Later On

Portland State University Press is now gone, but you can still get the italic instructional series that they published. This information is thanks to Kate Gladstone of Handwriting Repair. She also notes:

You may or may not know that, since Obama came into office, the Department of Education has quietly re-opened the question of whether the United States should establish a national curriculum with standards for *all* subject areas ("all" would seem likely to include handwriting). In fact, the newest TIME Magazine (April 27, 2009) has an article urging a national curriculum (p. 32, by one Walter Isaacson who apparently has some influence in such matters).

If this should happen, I would far rather see the national standards mandate (or at least encourage or explicitly permit) the teaching of Italic handwriting than to risk seeing the issue of handwriting ignored (or, worse, to see a national standard which mandated a conventional print-then-cursive program with all its accident-prone tendencies, including but not limited to its habit of falling apart at any speed above a snail’s crawl).

Interesting book review:

Bretz’s Flood: The Remarkable Story of a Rebel Geologist and the World’s Greatest Flood
by John Soennichsen

A review by Doug Brown

Beginning with the earliest surveys in the 1800s, geologists noticed there was something odd about eastern Washington. The term "scablands" was used to describe the landscape, which appeared to be covered with gaping wounds that went down to the bedrock. The prevailing assumption was that either the Columbia River had sculpted the landscape by shifting its course over the millennia, or that glacier ice had carved it.

Then in the 1920s, a headstrong geologist from the University of Chicago took a couple of trips to survey the scablands. J Harlen Bretz (no period on the J — his first name was actually Harley but he liked the sound of J Harlen) measured vast coulees and canyons, saw evidence of ancient waterfalls that dwarfed Niagara, and reached a radical conclusion. Soennichsen’s accessible book begins with an imagining of Bretz sitting on a bluff in the scablands, loading his pipe and double-checking his calculations as his graduate students toss rocks off the bluff into the water below. The inescapable conclusion was that water, not ice, had carved out the scablands, now dubbed by Bretz the "channeled scablands." And not water from some measly little river like the Columbia — there was evidence of flood bars over 600 feet high. An almost inconceivable amount of water had torn through eastern Washington, stripping the land down to the basaltic bedrock and then scouring into the basalt itself. Bretz found evidence of the flood all the way down the channel of the Columbia, particularly in the Gorge. The Willamette Valley still contains large boulders rafted here on ice from the Canadian Rockies.

Bretz knew this flew in the face of dogma, and not just regarding the origin of the scablands. In geology, the concept of uniformitarianism held sway at the time. This idea had arisen in the 1800s as a response to "catastrophism," which at the time meant trying to explain most geological features as having been caused by Noah’s flood. Uniformitarianism held that geologic processes today were the same as those from the past. It was a way to break from the religious dogma of a young Earth and begin seeing what John McPhee later poetically called "deep time." Given enough time, a river really can carve a grand canyon just by flowing the way it is today, as the Colorado did. Yet here was Bretz invoking passé catastrophism, even though he backed it up with an impressive amount of field observation and calculation.

He published a couple of papers that met with less response than he had hoped for. Then he received an invitation to present his work at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. For a scientist, this was the equivalent of a musician being invited to play in Carnegie Hall. Bretz didn’t realize until too late it was an ambush…

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I watched three movies last night, so off to a very late start today. The movies:

Pineapple Express – I thought it was quite funny, but for a stoner comedy it had a very high body count and some amazing fight sequences.

The Caller – Interesting, slow-paced, and absorbing movie. Good performances, timely story.

Life or Something Like It – a romantic comedy from 2002 with Edward Burns and Angelina Jolie, but Tony Shalhoub steals the show.

The roasted chunks of purple potato and celeriac were extremely tasty. I found some fresh rosemary in the fridge and chopped up some of that to use—you can’t use dried herbs when roasting veg because they get bitter and burned. I tossed the potato and celeriac cubes in olive oil, spread them in the pan, and sprinkled them with the rosemary, a generous amount of coarse salt, and enough freshly ground pepper that they tasted spicy. Roast for 45 minutes at 375º F and Bob’s your uncle. I discovered that squeezing lemon juice over the roasted celeriac was a fine touch.

Today’s a task day: we’re shopping for clothes for The Son’s wedding, so we’ll be out and about. 

Tiny in terms of tools: the Classic is a very small brush, but it still held plenty of lather for three (or even four) passes. The shave stick is Palmolive (presumably because the fats used to make the soap were palm oil and olive oil, at least originally). Booster Mosswood (a sample) was prompted by Steve’s use of same, as mentioned in Kafeneio today. The Gillette Toggle, holding a Iridium Super blade of some uses, is (of course) full sized, and it did a really fine job. All in all, big enjoyment and a great shave.

From the YouTube site:

From a charity cd made in 1999 of which only 1000 copies were made.

Marion Nestle at Food Politics:

The New York Times, in an editorial “Food safety, one pistachio at a time,” says “it is time to think seriously about establishing one federal agency to coordinate and enforce food-safety regulations.”  And Michael Taylor and Stephanie David of the George Washington University Department of Health Policy provide a major position paper arguing that food safety must be a joint effort among federal, state, and local health agencies to address risks across “the farm-to-table spectrum of food production, processing, distribution, retailing, and home preparation.”  Let’s hope Congress is listening as it ponders the various bills introduced to fix the FDA or fix the entire food safety system.

Good article in the Kitchn [sic] on how to make and use a beurre manié.

Via Slashfood:

Carol, a commenter, pointed out the E-Lampinator as the current best recycling technique for fluorescents. It would be nice if these devices could be found at any store that sells fluorescents: take in the old for recycling when you buy the new.

Interesting article by Frank Greve in McClatchy on the technology of today’s ballpoint and rollerball pens, which write so much better than the early attempts:

Disposable pens used to be things you wanted to dispose of by throwing them across the room.

They skipped. They had to be muscled across the page. They leaked sticky ink that smeared good words — and shirt cuffs if the writer was left-handed.

Sometimes America progresses, however, and it has, thanks to generations of Japanese engineers driven by dreams of better pens.

“It’s getting so that all of the pens that I get leave a very nice, deep, black line with instant starting and no globs or drips left behind,” reports Dave Bengston, the founder of the Web site “Cheap Pen Review.”

Among retractable pens, he lauds Pilot’s G2 and the uni-ball 207 for writing ease; among capped pens, the uni-ball Vision Needle. In multi-packs, all cost less than $2 each.

The Vision even gets grudgingly good reviews from Chuck Edwards, the pen doctor at Fahrney’s Pens in Washington, an emporium that is to high-end fountain pens what Tiffany is to diamonds.

“They write well, they hold a lot of ink, and they don’t cost a lot,” Edwards conceded.

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The recipe comes via the Kitchn [sic], which also has photos:

World’s Greatest Sandwich
from Thomas Keller
makes 1 sandwich

3-4 slices of bacon
2 slices of Monterey Jack cheese
2 slices of toasted rustic country loaf (pain de campagne)
1 tbsp of mayo
4 tomato slices
2 leaves of butter lettuce (yes, it’s called butter lettuce)
1 teaspoon butter
1 egg

1. Cook the bacon until crisp, drain on paper towels

2. Place slices of cheese on one side of toasted bread. Place in toaster oven or under broiler to melt.

3. Spread mayo on other slice of bread top with bacon, sliced tomato, and lettuce

4. On non-stick skillet, melt butter over medium heat. Fry egg, turning over briefly when the bottom is set (keep yolk runny)

5. Slide finished egg on top of lettuce, top with other slice of bread (cheese-side down genius)

6. Place sandwich on plate and slice in half, letting yolk run down sandwich

The above is intriguing, but does have some drawbacks, which you might find to be show-stoppers. Read the review here. The Adagio UtiliTEA is a good alternative at 1/3 the price.

I like miso and have several jars of different varieties. Cynthia Lair has suggestions for using it:

Miso is a savory, salty soybean paste made by combining soybeans with a fermented rice culture called koji. Koji is made from a lactic-acid-producing bacteria, a grain, and aspergillus oryzae.

The soybean/koji mixture undergoes an intricate fermentation and aging process for six months to two years. Miso-making is considered a fine craft in traditional Japanese culture, and miso itself has been a staple of Japanese cooking for 2500 years. It is thought to promote long life and good health and has also been touted as neutralizing some of the negative effects of smoking, air pollution, and radiation sickness.

I had one teacher who referred to “salty seasoning” in cooking, not assuming that salt is the only choice. There are actually a few things that one can use to “salt” a food: Tamari (soy sauce), anchovy paste, ume plum vinegar (salty and sour!), fish sauce, and of course miso.

When you use miso to salt a soup you get some added bells and whistles: The fermentation process gives miso beneficial enzymes that aid digestion — like yogurt — making it a “live” food. Buy unpasteurized miso and cook it as little as possible to preserve the beneficial enzymes. Miso also adds an extra dimension of flavor. You can taste the fermented-ness, plus the soybean and other grains used in the process add to the mix.

You don’t want to …

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I’ve become quite fond of celeriac (celery root), and this column suggests more ideas. I’m thinking I’ll cut a celery root and a few purple potatoes into little chunks and then toss with olive oil and roast (375º for 45 minutes is what I use). I’ll include a few quartered small onions and domestic white mushrooms as well. After tossing them and spreading them out in the roasting pan, I sprinkle with Maldon salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Interesting article by Elanor in The Ethicurean:

Couched deep within the earth-mother rhetoric of a recent Monsanto ad (which you can also see on the back cover of the current New Yorker issue, a $100K-plus ad buy) is a bold claim:

Providing abundant and accessible food means putting the latest science-based tools in farmers’ hands, including advanced hybrid and biotech seeds. Monsanto’s advanced seeds not only significantly increase crop yields, they use fewer key resources — like land and fuel — to do it. That’s a win-win for people, and the earth itself.

Oh, really?

I’m not here to challenge their cheery scenario, though I could. And I’m not going to dig into the claim about using fewer resources. Nope, today I’m just tackling the assertion that “Monsanto’s advanced seeds… significantly increase crop yields.” Luckily, I have a new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists to help me.

Released yesterday, the report, “Failure to Yield: Evaluating the Performance of Genetically Engineered Crops,” was authored by Doug Gurian-Sherman, a plant pathology and molecular biology PhD (who, it should be noted, works for a progressive nonprofit). Gurian-Sherman took two decades of peer-reviewed research on GE crops and analyzed how much the technology has actually increased yields over time. Then he compared those gains to the yield improvements that scientists have achieved using traditional crop breeding and other non-GE techniques.  The two dozen GE crop studies he analyzed, which covered herbicide-tolerant corn and soybeans and Bt corn (which is engineered to be resistant to pests) showed pretty stunning results.

And by “stunning,” I mean stunningly lame.

The studies found that the engineering of herbicide-tolerant corn and soybeans has not increased yields at all for these crops. The yields of Bt corn, meanwhile, have increased by 3-4% over the 13 years the crop has been on the market, or between 0.2% and 0.3% per year.

I suppose you could look Bt’s record and call it a “significant increase in crop yields,” but only if you were living in a GE vacuum. When you compare Bt corn’s record to the yield increases that we’ve seen in corn that has not been genetically engineered, things start looking a little different. Since the 1930s, …

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Hilzoy’s excellent composition question: Compare and contrast the following:

OLC memo of August 1, 2002, signed by Jay Bybee:

“You would like to place Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us that he appears to have a fear of insects. (…) As we understand it, you plan to inform Zubaydah that you are going to place a stinging insect into the box, but you will actually place a harmless insect in the box, such as a caterpillar. If you do so, to ensure you are outside the predicate death requirement, you must inform him that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain. If, however, you were to place the insect in the box without informing him that you are doing so, you should not affirmatively lead him to believe that any insect is present which has a sting that could produce severe pain or suffering or even cause his death.”

George Orwell, 1984:

“‘You asked me once,’ said O’Brien, ‘what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.’

“The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because of the position in which O’Brien was standing. Winston could not see what the thing was.

‘The worst thing in the world,’ said O’Brien, ‘varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.’

He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better view of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats.’In your case,’ said O’Brien, ‘the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.’”

Industry lobbyists and others are quickly getting money to their members of Congress. I imagine it’s hell breaking in a new member. Better to keep the ones already trained in their place.

James Fallows has a very interesting post with an actual flight controller commenting on comments to his original post on the Air King situation.

Interesting story by Juliet Eilperin in the WaPo:

The Environmental Protection Agency today plans to propose regulating greenhouse gas emissions on the grounds that these pollutants pose a danger to the public’s health and welfare, according to several sources who asked not to be identified.

The move, coming almost exactly two years after the Supreme Court ordered the agency to examine whether emissions linked to climate change should be curbed under the Clean Air Act, would mark a major shift in the federal government’s approach to global warming.

Former President George W. Bush and his deputies opposed putting mandatory limits on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases for years on the grounds that it would harm the economy; Congress is considering legislation that would do so but it remains unclear whether it can pass the proposal and enact it into law in the near future.

Late last month EPA sent the White House a formal finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare; the Office of Management and Budget signed off on the determination Monday.

When reached this morning, EPA spokesman Allyn Brooks-LaSure declined to comment on the matter…

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