The Pen Ultimate

Plastic bags are killing us | Salon News

2007-08-10T03:12:00.000-04:00

Plastic bags are killing us | Salon News

In Switzerland, the grocery stores charge 30 cents per bag. As a result, people generally bring their own. Sometimes you'll forget to bring one, or you'll stop off at a store when you weren't expecting to, so you have to buy a new bag - at 30 cents, it's no big deal, but then you keep that bag and reuse it as long as you can. And the bags sturdy constructions with handles, well worth the money.

We've lived in Switzerland for about 7 months now, and we've used maybe 20 grocery bags in that time. Compare that to life in the US, where you can easily get 20 plastic bags on a single trip to the supermarket. At first it was annoying to remember to bring bags. Now it's just an ordinary part of life.

There's still far too much plastic in our lives, and we're trying to find other ways to reduce the amount that comes through our house. At least cutting down on the bags is a start - one we wouldn't have taken without the small financial incentive at the checkout counter.

And when you walk in the beautiful mountains around here, you don't see plastic bags in the trees and streams!

Soccer Victory Lifts Iraqis; Bombs Kill 50 - New York Times

2007-07-26T06:08:00.000-04:00

Soccer Victory Lifts Iraqis; Bombs Kill 50 - New York Times

my... head... is... spinning... around... and... around...

…My heart’s in Accra » The survival of languages in a digital age

2007-05-17T12:07:00.000-04:00

A very thoughtful posting from Ethan Zuckerman: …My heart’s in Accra » The survival of languages in a digital age

Northeast Stunned By Freak January Snowfall | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

2007-01-24T10:46:00.000-05:00

Northeast Stunned By Freak January Snowfall

SYRACUSE, NY—"I've seen some freak weather, but this definitely tops them all," said area resident Mary Baloh, whose garden was slightly set back by the 1.5-inch snowfall.

Trees Don't Spin: Plants respond to the big picture

2006-12-20T05:41:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post provides a dramatic illustration for what I've been saying about climate change being imperceptible from one year to the next, but indisputable when viewed over recent decades. The source is the National Arbor Day Foundation, hardly a hotbed of half-baked hyperbole:

A warming climate in the Washington area is beginning to affect the area's trees, with cold-loving species finding the weather less welcoming and southern transplants thriving, according to findings released yesterday by the National Arbor Day Foundation.

In a revised map of "hardiness zones" -- bands of similar temperatures where similar trees are likely to grow in winter -- the foundation reclassified the entire Washington area in the same zone as parts of North Carolina and Texas. In 1990, the region was on the border of northern and southern growing zones, but a foundation official said that has changed after 15 years of balmy winter weather.

The foundation's findings provide a window into the local effects of climate change, scaled down to lawn level. Colorado blue spruce and hemlock, at home in the cold, might have a harder time. Crape myrtles and camellias will have it easier.

"You could say D.C. is the new North Carolina," said Bill McLaughlin, a curator at the U.S. Botanic Garden on the Mall.

The Washington area's warming trend is one of many that the foundation detailed across the country as it presented its updated map.

In parts of Michigan, for example, the climate has warmed enough to accommodate southern magnolia trees, said Arbor Day Foundation spokesman Woodrow L. Nelson. Arizona cypress, another southerly species, also suddenly seems a better fit for some sections of the Northeast, he said.

"I mean, who would have thought that an Arizona cypress would be a choice for someone in New Jersey?" Nelson said.

The map divides the continental United States into nine zones, from Zone 2 near the Canadian border to Zone 10 at the tip of Florida. (Zone 1 is found only in Alaska's frigid interior, Zone 11 only in tropical Hawaii.) The zones were mapped by examining local weather data and averaging the lowest temperature recorded in the 15 previous winters.

The last time the U.S. Department of Agriculture presented such a map, in 1990, the Washington area sat on the boundary of two of these bands. Part was in Zone 6, an area from Massachusetts to Kansas where the lows hovered between zero and 10 degrees below. The other part was in Zone 7, stretching across the upper South, where temperatures were between zero and 10 degrees.

But in the foundation's revised map, the southern climate zone has swallowed the remainder of the area, taking in parts of the District, Montgomery County, and western suburbs in Virginia and Maryland. All of Zone 7 has shifted north. The zone now takes in most of Tennessee and Virginia as well as parts of North Carolina, Arkansas and Oklahoma.

Why we still have cold winter days during global warming

2006-12-05T19:32:00.000-05:00

Every year, wingnuts and oil executives feel the chill of a winter day and say, "See, no global warming here!" Every year, I vow to put together a few simple graphs that will show how dumb their arguments are. Usually I get sidetracked, often by the call of the snow on the mountains. But today is a cold December day, we haven't had any snow yet, and I've taken a little while to crunch some numbers.

Please bear with me while I explain a few graphs.

The graph above shows the way most people think about weather. We tend to perceive a steady wave pattern, where the temperature is cold in the winter, then gets gradually warmer until the middle of the summer, and then gets colder again. In the graph above, I made up some numbers, with the average temperature rising 1/2 degree every day from Jan. 1 until the beginning of July, and then falling 1/2 degree every day from the July until New Year's Eve.

In the first graph, I kept the temperatures constant from one year to the next. Now, how would this graph look if average daily temperatures rose by one degree a year? In the graph that follows, I've done just that, incrementing the average temperature up 1/2 degree in January and 1/2 degree in July. What do you notice?

You probably don't see that much difference between the two graphs. The summers are still hot, and the winters are still cold. The only difference is that the summers are just a little hotter, and the winters are just a little less cold. You can see this better if we zoom in on the peak of the graph, the imagined days at the beginning of July when the mercury stops rising and starts to sink back down. In the next graph I've zoomed in on the mythic warmest days of summer. The blue line shows the peak from the third summer of the top graph, where we held temperatures steady from year to year, and the red line shows the peak from third summer of the second graph, where we showed that temperatures had risen by two degrees.

Notice how every day was just a little hotter with a warming trend than without it (1.5 degrees hotter on the way up, and 2 degrees hotter on the way back down after I added in the 1/2 degree increment that my model puts in every sixth month). However, no particular day in June or July was noticeably out of the ordinary for that time of the year. Instead of reaching 98 degrees on June 29 in the steady-state model, it reached 98 degrees on June 26 with warming, and June 29 was just a little warmer than that. Really, on a day to day basis you would not notice the warming trend, even though each and every day was just a little warmer than it had been historically.

What these models don't show, of course, is the natural variability in the weather. High and low pressure fronts pass through, the jet stream slides the winds around, and one day is colder or warmer than the next. In October or April you might have one day that is 65 Fahrenheit, and the next day is 30 - the difference between comfortable and frigid. And then the next day it will pop back up to 50, and then down to 40, and then up to 65 again, and then down to 30. Here's a graph with data from the Temperature Data Archive that shows actual average temperatures for Hartford, CT, for 1995:

See how the average temperatures generally follow the same trend that's shown in the make-believe graphs above, but have huge swings off the trend line on a day to day basis? Every day in July was warmer than every day in January, but the coolest day in July was almost as cold as the warmest day in January. If we zoom in on any given month, we'll see that some days are warm and some are cool, but they are basically in keeping with the range of expectations for that month. Here is December 1995:

That December had a day that averaged a balmy 45, and a week or so later there were a few days that averaged around a bone-chilling 15. It would have been just as silly to say that the 45 degree day was "proof" of global warming as it would have been to say that the 15 degree days were "proof" against global warming. No single day can give you that sort of proof, because Mother Nature provides plenty of day-to-day variation within the cycle of the seasons.

The only way to demonstrate whether or not global warming is actually occuring is to look at averages over time. If the average temperatures from year to year are trending higher, then we have a situation that, accounting for normal day-to-day fluctuations, is much like the one shown in the second and third graphs. Here is a graph that does just that, using a variety of actual data over 30 years:

(Click here for more about that graph, and links to others.)

So, do not let the noise machine fool you the next time you see a headline on a cold winter day that says, "Global Warming, Huh?". Think about how the weather really works, and look at the trends over time. And then be afraid, be very afraid, because the trends are all pointing toward a world that we are making warmer than humans have ever experienced.

All about the 2006 GOP candidates

2006-10-25T14:16:00.000-04:00

--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl

--AZ-01: Rick Renzi

--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth

--CA-04: John Doolittle

--CA-11: Richard Pombo

--CA-50: Brian Bilbray

--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave

--CO-05: Doug Lamborn

--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell

--CT-04: Christopher Shays

--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan

--FL-16: Joe Negron

--FL-22: Clay Shaw

--ID-01: Bill Sali

--IL-06: Peter Roskam

--IL-10: Mark Kirk

--IL-14: Dennis Hastert

--IN-02: Chris Chocola

--IN-08: John Hostettler

--IA-01: Mike Whalen

--KS-02: Jim Ryun

--KY-03: Anne Northup

--KY-04: Geoff Davis

--MD-Sen: Michael Steele

--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht

--MN-06: Michele Bachmann

--MO-Sen: Jim Talent

--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns

--NV-03: Jon Porter

--NH-02: Charlie Bass

--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson

--NM-01: Heather Wilson

--NY-03: Peter King

--NY-20: John Sweeney

--NY-26: Tom Reynolds

--NY-29: Randy Kuhl

--NC-08: Robin Hayes

--NC-11: Charles Taylor

--OH-01: Steve Chabot

--OH-02: Jean Schmidt

--OH-15: Deborah Pryce

--OH-18: Joy Padgett

--PA-04: Melissa Hart

--PA-07: Curt Weldon

--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick

--PA-10: Don Sherwood

--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee

--TN-Sen: Bob Corker

--VA-Sen: George Allen

--VA-10: Frank Wolf

--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick

--WA-08: Dave Reichert

2006-10-22T08:12:00.000-04:00

The most devastating political ad. Ever.

This is the only political ad I've ever seen that has actually made tears well up in my eyes. Michael J. Fox is a person I grew up with, in a sense: Family Ties, Back to the Future, Spin City... On Family Ties he played the conservative son of liberal ex-hippies. He has always conveyed a persona of being reasonable, measured, and an all-around decent human being.

Seeing him in such a degenerated condition is a shock. Seeing him retaining his dignity while pleading for his life is a sight that can hardly fail to move all but the most absolutist I'm-anti-stem-cell-research-because-all-life-begins-at-conception crowd. This ad makes the political extremely personal. It speaks directly to voters, saying that your vote matters because it matters to people you care about.

This could be the ad that flips the Senate. It should.

African Languages Grow as a Presence on Wikipedia - New York Times

2006-08-26T09:38:00.000-04:00

African Languages Grow as a Presence on Wikipedia - New York Times

By NOAM COHEN
Published: August 26, 2006

At the second annual Wikimania conference, held this year at Harvard Law School, there was what might be considered a quintessential Wikipedian moment: as Martin Benjamin, a researcher at Yale University, gave a talk about the Swahili dictionary he is creating online, Ndesanjo Macha was simultaneously sitting in the audience using a Wi-Fi connection and laptop to put the finishing touches on his Wikipedia entry, “Martin Benjamin,” in Swahili.

It was just the 1,025th article written for the Swahili version of Wikipedia (sw.wikipedia.org), the online, open-source encyclopedia founded five years ago by Jimmy Wales, and the fifth Mr. Macha had written that weekend in Cambridge, Mass.

In founding Wikipedia, Mr. Wales has said, he aimed to create “a free encyclopedia for every person on the planet in their own language,” a goal he has defined as having 250,000 entries in every language spoken by more than a million people.

But while larger Wikipedias, like those written in English (1,377,015 entries and counting) and French (348,243 entries), wrestle with questions of accuracy and vandalism, as well as the imposition of limits on who can create and edit entries, smaller Wikipedias face more basic questions: How do you create an online encyclopedia when few native speakers have access to the Internet? What use is an encyclopedia when literacy rates among a language’s speakers can approach zero? (This is not a problem for Swahili.) And who should control the content of an encyclopedia in a local language if not enough native speakers are moved, or able, to contribute?

If only native speakers of Swahili had contributed to that version, the Wikipedia might not exist at all. Though Mr. Macha, 36, who trained as a lawyer in Tanzania and is now director of the largest Boys and Girls Club in Greensboro, N.C., is a major source of entries, none of the other primary contributors grew up speaking the language: “One is German, one is in Texas, and one is in Canada,” said Mr. Macha, who was the only African — or African-American — to attend the entire three-day conference.

“They are all white, and to me it is very interesting — it shows that the world is not flat, that the world is still round,” he said. “We have allies, people who are willing to help us, but we need to be in charge of our own identity. When it comes to producing information, we don’t want to be dependent.”

Mr. Wales devoted part of his keynote address at the conference, which was held from Aug. 4 through Aug. 6, to the issue of African-language Wikipedias, of which there are now about 38, though many are mere shells waiting for articles to populate them. Swahili, which is thought to be spoken by as many as 100 million people, is the first African-language Wikipedia to have reached the 1,000-article mark — considered something of a tipping point toward faster growth in the Wikipedia world.

Far smaller is the version in Bambara, a language spoken by roughly three million people in Mali, in West Africa; as of the conference, there were more than 100 articles. Kasper Souren, 29, from the Netherlands, is responsible for most of them. Mr. Souren, who led one of the discussions at the Wiki conference, said he first came across Bambara as a volunteer in Mali in 2005. To get entries for the language’s Wikipedia, he said, he would introduce himself at a community center in the capital, Bamako, ask people to write articles in Microsoft Word and then pay “a buck an article.”

He then took the files they created and went back to an office and uploaded them onto the Bambara Wikipedia, being sure to credit the authors, even though they had never been on the Internet and thus could not have a Wikipedia user name. Mr. Souren learned enough Bambara to create the headers in that language; “nye” means article, for example.

Of the articles he posted, he said, “I can’t understand 100 percent of what they wrote, but I could estimate that it was right. It is a Wikipedia anyway, so I hope they can correct it.”

Most of the people who have heard about Mr. Souren’s decision to pay for entries lauded his goal but questioned his tactics, saying that they undercut the Wikipedia spirit, and that, ultimately, a Bambara Wikipedia would work only if there was a voluntary community to support it. Mr. Macha, who said he often felt that he was “speaking for a whole continent” at the conference, told Mr. Souren that “we don’t have to be paid to do it.”

Mr. Wales said that rather than pay for articles, the foundation that runs Wikipedia was likely to obtain a grant before the year’s end to sponsor a facilitator for an African-language Wikipedia, perhaps the Swahili one. “Writing encyclopedia entries sounds tedious, boring, but it actually is a very social activity,” he said. He said the facilitator would co-ordinate contributors among community leaders, bloggers, professors and graduate students and “jump-start” the growth of the encyclopedia.

To that end, among the most important connections made at the Wikimania conference was that between Mr. Macha and Dr. Benjamin, the Yale Africanist. Dr. Benjamin said that in the past Africanist professors have been reluctant to contribute to Wikipedias in African languages, either because academics look down on amateur contributors, are intimidated by the technology or find the process too time-consuming.

He said that sometimes entries have been mockingly shared via e-mail to point out errors, but that no one had offered to fix them. But there is talk of trying to change that attitude. He added that he thought that some of his students could begin contributing, too.

Mr. Wales contrasted the importance of this task with the relative success of Wikipedias in what he described as small European dialects, whether Luxembourgish, Cornish or Ladino.

“We are doing a good job in culture preservation,” he said. “We like that. We also think that is a secondary part of our mission. Almost no one who reads the Cornish Wikipedia reads only in Cornish. It is a little more critical or important in these other languages.”

Bush Fails Basic Algebra: A + B > A

2006-05-23T13:27:00.000-04:00

This one takes the cake:

"New technologies will change how we live and how we drive our cars, which all will have the beneficial effect of improving the environment," Bush said. "And in my judgment we need to set aside whether or not greenhouse gases have been caused by mankind or because of natural effects and focus on the technologies that will enable us to live better lives and at the same time protect the environment." (Bush Snubs Gore Film on Global Warming - Yahoo! News)

Let us review a little algebra, of the type most students are expected to master by the seventh grade:
A + B = some number greater than A (provided B is positive)

Now, let A = the amount of carbon and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere prior to, let's say, 1800. We can call this the equilibrium state, because the atmosphere was more or less in equilibrium, and humans were burning very few fossil fuels (maybe some coal here and there, but at that point almost all human energy needs were satisfied by methods such as burning trees, which is zero-sum because burning trees simply puts carbon back into the atmosphere that the tree had taken out during its lifetime). Here's our equation:
Equilibrium + B = some number greater than Equilibium

Ok? Now, let B = the amount of carbon and other greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere since 1800 by burning fossil fuels. We can call this "gases caused by mankind," because we are pumping up oil and digging up coal that has been safely buried beneath the ground, and releasing its by-products, such as carbon, into the atmosphere. Here's our equation now:
Equilibrium + Gases caused by mankind = some number greater than Equilibrium

Let's review. George Washington, riding along on his horse from Virginia to Philadelphia, did not contribute to global warming because the carbon dioxide that came out of his horse (from both ends) was simply reprocessed from the grass the horse ate, which had previously taken an essentially equal amount of carbon out of the atmosphere during photosynthesis. George Bush, on the other hand, when flying from Crawford to DC, does contribute to global warming, because the carbon put into the atmosphere by Air Force One had previously been trapped in a liquid or solid state beneath Saudi Arabia or Texas.

A + B > A. It's that simple. A true leader would recognize that B is currently way larger than safe margins, and is getting even bigger every day. True leadership would insist on doing something about the size of B. Failed leadership chooses to "set aside" science and basic algebra.

Man oh man, the Bush regime is a scourge on the planet.

Google Page Creator

2006-05-07T08:50:00.000-04:00

Just stumbled across this, which is in Beta version: Google Page Creator. Wow - this could be the next enormous thing. Everyone can have a webpage, without having to deal with finding a host or learning HTML. If they do this right, it will be an online Dreamweaver for the masses, and also an easy way for the already-savvy to create on-the-fly pages when they don't want to use their regular servers, for whatever reason.

Kudos!

NPR Rewrites History: Bush Wins by Acclamation!

2006-01-31T08:32:00.000-05:00

Sunday's All Things Considered featured NPR's Senior National Correspondent Linda Wertheimer talking about the president's standing in recent polls, controversy over domestic spying and the political importance of Tuesday's State of the Deception speech. The piece was mostly grim for the White House, since it is difficult for anyone except the most flagrant shills to spin the current poll numbers as reflecting public support for the mess the Republicons are making.

However, one nugget of ridiculous historical revisionism stood out:

"Just about the best thing the president could do for himself is to be himself and to be the sort of likeable George Bush that everybody liked better than John Kerry."

Whaaaa? I distinctly remember 59,028,109 Americans voting for John Kerry, not George Bush, in 2004. As one of those 59 million voters, I can say with absolute certainty that I liked John Kerry better than George Bush on election day, on the day before election day, the week before election day, the year before election day, and even years earlier when Bush was the Chief Executioner of Texas and Kerry was in the Senate. If I widen my view to include everybody I ever talked to about the election who voted for Kerry instead of Bush, I would say that somewhere close to 100% of those people said they liked Kerry better than Bush.

Yes, more people successfully cast ballots for Bush than for Kerry, at least many of whom did so because they believed the deliberate lies spread by the Bush regime about the war (not to mention the media and the swift boaters). But Linda darling, George Bush was not anointed king. He won a close election in which almost half the country voted to toss him out on his well-toned butt.

Perhaps, since NPR thinks we are nobody, they won't miss the contributions of we Americans who voted for John Kerry. I for one plan to sit out the upcoming pledge drive. Let them get their money from people who liked Bush better than Kerry in November 2004 - since "everybody" preferred W, those donations should just roll in.

How long is a moment?

2005-12-14T13:20:00.000-05:00

I have just discovered the answer to the vexing question of how long a moment is. While in an online chat session with Dell Gold Technical Support regarding the annoying tendency of my computer to crash and reboot when I run the machine in the bedroom, we had the following exchange:

12/14/2005 12:11:05PM
The Pen Ultimate: "ok, is there a case number I should take down if I need to contact Dell again?"
12/14/2005 12:11:36PM
Agent (GTS Les Vetor): "Just a moment while I get this for you"
12/14/2005 12:14:39PM
Agent (GTS Les Vetor): "Your case number is 119587XYZ"

So, the official Dell Computer definition of a moment is "3 minutes and 3 seconds."

Meaning that when Dell tells you they'll be with you in a moment, you have just about enough time to pop up some microwave popcorn.

Defining Moment for Swahili

2005-12-12T16:37:00.000-05:00

Kamusi Project Envisions A Unified African Dictionary Online And In Print
By ADRIAN BRUNE
SPECIAL TO THE HARTFORD COURANT
November 20, 2005

Coming of age during the American Revolution, Noah Webster believed fervently in the country's cultural independence and the role played by its American idiom, pronunciation and style. In 1806, America's first lexicographer published his "compendious dictionary of the English language." Nearly 200 years later, the Merriam Webster dictionary has become one of the world best known, with more than 200,000 entries.

Wesleyan University professor and Yale research fellow Martin Benjamin has a similar vision, one focused on another continent -- Africa and the language of Swahili.

"Some people argue that Swahili is associated with the slave trade, but now it is the language of the liberation movement," said Benjamin, an assistant professor of languages. "Swahili is becoming the go-to language of the African Union."

With more than 80 million speakers in East and Central Africa, Swahili is the most widely spoken language in Africa, though a fully updated dictionary of the language has not been produced for 30 years.

Benjamin aims to change that with the Kamusi (Dictionary) Project, an effort to document and produce a comprehensive guide to Swahili using the Internet. He just needs to maintain funding for the project and his desire to prepare the 120,000 or so entries he has received for print via www.yale.edu/swahili.

In the past year, the project has taken several big steps to stay out in front of other efforts, one based at the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and a private foundation in Tel Aviv, Israel. Recently, it made several Swahili-based computer programs available for download, including Jambo Open Office; it launched its photo engine, which allows users to upload pictures and illustrations to augment definitions; and began developing lessons for a comprehensive online Swahili curriculum.

And, of course, the entries grow daily as the website adds new words from Swahili's rich well, just as the language is enjoying a resurgence.

Now the official language of the African Union, Swahili (also known as Kiswahili, as the prefix "ki" means language) has its roots in the Bantu language family, which extends across the continent and includes thousands of words from other languages. There are words from Arabic - the language largely spoken in Northern Africa; words from the colonial languages of French, Portuguese, German and the like; and words from languages spoken in sub-Saharan Africa near the Middle East.

Benjamin compares his project to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia drafted largely by a band of worldwide literati. He emphasizes, however, that, unlike Wikipedia, he vets every entry for accuracy, sometimes within minutes, before he posts them.

So the Kamusi Project, in its most simplistic form, works as a translation device from English to Swahili, or vice versa. About half a million users visit the website each month, and there they can plug in a word and get its translation.

Many users probably don't recognize that the words they have just looked up don't necessarily come from Swahili lexicographers but from "akina sisi," everyday people. There's Ben Stanford, a former Peace Corps volunteer who taught sciences in Tanzania; Mayowa Famakinwa, a Yoruba man from Nigeria who enjoys learning different languages, he explains on the website; and Hartford resident Ed Mini, who used the Kamusi Project several years ago to make a "Welcome Home" sign for his daughter, returning from East Africa, and who contributed a few of his own words.

"Then there's the professional ecologist major in Benin - he's a birder. He's sent in hundreds of bird entries, every type of thrush or crow ever spotted in East Africa, with their English and Swahili names," said Benjamin, an enthusiastic scholar who can hold forth on the state of Africa for hours on end.

"Just two months ago, one of our regulars - a news buff - read about a plane crash in Africa, and within minutes, we had the Swahili word for cargo as an adjective." On the website, the example for Mizigo is given: "Cargo Plane Crashes in Tanzania," or "Ndege ya Mizigo yanngurka Tanzania (BBC 23 Machi 2005)."

The projects' regulars are appreciative of the entire effort, but at least one wishes it were not led by a "mzungu."

"I believe he [Benjamin] has a vision that should have been born in Africa, by Africans," wrote Carolyne Onyango in an e-mail from the United Kingdom. "I used it to encourage the high schoolers I teach to change the negative attitude they have about the subject - they are now more enthusiastic about Kiswahili.

"They were not pleased that a `mzungu' is the initiator of the project. But I reminded them that if we Africans won't revise the existing dictionaries quickly, [a non African] will do it. ... this should be our language, we understand it better."

Still, Benjamin's commitment would be difficult to question, after a decade of effort.

In 1992, Benjamin, then a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Yale, traveled to Tanzania to research his dissertation on the difficulties of international development aid in the countryside. He had a cursory knowledge of Swahili but pledged to learn it. Armed only with an Oxford University Press dictionary from 1936, however, Benjamin found learning the language difficult. (The Catholic University of America press had printed the last English-Swahili dictionary in 1967, but it was not widely available.)

Frustrated but inspired, Benjamin brought the idea for the Kamusi Project back to the States with him. In 1994, the dawn of the Internet age, Benjamin approached his adviser, Yale African scholar Ann Biersteker, about developing a website that would serve as a standard Swahili dictionary, one that documented the living, breathing language.

Biersteker approved and even turned over her book "Masomo ya Kisasa: Contemporary Readings in Swahili," from which Benjamin drew the project's initial entries.

"Of course, the Web and the Internet were both very different back then, and I wasn't sure how it would work," Biersteker said. "Both Martin and I thought [the website] would be used by academics and students. We were certainly not aware how many people worldwide would use it and the enthusiasm it would receive."

By spring 1995, Benjamin had entered 21,000 words into the database, and the Kamusi Project went live. It was one of Yale's first academic websites.

It took three more years for Benjamin and department research assistants - when he could afford them - to enter the entire Swahili-English Dictionary into the system. By 2000, the Kamusi Project had posted a 56,000-word dictionary, established a discussion forum and guide to Africa and launched the website editing engine, which brings the global community together to work toward the dictionary's refinement.

The following year, however, the money dried up. Though Kamusi remained online, Benjamin took a hiatus and applied for grants. It took nearly three years to return the project to its previous status. Now, closer than ever to his goal of printing a Swahili dictionary, Benjamin needs money again.

"We've done all the programming work that's possible, and I can envision hitting the print key in about two years," Benjamin said. "Yet I've received my layoff notice from Yale."

Biersteker and Benjamin have applied for several grants, including one from the National Endowment for the Humanities. But they won't know anything until the spring, so they need stopgap funding.

Since "Swahili is spoken by many of the world's greatest marathoners," Benjamin said, he has taken up the sport to raise money for the project. In October, Benjamin ran 26.2 miles in Yale's Payne Whitney Gymnasium to raise $2,495 toward his goal of $14,550.

In the grand scheme of African economics and politics, Benjamin remains realistic about the Kamusi Project's significance. "Having a dictionary is not as necessary as having a hospital; you can live without a dictionary," Benjamin said.

Still, last summer Benjamin was reminded of the dictionary's importance.

"I brought a bunch of English magazines to read myself to sleep at night, and this teenage kid, Ernest Kidenya, whom I've known since he was knee high, was looking through them wanting to learn some of the words," Benjamin said. "Then I realized, `How are kids in Africa going to ever learn a language if there is one dictionary for every 400 students?'"

Benjamin returned with a new vision; he's calling it "Kamusi in a Box," a Swahili instruction CD-ROM kit for Internet-less villages. He's also interested in other learning projects, including some with the University of Dar Es Salaam.

"It keeps getting better and better for Swahili," he said.

Copyright 2005, Hartford Courant

White House Tricks, NPR Treats

2005-10-31T14:18:00.000-05:00

On Thursday, Harriet Miers announced her withdrawal as Supreme Court nominee, effectively siphoning off some of the build-up to Indictment Day.

On Friday, a major figure within the White House was indicted, and the odds are that the Scooter Libby is just the first among several Bushies who will be swept away by the ongoing Fitzgerald investigation. The biggest names actively in play are Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. Gee, you think the White House might want to divert the press from continuing to report on the scandal?

After a weekend's repose, we all woke up to the White House announcing its new Supreme Court pick. Monday morning - the first real news cycle after the indictments came down. The administration's intent would be obvious to a third grader, or a program planner at Faux News looking for something, anything to air that didn't dwell on the catastrophes of the Bush regime.

How did savvy, independent NPR handle this ploy? Did they, in their necessary coverage of the nomination, point out the diversionary nature of the announcement? No, in the immediate hour after the announcement, Morning Edition went wall-to-wall with Alito. Perhaps one of their analysts mentioned something about the timing, but if they did slip that in, that must have been while I was in the shower. Other than their weekly Cokie Roberts interview, Morning Edition didn't even mention the White House scandal, as far as I heard or can see on their website. Their hourly news headlines have led with Alito, and had absolutely nothing about Treasongate in the cycles I've heard.

Top aide indicted? Look, over there, it's the Supreme Pumpkin, NPR. Trick or Treat!

Arizona's Shame is America's Shame

2005-10-25T08:55:00.000-04:00

The Arizona Daily Star has this story about a rape victim who was refused emergency contraception because of pharmacists in Tuscon who are too moral to stock or dispense the drug. Tuscon is one of Arizona's largest cities, and Arizona is one of the less rigidly Neanderthal red states. Women in more rural areas of much of the South and West must find it absolutely impossible to purchase Plan B. The result, of course, is that they will not get the drug in time, they will become pregnant, and then they will seek abortions (at great difficulty and expense). The pharmacists who won't supply morning-after pills to women who don't want to become pregnant presumably do so out of the righteous certainty that "life begins at conception." Are they too stubborn to realize that their actions actually lead to more abortions, not fewer? Or are they just too dense to understand that they are not God and are not uniquely capable of determining God's will?

I pray for them, for the Tuscon victim of rape and willful pharmacist malpractice, and for the thousands of women at risk of being saved from unfortunate pregnancies by the Bible Belt. May God have mercy on their souls.

Free, Free Falling

2005-10-03T22:24:00.000-04:00

Things aren't going so well for the Bush regime these days. As if quagmire in Iraq, bungling after Katrina, and a universally negative reaction to his crony pick for the Supreme Court weren't bad enough, now they've got to contend with jokers like this:

http://www.planetdan.net/pics/misc/georgie.htm

(The link points to an addictive little interactive web commentary on the presidency. You can use your mouse if the Bushie gets stuck.)

Hammer Sandwich

2005-09-28T14:32:00.000-04:00

The wingnuts are already busy trotting out the old saw that a good DA could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. Yeah, maybe. If there was a great deal of evidence that the ham sandwich had broken the law.

Tom DeLay was indicted today after months of investigation. He and the rest of the Republicon faithful will make sure that the media gives credence to the line that the indictment is a political vendetta. And maybe it is - maybe DA Ronnie Earle set his sights on DeLay like Ken Starr went after Clinton. Regardless of Earle's motivation, though, one fact soars high: the evidence that DeLay broke the law is strong.

A DA would not indict someone in a case like this if he didn't think he had an odds-on chance of winning in court. Many of the big contemporary corporate scandals have ended up with CEOs in prison precisely because their indictments have been preceded by meticulous investigations.

Though DeLay is within his rights to maintain his innocence until he gets sent up the river by a jury, this indictment will stand up to scrutiny - the evidence is darn compelling that he laundered money illegally, and the prosecution is prepared to meet its burden of proof. Tom DeLay is not a ham sandwich. He is one of the masterminds of a massive criminal syndicate that is defrauding the American people out of trillions of dollars, and he finally got caught playing his corrupt game. He will stand trial, and he will probably be convicted.

I hope they sell plenty of mayo in the prison commissary.

NPR Parodies Journalism

2005-09-26T10:08:00.000-04:00

I don't have the exact quote on this one, because I was being an uber-liberal and driving into New York City to see a foreign film at the NY Film Festival, but an NPR report on Saturday morning nearly caused me to swerve off the road.

NPR was reporting on the demonstrations in Washington that were about to start. One demonstration was the movement inspired by Cindy Sheehan, which was attended by at least 100,000 people and perhaps a quarter million, making it one of the largest demonstrations yet against the Iraq war. The other demonstration was a counter-demonstration with about 400 people.

Astoundingly, the NPR piece was almost entirely about the counter-demonstrators, with a brief mention that many people were also in DC to join Cindy Sheehan's protest. It was as though they had covered an Apollo launch and focused on the kids launching model rockets in Daytona, and then mentioned that, coincidentally, NASA had also launched a rocket from nearby that was successfully sending men toward the moon.

I'm sure the administration's overlords at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting were delighted.

Yes, Blame the Republicons

2005-09-24T09:16:00.000-04:00

No, George W. Bush didn't cause Katrina and Rita. The administration is at fault for gutting FEMA, for not paying any attention to increasing warnings of the threats that massive storms would cause to our nation, and for a response to the disaster to which future lexicographers will refer when they seek to define "inept," but all of W's huffing and puffing didn't blow the levees down.

Instead, the levees were blown down by the entire Republicon party.

Let's look at some facts. (Facts are those things that we in the reality-based community like to gather in order to form conclusions.)

1) Human activity has caused increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. You would need the IQ of a potatoe to fail to understand that extracting carbon from underground, burning it, and releasing it into the air would alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Here's a simple science experiment that doubting wing-nuts can try at home: take a sack of coal, preferably strip-mined, and dump it in your bathtub (making sure that no sentient beings are in the house while you do this). Close all the windows, doors, and vents. Douse the coals with lighter fluid, strike a match, and touch the match to the coals. After the fire has burned for a while, compare the amount of carbon in the air to the quality of the air before you started burning the fossil fuels - you should be able to note the change when you see the air getting darker. Your eyes will also start to get red and irritated, and you might have some difficulty breathing. If you are still not convinced that human activity causes atmospheric change, keep the fire burning until all unintelligent life forms in your bathroom become extinct.

2) Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have led to increases in average global air temperatures.

3) Increases in global air temperatures have led to increases in ocean temperatures. Although ExxonMobilHalliburtonGOP has managed to hire a few "scientists" to claim that facts 2 and 3 haven't been completely absolutely totally proven beyond any hint of a shadow of doubt, those scientists who do things like sophisticated computer modelling and sticking thermometers in the ocean year after year after year have all concluded that global warming is a fact.

4) Increased ocean temperatures are leading to increases in the severity of hurricanes, as recent research confirms. Dude, hurricanes feed off of warm water. The warmer the water, and the more warm water available, the more severe the storm. This is something that climatologists have been warning about for years. And something that certain people have spent years telling us not to worry about. Which leads directly to:

5) Who has refused, point blank refused to do anything about climate change caused by human activity? Let's see... The scientific understanding of the effects of human activity on the global climate started to be understood in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president and George H.W. Bush was VP. More was understood during the reign of Bush I. And those Republicon administrations refused to address the problem. During the Clinton years, efforts were made to address the problem - not enough, and I'm not going to claim the Dems were all saints on the issue - but the Clinton-Gore folks were blocked in any efforts to get too ambitious by the Republicon congress. Even before Newt gained control of the House in 1994, the Dems knew that doing the things necessary to protect the environment would get them tarnished by the brush of being big-government types who would therefore be unelectable. The 90s were lost to more effective efforts to combat climate change because such efforts would have been political suicide for the environmentally-minded, because, yo, protecting the environment costs money up front while desecrating the environment won't cost money until a little later. And then W came into office, the biggest polluters/ GOP donors literally started writing the environmental laws and regulations, and any glimmer of a science-based approach to environmental governance was tossed into the incinerator.

I repeat, the Superfund disaster that is the Bush Presidency did not cause the hurricanes. No, the hurricanes were as bad as they were because of human activity that has been greatly exacerbated by more than two decades of Republicon hostility to any sort of rational, conservative environmental policy.

Tsunami Memories (as not seen in the New Yorker)

2005-09-14T08:03:00.000-04:00

While watching the news the other day I saw some footage of crews cleaning up along the hurricane-ravaged beach in Mississippi. I've grimaced when I've heard comments like, "This is Louisiana's tsunami" (no it wasn't - this was a slow disaster that unfolded over many days, while the tsunami was a single unexpected catastrophe that hit at 600 miles an hour, literally the speed of a jet plane, and killed 100 times more people), but the image of people piling debris onto a tarp and hoisting the contents of the tarp onto a trash pile on the beach brought back memories.

As it happened, I was in southern India soon after the tsunami, and spent the one free day I had on the beach lending my hand to cleanup. During the trip home (Chennai/Madras to Delhi to Amsterdam to JFK, about 30 hours) I wrote a piece about that day. I envisioned it as New Yorker "Talk of the Town" item, but their editor didn't share my enthusiasm, so the article has never seen the light of day.

With Katrina fresh in mind, I'll post it now. One caveat - the piece was trying to strike the semi-detached narrative tone of the magazine section for which it was submitted. Clearly I didn't nail the landing, or you would be reading this as a link to a published article instead of seeing it on an obscure self-published blog...

A Day At the Beach

Five weeks after the massive wave hit southern India, about forty people milled around the Auroville Tsunami Relief Centre waiting for the morning transport to the disaster zone. A short orientation talk for the uninitiated explained that on this day they would be going to a village that the ad hoc international clean-up crew had not yet visited. The volunteers loaded themselves into three small buses, piling around work gloves, yellow plastic tarps, and crowbars. Twenty bumpy minutes later they came to a stop under some coconut palms, normal-size waves crashing on the beach ahead of them.

The area between the beachfront and the village was strewn with refuse. Much of the mess was vegetative, mixing palm fronds and oceanic flora in a soggy, sandy mass. Tarps were spread on the ground, armloads of organic garbage were dumped on the tarps, and small groups of four would soon coalesce around a full tarp's corners to pick it up and carry it to near the high-tide line. Soon a small hill of trash had formed, and after a while a new pile was started a dozen meters away, and later still another. As each tarp-load was dumped, often with a running start and a big swing to try to get the garbage to the top of the pile, one person would end up carrying the empty tarp back to the work zone. The group would disperse as each member saw another task that needed attention.

A few younger men had grabbed shovels and started digging deep holes in the sand. A middle-aged woman from France filled gunny sacks with bits of Styrofoam floats, plastic sheeting, and any other non-burnables she could scavenge, and lugged her garbage to the holes to be buried. Others found their own specialties - salvageable wood in one pile, bricks from a collapsed house in another. An American college professor on a brief visit to India spent some time wrestling with an endless plastic fishing net that had wrapped itself five times around the base of a coconut palm. An Indian professional set about gathering the fermenting coconuts that made the area smell a little too ripe.

A roar went up from the middle of the clean-up zone, and a dozen men from the village, joined by some of the visitors, began sliding a blue open fishing boat toward the beachfront. Some pulled on ropes, some pushed on any available hand-hold. A few minutes later, a red and white boat was hauled toward the sea. The wave had carried all the boats that had survived (the village lost five fishermen at sea) over or through the coconut palms and deposited them by the houses at the edge of the village proper. A yellow boat had to be dug out from under the thatching of the house that it had smashed into, looking like it might never float again, but it too was slid clear of the palms, to the part of the beach where boats belonged.

People from the village joined in the work, after having avoided stepping foot in the devastation for more than a month. They collected bits of nets into piles and cleared rubble from houses that had partially disintegrated. With a word from an elder, several boys scurried up the coconut palms. A few minutes later, all the visitors had their own fresh coconuts prepared for them, first to drink the sweet juice and then to eat the sticky meat inside.

Several American students, from a cadre in India for a semester abroad, began destroying an intact house that had been condemned. The dismemberment began by ripping straw and coconut fronds off the roof, then prying apart the roof's wooden framework. Great piles of debris were stacked on tarps and hauled to the mounds at the water's edge that would be set ablaze after the work crew drove away. When the roof was gone, the students began smashing bricks off the structure. One young man put a crowbar between an ornate entryway door frame and the wall next to it. "Save the door!" called the professor, and ran to the destruction site. He was handed a crowbar and began banging away the soft bricks above and around the door frame. With a push, the frame started to fall forward. Hands appeared to stop it from crashing into the ground. A beaming homeowner helped the professor carry the door frame to safety, then clutched him tightly to pose before a digital camera that a British woman had pulled out. The professor, who had begun the day fretting about tsunami tourism, was now thoroughly absorbed in the task at hand. He and a few younger men went back to demolishing the house, and cheers arose as each wall yielded to prying and smashing. The visitors were concerned that a wall would collapse onto the house next door, but the residents signalled that that house too was to go. With a push the wall toppled over, smashing half the house next door as it fell.

The stretch between the waterfront and higher ground was much cleaner than a few hours before, and work was declared done for the day. A few visitors ran to rinse off in the ocean while others guzzled clean water and wolfed down miniature bananas. The guests climbed into their buses, and were soon rewarded at headquarters with a lunch of rice, dal, tandoori chicken, and locally-made cheese and baguettes. A few village men began to inspect their fishing boats, and the other residents went back to their homes or temporary shelters. In a day or two the visitors would arrive again to confront the next hundred meters.

2005-09-05T13:15:00.000-04:00

Crossing the finish line at the Iron Horse Half Marathon. The company that clicks the pics during the races charges truly bizarre prices for their photos, so this screen capture of their "proof" shot is all I can afford. When you've just run 13.1 miles on a hot summer day, the victory wave when they call out your name as you cross the finish line just sort of happens!

2005-09-05T13:11:00.000-04:00

Here is a photo from the Iron Horse Half Marathon in June, probably at about mile 12. The company that clicks the pics during the races charges truly bizarre prices for the photos, so screen captures of their "proof" shots will have to suffice :-)

Sweat and Glory

2005-09-05T11:20:00.000-04:00

The official results haven't been posted yet, but according to my stopwatch I finished the 20 km New Haven Road Race in 1:40:19. That's about 14 minutes faster than the last time I ran this race, in 2003, and 3 minutes faster than my 34 year old legs did it in 2002! It's about 8 minutes slower than my first time running New Haven four years ago, but I have a lot more grey hair now, so I'll take it.

I also picked up my pace from the Iron Horse Half Marathon that I ran in June - only about 7 seconds per mile faster (by way of this cool pace calculator), but over 12.43 miles that adds up to a sweet 90 seconds gain. My average was 8:04 minutes per mile, so I'm getting close to the magic 8 minute miles that I'd like to see for at least the first half of the Hartford Marathon next month (though I doubt I'll ever again see the 7:24 splits from my younger days).

Now I've got about 35 days to get ready to double the distance of these races. Last week I ran a 14.4, and I'd like to bump that up by about a mile per run, running twice a week. If I can put myself through 20 miles about a week before Hartford, the marathon itself will be in sight.

Why go through all the pain? Well, in part because the pain is pleasurable. In part because being in shape increases the odds of living longer, and having a better quality of life during those extra years. In part because running a marathon is a challenge, a goal that passes from impossibility to reality only through constant effort. In part because married life and multiple jobs have put 25 pounds on my belly since my last marathon 4 years ago - now that my regular training run is 13 miles or more, I can drop a half pound every time I lace up my shoes.

And in part because the project that I started 10 years ago is about to run out of funding, and I really need raise funds to keep it afloat. The project gets better and better, and is headed toward being the tool that anybody on earth can use to learn any other language (in the long run - right now we're still perfecting the platform that will make the larger ambition possible). By running the Hartford Marathon I hope to raise the $14,550 that is necessary to meet the requirements for matching funds for a grant to which we recently applied, which will really push the project toward fulfilling multi-lingual dreams. I'm putting my body on the line in the hopes that people will sponsor my run and thereby raise the funds the project needs. If you haven't sponsored me, please please please click on my Marathon page and chip in what you can. Every little bit really does help, and the long term benefit of a free, high-quality educational resource is, I hope and believe, worthy of your support. So thanks in advance!

I won't use much more of this blog space to ramble on about running - but while my heart was still pumping from the race, I thought I'd digress from my usual rants. For now, though, it is definitely past time for a shower...

Throwing away the script

2005-09-01T20:54:00.000-04:00

What is happening in New Orleans right now is astounding - days after Hurricane Katrina, the city has become a lake, people are starving and ill and turning violent or desperate. This is something that we haven't seen in the US, and therefore something for which we are totally unprepared.

What we are witnessing is not beyond human imagination, however. Jose Saramago wrote a brilliant novel, captivating in its darkness, about what might happen when a catastrophe of these dimensions befalls a city. Read Blindness and you will feel much more a part of life in New Orleans today.

The Confederacy of Dunces, by which I mean both the media and the government, is nevertheless completely shocked by the things that are taking place. Why? If we are witnessing human behavior that has already been written about in excruciating, exquisite detail by a Nobel laureate, why aren't we just a little more prepared for such things happening in a real-life disaster?

The answer lies with the script. By now we know what a hurricane, or an earthquake, or a tornado, or any other natural disaster is "supposed" to look like. For a hurricane, we get a few days of stories speculating about the track the storm is going to take into the United States, and maybe a few stories showing the bad things that happened to some brown people as the monster wiped out their island. Then we get some exciting coverage of the storm moving in - lots of wind and rain, and the reporter clutching his hat while palm trees bend toward the road. The storm moves north, and the camera crews move in to the beachfront town. We get pictures of roofs lifted away, crumpled houses, boats that have landed inside restaurants. Some interviews with the distraught survivors. Maybe some funerals, which can stretch the coverage out for a few more days. And then we're on to the next story.

The problem with New Orleans was that Katrina didn't dance to the right music in the Big Easy. We weren't ready (except for the scientists and engineers who have been predicting this for years) for the rules to be broken, for the script to be tossed aside. After the hurricane, the water is supposed to go away, damn it! The part where a lake empties into a city that has been built below sea level just doesn't fit our expectations.

The government "leaders" had, of course, followed the same script. Why the hell wasn't the president in the situation room when all hell was breaking loose on the Gulf Coast? Why was he playing pretend guitar in Los Angeles? He wasn't in the situation room because nobody in the White House thought that we were facing a "situation." When we think of leadership, we think of Tommy Lee Jones in "The Fugitive":

Alright, listen up, people. Our fugitive has been on the run for ninety minutes. Average foot speed over uneven ground barring injuries is 4 miles-per-hour. That gives us a radius of six miles. What I want from each and every one of you is a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in that area. Checkpoints go up at fifteen miles. Your fugitive's name is Dr. Richard Kimble. Go get him.

Had the president been sitting in the White House making phone calls, gathering information, and giving orders, we would have seen every Greyhound bus, school bus, city bus, and minivan from a 500 mile radius driving to New Orleans 2 days before the storm, picking up the 35% of the city's population who didn't have their own transport, and getting them to a place of safety. We would have seen food and water pre-positioned in the places where people assembled. We would have seen all available emergency personnel from every state in the union on standby to go save lives the minute the winds dropped enough for them to safely enter the affected areas.

Instead, we saw the president leisurely deciding it might be a good idea to wrap up his vacation and fly slowly over the devastation zone, showing all the grace of Vladimir Putin at his dacha while the Kursk sank to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean and slowly suffocated more than 100 sailors. After all, his script said that everything would be all right in a day or two. Condi Rice was in New York shopping for thousand dollar shoes two days later - she had read the same script, and figured the cleanup would be already underway.

The reasons why the residents of New Orleans didn't have the good sense to get out of their city also have much to do with the script. Many residents couldn't get out because they didn't have private transport and lacked where to go. Others were stuck, in nursing homes or wherever. But a good many (probably a minority of those left behind) had probably seen the coverage of other hurricanes and knew that, according to the script, they would have some wild and wooly tales to tell and would then be the first to pick up the pieces and get on with their lives. How many Hollywood tales have you seen where you know the basic outlines of the movie after the first ten minutes of watching the plot get set up? Fault those people if you choose, but it is the media and the government leaders who really should have had the greater perspective to understand that the script would not necessarily apply. Alternate endings were not only possible but likely, and for those the people in command of public protection should have been in greater command of the realities faced by New Orleans and surrounding areas.

One other thing. We also all know the script when it comes to earthquake coverage. After the unpredicated initial event, after the shock of seeing buildings crumple and bodies crushed, we know that we have about 10 days during which rescue crews arrive from around the globe, put their stethoscopes to piles of rubble, and pull out "miracle" survivors who had managed to stay alive 4, 5, 8, or even 10 days after the catastrophe. Such stories should also be coming out of New Orleans right now. At this moment, 5 days after the storm hit, there are probably still people who are alive and trapped in their attics, people who will not be alive tomorrow. If they are alive tomorrow, they will not be alive the day after, or the day after, or whenever it is that help finally makes it to them. There are also people who are dead today - TODAY - who were alive yesterday, or the day before. If rescue personnel could have gotten in yesterday, these people might have lived. If the levee breach could have been fixed sooner, and pumping could have started sooner, some of the people who are dying NOW would instead live to tell the tale. We weren't watching the Earthquake script, though, where rescuers arrive en masse and save the survivors. We were following the Hurricane script, where you either die during the storm or you make it out alive. It will come as little consolation to the thousands of Americans who have lost family members - or whose loved ones will die in the next few days - that their suffering was caused in part because the media was broadcasting on, and the leaders were watching, the wrong channel.

NPR, Party Mouthpiece (A new feature)

2005-08-31T10:03:00.000-04:00

I listen to NPR a lot (and I'm a New England Yankee, and I like good coffee, and I drive a fuel-efficient car, and I fit a lot of the other stereotypes of educated Americans that for perverse reasons have managed to be given a negative spin in the US media). National Public Radio is a favorite target of the right for its alleged liberal spin, and I'll grant that some of their programming has a notably leftish sensibility. For example, This American Life, a fantastic program, treats homosexuality as a fact of life and treats gays as normal people with valid stories to tell - clearly this is part of the left wing agenda of acceptance and respect for your fellow person.

However, and it is a big however, the news division of NPR often echoes the party line of the current administration without even a nod toward the notion that they are presenting unvarnished propaganda. Case in point: today the news announcer has been repeating every half hour that the president is returning to the White House to "lead the recovery effort" from the devastating Hurricane Katrina in the New Orleans/ Mississippi Gulf Coast region. Clearly, the president is returning to the White House to be seen to lead the recovery effort - the actual work that he will contribute to the effort, beyond making some phone calls and issuing some statements, will be nothing compared to the people who are actually hired to lead the real recovery, such as the director of FEMA and the governors of Louisiana and Mississippi.

There is a difference between leadership and showmanship. We're getting the latter, but the White House claims we're getting the former, and NPR echoes the party line. I'm reminded of nothing so much as the evening news in Kenya during the long autocratic Moi regime - every night the news would begin with the magnificent things our glorious leader was doing on behalf of the good citizens of his country.

NPR is guilty of repeated "Dear Leader" coverage. Look to this blog to document the more egregious examples as they arise.

An explanation for my crusade against BS at JFK

2005-08-10T17:47:00.000-04:00

The introduction to Laura Penny's book, "Your Call Is Important To Us," has a paragraph that neatly sums up why I've made a minor mountain of the irksome experience at JFK. Call it an everyday form of peasant resistance, with a techie twist: by blogging about the times when bullshit is smeared in your face, you can out the bullshitter. For example, an internet search of "Greenwich Village Bistro JFK" is seeing a certain sordid tale climbing the ranks - link to this blog, and watch those responsible for rudeness and mediocrity in Terminal 1 reap what they sow.

If only I could blog about the experience of dealing with the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services... But that is one office that holds too much power over my life right now (imagine the temerity, I married someone who didn't even have the forethought to be born an American citizen), so you'll just have to imagine a scene, drawn out over months and years, that is not unlike dealing with the New Jersey DMV at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon.

Here's the excerpt from Penny's book:

&lt;br&gt; There are several reasons why there is so much bullshit, not the least of which is that we continue to tolerate it. We might grumble about bullshit, but few of us are inclined to ask for the manager or boycott the offender. This is partly due to a sense that resistance is futile. You, as a lone consumer, can hardly put a dent in any of the reigning oligopolies with your singular refusal, no matter how cruddy their service or product may be. You, as a single voter, can hardly influence matters of state to the same degree that industry concerns and special interest lobbies can. These feelings of impotence, insignificance, and isolation represent the bummer underside of all that self-interest speak, for you are but a superfluous drop in the mighty churning sea that will wash on with or without you. It's the triple-A of apathy, alienation, and atomization.

"Going Tribal" on the Discovery Channel - the most racist show on television?

2005-08-09T16:51:00.000-04:00

Someone posted a heads-up to the H-Africa discussion list about a program that is premiering tonight, called Going Tribal. It looks like an absolute train wreck. It turns out they have a discussion forum that doesn't yet have any posts.

Now it does:

From the looks of the "Going Tribal" website, this may well be the most bigoted, condescending, racist show on television. The premise seems to be: brave white man meets dark wild savages, and spears fly!

I'm glad that I don't get the Discovery Channel on my cable system, or I might feel compelled to watch this in order to see just how horrible it is. Kind of like the stairway in the building where I work - there is a dead bird that crashed into the window by the stairwell, and now tweety is decomposing on a ledge, and every time I go to another floor my eyes are drawn to the gory spectacle. I often respect the programs the Discovery Channel airs, but this looks to be the lowest of the low.

I write this as an anthropologist who has lived and worked in a remote part of Africa for many years. I was most recently at my home there one month ago. The sensationalistic promos on this website give the impression of primitives as they only exist in Hollywood's imagination - and I fear that the programs themselves will be carefully edited to fulfill that imaginary view of distant peoples.

(By the way - when I posted my comment, their website already knew my standard discussion board user name. I assume that I logged onto some other affiliated website sometime in the past, and that my browser was cookied, but it was just a little creepy.)

JFK Travesty, Part 6: The Fax

2005-08-05T10:58:00.000-04:00

I've photocopied the receipt and faxed it to Mike at Anton Airfood.

Along with the receipt, I sent the following cover sheet:

Re: Greenwich Village Bistro at JFK Terminal 1

Contents: 3 pages (This cover page plus 2 others)

Comments:

Hi Mike,

Following please find two copies (original size and enlarged) of my receipt from the Greenwich Village Bistro. I had walk-up bar service, for which I waited several minutes to be recognized at the empty bar, was treated as an imposition on the bartender’s afternoon, received a glass that was slathered with juice around the outside, had to ask for napkins, and sat at a table covered in something sticky.

Although there were no prices on the drinks list, posted anywhere in the bar, or itemized on the receipt, I watched my bill being rung up on the register. The charges were $6.49 for a glass of white wine and $2.80 for a glass of grapefruit juice. The total therefore should have been $9.29, and New York’s restaurant tax would bring the total to $10.06. The additional amount is $1.67, which is exactly 18% of $9.29 – meaning that I was assessed a service charge although I most certainly did not have table service.

I believe that the surly service I received was a direct result of the fact that the bartender was assured of his tip regardless of the level of service provided. I suspect that the restaurant is run with the knowledge that most patrons are under time pressure en route to international destinations and will not notice billing discrepancies or have any way of contacting management to discuss issues with the service. I therefore feel that, although the dollar amount under discussion here is small, the circumstances suggest underlying management issues that your company should address.

I look forward to hearing what steps you will be taking to resolve this issue and improve service at your JFK concession.

A call returned! JFK Travesty, Part 5

2005-08-04T19:43:00.000-04:00

My phone calls to JFK were returned! A nice woman who identified herself by name, twice, and then carefully spelled her name for me without being asked, called and gave me the actual phone number for the actual Greenwich Village Bistro. The woman said she worked for the Port Authority at JFK, which rents the concession to the Greenwich Village Bistro, but that the Bistro itself is the place to contact to deal with this customer service issue.

The phone number for the Greenwich Village Bistro at JFK is 718-751-2890.

I won't call them until tomorrow, however, since I still have to fax my contact at Anton Airfood. I've photocopied the receipt, so I'll fax it out as soon as I get home.

JFK Travesty, Part 4

2005-08-04T10:24:00.000-04:00

Let's try this again.

Dialing 1-800-498-7497

This time I didn't even go into the whole story of the horrible service at the Greenwich Village Bistro in Terminal 1. I just said that this was my third time calling, and that nobody had called me back.

The woman who answered the phone said that she would leave another message.

Now I see that my receipt also includes the words, "Anton Airfood Inc." Hello, Google!

They've got a website that says they are passionately committed to the BEST service: www.airfood.com

"At Anton Airfood, Inc., we believe that the customers' needs and wishes come first."

Founded by Bill Anton, the company is a major player in the airport concessions business. They appear to be based at Washington National. Let's try their phone number: 1-703-417-0900

A man named Mike is the person to contact: 301-896-xxxx

Fax is : 240-694-xxxx

Mike was very pleasant, and gave me his committment to "cure our evils." I'll fax him the receipt later today, when I get to the office.

It'll be a busy day at the fax machine. I've also got to fax a letter to the US Embassy in Ghana so that my programmer, Paa Kwesi, can get back into the country. PK, I need you here!

on Mexicans and the USA

2005-08-01T08:41:00.000-04:00

Op-Ed Contributors (Forum/Message Board) - The New York Times

This is in response to an op-ed in today's NYT by Matt Dowd that reads, in part:

WITH nearly six million Mexicans living illegally in the United States, some Americans, particularly those in border states, are greatly worried about the costs of illegal immigration and have demanded that more be done to stem it. Modern-day "minutemen" patrol the border. Voters pass measures limiting the rights of illegal immigrants, and senators debate legislation to establish guest-worker programs. Certain elected officials and pundits focus on the perils of illegal immigration to score political points.

But chances are that there will be a substantial decrease in illegal immigration from Mexico in the next 20 years, and it won't be because of civilian border patrols, laws being passed, pronouncements by politicians, or as some would like, "building a wall on the border." Instead, the cause will be demographic trends within Mexico itself, trends that have been largely ignored in the debate over immigration.

The aging of the population in Mexico coupled with Mexico's economic expansion mean that jobs in Mexico will be more plentiful, thereby prompting fewer young people to come to the United States in search of work. Studies have shown that as the population growth rate in countries worldwide slows, migration drops. This is especially true for an expanding economy like Mexico.

As these trends become more apparent to the public, politicians running on an anti-Mexican-immigrant platform will be seen as out of step. While these politicians may seem successful in the short term, by the next decade the facts will definitely get in their way.

Does the United States need to continue to worry about border security and terrorism? Absolutely. Do we as a society need to figure out how to handle illegal immigrants and their families already living and working in the United States? Of course.

But legislators and government agencies should spend more time and resources addressing the problems of immigrants already here and our direct security needs, and much less time on prescriptive laws aimed at stemming illegal immigration from Mexico. We should be aware of the historic transformations occurring in Mexican society so that we aren't fighting a war that is already ending.

Matthew Dowd, who was the chief strategist for the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign, is the senior adviser to the Republican National Committee.

JFK Travesty, Part 3

2005-07-29T16:22:00.000-04:00

It's, what, 73 hours after I first spoke to someone at JFK to discuss the Greenwich Village Bistro travesty. My phone has remained resolutely silent. So, I just called back the secret 800-498-7497 JFK customer service number. The phone was again answered on one ring. I gave a highly abbreviated version of the story, and the woman on the other end sounded very concerned. She took my name and number, and said that she'd "let them know." I asked her to have management call me back.

We shall see...

Incidentally, isn't it cool the way you can type something into your blog, like "Greenwich Village Bistro travesty" or "secret JFK customer service number" and watch it ripple into the consciousness of the internet?

JFK Travesty, Part 2

2005-07-26T14:15:00.000-04:00

Now it is Tuesday morning, and I am about to call JFK airport information to try to find a number for the management of the Greenwich Village Bistro in Terminal 1.

Airport Information (718) 244-4444

A recorded female voice is telling me about the AirTrain. Now she's talking about security issues. Never leave luggage unattended. Law enforcement officers throughout the terminals are there to protect me. She regrets the inconvenience if your car is towed. Press 1 for an automated information system. A new garage will serve the AA terminal, so allow extra time to get to the terminal during construction. (Different woman.) Try AirTrain instead of driving. There's a new "Kiss and Fly" at the 8/9 parking lot, which gives you free parking to drop off and say goodbye to your passenger. (New woman) Welcome to the automated information system. For this and that, press 1,2,3. For comments and complaints, please hang up and call: 800-498-7497

This phone number doesn't seem to be on the actual JFK web site. Google it and you'll find only a few obscure mentions.

Wow - a woman answered the phone on ONE ring! I told her an abbreviated version of my little story. She took my number, and said, "Okay, as soon as that department gets in, I'll have them call you right back."

To be continued...

Fixing a Travesty at JFK, part 1

2005-07-24T09:24:00.000-04:00

Yesterday evening, after checking Vero's mother in for her flight home, we went to the food court in JFK's Terminal 1. The food court only has a few choices: Mickey D's, a Chinese fast-food place, a stand that sells sodas and snacks, and a more "upscale" place called the Greenwich Village Bistro. The Greenwich Village Bistro has a cocktail area where you order at the bar, and a table-service area with food.

When we put Vero's father on the plane last fall, we'd had a drink with him at the Greenwich Village Bistro. We'd remembered that the drinks were way overpriced, but that the casualness of the occasion relaxed him after the tenseness of getting to the airport and getting checked in. We really wanted Vero's mom to be calm for her flight, so we thought we'd repeat the tradition.

We picked a table and sat on the raised stools. Vero and I decided to share a glass of wine, and my mom-in-law wanted a grapefruit juice, no ice. I went to the bar and waited for about 5 minutes while the bartender fixed sodas for another table, brought them food from the kitchen, and studiously ignored me. Eventually he came over and took my drink order. I forgot to mention the "no ice" part, and he was very quick about scooping the ice into the cup and filling the glass as I asked, "Excuse me, can we have the grapefruit juice without ice." Neither Vero nor her mom like ice in their drinks - I don't know why.

What a mundane little story, right? Why am I blogging this?

Because what happened next will be the beginning of a little adventure. The man walked over to the sink and started spooning the ice out of the glass, slopping juice all over the sides of the glass in the process. This being a bar, I would have grabbed a cocktail strainer and poured the juice into a new glass, but what do I know? Now the barkeep walked back to the drink-fixing area, filled the old glass to the rim, and put it on the counter. He rang up the drinks - $6.49 for the one glass of Pinot Grigio, and $2.80 for the juice, prices that did not appear on any menu so could only be learned by watching the cash register. Total of $11.73. I asked the man for napkins, which he plunked on the counter, and I wiped the sticky juice off the glass before I brought it to our table. Then I came back to the counter and signed the receipt, taking care not to include a tip.

I always tip. But this service was horrible. And when I joined my womenfolk at the table, I learned that my area hadn't been properly wiped from previous customers - in order not to have my arms stick to the table, I had to make my own tablecloth from one of the napkins.

Oh well, right? At least the wine was ok, and the grapefruit juice was what my mother-in-law was thirsty for. We sat and talked, with the desired pre-flight soothing effect.

As we got the bottom of our glasses, a thought hit me - $11.73 was way more than the price of the drinks plus New York tax. I pulled the receipt out of my pocket. It wasn't itemized, just a total, and then this notation: "FOR TABLE SERVICE ONLY A 18% Service Charge is included." The math works out. Even though we didn't have table service, our service charge was built into the bill.

No wonder the man was surly. No wonder he slopped juice all over the outside of the glass and didn't wipe it off or put it in a new glass. No wonder the table was sticky. In this high-priced eatery, there was no accountability. The customers pass through quickly and then they are on another continent. Management provides some tables, a menu with no prices, and pockets the profits. By the time you realize you've been overcharged for service after being overcharged for drinks, if you ever do (remember, there are no prices on the menu or the receipt), you've gone through security and passport control, or you've paid the short-term parking attendant and driven off.

This is only a matter of $1.67, but I'm thinking, wouldn't it be fun to see what it takes to get things set right? Really, whether it's one dollar or a thousand, bad business is bad business. This sort of thing has happened to me at many other places on the road (Paris Gare du Nord, I'm thinking of you), where businesses take advantage of travelers. So, the next few entries to this blog will track my efforts to find someone responsible for the Greenwich Village Bistro at Terminal One in JFK Airport.

I'd like an apology. I'd like my $1.67 back. I'd like to know that I can sit down at a restaurant in an airport or train station and have a tasty, enjoyable meal or drink. I'd like to restore civility to the public space through which we all must pass. This sounds like a tall order, but I recently realized that I've spent a month of my life just sitting in airplanes going to or from Africa, not to mention all the other flights, the time in airports, the time in trains, the time in busses, time getting to or from the point of departure or arrival. Wouldn't it be nice if you could count on that travel time being a civil experience with pleasant human interactions?

So I'll start with this little quest for the $1.67 that I paid for service I did not receive. I'll start here.

(P.S.- The spell-check on blogger.com is simply awful! Among the words in this post that blogger didn't recognize? "Blog." And "blogger.")

Blogging ain't easy

2005-07-15T17:04:00.000-04:00

Wow, I created this blog a year ago and I've only found time to write two posts? What have I been doing in the meantime?

Oh yeah. Weddings. Teaching. Working on www.yale.edu/swahili. Skiing.

Travels in the meantime: Romania. Delhi. Chennai. Colorado (with just a small broken rib from the snowboarding). Madison, Wisconsin. Malangali. Dar.

Maybe I'll actually use this blog some day...

The Cuba Complexity

2004-08-12T20:14:00.000-04:00

What's going on in Cuba?

Cuba is obviously not the Eden that idealists choose to believe it is. But when I was there in 1981, it was clearly not hell on earth, either. The US policy toward Cuba has been essentially the same for the past 44 years, and that policy has made it possible for Castro to stay in power. Castro is an enlightened despot. Enlightened in his speeches and actual policies that seek to improve the general welfare, making social services such as health care available to average Cubans that would make many Americans writhe with jealousy if they knew about them. Despotic - well, that hardly needs expounding, he's a petty dictator who brooks no opposition.

Cuba remains the only country against which the US is still fighting the Cold War, and this is absolutely unnecessary. Were we to drop our trade and travel restrictions - Ronald Reagan called it "constructive engagement" in the context of South Africa, where such a policy was misguided - Cuba would open up at warp speed. Cuba would follow the path of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Russia, and soon Castro would lose his power to the demands of a people interacting with the world. As it is, he maintains an iron grip because the people see no alternative.

Are we just going to wait for Castro to die, and then hope that the ensuing void will result in a more satisfactory regime? Or will some brave US politician stand up to the Miami cabal and finally kill Castro with kindness to the Cuban people?

Virgin Post

2004-08-11T12:14:00.000-04:00

There comes a time when new things must start. Today, The Pen Ultimate pens its first.

Expect big things from this blog, in days ahead. But first, expect little, for The Pen Ultimate is about to take his first vacation.

A wedding, in Bucharest. Followed by a honeymoon, in Croatia. These revelations will not be blogovised.

Though the blog may develop a bit in the few days before takeoff.

This is prelude.

All that follows is The Pen Ultimate.