The geniuses in the Pentagon have decided that soldiers shouldn't be allowed to send emails or post to blogs without clearing the content with a superior officer. (And we know officers in the field have nothing better to do than play editor/flack.) The link above is to BlackFive (via InstaPundit), where there's lots more, including the Wired.com report that should set off a firestorm among people on every side of the war issue. Soldiers have the strongest incentives not to reveal operational details. So why hide their points of view?
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 02, 2007 • Comments
Do street names affect housing values? A fun, if unresolved, discussion on the Freakonomics blog. (The map is from Highland Park, the Beverly Hills of Dallas. The major artery north of Mockingbird Lane, back in Dallas proper, is Lovers Lane.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 01, 2007 • Comments
As the vacuum cleaner remark suggests, I was suspicious of the panic over mercury in fluorescent lights--a concern in their production, perhaps, but not to the typical consumer. Reader Robert Horn writes with more information:
The information that you give on CFL safety is partially incorrect. It's amazing how hard it is to get the proper safety information through the public hysteria.
a) The mercury level in the CFL is extremely low. By comparison, one old mercury switch (like in an old thermostat) equals 1,000 CFLs. That silly woman in Maine sounds like the classic self-terrifying idiot who cannot grasp the concept of acceptable levels of toxic substances, and demanded that the government "do something".
b) The safe method of cleanup is a broom and gloves, followed by letting the room air out. The gloves are more for broken glass safety than for mercury risk. Vacuums are specifically a poor idea because they cause immediate mercury vaporization and dispersal of the mercury vapor into the room while you are there. You are probably safe even with your personal dose maximized, but why maximize it unnecessarily. Opening the windows and letting it disperse is a small step, reduces your personal dose, and still exposes the neighborhood by less than the airborne mercury emissions associated with coal powered incandescents.
See http://www.nema.org/lamprecycle/epafactsheet-cfl.pdf for official sagety practices.
As for lighting quality, there are significant variations and issues. There are a variety of phosphors used for CFLs, each of which gives a different color balance. CFLs are generally not a good choice when color is significant and must be manipulated. I personally use daylight CFLs extensively, and they give definitely different colors than incandescents. They match a north light (not a direct sunlight) very well. I determine this from a room with a good strong north light, where turning on or off the CFLs is hard to notice during the day because there is no lighting shift. With incandescents or warm-white CFLs (warm white is the most popular phosphor choice) you do see an immediate change when the lights are turned on and off.
The warm-white phosphor (and you must check the labels to get the phosphor that you want) is a reasonable match to warm-white incandescents for most purposes.
For retail color control I would stick to halogens and incandescents until LED lighting is cheaper. At the high end - where you hire a color lighting consultant and control everything about the display - LED lighting is gaining ground. LED lighting is much more expensive to install, but the lights last 50,000 hours and the color temperature can be fine tuned on a bulb by bulb basis and dynamically adjusted for daytime vs nighttime. This kind of expense is justified in some retail environments by the cost savings from the 50,000 hour lifetime (and LEDs use about 1/3 the electricity of incandescents). They never need to shut down the sales operation for bulb replacement and can put the lights anywhere the consultant wants, without much regard for the difficulty of replacing bulbs. But LED lights with color controls cost 10-20 times what a CFL costs. LED lights are still cheaper than color consultants, and their tunability reduces the color consultant time charges significantly.
In many states, however, retailers aren't free to use whichever bulbs they like. Electric bills are, of course, a major cost of operation, giving businesses plenty of incentive to cut costs. One of these days, LEDs will be affordable and people won't understand lightbulb jokes.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 01, 2007 • Comments
In response to the post below on light bulbs, my friend Nick Schulz of TCS Daily writes:
We recently installed the new fluorescents in the sockets in our dining room. Last night, my wife and I were sitting down to eat some sushi we'd brought home. She said, "I can't believe they gave us salmon instead of tuna." As it turned out, the new lights made the red tuna look like orange salmon. She took the sushi in the kitchen, where we have the plain old bulbs and are waiting for them to expire to put in the new ones. Sure enough, the tuna in that room looked like tuna.
Also, the new bulbs, I found out after having purchased them, are loaded with mercury. So make sure you don't break any of them. Pick your poison — reduce your carbon footprint but increase your risk of mercury poisoning.
Lastly, a relative of Edison made this point a few weeks back about warm vs. cool lighting
Speaking of mercury, reader Shaun Moore writes, "Tell this woman that CFL are better than incandescents." Hint to bulb breakers: Just get a vacuum cleaner and leave the authorities out of it. (I know mercury is poisonous, but we had so much fun as kids chasing it around the floor when the thermometer broke.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 30, 2007 • Comments
The WaPost's Blaine Harden reports on wifely resistance to compact fluorescent bulbs. The article includes this classic example of technocratic obtuseness:
"There is still a big hurdle in convincing Americans that lighting-purchase decisions make a big difference in individual electricity bills and collectively for the environment," said Wendy Reed, director of the federal government's Energy Star campaign, which labels products that save energy and has been working with retailers to market CFL bulbs.
No, that is not the big hurdle. The big hurdle is convincing Americans that ugly lighting is worth the savings--as Ms. Reed herself knows.
"I have heard time and again that a husband goes out and puts the bulb into the house, thinking he is doing a good thing," Reed said. "Then, the CFL bulb is changed back out by the women. It seems that women are much more concerned with how things look. We are the nesters."
If you want to get people to use compact fluorescents, convince them that the lighting looks good--they already know it saves electricity. And show, don't tell.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 30, 2007 • Comments
Is there really a book reviewing crisis? On his new blog, Alex Massie, The Scotsman's man in Washington, says no. I particularly liked this point: "It's not clear to me, incidentally, why a 'stand alone' book section is necessarily better than one that includes other copy. Indeed, if you wanted to pull new readers in to a books section the last thing you'd want would be to make it easy for them to throw it away unread, no? And if the stand-alone section is so sacred then British newspapers don't have proper books pages..."
As an author, I want more book reviews; quantity matters more than quality when you're going for sheer exposure. But as a reader, I only want more interesting reviews, particularly of books I'm not likely to learn about otherwise. (Here's a good example, from Sunday's LAT.) What Alex calls "the loss of pagination at a few provincial newspapers"--notably, in my life, the Dallas Morning News--mostly represents the loss of reviews that are short, dull reports on books everyone already knows about. Not a crisis, let alone a war on books or even (interesting) reviewers.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 29, 2007 • Comments
Kathryn Fiegen of the Iowa City Press-Citizen has written a nicely reported piece, using a striking local example to illustrate the importance of living kidney donors.
Yolanda Frudden, 52, of Iowa City, transports lab results at University Hospitals. Kathy Duttlinger, 50, of Iowa City, takes care of the plants in the hospital. They seldom saw each other, except in the hallway or in the elevator.
But one day a little more than a year ago, a ride together in the elevator would change both of their lives forever.
Frudden had just gotten to the end of a rope of bad news. She recently had been diagnosed with kidney disease and was searching through her family to find a match for transplant. Both of her brothers were perfect matches. However, both had a form of hepatitis. On that day, she had just returned from a trip to the Philippines, where one of her brothers lives with her family "I was really desperate," she said. "I was actually in tears."
Duttlinger got on the elevator and asked what was wrong. She said she knew Frudden was sick, but not as sick as she actually was.
"I just felt for her, and I thought maybe I could help her," she said.
Within minutes, Duttlinger had offered Frudden her phone number--and one of her kidneys
Fiegen's article is exemplary for reporting the story long enough after the surgery--which took place in January 2006--to let readers know the results. More than a year later, both donor and recipient are doing well. And Iowa is better than most places to be a living donor, especially if you're a state employee. The state's Donor Network, which allocates organs from deceased donors, actively support living donation, and living donors get a state income tax deduction. So they're less likely to wind up financially behind, because of lost wages, than donors elsewhere.
Because Duttlinger works at University Hospitals, she got five weeks of leave for being an organ donor, and Frudden's insurance paid for both procedures.
[Iowa Donor Network spokesman Paul] Sodders said all state employees get six weeks of paid leave to donate, without cutting into vacation time. The network currently is working with other major employers to see if they will draft similar policies, he said. Iowa also is one of the few states that offer a tax deduction of up to $10,000 for living donors.
"We're trying to make the process as easy as we can on these living donors," he said. "We're really beginning to advocate people being living donors because we really think that is the answer to cutting down on the waiting time."
Bravo to the Donor Network and the state of Iowa for their progressive attitudes--and to Kathryn Fiegen for covering this important issue.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 29, 2007 • Comments
"She got the wrong man and a D and A test will prove my innocent," Keith Turner, who had served six years in prison for rape, wrote to the Dallas district attorney years after he was paroled. In today's Dallas Morning News, Bruce Tomasco tells the story of how Turner's persistent requests for a DNA test--something he heard about on Court TV in 2001--finally got his name cleared. It's a sad, compelling piece, worth reading in full.
The DMN website has posted copies of documents from the case, including Turner's poignant, painfully respectfu, semi-literate letters.
As Reason's Radley Balko points out, Dallas seems to be exonerating a lot of prisoners--12 so far, with more than 400 waiting for DNA tests--but it's unlikely the city has an especially bad track record. It just has more evidence on file.
[New district attorney Craig] Watkins' quest to clear the names of the innocent is aided by the fact that Dallas County coincidentally has historically preserved blood samples from cases involving violent crime. Most other jurisdictions across the country only recently began doing that.
It's likely of no coincidence that the one jurisdiction where blood samples have been preserved is also one that's finding a shocking number of convictions of innocent people
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 29, 2007 • Comments
"She says her mind is no longer cloudy.
I say my kidney has made her a genius.
She says I shouldn't get carried away."
Explanation here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 28, 2007 • Comments
Ever hear of them?
Found in Half-Price Books, possibly Dallas's greatest institution.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 28, 2007 • Comments