Author Archives: jaj226

All by our lonesome?

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On Sunday I went on the Earth Day Hike in Ringwood Ponds. It turned out that it was just me, GRF Sara Schlemm and Todd Bittner, our guide. Although it was a small group it was nice to have more flexibility in where we went and what we saw.

One ofter hears about how being “in nature” or without electronics is a de-stressing activity, but you never really realize it until you do it. It was both a physical and emotional breath of fresh air to be in a natural area and just plain explore. This is something we do often as children, but gets harder and harder to do the older you get, as we accrue new responsibilities.

I’ll just give one example. We were watching newts swim around in a pond, when Todd motioned us toward the surface and used a stick to pick something up. On a closer look, it was a collection of newts eggs. The eggs are bound together by a jelly-like substance and attached to blades of grass.

It’s really quite beautiful up close. The sac does a wonderful job of protecting the eggs and keeping them stationary until they hatch.

The ponds at Ringwood are seasonal, in that they dry and refill seasonally. Because of this there aren’t any fish in these ponds, making them a ripe habitat for amphibians. When we arrived the ponds were mostly silent, but by the time we circled back around the sound of spring peeper’s was almost deafening. The variety of wildlife was pretty astonishing.

Something else that I really appreciated was tree identification. Before then I hadn’t a clue how to tell different species of trees apart. Todd showed us a bunch of different ways to tell common trees apart: from bark to leaf shape to branching patterns. The people in change of managing Cornell owned natural resources do a lot of management of species ratios and ecosystem health so  its crucial that they can identity trees quickly.

 

Winter jackets

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This week I attended a tour of the Cornell Teaching Dairy Barn which was absolutely fascinating. Our guide had a ton of knowledge on the workings of the farm and the techniques farmers use to provide for their cows. It was good to hear the seriousness that sanitation is considered with: before/after milking the cows are disinfected and the milk is inspected to monitor the health of the cow.

I was surprised at how little the difference was between pregnant cows and non-pregnant cows: since calves are at most 100 pounds and fully grown cows are 1300-1600 pounds, being pregnant has minimal impact on their gait. Another thing I didn’t expect was how early the calves are separated from their mothers: our guide mentioned that in general dairy cows aren’t known for their mothering ability, and so because of infection and other risks the calves are moved to individual “apartments” that they stay in for 2-3 weeks. They were all very cute, wearing their winter jackets and everything.

One thing I regret not asking about while I was there was what veterinary students think about the ethics of farming in general. What I saw while I was there was generally good (the cows seemed happy, clean, etc. maybe a bit cramped) but I’m not sure if this is just because the farm we were at is a teaching facility. I’d like to have asked about industry standards, what the ethical difference is (if any) between meat and dairy, etc.

Seeing people in other people

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Earlier today I watched 12 Angry Men, and I now know why it’s such a highly rated movie. There’s way too much in the movie to write about in general, so I’d like to mention in specific the personalities of the characters.

I think this movie does an amazing job of displaying how people make and are invested in decisions. If psychology has taught us anything, its that people have a hard time deciding things based on “objective” facts: people are very attached to ideologies. In fact, proving someone wrong may make them dig in their heels (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/12/vaccine-myth-busting-can-backfire/383700/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds).

So it was particularly fascinating to watch the jurors slowly be convinced that the defendant was innocent. At least two of them were clearly prejudiced from prior experiences (one of them had a traumatic experience with his own son, and the other was just prejudiced against poor kids in general). Another seemed initially to be the most invested in his view, but quickly changed his mind when he saw the tide turning, more concerned about attending a baseball game than deliberating over a mans life. I saw facets of people I knew from high school, family members, old friends inside each one of these men. The brilliance of the film is that it could have been about anything: the fact that it was about a trial was almost irrelevant. What mattered was how people decided on their views, and how they handled being proven wrong.

The lesson I took away from this is to be constantly vigilant in talking with people and forming opinions. The amount of our beliefs that come from anything that could be called “objective” or a “fact” is much smaller than we would like to think. The stakes are rarely so high, but the phenomena arise just the same.

Vaccines and national security

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Last week I attended the talk by GRF Ty about his work creating vaccines. I didn’t learn too much about specific vaccination techniques but I was very interested in a pathogen he mentioned, Francisella tularensis. This is a bacterium that, due to a variety of factors including the ability to be aerosolized, low dose needed to kill, and its very high virulence, is considered a prime target for bioweapons. Bioweapons are actually talked about surprisingly little today: I think more credence is given to nuclear and chemical weapons, so I thought I would try and look at the current state of precautions against them.

As an example, take anthrax. caused by Bacillus anthracis. Looking at CDC documentation on the current vaccination situation (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/anthrax/public/index.html) there is a vaccine available, but there is nowhere enough supply in the case of an attack. In addition, it can form endospores when necessary: small capsules that are resistant to most methods of destruction besides boiling. This makes it particularly easy to transport, as it was in envelopes during the 2001 attacks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks).

Another example is smallpox. Smallpox is extremely virulent, and basically the only disease that as of 2018 we have completely eradicated in the wild. However, there is still samples of the virus in the US and Russia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_virus_retention_controversy) over which there’s still a controversy over whether to destroy the samples. If a bad actor got ahold of one of these samples, there would be little in their way since vaccines aren’t produced anymore. This could be further compounded by growing the strain until it mutated into something that was resistant against current vaccines.

There is also substantial historical precedence for such programs. In the 70’s the Soviet’s tested smallpox as a potential weapon: one accidental release over the Aral Sea caused a smallpox outbreak (citation: https://smile.amazon.com/Soviet-Biological-Weapons-Program-History/dp/0674047702). In addition, during the Rhodesian Bush War water supplies were deliberately contaminated with cholera (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodesian_Bush_War). Again, these kinds of weapons are particularly problematic because they can very easily be mutated in isolation to be immune to known techniques.

 

A surprising letdown

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Today I saw the movie Coco, and I was very surprised. I’m a big fan of Pixar films in general, but I was not impressed with Coco.

A major issue for me was how derivative the plot was. There are three major surprises in the plot, and one minor one. I knew that two of the major ones and the minor one were coming well before they showed up onscreen. I’ll admit that this is a somewhat elitist/”true nerd” thing to say, but it happened nonetheless, and it took me out of the movie experience. This is problematic because the emotional parts of the story depend on the audience believing that the character has truly lost something (before the movie shows how it isn’t actually lost). I think this predicability of the plot stems from the fact that the general arc of the story is nothing new: a boy wants to follow his dream, but society/family/etc. say that he’s wrong, and he has to find his own path. This is a standard trope in movies and the media in general and doesn’t help the situation.

I also found the main message of the story problematic. Coco is supposed to emphasize the importance of family: my problem was that it seemed to do this at the expense of all else. The main character actually states at one point that “Nothing is more important than family”. This is not a good message to be sending, particularly in this context. Culture is changing now, to the point that it is more socially acceptable everywhere for people to strike out on their own, irrespective of family traditions. One should never give up on a major life goal (being a musician, traveling, marrying someone) because family disapproves. But at least to me, Coco seems to be specifically encouraging this model that we see in certain cultures that ones family gets to dictate their life.

A final pain point is the striking similarity to the movie Book of Life. I’m not going to say that Coco was a total rip-off, but it certainly is uncomfortably close to the Book of Life in visuals, subject matter, and overall themes.

An intellectual community

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Last week I attended Professor Blalock’s talk on the history of West Campus. He gave an excellent synopsis of the impetus and reasoning behind expanding West Campus to what it is today. Although the gothic’s are quite old, the Houses were conceived of around 20 years ago, when the university decided to expanding their current offerings to compete with the amenities of other schools. The idea was to create intellectual residential communities, and one of the components was a live-in House Professor. Personally I think that this is critical to such a community: both last year when I lived in CKB and this year in Rose House, I’ve attended several events hosted by the live-in professor; events that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.

Professor Blalock also took us into several lesser known areas in the houses; the most striking of which was the War Memorial in the north tower. It’s an absolutely gorgeous room rich in symbolism. It reminded me of how rich and varied this campus is, and how much of it I probably won’t get to see while I’m a student here. Going to Rose Scholar events regularly has really given me an extra dimension into what is hidden here on campus.

Jingoism in the Biggest Bowl

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This past week I watched the Super Bowl, and felt a little odd as opposed to years past. Back home people are big football fans: even if you don’t play, its not really an option to not watch the Super Bowl. But here at Cornell there are a lot more people who aren’t familiar with American football or just aren’t into it, and even though I don’t consider myself a big football person I found myself being *more* knowledgable than some of my friends who were watching with me.

The advertising is always a popular topic with the Super Bowl, but this year something caught my eye that I have never really paid too much attention to, which was the prevalence of military symbolism and veterans at the game. At the coin toss this year 15 Medal of Honor recipients were honored (https://chicago.suntimes.com/sports/super-bowl-nfl-honor-military-veterans-medal-honor/) and several military planes flew overhead. This strikes me as all the more odd in light of the recent kerfuffle about black players protesting racism by kneeling during the national anthem. Many opponents of these protests said that a football game is not the place for politics, and yet displays like this are clearly a political statement. Tacit endorsement of the U.S military and its activities is not an uncontroversial opinion in 2018. This also makes me wonder how common such a display is; whether other countries regularly have these clear endorsements of the military during privately run events like sports games.

This is an excellent article that analyzes the close ties between the military and sports in the US (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-astore/the-militarization-of-sports_b_912004.html)