May 24, 2011

I have loved books since I can remember, and since I was a teenager, I’ve had a personal library. It was just a few mass-market paperbacks then, but I can still see them on the shelves that separated my desk from my brother’s in the room we grew up in. Very gradually, as the years went by, I accumulated more books. I remember filling the two tiny shelves of my room in the dorm the year before my mission, having hauled them up there in a trunk. I didn’t make that mistake again, and as the years went by, and I moved repeatedly, I became an expert at boxing and moving my books, which now number in the thousands.

With the recent moves from Minneapolis to Salt Lake City and now from SLC down to American Fork, coupled with my advancing age, the burden of carrying all these books around with me has become just that; a burden. And now that we can purchase devices that can store “up to 3,500 books”, a capacity that will no doubt rapidly increase, there are alternatives to the traditional physical book. Faced with the certainty of moving them all again in 18 months when I will be even more decrepit than I am now, I have, for the first time in my life, begun to question keeping a library.

Just a few of them

On the other hand, the need for a personal library recently has become glaringly apparent as I have needed books for research that are unavailable in local libraries or bookstores. And, since I am at the bottom of my finances, I can no longer afford to purchase them even when they are available in a store, brick and mortar or online. This makes the book download, which is less expensive than a physical book, increasingly attractive.

But, there are so many things about books that I love, I find it hard to believe that I will ever be able to do without them. As John Updike put it:

a book is beautiful in its relation to the human hand, to the human eye, to the human brain, and to the human spirit.

There are far worse things to love.

May 23, 2011

The basic tenets of geometry as most people know them were laid out first by the Greek mathematician Euclid about 2,300 years ago. This Euclidean Geometry includes familiar propositions such as the fact that a line can connect two points, that the angles of a triangle always add up to the same total, or that two parallel lines never cross. The ideas are profoundly ingrained in formal education, but what remains a matter of debate is whether the capacity, or intuition, for geometry is present in all peoples regardless of their language or level of education. To that end, Pierre Pica of the National Centre for Scientific Research in France and his colleagues studied an Amazon tribe known as the Mundurucu to investigate their intuitions about geometry. Tests given to the Mundurucu suggest that our intuitions about geometry are innate. Researchers examined how the Mundurucu think about lines, points and angles, comparing the results with equivalent tests on French and U.S. schoolchildren. The Mundurucu showed comparable understanding, and even outperformed the students on tasks that asked about forms on spherical surfaces. Dr Pica and his colleagues engaged 22 adults and eight children among the Mundurucu in a series of dialogues, presenting situations that built up to questions on geometry. Rather than abstract points on a plane, the team suggested two villages on a notional map, for instance. Similar questions were posed to 30 adults and children in France and the U.S., some as young as five years old. The Mundurucu people's responses to the questions were roughly as accurate as those of the French and U.S. respondents; they seemed to have an intuition about lines and geometric shapes without formal education or even the relevant words. Most surprisingly, the Mundurucu actually outperformed their western counterparts when the tests were moved from a flat surface to that of a sphere (the Mundurucu were presented with a calabash to demonstrate). For example, on a sphere, seemingly parallel lines can in fact cross - a proposition which the Mundurucu guessed far more reliably than the French or U.S. respondents. The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

May 12, 2011

Got great help moving down to Marlene and Jim’s in American Fork last Saturday from Steve and Tyler Lindsay and Dave. They were fantastic!

Young McKay Lindsay was a big help moving things down into the basement once we arrived from SLC.

Here’s the view out the back of their place:

Not much going on down here in Utah Valley, other than all the righteousness, of course. But it’s a big help to me to be able to stay here, and I am very grateful.

May 10, 2011

62 years ago, on May 10, 1949, Marlene Kay Russell was born in Provo, Utah:

 

You’ve come a long way, baby.

 

And, almost as important, on this day in 1869, a golden spike was driven at Promontory, Utah, marking the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States.

May 9, 2011

With the help of 16 Democrats, one of whom is now my “representative”, House Republicans passed a bill the other day with the narrow-seeming title of the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act. The measure, which came just weeks after the furor over failed Republican attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, is a slightly modified version of a terrible bill proposed last year by Representative Christopher Smith, a Republican of New Jersey. It is far more sweeping than its title suggests. In fact, the bill is not really about federal financing for abortion or even preventing insurers from offering any abortion coverage on the insurance exchanges created as part of federal health care reform. The federal Hyde Amendment has long barred federal financing of abortion, and the burdensome rules for segregating an individual’s premium payments from government subsidies already seems destined to discourage insurers from offering abortion coverage on the exchanges. The Smith bill imposes new limitations on abortion access by driving to end abortion insurance coverage in the private market using the nation’s tax system as a weapon. A provision would deny tax credits to small businesses that offer private health plans that cover abortion services, as some 87 percent of private plans now do. The bill imposes no such restrictions on large corporations. The measure also eliminates the medical-expense deduction for most abortions and ends the availability of reimbursement for abortion costs from medical savings accounts — changes that could invite intrusive inquiries from I.R.S. auditors trying to confirm whether an abortion procedure fell within exceptions for rape, incest, or when the life of the woman is endangered. Over all, the bill treats tax benefits as the equivalent of public expenditures for abortion. This equivalency is at odds with a reality in which individuals can deduct donations to religious institutions without running afoul of the constitutional bar of government support of religion. The bill also would eliminate the yearly renewal of the Hyde Amendment’s denial of abortion services for poor women and others who rely on the federal government for their health care. It’s great to be an American.

May 8, 2011

From Paul Krugman:
The past three years have been a disaster for most Western economies. The United States has mass long-term unemployment for the first time since the 1930s. How did it all go so wrong? What I’ve been hearing with growing frequency from members of the policy elite — self-appointed wise men, officials, and pundits in good standing — is the claim that it’s mostly the public’s fault. The idea is that we got into this mess because voters wanted something for nothing, and weak-minded politicians catered to the electorate’s foolishness. So this seems like a good time to point out that this blame-the-public view isn’t just self-serving, it’s dead wrong. The fact is that what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes. These days Americans get constant lectures about the need to reduce the budget deficit. That focus in itself represents distorted priorities, since our immediate concern should be job creation. But suppose we restrict ourselves to talking about the deficit, and ask: What happened to the budget surplus the federal government had in 2000? The answer is, three main things. First, there were the Bush tax cuts, which added roughly $2 trillion to the national debt over the last decade. Second, there were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which added an additional $1.1 trillion or so. And third was the Great Recession, which led both to a collapse in revenue and to a sharp rise in spending on unemployment insurance and other safety-net programs. So who was responsible for these budget busters? It wasn’t the man in the street. President George W. Bush cut taxes in the service of his party’s ideology, not in response to a groundswell of popular demand — and the bulk of the cuts went to a small, affluent minority. Similarly, Mr. Bush chose to invade Iraq because that was something he and his advisers wanted to do, not because Americans were clamoring for war against a regime that had nothing to do with 9/11. In fact, it took a highly deceptive sales campaign to get Americans to support the invasion, and even so, voters were never as solidly behind the war as America’s political and pundit elite. Finally, the Great Recession was brought on by a runaway financial sector, empowered by reckless deregulation. And who was responsible for that deregulation? Powerful people in Washington with close ties to the financial industry, that’s who. Let me give a particular shout-out to Alan Greenspan, who played a crucial role both in financial deregulation and in the passage of the Bush tax cuts — and who is now, of course, among those hectoring us about the deficit. So it was the bad judgment of the elite, not the greediness of the common man, that caused America’s deficit. Does any of this matter? Why should we be concerned about the effort to shift the blame for bad policies onto the general public? One answer is simple accountability. People who advocated budget-busting policies during the Bush years shouldn’t be allowed to pass themselves off as deficit hawks; people who praised Ireland as a role model shouldn’t be giving lectures on responsible government. But the larger answer, I’d argue, is that by making up stories about our current predicament that absolve the people who put us here there, we cut off any chance to learn from the crisis. We need to place the blame where it belongs, to chasten our policy elites. Otherwise, they’ll do even more damage in the years ahead.

May 4, 2011

The House Financial Services Committee’s majority is expected to pass bills to cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the most important innovations in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. The bureau has one purpose: to shield consumers from unfair, misleading and deceptive lending. The purpose of the Republican bills is twofold. One is to deprive the agency of the power to fulfill its mission. Another is to attract campaign money. As long as the Senate and White House are controlled by Democrats, the bills are unlikely to become law. But by advancing them in the House, Republicans can demonstrate how thoroughly they would dismantle reform if they controlled Washington and, in the process, rake in Wall Street donations. What do the banks want in exchange? For starters, they want even stricter constraints on the agency than those that were written into the law last year — and that were expressly included to address banks’ objections to the agency. Under the law, a two-thirds majority of a panel of other financial regulators can veto rules by the consumer bureau — a constraint faced by no other government agency. One of the Republican bills would allow a simple majority of other regulators to veto bureau rules. Worse, the bill would lower the standard for exercising a veto. Under current law, a veto is allowed if other regulators deem consumer bureau rules a threat to system wide stability — a high hurdle. Under the bill, a veto would require only that other regulators find the bureau rules “inconsistent” with safety and soundness. In other words, if a rule might cause banks to be less profitable, say, by curbing tricky and excessive fees, it could be vetoed by bank-friendly regulators. Another of the Republican bills would rewrite the Dodd-Frank law so that the bureau would be managed by a five-member, bipartisan board, rather than one director — a recipe for delay and division. Yet another would block the agency from wielding its full powers until a director is confirmed by the Senate. That’s a way to hold up the agency indefinitely. President Obama and other White House officials have been aloof in the face of Republican rhetoric and bills that call for the demise of the consumer agency. The strategy seems to be to downplay the effort by ignoring it. That doesn’t generally work. In the battle to pass a budget earlier this year, the White House agreed to Republican demands for government and private-sector audits of the consumer bureau. It also agreed to a government study of financial regulation that is clearly intended to emphasize the cost — not the benefits — of regulation. Such audits and studies might seem to be mere annoyances, but as part of a larger effort to derail the consumer agency, they are dangerous steps. Unless the administration offers a quick, full-throated defense, the agency may never fulfill its promise. And the process by which Congress is bought and sold — and consumers and taxpayers are hung out to dry — will be, once again, on full display. Best government money can buy.

May 2, 2011

The international Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) compiles the latest science on how climate change has impacted the Arctic in the past six years. Their new assessment of climate change in the Arctic shows the ice in the region is melting faster than previously thought and sharply raises projections of global sea level rise this century. A summary of the key findings shows Arctic temperatures during the past six years were the highest since measurements began in 1880. It said melting Arctic glaciers and ice caps are projected to help raise global sea levels by 35 to 63 inches by 2100. That's up from a 2007 projection of 7 to 23 inches by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

May 1, 2011

Roast in hell, Motherfucker.