Taka sushi

I was just in San Diego for a couple days, where I felt like having sushi. So I tried out this one: Taka Sushi. Wow! It is highly recommended. The sushi chefs speak Japanese, and there were even a couple of native Japanese businessmen in there, looking just how they look in Tokyo.

The fish is tender and sweet, and served in large, medium-thin slices that overwhelm the rice, just like in Japan. (Only in America do they dwarf the fish with a big-ol' chunk of starch. Real sushi is melt-in-your-mouth fish draped over a small rice patty like a full blanket). You might try the Special Battera sushi if you have the chance.

I sat at the bar, which soon became crowded enough that I had a neighbor. He turned out to be in the insurance business, and ate sushi like he was an expert (although he said he had never been to Japan). I was intrigued that the first thing he asked me about Japan was whether it was challenging for me there as a woman.

Definitely a repeater!

Becoming true

Davis Guggenheim may not be a household name, but he directed An Inconvenient Truth. There is an interview with him on WorldChanging.

If you have seen the film, you may have felt the power projecting from Al Gore as he spoke on this subject so dear to his heart. What is this strange and stirring power?

It would be a mistake to think that such power is simply due to the importance of the facts he was presenting. And it would similarly be a mistake to think that such power is somehow inherent to Al Gore. Indeed, if you read the interview above, you will note that Guggenheim had to convince to him to tell his personal story, which Gore felt was irrelevant.

The power you felt was something shining through Al Gore that comes actually when people stop trying so hard to be someone, or do something, or present themselves in a certain way. It comes when people get out of their own way. We can call it many things, but maybe in light of the film's title, we should just call it "telling the truth."

Here is a bit more on truth that I found intriguing and worth pondering:

One of the primary characteristics of psychologically or spiritually mature people is that they never lie to themselves. Truth is not the same as facts. Facts alone carry no power, whereas truth does.

The awesome freedom and profound peace [from the perfection of truth] have nothing to do with how much we know, whom we know, how rich, smart, or beautiful we are, or who admires or even loves us. Rather, it has everything to do with telling ourselves the truth and, in doing so, becoming a true person.

Through mindfulness we discover a truth that is deeper than beliefs. If we don't become someone who is true, we have neither peace nor freedom. When our life is firmly based on truth, peace is not something we have -- it is who we are.

The echo-system

Some people pronounce the word ecosystem as "ee-ko-system," and others as "eh-ko-system." I was listening to someone who says the latter, and had an interesting mis-hearing.

I heard it as echo-system.

And then it occurred to me how perfect this is. The interconnection of nature means that everything we do spreads out like ripples in a pond, or sound in an echo chamber. It comes back, interacts with itself, loops around, and heads out again. We live in a vast echo-system, so we should be careful what we send out into it.

Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal

(Via ELS Connections)

Joel Saladin offers his thoughts on trying to be an honest farmer: Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal. Much of it is about the regulatory constraints placed on modern agriculture. His voice contains both frustration and some sense of wry humor. For instance, this is his description of government regulatory agencies:

These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process.

Toward the end he waxes philosophical.

[I]t is the freedom to opt out that differentiates tyrranical and free societies. How a culture deals with its misfits reveals its strength. The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.

When faith in our freedom gives way to fear of our freedom, then silencing the minority view becomes the operative protocol.

I am intrigued by the idea that faith might really mean (or at least contain an element of) tolerance. In other words, we have faith that things are basically OK, that people are basically OK, and that we can work together to figure things out.

"Faith" is a word that I find complex, and the process of working out its meaning for me is dynamic and ongoing. This gives me a new dimension to consider.

Black and tan.... ice cream?

Yes! Only Ben and Jerry's could create Black and Tan ice cream.

The "black" part is chocolate, and the "tan" part is cream stout ice cream. Does it really taste like beer? Well, NO, of course not in the sense that beer is bitter and ice cream is sweet. But the flavor is darn close. There's definitely a ... beery quality to it. And it goes with the chocolate quite well.

Hmmm! Bartender, I'll take a pint.

Greenwash coming: Don't drown

Marketing is all about mindshare, which means understanding what is going to worm its way into people's minds. One new marketing method is "green" marketing-- appealing to the growing concern people have about the environment, climate change, power usage, and ecosystems. I ran across a great example the other day on ZDNet News. It's an article about 3M's Vikuiti films, which are used on LCD TVs.

(What, you say? There is marketing going on in a news article? Of course! You didn't know this? 3M is presenting its face to the world in a certain way. It's a whole different article to discuss where the line is drawn on "neutral", nonjudgmental reporting when the company giving the journalist the information is presenting it with a certain agenda in mind. Let's talk about that later).

According to the article,

Chemical giant 3M says it can save the world 33 million barrels of oil, if LCD TV manufacturers adopt a new film it has created.

The company's Vikuiti Dual Brightness Enhancement Film D400, or DBEF D400, can cut power consumption in liquid-crystal display TVs by 20 to 30 percent without dropping brightness or picture quality, said Dave Iverson, business manager for LCD TVs at 3M, who spoke at the Society for Information Display conference here.

On an individual TV turned on four hours a day, a TV with DBEF D400 will use about 36.5 kilowatt-hours less per year than a standard LCD TV, Iverson said Wednesday. Over five years, that turns into 182.5 kilowatt-hours.

"This offers a proven way for manufacturers to meet increased demands for energy efficiency," he said.

Now, it's important to realize what's going on here. 3M has been selling DBEF for years, and has enjoyed tremendous sales because of a superior patent position. But some of its key patents are about to enter the public domain, allowing more competition in the LCD film business. This marketing campaign is needed to boost awareness of its films in anticipation of having to distinguish themselves among multiple products in the market.

Furthermore, DBEF has long been part of a class of products called "light recycling film." (There are multiple ways to recycle light, and 3M's method is one of them, and it happens to work the best in a commercial sense). The ZDNet article goes on to highlight the recycling aspect of DBEF as an extension of the "green" qualities emphasized at the beginning!

This has nothing to do with the 3R's (reduce, reuse, recycle), but the word "recycle" is employed to invoke positive sentiment. 3M never bothered to use that long word in its marketing campaigns 5 years ago. No emotional appeal to it. But now, it's a good choice.

Expect more and more companies to proclaim their greenness in the coming years. This is a good thing-- greater awareness of anything allows the light of wisdom to transform it in ways that could not have happened without the awareness. But that does not mean wisdom is automatic-- you still have to exercise some judiciousness.

Phony green advertising is called "greenwash." Start training yourself to spot it-- for two reasons. One is so you don't get sucked into something false, but more improtantly, it's so you can genuinely support those companies that really are "green."

I have no comment on the truth or falseness of 3M's green marketing. But I am certain you will see more and more ads/articles like this.

BGI

It's official. I am enrolling this fall at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute to get an MBA in sustainable business.

There are actually three schools in the US that offer similar programs, all of which sprang into existence in the past few years. That means the curricula are far from settled, the finances of running these places is still in flux, and precious little reputation has been built up by the graduates out in the working world.

Who cares? What I know is that I think programs like this are incredibly important. One way to support them is to attend the school!

I visited BGI a couple months ago to kick the tires. It's located on Bainbridge Island off Seattle, at an ecological institute that usually serves as a retreat center for urban kids who haven't had much chance to be exposed to nature. It's gorgeous. But even more important, the students form a friendly community, and the material being taught and learned is amazing. Systems theory is mingled with accounting, and green-focused entrepreneurship is mixed with traditional marketing. The founder, Gifford Pinchot, comes in to spread his wisdom about gaining support for radical ideas within the bureaucracy of a large organization. Environmental thought leaders serve as part-time professors and mentors.

Something new is happening at BGI. I am grateful to have the opportunity to participate. It will change me to go there, and I am very curious to see what the result will be.

The Lara Sea

The Aral Sea is wet again!

The Aral Sea in central Asia has been in trouble for decades. Soviet engineering diverted the rivers feeding it to create vast agricultural canals, which eventually turned the body of water into two sickly, salty puddles.

By 1990 the falling waters cut the North, or "Small," Aral Sea off from the bigger southern part. In 2001 the island of Vozrozdeniya -- once so isolated that it was used for biological weapons research -- joined the mainland, turning the southern sea into the shape of two collapsing lungs.

All of this took a huge toll on the 3.5 million humans living nearby:

Over the past 15 years chronic bronchitis has increased by 3,000 percent in the area, arthritic diseases by 6,000 per cent. Oral Antaniyazova -- a local doctor whose campaigning on the issue has won her a Goldman Prize, the world's foremost award for grass-roots environmental activists -- says that up to 99 per cent of women of reproductive age on the southern shore of the sea have anaemia, and that 87 per cent of their babies are born with the condition. Cancers, allergies, miscarriages and kidney and liver diseases have all increased, she says, and life expectancy has slumped from 64 years to 51.

To add insult to injury, the irrigation has poisoned the cotton fields with salt, causing production to fall.

But now there is no more Soviet engineering. And the state of Kazakhstan -- rich with oil money -- is attempting to restore the waters of the North Aral by building a dam between the northern and southern portions, then trying to fill it.

By the time the new dam in the Berg Strait was completed last year, work had also been done to rescue the Syr Darya river, which flows into the northern sea, and its flow was doubled.

Even optimists thought it would take years for the small sea to recover; pessimists said it could never happen. But it has now filled up to the top of the dam, and the waters are flowing back towards Aralsk, the main port in the north, having previously retreated as far as 80km. Fishermen in the surrounding villages are going to sea again, and there are plans to release 30 million young fish into its waters to restock the North Aral.

Don't get entirely lost in the glory of this restoration: It is working wonders, but only for northern part. Meanwhile, the South Aral is further collapsing. Perhaps the death of the southern sea will be the price to pay for terraforming the north. All that Soviet engineering indeed had a lasting effect.

But really, I find this story incredibly inspiring. It highlights so many important truths. The main one is this: Human actions have effects. The Soviets permanently changed a large area of geography with their canal-digging projects. But getting people together to build a dam and collectively try to help the problem also had an effect.

Too often, the story of environmentalists is that human actions have caused huge amounts of damage, about which there is absolutely nothing we can do. This is nonsensical! If our actions have effects, then they have effects. We can do something. (And indeed, choosing not to act is itself an action that will have an effect).

But we need to be flexible about what we can do. It is not true that all problems in the world can be made to go away. Another truth of the world is nonreversibility: in fact, nothing can go back to "the way it was." [And would we want that?]

Hence, we are not really "restoring" the Aral Sea. We are creating a new body of water from what used to be the Aral Sea.

Let's call it the Lara Sea.

Radioactive soccer teams

This month's Physics Today has an article about Metin Tolan's calculations to model the outcomes of more than 34,000 professional soccer games. It's worth it just for this quote:

"We approximated a soccer team by a radioactive source. A soccer team emits goals according to Poisson statistics," he says.

Here's how the modeling worked:

Calculating the probability that a team will win or lose a game by a given number of goals leads to what Tolan calls the "Bessel-function theory of football" — as soccer is called in most places outside the US. A modified Bessel function results from summing over products of probabilities expressed as Poisson distributions.

Tolan's calculations assume that goals are independent of one another, which, he says, "is reasonable for soccer, but not, for example, for basketball, because there the points are connected."

[Note: Only a physical scientist could assume that goals are independent. In a single sweep, he dismisses the entire field of sports psychology.]

Here are the results:

[F]or soccer the Bessel-function fits are good. "We have no idea why. I never would have guessed that you would find anything regular in a chaotic game like soccer," says Tolan. Bessel functions would probably not approximate minor league teams well, he adds. "The professional teams, while not of equal strength, have a certain level, and you have a sort of restricted system where not everything can happen."

Hmmmm. This raises many more questions. What does it mean to say soccer is a "chaotic" game? And how does the level of skill restrict the space of what can happen?

Anyway, if you want to place a bet, here's the hot tip:

For this year's World Cup, Tolan and his colleagues carried out 100 000 simulations based on past performance to get the probability of each team's winning the title. "Statistics cannot predict the results of a specific World Cup," says Tolan. "So this is where the fun begins." The simulations put Brazil's chance at 15% and Germany's at 10.5%, he says. But home teams tend to score an average of 0.6 to 1 additional goal per game. Incorporating that "home advantage," says Tolan, boosts Germany's chance of winning to 33%.

Watch your seafood

There are many fish in the sea, but we need to be intelligent about how we take them out. I've been aware for a while that some fish are safer than others in terms of mercury, and that some have been overfished or are not farmed sustainably, and hence should be avoided.

But really, when I stand in front of the seafood counter, this knowledge does not kick in effectively. Who can remember the relative merits of bass, tilapia, and rock cod? And how about all those types of salmon-- Atlantic, King, sockeye, etc-- are they the same?

Thankfully, the Monterey Bay Aquarium has created a regional wallet-sized seafood guide that you can print out and carry to the store with you. One less thing to remember!

Some of the distinctions on the guide are ones that the fish labels probably don't make: Was that tuna caught using a longline or pole method? But you can ask the seafood person behind the counter. The more people ask, the more the store will feel the need to know this information.