Cycling vs. driving: which makes a faster commute?

My commute is roughly 4 miles each way, and although I don't own a car, I recently wondered which would make for a faster door-to-door commute: driving or cycling. Before I decide to rent a car or ask someone to do the drive for me, I want to estimate the difference.

My average "easy-commuting" speed (door-to-door) is about 10mph in the winter and 12mph in the summer, meaning that I get from my front door to the university in 24minutes and 20minutes, respectively. This is a total time that includes waiting for signals. My average moving speed is closer to 15mph during the winter and 18mph during the summer (meaning that if I didn't tire and I didn't have to stop, I would reach the university in 16 minutes and 13 minutes 20 seconds, respectively). However, since stop lights, stop signs, pedestrian flow, etc. exist, I will use the 24minute and 20minute figures for comparison.

Now, let's presume the fastest (legally) possible trip from my house to the University (i.e., no acceleration; one is immediately moving at the speed limit; no stops):

1. Cabin to the gate (0.4mi) can be driven at 20mph (1.2mins).
2. From the gate to Scio Ridge Road (0.9mi) is at 45mph (1.2mins).
3. From Scio Ridge to Virginia (1.3mi) is at 35mph (2.2mins)
4. From Virginia to First St (0.8mi) is at 30mph (1.6mins)
5. From First St to the Church St Parking Structure (1.0mi) is at 25mph (2.4mins)
• TOTAL: 4.4mi, 8.6minutes

However, we know that this is not a reasonable answer, since acceleration (and deceleration) occur, stop lights and stop signs exist, and we often cannot drive at the speed limit in the city due to traffic. Okay, so let's start to make this more realistic by adding in stop lights. If we assume that we will wait an average of 1 minute for each stop light, and 0.2 minute (12 seconds) for each stop sign, then we get:

1. Cabin to the gate: 1.2mins
2. Gate to Scio Ridge: 2.2mins
3. Scio Ridge to Virginia: 4.2mins
4. Virginia to First St: 2.8mins
5. First St to Church Street Parking: 9.2mins
• TOTAL: 19.6minutes

Already, the amount of time spent due to stop lights and stop signs brings this a lot closer to my summer travel time of 20 minutes! And we didn't even take acceleration into account. However, what is the average acceleration of a typical car? Well, according to hypertextbook.com, it's somewhere between 3m/s/s and 4m/s/s. Let's be generous and use the example with the higher acceleration (something like the 2000 Mitsubishi Eclipse GT). Now, we need an equation, something from elementary physics. Something like:

v = at + u

t = (v - u)/a

where t is the amount of time (in seconds), v is the final velocity (the speed limit, converted to meters/sec), u is the starting velocity (0m/s at stops, the previous speed at transitions), and a is the constant acceleration (4m/s/s). This will give us the time that it takes to reach the speed limit. Then we can find the distance it traveled over that acceleration time:

s = ((v + u)/2)t

where s is the distance traveled (in meters). The remaining distance will be traveled at the speed limit. (Stopping will be calculated in a similar fashion, and will assume 15fps (~4.6m/s/s). Now, running it through Excel (and adding all the stops), we get:

1. Cabin to the gate: 1.21min
2. Gate to Scio Ridge: 2.33min
3. Scio Ridge to Virginia: 4.25min
4. Virginia to First St: 2.73min
5. First St to Church St Parking Structure: 9.97min
• Total: 20.49minutes

Already it's on par with my average summer cycling commute time. And this is considering maximum acceleration and deceleration of a 2000 Mitsubishi Eclipse GT (i.e., stomps on the brake at each stop and floors it after each stop). If we assumed a more conservative driver, and take only 2/3 of the maximum acceleration and deceleration (still a bit of a lead foot, though), we get:

1. Cabin to the gate: 1.22min
2. Gate to Scio Ridge: 2.38min
3. Scio Ridge to Virginia: 4.30min
4. Virginia to First St: 2.79min
5. First St. to Church Street Parking Structure: 10.19min
• Total: 20.88minutes

Not much of a change in travel time (about 24seconds of difference if you don't have such a heavy foot). However, this doesn't take into account the additional time needed to find a parking spot (about 4 minutes) and to walk to the department building from the car (about 5 minutes), increasing the time to almost 30 minutes. If we add in things like waiting in traffic (the above calculations assume that you're the only car stopping at the stop lights and the only one stopping for the stop signs), and you can likely add another 2-5 minutes to the estimate.

In the end, using simple physics and reasoning, we can determine a few things:

1. It would take about 30 minutes to get from the cabin to my department using a car.
2. Driving at reckless acceleration and deceleration wouldn't really help reduce this figure.
3. Using a bike gives me 25 minutes of exercise in the morning (and about 30 minutes of exercise in the evening for my return trip), which I wouldn't get by driving, and would therefore need to spend at the gym as additional time.

Therefore, in addition to the points about cost that I mentioned earlier, riding a bike is, for me, a good way to travel for me. Still, I don't think that I'll be spending THIS much time on my bike:

THE MAN WHO LIVED ON HIS BIKE from Guillaume Blanchet on Vimeo.

UPDATE (4/11/2012): I took a quick drive to and from my house (via Zipcar), and on my way back, I actually clocked the driving time, which turned out to be 13 minutes (caught lots of green lights, and parked at a lot west of campus, meaning that I didn't have to drive through campus), followed by 10 minutes of walking from the parking lot back to my office. In contrast, my bike commute time that morning was 22 minutes.

Bilingualism and me

I think that I've written about this before: my level of bilingualism. I'm not fully bilingual; I cannot speak, read, nor write very well at all in Japanese - probably only at a 4th or 5th grade level in writing, perhaps a little bit higher in speaking. However, my comprehension of spoken Japanese is... a few grade levels higher. In contrast, my ability to speak, read, and write Spanish is far more advanced than Japanese (partly because Spanish and English share far more cognates than Japanese and English). When I consider how I personally relate to each of these two languages, however, I find that the quality of my understanding of Japanese is far deeper than that of Spanish. While the breadth of my vocabulary is far greater in Spanish, the words don't carry as much inherent meaning in that language as in Japanese, regardless of the fact that I actually know fewer words in Japanese.

The only thing that I can think of to account for this is that I grew up with my first few years listening to Japanese every day (and possibly, too, that I was living in Japan from 3rd through 9th grade), whereas I learned Spanish after the age of 30. (Maybe, too, there is some additional part of this that has to deal with the fact that - perhaps due to the myriad homonymous words between Japanese and Spanish - there is some level of internal discord between the languages in my mind.)

Would I have liked to have had Japanese as a greater part of my spoken environment (and education) while growing up? Sure. I think that if my parents had decided to keep my brother and me immersed in a spoken-Japanese environment, then I think that I would have had a good option of knowing my "other mother tongue." However, I think that my brain is "set up" as a bilingual, however, I've never looked into metrics of bilingualism, such as this recent one:

A. Karmiloff-Smith’s (1990) task of drawing a nonexistent object is considered to be a measure of cognitive flexibility. The notion of earlier emergence of cognitive flexibility in bilingual children motivated the current researchers to request 4- and 5-year-old English–Hebrew and Arabic–Hebrew bilingual children and their monolingual peers to draw a flower and a house that do not exist (N = 80). Bilinguals exhibited a significantly higher rate of interrepresentational flexibility in their drawings (e.g., ‘‘a giraffe flower,’’ ‘‘a chair-house,’’ found in 28 of 54 drawings), whereas the level of complex intrarepresentational change was similar across groups. Interrepresentational drawings were previously reported only for children older than 7 years. The specific mechanisms by which bilinguals’ language experience may lead to interrepresentational flexibility are discussed.

Why might I be thinking about this? Well, as much as conservative Republicans might like to mock and denigrate presidential candidates who speak another language (such as mocking Mitt Romney's ability to speak French; Newt Gingrich's ability to speak French is likely waiting in the wings, at least until they find audio or video evidence) as well as so many Americans desiring to make English the official national language of the US (and some people's desire to force new immigrants to assimilate into the English speaking majority).

Never mind that many Americans who can only speak English have been mocked of their inability to write in the language that they want to force others to learn (presumably as well as they know it). On Discover Blogs, "The Crux" wrote about the "Mental Costs of Linguistic Assimilation". Money quote (at least to me):

In the end, it’s clear that English is not under threat in the U.S. —bilingualism is. And the greatest cognitive benefits of bilingualism are likely to be reaped by those who are able to use their non-English language with neighbors, teachers, and bank tellers, those who can talk to other bilinguals in speech that is spangled with Spanglish or Chinglish or Franglais. In other words, those who are lucky enough to have the kind of bilingual environment that my kids never had. Just the kind of environment that English-only advocates seek to obliterate.

Why I hate Hoekstra's ad

I didn't actually see this ad when it aired during the Superbowl on Sunday night. However, when I saw it pop up on the Dish, I watched it, read the commentary that Bodenner collected, and decided to add my own. First, the video a screen capture from the video (now removed from YouTube):

(Source ABC)

Transcript:

Thank you Michigan Senator Debbie Spenditnow. Debbie spend so much American money. You borrow more and more -- from us. Your economy get very weak. Ours get very good. We take your jobs. Thank you Debbie Spenditnow.

And now the two pieces of commentary from the page at the Dish:

The ad is predictably pissing people off:

The spot has already invited a barrage of negative reactions, from a coalition of black ministers in Detroit ("The Asian woman speaking in this video would be no different than him having a black person speaking in slave dialect") and an Asian-American voting group ("It is very disturbing that Mr. Hoekstra's campaign chose to use harmful negative stereotypes that intrinsically encourage anti-Asian sentiment") to Republican strategist Mike Murphy ("Pete Hoekstra Superbowl TV ad in MI Senate race really, really dumb. I mean really.")

Of all the representations of a Chinese person to make an enemy of the American worker, Hoekstra had to pick a peasant girl? Not a financial tycoon in Shanghai, or a factory owner in Guangzhou? Damn those peasants for trying to escape abject poverty! Fallows provides a keen analysis along those lines:

The ad's words are about trade, budgets, and jobs, but its images are about -- 'Nam!!  Of course some parts of southern China look the way this ad does, with rice paddies, palm trees, no big buildings, people wearing conical straw hats and bicycling along dike tops. But this is nothing like how the typical big-factory zone looks in China, or the huge cities that would exemplify Chinese wealth and the country's rise -- ie, the subjects of this ad. So why this rural setting? I think it's because it offers a kind of visual dog-whistle, for those Americans who, either through experience or through Apocalypse Now-style imagery, associate smiling-but-deceptive Asians in a rice-paddy setting with previous American sorrow.

The point that makes me mad about this ad overlaps with these two reasons, but is also distinct. I am really offended that they used an obviously Asian American (listen to the accent) speaking in an obviously fake Asian patois of English. Seriously, who wrote that copy? Who did that casting?

What angers me most about the ad is that I'm supposed to swallow this racialized bullshit that goes beyond the message and the messenger (but extends to the expectation that Americans are EXPECTED to have a knee-jerk reaction to "Asians" who act in a stilted manner that is more akin to the Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto movies of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s than what an actual Asian from what is apparently northern Vietnam or southern China actually sounds like).

It's only steps away from the nonsensical, highly offensive, all-East-Asians-sound-speak-like "Ching-chong ching-chong" or the "you-likey-very-muchy". Seriously? Hadn't we gotten over that already? Who does this really appeal to? Obviously not to any Asian Americans. Obviously not to any American who has traveled to Asia (or even to a China town). Obviously not to anyone who can see through the not-at-all-veiled historical White American racial stereotypes of a few generations ago -- like when Hoekstra was growing up...

Even if I were to agree with the message of the ad - the Sen. Debbie Stabenow spends tons of money in South East Asia or China - the manner in which Hoekstra's ad fails on so many levels to actually make even a half-way decent portrayal of East/Southeast Asians in favor of thinly hidden stereotypes of Asians taken from Americanized depictions drawn from his childhood makes me want to barf. And this is one of his ads: it's posted on his YouTube page and ends with, "I'm Pete Hoekstra, and I approve this message" only says to me, "I'm Pete Hoekstra, and I approve of shallow, horribly out-moded racial stereotypes."

Bah!

UPDATE (2012-02-06): In the IHT Rendezvous blog, Mark MacDonald has an additional few comments about the video.

Mr. Hoekstra told The Detroit Free Press, “There’s nothing racist in this ad,” and he noted that there was no specific mention of China.

“The Chinese benefit from the recklessness of U.S. spending,” he said. “It doesn’t criticize the Chinese at all.”

Did he just make a comment that was critical of the Chinese and then say that it doesn't criticize the Chinese? Yes. Yes he did. Also, it looks like he's suffering from the typical "But I'm not a bigot" mentality: since he isn't affiliated with a racist organization (or an organization that he considers to be racist), he cannot - by definition - be a racist. (Am I the only one who sees a logical fallacy there?) However, let's continue with MacDonald's post:

Cweezy, a commenter on the 8Asians blog, said the “message of the ad isn’t ‘anti-Asian,’ but it does weirdly reinforce stereotypes/ignorance/xenophobia to make a point about the national debt. I got very uncomfortable watching it.’’

I'm with Cweezy: it isn't (obviously) "anti-Asian" ... in the sense that it doesn't say things like, "Asians suck," or the like. However, it is weird. It does reinforce stereotypes. It is uncomfortable to watch. (Partly because of the cringe factor, partly because you know that there are people who agree with it... and that in some places they may be a majority of the local population.)

However, MacDonald also doesn't catch on to the fact that the actress is obviously Asian American, and that if you met her on the street, she would probably sound like any other second (or more) generation Asian American. (You know: having a local accent that would match with most everyone around her.) However, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell did apparently figure that obvious point out, and called out the actress for doing such a stupid gig, saying:

"I've done things in show business...that I'm not proud of. But I've never done anything that I'm ashamed of."

UPDATE (2012-02-17): The actress, Lisa Chan, offered what appears to be a sincere apology, posting the following message publicly on her Facebook wall:

"I am deeply sorry for any pain that the character I portrayed brought to my communities. As a recent college grad who has spent time working to improve communities and empower those without a voice, this role is not in any way representative of who I am. It was absolutely a mistake on my part and one that, over time, I hope can be forgiven. I feel horrible about my participation and I am determined to resolve my actions."

In the political outfall of this, Hoekstra looks to have dropped severely in the polls, now trailing Stabenow by 30+%. In other news, the Hoekstra campaign took down the video (although some mirrored versions still seem to exist online) and they also took down the website that it showed. I can only hope that this proves a point, but with 16% of Republicans saying that they saw the ad and it made them more likely to vote for Hoekstra, I think that it's a faint hope for a sizable minority.

Smart bullets are here: oh shit.

 Via the Danger Room at Wired magazine:

The U.S. military has been after self-guided bullets for years. Now, government researchers have finally made it happen: a bullet that can navigate itself a full mile before successfully nailing its target.

The breakthrough comes courtesy of engineers at the government’s Sandia National Laboratories. They’ve successfully tested a prototype of the bullet at distances up to 2,000 meters — more than a mile. The photo above is an actual image taken during one of those tests. A light-emitting diode was attached to the bullet, showing the amazing pathway that the munition made through the night sky

The article goes on to describe the on-the-ground implications of this technology:

Even with an ace marksman, researchers found that a typical unguided bullet — operating in real world conditions that might include crosswinds or changes in air density — would miss a target that was a half-mile away by nine meters. A guided bullet, however, could get within eight inches of that same target.

For a little more perspective, consider the world record in shooting accuracy: It currently belongs to British Army sniper Corporal Craig Harrison, who shot two Taliban operatives from a mile-and-a-half away. And Harrison performed that feat under “perfect” conditions.

I only have two words, written in both awe and fear: "Oh shit."

Seeing is believing. However what you see isn't always what actually happens.

They say that "Seeing is believing," and it's a fundamental basis of a lot of science. Of course, "seeing" in a scientific sense doesn't always mean, "with your eyes," but can include doing statistical analysis on results, using objective measuring devices, using standard protocols, etc. Of course, we know (or ought to know) that the human eye isn't perfect, and that we can be tricked by having what we see manipulated by someone. Stage magic is a famous example of this perception manipulation.

However, according to new research from the University of Queensland (via MedicalXPpress), we learn that people's perceptions about their team's actions (see? a perfect topic for Super Bowl Sunday!) are unconsciously biased:

Lead researcher Dr Pascal Molenberghs said results showed the brain responded differently when people saw actions of their team members compared to the opposing side, but that this was not as simple as a bias in opinion.

“Our study found that people quickly identified with their group and that they consistently judged their own team's actions as being a fraction of a second faster than those of non-team members, when in reality the actions were identical,” Dr Molenberghs said.

Furthermore, this unconscious effect of biasing one's own team members' actions as better (or in this case faster) than the other team members' actions has serious repercussions on how one reacts to decisions made "against" one's own team:

“It's not simply that we decide to favour the actions of our team because we think they are the best. Rather, because we feel an affiliation with the team, our brain processes the actions of own team members more favourably.

“So next time you think an umpire has made an unfair call against your team, bear in mind that your team allegiance could be affecting the way your brain is processing what you saw.”

And this has further implications outside of sports:

“Our findings could help explain discrimination between all kinds of groups - including those of race, gender and nationality - because our study suggests that we see the actions of non-group members differently and what we see is what we believe.”

The evidence for this is known to exist: we see it every day when we point out hypocrisies that people hold about members of an "out group" compared to the actions of the "in group." Perhaps it's described as a parent being "blind" to the bad actions of the child. Research has shown, too, that many people (at least in the US) approach politics like sports: aligning with a team and having their team duke it out with the other team. This research shows that unconscious bias will play a role in the interpretation of actions of those who aren't on "your team" or aren't supporters of "your team."

Finally, remember, just because you believe that your team did something right and that the umpire's/referee's call against your team is wrong, your mind might be tricking your thoughts to see what you want to see. (Hopefully, though, the Superbowl - and other sporting events - doesn't fall to bad calls.)

What happens to winter sports if winter doesn't come?

By New Year of 2010, Vancouver had built its Olympic village. It had built its courses and tracks. However, there was one major missing ingredient for a good Winter Olympics: snow. This had been a problem in 1998, when Nagano - known in Japan for having snow - was running ever-closer to the start of the Olympics without enough powder to actually make it worthwhile. Both times, Olympic organizers were biting their nails (or perhaps had already gotten to gnawing on the skin) when - luckily - their major venture was saved by the timely arrival of the snow. In both cases, the countries were feeling the effects of El Nino (aka ENSO), when precipitation patterns shift and global temperatures rise. Indeed, the fact that it was an El Nino year was pointed out each time, not as an excuse for the weather, but as a frustrating explanation as to why snow-machines might have to be called in to do the heavy lifting (and I remember some punditry about whether this would help or hinder the various outdoor events).

This winter (2011/2012) is taking place during a La Nina (when global temperatures drop), although you wouldn't know it if you were experiencing winter in much of the United States in 2012, especially in the northeast. While the normal trend of La Nina is to have temperatures that are slightly cooler than the surrounding years (save for 1999 and 2000, which witnessed back-to-back La Nina years), this part of the world has seen record warm-spells. To look at the current condition of the US winter of 2012:

For the Lower 48, January was the third-least snowy on record, according to the Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University. Records for the amount of ground covered by snow go back to 1967.

Forget snow, for much of the country there's not even a nip in the air. On Tuesday, the last day in January, all but a handful of states had temperatures in the 50s or higher. In Washington, DC, where temperatures flirted with the 70s, some cherry trees are already budding -weeks early.

However, this condition of no snow is only within the "Lower 48":

Valdez, Alaska, has had 328 inches of snow this season - 10 feet above average - and the state is frigid, with Yukon hitting a record 66 below zero over the weekend.

Nearly 80 people have died from a vicious cold snap in Europe, and much of Asia has been blanketed with snow. This January has been the ninth snowiest since 1966 for Europe and Asia, though for the entire northern hemisphere, it's been about average for snow this season.

The weather is so cold that some areas of the Black Sea have frozen near the Romanian coastline, and rare snowfalls have occurred on islands in the Adriatic Sea in Croatia. Ukraine alone has reported 43 fatalities, many of the victims homeless people found dead on streets.

Why is this the case? Because of the unexpected interaction between two north-latitude oscillations:

The reason is changes in Arctic winds that are redirecting snow and cold. Instead of dipping down low, the jet stream winds that normally bring cold and snow south got trapped up north. It's called the Arctic Oscillation. Think of it as a cousin to the famous El Nino.

When the Arctic Oscillation is in a positive phase, the winds spin fast in the Arctic keeping the cold north. But in the past few days, the Arctic Oscillation turned negative, though not in its normal way, Halpert said. The cold jet stream dipped in Europe and Asia, but is still bottled up over North America.

That's because another weather phenomena, called the North Atlantic Oscillation is playing oddball by staying positive and keeping the cold away from the rest of North America. About 90 percent of the time, the North Atlantic and Arctic oscillations are in synch, Halpert said. But not this time, so much of the United States is escaping the winter's worst.

In other words, this warm weather is only really being felt in the "lower 48" states of the US, whereas Europe and Asia are far colder than normal. Furthermore, although the explanation for these causes of a lack of winter in much of the populated areas of North America can be made, it cannot be predicted, especially not when the decision of hosting city is made years in advance.

What if - for example - this were a Winter Olympic year, and the Olympics were scheduled to be in Morristown, Vermont (a state where skiing is normally a major part of winter tourism)? What would that town be doing to take care of not just a lack of snow but also temperatures ~10F (~5C) above freezing? Snow-making machines won't cut it (at least it was below freezing in the snow-less weeks leading up to the Nagano and Vancouver games). Would the games be cancelled - save for the indoor events? Postponed? Who would pay for the incurred costs? What about refunding the ticket sales? It will be far more disappointing to a far greater audience if something like what happened to the Red Bull Linecatcher event in France that was supposed to happen on January 11-18, 2012:

Just four days before the Red Bull Linecatcher was scheduled to begin in France, the event has been canceled due to unfavorable weather in France's Vars region. The event, which had a strong lineup of international athletes scheduled to arrive, was due to be held from Jan. 11-18.

"I feel ashamed to have to give you this news, but we are having really unfavorable weather in Vars right now," said Red Bull organizer Jean-Robert Bellanger. Rushed meetings had been held with the Vars safety guides and tourism office and with a heavy heart, Bellanger was forced to cancel the competition at this late date. "In Vars right now there is just not enough snow that has settled on the Eyssina Face. With sunshine and high temperatures ready to set in this week the decision was made that it would be too dangerous for the skiers."

There was a rumor of a potential change of location, but that was quickly put to rest by Bellanger. "There's just too much that has gone into this location, it's just not possible to change the resort at such a late date," he said.

This news comes as an additional blow to the ski industry, at a time where many American resorts are struggling to get their seasons underway. Europe's winter is off to a slightly better start, with much of eastern Switzerland and Austria getting snow, and resorts like St. Anton currently on hold due to too much snow.

This sort of question made me wonder what the major winter sports organizations are doing to talk about the problems that variable climatic conditions and (by extension) climate change will have on the pursuit (and investment in) their sports. Does the IOC have a position about climate change? Well, there is this report, put out in the lead-up to Vancouver, which seems to focus mostly on the Vancouver games and not on strategies for the IOC in general. Most of the search results for "climate change" and "global warming" on the www.olympics.org page are written for or before the Vancouver Olympic games. Worrying.

What about the Winter X-Games? Luckily, Aspen, CO had enough snow to permit the go-ahead of the 2012 X-Games, but if they had been - like in the example above - held in the Appalachians, a greater spotlight would likely have been put on how a combination of a lack of snow and high temperatures will kill international winter sporting competitions.

Who knows, though? Perhaps winter sports will all follow the lead that was taken by skating sports (and curling) and move indoors. Perhaps, then Dubai - with its indoor ski facilities - will be able to host a Winter Olympics... Dubai 2100 anyone?

Answering a religious birther's mad spoutings

I was reminded that Birthers still exist, and they occasionally spout silly statements about the eligibility of President Obama to actually be POTUS. I was reminded of this when reading an entry from Dispatches from the Culture Wars. I'm going to use the same blockquote of the interview transcript from Titus that was used there (important parts in bolded by me):

Titus: What’s important is to realize that being a natural born citizen is based upon the law of nature. Any natural law is based on a law of nature which is revealed by God. And the notion is that no one is accidentally born in any particular nation to any particular parent. You’re not born by accident, you’re born by design. And who’s the designer? Well, God’s the designer. So if you’re born of two parents, that is a mother and father, who are of the same citizenship, then you have been ordained by God to be a citizen of the nation of your parents. That’s why he’s a natural born citizen. So, there’s a design in this that goes all the way back to scriptural principles.


Schneider: Dr. Titus, when this issue has come up time and time again to either the president or his press secretary, they are now referring to the long-form birth certificate that they released in 2011. In your opinion, does the presentation of this long-form certificate, as they have given it and said, ‘See, there’s the evidence,’ in your opinion does this satisfy the matter?


Titus: Well, I think it does if your definition of natural born citizen is that the parents have to be citizens of the United States. Because the form that was produced by the Obama administration indicates that his father was not an American citizen. Where people said, where race usually you put ‘black’ but it has ‘African.’ Well, it shows that he had a national citizenship that was not the United States. So, you don’t need anything more than the evidence that’s already been furnished by the Obama administration themselves. You don’t have to go behind it, you don’t have to determine whether it’s a fraudulent certificate. It says it on its face.


…


Titus: The people have a responsibility here to make sure that the Constitution is followed as it is written. I mean, if people don’t like the natural born citizen requirement, then they can amend the Constitution. I think in this particular case, it demonstrates why the natural born citizen requirement is so important, because I think this president does have a divided loyalty. I think he is more loyal to his African father than he is to the American nation, and I think that’s been well-documented.

Ed - and the commentators there - did a good job of debunking (and mocking) these claims. However, no commentator actually pointed to the US Code that says what accounts for being a citizen at birth. The US Code is "a compilation and codification of the general and permanent laws of the United States." Titus (and all Americans who want to know about what the law actually is) should go to United States Code TITLE 8 > CHAPTER 12 > SUBCHAPTER III > Part I > § 1401, which deals with: “NATIONALS AND CITIZENS OF UNITED STATES AT BIRTH”

Obama fits the requirements for “Citizen of the US at birth” under category (A): “a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” He was born in Hawaii, which meets the requirement.

If you don’t believe (for whatever silly reason) that he was born in the United States or a US outlying possession (hello Titus and other birthers!), then he is still Citizen of the US at birth under category (G): “(g) a person born outside the geographical limits of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is an alien, and the other a citizen of the United States who, prior to the birth of such person, was physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than five years, at least two of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years” His mother was a citizen of the US. She was living in the US for a continuous period of MORE than two years – all of which were after attaining the age of 14 – before she would have gone to Kenya or somewhere else to give birth to her son. (NOTE: According to commentator "slc1", the US Code changed after Obama was born. It was previously a 5-year requirement, and this got changed to the 2-year requirement that I quote above. However, I can't find a version of the US Code that was in force in 1961 - when Obama was born - and the Office of the Law Revision Council's website on "Prior U.S. Code" only goes back to 1988.)

The only way that President Obama couldn’t be Citizen of the US at birth is if he wasn’t born in Hawaii (which he was) AND his mother wasn’t actually Ann Dunham (which she was) OR that Ann Dunham didn’t live for a total of two years in the United States after reaching 14 years of age and before she gave birth to Barack Obama (which would have been a trick for her to have all the US university education that she finished when Barack was born). In other words, the argument against President Obama being a Citizen of the United States at birth are logically warrantless.

Yes, yes, I know that “Citizen of the United States at birth” is not the same thing as “natural born citizen,” but it’s the closest thing that matches and it’s the thing that was used to justify George Romney’s citizenship requirement as well as John McCain’s citizenship requirement. (Both of these white Republican presidential candidates were born outside of the United States – Romney in Mexico and McCain in the Panama Canal Zone.) [UPDATE: An anonymous commentator below pointed me to an entry at Tan Horizons that shows the Wong v Ark case as an example "that the majority opinion in Wong did in fact bring up Article II section 1, and that 19th century judges tended to use “natural-born” and “native-born” interchangeably."]

Furthermore, since the US Code is the codification of the general and permanent federal laws of the United States, it is the closest legal definition for "natural born citizen" that we have. For people who argue against this point (saying, for example that it's not the Constitution), I would just say that - following their logic - most (if not all) of the US Code isn't in the Constitution, and therefore, arguments they might make about federal regulation over things like drugs (under Title 21), labor (under Title 29), phones (under Title 47), and other things that the founding fathers didn't conceive of are similarly invalid under their argumentation.

Additionally, contrary to Titus' argument that "natural law" requires that both parents need to be of the same citizenship, we have had presidents whose one parent wasn’t an American citizen: Thomas Jefferson (English mother), James Buchanan (Irish father), Chester Arthur (Irish father), Woodrow Wilson (English mother) and Herbert Hoover (Canadian mother). Therefore, Titus’ argument of “if you’re born of two parents, that is a mother and father, who are of the same citizenship, then you have been ordained by God to be a citizen of the nation of your parents” is historically unfounded. Maybe, though, Titus is really annoyed that Jefferson, Buchanan, Arthur, Wilson, and Hoover were allowed to be president, after all, he is saying that his definition of "natural born citizen" means that both parents need to be American.

We’ve even had a president with two immigrant parents: Andrew Jackson (which also goes against Titus' position that both parents need to be American).

Of course, Titus is using a Christian definition of "natural law"; which is something that I don't understand, since it deals mostly with metaphysical (i.e., NOT natural) things, and actually has changed a lot over time. However, someone should point out to him that Christianist natural law and the natural law of American jurisprudence aren't the same thing! With that in mind, the Christianist natural law definition has as much justifiable use in this argumentation as claiming that "natural born citizen" means a citizen that was parturated using natural childbirth, which would mean that the founding fathers actually didn't want anyone born via c-section.

Obviously, this meaning of "natural born citizen" is not what the founding fathers meant, but if Titus is going to misappropriate the term "natural" to fit his biases, then why not put forward something that holds just as well (i.e., only to a strained reading of the definition). What the founding fathers arguably argued for under "natural law" and a "Nature's God" that is akin to Spinoza's god, since Jefferson's writings do seem to align with Spinoza's. As written in "Negri on Spinoza":

Before starting to discuss Negri on Spinoza's political and legal philosophy, I would like, in passing to draw your attention to an aspect of the influence of Spinoza's political philosophy which has not yet found the interest it deserves: the influence he had during the founding period of the Constitution of the United States. As Guiseppa Saccaro Battisti has shown, there were three books of Spinoza's in Thomas Jefferson's library - the Opera Posthuma, the Tractatus Theologico-politicus, which Jefferson himself "ordered from Paris in 1792 (Saccaro Battisti, p. 1), and the English translation of that same work dating from 1789. Besides the reflections on the different forms of government or constitution in the Tractatus Politicus, especially on a federalist form of the state ... special attention has to be given to Spinoza's theory of civil religion ... as the secular complement of positive religion. While positive religion, because of its inherent particularism, divides people, civil religion is, according to Spinoza in the TTP, the necessary medium of political integration on the level of imagination - imagination being the level on which collective political thought is effective. The religious pluralism of the founding period of the United States demanded such a unifying religiously founded common belief, and as far as I can see, it is Spinoza's theory of civil religion that inspired the Founding Fathers, especially Jefferson, to push forward this concept.

Ergo (working back through the argumentation presented above): The founding fathers (at least Jefferson, who was heavily influential in the writing of the founding documents) believed in a "natural law" that was quite divorced from that of Titus. Therefore, Titus' definition of "natural" is very likely not that of the founding fathers. Therefore, Titus' extrapolations from his definition are likely wrong.

Next, Titus' argument that - under his definition of natural law - both parents must be US citizens for the children to be "natural born citizens" is proven incorrect, since we have had six presidents with at least one non-US parent. Therefore, Titus' arguments for the definition of "natural law" are not historically founded.

Next, the US Code is the codification of the federal laws of the United States. As such, it provides the closest thing to getting to the definition of "natural born citizen", at least until SCOTUS rules on it or a constitutional amendment is written on it. Therefore, ignoring the US Code is not very rational.

Next, looking at the pertinent US Code, we find that President Obama would be a Citizen of the United States at Birth under requirement G of the appropriate code even if he had been born outside of the United States. Therefore, birthers' standard argument that Obama wasn't born in the US, and is therefore ineligible to be POTUS, doesn't comport with the US code. In fact, the only way that Obama wouldn't be a Citizen of the United States at Birth would be if a foreign woman - not Ann Dunham - was his mother OR if Ann Dunham didn't live for a total of 2 years between 1956 (when she turned 14) and 1961 (when Obama was born). In other words, birthers' arguments don't hold any legal water. (NOTE: If slc1's point about it being a 5-year requirement in 1961 is accurate, then this would provide a means to challenge his Citizen of the United States at Birth status, only if it can be proven that the State of Hawaii as well as local newspapers lied about Obama's being born in Hawaii.)

Next, looking at the same US Code we find that President Obama - who was born in the state of Hawaii - is a Citizen of the United States at Birth under requirement A of the appropriate code. Therefore, Titus' argument that both parents need to be US citizens is legally incorrect.

Bottom line: Obama is a Citizen of the United States at Birth according to the US Code, and Titus' Christianist mumbo-jumbo is an invalid metric.

Groundhog Day explained

For those of you for whom "Groundhog Day" only means a rather humorous Bill Murray film.

Via CGPGrey:

LeBron rode his bike to the game

O.M.G.! LeBron James rode his bicycle to the game that he was playing in? He did what?!?!?!? Rode a ... bicycle?

ESPN "reports":

Word trickled out during Sunday's game that LeBron James rode his bike to AmericanAirlines Arena. Traffic was backed up because of a nearby marathon and LeBron decided to take another mode of transportation. The ride took 40 minutes and he safely arrived at the arena with plenty of time to spare.

Wait, wait, wait. Let me get this straight. A professional athlete used a pedal powered vehicle to go from point A to point B in one of the US's flattest and warmest cities, just like Dutch and Danish kids, adolescents, adults, and geriatrics do every day throughout much of the year (including the far-colder fall, winter and spring)?

Why is this news? Because he didn't drive and sit in traffic, having to go around the marathon course along with all the other cars? Seem like a smart option to me to ride his bike.

As Bike Snob pointed out in his original take on this:

I'm not sure if they're amazed he was able to do something a typical Dutch grandmother does on a daily basis, or that he didn't get run over by a car, or both, but in any case it's a sad reminder of just how developmentally challenged our relationship with cycling is here in Canada's steer head belt buckle. I'm also not sure why James opted for the "Cat 6 scuba diver" look (especially given the fact that he's in Miami, where it seems like his usual basketball uniform would have been a cooler and more comfortable choice of attire) but I'm sure he had his reasons. In any case, I certainly don't mean to criticize James himself for his mode of transport; rather, I just wish I lived in a country where this wasn't considered in any way remarkable. (I also wonder if ESPN would have found it funny if James was hit by a car and sent flying into a barbed wire fence.) Even the "smugness media" is excited about it, even though James appears to be one of those infuriatingly un-smug "vehicular cyclists" who wears a helmet and doesn't ride in tweed.

I am still amazed that people think that it's strange that I don't own a car and that I ride my bike throughout the year. The question of how else am I going to get to town if I didn't ride my bike throughout the year apparently doesn't occur to them. Still, I do it - not to cut through marathon-induced traffic jams - mostly to not have to pay for a car:

• gas (~$1000/year)
• insurance (~$750/year)
• registration (~$100/year)
• maintenance  ($150-$1000/year)
• parking (~$200/year)
• Total ($2000-$2850/year)

Compare this price to quarterly maintenance costs ($100-$200/quarter) and the financial incentive is clear. Add to this the distinction of not having to set aside extra time to do exercise (included in University fees if I do it on campus, or $1200/year at a gym), and the incentive becomes even more clear.

Although I don't know how long of a commute LeBron's was (that took him 40 minutes), I can say that I am one more person for whom bike commuting is not so strange (and feel that if others didn't look at it as a freakish thing to do, then there would likely be better bike infrastructure and commuter bike options around).

The winter hasn't (annoyingly) actually come.

I hold out hope that winter will actually come; a real winter that dips the thermometer down to the single digits (in Fahrenheit, of course; double negative digits in Centigrade). A winter with snow, dry air, and (if I can wish) clear, bright, and frigid days. You know what I'm talking about: winter in Michigan.

I'm not asking for huge amounts of snow. (In fact, I would prefer not to have too much of it, since it makes cycling to the campus difficult.) I am, though, hoping - as the well-above-average-temperature days tick past - for cold enough weather to actually call these months "winter". As it is, 30 of the past 40 days of winter (counting back to the Winter Solstice) have been above the average temperature range, while only two have been below the average temperature range. In other words, 75% of the days this winter season have been above average, while 5% have been below average, leaving 20% within the average range of temperature. Furthermore, 25 of the above-average-temperature days or have been above freezing, and 15 of these days were above 40F (~4.4C). In other words, 62.5% of the winter days have so far been above freezing and 37.5% of the winter days have so far been above 40F!

My point is that this year's weather can't really be called "winter" for Ann Arbor... at least not in the sense of how it feels. It can technically be classified as on the warm edge of what a winter for this area might feel like, but I would suggest that even this would be a difficult stretch to make.

At least it isn't raining right now... At least the sun is shining and melting the snow (hopefully clearing it all up before any ice forms on the roads).

Captcha! Story

A short story that makes rather fun use of the random Captcha words that we often see online.

Captcha from Gabrielle de Vietri on Vimeo.

Via The Dish.

Listening to the story and watching the Captcha images (to confirm the nonsense word is actually a nonsense Captcha-generated word), it's interesting to cogitate upon the "flavor" of the word - how the author uses these words to so perfectly color and enliven the text of the story. Just like Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," this one makes good synaesthetic use of the words to convey the feeling of what things are:

The redlemutes shuffled along silently. The mouthless creatures had no language, but desmodowe could tell they were sending vibes to each other in conspeali. He knew that if they conspealed too loud, they would awake the terrible manackboar, who would be sent into a frenzy by the rustiant scrape of the acithidoid's frequency, but that was the least of their worries..."

Lines like this - although lacking the tradition that time imparts to resilient works of art - are so much like those found in Carroll's poem:

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Linking this to Synaesthesia
All this reminds me of the lessons that I learned waaay back in undergrad basic psychology about the fact that we all share some basic level of synaesthesia (yes, I'm using the British spelling, since that's how I learned it in the first place, and my fingers prefer to spell it that way on the keyboard).

We find it easy to read a colored word when the word and the color match:

RED, ORANGE, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE, PURPLE

but difficult when it's colored a different color than the word

PURPLE, BLUE, YELLOW, GREEN, RED, ORANGE

We also share the "Bouba/Kiki Effect" in which people are given the nonsense names "Bouba" and "Kiki" (apologies to anyone names Bouba and Kiki) and told to assign the names to two blobs, one of which is angular and one that is rounded:

Even cross-culturally (based on a 2001 study between American and Tamil college students), almost all assigned "Kiki" to the angular blob and "Bouba" to the rounded blog.

While I don't know what a manackboar looks like, the fact that it's colored blue makes me think of a manackboar that has not yet become frenzied (since I associate blue with calm). Analogously, the term conspeali, being written in bold red makes me think that it's somehow dangerous (since I also associate red with danger). In short, watching the story play out with the colors and nonsense words in context makes this story (and this is only the first chapter) an interesting one for the senses.

Insights about Minnesota lakes: implications about Third Sister Lake

Hopefully, no one is naive to the fact that this winter's temperatures have been far above the long-term average. In fact, although we reached a low of 10F (well below the mean temperature for the night of Jan 29/Jan 30), the trend for most the entire previous week was that of above-average daytime and nighttime temperatures (and 20 of the previous 30 days in January have been above average, too, and today through February 4 is supposed to be not only above average - which is a daytime high temp of 28F - but above freezing, too).

This has meant many things for the forest, but it has meant a very critical thing for Third Sister Lake: the ice cover this year remains un-set: a small open pool remains toward the center of the lake, filling in only when temperatures stay below freezing, but opening again once the snows melt (and the rain falls). It is with this reality in mind that I was interested to read this story from Greg Laden's Blog titled, "Global Warming is Ruining Minnesota Winter".

In the post, Greg points out a few things about Minnesotan lakes that appear to generally hold true for Third Sister Lake as well:

Since the water is cold at the time of freezing, there is more oxygen in some of the lakes than there might otherwise be. Since some of the lake surface is covered with ice but not a thick layer of snow, sunlight gets into the lakes during the winter promoting photosynthesis in the algae living beneath the ice, which enhances oxygen supply. The occasional break-through of ice during the winter, if there is a warm up and sufficient wind, adds additional oxygen.

Meanwhile, if the ice gets thick fast and stays thick, fishermen and women can ice fish early, often, and well into the season. Many Minnesota lakes sport regular fish contests and festival's during the winter that depend on this thick ice.

Third Sister Lake has seen similar trends over the past couple of years, being able to literally support some illegal ice-fishing on the lake. Last year's ice sheet was quite thick and stayed set up well into March (and the ice didn't go away until April). However, there was also a lot of snow; the 8th most snow recorded in Ann Arbor. In some Minnesotan lakes, high levels of snow actually led to fish die-offs:

In recent years, there have been some changes owing to global warming. In a warmer world, there will be some years (but certainly not all) where Minnesota experiences much more snow than it used to. This happened last year. Some lakes had so much snow on them last year that the algal activity was stifled and there was less oxygen in the water, and so those lakes experienced large die-offs of fish. Die-offs happen every year in some lakes, but it seems that the extra snow may have caused more fish to die than usual.

Luckily for the bass and bluegill, this didn't happen in Third Sister Lake, despite the additional snow in the region (although a die-off of Gizzard Shad did occur elsewhere in Southeast Michigan). This could have been due to the existence of groundwater seeps into Third Sister Lake, but this is merely conjecture on my part.

While we cannot definitively say that the 2010-2011 winter's snowfall was caused by global warming, scientists do recognize that, under conditions of global warming, greater amounts of snowfall is expected in regions where snowfall is possible, such as the upper Midwest. (For an explanation as to why, check out this article from Feb 2010.)

In warmer years, such as we are experiencing this winter (and in many previous winters) the lack of thick ice has caused numerous accidents and even fatalities as Minnesotans wandering around on insufficiently frozen lakes, falling in now and then. This, to me, is the ultimate form of Global Warming Denialism. One ignores through ignorance, or willful ignorance, the obvious change in our climate and as a result dies. The number of people falling through ice and drowning in Minnesota seems to be on the rise (though even with increased numbers, the quantities are small enough that a statistical test may be impossible). An excellent indicator of the increased dangers of ice with global warming can be found in what is happening with fishing contests. Contests on lakes in the central part of the state have been repeatedly canceled, and in the case of the Big Lake contests, permanently abandoned as an activity after being canceled several years in a row. In other words, global warming has caused Big Lake to no longer reliably freeze. It's simply a new reality. 

Third Sister Lake has not - yet - set up. There remains a small hole toward the center of the lake, which opens up when the weather climbs above freezing and especially when there is rainfall. It could cause problems not only for the illegal ice-fishers, but also for the ecology classes that come out in February.

Playing for Change - Love the mission, love the videos

A little while ago, I learned about Playing for Change. This group, this mission, this music is truly internationally bound, uplifting, and moving. The mission of the PfC Foundation is "to connecting the world through music by providing resources to musicians and their communities around the world." The foundation does some great filming and mixing of musicians from around the world - to play "together" in completely new versions of well-known pieces of music.

These are some of my favorites (with their own video descriptions, when relevant):

La Tierra Del Olvido

This video features over 75 musicians across the country of Colombia. Throughout our journey we have learned that music is the greatest tool for healing broken countries, cultures and hearts. With this video we set our to unite and inspire the people of Colombia so they can move forward from years of conflict and create a positive future.

Higher Ground


One Love


Groove in G
I really love the international complementarity, cohesion, and channeling that these artists are doing; grooving with each over to completely extemporaneously derived and layered music that started with only a requirement of a key.

We started this track in West Africa with a musical group named Tinariwen. We asked them to play a groove in the key of G, then as we traveled the world we added more musicians to the song. Over the course of our travels it transformed into a global jam with its roots in the blues.

Imagine

In the beginning of 2010 the Playing For Change crew began work on a new Song Around the World, John Lennon's "Imagine." It has been an amazing year of production, taking the crew from the favelas of Brazil to the shrines of southern India, from villages in Nepal to the glittering urban landscape of Tokyo and New York, and beyond.

This song is the Playing For Change Foundation's gift to the world. The Playing For Change Foundation feels honored to have the blessing and generous support of Yoko Ono as music lovers around the world join together to launch the Power to the People campaign. The campaign seeks to advance John Lennon's vision of peace by engaging artists and audiences to contribute to music education programs worldwide. Proceeds raised will help build music schools, support teachers and music programs, purchase instruments, and connect schools for cross-cultural learning and conflict resolution across borders. Music IS the power: Power to the People.

Chanda Mama

This Song Around The World is a folk tune from Chennai, India. We started the track in New Orleans and added musicians from the across the globe before finally delivering it the people of its origin. We ended up in Chennai recording and filming the vocals from the Oneness Choir. The track has a feeling of perseverance and joy and features vocalists from four continents.

Don't Worry

From the award-winning documentary, "Playing For Change: Peace Through Music", comes an incredible track written by Pierre Minetti performed by musicians around the world adding their part to the song as it traveled the globe. "Don't Worry" is the follow up to the classic "Stand By Me" and the second of many "songs around the world" released on the "Songs Around The World" CD/DVD in stores now everywhere.

\


and finally, my favorite song Stand by Me


If you like this foundation - the music or the mission - then check out their page (playingforchange.com) or their YouTube channel.

Songs that make me cry (or at least start to tear up)

Sometimes, when I listen to songs from the deep depths of my childhood, tears start to come. These aren't moving arias. These aren't symphonic miracles. These don't have mind-blowing powerchords. These are - I must admit - almost all folk songs. Many of them written generations ago and now seem to be almost nothing more than distant memory for an aging generation. However, perhaps because I was the very youngest of all my cousins - born 12 years after my youngest cousin on my father's side and 6 years after my youngest cousin on my mother's side (but about 25 years after my oldest cousins on both sides) - I have inherited an "old ear". I certainly wasn't surrounded by classmates who sang these songs (so I have only my parents to "blame").

Too, due to my mixed heritage, these songs are both Japanese folk songs as well as American folk songs. It is, unfortunately, sometimes difficult to find songs that move me so much partly because I don't remember all the folk songs of my childhood. However, these are a few that tug greatly on my heartstrings:

"Aka tombou"


... and a different singing of it by the same artist (sung for Cyndi Lauper):


The second one really do cut right to the quick. The haunting aspect to the timbre really connects with something very deep-seated in me. Also, the style of singing is just so foreign in this world of pop hits and heavy rhythms. It all harkens back to a time that I never knew, but could imagine with as much longing as the words of the song - and the voices of the singers - convey.

I know that there are other Japanese folk songs that would evoke a similar reaction. However, these fall (unfortunately) in the category of not being able to remember the names of the songs that I heard when I was so very young. Perhaps, on a cassette somewhere in a box somewhere in my parents' home that has similar songs. However, I also remember growing up with this - somewhat famous even in the US - song:

"Ue wo muite arukou" (上を向いて歩こう) a.k.a. "Sukiyaki Song"


This one, though, only makes me sad when I start to sing along... However - moving over to US folk songs - this one is like "Aka tombou" above, jerking tears from my eyes with little problem:

"My Grandfather's Clock"


I also really get moved by "Old Man River". Especially Lawrence Beamen's 2009 audition version for America's Got Talent


Thanks to the cassette tapes that my parents had when I was growing up, I also got to learn the songs of Harry Belafonte. And while I like the songs that perhaps most people know - "Banana Boat Song," and "Jump in the Line" - one of the songs that I heard was "Island in the Sun":

It spoke to me - a child who was born on Guam (an island in the sun) who moved away from it so young. The feelings that would fill me every time that I listened to this song when I was in adolescence - when we were visiting Guam on occasion - I would have fleeting memories of the warm sun, the gritty sand, and the sounds of the waves and it taught me very early about the word "nostalgia."

Another one of Harry Belafonte's songs from that cassette tape of my parents' was "Cu Cu Ru Cu Cu Paloma":

I didn't even know the meaning of the words, and it wasn't until I listened to it recently - after I learned a decent amount of Spanish - that I could understand the lyrics. Still, the emotion poured into the words... moved me even as a child.

And my mom really liked the songs of John Denver, too. I must have listened to all the songs - famous and obscure - that he released during his career. One of my favorites - perhaps what piqued my interest in biology and science - was "Calypso"

True, "Rocky Mountain High" also lifts me (yeah, yeah), but nothing like this song. Strange, though, that it wasn't until MUCH later that I learned that the song was an homage to Jacques Cousteau and the name of his boat: Calypso. (Hell, I ended up going into marine biology at St. Andrews without ever having - knowingly - seen anything from Jacques Cousteau, heresy though that may seem.)

Then there are some songs that are - to me - just haunting in their rendition:
"Skye Boat Song"


and "Pokarekare Ana"


Okay, okay, I grew to like some Scottish folk songs - Scotland the Brave, Flower o' Scotland, Loch Lomond, etc. - a nod to the time that I spent in Scotland. (And a late toast to Burns Night, just 4 nights ago.) However, they weren't songs that I heard when I was growing up, so I won't include them here (also because this list is getting rather lengthy).

Therefore, I'll end with one more; a song that doesn't really fit in with the above. It's not "haunting"; it's not Japanese nor is it American; it's not from any single singer that my parents listened to. However, it's stuck in my mind as one of the songs of my childhood; one that can - at times - make me start to tear up a little bit: "Cielito Lindo":

Although this one was made by the Banamex bank, I really like its multi-regionality. It's strange that I remember hearing this song growing up, since it is one of the very few Mexican songs that my mother actually knew and had (and liked). Again, like "Cu Cu Ru Cu Cu Paloma," I had no idea of the meaning of the words before I listened to it again after learning Spanish.

Okay... I've got to stop now. It's getting too emotional for me. So, here's one to lighten the mood and go in completely the other direction:
"Birdhouse in your soul"

(Thanks to my brother to introducing me to this song.)

Amazing NASA image of the Earth

The above image is also available at 8000x8000 resolution. Pretty awesome! Also, there is an "expanded" version of Earth:

NASA Goddard has more photos of Earth on its Flickr page, too.

The problem with intelligence in science fiction

As a closing question in an interview with Tim Maudlin, there was this question (and response):

I recently came across a paper about Fermi's Paradox and Self-Replicating Probes, and while it had kind of a science fiction tone to it, it occurred to me as I was reading it that philosophers might be uniquely suited to speculating about, or at least evaluating the probabilistic arguments for the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. Do you expect philosophers of cosmology to enter into those debates, or will the discipline confine itself to issues that emerge directly from physics?

Maudlin: This is really a physical question. If you think of life, of intelligent life, it is, among other things, a physical phenomenon -- it occurs when the physical conditions are right. And so the question of how likely it is that life will emerge, and how frequently it will emerge, does connect up to physics, and does connect up to cosmology, because when you're asking how likely it is thatsomewhere there's life, you're talking about the broad scope of the physical universe. And philosophers do tend to be pretty well schooled in certain kinds of probabilistic analysis, and so it may come up. I wouldn't rule it in or rule it out.

I will make one comment about these kinds of arguments which seems to me to somehow have eluded everyone. When people make these probabilistic equations, like the Drake Equation, which you're familiar with -- they introduce variables for the frequency of earth-like planets, for the evolution of life on those planets, and so on. The question remains as to how often, after life evolves, you'll have intelligent life capable of making technology. What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that's not true. Obviously it doesn't matter that much if you're a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there's a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence. There is just too much we don't know.

Cultural calendars and global warming

From PhysOrg comes a news blurb about mapping climatic changes to the Chinese "cultural calendar" of the 24 solar terms. According to Wikipedia's entry (because the description on the PhysOrg blurb wasn't too enlightening) on solar terms:

A solar term is any of 24 points in traditional East Asian lunisolar calendars that matches a particular astronomical event or signifies some natural phenomenon. The points are spaced 15° apart along the ecliptic and are used by lunisolar calendars to stay synchronized with the seasons....

Because the Sun's speed along the ecliptic varies depending on the Earth-Sun distance, the number of days that it takes the Sun to travel between each pair of solar terms varies slightly throughout the year. Each solar term is divided into three pentads (候 hou). Each pentad consists of five days (rarely six), so there are 72 pentads in a year.

These solar terms have been given names of what is expected to occur during that period (e.g.,"awakening of insects", usually beginning around March 5 or "major heat", usually beginning around July 23). As such, these names serve a social use as well - mainly to provide agricultural cues. Provided that the climate remains stable, these cues - barring annual variations - provide a useful "farmer's almanac." Indeed, given the assumptions of the use over 2000 years in China, the 24 solar terms likely became divorced from the actual position of the sun and became more of a description of the expected climatic conditions at certain periods throughout the year.

However, the climate has not remained stable, and in an interesting combination of combining a cultural calendar with climatic measurements, a new paper has been published that shows how - in China - the 24 solar terms have changed in character. First, though, the researchers had to convert solar periods into correlative temperature ranges (in order to make the climate change comparisons). That done, this is what they found:

According to these results, the timings of the climatic Solar Terms during the warming phase (around spring) of the seasonal cycle have significantly advanced (by 6-15 days) from the 1960s to the present.

Across China, timings during the cooling phase (around autumn) have delayed by 5-6 days on average. This is mainly because of a warming shift of the entire seasonal temperature cycle, as illustrated in the figure. Four particular phenology-related climatic Solar Terms, namely the Waking of Insects, Pure Brightness, Grain Full, and Grain in Ear, have advanced almost everywhere in the country (as much as 20 days in North China). This has important implications for agricultural planning. The numbers of extremely cold (Great Cold) days decreased by 56.8% over the last 10 years as compared with the 1960s, whereas those of extremely hot (Great Heat) days increased by 81.4%.

Graph from Qian et al (2012). Caption from the paper reads: "Climatological mean ALCs (seasonal cycles) of the China mean temperature for the earliest 10 years (blue line) and for the latest 10 years (red line). Dashed lines indicate the temperature thresholds for the 24 Solar Terms"

One reason why I find this so interesting is that this is the sort of thing that represents an important step in disseminating information about climate change to the public, using cultural vehicles that they know, understand, and are familiar with. Too often, a lot of the cutting-edge science and its critical findings are written in a way that requires a mess of cultural decoding. Often, too, it takes the implicit assumption of the Western world: marking (in this case) the calendar into the 12 months (which - themselves - were rather arbitrarily set way back when) that are commonly used in the West, but may rarely be used so intuitively outside of cities in the rest of the world. Although this article refers to China, the 24 solar terms are used throughout East Asia, and they still mark major celebration points in the Japanese calendar. In other words, this paper's findings speaks in the calendar language that is understood by upwards of 1.6 billion people (i.e., the combined population of China, Taiwan, North and South Korea, Japan, and Vietnam).

The paper, "Climatic changes in the Twenty-four Solar Terms during 1960–2008", can be found here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/g0264r7102x18844/

How to improve air quality (Beijing style)

Although Beijing has started to release its fine-particulate (PM2.5) data, there is an additional point of concern: Beijing's current classification system currently classifies "light pollution" at the same level as the US classification for "hazardous."

This raises a point of concern about grading scales. If two groups are using two different scales to measure the same thing, then it is not likely that the values will overlap. This is easily seen with many things that we might deal with in life: metric vs. US/British measures; shoe sizes; clothing sizes; etc. While I wear a size 11 (or 11.5) in the US, I wear a size 46 (or 48) in Europe. While I wear a shirt size of "Large" in the US, it changes to XXL or XXXL in Japan (I even have a XXXXXL vest that I bought in Japan that is only slightly too big for me). If we live between the two systems of measurement, then we understand how to convert (or estimate) the rough value of the "other" scale (at least in the range that we most often encounter it). Therefore, I know how to "feel out" the rough temperature equivalents between F and C in the range that I experience them (0F to 90F or -18C to 32C); I know how to feel out the rough conversion from kph to mph (especially good when I'm driving in much of the world, since driving is the only time when I encounter speeds above 50kph). So that's pretty clear; if you rarely encounter a different scale, then your proficiency of mental conversion is going to be slower and less accurate. Finally, I have often found that if I use a particular metric for a long time, then I am likely to start thinking in terms of that metric than in terms of converting from my "original" one. Therefore, after having lived outside the US for several years, I was mentally converting temperature readings from F to C so that the number would make sense to me. Now, however, I don't really need to do the mental conversion; the value of the F reading makes sense in its self.

Well, that's all well-and-good, but what does this have to do with Chinese air pollution? Well... the values for temperature and shoe size don't come as subjectively named categories. We could, of course, convert air temperatures into a scale going from "blistering cold," to "searing hot". However, you and I would start to disagree on where the cut-offs should be. This is why I generally respond to question of, "is it cold outside," with, "Well, I don't think it's cold" (or, "it might be a little cold for you," if I happen to know or can guess at the other person's preference).

China's air pollution standard (at least how it currently stands) uses a different classification system than the US. It's analogous to your mother's definition of "cold" from your own.... except that it's a national standard. Of course, it's a national standard based on a measured number, but often - when it's something that a person is not really comfortable using the raw number - people will gravitate to the category bin label. This is one source of the problem, because the two scales are completely different. (I couldn't find a comparative chart between the US and Chinese PM2.5 scales, sorry.) The stated difference between the two scales is more like my stated range of "tepid" being analogous with another person's definition of "blistering cold." (I am reminded of a Costa Rican student who was experiencing her first semester of Michigan fall/winter weather: she came to class one early October day dressed in a full parka while most were wearing light jackets, and I showed up in shorts. If you had asked her if it was cold and asked me if it was cold, our answers would have been vastly different.) This wouldn't be such a problem if the measurements were merely stated perceptions of temperature, but they are actually more important than that: they are public health advisories.

Presumably, Beijing's classification system does go to "hazardous" and presumably the US scale does go to "light pollution" (or even "no measurable pollution"), but - even if they are using the same technique to measure PM2.5 in the air - it is clear that the cut-offs for the categories are very different. However, the credibility problem comes when people look at the measurement of "light pollution" vs. "hazardous" and recognize that what they are experiencing is much closer to what the other government is telling you. ...and China knows this. China also knows that the people - no matter how used to smog they may have become - know that the air is polluted and the water is polluted, regardless of what category name the use. Okay, so Beijing calls it "light pollution"; the meaning of "light pollution" will therefore mean something equivalent to, "shitty air." In isolation, having such a category name wouldn't mean very much to credibility, since people will merely do the conversion in their head (much like converting shirt sizes, mentioned above). However, when that categorization scheme is placed next to another one that makes more sense, then people are likely to start distrusting the one that makes less sense.

Therefore, yes, Beijing can say that it's air pollution levels are "light" or even "moderate". It can meet whatever environmental or public health policy goals by meeting the requirements of having a certain number of days that are classified as having "light" air pollution, but the reality is that if the definition of "light" pollution is, in actuality orders of magnitude above unpolluted conditions, then the only thing that you're fooling is the documentation; the only thing that you're fooling is the propaganda; the only thing that you're fooling is the official rhetoric... and those who believe. Do that in isolation and you might well get away with it (witness the mental dissonance that went on during the Cultural Revolution), but do that while a rival government gives away information that better matches what people experience, and you've got a serious credibility problem on your hands.

If you remember, this is what was popularly stated that George W. Bush's "Clear Skies Initiative" would have done: moved the goal posts on metrics of acceptability such that we could have had "acceptable" conditions under "Clear Skies" that would have been described as some level of "unacceptable" under the existing framework.

In short: You can improve air quality from "bad" to "good" by using a scale that shows current quality as "good". Don't be surprised, though, when people don't believe you. Don't be surprised, either, when they believe another government's scale that matches up more closely with their perceptions.

Story from PhysOrg.

2011 was globally the 9th warmest year since 1880

Well, the numbers are in: according to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), 2011 was globally the 9th warmest year since 1880, and 9 of the 10 warmest years have happened since 2000, with temperatures +0.92F (+0.51C) higher than the mid-20th century, which is used as a baseline for comparison.

Oh, and remember that 2011 was supposed to be a La Nina year (and that La Nina years are supposed to be colder than other years)?

"We know the planet is absorbing more energy than it is emitting," said GISS director James E. Hansen. "So we are continuing to see a trend toward higher temperatures. Even with the cooling effects of a strong La Niña influence and low solar activity for the past several years, 2011 was one of the 10 warmest years on record." 

And still 2011 broke into the top 10. Next year - unless we have two La Nina years in a row - is likely to be warmer globally. And if we have an El Nino year?

Hansen said he expects record-breaking global average temperature in the next two to three years because solar activity is on the upswing and the next El Niño will increase tropical Pacific temperatures. The warmest years on record were 2005 and 2010, in a virtual tie

"It's always dangerous to make predictions about El Niño, but it's safe to say we'll see one in the next three years," Hansen said. "It won't take a very strong El Niño to push temperatures above 2010."

Yeesh.

Hello...?

Several months ago, I saw this rather humorous sign:

Very cute (but unfortunately without attribution). I saw this other tribute to Lionel Richie's song:


Hello from ant1mat3rie on Vimeo.

For those of you who are not familiar with the song, here is the original (with lyrics):