So I put it up on a tree with the help of a towel (I didn't touch it directly), but felt slightly foolish for doing so. After all, have I really done anything other than prolonging its suffering - causing it to starve instead of getting squashed by a car?
What would you have done under those circumstances? Oh, and can anyone tell me what kind of bird this is?
I'm still only going to "The Dark Knight" this summer, however...
Naturally, I waited until the last evening before the deadline, and naturally the blasted thing took me five hours to write...
And it didn't help my productivity that I broke a personal record for long-distance swimming yesterday afternoon - three miles in three hours.
Naturally, I woke up at 6 am today, and now I'm still tired - and sore.
- The dangers of smoking and the tobacco industry.
- Evolution and so-called "Intelligent Design".
- Global Warming and its skeptics.
- And now, after reading this article and remembering some earlier essays, I will have to add "sexual education" to the list - especially the focus on "abstinence".
In all cases, there were and are huge lobbying efforts to obfuscate the results of scientific studies and prevent them from getting any recognition in the public consciousness. Sometimes this lobbying was for financial, and sometimes for ideological reasons, but it was all too often frighteningly effective.
Oh well. At least the tobacco industry lost its case... eventually. Let's hope that this will be true in the other cases as well...
- Across the Dark Islands: The War in the Pacific by Floyd W. Radike
- Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-45 by Max Hastings
- I Am America (And So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert
- McMafia by Misha Glenny
- Mysteries of the Middle Ages by Thomas Cahill
- Storm Front by Jim Butcher
- The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security by Kevin D. Mitnick
- The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker
- The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
- The Outlaw Sea by William Langewiesche
- The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by Max Brooks
Now all I have to do is find the time to actually read them...
- The books mustn't be too expensive (no more than $20 or so).
- They must be available from the Kindle Store
Since I don't have a car, my opportunities are a bit limited. The best options would probably to fly to a city that's not too far from here and has good public transportation, and explore it for a few days.
Given those limitations, Washington D.C. and New York sound like the best options. But I'd love to hear your opinions and advice.
- The house I live in is fairly close to a railway. And it seems that every single time a train goes by, it has to honk loudly.
But why? Is there any good reason why the trains here need to honk when they roll into a town?
I started going to RPAC, the Recreation and Physical Activity Center of the OSU. I had to pay $113 for staff membership to get in, so I want to get the most use of it.
The swimming pools are quite nice (and there are less pensioners to dodge when swimming laps, too). The pool for recreational lap swimming was neatly divided into slow, medium, and fast lanes so that the different types of swimmers don't interfere with each other (I naturally went into the "Slow" lane - I was never able to master anything but breast strokes). The length of the pool threw me off at first - it was 25 yards instead of 25 meters like the pool I normally visit in Germany. Back in Germany, I normally swam for at least 40 laps, or one kilometer. But how many laps in this pool were one kilometer?
Then I noticed a sign that stated that 72 laps equated one mile, so I decided to use that as my minimum distance for swimming here (as it turned out, it usually takes me a little less than an hour to traverse this distance). Now I also finally know how to convert between yards and miles - something that I've always meant to look up but never did.
- One annoying thing about the RPAC are its lockers. In German swimming halls, lockers have security locks, and the swimmers can wear the keys in the pool with a plastic wristband attached to them. On the other hand, the lockers at the RPAC only have number locks which you can borrow - and I don't trust number locks with my wallet (among other valuables). You can bring your own padlocks, but if you want a secure padlock, you have to figure out where to store the key - which is difficult when you go swimming.
In the end, I had to improvise. I found a dog collar that fits around my wrist and attached a keyring to it, which seemed to work. Unfortunately, the collar is in a nauseating pink color, but for the moment I just have to bear with this...
- The RPAC also has lots of other facilities besides the swimming pools. So far, I've only used the whirlpool (which is great - especially if you still have to walk for one hour through cold and/or rainy weather to get home...), but there are also all sorts of other equipment you'd find in a fitness study - only in vastly larger quantities. Since I've already paid for their use, I plan to make use of them as well - but first I will have to buy some sports clothes, since my regular sports clothes are all back in Germany.
- One the 12th, one of my flatmates invited me to come with him to a talent show called "Nite Out" which was organized and run by the medicine students of OSU. And I have to say, I was extremely impressed, considering everything was done by amateurs - they ran sketches, played and sung a variety of old songs, and even had three complete dance routines with large number of participants, two of which looked like they came straight out of Bollywood. I've heard that this show might be sold on DVD (all profits from the show are going to a Free Clinic, a place where people who don't have health insurance - apparently there are a lot here - can get free treatment), and I simply have to pick it up as a souvenir...
- Walking around the city, I often saw tiny flags in the ground which indicated that there was some fiber optics cable, gas pipe, or other utility buried here, and that you should call a certain telephone number for information before you started digging there.
This mystified me - don't they have some central maps that show the positions of all those lines which they can check before they start digging there?
- I also sometimes saw signs on laws that notified others to stay off it because it was undergoing some chemical treatment and thus could be dangerous to, for example, children playing on it.
So what kind of poison do they use there which is dangerous to people walking on the grass and yet harmless enough to be used near human habitation in quantities large enough to cover an entire lawn?
- Yesterday a student, whom I knew from a gaming forum, and I went to the Highbanks Metro Park, which was my first time outside of Columbus ever since I arrived here. At least, I think it was outside of the city, though I'm not completely sure - the suburbs just went on and on...
Anyway, it was nice going into a forest again. I would probably have been more exited if I had my father's encyclopedic memory for biological details and thus knew which species of plants and animals were completely new to me, but unfortunately I mostly missed those details. I also saw my first Native American mound, but it wasn't much to look at - just a very small grass-filled hill that rose perhaps one yard above its surroundings.
- Today at lunch I came across a booklet entitled "The Noösphere vs. the Blogsphere - Is the Devil In Your Laptop?". The introduction included the following paragraph:
"There is a mass-based fascist movement on college campuses, today," LaRouche said, identifying it as presently the greatest threat to the survival of our nation. This threat, he said, has three faces:
* MySpace, directed by Rupert Murdoch
* Facebook, directed by Bill Gates
* Computer games, particularly the homicidal maniac versions
At this point, I knew that I had found comedy gold, and took the booklet with me.
And have you tried to read gaming PDFs with it?
Mind you, this was supposed to be the baked variety...
The Science & Public Policy Institute published Mockton's essay in full here. According to its mission statement, it is "a nonprofit institute of research and education dedicated to sound public policy based on sound science. Free from affiliation to any corporation or political party, we support the advancement of sensible public policies for energy and the environment rooted in rational science and economics. Only through science and factual information, separating reality from rhetoric, can legislators develop beneficial policies without unintended consequences that might threaten the life, liberty, and prosperity of the citizenry."
Laudable goals... if they would only actually adhere to those standards.
Junkscience.Com republishes it here. According to their definition:
"Junk science" is faulty scientific data and analysis used to advance special and, often, hidden agendas.
So did they publish this essay as an example of junk science?
Climate Change Fraud also features it. I wonder what they mean with their motto:
"There's nothing wrong with a fourth grade understanding of science.
If you're a fourth grader."
I wonder if any of these sites will eventually retract their stories.
( Read more... )
This, of course, is probably stating the obvious to most Americans on this board, but what I want to say is that cities built around the car are not an inevitable law of nature, but a conscious design choice in city planning. Most American cities saw much of their expansion during a time when gasoline was cheap and plentiful, and to the people of the time, going everywhere by car was a sign of their newfound wealth - and they couldn't even conceive of even wanting to travel by any other way.
But now that the days of cheap oil are apparently over - and it is unknown whether they will ever be back - this is going to be a huge problem.
Commuting to work, or even just shopping for groceries by car, will become increasingly expensive, thus putting even further strain on the already shaken American economy - and this problem won't go away easily even once the economy recovers, since oil prices likely will still be high. Clearly, something needs to be done here.
To my mind, there are two main options. One is improving public transportation. There seems to be a strong stigma among many Americans - especially among those who have never lived in a city with a good transportation system before - against public transportation as a "poor man's transport" and as being slow and inefficient. And after my experiences with the local bus system in Columbus, I can understand that. But again, that's not something inevitable but merely the result of a lack of political will. A larger number of European cities - and quite a few cities in North America as well - have a widespread and efficient public transportation system with frequent stops along major routes throughout most of the day, to such an extent that even people who could easily afford to commute by car will take the bus because it is more convenient - and cheaper. Yes, such a system will likely require some subsidies to set up. But when compared to the subsidies that are used to expand the streets and freeways, would it really be that more expensive? And let's not forget the added benefits of reduced traffic and cleaner air...
The other possibility - which would involve a lot more effort than the first one - is to redesign the overall physical infrastructure of the cities. From what I've seen, American cities are often extremely wasteful when building new neighborhoods. Yes, all those enormous lawns look pretty, but do people really need them? What do they actually do with them, especially when they have no kids who could play around in them? In the end, they just contribute to the sprawling nature of the city and increase the distance to anywhere where you might need to go. Shops where you can buy groceries often tend to be clustered together at locations far from many homes, instead of being spread out through residential areas, again increasing the distance between your home and your destination. Conversely, there seem to be few, if any bicycle lanes that would make it easy to travel medium distances - and it's often just about impossible to simply walk to a nearby neighborhood without walking alongside a street that doesn't have any sidewalks.
Cities like Copenhagen - which has a population density lower than that of many American cities - have succeeded in restructuring the way they operate so that one-third of all people commute to work via public transportation, and another third commute by bicycle. I am sure that with enough effort and political will, many American cities could achieve similar results - and this option is increasingly looking better than the alternative. Mind you, I'm not arguing for abolishing the car - it still has its uses from time to time, and I am sure that most of those Copenhagen commuters still own one. It's just that I think it is important to offer genuine alternatives, so that the inhabitants of a city have the freedom to choose what mode of transportation they will use.
Some links of relevance to this topic:
Copenhagenize - Life In The World's Cycling Capital
Common Urban Myths About Transport
What are your own thoughts on this?
When I asked my co-worker here if there was something similar in this department, he said that "that's not the American way" - all such papers are thrown away. He pointed me to a stack with fresh paper instead.
-Besides getting my university ID (or "Buck ID" - apparently it's named after the university sports team), I also bought access to the recreational facilities for the rest of the quarter - which was cheaper than buying them on a monthly basis. It still cost me $113, but I really need to go swimming again - and quite frequently at that.
- Speaking of sports, the OSU Stadium is bloody enormous - certainly much larger than the soccer stadium in Aachen Since I've never actually been within a soccer stadium, the only monumental architecture I am familiar with and which is comparable in sight is at the Zeppelinfeld in Nuremberg. Perhaps not the most fortunate comparison, but the only one I know from personal experience.
- When you are withdrawing cash from ATMs, why can you enter amounts of money down to the second decimal points when at the same time the machine is telling you that you can only withdraw cash in amounts of 20 dollars?
- Minor detail for reading floor plans: In Germany, "first floor" means "the first floor above the ground floor". In the USA, the "first floor" is the "ground floor".
- Is it just me, or did the city planners run out of ideas for street names when planning the inner city? 5th Avenue, 4th Street... and then adding "W"/"E" or "N"/"S" abbreviations to it. Not very imaginative, in my opinion...
- In Germany, bus stops are usually named after specific landmarks within a city (and there are plenty), or failing that streets that the bus route is passing through or crossing. Here, bus stops are almost always named after street crossings - i.e., "Neil by Dodrige" and so forth. I'm guessing that's because the streets are so impossibly long around here - if you'd name the stops only after a single street, it would get confusing.
- During my walk yesterday, I saw a bunch of kids selling lemonade on a street corner, which I thought was a very American thing to do (at least, I haven't seen anything like this in Germany). I was tempted of buying a lemonade and maybe take a picture of them, but given my current condition anything that might upset my stomach is probably inadvisable.
- Stores opening up on Sunday is something I'm still getting used to - in Germany, only stores explicitly catering to travelers (such as gas station) are legally permitted to do so. But for me, it works out for the best - since it takes forever to get to other places for me, the weekend is about the only time I might actually get to certain stores.
- In Germany, ATMs are always located in special booth-like constructions - there's always something that will make it difficult for other people to look over your shoulder and read your pin as you are typing it. None of the ATMs around here have anything like it - and they can often be found in the entrance areas of supermarkets and other stores (which never happens in Germany) where a steady amount of traffic just behind your back is common.
I also have never seen a drive-thru ATM in Germany.
- If you want to spot a German in a crowded office: He's the one who will be complaining about the draft from the air conditioning.
This seems to be a uniquely German affliction. Germans, having fairly temperate temperatures in their native country even in summer, just aren't used to air conditioning. Almost no private homes will have air conditioning, and it is considered a luxury to have it - and also not very environmentally conscious, since it uses so much energy. Only few offices will have it either (apart from dedicated server rooms, where it is mandatory) - the German way of dealing with too much heat is to open doors and windows and create some "natural" air circulation, and stoically suffer through those few days in the year when that isn't enough.
So when a German stays in a country where air condition is far more common, such as the USA or Thailand, one of the first things he will do is switch the air conditioning of. I didn't do that in my office, since I'm not sitting in a place where this is much of an issue, but I talked to a German professor who did switch off the air conditioning in his office as soon as he arrived...
- It's strange that even with several game stores in the city, none of them is within walking distance of the OSU campus. Aren't students normally the best customers of such places?
- Many residences around here - including the house I live in - seem to be constructed out of wood. That's something I've never seen in Germany. Sure, some "summer homes" and other places not intended as permanent residences are out of wood - but normal habitations are constructed out of bricks, stone, and concrete.
(a) The typical German reaction to this would be: "Who is this person, and why is he spreading his germs all over my groceries?"
(b) Competition among discounter stores is so fierce in Germany that employing such people - and thus having to increase prices by even a few cents - would drive their customers to the competition.
(c) For the same reason, bags cost extra. Besides, it's more environmentally conscious if customers recycle their bags.
- I keep on forgetting that VAT is added to the price afterwards, and not included like in Germany. Now, that's understandable since VAT varies by state here. But it's still annoying.
- Instead of listing calories etc. for packaged food per specific amount of weight or liquid measure (for example, 460 kcal/100 ml), over here this information is derived by seemingly arbitrarily dividing the item into "servings" and listing the values per "serving".
I wonder what the message here is. "This food would have been perfectly adequate for a meal and not led to any kind of weight gain, if you hadn't been such a glutton..."
- On Friday, I went out for lunch with two of my new co-workers. We went to a place called "Wendy's". It should be noted that both were younger to me, skinny, and blessed with high-speed metabolisms that don't start to whimper when they had a good look at what this place had to offer.
I settled for one of the less threatening meals - it was called "Southern Taco" and was on the "salad" menu for some reason (presumably because the meat sauce didn't outnumber the vegetables by a huge margin). When I unpacked it in my office, I didn't even dare opening the dressing, let alone the cream.
I don't think I'll be going back there. At least in theory, I want to loose weight at the moment, even though I realize this is going to be difficult around here...
- The kitchen in this house also has a "food disposal unit", whose task it is to shred any food that ends up in the sink. I've never seen such devices back in Germany (where you are supposed to put such food leftovers into the bin for organic waste), and I'm looking forward to seeing this device in operation.
- Today, I tried to reach this place - by foot, since it was Sunday, buses were even more infrequent than usual, and I figured it would be good exercise. I discovered quickly that this is no city that was built with pedestrians in mind (as if I hadn't know that before) - on many parts of the route I was forced to walk on a fairly narrow strip of green beside the road.
On the other hand, I did walk some very nice residential areas. The architecture, apart from the unpainted brick buildings, was not all that dissimilar from upscale German neighborhoods, but the individual lots tended to be much larger - twice as large or even larger than that. I do not know if the neighborhoods I walked through were genuinely wealthy or if most residential areas are like this.
I made a mistake when navigating through the city - I went down Northwest Boulevard instead of walking down Tremont Road - but it was probably for the best, since I could walk on sidewalks almost the entire time.
My overall route can be seen here. You will notice that point "B" is not my intended destination, but a bridge - which, as I discovered, had no way for a pedestrian to cross it safely, since the road bordered the railings directly. Which just shows how much of a clueless foreigner I am - I honestly hadn't even considered such a situation.
- Well, the trip wasn't a total loss - on the way back, I stopped at a place called "Whole Foods", which had some decent bread in its selection (I got a tip from a German professor I had talked with on Friday). Overall, that place looked pretty good in terms of selection - I will go there more often in the future if I can figure out how to reach it by bus.
- Speaking of which, the first ATM in Newark where I tried to withdraw that money didn't work. It had a "DIEBOLD" logo on its frame. Now why does that name sound familiar?
- One of my first encounters with the native wildlife was with the local squirrels - the North American grey-furred variety. I last saw them in Scotland, where they were busy mugging the smaller, red-furred, European squirrels.
- Yesterday I went to the German Village in search of German bread. On the bus, I had a conversation with two middle-aged ladies, who had never encountered a German before. The two were going to Downtown to see a doctor - one of them was getting some sort of injection to prevent her from becoming pregnant. The other one asked if I would buy her a soda drink, and then the first one joked that if I was going to buy her a drink then she wanted one too. I decided to give each of them a dollar, whereupon they said "That's so sweet!" and each gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek. The first one also gave me a package of condoms - she said she got them for free - even though I pointed out that I was only staying here for two months and thus was unlikely to have an opportunity to work them.
- I don't care what the rumors back in Germany say - not all American cities are ugly hives of architectural conformity formed out of concrete. Columbus, for example, has plenty of pretty residential areas. For instance, the region north of the OSU campus has a large number of examples of beautiful brick homes, each one showing something of the owners' personality. The campus itself is also none too shabby, with wide green spaces reserved for pedestrians. And the downtown area has its own share of large but beautiful architecture not seen in Germany outside of Frankfurt. Sure, it too has its share of concrete sins, but so does Germany - especially all those "functional" public buildings erected in the 1970s (such as my former grammar school) where any graffiti can only serve to make them less repulsive to look at.
- Don't go to the "German Village" neighborhood of Ohio if you expect an "authentic German town" or some such rot. It's not, and even if it were, what would be the point? If you want that, go to Germany.
However, this is an American neighborhood with strong German influences. Sure, no real German town would have streets laid out in a square grid of that size. Nevertheless, the architecture and the way the houses are laid out certainly show similarities to Germany. The way most gardens have fences even on the street side, for instance. And many backyards and small side streets certainly wouldn't look out of place in a German village. This neighborhood has taken both German and American cultural traditions and created something unique and beautiful - which is how it should be.
And I'll take it over all the cheap Neuschwanstein knock-offs in the world.
- One thing that I've seen both in this neighborhood and others that's definitely very American are all the signs of private security companies showing which houses they protect.
- I did find German bread there after some searching - in a place called "Juergen's Restaurant". With a name like that, how can you go wrong? ;)
- The bread I bought wasn't the variety I wanted - I would have preferred darker sour dough bread made out of a mixture of wheat and rye. Instead, I got lighter "white bread" made entirely out of wheat. Nevertheless, it had a nice, thick crust that didn't yield easily to a probing finger (unlike American bread, where you can push a finger all the way in and hardly encounter any resistance). Two out of two Americans who subsequently tried it were impressed by its taste. For dinner, we ate it with butter smeared on it and either Leberwurst (a special German sausage made out of liver that can be smeared as a paste) or salted and sliced radishes on top of it. I also ate it with Cheddar, a type of cheese which I last ate in Scotland and which I missed.
- After getting the bread, I proceeded north to the Downtown area to get a monthly bus pass. I also took the opportunity to walk around the Statehouse and look at the war memorials. The names on the Civil War monuments only faintly rung a bell - I've heard the names of several of the listed generals before, but I can't really associate anything more with them since I never studied the American Civil War in detail.
However, I found one other war memorial particularly moving. It consisted of two large arrangements of stones in which letters of American soldiers to their families were engraved. Those letters dated from the Philippine War all the way to the Gulf War (with most being from World War II), and painted a vivid picture of these eras. I think similar monuments would be a good idea for Germany, although in that case it should probably consist of letters of all participating nations, together with their translations.
- In Germany, pretty much all restaurants have some sort of price tables in front of the building near the entrance. Over here, most restaurants seem to eschew this practice.
- By the way, can anyone tell me the difference between butter and "sweet cream"? I even found "salted sweet cream" in the store, which sounded... strange.
- There seems to be an ongoing religious war over here about what constitutes "real pizza". One of my flatmates, who comes from the Northeastern USA, favors Italian-style pizza, which is flat and has a strong crust - the type familiar to most Germans (thanks to a large Italian immigrant community). The other flatmate, who hails from further west, prefers American-style pizza, which is far thicker and has a more cake-like consistency.
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