Play it Again, Sam [For the Plants]

The feel good viral post of the week seems to be the Barcelona Opera House reopening for a quartet playing to a packed symphony hall... packed with plants! It's so charming that it's impossible not to love. The musicians clad in black, the lush reds and golds of the architecture peeking out behind massive green fronds occupying every seat make for a beautiful series of photographs that acknowledge how different the world has become since covid began to turn off various switches connected to our society. These musicians have spent lifetimes training to play beautiful music, each performance requiring countless hours of human striving before it drifts into the ears of their audience in normal circumstances; these days washing over plants.

I, too, make noises for my houseplants. I speak to them when I water them, asking how they are feeling while I gently feel their leaves to gauge their thirst. I see no reason to think they don't hear everything I  say, even if I doubt they care about any of the contents of the conversations I have. Like many houseplant owners, I am convinced that my green friends appreciate the nice things I try to do for them.

How odd that the photos of the Barcelona symphony didn't move me. For reasons then unknown, I reacted to the photos with complete indifference, and to be honest, I didn't even click them to get a closer look. Fortunately, either the universe is ordered or coincidences can be happy. Today, a musician friend posted a recording of the frogs in her backyard.

Do you remember the last time you heard frogs? Aren't they wildly unpredictable and magical sounding, even when you think you know what to expect?  I remember one time I was on a walk around a golf course and a chorus of the strangest miniature organs turned on in surround sound. That same year, I had been going to a church to hear Bach's organ works played regularly. Please do not ask me to choose which I preferred. I rarely hear frogs where I live now; how sad to know my home was certainly once a lush wetland filled with the peeps, urps and rorks of the amphibian chorus.

In search of a conclusion for this article, I looked at the photos. This time, I realized I have a new emotion, the result of the reflection that comes from sharing my thoughts.

I see excitement in the plants, and I share that emotion. What a magnificent and novel gesture this is for western society, to perform our art for plants! I see plants in the audience that acknowledge that humans are ready to try to please them. Iit is time for institutions such as opera houses to ask "what would the plants like?"And I think those plants thought our music was lovely, but I doubt it replaces the music to which they are attuned.

Think again about the music of frogs and insects and birds. Plants once had that ringing in their [whatever passes for plant] ears every evening. We once had that, too. I wish I had it, still. Do you?

We can have it again. The plants certainly will - they will be here long after we erase ourselves from this planet. You and I might not - unless we try very hard to bring the frogs back to where we live.

Remember this - all of those frog sounds you hear are no different than most human songs.The music of frogs is a chorus of frog love songs. Some things never change.

Fireworks for the People

Ah yes, explosions. We all kind of love them (unless you're a dog, asleep, safety conscious, averse to loud noises in general, favor creativity that doesn't involve destruction, etc) enough to go "oooo" and "aaaah" once or twice a year, depending on how warm New Year's Eve is.

Or do we? With so many things to worry about, you'd think we would be ignoring the occasional decorative kaboom, but the news in New York has been awash in fireworks these days.

First, the city fell apart. The budget exploded! As offices shut down and tax revenue plummeted, the city's budget went "poof" in a gaggle of news reports. Vital services were shut down - composting halted, for one - and yet, our leader-in-name-only Bill DeBlasio announced just a month into the shutdown that we had no reason to fear, for the fourth of July festivities would take place as planned! That's right - in a time when the city was hemorrhaging money, the mayor had the fearless vision to just blow some more money up in the sky. You are just a quick google away from finding how much one of these shows might cost, but I'm not going to do all your research for you. Maybe several million dollars worth? But who cares, explosions, right?

New York City got the message! While it's still illegal to throw explosives at cop cars and law enforcement will bring the brunt of the entire legal system to bear on anyone who tries a productive explosion, explosions in the sky are largely ignored!  And as fun as they are, fireworks you can buy will not harm a police car, so it really seems not to bother the police at all (if it did, they would simply run over some pedestrians).

 

And so, New Yorkers hopped into their cars (I assume?), drove to Pennsylvania where you can buy anything, and filled the trunks with explosives before returning to the city to set them all off. Even in my quiet neighborhood I hear the odd pop at the odd hour (kudos to the fellow who stayed up til 4:40 am to blow his load into the sky this morning).

Being New Yorkers, a fair number of us are doing our duty to preserve our reputation and complain about the seemingly random explosions now common in the city. Some even got in cars and drove around the upper east side (close to the home of mystic visionary DeBlasio) and honked their horns, which studies prove is the best way to demonstrate that you understand the optimum usage of cars in this city.

Most recently, in what I can only assume is a cruel joke, DeBlasio announced that the Macy's fireworks wouldn't take place the way that they have in the past (from expensive barges) but rather, from covert locations, unannounced, over the course of a week. That's right - you never know when the sky above your head will combust into fire sprinkles, but instead of some teens who haven't had social interaction for the past few months, it will be a massive retailer setting them off! Good thing the city can still funnel money to those guys.

The truly astonishing thing about this is how clearly this shows how if you want to do something wildly unpopular, the easiest way to do it is to become a corporation. Quite frankly, I don't care about the fireworks one way or another. My pyromania has evolved through several steps from when I was a child and burned leaves with a magnifying glass. In my teenage years, sure, I longed after strings of firecrackers and would try to time them so that I could chuck them into rivers like miniature depth charges. In college I was arrested with a potato cannon (dear employers - all charges were dismissed, because this is not against the law. Also, the police confiscated it, never gave it back, and I guarantee it is in Long Island being used at least once a year). These days, I hope to metaphorically burn our consumer society to the ground, which does not require or benefit from fireworks. But I have spent the past week listening to the mayor promise to crack down on rowdy New Yorkers blowing things up, and now that same deranged tall man who lives in Gracie Mansion is explaining that Macy's is allowed to run amok in the city and blow things up - AND THE CITY WILL PAY THEM.

The only consolation for those of us whose heads are still reeling from the whiplash of this cognitive dissonance is that the NYPD have also stopped caring about cracking down on fireworks because they will not lift a finger to help DeBlasio any more, and who can blame them?

Fortunately, I have a solution to propose for the honest, law abiding citizens of this city: Macy's will blow things up unnanounced and get paid for it. If they are allowed to do so, the citizens of New York should be allowed to take advantage of unannounced sales at Macy's of up to 100% off for up to the full cost of the firework display. No need to have the discount applied at the checkout lane - just walk on out. It seems only fair.

Better than David Brooks

Last week, while arguing with a friend, I claimed that it was possible for mediocrity to be rewarded while greatness could languish. I pointed to the field of journalism to back my claim. When challenged to name a single, overpaid journalist, one name flew into my mind: DAVID BROOKS.

I keep my resentment of David Brooks no secret. The closest I came to insulting him directly was when I tweeted something along the lines of "David Brooks is actually a vat of boomer brains suspended in a jar in a basement and hooked up to a typewriter." While my cutting words did not make their way to David Brooks' attention, my then girlfriend's mother did see them and was not entertained.
 
"David Brooks," I replied to my friend. "Absolutely mediocre, wildly overpaid."

"But could you write as much as he does?," my friend challenged me.

And as my friend blew on the embers, the fire of my former blogs glowed. From their ashes rises my new blogging project - how would my output compare to David Brooks' dithering mediocrity? Am I able to produce the written equivalent of a bowl of instant oatmeal every day? Will I tire from the blandness of my own thoughts? 

Only time will tell. But I will say this - for the next few weeks, I intend to challenge myself. I will make the same oatmeal as David Brooks, but I will add unexpected spices to my writing. Cilantro. Curry. Incorrect metaphors. I will turn my blind, uninformed eyes on the events of our times and issue withering moral criticisms establishing the superiority of my viewpoint, which I consider centrist if the extremes are David Brooks and the opinions of the ancient elders who have long slumbered under the ground upon which we tread, to whom the lives of humans are but playthings and whose return will herald the end of times. 

Expect drivel, friends, acquaintances, and strangers. Expect loads and loads of uninformed opinions backed by fabricated, Borges-ian studies.

How long will this last? Very definitely until I get bored and run out of things to say. But hopefully, dear readers, you will find this entertaining.

And if you all just love it, please start the petition to have the New York Times replace David Brooks' overpaid dreck with my own. If that comes to pass, I will think kindly of you when the ancient elders return, thank me for my work, and ask me who I think should be spared.

Our Fearlful Leader

The White House website transition went about as smoothly as could be expected, and while people have focused on what isn't there, it's time to move on to what IS. And what is more important in a Trump presidency than Trump's own mythology biography? And what a story it tells!

How does it begin?

"Donald J. Trump is the very definition of the American success story."

Which makes sense if your version of the American Success Story is to inherit your wealth from your father's company. Bonus points if that company is accused of profiteering on public contracts and also discriminated against tenants on a basis of race.

One paragraph consists of boring biography I imagine he has printed on the back of his business cards, and another longer paragraph discusses his path to the presidency, and this is where a close reading is most enjoyable.

Mr. Trump won the election on November 8 of 2016 in the largest electoral college landslide for a Republican in 28 years.

Whoa! 28 years! That's back in the 80s! I know Reagan was the president, and he won in landslide, right! But wait, 28 years ago is the 1988 election, in which George H.W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis, whose campaign's greatest legacy might be the worst photo-op ever. It also ranks 22nd of 56 in percentage difference in electoral college votes, as opposed to Reagan's 1984 election, which ranks 5. Sure seems like he's referring to it as "28 years ago"  because Trump thinks big numbers are good, or because he is hoping whoever is browsing just assumes he's referring to the actual landslide.

Oh, wait, here we go - he mentions that election in another sentence!

He won over 2,600 counties nationwide, the most since President Reagan in 1984.

I wonder why he didn't just say 32 years ago? This actually is a noteworthy statistic, but one that says more about the urban rural/divide in our country than it does about Donald Trump. A serious topic, so I'll avoid it.

Additionally, he won over 62 million votes in the popular vote, the highest all-time for a Republican nominee.

Which would totally be impressive if the total turnout hadn't been climbing the whole time. How fast, you say? Well, it doubled from 68.8 million voters in 1960 to 138.9 million voters last year, so comparing total Republican votes is pretty meaningless. Unfortunately, if you rank him on the percentage difference (which would be unaffected by increases in population), you end up with him having the 58th largest difference in percentage points out of 58 elections. These are apparently not the sort of big numbers Trump wants advertised, for some reason.

For fairness sake, let's compare it to Romney, who won 60.9 million votes out of a total 131.4 in 2008. If we assume that he would win that same percentage if we just scaled up the election to the 138 million who voted in the most recent election, he wins (60.993 x 13.885 / 131.407 =) 64.463 millon, votes, which is more than Trump. Keep in mind, Romney was also running against some Barack Obama dude who I'm told was kinda charismatic, and not someone who almost half of the country apparently hated from the get go.

And here's a new low bar for expectations:

He also won 306 electoral votes, the most for a Republican since George H.W. Bush in 1988.

Sure, I guess we should skip over the past two when Republicans lost, that makes sense.  Trump is bragging about winning more electoral votes in 2004 and 2000. Congratulations on winning an election without resorting to using the words "dimpled chad?"  And last I checked, being more popular than Dubya was not the achievement politicians these days gun for. Before that, the republican candidates lost to the more popular democratic candidate, Bill Clinton (who won 379 and 370, for comparison). And Bush senior, commonly known as the most popular Bush to win the presidency, convincingly wiped the floor with Trump's toupee, winning with 426 electoral college votes.

The page goes on. Trump's not lying. He's like he 6th grader who carefully chooses his words to make sure that if he's ever caught, he can go back and say "I didn't lie." There are lots of reasons students do this. Laziness is one. I like to imagine these sorts of conversations in his reform school military prep days:

Donald, where's your homework?
I left my notebook at home.

Except this time, it's not just that Donald didn't do his homework. He's afraid and insecure, because he just lost the popular election as badly as an elected president has ever done, and now he needs to lead a government where his validity will be questioned every second, and if there's one thing someone with his insecurity issues can't stand, it's to have his authority challenged.

The best part? Everybody who's watching always knows the little sixth grader is a lying weasel, and it's only a matter of time until sort of kid loses friends. Trust me. I taught sixth graders just like him. 

In Defense of Cairns and the Wilderness You Walk Through

I recently came across this article calling for the end of rock stacking (or cairns) in the wilderness. The argument has been bouncing around my head for quite some time, but it took me some days to determine why a) I disagree and b) why I can't get it out of my head without discussing it.

The author views these cairns as intrusions in the wilderness - reminders that other humans have been here before, and likens them to graffiti. As reasons against stacking them, she points out that moving stones hastens erosion, disturbs native plants, and destroys potential homes for insects and burrowing mammals. Her main argument (and the one that I believe annoyed her to the point where her wrote this) rests on the fact that a cairn is an "unwelcome reminder of humanity" that degrades an "already beautiful landscape." This thought comes from the attractive self-delusion that we have somehow not already profoundly altered the landscape, and this is a dangerous type of environmentalism.

 Untouched wildernesses do not exist in North America; I will change my opinion on this when I see a woolly mammoth or a ground sloth. The introduction of the Clovis culture to the Americas abruptly ended an age filled with megafauna. If photographing one of those was on your wilderness checklist, it was not the cairns that interfered, but human activity (on the plus side, I'm glad I no longer have to worry about sabertooth tigers sneaking up on me while I'm focused stacking rocks in the wilderness). Nowhere on the surface of the earth is unaffected by humans. Central Greenland is losing ice faster than ever before; mountaineers in the Himalayas report changing conditions over the past decades, with more rocks visible and more frequent avalanches. The Amazon Rainforest is shrinking faster than monkeys can shake their tales. Unless the author is carbon neutral (I'd even accept her buying carbon offset credits), she, too, leaves a little human footprint tracking around the globe.

That is all secondary to the core of my disagreement with this ethos. This article posits a false dichotomy between the "wilderness" and "man-made environments." Nature is not something that is outside; we are inside nature, and then we make little boxes in nature that we go into to hide from nature. Sometimes we pile a bunch of boxes on top of each other, and connect them so carefully that we can temporarily forget about nature. We invert the natural order and call nature the "outdoors" and whatever we created our "natural environment" (I'm a "city boy," for example). Should our boxes of security be "invaded" by nature (I just had a fire ant visit my pen-holder), there are always exterminators to call.

Fetishizing untouched wilderness is dangerous. It doesn't exist, and any attempts to create it foster an unhealthy dichotomy between ourselves and nature. Humans, our cave paintings, our rock piles, our cities, and our greenhouse gases all exist within nature. It is far too late to try to keep the humans in their human boxes and the nature everywhere else.

Don't knock over stacks of stones. Instead, allow nature back into your human boxes. Go birdwatching. Build a bat-house. Grow plants on your windowsills. Try growing oyster mushrooms on your compost. Learn about the trees in your neighborhood and what their vital signs are. If you want to feel connected to the sublime, I suggest starting in your own backyard.

Martin Shkreli was Arrested for the Wrong Thing

Martin Shkreli, previously famous for being a gigantic jerk, was arrested. Which is fantastic news, as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, he wasn't arrested for single handedly making a common and cheap life-saving drug exorbitantly expensive. He was arrested for security fraud. The short version of the story is that after losing other people's money in the stock market, he lied, and said he was doing great things with their money. To make it look more accurate, he started a company named Retrophin (which, incidentally, he used to gouge prices on already-developed drugs) whose revenue he used turn his investors losses magically into gains and also buy Wu Tang Clan albums. Unfortunately, that company Retrophin had a board, which is suing him for taking their money. And the SEC is suing him for lying to his investors. Which leads us to today, when we got to see his mugshot in the morning (making this one of the best news stories to wake up to in a while).

Great, he's arrested. But what does that say about us?

When Martin Shkreli exploited the pharmaceutical industry to line his own pockets, he wasn't doing anything illegal. There is nothing illegal about profiting from attempting to create a monopoly on a life saving drug in order to price gouge the sick. Some politicians made a hubub about it, and naturally legislation to make this sort of maneuvering illegal promptly stalled. But now we hear that justice is served, because while he was busy deciding if he wanted to deprive patients of affordable treatment or just make insurance expensive for everyone else, he was also committing securities fraud. And God forbid Martin Shkreli lie to his investors about losing their money! That gets the feds involved and a swift case in court.

The  government is going after bad guys, and that's generally a good thing. But keep your eyes peeled to see what bad guys have to do to get the government's attention. Because it's not "harm the sick/environment/needy." Those just seem to get you applause from some presidential candidates.

What is the House Science Committe Doing?

And more importantly, what should it be doing?

I've read several news stories in the past month about the House Science Committee and its ability to subpoena scientists who receive government funding ( see here, here or here for examples). The ones I read have been saying that Lamar Smith, the republican representative who is chairman of the committee, has been using this power to harrass scientists whose conclusions support the theory that man has changed the climate, and it is warming.

Lamar Smith, who, as you can tell from his choice of clothing, is not a scientist.

The biggest story has centered around this paper, published in Science Magazine, in which NOAA attempted to fix errors in their physical measurements of temperature in the past and update their historical datasets for the public. In the course of analyzing the new data sets, it also appears that the recent "hiatus" in global warming may be an artifact of incorrect data. Lamar Smith has subpoenad a substantial number of scientists to get to the bottom of this. He accuses NOAA of rushing this paper to publication so it could be ready for the climate talks going on now in Paris. His biggest criticism is that it doesn't take satellite data into consideration, and had they done so, their conclusion regarding the hiatus would be different. When I read that, I thought "that seems like a fair criticism. I know a little bit about satellite data, and I know that it is a useful tool for measuring climate trends. Why wouldn't they include it?"

So I took a look at the paper, and it's pretty interesting stuff to read about - it turns out that lots of sea-surface temperature measurements came from boats all the way back to WWII. The engines had water intake thermometers, and the ships kept logs of their readings. Some ships also lowered buckets into the water, and measured the temperature of that water. Other readings come from bouys. Not surprisingly, it turns out that each of these methods can create a slightly different temperature read-out, which NOAA had not taken into consideration. In the disputed paper, they attempt to correct for those slight discrepencies. The new, standardized dataset gets applied to papers that looked for trends in the data over decades. NOAA's paper links to updated papers. These papers presumably showed a hiatus when using the old data; using the updated data, the hiatus is less prominent. That's all the NOAA paper says. The conclusion that the hiatus isn't a thing doesn't seem to have anything to do with this study - that comes from other papers that already been accepted!


In other words, NOAA didn't include satellite data because the paper had nothing to do with satellite data. Imagine if you had been using two different scales for the past ten years to weigh yourself, and those scales disagreed with each other by a five or ten pounds. Correcting all your old measurements might make your own records more accurate. If you bragged about this to your friend, who then asked you "well, why didn't you also check your old height measurements,"you would probably want to whack your friend on the head with a yardstick; you weren't talking about height to begin with! (To be fair, for this metaphor to be more accurate, you would have had to make your weight records available to the public for a while. Lots of doctors would then get together and look at your records and conduct an astonish amount of science indicating that your weight looks like it's been rising really, really quickly in the past couple of days, and that it's probably because you started eating thousands of donuts without pooping a week ago. Those doctors would then note that you haven't appeared to have gained any weight over the past few minutes, but once they hear about your new measurements, they recheck their data and say "you might have still been gaining weight." And this is when your friend comes in, starts bothering the doctors, and asking "how come his height doesn't show any change?)

Getting to the bottom of this took me about two hours. Not bad, and I'm glad I questioned this story. But it also made me angry that this is a story at all. This government committee is taking a lot of time in Washington, and my understanding of time in Washington is that it is expensive. As I see it, the government is spending money creating two hour research projects for citizens who want to stay informed of important climate science. The House Science Committee is tasked with making sure that government funding for science is used properly. Oversight is one thing, but that should be secondary. The government's first role should be to clarify the findings of papers that they think are important. If a "Science Committee" finds issues with a scientific paper that discredit it, I want those issues clearly explained. That's important, and I don't disagree with Lamar Smith on that, but adding confusion by making irrelevant objections is not helpful. The best way to make sure that government funding is put to good use is to communicate the findings of important papers to the public, not to distract attention from them.

[Sidenote: I did a little more reading, and found this blog article from 2014, by Carl Mears, the person Senator Ted Cruz cites when he brings up the hiatus and satellite measurements, Carl Mears points to disagreements in the satellite datasets that are even more substantial than those in direct surface temperature measurements. As of 2014, he did not think that the hiatus was entirely an artifact, but that was before this paper.]