April Photos

Close-up of Rackham

School of Public Health
Buildings One, Three (and Two)

City Hall cows

Diag covered for graduation ceremony (they put chairs out)

Behind a massive LCD monitor array set up for 2008 Graduation

One problem of listening to too much news

No, I'm actually not going to focus on the problem of becoming too depressed from listening to the news. This one is more insidious, but might well be only an issue for me: writer's block.

I don't know why it happens, but I become more "verbose" in my writing when I'm not listening to so much radio or television news (I don't always watch the screen when the news is on - it doesn't always add that much more to the discussion of events). This being National Poetry Month, I had thought to myself, "Self, why not put together a poem or two? You know, something to do with wind, sky, air, water, spring, life, etc.?" Well, it is now the last day in April, and I just realized that the implication of that was that I had not composed a single poem for this month. True, I did post one poem, but that was one I found online.

So what should I write about now that the end of the month is so near? Should I not worry, and try and throw something together really quickly? Should I be angst-ridden and worry over each line? How does this all relate to writer's block (and should that be the subject of my poem)?

Well, to answer the last (non-parenthetical) question first. I have found that I've been suffering from a massive case of writer's block. I've also realized that I have these when I am listening to a lot of NPR and watching a lot of BBC. I've just now turned off the Beeb and am listening to the flowing water of my housemate's large fish tank. The sun is setting, and the light is shafting in through the front-door window. I'm sitting, thinking about going out in an hour to Leopold Bros - getting in a last couple of visits before they up-and-go to Denver, CO.

So, here's my thrown-together, semi-thought-through poem:

The end of this month arrived so fast.
Through many weeks of work and celebration,
It sneaked up on me.

The end of this month looms ahead.
And I realize now, with a warm setting sun,
It will slip softly by.

The end of this month is so easy to see.
A campus devoid of stressed scholar-students,
Lies recovering in the sun.

The end of April, the cruelest month,
Will flow out with a soft, cool, breeze;
A sylph's caress upon the brow of Time.

Anticipate May.
May Day through and past Memorial Day.
Sunny, warm, and May.

Last.fm

Just started out with Last.fm. So far, so good. However, with such an eclectic taste in music, I wonder who will be classified as "neighbors" for me. I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

Today in history: Fuehrerstodestag!

On this day in 1945, ten days after his fifty-sixth birthday, Adolf Hitler killed himself and his wife of one day - Eva Braun - in his Berlin bunker as Soviet soldiers raised the flag of the USSR over the Reichstag. The end of the nightmare leading up to and through WWII was soon about to be over. (The Third Reich - what Hitler claimed to be a "Tausendjähriges Reich" - would finally crumble completely on May 8.)

Hat tip to Respectful Insolence.

The Old Red Gown

The mist hangs round the College tower,
The ghostly street
Is silent at this midnight hour,
Save for my feet.

With none to see, with none to hear,
Downward I go
To where, beside the rugged pier,
The sea sings low.

It sings a tune well loved and known
In days gone by,
When often here, and not alone,
I watched the sky.

That was a barren time at best,
It's fruits were few;
But fruits and flowers had keener zest
And fresher hue.

Life has not since been wholly vain,
And now I bear
Of wisdom plucked from joy and pain
Some slender share.

But, howsoever rich the store,
I'd lay it down,
To feel upon my back once more,
The old red gown.

R.F.Murray
1863-1893

The poem was about my alma mater, St. Andrews University, in St. Andrews, Scotland.

Pray-in to solve gasoline prices?

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars wrote a blurb about this amazing story of illogic running (near) rampant in San Francisco:

Pray-in at S.F. gas station asks God to lower prices

Rocky Twyman has a radical solution for surging gasoline prices: prayer.

Twyman - a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs - staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation's Capitol on Wednesday, with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in. Today he will lead members of an Oakland church in prayer.

Yes, it's come to that.

"God is the only one we can turn to at this point," said Twyman, 59. "Our leaders don't seem to be able to do anything about it. The prices keep soaring and soaring.

Ummm... What? Come again?

"Our leaders" (well, our CiC and his [Good 'ole Boy] Party) seem unwilling to do anything about it. The President doesn't want to take action, his appointee in the EPA is dragging his agency's feet on monitoring CO2 as a pollutant, and the administration doesn't want to allow California (and 17 other states) to strengthen Clean Air Act requirements (which CA is allowed to do under the CAA). All of this, even though the Supreme Court made a decision last year that CO2 was not exempt from pollution monitoring.

Okay, so this isn't only about climate change/global warming. This is a discussion about the price of gasoline, and it's recent meteoric rise (see left). However, if Twyman wanted to make some real impact, maybe he should talk with Gordon Brown to have him work more closely with the strikers at Grangemouth. I mean, now that they are striking, the price of gas has increased past £5 per gallon (roughly $10/gallon)! If there isn't a strong argument for a cause-and-effect relationship between a human action (union strike) and the price of a human-manufactured commodity (petroleum), I don't know what is.

Of course, Twyman could have exhorted activists to talk with Chevron - make the oil company responsible for human life (something that Xtians always seem to point to in their vaunted morals) caused by extraction. If Chevron (and other oil/gas companies) didn't pay so much for their lawyers and public relations firms, possibly the price of gas might be a little less. And if not, then it would at least be easier to bend over and take it at the pump, knowing that - at least - the company reaming us (thanks to a myopic, all-eggs-in-one-basket method of automotive technology development and synergistic urban planning trajectory over the past several decades) is socially aware, and not merely spreading poverty and multi-generational toxic health hazards to poor parts of the world for the benefit of our modality of life. (I'm sorry, am I coming across a little strong there?)

But this isn't a single-sector, single-nation issue, right? Maybe the whole thing is too big for one person to do anything about. Well, instead of praying that gasoline prices drop, Twyman could pray that people change their actions to bring about a change in the gasoline price. Or Twyman could tell people petition their government (a very constitutional thing to do) to provide incentives for people to purchase urban-friendly electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles; cities to increase the number of bicycle-friendly bike lanes and bike parking; invest in public transportation; etc. In other words, provide real alternative options for people to solve their transportation problems. Gasoline prices might well be less of an issue once the need for it is diminished.

Ahcuah (one of the commenters of Ed's post) made the comparison between Twyman's call-to-prayer with Georgia's Gov. Sonny Perdue's call-to-prayer for rain (much more of a traditional reason to pray - harkening back to times when people beseeched a divine Otherness (deity, nature spirit, ancestors, etc.) to provide something over which the supplicant had no control). The governor's prayer for rain seems to have had rather ... 'parched' results (see right). Although I can see the comparison between the two, I don't think it really is an apples-to-apples comparison. Gov. Perdue's prayer is for something outside the 'human-realm'; over which we have little actual control. On the other hand, Twyman's is for something that is entirely in the 'human-realm' of possible action. Twyman's actions are akin to praying for lower medical costs (a 'human-realm' issue) because our government leaders can't reach a compromise on how to tackle the problem of national health insurance (something that will have an effect on the 'human-realm' of issues).

Of course, people are allowed to pray for anything they want (far be it for me to dictate what people should and shouldn't pray for), and prayers for world peace are made every day. However, prayer by itself is not as effective as prayer followed by constructive action. It's for this last reason (the disconnect between what we may wish - and therefore pray - and those things that we can actually act on - and maybe pray for the conviction or endurance to pursue) that I'm most peeved with this story.

Final thought: maybe this was prayer motivated by feelings of frustration with the government. Maybe this is equivalent to the "clinging to guns and religion" we heard so much negative press about. If this is the case, then perhaps Obama had it right, after all. (I'm convinced he did, but that's just one small voice, and what does one small voice know about anything?)

Graduation and a bunch of celebrations

The end of this Winter 08 semester has been - for me - somewhat hectic. (Admittedly by being social with people who will be soon leaving the nice safe confines of academia to enter into the real world.)

4/15: A colleague's birthday celebrations at Cafe Habana, followed by post-M.S. project presentation celebrations at Grizzly Peak, then followed by celebrations at Bab's Underground.
4/16: SNRE Spring Picnic in the Nichols Arboretum, followed by socializing at the wondrous (although slightly expensive) Dominick's. (This time, however, someone got bad pizza... Boo.)
4/17: Fundraising event for Environmental Justice track, held at the Elks lodge.
4/18: Celebration of a friends successful dissertation defense, held at Dominick's.
4/19: A [belated] birthday celebration of a graduating department colleague at Pub 13 in Ypsilanti.
4/20: Ushering at the Dalai Lama's visit to Ann Arbor from 7AM - 4:30 PM. Crashed after getting home; slept 14 hours.
4/21: Rest.
4/22: Rest.
4/23: "GreenDrinks"/Net-impact networking event at the Arbor Brewing Company, followed by a colleague's birthday celebrations at Conor O'Neil's.
4/24: Rest.
4/25: GEO BBQ in celebration of the new contracts (and the great efforts of the bargaining team).
4/26: SNRE graduation ceremonies. (I skipped out on the general graduation ceremony on the Diag, even though it was converted to accommodate several thousand seats.)
4/27: BBQ to celebrate the graduation of a friend from the IPCAA program (that's the Classical Archaeology dept for those of you not in the know).

Now is Monday, and the Diag is having its coverings removed. Hopefully, all will be back to summer-time normalcy by tomorrow. (Although I think that is being unreasonably hopeful.)

I step in on the topic of the Olympic torch protests

Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars:

I've been watching the protests around the world as the Olympic torch makes its way toward China. My thoughts are this. First of all, I don't think the US should boycott the Olympics. I think that was a mistake in 1980 and I think it would be a mistake now. All that does is deprive hundreds of American athletes of a lifelong dream they've worked endless hours for (my friend Vinx had his dream destroyed in 1980 when he was on the Olympic team in the triple jump). And it doesn't do anything positive to make up for that.

But having said that, I'm happy to see these protests going on and I'm particularly happy to see them happening in so many different nations. I think that's very hopeful. I am always glad to see large groups of people stand up against oppression. Liberty lives first in our minds and when we casually accept its destruction for others, we let that flame burn out. So I hope the protests continue. It may not change the Chinese government, but it's still sending a strong message against tyranny.

Did anyone hear or read the recent statements made by the governor of Tibet?

Via The Press Association:

Champa Phuntsok, the Chinese-appointed head of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, said he believes supporters of the Dalai Lama, who Beijing has accused of instigating last month's unrest, will seek to use the Olympics to publicise their cause.

...

Champa Phuntsok pledged that the relay will be "completely successful and safe" in Tibet, adding that authorities have made special security preparations.

"During the torch relay in Tibet and in climbing Mount Everest, if anyone should attempt to disrupt or undermine the torch relay, then they will be dealt with severely according to the law," he said.

This seems - if it were made by a governor of a province/state in a Western country - a ludicrous position. You are the governor of a province that has - for better or worse - a romantic place in the hearts of many Americans and Europeans. It is presently in a state of [controlled] upheaval; protests by the native people against what they still consider as a foreign occupier. The national regular military has already been sent in to quell the worst of the rioting. (Which would cause a massive uproar if something similar was tried in the United States with the regular military.) Why are you blaming the very internationally popular and charismatic exiled and politically powerless leader of the country that is now your province, as well as threaten anyone in your province who is exercising what many people in the Western world (who generally follow a similar model of human rights) consider their right to free speech with a crack-down which may well again involve the use of military force? One obvious reason is that you don't see it the way one might in the West.

Two nights ago on the 10PM EST news show BBC World News America, the commentator said that China was more interested in national security than on its international reputation. This was the main reason that no one in the government would ever talk with the Dalai Lama - doing so would be seen as talking with an illegitimate head-of-state, and a concession of some sort of legitimacy. I suppose the fear is that the unpopular imposition of a Han-Chinese-based form of national identity upon the millions of non-Han peoples (a.k.a., "forced acculturation") would quickly devolve into chaos if the central government made any concessions in Tibet. A part of me is hoping that - as the time of the Olympics draw closer - more ethnic minorities start to protest throughout the country. (If it really got out of hand, it might be the first time that an Olympics was canceled by a host nation for a reason other than a World War. Tragic for the athletes, but I think that they can get over it, but well worth it, imho, if it means greater social and political freedoms for the Chinese people.)

However, one major thing that the Chinese government has working in its favor is its firm control over state media and information. If you look at stories covering Chinese national media coverage of the flame protests throughout the world, you will notice a disturbing trend - Chinese state media covers the protest story hours (if at all) after their first story of how great it was that the flame was making its way around the world.

Recently, the Australian PM, Kevin Rudd, gave a speech at Peking University and made some pointed comments in Mandarin when he went to China the other day. (Apparently, Chinese officials didn't like some of Rudd's comments.) Many of these were focused on China needing to be in harmony with the rules of the world to work toward utopia. (The speech linked to above is apparently a translation from Mandarin, and, as such, draws many allusions that work better in Mandarin than in English.) The fact that he spoke fluent Mandarin meant that his words couldn't be censored by translators, and could only really be censored by omission for later broadcast.

I only bring this up because if you talk with Chinese people - even Chinese nationals in the United States - there is a great defensiveness when it comes to any criticism of their government, or their "right" to hold the Olympics. The root of this type of sentiment may - I assume - be a result of the understanding that citizens not question the policy of the central government, and to unquestioningly accept the statements of history and policy that are fed them. (Ask a Chinese national you know how many wars China started since 1949, the state of human rights in China today, etc., and you are likely to get a very defensive - or completely uninformed - response.)

Going back to the issue of the Olympic flame and the Chinese government, I have to agree with Ed, in that I, too, am "happy to see these protests going on and I'm particularly happy to see them happening in so many different nations." However, I believe that so long as the Chinese government maintains control over all media and information, Chinese people won't understand why people are protesting. I believe that so long as Chinese people are disallowed from openly questioning their government, they will not understand why people are protesting. I also believe that so long as Western nations rely on non-Chinese speakers to deliver international policy statements in China that censoring their speeches will be too easy, and the Chinese people won't be allowed to understand why people are protesting. Finally, I agree with the statement from the BBC, that China is more concerned with its national security than on its international image. It will hold on to as much state control of the media, will attempt to limit the movements of the press during the games, and go back to business-as-usual after the games are over. All this means that - yes - the Chinese people won't understand why people are protesting.

Maybe I'm wrong. Hopefully I'm wrong. I'm scared of how much I may be right.

Problems with EToH fuels

Reading through my usual news feeds (mostly related to science), I found that there were three stories - all through the PhysOrg.com newsfeed - about how fuel ethanol was becoming less favored around the world. This is not a surprise for me, since I have been - for over a year - skeptical about the claims of how wonderful this new technology is for people and the environment.

The spinners failed (ha!) to show how much energy is required to move energy feed stocks from farms to energy plants. They failed to show how much energy is required to make the ethanol. They also failed to show how much energy is required to transport the ethanol to market. And this is only looking at the direct energy inputs to the system.

Indirect energy inputs to this whole system comes from the energy needed to pump and spray groundwater; create and transport fertilizers and pesticides; clear and plow the fields; and remove the byproducts of stalks and stems to name a few. Then there are non-energy costs to a system of ethanol production which include nitrogen loading in rivers; increased sediment runoff into lakes, ponds, and streams; loss of wetlands; increased use of GMO crops (and we still don't know if there are negative impacts of GMOs in the wild); eutrophication; and burning former conservation lands to name only a few that come to mind.

Stack on top of that rising costs of food around the world (mostly blamed on a hungry India and China); a declining value of the US dollar (causing international oil prices - set to the USD - to rise); a skyrocketing national debt figure; and lowered environmental regulations, you start to get a picture of how bad things might actually be.

And all this I knew before even reading the articles. (I still haven't read through them at the time of this writing.)

The first article - Fueling ethanol production while protecting water quality - talks about the need to minimize the amounts of N and P entering into water systems. Increased levels of N and P have been linked directly to anoxia in the Gulf of Mexico and inland water systems, respectively. The article reviews the benefits of different types of ethanol production - some of which are still experimental - and doesn't really make the point that once a major investment takes place in one form of infrastructure, there is little desire to chance that infrastructure, especially if there are more costs to be incurred. (People want returns-on-investment, not more costs.)

The second article - World cooling on biofuel solution to climate change - touches on some international perspectives of the different needs of food producers and energy producers. It seems to be rather a basic overview of different points-of-view.

The third article - Study finds concern with biofuels - is a summary of an academic essay - Biofuels and Biodiversity: Principles for Creating Better Policies for Biofuel Production- from Conservation Biology. The essay has a nifty table showing that corn has roughly 81-85 kg CO2 emission/MJ energy - one of the highest of all the energy conversion options reviewed. Within the "grass -> ethanol" category, "native prairie grasses" had the lowest GHG emissions potential, with -88 kg CO2 emission/MJ energy (that's right: negative). However, the overall winner (since I presented corn as the overall loser) across categories is using microalgae to make biodesiel, with a whopping -183 CO2 emission/MJ energy!

Speaking of microalgae to biodesiel, there was a story in EcoGeek recently about this. However, I'll not go into it in more detail here. And wouldn't you know it? Just as I went to check on this story, PhysOrg's newsfeed gave me:

Algae could one day be major hydrogen fuel source. Serendipity?

Not really April Fool's Day humor

Via Evolving Thoughts comes a response to the claim that Darwinism was the cause of Jewish persecution. Although done using the satirical application of crossing out whatever religion was persecuting Jews and replacing it with "Darwinism," the underlying message - that Jews were persecuted throughout history, long before Darwin was born - is quite clear.

I have yet to see the film Expelled, because it hasn't come to Australia yet, but I have become absolutely convinced that Ben Stein is correct. Darwinism causes antisemitism. I have therefore conveniently listed all the cases known of this below the fold. I'll stick with those in which Jews were killed or which led up to justifying such killings. I have of course had to correct the Darwinian fake history, which I have done with strikeouts and italic insertions so you all can see how perfidious these Darwinian revisionists are.

38CE: Thousands of Jews were killed in Alexandria, under Darwin's influence, as reported by Philo.

Christian Darwinist era

315CE: Constantine published the Edict of Milan. [...] Jews lost many rights with this edict. They were no longer permitted to live in Jerusalem, or to proselytize.

...

Eleventh Century

The eleventh century saw Muslim Darwinist pogroms against Jews in Spain; those occurred in Cordoba in 1011 and in Granada in 1066.[3] In the 1066 Granada massacre, a Muslim Darwinist mob crucified the Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and massacred about 4,000 Jews.[4]

...

Twelfth Century

1189 CE: At his coronation, under Darwinian influence, the rumour came that the new king Richard Lionheart wanted Jews killed for not showing reverence to the cross (a common trick by the Darwinists to disguise their activities). Several Jews were killed when mobs of Darwinists set fire to their houses at night.

...

Thirteenth Century

1205 CE: The Darwinist Pope declares that Jews are in eternal servitude because they killed Christ, a view that originated with the Darwinist Church Father, St John Chrystostom.

...

Seventeenth Century

In 1648 the Commonwealth [of Poland-Lithuania] was devastated by several conflicts, in which the Commonwealth lost over a third of its populations (over three million people), and Jewish losses were counted in hundreds of thousands. First, the Chmielnicki Uprising when Bohdan Khmelnytsky's Cossacks massacred tens of thousands of Jews and Poles in the eastern and southern areas he controlled (today's Ukraine). It is recorded that Chmielnicki told the people that the Poles had sold them as slaves "into the hands of the accursed Jews". The precise number of dead may never be known, but the decrease of the Jewish population during that period is estimated at 100,000 to 200,000, which also includes emigration, deaths from diseases and jasyr (captivity in the Ottoman Empire). The Jewish community suffered greatly during the 1648 Cossack uprising which had been directed primarily against the Polish nobility. The Jews, perceived as allies of the nobles, were also victims of the revolt, during which about twenty per cent of them were killed.

Nineteenth Century

1809CE: Charles Darwin, the Destroyer, the Evil One, is born

...

Yes, it is a long piece, but it seems quite extensively researched. I could be wrong, though, since I'm not a student of history. However, any time someone pulls out the Darwin-caused-Nazism canard, point that ignoramus to this page.

Or you can point him to a number of other pages, including PZ Myer's latest statement on how, for such a long time in history, the knowledge that "If members of a population die or are killed off, they will leave no descendants for subsequent generations." Well, duh. That's why so many kings ensured the presence of their "line" by having so many children (which would come to haunt them in the end, as so many claimants for a vacated throne would rally for power).

Wonders of AF'sD.

Via Inhabitat: "New Frank Gehry Residence in Los Angeles."

It is not often that an architecture master reinvents himself, but that is precisely what Pritzker Prize winning architect Frank Gehry has done. Gehry, who first won international recognition with his own residence, a masterpiece of post-modern architecture, has revealed what can only be described as the first post post-modern architectural work, the New Gehry Residence, completely confounding both his critics and promoters alike.

...

If it seems like this is simply a McMansion, be assured, it is not. This is the work of a modern genius, an artist in his prime. The New Gehry Residence is a masterful adaptation of the architectural typological expression of the modern American homeowner. It expresses, both without any irony and by having a profound sense of modern causticness, the expression of contemporary urbanism. A critical look at the consumer expressionism of the spatial factors involved in the formal relationships of how the shapes simply seem as though they formed themselves. It is a simple, yet brilliant reinvention of the modern American house. It is a work of genius.

Via Wired Online: "Top 10 Creationist Discoveries of All Time."

This has been a huge year for intelligent design research, we took a look back at some of the most important moments. Until recently, Wired has been too hard on the proponents of creationism. To rectify that, our science desk has hired a full staff of religious zealots. Here is their first story:

10. T. rex ate coconuts
According to experts at the Creation Museum, our favorite predatory dinosaur would have fit right in at Whole Foods.

9. The Earth is only six thousand years old
Carbon-13 and potassium argon dating are myths created by the devil to cast doubt on the existence of God.

8. Stem Cells are evil
Curing terrible diseases is not worth the trouble of sacrificing some abandoned eggs from the deep freeze at a fertility clinic.

7. NASCAR is the official sport of the spiritually enlightened
Some forms of entertainment were meant for the pure of heart.

6. Guns were created by God to kill deer
It is our responsibility as humans to encroach on their habitats by building track homes and then blow the sweet crap out of them so that they don't starve to death in the winter.

5. Liberals are evil
Even though most of the truly bizarre sex scandals have involved republicans, and democrats prefer to have affairs with women of legal age, left-wing politicians are morally more morally bankrupt than their conservative counterparts.

4. Civil Liberties are for sissies
Under the benevolent Bush II theocracy, we don't need privacy. Like the Pope, he is in direct contact with God, so we can feel secure knowing that every one of his decisions will be fair.

3. President Bush can look directly into our souls.
Bush II looked directly the soul of Russian President Vladimir Putin and saw that he is a good man!

2. Iraq had ties to Al-Qaeda, was enriching Uranium, and all that jazz.
By bombing Iraq back into the stone age, then occupying it, we have protected our country from terrorism. Who cares if we destroyed our economy while in the process? Dubai is certainly not complaining.

1. Evolution is a myth.
Just ask Ben Stein, evil academics suppress any luminary who dares to question the mounds of evidence that life evolved gradually. Get your facts straight. It took seven days to make the earth.

Via Google: Gmail Custom Time. I love the tagline: "Be on time. Every time." Geeky brilliance.

Yet another on nationality and identity

I received an application "form" for becoming a volunteer in the Rackham Graduate School's I-Connect Program for the 2008/2009 academic year. I filled out the entire form, but there was one item that stuck in my craw, and which I wrote a comment to them about, both commenting on my answer, and why their question was not a good question.

Here's the commentary I wrote:

Although I recognize that I fit into a minority category, let me explain why I don’t like answering the question of “Country of Origin.” Although I put down “USA/Japan”, if you think about it, my answer represents neither a country of origin (as requested) nor a true national identity (since I don’t consider myself to be either “typically American” or “typically Japanese”). To make it more complicated, I was born on Guam, which is only technically part of the United States of America.

A likely assumption underlying this whole thing is that your country of origin is where you grew up and from where you derive a nationality, culture, and personal identity. It was to the assumption of a conflation I answered “USA/Japan” (my nationalities, but not my personal identity). However, in this day and age, this assumption cannot be assumed (something to which I feel the I-Connect Program should be quite cognizant). I have friends who were born in the United States while their parents were attending university during the 1970s, but ended up growing up in their parents’ home country. Since many countries provide automatic citizenship for their nationals’ children, these friends of mine ended up with dual citizenship, and spent most (if not all) of their lives in their parents’ country of origin. What do these people put down on such a form? To report the literal truth, they would have to put down “USA”, since they were born (i.e., “Originated”) in the USA. However, they may well be as foreign to the United States as many of the international students in their incoming cohort.

If the I-Connect Program wants to ask a question about identity, then I suggest that in future it instead ask for a volunteer’s “National Identity” (or something that doesn’t conflate identity with origin). With this question, people in a similar position as my friends could put down that they are of the country where they grew up, and it offers an option for people like me, who grew up as “third culture kids” (TCKs) to give an answer unconstrained by national borders. Finally, it doesn’t change the answer given by those people who were born and grew up in the country of their nationality (indeed, I imagine that such people wouldn’t immediately see any difference between the two questions).

Although the question of “Country of Origin” is not as outmoded as asking for a single racial identity (which is no longer done), I believe it is just as difficult for people like me and my friends to provide a suitable - and ultimately useful - response to the question. As a mixed-heritage, multi-national student, born in an organized unincorporated territory of the United States, and grew up in seven different countries, asking me my “Country of Origin” has about as much useful truth for those using my answer as asking me to limit my racial identity to only one racial group.

Of course, if Rackham asked for some more concrete concept, such as nationality (and for many people, country of origin and nationality are the same thing), merely asking for nationality wouldn’t make TCKs and dual-nationals once again feel issues of inadequacy of not belonging to a wider culture, since “nationality” and “national identity” are not necessarily the same thing. Furthermore, nationality is a simple question, and if the eventual reader wants to assume some correlation between nationality and identity, that’s up to him or her.

About Radical Christian Craziness

Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars:

This was so perfect that I had to edit my speech for Wednesday night to include it. From anti-gay whacko James Hartline and quoted, naturally, in the Worldnutdaily:

"The American Civil Liberties Union has done everything possible to destroy Christianity in the American culture and government. From tearing down crosses on public property to removing crosses and the Ten Commandments from governmental buildings, there has been no greater hate machine against our constitutional right to free religious expression in America than the ACLU!" Hartline said.

Notice how he shifts ground, using examples of government religious expression and then claiming that the ACLU is out to destroy individual religious expression? That's standard operating procedure for the ACLU haters.

This sort of conflation shouldn't come as a surprise when you realize that "Conservative Protestants' Religious Beliefs Contribute to Their Low Wealth", and that education and wealth are good indicators of each other. From the actual paper (free access!):

Low educational attainment is an important reason for low CP [Conservative Protestant] wealth. There is long-standing evidence that religion affects education (Glenn and Hyland 1967; Greeley 1969; Lenski 1961), and recent research shows that CPs complete comparatively low levels of schooling (Darnell and Sherkat 1997; Sherkat and Ellison 1999). CP cultural orientations tend to be at odds with the approaches of nonreligious schools and universities that propagate secular humanist values (Sikkink 1999) and promote scientific investigation rather than acceptance of divine truths (Darnell and Sherkat 1997). ... As a result, educational attainment for CPs is significantly lower than for members of other faiths (Darnell and Sherkat 1997), declining most noticeably after high school (Lehrer 1999).

To some people, the conflation that Ed outlines is non-existent. They only see government interfering with their "God-given" rights (through a "Christian-influenced" Constitution) of freedom of religion. The way to deal with these sorts of anti-ACLU accusations from such Conservative Protestants (wingnuts thought they may be) may well be to follow the advice that Cortunix suggests over at his blog:

Some people only know the language of power. They see conciliation and compromise as weakness. Show strength. If they are sissies hiding behind machismo, slam them hard. You have nothing to lose. Some will convert and come to your side. Some will go cower in the corner. None will hang around risking your anger for very long.

I mean, we aren't trying to "convert the choir" with the issues of public displays of religion; proselytization in schools; accusations of a "homosexual agenda"; the mythology of the United States being founded as a "Christian nation"; and others. Why not use their own tactics of bluster and steam-rolling (which they can understand) against them? (Of course, make sure we have all our facts correct at the get-go.)

Some USGS river gage data fixed... others still out.

The USGS has filled in the data for the Salt River gage. Apparently, there was a "little bit" of a change in discharge from the long-term average discharge values (~23000 cfs vs ~2000 cfs). And with the sudden increase in discharge, it's no wonder that the gage shut down/

However, the Big Muddy River gage at Murphysboro is still in need of correction, and may need to be replaced. (I'm basing this last hypothesis on the fact that there is no current discharge measurement being made at this site.)


I'm not familiar with the White River near Fayetteville, AR, but I assume that it normally runs at a discharge level of slightly larger than the ~1 cfs indicated in its graph. Possibly another indication of an outed gage?

Again, not being situated in the Mississippi River system, I have little opportunity to actually go out and check on the situation of these gages. However, based on news reports, the Kaskaskia river did overflow its banks in Fayetteville during the recent rain storms and flooding in the Mississippi River basin. (I assume that the Kaskaskia and the White converge at some point near the city.)

TMI and ignorance

Via PhysOrg:

... economists Isabelle Brocas and Juan D. Carrillo present a situation – commonly observed in real life – in which all parties have access to the same information, but one party still manages to control public opinion.

...

The study, “Influence Through Ignorance,” is the first to thoroughly examine situations in which power comes from controlling the flow of public information, as opposed to the possession of private information.

As Brocas and Carrillo explain, there are secrets – facts that are deliberately withheld – and there are facts that are not known to anybody.

“It’s not necessary to have extra information,” Brocas said. “You can induce people to do what you want just by stopping the flow of information or continuing it. That’s enough.”

Notably, the party manipulating the flow of information must deliberately choose to remain uninformed as well – which can backfire.

...

“Overall, the ability of to control the flow of news and remain publicly ignorant gives the leader some power, which is used to influence the actions of the follower,” the researchers wrote. “Our result suggests that the chairperson, the President and media can bias the decision of the committee, electorate and public by strategically restricting the flow of information.”

This is something that I believe can also be seen in any discussion of science vs. religion - specifically in the evolution vs. creation debate. In the end-point of such debates one is left wondering why the other side chooses to remain ignorant your point-of-view (note: I'm not presently saying that one side is correct in their viewpoints, just that both sides might well feel that the other chooses to remain ignorant of the evidence so clear to them).

What one must do when confronted with such a feeling, however, is to consider whether or not the actual reason why there is such a feeling arises from a lack of access to knowledge (or explicitly choosing to remain ignorant of knowledge) on one's own side, or if it is more the case on the other side. I would argue here that dogmatic environments of learning tend to control the types of knowledge their adherents (be they students or acolytes) receive, while more liberal learning environments tend to encourage their adherents to learn from a variety of sources (or even - gasp! - on their own).

PZ Myers points to a great example that shows an explicitly dogmatic point-of-view in this evolution vs. creation "debate", and it does seem to me that much of the dogmatism in this "debate" does seem to rest with the side of the creationists. There is a lot of what appears to be dogmatism on the evolutionist side, but one has to realize the difference between assertions and dogma (at least how I'm using them).



Assertions are statements of fact based on repeatable observation or a rational explanation. Dogma are statements of fact based on tradition, which requires neither repeatable observation nor a rational explanation. One can say that Newtons laws of motion are "dogmatic" within kinematics - many people accept the three laws based on the long line of physicists that came before them who used the laws accurately and without mishap. However, this "dogma" was based ultimately on an assertion which was (using my definition above) based on repeatable observation (which can still be done today) as well as rational explanations (which work to accommodate many other areas of physics).

The coverage of the Brocas and Carillo paper does go on to say that:

Competition, supported by media diversity and public sources of research funding, not only induces outlets to release more information but also causes the “influence through ignorance” effect to diminish – and under certain circumstances to vanish – the researchers found.

This leads one to wonder whether, in the evolution vs. creation "debate", competition-based information releases will actually reduce ignorance, or if the authors are only really discussing situations where the information produced on all sides is accurate and equally accepted. If the former, then scientists shouldn't matter, and the whole PZ-Dawkins vs. Expelled! controversy should just quietly blow over (which much of the scienceblogosphere doesn't think will happen) with the passage of time. However, I feel that the opposite will happen: hard-held beliefs will not be broken with merely the presence of well-disseminated information (especially if there is equally well-disseminated [false] information supporting the opposing view, which happens to match with the pre-existing world-views held onto strongly due to those very hard-held beliefs science might be trying to sway).

At least the fight should prove interesting. I only hope that we don't end up with an American version of Lysenkoism (because that would NOT be good for the advancement of American science).

Re: Where are the multiracial Americans?

From Sociological Images: Seeing is Believing:

Over at the New York Times, Peggy Orenstein wrote a light article about the social construction of race, ethnicity, and culture through the lens of multiracialism. This figure (in Hawaii, Hapa means "half") shows the states with the highest percentages of people claiming to be multiracial:


For background: 2000 was the first year that the Census allowed us to mark more than one race... talk about the social construction of racial categories!

My response to this posting (and to Orenstein's piece) is this:

I'm Hapa, but I think this has article has a few problems...

One might argue that there are many more "multi-racial" people throughout the country if the question were changed to ask if a person knew of having ancestors from more than one race.

I think that a whole lot of "African-Americans" are multi-racial, but identify themselves as "African-American", and not "multi-racial". Similarly, I think that many "Caucasian" peoples are likely to be "multi-racial" by descent, but identify themselves as only a single race.

Because of the relatively recent "allowability" of claiming multiple races on the Census, I think that this question only really affects people who have parents of different [single] "races" and aren't themselves subsumed into a single racial group. For example, Barak Obama is multi-racial. However, he is more likely to be seen as "African-American." He may try and distance himself from being "African-American", but I think that many people in a similar "racial descent" position may allow themselves to identify (at least publicly) themselves as the racial group which most of society sees them as.

On the other hand, some "races" have not allowed the children of mixed-race marriages to really enter into their society. (I'm thinking specifically of "white" and "Asian".) This provides for a strong environment for a person to cultivate an ethnic identity as something other than merely one or the other.

Similarly, in some places (such as some areas of California and many places in Hawaii), there are enough children of mixed "racial" heritage that identifying oneself publicly as mixed is acceptable (and one merely got aggravated with stupid government documents requiring that you note whether you were "Non-Hispanic Caucasian" or not).

Snowing.

It's snowing in Ann Arbor right now. It started about 15 minutes ago, and expected to go until 8AM.



And now for something apropos:

A March Snow
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Let the old snow be covered with the new:
The trampled snow, so soiled, and stained, and sodden.
Let it be hidden wholly from our view
By pure white flakes, all trackless and untrodden.
When Winter dies, low at the sweet Spring's feet
Let him be mantled in a clean, white sheet.

Let the old life be covered by the new:
The old past life so full of sad mistakes,
Let it be wholly hidden from the view
By deeds as white and silent as snow-flakes.

Ere this earth life melts in the eternal Spring
Let the white mantle of repentance fling
Soft drapery about it, fold on fold,
Even as the new snow covers up the old.

Some river gages are out/malfunctioning

There are a few river gages that are not functioning properly, due - most likely - to the major storms running through the area, possibly even tearing our or damaging the discharge sensors. For whatever reason, these USGS discharge gages are showing zero cfs discharge, even though the gage height indicator clearly shows a continued water column height increase after the malfunction of the discharge gage. Check out two of the sets of graphs below.



Unfortunately, due to specific station geometry (the geometry of the river-bottom at the location of the stream gage), it is not easy to directly translate gage height (the right-hand graphs) with the discharge (left-hand graphs). This might make it difficult to easily back-cast the actual discharge based on the gage height, especially if the user of the data is not local to the area.

Of course, the discharge gage could have just shut off due to reaching some pre-programmed maximum recording limit, and will turn back on again as flood waters decrease. Since I'm not in a position to go out and check on it, though, I'll just have to wait and see...

Photos from the end of winter/start of spring

For your pleasure, I tried to put a few photos together of what's happening around Ann Arbor as it slowly comes out from one of the wettest winters (in terms of total precipitation - not accumulation) in several years. Coming into spring, the snow and ice start to melt, humidity increases, and students start to feed the "wildlife."

Ducks swimming in the slowly-warming waters of the Huron River just downstream of the Argo canoe livery.

Fog lightly envelops the Diag. All the damp in the air started to condensate as nighttime temperatures dropped below dew point.

Students provide handouts to squirrels. (Notice the two students with cameras poised to provide their own private "paparazzi moment". I wonder if the squirrel can stand to be in the spotlight of so much attention!)

Sometimes I like to try and find views of Ann Arbor that make it look more like a proper city. I found this one when taking photos from atop a parking structure. The proximity of so many brick buildings, with the duct work snaking downward into alleyways made the shot look more "urban" than one might otherwise expect Ann Arbor to be.

Vernal Equinox

Yes, this year, because of the Leap Year, the Vernal Equinox is on the 20th of March (well, it isn't because of the leap year, since the equinox is either on the 20th or the 21st of March).

I'm off to the Grizzly Peak for some late-night-happy-hour beer in a few.