RSS FeedAdios, Varmints
For the past seven years, until this weekend, I have lived in “the South”—in a few different places in Alabama and Georgia. I grew up in Florida, which is also a southern state, obviously, though not always in the capital-s sense. All of my human neighbors over the years have been unfailingly pleasant and hospitable. But many of my non-human neighbors I most assuredly will not miss. Among them are, first and foremost, the American Cockroach; and second, the mosquito.
As I set out for the San Francisco Bay Area, where I spent almost four years after college, I am reminded of the blissful and near total absence of both of my two greatest insect nemeses. I know there are many positive reasons to love the Bay Area, but these negative reasons are frankly far more significant to me. I am, at bottom, much less a pleasure-seeker than a displeasure-avoider.
So, good-bye ye dark and hideous invaders of my psychological comfort zones, and good riddance ye baneful blood-gorging plagues. May you and your proboscises shrivel and desiccate in an evolutionary cul de sac of no consequence to anything.
Weekend Wordery: In Praise of Y’all
I grew up in Northwest Florida, so I am, geographically at least, a southerner. But I don’t have a southern accent—maybe just a touch here and there, but hardly anyone recognizes it. I don’t say “own” for the word on; I do not pronounce my name with two syllables (“gee-um”); and I do not use such phrases as “used to could.”
But I do sometimes stress the initial syllable of umbrella rather than the second. And I do, from time to time, employ the second-person plural pronoun y’all.
Now, English has an official second-person plural pronoun: you. But, on its own, you is not always adequate to the task of providing actionable information. In certain contexts, it must be supplemented, as in: “You two get out of here,” or “You are all invited.” Otherwise, you can’t tell from the context whether, for example, both of you should get out or just one of you; or if you and your whole group are invited, or just you alone. This ambiguity inevitably necessitates a request for clarification, usually including an explanation of the reason for confusion, followed by the requested clarification, and then an apology; obviously, much of that exchange would be optional, but is often socially expected.
No such problem exists in any of the European languages I’m familiar with, where typically both the pronoun and the verb inflection tell you whether the meaning is singular or plural. And it need not be a problem for us, either, because y’all is a perfectly serviceable candidate for a second-person plural pronoun in English—indeed, it already is one, whether “official” or not. So I guess the more relevant point to make is this: y’all isn’t stupid; on the contrary, it is a very useful addition to the language. And it’s time for y’all to embrace it.
Weekend Birdery: The Mosquito
The mosquito, according to leading organismal biologists, is not a bird. It does fly, and it is featured in this Weekend Birdery post. Yet it is not a bird. People in southern states sometimes like to quip that their state bird should be the mosquito, 
but as far as I can tell the distinction between birds and insects remains one of the areas of universally accepted scientific knowledge not actively disputed by conservative state and local officials in the South.
Anyway, I have two unresolved lines of inquiry concerning the biology of mosquitoes.
First: what is the trick to the way mosquitoes seem to vanish into thin air? Is there some set of tactical mosquito-flight maneuvers such that, if you knew them, you would know where to look for an offending mosquito after it has evaded your swat? For example, do they drop straight down, and/or zigzag backwards? Something different every time? In any case, if you haven’t lost track of the offender, it seems the most effective way to kill it is by clapping it between your hands. This reduces the chance that the air-flow disturbance caused by the swatting motion will simply push the mosquito out of harm’s way, as commonly results from the one-hand swat. A bazooka may work, too.
And second: wouldn’t it be better for mosquitoes, from an evolutionary perspective, if their proboscises didn’t cause such irritating reactions? I suppose the answer here is the fact that, even though the irritation leads to us making sporadic efforts to kill them, we don’t kill nearly enough of them to give rise to any selection effects.
Photograph by Darlyne A. Murawski.
Programming Note
Tomorrow is moving day. I’ll be unplugged for much of the next week or two until our stuff lands at our new pad in the SF bay area. My spouse and youngun’ are going ahead in one of them big jet planes while I steer our stagecoach over hill and dale.
Chart Du Jour: Effects of Partial Repeal of the ACA
Via Igor Volsky, here’s a chart from a report by Jonathan Gruber (pdf) detailing what would be the effects of scaling back the Affordable Care Act:
If the nightmare scenario of the legal challenges to health reform came true and the Supreme Court struck down the individual mandate, we can all look back at this chart and figure out how much they took us for.
Crude, Degrading
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provides this chart of where all the spilled Deepwater Horizon oil has gone:
Bradford Plumer summarizes:
About one-quarter of the oil is still bobbing on the sea surface or washed ashore. Another quarter has been dispersed into microscopic droplets, either by artificial chemicals or natural processes. And another quarter has been “dissolved.” All told, just 25 percent has been physically removed from the Gulf ecosystem. The rest is still lurking… somewhere.
It’s good to know that much of the oil has evaporated or been dispersed. The trouble is, as Kate Sheppard notes, that there are still “about nine and a half Exxon Valdez spills” out there.
Find the Flaw in this Argument
This is how the American Families Association reacted to the ruling by federal district court Judge Vaughan Walker that California’s Prop. 8 (banning same-sex marriage) violated the federal Constitution:
It’s also extremely problematic that Judge Walker is a practicing homosexual himself. He should have recused himself from this case, because his judgment is clearly compromised by his own sexual proclivity.
…whereas practicing heterosexuals have never been known to allow biases about their own sexual proclivity interfere with their tireless pursuit of equal justice for all? Hmmm.
Could any defense of the anti-gay agenda be more illustrative of its own failure to comprehend the meaning of equal protection of the law? It’s amazing that it’s even possible to be so oblivious to the fact that your own positions cannot withstand the very same criticisms you make against your opponents’.
Via Igor Volsky.
Weekend Wordery: Ghoughpteighbteau
Last week I blogged about spelling reform in response to a post Matt Yglesias wrote a while back. I mentioned “Ghoti,” the re-spelling of fish (with the gh from tough, the o from women, and the ti from nation) that illustrates the absurd possibilities of letter combinations in English. Another example is “Ghoughpteighbteau.” Try to work it out, if you’re in a sporting mood. I’ll even drop a hint or two in the comments. Otherwise, go straight to the answer here.
One more thing I wanted to comment on: Yglesias says “we lack an underlying set of rules to determine how letter-strings form phonemes.” But by and large that is not true. English spelling is mostly predictable and follows regular rules. According to Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct, about 84% of English words follow regular, predictable spelling patterns. And the words with the weirdest spellings (like people, women, done) are among the most commonly used words, which makes them relatively easy to memorize.
But the crux of Yglesias’ point still stands: it’s pretty hard for non-native speakers and even native speakers with little educational capital to reach levels of spelling attainment required to succeed in any venture where written communication is important. It is worth mentioning however that the reason isn’t just that English is so loopy. It’s that people who have attained sophisticated written language skills are generally intolerant of and biased against those who have not—even when there are plenty of complementary signals of intelligence and skill available. It would be interesting to explore those biases and find out how deep they run. Pretty deep, I’d guess.
Weekend Birdery: Oil Cleanup Crews May Be Worse Than Oil
At coastal nesting sites in Florida, well-meaning oil cleanup crews have inadvertently trampled shorebird nesting sites, apparently becoming as much of a threat as the oil itself in some cases. A resource management specialist at the Gulf Islands National Seashore at Pensacola Beach (shown below) was quoted by National Geographic as saying, “the cleanup can do more damage than the oil could ever do.”
From April to August each year, rare shorebirds such as the snowy plover and least tern lay nests of two to three eggs directly on the softly undulating, open dunes about 40 feet (13 meters) from the water’s edge.
Snowy plovers and least terns are considered threatened in Florida. When nesting, both species’ survival depends on limited contact with people.
But with oil encroaching on Florida’s coasts, an army of cleanup crews has descended on the seashore. About 44,300 people are now de-oiling roughly 450 miles (720 kilometers) of Gulf coastline, according to the website for the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command, the joint federal-industry task force responding to the Gulf oil spill.
With so many people working so close to breeding grounds, frightened adult birds are abandoning their nests, and adults and chicks are being inadvertently trampled.
Manufacturing Standing
Igor Volsky asks a good question about Monday’s ruling in Virginia v. Sebelius: Why should Virginia be allowed to manufacture standing to challenge the individual mandate?
In fact, that really is the question in this case. Unlike the other 20+ states challenging the ACA in Florida, Virginia argues that it has standing based on the federal government’s interference with Virginia’s “sovereign” lawmaking authority reserved to it by the Tenth Amendment. In other words, Virginia claims standing based on the conflict between the ACA and the state’s own Virginia Health Care Freedom Act, which outlaws an individual insurance mandate. Now, my own rule of thumb is to tune out any legal argument which relies in any way on the Tenth Amendment or employs the word ‘sovereignty’ as if it had any cognizable meaning at all. You can ponder the arguments if you wish—and in a different mood, I might—but basically what the judge said is this: Virginia has standing because its government wants it.
Here’s how I think things could shake out on appeal. The Fourth Circuit will be more discriminating than the district court, and will separate out the issues that Judge Hudson conflated in his opinion. It will find no current or imminent injury to the state’s interest. It will then rule that the Virginia law has been preempted by the ACA and, as such, cannot be the basis for standing. (Heads will spin at the thought of getting a kind of substantive ruling that undermines the basis for standing, the procedural hurdle which must be cleared in order to reach the substance in the first place. But hey—this is standing! It’s not supposed to make sense.)
The Supreme Court will then decline to take the case on cert, or summarily affirm the circuit court; we won’t see the substantive issues until 2015 when a modest taxpayer somewhere challenges them, after the penalty has been assessed.1
Why wouldn’t the Supreme Court want to rule in Virginia’s favor? Because the conservatives on the Court are generally fanatical about standing restrictions. Chief Justice Roberts in particular really doesn’t want to see a proliferation of ways for anyone or anything—including Tenther-loving red states—to manufacture standing.
- I’ll go out on a limb and predict that this modest taxpayer challenger will be a Republican, or else will suddenly have lots of Republican friends. [↩]
Pi/e
Woah, I guess pie aren’t squared, after all.
From the Puzzler. (Hat tip Austin Frakt).
Who’s Afraid of the Virginia Challenge to Healthcare Reform?
On Monday, a federal judge ruled that Virginia’s constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s individual-mandate provisions could go forward, denying the Administration’s motion to dismiss. Probably the most important thing to bear in mind about the ruling is that it was only preliminary—not a final, definitive victory for either side.
The opinion (pdf), issued by Judge Henry Hudson of the Eastern District of Virginia, dealt primarily with issues of justiciability: standing, ripeness, and statutory jurisdictional restrictions under the Anti-Injunction Act. Each of those issues were resolved in Virginia’s favor, though not always convincingly. They will certainly be revisited on appeal. The ruling also touched on the merits of the case but left their resolution to a later date. (For a more detailed review of the opinion, see this post by Jack Balkin.)
Two key ideas undergird Monday’s decision. The first is that a state should be accorded special access to federal court when challenging the constitutionality of a federal law that conflicts with state law. And the second is that the ACA’s individual mandate is unlike anything else in federal law and raises novel constitutional issues which cannot be definitively resolved by precedent.
I can’t say I strongly disagree with either of those propositions, even though I believe the mandate should ultimately be found constitutional. But nevertheless there are signs of trouble ahead. As Professor Balkin writes, Judge Hudson clearly “tipped his hand [as sympathizing with the challengers] in the way he describes the case,” framing the issue as whether the federal government can force individuals to participate in commerce and collapsing the taxing power argument into the commerce power argument.
Also, though again I’m not too troubled by the result, the court’s analysis of standing seems somewhat muddled. States aren’t generally granted standing to sue the federal government on behalf of their citizens, but must have their own “sovereign interests” at stake. Now, Judge Hudson found that the ACA’s individual mandate was in conflict with a “core sovereign power” of the state: its legislative authority as exercised through the enactment of the Virginia Health Care Freedom Act, which declares that no citizen of Virginia will be subject to any mandate to buy insurance. Judge Hudson deemed this conflict between the Virginia VHCFA and the federal ACA sufficient to establish standing.
OK, so what’s wrong with that? Well, maybe nothing’s wrong with it. But there certainly is something fishy going on in there. Here’s Brad Joondeph at the aca litigation blog:
States arguably should have standing to sue the federal government to determine whether a state law is preempted in particular circumstances–specifically, when the existence of the federal law jeopardizes the legality of the actual or imminent enforcement of a state law. For instance, if California makes it unlawful to generate a certain level of greenhouse gases, and a federal law arguably preempts the state law, the state plausibly is entitled to seek declaratory relief to determine whether the enforcement of the state law is permissible (i.e., not preempted), at least when the state is actually committing (or about to commit) significant resources to its state-level enforcement regime.
Here, though, there is no sincere (or realistic) desire by Virginia to “enforce” anything. (The ACA may be forcing Virginia to carry out certain actions already related to Medicaid, but those actions are wholly unrelated to the minimum coverage requirement of ACA 1501 that the Commonwealth is challenging.) Virginia’s law, as a transparent attempt to nullify a federal statute, was legally invalid at its inception. It purports to direct the federal government on how it can regulate the citizens of Virginia. This is constitutionally inadmissible. Or at least it has been since 1865.
(Emphasis added.) This seems to me the central argumentative ploy of Judge Hudson’s opinion: opportunistic muddling. The opinion conflates implementation of the ACA’s Medicaid and insurance-regulation reforms with implementation of the mandate—even though the state has absolutely no role in the latter. It conflates Virginia’s “sovereign” interests with the interests of its citizens. It conflates a single, declaratory enactment of the Virginia legislature with the full breadth of state “sovereign” powers. It conflates the mandate’s minimum coverage requirements with its penalty. And it conflates the scope of the commerce power with that of the taxing power.
For the most part, all that muddling and conflation is achieved obliquely—e.g., through a suggestive quotation from plaintiff’s counsel. And though I’m not worried about the mandate’s long-term prospects, I’d be a lot more comfortable for now if Judge Henry Hudson didn’t seem so comfortable with the arguments of the mandate’s opponents.
Oil Spills? Don’t Worry, They Happen All the Time
Kate Sheppard shares the map below from a National Wildlife Federation report on the many oil-production incidents which occurred in recent years, before BP captured our full attention. Sheppard writes:
From 2000 to 2009, onshore pipeline accidents caused 2,554 major incidents, including 161 deaths and 576 injuries. Offshore, 1,443 incidents caused 41 fatalities, 302 injuries, 476 fires, and 356 releases of pollution into the waters.
A Visual Guide to Rock Paper Scissors
I think the title “How Do I Win Rock Paper Scissors Every Time?” is more than a little misleading, but I’m glad to know about the “unexpected and highly illegal” Spock maneuver:
Via Cool Infographics.
Weekend Wordery: Ghoti out of Water
Matt Yglesias thinks that a language in which spelling bees are possible is a language that needs to simplify and regularize its spelling.
For a long time, of course, English words were spelled irregularly because spelling simply wasn’t regularized. But for the past 150 years or so spelling words “correctly” has been an important class signifier, even as we lack an underlying set of rules to determine how letter-strings form phonemes. Thus it’s possible for “correct” spelling to differ from country to country, and it’s harder than it needs to be for children to learn how to spell. And it’s worth noting that the adverse impact falls especially hard on children from a low socioeconomic background. It would be one thing to teach such kids a finite set of spelling rules, but to ask a child to master a vast set of brute-force memorizations creates a situation wherein whether or not his parents know how to spell “correctly” is going to be a major factor in his own success.
If you look at French or Russian or Spanish (to name some languages I’m familiar with) by contrast, if you know how the language works it’s very easy to relate what a word sounds like to how it’s spelled. English is full of stuff like the “ough” letter combination that’s pronounced all kinds of ways (”thought,” “thorough,” “tough”) words that are pronounced two different ways (”wound,” “bow”) and nutty spellings like “stomach” that have nothing to do with how the word is said.
Yglesias is obviously not the first to wish for more consistency between written symbols and spoken sounds in English. George Bernard Shaw, noted fellow traveller of this cause (and others), illustrated the absurdity of English spelling by suggesting the word fish be spelled “ghoti”—with the gh from tough, the o from women, and the ti from nation.
I don’t disagree with Yglesias’ inclination to help people thrive by making it easier to learn standard written English. Far from it. But, as I suspect everybody intuitively recognizes, broad-based spelling reform is doomed to fail. There are some fairly obvious and boring reasons for this: inertia, absence of a central body with authority to disseminate new standards, too many speakers in too many places, etc. The more interesting reason is that spelling-reform advocates may misjudge the purpose of a system of writing.
Spelling-reform advocates tend to assume that there’s something wrong when graphemes (units of written language) don’t match up neatly with phonemes (units of spoken language). But written language isn’t just about encoding units of sound. As Steven Pinker writes in the Language Instinct (excerpt here):
English spelling is not completely phonemic; sometimes letters encode phonemes, but sometimes a sequence of letters is specific to a morpheme. And a morphemic writing system is more useful than you might think. The goal of reading, after all, is to understand the text, not to pronounce it. A morphemic spelling can help a reader distinguish homophones, like meet and mete. It can also tip off a reader that one word contains another (and not just a phonologically identical impostor). For example, spelling tells us that overcome contains come, so we know that its past tense must be overcame, whereas succumb just contains the sound “kum,” not the morpheme come, so its past tense is not succame but succumbed. Similarly, when something recedes, one has a recession, but when someone re-seeds a lawn, we have a re-seeding.
[...] Of course English spelling could be better than it is. But it is already much better than people think it is. That is because writing systems do not aim to represent the actual sounds of talking, which we do not hear, but the actual abstract units of language underlying them, which we do hear.
If serving as a pronunciation guide is not the sole purpose of written language, then simplifying and regularizing our spelling would interfere with other language functions, namely the morphemic function. I’m not sure what exactly would happen if we tried, but if spelling reform were even possible, it is not at all clear that the outcome would be beneficial to anyone—perhaps least of all to Matt Yglesias and those of us who are enriched by the nuanced contents of his mind as expressed through the sometimes complex and irregular spellings of written English.