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.

Why Are Some People Successful and Others Not?

How much of success is nature?  How much is nurture?  Is it your talent?  Hard work?  Or good luck and helping hands?

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers:  The Story of Success offers a challenge to the belief that all you need are talent and hard work.  It offers a mental challenge   for  those who are successful and take all the credit for themselves.  Or aren't and take all the blame.

When Obama said recently "If you’ve got a successful business, you didn’t build that, somebody else made that happen" he was echoing the sentiment of the book, though that single sentence, out of context, certainly gave the Romney team lots to work with.  He should have added "all by yourself" and left off the 'somebody else made that happen.'  But if you heard the whole piece, you know he meant it right. 

" If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.  You didn’t get there on your own.  I’m always struck by people who think, wow, it must be because I’m so smart.  There are a lot of smart people out there.  It must be because I worked harder than anybody else.  Let me tell you something.  There are a lot of hardworking people out there.  If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.  There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.  Somebody worked to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.  Someone invested in roads and bridges.  If you’ve got a successful business, you didn’t build that, somebody else made that happen." [For the video click here.]

 Now that my book club's discussion of Outliers is over let's see if I can give a more thorough look at the book than I did in the previous post that highlighted just one section.


First, the basic argument of Outliers is simple, but not quite straightforward.
Second, and more problematic, is that the proof he offers is a series of case studies.  The cases support his argument, but don't prove it.

Some of the cases are strong and well supported by data - like the hockey players' birthdates.  Others are incomplete (though detailed) and vague, thus open to other interpretations. 

So let me first try to offer the basic argument and then go through the some of case studies.  Even if they aren't clear proof, they are all interesting and raise interesting questions.

The Basic Argument (as I see it)

• Among the United States' most fundamental beliefs are  
• the self-made man.  If you are smart and/or talented and work hard, you can succeed.  
• people who achieve amazing feats - star athletes, star entrepreneurs, star musicians - are 'outliers'.  That is they fall statistically on the far end of the bell curve.  They are exceptions.  (Which somewhat contradicts the idea that anyone can succeed.)
• These are myths, at least to some extent.
• achieving recognized greatness depends on
•  having 10,000 hours of experience, not just innate genius or talent
•  being at the right place at the right time
•  cultural background which prepares individuals and/or privileges them

Basically, he's saying that while talent and hard work certainly help people succeed, individuals aren't necessarily responsible for their success or failure.  Other factors - beyond hard work and ability - play an important role: particularly being at the right place at the right time and your cultural background which does or doesn't prepare you to succeed in a particular environment.

Support 

Now let's look at the cases that most strongly support his argument.

1.  10,000 hours  - this was the subject of my previous post on this, you can get more details there.   He basically takes a study of musicians that says 10,000 hours of serious practice is the threshold separating those who succeed big and those who don't.   It's not special genius, it's the work.  He gives the example of the Beatles working 8 hours a day, seven days a week playing in Hamburg strip clubs that gave them the 10,000 hours that pushed them beyond the average band.  He cites Bill Gates getting access to a time-share computer in high school at a time when most colleges were still using punch cards as an example of someone who got his 10,000 hours in before anyone else and thus was ready to excel in the new world of ubiquitous computers.

He's not saying talent doesn't help, but the real demarcation between those who become great is the 10,000 hours.  And, those 10,000 hours include hard work.  But that's not enough.  Gladwell cites K. Anders Ericsson on the 10,000 hours rule for developing expertise and then extrapolates that to other areas. 

2.  Being at the right place at the right time.  His best example here is Canadian hockey players.  The best are overwhelmingly those who were born in January, February, March, and April, because January 1 is the cut off for each year's new kids in school hockey.  And for the 9 and 10 year olds, a year's difference is a lot in terms of size and ability.  So the oldest kids, those born in the first three months, start out better, so they get more game time, more positive attention from the coaches, and generally more help and recognition  that they are 'better.'  This extra attention, Gladwell writes, actually makes them better in a few years.  They are the ones who get their 10,000 hours.  Since there should be a more equal annual distribution of hockey skill, this argument is pretty persuasive and got most media attention when the book came out in 2008.  I covered this in more detail in the previous post too.

3.  Culture.  The example that seemed to have the most objective basis was Korean Airlines pilots.  After a series of crashes,  KAL had to examine why its pilots were crashing planes more than other airlines' pilots.  It turned out that Korean culture is one of the most hierarchically deferential.  Co-pilots were never able to directly confront the captain when they thought the captain was making an error.  They made very indirect hints.  With retraining led by Delta Airlines' David Greenberg, the pilots learned to overcome their culturally induced hierarchical deference so that co-pilots could confront captains in the cockpit.  A particularly telling comment (it's hard to find the data behind the comments because the notes in the back are sparse and there's no bibliography) is that most plane crashes occur when the captain is flying the plane (the piloting and co-piloting duties, Gladwell says, are split 50-50 between the captain and co-pilot).  The explanation is that the captain, when acting as the co-pilot, is much more assertive telling the pilot to make corrections. 

A second cultural example, Asian dominance in international math exams, is interesting, but the cause and effect relationship is harder to prove. (At least with the KAL example the explanation was tested through the retraining.)  He's arguing on two levels:

• Growing rice establishes a culture of hard work and perseverance that causes Asian students to spend more time on their math homework
• Chinese (and other Asian) words for numbers better express their numerical value and thus Chinese kids learn them faster and learn to do arithmetic faster 

Gladwell cites a Chinese proverb "No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich."  (So, does that mean working hard is all you need and not good timing and culture?  Or is growing up in a Chinese rice farming area the culture?  Are all Chinese rice farmers who often get up early successful? What about all the years of starvation in China's history?)  He goes into detail about what's required to plant rice and how that's a great education.  It's meaningful work he claims because:

• of the relationship between how hard you work and the reward
• it's complex - effectively running a small business, juggling a family workforce, selecting the right seeds, building a sophisticated irrigation system, etc.
• it's autonomous - here he says the landlords, by the 14th or 15th Century practiced a hands-off relationship and merely collected a set rent and gave the tenant farmers autonomy

He compared the Chinese proverb above to a more fatalistic Russian proverb:  "If God does not bring it, the earth will not give it."  (Why not say it's the belief in God that's the problem?)

In the second part of the Chinese cultural example - the impact of language on how we know the world (a topic dear to my heart) - Gladwell argues that Chinese words for numbers make it easier to learn math.

• all the numbers can be said faster than, say English numbers, and the shorter time needed to say the numbers, the more numbers in a list you can remember. 
• the structure of the number words is different in Asian languages
• in Chinese 
• the teens are ten-one (eleven); ten-two, ten-three, etc. and 
• the twenties are two-ten-one; two-ten-two, etc.
• one hundred (bai) and one thousand and ten thousand are all a one syllable words, thus:
• yi-bai-yi (one hundred and one)

So not only are the numbers faster to say, but they include a numeric structure that helps to learn mathematics.  Gladwell writes:

"Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22).  Only then can she do the math:  2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59.  Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there.  No number translation is necessary:  It's five-tens-nine."  [The literal translation is three-ten-seven, not 'tens']

The language makes doing math much easier than in Western languages.  The words for numbers fit the numerical structures and computational functions  better.  His backup on this is the fact that international tests of school children have Asian kids way out on top, every year.

"On international comparison tests, students from Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan all score roughly the same in math, around the ninety-eighth percentile.  The United States, France, England, Germany, and other Western industrialized nations cluster at somewhere between the twenty-six and thirty-six percentile.  That's a big difference."

Well, I looked at the TIMSS scores.  Here's part of one chart.

Chart from National Center for Educational Statistics - Supplementary Tables PDF link

[They seem to give the tests every four years and the 2011 scores aren't online yet.  China's not on the list because they do not take the exams.  They seem to be in numerical order for 2007, and so the 1995 list is somewhat out of order.  To make it large enough, I cut off the screenshot leaving out nine other countries.]

OK, the five top countries are Asian: three Chinese speaking countries and South Korea and Japan.  Both Japanese and  Korean numbers share the Chinese structure for teens, decades, and hundreds.  But the Japanese numbers are not all single syllable words.  Maybe that's why they are the last of the top Asian countries.

But I would point out that the language of Thailand, which is also a rice producing country - though the paddies aren't as intricate as he describes the terraced Chinese ones - also shares the linguistic numerical advantages of Chinese and Korean and Japanese, yet it is significantly lower on the list than the European countries and the United States.

Ropi, is there something about Hungarians that puts you just below the Asians?  Though there is a big gap.

I would also note that such comparative test scores are misleading, because other nations track their students out of the academic tracks at different stages.  The lower grades may be more comparable, but by the higher grades, the non-academic tracked students are in vocational schools and don't take the exams.  Also, in the US a wider range of students with disabilities often take these sorts of tests (I don't know about the TIMSS though) which can make the US look much worse than it actually is since a different set of kids is tested in different countries.  Also, Gladwell uses percentiles whereas the charts I found had raw scores and this way the gap didn't look as large. 



If there really is a linguistic advantage for math in Asian languages, that totally changes how we think about the meaning of the test scores and perhaps how we teach math.  This argument is more persuasive for me than the rice farming one, though I understand that Gladwell is saying that people in these cultures have a tradition for harder work.  But so does every generation of immigrants to the United States and that drive lessens, it seems to me, with each generation.  I suspect the story is much more complex than Gladwell portrays it.

There are a number of other interesting cases, but this is long enough. I'll try to do a couple more of his cases in another post.  Especially his discussion of cultures of honor and how that explains some Southern behavior.  

Basically, Gladwell's book is consistent with Obama's point that successful people are successful because of a combination of things.  Obama's blunt "you didn't build that, somebody else did" isn't quite the right message though.  And just as Obama supporters use every Romney gaffe, I'm sure the Romney folks enjoyed this one from Obama.  But the context of the statement shows he's really saying that no one does it alone.  The fact that there are more small business successes in the US than most other countries, for example, makes the point - our system is more supportive of that kind of success.

But I suspect many would disagree with Obama even if his wording were perfect.  The Ayn Rand contingent believe the individual is successful on his or her own without help from others. (If that were actually true, then Ayn Rand could have stayed in Soviet Russia and succeeded.  They'd say the freedom of the US fosters individual freedom.  And I'd say that was what Obama was saying.)

An example of someone who apparently believes that the individual deserves all the credit  is described in a Gladwell chapter note about Jeb Bush from S.V. Dáte's Jeb:  America's Next Bush:

"In both his 1994 and 1998 runs, Jeb made it clear:  not only was he not apologizing for his background, he was proud of where he was financially, and certain that it was the result of his own pluck and work ethic.  'I've worked real hard for what I've achieved and I'm quite proud of it, ' he told the St. Petersburg Times in 1993.  'I have no sense of guilt, no sense of wrongdoing.'
The attitude was much the same as he had expressed on CNN's Larry King Live in 1992:  'I think, overall, it's a disadvantage,' he said of being the president's son when it came to his business opportunities. 'Because you're restricted in what you can do.'
This thinking cannot be described as anything other than delusional."

 I don't think anyone needs to apologize for their family background, but one should be able to acknowledge that being the son of a US Senator/ Vice President/President of the United States might have offered some contacts and access to resources that most people don't have.  It's this blindness to one's privileges compared to others that allows rich people to say that the poor are all lazy shirkers.  If they weren't they'd all be rich, right? 

Gladwell isn't saying special talent and hard work aren't important.  He's saying that lots of people have talent and work hard.  But it takes more than that.  It also takes luck, being at the right place at the right time with the right individual and cultural skills for the times.  That makes sense to me.

Here are the other two posts on Outliers:

• 10,000 Hours - Gladwell's Outliers Part 
• Does Culture of Honor Explain Southern Murder Style - More From Outliers

"to secure a citizen's right to acknowledge Almighty God according to the dictates of his or her own conscience"

[UPDATE 7:47pm:  The people of Missouri sure do like to pray.  Here's the result (with only two precincts missing) from the  Missouri Election page:

Constitutional Amendment 2

yes no

779,269 162,326

83% 17%

HTML Tables

 942,032 Missourians voted out of  4,137,545 registered voters (as of 2010.)  22% of the registered voters made decisions for the other 88%.  The result will be expensive legal battles when this amendment is challenged in court.]

People in Missouri today are voting to amend their Constitution's Article I, Section 5 Religious Freedom--Liberty of Conscience and Belief--Limitation.  They are going from about 100 words to about 600 words. 

I was first struck by this phrase which only gets changed by adding "and women":

"all men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences;"

The Alaska Constitution, for example [in contrast], mimics the US constitution:

§ 4. Freedom of Religion

No law shall be made respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Specifying "Almighty God" seems to suggest a particular god, a single god, one that has ultimate power.  There's no article such as "an" almighty god.  And it's capitalized which suggests it's a proper name of a specific god.

I'm guessing it refers to the Judeo-Christian god.  Possibly the Muslim god is included since Muslims also worship Almighty God.

But what about Hindus or Buddhists who don't worship an Almighty God?

It doesn't include "not worship,"  only worship.  What rights does  "according to the dictates of their own consciences" give to agnostics and atheists?

The most controversial language, apparently, is that part that allows school children to opt out of curriculum that conflicts with their religious beliefs.

"no student shall be compelled to perform or participate in academic     assignments or educational presentations that violate his or her religious beliefs;"

The Kansas City Star's Midwest Democracy writes:

Susan German, president of the Science Teachers of Missouri, said the amendment could have a major impact on the teaching of certain topics in classrooms around the state.
"It is evident that some of the major areas of concern include teaching the age of the Earth, evolution, or climate change in the science classrooms," German said in a letter to the organization's 450 members. "While this may not be a direct attack, it certainly opens the door."
German said her organization has not taken a formal position on the amendment, but it is urging its members to go beyond the summary to fully understand potential ramifications.

The sponsor, state Rep. Mike McGhee, according to the article, says the intent is to allow students to not take a class on Buddhism or Islam if they so choose.  And a Muslim student wouldn't have to learn about Christianity.  He thinks if the curriculum is offensive to some, it should just be changed.

There is a difference between "learning about" and  being proselytized.   The only reason I can think of that a parent might not want their child to learn about other religions is that such classes may raise questions about their own religious beliefs.  Blocking objective knowledge about other beliefs deprives their own children's right to religious freedom. 

The article then points out that this section of the amendment is not mentioned in the ballot summary:

"You can't put the entire amendment in the summary, but letting students opt out of assignments is a pretty big change," said Anthony Rothert, the legal director of the ACLU of Eastern Missouri. "I don't know if voters will know that this is what they are voting for."

It appears that the vagueness of the amendment - despite its length - means it will be resolved in the courts.  Perhaps that will have the unanticipated effect of questioning the language which specifies worshiping Almighty God.

Read more here: http://midwestdemocracy.com/articles/right-to-pray-amendment-spurs-debate-about-students-opting-out-of-schoolwork/#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://midwestdemocracy.com/articles/right-to-pray-amendment-spurs-debate-about-students-opting-out-of-schoolwork/#storyli

Where Are You On The Climate Change Policy Hierarchy??

It seems to me there is a hierarchy of Climate Change statements.  Some don't agree with the first statement.  Others get further down the list.  Here are the statements that I see.  How far down the list do you get before you don't agree? 

1. Global Climate Change is occurring.
2. Humans actions are causing most of it.
3. We can do something about it. 
4. We can be fossil fuel free by 2050, possibly 2030.
1.  It's technically possible, but alternative fuels are too expensive
2.  It's technically and economically feasible, but not politically feasible.

[UPDATE August 9:  I should have added 4.3 here.

•  3.   It's technically, economically, and politically feasible.]

I was probably at statement 3 a year ago. At the Bioneers in Alaska  conference last year, I heard a telesession with Amory Lovins discussing his book Reinventing Fire.  He argues that we can be carbon energy free by 2050 and it wouldn't cost more than the path we are currently on.  (You can hear his TED talk explaining how, here.)

A friend who is far more technically savvy than I expressed serious doubt.  So I started going to Citizens Climate Change monthly meetings, another group I learned about at the Bioneers Conference.

Let's look at the four (plus 2) statements.

1&2.  Climate change is happening and people are causing it.

Most scientists agree this is the case.  A small minority are still skeptics.  Their number decreases regularly.  A major recent convert is UC Berkeley Prof. Richard Muller, who had been a high profile skeptic, and recently wrote a New York Times opinion piece, “The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic,”

“Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.”

The Koch brothers seem to be the main supporters of global warming deniers.  They even paid for part of Muller's research.

3.  There's something we can do about it.

I think most people who accept that people cause climate change believe something can be done - like turning out the lights when you aren't using them, buying electric cars, and other energy saving activities.  But is this enough to prevent irreversible harm to the earth and our ability to survive?  That gets us to statement 4.

4.  We can switch to alternatives by 2050.

This was where I was getting hung up.  After Saturday's Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL) meeting I have come to understand why my tech friend doesn't agree and why he might be wrong.

4.1 - If you compare prices of oil, coal, and natural gas to alternative fuels, it looks like it will be impossible to be able to switch.  But the people who argue that we can,  include the externalities of coal and oil in their economic calculations.  That is, they look at the costs that are imposed on society by these energy sources that the companies don't pay - health costs and all the environmental damage.  If they were forced to pay for this, then alternatives would be more than competitive.  There are a number of other issues that help support the idea of things being switchable.  I don't claim to understand it all, but I do know that human history is full of such changes from old technologies to new, unbelievable ones.  Anyone living in the last 40 years has experienced this first hand on a lot of fronts. 

4.2 - Even if it were technologically and economically feasible, many people just think it's not political possible.  I'm seeing a number of books at the CCL meetings.  One is a book of statements on climate change by most of the major religious groups.  Most of them recognize that climate change is a human caused problem.  So that's a big step.
Second, there are people working on a carbon tax, that uses market forces, to tax carbons and give every American part of that tax.  As an Alaskan I think about the Alaska Permanent Fund dividends, though I'm not sure that's quite the right model.

I'm also impressed with the CCL strategy.  Their goal is to have groups in every Congressional district who can build relationships with their US Senators and Congress members where they can share their expertise and counter the lobbying by those who have an economic or ideological stake in fossil fuels.

At the monthly meetings there's an international (Canada and the US) teleconference call which includes a presentation by an expert and then there is discussion among the different local groups.  The meetings are run very efficiently.

You can learn more about CCL at their website.  Folks in the Anchorage area can talk to CCL reps at the CCL table at the

Renewable Energy for Alaska Project (REAP) Fair 

on the Parkstrip 

Saturday August 11, 2012 

between 11am and 9pm. 

Curiosity Lands Safely On Mars - Live Via Ulive

There's been a lot of bad mouthing of 'scientists' these days, mostly by some politicians who don't like what scientists are telling them.  But I'd like to see members of Congress perform as spectacularly as these scientists at the Jet Propulsion Lab as they landed their cargo safely on Mars.  This was no small feat.  Here are some screen shots from the live online video feed.  Double click to enlarge them. 

Four minutes to go

JPL Staff Waiting

Simulated Image of Parachuting Down

Touch Down

Safe On Mars - Lots of Hugging

More Happy Scientists

First Two Images - Left Shows Shadow of Curiosity, Right is Wheel

There is still live coverage, as I type, online here.

This is what science can do when supported by politicians approving their budgets. 

Who Are The Sikhs?

We've been out all day enjoying being in Alaska, so I only just heard about the attack at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin.  

I'm guessing a lot of Americans don't know much about Sikhs.  I don't know a lot, but we did get to go to the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India in 2006.  The Golden Temple is the center of the Sikh religion. I'm editing together a few posts from that time. 

November 10, 2006

We gave up on the idea of going to the Golden Temple at 4 am to see the Book procession. That turned out to be fine and we got to sleep in a bit. We were at the Temple at 8:30am. You come into the complex, check in your shoes and socks, (Yeah, I got to go barefoot!) and then walk through the water pools (running water to clean your feet). Then up the stairs to this magical view of the temple shimmering in the middle of the water.  We walked around the temple first, then along the causeway out to the temple. The place is full of people in all manner of beautiful and/or interesting types of clothing. Men strip down to their shorts and bathe in the pool. Women have a more private bathing area. This is the Vatican of the Sikh world. Built about 400 years ago it is a beautiful and spiritual place. The chanting inside the temple is broadcast throughout. You watch Sikhs enter and a look of joy comes over some of them as they then prostrate themselves toward the temple. We were there early enough that it wasn't too crowded going into the temple. No pictures allowed there. In here is the holy Book of the Sikh world. Beautiful carpets, the walls intricately painted, the rhythm of the chanting, pilgrims meditating. There is such a spiritual and calming sense here. Someone gives me a round sweet. Someone else mimics sticking it in my mouth. Another asks if we have gone upstairs. We follow the winding stairs to another room with a man reading a huge book. Views from between the golden 'knobs' surrounding the roof of the temple.

A really special place. Our short stay in Amritsar has been fantastic. Then after circling (squaring would be more accurate) the temple again, we eventually decided we needed to move on. We stopped in a book store and bought a couple of books and some CDs of the chanting, retrieved our shoes and wandered out into the world again. By the way, when I pulled out my map of Amritsar to ask the man at the book store directions, he said, Put away the maps. Maps are useless in India. One gains spiritual enrichment by helping others find their way.

The world. Bike rickshaws, motorcycles, horse drawn carriages, shops selling all sorts of Sikh related paraphernalia, people squeezing between the vehicles, horns honking... up the street and into another oasis - at least today. This is the Jailliawalla Bawg, where the British massacred about 1000 Indians. If you saw the movie Gandhi, you saw the Indians protesting in the park while the British came in through the only entrance and set up their guns. Today it is a lush green park full of school kids visiting the various memorials to the dead.

We stopped in a cyber cafe and got all my pictures downloaded to a CD and then into a restaurant for a delicious lunch.

 October 25, 2006

We're going to India next week and so today we met with a Sikh friend to talk about our trip. While talking about visiting the Golden Temple in Amritsar, he told us that every day "The Book" is ceremoniously carried into the Golden Temple at 4am and then returned in the evening. And - here's the interesting part - that ceremony is covered live every day by satellite! So we saw a tape of today's ceremony. Below is more about it from incredibleindians.com.

Amrit Vela
Amrit Vela means the pre-dawn moment. It is actually the time when the watch strikes four o'clock in the morning. The pilgrims wake up and start preparing for a serene early morning visit to the Darbar Saheb. After reaching the temple entrance, one must take off their shoes at the 'shoes counter'. The next step is to dip one's feet at a channel of running water. On the way to the temple, there are lined up flower stalls, for one to buy garlands or just fresh flowers for offering...

This link tells you more about the Golden Temple and has spectacular photos that give you a better sense of the whole temple grounds.

Here's a link that tells you a little about the Sikh religion.