Link Banana

This blog has briefly mentioned the idea of giving legal rights to nature before, but Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow offers an interesting analysis of the logic, history, and ramifications of the practice. Consider:

Richard Stewart, a law professor at New York University, believes that inanimate objects such as trees and rivers do not have interests or values. Rather, he says, the argument really concerns “human ideas about what’s good for nature.”

I was surprised to learn that Henry David Thoreau was a pencilmaker, but this is the real meat:

On April 30, 1844, Thoreau started a blaze in the Concord Woods, scorching a 300-acre swath of earth between Fair Haven Bay and Concord. The fire was an accident, but the destruction of valuable woodland, the loss of firewood and lumber, and the narrowly avoided catastrophe that almost befell Concord itself angered the local residents and nearly ruined Thoreau’s reputation. For years afterward, Thoreau could hardly walk the streets of his hometown without hearing the epithet “woods burner.”

The portrait Pipkin paints, of an adrift and struggling writer in his mid-twenties, is an angle on Thoreau I’d never seen before.

I think there’s something to Michael Schaffer’s thesis that the burgeoning pet industry owes something to American alienation, but really it’s this statistic — whose statistical rigor I doubt — that got my attention:

A 2001 survey for the American Animal Hospital Association revealed that 83 percent of pet owners call themselves their animal’s “mommy” or “daddy.”

While they obviously have their nontrivial problems, unplanned urban development has some characteristic that unlikely people are praising:

Prince Charles of [Wales], who founded an organization called the Foundation for the Built Environment, praised Dharavi (which he visited in 2003) for its “underlying, intuitive ‘grammar of design’ ” and “the timeless quality and resilience of vernacular settlements.” He predicted that “in a few years’ time such communities will be perceived as best equipped to face the challenges that confront us because they have built-in resilience and genuinely durable ways of living.”

In explaining how she unintentionally made “Duro” the eponymous name for a style of dress, Erin McKean tells a cogent story about where words come from:

Someone wants an easy way to refer to something, and grabs whatever’s close to hand. Other people with the same need pick up the same tool. If the word fits, people will use it.

Eric Calderwood thinks that while the network’s coverage is unquestionably biased, it’s not without merit.

But in a larger sense, Al-Jazeera’s graphic response to CNN-style “bloodless war journalism” is a stinging rebuke to the way we now see and talk about war in the United States. It suggests that bloodless coverage of war is the privilege of a country far from conflict. Al-Jazeera’s brand of news - you could call it “blood journalism” - takes war for what it is: a brutal loss of human life. The images they show put you in visceral contact with the violence of war in a way statistics never could.

From the department of absurd comparisons comes this:

The odds of landing a part-time job at department store operator Bealls Outlet Stores Inc. this holiday season are slimmer than getting into Harvard: It’s one out of every 45.

Don’t think the chances are any better at 7-Eleven. One California store received more than 100 applicants in a week and a half for jobs that pay $8.50 per hour - and the retailer doesn’t even usually hire holiday workers.

(via Tomorrow Museum)

Today, in the regularly-provacative Ideas section of the Boston Globe, lurks a piece to warm the hearts of “tax-and-spend liberals” (and will no doubt lead to at least one smug declaration of “That’s what I’ve said for years”). A sampling:

Lindert’s work surveyed a century of data across numerous countries and found that high taxes and social spending did not slow the growth of productivity or GDP. Statistically speaking, Lindert found no relationship between the level of social spending and economic growth. High tax nations like Norway grow rapidly and produce high standards of living. Even the income per hour of work in nations like France and Germany is equal to or even exceeds America’s.

Uncommon Knowledge highlights interesting facts about the Olympics. This one was new to me:

the disruptions in the host city - or at least the perception of disruptions - are actually a major boon to competing locales. In 2002, the year Utah hosted the Winter Olympics, counties with ski resorts in Colorado netted an additional $160 million in retail sales, according to sales-tax data.

This on isn’t surprising, but it’s still interesting:

Male athletes were seen as more composed and intelligent in victory, and less committed in defeat. Female athletes were seen as more courageous in victory, and weaker athletes in defeat. A similar pattern was found [in NBC’s coverage] with regard to nationality. Americans were seen as having more concentration, composure, commitment, and courage in victory, while non-Americans were granted more athletic skill. The authors note that “parallels between long-held racial stereotypes (e.g., blacks being ‘born’ athletes and whites being superior intellectually) may transfer in similar ways within the domain of nationalism.”

I wasn’t aware of the massive unpopularity of semicolons among male literary types; apparently only the effete are supposed to use them.

Ben McIntyre, writing in the Times of London a couple of months later, added to the collection of semicolon snubbers: Kurt Vonnegut called the marks “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King, said McIntyre, “wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon (though Truman Capote might). Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons.”

Shira Springer captures my hesitance to regard any sport as fair and clean, any athlete as above suspicion:

Instead of fully independent investigations, random drug tests, and cleansing of the record books, sports leagues and their stars are offering tightly controlled exercises in disclosure in which league executives, lawyers, and public-relations personnel still carefully dictate what becomes public and when. The seeming glut of available information - test results, reports, and press conferences - functions as part preemptive strike and part smokescreen, distracting fans from the growing concern that they can no longer trust what they see in competition or in record books.

Kevin Lewis offers five interesting tidbits from academic studies I’d not heard of. This one was most interesting to this chronically-unshaven male:

In line with previous research, perceptions of masculinity, dominance, aggression, maturity, and age all increased in proportion to facial hair. However, attractiveness was highest for light-stubble faces and lowest for clean-shaven and fully bearded faces. The authors note that this result could be due to contemporary fashion, the particular age preferences of the (university) women in the study, or stubble signaling a happy middle ground of masculinity.

The Big Picture has a great set about China’s recent “Great Wall 5” drills. Included is the already well-known snap of an armed SWAT team advancing on Segways.

The Boston Globe’s Ideas section recently featured this interesting idea: natural disaster may actually be an economic good for the affected country.

Rebuilding efforts serve as a short-term boost by attracting resources to a country, and the disasters themselves, by destroying old factories and old roads, airports, and bridges, allow new and more efficient public and private infrastructure to be built, forcing the transition to a sleeker, more productive economy in the long term.

“When something is destroyed you don’t necessarily rebuild the same thing that you had. You might use updated technology, you might do things more efficiently. It bumps you up,” says Mark Skidmore, an economics professor at Michigan State University. “Disasters help people think about things differently.”

But there is this cogent counter-argument:

“Over any reasonably relevant period of time, society is not made wealthier by destroying resources,” he adds. If it were, “Beirut should be one of the wealthiest places in the world.”

The Boston Globe ideas section has some interesting details about Americans’ beliefs about heaven and hell. For myself, I’d always thought each necessary for the existence of the other.

The Pew survey, significant for the breadth and depth made possible by its unusually large 35,000-person sample, found that 74 percent of Americans say they think there is a heaven, “where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded,” while just 59 percent think there is a hell, “where people who have led bad lives, and die without being sorry, are eternally punished.”

…there are peculiarly American characteristics to this emerging hell gap: an insistent optimism, perhaps a kind of cultural self-contentedness, and a tolerance born of diversity that makes damning the other more problematic.

… Mormons are the most likely to believe in heaven, but just average in their belief in hell. The biggest believers in hell are evangelical Protestants, African-American Protestants, and Muslims.

The Big Picture has some pictures of a phenomenon I’d never heard of.

Two years ago now, on 28 May 2006, gas company PT Lapindo Brantas exploring for gas in Sidoarjo, in East Java, Indonesia, drilled a borehole. At 5 AM, a secondary stage of drilling began and the drill string went about 9,300 feet down, after which the first small eruption of water, steam and a small amount of gas occurred at a location just southwest of the well. Several other eruptions followed over the next few days. The flow of hot mud has not ceased since.

Fourteen people have been killed and 30,000 people have been evacuated from the area. At least a dozen villages, with more than 10,000 homes have been destroyed while schools, offices and factories have also been wiped out and a major impact on the wider marine and coastal environment is expected.

Inspired by the now-defunct Life magazine, The Boston Globe has introduced a great section of high quality picture-stories on it’s website.

(via Waxy, who points to Kokogiak’s announcement)

A fascinating argument:

Presidential candidates, take note: Long before they made their way into the workings of modern government, the democratic tenets we hold so dear were used to great effect on pirate ships. Checks and balances. Social insurance. Freedom of expression. So Leeson, an economics professor at George Mason University, will argue in his upcoming book, “The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates.”

(via Freakonomics)