From Xico

"Now the Rich Want Your Pity, Too"

Richard Reeves wrote an excellent post today on the travails of the very rich.  He points out that they are travails that are unnecessary and in fact limit severly the lives of people working and working and working and driving their children to do the same.

The idea of meritocracy has long been used by the rich for self-justification. Now it is becoming fuel for their self-pity.

The raw competition for success, so the argument goes, hurts the winners as much as the losers: It is “mutually destructive.” But this is not true. By any objective measure, the rich are doing just fine. They are wealthier and healthier than ever. Economists at the Brookings Institution found that the top 10 percent of male earners born in 1940 can now expect to live to the ripe old age of 88, 12 years longer than male earners born the same year in the bottom 10 percent.

This is not to say that successful people are immune to life’s difficulties and strains. But there is no moral equivalence between the stress of a senior executive staying up late to polish a presentation for a client and the stress of a retail worker unsure if she will get the shift she needs to make rent.

The problems of the affluent are not systemic. They are self-inflicted. Well-heeled Americans have persuaded themselves that the stakes are high in every race in life. Especially when it comes to their children, the good is never good enough. Their children must have the best: the best preschools, the best high schools and the best colleges.

 

Reeves points out that thre are much better alternatives. if the super rich pushing themselves and their kids in the super rat race followed Reeves's suggestions, they might find it necessary to advocate for decent public schools which would benefit far more than their kids. They might have time to talk to people different from themselves, learn about lives different from their own. Learn not only about the difficulties of the poor and middle class,but also about who they are. For me, a graduate of a very fine high school and an Ivy League college, the best education I had was my two years in the Peace Corps in Uganda living in a semi-rural community teaching boys whose main shoes were flip flops. It wasn't learning that they were poor that mattered, though, it was learning that their lives mattered and that there was not a single (American) way to live your life.

Amos Moore should be alive today to see this published correction to African and American history

In this week's New York Review of Books, Howard W. French reviews several recent books of African history which very successfully banish the common and incorrect stereotypes of the African past that many Europeans and USAers have held: that Africa was "primitive", without states, etc.  I have known this.  I have a Master's degree in African History from the University of Minnesota where the research we were exposed to made this clear.  Nonetheless, I heard nothing at that time about Africans in the Americas before slavery.  There has been a lot of quite reasonable speculation about the possibility that Africans landed on the coast of the Americas a long time ago, but none that has been, as far as I know, acknowledged by "main stream (white?) historians. The book that finally presents this in a way that legitimizes it is  The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages by François-Xavier Fauvelle, translated from the French by Troy Tice, Princeton University Press, 264 pp., $29.95. Our friend here in Xalapa, Amos Moore, one of the very few black Americans here, had read huge amounts on the subject and talked about it with increasing weariness to his skeptical friends.  So here from The Golden Rhinoceros is some documentation for him to add if he exists in some netherworld where he can read it.  I still miss Amos more than I can say. 

The most intriguing story in Fauvelle’s book comes from the kingdom of Mali in the early fourteenth century. More than a century and a half before Columbus’s voyages, a Malian ruler named Abu Bakr II was said to have equipped an expedition involving two hundred ships that attempted to discover “the furthest limit of the Atlantic Ocean.” The expedition failed to return save for one vessel, whose survivor claimed that “there appeared in the open sea [as it were] a river with a powerful current…. The [other] ships went on ahead but when they reached that place they did not return and no more was seen of them.” Some modern historians (Michael Gomez, Toby Green, and John Thornton, among others) have interpreted this to mean that the Malian ships were caught in the Atlantic Ocean’s Canary Current, which sweeps everything in its path westward at about the same latitude as Mali.

Abu Bakr II supposedly responded not by abandoning his dreams of exploration but by equipping a new and far larger expedition, this time involving two thousand ships and with himself in command. That was the last that was seen of him. We know of this story only because when Abu Bakr’s successor, Mansa Musa, was staying in Cairo in 1324–1325 on his pilgrimage to Mecca, the secretary of the chancery of the Mamluk Dynasty asked him how he had come to power and recorded his reply. There are no other traces of Abu Bakr’s attempt. (New York Review of Books, June 27, 2019 issue).

Informing People of Stuff They Ought to Know -- Public Service Announcements

Last Wednesday we went to the Xico city hall to pay our predial, or property tax for this year.  It wasn't quite the last minute, but almost. The city hall is an old stone building.  The original facade has recently been uncovered and it is now fashionably old colonial looking.  I will try to remember to post some pictures.  This time I am posting photos of two public service  posters distributed by the Comisión Nacional de las Derechas Humanas, a federal organization.  Click on them to make them big enough to read.   The first one, translated into English, says:

"Do you know what you are buying? Some products which you buy have been made by people captured for the purpose of exploiting them in forced work or services. Don't be an accomplice.  Behind what you buy there could be a story you don't want to be a part of."

 

 

 

 

 

This second image which is definitely eye-catching says, "Seduction is one of the means most used by human traffickers to capture women for the purpose of sexual exploitation.  Take care! Look past appearances.  Behind what you think you want may be a story you don't want to be a part of." 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This final notice, stuck on the wall with masking tape, is anything but arty.  But it is a nice notice.  It advertises on behalf of the State of Veracruz that you can get free civil marriage for a period of time: "The general public is invited to participate in the free matrimony campaign inspired by The Day of Love and Friendship [Valentine's Day here].  Information in the office of the Civil Register from 9am to 3pm.Requirements: Birth certificate, electior credential, CURP, kids' birth certificates."

Here in Veracruz and maybe all México, the civil marriage by a civil officer is required for a legal marriage, followed by a church marriage.  For poor people, both can be too costly to afford.  Many people just move in together and consider themselves married for this reason.  After eight years, it is considered a legal marriage. Even before, both partners are entitled to some right of marriage. But this gesture will certainly be welcomed by some couples.  You can see that after a few years, they may very well have kids.

 

Here we often see public service notices addressing all kinds of issues like these.  There are many public health messages on safe sex, taking care of yourself in pregnancy, how to avoid illness, etc.  They tend to be quite direct.  Also, I am also struck by how art is used, how arty, if you will, the illustrations are. I thought you might enjoy this glimpse into everydayness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Empathy might help.

 

I was a history major and also have a Masters in history.  As an undergraduate, I majored in Medieval English history, as a graduate student,I majored in African History.  Then I got a Masters in Social Work!  Somehow it all makes sense to me.  The article below, reproduced from AEON, addresses empathetic humanities, notably history.  In our extremely adversarial age, it points out the tremendous importance of empathy which should help us avoid blackandwhite thinking and judgment making which afflicts our society, and others, like the plague.  PLEASE READ IT!

Alexander Bevilacqua

is an assistant professor of history at Williams College, Massachusetts. He specialises in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe (c1450 to 1800). His most recent book is The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (2018).

1,300 words

Edited by Sally Davies

 

 

 

REPUBLISH FOR FREE

 

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Recently discovered prisoner writings on the wall of Lyon’s notorious Montluc prison from which résistant and historian Marc Bloch was taken and executed by the Nazis on the night of the 16 June 1944. A noted historian, Bloch wrote: ‘The task of the historian is understanding, not judging.’ Photo by Bony/AP/Rex.

As anyone on Twitter knows, public culture can be quick to attack, castigate and condemn. In search of the moral high ground, we rarely grant each other the benefit of the doubt. In her Class Day remarks at Harvard’s 2018 graduation, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie addressed the problem of this rush to judgment. In the face of what she called ‘a culture of “calling out”, a culture of outrage’, she asked students to ‘always remember context, and never disregard intent’. She could have been speaking as a historian.

History, as a discipline, turns away from two of the main ways of reading that have dominated the humanities for the past half-century. These methods have been productive, but perhaps they also bear some responsibility for today’s corrosive lack of generosity. The two approaches have different genealogies, but share a significant feature: at heart, they are adversarial.

One mode of reading, first described in 1965 by the French philosopher Paul Ricœur and known as ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’, aims to uncover the hidden meaning or agenda of a text. Whether inspired by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche or Sigmund Freud, the reader interprets what happens on the surface as a symptom of something deeper and more dubious, from economic inequality to sexual anxiety. The reader’s task is to reject the face value of a work, and to plumb for a submerged truth.

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A second form of interpretation, known as ‘deconstruction’, was developed in 1967 by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It aims to identify and reveal a text’s hidden contradictions – ambiguities and even aporias(unthinkable contradictions) that eluded the author. For example, Derrida detected a bias that favoured speech over writing in many influential philosophical texts of the Western tradition, from Plato to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The fact that written texts could privilege the immediacy and truth of speech was a paradox that revealed unarticulated metaphysical commitments at the heart of Western philosophy.

Both of these ways of reading pit reader against text. The reader’s goal becomes to uncover meanings or problems that the work does not explicitly express. In both cases, intelligence and moral probity are displayed at the expense of what’s been written. In the 20th century, these approaches empowered critics to detect and denounce the workings of power in all kinds of materials – not just the dreams that Freud interpreted, or the essays by Plato and Rousseau with which Derrida was most closely concerned.

They do, however, foster a prosecutorial attitude among academics and public intellectuals. As a colleague once told me: ‘I am always looking for the Freudian slip.’ He scours the writings of his peers to spot when they trip up and betray their problematic intellectual commitments. One poorly chosen phrase can sully an entire work.

Not surprisingly, these methods have fostered a rather paranoid atmosphere in modern academia. Mutual monitoring of lexical choices leads to anxiety, as an increasing number of words are placed on a ‘no fly’ list. One error is taken as the symptom of problematic thinking; it can spoil not just a whole book, but perhaps even the author’s entire oeuvre. This set of attitudes is not a world apart from the pile-ons that we witness on social media.

Does the lack of charity in public discourse – the quickness to judge, the aversion to context and intent – stem in part from what we might call the ‘adversarial’ humanities? These practices of interpretation are certainly on display in many classrooms, where students learn to exercise their moral and intellectual prowess by dismantling what they’ve read. For teachers, showing students how to take a text apart bestows authority; for students, learning to read like this can be electrifying.

Yet the study of history is different. History deals with the past – and the past is, as the British novelist L P Hartley wrote in 1953, ‘a foreign country’. By definition, historians deal with difference: with what is unlike the present, and with what rarely meets today’s moral standards.

The virtue of reading like a historian, then, is that critique or disavowal is not the primary goal. On the contrary, reading historically provides something more destabilising: it requires the historian to put her own values in parentheses.

The French medievalist Marc Bloch wrote that the task of the historian is understanding, not judging. Bloch, who fought in the French Resistance, was caught and turned over to the Gestapo. Poignantly, the manuscript of The Historian’s Craft, where he expressed this humane statement, was left unfinished: Bloch was executed by firing squad in June 1944.

As Bloch knew well, historical empathy involves reaching out across the chasm of time to understand people whose values and motivations are often utterly unlike our own. It means affording these people the gift of intellectual charity – that is, the best possible interpretation of what they said or believed. For example, a belief in magic can be rational on the basis of a period’s knowledge of nature. Yet acknowledging this demands more than just contextual, linguistic or philological skill. It requires empathy.

Aren’t a lot of psychological assumptions built into this model? The call for empathy might seem theoretically naive. Yet we judge people’s intentions all the time in our daily lives; we can’t function socially without making inferences about others’ motivations. Historians merely apply this approach to people who are dead. They invoke intentions not from a desire to attack, nor because they seek reasons to restrain a text’s range of meanings. Their questions about intentions stem, instead, from respect for the people whose actions and thoughts they’re trying to understand.

Reading like a historian, then, involves not just a theory of interpretation, but also a moral stance. It is an attempt to treat others generously, and to extend that generosity even to those who can’t be hic et nunc – here and now.

For many historians (as well as others in what we might call the ‘empathetic’ humanities, such as art history and literary history), empathy is a life practice. Living with the people of the past changes one’s relationship to the present. At our best, we begin to offer empathy not just to those who are distant, but to those who surround us, aiming in our daily life for ‘understanding, not judging’.

To be sure, it’s challenging to impart these lessons to students in their teens or early 20s, to whom the problems of the present seem especially urgent and compelling. The injunction to read more generously is pretty unfashionable. It can even be perceived as conservative: isn’t the past what’s holding us back, and shouldn’t we reject it? Isn’t it more useful to learn how to deconstruct a text, and to be on the lookout for latent, pernicious meanings?

Certainly, reading isn’t a zero-sum game. One can and should cultivate multiple modes of interpretation. Yet the nostrum that the humanities teach ‘critical thinking and reading skills’ obscures the profound differences in how adversarial and empathetic disciplines engage with written works – and how they teach us to respond to other human beings. If the empathetic humanities can make us more compassionate and more charitable – if they can encourage us to ‘always remember context, and never disregard intent’ – they afford something uniquely useful today.

 

Science helps us know what we know, know what we don't know and know what we don't know we don't know*

GMOs are the product of biotechnology, but it was the science of biology that made them possible.  It is a scientific approach which can help us examine how GMOs work, whether their use should be better controlled,or whether they should be used just the way other seeds and plants are used.  It can shed light on some possible consequences of their use.  A good scientific approach can help us understand their risks as well as their benefits.  It  can also help us to refine what we are looking for. This may all seem obvious, but it's altogether too easy to forget in the flames of hysteria which surround the HMO issue as well as a lot of other hot button topics.

It's easy to forget the importance of using science to evaluate arguments and hard to remember to, because to do so means we can't just throw out slogans and side with our friends and political allies.  It means we can't just assume that the people on the right and the arguments on one side are ipso facto stupid, ignorant, racist, whatever, or that the people on the left are communists, godless, smart asses who manipulate data for their own ends.

And the media leads the band in presenting most things as if there are only two sides to an issue and that the two sides are polar opposites.

In the face of my own ignorance, I decided I'd better learn some stuff and review other stuff before I started telling you folks what I think we need.  I have to say that for non-science types like me, it's close to impossible to understand well or thoroughly what goes on with GMOs.  I am trying. As an important part of my effort, I decided to (re)educate myself with some kind of review of biology. I looked up college biology texts. where else but on Google and decided that I might be able to cope with Campbell Biology, a well-regarded college text book, as a much needed aid. I have to tell you, biology has sure changed since I took my last course in high school (gulp) 55 years ago (that's no typo.)  It has changed since I struggled through botany in college where I discovered some chemistry had crept into it; it was no longer just classifying and describing things and drawing pretty specimens  (I'm exaggerating).  

This opacity that science has, its complexity, its vastly greater store of knowledge does make it extremely hard for lay people like me to try to understand what's going on in any number of areas: global climate change is a biggy.  How much easier it is just to jump on the band wagon that denies global warming or on the one that paints doomsday scenarios that lie just around the corner.  Why are we so eager to be extremists?

So from Cambell Biology I've drawn out the basics of what science is.  I am trying to use these basics to understand what GMOs are, how they are brought about, and how they may be the same or different from other forms of plant modification.  I'll condense and share my findings with you and hope that you read what I say with a critical eye.  Don't give up!

*********

So what is written below is drawn from Cambell, at times word for word, pages 18-24.

The word SCIENCE comes from the Latin verb TO KNOW.  Science is an approach to understanding the natural world which developed because people are by nature curious and strive to understand the world around them.  

INQUIRY is at the heart of science.  Inquiries are the questions we ask as we search for information and explanation.  The search for information often focuses on specific questions. For Charles Darwin, for instance,  the main question was how species adapted to their environment.  Evolution lies at the heart of modern biology, by the way.  No getting around it.

So how do you go around inquiring in a scientific way?

    You make observations

    You form logical hypotheses

    You test your hypothesis thoroughly.  If observations don't support a hypothesis, perhaps the hypothesis needs to be modified or thrown out.

    You hope with each go-round you get closer and closer to the truth: to the laws that govern nature.

According to Campbell, in biology, scientists are looking to describe natural structures and processes as accurately as they can.

Today a lot of biology involves studying things on a micro scale.  GENOMICS for instance is the analysis to help us understand biological unity and diversity at a molecular level.GMOs are created on a molecular level though the results we see can be on a macro level.

As we read in Campbell Biology, Science is much less structured than people realize, and there is no single "scientific method" with a rule book that researchers must follow.  There is no fixed formula for successful inquiry though many of us remember being taught that there was. On the other hand, the looser approach to the scientific method definitely does not mean a looser approach to testing hypotheses, retesting them,and opening oneself up to evaluation by others.

Campbell points out that what is important to the search for scientific knowledge are reasoning, planning, creativity, cooperation, competition, patience, persistence, and the ability to withstand setbacks. Withstanding setbacks means to me being able to face the truthl: to not falsify data because of pride or laziness or looming deadlines or the desire for money or fear of academic standing.  Today, our society has a problem with being able to accept scientific data not because we are troglodytes (although we may be that, too) but because false data has been presented to us by supposedly reputable scientific sources a little too often.  And it's just technically too hard for untrained people to investigate for ourselves claims that might look a bit odd.  Untrained doesn't mean ignorant: it means that understanding very complex microscopic processes is not an ability to be picked up by quickly reading a book or taking a course. We have to depend on people being honorable.

Scientists should be aiming to describe natural structures and processes as accurately they can after observing and analyzing their observations.  The stuff they get from their observations is DATA.

There is quantitative and qualitative data.  Quantitative is data that is counted, basically, that aims to prove something with quantities of information.  Qualitative data is gathered from observation of a single or a few subjects. For instance, you might say that a certain medicine is useful for treating measles because it has had successful results in 500 cases of measles and did not have success in 6 cases.  Qualitative data might be to look at, say, an insect and note his physical characteristics, his environment, his diet, etc. The scientist might want to ask what happens when the insect is exposed to a toxin.

Some DATA might lead you to form a hypothesis which would be asking what causes something or/and what explains it.  A HYPOTHESIS is a tentative answer to a well-framed question.  It is testing whether the explanation you have is true.  It can be considered a "rational accounting of a set of observations."  It leads to testable predictions.  

Reasoning can be INDUCTIVE: You generalize from a large number of specific observations. For instance, you've observed the sun rises in the east.  You could decide to prove that by observation over a period of time, maybe five years of observations.  You'd then analyze the data and finally make the generalization your data warranted.  Hopefully, the generalization would be that the sun rises in the east.  (I know, I know, the sun does't really rise. But it appears in the east every morning.)

Deductive reasoning is generally used after a hypothesis has been developed.  It involves logic developed from the general to the specific.From general premises, you extrapolate to specific results.For instance, if all organisms are made of cells and humans are made of cells, then humans are organisms.  This is "if....then" reasoning.

Here are some important characteristics of hypotheses:

    No amount of experimental testing can prove a hypothesis beyond a shadow of a doubt.  It is impossible to test all alternative hypotheses.

    Hypotheses gain credibility by surviving multiple attempts to falsify them.

    Hypotheses gain strength as alternative hypotheses are eliminated.

    A hypothesis MUST be testable.  There has to be some way to check the validity of an idea.

    A hypothesis must be falsifiable. Huh??? This confuses me, too. So let's see if I can explain it.  While there is no ultimate way to prove the truth of something, you should be able to create a NULL HYPOTHESIS which if proven would absolutely prove the original hypothesis false.  A common example:  If I hypothesize that "all swans are white", we would have to find every last swan and see that they are all white to prove the hypothesis absolutely true.  A null hypothesis might be: There is at least one black swan.  So if you come up with a black swan, then you have absolutely disproved the original hypothesis.

SCIENCE's hypotheses are actually not a bunch of absolutes.  Nothing scientists propose and prove is absolute.  BUT the proofs of hypotheses must be replicable by INDEPENDENT efforts.  You don't have to and should not accept someone saying you should accept something because I or the Bible or God's prophet says you should.  

Scientific research has become so technical, so dependent on stuff I didn't even know existed, that I have to depend not on evaluating the science so much as evaluating the articles I read. And this is also a challenge.  But as you plough through research papers, you'll get a feel for what makes for a good research article. But who has the time?  Ideally we'd have research paper groups the way we have book groups so we could read articles and then discuss them and then challenge each other.

Anyway, a very good article on evaluating research papers and articles can be found here.  This is on a blog called The Skeptical Raptor (skeptical raptor.com) which is a chatty, easy to read site dealing with scientific research.

The take-away from all of this is that laypeople are kind of up a creek when it comes to understanding the science of GMOs and a lot of other things.   But here are a few quick and dirty hints: articles should appear in well-established journals. How do you decide?  Who writes for the journal? Are the articles in the journal peer-reviewed?  This means the research article should have been read by at least three independent scholars/experts.  Reviewers and authors should be anonymous to each other.  Then you can find out how often the article has been cited and by whom.  And....

Now I can say no more.  I have to walk the dog, fortunately.

 

*This is a famous quote from Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense under George Bush 2 and not a scientist. 

 

 

 

I Hate Daylight Savings Time

Never do I quite get used to the loss of that hour hour in the morning. I really need my cup of coffee when we are enduring DST.  Although it's not terribly hot here where we live very often, it can be a bit uncomfortable during the middle of the day. (And who knows what will happen as the climate changes.)  So I have to wake up very early (CST) for us to get our walk with the dogs in before the sun is too high. Suppertime rolls around too soon. And if it has been a hot day, we have to wait an hour longer for the sun to start to set and the air to cool. 

And then all of a sudden it's bedtime!   Pet peeves rather than serious, I know.  But still....

Here in Mexico, we change our clocks in the spring about a month later than in the US and about a week earlier in the fall.  It was decided quite sensibly to leave things as they were and not to follow those Merkans up north who for some unknown reason decided to make DST season even longer than it had been a few years ago. And mercifully (a little bit) we turn back the clock about a week earlier in the fall. Some countries did not follow suit at all, like Chile.  But of course Chile doesn't lie along an uneasy border shared with the US.

The photo above is of workers changing the time on (I think) Big Ben that I stole from this article on the time changes in BBC News online including the bit on Chile which just decided to reject, cast off, DST this year.

Some Time Change facts, courtesy of the BBC article, bits of which I translated, below:

• It was originally a German idea introduced during the First World War to economize on energy.
• It was thought that housseholds wouldn't need artificial light in the evenings until later which would be good.
• However, someone forgot that it meant you'd have to use it in the morning for longer.
• In the United States, there is a growing number of voices challenging  the idea that the benefits of DST are worth the pain of getting up an hour earlier.
• In a study called "Estimating the Economic Loss of Daylight Saving Time for US Metropolitan Statistical Areas (whew!)put out by Chmura Economics, it's said that the contry loses $424 milllion dollars in r educed productivity because of DST.
• A Yale study by Matthew Kotchen and Laura Grant looked at the change in Indiana which only adopted Daylight Savings Time in 2006. They found that lighting use was reduced but air conditioning increased, and the air conditioning is more expensive.
• There are various United States states investigating the elimination of DST yay!) 

And I grew up thinking it was to give farmers an extra hour of light for work during the farm season.

You folks up north are already on DST.  Down here, don't forget to change your clocks on April 5.

Peña Nieto in Great Britain: Unfavorable Press for Drug War in Mexico

EPN is in the midst of a state visit to Great Britain.  He has visited the queen and I think is staying in Buckingham Palace.

And right in the midst of his visit, Nick Cleg, the Deputy Prime Minister of the UK and Richard Branson, the owner of Virgin Airlines had an interview published in The Guardian urging the UK to begin decriminalizing drugs.  Like many others, they say the "war on drugs" has failed.They pointed out that "The Home Office's own research, commissioned by Liberal Democrats in government. . . found there is no apparent correlation between the 'toughness' of a country's approach and the prevalence of adult drug use." [Branson is a member of the global commission on drugs policy.]

In the article by Clegg and Branson, they continue, "Yet the criminal market continues to grow, driving unimaginable levels of profit for organized crime....,"

Clegg and Branson continue, "As Mexico's president, Enrque Peña Nieto, visits the UK, we should remember the estimated 100,000 people killed in Mexico alone since 2006."

There is much meat in the article and praise for Portugal's apparently successful approach as well as the position of the President of Colombia.

The ants go marching

 

We  had a potential invasion of ants the other day. Every now and then, millions (okay, thousands)of ants go marching along right near and sometimes right through our house and out the other side and are gone. While their marching form wouldn't do for soldiers in North Korea (or the US either) they are sufficiently well-trained and well-disciplined that they don't wander too far away from their ranks and actually infest your abode.  You don't find wanderers who have nestled down in your underwear, for instance. Nonetheless, I prefer them confined outside our house. A wide and pretty typical parade of ant marchers was moving up from the front garden along the side of the house and to the back the other day.  Our neighbor, our housekeeper and I made appropriate squealy noises upon seeing them, and Jim went and got his camera.  Our neighbor showed us how to divert them.  You lay down a long length of rope to channel them to where you would rather they go.  Jim got the rope out of the bodega and the neighbor lay it down in a long wiggly line so that they would be diverted and go out the gate at the back.  She said the ants thought the rope was a snake. I thought, "Wow! It worked." Jim said, though not to the neighbor, that it was where they were going anyway.  Well, I thought that at least they'd closed ranks along the side of the rope away from our house.

The ants before being disciplined by the rope into a more compact line: 

 

At this point I was going to insert a video of "The ants go marching..." but Typepad won't let me even though I followed the directions as far as I could understand them.  Instead I give  you this picture of very, very tiny white crawly things that were on one of Jim's small sculptures of a four-sided polygon on our balcón.  In the photo they are magnified five or six times. They are smaller than the ants.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The green and black patches on the sidewalk and the sculpture are loving our weather and growing happily in the forever damp and chilly air.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Popocatepetl Observed and Described (with a super-quick introduction to volcanoes in general)

What follows is A VERY elementary description of what volcanoes are and do. Some of the information and illustrations below drawn from online site of the magazine Arqueología Mexicana which, believe it or not, I have seen in our local Chedraui supermarket.  I've put links to the other sources I've used and they are all worth exploring, and none is overwhelmed by jargon.

There are three important and intertwined factors used to describe volcanoes:

           Spatial distribution of volcanoes

           Time factors

           Nature and intensity of volcanic activity

Spatial distribution

    Volcanoes are not dispersed arbitrarily over the surface of the earth but rather are distributed in different regions which are defined by global tectonic activities -- that is, shifts in the earth's plates. México is a region that is tectonically active, especially in the band from Nayarit to Veracruz.  The map below shows this belt and labels the major volcanoes in it as well as a couple in Baja and one at the very top of the Sea of Cortez (also known as the Gulf of California).  Where we live in the state of Veracruz a little north and west of Veracruz, the city, we can see a number of small cones that are no longer active and probably haven't been for a huge amount of years, if ever. Directly opposite our house sits one called Acamalín.

I took the picture below on a hike. This is a spot sort of between Xico and Xico Viejo. Acamalín is the bump between the two tree-covered hills.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My father-in-law witnessed some of the  growth of Paricutín in West Mexico, number 10 on the map below, in the late 1940s.  .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As everyone who has come across it knows, it literally sprang up in a cornfield and buried everything in the town of Paricutín except the church.

Below is a picture Jim took during a trip we made to the state of Morelia. The volcano Paricutin is the small dark caldera outlined by the mountains behind it.

 

Well, maybe a little about plate tectonics.  There are a whole bunch of good sites with well-illustrated information if you want to know more.The earth's outer layer, the crust, is divided into a set of large moving plates.  The lines where they meet are called plate boundaries.  

The illusltration below shows the different kinds of plate boundaries and hotspots.

From left on the picture below, a divergent boundary, a hotspot, a convergent boundary and another hot spot.  

 

 

 

 

 

HOTSPOTS are stationary plumes of magma. This is a good brief discussion of them.  Volcanoes in Hawaii are the result of hotspots.

The illustration below shows a hotspot forming an island in the Hawaiian Emperor chain.

 

 

 

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Temporal distribution

This is the second factor considered important in evaluating volcanoes.  It refers to the frequency of eruptions, especially of the biggest and most destructive ones. Timing is related to the intensity of tectonic processes.  Figuring out timing remains a puzzle.  No one can exactly say when a volcano will erupt.  Furthermore, eruptions don't happen in any predictable cyclical way though the past does provide some guidance about what might happen in the future.

The nature and intensity of volcanic activity

Temporal distribution and spacial distribution affect the nature and intensity of volcanic activity although they are not the only factors.  And volcanic activity is not necessarily harmful.  For instance, volcanoes enrich the soil.

Kinds of volcanoes

In a very interesting and easy to read article from Oregon State University, the author explains that though people like to characterize things in strict ways, really, nature chooses its own ways.  People miss a lot by holding to strict categories, especially the three that have long been used for categorizing volcanoes. The unnamed Oregon State author (see link immediately above) proposes six and hopes you won't be limited by the brief explanations he gives. 

Popocatepetl, sort of scientifically speaking 

Lies at latitude 19.02 and longitude -98.62, about 43 miles to the east of Mexico City and roughly 28 miles to the west of the city of Puebla. It is similar distances from Tlaxcala and Cuernavaca. It occupies parts of the states of Morelos, Mexico and Puebla. So clearly people in the Valley of Mexico and near it have a personal interest in Popo and in how it might affect them.

Briefly, Popo is a stratovolcano which spews out lava characterized as andesite and dacite.  These are lavas that are cooler and more viscous than basalt,   Popo is also known as a composite volcano.

"Below  is a schematic diagram of a stratovolcano intended to illustrate the different layers of different materials that comprise them. The purple colors are meant to represent layers, either the products of fall-out from big eruption clouds or the products of pyroclastic flows. Notice that these ash layers tend to be thin but widespread. The orange colors represent lava flows, and note that some of them have cinder cones associated with them at the vent. The green colors are meant to represent lava domes, and notice that they do not flow very far. Each eruption, regardless of what it produces, is fed from the the magma chamber by a dike. Most dikes come up through the center of the volcano and therefore most eruptions occur from at or near the summit. However, some dikes head off sideways to feed eruptions on the flanks."

 

 

 

 

 

Popo has been rather active of late, and so there are many questions about what it might do.  The past few days it seems to have quieted down a bit.  You can read the official daily report and see the related charts at the Cenapred website here.  Although Popo is the second tallest volcano in Mexico and one of the most active, it hasn't had a big eruption for many  years. It is not considered extremely explosive, either, rating a 1-2 on the Volcanic Explositivity Index where the highest score is 8 and all the values after 1 (i.e. 2-10) increase from number to number by a factor of ten the way numbers on the Richter scale for measuring the intensity of earthquakes do.

Here people are aware that Popo has been a more active than usual.  What can they expect? Currently the warning level is yellow.  That's right in the middle with red indicating it's time to move nearby people and green meaning things are very quiet.

This is what Popo might do in the near future:

• Continue explosive activity at a low to intermediate level.
• Cause rains of ashes from a light to moderate level in nearby populated areas
• Possibly there will be pyroclastic flows which are "fast-moving currents of hot gas and rock" which can reach "speeds moving away from a volcano of up to 700/km/h (450 mph).

You can find a list of what to do if there is imminent danger to you at this link.

Below is a kind of scary picture of pyroclastic flows "sweeping down the flanks of Mayon Volcano, Philippines in 1984."  This is NOT Popocateptl. The Mayon volcano has a Volcanic Explosivity Index of 4.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Volcanoes' eruptions can't be predicted over the long term, but over hours and days, it becomes more possible.  Cenapred and other government offices have things well-covered.  They are experienced and can be depended on.

Coincidentally, today the NY Times has a short video on what volcanoes are and how they work.  It is on the front page of the digital edition at the moment.  If it is moved from there, you can find it in the science section.

 

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Dick Cavett, Typepad, Shakespeare, Twain and Eleanor Estes

Once again Typepad annoys me.  It's NO WONDER I don't post more!  I'm just a simple little old lady blogger.  Can't they keep things simple for me?  So what happened is I started this out as a quick post on the Dashboard, and it started getting too long so I clicked to use a full entry, and what I'd written on the Quick Post quickly had completely disappeared!  So this is taking me a LONG TIME.  Anyway, all I really wanted to do was direct you to the interview with Dick Cavett in the upcoming NY Times Sunday Book Review here.  Just a couple of funny things stand out, so I am copying them for you:

"And for an instant cure for the blues, the great Robert Benchley most frequently supplied the most recent laugh. Who else could have reported that the plays of William Shakespeare had, in fact, not been written by William Shakespeare at all, but by someone else of the same name? Or that you can divide people into two groups: those who divide people into two groups and those who don’t?" 

Cavett who never sounded exactly like a young man even when he was one has settled nicely into a not-quite-stereotype of an elderly, aristocratic English teacher specializing for the most part in the comic with of course a deep well of wit.  Are you surprised that he read by himself by the age of ?  This is his account of "Rufus M." by Eleanor Estes, one of his beloved books when he was a precocious reader.

"Rufus was a hilarious kid. He planted beans for his not-wealthy family’s dinner table. Unfortunately, he also dug them up every day to see how they were doing."

His favorite book of all time is "Huckleberry Finn".  He says a couple of interesting things about race in Huck Finn and about the book being banned from a library Mark Twain knew about.

Anyway, read the article, as I said, here.

This was my break from translating.  Gotta go back to it.  You can check translations of good Mexican articles about current Mexican issues at mexicovoices.blogspot.com