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Genieve Long holds a photo of her son at a rally outside the State Department on Thursday.

Two residents of Mayflower, Arkansas, the site of the March 29 pipeline spill, traveled to Washington on Thursday to ask Secretary of State John Kerry to reject the Keystone XL pipeline.

They came here, Genieve Long said, to ask Kerry to "come to our state to see the devastation and hopefully get the Keystone XL stopped." They are working with All Risk, No Reward, a coalition of local and national groups that oppose the proposed 1,600-mile pipeline that would carry oil from Canada to Texas.

Long and her four children—ages 9, 8, 7, and 5—live beside Lake Conway, not far from where Exxon's Pegasus pipeline spilled at least 210,000 gallons of crude oil from Canada's tar sands into a subdivision. Exxon has said that while there is oil in a cove on the lake, clean up crews haven't seen oil in the main body of water. But Sierra Club has said that an independent contractor the group hired found evidence of oil in the lake. Long thumbed through photos on her phone on Thursday morning, showing me images of oily sheen and what appeared to be black residue along the shores.

She says that Exxon has not been responsive to the complaints of people who live outside the area where the oil originally spilled. "I've asked them to just relocate us due to the smells," she said, noting that several of her children have asthma. "They told us the air quality was fine and they wouldn't relocate us." She's maintaining a Google Map that catalogs where people have reported seeing or smelling oil or experiencing negative health effects, as well as photos and video. She's also maintaining a Facebook page on the spill.

Reported oil sheen on Palarm Creek, off of Lake Conway. Genieve Long.

The oil is bad, but so is the cleanup, she says. "It's horrible. They have roads blocked down to one lane, constant police, constant traffic."

She was joined in Washington by fellow Mayflower resident Damien Byers, whose house is about a half a mile from the spill site and sits atop another portion of the Pegasus pipeline. He worries about the air quality in the area, especially when his 15-month-old son is staying with him. "I'm not an environmentalist, I'm not a treehugger," says Byers. "I'm just a concerned single daddy who happens to have 400 feet of this pipeline running through his property."

The pair delivered a letter to the State Department from a group of 21 residents of the town who have organized as the "Remember Mayflower Coalition." The letter asks Secretary Kerry to reject the Keystone pipeline—particularly in light of the Arkansas spill:

There is still so much we don’t know about tar sands—about the economic risks of them spilling in communities, about how they impact important water sources, and about how they effect our health. We don’t know enough to say "yes" to a massive tar sands pipeline through the country’s heartland.

Before you issue your final evaluation of Keystone XL, we ask that you and your staff come to Mayflower to see what happens when a tar sands pipeline ruptures in your backyard. We ask that you observe the remnants of black tar, smell the toxic chemicals that are polluting our air, and ask yourselves whether you can in good conscience inflict this same devastation on families along Keystone XL’s route.

"If this can happen to Mayflower," Long said, "with this Keystone pipeline, it can happen to anybody else also. We're trying to keep that from happening."

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Cicada:xpixel/Shutterstock; Capitol:J Main/Shutterstock.

The "Great East Coast Cicada Sex Invasion of 2013" is upon us.

After 17 years of feeding and living under the earth's surface, billions of "Brood II" cicadas will emerge this summer between Connecticut and Georgia, swarming in thick, forbidding billows of shed exoskeletons and raucous insect lovemaking. (To get an idea of what the cicada mating call sounds like, click here for audio.)

For all their physical creepiness and loud public sex orgies, the (actually completely harmless) bugs have a rich cultural history in the United States. Bob Dylan wrote a song about the cicadas, for instance. But cicadas also have a rich political history in this country. Here are their greatest hits:

1. Ronald Reagan name-checks the cicada: In June 1987, Greatest President in American History Ronald Reagan delivered one of his weekly radio addresses on the budget plan for fiscal year 1988. In his prepared statement, he used the cicada in a simile to bash Democratic budget proposals:

Like the cicadas, the big spenders are hatching out again and threatening to overrun Congress.

President Reagan then asked the American people to get behind a balanced budget amendment and the line item veto to "make the cicadas in Congress go back underground."

The subsequent UPI headline read:

UPI

2. John Kerry and the cicada-morphing attack ad: Reagan wasn't the only Republican (or politician, for that matter) to invoke cicadas in a political attack. During the 2004 presidential campaign, the Republican National Committee launched a 1:15-long web ad comparing Democratic candidate John Kerry to the "Brood X" cicada. The attack ad includes an up-close shot of a cicada's face morphing into a picture of a confused-looking John Kerry:

The video, which (naturally) painted Kerry as a serial flip-flopper, was emailed to approximately 700,000 supporters of President George W. Bush: "Every 17 years, cicadas emerge, morph out of their shell, and change their appearance," the narrator observes. "Like a cicada, Sen. Kerry would like to shed his Senate career and morph into a fiscal conservative, a centrist Democrat opposed to taxes, strong on defense."

The Kerry campaign and the Democratic National Committee responded to the ad by saying they were "not bugging out" over it.

John Kerry would go on to lose to George W. Bush in the November election by about 3 million votes.

3. Teddy Roosevelt vs. the anti-imperialist cicadas: In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt gave a Memorial Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery. During that speech, he passionately defended American imperialism in the Philippines and his administration's policy of imposing "orderly freedom" on the Filipino people.

[Read more]

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I feel the need to write about something that's as far removed from Benghazi as humanly possible. How about Isaac Newton? As we all know, he invented calculus, the theory of gravity, and Newtonian mechanics, as well as conducting pioneering work in optics. But I'm reading a book called Newton and the Origin of Civilization right now,¹ and I've learned to my surprise that he invented something else that was similarly groundbreaking. Read on for more.

Observational science was as important in the 17th century as it is today, and Newton has long had a reputation as a master of precise observation. But one way or another, observations of that era all depended on the human eye. Some were unaided, while others depended on instruments, but in the end, their accuracy was still no better than that of the observer, and scientists of the day—very much including Newton—were well aware that human observation was imperfect. The usual way of handling this was to make a series of observations and then pick out the one that seemed most accurate. Newton, however, invented a revolutionary new method in 1671 while he was measuring the differences in the diameters of the rings produced when a spherical lens is pressed against a plate of glass—the phenomenon later termed "Newton's rings":

Newton did something unusual, and even, as Alan Shapiro notes, "almost [we would say entirely] unprecedented in the 17th century": he averaged all of the differences....None of this reached print....Newton certainly avoided hinting in print that his law of arithmetical progression was adduced by anything other than the most skillful and precise of measurements.

....Newton's "mean"—the average—was the weapon with which he slew the invevitable dragons of sensual errors. It was a most paradoxical weapon for the times, because it amounted to a method by which error seems to be reduced by committing it repeatedly. No such method appears elsewhere at the time, and it would certainly have seemed odd, to say the least, to most practitioners of the period.

....We have no contemporary record of the reasoning by which he justified this unusual method....Yet Newton used averages early on; he used them frequently and, it seems, consistently....Why did Molyneux and Flamsteed, a decade or two later, do so as well?....Is there some evidence as to what underpinned the average, decades before statistical notions became widespread?

Apparently the answer to that last question is no. The authors produce a bit of evidence that Newton thought of the average as akin to measuring a center of gravity, but that's about it. It appears that Newton never explained himself, but just quietly went ahead with his use of  averages several decades before anyone else. It was the secret behind his famously accurate observations.

So how about that? Newton invented the now-standard method for reducing noise in measurements, and did it apparently by pure intuition, long before anyone (including Newton) suspected there was a rigorous mathematical basis for doing so. Also—and this is par for the course—he kept it a secret. So chalk up another amazing discovery for old Isaac.

¹Actually, reading might be too strong a word. It's a long, dense monograph about Newton's obsession with ancient chronology, which joins alchemy, numerology, and Biblical exegesis among his somewhat less successful endeavors. So I'm sort of dipping into the book here and there, not really giving it a thorough read.

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Matt Yglesias informs me today that there is something called the Sohn Investment Conference, which, according to Reuters, "gets big name hedge fund managers to share their 'best ideas' with other wealthy investors." The hedge fundies, it turns out, are really unhappy with Ben Bernanke's monetary policy, and Matt provides a fairly philosophical explanation for why this is. I suppose he might be right, but I'm going to take a wild guess that the real reason is much simpler, summarized here by Reuters:

The Fed's easy money policy has helped boost riskier assets such as equities, with the S&P 500 up 14 percent this year. Both the S&P and Dow Jones Industrials have set a string of all-time highs.

In contrast, the average hedge fund is up only 4.4 percent.

So there you have it. In Ben Bernanke's America, hedge funds aren't doing so well. And guess what? Billionaire hedge fund managers aren't very happy about that. It's not complicated at all.

By the way, I love the scare quotes the Reuters reporters put around "best ideas." I'm guessing they're a little skeptical that these billionaires are truly sharing anything remotely approaching their best ideas. I would be too.

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