19 June 2011
17 June 2011
Alice Liddell portrayed as a beggar-maid
She is lazing coquettishly against a much eroded garden wall of limestone and sandstone, standing in a corner in her bare feet. She looks with a calm directness right into the camera lens, her face bearing an expression quite unutterably different from those in all the previous images. It is an expression of impish, secret knowledge, a winsome look that manages to be both confident and disturbing. Many who view it find it vaguely unsettling to return the young girl's gaze, and not a few move on to other pages, or close the book and return it to the shelves. Yet, for most, even after the book is finally shut and put back, the memory of the image proves hauntingly and lingeringly distracting, and for a long while...Text from pp 5-9 of Simon Winchester's The Alice Behind Wonderland. Every book of his I've read has been a delight to read. I've previously blogged reviews of his Krakatoa; the Day the World Exploded and his The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. I can also highly recommend The Man Who Loved China.
The girl stands, leaning very slightly back, though not apparently touching the garden wall, in a seductive pose. Her left arm is crooked and the hand placed on her waist, the fist half-closed. Her right arm is bent in front of her at waist level, her hand cupped in a posture of a person hoping to receive alms, or else a benison of some kind. Her hair is newly washed and gleaming, cut in page-boy style, bobbed and with a fringe, parted in a line directly above her slightly retrousse nose...
The shift is folded and tucked above her waist so that it falls double, but has been shortened to reveal her calves and, of course, her slender ankles and her surprisngly large feet. There is sufficient shoulder, ankle, and skin revealed about Miss Liddell to excite and, these days, to infuriate...
This book focuses on the photograph above, offering as background a biographical sketch of Charles Dodgson (his uncle, for example was "Commissioner of Lunacy" with responsibility of oversight of the country's asylums, which might be relevant to certain stories Dodgson was later to pen...), detailing what is known about Dodgson's relationship with Alice, her siblings, and the Liddell family, providing a rather detailed explanation of the new science of photography and why serious amateur photographers of the time came to prefer the collodion process rather than the daguerrotype (Stan B and other photographers who read this blog will be interested in this part of the book), explaining how Alice prompted Dodgson to write Alice in Wonderland, and detailing some of Alice's later life as a housewife and a celebrity. All this in only 100 pages, which allows the book to be consumed in a single pleasant evening.
The Great Missouri River flood of 2011
But that isn't even the full story. The Rocky Mountain snowpack in Montana is now beginning to melt in earnest. In places, that snowpack is at 140 percent of normal. All of that melt water is just going to pass through Fort Peck reservoir. Then there is the issue of rainfall. June is the wettest month of the year on the Northern Plains and within Montana. The rains are going to come. The National Weather Service has predicted above-average rainfall for June in Montana because of the presence of La Nina in the Pacific.
Neocons and Republican foreign policy
An interesting post at The Desk of Brian suggests that the foreign policy espoused by the Republican party is undergoing changes from within:
Nearly ten years after seizing control of Republican foreign policy, neoconservatives and other hawks appear to be losing it.More at the link.
That is at least the tentative conclusion of a number of political analysts following Monday’s first nationally televised debate of the party’s declared Republican candidates — none of whom defended the current U.S. engagement in Libya, while several suggested it was time to pare down Washington’s global military engagements, including in Afghanistan.
“This sure isn’t the Republican Party of George Bush, [former Vice President] Dick Cheney, and [former Pentagon chief] Donald Rumsfeld,” exulted one liberal commentator, Michael Tomasky, in the Daily Beast. “The neocons are gone.”..
Of particular note during the debate was a comment about Afghanistan by former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who is widely acknowledged to be the current front-runner in the Republican field.
“It’s time for us to bring our troops home as soon as we possibly can, consistent with the word that comes to our generals that we can hand the country over to the [Afghan] military in a way that they’re able to defend themselves,” Romney said, adding, perhaps fatefully, “I also think we’ve learned that our troops shouldn’t go off and try and fight a war of independence for another nation.”
What precisely he meant by the latter sentence was left unclear, but it was sufficiently negative for one prominent neoconservative, Danielle Pletka, to tell Politico that her inbox had been flooded Tuesday morning with emails calling Romney’s remarks a “disaster.”..
Since the mid-1970′s, Republicans have been divided between aggressive nationalists, like Cheney, and Israel-centered neoconservatives — who also enjoyed the support of the Christian Right — on the one hand, and isolationists and foreign-policy realists on the other. The balance of power between the two groups has shifted more than once in the nearly four decades since...
But the Sep 2008 financial crisis — and the economic distress it caused — laid the groundwork for the resurgence of the party’s realist-isolationist wing, according to political analysts.
“The economic duress is undermining the national greatness project of Bill Kristol and the neocons,” according to Steve Clemons, a national-security expert at the New America Foundation (NAF), whose washingtonnote.com blog is widely read here.
“What we are seeing evolve among Republicans is a hybrid realism with some isolationist strains that believes the costs of American intervention in the world at the rate of the last decade simply can’t be sustained,” wrote Clemons...
Just last week, the Pew Research Center released its latest poll on U.S. foreign policy attitudes which found that “the current measure of isolationist sentiment is among the highest recorded” in more than 50 years..."
Wasp-waisted
Wasp waist refers to a woman's fashion silhouette, produced by a style of corset and girdle, that has experienced various periods of popularity in the 19th and 20th centuries. Its primary feature is the abrupt transition from a natural-width rib cage to an exceedingly small waist, with the hips curving out below. It takes its name from its similarity to a wasp's segmented body. The sharply cinched waistline also exaggerates the hips and bust.More at Wikipedia. Those intereted should also read the entry for "tightlacing."
In the 19th century, while average corseted waist measurements varied between 20 and 23 inches, wasp waist measurements of 18 to 16 inches were not uncommon and were often striven for as the reigning standard of feminine beauty in the period.
The scientifically-minded reader may be more intereted in this curious, frankly bizarre, experiment.
The photo is undated, and I don't have a primary source. Based on the other clothing, one suspects that her waistline reflects fetishism rather than fashion per se. Found at the totally-unsafe-for-work tumblr queerest of them all.
Addendum: A hat tip to Kniffler, whose web search revealed that the person in the photo is Cora Korsett, taken in 1973.
Jimmy Carter: "End the global war on drugs"
In a message to Congress in 1977, I said the country should decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, with a full program of treatment for addicts.More at the StarTribune.
I also cautioned against filling our prisons with young people who were no threat to society, and summarized by saying: "Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself."
These ideas were widely accepted at the time. But in the 1980s President Ronald Reagan and Congress began to shift from balanced drug policies, including the treatment and rehabilitation of addicts, toward futile efforts to control drug imports from foreign countries.
This approach entailed an enormous expenditure of resources and the dependence on police and military forces to reduce the foreign cultivation of marijuana, coca and opium poppy and the production of cocaine and heroin. One result has been a terrible escalation in drug-related violence, corruption and gross violations of human rights in a growing number of Latin American countries...
And the single greatest cause of prison population growth has been the war on drugs, with the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses increasing more than twelvefold since 1980.
Not only has this excessive punishment destroyed the lives of millions of young people and their families (disproportionately minorities), but it is wreaking havoc on state and local budgets...
Two Afghan girls
Gulsum,12, holds a baby cannabis plant plucked out of the field while she works with her father Ghafordin on May 15, 2011 in Wakhil, in the mountainous upper Panjshir region, Afghanistan. The farmer has been growing cannabis for three years and has seen the prices triple since 2008. This spring he is planting less wheat in order to increase his marijuana crops. Known as the world's largest producer of opium, the raw ingredient of heroin, Afghanistan has now become the top supplier of cannabis, with large-scale cultivation in half of its provinces, according to a 2010 report by the United Nations. (Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)
Shabaneh plays with the parallel bars May 10, 2011, as her aunt Somayeh Masroor, 44, takes a rest after she walked with her artificial leg at International Committee Red Crescent Orthopedic Center in Kabul, Afghanistan. Somayeh lost her right leg when she was 13 years old and traveling from Herat to Kandahar while they were caught in a fight between Soviet forces and Mujahedeen in Shajoor and their car hit a landmine off the road. (Kamran Jebreili/Associated Press)
Both photos from a group of 45 assembled at Boston.com's The Big Picture.
A question for linguists and mathematicians
Yesterday I concluded my blogging day with a report I entitled "The decimation of Atlantic food fish." The scientific study described a decline in biomass of the fish "by a factor of nine over the [twentiety] century."
Sue Dunham quite correctly pointed out that by definition, decimation is a reduction by 1/10th, not a reduction to one-tenth, based on the Roman military discipline:
But an even more interesting question is mathematical. How many times must humans (and nature) have decimated the Atlantic food fishes (at 10% per decimation) to reduce the population to 10% of its original level? Probably about twenty true decimations. That makes the results of the study even more impressive.
Sue Dunham quite correctly pointed out that by definition, decimation is a reduction by 1/10th, not a reduction to one-tenth, based on the Roman military discipline:
A unit selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten; each group drew lots (Sortition), and the soldier on whom the lot fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning or clubbing. The remaining soldiers were given rations of barley instead of wheat and forced to sleep outside the Roman encampment...She and Wikipedia both note that by modern convention, the term can be used in a less precise way to indicate massive reduction -
The Italian General Luigi Cadorna applied decimation to under-performing units during the First World War. In his book Stalingrad, Antony Beevor recounts how, during the Second World War, a Soviet Corps commander of a division practised decimation on retreating soldiers by walking down the line of soldiers at attention, and shooting every tenth soldier in the face until his TT-33 pistol ran out of ammunition...
In Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, Stephen Jay Gould uses "decimate" to indicate the taking of nine in ten, noting that the Oxford English Dictionary supports the "pedigree" of this "rare" meaning.So, this morning I wondered - is there a better term I could have used? The Latin equivalent of a 90% reduction would apparently require a neologism like ? nonagintication.
But an even more interesting question is mathematical. How many times must humans (and nature) have decimated the Atlantic food fishes (at 10% per decimation) to reduce the population to 10% of its original level? Probably about twenty true decimations. That makes the results of the study even more impressive.
16 June 2011
The decimation of Atlantic food fish
Jilted lovers used to be consoled by friends with the reassurance that "there are plenty more fish in the sea." That analogy may not be valid much longer. Here are some excerpts from a column in the Guardian's Datablog:
This image shows the biomass of popularly-eaten fish in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1900 and in 2000...The study itself was published in Fish and Fisheries in 2003. Here's part of the abstract -
Dr Villy Christensen and his colleagues at the University Of British Columbia used ecosystem models, underwater terrain maps, fish catch records and statistical analysis to render the biomass of Atlantic fish at various points this century...
These early accounts and data on the past abundance of fish help reveal the magnitude of today's fish stock declines which are otherwise abstract or invisible.
They also help counter the phenomenon of "shifting environment baselines". This is when each generation views the environment they remember from their youth as "natural" and normal... The problem is, the sea was already heavily exploited when we were young. So this is a kind of collective social amnesia that allows over-exploitation to creep up and increase decade-by-decade without anyone truly questioning it...
As Prof Roberts writes: "The greater part of the decline of many exploited populations happened before the birth of anyone living today."
We estimate the biomass of high-trophic level fishes in the North Atlantic... from 1880 to 1998. We extract over 7800 data points that describe the abundance of high-trophic level fishes as a function of year, primary production, depth, temperature, latitude, ice cover and catch composition.We then use a multiple linear regression to predict the spatial abundance for all North Atlantic spatial cells for 1900 and for each year from 1950 to 1999. The results indicate that the biomass of high-trophic level fishes has declined by two-thirds during the last 50-year period, and with a factor of nine over the century. Catches of high- trophic level fishes increased from 2.4 to 4.7 million tonnes annually in the late 1960s, and subsequently declined to below 2 million tonnes annually in the late 1990s... Our results raise serious concern for the future of the North Atlantic as a diverse, healthy ecosystem; we may soon be left with only low-trophic level species in the sea.Writing this post has reminded me that I need to revisit my review of the excellent book Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery, by Steve Nicholls. I wrote one post about the topic last year, but there's much more amazing information to present.
Bundlers and patronage in the Obama White House
From an extensive report at iWatch:
More than two years after President Obama took office vowing to banish “special interests” from his administration, nearly 200 of his biggest donors have landed plum government jobs and advisory posts, won federal contracts worth millions of dollars for their business interests or attended numerous elite White House meetings and social events...Much more at the link.
As a candidate, Obama spoke passionately about diminishing the clout of moneyed interests and making the White House more accessible to everyday Americans. In kicking off his presidential run on Feb. 10, 2007, he blasted “the cynics, the lobbyists, the special interests,” who he said had “turned our government into a game only they can afford to play.”
“They write the checks and you get stuck with the bill, they get the access while you get to write a letter, they think they own this government, but we’re here today to take it back,” he said...
Overall, 184 of 556, or about one-third, of Obama bundlers or their spouses joined the administration in some role. But the percentages are much higher for the big-dollar bundlers. Nearly 80 percent of those who collected more than $500,000 for Obama took “key administration posts,” as defined by the White House. More than half the ambassador nominees who were bundlers raised more than half a million...
Bundling is controversial because it permits campaigns to skirt individual contribution limits of $2,500 in federal elections. Bundlers pool donations from fundraising networks and as a result “play an enormous role in determining the success of political campaigns,” according to Public Citizen...
Public Citizen in 2008 found that George W. Bush had appointed about 200 bundlers to administration posts over his eight years in office. That is roughly the same number Obama has appointed in little more than two years, the iWatch News analysis showed...
Some of the biggest fundraisers end up serving in foreign capitals. Obama made a nod to this long practice in a pre-inauguration news conference, saying, “It would be disingenuous for me to suggest that there are not going to be some excellent public servants but who haven’t come through the ranks of the civil service.”
About a third of Obama's ambassadors have been political appointments as opposed to career foreign service officers—about the same as recent presidents. However, Obama has nominated 24 bundlers to ambassadorships to date...
The bundling merry-go-round is cranking up for its second act: Obama’s re-election campaign.
15 June 2011
U.S. life expectancy
I'm not sure what to make of the data. I can see on the map Hidalgo County, Texas (on the Rio Grande) coded in dark red for "long life expectancy," but that's where my dad spent his retirement years in a trailer park full of old people. The same effect is evident in the South Florida coastal cities. I'm not sure it's a map of relative health so much as a map of old/young populations.
Ticked off
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