Archive for August, 2009
Better health care
We desperately need better health care in the US. As a queer woman with a chronic illness, it’s a very personal issue for me. Reforming health care in the US is complex and faces a lot of opposition from people concerned about personal freedom and insurance companies worried about profits. I certainly didn’t expect health […]
Global Warming is Going to Get Us
The Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, is doing his best to get countries to work together to deal with climate change, warning us that “We have four months to secure the future of our planet.” You may think that’s alarmist, and that’s what the oil companies funding “controversy” are banking on. Yes, figuring […]
The real “hard sciences”
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge: Everyone knows that the social sciences are hypercomplex. They are inherently far more difficult than physics and chemistry, and as a result they, not physics and chemistry, should be called the hard sciences. They just seem easier, because we can talk with other human beings but not […]
What I’ve Noticed: Really Long Edition
Between things like steep fines and jail time for the “crimes” of being poor and/or a person of color and being unable to get a job because of poor credit, it’s almost impossible to escape poverty in the US. Yesterday was the anniversary of Japan’s surrender in WWII. Still sucks to be a woman in […]
ESA Meeting
I spent last week at the Ecological Society of America meeting in Albuquerque. ESA meetings are huge, and Albuquerque was not quite prepared – at least one bar ran out of beer. Albuquerque was not the prettiest city, but I loved that there were murals everywhere. Unfortunately, I only got one picture. There were […]
Davis arboretum
While in Davis, I did take my own advice and went to the arboretum a few times. I was especially fascinated with a group of plants in their Australian collection that produced flowers along their stems and kept on growing – you could see what was left sheathing the stems for years afterward. I wish […]
What’s the problem?
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge: The current status of the social sciences can be put in perspective by comparing them with the medical sciences. Both have been entrusted with big, urgent problems. … In both spheres the problems have been intractably complex, partly because the root causes are poorly understood. The medical […]