ragged claws and traffic tradeoffs

Category: [Idle Musings]

just a random thing I was thinking about just now. Even though I’ve got a car I’m pretty happy with, that’s about 2 and a half years old with slightly more than 20,000 miles on it, every couple of months I find myself reading usnews car reviews for cars I could potentially buy, if I needed to buy a car right now.

I’m not totally sure why this is, but I find it fascinating entertaining the mental image of me in a Lexus ES or a Mercedes E-class. I even go so far as to go to relevant manufacturer websites and spec out the car I’d want to buy, if I wanted to buy one, and sometimes to search inventories and scope out the monthly payments.

But it got me thinking just now, as I found myself contemplating the monthly on a luxed-out Taurus SHO and comparing it to what I have available now and what I’m paying on my Altima, and I realized that the interest in cars is mostly an interest in commute comfort. Right now I’m doing pretty well … I’ve got good AC, good heating, comfy seats and good performance, pretty respectable audio system, satellite radio. That’s really all I’m asking for. But the entertaining other car ideas thing strikes me as a tradeoff.

See, I’m living in a situation where my rent and utilities are relatively low and the quality of the place I live is relatively high. If I stayed here indefinitely, I’d likely in the future want to scope out upgrades to my ride to and from work (and just in general), but if I only stay here a while longer and then move even closer to work, my driving would be a smaller part of my day, so I’d be less interested in trading up on it. But my living expenses would almost certainly be dramatically increased.

So there’s the question: does it make sense to sink your money into the present and near future, slowing your rate of savings in exchange for a solution to an immediate trouble, or are you better off putting your money in savings and buying the dream-house sooner?

I mean, obviously, should I survive to see that bright future, it’d be better to be prepared for it than not. But tomorrow is guaranteed to no man, so maybe it’d be better to be a little spoiled?

Regardless, I’m in a holding pattern right now. I’m around 3 months ahead on my car payment, but that’s still less than 60% of the way there. I’m still at least a couple months away from being done with my student loan (hoping I can still meet the birthday no-student-loan target, but it’s iffy, I might opt to buy a couple things instead). I just signed another 1 year lease extension. That means I’m still at least two years (and more likely three) away from having anything remotely resembling a meaningful down payment on a house around here, so it’s not like I’ve got any great situation-change options waiting for me. But it’s still interesting to entertain the possibilities. Shall I shop for an Infiniti? Do I find a condo in reach? I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach…

God is Not Great, The End of Faith

Category: [Book Reviews]

I recently gave Chris Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great” and Sam Harris’s “The End of Faith” some listening time, and thought I’d share some impressions.

My biggest impression is that these books are pretty much cut from the same cloth. Hitchens has, as his basic thesis, that the whole idea of religion poisons everything in the world. Harris has a pretty similar view, that the presence of faith is a corrupting influence in the world.

Both Hitchens and Harris are pretty hard on the Jews and on Muslims, too, and Harris especially beats up on Islam for its intrinsic and unmoderated violence. Neither of them loses any love in the direction of the Christian establishment either, and neither has any illusions about the violence inspired by dominant Buddhism and Hinduism, and they both spend a bit of time dispelling false beliefs about so-called “peaceful religions”….

Both books have another similarity too: they spend significant amounts of time in hamfisted brutalizing of their points. Like …. I think Harris spends like 30 minutes of the 9 hour book citing chapter and verse from the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah as examples of the violence inherent in those books. Hitchens spends probably the latter third of his book beating on various historical issues pointing out how the jews were nasty people before they were the displaced minority, about how the muslims have been getting progressively nastier, about how christianity marched boldly into some really dark times.

That’s really my biggest complaint about these books … they both make good cases for their points, but at some point you just kind of have to look at the flayed mound of horseflesh and realize that there’s not much point in continuing to beat on it. That’s it.

Harris spends some time exploring non-religious spirituality … meditation, the exploration of the concept of self as subject and illusion, the nature of mind…. stuff like that. So from a phenomenological perspective, his work is pretty interesting, and leaves the window open for spirituality while slamming shut the door of dogmatic faith. He also spends time exploring a scientific morality and some of the problems with figuring out where our moral sphere does and doesn’t extend given the absence of an imposed religious order. So even if you’re going to opt to skip over the half a chapter that’s built entirely of bloody verses from holy books, the philosophical subject matter is worth thinking about.

Hitchens spends more of his time on history, talking about how religions around the world were basically the source of all kinds of evil, and how even ostensibly atheistic movements that turned out pretty badly generally involved elevating a leader to the level of occult figurehead. Less of the Stephen Pinker philosophical rigor, more of the journalistic bent.

Still, if you’re interested in hearing about how religion is bad for things, both books are pretty good things to sink your time into.

The Checklist Manifesto

Category: [Book Reviews]

I recently finished the relatively small morsel that is Atul Gawabe’s The Checklist Manifesto. Audiobooks are fun!

The Checklist Manifesto is a doctor’s exploration of unexpected ways we can cope with complexity in an increasingly complex world. Gawabe leads in by talking about the challenges that keeping track of a large set of relatively mundane tasks when we’re beset by complexity, especially in the context of his home discipline: medicine. He talks about patients he and other experienced surgeons have nearly lost because of avoidable complications and screw-ups in mundane stuff. It’s … a bit scary, in that regard. That leads to his thesis: that in a complex world, a well-crafted checklist, well-implemented, can be a huge boon.

He talks about the aviation origins of the checklist, and how modern pre-flight procedures in commercial airlines evolved from those origins. Explores the use of checklists in other fairly mundane but inherently complex trades, particularly construction and civil engineering, and then talks about application of the theory to less mundane things, particularly investing.

As a result of reading this book, I’ve sort of integrated its ideas a bit into my own work. Not going to get into it too much here, but … there’s a lot of things in my own life that work out better if I at least stop and take inventory of what I need to do before I start.

Blaargh, there’s more to say about it, but I’m not going to. Just read (or listen to) it, it’s good!

The Blank Slate, Hot Flat and Crowded, The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Category: [Book Reviews]

More on audiobooks. Recently tore through Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate, Thomas L. Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded, and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (all via Audible. Might as well do some reviewing…

So Stephen Pinker’s got a really, really academic, very thorough style that really comes across in The Blank Slate. The whole book is a giant refutation of the idea that humans lack a complex, hard-wired human nature. Pinker methodically picks apart the argument from a biological and neurological perspective, then proceeds to pick apart why people are so attached to the idea of the tabula rasa, and from there proceeds to address the social consequences of the prevalence of the theory.

It’s a pretty intensive treatment — Pinker goes through every obvious argument, refutes it, addresses possible rejections of that refutation, and builds a solid case for his position at every step along the line, almost to annoying levels of thoroughness. He pulls in a wide variety of philosophers, biologists, and thinkers in general and paints a pretty complete picture. Very well-constructed, but a little plodding at times. Hard to get through, but definitely worthwhile.

Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded was also a bit hard to get through, but not for the same reasons as The Blank Slate was. While TBS suffered from its density and thoroughness, Friedman’s style is a bit less thorough, less philosophical, and more repetitive. I don’t have any idea how many times he belabors the phrase “Hot, Flat and Crowded” in the book, but it’s enough that I felt like it was gratuitous.

The book was a meandering trip through the dangers of growing populations of ever-richer people aiming for an American lifestyle replete with energy-hungry devices, polluting cars and factories, and a simply lousy way of getting that energy. It didn’t address the catastrophic consequences of dramatic global warming in quite the way I expected, but rather alluded to them while outlining the insane acceleration in emissions that rising standards of living for literally billions of people in the next couple decades will surely bring forth. He lays out the positive motivations for mitigating the problem that are true whether sea level rises three inches or three meters in the next century or so, and describes an energy economy based on large-scale adoption of sustainable sources.

The biggest reason the book was hard to get through, though, was its repeated rambles down utopian futuristic fantasies of repugnant lifestyles and micro-scale energy economies completely miss the fairly basic reasons that what he’s proposing probably probably can’t work. Beyond that, aiming at specific products, which in the two years or so since the book came out have proven quite untenable. He proposes this lifestyle that’s something like massively sedentary, which, as someone who already lives a very sedentary lifestyle, I don’t see as sustainable — I struggle with the health implications of my lack of ground covered on a daily basis as it is.

Other than getting a little preachy about some things and a little repetitive about others, and screwing up the science in a couple annoying and persistent places, he makes a good case for green, and that’s not a bad thing. All in all, I’d call it worth a go, but there’s definitely some parts where if you’re like me you’ll find yourself skipping a bit and being a bit annoyed.

Lastly, I gave a binge-listen to Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. This book promised, on its surface, to be an interesting run through the psychology of food and consumption, and with that regard, it delivered — kind of.

Pollan structures his book around four meals he prepares, and gimmicky set-ups to get to them. He pretty much goes from the industrially-raised corn and corn-fed beef culminating in an industrialized McDonald’s dinner to a Whole Foods “organic” meal to a meal gleaned from a particular local food operation to a hunter-gatherer meal, while exploring the food chains that the foods come from and interact with, their origins and backgrounds and how they came to be on his plate. In the process, he struggles with the ever-present question a modern omnivore faces: “what should I eat?”

This book sort of loops back in itself in almost a stream-of-consciousness way, reflecting the same thoughts and ideas in a couple different places, pulling back from the eating to think about the origins of the food, the perspective of the eater, the perspective of the eaten, evolutionary strategies, symbiosis, and what he often calls the “true cost” of various foods. Sometimes, these “true costs” are the hidden costs of industrialization — for example, fuel to produce industrial corn, fuel to transport it, energy input and water to refine it into an edible form, the cost to public health of eating a diet rich in corn. Some of the book focuses on pretty scientific topics, while others wax almost spiritual, agape at the limitations of either the author’s understanding, or the limits of the science.

Pollan brings up a lot of pretty interesting points as he explores his true costs, and as he wanders through industrial food production, then through a farm in the Shenandoah valley, through a brief flirtation with vegetarianism and into full-on hunter-gatherer mode, exposing in the process the inherent self-contradiction of a place like Whole Foods going nationwide and selling out-of-season organic Argentinian asparagus, the purported organic benefits of which likely ceased to exist over the days or weeks it spent on a boat from a continent away, and on trucks on the highway, before landing on his plate. Some of his descriptions called back to The Jungle, with his graphic descriptions of his own slaughter of chickens at Polyface Farm, and his description of how a slaughterhouse killing floor works.

Wandering from his own struggles with the question of what to eat, Pollan runs through the problems of how to feed himself, how to feed the country, the possibility or lack thereof of feeding cities without doing what we do, the ethics of eating animals, our atavistic conceits and a whole host of other issues.

One big problem I had with this one was that Stephen Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” is still fairly fresh in my mind, and so I have a lot of trouble with the strong presence of “the noble savage” in Pollan’s work. Every time he extolled the virtues of some prehistoric species or civilization and how it negotiated its way into a complex web of symbioses called out in my mind the assumption that the primitive, uncivilized way is inherently better. Some of these assertions seemed to me a bit too accepting.

Pollan doesn’t prescribe sweeping answers, doesn’t claim that industrial food is evil or that organics are always better, and does pull back some of the veil in ways that ordinary folks don’t normally get a chance to do, so that much was interesting. His refreshing acknowledgment that his hunter-gatherer meal and the organic foods he got were not for everyone and were the conceits of a modern person with a lot of opportunities to engage in those things was certainly appreciated. He engages with some of the intrinsic absurdity of his stated goal, while at the same time constructing a narrative that is both enlightening and edifying. So … again, worth a read, but with caveats.

I guess the takeaway from these last two is that we face systemic problems, the answers to which are either hard to do or simply unclear, and that we must nevertheless boldly engage these problems to make the future a better place. That’s the story, that’s where it’s sticking.

Wild Grape Roots

Category: [life and times, observational]

A year or so ago, my roommates and I noticed, as we were fighting a mouse problem, that one possible access mode to the house was a dogwood that was pretty close to an attic vent. We’ve got wall voids that go pretty much all the way up to the attic, so it seemed like a valid thing to think about.

Other than that, we also noticed squirrels running around the roof, going down our chimney. In short, the whole house was porous. So we got the chimney re-sealed, we did other rodent exclusion work and pretty much got the mouse problem in check. And we went to trim away the tree branches from the side of the house.

And that’s when I noticed it. Much of the thick, vibrant foliage on that dogwood wasn’t dogwood leaves. It was some sort of insane climbing invasive vine that had gotten to the top of the tree and completely established a canopy. It was a mess. And it was wild grape.

Well, tracing the vines back to a root location, I chopped them down and did my best to remove them, and I think the tree’s been doing better since losing its aggressive competitor. Hard to tell though, the damage was probably already done. Anyway, I cut back the vine and left it at that.

Well, fast forward a couple months, through the winter and into today, and I was out in that area raking up some dead leaves, pulling some ivy vines, etc, and one apparent vine was buried a bit better than the normal ivy runners. Pulling on it revealed a bigger thing that looked exactly like the above-ground grape vines. And more pulling and digging and following had me pulling out probably in the neighborhood of 30 foot long vines from just under the surface of the ground, snaked out into the lawn, running along the house … just everywhere. It was really phenomenal. I filled one of those kraft paper yard waste bags with ivy vines, late-fallen leaves and rogue wild grape roots, and I know for sure I didn’t get all of them either from that vine head, or from that part of the yard.

So let that be a lesson to anyone who’s paying attention. Wild grape is insane. Kill it. Kill it fast. Kill it with fire, if you can. Because if you don’t kill it, it’ll kill your trees, it’ll kill your grass, it’ll take over your whole damned yard from both above and below with a virulence and implacability that trumps even ivy.

That’s all.