GRE

I went into London yesterday and took my GRE.  Thanks to the wonders of computer-based testing, I got my results for the math and verbal sections straightaway; the writing sections still have to be read.  Out of a possible 800 apiece, I got:

560 on the maths
740 on the verbal

I’m pretty darn happy with these scores.  I’ll still probably take it again, because I think I can do better, and I’m almost positive that my writing score is going to be awful, but overall, it’s a lot better than I was expecting.  :-)

Exercising my citizenship

I wrote to my Congressman yesterday.  (Well, I actually messed up and wrote to two Congressmen, of whom only one is actually my Congressman.) I wrote to encourage him to stand up against the renewed push towards drilling in the Arctic Refuge and offshore, and instead to put more emphasis on alternative/renewable energies.  I received a response - an actual response from an actual Congressman (it wasn’t from the one who actually represents me, but hey, it’s something).  It wasn’t a form letter from a staffer!  And I wrote back this morning, in greater depth. 

And do you know how fantastic it feels to think that I’m having some say, no matter how small, in the way things are run?  Pretty bloody fantastic, let me tell you!

Zen and the art of travelling

We’re leaving for Africa two weeks from tomorrow.  And you know what I’m spending most of my time doing?  Trying not to think about it.  I’m really quite nervous, and every time I think about it (like right now), I end up with a knot or two or fifteen in my stomach.

I’ve never been tents-camping.  (I’ve been snow camping, but somehow I doubt that will be a skill transferable to Africa.) I’ve never really been backpacking at all.  I’m never been to Southern Africa.  I’ve never been travelling for more than a couple of weeks.  I’ve never been somewhere where there’s a real risk of catching a dread disease or getting caught up in a tense situation.  I’ve never done any travelling where I didn’t have *any* places to stay booked in advance.

… And this is our honeymoon.  ::shaking her head::

I mean, it’s going to be great, I’m sure.  I know that I’ll come back amazed by the experience, hopefully with lots of lovely photos to show for it.  I’m fully expecting it to be wonderful through and through.  But that doesn’t mean that I’m not nervous.

… Oh yeah.  And I have to take the GRE in a week and a bit.  Ohbloodyhell. 

Carbon emissions

A few days ago, a friend posted the following comment on this blog: “Recently I heard on NPR that of the entire total sum of human carbon emissions, driving personal cars makes up 10%.  This really shocked me since so much effort is made to have people drive less.  This essentially means to me that if everyone started walking and sold their cars today, we would still be at 90% of our carbon emissions.  I’m not sure what makes up that 90%, it wasn’t addressed—factories? air planes?  Whatever it is though, while we should all try to drive less of course, I think we should be much more aggressive about stopping that source!  I was thinking of you actually, and wondering if you know what the main causes of carbon output besides driving are . . .”

I’m currently reading Jeffrey Sachs’ Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, and was happy to run across the exact answer to my friend’s question whilst reading tonight.  In Chapter 4, Table 4.1, Sachs gives the breakdown of the total carbon dioxide emissions in 2007, extrapolated from 2005 data from the International Energy Agency.  The burning of fossil fuels, according to Sachs, accounts for 81% of all carbon dioxide emissions, of which the creation of electricity causes 32%, industry causes 22%, transportation (including personal) causes 18%, residential (i.e. fires, furnaces, etc.) causes 6%, and commercial emissions causes 3%.  The 19% of carbon dioxide emissions not caused by fossil fuel consumption is accounted for in deforestation.

So what this means is that transportation is the fourth largest (of six) emitter of carbon dioxide, with 10% (according to NPR) coming from personal transport.  It’s true that ten percent isn’t that much.  My inclination is to believe that the push towards personal car use reduction stems from a “give them something they can deal with” approach to educating the public about personal responsibility for environmental action.  You know, people in power thinking that they can’t overwhelm us, or perhaps not wanting to threaten the industries that fund all of their campaigns by bringing constituents’ attention to the problems in industry.  Or maybe it comes from the other side - what are Americans if not consumers, after all, so push for them to consume less or, at least, differently.  “Go green.” So, in light of the fact that electricity is such a larger emitter, perhaps there should be an equally-large, if not larger, push to encourage Americans to go for green energy plans.

Or should there be?

Another book I read recently, Judith Levine’s Not Buying It had a quote which struck me: “If I am a consumer first and last, all I can do to better the world is consumer more responsibly - ‘buy green,’ invest in socially responsible businesses, and buy less.  The other choice I have is to reject consumer as my sole role and reclaim my other public identity: citizen.”

We can choose the Prius.  We can choose Ecotricity, or whatever green tariff our local energy supplier has.  We can drive less, and turn off more lights in our houses.  And we should.  Every little helps.  BUT… we shouldn’t stop there.

Instead, we should become citizens again.  It’s been obvious of late (see the abysmal voter turnouts in the last several elections) that, for whatever reason, citizens aren’t acting like full citizens.  Perhaps we are understandably disenchanted with governance that seems determined to pander to a few, divide the rest, and to assume the lowest common denominator of its citizens.  Perhaps we don’t vote because, really, what can one individual vote do? 

But that’s not how America has always been!  We are taught to revere the Founding Fathers as men who fought and won a revolution because they felt their voices weren’t being heard by their government.  Women banded together and won the vote; African-Americans banded together and ended segregation.  We are a nation founded on idealism and stubbornness and individual, collective action.  We can still be so! 

So instead of just buying a Prius, buy a Prius (or a bicycle), talk to all of your friends and coworkers and people who help you and Facebook contacts and everyone else about how great your Prius (or bicycle!) is, and then send a letter to your senators and representatives urging them to force greater fuel efficiency measures onto the auto industry (and urge them to push a bicycle-lane structure into your local area), and sign all those petitions that get shoved your way about autos, and attend local government meetings and speak up about how your city should pass a congestion and emissions charge like London, or whatever scratches your auto/bicycle/public transport itch.

And instead of just buying the wind-power option, buy the wind-power option, do all the yammering to everyone, and then start pushing HARD for greater investment in R&D for alternative energy.  I know I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: humans are incredibly ingenious.  The technology already exists to squeeze much greater efficiency out of our current energy structure - push to have it applied.  But equally, the intelligence and imagination is undoubtedly out there to find new ways of powering things, ways that don’t burn fossil fuels and don’t depend on the fossil fuel chain (as biofuels currently do) and that won’t cause mass extinctions or altered wind patterns or even ugly landscapes.  That intelligence and imagination needs to be drawn to work on this problem if it’s not already there, and one good way to draw people in is to pay them.  So make sure more money - LOTS more money - gets put into the research sector.  And then help make sure that the results are applied quickly.

A citizen is not just a voter, nor just a consumer, but a member of society.  Movements happen when like-minded people find each other and start talking and doing about the thing they believe in, regardless of the scorn/derision/hatred of those who disagree with them.  Let’s keep this movement moving! 

It’s important to remember, however, that not everyone prioritizes everything the same, even if they are of like minds.  Some people might find the plight of the polar bears or the national parks more engaging than climate change or famine.  We can’t insist that everyone focus on any one goal.  They are all under the same umbrella.  Decide which is the most important to you and put the vast majority of your energy towards that.  Save a little to support others’ causes (petitions, anyone?), and remember to occasionally raise your eyes from your specific cause to the grander scale.  Don’t lose the forest for the trees, or something like that.  But most importantly, keep moving!

And… relax.

I just passed the theory portion of my UK driving test!  Including the annoying “hazard perception” portion, which disqualified one of my clips because I clicked the mouse too many times.  I now have two years to pass the practical portion, so I’m not going to worry about it until after we get back from Africa; I have plenty to do between now and then, what with the GRE and all.

A month from yesterday

A and I went out and bought our tent for Africa this last weekend.  We bought an Octance 2 tent from Blacks, which looks to be a good balance between size and weight.  We’re both a little nervous about this, as neither of us has really spent much/any time camping, but I’m sure that after seven weeks in Africa, we’ll be fine!

I’m also going to get a good tripod to take with me.  I’ve been wanting a good one for years - I love low-light shots but have shaky hands.  This is a probably the best time to get it, as I want to make sure I have lots of wonderful photos from this trip!  It’s also a great time to get one because my wonderful mom and grandfather have offered to cover the cost.  ::grin::  I’m going to get a Velbon Sherpa Pro tripod with a Manfrotto ball-and-socket head.  Overall, what with the tripod and the head and the 30-year-old, metal-body camera and all the film, my photo equipment is going to be by far the heaviest things in my backpack, but, again, how often am I going to make a trip like this?

We went down to London last Wednesday and dropped our passports and visa applications off at the Kenyan embassy.  All being well, they should be in the mail back to us today.  We probably won’t be getting any other visas before we go, as our plans are flexible and so we aren’t really sure where we’re going to go.

Looking at the state of things now, we’re probably going to follow something like the following route: fly into Jo’burg.  Leave South Africa pretty much immediately.  Head up the Mozambique coast, possibly stopping in to visit a friend’s daughter, who lives there.  Cross over into Malawi, thence to Zambia.  Canoe trip on the Zambezi (note: don’t annoy the hippos).  Train from Kapiri Mposhi up to Dar es Salaam.  Zanzibar.  Travel along the northern part of Tanzania, past Kilimanjaro (but not up it), into Uganda.  Out of Uganda, down through Kenya, out of Nairobi. 

Three days after arriving back in the UK, travel up north for some friends’ wedding.  Eat lots and lots of food there, and enjoy sleeping on real beds.

I’m finally starting to get excited about this trip.  Before now I hadn’t been too bothered, mostly because it seemed so remote and impossible.  Now, however - we leave in less than a month!  And we’ve bought a tent.  I mean, we must be going somewhere if we’ve bought a tent, right?

As mentioned before, our plans are very flexible.  The one thing we definitely do not want to do is rush too much, try to fit too much in.  One of my big failings is a tendency to look towards the future too much, to the detriment of my experience of the present.  So I’m going to try my best to be very conscious and in-the-moment, and not to worry about what’s going to happen next or where we’re going to go next or how we’re going to get there.  That’s one reason (for me, at least) that I haven’t been pushing to plan more for this trip.  Up until just a week ago, all we really had was the arrival date and departure date; now we have a date to enter Kenya.  We still don’t really have much of anything in between, and that’s fine by me.  It’s good for me, too.  ::grin::

OSTP report

“For example, in their most recent assessment of climate change science, the IPCC concluded that it is unequivocal that the average temperature of Earth’s surface has warmed recently and it is very likely (greater than 90% probability) that most of this global warming is due to increased concentrations of human-generated greenhouse gases. … An increasing body of scientific research supports the conclusion that, while greenhouse gases are but one of many factors that affect climate, they are very likely the single largest cause of the recent warming. … Studies that rigorously quantify the effect of different external influences on observed changes (attribution studies) conclude that most of the recent global warming is very likely due to human-generated increases in greenhouse gas concentrations. A large number of climate model simulations show that natural factors alone cannot explain the observed warming in the second half of the 20th century of Earth’s land masses and oceans, or that of the North American continent. On the other hand, simulations that include human factors are able to reproduce important large-scale features of the recent changes. … Discernible human influences extend to additional aspects of climate, including the recent decreases in Arctic sea ice extent, patterns of sea level pressure and winds, and the global-scale pattern of land precipitation.  According to CCSP Synthesis and Assessment Product (SAP) 3.3, it is very likely that the human-induced increase in greenhouse gases has contributed to the increase in sea surface temperatures in the hurricane formation regions. …” (all italics from the original)

Hooray!  The current administration has come on board the anthropogenic climate change boat, posting a report titled ”Scientific Assessment of the Effects of Climate Change on the United States” on its Office of Science and Technology Policy home page.  The above quotes are from the executive summary of the report, which runs to 271 pages and is thus going to take me a while to plow through. 

I’m glad that this has happened.  Unfortunately, the publication date being as late as it is pretty much precludes anything major happening before President Bush leaves office.  But I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.  This sets the bar for the incoming President, whoever he or she may be.  Logically, if humans are very likely to have created or accelerated global warming, and if said global warming is likely to have a negative impact - for instance, if “[c]limate change is likely to increase the risk and geographic spread of vector-borne infectious diseases, including Lyme disease and West Nile virus” (p. 15) - then surely we are under obligation to address the issue and mitigate it as best as possible?

Support

Last night, my wonderful A happily stayed up until well after midnight (even though he had an early start this morning), listening supportively while I talked about the various things that have been troubling me of late, not even protesting as my tears wet his shoulder. 

Yet another example of how lucky I am to be with him.  ::contented smile::

(Sorry for the schmoopy post.  Just feeling, well, content.)

Brief update

After a couple of weekends of back-twinging labor, copious amounts of seed, and a fortuitous run of really hideous (i.e. rainy) weather, our back yard now actually has a yard.  It’s still too fragile to walk on, but it’s gotten past the point where it merely looks like our ground is moldy.  I had no idea that brand-new grass was so electrically green!

Also, the rain has encouraged the passion flower to really put some growth on, and the one remaining poppy to bloom.  The other one would probably be blooming, too, but a friend of ours who was helping put down the grass seed decided - without asking - that the poppy was a weed and raked the living daylights out of it, knocking off the only seed head.  ::sigh:: 

We went to the Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye on both last Friday and this Monday.  Last Friday, A and I saw Barry Cryer and Colin Szell speak/play the piano; it was a lot of fun.  Monday, A, J and I went to see Jasper Fforde speak.  I must say, for a man whose books leave no doubt as to his utter madness, he was remarkably coherent.  ::grin::  He read a bit from First Among Sequels, which A and I are determined to read now, and then from his next book, which won’t be out for another fourteen months, called Shades of Grey.  It sounds very interesting - a dystopian view of a future England with the classes divided by who can see what color.  Those who can see the color purple rule, those who can see only red are next-to-last, and the “achromatics,” who can’t see any colors at all, are the untouchables.  ::shaking her head::  Where does he come up with these things?

Displacement 2.

I’m homesick.  And it really is a sickness - it affects the majority of my life over here.  I haven’t been at home for just under five years, not counting the summer I spent there in 2004, and it’s starting to tell inside me.  I read the blogs and look at the Flickr photos of friends in Portland with something twisting inside me.  I daydream - and dream at night - about being back there.

This probably sounds terribly melodramatic, and I know that you’re probably all really tired of me yammering on about this.  And, truthfully, I wouldn’t have believed that I could get like this from homesickness.  Sure, I was homesick for Texas for the first few months of college, but that went away.  This hasn’t.  There haven’t been but a handful or two of days since I left in 2003 that I haven’t thought about Portland. 

Part of me wonders why I ever left.  Okay, I know that, really, I left because I knew that if I didn’t go away for a while at that point, I never would, and I wanted to see more of the world.  But I didn’t intend to be gone this long.  And while there are some things that I am glad have happened, and overall I know I am a stronger, possibly better, person for having done all this, there are other things that I regret.  Also, dammit, I’m tired of being blue.  I feel constrained, restless, but know that there is no solution other than to wait and see whilst steering towards whatever of my future seems certain.  I’m not a patient person, not really.  And I worry about opportunities passing me by, perhaps irrevocably, while I’m sitting, waiting and seeing.

Displacement 1

Lion in Kenya.  I’m going to be where this lion is (ish) in a month and a half. 

Numbers game

Entering the house for lunch today, I found the most recent Reed magazine sitting in the pile of mail below the letterbox.  I’ve browsed some of it already, but read through the article on the admissions process.  Given that I worked in admissions for three years while at Reed, in my final year as an intern, responsible for weighing in on the applicants, the article was of interest to me.

I was disappointed.  The article explains the process well enough.  But there is a strong theme, almost sensationalist in its tone, of worry about the dwindling acceptance rate.  Repeated emphasis is placed on percentage of students accepted, both historically and nowadays.  The author worries, or repeats others’ worries, that the decreasing acceptance rate signals a shift in Reed culture from the fringe to the center.  Yes, there are quotes from people like good old Ed Segel and Peter Steinberger about how everything is just fine, but the overarching impression, emphasized by the final quote from an alumna admissions counselor about how she wonders whether she would get in nowadays, is that things are changing for the worse.

The one thing that bothered me in particular about the article is that, although the author mentions - repeatedly - the rising number of applicants, and even mentions - once - the desired entering class size, the rather obvious leap from inflating-applications-and-steady-state-class-size to dwindling acceptance rate is never made.  And small class size, with all its ramifications, seems to me to be much more crucial to the preservation of Reed culture than a resulting loss in acceptance rate.  Can you imagine if every class at Reed was like Hum 110 lecture?  Hundreds of students gently dozing in motionless air.  The prof an unreachable entity at the front, passing on knowledge without being able to actually interact with his or her students.  What would distinguish Reed from a stereotypical state school, were that the case?

The author states that, “Since 2001, applications to Reed have doubled, and the acceptance rate has plummeted - from 74 percent to an all-time low of 32 percent this year.” This year, there were 3,485 applicants.  So in 2001, there were roughly 1,750 applicants.  That means that back in 2001, about 1,300 were accepted.  This year, about 1,100 students were accepted.  That’s not a huge difference in output for a massive difference in acceptance rates.  Even I can see that, and as we all know, my math sucks.  So why not spend some time in the article debating about whether small class sizes are critical to the preservation of Reed culture, rather than hand-wringing about a percentage? 

In the end, it seems to me that the conflict is deciding which is more crucial: Reed’s tradition of broad admissions acceptance, or Reed’s tradition of small class sizes.  I know which one I would vote for.

Michael Maniates

Going Green? A short argument for big aspirations in the environmental sector.

Unexpected

D’you know, I’m actually… well, “enjoying” would be too strong a word… relishing studying for the math portion of the GRE?  It’s not that I actually like math; I still don’t.  But math has always been something I’ve been afraid of.  Something I had to be forced to do.  Something that, despite my protestations that I can do anything I set my mind to, I couldn’t do.

I don’t like having fears, or, at least, leaving them untackled.  Particularly when it’s something as omnipresent as math.  I hate feeling sheepish/ashamed every time I get asked to do even the most basic math and either can’t do it or have to resort to a calculator or my fingers.  And I really hate feeling like I’ve left something unfinished, unresolved. 

I didn’t realize that I considered math unresolved.  As far as I’ve been concerned these last ten years, I had done my bit, managed to scrape through even BC Calculus, and that was that.  So what if I couldn’t really add or subtract and the sight of fractions and ratios sent chills down my spine?  Why should that matter - I got a history degree; I was going to do something firmly on the verbal side with my life.

But now that I’m working on math again, I’m discovering all sorts of things.  For one, it turns out that there are a lot of tricks to doing basic math that work better than trying to do it straight.  (Like figuring a 15% tip by moving the decimal place and adding half, or adding half again to figure VAT, etc.) For another, I’m discovering that I *can* do math.  I’ll still probably never be able to calculus (which is fine by me), and I’ll never be quick (which is more of a problem, given the timed nature of the GRE, but still something I can live with).  But I can do it.

And you know, that makes me very content.  I have chosen to challenge a fear that I have held for… oh, ever since starting math classes back twenty-odd years ago.  And I can do it.

Yes, we can.

I attended an “Earth May Day” event hosted at the local university this weekend.  The event was intermittently interesting: the MP for Cheltenham is well-spoken and well-informed, for instance, and there was an interesting game-driven discussion session.  But during that discussion session, something very disturbing became clear.

Before and after the game, the session’s facilitator asked a series of questions about attendees’ views on climate change.  Keep in mind, all the attendees were specifically targeted and invited as being eco-oriented and well-placed to have an effect within the local community.  We were supposed to raise our hands as he went along a continuum of opinion responses from one, being very pessimistic, to seven, being very optimistic.

One of the questions was something like, “Do you think humans can overcome climate change?” Both before and after the game, I was the only person who responded with the most optimistic seven.  Most people ended up in the middle-to-bottom range.  A number of people supposedly moved themselves to a more optimistic response after they had verified that yes, the question was about whether we CAN, not whether we WILL.

If the people who care enough about issues like climate change to give up their Saturdays, and who are in influential positions within the community (at local schools, in local government, etc.) are so pessimistic about our ability to get ourselves out of the mess that we have created/exacerbated, how are we supposed to inspire anyone else to join up?  People will not even try if all they hear is that it’s hopeless!  And how are we supposed to gather the momentum to create the necessary changes if those of us who are best placed to push for change feel, if we’re being honest, that there’s not really any point?

Look, I’m not pretending that I don’t have pessimistic moments.  I have to admit that I consciously CHOSE to answer “seven” when asked.  And I know my optimism may seem naive to some. 

Pessimism is normal.  Optimism is hard to maintain.  But conscious choice is absolutely crucial. I know I’ve said this before, but I honestly - really, truthfully - believe that I can do anything I set my mind to.  And I believe that that extends to all humanity. 

We are a remarkable species.  We have accomplished so much in our time on earth.  So many things that used to be “impossible” are now everyday - space travel, walking on artificial limbs, talking instantaneously with someone on the other side of the planet.  All these things were accomplished because someone chose to address a perceived impossibility.  Yes, we’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way.  Yes, by solving some problems we have caused others.  That’s how you learn.  The current ecological problems may be an example of that.

If we choose to roll over and give up, to believe that anthroprogenic climate change is unfixable, well, then, it will be.  We’ll all freeze or bake or drown or whatever.  We may still freeze or bake or drown, even if we choose otherwise. It may be, as many say, that the current instabilities are part of a cycle far too large for the brevity of human existence to comprehend.  Certainly mass extinctions are an obvious part of history. 

If, however, we choose to try, then we can neutralize all the things that contribute to anthroprogenic climate change.  We can find a happy medium; we can make carbon-neutral planes and cars, ways to support a healthy economy without the mounds of waste and pollution that the current system creates, ways to have green space and animals and human civilization too.  We can undo any damage that we have done.  We CAN.  Then, no matter the end result, we will have tried.