Ramblings of a Conuly

An article on health care

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:56:53 GMT

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Why We Must Ration Health Care
By PETER SINGER

You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much?

If you can afford it, you probably would pay that much, or more, to live longer, even if your quality of life wasn’t going to be good. But suppose it’s not you with the cancer but a stranger covered by your health-insurance fund. If the insurer provides this man — and everyone else like him — with Sutent, your premiums will increase. Do you still think the drug is a good value? Suppose the treatment cost a million dollars. Would it be worth it then? Ten million? Is there any limit to how much you would want your insurer to pay for a drug that adds six months to someone’s life? If there is any point at which you say, “No, an extra six months isn’t worth that much,” then you think that health care should be rationed.

In the current U.S. debate over health care reform, “rationing” has become a dirty word. Meeting last month with five governors, President Obama urged them to avoid using the term, apparently for fear of evoking the hostile response that sank the Clintons’ attempt to achieve reform. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published at the end of last year with the headline “Obama Will Ration Your Health Care,” Sally Pipes, C.E.O. of the conservative Pacific Research Institute, described how in Britain the national health service does not pay for drugs that are regarded as not offering good value for money, and added, “Americans will not put up with such limits, nor will our elected representatives.” And the Democratic chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Max Baucus, told CNSNews in April, “There is no rationing of health care at all” in the proposed reform.

Remember the joke about the man who asks a woman if she would have sex with him for a million dollars? She reflects for a few moments and then answers that she would. “So,” he says, “would you have sex with me for $50?” Indignantly, she exclaims, “What kind of a woman do you think I am?” He replies: “We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling about the price.” The man’s response implies that if a woman will sell herself at any price, she is a prostitute. The way we regard rationing in health care seems to rest on a similar assumption, that it’s immoral to apply monetary considerations to saving lives — but is that stance tenable?

Health care is a scarce resource, and all scarce resources are rationed in one way or another. In the United States, most health care is privately financed, and so most rationing is by price: you get what you, or your employer, can afford to insure you for. But our current system of employer-financed health insurance exists only because the federal government encouraged it by making the premiums tax deductible. That is, in effect, a more than $200 billion government subsidy for health care. In the public sector, primarily Medicare, Medicaid and hospital emergency rooms, health care is rationed by long waits, high patient copayment requirements, low payments to doctors that discourage some from serving public patients and limits on payments to hospitals.

The case for explicit health care rationing in the United States starts with the difficulty of thinking of any other way in which we can continue to provide adequate health care to people on Medicaid and Medicare, let alone extend coverage to those who do not now have it. Health-insurance premiums have more than doubled in a decade, rising four times faster than wages. In May, Medicare’s trustees warned that the program’s biggest fund is heading for insolvency in just eight years. Health care now absorbs about one dollar in every six the nation spends, a figure that far exceeds the share spent by any other nation. According to the Congressional Budget Office, it is on track to double by 2035.

President Obama has said plainly that America’s health care system is broken. It is, he has said, by far the most significant driver of America’s long-term debt and deficits. It is hard to see how the nation as a whole can remain competitive if in 25 years we are spending nearly a third of what we earn on health care, while other industrialized nations are spending far less but achieving health outcomes as good as, or better than, ours.

Rationing health care means getting value for the billions we are spending by setting limits on which treatments should be paid for from the public purse. If we ration we won’t be writing blank checks to pharmaceutical companies for their patented drugs, nor paying for whatever procedures doctors choose to recommend. When public funds subsidize health care or provide it directly, it is crazy not to try to get value for money. The debate over health care reform in the United States should start from the premise that some form of health care rationing is both inescapable and desirable. Then we can ask, What is the best way to do it?

Last year Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence gave a preliminary recommendation that the National Health Service should not offer Sutent for advanced kidney cancer. The institute, generally known as NICE, is a government-financed but independently run organization set up to provide national guidance on promoting good health and treating illness. The decision on Sutent did not, at first glance, appear difficult. NICE had set a general limit of £30,000, or about $49,000, on the cost of extending life for a year. Sutent, when used for advanced kidney cancer, cost more than that, and research suggested it offered only about six months extra life. But the British media leapt on the theme of penny-pinching bureaucrats sentencing sick people to death. The issue was then picked up by the U.S. news media and by those lobbying against health care reform in the United States. An article in The New York Times last December featured Bruce Hardy, a kidney-cancer patient whose wife, Joy, said, “It’s hard to know that there is something out there that could help but they’re saying you can’t have it because of cost.” Then she asked the classic question: “What price is life?”

Last November, Bloomberg News focused on Jack Rosser, who was 57 at the time and whose doctor had told him that with Sutent he might live long enough to see his 1-year-old daughter, Emma, enter primary school. Rosser’s wife, Jenny, is quoted as saying: “It’s immoral. They are sentencing him to die.” In the conservative monthly The American Spectator, David Catron, a health care consultant, describes Rosser as “one of NICE’s many victims” and writes that NICE “regularly hands down death sentences to gravely ill patients.” Linking the British system with Democratic proposals for reforming health care in the United States, Catron asked whether we really deserve a health care system in which “soulless bureaucrats arbitrarily put a dollar value on our lives.” (In March, NICE issued a final ruling on Sutent. Because of how few patients need the drug and because of special end-of-life considerations, it recommended that the drug be provided by the National Health Service to patients with advanced kidney cancer. )

There’s no doubt that it’s tough — politically, emotionally and ethically — to make a decision that means that someone will die sooner than they would have if the decision had gone the other way. But if the stories of Bruce Hardy and Jack Rosser lead us to think badly of the British system of rationing health care, we should remind ourselves that the U.S. system also results in people going without life-saving treatment — it just does so less visibly. Pharmaceutical manufacturers often charge much more for drugs in the United States than they charge for the same drugs in Britain, where they know that a higher price would put the drug outside the cost-effectiveness limits set by NICE. American patients, even if they are covered by Medicare or Medicaid, often cannot afford the copayments for drugs. That’s rationing too, by ability to pay.

Dr. Art Kellermann, associate dean for public policy at Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta, recently wrote of a woman who came into his emergency room in critical condition because a blood vessel had burst in her brain. She was uninsured and had chosen to buy food for her children instead of spending money on her blood-pressure medicine. In the emergency room, she received excellent high-tech medical care, but by the time she got there, it was too late to save her.

A New York Times report on the high costs of some drugs illustrates the problem. Chuck Stauffer, an Oregon farmer, found that his prescription-drug insurance left him to pay $5,500 for his first 42 days of Temodar, a drug used to treat brain tumors, and $1,700 a month after that. For Medicare patients drug costs can be even higher, because Medicare can require a copayment of 25 percent of the cost of the drug. For Gleevec, a drug that is effective against some forms of leukemia and some gastrointestinal tumors, that one-quarter of the cost can run to $40,000 a year.

In Britain, everyone has health insurance. In the U.S., some 45 million do not, and nor are they entitled to any health care at all, unless they can get themselves to an emergency room. Hospitals are prohibited from turning away anyone who will be endangered by being refused treatment. But even in emergency rooms, people without health insurance may receive less health care than those with insurance. Joseph Doyle, a professor of economics at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., studied the records of people in Wisconsin who were injured in severe automobile accidents and had no choice but to go to the hospital. He estimated that those who had no health insurance received 20 percent less care and had a death rate 37 percent higher than those with health insurance. This difference held up even when those without health insurance were compared with those without automobile insurance, and with those on Medicaid — groups with whom they share some characteristics that might affect treatment. The lack of insurance seems to be what caused the greater number of deaths.

When the media feature someone like Bruce Hardy or Jack Rosser, we readily relate to individuals who are harmed by a government agency’s decision to limit the cost of health care. But we tend not to hear about — and thus don’t identify with — the particular individuals who die in emergency rooms because they have no health insurance. This “identifiable victim” effect, well documented by psychologists, creates a dangerous bias in our thinking. Doyle’s figures suggest that if those Wisconsin accident victims without health insurance had received equivalent care to those with it, the additional health care would have cost about $220,000 for each life saved. Those who died were on average around 30 years old and could have been expected to live for at least another 40 years; this means that had they survived their accidents, the cost per extra year of life would have been no more than $5,500 — a small fraction of the $49,000 that NICE recommends the British National Health Service should be ready to pay to give a patient an extra year of life. If the U.S. system spent less on expensive treatments for those who, with or without the drugs, have at most a few months to live, it would be better able to save the lives of more people who, if they get the treatment they need, might live for several decades.

Estimates of the number of U.S. deaths caused annually by the absence of universal health insurance go as high as 20,000. One study concluded that in the age group 55 to 64 alone, more than 13,000 extra deaths a year may be attributed to the lack of insurance coverage. But the estimates vary because Americans without health insurance are more likely, for example, to smoke than Americans with health insurance, and sorting out the role that the lack of insurance plays is difficult. Richard Kronick, a professor at the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, cautiously concludes from his own study that there is little evidence to suggest that extending health insurance to all Americans would have a large effect on the number of deaths in the United States. That doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t; we simply don’t know if it would.

In any case, it isn’t only uninsured Americans who can’t afford treatment. President Obama has spoken about his mother, who died from ovarian cancer in 1995. The president said that in the last weeks of her life, his mother “was spending too much time worrying about whether her health insurance would cover her bills” — an experience, the president went on to say, that his mother shared with millions of other Americans. It is also an experience more common in the United States than in other developed countries. A recent Commonwealth Fund study led by Cathy Schoen and Robin Osborn surveyed adults with chronic illness in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Far more Americans reported forgoing health care because of cost. More than half (54 percent) reported not filling a prescription, not visiting a doctor when sick or not getting recommended care. In comparison, in the United Kingdom the figure was 13 percent, and in the Netherlands, only 7 percent. Even among Americans with insurance, 43 percent reported that cost was a problem that had limited the treatment they received. According to a 2007 study led by David Himmelstein, more than 60 percent of all bankruptcies are related to illness, with many of these specifically caused by medical bills, even among those who have health insurance. In Canada the incidence of bankruptcy related to illness is much lower.

When a Washington Post journalist asked Daniel Zemel, a Washington rabbi, what he thought about federal agencies putting a dollar value on human life, the rabbi cited a Jewish teaching explaining that if you put one human life on one side of a scale, and you put the rest of the world on the other side, the scale is balanced equally. Perhaps that is how those who resist health care rationing think. But we already put a dollar value on human life. If the Department of Transportation, for example, followed rabbinical teachings it would exhaust its entire budget on road safety. Fortunately the department sets a limit on how much it is willing to pay to save one human life. In 2008 that limit was $5.8 million. Other government agencies do the same. Last year the Consumer Product Safety Commission considered a proposal to make mattresses less likely to catch fire. Information from the industry suggested that the new standard would cost $343 million to implement, but the Consumer Product Safety Commission calculated that it would save 270 lives a year — and since it valued a human life at around $5 million, that made the new standard a good value. If we are going to have consumer-safety regulation at all, we need some idea of how much safety is worth buying. Like health care bureaucrats, consumer-safety bureaucrats sometimes decide that saving a human life is not worth the expense. Twenty years ago, the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, examined a proposal for installing seat belts in all school buses. It estimated that doing so would save, on average, one life per year, at a cost of $40 million. After that, support for the proposal faded away. So why is it that those who accept that we put a price on life when it comes to consumer safety refuse to accept it when it comes to health care?

Of course, it’s one thing to accept that there’s a limit to how much we should spend to save a human life, and another to set that limit. The dollar value that bureaucrats place on a generic human life is intended to reflect social values, as revealed in our behavior. It is the answer to the question “How much are you willing to pay to save your life?” — except that, of course, if you asked that question of people who were facing death, they would be prepared to pay almost anything to save their lives. So instead, economists note how much people are prepared to pay to reduce the risk that they will die. How much will people pay for air bags in a car, for instance? Once you know how much they will pay for a specified reduction in risk, you multiply the amount that people are willing to pay by how much the risk has been reduced, and then you know, or so the theory goes, what value people place on their lives. Suppose that there is a 1 in 100,000 chance that an air bag in my car will save my life, and that I would pay $50 — but no more than that — for an air bag. Then it looks as if I value my life at $50 x 100,000, or $5 million.

The theory sounds good, but in practice it has problems. We are not good at taking account of differences between very small risks, so if we are asked how much we would pay to reduce a risk of dying from 1 in 1,000,000 to 1 in 10,000,000, we may give the same answer as we would if asked how much we would pay to reduce the risk from 1 in 500,000 to 1 in 10,000,000. Hence multiplying what we would pay to reduce the risk of death by the reduction in risk lends an apparent mathematical precision to the outcome of the calculation — the supposed value of a human life — that our intuitive responses to the questions cannot support. Nevertheless this approach to setting a value on a human life is at least closer to what we really believe — and to what we should believe — than dramatic pronouncements about the infinite value of every human life, or the suggestion that we cannot distinguish between the value of a single human life and the value of a million human lives, or even of the rest of the world. Though such feel-good claims may have some symbolic value in particular circumstances, to take them seriously and apply them — for instance, by leaving it to chance whether we save one life or a billion — would be deeply unethical.

Governments implicitly place a dollar value on a human life when they decide how much is to be spent on health care programs and how much on other public goods that are not directed toward saving lives. The task of health care bureaucrats is then to get the best value for the resources they have been allocated. It is the familiar comparative exercise of getting the most bang for your buck. Sometimes that can be relatively easy to decide. If two drugs offer the same benefits and have similar risks of side effects, but one is much more expensive than the other, only the cheaper one should be provided by the public health care program. That the benefits and the risks of side effects are similar is a scientific matter for experts to decide after calling for submissions and examining them. That is the bread-and-butter work of units like NICE. But the benefits may vary in ways that defy straightforward comparison. We need a common unit for measuring the goods achieved by health care. Since we are talking about comparing different goods, the choice of unit is not merely a scientific or economic question but an ethical one.

As a first take, we might say that the good achieved by health care is the number of lives saved. But that is too crude. The death of a teenager is a greater tragedy than the death of an 85-year-old, and this should be reflected in our priorities. We can accommodate that difference by calculating the number of life-years saved, rather than simply the number of lives saved. If a teenager can be expected to live another 70 years, saving her life counts as a gain of 70 life-years, whereas if a person of 85 can be expected to live another 5 years, then saving the 85-year-old will count as a gain of only 5 life-years. That suggests that saving one teenager is equivalent to saving 14 85-year-olds. These are, of course, generic teenagers and generic 85-year-olds. It’s easy to say, “What if the teenager is a violent criminal and the 85-year-old is still working productively?” But just as emergency rooms should leave criminal justice to the courts and treat assailants and victims alike, so decisions about the allocation of health care resources should be kept separate from judgments about the moral character or social value of individuals.

Health care does more than save lives: it also reduces pain and suffering. How can we compare saving a person’s life with, say, making it possible for someone who was confined to bed to return to an active life? We can elicit people’s values on that too. One common method is to describe medical conditions to people — let’s say being a quadriplegic — and tell them that they can choose between 10 years in that condition or some smaller number of years without it. If most would prefer, say, 10 years as a quadriplegic to 4 years of nondisabled life, but would choose 6 years of nondisabled life over 10 with quadriplegia, but have difficulty deciding between 5 years of nondisabled life or 10 years with quadriplegia, then they are, in effect, assessing life with quadriplegia as half as good as nondisabled life. (These are hypothetical figures, chosen to keep the math simple, and not based on any actual surveys.) If that judgment represents a rough average across the population, we might conclude that restoring to nondisabled life two people who would otherwise be quadriplegics is equivalent in value to saving the life of one person, provided the life expectancies of all involved are similar.

This is the basis of the quality-adjusted life-year, or QALY, a unit designed to enable us to compare the benefits achieved by different forms of health care. The QALY has been used by economists working in health care for more than 30 years to compare the cost-effectiveness of a wide variety of medical procedures and, in some countries, as part of the process of deciding which medical treatments will be paid for with public money. If a reformed U.S. health care system explicitly accepted rationing, as I have argued it should, QALYs could play a similar role in the U.S.

Some will object that this discriminates against people with disabilities. If we return to the hypothetical assumption that a year with quadriplegia is valued at only half as much as a year without it, then a treatment that extends the lives of people without disabilities will be seen as providing twice the value of one that extends, for a similar period, the lives of quadriplegics. That clashes with the idea that all human lives are of equal value. The problem, however, does not lie with the concept of the quality-adjusted life-year, but with the judgment that, if faced with 10 years as a quadriplegic, one would prefer a shorter lifespan without a disability. Disability advocates might argue that such judgments, made by people without disabilities, merely reflect the ignorance and prejudice of people without disabilities when they think about people with disabilities. We should, they will very reasonably say, ask quadriplegics themselves to evaluate life with quadriplegia. If we do that, and we find that quadriplegics would not give up even one year of life as a quadriplegic in order to have their disability cured, then the QALY method does not justify giving preference to procedures that extend the lives of people without disabilities over procedures that extend the lives of people with disabilities.

This method of preserving our belief that everyone has an equal right to life is, however, a double-edged sword. If life with quadriplegia is as good as life without it, there is no health benefit to be gained by curing it. That implication, no doubt, would have been vigorously rejected by someone like Christopher Reeve, who, after being paralyzed in an accident, campaigned for more research into ways of overcoming spinal-cord injuries. Disability advocates, it seems, are forced to choose between insisting that extending their lives is just as important as extending the lives of people without disabilities, and seeking public support for research into a cure for their condition.

The QALY tells us to do what brings about the greatest health benefit, irrespective of where that benefit falls. Usually, for a given quantity of resources, we will do more good if we help those who are worst off, because they have the greatest unmet needs. But occasionally some conditions will be both very severe and very expensive to treat. A QALY approach may then lead us to give priority to helping others who are not so badly off and whose conditions are less expensive to treat. I don’t find it unfair to give the same weight to the interests of those who are well off as we give to those who are much worse off, but if there is a social consensus that we should give priority to those who are worse off, we can modify the QALY approach so that it gives greater weight to benefits that accrue to those who are, on the QALY scale, worse off than others.

The QALY approach does not even try to measure the benefits that health care brings in addition to the improvement in health itself. Emotionally, we feel that the fact that Jack Rosser is the father of a young child makes a difference to the importance of extending his life, but his parental status is irrelevant to a QALY assessment of the health care gains that Sutent would bring him. Whether decisions about allocating health care resources should take such personal circumstances into account isn’t easy to decide. Not to do so makes the standard inflexible, but taking personal factors into account increases the scope for subjective — and prejudiced — judgments.

The QALY is not a perfect measure of the good obtained by health care, but its defenders can support it in the same way that Winston Churchill defended democracy as a form of government: it is the worst method of allocating health care, except for all the others. If it isn’t possible to provide everyone with all beneficial treatments, what better way do we have of deciding what treatments people should get than by comparing the QALYs gained with the expense of the treatments?

Will Americans allow their government, either directly or through an independent agency like NICE, to decide which treatments are sufficiently cost-effective to be provided at public expense and which are not? They might, under two conditions: first, that the option of private health insurance remains available, and second, that they are able to see, in their own pocket, the full cost of not rationing health care.

Rationing public health care limits free choice if private health insurance is prohibited. But many countries combine free national health insurance with optional private insurance. Australia, where I’ve spent most of my life and raised a family, is one. The U.S. could do something similar. This would mean extending Medicare to the entire population, irrespective of age, but without Medicare’s current policy that allows doctors wide latitude in prescribing treatments for eligible patients. Instead, Medicare for All, as we might call it, should refuse to pay where the cost per QALY is extremely high. (On the other hand, Medicare for All would not require more than a token copayment for drugs that are cost-effective.) The extension of Medicare could be financed by a small income-tax levy, for those who pay income tax — in Australia the levy is 1.5 percent of taxable income. (There’s an extra 1 percent surcharge for those with high incomes and no private insurance. Those who earn too little to pay income tax would be carried at no cost to themselves.) Those who want to be sure of receiving every treatment that their own privately chosen physicians recommend, regardless of cost, would be free to opt out of Medicare for All as long as they can demonstrate that they have sufficient private health insurance to avoid becoming a burden on the community if they fall ill. Alternatively, they might remain in Medicare for All but take out supplementary insurance for health care that Medicare for All does not cover. Every American will have a right to a good standard of health care, but no one will have a right to unrationed health care. Those who opt for unrationed health care will know exactly how much it costs them.

One ﬁnal comment. It is common for opponents of health care rationing to point to Canada and Britain as examples of where we might end up if we get “socialized medicine.” On a blog on Fox News earlier this year, the conservative writer John Lott wrote, “Americans should ask Canadians and Brits — people who have long suffered from rationing — how happy they are with central government decisions on eliminating ‘unnecessary’ health care.” There is no particular reason that the United States should copy the British or Canadian forms of universal coverage, rather than one of the different arrangements that have developed in other industrialized nations, some of which may be better. But as it happens, last year the Gallup organization did ask Canadians and Brits, and people in many different countries, if they have confidence in “health care or medical systems” in their country. In Canada, 73 percent answered this question affirmatively. Coincidentally, an identical percentage of Britons gave the same answer. In the United States, despite spending much more, per person, on health care, the figure was only 56 percent.

It gets very dry and factual and mathy midway through - if anybody could sum it up, that'd be great, I sort of glazed over even though the individual facts were interesting. (Gee, that's an incentive to read, isn't it?)

Taken from multiple sources

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:41:51 GMT

So, over at Conservative Free Republic they have a forum. Lots of places have forums.

And over there, occasionally they have people making and commenting with objectionable matter. Lots of forums have that problem.

And hey, there it's racist and people are attacking the President's young daughters, which is abhorrent. Okay... it happens... but hey, their policy forbids racist content! (And anything which advocates for rebellion and secession as well.) So you'd think that they'd deal with that fast before it made them look bad... right?

Well... no, don't make me laugh. They waited a day, and then only removed it because a guy doing research made a complaint. And... then they put it back up, only removing it for good once liberal blogs got a hold of this.

Link one
Link two
Link three.

Now, everybody is commenting on the vicious comments left about the President's kids, which is as it should be. Attacking anybody's young children (and 11 is still young) with slurs and misogyny (as well as racism and some basic classism, they've hit the trifecta there) is wrong, that goes without saying.

But what gets me is the comment about Obama's Mother-in-Law, that she's "free-loadin'". I've heard that before, but without the overt racist ~~sub~~text, and it makes no sense to me, firstly because she is, as I'm told, there to help keep things normal for her grandkids, and second because she's seventy-one! Seventy-one! What sort of family values allow you to insult people for taking care of their parents? If she were sitting around doing nothing, isn't she entitled? Surely, after 71 years, she gets to rest and be with her family? (Well, I suppose those are the same family values that tell you it's okay to insult defenseless 11 year old girls who haven't even done anything.)

Some choice comments

We grab a worthless social worker off the street because he speaks well with a teleprompter and toss him into a job with 230 years of history and class. Anyone else see the problem with this? All the presidents before this idiot knew the enormity and responsibility of the office.

Yeah, I see a problem with this. I see a problem with an educational system that apparently allowed you to forget all about Andy Jackson, that's my problem! (Not to mention George W. Bush, but that's a bit of a low blow, this guy no doubt voted for him.)

"Poor kids. I hope they're not 'punished with a baby'".

Ironic in light of the children of certain conservatives recently. (I have nothing but sympathy for Palin's daughter, who is in a difficult spot that was only made worse by being in the public eye.)

So you know I've been reading OotS lately.

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 02:49:51 GMT

SO glad he finished the recent arc, so I'm not refreshing every 5 minutes anymore!

I read the fora when I'm super bored. Don't know why, it just irritates me. I can only hope most of those people are posting because they're bored and not because they mean the crap they're spouting.

(And for the record, I'm sick of the V gender debate. Seriously? Can we not have an opinion on this character until and unless we see them naked? Not that that would help, given that V's more or less said outright that V lacks any sort of firm gender identity other than "none of the above".)

So the big thing now seems to be "was it evil for V to cast familicide?"

Evidence for yes is: One shouldn't kill babies and children, including unhatched infants; the spell was *invented* by somebody whose soul had been consigned to blazes; V's thoughts ahead of time indicate that V only did this to hurt Mama Dragon - which, however much she had it coming was still a little classless; wiping out 25% of a sentient species is something akin to genocide; both the folks above and below think this was an evil act.

Evidence for no is: V is good or neutral so it can't have been evil; Roy once made a weak defense for killing a dragon as being "good" because "it's scales weren't shiny?" and Miko-the-Paladin agreed with him; black dragons are evil and anyway Mama Dragon started it.

Now, it's that middle argument for "V did something GOOD there" that concerns me. I always figured that line was a throwaway line to show how off-kilter Miko's view of morality was. I was not aware that we were supposed to take it seriously or consider her ethical views valid or reasonable.

But you know, I have a copy of Start of Darkness here with me. And guess who wrote the preface? That's right, Miko, the girl herself! Let's see what she has to say on the subject of evil....

This story, however, takes the simple and undeniably true premise that all evil creatures are uniformly and irredeemably evil and deliberately confuses the issue by showing us that some villains may perform evil actions for purportedly noble means. Do not be swayed by this rhetoric, however: we all know that every being of the same alignment is indistinguishable from one another....

She goes on for this for a while and then proceeds to slash us all to bits for continuing to read the book despite her warnings - reading the book (which she has not) that ascribes "motivations" to evil beings is clearly an evil act for which the only response is "immediate eradication".

Yeeeeeeeeeeeah. I think I'll continue to not take advice from her, thanks very much. I'll align my moral code somewhere back in the realm of the sane and pragmatic. And maybe I'll learn to not read the threads over at GitP as well!.

Also, and unrelated, are we gonna see all 9 sides that the demon roaches counted? We've got the IFCC, the goblins (led by Redcloak), Xykon, the Order of the Stick - that's only four. At a stretch I guess we can throw the Scribblies and the Sapphire guard in, and maybe the good gods as well, which still makes only seven. I don't get higher than that, and it seems a little late in the game to add more sides to this conflict. Does the Snarl count as a side?

I saw the weirdest sign on a restaurant on Broadway today.

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 02:25:39 GMT

That's Broadway in Lower Manhattan. I was heading to the boat to go home, and I see this Chinese restaurant. I couldn't see the whole sign at once, it sort of revealed itself to me as I walked.

Now In Elt
Now In Eltin
Now In Eltingv

Eltingville? Eltingville, Staten Island? NO WAY. No *way* any place in Manhattan is gonna advertise that - right? There's gotta be another Eltingville out there.

I take one last look before I head the rest of the way to the boat.

Now in Eltingville, S.I.

Huh. So it is. Surreal, I tell ya!

Here's an article on free-ranging kids, though the author doesn't call it that

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:26:19 GMT

It's unusual in that the comments are worth reading.

One that stands out starts thusly:

Teaching in a comm. college, I find that younger students are typically unable to describe the neighborhood they grew up in. Some say they still don't know their own neighborhoods beyond the back yard. Older adults have strong sensory memories of their childhood neighborhoods, and usually enjoy recounting those places, people, and games.

That? That is terrifying.

The kids on this block aren't growing up like that, most of them, which is a great relief to me. Annoying as the local kids are at times, I'd rather see them outside playing than stuck inside all day.

I forgot about this.

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:35:05 GMT

One my way walking to Chelsea Piers yesterday (we really need a new train line further west than the A, that's for sure, but let's see if it ever happens before we're all dust in the grave) I passed by a store. It nearly made me late, and I couldn't figure out why. Chelsea Dentistry isn't that weird a name, is it?

Then I realized it was Chelsea :Dentistry (and yes, they did use a different font for that :D), and I realized how awesome that was.

An article on whales

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 01:45:43 GMT

Clicky!

On the afternoon of Sept. 25, 2002, a group of marine biologists vacationing on Isla San José, in Baja California Sur, Mexico, came upon a couple of whales stranded along the beach. A quick assessment indicated that they had died quite recently. The scientists radioed a passing vessel and sent a message to a colleague at a nearby marine-mammal laboratory, who came to the beach to do an examination.

They were beaked whales, of which there are 20 known species. Relatively small members of the cetacean family, they resemble outsize dolphins, and because of their deep-diving ways, they are among the least observed and understood. Curiously, the stranding on Isla San José followed by just one day the stranding of at least 14 other beaked whales 5,700 miles away along the Canary Islands beaches of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. Rescuers there worked feverishly to water down the whales and keep them cool. They all eventually died, however, and some of their bodies were immediately sent to the nearby city Las Palmas de Gran Canaria for analysis.

It is nearly impossible to pinpoint the precise cause of a whale’s stranding. Theories invariably include factors like the straying of a sick and dying whale leader, faithfully followed by the members of his pod, or sudden shallows along the shores of a migratory route. The two strandings in September 2002, however, did have something intriguing in common. It was noted by the Canary Islands rescuers that naval vessels were carrying out exercises that day not far offshore, a situation that had accompanied four other mass whale strandings on Canary Islands beaches since 1985. And while no such military exercises were being conducted off the beaches of Isla San José, the vessel that the scientists radioed turned out to be a research ship dragging an array of powerful underwater air guns that were repeatedly set off the previous morning in the course of seismic tests of the region’s ocean floor.

The suspicion of a causal relationship between whale strandings and either seismic tests or the use of new high-tech sonar tracking devices in military-training exercises had been mounting for some time. Similar coincidences had been noted off the coasts of Brazil, the Bahamas, the Galápagos Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Japan, as well as in the waters off Italy and Greece. Necropsies performed on a number of the whales revealed lesions about their brains and ears. The results of the examinations performed on the Canary Islands whales, however, added a whole other, darker dimension to the whale-stranding mystery. In addition to bleeding around the whales’ brains and ears, scientists found lesions in their livers, lungs and kidneys, as well as nitrogen bubbles in their organs and tissue, all classic symptoms of a sickness that scientists had naturally assumed whales would be immune to: the bends.

It might sound like something out of a bad sci-fi film: whales sent into suicidal dashes toward the ocean’s surface to escape the madness-inducing echo chamber that we humans have made of their sound-sensitive habitat. But since the Canary Islands stranding in 2002, similar necropsy results have turned up with a number of beached whales, and the deleterious effects of sonar and other human-generated sounds on ocean ecosystems have been firmly established.

As described in a 2005 report published by the Natural Resources Defense Council, “Sounding the Depths II: The Rising Toll of Sonar, Shipping and Industrial Ocean Noise on Marine Life,” oceans that as recently as 100 years ago had been one vast, ongoing whale and piscine chorus have now essentially become senses-wilting miasmas of human-made noise. At a 2004 International Whaling Commission symposium, more than 100 scientists signed a statement asserting that the association between sonar and whale deaths “is very convincing and appears overwhelming.”

The question of sonar’s catastrophic effects on whales even reached the Supreme Court last November, in a case pitting the United States Navy against the Natural Resources Defense Council. The council, along with other environmental groups, had secured two landmark victories in the district and appellate courts of California, which ruled to heavily restrict the Navy’s use of sonar devices in its training exercises. The Supreme Court, however, in a 6-to-3 decision widely viewed as a setback for the environmental movement, overturned parts of the lower-court rulings, faulting them for, in the words of Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion, failing “properly to defer to senior Navy officers’ specific, predictive judgments,” thereby jeopardizing the safety of the fleet and sacrificing the public’s interest in military preparedness by “forcing the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained antisubmarine force.” In his decision, Roberts went on to minimize, in a fairly dismissive tone, the issue of harm to marine life: “For the plaintiffs, the most serious possible injury would be harm to an unknown number of the marine animals that they study and observe.”

Still, the majority’s verdict somehow seemed incidental to the greater, tacit victory for environmentalists of having gotten the nation’s highest court to even consider the well-being of whales in the context of a debate about national security, something that would have been unthinkable not so very long ago. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a dissenting opinion joined by Justice David Souter, took pains to cite the research linking sonar to “mass strandings of marine mammals, hemorrhaging around the brain and ears, acute spongiotic changes in the central nervous system and lesions in vital organs.” After quoting as well the Navy’s own environmental assessments of the extensive damages that its exercises would cause, Ginsburg went on to conclude: “In my view, this likely harm . . . cannot be lightly dismissed, even in the face of an alleged risk to the effectiveness of the Navy’s 14 training exercises.” Since the Supreme Court’s ruling, meanwhile, the Navy has made an agreement with the N.R.D.C. to do more extensive environmental-impact studies and advanced scouting to avoid, whenever possible, conducting exercises in close proximity to whales.

In the end, the Supreme Court dispute over the use of sonar can be viewed as a turning point in our fraught relationship with whales — a moment when new insights into the behavior of our long-inscrutable, seabound mammalian counterparts began forcing us to reconsider and renegotiate what once seemed to be a distinct boundary between our world and theirs. Scientists have now documented behaviors like tool use and cooperative hunting strategies among whales. Orcas, or killer whales, have been found to mourn their own dead. Just three years ago, researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York discovered, in the brains of a number of whale species, highly specialized neurons that are linked to, among other things, the use of language and were once thought to be the exclusive property of humans and a few other primates. Indeed, marine biologists are now revealing not only the dizzying variety of vocalizations among a number of whale species but also complex societal structures and cultures.

Whales, we now know, teach and learn. They scheme. They cooperate, and they grieve. They recognize themselves and their friends. They know and fight back against their enemies. And perhaps most stunningly, given all of our transgressions against them, they may even, in certain circumstances, have learned to trust us again.

Whale! Two o’clock!” our boatman and guide, Ranulfo Mayoral, shouted one morning in March, steering toward a distant spout of vapor above the clear blue waters of western Baja’s Laguna San Ignacio, where I’d gone in hopes of experiencing firsthand this ever-evolving relationship between humans and whales. We had been out in Mayoral’s 18-foot fishing skiff, or panga, the Dolphin II, for less than 20 minutes — myself, a marine mammal behavioralist named Toni Frohoff and a group of three other whale watchers — and already we had a number of gray whales in our sights, yet another exhalation appearing now along the Pacific’s horizon, followed, in turn, by the balletic, sun-glistened flourish of a suddenly upraised tail, or fluke.

They largely elude us, whales, thus their deep allure. The earth’s most massive creatures, they nevertheless spend the bulk of their lives off in their own element, beyond our ken, about as close as fellow mammals can get to being extraterrestrials. Other than the occasional disoriented stray or the victims of strandings, whales typically visit us only fleetingly, to grab a passing breath of air or, rarer still, when they’re breaching: spectacular, body-long heaves, the impetus for which still baffles scientists, who have attributed them to everything from sheer exuberance to attempts to shake off body lice. And yet for all of their inherent elusiveness, the gray whales of Baja baffle scientists for the opposite reason: They can’t seem to get enough of us humans.

When I first contacted Frohoff, a specialist in whale well-being and stress, back in January in Seattle, where she lived at the time, she mentioned that she would soon be heading down to Baja as part of her ongoing research into “the human-whale interactions there.” Each winter and early spring, gray whales, members of the baleen family (named for the keratin mouth plates through which they filter their food) arrive by the thousands to the warm, placid lagoons off Baja’s western coast, where the mothers give birth and nurse their calves for two to four months before beginning the migration northward to their feeding grounds in the subpolar waters of the Bering and Chukchi Seas. Typically such child-rearing is a time of intense seclusion and protectiveness among mammalian species, but many of the grays of Baja, Frohoff told me, treat their days of birthing and nursing there as a kind of protracted coming-out party. “It’s extraordinary,” she said. “At precisely the time when you’d expect them to be the most defensive, they’re incredibly social. They’ll come right up to boats, let people touch their faces, give them massages, rub their mouths and tongues.”

The very notion of sociable, extroverted whales seemed to me at the time an oxymoron. And yet even as Mayoral, our guide, was speeding toward the blow we just sighted that morning, we were being treated to a spectacular breaching display: four consecutive, time-delayed flights of a mother gray’s 40-foot-long, 30-ton bulk; a performance so exhilarating I couldn’t believe that Mayoral was suddenly slowing his panga to a sputtering idle. Until, that is, he happened to mention that the very whale we were pursuing was now in fast pursuit of us.

“She’s coming straight this way,” Frohoff shouted as she reached for the sound-recording device she has fondly dubbed Fluffy — a two-foot-long, cylindrical microphone sheathed in a filtering fleece of shaggy fur — and held it off the bow toward a darkening wave of advancing whale.

Among the most ancient of all the whales, grays are also by far the homeliest, their gunmetal bulks encrusted with barnacles and lice and the crisscrossed scars of everything from orca attacks to the blades of boat propellers. Indeed, the mother gray fast approaching us just then looked like one of those sunken Civil War-era submarines and appeared to be just as inert, until she suddenly surfaced right alongside us with a huge, plosive whoosh of air from her blowhole before submerging once more.

Eighteen feet of boat on open seas is in almost any circumstance a tenuous alignment. But to suddenly find yourself in that same small vessel above a fleet, 40-foot-long midsea mastodon — one whose fluke alone could, with a cursory flip, send you and your boat soaring skyward — is to know the pure, wonderfully edgeless fear of complete acquiescence. I watched, wide-eyed, the soundless slide of that “moving land,” as Milton once described whales, everywhere beneath our boat, and suddenly felt the whole of myself wanting to go away with her; to hop on for a long ride downward toward some dimly remembered, primordial home.

And then, within moments, the mother was surfacing again off to our stern and doubling back in our direction, but this time with her newborn male in tow: a miniature version of herself — if two tons of anything can be referred to as miniature — the calf’s skin still shiny and smooth. The baby gray glided up to the boat’s edge, and then the whole of his long, hornbill-shaped head was rising up out of the water directly beside me, a huge, ovoid eye slowly opening to take me in. I’d never felt so beheld in my life.

A FELLOW MAMMAL breaking the boundary of its domain for a long look at you is beguiling in and of itself. Such behavior becomes downright otherworldly, however, when you consider the not-so-distant history of human-whale interactions in the birthing lagoons of Baja. Much like their extinct Atlantic counterparts or the extremely endangered 100 or so western Pacific gray whales that still yearly ply the coastal waters between South Korea and Siberia, eastern Pacific grays were nearly hunted out of existence as recently as 75 years ago. The waters of Laguna San Ignacio once ran red with whale blood each winter and spring, orphaned calves circling whalers’ vessels for days afterward before dying themselves of starvation.

Gray whales, thought by some scientists to live as long as 100 years, were once commonly referred to as “hardheaded devil fish” because of the ferocity with which they would defend themselves and their young, smashing whaling vessels and killing their occupants. A gray-whale hunting ban agreed upon by most of the world’s whaling nations in 1937, along with the inherent resilience and adaptability of the eastern Pacific gray, has since allowed the species a rather remarkable rebound. Its current population is estimated to be in the range of 18,000, and in 1994 the gray became the first marine mammal to be removed from protection under the federal Endangered Species Act. Still, the question of why present-day gray-whale mothers, some of whom still bear harpoon scars, would take to seeking us out and gently shepherding their young into our arms is a mystery that now captivates whale researchers and watchers alike.

Some marine biologists have dismissed the phenomenon as little more than a reflexive behavior, suggesting that the whales are merely attracted to the sound of the boats’ motors or that they are looking to scratch their lice-ridden and barnacled backs against the boats’ hulls. Still, a combination of anecdotal evidence and recent scientific research into whale biology and behavior suggests that there may something far more compelling going on in the lagoons of Baja each winter and spring. Something, let’s say, along the lines of that time-worn plot conceit behind many a film, in which the peaceable greetings of alien visitors are tragically rebuffed by human fear and ignorance. Except that in this particular rendition, the aliens keep coming back, trying, perhaps, to give us another chance. To let us, of all species, off the hook.

The story is by now legend in the small fishing villages of Baja and beyond: how on a February morning in 1972, Francisco Mayoral — who is known as Pachico and happens to be the father of Ranulfo, the guide on my trip with Frohoff — was out in his panga with his partner, Santo Luis Perez, fishing for sea bass when a female gray whale approached their boat. Pachico tried to maneuver away. The whale, however, kept rising up beside them. At one point, she positioned herself directly under the panga. Pachico, Ranulfo told me one night over dinner at our beachside base camp, had no choice but to hold his place and wait for what would come next. “All he knew,” Ranulfo recalled of his father, “was that this animal was the boss.”

Human-whale relations at that time in Laguna San Ignacio were testy at best. Stories circulated about female grays smashing boats and overturning kayaks, and local fishermen and visitors alike were still making a point of steering clear of the devil fish, ever mindful of its fearsome reputation and of the turbulent history of human-whale interactions in San Ignacio and the other birthing lagoons of Baja — Bahía Magdalena to the south, Guerrero Negro and Ojo de Liebre to the north.

Ojo de Liebre was once known as Scammon’s Lagoon, after Charles M. Scammon, the 19th-century whaling captain who first discovered Baja’s birthing lagoons. A pioneer of modern commercial whaling and the newly emerging field of cetology, Scammon used new shoulder-launched harpoon guns that allowed him to take not only mother grays and their calves but migrating bulls, too, all along the gray’s coastal migratory route, thus setting the stage for the near extinction of the very species that Scammon himself exhaustively studied and detailed in “The Marine Mammals of the Northwestern Coast of North America, Together With an Account of the American Whale-Fishery,” published in 1874, 23 years after “Moby Dick” and, like it, still considered one of the best books ever written about whales and whaling.

Human-whale relations have long been defined by this stark dualism: manic swings between mythologizing and massacre; between sublime awe and assiduous annihilation, the testimonies of their slayers often permeated with a deep sense of both remorse and respect for the victims. In our earliest cosmologies, the whale loomed so large as to be more or less commensurate with the cosmos, equally vast and unknowable, as hugely fearsome and immeasurable as any god. The very earth was said to be borne upon the back of a whale, one whose writhings caused earthquakes and floods. In “A Thousand and One Nights,” Sinbad and his crew come at one point upon a pristine island. They set up camp there and light fires to cook their food, only to find themselves suddenly being tossed off and dashed at sea by the violent trembling of the whale they had mistaken for land. Similar tales of mistaken “whale-lands” recur throughout early literature.

IN A SENSE, the urge to kill the whale was originally rooted as much in a need to conquer and contain the unknown as it was in a need to gather the bounty of its actual flesh and bone. As far back as the first century B.C., a whale skeleton was transported from Palestine to Rome merely for the public to marvel at. This same impulse would persist through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when ours had become a world lighted, greased and corseted by whale oil and bone. Joe Roman, a biologist at the University of Vermont, recounts in his book “Whale” that in cities and towns across Europe and the United States, the chemically preserved carcasses of beached whales became wildly popular traveling exhibitions. One blue whale that stranded off the coast of Sweden in the 1860s was converted into a kind of traveling cetological cafe that for years made the rounds of Europe’s major cities. People would stroll in through the whale’s opened mouth and have tea inside its belly before re-emerging, Jonah-like, back into the light of day.

By the middle of the 20th century, worldwide stocks of nearly all the earth’s whale species had been so depleted that the newly formed International Whaling Commission began placing limits and wholesale bans on commercial whaling in the futile hope of saving an industry fast running out of its only resource. Earth’s oil, meanwhile, had by then more or less obviated our need for the whale’s, which, because of its inherent resistance to extreme cold, is used now only in the most specialized machinery of, appropriately enough, sea and space exploration: deep-diving subs, Mars and lunar rovers and the Hubble Space Telescope. In the end, our conquest of whales has mirrored that of the very earth we once thought whales symbolized, just as our current regard for both entities now stems, in large part, from an increasing awareness of their finitude and frailty.

Of course, as the mother gray kept circling his boat on that February morning in 1972, the question of whether the grays of Baja had somehow heard the news of our gradual transition from murdering whales to marveling at them was very much on the mind of Pachico Mayoral. “At one point she went directly under and lifted the boat out of the water,” Ranulfo, the son, told me. Pachico and his partner were poised there helplessly, like Sinbad and countless other travelers along the “whale road,” as early Icelanders once referred to the sea.

And then their boat soon settled again, and the mother gray came back around once more, her head popping up out of the water now directly beside Pachico. She remained there for so long, just eyeing him, that Pachico finally reached across and touched her with a finger. And then with his whole hand, the whale holding still there before him, as if basking in the feel of a grasp without malice. “Before then, everyone went out of our way to avoid the whales,” Ranulfo told me. “And then all of that suddenly changed.”

It wasn’t until I got back to our base camp on the day of my first close whale encounter that I could begin to parse what happened in a calm and coherent fashion: the seemingly undeniable fact, for example, that the mother whale’s first pass that morning was a reconnaissance mission to check out our boat, and us, before offering up her calf for review: his of us and ours of him.

I read before my journey to Baja of what happens to people when they come in contact with a whale, how they tend to go, literally and figuratively, a bit overboard: nearly tipping over boats for a passing touch; spontaneously breaking into song; crying out in ecstasy; or just flat-out crying. Frohoff herself warned me as we were first boarding Dolphin II that morning that she was given to doffing her scientist hat in the presence of a whale, and sure enough, there was Fluffy, her microphone, set down for a moment beneath her seat, Frohoff dangling far out over the boat’s prow, arms outstretched, cooing and trilling at the approaching mother and calf. Another watcher in our boat began singing Broadway show tunes. I joined in.

A behavioral and wildlife biologist, Frohoff is something of a pioneer in the field of human-cetacean interactions, having begun her career in the early 1980s studying the to and fro between dolphins and people — both in captivity, with the then-emerging swim-with-dolphins therapy programs, and in the wild. She currently serves as the research director of TerraMar Research, dedicated to the protection of marine mammals and their ecosystems, and is a founder of its educational offshoot, the Trans-Species Institute. She began observing the extraordinary goings-on with the so-called Friendlies of Baja in the late 1990s.

“Studying human-gray whale interactions was a natural progression for me and my work,” Frohoff told me as we sat up talking one night in base camp, the usually persistent desert winds so still at that moment that we could hear, out in the lagoon, the ethereal sound of whales breathing. “And yet even as somebody who has specialized in human-dolphin interactions, I was not prepared for the profound nature of what’s going on down here. These encounters are highly unique and rare. And there’s another word for it: it’s an enigma. Intellectually, it is an enigma as to why gray whales do this, because there’s a continuity and predictability to these interactions. What we have here are highly sophisticated minds in very unique bodies, living in such a different environment, and yet these whales are approaching us with some frequency for what appears to be sociable tactile contact. And with no food involved.”

The very coastal existence that has long afforded grays the protective lagoons for giving birth and nursing and the coastline kelp beds in which to feed and shield their young from the assaults of orcas on the journey north, has also, with the rise of human civilization, increasingly exposed them to a gantlet of human-made perils: ship and small-boat traffic as well as various chemical contaminants and forms of noise pollution, including military sonar.

Despite a mysterious die-off between 1998 and 2000, during which several thousand whales perished, the eastern Pacific gray has thus far proved to be one of the few whale-conservation success stories. Hunted to near extinction by whalers in the 1850s and again in the early 1900s with the introduction of so-called floating factories — modern whaling vessels that allowed for the immediate on-board flensing and refinement of the carcass — the gray-whale population was reduced, according to some estimates, to fewer than 1,000 animals, a small fraction of their current estimated population of 18,000. Nearly all other whale species, by contrast, have been far slower to rebound, with some scientists estimating that none have reached even half of their former numbers.

Indeed, grays have exhibited a degree of resiliency and adaptability that suggests, among other things, that their sociability in Baja is far more than a reflexive, moth-to-flame-like behavior. Elizabeth Alter, a marine biologist at the N.R.D.C., has done research, for example, that indicates that grays have what she describes as “a great degree of behavioral flexibility.” With time and shifting circumstances, they have switched from exclusive bottom-feeding to occasionally foraging higher up in the water column, and they have been able to seek out a variety of different feeding grounds depending on the conditions and obstacles with which they are confronted. A good percentage of the gray-whale population, Alter also says, may have avoided the Baja lagoons during the peak hunting years and found other areas to calve and nurse.

“Some naysayers,” Toni Frohoff told me, “might claim that these whales don’t have the intelligence to know the difference between the present peaceful climate in the lagoon and what transpired in the past, that they’re not smart enough to remember that humans can inflict pain and cause death. However, historical evidence, as well as the limited data we do have on these whales, compels us to think otherwise. I mean, there are numerous stories of how they avoid certain areas and learn to stay away from particular trouble spots, as well as the simple fact that they have to be intelligent and have good memories to survive the way they have, especially navigating along their migratory route, which involves not only memory but making quick assessments and decisions that go beyond just instinctual behaviors. So for me the most plausible explanation, without having any data indicating otherwise, is that they’ve now come to consider us as safe in these areas.”

TO DATE, NO neurological studies of the gray-whale brain have been done. In 2006, however, researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine analyzed the brains of two other baleen species — humpback and finback whales — as well as those of a number of toothed whales like dolphins and killer and sperm whales. The study revealed brain structures surprisingly similar to our own. Some, in fact, contained large concentrations of spindle cells — often referred to as the cells that make us human because of their link to higher cognitive functions like self-awareness, a sense of compassion and linguistic expression — with the added kick that whales evolved these same highly specialized neurons as many as 15 million years before we humans did, a stunning instance of a phenomenon biologists refer to as parallel evolution.

“In spite of the relative scarcity of information on many cetacean species,” the Mount Sinai scientists concluded in a report in the November 2006 edition of the journal The Anatomical Record, “it is important to note in this context that sperm whales, killer whales and certainly humpback whales exhibit complex social patterns that include intricate communication skills, coalition formation, cooperation, cultural transmission and tool usage.” They added that it is therefore “likely that some of these abilities” are related to the comparable complexity in the brain structures of whales and hominids.

The sperm whale, for example, which has the largest brain on earth, weighing as much as 19 pounds, has been found to live in large, elaborately structured societal groups, or clans, that typically number in the tens of thousands and wander over many thousands of miles of ocean. The whales of a clan are not all related, but within each clan there are smaller, close-knit, matriarchal family units. Young whales are raised within an extended, multitiered network of doting female caregivers, including the mother, aunts and grandmothers, who help in the nurturing of babies and, researchers suspect, in teaching them patterns of movement, hunting techniques and communication skills. “It’s like they’re living in these massive, multicultural, undersea societies,” says Hal Whitehead, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and the world’s foremost expert on the sperm whale. “It’s sort of strange. Really the closest analogy we have for it would be ourselves.”

Whitehead has even discovered distinct clan dialects using different codas, what he describes as a “Morse code-like pattern of clicks” that the whales make with their long head cavities and use to communicate with one another over many miles, reinforcing social bonds and declaring clan affiliation. Whitehead, who has been tracking and recording sperm whales around the globe since the early 1980s, has positively identified five distinct clan dialects and studied two extensively. “The regular clan,” he told me in a phone conversation from his lab in Nova Scotia, “makes three to eight equally spaced clicks. And then there are the Plus-One clans. They have two to eight clicks and then a pause and an added click at the end, kind of like the Canadian ‘eh.’ We’ve also noticed that these clans ply the water differently. Regular groups move in wiggly tracks closer to shore, while the Plus-Ones swim further from shore in straight lines.”

Whales display an incredible degree of coordination and cooperation in their efforts. Aaron Thode, an associate research scientist from the Scripps Institution, who was in Baja doing acoustical studies of grays, told me of another project he is involved in, using the latest research tools to gain insights into how whales perceive the world. He showed me an extraordinary video of sperm whales pilfering catch from fishermen’s lines in Alaska, 50-foot-long, massive-jawed behemoths delicately snatching a single black cod from a longline’s dangling hook, like an hors d’oeuvre from a cocktail toothpick. Fishermen are currently losing 5 to 10 percent of their yearly haul and fear the problem could become worse because whales who have mastered the technique are busily teaching it to others. The news seems to be rapidly spreading, as reports of similar fish-snatching are coming in from fishermen all over the world.

Humpback whales, meanwhile, have devised a prime example of what Fred Sharpe, executive director of the Alaska Whale Foundation, has described as “communal tool use.” Based on 20 years of observing humpbacks at sea and simulating their behaviors in the laboratory, Sharpe has been able to piece together the humpback’s rather ingenious fishing strategy. A group of humpbacks will get together and begin herding prey — herring, for example — toward the sea surface through the use of coordinated hunting calls. A designated leader of the group, meanwhile, will dive beneath the herded fish and emit from its blowhole an intense stream of rising bubbles, essentially forming a tube-shaped net to hold the fish in place. Waiting for the precise moment when the net has fully formed and captured the optimum number of fish, the group then rises as one, mouths agape, toward the surface.

Somehow the more we learn about whales, the more we’re coming to appreciate the sublimely discomfiting reality that a kind of parallel “us” has long been out there roaming the oceans' depths, succumbing to our assaults. Indeed, when that baby gray calf bobbed up out of the sea and held there that first morning, staring at me with his huge, slow-blinking eye, it felt to me as if he were taking one impossibly long and quizzical look in the mirror.

I asked Frohoff at one point if, given both the dark past of human-whale interactions in those lagoons and what we’ve now come to know about whale intelligence, there could possibly be some element of knowing forgiveness behind their actions. She took a deep breath and widened her eyes, making it clear that she wanted to be very careful about how she answered such a question.

“Those are the kinds of things that for the longest time a scientist wouldn’t dare consider,” she said. “But thank goodness we’ve gone through a kind of cognitive revolution when it comes to studying the intelligence and emotion of other species. In fact, I’d say now that it is my obligation as a scientist not to discount that possibility. We do have compelling evidence of the experience of grief in cetaceans; and of joy, anger, frustration and distress and self-awareness and tool use; and of protecting not just their young but also their companions from humans and other predators. So these are reasons why something like forgiveness is a possibility. And even if it’s not that exactly, I believe it’s something. That there’s something very potent occurring here from a behavioral and a biological perspective. I mean, I’d put my career on the line and challenge anybody to say that these whales are not actively soliciting and engaging in a form of communication with humans, both through eye contact and tactile interaction and perhaps acoustically in ways that we have not yet determined. I find the reality of it far more enthralling than all our past whale mythology.”

ON MY FOURTH and final day in Baja, I set out once more with Frohoff in Ranulfo Mayoral’s panga. We were well into Hour 2 of our watch that last day when a mother gray suddenly emerged from San Ignacio’s riled-up waters a short distance off our bow. Having trained my eye somewhat over the previous days, I knew straight off that this was the same mother from my first day’s encounter because of the telltale markings of her barnacles and orange sea lice, some 400 pounds of which gray whales typically bear upon their bodies all of their adult lives.

The mother gray let out a great exhale before sliding under again, only to re-emerge a moment later, this time with her male calf, who began treating us to such a rollicking display of playful turns and flips we soon dubbed him Little Nut. For the next 30 minutes or so, despite the choppy seas, mother and son repeatedly wove us and our boat into their designs, and then all at once Little Nut popped up directly alongside the boat again and held there. I reached over and touched him on the head, the smooth, shiny, melon-cask of him, dimpled everywhere with stubbles of hair.

Then, as spontaneously as the interaction had been initiated, it was deemed, by the mother at least, over; time to move on to other things. Not, however, before she abruptly decided to admit us into that exclusive club of unwitting whale riders, the many Sinbads and other, real-life seafarers of this world.

“She’s coming under the boat,” Mayoral shouted, cutting the engine, and there we suddenly were, borne up on a swelling promontory of whale back, giddily airborne and helpless.

When Little Nut next emerged, the mother let us gently back down. She then thrust the whole of herself between her calf and our boat, and began to shepherd him away. For another 10 minutes or so, the two swam along about 50 yards off and parallel to us, the mother at one point going into a spectacular series of breaches, as if in both great relief and playful salutation, she and Little Nut fully off in their own element now, heading west toward the lagoon’s mouth and the open Pacific. “They’ll behave totally differently when they do decide to leave,” Mayoral said. “It’s all business out there. They know they’re going to be attacked and that they need food. There’s no time to be friendly.”

AMONG THE MANY obstacles migrating grays face in the course of their travels, boat traffic has become such a problem that a number of whale researchers are now proposing to establish an official boat-free zone or “whale’s lane,” as they call it. From the Icelanders’ “whale’s road” to the “whale’s lane” — a transition that, in many ways, encapsulates the entire arc of our history with whales: from mythologizing to massacre to marveling at and making way for them anew.

At the American Cetacean Society’s biennial conference in Monterey, Calif., last November, a mixed bag of gray-whale experts, marine biologists, marine paleontologists, geologists and oceanographic researchers participated in a workshop on “Gray Whales and Climate Change.” They proposed that the resiliency and adaptability of gray whales in response to the shifts in their environment made them what’s known as an indicator species, one whose health and long-term survival prospects are a good reflection of the state of the overall environment in which they live. “We refer to them now as ‘sentinels of the seas,’ ” says Steven Swartz, a government marine biologist in Silver Spring, Md., and one of the world’s foremost experts on gray whales. “Typically, an indicator species is among the smaller creatures in the environment, micro-organisms. But here we have the largest taking on that role. So it is very unique. Gray whales are delaying their southbound migration and spending less time in the breeding lagoons. They’re expanding their feeding grounds all along their migration route and in the north, and some are even staying in Arctic water over the winter, all of which reflect climate change and changes in the whole ecosystem.”

Scientists and devout whale watchers alike now keep constant vigil over the movements of gray whales up and down the West Coast, conducting a census of their numbers, watching out for the injured and stranded. By far the best-known stranding incident occurred in January 1997. A 7-day-old, 14-foot-long baby gray whale was found on the beaches of Marina del Rey, Calif., her skull and ribs evident from extreme malnourishment. An army of local volunteers tried to push her back out to sea to rejoin the southerly migration of her fellow grays, but by morning she was found in a nearby channel, listless, near death.

J. J., as the stranded baby was named, was loaded onto a flatbed truck and driven 150 miles south to SeaWorld in San Diego. The plan was to try to nurture J. J. back to health and release her back into the wild, something that had been done only once before with a captive gray whale, GiGi (for Gray Girl) at the same SeaWorld park. Kept in a 40-by-40-foot tank and tube-fed fluids, glucose and antibiotics, J. J. began to rebound. Soon shifting to a formula that included cream, puréed fish and vitamins, intended to approximate a mother’s milk, and then to a daily intake of up to 500 pounds of everything from krill to squid to sardines, J. J. by her 14th month had grown to be 30 feet long and 18,000 pounds, the largest marine mammal ever in captivity.

Her tenure at SeaWorld proved to be an invaluable learning experience for whale scientists. J. J. would lead researchers to, among other things, a key insight into the gray whale’s navigational skills. During the first spring of her stay at SeaWorld, J. J. was always found floating off to one side of her pool, and caretakers feared that she was perhaps suffering from boredom and depression. It soon dawned on them, however, that she was facing north, the direction of the gray’s spring migration. Subsequent necropsies on gray-whale brains revealed that they contain tiny particles of magnetic iron oxide, inner navigational ball bearings of a sort that whir in concert with the earth’s magnetic fields, guiding the whales toward their Arctic feeding grounds and, in the early winter, back down to Baja’s birthing lagoons. (Russian scientists, meanwhile, conducted sleep studies on J. J. and found the first definitive evidence that whales do, in fact, dream.)

By March 31, 1998, J. J.’s scheduled release date, millions around the world were following the story, hoping for the successful release of the largest animal ever to be returned back into the wild. The freeways were closed for J. J.’s transport to the release spot off San Diego’s Point Loma, where a construction crane lifted the 31-foot-long, 19,200-pound whale onto the Coast Guard vessel Conifer. Coast Guard helicopters, meanwhile, were out off Point Loma, scanning the seas for any pods of northward migrating grays that J. J. might join up with. Researchers also outfitted J. J. with radio transmitters in hopes of tracking, for the first time, a complete whale migration. The public would be able to log on to the SeaWorld Web site and track J. J.’s daily progress.

As her huge body was being hoisted with winches and harnesses off of the Conifer’s deck and then swung out and gently set down into the Pacific, the first question on everyone’s mind was would J. J. even know which way to swim. She immediately dove out of sight. Two days later, radio contact was lost, the transmitters having likely been scraped off against the ocean’s bottom.

The last confirmed sighting of J. J. had her not far from the U.S.-Mexico border. She was said to be near a group of migrating grays and heading north. Having been set free without any of the barnacled baggage and telltale scarring of a wild whale’s travels, J. J. cannot be positively identified. There is no way to confirm, for example, the hopeful rumor that I would hear often during my days in Baja: that J. J. is now among the Friendlies who return each winter to the waters of Laguna San Ignacio.

BACK AT OUR BASE camp that last night, still worked up from the day’s earlier turn with Little Nut and his mother, I sat up late talking with Mayoral and a number of the other boat guides, or pangeros. We talked that night mostly about the Friendlies and what might be behind their overtures toward us humans.

A distinctive aspect of the new cognitive revolution that Toni Frohoff spoke to me about is that scientific facts, of all things, are now freeing scientists like herself to be more expansive storytellers. The accusation of anthropomorphism — of projecting our thoughts and feelings on other animals; of trying to guess at what a whale’s day might be like, or a chimp’s or an elephant’s — has been obviated by the increasing evidence that such creatures have parallel days of their own, ones as distinctly intricate and woundable and, ultimately, unknowable as ours. “I don’t anthropomorphize,” Frohoff told me. “I leave it to other people to do that. What I do is study gray whales using the same rigorous methodologies that have long been used to study the behaviors of other species and interspecies interaction. Those who would reject out of hand the idea that whales are intelligent enough to consciously interact with us haven’t spent enough time around whales.”

The pangeros, for their part, have seen enough remarkable whale behavior to know better than to prejudge any explanation, however mind-bending, for what is going on in the lagoons of Baja. A 25-year-old named Alberto Haro Romero, known as Beto, told me of something he saw a month earlier while kayaking off Cabo San Lucas. A group of southward-migrating gray whales were suddenly surrounded and attacked by a pod of pilot whales. Out of nowhere, a group of humpbacks — who, like grays, are baleen whales — appeared and began going at the pilot whales, a highly coordinated counterattack. “It was unbelievable,” Beto said. “One baleen whale coming in on the behalf of another. It was, like, tribal.”

As Beto spoke, I thought of another bit of interspecies cooperation involving humpbacks that I recently read about. A female humpback was spotted in December 2005 east of the Farallon Islands, just off the coast of San Francisco. She was entangled in a web of crab-trap lines, hundreds of yards of nylon rope that had become wrapped around her mouth, torso and tail, the weight of the traps causing her to struggle to stay afloat. A rescue team arrived within a few hours and decided that the only way to save her was to dive in and cut her loose.

For an hour they cut at the lines and rope with curved knives, all the while trying to steer clear of a tail they knew could kill them with one swipe. When the whale was finally freed, the divers said, she swam around them for a time in what appeared to be joyous circles. She then came back and visited with each one of them, nudging them all gently, as if in thanks. The divers said it was the most beautiful experience they ever had. As for the diver who cut free the rope that was entangled in the whale’s mouth, her huge eye was following him the entire time, and he said that he will never be the same.

Got me a problem of sorts, to think over for a while.

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:03:59 GMT

Ana went to this program today. 45 minutes of trampoline and 45 minutes of rock climbing. AWESOME! She loved it, big grin on her face the WHOLE time.

Didn't nab a single picture, I'm sorry to say, but that's okay, I plan to go back.

Here's the thing. The group of 14 kids was divided approximately by age. Ana, of course, was in the younger group.

The older group did rock climbing first. I noticed as they did it that all the kids were up on the rock at once, on the part of the rock face that juts out a little and is somewhat more challenging.

When it was Ana's group's turn for the rock, because they were younger, they went in what I could see is the "easy" spot - straight up and down. Unfortunately, that spot (the corner) was small enough that only one kid could go up at a time (this after 15 minutes talking about safety, which was necessary, no argument). So Ana didn't get much climbing in... and as it was, she was getting up there (15 feet!) pretty fast. It wasn't difficult for her at all. (It never is, no type of climbing.)

I totally intend to go again (and get some pictures next time)! She had so much fun! But if they divide roughly by age again, I want her in the group that does more climbing. Watching her and the other kids I think she's ready for it (with the same level of help that the others had, of course), and I know she'd prefer to do more climbing instead of sitting down.

How does one go about requesting this without coming off like one of those people, though? You know, the ones who think their kids are sooooo special rules just don't apply? I don't think there is a hard-and-fast rule here, but I certainly don't want it to seem like I think my niece is just much too advanced, etc. etc. etc.

The synopsis would show that this is probably ANOTHER version of "Little Black Sambo"

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 22:15:50 GMT

But probably without the butter.

BTW, I want some icons. I'm looking at the pictures, and I know what I want.

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 15:18:38 GMT

If I could just get one picture, I'd like it to be this one, but cropped to just show her.

Otherwise, a retrospective of Ana is nice. We could have this one, this one, and this one.

If I could just get one picture, it'd have to be this one or this one. I can't decide!

But I also like an Evangeline retrospective. One of the two pictures I mentioned above and, say this one, and... I guess this one or this one.

If I could only get one, I'd like this one. I know the shot is old, but it just looks vintage, doesn't it?

If I could have more than one, I'd go with that one, maybe this one (poor shot notwithstanding), this one, maybe this one, and this one.

So, yeah. Three icons.

Looking back at all these old pictures is making me realize something. Two things.

A? I need to take more pictures more often.
B? I sure do take a lot of pictures of the girls with various friends sitting on our porch! You'd think we'd keep it a little better looking....

OMG THIS IS AWESOME.

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 12:03:18 GMT

I'm going to email them RIGHT NOW and demand to know why they do not offer these parties for grown-ups!

It can be hard to convince people to leave the Island sometimes (no, seriously), but either Evangeline or Ana has got to have a birthday here soon. I AM SO NOT JOKING. I will sell anything short of my soul and body to get them here.

DOES THAT NOT SOUND AWESOME????

I don't usually have weird dreams like this, but I think I just did.

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:16:01 GMT

I was randomly building a train set in the (cramped, tiny) White House when my mom called me over to sit in the bath with Evangeline. Obama's kids walked in on us and were *totally* unconcerned, but, in the manner of dreams, I started a new one with no transition whatsoever. I found myself in my sister's real life bedroom (possibly still in the White House) holding two bricks which may have come from the wooden train set. Jenn was inching closer to me (somehow, her room - while looking the same as always - was a lot larger than in real life) and trying to get them, but I was sure something was really weird. Just as I smacked myself on the head to think she turned into Voldemort. I was quite obliging and voluntarily (no torture or Imperius or anything) gave up some useful information (no idea what) to her. Then I died.

It was right when I had to talk to an irritable Severus Snape that I remembered I didn't like Harry's death scene in book 7 and had no intention of reliving it (the other day I actually forgot for a minute that that book had come out already. The feeling of anticipation for something good was pure bliss, I tell you) and woke up.

The girls are back from their grandmother's house.

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:01:30 GMT

I swear, Evangeline grew over the past week. I'll measure them Monday to confirm this!

Tomorrow, this is my plan. Doesn't it sound awesome??? Of course, now that I'm at the website I'm browsing through their camps and cursing the fact that I have no cash. I'm sure Ana would like this one, and nothing could be cuter than seeing Evangeline on ice.

This fall, I'm getting a real job. I don't care what sort of job it is (except that it has to be legal and safe), but I'm getting a real job.

I'm also going to see if I can get Ana or Evangeline any sort of scholarships to classes. Just one each for the year would be good, but... Ana especially is so gifted physically, she can't challenge herself much longer. And Evangeline can hold a tune really well, I can teach her the basics of piano but... *shrug*

Maybe some sort of work exchange thing. I don't know. How does one go about this sort of thing anyway?

And some pictures from last summer.

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:54:49 GMT

There's a few more I want 'dul to scan in, I'll ask him specifically later.

Now, these pictures are from disposable cameras that were over a year old and that had spent some time in the sun. (Like, three days in a hot car in California!) The quality of the pictures is therefore not so hot.

However, if you pretend I did this on purpose they're actually kinda cool and a bit artsy. So let's go with that, shall we?

Ana dancing

Ana and Bonne-Maman

Bonne-Maman

Evangeline

Ana at the beach, probably TWO years ago

Me with Evangeline asleep on my back. I have few pictures of her uppy.

Evangeline and Ana in the pool

Evangeline and Ana hugging at the airport. See how much smaller than Ana Evangeline was? She only comes up to her chin, not even! Now she's only a few inches shorter than her sister.

Ana jumping into the pool

Ana staring into the camera. Is she pondering what I'm pondering, I wonder?

Evangeline, looking like she wants to pick her nose.

We have this totally awesome picture of the whole family that Jenn needs to crop so I can post it.

Pictures!

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:05:43 GMT

Ana sitting with the other children

Another shot of Ana. She only smiled if she caught us looking directly at her.

Look, like see here? She looks like a major crankypants!

The classes did some various routines.

And they were very cute

Ana whooshing or blowing a kiss, I don't know, I could barely see anything (which was a plus when it came to hiding my book!)

Ana rising to get her diploma

Ana playing with her diploma

More of that

Ana with her teacher - and a pretty unattractive shot of me too, thanks for telling me, Jenn!

Ana with a very tall friend

Ana with her OTHER classroom teacher

Ana and a friend we've known for a while

Ana and a camera (and a friend)

Evangeline with a dolphin balloon and a big ol' grin

Evangeline just generally being cute

Meghan being sideways. I'm not fixing that, just tilt your heads.

A bagel in the corner of the playground. I imagine that Ana took this picture.

Ana and Meghan goofing off

And still goofing off

Ana, Evangeline, and Ana's best friend from her class this year - who was being a REALLY good sport about taking her zillionth picture of the day before lunch.

Ana climbing the stopsign by her school on the way home. That car belongs to two of her friends, Christian and Kira. Kira thought this was AWESOME, compelling me to shout an apology to her mother as they drove past.

Ana and Evangeline outside. Notice that even though it was the LAST FRIDAY IN JUNE, Evangeline has long sleeves and Ana has long leggings on under her dress. I think it was drizzly, too.

Jossy and Junior came over, and they had lemonade popsicles before heading over to their house for a sleepover.

Now, we have a video of a small part of Ana's graduation, but Jenn needs to upload it to YouTube for me. Because she's the one who has it.

Some articles

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 04:01:00 GMT

One on building structures out of glass.

To truly appreciate how glass can be used structurally, make your way to 233 South Wacker Drive in downtown Chicago. More precisely, make your way 1,353 feet above South Wacker, to the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower.

Once there, take a few steps over to the west wall, where the facade has been cut away. Then take one more step, over the edge.

You’ll find yourself on a floor of glass, suspended over the sidewalk a quarter-mile below. If you can’t bear looking straight down past your feet, shift your gaze out or up — the walls are glass, too, as is the ceiling. You’ve stepped into a transparent box, one of four that jut four and a half feet from the tower, hanging from cantilevered steel beams above your head. The glass walls are connected to the beams, and to the glass floor, with stainless-steel bolts. But what’s really saving you from oblivion is the glass itself.

The boxes, which opened last week as part of an extensive renovation of the tower’s observation deck, are among the most recent, and more outlandish, projects that use glass as load-bearing elements. But all glass structures have at least a bit of daring about them, as if they are giving a defiant answer to the question: You can’t do that with glass, can you?

You can. Engineers, architects and fabricators, aided by materials scientists and software designers, are building soaring facades, arching canopies and delicate cubes, footbridges and staircases, almost entirely of glass. They’re laminating glass with polymers to make beams and other components stronger and safer — each of the Sears Tower sheets is a five-layer sandwich — and analyzing every square inch of a design to make sure the stresses are within precise limits. And they are experimenting with new materials and methods that could someday lead to glass structures that are unmarked by metal or other materials.

“Ultimately what we’re all striving for is an all-glass structure,” said James O’Callaghan of Eckersley O’Callaghan Structural Design, who has designed what are perhaps the world’s best-known glass projects, the staircases that are a prominent feature of some Apple Stores.

Through it all, they’ve realized one thing. “Glass is just another material,” said John Kooymans of the engineering firm Halcrow Yolles, which designed the Sears Tower boxes.

It’s a material that has been around for millennia. Although glass can be made in countless ways to have any number of specific uses — to conduct light as fibers, say, or serve as a backing for electronic circuitry, as in a laptop screen — structural projects almost exclusively use soda-lime glass, made, as it has always been, largely from sodium carbonate, limestone and silica.

“For years, the basic composition of soda-lime glass has not changed much,” said Harrie J. Stevens, director of the Center for Glass Research at Alfred University. It’s the same glass, more or less, that is used for the windows in your home and the jar of jam in your fridge — and that old elixir bottle you bought at an antique store.

It’s basic stuff, but far from simple. “Of course, glass is an unusual material,” said James Carpenter of James Carpenter Design Associates, who has designed glass facades and other structures and was a consultant for the glassmaker Corning in the 1970s. “Since we don’t really know what it is.”

Although there has long been debate as to whether glass is a solid or liquid, it is now usually described as an amorphous solid (there is no evidence that it flows, extremely slowly, over time as a liquid). The noncrystalline structure is achieved by relatively rapid cooling below what is referred to as the glass transition temperature, around 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit for the soda-lime variety.

Cooled further and cut, pristine glass is very strong. But like a new car that plummets in value the moment it is driven off the lot, glass starts to lose its strength the instant it’s made. Tiny cracks begin to form through contact with other surfaces, or even with water vapor and carbon dioxide.

“If you take the freshly made surface and blow on it with your breath, you’ve reduced the strength of glass by a factor of two,” said Suresh Gulati, a mechanical engineer and self-described “strength man” who retired in 2000 after 33 years at Corning but still works for the company as a consultant.

Even one gas molecule can break a silicon-oxygen bond in glass, generating a defect, said Carlo G. Pantano, a professor of materials science at Pennsylvania State University. While glass is very strong in compression, tensile stresses will make these tiny fissures start to grow, bond by bond. “That’s what makes glass break,” Dr. Pantano said. “And if it doesn’t break, it weakens it.”

Protective coatings are one way to avoid new cracks, although they can affect transparency, which is the main reason for using glass in the first place. Changing the glass recipe can also make it harder for cracks to form and propagate. “There is some evidence that you can modify the composition to make it innately stronger,” Dr. Stevens said, although that risks altering other properties or making the glass too costly. (And glass projects are not cheap to start with; the glass in the Sears Tower project cost more than $40,000 per box.)

The manufacturing process can be modified, too, to keep the surfaces of the glass as pristine as possible. In one technique, used for laptop glass, molten glass is pumped into a V-shaped trough, spills over on both sides and flows down the outside of the V, joining together at the bottom into a sheet that continues to move downward as it cools. This way, each side of the sheet is a “melt surface,” exposed only to the air and not touched by any part of the equipment.

For structural purposes, glass is often strengthened the old-fashioned way — by tempering. This puts the surface under compression, so that even more tensile force is needed for cracks to grow.

For flat glass, heat tempering is most often used. William LaCourse, a professor at Alfred, said the process took advantage of one property of glass — that when it cools slowly it becomes denser. By rapidly cooling the exterior of a sheet (usually with air), the surface stays less dense. “Inside it’s still hot, and tries to cool to a more dense structure,” Dr. LaCourse said. “This pulls the surface into compression.”

In chemical tempering, sodium ions in the surface are replaced with potassium ions, which are about 30 percent larger. It’s like taking a suitcase full of summer-weight clothes and replacing the top layer with winter-weight items; the suitcase will bulge at the seams when you try to close it. Glass cannot bulge at the seams, so the surface becomes compressed.

Tempered glass may take longer to crack, but it can still break. Because surface compression must be balanced by interior tension, when tempered glass does break it forms many more smaller pieces than untempered glass, as more fracture lines release more energy. “The more it is strengthened the more pieces it will fly into,” Dr. Gulati said. An extreme example of this is a Prince Rupert’s drop, a small glass ball with a long tail formed by dropping molten glass into water. You can pound on the ball end with a hammer and it will not break, but snip off the tail and the ball will explode into tiny pieces as the tensile forces are released.

In structural applications, breaking into smaller pieces is often preferred, because these have less chance of causing injury. But tempering alone is usually not enough.

A primary concern when building with glass is what happens if and when a component breaks — what engineers call “post-failure behavior.” Unlike steel or other materials, glass does not deform or otherwise give advance warning of failure. If breakage occurs, maintaining the integrity of the structure is paramount so that people on or below it are safe.

That’s where lamination comes in. In a typical project, glass sheets (one-half-inch thick in the Sears Tower project) are bonded with thin polymer interlayers. The interlayers add strength and, should one of the glass layers break, keep the structure together, and the pieces from falling.

But lamination makes fabricating glass for structural uses very difficult. Since cutting into tempered glass causes it to break, each sheet must be polished and drilled for the connecting fittings before it is tempered. Tolerances are extremely small, to avoid potentially destructive stresses in the assembled structure.

“It’s doable,” said Lou Cerny of MTH Industries, who managed the installation at the Sears Tower, where the tolerances were one-sixteenth of an inch. “There’s just not a lot of people who want to get involved in it.”

No wonder, then, that those who build with glass look forward to a day when their structures will be unencumbered by metal or other materials.

“My goal has always been to reduce the amount of fittings in glass,” said Mr. O’Callaghan, whose Apple staircases use stainless steel and, occasionally, titanium to join the glass components.

Already, some engineers are using different glass shapes to reduce the dependence on metal. Rob Nijsse, a professor at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and a structural engineer with the firm ABT Belgium, has used large sheets of corrugated glass, mounted vertically, for window walls in a concert hall in Porto, Portugal, and a museum being built in Antwerp, Belgium. The shape helps stiffen the glass against wind loads.

Other designers think about using different kinds of glass. “There are so many amazing types of glass available,” Mr. Carpenter said. “There’s an enormous potential to transfer some of their characteristics into architectural uses.”

Using a glass that does not expand much when heated, for example, would enable components to be welded together, forming, in effect, a continuous piece of glass. Conventional soda-lime glass expands too much, so welding introduces stresses that can lead to failure.

Researchers at Delft have experimented with welding glass components. But low-expansion glass is much costlier than soda-lime glass.

Other engineers are starting to use adhesives to join glass directly to glass. Lucio Blandini, an engineer with Werner Sobek Engineering and Design in Stuttgart, Germany, used adhesives to create a thin glass dome, 28 feet across, for his doctoral thesis in a clearing in Stuttgart. “I think adhesives are the most promising connection device,” Dr. Blandini said. “It allows glass to keep its aesthetic qualities.” His firm is using adhesives in parts of structures being built at the University of Chicago and in Dubai.

But the long-term strength and reliability of adhesives has not been proved, so most people who work in glass think an all-glued structure is a long way off.

“We have way too many lawyers in this country,” said Mr. Cerny, the installer at the Sears Tower. “It’ll be awhile before we see that.”

On the increase in homeless people that occurs every summer

Summer Brings a Wave of Homeless Families
By JULIE BOSMAN

As the school year sailed to a close last month, Arielle Figueras crossed the stage in her cap and gown and proudly accepted her fifth-grade diploma.

The next day, she was homeless.

Arielle, a petite 11-year-old, and her parents, brother and sister packed their belongings and arrived at the intake center for homeless families in the South Bronx. Though they had been fighting with their landlord for months and their gas and electricity had long been shut off, they refused to leave their apartment while school was in session.

“She was graduating, so we had to wait,” Arielle’s mother, Marilyn Maldonado, said. “We just didn’t want to disrupt their routines. We couldn’t do that to them.”

Many New Yorkers view summer as a time for vacations, camp and lazy days at the beach. But city officials have been preparing for quite a different summer ritual: the swelling of the population of homeless families.

They call it the summer surge, and say that this year could be the worst yet.

Because the homeless population this spring was up more than 20 percent over last spring, possibly because of higher unemployment, officials are girding for an all-time high in the number of families in shelters at once, expecting close to 10,000. Already, the number has reached 9,420.

Other cities are noticing a similar trend. In Toledo, Ohio, one overcrowded shelter has been turning away dozens of people each night. In Charlotte, N.C., a shelter that is typically open only in winter has stayed open for the summer to meet demand, which is 20 percent higher than last summer. Across town, a Salvation Army shelter is so full, it has set up mats on the floors.

The reasons are varied but simple. Landlords who are reluctant to evict during winter are less hesitant when it is warmer. Parents like the Maldonados, who have endured poor housing conditions to spare their children agitation and humiliation at school, finally pack up and leave. And relatives who have taken in families in cramped apartments lose patience when children are suddenly underfoot all day long.

“When school’s open, families tend to stay where they are,” said Deronda Metz, the director of social services for the Salvation Army in Charlotte. “And when school’s out, they’re told it’s time to go.”

In New York, the number of homeless families applying for shelter in the summer has been 28 percent higher than the rest of the year the last three years. Their first stop is the intake center, a 24-hour, sprawling 66,000-square-foot brick building in the Bronx. They must walk through metal detectors, must submit to questioning from social workers and, after hours of waiting for their names to be called, are bused to a temporary hotel room or apartment.

Workers have begun to make room for the hundreds of extra families that are expected at the center this summer. On the second floor, all of the cubicles in one room were dismantled, replaced by rows of plastic chairs to make a waiting room for up to 114 people. Rows of boxy light gray metal lockers — each large enough to hold several suitcases — were installed. Employees at the intake center are being limited to one week of vacation during July and August.

Just a few hours after the public schools let out for summer, families began trickling into the center, their faces tight with stress. One woman walked briskly inside with her young son, who wore a bright blue backpack and held an armful of books. Another woman, who would not give her name, waited outside with her daughter, who had just finished second grade. “My sister said we couldn’t stay with her anymore,” she said, fanning herself for some relief from the humidity. “I said once she’s done with school, we’d get out.”

Arielle’s father, Douglas Maldonado, said that their landlord had stopped making repairs and had altered the building’s electric billing to make the Maldonados pay for other apartments’ power, up to $8,000 a month. But they held onto their apartment just long enough for Arielle’s graduation and for their son, Sabino Figueras, to graduate from eighth grade the week before.

The Bloomberg administration has run into trouble before with its handling of the summer influx of homeless families. In 2002, there was a public relations debacle when officials allowed hundreds of parents and children to wait in the intake office each day, more than three times the number that city fire codes allowed. Other families were placed in an empty men’s jail in the Bronx that was later discovered to have been contaminated with lead paint.

This summer, the administration will use a combination of existing homeless shelters that are not quite full and vacant apartment buildings that have been fixed up for homeless families, said Robert V. Hess, the commissioner of homeless services.

“We have a variety of options, so that we can be as nimble as possible,” Mr. Hess said. “We keep some reserve.”

One essential part of the city’s plan is to place families in hotels temporarily, some of which are used for both homeless people and paying customers.

Mr. Maldonado’s family spent its first few nights in a hotel on 145th Street in the Bronx. One of the mattresses in the room, Mr. Maldonado said, was filthy and stained with urine.

On June 28, Tarshima Dixon, a mother of four, went to the intake center with her 14-year-old son, Jason. Two more sons, Craig Dixon, 13, and Nahjee Johnson, 8, waited outside with their grandmother and cheerfully bounced a basketball on the sidewalk as Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” played from their minivan’s stereo.

The family was evicted in April, and Ms. Dixon’s mother did not have room for all of them. So Ms. Dixon, along with Craig, Nahjee and another son, Gregory, 16, moved into a shelter in Brooklyn soon after. Jason had been living with his father in Camden, N.J., but Ms. Dixon wanted him back with his brothers. They had to come to the intake center to let the city know there would be one more homeless person needing a bed.

“He just finished school this week,” said Ms. Dixon, who added that she was determined that the whole family would move into an apartment by August. “I wasn’t going to bring him here until he was done.”

On energy efficient incandescent bulbs.

Incandescent Bulbs Return to the Cutting Edge
By LEORA BROYDO VESTEL

SANTA ROSA, Calif. — When Congress passed a new energy law two years ago, obituaries were written for the incandescent light bulb. The law set tough efficiency standards, due to take effect in 2012, that no traditional incandescent bulb on the market could meet, and a century-old technology that helped create the modern world seemed to be doomed.

But as it turns out, the obituaries were premature.

Researchers across the country have been racing to breathe new life into Thomas Edison’s light bulb, a pursuit that accelerated with the new legislation. Amid that footrace, one company is already marketing limited quantities of incandescent bulbs that meet the 2012 standard, and researchers are promising a wave of innovative products in the next few years.

Indeed, the incandescent bulb is turning into a case study of the way government mandates can spur innovation.

“There’s a massive misperception that incandescents are going away quickly,” said Chris Calwell, a researcher with Ecos Consulting who studies the bulb market. “There have been more incandescent innovations in the last three years than in the last two decades.”

The first bulbs to emerge from this push, Philips Lighting’s Halogena Energy Savers, are expensive compared with older incandescents. They sell for $5 apiece and more, compared with as little as 25 cents for standard bulbs.

But they are also 30 percent more efficient than older bulbs. Philips says that a 70-watt Halogena Energy Saver gives off the same amount of light as a traditional 100-watt bulb and lasts about three times as long, eventually paying for itself.

The line, for now sold exclusively at Home Depot and on Amazon.com, is not as efficient as compact fluorescent light bulbs, which can use 75 percent less energy than old-style bulbs. But the Energy Saver line is finding favor with consumers who dislike the light from fluorescent bulbs or are bothered by such factors as their slow start-up time and mercury content.

“We’re experiencing double-digit growth and we’re continuing to expand our assortment,” said Jorge Fernandez, the executive who decides what bulbs to stock at Home Depot. “Most of the people that buy that bulb have either bought a C.F.L. and didn’t like it, or have identified an area that C.F.L.’s don’t work in.”

For lighting researchers involved in trying to save the incandescent bulb, the goal is to come up with one that matches the energy savings of fluorescent bulbs while keeping the qualities that many consumers seem to like in incandescents, like the color of the light and the ease of using them with dimmers.

“Due to the 2007 federal energy bill that phases out inefficient incandescent light bulbs beginning in 2012, we are finally seeing a race” to develop more efficient ones, said Noah Horowitz, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Some of the leading work is under way at a company called Deposition Sciences here in Santa Rosa. Its technology is a key component of the new Philips bulb line.

Normally, only a small portion of the energy used by an incandescent bulb is converted into light, while the rest is emitted as heat. Deposition Sciences applies special reflective coatings to gas-filled capsules that surround the bulb’s filament. The coatings act as a sort of heat mirror that bounces heat back to the filament, where it is transformed to light.

While the first commercial product achieves only a 30 percent efficiency gain, the company says it has achieved 50 percent in the laboratory. No lighting manufacturer has agreed yet to bring the latest technology to market, but Deposition Sciences hopes to persuade one.

“We built a better mouse trap,” said Bob Gray, coating program manager at Deposition Sciences. “Now, we’re trying to get people to beat a path to our door.”

With the new efficiency standards, experts predict more companies will develop specialized reflective coatings for incandescents. The big three lighting companies — General Electric, Osram Sylvania and Philips — are all working on the technology, as is Auer Lighting of Germany and Toshiba of Japan.

And a wave of innovation appears to be coming. David Cunningham, an inventor in Los Angeles with a track record of putting lighting innovations on the market, has used more than $5 million of his own money to develop a reflective coating and fixture design that he believes could make incandescents 100 percent more efficient.

“There’s enormous interest,” Mr. Cunningham said. “All the major lighting companies want an exclusive as soon as we demonstrate feasibility.”

Both Mr. Cunningham and Deposition Sciences have been looking into the work of Chunlei Guo, an associate professor of optics at the University of Rochester, who announced in May that he had used lasers to pit the surface of a tungsten filament. “Our measurements show that the treated filament becomes twice as bright with the same power consumption,” Mr. Guo said.

And a physics professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Shawn-Yu Lin, is also seeing improved incandescent performance by using a high-tech, iridium-coated filament that recycles wasted heat. “The technology can get up to six to seven times more efficient,” Mr. Lin said.

Despite a decade of campaigns by the government and utilities to persuade people to switch to energy-saving compact fluorescents, incandescent bulbs still occupy an estimated 90 percent of household sockets in the United States. Aside from the aesthetic and practical objections to fluorescents, old-style incandescents have the advantage of being remarkably cheap.

But the cheapest such bulbs are likely to disappear from store shelves between 2012 and 2014, driven off the market by the government’s new standard. Compact fluorescents, which can cost as little as $1 apiece, may become the bargain option, with consumers having to spend two or three times as much to get the latest energy-efficient incandescents.

A third technology, bulbs using light-emitting diodes, promises remarkable gains in efficiency but is still expensive. Prices can exceed $100 for a single LED bulb, and results from a government testing program indicate such bulbs still have performance problems.

That suggests that LEDs — though widely used in specialized applications like electronic products and, increasingly, street lights — may not displace incumbent technologies in the home any time soon.

Given how costly the new bulbs are, big lighting companies are moving gradually. Osram will introduce a new line of incandescents in September that are 25 percent more efficient. The bulbs will feature a redesigned capsule with higher-quality gas inside and will sell for a starting price of about $3. That is less than the Philips product already on the market, but they will have shorter life spans. G.E. also plans to introduce a line of household incandescents that will comply with the new standards.

Mr. Calwell predicts “a lot more flavors” of incandescent bulbs coming out in the future. “It’s hard to be an industry leader in the crowded C.F.L field,” he said. “But a company could truly differentiate itself with a better incandescent.”

Another article on bees in the city

Buzz kill
Preparing my back-porch beehive is my favorite rite of spring, but this year my flock mysteriously went missing. I'll miss more than just the honey.

By Novella Carpenter

Mar. 13, 2007 |

Bee! I'm expecting you!
Was saying yesterday
To someone you know
That you were due.

The frogs got home last week,
Are settled, and at work;
Birds, mostly back,
The clover warm and thick.

You'll get my letter by
The seventeenth; reply
Or better, be with me,
Yours, Fly.

-- Emily Dickinson

Spring arrived here in Oakland, Calif., and I didn't even notice until the police busted a marijuana-filled warehouse across the street. I was in my garden -- raised vegetable beds in an abandoned lot in the bad part of town -- picking grass and clover for my rabbits, when I heard pounding on the warehouse's metal roll door. Ten black-and-white squad cars screeched up, some emblazoned with the words "Canine Unit." I watched awhile -- the door came up cautiously, the police inched closer -- until, out of the corner of my eye, I was distracted by the most beautiful peach blossoms. Decorating the parking strip between my garden and the just-raided drug warehouse, the blooms were frilly and deep pink, and would have made a good tattoo.

Then I noticed other trees. A weeping Santa Rosa plum, branches like dreadlocks woven with white buds. A three-way grafted apple, each of its girlish pink-and-white blooms promising fruit, a different variety on every branch. Even the eucalyptus across the street, shading the police, was adorned by thousands of filamenty flowers.

All those blooms, but no honeybees.

Like commercial and backyard beekeepers in 22 states around the nation, I recently opened up my beehive for spring inspection, only to discover that my hairy herd had gone missing. For years, the beehive has presided over the deck off my apartment, and the bees bobbed in and out, loaded down with pollen baskets and nectar collected in my garden and in the weedy debris of nearby abandoned lots. But now, nothing.

They left behind no forwarding address nor clues to their whereabouts, and there were no corpses cluttering the hive for my amateur forensic inspection. My flock had simply wandered elsewhere, and likely perished. Bee researchers and and scientists at the Department of Agriculture have christened this unexpected bee holocaust Colony Collapse Disorder and hypothesize that the die-off could be a result of either a fungus, a nicotine-based pesticide, or a virus. (They're working on it.) But in the meantime, CCD could very well spell commercial disaster: for almond farmers whose trees won't be pollinated, for consumers who may face a shortage of apples and peaches and cherries because there are no bees to turn flower into fruit. While my livelihood may not depend on it, as the mistress of one hive on one porch in Oakland, the loss still came with an intense pang of grief, like a death in the family.

When a beekeeper dies, the bees must be informed. I learned this tradition a few years ago, while visiting Slovenia's Apicultural Museum. One of the exhibits was a short film. My mother and I watched as a grandfather trained a lederhosen-wearing boy to be a beekeeper. Shot entirely in golden late afternoon light, it was a bittersweet story, and near the end of the film the grandpa died. A final scene showed the boy hunkered near the hive, his lips moving in a whisper. I knew the boy would have felt the heat of the hive, generated by so many thousands of bees, and that it would have smelled like wax and propolis -- a rich ambrosial aroma. The bees whining through the box would have sounded like a wail. How consoling that act would be in the face of death.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Back then I hadn't yet experienced the loss of a hive -- I was too engrossed in the joyful part. Like installing new packages of bees -- one of life's greatest pleasures. The last one I got, the one that has now died, arrived at the Oakland post office three years ago.

When I pedaled up to retrieve my flock, a few lonely, feral honeybees hovered around the post office. It was April in Northern California, arguably the loveliest month of the year. The postmistress seemed unnerved by their arrival, but admitted she wouldn't mind some honey, if I got the chance. This was Oakland, not Mayberry -- but I nodded and promised anyway. My bike had a basket attached to the front and the humming package fit perfectly inside. As I rode down Telegraph Avenue, I laughed out loud at the bees that trailed us through the traffic and stoplights.

My first colony was a birthday gift, from my beau, Billy, while we were living in Seattle. He loaded me into the car and took me to a small beekeeping shop in the middle of the woods. He promised me a beehive with all the fixings: a smoker, a veil and cap, long, thick gloves, a hive tool, boxes to add as the colony grew, a starter book ("First Lessons in Beekeeping") and a small wire box filled with 3,000 bees and one queen suspended in her own chamber.

I don't have children, but that day I experienced a glimmer of what it must feel like to return from the hospital with a newborn. As we pulled our Dodge Dart away from the forest of Christmas trees, I wondered if I could handle such responsibility. What if I dropped the box? What if they grew up and decided to swarm, or to abandon me? But also, to be honest, I was thinking about getting stung. A lot.

Even if you've been stung before (when I was 12 I stumbled through a yellow-jacket nest and received more than 25 stings), as a beginning beekeeper you worry about your first sting. We're choosing to get stung. It feels a bit transgressive. It certainly seemed so to my next-door neighbor.

"You should move to the country," Trudy said when she saw my buzzing shoe box. She was out on her lawn, trimming the grass with a pair of scissors. Next to her lawn was our raised parking strip garden, a chaotic jumble of tall stalks of fava beans, lettuces and Swiss chard. Most city ordinances allow beekeeping if there is adequate distance from the hive to any neighboring structures. Since we planned to house the hive on our upstairs deck, we were within that legal boundary. And so I marched upstairs to our deck clutching the bee package, hoping I looked like I knew what I was doing.

I put on as much clothing as possible. Triple shirts; a mechanic's jumpsuit; several pairs of socks, hiked up and tucked into my pants; heavy-duty fabric beekeeping gloves (regretting I hadn't bought the more expensive leather ones), and finally, my veil. Swaddled as I was, I could barely put down my arms.

The sun was going down, that lovely April day. I set up the hive to face due east so it would get early morning sun. Installing the bees later in the day avoids confusing them, for they like to spend at least a night in their hive before venturing out. I pried the lid off the bee package and, as instructed, tilted the opening toward the fresh hive body, with its orderly rows of frames just waiting to be filled with honey.

The bees fell out like a liquid, spilling into the box without incident. The bearish man who'd sold them to me had demonstrated how to tap the box out -- like a ketchup bottle -- which I did to get the last of the stragglers. Because of my fear and the sheer volume of my clothing, I had a slick of sweat dripping down my back. But my terror was unfounded: The bees were entirely docile.

Finally, out of the then mostly empty box, I fished out the queen chamber. A few bees, her attendants, clung to the sides. At the bottom was a stopper plug made of candy. The idea is that the workers will eventually chew through the sugary plug and release the queen. But I wanted to see her. So, against proper bee protocol, I popped the candy inward with the end of my hive tool -- and out she emerged. Her ass was enormous; she looked like some kind of exotic beetle. I held her on the top of the new hive, and she strutted across. Was it just me, or did she actually have the gallant air of royalty? Then she was gone, down into her chambers where she would lay all the eggs to keep the hive going.

Most of us carry around a pack of defining moments. Beginning that colony on a gentle spring day is one of my fondest. I received one sting: on my wedding finger.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Six years later, I've made room for a honey extractor in our living room. And each year during prime honey-extracting season -- late summer -- I invite friends over for a sticky party. In preparation, the night before we place a "bee escape" under the super, the box where the honey is stored. The escape allows the bees trapped in the box to flee through narrow tunnels, but prevents them from returning to the box once they've left.

After 12 hours, the entire box of honey is bee-free, and we take it to the kitchen. The super looks like a bottomless dresser drawer, except inside, instead of socks, 10 frames are crammed side by side, lined up like library books. Inside each one, a Bible-size chunk of sealed honeycomb hangs suspended in the rectangular frame. We spin the extractor and centrifugal force splatters the honey on the stainless steel sides, where it drips down and collects at the bottom. Most "real" beekeepers use an extractor with a motor, heaters and filters. But our guests simply steady the hand-spun extractor (which has a tendency to keel over), and crank it as hard as they can. Then they open the valve at the bottom and let the honey dribble out into quart-size Mason jars.

At these gatherings, everyone gets covered in honey, and we eat as much in one sitting as we can bear. The harvest is different every year, and the flavor of the honey can even vary from frame to frame. If a frame appears darker in color, we'll spin and bottle it separately. One year the honey tasted like licorice -- was it from the wild fennel filling so many abandoned lots? Another frame held eucalyptus honey, which had a medicinal taste to it. A different time, the honey was so sweet, it hurt. But no matter how it tastes, the experience always makes everyone involved feel richer for it -- charmed, elated, sated.

Afterward, when I return the honey super to the hive, the bees are always more apt to sting, and they seem, well, upset. That's why beekeepers call it robbing the hive. But bees don't organize a block watch or call the police; they simply get back to doing what they do, which is to salvage any remaining honey and wax and clean up the now mostly empty frames. I take, they give.

But this spring will be different. My honeybees won't pollinate my fruit trees. There'll be no sticky party this summer. My home will seem empty without their comings and goings. I'll even miss their stings.

In Slovenia, you're supposed to tell a hive when the beekeeper dies, but what are you supposed to do when it's the bees that have left you? Should I console myself and whisper into the hive, "It's spring. I'm expecting you." Lean into its warmth and whine, breathe in the scent of that insect cathedral? Maybe. But the box is as cold as winter now, and there's nothing inside to receive the news.

One on lead in urban gardens. I wonder if that affects the honey.

For Urban Gardeners, Lead Is a Concern
By KATE MURPHY

FRANK MEUSCHKE’S garden, which surrounds the house he rents in Brooklyn, is a bountiful source of tomatoes, snap peas, green beans, peppers, lettuce and multiple varieties of flowers. It is also, as he recently discovered to his dismay, a rich repository of lead. He had his soil tested last month, and the analysis showed more than 90 times the amount of lead expected to occur naturally.

Mr. Meuschke, an artist who specializes in landscape paintings, is well aware of the dangers of lead paint. “You know not to eat while you paint,” he said. And he had suspected that paint scraped off houses in his neighborhood might have left lead residue in the soil over the years. “But I really didn’t expect there to be that much,” he said.

Harmful even at very low doses, lead is surprisingly prevalent and persistent in urban and suburban soil. Dust from lead-tainted soil is toxic to inhale, and food grown in it is hazardous to eat.

Health officials, soil scientists and environmental engineers worry that the increasing popularity of gardening, particularly the urban kind, will put more people at risk for lead poisoning if they don’t protect themselves.

Thanks in part to the influence of the local-food movement and to economic considerations, more households in the United States plan, like the Obamas, to grow their own fruits, vegetables, herbs and berries this year — seven million more households, according to the National Gardening Association, a 19 percent increase over last year.

While the increased physical activity and access to fresh produce promised by this trend are certainly healthy developments, widespread lead contamination means that many people are going to have to do more than wear gloves and sunscreen to garden safely. The presence of lead in soil doesn’t mean gardening is out of the question, but it may require a change in plot design and choice of crops, and soil amendments.

“You won’t know if you’re at risk unless you test your soil,” said Murray McBride, a professor of soil chemistry at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., which because of concerns about lead in community gardens began a free soil-testing program last month in cooperation with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

County extension services as well as local public health departments often offer free soil testing or can recommend schools or companies that do it for a fee. Individuals generally mail dirt in sealed plastic bags for analysis. Mr. Meuschke paid $12 to have his soil tested by the Environmental Sciences Analytic Center at Brooklyn College; some private companies charge as much as $50.

The Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Housing and Urban Development advise (but do not require) remediation if lead levels in soil exceed 400 parts per million in children’s play areas and 1,200 p.p.m. elsewhere. But some states and cities have set much lower limits. For example, 100 p.p.m. is considered hazardous in Minneapolis. In the Netherlands, 40 p.p.m. is unacceptable. Unpolluted soil averages 10 p.p.m. Mr. Meuschke’s soil had lead levels of 939 p.p.m.

Since 2003, hazardous amounts of lead have been documented in backyard and community gardens in New York as well as in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Washington. Lead-laden soil has been found not only in inner city neighborhoods but also suburban areas.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor,” said David Johnson, a professor of environmental chemistry at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, where he has found lead concentrations as high as 65,000 p.p.m. in the yards of upscale homes. “Lead knows no socioeconomic boundaries.”

Excessive lead in soil is the legacy not only of lead paint but also of leaded gasoline, lead plumbing and lead arsenate pesticides. Although these products were outlawed decades ago, their remnants linger in the environment. Lead batteries and automotive parts, particularly wheel balancing weights, are still widely used and are sources of soil contamination.

Soil is likely to contain high levels of lead if it is near any structure built before 1978, when lead-based paint was taken off the market, or if a building of that vintage was ever demolished on the site. Pesticides containing lead were often used on fruit trees, so land close to old orchards is also of concern. And beware of soil around heavily trafficked roadways; it, too, is probably laced with lead. But environmental engineers and soil experts said any place is potentially tainted.

“It’s kind of a dirty secret nobody really knows about because we’re all distracted worrying about lead in toys from China,” said Gabriel Filippelli, a professor of earth science at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis who has published several papers on lead accumulation in soil. His and other research indicates lead levels in people’s blood correspond directly to the amount of lead in the soil where they live.

“We have been unable to identify the threshold of lead exposure at which there is no risk to health,” said Mary Jean Brown, chief of lead poisoning prevention in the Healthy Housing Branch of the federal Centers for Disease Control. “But we know the risk increases with increased exposure.”

Fetuses and small children, because of their rapidly developing nervous systems, are more sensitive to and suffer the most harm from lead exposure. Adverse effects include damage to the brain and nervous system, lower I.Q., behavior problems and slow growth. Adults may suffer cognitive decline, hypertension, nerve disorders, muscle pain and reproductive problems.

If soil is found to have high levels of lead, experts advise covering it with sod. Those who want to grow flowers or edible crops can either replace the contaminated soil or alkalinize it by adding lime or organic matter such as compost. Soil with a pH level above 7 binds with lead, making it less likely to be absorbed by plants and the human body if the dirt is inadvertently inhaled or ingested.

The White House is mixing lime and compost into the soil for its kitchen garden, which according to a National Parks Service analysis has 93 p.p.m. of lead — an amount above background levels but not considered hazardous to children or adults by the E.P.A.’s standards.

Dr. Filippelli recommends planting kitchen gardens with fruiting crops like tomatoes, squash, eggplant, corn and beans because they don’t readily accumulate lead. Lead-leaching crops, he said, include herbs, leafy greens and root vegetables such as potatoes, radishes and carrots. Dirt also clings to these crops, making it hard to wash off and thereby increasing the risk of ingesting lead.

But some experts advise planting greens, specifically Indian mustard and spinach, for a couple of seasons as phytoremediation, or plant-based mitigation, before growing crops intended for food. By growing spinach for three months, researchers at the University of Southern Maine lowered the lead count in one garden by 200 p.p.m. Of course, the lead-leaching crop cannot be eaten or composted and must be disposed of as toxic waste.

A safer approach, particularly in areas where lead levels exceed 400 p.p.m., is to build raised or contained beds lined with landscape fabric and filled with uncontaminated soil. Luckily for Mr. Meuschke, many of his edible crops are in containers or pots filled with dirt bought at nurseries.

But lead dust blowing in the wind or rain splashing off lead-painted structures can sully food grown even in raised beds or containers. Situating gardens away from buildings is therefore a good idea, as is washing produce thoroughly with water containing 1 percent vinegar or 0.5 percent soap.

“It isn’t that you shouldn’t garden if you find lead in the soil, you just have to manage the space,” said Edie Stone, executive director of GreenThumb, a division of the New York City Parks and Recreation Department that supports urban gardening. “You can’t assume what you buy at the grocery store is any safer.” Peanuts anyone?

An editorial on journalistic use of the word "torture"

A post on the deficit model of autism

An article on the totally unsurprising amount of heteronormativity (did I spell that right?) in Disney movies, which elevates heterosexual love to absurd degrees.

Quick, one more! Black kids kicked out of private pool for... oh, go read the article. From homasse.

Incidentally, those kids got offered a slot at a pool at this school, which looks more interesting the more I check out their webpage. Further research indicates the school may have its own past problems, but eh, it was all 50 years ago or so. What's going on TODAY is quite the opposite.

Ugh.

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:15:28 GMT

So we're in the middle of this whole "thing" about safety and unattended children and whatnot over elsewhere.

And somebody who thinks this woman should not have left her 12 year old babysitting her younger siblings in the mall (actually, I agree with that, I just disagree that it was criminal or that the children were in any particular danger) goes "The world has changed for the worse, it's not safe, doesn't anybody remember Adam Walsh????"

You know what? I don't remember Adam Walsh. You know why? Because he died before I was even born!

When the statistics show that every measure of crime (including violent crime against children, which is what's relevant here) has gone down since then ("do you want your kid to be that low statistic???"), and the facts and the evidence all show that kids today are safer than they were when I was growing up and for a good decade or two before that as well, what does that say about your argument ("If something terrible had happened to any one of those children then nothing would have been written like that and it would be total outrage at the mother then") if the only specific thing you can think of to bolster it is a case that is thirty years old?

Not that any specific cases would make a difference. Horrible things happened to kids in the 50s and the 30s and the 90s and in the past year as well. The question isn't whether or not these things happen, but what the appropriate response to that fact is.

Edit: And for that matter, why are these people convinced that the twelve year olds were safe but the three year old (I should really link to this) was in danger? Statistically speaking, the kids least likely to be abducted by strangers? Little kids! The risk increases steadily as they get older, and teens and pre-teens are much higher risk than their younger siblings (not that they're *really* in danger anyway).

It's Adam Walsh again, isn't it? Well, Adam Walsh is an exceptional case. Aside from the low odds of being abducted and killed by a stranger anyway, he was both the wrong sex and the wrong age to be the more likely candidate for hitting the low end of statistics.

I mean, it's not like I'm going around cheering "YAY! Only teenage girls get kidnapped and raped and killed!" or anything, it's a bad (if improbable) fate no matter your age and sex, but... it makes no sense to put your fears on the kids least likely to have that improbable end!

A while back (a LONG while), I asked if anybody had the Moleville scripts for Mario RPG

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:55:14 GMT

And now I'm playing the game again, so I'll just type them all up, why don't I - or at least the ones that strike me as wrong.

See, that's the thing. The way the moles talk seems like it's intended to emulate AAVE, with "be" instead of "are" and whatnot. If it is, though, it's doing it wrong. Or maybe not. Maybe it's supposed to be in some other dialect and doing it just right, or maybe it's doing AAVE just right and I don't know because it's not my dialect and I don't catch it. But I'm reading it aloud and it sounds just wrong.

Any insight would be appreciated :)

Prior to fetching the star:

Little kid in the inn: Dyna went to the mountain with little Mite. But a star crashed into the mountain and now they be trapped!

Woman outside mine: A star crashed into the mountain and trapped some kids inside. To make things worse, one of the men folk be stuck inside too. Please Mario, you gotta help us!

Man inside mine: I don't know if I'd be feelin' any different if I was her. (This one is borderline, it doesn't sound wrong to me, but neither does it sound right.)

Fried coke.

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:59:16 GMT

It sounds disturbingly delicious. (Or deliciously disturbing, your choice.)

Two quick articles

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:50:11 GMT

One, a post on LanguageLog on the metaphorical use of the terms autism and Asperger's. Well worth a read.

And another on a kid who had trouble being accepted into school because of (most likely) his diagnosis. Not cool.

Why am I ALWAYS the last to know?

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 06:24:33 GMT

Seriously, this is going to REVOLUTIONIZE answering silly questions.

Check out their live queries!

Been reading up on missing person cases and unsolved murders.

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 02:38:54 GMT

It's depressing and fascinating at once. It is also depressingly fascinating and fascinatingly depressing! Four sensations out of only two adjectives, a new world record!

Here's a man with a rare case of retrograde amnesia. I wonder why, as he remembers growing up in Indianapolis and as he thinks he attended Catholic school, he hasn't searched old parochial school records - maybe an old yearbook from a few years around when he's likely to have graduated? Well, it'd require tremendous manpower, I suppose, and in the meantime he has to live the life he HAS, doesn't he?

Still, if anybody reading recognizes this guy, go tell him :)

On the list of highly ironic images....

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 04:21:22 GMT

Take a look at this picture.

The caption reads: In this picture provided by Six Flags Discovery Kingdom, Liberty, a male Atlantic bottlenose dolphin, wears a hat and waves an American flag in honor of the Fourth of July at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo, Calif. on Friday, July 3, 2009. Liberty, born on July 4, 1990, was named after his birth date, and this year turns 19 the same day the nation marks its 233rd year.

The irony of naming a caged animal born in captivity (no matter how well-treated) "Liberty" and teaching it to do foolish tricks to earn money is astounding.

I'm not opposed necessarily to zoos and whatnot, nor to teaching dolphins tricks (it stimulates their minds, anyway), but the name...!

Dear idiot neighbors

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 04:16:12 GMT

Today is July FIFTH. Your fireworks, aside from being illegal, are much too loud for midnight. A lot of people on this block have kids who might not appreciate being woken up by those overly powerful explosions in the middle of the night. A lot of people on this block might intend to go to church tomorrow, and would like some rest. If this was a once a year thing, I'd ignore it, but you have a history of acting like five year olds in regards to your own noise levels. Knock it off, or I'm calling the cops. They actually care about things like illegal fireworks.

Here's hoping one of them sends themselves to the hospital with minor injuries....

OMG SLUG PORN

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 04:06:51 GMT

Here is an image of the Great Grey Slug mating.

Here's another.

I'm staring at what are *obviously* the sex organs and find myself deeply, deeply fascinated. And confused.

And now I find out about Love Darts. People, gastropods are the kinkiest animals in your backyard. You heard it here first!