Road Trip

This Thanksgiving, in an effort to save some cash on expensive plane tickets and dog boarding, we decided to rent a car and drive to New England. My love for a good road trip has never dimmed and so of course I was up for it. We even convinced Susan, Lauren's sister, to fly down here from New York and drive back up there with us. It was all Susan's idea, and honestly with the exception of me and few other people, no one could understand why she would want to do this. My philosophy was, the more the merrier, and I was glad that she had suggested it. Plus we never get to see her and so even if our time together was crammed in a Dodge Caliber with dog in tow it was time well spent. I'm not sure if she felt that way at the end of the trip but it's the thought that counts.

We left Atlanta early Tuesday morning and set off for Lambetville, NJ to stay with Lauren's dad in his apartment there. We made decent time and the back seat (with the dog) of the Dodge turned out to be a real hit, everyone fell asleep when seated there. We arrived in Lamberville around 8:30, 14.5 short hours after we left Atlanta.

Lambertville is a hip little town situated right on the Delaware across from New Hope, Pennsylvania. Lauren and I made it out for a walk along the river in the morning before leaving. From there we headed to Hampton, CT to stay on the farm with Lauren's mom and Mack. Here we spent our Thanksgiving before heading out on Friday to Newport to spend time with family there. By Saturday our short trip had come to end and it was time to pack up the car and hit the road once again. We were not sure where we were going to stop or stay on Saturday night but we set off just the same. We pondered going to DC to stay with friends and head down 95 but changed our minds somewhere in Virginia. Then we started thinking about finding a dog-friendly hotel in Charlotte but again changed our minds.

Ultimately we trudged through and beat the Sunday traffic by arriving at our house in the middle of the night on Saturday. By the end of it we had added 2,318 miles to the Caliber and see three generations of two sides of Lauren's family. We'd also eaten more than our fair share and paid our first visit to Lauren's dad's new house. In the process we managed to save over $1000 compared to flying and boarding the dog. Now we're trying to decide whether or not to do it again (to Michigan) in December.

Seeing Like a (noun)

The end of my semester is here and I am semi-swamped with little pieces of things to get done. I also find myself running constantly to another meeting. I was telling someone earlier today (while looking for a bright spot) that I like this time of the year as I get to cross so many things off my to do list. Of course getting them done and handing in quality work are not equivalent. Regardless I haven't found too many of my peers eager to share in my optimism.

As I have been away for the blog for a bit I thought I could at least share with you some of my work. For a Anthropological Perspectives on Global Health assignment I read a book and wrote a reaction paper. Here is a summary of the book, I'll spare you the reaction so as you can have your own. If it sparks your interest, follow the link at the bottom to buy it, or find me and you can borrow.

The cover of Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott features a z-shaped double bend in an empty road with little else around it except for meticulously manicured fields. The jog in the road is a systematic blip in an otherwise uniform grid of roads that have been laid out to define six-square-mile townships in North Dakota. The roads follow lines of longitude and are forced to dogleg every twenty-four miles in order to keep with the decreasing distance between longitudinal lines as they continue north. Initially, the photo seems an unimportant adornment on an otherwise detailed work of analysis, however once you have read the text this choice of photo becomes much clearer.

In the text, Scott points out the methods which states have used to simplify, control, standardize, manage, and manipulate complex and diverse systems; first in nature and eventually in social environments. Scott begins with the example of a managed forest in which specific characteristics of the forest (perhaps specific to a type of tree), for example growth rate/yield, are recorded, monitored, and managed so that over time the forest is changed to take on those characteristics that its managers have favored. He views this as an oversimplification of the complex system that is the forest and points out some of the flaws and vulnerabilities it exposes.

Having exhibited control of the ‘wild’ natural forest the management of inhabited land followed. Scott argues that similar simplifications and standardizations, most influentially with the cadastral maps, were a necessary part of modern statehood and important in colonization. Maps were developed so that the state could quickly survey lands for the enumeration and location of population, wealth, and resources allowing those in charge to act strategically to influence ownership and to ultimately impose their own values. The influence was increased though the use of standardized systems of measurement, languages and surnames. More importantly, Scott shows that as officials of these modern states assessed life as a series of categorizations they were removed, to some degree, from the society they governed.

Scott carries his analysis from the formation of modern states to larger social and philosophical movement of High Modernism. Here he explains some of the more extreme authoritarian views on using the new science of the day to manage people as well as place. In High Modernism, an understanding of administrative ordering of nature and society is assumed to be an entitlement to such duties. Proponents of such radicalism proposed a comprehensive rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition. It is typified by a top-down structure, the rejection of the past as a model upon which to build and is influenced by the military mobilization of World War I. The technocratic nature of High Modernism brings with it an incredible hubris. This is amplified in the circumstance of colonization where visionaries of the day were less constrained to carry out grand schemes and the chasm of cultural knowledge was even greater. Here Scott points out the failures of High Modernist agriculture and ‘villagization’ in Africa.

Seeing Like a State

For the Birds

In this age of the internet, most of us are constantly turning to the internet for answers. In that search you are likely to come across multiple sites that provide access to the same type of information, and so the question becomes which one gives me the most accurate information and which are the easiest to use. The latter is a question of particular interest to me. New tools are always being developed to help the user work with the interface to find what their looking for and do so with efficiency.

This is most obvious in looking at the banners and sidebars that act like tables of contents for websites. One of the most useless tools that websites employ must be the sitemap. An example of web design navigation success are breadcrumbs that help you see where you've come from or the departments under which the information you are viewing fall.
Alternatively some webpages are designed specifically for getting people to the information they want when they have relatively little to go on. Our recent car search (which ended at a 2003 Jetta) had us trying out a few such web tools that allow you to customize your search by style, number of doors, power accessories, etc. All of these options are fairly familiar to all of us. Not many people have trouble telling you how many doors are on a car. However, in other situations these defining characteristics are not so clear.

We found ourselves in one such situation recently when while playing bocce ball in the back yard we saw an odd bird hopping around back there. Now, imagine going to a site like the used car site and entering wing style. That's when we came across whatbird.com. This site had a very helpful multistage selection search feature that helped us to finally identify our newest wildlife as the American Woodcock. You can choose from a number of options including call type and there are examples and pictures to help you make your selections. When Matt and I came in from the game I could only describe the bird as a chipmunk with wings. As you could imagine my description was not too helpful in identifying the bird, but thanks to the ingenuity of the tool we succeeded. It turned what felt like ignorance into knowledge.

If you have a web tool that you love please share it.

American Woodcock

Year One

Tuesday probably passed without you even noticing, but it was a day of serious memorial. Though I’ve slowed in recent weeks (decreased my vargocity) I am proud to announce that we’ve made it through an entire year of blogging here at Vargocity. To celebrate, I urge you to go back to some of the first posts and (re)read them.

In the past year I got 93 posts up and hope to do more in the coming year. There are always new things happening around me and plenty of good material. You, the reader are an important part of my motivation and the site's continuation. Thank you for your attention and I hope you will keep coming back for more.