I Heard It On NPR

Rugby Blow-Ups

2009-03-18T10:33:00.001-07:00

So it's been a while since I last wrote, what with the arrival of the Gumdrop and all, and the fact that I rarely commute anywhere anymore while listening to NPR, much less have time to write blog posts! However, yesterday as the Gumdrop and I were headed back from a quick trip to the store, I heard a story on The World that I couldn't keep from sharing, just because it was so silly.
Lisa Mullins reported that the Nottingham Rugby team is doing so poorly that they are experiencing a huge dip in their fan base. To combat this, a company donated 1000 blow-up people to sit in the stands along with the 1300 real fans at a recent game. I'd like to leave it at that, because the item speaks for itself, but I have to ask:

What on earth did the company think it would get out of this move? Does this company make blow-up dolls? Did they have them all wear hats with their logo? Not including this information seems like a serious miss.
What would it be like to sit at the ballpark (or whatever a rugby stadium is called) surrounded by blow-up dolls? Would it not give the poor fans nightmares?
Will this cause more fans to come out for the poor Nottingham club?

Okay, going back to baby-land and signing off for now. I'll be trying to start writing sporadically now and again, as I hear stories worth sharing.

Parmesan Bailout

2008-12-10T16:26:00.000-08:00

What do you do with 100,000 wheels of cheese? If you’re Italy, according to Morning Edition today, you buy them from cheese-makers and donate them to charity to help the struggling parmagiano industry. According to Malcolm Gladwell in his latest book Outliers (which I just read since I sneakily gave it to C for her birthday and she kindly loaned it back to me when she was done), one of the ways to measure intelligence that’s not captured in IQ tests is to see how many creative uses people can come up with for everyday objects. So I will try to suggest a few of my own:

Build a bigger mousetrap
Create a human maze (ala the Wooz), and if people can’t figure out how to get out, they can eat the walls for sustenance
Use them as renewable-source tabletops
Roll them down highways and track the patterns made by the gravel to see if you need to re-pave the road
Stick them over very large bonfires and dip large pieces of toast into them after they melt into a creamy “fondue”
Dye some of them red, green, and blue and then place them end to end for a giant game of twister

Feel free to help me out by adding some more!

NPR Fan Bailout

2008-12-03T10:24:00.000-08:00

Okay, I’ve changed my mind. For the past couple weeks, I’ve been on the fence about whether we should bail out the Big Three car manufacturers, and I’d pretty much decided that we shouldn’t. Yes, they employ many people, and those people in turn keep many others in business. Yes, they’re a core American industry, etc etc. But really, I couldn’t imagine that lending them billions of dollars would actually accomplish anything. They need the money to “restructure” which really just means lay people off – that doesn’t seem like it will do much for the economy. And they don’t really seem to have a viable plan to get back to profitability. All that, and I didn’t appreciate (other than for its humor) the fact that they CEOs of Ford, GM, and Chrysler each flew their own private jet to go begging in Washington last week, and seemed shocked that they weren’t going to just get whatever they asked for.

But that’s all changed, because now I know that the CEOs of Ford and GM, at least, listen to NPR. Last week on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, they joked about the CEOs and their corporate jets, and Roxanne Roberts suggested that they should have just driven to Washington. Although Peter Sagel thought that would be a horrible idea because of they’d break down in Pittsburg, apparently the CEOs were listening! Last night on All Things Considered, in what I struck me as a very funny piece, Brian Naylor and Michele Norris reported not only that the CEOs of Ford and GM were driving to the new set of hearings in Washington this week, but also what type of cars they would be using – a Chevrolet Malibu hybrid sedan and some kind of Ford hybrid. The CEO of Chrysler may be driving to Washington, but Chrysler won’t say for sure, citing “security reasons”.

So there you go – if the car companies are run by NPR listeners, they must be in good shape. Bailout approved!

Belt Tightening

2008-12-01T10:49:00.000-08:00

In regards to belts, there are some obvious things you’d think of when it comes to pregnancy, like needing to buy a bigger one, but one of the results they don’t warn you about is that you can’t actually see your belt when you’re putting it on. This makes belt tightening quite challenging and requires a mirror and some skill. Which is why I was especially entertained by a story on Marketplace last Wednesday about belt tightening – not the economic kind, but the actual belt type. Sean Cole did a hilarious job of interviewing people who make belts about what’s happening in the economy, and apparently belt tightening, specifically punching extra holes in existing belts, making shorter belts to use less material, and appreciating the new trend for skinny belts, is quite prevalent. In fact, given how many people talked about making their belts actually tighter since they’d lost weight you’d think we didn’t have an obesity crisis in this country. My favorite part was when he did his “man on the street” interview that went as follows:

Strangely, some people thought I was talking about money.
WOMAN 3: It's important to not completely retract. Confidence in the market has a lot to do with people's spending.
COLE: I think that's very wise and cogent. I am actually talking about your belt, your belt.
WOMAN 3: I think you need to expand your definition of belt tightening.
COLE: Really?
WOMAN 3: Yeah.

Pieces like this make me remember why, even in these depressing economic times, Marketplace is one of the most informative but also entertaining shows around.

A True Professional

2008-11-18T16:35:00.000-08:00

Reason #371 why Ann Dornfeld is my favorite KUOW reporter: she's a true professional. This morning, without bursting into laughter, she reported on a local man who had his genitals eaten away by some kind of fungus while in jail and had just settled his lawsuit against said jail for $300,000. Of course I feel sorry for the poor guy, but I could not have said those words without at least a snicker.

Presidential Grammar

2008-11-12T12:40:00.000-08:00

Last night on All Things Considered, Robert Siegel outlined the official NPR rules for presidential grammar in a response to a letter from an irritated viewer. Being a total geek, I was thrilled to know that that there was an official policy and to hear it explained, but I must admit I’m not sure I understand it. The rules seem to be:

For a current president, use “President X” for the first reference, then “Mr. X” for all remaining references
For an elected but not yet serving president, who happens to currently be a Senator, use “President-Elect Y” for the first reference, then “Senator Y” for all remaining references

I can understand that President-Elect Obama is a long and inelegant title and that Senator Obama is more compact. However, it seems to me that “Senator” includes the same number of syllables as “President” and is, if anything, a less valued title given that presidential approval ratings are in the 20%’s (Who on earth are the people who still approve of him, by the way?) but Congress hit 9%. So why does the President get demoted to “Mr.” while the President-Elect gets demoted only to “Senator”? Grammar nitpickers in my reading public, please help!

Voting Day!

2008-11-04T14:47:00.000-08:00

Sorry, I have about four half-written blog posts about cool NPR stories that I haven't gotten around to finishing, but it's election day! NPR is full of stories about electioneering, voter fraud, and general voter excitement, which is what I experienced.

Today was my last ever vote at a real polling place because King County is going absentee-only after this election. Given that 90% of King County votes absentee already, I was really surprised to see the crowds at the polling station this morning, and excited crowds at that! Unlike some places on the East Coast, I only had to wait about a minute before checking in and getting my ballot, but there were more people there than I'd ever seen in an election, including the last presidential election.

It's really too bad that we're going to get rid of this opportunity for educating our kids and just getting together to do our duty as citizens, especially since in order to tally absentee ballots we apparently have to go through a lot of rigmarole (see this description from The Stranger). There are also lots of stories of people who have signatures on their ballot envelopes that don't match their signatures on record, or who accidentally signed their ballots and invalidated them (you can't sign the actual ballot, just the envelope). Does this really seem like a good system?

Either way, happy voting everyone! And if you haven't yet (and you live in WA), go vote Yes on I-1000.

Voting the Issues

2008-10-20T20:01:00.000-07:00

This seemed to be a good day for folks interested in health care as a political issue. First, this morning on Day to Day, they compared Senator Obama and McCain's health care plans. Trudy Lieberman explained that under McCain's plan families would get a $5000 tax credit to buy health care, but

(a) this wouldn't grow as health care costs went up,
(b) average cost for health care for a family of 4 is $12,000, and
(c) if you get health care from your employer, you'll have to start paying taxes on it.

For the latter, I'm not sure what happens if you work for a self-insured company like Microsoft - would I pay taxes on a set amount per year that Microsoft pays to "insure" me or would I pay taxes on any money spent on my personal health care? If it's the latter, it seems like people who are really sick could potentially end up losing income because they have to go on disability at the same time they might have to pay astronomical tax bills. Obama's plan is supposed to allow anyone currently insured by Medicare or their employer to keep their current coverage while people who don't have either will have the opportunity to buy "government" insurance. The latter is a little unclear, but at least it doesn't sound catastrophic like McCain's plan. I can't see how his plan helps a single person, but it certainly could hurt quite a few.

Then, on Marketplace Jeremy Hobson interviewed some laid off Wall Street workers about what regulations they thought were needed and would influence their vote in the next election. One of them was laid off in February and while he had enough money to cover expenses, the fact that he lost his health care as part of losing his job meant his health care bills shot through the roof right when his income tanked. (Correction: as my good friend B, who worked in the benefits industry in a former life, points out, he didn't really lose his health care, but he had to start paying for COBRA out of pocket.) I hadn't really thought about the fact that having health care tied to your job really means you get hit right when you're down, but it just shows that even Obama's plan doesn't go far enough in really providing health care as a right to all Americans as it is in every other developed country.

Ultimately this election I'm doing a lot of voting against people. I'm voting against Dino Rossi rather than for Chris Gregoire for Governor because he's a creepy lackey for business organizations. I'm voting against Toby Nixon rather than for Roger Goodman for State Senator because Toby sent a flame mail complaining about something I'd done at work years ago that had no basis in reality (go ahead and call me petty, but I'm not voting for him!). And I'm voting against McCain (and most decidedly against Palin - don't even get me started there!) rather than for Obama. McCain's crazy health care plan is just one more item on the list of reasons I think it would be a disaster if he won.

15 days and counting.

Wednesday Silliness

2008-09-12T16:11:00.000-07:00

NPR seemed to be getting it’s sillies on last Wednesday, and it made for a great day of radio.

First of all, A pointed me to a fabulous story on Morning Edition about Russian leaders. This could have been a very serious or even depressing story, but instead Robert Krulwich chose to focus on the fact that Russian leaders have alternated through history as bald, then hairy, then bald, then hairy etc. And not only did he cover this very silly issue with aplomb, but he then created a song!! I couldn’t possibly do it justice by writing about it, so I suggest you check out the whole story and song here.

Then, on All Things Considered Robert Siegel decided to do some investigative reporting on the phrase “putting lipstick on a pig” after the most recent Obama/McCain contrived controversy. For those who haven’t been paying attention, especially to manufactured insults, the “controversy” went something like this:

Obama said McCain was just like Bush and that his policies would not be real change, but just “putting lipstick on a pig”.
The McCain campaign accused Obama of sexism because Palin had made a joke about lipstick last week saying that the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull was lipstick.
Obama said that was foolish.

Because McCain’s accusation was so ridiculous I was frustrated to hear that Mr. Siegel was going to give it any credence at all by reporting on it, but he went beyond the normal “here’s what happened” to doing a classic investigation.

First, he did some research into how long the phrase has been around and played some classic examples – such as McCain himself calling Hillary Clinton’s healthcare plan (and note she’s a woman too!) “putting lipstick on a pig”. Not content with that, Mr. Siegel called up Joel Salatin, best known by foodies around the world for his role in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma as a sustainable-growth farmer. Salatin was out in his field with 50 pigs and some “ruby red” lipstick and proceeded to attempt to actually put lipstick on the pig. He complained that the pigs didn’t have much lip and it was more like putting lipstick on a hairbrush, and also that the pigs seemed to prefer to eat the lipstick rather than wearing it, but after a short struggle he was able to report back that the pig indeed did not look any better with the lipstick on. Excellent reporting, and very, very silly.

The Really, Really Big M's

2008-09-10T11:21:00.000-07:00

On All Things Considered last night, Adam Davidson talked about what would have happened if Fannie May and Freddie Mac had failed, and I was shocked to hear that the amount of debt that they’re in for is $5 trillion dollars, which puts them at a larger debt than any other country (aside from the credit-riding US of course). What that means is that if Japan or the UK went bankrupt, it would have a smaller financial impact on the world than the potential bankruptcy of Fannie and Freddie. This is pretty scary news and really gives a perspective on both how important and how crazy these two companies are. As someone who’s averse to any kind of debt, it seems to me to underscore a lot of what’s wrong with our American culture.
One thing to note is that I was surprised at how much debt Fanny and Freddie were carrying, but at least I know that they were private institutions. That’s more than I can say for Sarah Palin, who seems to think that they’re taxpayer funded but doesn’t see her complete ignorance of important issues (among many other things to be covered in an upcoming blog rant) as a problem.

Primaries

2008-08-20T14:00:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was Primary day, and I was unprepared. As I said in my prior post, I've been a bit distracted, and although I am the PCO* for a neighboring district and spent a couple hours leaving Primary-day endorsement pamphlets (i.e. cheat sheets) on the doorsteps of Democrats in my precinct, I hadn't had a chance to read through and mark up my voter's pamphlet the way I usually do. Plus, at around 7pm I was at C's house as per my normal Tuesday night tradition and realized I had totally forgotten to go to the polls! Luckily, C was understanding so we hopped into my car, drove home to get my voter registration card, voter pamphlet, and one of my left-over cheat sheets, and walked to my polling station.

We arrived in good time - there didn't seem to be many people there and the older women who always (wo)man the sign-in tables seemed excited to see us. I think I was a little more excited than most people who come through there, because they asked me if it was my first time voting, and then were very excited that C was there as an international observer. The poll worker reminded me that if I didn’t want C to look over my shoulder, I had a right to tell her to go away, which was not necessary but kind of cute. We decided to try the electronic voting machine again just for kicks, and headed over to the one machine available. (During this time, perhaps 5-10 people came in and voted, all using paper ballots.) Some things I noticed beyond what I shared during last November’s election:

This was the first (and I really hope, last) year of the top-two primary. In this new system, Washington voters who for some reason have missed the fact that the purpose of the primary is to let party loyalists choose their candidates for their own party can now vote for anyone they want, with the top two vote-getters ending up on the general election ballot. Although in most cases this means a Democrat and a Republican will end up there (which cuts out the smaller parties completely) there are some areas and races where, after the election yesterday, two Democrats or two Republicans will end up on the ballot. This seems pretty dumb to me because if you have, for instance, three really capable Republicans and two really capable Democrats on the ballot, and assuming you have approximately a 50/50 split of voters for each party, you could end up with each Democrat receiving 25% of the vote and each Republican receiving 16.5%, and then end up with two Democrats on the ballot because the Republican vote got split amongst more qualified people. I don’t get why this is an improvement.
As part of this top-two primary, each candidate has to say which party they associate with, but there’s no way for you to tell which of the “Democratic” candidates is the one that the party is really backing. However, the Republicans have figured out a sneaky system. I’d heard that Dino Rossi, the main Republican gubernatorial candidate, was planning to say “supports the GOP” instead of “supports the Republican Party” to avoid negative connotations about the Republicans in this election year . It turns out that all the “official” Republican candidates were doing the same thing, while the unofficial ones didn’t seem to get the memo. For the Democrats, though, you had to rely on your cheat sheet, if you had one.
Last November I said that my printed-out ballot was hidden behind a plastic cover so I couldn’t review it. It turns out you can lift the cover to watch it print out. I have no idea why they wouldn’t have just used a clear cover so you could see it at all times.
C and I tried to select a write-in candidate for one office, and it turns out you need to type in the candidate name and also their party affiliation. I found this very odd – I guess you could just type in your party affiliation and hope, but what happens if you got it wrong?
I was amused at how uncomfortable C was about looking over my shoulder while I voted, despite the fact that I’d invited her to do so. I don’t know if it was because the whole “secret ballot” thing was drilled into her as a child or if it’s a Canadian thing (always a good place to put the blame) but either way, you should know that if C comes to the polls with you, and you haven’t done your research on a particular candidate so you hand her the voter pamphlet and tell her to read it and tell you who to vote for, you will be privy to a pretty funny look of shock and horror.
Finally, some voting machine humor from XKCD for your entertainment:

*Precinct Committee Officer (or something like that)

The Gumdrop's Progress OR Why I've Been Too Distracted To Post

2008-08-13T09:00:00.000-07:00

Come January J and I will be welcoming a new NPR listener to the planet, known currently as "The Gumdrop". Over the past months I've been updating my messenger picture with Office Online clipart to track the gumdrop's size and thought I'd share the collection so far with you. I find it pretty astounding myself.

Here's to many more years of growing and learning and excitement to come!

Cell-etiquette

2008-07-01T14:44:00.000-07:00

Today on Morning Edition there were two stories back-to-back about California’s new cellphone driving policy. I was pretty confused about what the actual policy was, but it seems to boil down to this: as of today, drivers can’t hold their phones while talking. That’s it. If you want to text, dial, play solitaire, read your email, or use the vibrate mode in a way other than it’s intended, that’s fine. But if you’re talking, you need to be hands-free. So I have a few issues with this, as usual:

The goal of this law is to reduce accidents, and I can understand that cell-phone talking causes distractions. But it seems like there’s no specific data that backs up the fact that talking on your Bluetooth headset is any better for distractions than holding your phone. I’ll agree it’s more comfortable, and I’ve enjoyed using mine the last year or so, but less distracting? And certainly, it seems like if anything dialing and writing on your phone take a lot more concentration and are therefore even more distracting, so why not ban them too?
My real goal with this law (and it’s all about me, of course) would be to enforce J’s cellphone etiquette. I read on Slate.com that the currently accepted rule is that you should only be talking, texting, or playing with your phone in the same circumstances under which you’d be solving a crossword puzzle. When I brought this up to my group of symphony friends they suggested you could do a crossword puzzle in a collaborative way, so we decided we should really go with Sudoku. So if you play Sudoku while driving (and it is still legal, remember) then talking while driving should be fine too. But I certainly don’t play Sudoku while out to dinner with friends, and I wish J wouldn’t either. Also our same friends decided that while C’s husband’s “other girlfriend is his boat”, J’s “other girlfriend” is a “regularly changing set of small electronic devices” so I think it’s a good sign that he needs to keep his cellphone in his pocket where it belongs…but that’s a whole other matter.
California has had gubernatorial press conferences, ads, and public statements galore regarding this new rule, to make sure people understood what was coming. But Washington apparently implemented the same law today as well, and I haven’t heard a peep about it anywhere. Are we not worthy of a couple quick commercial announcements, or have I been living under a rock and just not noticed?

So for those in California, and those in Washington state, I bid you good driving, with your cellphone firmly ensconced pretty much anywhere but next to your ear. Enjoy.

Emerald or Jade or Maybe Even Olive

2008-06-28T17:39:00.000-07:00

I am green with envy. Perhaps even chartreuse. And I deserve to have my NPR-groupie credentials taken away from me. All because Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me was filmed right here in Seattle this week, and I didn’t go. Oh, I tried to go, in a wishy-washy way. I think back in September some time I realized they were going to be here and found out tickets were already sold out and never thought about it again. But my friends A, R, and M were not so dismissive. They had foresight. And they also checked the website in August and bought tickets. Last night on our way to see Joshua Roman’s last concert with the Seattle Symphony (we’re also Joshua Roman groupies – such nerds) the three of them told me all about it. I believe M is writing about it in his blog so I’ll post to that as soon as I see it, but the short version: it was really cool. Karl Kassel had a bodyguard. He also apparently manages to do all his impressions without moving anything below the neck – a true radio professional. Apparently there was quite a bit of lewd humor, which the three of them assume will be cut out of the real show. And the show must have been good, because this morning while J was “running errands” he ended up spending most of the time in his car listening to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me instead. So the moral of the story is – if you hear that Wait, Wait is coming to a town near you, don’t delay. Green is not a color that goes well with most outfits.

*Update: M's blog post can be found here. He says he or A may write more about it since he just covered a couple specific bits, but at least you can get a bit more detail.

Milk Madness

2008-06-21T13:13:00.000-07:00

In more catch-up blogging, Sasha Khokha did a report on Marketplace a couple weeks ago about raw (unpasteurized) milk. He discussed a growing trend for people to spend $12 a gallon buying raw milk for its supposed health benefits, and quoted a mother who'd been giving her daughter raw milk since infancy saying, "I knew if breast milk is all natural, there has to be another all natural way to feed your baby." Obviously if it's "natural" it must be okay (see previous rant about "natural" radiation).

Statements like this are so disappointing - it's clear that well-educated people are being deceived by so-called “experts” who prey on their skepticism or disappointment with real science and medicine. Somehow they don’t start thinking that there was a reason Louis Pasteur invented the process named after him - people were getting sick from bacteria in their milk. Why on earth would drinking raw milk be healthier? This is the same false logic that people use when they get conned by vitamin salesmen or “doctors” selling a treatment with no scientific backing.

I feel a bit hypocritical in that I've always thought the fact that we don't allow unpasteurized cheese in most states is silly, but then (a) I am a bit cheese-obsessed and (b) I’m sure you can get different flavors from unpasteurized cheeses, but I certainly don't think they're healthier. And now that I’ve heard this story, I might have to reconsider my stance. As proven by the pasteurized La Tur I had this weekend during my visit to Berkeley, you don’t need to raw milk to get some exquisite flavors.

Sci-Fi Story in our Midst

2008-06-20T09:00:00.000-07:00

Pickings have been slim on NPR recently – few things have stood out enough to make me want to take a break from all the hecticness (to coin a word) and catch-up sleep I've been indulging in recently. But I did want to catch up on a couple stories that made it through the noise.

I’ll start today with a story on Weekday a few weeks ago. I came into it part-way through, as I was heading to work from the gym in the morning, and assumed that Steve Scher was interviewing a sci-fi author. They were discussing these clearly fictional communities where the local newspaper only prints happy news (which reminds me of this site) and children need visas to visit because only older people are allowed. But then I realized something horrifying – this wasn’t actually fiction. Apparently these communities are real, and springing up all over the US. They’re geared towards retired people who want easily accessible social activities and clean, well-maintained neighborhoods, which is fair enough. What’s creepy is that they want this with no children around. Andrew Blechman, who was the guest on the show, suggested that in addition to the obvious reasons for not wanting children (lower noise, crime, etc) there are more devious ones – you avoid having to fund school districts with your taxes, and you’re less likely to have minority families because they tend to live in multi-generational households, which wouldn’t be allowed. I think many would agree that this society does not generally treat our elders with the respect they deserve, but is this really the answer?

Subway Gropers

2008-05-21T17:30:00.000-07:00

On Monday, Tovia Smith reported for All Things Considered about Boston’s campaign to crack down on people groping other people on the subway. Not riding the train regularly myself (because we can’t get our transportation act together enough to actually build a rail system) I’m still well aware of the normal “ick” factor of using public transit when it’s really full. You’re squished up next to other people, some of whom clearly need a post-work shower, others who are perfectly nice but just not the person you’d want to snuggle up with on in a normal situation. On top of that, you have to keep from falling while the train moves, and maneuver your way to the doorway in time to get out at your station.

Still, trains are awesome and I’d kill for a subway system here like the one in Tokyo. The hotel where J and I stay whenever we go there is right next to Shinjuku station, the busiest train station in the world, where they hire men in white gloves to push passengers into the cars in order to maximize space at rush hour. Being an American, and especially travelling around Japan with a very tall husband (or my equally tall co-workers), I can usually stand near them and enjoy the little circle of privacy that forms. But a few years ago, one of my Japanese colleagues told me, quite matter-of-factly, that she regularly travels with a pair of scissors so that when men try to grope her she can poke them and make them stop. I was horrified, both at the fact that she regularly gets groped and that she casually talked about jabbing a sharp object into people to stop them, and assumed this was a strange Japanese cultural thing. Apparently I was wrong.

The Boston crackdown effort, which consists of signs warning people that they’re being watched and encouraging women to report incidents, as well as sending out decoys to try to lure flashers and gropers, has been successful in raising the number of arrests and filed complaints for sex assaults. If nothing else, I hope that it makes it clear that being groped shouldn’t just be accepted as a necessary evil of using mass transit. There are going to be bad people out there, but that surely we can find a solution that doesn’t mean we have to start carrying pointed objects in our pockets at all times. That would be a definite “ick”.

True Professional

2008-05-15T09:25:00.001-07:00

On Monday, Melissa Block and Robert Siegel were in Sichuan province in China when the 7.8 earthquake hit, getting ready to do an unrelated set of stories about China. Ms. Block was actually taping an interview as the earthquake hit, and Morning Edition on Monday played a recording of her reaction and continued reporting.

I grew up in California so I’m no stranger to earthquakes, and I certainly don’t freak out when the ground starts shaking. During Loma Prieta, I was walking down the stairs of my parent’s house carrying a toddler, and I just walked to the sidewalk and waited for the shaking to stop. We did earthquake drills where we’d stand in a doorway or under a desk (although strangely, we weren’t taught the “triangle of life” technique that C learned in elementary school – Wikipedia claims that this is a controversial theory but apparently it’s accepted by those wacky Canadians). Most importantly, we learned to consider ground shaking to be a normal event.

That said, if you were recording my reaction, there’s no way I’d sound like Ms. Block. Partway through her interview, you can hear a rumbling, and the first thing she says is, “what’s going on, the whole building is shaking”, and then, “oh my goodness, are we in an earthquake?”. These statements could sound completely panicked depending on the particular tone of voice, but Ms. Block managed to make it sound like she was merely curious. As she went on, she described birds flying, bricks falling off buildings, and even mentioned that the ground was “undulating under [her] feet”. Somehow I have a feeling that if I was in the middle of an earthquake, “undulating” would not be the word that would come to mind. Perhaps later, but not right then with a microphone in my face. Clearly that’s what separates the true professional journalists from us mere mortals.

Wait till you hear my recipe for making my own dirt!

2008-05-08T20:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning, instead of listening to KUOW, I tuned into our other local NPR station - KPLU (aren't we lucky that we have two?). KPLU markets itself as "NPR News and All That Jazz" but more importantly it also boasts my friend A filling in as the local host of Morning Edition this week! Listening to the radio when you know the person who's speaking is a whole new experience, and a lot more fun. A did a great job - her voice was very soothing, and we all enjoyed listening to her call traffic "sticky". I'm hoping she uses one of my suggested phrases for traffic tomorrow, and actually intend to pay her money (or give her extra chocolate) if she calls it "slower than a cat putting on its pajamas". Most impressive, however, was when she managed to not laugh out loud while setting up an upcoming segment on Do-It-Yourself Designer Water.

In this segment, Dick Stein was interviewing a Seattle Times food writer and got the story turned on him when she asked him to tell her about his secret recipe for "making water". Based on the description, I was expecting anything from a machine that takes hydrogen fuel cells and purifies the water they create to hand-blown glass bottles filled with water collected at Lake Valhalla. It seems I was nowhere close. Mr. Stein was convinced that carbonated water from Europe has smaller bubbles, and is therefore tastier, than cheap-o local carbonated water, but he didn't want to pay more for water than he does for gas (in these days of $4 gas, that's saying something). Instead of going the fancy restaurant route (led by, among other places, Chez Panisse, located in the heart of the Gourmet Ghetto in Berkeley where I grew up) or choosing to go my grandfather's route and buying a home seltzer machine for his tap water, thereby both saving money and not wasting plastic bottles, his "recipe" consists of taking a bottle of QFC sparkling water and adding some plain water from his tap and a lime. I was very entertained, both that this could be called an actual recipe, and that anyone would choose to give it air time.

At the same time, as A pointed out, he did say that drinking grocery-store fizzy water was, "like swallowing an electric fence". So props for the funny analogy at least.

What's Next?

2008-05-01T08:50:00.000-07:00

Just a quick rant about the latest Senator Obama news. On Tuesday every show on NPR was full of news that Senator Obama is now denouncing Reverend Wright, with whom he formerly disagreed but couldn’t part because he had been a good friend and mentor for 20 years. He claims he’s denouncing him because he “is not the same man I met 20 years ago”. What did the Reverend do to deserve this? Did he share new, more offensive opinions? Actually, no. All he did was spend the past few days re-stating the same illogical and hateful views, including that the US government created AIDS and that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is the equivalent of Apartheid. But somehow – clearly because public opinion demanded it – Senator Obama now claims that he’s so horrified that he has to denounce him.

There are two problems with this. First, I can’t believe that someone who listens to hateful speech for 20 years doesn’t pick up some of it, even if he claims he disagrees. There’s a reason the UK has one of the highest rates of anti-Israel sentiment, and I lay the blame firmly at their skewed public media source, the venerable BBC. Similarly, if all the churchgoers at Trinity United heard absurdities every day, some of it will stick – and I’m concerned about a president who subconsciously believes these things.

Second, and almost more important, is what the media will find out next about Senator Obama. Throughout this campaign, few have looked beyond his charisma, and this is the first piece of dangerous information to come out about him. Both Senators McCain and Clinton have been in the public eye for long enough that it’s unlikely we’ll find out anything serious and new about them. But if Senator Obama wins the Democratic nomination, what additional dirty laundry will be aired between now and November? And will it be ugly enough to make him lose the election? I’m not a huge fan of the Senator, but I still think four more years of Republican rule would be much worse for the country, and possibly the world.

Surveillance

2008-04-28T09:36:00.001-07:00

I'm not usually a stickler for privacy. When people freak out over people tapping phones without warrants, or covertly checking out someone's library record, I usually shrug. It's not that I don't think that these things could be taken out of context and used to build a case against someone who doesn't deserve it, but I guess I have a naive faith in the justice system and assume that if such a thing happened, it would be unpleasant but the truth would prevail. There just seem to be bigger things to worry about, and frankly, my list of library books or transcripts of my phone conversations would most likely either bore anyone paying attention.

That said, I was definitely concerned about a story on Morning Edition last Monday in which Vicki Barker reported on schools in London using surveillance camera data to figure out whether someone actually lived in the school district as they claimed. (And tracking under-age smoking, along with other minor crimes.) There are a few things about this privacy breach that put this in another class for me, and I don't know which is the one that upsets me the most:

The information is not going to affect national security; is it really necessary to use subversive means to obtain it?
There are other easy ways to get the information (ask for phone records, utility bills, or even ask neighbors).
They asked parents for private information in order to even make use of the surveillance camera data (like car license plates) but didn't tell them what that information would be used for.
The footage is video footage, which somehow seems more intrusive than text.

Either way, I'm befuddled as to how this tracking was done. I've often heard reports that even though London has an insane number of video cameras (one for every 14 people) that capture every street, it's so expensive or time consuming to retrieve a particular camera's footage that even when crimes such as car theft or muggings could be solved with it, they don't bother to get the footage out. Add that to the fact that I was unaware that video software was good enough to truly track a particular car, and the fact that I don't know how the information that your car goes from place to place is a perfect indicator that you live in a particular area, and I become really confused, and concerned.

It sounds like a few people are starting to sue and protest this behavior, although they're not getting very far. Britain's Information Commissioner warned people a few years ago that they were, "sleepwalking their way into a surveillance society". I can't help but agree - to me this type of surveillance steps way past the slippery slope and may just hit the chasm below.

No Longer (Thank Goodness) A Presidential Candidate

2008-04-28T08:51:00.000-07:00

As you may recall, E and I saw Mitt Romney a few months ago when he was on his campaign stump and I was kind of creeped out by him. That hasn't changed. However, a week or so ago, All Things Considered reported on his speech at the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner, in which he gave a top ten list of the reasons he left the presidential race. I was shocked to hear him be amusing, but even more so because he did it partly by making fun of himself. It doesn't mean I would have wanted him to be the Republican nominee - he agrees with Bush on everything and with himself on nothing (talk about a flip-flopper!) but I was impressed to see a more appealing side of him. A couple of my favorites are below (you can hear the whole thing here).

There weren't as many Osmonds as I thought.

I was upset that no one had bothered to search my passport files.

I needed an excuse to get fat, grow a beard and win the Nobel prize.

And my favorite:

There was a miscalculation in our theory: "As Utah goes, so goes the nation."

Water, Water, Everywhere

2008-04-18T09:02:00.000-07:00

A couple days ago on Morning Edition, I heard yet another story about how tap water is now dangerous. This time the story was about Congress starting a series of hearings on the findings that tap water in various cities was found to have minuscule amounts of multiple prescription drugs, and included a scientist who said that although tests had determined that people were not affected by such minute amounts of individual drugs, it was not clear what the results could be from ingesting the combination of all of them.

Now I'm normally concerned about pollution, and the idea that our water is laced with random medications is kind of scary. But the more I hear about it, the more I get frustrated. First of all, the proportions of chemicals they're finding are tiny - so much so that we are only able to trace them now with the latest equipment; just a few years ago we wouldn't have even known we had this problem. That doesn't make them safe, but it does mean we're in a media-induced frenzy over something that likely has been going on for a long time.

Second, water is one of the few truly recyclable resources, as many drought-ridden cities are starting to realize. Cleaning and filtering sewer water, while it definitely has the "yuck" factor, is much cheaper, takes less energy, and has fewer bad byproducts than de-salination, which somehow seems so much less gross. Desalination is extremely energy-intensive, which is why it's generally done only in oil-rich, water-pour Middle-Eastern countries. Furthermore, Ocean water isn't actually all that clean - there's a whole lot of raw sewage (thank you, Victoria and Mr. Floatie, among other places!), garbage, and salt. And after they de-salinate and remove that briny, gross stuff, what do plants generally do? Throw it back in the ocean, of course, so the problem just gets worse. Cities like San Diego are finally figuring this out and building sewage to tap plants despite public concern.

Clearly we're not going to get away from this problem. There's less "clean" (i.e. evaporated, rained down, and filtered through some rock into a stream or lake) water available and more people who want to drink it. We can do better at conserving by reusing our grey water for gardening and other non-potable needs, but ultimately we need to drink. The only alternative I can think of is for all of us to start drinking mead. Either the alcohol will kill off anything bad in the water, or if it can't, at least we'll all be happier.

Geoducks

2008-04-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

I have a strange fascination with Geoducks. Perhaps it’s because they’re just so odd-looking, or because I’d never heard of them before moving up here, or because they are so much fun to say (Gooey-duck! Gooey-duck! Who doesn’t love that?) or because Mike Rowe did a segment on them in Dirty Jobs, but I just think they’re interesting. And it seems I’m not the only one – when a few of us first went to our local pub’s trivia night, we all agreed that Geoducks was a great name for our team. It was entertaining listening to the Irish announcer mispronounce the word until some irate Pacific Northwesterners in the front area corrected him.

Anyway, I was interested to hear yesterday morning on KUOW’s local news about a current conflict between local Geoduck farmers and people living in the South Sound. Apparently the South Sound neighborhood group is up in arms over the extensive Geoduck farming that’s going on, claiming that it creates silt that goes into their yards, creates trash that goes into the Sound (nets and plastic pipes) and disrupts the shoreline environment. I’m a little confused about how the land-use rights work, and whether the homeowners actually “own” pieces of the beach, and what parts are used by the farmers, but I can certainly see the concern. On the flip side, some biologists said that Geoducks and shellfish in general were good for the marine environment, although they specified that there are “not many scientific publications about Geoduck farming,” if you can imagine.

With almost no information on which to base my decision, I’m going to say I support the Geoducks. If nothing else, more scientific research must clearly be done. So support your scientists in supporting the Geoducks, and I think our world will be a better, and more-informed place.

Green Buildings

2008-04-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

Monday on All Things Considered, Michele Norris reported on Beijing’s ambitious plan for every new building to be 50% more efficient and environmentally friendly by 2010. It’s great to see the Chinese government thinking about the environment since there are plenty of counter-examples and issues, and since China has so much construction going on it’s a reasonable thing to focus on. However, I still wish the focus wasn’t on green products but conservation.

In the Seattle Times this weekend there was an article about going green, and it started with a great question – how many green products does it take to reduce your ecological footprint? The answer? As few as possible. Green products are great, but buying more to save the planet is going about it backwards. I’m totally guilty of this – between the two of us, J and I probably have 15 heavy-duty plastic water bottles so we can avoid using disposable water bottles. Do we really need so many? Same with fancy new buildings – I get that people need places to live and work, and if we have to build them we should certainly do so in as environmentally friendly a way as possible, but wouldn’t it be better to figure out how to need less stuff in the first place?

I also read – I think in Seattle Magazine - that the various certification programs, particularly the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System™, can encourage some unfortunate behavior by developers trying to tack on just enough features to reach a specific certification level while not actually thinking holistically about the best way to design a building (how to situate it on a site, where to source the materials, etc). I think LEED is a great start – it’s hard to improve something you can’t measure – but I just worry that the Chinese government will focus on this one element and then rest on their laurels regarding the rest of the environmental issues.

In Which I Feel Flattered, And A Little Worried

2008-04-15T17:45:00.001-07:00

When I started this blog, I assumed that I’d have about 5 readers, all of whom would be my friends who I’d be babbling to about NPR anyway, and this is more or less true. But over the past couple of weeks, I’ve noticed a trend where people I’ve written about find my blog posts and actually comment on them! I’m really flattered that they bother – and really excited to prompt a reaction, whether positive or negative, but it definitely makes me double-think what I post.

For instance, Steve Orfield, who I wrote about in Thinking About Silence, responded with more info on the story I mentioned. And Alex Schmidt posted a long response to my story on Plankton Credits in which he disagreed with some of my comments and reminded me that Marketplace is produced by American Public Media and therefore not truly NPR. I told this story to my friend F, who has had to sit through many dinners surrounded by people who work in public radio thanks to his cool NPR reporter girlfriend, and he says that he’s gotten lots of grief over mislabeling APM as NPR too, so I felt better. And a few months earlier than this, Michael Oshman, director of the Green Restaurant Association, had some really valuable comments on my story about the Green Restaurant Certification.

I wonder if there’s a trend, like maybe environmental posts get more activity? Or posts where I ask more questions rather than just going on about my opinion? Either way, I’m certainly flattered…but it does remind me that posting to the internet is definitely not the same as ranting in C’s kitchen. It’s a big, public world out there, and hopefully I’ll be able to occasionally write something that inspires folks to talk back!

Hiatus

2008-04-15T17:44:00.000-07:00

I’ve been busy, KUOW had their pledge drive and therefore had fewer inspiring stories, and blogging just didn’t make it high enough on my to do list for the last few weeks. Sorry! I’ll try to do better.

Audacity of (False) Hope

2008-03-25T13:26:00.000-07:00

No, this isn’t going to be an analysis of a presidential candidate’s “groundbreaking” recent speech on race relations that, now that I’ve read the transcript several times, I still find beautifully worded but lacking in any substantive message and full of misleading equivalencies. In fact, this blog post is not political at all. (I’m sure you’re all breathing a sigh of relief).

Instead, it’s about one of my pet peeves: people who take advantage of those in dire medical situations with unsubstantiated and expensive cures that “your doctor doesn’t want you to know about”. I’ve always been surprised by people who take tons of vitamin C because it will cure what ails them, or people who think that just because something is natural, it must be healthy. (My favorite story there, which I may have mentioned already, is a video we watched in Physics class where people were not worried about “natural” radon that was polluting their homes and giving them cancer, but they were worried about the non-existent levels of radiation coming from a well-built nuclear power plant nearby.) But about a year ago I read an expose on the entire vitamin industry called Natural Causes: Death, Lies and Politics in America's Vitamin and Herbal Supplement Industry that explained some of the lies and politics the vitamin industry goes through to get people to use their products without having to do any rigorous safety or effectiveness testing. Recent news stories about Airborne show that this is something that’s prevalent even where you wouldn’t expect it.

That said, I was horrified to hear an NPR story last week that gave an entirely positive view of an experimental use for stem cells. I originally heard the story on Morning Edition last Tuesday. It described a $20,000 treatment that one Chinese doctor was doing where he would inject stem cells into children to cure a particular form of blindness. American doctors were advising their patients not to get it done, but parents willing to try anything were going there. I was disturbed that they were reporting the story as though it were proven fact that, because there were a few cases where the children seemed to improve, this was a great new treatment that might change the face of medicine. There was absolutely no skepticism in the report, except in the form of, “well our Doctor was skeptical about this, but we didn’t believe him and did it anyway and now look how great things are”. This plays right into the fears and assumptions that the Vitamin industry plays into – “we know something your Doctor doesn’t want you to know about”.

So I was relieved when, the next morning, Renee Montagne interviewed Dr. Borchert, who’s in charge of the Vision Center at Children’s Hospital in LA, to give his opinion on this miracle cure. He made some great points, including (a) This particular form of blindness can improve on its own, so there’s no telling that the stem cells had anything to do with the recovery and (b) If the treatment were really as simple as injecting a few stem cells, then $20,000 is an insane amount of money to charge and shows they’re taking advantage of the patients. Ms. Montagne also interviewed prominent Chinese scientists who are worried that this false treatment will ruin China’s entire reputation in biotech.

It’s clear to me that this is yet another way that people have the audacity to sell “hope” to the folks who need it most, but without delivering any of the real results. I hope next time Morning Edition takes the time to get the full perspective the first time around.

NPR Library

2008-03-17T12:43:00.000-07:00

Nancy Pearl, who writes the Book Lust series, is often interviewed on Weekday and while I love books and talking about books, I can’t imagine buying a book that is just a list of other books that someone recommends. Where would you start? And why would you trust her taste?

Last Tuesday, though, NPR acted like my own private book recommendation engine. First of all, I had started reading The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World by Tim Harford the night before because I’d heard him on The Conversation a few weeks earlier. I was actually pretty proud of myself because I convinced our company library that they should order the book and check it out to me so that I didn’t have to wait in line at the regular King County system, which is excellent but can take a while for popular books. Also, although I found the book didn’t hang together quite as well as Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything I’ve actually found more relevant instances to throw out, “well, in this book I was reading it said that…”, helping me in my constant quest to be erudite and witty at dinner parties.

Anyway, on Weekday that morning, E.J. Dionne Jr., author of Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right talked about how religious people don’t necessarily have to end up in the conservative camp and how some of them are really living their religious values and finding themselves more drawn to the left. Given that I have to work really hard to not just assume that all strongly religious people are not crazy right-wingers by default, I think this book is a good one for me to try. Then later that afternoon on The Conversation, Daniel Klein and Thomas Cathcart, authors of Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington: Understanding Political Doublespeak Through Philosophy and Jokes* discussed lots of fun anecdotes about politics, making me want to go check out their book too.

See, who needs Book Lust when you can hear it straight from the authors’ mouths? Now that’s effective marketing.

*What is it about books today that every single non-fiction seems to be titled Pithy Short Phrase: Longer and Sometimes Still-Witty Explanation? It’s getting a bit old.

Horsey Dilemma

2008-03-01T19:47:00.000-08:00

Yesterday on The World, Genevieve Oger reported on the Bridgette Bardot Foundation’s efforts to get French people to stop eating horsemeat. Horsemeat used to be poor man’s meat in France, but now it only accounts for 2% of meat eaten, and it’s more expensive than beef or pork, but the Foundation is focusing on giving out pamphlets and pressuring markets to stop carrying it. They admit their real goal is to try to get people to eat less meat in general, but they say that such a goal is unrealistic so they’re focusing on this particular issue.

As someone who gave up red meat with no problems 4 years ago (and pork a year or so ago; that’s much harder even for a good Jewish girl like me…mmmm…bacon) I have no real interest in trying horsemeat, although since I do eat meat when I travel abroad I wouldn’t be averse to trying it if I were in France. However, images of My Little Pony aside, I have two issues with the Bridgette Bardot Foundation’s plan:

I really don’t see how eating horsemeat is any worse than eating the meat of any other large herbivore. If anything it might even be better when it comes to the environment and humane treatment of the horses since there aren’t any large factory farms that raise and slaughter horses. I assume that therefore most horse’s lives while alive are probably a great deal better than your average meat cow, and they probably consume more grass and less oil-based-fertilizer-enhanced corn.
Convincing people not to eat horsemeat is not going to raise the number of people who are vegetarians or even those who eat less meat. I would be willing to bet that for every person who goes to the store to buy horsemeat and doesn’t find it, they will simply buy some other meat product. Why is the horse more special than any other mammal? It’s really just a cultural thing – it’s the reason some cultures eat dogs but no one here would even consider it – and if France’s culture still thinks eating horses is okay, albeit for a very small percentage of people, that’s fine by me.

At best this is a showy effort to bring attention to the plight of animals that are bred for the food chain. Realistically though, I think this is much like the efforts of a few socialites ten years ago or so to pass an anti-horsemeat initiative in California – it was an activity for folks with too much time and money on their hands, and the opposition encouraged us to, “Just say Neigh”.

Thinking about silence

2008-02-29T16:30:00.000-08:00

Weekday had an interesting program yesterday about silence. There were a lot of interesting parts, especially around how true silence is so hard to find, how people measure really quiet noises etc, but I was most interested by a story told by Stephen Orfield, who founded a lab that measures noises and is apparently listed as the quietest place on earth in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Mr. Orfield’s lab was hired by Harley to help them figure out how they could lower the amount of noise made by their motorcycles to meet European standards without losing market share, which their focus groups had shown would happen if their bikes were less loud. Mr. Orfield managed to record all the different bits of the current Harley noise and played these sounds for people to ask whether they saw them as powerful, weak, fun, lame, etc. He said that although when people came in they said they loved the whole Harley noise and when they left they said the same, the actual data showed that there were lots of individual parts of the noises that customers found unpleasant. By removing just those but maintaining the parts that people really associated with Harley’s image, they were able to lower their overall noise but keep people happy. I thought this was really fascinating because it just goes to show that we don’t know what happens in our own heads. Just like in so many other areas, when it comes to sound, we have opinions that aren’t based on what we think.

Despicablest

2008-02-28T08:55:00.000-08:00

I always thought that there was nothing more despicable than someone who convinces someone else to become a terrorist. Now I've been proven wrong - Peter Kenyon last night reported on All Things Considered how there's suspicion that the head of a psychiatric hospital conspired to hook up unstable women with terrorist recruiters, culminating in a suicide bomber attack earlier this month which killed almost 100 people.

Brainwashing young people and convincing them that their lives will hold more value, not if they go to school and find a cure for cancer, but if they blow up as many innocent people as possible, and then paying them off so they know for certain that their families would be better off with them blown up than alive, is horrific, much more horrific than the poor brainwashed young men and women themselves. But preying on people who are mentally ill and convincing them to do the same takes appalling to the next level.

I really do try to get into the heads of people who disagree with me - I get that people who consider abortion murder want to prevent other people from having them, even if I disagree. Same for embryonic stem cells. But I just can't wrap my head around the motivation of these terrorist recruiters and the people who help them. I think what mystifies me the most is that these people are rational enough not to go blow themselves up, but then logic fails me when I try to understand what cause can possibly be important enough to make it worth convincing people to kill themselves and hordes of others. Any suggestions to help me comprehend would be welcome.

Faux Russian Candidate

2008-02-20T20:05:00.000-08:00

Yesterday on Morning Edition Gregory Feifer reported on what I think is a brilliant and scary plot by Putin to create a fake opposition candidate. All the candidates that have any chance of getting significant backing or media (like Garry Kasparov) have been blocked at every turn with claims that the signatures they needed to make it on the ballot were forged. However, now there's a new candidate, Andrei Bogdanov, whom no one has ever heard of but who had no problem getting his candidacy approved. Mr. Feifer interviewed plenty of Russians who had no idea who this guy was either, and his interviews with the candidate made him sound like an absolute novice who was really excited because, although no one showed up to see him on his campaign stop, a few people in the street recognized him.

Personally, I think this sounds like it's right out of a novel. Not only does Putin have pretty much absolute power to go with his popular support, but he's not content with that and needs to exert complete control by actually creating a fake candidate to consolidate the opposition on someone harmless. How much do you want to bet that right before the election Mr. Bogdanov comes out and says that he supports Putin after all?

Firming up my status as a wannabe Canadian

2008-02-19T19:55:00.001-08:00

It's not NPR, but after spending the weekend in Montreal with C and her sister J, I now have a favorite CBC radio catchphrase, "this show will be on at 8pm, or 8:30 Newfoundland". Apparently everything in Newfoundland happens a half hour later.

Also, in Canadian-wannabe-ness news, I went to the primaries today to vote in our election that doesn't count. I had to declare a party when I signed in, but then received a ballot that, though it had both party options on it, was as close to Canadian in simplicity as any I have seen. I think even C would have been happy to vote on this one!(Sorry for the fuzziness and strange yellow lines; I only had my cell phone camera with me.)

Publisher's Point of View

2008-02-19T19:52:00.000-08:00

Earlier this month I heard Lynn Neary on All Things Considered talking about a publishing house called Publishers 12. Their gimmick is that instead of publishing loads of books, they just pick one per month and focus all their attention on it. It was an interesting take on the publishing industry as a whole; one of the people interviewed for the story called book publishing "legalized gambling" and I can see why - for a new author, it's impossible to predict what books will be successful. (I was going to say, "or which ones will fail" there, but actually I think you can be pretty sure that a coffee table book on broomsticks, even though it might interest a strange few, will soon be found in the bargain bin of your local Barnes and Noble.)

Anyway, it seems like a reasonable idea to pick just a few really good books - this is great for the environment because it doesn't waste paper on crappy books that no one will buy (and will end up with their cover ripped off, sent back to the publisher), and it allows the publisher to give a lot of personal attention to the marketing and editing of each book. However, the idea is also worrisome because I certainly don't want some person I don't even know to make the call on what book is worth reading. I especially don't want one who, like the owner of Publishers 12, judges their success by saying that several of their books are on the NYTimes bestseller list, since that seems to me to be entirely about advertising rather than book quality.

But most of all during this All Things Considered piece, I wondered how on earth Publishers 12 makes enough money off its one publication a month to justify all the attention placed on each book. I just hope Marketplace picks this up someday and fills me in.

In which the Democrats teach us to do math

2008-02-10T14:58:00.000-08:00

So the caucus was pretty interesting – although in our precinct the votes went 1 for Clinton and 4 for Obama, I was glad I was there and it was great to see so many people there all excited about electing a Democrat to the White House!

I got there an hour and a half beforehand to help set up. In our Legislative District, six precincts met in one big auditorium and had what they call an “area caucus” where the Area Captain (AC) read the rules for everyone before we were going to discuss and vote as individual precincts. To make it more obvious where to go, we set up colored balloons for each area and then I stood outside with a map helping people figure out which color they needed to go to. I also put up a bunch of Hillary signs – it was frustrating because I was the only one of the early volunteers who was a Hillary supporter, and when I asked the AC to make sure it was okay to put up signs in the auditorium she said, “as long as there’s an Obama sign there too” and was mildly rude to me all day. But eventually J showed up with our official “International Observers” C and E (I’d given the AC a heads up that they were coming and she actually called them out as “our Canadian friends who wanted to see how their wacky friends down south do politics” – it was pretty funny) and we got started.

At that point the AC let one speaker for each candidate give a two-minute speech. I’d spoken with another woman supporting Hillary and agreed that she should give that speech because she had a background in marketing and really wanted to do it, but unfortunately she wasn’t super-eloquent. The Obama speaker talked about how he’s so much more electable amongst swing voters and how he was inspirational. (We heard that a lot, and as E said, “what’s wrong with these people’s lives that they need to be inspired by a candidate? Can’t they find inspiration themselves and look for someone who can actually get the job done??”) We then broke up into our precincts to write down our names and initial votes, and I ended up giving my one-minute speech for Hillary at this level. They’d asked us to focus on one issue that was especially important to us, so for those who are curious, this is more or less what I said:

I work at Microsoft, so I see every day how hard it is for us to find and hire college students with a strong foundation in science. And that’s a problem, because maintaining our leadership in science and technology is what’s going to keep America strong and thriving, grow our economy, and help us start making a dent in fixing our environment.
So when I read Science magazine’s rave reviews of Senator Clinton’s science platform, I knew I had to support her. She’ll raise funding for the NSF and NIH, she’s got a bunch of creative ways to motivate more research in the right areas, and most importantly to me, she’s made a 100% commitment to take politics out of science.
I’m supporting Hillary because she’s smart, she can hit the ground running, she’s wildly competent, and she can win in November. Please come join me!

I got a lot of applause, but no one changed their vote because of my speech or any other discussions. It was interesting to see how different the various precincts were – some of them had long, long discussions and arguments back and forth; ours just had my speech and a response speech for Obama, something along the lines of, “I’m not just supporting Obama because I’m black; I’m supporting him because I have a friend who knows him and says he’s really nice.” I'm not sure about you, but I wasn’t super impressed. Then one woman got up and said she was voting for Hillary because we’ve been dealing with the politics of fear for so long, and people need to stop fearing that Hillary can’t win in November and should vote for her because she will make a better president. Finally someone else got up and gave another “Obama didn’t vote for the Iraq war” speech. That speech seemed to be very popular in the other precincts too, which just goes to show that math is not people's strong suit since Obama was not actually a Senator during the vote and wouldn't have been able to vote either way. C says she supports Hillary because she didn't vote for the war in Vietnam.

Anyway, next they tallied the votes (this was done by all the precincts at once with instructions from the AC – “copy column A to column C. Now multiply column C by column B. Now…”. It felt like a huge elementary-school group math lesson) and asked if anyone wanted to change their votes given the speeches (no one did) and then we chose delegates. I would have run as the one Clinton delegate or alternate, but there was a woman who really, really wanted to be a delegate and someone else who wanted to quite a lot, and I didn’t want to get in the way of energized people getting involved.

Overall, I’m happy I was there. J's been griping about the whole primary system because Florida and Michigan got disenfranchised (he has a good point; I think that’s appalling) but he seemed to have a fun time hanging out with a couple of our neighbors and cracking jokes with E and C about how the Democrats were teaching us to do math.

However, I’m also glad it’s over – I went a little overboard in my time and mental energy investment. I’m bummed about Obama’s win, but Clinton’s still got a chance overall and really the most important thing is that one of them winds up in the White House. And on that front, after all my phone calls trying to get some people to speak for Clinton at the caucus (that was horrible – I will never again agree to do cold calls) I saw a couple of people I’d talked to who were at the caucus because of my call, and interested in participating more between now and November, and my friend A ended up running her precinct’s caucus and getting elected to be a Clinton delegate after the training she attended with me a few weeks ago, so I guess I’m helping that goal at least.

With my caucus report complete, I'm going to do my best to stop writing about politics for a bit. We'll see how it goes.

Numbers I Can Work With

2008-02-05T09:47:00.000-08:00

Today on Weekday Steve Scher interviewed several people about campaigns and politics, including Sheila Krumholz, Executive Director of the Center for Responsive Politics. She shared information on individual donations by people in Washington, grouped by the company where they work. Microsoft employees donated the most in the state, and specifically the top donation-getter was Senator Clinton (by quite a bit, actually - something like $130,000 to $80,000) while the top Republican was - are you ready - Ron Paul! That must explain all the Ron Paul signs I've seen around campus. Romney was next in line for Republican donations, but the best news was that Microsoft employees were the top donators to every Republican except Huckabee.

It makes me feel pretty good to know that the majority of employees here are not falling for the articulate but content-lacking hype which is Senator Obama. I'll get behind him if he's the eventual nominee, but if I have the choice give me someone who can hit the ground running, who is intelligent and thoughtful, who is practical and will get stuff done - I'll take Hillary Clinton any day.

And while you're at it, read this for an awesome articulation of what I've been thinking when I hear all the arguments and media coverage against her (thanks S for the link!).

Uncommon Look at Sderot

2008-01-25T15:50:00.001-08:00

On Wednesday the news was full of reports of the hole knocked into the wall between Gaza and Egypt and the fact that Palestinians were pouring through the wall to buy essentials (which, depending on the reports you listened to, included a brand new washing machine that one man attempted to tow by donkey cart and lots of cigarettes along with food and medicine). Almost all of the coverage either alluded to or flat out stated that the people in Gaza were in a blockade because Israel had decided to retaliate against some "home-made missiles" being lobbed at "Israeli border towns" (as though because they're home-made they're less destructive and because they can only reach border towns, we shouldn't consider them too serious). A few mentioned that the civil war between Hamas and Fatah had a bit to do with all this as well, but most implied that Israel was cutting off all supplies - including electricity, which is blatantly untrue yet bandied about by many of the media outlets.

Anyway, after hearing this coverage of the story all day, including on my very favorite show Marketplace which normally steers clear of one-sided reporting but yesterday interviewed economist Youssef Dauod in the West Bank about what the Palestinians need most - including "the hospitals will need the energy for people not to die," I was pleased to finally hear coverage of the flip side of the issue - what's happening to all those people living in the "border towns".

Linda Gradstein interviewed a few of the residents of Sderot, one of the main towns that's been the target of Kassam rocket attacks because it's so close to the Gaza border. When people say there are rockets, you have to understand that this means 200 rockets fired in the last week, each accompanied by alarms that go off when a rocket is incoming. I can't how someone would handle living in that situation (thank goodness my family lives far enough North that the current generation of missiles can't reach them). Ms. Gradstein did a sensitive interview with a mother who's been traumatized, needing medication to stay calm but clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, only not really post-trauma because she's still right in the middle of it. She also interviewed a hairdresser who deals with the terror by designing a Kassam rocket hairdo, and a seller in the fruit market who blamed the Israeli government for being too kind to Gaza – giving them electricity, gas, and food. All in all, it was nice to see some attention given to the other victims of this horrible situation. I don't doubt that conditions in Gaza are terrible, and I wish that there could be peace there once and for all, but the only way we'll get there is if both sides are given equal, fair exposure so they can appreciate each other's challenges and hopes. For once I can say at least one show on NPR did a good job with that.

Dutch Land Grabs

2008-01-24T09:00:00.000-08:00

Last week I caught the second half of a story on All Things Considered. I tuned into:

but that can also mean forcing people to relocate. "Of course, it's difficult to come in and say well, '30 years ago we wanted you to live here, to be a farmer, but now we want you to move out to keep the system safe,'"

and jumped to the conclusion that this was a story about repatriating white farms in Zimbabwe. Until I realized it was actually a discussion of Holland's farsighted policy and planning for increased global warming and dealing with flooding. So now I will forever link Zimbabwe with Dutch land grabs.

Rock, Paper, Scissor for President...and Other Fun Caucus Facts

2008-01-16T22:05:00.001-08:00

Last Sunday A and I went to get some good ol' fashioned caucus training. Being both frustrated by the complexity of caucuses (relative to our upbringing in nice normal primary states) as well as interested in the details of how they work, it was certainly an interesting experience. I thought I'd share a few of the things we learned, for those who are equally enamoured, although I certainly won't blame you if you aren't.

First of all, apparently you shouldn't go to a meeting of the Democratic party if you don't want to really participate. I didn't mean to do anything more than learn a little bit about what my local Democrats were doing for the election when I went to their meeting last week, but somehow I ended up being elected Precinct Committee Officer (or PCO) of the precinct next door to me, being asked to give a speech about Hillary at the caucus, and going to caucus training a few days later. So be forewarned. But also go to http://www.kcdems.net/ to find out about your local district.
Once you're involved, there are things you need to know. For instance, WA state Democrats allow you to vote for anyone in the caucus, even people who aren't running. There's no minimum threshold like there is in Iowa - anyone can stick with their candidate, even if they don't get enough votes to warrant a delegate.
And by the way, Republicans assign all the delegates from any state to the winner of that state, while Democrats give proportional representation, so usually Republican choices are apparent way before Democrats are. This year might be different since so far three different people have won the three major Republican states that have voted so far. I'm just waiting for Thompson and Giuliani to pick up a couple states each too.
The number of delegates that each precinct gets here in WA is determined by how many people voted for Kerry in the district, presumably in the last general election.
When you enter the primary, you sign your name, your gender, your sexual orientation (optional, but strange that they would ask) and write in the name of the candidate you pick. After the votes are tallied the first time and people get the opportunity to try to change everyone else's mind, you can go back and cross off the name of the person you originally voted for and pick someone else. From what I can tell, this somewhat answers one of C's biggest questions (and mine too) which is - how do they report the percentages of votes in Iowa since the precincts just report the number of delegates? This was especially strange since Hillary came in third in the percentage of votes but second in the number of delegates that they think she'll eventually get from Iowa once they have their state convention later this year. Anyway, the sign-in sheet is public record, so the media must have access to it. I don't know how they calculate the percentages so quickly on caucus night since they have to decipher a hand-written stack of paper, but I'm guessing that's what they do.
Delegate math is kind of like rounding but not. You take the percentage of people who voted for the candidate times the number of delegates being assigned by the precinct, assign each candidate the full whole number of delegates (so if candidate A got 2.4 and candidate B got 0.6 then A would get 2 delegates and B would get 0). Then you take the rest of the delegates and assign them according to who has the biggest remainder (in this case if there were three total delegates, B would get the last one). We were told that there were cases where this wasn't exactly like rounding, but I think that would mostly happen if you had exactly x.5 and it ended up rounding down instead of up...either way, it's pretty simple once it's explained to you. Unfortunately there seemed to be quite a few people who were confused. It doesn't help that they provide you a multiplication chart that makes it all look way more complicated than it is.
After the tallying of votes and the fundraising of the money and the asking of people to become involved (and become PCOs), the next step is the electing of delegates and alternates. I have no idea what would qualify someone to be a delegate more than someone else. I guess stubbornness so you can trust that the person won't change their vote? Anyway, if not enough people volunteer to be delegates, then the precinct loses that vote. I guess if people aren't interested enough to go participate in the Legislative and Congressional State conventions, they can't influence who gets elected.
Finally my very favorite thing - if you're distributing the last delegate and two candidates have the same remainder, you break the tie "by lot". According to our caucus training instructor, that means you can flip a coin or do whatever you'd like to randomly choose who gets the delegate. Which gives me an excellent image of people playing rock, paper, scissors to pick the next president.

P.S. A non-sucky way to go

2008-01-15T17:01:00.001-08:00

Cross-country skiing, exuberantly, at age 94 or so. Perhaps while listening to This American Life on a pink Zune, 62nd edition.

What would you choose?

On sucky ways to go...

2008-01-15T16:18:00.000-08:00

Drowning in fish parts. Melissa Block reported on the deaths of 20 eagles yesterday on All Things Considered who had died because a dump truck carting bits of fish being discarded from a cannery proved to be too tempting, and while attempting to gorge themselves, many of them drowned. In bits of the fish they were eating. I know they're birds, not people, but still...isn't there something very Greek or Biblical about it? It's like Gluttony personified.

Separating the live drowned birds from the dead ones and cleaning them up doesn't rank too high on my list of things I'd want to do either. I should send in a suggestion to my favorite man on TV, Mike Rowe.

Presidential Candidate, the Fifth

2008-01-11T12:02:00.000-08:00

A while back E and I got to see Mitt Romney in action as he visited campus. The event started out well from a comedic point of view, with both a greeter at the door and several of his campaign staff showcasing preposterous Amish-style haircuts. After having seen so many reports of his "presidential handsomeness”, I found him to have a smooth speaking voice and general good looks, but he really lacked a presence. He stood in the front of the room...well, like a guy standing by himself in front of a room. The fact that he moves like C3PO doesn't help either. Some more highlights and lowlights:

A scan of his website reveals my favorite political website component yet - the MittMarket. "Do you have items lying around that you don't use? From bicycles that the kids have outgrown to old electronics or baseball cards, your stuff may be someone else's treasure. Now, you can sell these items with little hassle and the added benefit of supporting Governor Mitt Romney." Christmas is over, but if you feel like buying me a gift, please do not do so from the MittMarket.
He had a couple of value statements ("pick the right team" was the lamest) but one that I can't help but agree with, and which was calculated to excite the geeky audience he was speaking to - "I love to bathe in the data". I can appreciate someone who wants to make decisions based on lots of data. Unfortunately I wouldn't be able to depend on his ability to process the stuff, based on what he presented to us next.
After mouthing a bunch of platitudes geared towards his base, “use the vibrant economy, privatize everything, lower taxes, make people realize that everyone should get married before having kids, reduce dependence on foreign oil, invest in technology , science is good” he ended with, “open up markets” and decided that a PowerPoint deck was necessary for that last point. The deck, aside from having been created in what looked like a 10-year old version of PowerPoint and being full of typos, was basically about how protectionism hurts and other countries have been making trade agreements that don’t include us “because we’re tied to politics” and included a proposal for a “Reagan zone of economic freedom” (I wonder how long they worked to weave the name Reagan into his plan?). There were multiple slides that he looked at and promptly skipped through, and what was most apparent was that he didn’t seem to have a particularly good grasp of what the data he was showing actually meant. So bathing in the data apparently just involved hot water and bubbles rather than real contemplation.
He often repeated his position that states and local government should have complete control over everything and therefore he wasn’t planning to put forward a proposal for actually fixing anything (heaven forbid the Federal government should actually accomplish anything itself!) On healthcare, despite his record of getting statewide healthcare in MA, he though each state should “have the opportunity” to do the same but have no federal mandate. On Education, states should give scholarships for strong students to go to college (you can imagine this went over well with the gushing Jeb Bush supporter and her whiny, “why can’t you spend more money on my smart kids” attitude) but receive no federal funding because, “states have money”.
I found it interesting that the only time he mentioned our wildly unpopular president was to agree with him. Bush’s current plan for Iraq and the surge is great (“thank god we didn’t have Obama as president”). The only thing the Federal government should do in education is continue Bush’s great policy of No Child Left Behind. Etc.
He did, however, close his inspirational speech with a perfect summing-up of his positions. “I want to make America strong, and I’d appreciate your help and all your money”.

Wasn't that handy?

Why Canadians make fun of our low voter turnout

2008-01-09T13:23:00.000-08:00

Compare all the craziness of the caucus process, the challenges of voting either through our interminable scantron ballot or digital voting machines, and just generally the over-involved process us Americans go through to what C's Vancouver absentee ballot looks like:

(pencil added for size reference)

And is it any wonder Canadians are more likely to vote?

2008: The Year of Yet More Foodies

2008-01-09T12:30:00.000-08:00

My plan was to make this the first post of 2008 before I got all grumpy about caucuses (and I'm not done yet!) so you'll just have to pretend. Frankly, I'm surprised I haven't written more about food since, what with my double-whammy Berkeleyan AND Jewish upbringing, I'm a bit obsessed. Anyhow, as J and I were driving back from our very snowy cabin on New Year's Eve, Amy Stewart on All Things Considered was ranting about people talking too much about food, particularly local food.

Now I can understand how people who are not as into food as I am might find juicy discussions about the orgasmic pleasure of Rover’s Scrambled Eggs with Lime Crème Fraîche and White Sturgeon Caviar a bit boring and perhaps even unhealthy. For instance, I was considering buying a new book by the author of one of the food blogs I regularly check out – Gluten-Free Girl – as a Christmas present and perused the customer reviews, many of which were appalled by the loving, some said obsessive, language that she uses about food which I find simply poetic. So I get that not everyone is into it. And really, it’s no longer creative to write a “How I Ate Locally” memoir – been there, done that.

But people, you do have a choice! You don’t need to buy cookbooks or food memoirs. You don’t need to watch the food channel! You don’t need to go to dinner parties (at least not at my house). But don’t take away the joy from those of us who love food. Following chefs through markets on TV (which Ms. Stewart derides) may not be news, but it is entertainment for people like me. There’s no such thing as “just grocery shopping".

Ultimately, I can think of few things more depressing than Ms. Stewart’s suggestion of the book of 2008 - My Year of Never Ever Talking About Food, Even Once: Your Quest of Finding Something Else to Say At Breakfast.

Tell me again why I care about Iowa?

2008-01-03T18:08:00.000-08:00

I generally just ignore the "square middle states" as B's husband calls them, and I'm kind of grumpy that I have to hear all about what random people in Iowa think about presidential politics. NPR, along with everyone else, has been talking to tons of people in Iowa about who they're going to vote for, and I've been trying not to care because I think the fact that primaries happen on different dates in different states is completely broken. But that's not what I wanted to talk about here, on my first blog post of the new year. Instead, I wanted to talk about caucuses.

On the local news today I heard to my dismay that Washington state is going to continue to use caucuses this year, as they did during the last presidential election. Apparently the Democrats are going to entirely use the caucus results, while Republicans will use the primaries to allocate 51% of their electoral votes and the caucuses to allocate the other 49%. I'm pretty confused, because I thought that last time we switched to caucuses because they were cheaper than primaries even though they're extremely inconvenient and the number of people who have 2 hours to spare for voting and who bother to figure out the process is small. But if we're having primaries anyway, why are we still having caucuses?

Anyhow, a few minutes later on All Things Considered, Melissa Block reported from the home of Joe Loebach, who was hosting his 6th caucus tonight. First she mentioned that part of the caucus complexity is both getting folks to go (apparently bribing them with food, babysitting, and who knows what else is legit, based on other pieces I've heard on NPR this week) but also allocating people correctly. Each "district" within Iowa has votes according to how many people showed up to vote last time around, so if, for instance, a candidate got all her supporters out to vote but they all went to the same district, it wouldn't help her (Ms. Block compared it to the Democrats getting 10 million extra people out to vote in New York). But from what I understand, you don't have to go to the place closest to you so each candidate has to convince people to disperse around the various homes.

Next Mr. Loebach explained how the caucus this evening will work, and it seems to be just as crazy as the regular electoral system and require regular citizens to (gasp!) do math. People come in (he expects 30 but has room for 50) and say who they're supporting, and get broken up into different areas of the room. Since his house has 2 electoral votes, at least 25% (8 people) need to support a specific candidate for them to have any potential to get votes. If people's candidate of choice doesn't get enough votes, they can change their votes, leave, or go to the "undecided" section, and eventually the house works out whom to cast the two votes for. Then Mr. Loebach calls a magical phone number and punches in some buttons, which "instantly" let some messageboard in Des Moines update, and Mr. Loebach and his caucus colleagues watch this on TV. Simple, right?

So okay, I actually like the idea that you can come in and vote for your candidate and then select a secondary and tertiary candidate if yours doesn't have enough support, but you could do this on a regular ballot much more easily! And I especially dislike the fact that people who are susceptible to peer pressure (or, more common, spousal pressure) are forced to tell everyone who they're voting for, and possibly even shout down people who disagree. This is one of the many reasons I don't like enforcing vote by mail, because often women's husbands fill out their ballots for them and force them to sign. (It might be a good idea in our household if J persists in trying to tick me off by vowing to vote for Huckabee though!). Caucuses just seem to exacerbate this problem. They also remove all the people who can't afford or don't want to be away from their family, or work, or anything else for several hours from the political process. And they also require untrained civilians to do math, always a dangerous proposition. So overall, a bad idea.

That said, apparently I'll be reporting from a real-life caucus in a few months, since otherwise I can't get in my vote for Hillary. Let's hope she's still in the running after the square middle states get their opinions out.

Props to the Squircle

2007-12-25T10:59:00.000-08:00

My new favorite thing is listening to This American Life which is automatically downloaded every week to the new pink Zune my sweetie gave me (as a "just because" present - does he get extra points or what?) while running my 5-mile outdoor course. Somehow when I can listen to Ira Glass help one of his editors get her MCI bill figured out in "When You're on Hold No One Can Hear You Scream" and hear someone's Thanksgiving family horror story my run just breezes by. I highly recommend it. Plus the squircle is awesome.

Happy Xmas All.

Thankfully Not A Candidate For Anything, The First

2007-12-22T20:44:00.001-08:00

Playing catchup here...A long while back, E and I heard Jeb Bush was in town and of course we had to go see him. I was really curious about what to expect - after all I loathe his brother but Jeb hasn't been given the chance to screw up the country (and hopefully never will!) so I thought I'd give him a chance. Overall, although I was happy to see that he doesn't suffer from his brother's embarrassing verbal skills, I was totally unimpressed. Jeb came to town to talk, not about the future or what he wanted to do, but about "great leadership" - i.e. how great he was when he was governor of Florida.

The audience was small, and consisted primarily of the conservative/libertarian group at work (called the CLAMs!). Jeb tried to pull out some Libertarian credentials - I couldn't quite follow them; something about government being a heart with clogged arteries, post-heart attack and unable to change - but mostly he answered questions from whiny parents and avoided all tough questions. A couple specific comments that struck me:

He talked about some of the innovative things he did to help listen to his citizens. For instance, he gave people his email jeb@jeb.org and supposedly got millions of emails, which I'm sure he read carefully. He also held citizen hours, where he let anyone have 5 minute increments to talk to him. Apparently he learned about, “rodents in basements, varmints on streets, traffic lights misplaced”, all, “things important for a governor to know about”.
He said that overall 60% of students in college graduate in 6 years, with the #1 degree being psychology. However, he says of psychologists, “we have enough in Florida”. He said he prefers occupations where people are creating wealth. It's interesting since even J wouldn't call psychology a "homeless degree" as he so considerately calls English degrees.
Jeb spent a majority of time talking about how education is broken, but as with most politicians we've seen, neglected to come up with any solutions. When some folks in the audience asked for specifics, he offered, “teacher’s unions are bad because they lack accountability. The local Florida teacher’s union mortgaged their building to support my opponent during his campaign…I thought that was entrepreneurial of them.” I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like much of a "solution" to me.
A bunch of parents in the audience whined about gifted kids not getting enough money from public schools. Jeb's response, “we’re losing our geniuses" and “high school is boring, even if you’re not smart” E's response:” I went to math camp.” My response, "You've got to be kidding; you work at Microsoft, you can afford to get your kid in some after school classes if it's so important." (The main whiny mom showed up to hear Mitt Romney when we went to see him too, and E and I noticed her clapping and glowing as though in the presence of a demi-god when Mitt said he'd give more money to gifted education too.)
Jeb obviously thought interest in politics was something to take seriously; he said, “the fact that you showed up at a PAC meeting for a former governor on a random afternoon means you’ve got something funny going on with your life”
Finally, the organizer of the event said, “who will be president - you’re off the record here”. Jeb's reply: “nothing is off the record!”

At least he was right about the last part.

Prohibition

2007-12-20T21:00:00.000-08:00

Last Monday I heard just a snippet of Weekday, a discussion about drugs and prohibition vs. legalization vs. other alternatives. Before listening to the show, if asked I would have probably said I would support continuing to prohibit "hard" drugs like crack and meth, legalizing marijuana, and prohibiting guns altogether (amongst non police officers) - just like most good progressives. However, one of the speakers made two good points in favor of legalizing and licensing everything:

Prohibition didn't working for alcohol, tobacco, or coffee (apparently people were killed for using the last two back in the day). I knew about the first one of course - it's one of the reasons I'm for legalizing marijuana - but didn't realize the other two had happened in the past as well.
The speaker made the specific suggestion to legalize opium - force people to get a license to grow it and sell to the state to make pain medications for the poor, who apparently lack access to opiates, especially in Afghanistan, because all the opium is sold to illegal drug dealers.

So it made me think - does it really make sense to restrict access to any drugs? I can't think of anything positive about speed, but I think the same about cigarettes and I wouldn't want to make them illegal (just illegal to smoke anywhere around me, but that's a whole other issue). I think there might be issues; for instance I assume in Afghanistan the state wouldn't be able to pay market rates for opium so I'd imagine there would still be a black market in that case, but you might be able to overcome that with better policies.

So I can almost come to accept legalizing all drugs, but then what about guns? Is being pro-gun-control hypocritical if I want to legalize and license other bad substances? Or is it still okay because drugs (generally) only hurt the person who takes them while guns are much more likely to be used to hurt someone else (although statistics say you're most likely to get killed with your own gun).

At the moment I'm sticking with legalize drugs, ban guns, but I'll have to keep thinking it through. I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts.

Six Degrees of Actual Bacon

2007-12-12T13:58:00.000-08:00

Last night I caught the tail end of NPR Presents in which apparently KUOW airs some random other good NPR show. Since I missed the beginning and the end, I don't know what show it actually was, but I do know that I enjoyed it. Ken Jennings, the guy who won the most consecutive times on Jeopardy, was on, talking about his new book and his regular column in a brainy magazine of some kind.

Now I am by no means a Jeopardy-watching regular, but I did see multiple news reports and clips of Ken, and he always struck me as kind of scary and robotic - in fact Mitt Romney kind of reminded me of him (and I think they share the same belief in Joseph Smith's golden plates). However, on the radio he came across as smart, and most surprisingly, kind of funny. In the bit I heard, he talked about random trivia from Washington (like the etymology of Skid Road) and then at the end, he shared the "homework" the show producer had given him. In his column, he often takes two ideas and does a six-degrees-of-separation thing between them, and the producer asked him to do the same with two terms you don't normally find together: NPR and Bacon. And here's how he did it:

Start with NPR

NPR has pledge breaks
Takes you to the Pledge of Allegiance
Which was written by flag companies as a way to sell more flags
The Canadian flag (which he mentioned has an 11-point Maple leaf) is a flag
And Canada brings you to Canadian Bacon

End with Bacon.

Now you know too.

Russian Analogy

2007-12-11T18:16:00.000-08:00

And just a quick update on Russia: On Monday, Putin endorsed Dmitry Medvedev for President, a man who is apparently quite young and unknown, and who will most likely allow Putin to direct from behind the scenes. On The World today they reported that Medvedev has, unsurpisingly, called for Putin to become his Prime Minister after he takes office.

I was talking to A about this today (check out his extremely erudite response to my previous Russian blog post) and he had the interesting idea that democracy, rather than being a totally new form of government, was really just an evolution of a monarchy:
Monarchy ->
King plus multiple Lords with power (ala Magna Carta) or multiple Oligarchs ->
A bunch more Lords or Oligarchs so power is more distributed ->
A way to elect said Lords or Oligarchs (aka democracy).
And so I came to my new Russian analogy - when I don't understand why Russians don't want democracy, what really makes me crazy is that I don't get why some societies are not interested in evolving. It's like the Russians see the folks with the opposing thumbs, but don't care about how easy it makes it to peel bananas. I just don't get it.

Cardboard Economy

2007-12-11T17:32:00.000-08:00

According to All Things Considered, we are all ignoring one of the best economic indicators - cardboard production. I love hearing stories like this that take a complex financial thing like the US economy and make a clear analogy with something we can all relate to. It makes good sense - if cardboard production is up (I guess it's not a commodity where the price really changes; it's just a question of how much is being made at a given time) then that means manufacturers are making, and therefore selling, more goods, and that the economy is therefore okay. This is a fun way of looking at things, but I did have a couple of thoughts while I was listening:

The fact that manufacturers are making more goods doesn't indicate where they're being sold, or to whom. If they're being sold in the US, it could indicate that US consumers are still spending like crazy even though their mortgages are falling apart - which doesn't make me, a solidly conservative "debt is always bad" sort of saver, feel all that encouraged. We could also be selling all those goods to countries outside the US which are taking advantage of our pathetically low dollar. Neither of these would necessarily indicate a strong economy.
I feel uncomfortable being happy that we're killing more trees to make more cardboard. Shouldn't we be using existing boxes, and making lighter-weight packaging that takes a lower toll on the environment? I guess on the scale of environmentally-friendly packing material, cardboard is pretty good, but still...Of course my friend M says that he buys non-recycled stuff because it encourages people to grow more trees and is actually more environmentally friendly. C and I had a long discussion about this and agreed that this might be true in places where it's all new trees being harvested, but in BC where older growth trees (read: 50++ years, when trees are in prime carbon reduction mode) are being chopped down, we don't really think that's the case.
As the president of President Container spoke about his operation, I once again had to note that there are a lot of people who work in jobs might as well be on a different planet from mine. I'm very glad that I don't have to think about how many yards of cardboard are going through and whether the cutter is going to get jammed, but I do have to keep reminding myself that there's a lot more people like that then people like me.

So cardboard. I guess it's the new gold standard.

Russian Democracy

2007-11-28T18:00:00.000-08:00

A couple days ago on Morning Edition, Gregory Feifer reported on the upcoming election in Russia and how Putin is doing his best retain power. As R has reported in his blog several times, Putin has already served the maximum number of consecutive terms that he can under Russian law (depending on how you count, he might have actually served an extra partial term already) and there are lots of theories as to how he'll retain power. While I find all the potential political machinations fascinating, what I find scary is how little Russians seem to care. In fact, Putin is so popular in Russia that most people would welcome him staying in power indefinitely. This is scary on two fronts:

Putin's government is, for all intents and purposes, an authoritarian regime. He's using the same sort of fear propaganda that Bush uses against the Axis of Evil, referring to the enemies who "toppled the Soviet Union and sowed chaos in the 1990s" and saying a vote for his party as the only way to save Russia. Russia is cracking down left and right on freedoms and liberties, everything from disqualifying a political party because they aired an ad that said Putin is leading the country backwards to (according to a recent Business Week article) pulling a Pepsi ad showing teenagers playing music and just raising the volume when the neighbors complain because it was deemed that it incited anti-social behavior. But Russians don't care; they love Putin.
Russian Democracy is being dismantled after only a few years, and it seems like most Russians actually support it! They don't care if Putin changes the Constitution or changes laws, as long as he stays in control.

One of the quotes in the piece summed it up - a Russian woman said, "The thing is, people really feel a sense of stability and order right now. I'd be perfectly happy if Putin stayed for a third term and violated the constitution". It makes me wonder, how long does a country have to have Democracy before people become a true advocates of the system? We always talk about "bringing Democracy" to the Arab world, and it's clear there are countries which are not yet ready for it - where you need to start slowly and build up the economy and make people feel secure before you have complete Democracies so people don't immediately vote for the strongest candidate out of fear. But Russia has been a Democracy for a while now and it was, more or less, working out, so why don't people care that it's slipping away?

I try to compare it to the US - I think most Americans are extremely proud of being a Democracy and of every citizen having the right to vote*. If someone tried to break the constitution here there would be huge outcry (as there was with warrant-less surveillance). While I think I would have been tempted to set aside constitutional limits on how long a President could serve if it would have allowed Bill Clinton to stay in the White House instead of our current excuse for a leader, ultimately I would never have been in favor of it since laws like that keep also limit the amount of time a horrible leader can be in power. So how long does it take? Do you need to be a Democracy for 30 years? 50? more? before your citizens, who might not agree with each other on most things, at least feel like being a Democracy is more important than their differences?

I guess we'll all have to wait and see how far Putin's "cult of personality" takes him.

* Even though I heard another NPR story last week about how 43% of Americans would trade their right to vote for a $50 Olive Garden gift certificate.

AWAD Surprise

2007-11-20T15:08:00.001-08:00

I am a total language geek. I admit it. When I heard about the A.Word.A.Day (AWAD) email list, I signed up right away, and I've been enjoying it for years. AWAD includes a weekly theme of words and their etymologies, and what could be better than that for fun facts to pull out at the dinner table (when you're out of NPR references, of course!) There's also a daily quotation – some of my favorites:

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. -Anne Lamott, writer (1954- )
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning. -Bill Watterson, comic strip artist (1958- ), in his comic strip Calvin & Hobbes
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. -Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author(1743-1826)

Notice a theme? I love that AWAD is as skeptical about religion as I am!

Today on Weekday, Steve Scher* had Anu Garg, the founder of AWAD, on as his guest, and I had one of those moments where you realize all is not as you expect – like when I looked online and saw that Ira Glass looked nothing like I'd been picturing all these years. I'd always imagined Mr. Garg would have a very regal, clear, Indian-accented voice, but instead he had an accent so thick I could barely understand him. I'd always pictured him living somewhere in central California (not at all sure why) but instead he lives here, in Seattle. I'd always assumed Mr. Garg could reply wittily to any question or comment about etymology, but instead he struggled to find something to say when a caller asked him something that wasn't listed in his book. However, the hour was still full of fun facts about cool words, and there he didn't disappoint at all. I'm only going to leave you with one, because I know you're not all geeky like me:

Teetotaler: Apparently this comes from a speech where someone was advocating that people give up alcohol totally – with a capital "T" – and he said it as T-Total. People heard it as teetotal and started calling folks who didn't drink teetotalers.

Isn't that great? And in perfect time for making conversation with family at Thanksgiving get-togethers. Go Mr. Garg.

* I was horrified today to learn from my friend F, who's "in the know" about our local NPR station, that Steve Scher is apparently a lecherous, unlikeable person. E and F have always complained that he talks too slowly and his intros are all the same, but I've always enjoyed Weekday's guests and now I'll never be able to listen to him without thinking of him trying out lame pickup lines on all the women at KUOW. Yuck!

Presidential Laddie Candidate, The Only

2007-11-19T21:21:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, right before Hillary Clinton came out to speak, the announcer gave out a teaser by saying that someone even more exciting was coming the next week. At the time, I couldn't imagine who would be more exciting than the top-ranked democrat and first woman with a serious chance at becoming president, until I found out...her husband! Overall, I was definitely impressed with Bill. He is indeed the great speaker that everyone makes him out to be, especially when he starts in on one of his anecdotes - he is a wonderful storyteller and can really weave the story into the message he's trying to get out. His speech to us focused mostly on giving and the environment, and made a few key points:

Giving is growing - there's been explosive growth in NGOS - with 1,070,000 NGOS in the US, half of which were created since 2000.
Giving is getting easier with technology - he told a charming story about what he called his one duty as husband of a senator - going to the NY State Fair. He was there a few months after the Tsunami and a woman came up to him and gave him some cash for his charity. She worked at the state fair and told him that she'd prefer to give online but that she didn't have time to get to a computer, so she was giving him the money directly. He said the fact that even someone without much education and money preferred to give online made it clear that this was the way to go.
Environmental change is only going to happen if you make it economically advantageous - which it already is. All the countries that signed and are sticking to the Kyoto treaty have had their economies improve relative to countries that haven't. (He argued that this was because many new jobs were created by working on environmentally friendly solutions, although I don't know that you can assume that this was really what made the economies better.)
When Jeb Bush was in town (I promise I'm working on my write up - really! I know I have a lot of catching up to do) he spent his whole talk on leadership and never said one thing that was interesting. Bill Clinton was asked what distinguishes a great leader. He responded that great leaders understand where their people are in the sweep of history, can paint a picture of where they want to be and convince people that they should try to get there, and who lived what they believed. He gave only three examples - Rabin, Mandela, and Muhammad Yunus (last year's peace prize winner for micro-loans, who Bill said he campaigned for for years - apparently when Yunus won he told Bill that the head of the peace prize committee told him, "at least that Bill Clinton fellow will stop calling me now)
Someone asked him if he could be appointed Secretary of State. I loved his response - it made me remember that at one point we actually had a president who was smarter than me. Boy I miss those days! Anyway, he immediately explained that a law was passed in the 1960's to prevent a president from appointing a family member to a cabinet post. He explained the history of the law (Congress was responding to JFK's brother being so influential on his cabinet, although he was one of the best Attorney Generals there were according to Bill) and got in a jab at the Republicans (saying the Dems had passed the law because it was the right thing to do even though it wasn't great for them, something the Republicans wouldn't have done). He also said that he shouldn't be appointed because no one should be on the cabinet who the president cannot fire. He actually joked, "I know she could fire me, but the country doesn't".
He ended on a hopeful note talking about African countries which have a large Muslim population still being very pro-American because they see us a preferring diplomacy to unilateral action because of the work we've done to save their kids from AIDS, malaria, etc. He said it won't be rocket science to change our global image once we get a new administration - we just have to prove to these and other countries that America is back.

*As an aside - I found out that Bill was planning to head to UCLA the next day where my little sister would be seeing him, and I considered baking cookies and asking him to be a courier for me, but I thought that might be a bit forward. E wanted me to try to seduce him so that he could show up and get a picture with Bill, but I said no to that one too. Don't want to cause a scandal and hurt Hillary's rankings!

Even more thoughts on voting

2007-11-06T13:56:00.000-08:00

Today is Election Day, and for the sake of you, my fine readers, I decided that this election I'd take advantage of the new electronic voting machines and report back. I hope you appreciate the fancy investigative journalism I've done here. According to NPR this morning, 90% of ballots cast in today's election will be done by mail, so most of you probably didn't get a chance to experience this. Some thoughts from my fun time this morning:

I'm one of the few and proud who showed up to the polls this morning, along with a gentleman and his four-year-old daughter who said he was teaching her civic responsibility. This is exactly the reason I hate to give up on polling stations, which unfortunately seems quite likely as we move to all vote-by-mail.
The polling station ladies were giving out the non-electronic ballots by default this time. When I requested the electronic ballot the woman helping me had to fill out a form, have me read out the precinct information that she'd filled out from a carbon copy, and then have me hand that carbon copy (and read the precinct information out loud again) to the Deibold representative so he could program the card I'd be using. Why is it that the electronic option actually takes more paper than the non-electronic one?
The Deibold rep didn't seem to want to help me, either - his instructions consisted of, "you've used this before? no? just put your card in there". I'm glad I didn't actually need help, because I don't think he could have provided it.
On the ballot itself, I was very curious as to how they would translate the information that's currently in scantron form on the paper ballots into a web-like UI. I should have realized that they wouldn't - they took no advantage of the opportunities provided by the display and simply presented the exact same interface - three columns, squares instead of bubbles, no links to more information or any improvements to readability.
I also only had the choice of either reading the ballot in high-contrast mode or large fonts. Apparently people aren't allowed to want both.
Once I got to the end of the ballot, I was allowed to review all my selections and hit "print". You'd think this would print the whole ballot, but for some reason it only printed the first few votes, then asked for more confirmation to print the next few votes, and so on. At any time I could reject the ballot, but it let me know up at the top that I could only reject the ballot twice. I don't know what would have happened if I had tried to reject it three times.
Each time I printed, it made this horrible screechy printing noise that I was sure everyone could hear (apparently not; the polling ladies either have bad hearing or the noise is pointed just at the user). When I rejected the ballot just for fun, it called out "ballot rejected". All in all, I felt very exposed.
Although I seem to remember that I would be able to see what was being printed out so I could confirm its accuracy, it was actually hidden behind a plastic panel. Maybe I missed something in my non-introduction from the Deibold rep?
Finally, when I was done the polling ladies and Deibold man all looked at me curiously so I spoke to them about it for a while and described the experience - it turns out not a single one of them (including the Deibold representative!) had ever seen what the screens look like while voting. I guess they all prefer paper.

There were quite a few important issues on the ballot today, so for all of you living in the area, you've got till 8pm - go out and vote!

What Girls Really Talk About

2007-11-06T12:46:00.000-08:00

Warning: Gentlemen - if you're at all squeamish, I suggest you skip this post.

Last weekend my friends C and B and I spent a girl's weekend up at our cabin by the lake. When we got back home, J wanted to know all about what we'd done and what we'd discussed. Unwilling to counter the visions of panties and pillow fights flying through his head, I described our hike and hot tub, the wine we drank, the movies we watched, and outlined a few of the conversations we'd had. What I didn't mention was that we'd had a long and detailed conversation about circumcision. B is the only one of us with children and also the resident expert on Judaism so I was asking her about the rules around it, her personal experience, American norms, and other alternatives (not because I have a child on the way - please don't get any ideas! - but it's always good to be prepared right?). It was an interesting conversation.

Imagine my surprise when, while driving back from lunch today, I heard a story on Day to Day about an Oregon court case regarding circumcision. A divorced couple with a twelve year old son are having a dispute about whether he should get circumcised. His father, who has sole custody (I wonder what the mother did?) converted to Judaism a few years ago and now wants his son to convert as well, and therefore get circumcised. His mother is not Jewish, and objects. She's being supported by an organization called something like "Doctors against Circumcision" who argue that circumcision under any circumstances is bad, although Jews, Muslims, and a large majority of Americans do it. The Rabbi interviewed in the story said that because Judaism is inherited from the mother, the son wouldn't necessarily need to get circumcised if his mother had converted, but because it's his father he would. Other groups are concerned that if the mother wins the case then circumcision might eventually be outlawed entirely, or, as in a case in Chicago, left to the individual to decide when they turn 18.

I've never thought all that much about this topic (until this weekend I suppose) but I don't have a problem with circumcision. However, if there's an appropriateness scale for voluntary surgery on your kids that goes from acceptable ear piercings to horrifying genital mutilations, is it just custom and social norms that puts circumcision closer to ear piercings? I understand the surgery itself, with local anesthesia, is pretty painless for infants, but I don't know how it feels for twelve year olds. And obviously you're not in pain during sex for the rest of your life the way you would be if you were a girl in Africa who'd had genital mutilation. But still, it's a pretty strange thing to do. I don't think this changes a decision I'd make for my own child, but in answer to your question, J, this is what girls really talk about. Along with the pillow fights.

NPR covers France

2007-11-01T20:39:00.000-07:00

Way back before 9/11, I started boycotting French products because I was angry at France's anti-Israel foreign policy and the way they were ignoring or accepting the rise in anti-Semitic attacks within France itself. But it was hard, because while I can live without French wine, it's much more difficult to live without French cheese, and I found out that it's really quite difficult to find any semi-fancy soap that isn't made in France either. It was also hard because I love France. I've probably spent a good six months there between various trips, and I've travelled to all parts of the country (and have I mentioned the eating of the cheese? )

Well, I gave up on the boycott long ago (not too long after America spiraled into the absurdity which was Freedom Fries) but I was still pleasantly surprised when Sarkozy was elected this past May. Part of it was because his name is so much fun to say, but most of it was because he is the first pro-Israel (and pro-US; they often seem to go hand in hand don't they?) leader of France in a long time. And while normally I'd shy away from a conservative politician, France's version of liberalism is too close to socialism for my taste - while I like the idea of working 35 hours a week and spending 6 weeks in the Riviera, I think it's a bit much to consider it a right, especially when your economy is going nowhere.

All this to say, I was interested to hear the news coverage a couple weeks ago about Sarkozy's initial attempts to scrap special retirement privileges for, among other people, miners, train drivers, and opera singers. NPR covered the transit strike several times during the day, and All Things Considered in particular did a good job of interviewing some union workers about how unfair it was and how Sarkozy was trying to ruin what makes France French, but always giving perspective by including folks who disagreed, and mentioning that the vast majority of Frenchmen thought these privileges should be removed. Of course, all news stories took the opportunity to mention that on the same day as the strike, Sarkozy admitted that he and his wife were having issues and in fact their divorce was now final. It made sense to report on this - after all, Sarkozy was having a really bad day and it was interesting, if unfortunate, that these two events would happen simultaneously. But I was sure that NPR was focused on the transit issues and how they would affect France much more than Sarkozy's divorce proceedings, as a serious news station should be. Imagine my surprise when, for the next two weeks, I didn't hear a single word about what was happening in France. What was the outcome of the strike? Will this stop Sarkozy's reforms? What's going he going to try to tackle next? If I want to find this out, apparently I can't do so on NPR.

Presidential Candidate, The Fourth (Part 2)

2007-10-25T17:29:00.000-07:00

More thoughts on Hillary:

One of the women in the audience asked the question that's been asked of every politician I've come to see,"what will you do to help legal immigrants on H1-Bs". Most other speakers have just answered, "we'll raise the number of visas we grant" and left it at that. Instead Clinton took the opportunity to discuss her policy for illegal and legal immigration. You can read about her thoughts on her website, but what I thought was really interesting was that she pointed out that 10 years ago, people weren't freaking out about illegal immigrants. They were too busy going to work and living their lives. It's now, when the economy isn't doing well, and healthcare is not affordable, and it costs enormous amounts to send your kid to college, that people are concerned, and she says that it's because certain politicians took advantage of this to say, "pay no attention to the poor government policies that got us here, blame the immigrants instead!" Clinton says that what we have to do is work on policies that make people feel secure about their lives, and then the politicizing of the immigration debate minimize and we'll be able to concentrate on helping the illegal immigrants and enticing educated legal immigrants to our country.
At one point she spoke about our budget deficits, and she made a great point about how owing enormous amounts of money is not only bad from a basic budget perspective, but from a foreign policy perspective. She said that when her husband was president, China massed on the border of Taiwan. Bill sent in a fleet to the South China Sea and China pulled back. Today if the same thing were to happen, China could simply say, "if you don't remove your fleet we'll start dumping dollars". It was one of the first concrete examples I've seen of problems caused by our government's over-extended finances (aside from the prices J and I had to deal with in London!)
Someone asked her how she'd win in Middle America, which is a fair question. She talked about what she'd done when running for Senator in New York. Rather than focusing on areas that were highly Democratic already, she went to very Republican areas to work on reducing her margin of loss. She talked about talking to craftspeople in upstate NY who lived in towns too small to support a marketplace for their goods, and how she worked with EBay to put together an online marketplace for them. Of the 20 people in that town, 5 couldn't figure out how to make it work and gave up, but 5 did extremely well...and those people were more liable to vote for her. She said efforts like that are the reason she won by 55% her first election but by 67% the second time around. And she also said that's what Kerry did wrong - he focused on places like Reno and Las Vegas in Nevada where he already had huge support and could hold rallies that looked good on TV, but he lost in the rural areas that Bush and Cheney visited regularly.
Finally, I was also impressed by all her local references. She must give multiple speeches a day all around the country, but she included multiple references to the Seattle area, and did it in a really natural way that made it clear that she'd just absorbed the information rather than having some staff member add bits to specific areas of her speech. She mentioned a book our local congressman had written on the environment, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation on healthcare, and even mentioned a recent product our company had released (actually the product on which my friend B's husband has been working his butt off!). I appreciated the amount of preparation she must have done.

Overall, it was an inspiring hour, and I just wish I could remember all the details. Between the gorgeous changing leaves outside and the candidates coming just to see us, I can pretty much pretend I'm in New Hampshire!

Presidential Candidate, The Fourth (Part 1)

2007-10-24T14:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was extremely excited, and a bit apprehensive, because Hillary Clinton came to town. Excited because at the moment she's the person I'm most likely to vote for and I was looking forward to seeing her in person, and apprehensive because after Bill Richardson's abysmal visit, I was worried that Senator Clinton would also crash and burn.

Luckily, I was very pleasantly surprised and impressed. I thought Senator Clinton came off as professional, intelligent, powerful, and even charismatic. She projected just the image I would want for the president of the United States. I took a bunch of notes about what she said on my laptop, but due I managed to lose them somehow (I can only imagine it must have been a secret service mission in which they replaced my laptop with one that was identical except for the deletion of the mail I sent to myself with my notes!). So unfortunately, you'll have to be content with a few thoughts about what I remember:

Clinton's speech was the first one of all the politicians I've heard that was organized and logical. She laid out her four issues and throughout her speech you could see she was going through them in a methodical way. It seems like a small thing, but it really made what she said hang together. So what were her 4 issues? Well due to my email screw-up and pathetic short-term memory, I can only remember the last three:
2. Strengthening the Middle Class - basically improving on health care, infrastructure, and economics
3. Comprehensive government reform - specifically getting competent people back in government
4. Restoring America’s standing in the world - can't really argue with that, can you?
She told a charming personal story about Sputnik (and no, it wasn't quite as moving as Elaine's). She did say that at the time, everyone felt like the US was in charge and going strong - we'd won the war, we were the only real superpower, etc, and that when the Russians launched this "piece of junk" into space, the Republican president called in the best scientists of the time, created agencies that became DARPA and NASA, and pushed young people into math and science. She said that she was in 5th grade at the time and her teacher told her that President Eisenhower wanted her to learn math and science, and she believed that the President had actually called up her teacher to talk to her personally. Her point, of course, was that at some point in the past Republicans actually listened to scientists, and she took the opportunity to talk about her science agenda, which involves bringing politics out of science while raising the federal funding levels for science organizations.

More tomorrow...

Mr. Kassel's Message

2007-10-21T12:03:00.000-07:00

As I was listening to Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me yesterday while driving over to meet up with E for a fun day at Turkfest, it occurred to me that I have no idea what I would have him say if I won Karl Kassel's voice on my answering machine. So I thought I'd do some research. First, I found out this Karl Kassel is yet another NPR reporter who spells their name in an unexpected way. I'd always thought that Castle was a great last name for a guy with such a solid and commanding voice.

After I got over that disappointment, I found out that there's a Facebook group called "All I Want for Christmas is Karl Kassel's Voice On My Answering Machine". Of course, I had to join. Karl Kassel is actually on Facebook himself, but I didn't want to be presumptuous and ask him to be my friend.

Finally, I looked for examples of messages and found out that Mr. Kassel himself has collected some of his favorite messages and posted them here (requires RealPlayer). They seem to break down into a few different categories:

People who are trying to get Carl to do something embarrassing
People who make fun of NPR geeks who might be calling just to check out his voice (that would so be me!)
People who are really impressed with themselves for winning
People who write jingles or news articles for Carl to narrate
My personal favorite, people who claim they've just run off and eloped with Carl. (J - please don't be sad when you read this, I know we're already married but come on...Carl Kassel!)

So now that I've got some info, I'm waiting to (a) be inspired and (b) actually get on the show and win! But I'm curious about all of you - what would I hear if I called your answering machines after you'd won?

Sponsor Trouble

2007-10-17T19:21:00.000-07:00

On All Things Considered today, Cheryl Corley reported on a brouhaha going on at an NPR station in Pittsburgh, WDUQ. WDUQ recently decided to return money to Planned Parenthood and decline to have them sponsor a show. I got the impression that they had purchased something a bit more ad-like than the normal NPR "this show brought to you by " because the Planned Parent representative specifically said that they were advertising some of their non-abortion services like birth control and gynecological care, but regardless, it was an NPR ad so I'm sure it was still pretty low-key.

Now, I suppose NPR should be able to accept or reject any sponsor they choose. For instance, according to Ms. Corley, there was a lawsuit that NPR won a while back where the Ku Klux Klan was trying to force an NPR station to let them be sponsors; obviously I'd prefer that NPR would be able to avoid that sort of thing. However, NPR is a publicly funded radio station, on airwaves that are specially set aside for non-commercial/educational stations (actually KUOW, our local station, is an exception to this last part but in general it's true). In my head that puts them in a similar class to a school or library, where you'd expect that they'd have to be pretty open to any sponsor unless they were doing something illegal (I wouldn't expect a crack dealer to be able to sponsor a show, for instance, and the Ku Klux Klan falls somewhat into this bucket since they get persecuted for hate crimes quite regularly). Frankly, if they don't get their money from Planned Parenthood, they'll have to get it from their listeners or the government, aka us.

Even more disturbing, though, is the reason behind this decision. WDUQ resides on the campus of Dunsque University, a Catholic School. From their website:
Duquesne University holds the broadcast license for DUQ's 25,000-watt broadcast signal. The station is a non-academic unit reporting to the Provost and Academic Vice President. Duquesne University provides DUQ with annual in-kind support (facilities and services) and 6% of cash funding. DUQ is considered self-sustaining. This means that DUQ must raise its direct cash operating support from sources outside of the University, such as membership and program underwriting.
Dunsque University was apparently offended by the Planned Parenthood ads and asked that they be discontinued, and the station complied. I can't really blame WDUQ; moving the station would be extremely expensive and the University provides 6% of their cash funding as mentioned above. However, there's no doubt that there's a short and slippery slope between removing a sponsor and editing a story. The University representative interviewed for the story denied that the school would ever make such a ludicrous request, but I have to say I'm extremely skeptical. I thought the whole purpose of NPR being government and listener funded was that public radio didn't have to kowtow to special interests so it could be as fair as possible. Isn't that hard enough these days? It's disappointing that a school that clearly values public radio like Dunsque University would choose to mess with one of its fundamental characteristics.

Mini-ode to Sputnik (and Elaine)

2007-10-09T18:21:00.000-07:00

As I was driving home from B's house last Thursday night, I heard a re-broadcast of The Conversation in which Steven J. Dick, a NASA historian, was being interviewed about the history and attitudes 50 years ago when Sputnik launched. It was interesting to hear about the fear that many Americans felt because of the cold war, and to get the perspective of people who were excited about it from an evolution of science perspective. But my favorite was a caller named Elaine who said that she and her husband were camping at Mt. Rainier a month after the launch and they saw Sputnik travelling across the sky at night. She said they were amazed that, "something from our planet was up there in the sky so far away, like a star in the night." She also said that they didn't see it as a threat, but instead, "as a huge expansion for mankind, to have a whole other aspect of life, and life beyond our own boundaries."

I thought she expressed the emotion beautifully - to me that's what space exploration is about - it's a way to reach beyond ourselves, a way to connect with all people on Earth in a quest to put a part of ourselves out among the stars. Maybe I spent a little too much of my childhood watching Star Trek, but to me the thought of space is uplifting, and both I and the host (he actually said "well done Elaine") thought she captured that feeling, and I got home feeling like a better person for it.

So happy 50th birthday, Sputnik, and thanks Elaine.

Random Republican, The First

2007-09-30T21:09:00.000-07:00

Along with interesting Presidential candidates, lately we've been getting a strange spurt of random Republican politicians. A couple weeks ago E and I went to see Newt Gingrich speak. When I've thought of Gingrich, which has not been often, I've always pictured this rotund, sweaty man preaching that President Clinton was reprehensible. I certainly didn't expect to find him to be quite charismatic and funny. I'm going to go ahead and assume it's mostly due to speechwriters, but I guess you don't get elected so many times without having a decent public presence. I thought I'd share some quick thoughts from his speech:

He's positioning himself as a centrist; he even said he thinks Senator Clinton has an 80% chance of winning the presidency. Interestingly, J pointed out that Gingrich recently said he'd consider running for president if his people could raise enough money, although as of today he's saying he won't because he can't keep working for his non-profit.
As with all politicians, I'm learning, he talked a lot about problems without giving any real solutions. Specifically, he said education is broken and we’re not likely to get any answers because the media is too into soundbites. His eventual "solution" for this was that technology would solve everything. Okay...
He spent the talk being very pro-science and pro-technology, which of course was appropriate for the audience. Specifically, he said 2/3 of all new knowledge will come from outside the US because we don’t have the relative mass of scientists. He made no mention, of course, of the fact that his party keeps cutting funding for science research.
On the other hand, you can tell he’s not an engineer because he told an anecdote about how he never knows how much money he takes out of foreign ATMs (he doesn’t do the math, just guesses based on where the number is). He asked for a show of hands of who else is in the same boat but didn't get very many.
A couple of soundbites: "The Republican battle cry for next year is 'we’re bad, they’re worse'" and "Nobody has made money in America betting against the Clintons"
He gave us a history lesson - apparently the US has had 8 cycles of fundamental change, whatever that means. Along with Jefferson's time and Lincoln's era, he said his “Contract with America” is one of those fundamental cycle. Humility may not be one of his greatest virtues.
And of course, I have to critique his website, http://newt.org. First of all, the ego in using his first name is pretty astonishing. Secondly, it's funny he doesn't own newt.com. On his website you can pay to download his iNewt podcasts, and real Newt fans can buy a signed gavel for $199. Hanukkah is coming up, but please don't buy one for me.
Finally, he ended by saying, “Tell all your smart friends to vote or they have no cause to gripe when the dumb people are in charge!” I'm embarrassed to admit I couldn't have put it better myself.

And more swear words

2007-09-26T15:30:00.000-07:00

Today on Weekday, Steve Scher interviewed Steven Pinker, one of my favorite linguists. I didn't listen. That's because, along with interesting political speakers who visit here at work (like presidential candidates and my soon-to-come review of Newt Gingrich), we get to see interesting authors too, and we were lucky enough to get Dr. Pinker in to speak about his new book.

It was a great lecture, and I recommend everyone read his new book because as an audience we spent the better part of an hour and a half laughing out loud at some of his examples, but my favorite was his discussion of how you can tell a lot about human thought by the obscene language they use (I've never heard so much bad language spoken in such a short period of time; and hearing it at work just made it that much more funny!) and brief divergence into how swear words in different languages don't translate. Specifically, he said that in Quebec, being a very Catholic society and the place where he grew up, the worst swear words you can utter are, "Damn Tabernacle" and "Damn Chalice". He also said that he's single-handedly trying to resurrect a phrase last commonly used in the sixteenth century because he loves its beautiful alliterative imagery: "Kiss a cow's cunt". Not quite "Three hundred hairy bears!" but still pretty good.

Know Thy Neighbor

2007-09-06T15:31:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday I got stuck listening to The Conversation. I think Ross Reynolds is a great moderator - he lets people voice their opinions, cuts them off respectfully, and doesn't impose his viewpoints. Unfortunately, I'm not really that interested in hearing what the Hoi Polloi think - I'd rather hear from someone who's actually studied the subject under discussion and can make reasoned, thoughtful arguments. All that to say that I'm usually not a fan of the show.

However, at the end of the show on Tuesday Mr. Reynolds interviewed a member of Know Thy Neighbor Oregon. This year Oregon passed two laws supporting Gay and Lesbian equality (one for same-sex domestic partnerships, and one for anti-discrimination) and some citizens are trying to get initiatives on the ballot to overturn those laws. The Know Thy Neighbor organization is trying to educate people about those initiatives to ensure that if they sign the petitions, they are doing so with full comprehension of what it would mean for Oregon's Gay and Lesbian citizens. They're also letting people know that if the initiatives make it on the ballot, they will publish the names and addresses of every person who signs the petition.

My initial thought on hearing this threat was positive, "good, maybe that'll keep people from putting this offensive initiative on the ballot!" However, that was followed quickly by, "ouch, that's a serious violation of people's privacy and would I still feel the same way if this was an initiative I agreed with?" However, the representative of Know Thy Neighbor made what I thought was an excellent point. The whole point of the initiative process (which I have all sorts of issues with, but I'll cover that another time) is to let citizens act like legislators and sponsor laws. If a legislator sponsors a law, that goes into the public record. Similarly, if a citizen sponsors a law, it's reasonable to do the same. I actually think this should be taken a step further - let's make every name, at least, public for every initiative petition that people sign. This would serve several purposes:

It would improve the accuracy of the petitions because you could check whether your name had shown up on the list and get it removed if you didn't agree with the initiative
It would allow people to sign petitions online rather than relying on running into someone looking for signatures. This happened to me when the anti-smoking initiative was in its petition state - I really wanted to sign it but almost missed the opportunity until finally on the last day I tracked down a man with the petition standing around in front of Trader Joe's.
It would potentially make it cheaper to add initiatives because you wouldn't need to hire folks to collect signatures. This isn't a good thing because I want more initiatives (since I don't) but I'd prefer to see a level playing field so people like Tim Eyman with a huge organization behind them would not have as much of advantage over people with no financial backing who want to do things like stop smoking.
Finally, it might encourage people to actually read the literature for the petition they're signing, or at least ask a few questions before they do so.

So I'm thinking I should start collecting signatures for my new initiative to publicize all initiative signators. Any interest in joining my cause? :-)

NPR v CNN

2007-09-05T19:00:00.000-07:00

It's always nice to have a reminder of why I'm an NPR junkie.

Last week as I was driving to the gym, I heard Sylvia Poggioli report on the fires in Greece. She described the devastation, but also talked about the protests going on in Athens to decry the government's lack of preparation and alleged negligence in underfunding the firefighters. She covered the potential repercussions to upcoming elections (more people are undecided), and, most interestingly, mentioned that many people think the fires were set intentionally because Greek forest land is inadequately documented and the zoning officials are corrupt so by burning a patch of land, people can take over what was once a natural resource and use it to build homes. All in all, in just a few minutes she gave a multi-faceted insight into the fires.

Then I went to the gym, went into the "ladies only" area (J thinks it's offensive and that there should be a "men's only" area too, but I like it because the TVs all have the subtitles turned on and there are actual windows and natural light), got on the treadmill, and noticed CNN was doing a report on the fires in Greece too. The gist of their story? "There are fires, but don't worry they're under control, but it's hot so there might be more...now let's talk about Princess Diana".

Good to know that CNN is where you go for a nuanced discussion of someone who died 10 years ago. I'll stick with NPR.

More thoughts on Voting, Part II

2007-08-27T21:06:00.000-07:00

To continue yesterday's thoughts:

The guys running the electronic voting machines (EVMs) are technically inept. I was excited to find out that I had a choice between an old-school "scantron" ballot or an EVM. Since I don't trust that newfangled technology stuff, I went for the old school. However, I then asked the Diebold technitian (I guess every polling spot had one) for a demo since I've been really curious about them. He got very confused saying he couldn't really show me because I'd already voted, but when I asked him to just talk me through it he agreed. According to him, I would have gotten a number from the election officials which corresponds to my precinct (and therefore the various races I was eligible to vote in) and he would "burn" it onto a smartcard. Okay, he didn't actually call it a smartcard, and he's completely wrong about burning it but whatever. Next, I would put the smartcard into the machine, ignore the old-school number pad that was attached (he couldn't tell me what this was used for), and use the touchscreen to cast my votes. I even got to see the paper trail, which would have recorded my vote on receipt paper under glass, so I could see it to confirm my vote, but not tamper with it or take it with me. Technical ineptitude aside, I was reasonably impressed with the EVM so I'll give it a shot in November.
The poll workers were so happy to see me. The polling place was pretty empty, as expected during an early odd-year primary, and it was really cute how excited they were to have someone young-ish, interested, and competent there (there was one other guy trying to vote while I was there, but he was old and curmudgeonly and totally confused by the fact that you had to choose only candidates of one party, not both - more on that later).
I've heard from several Canadians that they don't understand why Americans have such low voter turnout until they first see an American ballot and realize how long it is and how much research you have to do to figure out what to vote for. I guess there you just pick your party or person and that's it. I wonder if we should consider something similar, but then I go back to my point about people needing to make an effort to vote, and I think, "why bother"?
I'm totally befuddled by the fact that Washingtonians get so freaked out at having to declare party allegiance during the primaries. In California you registered as a Democrat (or Republican if you were from Orange County) and that was that. When you went to vote you got your Democratic ballot, and all was good. Here people can't handle that. They want to vote for anyone they like during the primary, and when that was declared unconstitutional they tried the current method which has you "declare" a party at the top of the primary ballot and then only vote for the candidates on that section of the ballot (this is what was causing the curmudgeon mentioned above some confusion - he understood declaring one party, but wanted to vote for candidates in all the party ballot sections). Why is this so awful? J even uses it as an excuse not to vote in the primaries - he claims he's protesting. What I don't get is how a system with no parties works better - let's say you have 10 Republican candidates and 2 Democratic ones vying for a spot - if the Republican vote gets split 10 ways it's likely you'd have 2 Democrats on the ticket in November. That's great for me (generally) but seems pretty unfair. I'm fine with the primary system as is, but I'd love to see a full-election system where you could vote for candidates in priority order, so that if your #1 candidate didn't get more than 50% of the votes, your vote would roll down to your #2 candidate and so on. That way you could vote for the small-party candidate without feeling like you were throwing away your vote.

Anyway, there are just a few of my many thoughts on voting. Now if only I ruled the world...well, at least the polls would be populated by tech-savy geeks who would know about upcoming elections. It would be a small step forward.

Some Thoughts on Voting, Part I

2007-08-25T18:00:00.001-07:00

August 21st was our primary, and, as always, I did my civic duty, went to the polling place, and voted. I love voting, particularly the satisfaction of reading through the voting pamphlet ahead of time, discussing any questions or dilemmas I have about propositions or candidates with friends, and going in and marking my vote on a scantron and inserting it into the submission machine. Yes, I'm the worst kind of keener and a complete geek. That said, there were a lot of interesting things about both the voting experience and the atmosphere around it.

There are some dumb people working at the polling stations. I always thought I might want to volunteer at a polling station, but I'm now convinced that would be a bad idea. Some examples - one of the women working at the poll did not know what my voter registration card was (!) and was shocked to hear that there would be another election in November. When she asked one of the other poll workers how she knew that (the other worker and I were having a conversation about the upcoming election) that rational woman mentioned that she'd gone to training. The clueless woman said, "so did I! You must be so smart."
The vote by mail requirement might be delayed. I really love going to the poll to vote. In fact, I think if people can't get off their butt (and they don't have a good reason like being out of town or disabled) and make the minimal effort required to vote, they shouldn't really be allowed to. After all, fewer voters means my vote counts more. On the other hand, it's hard to argue with the numbers for this election: Poll votes-29,531, Absentee ballots-192,840. Anyway, the clued-in poll worker mentioned above told me that King county hadn't decided when it would go to vote-by-mail only elections, so I might have a few more that I can go to the polls for.
I think people don't vote because they don't get stickers. In my youth in California, we got stickers that said "I voted" and all us keeners wore them all day long to remind other people to vote too. I loved those stickers, and I don't know why we don't have them here in Washington. It seems like a small price to pay.

More tomorrow.

A Pleasant Surprise

2007-08-25T17:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Rick Steves was interviewed on Weekday in some fun NPR cross-pollination. Usually I listen (or rather, try not to, bears excepted) to Rick Steves on weekends when he's putting on his "gee shucks, I'm just an American, I don't know what I'm doing" persona, and usually I change the channel. I think Mr. Steves created his persona of the American who's never left Kansas before back in the 1980's, and unfortunately his show seems about as relevant, as he pesters his guests, invariably guides in some country in Europe, with inane questions and talks over their responses. I've also had one bad experience using his guidebook (it sent us to several uninteresting places and bad restaurants in Paris years ago when travelling with friends) and I've heard that the best way to use his books is to read them to find out which little town in Italy to avoid - because if he mentions it, it will be filled with tourists.

However, Mr. Steves has two things going for him - J likes his TV shows on public television, and since he's a local I had one of my few "celebrity sightings" when I saw him snowboarding at Steven's Pass last winter.

Now he has a third thing - instead of interviewing him about travel, Steve Scher interviewed Mr. Steves about his support for de-criminalizing marijuana. Who would have thunk it? Even more surprising, Mr. Steves was actually quite eloquent about his position, bringing in a lot of his experiences travelling through Europe (did you know that in Zurich by law all publicly accessible bathrooms have to have blue light - technically blacklight, as C. and her sister were quick to point out to me last night while we were discussing this - so that junkies can't see their veins? And syringes are available for sale from vending machines outside.) and also bringing up the good point that kids aren't dumb, and if we tell them pot is the root of all evil and will make them poor, ugly, and pregnant, they will figure out that we're lying and stop believing all the other things we say too.

I have to say I agree. I grew up in Berkeley, where you can walk around any respectable neighborhood and notice the distinctive aroma of marijuana. I don't know anyone in high school who hadn't tried it, and I know two successful adults (as in, folks my parent's age - I'm not prepared to admit that I'm an adult yet) who have smoked pot every single day for decades with no deleterious effect. I also know a guy my age who, while he graduated from college and has a reasonably successful career, cannot function in a social situation without smoking up hourly. So yes, marijuana can be a bad thing if abused - but so can alcohol - and we've come to the realization as a society that it's more important to treat alcoholism as a disease than as a crime. It would be nice to see this topic be de-politicized so we can all stop wasting our effort and money trying to solve a non-problem. At least I got the pleasant surprise of having Rick Steves stand up for a cause that I agree with.

Nuclear Power

2007-08-20T20:03:00.000-07:00

David Kestenbaum did a report on All Things Considered today about France's plans for storing nuclear waste from their reactors. Some astounding amount of France's power comes from nuclear reactors, one of the few things the French government seems to have handled competently (they need power and don't have natural reserves, so nuclear is a reasonable solution). What I didn't realize was that the French aren't all enamoured of nuclear power, even though they have been using it safely for years. I always assumed that fear of nuclear energy would go away after enough exposure to it, but according to Mr. Kestenbaum, 1 in 3 French people is opposed to nuclear power, and only 1 in 5 is actually for it (I'm not sure how those numbers worked out, but it's an EU poll, so we can only imagine).

The biggest issue there, just like here, is where to store the nuclear waste. In France they've mandated a location - a city called Bure - and are dumping enough money there to convince the residents that it's a reasonable idea, although many still don't like it. Here, Yucca mountain has been under discussion for years as a spot to store our nuclear waste, and we don't seem to be any closer to a resolution. Honestly, though, I think it's just a matter of perception - people are disproportionately scared of radiation without really understanding it - perhaps because they don't really understand it.

In my college physics class (thank goodness for Professor Muller - even if it was the worst grade of my entire university career, at least he made it fun), we watched a documentary about attitudes of people who lived near a nuclear reactor. One of the men who worked at the facility was found to have elevated levels of radiation, but on investigation it was discovered that the radiation wasn't coming from the nuclear plant, but instead from naturally occurring radon in the earth. When local people found out about this, they were relieved, because the radiation was coming from "natural" causes. They went about their daily business, continuing to hate and mistrust the nuclear power plant and not worry about the fact that they were all going to get cancer. Of course as physics students, we knew that it was only the type of radiation, not the source, that mattered. But we weren't surprised to see that average Americans didn't understand that distinction.

Similarly, we don't seem to have problems finding places to build new coal power plants in the US, but no one wants a nuclear waste facility anywhere near them. I don't get it - the pollution caused by the coal plants is going to have a much larger impact on the environment and people's health - at least in the near future - than a waste facility. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a complete proponent of nuclear power, and frankly I wouldn't want any kind of power plant or waste facility in my backyard. But if I had to choose, trying to address the energy crisis by expanding our nuclear facilities seems like a much better way to go.

Clementine

2007-08-20T19:48:00.000-07:00

Although the song Clementine is really about water safety, the only part I ever remember is the first verse:*

In a cavern, in a canyon,

Excavating for a mine

Lived a miner, forty-niner

And his daughter Clementine

According to Melissa Block on All Things Considered today, the place where the miner lives is actually quite important. Note the contrast - in Utah we've sent a search and rescue team, three of whom died, to try to find six miners who are trapped and likely dead. (In fact, I have to say I'm really surprised that every news report keeps acting as though there's actually hope that they're alive. I seem to remember them being a lot more pessimistic - and realistic - about previous mine cave-ins. Why do they continue to think these miners are alive after so long?) Anyway, in China, 181 miners have been trapped for the last couple of days, and aside from the beginning of some protests from the miner's families who want information from the mine owners, nothing has happened. Ms. Block reports that there were many warnings of flooding causing dangerous conditions which prompted several mines in the region to close, but this particular mine didn't close, whether because they had safety gear that actually made it safe or because economics prevailed. Either way, there is a distinct lack of outcry and action. Even more astounding is the fact that 13 people die per day in coal mines in China, and this is after new safety standards have greatly reduced the casualties per ton of coal extracted. I guess if I had to be a coal miner, I'd rather be in Utah. I certainly can't think of many other circumstances for wanting to move there.

*I do actually remember the chorus and the last verse about kissing Clementine's little sister, but let's not get into that.

I'm not as short as I think I am

2007-08-17T16:54:00.000-07:00

I didn't think about it much, but I guess I always assumed that Americans were pretty tall, on average. If I had to have guessed, I'd have said that we were taller than most Asian countries, and probably shorter than folks in Scandinavia. Strangely enough, I would be right today (more or less) but not in the not-so-far past. As Frank Deford mentioned on Morning Edition last Wednesday, apparently Americans actually used to be the tallest country in the world, but the winner now is Holland (followed by Denmark).

American Average height (for men) = 5'10''

Dutch Average height (for men) = 6'1"

Considering that my minimum bar for men I date is 6 ft (yes, I've broken it a few times, but that's the goal) I guess if I were still single I'd head on over to Amsterdam and see if I could get a guy to buy me some tulips.

I did a bit of web research on this and came across some (completely unsubstantiated) fun facts:

About 100 years ago, 25% of men who attempted to join the army in Holland were rejected as being too short, less than 62 inches tall
In recent years, the Dutch have had to make changes to building codes in order to provide taller door frames

But what I thought was most interesting were the possible reasons for Holland and Denmark having such tall people. My assumption was that it was just good genetics, but apparently what's really key is that wealth is spread more evenly in Scandinavia (thanks to the 60%+ tax rate, I guess) so on average more people are well nourished and able to get to their maximum genetic heights, whereas in the US there are more pockets of malnourished people who bring down our average.

And since taller people tend to earn more money, I now propose a new political platform for one of the many conservative presidential candidates to adopt: up the money we put into food stamps, and America gets taller (and richer). I think it's a winner.*

* Yes, I do realize it's also completely circular in that people who are taller make more money (according to the linked article) because they are better nourished because their parents are smarter and make more money and pass on good IQ points but still...maybe the Republicans won't figure that out. (Read Freakonomics for a similar experiment giving books to every kid in the hopes they'd be smarter too.)

My new favorite word

2007-08-17T16:49:00.000-07:00

Overheard Wednesday, on All Things Considered: "happenstantially". Even Robert Siegel was clearly so impressed he had to repeat it to make sure he'd heard it right.

Web 2.0 Faceoff

2007-08-13T13:55:00.000-07:00

On August 3rd, Danah Boyd spoke on On the Media about the social striation of social networking sites, specifically Facebook vs. MySpace. Her description boiled down to this: Facebook is for elitist college-educated people, while MySpace is for grungy non-college bound blue-collar folks. Boyd claims that this is because Facebook was started by a bunch of Harvard kids while MySpace was started by some kids who wanted to keep track of their favorite rock band concerts.

Now I had done absolutely no conscious thinking about this topic, and actually I have very little interaction with MySpace at all (I'll admit to being on Facebook - I like being able to keep tabs on what my baby sister is doing at college and see other photos from friends, but I really only joined as part of some research I was doing at work). However, I will admit that in my head, MySpace was always in the "skanky" list. I remember reading an article in Time (or possibly Business Week) a year or two ago where one of the 100 most influential people was a girl who had made a huge business out of selling suggestive pictures of herself based to her 100,000+ friends on MySpace. However, when the topic came up at work recently in a discussion of web design, MySpace was also immediately and consistently consigned to be a "don't" by my colleagues. I guess we've all bought into the "MySpace is skanky" hype.

What I do wonder is when the assumption was made that people who are into music don't go to college. I suppose the idealized view of a band groupie is someone who's sort of anti-establishment, but I taking it to the next step of assuming they're also all uneducated seems extreme. Either way, I'm not planning to hit MySpace any time soon. I guess that makes me an elitist, college-educated snob.

Bonus: check out one of my favorite geeky comics on Facebook: http://xkcd.com/300/

NPR meets Presidential Candidate, the Third, Sort Of

2007-08-13T13:50:00.000-07:00

Imagine my excitement when two of my favorite blogging topics, NPR + Presidential Candidates visiting the area, coincided! I posted a few weeks ago that John McCain was coming to visit our fair company, and I'd be attending and posting a review of his visit and my thoughts on him as a presidential candidate (don't worry, I haven't randomly changed my political stripes - this was going to be purely speculative). However, I got an email a day or so beforehand that unfortunately he had to postpone his visit until a later date. I was really thrilled to hear on NPR that very day that John McCain was postponing a trip to Seattle and Portland because he wanted to go vote on a bill going through Congress. It's like the folks at NPR reads my blog! Okay, not really, but still...I can pretend.

Unfortunately the next speaker we have coming to town is Jeb Bush, who is neither a presidential candidate (I hope!) nor someone I really want to see in any context that doesn't involve giving him tomatoes to throw at his brother. We'll see if I attend.

Personal update

2007-08-13T13:30:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, it has been a long and difficult couple of weeks. Friends in high seas, a slightly disappointing beginning to a new enterprise, seven Harry Potter books to read, and general ennui and exhaustion. However, yesterday J and I celebrated our first year of marriage with a lovely dinner and walk, so I'm ready to begin anew. I'll start with a couple quick posts of catch-up and then hope to get some good NPR listening (especially with my new favorite NPR correspondent now working locally - go Ann!) in soon.

Picking on Nigeria

2007-07-30T18:22:00.000-07:00

I guess it's better than picking on China again...last week on Morning Edition, Ofeibea Quist-Arcton (yet another fabulous NPR name) covered the environmental disaster caused by burning natural gas in Nigeria's oil fields. I was surprised to hear that Nigerian natural gas is burned on site in the oil fields rather than being used for energy because the oil coming up is worth so much money that it's not worthwhile to separate and transport it. The fires created are actually visible by Satellite (they actually specified that you can see the fires in Google Earth and there's a picture on the NPR website, but of course you could use any company's satellite viewing technology). Why is this a problem?

It causes more carbon emissions than any single source in the rest of Africa.
Natural gas flares worldwide account for more emissions than all the Kyoto treaty projects will prevent combined.
Nigerian villages nearby are poverty stricken and have no electricity, even though their natural resources are being used. Nigeria in general suffers from energy shortage.
The nearby villagers are getting sick from the polluted air, and the heat is killing their crops.
All that energy is being wasted - the World Bank (through wikipedia) says it's enough to supply the entire world with their natural gas needs for 20 days.

So why is this picking on Nigeria rather than just alerting us to a serious environmental issue? Well, there are two reasons:

In the piece, Ms. Quist-Arcton devoted one quick sentence to the fact that Russia actually burns more natural gas than Nigeria does. So why aren't we picking on Russia? Surely they have more infrastructure and natural gas pipelines already in place, and getting them to change their habits will have more impact overall
Secondly, Nigeria is one of the few places in the world where they're lowering the amount of gas flaring (they promised to eliminate it by 2008, and although they won't make that target, they're making progress towards it). Again, why not pick on countries that aren't doing their bit?

So there you go, picking on Nigeria. I guess it wouldn't be news if it wasn't picking on someone.

Things you don't often hear on NPR

2007-07-29T21:39:00.000-07:00

TMBG being interviewed on Studio 360 about mermaids and discussing the fact that they're not erotic because they're lacking certain "parts", and then Kurt Andersen, who's interviewing them, saying, "but you can get to second base!"

Contagious Fat

2007-07-26T10:40:00.000-07:00

According to Allison Aubrey on Morning Edition, fat is contagious*. It's not in the standard sense of sneezing on someone and causing them to suddenly gain seven pounds (although wouldn't that put a whole new spin to the phrase, "i spit on you") but in the sense of ideas and social norms. Using information collected from a 30-year heart study in one town along with records of social networks among the participants, a study found that those who had friends who gained weight were more likely to gain weight themselves. Neighbors apparently didn't count.

I thought this was a bit overstated, but a few of the points really made me think:

The amount that I eat is definitely influenced (not controlled, but influenced) by how much the other people I'm with are eating. If no one else is ordering dessert, I won't either, and conversely if everyone is ordering dessert, I'm much more likely to indulge. On Tuesdays when I go to C's house, I generally eat less than I would at home, simply because she and her husband do (my hips thank you, C!). I'm not any less full, but if I were cooking at home I'd probably serve myself more without thinking about it. So in that sense, my friends' fat (or lack thereof) is contagious.

The vast majority of my friends and co-workers are quite fit and relatively conscious of eating healthy food. In fact, over the past couple of years, many of them have lost quite a bit of weight. This trend seemed to start as some people started taking advantage of a weight management program offered by work, but I noticed at the time that it also affected others (like me) who weren't on the program. I wonder how much of that was inspirational, how much was people not bringing unhealthy snacks to share, and how much was happenstance.

I definitely feel social pressure that it is somewhat uncool to diet or exercise to lose weight. Acceptable reasons would include the nebulous "be healthier" and the more specific "train for a race" or "control blood sugar". I've even found myself using this logic with J, saying things like, "you should go running today because you want to be healthier" rather than, "you should go running today because I'd love it if you had washboard abs". Depending on the specific folks I'm with, this stricture can be more or less severe, but I do remember a friend telling me disdainfully that a mutual friend had taken up exercising "only to get thin!". I wonder what effect this pressure has on fat contagion.

And because this report was on as I drove to work, NPR has not only informed me, but I'm probably less likely to sneak into our group admin's office and steal a cookie today.

*Technically it's according to New England Journal of Medicine, but Ms. Aubrey is the one who brought it to my attention.

Secularism

2007-07-23T20:07:00.000-07:00

On days like today (and most other days too, of course!) I feel lucky to have a friend like E, who is a Cypriot and can fill me in on Turkish politics. In the morning as I was driving to work, Morning Edition had a piece on Turkey re-electing their Prime Minister, whose opposition fears that he is "too Islamist". If E hadn't explained it to me a while back, I wouldn't have understood the way many Turks feel about the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who founded the modern republic of Turkey as a secular state, and I would have been confused at a Muslim country being worried about a leader being "too Islamist".* Atatürk seems to have been a great proponent of education and women's equality, but also of not passing laws that forced people to change their ways or their religious beliefs, but simply encouraged them towards tolerance and secularism (for instance, his wife wore a headscarf, but he married her in a civil, not religious ceremony). It's hard to argue with a man who said, "A nation which does not practice science has no place in the high road of civilization. But our nation, with its true qualities, deserves to become - and will become - civilized and progressive."

Then this afternoon on my way home, I heard Robert Seigel interviewing the director of The Washington Institute's Turkish Research Program, Soner Cagaptay, on All Things Considered. It was a fascinating interview, and Mr. Cagaptay's main point was that the political discussion in Turkey had changed from "Islamist v. Secular," where secular was apparently an easy choice, to "Muslim v. Secular". The latter was causing secular party to lose support as, understandably, many Muslims, when forced to choose, were choosing "Muslim" over "Secular". This reminds me of the debates here where the conservatives have managed to re-frame the discussion over the past years from "Republican vs. Democrat" to "moral vs. liberal". Under those new names, you can see why people who would align themselves with the Democrats would instead give allegiance to the "moral" party (well, I wouldn't, but I guess I would call it "traditional vs. progressive" and hence choose the latter). Anyway, in Turkey the debate has been re-framed, and it's split the country approximately 50/50.

Up till now, the military has always stepped in if they felt that the Republic and values of Atatürk were at stake, and apparently the Turkish elite, appreciating the progress under the Republic, have approved of that. (Isn't it surprising to see the intellectual elite and military on the same side?) And now we'll have to see what happens, and whether Turkey can preserve itself as a country where one can be both a Muslim and a secularist, and whether it can do it without a violent military coup. I hope, as an example to the whole world (including us, who could really use a reminder of what a secular government looks like!) that it can.

* I also wouldn't have known that you can't search for Turkish swear words on Google without getting back a whole lot of porn.

Picking on China...Some More

2007-07-19T18:32:00.001-07:00

Is it just me, or is everyone picking on China? Here are just a few of the stories about China on NPR in the past couple of days:

A Year Without "Made in China": One Family's True Life Adventure in the Global Economy
Consumers Sue over Tainted Pet Food from China
Starbucks Closes Coffeehouse in Forbidden City
Congress to Grapple With Chinese Food Safety

Plus tons of news stories about the things I've blogged about over the past little while. I think if there was a tag cloud of news stories recently, China would easily be in 72 point font.

That's why I was not surprised to hear two stories about China in a row on All Things Considered as I was driving home today, but I was surprised that both took a somewhat new slant.

The first story started out sounding like all the other coverage - Chinese and international news agencies aired an undercover report investigating the use of cardboard as a filling in dumplings. What was fascinating was that apparently after this report came out to much horror, it turned out that it was a hoax (and the reporter was arrested, which I thought was an interesting reaction). Beijing news apologized for not following up on this more carefully...except, there's also rumor that Chinese sensors actually forced them to issue a fake retraction because the story wasn't a hoax at all.

The second story was about finding Chinese stars for the NFL. Since Yao Ming joined the NBA, Chinese interest in basketball has risen dramatically, but the Chinese are apparently not so into football because they consider it a pretty barbaric, violent sport (one of those cultural differences that make life so interesting, since we think nothing of it here but even theoretical cardboard-filled dumplings would have necessitated a federal commission). Because of this, the NFL is having trouble getting any players from China, and those few are all training as kickers because it's a position that requires the least amount of violence and a lot of precision. Despite the fact that four Chinese players had been training all year, none of them were actually allowed to play. What I found most fascinating was the interview with one of these players, who said that he guessed the NFL didn't want him to play even when his team's kicker was injured, because they were protecting him. I just can't imagine an American saying that, can you?

And that's it for me regarding China, at least for the next week.

Update on Presidential Candidates

2007-07-14T10:47:00.000-07:00

John McCain is coming to town in early August. Stay tuned for Presidential Candidate, the Third!

And More on China

2007-07-14T10:30:00.000-07:00

According to Morning Edition yesterday, knock-offs in China aren't all bad. Apparently there's a huge market in Harry Potter rip-offs, or versions of Harry Potter that take place in China, for instance, an example from 2003 (according to Slate.com) Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon, in which Harry encounters sweet and sour rain, becomes a hairy troll, and joins Gandalf to re-enact scenes from The Hobbit. Somehow it makes me smile to think that even if they have to deal with messed-up, potentially deadly drugs (see yesterday's post), at least they don't have to worry that Harry Potter #7 will be the last time they get to hang out with Harry and friends.

China's Take on Food Safety

2007-07-11T16:07:00.000-07:00

On Morning Edition yesterday, Renee Montagne reported on the execution of China's head of food and drug safety, which was ordered because the guy embezzled money, took bribes, and approved medications that ended up killing at least 10 people. According to Chinese standards, his punishment was very severe, because the reality is that bribes and corruption seem to be a norm in doing business in China, even though every once in a while the government turns around and condemns people for actions that they've been silently condoning or even encouraging up till then.

What's strange to me is how much of a big deal corruption and general safety issues with Chinese products has become. A friend of mine recently moved to China for six months and found this link, which goes through the long list of recalled products from China just in 2007. So the question is, with China being the manufacturer to the world for years now, is this a recent phenomenon or is this something that's been happening all along but just hasn't made headlines? And does this recent execution, which seems quite extreme to my Western ears, mean that Chinese people will be able to rely more on the safety of their food and drugs, or is it just a publicity stunt to show the world that the Chinese government takes this issue seriously?

Pandering

2007-07-10T16:05:00.001-07:00

KUOW, our local NPR station, runs their own local news as most stations do. Unfortunately, yesterday that meant that they did yet another whole piece pandering to Rachel Corrie's parents (see my previous post on this topic). In this case, they reported on Corrie's parents, who are suing Caterpillar, the manufacturer of the bulldozer that was involved in the accident that killed her. Their case was thrown out originally but they're trying to get it re-heard by the appeals court. KUOW went ahead and interviewed the Corrie's attorney, letting her talk about how the Israelis were committing war crimes by knocking down Palestinian houses. This would have been a perfect opportunity to throw in a comment that every credible investigation has showed that Corrie was killed by accident after she'd been warned to stay out of the area, but apparently KUOW didn't want to do that to a local "heroine". What a shame to hear them continue their completely biased coverage of everything Corrie.

Plankton Credits

2007-07-06T19:30:00.001-07:00

On Marketplace last night, Alex Schmidt reported on the business of selling carbon offsets, and specifically a new facet of it: plankton. In all the time I've been ranting about individual carbon offset buyers and the fact that they're busy buying indulgences for their hummers* I haven't really put a lot of thought into the people selling credits. I do feel like there's something kind of sketchy about being paid to plant trees, which for some reason seems like it should be an altruistic act, not an act of capitalism. But on the other hand, it's nice when people doing good for the planet get paid for their effort. Now, with the US poised to possibly (finally) sign the Kyoto Accords, there's the chance that we would set up a real system where companies would have to cut their carbon emissions or pay for offsets (it's already like that in Europe) so of course there are lots of companies investigating interesting ways to cut carbon in the air.

Schmidt's story was about one company in particular that's trying to artificially induce plankton to grow in the ocean by dumping iron into it. The idea is that the plankton will act like a tree planted on land and reduce CO2 in the air. What Schmidt failed to do was ask any questions:

What happens to the iron when you dump a bunch of it in the ocean? I can't imagine that that's good for the sea or the fish long-term.
How long does the plankton keep sequestering the carbon? As far as I know, when a plant dies it gives carbon back off as it decays; does plankton do the same?
What will be the long-term effect of lots of additional plankton in the ocean? Will there be disproportionate growth in the populations of fish that eat it? Will it prevent the ocean from the current carbon sequestration it already does? Will the plankton give off some other chemical we don't want?
According to wikipedia, there are potentially a lot of positives about adding iron to oceans that need it, making them more productive and healthier, but who's to say that the companies trying to sell offsets will stick to oceans that need iron?

I love Marketplace and the economic perspective they take on stories, but it seems like for this one, Kai Ryssdal needs to take over and try again.

*There was a great tongue-in-cheek article about this in a recent issue of Time Magazine, actually, where the author suggested that we allow parents to buy credits when they want to hit their children. They'll purchase a credit which would pay off a parent who regularly hits their kid in exchange for them taking the day off. The child abuser is happy, the kid who would have gotten hit is happy, and the parent who bought the credit is happy. The credit-buying parent's kid, not so much.

Mind your PMQs

2007-07-04T07:50:00.000-07:00

For those of my readers who didn't know, I've been travelling the last few weeks and therefore not listening to NPR. However, I did have the opportunity to be in the UK for Tony Blair's last day in office, and I watched his final Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs) with the British branch of my family giving me context. I'd never watched a PMQ before, and for those of you who haven't, it's a pretty amazing thing. PMQs is a political convention in which once a week the current Prime Minister spends half an hour answering questions from Members of Parliament at the House of Commons. Apparently this usually gets quite heated, and so there are lots of rules, along with a Speaker of the House of Commons who decides the order in which people's questions will get heard (in the case of the current speaker, a doddering old guy unfortunately), and no one answers the questions directly, they all reply to the Speaker. So for example, there's a lot of "I would reply to the right honorable gentleman that...". It all seems very British to me, although C. tells me that Canada does basically the same thing.

Anyhow, I don't really have an opinion about Blair, other than that he seems to be a hell of a lot smarter than the leader of our fair country, but that's actually being held against him by many Brits who say, "Bush is too dumb to have known the truth about Iraq, but Blair did know the truth and lied about it." I don't know; I think I'd rather have an intelligent (and intelligible) president who lies than a delusional one who doesn't know any better, but I suppose the grass is always greener etc. Regardless, I must say I was impressed with Blair's wit and charm during his last PMQs. You should really watch it here to get a flavor of it, and to hear Blair's verbal intonations which make everything even funnier, but below are a couple of my favorite parts for your enjoyment. As you read them, imagine as I did how impossible it would be for our sad President to think so quickly on his feet.

context: apparently P45 is an unemployment form
Burden (Labour MP): I thank my right hon. Friend for the huge contribution that he has made, not only to the success of our party, but to the transformation of our country...
Blair: ...I thank my hon. Friend for his kind words in relation to the closure of Longbridge in his constituency. He is absolutely right. I think that 85 per cent. of the work force have now found a job, and I congratulate him on that. I feel a certain solidarity with them since I received the following communication by urgent letter yesterday:
"Details of employee leaving work: Surname Blair. First name T"—
it actually says "Mr., Mrs., Miss or other"—
"This form is important to you. Take good care of it. P45."

context: Tony Blair is going to convert to Catholicism as soon as he can. He couldn't do it as Prime Minister because part of his job is recommending bishops (for the Church of England of course) to the Queen, something that struck me and J. as completely strange in our world of theoretical separation of church and state
Younger-Ross (Liberal Democrat MP): What advice would the Prime Minister give his successor on the relationship between faith and state, in particular with regard to his successor's reported views on the disestablishment of the Church of England?
Blair: I am really not bothered about that one.

context: there's been some kind of scandal about an EU treaty that Blair says he didn't sign but did, or something like that. I didn't catch the details.
Winterton (Conservative MP): I wish the Prime Minister and his family well for the future, but is he aware that a majority of the people of the United Kingdom feel betrayed by the fact that they are being drawn down further into the suffocating quicksand and expensive bureaucracy of the European Union?...
Blair: ...I am afraid that we cannot agree on the treaty, but as for his good wishes to me, may I say to him au revoir, auf Wiedersehen and arrivederci?

context: there's been massive flooding in the Sheffield area, it was a pain in the ass for us when it caused trains to stop running, but it also really sucked for the several people who drowned
Smith (Minister of State): My right hon. Friend has visited the city of Sheffield on a number of occasions over the past 10 years to see for himself the work done by that city in rebuilding itself after the economic devastation of the 1980s. Now, of course, we have to start all over again. On his final day as Prime Minister, can I ask my right hon. Friend what message he has for the people of Sheffield?
Blair: Vote Labour...

And finally, how could you not approve of someone who uses the phrase "low skulduggery"? Almost makes me want to move to England.

Three hundred hairy bears!

2007-06-09T20:16:00.001-07:00

I don't know any Hebrew swear words because when I was growing up, my dad would only curse in Polish or Arabic. His most common swear word was to yell, "Cholera" but if he was extremely irked he'd revert to Polish for "blood of a dog".

Apparently Slovenian has similar issues. According to a guest on Travel with Rick Steves today, Slovenians are really polite because they have no swear words in their language. If they're really pissed off, the worst thing they can say would be, "Three hundred hairy bears!". And if they're really, really mad at you, they'd say, "May you get kicked by a chicken!"

Sad news for me

2007-06-08T08:42:00.000-07:00

I just found out that Presidential Candidate, the second, who happens to be Giuliani, is coming in next Friday, while I will be en route to Paris. I was so looking forward to seeing him, especially after hearing a Day to Day piece on him back in May where Madeline Brand interviewed a reporter (Michael Wolff) who had covered him as Mayor of NY and was now writing a Vanity Fair piece on him where he claimed Giuliani was insane. As in, off his rocker. Totally unpredictable. He referred to an incident on Giuliani's radio show where he berated a ferret owner who had called in after a law was passed banning ferrets, and apparently he just lost it with the caller, calling him names and being extremely offensive. Mr. Wolff also pointed to the fact that Giuliani had announced his divorce to his then-wife through a press conference as more evidence that he had some screws loose. I'm used to politicians being referred to as inflexible, extreme, or offensive, but insane is a whole other thing. And now I'm going to miss seeing him in person. Bummer.

Quick Gore Update

2007-06-07T09:39:00.000-07:00

With all the press surrounding Gore and his potential presidential run, (which he vehemently denies, and which just shows that my basic assumption: anyone who actually wants to run for president should automatically be disqualified also holds true in the negative: anyone who seems like they maybe should run for president is not interested) I've learned a bit more about the energy use in his Tennessee home (see previous post on carbon rants).

I, along with everyone else, was annoyed to hear that Gore's home used 20 times as much energy as an average home even though, according to my calculations, it was only 4 times as big. However, according to a recent issue of Time magazine there are two somewhat mitigating circumstances:

The amount of energy Gore uses in some of the figures cited was calculated by the cost of his electric bill rather than actual kilowatts used (NPR used kilowatts though, and that's what I blogged about). However, he chooses to pay more for electricity by paying for power only from renewable sources. According to MSNBC, the Gores paid twice as much for this power, so that means some stories probably doubled the amount of energy they actually used.
The Gores bought their house five years ago and are still in the process of upgrading it to use energy-efficient glass in the windows, add solar panels etc.

Wikipedia also mentions that Gore's home, with it's security needs, is not an average home, and that the reason they haven't added solar panels until now is that the neighborhood zoning rules didn't allow it until recently.

None of this takes away from the fact that every article about Gore mentions that he buys carbon offsets, which I still think are completely bogus, but at least they also say he flies commercial to save energy, unlike the Queen.

Sushi Economy

2007-05-30T20:19:00.000-07:00

On Marketplace today Kai Ryssdal interviewed Sasha Issenberg, author of "The Sushi Economy" in a fascinating story. First of all, it made me hungry because they did the interview while sitting down over what sounded like really tasty sushi. Secondly, it was interesting to hear the premise of the book, which is that sushi one of the unabashedly positive* products of globalization. Globalization has helped the fishermen who can catch their fish and get access through fax machines in remote villages to find out exactly how much fish is selling for so that they can get a good price. Quick travel (by plane) and fancy deep freeze machines have also meant that fishermen can expand their reach. On the flip side, globalization of culture has also meant that what was a strange Japanese roadside snack is now a luxury available worldwide, so the market for sushi has expanded tremendously. Overall, more people being happy eating wasabi around the globe (except they aren't actually, but that's a whole other story...). And that's a good thing.

*Of course, by eating more sushi we're also contributing to the over-fishing of the oceans and probably to the destruction of the planet et cetera...but let's stay positive today people, shall we?

Presidential Candidate, the First

2007-05-29T20:30:00.000-07:00

I work for a large multinational corporation. Often I feel slightly guilty about this, especially having grown up in Berkeley where joining such an entity is about the worst thing you could do. However, one of the perks is that we get excellent speakers who show up to talk to us. Many times I hear someone being interviewed on NPR and know that I have an appointment on my calendar later that day to hear that author in person. As election season comes upon us, we're also starting to get all the various candidates in. I've never attended one of the political talks before so when I saw the invite to see Bill Richardson last week I didn't quite know what to expect; however I'd heard good things about his experience and I've been wanting to find out more about him so I took the opportunity to go see him.

I'll thought I'd share a few thoughts about him with you, in no particular order:

Overall, I was disappointed. I don't want to vote for a president just because he has stage presence and charisma, but boy it sure would help to have a little bit if you're going to be on the world stage. Unfortunately Richardson came across as your kooky uncle who regales you with anecdotes that bear only passing resemblance to relevance and was pretty forgetful on top of it all.
I'm a technology snob (see some previous posts) and I have to say I couldn't believe that http://billrichardson.com does not go to Bill Richardson's election campaign! Instead it goes to a landing page that I'm sure is making someone lots of money.
When you do go to his actual website at http://richardsonforpresident.com/ there's no search box! The feeling of panic I had in the pit of my stomach when I figured this out is obviously extreme for a normal person, but still, this is pretty egregious.
On the other hand, his website did have a few really funny ads where he pretends to be having a job interview.
Richardson started his speech by telling us that he wasn't going to give us his stump speech because we were too smart for that. I have to say, I'm too smart to fall for the "you're too smart" speech too.
He then went into a rambling discussion of some of the issues that he thinks are important. Often throughout the talk he would say he had three points to make and only make one or two. He also discussed a lot of issues about things that were relevant to New Mexico but not really important in Seattle (like water rights)
Every once in a while he would turn on the charm and say some pretty funny things, like "I’m not a rock star" (if you'd seen him you'd know why this is funny) and "my consultants hate me to use the word 'sacrifice' as part of my energy policy because it sounds like I'm turning into Jimmy Carter...are you going to wear a sweater?" and “Chavez is not a stable guy”
There were a few areas that he seemed really passionate about, but the one he kept saying he was most advanced of all democratic candidates on was about his energy policy. When you read his website it sounds reasonable, and he kept saying that we need a policy like Kennedy's race to the moon to solve it, which of course I agree with. Unfortunately several people asked him questions about it but he never articulated any substantial ideas other than saying we need to mandate carbon limits and that NM was the only state that was following the rules of the Kyoto Protocol. This was the same for his policy on education.
Twice during his talk he forgot words and had to yell for his advisors to help him remember what various things were called (for instance, he forgot the name for the "100 mpg car" that he claimed credit for - the name is "100 mpg car" so it's not like it's really hard to remember)
In the intro, the gentleman introducing Richardson said that he'd been nominated for the Nobel peace prize four times. As has been pointed out, though, nominations for the Nobel peace prize are kept secret for 50 years so we have no way of confirming this, and furthermore all it takes to get nominated is for any government employee to add you to the list.

As I look back on this list of random thoughts, it sounds like the talk was worse than it actually was. However overall I was disappointed and I'm hoping that the other candidates who come through (especially the democratic ones of course) impress me a bit more. If you have any thoughts on Richardson and why I should re-evaluate, I'd love to hear them.

Twits for Twitter

2007-05-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

On All Things Considered last night, Laura Sydell did a long overdue (only because every other fatuous technology reporter did it last month) review of Twitter, the service that lets you tell all your friends exactly what you're doing at all times. If I had a penny for every article hailing Twitter as this year's YouTube, well, I would probably have at least a dollar. Twitter is for people want to share everything about their lives, but, in Ms. Sydell's words, "don't want to commit to a fully thought-out journal entry". Instead, they want to share 140 word (max) chunks of information about exactly what they're doing right now. I don't know about you, but I don't want to constantly hear the minute details of your life and and I don't know why you'd want to hear mine, certainly not until I'd digested them a bit and taken the time to come up with some intelligible thought, rather than a "twitter". Aside from the inanity of the service*, I think the thing that bugs me most is how many journalists are hopping on the bandwagon and insisting that this is the new hot thing (well, unless they're writing paeans to the iPhone). Either way, Twitter has my vote for most over-hyped new service of 2007.

*I tried to find something to like about Twitter and the only thing that seems remotely amusing is the fact that it lends itself to a new art form - Twitter Haiku. Here's apparently a real one:

very crazy day
please don't ask me about work
folks, seriously

Not a lot of redeeming value (especially since in spoken English you'd elide the second and third syllable of the last word and end up with a 4-syllable line instead of 5 as a Haiku demands) but it's as much as I could find.

Lowbrow

2007-05-15T19:07:00.000-07:00

I am a thirty year old woman who watches Gilmore Girls. Well actually I haven't watched it for the past few months because we upgraded our Media Center and it's gotten so lame that I forgot to add it back to my set of shows to record. However, I just remembered last week and found out that tonight is the finale of the series.
I'm happy to report that NPR doesn't always just report on stuff we can feel superior for knowing, but occasionally, it does cover lame pop culture. Today on Day to Day, they did a fun piece interviewing a bunch of Gilmore Girls fans and covering topics like the show's recent ratings, why the show sucked the past year (apparently the main writer quit last year right after making Luke and Lorelai break up) and spoilers about the finale. I kind of felt like I'd been sneaking a read at People magazine in the supermarket checkout, but I have to say, I really enjoyed the piece.

Highbrow

2007-05-15T18:57:00.000-07:00

I love it when I learn about something I'd never heard about on NPR. On Friday on All Things Considered, Lourdes Garcia-Navarro did a great report about house-swapping in Cuba. Before the segment, here's what I knew about Cuba:

They make Mohitos there - yum
Americans aren't supposed to visit*
Castro is sick but his previously unknown brother doesn't seem to be any less into crazy communist theories than he is.

Okay, so really I know a few more things, but those were the main ones. What I didn't know was that, as part of the Communist mantra, all Cubans get a house. However, they're not allowed to buy or sell houses because they've been granted them by the government, so if they want to move, they have to find someone who's willing to swap houses! Every day there's a house-swapping spot (isn't this a great opportunity for Craig's List -Cuban edition?) where people gather to discuss who wants to move where. If people want to move in together they have to find two people who live together and want to split up. If people want to move out of a neighborhood (as long as they're not in one of the areas that the government has declared dead zones and can't be traded into or out of) they have to find someone who wants to move in and is living where they want to go to. And after finding a match, they need to get government approval! There is of course a black market of people swapping houses and offering or demanding money in exchange, but either way this was a fascinating glimpse into a very different culture.

* When I told him about this story, J mentioned that Michael Moore was doing a documentary about health care and took a bunch of Canadian journalists to Cuba to get their opinion on Cuba's free health care system and now he's getting in trouble with the US government for having visited. For some reason this struck me as funny.

Going Bananas

2007-05-10T20:22:00.000-07:00

Today on All Things Considered was letter day, and one of the letters was about a story last week about - you guessed it - carbon. Apparently they asked the question, "which is better, composting your banana peel, or putting it in the garbage disposal?" The response was that it doesn't matter because the carbon that is in the disintegrating banana was taken from the air in the first place. The letter-writer said that they should have thought outside the box and said, "neither" - that you shouldn't eat bananas because they're not grown locally and the amount of carbon used to transport them is very high. So I have two responses:

Damn, I knew I was doing badly at my "eat local" goals when I tried that mango last week, but I really hadn't thought through bananas. Bananas are a staple at our house. J will only eat them when they're at the perfect ripeness but I like them in almost any condition - in cereal when under-ripe, on brown rice crackers with peanut butter when perfect, and in banana pancakes when they're past their prime. Mmmm. I'm not giving them up, even if they do get carted all the way from Guatemala. So much for my ideals.
The fact that the carbon output of a banana is the same whether you stick it in the garbage disposal or in the compost pile isn't the only thing to consider, and I'm disappointed that they wouldn't have reported that of course it's better to compost it and re-use the remains than to stick it in a landfill (or in the Juan de Fuca Straight if you're in Victoria)

Micro-loans

2007-05-09T08:00:00.000-07:00

On Weekday yesterday, Steve Scher interviewed people who are involved with micro-loans. Micro-loans are great - everyone loves them because they seem like the perfect way of helping people pull themselves up by their own bootstraps rather than just giving charity. You feel good about yourself, the recipient feels good about themselves, and the world is a better place. The folks being interviewed were all very positive on micro-loans of course, and talked about how they actually work with local organizations in poor countries who can then give out loans themselves to local people whom they vet. They also talked about how micro-loans are working even in America - one of the women had been given a $500 micro-loan (yes, just $500) and managed to start a business that employs several people now, some of whom have gone off and started businesses of their own. In general the stats are great, especially for women. When women get out of poverty they tend to spend money on their children's education, which helps everyone in the long run.

So what's not to love? Well, the fact that it's not all jolly in the world of micro-loans. Time did a great story on them back in April, and while they included several success stories, they also talked about the darker side - namely that many people are using their micro-loans to pay off debt rather than start a business, or even worse, to buy consumer goods. By the time they're done they're even more in debt than when they started. As micro-loans become more popular, for-profit companies are getting into the game, and their screening process to make sure that the money will be used wisely is much less strict because ultimately they just want to loan the money out (and get up to 60% interest because the borrowers are so high risk!) Also, all the charity money going into micro-loans means that much less is going towards developing infrastructure and other necessities in these countries.

While I like the idea of giving directly and potentially seeing immediate results, I think if people really want to help, they should sponsor a child's education through one of the many programs available - long term that will help raise a generation who can support themselves.

In which the BBC sounds a bit silly

2007-05-03T20:23:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday as I was driving home listening to All Things Considered, David Folkenflik (seriously, what is it with these reporters and their funny names?) did a great report on Rupert Murdoch's offer to buy Dow Jones and acquire the Wall Street Journal for a very large sum of cash. He immediately started by explaining that the Bancroft family, which controls restricted shares (or some kind of special shares that give them an outsize influence) of Dow Jones has turned down the offer, which is likely to mean that the board of Dow Jones will also turn down the offer. He then described the offer, the fact that it made Dow Jones' stock rise, why Murdoch would want to buy it, and what it would mean to consumer. Most interestingly, he interviewed a gentleman from T. Rowe Price who explained that if Dow Jones turned down such a generous offer, there would be a potentially huge backlash from shareholders who might even sue the company for acting against it's own financial interest, which could cause a long-term sharp drop in the stock price.

A couple of hours later as I was driving to C's house for TNFN, I overheard the BBC News doing an in depth story on the Dow Jones offer as well. However, in a story that seemed equally long, they only covered the offer and why Mr. Murdoch was interested in Dow Jones, leaving the listener (if they hadn't heard David Folkenflik earlier in the afternoon) convinced that the offer must be on the verge of going through. It was an interesting case where you could clearly see the difference in quality between the two stories. I have to admit, given the BBC's biased coverage of almost all stories regarding Israel, that I wasn't too sad to see them look a bit silly.

And even more follow-up

2007-05-03T20:18:00.000-07:00

According to Morning Edition the Queen of England is planning to spend $20,000 on carbon credits to offset the carbon emitted on her state visit to the US. Why does she have to spend so much money? Because she wants to feel better about the fact that she and her small entourage are flying by themselves in an otherwise empty large passenger jet! Just the kind of hypocritical "conservation" I like to waste my time railing against.