What are the chances?

Last week I read the new Matt Ruff novel about 9/11, an alternate history focused on examining its own premise.

On Tuesday evening, a huge billowing cloud of smoke displaced the usual traffic in photo after photo looking down Newbury Street and Boylston Street. The view from across the river showed the smoke spreading over Boston. People were evacuated from a large swath of the city, work and life were disrupted for tens of thousands of people, a number of roads and subway stations were closed, and there were early warnings that the smoke might be particularly harmful though the government was quick to dispute that (while also asking people to stay out of the area).

Then I went to a show last night. I arrived early and talked a bit with the person who was filling in as house manager since the house manager was having trouble getting to the theater. Conversations as people arrived were about trying to reach friends and colleagues, traffic disruptions, power disruptions, and cancelled performances.

This all led up to seeing the show “Recent Tragic Events” last night, which was set in an apartment the day after 9/11. The lead character is trying to reach her twin sister, who lives in New York and has not been in contact. A show set the day after the city I know was filled with smoke, which I’m watching the day after the city I know is filled with smoke. And it was absolutely creepy how easy it was for me to go back to that time. Was it all the priming and context? Was it the television on the set playing CNN from 9/12/2001 for two hours? Was it the powerful performance from Aimee Rose Ranger? Regardless, I was relieved to return home to my infant son, to my wife of more than 10 years, and to a television which is no longer tuned to CNN.

Understanding the Fukushima news coverage

News coverage about the problems at the Fukushima nuclear reactors has been somewhat confused.

Radiation and radioactive are different terms. Radioactive substances emit radiation. A release of radiation is dangerous to those nearby. A release of radioactive substances is a wider problem, because those substances can then travel and emit radiation wherever they end up. For those of us who aren't near the Fukushima reactors, the key question is the volume and type of radioactive substances that are released into the environment, not the radiation levels near the plant.

A fuel rod within the reactor being exposed to the air does not mean that the fuel rod is exposed to the environment. There is air inside the containment structure. The concern with fuel rods at the Fukushima reactors being exposed to the air is that they then overheat, damage the cladding around the fuel rods, and make a core meltdown more likely.

A core meltdown is not, by itself, a widespread disaster. A meltdown that happens within an intact containment structure, as at Three Mile Island, doesn't mean that radioactive substances will escape. The key question with meltdowns at the Fukushima reactors is whether the containment structures stay intact.

Spent fuel rods are not safe. And the spent fuel pools at the Fukushima reactors are not inside containment structures the way that the reactors are (or used to be).

Using sea water for cooling is not just as good as using the purified water that is usually used for cooling. Purified water that becomes activated (turned radioactive) has a very short half-life. Sea water contains a lot of other substances that will stay radioactive a lot longer. Sea water can also damage pumps that are designed for fresh water, and the salt left behind may physically block continued access for the water needed to cool the fuel rods.

When radioactive substances escape into the outside air, it doesn't make a lot of difference whether they escape in a hydrogen explosion, in a steam explosion, in a fire, or in a steam release. What matters is the volume and type of radioactive substances that are then in the outside air, because they will gradually fall down to the ocean or the ground. The other key question that is unknown is how far the fallout will travel.

Heard it on the radio

I love the radio when I’m driving. Lisa prefers her own playlist on her iPod, but I love the randomness and diversity of spinning the dial. At home my music selection is mostly limited to folk and rock and jazz, but in the car I happily add in hip hop and country and Latin and the frequently uncategorizable local college station shows. And sports radio, and talk radio, and hate radio, and NPR, and almost anything that’s not Diane Rehm. But I only recall being really stunned by music on the radio twice.

On July 21, 1990, I was driving in a small town in Pennsylvania and heard a cover of a song from Pink Floyd’s The Wall. And then I heard another. In my memory, it was Joni Mitchell doing “Goodbye Blue Sky.” And then I found out that this was a live broadcast from Berlin. I hadn’t heard this concert was happening, and here I was listening to a concert in Berlin while it was happening from my car in Pennsylvania. My 5 minute drive across town lasted over an hour.

About 250,000 miles later, on January 10, 2011, I was leaving Pennsylvania and had just started picking up radio stations in upstate New York. It was 11 a.m., at the time of the national moment of silence for the Arizona murders. The most prominent victim, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, was lying in a hospital, somehow alive after having been shot in the head. I had wondered what music stations would do for the moment of silence, and the station I was listening to chose to play “Grenade” by Bruno Mars. With the repeated lyrics “I would go through all this pain, Take a bullet straight through my brain, Yes, I would die for ya baby, But you won't do the same.”

It’s almost enough to make me get an iPod too.

Tax the bonuses at 100%

Tax the bonuses at 100%.

It’s really a simple solution. If Congress actually cared about the AIG bonuses and similar abuses, they could amend the income tax to tax those bonuses at 100% with no deductions allowed. Since most states would have their own taxes on top of that, you’d see any AIG employee with a brain declining the bonus, just as working people all across this country have been forced to accept lower salaries and lower benefits than their contracts call for.

Tax the bonuses at 100%.

Anything short of that is just politicians making noise while they continue to let the hyperwealthy finish destroying our entire economy. Cap the salaries, tax the bonuses at 100%, fire the executives, put the companies into receivership, and then tell me that you intend to tackle the significant problems like the 1.4 quadrillion dollar derivatives market.

The news of the bonuses has focused some anger on AIG. Maybe realizing that Congress is rolling over for it will redirect the anger where it will do some good. Tax the bonuses at 100%.

Forget about it

If you could take a pill that would permanently reduce the emotional impact of a stressful memory without losing the factual recall, would you want to?

Beta blockers may let you do that: take a pill, deliberately recall the stressful memory, and let the brain rewire the memory a bit to permanently reduce the emotional impact. Repeat as needed, or at least that’s the theory. Researchers are currently testing it with PTSD patients and touting it in the news.

We have natural healing processes that can, when they are working well, help us gradually cope with traumatic experiences. PTSD is typically defined as a set of symptoms that are interfering with a patient’s life more than a year after the initial trauma. Does that mean we should accept being put in a state of fear and anger when recalling a traumatic event for anything up to a year, just because that’s been considered a normal response? Would you rather suppress the fear and anger after a month? After a week? After a couple of hours?

If this became a common treatment, I’m sure people would have widely variable threshholds for treatment just like we do with many other problems, and it seems unlikely to create an affectless society. But before seeking treatment myself, I’d be really concerned what other emotional impacts this might suppress aside from fear and anger. Sit here, take this pill, and for the next several hours try not to think about any of your joyful or spiritually meaningful memories whose emotional impact you don’t want to lose.

For a deeper look, I strongly recommend reading “Better” Memories? The Promise and Perils of Pharmacological Interventions, a 2003 staff working paper from the President’s Council on Bioethics.

From untitled to unattributed; or, the rapid decline of the ICA

Shepard Fairey has been much in the news, between the AP pointing out that he took the image of Obama for his Obama Hope poster from an AP photograph, his inexplicable solo show at the ICA in Boston, the overwhelming volume of promotion for his ICA show, and his arrest by the Boston Police because of his past (alleged/admitted/celebrated) tagging around Boston. The AP flap has gotten people all confused again about the difference between copyright infringement and plagiarism. Here’s one way to think about it: art may involve copyright infringement, but art should never involve plagiarism.

As hard as it is to define art, we should all agree that art has to include some originality. Plagiarism—the passing off of someone else’s idea as your own—does not preclude originality, but it deceives the audience as to what that originality includes. For that reason, plagiarism is simply incompatible with art. Shepard Fairey knows that he plagiarizes. The ICA apparently doesn’t know, or doesn’t care. Out of all the fawning and foaming that Shepard Fairey has induced around Boston of late, it’s the acceptance of plagiarism by our Institute of Contemporary Art which truly reflects poorly on our fair city.

Future news

In a little over an hour, the Executive Office of Transportation is going to release their recommendation to extend the Green Line out to a Route 16 terminus (with no parking structure).

Closing the Rose

In a colossal failure of public relations, donor cultivation, and fiscal management, Brandeis recently announced their intention to close the Rose Art Museum and sell off their entire collection of art. At least they haven’t yet torched the collection for the insurance money, though they may consider that when they discover that potential buyers live in the same economic climate as Brandeis, and aren’t eager to pay anywhere close to the inflated appraised value of the collection.

Now the Brandeis COO has come forward to explain that the only other choice is to cripple the university. After all, they only have $530 million in their endowment, and a fictitious law prevents Brandeis from using it for anything. These false cries of poverty and pantomimed acts of desperation mimic the North Shore Music Theatre, which is still raising money despite having basically closed down, all the while refusing to refund subscribers who already paid for a non-existent next season. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum claims the museum will die from overcrowding if they are not allowed to fully break the terms of Mrs. Gardner’s will, proving that even long-lasting financial success is no protection from the idle whims and compulsive attention-seeking of those who deign to run our cultural and educational institutions today.

Deaccessioning is not new, theaters have never lasted forever, and the insult to the Gardner’s architecture will not ultimately destroy everything charming about the place. But this string of news is destroying the trust that we should be able to have in our cultural and educational institutions, because the institutions no longer even pretend to respect their supporters and patrons. Just ask Lois Foster.

What will you remember from 2008?

On second thought, maybe I’ll go to Yale

15-foot-high flames shooting out of manholes in Harvard Square at 2:30 a.m. I mean, what are the three terrors of the Fire Swamp Harvard Square? Flame spurts, panpipes, and Rents of Unusual Size.

The cult of the quarterback

Sure, I could talk about Tom Brady’s numbers this season, or in his career, or just in the game last night. I could analyze the media focus on quarterbacks, or the fan focus on quarterbacks, or the game’s focus on quarterbacks. I could, but I’m busy making plans for next week’s worship meeting.

Web design

The design of the front page of the boston.com website has greatly improved today, and now looks much more like the Guardian website. Updated a few days later: Boston.com took only a couple of days to clutter themselves up again with a seemingly infinite number of ads, pop-ups, random images, and outside links. It is now worse than ever.

I’m supposed to be redesigning one large established site and developing a new small one from scratch, so it’s great to have new models to wander around. While I’ve been noticing news sites, I really need to find good models for two different sorts of websites: one for shopping (oriented around text descriptions rather than product images) and one for a small organization.

What sites do you find easy to navigate and pleasing to the eye?

Welcome to the Guardian

The Guardian now has a US-oriented web site called Guardian America, using the same clean layout as their primary site and linking to many of the same stories. Really, it’s more of a US-oriented portal to their content, and that suits me just fine. I enjoy their content, and this makes the choice of content more familiar. They are supplementing with some new material created in the US, primarily in the areas of culture and commentary. And thus we glimpse the new answer to our concerns about global outsourcing: with the current exchange rate, American writers and editors are a tremendous bargain. We’ll see whether we can adapt to the Guardian stylebook better than China’s factories can adapt to our manufacturing requirements.

In other news, tomorrow the New York Giants and the Miami Dolphins will play a regular season NFL game at Wembley Stadium in London. You can read about it in the Guardian or on nfl.com or even on the horribly-named nfluk.com. (Was nfl-uk.com unavailable?) There’s even reports of a comedy routine at a press appearance by one of the Dolphins players. I’m surprised that a team owner would give up the home field advantage and home field revenue, although the Dolphins stands looked pretty empty during last week’s game and home field advantage hasn’t been doing the 0-7 team any good.

So we send over an NFL game (which we still get to watch on its regular time and channel), and we get Britain’s best newspaper partially customised in return. Free trade does work!