Defining Normal in a Parking Garage

Here's another great passage from Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic. Vanderbilt is explaining why traffic behaves differently in different places, and refers to the work of psychologist Robert Cialdini to explain how social norms work:

"In one study, handbills were placed on the windshields of cars in a parking garage; the garage was sometimes clean and sometimes filled with litter. In various trials, a nearby 'confederate' either littered or simply walked through the garage. They did this when the garage was filled with litter and when it was clean. The researchers found that the subjects, upon arriving at their cars, were less likely to litter when the garage was clean. They also found that subjects were more likely to litter when they observed someone else littering, but only if the garage was already dirty.

"What was going on? Cialdini argues there are two different norms at work: an 'injunctive norm,' or the idea of what people should do (the 'ought' norm), and a 'descriptive norm,' or what people actually do (the 'is' norm). While injunctive norms can have an impact, it was the descriptive norm that was clearly guiding behavior here: People littered if it seemed like most other people did. If only one person was seen littering in a clean garage, people were less likely to litter -- perhaps because the other's act was so clearly violating the injunctive norm. This is why so many public-service advertising campaigns fall on deaf ears, Cialdini and others have suggested." (pages 228-229)

The correlation to behavior in traffic is obvious... who doesn't feel like it's pretty much okay to go the speed of traffic on a highway, even when that speed is five or 10 miles over the limit?

Fourth Cyclist Killed in Twin Cities

In both of Sunday's papers, there was a brief story telling about a woman who was killed while riding her bike down Summit Avenue in St. Paul on Saturday morning. Ginny Heuer, 51, was riding for exercise, and despite wearing a helmet, suffered fatal head injuries in the collision. Today's Star Tribune carries a more detailed article.

Heuer was the most recent of four cyclists to be killed within a few months in our fair cities. As one who has just started riding a bike to work a few days a week, I have to say I'm having the expected reaction. Our closeness in age and the fact that she also recently started riding probably adds to my reaction.

Remembering Tom Vanderbilt's admonition in Traffic, I refuse to call it an accident. I know the spot where Heuer was killed very, very well, because my own daughter number one took an art class right there for years.


The 39-year-old driver of the SUV that killed Heuer says he stopped at the stop sign where the Summit Avenue service road joins the two-lane through-street. There's a bike lane along the right side of the through-street. As he accelerated onto Summit, he told police that all of a sudden, she was in front of him.

Well, of course, she didn't appear from nowhere. She was right there, in the bike lane, relying on the fact that she had the right of way and that it was broad daylight. Of course the driver of the car would see her, yes?

No. She might as well have been invisible.

Although the collision was obviously not intentional, neither was it a true accident: It was caused by a moment's inattention to one important detail in a busy world. By a person who was moving a two-ton piece of equipment down a city street.

As I said in my earlier post on Traffic, Vanderbilt writes that the more pedestrians or bicyclists there are on the streets, the safer they are per capita -- because drivers are less likely to hit something they are used to seeing (page 86). This is Summit Avenue, for goodness sake -- it's one of the main bike thoroughfares of the Twin Cities. If drivers don't see bikes there, where do they see them?

That's all I can say about this, except the more I bike, the less I like cars, including my own.

P.S. -- Neither paper got Ginny Heuer's name correct in their Sunday stories -- the Star Tribune called her Virginia Heuerbowar, the Pioneer Press Virginia Heuer-Bowar, but from today's paper, it appears her name was actually Virginia Heuer, and her husband's last name is Bowar.

Sarah Palin, Ice President -- at the Movies

In a world where movie trailers as a medium cry out for parody, one invention called the World Wide Web has answered that cry.

Now, on a computer near you, via Boingboing, comes this pseudo-trailer for a movie called Sarah Palin: Head of Skate.

Watch as the parody's makers, CollegeHumor.com, point out the absurdity of Hollywood films and our political situation -- at the same time!

Gasp at the astute characterizations, deft editing and rich cinematography.

And laugh out loud when the baritone narrator says, "From the makers of The Mighty Ducks and Syriana" (I did, anyway).

Putting the Trash in Its Place

I had a revelation about switching the way the trash is arranged in our house.

Even though I've been composting for quite a while in a laid back way, we only had a small container for compost in the kitchen, which we used primarily for food scraps and bread heels (silly of me, but I don't like to eat the heals on my regular whole wheat bread, although I love them on baguettes).

I realized that a whole lot of what we throw in our trash is actually compostable (paper towels, tissues and other nonrecyclable paper being key examples), but because the compost receptacle is small, infrequently emptied and therefore stinky (if that's not TMI!), there's a big disincentive to using it.

I should also say that we've found a way to recycle a lot of our plastic, so that's no longer going into the trash. The city of St. Paul picks up our bottles, like most places, but the city of Minneapolis is running a pilot program to collect all other labeled plastics as long as they're clean. My office (which is in Minneapolis) is collecting plastic for all of us who work there, and once in a while hauling it (actually, I'm hauling it) up to the place where it's being collected for the city at Eastside Food Co-op.

The one catch on the plastic recycling is that it has to be clean and separated by number... I now know more about plastic types then I ever thought I would. The Pioneer Press ran a really helpful article on this awhile back -- it has a complete list of the numbers and what fits into each category, even if it isn't labeled. (For instance, did you know that straws are always #5 and cereal box liners are #2? Cool!) Now if I could just figure out if CD-Rs are recyclable.

Anyway, after eliminating most of the plastic, and with an existing compost pile, I had one of those "Wow, I could have had a V8!" moments... and realized I should change the spot where we currently have the trash into the compost receptacle and make a smaller, out-of-the-way trash receptacle. That way, we'll all think twice before we actually throw something away permanently, and almost all of it will be nonrecyclable plastic. The compost will be the receptacle that gets filled fastest, and get emptied fastest, so it won't start to stink.

And then we can get a smaller trash can (or maybe switch to every other week pickup), pay less for our trash service, and (of course) put less into the landfills.

Maybe this is why our local recycling company is called Eureka!

Michele Bachmann's Full Speech

If, like me, you want to hear everything Michele Bachmann said in her much-discussed speech in Congress about how the mortgage crisis was caused by the Clinton administration doling out patronage, check out the full-length clip on Ken Avidor's YouTube page.

Ken is always there with the latest on Minnesota's own Sarah Palin action figure.

In the speech, Bachmann fixes her sites on a group of people (which she unusually dichotomizes by calling it "minorities and people of color" in low-income neighborhoods -- i.e., Clinton supporters) who were given loans based on no more than the color of their skins.

All this, she says, is the fault of changes Bill Clinton made in the Community Reinvestment Act, which was originally passed in 1977 (under another Democratic administration, eh?) to stop mortgage redlining.

First, a little history on the CRA, courtesy of the Wikipedia. (Although this wiki entry is obviously being contested by different factions, I would say some info in it appears to be objectively true, based on its footnoting). Banks opposed the act, and the only banker to speak in favor of the CRA in 1977 was from Chicago's long-time progressive community lender, Shorebank. Interestingly, Shorebank appears to be weathering the current mortgage crisis in fine shape, despite lending to the same group of people Bachmann disparages.

The CRA was changed during the Clinton years to reach more people with home ownership opportunities. Bachmann basically calls this political patronage (without using that word) in her speech, and blames it for the sub-prime flameout.

In her speech, it's actually hard to tell if these are her words or not, because she begins by saying she is quoting an article by Terry Jones of Investor's Business Daily, but she never closes the quote.

Unable to tell if Bachmann's entire speech was lifted from Jones or just the first sentence, I found Jones's original article (from Sept. 24, and I'd like to point out it's an editorial, not a news story). Here's what belongs to whom in Bachmann's words.

Just about the first half of the speech is a direct quote from Jones, including the most inflammatory verbiage (that loans were made on the basis of race and little else, and that Clinton was paying back his urban voting bloc). From the point when Bachmann says "These were changes that led Fannie and Freddie to get into the sub-prime loan market," she is speaking in her own words (still somewhat based on the article, but it would pass a plagiarism test). This is the part where she tries to qualify her remarks up until that point by saying that minority homeownership is a good thing, it was just done wrong.

I gather from my Google search that the CRA is a favorite whipping boy of conservative media, such as the National Review (gee, I never thought I'd link to that). However, a relatively well-footnoted paragraph near the end of the Wikipedia entry says:

Robert Gordon [professor of economics at Northwestern] has pointed out that approximately half of the [bad subprime] loans were made by independent mortgage companies that were not regulated by the CRA, and thus had no government obligation to offer credit to minorities. In the later part of the crisis, these mortgage companies made subprime loans at twice the rate of CRA banks. Another third of the major subprime lenders were regulated, but had very little CRA involvement. Gordon also makes the argument that the weakening of the CRA in 2004 was followed by intensified subprime lending.

Wonder if Michele read the Wikipedia before her speech.

Follow up, Oct. 23, 2008: Pioneer Press business columnist Ed Lotterman published a well-phrased refutation of Bachmann's CRA rant.

Debatable Thoughts

Glad we're actually having a debate!

If I'm not mistaken, this debate format is better than the ones preceding other recent elections because it does seem to have more direct address between the candidates. (9:00 p.m. CDT)

It's so refreshing to hear a debate that doesn't include incorrect pronunciation of the word "nuclear." (9:05 p.m. CDT)

Great point on Kissinger and Iran by Obama! (9:12 p.m. CDT)

"Henry Kissinger has been my friend for 35 years" .... McCain is stretching for something like Lloyd Bentsen's "Y0u're no Jack Kennedy" line there, I think. (9:17 p.m. CDT)

Boy, if McCain tells us where he's been in the world one more time, I may have to ask to see his passport. Perhaps if you average the number of stamps he's got with Palin's passport, she might look like she has some international experience. (And let me say, this is a fine example of how an average is very misleading when dealing with a small number of data points.) (9:21 p.m. CDT)

Geez, Obama has gotten a lot grayer during this campaign. Sorry if that's trivial. (9:29 p.m. CDT)

McCain calls on Obama to be flexible, and implies Obama is too stubborn to be president. Isn't that the pot calling the kettle.... black. (Not to make anyone thing of lipsticks and pigs.) (9:36 p.m. CDT)

KSTP Channel 5's local news coverage of the debate is very biased against Obama -- making fairly glowing pronouncements about McCain being optimistic and forward-looking, while Obama was negative negative negative. Even their academic expert sounded biased. I didn't catch her name. (10:02 p.m. CDT)

KARE 11's coverage is more balanced describing both sides' presentations in a neutral way. (10:04 CDT)

Jill Miller Zimon from Blogher is on C-SPAN and she is very coherent. Her blog is writeslikeshetalks.com. (10:10 CDT)

A C-SPAN caller (an Obama supporter from Georgia) just said a really funny thing -- she said she felt like McCain was acting like he was in a night club, he was name dropping so much. (10:18 CDT)

Soledad O'Brien on CNN is telling about a focus group CNN ran during the debate. They were submitting their reactions to the questions as the debate went on, so O'Brien could show a graph comparing Democrats', independents' and Republicans' reactions on each question. Overall, 64% said they think Obama will win the election, and a similar number thought he had won the debate. This was (according to CNN) a mixed audience that included quite a number of independents. (10:42 p.m. CDT)

CNN is reporting some instant polling by gender and age... way more women thought Obama won (59%, vs around in the mid-40s for men), and a surprisingly high number of voters over 50 thought Obama won (I think it was 48 to 44 for Obama). (10:57 CDT)

Guess I'm going to sign off for the night. I know I did this in an inverted way... not so good if anyone was trying to read it as I was writing (hah! bet that didn't happen) but better for reading after tonight.
_________

And to continue the reverse order, here are some other election-related thoughts from before the debate started.

First, some letters from today's Strib. Anthony Becker of Northfield, Minn., wrote:

In 1864, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and George McLellan continued their campaigns for the presidency, even as Confederate troops approached to within six miles of the Capitol and Sherman captured Atlanta. In 1944, in the midst of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt and Thomas Dewey continued their campaigns while France was liberated and Allied troops fought their way to the Siegfried Line.

In those times of national emergency, campaigns were not suspeneded. Lincoln, McLellan, Roosevelt and Dewey knew that this nation needed its democratic processes to move forward in good times and bad. In this current economic crisis, we need the candidates to continue to campaign, to continue to speak to the issues. Suspending a presidential campaign to confer on a Wall Street bailout is a repudiation of the processes that have made this nation great.

Betsy O'Berry of Ramsey wrote:

With John McCain announcing that he wants to postpone his debate with Barack Obama during the financial crisis, will he and the Republicans decide that we need to postpone the elections during the financial crisis? Four more years of Bush sounds more possible each day.

_________

This, from a wonderful blog called Indexed, which creates these types of simplified diagrams on a range of topics:


_________

Okay, these two aren't about the debate, but here are a couple of things on the election that I've been saving up. One about a Minnesota race, one national.

A letter to the editor, Star Tribune, from Aleks Hindin, St. Louis Park:

I was so relieved to read Sen. Norm Coleman's statement that by giving the nation's worst bankers $700 billion for their unrecoverable loans, "The government could make 10 or 20 times what it pays on this, possibly."

Of course, this crew also told us the Iraq war was going to pay for itself. But hey, we don't want our leaders to have elitist qualities like knowing what they're talking about or voting on, or learning from the past or consulting knowledgeable experts or even running their ideas by people with common sense to see if they pass the laugh test.

Also from the Star Tribune, this news brief by Bob Von Sternberg and Aimee Blanchette:

When [Sarah] Palin delivered her acceptance speech at the RNC a couple of weeks ago, she got some pronunciation help from the teleprompter for the word nuclear -- spelled out phonetically as "noo - clee - er."

Speaking sans teleprompter Friday, she referred to the nuclear power as "noo - clue - ler" -- a pronunciation made famous by the current White House occupant.

I loved finding out about this particular fact, not because it matters how she pronounces the word, but because it reveals how much her party cares that she not pronounce it the way the George W. Bush does.

A Law's a Law, If I'm Not Mistaken

Driving home last night, I heard a bit of the BBC program "The World" on MPR. During the news break, they mentioned that the son of former Liberian president Charles Taylor is on trial in Florida.

Basically, because Taylor's son was born in the U.S., he is a U.S. citizen and is therefore subject to a law passed 14 years ago that allows the government to prosecute citizens who commit torture abroad.

Yes, you heard it. Our government has the right to prosecute citizens for torture committed outside the U.S.

Hmmm. Guantanamo Bay (plus any secret extraordinary rendition sites), waterboarding, Alberto Gonzalez (let alone his bosses)... does anyone else see the possibilities here?

American Legion Posters Go Green

I was reading through boingboing.net as I often do, and saw a link to the American Legion's online collection of World War II posters. They've got really large scans of dozens, maybe hundreds, of these classics.


This was a time when the best minds in American advertising turned their skills toward winning the war in every way possible.


Their goal: to enlist the unenlisted in the war effort through gas conservation, victory gardens, and scrap drives.


Come to think of it, the messages on these posters have a lot of resonance right now as well...if you think of global warming as the enemy.

Baby, That's Shameless

As the fine print near the baby's tiny left shin says, "These dolls are not toys; they are fine collectibles to be enjoyed by adult collectors."


Let's see... what definition of "fine" could possibly be matched up with this misbegotten product placement, for which the advertiser is charging $29.99, plus $6.99 shipping per baby (totaling $147.92 for all four)?

1. Free from impurity -- Hmmm. I don't think there was a whole lot of purity involved in the motivations to make this product.
   
2. Having a delicate or subtle quality -- Subtle? Like a sledgehammer, maybe.
   
3. Superior in quality, conception, or appearance -- I don't think placing an ad for a candy on a pseudo-baby's chest, with a mouth just over the belly button probably qualifies.
   
4. Marked by or effecting elegance or refinement -- Ditto.
   
5. Very small -- Okay, they got me on that one. The doll is 6" long, not quite as big as my hand.
   

The only upside of our current economic tailspin is that it might drive places like The Ashton-Drake Galleries out of business.

Hazardous Cat

Back in July, I posted about this sign, which I saw in Erie, Pennsyvlania:



So I was highly amused when I followed a link from boingboing.net to a Flickr page with a bunch of manipulated signs, and found this riff on the same sign:


This guy has a fine sense of humor. Another one of his signs (apologies to Target):

Wouterina de Raad, Environment Builder

Last week, a friend organized a small-group tour of the garden and art environment created by Wouterina de Raad, a Dutch-Indonesian-American artist in western Wisconsin (www.concretemosaicsculpture.com).

I wasn't entirely sure where the work would fall along the line between kitsch and folk art (a malleable boundary, I admit), but once there, I was impressed with the range of de Raad's work, and her commitment to both her place and her vision.

As with any environment builder, it's hard to show the entirety of the space with photographs, so I recommend a tour if you can arrange one (she does them June–September).


This figure welcomes visitors. The close-up at right shows the bottle caps used in his pants.


These clothes line figures serve more than just the obvious function -- each one provides nooks for nesting birds.


The figure at right is quite tall. It's located adjacent to one of the many out buildings on the site.


The most beautiful building is de Raad's studio, where she also teaches classes.


I particularly liked de Raad's bird works, especially this one of a man interacting with crows as if they were pets. Other crows popped up in unexpected places throughout the environment. Each one includes shiny metallic tiles as well as darker ones, which I appreciated for its insight into the nature of crows and their love of shiny objects.


Another wonderful bird sculpture.


This sentinel guards a wooded area along one side of de Raad's house.


This redhead graces a table near the back corner of the site.

It's challenging to think about how de Raad fits into the tradition of Wisconsin environment builders. Unlike most (or maybe all) of the environment builders, she's not completely self-taught (she studied fine art in college), and she seems well aware of art as a marketable item. She teaches others her methods (albeit in a very generous manner). And in some ways, her beautiful, handmade studio has more in common with Martha Stewart than Tom Every.

But who is to say that folk artists can't be aware that their work and their methods have value? That an art space has to be messy? That the art has to involve welding together large pieces of metal or carving wood? There may be an inherent gender bias in the definitions running around in my head, since mosaic has lately become a women's medium, just like textile arts, which also struggle for artistic recognition.

Or maybe it's just the fact that all of the other Wisconsin concrete/mosaic sculptors are dead, which lends them an air of legitimacy.

I think de Raad's work and her complete environment place her squarely within her state's folk art tradition. It was exciting to see a living artist in her prime, and in her place.

More Words I Hate

It's been a while since I last wrote about words that I dislike, so by now I have a few more examples ready to share.

First is a word I actually like but am soooo sick of hearing in one specific phrase: fledgling nation. There was a week recently when I kept hearing those words repeated on the news ("The fledgling nation of East Timor..." "The fledgling nation of Kosovo...") and I thought, When that phrase was first used, it was a nice metaphor, but now it's wrecking the nest.

In my previous post on this topic, I talked about the phrases "a wealth of" and "a host of." In the same vein, this time I want to gripe about galore and aplenty. Not much better is abound -- as in that classic Realtor® phrase, "Closets abound." When I put all three words into one Google search, I found links to sites related to tourism, sports or real estate... none known for their measured use of the English language.

Enough about quantity over quality. Another thing that aggravates me is singulars made plural and plurals made singular. Two cases in point:

Person. It's definitely an oddity of English, but really, the plural of person should not be persons. It's people, right? I blame the police (or maybe police T.V. shows) for popularizing the "missing persons department."

Imagine if this usage had been common in classic song lyrics. We'd have Barbra Streisand singing "Persons... persons who need persons are the luckiest persons in the world..." or The Youngbloods admonishing us, "Come on persons now, smile on your brother, everybody get together try to love one another right now."

Okay, I just checked my dictionary (American Heritage) and it tells me that "persons" can be used for specific, small numbers of people, but that in modern usage "people" is also acceptable in that case. The British site World Wide Words says:

Though persons survives, it does so largely in formal or legal contexts...and often seems awkward and old-fashioned. Where it survives it emphasises that each member of a group is being considered as an individual: ...“Eight persons shared a single room”. From the evidence, it seems that the trend towards using people instead of persons is accelerating and that it may not be so long before persons vanishes from the language except in certain set phrases.

So it's not wrong, I admit, to use "persons" but it does sound fussy, legalistic and over-corrected, which is why I don't like it.

Troops. Troop is a group noun -- it's a group (usually of soldiers). More than one group of soldiers can be referred to as "troops." "Support our troops" means support our groups of soldiers. One member of a troop (at least in the cavalry) would be called a trooper in the old days.

But nowadays each soldier has somehow become a troop of one, as in this headline recently run in the Star Tribune, which tells us that two soldiers died, not two entire troops. (And I would point out that the word "soldiers" would have fit in the same line width as "troops," so that's no excuse here.) Can I expect, one day, to read a headline that says "1 U.S. troop dies in Afghanistan"? Because if troop really means one individual soldier, that construction should be possible.

M.T. Anderson's Octavian Nothing

Before I had ever heard of M.T. Anderson, author of Feed, of which I wrote previously, I picked up a copy of Octavian Nothing because I liked the cover. (Yes, I admit it and remind you that I had originally planned to call this blog "Book By Its Cover.")

The golden National Book Award Winner seal on the cover may have had something to do with it. I glanced at the jacket flap and thought it was a fantasy novel. Its full, fanciful title did nothing to dissuade me from that thought: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation: Volume I The Pox Party.

Well, last week I finally read it. As its lengthy title has perhaps alerted you, it is not fantasy, but rather historical fiction set just before and during the early years of the American Revolution. And the rest of this blog entry is one big spoiler, so if you like to be surprised by your reading and you want to read this book, stop now.

Octavian is a young Boston boy who is an enslaved African, but he doesn't know his status in the early part of the book. He is an experimental subject -- watched, measured and weighed by a bunch of 18th century scientists intent on discovering whether Africans are equal to Europeans if given the same upbringing. That's bad enough, but as the book unfolds, the experiment is hijacked to force its outcome to support one conclusion (it's not hard to guess which one).

As in Feed, but in a completely different way, Anderson captures the language of the time. This is a book that would be incredible to read aloud, if you could keep from crying at its harshest points.

And it's all the more startling because the context established by other juvenile and young adult novels set in the same time does not inoculate you at all. Newbery books like Johnny Tremain or My Brother Sam Is Dead, for instance, deal with pain and death, but leave the reader unprepared for the unflinching reality in Octavian Nothing.

This book would be a wonderful addition to high school classes on the American Revolution or the slave trade. It makes accessible a terrible part of American history that many do not know exists, and it highlights the irony (and hypocrisy) of our nation's struggle to achieve freedom while humans remained property.

For a young person, it could be a life-changing read. Even at my age, it has haunted my thoughts.

(According to the Wikipedia, Volume II is due out October 14.)

----------------

One final note. Before the story reaches its grim heights, Anderson includes an insider's reference for the readers of Feed. One of the scientists is observing young people dancing at a party, and he says:

"When I peer into the reaches of the most distant futurity, I fear that even in some unseen epoch when there are colonies even upon the moon itself, there shall still be gatherings like this, where the young, blinded by privilege, shall dance and giggle and compare their poxy lesions."

If you've read Feed, you know what future that scientist was foreseeing.

Strange Maps and Soda Pop

In my college days, I flirted with the idea of majoring in linguistics, and one of my favorite classes was about the history and linguistic structure of English. The professor was a specialist in American dialects, and I remember her telling us about the way you could map the parts of the country where people said "greasy" vs. "greazy" or "skillet" vs. "spider."

Having already discovered the amusing New York state debate over standing in line vs. standing on line, I later found out about other variant usages -- one I found particularly amusing was the mundane "drinking fountain" vs. the whimsical Wisconsin "bubbler."

So I was very pleased to see a map showing what people call carbonated beverages all over the U.S. on the Strange Maps site.

Check it out (you can see a pretty big version by clicking on the map graphic on the Strange Maps site). Not only is there the soda vs. pop dichotomy, there's also the trademark-infringing Southern habit of calling all the drinks Coke, and the anomalous counties here and there who don't use any of the three predominant names, favoring what the researchers refer to as "other."

What could Other be? Selzer? Fizzy juice? Oh, maybe it's just soft drinks.

Minnesota is solidly in the Pop camp, which I had to get used to when I moved here 20-odd years ago. My home county in New York is 80 - 100% for Soda, but just two counties to the west, it abruptly switches to 50 - 80% pop! I never knew that.

My favorite facts:

• The Midwestern Pop counties meet the Southern Coke counties along the Ohio River and the Missouri/Arkansas border, with one major exception -- there's a huge circle of Soda centered on St. Louis.
• New Mexico is about half Coke, but four counties go with Soda and one with Pop -- and three use the mysterious "Other," including one where 80 - 100% of the population uses it (whatever it is).
• Alaska is very split. The middle of the state is 80 - 100% for Pop, and a good bit of the rest of the state is 30 - 80% for Pop. But the far north and a couple of other pockets are in the Soda camp (including, it looks like, Anchorage), while the area just west of the Aleutians is 80 - 100% for Other, and the area immediately adjacent to that (to the north) is 80 - 100% for Coke. Whew. Maybe the researchers got really small (and skewed) samples up there or something. Makes you wonder what Sarah Palin calls it.
  

Barton Gellman, Media Hero

I've found a new journalist to hold up as an example of all that is good about daily newspapers.

Out here in the hinterlands, it's easy to be unaware of what's happening inside the Beltway. I see stories reprinted from the Washington Post, but I have to confess I don't really pay attention to the bylines unless it's one of the writers who's been around since the 1980s, when I lived in D.C.

So when I saw a really important story based on a book by Barton Gellman in Tuesday's Pioneer Press, I was curious about who Gellman was. His book, called Angler, is about Vice President Dick Cheney.

Titled "Armey says Cheney exaggerated Iraqi threat," the story recounts Gellman's interview with former Republican Majority Leader Richard Armey. In 2002, when Armey was resistant to White House pressure to invade Iraq, Cheney met with Armey privately to tell him about the case for going to war.

The Iraqi threat, Cheney confided, was "more imminent than we want to portray to the public at large." Specifically, Cheney said there was proof Saddam Hussein was connected to Al Qaeda and that Iraq had the technology to miniaturize nuclear weapons to suitcase size.


Neither of which was true, as Cheney must have known at the time. The story concludes with this incredibly damning quote from Armey: "Did Dick Cheney ... purposely tell me things he knew to be untrue? I seriously feel that may be the case. ... Had I known or believed then what I believe now, I would have publicly opposed (the war) resolution right to the bitter end, and I believe I might have stopped it from happening."


Wow. I think this is one of the top 10 most important stories to come out in years, but it hasn't even appeared in the Star Tribune, and the Pioneer Press buried it at the bottom of an inside page.

I'm not one to jump on the impeachment train, but shouldn't intentionally lying to Congress to trick them into voting a certain way be grounds for impeachment? 4,000 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis have died because of this; our economy is being ground into the dirt because the war is bankrupting us.

Isn't this front page news? Not at the Pioneer Press. And it's not news at all at the Star Tribune.

So who is this Barton Gellman? Maybe the editors doubt his credentials, I thought.

Well, he's a special projects reporter on the national staff of the Washington Post. He's been a diplomatic correspondent, Jerusalem bureau chief, Pentagon correspondent and D.C. Superior Court reporter. He was the co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2002 and 2008. He's a graduate of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and was a Rhodes scholar, which led to a master’s degree in politics at University College, Oxford. He's written an earlier book on George F. Kennan.

Guess he sounds pretty credible, and I would think Dick Armey would be considered credible, too, since, if anything, he would want to make a Republican administration look good, not bad.

So perhaps the local papers just think this story is past its freshness date, that no one cares anymore, that we all already know the administration lied and misled Congress. I've got news for them -- finding out the truth never gets stale.

All I can say is, Barton Gellman makes me proud of journalists. But our local papers' behavior makes me seriously doubt editors.

These Ads Are Just Goofy

More glimpses of the Land of Beef, of which I have written earlier. There's not much more to say, except these ads drive me farther and farther from returning to a life of beef consumption.


This one is just too bizarre for words. In case you can't read it, the headline says "Unlike regular soaps, our new bars keep skin strong." Now there's a product benefit America has been waiting for.

Perhaps the agency did audience testing for this ad with some adolescent boys at the Comic-Con costume contest.


This local ad for the Minnesota Orchestra is an example of a classic goof. At left the full ad; at right a close up of my favorite part.

And they say women don't wear hats anymore.

F-F-Flying

Tony Carrillo strikes again with this Sunday edition of F-Minus.

When I was a child, I half believed that I could make the car take off if I put my arms out the window. (The other half of the time I believed I would get stung by a passing bee, as my mother told me.)

See my earlier post on F-Minus.

More Logos that Don't "Read"

Before you send me a comment on my use of quotation marks in this title, let me explain. I believe this is definitely an example where the marks help the meaning, because I am using the word "read" in a sense that is out of the ordinary.

As I wrote back in July, I try to maintain a collection of logos whose design makes them unclear. Usually, this means the logo replaces one of its letters with artwork, and the letter is no longer readable as part of the whole word.


For instance, this product's designer wanted to emphasize the lightning bolt so much that the Z doesn't read easily as a Z -- it looks like a couple of trapezoids with a lightning bolt. Because it's red, the lightning bolt seems to have more to do with the word ODOR than it does with ZAPP... which reads as APP. (No comment on the basic premise of the product, which is a flammable chemical you can add to paint so it won't stink... not that it does anything to address the volatile organic chemicals in the paint that cause it to stink in the first place.)

In other cases, the problem is more fundamental.


In this case, the readability problem comes from the fact that the little painter guy obscures the final T -- the letter appears to be part of the illustration, leaving the other letters standing on their own. And so, what I saw was TOP COA. This impression is more pronounced from a distance (I originally saw the truck across a parking lot).

Finally, here's one where it's not a problem with pictures at all -- just the letter shapes themselves.



I first saw this logo because it appears above the ads on the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. On that site, the logo is a little smaller than the version shown at right. What do you read in that graphic? I read "blocher" -- kind of like blotcher, but without the "t." Blotcher, hmm, I thought, what the heck is that? I could tell it was a service providing ads (and ad revenue) to the blog, and out of curiosity, I clicked on it.

Darned if I didn't find out right away that it actually says "blog her," and it's a network of women bloggers (which I was eligible to to join, by the way). Not a bunch of blotchy people looking for their spotted fellows.

What's wrong with the logo? Mostly, it's that capital G. You've got seven letters, six of which are lowercase, and then you throw in a capital letter, scaled to the size of a lowercase C... and you use a typeface whose G lacks a prominent crossbar.

Why not use a lowercase g instead? Maybe the blogher women didn't want to have the part of the letter that goes below the baseline (called a descender). Maybe they didn't like the shape of the serf g. But for whatever reason, it was a bad decision, because the lowercase g has a lot more information in it to tell the reader it's a g than the uppercase G does.

But why stop there? The designer also spaced the letters very tightly, making their shapes even harder to distinguish than they would already be in a pixel graphic. There's no excuse for this. When you've got a neologism, I think it's even more important than usual to make sure your logo is readable.

My reset versions are still tight but not touching, and I've shown it in the same base typeface (Baskerville, but without the jacked up lowercase x-height and the tilted letter e) and also in a sans serif, with and without the capital G. Any of these is an improvement (in my opinion), particularly at the smaller size shown at right. Even the one with the uppercase G still reads okay (although I prefer the lowercase versions).

Agriculture Equals Death

My daughter, newly minted as a high school student, is taking world history, beginning with prehistory. Yesterday she told us about an article she'd read in class, which made the provocative claim that the invention of agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened in human history.

What? I said. Why would that be?

She proceeded to explain that hunter gatherers lived longer, were healthier, and worked substantially fewer hours per week than their farmer counterparts. We would all have been better off if agriculture had never been invented.

I thought perhaps it was a parody, somewhat akin to Swift's "A Modest Proposal," but she assured me it was not. Farming created inequality, she reported, including gender inequality, since women had held important roles as gatherers among nomadic peoples, and spaced their children more because they could only carry one at a time (and so had to wait until one child could keep up with adults before having another). It created infectious disease through some mechanism she couldn't recall, but which sounded familiar from reading Jared Diamond.

Finally I asked her if she could bring the article home, to which she replied, "I have it in my bag." And voila, she produced a copy of Jared Diamond's 1987 Discover magazine article "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race."

Suddenly it all became clear.

Jared Diamond is a girl's best friend

Early in my addiction to Discover magazine, I read Diamond's 1992 article, "The Arrow of Disease," which later was expanded into the book Guns, Germs and Steel. It explained why Europeans brought epidemic disease to the Western Hemisphere, but the Western Hemisphere didn't send disease back. And part of that picture was a direct result of agriculture -- farmers lived in close quarters with their animals, and over time diseases jumped the species barrier to infect humans. Europeans had immunities built up to these diseases, but the native people of North and South America did not.

"The Arrow of Disease" was a media clipping that I kept in the filing cabinet for years. In fact, I may still have it tucked away somewhere.

Well, it turns out that five years before, Diamond had published "The Worst Mistake" in Discover as well.

Why was agriculture a mistake?

Diamond realizes that his contention that agriculture was a mistake stands in stark contrast with the common assumption of progressivism in the study of history -- basically, the idea that humans are on an ever-improving path toward a better life. Many historians have assailed this assumption, but Diamond's basic premise -- that agriculture itself was the mistake of all mistakes, and we have been devolving since then -- is pretty much mind-blowing.

Diamond implies that a hunter-gatherer system does no or little damage to the planet and provides for the greatest happiness for the greatest number (of the much smaller number of people who would be born). As evidence, he lists some facts from the recent archaeological record that are indeed surprising.

For instance, Greek and Turkish pre-agriculture skeletal remains are 5'9" for men and 5'5" for women; after agriculture, their heights crashed to 5'3" for men and 5'0" for women, and to this day have not recovered their pre-agricultural heights. Skeletons from the mounds along the Illinois and Ohio river valleys show that farmers "had a nearly fifty percent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia..., [and] a threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general." Their life expectancy was 19, versus 26 for the hunter-gatherers. And the fact that farming caused people to clump together more led to more communicable disease -- one of the things I remember from "The Arrow of Disease" is that epidemics require density, or they die out before they get started.

Diamond also provides information on the few remaining hunter-gatherer peoples today, such as the Kalahari Bushmen, who "have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors," and whose diets are much more varied and balanced than their farming counterparts nearby.

Class divisions, patriarchy and art

Because there was little stored food among hunter-gatherers, there was no class of people who could live off the work of others. Again, the skeletal record shows that agricultural peoples were shorter than their rulers, with worse teeth, and more bone lesions that indicate disease, a clear indication that the rulers had it better than the common people. For women, agriculture led to more frequent pregnancies, which sapped their health (women had more bone lesions than men), and probably to a diminished role in the life of the family and community.

The idea that farmers had more free time for art or other pursuits is also not correct, at least when considering modern hunter-gatherers. Ancient hunter-gatherers created art, Diamond argues, it just hasn't been preserved for the most part. Of course, there was no or little division of labor that could allow for a person whose sole job was "artist" or "musician." But everyone would have had time to pursue whatever artistic impulses they had, if so inclined. This reminds me of Wendell Berry's ideal world (despite the fact that Berry's world is, of course, agrarian), where each man and woman is connected to the land they live in, and many make art in the place they are from.

Why haven't I heard of this before?

From what I can tell by perusing the Web, "The Worst Mistake" is used as a conversation-starter or thought-provoker in colleges and schools (as my daughter's teacher used it), but it doesn't appear anyone has made a cogent argument against its chilling indictment of all we hold as the way things "must" be.

But neither does anyone carry Diamond's argument forward to any recommendations for how we live our lives today.

The idea that the pre-agricultural model provided the greatest good for the greatest number is key to Diamond's thesis. Yes, yes, we (I) think, that's right, it's easy to admit. But, but, but... What is the but? I think it's that -- just as most people who believe they are reincarnated seem to think they used to be Cleopatra or Alexander the Great rather than some average peasant -- we all think that we would have been one of the elite few who actually were better off after agriculture, rather than one of the many farmers who were worse off. And we can't deal with the idea of giving up our many comforts.

Gee, that even sounds a bit like the debate about national health insurance, now that I think of it. Piles of evidence show that average health outcomes are significantly better in Canada, Britain or France. But if I -- a member of the upper middle class with good health insurance -- need some procedure done, I will get it faster in the U.S. because of our free market system, even though my uninsured cousin probably would not get it at all, or would go into debt.

What to do with the hunter-gatherer idea?

What would it mean for people today to try to create a life that was at least partly based on a hunter-gatherer model? There's an inkling of this in the last section of Michael Pollen's The Omnivore's Dilemma. And in some ways, the development of permaculture is more like it than anything else, despite the fact that permaculture is still an agricultural model. Guess I'll have to look into that some more.

Also, as a person with a love of science fiction and particularly alternate histories, I wonder if anyone has written such a history of an alternate Earth, based on the premise that agriculture was not invented. Would it mean a permanent state of no technology, no writing, no permanent settlements with indoor plumbing (one of my favorite post-agriculture inventions)? Is there a way to conceive of a different type of social order that could arise from an economy based on hunting and gathering?

If anyone knows of such a book, let me know. Meanwhile, I have a feeling Diamond's challenge to progressivist history is going to be occupying my mind for some time to come.

It Costs Me, It Costs Me Not

In Wednesday's papers (Sept. 10), I saw this headline on a Star Tribune story:

Retail clinics haven't cut health costs, study finds
A study of HealthPartners patients found that overall medical costs rose despite competition from MinuteClinics

Then in the same day's issue of the Pioneer Press I saw this:

Study: Retail clinics cost-effective
Researchers examine MinuteClinic, find health expenses held down

Wow. Were those two headlines written for stories about the same study? Yep.

Reading both stories reveals that Chen May Yee, writing for the Strib, focused on costs overall, and the finding that MinuteClinics have not had the competitive effect some would have expected. Costs at all providers went up substantially over the three years of MinuteClinic's existence. Yee quotes the study's author, who said "The data does not support the idea that MinuteClinic or other retail clinics has had any negative impact on rising health-care costs."

The PiPress's Jeremy Olson mentions this fact in one paragraph about two-thirds of the way through the story. He does not quote the researcher on this point. Instead, his lead tells us that patients "get their money's worth" at MinuteClinics. His story also included a glowing quote from MinuteClinic's CEO. In fact, I started to suspect that his story may have been largely based on a MinuteClinic press release, but I couldn't find such a release on the website, so I guess not.

Both stories reported that MinuteClnic patients paid an average of $51 less for treatment than those at urgent care and $55 less than those at a primary-care physician. The Strib's Yee also gave us two additional and important facts:

The additional amount patients paid for emergency room care ($279) -- a key number for people without health insurance to know when making a decision about where to turn for care.

The average amount paid by MinuteClinic patients ($104) -- useful to know to get a sense of scale of the various payments. A bar chart would have been even better to illustrate this:


Why weren't those two facts included in the PiPress story, even though it was 73% longer (22.5 inches vs. 13 inches for the Strib)?

Just another example of media weirdness, I guess.

Button Button

Saw this on Dan Piraro's Bizarro blog.

He doesn't say where he got it from, but it sure is funny.

Women's Pentagon Action vs the RNC Protests

Gary Thompson of St. Paul had a letter in the Star Tribune on Sept. 9 I wish I'd written:

How can news reporters agree with local authorities that the "show of force was purposeful and appropriate" on anti-war protesters near the RNC, who were nonviolent and civil disobedient? Not long ago, nonviolent, civil disobedient protesters were not tear-gassed by the police if they refused to move, but were just picked up and carted away. Nonviolent civil disobedience is what the Martin Luther King Jr. taught us and still is a useful and heartfelt response, for many very truly outraged and caring citizens.

These police and other security forces appeared to go even beyond their orders and kept tear-gassing some protesters over and over. The tear gassing of a nonviolent citizen even once, I feel is unlawful and probably unconstitutional. I believe the security forces were led by someone or organization other than our local police. An investigation of this terror-like behavior is definitely in order and should be done by an outside group.

Gary's letter made me think back to the first big protest I attended: the second Women's Pentagon Action. I believe it was in 1981, not long after Three Mile Island, and just after Reagan was elected and began the escalation toward the cruise missile deployment in Europe. If you're old enough, you probably recall that in the early 1980s, we all really did think the world was going to end any time.

I went down to D.C. on a chartered bus with a bunch of other women from my college. After our bus driver got lost in the city, we finally got to the assembly area, which was at a large civic building of some type in Northeast Washington. It was filled with women making signs and puppets. That night, we slept on the floor in the basement of St. Stephen's church along 16th Street NW.

The day of the action, we rode the Metro over to Arlington for the march to the Pentagon. Some of the women I was with had planned to do a piece of street theater on the train; I recall it involved holding gray balloons wrapped in baby blankets, pretending that they were missiles. But the balloons didn't work out, so they bagged the idea.


My memory of the march itself is mushy on the details, but I remember the huge puppets (made by Bread and Puppet Theater), and that a number of women wove the doors of the Pentagon shut with yarn. Some women had planned to carry out civil disobedience such as this (and there may have been some blood thrown on the building as well). Those who planned to do C.D. were all in "affinity groups" who would support them -- some members of each group were not going to be arrested, and would deal with the legal system for their arrested group members.

None of the women from my school were part of that, though, and none of us were arrested. Afterward, we got on our bus and went back to college.

Now, let's see. If that protest had been managed the way the city of St. Paul and its law enforcement brethren (and I do mean brethren... I didn't see a single woman cop at the Labor Day protest) managed the protests at the Republican National Convention, here's what would have happened:

• The staging area in Northeast would have been busted and shut down on conspiracy to commit riot, all of its signs and flyers confiscated, and its leaders imprisoned on felony charges
  
• The church we slept in would have been raided, its doors broken in, and we all would have been at least questioned if not arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit riot or throw biological materials
• The large puppets would have been barred from the march because they might be a place where we could hide biological materials or bombs
• Everyone would have been arrested if they didn't immediately leave the public streets when it was demanded by 3,500 police in riot gear
• We would have been tear-gassed, percussion grenaded and shot with "baton rounds" to corral us into an area where they could arrest us more easily

I'm sure some of the actions we took that day in 1981 would have been arrest-worth offenses if they had taken place in St. Paul in 2008. As a case in point, Nick Coleman's column in the Sept. 9 Strib tells the story of one young man, acting as a medic at the march on Labor Day, who was shot in the back with a baton round and arrested for no reason while treating a tear-gassed protester. He was wearing clothing that clearly labeled him as a medic (you know, those little red crosses that are generally recognizable).

Coleman points out that, given the $50 million spent on security for the convention, each arrest cost $61,125, and that the cost per conviction is likely to be a lot higher (I predict they'll be lucky if they come out of it with a million dollars per, and that's not counting what will be paid out in wrongful arrest lawsuits).

Yeah, I'm still mad about what they turned my city into. And I've seen protests where it wasn't that way. Maybe someone could learn from the past, hmmm?

The Best Bathrooms in America

Back in July when I visited the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, Wis., I not only went into all the restrooms (including the men's rooms), I took photos. Why?

The Center has six artist-designed restrooms, all done in ceramics. One wasn't on view (I think it was inside the kids' classroom), and one was kind of small and didn't come out too well in my photos. But here are the other four.

First is Matt Nolen's "The Social History of Architecture," just off the main lobby.


This is one wild room!


The sinks were amazing.


As were the other... ahem... fixtures.

Also on the main lobby is Cynthia Consentino's "The Women's Room." Pink is the dominant color, but don't let that fool you.


Referring to paper dolls and dress-up, the bas-relief tiles are incredibly detailed. You could spend at least an hour studying this room.


The figures, of course, are meant to be suggestive of the variety of roles women play in society. The wolf head (left) is an interesting twist on that notion!

The third restroom I saw is called "Emptying and Filling." Created by Merrill Mason, a fiber and mixed media artist, her restroom is very calm and soothing. In some ways, it appears to be just a very nice public restroom in grays and off white, except for the details, such as the toilets (at right above). The wall tiles are embossed with monograms. As the accompanying description says, the room "quietly contemplates the boundaries between public and private through personal objects and procedures that prepare one for public presentation." I guess that's one way to describe what goes on in a public restroom!

The last one was my favorite. Ann Agee's "Sheboygan Men's Room" is a Delft-like marvel, but rather than using the familiar Delft subject matter of windmills, fishing boats and seascapes, Agee pictures scenes from Sheboygan.


Those little vignettes at the top of the wall at left are all specific houses in Sheboygan. And check out the snow flakes in the sinks at right. Above and between the mirrors is a snow plow.


Above the toilets, we have a car going through a car wash and water going over a local dam. The expression of mundanity in this beautiful medium is so funny!


And, last but not least, the Sheboygan water tower and its schematics -- all-important in a Midwestern city!

So, there's one more reason to take a trip to Sheboygan to check out the Kohler Arts Center.