photo: markk
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
Thoughts on Trump
To save myself from answering this question repeatedly, these are the thoughts I have had about Trump since he became a presidential candidate, which were partly expressed in a Politico article over a month ago.
First of all, I think his support is firm and shows no sign of diminishing. He has already weathered storms such as his criticism of John McCain that would have doomed any other candidate. Anyone who thinks he is the current version of Cain, Bachmann, Santorum or other nutcase that briefly led the GOP field in 2012 is dead wrong.
Keep in mind also that in primary elections, one doesn’t need majority support to win in a field with multiple candidates. And intensity of support is often more important than the percentage. Support for the designated favorite of party insiders is often exaggerated in polls and I think Trump’s supporters are unusually motivated.
Second, Trump’s positions on the issues are largely irrelevant to his success. None of his supporters care whether a wall across Mexico is remotely feasible or that he regularly flip-flops on the issues. What he is selling is attitude and a certain fascistic form of leadership. He will get things done, his supporters believe. And it’s less important what he will do than that he will do something.
Ironically, Republicans brought this on themselves in two ways. To begin with, they grossly oversold what they could do just with control of Congress. The Republican base really seems to have simply forgotten about the presidential veto or the Senate filibuster. They seem to have thought all they had to do was pass bills with a simple majority and they would magically become law. How else to explain voting over and over and over again to repeal Obamacare. It makes no sense unless my assumption is correct.
Additionally, Republicans are suffering from the gridlock that they themselves caused. We all know that nature abhors a vacuum, but I think it abhors gridlock as well. That has always been the appeal of fascism and it would be very foolish to believe that Americans are immune from its attractive qualities of getting things done that need to get done. And let us not forget that Trump is talking about genuine problems even if his solutions are simplistic or even wrongheaded.
My third point in Trump’s favor is his willingness to fund his own campaign and ability to run such a campaign on the cheap. By the latter, I mean that he started his campaign with close to 100% name ID and he has the amazing ability to get massive free media exposure any time he wants it. The mainstream media seem powerless to ignore the newsworthiness of anything he says about anything at any time in any place. In lieu of a traditional campaign staff, all Trump needs are the PR people he has long employed, a scheduler and a pilot for his plane.
by Bruce Bartlett, The Big Picture | Read more:
Image: via:
First of all, I think his support is firm and shows no sign of diminishing. He has already weathered storms such as his criticism of John McCain that would have doomed any other candidate. Anyone who thinks he is the current version of Cain, Bachmann, Santorum or other nutcase that briefly led the GOP field in 2012 is dead wrong.
Keep in mind also that in primary elections, one doesn’t need majority support to win in a field with multiple candidates. And intensity of support is often more important than the percentage. Support for the designated favorite of party insiders is often exaggerated in polls and I think Trump’s supporters are unusually motivated.Second, Trump’s positions on the issues are largely irrelevant to his success. None of his supporters care whether a wall across Mexico is remotely feasible or that he regularly flip-flops on the issues. What he is selling is attitude and a certain fascistic form of leadership. He will get things done, his supporters believe. And it’s less important what he will do than that he will do something.
Ironically, Republicans brought this on themselves in two ways. To begin with, they grossly oversold what they could do just with control of Congress. The Republican base really seems to have simply forgotten about the presidential veto or the Senate filibuster. They seem to have thought all they had to do was pass bills with a simple majority and they would magically become law. How else to explain voting over and over and over again to repeal Obamacare. It makes no sense unless my assumption is correct.
Additionally, Republicans are suffering from the gridlock that they themselves caused. We all know that nature abhors a vacuum, but I think it abhors gridlock as well. That has always been the appeal of fascism and it would be very foolish to believe that Americans are immune from its attractive qualities of getting things done that need to get done. And let us not forget that Trump is talking about genuine problems even if his solutions are simplistic or even wrongheaded.
My third point in Trump’s favor is his willingness to fund his own campaign and ability to run such a campaign on the cheap. By the latter, I mean that he started his campaign with close to 100% name ID and he has the amazing ability to get massive free media exposure any time he wants it. The mainstream media seem powerless to ignore the newsworthiness of anything he says about anything at any time in any place. In lieu of a traditional campaign staff, all Trump needs are the PR people he has long employed, a scheduler and a pilot for his plane.
by Bruce Bartlett, The Big Picture | Read more:
Image: via:
Streets With No Game
Behavioural effects of city street design have been reported before. In 2006, the Danish urbanist Jan Gehl observed that people walk more quickly in front of blank façades; compared with an open, active façade, people are less likely to pause or even turn their heads in such locations. They simply bear down and try to get through the unpleasant monotony of the street until they emerge on the other side, hopefully to find something more interesting.
For planners concerned with making city streets more amenable and pedestrian-friendly, findings such as these have enormous implications: by simply changing the appearance and physical structure of a building’s bottom three metres, they can exert a dramatic impact on the manner in which a city is used. Not only are people more likely to walk around in cityscapes with open and lively façades, but the kinds of things that they do in such places actually change. They pause, look around and absorb their surroundings while in a pleasant state of positive affect and with a lively, attentive nervous system. Because of these kinds of influences, they actually want to be there. And because of such effects, many cities have carefully designed building codes for new construction that dictate some of the contributing factors to happy and lively façades: in cities such as Stockholm, Melbourne and Amsterdam, building codes specify that new construction cannot simply be parachuted into place. There is a hard lower limit on the number of doorways per unit of sidewalk length, and there are specifications for transparency between the building and street in the form of clear windows with two-way views.
In Gehl’s terms, a good city street should be designed so that the average walker, moving at a rate of about 5km per hour, sees an interesting new site about once every five seconds. This does not happen in front of Whole Foods in East Houston Street, nor outside any of the other large, monolithic structures such as banks, courthouses and business towers in cities throughout the world.
If city streets are designed with endless closed façades, such as those seen in supermarkets and bank headquarters, people might feel a little less happy and they might walk faster and pause less. But what is really at stake here? The real risks of bad design might lie less in unhappy streets filled with unmotivated pedestrians, and more in the amassing of a population of urban citizens with epidemic levels of boredom.
Boredom research has, on the whole, been conducted by individuals who were especially repulsed by the feeling. William James, one of the founders of modern psychology, wrote in 1890 that ‘stimulation is the indispensable requisite for pleasure in an experience’. In more recent times, serious discussion and measurement of states of boredom and stimulation began with the work of the late University of Toronto psychologist Daniel Berlyne, who argued that much of our behaviour is motivated by curiosity alone: the need to slake our incessant thirst for the new.
To make his case for information-seeking as a prime motivator of human behaviour, Berlyne turned to a branch of applied mathematics known as information theory. This powerful set of ideas, born in the laboratories of the Bell Telephone Company in the 1940s, was designed to help understand the transmission of signals through wires. The unit of information was described as the bit, which could range in value from zero, containing no information, to one, being filled with information. One of the keys to the theory is that elements that don’t occur very often provide more information than those that occur commonly. Imagine you retrieve a garbled message from your voicemail, and can make out only certain words. If you heard the message: ‘. . . the . . . to . . . and . . . you . . .,’ you would learn very little; the bit value of the utterance would be close to zero. But if you heard: ‘I’m . . . way . . . dinner . . . call . . . later,’ you could do a good job of disentangling at least a part of the meaning. In terms of information theory, both utterances contain the same number of words. The difference is that the first contains only words that appear with high frequency in English, and carry few bits of information, while the second message contains words with lower frequencies (hence lower probabilities of occurrence), and more information.
Though it might seem like a stretch, there is in fact a connection between the technicalities of phone transmission and an understanding of urban psychology. According to Berlyne, it wasn’t just signals sent along wires that could be characterised in terms of their information content, but any kind of object that we can perceive, including visual displays such as pictures, three-dimensional objects, even streetscapes.
Now the reason for the dismal recordings of happiness and arousal in participants standing in front of blank façades should be clearer. At a psychological level, these constructions fail us because we are biologically disposed to favour locations defined by complexity, interest, and the passing of messages of one kind or another.
The opposite of this situation translates, essentially, to boredom. Though we might not all agree on a precise definition of boredom, some of the signs are well-known: an inflated sense of the inexorably slow passage of time; a kind of restlessness that can manifest as both an unpleasant and aversive inner mental state but also with overt bodily symptoms: fidgeting; postural adjustment; restless gaze; perhaps yawning.
Some researchers have suggested that boredom is characterised (perhaps even defined by) a state of low arousal. In some studies, it seems that when people are asked to sit quietly without doing anything in particular – presumably a trigger for boredom – physiological arousal appears to decrease. But Berlyne, and recently others, have suggested that boredom can sometimes be accompanied by high states of arousal and perhaps even stress. (...)
Boredom can also lead to risky behaviour. Surveys among people with addictions, including substance and gambling addictions, suggest that their levels of boredom are generally higher, and that episodes of boredom are one of the most common predictors of relapse or risky behaviour.
Merrifield and Danckert suggest that exposure to even a brief, boring experience is sufficient to change the brain and body’s chemistry in such a way as to generate stress. It might seem extreme to say that a brief encounter with a boring building could be seriously hazardous to one’s health, but what about the cumulative effects of immersion, day after day, in the same oppressively dull surroundings?
by Colin Ellard , Aeon | Read more:
Image: Getty
For planners concerned with making city streets more amenable and pedestrian-friendly, findings such as these have enormous implications: by simply changing the appearance and physical structure of a building’s bottom three metres, they can exert a dramatic impact on the manner in which a city is used. Not only are people more likely to walk around in cityscapes with open and lively façades, but the kinds of things that they do in such places actually change. They pause, look around and absorb their surroundings while in a pleasant state of positive affect and with a lively, attentive nervous system. Because of these kinds of influences, they actually want to be there. And because of such effects, many cities have carefully designed building codes for new construction that dictate some of the contributing factors to happy and lively façades: in cities such as Stockholm, Melbourne and Amsterdam, building codes specify that new construction cannot simply be parachuted into place. There is a hard lower limit on the number of doorways per unit of sidewalk length, and there are specifications for transparency between the building and street in the form of clear windows with two-way views.In Gehl’s terms, a good city street should be designed so that the average walker, moving at a rate of about 5km per hour, sees an interesting new site about once every five seconds. This does not happen in front of Whole Foods in East Houston Street, nor outside any of the other large, monolithic structures such as banks, courthouses and business towers in cities throughout the world.
If city streets are designed with endless closed façades, such as those seen in supermarkets and bank headquarters, people might feel a little less happy and they might walk faster and pause less. But what is really at stake here? The real risks of bad design might lie less in unhappy streets filled with unmotivated pedestrians, and more in the amassing of a population of urban citizens with epidemic levels of boredom.
Boredom research has, on the whole, been conducted by individuals who were especially repulsed by the feeling. William James, one of the founders of modern psychology, wrote in 1890 that ‘stimulation is the indispensable requisite for pleasure in an experience’. In more recent times, serious discussion and measurement of states of boredom and stimulation began with the work of the late University of Toronto psychologist Daniel Berlyne, who argued that much of our behaviour is motivated by curiosity alone: the need to slake our incessant thirst for the new.
To make his case for information-seeking as a prime motivator of human behaviour, Berlyne turned to a branch of applied mathematics known as information theory. This powerful set of ideas, born in the laboratories of the Bell Telephone Company in the 1940s, was designed to help understand the transmission of signals through wires. The unit of information was described as the bit, which could range in value from zero, containing no information, to one, being filled with information. One of the keys to the theory is that elements that don’t occur very often provide more information than those that occur commonly. Imagine you retrieve a garbled message from your voicemail, and can make out only certain words. If you heard the message: ‘. . . the . . . to . . . and . . . you . . .,’ you would learn very little; the bit value of the utterance would be close to zero. But if you heard: ‘I’m . . . way . . . dinner . . . call . . . later,’ you could do a good job of disentangling at least a part of the meaning. In terms of information theory, both utterances contain the same number of words. The difference is that the first contains only words that appear with high frequency in English, and carry few bits of information, while the second message contains words with lower frequencies (hence lower probabilities of occurrence), and more information.
Though it might seem like a stretch, there is in fact a connection between the technicalities of phone transmission and an understanding of urban psychology. According to Berlyne, it wasn’t just signals sent along wires that could be characterised in terms of their information content, but any kind of object that we can perceive, including visual displays such as pictures, three-dimensional objects, even streetscapes.
Now the reason for the dismal recordings of happiness and arousal in participants standing in front of blank façades should be clearer. At a psychological level, these constructions fail us because we are biologically disposed to favour locations defined by complexity, interest, and the passing of messages of one kind or another.
The opposite of this situation translates, essentially, to boredom. Though we might not all agree on a precise definition of boredom, some of the signs are well-known: an inflated sense of the inexorably slow passage of time; a kind of restlessness that can manifest as both an unpleasant and aversive inner mental state but also with overt bodily symptoms: fidgeting; postural adjustment; restless gaze; perhaps yawning.
Some researchers have suggested that boredom is characterised (perhaps even defined by) a state of low arousal. In some studies, it seems that when people are asked to sit quietly without doing anything in particular – presumably a trigger for boredom – physiological arousal appears to decrease. But Berlyne, and recently others, have suggested that boredom can sometimes be accompanied by high states of arousal and perhaps even stress. (...)
Boredom can also lead to risky behaviour. Surveys among people with addictions, including substance and gambling addictions, suggest that their levels of boredom are generally higher, and that episodes of boredom are one of the most common predictors of relapse or risky behaviour.
Merrifield and Danckert suggest that exposure to even a brief, boring experience is sufficient to change the brain and body’s chemistry in such a way as to generate stress. It might seem extreme to say that a brief encounter with a boring building could be seriously hazardous to one’s health, but what about the cumulative effects of immersion, day after day, in the same oppressively dull surroundings?
by Colin Ellard , Aeon | Read more:
Image: Getty
Willie and the Weed Factory
Marijuana’s state-by-state march toward full legalization would never have happened without Willie Nelson. He’s 82 now, and he’s spent nearly half his life as America’s most famous stoner. But this fall he’ll be making the leap from aficionado to entrepreneur. What Paul Newman did for tomato sauce, what Francis Coppola did for Cabernet, Willie Nelson is hoping to do for weed
“I’ve bought a lot of pot in my life,” Willie Nelson tells me, “and now I’m selling it back.”
Willie Nelson has this kind of answer—stock, pithy—for all kinds of questions, and he’s been using them for decades. Bring up his brief abortive stint at college studying business administration? Invariably he’ll soon say, “I majored in dominoes.” Mention the massive sum he owed the IRS in the early ’90s—somewhere between $17 million and $32 million—and you’ll get the one about how it isn’t so much “if you say it real fast.”
As time passes, the world offers up new questions, and so sometimes new answers are required. Once he reached the age when people began asking about retirement, Nelson would reply that he doesn’t do anything but play music and golf: “I wouldn’t know what to quit.” And now that one of America’s stoner icons is going into the pot business and planning to launch his own proprietary brand called Willie’s Reserve, this bought-a-lot-of-pot-in-my-life line is already on instant replay and you can confidently expect to hear Nelson use it for the next few years, anytime the subject is raised in his vicinity. In fact when we first meet, on the tour bus where he likes to do interviews and live much of his life, less than ninety seconds pass before he
deploys it.
There’s a lot of shade and space behind answers like these. They leave people feeling like they’ve had a funny and intimate encounter with someone who, as Willie Nelson does, knows how to deliver them—with an amiable mischievous half-smile and a wizened wink in his eye, as though the words have just popped into his head. Answers that charm and entertain but also leave his real thoughts unbothered, his real life unruffled.
Willie Nelson has plenty of real thoughts, and he has lived a life as real and unreal as they come for eighty-two years and counting. Those stories are a little harder to shake loose, but he will share some of them, too. And when it comes to Willie Nelson, it’s worth holding out for the good stuff.
Maybe all of us are engaged in a lifelong fight to find our better natures. But some of us, perhaps the luckiest ones, find a reliable shortcut. For Willie Nelson, that shortcut has turned out to be pot. It works for him, and he needed it. His public image is a kind of Zen cowboy, a naturally chilled-out elder—Robin Williams used to have a bit in his act about how even Buddha was jealous of how mellow Willie Nelson was—but of course the truth is more complicated. “I can be a real asshole when I’m straight,” he tells me. “As Annie can probably adhere to.”
Annie is Nelson’s fourth wife—“my current wife,” as he has sometimes described her, though they have now been married for twenty-four years. She sits out of my sight, behind me, but periodically she contributes to the conversation. “He’s not an asshole sober,” she clarifies, coming to her husband’s defense. Briefly, at least. “Only when he’s drinking. Then he’s an asshole.” (...)
You’ve said that you’re naturally a little too revved up, and that pot brings you back closer to normal.
He nods. “I have compared myself to the motorboat where the fuel for the motorboat is a little too hot for the motor, where you have to add a little oil in it. I figure that’s my oil, you know. It’s what I have to do to, you know, to make it easier.”
And what happens to the motorboat without the oil?
“Burns out,” says Annie.
“Yeah. It wears out. And he does dumb and dumber things.”
“The motorboat stays a redhead,” says Annie.
Do you ever drink at all now?
“Very rarely. If you got a drink, I’ll take a drink. But no, I don’t like me drinking.”
Why do you think it had that effect on you?
“I don’t know, I’ve got a lot of Indian blood in me, and something true is that Indians can’t do alcohol. So I start out knowing that. My drummer, Paul, we’ve been together for a long time, and back in my drinking days whenever I’d get too drunk and out of order, he’d roll up a joint and hand it and I’d take a couple hits and pass out. So he knew how to handle me.”
He’s said that you always wanted to drive cars when you were drunk.
Nelson’s eyes light up. “Yeah. And see how fast they would go.”
That’s really not a good idea.
“Thank you.” He laughs. “No, you’re right.” (...)
Why do you think you had the impulse to do that?
“I don’t know. I was always a kind of go-fast guy, you know.”
And what are you now?
“I still am a go-fast guy, but I know that and I try to guard against my instincts a little better.” (...)
You’ve got an interesting sense of fun.
“Yeah. You see why I smoke a lot. I’ve got to calm that out.”
by Chris Heath, GQ | Read more:
Image: Getty
Monday, August 31, 2015
Sunday, August 30, 2015
The Life and Death of the American Lawn
The hashtag #droughtshaming—which primarily exists, as its name suggests, to publicly decry people who have failed to do their part to conserve water during California’s latest drought—has claimed many victims. Anonymous lawn-waterers. Anonymous sidewalk-washers. The city of Beverly Hills. The tag’s most high-profile shamee thus far, however, has been the actor Tom Selleck. Who was sued earlier this summer by Ventura County’s Calleguas Municipal Water District for the alleged theft of hydrant water, supposedly used to nourish his 60-acre ranch. Which includes, this being California, an avocado farm, and also an expansive lawn.
The case was settled out of court on terms that remain undisclosed, and everyone has since moved on with their lives. What’s remarkable about the whole thing, though—well, besides the fact that Magnum P.I. has apparently become, in his semi-retirement, a gentleman farmer—is how much of a shift all the Selleck-shaming represents, as a civic impulse. For much of American history, the healthy lawn—green, lush, neatly shorn—has been a symbol not just of prosperity, individual and communal, but of something deeper: shared ideals, collective responsibility, the assorted conveniences of conformity. Lawns, originally designed to connect homes even as they enforced the distance between them, are shared domestic spaces. They are also socially regulated spaces. “When smiling lawns and tasteful cottages begin to embellish a country,” Andrew Jackson Downing, one of the nation’s first landscaper-philosophers, put it, “we know that order and culture are established.”
That idea remains, and it means that, even today, the failure to maintain a “smiling lawn” can have decidedly unhappy consequences. Section 119-3 of the county code of Fairfax County, Virginia—a section representative of similar ones on the books in jurisdictions across the country—stipulates that “it is unlawful for any owner of any occupied residential lot or parcel which is less than one-half acre (21,780 square feet) to permit the growth of any grass or lawn area to reach more than twelve (12) inches in height/length.” And while Fairfax County sensibly advises that matters of grass length are best adjudicated among neighbors, it adds, rather sternly, that if the property in question “is vacant or the resident doesn’t seem to care, you can report the property to the county.”
That kind of reporting can result in much more than fines. In 2008, Joe Prudente—a retiree in Florida whose lawn, despite several re-soddings and waterings and weedings, contained some unsightly brown patches—was jailed for “failing to properly maintain his lawn to community standards.” Earlier this year, Rick Yoes, a resident of Grand Prairie, Texas, also spent time behind bars—for the crime, in this case, of the ownership of an overgrown yard. Gerry Suttle, a woman in her mid-70s, recently had a warrant issued for her arrest—she had failed to mow the grass on a lot she owned across the street from her house—until four boys living in her Texas neighborhood heard of her plight in a news report, came over, and mowed the thing themselves.(...)
Which is all to say that lawns, long before Tom Selleck came along, have doubled as sweeping, sodded outgrowths of the Protestant ethic. The tapis vert, or “green carpet”—a concept Americans borrowed not just from French gardens and English estates, but also from the fantastical Italian paintings that imagined modern lawns into existence—became, as installed in the not-yet-united states, a signal that the American colonies aspired to match Europe in, among other things, elitism. (Lawns, in Europe, were an early form of conspicuous consumption, signs that their owners could afford to dedicate grounds to aesthetic, rather than agricultural, purposes—and signs, too, that their owners, in the days before lawnmowers lessened the burden of grass-shearing, could afford to pay scythe-wielding servants to do that labor.) Thomas Jefferson, being Thomas Jefferson, surrounded Monticello not just with neatly rowed crops, but with expanses of sheared grass that served no purpose but to send a message—about Jefferson himself, and about the ambitions of a newly formed nation.
As that country developed, its landscape architects would sharpen lawns’ symbolism: of collectivity, of interlocking destinies, of democracy itself. “It is unchristian,” the landscaper Frank J. Scott wrote in The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds, “to hedge from the sight of others the beauties of nature which it has been our good fortune to create or secure.” He added, magnanimously, that “the beauty obtained by throwing front grounds open together, is of that excellent quality which enriches all who take part in the exchange, and makes no man poorer.” Lawns became aesthetic extensions of Manifest Destiny, symbols of American entitlement and triumph, of the soft and verdant rewards that result when man’s ongoing battles against nature are finally won. A well-maintained lawn—luxurious in its lushness, implying leisure even as its upkeep had a stubborn way of preventing it—came, too, to represent a triumph of another kind: the order of suburbia over the squalor of the city. A neat expanse of green, blades clipped to uniform length and flowing from home to home, became, as Roman Mars notes, the “anti-broken window.”
The case was settled out of court on terms that remain undisclosed, and everyone has since moved on with their lives. What’s remarkable about the whole thing, though—well, besides the fact that Magnum P.I. has apparently become, in his semi-retirement, a gentleman farmer—is how much of a shift all the Selleck-shaming represents, as a civic impulse. For much of American history, the healthy lawn—green, lush, neatly shorn—has been a symbol not just of prosperity, individual and communal, but of something deeper: shared ideals, collective responsibility, the assorted conveniences of conformity. Lawns, originally designed to connect homes even as they enforced the distance between them, are shared domestic spaces. They are also socially regulated spaces. “When smiling lawns and tasteful cottages begin to embellish a country,” Andrew Jackson Downing, one of the nation’s first landscaper-philosophers, put it, “we know that order and culture are established.”That idea remains, and it means that, even today, the failure to maintain a “smiling lawn” can have decidedly unhappy consequences. Section 119-3 of the county code of Fairfax County, Virginia—a section representative of similar ones on the books in jurisdictions across the country—stipulates that “it is unlawful for any owner of any occupied residential lot or parcel which is less than one-half acre (21,780 square feet) to permit the growth of any grass or lawn area to reach more than twelve (12) inches in height/length.” And while Fairfax County sensibly advises that matters of grass length are best adjudicated among neighbors, it adds, rather sternly, that if the property in question “is vacant or the resident doesn’t seem to care, you can report the property to the county.”
That kind of reporting can result in much more than fines. In 2008, Joe Prudente—a retiree in Florida whose lawn, despite several re-soddings and waterings and weedings, contained some unsightly brown patches—was jailed for “failing to properly maintain his lawn to community standards.” Earlier this year, Rick Yoes, a resident of Grand Prairie, Texas, also spent time behind bars—for the crime, in this case, of the ownership of an overgrown yard. Gerry Suttle, a woman in her mid-70s, recently had a warrant issued for her arrest—she had failed to mow the grass on a lot she owned across the street from her house—until four boys living in her Texas neighborhood heard of her plight in a news report, came over, and mowed the thing themselves.(...)
Which is all to say that lawns, long before Tom Selleck came along, have doubled as sweeping, sodded outgrowths of the Protestant ethic. The tapis vert, or “green carpet”—a concept Americans borrowed not just from French gardens and English estates, but also from the fantastical Italian paintings that imagined modern lawns into existence—became, as installed in the not-yet-united states, a signal that the American colonies aspired to match Europe in, among other things, elitism. (Lawns, in Europe, were an early form of conspicuous consumption, signs that their owners could afford to dedicate grounds to aesthetic, rather than agricultural, purposes—and signs, too, that their owners, in the days before lawnmowers lessened the burden of grass-shearing, could afford to pay scythe-wielding servants to do that labor.) Thomas Jefferson, being Thomas Jefferson, surrounded Monticello not just with neatly rowed crops, but with expanses of sheared grass that served no purpose but to send a message—about Jefferson himself, and about the ambitions of a newly formed nation.
As that country developed, its landscape architects would sharpen lawns’ symbolism: of collectivity, of interlocking destinies, of democracy itself. “It is unchristian,” the landscaper Frank J. Scott wrote in The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds, “to hedge from the sight of others the beauties of nature which it has been our good fortune to create or secure.” He added, magnanimously, that “the beauty obtained by throwing front grounds open together, is of that excellent quality which enriches all who take part in the exchange, and makes no man poorer.” Lawns became aesthetic extensions of Manifest Destiny, symbols of American entitlement and triumph, of the soft and verdant rewards that result when man’s ongoing battles against nature are finally won. A well-maintained lawn—luxurious in its lushness, implying leisure even as its upkeep had a stubborn way of preventing it—came, too, to represent a triumph of another kind: the order of suburbia over the squalor of the city. A neat expanse of green, blades clipped to uniform length and flowing from home to home, became, as Roman Mars notes, the “anti-broken window.”
by Megan Garber, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Robert Couse-Baker / Flickr
Denali. Finally.
[ed. About time. Actually, way past time.]
It’s official: Denali is now the mountain formerly known as Mount McKinley.
With the approval of President Barack Obama, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell has signed a “secretarial order” to officially change the name, the White House and Interior Department announced Sunday. The announcement comes roughly 24 hours before Obama touches down in Anchorage for a whirlwind tour of Alaska.
Talk of the name change has swirled in Alaska this year since the National Park Service officially registered no objection in a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C.
The tallest mountain in North America has long been known to Alaskans as Denali, its Koyukon Athabascan name, but its official name was not changed with the creation of Denali National Park and Preserve in 1980, 6 million acres carved out for federal protection under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. The state changed the name of the park’s tallest mountain to Denali at that time, but the federal government did not.
Jewell’s authority stems from a 1947 federal law that allows her to make changes to geographic names through the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, according to the department.
“I think for people like myself that have known the mountain as Denali for years and certainly for Alaskans, it's something that's been a long time coming,” Jewell told Alaska Dispatch News Sunday.
Every year, the same story plays out in Washington, D.C.: Alaska legislators sometimes file bills to change the name from Mount McKinley to Denali, and every year, someone in the Ohio congressional delegation -- the home state of the 25th President William McKinley -- files legislation to block a name change. (...)
According to the order Jewell signed, there is a policy of deferring action while a matter is under consideration by Congress. So the Ohio delegation’s annual legislative efforts have stalled any federal movement. But the law does allow the interior secretary to take action when the board naming doesn’t act “within a reasonable amount of time,” the order said.
“It's something (former Alaska Gov. Jay Hammond) pushed for back in 1975, and because of an effort to stop it in legislation that has not actually gone anywhere in the last 40 years, the Board of Geographic Names did not take it up,” Jewell said.
As interior secretary, she has authority to make a unilateral decision after a “reasonable time has passed,” Jewell said.
“And I think any of us would think that 40 years is an unreasonable amount of time. So we're delighted to make the name change now, and frankly I'm delighted that President Obama has encouraged the name change consistent with his trip,” Jewell said.
Jewell said the “overwhelming support for many years from the citizens of Alaska is more robust than anything that we have heard from the citizens of Ohio,” and that filing the same legislation year after year has not been accompanied by any “grass roots support” in Ohio. (...)
“I think most of us have always called it Denali. I know that's true in the climbing community and I suspect it has been true in Alaska for a very long time. So it'll just be great to formalize that with our friends at the U.S. Geological Survey and the Board of Geographic Names,” Jewell said.
The name “Denali” is derived from the Koyukon name and is based on a verb theme meaning “high” or “tall,” according to linguist James Kari of the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in the book “Shem Pete’s Alaska.” It doesn't mean "the great one," as is commonly believed, Kari wrote.
The mountain was named for McKinley before he became president, by gold prospector William A. Dickey, who had just received word of McKinley’s nomination as a candidate in 1897. McKinley died without ever setting foot in Alaska, assassinated at the start of his second term in office.
It’s official: Denali is now the mountain formerly known as Mount McKinley.
With the approval of President Barack Obama, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell has signed a “secretarial order” to officially change the name, the White House and Interior Department announced Sunday. The announcement comes roughly 24 hours before Obama touches down in Anchorage for a whirlwind tour of Alaska.Talk of the name change has swirled in Alaska this year since the National Park Service officially registered no objection in a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C.
The tallest mountain in North America has long been known to Alaskans as Denali, its Koyukon Athabascan name, but its official name was not changed with the creation of Denali National Park and Preserve in 1980, 6 million acres carved out for federal protection under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. The state changed the name of the park’s tallest mountain to Denali at that time, but the federal government did not.
Jewell’s authority stems from a 1947 federal law that allows her to make changes to geographic names through the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, according to the department.
“I think for people like myself that have known the mountain as Denali for years and certainly for Alaskans, it's something that's been a long time coming,” Jewell told Alaska Dispatch News Sunday.
Every year, the same story plays out in Washington, D.C.: Alaska legislators sometimes file bills to change the name from Mount McKinley to Denali, and every year, someone in the Ohio congressional delegation -- the home state of the 25th President William McKinley -- files legislation to block a name change. (...)
According to the order Jewell signed, there is a policy of deferring action while a matter is under consideration by Congress. So the Ohio delegation’s annual legislative efforts have stalled any federal movement. But the law does allow the interior secretary to take action when the board naming doesn’t act “within a reasonable amount of time,” the order said.
“It's something (former Alaska Gov. Jay Hammond) pushed for back in 1975, and because of an effort to stop it in legislation that has not actually gone anywhere in the last 40 years, the Board of Geographic Names did not take it up,” Jewell said.
As interior secretary, she has authority to make a unilateral decision after a “reasonable time has passed,” Jewell said.
“And I think any of us would think that 40 years is an unreasonable amount of time. So we're delighted to make the name change now, and frankly I'm delighted that President Obama has encouraged the name change consistent with his trip,” Jewell said.
Jewell said the “overwhelming support for many years from the citizens of Alaska is more robust than anything that we have heard from the citizens of Ohio,” and that filing the same legislation year after year has not been accompanied by any “grass roots support” in Ohio. (...)
“I think most of us have always called it Denali. I know that's true in the climbing community and I suspect it has been true in Alaska for a very long time. So it'll just be great to formalize that with our friends at the U.S. Geological Survey and the Board of Geographic Names,” Jewell said.
The name “Denali” is derived from the Koyukon name and is based on a verb theme meaning “high” or “tall,” according to linguist James Kari of the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in the book “Shem Pete’s Alaska.” It doesn't mean "the great one," as is commonly believed, Kari wrote.
The mountain was named for McKinley before he became president, by gold prospector William A. Dickey, who had just received word of McKinley’s nomination as a candidate in 1897. McKinley died without ever setting foot in Alaska, assassinated at the start of his second term in office.
The Perfect Poop
It’s the middle of the day for Eric, a 24-year-old research assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and nature is calling.
Eric leaves his job and hops a train. Then a bus. Then he walks some more. He passes countless toilets, and he needs to use them, but he doesn’t.
Eventually, Eric arrives at a nondescript men’s room 30 minutes away from MIT. A partition separates two toilets. There’s a square-tiled floor like in any public restroom. It’s unremarkable in every way, with one exception: A pit stop here can save lives.
Eric hangs a plastic collection bucket down inside the toilet bowl and does his business. When he’s finished, he puts a lid on the container, bags it up and walks his stool a few doors down the hall to OpenBiome, a small laboratory northwest of Boston that has developed a way to turn poop from extremely healthy people into medicine for really sick patients.
A lab technician weighs Eric’s “sample.” Over the past 2½ months, Eric has generated 10.6 pounds of poop over 29 visits, enough feces to produce 133 treatments for patients suffering from Clostridium difficile, an infection that kills 15,000 Americans a year and sickens half a million.
To donate, Eric had to pass a 109-point clinical assessment. There is a laundry list of factors that would disqualify a donor: obesity, illicit drug use, antibiotic use, travel to regions with high risk of contracting diseases, even recent tattoos. His stools and blood also had to clear a battery of laboratory screenings to make sure he didn’t have any infections.
After all that screening, only 3% of prospective donors are healthy enough to give. “I had no idea,” he says about his poop. “It turns out that it’s fairly close to perfect.”
And that, unlike most people’s poop, makes Eric’s worth money. OpenBiome pays its 22 active donors $40 per sample. They’re encouraged to donate often, every day if they can. Eric has earned about $1,000.
“It takes us a lot of time and effort to find these donors,” says OpenBiome’s research director, Mark Smith. “When we do find them, we want to keep them as engaged as possible and really want to compensate them for their time.”
Why is Eric’s poop so valuable?
A hundred trillion bacteria live inside your gut, some good, some bad. When patients take antibiotics for infections, sometimes they fail to work; good bacteria gets killed off while bad bacteria — C. difficile — grows unchecked.
The life-saving bacteria from the guts of people like Eric can help. When their healthy microbes are placed inside the intestines of a sick person they can chase out harmful C. difficile bacteria. It’s called a fecal transplant. The treatments are administered bottom-up, through a colonoscopy, or top-down, through a tube in the nose.
OpenBiome’s poop donors have created about 5,000 treatments, and the organization says the results have been stunning. Stinky human waste is an astonishingly simple cure: 90% of the patients get better.
“They’ll actually have this really transformational experience where they’ll be going to the bathroom 20 times a day and then have normal bowel movements sort of immediately or the next day,” Smith says.
The organization’s fecal transplants cost $385 to purchase and are providing a treatment to more than 350 hospitals in 47 states.
Eric leaves his job and hops a train. Then a bus. Then he walks some more. He passes countless toilets, and he needs to use them, but he doesn’t.Eventually, Eric arrives at a nondescript men’s room 30 minutes away from MIT. A partition separates two toilets. There’s a square-tiled floor like in any public restroom. It’s unremarkable in every way, with one exception: A pit stop here can save lives.
Eric hangs a plastic collection bucket down inside the toilet bowl and does his business. When he’s finished, he puts a lid on the container, bags it up and walks his stool a few doors down the hall to OpenBiome, a small laboratory northwest of Boston that has developed a way to turn poop from extremely healthy people into medicine for really sick patients.
A lab technician weighs Eric’s “sample.” Over the past 2½ months, Eric has generated 10.6 pounds of poop over 29 visits, enough feces to produce 133 treatments for patients suffering from Clostridium difficile, an infection that kills 15,000 Americans a year and sickens half a million.
To donate, Eric had to pass a 109-point clinical assessment. There is a laundry list of factors that would disqualify a donor: obesity, illicit drug use, antibiotic use, travel to regions with high risk of contracting diseases, even recent tattoos. His stools and blood also had to clear a battery of laboratory screenings to make sure he didn’t have any infections.
After all that screening, only 3% of prospective donors are healthy enough to give. “I had no idea,” he says about his poop. “It turns out that it’s fairly close to perfect.”
And that, unlike most people’s poop, makes Eric’s worth money. OpenBiome pays its 22 active donors $40 per sample. They’re encouraged to donate often, every day if they can. Eric has earned about $1,000.
“It takes us a lot of time and effort to find these donors,” says OpenBiome’s research director, Mark Smith. “When we do find them, we want to keep them as engaged as possible and really want to compensate them for their time.”
Why is Eric’s poop so valuable?
A hundred trillion bacteria live inside your gut, some good, some bad. When patients take antibiotics for infections, sometimes they fail to work; good bacteria gets killed off while bad bacteria — C. difficile — grows unchecked.
The life-saving bacteria from the guts of people like Eric can help. When their healthy microbes are placed inside the intestines of a sick person they can chase out harmful C. difficile bacteria. It’s called a fecal transplant. The treatments are administered bottom-up, through a colonoscopy, or top-down, through a tube in the nose.
OpenBiome’s poop donors have created about 5,000 treatments, and the organization says the results have been stunning. Stinky human waste is an astonishingly simple cure: 90% of the patients get better.
“They’ll actually have this really transformational experience where they’ll be going to the bathroom 20 times a day and then have normal bowel movements sort of immediately or the next day,” Smith says.
The organization’s fecal transplants cost $385 to purchase and are providing a treatment to more than 350 hospitals in 47 states.
by CNN Wire | Read more:
Image: Andrea Levy, The Plain Dealer
Saturday, August 29, 2015
Friday, August 28, 2015
Cancer Cells Programmed Back to Normal
Cancer cells programmed back to normal by US scientists
Scientists have turned cancerous cells back to normal by switching back on the process which stops normal cells from replicating too quickly
Image: Wellcome Collection
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Keith Richards on ‘Crosseyed Heart’
[ed. I want that guitar.]
He’s the archetypal rock guitarist: the genius wastrel, the unimpeachable riff-maker, the architect of a band sound emulated worldwide, the survivor of every excess. Onstage, he is at once a flamboyant figure and a private one, locked in a one-on-one dance with his guitar, working new variations into every song. “I never play the same thing twice,” he said. “I can’t remember what I played before anyway.”
With the Stones in “hibernation” after a tour that ended in 2007, Mr. Richards took two and a half years “immersed in my life twice” to write (with James Fox) a best-selling memoir, “Life,” that re-examined his many sessions, tours, trysts, addictions, mishaps, arrests and accomplishments. After “Life” was published in 2010, he was enjoying being a family man and a grandfather. Retirement was a real possibility.
“I thought, that’s the craziest thing I ever heard,” said Steve Jordan, Mr. Richards’s longtime co-producer and drummer on his solo projects. “He felt comfortable with where he was and what he had done and what he had achieved. But knowing Keith, to not have him pick up an instrument and play, it was weird. When you’re a musician, you don’t retire. You play up until you can’t breathe.”
Mr. Jordan nudged Mr. Richards in a different direction: back into the recording studio to make his first solo album in 23 years, “Crosseyed Heart” (Republic), to be released Sept. 18. “I realized I hadn’t been in the studio since 2004 with the Stones,” Mr. Richards said. “I thought: ‘This is a bit strange. Something in my life is missing.’”
It’s a straightforwardly old-fashioned, rootsy album that could have appeared 20 years ago. The instruments are hand-played, the vocals are scratchy growls, and the songs revisit Mr. Richards’s favorite idioms — blues, country, reggae, Stonesy rock — for some scrappy storytelling. The album was recorded on analog tape. “I love to see those little wheels go around,” Mr. Richards said.
Eased onto a couch at his manager’s downtown Manhattan office, surrounded by merchandise from this year’s Rolling Stones tour and memorabilia dating back decades, Mr. Richards, 71, alternated between a Marlboro and a drink. He was wearing an ensemble only he could pull off: a striped seersucker jacket over a black T-shirt decorated with a Captain America shield, black corduroy jeans and silvery-patterned running shoes. A woven headband in Rastafarian red, gold and green held back his luxuriantly unkempt gray hair. A silver skull ring was, as usual, on his right hand as a reminder, he has said, that “beauty’s only skin deep.”
In a conversation punctuated by his wheezy, conspiratorial growl of a laugh, he was a man at ease with himself as a rock elder. “It’s all a matter of perspective and which end of the telescope you’re looking at,” he said.
“Nobody wants to croak, but nobody wants to get old,” he said. “When the Stones started, we were 18, 19, 20, and the idea of being 30 was absolutely horrendous. Forget about it! And then suddenly you’re 40, and oh, they’re in it for the long haul. So you need to readjust, and of course kids happen and grandchildren, and then you start to see the pattern unfolding. If you make it, it’s fantastic.”
by Jon Pareles, NY Times | Read more:
Image: J. Rose/Netflix
How Cities Can Beat the Heat
The greenhouses that sprawl across the coastline of southeastern Spain are so bright that they gleam in satellite photos. Since the 1970s, farmers have been expanding this patchwork of buildings in Almería province to grow produce such as tomatoes, peppers and watermelons for export. To keep the plants from overheating in the summer, they paint the roofs with white lime to reflect the sunlight.
That does more than just cool the crops. Over the past 30 years, the surrounding region has warmed by 1 °C, but the average air temperature in the greenhouse area has dropped by 0.7 °C.
It's an effect that cities around the world would like to mimic. As Earth's climate changes over the coming decades, global warming will hit metropolitan areas especially hard because their buildings and pavements readily absorb sunlight and raise local temperatures, a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect. Cities, as a result, stand a greater chance of extreme hot spells that can kill. “Heat-related deaths in the United States outpace—over the last 30 years—all other types of mortality from extreme weather causes,” says Kim Knowlton, a health scientist at Columbia University in New York. “This is not an issue that is going away.”
Some cities hope to stave off that sizzling future. Many are planting trees and building parks, but they have focused the most attention on rooftops—vast areas of unused space that absorb heat from the Sun. In 2009, Toronto, Canada, became the first city in North America to adopt a green-roof policy. It requires new buildings above a certain size to be topped with plants in the hope that they will retain storm water and keep temperatures down. Los Angeles, California, mandated in 2014 that new and renovated homes install 'cool roofs' made of light-coloured materials that reflect sunlight. A French law approved in March calls for the rooftops of new buildings in commercial zones to be partially covered in plants or solar panels.
But the rush to act is speeding ahead of the science. Although cool roofs and green roofs can strongly curb temperatures at the tops of buildings, they do not always yield benefits at the street level, and they may trigger unwanted effects, such as reducing rainfall in some places. “There was a notion that the community had reached a conclusion and there was a one-size-fits-all solution,” says Matei Georgescu, a sustainability scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe. “But that is not the case.”
On top of that, it is unclear whether the limited programmes currently in place will have a measurable effect on temperature—and citizen health—and whether cities will expand their efforts enough to produce results. “If you're just putting green roofs on city hall and schools, it's not going to move the needle,” says Brian Stone Jr, an urban scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
That does more than just cool the crops. Over the past 30 years, the surrounding region has warmed by 1 °C, but the average air temperature in the greenhouse area has dropped by 0.7 °C.It's an effect that cities around the world would like to mimic. As Earth's climate changes over the coming decades, global warming will hit metropolitan areas especially hard because their buildings and pavements readily absorb sunlight and raise local temperatures, a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect. Cities, as a result, stand a greater chance of extreme hot spells that can kill. “Heat-related deaths in the United States outpace—over the last 30 years—all other types of mortality from extreme weather causes,” says Kim Knowlton, a health scientist at Columbia University in New York. “This is not an issue that is going away.”
Some cities hope to stave off that sizzling future. Many are planting trees and building parks, but they have focused the most attention on rooftops—vast areas of unused space that absorb heat from the Sun. In 2009, Toronto, Canada, became the first city in North America to adopt a green-roof policy. It requires new buildings above a certain size to be topped with plants in the hope that they will retain storm water and keep temperatures down. Los Angeles, California, mandated in 2014 that new and renovated homes install 'cool roofs' made of light-coloured materials that reflect sunlight. A French law approved in March calls for the rooftops of new buildings in commercial zones to be partially covered in plants or solar panels.
But the rush to act is speeding ahead of the science. Although cool roofs and green roofs can strongly curb temperatures at the tops of buildings, they do not always yield benefits at the street level, and they may trigger unwanted effects, such as reducing rainfall in some places. “There was a notion that the community had reached a conclusion and there was a one-size-fits-all solution,” says Matei Georgescu, a sustainability scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe. “But that is not the case.”
On top of that, it is unclear whether the limited programmes currently in place will have a measurable effect on temperature—and citizen health—and whether cities will expand their efforts enough to produce results. “If you're just putting green roofs on city hall and schools, it's not going to move the needle,” says Brian Stone Jr, an urban scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
by Hannah Hoag, Nature/Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Goldmund Lukic ©iStock.com
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