I love playing around with simple things on my camera. This is an example of "shallow depth of field." Using a Nikon 50 mm prime lens at an f-stop of 1.4 I was able to get the front figurine in sharp focus while leaving the back figurine blurred. The back figurine is only five inches behind the front one. Simple, but cool.
Hurricane Irene Strikes Cape Cod
Does it bother you that the news media is not so much about news as it is about profit-motivated entertainment? I'm not talking about the ideological radical right-wing attacks on the "liberal media." I'm talking about news being turned into a business, and in the process ceasing to be news and becoming all about propaganda and entertainment.
Fear and anger motivate people to do things, including watching more scary stuff on television. We are bombarded nearly nonstop with messages of fear and anger by programs claiming to be objectively reporting the news. It seems obvious that reporting the news is at the bottom of their priority list. Think about how political sex scandals dominate the news cycle for days at a time as if nothing else is happening in the world.
So it is with natural disasters like hurricanes. Is it really informative to watch news reporters struggling to keep their balance while standing in flood waters and leaning into hurricane force winds? Are we watching in the hopes of seeing one of these idiots get hammered by flying debris? Is the television news organization sending its reporters into these conditions precisely because they know the public will watch - hoping to witness something horrible on live TV?
Anyway, these thoughts were on my mind when I coerced my family into making this short video spoofing the news media. The video does, briefly, show our experience with hurricane Irene.
How Much is a Billion?
I've been thinking about the discussions going on in the news these days about the economy. The number 1 billion gets tossed around in a manner that strikes me as way too casual. I think there is a good chance that a lot of people don't really understand how big 1 billion is - a 1 with 9 zeros like this: 1,000,000,000.
Today I visited one of my favorite websites, SamHarris.org, and read Sam's latest blog post entitled "How Rich is Too Rich?" The number 1 billion came up and I was inspired to write Sam a response, which I am going to post here on my blog as well since I'm sure it won't get posted on Sam's blog.
Sam,
In your article on wealth and taxes you gave some examples of how much money the richest Americans have, but you compared them to another group of fabulously wealthy people. Given that many (most) Americans have poor math skills it might be more instructive to describe how much a billion is relative to a number the average American can understand.
As best I can tell it looks like the median American family income is somewhere around $40,000.00 to $45,000.00 per year. That means that half of Americans earn less than $45,000.00 per year and half earn more. People who earn $250,000.00 per year are easily in the top 2 or 3% of income earners in America, but $250,000.00 is still a number that most people can get their heads around.
If a person or a family earning $45,000.00 per year were to get a raise to $250,000.00 per year this would be a really big deal – more than a fivefold increase in income that would clearly change their lifestyle. If that person continued in the same job making $250,000.00 per year indefinitely it would take them four years to earn $1 million, but it would take them 4000 years to earn a billion dollars! Not many Americans will ever get their hands on a billion dollars.
The people earning average incomes are people that our society absolutely depends upon. They are police officers, firefighters, nurses, teachers, garbage collectors, postmen, construction workers, and other typical jobs that make our communities run smoothly. When these people stop doing their job the impact on the rest of us is immediately noticeable. How quickly would you notice that garbage collectors had stopped picking up the trash in your town?
On the other hand there are hedge fund managers earning between 2 – 5 billion dollars per year (remember, it takes 4000 years to earn 1 billion dollars at $250,000.00 per year). Who would miss any of these hedge fund managers if they disappeared tomorrow? What indispensable service do they provide for our nation? What could they possibly do that makes them 8,000 to 20,000 times more valuable than a medical doctor with ten years of specialized training after college? What do they do that makes them 20,000 to 50,000 times more valuable than a nurse or a school teacher?
Doctors and nurses pay income tax at a rate between 25 - 33%, but hedge fund managers pay income tax at a rate of only 15% because their income is classified as capital gains. If a hedge fund manager earning $2 billion per year were charged a tax rate of 50% that would provide the federal government with a billion dollars per year to use for schools and roads (or, sadly, bombs and bullets). Of course, the poor hedge fund manager would have to figure out how to survive on a paltry $1 billion per year, or to put it another way, slightly less than $3 million per day! It’s easy to see why they would be upset.
Monte Ladner
Education and Democracy
I just finished reading The Age of American Unreason (Vintage) by Susan Jacoby. Terrific book, but it did make me feel a little bit stupid. In fact, after I finished the book I immediately went to the Teaching Company website and ordered the 84-lecture series on the history of the United States. I’m not joking. The book exposed my inadequate knowledge of American history and shamed me into doing something about it.
My one sentence summary of the main argument in the book is that we, The United States of America, might just be the dumbest country on the planet. This remark is intentionally hyperbolic, but you do have to look hard to find countries in which people are less informed about math, science, and history than we are. Jacoby cites a 2005 finding by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development revealing that “American fifteen-year-olds ranked twenty-fourth out of twenty-nine countries in mathematical literacy.”
The book is filled with discouraging statistics about American ignorance. For example, more than half of our citizens believe in ghosts and a similar percentage reject the theory of evolution. However, the book is more than a catalog of negative data on the American mind. A sentence in her final chapter provides a succinct summation:
“Anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism flourish in a mix that includes addiction to infotainment, every form of superstition and credulity, and an education system that does a poor job of teaching not only basic skills but the logic underlying those skills.”
Right-wingers determined to justify their idiocy will dismiss Ms. Jacoby’s book as just another example of liberal America-bashing, but that would be wrong. Democracy is a full-time job requiring a serious effort to stay informed and educated. This book offers overwhelming evidence that we aren’t doing that.
Intellectual laziness results in citizens who behave as a fearful herd of knuckleheads and who are easily manipulated into voting against their own interests. Voting for a candidate because of his or her position on gay marriage while ignoring his or her record on allowing corporations to pollute our air and water really isn’t a very smart vote. Or do you seriously believe that the issue of gay marriage is more important than having clean air to breathe and clean water to drink?
Ignorance destroys the fabric of democracy and you should consider this reality when you read that presidential candidate Rick Perry is subsidizing low taxes for rich people in Texas by slashing funding for public education.
So, turn off the television, especially if it is tuned to Fox Propaganda. Unplug from your iPod. Stop text messaging about irrelevant nonsense, and stop playing video games. Read a book; it’s better for your brain and our democracy. Start with Susan Jacoby’s book.
Monte
Governors from Texas
I was born in Texas. I grew up in Texas. I went to college and medical school at the University of Texas. I still feel a twinge of undeserved pride when I say I'm from Texas.
But ...
Are there really people in this country who want another redneck, bible toting, gun slinging governor from Texas to be the next President of the United States?
What part of the last decade have we forgotten?
Macro Photography
I just got a new macro (micro) lens for my camera. The goal is to learn how to take close-up pictures of small things and achieve a high level of detail. This is a picture of an almost empty jar of peppercorns. The image quality of the original photograph has been diminished by compressing it for display on the web. Click the image to enlarge it.
Evolution
I never get tired of reading about evolution. So, I’m either a boring geek or a heretic depending on your worldview. I’m astounded with the progress of science in deciphering evolution and writing the story (a story that can be tested and verified) of how we got here.
I just finished reading Dr. Jerry Coyne’s book Why Evolution Is True
The statistics on the percentage of Americans who reject evolution (over half) is disgraceful. Turkey is the only country with a higher percentage of its population who don’t “believe” in evolution. I put “believe” in quotations because evolution is science that has to be understood not believed in and that means making the effort to read a few books. Blind faith is easier than understanding and that accounts for its greater appeal.
Another contributing factor to our national ignorance about evolution is fear. Demagogues tell us that without God we will decay into a morally bankrupt society and lose all sense of purpose in our lives. That argument is ridiculous on multiple levels starting with the fact that understanding evolution doesn’t require discarding God.
Ironically, the widely held belief that we are separate from the natural world allows us to persist in our morally reprehensible pollution of the environment. We are part of nature and understanding evolution is the best way to maintain that perspective. It may also be the best way to save us from ourselves.
Read the book.
Monte
Cars and the Environment
I'm reading a book called Something New Under the Sun, which is a catalog of human environmental misadventures. Here's a crazy fact I just read: Making a single car produces as much air pollution as driving the car for ten years!
MonteSeagulls
Click image to enlarge
Swan
The Dog
Spring Break
Global Conflict and Climate Change
In January of 2010 the Pentagon revealed that it is now including the impact of climate change in its planning for future issues that might require military intervention. Several possible crisis scenarios were cited by Pentagon planners including humanitarian disasters and violent conflict resulting from food and water shortages and extreme weather events like drought and flooding.
Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times on February 6, 2011 about rising world food prices in response to reduced food production, especially a failed wheat crop due to drought in Russia last year. He made the case that the decrease in food production is partly a consequence of extreme weather conditions. The Wall Street Journal reported that the drought in Russia last summer reduced their wheat crop by 40%, and was the worst drought they had suffered in 100 years.
Rising wheat and food prices have been identified as one of the causes of current rioting in Egypt and other Arab countries. This is the sort of social instability created by climate change that Pentagon planners are concerned about.
The worst drought in 60 years in the wheat growing region of China began in September, 2010 and could lead to severe shortages of wheat and corn that may require China to begin importing grain, which it doesn’t usually do. If China has to import a large amount of grain it will cause another spike in world grain prices, which will impact poor nations most severely leaving large populations with food shortages, and the possibility of social unrest. The Chinese drought is also leaving millions of Chinese with drinking water shortages.
In 2010 there was unprecedented flooding in Australia, extreme snowstorms in America, and a severe drought affecting the Amazon rain forest. The 2010 Amazon drought was even worse than the 2005 Amazon drought which was believed at the time to be a “once-in-a-century” drought. An article in the Huffington Post notes the Amazon rain forest generally soaks up significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the air, but the two droughts in 2005 and 2010 will actually cause the forest to produce excess carbon dioxide over the short term from the trees that died and are now producing carbon dioxide as they decay.
How much longer will we keep buying the fossil fuel-industry-funded misinformation campaign that climate change isn’t happening, or at least isn’t related to their product? Or, asked another way: Are we smart enough to save ourselves from our shocking gullibility?
References:
Pentagon to rank global warming as a destabilizing force
Pentagon Planning for Global Warming
Krugman blog: Speaking of Extreme Weather
Krugman editorial: Droughts, Floods, and Food
Wall Street Journal: When Will Russia Resume Grain Exports Again?
Evolution and America - Part 1
The data on what Americans believe about evolution and creationism is disturbing, at least to me. This is going to be the topic of my next few blog posts and probably my next video. Gallup polls on the issue have collected some interesting, and not always easy-to-interpret, data. Here are just a few “teaser” points that I hope to explore more deeply in forthcoming posts:
About a third of Americans report they believe the Bible to be literally true word for word.
Another 47% believe that the Bible is inspired by the word of God.
Less than 20% believe that the Bible is a collection of ancient myths.
Around 40% of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form less than 10,000 years ago, and that evolution played no role in our development as a species.
Less than 20% of Americans believe that humans evolved from other life forms over millions of years without the input of God.
Nearly three quarters of Americans think that a presidential candidate’s views on evolution are irrelevant.
There is more, but I’ll save it for later.
The thing that surprised me the most about these Gallup statistics is that they haven’t changed much in the past thirty years. I am sure that I was not aware of the widespread rejection of evolution in the early 1980’s, but in 1982 only 9% of the population believed that humans evolved without the help of God, and 44% believed that God created humans in their present form less than 10,000 years ago. The fact that I had just earned my undergraduate degree in Biology in 1981 and started medical school that same year probably accounts for why I thought “everybody understands evolution”.
We might actually be inching towards a wider acceptance of evolution, but I wouldn’t suspect that based on the voices getting the most attention in the mainstream media.
Why is this important? I think understanding evolution reflects the overall level of education in a given society and thus their (our) ability to think rationally about all issues.
In upcoming posts and videos I’ll review a study that looked at the relationship between beliefs about creationism and measures of morality in various countries, including America.
References:
1. Evolution, Creationism, Intelligent Design – Gallup Polls
2. One-Third of Americans Believe Bible is Literally True
Monte
Freethinkers
I just started reading Susan Jacoby's book, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism
After a hundred pages I can say that I like it. The feud between religion and rational thinking has been with our country from the beginning and this book takes a good look at how it has played out.
The book is a few years old and she already has two new titles out, but I think it's an important topic.
Monte
Climate Change and Food Production
I Just read Paul Krugman's editorial in today's NYT.
How bad and obvious will climate change have to get before people stop denying it and start working to solve the problem? Sadly, it appears that global appreciation of global warming will finally occur only after it is way too late.
Monte
Christian Nation?
I took a look at the Constitution and some other historical documents to better understand the intention of the guys who wrote it.
Read Morepower out!
The combination of wind and snow is intermittently knocking out our power. Changing batteries in the lamp in the dark turns out to be harder than expected.
happy holidays
Happy Holidays.
my plan to save the world - part 1
In this video I share some thoughts about the impact of cars on our culture, our environment, our health, and our "war on terrorism." Would we do better to ride bicycles?
References:
2. NYT article on mideast oil and terrorism
3. T. Boone Pickens on funding both sides of the war on terrorism
4. Thomas Friedman editorial: The Big American Leak
5. Wikileaks: How Cash Flows to Terrorists: