From Sunny DC to Cool, Rainy Omaha

It was nice to see the Alaska Airlines plane at the National Airport.

It was sunny and getting warm when we left, but fairly hazy.

Rain drops as we waited for the hotel shuttle.  

Downtown Omaha.  We're here for the Public Administration Theory Network Conference.

Small World DC Style

We got to DC on Monday evening and while changing Metro lines the daughter of good friends in Anchorage came up to us to say hello.  I expect that sort of thing to happen in Anchorage, but not in DC.

Tonight, while walking J2's dog Kona, a man came up to me, looked at me closely, then said my name.  I haven't seen Joe Reum for many, many years.  We both worked at the Municipality of Anchorage in the early 80s and then he took a class from me at UAA.  And now he has his PhD and is Interim Dean of the School of Public Health and Health Services at the George Washington University.  He lives a short block from where my son lives.

Joe is someone I always enjoyed talking with and it was a real delight to see him again, albeit briefly.  

Book Browsing Fix at Reiter's

Dropping into a good bookstore and just checking out what's new (to me) is always enjoyable.  Today we did that at Reiter's  Scientific, Professional, and Technical Books.  I did get to look past the cover, but you'll have to go a local bookstore, probably, to do that with these books that looked interesting.

What does it mean to have English spoken around the world?

I'm not sure about these volumes, but just the attempt to catalog so much was exciting.

The issue of honor killings came up in Germany, so this might shed some light.

There were quite a few books about the brain and how it works. I

I did look at this one more closely.

Not sure this is that great, but it is always interesting to test oneself against such lists. Do I know all these ideas?

Since this is my daughter's field, a beginner's guide might be useful.

And I'm always interested in how people write about power.

Jetlagged in DC, We Go for a Walk

We woke up about 4am, but J went back to sleep.  Eventually we went off walking to Georgetown to pick up a bike part for J2.  We found our way down through Rock Creek Park which is a piece of fairly untamed looking water winding its way through the nation's capital.

There was even a heron sitting on a very unnatural looking log in the creek.

After we got what J2 needed we wandered vaguely toward 

the mall and ran into the C&O canal path.

They were even filling one of the locks for us.  

Then on past the Watergate.  

And I couldn't help but notice that this huge building situated between the State Department and the Mall was owned by the American Pharmacists Association.  The cynic in me can't help but think about the huge lobbying force pharmaceutical companies have and start wondering about the linkages between the pharmaceutical companies and the pharmacists.  OpenSecrets.org says the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) spent $6.3  million just in the last three months of 2009. (This doesn't include what individual drug companies spent.)

Here it is from the front on Constitution Avenue looking out onto the national mall and the Lincoln Memorial.  The APhA website offers some history:

Located between the Lincoln Memorial and the U.S. Department of State and adjacent to the National Academy of Sciences, the site for APhA headquarters was authorized by an act of Congress in 1932 and is the only privately owned building on the National Mall.

The original structure has become known as the Pope building, after the architect John Russell Pope, whose work includes some of the most famous structures in Washington, DC. Pope was the architect for the Jefferson Memorial, National Archives, National Gallery of Art, and Constitution Hall.

The dedication of APhA headquarters was held on May 9, 1934. Twenty-five years later, in 1959, APhA broke ground for an annex to the original structure. The annex was completed within a year and dedicated during the 1960 APhA Annual Meeting. More than 40 years later, plans were unveiled at the 2001 APhA Annual Meeting to purchase the land behind APhA headquarters and replace the annex with a new structure. On January 26, 2007, APhA broke ground on a project that would add more than 300,000 square feet of space and enhance the historic Pope building.

The renovation and expansion of APhA headquarters augments the vision of Henry A.B. Dunning, Chair of the APhA All-Pharmacy Headquarters Building Campaign, who predicted in the 1934 dedication that "immediately in the rear of this building, there will begin the erection of another building" that will provide a venue for pharmacists from all related associations to gather to explore new opportunities, foster partnerships, and demonstrate the importance of the profession to the public, media, and policy makers.

Wikipedia has a link to the original forms that officially nominated  this building to the National Historic Register.  (Beauchamp, Tanya. "National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination: The American Institute of Pharmacy Building". National Park Service. http://pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NRHP/Text/77001497.pdf.)  I couldn't find the date of the document, but the form says it is under an Act passed in 1966.  It gives lots of details about this building. 

Across the street is a building under construction.   The sign at the lower left says United States Institute of Peace.  The cynic pops up again, with George Orwell in mind, and wonders whether this is a weapons industry organization.   Their website suggests otherwise.  

The United States Institute of Peace is an independent, nonpartisan institution established and funded by Congress to increase the nation's capacity to manage international conflict without violence. Having passed our 25th anniversary milestone, we are now moving into our next period of growth.The United States Institute of Peace (USIP) is transforming approaches to international conflict. USIP draws on a variety of resources in fulfilling its congressional mandate: staff, grantees, fellows, research, education, training, innovation, outreach, publications, and national and international partnerships.

USIP’s Strategic Goals

• To help prevent, manage, and resolve violent international conflict both within and between states
• To promote post-conflict stability and development
• To increase peacebuilding capacity, tools, and intellectual capital worldwide
• To build and shape the field of international conflict prevention and management and to professionalize its practice
• To build knowledge and create innovative tools for peacebuilding
• To bridge research and practice in preventing, managing and resolving violent conflicts
• To teach, train, inform policymakers, practitioners, students and the public about the challenges of conflict prevention, management and resolution and how to respond to those challenges

It also says we missed a conference on how conflict affects gender today.  It's a good thing that there is an Institute of Peace since so many of the monuments are war related. 

Would this monument be here if not for his role in the Civil War?  

And just to the north east of Lincoln's temple is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.  There's the stunning black monument designed by Maia Lin that caused such a controversy when it won the design contest.  It's a powerful memorial for most people, but I would guess it particularly plays to those of us who think abstractly. 

The 50,000 names etched into the black marble between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument is truly a memorial to those who died in this war.

It doesn't exalt war, it doesn't glorify the dead.  It simply and elegantly remembers each one in the US military who died in Vietnam.  The Wall offers a lot of information on the memorial including seventeen pages of names on the wall who had birthdays yesterday when we were there beginning with

ROWLAND JOSEPH ADAMOLI

Marine Corps - CPL - E4

Age:	25
Race:	Caucasian
Sex:	Male
Date of Birth	May 18, 1940
From:	PHILADELPHIA, PA
Religion:	ROMAN CATHOLIC
Marital Status:	Married

who died of hostile small arms file, and ending with

AKIRA YAMASHITA

Army - SP5 - E5

Age:	38
Race:	Mongolian
Sex:	Male
Date of Birth	May 18, 1928
From:	SAN FRANCISCO, CA
Religion:	BUDDHISM
Marital Status:	Married

who died in a non-combat vehicle accident after a year in country.

But I learned as a teacher that students fall somewhere on a continuum between those who are mainly abstract thinkers and those who are mainly concrete thinkers.  For those at the concrete end of the continuum, a black slab just didn't do it and they wanted something more representational of soldiers.   So eventually this statue was added:

Or maybe it was people who wanted to glorify the soldiers as these super-real, super-buff figures seem to do.  These are John Wayne soldiers.  There's nothing left here for the viewer to imagine (except maybe how could these guys die and how could the US abandon Saigon in defeat?), while the wall leaves the viewer with lots and lots to think about. 

And finally, as we were almost back at J2's apartment, we passed this sign for a rather specialized museum, also war related.

St. Peters on-the-wall Essex

I'm taking advantage of a gray day and internet access to do some catching up on places and events I didn't have to time to post on the trip.  Of course, technically, we're still on the trip here in DC. 

But here's a lovely spot Doug took us to in Bradwell on the coast of Essex, UK. 

I've made this bigger so it's easier to read.  But you can get a lot more information at the Bradwell Chapel website.  Here's a short snippet that tells how it got its name:

654     Cedd founded a Celtic style community at Othona, built his Cathedral of St Peters on the foundations of the Roman fort and was consecrated Bishop of Essex. In fact Cedd's Cathedral was built where the gatehouse of the fort had been - so it was built on the wall of the fort - hence the name - Saint Peter-on-the-Wall.

The yellow flowers are rape seed and I'm hoping to do another post just on that eventually. 

Berlin's Wild Boars

 When we got back to Berlin, we learned from our daughter that her roommate/landlord had encountered a wild boar walking to the subway station a couple days before.  I've recreated the scene here using a picture of the street where it happened and a porcelain boar we saw at Jagdschloss (hunting castle)  in Grunewald, where we walked Sunday to see a festival. 

 The Jagdschloss had a small festival Sunday which included a wild boar on a spit and you could have a sandwich for €6 (which my computer currency converter says is $7.40 today).

 We got there so late they let us in free, so I imagine the boar was a lot bigger when they started. 

The National Wildlife Federation adds some history:

Long-snouted and shaggy-haired, wild boars, native to the woodlands of central Europe, have long been a strolling--albeit occasional--presence in the German capital. But when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, residents discovered that the 96-mile barricade had confined more than the East Germans. It had also prevented boars in the surrounding forest from inhabiting their historic range, which now happens to include the city's suburbs. On the outskirts of town, changes in agricultural practices, such as greater production of corn--a boar delicacy--have also drawn the creatures closer, while fruit-bearing city trees help to sustain them.
Combined with hunting bans and an absence of natural predators, these changes have unintentionally made Berlin, often described as the world's greenest capital, a boar's playground, says German photographer Florian Möllers, who for five years has used his lens to get up close and personal with Berlin's wildschwein.

And Businessweek.com adds some statistics:

The German capital’s wild boar population has been cut by more than half to about 3,000 because of hunting and cold winters, city officials said.

“The boar population has been radically reduced,” Marc Franusch, a spokesman for Berlin’s forestry agency, said by telephone today.

An estimated 8,000 to 10,000 wild boars roamed Berlin’s parks in 2008, Franusch said. Since then, hunters have killed about 4,500 of the stiff-furred, tusked hogs that can be as long as five feet and weigh up to 300 pounds (136 kilos), he said.

Anchorage folks sometimes think we're the only people dealing with wild animals in town, but clearly others have to work out similar problems.

The Monitors

Our friend near Wuppertal whom we visited last week is one of the world's experts on monitor lizards.  Most of the cages  are now empty and there are only a few monitors left here.  However, the research done on HG's monitors  has led to about 70 articles in scientific journals.  And he's been invited to lecture in California, Israel, Florida, and Scandinavia on monitors.

Two people from the nearby university measured the strength of monitor footprints and also took physical measurements on how they walk.  In addition, HG,  determined the conditions necessary, for the first time outside of Australia,  and had lace monitor reproduce in captivity

.  


Iguanas are not monitors.  They eat leaves and monitors nearly always are carnivorous, though there are three monitor lizards in the Philippines that eat leaves.  (The last of the three was published two weeks ago.) And their distribution area is different.

Down here many observations of monitors were carefully made including the conditions of reproductions.  First, on what kind of diet they will survive.  How many trace elements do they need?  What kind of vitamins do they need?  What sort of climate?  Humidity and temperature.  This is a difficult condition.  Each cage could have different conditions - one the climate of a rain forest, in another the climate of a desert. 

Clean windows are something that zoo goers want to have.  And at first here they worked hard to keep the windows clean.  But they discovered one day that the clean windows made the monitors nervous and determined that the dirt on the windows helped the monitors to know where the border was.  Most of these photos are through the glass, but the last ones the glass was opened and I could get much cleaner pictures. 

Varanus Gouldii from Australia (I think.  My notes have hidden themselves somewhere.)

Varanus cumingii from the Philippines.  This one is almost 2 meters long.

Here's a page of another paper based on monitors here.