Did you know about these ten things?

From the BBC. Some more hilarious than others!

1. Breaking wind is a bookable offence in football.
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2. Black soldiers fighting for the Free French Forces were removed from the unit which led the liberation of Paris to ensure a "whites only" victory.
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3. Many of the mosques in Islam's holiest city, Mecca, point the wrong way.
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4. Britain pays an annual sum to Ireland to cover healthcare costs of Irish workers who have returned home.
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5. Jellied hoof meat from horses is a delicacy in Siberia.
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6. Potholes are aggravated by cold weather.
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7. Car ownership in India is about nine per thousand people.
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8. Mexico City was once a floating city.
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9. Six percent of England's streets are littered with rubber bands.
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10. More than 97% of all e-mail traffic is spam.
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narcissism run amok

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Asian Immigrants should "Americanize" names? WTF?

As the LA Times correspondent notes, speechless we are:

Republican Betty Brown said this week she thinks Americans of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent should change their names to make it easier for poll workers to identify them.

According to the Houston Chronicle, the comment came late Tuesday as the House Elections Committee heard testimony from Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Ko told the committee that people of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent often have problems voting because they may have a legal trans-literated name and then a common English name used on driver’s licenses or school registrations.

Brown, who with her husband Ron operates a ranch near Terrell on land that has been in her family for four generations, suggested that Asian Americans should find a way to make their names more accessible. She said:

Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here? ... Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?

No word on how Ko responded. Perhaps, like us, he was speechless.

Very depressing: Bush/Cheney era lives on

People laughed Ralph Nader off when he often compared the two major parties as tweedledum and tweedledee. Watch this video and think about Nader's remarks:

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Via Glenn Greenwald, who writes:

Several weeks ago, I noted that unlike the Right -- which turned itself into a virtual cult of uncritical reverence for George W. Bush especially during the first several years of his administration -- large numbers of Bush critics have been admirably willing to criticize Obama when he embraces the very policies that prompted so much anger and controversy during the Bush years. Last night, Keith Olbermann -- who has undoubtedly been one of the most swooning and often-uncritical admirers of Barack Obama of anyone in the country (behavior for which I rather harshly criticized him in the past) -- devoted the first two segments of his show to emphatically lambasting Obama and Eric Holder's DOJ for the story I wrote about on Monday: namely, the Obama administration's use of the radical Bush/Cheney state secrets doctrine and -- worse still -- a brand new claim of "sovereign immunity" to insist that courts lack the authority to decide whether the Bush administration broke the law in illegally spying on Americans.

The fact that Keith Olbermann, an intense Obama supporter, spent the first ten minutes of his show attacking Obama for replicating (and, in this instance, actually surpassing) some of the worst Bush/Cheney abuses of executive power and secrecy claims reflects just how extreme is the conduct of the Obama DOJ here.

Liberalization, privatization, and bailouts. Déjà vu all over again

Today countries around the world view with cynicism the economic ideas we were trying to export. They came to believe that our push for liberalization and privatization was guided in no small measure by our own corporate and financial interests. Our bailout plans, which provided billions of dollars to help repay banks but denied millions of dollars in food and fuel subsidies for the very poor, only confirmed this impression.

You know what is really interesting about this excerpt? The "today" mentioned here is not in the context of the current economic crisis and the trillion-dollar bailout plans. No sir. This is from an essay that the Nobel-prize-winner Joesph Stiglitz wrote in the Atlantic in October 2002! In this essay, Stiglitz was reflecting on the "roaring nineties" during which he was at various times the chief economist for the World Bank, and chaired Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers.

Well, here he is explaining the current global economic crisis:

We are not "in a war of reason against faith"

So, there I was reading David Brooks' rather strange column, and all of a sudden I run into the following sentences:

The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.

I got ticked off.
As an atheist, I have never felt that I was involved in a war of reason against faith. On the contrary, I am sick and tired of the "faith" people's attempts--on a regular basis--to push science and reason to the remotest possible corner. If at all there is a war, there is only one warring faction and that is the "believers".

Second, I do not see myself as having "unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning" .... oh, please .... I walk around with doubts all the time. I just plainly refuse to accept through "blind faith" ideas that religions and religious people want me to believe. Brooks does not seem to understand that in reason and science we always leave room for possibilities. As long as the evidence we have leads us to certain conclusions, well, we can't adopt a position that will contradict that data, can we? On the other hand, as Keynes remarked, when the facts change we correspondingly change our minds.

Heather Mac Donald has a similar point:

As for non-believers’ purported faith “in the purity of their own reasoning,” I have no idea what Brooks is talking about. The new atheists are not on an intellectual purity crusade; they see the whole of human thought as evidence of the richness of the human mind. They embrace the gorgeousness and grandeur of music, art, and literature as a source of meaning and wisdom.

She adds a lot more. I liked this:

With all respect to David Brooks, this claim strikes me as nonsensical. The new atheists are arguing not against the view that morality is innate, but that it is the product of formal religious teaching. It is the theistic and theocon worldview that is challenged by what Brooks calls the “evolutionary approach to morality,” not the skeptical one. It is the theocons who assert that unless society and individuals are immersed in purported Holy Books, anarchy and depredation will rule the world.

Skeptics respond that moral behavior is instinctual, that parents build on a child’s initial impulses of empathy and fairness and reinforce those impulses with habit and authority. Religious ethical codes are an epiphenomenon of our moral sense, not vice versa. The religionists say that morality is handed down from a deity above; secularists think that it, and indeed the very attributes of that deity himself, bubble up from below. Children raised without belief in divine revelation can be as faithful to a society’s values as those who think that the Ten Commandments (at least those not concerned with religious prostration) originated with God.

I think that Brooks should restrict himself to writing about politics and economics, and not wade into philosophy, reason, and faith.

We give them Obama, they don't hate us anymore

If Barack Obama wasn't an off-beat enough name, how about Wyatt Cenac? He is, of course, one of the "correspondents" in the Daily Show. Watch this hilarious "report":

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Gas tax, roads, and low-bids in contracts

While searching for the lowest and best price has its merits, consider this:

The dilemma of modern construction is summed up in an anecdote that Wernher von Braun, the scientist who developed the U.S. space program, used to tell about John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth: “Seconds before ­lift­off, with Glenn strapped into that rocket we built for him and man’s best efforts all focused on that moment, you know what he said to himself? ‘My God! I’m sitting on a pile of low bids!’

I wish I had read the essay from where I have excerpted the quote, before I submitted the following op-ed to the Statesman Journal:

I was reminded of Johnny Carson’s quip, “I did not know that,” when I read that 90 years ago, on February 25, 1919, became the first state in the union to implement a tax on gasoline sold at the pump.

The tax of one cent per gallon was based on a simple and straightforward idea that construction and maintenance of roadways ought to be paid for by their users. Oregonians intentionally chose this, and not a general tax on the population. What a novel idea for that time period, when automobiles were still being thought of as horseless carriages by many in this country and elsewhere!

As automobile usage increased, other states and the federal government also followed up with gas taxes. Now, when we purchase gas in Oregon, the price for every gallon at the pump includes state and federal taxes, which have gone up over the years, to keep up with inflation and the phenomenal increase in automobile and truck traffic. Local governments have the authority to charge additional taxes as well. Of course, there is a comparable tax on other types of fuel too.

That same year, in 1919, Dwight Eisenhower participated in the army’s exercise to study the logistical issues in moving military vehicles and equipment from coast to coast. It was this, together with his war-time experiences in Europe, which later led Eisenhower to call for a national system of highways when he was elected to the presidency.

The two unrelated events of 1919 continue their influence on us even today, through gas taxes and a complex network of federal and state highways. At the same time, we are also in the middle of intense public policy discussions related to gas taxes, and the conditions of the roadways that seem to be rapidly deteriorating.

According to the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission, America’s transportation infrastructure is falling apart—sometimes literally. In its report to Congress, the Commission recommended implementing a mileage-based fee system by 2020, with modest increases in federal fuel taxes in the meanwhile in order to get out of “the hole we have dug for ourselves.”

Well, the forward thinking public policy pioneers that Oregonians are, we have engaged in an interesting discussion over the last couple of years on precisely this same idea of charging road users not by the gallons of gas bought but by the miles travelled in the state.

However, to a large extent, such discussions are not entirely new. Almost 15 years ago, I was a junior participant in similar policy discussions in my earlier career as a transportation planner in Southern California. Even then, there was very little disagreement on the state of roads and bridges—this was well before the catastrophic bridge collapse in Minneapolis in the summer of 2007, which served as a tragic reminder to those who were in denial about the state of the transport infrastructure.

Thus, after years of deliberations, I am ready for action, once we climb out of these depressed economic conditions. At least before the centennial of the gas tax?

In energy, too, it’s the water

Over spring break, I did what university faculty members are notorious for. I attended an academic conference in Las Vegas — and got more depressed about the state of the world!

At the opening plenary session, the speakers talked about the increasing problems with water in the American Southwest, which might also be related to systematic changes in worldwide precipitation patterns. One piece of local data: Water levels in Lake Mead, the reservoir behind Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, are down to 48 percent of capacity.

So the following day I headed out to Hoover Dam — consistent with the teacher in me who favors field trips as key learning exercises. My previous visit there was more than 10 years ago, when my parents visited us from India. My father had studied about Hoover Dam in his civil engineering program, and I recalled his eager beaver excitement when we were there.

This time around, the low water level was obvious. The bathtub rings above the water’s surface looked like nasty scars. To see the conditions in person was way more real and worrisome than it was when I listened to the speakers while comfortably perched in the conference hall.

Tourists rushed past me as I was parked overlooking the dam, and I wondered how the changing water and drought conditions around the world might affect electricity generation. We tend to forget that even coal-fired power stations need a lot of water; globally, about 45 percent of electricity comes from coal.

I grew up in an industrial company town — Neyveli — in southern India, where the principal activity is to generate about 2,500 megawatts of electricity by firing up the lignite mined there. Lignite, a variety of coal, has a low energy content compared to more energy packed varieties like bituminous or anthracite.

Generating power from lignite requires water every step along the way — which, in Neyveli, came from underground. The area was fortunate to have extensive aquifers, naturally recharged by the approximately 40 inches of monsoon rains every year. However, many engineers, including my father, were and are worried that continued large-scale use of groundwater might catalyze sea water intrusion — after all, the sea is barely 20 miles away.

Thus, strange as it was to think about how water shortages might affect coal-fired power generation while standing atop Hoover Dam, it was more worrying to think about the following confluence of factors:

Coal is being used extensively worldwide as a source of energy. In India and China, 70 percent to 80 percent of electricity is coal-based.

Burning coal is a major source of carbon dioxide, an agent for global warming and climate change.

Huge quantities of water, often groundwater, are needed to sustain coal-based power generation.

Water is absolutely necessary for life on this planet, and there are enough data trends to justify worry about the future availability of water — especially groundwater.

Therefore, instead of urging countries, particularly India and China, to stop using coal, perhaps we ought to focus on how to a large extent it is all about water. Many parts of India, China and other countries have low levels per capita of available water. For instance, while the United States has about 1,600 cubic meters of water per person, the average in China is about 400 cubic meters, and even less in India. This immensely valuable resource can be put to better uses than in coal-fired power plants.

This is but another incentive for us to explore alternative energy sources that do not impose additional demands on water, which will then also mean lesser reliance on coal. Water-constrained countries such as China, India and Israel ought to encourage innovation on this urgent issue.

At the same time, we here in the United States have a wonderful opportunity to use our research and development infrastructure to develop feasible and economical approaches that will ease the pressure on water resources, and thereby help the world.

After all, to borrow a water metaphor, we sink or sail together!

For The Register-Guard
Posted to Web: Sunday, Apr 5, 2009 04:29PM
Appeared in print: Monday, Apr 6, 2009, page A7