Insight into contemporary culture, passed along by Josh at the American Sector.
Sunday morning, 8:30 am. Kitchen table.
Undercaffinated groggy blogger reading newspaper: “hrumph..”
Cheerful ten year old with endless energy: “Can I see the coupons and advertisements from the paper?”
UCGBRN: “Why?”
CTYOWEE: “I don’t know… I just want to see what’s going on in the world.”
Not me — I’m blogging from the Denver airport, on my way from Boston to California. Why someone who lives in Chicago would be flying from Boston to California is too complicated to explain.
Despite the weak coffee here, I’m sure I’m in much more comfortable surroundings than Lindsay Beyerstein from Majikthise, Bob Brigham from Swing State Project (and now Operation Flashlight), and Kyle Shank from Americablog. (It’s not perfectly clear who all is going along, so there may be others for all I know.) They have made the trip down to New Orleans, both to report what they see and to help out where possible. (For example, working to extend the Voting Rights Act to prevent evacuees from become involuntarily disenfranchised.)
The reports are chilling. Lindsay:
The Convention Center was truly horrifying: A sea of filthy orange-upolstered institutional chairs. Blocks and blocks of chairs set out on the sidewalk. Mountains of trash. Abandoned supplies rotting in the sun — cases of muffins, an entire crate of coffee creamers upended, dirty needles, unopened bottles of sparkling cider that looked like champagne, rhinestone earings still in their packages, a tiny Spiderman flip-flop, water bottles full of urine, strollers, several barbeques… The 82nd Airborne was on the scene in their red berets. Black Hawk helicopters were taking off and landing across the parking lot. It’s really something to see a Black Hawk skimming the horizon of a devastated American city.
Kyle:
Unreal.
That’s the only word I can think of to describe what I’ve experienced today. The moment you step in it’s as if you’ve entered another reality. Helicopters dart overhead and pound a rhythm into the horrific scene. The stench of death and suffering overwhelm the senses. It’s a smell that doesn’t make sense until you’ve seen the filth the victims had to cope with. Try to think about all the worst possible scents combined; I guarantee it’s worse. Chairs, clothing, and drinks remain in the same position as if those people just vanished into the air you’re breathing in. Your mind goes numb during that brief inhale and you can only try to imagine what these abandoned citizens went through. Being in New Orleans is like soaking yourself in unthinkable despair.
And Bob:
We are in Jefferson Parish, just outside of New Orleans. At the National Guard checkpoint, they are under orders to turn away all media. All of the reporters are turning they’re TV trucks around.
Things are so bad, Bush is now censoring all reporting from NOLA. The First Amendment sank with the city.
Fortunately they managed to make it in, with the 82nd airborne. Keep checking back at each blog as updates appear.
Blogging from New Orleans Read More »
By Adam Zagajewski.
A blackbird sat on the TV antenna
and sang a gentle, jazzy tune.
Whom have you lost, I asked, what do you mourn?
I’m taking leave of those who’ve gone, the blackbird said,
I’m parting with the day (its eyes and lashes),
I mourn a girl who lived in Thrace,
you wouldn’t know her.
I’m sorry for the willow, killed by frost.
I weep, since all things pass and alter
and return, but always in a different form.
My narrow throat can barely hold
the grief, despair, delight, and pride
occasioned by such sweeping transformations.
A funeral cortege passes up ahead,
the same each evening, there, on the horizon’s thread.
Everyone’s there, I see them all and bid farewell.
I see the swords, hats, kerchiefs, and bare feet,
guns, blood, and ink. They walk slowly
and vanish in the river mist, on the right bank.
I say goodbye to them and you and the light,
and then I greet the night, since I serve her–
and black silks, black powers.
Okay, a new contest: come up with more appropriate acronyms for FEMA. No profanity allowed, despite the obvious temptation. For inspirational purposes, visit Shakespeare’s Sister and check out Cookie Jill‘s list of above-and-beyond measures by this fine agency — not simply everyday unhelpfulness, but making an active effort to prevent anyone else from helping.
Here is my favorite, unimpeachable in its objectivity because it is from FEMA’s very own press release!
First Responders Urged Not To Respond To Hurricane Impact Areas Unless Dispatched By State, Local Authorities
Release Date: August 29, 2005
Release Number: HQ-05-174WASHINGTON D.C. — Michael D. Brown, Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Emergency Preparedness and Response and head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), today urged all fire and emergency services departments not to respond to counties and states affected by Hurricane Katrina without being requested and lawfully dispatched by state and local authorities under mutual aid agreements and the Emergency Management Assistance Compact.
“The response to Hurricane Katrina must be well coordinated between federal, state and local officials to most effectively protect life and property,” Brown said. “We appreciate the willingness and generosity of our Nation’s first responders to deploy during disasters. But such efforts must be coordinated so that fire-rescue efforts are the most effective possible.”
Thank goodness the benevolent hand of Michael Brown was able to prevent any unlawful rescue operations from messing things up in New Orleans. Who know what kind of confusion might have resulted if things hadn’t been so well-coordinated?
Flagrantly Egregious Malfeasance Agency Read More »
Science magazine has a nice article about dark energy by Adrian Cho. But you can’t read it unless you subscribe. Except that the nice folks at UC Davis have decided that the article is nice publicity for Tony Tyson and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, so they’ve put the article online for free. See Mark’s post for some of the theoretical background.
The LSST is an ambitious project — a proposed giant telescope with a wide-field camera that scans the sky in real time. Every three nights it will complete a survey of the visible sky, providing unprecedented access to astrophysical phenomena in the time domain — supernovae, asteroids, variable stars, you name it. It will probe dark energy in at least two ways: using Type Ia supernovae as standard candles (which is how the acceleration of the universe was first discovered), and by measuring cosmic structure via weak gravitational lensing.
One of the great challenges of the project is the huge amount of data it will produce. We are talking about a petabyte of data per year (pdf) — about the size of the entire internet archive. To search such a database for some string of characters (say, using “grep”) would take several years! It’s a tremendous intellectual challenge just to design the ways that such data can be usefully arranged so that we can find what we’re looking for. As you might guess, expertise from people like Google is turning out to be very valuable. In fact, the value goes both ways. It turns out that computer companies love to play with astrophysical data, for simple reasons — it’s publicly available, and worth nothing on the open market. We like to think that the data has a loftier kind of worth.
I’m back from a brief but busy trip to Syracuse, where I hung out with co-blogger Mark and gave a talk or two. No time for any substantive blogging, which is just as well, as the rest of the crew has been discussing the Katrina fiasco better than I could have.
In fact, had I been stuck in front of the computer with nothing to do but blog, I would likely have posted something early on about how this is no time for partisan political sniping — it’s a massive human disaster, you can’t blame the President for the weather, and there will be plenty of time for sorting out responsibility later.
What a mistake that would have been. Sure, you can’t blame Bush for the hurricane, but the tragedy has been needlessly magnified by massive incompetence at all levels, foremost at the very top. The extent to which things have been screwed up is only gradually becoming clear, but we already know that the response strategy included funneling large numbers of poor people into the convention center and locking them in, while refusing help from other countries and cities, and keeping out the Red Cross on the theory that the refugees wouldn’t leave the city if there were food and water and medicine there.
The incompetence is staggering. If nothing else, the one thing that should have been figured out after September 11 is how to coordinate a response to a large-scale disaster. Don’t you think they’ve had time to settle on a plan? Of course they have, but perhaps the decision to gut FEMA rather than strengthen it was a little shortsighted. And perhaps political hack Michael Brown’s job experience as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association — from which he was fired for incompetence — didn’t really prepare him for the realities of being Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Oh yes, and perhaps it would have been good if more of the National Guard were here guarding the nation, rather than somewhere else.
Yes, there will be time for recriminations later. (And for gathering more synonyms for “incompetence,” I’m running low.) But as James Wolcott stresses, later never comes for these people. Right now, when the stupidity and mendacity of the administration is visible in sharp relief, is the best time to hold them responsible for their mistakes. I’m sure there is plenty of blame to go around, and I’m sure a lot of it will deservedly fall on state and local officials, and I’m sure many of them will be Democrats; it doesn’t matter, anyone who failed in their job in this time of crisis deserves to be held accountable. And it starts at the top.
Update: If you’d like to see an actual attempt to use the disaster for a brazenly partisan political advantage, see this. (Via Pandagon.)
Hurricanes and politics Read More »
I’m writing a review for American Scientist magazine of two recent physics books for general audiences: Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages and Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds. Lisa’s book is a great look at the details of how we come up with crazy ideas like brane worlds by working through attempts to understand particle physics — extremely rewarding for an interested reader, and I hope to say more about it later. I have mixed feelings about Kaku’s book, but one undeniable feature is the large number of interesting stories he relates.
One of the stories is about Vera Rubin, one of the discoverers of dark matter.
Rubin observed the rotation curves of spiral galaxies — the rate at which stars moved around the galactic center, considered as a function of the distance from that center. You would think that the velocity would diminish as you got farther away from the massive galaxy, but in fact it doesn’t — Rubin found that rotation curves were flat, implying a greater gravitational field than can be explained by the visible matter. From Kaku’s book, a story that originally appeared in Ken Croswell’s The Universe at Midnight:
Vera Rubin was ignored, in part because she was a woman. With a certain amount of pain, she recalls that, when she applied to Swarthmore College as a science major and casually told the admissions officer that she liked to paint, the interviewer said, “Have you ever considered a career in which you paint pictures of astronomical objects?” She recalled, “That became a tag line in my family: for many years, whenever anything went wrong for anyone, we said, ‘Have you ever considered a career in which you paint pictures of astronomical objects?'” When she told her high school physics teacher that she got accepted to Vassar, he replied, “You should do okay as long as you stay away from science.” She would later recall, “It takes an enormous amount of self-esteem to listen to things like that and not be demolished.”
Vera Rubin, with DTM image tube spectrograph attached to the Kitt Peak 84-inch telescope, 1970. Images from Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
Painting pictures of astronomical objects Read More »
Retired general (and once-and-future Democratic presidential hopeful) Wesley Clark is doing a guest-blogging stint at TPM Cafe. I am cautiously optimistic about Clark, keeping in mind the uncertainty principle that guarantees that a candidate’s viability is in inverse proportion to how much I like them.
His first post concerns our options in Iraq, given the mess in which we are currently mired.
Not only do I disagree with the premise by which this Administration started the war in Iraq, I also disagree with their current strategy of urging American “resolve” and fighting in Iraq in an open-ended manner. Simply “staying the course” is not an option, and neither is cutting and running. Too much is at stake. There is still time succeed, but the President needs to stand up and admit his mistakes and be willing to do the hard work that is needed to build a stable and peaceful Iraq. He needs to implement to exhaustion a three pronged strategy — I outlined it in my op-ed, so I won’t do it again here — and work the regional politics to bring about a sustainable solution before the armed and political opposition to our presence in the region crystallizes, and finally justifies, a demand for the return of our troops.
A sensible strategy, obviously with serious questions about how realistic it really is. At least Clark seems to be welcoming criticism and commentary, which by itself would be a refreshing change from the status quo.
Four-Star blogging Read More »
Hurricane Katrina has weakened slightly, but is still extremely powerful as it heads towards New Orleans. (Current forecast here.) The city is extremely vulnerable to this kind of storm, as Chris Mooney pointed out a few months ago. See also Roger Pielke.
Our wishes are with everyone on the Gulf Coast affected by this storm. Consider donating to the Red Cross to help.
Continuing the Cosmic Variance/Dinosaur Comics synergy: T. Rex contemplates multiple universes.
I’m pretty sure that T. Rex would have eventually gotten around to explaining eternal inflation and the landscape, if only that downer Utahraptor hadn’t been such a buzzkill. Maybe we should get Ryan North as a guest blogger?
Except that: there are plenty of borderline-plausible theories that we haven’t yet put forward. We’re working on that.
Friggin' scientists Read More »