Weather

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Telsa observes what must be a defining difference between her European mind and my oh-so-New World way of thinking – the question of how one dresses for the weather:

In America once, Alan grabbed his coat and got a strange look. “It’s sunny. It’s not going to rain.” “Just in case..” “No, you don’t understand. It won’t change today.” It’s not like that here. In cold weather you still make sure you have something you can take off in case it brightens up. And in bright weather you still carry along a jumper or a coat or a hat or something. Just in case.

One wonders what other false confidence, what ill-advised certainty, we might project unto the world. Arrogance in the face of weather may be ill-advised, humility a good thing.

The Why’s of Tech Writing

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Joel Spolsky wonders:

Why does every technical manual and book include a section at the beginning on “conventions used in this document,” full of ridiculous and useless tips like, “Tips are indicated by a lightbulb icon in the margin”? Is it because you’re paid by the word?

We aren’t (paid by the word) and we don’t (begin our docs that way). Go free software!

Cereal

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April 19, just four short days away, is the festival of Cerealia, a celebration in reverence to Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture.

I plan to eat cereal for breakfast that day in celebration. Lissa notes that I eat cereal every day. This is true, and a good thing, for I’m somewhat absent-minded and am likely to forget the holiday.

This comes to mind because it’s the season of spring festivals, rooted in a time when our religious celebrations served as practical markers of stuff we needed to do, like planting. Today is the Fordicia. We’re apparently supposed to sacrifice two dozen pregnant cows in the temples in honor of Tellus, Roman god of the Earth. This seems impractical, so I ate cereal this morning as well.

Cuckoo

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It is said that on this day (ah, sweet harbingers of spring!) the cuckoo makes its appearance. But careful what one wishes for, eh? For “cuckoo”, the bird that lays its eggs in the nest of another, is the root of “cuckold”:

Cuckoo, cuckoo – O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear.

(Thanks to the Book of Days.)

Jefferson

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Thomas Jefferson, born on this day 260 years ago, was one of America’s first meteorologists, identifying the phenomenon of temperature inversion. He also became president.

The Two Cultures

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I’ve added a new blog to my blogroll, that of David Harris, a physicist who works with the American Physical Society. He’s got a lot of good science, mixed with a range of literary discussion that fills the blog with useful surprises.

One imagines a bridge here between The Two Cultures, with literary types unexpectedly exposed to nuclear fusion and the like while the scientists dabble in haikus or David’s discussions of Herman Hesse.

I’ve been reading him for a while, but his work is especially on my mind after a fascinating talk yesterday by Tim Moy that touched on C.P. Snow’s famous lectures/book on “The Two Cultures”. Snow was a poet and physicist who spoke famously in 1959 about the divide between humanities and science, neither understanding the other’s world. If anything, the divide has widened in the years since, with the postmodern critique of science creating a chasm that seems at times unbridgeable.

The context of Moy’s talk was a global climate change workshop (the one I’ve been yarmmering about of late – fascinating stuff in other ways too numerous to blog completely). Moy broadened the two cultures to three in a perceptively useful way – science, humanities, and “the public”. He pointed out an issue I’ve thought about a lot – the relative distrust on the intellectual left of the idea of a consensus of science – this is at the heart of the postmodern critique. Here the left, if I may overgeneralize, is a hypocrite. On the issue of global warming, it demands we accept and act on the scientific consensus. But on issues that do not suit it – the risks of low-dose radiation, or genetically modified foods, to cite my two favorite examples – the left rejects the scientific consensus and demands we listen to the scientific outliers with whom it agrees. Tricky business, this intersection between science and politics. (I would point out that the intellectual right labors under the same hypocrisy, mocking the left and hewing to consensus on GMO’s and radiation while picking its contrarian darlings on global warming.)

Snails and Slugs

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Perhaps in spring one’s thoughts should turn to the flowers of the field, as Longfellow:

I open wide the portals of the Spring
  To welcome the procession of the flowers
With their gay banners, and the birds that sing.

Which is why the 18th-century British naturalist Gilbert White is all the more remarkable in this instance, musing as he did on snail and slug:

The shell-less snails, called slugs, are in motion all the winter in mild weather, and commit great depredations on garden-plants, and much injure the green wheat….; while the shelled snail … does not come forth ’til April the tenth…. Why the naked slug should be so much more able to endure cold than it’s housed congener, I cannot pretend to say.

(Inspiration and quotes from the Oxford Book of Days)

Thinking About Climate

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Some thoughts on issues associated with communicating with the public about climate change, triggered by reading I’ve been doing to prepare for ?Heating Up: Coming to Terms with Climate Change in the Southwest” this weekend at the University of New Mexico:

I started with the naive premise that the U.S. public’s ignorance of science was a central problem, realized my premise was probably wrong in the case of global climate change, but ultimately concluded that my original premise, accompanied with some carefully subtlety, was probably more right than I realize.

The PowerPointIsh Bullets:

  1. The general public in the United States does not doubt the reality of global warming.
  2. The general public in the United States generally trusts the scientific consensus that the warming is significantly human-caused.
  3. The general public in the United States doesn’t distinguish between settled “textbook” science and the cutting edge of research, where stuff is hard and uncertain.
  4. Global climate change research is very hard and very, very uncertain.

Continue reading ‘Thinking About Climate’ »

Blood, Linux and the Commons

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Giving blood sucks. They poke me, sometimes painfully, and I feel crappy afterwards. There is no amount of money they could pay me to make it worth my while. But that’s the point.

I went in today to donate, and for not the first time they screwed up getting the needle in my arm. It hurt, of course, but moreso because they were using a new system that extracts more blood, centrifuges out the red blood cells and returns the liquid along with some saline for good measure. This gives them more usable blood and, in theory, leaves the donor less dehydrated, which is one of the main pains of blood donation. The problem was when the gizmo started pumping liquid back into my arm, I felt a burning pain, and I could see a lump growing under the needle. They had missed my vein.

So why do I donate? My friend Scott Smallwood turned me on to a writer called David Bollier, who writes about the gift economy and the commons. It’s stuff that applies real obviously to free software, but also to blood donation:

One of the most vivid case studies comparing the performance of market and gift economies is Richard Titmuss?s examination of British and American blood banks in the 1960s. Drawing upon extensive empirical data, Titmuss concluded that commercial blood systems generally produce blood supplies of less safety, purity, and potency than volunteer systems; are more hazardous to the health of donors; and over the long run produce greater shortages of blood.

What can possibly account for these counter- intuitive deviations from market theory, which holds that the price system produces the most efficient outcomes and highest quality product? It turns out that the introduction of money into the blood transaction encourages doctors to skirt prescribed safety rules and tends to attract more drug addicts, alcoholics, prisoners, and derelicts than altruistic appeals do.

According to Titmuss, Britain?s National Blood Transfusion Service ?has allowed and encouraged sentiments of altruism, reciprocity, and societal duty to express themselves; to be made explicit and identifiable in measurable patterns of behavior by all social groups and classes.? In this context, the gift economy regime is not simply ?nice.? It is actually more efficient, cheaper, and safer.

So I donate blood because it’s the right thing to do, because Lissa and my Dad did but can no longer. And because they don’t pay me.