The Rage Diaries

Two vital things: air and chocolate

Who would like a little irritation to push them over the hump this week?

Exhibit A: Jon Carroll's column, which details the Bush administration's efforts to appoint: William Wehrum as the head of the air quality division of the EPA; former Koch Industries exec Alex Beehler as head of the EPA's inspector general office; Susan Dudley as an OMB official heading up the department that reviews all proposed government rules. Carroll wrote the column after reading the LAT's Apr 1, 07, article, "Bush Again Pushes 3 Nominees Seen as Pro-Industry." This latest executive office caper will not do a lot to ease the U.S. rep as a total first-world jerk. (If you'd like to be piqued over that too, read, "Poor Nations to Bear Brunt as World Warms," NYT, Apr 1, 07.)

Exhibit B: The environment isn't the only place where the regs are about to get a lot looser and our quality of life to get crappier. The government would like to ease up on the definition of "chocolate," so that items that do not contain cocoa butter are officially, legally classified as "chocolate."

The Chocolate Manufacturers' Association is pushing for this, because taking cooca butter out of chocolate makes producing it more efficient, ergo there are rich, delicious profits in it for them. At least in the short term.

Just say no. I say this after having exhausted my stash of Canadian chocolate and seriously considered ordering more.

Candyblog has a great post telling you how you can tell the FDA that you like your chocolate with cocoa butter in it, thank you. Don't Mess With Our Chocolate has another good post on what you can do to make your voice heard.

Hey -- we can't do squat about the recess appointments Bush will likely make. But at least we can complain about the move to lower the bar on chocolate quality.

Yet another reason to love bats

It's no big secret that I dig the monkeys, but I also adore bats. What is not to love about them? And now here's a new reason to love our little friends in the order chiroptera:

Bats can be lured into large areas of destroyed rainforest with fake fruits, researchers have found. This, they say, could be the key to restoring patchy parts of the landscape.

South American leaf-nosed bats of the family Phyllostomidae defaecate the seeds of the fruits they have eaten as they fly. This process, known as 'seed rain', aids plant dispersal throughout the rainforest.

-- "Fake Fruits Could Help Restore the Rainforest," Nature, Feb 8, 07

That's right: by directing the bats via a few olfactory cues, there's a way to re-seed denuded rain forest in a way that is more in line with non-human-directed development. What a cool idea. Let's hear it for both the scientists and the bats!

Frostbite in California, sunburn in D.C.

Our Subaru has an external-temperature gauge in the dashboard, and it is somewhat weird to be tooling toward the gym in the morning and seeing the gauge read 43 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm used to it being at least a little warmer here. And this nippy-Bay-Area-winter phenomenon felt a little weirder after I read yesterday's "Seldom Heard in January: Hot Enough for Ya?" in the WaPo. 73 degrees Fahrenheit! In January? Back when I lived there, January was all about fretting over how not to freeze during inauguration, stocking up on bread in anticipation of snow days, casting longing looks at Bahamas posters strategically placed in travel agency windows.

That this should appear the same day the NYT runs the speculative piece "The Ununited States, When It Comes to the Weather," is just delightful. The argument in the piece is this: because the U.S. has such vastly different weather systems, it's hard for anyone to make global warming seem like a national issue. Days like yesterday certainly seem to back that theory up.

After 20,000,000 years

A rare, nearly blind white dolphin that survived for millions of years is effectively extinct, an international expedition declared Wednesday after ending a fruitless six-week search of its Yangtze River habitat.

The baiji would be the first large aquatic mammal driven to extinction since hunting and overfishing killed off the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s.

For the baiji, the culprit was a degraded habitat — busy ship traffic, which confounds the sonar the dolphin uses to find food, and overfishing and pollution in the Yangtze waters of eastern China, the expedition said.

"The baiji is functionally extinct. We might have missed one or two animals but it won't survive in the wild," said August Pfluger, a Swiss economist turned naturalist who helped put together the expedition. "We are all incredibly sad."

The baiji dates back 20 million years. Chinese called it the "goddess of the Yangtze." For China, its disappearance symbolizes how unbridled economic growth is changing the country's environment irreparably, some environmentalists say.

-- "Rare White Dolphin Declared as Extinct," Dec 14, 06

I first wrote about Lipotes vexillifer two years ago.

One of the greatest sources of pollution along the Yangtze River is, of course, the Three Gorges Dam ("Yangtze River Pollution at Dangerous Levels," New Scientist, Jan 17, 02), but industrial pollution linked to manufacturing and agriculture is right up there ("Yangtze River 'Cancerous' with Pollution," China Daily, May 22, 06). This pollution is a byproduct of voracious demand for cheap Chinese goods.

I own things made in China. And today, I'm feeling pretty goddamn responsible for wiping out the flag bearers who were left behind.

If God had wanted you to drive an energy-efficient car, He would have made Priuses grow on trees

Activities that produce carbon dioxide—such as "breathing, building a fire to cook or keep warm, driving a car or tractor, or burning coal to produce electricity … [are] morally good and necessary activities that God intended for us," said Wayne Grudem, research professor of Bible and theology at Phoenix Seminary. "It seems very unlikely to me that God would have set up the earth to work in such a way that these good and necessary activities would actually destroy the earth."

-- "Cool on Climate Change," Christianity Today, Aug 26, 06

Can't ... type ... refutation ... brain ... collapsing ... into ... vaccuum ... total ... lack ... of ... logic ... created.

*

The main gist of the article is that the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance says fighting global warming will hurt the poor more than if we keep on with the God-given right to waste fossil fuels with impunity. They have issues with the Evangelical Climate Initiative's recent "Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action." The ISA claims many of the issues are scientific. However, all of their arguments are rooted in the premises outlined in this document, which include:

Many people mistakenly view humans as principally consumers and polluters rather than producers and stewards. [...] Humanity alone of all the created order is capable of developing other resources and can thus enrich creation, so it can properly be said that the human person is the most valuable resource on earth. Human life, therefore, must be cherished and allowed to flourish.[...] Some unfounded or undue (environmental) concerns include fears of destructive manmade global warming, overpopulation, and rampant species loss.

In other words, the people who buy into this creed see no moral imperative whatsoever to preserve any of God's species save man. "Stewardship" just a euphemism for "self-preservation."

Frankly, using the poor as a human shield is a foul move, especially since the poor really are the people most likely to be affected by global warming. Alleging that Jesus would have seen nothing wrong in driving a gas-guzzling vehicle and smugly asserting that there's nothing immoral about wiping out other species? Well, those are just bonuses.

Road trip! Road trip! Road trip!

This is the second time I've written this post -- the first was in all-caps, and that's no good for anyone. However, I am justified in being totally shouty and excited, because the Monterey Bay Aquarium has a healthy, young Great White Shark (Carcharodon carcharias) in their Outer Bay exhibit! Again!

He was apparently caught off the southern California coast and held in an offshore pen on Aug 17; yesterday marked his public debut on the tank. You all know I went to visit the first shark the aquarium put on exhibit, and that I'm all "Carcharodon carcharias! Locals represent!"and that I like to read shark books. So you can imagine how I am bouncing with glee in my chair over the prospect of seeing another shark in the aquarium.

Because for all that I love the Carcharodon carcharias, that sentiment is assisted by the knowledge that A) I will not be running into one while I am taking my morning swim and B) when I do see one, it will be in a very safe environment. So yippee for aquariums! Yippee for sharks in aquariums!

Now, who's up for a road trip in September?

Why I wish I had a time machine

In Vernor Vinge's Across Realtime, the idea of "bobbling" -- traveling hundreds or thousands of years in the future in a stasis field -- drives the action and provides the plot complications for some whodunit-style yarns. However, what stuck with me was a sequence at the very end of the book, where an antagonist is forced to live thousands of years on a deserted planet, and in his boredom, he attempts to direct the evolution of a species.

This seems like a perfect use of time-travel to me. Not the stranding part, but the rise-of-a-new-species part. How else could you observe how one species gives way to another? How else could you understand why some ancient species -- sharks, crocodiles -- persist while others dwindle into nothing?

After reading Carl Zimmer's latest weblog post on the possible evolutionary paths of baleen whales, "The Origin of the Ridiculous," I want more than ever to be able to bobble back and forth, to see and learn the answers to the questions surrounding order cetacea.

ETA: Zimmer's post was inspired by a paper in Nature; its layperson summary, "Ancient Whale 'Truly Weird'" (Aug 16, 06) is here.

The color of money, the color of Earth

Though Cuba is economically destitute, it has the richest biodiversity in the Caribbean. Resorts blanket many of its neighbors, but Cuba remains largely undeveloped, with large tracts of untouched rain forest and unspoiled reefs (map of Cuba).

The country has signed numerous international conservation treaties and set aside vast areas of land for government protection.

But others say Cuba's economic underdevelopment has played just as large a role.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union—its main financial benefactor—Cuba has had to rely mostly on its own limited resources. It has embraced organic farming and low-energy agriculture because it can't afford to do anything else.

And once Castro is gone, the experts say, a boom in tourism and foreign investment could destroy Cuba's pristine landscapes.

-- "Castro the Conservationist? By Default or Design, Cuba Largely Pristine," National Geographic, Aug 4, 06

This is a great story that illustrates how dramatically a country's environment is tied to its industries. Reading about the factors that can kill off wetlands, forests and reefs -- all of which are the unintended consequences of other, unrelated industries (see also: "Dead ZoneThreatens Shrimp Fishery," Jul 13, 06 and "Dead Zone: Problem Grows From Farmer's Fields," Jul 14, 06, both Marketplace) really brings home the point that few of the things anyone on this planet does happen in a vacuum.

An argument against multitasking?

"[E]ven if you can learn while distracted, it changes how you learn to make it less efficient and useful," said Russell A. Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

[...]

As Poldrack explains it, the brain learns in two different ways. One, called declarative learning, involves the medial temporal lobe and deals with learning active facts that can be recalled and used with great flexibility. The second, involving the striatum, is called habit learning.

[...]

The problem, Poldrack said, is that the two types of learning seem to be competing with each other, and when someone is distracted, habit learning seems to take over from declarative learning.

"We have to multitask in today's world, but you have to be aware of this," he said. "When a kid is trying to learn new concepts, new information, distraction is going to be bad, it's going to impair their ability to learn."

-- "Distractions Impede Learning," Boston Globe, Jul 25, 06

I am very curious as to what the long-term effects of texting will be on the way today's children and teens are learning. I wonder if it will depend on how it's used -- if you're texting your friends with stuff you've just learned, that's boosting declarative memory, isn't it?

ETA: So here's an interesting, and possibly related, thing: USC professor Bart Kosko says ambient noise can actually boost mental clarity:

The more you can concentrate with background noise, the more it strengthens the brain. Isaac Asimov used to set his typewriter up in stores and other loud places to work. His claim was that you get really good at writing when you’re in a crowd. You want to be energized by that background noise, rather than distracted.

-- "Now Hear This!" Wired, Aug 06

I can't speak for anyone else, but I have noticed that when I've got my headphones on and am listening to either podcasts or music, I can write without distraction for a few hours at a stretch. Otherwise, I'm working in much shorter chunks.

Think harder, then smarter

I don't know how many of you grew up with parents admonishing, "Work smarter, not harder!" but that was pretty much a theme around the Schmeiser house. It's almost like that whole mindfulness principle where you're living in the moment -- except with a little Type-A twist. Consequently, working smarter is of perpetual interest. Please do not confuse this with having a productivity hang-up; I don't necessarily want to do more, I just want to do whatever it is I do without sinking into further idiocy.

So it's good for me that two different magazines this month* take on that working-smarter interest. Scientific American's Aug 06 story "The Expert Mind" explains why some people just keep getting better all the time:

[K. Anders ] Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. [...] Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or in driving a car. But having reached an acceptable performance--for instance, keeping up with one's golf buddies or passing a driver's exam--most people relax. Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement. In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind's box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields.

And in Wired's Aug 06 issue, there's a big, fat section on how to do many things better. In the magazine, the thing reads like a series of blog posts cut-and-pasted into a layout, and if I were affiliated with either Lifehacker or 43 Folders, I'd be quirking an eyebrow at all this. But here's a little bit I found interesting in the page titled "How To: Work Smarter" called "Amp Up Your Brain:"

Think out loud.
Ever notice how kids narrate what they’re doing? (“Just one more Lego and my fortress is complete!”) In the book Mind Hacks, Tom Stafford and Matt Webb call this “self-instruction.” According to a University of Maryland researcher, language helps us process multiple strands of information more efficiently. So go ahead, talk to yourself – and ignore the funny looks you get. Your results will speak for themselves.

I know personally, the ol' "See One, Do One, Teach One" method has always helped me learn quickly -- in part because having to articulate what I know well enough to pass it on to others forces me to figure out what I really know. So I wonder if there's a way to measure the impact and effectiveness of language as an element of elite-level effortful study?