Later On

How the NY Times created the magazine cover:

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Very interesting article on human decision-making in regard to the environment. It begins:

Two days after Barack Obama was sworn in as president of the United States, the Pew Research Center released a poll ranking the issues that Americans said were the most important priorities for this year. At the top of the list were several concerns — jobs and the economy — related to the current recession. Farther down, well after terrorism, deficit reduction and en­ergy (and even something the pollsters characterized as “moral decline”) was climate change. It was priority No. 20. That was last place.

A little more than a week after the poll was published, I took a seat in a wood-paneled room at Columbia University, where a few dozen academics had assembled for a two-day conference on the environment. In many respects, the Pew rankings were a suitable backdrop for the get-together, a meeting of researchers affiliated with something called CRED, or the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions. A branch of behavioral research situated at the intersection of psychology and economics, decision science focuses on the mental proces­ses that shape our choices, behaviors and attitudes. The field’s origins grew mostly out of the work, beginning in the 1970s, of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two psychologists whose experiments have demonstrated that people can behave unexpectedly when confronted with simple choices. We have many automatic biases — we’re more averse to losses than we are interested in gains, for instance — and we make repeated errors in judgment based on our tendency to use shorthand rules to solve problems. We can also be extremely susceptible to how questions are posed. Would you undergo surgery if it had a 20 percent mortality rate? What if it had an 80 percent survival rate? It’s the same procedure, of course, but in various experiments, responses from patients can differ markedly.

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Very interesting article in the NY Times Sunday Magazine:

The stage lights went up at the Panida Theater, a classy old movie house in Sandpoint, Idaho, and the M.C. stepped out of the dark with one finger high in the air. There was an uprising of applause and cheering. Then, shouting like a head coach before a bowl game, she said, “Sandpoint, are you ready?”

It was a Friday night last November. All around the little town of Sandpoint, beetles were blighting north Idaho’s pine forests. The previous day, the U.N. reported that emissions from automobiles and coal-fired power plants were collecting in brown clouds over 13 Asian and African cities and blocking out the sun. Iceland’s main banks had crumpled, and American auto executives were about to fly to Washington in private jets to plead for a bailout. Off the coast of Africa, Somali pirates were hijacking oil tankers. But the folks at the Panida Theater wouldn’t stop clapping. The Sandpoint Transition Initiative, a new chapter of a growing, worldwide environmental movement, was officially coming to life.

The Transition movement was started four years ago by Rob Hopkins, a young British instructor of ecological design. Transition shares certain principles with environmentalism, but its vision is deeper — and more radical — than mere greenness or sustainability. “Sustainability,” Hopkins recently told me, “is about reducing the impacts of what comes out of the tailpipe of industrial society.” But that assumes our industrial society will keep running. By contrast, Hopkins said, Transition is about “building resiliency” — putting new systems in place to make a given community as self-sufficient as possible, bracing it to withstand the shocks that will come as oil grows astronomically expensive, climate change intensifies and, maybe sooner than we think, industrial society frays or collapses entirely. For a generation, the environmental movement has told us to change our lifestyles to avoid catastrophic consequences. Transition tells us those consequences are now irreversibly switching on; we need to revolutionize our lives if we want to survive.

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Interesting article in New Scientist:

Brain training in a computerised mind gym could help people with schizophrenia cope with the debilitating cognitive problems caused by the condition.

The obvious schizophrenic symptoms – such as having animated conversations with people who aren’t really there – can be controlled by antipsychotic drugs. However, people with schizophrenia find their difficulties with learning, remembering, making decisions and processing information even more problematic than hallucinations. These symptoms have proved hard to treat, making it difficult for people with the condition to hold down a job or deal with social situations.

Now there is hope. At the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, a team led by Sophia Vinogradov has put 55 volunteers with schizophrenia through "brain fitness" training, using software made by the firm Posit Science, also in San Francisco.

The brain fitness software starts by …

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ThinkProgress:

Marcy Wheeler digs through the recently-disclosed Office of Legal Counsel memos authored by the Bush Justice Department and finds these startling statistics: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002. Wheeler concludes, “The CIA wants you to believe waterboarding is effective. Yet somehow, it took them 183 applications of the waterboard in a one month period to get what they claimed was cooperation out of KSM. That doesn’t sound very effective to me.”

Blue Girl lays it out:

The Mount Sinai Center for Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research, a multi-year study launched in 1998, released their findings for years 6-10 on Thursday, and they shine a harsh light on the use of phthalates, potent endocrine disruptors and a component of plastics used in food packaging.  Phthalates, long maligned for their carcinogenic properties, are used to make plastics pliable.  They are fat-soluble and absorbed into the body, where they adversely affect hormone levels and metabolism, and the new data suggests that they are a major contributing factor in the skyrocketing rates of childhood obesity.  

The researchers measured exposure to phthalates by looking at the children’s urine. "The heaviest girls have the highest levels of phthalates metabolites in their urine," said Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, a professor of pediatrics at Mount Sinai, one of the lead researchers on the study. "It goes up as the children get heavier, but it’s most evident in the heaviest kids."

This builds upon a larger Mount Sinai research effort called "Growing Up Healthy in East Harlem," which has looked at various health factors in East Harlem children over the last 10 years, including pesticides, diet and even proximity to bodegas.

About 40 percent of the children in East Harlem are considered either overweight or obese. "When we say children, I’m talking about kindergarten children, we are talking about little kids," Dr. Landrigan said. "This is a problem that begins early in life."

The study was conducted following 300 children in East Harlem and an additional 200 children from the surrounding community; and a separate group of approximately 400 girls in the same communities, in the 9-11 age range.  

The findings bring an additional causative factor in childhood obesity to the fore, introducing a new variable – environmental factors – into the equation.  Most people have assumed one of two positions in the debate over what has caused the increased incidence in childhood obesity.  Some claim …

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Very good editorial in the NY Times:

To read the four newly released memos on prisoner interrogation written by George W. Bush’s Justice Department is to take a journey into depravity.

Their language is the precise bureaucratese favored by dungeon masters throughout history. They detail how to fashion a collar for slamming a prisoner against a wall, exactly how many days he can be kept without sleep (11), and what, specifically, he should be told before being locked in a box with an insect — all to stop just short of having a jury decide that these acts violate the laws against torture and abusive treatment of prisoners.

In one of the more nauseating passages, Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.

These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors’ statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country’s most basic values.

It sounds like the plot of a mob film, except the lawyers asking how much their clients can get away with are from the C.I.A. and the lawyers coaching them on how to commit the abuses are from the Justice Department. And it all played out with the blessing of the defense secretary, the attorney general, the intelligence director and, most likely, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

The Americans Civil Liberties Union deserves credit for …

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Interesting article by Sarah Posner in The American Prospect:

Every once in a while, two simultaneously published books work in tandem to illuminate their subjects in ways that each book might not if read alone. Readers interested in the challenges of achieving sexual equality and in the dangers of religious fundamentalism — subjects that arguably cannot be understood in isolation from each other — will find such a convergence in new books written by two of our most important investigative journalists.

Michelle Goldberg’s latest, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World, (excerpted in the May issue of The American Prospect) is an essential account of how U.S. aid policy, beginning in the 1970s with efforts to slow spiraling population growth, came under the sway of the sexually puritanical demands of the American religious right, to ruinous effects. The resulting unavailability of safe abortion and family-planning services, combined with the devastation of HIV/AIDS and other disasters, has wreaked havoc, Goldberg argues, on personal lives, economic prospects, and therefore political stability. Taking her readers through Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe, Goldberg shows how homegrown religious fundamentalism, with its own restrictions on sexual autonomy, converges with the U.S. presence to upend the future of generations of children.

To some, Goldberg’s view that religious meddling in the reproductive policies has led to a global crisis might seem overstated. After all, countless factors combine to undermine global security. Yet Goldberg’s argument, bolstered by her meticulous policy and historical research, transcontinental on-the-ground reporting, and impassioned analysis, serves, if nothing else, as a wake-up call. Reproductive justice is not an outpost "women’s" issue; it’s essential for the well-being of the planet.

Goldberg offers numerous examples of how religious belief structures — local and imported — have crushed the everyday lives and future well-being of women across the globe: …

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Adam Serwer has a good article in The American Prospect:

Yesterday the Obama administration ordered the release of four Bush-era memos from the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that vividly describe "enhanced interrogation" techniques used by the CIA. The memos were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

"Transparency won today," said Ken Gude, a human-rights and international-law expert at the Center for American Progress.

One memo, written in August 2002 and signed by then OLC Chief Jay Bybee, approves a list of 10 "enhanced interrogation" techniques that the CIA wanted to use against Abu Zubayda, who was believed to be a senior member of al-Qaeda. The techniques are described in a detached, clinical manner: "walling," the act of throwing detainees against a "flexible wall," and "close confinement," the act of placing a detainee within a confinement box that forces the detainee to stand or sit. The memo also approves the use of insects with the confinement box to enhance detainees’ sense of terror.

The techniques listed do not rise to the level of torture, the memo says, because they do not cause severe physical or mental suffering. But the abstract descriptions of these techniques stand in stark contrast to detainee testimony of how they were actually applied, according to a 2007 report by the International Committee of the Red Cross. In addition to describing techniques outlined in the Bybee memo, the ICRC report describes several other techniques, such as forced nudity, the dousing of detainees with cold water, and forcing detainees to wear diapers. All of these appear to violate the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment to which the United States is a signatory.

Alex Abdo, a legal fellow with the ACLU’s National Security Project, says comparing the clinical description in the OLC memos to the ICRC report was surreal. "The four memos were written by lawyers trying to construct a legal regime that allowed the unthinkable. The sterilized language they use in the memos as compared with the graphic descriptions of the ICRC report make that patently clear," Abdo says. "It’s as though you’re in Alice in Wonderland."

***

Waterboarding is a form of torture in which cloth or cellophane is placed over the victim’s mouth or head and water is poured over him to force a sensation of suffocation and drowning. The victim is restrained to a wooden board by leather straps to prevent struggling during the procedure. In the Bybee memo, waterboarding is described as a "controlled acute episode." During the procedure, "although the subject may experience the fear or panic associated with drowning, the waterboard does not cause physical pain." The personal accounts from the detainees contradict this description…

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Interesting article in the LA Times:

UCLA researchers have provided strong new evidence linking at least some cases of Parkinson’s disease to exposure to pesticides.  Researchers have suspected for some time that pesticides may cause the neurodegenerative disorder, and experiments in animals have shown that the chemicals, particularly the fungicide maneb and the herbicide paraquat, can cause Parkinson-like symptoms in animals. But proving it in humans has been difficult because of problems in assessing exposure to the agents.

Parkinson’s is a disorder of the central nervous system that often impairs the sufferer’s motor skills, speech and other functions. It is not fatal of itself, but complications often are. The disease has been recognized since the Middle Ages but became more prevalent in the 20th century. As many as 180 of every 100,000 Americans develop it.

To explore a potential connection to pesticides, epidemiologist Beate Ritz of UCLA and her graduate student Sadie Costello, now at UC Berkeley, studied public records of pesticide applications in California’s Central Valley from 1974 to 1999. Every application of pesticides to crops must be registered with the state. Working with Myles Cockburn of USC, they developed a tool to estimate pesticide exposure in areas immediately adjacent to the fields.

They then identified 368 longtime residents who lived within 500 yards of fields where the chemicals had been sprayed and compared them to 341 carefully matched controls who did not live near the fields.

They reported in the current issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology that …

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Excellent point by Tom Ricks:

Want to trim the federal budget and improve the military at the same time? Shut down West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy, and use some of the savings to expand ROTC scholarships.

After covering the U.S. military for nearly two decades, I’ve concluded that graduates of the service academies don’t stand out compared to other officers. Yet producing them is more than twice as expensive as taking in graduates of civilian schools ($300,000 per West Point product vs. $130,000 for ROTC student). On top of the economic advantage, I’ve been told by some commanders that they prefer officers who come out of ROTC programs, because they tend to be better educated and less cynical about the military.

This is no knock on the academies’ graduates…

Continue reading. Interesting that he leaves the fourth service academy, the Coast Guard Academy, in place.

Sounds interesting:

Structure and Randomness: Pages from Year One of a Mathematical Blog
by Terence Tao

A review by Cosma Shalizi

Terence Tao is an almost ridiculously distinguished young mathematician, perhaps best known for his work in combinatorics and number theory, especially the theory of arithmetic progressions of prime numbers. In early 2007, he turned the “what’s new” section of his home page into a blog, and his new book, Structure and Randomness, collects some of the writings that first appeared there: expository notes on mathematical results that are or ought to be well-known, sketches of unusual proofs for classical theorems, the texts of three invited lectures, a selection of discussions of open problems, and a few curiosities, including a famous — or infamous — attempt to explain quantum mechanics in terms of the video game Tomb Raider. What should we make of this?

The first thing to say is that Tao is a mathematician writing for other mathematicians. The knowledge of modern mathematics needed to follow everything in this book, or on his blog, is very broad. The implied reader of the expository notes is familiar with abstract algebra, algebraic geometry, functional analysis, graph theory, harmonic analysis, Lie algebras, mathematical logic, measure theory, number theory, partial differential equations, real analysis and representation theory, among other topics; other fields (most notably ergodic theory) appear as background to the lectures and as open problems. Readers needn’t have very deep knowledge of any of these subjects, and no one chapter uses them all, but Tao is certainly not writing for neophytes. (Online, he usually links terms to their Wikipedia definitions, but that doesn’t work in a book, of course.) Given that background, however, Tao does a fine job of providing new insights into old ideas, building intuition about why results come out the way they do, exploring why certain problems are at once interesting and hard, and explaining tricks (of which more later).

Despite the range of subjects Tao covers, certain themes keep recurring. (It’s an interesting question whether this reflects the author’s preoccupations or is just inevitable given the quantity of material.) We can call these randomness, obstacles and tricks.

The first of these themes is …

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Easily and cheaply made.

But they’re not. Take a look.

The Gathering Storm, a youtube video against gay marriage, was so surpassingly lame that I wasn’t even going to comment, but Stephen Colbert’s parody (starting at 7 minutes in at the link) is so good that I have to point it out. The Younger Daughter tipped me off. It’s truly wonderful.

Gay marriage has, I think, won. It may take a few years, but the war is over and only mop-up actions remain.

The kitchen has become a total pit of dirty dishes. How does that happen, anyway? So a part of today (one or two hours) is going to be spent in a particular kind of meditation: cleaning meditation. I call it meditation because if I slow down a bit, become calm, become absorbed by the cleaning, the time passes quickly and I even can enjoy it. It’s the same trick of mind I used to use when it was time to fill out expense reports: get in the right zone, relax, and the task becomes a way to meditate.

The plan today is to go to Carmel for something The Wife must do, and while we’re there, have lunch at Casanova. That should be pleasant: it’s a clear sunny day and you can eat outside in a patio they have.

The political break was good, and I plan to continue to mostly read rather than blog politics, though of course if I see something particularly good, it will be blogged.

Now, while the tea brews, let’s get started.

Give the sunbird a few hundred thousand years—maybe a million—and some subset of them will evolve to a new species analogous to the hummingbird. Or so I would bet. The process is already begun, I would think: sunbirds that are smaller and can hover longer will get more food and have more babies. Etc. See the video and a brief article here in New Scientist.

I think it was Bob Slaughter who first let me know about Fee Brothers Bitters. I ordered a set of six, and now I see that DougJ has discovered them. Click through and read his post.

I got my clothes for The Son’s wedding, plus was able to find black mustard seed and fresh dill for this salad:

Sour Cream Cucumber Salad with Mustard Seeds
serves 4-6

1 seedless English cucumber, washed and unpeeled
3 smooth ordinary slicing cucumbers, washed and peeled
Fine table salt
2 teaspoons black mustard seeds
4 large shallots, peeled and sliced
2/3 cup sour cream
1 small handful fresh dill, chopped fine
Freshly ground black pepper

Chop the cucumbers in half longwise, then into thin half-moons. Layer in a medium-sized bowl, sprinkling each layer lightly with salt. Put two small plates on top then cover the bowl with plastic wrap. Refrigerate for at least an hour, or overnight.

Put the cucumbers into a large colander and drain any excess water. Pat lightly with a kitchen towel to remove as much moisture as you can.

Heat a small skillet over medium-high heat. Add the mustard seeds and cook, shaking the pan, until the mustard seeds pop just a bit. This should take no more than a minute or two. Take the skillet off the heat and pour the seeds into a plate to cool.

Toss the cucumber slices with the shallots, sour cream, and chopped dill. Mix in the cooled mustard seeds. Taste and season with black pepper. You can serve this immediately, or refrigerate it for up to a day before serving.

Also picked up a couple of nice little Xmas presents, though for whom I’ve not decided. And returned books to libraries. Good, constructive day, for all that it started late.

UPDATE: Regarding the recipe: skip the shallots and use one small sweet onion.

Steve Schmidt yesterday spoke to the Log Cabin Republicans, a group of gay Republicans, and his speech pointed out the problems in the GOP opposition to gay marriage. From his speech (full transcript at the link):

… As a percentage of the total vote, younger voters didn’t really increase in the last election.  But the Democrats’ margin with those voters certainly did.  In short, we were crushed by the Obama campaign with voters under 30.  President Obama was a uniquely attractive candidate to younger voters, in matters of style as much as substance.  And maybe as those voters grow older and acquire greater responsibilities they will develop a better appreciation for Republican values of limited government, fiscal discipline, low taxes and a strong defense.  That has happened in the past. 

But even if they do, I doubt they will abandon social attributes that distinguish them from older voters; among them, a greater acceptance of people who find happiness in relationships with members of the same sex.  And I believe Republicans should re-examine the extent to which we are being defined by positions on issues that I don’t believe are among our core values, and that put us at odds with what I expect will become over time, if not a consensus view, then the view of a substantial majority of voters.

Of course, a party cannot grow if it subtracts while it tries to add.  Social conservatives remain an indispensable part of the Republican coalition.  I don’t subscribe to the notion that social conservatives are a monolithic bloc of close-minded people who would tread on the rights of Americans who disagree with them. Nor do I think conservatism will or should abandon its reluctance to change or abandon social conventions that are important to the strength and stability of our society. 

… The institution of marriage is the foundation of society and alterations to its definitions shouldn’t be lightly undertaken.  It has always been defined as the legal union of a man and a woman, and it’s understandable that many Americans are apprehensive about making a definitional change to so profoundly an important institution.  But it is a tradition, not a creed, or, at least, not a national creed.  It is not how we define ourselves as Americans.  And while we shouldn’t carelessly dismiss the importance of enduring traditions, we should understand that traditions do change over time in every society.  And as long as those changes do not conflict with the tenets of our national creed then they can, and inevitably will, be modified by a society that has come to view them as inequitable. 

It can be argued, although I disagree, that marriage should remain the legal union of a man and a woman because changing it to admit same sex unions would undermine the most basic institution of a well ordered society.  It can be argued according to the creeds and convictions of religious belief, which I respect.  But it cannot be argued that marriage between people of the same sex is un-American or threatens the rights of others.  On the contrary, it seems to me that denying two consenting adults of the same sex the right to form a lawful union that is protected and respected by the state denies them two of the most basic natural rights affirmed in the preamble of our Declaration of Independence – liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  That, I believe, gives the argument of same sex marriage proponents its moral force.