaminated, it totally isn't our fault, we blame Petroecuador
• and if it is our fault, the waste oil and produced water aren't even bad for you (trust us!)

After years of delay and stupid lawyer tricks the case was moved to the Ecuadorean courts, and now it kind of looks like Chevron might actually lose and have to pay the community upwards of $16 *billion* in damages.

We visited 3 other waste pools. The first was in the process of being cleaned up by the government, the second had an outlet pipe that flowed into a nearby stream (!) and the final one was one of the pools that had been "remediated" Texaco in the '90s. A family home had been built on top of the site in the meantime, but our guide took a post-hole digger and a mere six inches below the surface dug up contaminated soil. He mentioned that Texaco had simply bulldozed earth on top of many of the waste pits - and that this shoddy work was one of the reasons they might lose the case. Anyway, here are the pictures. They don't really do justice to the visceral sense of outrage I think we all felt while we were there.