Michael Bates: December 2019 Archives
The History of Land Fill in Boston
A series of five maps illustrating the growth of Boston through the use of landfill, showing the original Shawmut Peninsula in 1630, the filling of the Mill Pond (Causeway Street really was a causeway), the filling of the Great Cove, South Cove, and West Cove, and the massive addition of the Back Bay after the Civil War.
Online exhibit from the West End Museum in Boston on the use of tidal ponds (like the Mill Pond filled in with the top of Beacon Hill in the first decade of the 1800s) to power mills.
Renowned physicist and skeptic of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, in a 2011 interview via e-mail:
"Among my friends, I do not find much of a consensus. Most of us are sceptical and do not pretend to be experts. My impression is that the experts are deluded because they have been studying the details of climate models for 30 years and they come to believe the models are real. After 30 years they lose the ability to think outside the models. And it is normal for experts in a narrow area to think alike and develop a settled dogma. The dogma is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. In astronomy this happens all the time, and it is great fun to see new observations that prove the old dogmas wrong.
"Unfortunately things are different in climate science because the arguments have become heavily politicised. To say that the dogmas are wrong has become politically incorrect. As a result, the media generally exaggerate the degree of consensus and also exaggerate the importance of the questions."
Latin has six cases (and sometimes a seventh), Greek has four, but Finnish has 14 or 15: Nominative, genitive, essive, partitive, translative, inessive, elative, illative, adessive, ablative, allative, abessive, comitative, instructive, and maybe accusative. And then there are the disputed cases: prolative, exessive, compositive, lative, multiplicative.
A Fitbit-based study attempting to show a link between exercise and better grades showed something entirely different:
"When Grossman and his colleagues began looking at the data again, they found that students who are consistent in their sleep habits, turn in before 2 a.m., and average around seven hours of sleep, are more academically productive.
"Essentially there was a straight-line relationship between the average amount of sleep a student got and the marks they received on the 11 quizzes, three midterms, and final exam, with the grades ranging from A's to C's, according to the study which was recently published in the 'Science of Learning.'...
"In fact, students who consistently added one extra hour of sleep a night jumped a full letter grade, from a B to an A, said Dr. Kana Okano, first author on the paper and Grossman's research assistant....
"Consistency is key.
"Students don't do better by getting more sleep the night before a quiz or exam. They don't do better if they try to sleep in an extra few hours on a Saturday or Sunday morning. They must get consistent good sleep during the entire learning process, she said.
"Additionally, the researchers discovered that 2 a.m. appears to be a magic hour of sorts. Students who went to bed after that time, even if they got 7 hours of sleep, had lower class scores, Grossman said."
Mister Rogers's Enduring Wisdom - The Atlantic
"It was the summer of 2018, and so it was the summer of Fred. It was also the summer of incivility--the summer when the very idea of civility was up for debate--and one night, in Tampa, Florida, the two converged.
"It was the summer of Fred because of the release of Morgan Neville's beautiful documentary about him, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, which became the highest-grossing biographical documentary ever. It was the summer of incivility because some progressive activists had decided that civility was a luxury we could no longer afford, an instrument of an intolerable status quo....
"Then, on June 22, Florida's attorney general, Pam Bondi, attended a showing of Won't You Be My Neighbor? in downtown Tampa, and was confronted by protesters who condemned her for her legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act and her silence in the face of the administration's family separations at the southern border. They yelled at her and called her a 'horrible person,' and when I spoke with her a year later, she told me that they'd tried to stop her from entering the theater, shouted in her face with such vehemence that she was flecked with spit, and bullied her boyfriend in an attempt to provoke a fight. She watched the movie, but she was 'shaking the whole time,' and when she was on her way out of the theater they accosted her again, videotaping her as she attempted to go to her car. On the tape, a woman is heard yelling: 'Would Mister Rogers take children away from their parents? Would Mister Rogers take away health insurance? ... What would Mister Rogers think about you and your legacy in Florida, taking away health insurance from people with preexisting conditions? Pam Bondi, shame on you!'
"...But even more obvious is what his position would have been regarding the civility debate. Fred was a man with a vision, and his vision was of the public square, a place full of strangers, transformed by love and kindness into something like a neighborhood. That vision depended on civility, on strangers feeling welcome in the public square, and so civility couldn't be debatable. It couldn't be subject to politics but rather had to be the very basis of politics, along with everything else worthwhile....
"What he would have thought of Pam Bondi's politics is one thing; what he would have thought of Pam Bondi is quite another, because he prayed for the strength to think the same way about everyone. She is special; there has never been anyone exactly like her, and there never will be anyone exactly like her ever again; God loves her exactly as she is. He repeated this over and over, and that his name was invoked as a cudgel by activists who probably shed tears over the documentary has haunted me since I first saw the video from Tampa. It isn't that he is revered but not followed so much as he is revered because he is not followed--because remembering him as a nice man is easier than thinking of him as a demanding one. He spoke most clearly through his example, but our culture consoles itself with the simple fact that he once existed. There is no use asking further questions of him, only of ourselves. We know what Mister Rogers would do, but even now we don't know what to do with the lessons of Mister Rogers.
"...How would Fred Rogers have responded to Twitter? He would have signed up for an account, @ZZZ143, #YouAreSpecial; he was not one to back away from the fray. But Twitter is a platform consecrated to the eternal pie fight--to the purposes of protest, complaint, and particularly punishment--where nobody is special and nobody is invulnerable. Who would have been Fred's first troll? Who would have taken it upon themselves to 'school' Fred, to 'call him out,' to 'educate' him? Who would have told him that his faith in us was misplaced, and informed him--and us--that Mister Rogers was wrong?"
