Tag: Obama

#Review: BECOMING, by Michelle Obama

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews5 Comments

Barack Obama was my president.

It’s possible that you intuitively grasp exactly what I’m talking about, but I’m going to explain anyway.  I voted for Barack Obama literally every single time he stood for public office.  I was living in Hyde Park, in an apartment across the street from the Baskin-Robbins where he and Michelle had their first kiss, when he was rising to prominence before running for the Senate.  I attended the University of Chicago, where he worked.  I have met Jeremiah Wright, who was his pastor.  He and Bill Ayers were never as close as the media liked to pretend (they served on a board or two together, and Bill had a picture of the two of them together on his refrigerator) but Bill was one of my professors at the University of Illinois.  I haven’t talked to Bill in a several years, but, well, I know there used to be a picture of him and Barack together on the fridge in his house and his number is still in my phone.  

I was telling people Barack Obama was going to be the first black president before anybody outside of Chicago knew who the hell Barack Obama was.  I can remember someone passing me on the highway and honking and waving, and waving rather confusedly back until they got ahead of me and I realized they also had an Obama for Senate bumper sticker on their car.  

Was he a perfect president?  Absolutely not.  Ask me about his education policies sometime, which were more or less continued without modification from his predecessor, and I loathed his first choice for Secretary of Education– Arne Duncan, who had been CEO of Chicago Public Schools, where I had worked.   But he was my president in a way no one ever had before and in a way that it seems highly unlikely anyone ever will be again. My attachment to this man is deep and abiding and I suspect it will not be waning anytime soon.  

And the truth is, as much as I like Barack, I like Michelle even more.  Because Michelle has everything going for her that her husband does, only she’s never disappointed me.   

I have a particular bookshelf that contains at least one book by or about every legitimately elected American president.  Hillary Clinton’s book WHAT HAPPENED is occupying the space that might belong to the Current Occupant, who forced me to institute the “legitimately elected” rule.  I’m adding BECOMING to this shelf.  Michelle makes it clear that she never intends to run for political office, and a good chunk of the book is dedicated to the various debates and conversations that she had with her husband about his own choices to run for office.  She’s never going to be president.  But I’m putting it there anyway, because it’s my house and my bookshelf and I can.  

Yeah, this is gonna be one of those book reviews where I spend 80% of the review talking about me and then the last 20% talking about the book.  But hey: my blog; y’all know how I work by now.  And here’s the thing: Michelle Robinson would still have turned out to be a fascinating human being even if she’d never become Michelle Obama.  The part of the book dedicated to her childhood and her pre-marriage-and-kids life is every bit as interesting as the stuff I actually remember, and her perspective on her husband’s fame and her own, and her charting her own path as she learns the “soft power” of the First Lady’s office, makes for a great read.  This isn’t a book about Barack Obama, even if he is (obviously) a major player for a large part of it.  But it’s absolutely a great read and it’s going to show up on my top 10 list when I write it in a couple of weeks.

Also, because I’m this guy and I can’t not mention this: this book is for some reason one of the most physically satisfying tomes I’ve ever held.  As an object it’s great; the paper is creamy and feels wonderful (they’re clearly using a higher grade of paper than most of the books I read) and the weight of the book is … well, I just said “satisfying,” and I don’t like constantly re-using words, but fuck it: the book is just tremendous to hold as you’re reading it.  I’m sure the paperback will be fine, and as an indie author I can’t come down too hard on ebooks, but still: get it in hardcover.  It’s worth it.  

It is cold and snowy outside…

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

…and yet, I have to go to work.

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2014: White House Year in Photos

On By Luther M. SilerIn PhotographyLeave a comment

I already Tweeted and Tumblrd (Tumblred?) one of these images, but man, the entire set is just amazing.  Check them out.

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Reblog: Ducks and Horses

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Politics, Uncategorized4 Comments
This was too awesome not to reblog.  Original version here, at Giant Flightless Birds.

Ducks and Horses

A certain amount of nonsense has been written about duck-sized horses and horse-sized ducks, and it’s time to set the record straight.

In an online Q&A session back in August, President Obama was asked, “Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck?” The Atlantic wrote a cheerful article about Obama’s choice (horse-sized duck), but the biologists they hastily recruited as fact-checkers were obviously operating outside their specialty. I feel it’s rather a shame Obama staffers neglected to consult me, as that question was, in essence, my PhD topic; I could have given the President better advice, and explained why his intuition—that a single giant duck would be an easier fight—is wrong, wrong, wrong.

The Fight

Ground rules: in the immortal tradition of Flash Gordon or Star Trek, the President finds himself alone in an arena, armed only with what he can improvise (“Your drones will not help you now, Mr President”). He’s faced with two doors: behind each are the opponent(s) he must defeat in order to, I don’t know, save the Earth. Which should he choose?

Horse-Sized Duck

A good-sized horse weighs 500 kg, or half a metric ton. What would a half-tonne duck look like, exactly? The problem is most people aren’t thinking of the biological scaling laws, known as allometry, that come into play when you make animals larger or smaller. While I’m sure John Eadie, the conservation ecologist quoted by The Atlantic, knows his field, he’s just wrong to imagine a giant duck would be dealing terrible blows with its enormous wings. It would be flightless, and its wings would be reduced to tiny stubs or have vanished altogether.

obamadromornis

The closest thing to half-tonne ducks we have in the fossil record are Gastornis, sometimes known as Diatryma, from Europe and North America, and the dromornithids of Australia. Both were gigantic moa-sized birds, related to ducks and geese, with huge sturdy legs and gigantic sharp beaks. They’re sometimes thought to be scavengers or fruit-eaters, but were likely predators similar to the better-known but unrelated phorusrachids of South America. Dromornis stirtoni, one of the largest birds ever, approached 500 kg and has even been nicknamed “the demon duck of doom” by Australian paleontologists, in their playful way.

Duck-Sized Horses

What’s a typical duck? I had to measure many, many duck bones to come up with a model for estimating body mass from femur diameter. There are over 100 species of ducks, and they range from less than 300 g (10 ounces) to about 4 kg (9 lbs); the “average duck” weighs about 700 g, the same as a guinea pig. That’s smaller than you would think, but more of a bird’s volume is made up of feathers than most people realise, now that we no longer pluck our own game.

What would a duck-sized horse look like? The smallest horse that springs to mind for most people is the ancestral Eohippus, famously “fox-terrier” sized, but actually about 30 kg according to more recent models (such as MacFadden’s in his 1994 book on fossil horses), so about 40 times too large for our purposes. When we scale animals up and down in size, allometry—the laws of physics—has far more effect on their appearance than their ancestry does. A dog-sized horse has body proportions about that of a dog; a guinea-pig sized horse would look pretty much like a guinea pig.

eohippusguineapig

Wouldn’t about 100 of them be fairly formidable, though? The herding behaviour of horses and other large herbivores lets them spot predators and defend themselves if necessary, but that only works if predators are roughly the same size as them. For a predator 100 times your size, the only response is not to try and swarm it, but to flee in terror.

Conclusion

President Obama weighs about 80 kg. Should he try to take down a 500 kg bird, with its powerful kick and huge razor-sharp beak, using just his bare hands? Or should he rather face 70 kg of terrified guinea pigs, which would require nothing but stout footwear? If the Earth’s fate is in the balance, the choice is clear, and it’s a specific instance of a general law I once came up with: nothing in evolution (or imaginary arena combat) makes sense except in the light of allometry.

 

In which I bullet point

On By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

ostriches-head-in-sandJust  a couple of things that are rolling around in my head; do with them what you will:

  • President Obama did the right thing– politically, morally, and legally– by going to Congress for authorization to attack Syria.  I have no idea whether he’ll get it, but this thing where we just attack other countries without a declaration of war because the President wants to needs to stop.  That said, the AUMF is probably too broad, and for it to matter Obama’s going to have to pay attention to what Congress says to do, which he doesn’t actually have to.
  • Congress should say no, and Obama shouldn’t have wanted to do this in the first place.  Not one more thin fucking dime for bombs in the Middle East; I don’t give a shit what they do to each other anymore.  Chemical weapons, machine guns, eat each fucking other for all I care.  No more goddamn Middle East wars.  There’s no good outcome from this under any circumstances– we take out Assad and bring democracy to Syria, they’re just going to elect an Islamist government– so we shouldn’t do anything at all.  Let them solve their own goddamn civil war.
  • Humanitarians are no doubt thinking humanitarian things based on that last paragraph.  I initially supported the Iraq war on humanitarian grounds; look at where that got us.  “Fuck it” is now officially a position on war.  If that makes me a bad person, I can live with it; if that means tinhorn despots will continue to use chemical weapons to ineffectively kill relatively small numbers of people I can live with that too.
  • NICE OF YOU TO SAY “FUCK IT” WHILE PEOPLE ARE DYING, ASSHOLE:  Refer to “no good outcome” response.  Nothing we can do about this.  Bombing just kills more innocent people.  I’d prefer we not do that, and since there’s no viable positive outcome that means we don’t do it.
  • I was already aware of most of the information in this useful article except for the bit where we’re pissing Russia off, which seems like another reason for this to be a nay-nay war, as John Pinette might say.
  • Notre Dame’s first home game was yesterday, which meant we got our first onslaught of poorly-housebroken drunk asshole fucks after the game, two of whom were wearing shirts that said “SOUTH BEND FUCKIN’ INDIANA” on the front and something along the lines of “IF YOU DON’T BLEED BLUE AND GOLD TAKE YOUR BITCH ASS HOME” on the back, displaying the kind of grace and class I’ve come to expect from Notre Dame students over the years.  I considered throwing them out on the spot and settled for making them turn the shirts inside out, then managed to get into a minor Twitter fight this morning while making sure I’d gotten the back of the shirts right.
  • No demolition today in the bathroom; we’ve decided to wait until measuring is done and we have a timeline on the guy coming in to do the tile.  There’s no point in wrecking the bathroom early– possibly a couple of weeks early– when there’s so much else to be done before we can put it back together, even if a three-day weekend would be convenient.
  • Here’s the front of the shirt.
  • It’s probably time to potty train the boy.  There have been Constipation Issues this week.  I don’t like knowing about other people’s poops.
  • Making snow pea beef stir fry tonight.  I am hugely looking forward to it.
  • Looking less forward to having to wade through four inches of grading HOW THE HELL DID THAT HAPPEN ALREADY.

Might add more later.  Whee!

In which I’m too bored to be angry

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

ostriches-head-in-sand

It’s an odd feeling to not be mad about something that you know that you ought to be mad about.

I’m weird about my privacy.  If you have access to my Facebook page and you go look at it, it’s going to be a very few posts up at the top and then nothing but posts about what I’ve been reading after that.  I generally delete anything else after a couple of days.  I’m scrupulous about not using my real name anywhere on my blog, right down to the point where I’m probably going to change the username soon to pull my initials out of it.  This is, admittedly, mostly because I’m a teacher and am not terribly interested in my students discovering my writing online.  But I’m also genuinely not interested in strangers being all up in my shit; a friend of mine (who, it should be pointed out, I’ve known for ten years, met online, and have only seen in person *once* in that time) once referred to me as “the most online-active paranoiac she’s ever known,” and it’s not an unfair description at all.

I should give a damn about PRISM.  The idea that the government is literally spying on us and tapping into our electronic everything should make me mad.  The Fourth Amendment should mean something.

I don’t.  It doesn’t.  It doesn’t, and it hasn’t for decades.

I’m interested in privacy issues, particularly as they relate to futurism, and I talk about them a fair bit.  My last real post on Xanga was on the surveillance state, in fact.  But that doesn’t mean that I really believe privacy is still a thing anymore. The bit that George Orwell never got– and who could have blamed him?– was that we were going to cheerfully hand over any semblance of privacy to corporate and governmental entities so that we could post cat pictures and look at porn.  Big Brother didn’t have to watch; we handed him a camera and posed.  I’ve known– put “known” into quotation marks if you like– that the government was spying on electronic communications for as long as I’ve been logging into anything, so… twenty years now, give or take?  The fact that it’s confirmed now doesn’t mean anything to me.  We’re surprised about this?  Verizon has location data on me basically 24/7/365 and they’re not sharing that with anyone who asks?  C’mon, now.  Of course they are.

It’s not that I think they should be able to do these things; they clearly should not.  It’s that I see absolutely no way for the genie to go back in the bottle, and the forces that are destroying the concept of privacy in this country are not, in and of themselves, necessarily specifically malevolent.  We get stuff, for lack of a better word, in return for our privacy; the spying isn’t gratuitous.  Combine that with Americans’ generally supine attitude toward the government in every area except our guns and a healthy dose of “If you aren’t doing anything wrong you have nothing to fear” and you’ve got our current situation in a nutshell.  It’s only gonna get worse once facial recognition technology gets more accurate and publicly available.  I can either get used to it now or go nuts; I’d kinda prefer to not go nuts.

(Sidenote: no force on Earth can make me buy an Xbox One despite owning and really enjoying both previous iterations of the Xbox, and the main reason is Microsoft’s apparent belief that it’s okay to insist on putting a device in your living room that watches and listens to you all day, every day and cannot be turned off.  Apparently that’s where I draw the line.  Government, okay, fine, whatever.  Toys?  No.)

The thing that’s sticking in my craw is the partisan affiliation part.  “IF THIS HAD HAPPENED DURING THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION YOU’D BE SCREAMING BLOODY MURDER!!1!!1ONE!!,” part of my brain is screaming. And when they called it Carnivore and not PRISM, well, I did.  But a curious thing happened; five years or so of basically being completely furious about everything all the fucking time kind of drained my ability to get pissed off about politics.  (Some of you, who didn’t know me during the Bush administration, are shaking your heads.  No.  This is absolutely and undeniably and clearly true.  The fact that I still possess the ability to get pissed off about stuff is nothing compared to what I was capable of in 2004.)  Plus, hey, conservatives, this is what happens when you give your guy unlimited power to do bad shit.  (Cough*drones*cough)  Our guy gets in power and then he can still do the bad shit you let your guy do.  I don’t want either of our guys to be able to do this thing, but now that they can, no one will ever stop.  That’s why it was a dumb idea, see.

So, yeah, I’m probably being inconsistent here.  I think I can make a reasonable case that it’s me being older and, if not wiser, at least less volatile, and not strictly a partisan politics thing, but if you want to blame it on that go ahead; I’m a grown-ass man and I suspect I can handle it.

One more thing: speaking of privacy concerns, I went ahead and let WordPress tell Facebook about yesterday’s post, a policy that I might continue and I might stop doing depending on how it ends up affecting my ability to talk about whatever the hell I want on here.  The result, possibly coincidental but probably not, was fifty hits on a blog that isn’t a week old yet.  Fifty hits was a good day at the peak of the original Xanga MKF.  Granted, only one person left any comments, but that’s a hell of a traffic leap from the three or four visitors a day I was getting before now.  It’ll be interesting to see if it keeps up today.