Monthly Archives: November 2007

Day 823: Not Dead Yet

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“Suck it up, sugar” has been the mantra over here for the past few days as work, preparing for the upcoming two-week business trip, krewe business, change in weather, insomnia and (get a load of this) homework for the course I’m about to take converge towards Maitri Wants To Cry While In The Fetal Position.

My brain is one big paste of the physics of porous rocks, fluid mixing laws, Bayesian probability, Dutch train timetables and krewe invoices. On some days, the inner mother reminds me I should have stayed on the initial career path and not have asked pointed questions about the nature of seismic data, which sent me careening towards my current state of Still Learning. The continuation of education is in itself a wonderful and laudable thing, and the topic in question quite fascinating, but not for two weeks in December in dark and bone-chillingly-cold Den Haag right before Carnival hits the fan here at home. Aaah well, at least I’ll get to see Sinterklaas (who is said to have “passed through a rainbow with his boat” in 2006).

Lots of stories to tell including my own personal Seinfeld episode while aboard the flight home from Chicago after Thanksgiving.

Day 820: African-American Women And Where They Stand

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MSNBC to air five-part series starting Monday, November 26th

Throughout the week of November 26, “NBC News With Brian Williams” will take a look at the issues facing African-American women across our nation in a new series “African-American Women: Where They Stand.” The series will cover a wide-range of issues from their role in the ’08 Presidential race, to the increased health-risks that they need to be concerned about.

Day 816: Up North For Thanksgiving

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Light blogging ahead as D and I fly into O’Hare on the busiest travel day of the year.  Shoot me now.  On the bright side, we will drive right past Lambeau Field on the way home.  ”Our Favre, who art in Lambeau, hallowed be thine arm.  The bowl will come, it will be won … For thine is the MVP, the best of the NFC, and the glory of the Cheeseheads, now and forever.  Amen.”

Have a great Thanksgiving weekend.  (Special thanks to Oliver Thomas who did his city proud by not being a rat.   Same as it ever was.)

I leave you with a happy Wisconsin basketball video of fast-footed Bo Ryan doing the Crank Dat.

Day 815: Just In Time For Christmas, It’s Maitri Barbie!

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At Best Buy in Metairie a few nights ago, I neared the checkout register only to be greeted with, “Oh my god, you look like a Barbie!”

“Huh?” was my immediate response as I restrained retorts like “Which one? Malibu Barbie or Peaches & Cream Barbie? Diwali Barbie, perhaps, seeing as how my luscious black hair reaches all the way to my calves and I’m here in a flowing sari. Or maybe it’s the new bangs which I just did with my Magic Hair Styler. If I’m Barbie, who are you, the Queen of Sheba?”

Checkout girl: “It’s just all of you. I saw you and I just knew you looked like a Barbie. Your face and everything.”

Oh brother. Not just Barbie, but a Barbie. A Barbie in headed-for-washer capris, a t-shirt, a non-descript black fleece vest, hair pulled up in a bun and smelling like the tail end of the Po’ Boy Preservation Festival. Aaah, that’s it, Harried Stinky Scientist Barbie. I thanked the nice (yet perplexing and obviously blind) girl, regardless, and told her it was the nicest thing I’ve heard in a long time.

While Maitri Barbie does not hit stores everywhere for a few more years, how about enlightening your kids in Hinduism Meets Marketing this holiday season with a nice Mighty Hanuman Action Figure? (Thanks, SM!)

Day 815: New Orleans vs. America

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NYTimes: Panel Picks 4 Debate Sites, Angering Excluded New Orleans

IHT: Organizer told New Orleans “not ready” for presidential debate

New Orleans was turned down as a site for one of the 2008 presidential debates because organizers said it had not sufficiently recovered from Hurricane Katrina to handle such an important event, the woman spearheading the effort said Monday. 

“I was shocked to say the least,” said Anne Milling, founder of Women of the Storm, a group of local women who have aided recovery efforts and lobbied for federal aide. “This is exactly the sort of thing we do so well. I can’t understand the reasoning.”

A number of NOLA bloggers are incensed about this turn of events and rightfully so.  If New Orleans is good enough for the Society of Exploration Geophysicists annual meeting, various large medical conferences and can host thousands upon thousands during Carnival season, why not one measly presidential debate?  If a debate is not held in the nexus of our unraveling as a nation, the cynosure of the descent, the lens that focuses the knowledge that our government doesn’t have a stitch on, where else? 

Not one of the 2004 debates may have been held there, but where did the 2004 Republican National Convention take place?  New York City.  And where will the 2008 convention go down?  Minneapolis.  Far be it from the GOP to face down hard truths in a city where they have failed Americans repeatedly.  But, why allow the GOPers to take sole blame (or why do they unconsciously blame themselves) for keeping the national conversation away from New Orleans when debate locations are chosen by a bipartisan commission and the spineless Democrats have chosen Denver as their party location?

The arguments are not about America and its problems any longer; they have been whittled down to non-topics as asinine as Islamophobia, the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman and who has more political experience.  If we were to calmly and rationally talk about the state of Americans at home and abroad as well as our real plagues, sans the stage makeup and bluster, hell, America may make some progress.  Not movement.  Progress.

Something Nameless Tim said over email today continues to stick with me and is worth sharing with a wider audience.

“[This] underscores how totally controlled by the two major parties this particular debate organization is.  Once upon a time, presidential debates were organized by the League of Women Voters and PBS.  Now it’s this “Presidential Debates Commission,” which is a puppet of the Democrats and Republicans.  They have adopted increasingly tight rules to keep anyone but their annointed candidates to participate and they play the game of trying to one-up each other.  If the destruction and recovery of New Orleans is an issue, then in a legitimate political process, that would make us MORE desireable!!!” [sic]

American politics is a club and we, the people, are not invited.  New Orleans does not further any party’s political agenda like New York City did the Republicans’ continued presence in Iraq.  This in itself is telling of the Democrats’ poor strategy because they could use this place to their advantage and gloat about how horribly the current administration bungled the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the flood, and how they could do better if elected.  Of course, they won’t.  Such Oh So Obvious cannot happen when the wool is pulled over our eyes and a Republican president tells Democrats for which candidate to cast a vote.

The ignominy of being a New Orleanian and an American today.

Day 813: A Further Exploration Of NOSHIT

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As a follow-up to Dambala’s post on riotcasting and the New Orleans Societal Havoc Indicator Test (NOSHIT), here’s an article about the work of game theorist, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. Despite how this self-proclaimed rational Nostradamus prognosticates medium-sized conflicts and political successions, couldn’t foresee 9/11 and the not trivial unraveling of the situation in Iraq and denies local specifics as important to sociopolitical predictions, his track record is still an interesting read. The following is the crux of Bueno de Mesquita’s theory.

In the foreboding world view of rational choice, everyone is a raging dirtbag. Bueno de Mesquita points to dictatorships to prove his point: “If you liberate people from the constraint of having to satisfy other people in order to advance themselves, people don’t do good things.” When analyzing a problem in international relations, Bueno de Mesquita doesn’t give a whit about the local culture, history, economy, or any of the other considerations that more traditional political scientists weigh. In fact, rational choicers like Bueno de Mesquita tend to view such traditional approaches with a condescension bordering on disdain. “One is the study of politics as an expression of personal opinion as opposed to political science,” he says dryly.

He gives an innovative solution to post-conflict Palestine, portions of it possibly applicable to New Orleans and its crime problem.

“In a peaceful world, what do the Palestinians anticipate will be their main source of economic viability? Tourism. This is what their own documents say. And, of course, the Israelis make a lot of money from tourism, and that revenue is very easy to track. As a starting point requiring no trust, no mutual cooperation, I would suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don’t come. So the tourist revenue is automatically responsive to the level of violence on either side for both sides …”

Edit: Local quirks and conditions aren’t important to such prediction machines, these theorists explain. Then, why don’t we experience chaos and predictable election results in New Orleans? If various factors in New Orleans make it ready for a race or socioeconomic riot, what keeps it from happening? My bets are on the apathy of the majority of the local populace, their inability to organize effectively and greater readiness to eat, drink and pass a good time (very much a local flavor). D believes it will take something simpler, like a great fire that eats up whole neighborhoods caused by extended drought or more nooses hanging around the Greater New Orleans area. Of course, another possibility is nothing happening, which would be ideal and well within the statistical parameters.

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Related: Play Prognosticate and “use your powers of deduction to predict what happens next in today’s news stories.” It’s a lot of fun, only irritating when picky about grammar and choice of synonyms.

Day 812: Simple Math, Unsound Assumptions & General Disappointment

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Army Corps of Engineers To New Orleans: OH WHOOPS WE WERE JUST KIDDING LOL

Turns out, the corps was right when it announced in June that new gates and levee repairs would reduce flooding in those areas by up to 5 1/2 feet if the city is hit by a 100-year hurricane.   But on Friday, the agency spooked residents by announcing it put a minus sign in a calculation that called for a plus sign, and that the maps underestimated flooding by 4 feet in Old Metairie and 5 feet in Lakeview.

… After two days of checking and rechecking, Link said Sunday that the numbers in a table in the task force’s long-awaited risk study were wrong, but the numbers used to make the maps were right.  “I cannot explain yet why those tables have incorrect numbers in them,” he said. “But the most important thing here is that we are not misinforming the people of New Orleans.”

Oh yeah, then what the hell was this?  The left hand of bureaucracy still hasn’t met its right, and WE ARE SCREWED.  It’s still just a big, fat joke to you guys, isn’t it?

AP: Mistakes Made in New Orleans Flood Maps
nola.com: Flooding estimates are off by 5 feet

The Lakeview data got fouled up when somebody put a minus sign in a calculation that called for a plus sign, Ed Link, leader of the corps-sponsored Interagency Performance Evaluation Task [IPET] Force, said Friday. The Old Metairie errors stemmed from faulty assumptions about the way water would move into and out of the neighborhood from surrounding areas, Link said.

… Link blamed the rush to get as much information out to the public as quickly as possible for the release of the inaccurate draft maps in June, as well as the failure to correct them until this week. At the time, senior corps officials and Powell’s office scheduled the news conference for the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, even though the risk report on which the maps were based had not been completed.

“We said, ‘Oh, my God! There’s that stupid negative sign,’” an exasperated Link said. “We’ve got too many thousands of numbers.”

Too many thousands of numbers. Indeed. That’s what “somebody” was paid to handle. A critical arithmetic sign error and faulty flow assumptions, i.e. cutting corners and sloppy work, just to meet a fake anniversary deadline. So, what effect does Gross Public Dumb have on the people of New Orleans, those who’ve worked hard for 812 days to reclaim their homes, once again believed in the Army Corps of Engineers and continue to be let down?

… the maps were not inconsequential because they were touted as roadmaps insurers, residents and businesses should pore over in making decisions about where and how to rebuild in the hurricane-hit region.

… “I have confidence in what they’re doing all along the levee, with the pumps. That’s one of the reasons we’re back here,” [Lakeview resident, Tami Do] said. “But these kinds of things put doubt back in your mind. If they got this wrong, what else have they gotten wrong?“

Her husband, Tommy Do, wondered if the mistake would mean an increase in insurance rates, or perhaps a change in building requirements. To get flood insurance people must build their homes out of the flood plain, and he wondered if those calculations might have to be re-calibrated because of the new data. “Now all these people who have built these $300,000, $400,000 homes should be higher?” Tommy Do said. “That’s not good. We’re going to have to sue the Corps again!”

Now I leave my computer to choose between Cynthia Willard-Awful and Jackie Awful as the next City Councilmember At Large.

What have we attained in the fight of the last two years when everyone from the Army Corps of Engineers to local politicians still treat the recovery like some big joke? Disappointment doesn’t begin to cover my feelings at this time. Nothing has changed.

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Current web clip at the top of my Inbox: Did You Vote For Jindal? – www.GOP.com – Vote Republican on Nov. 17th & Give Him A Legislature He Can Work With. Blech, first my phones, then my email and now my email box. It’s a conspiracy to drive us to Ren-sanity, I tell you. For a good NOLA-election-related opinion, including tomorrow’s battle of the “snotty self-important blowhard retreads,” please read ever-yellow, ever-gloomy Jeffrey.