2. Feedback - Lake Merced MOU
3. Fire in California
4. Save the date: Oct 9 Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time
5. Ted Kipping potluck/slide show July 26
6. Stove that will save the world? July 31/solar showcase tour San Jose July 27
7. Urine charge: Pee on Earth Day
8. Parsing the Twitterverse (yawn)/Where housecats roam
9. Scientific American potpourri
10. Testosterone and high finance do not mix, so bring on the women
11. Last of the moguls: Rupert Murdoch
1. SaveMuni.com
PRESS CONFERENCE
Wednesday, July 27, 2011, 1:00 p.m.
St. Francis of Assisi Church
610 Vallejo St. (at Columbus Ave.), San Francisco
Central Subway Project Unraveling
Despite all the recent adverse news about the Central Subway Project, San Francisco officials have unaccountably decided to plow blindly ahead with a $246 million tunneling contract, which would immediately drain $57 million of scarce local transit funds from the citywide Muni System.
SaveMuni.com Board member Bob Feinbaum points out that “if either state or federal cost-cutters decide not to underwrite the project, San Francisco would wind up with a large hole in the ground, and some very expensive tunnel boring machines to unload on eBay”.
For the following reasons, recent Central Subway decisions by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) and San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFTA) make no sense:
1. On July 1, 2011, the San Francisco Civil Grand Jury issued a scathing report on the Central Subway, citing Muni’s financial and operating difficulties as strong evidence that the SFMTA is in no position to operate an ill-conceived, money-losing Subway. Here are two of the report’s many criticisms:
The Central Subway would result in the elimination of “direct connectivity from the T-Third line to the Muni Metro”.
With the Central Subway, “Riders not only lose the direct connections. They face ‘The Walk’. According to SFMTA, ‘to get from the Union Square/ Market Street Station to the Powell Street Muni Metro Station is about a thousand feet’.”
2. Governor Jerry Brown has just cut $ 27 million from State Proposition 1A allocations to the Central Subway. Another $34 million in Proposition 1A funds is potentially also on the chopping block. A State Proposition 1B allocation of $308 million could also be in jeopardy.
3. The House of Representatives is targeting pork barrel projects, threatening significant portions or even the entire New Starts program. SaveMuni.com Co-founder Howard Wong notes that without the full $983 million New Starts grant, the Central Subway project would “just drain state and local funds from the citywide Muni System”. He adds that the Grand Jury’s conclusion, ““Central Subway---Too Much Money for Too Little Benefit”, succinctly crystallizes the problem.
4. Opposition to the Central Subway in Chinatown and within the Asian community is growing. As San Francisco organizer David Tse puts it: “We are convinced that this [Central Subway] is more a developer’s dream than a transportation project. And they are using a flawed transportation analysis to make way for the wholesale alteration of everything along the route of the subway. If this project goes forward, I am especially worried over the irreversible impact on San Francisco’s historic and still vibrant Chinatown, where my sister and I grew up with many happy memories”.
5. On May 9, 2011, the 70,000 member Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club acknowledged new factors by passing a resolution encouraging the SFMTA to “pursue alternative uses of the state, regional and local funds programmed to the Central Subway but not yet spent”.
SaveMuni.com urges the City and County of San Francisco to pull the plug on the Central Subway.
By freeing and recovering existing state/ local funds and future savings in operating subsidies and capital renewals, over $800 million can be invested in the citywide Muni System---transforming transit corridors on Stockton Street, Geary Boulevard., Van Ness Avenue, Mission Street, Judah Street, Taraval Street, Third Street, Market Street……
Contacts:
Howard Wong, AIA
415 982-5055 wongaia(at)aol.com
Gerald Cauthen, PE
510 208-5441 Cautn1(at)aol.com
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2. Feedback
Jerry Cadagan:
Bless you and thank you, Jake, for keeping Lake Merced on the front burner. Apparently our efforts Tuesday night and subsequently have worked as this afternoon (Thursday, July 21) SFPUC put out an email saying that there would be another draft of the MOU circulated at some point and submission to the Commission would likely happen in September.
So, now is the time for folks who have hopes for improved management at the lake to let the SFPUC folks know that we want them to do what was intended by the Board of Supervisors back in January 2007 --- transfer back to SFPUC responsibility and the concomitant accountability for management at the lake, with Rec & Park continuing to run the golf course, the Natural Areas Program and not much else other than mowing the lawn.
Louise Lacey:
Jake
3. Help your local trout on Codornices Creek Saturday the 23rd
Wildcat (Canyon) Creek has trout, but it is trapped and not sent out to the bay. But I remember a few years ago watching them mate on the first day of Spring in the Tilden Botanic Garden! As far as I know they are still there.
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3. Fire in California
Each year, and for long periods of every year, fire can propagate somewhere everywhere. Humans ensured that ignition remained more or less constant. California nourished an intricate melange of native tribes, none of which, interestingly enough, practiced agriculture. Instead, with fire for plow, rake, and ax, they harvested the native flora and hunted the resident fauna. Fire use was most intense and the fires smallest near settlements, particularly abundant in grasslands, oak savannas, or ecotones of grass and chaparral, precisely those sites most amenable to anthropogenic burning. Some sites burned annually; others, as needed. Probably the most frequented mountains had their slopes dappled with chaparral and grass, the signature of an anthropogenic economy.
Colonizing Spaniards arrived in the eighteenth century, and found the native fire regime not to their liking...
[After the American acquisition and the Forest Reserve Act of 1891, programs] to control fire and grazing promptly appeared...To the attrition of fire that accompanied the disintegration of aboriginal and Hispanic society, the new colonists promoted active fire suppression...
Active suppression changed all this [the old pattern of smaller fires], much as levees and channelizing could eliminate nuisance floods but lead to more frequent large floods. Fire control could, by deferment, contain the wildfire menace for several decades...
Not everyone accepted fire control as necessary or practical. No less a figure than William Mulholland, architect of the Los Angeles water system, refused to send men to battle fires that raged in the mountains in 1908 and again in 1919. Big fires, he insisted, were "beyond the power of man to stop". Those big fires were dangerous, and putting them out was, over the long term, no less dangerous. It was better, Mulholland insisted, to "have a fire every year" that burned off a small plot than to wait several years "and have a big one denuding the whole watershed at once"...The greatest check on unrestricted fire exclusion, however, was simply the lack of tools, men, and money. That began to change during the New Deal, and the sense of limits--limits of any kind--appeared to vanish completely with World War II.
Stephen J. Pyne, World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth
“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” Mark Twain
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4. Save the date: October 9, 2 pm at San Francisco Public Library
Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time
The filmmakers Steve & Ann Dunsky presented their film to the California Native Plant Society on July 7, one of many presentations they will do in the Bay Area. The following is what I wrote them the following day:
I was deeply moved by your presentation to our chapter on our icon, Aldo Leopold. More than that, I was choked up and had a lump in my throat the entire presentation. What a great man, speaking truths about profound connections that most of us don't have the understanding to comprehend. (As I get older I use "us" and "them" less and less often, as I become aware of my own profound ignorance.) You did a beautiful job of acquiring and integrating a cornucopia of rich material, and the participation of Leopold's wife and his descendants added immeasurably. They were all chips off the old block, and kept his light-hearted spirit even at the times that were tinged with sadness or tragedy.
Thank you for presenting this. I do hope the film acquires a large audience. The message is too important for it not to.
For information, and nationwide opportunities to see the film:
http://www.greenfiremovie.com/
https://www.aldoleopold.org/greenfire/findshowing.php
"One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise. A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
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5. Ted Kipping pot luck/slide shows
4th Tuesday of the month at 7 pm (slide show at 8 pm) at the San Francisco County Fair Bldg, 9th Av & Lincoln Way in Golden Gate Park
Served by Muni bus lines #6, 43, 44, 66, 71, and the N-Judah Metro
July 26 Paul Donahue: The Brazilian Pantanal: Jaguars and Birds in the World's Largest Wetland
*Please bring a dish and beverage to serve 8 people
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6. From Acterra
The Stove That Will (Help) Save the World
Sunday, July 31, 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Acterra - 3921 East Bayshore Road, Palo Alto [map]
Three billion people worldwide cook over biomass fires. This practice burns enormous quantities of wood, leading to widespread deforestation and dangerous C02 emissions.
Join us for a presentation by Fred Colgan of the Aprovecho Research Center on some breakthrough cooking technologies. Fred is bringing super-efficient large stoves to refugee centers, schools, and orphanages around the world - dramatically improving lives of the world's poorest people while significantly reducing carbon emissions.
For more information and to RSVP, please contact Michael Closson at michaelc@acterra.org
(Save the world? Just wait until it gets bogged down in United Nations politics, such as Solar Cookers International has experienced with an even more efficient stove than this. Private donations fund it, not the UN. JS)
Solar Showcase Tour
Wednesday, July 27
6:00 pm - 8:30 pm
San Jose City Hall
200 East Santa Clara Street, San Jose [map]
Join others from Acterra on a special tour of the Solar Showcase across the street from San Jose City Hall on Wed., July 27 from 6:00 - 8:30 pm. An outdoor demonstration of 16 different types of solar energy, the showcase includes full size models of solar water heaters, residential and commercial applications for solar electricity, passive solar design on a model mini-house, thin film PV and more! For details, please visit the San Jose Green Vision website.
The tour lasts an hour and will start at 6:30, with socializing and refreshments afterwards. Carpools will leave from Acterra at 5:15 pm. Please RSVP to Deb Kramer at debk@acterra.org or (650) 962-9876 x353.
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7. http://liquidgoldbook.com
Pee On Earth Day is June 21 (Missed it? Awwh...)
Pee-er reviewed!
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8. Scientific American August 2011
Parsing the Twitterverse: New Algorithms Analyze Tweets
Smarter language processors are helping experts analyze millions of short-text messages from across the Internet
Illustration by Thomas Fuchs
Researchers have been trolling Twitter for insights into the human condition since shortly after the site launched in 2006. In aggregate, the service provides a vast database of what people are doing, thinking and feeling. But the research tools at scientists’ disposal are highly imperfect. Keyword searches, for example, return many hits but offer a poor sense of overall trends.
When computer scientist James H. Martin of the University of Colorado at Boulder searched for tweets about the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, he found 14 million. “You can’t hire grad students to read them all,” he says. Researchers need a more automated approach.
...Although Twitter-trawling technology is not yet ready to deploy, as a field, “it’s getting there pretty quickly,” Martin says. Once it matures, researchers should have access to an unprecedented trove of data about human behavior. For the first time in history, “watercooler talk” is recorded and publicly available, Ellen says. “A hundred years ago we just didn’t know what everybody was thinking.”
(Uh, researchers, did it ever occur to you that you may find nothing of value in knowing what people are thinking all the time? Sometimes I think western civilization will go out not with a bang but a whimper--it will trivialize itself out of existence.)
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Where House Cats Roam
Researchers compare the mysterious wanderings of pet and stray felines
Anyone who has ever owned an outdoor cat knows that it tends to disappear for hours, sometimes days, at a time. where do cats go when they are lurking out of sight? The question is of interest not just to pet owners but also to conservation scientists who study the impact of free-roaming cats on wildlife populations. Scientists...recently attached radio transmitters to the adjustable collars of 18 pet and 24 feral cats in southeastern Champaign-Urbana and tracked the animals by truck and on foot for more than one year. The research, published in the Journal of Wildlife Management, shows that pet cats maintain a rather lazy existence: they spent 80% of their time resting. They devoted another 17% to low-activity pursuits such as grooming and only 3% to high-activity pursuits such as hunting. Unowned cats rested just 62% of the time and spent 14%, mostly at night, being highly active. Feral cats roamed far more widely than researchers had expected: up to 1,351 acres. In contrast, pet cats stayed within an average of about five acres of home.
The small cats' behavior is similar to that of their larger cousins. "Maintaining a ranging area is a very intrinsic behavior to cats," says Alan Rabinowitz, CEO of the conservation organization Panthera. Like small cats, wild cats like to stay close to humans for easier access to food. Jaguars in Latin America, for example, slink quietly through massive stretches of human land. It's part of a cat's nature to live on the interface of wild and human-inhabited land.
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9. Scientific American
OBSERVATIONS: Nuclear Fission Confirmed as Source of More than Half of Earth's Heat
Radioactive decay powers the movement of Earth's continents and crust
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=13&ms=MzY4NDY1MzQS1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTA2OTE5NTE4S0&mt=1&rt=0
SCIENCE SUSHI: Mythbusting 101: Organic Farming > Conventional Agriculture
Ten years ago, Certified Organic didn’t exist in the U.S. Yet in 2010, a mere eight years after USDA’s regulations officially went into effect, organic foods and beverages made $26.7 billion
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=64&ms=MzY4NDY1MzQS1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTA2OTE5NTE4S0&mt=1&rt=0
OBSERVATIONS: Advanced CO2 Capture Project Abandoned Due to "Uncertain" U.S. Climate Policy
Utility American Electric Power has decided not to proceed with plans to expand CO2 capture and storage efforts at its Mountaineer power plant in West Virginia
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=25&ms=MzY4NDY1MzQS1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTA2OTE5NTE4S0&mt=1&rt=0
EXTINCTION COUNTDOWN: Want to Conserve Bats? There's an App for That
A new app from the Zoological Society of London and the Bat Conservation Trust offers a chance to get involved in citizen science and to help conserve bat populations
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=23&ms=MzY4NDY1MzQS1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTA2OTE5NTE4S0&mt=1&rt=0
EXPEDITIONS: Squid Studies: Saving the Sea of Cortez? We all need to help
Experiments continue day and all night
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=28&ms=MzY4NDY1MzQS1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTA2OTE5NTE4S0&mt=1&rt=0
CLIMATEWIRE: Colorado River Faces Flood and Drought--Becoming Less Reliable?
The river provides water for the western U.S. but faces significant challenges under climate change
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=33&ms=MzY4NDY1MzQS1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTA2OTE5NTE4S0&mt=1&rt=0
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(These are few highlights from a long article in the Observer. Want to see testosterone in action? If the Congress doesn't agree on a debt-limit raising by Monday morning there'll be a testosterone orgy on Wall Street. JS)
10. Testosterone and high finance do not mix: so bring on the women
Gender inequality has been an issue in the City for years, but now the new science of 'neuroeconomics' is proving the point beyond doubt: hormonally-driven young men should not be left alone in charge of our finances…
Panic hits the trading floor in October 2008. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
For the past few weeks I've had two books by my bed, both of which offer a first draft of what history may well judge the most significant event of our times: the 2008 financial crash. Read together, they are about as close as we might come to a closing chapter of The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. As literature, one of them – the final report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission of the US Treasury – doesn't always make for easy reading: there are far too many nameless villains for a start. And, quite pointedly, there is not a heroine in sight. Reading the report I became preoccupied by, among other things – the fairy steps from millions to billions to trillions, say – the overwhelming maleness of the world described. The words "she", "woman" or "her" do not appear once in its 662 pages. It is a book, like most historical tragedies, written about the follies and hubris of men.
...The second thing that Coates noticed was even more revelatory to him. "I noticed that women did not buy into the dotcom bubble at all," he says. "You couldn't find one who did, hardly. And that seemed like a pretty cool fact to me."
With this cool fact in mind, Coates began splitting his time between his trading desk and the Rockefeller University in Manhattan, which is perhaps the world's leading institute for the study of brain chemicals. There he started to become interested in steroids, and in particular something called "the winner effect".
...Neuroeconomics: Six things that the science of decision-making reveals
■ If groups of young men are shown pornographic pictures of women and then asked to choose between safe and risky investments, compared with men shown non-pornographic pictures they choose far riskier portfolios.
■ Our brains are designed to seek out novelty, but too much information can overwhelm them; we are generally better at assessing risk when listening to Bach than with the chatter of TV news.
■ Men's brains tend to shut down after they have proposed a deal, waiting for the response. Scans show that women brains continue to be active, analysing whether they have done the right thing.
■ Humans are the only animals that can delay gratification, a function of the prefrontal cortex. However, the prefrontal cortex only matures after the age of 30, and later in men than women. Before that, we are more likely to seek immediate gratification.
■ Our brains reward social interaction with the release of a chemical called oxytocin. It makes us feel good when we follow the herd. Stock market bubbles are one likely result of this.
■ Our brains are wired for human oxytocin-mediated empathy (or HOME). We are biologically stimulated to love (or hate) what is most familiar to us. We are built to form attachments, to value what we own more than what we do not own. This fact skews the rationality of all our investment decisions.
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(G'bye.)
11. Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation
Last of the moguls
Rupert Murdoch is the last member of a dying breed. Time for him to step back
Jul 21st 2011 The Economist
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