The Wild Geese

Every now and then, I feel a little sorry for myself that I rarely go to exotic places and see exotic flora and fauna. And then all it takes to snap me out of that mood is to take look around with fresh eyes.

There’s a good hundred or so Canadian geese hanging out at my office building. I can’t really say I strike fear into their hearts; when I walk around the building I can get within five feet or so of some of them before they seem to care.

Now Canadian geese are utterly common in Colorado. Still, last week I was taken aback by just how weird and amazing they really are. There’s the color pattern – striking, and pretty, in my opinion. Some weird features: webbed feet; one eye on each side of the head, and that strange, long, undulating neck. Not only that, but they can actually fly. When you think about it, that really is something unexpected and to be amazed at. If you lived in a land where all the birds were flightless and then one day saw a V-wing of geese land in front of you, it would blow your mind.

Urban Wildlife Watching

In the past month: my wife and daughter saw a fox that climbed the fence into our back yard. A bald eagle flew over my car as I drove down the Boulder Turnpike. Standing on the top floor of my work office building, I looked down two small flights of geese coming in from different directions as they landed on the front lawn. Very cool.

Econ 101

I decided it would be good to do some formal reading in economics. I avoided it in college since (i) it sounded boring and stuffy, (ii) it sounded dangerously real-world and money-grubbing, things I was trying to avoid at the time, and (iii) it seemed kind of pointless. It looked like all economists did were to criticize past, failed, policies, which were always made upon recommendations of economists at the time. That, or they engaged in polemical debates where the economics theories were purely constructs built up to support preconceived political ideas.

But lately, the more I read the more it sounds like economists do some cool kinds of analysis and ask interesting questions. Plus, they use a lot of math, which can only be a good thing. So I’ve been thinking it might be kind of fun to read some econ textbooks and see what they have to say. Of course, I might decide that points (i) and (iii) are indeed the case. But we’ll see … given that I have time to get into it.

So I ordered some econ books from half.com, and without even reading them, I was already treated to my first econ lesson! That lesson being: college students get hosed. Well, I actually already knew that, but it was still something to see. I bought five books: a textbook each for econ 101, micro, and macro, and then Schaum’s outlines for micro and macro. The textbooks were by a widely used author, and were published in 2000, 2004, and 2004. The outlines were published in 1990 and 1992. Price? Seventy-five cents each for the textbooks, about three bucks for the outlines. Total of $8.50, and shipping brought it to $19.50.

List price for the textbooks on Amazon: $142, $122, and $133. The Schaum’s are $18 each, bringing the grand total to $397. On the plus side, Amazon would provide free shipping for that order. Talk about depreciation; a book you bought for over a hundred bucks two years ago is now worth approximately nothing. Of course everyone knows what’s going on; the book publishers release new editions, invalidating (somehow) the old, and their captive market has to play along. The Schaum’s hold their value much better since people buy them for content, not to match version numbers.

I guess I should give a shout-out to the anonymous college kids who just subsidized my econ library – thanks!

Social Differences and Language Development

A few statistics from the book How Babies Talk.

Words spoken to a child in an average hour at home:

• professional class child – 2153 words
• working-class child – 1251
• welfare child - 616

The quality of the conversation differed: were the parents interacting positively with the child, or were they just telling him/her not to do something?

• professional class child – 32 affirmatives and 5 prohibitions
• working-class child – 12 affirmatives, 7 prohibitions
• welfare child – 5 affirmatives, 11 prohibitions

Reading before first grade:
The typical middle-class child entering first grade has had 1000-1700 hours of one-on-one picture book reading time. For low-income family, that number is 25.

Books in the house:
47% of public-aid preschoolers had no alphabet books in the home, compared to 3% of children in professional families.

I would love to know the reasons behind the differences. Are welfare children talked to less because their parents have less time with them, or have less energy because they work more jobs? Does the number of children in a household matter? It would be interesting to follow up and find out what’s going on here. They cite a number of sources; the main book citation is for Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children
by Hart and Risley.

Book Notes : How Babies Talk

Notes on How Babies Talk: The Mgic and Mystery of Language in the First Three Years of Life
Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, 1999
Read-skimmed November-December 2006

The book discusses how children learn to speak, from before birth to three years old. Describes current research in the field, with many examples of experiments that show that children do or do not understand different things at different points in their growth.

It’s all plainly described, in jargon-free language, but I had a hard time focussing and reading this book. I slogged through the first seventy pages before giving up and skimming the rest (which was, admittedly, more interesting).

Too bad I couldn’t read it, since there was lots of interesting content. It really is amazing that a person can learn to speak in three years, given that you start from scratch in so many ways. I mean, you don’t even know what objects are when you’re born. Somehow they are able to listen to uninterrupted syllable streams and eventually be able to decode them and create their own.

I’m not sure why I found it so hard to read. One thing that hurt was that too many experiments were discussed. The treatment of each was fine: here’s what the researcher was trying to figure out; there’s the technique; there’s the results. Good scientific method all around. But it took too much energy to read that critically – did the experiment really prove what it was supposed to, or were there better, alternate, explanations? Was the design correct? That took too much thinking; not that there was enough detail given to really answer those questions anyways. The experiments were certainly interesting and in some cases ingenious, but I would have preferred leaving them out.

Some interesting points:

At all stages of growth, children understand much much more than they can communicate. Newborns can make out their parents voices, and they can tell the difference between their parents’ language and other language. It’s not long before they recognize their own name.

There is a “vocabulary spurt” that usually happens around eighteen months. Here’s an experiment to do with your child. Place two objects on the table, one of which is recognizable by the child (so that you can ask for it by name), and one which isn’t. Ask for the non-recognizable object by name. Before the vocabulary spurt, the child doesn’t know what you’re talking about, and can’t figure it out. After the spurt, the child has the logic to know that it’s not the object he/she knows about, so it must be the other one. Not only does the child now give you the right object, but he/she has incidentally learned the name of that object.

Which sounds can be pronounced when:

p, m, h, n, w, b	first two years
k, g, d, t	two – four years
r, l	three – six years
f, y	2.5 – 4 years
ch, sh, z, j, v	3.5 – 8 years

There were some very interesting items on class-based differences in children's environments, but I will put those in the following post.

Book Notes : Powerdown

Notes on Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World
Richard Heinberg, 2004
Read November 2006

After a while, all these peak oik doomster books start to run together. They all quote the same few sources, they all say pretty much the same thing, and they all tend to be insufficiently self-critical. This book looms large in the Peak Oil doomster canon, but honestly, I kind of snoozed through it. Admittedly, that was partly because I was sleep-deprived when I read it. It covers the same ground as The Long Emergency, but was not as hysterical, and therefore, not as entertaining as that text, which so far is turning out to be the ne plus ultra of doomster books.

So this book is the same old story – energy needs are increasing; we’re running out of oil; the alternatives aren’t going to be adequaate. All this leads up to some meandering thoughts about preserving our technical knowledge and limiting growth (or actually, reducing population). But it’s all very vague.

Here’s one point the book made that I liked. Individual energy conservation is a good thing. But if you practice it, it takes, well, personal energy to do, and in a sense reduces your power to change the world. Which isn’t good.

Part of the book is marred by the insistence that Bush and cronies engineered the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the book, but maybe it’s meant to filter out any critical readers early on.

Ok, that’s a little harsh. I’m generally sympathetic to the concerns of oil depletion and overpopulation. But it was hard for me to take this book seriously.

A more detailed review of this book can be found at http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2006_07_09_peakoildebunked_archive.html. Good site, by the way.

Book Notes: Blood and Oil

Notes on Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum

Michael Klare, 2004
Read November-December 2006

Here’s the book in a nutshell: The Bush/Cheney administration decided in 2001 that the United States should meet her ongoing oil needs by ensuring access to oil supplies. That includes expanding domestic production, but those supplies are limited. So we must act diplomatically and militarily where necessary to get our oil. Unfortunately, the current and future big oil locations are in unstable areas, and fighting is likely to be involved.

… and that’s about it. And I already knew all that, or at least figured it was probably the case. So the book wasn’t very exciting. All in all, it was fine; well researched; solidly written. But not much new if you follow this stuff, and not a compelling read. The lurid title is not representative of the book.

Some selected points:

The 2001 National Energy Policy document that Cheney’s team put together listed these locations as good alternatives to the Persian Gulf:
· Mexico
· Venezuela
· Colombia
· Russia
· Azerbaijan
· Kazakhstan
· Nigeria
· Angola

You wouldn’t exactly call any of those countries stable. Development in most of those will be dogged by political uncertainty, crime, and corruption. Klare cites that in the single year of 2000, Nigeria’s state-owned oil company lost over four billion dollars due to crime and corruption. Unfortunately, oil development is correlated with increasing violence and corruption, as it increases economic inequality and decreases stability.

The most interesting chapter was the penultimate one, Geopolitics Reborn, which discusses American, Russian, and Chinese moves around the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea regions. All three countries are building alliances with and pouring arms into unstable countries. Klare doesn’t predict that superpower warfare will break out, but he doesn’t like it. China's dog in the Persian Gulf hunt is that if the U.S. controls (implicitly or explicitly) the flow of oil from that area to China, then they have leverage to apply to Taiwan or other points of disagreement.

The last chapter details what Klare thinks we should do:

• move towards a policy of autonomy and integrity


• autonomy – we can’t be held hostage by a single oil supplier


• integrity – we don’t provide aid and arms to countries that don’t meet our ideals


• tighten efficiency standards to reduce oil consumption


• develop energy alternatives, funded by a tax increase on gasoline

Sounds good to me.

The Hobbit and Peter Jackson

Hey, speaking of individuals making humongous salaries, it amazes me that New Line Cinema did not hire Peter Jackson to direct the upcoming Hobbit movie. I don’t know the details, and I’m not interested enough to find them out, but how can you not make that deal? If Jackson shoots the movie, it will get done, it will be done well, and pull in what, $500 million bucks, whereas if it’s given to anyone else, all bets are off. Don’t get me wrong; some other director may well do just fine, but why take the risk when you have a sure thing?