Go read Pistolette’s take on Mitch Landrieu’s State Of New Orleans speech. All of it.
Wow, Ray Nagin is the bald, black version of W. We always knew it, but it isn’t so stinkingly apparent until you’re confronted with the final bill. Um, waiter, we didn’t order all that. Too bad, it’s your lucky day to pay it.
If you come away from it thinking “Boy, am I glad I don’t live in that city,” you are blind and deaf. It is everywhere in this country and especially bad when visitors from India say, “Hey, this sounds just like home!”
Meanwhile, back at the oyster farm, they’re all dead and, as oil comes ashore, the Mississippi coast faces its largest environmental crisis since Katrina. Someone alert Haley Barbour. Oh wait, he doesn’t really care.
Southeast Asia handled the tsunami aftermath better than this.
If you don’t know already from some of my VizWorld posts, I’m a Flowing Data fangirl. Nathan Yau is the younger, hipper, nerdier Edward Tufte, and one who likes to share his sources and techniques. Understandably, Tufte has his trade secrets, but it was like pulling teeth to get him to share what tools and design methods he uses to make his graphics. Something about Adobe Illustrator and a cadre of assistants is all I got.
Last night, I made a 2009 United States county-specific unemployment map using Flowing Data’s How to Make a US County Thematic Map Using Free Tools tutorial. All you need is a Python installation, the BeautifulSoup XML parser, a good text editor and some patience to debug. (Another reason I like Nathan: He codes in Python, the best, most intuitive programming language out there!)
These are the results, admittedly without a legend (bad Maitri!), which I will work on in Photoshop. So you know what you’re looking at here, the lightest color is 0% unemployment and steps up from there in 2% increments, with the darkest color denoting 10+% unemployment. This data was downloaded from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
1. The Flowing Data original reproduced:
2. Diverging colors (blue=low; red=high)
3. Sequential colors (white=low; orange=high; black=+10%). The darker the hues, the more trouble folks have telling them apart. Black shows the worst hit spots and provides a backdrop with which to differentiate between the other colors
Check out the original Unemployment, 2004 To Present to see how bad things have become just in the last two years. This isn’t news, but just as well when you look at it in a county-by-county color graphic. The nation is indeed bleeding. Let’s make more casinos at home and start more land wars in Asia!
I’m not one for gut feelings, given that mine are usually wrong, but this morning, the notion settled deep into me that What-We’re-Still-Calling-A-Recession is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. This was the sign: Recession Cracks Open Big Beer. No, not the cheap, awful-tasting beer! America will be torn asunder.
***
Oil patch buddies call and email now with the same tune: “It looks like you may have chosen a good time to abandon this well.” Big Oil’s New Lean Look: ‘Glory Days’ May Be Over Royal Dutch Shell, Conoco Phillips and BP are looking to lay off thousands of white-collar workers because of the dizzying drop in the price of oil. I predict that people in my demographic will retain their jobs, while senior managers are ushered into early retirement. It’s a daft move – letting older professionals go when they are needed to teach younger ones. A time when “the costs and challenges of accessing new oil and gas reserves are rising each year” is exactly when you keep people with experience and pay them what they are worth, instead of allowing the inexperienced to flounder just because they are cheaper. Of course, this is all educated surmise on my part and we will not hear until early next year where the chips do fall.
I used to wonder if large oil companies are in it to succeed. They are, it turns out, but not at finding and producing hydrocarbons. A shame given the number of intelligent, enthusiastic and talented scientists and engineers they attract, many of whom are my friends and former mentors.
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Some days, it’s hard to be an impatient, results-oriented person who is also a Hindu. Why won’t my code do this? Why won’t my map do that? Where is my computer cluster information? Why do I exercise my heart out and watch what I eat only to gain weight? The sadhu who lives in the back of my head says, “All in good time. The real hard work, the true zen is in not throwing your hands up in exasperation and walking away from apparent failure.” Makes me wonder where I’d now be had I kept at some of those doomed projects. And then I look down and notice that these pants used to be a lot tighter. It may be time to end the abusive relationship with my scale and find a new metric. Probably time for all of us to recalibrate and redefine success.
Back to Python and XML it is.
Ok, even if I don’t know how to do (see previous post), I’ll start with what I done did.
Work: Submitted a 30-minute speaking proposal to the Where 2.0 2010 conference. I’ll leave worrying about the slide deck and what I’m going to wear until after it’s accepted.
Movies: After not having watched a feature film since Harry Potter And The Half-Blooded Snape earlier in the summer, our two trans-Atlantic flights afforded me the chance to catch Sunshine Cleaning, Transformers 2, I Love You, Man, The Hangover and Watchmen (twice). I know watching a bad Michael Bay film is not an accomplishment, but a) insomnia, b) 3D visual effects and c) giant metal robots making that hella-cool Zing! sound. Hoping to watch Slumdog Millionaire this weekend with the fam.
Books: Finished Not Enough Indians. Harry Shearer is the king of the simile and this quick, hilarious read made me think of two things only: Whom will my former neighbor Jennifer Coolidge play when the book is optioned, and isn’t this timely given the casino debate in Ohio?
Election: Continued from above, what is up with the Casino Economy permeating this country? Issue 3 is on the November ballot in Ohio. After having read the arguments of both sides, I have decided to vote No on this issue. Gambling, especially in the absence of a robust bidding process and with only 30% going to the state for education funds, is not economic recovery. Instead, it is poison to our population of under- and unemployed who have very little money as it is. If you don’t believe me, talk to the folks who run Salvation Army, adult literacy and workforce development programs in this area and listen to their stories of people blowing their last $40 at a betting table hoping to make it big.
Anyway, these are Things I’ve Done To Date Worth Noting.
Yeah yeah, Revolutionary Tea Parties, whatever. Wake me up when you’ve repaid the surplus you wasted on the Great War On Terror in Iraq (fat lot of good that did). Even reasonable conservatives aren’t taking these Wingnut Picnics seriously. So can we move onto something of national importance already?
I want to believe in these tea parties, I really do. But they bug me just a little bit. First of all, the Boston Tea Party was an act of outright rebellion by fed up colonists, this is a planned rally by the dorkiest segments of the GOP.
Already, organizers are trying to preempt any liberal backlash by saying “it’s coming, they’re going to call us racists.” This is exactly what Obama did in the campaign by “predicting” that conservatives would try to scare voters because he was “different.” It might have worked, he did get elected after all. The thing is, the vocal part of the anti-tax crowd overlaps with the lock-and-load gun lovers, the Jeffersonians and the John Birch Society. I hate taxes and government excess, but I would never trust any of these people under any circumstances. There’s internet kooks, then there’s the REAL kooks!
As much as I don’t want to admit it, there’s an element of fear in hard-right conservative politics. Fear of the unknown, fear of black people, fear of Mexicans, fear of anything unfamiliar. (Ever been to a Republican women’s meeting? Those who have will know what I mean.) Anyway, these kooky, almost 110% white people will be front and center, with the camera firmly planted upon them. Is this what we Republicans want? Would you trust the Pat Buchanan crowd to put on the best face? It’s like ACORN, SDS, Michael Moore and ACTUP carrying the Dem’s flag, when it should be the Blue Dogs.
Looking at the BTR lineup of speakers, it reads like a live broadcast for also-ran talk radio hosts. And by “also ran,” I mean anybody other than Rush Limbaugh. What profound thoughts could these folks have to add to the dialogue that hasn’t already been said on the radio?
Everyone hates the IRS — especially on April 15th. This is a given, and it’s important to tap into that universal dislike. We’re not going to accomplish that by highlighting the differences between normal people and our kooky core or pseudo-celebrities from a decaying medium.
1. VatulBlog existed long before New Orleans and Katrina. It will continue to be my online voice no matter where I physically live. I’ve been a journal keeper from a very young age and don’t plan to stop soon.
2. Once I leave New Orleans, I will still read all of your blogs and continue to pass on your important messages and opinions to readers. However, I will no longer keep track of how many days it has been since Katrina’s landfall. As Michael Homan notes, it’s only healthy that I let that go. Come to think of it, I don’t even know why I started doing it other than to keep time while I was away in Houston and perchance to say, “It’s Day 1500 and the recovery is complete. The floodwalls offer us Category 5 protection, all homes and schools are rebuilt, the economy is off the charts and crime is the lowest it has been since 2005.” A girl can dream.
3. More 3D modeling, visualization and simulation talk. While employed by an oil company, I haven’t been able to grow the technical aspect of this blog for proprietary reasons. Sure, there will be projects and technical developments at my new job that I cannot divulge, but data visualization technology takes from and gives a lot back to the OpenSource and OpenData community. I’d like to learn and teach more in that regard.
4. Genealogy. Now that I will be closer to family on both sides, writing up our family trees and scanning old pictures can finally happen. Be on the watch for old black and whites of Tamilian and German-Dutch relatives.
5. We’re moving to a town that somewhat/somehow thrives while economic devastation consumes surrounding areas, including the Rust Belt to the immediate north and east. We will also be right in the heart of a farming and Amish stronghold, of which the latter interests me from a community-sustainability standpoint. How are the Amish and their lifestyle going to weather this storm? How did they survive the Depression? But, first, do they want to and how would they interact with a curious female documentarian of Indian origin?
6. Lots more photographs. One thing I will have more time for is exploring the countryside and figuring out my under-utilized Canon EOS’s bells and whistles.
Never fear (or go right ahead and be scared), VatulBlog and I are not going anywhere.
