Rude Miners

These guys we saw at the airport leaving Anchorage are sure to win Pebble Mine supporters.

More Superb Alaska Native Art at Anchorage Airport

The Anchorage Airport has a small, but spectacular display of Alaska Native art on the mezzanine between terminals B and C.  If you have an extra 15 minutes or more, it's got first class pieces.  Here are a few examples.

This is part of a Jack Abraham mask.

Joe Senungetuk mask

Elena Charles Yup'ik men's dance fans

Floyd Kingeekuk's four seals - spotted, beaded, ribbon, and ringed

Kingeekuk, I was told long ago, is the best of the best of the seal carvers. 

They have a large book on a platform that lists the Alaska Native art throughout the airport including at this display.





Here's a link to a post about this great little airport gallery I did in 2011.

Now That Olympics Are Over, What Do Romney's Olympic Predictions Tell Us?

On the eve of the Olympics in London, as everyone knows, Mitt Romney, when asked his thoughts, told the Prime Minister that he had concerns about London's readiness.  Now that the Olympics are over, and were very successful if the press can be believed,  it seems appropriate to consider what this might reveal about the candidate.

1.  Social Graces

Romney clearly has trouble with his sense of appropriateness in interpersonal relationships.  He appears to be much more task oriented (thinking about the games) and lacking in his people orientation (not understanding this was like asking "how are you? or that as a guest you should say positive things when you first meet, not criticize.)

Asked a ritualistic question about the Olympics, which any guest should know is supposed to be answered politely and positively  - "Oh, it looks to be a great Olympics!" he took the question literally, and gave an negative assessment.

This insensitivity to non-verbal communication, to social customs, is a serious problem for a president.  Much of the job is to ceremonially represent the United States.  Much of the job requires the ability to assess the character, sincerity, and capacity of people advising you as well as inspiring their confidence in you.  This is hard to do when you are tone deaf to social signals.
 

2.  Assessment Skills

The lack of social skills is problematic.  For some people, this is made up in other skills.  But Romney, someone who has worked on a previous Olympics, was wrong in his assessment of the London Olympics.  The Olympics went well and there was no security breach, something he specifically noted as a concern.  So his assessment on a topic he is a reputed expert on, was wrong.  I must acknowledge that we don't know if there were no terrorist issues because of how good the security was or simply because no one attempted to disrupt the Olympics.  But ultimately, his assessment - inappropriate as it was to share at that moment - was wrong.

Some might argue shouldn't jump to conclusions here.  Was this something he had studied or was he just reflecting the media accounts?  But what we do know is that his inability to read the human aspect of the situation, led him to think that his opinion was being seriously sought.  And, again, due to his lack of sensitivity to basic etiquette, instead of praising his host's efforts, he criticized them, implying that there were likely to be problems - a prediction of sorts.  A prediction he never had to make.  One that now turns out to be wrong. 

If he was wrong about the odds of a successful Olympics, what does that tell us about his assessments of things like the economic crisis, health care, tax policy, etc.?

In terms of the social problems, this is just one more in a long series of such incidents.  In terms of his assessment of the Olympics this doesn't tell us too much, but we learn about people by adding up bits of information over time.  So I'm just taking notes that can be compared to his other pronouncements. (We could, say, add this to what we know about someone who set up a health care  plan as a governor that is remarkably similar to Obama's national plan that Romney tells us is terrible.) 

But I think this episode tells us, at least, this much:

• His sense of appropriate behavior and etiquette are out of synch with most folks
• He takes things literally, missing the social meaning
• His first response was to point out the potential negatives
• He was wrong 

[As I reread this, I realize that it sounds like I'm pussy-footing around here, treating Romney way too gingerly.  My rationale is that much of the debate going on over the presidential candidates has been about things which are difficult for the average no-too-involved observer to assess.  But this Olympics incident, thought not big, is something where we can look at the facts and come to a pretty clear conclusion that most people can understand easily.]

Car and Truck Show

I ran through the car show at UAA Sunday.  So I stopped to take a few pictures.

A Year Eating Local in Anchorage

Last year a group of people scattered around Anchorage took on the challenge of eating local food for a year.  There were different levels of purity.  I don't think anyone thought they could be completely free of non-local food for a year.

Friday I stopped by the Williams Street Farmhouse which is several blocks from my home and talked to Matt Oster and Saskia Esslinger.   They've transformed a very urban city lot into a cornucopia.  They share what they've learned in classes they offer and also do consulting on home energy work (Matt does state energy audits} and on other home and garden projects (Saskia is certified in permaculture design).

They have two websites, one for the design and energy work and one for the farmhouse.

•  Red Edge Design  and
• The Williams Street Farmhouse

In the video you can see a bit of the garden including the chickens and hear about how they managed to live a year on local food and a couple of the exceptions to the local rule.  Can you guess?

Anchorage Perseids 2012

It's been clear so Anchorage folks should be able to see the Perseids tonight. (I just checked outside and clear is gone.)  I've been trying to see if our western location means we can see them a little earlier.  Or which direction to be looking from here. 

Space.com says:

If you watch one meteor shower all year, then catch the overnight Perseid shooting star display tonight.
This weekend, the annual Perseid meteor shower peaks, sending hundreds of shooting stars flying through the night sky in what many experts call the best shower of the year.
"We expect to see meteor rates as high as a hundred per hour," Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office said in a statement. "The Perseids always put on a good show."

 They also say to look to the Northeast sky (there's a diagram on their site.)

NASA has a chat you can join (It's not obvious to me how it works, but there is a comment box.)  They also have a livestream, except it doesn't seem to be streaming. 

I'm going out to check.  It's not completely dark out and it looks like there are clouds covering the sky anyway.  And it was so sunny and clear most of the afternoon and evening.  Oh well. 

Here's a 2009 report.

Creek Art (or Is It Under Street or Trail Art?)

Coming home on the Chester Creek bike trail today there was a cluster of folks under the A Street Bridge.  I stopped to see what it was about. 

Turns out Daniel was pointing out his rock statues in the creek.   If I understood him right, he's been keeping this going for a couple of weeks now. 

Cellos, Religion, Need, Speed, Greed and Other New Books

I checked out the new books at the UAA library today.  I'm always amazed at how many new books there are every day. 

Since the photos are so bad, here is more information

Henry Cisneros (ed), Independent for Life:  Homes and Neighborhoods for an Aging America

Gaston Espinosa,  Religion and the American Presidency: George Washington to George W. Bush

David R. Roediger & Elizabeth B. Esch,  The Production of Difference

Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, Need, Speed, and Greed:  How the New Rules of Innovation Can Transform Businesses, Propel Nations to Greatness and Tame the World's Most Wicked Problems


Abbie Griffin, et al, Serial Innovators:  How Inidividuals Create and Deliver Innovations in Mature Firms

I was really surprised that there were six new books about cellos!

And six more (one is missing from the picture) about Mahler.  I asked about this and found out that someone had given the library money and wanted it to be used for the Mahler books, and I guess the cello books.

And there was this book from a comic strip I didn't even know existed.

There were a lot more new books on all sorts of topics.  So I have to stop and go read now. 

Does "Cultures of Honor" Explain Southern Murder Style? - More From Outliers

Here's the last Outliers post that I promised.

This is the part of the book where Malcolm Gladwell writes about Harlan County, Kentucky.  He proposes that the Scotch-Irish people who moved here and to other parts of the South, because of their herding cultural heritage, were quicker to respond to threats than more agricultural people.  The logic is that herders live in remote areas where they enforce their own law. Sheep and cattle can be stolen more easily than crops, so to save one's wealth, one needs to be known as someone who will attack quickly.  He calls these "cultures of honor."  We aren't just talking about the Hatfields and the McCoys in Harlan County.  He lists a lot of different family feuds in the area.

When one family fights with another, it's a feud.  When lots of families fight with one another in identical little towns up and down the same mountain range, it's a pattern. (p.249*)

Understanding the many feuds in this region, he tells us, requires us knowing some history. 

The backcountry states - he lists Pennsylvania's southern border, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, North and South Carolina and the northern parts of Alabama and Georgia -

"were settled overwhelmingly by immigrants from one of the world's most ferocious cultures of honor.  They were 'Scotch-Irish'  - that is, from the lowlands of Scotland, the northern counties of England and Ulster in Northern Ireland.
The borderlands - as this region was known - were remote and lawless territories that had been fought over for hundreds of years.  The people of the region were steeped in violence.  They were herdsmen, scraping out a living on rocky and infertile land.  They were clannish, responding to the harshness and turmoil of their environment by forming tight family bonds and placing loyalty to blood above all else." (251-252*)

When they got to the US, Gladwell writes, they found a similarly remote environment in Harlan County.

Gladwell recognizes that he's moving into touchy territory.

I realize that we are often wary of making these kinds of broad generalizations about different cultural groups - and with good reason.  This if the form that racial and ethnic stereotypes take.  We want to believe that we are not prisoners of our ethnic histories.
But the simple truth is that if you want to understand what happened in those small towns in Kentucky in the nineteenth century, you have to go back into the past - and not just one or two generations. (255)

"The simple truth is . . ." Hold on to that thought for later.

We've gone through period of strong racial and cultural stereotypes.   We're more enlightened as a whole, but there are still plenty of people stuck in old stereotypes or picking up new ones to match newer immigrants (who are both subject to, and bring their own, prejudices.)  Any time someone discusses groups of people like this there is a likely backlash. Often with good reason. How many violent people does a community need before we say everyone in that community has that trait?  What if only 10% of the people in Harlan County fit this herdsman culture?  Would that be enough to push whole communities into never ending feuds? Does that mean that everyone else wants to participate, or do they just have no choice?  It's interesting to explore these ideas, but it's pretty hard to prove that my great-great-great grandfather's behavior determines mine.  Though I do think there's plenty of evidence that behavior does get passed on genetically.  And if a community stays intact, it is easy to understand how behavior is passed on.

But since the Scotch-Irish also were a big part of the migration to the rest of the South, Gladwell goes on to say this heritage explains some Southern behavior.

"The triumph of a culture of honor helps to explain why the pattern of criminality in the American South has always been so distinctive.  Murder rates are higher there than in the rest of the country.  But crimes of property and 'stranger' crimes - like muggings - are lower. As the sociologist John Shelton Reed has written, "The homicides in which the South seems to specialize are those in which someone is being killed by someone he (or often she) knows, for reasons both killer and victim understand."  Reed adds:  "The statistics show that the Southerner who can avoid arguments and adultery is as safe as any other American, and probably safer."  In the backcountry, violence wasnt for economic gain.  It was personal.  You fought over your honor." (pp. 253-4*)

 That's a pretty sweeping generalization.  I think the idea is interesting, but that Gladwell is too quick to reach conclusions.  There just isn't enough evidence.  And is he only talking about white Southerners?   I don't think, for example, that the black population of the South has much Scotch-Irish blood.  Does 'both killer and victim understand' mean both the white lynch mob and the black victim understand it's because they are white and he is black?  While it might seem obvious to Gladwell, it would be helpful for this reader had he clarified his scope when writing things like, "pattern of criminality in the American South." 

I think it's human to want an explanation for things that don't make sense.  It's also human to take the first plausible explanation and stop looking further - especially when such an explanation allows us to keep our general world view.  (In fairness, Gladwell is challenging a US general world view - he's arguing that timing and culture play as big a role in individual success as the individual's own hard work.)

So it's tempting to take a neat explanation like cultures of honor to explain Harlan County feuding and the Southern trend to murder friends and relatives rather than strangers.  Is there an unspoken implication that the herdsman culture of the Scotch-Irish made slavery a natural development?  Just another form of herding?  After all, slaves were seen as less than human.  Gladwell didn't go there, but why not?  How does culture of honor explain segregation and lynchings?  Was this too touchy for Gladwell to discuss? (In the epilogue  he does talk about the advantages of lighter skin color among Jamaican blacks and how his successes are based on his forebearers' lighter skin.) Or is this too much of a leap?  If this is too much of a leap, why not the whole argument?  I haven't read the sources Gladwell cites.  Maybe they have a lot more evidence to support the claims they make.

Gladwell, too often says things like (quote - p. 255 - above) "The simple truth is . . ."   The truth about human behavior over generations and across continents, is never simple.

In the same paragraph he says:

"The "culture of honor" hypothesis says that it matters where you're from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up  . . . That is a strange and powerful fact." (p. 356*)

 From hypothesis to powerful fact in  50 words or less. 

I'm just saying that claims like this need to be treated cautiously.  Things are much too complicated than these rather neat A caused B explanations.

If being of Scotch-Irish background so significant, maybe the Census Bureau should put Scotch-Irish among its race choices.  Caucasian is just too limiting.  Whoops, I'm making my own leaps. 

I said in one of the previous posts that while I have problems, the many case studies raise very interesting ideas to consider.

The previous Outlier posts were:

• 10,000 Hours - Gladwell's Outliers Part I
• Why Are Some People Successful and Others Not?

*My page numbers are from the Big Print version of the book, so they won't work with a regular version.  These are all from the chapter on Harlan, Kentucky.

Noctuidae

Amateur birding and bugging (is there an insect equivalent to the word birding?) is fraught with false identifications.  Without a decent photo, my mind quickly loses the details - color of feet, shape of beak, etc.  When I look in the bird book, often none of them seem quite right.  Even if I'm looking at the bird in the binoculars or have a picture.  Sometimes there is a clear identifier and I know I've found it. 

With bugs it's much, much harder.  There are just so many of them.  So when I looked in Dominique M. Collet's Insects of south-central Alaska I found one that looked pretty much like this moth I photographed last night in our bathroom. But how much variation is there?

Late night visitor

I'm pretty sure it fits in the family noctuidae.  Online dictionaries translate this from Latin as coming from the word for owl.  From Collet:

The moths of this family are mostly cryptic* like Autographa,, which is almost invisible when resting on birch bark.  A few noctuids like Androloma and Alyopia are brightly contrasted. 

The one called Semilooper Autographa sp. looks most like the one that visited last night.

This moth is mottled grey or brown with a white or yellow comma-shaped spot in the middle of its forewing.  The moth is well camouflaged when resting on birch bark with lichens.  Newly emerged moths have tufts of hair on the back that break up its silhouette and help it resemble the rough bark scars on trunks

The shape matches that of the one in Collet's book.  The size is right (about 3/4".) It's got the little spots on the wings, but not quite commas.  And its rump looks hairy, is that the 'back'?  The diagram that shows body parts on page 19 doesn't identify 'back.'

The caterpillars are cutworms, so that would work.  Ah, the joys of trying to 'know'.  

 While trying to confirm this online, I did find a great page full of similar, but much better photographed and much more interesting moths at the site of the Mississippi State University Entomological Museum.


*Definitions.net  includes this 4th meaning of cryptic:

4.  Zool. fitted for concealing; serving to camouflage.