August 26, 2010

On this date in 1920, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was declared in effect. Mary Ann Freeze, whose diaries I am editing, was very involved in working for Utah women to get the vote.

Here is an entry from her diary:
January 1889
Thurs 10^th Attended a meeting held for the purpose of organizing a Woman’s Suffrage Association of Utah. All went off smoothly the organization completed with some of our noblest women as officers. Sisters Caine & Emily Richards were nominated & sustained as delegates to go back to Washington & plead in our defense,

Mary died in 1912. Too bad it took eight more years for women to get the vote, though as we know, there’s been nothing but trouble ever since.  Wish she could have seen it.

August 23, 2010

Cellphones, which in the last few years have become full-fledged computers with high-speed Internet connections, let people relieve the tedium of exercising, the grocery store line, stoplights or lulls in the dinner conversation. The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas. At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience. The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn. At the University of Michigan, a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued. Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, scientists say. Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories. When you constantly stimulate the brain, it doesn’t experience this learning process.

August 18, 2010

For months, it has been clear that Republican Congressional candidates would benefit from independent voters’ dissatisfaction with President Obama because he has completely mismanaged the mandate he was given. The Republican party has nominated so many at the whacko far right, as well as some other unusual choices — Linda McMahon, the candidate for the United States Senate in Connecticut made millions running the sex-and-violence spectacle known as World Wrestling Entertainment — that the Republican brand is barely recognizable. Consider:
Ken Buck, the United States Senate nominee in Colorado. A former district attorney, he has said that the separation of church and state is too strictly enforced and wants to eliminate the Energy and Education Departments. Until recently, he supported repealing the 17th Amendment, which provides for direct election of senators. In the primary, he said he should win because “I do not wear high heels” — his opponent was a woman. As a federal prosecutor, he was reprimanded by a United States attorney after he gave information about the weakness of a case against gun dealers to the defense.
Rand Paul, the United States Senate candidate in Kentucky and a physician, has criticized the minimum-wage law and the civil rights and fair housing laws. He wants to cut way back on unemployment insurance and has denigrated Medicare as “socialized medicine.”
Sharron Angle, the United States Senate candidate in Nevada, believes that same-sex couples should not be allowed to adopt children, that the United States should pull out of the United Nations, and that Medicare and Social Security should be phased out in favor of a privatized system. In May, she suggested to The Reno Gazette-Journal that if she failed to defeat her Democratic opponent, Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, then conservatives might have no choice but to turn to violence. “I look at this as almost an imperative. If we don’t win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?” she said.
Mike Lee, the United States Senate candidate here in Utah, said he favors repealing the progressive income tax and supports a low cap on liability for oil companies that cause extensive environmental damage. He is one of the many Republicans who support changing the 14th Amendment to prohibit American-born children of illegal immigrants from being granted citizenship.
These people  are out of touch with mainstream American values of tolerance and pretty much everything else, especially what passes for human reason. Is this a great country, or what?

August 9, 2010

According to recent research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), global warming is cutting rice yields in many parts of Asia, with more declines to come. Yields have fallen by 10-20% over the last 25 years in some locations. The scientists studied records from 227 farms in six important rice- producing countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, India, and China. This is the latest in a line of studies to suggest that climate change will make it harder to feed the world's growing population by cutting yields. In 2004, other researchers found that rice yields in the Philippines were dropping by 10% for every 1C increase in night-time temperature. That finding, like others, came from experiments on a research station. The latest data, by contrast, comes from working, fully-irrigated farms that grow "green revolution" crops, and span the rice-growing lands of Asia from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu to the outskirts of Shanghai. Specifically they found that as the daily minimum temperature increases, or as nights get hotter, rice yields drop. The mechanism involved is not clear but may involve rice plants having to respire more during warm nights, so they expend more energy, without being able to photosynthesize.

August 4, 2010

Until today, the thousands of same-sex couples who have married did so because a state judge or Legislature allowed them to. The nation’s most fundamental guarantees of freedom, set out in the Constitution, were not part of the equation. That has changed with the historic decision by federal judge Vaughn Walker that said California’s ban on same-sex marriage violated the 14th Amendment’s rights to equal protection and due process of law. The decision is a stirring and eloquently reasoned denunciation of all forms of irrational discrimination, the latest link in a chain of pathbreaking decisions that permitted interracial marriages and decriminalized gay sex between consenting adults. As the case heads toward appeals at the circuit level and probably the Supreme Court, Judge Walker’s opinion will provide a firm legal foundation that will be difficult for appellate judges to assail.  The case was brought by two gay couples who said California’s Proposition 8, which passed in 2008 with 52 percent of the vote, discriminated against them by prohibiting same-sex marriage and relegating them to domestic partnerships. The judge easily dismissed the idea that discrimination is permissible if a majority of voters approve it; the referendum’s outcome was “irrelevant,” he said, quoting a 1943 case, because “fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote.” He then dismantled, brick by crumbling brick, the weak case made by supporters of Proposition 8 and laid out the facts presented in testimony. The two witnesses called by the supporters (the state having bowed out of the case) had no credibility, he said, and presented no evidence that same-sex marriage harmed society or the institution of marriage. Same-sex couples are identical to opposite-sex couples in their ability to form successful marital unions and raise children, he said. Though procreation is not a necessary goal of marriage, children of same-sex couples will benefit from the stability provided by marriage, as will the state and society. Domestic partnerships confer a second-class status. The discrimination inherent in that second-class status is harmful to gay men and lesbians. These findings of fact will be highly significant as the case winds its way through years of appeals. One of Judge Walker’s strongest points was that traditional notions of marriage can no longer be used to justify discrimination, just as gender roles in opposite-sex marriage have changed dramatically over the decades. All marriages are now unions of equals, he wrote, and there is no reason to restrict that equality to straight couples. The exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage “exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage,” he wrote. “That time has passed.” To justify the proposition’s inherent discrimination on the basis of sex and sexual orientation, he wrote, there would have to be a compelling state interest in banning same-sex marriage. But no rational basis for discrimination was presented at the two-and-a-half-week trial in January, he said. The real reason for Proposition 8, he wrote, is a moral view “that there is something wrong with same-sex couples,” and that is not a permissible reason for legislation. “Moral disapproval alone,” he wrote, in words that could someday help change history, “is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and women.” Just as they did for racial equality in previous decades, the moment has arrived for the federal courts to bestow full equality to millions of gay men and lesbians. God bless America.