Category Archives: Web Article Review

“delusions of merit”

This long article describes how people who have made it tend to have have “delusions of merit“. In other words, they believe they have earned their place in society through effort or self-discipline, that those less fortunate have not made the effort or do not have the self-discipline, and therefore they feel no moral obligation to help those beneath them. The problem is, we are not talking about a vast middle class refusing to help a small underclass here. We are talking about a small minority failing to feel compassion for the vast majority of fellow people.

Philadelphia’s new rail park

This article on Philadelphia’s new rail park sounds kind of cool. Sure, we are copying an idea from New York with the typical one-decade lag, but it sounds like the designers have given some thought to ecology.

The Rail Park’s horticultural design is a “simple palette” with three main layers, he explained.

Hardy London plane trees — “the classic park tree” found along the outer lanes of the Ben Franklin Parkway and throughout the city — will dominate the upper layer. Multi-stem oaks and Kentucky coffee trees will fill in the medium layer, along with shorter redbuds and other flowering trees, American holly and Eastern red cedars. A birch grove will “play off the window boxes” that adorn a neighboring apartment building, like “a domestic landscape writ large,” Hanes said.

The lower level of plants will be more diverse, with arrangements of shrubs and perennials that include:

  • Bottlebrush buckeye
  • Oak leaf hydrangea and viburnums
  • Sedges, tall grasses and ground covers
  • Several varieties of fern
  • Sumac
  • Asters
  • Sage
  • Goldenrod
  • Milkweed
  • Alum root
  • Wild petunias
  • Wild indigo

I can vouch for this part of town being sorely in need of some wildness.

gaming the system in Arizona

Arizona water managers are being accused of finding a way to gain the system as climate change takes hold and there may not be enough water to fill both Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Under a formula set by the state and the U.S. Interior Department, Lake Powell will send 9 million acre-feet to Lake Mead this year to prevent shortage, rather than the 8.23 million acre-feet it would send under normal river conditions. Each acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons and is enough to serve about two households for a year.

Conserving enough to prevent a shortage but not so much as to slow the flow from Lake Powell represents a “sweet spot,” CAP argued, in language that has now alarmed upstream water officials…

CAP’s “manipulation of demands in order to take advantage of the supposed ‘sweet spot’ in Lake Powell water releases undermines (regional conservation), and is unacceptable,” Denver Water CEO James Lochhead wrote.

psychedelics, the cure for…everything?

Serious research suggests psychedelics may be an effective cure for depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and addiction, among other things. This article also compares reported experiences under psychedelics to meditation, which I found interesting.

What is happening when a person meditates? If you meditate in a dedicated way, for long enough, most people say that they start to experience a spiritual change. Why did meditation make people feel they were being changed in a way that was mystical — and what did that even mean? He stumbled across the psychedelics studies from the 1960s, and it seemed to him that the way people described feeling when they took psychedelics was very similar to the way people described when they were in a state of deep meditation. He began to wonder if they were, in some strange sense, two different ways of approaching the same insight. Could investigating one unlock the secrets of the other? …

When you take a psychedelic, most people will have a spiritual experience – you get a sense that your ego-walls have been lowered, and you are deeply connected to the people around you, to our whole species, to the natural world, to existence. But it turns out the intensity of the spiritual experience varies from person to person. For some people, it will be incredibly intense; for some people, mild; and some people have no spiritual experience at all. At Johns Hopkins, the team discovered that many of the positive effects correlate very closely with the intensity of the spiritual experience. So if you had a super-charged spiritual experience, you got the benefits very heavily; and if you had no spiritual experience, you didn’t have many positive effects.

Okay, I don’t usually go here, but let’s say just for the sake of argument that religion is not objectively true. Then these spiritual experiences people tend to have while under the effects of drugs, meditation, and prayer actually come from inside us, are baked into our minds in some way. And maybe people who have more of them really are happier and better off, which would seem to be a good thing maybe even if they are not objectively true.