The Semantics of Race

Yesterday the New York Times published an article on gentrification in my (arbitrarily-chosen) hometown of Portland, Oregon. As in many metropolitan areas, Portland’s urban renaissance has been a mixed blessing. On one hand, many previously drug- and crime-ridden neighborhoods have seen drug use and crime rates plummet, housing values rise, and a return of civic pride. On the other hand, the rising property values have tended to force low-income, mostly black residents to move to less-expensive areas of the city. Naturally, the colonization of black areas by white, upper-middle class, Prius-driving, little-league families has raised hackles in Portland’s small black community.  In an effort to promote dialogue on the effects of gentrification, a Portland group has organized a series of meetings in which neighborhood residents share their experiences from both sides of the color line.

What caught my eye was an anecdote near the end of the article:

The meetings have had awkward and tense moments, too. Last month, Joan Laufer, who is white and who moved into a house in Northeast in 2006, stood up to express gratitude to a black minister for describing how hard it was for blacks to get home improvement loans and for addressing some sensitive stereotypes.

“I’ve learned two things about all you guys already — why the houses aren’t fixed up and why you guys are riding around in all these big flashy cars,” Ms. Laufer, 55, a nurse practitioner, said.

At one point, she also asked blacks what she should call them — blacks or African-Americans.

An older black woman in the front replied, “People.”

Another black woman, toward the back, said, “Donna.”

This caught my attention because it’s a common uncertainty, especially among older white people, who may still remember using now-offensive, pre-Civil Rights designations (though the reverse, I think, may be less true; for better or worse, “white”s only serious competition, “Caucasian,” is stilted and makes it sound as though all light-skinned people emigrated to America directly from, say, Azerbaijan). While I appreciate the sentiments expressed by the two women asking to be called “People” or by her own name, Ms. Laufer’s uncertainty is, I think, legitimate. Even as a young white person who grew up in the ultra-PC 1990s, I don’t always feel 100% certain that I am using the “right” word to refer to a (insert proper minority-related adjective here) person. I’m not saying this is unfair–all people have the right to define their own identity and ask others to respect it–but I would insist that a confused person’s sincere desire not to cause offense deserves respect rather than eye-rolling.  

In other words, I would suggest that Ms. Laufer’s question is not an indication that she is unwilling or unable to see people of other hues as “People” or to learn their first names.  It is simply a recognition of the fact that there are deep, legitimate grievances connected to race in this country, and that these grievances have perpetuated a divide that, however unsightful it may be, is real.  Until this divide is healed, and we can all recognize each other simply as People, we will need adjectives to use to describe each other. Understanding what others want to be called may be a small step towards understanding them. But it is a step–one worth respecting.

Cat Holds “Fifth-highest position” in Japanese Rail Company

In a story oddly reminiscent of the time C. Montgomery Burns named a canary titular head of his nuclear power plant, a cat is being credited with “single-pawedly” saving a Japanese railroad company. Tama, a nine-year-old tabby, became a national tourist attraction after the staff at her backwater station were laid off because of declining ridership. She was named stationmaster in early 2007. 

The station now sells postcards and other touristy items featuring the cat, who was recently promoted to “super-stationmaster.” According to AFP, Tama’s salary comes in the form of cat food, and the job’s benefits include an “office” complete with private litterbox. Apparently Tama “declines to relieve herself when passengers are looking,” so this was an important workplace feature. Although there is (to my knowledge) no union for Feline Railway Workers of the World, Tama gets to work a regular 9 to 5 schedule, and has Sundays off. She commutes from a shed next to the station.

Two comments before I go: first, I’m a reasonably well-educated human who doesn’t have Sunday’s off, let alone a 9 to 5 schedule.  So…good for the cat, but I’m jealous.  Maybe if I borrow an old costume from a certain Broadway musical…

Second, the Wakayama Electric Railroad Company seems to be more comfortable with a female cat in charge than with a woman in charge.  According to the railway, Tama is “the only female in a managerial position.” I’m not generally known as a crusader for the cause of feminism, and I don’t know how many managers this company actually has, but still.  Wow.

The Answers

OK, here are the answers from yesterday’s exercises:

1. You’ll need about 5.3 lbs of your product. Go for six to be safe.
2. At least 9.1 lbs. Or ten to be sure.
3. At least 31.69 lbs. It comes in 1 lb. bags, so you’ll put it 32 lbs.

How to Fix Your Chlorine Lock

This week’s Science and Tech Tuesday is a short chemistry lesson. One of the least exciting things to hear when you go to a pool store is, “You have a chlorine lock.” As noted in an earlier post, this means you’ll be spending anywhere from fifty to two hundred dollars before your pool is anywhere near ready to swim in. What I’ll try to do in this post is explain exactly how that money is going to fix your problem (If you’re unclear on what a chlorine lock is and why it’s bad, please see my earlier posts on the subject).

The important thing to remember is that there are many ways to approach this problem, and many variables which may not be covered in this explanation. Your pool professional will be able to help you better than I can, because he or she can ask questions about the condition of the water, previous attempts to solve the problem, etc. Basically, this is for informational and educational purposes only. So don’t sue. Now, to business.

We’ll start with the easiest case: a simple chlorine lock in a 10,000 gallon pool. Your numbers might look something like this:

Free Chlorine: 2.3 / Total Chlorine: 8

Subtracting the amount of free chlorine from the amount of total chlorine, we find that you have 5.7 ppm combined chlorine in your pool.  We need to oxidize that 5.7 ppm in order to break the chlorine lock. We have two choices: first, we can use a chlorine-based shock product to raise the chlorine level by 10 ppm per ppm of combined chlorine (in this case, we’ll need to raise the chlorine levels by at least 57 ppm).  This is called “breakpoint chlorination” and is relatively straightforward, simple, and effective.  There is a downside, however. If, for some reason, you don’t reach the breakpoint, you’ll have just made the problem worse.  So it’s best to aim a little high.

Breakpoint Chlorination

To solve your chlorine lock using breakpoint chlorination, we’ll need to do some calculations. Ideally, we’d be doing these in metric, but pool chemicals generally come measured in pounds, so we’ll just use those for now. OK, so one gallon of water weighs about 8.34 lbs. So we’ll multiply 10,000 (the number of gallons in your pool) by 8.34 to get the approximate weight of the water in your pool.

Then we’ll divide the result into 1,000,000, thus: 1,000,000/83,400=11.99, or about 12.  This number is the ppm each pound of added chemicals will add to your water. One pound of chlorine, in this case, will raise the chlorine level by about 12 ppm.

Next, to find out how many pounds of chlorine we’ll need in order to raise your chlorine level by 57 ppm, we’ll divide 57 by 12, which will give us 4.75.  So we’ll need to add at least 4.75 lbs of chlorine to break your pool’s chlorine lock.

Unfortunately, every product has a different amount of available chlorine, so we’ll need to do one more calculation. Take the number of pounds of chlorine we’ll need (4.75), and divide it by the percentage of available chlorine in the product you want to use. If, for example, you’re using HTH Poolife’s TurboShock (75% available chlorine), you’re figures will look like this: 4.75/0.75=7.31, or 8 to be safe.  So you’ll need to throw in at least 8 bags of TurboShock. 

In a single equation, these calculations will look like this:

(10*(Total Chlorine-Free Chlorine))/(1000000/(Number of Gallons*8.34))/Percentage available Cl in Product

It may look complex, but try plugging in the values, and you’ll find it’s quite simple.

Non-Chlorine Shock

Our second option is really only a first step.  That is, we’ll still probably have to use the first option, but we’ll need less chlorine. For this option we’ll use a non-chlorine shock like BioGuard’s OxySheen.  This product will oxidize the combined chlorine in your pool, but won’t add any more chlorine to the water.  On the up side, it’s not an “all or nothing” proposition: you can take half measures in this case.  In fact, since OxySheen is relatively expensive, you might want to take half measures. 

Let’s take the previous example pool: 10,000 gallons, 2.3 ppm free chlorine, 8 ppm total chlorine. Once again, we have 5.7 ppm combined chlorine present in the pool. 

In this example, weight is less important, so we’ll simply divide the number of gallons by 10,000, then multiply the result by 5.7 ppm. In this case, we’re left with 5.7, since 10,000/10,000=1.

Finally, we’ll multiply the last result by two, giving us the amount of product necessary to oxidize 5.7 ppm combined chlorine: 11.4 lbs.

Once again, in an equation, it would look something like this:

(((Total Chlorine-Free Chlorine))*(Number of Gallons/10000))*2=Required Lbs. of OxySheen

This equation works only for this particular product, although it could no doubt be adapted to fit any non-chlorine shock. 

Using this much OxySheen would oxidize all the combined chlorine in the pool, but we would still need to perform a superchlorination.  The difference, of course, would be that you’d need to add far less chlorine this time.

More next time on a chlorine lock couple with a chlorine demand…the beast of them all.  Oh, and here are a few exercises in case you’re interested in practicing this math:

1. Pool size: 15,000 gallons/Total Chlorine: 5/Free Chlorine: 3/Product used has 47% available Cl
2. Pool size: 25,000 gallons/Total Chlorine: 3/Free Chlorine: 0.5/Product used has 57% available Cl
3. Pool size: 30,000 gallons/Total Chlorine: 9.5/Free Chlorine: 0/Product used has 75% available Cl

I’ll post answers tomorrow for any who are interested.

–

 

 

How to Go From Zero to “#&%$ You!” in 15.2 Seconds

While we were waiting for Midas to adjust our Toyota’s brakes yesterday, my wife and I visited a nearby Chinese restaurant. The restaurant was small–there was only space for about thirty people, who would need to be on good terms with one another–but they had an extensive vegetarian menu, a fact which instantly gave them about a million points in my book. We had sat down, ordered our food, and reached that point in dinner conversation where you both pause awkwardly and one of you finally asks “Where’s the food?” when the commotion started. 

Well, actually it wasn’t a commotion at first. It began very quietly, but I heard the entire exchange since I was sitting three feet away.  The woman who had taken our order emerged from the kitchen with a menu and asked the man if he had ordered “the crispy beef spicy.” At least I think that’s what she said…she don’t speak English pretty good, to quote Lady and the Tramp.  She then explained that the crispy beef listed on the menu was not spicy and did he see that? He replied, irritably, I thought, that he had ordered it spicy and yes he knew it wasn’t like that on the menu, but he had ordered it that way. I don’t think she fully understood, because she repeated the same thing again. He became more upset and said, “Alright, just give me my money back.” She was even more confused.  She told him, “Sir, I’m just telling you the crispy beef doesn’t come with the spicy sauce.  Here on the menu…” She pointed to it.  Less than fifteen seconds had elapsed since the conversation began.

And this is where things got interesting.  Instead of trying to clear up the misunderstanding, like it seems a well-adjusted adult would (this man was well-north of fifty), this man, starting his statement at a normal volume, but ending it with a crescendo to a mighty roar, said, “You know what? You’re right.  You’re absolutely f**king right!”

As I said, this was a small restaurant. Everyone had stopped eating now, and was watching this grown man throw a tantrum. He continued, still shouting: “I’ve been a customer here for eight f**king years! And now you’re not going to give me what I ordered? F**k you! F**k all of you!” And so on.

He continued ranting about how he had organized dinners at this restaurant, and had been a customer here for eight f**king years and now he wasn’t being given what he had ordered. On his way out the door, he shouted for no one in particular to tell “Audrey” he wasn’t coming back after eight years.

We all sat for a moment.  I let out a muffled “Ha,” and then he burst back through the door, and repeated his litany of complaints, ending by telling the restauranteurs they could all go to hell. I was trying not to laugh. Really I was. And I’m sure it was stressful for the restaurant’s employees, but it was ever so funny to see this bearded, bespectacled man behaving in a way that would earn a child a ticket to bed without supper. And it looked like his eyes were going to pop. It really did.

Then he left. I think I saw him talking outside with the manager, who had gone out to mollify him, but he didn’t come back in.  Not that I blame him for that, at least.  If I had just acted one-tenth my age, I’d have been a bit reluctant to finish my meal too.

My Day Off

It’s a strange feeling, I’ll admit, but I have no opinions or thoughts today. Better luck tomorrow, I guess.

Two Good First Steps

Wednesdays on Fishoutofchlorine will focus on my first love, the Middle East. Needless to say, the news from this region has been mostly bad for…oh, let’s say the past sixty years. In the last week, aside from the now-commonplace violence in Iraq, there has also been a near-civil-war in Lebanon that threatened to unravel an already fragile society that has been in (or nearly in) chaos since the mid-twentieth century.  Two bits of news from the region today that suggest motion in the right direction:

First, Israel and Syria are talking, with Turkey as an intermediary, about peace. The two countries have officially been at war since Israel occupied the Golan Heights during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and their continued hostility has further complicated the already-complex Israeli-Palestinian peace process.  Now, to be circumspect, these talks aren’t direct, and they’re hardly likely to lead to anything conclusive, but for two countries that have been behaving like teenagers before prom night (“I don’t want to ask him; he should ask me!”/ “I don’t want to ask her; she should ask me!”), it’s definitely a start.

Second, next door in Lebanon, Hezbollah and its rivals, all of whom spent last week turning Beirut into the OK Corral of the Middle East, signed an agreement to end the 18-month-old political crisis.  The agreement isn’t likely to end factionalism in Lebanon (whose constitutional requirement for divying up power along sectarian and confessional lines is a major factor in the current crisis). It is, like Israel’s and Syria’s indirect do-you-like-me-check-yes-or-no peace talks, a step towards a resolution that could make the region a better place.

(Surprisingly Fun) Games with a Conscience

I’m not much of a gamer. Although I was growing up around the time the NES made it big, I was never any good at Super Mario or Metroid or Star Fox. I also never got to spend my afternoons at the mall wasting quarters on Pacman or The Simpsons: The Video Game. As I grew older, I sampled Counterstrike, Age of Empires, and Medal of Honor, but rarely won even on the easiest level. All this self-deprecation to let you know you should take any gaming advice I might give with a grain of salt.  But if you’re bored at work and want to waste a few minutes playing one of the following games online, it might be worth your while.

The two games I’ll mention (on this blog’s inaugural Tech Tuesday) have one thing in common: they have a component of social awareness. This ought to make them boring, slap-dash wastes of time (in the line of the long-defunct Wolfenstein clone Super 3D Noah’s Ark).  But it doesn’t. The games listed here may not be engaging enough to spend sixty dollars on at Best Buy, but they can certainly fill a few minutes on a slow afternoon as well as your average BeJewelled clone.

1. McDonalds: The Video Game

This game has you managing all aspects of the McDonalds corporation. You simultaneously control the pastures/soybean fields, slaughterhouse, restaurant, and corporate headquarters.  Decisions at each level affect outcomes at others: e.g., if you don’t cut down enough rainforest to produce enough cattle for burgers, your restaurant runs out of food, but if you cut down too much rainforest, your corporate image suffers and must be revived through an aggressive ad campaign.  You lose if your profits go into a tailspin or if your company is shut down by health-nut politicians.

Analysis: The graphics in this game are cartoony, as is the social morality. There are no choices in the game that will help both your bottom line and the environment. And adding industrial waste to cattle feed has no ill effects so long as you keep an eye out for sick cattle, who can be easily converted to ashes at the touch of a flamethrower. But all this aside, the game is a great way to become more aware of the effects of one’s choices upon the rest of the world. An increased demand for hamburgers in the US does in fact translate to more deforestation in the Amazon, but few of us think about that regularly. So the game succeeds in its primary motivation, which is to make people aware of the trade-offs involved in globalization. 

2. Electrocity

This game, developed in New Zealand, puts you in charge of a small town in that fair land.  You must grow the town in size, while maintaining its natural beauty. You can mine for coal, build wind power plants, establish national parks, and plant/harvest forests. You’re scored based on how low your town’s pollution output is, how large your town grows, how happy you keep your citizens, and how well you keep your town supplied with electricity. The game is turn-based, but you can easily play through an entire game in ten or fifteen minutes.

Analysis: This game’s social morality is much more nuanced than that of the McDonalds game–but then, so is its subject. Any environmental initiative has to deal with the fact that our current society uses a lot of energy. Like it or lump it, that’s the way it is. The fact that your score reflects not only green-ness, but also town size forces you to balance economic growth with environmental stewardship. This game is aimed mainly at schoolchildren, but I enjoyed playing through a few times.  It’s no World of Warcraft, but I don’t have the patience for that, anyway.

Why Can’t We Break 40 MPG?

Because I’m planning a transcontinental move (for the second time in the past year), I have been thinking about fuel economy lately. I drive a well-used 1998 Camry, which, according to the EPA’s newest calculations, gets about 29 mpg/highway. If I take the most direct route from DC to Missoula (a little over 2000 miles), I’ll go through somewhere around 80 gallons of gas along the way. Optimistically assuming an average of $3.90/gallon for gas along the way, fuel alone will set me back $312.  I probably won’t take the most direct route, and gas may top four dollars a gallon, so I may be looking at something more like $500. Just for gas.  That’s a month’s rent in Missoula.

You’d think I’d be upset about this (and, in a way I am…last year, with gas at three dollars a gallon, I would have spent only about two or three hundred), but what I’m more upset about is the fact that my ten-year-old car still gets better highway mileage than most cars on the market today.  Specifically, according to fueleconomy.gov,  the Nissan Altima, the Kia Spectra, and the Hyundai Elantra are the only non-hybrid sedans that get better highway mileage than my Camry with 162,000 miles on it. And there are only five hybrid sedans that get better mileage–and even then, most of the only get 31 or 32 mpg, hardly a substantial improvement. What exactly have car manufacturers been doing for the past decade?

Every time Congress attempts to legislate tougher fuel economy standards (which, one would think, is at least as patriotic as handing people 1200 dollars and telling them to spend it on things which were probably made in China), car companies, including ostensibly “green” Toyota, whine that the standards are unrealistic and that they need more time to comply.  So here we are in 2008, with almost no normal-sized cars that break the 30 mpg barrier, let alone 40 mpg.  Seriously. We can invent the internet, the airplane, and the telegraph, but our car manufacturers have barely improved their mileage ratings in the past 20 years (btw, I checked on the 1988 Camry…it also got 29 mpg, although it was smaller than the 1998 model)? I guess if anything good comes out of four dollar gas, it will be that American car companies may finally have to quit hiding behind the “It’s too much too fast” defense, and actually…oh, what’s the word?…innovate!

Politics and the U-Turn

A post on Politico yesterday detailed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s recent deployment of a “media backlash” strategy.  This is a fairly simple but (the Clinton campaign hopes) effective antidote to the “mathematically there’s no way she can win” refrain now common among the stars of the political talk show circuit. It works like this: Clinton’s campaign releases an ad in Oregon that shows several (male) pundits (Russert, Stephanopoulos, et al) counting her out. A narrator then contrasts the values of “Washington” with the values of Oregon: the former cares about “who’s up and who’s down,” while the latter cares about “what’s right and what’s wrong” (no word yet on how Oregonians, who generally think of neighboring Washington state when they hear “Washington,” have responded to the ad).  Translation: Clinton is the one politician in the presidential race who isn’t participating in a glorified popularity contest. Wait, scratch that. Make it “the one politician in the history of the world,” or at least the only one who has both held to high principles and achieved any real power. More on this later.

The idea is to push voters’ indignation buttons (particularly older women’s…note the “bad” pundits in the ad) and call out the “we’ll-show-them-a-thing-or-two” troops in numbers large enough to at least dent Obama’s apparent commanding lead in Oregon.  This strategy, according to Politico, seems to have worked in West Virginia and seems to have influenced the New Hampshire vote, in which Clinton went from being several points behind in pre-election polls to beating her nearest rival (Barack Obama) 39% to 37%.

What intrigues me here is the way in which a politician can control (or attempt to control) public discourse simply by defining who the “enemy” or “Other” is. George W. Bush managed to do it for several years simply by appealing to the abstract notion of Terror and to its incarnation, Osama bin Laden. John McCain has attemped to do it by equating a pledge to talk to groups like Hamas with “appeasement,” a dirty word because of its association with the Nazi takeovers of Austria, Czechoslovakia, et al.  Obama has done it by blaming the country’s problems on partisan hacks.  Clinton has done it in New Hampshire by insinuating unfair treatment by condescending males, in Ohio and Pennsylvania (where both she and Obama competed for the “Most Anti-NAFTA” award) by blaming job losses on the Fat Cats who engineered NAFTA (not including, apparently, her former president husband) , and just about everywhere by pointing out how Bush’s policies have taken the country in the wrong direction, a strategy so obvious I’m surprised at how well it seems to have worked.  And now that the pundit class here in DC is counting her out for the nomination, they have become the symbol of all that is wrong with America, all those who have an interest in not having every vote count.

This is an odd position for Hillary to take, because, as the Politico article notes, her campaign began with encouragment for “media characterizations of her as the inevitable nominee.” Now that the pundits are going against her, they have suddenly become more interested in up and down than in right and wrong.  It’s not that the U-turn is uncommon in politics (John McCain recently gave a conciliaory speech to the NRA, whose political influence he helped to curb with his campaign finance reform bill, and Obama has had to distance himself from spiritual mentor Jeremiah Wright), but with Clinton’s focus-grouped campaign, the maneuver is perhaps more noticeable than usual.