I played “In a Pickle” with Lory. I liked getting to relax and play a pretty easy game. It probably would have been more fun with more people, but I think we both still had fun. The game is about different sized objects, but it gets a little harder with abstract cards, like for a dream being able to fit inside a brain or a song being able to fit inside a piano. I was thinking about the strategy of the game, and I think you want to get rid of as many of your small cards early in the round so that you can use your large cards to try to win at the end. Then, since you’ve gotten rid of your small cards, you can draw more cards for the next round and hopefully draw something really big like “solar system” or “galaxy.” I don’t think there’s much more to the strategy than that. There might be exceptions where you might want to save a really small card since it can fit inside of almost anything, but other than that, I think the game is pretty simple. Maybe people who have played it before can correct me in the comments if I’m missing something.
Author Archives: rjc397
Snakes of every size and color (lots of them anyway)
I’ve never held a snake before and I was surprised by how soft and relaxed they were. They just lay there and enjoy your warmth most of the time. Some of them were more adventurous and liked to climb up people, and they all had interesting quirky behaviors. I was especially impressed with how nice the herpetological society was. Everyone was happy to tell me lots about snakes and answer questions. They let you hold the snakes as often or as little as you wanted. I learned a lot about snakes and I’m glad I went to this event. I think more people should give snakes a chance, even though they’re pretty scary at first.
Sam Quinones: Prophet of Opioidism
I went to see Sam Quinones’ Dreamland lecture last night, and I thought it was interesting. The biggest thing that struck me was that Mr. Quinones wanted to use the government to stop the opioid epidemic but also acknowledged briefly that the government has utterly failed in the war on drugs and has only succeeded in locking up as many people as it can. That was very incongruous, but that’s not what I want to talk about. More important was the hype that Quinones’ has stirred up over the opioid epidemic with its effect on thousands of people across the globe. However, Quinones makes money by selling the idea that the opioid epidemic is the end all be all, but there are many more deadly epidemics out there that kill many more people and that perhaps we should be much more concerned about. Opioids killed 49,068 people in the US in 2017 according to the National Institutes of Health. That’s a lot of people that didn’t need to die. However, according to the World Health Organization, 4.3 million people die each year as a result of indoor air pollution from inhaling the smoke from their cooking fires. That’s more than 87 times the number of deaths from opioids in the US, and it is a very easy problem to fix; simply buy the global poor cheap electric cooking stoves. Drug rehabilitation is much more expensive due to its heavy use of the most valuable resource known to humanity, our time. The time of counselors, therapists, doctors, nurses, and the patient are all very expensive resources to purchase. If you still care more about the opioid epidemic, how do you feel about malaria? According to the WHO, malaria killed 445,000 people worldwide in 2016, nine times the number of people who died in the US from opioids. The solution to malaria is even cheaper, with malaria nets costing only 5 dollars each on average. While Quinones would like us all to believe that what he wrote his book about is America’s most pressing issue, we should think critically about problems that might not be as interesting as blaming the evil pharmaceutical industry and hotshot doctors for humanity’s biggest problems.
Raptors are cuter than you’d think
I went to the Raptors at Rose event this week, and it was very interesting. Each bird had its own unique characteristics. The kestrel was the cutest, and the horned owl was pretty scary looking. This event made me interested in joining the Cornell Raptor Program since the birds were so fun to be around. I took a field ecology class one summer ago and we got to see birds of prey like hawks and some turkey vultures, but they were always high up and pretty hard to see clearly. It was nice to see the birds up close and see how they reacted to humans. The youngest one was not happy, but some of the older ones seemed used to the program and were more relaxed. I hope Rose has more ornithology events in the future because I had a lot of fun with this one. An anatomy one or conservation one may be less popular than this one was, but maybe songbirds or hummingbirds would get just as much attention from people with interests in those. Overall I was very happy with this event and I look forward to more events like it.
What are pumpkins?
I was wondering how pumpkins evolved to look so distinct from other plants, so I looked it up. Pumpkins are formally in the species Cucurbita Pepo (literally “gourd pumpkin”), which is the same species as winter squash and zucchini. The species can look so different because it is one of the oldest, if not the oldest domesticated species thanks to prehistoric Native Americans. When you think of a pumpkin, you’re picturing the Connecticut Field variety, which fittingly was grown in fields in Connecticut by Native Americans. Nowadays, 95% of the US pumpkin crop intended for processing is grown in Illinois, so if you’re eating pumpkin pie, the pumpkins probably came from Illinois. If you’re curious about jack-o-lanterns, they started in Ireland to commemorate “Stingy Jack,” a mythical figure so stingy that he duped Satan twice but ended up having to roam around between Heaven and Hell with a candle because Satan wouldn’t let him into Hell (Irish people must have been really bored). The Irish didn’t use pumpkins though since they were a New World crop; rutabaga was used instead. If you’re wondering where pumpkin spice lattes come from, the answer is Starbucks, of course. They weren’t invented until 2003 and contained absolutely no pumpkin until 2015. Starbucks has sold at least 200 million pumpkin spice lattes since then. As you can see, pumpkins are a pretty versatile plant and surprisingly important to human history.
The Blue Team vs. The Red Team
Prof. Altschuler talked to us yesterday about the upcoming midterm elections. It was interesting to hear his perspective on the chances of the Democrats taking over Congress or the Republicans staying in control. Political polarization is strong, but I disagreed with him that it is the strongest it’s been since the civil war. Just looking back to the 1960’s, lynchings still happened in the south, JFK and MLK were assassinated, the Vietnam war was forcing involuntary servitude to the government on young men, large-scale protests and even riots were common, and bombings happened every day across the country. People are certainly polarized now, but violent clashes have typically been small-scale between Antifa thugs and neo-nazi thugs. Most people are not partaking in violent protests or riots. If people were so ideologically polarized that they were willing to kill each other over it 60 years ago, then they were more polarized than we are now.
One thing I was impressed with Prof. Altschuler for was his relative non-partisanship. He justifiably made fun of Trump a few times, but he didn’t vilify the Republicans or glorify the Democrats. He said that independents were ignorant, but he meant it as a statement of fact, not as an insult. I can’t remember his exact prediction for how the midterms would turn out, but it sounds like they will be pretty close, or at least that there is still a large amount of uncertainty. I the election is a referendum on the president, as Prof. Altschuler said, then I would expect Democrats to do well, but it seems like the Democrats might not be able to fix their voter turnout problem. If I had to make my own guess, I think that the Republicans will probably hold Congress, maybe not both houses, but overall they will keep enough seats.
I’m not entirely sure which is a better result for the United States. If the Republicans hold on, then they will continue trying to push Trump’s incoherent agenda, but probably won’t cause too much damage. If the Democrats take both houses, then we’ll have gridlock and nothing will happen for two years since Trump can veto everything. The election seems a lot less important framed this way, but I think that is the correct framing. I guess the real fear is that Trump will go nuts and start a war or cause a recession, but if he hasn’t done that yet, I don’t expect him to do so soon.
One last point I was thinking about was how much political scientists think that everyone should care about politics as much as they do. I recognize that I am a crazy person who cares too much about politics, and I think political scientists should realize the same thing. Politics doesn’t actually affect people’s lives very much, and most people are busy trying to make a living and take care of their families to worry about whether the blue team or the red team is in charge.
Big Pharma, Drug Prices, and FDA Standards
I attended Prof. Nicholson’s talk on prescription prices. I liked learning about the pricing structure from him, and there was even a woman there who works for Cornell’s private self-insurance group who had s some interesting things to say about pricing structure for employees at Cornell. The audience was very anti-pharma, and it was interesting hearing Prof. Nicholson half-heartedly defend pharmaceutical companies for the life-saving drugs that they churn out every year. This will be no surprise to people who know me, but I am very libertarian, so hearing the audience go after pharma companies when to me the obvious culprits are Congress and the FDA was disheartening. Drugs would be a lot cheaper if Congress and the FDA passed fewer regulations that prevent drug competitors from entering the US market. As I tell my socialist friends, even Bernie Sanders agrees that US citizens should be able to import drugs from Canada and the EU, but that is currently illegal under FDA guidelines and could get you thrown in prison, just for wanting cheaper pharmaceuticals. Professor Nicholson also recommended a single-payer system like the UK’s NHS which he romanticized. The obvious counterargument to a single-payer system is, “would you want the government to have a monopoly in any other market?” The answer to most people is no, government monopolies are just asking for gross misuse of resources, cronyism, and poor quality services. All of this said, Prof. Nicholson knows more about healthcare economics than I do, but I feel very strongly that he is missing fundamental economic insights because he is awash in the complexities and minutiae of healthcare policy.
Environmental science of the gorges
Dr. Bittner gave us a very in-depth look at how erosion, deposition, and glacial activity formed Ithaca’s gorges. I was hoping for more talk about biodiversity and the flora and fauna around Ithaca, so I was a little disappointed. He did talk about deer and bobcats and the different types of wet ecosystems like swamps, marshes, and bogs. That was definitely the most interesting part for me. I wish Dr. Bittner had us participate more or let us ask questions so that we could try to show what parts of the talk we were interested in. I’m sure some people liked the geology parts, but if we had gotten to talking about ecosystems sooner, I would have had a better time and maybe some other people would have too. His handouts were interesting, but he didn’t explain them as well as I would have liked. I don’t know anything about geology or environmental science, but he just gave brief explanations of the different rock layers and types of rock as if we were familiar with them. Also, his wife came along and she studies insects but didn’t talk much. I would have liked to have heard more about what she does with that, but she might give a talk of her own at some point. I’ll have to try a different Rose Cafe in the future for more ecology information.
Dedicating Your Life to Taking Pictures on the Street
Garry Winogrand spent most of his adult life taking pictures of random people on the streets of New York City, and later Los Angeles. The documentary we watched did not convince me that he was a great photographer though. If you dedicate your whole life to anything, you must accidentally have some good moments just by the law of averages. Some of his pictures will be uncharacteristically amazing just by sheer luck. He might have happened to be in the right place, at the right time, and took enough pictures. If he was not running on accidental successes, then we should have seen a high ratio of exceptional photos to mediocre photos, but Garry had to take hundreds of thousands if not millions of photos just to fill a few books with his best photos. If I decided today that I was going to start gambling, then there would be some days where I do exceptionally well at the casino, despite the fact that I have not gotten any better at gambling. Cynicism aside, Winogrand did seem to have contributed to American culture and academic photography despite his possible lack of talent. At the very least, he had a lot of grit to keep taking those pictures every single day. His work ethic is much more impressive to me than his ability to take an exceptional photo.
Photos and Learning about Tie Knots
I went to the Mini Seminar: Professional Headshots event. The main thing I learned at the event was from Shiv about tying the Eldredge tie knot. I looked up more information about the knot after the event, and apparently it was invented in 2008 by Jeffrey Eldredge, a systems administrator from Salt Lake City, Utah. You can even find his original video still, here: https://youtu.be/i5n_Sp18_Go
or if you don’t want to watch the video, here’s a picture from ties.com:
and then if you want to see what Eldredge was basing his knot on, you can look at the Ediety knot, also called the Merovingian knot because it was worn by “the Merovingian” character in the second Matrix movie.
From Google Images
I also, of course, got my professional headshot, which makes me look pretty goofy, but I think I always look like that. Thank you for taking my picture, Sabrina!