Why I used to think I was a socialist but was wrong

[by "popular" demand]

I used to think I was a socialist. I didn't know much about socialist economic, social or political theory. I hadn't read Marx. I couldn't articulate the differences between socialism and communism. I had never heard of the Second International or Frederick Engels. So... why?

To be completely honest, a lot had to do with my aesthetics. For me--and this is still true--there was literally nothing in the world more offensive to the senses than a large crowd. Times Square, Pier 39, sporting events, zoos, concerts, Yellowstone, and the Rose Festival all left me with acute sensory rage. The merciless ugliness of these places arose from individuality taken too far, I thought. Each person was so focused on making themselves stand out in a crowd that the effect of the crowd was complete and intense visual confusion. Add to that intense blasts of noxious deodorants, bodily insecticides, hair spray, perfume, and other industrial synthesized personal care products, and I experienced my own personal hell.

So I decided that I was not a huge fan of freewheeling individuality and that a certain amount of uniformity across society is a good thing. While jealously defending my need to be different from everybody else, I wanted the rest of humanity to stop being so frazzin' different from each other. Somehow I thought that socialism would deliver this. The key here is that a large portion of my motivation was aesthetic. Not moral, not philosophical, not logical, but aesthetic.

I thought of other ways to defend what I considered socialism, which I thought of as simply the mandated practice of equality and unity. Scripture, the fantastic gulf between the well-offs and the have-nots, an ideallistic streak and a taste for being different [ironically enough] all seemed to solidify my position on socialism.

Then, I learned what socialism is all about. Nothing doing!

At this point in my life I see the aesthetic purgatory that is Disneyland as an unavoidable consequence of the inalienable rights of human expression. I still feel strongly that every tax-paying citizen has the right to health care, that unfettered consumerism is immoral and destructive, that capitalism is in essence sinful, and that masses of people are profoundly nauseating.

But I am not a socialist!

What to write about?

I have a backlog of blogs I've been wanting to write. My 2 or 3 readers can vote on which one comes next [in order of how likely I am to do it before we leave for Montana on the 24th]:

1. The chimp video game study fraud
2. Review of The World Without Us by Alan Weisman [5 stars]
3. The demise of the clovis megafaunal extinction theory and discussion of the carolina bays
4. Review of 1491 by Charles C. Mann [2.5 stars]
5. Review of Resistance by Barry Lopez [4.5 stars]
6. The first Global Warming data
7. Explaination of why I used to think I was a socialist but was wrong
8. A review of the Pinker/Bloom language evolution paper

Anybody out there have an itching to hear any one of these? I've been dying to jump into any one of these, so just let me know...

Herons, Spandrels, Voles, and Exaptation

Walking back from the library today, BChester asked me to find the great blue heron which we saw on the way out and which lives in our neighborhood. We spotted it hunting voles along the path back to our apartment.

We stayed and watched long enough for the heron to get accustomed to our presence. BChester kept on saying "heron pretty!" and "heron cute!" as we watched it wander around looking for rodent holes to peer into. The heron apparently noticed a vole about 10 feet in front of us and decided to stalk it, ignoring us completely. He [it was a male] very slowly walked toward the vole in a heron's equivalent of a soldier crawl, with his neck folded up and so close to the ground that his neck plume was dragging in the dirt. When he was about a foot away from the vole he stopped and began adjusting his footing and angle to get the perfect strike. He further retracted his neck until it was wound up like a spring. BChester found this completely entrancing.

The heron soon struck. His neck sprung, propelling his head forward like a viper, and he used his hefty and razor-sharp bill as a spear. We could distinctly hear the sound of rodent bones being crushed [if you haven't heard this sound before, it actually is quite distinctive]. He immediately calipered the vole by the neck and lifted it off the ground.

But at this point, the heron was out of tricks. He had to wait for the vole to bleed to death since he had no built-in way to off rodents like most specialized rodent-killers do [watch a prairie falcon casually rip the spine out of a ground squirrel some day, it's easy for them]. After several minutes, the vole turned its head around and started to gnaw on the heron's beak. I imagine a bone saw would make a similar sound. Eventually the heron got tired of that and threw the vole back on the ground, wound his neck up, and piked it right through the skull. The vole didn't move much after that.

We then watched [BChester: "heron lunch"] the heron orient the vole nose-down and swallow it whole. At one point the vole got stuck in the bottom of the u-curve section of the heron's throat and we watched him contract his whole neck over and over again to try to get it down ["heron play"]. But then it was over. BChester didn't want to leave but once the vole was down it was obvious that the heron didn't want any more company.

Besides a thrilling up-close look at some serious natural carnage, this experience got me thinking about some pretty profound evolutionary messages hidden in this behavior.

The great blue heron is a fantastically well-adapted bird--for stalking fish in shallow water. The entire genetic code of herons is calculated for two things: fishing and sex [what a life, eh?]. The long legs keep the body elevated above water, the long neck helps them reach into the water without submerging the body, the long beak helps them catch fish, etc. Herons can catch a fish, toss it into the air, catch it when its head is oriented the right way, and swallow it in under a second and without rippling the water. They have extensive in-built hunting techniques which assist them in stalking fish, utilizing light and shadow and fish behavior. The cumulative effect of all of these features is that of a very refined and polished masterpiece of evolution.

Except...

Our bird was hunting on dry ground for voles. The stalking method, the attacking method, the killing method and the eating method that I witnessed are all completely different than the way they stalk, catch and eat fish. The special adaptations that herons have for hunting fish put them at a disadvantage when hunting voles. Their long legs and large body make them conspicuous and hard to hide, they have no way to kill prey quickly, and there are few voles swimming around in the shallow waters at the edge of bays, which is where herons should be programmed to try and find food.

The first observation is a simple one: animals are not stupid. The popular consciousness [such as it is] has held for a long time that genes control everything about an individual animal's behavior and capabilities. Besides being anthropocentric, blatantly contrary to common experience and logically ludicrous, this idea is also the foundation of a litany of corrupt philosophies about human nature. And most conscious biologists would find the idea appalling. If genes controlled all the behavior of every member of a species herons could never hunt voles. Somewhere at some time, this bird or one of its ancestors discovered a source of calories and through trial and error devised a hunting technique that would work for voles. This requires thought. Perhaps rudimentary thought, but thought nonetheless.

Now that that's out of the way, there are some more interesting things to talk about.

We're taught [if at all] that all traits are the result of millenia of selection events. The truth, as pointed out by Stephen Jay Gould, is that some features are "spandrels;" excess baggage created by genes which control other features which have been selected for. These features then have not been selected for even though they exist. Some features arrive through "exaptation;" adaptations co-opted for new beneficial uses. Think about our ability to wipe our butts, which was not the evolutionary impetus for hands but is a great use for them.

It appears that this heron has used some amount of general intelligence to co-opt their specific fish-catching adaptations [I'm thinking the lance-like beak] to catch voles, a perfect example of exaptation. This required, in the least:

1. Recognizing voles as a source of calories
2. Devising a strategy for stalking voles
3. Devising a strategy for catching voles
4. Learning not to swallow the voles until they die

Since I actually have seen two distinct herons in this area do this, I can add another one:

5. Teaching others steps 1-4

I'm not claiming herons are terribly bright. And I'm not claiming this is particularly new, it's actually rather old news as far as evolutionary biology is concerned. But what did impress me is that it took evolutionary biology until 1982 to recognize what was supremely evident in this heron; that adaptation and natural selection are only a portion of the whole evolutionary picture.

Suppose there is enough habitat in the bay area to support a couple hundred full-time vole-eating great blue herons for dozens of generations. Then we could see a subset of the population break off and eventually parapatrically speciate. That means that they could form a mostly isolated gene pool which will slowly acquire traits beneficial to vole hunting and thus diverge from main-stream herons and become its own species. The new niche is actually not new, it's just nearly infinite; there are not enough snakes, raptors, and coyotes in the area to make a dent in the vole population.

The heron I saw was so successful [killed in one attempt; 90% of the raptor attacks I see are failures and they all use lots of energy] that I can imagine it turning out that only one or two genes need to be changed to make the herons the most efficient vole-eaters on the planet; none of this wasteful hovering like kites and none of the slow dangerous slithering of snakes. Classic Darwinism pictures species arriving at an optimal form always from the bottom-up, arriving through branches of selective adaptations after millenia. The concepts of spandrels and exaptation allow hopping from limb to limb on the evolutionary tree in a way that creates species laterally. We're not talking about herons moving to enjoying crustaceans here-I'm talking about a change in almost every non-morphological phenotypical aspect of a species in one shift occuring over only a few generations. And these behavioral and environmental changes will surely lead to accelerated genotypical shifts due to the extreme "distance" between the niche evolved in and the niche moved into. This strikes me as a much more efficient way of generating diversity than classical adaptation, even if the conditions for exaptation have to be just right. The catalyst for using exaptation this way is general intelligence. In that way I'd expect the diversity of life on this planet to be much smaller if animals were thoughtless robots as popularly assumed.

This, in a nutshell, was half of what I was thinking when I saw the heron, beak sheathed in dripping blood, saunter away from the killing site. The other half was this:

Holy son of beelzebub!

A Logical Approach to Global Warming, part II : The Outline

Here is the logical structure and links to data for our GW guide. The structure is organized into topics [arabic numerals; 1, etc.], sub-topics [capital letters; A, etc.], bullets [small roman numerals; i, etc.], and sub-bullets [lower-case letters; a, etc]. In order to prove each topic, each sub-topic and each bullet under it must be shown first. After a bullet is completed, its result will be compressed into FALSE, UNCERTAIN, or TRUE markers, sometimes dependent on sub-bullets. Only when/if each sub-topic is full of bullets with TRUE markers will the sub-topic be marked TRUE and the next sub-topic addressed. The analogous process will be used for proving the topics. Feel free to contribute.

[NOTE: as the structure is being refined, some of the category names might not match the outline. This will be remedied whenever the structure becomes stable.]

1. The earth is warming

A. There is a clear trend of warming

i. direct temperature measurements

a. atmosphere [satellite, balloons]

b. surface [stations]

c. ocean [buoys, satellites]

ii. proxy temperature records

d. ice cores [antarctica, greenland]

e. tree rings

f. other [tree rings, sediment, ice cores]

iii. ice sheet behavior INCOMPLETE

g. Greenland TRUE

h. Antarctica TRUE

i. continental glaciers

j. sea level

k. permafrost and lake and river ice

iv. life TRUE

v. other [coastal wind speed, sea ice]

B. The warming is "special"

vi. rate [historically; accelerating]

vii. scale [historically]

viii. solar system [recent trends]

2. The warming is significantly anthropogenic

C. Natural explainations for the warming are not sufficient

ix. solar [spots, flux, cosmic rays]

x. ice age departure

D. Anthropogenic sources can explain non-natural contribution to the warming

xi. greenhouse gases

a. Are atmospheric GH gases increasing in concentration?

b. Are people responsible for the increase?

c. Can GH gases cause the GH effect?

xii. is the proportion of warming due to anthropogenic causes dominant?

3. Something should be done about it

E. it is possible to solve

F. it is worthwhile to solve

Logically, we can say: AWG if and only if A and B and D. AWG mitigation action is required if and only if 3 [contingent on E and F] and D. Additionally, the hierarchy of the logic is top-down, meaning that questions v through xi are irrelevent until questions i through iv have been established, and so on. I hope that you can all help me flesh out these categories to include more crucial steps in the logic, particularly in part 3.

A complete proof of AWG would flow like this [using ^ for the logical operator AND and => for "IF...THEN" and <=> for "IF AND ONLY IF" and semicolons to seperate clauses]:

(i ^ ii ^ iii ^ iv) => A; (v ^ vi ^ viii) => B; (A ^ B) => 1; (viii ^ ix) => C; (((a ^ b ^ c) => x) ^ xi) => D; C ^ D=> 2; (1 ^ 2 ^ E ^ F) <=> 3.

3, of course, is the only thing that matters.

This will be the logical structure we will follow once it is set in stone. Of course, it is possible to remove a bullet later on by arguments such as "the scale of the warming is irrelevent because..." but we will treat those instances as proven bullets to simplify the process. Help me out with this now so we won't have issues with it later!

The Atoms of Language

The Atoms of Language
Mark C. Baker

I must admit to a lifelong predilection to the aesthetic of reductionism [maybe that's why I ended up in particle physics; the ultimate end-of-the-road for reductionism]. Right or wrong, I find a certain beauty in the reduction of a messy, complicated and fundamentally unexplainable system down into an elegant set of constituent parts and rules.

I guess I'm not alone. Mendeleev, Mendel, Gell-Mann, Linnaeus, Schoenberg, and Chomsky all made their considerable fame through discovery of reductionist principles in their fields. I can't profess much aesthetic interest in the product of Schoenberg's reductions of music, but I spend almost all of my free time these days studying those of Gell-Mann, Mendel, Linnaeus, and Chomsky. There is no doubt that the principles of understanding given to us by these men are powerful.

This fascination of mine is probably why I ended up getting hooked on The Atoms of Language after casually flipping through it a couple weeks ago. It was intended as a supplemental book for an advanced linguistics course my wife took as a student in college. It's very dry, quite dense, and particularly narrowly focused. But it is a thorough reduction of human language in the Chomskyan style and as such really appealed to me.

Gell-Mann's discovery that all visible [and much of the invisible] material in the universe is composed of a very small handful of fundamental particles is the reductionist heritage of Mendeleev's periodic table. This reduction is clean, precise, and demonstrably true. The reduction of all life into species, genera, families, etc. as initiated by Linnaeus is, on the other hand, completely messy, controversial, and even arbitrary. Species are not a fundamental building block of ecosystems in the way quarks and leptons make up the entirety of any atom, molecule, or star. There are compelling practical uses for species and genera, but they exist more on paper than in reality because of the inherent messiness of ecosystems.

Chomsky's reduction of language falls somewhere between the intractable reduction of ecosystems and the neat and tidy reduction of matter. Although messy and strewn with exceptions, language is surprisingly reducible, lending itself shockingly well to a hierarchy of constituents and rules. This concept strikes me as terrifically profound. Whereas the species concept is mostly a construct created for practical purposes, the "atoms of language" are quite real and tell us a great deal about human nature and, importantly for me, what's going on in the head of my babies when they hear me talk.

In this way, Mark Baker's incessant use of an analogy between the periodic table and the reduction of language is apt. When he speaks of the "atoms" of language, he is not referring to the words we speak, which are in a sense the fundamental constituents of the language that we can hear when others speak [or morphemes, which are even more fundamental]. This language--what Chomsky calls "E-language" or external language--is mostly culturally transmitted. The atoms of the language that are really interesting are the parameters that set the rules for syntax within our "I-language" or internal language. What appeared, until Chomsky, to be a potentially infinite set of possible languages with a continuum of possible properties turned out to be the result of a nearly ludicrously small set of "parameters" which come pre-loaded in our brain and are set by experience with our native language as babies.

This is a powerful concept, and the book fulfils its role as an explicator of the known parameters extremely well. The details get tiresome for somebody reading it from my angle, just wanting to learn about human nature, but the big picture is presented well too. Here's a recap of my greatest insights from this book [since you probably won't read it]:

1. Based on surveys of known world languages, it is clear that not every syntactic structure possible is used. In fact, there are only a few syntactic systems humans use out of potentially thousands or millions. This is a clear indication, in the very least, that humans share an innate knowledge pertaining to syntax.

2. Chomsky likes to talk about the "poverty of the stimulus," which points out that children do not have enough language presented to them to learn every rule for every possible sentence in their native tongue. In fact, there are exactly infinite possible sentences. We would then never learn to speak if parameters didn't exist. This is not new to me, but through reading this book I realized that the evolutionary purpose [so to speak] of parameters is language acquisition. Acquisition is a two-fold task: (a) acquiring a lexicon and (b) setting a few parameters. This is an infinitely simpler proposition than memorizing every legal sentence configuration in the native tongue.

3. One of the most interesting new revelations I had from this book is that parameters are hierarchical. Some parameters take presendence over others, and some manifest themselves in obvious ways better than others. Baker constructs the rudiments of a parameter tree that will presumably at some point have every language on earth on its branches.

4. The lack of geographic inhomogeneity in syntax speaks volumes for the hypothesis of parameters. The fact that Indonesian, for example, has syntax essentially identical to English, yet German is quite different is completely incompatible with a fluid, infinite, culturally-transmitted grammar. Suppose language A diverged from language B a couple hundred years ago, and now has a completely distinct grammar. Also suppose that there exists a language C which is thousands of miles away and historically completely socially isolated from language A, but which has identical syntax to language A. The only explaination for this occurrence--which, by the way, is very common--is that language A swapped a parameter from its original form and since there is a finite number of parameter configurations now matches another isolated language by lucky accident.

5. It actually turns out that not every syntactic property is parametrically controlled. For example, the fact that English has reflexive pronouns [like himself and themselves] allows us to use the construction Bob said that Joe should buy himself a car. It is clear that it is Joe that should be buying the car because the pronoun himself attaches itself to the secondary subject Joe. If English didn't have reflexive pronouns, the sentence Bob said that Joe should buy him a car would be ambiguous at best and thus not possible. The lexicon of a language can influence the possible syntax without the involvement of parameters, but it requires special situations.

We have to be cautious with this, though. The evolutionist Daniel Dennett aptly described a very useful concept called "greedy reductionism." It refers to the compulsion to take reductionism well past its practical limitations. Describing the behavior of a bird in terms of the quantum mechanical interactions of its constituent electrons and nucleons, for example, is greedy reductionism. However, Baker doesn't fall into this trap. He aspires to, I think, but the field is so new and fresh that every reductive step is sound and useful up to this point. That's not to say that there is no controversy on the issue of the existence of parameters though.

Philip Lieberman is the modern anti-Chomsky whose ideas shaped a large portion of Christine Kenneally's The First Word, which I reviewed a few weeks back. In his 1984 book Toward an Evolutionary Biology of Language, Lieberman argues that one simple result of evolutionary biology sinks every language innateness theory. The argument is this: single random genetic mutations are common from one generation to the next. If all human grammar was pre-programmed in our genes, then some people with random mutations should be expected to display an inability to form certain syntactical structures or learn language at all. Such people do not exist, and thus, Lieberman says, the sum of human syntax is not encoded in our genes.

I have what I consider to be a simple refutation of this idea, but it requires a small retreat from a strictly Chomskyan theory. Chomsky views language as being a single entity which is whole, complete, and perfect. In his view parameters come as a bundled package; each is as necessary to language acquisition as every line of code is to a computer program [often removing one line at random will render the entire program useless]. Not only does this idea make it impossible to manufacture language through selective evolution, but it creates the exact problem that Lieberman takes advantage of in his attacks against the entire theory.

I however see parameters strictly as a learning tool; their biological purpose is to assist babies in learning language. If human language is limited to a certain subset of possible grammars, and if each child comes already knowing the settings that contribute to each possible grammar, then learning language becomes tractable. This allows an evolutionary theory of language since each built-in parameter increases a child's ability to learn language and presumably increases their reproductive viability. Additionally, Lieberman's complaint becomes moot: genetic mutation is likely to only effect a single parameter. Remove one parameter and all it does is make learning language harder for that one individual. One of the "startling" revelations in the post-Chomsky days is that human brains are very powerful. Not only are we pre-programmed with some things, but we can also figure things out other things for ourselves very well [like where the breaks between words occur, which is terrifically difficult and requires tremendous computation power]. General cognition can cover the holes in parameter space left by random genetic mutation.

Of course, parameters are studied from the perspective of systematics. That means that the parameter hierarchy describes [most of; see point 5] the differences between the syntaxes of languages, not how parameters can help children learn the bulk of the syntax of their native language. A meaningful parametric theory should have as its final goal a map of the innate choices in grammar each child is born with which teaches them their native syntax based on setting parameters through experience. This map is complete only when it contains every parameter a child must have in order to learn any possible human language. Baker's ultimate goal is a systematic description of the systematic relationship between the grammars of all languages. His parameter hierarchy is complete when it describes all of the observed differences between languages. This is actually a huge distinction and a potentially schema-breaking one for me. Baker's hierarchy shows only two parameters necessary to explain every observed difference between Mohawk and any other language. But I guarantee that a child learning Mohawk will have to flip more than two mental switches before being able to create every valid sentence in that language.

I don't see any evolutionary force in Baker's method; the diversity of languages is just a byproduct of the existence of parameters, and thus any description is akin to the reduction of life into species and genera; it is a useful description tool but doesn't hint at much that is more more profound [in that species per se are not the goal of evolution but survivability is]. I see Baker's method as analogous to the species method of description, and this acquisition-oriented method as analogous to a genetic description. I think his approach will break down at some point, or get mired in greedy reductionism. Shifting focus to discovering which parameters a child much identify and set to properly learn his native grammar is surely the path to follow.

I don't suggest reading this book for everyone. It does requires a small amount of introductory linguistics knowledge [for me, one introductory class and a few books, including most Pinker]. But beyond that, it's really intended as the definitive source on the workings of each parameter. There is little indulgent philosophizing about the implications of parameters; for that, go to Pinker. But if you, like I, enjoy the beauty of reductionism then you will enjoy Baker's relentless systematic destruction of the apparent infinite variability of language in this book. His brutally clean logical structure and impeccable analysis leaves analyticians like me very satisfied, even if in the end he strays off in a tangential direction.

A Logical Approach to Global Warming, part I: The Wind-Up

I've been planning on doing this for a while, but it will take a lot of work so I put it off as long as I could.


What I have in mind is a simple, 4-part guide to the science behind the Global Warming debate. Here's the outline:

• 1. The Wind-Up. A description of the ground rules and structure of the guide.


• 2. The Outline. A structured outline of all issues pertinent to the subject of GW, to be addressed in part 3.


• 3. The Data. References and discussion of peer-reviewed data addressing each bullet from the Outline, linked to and thus indistinguishable after completion from the Outline.
  


• 4. The Synthesis. Drawing logical conclusions from the data.

Given that there is an infinite supply of any possible opinion on the matter online, you might wonder why I bother with this. The reason is simply because I have never run across a resource that goes about it the way I think it should be done: pure science mounted on a bullet-proof logical framework. I have a great faith in this logical framework [coming in Part II] because my observation is that a vast majority of the debate is essentially meaningless; it doesn't touch on any of the main pillars that support the theory. Without an explicit logical structure, I believe that any of the conclusions drawn from these debates are inherently flawed, in that any simple statement of "since X then GW is T/F" ignores the logical structure surrounding X which is required in its entirety to prove/disprove the theory.

As far as working rules for this guide, I only have two. You must believe these before you participate:

1. Data is the only thing that matters. A vast majority of the current debate seems to revolve around issues like Al Gore's hypocrisy or Jim Inhofe's conflicts of interest. These issues are completely irrelevant and I won't ever mention them again.


2. Nothing is simple. Anybody who claims to know for absolute surety one way or the other is claiming a mystical knowledge that science can't begin to reproduce. The issue is complex and each item has multiple potential causes.

I will run this in a semi-wiki fashion. I will post an initial draft and leave it on the site for a couple weeks. Any additions should be left in the comments and I will add those which are appropriate.

A note on my motivations for doing this: After spending an embarrassing portion of my life watching both sides [shouldn't there be more than two? As in: the neutral, objective view so dear to science?] of the debate, I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with the nature of the debate. Every resource which touches the general public is so steeped in rhetoric, slander, and fustian grandiloquence that the underlying science has no chance to escape. Even the few sources that try to present the science do so in a haphazard and illogical way, discarding contradicting evidence and making logical mistakes that shouldn't make it past the simplest jury. The audience is just as bad: we watch/read/hear and agree or disagree based on what we believe. Personal belief has nothing to do with GW, it just gets in the way. I fear that the public is getting manipulated by our lack of critical thinking and the absence of motivation to challenge previously held notions. Political predelictions are motivating people's acceptance or not of the thoery without reference to the science involved. This is a disasterously bad state of affairs. Even though the audience of this blog is about a dozen at best, I hope even a couple of you will find use for this guide.

[As a disclaimer, I believe in anthropogenic global warming. But I am extremely skeptical of the vast majority of the claims made in the popular media pertaining to it. I hope through this exercise to disprove the theory because I feel that its presence critically distracts from other extremely pressing environmental issues, like species conservation and habitat protection. So maybe I'm not entirely neutral, but you can be sure that I won't suppress any data or distort any findings to meet some agenda of mine, because any agendas I have are at war with eachother.]

Enjoy! And please contribute! Participation is the point of this exercize.

Self Revelation

Here, according to Chuckwalla, is a picture of me:

No, seriously. This is from Dr. Seuss' One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. Every time MChes reads it to her she says "Dad!" and points to it. When I read it to her she says "Dad!" and looks back and forth between me and the picture over and over again.

MChes, in all seriousness, says that she can "see the resemblance." What else are wives for?

The First Word

The First Word
Christine Kenneally

Christine Kenneally brings a unique perspective to popular science writing; she's a freelance journalist but also has a PhD in linguistics from Oxford. The First Word is therefore primarily a piece of journalism, secondarily a scientific look at the evolution of language. It is the anti-Pinker; very straightforward, unchatty, and more distanced from concrete conclusions. But it's probably the only way available to get a good glimpse of the complexity and contention surrounding the very new field of the evolution of language.

Kenneally's main thesis is that the strictly old-style Chomskyan model of a pre-programmed syntax is not consistent with modern experimentation and therefore is false [in fact, a simple statistical argument would have sufficed for me: the probability that the number of genetic mutations required to construct all of Chomsky's Universal Grammar could arise in one generation, as the theory demands, is much smaller than your average zero]. Her conclusion is that language does require some innate and specialized genetic code [descended larynx, fine motor control of mouth and tongue, some built-in language-specific cognitive structure, etc.]. However, this coding arose over thousands of generations for other purposes than language itself; language is a pastiche of adaptations which were beneficial in more ways than just verbal communication. Language is not a thing as much as it is a set of communication and cognition capabilities developed and boot-strapped together into a coherent ability. This is evident by the fact that many of the traits which are recognized as essential to human language production are homologues we share with our genetic cousins, and even those less related to us.

Kenneally goes a bit too far. The structure of her book is very balanced and journalistic; she gives several rounds of the debate to various sides, often giving way to broadside blows and rhetoric that would make Nancy Pelosi proud. However, the last word is given to those who oppose UG, despite the fact that a majority of them are not actually linguists, but ape researchers. This sells the very successful and still useful old model quite short. It should be customary for the old theory to get the final chance to defend itself, especially one as deeply entrenched and successful as UG.

Very little of the book deals with linguistics itself, but rather ape language study and evolutionary biology. Despite a truly epic amount of research, I feel that Kenneally didn't completely understand the evolutionary biology she was reporting on. Here's an example:

Evolution is the process by which genetic mutation influences the reproductive viability of individuals and propagates genetically across the species according to the reproductive advantage the mutation gives the individual over the other members of its species. Evolution proceeds by two paths: natural selection, in which the mutation influences survivability; and sexual selection, in which the mutation influences the likelihood that an individual will actually reproduce. Natural selection gets all the attention because it is the real driver of the creation of species. Sexual selection is traditionally associated with creating sexual dimorphism--males and females having different appearances--and mostly superficial traits. So sexual selection changes mostly details within a species [this is a vast overgeneralization, but it's mostly accurate].

This is very important for the study of the evolution of language. The human species has basically stopped evolving by natural selection; people in modern society live or die according to geographic and socioeconomic conditions and not, generally, as a result of personal genetics. However, sexual selection has taken its place as a vastly powerful means of shaping the species. The caution with which most humans choose who to create children with ensures that there is at least the potential for major genetic trends to be introduced to the species by sexual selection alone [more on this in a subsequent post].

So, what am I driving at? Christine Kenneally has completely ignored the effect of sexual selection in language evolution, and I think it is potentially the most important driver of recent hominid evolution. In fact, she only devotes one paragraph to sexual selection and dismisses it promptly with an analogy from Tecumseh Fitch, one of the scientists she interviewed for the book. The analogy goes something like this:

Peacocks have strong sexual dimorphism from sexual selection. The selection pressure forced the sexes apart, instead of brought them forward together to new traits. Since human language is balanced between the sexes, it cannot be the result of sexual selection.

Besides being a faulty analogy, this is one fabulously impoverished piece of logic. First off, a peahen doesn't need a gaudy tail in order to be attracted to a male's gaudy tail. But a female human must have somewhat comparable language to the male who is courting her in order for her to even observe the trait. It is fairly easy to imagine that the only male in a band of early hominids who can communicate with a particular female at her capacity is more likely to be the father of her children. Secondly, the whole notion of sexual selection becomes infinitely messy and unpredictable with very social species, which we and our recent ancestors are. So comparing us to peacocks is completely disingenuous. It is clear that sexual selection is a potentially powerful force in human evolution, so why ignore it? I think the problem lies in the fact that traditional evolutionary biology focuses on the creation of species, for which sexual selection is impotent compared to natural selection. The language evolution people have inherited this inappropriate bias. [note that I don't claim to possess a model for how sexual selection influenced the genesis of language; how the female and the male came to the same mutation is difficult to understand without invoking widespread incest. But it should at least be obvious that the potential power of sexual selection demands that it be part of the discussion].

Not to get too tied up in this point, here's the rub: The First Word is a great and important book. The question of the origin of language is at least as vexing as the properties of dark matter, and the prospects of conquering the problem significantly less so. Christine Kenneally does a fabulous job of crystallizing and enlightening the debate, and presenting the most recent research. The fact that I disagree with her to a degree is not surprising; out of many dozens of researchers she interviewed for this book, no two agree on the subject either. The issue of language evolution is crucial for understanding our species and ourselves, and this book does a nearly perfect job of drawing the borders over which the wars of human nature will be fought for the next decades.

[Washoe, the first non-human trained for human communication, died two days ago. She was a significant character in the book.]

The Pumpkin Dude

Earthquake

We just had a small earthquake. Hope it wasn't a foreshock!

Update: it's not a foreshock. It's not on the San Andreas, and the fault is only capable of ~5.6 quakes, which this was [except we didn't feel more than a rumble because we are ~20 miles away]

Chucricket

Chuckwalla woke up extra early this morning. I went in to check on her, and she pointed to the wall and told me there was a cricket there. She wasn't scared, just excited that there was a cricket in her bedroom!

There wasn't a cricket there.

So I tried to put her back to sleep but she kept on telling me there was a cricket on the wall.

So I checked again, and I noticed that there was a shadow coming from a street light passing through the top of a crib. It cast a long horizontal shadow with a very abstract insect-looking silouette--complete with 3 blocky legs--onto the wall. A cricket.

So I turned on the light and showed her that there was no cricket, it's just a shadow. She was a little disappointed but satisfied.

I wonder what being 20-months-old is like. The world must seem very different! I'm glad she knew the word for cricket and the concept of shadows, because otherwise I never would have been able to get back to sleep [I nearly didn't anyway].

Desert Solitaire

Desert Solitaire
Edward Abbey

I wish I had known what was going on when Edward Abbey's drunken and highly illegal wake was held per his request in Saguaro National Monument west of Tucson. I wouldn't have gone [I was 6. I wouldn't go now either.] but it was likely little more than a short hike from our house at the time, and it would be a nice memory to have.

I won't say much about this book. Ed Abbey is brash, manly, serene, enlightened, hilarious, gentle, ignorant, brave, humble, loud, brilliant, passionate, misguided, visionary, articulate, well-read, witty, opinionated, zany, compassionate, and most of all downright daft.

Solitaire is a superb book. It makes you feel, laugh out loud, get angry, become enlightened, scratch your head, and hopefully go outside. It is also a very important book.

If you haven't, read it.

Life of 4/1 - 4/3 + 4/5 - 4/7 + 4/9 - 4/11 + 4/13 - ...

Life of Pi
Yann Martel

I had to read this book because I needed some fiction to balance my literary diet. And I heard it was great. A story about a shipwrecked Indian boy spending 227 days afloat in a life boat on the Pacific ocean with an adult male Bengal tiger for company has to be good. Even if it is semi-allegorical and/or fableized.

But I was pretty disappointed.

It's not that the book didn't deliver the promised fun shipwrecked-with-a-man-eater excitement. It's just that the rest of the book was terrible. The book comes in three parts: A long-winded and dry prelude which lasts nearly a third of the book; the shipwreck and survival section, which takes up the bulk of the rest of the book; and the cadenza, wrapping up loose ends and applying a good Hollywood ending.

I'm surprised that many people got through the first third. I'm pretty thick skinned about plotless writing; I devour Jared Diamond and Edward Abbey. But this still tested my mettle. The problem is that Yann Martel tries his hand at pursuasive writing, completely forgetting that he's writing a novel and that he is a novelist. I itallicized that last sentence because that is all he appears to be. His arguments are so ludicrous; filled with naive generalizations, ignorant statements, and some of the worse logic I've ever seen in copyrighted publication. He just has no idea what he's talking about, but he still talks about it, Krishna only knows why.

The first and third segments have a bit of dialog. I had to put the book down occasionally during these parts and check the front cover just to make sure I hadn't accidentally started reading a George Lucas book [a classy literary reference if I've seen one]. The dialog was impressively contrived and laborious. I often pondered whether the author was trying to create a nightmarish world of stilted communication in order to do something the English professorial types would have fun with. But I decided against that. I think Yann Martel just lacks any subtlety at all, and doesn't really care whether his characters seem real.

On the issue of subtlety, I think that the lack of it destroyed an otherwise cute and gratifying surprise ending. Throughout the book the author felt need it to pound into our heads every time he did something he thought was clever, and the ending was no exception. He leaves nothing of the nearly-perplexing and interesting ending to the imagination. After being bludgeoned repeatedly throughout the book with banal psuedoreligious pandering, the reader deserves a gentle, subtle, thoughtful ending.

I grant fiction writers almost infinite freedom to stretch credulity with the setup of the plot. What's the fun of fiction if they can't? So I have no bones to pick about the fantastic nature of the story itself, it is the book's main draw. But I did find Yann Martel's extensions and details so outrageous that it detracted from the story. I think he intended the book to have a "choose for yourself" type ending, like K-PAX, but unlike K-PAX one of the possibilities is so impossible and fantastical that it isn't an option. So you're forced to choose the other option [and if you missed the choice, he has a clunky dialogue that forces you to interpret it this way]. It's just not fun, it leaves the reader with no space for imagination or intrigue.

So, I don't know what all the fuss is about. The book is fun-you should read it-but the claim on the back of my edition that Yann Martel is the "greatest living writer of the generation born in the sixties" is absurd. I'm not sure that he's the greatest author born in 1963 in Salamanca with the surname of Martel, but I'll need to do some more research before I can say that for sure.

Transcendent music

People have often asked me why my wife and I often limit ourselves to a narrow range of classical music. I've had a lot of trouble explaining this, so I want to try here.

First of all, these are some of the reasons that have been speculated for our choice of music, all of which are wrong:

1. We think it makes us smart
2. We think it makes us look smart
3. We have an elitist disdain for other music
4. We have a moral issue with other music
5. We haven't been exposed enough to other music

We both actually listen to and appreciate a wide variety of music. But we still keep on discovering that nothing reaches us like our music, particularly late romantic chamber. One of the reasons for this is a feeling that we have both arrived at independently, and describe in the same language. I'll try my best to explain from the bottom up:

There are many categories of "bad" music [of course judged by how it affects and reaches us]. I won't discuss this here, it should be fairly obvious what makes up the bulk of the inhabitants of these categories. And there are "good" music categories. Here are some examples of pieces and composers which might fit under various good categories, based on our tastes:

Merely good: most of Mozart. Schumann, most of Mendelssohn, Lizst, Chopin, etc. Almost anything you hear on a classical station is here or below.
Really good: most of Dvorak, most Beethoven, Stravisnsky, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, etc. I don't think we bother listening to anything below this category.
Spectacularly good: Mendelssohn quartet Op. 13; Ravel and Debussey quartets; Bach Cello suites; some Beethoven; Smetana quartet and Moldau, Dvorak serenade for strings, etc. This is a huge category considering how distinguished it is.
That much gooder [a.k.a. perfect]: Schubert late chamber and nearly all Brahms chamber. Grieg g quartet.

Most of the non-chamber music we listen to falls within the "merely good" to "that much gooder" categories and this includes non-classical music, what we listen to for dancing, and whatever else we have on our iPod.

This is pedantic.

The point is that there is great music everywhere, even music that rivals our holy "that much gooder" music.

But there is one more category that we have both arrived at without triangulation. It is transcendent music. This is music that breaks some invisible barrier and really deeply penetrates us. This is music which feels like it was written by God, and probably was. There are only certain passages in certain pieces which are transcendent in this way for us, and they hold a very special place in our lives. We both claim the most profound spiritual, emotional, and penetrating experiences with these passages. It's different than very, very good music; it is very, very good music with a divine touch. Here's what is transcendent for us:

Scattered passages of the Dvorak cello concerto, mostly in 1st and 2nd movement.
Brahms piano quintet in f, especially the B and D sections of the 4th movement [this trumps all for me, put me on a desert island with this and I'll die a perfected saint].
Schubert quintet in C, B section of the second movement

I want to stress that we dearly love and are passionate about other music. The second movement of the Ravel quartet, Schubert's Death and the Maiden 1st and 2nd movements, the opening sequence in Grieg's quartet in g, the first movement of Smetana's "From my Life" quartet, Brahms' piano quartet in g final cadenza and piano quartet in c 2nd movement climax and a huge amount more, Schubert's G quartet 1st movement, Bach cello suite #5 prelude. These are all the absolute pinnacle of human musical achievement. But the transcendent passages [of which there are few more] go beyond the pinnacle and enter into another realm for us. And the key is that these transcendent passages cluster mostly around late romantic chamber music. That's why we listen to chamber as much as we do. It doesn't hurt that the non-transcendent stuff is flappin' awesome also.

So we don't think music can make us smart. And we're not musical snobs or prudes. We just found a little patch of the transperfect and we can't get enough of it.

The Best Widget

It's absurd that so much of critique in popular circles revolves around the best of something or other. How can anybody claim to judge the best book, actor, food, music, athlete, temperature, dog, linguine crunchiness, song, expletive, or friend? It's a compulsion born of lack of vision, objectivity, humility, and experience. I find it beyond reproach that anybody dares to proclaim that X is the best Y, no matter how passionately they feel it.

The Dvorak cello concerto is the best and greatest concerto ever written. And Jacqueline DuPre's recording of it is the best in existence. No argument possible. I'm not joking.

The Magic Cello

On an orchestra tour in Aspen, CO, I started warming up before an open-air performance, surrounded by the beautiful dissonant noises of a full contingency of strings playing whatever they wanted simultaneously and in small quarters. As a 17-year-old, I had been playing the cello for 11 years and loved it. I was reasonably good at it. That summer I had been busy spending quality time [and otherwise] with my future wife and hadn't so much as touched the cello in many weeks before the tour.

So I sat there in the middle of Kitschville and just started playing, barely able to hear myself. And...

... music came out!

Sorry if this doesn't sound profound, but it really was. Like I mentioned, I was a good cello player but I was not really a cellist. I didn't think that I ever would be; I considered cello playing just a vehicle for experiencing the chamber music I loved. So something in my mind, my fingers, my inner musikmensch, my muscles, just clicked and I knew how to really play. I didn't instantly become any better technically, that would be magic. But this was the next best thing to magic: somehow I figured out how to project, to vibrato, to sing, and to create music with my cello. I wasn't playing anything that had ever been played before [this was typical for me; I shouldn't have wondered why practicing didn't help my solo pieces much].

So I became a cellist. A great cellist? Nope, just a cellist. Sometimes I pull my cello out and just glory in the beautiful sound that comes out of it, feeling blessed that my brain mysteriously figured out how to play that day in Colorado. I've never forgotten.

So what happened? I have no idea. Maybe some final, last neural connection between different regions of my brain that allowed me to express music through the cello? Who knows? A blessing no matter how it came.

Has anybody else had an experience like this? Your brain just figured something else out without you knowing?

San Pedro

This is a complete travesty.

My wife and I spent a significant portion of our considerable courtship hiking along the San Pedro in the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area, perhaps the busiest corridor for illegal immigrants in Arizona [though the Border Patrol coverage there seems spotty; they never seem to leave their flatulent air-conditioned SUV's]. The river provides cover and lower temperatures during the summer, runs straight north to I-10, and has an old abandoned railroad track running right along it, all of which factor to make this an ideal illegal immigration corridor. Hiking along the more remote stretches of the tracks is like trekking through a 40-mile-long 10-foot-wide landfill. Every step is littered with discarded water bottles, batteries, shoes, socks, shirts, pants, backpacks, empty food cans, plastic bags, blankets, utensils, and other detritus of desperate human exodus. Walking these tracks is an extremely sobering and humanizing experience. Almost 50 illegal immigrants a day are apprehended in the conservation area but nobody knows how many make it through. Only God knows how many people have died along this route trying to win a better life for their family, but it is easy for me to imagine as I walk there that I am surrounded by informal graves, each marking the end of a brave soul and their family's dreams. Maybe I over-estimate the deaths, but the marks of human tragedy are obvious.

The track route is subject to brutal day-time heat [up to the high 110º's] but the neighboring river-bed is protected by a canopy of massive cottonwoods and thermally regulated by the flowing water. It is an oasis. Hiking in mid-July is rarely feasible in southern Arizona, but here it is delightful. To escape the heat during the days the immigrants pick their way up the river bed, which is exceptionally rough going. We have run across elaborate networks of food caches, scouts, runners, and guides using the bed to smuggle immigrants during the day. Besides a pair of entomologists speculating that our southbound route constituted illegal immigration in an unusual sense, and a single nudist right at the confluence with the access wash, we have never run into a legal American citizen along the river. The Border Patrol flies by the dirt access roads in their SUV's without pausing [except for occasional stops to examine our vehicle and attempt to exact intelligence from us--they shouldn't dare].

That's the immigrant picture in San Pedro. Here's the biological picture:

San Pedro is a complete biological treasure. Due to the proximity to Mexico, north-south orientation, flowing water, monsoons, and high temperatures, the San Pedro contains the breeding grounds for many of the rarest birds in North America [using the convenient birder's definition excluding Mexico]. These birds represent the furthest north extension of many of the neotropical species. Several dozen of these exotic tropical bird species which are found nowhere else in North America breed in the giant cottonwoods along the river. Go to this gray hawk page and look at the range map; the long straight range extension up the western flank of the Sierra Madre Occidental in Mexico is typical of many tropical species found in extreme southern Arizona but nowhere else in North America. Gray hawks were actually our main targets in the area; 75% of all gray hawks north of Mexico breed along the San Pedro.

Western riparian habitats account for more than half of all species found in the region. The San Pedro is often cited as the richest riparian area in the state, and it is the longest undammed river in the southwest. Approaching the San Pedro is a shock of senses: arrogantly laid down in the middle of drab, low-level desert-scrub is a gaudy green ribbon of thriving giant cottonwoods and biological extravagance. It is truly one of the precious treasures of the country.

Much could be said about the damage that has already been done to the San Pedro: devastating, though not on the same scale as the full-fledged rape and murder of the similar Santa Cruz river, parallel and 40 miles to the west. I won't devote any more of this post to those issues, but this piece is well-written, lightweight, digestible, and touches on the conservation issues of the San Pedro watershed.

Now that the background is painted, here's the issue: The Fence. Right through the corridor.

Backed by the ignorant flood of vitriol that is steadily disseminated by the conservative punditry, and empowered by the heavy-handed and arrogantly mongering Current Administration, Michael Chertoff wants to build a fence right through the conservation area. He has used his God-given, er, Current Administration-given powers to “waive in their entirety” every single piece of modern legislation that stands between the Republican extractive economy and complete ecological ruin for the western States. The Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, all are impotent against Michael Chertoff's whim. These acts are often the only weapons on conservationists' belts, now rendered obsolete by a flick of somebody's president's pen.

[So I have just demonstrated what I hate about blogs: diatribing, name-calling, generalizing, ranting, sourceless opining. Here's my attempt at an objective discussion, minimized by the late hour:]

For the fence to be built, it must be established that:

1. The Fence will work
A. Illegal immigrants will no longer be able to cross
B. Drugs will not be able to cross
C. Foreign terrorists will not be able to cross

2. Benefits outweigh costs
A. Environmental damage
B. Capital costs

3. The Fence constitutes a solution to current border issues

Let me set one thing straight before we continue: the god-like powers given to Michael Chertoff to suspend environmental regulations were given as an add-on to his Department of Homeland Security duties in the Real ID Act, which deals almost exclusively with terrorism-related regulations. So nominally the Fence is about terrorism. It is not about illegal immigration.

To address the issues above, I'll say this, briefly:

1. The Fence will not work
A. Illegal immigrants will find other ways to cross the border. They will until economic opportunities exist at home. Desperate people willing to risk death to cross will always find a way to do it.
B. Our own capitalistic model insures that drugs will always be available. Walling off Ogden, UT is probably a more effective method of controlling methamphetamine distribution in the US than the Fence will be for any drug.
C. Foreign terrorists? Are you kidding me? 36 of the 48 al-Qaeda operatives who have been implicated in crimes in the US between 1993 and 2001 entered and stayed in the country legally. They can fly over on a student visa, a business trip, to visit family, for the holidays. A Fence won't stop legal immigrants and visa-holders from blowing up Americans. So who cares even if it can stop illegal entrants from doing it? There are millions of volunteers to do it now that we've set up camp over there and created hundreds of thousands of widows.

2. Benefits do not outweigh costs
A. Environmental damage is the only lasting legacy of a Fence. Habitat fragmentation is the most potent cause of biodiversity loss. The Fence cuts an ugly impenetrable swath right across the San Pedro, among other important areas. I'm convinced, after all my time in the area, that bulldozing even a 10-foot chunk out of the middle of the riparian zone and placing fence there will drastically alter the life cycles of much of the local flora and fauna. Rivers in the southwest are superhighways of animal movement. Walls bisecting highways are not a good idea.
B. Capital costs. Really, at 2 billion a week the War pretty much makes any other expenditure moot. But the 1 billion or so it will take to build the fence could absolutely and irreversible revolutionize the worldwide species conservation effort.

3. The Fence constitutes a band-aid at best for current border issues

The last issue is illegal immigration. Although the Fence is nominally about terrorism, the political expediency comes from rampant fear and misanthropy caused by poor statistics and hysterical public figures. Have you ever known an illegal immigrant? I have. Have you ever met one? Talked to one? Eaten dinner with one? I have. Fantastic, humble, family-oriented people. We could use more. I would have an illegal family as neighbors without pause. The proportion of rotten ones is no higher than that of the general American populace. But their illegal status and the accompanying social barriers put their children at extreme risk for criminal behavior. That is the fault of the way we treat the immigrants, not the fault of the immigrants.

I meet so many people who are ridiculously ignorant on this issue. "They broke the law, I have no sympathy for them." Really? I would jump the fence for my family. Wouldn't you? I'm not a bad person [Ann Coulter is not my judge]. "I say just send them all back where they came from." Really? Will you be the one to work in the fields when all the immigrants are gone? I've worked side-by-side with illegal immigrants harvesting onions, pumpkins, and hay. What they do in a day would reduce you to a quivering pile of whimpering. And it is necessary labor, needed to sustain the economy we all benefit from. "They're not American, America has no obligation to help them." What moral right do you have to a microwave, 3 TV's, frozen pizza, an SUV, multiple pairs of shoes, and all-you-can-eat buffets? You were born an American, yes. Did you die for this country? The entire founding philosophy of this country centers around the inalienability of fundamental human needs. Will you be the one to tell them that your rights are inalienable but theirs are alienated in this country because of where their parents lived when they were born? Your ancestors--if you are like most Americans'--immigrated to this country and found equity. Will you deny equity to those who would come now? What proportion of your hoarded wealth do you feel you will lose from having to share with our new arrivals? "They steal my tax money." Sure. The solution to this is to make them tax-paying citizens.

Something that really, truly should appeal to the very people I wish would listen to this but will never read my words: would Jesus Christ turn the illegal immigrants away? Would he deny them health care? Would he let them die in the wilderness? Would he condemn them for trying to save their families? Would Jesus Christ build a Fence? Would you?

I once met a Peruvian sheep-herder living alone in a small trailer on top of a mountain in Idaho. He spent 9 months a year with virtually no human contact doing a job that no American would take at well under minimum wage in order to feed his wife and children at home. He had to hop the border twice a year. Why should this man have to break the law to get home to his family?

And we're back. This is where it ends:

In the far distant future, a ceremony will be held atop an old set of tracks next to the San Pedro during mid-July at mid-day. The participants will dedicate a memorial to the souls who died trying to find a way to provide for their families. Somebody will say "Mr. President, tear this *&!^@ fence down" and it will be done.

Long live the San Pedro!

Ma propre expérience française

Mon frère Beerstraw a écrit dans le français l'autre jour sur son blog. Je n'ai pas pensé qui était équitable parce que j'ai dû compter sur une page de traduction en ligne problématique qui a rendu son écriture illisible. Donc j'espère qu'il lira cette traduction contraire et sentira la même frustration j'ai senti l'essai de lire ce qui a eu l'air d'une collection sans fin d'expressions banales courtes et vaguement spirituelles. Je ne sais pas comment ce traducteur voudra traduire "et là j'avais la révélation" mais j'espère que cela tourne dehors plus comme "et là j'avais quelque chose de bon." Mais le lecteur ne sera pas capable de répéter parce que les deux expressions sembleront identiques si ainsi.

En tout cas, j'ai pensé à l'insérant des articles supplémentaires juste pour l'amusement mais j'ai décidé que ce sera assez impénétrable sans eux que je peux garder la traduction torride pure, après une manière du fait de parler.

Durablement, votre frère de votre mère.

Searching in vain

We've spent the last week researching a new lens we need to acquire to fill a gaping hole in our coverage and to give MChes something to shoot with while we're out our requirements:

1. ED glass with max focal length no less than 300mm
2. Hand-holdable
3. Fast [f2.8 hopefully]
4. Fast AF [AF-S preferable]
5. VR would be very, very nice considering that we'll be using it handheld under rainforest canopies

And, of course, we have to be able to afford it. We were thinking about the 80-400mm VR, which is really versatile. But I've looked at hundreds of images online from people using it, some of which are explicitly designated as proof of the lens' superior optical performance, and they're all garbage. Nothing doing, I won't touch a lens that will ruin an otherwise awesome picture with bad glass. Plus the lens is slow and the AF is super slow.

So we were looking at a variety of 300mm primes. The 300mm f2.8 would be sweet, but the AF-I and AF-S versions are too heavy to hand-hold and the VR versions are so fantastically expensive that it would be more economically feasible to switch to barnacle photography than to buy it. Same for the fabulous 200-400mm f4 VR.

So maybe we'll get an old, cheap used 300mm f4. Not as fast as we'd like, too-large depth of field wide-open, and no VR.

So we just can't get what we want. It's frustrating.

Chuckwalla

Second draft

Thanks for all the comments [I especially liked the "you're a stud" ones]. Here's the next draft:

http://raptorphoto.sundala.com/NewSiteSandbox/

Note that the title is just a stand-in, we haven't decided what to call ourselves yet, and I'll still add Beerstraw's copyright at some point.

Lemme know, etc...

New Website Front Page

Here's the first draft of the new front page to our site:

http://raptorphoto.sundala.com/NewSiteSandbox/

Some questions about it:

1. Is it too big? I'm curious how it looks on smaller resolution screens
2. Is it clear? If you clicked on a link to take you here would it be too confusing what you need to do?
3. Is it attractive?

Any help is help. We want this to be gooooood.

The incredible explodable egg

I just got home from work and felt like a little protein before heading off to tutor tonight. So, on a whim, I put an egg in the microwave.

It exploded all over the microwave. So I tried again.

The second one split open but didn't explode. I salvaged a core of yolk and white which was piping hot but looked edible and intact. When I bit into it, the burnt yolk exploded in my face.

It smelled like a large quantity of rotting ant dung. And it was all over my face, the table, the floor, and the chair. And it was, I should emphasize, piping hot.

So don't try that at home [I'm not sure why I did].

Into the Wild

Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer.

I'm not prone to saying things like this, so enjoy it while it lasts:

I learned something about myself by reading this book.

First you need to know what the book is about. If you haven't heard the story already, it's about a guy my age [24] named Chris McCandless who dies of starvation alone in the wilderness in Alaska two years after converting to asceticism and disowning materialistic life. But it's not really that simple. The guy was not nutty, and he was not stupid. He was irrepressibly idealistic and passionately morality-minded. Being a real person, it's foolish to try to attribute his actions to any single factor.

Read this if you want to know more of the story and about Chris [this is the article that the book was derived from]. It's very good reading.

Chris reminded me in many many ways of myself. I hesitate to explain how, but it was uncanny. Reading the book was like reading a story of me in a parallel universe but with these differences:

∙ I'm married to the same woman I dated when I was 16 [this is actually crucial]
∙ Religion

That's it. As far as I can tell all the other differences are superficial. Sure we had different parents and were raised in different homes, but we both showed such a convergent evolution of philosophy and traits that I can't imagine that differences in environment can explain much.

Being married has been a tremendous moderating force in my life. I've flirted here and there with radicalism but the practicalities of marriage and parenthood as well as the personal influence of my wife has smoothed over my most extreme views and tendencies. I discovered how much of a blessing this is through reading Krakauer's book.

Chris's views were not fundamentally wrong or bad. And his ideals didn't kill him. What killed him was his immoderation and, frankly, some pretty bad luck. He was somewhat reckless, but not suicidal.

So reading the book was a great education for me. It taught me that people like me exist elsewhere in the world, it taught me the dangers of taking my idealism too far, and most of all it showed me how lucky I am to be married to a stabilizing woman.

It also forced me to imagine what my life would look like posthumously through the lens of a nature/adventure writer in mainstream culture. I imagine a lot of armchair psychologists saying "obviously suffering from X" or "clearly his behavior was caused by Y" which seems so foreign seeming when it's referring to me. I'm me, I decide what I do, I decide how I am, and I'm neither insane nor stupid. So I don't believe that Chris McCandless was stupid, repressed, off-kilter, insane, arrogant, heroic, brave, naive or even labelable at all. He was just a guy with no moderation who felt strongly and acted on his feelings. A weird duck, no doubt, but a duck nonetheless.

[I feel like I'm rambling. I listened to some of my old music today and it had this same structure: clumps of connected material haphazardly strung together with no driving purpose, no direction, and no correlation. Whoops.]

THE Forgotten War

I'm thinking of an American war.

The war was fought on foreign soil in a country which had inferior technology and tactics. The Americans defeated the regular army soundly and quickly. Within a few months the Americans declared the war over and won.

But violence still continued. Thousands of American soldiers died in protracted conflict with guerrillas determined to liberate their country from occupation. In response to guerrilla tactics the Americans started resorting more and more to brutal methods. Prisoners were regularly tortured and civilians targeted. The Americans trained and used native troops against their own countrymen.

News of atrocities incited the American people to denounce the war. Many influencial personalities demanded publicly that the war be ended on grounds that it constituted an act of imperialism which the United States was fundamentally opposed to on principle [the Monroe Doctrine is a manifestation of this].

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OK. So if you're a non-savvy reader you might think that I'm talking about Iraq. If you're a little smarter than that, you'd recognize that I must be talking about another war which I've simplified in just the right way to highlight resemblance to the Iraq war.

But the one you're thinking about isn't it at all. This isn't Vietnam. It's not Korea [obviously]. And since it's quite certainly not either of the world wars, the civil war or the revolutionary war, I think the average American can safely be assumed to be 100% absolutely ignorant of its very existence.

I'm talking about the Philippine-American war, fought from 1899 to 1913.

Never heard of it? I don't think most people have. It's an embarrassing war: 4,324 Americans and maybe 1,000,000 Philippinos died in this little adventure. In case you missed that, 500 more Americans died in this war than have died in the Iraq war to date. The war was essentially an act of imperialism, not nearly as complex in cause as the current war. The Americans had just soundly defeated Spain [how many people even know we fought Spain? and as a result of a purported act of terrorism?], and Spain was the colonial ruler of the Philippines. The U.S. sought to replace Spain in its role as colonial governor. So this war was, in essence, a war of independence with the Americans as the "bad guys."

Virtually anything else that can be said about the Philippine-American war proves that it was quite different than Iraq; no WMD's, no IED's, no Saddam, no Islam, no Dick Cheney, and no oil interests. Many of the soldiers died of disease and not combat.

But there were Guantanamos, there were Hadithas, there were John Murthas, and there was a messy, unpopular, ugly, expensive and unwinnable war in a country so far away that the majority of modern Americans cannot find it on a map. So there are lessons to be learned.

A few weeks ago cnn.com showed a graphic of war casualties from all "major" American wars. I can't find it now, but I think the data came from here. The P-A War wasn't on the list. This is completely consistent with the lack of profile that this war has. Wars with a fraction of the casualties of the P-A War--like the Gulf War and the Spanish-American War, the Mexican War, and the War of 1812--were shown while the P-A War was not [note that the page referenced specifically lists "battle deaths." Even by this measure the P-A War, with 1,000-1,500 conflict casualties is worse than the Gulf War and the Spanish-American War and thus certainly deserves place on the list]. A quick google search for "american war casualties" yields among the top hits this, this, and this, with no disclaimer of incompleteness and with the second link even going so far as to mention Grenada [but not Panama??], but none mention the P-A War. The last link is a very thorough documentation of every death in US military history, found on fas.org, the website of the Federation of American Scientists, an extremely well-respected non-profit group dedicated to collecting and publicly distributing information pertaining to the US military. It lists Haiti, Somalia, Grenada, Panama, and even the Iranian Rescue Mission which combine for 82 casualties. Combat and non-combat deaths are totaled one-by-one by race and cause but the Philippines-American War doesn't show up.

How could over 4,000 Americans die and nobody seems to know about it? How has our information-oriented culture completely forgotten a major American war? I don't know, but I do have a theory.

I think that nobody is comfortable with such a blatant act of imperialism by the US. We rarely hear of the American intervention in the Bolshevik revolution. Nobody even mentions US occupations of Haiti, Cuba, Panama in the 1900's, Nicaragua in the 1920's and 30's, Hawaii, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, etc. All of these occupations were adventures in imperialism carried out by the United States before most of us were born. In many cases the US supported or installed evil, cruel, tyrannical dictators who made Saddam's only unique attribute his mustache. In the vast majority of these cases even the most optimistic and patriotic American would have trouble demonstrating some great good either then or now that these occupations have accomplished. This is embarrassing.

Forgetting this war has rewritten US history just like remembering Valley Forge has written it. It surely is not the most important war in American history. But remembering it may have prevented us from embarking on the most frivolous one.

So how does the story of the Philippine-American war end? The violence lasted for years until the United States backed out and ceded control of the country to its own citizens. The US lost the country and several thousand soldiers. Nothing was won with this sacrifice. It wasn't sacrifice for freedom. America lost the war.

Raptorrific

[images copyright 2007 RaptorPhoto]

Today we drove to Half Moon Bay to photograph a huge concentration of raptors dining on a population explosion of voles. We saw perhaps a dozen white-tailed kites, 4-5 northern harriers [one male], and several red-tails [top picture is one of them] dining on the voles. Additionally there were two great blue herons hunting voles at sunset [bottom picture is one of them, a 1st year].

The herons were interesting. They slowly walked through the grass while waddling their entire bodies snake-like with head poised to strike. They looked like cobras on stilts. I didn't see them catch anything.

The kites hunt by hovering over a vole then periodically lowering themselves down until they are within range. Then they fold in their wings and drop like a rock. I didn't see them catch anything.

The harriers fly acrobatically very low over the ground and periodically ambush voles. They have many other tricks in their arsenal but this is all we saw today. I didn't see them catch anything.

The red-tails just sit on a stump and wait until they see a vole. Then they fly over and eat it. They ate lots of voles.

So I think the red-tails have something good going here. No wonder they're the ubiquitous hawk of North America. Now if somebody would inform the other raptors that they don't need to work that hard maybe we'd see more of them too!

Costa Rica

From Jan 9 to Jan 23 [plus or minus a day or two on either side] 2009, MChes, Chuckwalla, Pummelo, Beerstraw's older brother and I will be in Costa Rica. We've hired a private bird guide to show us around for a week and then we're going to spend the rest of the time camping in Corcovado National Park ["the most biologically intense place on earth" according to National Geographic].

We will hopefully be sleeping outside for most nights, a good primer for Peru and New Guinea. It's going to be awesome! I can't wait.

Literally.

I'm pretty much just sitting around waiting for it to happen.

But there's a lot to do until then. We have 820 species worth of field marks to memorize, half a dozen books on neotropical ecology to read, tropical camping gear to acquire, vaccinations to receive, a camera and the Nikon 80-400mm VR lens to buy, and many other nouns to verbize.

The original incarnation of this trip was a two-week guided backpacking expedition in August 2008 in the western Amazon basin in Peru. After a huge investment of time planning that trip it pretty much imploded based on cost and safety concerns. Costa Rica will be half the price and much, much safer. And quite possibly birdier too.

So, imagine us with a nealy-3 Chuckwalla, a 16-month Pummelo, a 500mm f4 lens mounted on our antiquated but trusty D100, our tripod, a D200 with the 80-400mm VR mounted on it, a tent, sleeping bags, bug netting, food, field guides, baby backpacks, rain gear, binoculars, and possibly an infrared trigger for the cameras. Not exactly Chris McCandless, but worth it to us.