Month: November 2012

Ask Me Anything: Obama And Marriage Equality

Because of Hurricane Sandy, we have been unable to process new videos for the feature this week. So we dug into the new “Ask Andrew Anything” archive page to find this one from November 7, 2011:

Contrast that with my initial reaction to Obama’s surprise embrace of marriage equality on May 9:

I do not know how orchestrated this was; and I do not know how calculated it is. What I know is that, absorbing the news, I was uncharacteristically at a loss for words for a while, didn’t know what to write, and, like many Dish readers, there are tears in my eyes. So let me simply say: I think of all the gay kids out there who now know they have their president on their side.

The Election Could Go Either Way

Gelman assesses Romney's chances:

I can simultaneously (a) accept that Obama has a 72 percent chance of winning and (b) say the election is too close to call. What if the weatherman told you there was a 30 percent chance of rain — would you be shocked if it rained that day? No. To put it another way, suppose Mitt Romney pulls out 51 percent of the popular vote and wins the election. That doesn’t mean that Nate Silver skews the polls (as is suggested by this repulsive article at Examiner.com, which, among other things, criticizes Silver for being thin and having a soft voice). Romney winning the election with 51 percent of the vote is well within the margin of error, as Silver clearly indicates. That’s what too close to call is all about.

But, as psychologists like Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky have shown, people aren’t so good at thinking about probability and uncertainty. I struggle with this every day, and I can only imagine how difficult this sort of thing is for non-statisticians. 

Bringing Back New Amsterdam

Yglesias thinks Dutch ingenuity might be just what NYC needs:

The idea of essentially damning up New York Harbor sounds extreme, but that’s equivalent to what the Dutch did with the Zuiderzee Works and especially the Delta Works projects undertaken after the 1953 flood. Some of the Dutch works are permanent dijks, but others are open sluices that merely shut when storms are coming to block surges. The idea is to in effect shorten your coastline which makes it easier to defend with high walls.

John McQuaid agrees:

Ultimately, I think something like this is exactly what we’ll see in New York and other coastal cities. It sounds fanciful, but New York is simply too big and important not to protect, and a system of surge barriers and other structures is probably the only way to protect it long-term. Which is exactly the thinking behind the Dutch system.

Elsewhere, Emily Badger lists four additional ways NYC could avoid another Sandy like catastrophe, among them – elevated infrastructure:

There are very few buildings in the entire state of New York built at grade at elevations below sea level. But New York City has constructed one massive piece of infrastructure below that threshold: the subway system. As we saw this week, flooding can devastate an underground network of tunnels, train platforms and corridors. So how do you keep more of that water out? For one thing, elevating subway entrances would help. Bangkok, another low-lying city susceptible to rising tides, has built precisely these kinds of subway entrances. They’re raised a meter off the ground and include built-in floodgates. A subway rider in Bangkok must first walk up a stairway from the sidewalk before heading down into the metro.

Supreme Voting

Noah Feldman thinks that the close election will mean that both candidates will govern as centrist pragmatists – with one notable exception:

When it comes to Supreme Court appointees … the differences really are going to be stark — and they will last for a generation. Somehow the campaigns have failed to remind us that four justices are 74 or older, meaning they will be at least 78 by the end of the term. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is already 79, with Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy not far behind at 76 and Justice Stephen Breyer at 74. One hopes of course they all live long lives, but the notion that all four will still be willing and able to serve the next four years is preposterous. Several will retire and be replaced — and even one replacement could fundamentally change the configuration of the court.

Out Of The Holocene

Bill McKibben begrudingly welcomes a new era in climate change:

So far we’ve raised the temperature of the earth about one degree Celsius, and two decades ago it was hard to believe this would be enough to cause huge damage. But it was. We’ve clearly come out of the Holocene and into something else. Forty percent of the summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone; the ocean is 30 percent more acidic. There’s nothing theoretical about any of this any more. Since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere is about 4 percent wetter than it used to be, which has loaded the dice for drought and flood. In my home country, 2011 smashed the record for multibillion-dollar weather disasters—and we were hit nowhere near as badly as some.

While the presidential candidates continue to dither, at least one up-and-comer is getting the message:

Environmental activist Bill McKibben applauded New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo Wednesday for saying lessons learned from Sandy would include "the recognition that climate change is a reality." … "It’s actual experiences that change people’s minds, or let them really feel what’s going on. One wrecked subway system, I fear, equals a thousand academic studies," said McKibben, founder of the climate advocacy group 350.org.

Previous thoughts from Bill here.

Everyone Should Write

Says James Somers:

You should write because when you know that you’re going to write, it changes the way you live. I’m thinking about a book I read called Field Notes on Science & Nature, a collection of essays by scientists about their notes. It’s hard to imagine a more tedious concept — a book of essays about notes? — but in execution it was wonderful. What it teaches you, over and over again, is that the difference between you and a zoologist or you and a botanist is that the botanist, when she looks at a flower, has a question in mind. She’s trying to generate questions. For her the flower is the locus of many mental threads, some nascent, some spanning her career. Her field notebook is not some convenient way to store lifeless data to be presented in lifeless papers so that other scientists can replicate some dull experiment; it’s the site of a collision between a mind and a world.

More interesting insight:

When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular I’ll remember everything better; everything will mean more to me. That’s because everything I perceive will unconsciously engage on its way in with the substance of my preoccupation. A preoccupation, in that sense, is a hell of a useful thing for a mind.

(Hat tip: Reading By Eugene)

All Politics Is Toxic

Reviewing the series finale of "The Thick of It" (spoiler above), Brendan James underscores the unsentimentality of British TV shows compared to their American counterparts:

The series finale on Sunday was in fact a brutal affair, with every wretched minister, back-biting adviser and thickheaded secretary suffering the full consequences of their idiocy, duplicity, and cruelty — except for the really awful ones, who got off scot-free! Even the format was unsentimental. There was no extended, hour-long run time; the conclusion of seven years, four seasons and an Academy Award–nominated film was wrapped up in half an hour, business as usual. All the usual avenues for last-minute TV moralizing were blocked; anyone who attempted an onscreen monologue was heckled in real time by the other characters ("If you’re gonna go, go. Spare us the Peter Finch bullshit").

His larger point:

But the bleakness of Iannucci’s final act in Westminster was precisely the show’s last artistic success. The finale spelled out an essential truth about the world it so successfully (and sometimes prophetically) satirized: In politics, there really are no happy endings. One comes into contact with too many toxic agents, too many compromises with conscience. As the near-psychopathic senior press officer Jamie McDonald once barked in the show’s outstanding "Spinners and Losers" Christmas special: "This isn’t ‘EastEnders.’ This is politics. There’s no clean hands." The best one can do is make it out of there with some humanity intact.

In Case The Soviets Bombed Rural America

Anne Marie Wheeler explores bomb shelters from the 1961 Community Fallout Shelter Program. She visits caves that were used as shelters in sparsely populated, but militarily important, parts of Idaho:

In an area with very few large buildings capable of supporting a community shelter, and an economy that certainly wouldn’t support a new, large suburban shopping center, the cavernous landscape provided a natural, but very afterthoughtish answer to the shelter question. I haven’t found a whole lot of information about what made certain caves suitable shelters and others not, aside from the ability to create a "spot" within the cave turned shelter for less than $100 ($775 in 2012). A spot seems to have included 1 quart of water, 700 calories of food (that’s one Big Mac) per day, along with, sanitation supplies (toilet paper, cups, etc.) and radiation detection instruments for one person. No word on bunks, blankets or anything of that sort.

Unraveling Animal Speech

Ben Ambridge checks in on recent research:

Previously it was thought that the magical ability which non-human species lack is the understanding that words can be put together in different orders to express different meanings. There’s a saying in journalism: Dog Bites Man isn’t news, but Man Bites Dog is. It makes sense only because we understand that the order of the words tells us who’s doing the biting and who’s getting bitten.

However, a few species have actually passed this test. On the comprehension front, we have Phoenix and Akeakamai, two dolphins studied at the University of Hawaii, who were taught a language in which the ‘words’ were different whistle sounds played by the trainer (and chosen to approximate dolphins’ own calls). The dolphins understood that, for example, "put the pipe on the hoop" and "put the hoop on the pipe" meant different things and were able to respond accordingly, even when the exact sentence hadn’t been presented before. 

Ed Yong explains the above video: 

It sounds like a drunkard playing a kazoo, but it’s actually the call of a beluga (a white whale) called NOC. Belugas don’t normally sound like that; instead, NOC’s handlers think that his bizarre sounds were an attempt at mimicking the sounds of human speech.

(Hat tip: 3QD)

The Case For Free Transit

The French city of Châteauroux offers a good case study:

The motivations for making a transit system free are obvious. Increased ridership can relieve traffic, improve the environment, boost the system’s efficiency, give residents more spending money, help the poor, and rejuvenate central business districts.

Unfortunately, the Châteauroux report contains little large-scale analysis of the effects of the system. But as it turns out, the change nearly paid for itself. Forty-seven percent of bus-goers were already riding for free, and tickets covered only 14 percent of the city’s transit expenses. By slightly increasing the transit tax on big local businesses while eliminating the costs of printing, ticket-punching technology and the human infrastructure of ticket sales, the city turned a profit on the transit system in ’03, ’04, ’05, and ’07. Since ’08, returns have not been as positive, though the report attributes that to a shift in control from the city to the region.

The strategy wouldn't scale for larger cities, but other small cities have had success:

At the end of this year, Tallinn, Estonia (pop. 406,000) will eliminate fares on its transit system for residents, making it the world’s biggest city with free mass transit.