On Genius and Distraction

I'm reading Fitjof Capra's book on Leonardo da Vinci, which, as far as I can tell so far makes the case that Leonardo was a great "systems" scientist - the emerging field that embraces nature's messiness and looks for patterns within it rather than searching for one mathematical proof to rule them all. But that's not the point - Capra was making the case that Leonardo was a genius and he cites what (he says) psychologists agree are three traits of genius. Despite my better instincts I became hopeful that I'd find myself described in the following lines.

Sign #1 - Insatiable curiosity, and enthusiasm for discovery (okay!)

Sign #2 - Ability to memorize large amounts of information (...)

Sign #3 - Capacity for intense concentration over long periods of time (um, brb, the podcast I'm listening to just ended and I have to cue up the next one)

If you want to be sure your food is really all natural

... then grow it yourself. From scratch. That's the modest proposal Meghan Laslocky makes here. As yet there is no sign of outrage. What's wrong? Have all the tone-deaf people abandoned the Internet at once?

So cute I could just eat him! But medium well, okay?

Like A Natural Woman

Okay this is off topic, but my profile of San Francisco politician/police commissioner/future icon Theresa Sparks just came out in San Francisco Magazine. I suppose it is on topic if you stretch to consider how people use the term natural in moral arguments. To me Theresa represents another realization as well: Natural can connote a sense of comfort. She may not have the body nature gave her, but spend 5 minutes with her and I guarantee that you'll forget about that. The conversation feels perfectly natural.

Salt wars

An interesting paper came out last week in that delightful wellspring of whimsy - The Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (not actually one of the many periodicals I follow). It made a splash because the authors were saying that - despite the fact that nutritionists have been trying to cut back on salt intake - despite the fact that we're getting more and more salt in processed foods - that the country's nutrition experts have set recommended salt intake levels too low. It got picked up in a lot of papers because this is how health/science news works: Conventional wisdom is established with a few articles (and reinforced with simpering on morning television) and we all assume that we are dealing with certainty (Salt: Still Bad For You!) so we don't see it in the papers again until you get a study that perks everyone up by questioning that conventional wisdom. This is the structure that forces every science article to say "everything you knew is wrong." Furthermore - we should pause to note that two of the authors of this paper have buddied up to consult with the pro-salt lobbying group, the Salt Institute. Nevertheless, it's worth taking seriously for the following reasons:

The cure for health care coverage

If anyone is feeling confused about health care it's probably because you haven't listened to the This American Life episodes on the topic. They did a great job. And I say that as a reporter who is doing work on these same issues (actually preparing a radio piece that overlaps with their segment on PSA tests a lot). They zeroed in on the fundamental problem: skyrocketing costs. They explained exactly why they are so high. There are a lot of factors - but all in all it's not so complicated. The real mystery to me is why no one has done this before. Instead we get reporters running around in manic circles, yelling at the insurance agencies, or the doctors, or big pharma. Are we so oriented on rooting out the villains that we journalists lost the ability to do good reporting on this? It's as if we are back to the time when the crops fail (or premiums rise) and to solve the problem we tie some woman (or HMO executive) to a tree and light the fire.
Admittedly, there's a lot to health care reform that is utterly counterintuitive (eg more doctors competing drives the cost of care up, eg care can kill) and people like Shannon Brownlee have traversed this path before (actually it seemed like TAL was borrowing a lot from "Overtreated"). But still, hats off to TAL.

God travels back in time to thwart the collider

A fun essay by Dennis Overbye. I love it when science finds itself forced to confront first principles, it happens all too rarely. Often, scientists are like these lonely dwarfs, chipping away at the end of some tunnel that has wound down into some truly esoteric schist. If I try and pull them up to the surface to talk about how the little gems and fossils they've found contribute to the big picture, the stumble around in a kind of dazed cranky fashion, as if they are overwhelmed by the scale, aggravated by the light. Of course there are those scientists who have the disposition to do the small-scale chipping (the only way to make real progress) and also to pull back at the end of the day and think about what it all means, and why (or if) we should be digging in that spot at all. People like Stephen Jay Gould - cheers to them.

Is the Future our version of Heaven?

painting/Robert Shetterly

I'm reading Wendell Barry's "The Unsettling of America." He writes: "The modern mind longs for the future as the medieval mind longed for Heaven." These are the sort of profundities that he's able to jot off (with ostensible ease) that stop me in my tracks. This one especially because it hits close to home. I don't really believe in Heaven, but I do have a deeply ingrained belief that the future is a better place, that we are constantly making progress, moving forward, making the world a better place. But by what metric do you measure improvement? The number of people living in poverty has grown. Large portions of the earth have become much less hospitable for human living. We have just closed the door on a millennium red from tip to toe with genocide. We all can tick off the improvements:

That soaring feeling

One of the great things about living in San Francisco is that every once and a while I'll come across a prospect that just lifts me a bit, as if I'd achieved aerodynamic properties for a fraction of a second. That happened today as I was walking up Coleridge St. I looked out to the west where the Golden Gate is and instead saw towering clouds sweeping in from the sea. I get the same sort of surge at the sight of certain mountains, waterfalls, summer thunderstorms. I feel at once very small, and powerful. Small, because it's clear that whatever I'm looking at could crush me, and powerful because it doesn't, because in fact I'm warm and secure - despite the fact that nature is overwhelming and incomprehensible, and the fact that there's a stiff wind whipping in off the Pacific - I'm able to stand there looking into the closest approximation of the eye of God I can imagine, and then walk away unscathed.