Monday, November 30, 2009

New office

Found an office more beautiful than I had ever imagined possible.


Main reading room from my position

It's the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress. I discovered it last weekend, as it was listed as the third (of 26) reasons to love living in Washington DC in the Washingtonian magazine that I read last weekend in the 'man's corner' of a women's boutique on Connecticut Avenue. The magazine was right. When my inspiration runs dry, I look up to Shakespeare's statue. When I tend to dream away, the serious look of Beethoven forces me to refocus. And on the left there's Newton to help stay grounded in science. When I get hungry, I can walk to a cafeteria through the marble floored corridors and the concrete catacombs underneath the building, where blue and white collar workers and tourists pass each other, neither of them paying particular attention the other. Around me, in the reading room, in the cone of the light from the small desk lamp that is closest, people pear through reading glasses to the yellow pages of old books that were brought to them from the dark wooden stacks in the alcoves. Many alternate reading and hastily typing on their laptops. I wonder what works of art or Pulitzer prize winning master pieces are being conceived in this serenity. Or would most of them be, like me, officeless freelancers who fled the demon of restlessness residing in their appartments? Sssshhh...can't ask.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Here-to-stay travel mug

May I proudly introduce my new acquisition. Here she is:



...my new companion. She's a mug, that's right, a Maryland Terrapins travel mug. Look at that chic deep metallic red finish. She can hold almost 16 oz., coffee of course (she hates tea), and keep it nice and warm for me thanks to her insulating double wall. I bought her to be able to enjoy my coffees without the bitter side taste that disposing of the paper cup coffee is inevitably served in gives me every time I frequent a coffee shop, which has become much like a daily habit. It feels bad to throw away so many cups. Considering a-coffee-a-day routine, on a yearly basis that would equal to sending some 360 cups to the landfill, me alone. That feels like a lot. Accounting for all consumers the numbers are staggering: it is estimated that in America 23 billion paper cups will be used in 2010. Nearly all of them go to the landfill. They can't be recycled, because regulations are strict when it comes to allowing recycled paper to be in direct contact with the beverage. Besides, the cups are lined with polyethylene to waterproof them, making it more difficult to recycle them.
Drinking coffee from a reusable cup must be better, right? Intuitively that's what I thought, and since many coffee shops would fill-up your cup if you bring one, It made sense to buy one. But is it really better? A reusable cup must be manufactured, and in the case of my metal baby that requires non-renewable resources and likely more energy. It needs to be washed, too. Googling a little bit didn't yield a clear answer: it's a close call and depends on (and is sensitive to) factors that vary geographically. Apparently, it's not an issue that has wide academic attention. Many sources lead back to this 1991 study by Hocking, who compared disposable cups to reusable ones for energy consumption only. This 'sustainability is sexy' website judges in favor of the reusable cup.
One conclusion that I think I can draw is that if there could be an environmental advantage to my mug, the mug is to stay with me for quite a while to harvest its potential, forcing me to overcome that little awkward feeling when digging up that thing from my backpack and handing it over to the cashier, with the remnant smell of my last coffee experience filling the local air space. Not using a reusable cup makes things only worse. I'm locked-in to this thing now. In the end, it makes me feel better.
And what's more: how wide should the boundaries of the comparison between reusable and disposable be chosen? I wonder what the co-benefits would be of all coffee houses switching to reusable cups; would it have mental side-effects and affect the throw-away culture to one of more durable goods and less packaging?

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Precious

Merijn and I went to see the much debated movie 'Precious' yesterday. It's about obese, emotionally and sexually abused, HIV-infected, illiterate teenage mother Claireece 'Precious' Jones, living in New York's Harlem in the late 80s. It's shocking, ugly, touching, telling and important. Go see it. (In the Netherlands from December 3rd.)


Margriet Oostveen wrote about it in the Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad (Nov. 20th, 2009). The movie generates controversy. Some think it is stigmatizing and casts a shadow on the emancipation of the black community. Others say, which I think makes more sense, that stories like Claireece's are nothing like unique; they are everywhere and need to be told - read what the comments on this NY Times article say. Now with an Afro-American in The White House there may be new resilience for less pretty stories to be addressed. Besides, blacks do not hold the patent on problems like AIDS, illiteracy, incest and obesity.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Paralyzed America

The political system in the USA is paralyzed. In fact, it has been since the early 1970s, due to an immovable taboo on higher taxes. There is just no money for the "change". That's what Jeffrey Sachs told his audience in this year's Student Lecture at Columbia University in New York City yesterday. I had come over from DC by bus to listen to Sachs.

The approach to New York through the desperate ugliness of the industrial swamp surrounding the New Jersey Turnpike was shocking. The coal-fired power plants in front of Manhattan's skyline, the harbor cranes, the container trains and the endless oil storage tanks remind the commuter and visitor that the energy to power the screens on Times Square, the clothes in the fancy shops and the fuel to keep the yellow rivers of cabs flowing must come from somewhere. The swampy areas filling up the spaces in between the facilities suggest that New York is facing an adaptation challenge as sea levels rise. I was dropped off on 7th avenue in bustling Manhattan. What a city, so much alive. Sidewalks crowded with fashionable people, short blocks of towering building resting on lines of tiny and mega shops at street level. Compared to this, Washington, DC is a sleepy village. I took the subway to Columbia University's Morningside campus. Not so big a campus, I thought. Apparently I had assumed that the more big names the university has, the more space it requires.

Sachs showed that US federal taxes have been steady at 17-18% for the past 60 years. In the fifties and sixties budgets for initiatives like the highway system (fifties) and social security and medicare/medicaid (sixties) could be freed by reducing spending on the military. But when military spending bottomed out at 5% of GDP, non-military had to top-out, as raising taxes was just not an option: Joe the Plumber would not buy it. And that attitude toward taxes has never gone away since. The result: no significant government initiatives have been made for the past four decades. Today, all federal tax revenues are consumed by social security, medicare/medicaid, the military, veteran benefits and interest on debth. Everyhting else - from roads to child care, from sustainable energy to development assistance - has to be done on borrowed money. That's the paralysis. Paralysis is not the same as stability: it shows up in the poverty statistics as a steady increase in child poverty since the early seventies up to the point where nowadays 1 in every 5 children in the US live in poverty. The poverty rate in the US is 17.1% compared to 5.6% in those "socialist states" of Scandinavia. The trajectories of Europe and the US started to diverge when Europe introduced the value added tax (VAT) and America didn't. Since then, in Europe government revenues as share of GDP have risen to 10% points above the US level, allowing European governments to continue expanding and improving services, like education and health care.

Sachs doesn't see Obama breaking out of this lock-in. Obama ran is campaign on 'not raising taxes'. "Not raising taxes? How are they gonna fund the "change we want to see"?" cried out Sachs. The proposed budget cuts would only affect "the third decimal". Besides, Sachs is disappointed in how Obama does not put an end to the influence of special interests. He may define the topics, but leaves the policy making to Congress, and hence, to the powers of the uncountable lobbyists defending the interests of incumbent corporations. The paralysis blocks structural change and leaves not much more than tweaking some numbers here and there, like the FED's interest rate. But according to Donella Meadows' list of "places to intervene in a system", adjusting numbers is the least effective measure one can take change behavior of a system, yielding the least leverage. "I'm a big fan of the market," said Sachs,"but I don't want to see them in Washington. They should do business, innovate, not make the rules." Today, at the University of Maryland, Undersecretary of Energy Steven Koonin touched upon this lock-in by quoting what he was once told: "A price on carbon is never going to be high enough to make a difference, because when it does, the political system will oppose." Sachs's conclusion: "This is a very weird country, and I mean that scientifically by the way."

Although reasonable perhaps, I think it would be irresponsible to accept fatalistic arguments as a working theory. And I think Sachs does too. He presented a plan to get American economy back on track, requiring an extra federal revenue of 6% of GDP, meaning a 1/4-1/3 growth in government spending. Would a good plan be enough to break the paralysis? It sure is a good step, but how do we get people to be open to more taxes? Sachs recalled how he once was asked this: "You say Washington is doing it all wrong, and then you still want me to give 'em more money?" Would it help to 'reframe' the issue, like one woman in the audience suggested, focussing on the benefits, what we can and need to do for our children? Sachs agreed that that's part of the strategy. One thing to reframe could be the word 'tax' itself. At last weeks' Bioscience Day at the University of Maryland, Matthias Ruth had referred to the not very helpful ethymology of the word 'tax'. It means something like 'to drain', sucking the money out of you. The same for the Dutch word 'belasting', emphasizing the burden, which is only one side of the story. The german word is 'Steuer', meaning 'to steer', redirecting and allocating the money. That's a big difference. We need an organization, Sachs said, to tell the people what is going on. He then looked at demographics. Especially hispanics are quickly becoming a larger share of the population, and other ethnic groups are gaining share as well. As these groups have different cultural legacies, the receptivity to a dialog on taxing is likely to increase as well. But do we have time for waiting that long?

On the subway back to Penn station, I looked at the people around me, conversing vividly, listening to their iPods or scrolling their blackberries. Is this what a country in denial of its becoming an underdeveloped nation looks like? Poor boiling frogs. In the bus back to DC, in the front of its upper deck, with the ugliness hidden by darkness, I enjoyed the magnificent sight of all the little lights on the industrial facilities lining the Turnpike.

PS: Much of what he said, Sachs had written in this op-ed piece for the Financial Times.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Research: between (Love)joy and depression

Hold on: the tipping point for Amazon collapse is at 20% deforestation. Guess where we are now: at 19%! Oh my God. That is maybe the most, but not the only worrying fact presented at the Bioscience Day held yesterday at the University of Maryland. The Amazon data were a sneak preview of a World Bank study to be published one of these days, given by keynote Dr. Thomas Lovejoy. He also mentioned a study by the UK Hadley Center, concluding that 20-40% of the Amazon will be lost at 2 degrees. But besides climate, the Amazon is also under stress from deforestation (which contributes to global warming) and forest fires (aggravated by global warming). To curb a spiral of depression in the audience's mind, Lovejoy presented a bright green solution: planetary engineering using ecosystems - a "re-greening of the emerald planet", meaning carbon sequestration through restoration of ecosystems to bring CO2 concentrations back to 350 ppm (we're now at 390), a level considered safe according to up-to-date climate science. (See a short version of his slide show in this video.) The idea was attractive. But where is the energy in the equation? Mr. Lovejoy didn't talk about efficiency or renewables. I can't believe he would advocate unabated use of fossil fuels. The key thing is that there is a huge potential for mitigation of disruptive climate change in restoring ecosystems, which means: protection, reforestation, restoring grassland and agricultural practices that restore soil carbon.

During the day, in the presentations of many research projects, endless graphs with down-sloping trends were shown, painting a rather depressing picture of the state of nature. Eric Post titles his talk "the vanishing arctic". He showed how population, individual weight, size, fertility and first year survival of polar bears were all going down steadily. Caribous? Some up, the vast majority down. The arctic in particular is teaching a lot about the impacts of climate change. It is a relatively simple ecosystem, with little functional redundancy and clear species interactions. Besides, warming is faster in the Arctic than elsewhere. It is a real-life laboratory for climate research. Eric Post also showed that current warming is not unique. It happened before, in the Pleistocene, but today's warming is even faster. And the rate of warming is what matters for species and ecosystems having to adapt. Studying Pleistocene extinctions teach us that climate change has likely been the driver of the demise of icons like the mammoth and the steppe bison. Their decline had started long before humans came into play, although humans might have played a role in the final extermination of the species. This underscores that climate change is a major driver and risk of loss of species.

To balance the depressing results there was the joy I could feel about the research itself, about the quest for data and understanding what is going on out there and how the world works. It must be wonderful to let yourself be surprised by nature, but also to find your theory or model confirmed in real-life experiments and put an end to falls debate, myths and unproductive opinions with real data. That is not so easy, unfortunately. While the scientific consensus about the existence and causes of climate change is so great that talking about 'likeliness' and 'uncertainty' has become a marginal discussion for purists, the debate is naggingly persistent in the media. Inexplicably popular right-wing talkshow hosts like Rush Limbaugh keep polluting the ether and infesting people's minds with nonsense. And to hear Eric Post say that he regularly receives anonymous emails asking him "where he bought his PhD," putting him under pressure not to talk about climate change anymore. Shocking, criminal.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Chasing Molecules

Attended a brown bag conversation (referring to the brown paper bag in which you bring your own lunch) with Elizabeth Grossman at Worldwatch Institute this afternoon, where she talked about her new book "Chasing Molecules." The book is on the issue of persisting chemical pollutants. Although the issue is not new - in fact, in 1962 it was Rachel Carson who by addressing this issue in "Silent Spring" (o, o, I still haven't read it) ignited environmentalism - it hasn't been on my radar screen clearly. It's said that, despite these first strong warnings almost five decades ago, the issues isn't tackled yet. Let me highlight one of the many intriguing aspects. Grossman explained how pollutants are pretty much in everything and are found in the environment literally everywhere, but most of them travel northward to the Arctic. As they are soluble in fat and not in water, they end up in fatty tissue of animals and plants and travel up the food chain, accumulating in top predators like the polar bear, the killer whale and humans. The arctic is also experiencing far more than average warming of the climate, affecting the ability of polar bears to hunt. They become more skinny, which increases the concentration of toxics in the fat. Like climate change, the pollutants issue also has its origin in fossil fuels and the petroleum industry. So through multiple mechanisms our use of fossil fuels turns polar bears (and with some delay ourselves, too) into living toxic waste. And like said, there are many more facets to it. I should read the book and dig into this a little deeper.

Wizards

We're going to the Washington Wizards! I got tickets for the important game against the Cleveland Cavaliers, a top team with super stars Lebron James and Shaquille O'Neal. Last Sunday, the Wizards got their asses kicked by the Phoenix Suns (102-90), and together with New Jersey they are the absolute losers in the Eastern Conference. Thy need our support. We will need to shout out loud to be heard from our seats close to the ceiling of the stadium, but we will.
Go Wizards!
I'm determined to prepare well, so I became a fan at Facebook. I will study the bios and stats of all players. I'll make sure I'm on top of the latest news, through newsletter, blog and twitter. And of course, a good sense of his team's history is indispensable for the real fan.
I'm convinced that the not too fortunate start of the season tells the true story about the capacity of the Wizards. They know how to play. Look at this:
But, to be honest, isn't the sport just a masquerade for what's written 'between the lines'? One would be hard pressed to argue otherwise considering this.

Post-match update: Boy, that was cool! Two and a half hours non-stop top-class entertainment. Not a masquerade at all (where were those cheerleaders anyway?), it was about the game, and what a game. The Wizards beat Cleveland 108-91! Great battle and magnificent plays.

Friday, November 06, 2009

Interview

This morning I was interviewed for a job I very much want. Now, several hours after the telephone conversation I'm still left with an unsatisfactory feeling. What happened? It began with the first question I got asked, which was to mention recent work I was proud of. Hearing the question I automatically assumed that I should be proud, that that is a good thing. I was conditioned by the question right away! But what was the purpose of the question? And should I be proud? Ís pride a good thing? I'm not sure. If you're not proud of your own work, does it mean that you're failing? I don't think so. I feel one should be careful of feeling proud. It may be quite an unproductive emotion. If you're proud, would it not mean that you're satisfied with your performance and take away the incentive to do strive for improvement? On the other hand, pride might feel good and make you want to experience it again (like a drug), creating a productive loop, too. Which structure is the more beneficial one?

When I feel pride, I doubt if I feel it for my own achievements. Several reasons: first, achievements are never perfect; there are always mistakes or things that could have been better. Those may not be visible from the outside or be significant, but the 'achiever' is likely very well aware of them. Second, achievements are hardly ever fully ascribable to oneself fully; they most of the time rely on external factors, like contributions from others and specific favorable (or adverse) circumstances. I think that's why pride is being felt not so much for one's own work, but for what others who one has a bond with achieve. Like a coach who is proud of his team, a mother who is proud of her child, or a citizen who is proud of his country or city - the facilitator or mentor for his/her disciples. I think I do feel proud of my own actions when I live up to virtues I consider important (of which perseverance seems to stand out), going beyond compliance with expectations and minimal levels of acceptability.

My view might be a cultural one, stemming from the deep-rooted mental model that underlining one's own accomplishments is regarded as bragging in the milieu I'm coming from and it is not appreciated if one sticks out one's head. But it could be possible that in the US not doing so is regarded as plain stupid, or intransparent and hence arrogant and impolite, or cowardice. This I haven't figured out yet and maybe interesting to test with some natives here. So, in hindsight, I think the question I was asked is a complicated one, which I might have answered more comfortably had I taken some distance from the literal phrasing. I hope this tension was sensed at the other side of the hampering telephone connection. I'll know in a weeks time. In the mean time I have some practicing to do to be better prepared next time. And please, tell me if you think the foregoing makes no sense.

Update Nov. 11th: Application not successful. Bummerrrr! Big time. Got useful feedback, though.