I just learned of a very cool idea called "yard sharing." The idea is to match up people who have yards but no time or interest in gardening with people who want to garden but have no yard. The property owner gets a share of the harvest, and the gardener gets a place to grow stuff. It's like a community garden, only it's a private arrangment.

The idea seems to be really taking off in Portland, OR, although similar programs can be found elsewhere in the US and around the world.

Monsanto is widely distributing seeds for genetically modified crops in India, with the cooperation of the government. Farmers are told that although these seeds cost twice as much as conventional seeds, the plants will not require pesticides. The sad reality is that they cost nearly four times as much as conventional seeds, they require pesticides AND they require four times as much water as conventional crops (a fact which is usually withheld from the farmers). And after all that, the farmer cannot save seeds him or herself for the next year, and must buy fresh seeds again.

Farmers who live at the very edge of existance in India are being sold this bill of goods by unscrupulous seed dealers who don't give them complete information, and by Monsanto, who is pushing GM crops hard with the cooperation of the Indian government. Neither traditional nor GM seeds provide insurance for the farmer in the event of a bad season, but failure of a GM crop leaves a farmer far worse off than failure of a traditional crop, mostly because of the debt loads required to obtain GM seeds. Thousands of these destitute farmers are committing suicide across broad regions of India, leaving their families completely destitute. This "GM genocide" is an epic tragedy. Although the suicides are tragic enough, the situation is worsened by the fact that the debt does not die with the farmer, instead it is passed on to his (for these farmers are usually male) wife and children, who become homeless, resourceless outcasts.

This tragedy is akin to the marketing of baby formula to mothers in poor countries. Both represent efforts of Western companies to profit from the lowest economic classes in poor countries, without any consideration of the effects the products they are pushing might have on such economically marginal people. Baby milk mixed with contaminated water becomes poison; GM crops that fail become an economic death sentence.

Human beings really suck sometimes.

A new study suggests that healthy people might benefit from taking cholesterol drugs, even if they don't have high cholesterol or any risk factors for heart disease. Healthy people who took the drug suffered from fewer heart attacks than people who did not.

This sounds like great news, but caution is warranted before we put our entire adult population on Crestor to prevent heart attacks. From a public health perspective, it's desirable to see a population-level improvement in health outcomes before you implement any kind of prevention program. For example, there is a clear, measurable population-wide effect of folic acid supplementation during the early stages of pregnancy, and a smaller, although still measurable effect of folic acid supplementation before conception -- in both situations, the rates of spina bifida and similar birth defects are dramatically decreased. If only some people, or only a very small number of people benefited from taking folic acid supplements, then the CDC's controversial "all women, every day" folic acid advisory would be unwarranted. But the decrease in the number of babies born with spina bifida when their mothers have taken folic acid is so very, very large that the advisory makes sense (although it has been handled ham-fistedly).

What's this got to do with Crestor? Well, on the basis of the above study, you might think that everyone should take Crestor to reduce their risk of heart attack, regardless of what their specific risk factors for heart attack are. You might think that the someone should sponsor a media campaign to educate the public and doctors about this fantastic new finding. But look at the reported results -- 120 people would have to take the drug for 2 years to prevent a single heart attack. Getting more sleep, eating more leafy greens or getting 30 minutes of exercise every day would prevent more heart attacks than that. This study has not demonstrated a large enough, population-level effect to justify the billions that a population based prevention campaign would require.

That said, you should of course make your own health decisions in consultation with your doctor. I'm not telling you to not take Crestor or any other drug. I'm just saying that an anti-cholesterol drug regimen as a prevention therapy doesn't make sense from a public health perspective.

Inspired by Medley's post about author Sarah Pekkanen's website, I looked up the website of the book I just finished reading, The Secret Life of Lobsters, by Trevor Corson, and found a wealth of lobster-related information that isn't in the book, such as a confessional tale of the book's challenges, a lobster FAQ and user-submitted lobster stories. Although none of this is quite as cool as Pekkanen's innovative e-mail strategy (see Medley for more on that), it's still dynamic and engaging.

By the way, I highly recommend The Secret Life of Lobsters. Lobsters, the most sustainably fished marine creature, are far more interesting than I anticipated. They have incredibly complex -- and flexible -- migration patterns, mating rituals and survival strategies. The book goes beyond just talking about the lobsters and also examines the relationships among fisherman, scientists and the state. It's gripping stuff.

Off and on over the past few weeks, I've been thinking (and saying) that I ought to buy stock in AIG. After all, if the government is going to spend all those billions bailing it out, they aren't going to let it fail. And since it's lost over 90% of it's value, I would assume that after this recession, it would be worth something in the neighborhood of its old value. But as I've watched AIG's stock price fall and fall and fall and fall and fall, I started to think I must be wrong, because I surely can't be the only person to have this idea.

So here we are, and AIG is not only getting more money, but under more favorable terms. That's either proof of the government's commitment to keeping AIG afloat, or it's a nasty game by AIG's management to loot as much as possible from the US Treasury before going under. Either way, I don't want to have anything to do with this stinking mess of inbred opportunism. I'll keep my money where it is for now, thanks.

After the liberation of Paris in World War II, the US Army set up several camps around the port city of Le Havre. These camps were staging areas for men entering and exiting the European theater -- no one was in these camps for very long. As with most WWII army camps, they all had nonsensical code names unrelated to their location or purpose to ensure security.

In the case of Le Havre, the camps were all named after US cigarette brands. According to The Cigarette Camps, the brand names were thought to provide some comfort to the men. Given how important cigarettes were during the war, I suppose this isn't surprising. The link above provides lots of pictures and personal reminisces of the camps.

I love my country, and I'm so proud of it I could bust. I waited in a long line today to vote. And I cast my vote for the first African American major party candidate, someone I hope will be our next president (I still can't let myself believe it).

I can't believe I had the opportunity to vote for our first black president. I know the hard work starts tomorrow, but just for today I am happier than a lobster in a pile of rotten halibut. It's a cliche to say it, but this really could only happen in America, and being even a small part of this process is very cool.

(Image courtesy of Now This)

I want to sew a skirt for myself.

I am afraid to sew a skirt for myself. It might not turn out, and I don't want to waste the fabric.

I wish I would stop it already. I keep imagining all the cool skirts I can make (there's the one with lobsters, the black one with 4-gores, the one with pockets, the brown and pink one with zipper-teeth piping, the one with bowling balls....). Seriously, I need to stop being afraid!

A few years back, I read Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital series, and I continually scoffed at the character of Phil Chase, an idealistic senator who ultimately wins the presidency during a worldwide ecological crisis. I kept thinking how nice it would be to have a president like that -- a smart guy with a vision -- and the further into the series I read, the more depressed I became. I kept thinking "There's no way Americans would elect a president like that, and even if they did, a person like that wouldn't want the job."

I'm afraid to hope that I was wrong, and that Obama might be that person, and that he might actually win this election. I have been horrified by the Bush presidency, but that doesn't mean I've loved our democratic presidents. Clinton disappointed me terribly -- among many other things, he broke my heart with TANF.

But the more I listen to Obama's plans, look at the way his campaign has been run, read the polls and (more importantly) read analysis of those polls the more I feel this thing in my chest with feathers. Is this what hope feels like?

I'm not a fan of lawns, in part for environmental reasons, but also because they are wasted opportunities -- something so much more interesting could have been done! This front yard edible knot garden is just one example of the sort of thing that can be done when you rip out the lawn.

Apparently, The Bee Gees song "Stayin' Alive", at 103 beats per minute, is the exact tempo at which heart compressions should be optimally performed when doing CPR.

In other news, I now have the Bee Gees song "Stayin' Alive" stuck in my head.

I would not have anticipated that a weblog about playground architecture would be interesting, engaging and fun. But it is.

I've not read this book, but I just placed it on hold at the library: Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots. It's a book with a manifesto:

A Crunchy Con Manifesto

1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.

2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.

3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.

4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.

5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.

6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.

7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.

8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.

9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”

There's not much in that I disagree with. Of course the devil is always in the details.

I'm not a fan of Economics. Economists, as a rule, have too much of a tendency to adopt ideas from other fields and then claim them as innovations without acknowledging the borrowing (see James Surowiecki's work for one of the most egregious examples). Yes, this is sour grapes, as much of the borrowing in recent years has come from Sociology, and I am a sociologist.

But in spite of my bias against economists, I am happy to see that Paul Krugman won the Nobel price for economics. Krugman is so often right that it's hard to not be a fan.

I've been watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles since it started. It's a really great show. The series' story arc is inserted between Terminator 2 and Terminator 3 -- in fact, it thankfully ignores T3 (a terrible movie) entirely.

The show captures the spirit of the first two Terminator movies exactly: the fatalistic dread, the hope, the determination, the love. Several new characters are introduced, including a "white hat" terminator played by Summer Glau and another member of the Reese clan. The stories are deep and detailed, more like watching a movie than watching TV. It's a satisfying extension of a satisfying franchise.

Sadly, the show is in very real danger of being canceled because viewership is low.

Now's your chance to start watching it. The series does have an ongoing story arc -- John, Sarah and Summer Glau travel forward in time several years, where they fight off "black hat" terminators, while trying to stop Skynet (that's right -- Skynet wasn't destroyed by the events of T2, just changed). That's all you need to know about where we are now -- you can dive right in. You can find old episodes on iTunes or Hulu.com if you'd like to catch up, but you don't need all that backstory to enjoy it now. It's a great show.

I keep finding myself in the odd position of defending Sarah Palin. It's baffling. Not only do the few policy positions she has articulated appall me (even in -- and perhaps especially in -- her area of expertise, energy policy), but her hate-based, racist, untruthful and vacuous attacks on Obama disgust me. This is America at its very, very worst.

But she's still a woman in a male-dominated field, and I guess that's where I find myself feeling some kinship with her, even though I suspect she would feel little with me. I keep hearing comments about how great it is that she doesn't dress like most female politicians, eschewing pantsuits and solid reds and pinks -- to which I respond that it would be really great if we would stop talking the clothes of female politicians. I also hear comments that it's disrespectful of her to refer to her opponents as Joe and Barak, when they go out of their way to refer to her as governor -- to which I respond that she's got to demonstrate that she's at their level, that she's part of their club.

Those are the kind of small battles that I fight every day. When I'm introduced as FirstName (no last name and no title) to someone of equal age and rank who happens to be of the opposite sex who is introduced to me as Dr. LastName, I have to find a way to politely work a comment like "what field is your doctorate in? mine is in sociology" into the conversation without looking like an ass or a moron so that this new network tie knows I am like him. It's embarrassing, but it's the only way I can avoid later being asked to take notes, fetch water or operate the projection equipment. When informal hallway conversations during review time focus on the "intuitive understanding" of our female staff and the "intelligence" of our male staff, I have to find some way to make sure that the women get credit for their brains as well as their empathy without looking like a crazy feminist. And don't get me started on the nuances of what "business casual" or "causal Friday" mean for a woman's wardrobe (and bank balance), nuances that men do not face.

I don't like Sarah Palin and I desperately hope that recent polls are correct, that Obama is gaining ground over McCain. But I respect what she's accomplished. As I said above, I suspect that she would not respect childless-by-choice-progressive-pro-choice-feminist me. Because of that, I really, really wish I could stop defending her, but I find that I just can't.

Watch the spread of Walmart over both time and space in this animated map from Flowing Data (link via Mr. Katxena). It's interesting to watch it a couple of times and then mentally map major transportation routes (such as the port of New Orleans and the Mississippi River) over it. Whether you loathe or love Walmart (personally, I'm in the former camp), it's a cool little case study in organizational ecology.

House Peters, Jr., the original Mr. Clean died Wednesday at the age of 92. Prior to portraying Mr. Clean, he was a character actor who specialized in burly bad-guys.