On Not Seeing the Mona Lisa, or the Water Lilies

I suppose it's reasonable that I, a generalist, not a scholar of Renaissance art, should be granted no special access to the Mona Lisa, no particular ability to view the painting, much as -- for reasons I recognize as good, and having to do with preservation -- non-specialists might be able to look at two facing pages of, say, a Gutenberg Bible under glass, but not to sit down in an easy chair paging through it at leisure.

But right out there in a museum, ostensibly in public, I was unprepared for how deeply it was impossible to see the Mona Lisa. It is surrounded by a barrier keeping viewers perhaps fifteen feet away, and covered with glass. What I saw, then, was a ghostly face and the reflection of an exit sign over a door at the back of the gallery, punctuated by flashes from the scores of people in the room taking selfies and snaps of each other.

It got me thinking about reproduction. Digital techniques today allow the surface to be mapped, a model of the texture created, and the image itself photographically rendered onto such a textured model. I'd have gotten more out of looking at a good reproduction of the painting than I did looking at glass and reflected light. I got a better look at the painting someone was selling along the river, with Mona Lisa's face on a cat, than I did at the original.

Monet's Water Lilies are hard to see for another reason: their scale. I had the great, vast privilege to see them on display in the purpose-built gallery in L'Orangerie, mounted on slightly curved walls in an oval-shaped room.

I looked from the front, but the room is barely large enough to see the whole painting. The edges fade into peripheral vision and the details of the paint, layers over layers making a textured surface, fade into the distance.  Looking from the side, I could focus on the near end of the painting, or the far end, but never both at the same time. Up close, I could examine the texture, the detailed use of color, but only for a tiny fraction of the paintings at one time.

And only retreating once more to a distance could I see the shadow of light on the surface of water, or the shape of a tree in the foreground.

The vastness of the paintings, for me, foregrounds the landscape, makes it a kind of actor in the interaction between viewer and image.  I felt myself reduced in scale, in scope, in agency, as a human viewer. What one sees is not landscape, it is one human's interpretation of landscape, but it gives that landscape something that gives pause. Water and light overshadow human scale, force a recognition that the human place in the world is limited.

Winter Biking: Gear List

A friend writes that she hangs up her bike in the fall because she doesn't have the warm clothing to bike in the winter. She's thinking it might be nice to ride, but says she doesn't know where to start in terms of buying the gear.

So, if you'd like to lengthen your riding season, here's a suggested list. You might already own things that you can use for biking; a lot of my gear does double- or triple-duty for hiking, biking, and jogging. Some items are very bike-specific.

First off, safety. Winter is wetter and darker than summer, and drivers are less attuned to seeing cyclists.

• Traction. Make sure your tires still have good tread and make sure they're pumped up appropriately so you don't slip on roads that will stay wet longer after rain or frozen precipitation. If you want to ride on snow or ice, consider studded tires. If you've never ridden in wet conditions, start slow and brake early: wet brake pads take longer to work.
• Visibility. Motorists notice motion, so make sure you have good pedal reflectors, and wear reflectors on your ankles. Get a brightly colored vest with reflective stripes, in a size big enough to wear over all kinds of warm layers. Add reflective tape to the front, sides, and back of your helmet. (You have a helmet, right??) Get blinky red lights and put them all over your back: on the bike, on your helmet, on a backpack if you're wearing one. Use a white light for the front of your bike.
• Vision. If you're going to be riding on roads or paths that aren't lit at night, get a really good light for the front of your bike. This is a place to spend money to get a very bright light with an internal, rechargeable battery. (AA batteries drain fast in cold weather, and drained batteries produce poor light).

Secondly, comfort. Winter is also colder than summer, and wind sucks the warmth right out of your body. The tricky part is keeping the extremities warm without overheating.

• Hands. Lobster claw gloves divide your four fingers into two, providing better warmth than standard gloves and better grip on handlebars and brake levers than mittens. If in doubt about size, opt for slightly larger; the air inside will warm up and help insulate. Whatever you wear, make sure the palms and fingertips are covered with material that grips, not just plain fleece or wool, which will leave your hands sliding all over the place. If it's *really* cold, a pair of breathable-waterproof mittens large enough to fit over your gloves/mitts is helpful. Or you can do like New York City delivery guys, and tape plastic bags around the ends of your handlebars.
• Eyes. Need to be protected, night and day. Biking gear manufacturers make glasses with interchangeable lenses that you can swap out with clear ones for night riding. If you wear glasses anyway, you might want to consider a pair with transitional lenses that go dark in bright sun.
• Ears. Depending on temperature, a thin headband or a thin hat to go under your helmet. A gore-text helmet cover (and again with all the reflective stripes) will also keep your head warmer as well as dryer.
• Feet. Hiking boots or knee-high boots with thick wool socks will work, as long as they're not too bulky and as long as it's not too cold. Another option is neoprene shoe covers, which will also protect street shoes from salt and damp if you're commuting to work.
• Legs. You want both warmth and protection from precipitation or road spray, and the amount and the layers will depend on temperature and your own body. Lined hiking pants are a good starting point. Look for a pair that provides warmth, protects from wind, and resists water. Depending on conditions, you could add long underwear (non-cotton!) and/or rain pants.
• Upper body. Here, you want layers as well as the ability to zip easily at the neck as you warm up, or turn into or out of the wind. Avoid cotton like the plague. Start with a light wicking bottom layer, add layers of fleece or wool, top with tightly woven wool or a breathable waterproof.
• Face. You can get a fancy neoprene mask, or a cheap light-weight balaclava, or tie a bandanna over your mouth and nose, or pull up a scarf. Whatever you do, your glasses will fog up. Once you've been riding for 10 or 15 minutes, you'll probably generate enough body heat to keep your face warm, unless it's well below freezing.

Again, if you're already walking or jogging outdoors (or, who knows, cross-country skiing or canoeing) in cold weather, you may have some gear you can repurpose for winter biking. I've acquired most of the stuff I use for winter biking over several years. I see fastest wear on gloves, but other that (and bike seat and tires), I very seldom need to replace anything because of wear.

But chances are you'll need to buy at least a couple of items. If you're on a budget, the first place to spend is on a good headlight; you can get away with a dirt-cheap vest or pinney and inexpensive tail-lights. Money also helps buy warm gloves.

I've deliberately left off the names of shops or manufacturers from the above list. But I will say that everything I've ever bought from Pearl Izumi has been great quality and very long-lasting. Schwalbe makes great tires, including studded ones; having used their punctureless tires, I'll never go back. If you're wondering where to shop, US readers could try Eastern Mountain Sports, Campmor, Sierra Trading Post, Bike Nashbar; I don't have enough experience with shopping elsewhere to make recommendations.

Questions? Anything I've forgotten? Let me know. And happy riding.

Fear of Side Effects / Call Me Superwoman

Theorists of disability have very rightly criticized the "medical model" suggesting individuals should be rehabilitated, normalized, fixed, in favor of a social model calling for modifications to the built environment that avoid putting, as Leviticus forbids, a stumbling block before the blind, or, for instance, stairs when a ramp or a sidewalk-level entrance would allow more equal access.

My experience of disability, however, involves interactions with the world that are hindered by exacerbations of chronic illness, typically asthma attacks triggered by upper-respiratory infections that for most of the people who catch them are at worst an annoyance, as well as by life-threatening allergies to things that other people aren't in the least bit bothered by. Or that they love, like mushrooms and cats.

Building streets with curb cuts and buildings with ramps as a matter of course is an obvious act of inclusion. Eliminating smoking in public areas to help everyone avoid upper airway disease is a no-brainer. But object when Edinburgh University gives a cat a library card or a cafe owner opens the premises to cats, and you might get death threats.

Actually, I'm not interested in challenging anyone's right to consort with cats, though if a friend has a cat, I can't visit, ever, and The Mate hasn't eaten mushrooms at home in years. I am trying to make the point that the idea that disability is a socially constructed phenomenon, rather than an individual problem subject to remediation, is problematic in my experience.

Chronic illness seems to depend upon a medical model. The wheelchair icon and the understanding of disability as constructed by exclusionary social practices both suggest that disability in individuals is stable. But chronic illness seems to be characterized by flux, whether progressive decline or alternating periods of illness and remission. Medical help, usually in the form of pharmaceuticals, can delay decline and treat attacks and exacerbations. Sometimes medicine is needed to keep a person alive long enough to recover and return to remission.

If there were a pill that made my allergy to cats go away? I'd take it in a minute.

Actually, there is such a pill: prednisone.

The problem with prednisone, as with many other medications people take for epilepsy, asthma, depression, crohn's disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis, to name just a few, is side effects.

Maybe a medication is extremely effective in treating a symptom, and the side effects are so minor, that it's not worth worrying about.

Maybe a medication works like that for most of the people who take it, but for a small minority, it turns out to have life-threatening effects.

Maybe it wasn't anticipated during trials that a lot of real-life people taking the drug under investigation would also be taking another medication at the same time, and the interaction between those two medications would turn out to be potentially lethal.

Maybe the test population didn't include any women, because women's hormonal cycles were long thought to screw up the results, and the drug turns out to be more effective in women. Or less effective.

Drug development and testing is done by people in lab coats, with careful measurements of doses, conditions, and outcomes. It sounds like science, it smells like science, it must be science. But real live people turn out to be so different in their responses to medications, including reduction of symptoms as well as side effects, that treating individuals turns out to be more art than science.

With some medications the line between effectiveness and toxicity is narrow. Or non-existent. If I took enough prednisone to eliminate my cat allergy I'd probably have a few great years. Manic years, since prednisone also is known to affect moods; it makes some people depressed and suicidal, but it makes me fly high as a kite. Kind of fun, and I tend to get a lot of work done, but not necessarily what I want when my body needs rest to recover from the infection that triggered the attack.

But then the side effects would almost certainly take over: weight gain, suppressed immunity, diabetes, hypertension, osteoporosis, psychosis, dementia.

Last week, I did a six-mile run and I lifted some weights, as well as other exercise. Monday morning, I woke up so sick I got winded brushing my teeth. I am the stumbling block, or in any rate my lungs are; there's no social reorganization that will change the fact that I need to breathe, or I'll be dead.

Even Harry Potter needed the occasional hit of oxygen during that underwater scene.

So I take just enough prednisone to control the symptoms. I watch as my cholesterol and A1C levels creep up, despite a vegan diet and lots of exercise. I need the medicine; I fear the side effects. As for the mania? I finished a book chapter, outlined another, and wrote two blog posts today.

Call me superwoman.

What I Can't Live Without: Clean Water

What can you not live without?  A cousin asked me that excellent question after I wrote my last post about minimalism in the kitchen.

I'm on sabbatical at the moment, living in a furnished apartment in the UK, with a tiny kitchen containing far fewer pots and pans and gadgets and appliances than my kitchen, or rather storage locker, in New York.

And even my New York kitchen is fairly small by white upper-middle-class American suburban standards.

I've been mulling over that question for the last several days, because I've also spent a fair amount of time cooking in even more minimal conditions on camping trips.

What I can't live without includes a knife, a cutting board, a pot. But it also turns out to include fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and some variety of gluten-free flour. Home-made jam and applesauce and thai curries and Indian utthapams and bhajis and vegan soups and stews. Enormous salads. Bowls of cooked greens.

And lettuce and other greens, as I discovered during the lower Manhattan blackout after Hurricane Sandy, require large quantities of running water for cleaning. You can scrub root vegetables in a small amount of water, then rinse with another small amount. Most fruit can do with just a quick rinse, and legumes don't require too much more than cooking water.

But greens -- kale, collards, chard, spinach, bok choy, and lettuce -- I wouldn't want to have to live without those, not for the long term.

We take clean running water casually, so terribly casually, for granted, in North America and Western Europe.  Even as we buy vast quantities of bottled water, we forget that in large parts of the world -- and even in parts of the US -- the water isn't safe to drink or take a shower in.

I am very glad not to have to live without clean running water.

Fighting for Minimalism

I've lived in apartments in New York City for the past 25 years, and that means keeping possessions to a relative minimum unless I want to pay for storage for stuff that I then won't be able to use ... because, well, it's across town in storage.

Today, I ran across the Haters Guide to the Williams Sonoma Catalogue, which includes this gem:

The Williams-Sonoma catalog will not rest until you need a separate pot for every single goddamn thing you make.

For a while, I owned a crock pot that I'd found in my building's recycling area, with a note promising, "it works!" Since I'm either home all day or out for fifteen hours, I never left the thing unattended, and eventually I came to the conclusion that I could cook more efficiently in -- gasp -- a normal pot on the stove.

By that time I'd moved, twice, paying movers to schlep that crock pot down five flights, up four, back down the same four, and up three. In the last move, I finally after nearly 25 years in New York City moved to an elevator building, but still.

In the end, the crock pot ended up at the Salvation Army. Maybe now some other poor soul is using it based on the promise of better meals than you can make with a normal pot on a normal stove.

But the thing about Black Friday and Cyber Monday and our consumer-driven society in general is that, with the exception of kids moving out on their own, people pretty much already own all the pots they need. And so Williams Sonoma, and for that matter Walmart, need to persuade you that you need MORE pots in your kitchen.

If they can find a way to sell you DISPOSABLE kitchenware, for instance single-use roasting pans or pie pans, then they've hit the jackpot.

It takes WORK to avoid advertising. I regularly make phone calls to get people to stop sending catalogues, but one on-line purchase can mean another whole pile of them. I've installed ad-blocker on my PC, but I still see advertising on my iPad. And internet advertising is a special horror:it takes extra discipline not to click through to the next web site, and the next.

Everyone wants me, or rather my limited amount of disposable income. Another pot, a better cleaning product, another sweater, a new pair of socks, a better health plan. I'm constantly fighting the capitalist barrage of advertising trying to persuade me that I need another item.

And budget considerations aside, it's an environmental issue. How do you fight the good fight?

Green Christmas

It seems early, but then I want to get this post up before Black Friday. Christmas has become, for many people, a holiday of massively commercial proportions. Hannukah isn't far behind. With the commercialism comes a massive environmental impact. So here are some ideas about how to minimize the impact.

Presents

Consider making gifts, if you can, or buying from a craft market featuring the creations of local artisans, rather than buying on Amazon (with all that shipping and packaging) or Walmart (of the dismal labor record). Think about gifts that the recipient can use and enjoy -- food? -- rather than things that will need to be stored indefinitely.

Food

Food waste is a major contributor to over-consumption, with estimates for how much of our food we throw away ranging from 30 to 50 percent. As you plan your holiday meal, or meals, think about food waste. We all cook extra to make sure everyone will have enough to eat. Can you make plans to freeze leftovers for future use? Make the turkey bones into soup, maybe even with leftover vegetable side dishes?

Packaging

There's the packaging that stuff comes in. Would you consider choosing purchases based on the amount of packaging? Amazon comes to mind again. But making stuff by hand or buying locally also has good potential to reduce packaging. Then there's wrapping paper. We keep a box of used wrapping paper; other families use cloth wrapping bags and reuse them every year; others use the comics section of the newspaper for wrapping.

Travel

With family in Europe and across the US, I travel a lot, and I often end up flying instead of using ground transport, and I often travel by car rather than on trains or buses. So I feel a bit hypocritical including this category. But the point is for everyone to think about areas where they can cut back, and different things will work for all of us. Think about carpooling or, if possible, taking a train or a bus to your destination. Shopping locally can also limit driving time.

Chocolate

The Hershey corporation has made a commitment to ending the use of child labor in its source chains... by 2020. You can end child labor in your own chocolate today by purchasing fair trade chocolate.

Happy holidays, y'all.

Joseph of the Colorful Coat as Climatologist

A guest post by Bill Menke, October 9, 2014

I would like to use the story of Joseph to illustrate the problems that we scientists experience in talking about Global Warming.  The Joseph that I am referring to is the Biblical character who you might have encountered, either from having read the Book of Genesis, or by having seen the musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Joseph’s story is long and complicated – a fine story to tell around a bonfire in a Middle Eastern desert – but here I am focused on only a small part of it, the part that concerns Joseph’s prediction of an Egyptian famine. The short of it is that circumstances allowed Joseph to guide Pharaoh‘s response to that famine better than any of us scientists have been able to influence our own society’s response to Global Warming. I want to tell you why.

Here’s an abridged version of Joseph’s story …

Pharaoh had a dream … He was standing by the Nile, when out of the river there came up seven cows, sleek and fat … After them, seven other cows, ugly and gaunt, came up out of the Nile … And the cows that were ugly and gaunt ate up the seven sleek, fat cows. Then Pharaoh woke up. He fell asleep again and had a second dream: Seven heads of grain, healthy and good, were growing on a single stalk. After them, seven other heads of grain sprouted--thin and scorched by the east wind.The thin heads of grain swallowed up the seven healthy, full heads. Then Pharaoh woke up; it had been a dream. In the morning his mind was troubled, so he sent for all the … wise men of Egypt. Pharaoh told them his dreams, but no one could interpret them for him. Then the chief cupbearer said to Pharaoh, "Today I am reminded of my shortcomings.Pharaoh was once angry … and he imprisoned me and the chief baker in the house of the captain of the guard. Each of us had a dream the same night, and each dream had a meaning of its own. Now a young Hebrewwas there with us ... We told him our dreams, and he interpreted them for us, giving each man the interpretation of his dream. And things turned out exactly as he interpreted them to us …" So Pharaoh sent for Joseph… Pharaoh said to Joseph, "I had a dream, and no one can interpret it. … I cannot do it," Joseph replied to Pharaoh, "but God will give Pharaoh the answer he desires." Then Pharaoh said to Joseph, "In my dream …Then Joseph said to Pharaoh, "The dreams of Pharaoh are one and the same. God has revealed to Pharaoh what he is about to do. The seven good cows are seven years, and the seven good heads of grain are seven years; it is one and the same dream. The seven lean, ugly cows that came up afterward are seven years, and so are the seven worthless heads of grain scorched by the east wind: They are seven years of famine. …Seven years of great abundance are coming throughout the land of Egypt, but seven years of famine will follow them. Then all the abundance in Egypt will be forgotten, and the famine will ravage the land. The abundance in the land will not be remembered, because the famine that follows it will be so severe. … And now let Pharaoh look for a discerning and wise man and put him in charge of the land of Egypt.Let Pharaoh appoint commissioners over the land to take a fifth of the harvest of Egypt during the seven years of abundance. … This food should be held in reserve for the country, to be used during the seven years of famine that will come upon Egypt, so that the country may not be ruined by the famine." The plan seemed good to Pharaoh … So Pharaoh said to Joseph, "I hereby put you in charge of the whole land of Egypt."

​Book of Genesis, New International Version1

A really key part of this story is that Pharaoh, the political leader of Egypt, realized that something was wrong.  Now, I don’t want you to get distracted by this realization coming in the form of dreams. Today, we don’t take the content of dreams seriously.  I’d rather you think of Pharaoh as an astute leader with an intuitive feel for the rhythms of his society.  He begins to suspect that something is amiss and that suspicion manifests as dreams, either as a literal expression of the Pharaoh’s subconscious mind, or a metaphorical device of the Biblical storyteller.  The point is that the initiative to investigate comes from Pharaoh, himself.

Folks, issues involving climate are just not on the radar screen of the great majority of our leaders.  This is not to say that the more committedamong them don’t sense problems and take the initiative to understand them and to solve them, but they are focused on different problems – economic problems, foreign relations problems, and so forth.  I think this points both the subtlety of the climate problem - we can’t smell rising CO2, after all - and to the degree to which we of the Industrial Era are sundered from Nature.

I’m not sure who in today’s White House might play the role of Pharaoh’s chief cupbearer.  He seems to have had more influence than the White House’s chief chef but to have been well outside of the inner circle of advisors and Cabinet Secretaries.  But in any case, not only didhe bring Joseph to Pharaoh’s attention, but he gave him a strong recommendation based on his own eyewitness account of Joseph’s abilities.

I don’t know what kind of testimonial would make a compelling case forus scientists.  Both the public and the political leadership confer us a fair degree of respect, in a distant sort of way, but the same time portray our opinions as esoteric and politically naïve.  But more importantly, although we are recognized as having achieved some practical successes - building the Bomb, curing polio, inventing the Smart Phone and so forth – our ability to forecast the future is seldom acclaimed.  And, in fact, climate change is a new arena in which no long history of scientific predictions is available.

We scientists portray ourselves as being guided by the transcendent lawsof physics and chemistry with much the same spirit that Joseph portrays himself as merely the conduit through which God’s words are spoken. We do not invent Global Warming; we simply report an inevitable consequence of rising CO2 levels that change the heat balance of the atmosphere.  Pharaoh accepts Joseph’s ability to speak for God to a far greater degree than, say, the Congress of the Unites States accepts the ability of climate physicists to speak for the First Law of Thermodynamics. In the modern world every authority is suspect.

Joseph was in the very enviable position of speaking to the leader of what was, for all intents and purposes, the only political power in the affected region. Pharaoh could unilaterally decide to adopt Joseph’s program and know that its success would not depend upon the actions or inactions of his neighbors.  As a subsequent part of the story reveals, Pharaoh did have to deal with an influx of starving refugees (among who were Joseph’s brothers). But no invading armies arrived, intent upon carrying away Egypt’s stockpiles of grain.

The region that is both responsible for, and affected by, Global Warming is the whole world.  The United States is only of several major emitters of CO2 and only one of the many nations to be affected by its consequences.  No CO2 reduction unilaterally made by any nation is likely to have anything but symbolic value, for other nations can easily take up the slack.  Any lasting solution will require an international agreement whose negotiation will be a slow and tedious process.

The scenario that Joseph presents, of seven years of plenty followed by seven of hardship, is one which resonates with Pharaoh.  It connects with his experience in the same way that yet-another water shortage resonates with the mayor of Los Angeles. The Pharaoh had experienced famines before, had witnessed their horrors and the land’s slow recovery from them.  Unfortunately, none of us alive today have prior experience with Global Warming.

We scientists have not done well articulating what Global Warming is all about.  Nor have we done well explaining why it is a concern and especially why its effects are to be feared.  Few of my fellow scientists would ascribe to the apocalyptic scenarios put forward by the more extreme environmental activists – a group composed mostly of non-scientists.  Nevertheless, most of us agree that the world will change and many of the changes will cause great human hardship.  But here I think that our knowledge of history – I mean geological history – jades us. Anyone who has studied the earth knows that our planet has experienced great changes and that every change has engendered both winners and losers.  Scientists, committed to the power of the mind, are inherent optimists. Perhaps we can adapt in such a way to be among the winners. Global Warming is not nearly as simple as famine. And complexity leaves rooms for ambiguity.

Joseph’s solution to the problem of the forthcoming famine is simple: spend the next seven years of plenty stockpiling enough food to get through those seven lean years.  And the fraction – a fifth – of each year’s harvest that must be put aside is manageable. Pharaoh agrees that it can be done and orders the program to start.

Scientists have not put forward a plan for stopping Global Warming that is anywhere near as workable as Joseph’s.  We know at the very least that we must stabilize atmospheric CO2 at its current level and preferably reduce its level back to what it was in 1980. To stabilize it, we must either stop burning all fossil fuels or, alternatively, capture and store all the CO2 that their combustion produces.  To go further and actually lower CO2 levels would require the capture and storage of three decades-worth of burning.  Both scenarios are possible. Alternative sources like wind and solar can replace fossil fuels and sequestration technology can scrub CO2 from the atmosphere.  But both are massive undertakings of daunting scale.  Saying that the United States needs to install one million wind turbines, for that is the number it will take, is not the same as building them. Congress is not going to fast-track myproposal to expedite construction.

I envy the clarity of Joseph’s message to Pharaoh.  But as a scientist trained in the rigorous estimation of error, I shudder at the certainty with which it is presented, for it goes against scientific culture in which everything is subject to probability.  Hour before its landfall, the chances are ninety percent, not a hundred, that the hurricane will hit New York. We scientists cannot calculate precisely how severe the effects of current CO2 levels will be and so rightly state large bounds on our predictions.  Sea level will rise somewhere between one foot and threeby the year 21002. Our perspective is laudable, yet we are focusing on the wrong question.  There is no reason to think that CO2 will stay at its current level and every reason to think that their rise will be steady, or even that it will accelerate.  The two-thirds of the world’s peoples who are at the bottom of the economic ladder are rushing climb up – a process fueled by fossil fuels.  The probability of hugely painful climatic impacts is one hundred percent in a burning as usual world. Somehow, we scientists need to get that across.

1Gensis 41:1 – 41:41, www.biblestudytools.com/genesis/41.html

2http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf

-----------------

William Menke is a Professor of Earth Sciences at Columbia University.  He researches earthquakes and volcanoes and has won several kayaking awards. He also spends a lot of time hiking and taking photographs.