Kintsugi and Courts.

"Kintsugi," Wikipedia. 

available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

A "thank-you" to Pat Brown first, for linking to an image of a piece of Japanese ceramic ware. The picture illustrates Kintsugi, the Japanese technique for repairing broken pottery, using a lacquer or resin sprinkled with powdered gold.

The æsthetic value of Kintsugi comes from the marks of wear, an inevitability for the handiwork of humans in a land of earthquakes (like Japan or California). Kintsugi highlights the cracks and repairs as simply an event in life, rather than allowing service to end at the time of the damage. Kintsugi does not attempt to hide the injury, but instead "the repair is illuminated," illustrating the vicissitudes of existence.

"Napa County Courthouse Plaza," Wikipedia.

image available at http://tinyurl.com/lg26yxc

Given the beauty of the bowl pictured, it made me think of the recent damage to the Napa County courthouse in the 2014 South Napa Earthquake.  I have an emotional attachment to the structure, having been sworn in as an attorney there before my first trial. How fitting would it be, I thought, to embrace Kintsugi in the context of the High Victorian Italianate architecture of the historic 1878 structure?

Such a reminder seems somehow particularly appropriate for a building dedicated to law. To quote Holmes, law is a series of painful steps and world-shaking contests "by which mankind has worked and fought from savage isolation to organic social life." Law does not flow from some mysterious omnipresence in the sky, but is instead the consequence of the work of minds and hands. It is subject to crisis, disillusionment, and despair, much like pottery inevitably suffers breaks, knocks, and shattering in daily life.  Yet the æsthetic value shared by precious pottery, and even-more-precious justice, when joined by illumination, can make each more beautiful, and perhaps both even stronger for the history -- not less.

Trust Levels of News Sources.

I caught this on Twitter yesterday, and found it revealing. The Pew Research Center (previously came up here and here) conducted a survey across the United States to determine which media sources are the most trusted.  However, the researchers introduced nuance into their model, by investigating the ideological identification of the respondents.

One irony of the survey is that the sources that Americans trust the most are the Economist (a British newspaper masquerading as a magazine) and the BBC (the British Broadcasting Corporation).   The most trusted American sources are NPR and PBS, followed by the Wall Street Journal (which happens to be the only publication more trusted than not across the spectrum).

One interesting feature is the "hard shift" in this table, where the spectrum doesn't gradually adjust from one side to the other through the "equally trusted and distrusted" data point, and instead goes right to "distrusted" -- and where the "mixed" group also distrusts the source.  There are only three -- The Daily Show, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck.

I also note (without comment) that even those who identify as "mostly conservative" express skepticism towards Rush Limbaugh, who is the least trusted generally known figure in the table ...

Dual Immersion Enhances Attention.

The benefit of dual immersion in education has come up here before; the Prospero blog on Economist.com is the reason that I again return to the subject.  Earlier studies pointed to the benefit of bilingual education by noting enhanced executive function and delayed mental decline; but new research has special relevance for the screen-time enhanced, short attention span generation we all seem to be raising.

Roberto Filippi led a team that investigated the ability of bilinguals -- not those with a modest ability in a foreign language that is rarely employed, but in those who are required to use the language frequently in daily life -- to avoid distraction when concentrating on speech.  The study assessed listening comprehension while interfering conversations, first in English (understood by all subjects), and then in Greek (understood by none), were played at the same time.  The bilinguals exceeded the controls in both measures, supporting the hypothesis of the researchers that switching languages constantly exercises the mind; Prospero compares it to Crossfit for the brain.

This topic came up for David Brooks in the New York Times about four months ago, in his column "The Art of Focus."  Brooks suggested we're all losing the attention "war," living distracted lives, unable to focus on what we want to or should focus on.  Brooks cited research showing that two-thirds of the subjects in a comprehensive study of white collar professionals reported they do not have the ability to focus on one thing at a time at work. For the concerned parent, this is a strong argument that the impact of a dual immersion education, as our students move through their academic and professional careers, may stretch far beyond the obvious power it grants to communicate in more than one language ...

@sonomanews, a well reasoned and valuable pool editorial -- http://tinyurl.com/mjhxw2e

"How To Save A River," 

David M. Bolling (1993)

online at http://tinyurl.com/nf7qj4c 

via Amazon at http://tinyurl.com/m8yok9m

So, I give the Sonoma Index-Tribune a fair (sometimes, they think, unfair) share of criticism when they take chances on publishing third party pieces on their editorial page. But the editorials they draft themselves are different.  Today, they comment on the plans for Sonoma's pool, and the editorial is well-taken.

There's a specific reason that I want to single out this editorial, and it's because it debunks an idea that's been advanced against the pool that's obviously wrong, but that the community needed someone to do the math on, and to publish widely:

"[W]e have begun hearing timid voices of dissent, arguing that in the midst of the worst drought in modern California history we can ill-afford to waste water on a non-essential facility like a public pool." 

Intuitively, most people sense that there's no way a Valley of 42,296 people has its water use significantly impacted by an aquatic complex, but the argument creates a certain degree of uncertainty. Earlier this year, that kind of uncertainty (in reverse) was used by Roger Hartley to go after the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which I blogged about here. So the Index-Tribune broke out their reference materials, fired up Excel, and ran the numbers:

"[T]he average, daily per capita water consumption in Sonoma County is 160 gallons ... [t]he figure for Sonoma is closer to 180 gallons. We are also being asked – almost but not quite mandated – to reduce that consumption by 20 percent, a per capita reduction of 32 gallons a day. For the estimated 40,000 residents of the Sonoma Valley, that daily reduction in water use would equal about 1,280,000 gallons. [emphasis added.] 

"The volume of a standard Olympic swimming pool is about 660,000 gallons."

And there it is; a half-day's reduction by the Valley, along the lines requested by the Sonoma County Water Agency, and we've filled the pool.  Water's an important issue, but when you have a newspaper edited by the former executive director of Friends of the River, you should expect water policy's use as a red herring to get shut down, rather hard, quite quickly.

This isn't to say that the City Council meeting on July 21 necessarily epitomized Sonoma's ideal of procedural due process and organizational rationality.  Indeed, the hurried, rushed, and probably not-yet-fully-thought-through planning for the City of Sonoma's contribution to the pool demonstrates all the problems local government has in marshaling initiative. But the great and the good are not enemies, and the efforts (thus far) should be applauded, while knowing that the hard questions on ownership, the funding of construction, operations, and long-term maintenance remain unanswered.

@nytdavidbrooks, today is your best column ever.

David Brooks, writing in the New York Times today, wrote just about the best column I think he's ever come up with.  He starts with a distinction between baseball and soccer as cognitive metaphors for understanding modern life, and comes down decidedly on the side of soccer.

"Baseball is a team sport, but it is basically an accumulation of individual activities ... soccer is not like that ... [soccer] is defined by the context created by all the other players ... [m]ost of us spend our days thinking we are playing baseball, but we are really playing soccer. We think we individually choose what career path to take, whom to socialize with, what views to hold. But, in fact, those decisions are shaped by the networks of people around us more than we dare recognize."

Welcome to the party, sir.

image available at http://tinyurl.com/qh8ww2f

"Once we acknowledge that, in life, we are playing soccer, not baseball, a few things become clear. First, awareness of the landscape of reality is the highest form of wisdom. It’s not raw computational power that matters most; it’s having a sensitive attunement to the widest environment, feeling where the flow of events is going. Genius is in practice perceiving more than the conscious reasoning."

This is legibility via the back-door.  Brooks is arguing that value lies in awareness of the contours of the forest, rather than reshaping it to be "computable" (or presuming that it is legible in the first instance). This is a clarion call for evidence-based evaluation of reality, rather than the computation frame of thinking.  That concept's come up here before (and again here).

"... [s]occer is like a 90-minute anxiety dream — one of those frustrating dreams when you’re trying to get somewhere but something is always in the way. This is yet another way soccer is like life."

"Red on Maroon" (1959)
Mark Rothko (1903‑1970), Tate Modern
available at http://tinyurl.com/ohsovbl

This is Rothko's Red on Maroon -- a gateway through which one may struggle to pass, to a
destination unknown. A blocked portal, through which you're not even sure you want to go, knowing only that you feel little choice, on a path you sense will be fraught with danger, danger that we fear (which came up here).

Sometimes you want to just acknowledge the quality of another's writing, and while Brooks' often doesn't resonate with me like it once did, I think his time spent leading a writing seminar at Yale University may be paying off ...

#rebeccapurple.

Rebecca Alison Meyer
Ahuva Raya bat Kayla
7 June 2008 – 7 June 2014
image available at http://tinyurl.com/mrkb3vw 

On June 7, 2014, Rebecca Alison Meyer, age 6, of Beachwood, Ohio, passed away from complications associated with an anapestic astrocytoma ("brain cancer").  She and her parents, Kathryn and Eric Meyer, endured a multiyear struggle to save her life; Eric, a web technology expert concerning Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) blogged poignantly about the treatment.  The final memorial Eric wrote for Rebecca can be read here; the Economist's Babbage (technology) columnist drew attention to it today here:

"The death of a child is always a tragedy, and people of good will try to make sense of it through whatever means they have."

Eric's friends had one tool at their disposal to memorialize his daughter -- in CSS.  Style sheets control the appearance of certain items on a web page, and they allow colors to be expressed hexadecimally; #000000 is black, #FFFFFF is white. Other colors are combinations in between.  However, there are a certain select group of colors that may be expressed by name. For example, #ADFF2F can also be described as #GreenYellow.

Rebecca was particularly fond of purple -- her parents asked that family and friends at her funeral wear purple in memory of her.  Many who were touched by Eric's relating of Becca's story couldn't attend, for they were all over the world.  But a group of technologists, led by Jeffrey Zeldman, suggested that #663399 in CSS be designated #beccapurple.  As of the nightly Firefox build on June 23, the color has indeed been designated by name, but as #rebeccapurple.  Eric requested the change, saying:

"A couple of weeks before she died, Rebecca informed us that she was about to be a big girl of six years old, and Becca was a baby name. Once she turned six, she wanted everyone (not just me) to call her Rebecca, not Becca." 

"She made it to six. For almost twelve hours, she was six. So Rebecca it is and must be."

One particular passage from Eric's writings especially moved me, because it expressed and captured something so clearly important. In her last days, Eric and Kat made sure that, as long as she was able, Rebecca could go each day to kindergarten.  His explanation of why is one of the most saddening and yet eloquent statements of the nature of education and parenting I've ever read.  And so, as my tribute to Eric and Kat, as well as Rebecca Meyer, I include that passage, from May 1 of this year, from a post Eric entitled "Heroic Measures."

"This morning, I walked Rebecca and her best friend to kindergarten, all of us enjoying the crisp spring sunshine after the long, cold winter. The girls ran ahead of me to see if the playground had been re-flooded by last night’s rains (it hadn’t) and then balance-walked a low retaining wall. Once inside the school doors, I hugged and kissed Rebecca and told her to have a good day, collecting a hug and kiss and a 'Love you, Daddy' in return. I watched as she tromped down the hallway in her sparkly new Bella Ballerina shoes and pajamas (today is a special Pajama Day at school) and rounded the corner out of sight. And then I handed her principal a Do Not Resuscitate order." 

"... [w]e carry DNR cards with us, and have given the school a DNR form sealed into a manila envelope with our names and phone numbers written on the outside, because if she suddenly seizes, our overriding goal is to make her as comfortable as possible while she dies. The EMTs or hospice or we ourselves will give her medication to take away the pain and, if at all possible, the fear. As much as she needs." 

"... [w]e send her to school because she loves it there, however much she may complain about having to get up in the morning and get dressed and put on a coat to walk to school. Try as she may to hide it, she loves to learn. She loves her teacher, her classmates, and her friends, and they love her in return. It would be selfish of us to take that away, despite the risks, despite the hours of separation. It would shift some of our burden onto her shoulders, force her to pay the cost of our sorrow and fear ... we can give her her life, as whole and unbroken as we can manage, and an unspoken promise to fiercely guard it from even ourselves."

"We can give her this."

Who Turns Out?

About six weeks ago, I ran across this story, sort of a typical California pre-election analysis piece. The title of the article (as reprinted in the Petaluma Argus-Courier) made me squint to make sure I was reading it right -- "Bay Area tops state's voter turnout." I started reading, and one paragraph in particular caught my eye, because it mentioned Sonoma. "Poor people from Sonoma are far more likely to cast a ballot than someone living in poverty in Echo Park [Los Angeles]." The article attributed the quote to Paul Mitchell, the vice-president of Political Data Inc.

Paul Mitchell

image available at http://tinyurl.com/mk5hs2k

High voter turnout, expressed as a percentage, is generally seen as evidence of the legitimacy of a political system, while low turnout can lead to unequal representation among various parts of the population. Low turnout tends to be concentrated amongst the young and the poor, leading to significant under-representation in elections, with the potential to lead to improperly skewed policy. If Paul's right, that's pretty good news for Sonoma County.

So I went and took a look at the election results last night and this morning, to see what the data looks like.  California does a very efficient job of reporting election returns from different counties as they come in; the page is here. The Secretary of State conveniently makes the data downloadable as a CSV (thank-you!).  I pulled it this morning and graphed turnout, expressed as a percentage.  The results are on the right; a PDF of them is here (you'll probably need the resolution of the PDF to see the individual county names labeling the data points). 

I plotted the data on the log of the number of voters in each county, because the massive variance in the number of registered voters (Alpine with 766, Los Angeles with 4,857,424) makes a lin-lin comparison nearly impossible.  I did a power law regression on the data, which fits pretty well; as county size scales, voter turnout appears to decline fairly regularly.  

PDF available at http://tinyurl.com/obe7hjm

So, the Bay Area doesn't lead the state in turnout.  That award goes to the northern counties, and those of the Sierra foothills.  Tiny Sierra County turns out more than 60% (Alpine, so small I couldn't even get it on this graph, turns out nearly 70%).  There's a cluster of nine (admittedly, sparsely populated) counties clustered near 40%, all with 50,000 voters or less. Voting's a big deal in a small, perhaps remote community, and it shows.  

A second cluster drew my eye -- on the lower right, seven counties, all with more than 1.4 million citizens.  They are Santa Clara, Alameda, Sacramento, San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange, and San Diego Counties. Between them, they have 6,993,135 registered voters -- two million more voters than Los Angeles County, and a million more voters than the remaining 50 counties combined.  Their turnout is exceptionally low; only two of them managed to clear 20%, Santa Clara and San Diego, and even then, it was by a whisker.  Their location's also interesting; these counties are generally the southern (and to some extent, the eastern) neighbors of the California metropolises that garner an outsized degree of attention, San Francisco and Los Angeles.  

It was the third cluster that really got my attention, though. It's a cluster that's significantly above the trend line.  This group of counties, despite their size, still turn out a relatively high percentage of their voters. From north to south, they are Sonoma, Marin, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara counties.  The number of voters inside these counties is modest. But the number of votes they cast is significant. The four counties were responsible for 219,674 votes on June 3; only Orange, Los Angeles, and San Diego Counties cast more votes than the four put together. The 1,453,951 residents of the quartet cast just 20,000 votes less than the 3.09 million residents of Orange County. 

PDF available at http://tinyurl.com/lb5jsff

The parallel between Santa Barbara and SLO, and Marin and SoCo, strikes me as interesting. While it is Paul's point concerning poverty that got my attention, it is the similarities between the "1-2" northern territories of the great coastal cities, and the fact that they are both amongst the most substantial positive outliers (to the extent we consider higher turnout beneficial) on the graph, that holds my attention.  The unusual motivation of their citizens to participate in their governments makes me wonder what other trends in the data patterns for the two sets of counties may coincide.

But that's a question for another day ...