Melancholy

I miss my dad today.

I mean, I miss him every day, but today should have been his 85th birthday. Unfortunately, he only got to celebrate 56 birthdays. So it's kind of hard to imagine what he would have been like at 85.

So I guess it's time for one more reminder: Take care of yourselves and each other. And do what the doctor tells you.

And if you have a little extra (time, energy, stuff), please consider sharing some of it with the American Cancer Society. They do amazing work supporting people with cancer and their families, as well as supporting research so that maybe fewer people will have to miss their dads (moms, siblings, cousins, friends...).

You get the picture. Thanks for listening.

Abstinence FAIL

My niece and I were chuckling (well, laughing out loud, really) over news coverage of a U.S. Congressman who resigned this week over an affair with a staff member.

The most amusing part was that the staffer in question had hosted a video interview with the Congressman on the topic of...wait for it...abstinence.

My niece turned a video still I found online of that fine piece of work into a motivational poster that she said I could share:

It Has Come to This

I wasn't aware of this incident until I saw this piece at Digby's blog.

During Monday's Phillies game, a person in attendance at Citizen Bank Park ran onto the field while the Cardinals were up to bat. According to those at the game, this fan was promptly tasered.

This is just amazing to me. We seem to have lost all sense of proportion. Having a young child myself, I'm used to hearing kids threaten death and dismemberment for all sorts of minor transgressions. That's developmentally appropriate at a certain age, but eventually we're supposed to grow out of it as we come to understand both physical and social realities. By the time we're adults (or even teens), we are supposed to have developed some sense of measured response.

But really. Fans (usually inebriated ones) have been running onto fields for a long time: At least as long as games have been televised. And I am old enough to remember the "streaking" fad. For those who are fans and want to watch the game, these things are an annoyance, but a minor one at most. You have a delay while the intruder eludes a few security guards or police for a few minutes, then they subdue the person, remove them from the premises, and the game resumes.

In my experience, the intruder usually eludes being captured for a few minutes, probably causing a little embarrassment for the pursuer, but truly nothing of consequence is happening here.

So why is it even remotely reasonable to use a weapon of any kind, much less a taser, to subdue such a person? Delaying a sporting event isn't a serious offense. No one is in serious danger of attack (though there have been assaults on players an coaches, nothing that remotely justifies this kind of response to someone just running around). Embarrassing security personnel isn't smart, but again, it can't possibly justify subjecting the interloper to this level of physical danger.

[As someone once wrote about the decision to run out on the field, it probably seems like fun at first, but once you get removed from public view, you may get a lesson on differing interpretations of the term "reasonable force," especially if you've made the security guard or off-duty police officer run around and look a little foolish. But that was talking about a little roughness, not electrical shocks.]

My hat is off to Digby for her ongoing coverage of the taser issue. The taser is a great example of how our society has become inured to violence and torture and how the threshold for these things has gotten ridiculously low. Are we really so culturally immature that we believe this kind of behavior is reasonable?

Climate Change and Economics

I nearly always enjoy reading Paul Krugman's work. Not only is he a brilliant thinker, but he's a very good writer, with a knack for making complex subjects understandable.

So I was most pleased to see his piece today on climate change.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart. It was climate change and what we referred to at the time as the "greenhouse effect" that led me to study environmental science in college and to focus on the public policy aspects of that field. The intersection of science, economics, and politics is a fascinating, complex, and rewarding area, but not without its frustrations.

I recommend that you read Krugman's article. He concludes with what I think is meant to be a hopeful summary:

We know how to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. We have a good sense of the costs — and they’re manageable. All we need now is the political will.

Unfortunately, as he demonstrates earlier in his analysis, political will is hard to come by these days. Recent events haven't demonstrated to me that either the American body politic or its "leaders" have either the understanding or the backbone to make difficult choices. I fear we will dither ourselves into catastrophe.

Units of Measure

And while I'm uncharacteristically blogging, I ought to mention another fine Berkeley guy: Art Rosenfeld. He started out as a particle physicist, but the energy crisis of the 70s spurred him to turn his attention to energy efficiency.

He's now retiring after a long and distinguished career, and some of his colleagues have proposed naming a unit of measure (specifically a measure of energy conservation) after him.

Regardless of whether that takes hold, Rosenfeld has had an enormous influence over our world. For example, his research on reducing the size of the ballasts used by fluorescent lights led to the development of compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), which currently save huge amounts of electricity.

Rosenfeld also gets a lot of credit for the "California miracle," also known as the "Rosenfeld effect": California's per-capita electricity consumption has remained essentially the same since 1970, where that of the rest of the country has increased by about half. Through a combination of technologies, building codes, and other public policies, California has led the way, largely propelled by Rosenfeld.

My wife, who works in energy efficiency, got to go to Rosenfeld's retirement dinner this week, and it must have been a great event. His influence will continue to be felt both in the state and throughout the world.

Remembering Mario

No, not Super Mario: Mario Savio.

I never got to meet Mario, but as a student at Berkeley, I lived in a world that he helped shape. Walking through Sproul Plaza almost daily, it was easy to see the impact of Savio and the Free Speech Movement.

Even today, the FSM is remembered at the cafe in the undergraduate library.

Anyway, the linked review from The Nation is interesting, and makes me want to read the book.

What's in a Name?

A friend just pointed out to me that one can look up one's name in the Urban Dictionary. I thought the results for my nickname were particularly hilarious. I quite like:

2. v. as 'chard something up'. To, by error or misfortune, destroy iredeemably a situation that might otherwise have been promising or a suitestormme (see suitestormme).

Life is fun sometimes.

Crocodile Tears--For What?

Yesterday, the "big news" was that Mark McGwire finally admitted to using steroids during his baseball career.

Frankly, I have trouble seeing this as anything newsworthy, other than maybe the fact that a baseball team is actually hiring McGwire to work for them again. I'm all for forgiveness and redemption and all that, but really, you don't go hiring Al Capone to run BATF.

OK, here's my big problem with the McGwire admission: he's not sorry. He cheated through much of his career, and he clearly feels bad about it, but seems to think he was doing it for a good reason, so we should just forgive him. This, for me, was the money quote:

“I did this for health purposes. There’s no way I did this for any type of strength purposes,” he said.

Uh-huh. And why is that OK? You weren't trying to be a stronger ballplayer, you just wanted to recover quicker, or heal or prevent injuries. It's not like that would give him a competitive advantage over other players or anything. And then, he doesn't even take responsibility--it was the times, you see:

“It was a wrong thing what I did. I totally regret it. I just wish I was never in that era,” he said.

Yeah, because if there hadn't been those illegal drugs tempting you, you just would have lived with your injuries, put your tail between your legs and gone quietly home while someone else played ball. Bull. You cheated. You knew what you were doing, and you did it anyway.

And finally, the weaseling in his press statement about why he didn't come clean five years ago when he "testified" before Congress:

After all this time, I want to come clean. I was not in a position to do that five years ago in my congressional testimony, but now I feel an obligation to discuss this and to answer questions about it.

Uh, "not in a position"? What better position than when you have the attention of the whole country, broadcast live on C-SPAN and ESPN? I guess it's better to wait five years, then put out a press statement to clear the air for your new job. After all, it's all about you.

And that's bad. But even worse to me is the guy who is hiring him, again: Tony LaRussa. LaRussa was McGwire's manager when he broke into the majors with Oakland, then brought him to St. Louis later on. And now he's hiring him as his batting coach in St. Louis. LaRussa has insisted until yesterday that he had no knowledge, no idea that McGwire was juicing all those years. That doesn't even come close to passing the sniff test. LaRussa has been covering for McGwire (and therefore himself) for years. LaRussa has a fabulous (and IMHO, inflated) reputation as a baseball "genius" (I mean, he has a law degree from Florida State!) and humanitarian (largely for his work in animal rescue). But somehow he was unaware that the man he worked with for fifteen years was ballooning himself like a cartoon character and then lying about it. I offer you the opinions of baseball columnists Terence Moore and Ray Ratto. Neither seems to find LaRussa credible on this issue, either.

I have been accused of having a blind spot on this issue, having rooted for Barry Bonds for so many years. I will admit having suspicions for a long time, despite Bonds' denials. I will say this: he has been consistent with his stance that he did not knowingly use banned or illegal substances. That may not prove true, but I have no knowledge one way or the other. What I do know is that it was apparent during that era that some, indeed many, players were juicing. The fact that Bonds stood out among them does not diminish for me the achievements. He was the exciting player in an era of exciting players, some or all of whom may have been enhanced.

To me the bottom line is that one can never know all the details of who did what or just how much it helped them. McGwire claims he would have hit just as many home runs without enhancements. We'll never know, and that's too bad. What we do know is what happened: We saw, we cheered, we enjoyed. It's time to stop looking for which numbers need to have asterisks by them. Instead of moralizing about the past, we should learn from it and move on.

Baseball and other sports have always had their share of people trying to find advantages outside the game itself: doctored balls, amphetamines, steroids, altered bats. In a "game of inches," even tiny changes can make a big difference.

What we need to look out for is those who excuse or condone such behavior. People like Tony LaRussa or Bud Selig, the owners, managers, agents, and players who either supported or feigned ignorance of the drug problem that was making them rich, need to come clean about their culpability.

My Broken State, Part WAY Too Many

It's not getting any better.

The Left Coaster has a good piece today about the ongoing death spiral that is California these days:

Anyway, that’s basically it, nothing has been solved in California in all of 2009, there are no solutions in sight to solve any element of our revenue problems, and we will continue to abuse our little people in a stupid, cruel twist of human life that was never, ever necessary. As always, it was so easy to be so much better than this, the problems we face aren’t difficult to solve, but the Republicans have abandoned public service altogether, they’ll bring all of us down if they can’t get their way.

This on the tail of last month's news that California's roads, once the envy of the world, have almost slipped to the worst in the country. And the worst are in the major metropolitan areas.

Mark Watt, executive director of Transportation California, a labor and heavy construction industry group that works with TRIP, said the state's failure to raise the gasoline tax since 1990 combined with the recession-related decline in driving leaves the state with far too little money to maintain and rehabilitate highways.

"We've got to come to grips that we have to pay for it or we have to live with it," he said. "We need new revenues to dig through the backlog we're building."

It just keeps rolling. Downhill. You don't get what you don't pay for....

Terror, Paranoia, and Silliness

I always wondered when the Underpants Gnomes were going to go bad. Apparently many others fear this a lot more than I do.

As usual, Tom Tomorrow has his finger on the crazy.

Friends and Family

Time for one last post this year, I guess!

Sometime in the fall of 1987, I got my first apartment on my own. I had been sharing apartments with others for years, so I needed to acquire a lot of furnishings. As luck would have it, my friend Rod had recently moved into a house, and the previous owner had left a couple of pieces in the basement that Rod didn't want, so I inherited a big, solid woodblock chair and a credenza.

The credenza I ultimately gave away a couple of years later before I moved back to California. But I kept the chair. And it has followed me through several more moves, and eventually settled in our living room, where it became a favorite place for my daughter to curl up and read. It was quite worn and shabby, but the cushions and upholstery were really soft, so she liked it.

When we bought a ski house this summer, we decided the chair should move up there, and my mother-in-law took it upon herself to make the chair nicer. I had been thinking of reupholstering and restuffing the cushions, but she took it to a whole new level. Not only did she find terrific fabric with bears and moose on it, but she took the whole chair apart, refinished the wood, and just did a tremendous job of making it a whole new chair.

And here is the final result:

Not the best photo in the world (all I had with me was my iPhone), but you can see how cool it is! I know Rod, in particular, will appreciate the appropriateness of the moose motif. Hard to believe that this chair that has been cast off a couple of times and dragged across the country and around the state now has a whole new life. It's a really comfortable place to site and read or work.

So thanks again, Rod, and thanks to Cathy and her minions who made the whole refinishing and reconstruction project come off so well. I plan to enjoy this chair for many more years to come!

Who Could Have Predicted?

A year ago I was gloating about President-elect Obama's choice of John Holdren to be his science advisor. And I'm still quite pleased with the choice.

But it appears that Holdren is in the cross-hairs of the anti-science crowd:

But thanks to the magic of the Internet, right-wing blogs, newspapers, and television networks have seized on Holdren's old work and painted him as a wild-eyed environmental extremist — a crazed, misanthropic ideologue bent on controlling our lives and mass sterilization.

But the reality isn't quite like that:

Holdren and Erhlich considered a variety of other options for limiting population growth. Perhaps we could slip sterilization drugs into the water or food supply. Or force the mothers of illegitimate children to give them up for adoption. Or force pregnant single women to marry or have abortions. Ultimately, they decided that such options probably won't work. But they didn't exactly recoil from the ideas in moral horror. And therein lies the rub.

The article does a good job talking about the nature of scientific investigation, and how politics doesn't handle that well. For example:

At a time when populists distrust expertise, every scientific endeavor is politicized, and the Internet preserves your every utterance, it's getting harder and harder for scientists to do what they're supposed to: think out loud.

And this:

Nothing is more complicated than the weather, and as scientists try to predict the future of climate change, they're bound to make mistakes. But Holdren is operating in a different world now — a world where complexity is a liability or an irritant, where nuance is ignored, and activists on all sides strip away context as they search for something that can kill your career when framed in the right way.

Good article, especially for the local alt-weekly. It does a good job of comparing Holdren's situation with that of Van Jones, who shares local roots.

Anyone who has actually met or talked with John Holdren, even a little bit, knows that he's not a crazed, genocidal, eco-terrorist. He's a calm, thoughtful, and intellectually honest man who doesn't shy away from the findings of science or the hard policy choices they might dictate. At the same time, it's easy to envision him dispassionately evaluating even extreme policy options and dismissing them without getting riled up. He's a scientist. That's what they do.

One of my favorite memories of Holdren's class at Berkeley was his lecture on carcinogens. Instead of either dismissing or hyping the risks, it was all about evaluating the research and the numbers, even if it meant that peanut butter or tasty, dark beer might turn out to be seriously dangerous. He was trying to teach us to think like scientists and evaluate the evidence.

But our current political discourse doesn't have much room for nuance or dispassion. It's all about sound and fury, which has no place in scientific discussion.

I know Holdren is capable of handling the storms that are already swarming around him. I just hope the same is true of those around him, because I think he can be a tremendous contributor to solving some of the key issues facing the country and the world.

What Digby Said

I think Atrios or someone should have a copyright on that title, but whatever: Digby is right, as usual:

There were those who warned that allowing anyone president to have unaccountable powers would lead to every successor to fight to maintain them. But no one wanted to believe that a nice Democrat would ever do such a thing. Ahem:

Read it. And weep.

For Real This Time

Real ski weekend this time.

Started off with Opening Day at Alpine Meadows on Saturday. Although they only had two lifts running, the runs they had groomed were in really good shape. They had a few glitches with the new RFID gates at the lifts, but overall, things went well, and it was really fun. I'm glad we had a few practice turns last weekend at Northstar.

Rumor was that there would be snow pretty much after we left on Sunday, but the snow came early. And since we needed to get home early on Sunday, we decided to blow off the skiing and head out early. But a couple of accidents had closed the highway, so we decided to buy some groceries, head back to the house, and hunker down.

Here's what the deck looked like early on Sunday afternoon (it had been clear in the morning):
Then it really started snowing. Ski resorts were closed due to high wind. We stayed hunkered down. And when I got up Monday morning, the deck looked like this:
Needless to say, no heading home. Jan did go ski at Alpine, where she said the powder was excellent. I was under the weather with a headache, and besides, I needed to work. By today the roads were clear and we could drive home easily. So we've already had many of the season's experiences.

Looks like a great start to the season's snow, though. I can't wait to get back up on the hill!

Taming Snow

We couldn't help it. We really wanted to go skiing. In November. The opportunity rarely arises.

So we went to Northstar-at-Tahoe, which has minimal snow coverage so far. In fact, it was kind of surreal riding the lifts and seeing bare ground all around the groomed runs. Basically, they seem to have been making snow every night they could, and grooming the heck out of it.

So I have to say I was kind of surprised that the skiing was actually pretty good. There were only a few lifts and one or two ways down from each, and nothing very challenging, but hey, it was snow, and we were skiing!

On the other hand, there was this sort of weird feeling that we were skiing on a movie set or something, that if you ventured a few inches off to the side, you'd go through the scenery and there would be nothing there.

On still another hand, they were charging full price to use a very small portion of the hill, which felt a little like a rip-off. But did I mention we got to go skiing on Thanksgiving weekend?

And in one more week, we can hope for some real snow when Alpine Meadows opens.

Another Sad Passing

I just saw the news that Norton Buffalo has passed away from cancer:

Mr. Buffalo, who appeared on more than 180 albums and spent 33 years as a member of the Steve Miller Band, was diagnosed with cancer in September.

Buffalo was an extremely gifted and versatile musician, and I enjoyed hearing him live many times as well as listening to many of the recordings he either led or backed up on. I'm glad there is such a store of recordings, but I wish there could be more.

I haven't blogged about cancer much lately (yes, I know, or about anything else very much), but this one is very sad. 58 is much too young to be dying, especially from cancer.

So remember to take care of yourselves, get checked up, and help out where you can.

Twits and Twitter

Oh, dear. Some people just don't know when to, like, shut up:

A highlight of her invective was, perhaps: "Because people, like, honestly, like, I mean people wanna know why, like, you're, like, unhealthy, and, like, you need, like, get out and do stuff and, like, be in the world instead of being like this (pretends to be hunched over a keyboard) all the time. And, like, all I did was, like, lay in bed all the time."

I know there will be some who might fear that Miley has removed herself from Twitter because the 140 character limit did not allow her full expression of her likes and thoughts.

In case you weren't, like, totally sure, that was, like, Miley Cyrus opining on the future of Twitter, or rather her preferred lack of same.

It is unclear to my why I would care what she thinks about Twitter, but then, I'm pretty much a Twitter naysayer. I have a Twitter account. I think I've "tweeted" about 6 or 8 times in a couple of years. I rarely look at what others tweet. Perhaps I'm not spending enough time hunched over a keyboard.

I realize that celebrities are entitled to their opinions, just like everybody else. And I'm entitled to, like, ignore them, just like everybody else.

I know this wasn't important, but I thought the article quoted above had some high-quality snark, which I always enjoy. I couldn't bring myself to watch the video, but the text amused me.

Small World

Now and then you cross paths with someone from a long time ago.

That happened to me a lot this past weekend, but you expect it at a high school reunion. I didn't expect to see NPR interviewing one of my favorite teachers from college:

SARAH GARDNER: Well, laugh all you want, Sam, but old, dead tree stumps are actually clues to climate past. Listen to this:

SCOTT STINE: These stumps tell us that California is capable of experiencing droughts more profound and more persistent than anything that we've seen during the last 150 years.

GARDNER: Now, that's paleoclimatologist Scott Stine. He looks at past climate to help figure out future climate. And scientists are really interested in this kind of work because, if they can understand climate shifts in the past, the hope is that that will help them more accurately project what may be in store for us this time around.

Scott was a lecturer in Environmental Science when I was an undergrad at UC Berkeley. His class on Bay Area Environments was memorable for many reasons, not least of which was Scott himself. He was like a walking encyclopedia of natural history for the area, and it's nice to see that his ongoing research on Mono Lake and other places is still paying off for him.

Check out the slide show linked from the NPR page. Hearing Scott's narration was fun, and it brought back lots of memories from taking his classes. Coincidentally, I had been talking about Scott this weekend with one of my high school friends who also took his class in college. Small world, indeed!

Cruciferous Vegetables

I just need to get this off my chest: What's with broccoflower? And more to the point, why is it that Japanese restaurants insist on hiding it in their vegetable tempura? I bite into something that looks like a nice, tasty piece of tempura broccoli, and it turns out to be a disgusting, green cauliflower.

Is broccoflower just some sort of attempt to woo people who won't eat disgusting cauliflower by making it look like some kind of tasty green vegetable?

Yuck. I know cauliflower is supposed to be good for you, so I assume broccoflower is, too. But really: yuck.

My broken State, Part V

We used to educate our children. Now, not so much:

And all of this was going to be free for Californians. It was an investment in the future, and it paid off, big-time. The quality graduates that came out of this public education system helped to grow the California economy at a pace far outstripping the rest of the nation. Some like to call the 20th Century the American Century, well, if that was true, the last half of the 20th Century was the California Century.

But like all good centuries, they come to an end. And with the election of Ronald Reagan, and later Deukmejian and Wilson, and to an extent, even Brown's son Jerry, the Master Plan has been gradually chipped away. As we stand right now, of the approximately $18 Billion UC budget, around $3 Billion now comes from the state.

In other words, the state university system is merely a somewhat-state-subsidized system, and barely that.

Great quote at the end of the piece from George Lakoff:

Lakoff, UC Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and author of several popular and scholarly books on the language of politics, said in a letter to UCB's Townsend Center that "the privatization issue goes well beyond public education. It is about whether we have a democracy that works for the common good, or a plutocracy that privileges the wealthy and powerful. Privatizing the world's greatest public university is a giant step away from democracy."(Berkeley Daily Planet 9/17/09)

As a product of California's public-education heyday, all the way from kindergarten through college, I have a great appreciation for what we used to have. And I'm appalled that the state (both the people and their elected government) no longer seems to value public education.