Still on hiatus

So I said last week that I’d post an update today on the status of my little blogging vacation, and I’ve decided that I will not be resuming posting on any kind of regular schedule until February. I’ll probably write something short from time to time, or maybe post lists of links I found interesting just to keep a fresh forum for people to have their own discussions, but for the most part, I’m going to continue enjoying my much needed break, and spend my evenings watching The Wire instead of Council meetings.

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Wise men and fools

By Dogtown Commoner | Posted at 8:57 pm, December 19th, 2007 | Topic: Uncategorized

In a very interesting article in last week’s New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell recounts the following anecdote (the “WISC” test is a widely-used kind of I.Q. test):

The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories.

While Gladwell is citing the research to help rebut the arguments of “I.Q fundamentalists” who have come out of the woodwork yet again after recent comments by James Watson, the Kpelle story is also a cautionary tale that can be applied more generally: we are fools ourselves if we judge other people without first understanding why they behave the way they do. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t judge other people, only that wisdom requires judgments based on understanding, rather than ignorance. A trite point, perhaps, but one that is all too often forgotten when we assume that those with whom we disagree must therefore be evil or stupid. Sometimes those with whom we disagree are evil or stupid, but sometimes they just see the world in a different way that would be worth our while to comprehend.

Bad news at the gas pump is good news for mass transit

By Dogtown Commoner | Posted at 1:20 pm, December 16th, 2007 | Topic: oakland, economics, the press

Contrary to the widespread myth that Americans will never get out of their cars, behavior does seem to be changing as people start to accept that high gas prices are here to stay. From the Oakland Tribune:

Commuters are turning to public transportation in record numbers as gasoline prices seem to have gotten comfortable at or above $3 a gallon.

Unlike past surges in transit ridership, this one doesn’t have the help of a major freeway disruption like the Labor Day weekend closure of the Bay Bridge in August or the collapse of a MacArthur Maze ramp in April.

On Nov. 14 and Dec. 7, BART had its second and third biggest days, with 382,865 and 381,499 people inserting tickets on their way out of the system, respectively.

“This year’s going to be our biggest year ever,” said BART spokesman Linton Johnson, adding it would be on the heels of breaking the barrier of 100 million trips for the system’s last fiscal year, which ended June 30.

The jump has been noticed at other transit agencies, too, especially those that carry longer-distance commuters who have the choice of driving.

Caltrain’s ridership jumped 9.3 percent last month over November 2006. The Gilroy-to-San Francisco route hit a record for that month of 36,454 rides. The Capitol Corridor, which runs from the Sierra foothills to Sacramento, Oakland and San Jose, was up 13 percent from the previous November, to 136,650 riders for the month. Ferry ridership was also rising.

The fact that many people actually will switch from automobile to mass transit given the right combination of incentives and disincentives has been pointed out here several times before, but unlike the previous occasions when the switch was caused by highway or bridge closures, the trend outlined above seems to be driven only by high gasoline prices and perhaps growing awareness of the environmental benefits of public transportation compared to car commuting.

Oddly, the author of the above Tribune article, transportation reporter Erik N. Nelson, doesn’t mention that BART recently announced that it is increasing fares more than 5% starting next month. If, as the figures cited above suggest, people’s transportation choices are guided to some degree by rational cost/benefit analyses, rather than warm and fuzzy attachment to their cars, then you would think that an imminent hike in BART fares would be worth mentioning. I hear people complain all the time that BART is too expensive to make it worth giving up the convenience of their cars, and I would rather see BART pursue increased revenue by further boosting ridership instead of by hiking fares. Thankfully, BART’s fare hike is being accompanied by increased service, so there is reason for some optimism that the disincentive created by the higher prices will be offset by the allure of more frequent trains.

“A Montclair home at a Hillcrest price”

By Dogtown Commoner | Posted at 10:20 pm, December 12th, 2007 | Topic: oakland, economics

That’s an enviable problem to have:

OAKLAND — In mid-October, Dan Rascher and his wife bought a $1.4 million home in Upper Rockridge so their child could gain entrance to Hillcrest, Oakland’s most prestigious public school.

Last week, they began to doubt their investment. A proposed boundary shift, prompted by a population boom and overcrowding at Hillcrest, would make Montclair Elementary — a well-regarded, yet less exclusive school nearby — the family’s new school.

“It was really like a kick in the stomach,” said Rascher, who said no one informed him about the ongoing enrollment squeeze when he made the offer on his home. Although Montclair is a fine school, he said, “We didn’t think we were going to buy a Montclair home at a Hillcrest price.”

Was there a funeral service too?

By Dogtown Commoner | Posted at 7:29 pm, December 8th, 2007 | Topic: environment, oakland

I like trees. I really do. I’ve even marvelled at the wondrous environmental, social and emotional benefits of trees on this blog. But when it comes to tree appreciation, it seems that I’m just a two-bit amateur compared to some:

Meanwhile, Oakland Makeshift Memorials continues to document the tragedy of Oakland’s slain victims (slain human victims, that is). And the deforestation of the Amazon basin continues at the rate of roughly one Jamaica (or 6 Alameda counties) per year.

Some free advice

By Dogtown Commoner | Posted at 8:50 pm, December 5th, 2007 | Topic: oakland, Uncategorized

Here’s some unsolicited advice: If you’re considering getting married, you should probably think hard about the decision. If the person you are considering marrying is a convicted murderer and rapist, you should probably think extra hard about that decision. If the person is a convicted murderer and rapist and has also changed his name from Jesse Crisp to Jesus Jihad, then — just my two cents here, mind you — you probably shouldn’t think about marrying them at all. Here’s how the Oakland Tribune summarizes the background of Mr. Jihad, who will soon face trial for stabbing his wife to death and then severely wounding her sister and a 15-year-old relative in July:

Jihad was sentenced in 1973 to a life behind bars for the murder of the sailor in Alameda. But he was paroled in 1987 and changed his name from Jesse Crisp to Jesus Jihad.

About six years later, Jihad was convicted of raping his 19-year-old step-daughter in Berkeley and sentenced to 19 years in jail. Once again, however, he was released early and placed on parole after serving a decade in prison.

Police say he met Hendricks about three years ago and they were married for about two years.

Can someone remind me why it’s not legal for one law-abiding and nonviolent man to marry another law-abiding and nonviolent man, while it’s perfectly okay for a murderer to get married again after being convicted of raping his stepdaughter?

The Oprah Bowl

By Dogtown Commoner | Posted at 7:38 pm, December 5th, 2007 | Topic: politics

From the New York Times’ political blog, the Caucus:

How big is Oprah in South Carolina?

Barack Obama’s campaign has just moved its Oprah event on Sunday from an arena in Columbia seating 18,000 to a football stadium with a capacity of more than 80,000.

Tickets, which are free, went quickly on Monday, when they were first available, and the campaign had to shut down its distribution system. Now, the campaign says, tickets aren’t even necessary, although it hopes people will RSVP through its Web site.

I wonder what the record attendance for a campaign event is.

Resisting a Siege Mentality

By Dogtown Commoner | Posted at 3:39 pm, December 1st, 2007 | Topic: cities, new york, oakland

After a woman was robbed at gunpoint while walking home on Wesley Ave. near MacArthur Blvd this past week, signs have been posted on telephone poles alerting residents to the incident and offering tips for staying safe. It’s great to see Oakland residents getting involved in neighborhood safety efforts, but one piece of advice really jumped out: “Always Stay In Home After Dark.” Always? No more going out to dinner or to a movie? No more going to the local bar to watch a Warriors game with friends?

More seriously, even granting that the safety tip was not meant to be taken so literally, I have very mixed feelings about this piece of advice. It’s understandable that people want to avoid face-to-face encounters with the muzzle of a gun, and far be it from me to tell people they should walk around desolate streets after dark on principle, but on the other hand, ceding Oakland’s public spaces to criminals after the sun sets (that means 4:50 pm today) doesn’t seem like a solution either.

As Becks at Living in the O was reminded recently on a trip to DC, and as has been discussed here before, neighborhoods feel much safer and more walkable not only when there are police visible, but also when other pedestrians are around. During many years of living in New York without a car, I never once — no matter how late at night, or what neighborhood I was in — felt as exposed as I feel walking around Oakland after dark, simply because there were always other people walking around too. Of course New York City is an extreme case, given its density, its comprehensive and efficient public transit system, and its low car-ownership, and as much as I might fantasize about it sometimes, it’s unrealistic to think that Oakland will ever be as amenable to a carless lifestyle as New York.

Oakland does have some neighborhoods, however, which are close to BART, restaurants, bars, movie theaters, grocery stores and other amenities. Many residents of downtown, Temescal, Rockridge, and the neighborhoods surrounding Lake Merritt are able to get around fine without cars, and many car-owners would also appreciate being able to walk to dinner and back without feeling that they were putting themselves at risk. Rather than telling people to hide inside their homes after dark, should we be encouraging people to gather together some friends and go out for an evening stroll instead?

Eating globally

By Dogtown Commoner | Posted at 11:13 pm, November 13th, 2007 | Topic: environment, language

You may have heard that the New Oxford American Dictionary has named ‘locavore,’ meaning a person who only eats food grown or raised locally, as its word of the year. These sorts of awards from dictionary publishers, or the American Dialect Society, seem to pop up a few times a year, and they usually get some attention in the news for about a day before people forget all about them. So it would be silly to make a big deal out of it, but if these word awards mean anything, they’re a sign that a phenomenon has reached a tipping point and gone from marginal to mainstream. As the Oxford University Press’s blog notes in the announcement:

The past year saw the popularization of a trend in using locally grown ingredients, taking advantage of seasonally available foodstuffs that can be bought and prepared without the need for extra preservatives.

The “locavore” movement encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food, arguing that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locavores also shun supermarket offerings as an environmentally friendly measure, since shipping food over long distances often requires more fuel for transportation.

“The word ‘locavore’ shows how food-lovers can enjoy what they eat while still appreciating the impact they have on the environment,” said Ben Zimmer, editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press. “It’s significant in that it brings together eating and ecology in a new way.”

Along with the word ‘locavore,’ of course, another sign of the times is the success of recent books such as Michael Pollan’s great Omnivore’s Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which extol the virtues –environmental, social, and health-related — of eating local. The bay area, with its year-round growing season, its environmental activism, and its love of food, is naturally in the vanguard. They say that all politics is local, but in most American supermarkets, all food is global. As the environmental movement works to make people aware of how individual choices about food and transportation are connected to global problems of climate change and energy supplies, people need to realize that in one sense, eating locally is eating globally. because eating locally can be a piece of the solution to global problems.

I have to admit that I’m not very fond of the word ‘locavore’. To me, a locavore sounds more like a train-eating monster than a shopper at the neighborhood farmer’s market, but if the brief attention paid to this announcement makes more people aware of the growing local food movement, then who am I to complain about the aesthetics of the word? The irony in all this, of course, is that “eating local” is nothing new — it’s how the overwhelming majority of people have eaten for most of human history. Eating food from across the country, or across the world, is what should seem bizarre.

“Watch what you eat” isn’t just dieting advice anymore

By Dogtown Commoner | Posted at 11:16 pm, November 7th, 2007 | Topic: Uncategorized

Behold the geniuses keeping us safe from terrorism:

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.

A check of federal court records in California did not reveal any prosecutions developed from falafel trails.

Full story here.

A new concept: thinking ahead about energy

By Dogtown Commoner | Posted at 2:00 am, November 7th, 2007 | Topic: environment, cities, economics

This is good news:

The Berkeley City Council has given the green light on a new green initiative: a solar power loan program that would be the first of its kind in the nation.

The council unanimously approved a concept put forth by the mayor’s office that would loan individual property owners the up-front cost of installing solar panels; a fee that costs $20,000-30,000 depending on the size of the home.

Solar power isn’t a solution to all our energy problems, but programs like Berkeley’s are a step in the right direction — that is to say, programs like Berkeley’s are a step away from coal and petroleum as our main energy sources. Yes, solar panels are expensive, but we need to re-think what we mean when we talk about the cost of energy. Cost comparisons shouldn’t just involve the price of solar panels versus the price of one’s regular monthly electric bill. There are other costs associated with coal-based electricity that don’t appear on a monthly bill — such as the costs of dealing with air pollution, global warming, and other consequences of our carbon-based power sources. These are long-term costs that are shared widely among the population and future generations, and therefore these costs aren’t included in monthly bills, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Berkeley’s proposal isn’t only good policy because low-interest loans will enable some environmentally-minded homeowners to install solar panels who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford the upfront costs. It’s also good policy because it recognizes that individual homeowners making personal cost-benefit analyses have little incentive to shell out a lot of money for solar panels. The cost of solar panels is borne by individuals, while the true costs of coal and oil are borne by all of us, and future generations. By fronting the money for solar panels with low-interest loans, Berkeley would be giving its residents an incentive to make cost-benefit analyses that include long-term, shared costs which will never be reflected in one homeowner’s monthly electric bill.

The reality is that almost all individuals will make decisions based on rational economic self-interest. Who can blame them? That’s why it is so important for politicians — whose job it is to look out for the community at large — to think beyond the daily price of gasoline and electricity, and start implementing innovative policies that will help deal with ALL the costs — present and future — of our marriage to fossil fuels.

Seeing the world anew

By Dogtown Commoner | Posted at 4:43 pm, November 3rd, 2007 | Topic: art

I happened to stumble upon the photos of a Flickr user called hey mr glen, and they are so good that I feel compelled to re-post some of them here (as permitted by his creative commons license at Flickr). His sensitivities to color, geometry and serendipity are wonderful. His photographs cause viewers to see the world afresh, which is one hallmark of a good artist:

Some of hey mr glen’s photos are candid street shots that show an exceptional alertness to fleeting moments in the life of a city. Here are two taken in San Francisco:

Other photos are nicely-framed shots of architecture that offer a new perspective on buildings that have been photographed a million times before, like this shot of the Transamerica pyramid:

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