I read a piece in yesterday's New York Times about some useful lessons learned from animal trainers.

So, like many wives before me, I ignored a library of advice books and set about improving him. By nagging, of course, which only made his behavior worse: he'd drive faster instead of slower; shave less frequently, not more; and leave his reeking bike garb on the bedroom floor longer than ever.

... 

I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip and elephants to paint. Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.

The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.

Back in Maine, I began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I'd kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller.

I was using what trainers call "approximations," rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. You can't expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can't expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock. With the baboon you first reward a hop, then a bigger hop, then an even bigger hop. With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything.

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On a field trip with the students, I listened to a professional trainer describe how he had taught African crested cranes to stop landing on his head and shoulders. He did this by training the leggy birds to land on mats on the ground. This, he explained, is what is called an "incompatible behavior," a simple but brilliant concept.

Rather than teach the cranes to stop landing on him, the trainer taught the birds something else, a behavior that would make the undesirable behavior impossible. The birds couldn't alight on the mats and his head simultaneously.

At home, I came up with incompatible behaviors for Scott to keep him from crowding me while I cooked. To lure him away from the stove, I piled up parsley for him to chop or cheese for him to grate at the other end of the kitchen island. Or I'd set out a bowl of chips and salsa across the room. Soon I'd done it: no more Scott hovering around me while I cooked.

I followed the students to SeaWorld San Diego, where a dolphin trainer introduced me to least reinforcing syndrome (L. R. S.). When a dolphin does something wrong, the trainer doesn't respond in any way. He stands still for a few beats, careful not to look at the dolphin, and then returns to work. The idea is that any response, positive or negative, fuels a behavior. If a behavior provokes no response, it typically dies away.

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I adopted the trainers' motto: "It's never the animal's fault." When my training attempts failed, I didn't blame Scott. Rather, I brainstormed new strategies, thought up more incompatible behaviors and used smaller approximations. I dissected my own behavior, considered how my actions might inadvertently fuel his. I also accepted that some behaviors were too entrenched, too instinctive to train away. You can't stop a badger from digging, and you can't stop my husband from losing his wallet and keys.

Hmmm...

I found an interesting piece on the NPR website about the modern anti-abortion movement:

In the 1980s, in order to solidify their shift from divorce to abortion, the Religious Right constructed an abortion myth, one accepted by most Americans as true. Simply put, the abortion myth is this: Leaders of the Religious Right would have us believe that their movement began in direct response to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Politically conservative evangelical leaders were so morally outraged by the ruling that they instantly shed their apolitical stupor in order to mobilize politically in defense of the sanctity of life. Most of these leaders did so reluctantly and at great personal sacrifice, risking the obloquy of their congregants and the contempt of liberals and "secular humanists," who were trying their best to ruin America. But these selfless, courageous leaders of the Religious Right, inspired by the opponents of slavery in the nineteenth century, trudged dutifully into battle in order to defend those innocent unborn children, newly endangered by the Supreme Court's misguided Roe decision.

It's a compelling story, no question about it. Except for one thing: It isn't true.

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Let's remember, [Paul Weyrich] said animatedly, that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got us going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.

... 

"What caused the movement to surface," Weyrich reiterated,"was the federal government's moves against Christian schools." The IRS threat against segregated schools, he said, "enraged the Christian community." That, not abortion, according to Weyrich, was what galvanized politically conservative evangelicals into the Religious Right and goaded them into action. "It was not the other things," he said.

Excerpted from Thy Kingdom Come, by Randall Balmer.

In May, I pounded out a record 31 blog posts. June draws to a close and this is only my third post.

In brief, here's some of the highlights of June.

The Wild Geese Players of Seattle read the Cyclops chapter of Ulysses on June 16th. I read a part and I was also the script wrangler and webmaster.

My profile on my Windows XP laptop got corrupted. I decided that I would make flatten it and turn it into a dual-boot system. I'm now on my third week of running Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake). Quite easy to get going. Not so easy to get everything that I wanted running on it.

In late May at WinHEC, Microsoft announced FlexGo, the new pay-as-you-go and subscription versions of Windows. I spent a year working on this project, specifically on the hardware locking that underlies the business model. I swear I will write a more interesting post on this soon.

This weekend was Gay Pride, which was held for the first time at the Seattle Center. I helped staff the Freely Speaking Toastmasters booth yesterday morning.

As one of my commitments when I stepped down as president of BiNet Seattle I made up a new banner, which we marched behind in the Raise Your Voice march yesterday evening.

My woodworking class has finished, so my Tuesday nights are free for the summer. I'm making a coffee table. It's about half finished. I've taken a few photos along the way; I'll have to post some of them.

Christy at FireDogLake has written a post about this year's hurricane season, which officially started on June 1st.

New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf is still a disaster area: watch the video linked to above. Disaster preparedness is far from where it should be. The levee improvements are inadequate. Reconstruction is mired in bureaucracy and stalled in incompetence. The money promised has not materialized. Only one-third of New Orleans residents have returned.

Christy links to a report put together by Nancy Pelosi, detailing the incompetence and cronyism of the Republicans, both in the immediate response and in the long-term followup.

• Up to $1 billion dollars in waste and fraud for housing contractors and payments made by the government, mainly to contractors from outside the Gulf Region.

• The SBA has rejected more than 60% of small business loan applications in the wake of Katrina. Of those that have been approved, only 4% of funds have been disbursed to small business owners at this point. (Oh yeah, I got yer business friendly environment here. What was that Republican talking point that small business is the backbone of American jobs and communities?)

• Less than 2% of all Federal aid that has gone to the Gulf Coast has been used for education expenditures.

• The Rubber Stamp Republican Congress still refuses to ease Medicare restrictions for children in the Gulf Coast region, despite the fact that there is a substantial health care crisis for children in the region, stemming from infections and other issues arising from prolonged exposure to pathogens from flood waters, stress, and other factors. (1/3 of all children living in FEMA trailer parks have been found to have a chronic illness.)

• 40,000 families are still waiting for some sort of housing assistance, meanwhile there are 10,000 FEMA trailers still parked in the mud, just sitting there unused.

• Contractors with a political connection to the Bush Administration were paid up to 15 times the actual cost of jobs contracted.

As I implicitly promised here, we went to see Al Gore's new documentary on global climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, when it opened in Seattle last night. We brought some friends too.

Gore lays out a compelling case that global climate change is real, that it's been happening for decades, and that it's spiralling out of control. He backs it up with plenty of statistics and graphs.

• The ten hottest years on record have all been since 1990.

• The glaciers are in full retreat everywhere. The "snows of Kilimanjaro" are almost gone.

• At current rates, the Arctic ocean could be ice-free by 2050.

• If either the ice covering Greenland or the ice on the western side of Antarctica goes -- both very real possibilities -- the global sea level could rise by 20 feet.

• That rise would devastate coastal areas everywhere. At least 100 million people would be homeless.

Gore points to a review in Science magazine of 928 peer-reviewed scientific articles discussing "climate change". Not one of the papers disagreed with the scientific consensus that "climate change" is a real phenomenon. He points to a similar review of leading US newspapers over the last fourteen years, where more than half of the articles gave equal weight to the scientific consensus and to the view that human beings played no role in global warming.

The "controversy" has been manufactured by front groups for Exxon-Mobil and other leading polluters, just as the tobacco companies tried for decades to confuse the public about the linkage between smoking and lung cancer.

Gore earned the reputation in the 2000 election of being dry and wooden, but here he's engaging and animated. It's clearly a subject that he cares deeply about, and one that he's been agitating about for more than 30 years. He says that he's given his slideshow, which we see in several forms, over 1000 times, and he's gotten very good at delivering this message. The film is filled with science, but there's also a human touch. Gore brings in elements of his own life, such as his son's brush with death that energized him to make a difference to the Earth.

Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air interviewed Al Gore the other day: listen to the interview or read the transcript.

GROSS: ... at the beginning of the movie, you say that you've been trying to tell this story about global warming for a long time and that you feel as if you've failed to get the message across. Why was it so difficult as a politician to get the message across?

Former Vice President AL GORE (Author, "An Inconvenient Truth"): Well, Terry, I think there are several reasons. First, it's a complex issue. When you boil it all down, it's fairly simple, but it does have a lot of moving parts. And the complexity by itself is an obstacle. Secondly, there's a natural tendency to avoid thinking about the subjects that might involve some psychic pain, and the idea that human civilization is colliding with the earth's environment is a painful reality. And, third, it's a new reality. Nothing in our history or culture prepares us for the new reality, the new relationship between human civilization and the planet's ecosystem.

We've quadrupled our population globally in the last hundred years, and we've magnified the power of our technologies thousands of times over. And when you combine those two elements, 6.5 billion people times incredibly powerful ways of exploiting nature, and then you mix in a new philosophy of discounting the future consequences of present actions, it produces this new collision, the most dangerous part of which is global warming. And so it's hard to absorb it, but I think it is now beginning to sink in. I think people are coming to grips with it, and I'm actually becoming optimistic that we're going to respond in time.

... 

GROSS: You've traveled around different parts of the world looking at the symptoms of global warming. What's the most disturbing thing that you've seen in those travels?

Vice Pres. GORE: The melting of the North Pole is one of the most urgent catastrophes that should be prevented as quickly as we can convince people to act. It's a fairly thin floating ice cap, and as you know, the Arctic and the Antarctic are very different. The Arctic is ocean surrounded by land while the Antarctic is land surrounded by ocean, and that makes all the difference in the thickness of the ice. It's 10,000 feet thick in Antarctic and less than 10 feet thick in the Arctic. Much less now. We've lost 40 percent of it in the last 40 years. And when the ice there melts, there's a dramatic change in the relationship of the surface of the Earth there to the sun. The ice reflects 90 percent of the incoming sun's energy like a mirror. But the open seawater, after it melts, absorbs 90 percent. And that's a phase change. It sets up a positive feedback loop that magnifies and speeds up the melting process.

And the North Polar ice cap is in grave danger now. And nearby the great ice mound of Greenland is under increasing pressure from growing temperatures also. If that were to melt, it would--or to break up and slip into the sea, it would raise sea level 20 feet worldwide. The west Antarctic ice shelf, that's on the other end of the planet, the other pole, is the part of Antarctica propped up against islands that allow it to be affected by the warming ocean but also allow it to raise sea level by 20 feet, again, if it melts or breaks off and slides into the ocean.

And these are the three areas that many scientists point to as affecting a so-called point of no return which we need to avoid because if we cross that point of no return, then the process of a downward spiral would be irretrievable. So we have to stop short of that.

Gore has written a companion book, which I'm going to order.

I'm not the only one who thinks it's a great film. Roger Ebert gave it a 4-star review

What can you do? You can go see the film and you can take action.

This is something that (should) transcend politics and nationality. We are all going to be affected by climate change, for the worse.