Oh boy!

Alison is scheduled to be home in the next hour. The house is cleanish. Here's a quote from the book I'm reading.

In earlier days Socrates owned enough to do military service as a hoplite, a rank requiring the member to provide his own armor and weapons. In his last days he had little more than a wife and three children. To a friend he estimated that if he found a good purchaser, he thought he could get for all of his property, including his house, about five minae.
“You are living a life,” he once was told, “that would drive even a slave to desert his master. Your meat and your drink are the poorest. The cloak you wear is not only a poor thing but is never changed, summer or winter. And you never wear shoes or tunic.”
“But you must try to see,” explained Socrates, “my belief is that to have no wants is divine.”
He said he felt wealthy when he walked through the marketplace and took count of all of the things he saw there that he knew he could live without.
His attitude toward property is more easily admired than shared.
About the wife of Socrates, Xanthippe, you will find it reported, unreliably (in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers and Xenophon’s Memories of Socraties), that she was ill humored and would search him out in the marketplace where he idled with friends, to pull the robe from his back and harangue him in public because there was nothing at home, not even him. A modest freeborn Athenian woman never set foot outside the house if she could avoid doing so, and it was a signal of the extremity of the want of the wife of Socrates that she did not own a slave to go to the marketplace and do this for her.

Weekend fun

This weekend I am in the Valles Caldera. Right now I'm in the town of Jemez Springs, but I'm spending my nights in the Valles. SB and BT and many others will be up tomorrow night working on a service project, so I'll get to have fun too.
Any day in the Valles is a good day.

No-kill shelters: worse for animals?

I think that this news makes it official: everything sucks. MSNBC had an article today that talked about the possibility of no-kill shetlers actually being worse for the animals in them than would be the normal (or "kill shetlers" as I like to call them, starting right now) shelters. Go here to read the article.
The basic problem is that no-kill shelters do not euthanize any of their animals; however, if they continue taking animals they quickly fill up. In some cases they just keep adding more animals until they are overfull, overcrowded, and the animals are living in unhealthy conditions. Can you believe that there are 6-8 million dogs and cats sent to shelters in the US every year? That's ridiculous. If only people would pay attention, they would come to the conclusion that there is a solution whereby we don't have to continue killing defenseless animals:
Get your pets spayed and neutered; if you do not do this, you should not be allowed to have a pet.
Don't buy dogs out of puppy mills; that dog you have could have been a stray that you spared from death.
Better yet, don't buy dogs from breeders at all; would you love your dog less if you didn't know its background?

As the supposedly dominant species on earth it would be nice if we could make an effort to be better stewards of everything.

The...end? (XV, XVI, XVII)

Or is it the beginning? Alison has had three (!) articles published in the past three days, two of them on Saturday.
The first (XV) is about soot levels in Greenland ice cores from back in the Industrial Revolution. The heightened soot, a product of industrial work in the northeastern US, likely had a warming impact that has long been assumed to be part of a natural warming cycle. Soot warms us up by lowering cloud and surface albedo, causing more absorption of solar energy and less reflectance.
The second article (XVI) is about a small town in northeastern San Diego County that is having severe water shortage issues. If only people nationwide paid more attention to news stories like this they could think "why the hell are we devoting 90% of the water use in a desert to agriculture and golf courses?" Then maybe there would be some water-related reform. Ah, pipe dreams. I love the quote toward the end about the ultraconservative Californians.
The third (XVII) is about how short courses in CPR are just as effective as are long courses. I don't know whether I've ever taken a standalone CPR course, but I've been trained several times in the course of getting safety certifications back in the old consulting days. I guess we always had kind of a shortish course in that case; all I have trouble with is the number of compressions and number of breaths. But I think I remember hearing that the number isn't as important as the correct technique.
This may be Alison's last spurt of articles; she's currently in DC getting debriefed or something on the program, hanging out with her fellowship buddies for the last time (at least for awhile), and doing other things as well! I'm super glad she got the opportunity to do this for the summer, although I've been super unglad that she was gone.

This morning, on the way to Socorro, I finished reading my last Madeleine L'Engle book, Many Waters. This one was somewhat enjoyable, although again I've been vaguely disappointed in this series this time around. Not as good as I had remembered. I talked to SB a little bit about it this weekend on a service project up to Red River (which is a scary scary place, and is literally populated almost entirely by transplanted Texans), and he said that he remembers having read the first three books as a child and really wanting to enjoy the books, but not really being able to. Oh well, the next book is going to be Picture This by one of my favoritest ever authors, Joseph Heller. This book is about the Rembrandt painting Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer; as the painting is created, Aristotle becomes cognizant of his surroundings. As his ear is painted, he can hear, etc. It sounds interesting and I hope I enjoy it as much as I've enjoyed most of his other work so far (which is to say, a lot).

I'm at a tipping point now. I don't know which way I'm going to go but it will have implications on the entire rest of my life. I'm scared of making a decision, and not in my usual way of being scared to make decisions. There's going to either be a continuation or an ending and a new beginning.

Article XIIII + Your Food

OK, Alison had an article out yesterday afternoon or evening about the endangered Black-Footed Ferret, the only ferret native to North America. Go here to read the article. These guys were one of the first species listed under the Endangered Species Act, and this article deals with one of their last populations. This group was put out into the wild in an effort to reintroduce them to the area, but they decreased in population to 5 in 1997, after which they were given up on. Now there's 220 of the prolific little buggers. What a success! Unfortunately it suggests that species do better when we're not paying attention to them (this is not true).
Also, I am currently listening to Talk of the Nation, and they are having a discussion about the farm bill, and what it does to what we eat, including subsidizing the least healthy calories available; this is why junk food is so cheap, and why poor people tend to be overweight. Way to go gummint! Go here to check it out; you should be able to listen to the discussion soon.

Article XIII + book

Another new article out today! This one is about how polluted the beaches of southern California are; it discusses the results of the annual beach report. Go here to read the article. Only three days of work left for her. Guess I'd better get on my horse with cleaning the house! Hooray!
Also, I finished A Swiftly Tilting Planet. Only one more book until it's back to some Heller!

Edit (8/9): This article is now also in the travel section. Go here.

Article XII

Alison has yet another article out today! This one is about increased risk of birth defects among obese mothers. How cheery! Go here to read the article. Alison needs to get together a list of her best articles to send out with job applications. I say all of them are awesome, but she wants to be more selective than that; which ones do y'all think are her best?
Also, I just heard on NPR that the government charges organic farmers more for "farm insurance" because they don't use pesticides. Way to go, gummint! Of course, this one is not necessarily the fault of this administration; organic's been around since before 2001, right?