Books that changed the way I see the world, part 2: Under the Banner of Heaven

There are books that provide more detail to something you already knew or broaden your knowledge with something you knew nothing about.  Other books cause you to fundamentally shift your view of the world.  Under the Banner of Heaven is one of the latter.

I bought this book purely because I like the author, even though the topic was outside his usual area.

The book illustrates that religious fanaticism is the exclusive domain of neither Muslims nor foreigners and exists among homebred Americans.  It also demonstrates that the publicized behavior of "religious extremists" does not necessarily represent the values of the greater population following that religion.  "Under the Banner of Heaven" chronicals the events surrounding the gruesome murder of a young mother and her infant by two of her Morman brothers-in-law.  It provides a detailed history of the Morman church and explores how extremist factions have formed and continue to exist.

Krakauer writes with a very unbiased tone and lets the reader come to his own conclusions.  That said, reading this book completely changed my views on organized religion.

Bike lanes and ridership

I went for a walk during the morning commuting hour yesterday, which I don't usually do.  I was surprised by the number of people I saw riding bicycles through the neighborhood streets.  This shouldn't be too surprising as I used to see a large number when I commuted by bike, but what I really noted was the high proportion of females and the number of riders who weren't clad in Lycra.  In fact, I didn't see any Lycra.  I take this to mean that there are more people using bikes to get around than you generally notice, which is a good thing for several reasons.  First, bikes are superior to cars when it comes to pollution, fitness, and possibly mental health as well.  They are quiet, consume less space, are less likely to severely injure or kill a pedestrian or bicyclist if they collide, and they don't use any fuel or produce greenhouse gasses.  If we're not noticing them, that also means that they are less obtrusive than cars.  Sadly, many people have given up riding and discourage others because they do not feel there are safe locations to ride.

Okay, so it should be obvious that I like cycling by now.  You have probably also figured out that I think there should be a network of bike routes that rivals the network available for cars.

It's time for me to give credit where it is due: compared to many cities, Melbourne has a reasonably large network of bike paths and there are a number of bike lanes around.

Now that I've said that I can pick it apart: most of the bike paths around Melbourne are designed for weekend rides with the family, which is great if you only ride on the weekends with the family, but not very good if you want to use your bike for transportation, whether that means riding to work or to run errands.  Furthermore, the bike paths tend to be poorly maintained with very rough paving and vegetation encroaching on the paths.  Routes follow creeks, which make them scenic, but also circuitous.  And there just aren't enough of them.

I hear that there are very good cycling facilities in various parts
of Europe, but I've never been to those places, so I won't talk about
them.  I used to live in Boulder, Colorado, which is fantastic for biking.  The city has really committed to providing good, safe routes for cyclists and the network of paths is so extensive that it was often faster and more direct for me to ride my bike than to drive my car.  Furthermore, because many of the paths are along irrigation ditches and creeks, they are  quite scenic and generally isolated from automobile exhaust.  They are of excellent standard, with underpasses even for quiet neighborhood streets, and have good flat surfaces.  The city plowed the more popular ones when it snowed (granted - after the roads) and swept them occasionally.  The city also had bike lanes on some of the roads, which I used as well.

So I was pleased when my local council announced it would be spending more money to improve bike facilities.  The first evidence I saw of this was the painting of bike lanes along one of my nearby roads.  As is often the case with bike lanes, this one starts at the intersection with a busy road with no bike lane, ends at the intersection with another busy road with no bike lane, and does not intersect any roads with bike lanes (though it intersects many neighborhood streets on which bicycling would be appropriate).  The city must have painted other bike lanes because I've recently read several letters to the editor in our local paper (sorry, it's not on line or I'd provide a link) complaining about the city wasting money on bike paths.

My first reaction was intense irritation at the car drivers who think bicyclists are not entitled to use the roads.  As someone who has commuted by bike for almost 10 years, I've encountered plenty of drivers who act as though I wasn't supposed to be using the road.  And I thought - hey, great blog topic.  So I decided to do a little research on bike lanes, but was surprised by my findings.

It turns out that there is a vocal contingent of bicyclists who think bike lanes are a bad idea.  As I read their arguments I couldn't help but agree with some of them.  Essentially, they are saying that rather than improving safety for cyclists, bike lanes force cyclists out of the smooth flow of traffic and into places where it is dangerous for them to be (for instance, curbside of a car turning towards the curb - right in the US and left in Australia).  They argue that the mere presence of a bike lane reinforces car driver attitudes that roads are for the exclusive use of automobiles and that bikes do not belong there.  They believe the solution is to remove bike lanes and focus on rider education of how to manage traffic situations (what about driver education about who's entitled to use the roads?).

I must admit that when the bike lanes were painted on my local road, I was a bit concerned.  When I was commuting (I'm at home with my child these days) I regularly rode one block on that road and then turned right (across the lane of oncoming traffic - for all you non-Australians).  Because I would be turning right shortly after entering this road, I always turned onto this road into the right side of the lane so I was in position to turn right, and there was plenty of space for cars to pass me on the left.  Now there is a bike lane to the left, which reduces the amount of space the cars have to pass and could cause drivers to feel that I actually belong on the other side of the road from where I am.

In other parts of the city, the bike lanes include the bluestone guttering, which is a dangerous place to ride.  Many of Melbourne's bike lanes are shared use with car parking, and in my opinion, a good number of them are situated so close to the car parking that cyclists are jeopardized by car doors.  The essential problem with bike lanes is that they seem to be constructed as an afterthought and with very little regard to how bicycles work and where cyclists may need to go.

Whereas I agree that many accidents are caused by the cyclists themselves, either through inexperience, lack of attention, or arrogance, I feel the bicycle education solution ignores what I consider to be the superior option: bike paths or shared use paths, like the ones I used in Boulder.

Unfortunately, what is really needed is for drivers of automobiles to acknowledge that the roads are constructed for many modes of transport and to respect the rights of all road users.  It is possible to force respect of other road users by enacting and enforcing strict legislation, but in our car dominated culture, I can't see that happening anytime soon.

Incidentally, good bike routes are not the only facilities the council could provide to reduce the disincentives to ride, but that topic will have to wait for another post.

Wandering the streets for peace and quiet

I took my son to his first session of child care this morning so I could get some work done outside of his naptime.  However, since the session was when he normally napped, I had to wander the streets for an hour pushing him in his stroller to get him to sleep before the childcare session started so he wouldn't be too grumpy to survive the whole 2.5 hours.  The irony was not lost on me.

Fortunately, I have just gotten a report that he has settled in very well and is doing better than many children his age do on their first day.  After 11 months of not being able to leave the room without him complaining, I have just managed to leave him in the next suburb without him getting upset and I'm wondering why I didn't do this ages ago.

Send fresh produce for Christmas

I have vague memories of my grandfather sending us a box of pears for Christmas.  I suppose there was a time when this would have been a really big treat, but I think by the time I was a child there was pretty good fruit in the grocery store at Christmas, so I always thought it was a bit of a let down.

I would have thought this tradition had died a long time ago, but it turns out that you can still send a box of fresh produce as a gift.  And in my humble opinion, this one would be even more disappointing then that box of pears.

Is your dictionary missing something?

Half the time when I look up a word it's not so much because I want to know the meaning as where it came from.  As much as I like to know the etymology of a word, I'm too cheap to buy a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary and our many lesser dictionaries are missing this information for most words.  Of course, when I'm at my computer, I often use dictionary.com to look up words and it does not provide etymologies.

Fortunately, I've just discovered etymonline.com, which is for etymologies what dictionary.com is for definitions.

Books that changed how I see the world, part 1: Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice

I'm sure most people go through this when they start their blog, but when I was brainstorming what to write about, I couldn't help but think of my favorite books, not necessarily books that I would read over and over, but ones that really impacted me.  I'm always eager to share a good book with someone who's interested, so here's the first installment in my list of books that changed the way I view the world.  Needless to say, I highly recommend every one of the books that make it onto this list.

Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, by Mark Plotkin

I dragged this book around for five years before I finally had time to read it.  When I did, I couldn't put it down.

I always knew the world's rain forests hold plants that can be used as medicines, and this book provides living details of this, but the book also helped me see the many ways in which the developed world is impacting the native cultures, and the conflict that exists between protecting those cultures versus transitioning them to interacting with the developed world.

There are many sides to this interaction: the missionaries who try to convert "primitives" to Christianity, the aid workers who try to improve living standards and health, the anthropologists who study their culture as an oddity, the tourists who appear to have so much wealth.  Western medicine plays a particularly complex role in this tango between cultures.  All of these things are illustrated as the author recounts his experiences living with several tribes in the Amazon over a number of years.  Reading this book gave me a much greater understanding of the issues surrounding previously isolated cultures and the struggle that exists between retaining their identity versus integrating into the wider world.

The story is a race against time and, even though the author is an ethno-botanist, the story is compelling.

A music library on 4 disks

Our CD player died a few months ago.  It wasn't anything special, but it was a five disk changer, which was nice because it meant I could park a few disks in it for a while without getting completely sick of them.  Anyway, now it's dead and so not much use.

For a little while we just didn't listen to music.  It wasn't hard.  We had just had a baby and there wasn't much time for leisure anyway.  When we started to miss it, we looked into getting it fixed and found that, as is so common these days, it would cost almost as much to repair it as we originally paid for it.  We looked into replacing it, but everyone is selling (one disk) DVD players these days.

The DVD player!  I had forgotten that it could play CDs.  So we decided just to use the DVD player to listen to CDs.

This had its drawbacks, the biggest being that it could only hold one CD.  Most people would have bought an iPod to solve this problem long before it got to this, but we're too cheap.  We persisted for a while.

Somewhere along the line we got a new computer with a DVD burner.  I don't know what we expected to use our DVD burner for, but we got it anyway, then kind of forgot about it.   Eventually we remembered that our DVD player plays MP3s.

It took a week of concentrated disk swapping to rip our modest CD collection into the computer and another few days puzzling over why iTunes had rearranged all the songs in my "musicals" playlist when I burned them to CD as a test.  I never did figure it out, but decided to persist and burned one DVD containing a third of our music library.  Initial tests were promising.  For some reason, the renaming problem that occurred on the CD did not occur on the DVD, and the directory structure was surprisingly useful.  I especially liked that the highest level of directories was for genre.  The only problem is that the first two albums worth of music on each of the disks skips in our DVD player, a minor detail that I will resolve by burning another few disks.

So for the past week I've been listening to music almost non-stop and haven't heard the same song twice.  I'm still not through the first disk, and I'm hearing music that I'd forgotten about and really enjoying it.

The solution's not perfect, but it's working pretty well for now, and when I do get an iPod adding music to it will be as easy as plugging it into my computer.

Update: The DVD player didn't like dealing with so many songs.  Eventually we relented and got an MP3 player (but not an iPod).

Identifying your audience

Okay, post #2.  It's not much to you, but it's taken me some time to get here (way more than the half hour or so since the last post).  You see, for a while I was concerned that someone might actually read what I post.  Why post, you ask.  Good question.  Call it a learning experience (though I hope many of my posts will be worth reading nevertheless).  Now, I've realized that the real concern is that no one might read what I post.  It makes it hard to identify my audience, which is one of the first things you are taught to do in your high school English class.

What is a wombat?

You may know this already: a wombat is a furry, fat, nocturnal marsupial that comes from Australia, which is where I live.

So what does a wombat have to do with cents?  Not much, except that when I moved to Australia from the US the exchange rate was almost 2 Australian dollars to 1 US dollar.  It made for very confusing conversations about the price of housing with friends and family back home, so we decided to call the Australian ones wombats, though technically they probably should have been called roos or kangaroos, since that's what's featured on the $1 coin.

So what does this have to do with this blog?  Again, not much really, except that it will undoubtedly be flavoured by the fact that I am an American living in Australia.