myself, news, politics, radio, scheming
In Stating the Obvious, learning, linux on August 28, 2009 at 3:47 pm
I’ve been kicking around the right way to announce a thing I announced to my colleagues a week ago. That thing being that I’m leaving Gotham Gazette. The reasons are both simple and complex, but the simplest is that the publication really, really needs someone to evaluate web analytics tools not someone to tackle the big, fun, challenging question of why New Yorkers aren’t more interested in public policy. Well, I think they do need the latter, but fundamental scarcity of resources means that the former is winning out.
These are good questions, though. The civic engagement ones, I mean. Is it because we think policy is impenetrable and our legislators are all bought? Is it because we don’t notice that land use decisions matter until developers are breaking ground on a sky rise across the street? That we think the game is won already? I’m not sure, but I think changing the way people think about local policy is a really interesting part of our project here.
Read the rest of this entry »
art, artists, Brooklyn, local, news, NYC, organizing, politics, software freedom, unions
In Stating the Obvious, various on April 29, 2009 at 5:52 pm
Eventually: my promised report back on the Pirate Bay talk, which was great, and after which Mister Mux Tape explained that commercial software is, by its very nature, better than free and open source software and then asked me if I worked for the FSF when I called him on that bizarre and baseless assertion. I’m not even talking about Apache here. Or I am, but at the present moment, Open Office is better documented than the MS Office suite. And calc’s financial functions are just plain better. I didn’t point out that I don’t think that the Free Software Foundation really has the staff resources to travel the Eastern seaboard heckling speakers at community arts talks. I also didn’t point out that there are people in this world (no really, there are!) who hold opinions they aren’t paid to hold and expertise on subjects they are not professional lobbyists on behalf of.
Actually, I could kind of wrap that one up and repeat what we already know which is that the Bureau of Piracy is great, you should take a look at the links on the original post and (this is the part I hope you already know) that the real problem with the prosecution of the buccaneers is about free speech. Not about my right to swap music willy-nilly, copyright be damned (another thing I didn’t say to Mux Man: there is, I think, a big difference between software and music) but about whether a file sharing platform should be held accountable for the files shared over it. Particularly in a world where some musicians do want to make large files (their own) available free of charge and politically significant data sets can be a difficult thing to host on your own little server. Fundamentally, neither the laws nor the recording industry have kept up with the modern world and it is worth asking why that is really the fault of the Pirate Bureau.
That was rough. I might come back and try to make it sound a little coherent. Read the rest of this entry »
agriculture, bicycle, ecology, local, nutrition, sustainability
In Stating the Obvious on March 24, 2008 at 4:48 am
I was telling some lovely people, just this afternoon, about how my original purpose here was to keep track of just how many times scientists can possibly re-discover that red wine and chocolate are good for you in moderation. I was telling them this because I just read two articles (both in Harpers) that speak to a piece of the thesis.
- Tasmanian devils afflicted with a contagious cancer. Moral of the story: lack of biodiversity can really fuck with your immune system. Or, rather, your immune system can only function if you are a little bit different from the people you share germs (or viruses or cancerous cells) with. Industrial agriculture might be damn efficient when it works, but we’re inviting famine by basing a nation’s diet on a corn monocrop. Meanwhile, most news outlets seem to miss the point altogether. The story they tell is that there is new evidence that cancer could be contagious. They skip the whole part about the tiny gene pool among Tasmanian devils. Biodiversity.
- Also in Harper’s this month, a story about raw milk, pasteurization and replacing health with sterilization. About how healthy cows fed on grass aren’t nearly as prodigious as cows fed on protein slurry and shot full of antibiotics, and about how people who live antibacterial worlds have higher incidence of auto immune disorders. About how on a small scale, the sort of scale where dairy farming is truly sustainable, raw milk isn’t really so risky. About how on commercial dairy scales, we rely entirely on pasteurization to clean milk that is foul when it leaves the cow. Foul. Morals of the story: biodiversity is good for our guts, too. And a healthy immune system is one that is in balance, not one that has been scrubbed clean. We’re complicated ecosystems. One thing engineering won’t cut it.
- We rode out to Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pies yesterday. Highly recommended, even if the limes do kind of fail the food shed test. Cooked up a fantasy that we could stop for a drink at LaNell’s. You can’t. You can buy a whole bottle of rye and take it with you to a quiet alley (we didn’t) but LaNell’s is a shop. I think we even knew that, and yet we persuaded ourselves.
I’m looking forward to Edible Manhattan. Will it hold the keys to midtown?
Also, I love that I know a secret handshake. When you meet a librarian, you can say things like “oh? you are a librarian? Why, Jenna Freedman is a friend of mine.” Try it. Jenna is more famous than I’d realized. Today I met someone who wrote a thesis on Jessamyn West. Thinking back, I wish I’d gotten more details. We did have a good conversation about my latest big question, which is something fascinating about how to do substantive things with data and databases instead of laying a bunch of shiny baubles out for the magpies.
nutrition, Stating the Obvious
In Stating the Obvious on October 23, 2006 at 8:56 pm
red wine can help prevent stroke damage: study (Reuters, Oct 15, 06)
In which mice respond well to wine. Roughly, strokes hurt less.
Red wine, in moderation, is good for you. Where ever have I heard this before?
One day I’ll figure out how to explain that moderation to my mind comes out to a lot less than two glasses a day. I know that is the standard for moderation.
In Stating the Obvious on October 23, 2006 at 8:53 pm
Reuters, Oct 13, 2006
Polyunsaturated fatty acids improve heart disease
In which some Italians find that patients who have had heart attacks benefit from a supplement that adds poly unsaturaed fatty acids into their diet.
Polyunsaturated fats are the stuff in nuts and seeds. We already knew that they are good for you, at least in the “replace your palm oil with safflower oil” sort of good for you.
So you can take a supplement or you can just eat a well balanced diet rich in whole grains (which often contain polyunsaturated fatty acids) and a variety of fruits and vegetables.
In Stating the Obvious on October 23, 2006 at 8:48 pm
(Reuters, Oct 12, 2006) : New York subway could be damaging to ears
Could be? I cannot have a phone conversation (you’d think I would have stopped trying by now) on the Manhattan bridge because I can’t hear a thing over the passing trains. I thought we already knew that deafening roars are not good for your poor ears.
And don’t give me that lecture about people who talk on cell phones in public–it doesn’t count if I am alone walking over the bridge.
In Stating the Obvious on October 23, 2006 at 8:47 pm
URL: Eating bread ‘raises cancer risk’ (Oct 20, 2006, BBC News)
URL: High bread consumption tied to kidney cancer (Oct 20, 2006, Reuters)
Observation 1: if you actually read the articles, it turns out that the connection between bread and kidney cancer is tenuous at best. A fairly small study found a correlation between high consumption of bread and pasta and renal cell cancer, and the study was based on people’s own recollections of their diet. They don’t say anything about what a diet “high in bread” actually looks like or what kind of bread they are talking about.
Look up the glycemic index: it turns out that what they are probably saying is that the problem is highly refined carbohydrates. Which brings my to my longstanding assertion:
Observation 2: Eat a diet high in a variety of whole grains with minimal refined grains and sugars.
Stating the Obvious
In Stating the Obvious on October 23, 2006 at 8:43 pm
Two drinks daily help men avoid heart attack: study
Oh look! Two drinks a day. This is part of the original thesis, alcohol in moderation.
Between 1986 and 2002, 106 of the men had heart attacks, including eight out of 1,282 who downed about two drinks daily, compared to 28 of another 1,889 who did not drink at all.
There were nine heart attacks in a group of 714 men who drank more than two drinks daily, and 34 in a group of 2,252 who drank less than two a day.
Having just finished my second little hot buttered rum this evening, I’m decidedly tipsy and thinking that two drinks a day sounds boozy to me. (speaking of complimentary medicine–my yoga class was cancelled today so I came home and had a drink instead).
In case you don’t feel like doing the math, here are the numbers from their study:
| Daily Drinks |
Heart Attacks |
Number of Men |
| non drinkers |
1.48% |
1889 |
|
1-2 |
|
1.51% |
|
2252 |
|
2 a day |
|
0.62% |
|
1282 |
|
3 or more |
|
1.26% |
|
714 |
I know that men and women are different and all, but by these numbers, I need to drink more.
In Stating the Obvious on October 23, 2006 at 8:30 pm
URL: Vegetables slow memory loss in old age: study
(10/23/2006, Reuters)
In which scientists discover that aging folks who report eating the most leafy green vegetables experience the least memory loss. Yellow squashes and cruciferous vegetables came in a close second, benefit wise.
Elderly people who reported eating at least 2.8 servings of vegetables
a day compared to people who ate less than one serving a day saw their
rate of memory loss and other mental decline slow by 40 percent over
six years, the researchers found.
I have to stop using that “stop the presses” line, but look what science found? Eating leafy green vegetables is good for you. Got that?
Stating the Obvious
In Stating the Obvious on October 23, 2006 at 8:26 pm
URL: Congress Members Seek Action on Newtown Creek (NY Times, 10/17/06)
In which Thomas Leuck reports that 56 years after the famous Greenpoint oil spill, Exxon is trying to blame someone else (anyone else) for the benzene and methane in the ground under most of Greenpoint. The oil, they concede is their problem, but the rest someone else left there.
“No no,” they said. “You can trust us, it will be a really really clean facility. Modern technology will ensure that nothing toxic leaks into your ground and water.”
And when it does leak, they’ll bluster and deny until everyone has moved on. “It wasn’t me. ” I’m not even saying that Exxon is lying, I’m saying that we trust industrial production facilities way too much as it is, and yet somewhere out there Rush is making his case about over-regulation of American industry. When has corporate America ever taken responsibility for the havoc they wreak on the air, water and ground?
Sing along with me now, “How could I forget that I had given her an extra key …”
