Mark Kleiman and company is now a group blog with a new location (although the old url should still get you there). Adjust your links/blogroll accordingly.
Same Facts
by John Cole| 2 Comments
This post is in: Blogospheric Navel-Gazing
Same Facts
Open Thread
* National Review editorial on Abramoff: (via)
But this is, in its essence, a Republican scandal, and any attempt to portray it otherwise is a misdirection.
* Excellent commentary on global warming by Stirling Newberry.
* BoingBoing readers claim that the troll-killing ‘privacy law‘ may not be such a big deal.
Talk amongst yourselves.
What’s Killing New Orleans
Interesting piece in the City Journal discussing one of the real roadblocks to the rebuilding of New Orleans- murder:
New Orleans has two more pressing—and much simpler—problems that need fixing right now.
The first is obvious: “Gulf Opportunity Zone” or no, businesses won’t invest in New Orleans again, and workers won’t live there again, unless the government protects the city with the best flood barriers that technology and money can provide. This job is hard—but civil engineering actually works, unlike the social engineering that Bush has invited with his lament about urban Southern poverty.
The second job is less obvious. New Orleans’s immutable civic shame, before and after Katrina, is not racism, poverty, or inequality, but murder—a culture of murder so vicious and so pervasive that it terrorizes and numbs the whole city.
In 2003, New Orleans’s murder rate was nearly eight times the national average—and since then, murder has increased. In 2002 and 2003, New Orleans had the highest per capita city homicide rate in the United States, with 59 people killed per year per 100,000 citizens—compared to New York City’s seven. New Orleans is a New York with nearly 5,000 murders a year—an unlivable place. The city’s economy has sputtered over the past generation partly because local and state officials have failed to do the most elementary job of government: to secure the personal safety of citizens.
I had no idea New Orleans was that dangerous, although truth be told, in the parts of New Orleans that you and I would visit, it probably isn’t that dangerous. This is probably just more brown people killing brown people, so you and I never hear about it.
And while we are at it, make sure you read this lucid John Aravosis piece on Washington, D.C.:
This is your nation’s capital. A crime-ridden cesspool.
***The problem? We have a mayor who cares more about baseball than crime, and we have a police chief who likes to tell us it’s hard work keeping a big city safe. Yeah, we know it’s hard work, but why does most every other city in the nation always do better than us, even when their inner-city and socio-economic problems are just as bad if not worse than ours?
It’s sad, and its pitiful. But it’s only a matter of time before all the fools who bought half a million dollar condos in horrible parts of the city start to realize that just because half your block is rich yuppies doesn’t make it safe to walk around at night and doesn’t stop people from getting murdered on your corner – in fact, you’re quite tempting targets. When that happens, the mayor and the chief are in for a rude awakening, as are the fools who spent that much money on condos in the middle of a ghetto.
Yesterday, when I saw the news of Rosenbaum’s murder, I was joking with Tim that I was going to start screaming ‘Quagmire!’ and ‘Withdraw our troops’ just to tweak some of the commentariat. Then I realized, there simply isn’t any way to make what is happening in some of our cities funny. That we have places like New Orleans and Washington, DC, and other urban cesspools where crime is rampant, is such a collossal failure of leadership, willpower, and imagination at every damned level that it isn’t possible to joke about it.
The Amazing Rise And Fall Of A Stem Cell King
As a scientist, you can win a Nobel prize in three basic ways. Some discoveries fall into a researcher’s lap, unexpectedly, when they think they’re working on something else. To cite a classic example, in 1928 Alexander Fleming discovered pennicillin when a mysterious fungus killed off bacteria that he was using for influenza research. Sometimes the prize rewards a researcher who attacks a known topic but does so with a flair and persistence that singlehandedly gives the topic clarity and new life. I had the good fortune to recently see a talk by an excellent recent example of this in the person of Linda Buck, whose work on the way that our olfactory receptors (smell and pheromones) work earned her the 2004 Nobel in physiology and medicine. You could say that Max Planck and Albert Einstein had a similar effect on the then-hidebound field of Newtonian physics.
Nobel prizes reward a third, and I would say distinct type of work – the race by huge, well-funded labs to solve extremely high-profile problems. In this case everybody in science knows that the first person to reach finish line X, whether it be the first vaccine, the molecular structure of DNA or the sequence of the human genome, has a Nobel prize teed up and waiting. The pressure can be enormous, the money flows like water and the top people get used to reporters camped out on their front porch. The pressure and the profile of these contests can create an almost unbearable urge to fudge, to cut corners and to mislead the competition in people already inclined towards that sort of thing. A case in point being the amazing, meteoric rise and the meteoric flame-out of the stem-cell researcher Dr. Hwang Woo Suk. Read the story on the flip.
The Amazing Rise And Fall Of A Stem Cell KingPost + Comments (17)
Wow- Plame Update
This is pretty amazing:
Lawyers for NBC News reporter Tim Russert suspected in the spring of 2004 that his testimony could snare Vice President Cheney’s top aide, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, in a lie and Russert resisted testifying at the time about private conversations with Libby, according to court papers released yesterday.
Russert was aware that a special prosecutor probing the leak of a CIA operative’s name knew of his summer 2003 telephone conversation with Libby, and that Libby had released him from any promise of confidentiality. But Russert, the Washington bureau chief for NBC News and host of “Meet the Press,” and his attorneys argued in previously sealed court filings in June 2004 that he should not have to tell a grand jury about that conversation, because it would harm Russert’s relationship with other sources.
Forget about what he knew. Forget about his refusing to testify or resisting testifying. What pisses me off is that he conducted dozens of shows and who knows how many interviews while pretending to know nothing about what was going on.
Someone convene a panel on blogger ethics. Tom Maguire is going to be an interesting read today.
Alito Open Thread
Here is an open thread to discuss the Alito confirmation hearings, which are already underway.
Mining Safety
Interesting piece in the NY Times about mine safety. A snippet that made me see red:
But new technologies that might improve working conditions often enter mining slowly. Consider the oxygen canister carried by most miners. Weighing six pounds, it provides an hour’s worth of oxygen through a chemical reaction. The canisters have not changed substantially in more than 20 years.
An hour might have been enough to allow the Sago miners to reach fresh air, but the miners did not know that. Had their canisters delivered more air, they might have risked a two-mile crawl instead of retreating and waiting for rescuers who arrived too late.
Last year, researchers at Wheeling Jesuit University in Wheeling, W.Va., did a brief technology survey to determine if these devices could be improved to deliver more oxygen in a smaller, lighter container.
“What we found is that there are technologies that can be used to improve the system to do all three,” said Michelle Dougherty, a director at the university’s national technology transfer center. “I can’t answer why no one in the private sector has thought of this before.”
Bruce Watzman, vice president of safety, health and human resources at the National Mining Association, said it was not the responsibility of coal operators to develop new safety equipment. “We’re not in the self-rescuer manufacturing business,” Mr. Watzman said.
Something tells me that is the wrong attitude to display shortly after a bunch of men have suffocated in one of your mines. Not to mention it is just obscene. The article also answered a question I had last week:
Communications systems in underground mines are also often aging and rudimentary. Most mines have just a few telephones attached to cables – identical to systems in use for decades. In disasters, a crew may be trapped far from a phone.
A few mines have antennas that allow radio communication by any miner from any place in a mine. Every miner at the Willow Creek mine in Price, Utah, escaped a major fire in November 1998 in part because many crew members had hand-held radios and were alerted almost immediately, Mr. Oppegard said.
Seems like these are entirely doable and common-sense things that should be done.