Los Angeles to ban all head coverings inside Businesses

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Store owners, Banks have the right not to be threatened by individuals wearing Hoodies, Ski Masks or Burkas

From CBSLocal.com:

The effort is aimed at suspects who hide their faces during crimes, [LAPD Capt. Justin] Eisenberg said.

Headgear is often worn by criminals to shield their faces from security cameras during a break-in or robbery.

“If you think about schools where there are dress codes, or nightclubs or many establishments that have restraints as to what people can wear in their establishments, that’s a right that store owners have,” said Eisenberg. “This is just an additional tool that we’re giving store owners.”

Commenter Mike Lee wrote:

first time... they tell them to take off their hat, just watch... a muslim wearing not a hat but a burka.

Photo from the burka robberies London UK 2010.

Workplace discrimination of Muslim women wearing Hijabs justified?

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Health and Safety after all

From Eric Dondero:

Local governments and businesses in the U.S., Canada and across Europe are struggling with how to deal with increasing demands of Muslim workers. Hertz rent-a-car just made national news for laying-off Muslim drivers who took too many un-authorized breaks for prayer times.

Now this from the AustrianTimes.com:

A woman almost got strangled when her headscarf got caught in a dough mixer.

The 21-year-old woman worked a dough mixing machine in a tent at a party in Vienna's Krieau on Saturday night when her headscarf was caught in the running machine, strangling her by the throat.

A passer-by noticed the accident and cut the headscarf with a knife, saving the woman. She suffered life-threatening injuries but meanwhile is on the way of recovery, the doctor treating her said.

Could a bakery now claim that hiring a Muslim women would be a occupational safety hazard?

White House Fast Tracks Grid Modernization

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transmission lines
Some rights reserved by Theodore Scott

On October 5th, 2011, the White House announced it will fast track grid modernization projects around the country. The Obama Administration said it would accelerate the permitting and construction of seven proposed electric transmission lines in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Minnesota, New Mexico, Nevada, Wyoming, Utah, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Wisconsin. This move is expected to create thousands of jobs for workers in those states, while also beefing up the electrical grids that will benefit domestic energy companies.

The American Wind Energy Association responded to the statement put out by the White House by saying, “…An expanded transmission grid is critical not just for renewable energy, but also for our economic and national security by improving reliability and providing access to lower cost energy for consumers,” said Tom Vinson, AWEA senior director of federal regulatory affairs.

For details and maps on the proposed transmission lines go to the Federal Permitting Transmission Tracking website. Two of the projects listed are in Oregon and Idaho and should provide hundreds of jobs during construction.

Boardman-Hemingway Line powering Oregon and Idaho:

The new 500 kilovolt (kV) transmission line proposed by Idaho Power would create an approximately 300 mile long, single-circuit electric transmission line from a proposed substation near Boardman, Oregon to the Hemingway Substation near Melba, Idaho—known as the Boardman to Hemingway Transmission Line Project or B2H Project. According to the developer of this project during peak construction, this project is estimated to create about 500 jobs in Idaho and Oregon.

Oregon to get additional transmission from Cascade Crossing Line:

Portland General Electric’s proposed Cascade Crossing Transmission Project includes approximately 210 miles of 500 kV transmission line from Boardman to Salem, Oregon—for the construction of four new substations, expansion of three existing substations, and upgrades to the existing transmission systems near Salem. According to the developer, Cascade Crossing is expected to create about 450 jobs during peak construction.

The American Wind Energy Association released a statement that said the three biggest barriers to achieving a grid needed to support the nation’s future energy needs: federal siting, cost allocation, and transmission planning for power lines. They seem to strongly believe that more transmission lines across the country are needed to help spur the renewable energy industry, particularly for wind energy.

“These lines are needed for more than integrating renewable energy. They’re necessary to improve reliability and provide consumers with access to lower priced power…”

With so much going on in the wind energy industry it seems like the stars are aligning for it. An offshore wind conference kicked off in Baltimore a few days ago just as a couple of offshore wind projects are moving forward on the east coast of the United States. Meanwhile, wind power continues to surge across the globe. Between 2000 and 2010, world wind electric generating capacity increased at a frenzied pace from 17,000 megawatts to nearly 200,000 megawatts.

In the Pacific Northwest, transmission lines are sometimes at capacity during high peak times. Production has reached such a critical point that BPA operators and producers worry that lines will become overloaded. That could mean blackouts. More transmission capability will open the door to additional turbines. In fact, construction of new turbines in the area already has slowed because of the lack of transmission.

Thanks to the White House support of the fast tracks in these grid modernization pilot projects, all domestic energy projects, including renewable energy, will be able to benefit.


The history of the world! | Gene Expression

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My post from last week, Relative angels and absolute demons, got a lot of circulation. Interestingly I received several emails from self-described lurkers who asked me for recommendations on world history, with a particular thought to rectify deficiencies in non-European history. These were people who were not looking for exceedingly abstruse monographs. Below are some suggestions….


China: A History. The author is a journalist, so this should be a starting off point, as there are major shortcomings in the narrative. But if you don’t have much background I’d recommend this.

India: A History. Same author as above, same strengths and weaknesses.

China: A New History, Enlarged Edition. A classic survey. Nothing to shout home about, but useful (if sometimes thin and dated).

Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. The author is hated by many Hindu nationalists, but the period is old enough that much of the controversy is not relevant to this work.

When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World. A narrative history of the dynasty which crystallized much of Islam as we understand it.

Empires of the Silk Road. This is more a magnum opus, but it’s not a dry one. It can help “connect” the histories of the peripheral zones of the Eurasian ecumene.

A History of Iran. Iran is a small country, but its location is such that an understanding of it’s history can illuminate a great deal.

Power and Plenty. An economic history of the past 1,000 years.

After Tamerlane. The past 600 years. Becomes progressively more Eurocentric, as it should.

The Early Chinese Empires. This is not a long book, and it gives you a sense of what China was like before foreign influences (e.g., Buddhism).

The Classical World. Most people know very little of Western antiquity.

God’s War. This history of the Crusades ranges from the Baltic to Egypt. It has a wide enough spatial and temporal coverage to be a world history.

The Peacock Throne. To some extent this treatment of Mughal India almost seems out of Bollywood in terms of its dramatic nature. But then again the Timurids provide great raw material.

Africa. The title is short, but the yield is long.

1491. Many people know everything in this book, but too few still.

A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000 – 323 BC. This is an understudied subject. You need this to see long term patterns which began only with the Classical Greeks.

The Rise of Western Christendom. You can’t understand the core of antiquity and the roots of the Middle Ages without this book.

The Human Web. A world history co-authored by one of the masters, William H. McNeill.

That’s all for now. I haven’t updated it in a while, but you might want to check out Razib on books.

In which states do grandchildren live at home? | Gene Expression

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I recently noted that the SDA Archive has an American Community Survey interface. The ACS has huge sample sizes because the US government can afford to do extensive surveys. And naturally you find some really interesting facts. For example, there’s a variable which tells you about the presence of grandchildren in the household. In some nations this wouldn’t be a big deal, but in the USA it is not too common. You can also look at this by state, which is what I did. Then I compared the total proportion to those limited with college degrees or higher. No surprise, those with college degrees tended to be less likely to have grandchildren living at home…. But can you guess which state has the highest proportion of grandchildren living at home? And which states deviate from the trendline? Surprises to me….


Shades of preference in storytelling | Gene Expression

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Humans seem to have a strong bias toward narratives. We like stories. This is obvious when you read sports columns. Most of the time there’s really no substantive value-add. If you want substance, just check box scores. But we want a story. So sports columnists give us a story. Usually something mildly counter-intuitive, general platitudes and conventional wisdom with just a twist. It doesn’t matter if you’re wrong, no one cares. How many people remember Bill Walton talking about how Shawn Bradley was a better basketball player than Shaquille O’Neil?

Much the same applies to political punditry. There was no point in speculating whether Rick Perry would, or wouldn’t, do well as an aspirant nominee of the Republican party for the presidency. We’d know sooner or later. I really got tired of Texas pundits like Eric Greider going on about how we shouldn’t underestimate him. Aside from the fact that he was smart enough to be an air force officer, everything else implies that he’s not too sharp, validated especially by his recent debate performances. But we wanted a story, so there was a demand for pundits from Texas talking Perry’s prospects up. Now we have pundits like Ross Douthat echoing the line that Mitt Romney is inevitable as the nominee. Great. But remember when Ross and Matt Yglesias simply couldn’t imagine a scenario in which Hillary Clinton wasn’t the nominee in December of 2007? I do.

So we love stories. That’s a human universal. As human beings we have particular cognitive orientations which are general across our species. Our facility for language for example. An appreciation of art and other cultural productions which don’t seem to have immediate utility. But there is also variation. Our tastes differ. But sometimes we forget that. I thought of that when reading this piece in Slate, For the Love of Science Fiction. The author begins “…I disdained science fiction for many years, considering it too short on humanity and too long on pointless technical specs.“ There is definitely going to be a mention of Ursula K. Le Guin. The author concludes:

Perhaps the most important guidance Atwood offers on reading and loving science fiction is to respect the craft’s ability to explore unintended consequences but not to overstate its predictive qualities: “I carefully say a future rather than the future because the future is an unknown: from the moment now, an infinite number of roads lead away to ‘the future,’ each heading in a different direction,” she writes. I will cling to those words the next time I read a terrifying depiction of a technologically rich but morally bankrupt society in the years to come. Like the author who’s next up in my science fiction education: Neal Stephenson.

The first thing that came to mind is that the author has a background in liberal arts if they could throw out a line about “pointless technical specs.” Some people actually enjoy understanding technical specs! I mention Ursula K. Le Guin because in one of her essays she discusses her attitude toward science fiction and admitted her lack of interest in a lot of natural science, and her fascination with social science. Le Guin varies the parameters of sociology to generate her stories. In contrast, writers such as Greg Egan vary the laws of physics. Whether the former or letter is to your taste depends on your background and predispositions. In any case, the author of the above piece majored in “English with minors in business, media studies, and Latin.” If she had majored in engineering or physics I suspect that the technical sidebars and exposition which much of science fiction is larded with would seem less pointless, and much more illuminating. So this a matter of taste, not objective truth in terms of what is, and isn’t, good science fiction.

Somehow great literature is measured by psychological complexity rather than material complexity. “World building” is seen as a bonus, instead of essential context. But whether you see it as essential context or not is probably a matter of your own psychological orientation. And this exists on a continuum. Some readers of hard science fiction can not brook the fudges which are necessary in even this genre when it comes concepts such as faster-than-light travel. L. Sprague de Camp famously focused more on fantasy than hard science fiction because his background in engineering made it impossible for him to suspend disbelief even for the purpose of writing a story.

As I grow older I seem to be turning away from hard science fiction (when I have time to read fiction, which is not often). Does this mean that I am developing more refined taste? Perhaps. But I suspect that my brain is aging and changing, and so my preferences are as well. I’ve lived enough of a life that I have a requisite stock of social intelligence with which I can appreciate the subtly in more psychologically oriented fiction, where characters have more texture and grayness. Additionally, my own technical interests in science have narrowed to the point where I get a lot less out of science fiction which is predicated on some knowledge of disciplines where my comprehension is thin. This is a case where the child is not the father of the man. Just as I have changed over time, so humans a a species have different aesthetic preferences, rather than superior and inferior ones. I wish that people would be a bit more self-aware about this.