Drop Down and Get Your Eagle On

One of my favorite 21st Century harbingers of spring renewal is the yearly revival of live-streaming feeds from raptor nests across the world. When I was still doing ecology stuff, I was always fascinated by what are called "charismatic mega-fauna" - our peers in the animal kingdom. I'm a terribly unknowledgeable bird watcher, but I can easily identify all of the birds of prey native to the American Northeast.

So, as I sit down to work on some music in my studio today, I have a few raptor cams running on my second monitor screen. Here's what I'm watching today:

For me, the National Aviary in Pittsburgh is the OG of raptor cams. They have two - one in the Gulf Oil Building and one at University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning. Both are peregrine falcon nests - falcons have adapted to urban environments because they like to best in tall buildings that provide the same benefits as the tall trees and cliffsides they use in the wild. Since they often hunt small birds and catch them on the wing, this provides them with a good vantage point.

Cathedral of Learning Falcon Cam & Gulf Tower Falcon Cam
Two pairs Pittsburgh Peregrine Falcons (Falco peregrinus) and their incubating eggs

Alcoa Eagle Cam
Two Iowan Bald Eagles* (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) and their chicks. For my friends in Philly - there is a mating pair of Bald Eagles that hunts at the John Heinz Wildlife Refuge near the airport if you ever want to go check them out with me!

Friends of Blackwater Osprey Cam
This is a good one - a nest box set up for fish-hunting Ospreys (Pandion haliaetus) in Maryland seems to have attracted a mating pair, who are collecting nest material and then may have some chicks. This one doesn't refresh as often, but there's a little more going on, story-wise. Also, Ospreys are my favorite birds of prey, because they have their own genus all to themselves, and because they are fucking badasses.

Caught, Can We Get a Witness?

Astrophysicist... or Black astrophysicist?  Philadelphia Magazine lets you know white peoples' thoughts.

The City is all atwitter about Philadelphia Magazine's sensationalistic cover story "Being White In Philly."  Reactions to the story are pointedly negative, and for good reason.  At worst, the story is described as a central casting conservative indictment of political correctness as the protective veil of the welfare state.  That gives the author, Robert Huber, and the suburban cow-tows at Philly Mag a bit too much credit.  The story is not a polemic, it's a disjointed mess.  More accurately, it's a purely lazy, disconnected series of interviews with white people lamenting their inability to talk about race while proving terribly bad at it whenever they try.   The author editorially acquiesces to their feelings with such unconscious ham-handedness I was surprised nobody mentioned that "they have a lot of black friends."

In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and said "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."  The speech is so famous, and King so hagiograph-ied that invoking it may seem simplistic.  Worse, maybe it's hyperbolic, especially in a comments-section-driven era of extreme discourse.

Fast forward 50 years, and Philadelphia Magazine made it known that Huber (and by proxy, the editors), the vast majority of his interview subjects and by inference, white people across Philadelphia, rue the day such a dream was voiced.  They wish nothing more than to ramble inconclusively about whether or not we need to use skin color as a meaningful descriptor of their fellow citizens... in order to sell magazines.

That's pretty much all the article is - rambling.  A bunch of people say "some black kid stole a chair from my porch this once" or "black neighborhoods have low graduation rates."  There are man-on-the-street interviews where Huber meaningfully records that "black guys whistle at me, white guys don't."  Interspersed is a bunch of meandering commentary by the author and his subjects about whether or not blackness is what's important here.  "Not that it matters.... but maybe it does ... but if it did could I say anything... I don't know."  On and on and on.

What's the message here?  Not that "there's a problem talking about race."  The message is that "people who believe race determines behavior are not sure why they run into problems talking about race, and a bunch of other people seem not to be sure why they are being probed for their opinions on blackness."

Huber's work is a lazily written reason to put some 100+ point font on the cover of Philly Mag, draw sales and provoke blog posts like this one.  It's a sophomoric series of anecdotes about Philadelphia's descent into poverty, drugs, segregation, violence and every other social ill you can think of, and the main message is "do you think that maybe this is related to blackness... or something?"  There's no attempt at explaining the correlations between race and class.  If "show me, don't tell me" was the MO, the analysis would be a bit more trenchant than some ramblings about pangs of guilt and uncertainty about North Philly's ills on a drive to his son's apartment at Temple.  Who knew white people were so lazy?  I thought that was black people!  Quick, what do seven randomly selected white people think?

Robert Huber, and sympathizers city-wide, here's my message for you - if you wonder aloud whether or not it's OK to discuss race in Philadelphia, you are contributing productively to a discussion.  If place race* first in any discussion about human issues, like poverty, violence, education, you are doing it wrong.  Doing so is dehumanizing.  Plain and simple.  My message won't sell your magazine, but it would have saved you the trouble of having to account for your half-baked article.

*-"race" being a distinct concept from "racism"

Cover Story in Philadelphia Weekly

After a several year hiatus, I made my return this week to the Philadelphia Weekly.  Did it in style too, with a cover story about a Philadelphia activist software developer and his Shazam-like app for deciphering political advertisement provenance.

Check it out:  Fact Attack (Philadelphia Weekly)

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

My neighborhood brew-pub, Dock Street, is asking local graphic designers to enter a competition to design their newest t-shirt. After they receive the designs, staff and facebook group members will vote for a winner. The winning designer receives some limited edition beer, four t-shirts and exposure to any potential clients who may be paying attention to the voting. Oh, and what the Dock Street site calls "bragging rights."

I have a better idea - stop pretending that you are doing somebody a favor by printing their design on your t-shirt and stop pretending that a handful of beers and a t-shirt are worth anything at cost and just PAY A WORTHY DESIGNER TO CREATE A T-SHIRT DESIGN. It's really transparent to suggest that you are doing anybody a favor - you are Dock Street, a small neighborhood business. The scale of your business does not allow for your crowd-sourcing to reach so many people that the winner of the contest is sure to get tangible free marketing from this.

If you want to be a good neighbor, how about you ask if there are any graphic designers from West Philly (there are tons), and you stimulate your local economy with something that they can spend wherever t-shirts and limited edition beers are not accepted as currency.

You will also get a much better product, because when you pay somebody to design something for you, you can tell them exactly what you want and then they make it to your specifications. But if there's anything we know about business in the 21st Century, it's that everybody wants everything for free.

Crowdsourcing, the act of outsourcing a task to some general and broad population, seems like a slick, 21st century way to do business. Seems like some folks think they can get some kind of cool points for just dropping words they heard Kai Ryssdal use. The only way around this model, in this case, is to tell any graphic designers you know that they ought to keep a little self respect and spend the time they could have spent on Dock Street out there finding clients who pay for good work.
__________________

For posterity, since the contest information is on the Dock Street "events" page and there is no permanent post with a URL with the contest rules, here's a screengrab, which contains the awesome line "just for fun and to get your name out there!"

SCREENGRAB

Don't Drink The Water?

There was a story in a number of media outlets today about high levels of radioactive isotopes of Iodine in Philadelphia drinking water detected last week - amounts as high as 2.2 pCi/L (picoCuries per liter of water). The EPA's limit is 3.0 pCi/L Obviously, the first thing that comes to mind is the Fukishima nuclear disaster in Japan, which has just been upgraded to a level of severity on par with Chernobyl.

In a number of the articles I have read, experts are saying that the amount of radiation measured in Philly's water is not a big deal, and somebody is always quoted as saying the opposite "for balance." With trust in government at quite a low in the last 40 years, skepticism is natural, but with a lot of my friends wondering if the water is safe (myself included), I think it's a good idea to break down some of what we know and figure out what this means for public health.

Disclaimer - I am not a chemist, physicist or public health expert, merely a guy with an ecology degree and a blog, so I welcome anybody to correct any errors I may make or add to my comments.

First off - there are several kinds of radiation measures, a number of which you have probably heard on the news. These measures can tell you the radioactivity of a substance, the amount of dosage a human has absorbed or several other things. The Curie (Ci) is a non-metric measurement of radioactivity. Although I strongly prefer metric units, the Philly Water Dept measured in Ci, so let's talk in Curies to make life simple.

Second - all objects continuously emit electromagnetic radiaton, even human beings. This is how we're able to date archaeological objects - by measuring the decay of radioactive isotopes of carbon in formerly living objects.

Third - the water measurement was in pCi/L, picoCuries per liter of water. The prefix "pico" denotes a 1 in a Trillion multiplier (1/1,000,000,000,000 or 1x10^-12)). This is important because there are lots of radioactive objects and substances that would be useful as points of comparison. Many every-day radioactive objects have levels of radiation measured on different orders of magnitude: nano (1/1,000,000,000), micro (or milliCuries per weight or volume. At the risk of being insulting, this is worth explaining a bit. This chart gives a little rundown - keep in mind that these prefixes denote immense changes in magnitude of ONE THOUSAND. A centimeter is less than an inch, a meter is a few feet, a kilometer is a few blocks, a megameter is twice the width of Pennsylvania.



Now based some figures from various health departments and universities (links provided), here are the equivalents in water volume from the Queen's Lane facility:

1 Coffee = 12.27 nCi/lb
One pound of coffee has the same radioactive content as 5335 Liters of Philadelphia water.

Animals, plants = 6 pCi/g
One gram of any living animal or plant has the same radioactive content as 2.6 Liters of Philadelphia water. That means that a one pound steak has approximately the same amount of radiation as 73.8 Liters of Philadelphia water.
Beer (dry weight) = 390 pCi/kg
One kg of the solids left by dehydrating beer (which is probably equivalent to about 10 kg of beer by wet weight, not sure of the volume because I don't know beer's density) has the same radioactive content as 170 Liters of Philadelphia drinking water.

So I guess these levels of radioactivity in Philly water are not really that high, and the EPA standards seem awfully strict. Apparently, in August there were elevated levels of radioactivity in Philly's reservoirs but this went more or less without comment. I would be interested to see how much radioactive Iodine from Fukishima is being deposited in the Delaware watershed relative to elsewhere. I don't know how high the radioactive particles ride in the air across the Pacific, because my expectation would be that much of the radioactivity will condense over the western mountain ranges and fall as rain in the West or Midwest before it reaches here.



Anyways, I hope this was helpful, I'm gonna go get a drink.

The Philadelphia Experiment

"I ain't talkin bout chicken and gravy mang"

My homie Drew Lazor wrote a piece in a recent Grid issue (which is not available online yet) profiling "The Minimalist," Mark Bittman. In the interview, Bittman revealed (to me at least), that he was about to move from writing about cooking to writing about food politics. In his new role, and possibly as a result of his conversation with Drew or perusal of the Grid "Food Issue" that contained his interview, he developed an awareness of Philly's attempts to improve access to healthy food. His most recent entry is a glowing recounting of Philadelphia's nascent efforts to localize its food systems and discourage economic discrimination that is manifested by food-related health consequences.

As most know, Philadelphia has large swaths of concentrated poverty, even after decades of relatively impressive and innovative experiments with mixed income housing, transitional housing and public housing redevelopment. Most of these areas are defined by their relatively poor access to jobs, services and goods, including healthy food, which generally costs more than processed food. This arrangement is not a coincidence - decades of neglectful and racially or economically discriminatory policies by business and municipalities combined with market forces that created "food deserts."

Over the last several years, working a sort of consigliere to my fiancee's career efforts in community garden organizing, urban agriculture and sustainable food systems, I have gained an appreciation for the momentum this movement has in Philadelphia, and it's nice to see recognition from a national news outlet.

All in all, there have been some great accomplishments that I have personally witnessed, big and small. I've helped build two gardens, one of which is a community farm where young men and women from West Philly learn about food systems and business skills. Mainly through these efforts, and meeting my fiancee's acquaintances in this field, I have met a lot of people from a broad range of backgrounds who have come together because they care about food with an intensity equivalent to its importance in each of our daily lives. Alex Mulcahy, publisher of Grid, deserves a lot of credit for creating a well-produced publication that has communicated much of what I already knew to a broad audience.

I could list the accomplishments of the fine Philadelphians in this field in this space - new supermarkets deep in the ghetto, farms and farmstands and green roofs - but instead, I'll just direct you to some choice links at the bottom and let you explore some of what's going on in the 215.

Related:

Mark Bittman "Better Food in Philadelphia"
Grid Magazine
Philly Rooted
Farm to Philly
Philadelphia Orchard Project
The Food Trust

Worthy Causes

So micro-fundraising has seen a huge surge in popularity the last few years. I remember talking to Skinny about setting up a Kickstarter for some record label projects a few years back and it just seemed way to novel to get anybody interested. Now it's pretty normal, and that's a great thing.

The last few weeks I've been hipped to three different micro-fundraising projects that I think are worthy of your attention.

Apologies for the wonky video embedding:



Philly Rooted is working with UC Green and the Philadelphia Orchard Project to plant lots of fruit and nut trees along the West Philadelphia streetscape. In exchange for donations, you can get all kinds of gift certificates and coupons to local businesses.

Link: UC Green Kickstarter



Nic Esposito is my fiancee's business partner. Together with Nic, Erica and I have started two gardens in West Philadelphia - a community garden in the Woodlands Cemetery and a grower's co-op and community farm behind the 46th Street El station. Erica and Nic have conspired to become quite the big-wigs in the Philly gardening and sustainability scene the last few years.

Nic is writing a book, in which Erica and I are characters - he's self-publishing and he's asking for donations to finance the printing. In return he's offering various benefits - from a copy of the book to a storytelling salon at your house.

Link: Nic Esposito Kickstarter



Mariposa Co-Op - My neighborhood food Co-op is moving from it's teeny-tiny, members only location into a big space in what used to be a church, just down the block at 49th and Baltimore. The new Marioposa will be much more like a full-service supermarket offering lots of healthy, organic and/or local food options to a neighborhood underserved in all said commodities.

Link: Mariposa IndieGoGo Campaign

Labeled me a ho

Article in today's Times about Home Depot getting into green labeling. Perhaps this is a sign that being green is attractive to consumers in this down economy. I seem to recall that this was a big thing with lumber some time back- boasting of the concientious logging your companies suppliers practiced.

As most know, in the absence of any sort of regulation, a label doesn't really mean shit. The debate about what exactly qualifies food as "organic" illustrates this perfectly. If the label sells, people will surely try to sell the label without taking the hit associated with actually providing the bona fide product. I'm not saying this is what Homie D (nomenclature that proves I've worked on a construction site) is doing, but I'm just sayin is all.

Eco-labels.org keeps their eye out for this sort of thing. Recognize.



News on them internets:

-The Philadelphia Eagles are crediting members of their organization who invest in wind energy. Maybe that's because Lincoln Financial Field is in the Delaware River flood plain.

-I came across an interesting blog recently called Framing Science. The blog doesn't talk about science itself so much as it talks about the way in which science is talked about- e.g. The Frame. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term "framing" it can be losely understood as the way in which an issue is presented and understood in the public debate. For example, here are two competing frames: Estate Tax versus Death Tax.

Basically, Framing Science keeps up with the issues of rhetoric, debate and discussion in science policy. I have said numerous times before that I think scientists have to work harder to make themselves understood and accessible so that they are not pushed around in the public debate by people with political goals but no factual backup.