July 1, 2008
the giant pile of corn
from the associated press:
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Rod Brenneman, president and chief executive of Seaboard Foods, a pork supplier in Sawnee Mission, Kan. that produces 4 million hogs a year, said high corn costs were already forcing producers in his industry to cut back on the number of animals they raise.
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Brenneman’s cost for feeding a single hog has shot up $30 in the past year because of record-high prices for corn and soybeans, the main ingredients in animal feed. Passing that increase on to consumers would tack an extra 15 cents per pound onto a pork chop.
It’s a similar story for U.S. beef producers, who now spend a whopping 60-70 percent of their production costs on animal feed and are seeing that number rise daily as corn prices hover near an unprecedented $8 a bushel, up from about $4 a year ago.
i’ve been reading (listening to) michael pollan’s the omnivore’s dilemma
(it’s both fascinating and horrifying in the same way that “super size me” and “an inconvenient truth” were) and it’s helped me to understand the subtext behind why we’ve historically had these huge surpluses of grain, why the small farmers are going out of business, and why processed foods are so evil and making americans obese: the giant pile of corn.
the giant pile of corn (which is different from the giant pool of money, which if you haven’t listened to it, is brilliantly explained by this american life and shows how the housing crunch in america turned into a huge international credit crisis. highly recommended) is the huge surplus of grain produced by our current incredibly productive variant of maize that is propped up by cheap petroleum used for fertilizer by industrial farming. this has led to curious side effects like the flood of both processed foods and zillions of crazy corn by-products in said processed foods, and in turn rise of things like american obesity and type II diabetes from the spread of more corn by-products like high-fructose corn syrup. yet this has all been predicated by the cheap petroleum and in turn corn, which has been dropping from $2 a bushel down to $1.25 a bushel in recent years. yet now with corn up to $8 a bushel, you wonder how this will ripple through the industry. certainly our food chain built on unnaturally grain-fed beef is already seeing the effects, but how much further could this fundamentally change how our society feeds itself? could this turn people back to grass-fed cattle and poultry? local more sustainable farming and shopping? or is this just the first step towards soylent green?
Corn’s prices were already rising before the floods, driven up 80 percent over the past year as developing countries like China and India scramble for grains to feed people and livestock. U.S. production of ethanol, an alternative fuel that can be made with corn, has also pushed prices higher, prompting livestock owners to lobby Washington to roll back ethanol mandates.
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If corn were to rise to $10 a bushel, Richard Lobb, spokesman for the National Chicken Council, said recouping costs through higher retail prices may not be possible.
speaking of which, i do have to say that’s one thing that troubles me about obama— his support for corn ethanol subsidies. compare this with mccain’s recent proposal for a new automobile battery prize and support for more efficient sugar cane-based ethanol (from cnet):
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His $300 million car battery prize is meant to spur creativity among automakers to make energy-efficient products.
“This is one dollar for every man, woman, and child in the U.S.—a small price to pay for helping to break the back of our oil dependency—and should deliver a power source at 30 percent of the current costs,” he said.
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In the same speech, McCain repeated his opposition to policies that encourage corn-ethanol and said the U.S. should eliminate a tariff on ethanol from Brazil because it hinders free trade.
He said he would provide incentives to automakers to manufacture flex-fuel vehicles that can run on ethanol or gasoline. He said Brazil, which gets about half of its auto fuel from sugar cane ethanol, has shown that a country can change its fuel mix in just a few years.
of COURSE i’m not saying it’s enough to make me vote for him, but i’m just saying.
June 24, 2008
June 22, 2008
well-rounded/baby
one of the things i really struggle with as a new parent is exactly how much of my life to sacrifice to raising a kid. don’t get me wrong: i’m not someone who doesn’t expect or want my life to change as a result of having a child, in fact i welcome it and enjoy it. yet it’s hard for me to figure out exactly how much of my life to sacrifice for the sake of parenting, especially when i’m ready and willing to give anything and everything up for the sake of my daughter.
yet this can’t be good or healthy in the long run. i have to remind myself that i’m not shirking my duties by wanting to go out once in a while and see a movie or a show, or even going out to buy some records or whatever. yet when there’s any sort of time conflict, i feel bad choosing myself when snapper or hmc could use my time, whether it’s just staying at home and watching her or being around to take a walk or give her a bath, or being able to watch her to allow hmc to get out of the house and experience a little freedom from child house arrest.
there’s an article in the nytimes about the novel and exciting idea of sharing parenting duties 50-50:
i’m sure hmc will disagree, but at least in my mind this really isn’t the issue. i’m lucky that i’ve got a job that’s relatively flexible in that i can move my hours around and be at home for lots of times during the week, and i’m happy to do as much as i can around raising snapper and watching her grow up.
but on the other hand i realize that often i swing too far in choosing noble parenthood, and needlessly sacrificing everything in the name of parenthood doesn’t win anyone any prizes. at worst this would burn me out and perhaps cause feelings of resentment, and at the very least snapper gets a father who hasn’t grown or changed since 2007.
the tiny step towards this was going to yoga last week for father’s day. which was the first time in a year. surprisingly, the world hadn’t fallen apart while i was gone.
June 17, 2008
again, japan is awesome
from time magazine:
Besides his glowing complexion, Shigeo Tokuda looks like any other 73-year-old man in Japan. Despite suffering a heart attack three years ago, the lifelong salaryman now feels healthier, and lives happily with his wife and a daughter in downtown Tokyo. He is, of course, more physically active than most retirees, but that’s because he’s kept his part-time job — as a porn star.
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Tokuda is rare among Japanese porn stars in that his name has become a brand. The Shigeo Tokuda series he’s just completed portray him as a tactful elderly gentleman who instructs women of different ages in the erotic arts, and he boasts a body of work far more impressive than most actors in their prime.
Tokuda’s exploits have proved to be a goldmine for Glory Quest, which first launched an “old-man” series, Maniac Training of Lolitas, in December 2004. Its popularity led the company to follow up with Tokuda starring in Forbidden Elderly Care in August 2006. Other series followed, and soon elder porn had revealed itself as a sustainable new revenue stream for the industry. “The adult video industry is very competitive,” says Glory Quest p.r. representative Kayoko Iimura. “If we only make standard fare, we cannot beat other studios. There were already adult videos with Lolitas or themes of incest, so we wanted to make something new. A relationship between wife and an old father-in-law has enough twist to create an atmosphere of mystery and captivate viewers’ hearts.”
Director Gaichi Kono says the eroticism of their elders is captivating to younger viewers. “I think that as a subject, there is this something that only an older generation has and the young people do not possess. It is because they lived that much more. We should respect them and learn from them,” says Kono passionately.
But Tokuda stresses the appeal of his work to an audience of his peers: “Elderly people don’t identify with school dramas,” he says. “It’s easier for them to relate to older men and daughters-in-law series, so they tend to watch adult videos with older people in them.” The veteran porn star plans to keep working until he’s 80, or older, as long as the industry will cast him — and given the bullish market for his work, he’s unlikely to go without work.
June 15, 2008
the first father’s day
how was my first father’s day as an actual father? quiet. quiet=great. all that i did today was to go to yoga for the first time in a year, take a nap, and then go out for sushi. and in between play with and feed snapper. what could be better?
oh, and i got to watch the game, and much to my surprise, the lakers won and are alive for another day.
(quick basketball aside: can i say that 1. i lied and i’m NOT fine with the celtics winning after watching them rip the heart out of my two favorite teams and 2. watching the lakers blow a 24 point lead in game 4 made me sick to my stomach. even watching them win their two games, you never really get the sense that they deserve to win or even earned it. no one on the lakers besides kobe seems to understand that they need to PLAY HARD to win and they need to earn it. instead they seem to have bought into the idea that they’re the favorites, and once they jump out to a nice lead [which they do every game] the celtics will fold. which they don’t. because this is the finals. and the celtics aren’t quitting, and that’s why they’re up 3-2. is it time for wimbledon yet?)
honestly, to me this has always been a bullshit holiday, a sort of “oh yeah” equivalent to mother’s day. but i can’t tell you how much i appreciate it now. not the actual holiday, but just that day that reminds me: i’m a father. and i love it.
June 7, 2008
it’s oh so quiet
our friend k.o. organized this brilliant “spontaneous” rendition of bjork’s “it’s oh so quiet” in union square today:
there’s also a better video here, but i didn’t have multiple cameras, and i bet these people weren’t holding a baby.
June 2, 2008
month 9
dear snapper,
you’re nine months old now, and growing like a weed. a very very small weed, but a weed nevertheless.
your mobility is now a fact of life; no longer can we just put you down somewhere and rely on you to be there when we get back. at first it was your scrabbling around on your belly, but now you GO places and when you get there, you’re pulling yourself up onto things, even up to standing.
and yet, this new dalliance with the z-axis presents a whole new set of challenges:
- finding you rolled over in your crib, now crawling around when you should be sleeping. daddy doesn’t know what he was thinking when he taught you how to roll over in the first place.
- finding you kneeling in your crib when you should be sleeping. need i mention that this precipitated lowering of said crib?
- finding you standing up in your crib, hanging onto the bars, and baby-talking “ATTICA! ATTICA!” as you bang your sippy cup against the rails. (ok, this didn’t actually happen. at least the sippy cup part. yet.)
- baby bath time is now much more difficult, because you no longer want to lay there but insist on sitting up. which makes washing your hair more complicated. and which also makes washing your bum MUCH more complicated.
what’s a been a little bit concerning are the asthma attacks. you’ve had five or six in the span of three weeks, enough for us to be worried and take you to the doctor a couple of times. we even have a baby-sized inhaler for you, but haven’t used it yet. pray that we will never have to. a-mah reminded me that you daddy had asthma when he was young, but grew out of it. so hopefully you will too.
speaking of growing, when mommy was out of town, you suddenly decided to start eating TWICE AS MUCH FOOD as before. suddenly you started packing in two ramekins of baby food in a meal, and became a yogurt eating machine. now i have to count my fingers after every meal. and it’s not only yogurt, but it’s a whole cornucopia of things that i would never imagined that you’d like, and i certainly didn’t like until probably i was twenty times as old as you. things like: lentils, fava beans, yams, asparagus, and broccoli! i am continually astounded.
it both makes me so incredibly proud and super mushy when i see how much you’re growing every day. the other day in the bath, when you wanted not only to sit up but to stand up, and you determinedly grabbed onto the side of the baby tub, and then decided that wasn’t enough and lifted yourself up by the edge of the bathtub, stood up, and looked out, you smiled a great big smile— a smile not just of happiness, but of accomplishment.
i almost wept.
May 30, 2008
the littlest ramen
Japanese scientists create microscopic noodle bowl
Mechanical engineering professor Masayuki Nakao said Thursday he and his students at the University of Tokyo used a carbon-based material to produce a noodle bowl with a diameter 1/25,000 of an inch in a project aimed at developing nanotube-processing technology.
The Japanese-style ramen bowl was carved out of microscopic nanotubes, Nakao said.
Nanotubes are tube-shaped pieces of carbon, measuring about one-ten-thousandth of the thickness of a human hair.
Carbon nanotubes are being explored for a wide range of uses in electronics and medicine because their structure endows them with powerful physical properties such as a strength greater than steel.
The ramen bowl experiment included a string of “noodles” that measured one-12,500th of an inch in length, with a thickness of one-1.25 millionth of an inch.
“We believe it’s the world’s smallest ramen bowl, with the smallest portion of noodles inside, though they are not edible,” Nakao said.
The hardest part was to keep the noodles from rising upright from the bowl “like alfalfa sprouts,” he said. “The achievement was mostly for fun.”
The microscopic bowl was first created in December 2006, but revealed only Thursday after it was entered for a microphotography competition last week.
May 28, 2008
grandparents’ love: snapper 1, tivo 0
just to catch everyone up, hmc went to nyc/new haven for the week for her sister’s law school graduation. originally we were all going to try and go, but snapper and i ended up staying home instead. i was going to try and figure out how to work in a visit to my parents during my time off but they decided to come up here instead. it was great: they got to spend a whole week with snapper, and then every night after snapper went to bed and we ate dinner, we’d watch basketball, either lakers/spurs or pistons/celtics depending on what day it was. we took some walks, went to the park, and tamed the agave overrunning the front garden. plus, the endless home-cooked food!
out of this, i realized two things:
1. my dad is mostly fine.
he seems to be more or less recovered from the stroke or whatever it was. he’s sometimes still a little forgetful or says the wrong word, but you can’t tell whether it’s still side effects from the s.o.w.i.w. or just because he’s getting old. what i do notice is that he is old all of a sudden; it’s like he was able to hide it before and not show it so much, but the s.o.w.i.w. took so much out of him that he aged overnight.
again, i don’t know if anyone else really notices. but it’s strange to see him going a little slower now, and looking a little more grey.
2. my parents will probably never understand tivo.
the whole concept of not having to be wedded to when a certain show comes on and instead just watching whatever you want whenever you want to is just totally foreign to them. it took them several days to figure out what was going on when we’d watch the day’s basketball game, and why suddenly we were watching the beginning when it was clearly later then that, but not yet over?
in the end i didn’t even really take the time to try and explain it to them because it was clear that they didn’t need it or want it. yes, it can record stuff you want to watch, but you need to know what you want to watch beforehand so you can tell it to get it. and it can even suggest stuff, but i don’t think they even want that or even care that much. it’s not like they even really have favorite shows or anything. if it’s interesting they’ll watch it, usually golf or something during the day if they’re not out or working in the garden. at night they probably just flipp around prime time until the news comes on. it’s not really about finding good shows to watch or collecting things to see. it’s about filling the time until you go to bed.
so much for giving them that spare tivo.
it makes me realize that at a certain point, there’s some paradigm that you don’t need to and won’t buy into. whether it’s just because it’s too meta for you or you’re just too ingrained in whatever you’re used to; you just don’t see the value in it and it’s not worth the effort. i see tivo as being this for my parents. i just spent yesterday geeking out on the faviconize tab extension, and realized that this would not only make no sense to them, but i probably couldn’t explain to them why they would need tabs in the first place.
i look around and try to figure out what could be my equivalent. perhaps it’s the news comes from newspapers idea that i can’t seem to shake. i can’t really take news from blogs and rss feeds that seriously; i can only follow sports news and tech news using those. everything else is either from a real newspaper (nytimes), or some online replica (sfgate) or amalgamation (my yahoo!).
someday there will be a web 5.0 plugin where you get news piped directly into your brain, and i’ll say, “eh, what do i need that for? i get the news right here every day on my doorstep!”
May 26, 2008
the search for buddhism (or: journey to the west [of the bay])
snapper and i decided at the last minute to dash over to the asian art museum to catch the zhan wang exhibit that was closing yesterday. the highlight was a topographic San Francisco cityscape—one of his “urban landscape” series- using steel rocks, mirrored surfaces, silverware, and stainless steel pots and pans, which was pretty cute, although given all the hoopla i thought his exhibit might have more than just one small room. it certainly was shiny, though.
seeing as we were already out and had paid our admission, we cruised through the rest of the museum. i decided to let snapper lead the way, and would just go over and examine whatever she decided to look at. given that the entire third floor was dedicated to tracing buddhism’s spread across asia, there were a LOT of buddha statues and carvings. it was interesting to see what aspects of buddhism resonated with each culture and how that was reflected in their depictions of him. speaking of which, i’m reminded that i’m desperate to see the hewlett/albarn opera monkey journey to the west, and i see that it’s actually in the states, but i’d have to go to south carolina to go see it? uh, what?
on the other hand, it did make me think of jill bolte taylor, who gave a great TED talk and just had a piece done about her in the nytimes today:
The incessant chatter that normally filled her mind disappeared. Her everyday worries — about a brother with schizophrenia and her high-powered job — untethered themselves from her and slid away.
Her perceptions changed, too. She could see that the atoms and molecules making up her body blended with the space around her; the whole world and the creatures in it were all part of the same magnificent field of shimmering energy.
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She brings a deep personal understanding to something she long studied: that the two lobes of the brain have very different personalities. Generally, the left brain gives us context, ego, time, logic. The right brain gives us creativity and empathy. For most English-speakers, the left brain, which processes language, is dominant. Dr. Taylor’s insight is that it doesn’t have to be so.
Her message, that people can choose to live a more peaceful, spiritual life by sidestepping their left brain, has resonated widely.
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But many reaching out are spiritual seekers, particularly Buddhists and meditation practitioners, who say her experience confirms their belief that there is an attainable state of joy.
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Although her father is an Episcopal minister and she was raised in his church, she cannot be counted among the traditionally faithful. “Religion is a story that the left brain tells the right brain,” she said.
Still, Dr. Taylor says, “nirvana exists right now.”
“There is no doubt that it is a beautiful state and that we can get there,” she said.
i’m not sure that snapper felt any of this. she was pretty chilled out the whole time, but ended up getting a pretty bad diaper rash from the experience, so i don’t know what that means.
