Graphic Medicine Conference

The Graphic Medicine Conference takes place next week in Baltimore. My colleagues at VEOLI (Visualizing End of Life Issues) will be in attendance. We’re all making zines that will be available to participants. I’ve made three: one on Medical Aid in Dying (pictured at right); one on Advance Care Planning; and one on environmental costs of body disposition after death.

Cat Grass

There’s no more footie for several days, it is too hot to sketch outside, and I don’t feel like discussing the latest evil machinations of the Heritage Foundation, so here is my sketch of the day. We like to provide wheatgrass for our kitties, and pick up some from the produce section of the co-op every couple of weeks. Winston especially likes to graze on it.

Summer Socks

When we were growing up in Spain in the 1970s, white cotton lace ankle socks were a thing. I have no idea whether they still are, but my sister, recipient of a pair of wool birthday socks every year, asked me to design a pair of socks that could replicate these Spanish ones. I made her a pair last year and she was thrilled. So I’m working on a second pair. The yarn is a bamboo-cotton blend. The lace pattern is gull wings, which is easy to remember and does the required ventilation job.

Spain beat France. Wow.

A Drop in a Deluge

As I noted last Thursday, the deadline for submitting comments on the proposed Office of Management and Budget regulation that would turn federal funding into an ungodly system of patronage and at the same time devastate American science is this evening. This surely breaks the record for the most public comments on a proposed federal regulation — as of 11:59 PM last night 292,157 comments have been received. A text analysis of about 51,000 comments that were posted by July 9th indicates that 94% of the comments oppose the regulation. Of the 6% of comments in support of the regulation, they were almost all from a single form letter copy-and-paste campaign.

I am posting the public comment that I submitted below. My comment emphasizes the harms to science because that is where my expertise lies, but this regulation would basically codify a system of federalism by extortion, to use language cited in an excellent piece posted today.

—

I am a retired geographer and environmental informatics specialist who over the course of a 34-year university career has received funding from many federal agencies including NSF, USDA, USFS, USGS, EPA, and USFWS. I am also a second-generation scientist. Both my parents were scientists, and I grew up deeply appreciating the massive postwar investment in scientific research that made the United States the leading power in science. All Americans have been beneficiaries of this investment and our country’s commitment to open research.

I strongly oppose the proposed rule change published as OMB-2026-0034 and urge that OMB withdraw it in its entirety. Its impacts to American science would be devastating. I will comment on some of these impacts below section-by-section.

Section 200.205 (b) would mandate pre-issuance approval of grant funding by a senior political appointee. Such political control over its direction is antithetical to the progress of science. Many comments to this proposed rule mention the case of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union. Such a comparison is apt. Trofim Lysenko was a charlatan agronomist who curried favor with Josef Stalin and destroyed genetics as a science in the Soviet Union. Lysenko’s theories led to crop failures, and to this day Russia and the post-Soviet successor states lag behind in research in related fields like molecular biology.

Section 200.205 also states that activities under Federal awards should comply with administrative guidance respecting “Gold Standard Science”. This phrase is not defined anywhere in the proposed rule. It would be surprising if it could be defined — many decades of scholarship in the history and philosophy of science has shown that there is no one overriding methodology by which science can progress. The phrase “Gold Standard Science” is likely intended as a cudgel by which political appointees can squash research on topics that are uncomfortable for them.

Section 200.340 (a)(2) allows a federal agency to terminate a grant at any point due to arbitrary reasons. This is remarkably poor governance and is a violation of the public trust. People and institutions make serious commitments on the basis of funding agreements, especially multiyear ones, and it is a waste of public investment to halt these prematurely. I have personal experience here: in April 2025 the US Department of Agriculture ended the Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities program which was about two years into its five-year funding cycle, the agency not wanting to continue a Biden-era program. Thousands of enrolled farmers lost funding under this termination. I was an academic partner on one of these grants, and the resultant halt in funding essentially ended my university career.

Section 200.340 (e) allows a federal agency to temporarily suspend a federal award for a period of up to 90 days. In funding-constrained environments like almost every university, a 90-day cessation of funding of an already-awarded grant will cause layoffs to occur. Some of the afflicted individuals end up leaving their field, an enormous waste of training, talent, and educational investment.

The “domestic-first” framework of Section 200.202 will strongly discourage foreign collaborations. But science is a global endeavor, and isolating the United States in such a manner will only serve to greatly weaken the country in science.

Section 200.461 would make all journal publication costs unallowable by default. Publication of one’s research findings is core to the scientific research process, and failing to pay for journal publication costs hurts American scientists and weakens American science as a whole.

Section 200.432 requires that conference travel be pre-approved and written into an award at the time of grant application. But research is a process of discovery, and a scientist may want to present their findings at conferences they did not anticipate when they applied for the grant. This requirement hinders scientific communication.

The proposed changes will be remarkably deleterious to the American scientific enterprise. American science has been an engine of our country’s prosperity in the postwar period, and such changes will make our country poorer, more isolated, and a more backwards place.

The added administrative burden of complying with this rule go way beyond science. It will be harmful to a huge range of entities including schools, universities, non-profit organizations, small businesses, and state, local, and tribal governments.

The scope of changes in this proposed rule is massive and will have many unintended consequences. There are too many interactions between the various pieces of the rule that will lead to harms that no one will be in a position to understand in their entirety, let alone correct. For a rule that claims to increase transparency, accountability, and oversight it will fail at all three of those goals. I strongly urge that the proposed rule be rejected outright.

This or Aquel

As the World Cup draws to a close, and as the hullabaloo around FIFA corruption doesn’t, I thought I’d go into a bit more detail about the broadcasting options available (legally) here in the United States. Fox bought the rights to broadcast the World Cup in English and hired a number of commentators for each match along with three former players (Thierry Henry, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Alexi Lalas) for half-time and full time commentary. Several of the match commentators are Brits but many are American and they seem to have a fixation with statistics which are mostly meaningless: does it matter how many times England has made it to the quarter-finals vs. the semi-finals since 1966, in terms of predicting their performance in any given match at the World Cup in 2026? Of course not. Different players, different conditions, different coach, different. Apples and oranges. Football is just not a game of statistics, it’s more of akin to chess. But the commentators are paid to say stuff during the match and it’s so inane in English that I’ve avoided watching the Fox coverage as much as possible.

Which is where Telemundo comes in. These guys are PASSIONATE about football. They’re also knowledgeable, the kind of deep knowledge acquired by having kicked a ball about on dirt playgrounds as kids in Cali or Tucumán or San Luis Potosí and somehow having been noticed and gone on to play the sport professionally and sometimes even internationally. When they call the game, you sense they’re in there with the players. They do drop some statistics occasionally but never gratuitously. As my German friend put it, it’s more like radio commentary than TV. But lots of people who don’t even speak Spanish prefer the energy of the Telemundo coverage. Several Switzerland supporters, who’d watched the England-Norway match on Fox at a bar earlier in the day, came over to the Upper Crust café to watch Switzerland-Argentina in Spanish.

I did try to use a VPN to watch the Spanish matches on Spanish TV and was able to do so a couple of times but coverage was erratic. Telemundo has worked for me. I can’t believe Americans put up with the inanity of the Fox soccer commentary, but it’s what there is. It’s a metaphor for the state of the sport here. (Baseball commentary in the U.S. is exceptionally high on both radio and television; it’s not like it’s impossible for it to happen in soccer.)

Edited to add, 14 July 2026: Apparently 20% of the people watching the World Cup on Telemundo have English as their first language, much to the consternation of Fox.

On Local Fandom

We have eight days left in the World Cup, and already I am wondering about being bereft of football once it ends. What will I follow to get my footie fix? The end of summer is when professional clubs in many leagues start their season again — should I adopt a club? I did try that after the 2010 World Cup and started casually following Tottenham Hotspur. At the time they were consistently a 5th or 6th place side in the Premier League; since then they’ve gone through many managers (including Mauricio Pochettino, whose future as head coach of the U.S. Men’s National Team is under debate right now) and just had their worst season in a long while, barely escaping relegation.

I am thinking now that trying to be a fan of a side in a top-flight far-off league is just not a good strategy. I don’t have attachments to the places where these sides are located. (Our Davis sketching buddy Pete Scully is a huge Tottenham fan, but that is because he grew up in North London.) What if I find a local team to support? Looking into this matter has just led me into all the swirling discussion and debate over the future of soccer in the United States.

The first team that came to mind was Sacramento Republic FC. They have been around since 2012. I mention this to Pica; she says something about being interested in women’s footie. Well, there’s Bay FC, which was founded in 2023 and plays in the National Women’s Soccer League, the top women’s league in the country. But their stadium is in San Jose, which is too far for me to consider it local. (The identical logic applies to the MLS (Major League Soccer) team the San Jose Earthquakes who play in the same stadium).

I then discover the California Storm. How did I not know about the California Storm? They are an amateur women’s team that play in the Women’s Premier Soccer League. The WPSL was founded in 1998 and is the largest women’s soccer league in the world, with 150 or so teams in it. The California Storm are the winningest team in the league both in terms of number of championships and overall win-loss record. They are based in Davis, California.

But they are not the only WPSL side in Davis. There is also FC Davis. FC Davis is a semi-pro soccer club in Davis founded in 2017 with both men’s and women’s sides. Their founder in 2018 posted a fascinating account of FC Davis came to be. From its introduction:

“Start-up soccer” is a concept gaining momentum around the country as a growing number of communities are looking to break from the current mold of US Soccer and build a more intimate and organic soccer experience in their hometowns.

Due to the constraints of the US soccer pyramid (no promotion/relegation), you don’t start a semi-pro team for money or notoriety. You do it to create a vehicle for helping thousands of players in your community and to provide soccer crazy fans in your local area a team they can call their own.

The article is extremely critical of MLS and its closed system without promotion/relegation. MLS teams only exist where billionaires decide the market is big enough for them.

(Sidenote: Pete Scully has a couple of nicely illustrated blog posts about FC Davis.)

Returning to Sac Republic FC, it turns out they sit at the cusp of the debate over what direction soccer in the United States will go. They play in the USL (United Soccer League) where they have been since they were founded. The intention was that they would build a fan base and join the MLS as an expansion team. This almost came to fruition with Sac Republic FC signing an agreement to join MLS in October 2019, but 16 months later their main investor gets cold feet during the middle of the pandemic and pulls out of the agreement.

But this hasn’t deterred Sac Republic FC from continuing to build their team. They are constructing a new stadium close to downtown, and in November 2024 the Wilton Rancheria located in southern Sacramento County became the majority owner of the team, becoming the first Native American Nation to hold a majority interest in a men’s pro sports team. Meanwhile USL has their own expansion plans, and intends to start a three-tiered promotion/relegation system in 2027.

I very much like the notion of organic bottom-up growth of local teams and regional competition, which is how fandom works across most of the world. Teams remained tied to their community. To take an English example, it is virtually impossible to imagine the Bolton Wanderers up and leaving for Sheffield because they got a better stadium deal there. Relocations happen with major sports franchises in the United States with regularity, which as an East Bay native is something I am bitter about. Oakland no longer has a top-tier professional sports team, with the Oakland Raiders (football) leaving in 2019 and the Oakland Athletics (baseball) leaving in 2024. But they now have a USL team, the Oakland Roots, founded in 2018. The Oakland Roots play Sac Republic FC regularly.

—
Addendum. We watched the England-Norway match today over at the Upper Crust Bakery together with a pretty large crowd. Seated in front of us was an older gentleman wearing an Oakland Roots t-shirt.

Stylist to the Stars

My niece’s ex-boyfriend’s mother was a hair stylist, who said that the major trends in men’s hairstyles are always set by futbolistas. This makes sense: these people have money, sometimes a great deal of it, and an image to project well beyond the confines of a football pitch. Many if not most have Instagram accounts. The fact that football is international with men of all races playing the sport, who often need a new look every season — has brought us to this World Cup, where a short-back-and-sides has evolved into a reverse widow’s peak for white and brown men and breathtakingly sculpted cuts and braids for African and Afro-Caribbean players.

My sister drew my attention to this article about a London hair stylist who has been traveling with the England team but who knows absolutely nothing about football. Her first ever match was seeing England play Mexico at the Azteca last weekend. (She left before the end because it was too loud and drinks were getting spilled all over the place.) Her simplicity is delightful: she asked Jordan Henderson to help her with her bags because she didn’t know he was a player. Nor did she know Lamine Yamal was, but she had a nice time hanging out with his mum…

(Spain won today. It was a good match against a worthy opponent. Tomorrow, England face Norway and Argentina face Switzerland. This will all be over soon.)

Hunting For Apples

I just read the travelogue Apples Are From Kazakhstan: The Land That Disappeared by British journalist Christopher Robbins. The title statement about apples is true, but there is a tragedy around its discovery which has ripples that unfortunately are of great concern today.

The origin of apples was tracked in the 1920s to the Tien Shan mountains which run through northeastern Kazakhstan by a brilliant Russian botanist, geneticist, and geographer named Nikolai Vavilov. Vavilov was highly lauded by the Soviet state for his research on agronomy and the geographical origins of many crops, becoming the youngest member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.

Vavilov ran afoul of his onetime protegé, the scheming and ambitious agronomist Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko adapted his research so as to align with the Soviet policy of forced agricultural collectivization. To support his claims of making agronomic innovations that radically increased crop yields, he rejected both natural selection and genetics in favor of a modified sort of Lamarkianism. Lysenko became a favorite of Josef Stalin, and genetics research in the Soviet Union was destroyed. Over 3,000 biologists were dismissed from employment, and some were imprisoned and executed. Vavilov was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943. Rather than improving crop yields, Lysenko’s ideas did the opposite, and when implemented in China they would contribute to the famine there between 1959 and 1961.

Lysenkoism is much on my mind because of changes to federal funding administration that are being proposed by the US Office of Management and Budget. These changes are quite lengthy; former National of Institutes of Health program officer Elizabeth Ginexi provides a good summary of them. Her article is subtitled “Russell Vought [the director of OMB] is going to destroy American Science”. Probably the most significant change is that senior political appointees would be mandated to conduct a review of every grant before it is issued. Moreover, these appointees would be under no obligation to defer to the recommendations from peer review.

This proposal is open for public comment through July 13, and there has been a massive campaign to elicit comments opposing the new rules. I am presently working on my own comment. As of this writing 98,973 comments have been received. OMB may well ignore all the comments but such an outpouring provides a strong basis for legal action against any finalized rules.

Searching through the already-submitted comments, Lysenko has been mentioned in several hundred of them. Amusingly, someone has in jest submitted a comment as Trofim Lysenko. It concludes with the following:

I therefore urge OMB to finalize the rule and give America what every great centrally managed scientific system requires: political officers empowered to decide which science may live, which science must wait, and which science must be uprooted before it bears unauthorized fruit.

With ideological warmth and agronomic confidence,

Trofim Lysenko
Dictator Emeritus of Politically Convenient Biology
Former Specialist in the Suppression of Bourgeois Genetics

Freaking the Cats Out

For reasons that I won’t go into too much here, we feed the cats little and often. Partly to avoid Winston hogging all of Esme’s food, partly to avoid them gorging themselves (and then vomiting): they were picked up as kittens behind a Walmart, scavenging around some pallets. Such a traumatic early start doesn’t naturally lead to moderation in eating.

We recently bought an automatic feeder that will dispense kibble either manually or programmed. Numenius has an app to control it. At the moment they are wary and suspicious of the noise the opening slots make, but we hope this will eventually take away some of the early morning/late night feeding duties.

Zettlring After Nine Months

Back at the beginning of last October I reported on on how I was experimenting with a notetaking method called Zettelkasten, and had just starting using a software package called Zettlr to do so. I am happy with how this project has gone, and am using the system to store short thoughts, extended notes, and drafts of pieces of writing. As of now I have about 132 entries in my Zettlr workspace. This count may not live up to my hopes from then of one entry a day, but it is continuing to grow in diverse directions.

Each entry in Zettlr is a single markdown file — markdown is a simple structured text format — and a workspace in Zettlr consists of a nested directory of markdown files. I am not at all worried about when I end up having thousands of files instead of hundreds. The Zettlr software seems to scale well, and in addition directories full of markdown files have become a common way to organize information in our brave new world of AI-augmented knowledge management systems.