Category: politics

I like fountains. I live on a street with a world-class
fountain (the Tanner Fountain in front of the Harvard Science
Center) at one end, and what was originally a very good fountain
(“Galaxy: Earth Sphere” by MIT professor Joe Davis) at the
other.

This post is about the Kendall Square end. The original design
had a metal globe in the middle, jets of water spraying on the
globe in summer, steam mists arising around it in winter, and
small globes with different perforation patterns in them
illuminated at night. The globes weren’t as interesting as the
rainbows that form in the mist at the Science center on a sunny
afternoon, but they did change as you walked around them.

This fountain was installed in 1988. For most of the time
since then, it’s been broken.

This
article explains the repairs that resulted in the water flow
being restored after some number of years in 2010. It mentions
that at that time the steam was still broken. No article I’ve
ever seen mentions that the lightbulbs in the small steel globes
have never been replaced (or maybe are just never turned on).

There’s also no mention that the fountain is turned off at
night and on weekends these days. During the day, it is often running at less
than full strength, so that the water streams don’t actually hit
the globe.

My guess is that Boston Properties, which is responsible for
maintaining the fountain, got significant zoning concessions in
return for providing “amenities” to the neighborhood. In my
opinion, it should get no more development permissions until it
has restored this amenity, and is providing it for residents as well
as employees.

I might not have noticed this book if Fox News
hadn’t done an interview
with the author that was widely reported as a failed attempt at a
hatchet job.

I enjoyed the book a lot. This
review in the New York Times, by Dale B. Martin, who is the
Woolsey professor of religious studies at Yale University,
suggests that there’s current scholarship that casts some doubt on
ideas that Aslan presents as facts. But he doesn’t suggest any
books about such scholarship that are as readable as this one.

What makes this especially readable is that the notes are
separate from the texts — Aslan is a college professor, but he
obviously knows that books written by professors for other
professors don’t make the best seller lists. So he writes what he
considers the best guess about the history, and then for each
chapter has a notes section that lists the books he used, and
suggests further reading. (This is the references to other
contemporary writers; the biblical texts are referenced by chapter
and verse in context in the usual way.)

The best part of the book is the description of the politics
and economics of first century Palestine. Anyone’s guesses about
exactly what role the early Christians played in that mess are
clearly open to question, but in this century we really know a lot about how the
Romans, Greeks, Jews and other groups related to each other that
makes the stories in the New Testament make a lot more sense.

I especially liked the description of James the brother of
Jesus. (Aslan does not believe that brother meant half-brother or
cousin. I think I doubted that when the nuns said it in seventh
grade, too.) Here’s the first paragraph of that chapter:

They called James, the brother of Jesus, “James the Just.” In Jerusalem, the city he had made his home after his brother’s death, James was recognized by all for his unsurpassed piety and his tireless defense of the poor. He himself owned nothing, not even the clothes he wore—simple garments made of linen, not wool. He drank no wine and ate no meat. He took no baths. No razor ever touched his head, nor did he smear himself with scented oils. It was said he spent so much time bent in worship, beseeching God’s forgiveness for the people, that his knees grew hard as a camel’s.

His thesis is that Christianity would have become a
very different religion if the Hebrew faction led by James hadn’t been wiped
out by the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 65 C.E, leaving the
Greek faction led by Paul in charge by default. Martin
claims that this description of the early church is
oversimplified, but doesn’t claim that you won’t get the current
complicated view by reading the books in the notes section to that
chapter.

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The EPA requires water departments to send out warnings to
their customers when the required tests show any results that are
outside of the normal range. I get them from Cambridge quite
frequently in the winter, because the reservoir is next to a lot
of roads and parking lots that get salted in icy weather, so the
salt content of the water temporarily goes above the limit.

I was visiting Fall River yesterday, and there was one next to
the toilet about some pollutant I’d never heard of. It was one of
20 testing sites that had showed a slightly higher than allowed
value.

There were “reassuring” sentences after this required
information about how it’s not something you have to worry about
drinking a little of — you might get cancer if you drank that
much for years at a time. I understand a waiting room full of
cancer patients failed to find this reassuring.

What struck me about it, though, was that it was written for a
pretty high reading level — I’m not an expert, but I’d guess at
least seventh grade if not higher. When I get these notices from
Cambridge, they’re translated into three or four languages, with
information in a dozen more about where to go to get it in those
languages.

In Fall River, where half the population speaks Portuguese, and
although many of those also speak English, they haven’t had their
primary education in English, they had a paragraph similar to this
at
the bottom of the English letter:

Este relatório contem informação muito importante sobre sua água potável. Por favor traduza-o ou fale com alguém que-lhe compreende. As cópias deste relatório em Português podem ser obtidas no escritório do Departmento de Água no terceiro andar em Government Center, ou chamando 508-324-2330.

Which is a translation of:

This report contains important information about your drinking water. Please translate it or speak with someone who can, if needed. Copies of this report in Portuguese may be obtained at the Water Department’s Offices on the 3rd floor at One Government Center or by calling 508-324-2330.

I don’t have the actual document to point you to, because it
isn’t on the website. The Portuguese paragraph is from another
document that is on the website, but I’m sure it was similar.

I think if it’s information important enough to mail to all the
customers, it might be important enough to send it out in both
languages. Or at least to put the translated version on the website.

Those of us who read Flight
Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver were interested in Verlyn
Kinkenborg’s column
this morning about the monarch butterflies.

The novel is about a family in Apalachia who find a remote area
of their farm covered in butterflies one Spring morning. It’s
because of a fictional change to the pattern of monarch
butterfly migration.

The column is about what we now know about the real reasons for
the decline in the monarch butterfly population. He writes:

One recent study suggests that the long-term survival of the species may be in doubt. A few weeks ago, one of the scientists devoted to studying monarchs, Ernest Williams at Hamilton College, summarized for me the threats that have been reported in recent studies.

Nearly every link in the monarchs’ chain of being, he said, is at risk. Illegal logging in Mexico has reduced their winter habitat — an already vanishingly small area, which is itself being altered by the warming climate. Ecotourists who come to witness the congregation of so many butterflies disturb the creatures they have come to see. But perhaps most damaging is the demise of milkweed.

Monarchs have the misfortune to rely exclusively on a plant that farmers all across the Midwest and Northeast consider a weed. There is a direct parallel between the demise of milkweeds — killed by the herbicide glyphosate, which is sprayed by the millions of gallons on fields where genetically modified crops are growing — and the steady drop in monarch numbers.

To anyone who has grown up in the Midwest, the result seems very strange. After decades of trying to eradicate milkweed, gardeners are being encouraged to plant it in their gardens, and townships and counties are being asked to let it thrive in the roadside ditches. What looks like agricultural success, purging bean and corn fields of milkweed (among other weeds), turns out to be butterfly disaster.

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One of the great phrases from C.S. Lewis. The Scotsman who uses
it pronounces hiatus so that the second syllable has the same
vowel as the first syllable of phatic. Communications gap
is a more common idiom.

The people at the Carlone campaign were quite impressed by the
party
invitation I put together for my meet and
greet. (If you haven’t seen it, it prints on letter paper, and
folds in quarters.) So they asked if they could have the source so they
could use it for another get-together.

I sent them a zip file of the LaTeX, .eps graphics, and
Makefile, and said that if they didn’t have anyone who liked
playing with that kind of software (and already had LaTeX and pdf
utilities on their computer), I’d be happy to spend 10 minutes
fiddling with the text and send them a PDF file.

So they sent me the details with the phone number missing and
the room number wrong, and copied the host of the party, who
supplied the phone number and corrected the room number, so I
sent a second version, and he sent me this:

Half of this is upside-down, which will look funny when I tape it to
the wall.

When this is corrected, I can print it out and put it up next to our
mailboxes and a couple of other places.

Obviously, he hadn’t been who saw my original and thought it
was cute.

So I wrote him back:

The idea is that you fold it in quarters and put it in people’s
mailboxes (or in your pocket, and hand it to them). I could do a flyer
you could tape on the wall, but that would be a new design, not a
10-minute change to what I did for my party.

Two current Cambridge city councillors aren’t running for
re-election, so it’s a wild and crazy race this year. 25
candidates are running for 9 seats.

I usually like to find someone good who’s new to support, and
this year I’ve picked Dennis Carlone, based on the
recommendation of a couple of people who are currently active in
my neighborhood association. He’s an architect and urban planner,
and will bring a level of expertise about development and zoning
issues to the council that is currently missing. My friends also
tell me that he’s been superb in negotiations with developers even
after we’ve lost on the zoning issues in getting them to make
their designs more livable.

So I wrote his campaign a small check, and then we were talking
about what else I could do. I don’t usually put up signs, because
I live in a condo. One time another resident put up a sign for
the Libertarian candidate, and I was really annoyed at him.

But I like throwing parties, so I said I’d invite all my
friends and neighbors to come meet Dennis at my house, and we
settled on Calzones with Carlone on Wednesday,
October 9, at 7:00 PM at 233 Broadway.

If you vote in Cambridge, you’re welcome to come, meet people,
have some good food, and hear what Dennis has to say about what he
can bring to the city council.

Here’s an invitation
that you can print out and give to your friends.