“A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants a shade tree under which he knows full well he will never sit.”
The value of good sanitation
From the NY Times, Poor Sanitation in India May Afflict Well-Fed Children With Malnutrition:
[A]n emerging body of scientific studies suggest that … many of the 162 million … children under the age of 5 in the world who are malnourished are suffering less a lack of food than poor sanitation.
Like almost everyone else in their village, Vivek and his family have no toilet, and the district where they live has the highest concentration of people who defecate outdoors. As a result, children are exposed to a bacterial brew that often sickens them, leaving them unable to attain a healthy body weight no matter how much food they eat.
“These children’s bodies divert energy and nutrients away from growth and brain development to prioritize infection-fighting survival,” said Jean Humphrey, a professor of human nutrition at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “When this happens during the first two years of life, children become stunted. What’s particularly disturbing is that the lost height and intelligence are permanent.”
Thought for the Day: 16 July 2014
John Smelser, A Personal View on Sustainable Gardening and Going Green
Excerpts from John Smelser’s post on the Missouri Botanical Garden website, A Personal View on Sustainable Gardening and Going Green:
Compost or mulch-mow lawn clippings
Americans toss approximately 32-36 million TONS of lawn clippings into landfills during the course of a single growing season. We do this even though lawn clippings are a terrific source of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium; fertilizer elements essential to the maintenance of a healthy lawn… You can save a great deal of money and a great deal of space in your landfill by throwing all those lawn clippings into a compost pile instead of the garbage. If you don’t want to manage a compost pile, you can use a mulching mower to shred the material finely enough to leave in the lawn itself… Using a mulching mower would amount to applying hundreds of pounds of fertilizer-rich material to your lawn each growing season… Contrary to all those myths you have heard, the immediate recycling of lawn clippings into the lawn itself does not contribute to thatch. Lawn clippings consist of 75% water content. They decompose readily and add nothing more than nutrients to the soil. Thatch is a build-up of shoots and stems and, in some cases, roots; not grass clippings.
Recommended reading: Charles Mann, 1491
I read Charles Mann’s “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus” when it came out in 2005. Good book. I was thinking the other day that I should read it again.
Thought for the Day: 14 July 2014
Bruce Springsteen wrote “Hungry Heart” for The Ramones.
(I’m trying to imagine it. I think it would’ve worked.)
Weekly Digest – July 13, 2014 (Mid-Year Review)
I’ve been on vacation for the past week and left the laptop at home so no list of new articles this week. Instead, here’s a (relatively) short list of pieces from the year to date which I think are worth reading again – or reading for the first time if you haven’t already:
- Zadie Smith, Elegy for a Country’s Seasons
- Kerry Emanuel, MIT Climate Scientist Responds on Disaster Costs And Climate Change
- Rabett Run, The [West Antarctic Ice Sheet] and Resilience
- Clara Jeffrey’s interview with Matt Taibbi, The Man Behind the Vampire Squid: An Interview with Matt Taibbi
- Sarah Scoville, Reflection: Visions of Home
- Alyssa Battistoni, Alive in the Sunshine
Weekly Digest – July 6, 2014
Must Read
- Andrew Gelman, “The great advantage of the model-based over the ad hoc approach, it seems to me, is that at any given time we know what we are doing.”
- Jared Bernstein, The Risk of Insular Wonkiness
- Joseph Stiglitz, The Myth of America’s Golden Age: What growing up in Gary, Indiana, taught me about inequality
Should Read/Listen
- Sarah Kliff, What is single-payer health care?
- Danielle Kurtzleben, What does GDP measure? – Everything you need to know about GDP
- On Point with Tom Ashbrook, Private Stocks And ‘Dark Pools’ In American Finance
- Jim Tankersley and Jeff Guo, Congrats, America. You have less economic opportunity than you did in 1970
- John Nichols, Presidential Prospect or Not, Elizabeth Warren Has a Lesson for Democrats
Wrong.
(The original working title for this post was “Supposed Seasoned Veteran Makes Rookie Mistake”.)
I needed educate myself on how people retrieve water vapor column from satellite-based spectral measurements. I found what I was looking for – see, e.g., The MODIS Near-IR Water Vapor Algorithm and more recent versions of that document. I also encountered this, IR Expert Speaks Out After 40 Years Of Silence : “IT’S THE WATER VAPOR STUPID and not the CO2″. If you’re not intimately familiar with the details of the science being discussed the “It’s the water vapor, stupid!” argument sounds very informed, very sensible. But if you do understand the science… not so much.
Norman Mailer with Charlie Rose ca. 2003
NB: This interview was conducted during the run-up to the Iraq War.