A Change in the Wind

John D. MacDonald: Nature's tricks of interdependence

The Florida-based mystery writer John D. MacDonald, who like his funny counterpart Carl Hiassen unabashedly displays a wide streak of caring for the land and the sea on which he lives, tells a story about the way of buzzards in The Lonely Silver Rain. This is the 21st and last of his great series of Travis McGee novels.  

His flinty anti-hero McGee has, with much work and no small share of brilliance, tracked down a wealthy client's  missing boat, which unhappily turns out to have been the scene of a triple murder. McGee is the first to have found it, except for the buzzards. 

...the closer I got to her, the more disreputable she looked -- like an elegant lady who had stepped into the wrong bar on New Year's Eve. 

A lot of her varnish had been sprayed lavatory green and it had begun to flake off...a sudden shift of the breeze changed the look of the vessel and the shape of the day. It brought that thick ripe sweet stink of death and decay. I killed the motor and curved the skiff away from the stink, and as I did so, I noticed three buzzards in a dead mangrove which stood taller than the rest. Black sentinels defeated by the geography of a cruiser. They were never going to flap down to the cockpit deck, waddle down the steps to the feast. You seldom see them out on the islands, except after a red tide has washed the big dead fish onto the mud beaches. I hvae a friend who disbelieved the experts who say birds have no sense of smell, and so one summer out in the ranchlands north of Sarasota, he tested them. Before danw he would put dead meat under a white wooden box, and spread several identical boxes around the area with nothing under them. The buzzards would circle above them for a time, and then would always come down to clumsy landings aorund the baited box, ignoring the others. 

And then he realized that maybe it wasn't a keen sense of smell but instead remarkable eyesight. The carrion flies always arrive first. They have a shiny metallic-looking blue-green abdomen, and maybe the buzzards can spot the glintings from a thousand feet on high. Nature has many little tricks which reinforce the interdependence of the species. 

Yes, plausible. On the story about condors I did a few weeks back, I learned that condors find their meals in part by looking down on crows and buzzards from above, and preying on their carrion finds. 

For Mother's Day, a spiked New Yorker cover

From a fun new site called Blown Covers, a New Yorker cover that could have been:

 

Mitt Romney: Worse than George W. Bush?

One of this country's lesser-known great writers, Edmund White, writes for The New Yorker about the Cranbrook School, where Romney and a gang of followers ritually humiliated a gay classmate in l965. 

White attended the school, just as Mitt Romney did, but a few years earlier, and as a gay person. He speculates about Romney's motivations for his so-called "pranks":

Romney was not a good student nor was he athletic; he was the manager of one of the school teams, a sort of default position for boys who wanted to be athletic and cool and popular—a water boy, in essence. He was considered a class clown, always up to rather cruel pranks. I can picture his situation, though it’s only speculation on my part (I’ve never known any of his friends, though one of his older brothers was a classmate). On the one hand he had an embarrassingly famous father, the governor of Michigan, whom he idolized as the youngest child. On the other he was the sole Mormon, a member of what was definitely seen as a creepy, stigmatized cult in that world of bland Episcopalian Wasps (we had Episcopalian services at chapel three mornings a week). When his father was president of American Motors, he lived at home and was a day student, an envied status. When his father was elected governor and moved to the state capital of Lansing, he became a boarder. Suddenly he was surrounded by other Cranbrook students and the strict “masters,” 24/7. He no longer had the constant support of his tight-knit family. Now he had to win approval from the other boys.

No wonder he became a daring and even violent prankster. He who worried about his own marginal status couldn’t bear the presence of an unapologetic sissy like [John] Lauber, with his long bleached hair (the Mormons, then as now, have insisted on a neat, traditional, conservative appearance, especially in their young missionary men whom they send out all over the world). In scorning and shearing a sissy student and leading a gang of five other boys in this “prank,” Romney may have felt popular and in the right for the first time. According to one of Romney’s repentant accomplices, [his gay victim] Lauber was terrified, weeping and begging for help.

Interestingly, the same year that Romney was cruelly terrifying a "sissy" classmate, George W. Bush, also a cheerleader, was protecting a "sissy" classmate being teased by his friends: 

Lanny Davis, who knew Bush at Yale, and admired him in many ways, despite being on the other side of the fence politically, recalls the incident:

[A student] we all believed to be gay walked by, although the word we used in those days was "queer." Someone, I'm sorry to say, snidely used that word as he walked by.

George heard it and, most uncharacteristically, snapped: "Shut up." Then he said, in words I can remember almost verbatim: "Why don't you try walking in his shoes for a while and see how it feels before you make a comment like that?"

Remember, this was the 1960s -- pre-Stonewall, before gay rights became a cause many of us (especially male college students) had thought much about. I remember thinking, "This guy is much deeper than I realized."

George Bush, thoughtful and sensitive, putting Mitt Romney to shame. Who would've thunk? 

Andrew Revkin: on climate change in a post-media world

Covered a talk by the dean of climate reporters, Andrew Revkin, last week at UCSB, for the Santa Barbara Independent. In part because he got so sick of "the yelling" around climate, a couple of years ago Revkin gave up traditional reporting to teach at Pace University, and to run the great Dot Earth blog on sustainability (and related questions, such as climate) for the New York Times.

This year, seemingly in a better mood, Revkin is promoting the concept of the Knowosphere, a portal for the exchange of ideas useful in getting us humans through "the bottleneck" that E.O. Wilson spoke of a decade ago. Revkin brought up the analogy of yeast bacteria in a sugar solution in a petri dish. They will multiply until they consume all the food, or until they foul their nest with waste, or both, and crash.

In his talk, Revkin pointed out that:

"Scientists for the last fifty years have been saying, "Hey, there's an edge to the petri dish!" Essentially the question is will we be able to find a "peak us" before nature imposes a limit on us." 

Revkin had some nifty examples of how Internet ideas have proved useful in facing problems; for instanct, a site for Pennsylvania residents called Fraktrack, that puts all public documents relating to hydraulic fracking on-line in a searchable form. He also thinks education -- which can teach the well-accepted fundamentals of climate science to young people -- offers hope.

But when it comes to "the yelling," in an answer to my question, Revkin put it with pithy vigor:

“In a post-media world, which is what we’re entering, it’s a great opportunity for institutions, or for individuals who understand these issues, to create a new space for scientific discussion,” he explained. “I think that’s the way forward.”

On the one hand, he's absolutely right about "the yelling." My little story led to immediate attacks on Revkin, inadvertently and ironically proving his point, and making me feel guilty for causing him pain.

On the other hand, I'm troubled by his blithe reference to a "post-media world."

Really? Do we not use the media and need the media today as much as we did twenty-five years ago?

To be specific, aren't we actually more dependent on The New York Times than ever?

The culture without the media. Talk about a post-apocalyptic landscape...

Eulogy for a watershed: Tam Valley in Marin County

My good friend David Healy sends along a touching/troubling essay about the development of his Marin County town, Tam Valley, in the days of his and my youth, approximately fifty years ago. 

When I was a kid in the valley, we didn't need "facilities." We had the hills to hike in and the fields to play football in. Recreation was spontaneous, creative, inventive.

I remembered again Coyote Creek made sterile, and Corte Madera Creek and Tamalpais Creek, and the creeks of Terra Linda, Lucas Valley, and Novato following suit. I thought of all the marshes long since filled, like the ones where Redwood High School and Mill Valley's new Middle School now stand, and I wondered what the students in these schools know about the heritage that could have been theirs.

Not much, I guess. They study biology in text books while the great marshes rot under them, beneath six feet of "clean fill."

I thought again about my Tam Valley childhood, and I realized that almost everything I know about the natural world I learned during those years. Most of what I studied in college text books I have forgotten, but childhood experiences have stayed with me. Those years cannot be repeated; every wild place of significance which I knew as a kid is gone, transformed, sanitized, "brought up to standard." I realized, standing in that desolate asphalt and weed covered school yard, that when I wrote LIVING WATER, a story about the Sierras and the mighty watershed of the Sacramento River, I was really writing a eulogy for the little watersheds of my childhood creeks, and that THIS LIVING EARTH, which traces the learning process my wife and I experienced in the San Geronimo Valley and West Marin, is just as much an epitaph for the house--covered Tam Valley grasslands.

Though published in l973, David Cavagnaro's writing remains as potent and as relevant as ever.What will our future look like, when kids today -- in Marin County and around the world -- grow up away from nature? 

At least we have some idea of the past. Here's a favorite painting of Marin by William Keith, from 1869, before it was "brought up to standard." 

It's called San Anselmo Valley near San Rafael. 

The Sierras: A lot younger than they look

The Sierra Nevada mountains are nowhere near as old as they look; geologically, they're shockingly young. That's the news from David Perlman, a science writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. 

The mountains of the Sierra Nevada are still rising, and they're a lot younger than most scientists previously thought.

That's the conclusion of Earth scientists in Nevada who have used space-based radar and the most advanced GPS measurements to conclude that the entire range is now rising at a rate of one to two millimeters a year - less than an inch a decade - and in its modern form could be less than 3 million years old.

Perlman writes this story so well you can forget it's geological in nature. His lede touches on an underlying reality, as psychological as it is scientific: When you're in the mountains they can seem impossibly ancient.

Interestingly, their most famous fan, despite living in the 19th century with zero access to this sort of data, was forever insisting on their youth and creativity.

Whether or not we humans can see it:  

"Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everyting in endless song out of one beautiful form into another." 

[So wrote John Muir, in "Yosemite National Park"] 

And this gives me a chance to put up the latest of Tom Killion's work from the High Sierra. His colors are characteristically wild, even as he perfectly frames a classic Sierra scene, from the deservedly popular Rae Lakes area near Kearsarge Pass; and well, I just have to post it. 

How to salve the pain of long-term unemployed: Retire

Could early retirement be even better for the long-term unemployed than marriage?

A new study by a team of German economists tests a theory that suggests so. The thery posits that we all have a "identity utility," and thus the unhappiness we feel due to unemployment -- which in countries like Germany and even the US probably doesn't mean hunger or great deprivation -- comes from the sense that we are abnormal, that we have failed, because we aren't doing our jobs. 

...unemployment makes those people who consider themselves part of a social category “able-to-work members of society”, but who are no longer able to meet one of the most important norms of that group (ie being employed), unhappy.

To confirm this interpretation and to isolate this cause for the unhappiness of the long-term unemployed from other causes, we focus on a very special event in the life of the long-term unemployed – retirement (Hetschko et al 2011). Entering retirement brings about a change in the social category, but does not change anything else in the lives of the long-term unemployed. When a long-term unemployed person retires, she is still out of work, but she no longer identifies herself with the social category of those “able to work”, but rather with that of the retired. Retirees are no longer subjected to the social norm of having to be employed, thus evoking an increase in the identity utility and the wellbeing of the long-term unemployed. 

Could retirement really make that big a difference? Yes. According to this graph, life satisfaction jumps by an average of .3 on a scale of 1-10, after retirement among the long-term unemployed, and among men who have been unemployed for a long time, by .7 or even more.  

That's a greater life satisfaction increase than marriage, which comes in at a mere .2. [Of course, this is in Germany, where secure retirements are the social norm.]

Via Suzy Khimm. 

To see the Prez, it helps to be a whale

In Las Vegas, to be a "whale" -- a high roller -- you have to be ready to live large, even if it costs $500,000 an hour.

It's a little like what you have to do if you want to get into the White House and see the President. Big bucks, as this graphic shows. Perhaps coincidentally, it's known as the "Blue Whale": 

Other representations of related data, with other spirit animal names, are posted on a fascinating and apparently new site devoted to representing numerical facts in graphic form, a tumblr (of all things) called ChartsnThings. 

The proprietor, New York Times graphics editor named Kevin Quealy, discusses how he "cleans up" the data by putting it through programs. Correlation comes in various forms: Working in R is necessary but "unsexy," he says, for example.  He briefly explains how to explicate datasets with various tools. 

Could this be the fastest possible delivery of fact to mind? 

How to live forever: become a pop music star

This year at Coachella, the late great Tupac Shakur performed live with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre.

You can see it for yourself: 

Okay, yes, it's digital trickery, employing unimaginably vast quantities of data, but still -- it's pretty awesome. I'm ready to see the Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain versions, which are promised soon.

Why not? Isn't this the underlying promise of pop music stardom -- immortality?

[Ed. note: Correction! This was actually not a hologram, but an old stage trick -- but a comment on the story linked above once said that the creators are working to bring back other artists.] 

Rilke: gathering the sweetnessnesses of plant love

While walking the Appalachian Trail with a friend a couple of weeks ago, all through Georgia and into far western North Carolina I found myself in the company of wild violets. Brought to mind this quote from the fourth of Rilke's wide-ranging and ever-fascinating Letters to a Young Poet:

...all beauty in plants and animals is a quiet enduring form of love and longing...patiently and willingly uniting and increase and growing, not out of physical delight, not out of physical suffering, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain and more powerful than will and withstanding. O that man might take this secret, of which the world is full even to its littlest things, more humbly to himself and bear it, more seriously and feel how terribly difficult it is, instead of taking it lightly. 

In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling [the mind] with sublimity and exaltation. And those who come together in the night and are entwined in rocking delight do an earnest work and gather sweetnessnessses, gather depth and strength for the some of some coming poet, who will arise to speak of ecstasies beyond telling.