Inside Cell Block 7

Signs all over said leave your cell phone in the car, so I have no photographic evidence, but we spent our morning at the Cell Block 7 Prison Museum near Jackson, Michigan. It’s a working state correctional facility but they operate a museum in an unused wing. You can visit the prison yard, see the cells and the place where they eat, look at an exhibit of confiscated weapons, everything.

It was especially interesting to talk to a former guard, a retired guy who likes to spend his Saturdays volunteering as a docent.  He says that although the guards were outnumbered about 80 to one, they typically walk through the prison and interact one-on-one with prisoners and after working there a while, the inmates and guards become pretty friendly with one another.  The New York prison escape is in the news, so we asked and he says it can only have been possible if there was widespread corruption among the staff. All the other prisoners must have known the details of the escape while it was being planned. It’s just a thing among prisoners that they all get to know one another, there are no secrets, and there are no snitches.

Yes, homosexual activity is extremely common. Especially if you’re a young, white man, he says, you will certainly be a target, and you may as well just get used to it. In the showers, in the laundry room — the guards just can’t watch everyone all the time. The prisoners repeat over and over that they’re not gay, it's just something they all need to do.

You should have see the clever weapons and other confiscated contraband.  Plenty of sharpened screwdrivers, spoons, scissors, etc, but other things too: one guy even made a working set of walkie-talkies. Some of the prisoners had TV sets in their cells, which apparently is completely okay as long as it was purchased in the prison store.

From the upper level of the museum cell block, you could look out over the entire facility and see current inmates walking to and fro. I think Michigan must be fairly progressive in its policies (they banned capital punishment in 1846) because the prisoners are all kept busy, on everything from making license plates to growing trees. They have one big rule, though: no prisoner can earn money or be assigned a non-cleanup job, unless they pass their GED.

It feels good to be tough on crime, to think it’s okay for prisons to be cruel places where they get what they deserve, but you need to remember that many of these inmates are fundamentally good people who just made a mistake.  I imagine what it must be like to have your own son or brother in jail, and how you’d want the place to be fair to him. Sixty percent of those who are released end up coming back to prison, partly because there are so few things they can legally do on the outside. Many of them study for business degrees, intending to start their own businesses, like landscaping or home repair. Many of them end up in food service, as cooks, waiters, dish washers, etc.

My gut diversity through time

Clark Ellis posts a nice summary of his uBiome results over at the uBiome Blog and now, with more detail at The Self-Taught Author blog. A long period of antibiotic use has made him acutely interested in the understanding gut diversity, so he asks others to post their uBiome diversity results too.

Here’s mine:

A few caveats:

• These values only represent the identified results, which generally bounce from about 70% (at the genus level) to 95% (phylum). There could well be dozens, perhaps thousands, of other unique bacteria that are simply too rare to be counted by the uBiome technology.
• A single bacterium can have a big effect, so it probably doesn’t mean much to look at raw counts. Remember that the mammalian genus canis includes wolves, coyotes, and jackals in addition to your trusty dog Fido. Simply knowing there’s a canis at the door tells you nothing about whether it’s safe to go out.
• Species information is (probably) meaningless. uBiome uses 16S rRNA technology that can’t differentiate below the genus level. They don’t even post species information on their web viewer; you have to uncover it from the raw data like I did. They claim it’s “experimental”, which I interrupt to mean they apply some statistical “guess”, perhaps based on general trends. Anyway, you shouldn’t rely on it.

Something strange happened in my June sample, which was taken three weeks after the one from May, in what was frankly a boring period of my life (no travel, no unusual food, no camping, etc.). It’s possible that result was simply a mistake.

Note: all of my data is posted on GitHub, and you’re welcome to explore it and compare to your heart’s content as long as you promise to let me know if you find anything interesting!

“Aw heck, I don’t keep track of stuff like that anymore."

My grandmother’s reply to the doctor who, looking for signs of disorientation, asks her if she knows today’s date.

Learning Nascar

I’m in Michigan this weekend, experiencing as much authentic America as I can. After too much of a lifetime spent out of the country, I need to raise my Coming Apart score. And how better to do than than watch the latest NASCAR Sprint Cup race at the Michigan International Speedway?

NASCAR is much bigger than you might think if you’re not in their core audience. One of of three Americans is a fan (40% of whom are women). Although the National Football League takes in way more revenue overall ($9B vs. $650M), NASCAR earns $3B in sponsorship revenue each year (twice as much as the NFL). 

We’re fans of Joey Logano, so it was nice to see him finish the race in the top three today. (Here’s his car, traveling at 200+ mph and captured on my iPhone5s “burst” mode).

I’m probably not ready to devote myself whole-hog to becoming a NASCAR fan, but I’m glad I experienced a race like this. If you want to understand the real America, you could do worse than to spend some time with the 100,000+ people who packed today’s stadium with me.

 

 

 

Where are the starfish?

We’re on vacation this week in Coastal Maine, and yesterday at low tide we saw this on a beach south of Belfast:

Sadly, west coast starfish are victims of some kind of unexplained population collapse. There’s even an iNaturalist project to track deaths from the “starfish wasting disease”. Nobody is sure about the cause, though of course everyone’s first guess revolves around the usual suspects: pollution, climate change, George Bush the Koch Brothers. As a non-expert, I think it’s interesting that the population crash apparently follows a similarly-unexplained population explosion a few years ago, so I wonder if it’s just the normal cycle of life.

I thought this was limited to the West Coast, but apparently there are scientists worried about the same thing on the Atlantic. Glad to see that not all starfish are affected, at least not yet.

 

Great Spragues in history

Too bad that, as far as I know, I am no relation to Frank J. Sprague (1857-1934), an assistant to Thomas Edison. According to the Edison Tech Center: 

Edison's primary interest was in light, while Sprague was interested in power. He resigned his position after about a year and started the Sprague Electric Railway & Motor Company in 1884. During the next two years, Sprague produced a number of inventions of major significance.

Eventually Edison Electric ended up using so many of Sprague's inventions that they decided to merge the two companies into one: General Electric.

How's that for imagination at work?