New fake meat that apparently tastes really good

Slate has an interesting article about a new fake chicken, called Beyond Meat, that is so like real chicken it made a vegetarian a bit queasy.  I enjoy red meat, but know that it's not the healthiest thing on the planet (they say to have it only a few times a week max).  So I'm happy to try some of the fake stuff, but I haven't loved the stuff I've tried - it's either too salty, or too filled with garlic and other spices, or, like the chicken patties I was into for a while, too dry.  This stuff, apparently, is the real fake deal.  It's not available outside of Whole Foods in Northern CA, but I look forward to trying it. Read the rest of this post...

Fun with panoramic photography

I've been having fun lately with a free iPhone app called Photosynth. It's an app for making panoramic photos.

And while I don't like the fact that the app shrinks your photos (it limits the size of the panorama, otherwise the phone wouldn't have enough memory to stitch all the photos together), but it does a tremendous job of making panoramas IF you know what you're doing. Meaning, when you rotate the camera for a panoramic photo, you need to keep the point where the light hits the (metaphorical) film stationary, you pivot the camera around that point - rather than keeping yourself in one place and moving the camera through the air. (Read up on parallax and you'll see what I mean).

Anyway, I went out with some French friends tonight for dinner, and before we went to a place called Aftersquat, an old squatters' house of artist that the city of Paris bought, renovated, and turned into a huge multi-level artists' workshop.  It's at 59, rue de Rivoli (get off the Metro at Chatelet and take the Rue de Rivoli exit, it's right across the street).  You can visit any day from 1pm to 8pm and just walk around and check out the place - there's art EVERYWHERE.

I was really liking the stairwell because, with all the colors, and some banners hanging down, it was more interesting than the run of the mill spiral stairway photo, so I shot some photos.

Then I decided to move to the other side of the stairs and see if the view appeared any different. It did.

Then I thought it might be fun to take a Hipstamatic photo of the stairwell, from the same position, using another app on the iphone.

I really like the Hipstamatic photo, it's interesting how it totally changes the same image, and thus the mood of the photo.

Then I decided to take a panoramic photo using the Photosynth app.  This got interesting because it's rather difficult to tell how the photo is going as you're taking it.  You really can't tell all that well if the app itself is getting confused by the scene you're presenting it.  What I mean by "confused" is exactly what happened when I developed the photo when I got home.

First, the "'good" panorama:

Do you see how a good panoramic photo can invite you into the space, and let you experience the location in a way that a regular photo can't?  What I like about photos like this, using the panoramic feature, is that you see what I see as a photographer, what my eye sees.  You get a sense of the motion, the color, the symmetry and the forms that caught my eye and made me want to snap the photo in the first place.

Now the "bad" panorama, that I kind of like:

Photosynth messed up the photo in the most wonderful way.  It got confused by the spiral stairwell and started turning it in on itself, with what I think is a great result (that's me at the bottom left in the green shirt). I'm forgetting the name of the guy, but it looks like one of those logically impossible drawings of the staircases that twist into each other forever (or like a staircase at Hogwarts).

And unrelated to the squatters' house, here's a panorama I took once I got home tonight to Chris and Joelle's neighborhood in Montparnasse.  It had just rained, and I love Paris in the rain, for photography at least.  The city shines all the more when it's wet at night.

So there you go with a walk-through of how I look at a photo, and how panoramic photography works, doesn't work, but sometimes still does even when it doesn't.

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Romney in Israel

First, American Jews still support Obama:

While Republicans may look favorably on Romney's visit to Israel, another group with keen interest in U.S.-Israeli relations -- Jewish Americans -- solidly backs Obama in the election.

Gallup Daily tracking from June 1-July 26 finds Jewish registered voters favoring Obama over Romney by 68% to 25%. That is essentially the same as Gallup's prior update on Jewish voting preferences.

Although one goal of Romney's Israel visit could be to attract greater support among Jewish voters in the U.S., Jewish Americans have been a traditionally strong Democratic group, so they are unlikely to become much more supportive of Romney regardless of the outcome of the trip.

And the Washington Post reports that Romney has kicked the media out of his big fundraiser in Israel, violating an agreement he made months ago. Either Romney is still smarting from the disaster that was his trip to London, and he wants to minimize potential damage, or he's planning on blasting Obama, violating another rule that says politicians of the other party don't criticize the President when they're abroad. Read the rest of this post...

Cheney on choosing Palin as VP: "That one was a mistake"

Nothing from Cheney is said in a vacuum. There's some reason he's saying this publicly, now. He seems to be trying to shut Palin up, force her out of the picture. It's not entirely clear why, unless the GOP is afraid that she's somehow going to screw up the election, or the selection of the VP. But there's some calculated reason that Cheney is saying this now.

From Jonathan Karl at ABC News:

“That one,” Cheney said, “I don’t think was well handled.”

“The test to get on that small list has to be, ‘Is this person capable of being president of the United States?’”

Cheney believes Sarah Palin failed that test....

"I think that was a mistake.”

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Climate strategies that don't work

UPDATE: A complete list of climate series pieces is available here:
The Climate series: a reference post.
________

This is the second of a series of articles on Bill McKibben's must-read Rolling Stone piece, "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math". Our first article, on three climate numbers that tell the tale, is here:

  ■ McKibben's Three Numbers—Measuring the march toward climate catastrophe

And we teased out the meaning of his "2°C temperature increase" number here:

  ■ Illustrating global warming—What does "a 2°C increase" refer to?

Now we take a look at the second section of McKibben's article, one that could be titled "What doesn't work to fix the problem" (find it by looking for the paragraph that starts "So far, as I said at the start...").

What doesn't work

If the scientific problem is that we're dumping carbon into the air fast enough to make the planet soon unlivable, the political problem is that we seem not to be able to stop. McKibben (my emphasis and some reparagraphing throughout):

So far, as I said at the start, environmental efforts to tackle global warming have failed. The planet's emissions of carbon dioxide continue to soar, especially as developing countries emulate (and supplant) the industries of the West. Even in rich countries, small reductions in emissions offer no sign of the real break with the status quo we'd need to upend the iron logic of these three numbers.

So why have we failed? Or rather, what have we tried that hasn't worked?

Let's start with individual action — changing our own behavior:

This record of failure means we know a lot about what strategies don't work.

Green groups, for instance, have spent a lot of time trying to change individual lifestyles: the iconic twisty light bulb has been installed by the millions, but so have a new generation of energy-sucking flatscreen TVs.

Most of us are fundamentally ambivalent about going green: We like cheap flights to warm places, and we're certainly not going to give them up if everyone else is still taking them. Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change has been like trying to build a movement against yourself[.]

The problem is not just that people want their flat-screens; lots of people are trying to green themselves. And they see the results:

People perceive – correctly – that their individual actions will not make a decisive difference in the atmospheric concentration of CO2[.]

Read the rest of this paragraph to learn why; the data is sound.

That insight ("individual effort will not make a decisive difference"), with which McKibben and I both agree, is not only widespread, but frustrating.

It's not just that people don't want to do the right thing (many don't, but a great many do). It's that even if we all did the right thing — followed the green-lit way — we still wouldn't get the result we want. You have to get your power from somewhere, for example, even if you have no flat screen and more twisty bulbs than sockets for them. If that power comes from coal, what can you do?

This leaves political action — working the halls of power to make a change. So how's that been going?

A more efficient method, of course, would be to work through the political system, and environmentalists have tried that, too, with the same limited success. ...

Sometimes it has seemed to work. Barack Obama, for instance, campaigned more aggressively about climate change than any president before him [and] he has achieved one significant change: a steady increase in the fuel efficiency mandated for automobiles. It's the kind of measure, adopted a quarter-century ago, that would have helped enormously. But in light of the numbers I've just described, it's obviously a very small start indeed.

Limited success. That's not to say "no success." But limited.

I left in the part about Obama's victory with auto emissions standards because (1) it really is a victory, one that's eluded many administrations, and (2) I've given Mr. Obama so much grief on these pages (which he has richly deserved, in my opinion) that I owe him kudos and props (both) when he earns them. Here he has earned them.

And having praised the man and his administration, here comes the other shoe:

At this point, effective action would require actually keeping most of the carbon the fossil-fuel industry wants to burn safely in the soil, not just changing slightly the speed at which it's burned.

And there the president, apparently haunted by the still-echoing cry of "Drill, baby, drill," has gone out of his way to frack and mine.

This section is delicious with irony, if by "irony" you mean pain:

Sometimes the irony is almost Borat-scale obvious: In early June, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled on a Norwegian research trawler to see firsthand the growing damage from climate change ... describing the sight as "sobering."

But the discussions she traveled to Scandinavia to have with other foreign ministers were mostly about how to make sure Western nations get their share of the estimated $9 trillion in oil ... that will become accessible as the Arctic ice melts.

About those Arctic icemelts, I added my cents here:

So what do you think the Oil & Gas Barons (Our Betters) think of the fact that global warming — of all things — is opening up the Arctic for more oil and gas exploration?

Mission Accomplished, of course. For them, it's an opportunity.

Watch as they clamor for the chance to get rich by accelerating the catastrophe they're causing. Watch as world-wide government types (eager retainers all) fall over themselves to enable the world-wide destruction. (I include Mr. Eager-For-Keystone Obama in this; I think he wants it as badly as anyone does.)

"Watch as they clamor for the chance to get rich by accelerating the catastrophe they're causing." See? Ironical.

The political problem — by which I mean progressives' ineffectiveness — is not just national. It crosses borders. For example, our "friends" to the north:

[T]he rising price of oil suddenly made the tar sands of Alberta economically attractive – and ... that meant Canada's commitment to Kyoto was nonsense. In December, the Canadian government withdrew from the treaty[.]

See? Corporate money can corrupt anyone, even Canadians. There's a Venezuela story that's even more colorful — search the article for the phrase "Christ the Redeemer" and read.

What we've learned so far

This is me, summing up this part of McKibben's essay. What doesn't work?

Individual action is necessary — how can you ask of others what you won't yourself do? But it's not enough to keep us below 2°C before the year 2100.

Political action to date has been ineffective except for minor victories. There's the limitation on auto emissions noted above. And Obama has been forced to delay approval of the Keystone pipeline (the "Barack H. Obama Keystone Sludgepipe") until after he's safely free of voter control (sorry, duly elected).

But effective political action has not been tried. How do I know? Because all the political action so far as been ineffective — and not all action has been tried.

Which means ... obviously we need to try different political actions.

And here's where we leave our story for now. McKibben has more — a suggestion for effective political action — and I'll add my centimes to his.

Until next time,

GP

To follow or send links: Gaius_Publius
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A little Paris park blogging for your morning coffee

This is a lovely little park near Metro Cour Saint-Émilion (just east of Bercy).  I was waiting to see the Batman movie (which I didn't love, felt too simple - though Anne Hathaway and that kid from 3rd Rock, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, were amazing).

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