Continuous Partial Attention not Certified Public Accountant

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Where am I?

I am sitting in a chair in front of my computer which is on (to be honest) the nicest table I have ever owned or pretty much seen.

I am also looking out the window at the trees moving in the breeze, the California April afternoon of my dreams which is also where I was a few minutes ago. And where, to be honest, I more or less "am" now.

I am thinking of the table of friends across the green, Kevin Claire Lia Cat Nicole, and of the conversation we were having fifteen minutes ago when I was with them. And thinking of what they are talking about now, and how nice it might be to still be there drinking an espresso and listening as people use their mouths to make sounds that others understand. So, I'm sort of there now, too.

Next to me is a book. Anathem by Neal Stephenson. It is about a world not unlike and yet not like Earth. It parallels Earth's history in many ways, yet just differently enough to be fascinating. It sits next to me, all 935 pages of it. I was reading it on my porch, in the California April afternoon of my dreams, when I was called over to sit at the table of friends across the green. It exerts a pull on me, or several pulls: the pull of a book I am in the middle of and want to be reading, on the porch; the pull of a narrative that wends its way into my thoughts no matter how much I am focusing on writing this blog; the pull of a book that I've read before, and know I should recall, and yet do not, so that this curious thing (why did I remember the part about the clock, and the discussion of what comes down to Platonism vs Aristotelianism, and yet not remember the fable of the fly, the bat, and the worm?) calls to me and makes me focus on it and not on the task at hand.

So where I am is partially, continuously, in Stephenson's fictional world, which is like and unlike our world.

And I haven't even talked about my cell phone, which is sitting quietly next to me, because I've selected All Sounds Off, but which nonetheless exerts a kind of constant pull to its potential delights, terrors, information, conversation. How many times do I look over at it? Pick it up and look for texts? See if anyone has called? I'm pretty focused right now, and so the current answer is not too much; I've managed to go a half hour at least without even thinking about picking it up. Ok, I just picked it up to check. But that's only because I started to write about it. Scout's honor.

So. Where am I, now? Where are you?

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Continuous partial attention or CPA is something I've found my way to, like Hansel and Gretel, and the bread crumbs I've scattered on my way to CPA are not all still there, if you follow my fairy tale analogy. But I've been thinking about how cell phones distract us, and also allow us to be in constant potential communication with a whole range of people and places (Facebook, ESPN, Kirkwood Mountain and its weather). If there is something called focus, then there can be kinds of focus; if there is something called attention, then there can be loss of attention, or lack, or deficit. One of my latest tag lines has been "Everyone in the United States has ADD" because most of us are surrounded by devices and habits that make attending to one specific task almost impossible.

The quick and dirt way to understand Linda Stone's concept of CPA, or anything really, is to paste shit in from Wikipedia, right? I said right? Ok. So here goes:

The term Continuous Partial Attention (CPA) was coined by Linda Stone in 1998. Author Steven Berlin Johnson describes this as a kind of multitasking: "It usually involves skimming the surface of the incoming data, picking out the relevant details, and moving on to the next stream. You're paying attention, but only partially. That lets you cast a wider net, but it also runs the risk of keeping you from really studying the fish." Continuous partial attention has been understood as multi-tasking, but it is somewhat different, as full attention is not used (hence the partial) and the process is ongoing rather than episodic (hence the continuous).

Stone herself wants to draw a distinction between CPA and multitasking. She says in an article from Lifehacker.com:

Continuous partial attention and multi-tasking are two different attention strategies, motivated by different impulses. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient... In the case of continuous partial attention, we're motivated by a desire not to miss anything. There's a kind of vigilance that is not characteristic of multi-tasking. With cpa, we feel most alive when we're connected, plugged in and in the know. We constantly SCAN for opportunities—activities or people—in any given moment. With every opportunity we ask, "What can I gain here?"

http://lifehacker.com/#!343882/multitasking-versus-continuous-partial-attention

We might well ask the question, is this a distinction without a difference? I've been looking at some of the recent research on multitasking, and most of it seems to say, there isn't much that is good about multitasking. In a few instances it makes sense to scan information constantly and intermittently because we know that some of it won't be that useful or even relevant later, while some of it will turn out to be valuable in some way. And we can't know this beforehand. But of course most of us can feel the downside to this behavior, whether we call it CPA or multitasking or mundane cyborg activity.

In another short piece in The Huffington Post, Stone addresses this:

More and more, many of us feel the "shadow side" of cpa -- over-stimulation and lack of fulfillment. The latest, greatest powerful technologies are now contributing to our feeling increasingly powerless. Researchers are beginning to tell us that we may actually be doing tasks more slowly and poorly.

And that's not all. We have more attention-related and stress-related diseases than ever before. Continuous continuous partial attention and the fight or flight response associated with it, sets off a cascade of stess hormones, starting with norepinephrin and its companion, cortisol. As a hormone, cortisol is a universal donor. It can attach to any receptor site. As a result, dopamine and seratonin -the hormones that help us feel calm and happy - have nowhere to go because cortisol has taken up the available spaces. The abundance of cortisol in our systems has contributed to our turning to pharmaceuticals to calm us down and help us sleep.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-stone/fine-dining-with-mobile-d_b_80819.html

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So what do these two pieces of blog have in common? I'll keep it short. As I hope I've shown, already we are multiply-located, as humans. We are here, and we are also there, in memory, in desire, in readiness for fight or flight or a new input for the sensorium. Now we have added devices that have a multiplier effect on this multiplicity. Few would dispute that the cell phone, which is actually a number of things besides a cell phone, and the net-connected computer (and its nomadic sister the laptop/tablet and its midget cousin the smart phone), do not add mightily to this several places at once phenomenon.

And the final irony may be that the cell phone/computer prosthetic may also change the way we are when we are not even in their presence, or "packing" as people used to say of guns.

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Here I"m tempted to tell you how to 'fix' this "problem.' Nope. Partly i think you can imagine fixes already. And partly that is the wrong way to pose the question of how these cyborg prosthetics extend and augment human responses that are already "there" in the organism. More, I want to suggest that the language we are using to imagine these effects - addiction to cell phones, information overload, multitasking vs CPA, ADD vs focusing techniques - are part of a larger and less visible change in basic human behavior and our experience of time and space. And this is what I want to call the mundane cyborg.

Enough for now. Time to walk the dog out in that lovely Californian afternoon.

Tomatoes

Tomato season is not now. Tomatoes abound in the stores, though; some have come from places where tomato season is more or less now. Some come from the parallel world of hydroponics, greenhouses, the red legal cousin to all that marijuana similarly grown.

I recently went shopping and asked the produce maven about the tomatoes in winter. She took me around and introduced me to four kinds: "This beefsteak is ok but flavorless; these romas are ok for cooking, but eating not so much. This Mexican organic is not quite there. Try these cluster tomatoes, they're as close as you can get right now." So I bought them and sliced them up and put them on my burger, right off the grill, and they tasted pretty close.

Apropos of tomatoes as a kind of technology, I was reading Carroll W. Purcell's book The Machine in America, and was reminded of the trajectory, so to speak, of this scarlet sphere. The years after World War 2 saw the rise of the mechanical pickers, including the cotton picker and the tomato picker. The war had raised the cost of tomatoes and of labor; in 1949 G C Hanna of UC Davis had figured out how to "mechanize" the tomato: "if he could not invent a machine to pick the tomato, he would invent a tomato that could be picked by machine." But sales were not strong until the end of the Bracero program (and its federal importation of Mexican nationals as laborers) in 1964, and the beginning of Cesar Chavez's UFW in 1965. Within two years, 80% of the tomato crop was mechanized.

My favorite part of this sad story is the notion that making tomatoes pickable, that is, green and later-ripening (and at one point square, though this was a deal killer for consumers), also meant "inadvertently" breeding the taste out of them. So the fruit wasn't sweet anymore, and wasn't red anymore. Instead, the tasteless but easily picked fruit had large amounts of sugar and salt added. And color? Purcell documents the chemical company that reddened the tomatoes while in storage. Their motto?

"Etheral helps Nature do what Nature does naturally."

David Halbertam, in his nonfiction book The Fifties, talks about the application of industrial methods to all sorts of things in the 50s: housing (Levittowns), food (McDonalds), and so on. And the application of industrial processes to agriculture "rationalized" farming: large holdings were more profitable, labor costs were reduced and jobs eliminated, and every tomato was mixed with the oil it took to run the machines and make the fertilizer.

What do I think of all this?

I'd like to throw a tomato at G C Hanna, preferably one of his green tasteless ones. They're harder.

Oh and one more thing. Today I heard a story on NPR about slavery in the fields in Florida. And the crops included? Tomatoes.

See these articles:

http://www.amptoons.com/blog/2009/02/27/the-tomato-you-eat-this-winter-may-have-been-picked-by-slave-labor/

and

http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2009/03/politics-of-the-plate-the-price-of-tomatoes?currentPage=1

Market Day

A week ago I was in snow, four inches of fresh powder, skiing the last days of an epic winter.

Today I hit the Wednesday Farmers Market in Santa Cruz, with the full on sun, the clown and the balloons, the young guy getting his face painted. Early strawberries were like gold, snapped up almost as fast as they were brought out; Windmill Farms was sold out, Dirty Girl's boxes were stacked and empty, and still I found a half case of Swanton Road berries that I'm pretty sure the Royal Wedding wishes they had.

For some reason the market today was a little out of time for me, as if I'd come down from the mountain to a date both far in the past and a little in the future, when we'd figured out how to survive the hangover of the Green Revolution, oil and fertilizer and exhausted soils and all. I saw a couple friends and had that check-in conversation that you can't really have on Facebook. My friend Stiny was there and we were talking about the usual when he brought up how long we've known each other - since 1980?? - and I remember meeting him for the first time and thinking how like a bro he was to me: both skinny, long haired, rocking the revolutionary beret and irony, both. At one point a little girl skipped past and we both stopped talking to watch her, with her shock of red hair and three quarter length kid pants like a psychedelic Annie.

It was that kind of market.

I talked to people in line (the woman teaching at Stanford from Austria, the guy who wondered whether the roti chicken would leak through the leak-"resistant" waxed bag), talked to vendors (the flower people from Thomas Farms about lilies, the woman from Blue Heron about ranunculus, the guys at Pinnacle about snap peas). At the end I had the half case of berries, big bags of flowers, a half chicken and savory potatoes, a big veggie crepe, the peas and fattie asparagus for the grill.

Perfect. And I walked past Route One farms surprised to find no Romaine lettuce, and then remembered that after Fukushima's radiation plume, the word is don't buy broad leaf plants for a while. And I looked at where the lettuce usually is, that gap in the market, and looked up, and remembered being up in the mountains.

The snow, falling so late in the winter, fresh and white and infinite, falling through the chill sky toward the extended tongue, remembering too late the injunction against broad leaf plants and rainwater, the ghost of radiation a shimmer around each snowflake.

Easter at Coho

In the cohousing community I live in, we’ve had an Easter tradition forever. Well, for 12 years, which feels like the same thing. Some parents get up early and hide eggs around the property, which includes a pretty central green, lots of flowering trees, gardens. Then all the kids come out and stand on the steps of the Common House and wait until someone – usually Stephen Z – calls out ages, so that the small fry can get a head start on the faster and nimbler primate children.

The kids wander around looking for eggs. The parents wander around helping, or taking pictures, or chatting. Sometimes making sure the hidden eggs are all found (thus heading off in advance that moment a month form now of the sulfurous smell of unhappy eggs rotting in your neighbor’s shrubbery). In the past kids have more or less competed to see who can get the biggest haul, compared basketloads of loot, and occasionally traded up or down or sideways to get the chocolate of their dreams. And there are private baskets as well, usually made by moms, so that one’s child is not subject simply to the unregulated competition of late capitalist Easter.

This year, 12 years into forever, the kids are way bigger. Some are missing, wasting the time they could have been finding treasures in the greenery on graduating from Vassar and Wesleyan, on studying political theory at Swarthmore or navigating other cultures in Chile. Some are here, but wearing makeup, or sporting those flat bill caps that signify the skater cult. They look like great big puppies, not quite ready for the world which is not quite ready for them, frolicking in the late Spring finery. I watched them as I stood in my kitchen, thinking of my own overgrown pup, back on site after a night at a friend’s house (an increasingly common weekend practice, the blessed Avoidance of Parental Gaze). Praying, in a rational and secular way, that the easy laughter between these kids would pay off later in long term friendships that survive the bracing test of differentiation and adolescent drama.

The big metal bell sounded, time to bring things to the potluck. I looked at the five pounds of early strawberries, each one organic, free range, possibly college educated. I looked at the four containers of Tcho bittersweet chocolate medallions, bought here in Santa Cruz but made in San Francisco by a company that employs my good friend Nina, and I recalled wandering to her and Greg’s house after Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, an Arcadian romp of music in Golden Gate Park, and eating those same medallions and chasing them down with a Pisco drink called a Chilcano. I looked at the coffee I’d made for the masses at the potluck: Arabian Mocha Sanani, just ground in my most awesome burr grinder, just brewed under exacting conditions of measurement and quality control (water cold and filtered, pot scoured and clean, coffee at Strong-but-not-bitter levels).

And this would be the sunny, happy story of another fairy tale Easter at the green and pleasant land of cohousing. Except for the part where I enter the Common House and see some unhappy parents wrestling with the Slight Unpleasantness of the previous night (signs of alcohol in the Common House, a number of teens on the premises, questions of justice and retribution in the air).

Well. I find my wife, and we begin dipping strawberries, and placing them on a large tray, laid with parchment paper. I know that emotions will shift, a meeting will happen and people will talk about things, and that the difficult line between teenager behavior and adult behavior will once again be contemplated, negotiated, re-imagined. And that this all will go better after chocolate covered strawberries, excellent coffee, eggs with asparagus, scones. Devilled eggs.

It is a day about resurrection, after all. A day about hiding, and finding. A day when the lost is found, mystery is present, God or the Sun is on her throne, and the devil comes dressed as an hors d’oeuvre.

Late Season

Late Season

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It really does matter, this idea that we see and act from our own perspective, our own bodies, habits, history.

I was walking up from Timber Ridge to The Wall Bar when I thought about this. I remember teaching my lit students the poem Tintern Abbey, and quoting Wordsworth “We half create what we perceive.”

Let’s see how this plays out in writing:

I was walking up from Timber Ridge to The Wall Bar when I thought how different the mountain felt, how different I felt from all those other times (over 30 days here this winter). They feel like a dream, like the person who experienced them is a will o’ the wisp.

The mountain closes in two weeks or so, and has that late season feel. Some of these folks have had an entire winter in snow, or a good part of one. They’ve been in winter, in weather, and so the transition to Spring really feels like a transition.

Funny. I’m seeing the mountain for the first time again.

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Let me explain. I’m sitting at The Wall Bar at Kirkwood, surrounded by people who’ve been skiing all day, some of them, and all week some of them, and all winter a few of them. The loudspeakers are on not too crowded chill mode, so that I can barely hear Edie Brickell sing “choke me in the shallow waters/Before I get too deep.” The date is April 19, 2011, which is late in the ski season and so a slush fest late in the day. Gotta ski early on a spring bluebird. Anyway, I’m not skiing for the first time all winter, and sitting with that reality. I took a knee to the leg playing goaltie on Sunday, and instead of being annoying, it’s like someone from the millionaires vs billionaires locked out National Football League tackled me helmet on quad. So I’m walking to the mountain with no skis, with my black briefcase and no jacket and non-waterproof hiking boots and a black Triathlete visor. No helmet; no sound system.

Turns out all this matters. I feel the melancholy of the season, a little, as we all get ready to not ski for a year. To some extent I think a few of us are recalling what just happened for us this winter. And there really is, I think, something to be said about this feeling; it seems natural, and I surely feel it. Am I representative of the skiers like me? Or is my slight athlete’s limp and attire and inability to ski coloring how I see the scene? One thing is certain; absent the carving on the snow, and absent the mood-altering and producing playlists that live on my iPod but really come out to play in my ski helmet, the day feels less like a cool indie movie starring me, and more like an indie movie about the end of something, somethings. The lack of soundtrack is a dead giveaway.

This is a flaneur question. I’ve been thinking lately about how much blogging reminds me of the 19^th C flaneurs like Baudelaire, the one Edmund White talks about roaming Paris without goal or agenda, simply observing (and being observed, and merging with different scenes, and probably drinking one’s way into the early evening, even if the drink is espresso and not absinthe).

In case you need a definition, one that appears at the top of a web search is:

The term flâneur comes from the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer"—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means "to stroll". Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning of flâneur—that of "a person who walks the city in order to experience it". Because of the term's usage and theorization by Baudelaire and numerous thinkers in economic, cultural, literary and historical fields, the idea of the flâneur has accumulated significant meaning as a referent for understanding urban phenomena and modernity. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flâneur).

And I am certainly lounging, not skiing, loafing, not working, taking in, not filtering at first. Perhaps I am a snow flaneur. In any event, the music is playing at half volume, everyone is chatting and the sound of human voices rises and falls, that sea of murmur a nice counterpoint to whatever is playing over by Monte Wolfe’s bar. The scene is what it is, and is not what it is not. What it is not is what draws a lot of people here I think: it isn’t pretentious, isn’t super ski bunny fashion, isn’t overrun with the wealthy and especially the young of the wealthy, partying wildly and running over hapless victims when runs cross.

I mostly love this place. Have all winter. Skied it how many days? That memory comes easily and stays, here at this lift-side table, unlike when I’m skiing, and focus is often necessary. Skiing is about spacing on the lift and thinking your thoughts, and there is a span of time – lift time – when if you don’t get annoyed you can take a time out and see what you are feeling, let ideas and memories come as they will. And then at a certain point in this lift meditation, you are at the Rite of Passage of getting off the lift, transitioning from lift time, dream time, to ski time, be time, even when it isn’t hit it hard and fast time.

The Wall Bar in sun.

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I’m basking. Something about basking implies well being to me. I can remember times when my bones have been cold all the way down, and somehow I am now a lounging ski flaneur, a lizard in sun, on lizard time and not “die of cold” time. I think it was Loren Eisely who wrote about being on an archaeological dig in the Midwest of the United States, descending a narrow slit as the strata of rock and time moved slowly past his eyes. He talks about being out there, waiting for the dig, being utterly quiet and still, like the lizards are. Perhaps it is that unlikely meditation that prepared him for the epiphany of the piece, when as he descends he turns and is suddenly eyeball to eyesocket with a skull, animal skull, from long ago

It was not, of course, human. I was deep, deep below the time of man in a remote age near the beginning of the reign of mammals. I squatted on my heels in the narrow ravine, and we stared a little blankly at each other, the skull and I. There were marks of generalized primitiveness in that low, pinched brain case and grinning jaw that marked it as lying far back along those converging roads where, as I shall have occasion to establish elsewhere, cat and man and weasel must leap into a single shape. (Eisely, The Immense Journey).

That moment. Eisely is certainly sui generis, but as an essayist he and a few others have merged environmental knowledges and the essay form. And this is valuable because it experiments with a language designed to instruct but also to entrance, to invite into a more complex world.

I come back from this memory to realize I am basking in sun over 50 years later. And I recall Eisely writing in 1957,

Though he was not a man, nor a direct human ancestor, there was yet about him, even in the bone, some trace of that low, snuffling world out of which our forebears had so recently emerged. The skull lay tilted in such a manner that it stared, sightless, up at me as though I, too, were already caught a few feet above him in the strata and, in my turn, were staring upward at that strip of sky which the ages were carrying farther away from me beneath the tumbling debris of falling mountains. The creature had never lived to see a man, and I, what was it I was never going to see?

What, indeed?

[This is Ramona. She apparently has a reality show. I thought she exemplified sophisticated basking well enough to rate a citation.]

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The flaneur came about around the same time as 19^th c Realism and its literary effects. And so the essay, that excellent genre for the middle style, the anti-Ciceronian style, that easy Senecan amble…is for me a place of comfort. I can bask in certain kinds of language use. And I can use these effects to paint a picture for you, you who are not here, as skiers come off the mountain in droves. The snow is now utterly SLUSH! Did I say that late afternoon is when the grabby snow emerges like some horrid under bridge troll to grab you when you pass by?

So. These chairs are serious outdoor chairs here. Big metal; heavy for wind. And oddly comfortable for metal. They’ve been here every day and seen it all, the huge storms that blew snow sideways and challenged us to just get back down, the day after January day of no snow and worried people and still-happy skiers (hey with a huge early base the skiing was pretty sweet! And it did snow in February, just when it needed to).

I’ve sat in them many times this year. I remember two weeks ago sitting here in crazy hot 55 degree sun wondering how I was going to get home, no car, no plan. Now the sun is in and out, spring sun and white-gray overcast, calm and then breezy and then a chill winter wind from god knows where, and everyone feels it, like that moment when someone walks over your grave. People are talking and energized and happy to be down from the slush. Runs are compared, different parts of the day discussed, yesterday is mentioned (snowing, windy, often minimal vision) only to be incorporated into the other Days of Skiing that make up the body of skiing in your body, if that makes sense. Part of skiing is skiing in different conditions, being able to hang with all kinds of snow and weather, like baseball it’s a long season and there are lot of games.

Plans are also being made. The guy in the shorts and white restaurant jacket is indeed a chef, talking on the phone to someone who has plans for them. But the chef is calling to find out whether his replacement really is coming, and he sounds worried. Sounds also like he’s talking to a boss or someone else in charge, since the conversation is very polite. And suddenly he laughs, conversation shifts to its all good, he’s suddenly resigned to the fucking double shift, or not, and the not knowing because he hasn’t heard from his chef sub…or whether his sub is even on the mountain, or back in south lake, or Jackson, or…

Everyone who works here gets used to working way too many hours. Easier to overwork a few people than have too many employees…and someone is always quitting or leaving for whiter pastures.

4

The scene is, as my 15 year old would say, chill. I’m watching the various scenes unfold. The two dogs, the one dog who isn’t happy with the other dog, the owners negotiating the conflict pretty well. The young dude in long hair beard bright plaid shirt shorts snow board boots, and his story. About the place in New Hampshire, the one he’d heard about but never found, until that day. Up on top of the mountain, find a trail that goes along forty or so steps to…picnic tables. Hibachis. Secret grilling, wine drinking, a styling way to interrupt the ski day. The skiing Arcadian.

Off the mountain I feel this guy coming down hard, even in slush, and I pick my head up and watch him hit a big fat hockey stop almost spraying the locals. He stops, jabs at his bindings, steps out almost angrily. Comes off the mountain in a big helmet, goggles, who knows what’s going on in there. Maybe he got in a fight with his girlfriend who is five years younger and they have different ideas about a lot of things.

He walks by, storms by, or maybe he’s smiling behind that gear and he’s walking off the hill like Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, feeling it.

Five or so minutes later, more conversations, food and beer is mentioned, names of other ski places and other states and countries are overheard. The wind picks up a few empty plastic glasses and they veer over the ground, erratic, like the uncertain or the drunk.

The dog that wasn’t barking starts again, and peace is once again at risk. The couple sitting on the bench made of an old lift bench talk about telemarking, freeheeling, and the dude sees a workmate and they laugh at the inside joke: they all know the local tele stud, and like him, and put a sticker on his car (one that I’ve seen easily 20 times because I walk right by his parked truck):

No one cares that you tele.

Everyone is laughing at it, the attitude of it, the admiration mixed with chapping about potential “I tele and you don’t” attitude.

Jane, the woman on the bench, the one with tele boots, says we need to make another bumpersticker to balance the other one out: “If it were easier, it’d be snowboarding.”

Laughter, shaking of heads, thinking about those skiers and those borders, this run and that day and those moments, when none of these words matter too much. Just the something that happened to you, that you did, that time.

End of season.

Johnny Appleseed, drug dealer

So this is my version of the story we were telling last night in the hot tub at 2 am about the story people tell when they tell the story of Johnny Appleseed.

But first do you know the story? Here is how it sounds if you somehow find your way to http://www.applejuice.org:

The Story of Johnny Appleseed Johnny Appleseed spent 49 years of his life in the American wilderness planting apple seeds. Johnny Appleseed’s real name was John Chapman. He was born September 26, 1774 in Massachusetts. He created apple orchards in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Ohio. After 200 years, some of those trees still bear apples. Johnny Appleseed’s dream was for a land where blossoming apple trees were everywhere and no one was hungry. A gentle and kind man, he slept outdoors and walked barefoot around the country planting apple seeds everywhere he went. It is even told that he made his drinking water from snow by melting it with his feet. Johnny was a friend to everyone he met. Indians and settlers -- even the animals -- liked Johnny Appleseed. His clothes were made from sacks and his hat was a tin pot. He also used his hat for cooking. His favorite book was the Bible. There are many tales about Johnny Appleseed. It is said that once Johnny fell asleep and a rattlesnake tried to bite him, but the fangs would not go into his foot because his skin was as tough as an elephant’s hide. Another tale describes him playing with a bear family. Johnny Appleseed died in 1845. It was the only time he had been sick -- in over 70 years!!!

There are many tales about Johnny, indeed. Tall tales in the genre of, well, tall tales. The kind of story Twain was fond of tweaking and mimicking. Mike Fink, Riverboat Man; Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. That braggy writing about bigger than life guys that brag a lot and then back that shit up with bigger than life actions. It goes back to oral poetry (cf Beowulf). Heros were men who knew when to shut up (keep your ward hoard locked in your chest, advise the men in Beowulf) and when to boast (to fire up your men and to publicly cal yourself out: do or die. Babe Ruth pointing and then hitting the home run where he pointed, another tall tale).

You'll note the rabbit at the bottom of this image; I like that the girl is giving him a fully grown apple when he is starting to plant a nursery in a place likely not to have any apples. We rabbits are often sensitive to these contradictions, in stories as well as images.

The tale I told Pax was more or less taken from Michael Pollan's documentary The Botany of Desire. Basically, Johnny Appleseed was a drug dealer, spreading the seeds of mood altering plants across the country.

Pax liked this story. The moon was almost full and the sky was like the sky in a story about two early 21st Century males grooming each other with stories and with listening, with the animal pleasure of the play of language across our brains and minds.

For my next post I'll continue this story. For now most of you could likely guess why I call this John Chapman aka Johhny Appleseed chap a drug dealer. In a good way.

I was walking along the Internet minding my own business - well, sort of - when I came across some information I wanted to share. The video itself is a segment of a show called "Myth Lies and Downright Stupidity with John Stossel (he of the Jim Croce throwback 70s stache). The premise is that we’ve been told a pack of lies (and myths and stupidisms too I’ll wager) about radiation. It begins with monsters who use radiation to kill, and then shifts to scenes from the bombing of Japan. They cite the radiation deaths, but hten…they show that fearful writing in the New York Times from the forties turned out to be wrong. The film cuts to modern Japan, with healthy people walking down a crowded Tokyo sidewak. Hey! Guess they were wrong about radiation, huh? It didn’t have any effects after the first horrific exposure.

A toxicology expert, Dr Calabrese, argues that in fact those Japanese victims who got a smaller dose of radiation are actually living longer. It turns out that radiation is good for you in certain doses can slow aging and extend the life span of mice and possibly humans. They show people bathing in irradiated water in Euroep and Westerners go to an old uranium mine to breathe in the low dose goodness of radiation.

It turns out that the hysteria about radiation is hysterical. And The China Syndrome was Ground Zero on the hysteria. When Three Mile Island had its partial meltdown, people reacted with unreasonable fears and hysteria due to the Hollywood images of radiation; and that, says Calabrese, is why Americans are against nuclear power.

This story – that the real fear is the unwarranted hysterical fear of radiation, of nuclear power, of those in power who make and oversee nuclear policy – is all over the internet right now. It isn’t wrong, in one way: people are afraid and they are not educated about radiation dosages, amounts, etc. It’s like my friend Will Forest argues: if people can’t imagine the different between a thousand and a mmillion, a million and a billion, it is hard to imagine them making clear well founded decisions when it comes to the measurement of things.

The argument that no harm came from Three Mile Island, though. That’s a stretch. And what we know in retrospect was that the core was dangerously close to melting down all the way. It is easy in hindsight to say the hydrogen bubble could never have exploded because there was no oxygen, or that the meltdown was controlled and controllable. And while it is true that no significant radiation effects have been documented, the release of hydrogen and steam directly into the atmosphere, the release of radioactive water, and the disputed status of whether or not a hydrogen explosion actually occurred, all ought to raise some read flags about TMI being somehow “not” an accident, or not being serious.

Citation: Myth: Nuclear Energy is Dangerous‬

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2ZTt8O__zk&feature=related‬

The descriptor reads:

104 Nuclear Reactors operate safely in the United States without a single loss of life. Contrary to belief, only 56 people have died from the Chernobyl accident and no one from Three Mile Island.

Here are other links embedded in the above Youtube vid:



Going Nuclear - A Green Makes the Case (Patrick Moore, Ph.D. - Greenpeace Co-Founder)
‪http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR20060414012...

Love Uranium (Peter Huber, Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering, MIT)
‪http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/1127/122.html

Former 'No Nukes' Protester: Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Power (Wired)
‪http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2007/12/nuclear_qa?currentPage=1

Let's Have Some Love for Nuclear Power (The Wall Street Journal)
‪http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121659839296769061.html

Chernobyl Incident Had Fewer Long-Term Health Impacts Than Expected (Natural Environment Research Council)
‪http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070407172204.htm

Danger from radiation is exaggerated, say scientists (The Times, UK)
‪http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article685386.ece

The Truth About Chernobyl Is Told (Zbigniew Jaworowski, Central Laboratory for Radilogical Protection)
‪http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/chernobyl.html

UN Report says 56 killed so far due to Chernobyl nuclear accident (CBC News)
‪http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2005/09/05/UN_Chernobyl20050905.html

No Apparent Increase In Cancer Deaths Among Three Mile Island Residents, Report University Of Pittsburgh Researchers (University Of Pittsburgh Medical Center)
‪http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/05/000531071558.htm

No Significant Rise In Cancer Deaths In 3-Mile Island Residents Over 20 Years, According To Study (University Of Pittsburgh Medical Center)
‪http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/11/021101065838.htm

Uranium resources sufficient to meet projected nuclear energy requirements long into the future (Nuclear Energy Administration)
‪http://www.nea.fr/html/general/press/2008/2008-02.html

World has 200 Years of Uranium Reserves - Germany (Reuters)
‪http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/35026/newsDate/10-Feb-2006...

Recycling Nuclear Fuel: The French Do It, Why Cant Oui? (FOX News)
‪http://tinyurl.com/24qlau

Watching nuclear TV

For the last few days, I've been immersed in the up close and persona investigation of the various textures of snow (and yes I did inspect it with my entire body a couple days ago - not a garage sale fall but definitely a roll over and laugh with snow in your nose fall). And I've been reading a lot on technology, including the day to day distraction effects of mundane cyborg tech like cell phones (Hamlet's Blackberry is particularly readable on this) and larger issues of how we view the world (as a giant resource dump? as a set of living systems? as made by this or that really strong God who also told the priests what it was all for?).

Today I listened to the download of Sexy Beast's soundtrack, including the chilling voice of Ben Kingsley as a psychopathic thug, and that rocking song Peaches that starts the film's ball rolling (those of you who know the film will get that slight spoiler joke). Then I decided to follow up my recent documentary watching (The Botany of Desire; Enron, the Smartest Guys in the Room) with a quick Youtube turn about nuclear power. So as I was cooking bacon, scrambling eggs, and making toast (all with power completely trucked into this ski resort) I watched these four bits in succession.

The first film, produced in January 2006 by ABC Australia, is titled Who's Afraid of Nuclear Power. The blurb goes:

Almost every day seems to bring more horror stories on fossil fuels. We're bombarded with reports about global warming. The price of oil keeps increasing. But with each gloomy media prediction, the nuclear industry can boast: we've got the clean answer. This week's documentary looks at different approaches to nuclear power. It focuses on Australia and Scandinavia - where attitudes couldn't be more different. While Australia derives 80% of its energy from coal, half of Sweden's power is nuclear. Could Nuclear hold the answer to the world's looming energy crisis?

The show begins by showing happy people, most naked, swimming in the Baltic. Usually it is only warm enough to swim comfortably in for three weeks a year, but here in this cove, Swedes swim for four months. The idyllic scene (complete with very nice soothing music) then pulls back to reveal that the source of the warmth is the nuclear power station across the way. The smiling Swede looking up at the camera from the water lets us know that there’s no danger whatsoever. And the rest of the film goes back over the debate, from the early 1970s attempt to site a nuke plant in what is now a pristine nature preserve. At that time, the political drive was not simply to produce energy, but to allow Australia a nuclear option by producing weapons grade materials. The fact that this exactly mirrors Iran doesn’t somehow come up.

The Australian show was quite good at lining up the current talking points, which are not making bombs anymore (well that’s what the man said!) but about energy futures and greenhouse gases. Nuclear power is riding the global warming concerns back to a place at the table, and the pro-nuclear conclusion of the film is that Swedes love their hydro- and nuclear combo and are not afraid of nuclear power at all, whereas Australians live in a state of ignorance and fear mostly because of the anti-nuclear hype. Ironically, whether or not Australians go nuclear power, they are certainly gong nuclear mining; in the show the government was keen to forge ahead with new uranium mines.

The second film is called Nuclear Nationalism. It turned out not to be about nuclear power, but about India’s underground testing of three nuclear devices. The film connects this policy to the two potent right wing forces in Indian government: the BJP party, but more importantly, its ultranationalist and Hindu fundamentalist militia wing (though that may be too strong a word), the R.S.S. The juxtaposition of RSS youth groups (mostly from the affluent middle classes of BJP support) with their links to the party now in power in India (the BJP) is pretty terrifying. The RSS argues that there are no “muslims” but that everyone in India is Hindu, that it is one culture. And of course the rhetoric of power and national pride is shown to drive some of the nuclear weapons strategy (I believe the BJP prime minister was in office only two months before he provocatively set off the tests and then announced them as proof of India’s power and new course). The narrator consistently compared the RSS youth groups, marching in uniforms through public places and chanting Hindu slogans, to the Hitler youth (crossed with the Boy Scouts). When you hear the Prime Minister of India calmly explain the RSS ideology, and then see the nuclear tests and the political fallout (1998, more than a million troops poised along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir) you realize that that time paralleled the Cuba Missile Crisis in certain scary ways. Of course nothing is mentioned of nuclear energy in the film, but Paksitan has three commercial nuclear power plants. India has twenty, an atomic program since 1957, and is (at least according to the World Nuclear Association), currently building five more, including a large Russian reactor which will produce weaons grade plutonium, and a large Breeder reactor. Ten more plants are planned for the next ten years.

Putting the puzzle piece together for a moment: Australia’s decision to mine more uranium directly affects India, which must import all of its uranium fuel; a dip in world production in 2008 – 2010 had a big impact on India’s nuclear production. In addition, the language of nuclear power in India is rife with nationalist and patriotic rhetoric: there is reference to its “indigenous” nuclear program and expertise, and the search for indigenous and new designs that allow India to use thorium instead of uranium as a nuclear fuel. One reason for the “indigenous” nuclear program is that India, like Pakistan,Israel, and North Korea) is a nuclear armed country that is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The two bits I watched from CBS online were also fascinating. 104 plants now in the US; plans to build 20 more. So CBS took us to Avila Beach (love that place!) to Diablo Canyon, and to San Onofre. Both are on the ocean, and at Diablo, less than three years ago a new fault was found just offshore. In a moment reminiscent of the Duck and Cover exercises from the late 50s and early 60s, CBS showed footage of children in a classroom quickly getting under their (pretty small and sketchy looking!) desks in an annual drill called The Great Shakeout. Then the show contrasted the fifteen second shake of the 1989 earthquake with the massive and long over two minute shaking of the Japanese quake. I’m thinking the desks may not be the answer.

Lastly I checked out the CBS “expert analysis” of the Fukushima disaster. Professor Cham Dallas of the University of Georgia, an expert on nuclear energy, stood in front of a schematic of a nuclear reactor, and explained how it is supposed to work, and what went wrong. He gave the simple explanation (the nuclear fuel rods make heat which makes steam) and when confronted with the situation in Japan now, he focused first on what went right: they automatically shut down 11 reactors when the quake hit. The problem is the heat being generated, and the need for constant cooling via water. “It’s just like your stove at home” was more or less what he said; it takes time to cool, and reactors take days. From this stove metaphor the anchor then says “So that is the partial meltdown we’ve been hearing about.” The tone of it was interesting to me, honestly; I think the anchor was trying to find that middle ground between hyped fears and technospeak that seems to cover up more than it explains. And that was what Cham Dallas was after as well, I think.

He stresses it was NOT like Chernobyl, a total meltdown (a funny moment occurred onscreen when the reactor animation showed fuel rods descending all the way to the bottom of the hot reactor; both anchor and Dallas were quick to say no no that isn’t what happened, though the simulation showed how easily and more or less naturally it would go from top to bottom to meltdown). Instead it was a partial meltdown, from the top. And here is my favorite part: his metaphor for the meltdown was “its like a candle.” How it is like a candle? “Well, a candle burns from the top, and then it stops, well, we’re hoping that’s what happened here.”

Honestly, I did not want to pile on these guys. They are trying to explain in clear terms to a TV audience. But, um, doesn’t a candle more or less burn down all the way? Or is there some sort of moment where the heat in the reactor stops because it goes out in a puddle of wax?

The other part I think a lot of Americans picked up on: we’re hoping. They voted for Hope with Obama (who contiues to support nuclear power in the strongest way), and now we are assured that there is only a partial meltdown AND we are hoping that it is only partial.

Here’s hoping at you, kid.

Citations:

‪Who's Afraid of Nuclear Power? ABC Australia

‪http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLPu_xPD8Qo‬

‪Nuclear Nationalism - India‬ ABC Australia

‪http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWIJ8tXH0I4&NR=1‬

‪Are America's nuclear power plants safe?‬ CBS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK-De9ulFvI&feature=fvst

‪Japan's nuclear power plant: What went wrong?‬ CBS

‪http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gch0z456Ohc&NR=1‬