Small, surreal world

Stephen Bechtel (Jr.) and I went to the same high school.


And on a related note - I sure wish The Thacher School in Ojai did a better job of instilling environmental consciousness in their graduates. Perhaps they do now, but 40-odd years ago they were dropping the ball.
(caveat: n=2, not much of a sample size)

[Upon reflection, I have removed some remarks that seem inappropriate]

That pesky gulag

(This post is moot, BTW. Just so you know...)

Back in 2004, the day after George W. Bush was elected to a second term, after I'd done my crying I wandered over to a neighbor-of-sorts who'd I assumed had voted for him, and asked, quietly, only half in jest - "Will you come visit me in the gulag?"

To my surprise he exploded. "You are so full of $%^&!"

At the time the overreaction baffled me. Now I think I understand better; and what's more, I could - conceivably - be headed there after all.

So, y'all, if I do go, I hope you'll feel free to drop by.
(either there or the place with the straightjackets, if I'm merely losing my marbles)


Bring books, please.

The problem with metaphors

The problem with thinking in metaphors, or rather with expressing your thoughts if you think in metaphors, is that if you have more than one thought they're likely modeled using incompatible metaphors which makes for a muddled mess of mixed metaphors when you try to put them into print.

That is all.

Flu news site, interpreted by experts

The public health blog Effect Measure at Scienceblogs.com is the go-to site for pig flu news and interpretation thereof.

Just so you know.

Update - the latest Effect Measure post is on naming the strain; contenders include Aporkalypse and Hamthrax.

Me, I'm sitting this one out, unless it becomes a lot more newsworthy.
(I devoted a lot of blog real estate to bird flu, back in the day, not, at that time, being clear about some of the factors that would preclude it from becoming another severe 1918-style pandemic; am now older and more jaded and have more important things to work on.)

FYI though - I had started a rather cool, intended-to-be-month-long "~90 years ago today" blog history series on the 1918 pandemic (albeit in Oct 2005 not 2008) but life and work got in the way of completing it. If someone wants to spend some pleasant, old-book-smelling afternoons in the historical library on Pine St, to take it through the rest of the month, it's a worthwhile project.
...especially if cranking through microfilm doesn't make you carsick.

What you can't say

I forgot how good this is.

It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise.

Is our time any different?

...

Some would ask, why would one want to do this? Why deliberately go poking around among nasty, disreputable ideas? Why look under rocks?

I do it, first of all, for the same reason I did look under rocks as a kid: plain curiosity. And I'm especially curious about anything that's forbidden. Let me see and decide for myself.

Second, I do it because I don't like the idea of being mistaken. ...

Third, I do it because it's good for the brain. To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that's in the habit of going where it's not supposed to. ...

Aphorisms on inactivism

...they've been piling up. Google will tell you where they came from.
(and fortunately, many of these are obsolete, in locales more culturally advanced than ours)

Global warming deniers are "like polar bears on shrinking real estate." *

It’s their point of view. Annoyance, not collaboration, is their idea of effective action.

It's a munitions factory for saturation bombing of any debate that might actually be interesting and useful. There’s no interest in acquiring knowledge. It’s all for politics.

Conspiracies happen all the time. But we deny this because of a classic American fallacy, born of our relative unconnectedness to the old world: what I like to call the fallacy of insufficient cynicism.

In this persistent and well-funded campaign of denial [the skeptics] have become interchangeable ornaments on the hood of a high-powered engine of disinformation. Their dissenting opinions are amplified beyond all proportion through the media while the concerns of the dominant majority of the world's scientific establishment are marginalized.

‘How can we expect Americans to know anything beyond what they happen to remember from science class? Journalists certainly don’t tell them.’

It is a belief that can gain consensus and then become a permanent cultural carbuncle.

It seems to me we should be using mole traps, and not mallets, as the whack-a-mole game is nonending.

One partisan can tie up a whole company of the enemy’s troops by sniping from good cover and forcing them to pay attention to him, while maneuvers are going on elsewhere.

I don't think these people who believe that stuff ... I think they're not really getting it from the print either. They're getting it from Fox News and, I've heard, from their ministers, at their churches.

[Elke] Weber’s research seems to help establish that we have a “finite pool of worry,” which means we’re unable to maintain our fear of climate change when a different problem ...comes along. ...And even if we could remain persistently concerned about a warmer world? Weber described what she calls a “single-action bias.” Prompted by a distressing emotional signal, we buy a more efficient furnace or insulate our attic or vote for a green candidate — a single action that effectively diminishes global warming as a motivating factor. And that leaves us where we started.

What too many people refuse to understand is that the global economy's existence depends upon the global environment, not the other way around.

Someone asked [Dr. James Hansen] what the most important thing to do is, what can we personally do to help stabilize climate, to "answer the call to action"--what is the most important lifestyle change?

Hansen's answer was unequivocal. Take part in the political process. Help make our democracy real. Hold our candidates accountable.

Keynes’s genius – a very English one – was to insist we should approach an economic system* not as a morality play but as a technical challenge.

it was that night, a year ago today, that provided the lesson - never let a setback wreck our spirits, and never presume it's as bad as your opponents tell you it is - and gave the opening for a "teaching moment" about the contagion that is panic and the antidote that is hope.

and of course

It's not enough to pull drowning victims out of the river; we need to walk back upstream and find out who's throwing them in.

Update, some more* -

A newspaper's main product is neither news nor information but influence.

...the strong version of the Copernican thesis - where ever you are is, by definition, unimportant.

Reality is that which, when you refuse to believe in it, doesn't go away.

It's clear that the body politic is subject to power disorders. By this I mean events where some person or group suddenly concentrates a lot of power and abuses it. Power disorders frequently come as a surprise, and cause a lot of damage.

When the cavalry's not coming: some rules of thumb for standalone citizen journalists

Do as I say, not as I did.

"..."following the money" might be productive here."

I said that a year ago, before this journey began. And while I didn't end up following the money, I did dig into the story, and it dug its claws into me; and while the digging's not over, the outline's now clear.
(What's the outline, you ask? Patience...)

But oh, the time it took, that it didn't have to take; the mistakes I made... So, in the hope that this might save someone else from tarrying in dumpsters in blind alleys, if they undertake a quest like this one, I offer some rules of thumb.

1. If you're a newbie, try to avoid doing it on your own. If you can possibly find a group to work with, containing someone whose judgment you trust, enlist them. Doing it on your own is fine when it's going well, but really, really sucks when it isn't. And when those around you have zero or negative interest in your quest. or are using "local" epistemology - which they will, in a small town - it's mighty hard to summon up the will and the confidence to boldly go where you need to. Also, someone who knows more than you do will see more than you do, which - if your mind is open to recognizing it - can save you a whole lot of time.

2. Look up once in a while. It's great to focus on the minutiae - that's what alerted me to this story in the first place - but unless you stand back from your digging once in a while to survey the terrain, it might take you a long time to realize that the story's much bigger than just the one piece that caught your attention.

3. History matters; as Paul Graham says, it's all the data that we have so far - and if the history comes in book form, you also get the infrastructure for interpreting the data. Knowing the relevant history will help; you're going to need some structure to understand your story, and you don't want to have to build it yourself from scratch.

So again, look up; find the shoulders of giants, and stand on them - take time away from web and phone and go read books, since they contain pretty much all* the wisdom that we have so far. People and institutions and arrangements don't spring up de novo, they have antecedents; and knowing what's happened and what's been discovered before will cue your brain into recognizing similar themes in your own investigation. I've spent much of the last few weeks reading, and things just leap out at me now that had slipped my notice before.

The books are particularly helpful if you're not getting support elsewhere - like Machiavelli (the human, not the metaphor) you can spend time in the cognitive company of experts -

"When evening comes...in this graver dress, I enter the courts of the ancients, and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death; I pass indeed into their world."

We primates don't thrive alone, and the right authors help to ameliorate the cognitive isolation.

4. You will be able to perceive subtleties that are real, but that you'd never be able to convince someone else of*. So open your mind to recognizing this, and thus to sensing when you should just save your breath.

5. Be prepared to consider the unthinkable; sometimes it's been consigned to unthinkability for a reason.

Feedback for our local Economic Resource Council

From KNCO recently -

"[Huntington Labs] owner Ron Hooper decided to leave Silicon Valley for the more attractive country lifestyle of Nevada County. ..."

A large part of the charter of Nevada County's Economic Resource Council is to bring more - and more desirable* - businesses to Nevada County. This weekend we had a great coffeehouse conversation about what induces people to start or relocate their business here, and the consensus - strongly put forth by the group's* two tech business founders - was that the most essential factor is our local quality of life - and that that is what we should be promoting.

"Bring the owners up here, let them see what it's like."

So perhaps the ERC might consider focusing on protecting our local quality of life, rather than paving it over...

p.s. Recommendation #2 was for expanding rural broadband.

The Aggie code of honor

An Aggie does not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.

Winner, Laggard of the Year Award, 2008 and 2009

How anyone could have been so slow is beyond me.

(Being so slow, however, is not.)


on the bright side, i have learned a lot along the many scenic byways.

Miscellany - quotes and a story

Updated.
Mostly about journalism.

From Paul Graham's essay on essays -

When it comes to [collecting] surprises...there may be habits of mind that will help the process along. It's good to have a habit of asking questions, especially questions beginning with Why. But...how do you find the fruitful ones?

I find it especially useful to ask why about things that seem wrong.
...
Above all, make a habit of paying attention to things you're not supposed to, either because they're "inappropriate," or not important, or not what you're supposed to be working on. If you're curious about something, trust your instincts. Follow the threads that attract your attention. If there's something you're really interested in, you'll find they have an uncanny way of leading back to it anyway.

If there's one piece of advice I would give about writing essays, it would be: don't do as you're told. Don't believe what you're supposed to.

From a Nov. 2007 talk in London by the NYT's Bill Keller - -

"The curse of a journalist is that he always has more questions than answers."

This part made me smile -

"My friend Jeff Jarvis, a blogger of long-standing and professor of journalism at the City University of New York - refers to news bloggers as "citizen journalists", which has a sweet, idealistic ring to it."

Something I just learned recently - Bill Keller's father, George M. Keller, was CEO of Chevron, and even had a stint as chairman of the board, of the American Petroleum Institute. It sounds like he led an interesting life...

Returning to journalism -

"The better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be." - David Halberstam

There are two ways of appearing "smart." First, you can write something so complex, obscure, and abstract that no one can refute your bullshit. Second, you can write simply, clearly and directly. If you have something interesting and true to say, then the second method is better. On the other hand, if you are forced to say something boring or false, then pick the first method (and then change your life).*

Investors need to learn to look for the little lies, those minor inconsistencies that can be the first clue to bigger problems.*

"It may be true, as [I.F.]Stone said, that "all governments lie," but democracy cannot function if journalists do too." - Eric Alterman*

Had second thoughts & removed the story link - writing that captures one's zeitgeist* at time T can seem too morbid at time T+5 minutes.

On journalism, learning and heritage

From David Halberstam:
(who had a 20+ year FBI file)

I want to leave you today with one bit of advice: never, never, never, let them intimidate you. People are always going to try in all kinds of ways. Sheriffs, generals, presidents of universities, presidents of countries, secretaries of defense. Don’t let them do it. ...

and

At its best, [journalism] is about being paid to learn. For fifty years, I have been paid to go out and ask questions. What a great privilege to be a free reporter in a free society, to be someone whose job is a search for knowledge. ...

Back when I applied to grad school, for "career plans" I put "teaching and research", but not from any real desire for either. In truth, what I really wanted to be when I grew up was a student.

And in doing journalism - though hasn't paid as well* as grad school - that's what I get to be.

(Though I have to say, the teacher-student interaction is rather different in journalism - imagine your "teachers" saying right & left, "nothing to learn here, you've completely misunderstood the material, you're wasting your time and mine" ...which is why the reading tends to be more fun than the lectures.)

My father was a banker in his working life, a loan officer, back when humans were the deciders on loaning money for a project. And he told me once, that what he loved about the job was the learning - every new proposal that came across his desk was an opportunity to plunge into a new field of study.

And it was all "applied" learning, which does give it a special zing - it's not an abstract "you must learn this because you must learn this", it's "whatever you find out here could be the key".
-------------

And tracking down a story is like a series of such opportunites; it's taking a canoe trip, different sites of interest and loci for learning pop up along the way. For someone who's led a politically-ignorant life, there's a lot of remedial study, which can yield some rather cool discoveries. See the Council on Foreign Relations coming up over there on the right? Turns out its founding president was John W. Davis, my great great uncle; I'm named after his mother.

His daughter Julia, my great aunt, was one of the first women reporters to work at the Associated Press. (which it appears Halberstam never worked for, so we can't quite come full circle)

And - if you want to know what else has turned up -


patience...

Compare and contrast: journalism vs. science

Journalism's got a lot in common with scientific research - in both endeavors you're trying to understand and convey the nature of reality. But there are differences too, that you may not grasp if you're coming at it from the "science" end - it's not just that "journalism's peer review is a good deal easier to sneak through."

The good Dr. Heisenberg plays a much larger role in journalism, because your forays into gathering data involve the efforts of, in effect, lab techs who may have a strong desire to skew or otherwise obscure the results. And you won't necessarily know whether they're trying to do so, since you barely know them - with each story, you're working with a different group of techs.

So you need to put a fair amount of effort into controlling for any bias introduced by the techs - which means running the same experiment using different techs, or - if you realize you've left some "wiggle room" in an experiment - rerunning it more rigorously, using the same tech.

(Stripping out the metaphors, what this means is that you'll want to ask multiple people the same question, and you may ask the same person multiple variants of the same question. Which, I have found, makes the lab techs take umbrage...)

Barack Obama is the Union's new president

Just so you know.

"Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom (and a livable world) and delivered it safely to future generations."

President 'has four years to save Earth'

We are measured by our actions.

Jeff Ackerman is The Union's new editor

Just so you know.