This week’s essay of the week aggravates me and inspires me at the same time. It aggravates me because it takes a promising idea and does not do it justice. But it inspires me because it has gotten me thinking about why I don’t think this essay handles the subject properly and how I would do it differently.

And what is the subject of this aggregating and inspiring essay? Properly speaking it is death and the foundation of society. But in one the first ways in which the essay goes wrong the author of the essay (Joseph Bottum) elects to call the essay Death & Politics. He thus gives a rather mundane gloss to a serious issue.

Flaws aside, the inspiring aspects of this essay make it worth putting up with the aggravation that it contains.

Much of the US is operating under drought conditions as this story from USA Today demonstrates. This drought is afflicting parts of the country that are not use to prolonged dry spells. From the USA Today article…

This drought has been particularly harsh in three regions: the Southwest, the Southeast and northern Minnesota.

Severe dryness across California and Arizona has spread into 11 other Western states. On the Colorado River, the water supply for 30 million people in seven states and Mexico, the Lake Powell and Lake Mead reservoirs are only half full and unlikely to recover for years. In Los Angeles County, on track for a record dry year with 21% of normal rain downtown since last summer, fire officials are threatening to cancel Fourth of July fireworks if conditions worsen. On Wednesday, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa urged residents to voluntarily cut water use 10%, the city’s first such call since the 1990s.

In Minnesota, which is in its worst drought since 1976, the situation is improving slowly, although a wildfire last month burned dozens of houses and 115 square miles in the northeastern part of the state.

The Southeast, unaccustomed to prolonged dry spells, may be suffering the most. In eight states from Mississippi to the Carolinas and down through Florida, lakes are shrinking, crops are withering, well levels are falling and there are new limits on water use. “We need 40-50 inches of rainfall to get out of the drought,” says Carol Ann Wehle of the South Florida Water Management District.

Despite a recent storm, water hasn’t flowed in Florida’s Kissimmee River, which feeds Lake Okeechobee, in 212 days. The district has imposed its strictest water-use limits ever in 13 counties, cutting home watering to once a week and commercial use by 45%.

Of course, this is adding fuel to people’s global warming concerns. But to my mind, the really scary thing is how much worse this could get using only the historical record as a guide. As The Weather Guys point out in their blog….

But as bad as this drought is, it can’t hold a candle to the disastrous Dust Bowl of the 1930s. For example, in July 1934, an incredible 63 percent of the USA was considered to be severely to extremely dry, compared to just 18 percent this April, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

Just because we live in a traditionally wet area, does not mean we should assume that we are safe from really bad droughts. And I count the dry summers that we have suffered from in the past as being really bad droughts.

Most people don’t realize how many people risk their lives on a daily basis just so that people will not be inconvenienced. Electrical transmission capacity in the US is so tight that a lot of people would be seriously inconvenienced if lines were taken down for maintenance. That means some people have to work on high voltage lines while they are live.

This video gives you an idea of how they go about it.

This week’s essay is from the New York Times. We can’t get any lower then that can we? But in certain mental states, we like a good sappy story that celebrates the irrationality that makes life worth living. And the essay from the New York Times on a adoptive mother’s irrational love certainly celebrates that.

For comparisons sake, you should also read this story so you understand how rational people act. The comparison and contrast provides a good example of the deficiencies of rational thinking.

In the absences of human support, how long do you think it would take before an urban neighborhood to turn into wilderness rural again? I have always wondered about that question.
But apparently, I need not speculate too much. The process is actually happening in Detroit. This from Detroitblog…..
It’s always fun to go up north here Click Here to continue reading.

A recent post over at the Marginal revolution on Benford’s law was very educational. Here is a quote….

In many data series a surprising number of entries begin with the number 1, and the number 2 is also more common than a random distribution might suggest. This is called Benford’s Law. For instance about one third of all house numbers start with one. That may be a quirk of bureaucratic numbering psychology, but the principle also applies to the Dow Jones index history, size of files stored on a PC, the length of the world’s rivers, and the numbers in newspapers’ front page headlines. It does not apply to lottery-winning numbers, see the graph at the above link.

The law only applies if you are measuring or counting something. That is why it does not apply to lottery numbers. The interesting thing about this law is how it can be used to detect various kinds of fraud. Apparently, it is very hard to fake numbers (for financial results or voters tallies) and still comply with Benford’s law.

The New York Times has an article that suggests that interval training is the best way to lose weight.

After interval training, the amount of fat burned in an hour of continuous moderate cycling increased by 36 percent, said Jason L. Talanian, the lead author of the study and an exercise scientist at the University of Guelph in Ontario. Cardiovascular fitness — the ability of the heart and lungs to supply oxygen to working muscles — improved by 13 percent.

It didn’t matter how fit the subjects were before. Borderline sedentary subjects and the college athletes had similar increases in fitness and fat burning. “Even when interval training was added on top of other exercise they were doing, they still saw a significant improvement,” Mr. Talanian said.

The study is hardly definitive, but it makes intuitive sense to me. After all, interval training is just mimicking the natural way we work.

Life brings its share of surprises. But few things have surprised me more in life than finding out that almost everyone in America who is not white fears rural areas. I never would have thought the only areas of the country left where people do not lock their doors would inspire such fear, but apparently Click Here to continue reading.

I wish that this rant by Megan had been available to me last week. It would have gone way better with last week’s essay of the week. But we have to take what we can get when we can get it.

Did you know that there are 34 countries with a fertility rate of 1.5 or less? Did you know that to keep population stable it you have to have a fertility rate of 2.1 or more? Did you know that more then half the world’s population has a fertility rate that is below replacement rate?

Do you think that those trends are nothing to worry about? If so, you owe to yourself to read Wolfgang Lutz, Vegard Skirbekk, and Maria Rita Testa’s paper called The Low Fertility Trap Hypothesis: Forces that may lead to further postponement and fewer births in Europe.

This excellent paper lays out the reasons why it may be next to impossible to raise fertility rates once they drop below replacement levels. Even if you are not convinced by their interpretation of the data the paper will make you think.

For more on this paper, read this post by the Ape Man. And we call out a big thank you to the Alpha Source blog for bringing this paper to our attention.