Water Treatment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Health Care Stat of the Day

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

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.