indoor compost

My wife put together this helpful information about vermicomposting for a friend:


[I don't know why the 2nd one is sideways and I can't figure out how to change it]

I've included pictures of our bin and links I found helpful but basically this is what I did:

-Read up on vermicomposting (using worms to eat away organic matter then using their poo as great fertilizer!)

This series of short vids was great, since they described set up and then documented their failures and re-did it all.
http://ryanishungry.com/2007/03/24/apartment-composting-101-vermicompost-with-barb-finnin/ (she makes a kinda crucial descriptive mistake about depth versus width and length but a good intro nonetheless)
http://ryanishungry.com/2007/05/16/vermicomposting-jay-gives-a-worm-bin-update/ (hmmm)
http://ryanishungry.com/2007/06/16/vermicomposting-changing-the-world-1000-worms-at-a-time/ (put more of 'em to work!)
http://ryanishungry.com/2007/08/15/vermicomposting-results-barb-finnin-measures-us-up/ (oops)
http://ryanishungry.com/2007/09/14/vermicomposting-born-again-worm-bin/ (much better)
http://ryanishungry.com/2007/12/04/vermicompost-our-worm-bin-rocks/ (hooray!)


-Find a container that's waterproof and is longer and wider than it is deep. Worms will be active within the top few inches, just out of sunlight and just close enough to eat some stuff. Not deeper than 10-12".

-Vent this container (I drilled holes in all sides for drainage and airflow).

-Have something underneath to catch liquid or escapees.

-Decide how many worms you might need considering your bin size and your diet/output.

-Find a source for your worms (I called around to some bait shops after reading about different kinds of worms. None had them but luckily the Green Venture Eco House here in Hamilton had some.)

-Inside the bin I placed long strips of uncolored newspaper that had been wet and wrung for bedding. Emptied the worms and their castings (finished compost) on top (I also added soil, but learned later that some potting soils may be too harsh as well as unnecessary) and fed them.


TIPS
-After reading of some successful and unsuccessful bins, I've decided to process our waste in a blender before giving it to the worms.
-Check them daily (but they're fine with minimal to no care for days). Feed them if they've finished most everything. Don't keep it too wet (suffocation) or too dry (dessication).
-You'll get mites and wire/white worms but they're essentially a part of a healthy system.
-Covering their food with dry newspaper has kept fruit flies from laying their eggs and gives the worms some privacy while eating.
-I can tell the worms are happy and healthy when I pull off the lid and they all retreat into the dirt.
-ALWAYS wash your hands after handling (bacteria, fungus, mites).

DO NOT include the cabbage family. Some people warn against onions and garlic, and they do have a smell, but decaying Brussels sprouts give off an offensive odor. Truly.


Some Helpful Links:
http://www.nyworms.com/vermicomposting.htm
http://www.pr.uoguelph.ca/sustain/vermicompost.html
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/08/green-basics-vermicompost.php
http://agri.and.nic.in/vermi_culture.htm
http://www.cityfarmer.org/wormcomp61.html
http://www.redwormcomposting.com/

Good Luck!

standard

This audio is pretty amazing, but typical. (You'll get the point in the first few minutes.) The hosts of this show are some local political officeholders in Keene, the mayor and someone on the city counsel or something like that.

After the hosts evaded answering questions about a specific issue of open government (something like... the city clerk has been refusing to allow cameras in the city clerk's office, despite a law saying such filming is allowed), callers reduced the issue to a very simple question: "should government bureaucrats be arrested for breaking the law?" The hosts repeatedly just cannot answer that simple question. They just refused to talk about it after a while. They even admit that the reason is because it makes them uncomfortable. Of course it does! They know that if they say no, they are openly advocating government lawlessness, and if they say yes, they're 95% of the way to saying that the specific issue under discussion should be resolved by the arrest of government bureaucrats. So they just refuse to answer the simplest of questions.

Such are the people who control our most powerful institutions.

weird sleep

saturday - 9am
friday - 2:30pm
thursday - 6am
wednesday - 11am

those are my last 4 awaking times. each night i went to bed between 12 and 1am. no naps or extraordinary physical exertion or drinking as a noteworthy explanation for the extreme fluctuations.

fruit of the commute

lately i've been picking and eating wild rasberries, which seem to be growing wherever i go. i find this incredibly exciting. i'm having fantasies about collecting vast quantities of them and making preserves. instead i'm here blogging about it.

blood-drenched war criminal dies

Robert McNamara, dead at 93.

Rather than read that link, read Chomsky's take on the man.

via D.P

didn't see this one coming did ya?

i have a hard time seeing how sarah palin would be a worse president than BO

yo, so i'm an anarchist and whatnot, and that is an unpopular stance. let me just say once thing. this man is the fucking leader of the world's 10th largest economy.

yeah. authoritarian power-based governments are awesome ideas.

accidental email

I think it had been over two years since I stopped getting political emails from my family, but I got one this week. Below is the original email and my response. For previous editions of this fun little game, see here and here.

-----

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA

By Lou Pritchett

Dear President Obama:

You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any of the others, you truly scare me.

You scare me because after months of exposure, I k now nothing about you.

You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support.

You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.

You scare me because you have never run a company or met a payroll.

You scare me because you have never had military experience, thus don't understand it at its core.

You scare me because you lack humility and 'class', always blaming others.

You scare me because for over half your life you have aligned yourself with radical extremists who hate America and you refuse to publicly denounce these radicals who wish to see America fail.

You scare me because you are a cheerleader for the 'blame America' crowd and deliver this message abroad.

You scare me because you want to change America to a European style country where the government sector dominates instead of the private sector.

You scare me because you want to replace our health care system with a government controlled one.

You scare me because you prefer 'wind mills' to responsibly capitalizing on our own vast oil, coal and shale reserves.

You scare me because you want to kill the American capitalist goose that lays the golden egg which provides the highest standard of living in the world.

You scare me because yo u have begun to use 'extortion' tactics against certain banks and corporations.

You scare me because your own political party shrinks from challenging you on your wild and irresponsible spending proposals.

You scare me because you will not openly listen to or even consider opposing points of view from intelligent people.

You scare me because you falsely believe that you are both omnipotent and omniscient.

You scare me because the media gives you a free pass on everything you do.

You scare me because you demonize and want to silence the Limbaughs, Hannitys, O'Relllys and Becks who offer opposing, conservative points of view.

You scare me because you prefer controlling over governing.

Finally, you scare me because if you serve a second term I will probably not feel safe in writing a similar letter in 8 years.

Lou Pritchett


Note: Lou Pritchett is a former vice president of Procter & Gamble whose career at that company spanned 36 years before his retirement in 1989, and he is the author of the 1995 business book, Stop Paddling & Start Rocking the Boat.

Mr. Pritchett confirmed that he was indeed the author of the much-circulated "open letter." “I did write the 'you scare me' letter. I sent it to the NY Times but they never acknowledged or p ublished it. However, it hit the internet and according to the ‘experts’ has had over 500,000 hits.

----

Obama scares me too, for a few of the same reasons. These 3 in particular:

>You scare me because your own political party shrinks from challenging you on your wild
>and irresponsible spending proposals.

When the Republican Congress moved in lock-step to pass everything
Bush/Cheney told them to, they were rightfully criticized by Democrats
as mindlessly following executive orders. Now Democrats are doing the
same thing. In many cases they're actually saying that they oppose
the legislation that they're voting in favor of, but believe it is
more important to support "their" President. It is hard to see what
the point of Congress is, from a check-and-balances perspective, if
they just do whatever the executive says. It scares me to see how
easily people in positions of extreme power will cynically invoke or
ignore important principles at their convenience.

>You scare me because you will not openly listen to or even consider opposing points of view >from intelligent people.

I find this scary too, and this is true of all presidents in recent
memory. More on this later.

>You scare me because the media gives you a free pass on everything you do.

The media is highly deferential to power. Bush had an abysmal
approval rating for much of his presidency, and still the media
refused to call him on his blatant lies and multiple crimes against
humanity. A popular president like BO will get and even easier time
from the media, which is pretty damn terrifying. Just like Congress,
the mainstream media has abandoned any adversarial function it should
be performing, if it ever actually served one at all.


That said, the rest of the list is fairly insane. What does it say
about the author that he can begin a list with "I know nothing about
Obama," then go on to list 19 things he knows about Obama? He claims
to even know Obama's deepest feelings and desires (e.g. "you falsely
believe that you are both omnipotent and omniscient"). I guess if you
can simultaneously hold two contradictory beliefs, you can believe
pretty much anything, regardless of reality, which partially explains
the craziness here.

I won't address everything point by point, though I'm tempted, but
there are two general themes of his list that I'd like to comment on.
The first theme concerns these items:

> You scare me because you lack humility and 'class',
> always blaming others.

> You scare me because for over half your life you have aligned
> yourself with radical extremists who hate America and you
> refuse to publicly denounce these radicals who
> wish to see America fail.

> You scare me because you are a cheerleader for the
> 'blame America' crowd and deliver this message abroad.

The mainstream American media allows a certain a spectrum of opinion
about American foreign policy. On the right/nationalistic/

reactionary
extreme is the opinion that the US Government (hereafter "USG") is a
force for pure good in the world that is always perfectly morally
justified in anything it does and is always selflessly trying to
spread freedom and democracy across the globe. On the left/liberal
extreme is the opinion that the USG is a force for good in the world
that always acts with the purest intentions, but that has sometimes
gotten carried away in its quest for spreading freedom and democracy
and in a few isolated incidents has made regrettable mistakes. That
is the spectrum of opinion that is allowed in the US media (I say
"allowed" because editors and their bosses self-censor, not because of
any state censorship.)

The far right side can't stand even the suggestion that the USG has
ever done anything wrong, and so anyone who ever acknowledges American
misdeeds is instantly part of the "Blame America First Crowd," and
endlessly beaten over the head with this slur. This is objectionable
on several different levels.

One level of offensiveness is the inability or unwillingness to
distinguish between a group of people and their rulers. Is "America"
a nation of 300,000,000 people or the comparatively tiny group of
people that control the USG? To criticize the actions of a government
is not the same as criticizing the people of the nation, especially a
nation whose government often acts against the wishes and interests of
its population, as ours does.

So what would it mean to "wish to see America fail"? The overwhelming
majority of "radical extremists" who he's characterizing this way are
those who object to the actions of the USG, some of whom maybe even
wish for the dissolution of the government. But that doesn't mean
they wish harm on the 300,000,000 who live in the US; they think those
people would be better served with a different social arrangement.

Conservatives like Mr. Pritchett claim to value limited government.
They loved Reagan's "the government is the problem" line and supported
Gingrich when he led a shut down of the federal government in
opposition to Clinton. One would think such people would be cautious
about slinging accusations about "wishing to see America fail." But
given the breath-taking contradiction he chose to lead off this
tour-de-force screed, I don't suppose that connection has ever
occurred to him.

Beyond that, it should be noted that Obama himself is well within the
mainstream spectrum of opinion. And nobody within the spectrum
"blames America first." They all assume that America has noble
intentions, and any misdeeds they reluctantly acknowledge are taken to
be aberrant: it isn't really our fault because we were trying to help
but got carried away, or a few bad apples ruined it, or those
ungrateful Iraqis weren't willing to accept our help, etc.

My final note on that matter is that at no point does it have anything
to do with reality-based argument. There's no attempt to understand
the world, no argument as to why Obama's alleged "blame America first"
is factually incorrect or illogical. It is simply a smear designed to
demonize and avoid intelligent debate. If, as I would contend, the
unmistakeable reality is that foreign policy of the USG is not and
never has been about spreading freedom or democracy, and that it has
repeatedly immorally destroyed innocent lives around the world, should
we not acknowledge this as our first step to correcting it? (Not that
Obama does so.) Yelling "BLAME AMERICA FIRST" eliminates that
possibility, which is of course the entire point of yelling it. And
you have to yell it even at the people on the left end of the
permissible spectrum so that people outside it to the left (i.e. the
reality-based community made up of the vast majority of the rest of
the world) are ignored. And this is from the same guy who complains
about someone "refusing to listen or consider opposing points of view
from intelligent people."

So that wraps up my first general theme about discussion of American
foreign policy and "blame America first."

My second comment on general theme concerns the subtle bigotry running
through many of those items above plus these:

>You scare me because after months of exposure,

> I know nothing about you.

> You scare me because I do not know how you paid
> for your expensive Ivy League education and your
> upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support.

> You scare me because you did not spend the formative years
> of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.

> You scare me because you demonize and want to silence the
> Limbaughs, Hannitys, O'Relllys and Becks who offer opposing,
> conservative points of view.

Again, America is a nation of 300 million people, the vast majority of
whom can name an immigrant among their recent ancestors. The idea
that there is a single American culture or that spending 4 years of
your childhood in another country is necessarily sinister is
incoherent at best. It strikes me that when you combine that
xenophobia with the innuendo about mysteriousness about his life and
finances, it taps into the same pockets of fear and anger that in less
polite company express themselves as overt racism. Combine THAT with
the "Blame America" nonsense, and you get "Obama is a secret Muslim
working with the terrorists to destroy America, because after all he's
a nigger with a funny name so it is obvious." The conservative
commentators he listed regularly invoke this kind of bigotry, often in
not very subtle ways, and certainly deserve scorn. (Not that Obama
actually "demonizes" yet alone "wants to silence" them).

I suppose I'll leave it at that for now.

yup

Floyd:

When I saw that the president also invoked the words of Martin Luther King Jr. (“Martin Luther King once said, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’”), I very nearly threw up. To quote an apostle of non-violence, who spent his last days standing with striking workers and railing against the American government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" because of its murderous war machine, when you yourself are in command of that war machine, spewing out Vietnam-style death (and "targeted assassinations") in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan; when you are striving with all your might to defend, shield and in many cases continue to heinous torture atrocities of your predecessor; when you are pouring trillions of public dollars into the purses of the financial elite while letting millions of workers go hang; and when you yourself have made repeated statements that you will never take any options "off the table" when dealing with Tehran, including the nuclear destruction of the Iranian people for whose liberties and well-being you now profess such noble concern -- well, that seems a bit much, if I may riot in understatement.

rock on

as the blurg turns

i think one my primary uses of this blog has been to deal with changes. once i come to terms with the change, i lose the urge to write about it. this has happened repeatedly as frequent themes came and went: leaving my first job, poker strategy, poker life, career/grad school, atheism, political awakening, anarchism.

i'm kind of losing the desire to deal with political issues now, as i feel like i've 1) got things figured out and 2) have absorbed that understanding into my day-to-day psychology. the second point is more relevant to blogging because much of my blogging has been driven by outrage, and outrage derives from expectations. i'm still outraged on a moral level by a lot of things that happen in the world, but the outrage that primary drove the blogging was more about how other people respond to travesties, and now i have different expectations there.

anyway i think the kinds of changes i'm dealing with these days are not the kinds of things i'm likely to want to blog about. that's not meant to be ominous or anything; i'm just noting that i expect blog volume to continue to decline.

ratchet

here is a very nice explanation of the role of the two major political parties in the US. if you don't have 5 minutes to read that, take 20 seconds and read this summary.

textbooks

James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me criticizes the way popular high school textbooks cover American History, and gives a great history course along the way. Here's an insider perspective on textbook publishing that makes it easy to understand why the books are so awful.

underdog strategy

Reminiscent of Arthur Silber's tale, here's a basic strategy for resisting the evil of Washington. I hope I live to actually see a state secede from the US.

waterboard him! crush his son's testicles!

good point: we're going to torture this guy, right? ticking time bombs and all that.

the reveal

Andrew Carroll is spending 9 days in jail for holding a plant.  Government is violence.

a year in photo

So we've been here over a year now. Time flies. We'll be here at least one more year, and I hope beyond that. I haven't posted many pictures in that time because my camera died a year ago, but here are some from Kira's camera.

The fresh-faced fellow catching the ball has an awesome beard by the last picture. The bald headed guy who threw it to him has flowing locks by the last picture.




Bubble Tea in Toronto:



Cleverly imitating a sign at Niagara Falls:



These dudes jumped over me as part of a street performance:



These dudes raised me, as part of reproductive investment:



Hattori keeps me company while I engage in scholarly pursuits:



Katsu does nothing to help my scholarly pursuits:




Horus ventures out from the safety of the chair for a quick picture:



From right to left, that's a trumpet, a glass of beer, an African drum, and Blake:



A party for our friend Leo before he went home to Brazil:



Mustache Release Party:





Appendicitis rocks!



A birthday/thesis defense party featuring the previously mentioned beard and hair:

the greatest evils: atheism and anarchism

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the outgoing Archbishop of Westminster, says that atheism is the "greatest of evils."

Murphy-O'Connor's comment is an excellent example of the moral depravity of the Catholic Church, depravity which generalizes to most religious institutions and belief systems. Actions, not words or thoughts, are the proper basis for moral judgment. I think people understand that basic principle rather instinctively, and that it takes a huge amount of indoctrination to convince people of anything else, which is quite a feat really. The Catholic Church is a particularly amazing example. An organization that includes large numbers of men who sexually abuse children and that systematically shields these pedophile rapists from the law has managed to position itself as a moral authority, holding as their highest virtue the unquestioning belief in obvious absurdities.

How can that have happened? Like most questions, there are multiple layers of answers.

Many people who recognize the absurdity I'm pointing out attempt to answer the question by just saying the people are stupid, or evil, or both. I understand their frustration but I think they're wrong. My ultimate explanation is that I think that most people are basically good and basically smart, but have a huge blind spot: they conform and obey far too easily. A small number of wicked people take advantage of this, thus consolidating vast amounts of power for themselves, which they use to further reinforce those tendencies towards conformity and obedience. Such people rise to the top of power structures like religions, using the power of those institutions toward their own ends. Look at the history of any religion and you'll see this basic pattern.

There are proximate explanations that I think are also important and worth investigating, meaning the mechanisms by which the indoctrination takes place. The methods of religious indoctrination are obvious, even to religious people when they examine religions or cults besides their own (i.e. outside of their blind spots): start as young as possible, regularly force people to publicly affirm their loyalty and belief in the dogma, discourage critical thinking and exposure to outside thought, etc. How and why some people are able to resist these measures are important questions.

Note that the phenomena of wicked people rising to the top of power structures applies equally well to government and business; politicians are crooked and CEOs are ruthlessly amoral, as everyone understands, albeit with blind spots for "their" guys. And note that the methods of religious indoctrination are also used by the state, most notably through the "education" system, but in numerous other ways. These parallels between religion and state, and the interconnectedness and mutually reinforcing nature of these two morally depraved institutions, are among the reasons why, to me, anarchism and atheism are closely related moral positions.

how it got so square

comic

 i forgot to blog about canadian bowling.  they use a tiny ball with no finger holes and only 5 pins that are spread out in an inverted V shape.  pins have different values, totaling 15!  and you get 3 rolls per turn instead of 2.  you only get a spare, meaning your first roll in the next frame gets added to your previous frame, if you knock them all down by the 2nd roll though.  max score is 450.  weird.

one decent man? i doubt it, but kill him just in case!

again, i know sports is stupid, but sometimes you can learn a lot about people by the way they respond to sports and sports stories.  so take this thing where a a pittsburgh steelers player is not going to go with his teammates to the traditional white house visit that super bowl champs make.  and this is a big deal and people are freaking out about it.  

motherfuckers, the white house is the fucking command center of the world's most devastating human death machine.  why the fuck would anyone want to go there?  now i dont really expect mainstream commentators to say that.  but the speed with which these media idiots drop to their knees to suck the cock of state power is pretty pathetic.

this shit always bugs me

i know sports are stupid, but i want to comment about this, because this kind of thing has always bothered me. in some situations in basketball, the proper defensive strategy is to intentionally foul. but good sportsmanship means you don't actually hit the guy very hard, and because the refs should be and are aware of these situations, often just a tiny swipe at him is enough to get the foul call. and that's how it should be, since by not calling a foul in that situation, a ref effectively is telling the defender that he has to hit harder. that is dangerous. in the specific case of yesterday's game, the refs basically send a message that a 6'8" 220lb man has to hit a league superstar even harder if he wants to get a foul call. in a postseason already characterized by excessively flagrant fouls and injured superstars. pretty smart, NBA!

various stufffffffffff

So I'll get back to my series about evolution and morality eventually. Class has been over for several weeks, but the appendicitis derailed me and now I've got a big report due on Friday May 15. My experiment is over; now I have a crapload of data to analyze to include in that report. Softball has started back up too, which is fun. But I'm very busy.

I'm fairly thoroughly immersed in this whole grad school scene, and I feel very isolated from almost everything I was a part of before I came here. I don't have television, don't read mainstream publications often, and rarely talk to Americans about political issues. Hell I don't even watch sports any more. I'm really in my own world. When I occasionally get a glimpse of the real world, I find it very difficult to process. It makes me realize how all-encompassing the American propaganda barrage really is. Unplugging from that really clears your head, but after a while brief re-exposure to it is quite shocking. I don't know how to describe it. Reality-based reality is so different.

it all fits

I don't know how "stunning" this is, but... yeah.

Science 1 May 2009:
Vol. 324. no. 5927, p. 588
DOI: 10.1126/science.324_588a

American Association of Physical Anthropologists:

Civilization's Cost: The Decline and Fall of Human Health

Ann Gibbons

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS, 31 MARCH-4 APRIL 2009, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

When humans were freed from searching for food from dawn to dusk, they finally had time to build cities, create art, and even muse about the gods. Agriculture and cities made human life better, right? Wrong, say archaeologists who presented stunning new evidence that most people's health deteriorated over the past 3000 years. "We document a general decline in health across Europe and the Mediterranean," says bioarchaeologist Clark Spencer Larsen of Ohio State University in Columbus. He's a coinvestigator of the European Global History of Health Project, an ambitious new effort to study the health of Europeans during the past 10,000 years.

Bad back. The rise in tuberculosis in the Middle Ages left its mark on the spine of this English skeleton. CREDIT: CHARLOTTE ROBERTS [Larger version of this image]

Most bioarchaeology studies tend to tell the tale of illness and death of people from a single site, such as a burial pit for plague victims or an ancient cemetery. Larsen's project is one of the first—and the largest—to try to reveal broad trends by assembling standardized data from large samples. In a series of posters, the team presented the first analysis of data on 11,000 individuals who lived from 3000 years ago until 200 years ago throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. "This is a real tour de force," says bioarchaeologist George Armelagos of Emory University in Atlanta, after reviewing the posters.

The project has taken 8 years and $1.2 million to organize so far. The goal was to pool 72 researchers' data on standardized indicators of health from skeletal remains, including stature, dental health, degenerative joint disease, anemia, trauma, and the isotopic signatures of what they ate, says project leader Richard Steckel of Ohio State. They also gathered data on settlement size, latitude, and socioeconomic and subsistence patterns so that they could compare rich and poor, urban and rural, farmers and hunter-gatherers.

They found that the health of many Europeans began to worsen markedly about 3000 years ago, after agriculture became widely adopted in Europe and during the rise of the Greek and Roman civilizations. They document shrinking stature and growing numbers of skeletal lesions from leprosy and tuberculosis, caused by living close to livestock and other humans in settlements where waste accumulated. The numbers of dental hypoplasias and cavities also increased as people switched to a grain-based diet with fewer nutrients and more sugars.

The so-called Dark Ages were indeed grim for many people who suffered from more cavities, tooth loss, rickets, scurvy, and bone infections than had their ancestors living in hunter-gatherer cultures. People became shorter over time, with males shrinking from an average of 173 centimeters in 400 B.C.E., for example, to 166 centimeters in the 17th century—a sure sign that children who were not members of the elite were eating less nutritious food or suffering from disease.

Why would people want to settle in towns or cities if it made them sick? One answer is that settlers suffered less bone trauma than nomadic hunter-gatherers, suggesting to Steckel that they might have felt safer in villages and, later, towns where an emerging elite punished violent behavior—but also controlled access to food.

The social and political inequities in urban centers meant that for nonelites, moving into cities was "almost a death sentence" for centuries, notes Armelagos. In the Middle Ages, people in the countryside were generally taller than people in cities.

After a long, slow decline through the Middle Ages, health began to improve in the mid-19th century. Stature increased, probably because of several factors: The little Ice Age ended and food production rose, and better trade networks, sanitation, and medicine developed, says Steckel. But take heed: Overall health and stature in the United States has been declining slightly since the 1950s, possibly because obese Americans eat a poor-quality diet, not unlike early farmers whose diet was less diverse and nutritious than that of hunter-gatherers. By understanding how disease and malnutrition spread in the past, researchers hope to apply those lessons in the future. "Our goal is to understand the health context for what we have today," says Larsen.

Happy May Day

The effectiveness of the state-corporate propaganda system is illustrated by the fate of May Day, a workers' holiday throughout the world that originated in response to the judicial murder of several anarchists after the Haymarket affair of May 1886, in a campaign of international solidarity with U.S. workers struggling for an eight-hour day. In the United States, all has been forgotten. May Day has become "Law Day," a jingoist celebration of our "200-year-old partnership between law and liberty" as Ronald Reagan declared while designating May 1 as Law Day 1984, adding that without law there can be only "chaos and disorder." The day before, he had announced that the United States would disregard the proceedings of the International Court of Justice that later condemned the U.S. government for its "unlawful use of force" and violation of treaties in its attack against Nicaragua. "Law Day" also served as the occasion for Reagan's declaration of May 1, 1985, announcing an embargo against Nicaragua "in response to the emergency situation created by the Nicaraguan Government's aggressive activities in Central America," actually declaring a "national emergency," since renewed annually, because "the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States" -- all with the approbation of Congress, the media, and the intellectual community generally; or, in some circles, embarrassed silence. "

Noam Chomsky.  Necessary Illusions, pp 29-30.

I added the links.

burn one down

This is nice and all, but the point of drug criminalization is not to decrease dangerous drug use or protect the sweet innocent children or whatever the fuck the idiots yap about.  It has been obvious for many years that prohibition is a miserable failure at those stated goals, ergo cogito, the stated goals aren't the real ones.  They're diversions, conjured for public consumption, in service of narrow sectors of interests, force-fed by a complicit media.  

A prominent story about how one nation's decriminalization of drugs led to decreased drug abuse across the board is only relevant in The Greatest And Best Nation On The Face Of Jesus Christ's Sweet Earth to the extent that it helps the unwashed masses (1) see through the charade and (2) fight against it.  In other words, it doesn't matter.  The Portuguese are just a bunch of Euro-fags.

things people without appendices do?

today has been a good recovery day.  i took a walk outside, and my bowels are getting closer to normal functioning*.  i'm going to eat a hamburger for dinner, and i might have a beer too.  it still hurts though if i do anything that uses ab muscles, which turns out to be just about every movement.

i've watched way too many movies and tv episodes over the last few days.  in the hospital i actually managed to read a lot, and finished chomsky's "Necessary Illusions."  but i've had trouble concentrating on reading here.  that will improve soon.   i've watched:

• entire season 3 of The Office, and the last 5 episodes of whatever this season is
  
• the 2 recent episodes of Prison Break, which apparently started back up again (guilty pleasure)
  
• several episodes of Life of Birds with Attenborough (always awesome)
  
• 3:10 to Yuma (pretty good for a western starring a brit and an aussie)
  
• So Goes the Nation (very limited value, and not in the way they intended)
  
• Bourne Ultimatum (always awesome)
• American Gangster (pretty good, but more boring than i expected)

on my walk i picked up 2 more documentaries from the library that i'll watch soon, and that will probably end the dvd binge:

• the smartest guys in the room (mark cuban's enron movie)
• not yet rated (some expose of the the movie ratings nazis)

i just noticed that i threw in some random capitalization of the movie titles, but not the last two.  i'm weird.

* - every once in a while it occurs to me that everything i write on this stupid blog could conceivably be available to read 50 years from now.  my grandkids could be reading this, seeing how grandpa's bowels were functioning back in 2009.  hopefully just as well as they are in 2059!

fuck the police

Shit like this happens every single day.  Agents of the state use violence against peaceful people who merely wish to assert their basic rights.  Obey or else.  What a fucking joke America is.

hiding in a spider hole

In reference to how the supreme court thinks its pretty much just fine for school officials to strip search little girls to make sure they don't have any WMDs tylenol hidden in their panties, I'd just like to second IOZ's point: public schools are prisons for kids.

Is there any imagined threat that doesn't justify a US Government invasion of some kind?

canadian medicine stole my appendix

monday night: trip to ER - appendicitis

tuesday night: appendectomy

wednesday afternoon: home

ouuuuuuuuch

I just watched the new X-Files movie on DVD.  Holy shit was that awful.

gangsters

Dennis Perrin, 13-April-2009:

Democrats love spilling blood, believing they can do it better and more efficiently than those evil, crazy tea-bagging Repubs. The Dems as Michael Corleone to the GOP's Sonny.

adspar, 25-June-2008:

Democrats are dirty mob lawyers; Republicans are the mob enforcers. In the power struggle to be the next don, people get to choose between the no-neck tough guy (McCain) or the smooth-talking debonair schmoozer (Obama).

Notes on Morality and Evolution: Intro

I TAed a Behavioral Ecology course this semester, and a couple weeks ago I gave a 45 minute presentation to the class. I was asked to present about my research, but since I didn't have any decent data from my experiment yet, I decided to just present on topic related to my research that is somewhat relevant to the course. I'm going to make a series of blog posts based on my presentation.

So, here you go.

Intro.

This picture was chosen by the course professor to be on the front page of the course website. It is a great choice because it is such a dramatic illustration of an animal behavior that seems puzzling but can be explained quite well. The course covers parental favoritism and sibling rivalry, and students learn that these phenomena are widespread in the animal kingdom and that there are piles of data showing how these behaviors are explained by evolutionary theories.

I think it is interesting that this picture should even seem so dramatic to us. After all, if this behavior is so common, and makes such good sense in light of well established scientific theory, why should it be so surprising to us?

I think that it is because of our moral sense that the image is so powerful. We feel bad for the little bird getting squashed by his mother. It seems unfair. And if we were to see a pictures of a human mother doing the equivalent to her child, we'd probably make a moral judgment about her.

So, this series of blog posts is about morality, specifically from an evolutionary perspective. Morality is a broad topic, and a difficult one to define, despite most of us feeling like we have a pretty clear understanding of what it is. I'm not going to attempt to thoroughly cover the subject; instead I'll be breaking morality down into components or looking at certain facets of morality. By components I mean things like I mentioned in regards to the baby bird: feelings of fairness, empathy, and moral judgment. A facet of morality to keep in mind is that our moral sense seems to push us to act in service to others, as opposed to our own "selfish" interests. Another is that moral rules and judgments often feel absolute, an observation that I'll expound upon in the next post.

I'll discuss 4 pieces of research in 3 future posts, that will look something like this:

1) Why did morality evolve?
A model of stability-dependent cooperation.

2) Phylogeny and the Origins of Fairness.
Fairness in monkeys?

3) How do we study morality in psychology labs?
i. Economic games in the lab: Dictator games with manipulation of information.
ii. Proximate factors: audience effects.

Stay tuned for the next installment.

conversations

say, adspar, what is that obama fellow up to these days?  you know, that guy who was going to change everything for the better?  the one who gives us hope?

he's been busy.

that's good.  hope and change are hard work.  what a great guy.  so clean and articulate!  so charismatic and intelligent.  so what is he doing?  lots of great and wonderful things i'm sure!

yeah, well he's been changing bush's war on terror by escalating the slaughter of civilians in pakistan.  you didn't even know we were killing pakistanis did you?  

aren't they supposed to be our allies?  

oh well, no matter.  i'm sure he has very good reasons.  just like he has good reasons to send his troops to shoot pregnant women and destroy farms and crops in afghanistan.  you should have seen how articulately he gave that order!

that sounds kind of bad actually.  but i probably just don't know enough about it.  i'm sure he has access to secret information that makes this more understandable.  we should just trust his judgment on this.  he's not bush after all!  remember all those criticisms of bush he intelligently articulated in his campaign?  surely those criticisms prove his heart is pure and good.  yes, definitely, we should just trust him.

yeah, remember how he criticized bush for kidnapping people off the street and locking them in cages in guantanamo without any ability to challenge their detention?  obama is hoping and changing this by locking them in cages in bagram instead!  that probably sounds like it contradicts his campaign rhetoric, but don't worry, i'm sure you'll figure out some way to excuse him for it.

i don't know... i'll try hard...

i think you owe him that much.  he's working very hard to make sure there are no investigations or prosecutions of the well-documented widespread use of torture by bush's henchman.  he's working hard to make sure he can torture too.  so you better work hard to excuse, rationalize, or ignore anything he does that you don't like.

adspar, you're really such a downer.  i just want to feel good about the world, and have some hope.  times are really tough, so i don't think that's too much to ask for.  but you have to go and ruin it for me.  i don't think i'm going to ask you about politics any more.

cause he's the LESSER

when i posted this, the format of this blog included images that compare BO to an ape.   there's a point to that, and it isn't a racist one.  

SAYS I.  and the foolPROOF is that dick and dubya also are apes.  some of my best friends!  so clearly i'm as squeeeeeeky-ass clean as a flowing white KKK sheet.

but racism is fun, and this blog is all about fun, so i'm guessing that it makes way more sense to just call me racist and move on.  so, yeah.  go forth, ye progressive non-neocon wariors and wage your (righteous) wars and (efficiently) smite thine enemies and labelest thine detractors "racists" and "rednecks" and "dinosaurs."  

cause you know what?  dinosaurs are fucking cool as shit.  for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory.  baba yetu.

this shit, as far as i recall, has always primarily been about two things: truth and fun.  it is clear to me now that one of these two things just isn't very important at all.

This is an amazing photo exhibit.

short post about a long article

Read this and then read this.

Pretty impressive, BO, pretty impressive.

barely here

Haven't had much inclination to attend to this blog lately. My attention has been elsewhere.

• I noticed today that the NCAA tournament is starting this week, and apparently Maryland made it in as a 10 seed. I haven't paid any attention to college basketball at all, and have no plans to start. This will be another year where I don't even fill out a bracket.
• I started an experiment recently, and so far the results seem to be very weird. From what I can tell, nothing is turning out like we expected, and some things are going the exact opposite way. Science is weird.
  
• It is weird mostly being around the kinds of people who uncritically support Democrats after a lifetime of mostly being around the kinds of people who uncritically support Republicans. People around here love Obama and love to belittle people who supported Bush or McCain or Palin. My blood-drenched tyrant is better than your blood-drenched tyrant!
• A week from tomorrow I have to give a presentation to 200 students in a 3rd year behavioral ecology class about morality. I ought to be working on that.
• Friday and Saturday were the psychology graduate program's annual recruitment weekend. That means it must have been a year since the last recruitment weekend where I showed up without knowing why I had been invited and somehow talked my way into a lab that wasn't supposed to be accepting any more students. I'm still quite pleased with how things have worked out for me.
  

a quick lesson on media

A discussion about (east coast/large market) bias in sports media broke out on my fantasy basketball message board, so I posted my thoughts on the matter (starting by quoting someone's comment from earlier in the conversation). I thought I'd recycle it here too, what the hell. "A quick lesson on media" I called it.

"espn and all media is a business, they cover whatever they think people will watch."

sometimes they (media folks) pretend that they're objective truth-seekers. then when they're criticized they suddenly become businesses just catering to the demands of their consumers, the ignorant rabble. (the contradiction never seems to bother them.)

why are their customers so ignorant? because the media refuses to inform them. why does the media refuse to inform them? because they don't want to be informed! repeat as needed.

keep in mind what the exact nature of media business is: selling audiences to advertisers. the media serves the interests of its owners. in some cases this is best accomplished by running a story because it will get ratings/sell papers today, to justify higher rates on advertising. in other cases it is best served by pushing information that works to some other end. not many businesses want to buy access to an audience being told about future economic woes. so media coverage of economic issues is biased towards the sunny side, until reality interferes too obviously with this, at which point the story becomes "nobody saw this coming" to cover their own ass.

also note of course that often times the owners of media businesses have a variety of other business interests, in which case media can serve as a propaganda outlet for their larger interests.

same dynamic plays out in sports coverage. follow the money.

constructive solutions: a See For Yourself first?

After publishing this post about my wildest dreams I got an email from a friend:

I think this is the first time I have read the changes you want to see enacted. Some of your points I agree with and some I do not. But I have wondered from time to time what you are actually looking for in a government/society so I was very pleased to read your post. Just wanted to say that.

It was a well-intentioned message, and I appreciated the thought, but I thought he was wrong. I thought I'd been making it pretty clear what I'd like to see.

For example, in the same month as that dreams post I published this lament of the destruction of the Bush years, and I don't think my disgust with basically everything that man did has been any secret. Was it not clear that I'd like to live in a country that doesn't invade other nations based on outrageous lies, destroy millions of lives, torture its captives, and whatever else you want to include as part of the rotten corpse of the Bush legacy?

Also in the same month as the first post, just a few days before it in fact, I wrote that the departing Bush gang were all criminals but will be protected by the rest of the US political class, including Obama. In case it wasn't obvious, if I'm going to live under the rule of a government, I'd like that government to hold its leaders to higher standards of conduct than anyone, rather than the current arrangement of a two-tiered justice system where the full force of the law is brought down on common people while political elites break the law with impunity. I'd like my government to prosecute war criminals for war crimes and to honor the treaties they've signed that obligate them to investigate and prosecute such crimes. Was that not clear before?

And in case it wasn't clear from this post, also in the same month as the others, I'd like my government to display the opposite priorities from the ones criticized. I'd like government to place higher priority on meaningful help for needy people than on endless expansion of the war machine or corporate welfare. Did I not get that message across?

Again, I thought my friend's message was a nice-hearted gesture, especially from someone who has often disagreed with me. But I just find the idea that I've never said want I wanted bizarre.

Maybe I'm sensitive to this issue because I've seen the same idea applied to critics far more eloquent than I am, and I suspect it is yet another way that people have found to dismiss challenges to their perspectives without actually engaging them. "Oh sure, Chomsky is a smart guy, but he's so negative. He never offers constructive solutions, he just criticizes everyone." They can just tune out criticism based on the nonsensical idea that it isn't productive. It seems to me that criticizing terrible actions is highly constructive, and that the solution is obvious: stop doing the terrible stuff. But Chomsky's oh-so-wearisome negativity becomes the first talking point brought up in response to anything he says, drowning out his important message with this distracting bullshit. And by the way, while in some cases people do that as a conscious strategy, I'm sure that many people do it automatically and without realizing it, like a built-in ideological defense mechanism. (It is kind of a version of "poor form." I don't like that guy, so I won't listen to him.)

But instead of speculating about that kind of cognitive dissonance management strategy applying to my friend, I'll gladly adopt a more generous interpretation of his message: that he read my list of dreams as specific policy positions I'd like to see, and that seemed fundamentally different (and more interesting) to him than the criticism of past government actions that he's mostly seen me write. And I guess that's fair enough, at least for the first sentence of his message.

But as for the rest of what he wrote, his confusion about what I'm "looking for in a government/society" confuses me. Maybe I don't really have a good sense of how closely what I've written here keeps up with what is going on in my head. But as I've already mentioned, several of the items on that list had been mentioned in weeks before it, and most of the others in the months before (I assume, but I don't feel like looking it up right now). And all of them seem very straightforward extensions of the general philosophies I routinely express. So maybe he just doesn't pay close attention to my writing, and/or maybe he just didn't pick his words very carefully.

I'll emphasize that I don't mean to give any impression that I'm personally bent out of shape about his comment. I'm not. I read a post at another blog recently about a private email exchange that made me think of several of my own that I've considered writing about, including this one. I chose to go ahead with this one because of its similarity to the broader pattern I've observed where critics of power are dismissed for not providing "constructive solutions" or whatever, and I think that pattern is worthy of comment. So I used this personal example as a launching point for the discussion.

Another challenge: botanical edition

A while back I mentioned Andrew Carroll, an 18 year old kid who is really fucking brave.  He stood in the middle of his town holding some pieces of a plant, knowing what the result would be.  

Men with guns came, put chains on him, and forced him into a cage.  

Soon he'll face a "trial" in a "court" that is supposed to deliver "justice."  He'll make strong moral arguments, which will be ignored in favor of immoral laws that say he is guilty.  The state will punish him.  Because he possessed a plant.  

Challenge: justify this.

(Reminder:  your taxes pay for this kind of thing.)

If you aren't up to the challenge, Andrew has made his point.

on condescension

As a followup to the previous post, on a personal level, I want to say that I think Brice Lord is a good guy and I don't mean to pick on him specifically.  The views he has expressed are very common.  

Statism, especially in America, is basically a religion into which people are raised.  And just as I don't think people are stupid or evil just because they're religious, I don't think that about those who believe in the state or in the exceptionalism of America.  But I do think their beliefs are dangerous and can lead to actions that are stupid or evil, and as such I try to challenge bad arguments defending those beliefs.  

The most hopeful outcome of such a process is to convince people to give up their religions and evaluate the world around them without the blinders of faith.  Perhaps a more realistic hope is that by speaking up we make it easier for others to do the same and to unite, gradually adding cohesiveness and force to a previously-marginalized viewpoint.

Just like when I've spoken out against religion, I suspect a reaction to what I've said here will be that I'm terribly condescending.  But all I've done here is say that I disagree with someone (or lots of people).  Implicit in disagreement is the thought that the other person is wrong. Disagreements happen all the time without accusations of condescension, so clearly there's more to condescension that simply telling someone they're wrong.  

If it is the suggestion that a perspective is based on faith, not reason, that seems condescending, I would argue that if anything that is a nicer way of telling someone they're wrong.  Personally, I'd feel better if my failure to understand reality could be attributable to complex effects of the way loved ones have influenced my emotional development and trusted authorities have deceived me.  That seems like the nicest possible way to tell someone they're wrong.  

I think this feeling that someone is being condescending is an unconscious way of insulating ourselves from challenges to deeply held beliefs, a point I've made before when I talk about "poor form".  Rather than confront the ideas, it enables us to simply dismiss the challenger.  After all, even if I am being condescending, that doesn't mean I'm wrong.

reply to Brice Lord

I've been meaning to go back and address a point raised by Brice Lord in the comments to this post. I said that the government steals your money, calling it "taxation," to pay for its crimes, to which he replies:

First, who says it's my money anyway? Most of the money I make wouldn't be available to be made were it not for the facilitation of the government by redistribution of resources.

Perhaps this is a defensible reply to a narrow understanding of the specific comment that preceded his remark, but it doesn't meaningfully address the challenge I posed, though it may seem that way if you've deeply embraced the state structure, as most people have. To note that redistribution of resources is only necessary because of the state's essential role in maintaining massive inequality of resource distribution is to note that Brice Lord's answer begs the question: the state controls everyone's lives so of course the state should control our money!

To (hopefully) make this a little easier...

An easy way to dismiss Brice Lord's complaint is to imagine a farmer who earns a living by selling food that he grows to his neighbors, making little or no use of government infrastructure. He just works the land that his family has worked for generations, and sells his harvests to people nearby. He is taxed by the government, and if he refuses to pay, men with guns will throw him in a cage and/or take his property. I think this scenario goes most of the way to addressing Brice Lord's point.

As for the rest of us, how many people actually even have the option of making a living in a way that can't be seen as directly or indirectly reliant on government? Whether your career aspirations are about pure altruism, pure self-advancement, or anything in between, it is almost impossible to find a path that isn't state-managed. (If the privileged people that come from where Brice Lord and I come from have that option, they don't seem to exercise it very often. Our former classmates and mutual friends are lawyers, doctors, academics, federal law enforcement officers, Wall Street financiers, teachers, government policy advisors.) So pretty much the only way to make money, by which I mean the only way to gain access to general resources by the means of our personal specialized productivity, is by aligning yourself with the state. And it is this all-encompassing strangehold that the state has on our lives that Brice Lord offers as a defense of the state's all-encompassing stranglehold on the gains from our personal productivity. Obviously I find his argument unpersuasive.

As for Brice Lord's arguments in his other comments, I think he's committed several other errors. First he seems to think that because two-thirds of the annual federal budget (I'll just take his figure for granted here) goes to what are called "social programs," that means most of your tax money supports the "social safety net." He then acknowledges that such programs might be poorly managed, which immediately undermines his argument because poor management means that a significant percentage of that goes to waste. While some are content to politely call this inefficiency, there are thriving industries getting rich off this waste and investing a portion of their proceeds in lobbying to make sure the "poor management" continues. This is corporate welfare, redistributing resources in the opposite direction from what Brice Lord thinks the government is doing.

But you can even put that aside, because even if 100% of this money was devoted to the stated goals of these "social programs," many of them actually make things worse, not better. In order to adequately support this argument, I think we'd have to go through these programs on a case-by-case basis and examine their net effects, which is beyond the scope of this post. (As for the debate at hand, if Brice Lord can simply assert that these programs do good, I can refute him by simply asserting they don't, so at worst I've forced a draw on this specific point.)

Second, he seems to think that a meaningful version of democracy obtains in the US. It doesn't, and never has.

Third, he has only acknowledged negative actions funded by our tax dollars that take place in foreign countries. This might be because he thinks (perhaps fairly) that I've mostly focussed on those (though I did note a domestic issue in the original post). Following from the first point, I'd argue that the vast majority of all government action has negative consequences. An example that I must have mentioned before and that should be uncontroversial is the "war on drugs," which has devastating domestic effects and costs untold billions of tax dollars. Same with our agriculture policies and subsidies. Same with most federal "education" programs.

Fourth, to put all of it together, he seems to be saying that if a government elected by a plurality of a population engages in aggressive foreign wars resulting in millions of ruined lives, that it is defensible for everyone living in the area controlled by that government to be coerced into supporting the atrocities, as long as that government confiscates additional and more numerous funds that are used for good causes. Aside from the already mentioned cheapening-to-the-point-of-meaninglessness of "democracy," this makes a mockery of any notion of government by consent of the governed.

And that the defense of this is that there is no "practical" alternative is shockingly cynical, which is ironic in that Brice Lord's view here is quite common, and my political thoughts are often dismissed as too cynical. But I've never argued that the only way that 300 million people in a given geographic region could possibly live together in relative safety and do a fairly decent job of taking care of each other is by surrendering control of their lives to an institution that sociopathically will do whatever it can get away with to gain the slightest advantage for those who control it, up to and including the mass slaughter of millions of human beings. I might be insane or naive, but I do still believe that there are practical alternatives to such an arrangement.

update: slight edit to the wording of the 2nd to last paragraph.

on the role of intellectuals

I don't know if I have special access to Science articles because I'm on campus, so I'll just copy the whole thing below. The basic story is that some academics have developed mathematical techniques to analyze the shape of Congressional districts and provide some measure of how goofy the shapes are, which you could infer is a measure of how gerrymandered they are.

The last paragraph amused me. The discussion is entirely about whether these sophisticated mathematical tools will lead to people feeling like the process is fair. Note that the discussion is not about whether these tools will lead to a process that is fair. Apparently the latter issue cannot be addressed because of "contradictions out the wazoo" since "one person's equality is another person's gerrymander." Clearly it is beyond the capacity of academia's preeminent publications to attempt to referee such muddled debates! I'm sure they couldn't possibly find any patterns as to which kinds of people think shapes like Maryland's 3rd district represent equality, or do any kind of analysis as to who benefits from those kinds of shapes. Far too many contradictions indeed. More than can be contained in a single wazoo.

Instead what is important is that the outcome be "respected." Smoke and mirrors. As Chomsky has said many times, the role of intellectuals is to support power systems and justify their atrocities. At least they sometimes acknowledge it.



JOINT MATHEMATICS MEETINGS:
Can Mathematics Map the Way Toward Less-Bizarre Elections?
Barry Cipra

JOINT MATHEMATICS MEETINGS, 5-8 JANUARY 2009, WASHINGTON, D.C.
With the 2010 census looming, U.S. politicians and their legal teams are gearing up for another round of wrangling over the spoils of redistricting: the process of deciding which voters get to reelect which members of the House of Representatives and other legislative bodies. Parties in power like to carve up voters to their own advantage, a practice known as gerrymandering. Some reformers, however, hope to limit the mischief--and are turning to mathematics for tools to do so. In a marathon 6-hour session at the Joint Meetings, speakers discussed ideas ranging from pie-in-the-sky theoretical to crust-on-the-ground practical.

The term "gerrymandering" dates back to 1812, when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed into law a tortuous districting map that favored his Democratic- Republican Party over the rival Federalists. But given the fine-grain demographic detail of modern political databases, "the problem is much worse than it used to be," says Richard Pildes, an expert on election law at the New York University School of Law in New York City. Gerrymandering "gives people the sense that they're not really in control of their democracy," Pildes says. "It's part of what contributes to an alienation and cynicism about democracy."

The mathematics of redistricting starts with arithmetic and geometry. Ideally, every district in a state would have an equal population and would be, in some sense, both "contiguous" and "compact." Socioeconomic, political, and racial demographics also come into play. "You can have equipopulous districts and still have whoppingly biased gerrymanders," notes Sam Hirsch, a lawyer at Jenner & Block in Washington, D.C., who specializes in election law and voting rights.

To a mathematician, contiguous means connected--i.e., you can travel from any point in it to any other without leaving the region. Compactness is trickier. Various definitions have been proposed, including one presented at the session by Alan Miller, a graduate student in social science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California.

Miller's method, developed with Caltech economist Christopher Chambers, quantifies the "bizarreness" of geometric shapes. (The word "bizarre" traces to a 1993 ruling in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down several oddly shaped congressional districts. Politicians' attempts to handpick their constituents invariably create convolutions in district lines.) In essence, bizarreness is the probability that the most direct path between two randomly chosen voters within a district crosses district lines. The higher the probability, the more bizarre the district is. (The path is required to stay within the state, to avoid penalizing districts that sit on ragged state boundaries.)

Using block data from the 2000 census, Miller and Chambers have computed bizarreness for the congressional districts of Connecticut, Maryland, and New Hampshire. Most compact was Connecticut's 4th District, with bizarreness 0.023; most oddly shaped: Maryland's 3rd district, at 0.860 (see figure).

Bizarreness could be used as a threshold criterion in producing redistricting maps or comparing alternatives, Miller says. "You can use it to reject districts that are badly shaped."

In his own proposal, Hirsch took the idea of thresholds and added a dose of high-octane competition. Rival factions--or anyone else interested in entering the fray--would be able to counter one another's maps, as long as each new submission improved on at least one of three criteria and matched the other two. The goals of the three criteria are to minimize the number of counties cut up by district lines, equalize as much as possible the number of districts leaning toward each of the two major parties, and maximize the number of "competitive" districts, in which neither major-party candidate in a recent statewide contest would have won by more than 7% of the vote.

Hirsch's proposal "is a great idea," says Charles Hampton, a mathematician at the College of Wooster in Ohio, who has been involved in redistricting since the early 1980s. (He drew maps in 1991 for the governor of California's Independent Redistricting Panel.) "We quibble on some of the details," Hampton says, but "I think [it] has some real prospect of producing a much better situation."

No one expects mathematics to solve the problem to everyone's satisfaction. "It's ultimately a political problem," Hirsch says. Kimball Brace, head of Election Data Services in Manassas, Virginia, and a member of the 2010 Census Advisory Committee, agrees. "Redistricting is contradictions out the wazoo," Brace says. "One person's equality is another person's gerrymander." Nonetheless, a growing group of practitioners believe mathematics can play a key role. Says Pildes, "Math can give you tools for creating processes that are likely to lead people to feel that the process is fair and that the outcome is therefore something to be respected."

my job this semester

The class I TAed last semester was amazing. I wish I had taken something like it as an undergrad.

This semester I'm TAing a behavioral ecology course:

Behavioural Ecology is a field devoted to understanding animal behaviour in terms of evolution and ecology. In this course, we will study the behaviour of animals, why such behaviour evolves and how behaviour may enable animals to adapt to their environments. As a field, behavioural ecology emerged from a synthesis of many scientific disciplines including ethology, evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology, zoology and population genetics. Note, this course is NOT centrally concerned with Homo sapiens, and will take a comparative approach to the study of
animal behaviour.

I would have loved this course as an undergrad too, but I stayed away from biology because I hated dissecting things. I haven't taken a biology course since my freshman year of high school, 1994-1995. I don't remember evolution being covered in that course, and there certainly wasn't any cool analysis of behavior. The stuff worth learning managed to elude me for a long time, but I found it eventually.

Repeat

Chris Floyd:

How many times do you have to see it? How many times must it be shoved in your face, crammed down your throat, brought down on your head like a ton of bricks, before you get the picture? When it comes to the lineaments and methods of empire -- war, murder, torture, extortion, and deceit -- there is no difference, none whatsoever, between the hip, cool "progressives" in Team Obama and the gaggle of militarist goons who preceded them.

Go read the rest!

dream a little dream

Sometimes you hear a philosophical examination of consciousness or something that argues that maybe you're just dreaming this right now and don't realize it. So how to do you know it is really real? That kind of thing.

Here's what I realized. I'm pretty sure that any time I've ever stopped and thought about whether something I'm experiencing is real, I've gotten the right answer. I've been in dreams and not thought about whether it was real, but whenever I actually stop and think about it, I realize I'm dreaming. (Then I get to start controlling the dream, which is awesome.) And any time in real life I wonder if I'm dreaming, I know I'm not. So I don't get what all the fuss is about.

Maybe I need to do more drugs though. I suppose that could trip me up.