Unexpectedly In Cordova Airport

When we checked in for our 8am flight home from Seattle, they asked for volunteers because the flight was full.  I had been looking forward to a quick return to Anchorage, but we had nothing urgent, so we figured we'd see what they had to offer if we took a later flight.

It turns out they had an earlier flight (7:30am), but with stops in Juneau, Yakutat, and Cordova.  But for $400 vouchers for future flights it seemed like we could go sightseeing.  Not sure how much time I have left with this wifi - I'm on the plane getting it from the Cordova airport - so I'll put up the pictures, in the order of the trip, but the best ones are at near the end.

From the plane at the Juneau airport.

It was snowing in Yakutat and the visibility was below the standards for landing, so after circling a while, we continued on to Cordova.  The image above was while we were waiting for Yakutat to clear.  

Flying into Cordova was pretty spectacular.  

Almost there as we fly past the glacier.


And this last photo is for my friend Jeremy who likes towers that do radio and other electronic things.

This is at the Cordova airport.














For non-Alaskans who have no idea where these places are, here's a map.  (I'm going to post this now  and I'll add the map. UPDATE 3:30pm:  There's the map.)

Cable Car Museum

We took the cousins - our grandkids - to the cable car museum yesterday.  It's a free museum housed in the Washington/Mason cable car barn.

Most impressive are the active winding wheels that pull the cables.

There's a brief explanation of how cable cars work here on the museum site.

And here's a cable car on a very level portion of the ride.

There's more, but have been walking around San Francisco with grandkids in tow.  Sometimes on my shoulders.  There was an interesting set of posters in the museum about how the mayor in 1947 was planning to do away with the cable cars until some women got together and got a ballot initiative to prevent that.  I'll give more detail on that because it has important lessons for people today.  We even had some playtime at the Joe DiMaggio recreation center playground.

Oscar Screwup Response Was Class Act

It was any event organizer's worst nightmare.   The last award.  The most important.  And the wrong film was announced.  The La La Land crowd - there were a lot of people who took the stage - began their jubilant thank you's when La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz (I didn't know who it was at the time) told the audience that it was a mistake, that Moonlight had actually won.

There were no tears (at least visible on tv), no refusal to give back the awards, no yelling, no blaming.  Just the opposite.  It was one of the wrong winners who announced the mistake and who said very positive things about the actual winner, and the La La Land crowd gracefully ceded the limelight to the crew from Moonlight.

The mistake was acknowledged immediately and openly and the response was all so adult, so gracious, so harmonious.  This was not some minor issue, but rather the most prestigious award in the film industry, an industry filled with ambitious people.

Our news has been so dominated by three-year old tantrums lately, that this is a wonderful relief, and we should all be glad for the error, just to see how decent people behave.

Deadline says that PricewaterhouseCoopers has claimed the blame:

"We sincerely apologize to Moonlight, La La Land, Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, and Oscar viewers for the error that was made during the award announcement for Best Picture. The presenters had mistakenly been given the wrong category envelope and when discovered, was immediately corrected. We are currently investigating how this could have happened, and deeply regret that this occurred. We appreciate the grace with which the nominees, the Academy, ABC, and Jimmy Kimmel handled the situation."

Another, adult statement.  No weaseling.  Just standing up and admitting the fault, and apologizing to those who were affected.

Can An Alternative Fact Sell Jeans?

The first time I was aware of alternative facts in advertising, I was about ten or eleven.  I'd ordered the 'fresh' strawberries from the menu.  When they came, they were obviously frozen strawberries.  I told the waitress that they weren't fresh.  "Sure they are," she said, "their fresh frozen."

So lying in advertising is probably as old as advertising.

But announcing that what your are saying is a lie, I don't recall any ads like that before.

Here's a San Francisco billboard I saw today.

Maybe this is just a local joke, since Levis, the Gap, and Betabrand are headquartered in San Francisco.


*For the visually impaired, the billboard in the image says:

"Alternative Fact:

We're now bigger than

Levi's and Gap

Combined"

Betabrand

NOW YOU CAN SAY ANYTHING."

Structural Difference Between US and 1930's Germany That Makes It Harder For Trump

As a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand, I began to understand the differences between a centralized national government and one that split powers between the national government and the states.

In Thailand, everything was centralized in Bangkok.  There were provincial and local governments but they were controlled by Bangkok.  All government professional positions - in schools, hospitals, police departments, courts, etc. - were controlled by Bangkok.

This means if you run afoul of your employer in one province, you're screwed in every province.

If someone had issues  - i.e. disagreed with the actions of the headmaster of the school she was teaching at - they couldn't just go to another school district and apply for a job.  There was, essentially, just one school district, administered in Bangkok.  If you vocalized your disagreement and irritated your boss enough, you might find yourself transferred to a distant part of Thailand while your spouse, say a doctor in the hospital, was not transferred there (and couldn't get a job there without official sanction.)  An indirect, but very effective way of keeping employees in line.

My mother was 17 when she escaped Nazi Germany.   On more than one occasion told me that "the same thing could happen in the US," I have always wondered about that.

In Thailand I began to understand that the US structure, with powers divided between the states and federal government, would make it harder for an autocrat to seize control of the US.

Yes, local schools and police departments get federal funding, and Washington can threaten to withhold that funding.  But, a local police department is independent of the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies.  They can tell them to go to hell if they find an order distasteful or out of sync with local values.

So the other day when I heard the police chief of Santa Cruz declare their department would 
take a long hard look on whether to cooperate with Homeland Security in the future, I thought about this structural benefit of our government.

In Hitler's Germany, Berlin was similar to Bangkok.  All power was centralized there.  But here, the Santa Cruz police chief can tell Homeland Security to go to hell without losing his job.

As we figure out how to deal with the reality of most divisive and abusive president in American history, I can take some solace in this division of power between the feds and the states.

San Francisco Baby Visit -

In San Francisco to see the baby.  She's tiny and beautiful for a week old.  You have to take my word for it.

But here are some pictures I took on the walk from the BART station.

San Francisco City Hall in very bright morning sunshine.

And right in front were these barricades waiting for duty.

A mural.

And a bit of resistance.

Can The "Efficiency Gap" Concept Change The Supreme Court's Mind On Gerrymandering?

[UPDATE September25, 2017: Gill v. Whitford is scheduled to be heard at the US Supreme Court October 3, 2017]


A Mark Butler FB repost got me to a Slate article on something I'd never heard of in terms of gerrymandering.  Since I got pretty involved in blogging the last Alaska redistricting process, I figure if I didn't know about this others don't either.

The article talks about a challenge to the Wisconsin state redistricting process that successfully used this concept of "efficiency gap."  The case has been appealed to the US Supreme Court, so it's something to pay close attention to.

While double checking, I came across a New Republic article written by Nicholas Stephanopoulus who was quoted in the Slate article.  It seemed more appropriate to go to the horse's mouth for my quotes about 'efficiency gap.'

Stephanoupoulus begins by pointing out that while the Supreme Court isn't for gerrymandering, litigants haven't come up with solutions that they are comfortable with.  He says they have hinted at some ideas such as Justice Stevens' idea of 'partisan symmetry.'  So Stephanopoulos and Eric McGhee have come up with what he claims would test for that, though he calls it something a little different.

"No litigants have seized this opportunity yet, but they should. To assist them, McGhee and I have devised a new metric of partisan symmetry called the efficiency gap. The efficiency gap is simply the difference between the parties’ respective wasted votes in an election, divided by the total number of votes cast. Wasted votes are ballots that don’t contribute to victory for candidates, and they come in two forms: lost votes cast for candidates who are defeated, and surplus votes cast for winning candidates but in excess of what they needed to prevail. When a party gerrymanders a state, it tries to maximize the wasted votes for the opposing party while minimizing its own, thus producing a large efficiency gap. In a state with perfect partisan symmetry, both parties would have the same number of wasted votes. 

Suppose, for example, that a state has five districts with 100 voters each, and two parties, Party A and Party B. Suppose also that Party A wins four of the seats 53 to 47, and Party B wins one of them 85 to 15. Then in each of the four seats that Party A wins, it has 2 surplus votes (53 minus the 51 needed to win), and Party B has 47 lost votes. And in the lone district that Party A loses, it has 15 lost votes, and Party B has 34 surplus votes (85 minus the 51 needed to win). In sum, Party A wastes 23 votes and Party B wastes 222 votes. Subtracting one figure from the other and dividing by the 500 votes cast produces an efficiency gap of 40 percent in Party A’s favor. 

The efficiency gap has several properties that make it ideal for measuring the extent of gerrymandering. First, it directly captures the packing and cracking that are at the heart of every biased plan. Surplus votes for winning candidates are the definition of packing, and lost votes for defeated candidates the essence of cracking. All a gerrymander is, in fact, is a plan that results in one party wasting many more votes than its opponent. The efficiency gap tells us exactly how big the difference between the parties’ wasted votes is."

If you didn't read that carefully, here are some key terms:

Two Kinds of Wasted Votes - votes that didn't contribute to victory
Surplus Votes - those votes more than needed to win
Lost Votes - votes cast for candidate who was defeated

Efficiency Gap is simply the difference between the parties’ respective wasted votes in an election, divided by the total number of votes cast.

An extreme example was Pennsylvania where gerrymandering gave the Democrats lots of lost votes.   From Republic Report:

"In Pennsylvania, one state in which the GOP drew the congressional districts in a brazenly partisan way, Democratic candidates collected 44 percent of the vote, yet Democratic candidates won only 5 House seats out of 18. In other words, Democrats secured only 27 percent of Pennsylvania’s congressional seats despite winning nearly half of the votes."

Democrats, who have been hurt badly by Republican control of redistricting after the 2010 census, are hoping this case could break open some opportunities for them.  Here's a FairVote article from December 2016 looking at this case and the larger picture.  

No Such Thing As Tone Deaf - As La Scala Orchestra For The Tone Deaf Demonstrates

Having learned one tonal language (Thai) and struggled with two others (Cantonese and Mandarin) I realized that people who say things like "I can't sing because I'm tone deaf" really aren't tone deaf.  They just think that.  After all, people in Thailand and China who can hear, all understand what people say to them, and if you are tone deaf, you simply can't do that.

My test for English speakers who tell me they are tone deaf is to offer the most tonal two phrases I know in English - listen to the short audio below.




And 100% of them understand that the first one means 'yes' and the second means 'no.'  The phonetic sounds are nearly identical.  The key difference is in the tones.  I first became aware of these tonal words in English when some of my high school students in Thailand came up to me after class and asked, "Ajaan Steve, What do mmm hmmm  and mmmm mmmm mean?"  I'd been using them in class unconsciously.

In Thai and Chinese the tones are part of each individual word - each syllable actually - but in English our tones are embedded in the sentences.  We tend to have a rising intonation for questions, for example.  Just say "no'
1.  As though this is the third time your four year old asks if he can have an ice cream.
2.  As though your girl friend has just turned down your marriage proposal, and you are checking in shock if she really said, "no."

Totally different tones.

This all came to mind today as I read a short piece about La Scala setting up a chorus for the tone deaf.  I smiled when I got to this sentence:

"Maestro Maria Teresa Tramontin has directed the choir for the tone deaf since its formation, in 2010, at the suggestion of Luigi Corbani, who was until recently the director general of the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, known as La Verdi. "He believed that tone-deaf people didn't exist," Tramontin said." (emphasis added)

"In many cases, tone-deaf people have to be unblocked from a psychological point of view," Tramontin said. . .

Note:  There may be some people who cannot distinguish tones, I guess.  But then these people would have serious problems listening and understanding, let alone speaking, in countries that use tonal languages, as well most other languages, like English, where tones are connected to sentences rather than individual syllables.  They wouldn't be able to say in perfect English, "I'm tone deaf, so I can't sing."

A New Life

We're headed to San Francisco in a couple of days to meet our new granddaughter who arrived Thursday.  She's inherited my mother's first name.  My Seattle granddaughter got my mother-in-law's first name and it took a while to not look for my mother-in-law when her name was mentioned.  Neither name is at all common in the US.  Mentally, seeing my mother's name attach to a new human being is exciting and confusing.  But I know from the first granddaughter experience, that soon the new granddaughter will be the rightful heir to the name, and it will sound totally normal.

















[Fill in the blank space as you like.  There are too many thoughts churning in my head to attempt to pin them down in a post.  Work for a better world for the babies being born this year.  Resist, but with respect and kindness and understanding.  Let's have a moratorium on vitriol.]

The Case For Hidden Figures As Best Film For 2016

When I started thinking about this, La La Land was getting lots of raves and I was thinking about why Hidden Figures was a better candidate for the Academy Award for best film.  Since then,  I've seen two more films - Fences and Moonlight -  which I'll add in.

Defining 'best' is always tricky.  There are lots of factors to consider and how important one factor is compared to another is up to the viewer.

I'm borrowing  criteria I used to explain my favorites at the 2007 Anchorage International Film Festival, and I'll use those here to help explain the case for Hidden Figures.


So what were my criteria? There are several factors.

1.  Technical Quality - There's a rough continuum from

shaky...........no problems.............very good...............innovative.

You can see this is not exactly a continuum.  Innovative is good when it works, but not when it doesn't.  The technical stuff, ideally, works so well it enhances rather than distracts from the story.

2.  Content - There's a vague continuum from:

Negative/disrespectful ............Boring.........good story.........original.......current.........important

Again, as I look at the line above, this is more a list of factors to consider than a continuum.

3.  Use of Medium. Movies combine sight and sound and movement and timing. The best movies are those that take advantage of the medium and tell their stories in ways that you couldn't tell it orally, in a book, etc.


4.  Whole Package. Even with weaknesses here and there, a film could pull it off by doing some things so well that the problems don't really matter.


Applying the criteria

As I mentally compared La La Land and Hidden Figures, it's clear that Content became my most important category.

La La Land scores high on Use of the Medium.  My brief review of it after I saw it mentioned that the camera was one of the actors in the film.  It wove in and out of scenes like another person on the set.  It wouldn't have worked as a book, you have to see it to get the effect.  I walked out of the theater happy.   But eventually, I realized that the whole movie was like a bubble - beautiful and shimmering and . . . empty and ephemeral.  There was no real content, the singing and dancing were acceptable.  Like a bubble, after it popped there was nothing left.  (Well, if you had just been through a similar kind of disrupted relationship it might feel more meaningful, but it didn't really tell us all that much about that either.)

Hidden Figures on the other hand was rich in Content.  It was a great story that not only told about  the lives of the three main characters, but their place in a pretty much unknown part of American history.  It smashed so many stereotypes about blacks, about women, about the US space program that it's impact is huge.

The three women were part of the 'colored women calculators' at NASA.  Their job was to do the math before computers were installed.  Despite American stereotypes, they were all three extremely bright mathematicians.  The film helps demonstrate why women aren't considered good at math and science.  The movie is replete with ways their brains were used, but they were kept invisible while the men got the credit for their work.  It also powerfully shows the obstacles that black women faced in the Jim Crow South.  Most vivid was Katherine's regular run nearly a mile each way to get to the only colored women's room on the NASA campus - in the heels that women were required to wear.  She was assumed to be the janitor when she walked in, and someone puts up a colored coffee pot so she won't contaminate the white folks' coffee.  And given the level of racial conflict in the US today, being reminded of sanctioned racism in place in the 60s.  And it's important to see real historical role models of smart, resourceful, black women and to be reminded (for some it will be the first introduction) that  black women can be, were, and are brilliant mathematicians and scientists if they're allowed to be.

Technical Quality and Use of the Medium were high, moving the story along without being flashy or in any other ways calling attention away from the story.

Fences and Moonlight are also good films with important stories about black lives.  The language in Fences is exquisite.  The story in Moonlight is compelling, but the structure is sometimes hard to follow.  That's not necessarily a bad thing.  Any good work of  art reveals itself more and more with each new encounter.  I could learn a lot by seeing Moonlight a few more times.

Ultimately though, the characters portrayed in Fences and Moonlight  are African-American characters we've seen on screen over and over again, though usually not in such a rich and understanding way.

But the characters in Hidden Figures are ones we have never seen portrayed on screen before - brilliant, gutsy black women who are vital to the US Apollo program, not because of their unsung physical labor, but because of their brains and insight.  This is a movie that corrects a huge oversight in the narrative of African-Americans in the space race, and by extension probably in a lot more areas that we don't know about.

Thus the content of this compelling story starts to fill a huge gap in our knowledge of how African-American women contributed to the United States, and thus to our understanding of the huge loss we've suffered by not fully using the talent of ethnic minorities and women as we strive for a better, stronger USA and world.  Ultimately, Hidden Figures just tells the best story and the story we know the least.  Thus, for me, it's the movie that matters the most.