Tuesday, March 23, 2004
On Being an Old Fuddy Duddy (part 1):
I'm 29 and have spent the lion's share of my adult life in academia (which is to say surrounded, mostly, by men and women in the 18-22 demographic). When I was an undergraduate (cast your mind back to 1992-1996) the dominant women's aesthetic was crunchy: flannel, shorts, minimal make up, everyone had a Nalgene water bottle. I've got fond memories of this sort of vibe but for the last couple of years on campus the trend seems to be almost the opposite: young women bedecked in tight tank tops, midriffs bare even in winter and shorts which a friend of mine once described as vertically challenged (which is to say wider than they are long). The logical extension of all of this is the Girls Gone Wild video series in which, I presume, otherwise really average college age women engage in all kinds of debauchery (make out sessions, masturbation...) in front of video cameras in exchange for hats and t-shirts. One of the interesting things about what I see on campus, and what the GGW videos sell from the internet portal, is that its all symptomatic of a gradual movement to do all the sorts of things feminists used to decry as derogatory toward women in the name of enpowerment. This theme and an interesting description of a night out with the GGW crew in South Beach Miami can be found, courtesy of Ariel Levy, in Slate, here.
Sunday, March 07, 2004
Getting Energy from Waste Water -
Bruce Logan, a professor of Civil Engineering at Penn St, has generated a lot of media hubaloo recently with a pilot version, produced with Hong Liu and Ramanathan Ramnarayanan, of a microbial fuel cell (article is here, it will require a subscription to Environmental Science and Technology). The basic idea is to run waste water through a closed fuel cell containing a consortium of microorganisms. Faced with the abundant source of organic carbon these organisms find themselves in metabolic heaven, oxidizing carbon like crazy. The key point is that the geometry of the fuel cell allows the bugs to dump the electrons from the carbon compounds onto conducting rods and to have this flow of energy removed from the cell where it can either be stored (in some other sort of battery) or immediately used to do useful work.
This is a really nice experiment. It is, however, worth noting its limitations. Basically the idea behind the work is to harvest some of the wasted energy from sewage. However, it still takes energy to produce all the things that go into sewage. Which is to say it takes energy to produce the food we eat, to heat and cool the houses we live in and to create the clothing we wear. Some of this fuel is used (e.g. as heat to keep us warm in the winter) other parts of it (e.g. food that is incompletely digested) is not. This system can, at best, just make up some small portion of this cost. It doesn't even have the potential to remove our fossil fuel dependence.
This is a really nice experiment. It is, however, worth noting its limitations. Basically the idea behind the work is to harvest some of the wasted energy from sewage. However, it still takes energy to produce all the things that go into sewage. Which is to say it takes energy to produce the food we eat, to heat and cool the houses we live in and to create the clothing we wear. Some of this fuel is used (e.g. as heat to keep us warm in the winter) other parts of it (e.g. food that is incompletely digested) is not. This system can, at best, just make up some small portion of this cost. It doesn't even have the potential to remove our fossil fuel dependence.
Saturday, March 06, 2004
Introducing Democracy into the Middle East and why its so difficult -
The sociocultural problems in Saudi Arabia have been well documented (by Robert Baer among others): a dissolute and corrupt royal family that is bleeding the country dry, no willingness to allow for any meaningful social criticism and rights for any of a large number of minorities. Less clear in much of this work, but really nicely highlighted in Elizbeth Rubin's piece in the current issue of the New York Times Magazine, is just why reform is so difficult.
Rubin argues that the modern state of Saudi Arabia was founded on a sort of devil's agreement betweent he House of Saud and the Wahhabi clerics...
The Saud dynasty and the Wahhabi clerics mutually reinforce each other's authority. It's been that way since the 18th century, when Muhammad Ibn Saud, a tribal ruler in the untamed deserts of central Arabia, struck a bargain with Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a puritanical religious reformer. They would purge Islam of the idol worshiping that had slipped into Bedouin religious practices, unify the competing tribes and conquer the Arabian peninsula. The Sauds lost and regained power over the centuries, but that religious-political covenant has endured and is the source of today's Saudi system. The royal family rules over politics, security and the economy. The clerics hold sway over things social and cultural while preaching loyalty to the ruler as one of the highest duties of the good Muslim.
So substantive reform, then, requires a sort of rewiring of the basis of the state: inventing a new state justification, and somehow managing to substitute it for the old, on the fly. Once you start to think about how truly difficult this is, the rest of the article, largely focussed on the reform efforts of the jounrnalist/activit Mansour Al-Nogaidan seem all to predictable.
Rubin argues that the modern state of Saudi Arabia was founded on a sort of devil's agreement betweent he House of Saud and the Wahhabi clerics...
The Saud dynasty and the Wahhabi clerics mutually reinforce each other's authority. It's been that way since the 18th century, when Muhammad Ibn Saud, a tribal ruler in the untamed deserts of central Arabia, struck a bargain with Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a puritanical religious reformer. They would purge Islam of the idol worshiping that had slipped into Bedouin religious practices, unify the competing tribes and conquer the Arabian peninsula. The Sauds lost and regained power over the centuries, but that religious-political covenant has endured and is the source of today's Saudi system. The royal family rules over politics, security and the economy. The clerics hold sway over things social and cultural while preaching loyalty to the ruler as one of the highest duties of the good Muslim.
So substantive reform, then, requires a sort of rewiring of the basis of the state: inventing a new state justification, and somehow managing to substitute it for the old, on the fly. Once you start to think about how truly difficult this is, the rest of the article, largely focussed on the reform efforts of the jounrnalist/activit Mansour Al-Nogaidan seem all to predictable.
Saturday, February 28, 2004
A worthy cause in NYC -
McSweeney's (the creation and ongoing project of Dave Eggers of A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius fame) is many things. It's a publisher of books (I picked up Nick Hornby's SongBook from them before it went main stream - still a purchase well worth making but I digress), a quarterly literary magazine, runs an excellent website and a nonprofit tutoring arm in San Fransisco (called 826 Valencia). Hot on the heels of all this they are opening up a similar tutoring arm in New York (called 826 NYC - no web site yet) for which they are holding a benefit at Symphony Space in New York on March 2nd.
Just to give you some idea of how McSweeney's approaches the tutoring arm, 826 Valencia is apparently (in addition to being a great asset for the community) the only independent (not sure exactly what this means in this context) purveyor of pirate garb in San Fransisco. How did that come about? Simple,
In San Francisco, our landlord required us to maintain a retail space. We hadn't thought of maintaining a retail space, and scrambled to come up with an appropriate theme. We knew there were no other independent pirate supply stores in San Francisco, and thus we had no choice.
So what will the retail arm of the 826 NYC do...
In Brooklyn, the storefront will sell superhero supplies.
In any case, this is a worthy cause and these guys are nothing if not clever. Stop by Symphony Space if you're in NYC on March 2nd and surely think about volunteering.
Just to give you some idea of how McSweeney's approaches the tutoring arm, 826 Valencia is apparently (in addition to being a great asset for the community) the only independent (not sure exactly what this means in this context) purveyor of pirate garb in San Fransisco. How did that come about? Simple,
In San Francisco, our landlord required us to maintain a retail space. We hadn't thought of maintaining a retail space, and scrambled to come up with an appropriate theme. We knew there were no other independent pirate supply stores in San Francisco, and thus we had no choice.
So what will the retail arm of the 826 NYC do...
In Brooklyn, the storefront will sell superhero supplies.
In any case, this is a worthy cause and these guys are nothing if not clever. Stop by Symphony Space if you're in NYC on March 2nd and surely think about volunteering.
The root of electability -
Geoffrey offered his (and for much the same reasons our) endorsement for John Edwards in the Democratic primary weeks ago. Imagine my (and I assume his) chagrin as Kerry's electability seems to win him more and more primaries. I'm frustrated by this on all sorts of levels; I think political campaigns would be much better (and political journalism much more interesting) if they could somehow focus on policy positions rather than political process. Another source of frustration is with the very idea of electability. I mean what is it? What does being thought of as electable actually mean? Where does this nebulous sense that a candidate is electable come from?
Since we know electability deals, more than any single other candidate attribute I can think of, with political process we can, perhaps, gain some insight into these questions by moving into the realm of the sociologist. Duncan Watts (sociologist/physicist at Columbia) argues that the pheomenon of electability is much like any other social fad. Therefore, it follows, that elecability might be understood like any other fad, as springing from the difficulty that individuals have in making good decisions (and hence our tendency to defer decision making to our perception of the collective will).
So now we know (or at least have some insight into the process). Unfortunately, I find this does little to make me much happier about candidate Kerry.
Since we know electability deals, more than any single other candidate attribute I can think of, with political process we can, perhaps, gain some insight into these questions by moving into the realm of the sociologist. Duncan Watts (sociologist/physicist at Columbia) argues that the pheomenon of electability is much like any other social fad. Therefore, it follows, that elecability might be understood like any other fad, as springing from the difficulty that individuals have in making good decisions (and hence our tendency to defer decision making to our perception of the collective will).
So now we know (or at least have some insight into the process). Unfortunately, I find this does little to make me much happier about candidate Kerry.
Friday, February 27, 2004
The Real Corruption in Sports -
Those who care about sports out there have heard it, more or less, all before: Jamal Lewis attempting to buy cocaine, Gary Barnett running some sort of brothel/street gang at the University of Colorado, star baseball players jacked out of their minds with muscle enhancing drugs. For sheer strike at the heart of the game, nothing, it is now clear goes as far as the corruption in college flag football.
Flag football has a noble tradition of academic disloyalty. Take the squad that calls itself "Widespread Panic." In 2001, the team played for the University of New Orleans. In 2003, Widespread Panic made the tourney final as students at Nunez Community College.
These days, Nunez reigns as flag's all-powerful overlord. The 2000-student Chalmette, La., school has won three championships in five years under the stewardship of Andrew Sercovich, a 38-year-old former player who now teaches a one-credit athletic conditioning course at the school...
...In last year's flag championship game, the Nunez Pelicans and their 30-year-old quarterback David "Duke" Rousse scored a 26-7 victory over … the Nunez Widespread Panic. That's right: When flag football's most prestigious title was on the line, Nunez played Nunez for all the marbles. Even so, Sercovich bristles at the charge that he's running a flag football factory. He's particularly galled by accusations that his 28 players qualify by registering for a single course—Sercovich's own athletic conditioning class, which includes heavy doses of flag football theory and technique.
Flag football has a noble tradition of academic disloyalty. Take the squad that calls itself "Widespread Panic." In 2001, the team played for the University of New Orleans. In 2003, Widespread Panic made the tourney final as students at Nunez Community College.
These days, Nunez reigns as flag's all-powerful overlord. The 2000-student Chalmette, La., school has won three championships in five years under the stewardship of Andrew Sercovich, a 38-year-old former player who now teaches a one-credit athletic conditioning course at the school...
...In last year's flag championship game, the Nunez Pelicans and their 30-year-old quarterback David "Duke" Rousse scored a 26-7 victory over … the Nunez Widespread Panic. That's right: When flag football's most prestigious title was on the line, Nunez played Nunez for all the marbles. Even so, Sercovich bristles at the charge that he's running a flag football factory. He's particularly galled by accusations that his 28 players qualify by registering for a single course—Sercovich's own athletic conditioning class, which includes heavy doses of flag football theory and technique.
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Iverson watch? St. Joe's!
A painful thought for some: but are we watching the last days of Iverson's tenure with the Sixers? I don't have cable -- so I'm not actually one of the "we" who are watching. But I am, I suppose, one of the "we" who is wondering.
Also not watching, though wishing I were, St. Joe's still undefeated and now #2 in the country in college ball. For sentimental reasons, I always pick whichever Jesuit schools make the tournament to go far -- though last year I think I picked St. Joe's in the final four instead of Marquette's entertaining run. Maybe I was a year too soon with the Hawks??
For those that might like to use my own unorthodox picking methodology, the Jesuit schools that seem to make, or have made, the tournament are: St. Joe's, Marquette, Creighton, Georgetown, Boston College, Loyola Marymount, Gonzaga, St. Louis U., Santa Clara U. Have I missed any? I think Bill Russell may have won several championships while attending University of San Francisco, but that's a while ago.
Also not watching, though wishing I were, St. Joe's still undefeated and now #2 in the country in college ball. For sentimental reasons, I always pick whichever Jesuit schools make the tournament to go far -- though last year I think I picked St. Joe's in the final four instead of Marquette's entertaining run. Maybe I was a year too soon with the Hawks??
For those that might like to use my own unorthodox picking methodology, the Jesuit schools that seem to make, or have made, the tournament are: St. Joe's, Marquette, Creighton, Georgetown, Boston College, Loyola Marymount, Gonzaga, St. Louis U., Santa Clara U. Have I missed any? I think Bill Russell may have won several championships while attending University of San Francisco, but that's a while ago.
Why Women Disparage Each Other's Looks -
It's a setting I'm sure we're all somewhat familiar with (or at least have seen happen on movies or TV). The group of women in the bathroom at a club or restaurant who are disparaging the looks of some other woman who is usually still outside (of course in the movies I watch the one still outside ends up overhearing the comments but overcomes this peer adversity and eventually gets the guy -- I know I'm a bit of a sap). It turns out that this impulse to disparage the looks of other women may be an evolutionarily selected trait.
In a study recently released in the Royal Society's Biology Letters Maryanne Fisher reports an experiement in which one group of women were asked to evaluate the attractiveness of a group of photographs of other women. Fisher found that women tend to find other women least attractive at times during their menstrual cycle that correlate with greatest fertility. She speculates that this disparaging might help increase the odds that a given woman would be most likely to reproduce.
Men showed no such cyclicity in their evaluation of the looks of other women.
In a study recently released in the Royal Society's Biology Letters Maryanne Fisher reports an experiement in which one group of women were asked to evaluate the attractiveness of a group of photographs of other women. Fisher found that women tend to find other women least attractive at times during their menstrual cycle that correlate with greatest fertility. She speculates that this disparaging might help increase the odds that a given woman would be most likely to reproduce.
Men showed no such cyclicity in their evaluation of the looks of other women.
Brooks Smack Down -
In an entirely nonquantitative, purely subjective way I haven't been that impressed with David Brooks' tenure on the Op-Ed page at the New York Times. To me about 1/2 of the stuff he writes seems to make sense, 1/3 of it is wrong and the remainder seems (at best) delusional.
His latest effort is a nice representative of the just wrong class. As David Adesnik points out over at OxBlog the article seems to over estimate the moral content of Reagenite foreign policy (good democracy promotion, lousy human rights) and just misconstrue the Carter legacy (Brooks argues, basically, that Carter employed a lot of mush about root causes without a cogent plan).
To me the Carter error seems much more egregious (Reagen comes out OK in the assessment after all). As David points out, Carter, more than any other president in the last 35 years, injected morality into foreign policy. More than anything else, this moral dimension was at the core of what he did as President and of the life he's lived since. I miss it.
His latest effort is a nice representative of the just wrong class. As David Adesnik points out over at OxBlog the article seems to over estimate the moral content of Reagenite foreign policy (good democracy promotion, lousy human rights) and just misconstrue the Carter legacy (Brooks argues, basically, that Carter employed a lot of mush about root causes without a cogent plan).
To me the Carter error seems much more egregious (Reagen comes out OK in the assessment after all). As David points out, Carter, more than any other president in the last 35 years, injected morality into foreign policy. More than anything else, this moral dimension was at the core of what he did as President and of the life he's lived since. I miss it.
Apologies for Light Posting -
I've been busy the last week or so taking my comprehensive exam (the last exam ever unless, you know, this whole science thing doesn't work out and I end up being a lawyer). In any case, more normal posting should be back now.
Sunday, February 08, 2004
I still believe in miracles...
It was always unlikely that a kid growing up in New York City was going to be a bobsledder or a ski jumper (which of course didn't stop me from wanting them). But it's still possible to dream big...
If you used to imagine yourself hitting the World Series winning home run, or skiing the fastest downhill or nailing the dismount in gymnastics, or even if you had some entirely different dream, the movie Miracle is great. If you think you used to do these things but just don't remember, see the movie and you'll start to remember a little bit of what it felt like and maybe dream again.
If you used to imagine yourself hitting the World Series winning home run, or skiing the fastest downhill or nailing the dismount in gymnastics, or even if you had some entirely different dream, the movie Miracle is great. If you think you used to do these things but just don't remember, see the movie and you'll start to remember a little bit of what it felt like and maybe dream again.
