botany, shoes, books, and justice
Cover of The Truth
From The Truth by Terry Pratchett:
He was the younger son in any case, and family tradition sent youngest sons into some church or other, where they couldn’t do much harm on a physical level. But too much reading had taken its toll. William found that he now thought of prayer as a sophisticated way of pleading with thunderstorms.
Southern California is known for being sunny and warm. Of course, it’s chilly and pouring rain the weekend I’m visiting. I’d much rather the weather back home.
My lovely walk to work last Monday
I won a hand lens from the awesome Encyclopedia of Life for some lichen photos. So far I’ve only used it to look at the surface of this dried up algae, but I might get to pull it out for some botanizing this weekend.
From An Introduction to Ecological Genomics
Despite the importance of allocations and trade-offs in life-history theory, reliable empirical measurements are difficult. This is especially annoying because often the outcome of an optimization procedure depends critically on the shape of a trade-off function… [emphasis mine]
This had my roommate and I in fits of giggles over breakfast this morning. Clearly, we need to get out more.
I’m as guilty as the next tourist of taking mediocre photographs of sites that already have a thousand representations. I can feel a bit less guilty about clogging up Flickr with them after seeing how Corinne Vionnet transforms such banal pictures into beautiful art.
by Corinne Vionnet
The Republicans were voted in on a promise to make $100 billion in spending cuts. They’ve walked back from that number, but are still doing their best to cut any program that might help the average US citizen. (If you have money to burn, however, your fire isn’t going out anytime soon.) The proposed spending cuts are wide ranging, targeting everything from programs keeping the heat on for poor families to health research to Planned Parenthood. All of the cuts do have one thing in common: they aren’t security spending. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if security spending was small, but HALF the discretionary budget is security spending. So all the cuts are coming from the side of the budget that supports regular US citizens and none from the side that supports the military blowing people up on the other side of the world.
Ok, ok. I recognize that getting rid of the military is not a real option (and probably a terrible idea). But poor people might freeze to death while the richest of the rich get even richer and we’re killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people in wars that aren’t making us safer.
The US economy might not be in good shape, but there is a lot of money here. A lot. Even though a lot of our country’s wealth is locked up in the hands of a very, very few people, we could do a lot to help ordinary Americans by spending less money on war and bumping up the tax rate on the richest Americans. For example, for the 2011 fiscal year, Arizona taxpayers will spend about 1.5 billion dollars to support the war on terror. What else is 1.5 billion dollars good for in Arizona?
That’s a lot of good stuff Arizona could pay for if we weren’t spending money in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I finished reading Cryptonomicon
As much as I enjoyed the book, I was again disappointed by Stephenson’s female characters. The comments here do a good job of laying out some of the issues. My biggest problems are that none of the women get to be characters in their own right and that our impressions of them are always filtered through the male characters. Stephenson wrote terrifically sexist male characters (some are assholes, some are just men that lived pre-second wave), and it’s done in a way that makes his characters’ unfortunate view of women (I thought) glaringly obvious. At first, I thought he did it to show how awful/silly/useless sexism is. But while a scene that showed what one of the male leads thinks of his intended disgusted me, a male (engineering) acquaintance of mine found it hilarious – if the character was real, I’m pretty sure they would have high-fived. So maybe I’m giving Stephenson too much credit.
I twisted myself into knots trying to make Cryptonomicon feminist, but ultimately I think Alyssa is right when she says that in the novel “women are amusing, mysterious, trivial but enchanting creatures. There’s something almost Victorian about it, and it’s annoyingly reductionist.”
