Drop Inn Center Blog

The Drop Inn Center just entered the blogosphere. Since there is so much talk about their possible move and various issues such as sex offendors, I look for this to be a place for some straight talk, straight from the source:

...It is important not to mistake rhetoric for reality. In the end, no ultimatum given by the City, the School Board or any other group will compel us to move.

3CDC has offered to help us both with improvements to our facilities and exploring new possible sites. We realize the DIC is part of a whole community effort and we also realize it is important for us to explore any opportunity that could potentially benefit our residents. The Drop Inn Center Board and staff are deliberating all possibilities carefully and all policies will be implemented in an appropriate timeframe. As always, the needs and requirements of our residents come first...

Visualize the Spill

The BP Oil Spill overlaid on Cincinnati, so you can visualize the scale of the disaster, found here:
 

UPDATE: But that is nothing compared to this visualization of the possible long-range spread:

Don't Subsidize Home Construction

... The difference between Germany and Spain, when you get down to it, is that Germans work for companies which provide goods and services that the rest of the world wants. In doing so, they make good money, which they save up. That’s how they became rich. The Spanish, by contrast, have massive unemployment, and most of the country’s GDP growth in recent years has come from the construction industry. Their main export is tourism, if that counts as an export, and the main way that Spaniards have become rich in recent years is by sitting back and watching the value of their real estate grow exponentially.

The U.S., going forwards, needs to be less like Spain and more like Germany. So let’s not subsidize housing. That way lies fiscal disaster. - Felix Salmon

The 18 Year Marathon

...a new UCLA study that documented the life of middle-class families, videotaping their dinners, conversations and leisure activities:

The U.C.L.A. project was an effort to capture a relatively new sociological species: the dual-earner, multiple-child, middle-class American household. The investigators have just finished working through the 1,540 hours of videotape, coding and categorizing every hug, every tantrum, every soul-draining search for a missing soccer cleat.

So what did they find? The general conclusion is that family life is extremely stressful, a relentless barrage of problems, mishaps and negotiations. One of the graduate students who spent time with the families referred to the experience as "the very purest form of birth control ever devised."

...And yet... it's much easier to quantify pleasure on a moment-by-moment basis, or document the swing of cortisol levels in saliva, than it is to quantify something as intangible as "unconditional love". Changing a diaper isn't enjoyable, and teenagers can be such a pain in the ass, but having kids can also provide a profound source of meaning. (I like the amateur marathoner metaphor: survey a marathoner in the midst of the race and they'll complain about their legs and that nipple rash and how the endless route. But when the running is over they are always incredibly proud of their accomplishment. Having kids, then, is like a marathon that lasts 18 years.)

The larger point, though, is that just because we can't measure something doesn't mean it isn't important, or that we should always privilege the quantifiable (pleasure, stress) over the intangible (meaning, purpose). Real life is complex stuff. - The Frontal Cortex