Month: April 2014

Bonnie Tsui chides our aversion to ugly produce, which results in massive waste:

A recent report commissioned by the U.K. global food security program shows that of a given crop of fruit or vegetables grown in the country, up to 40 percent is rejected because it doesn’t meet retailer standards on size or shape. That’s a sizable chunk of the $31.3 billion of food that gets jettisoned in Britain every year. American supermarkets lose $15 billion each year in unsold fruits and vegetables. American consumers like their apples red and their bananas unspotted, so grocery stores comply—sometimes even dyeing and cutting to fit.

Changing mainstream culture to accept a crooked cucumber has bigger implications than just cost. Given that 20 to 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, food waste is a huge piece of the global climate problem. Last month, a new study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change revealed scientists’ deep concerns about dropping agricultural production—as much as 2 percent per decade for the rest of the century. The panel’s researchers have also found that though minor improvements can be made to improve efficiency in agriculture, the real game changers will lie on the consumption side.

(Image via Flickr user comedynose)

Kent Sepkowitz explains how the 16-year-old boy who stowed away in the wheel well of a Hawaiian Airlines flight from San Jose to Maui on Sunday survived the ordeal:

[A] confluence of dangers sometimes works to some small advantage.

The extreme cold of the upper atmosphere—wheel well riders have had body temperatures recorded at around 80 degrees Fahrenheit—slows the body’s cellular activities, sharply reducing the demand by cells for oxygen. A normal person becomes unconscious—comatose really—in this extreme cold. Just as once in a while, a drowning victim will survive because the extreme cold water acted in a similar fashion to suspend normal function, so too does some lucky wheel well stowaway occasionally make it back to the ground alive. According to the FAA data, younger men, like this week’s 16-year-old, are the survivors.

That is, unless they fall out as the plane lands:

The bodies of stowaways falling from airplanes on final approach has happened a few times in recent history, including on flights from Angola to London and from Charlotte, N.C. to Boston. The FAA lists several instances where a stowaway managed to survive the extreme temperatures with little oxygen, only to fall to his or her death when the airplane started to land.

David was originally intended for the buttress of the Florence Cathedral. But William E. Wallace figures that Michelangelo knew that at a weight of 8.5 tons, devising a proper support system for the sculpture would be “an impossible task.” The artist “realized the impossibility of the job from the earliest moment, even before he began carving the figure,” insists Wallace. “This realization, in effect, liberated him”:

Given the familiarity of the David, it is difficult for us to appreciate just how novel it is. Despite many highly regarded precedents in Florentine art for the representation of David, Michelangelo carved a unique work: an oversize, illogically nude figure with almost no identifying attributes. One could hardly imagine a more peculiar means of representing the young shepherd boy of the Bible, nor a more inappropriate figure to adorn the cathedral. I believe David looks as it does because Michelangelo, realizing that it would not be placed on the cathedral buttress, was free to carve a completely original work. And that is precisely what he did.

(Photo by John W. Schulze)

Counterintuitively, Jeffrey Rosen argues that liberals should be happy about the Schuette ruling:

In cases like affirmative action bans, where citizens (including minority citizens) vigorously disagree about whether the policy in question are likely to harm minorities or help them, the conservatives held, the court should practice judicial restraint and defer to democratic decision making. Breyer didn’t need to hold his nose to support this. Far from it. He enthusiastically defended the importance of letting democratically accountable bodies decide whether affirmative action should be adopted or rejected. …

Liberal defenders of affirmative action should embrace Breyer’s reasoning, rather than reluctantly tolerating it. The framework provides a principled reason for criticizing conservatives when they resort to judicial activism to strike down state policies that permit affirmative action. As Breyer wrote: the Constitution “favors decisionmaking though the democratic process. Just as this principle strongly supports the right of the people, or their elected representatives, to adopt race-conscious policies for reasons of inclusion, so must it give them the right to vote not to do so.”

Richard Kahlenberg thinks race-based affirmative action is on its way out, which he says is a good thing:

In 2012, my colleague Halley Potter and I examined a number of states that had outlawed considering race in admissions, often by voter referendum. In addition to Michigan, these states include Arizona, California, Florida, Nebraska, Washington and others. Six states, we found, have spent money to create new partnerships with disadvantaged schools to improve the pipeline of low-income and minority students.

Eight states have provided new admissions preferences to low-income and working-class students of all races. Eight states have expanded financial-aid budgets to support the needs of economically disadvantaged students. In three states, individual universities have dropped legacy preferences for the generally privileged—and disproportionately white—children of alumni. In three states, colleges created policies to admit students who graduated at the top of their high-school classes. And in two states, stronger programs have been created to facilitate transfer from community colleges to four-year institutions.

How well have these programs done in promoting racial and ethnic diversity? In examining 10 leading public universities, we found that seven were able to maintain, or exceed, the proportion of African American and Latino students they had achieved through racial preferences in the past. So it can be done.

Frum also supports the “class, not race” argument:

Lyndon Johnson’s America was a country slashed by a color line of racial domination and subordination. Even the most affluent black citizen of the United States could expect to face humiliating economic and social discrimination. Meanwhile, the white majority overwhelmingly regarded itself as “middle class,” standing on a more or less equal footing with other “middle-class” whites.

Today’s America is a country whose class distinctions are growing as extreme as those in Edwardian England. Johnson’s assumption that non-black Americans all enjoyed more or less equivalent opportunities “to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities” seems poignantly out of date. A white skin may still correlate less with poverty than does a darker skin. But that skin alone long ago ceased to convey much in the way of privilege to the less affluent half of white America.

It’s true, even Oprah can encounter rude treatment in a Swiss boutique. Day in, day out, however, William Julius Wilson’s prediction has been vindicated and more than vindicated: In 21st-century America, class trumps race.

But Julianne Hing points out that class-based solutions don’t always help black students:

California, for one, has yet to recover from the disastrous impact of Proposition 209, the nation’s first statewide affirmative action ban, which state voters passed in 1996. Despite adopting aggressively class-based, race-neutral admissions policies to stay in line with Prop 209, the state’s flagship universities have not been able to return black student enrollment to their pre-1996 levels.

Today, California’s university system is educating an increasingly economically diverse but racially isolated crop of students. Roughly one-third of University of California undergrads qualify for federal Pell Grants, but in 2012-2013, black students made up just 2.4% of UC-Berkeley’s enrolled undergrads. African-Americans, meanwhile, make up about 6.6% of the state’s population. The economic workaround is not working alone.

It’s hard to say:

Dogs have lived with us for as many as 30,000 years—20,000 years longer than cats. More than any other animal on the planet, dogs are tuned in to the “human radio frequency”—the broadcast of our feelings and desires. Indeed, we may be the only station dogs listen to.

Cats, on the other hand, can tune us in if they want to (that’s why they pass the pointing test as well as dogs), but they don’t hang on our every word like dogs do. They’re surfing other channels on the dial. And that’s ultimately what makes them so hard to study. Cats, as any owner knows, are highly intelligent beings. But to science, their minds may forever be a black box.

Still, there may be hope. As scientists begin to experiment with new ways to study animal intelligence—from eye-tracking technology to fMRI machines—they may yet find a way to peek inside the feline mind.