OUSD lead levels status

I was not paying attention, and did not understand the severity of the problems with lead levels in drinking water in the Oakland Unified School District schools.

OUSD maintain some information on their web site here.

Reading through the site, it's clear that this has been a long, slow effort:

• August 2017: OUSD inquired about district-wide water quality testing through a state-funded program administered by East Bay MUD (EBMUD).
• On Feb 28, 2018 the Board of Education adopted Board Policy 3511.3 Clean Drinking Water. This policy requires the district to replace or remediate sources of consumable water that contain lead levels higher than 5 ppb. Previously, the district had been adhering to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommended action level of 15 ppb.
• March, 2022: Work order for repair and retesting (these fixtures were taken out of service and are awaiting repair).

So after five years (three of those years covered the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, when surely progress was slow, work was still required to repaire and retest water fixtures known to be delivering dangerously high levels of lead.

Several more years passed until last summer the city revealed that there were still massive breakdowns in the project.

• The protocols previously established were not followed as there were gaps in communication, workflow, and the ability to conduct testing and communicate properly with more sites being tested in the Spring of 2024.
• An average of 62 days of communication gaps has been identified between the testing date and notification to department and sites of the schedule and status of the quality testing process.
• The realization of this failure occurred August 10, 2024

Six more months have passed, but this week we heard that the district is deploying water filtering systems into a number of schools, funded by some (welcome!) private donations:

Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry and his wife, Ayesha Curry, are helping public schools in Oakland where high levels of lead plague water systems and pose health hazards to students.

The power couple’s nonprofit organization, Eat. Learn. Play., announced on Wednesday that it donated more than half a million dollars to rapidly install water filtration stations across 60 elementary, middle and high schools this school year.

Elevated lead levels were found in nearly 200 fountains and faucets at Oakland Unified School District buildings during testing last spring and summer.

It's truly sad and tragic that this problem is moving so slowly but I'm glad to see any little bit of progress being made.

I'm already missing Phil Lesh.

I'm very sad to hear that Phil Lesh passed away.

I'll be listening to Box of Rain a lot for a while now. That song has always brought tears to my eyes, but I know it will bring a lot more emotion now.

I've been making this mistake for 40+ years!

It's incredibly embarassing that, for essentially my entire adult life, I thought that Stanislaw Ulam and Stanislaw Lem were one and the same person.

And every so often I would read an article about one of them, and think to myself: "how amazing that guy was! look how many different things he did! look how much output he had! how did he find the time!"

Most recently, there was an article about Lem in the New Yorker last spring, and an article about Ulam in the New Yorker this fall. That was, finally, close enough together that something clicked in my brain, and I looked them up properly.

I mean, each of them, separately, truly was amazing

But now at least I'm no longer harboring the impression that Stanislaw was simultaneously working on the Manhattan Project while living in the Lviv Ghetto.

Well, I guess he was, in a way, but it was two different Stanislaws.

Embarassing, indeed. But I'm set straight now.

Is Earth Exceptional?: a very short review

Earlier this month I found myself reading Is Earth Exceptional? by Livio and Szostak.

This is a popular science book (that is, not a textbook) which gives a status report on two related scientific efforts:

1. How did life on Earth begin?
2. Is there life anywhere else in the universe besides Earth?

Attempting to answer these questions involves both chemistry and astrophysics, and so it is reasonable that the book is co-written by an astrophysicist and a chemist.

Some 45 years ago, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I remember taking an introductory course, I think it was called something like "Moons and Planets", which talked a bit about both of these topics. I don't remember very much about the course, but I definitely remembered learning about the Miller-Urey experiment, which was of course a highlight of the course given that the work had been done at the UofC. Whatever course it was I took, it was very similar to this course that is currently taught, so it's interesting to see that the University is sustaining their efforts to keep their students aware of this very interesting area of pure science.

It was fun to return to this area and get a feel for how much things have progressed in the 70+ years since Miller-Urey.

For a book on pure science, Is Earth Exceptional? is quite entertaining and strikes a good balance between scientific accuracy and approachability to the layman. You will read a fair number of passages such as:

Similarly, activated nucleotides dissolved in water will not polymerize, but if that solution freezes, as might happen during a winter cold snap, polymerization starts to happen because the nucleotides become concentrated in the thin liquid zones between the growing water-ice crystals. Wet-dry cycles can also lead to the formation of peptides. In one interesting process, alpha-hydroxy acids, when dried down, spontaneously react with each other to form polymers known as polyesters. Amino acids can then attack these ester linkages, becoming incorporated into a mixed polymer of amino acids and hydroxy acids.

This is, approximately, about as deep and about as shallow as any other arbitrary passage in the entire book. Which seems pretty reasonable to me. If you're comfortable reading material like this, you'll probably like Is Earth Exceptional? a lot and find it fascinating! If the above turned you off instantly, well, then, now you know.

UPDATE: Forgot to initially mention that if you like this stuff, don't miss the Dave Eggers piece in WaPo: The Searchers:

But at the moment, much of the work at JPL is devoted to finding and examining exoplanets, and there is an urgency to the work that is palpable. In more than a dozen conversations with some of the best minds in astrophysics, I did not meet anyone who was doubtful about finding evidence of life elsewhere — most likely on an exoplanet beyond our solar system. It was not a matter of if. It was a matter of when.

Unusual Want Ad

We were wandering through the back pages of one of our local neighborhood publications, and we spotted a quite unusual help wanted ad.

Not the sort of ad you see every day.

Labyrinth: a very short review

I happened to take a vacation to France, and I was looking for a book to take on the trip. I ended up picking several books, and then the first of those books that I actually started reading was Labyrinth by Kate Mosse.

Mosse's book is 500 pages of summer vacation escapist fun.

And it fit quite nicely into my vacation beause it's set in southern France; more specifically it's set in the region of Occitania. Although my particular trip was to the regions of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, these are all adjacent regions and so it's close enough to be enjoyably topical to my trip.

Also, the book uses a simple but effective technique of telling two related stories, one set in 12th century Occitania and the other set in current-day Occitania. And since my trip was full of Bryan Goes Walking Around in Modern Towns Which Have Well-Preserved Medieval Old Town Areas, the book was really a good match.

There's not a lot more to say about Labyrinth. It's romantic historic fiction, with lots of lords and ladies and roughly realistic historical depictions. So I enjoyed it and it made my own wanderings considerably more fun.

Plus I learned a few things, such as what Languedoc means as a place name, and such not. Which was fun too!

Labyrinth is apparently the first book in a trilogy. I'm not sure I actually enjoyed it that much, but who knows?

Bummer that AnandTech shut down

I didn't visit AnandTech very often, but when I did, I found high-quality carefully written material. It seemed to have sustained that high quality information for a good long time, which is rare these days.

Editor Ryan Smith sums up the three decades.

I love the 1998 picture of Anand Lal Shimpi reviewing a motherboard!

Smith makes a good point about the challenge of finding high quality technical material nowadays:

A core belief that Anand and I have held dear for years, and is still on our About page to this day, is AnandTech’s rebuke of sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o'clock-news reporting. It has been our mission over the past 27 years to inform and educate our readers by providing high-quality content – and while we’re no longer going to be able to fulfill that role, the need for quality, in-depth reporting has not changed. If anything, the need has increased as social media and changing advertising landscapes have made shallow, sensationalistic reporting all the more lucrative.