Under 30 at Out North

We made it on time to Out North last night for Under 30. (Under 30 refers to the time (minutes) of the performance, not the age of the performers. It seems they now spell it Under :30 which I thought was a typo, but now see it's trying to clarify the meaning.) Last week we got to Santaland Diaries a few minutes late and it had already begun and was full, so we weren't allowed in, although we had purchased tickets in advance online. We were able to transfer our payment to this show. So we got there early enough this time to check ou the retrospective exhibit of the Under 30: Sweet Sixteen Archive Exhibit.



The exhibit has a wall length time line of the Under 30 programs from the beginning. And then there were these various props from different shows over the years. We've been to a fair number of them and they are always interesting, and usually there's at least one performer we know.

The last page of the program has a recruitment ad for next year's Under 30.

Many of the performances over the years have been done by people who don't normally do theatrical work.  It seems like as good a way as possible to work on and present something important to the world.  A lot of the work is still in the development stage.  This is the first public showing and gets important feedback for the next stage, if the person wants to go further with it.  Some manage to work well even at this stage. 

There's a more complete proposal description on their website.

The performances were introduced by Scott Turner Schofield who is a visiting performer who will be putting on Debutante Balls Jan. 14 -17. He seemed totally comfortable onstage and I'm sorry we're going to miss his show, but we leave for Juneau on the 11th.










Given that taking pictures in the middle of the show is often forbidden I'm filling in with these pictures from the exhibit.

All four performances last night kept my attention, though for me the third one - Jonathan Lang's "Radio" - worked most fully. It was a retrospective of radio in Alaska, starting from when Jonathan's family arrived in Alaska through his days on radio in Anchorage. The juxtaposition of taped 'radio' in the background, some props on stage, and probably the relatively uncomplicated content, made it the most complete and unified piece for me.



Van Le's "Letters to Ho Chi Minh" represented, perhaps, the most ambitious work, as she tried to articulate her family's experiences as refugees who survived smugglers, pirates, refugee camp in Malaysia on the way to the United States and the cross generational conflicts of children who want to know what happened and parents who want to forget. Some of the obstacles she still has to work out in the piece are technical ones - jumping back and forth between different time periods. Others are probably more emotional - I think more reenactment rather than telling of the stories would be more powerful. I got to meet Van Le when she was volunteering for the Anchorage International Film Festival and so it was particularly fun to be able to see how she put this together. The photo was taken after her performance, but before they moved things off the stage for the next performance.

Don Decker's piece  integrated video into the performance.  I liked a lot of the parts - particularly the extreme closeups of the lines in the videos.  And he had some audience members laughing almost non-stop.  I just didn't follow how all the pieces came together as one coherent statement.  But maybe that wasn't intended.

Mark Muro's monologue started shakey, then got into gear, and then seemed to veer into different directions.  Mark's done the Under 30 thing four times before according to the program and he could talk off the top of his head and it could be interesting and provocative.  And I've heard him do that more effectively than his piece last night - but then last night he had to carry it off for thirty minutes.  But Mark took the challenge and stood up and did his thing.

That's one reason people should go to the performance this afternoon at 3 or next weekend.  The challenge is out there for next year's Under 30.  This is something anyone could actually do.  The only thing different from those on stage and you and me is that they put in their proposals.  So, being in the audience is also a personal challenge.  What do you have to say and how could you say it so it would keep an audience's attention for 30 minutes?

November/December 2009 Google Searches

Once again I post some of the search terms people used and what they got to list some interesting search terms and to see how google works.


Bullseye

santa monica trapeze school - this was an image search that got to a post on the Santa Monica pier with a photo of the trapeze school.

rockin dentist - I actually have a post called 'Rockin Dentist'. I got scheduled once with another dentist in my dentist's office and it turned out he has a second amateur career as a rock guitarist.

how do you get prickly pears outta your skin - I had the answer to that at the bottom of a post on eating prickly pear. (Duct tape)

unfuck the world, the song -  This got to an audio clip of the song from Kathryn Blume's play Boycott when she performed it here in Anchorage.  But the most interesting part of this was that the computer seeking this came from the World Bank.  Does this mean they finally have defined the problem they're working on? 


black members of congress -  I take a certain amount of pleasure when someone at
the ISP "Information Systems, U.S. House of Representatives" comes to a blog in Alaska to get information about Congress.  


fruit flies fungus gnats difference - Got to  Tiny Black Bugs - Fruit Fly or Fungus Gnat?  The visitor, from Boston, probably had fruit flies, because the outclick was to the Oklahoma State University page on fruit flies, not the Colorado link on fungus gnats. 


pantalla en negro snow leopard - Ah, even in Spanish they get to  snow leopard black screen disease. 

Close


picture of seven mangoes -  This image search got a picture labeled "six mangoes in plastic."

famous people who was born in pansilvania that start with the letter c - First, I need to say this person was from Pennsylvania.  Google did manage to get him to the post on famous people born in 1909, and two - David Riesman and Joseph L. Mankiewicz - were born in Pennsylvania, but as you can see there was only one c between them and it wasn't at the beginning.


difference between a clique and a colloquialism - Never thought about a connection between those two words, but I can see how this Dutch searcher might have. Unfortuantely, I don't have anything on that and google sent him to Difference between a Cyclone and a Hurricane. (I probably jumped to the wrong conclusion on the nationality. It was from Holland, but Schiphol, which is the Amsterdam airport and the computer uses US English.)

a yellow egg with a tan spot. the moment you look away from it, it moves to another space - got to a picture of a yellow egg I did in photo shop in class last year..

Not even close.


2.employee bloggers sometimes use pseudonyms. under what conditions might the blogging service be forced to provide the real identity of the blogger? - This one got to a post that at least touches the issues here, The Right to Privacy, Bloggers and Privacy. This post discusses privacy in general and specifically the outing of Alaska's most read blogger at Mudflats. It doesn't quite get into the question sought though.

gender butterfly abdomen - When I stopped to think about it, it seemed to be about how to tell the gender of a butterfly.  If it was, it got a pretty picture of a white butterfly with brown markings in the foothills in Northern Thailand, but nothing on determining gender.  This one got me wondering. If you're interested, Clay shows how to identify a Monarch's gender when it's still a chrysalis.  Dragonfly power gives a more thorough explanation.  Scroll down to Part 1.

do flies know when they're full - Interesting query.  I'm not even sure where this one landed. I certainly didn't have the answer. 



do humans live in alaska -  This one came from a computer that is set for Arabic from Jordan.  So at least we can say some people in that part of the world are as ignorant of us as we are of them.  Google sent them to the post "To Live and Die in Wales Alaska"  He did get the answer, that yes we do. 

do hipsters go skiing -   I wrote about the movie Hipsters and I mention skiing now and then in my posts, but there's nothing that answers the question.  Google took them to a post on the Russian movie Hipsters that won the Anchorage International Film Festival Best Feature.

Missed the target even.

if you don't know when you were born how old are you -  This is a legitimate question. Got to famous people born in 1909.

how to get lover out of house  - got them to "cat lovers should check out this house" 

racket tailed drongo sound clip - There actually is video with a racket tailed drongo calling, but Google took this person to a post in the same month on Burma and bio fuels policy.  If the searcher had been persistent, he might have followed my search instructions in the upper right hand corner.  If he had searched for the word drongo on that page he would have found the link to the post with what he was after.  But the Sitemeter data suggests that he didn't get to it.  He was so close to exactly what he wanted, but Google should have put him on the right page. 

how much does it cost to get into amber in nature the mueseum in warsaw??tell me now!!! i need this for homework!!! - Despite the fact that my blog can't even come close to answering the question, What Do I Know came up first out of 1340 hits.  Why?  Because google uses robots, not people to find the hits.  They found a page with enough posts to match six of the words in his search command.  (It does sound like some bratty kid doesn't it?)  But there are no two words together even.  If mine was the number 1 hit, can you imagine how useless the others were?  And if there were some that got him to the museum in warsaw, why was mine number 1?  Does google think it's better to give lots of wrong answers than to say, "Sorry, we can't find anything useful"?  Here's the google link he found:

What Do I know?: July 2009

You can get the whole letter at the Warsaw Gazette.] ...... There's so much to tell...... I don't need to do my homework, the college guys like me just the way I am. ...... Seward Highway that is now a bike trail to Girdwood, I found this nature lesson - on cottonwoods. ...
whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html - Cached -

Google Sense of Humor

politicians laughing - This image search got to a picture of a white crested laughing thrush. Why not? Unfortunately, it wasn't even a good picture.

Renewing the Brain for 2010

It's time to pump up the brain and get moving on this second decade. It's not that I partied hard last night, but I'm still trying to get some other things done. We did connect on an apartment in downtown Juneau this week, so the ethics issue over staying with a friend is moot. I'm trying to get up this year's post on famous people born a hundred years ago, but my original source of such information has changed its format and a new source has way more names than I can handle. But I can tell you at least two seem to be still alive - a sports legend and an economist. Some everyone knows - like Mother Theresa and Jacques Cousteau - and some are obscure and I might not include. At least one of the obscure has affected so many lives I probably will include him - the inventor of instant noodle soup. There's lots of B actors I think I'll skip, though my mother might know them. More tomorrow. The bread is almost done then we're off to friends for dinner.

Think Bike in the New Year

Some of you might be wondering why I keep taking pictures of bike racks.  We all see what we are looking for.  When my wife was pregnant, suddenly we saw all the other pregnant women, a phenomenon we'd barely noticed.  Nothing had changed in the world, only in our heads.  When we bought our first Subaru, we suddenly began seeing how many Subarus were on the streets of Anchorage.  



[This first picture was at the Providence Hospital garage yesterday.  I biked over (about a mile) to get my teeth cleaned.  There were three bikes (one fat bike on the right) and two mountain bikes in this rack - mine's the fourth - and there were four in the other rack in the background.  This is winter.  I've never seen more than one or two bikes here in the winter before.  These bike racks are close to full, again, in the winter.  The summer is going to mean that Prov will need more bike racks for sure.]

Cars dominate life in the US and increasingly elsewhere.  But in many ways they are the default status quo, bolstered by habit, by advertising, by city planning, and by our mental models that say we can't live without cars.  But my personal experience is that using alternative transportation - such as bikes or walking or buses - when feasible is really liberating.  When challenged to change, we think about what we're giving up, not what we're going to gain. Foot power not only saves petroleum, the air, and parking spaces,  it also keeps us healthier, connects us to the world we usually whiz by - the trees, the flowers, interesting houses, new shops (old shops we never saw) and to other people.

It's NOT either/or.  We won't eliminate the auto.  That's not the point.  We'll just use it less.  If everyone drove 20% less, that would be a huge impact.  So we just need to rethink some of the short trips.  A mile walk is extremely doable.  It shouldn't take more than 20 minutes once someone is fit.   But walks of 3 miles - hikers do it all the time as recreation - are also very doable.  But few people think about walking from downtown to UAA, but it's about a 60 - 80 minute walk.  I don't have time for that, you say.  But if you walk, you can skip the trip to the gym.  When we talk about bikes, the distances we can go increases.

[This second picture was last night at Benson and LaTouche.  The biker is in the white oblong.  It would have been better in video as his head lamp and bike lamp both flashed on and off.  These LED lights are making winter bikers much more visible to drivers.]




So, there are two reasons I do these posts:

1.  To raise people's awareness that more and more people are biking, even in the winter,  change people's idea of what is possible.  It's not just fanatics who are on their bikes.  It's normal, average people who have found that it works in their lives.

2.  To document the changes that are going on as people do start using their bikes - some just making occasional use of the bike instead of a car when it's a short trip and others actually commute every day by bike, some doing ten mile round trips or more, even in winter. 

It's the last day of the year.  Even if you aren't going to write down any New Year's resolutions, this still is a time to reflect on how we've lived our lives and how we might do it better. 

I urge you to 'see' all the bikers around you.  I urge you to try to abandon your car for at least one trip a week - and either walk or bike instead.  Start small.  You're parked at Barnes and Noble.  Instead of driving the short distance to Blockbusters for a video, walk there and back.  Once you start making some small trips like that without the car, you'll start thinking about other times you could walk or bike instead.  For some, you can start in January.  For others, go ahead, wait until April when the snow is almost gone and there's more light.  I promise you, you'll feel better. 

Phil Munger, Composer

One of the reasons Progressive Alaska is such an interesting blog is that its blogger, Phil Munger, has worn so many hats that give him intimate knowledge about so many important topics in Alaska and beyond.  One of his hats is musician, composer.  Last night he and his wife Judy Youngquist celebrated their 30th Anniversary with a lot of others who crowded into their Wasilla home. 

At one point Phil invited me downstairs to his home studio to see his set up and to hear some of his new unfinished work.  Here's a glimpse of that studio and his music on the speakers and on his screen  - watch the vertical green line.  I wasn't able to figure out how, with just my Powershot, to get the light right for both the screen and the rest of the scene, so when I'm not right up to the screen, it just whites out.  And the water heater is in the same room and adds its own improvisation to Phil's composition.

A Serious Man Hard to Watch

It wasn't that it was boring, but there wasn't a single character who I would like to know or be around.  They were all seriously annoying in one way or another.  Was it a good movie?  My first reaction is no, but I'm willing to pull back and consider that there was more; that I just didn't get it.

[I don't think what I write here will give anything away, but if you're planning to see the movie and want to go in with fresh eyes, stop now.]

As we talked about it over dinner afterwards, some basic themes emerged.  Perhaps the key  theme is the basic theme of this blog - What Do I Know?  What can I know?  How certain can I be?  A sub theme is about how one can find truth - science and spirituality (religion) are the main contenders.  Or maybe nothing means anything. 

For example, we have the physicist giving his students truth in a wall covering formula that none of them understand - and it's not an accident that what the Professor Larry Gopnik is proving is the uncertainty principle.  The discussion with Clive, a student who has failed the physics exam and requests a passing grade or to take it over because he didn't know there would be math on the test, also reflects the theme of how do we know what's truth.  The student says the math is hard, but he understands the dead cat (Schrödinger's Cat):

LARRY (SURPRISED) You understand the dead cat? 19 CLIVE nods gravely. But... you... you can't really understand the physics without understanding the math. The math tells how it really works. That's the real thing; the stories I give you in class are just illustrative; they're like, fables, say, to help give you a picture. An imperfect model. I mean-even I don't understand the dead cat. The math is how it really works. CLIVE shakes his head, dubious.[script from IMSDB]

But while Larry 'knows' the reality through math, it doesn't seem to translate into truths about his career or his family.   He seeks other truths from three rabbis, who tell him stories.  But when it comes to stories, Larry is just as clueless as his students are about his formulas. 

The truth theme begins the movie in the opening Yiddish tale in a Polish shtetl near Lublin, as a man comes home to tell his wife he was helped by someone she knows.  Not possible says the wife, he's dead.  So when he shows up at the house the man and wife debate if he is truly Traitle Groshkover or if he is a dybbuk. 

We transform from shtetl life into a 1967 Hebrew school class through an earpiece (they weren't called earbuds back then.)  The wife has stabbed the dybbuk (or was it Traitle Groshkover?) with an ice pick. The dybbuk or mortally wounded Traitle stands up and walks out.  From the script again:

WIFE
Nonsense, Velvel...
She walks to the door...
Blessed is the Lord. Good riddance to evil and shuts it against
the wind.

BLACK
A drumbeat thumps in the black.
Music blares: the Jefferson Airplane. Grace Slick's voice enters:
When the truth is found to be lies
And all the hope inside you dies
Don't you want somebody to love. . .


An image fades in slowly, but even up full it is dim: some kind
of round, dull white shape
with a small black pinhole center. This white half-globe is a
plug set in a flesh-toned
field. The flesh tone glows translucently, backlit. We are drifting
toward the white plug
and, as we do so, the music grows louder still.

AN EARPIECE

A pull back-a reverse on the preceding push in-from the cheap
white plastic earpiece
of a transistor radio. The Jefferson Airplane continues over
the cut but becomes
extremely compressed. The pull back reveals that the earpiece
is lodged in someone's
ear and trails a white cord.

We drift down the cord to find the radio at its other end. As
we do so we hear, live in the
room, many voices speaking a foreign language in unison.

[An aside:  I don't recall white ear pieces back then.  I'm pretty sure they were all black.  And this was a transistor radio, not an iPod or even a Walkman, where it would make sense that the rabbi would later hear the same song that Danny was listening to.  Perhaps the white cords were to fool us into believing that it had Danny's songs saved instead of being a radio that would play different songs.  This is not a big deal, artistic license and all.  Just a note.]

Throughout the movie, all the things Larry knows - his marriage, his brother, his job - turn out to be not what he thought they were.  

Grace Slick's words come back near the movie's end, on the lips of the elderly rabbi:

When the truth is found to be lies
And all the hope inside you dies


Another important theme - "I haven't done anything" - comes over the phone from Dick Dutton of the Columbia Record Club.  I'd forgotten about record clubs.  The ads in magazines and in the mail offered you a bunch of free records (the kind you play music on), but the catch is that you have to then buy one each month for X months, and then they keep coming UNLESS you tell them to stop.  That scheme has migrated even more effectively to the internet.  

VOICE Okay, well, you received your twelve introductory albums and you have been receiving the monthly main selection for four months now- LARRY "The monthly main selection?" Is that a record? I didn't ask for any records. VOICE To receive the monthly main selection you do nothing. LARRY That's right! I haven't done anything! [emphasis added] VOICE Yes, that's why you receive the monthly main selection.

Through much of the movie, Larry doesn't do anything.  His wife wants a divorce and tells him to see a lawyer.  He does nothing. Finally, when it's too late, he sees the lawyer.  Clive (the failing grad student) leaves an envelope full of money, but Larry doesn't do anything - doesn't report the money or the student, doesn't change the grade, just lets things slide until the very end.  He's up for tenure, but he hasn't published any articles.  His tenure committee chair, Arlen Finkle stops by to see if there is anything Larry wants to add to his tenure file:

Arlen Finkle Well. Anything. Published work. Anything else you've done outside of the institution. Any work that we might not be aware of. LARRY I haven't done anything. [emphasis added] Arlen Finkle Uh-huh. LARRY I haven't published.


Is fate vs. free will another theme here?  Maybe, but I'm not sure.  There's a number of mentions of Hashem.   Though mostly these don't really imply fate.  Rabbi Scott does say, about all the things happening to Larry:

You have to see these things as expressions of God's will.
You don't have to like it, of course.

Or is this the curse of the Dybbuk stabbed by some foremother of Larry in the shtetl?  

I'm sure there's lots more than this.   There are the obvious similarities to Job for example.  But is this bringing together of diverse references what it takes to make a good movie?  Or is this cinematic trivial pursuit in dark heavy tones disguised by first rate technical work and acting?  Why is this world so relentlessly joyless?  While Larry, who can't seem to do anything, is painfully helpless, the other characters each have their own distastefulness.  There's his wife who's leaving him.   There's his failing student.  The rabbis who can't or won't help Larry.  His weird brother who is oblivious to anyone else's needs.  His daughter who's always nagging.  His son who's an unlovable 12 year old pot head.  Or are these people this way because Larry 'doesn't do anything'?  Or are we seeing them through Larry's eyes? 

The world they depicted is not a world I know.  Not a world I would want to live in.  Most writers and film makers write about their own worlds.  What sort of depressing childhood did the Coen brothers have to lead them to the series of films they've offered?  They aren't simply eccentric, they're dark, morose, violent.  They highlight the worst features of human beings.  There are dark films that show people living difficult lives that I've thought were terrific.  But they reflect a truth about humans, and insight into humanity, that I just don't see in this movie.  While the Coen brothers may work with the most classic of human themes, I don't see that they bring any enlightenment.  Using Shakespeare's themes, doesn't make one a bard.  I just don't think they have the wisdom to make profound films.  They're still children playing at grownup.  They can make films like Professor Gropnik can write formulas.  Their technical skill is impressive, but their understanding of humanity is not nearly as developed.  This was not my cup of tea.  

OK, that's my take.  Now I can go look at what others have said.

Jerry Traverse at Rolling Stone begins:

The Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, are getting personal. They shot their new film in suburban Minnesota, where they grew up as sons of Jewish academics. But if you're expecting something warm and fuzzy, circa 1967, you don't know the Coens, and A Serious Man is no country for you. This seriously funny movie, artfully photographed by the great Roger Deakins, is spiritual in nature, barbed in tone, and, oh, yeah, it stings like hell.

A.O. Scott writing at the New York Times seems to have liked it (It's a NYTimes Critic's Choice.)  Here's a snippet of his review:

. . .So a question put before the congregation by “A Serious Man” is whether it makes the case for atheism or looks at the world from a divine point of view. Are the Coens mocking God, playing God or taking his side in a rigged cosmic game? What’s the difference?
The philosophical conundrums in “A Serious Man” can be posed only in jest — or, at least, in the cultural tradition of Ashkenazic Judaism that stretches from the shtetls of Poland to the comedy clubs of the Catskills, that is how they tend to be posed. But a deep anxiety lurks beneath the jokes, and though “A Serious Man” is written and structured like a farce, it is shot (by Roger Deakins), scored (by Carter Burwell) and edited (by the Coens’ pseudonymous golem Roderick Jaynes) like a horror movie.

I wouldn't go as far as Goatdog, who truly didn't like it:

A Serious Man is a truly despicable film, and I I [sic] ordinarily count myself among the Coen brothers' fans and/or defenders. So I was astonished that with this film, in one fell stroke, they had me believing that everything their detractors say might just be right: they may be talented yet juvenile creeps, the cinematic equivalent of a 13-year-old supreme being who delights in putting his little Job through unbearable torment, only to reward him with a painful death. In 90 minutes, they shook my faith in twenty years of films. Suddenly the Coens are the Federico Fellinis of burning ants to death with a magnifying glass.

 Michael W. Phillips Jr.'s (Goatboy) "talented yet juvenile" says much more clearly what I think is wrong with this film.

Brain Occupied Elsewhere, Mac Video Capture, Serious Man Alert

I guess I should be posting something today, but I'm mentally engaged with other projects. I've got a manuscript I'm reviewing for a journal. It's the second time round and I was the only negative reviewer the first time.  They have tried to address issues I raised, and it is much better, but I still have problems and I'm trying to figure out

1. whether it's worth pursuing further or is their key issue really a non-issue and 
2. if it could lead to something useful, how do I articulate my problems and make constructive suggestions?

Having been the recipient of plenty of reviewers comments on my own papers, I know what it feels like to get negative comments.  Negative doesn't mean abusive.  It means that the reviewer doesn't think it's ready for publication.  And for negative comments I feel an extra obligation to give lots of reasons and examples, but it's never an easy process.  So I'm struggling with how to express my reservations in as constructive a way as possible.   That's probably about all I can say on that.

Then I got notice recently that a proposal I submitted for a paper at a conference in May was accepted. So now I have to work on that. I probably will be able to share some of that process, but since I have a co-author, it gets a little more tricky.

We got a call back about an apartment in Juneau - that would make moot the ethics issues. The price and location are right and a friend down there has promised to take a look.

I went to the dermatologist this morning to check on some spots.  That's a cost of growing up near the beach in Southern California.  Nothing alarming. 


Snow Leopard Tip

Here's a gizmodo page that tells you what's new in Snow Leopard. The function I found most interesting is the ability in the new Quicktime to do VIDEO CAPTURE. From my initial experiment, you record the whole screen, so I can use this to record video, but I get everything else on the screen as well, including curser movements.  But there wasn't any audio.  I'll check it out a bit more, but even so, it's a potentially useful function and comes included in Snow Leopard.

In the new Quick Time Player, in FILE, there's an option for 'new screen recording.'  Play around from there.


And a last note:  A Serious Man is at Bear Tooth tonigh 5:30 and 8pm.  A friend in the Chicago area has assigned me that so we can discuss it.  I'm not a fan of the Coen brothers love of blood, but the violence in this movie is apparently all mental.   

Plowing Snow Berms? 2 - Maybe Not

This is what my parking space looked like after the plow went by several times.  They did use the snow guard to keep most of the snow out of the space.  Not too much spilled.

It only took about five minutes to get rid of the snow and clear my space.

Using the new snow shovel. The old one was just like this one, except it had a black synthetic material as a blade. In the last big storm, it pulled out of the little screws (what are those called, they aren't really screws). All but one of the holes failed and this black strip was loose as I shoveled. Costco took it back with no question and the new version has a metal strip instead.

Our neighbor said he thought they had trucks to clear the berms in the neighborhood, so I left the car in the driveway and went for my run.  Here's the midday sun, getting a little higher on the southern horizon.

And here it is lighting up the trees and casting a very long shadow of the photographer.

While I was running - an abbreviated run (less so in time than distance) - it didn't appear that the other neighborhoods had had their berms cleared.  Here's the berm at the corner as I came back from the run.  My car is still in the driveway and the one you can see on the street is our neighbor, just past our place.  That car caught fire last week so they can't move it right now.  It was idling outside.  We weren't home when it happened otherwise you'd have seen the fire trucks here. :)

We're headed to Out North to see Santaland Diaries.

Plowing the Berms, Maybe

I was doing my stretches and getting ready to go out and run - I've been terribly derelict, but it's been around 30 the last few days and I have no excuses not to get out - when I heard the snow plows.  So I stopped, got some outdoor clothes on and moved the van into the driveway. 

So, here's the second sweep after I moved the van.  You can see some pavement between the front wheel and the mailbox that I did have a cleared spot for my car.  To the left is a two foot high, four foot wide berm.  The question is whether they are just coming by a couple of times to scrape a little more off the street, or are they going to actually clear the berms?  And are they going to leave my parking space, or push the berm into my space?  So far it looks like they are trying to leave my space. 

Now I have to finish the stretches and go run.  It's nice out.

Reading Brooks' Bests and Reexamining What We Know

How do people know what happened?  Even things they've seen themselves.  How does what other people say affect what they 'know?'   We really don't know that much about these things.  Kevin L. Leahy, an attorney who has defended corporations against asbestos personal injury claims writes about the memory of witnesses:

Cognition specialists discuss memory as a process that has three primary stages: (1) encoding; (2) consolidation and storage; and (3) retrieval. (Id.) Each step involves biological efforts within our brains to ensure that an eyewitness account is accurately retained. (May 2003 issue of HarrisMartin’s COLUMNS-Asbestos.)

He goes on to say that unlike artists or story tellers, who can fill in the details after the fact, and not necessarily accurately,

eyewitnesses have no license to stray from their understanding of past events during trial. Our system expressly demands that witnesses “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Once the bailiff and judge forbid conscious manipulation of testimony, however, the remaining instructions are generally silent about the accuracy of the witness’ recall.

So, you might ask, where is this coming from and where is it going?  David Brooks, in the Friday, Dec. 25, 2009 NY Times gives out his Sidney Awards to the best magazine essays  of 2009.

One of his choices is a lengthy story about Todd Willingham, an unemployed auto mechanic, who was put to death in Texas for killing his three daughters by burning his house down.  All the expert witness arson evidence pointed to Willingham.  And so did the eyewitness evidence.  But a friend who came to know Willingham when he was on death row, decided to  recheck the evidence.  And what she found suggested that  some of the details the eyewitnesses gave, was revised later on, after they were exposed to what the 'experts' thought.  From the New Yorker artcle,  "Trial by Fire"   by David Grann:

The witnesses’ testimony also grew more damning after authorities had concluded, in the beginning of January, 1992, that Willingham was likely guilty of murder. In Diane Barbee’s initial statement to authorities, she had portrayed Willingham as “hysterical,” and described the front of the house exploding. But on January 4th, after arson investigators began suspecting Willingham of murder, Barbee suggested that he could have gone back inside to rescue his children, for at the outset she had seen only “smoke coming from out of the front of the house”—smoke that was not “real thick.”

An even starker shift occurred with Father Monaghan’s testimony. In his first statement, he had depicted Willingham as a devastated father who had to be repeatedly restrained from risking his life. Yet, as investigators were preparing to arrest Willingham, he concluded that Willingham had been too emotional (“He seemed to have the type of distress that a woman who had given birth would have upon seeing her children die”); and he expressed a “gut feeling” that Willingham had “something to do with the setting of the fire.”

Dozens of studies have shown that witnesses’ memories of events often change when they are supplied with new contextual information. Itiel Dror, a cognitive psychologist who has done extensive research on eyewitness and expert testimony in criminal investigations, told me, “The mind is not a passive machine. Once you believe in something—once you expect something—it changes the way you perceive information and the way your memory recalls it.”

Certainly anyone who is married knows that spouses can remember something that just happened very differently, and both are sure they are right.  And as Democrats and Republicans and everyone in-between or beyond makes claims about health and other policies, I  wonder what causes people to be so sure about things they can't possibly know too much about.  If eyewitnesses have trouble remembering what they saw in the past, how can we possibly know for certain things that haven't yet happened (the effects of carbon on the environment, the impact of health reform, etc.)  I'm not saying we can't make educated guesses based on the facts we do know.  I'm really referring to the people who are absolutely certain, who have no doubts, who can't see any possibility that perhaps their opponents may actually be right.

[Update, Saturday afternoon:  The New Yorker Fire article is 17 pages long and I'd only read part of it when I first posted.  The real issue in this article about knowing is that the arson experts based their findings on myth.  They didn't know:

In 2005, Texas established a government commission to investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists. The first cases that are being reviewed by the commission are those of Willingham and Willis. In mid-August, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire. He said that Vasquez’s approach seemed to deny “rational reasoning” and was more “characteristic of mystics or psychics.” What’s more, Beyler determined that the investigation violated, as he put it to me, “not only the standards of today but even of the time period.” The commission is reviewing his findings, and plans to release its own report next year. Some legal scholars believe that the commission may narrowly assess the reliability of the scientific evidence. There is a chance, however, that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”[emphases added]]

And, as I remind readers now and then, this blog is fundamentally about examining what I know.  

Anyway, Brooks' recommendations are worth a look.  Besides Grann's reexam of the arson evidence,  Brooks has several more suggestions.  He mentioned, but because it was published in the New York Times (where he himself writes) did not include it,  David Rohde's  series on being a Taliban captive that I pointed out in October.

His other choices include:

1. Atul Gawande’s piece, “The Cost Conundrum,” in The New Yorker, was the most influential essay of 2009, and
   
   
2. David Goldhill’s “How American Health Care Killed My Father,” in The Atlantic, explained why the U.S. needs fundamental health reform.
   
   
3. Jonathan Rauch’s delightful essay, “Fasten Your Seat Belts — It’s Going to Be a Bumpy Flight,” in The National Journal. Rauch described what the airline industry would look like if it worked the way the health care industry works.
   
   
4. Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard['s] . . . piece, “A Rake’s Progress” was a sympathetic and gripping profile of Marion Barry, the former Washington, D.C., mayor, crack-smoker and recent girlfriend-stalker.
   
   
5. S. Frederick Starr’s “Rediscovering Central Asia,” in The Wilson Quarterly, is an eye-opening look at what once was. A thousand years ago, those mountains [around Afghanistan] were the intellectual center of the world. Central Asians invented trigonometry, used crystallization as a means of purification, estimated the Earth’s diameter with astonishing precision and anticipated Darwin’s theory of evolution.

(While I've added numbers, I've kept Brooks' own descriptions above)  All the articles challenge our notions of what we know, if you are looking with that in mind.

Atul Gawande does a case study to see if looking at the most expensive town in the US can give him new insights.

The question we’re now frantically grappling with is how this came to be, and what can be done about it. McAllen, Texas, the most expensive town in the most expensive country for health care in the world, seemed a good place to look for some answers.

 Goldhill's article on his dad's hospital caused death immediately made me rethink the level of risk of different activities just by how he placed statistics side-by-side:

My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals. One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another victim in a building American tragedy.

Jonathan Rauch’s article, gives us another way to 'know' the health care system.  He imagines booking an airline ticket as though the airlines were run like health care.  It causes us to 'know' the issues differently than before.

May I have your flight-insurance information, please?"
"Millennium Travel Care, group number 068832, ID number RS-3390041B."
"I'm sorry, sir, we're not in Millennium Travel Care's provider network."
"You're listed on their website. It says you accept Millennium."
"We did until last week. If you like, you can pay out of pocket for your ticket."
"How much would that be?"
"Yes, sir, I'll be happy to get that price for you. That would be $17,885.70."
"What? For a flight to Chicago? Does anyone actually pay that?"
"I'm sorry, sir, I wouldn't know. I can tell you that different clients and insurers pay different rates. For individuals, the rate is $17,885.70."
"Oh."

[Update Jan. 8, 2009:  Phil Munger put up this video of a version of the Rausch airline/health piece on Progressive Alaska.]


I'm having some trouble seeing a different way of knowing in the Matt Labash article.  It's a rip roaring article that reminds me of Tom Wolfe.  Brooks calls it sympathetic, I'd say it's more like damning with very occasional faint praise.

Barry is by now transported himself. He gets up and joins the mosh pit of ululators, swinging his arms like a child readying himself for the standing broad-jump at a school track meet. When asked afterward what part of the sermon spoke to him most, he says, "All of it," then starts throwing some Bible himself. "It says, 'Greater is He that is in us than he that is in the world,' " Barry says, adding his own interpretation: "Greater than devils, and evil-doers, and haters .  .  . Barry critics."
It's a tad ironic that while all but Emperor-for-Life in Ward 8, Barry didn't make his bones as mayor by standing up for "the last, the least, and the lost," as he has spent the post-Vista half of his career rebranding himself in these parts. While his signature summer-jobs program for youth insured that you can swing a cat in a local black neighborhood and hit five adults for whom Barry provided their first gig, his primary accomplishment was riding '80s-era real-estate-boom market forces.
Barry threw the city open to development the likes of which D.C. hadn't seen before. He was so proactive that old staffers tell how, early in his mayoral tenure, he used to have weekly brainstorming brown-bag lunches with architects and developers and would fast-track formerly glacial construction-approval processes with Post-it notes saying "Good idea, do it!" When he assumed office in 1979, whole quadrants of the city were ghost towns, and there were streets untouched since they were torched in the '68 riots.

It's not so much about knowing something differently as adding more data to what we know. Though at one point we do see Barry having an insight about his behavior:

Both Barry and Linda talk freely about how much he cared for Effi, which prompts me to ask how he could put her through what he did: the infidelity, the public humiliation. Linda covers for him: "He's not doing it out of disrespect, or less love for the person he's committed to at that time."
Barry takes this in, meditatively chewing on a pineapple slice. "I haven't thought about it much," he confesses. "First of all, I love people. Attractive women. They're all attractive to me if they're female." We laugh.
"No, really," he insists:

But I guess part of what happens in life is you are what you see. Growing up without a natural father, I didn't see these one-on-one relationships. I'm just thinking about it for the first time, quite frankly. I mean I've thought about it, but not in this depth. .  .  . I think there ought to be fidelity between a man and a woman. .  .  . But you are what you see. And when I was growing up, I didn't see men who were one-woman men. So I guess it sort of got caught in my personality. I'm not rationalizing it. It is what it is. [Emphasis added]

S. Frederick Star's "Rediscovering Central Asia" gives us a number of ways to rearrange what we 'know.'  Most obvious is filling in the gaping holes in our knowledge about that part of the world where our military is most visibly engaged.  Many of us think about it as a backward land of ignorant people.  That isn't true today, and Star tells us that it certainly wasn't true in the past.

It is one thing to draw a circle on the map, but quite another to explain why this region, call it Greater Central Asia, should have produced such a cultural flowering. Booming cities provided the setting for cultural life. A traveling Arab marveled at what he called the “land of a thousand cities” in what is now Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The ruins of mighty Balkh, once the capital of this region, still spread for miles and miles across the plain west of modern Mazar–­i-­Sharif in Afghanistan. In its heyday Balkh was larger than Paris, Rome, Beijing, or Delhi. Like all the great regional centers, it had running water, baths, and majestic palaces—and solidly built homes of sun-dried brick for non-palace dwellers.

It was also richer, thanks to continental trade. Merchants from Balkh and other Central Asian commercial centers journeyed to the Middle East, Europe, China, and deep into India. Traders from those lands brought goods to the sprawling commercial entrepôts in Greater Central Asia. Since slavery thrived throughout the Muslim world and beyond, the bazaars also included large slave markets. Gold, silver, and bronze currency from these thriving hubs of commerce traveled all the way to Gotland in Sweden and to Korea and Sri ­Lanka.

And for most US citizens who think of their country as the world's cultural leader today, it's sobering to remember the fate of such leaders of the past.   There's an opportunity for a little rearranging of our mental maps in this article, if one is open to that sort of activity.

Leahy - you remember him, the asbestos lawyer mentioned at the beginning of this post - used three cognitive steps to frame his discussion of eyewitnesses' ability to accurately report what they had seen in the past.  We shouldn't just be adding facts to reinforce our old stored beliefs.  We should be rearranging everything know and then to see whether that affords us a more effective view of the world. 


David Brooks recommends people forgo watching "It's a Wonderful Life" once again and read these articles instead.  (He has still more recommendations coming Tuesday.)  And given that in today's world, you don't have to go to the library or bookstore to read these, I'd nudge you to give at least a couple a look.  And remind yourself how much you can actually expand what you know with a couple of hours of reading good stuff.