cities. physics. food. environment. fatherhood.

Via Ethicurean, a Wall Street Journal article about a shamefully under-appreciated and under-publicized competition… intercollegiate meat judging. I had no opportunity for this at my undergraduate institution, and even though my graduate institution has an Animal Science program, I think it focuses on dairy instead of meat. I do wonder if anyone runs meat-judging competition pools? Or if meat judging is ever televised?

My graduate school was primarily a hockey school, although this year it has made the NCAA basketball Tournament for the first time in decades. In fact, my graduate institution plays my brother’s graduate institution in the first round (I don’t predict mine to win), and one of my grad school friends has his undergrad, graduate, and (present) faculty schools all in the tournament. (Take a look, though, at Chad Orzel’s bracket based on the strength of physics graduate programs: Cornell would win!)
While in grad school, I didn’t really follow the basketball team, and I don’t think I even went to a single game. But even though I don’t really, nor have I ever really followed college basketball, I will say that March Madness is the greatest sporting event in the world. Sixty-four games and they all matter.

My brother has, for a number of years, run the only March Madness pool that I participate in. Compared to the rest of my family at least (and sometimes his other friends as well) I tend to do rather well: I’ve never won but I have placed second twice. My general strategy is to pay as little attention to college basketball as possible during the regular season. This works: in our family, at least, there does seem to be an inverse correlation between the number of games watched and performance in the pool. Once, in graduate school, I tried to pick a bracket by flipping a coin, and it was absolutely dismal. I turn to two strategies, then, to fill out my brackets.

Statistics

There are two strategies with statistical bracket-picking methods. The first is to try find the characteristics (such as average winning margin or number of times the coach has been to the tourney) that historically have led to success in tournaments, and to see which of the current teams best meet the characteristics of historically successful teams. Pete Tiernan is the highest-profile guru of this sort of work and he’s put together a set of phenomenological models that predict success at all levels of the tournament, from choosing a final four to picking the 6-11 upsets. Of course, I’m too cheap to actually pay the $20 to buy full access to his research, nor do I want to buy ESPN insider to read his in-depth articles there. And the big question here is whether the methods actually work: compared with all the brackets on ESPN’s tourney challenge, a model (he has about a dozen) that hits the high 90’s pecentiles one year very often hits the 30 percentiles the next. So it may like picking winning lotto numbers: the winners don’t win because of the strength of the model, but because if there are enough entrants, one will be the best.

The second statistical approach is to construct models of team skill, and either rank the teams or put them head-to-head. An amazing amount of free analysis is available from Ken Pomeroy and I’m sure there are other sources as well.

For bracket construction, it’s actually pretty boring to just use somebody else’s ranking list to fill out a bracket. I’ve put together one bracket that’s a sort of half-hearted attempt to use Tiernan’s guidelines (at least the ones you can read for free) combined with Pomeroy’s Pythag numbers. What I discovered is that, more often than not, the simple guidelines don’t give clear-cut results, so doing this thoroughly requires sifting through an awful lot of data, which itself requires a good deal of effort to find. And although I’m a numerically-minded person, my interest does wane after a while.

Pundits

The method I like the most for bracket-picking is to see what all the sports pundits have to say. This year, at least, 5 writers for CNNSI and 5 writers for CBS Sports put their entire brackets up soon after Selection Sunday, and ESPN had 5 pundits with their Elite Eight picks. (CBS Sports has added two more brackets that I didn’t look at.) Sports pundits watch an awful lot of college basketball. To be a national-level sports pundit, you have to pay attention to all the conferences and a wide swath of teams. (This is where I think basketball enthusiasts stumble: they generally have their favorite teams and conferences upon which they focus their attention, and as a result overlook and underestimate the rest of the teams.)

What was interesting to me is the variation in pundit picks. All 5 of the CNNSI writers picked UCLA to win the tournament and none of the ESPN pundits did. All of the CNN pundits pick 13-seed Siena to upset Vanderbilt, while only 1 CBS pundit did. Four of five CNNSI pick 11th-seed St. Joseph’s to beat Oklahoma, while only one CBS did, while 3 CBS writers picked 11th-seeded Marquette to beat Kentucky, while only 1 CNNSI writer did. Out of all ten full brackets, there was only one prediction of a 14-over-3-seed upset: CBS writer Brian De Los Santos picked Georgia over Xavier.

In addition to sending them to my brother, I posted my brackets to the Washington Post Tourney Tracker: Search for thm_A_exp for the pundit-derived bracket, thm_C_stats for the statistics-derived bracket, and thm_B_pyth for the (boring to construct) bracket filled out strictly based on Pomeroy’s pythag statistic. I’m curious how each of these strategies fares in a wider pool of competition.

This year, I only went to the first three days of the March Meeting; extended trips are less feasible now with a baby at home. The trade show and posters are only Monday–Wednesday, and a fair number of attendees–particularly college faculty with classes to teach–stay for only a few days. So Thursday and Friday the conference is sort of a ghost town, but one thing I’ve heard from quite a few people this year is that it looks like several interesting sessions are scheduled for Thursday and Friday.

To read up on some of the physics presented at the March Meeting, a physics blogger’s account starts here. Physics journalists are blogging from the meeting here. Another attendee’s take is here. (I’ll update periodically if I find new blogged accounts.)
Photographing Talks
One phenomenon that’s becoming more common, and which is at least slightly disturbing, is for audience members to use digital cameras to photograph all the slides that a speaker presents. It’s obnoxious when the camera makes faux-shutter sounds, and it’s really obnoxious when the flash fires. When the flash is used, it’s also a sign that the photographer is an idiot, because the flash will make the image of the projected slide come out worse: physicists should be able to figure this out. If the photographs are unobtrusive, I haven’t quite figured out what the ethics of the situation are. I’d think if you really wanted someone’s viewgraphs, or data, you should just send them an email and ask: I’d share my data and graphs if someone asked for them.

Viewgraphs
I saw 39 talks this March Meeting, and only one used viewgraphs, and that was after the speaker attempted to use the computer but had some difficulty getting the computer to cooperate with the projector. The APS recommends that speakers have viewgraphs as backups; most don’t, but this speaker did, and the talk otherwise went off without a hitch. One out of 39 is 2.6%, which is a smaller fraction than last year (but not significantly so).

Microphones
One piece of technology that number of speakers decided to do without was the (supplied) wireless microphone, which is a real shame. Perhaps the folks up front can hear the speaker fine, but there’s always a background rustling of papers and backpacks and schedule books, and people are talking outside the room, and if the doors are open this really filters in, and if the doors are closed then they keep opening and closing as people straggle in. It’s really hard to hear an un-miked speaker in the back of the room.

Seating
Because of the 39 parallel sessions, in which you wish you could be two or three places at once, people do lots of session-to-session shuffling. It’s always awkward to squeeze in to the open seats mid-session. The solution to this: more aisle seats! Instead of having two columns of seats, with an aisle down the middle and sometimes aisles down the sides, the APS should have the convention center arrange the seats to be at most 4 across, in 3–5 columns, so that everyone who wants an aisle seat–which is everyone who’s shuffling between sessions–could get one. It would cut down on the capacity a little, but although there are some overflowing sessions, there are plenty that are sparsely attended. To this end, the APS should try a little harder to predict the attendance at the sessions, and put the popular ones in the large rooms. I know this is hard, but isn’t this the sort of problem that physicists should be able to tackle?

New Orleans Convention Center
The March Meeting isn’t like a trade show, where you need lots of floor space, preferably contiguous, for all the vendors to set up their booths. Rather, we need lots and lots of meeting rooms. Convention centers, as a rule, have both, but some do the meeting rooms better than others. The shorter the distances between rooms, the better, because at the March Meeting it is common to try to shuffle between different rooms during a session. In New Orleans, there were two giant rooms on the first floor, and the rest were on the second floor. Most of these were along one long linear corridor, but a handful of rooms were in a parallel corridor on the other side of the center. To get between these corridors you went through an elevated walkway that overlooked the trade show floor. The convention center is along the Mississippi river. Between the center and the river are active railroad tracks. In the rooms on the river side, one could clearly hear the horns of the trains that used this track. I suppose this isn’t a problem inside a noisy trade show floor, but when you’re trying to listen to a talk, it makes you wonder why the architect didn’t specify more robust soundproofing on the walls that face the river.

The trade show:

And the posters:

The PAR 124 lives!
Perhaps the most exciting development, from my perspective, was the unveiling of the Signal Recovery 7124 Lock-In amplifier, so new it doesn’t appear on their website. Lock-in amplifiers are one of the most useful pieces of equipment in experimental physics research: They perform frequency selective signal detection and amplification, showing the amplitude and phase that appears on a signal in relation to a reference signal. They are tremendously valuable for processing noisy signals.

Years ago, a company called Princeton Applied Research (PAR) produced a truly amazing lock-in, the PAR 124. Built with all analog electronics, and mostly from discrete components, it was very sensitive, very quiet, and had been a staple of low-temperature research labs for decades. Contemporary lock-ins are, as a rule, digital, making use of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) to process the input signals, and do more with them than ever possible with analog electronics. But the digitization process itself is noisy, sending a sort of switching noise back up the input line to the experiment. This added noise and energy is very much unwanted in low-temperature experiments, so low-temperature labs kept PAR 124s around and sought them out from second-hand equipment dealers.

(I’ve used them in many of the mechanical oscillator projects I’ve worked on, but for a slightly different reason. Even when you use an external signal for the reference channel of the 124, the internal oscillator locks to your external reference and then this internal oscillator is used for signal processing. Because of the way this locking is accomplished, the 124 can be used to implement a phase-locked loop, by driving the mechanical oscillator with the reference signal output.)

Princeton Applied Research was bought by EG&G, who was then bought by Perkin-Elmer, then became Ametek, and who finally decided to call themselves Signal Recovery. And whenever they showed up at a trade show, such as at the March Meeting, low temperature physicists (including myself) would always ask if the PAR 124 would ever come back. “We’re working on it,” was always the answer.

And so they were. This March Meeting, they had on display the 7124 lock-in. It uses an all-analog front end, to which you connect your experimental signal. It’s connected by a 5-meter fiber optic cable to a digital DSP lock-in, so you can take advantage of all the advanced features of a DSP lock-in without the digitizing noise getting back to your sample. If I had a spare $15000 sitting around, I might buy one.

I am now in New Orleans, for the 2008 American Physical Society March Meeting. This is a huge conference, lasting 5 days and attended by perhaps 7000 physicists. Most attendees give some sort of presentation, the bulk of which are contributed 10-minute talks; this is the first year that I’m attending without giving a presentation. This meeting only covers what is known as condensed matter physics–the folks doing particle, nuclear, and atomic physics have their own meetings.

Each day, there are three large time blocks of talks, beginning at 8am, 11:15am, and 2:30pm (although Friday only has the first two blocks). Blocks are assigned letters: A, B, and D for Monday, and continuing alphabetically until X and Y for Friday. Poster Sessions and special evening sessions also get their own letters; year-to-year, the assignment of the letters varies. Within each block, individual sessions are numbered, with numbers corresponding to the rooms used. If a room is not used one block, the number will be skipped: this year there are sessions A33 and A35 but no A34; there are, however, sessions P34 (on Wednesday) and V34 (Thursday), both in room 226 of the Convention Center.

Invited talks last 30 minutes, with 6 minutes for questions, contributed talks last 10 minutes with 2 minutes for questions. Talks within each session, of course, are grouped around a common topic. Each block runs for a full three hours and, for an entirely contributed session, can have as many as 15 talks. If you stayed for a full session and then went to the beginning of the next session, you’d get all of a 15 minute break between them.

To accommodate several thousand talks during the 14 3-hour blocks, the conference has, this year, as many as 39 parallel sessions running; last year there were as many as 43 parallel sessions. All total, this year, there are 518 sessions of talks. For each block, sessions 1 through 7 have 4 or 5 invited talks and no contributed talks; other sessions will have zero to two invited talks and as many as 15 contributed talks. All together, there are 729 invited talks this year in the regular sessions, and 5193 contributed talks.

Of course, some popular topics have more than 15 talks, and in this case, there can be multiple sessions with the same title, usually in the same room, with roman numerals appended. This year, in what must be some sort of record for such numbered sessions, there are 16 sessions on “Carbon Nanotubes and Related Materials.” Session 29 of every single block is devoted to this, and blocks B and D double up with Session 30. In these 16 sessions, there are 15 invited talks and 195 contributed talks.

The posters are treated as an afterthought. There’s no time set aside to look at posters; poster authors are instructed to be present during the third time block for each of the three poster sessions, which are, as a result, very lightly attended. Nevertheless, there are 1032 posters to be presented. Some physics bloggers have written about the poster-versus-talk question, and although people in other scientific fields can have a useful discussion about the relative merits of each, the culture of the March Meeting, which highly values the talk, seems unlikely to change.

Since the APS lets anyone who wishes to give a talk do so, any prestige associated from giving a talk is purely illusory (unless it’s necessary to convince the bureaucrats at one’s institution to let you go to the meeting in the first place). The prestige comes only from being sorted into a prestigious session, and getting a large audience. But, in the case with really popular topics, such as the aforementioned “Carbon Nanotubes and Related Materials” series, you still can’t see all of it, and even if you maximized your attendance, at 197 talks, you wouldn’t be able to see talks on any other topic, nor visit the trade show. And I’d imagine that a good number of those 197 talks wouldn’t actually be worth watching.

As far as I know, few other scientific organizations with conferences this big let anyone who wants to give a talk: more commonly, the only talks are invited presentations and the contributed sessions are posters, and there is a set time and some incentive (such as free beer) to attend the posters. I wouldn’t mind seeing the APS adopt this system. Certainly, one advantage of giving a talk is that it doesn’t have to be finished before you leave for the airport. But with 5299 talks, and the possibility to see at most 210 contributed or 70 invited talks, means there’s going to be stuff scheduled at the same time that you want to see. I’ve even known a session chair to be scheduled to give a talk in a different session as the one s/he is chairing! In the nanotubes case, it would probably be easier to scan through the 183 contributed papers as posters, looking at the titles and figures, and decide on the few you’d like to read in-depth, than to make it through 197 talks.

Posters help at the other end of the popularity scale as well, those people working in less popular fields. The attendance at talks can be quite varied, especially for those doing less trendy physics. I’ve been in sessions where the audience is about 6 people, usually four people waiting for their turn to talk and the other two labmates of the speaker. If there are only a handful of people interested in one particular topic, a poster session is more conducive to mutual discussion of each presentation than a handful of 10-minute talks in a sparsely attended session that’s only loosely bound together around a broad theme. And you can certainly fit more substance into a poster than into a 10-minute talk. I know there are several people (my graduate advisor, for example) who think that the March Meeting is so large, and that 10 minute talks are so insubstantial, that the March Meeting is not worth bothering with at all.

But for now, talks it is. Even for 10 minute talks, these days the overwhelming majority are given with laptops and Powerpoint. In 2005, it seemed, there was an equal balance between laptops and viewgraphs. In 2006, I definitely felt in the minority as a viewgraph-user, and I think for my session I was the first to use the overhead projector. Last year, I finally broke down and used a laptop (although apparently I had a problem with the display resolution). I kept tally: last year I saw 20 invited talks, 58 contributed talks, and only 3 used viewgraphs. Of course, with such a packed schedule there really can be no tolerance for slipping from the schedule, so those whose laptops refuse to behave are essentially out of luck. In fact, last year I did see a presenter use his entire 12 alloted minutes trying to re-boot his laptop and get the external display to work. (There is an AV ready room, in which presenters are encouraged to make sure their settings are correct.)

The posters are held in the same space as the trade show, where scientific equipment vendors have booths. The vendors (and their wares) tend to be the same from year to year. Perhaps the most interesting vendors are the scientific publishers, who have for sale all the new physics books of the year. I have a bookbuying habit, and usually pick up three or four new books at the March Meeting, but so far I’ve yet to actually read a book I’ve bought. The vendors hand out disappointingly little swag. And there is no conference swag: all you get when you register is a badge and the schedule book.

One soon realizes that the additional activities: receptions, special sessions, and the like, are also concurrently scheduled, and tend to stay at the same time slots from year to year. The only event I regularly attend is the alumni reunion for my graduate program, which is always held on Tuesday evening.

My strategy, for choosing what to see, is first to look at sessions in my research area. Then, I look for talks given by people I know personally, and also talks by people who I know to give interesting talks. Finally, I look through the lists of invited talks to see which have interesting titles. I might look over the abstracts for the talks or sessions that look interesting, but it’s hard to look through many abstracts beforehand.

To accommodate the large number of presentations, contributed abstracts are restricted to 1300 characters, about a paragraph. Until a few years ago, these were printed and bound and distributed to all conference attendees as two volumes, known as the Bulletin of the American Physical Society (BAPS), each of which resembled a phone book. To cut down on the bulk, they tried in recent years to simply give everyone CD-ROMs while having terminals with an electronic version of the BAPS are set up throughout the conference site. Now, we just get a bound volume with abstract titles; it resembles the phone book of a small city.

Of course now one can also download the program contents beforehand, and in order to facilitate my own planning, I wrote a few tcl scripts to parse the list of sessions and the list of invited talks and to make more readable forms of these. (If they didn’t require so much hand-tweaking each year, I’d post them–anyone who wants them, though, I’d be happy to share.) It’s in part from these scripts that I was able to get the numbers I quote here.

So what’s in it for me? Perhaps the most important thing I get out of the March Meeting is a chance to see what’s happening in a broad swath of contemporary condensed matter physics. The talks are as hit and miss as talks anywhere, and even if some of the same information could be gleaned by reading journals, I simply don’t have the time to read many journal articles outside my immediate field of interest. Of course, meetings are also good chances to catch up with grad school friends who are now dispersed at institutions across the country. But no matter what I end up doing, I find that the March Meeting always rejuvenates my enthusiasm for physics, and provides a motivational boost to continue my research back in the lab.

There are three books that form the foundation for my urban Weltanschauung, and I hope to write of each. The first of these, for me, was James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere, a polemic examination of the state of our built environment. Written before global warming or peak oil commanded the attention they do today, Kunstler focused on the dehumanizing aesthetics of postwar development, particularly suburbia.

I’d long felt an uneasiness about the suburbs: I’d had a general notion that total reliance on cars must be bad for the environment, and I also knew that the suburbs appeared dull and boring at best, but I could never quite put a finger on precisely what was wrong with them. Kunstler’s book was a clarion illumination of the problems of suburbia; he put into amusingly acerbic words precisely what I had felt.

Kunstler wrote two more books about the built form: Home from Nowhere, and The City in Mind, and he maintains a curmudgeonly website, with his delightful eyesore of the month. Kunstler is, by trade, a writer, and so his work is generally very well crafted. In the past few years he has mostly been concerned with Peak Oil and the complete catastrophe it could be for the American Way of Life, and his book on the subject, The Long Emergency, isn’t quite as captivating as his other works: in large part because the depth of research and analysis that went into his other books just isn’t there.

As someone who listens to several podcasts, I was excited to learn that he is now doing a weekly podcast of his own: Kunstlercast. The first episode concerns (chain) drugstores, and their proliferation. It’s worth listening to.

When we bought our house, four years ago, we had most of the carpet and linoleum ripped up, revealing beautiful oak floors underneath, which we had refinished. The only room in which we did not do this was the kitchen, because we (and the floor refinisher I hired) were unsure whether there were good floors in the kitchen to be refinished. We’re updating the kitchen piecemeal: we repainted the walls, in two phases, and with much help from my father, we repainted the kitchen cabinets as well. We put open shelving on one wall, and fashioned a counter from Metro shelving and bamboo butcher block.

So finally it was time to address the floors, which meant ripping out the existing vinyl and seeing if we had wood to refinish, or whether we’d need to buy some new floor covering. My friend rg agreed to help with the ripping out, and as it turns out, we removed six layers of older flooring to expose a finish-able pine floor.

To begin with, the vinyl that was our floor:

(It isn’t this brown–this is an artifact of the lighting.) But it was old, and dirty. Underneath this was a layer of square tiles:

Underneath this was a layer of eighth-inch thick plywood. The plywood was attached with several dozen wood screws: finding and extracting these was perhaps the most time consuming part of the whole process.

Here are the nails that held it down:

Below the plywood was the most hideous of the layers, a yellow vinyl:

Beneath the yellow layer, and tightly bound to it, was a layer of off-white square tiles:

Below this was what I believe was the original kitchen floor: blue linoleum.

If we had wanted to “restore” the house to its 1941 look, this blue linoleum is what we’d be after, but we’re not.

The blue, white, and yellow layers were all very strongly attached to one another and mostly came up as a whole, to reveal the wood floor covered with the remnants of a black adhesive:

This is the stage rg and I got to Sunday. Fortunately, the guy who finished my other floors said his crew would be available today, Wednesday, so they came over and went to work. After sanding the floors, their method is to apply a coat of shellac, which dries in about a half an hour, and then a coat of water-based polyurethane, which does need to cure overnight. This is certainly expedient, compared with other schemes that use multiple coats. Opinions vary as to the ultimate durability of multiple coats versus a single coat, but I do appreciate getting nice floors after only one day’s work.

In the case of the kitchen, the floors were pine, not oak, and were never finished. The pine was never intended to be the top layer–I suspect it was simply the cheapest substrate for the blue linoleum available at the time. So the pieces weren’t chosen for aesthetics, and in addition to a variation in coloring of the wood, there’s also nearly seventy years of kitchen abuse to the unfinished wood. This all adds up to a sort of rustic look, much more so than with any of the other floors in the house.

For Presidents’ Day, the Washington Post reports: banks are closed, courts are closed, local government offices are closed, schools are closed, libraries are closed. There is no trash pickup on Presidents’ Day, and Sunday traffic and parking regulations are in effect. 

But the lotteries have regular drawings! Can’t stop the lottery for a holiday.

The lottery is a tax on hopelessness, at a dollar a prayer. The church stopped such selling of indulgences in the sixteenth century, that our governments do so today is shameful.

I earned my “I voted” sticker today by going to vote in the “Potomac Primary,” the day in which DC, MD, and VA all held their presidential primaries.

Perhaps the most apt description of the primary contests so far is that while Democrats wish we could have an “All of the above” choice, the Republicans wish for “None of the above.”  A rare combination of political energy and deep political networks has given us a Democratic primary season in which my vote actually means something; the nomination is still very much in play.

As has happened everywhere else, turnout has been much higher than anyone can remember for the Democratic side. The Post is reporting that the high turnout led to chaos at the polls, such that an hour and a half after the polls have closed we still have no results. But a statistic that warms my heart, which captures a story that’s been repeated in our region and nationwide: In Virginia, a state not known to be blue, Hillary Clinton, finishing second with only 36% of the Democratic vote, still had more votes than either John McCain or Mike Huckabee. Barack Obama got 20% more votes than were cast for all the Republicans combined.

I wish to see a Democratic presidential victory as much as anyone. The turnout is only one facet of a whole country yearning for change: the breathtaking political energy is fueled by an army of volunteers, many making their first foray into political work. But not me: of course there’s the baby at home, which means I don’t have any free time (although on the other hand, it’s his future that’s at stake here). I discovered two years ago that I really, really don’t like politics.

Or perhaps I should say, I really, really don’t like the stuff that matters in politics. Of course I stay up later than I should watching election results, and plugging them into spreadsheets. A fair share of my websurfing time is spent reading DailyKos. But my own personal transformation from informed voter to political junkie doesn’t make a bit of difference to any election outcome. Neither would it matter if I filled this blog, or any other, with posts about this candidate or that one.

I did do a lot of work on a political campaign two years ago, helping to re-elect the most progressive member of the DC City Council. I learned, doing this, that I don’t like making political phone calls from a voter list. I don’t like knocking on doors, even if the candidate is doing all the talking. I hate confrontational political messages, especially in multi-candidate forums. I don’t like asking people to sign nominating petitions. I hate the uncomfortable amalgam of cordiality and confrontation that happens when the opponent is campaigning at the same place my candidate is, especially when my candidate shows up late.
But this, I’ve learned, is the stuff that matters. There’s not even much need for mundane tasks like envelope stuffing or flyer labeling: that’s all automated now. All together there isn’t much need for behind-the-scenes work (at least in city council elections), not in comparison to the monumental task of connecting with voters.

The only thing I enjoy¹ is handing out flyers at Metro stations during rush hour. A stack of flyers and a direct tagline and even the people supporting the other candidate are in too much of a hurry to argue with you.

So, although I’m somewhat sympathetic to the notion that those who care deeply about the results of an election ought to be on the ground working for their candidates, I don’t know that I’ll get involved in this presidential contest.

1. I might do okay at fundraising, but as a Federal employee, I’m prohibited by the Hatch Act from asking anyone to make any contribution to any partisan political candidate, even the DC city council, nor can I even have my name listed on an announcement for a fund-raising event. [↩]

I can’t quite decide what to make of the Save the Planet Protest: if it weren’t for the fact that there have been full-page ads, featuring the same text as from the webpage, in Express (the free tabloid version of the Washington Post that’s given away at Metro stops), it’d be easy to say that it’s just a joke, and it would probably be so inconsequential that I wouldn’t blog about it. But there on page 17 of the Express is the ad, and I can’t quite tell whether it is high snark, an over-the-top practical joke, or misguided sincerity.

The idea is (but you miss so much without reading the original wording): A guy named Lee is organizing a protest in front of the Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring, MD, 12 hours a day (9am–9pm), for 9 days (15–23 February), because their environmental-themed programming isn’t working. That is, environmental problems are still getting worse, and the text is ambiguous as to whether he means that the failure of the environment to improve even after Discovery Channel programming is evidence that Discovery Channel programming is defective, or that Discovery Channel environmental programming is misguided and focused on ineffective and insufficient initiatives.

There are legitimate points that could be made here: that the Discovery Channel tries to market itself as green, with a LEED-Silver certified headquarters and a new PlanetGreen channel, but is in fact offering only feel-good greenwash programming and continues to produce anti-environmental programming, like Future Weapons. I don’t watch the Discovery Channel, but I’m in general sympathetic to the viewpoint that mass media portrayals of environmental issues overemphasize the inconsequential. Heck, even non-profit environmental groups are guilty of this.

Of course, if he is sincere, Lee’s tactics are way off the mark.

It’s easy to poke fun at Lee’s writing style, although if this is a joke, then it’s a very well-crafted parody of vacuous sincerity. But I also have a bit of admiration for the writing, because writing something like that would be very difficult for me. I am a slow writer, and am often astonished when I go back and look at my blog posts and realize how short they really are, compared with the time it took me to write them. If you ever watch me try to write (although I hope you don’t–I don’t consider writing to be a spectator sport), you’ll notice that typing only comes in short bursts. I remember using the computer labs at college, watching the people around me type furiously and continuously as they wrote up their papers, and wondering how they could get the words to flow so quickly. There have been times when I wished I could have just sat down and dashed off a repetitive, rambling, semi-coherent piece that filled up some space. Sometimes quantity has a quality of its own.

I’ve been paying attention to food more or less since I moved to DC. Throughout grad school, I didn’t really take the time to cook or think about food (except at Thanksgiving). I’ve had a latent interest in cooking since college, but never had done much about it. I started cooking more frequently living in DC, and I made enough money to eat, occasionally, at nice restaurants, and I discovered Cooks Illustrated magazine, and my wife and some of our friends were also interested in food, and the Washington Post has a better food section than the Ithaca Journal, and we had the opportunity to join a CSA and shop at farmers’ markets, so everything sort of fell into place.

Without a doubt, Cooks Illustrated has been the most influential component of the “how can I make good food” question. For the “what role do our food choices have in our relationship with the natural world” question, though, the most influential voice has been that of Michael Pollan.

He’s written two books about food: The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food. I’ve only read the first–it’s a lucid, alarming, deeply thoughtful, hopeful, yet non-judgemental examination of American food systems, structured by tracing the sources of the components of four meals that Pollan prepares. (See a review here.) Pollan has been one of the leading voices in the nascent revolution in food awareness, drumming up orders of magnitude more interest from non-farming states in the Farm Bill than ever before, and inspiring websites like The Ethicurean.

With that, I present and recommend two recent interviews in which he talks about In Defense of Food.

Interview on CBC’s The Current radio program.

Segment on Sierra Club radio.