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Collection: Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading 11/11/11

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Eric dP:

It was with a sort of grim satisfaction that I read the Washington Post’s excellent feature, “Wall Street’s resurgence frustrates its claims, and Obama’s.” It’s a close look at recent bank profits, bonuses, and growth and it gives lie to the complaints from the finance sector that the Obama administration is treating it punitively. It also, of course, gives lie to the idea that the Obama administration is reigning in the finance sector.

I also enjoyed Matt Taibbi going ape over Mitt Romney’s entitlement plan.

Finally—and this is completely and totally unrelated to Sightline—I’m about halfway through a new novel “Mule: A Story of Moving Weight” by an old friend of mine, Tony D’Souza. It’s a ripping yarn, as they say, and being unable to put it down almost made me late to work this morning. I am assured that the characters and events it depicts are in no way based on reality.

Alan:

This past week included the anniversary of Kristallnacht: November 9, 1938, when Hitler launched his genocide against German Jews, burning and sacking thousands of synagogues, homes, and businesses. Next came the concentration camps.

In 1939, as clouds of war gathered over Europe, many refused to recognize what was about to happen. No one could imagine a Holocaust, even after shattered glass had filled the streets on Kristallnacht. World leaders waffled and waited, hoping that Hitler was not what he seemed, that world war could be avoided. . . .

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Weekend Reading 11-4-11

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Clark:

alan ruben, flickr

According to National Geographic, Nemo can change into a girl:

Many reef fish have the ability to change from one sex to another. Most, such as wrasses and parrotfish, change from female to male. But the clownfish is one of the few known to change from male to female: If a dominant female dies, the dominant male will become the dominant female, and the largest remaining juvenile will assume the role of dominant male. No one has yet identified the hormones responsible for this sexual plasticity. “It’s a really good adaptive strategy to make sure the species is perpetuated,” Allen says. “There will always be a breeding pair at any given anemone.”

From Cracked.com—a website known more for fart jokes than serious analysis—here’s an article that’s actually quite insightful:  a readable synopsis of five quirks of human reasoning that make us wrong more often than we think.  In case you don’t like to read more than a paragraph, here they are: (1) motivated reasoning: humans reason to win arguments, not to discover truth; (2) probability blindness: we’re just not wired to understand randomness and chance; (3) paranoid bias: we’re too quick to assume that other people are out to get us; (4) fundamental attribution error: we’re hard-wired to employ double standards, assuming that our own foibles are caused by uncontrollable circumstances (“I couldn’t finish my homework because my car broke down!”) while others’ are signs of inherent weakness (“Clark’s just too disorganized to meet a deadline.”) (5) confirmation bias: we treat facts that confirm our opinions as the gospel truth; yet when facts clash with our opinions, we simply disregard them!  It’s fun to spot yourself making these sorts of mistakes. Try it at home, kids! Collect all 5!

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Weekend Reading 10/28/11

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Alan:

A big list this week.

The Center for Progressive Reform mounts a spirited defense of regulation, showing that the US economy delivers much greater benefits thanks to rules democratically established to reduce pollution, protect workers, and prevent fraud and abuse in financial markets.

Two Texas chemists have developed a nanometer-thick coating that’s an effective nontoxic flame retardant, reports Science News. Made of alternating layers of clay and an extract of seashells, it slows fire well on polyurethane foam or cotton fabrics. Good news (including for pets)!

Our friends at Shareable.net have launched a fascinating new series on public policies cities can establish to welcome local food, car sharing, co-housing, and other forms of green, community-supporting economics.

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Weekend Reading 10/21/11

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Eric dP:

Probably the best thing I read this week was Elisabeth Rosenthal’s Sunday NYT piece about what ever happened to global warming as a live political issue.

I like these images of turning dollar bills into infographics as a way to illustrate economic inequality.

Writing for the Atlantic, I thought Matthew Yglesias did a good job of capturing what’s wrong with municipally-owned parking garages:

But municipal provision of subsidized parking is another thing entirely. For one thing, it’s regressive. In almost every city, regular drivers are richer than transit users. Guaranteeing cheap parking in the city center also has the perverse impact of reducing incentives to live in the city, ensuring suburbanites that they can have convenient access to the center without living in the city limits and contributing to the tax base. And in environmental and congestion terms, it’s the exact reverse of building a train. You’re encouraging bad behavior.

I’d add that the next logical step is divesting our cities of municipally-owned paid street parking. It’s hard for me to see why the government should be in the parking business when there’s a real live parking industry that would be happy to provide for local parking needs at market rates.

In the same vein, I also liked Ezra Klein’s piece at the WaPo on how congress shapes your commute and why “parking cash-outs” are such a good idea.

Finally, I haven’t actually read this one yet, but I’m looking forward to sitting down with the Seattle Weekly’s in-depth story on whistleblowing at Hanford by Joshua Frank.

Clark:

On the increasingly skewed distribution of income, some telling interactive graphs: the State of Working America and Income Gain Distribution since 1917.

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Weekend Reading 10/14/11

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Anna:

I’ve been obsessed with the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon this past week, in part because I’m personally exhilarated by the growing, populist call for change, and in even greater part because of all the lessons in messaging and organizing and mobilizing that this crazy, leaderless, chaotic movement holds for those of us who’ve been trying to stir up interest in policy change by more conventional means for way too long. I’m taking notes!

One of the best overviews of these lessons—and the opportunities they represent—is by communications expert John Nicols in The Nation. The time was certainly right—the stars were aligned just right so that taking to the streets became a no-brainer for many Americans from diverse backgrounds and for all kinds of different reasons. But Nicols also shows how the targets are right (“Occupy Wall Street has not gotten distracted by electoral politics; it has gone after the manipulator of both major parties—what the radicals of old referred to as ‘the money power.’”), the numbers are right (“The brilliance of Occupy Wall Street’s message, ‘We are the 99 percent,’ is that it invites just about everyone who isn’t a billionaire to recognize themselves as members of the class that has suffered what Thomas Jefferson once described as ‘a long train of abuses and usurpations.’”), and the demands—or lack thereof—are right on too (“the objection of the occupiers to a system of corporate domination and growing inequality, and their desire to change that system, makes a lot more sense to a lot more Americans than anything being said by politicians.”).

Read the whole thing here.

And, another awesome video on the economy from Robert Reich. Here he exposes seven “biggest economic whoppers and the facts in two minutes and 30 seconds.” He starts with “Tax breaks on the rich trickle down to the rest of us.” Wrong.

Alan:

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Weekend Reading 10/7/11

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Eric

I pounded my fist on the table in vigorous agreement with Dave Roberts on the problem with climate wonks in politics:

Here are the outlines of a theory of politics I think many wonks share. It envisions a vast “American middle,” obscured by the din of partisans on both sides, filled with undecided, uncommitted, but fundamentally reasonable people who are just waiting to be spoken to in a “grown-up” way…

The problem is that this theory of politics is mistaken. It is not even really a theory of politics so much as a desire to remove politics from politics.

In fact, as Dave ably points out, there is abundant evidence that people simply do not form opinions (or political blocs) in anything like the way that scientists and researchers imagine them to.

I barely had the stomach to finish reading Bloomberg’s damning reporting on the Koch brothers flouting US law to sell to Iran. And that’s not the half of it. As Bloomberg’s reporting details, the Koch enterprises repeatedly violate workplace and environmental protections—showing a disregard for American law that helps explain their founders’ vicious hatred of regulation and government.

After reading even a partial catalog of the Koch brothers misdeeds, the growing Occupy movement starts sounding better and better. In that vein, go waste 9 minutes with Jon Stewart.

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Weekend Reading, 9/30/11

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Clark

Over the last few months, I’ve been exchanging emails with a friend about a nerdy but important question: does individual action inspire or substitute for systemic change? That is, if we all get our friends to make small, daily decisions to make their own habits more sustainable, will that truly hasten political changes that are needed to make the economy as a whole more sustainable?

It’s a question that probably doesn’t have a single answer. I’m a little more skeptical than my friend about the power of small individual actions, in part because of the extensive research on the limits of will power. Here’s an interesting example: people who exercise the willpower to buy green may subsequently slack off on other “moral” choices. To me, the exhaustibility of will power is closely related to the widely studied problem of decision fatigue: the simple act of making choices is enough to sap your self-control. So encouraging people to make lots of daily choices that are good for the planet could distract them from the few BIG choices that really matter: what home to live in, what car to drive, what appliances to purchase, and whether to put any time or money towards political or policy causes that you support.

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Weekend Reading 9/23/11

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Clark

Are you a Puget Sound Energy customer?  Thanks to a new incentive program, you can get a super-efficient heat pump water heater for next to nothing! Really!! Yeah, I know I’m an energy geek. But man I love me some heat pumps.

GAAAAH!!!!! of the day:  staggering growth in US student loans. GAAAAH!!!!!

Neutrinos traveling faster than light? You’re making Einstein very, very angry, CERN.

From the “people are just plain weird” files: lying to athletes about their performance makes them capable of achieving more. Wouldn’t it be nice if people were easier to figure out??

In Southern California, brilliant grafitti activism.

A compelling argument for the Oxford comma (this kind, not this kind).

Congrats to the two Cascadians who won MacArthur “genius” grants:  UW computer researcher Shwetak Patel, and UBC biology researcher Sarah Otto.

I love it when articles in the Sightline Daily news service (which you should subscribe to, if you don’t already) mention bits of actual math that yield surprising, counterintuitive results. Here’s one:

But [the EnerGuide Rating System for home energy efficiency] has its detractors. In a 2007 assessment, the Canadian Home Builders Association identified a “logarithmic bias” with the ERS scale that makes it difficult to compare performance between homes. For example, a home with an ERS score of 80 uses half the energy of one scoring 13 points lower at 67. But it uses twice as much as a home with an ERS score of 86, only six points higher.

This is the exact reverse of the miles-per-gallon problem, where each mile-per-gallon means less and less as you move up the scale.

This article on cul-de-sacs and car crashes mentions some interesting math-y research as well, showing that places with lots and lots of street intersections tend to have fewer fatal car crashes—which is the opposite of what transportation planners expected.

Anna:

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Weekend Reading 9/16/2011

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Clark:

Deskbound, but looking for some exercise?  We’ve been amusing one another all week with these humiliating yet effective “deskercises”.

More amusement, but not in any way related to sustainability: people imitating modem screeches.

From Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a run down of supercomputing’s greatest hits!  Protein folding!  Earthquakes!  Clean energy!  And the first-ever simulation of “abrupt climate change!” More examples in this pdf.

Anna:

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Weekend Reading 9/9/11

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Sightline Weekly readers: we accidentally linked to the 9/9 edition of Weekend Reading, when we meant to link to today’s. Read today’s (9/16) Weekend Reading here.

Alan:

Like many, I watched with acute interest the tar-sands pipeline protests in Washington, DC, which wrapped up last weekend. (Photos here.)

Last week, nearly every major environmental group in the country signed on to a letter demanding President Obama deny the pipeline permit. “There is not an inch of daylight between our policy position on the Keystone XL pipeline, and those of the protesters being arrested daily outside the White House,” wrote the groups in their letter.

What few in the Northwest states realize is that plans are afoot to bring tar-sands oil into Cascadia through a new pipeline proposed for northern British Columbia and also possibly through an existing pipeline that connects the Alberta oil fields with greater Vancouver, BC, and then western Washington.

For simple fascination—mathematical, pecuniary, and psychological—I recommend this Harper’s article by Nathaniel Rich on the winningest lottery winner ever (subscription required). Luck or criminal genius? If there’s a lesson, it’s the same one Freakonomics taught: people will try hard to game any system, especially when money is at stake.

Eric dP:

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