[gallery] Jeannine Mosley made a Menger sponge out of business cards.
There’s a current problem in biomedical research,” says American biochemist Robert Lefkowitz, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. “The emphasis is on doing things which are not risky. To have a grant proposal funded, you have to propose something and then present what is called preliminary data, which is basically evidence that you’ve already done what you’re proposing to do. If there’s any risk involved, then your proposal won’t be funded. So the entire system tends to encourage not particularly creative research, relatively descriptive and incremental changes which are incremental advances which you are certain to make but not change things very much.
Is it uncharitable to want a book that achieves so much to do more? Perhaps. Taken on its own terms, “The Human Age” is a dazzling achievement: immensely readable, lively, polymathic, audacious. But as the Anthropocene becomes a defining paradigm of our time, it matters how we frame the challenges ahead. It’s easy to agree with Ackerman’s assessment that “a warmer world won’t be terrible for everyone, and it’s bound to inspire new technologies and good surprises, not just tragedy.” But her assertion deserves a follow-up question: Who is in line for the good surprises, and who is queuing up for tragedy? Hurricane Sandy brought precisely that question to the fore. Manhattan? Too valuable to lose. Bangladesh, even Far Rockaway, not so much.The science writer Elizabeth Kolbert has tweeted, “Two words that probably should not be used in sequence: ‘good’ & ‘anthropocene.’ ” Ackerman’s Anthropocene, however, is decidedly sunny side up. Her instinct is to celebrate this new age: “We are dreamsmiths and wonderworkers. What a marvel we’ve become, a species with planetwide powers and breathtaking gifts.” That we are, but we also possess more sobering powers, a recklessness and greed that will be inscribed in the fossil record. Ackerman’s optimism can feel eerily unearned in the absence of a measured acknowledgment of the losses, the traumas, the scars that afflict human and nonhuman communities in this volatile new age. At least pause to ponder this: Is it ethical that as the superrich capture ever more resources, the poor, who have contributed least to our planet’s undoing, are forced to bear the brunt of the chaotic effects?
my own private Kanban
What you see above is a picture of an approach to task management I’ve been using lately — a simplified and individual version of the Kanban model used in software development and manufacturing/distribution. I dislike the rah-rah cheesiness of the Personal Kanban website, but I have to admit that it gave me the idea that this could work for me.
Kanban is supposed to be done with sticky notes on a whiteboard or wall, but that poses a problem for me: I work about half the time in my office, about half the time at home — so where do I put the board? An insoluble problem. So I decided to do it digitally, using the good ol’ Stickies app on the Mac.
Here’s the system as I have developed it so far:
- Just three stages of action: To Do, Doing (i.e., In Process), and Done (Completed)
- Three colors of notes: green for teaching, yellow for writing, blue for personal stuff (and something, anything, different for the three stages)
- They’re arranged in rough order of priority, with highest priority tasks at the top
- Occasionally I might use text styles (color, bolding, sizing) for emphasis
Why do I like it? Because it uses a very simple structure to convey lots of information. At a single glance I can see what’s coming up, how much of it involves writing or teaching or personal stuff, what I’m (supposed to be) working on now, and what I’ve recently completed. Also, I can easily write in detail when I need to and minimize that note to it doesn’t dominate the screen.
What don’t I like? Really, only one thing: it’s not portable. I can’t export my data very conveniently, or view it on other devices. Not sure whether that will be a problem or not — that could end up being a feature rather than a bug. In any case, here it is, in case anyone is interested.
(Cross-posted from Text Patterns as a kind of test.)
Until the late 19th century, according to historian Howard Chudacoff, age wasn’t such a defining fact about people’s lives. A professor at Brown University and the author of the book “How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture,” Chudacoff found that for most of the country’s history, people of different ages tended to mingle: Families were bigger, generations often worked side by side, and kids and adults got their entertainment at the same county fairs. Schoolchildren, meanwhile, were often assigned to classes based on how much they knew rather than when they were born.All that changed with the Industrial Revolution. Child labor laws kept children out of dangerous factory jobs; older people were also deemed badly suited for new kinds of physically demanding work. Society began to divide people up into distinct stages. “Standardization spilled over into many different facets of life,” Chudacoff says, including the way people thought about the passage of time. Schools introduced so-called age-batching; birthdays became a bigger deal. In health care, pediatrics and gerontology broke off from the rest of medicine.
Today we divide people into generations and micro-generations almost obsessively, spending energy and marketing dollars trying to understand how millennials are constitutionally distinct from Gen-Xers. In dividing everybody into categories—tweens, thirtysomethings, senior citizens—our society implicitly treats age as a force that separates us.
It’s not the sort of accomplishment that ESPN is likely to crow about, but Philadelphia Phillies center-fielder Ben Revere is on track to set an astonishing baseball record—a mark that says as much about the game today as Barry Bonds’s 73 home runs said about the swollen biceps that defined the early 21st century. Revere is currently batting just over .313, higher than any other player in the National League. That figure would match the lowest batting title in the NL’s 138-year history and the fourth lowest in baseball since 1900. Can’t anybody hit, these days?
First of all, throughout it Thompson equates offense and power, or home runs. But while home runs are the most efficient way to score runs, they aren’t the only way. In the history of baseball, there have been very high-scoring offenses with few power hitters. It’s true that we’re not likely to get another situation like, say, Busch Stadium in the 1980s, when Willie McGee could pound a ball onto a thinly-covered concrete infield and be at first base before the it made re-entry, but there are a good many things that hitters could do to improve their chances that virtually none of them are doing. And that would be something to worry about even if more accurate umpiring was their only problem — which it isn’t.
On defense, MLB teams today employ extreme defensive shifts for one simple reason: they know that hitters won’t adjust to them. It has been a long, long time since big-league hitters, or hitters on any other level for that matter, practiced real situational hitting. I suspect that very few current players even know that there was a time when striking out was so frowned upon that every hitter with the exception of Ted Williams was expected, when the count hit two strikes, to choke up on the bat and shorten his stroke.
No, those were not the Good Old Days, and the game wasn’t better then. I’m just wondering: Could the combination of a larger strike zone and pervasive defensive shifting mean that hitters need to become more resourceful, more adaptable, more situational? I think that that could increase the tactical complexity of the game. And somebody needs to try something, because hitters are losing ground pretty significantly. They’re the ones who need to react — unless, of course, they just want to keep on declining until MLB addresses the problem by changing the strike zone, as it has done so many times in the past. But I’d prefer to see hitters make that unnecessary.
[gallery] natgeofound:
A solitary fisherman’s home keeps watch on quiet Placentia Bay in Newfoundland, Canada, 1974.Photograph by Sam Abell, National Geographic Creative
