Run down to Venice Beach

Today I ran down to Venice Beach. I ran on Half Moon Bay (south of San Francisco) beach on Saturday morning. Venice is my obligatory run whenever I visit my mom in LA. And you could even see Catalina, just barely, on the horizon. I admit it's a leap of faith based on the photo. But it was out there. I did try to play with the contrast to make it more visible in the picture.

It didn't help, but I thought wiping out the contrast offered an interesting picture of the runner.

If you double click the picture and look at your screen from the right angle, you might be able to see the outline of the island. It's only 26 miles away. Makes you appreciate being able to see Denali from Anchorage 150 miles away. You can see it better and listen to the song at this post I did last October.







Here's looking north toward the Santa Monica Mountains. As you can see the surf was decent sized today.





Here's another picture of the surf with a couple people in front to get a sense of the waves.

And as I left the beach for home I passed this sign at a pre-school. I realized that I agreed with the sign and that our country has weirded out enough that there are people who would be disturbed by this sign. Like people opposing the ordinance before the Anchorage Assembly offering equality (freedom from discrimination) to gays, lesbians, and transgendered folks.

Botany of Desire

I've heard about the Botany of Desire for a while now. It was a best seller, but somehow it didn't really get my interest until I read a chapter of it in Sun Magazine. So when I found it cheap at Costco I took it for this trip.

I've only just begun it, but it's good on several counts. It's making me think about things from a totally new perspective and it's so well written that it zips right by.

So, this is for those of you who also never found your way to this book or never even heard about it.

Michael Pollan's premise, well he seems to have several. One is that we've taken a human-centric view of the evolution of plants that we've cultivated. Humans, from this perspective, have played with the plants for our benefit. In this book Pollan wants to look at four plants - apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes - from the plants' perspective.

These plants hit on a remarkably clever strategy: getting us to move and think for them. Now came edible grasses (such as wheat and corn) that incited humans to cut down vast forests to make more room for them; flowers whose beauty would transfix whole cultures; plants so compelling and useful and tasty that they would inspire human beings to seed, extol, and even write books about them.(pp. xx-xxi)

Pollan makes clear this wasn't done consciously.

In a coevolutionary bargain like the one struck by the bee and the apple tree, the two parties act on each other to advance their individual interests but wind up trading favors; food for the bee, transportation for the apple genes. Consciousness needn't enter into it on either side and the traditional distinction between subject and object is meaningless.(p. xiv)

Humans, he points out, weren't as in control as they think. This worked both ways. The oak, for example, did fine with the squirrel burying (and often forgetting) acorns, that it never had a need for humans.

So Pollan figures that we can learn about ourselves by studying four desires that the four plants exploited - sweetness (the apple), beauty (the tulip), intoxication (the marijuana), and control (the potato).

One thing we learn is that we tend to underestimate the characteristics of other species and overestimate our own.

Plants are so unlike people that it's very difficult for us to appreciate fully their complexity and sophistication. Yet plants have been evolving much, much longer than we have, have been inventing new strategies for survival and perfecting their designs for so long that to say the one of us is the more "advanced" really depends on how you define that term, on what "advances" you value. Naturally we value abilities such as consciousness, toolmaking, and language, if only because these have been the destinations of our own evolutionary journey thus far. Plants have traveled all that distance and then some - they've just traveled in a different direction.

Plants are nature's alchemists, expert at transforming water, soil, and sunlight into an array of precious substances, many of them beyond the ability of human beings to conceive, much less manufacture. While we were nailing down consciousness, and learning to walk on two feet, they were, by the same process of natural selection, inventing photosynthesis (the astonishing trick of converting sunlight into food) and perfecting organic chemistry. As it turns out, many of the plants' discoveries in chemistry and physics have served us well. From plants come chemical compounds that nourish and heal and poison and delight the senses, others that rouse and put to sleep and intoxicate, and a few with the astounding power to alter consciousness - even to plant dreams in the brains of awake animals.

I'm only into the first part on apples, but already he has burst a common myth for me - the story of Johnny Appleseed.

Actually, apples and the man [Johnny "Appleseed" Chapman] have suffered a similar fate in the years since they journeyed down the Ohio together in Chapman's double-hulled canoe. Both then had the tang of strangeness about them, and both have long since sweetened beyond recognition. Figures of tart wildness, both have been thoroughly domesticated - Chapman transformed into a benign Saint Francis of the American frontier, the apple into a blemish-free-plastic-red saccharine orb. "Sweetness without dimension" is how one pomologist memorably described the Red Delicious, the same might be said of the Johnny Appleseed promulgated by Walt Disney and several generations of American children's book writers. (p. 7)

It turns out that apple seeds do not replicate the fruit they come from. To do that you need to graft a slip of wood from a desirable tree onto the new tree. Apples from seeds tend to be sour enough

"to set a squirrel's teeth on edge and make a jay scream."(p. 9)

Therefore, the seeds that John Chapman took into the wilderness, were way too sour to eat. Instead, the reason settlers welcomed Chapman, according to Pollan, was that Appleseed's apples were essential for making apple cider about the only alcoholic beverage on the edge of frontier.

Since I've been talking about people's narratives about how the world works, this book naturally appeals to me because it too challenges long held narratives.

[Nov. 1 update: Click the link for the PBS site about the movie.]

Jacaranda Tree and Agapanthus

When we moved into the house where my mom lives now in LA, I was about ten. There was a row of agapanthus plants (the one's in front in the picture). That's why I even know the name. This amazing stalk, nearly three feet would zoom out of the leaves and then it would burst open with this splash of pale blue flowers.

So I stopped during my run today to get this picture of the agapanthus AND the jacaranda tree behind them. The jacaranda tree is another LA spectacular, boldly making its Junish statement in lavendar solidarity with its jacarandan brothers and sisters scattered around the city. A good time to be in LA.

From Botany.com

Agapanthus - African Lily, Lily Of The Nile (Agapan'thus)

DESCRIPTION: This group consists of tender, evergreen or deciduous plants, which are natives of South Africa and belong to the Lily family, Liliaceae. Most African Lilies are evergreen in mild-winter climates. The fleshy rhizomes of these plants spread over the soil's surface and support a short, more or less tuberous rootstock. Agapanthus, also known as African Lilies and Lilies-of-the-Nile, produce clumps of long, shiny, strap-like leaves, which look attractive even when the plant isn't flowering. Tall stems, reaching 2 to 6 feet in height, are topped with clusters of pretty, white to dark blue flowers from late spring to early autumn. Each flower resembles the flowers of a lily, but are borne in umbels like those belonging to the group, Allium. African Lilies are suitable for growing in the garden, in containers, and as houseplants. They flower better when their roots are rather crowded in a container. The flowers of these plants can be cut for use indoors; they can last up to seven days in a vase. The dried seed heads also look attractive in arrangements.

Just Pics

Yesterday was a quiet day.






Breakfast out with my son. Then worked on some projects while he was at work.







We picked up Des at the airport and took him to dinner and got him back into the car he lent J1 - minus the Kona hairs I so carefully cleaned out.








Then a little shopping at Ranch99 a supermarket owned by someone from Taiwain.

Robert Lapage's The Blue Dragon in Berkeley

Wow! I just saw the future of theater. I had no idea what I was going to see. I went into Oakland today to see friends I've known forever. They were going to a play tonight and asked if I wanted to come along. I said sure.

Then we picked up my ticket at will call after dinner and walked around campus till it began.

No pictures during the show, but I took this before and it will help a little to understand why this was so incredible. If you look at the stage, you can see the three vertical lines that divide the stage into four units. Think of the stage more as a computer window that can be divided into eight frames. Four on top and four below. The stage was alternatively one large frame, one half screen frame, or one small frame; two frames (top and bottom, two small frames, though I can't remember how often or how configured, I remember one small one on top and another below over to the side open together.)

But there was also a "curtain" that was the canvas for computer graphics, which again could be part of the whole or the whole itself. This is like describing someone tying his shoe. It may get you the info, but the reader still can't tie the shoelace, or, in this case, imagine the stage.. It rained and it snowed, for example, it was an airport with perfect arrival and departure signs.

The play opened - I'm not even sure which of the following was first, but I think I have it right - with a man standing on the lower half of the screen/stage, at a small table about to do calligraphy. As he uses the brush to make his strokes, a single solid horizontal stroke appears above him in the upper left frame. And he talks about the Chinese character for the number one. Then he makes a tree and then a forest. Then he does child and it appears in the next screen. Immediately I knew this was going to be my kind of experience.

I think this was followed by the Chinese dancer in white came out. (Though she might have been first.)

She danced with her scarf flowing. Then suddenly puffs of white exploded out of the end of the scarf as the computer extended her dance magically. And as this was happening on the lower half, the black screen also became a movie screen with the credits. (Don't bet on the sequences exactly, I'm trying to pull this out of memory totally.)

This all could have been a big gimmick, but it wasn't. Robert Lapage managed to use a much greater variety of tools to help him create his stage and it almost all fit absolutely perfectly. The actors at times blended in with computer graphics.

The almost two hour play just flew by. In part, I think because the scenes changed more like television than a play. We didn't have the stage simply go black and wait as actors moved furniture for the next scene. Instead the scenes evaporated and appeared through the graphics. The stage was a perfect passenger section of a jet, it was a commuter train, a regular train, a boat. It was the Canadian ex pat's two story loft apartment, an art gallery, a bar.

What I've always liked about movies is that when done well, they could tell the story in visual - color, light and dark, etc. - and audio and tell the story with more than words. They went beyond theater because you could have the real world as your stage. Lepage has used the computer to make this possible on stage too.

Now, since I've spent all this time on the stagecraft, you might be wondering about the play. Surely it was upstaged by all the glitz. Perhaps in the same way that seeing one's first movie would cause you to talk about the technology more than the story. Well, it wasn't glitz. All the techie stuff was exactly right for the story. It wasn't gratuitous. I've seen computer generated backdrops, and lighting, and the incredible dancing of Bridgman and Packer who danced on stage with live video of themselves dancing. In their performance at times you couldn't tell, even though we were very close, which was the live dancer and which the video.

Lepage has taken all the experimentation and applied it to his story of the French-Canadian artist expat in Shanghai whose old friend visits him on her way to adopting a baby in China. The story of their two compromised careers, of the need for babies, of love, of disappointment, all of this was told almost movie like, but with live actors on stage before a live audience. Three very real actors and lots of brilliant stagecraft.

I was totally dazzled.

(There were two scenes that I might have cut. At least I didn't feel they were integrated into the whole as seemlessly as everything else. The Chinese KFC ad near the beginning generated laughs, but wasn't connected to anything else in the play. My friends suggested it helped show the contrast between the old and new China, but to me it seemed an intrusion. I also didn't quite understand the scene with the iconic Chinese revolutionary dancer. The CCTV (Chinese Central Television) going-off-the-air broadcast worked better because it emphasized the closing of a night and it ended in static which transferred onto the stage.

I'm still stoked and absolutely delighted G and H pulled me into this. Great night. Anyone in the Berkeley area who wants to see a great production has a few more days left. (Comparing the box office dates to the post card dates, I'm guessing they added a couple of performances.)

Here's a more professional review from the Bay Area Arts and Entertainment Blog.

Stanford and Half Moon Bay

We went in with G. J1 went to the office and I walked over to Stanford University where I wandered around and sat outside and did some work. It was mostly overcast and a little drizzly now and then.

Eucalyptus trunk without bark.

Eucalyptus trunk with bark.

These palms line the main road onto campus.

I joined J1 for lunch, then did some more work at the
office where I could get wifi. Then we got G and took him
to the airport and went back home

Sunset from J1's deck.

Palo Alto Robots, Gardens, Downtown

I went with J1 and Kona to J1's office today. He's still not going full time, but we got there in time for lunch. Sitting out in the garden patio area was a bit like having lunch in Thailand. There, I knew what the topic was but was never sure of the details. Today I understood the details, but wasn't completely sure of the topic. Lots of jargon.







Essentially, they are making robots. Fortunately for them and for me, the New York Times scooped me on this story by one day, so I can use them to explain what the company's doing.

. . . a Silicon Valley robotics research group, said that its experimental PR2 robot, which has wheels and can travel at speeds up to a mile and a quarter per hour, was able to open and pass through 10 doors and plug itself into 10 standard wall sockets in less than an hour.

When J1 told me the robot could open doors and plug itself in, I was less than impressed. I've seen enough robots on television and movies to 'know' that ain't no big deal. But, apparently it is:

But roboticists said that the Willow Garage robot was the first to integrate the ability to do a number of operations in a real-world environment.

“There are other groups that have opened doors before,” said Andrew Ng, a Stanford roboticist with several students who have gone to work for the company. But, Mr. Ng said, this seemed to be the first robot able to repeatedly and reliably open doors and plug itself in.

William L. Whittaker, a Carnegie Mellon University roboticist and the winner of a Defense Department urban challenge robot driving contest last year, said it was “unprecedented” for a robot to navigate in a building reliably and repeatedly recharge itself. “These guys are the real deal,” he said.

I did some writing after lunch and then walked round Palo Alto while J1 had a meeting.



















































A lot of the homes in the area do not
have lawns. But most look like they have pretty pricey gardeners to keep these alternative landscapes looking good.













Where the ground isn't watered, the grasses are totally dried out.



Here's Kona waiting to go home.













And apparently Anchorage is no longer the most expensive city for gas.

Anchorage - San Francisco

The plane took off about 1:50am. It is less than
two weeks from solstice, so it doesn't really get dark anymore.

Denali and Foraker a little after 2am.

The Chugach. There is snow, but much of the white is cloud.

Approaching San Francisco about four hours later, almost 7am.

Arrived at SFO.

Spinning the Supreme Court 2 - Political Stragegy Narratives

Part 1 of this post first gave some background on what I mean by narrative and then looked at a few narratives about the Supreme Court nominees and judges. Part 3 will be about race narratives. So here is part 2. 

 Political Strategy Narratives 

 The Senate is divided between members of the majority party and members of the minority party. At present, the majority party is also the party of the President. We know the majority party will support the new nominee. So what is the proper role of the minority party here? Some possible narratives: 

 1. Affirm any candidate who meets basic standards. This would call for the Republicans today to weigh Sotomayor's qualifications and confirm her nomination as long as she proves to be legally competent at some more than minimal level and if she appears to be reasonably close to the mainstream in her ideology. 

Of course, as we mentioned in Part 1, people have different narratives about what fits in the mainstream. For some, a Democratic Hispanic will never fit in. Some might add, "Just as a Republican African-American was suspect to Democrats." 

But, to switch narratives once again, if an African-American or Hispanic adds life experiences and differently nuanced narratives which enlarge the court's ability to comprehend a situation in a court case (In Part 3 I'll give an example of when Justice Thomas apparently affected a decision when he talked about the meaning of cross burning*), then it makes sense to add, all other things being equal, an African-American or Hispanic whose expressed world view is consistent with the group he or she 'represents.'  [*UPDATE 2022: Not sure I ever did Part 3.]

 I also agree that such a position gets me pretty close to stereotyping and prejudging people, not as individuals, but as interchangeable members of a group. "Give me one African-American, please, to add a little balance to the court. Now, how about another woman." But, I would also argue that to ignore race and the impact of past discrimination is to ignore the facts of American culture. (Recall, please, how white and black Americans differed in their reaction to the OJ Simpson case.) Bumper stickers - even blackboards - appealing as they might be, aren't big enough to express the complexities of the world in which we live. 

So let's move on to narrative number 2, recognizing how the simplicity of each of these narratives can be deceiving. 

 2. Fight against everything the other side proposes. This could be the result of people who see themselves as part of a team (party, ideology, cause) that is smaller than the people of the United States as a whole and who see the world as a zero-sum game. They are inclined to competition, no matter the odds. 

In this situation the opposition fights everything the administration proposes simply because it is the administration’s proposal. There are variations on this narrative. 

a. Battle for the sake of battle. I had a boss once who told me that his son said he was too competitive and then he proceeded to tell me that he does like to make everything a contest. He simply likes to compete and to win. And I finally understood why everything with him had to be a battle. Not my style, but there are plenty of people like that out there. 

b. Ideology. There are also politicians who are on an ideological crusade. Anything that appears from their charged up perspective as not going in their ideological direction must be attacked. They see themselves as fighting the good fight. Even if they lose, they stood up for their beliefs. 

c. Zero-Sum game. There are politicians who see everything as us v. them (rather than, say, we are all for bettering the US). So any victory for the other party is seen as a loss for oneself. This is known as a zero-sum game by game theorists. What the other person wins, I lose. So everything must be fought tooth and nail. 

Clearly, these three can overlap - and they overlap with next one - but I'm just trying to identify different narratives that play a role here. They are generally only so distinct in the abstract. In real situations they are all intertwined, and harder to see. 

One narrative that explains why things have gotten this contentious blames the creation of safe Republican and Democratic seats, where the real election takes place in the primaries. This causes candidates to pander to the more extreme members of their parties, thus producing a far more extreme and less willing to negotiate Congress than we had, say, during the Watergate hearings. During those hearings, which I listened to live on television and radio, while Republicans made sure Democrats didn't abuse their power, they didn't defend the indefensible either. As Nixon's complicity became clear, rather than obstruct the whole proceedings as tends to happen today, they carried out their roles of calling their leader to account. Today, they would be more likely to fight to defend their own, right or wrong. 

2. Ideological goals for the Supreme Court. This is slightly different from #1 in that these people see the position of a Supreme Court Justice as so important that, while they may be willing to cooperate on lesser issues, on this issue they will fight tooth and nail. Franklin Roosevelt even tried to enlarge the Supreme Court so he could appoint new, friendlier justices. 

But Republicans have taken this to a new level. In a dominant liberal narrative, they have decided that the way to get things they feel important (overturning Roe v. Wade, prevent any attempt at gun-control, etc.) they've decided on their own version of court packing. 

In a March/April 2009 Washington Monthly piece, Rachel Morris outlines this narrative about how the Federalist Society helped the Republicans develop a supply of attorneys and an ideology to fight what they saw as liberal dominance in the law.

However, it was only when Edwin Meese became attorney general in 1985 that things really began to change. . . He brought in a cadre of loyal and experienced senior staffers, and directed them to recruit smart, young, conservative lawyers in order to set them on the path to the judiciary or higher office. Thanks to the Federalist Society, his officials now had a one-stop shop for promising candidates, and they hired many of its members. When they found lawyers with senior leadership potential who lacked previous government experience, they brought them on as special assistants or advisers so that in a few years they could be assistant attorneys general. In the short term, this helped Meese gain control of the bureaucracy, but he was also planting seeds for the years ahead. One of the many lawyers he cultivated was Samuel Alito. Meese promoted the thirty-five-year-old to deputy assistant attorney general in 1985, after Alito impressed him with his work on a strategy to eviscerate Roe.

Meese’s second innovation was ideological. He wanted to keep his young staffers motivated, and create the intellectual conditions in which conservatism could thrive. His DOJ held regular seminars and lunchtime discussions—John Roberts, then at the White House Counsel’s office, also attended these gatherings. Meese asked a group of department lawyers to craft detailed constitutional arguments for the movement’s legal agenda, which remains the same today: outlawing abortion, ending affirmative action, protecting the death penalty, restricting government regulation, and expanding presidential power.

In particular, Meese was determined to elevate the status of originalism, the notion that the Constitution should be understood as its authors wrote it. Championed by the Yale law professor Robert Bork, originalism enjoyed a small academic following, but Meese believed it could provide the intellectual fuel for Reagan’s goals. On the surface, it sounded nonpartisan, and there was something deceptively intuitive about it: surely judges are supposed to confine themselves to the strict meaning of the constitutional text. However, originalists tended to be selective about the norms they invoked from the Founders, and their selections usually overlapped with conservative goals—prohibiting abortion, or returning to an era of a smaller federal government. (Antonin Scalia, for instance, defends the death penalty on the grounds that it was clearly acceptable when the Constitution was written, yet he admits that it is not okay to flog people, a punishment also tolerated at the time. He also says that he would have signed on to Brown v. Board of Education, although there is no originalist way to reach it.) [Originalism sounds to me a bit like Fundamentalism.]

Meese saw that originalism could do more than just rationalize conservative policy positions. It provided a justification for overturning decisions that conservatives didn’t like, because the Constitution, not accumulated precedent, was meant to be the judge’s only guide. Most important, it represented a direct assault on the "Living Constitution"—the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the evolving values of the times—which underpinned the major liberal victories of the Warren Court.

She further asserts that,

... the movement won another, more enduring victory during this period, by significantly constraining the types of liberal judges Bill Clinton could appoint. Continuing the public conversation that Meese started, conservative lawyers outside the government painted many of Clinton’s nominees as liberal extremists who were unfit for the courts. Federalist Society lawyers on the Republican staff of the Senate Judiciary threw procedural obstacles in the way. In the end, they blocked votes on more than sixty of Clinton’s nominees to the federal courts (one was Elena Kagan, the new solicitor general), and ensured that his Supreme Court appointments were moderates.

So, a judge without an ideological ax to grind, would have a voting record that wouldn't favor one particular class or group or issue consistently. Such a judge would simply weigh the facts against the law and Constitution. Perhaps in one case that judge would find for a corporation and in another case for a union or a consumer group against a corporation. After all, the corporations or the unions can't be right in every case that comes before the supreme court, can they? 

But a judge with an ideological view would find some way to interpret the law so that the decisions tend to fall for the judge's favored groups. I

In a May 25, 2009 New Yorker article, Jeffrey Toobin writes that:

In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

You can see narratives within narratives within narratives. As George Lakoff pointed out, Republicans had become much better at framing issues (creating narratives with which voters could connect) than Democrats. 

Listening to politicians talk, keeping track of the narratives being used is a little like watching the nuts being switched around and trying to keep of track of which one is covering the pea. I

I'll put up Part 3 which will discuss Narratives of Race in the near future. [Update August 1, 2022:  As I repost these, I can't seem to find Part 3.  I have some posts on how race is characterized, but nothing with the planned title.  So don't look for Part 3, but if you do and you find it, let me know.]

Headed to SF to Visit J1 - Alaska Airline Pricing Joke

Sorry, this screen shot looks so bad. You can double click it to see it clearly.



OK, so I made a last minute reservation. $656 one way to San Francisco. Steep. I check how much it would be in mileage.

12,500 miles. And $2.50 security fee. OK, that's fine. I book it. But look in the red circle. Alaska is kind enough to show me some alternative pay options.

• $656 cash.
  
• If I want to use cash AND mileage I can go with:
  $527 plus 7,500 miles or
  $398 plus 15,000 miles

Why would they offer me that last choice if I'm already getting the ticket for
$2.50 and 12,500 miles? I wonder if anyone ever takes that choice.