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I fulfilled a promise to my daughter last week with a 5-day trip to Cape Cod.

She’d never been to the ocean before :-)

It was a wonderful trip — very beachy! My daughter learned how to use a boogy board to ride the waves and got to hold a star fish some other kids had caught.

One of the nice things about Cape Cod is how different the beaches are depending on where you go. We sampled three different areas, including the National Seashore on the upper cape — wonderful surf, but cooooold –

Leashed dogs allowed outside the lifeguard areas! Hooray! Because every dog needs to learn that if you eat a bunch of beach sand, it’s gonna come back up . . . a little at a time . . . for hours . . . and hours . . . and hours . . .

We also spent one day on the bay side, where the water was calmer & shallower.

We caught dozens of little hermit crabs :-) All of whom are named “Hermie” btw.

We stayed in South Yarmouth, on a beach that faces the south. The water there was warm enough there for lots of boogey board practice. And our hotel held beach parties at night, with live music . . .

. . . plus kid-friendly activities like night volleyball. Kept my daughter happy while I took pics of this sunset.

All told, an idyllic summer interlude — and the native Cape Codders, I have to say, are some of the nicest people you’d ever hope to meet. So many little kindnesses they showed us! Thank you guys!

Oh, and thank you Debi for letting us pit stop at your place on our way out — and inviting us to stop back again on our way back, don’t ask me how I managed to miss the exit :-)

You got it, New Yorkers: a bloated, paraciticistic bureaucracy that taxes us rapaciously one day, then gives a bit back (aka pork projects, STAR rebates) the next with a nice wet “see all we do for you?” kissy kiss.

Apparently it works for most of us most of the time. But what about now, when the economy is stumbling?

We’ll soon find out: as the WS Journal reported a few days ago, New York is one of many states facing a huge tax shortfall.

A spokesperson for Paterson is out there softening us up with the words “fiscal crisis.”

The Albany Times-Union piece lists some possible solutions. Guess what they cite at #1? Raise taxes, of course.

Once you’ve fed it and fed it and fed it, you can’t cut it off — it won’t let you.

Good thing the government’s in charge of keeping us happy and healthy and entertained! Such a deal, such a deal!

The economy is teetering. Our food & gas prices are climbing. And, lest we forget, we citizens of New York are the highest taxed in the country.

So how do we want our politicians to spend our tax money?

If you’re a construction worker, you’ll answer: Build Renaissance Square! Because yeah, if that happens, you’ll have a job for, ya know, a few months.

I can understand that. But what comes next?

Most likely, a big long morning after. For example, take this article by Mark Yost in the Wall Street Journal. He’s writing about sports stadiums, but what he says is enough to remind you of your worst public project hangover.

Sports economists have long argued that publicly financed stadiums are a waste of taxpayer money. And they have the data to prove it.

Yes, stadiums do create high-paying construction jobs for a year or two. But the vast majority of long-term employment is low-wage concession jobs. A Congressional Research Service study of the Baltimore Ravens stadium found that each job created cost the state $127,000. By comparison, Maryland’s Sunny Day Fund created jobs for about $6,000 each . . .

Then there’s the fact that only a sliver of the tax base really benefits from a sports stadium. And with ticket prices rising rapidly, that group is getting much smaller.

Consider the New York Yankees, who have the highest payroll in baseball and take in more than $300 million a year just from their television network. They’ll move into a new $1 billion stadium next year, about half of which was covered by the taxpayers. Seats behind home plate that cost $250 this year will be ten times that next year. The net result is that very few of the people who paid for the stadium will be able to afford a seat there.

But perhaps the best argument against publicly financed stadiums is straight out of Econ 101: Opportunity cost.

“What else could the city have invested its money in and what kind of a return would it have produced?” said King Banaian, chairman of the St. Cloud State (Minn.) Economics Dept. Despite reams of evidence to the contrary, the District proceeded with what Councilman Kwame Brown calls “the most controversial project in the history of the city.”

It was controversial, he said, because the city had more pressing needs. The city’s schools are in shambles; crime is out of control; and unemployment in distressed neighborhoods, like Southeast, is double the national average, if not higher.

Fortunately, people are raising their voices. In City Newspaper, Mary Anna Towler asks a whole slew of questions about Ren Square that need to be asked.

Was the big theater the best theater for Ren Square? If MCC or SUNY owns the theater, will taxpayers’ money be diverted from education to subsidize the theater?

If there’s not enough money for the theater, should we go ahead with the MCC campus and the bus station?

And: does downtown Rochester need Ren Square? A few years ago, it seemed to be about the only development hope we had. That’s no longer true. Is it a good idea to build Ren Square, taking prime development land out of the private market - and taking that land off the tax roles?

There’s also an excellent comment after the City piece:

It would be good if the transit portion of the project were as closely analysed as the PAC. Shouldn’t we also notice that over $100 million TRANSIT dollars are essentially being squandered in a way that will make the bus system slower, less efficient and much more costly to operate? Ther is no advantage to the city to leave the auditorium theater and sibleys building empty, as the current plan would do.To pursue such a plan in an environment of record gas prices, (not to mention global warming) falls on the spectrum between “sub optimal use of public funds” and “complete insanity”. The bus station is both the achilles heel and fatal flaw since it literally cannot be used by buses. This might explain why no traffic study has been done.

Hopefully the Ren Square cloud will clear in time to save the federal transit funds to use for badly needed transportation projects that actually move people TOWARDS their destination at lower energy and lower cost.

We have already spent $15.8 million on the Renaissance Square project.

Are we going to wake up and say “no more” before it’s too late?

You know we’re in trouble when our best hope is that Chuck “Godzilla” Schumer will find a way to jinx Ren Square like he did Indy Mac.

Rochester region EWGA chapter tournament, played at Ravenwood yesterday. I shot a 101 and took low gross for my flight.

I’m a happy camper :-)

Cross-posted at Golfolicious.

I am now drinking distilled water, and I just had to share this: when I finish distilling a gallon of water, there are a few teaspoons left in the bottom of the distiller tank, and I kid you not, it’s the color of weak tea.

Bleh! What is that stuff? I have no idea. Mind you, I’m starting with water that has already run through a decent countertop filter.

Here’s a pic of my distiller. I bought it from EcoPure. It cost $100 plus shipping, distills a gallon at a time. Distilling into a plastic container isn’t ideal but they say they’re working to develop a glass one; I’ll upgrade to it when they do. The water comes out tepid; I decant into glass jugs and refrigerate as soon as it’s done.

The water, incidentally, tastes fantastic. I always assumed distilled water would taste flat, but this sure doesn’t. It tastes marvelous.

I’m working! But I couldn’t resist trying for this pic :-)

I usually compress files a bit more but he lost too much of his definition when I did — sorry if the image loads kinda slow . . .

This topic is almost too upsetting for me to blog about, but I need to put my opinion out there in the hopes that somehow it might help influence peoples’ thinking on this topic.

As you know if you’ve been anywhere near a mainstream media outlet this week, the American Academy of Pediatrics has issued a recommendation that children as young as two be screened for cholesterol and, even more heinous, children as young as eight should be put on cholesterol-lowering drugs.

We need to wake up. Cholesterol is NOT the problem.

Trying to lower cholesterol via prescription drugs, OTOH, is a HUGE problem.

I’ve blogged before about cholesterol. We’ve managed to collectively demonize the stuff: a textbook example of the phenomenon of “mistaken consensus.”

Here’s the reality of the situation. We NEED cholesterol. Our brains need it, our bodies need it. It’s an essential component of dozens of critical cellular structures, such as the myelin sheaths that surround our nerve cells (can’t lay down new neural pathways in the brain without myelin, folks); it’s a component of the bile salts we use to digest fats; it’s a building block of our sex hormones (yes, that’s estrogen, testosterone, & friends).

So why is cholesterol the bad guy? Because it’s also a well-known component of arterial plaque.

But we’ve made a crucial error. We’ve assumed that since plaque is made of cholesterol, lowering cholesterol levels will help prevent heart disease.

Well, I say “we.” People have been questioning the role of cholesterol for years, now. This is from 1987:

In considering 1,400 patients whose blocked arteries were replaced with veins taken from other parts of their bodies, Dr. [Michael E.] DeBakey found again that cholesterol levels did not predict which of these bypass patients would redevelop blockage and require further surgery. He said patients with ”low” cholesterol levels, below 200 micrograms per milliliter of blood, did not fare better as a group than patients with high levels, about 240.

That’s over 20 years ago!

Since then, the thinking has evolved considerably; research now points more toward inflammation than cholesterol levels as the critical risk factor for heart disease. Google “inflammation heart disease” and you find plenty of stuff to mull, much of it along the lines of this bit from Andrew Weil’s website:

C-reactive protein (CRP) is a substance found in blood that is a marker for inflammation in the body. High levels of this protein are associated with an increased risk of heart disease and low levels with a low risk. The notion that inflammation plays a central role in heart disease is relatively new, although we’ve long known that CRP levels go up to signal any type of inflammation . . .

[T]he link between elevated CRP levels and heart disease has been demonstrated repeatedly, and there is some evidence that CRP may be a more important indicator of heart disease risk than high LDL (”bad”) cholesterol. In an eight-year study involving 27,939 women led by Paul Ridker, MD, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, more than half of the women who eventually developed heart disease had high CRP levels even though their LDL levels were not considered high. Dr. Ridker has estimated that the same may be true for 25 percent of the U.S. population. The study results were published in the November 14, 2002, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. More recently, a Cleveland Clinic study found ultrasound evidence that clogged coronary arteries had not gotten worse among 502 patients who were most successful at lowering their CRP levels. The study was published in the Jan. 6, 2005, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

It gets crazier. Courtesy of this piece published by the Weston Price Foundation: cholesterol seems to protect against infection. Since infection causes inflammation (low grade bacterial infection might be the true heart disease culprit), high cholesterol levels might actually PROTECT against heart disease.

Yes, there is a subset of the population for which high levels of so-called “bad” cholesterol is correlated with increased risk of heart disease. But it’s only a small subset. And it doesn’t include kids!

So why would ANYONE even CONSIDER drugging kids to lower their cholesterol levels?

I’m no conspiracy theorist. But I do think the American Academy of Pediatrics has betrayed its role as an advocate for our children. It’s shown itself to be too cozy to the “drugs are the answer” model of health care–and that’s not a positive thing.

Put on your thinking caps, guys, for crying out loud.

We need to feed our kids better. Childhood obesity IS an issue.

But drugging our kids to artificially lower levels of an essential molecule is NOT going to solve the problem.

What is will do, count on it, is put them at risk for a world of hurt. Starting with the known side effects of these drugs. And ending with who-knows-what other horrors. Messed up brain development? Hormonal imbalances during crucial stages of puberty? We just don’t know.

It makes me sick to my stomach . . .

More evidence that our rational self isn’t really the self that’s in charge: as described in a piece by Robert Lee Hotz in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, research suggests that when we “decide” to do something, we’re not really deciding. What we’re really doing is becoming aware of a decision that’s already been made.

In one study, researchers led by John-Dylan Haynes in Berlin monitored “neural currents” in volunteers’ brains (using magnetic resonance imaging) as the volunteers pushed buttons using either their left and right hands. The researchers discovered that they could predict which hand the subjects would use by the neural activity that preceded the button-pushing.

The foundation of this research is the work of
the late Benjamin Libet, who came to similar conclusions.

One way a lot of people respond to these sort of findings is to question whether humans have “free will.” But if you accept the assumption that there is an aspect of the Self that operates more or less independently of the Self with which we generally identify, none of this is the least bit surprising. Of course “Self 2″ causes ripples in the brain’s electromagnetic field. They just happen to be ripples beneath the surface of conscious awareness. It doesn’t mean we don’t have “free will.” It may, however, mean that “free will” is a meaningless concept.

In the WSJ piece, Hotz goes on to report other research that suggests that we make better “consumer decisions” (e.g. what car to buy) when we’re distracted.

See? It’s not just about swinging a golf club ;-)

I haven’t found one of these since I was a kid . . .

Isn’t it gorgeous?

Most the ladybugs we see anymore are non-native species that were imported by the U.S. Dept of Agriculture in the 70s to control agricultural pests.

Sounded like a good idea at the time, but they’ve driven out many of our native species.

The law of unintended consequences.

And look what else I found: Cornell University is asking kids to find and photograph native ladybugs and submit the photos with a little supporting data (date and time seen, location, habitat).

To be able to help the nine spotted ladybug and other ladybug species scientists need to have detailed information on which species are still out there and how many individuals are around. Entomologists at Cornell can identify the different species but there are too few of us to sample in enough places to find the really rare ones. We need you to be our legs, hands and eyes. If you could look for ladybugs and send us pictures of them on Email we can start to gather the information we need. We are very interested in the rare species but any pictures will help us. This is the ultimate summer science project for kids and adults! You can learn, have fun and help save these important species.

The website tells about how a couple of kids found a nine-spotted ladybug in Virginia in 2006 — the first sighting of this species in the Eastern U.S. in 14 years. Isn’t that cool?

And what a great environmental science-based summer activity!