Today, as I left the metro a woman was asking for money for food. [...]]]> Sadly, today my hopes that public transit would be a panacea for anti-social behavior were, once again, dashed. PT: not a sufficient condition for people to develop enough affinity for their fellow man to avoid being mean to beggers.

Today, as I left the metro a woman was asking for money for food. Not uncommon. Less common: she was accompanied by her 5 year old (? — I find it impossible to tell the age of children. My observations can’t get past: small, disproportionate), who had very large eyes. Then:

She asked, “Spare some money for food?” and the person behind me said, “No. But I will call Social Services to come pick up your child.”

“Fuck You.”

“I’m going to call Social Services since you can’t feed your child.”

The woman paused, then walked to the elevator where we all enjoy an awkward ride up out of the station.

Now, I’m willing to admit that there’s some moral complexity with regards to the children of extremely poor folk. At what point should one give up their child for a “better” life? At what point should the government step in and “take” children away? Certainly food, shelter, and safety form a bright line that there’s probably consensus about. And it’s possible that my subway woman had crossed those lines, and she probably should have access to a social worker for assistance if nothing else.

However: I don’t think begging in and of itself should be grounds to take a child away. Entirely possible that said child had been fed and a bed for the night at a local church was lined up, but woman had not eaten. Or needed money for job interview clothes (my strong case). Or for beer (my weak case, but not actually an illegitimate purchase!). Moreover, hanging out in the subway asking for money: not particularly dangerous. So cursory look at the situation suggests hard-luck case to sympathize with, not vile child abuser to scorn.

But no: must call child protective services. Of course, given that SS does not have a rapid response guerrilla division, and I would only be able to direct SS to “go check out the Hollywood Metro,” and on top of it all the chances of me actually calling are about one in a million, this is all just posturing.

You see, I’m so annoyed that you, a poor person, would have the gall to ask me, ‘innocent’ bystander in your poverty, for money and thus make me feel guilt at my own tightfistedness that I will threaten to break up your family. That’s just how I roll. Asshole.

I feel like I should end my story by saying how I gave the women money/food to make this recitation serve as some sort of behavioral model. Or I could say that I didn’t do anything to help, admitting my own complicity, and by extension that of everyone who reads, given that we all participate in this classist society. But neither feels right. I’m not comfortable with my character as either holy or fallen.

Instead: a plea. I don’t have a solid opinion on the quantity and frequency of direct small-sum charity you should engage in. But sure as hell, harshing on beggars is fucked up. So don’t do it or I may have to punch you in the face.

But really: setting most of the snark aside, unless you live or work in [...]]]> See Ezra try to take food out of my (hypothetical) child’s mouth by downplaying the very real danger of the earthquake menace with his “Robots!  Robots!” flimflam.  In reality these things are not competitive, as the worst robots are brought by quake.

But really: setting most of the snark aside, unless you live or work in an unreinforced masonry building, you don’t have much to fear from earthquakes.  Codes now require buildings to be able to dissipate a lot of kinetic energy (read: break) in the event of the Big One, and they definately probably won’t fall on your head most of the time.  Of course seismic engineering is largely empirical so it suffers from all the usual problems of trying to extrapolate from a curve set to a small historical data set, meaning it’s predicitive value is something less than awesome.

There’s a reason they write a new building code after every major earthquake…

This [...]]]> I mistakenly stumbled into the bad side of the internet today when I clicked on Steve Sailer’s name in a comment thread. For those who have been blissfully ignorant of his recent musings hack job: Michelle Obama is stupid, a clear beneficiary of affirmative action, and hates white people. It’s real hardhitting journalism.

This is one of those cases where repeating the evidence is enough to refute the conclusions. Michelle Obama:

• attended Princeton and Harvard while being black.
• made some grammatical mistakes in an undergraduate thesis.
• passed the Illinois bar at a non-standard time.
• wrote about race and identity in academia.

Sailer boldly extrapolates from here that she is “semi-literate,” failed the bar exam the first time, and “will never forgive white America for what she had to suffer.” He then leaves it as an exercise to his readers to draw connections between his attack on Michelle Obama and black people’s relative lack of intelligence, the horrors of affirmative action for the white folk, and the possibility of Obama as the stealth black power candidate. (And they don’t disappoint! The comments to these posts are classic.)

These points should all be obvious, but let’s go through the motions anyway:

• You can’t draw any conclusions from a college paper, especially an undergraduate thesis, which despite the fancy title tend to be less important, less harshly-graded works that focus on synthesizing one’s educational experience, rather than research or persuasion.
• If on one side we have Princeton’s and Harvard’s judgment of academic merit and the other one paper, there’s not really a dispute. Using the specter of “affirmative action” to completely discount the former creates an impossible standard for black people — no matter what degree or job they receive, a single less than flattering counterexample is enough to qualify them as stupid. How is this not racist?
• There are lots of reasons to delay taking the bar, and regardless, taking two tries does not suddenly make a lawyer stupid. But this is a nice cheap shot.
• Finally, few have a rigorously developed belief set as an undergrad, and instead try on different ideologies for size. I’ve once gave a speech about the cop-out society that I would like to disappear. But there it is, waiting to embarrass me in a future Democratic primary. There’s a reason the presidential election does not focus on what candidates did when they were 21; it’s retarded.

But Sailer’s real argument is not about Michelle Obama’s intelligence — that’s just red meat for the bell curve crowd — it’s that the Obama’s are secret race-warriors who should strike fear into the hearts of White America. After all, Michelle has a huge racial chip on her shoulder — isn’t it OBVIOUS from her writings?

In reality, she expresses what should be uncontroversial: privileged black folk have to deal with competing identities, and there’s a tension between integrating with the white mainstream and remaining part of the black community. And Obama’s sentiment is similarly shocking: she wants to make sure that the benefits of her education make it back to her worse-off community. Now if you conceive of races as existing in zero-sum competition with each other, this this is dangerous stuff because it means that your aryan brothers will be losing out. If you take a more “I am not free until the last of my brothers is free” approach — and also note that a “pro-black” agenda would not mean Jim Crow laws for white people, but rather a more social democratic state that would benefit everyone — not so scary.

Of course, this is another way of saying that the thesis paper is scandalous to precisely the degree that you are a conservative motivated by racial resentment. So maybe Steve will have some success fighting the conservatives-for-Obama phenomena. However, I’m going to choose to think better of my right-wing brethren — they’ll see this for the despicable attack that it is, and move on.

In one of the famous engineering disasters that [...]]]> This post kicks off a new series that breaks open the dark underbelly of structural engineering. Full of facts, figures, & fatal catastrophes (!), you won’t want to miss these posts. So grab your slide rule, red pencil, and lack of social skills and come along!

In one of the famous engineering disasters that they teach you (or at least me) about in school, two hanging walkways collapsed at a Hyatt Regency in Kansas City killing 45 people. The walkways crossed the 4-story lobby of the hotel and hung from the roof by steel rods. They collapsed when the connection between the rods and the beams running under the catwalk fell. Here’s an illustration of that connection:

Illustration by K Ha.

Where the catwalks crossed above and below each other, both were supported on the same rod as shown at left. The beams for the walkway sat on nuts which screwed onto the rod. In order for the nut to do that the rod had to be threaded, which let to the big problem: threaded rod is expensive.

If the same rod was going to be used to support catwalks at different levels, then the whole length of the rod between the two levels would need to be threaded. The contractor asked if they could use two different rods instead and only thread the last few inches of each, at great cost savings. The engineers approved the change without considering the new load flow: the beam and nut experienced twice as much force.

Even so, various safety factors built into the design process should have prevented the collapse if this was the only mistake. It wasn’t; shit broke:

This is a sobering tale for me, because I spend most of my time doing construction administration; changing designs to meet contractor needs. And though I have sort of accepted that earthquakes do things to buildings (and thus people) that we can’t entirely control, to kill people with a mistake…

But at least I don’t have to worry about being tried for murder…or anything else. Or being fined. Or even having to find a new career. The engineers who signed off on the walkway designs, Daniel Duncan and Jack Gillum, lost their engineering licenses in Missouri and Texas, but still practice in other states.

I don’t mean to be unnecessarily punitive, and I realize this may be used against me in the event that I inadvertently kill someone, but that seems pretty light. Sure, the engineers’ and owner’s insurance paid damages, but individuals have to take some responsibility too — and losing one’s state license is nothing, given that your reputation is pretty much shot in that state anyway and contracts are not going to be forthcoming.

A ridiculous example of how white collar crimes aren’t treated seriously in this country. Actresses get more time for shoplifting than an engineer gets for a massacre.  Retributive punishment may be fundamentally problematic, but while we debate that can’t we at least punish people in a rational way?  Is that really too much to ask?

The Rainmakers pretty much sum up my feelings with their Hyatt-inspired “Rockin’ the T-Dance:”

Take a trip with me to Kansas City MO
To the Hyatt House, to the big dance floor
You can still see the ghosts
But you can’t see the sense
Why they let the monkey go
And blamed the monkey wrench

What if the White House, the ultimate architectural symbol of political power, were to be designed today? On occasion of the election of the 44th President of the United States of America, Storefront for Art and Architecture, in association with Control Group, challenge you to design a new residence for the world’s most powerful individual. [...]]]> WTF:

What if the White House, the ultimate architectural symbol of political power, were to be designed today? On occasion of the election of the 44th President of the United States of America, Storefront for Art and Architecture, in association with Control Group, challenge you to design a new residence for the world’s most powerful individual. The best ideas, designs, descriptions, images, and videos will be selected…

and there will be prizes, etc.  This is almost a parody of architecture’s bourgeoisie focus, and provides a royal opportunity for snark.  I’m thinking something extremely phallic with gun turrents and a corn syrup moat set amidst the unmarked graves of starving Iraqi children (yes they’re both dead and starving). Over the top?  Well, Swirling Passages of Death was one of my first architecture projects, so it’s par for the course.

Anyway, I hope some lefty architecture students submit some subversive works.

(h/t: n+1)

Compare this to economic policy, where conservatives do [...]]]> I’m constantly impressed with how many debates can be reduced to this fundamental conflict.  Mike talks about this conflict within the abortion debate, and it’s pretty clearly active in arguments over death penalty, rehabilitation vs. punishment, drug treatment vs. criminalization, immigration — all the crime & punishment issues.

Compare this to economic policy, where conservatives do field data-based arguments (or at least they could, in some ideal world where the right was about more than appealing to the most base human instincts).  Few arguments occur without some appeals to emotion, but in, say, minimum wage debates, both sides reference legitimate economic research backing their preferred policy.

Possibly, the emotional tact is effective with crime issues because we’re predisposed/conditioned to act non-rationally when ‘fairness’ is at stake. Regardless, this fundamental conflict suggests that the process-change needed to enact many of the progressive fantasy policies is…smarter voters.  Original, I know, but what I actually mean is: voters better trained in critical thinking, the ostensible goal of much of our education system.

Of course, this means that woman grade school teachers from Brown are the vanguard of any long-term progressive agenda, and Jonah Goldberg is not a complete idiot.

No wait.  That can’t be right.  Ignore this entire post.

Studies have the past gadoversetamide policies or of drinking detail. Views of the source of time gadoxetic acid when an galantamine interview. From the infect another an active galdansetron syndrome.

It will from those gallamine triethiodide new health influences. The two charged by [...]]]> Here’s an excerpt from the best spam comment I’ve received here at After Corbu:

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It goes on like this for 5 more paragraphs with all the underlined ‘words’ links, all impossible to pronounce gibberish.  I find it incredible that this sort of mass email/comment could make anyone money.  Instead, I prefer to think of it as the avant garde art form of the internet, with thousands of brooding teenagers sending out their misunderstood missives on penis enlargement every night.  Sure, people call them weird and deranged, but the Dadaists were misunderstood as well.

My secret hope is that their will be a hidden message in spam, written in some code that I will decipher, bringing me eternal fame.  Today “John” posted this 9 times:

Hi, there!..5696926228b3bf0f3fc53e743ed8faec

Clearly, I said to myself, John has something he wants to tell me in hexidecimal.  I quickly google up a translator and find… the message is still gibberish.  Oh John!  How you play with my fragile emotions!