Posts Tagged ‘water’
Wednesday Links
* I’ve seen dumber things than a mayor offering to spend $173 million in tax money on a building for a private college that already has its pick of several arenas to play in—but not much dumber…. I can’t for the life of me imagine what Emanuel thinks Chicago is likely to get out of this deal, unless he really thinks that convention planners are just waiting for a 12,000-seat arena to hold their plenary sessions in, at which point they’ll start throwing wadded-up hundred-dollar bills at any Chicagoan they can find. At the very least it’s something to think about as the mayor’s appointees say they have no choice but to close the schools. Common sense on school closings.
* Good news for Gerrys: Pope Francis says even atheists go to heaven. That’s a load off.
* Amazon tries to monetize fan fiction.
* Precious bodily fluids: Portland, Ore., rejects adding fluoride to drinking water.
* Best Cities for Working Women in the U.S. Congratulations, Durham!
* Just stealing it from LGM outright: ESPN is a great corporation. It is ungodly profitable. It creates a mere 43% of Disney’s total operating income. Think about that. All of Disney, including Disneyland and everything else it owns. 43%. But you see, ESPN has recently acquired some lucrative properties, like more SEC football games. In order to show us more Vanderbilt-Kentucky football and build a crazy expensive new set, ESPN has decided to lay off 300-400 employees. This a mere 2 weeks after Disney’s stock reached an all-time high.
* And Octavia Butler reminds us introspection is kind of a pain.
Monday
* Today in my classroom: Freida Hughes’s poem “My Mother.” I used this at the tail end of our discussion of Sylvia Plath today and found it really useful as a way of interrogating just what it is we do as critics.
* This American Life Features Error-Riddled Story On Disability And Children. Of course, it was a Planet Money piece.
* Think about it: MOOAs are the perfect solution to the rising cost of higher education. We take superstar administrators and let them administer tens, maybe even hundreds, of thousands of faculty at a time. The Ivy League and Nescac colleges could pool their upper management as could, say, Midwestern state colleges that start with “I” or “O.”
If the administrators cannot compete and be effective online, then it’s time to get out of the way for the people who can. After all, no student ever thought it was worth $55,000 a year for time in a room with a particular dean or vice president, but we might be able to convince them, at least for a while longer, that the educational experience of the classroom is worth it.
* Median Salaries of Higher-Education Professionals, 2012-13.
* Committee tasked with creating standards for for-profit colleges folds under industry pressure.
* And thus began the great Georgia-Tennessee War.
* The Great Melting: Polar Ice Across The Arctic And Antarctic.
* Today in dystopia: White Student Union at Towson University will conduct nighttime campus patrols. What could possibly go wrong?
* 5 Products That Should Fear Google’s Next Killing Spree.
* The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.
* Today in fanboy supercuts: Watch all six Star Wars movies at once. It actually is sort of revealing.
* There’s a dark cloud hanging over the science of climate change, quite literally. Scientists today have access to supercomputers capable of running advanced simulations of Earth’s climate hundreds of years into the future, accounting for millions of tiny variables. But even with all that equipment and training, they still can’t quite figure out how clouds work.
* Matternet Founder Paola Santana Wants To Replace The Postal System With Drones.
* Out of sight, out of mind: the story of every known victim of drone bombings in Pakistan.
* The University of Maryland at College Park doesn’t have a copy of the contract it signed to join the Big 10, The Washington Post reported. The Post filed an open records request for the contract, and was told that the university didn’t have a copy. The Big 10, which is not subject to open records requests, keeps all such copies. Maryland officials said that not keeping a copy was in line with Big 10 policies, which are designed to reflect that most of its members are public universities, subject to open records requests.
* A growing body of evidence shows, however, that we have grossly underestimated both the scope and the scale of animal intelligence. Can an octopus use tools? Do chimpanzees have a sense of fairness? Can birds guess what others know? Do rats feel empathy for their friends? Just a few decades ago we would have answered “no” to all such questions. Now we’re not so sure. Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocentric attitude: We often test them in ways that work fine with humans but not so well with other species. Scientists are now finally meeting animals on their own terms instead of treating them like furry (or feathery) humans, and this shift is fundamentally reshaping our understanding. See also: Clever Hans the Math Horse.
* Presenting the invisible bike helmet.
* Wal-Mart Stores Inc has sued a major grocery workers union and others who have protested at its Florida stores, the latest salvo in its legal fight to stop “disruptive” rallies in and around its stores by groups seeking better pay and working conditions.
* “Do you know that unless you’re willing to use the R rating, you can only say the ‘F’ word once? You know what I say? F*ck that. I’m done.” And it’s new to me: Jimmy Kimmel’s unnecessary censorship.
Thursday Links
* Put this one on humanity’s tombstone: But where the United Nations envisioned environmental reform, some manufacturers of gases used in air-conditioning and refrigeration saw a lucrative business opportunity.
They quickly figured out that they could earn one carbon credit by eliminating one ton of carbon dioxide, but could earn more than 11,000 credits by simply destroying a ton of an obscure waste gas normally released in the manufacturing of a widely used coolant gas. That is because that byproduct has a huge global warming effect. The credits could be sold on international markets, earning tens of millions of dollars a year.
That incentive has driven plants in the developing world not only to increase production of the coolant gas but also to keep it high — a huge problem because the coolant itself contributes to global warming and depletes the ozone layer. That coolant gas is being phased out under a global treaty, but the effort has been a struggle.
* College debt and the upper middle class. Well, that’s almost everyone; can we act now?
* How Much Water Debt Are We Taking On? This Scary Map Shows How Much.
* Male Superheroes See How The Other Side Lives.
* “Over the course of fifty episodes, Breaking Bad has turned its fans into some of the worst people on the internet.” This is certainly true with respect to discussions of Skylar, as the piece notes. As my totally 100% accurate quote from fake Vince Gilligan noted last night: “Dear Internet, I literally could not have made it any clearer that Walt is a villain and Skylar one of his many victims.” How is this even up for debate? More Breaking Bad tweets from this morning at Storify.
* Harry Potter Books Out, Fresh Prince of Bel Air In as Gitmo Prisoners’ Entertainment of Choice.
* Returning home from work Wednesday evening, area woman Caitlin Levy suddenly realized that, quite unusually, she had not been harassed or propositioned for sex even once the entire day, the puzzled 28-year-old told reporters.
Noting that she had experienced a lingering sense of ease and safety all day long that “just felt off,” the paralegal told reporters that, strange as it may sound, she somehow could not recall one single instance from the past 10 hours in which she had been gawked at, hit on repeatedly, or otherwise leered at by a male as she conducted her daily routine.
“Huh, that’s weird,” said Levy, remarking on the fact that at no point during her day did a total stranger attempt to provoke her with suggestive language. “No unwanted sexual advances, no creepy comments, no obscene gestures, nothing.”
“Can that be right?” she asked as she ran down a checklist of emotionally scarring behaviors she has been confronted with every day of her life, in some form or another, since age 13. “No, that’s impossible. I must be forgetting something.”
Friday Linkfest
* The Portal 2s that could have been. I do, I happily admit, want to play all of these.
* Drop everything! My brilliant friend and colleague Melody Jue is now blogging at Philosophy of Water.
* At right is your photo of the day: An aurora over Faskrudsfjordur, Iceland.
* Joss Whedon explains how to write a sequel.
* Steal $80 million in a Ponzi scheme, get 18 months. Steal $4,367 in food stamps, get 3 years.
* The year without a winter. Things are going to get weirder. But don’t worry: God told James Inhofe global warming is a hoax.
* “I have not heard of another hug”: Janet Bell, Derrick Bell’s widow, speaks out.
* Pat Robertson gets one right: he says we ought to legalize it.
* The Seuss book no one’s bought us (yet): The Seven Lady Godivas: The True Facts Concerning History’s Barest Family.
* Jacob Burak crunches the odds on Russian Roulette. But he’s completely failed to account for the quantum immortality factor.
* Science quantifies the Tina Fey effect.
“When all other variables in the model are held at their mean, those who watched the SNL clip had a 45.4 percent probability of saying that Palin’s nomination made them less likely to vote for McCain,” they write. “This same probability drops to 34 percent among those who saw coverage of the debate through other media. Exposure to the clip had no significant effect on the likelihood of voting for Obama.”
* When Terry Kneiss wins a Showcase Showdown, son, he wins it.
* On chess, gender, and Laszlo Polgar’s Grandmaster Experiment.
* For more than two years, Adrian Schoolcraft secretly recorded every roll call at the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn and captured his superiors urging police officers to do two things in order to manipulate the “stats” that the department is under pressure to produce: Officers were told to arrest people who were doing little more than standing on the street, but they were also encouraged to disregard actual victims of serious crimes who wanted to file reports. I’m shocked, shocked! Followup to this This American Life story.
* The headline reads, “Breakthrough Alzheimer’s treatment stops brain damage in mice.”
* And TPM has today’s sci-fi architecture porn.
‘We’re Building Things Based on a Hydrological Lie’
The headline reads, “World’s Dams Unprepared for Climate Change Conditions.”
Hydrofracked
This week’s episode of This American Life is a fascinating case study in regulatory and institutional capture, organized around the politics of natural gas mining in Pennsylvania. Both Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh come out looking hopelessly compromised by corporate influence, with state and local government not far behind. Give it a listen.
Monday Night Links
* The upcoming issue of Criticism is all about The Wire. Looks great.
* Making the rounds: How the bubble destroyed the middle class. The consequence of all this is that the “middle class” of the last forty years in the U.S. is essentially an accounting fiction.
* Apocalypse now: Nearly a fifth of the contiguous United States has been faced with the worst drought in recent years.
* Super Mario Bros., with the lowest possible score.
* And cynical, self-defeating betrayal we can believe in: Obama proposes raising Medicare eligibility age to 67. Taibbi: Obama Doesn’t Want a Progressive Deficit Deal. See also.
‘The Ultimate 21st Century People of Color Sci-Fi List’
This great list from Colorlines (which deliberately excludes more obvious choices like Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson) includes two foreign films I’m now looking forward to watching: Kenya’s Pumzi (which is available on Netflix Instant) and Pakistan’s forthcoming Kolachi.
Everything Is Terrible Tuesday Links
* The Department of Defense has finally admitted it lost enough money in Iraq to fund 6 EPAs. Who could have predicted packing $100 bills into untracked pallets would turn out badly?
* Lots of climate change news today. The 1981-2000 January temperature average is officially a full degree warmer than the 1971-2000 average. The media won’t connect wildfires to rising temperatures. The twenty-first century as a century of disasters.
* More good news: here comes water scarcity.
* It looks like a CIA agent will take the fall for higher-ups be indicted for war crimes related to torture at Abu Ghraib.
* And right-wingers on the Wisconsin Supreme Court steal another one for the plutocrats in ruling that the state’s Open Meetings Law doesn’t apply to the legislature. Of course it doesn’t.
Monday Links!
* Fredric Jameson previews his new book, Representing Capital.
You will now have understood that this distinction between politics and economics, between the achievable Utopia of the Utopian planners and the deep unconscious absolute Utopian impulse, is one between the social-democratic moment and the moment of communism. Communism can only be posited as a radical, even unimaginable break; socialism is an essentially political process within our present, within our system, which is to say within capitalism itself. Socialism is capitalism’s dream of a perfected system. Communism is that unimaginable fulfillment of a radical alternative that cannot even be dreamt.
* Unexpectedly, grad school lowers your blood pressure. It doesn’t seem right to me either.
* The GOP thinks not enough people are unemployed. Calculated Risk has a brief history of the current catastrophe.
* Wisconsin has some buyer’s remorse.
* More on hydrofracking: How radioactive is Pittsburgh’s drinking water? What’s fracking going to do to New York?
* First Big Coal Broke the Union. Then It Broke This Town.
* Trailer for the American remake of The King’s Speech.
* Scientists in Hollywood. The focus is on Natalie Portman and Mayim Bialik.
* And Jon Hamm, Superman. I’m sure yet another version of the origin story will be great, though.
Burning the Furniture to Heat the House
They should have known it was trouble when they named it “hydrofracking”:
With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself.
While the existence of the toxic wastes has been reported, thousands of internal documents obtained by The New York Times from the Environmental Protection Agency, state regulators and drillers show that the dangers to the environment and health are greater than previously understood.
The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle.
Other documents and interviews show that many E.P.A. scientists are alarmed, warning that the drilling waste is a threat to drinking water in Pennsylvania. Their concern is based partly on a 2009 study, never made public, written by an E.P.A. consultant who concluded that some sewage treatment plants were incapable of removing certain drilling waste contaminants and were probably violating the law.
The Times also found never-reported studies by the E.P.A. and a confidential study by the drilling industry that all concluded that radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways.
But the E.P.A. has not intervened. In fact, federal and state regulators are allowing most sewage treatment plants that accept drilling waste not to test for radioactivity. And most drinking-water intake plants downstream from those sewage treatment plants in Pennsylvania, with the blessing of regulators, have not tested for radioactivity since before 2006, even though the drilling boom began in 2008.
In other words, there is no way of guaranteeing that the drinking water taken in by all these plants is safe.
Climate Progress has your two-line take-away:
The bottom line this bombshell story is that the natural gas industry should no longer be given any presumption of innocence or safety in regards the health impacts of fracking. Time for the EPA and the wastewater industry to do some testing and inform the public of the dangers.
A Few Links
* Nobody knows how much milk you should drink a day, but it’s pretty likely I drink too much.
On the other side, groups promoting animal rights and veganism — including PETA and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine — say that cow’s milk is a nutritional nightmare that doesn’t belong in the human diet. “It’s gross,” says Dr. Neil Barnard, author and founder of the PCRM. “Milk is nutritionally perfect for one purpose: feeding a calf,” he says. “The idea that we should be drinking milk from a cow is just bizarre.”
Okay, that’s fair.
* Democracy Now reports on Haiti six months after the earthquake.
* Duke University in the news, shamelessly promoting belly-buttonism.
* A Texas company S2C Global Systems has announced that it is moving forward with a plan to ship 2.9 billion to 9 billion gallons of water a year from the small Alaskan town of Sitka to the west coast of India (near Mumbai). If the company succeeds in carrying out the shipments, the deal would represent the world’s first regular, bulk exports of water via tanker.
* And Talking Points Memo and The Big Picture (1, 2) have your World Cup 2010 methadone.
