Where it comes from

Doing yardwork...


Brendan: Dad, check it out. Looks like Zoey got into some Halloween candy. Grosss, is that a 'mounds' wrapper?
Dad: Is it? Looks more like Reese's Feces to me.

Quick Update

I should mention I've taken my next steps to getting out of Ann Arbor. I applied to Michigan Tech's Master's International program. It's simple. 1 year coursework + 2 years Peace Corps service = masters in civil engineering. Pie, no? The past few weeks have been busy making sure all the paperwork is in. Recommendations, fingerprints, background checks, letter of intent &c. It hasn't been fun. My interview with the Peace Corps last Wednesday went well enough, and there should be a second interview over the phone with the office in Chicago sometime soon. If that goes well, all I have to do is clear medical and legal checks and I can be nominated. Meanwhile my MTU application is in committee, so I should hear about that in a couple of weeks. It's nice to be in a place where the most I can do is cross my fingers.

I'm pretty excited. I visited MTU at the end of the Summer on the way back from a wedding in Wisconsin, and the campus defied my expectations. The kids in the program seem to be a tight-knit group and have a lot of fun together. So it was good to see that it isn't just a bunch of nerds staying inside and playing Counterstrike. I don't even think it will be too hard to find some folks to help me test out a little winter camping. Not to mention the coursework sounds exciting, and the Peace Corps is something I'd probably want to do anyway.


Plus, I don't know what the hell I'd do if I didn't get in.

Bush Needs Brain, Lobotomizes EPA

NPR's Science Friday did a piece [mp3] with Jeff Ruch of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) on the closure of the Environmental Protection Agency's library system that went into effect this afternoon. Here's the gist from the PEER website:

These libraries and their staff provide essential services to EPA staff and to the general public, such as finding the most current information on health risks of chemical substances, providing documentation in enforcement cases against corporate polluters, and helping to prepare scientific support for new regulations.

Shuttering the EPA libraries means that:
• Tens of thousands of unique holdings will be boxed up and inaccessible for an unknown period;
• Public access to EPA holdings will cease; and
• EPA scientists, enforcement agents and other specialists will have a much harder time doing their jobs. See EPA scientists’ letter of protest to Congress.

While cloaked as a budgetary measure, the actual motives appear to be rooted more in controlling access by both EPA staff and the public to information. (An internal EPA study estimated that the library network saved approximately $7.5 million annually in professional staff time, an amount far larger than the agency library budget of $2.5 million.)

I want to highlight that this is irreversible. It is not a matter of cracking open the sealed archives and digitizing them. The library in Chicago has already started to find new homes for many of their documents. Also, FOIA requests will not be effective since these records have not been catalogued. If you can't name the document, you can't request it.

Also, this is NOT about balancing the budget and finding a responsible way for paying for our dabblings in offensive warfare. It is not even an effective way to achieve a "small government." The library program IS small ($2.5 million isn't even a rounding error compared to the proposed $350 billion non-military discretionary spending) and it is not "government waste." It's what keeps the Agency running. In fact, removing the program will likely cause the $7.3 billion spent annually by the Agency to get tied up in paperwork and data mining. And THAT is wasteful.

I've stopped seeing stars when I stand up to fast. Must be election season. Call your Congressman.

End of the Line

Foreign Policy Magazine has a stunning photo essay about the shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh. About half of the worlds super tankers are disassembled there, the others mostly go to China or India. The methods and work conditions are almost medieval. From the essay:

When the tide is high, vessels are driven at full speed toward the shore. Once the water recedes and the ships rest along the muddy beach, the salvage crews move in, emptying the vessels of everything on board.

The OSHA factsheet [PDF] on shipbreaking includes a who's who of toxic chemicals including PCBs, lead and other heavy metals, asbestos and CFCs. Not to mention all the sharp metal, broken glass and fire-prone liquids aplenty. The US has workplace standards to protect its citizens from these hazards. The laws of economics see to it they are protected from doing the work at all. Bangladesh has few or no standards, which is why you see 200,000 people in bare feet and no protective equipment. Bangladesh also has lax environmental regulations, so when the tide comes in, all those chemicals get washed right into the Bay of Bengal.




The magazine isn't the first to cover this story. Will Englund and Gary Cohn were awarded a Pulitzer Prize for their 1998 piece in the Baltimore Sun on Alang shipyard [google satellite image] in India, and Greenpeace (yes, they're still around) has declared it one of their priorities. So I'm a little surprised I hadn't heard more about it.

Hold me

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Take a Bow

My friend Annick has been working hard as producer for a documentary about Clare Woods Academy, a school for kids with special needs. From the website:

The film chronicles the amazing kids, with various disabilities, through rehearsals, classroom time, their home lives, and finally, the sold -out, standing-room-only performances of the musical. The film aims to show that despite outward appearances or physical differences, these special kids are just like any other child, with the same hopes, dreams, and fears.

She just posted an announcement that the rough cut has just been finished and the real thing shouldn't be too far behind. The trailer is wonderful (I found the quicktime file to work better for me), and the whole project oozes with a professionalism that just awes me. But as LeVar would say, take my damn word for it and make a donation.

Tomatoes

My dad never ceases to amaze me with his ability to be trendy at least a decade too early. He was making himself "western-style" shirts back in the late 80s. He developed a predecessor to GIS for Wayne county way before it became an important land-use planning tool. To be fair, he has his share of things that never caught on. Before I was born, he started a croquet league that played during the lunch hour - in 1970's downtown Detroit. This time, though, he's caught something just before it reaches its tipping point.

Every August, the kitchen becomes inundated with tomatoes of all shapes, colors, and states of decay. By the second week, my tongue is raw and my sense of taste diminished. I start to wonder if the same happens to the fruit flies which have by then fortified a perimeter around the kitchen table.

This year, our troubles were alleviated when People's Food Co-op in Ann Arbor agreed to sell his tomatoes - at $5.69 a pound. The PFC was already carrying his heirloom vegetable seeds, which were profiled in a Michigan Radio piece in May last year. I'll work on posting the audio file later. Michigan Radio doesn't have a very friendly archive. Meanwhile, you can listen to a higher-profile bit [transcript. Scroll up for the mp3.] on heirloom tomatoes that aired on NPR's Living on Earth just a few weeks ago.

As I was searching for the segment, a bit of fill music caught my ear. It was Wendy Mae Chambers' car horn organ playing "New York, New York"

The instrument is comprised of 25 car horns operated by a homemade keyboard and powered by a car battery charger. The car horns were selected with a pitch pipe and purchased from junk yards, with the exception of the Cadillac C-Trumpet and the "ahooogah" horn which were purchased new... She believes she got the idea for the instrument while asleep in her apartment in Brooklyn, waking up to a distant traffic jam on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway that sounded like a Mahler symphony.

Bonus points for the apt Mahler similie. She also has a quite charming version of "Winter wonderland" that she plays on her toy piano. John Cage would be proud.

Speaking of Cage, youtube has his "Sound" posted in three parts. If you can tolerate Cage's urgent and self-important blatherskite, it's worth a look to see why I like Roland Kirk so much. Kinda like my blog. Was that too self-aware? C'mon, you like it when Eggers does it!

Kirk and Cage

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