Later On

Informative and helpful book review at The Simple Dollar. Good decluttering advice. The review begins:

Whenever I see clutter, I see money lost. For one, the clutter itself is usually made up of unused items that have value. Books, decorations, games, DVDs, and so on – they all cost money to purchase and many have at least some degree of resale value. For another, clutter takes up time, and time is money. It takes longer to find things. It takes longer to clean. It takes longer to rearrange and to organize.

Thus, over time, I’ve begun to look at clutter as an enemy of sorts. Stuff that just takes up space, particularly stuff with very limited aesthetic appeal, is stuff that can easily be eliminated.

That’s not to say that I’m entirely successful in my war on clutter. There are many places in our home that are quite cluttered (starting with my office, for example), but I often have difficulty sifting through that clutter and determining what exactly I should keep – and what I should get rid of.

Throw Out Fifty Things by Gail Blanke offers an interesting solution in the title itself. Blanke’s premise is that by going through your cluttered spaces and choosing fifty things to get rid of, you push yourself through the psychological barriers that cause you to create clutter in the first place.

Blanke identifies four key rules of disengagement (how to decide what to get rid of): …

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Very nice interview of Richard Anderson (CEO of Delta Airlines) in the NY Times with some life lessons he’s learned. For example:

I’ve learned to be patient and not lose my temper. And the reason that’s important is everything you do is an example, and people look at everything you do and take a signal from everything you do. And when you lose your temper, it really squelches debate and sends the wrong signal about how you want your organization to run. And it was a good lesson. It was a long time ago. And I had a C.E.O. who I was very close to, and he just took me aside and gave me a really short instruction about it. And it was a really important instruction.

Lots more. Read it all.

Interesting article by John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira in The American Prospect:

President Barack Obama’s stimulus package, his joint address to Congress, and his 2010 budget have sent conservatives into fits of indignation over the supposed radicalism of the new president’s agenda. Dusting off red-scare rhetoric from the early years of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, Minority Leader John Boehner declared Obama’s initiatives on energy, health care, and education to be "one big down payment on a new American socialist experiment." At the Conservative Political Action Conference held at the end of February, Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina implored the young activists to "take to the streets to stop America’s slide into socialism." Former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee added, "The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics may be dead, but the Union of American Socialist Republics is being born!" National Review, taking a slightly more measured tone in confronting the specter of collectivist tyranny, asked historians and other academics, "Is Ayn Rand freshly relevant in the Age of Obama?"

How do we make sense of all this righteous anger? Are conservatives tapping into a deep-seated aversion to progressive government among the electorate? Hardly. Not unlike the characters in Rand’s various fantasies of libertarian anarchy, conservatives today are living in an alternative universe. And the sooner they wake up to this reality the better off they will be.

The 2008 presidential election not only solidified partisan shifts to the Democratic Party, it also marked a significant transformation in the ideological and electoral landscape of America. In two major studies of American beliefs and demographic trends–the State of American Political Ideology, 2009 and New Progressive America, both conducted by the Progressive Studies Program at the Center for American Progress–we found that the president’s agenda reflects deep and growing consensus among the American public about the priorities and values that should guide our government and society. Not surprisingly, conservatives are the ones who are out of line with the values of most Americans.

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The rise of progressivism in America today is reflected most directly in public ratings of various ideological approaches…

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Mark Kleiman points out this little trick:

Most of America’s prisons are in poor, rural, predominantly white, Republican-voting areas. The Census Bureau counts people as residents of the place they usually sleep, so prisoners count as residents of their prisons.

But the inmates themselves are more than 50% African-American or Latino. The Census Bureau rule artificially increases the nominal population of those areas (and thus their voting power and share of federal dollars) at the expense of the places the inmates actually come from and will return to. That helps stack legislatures with supporters of more and more incarceration: the repeal of the Rockefeller drug laws in New York was delayed for more than a decade by northern-tier state senators who feared the loss of prison-guard jobs for their actual constituents.

There’s a grim echo here of the "three-fifths rule" under which the voting power of slave-owners was inflated by counting a fraction of slaves as part of the population.

The effect is not a small one: the current prison headcount is 1.5 million. Is is really too late to change the rules before the 2010 Census?

With eyeglasses, the divergence between the interests of the manufacturers and the consumer seem to diverge markedly. I have a pair of Takumi frames that I’ve used for years. I like them because the temple pieces use internal springs to stay tight and the clip-ons are magnetic. But one temple pieces is now useless: the internal spring broke. The frames were expensive—around $300, as I recall, and the lenses (which fit this particular frame) were $400: bifocals with a slab-off, high-index plastic, anti-reflection coated. So about $700 worth of eyeglasses is unusable because of a spring that cost less than a penny.

I realized last night that I could simply buy another temple piece of the right length. It wouldn’t even have to match the other temple-piece: who cares?

Only, of course, opticians—at least the one I went to—are basically order-takers. They don’t, for example, stock spare parts. And the reason for that is simple: manufacturers go to great lengths to ensure that a part of one frame will not work in another. Much better (for them) that you buy an entire new frame than simply replace the temple—and, of course, that involves buying new lenses, since they also take care to design unique lens shapes (the perimeter shape).

So I’m sitting here fuming and thinking that a string might work: tie a loop with a bowline knot, then feed the string through the temple attachment point and tie at knot to make the string the right length. It might work.

In the meantime, I’m working, blurrily, sans glasses.

UPDATE: My Santa Cruz optician is NOT an order-taker but an actual optician. I called, and though the frames are now out of print, he has lots of spare temple pieces that would fit. I’ll drive up this afternoon and let him have a go at it.

Traditional tools for a great shave: the Plisson Chinese Grey created a greated lather from Geo. F. Trumper’s Rose shaving cream. Shaving cream has one great advantage over shaving soap: the fragrances in shaving cream can be more intense. It’s very pleasant to shave to the accompaniment of the fragrance of roses. I used a Gillette Tech, though since it’s in gold it may have a special model name. The Tech is generally too mild for me, so I brought it up to snuff with a very sharp blade: the Gillette 7 O’Clock SharpEdge, made in Russia (St. Petersburg). (This is not the Indian 7 AM blade.) Very smooth shave, one small nick on the chin that I didn’t even feel. My Nik Is Sealed fixed it right up.

And, to end on a traditional note, Pinaud’s Clubman aftershave.

An interesting article by Linda Geddes in New Scientist:

A GROWING appreciation of the links between anorexia and autism spectrum disorders has uncovered new opportunities for treating the eating disorder.

Mental health professionals are now attempting to train the brains of people with anorexia to be more flexible and to see the big picture as well as fine details. In doing so, they hope patients will be less inclined to obsess about body weight and calories and be better equipped to overcome their eating disorder in the long term, as well as gaining weight more immediately.

Last month, the international Academy for Eating Disorders published a paper calling for eating disorders (EDs) such as anorexia and bulimia to receive the same degree of healthcare as other biologically based mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) (International Journal of Eating Disorders, DOI: 10.1002/eat.20589). Other groups are even calling for anorexia to be placed in the same diagnostic category as autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

The main reason for this change is …

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New Scientist has a good FAQ.

I just disjointed two pounds of chicken wings, discarded the tips (though I probably should have used them to make stock) and put the other pieces in a bowl of Shari’s chicken marinade to marinate until dinner.

UPDATE: They were, as always, delicious, but one tip: line the baking sheet with aluminum foil and then put the wings on a rack above the foil. Because of the brown sugar in the marinade, the drips adhere tenaciously to the foil.

The shoes can be increased by one full size (6 to 7 for example) in half-size increments: 6, 6 1/2, 7. Good idea when buying shoes for kids still growing fast.

I’m a big fan of Tom Bihn bags, from the time he was making the bags in Santa Cruz on a side street just off the Pacific Garden Mall. I even talked with him about making a Go equipment bag (two bowls of stones, a folding Go board, and perhaps a few Go books and clock) and he seemed enthusiastic for a while, but the bag has yet to be released.

Here’s an enthusiastic (and detailed) endorsement of Bihn’s top-of-the-line laptop bag. It begins:

In the post What we want but can’t yet have, I bemoaned how I had yet to find a decent laptop bag for business travel:

The perfect laptop bag has a pocket for everything you need to carry with you, has a comfortable shoulder strap, is made to last, is professional in appearance, and doesn’t scream I’M CARRYING A LAPTOP FOR YOU TO STEAL. This bag is so perfect that you want to name your pets after it. We have found many bags that come close to meeting these requirements, but none that is perfect.

The day after this post ran, I got an e-mail from a lovely woman at Tom Bihn bags explaining that the reason I hadn’t found the perfect laptop bag was because I hadn’t tried her company’s top-of-the-line product. Fair enough, I hadn’t tried the exact bag she was referencing in her e-mail. I told her I would take it out with me on a few trips and see how it handled. My expectations were low; I’d been let down so many times in the past that I assumed I would be let down again.

I’m not one to eagerly admit when I’m wrong, but I was. This bag is amazing. It meets my qualifications for a perfect laptop bag for business travel — and more. I’ve since taken it out four times (three of those involved air travel), and feel comfortable singing its praises.

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A self-published author who’s one of the best-selling authors of all times. Via Tom Colvin’s blog, Becoming a Writer Seriously:

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I see that the government has declared a public health emergency about the swine flu, and Gov. Perry of Texas has gone from talking up secession (Texas leaving the US to become an independent republic) to pleading for help from the Federal government. Or maybe he’s doing both: logic is not his strong suit.

This is an excellent time to read John M. Barry’s fine book The Great Influenza, the influenza pandemic of 1917-18, which killed as many as 150 million people worldwide. Like today’s swine flu emergency, the disease started among swine in Iowa. Your library probably has the book, or you can buy a copy for as little as $1.00.

It is truly a fascinating book. And if you ask, I would bet you would find that some member(s) of your extended family died in that epidemic.

Broder long ago outlived whatever promise he once evidenced, and nowadays he’s nothing but an apologist for the elite. Glenn Greenwald has an excellent column today, from which I take this one paragraph:

To justify the absolute immunity he wants for government lawbreakers, Broder describes the Bush era as “one of the darkest chapters of American history, when certain terrorist suspects were whisked off to secret prisons and subjected to waterboarding and other forms of painful coercion in hopes of extracting information about threats to the United States.”  But that’s easy to say now that the Bush presidency is over and the evidence of its criminality so undeniable.  But Broder never said any such thing while it was all taking place, when it mattered.  In fact, he did the opposite:  he mocked those who tried to sound the alarm about how radical and “dark” the Bush presidency was and repeatedly defended what Bush officials were doing as perfectly normal, unalarming and well within the bounds of mainstream and legitimate policy.

Really, read the whole thing.

Well, one more paragraph:

What Broder states today as fact (that the Bush presidency is “one of the darkest chapters of American history”) is almost verbatim that which, when it mattered, when it was happening, he vehemently and repeatedly denied — and, of course, given that he works in the most accountability-free profession of all (establishment punditry), he does not even have the minimal honesty to acknowledge that.  Like so many of his colleagues, Broder played a critical role in defending these crimes and insisting that they were not taking place.

One more—and this is the last, I promise:

More than anything else, Broder’s column illustrates the Central Creed of Beltway Culture, which should be memorialized on plaques throughout that city:

When poor and ordinary Americans who commit crimes are prosecuted and imprisoned, that is Justice.

When the same thing is done to Washington elites, that is Ugly Retribution.

I watched Babylon AD last night. Interesting cast: Vin Diesel, Michelle Yeoh, Mélanie Thierry, Gérard Depardieu, and Charlotte Rampling, among others. It was a straightforward science-fiction film, not bad.

Take a look at these.

I made this recipe last night and it was fantastically good. I even turned off the movie I was watching so I could give the food my full attention. And: it’s easy and it’s quick. It doesn’t get much better. From Mark Bittman’s blog:

Freshly squeezed orange juice can be the base of a Spanish-style sauce, spiced with cayenne and cumin. Use it on grilled chicken, broiled fish, even steamed broccoli, but the ultimate partner is crusty roasted pork.

Pork With Orange Sauce

Yield 4 servings
Time 30 minutes

Even with these fattier cuts of meat, overcooking is a danger; it is best to leave the pork a little pink in the middle, as is commonly done these days. If you must cook it well done, stop the cooking a little shy of where you want to eat it, because the meat’s internal heat will take it to the next stage.

• 2 pounds country-style pork ribs, or boneless steaks cut from shoulder, about 3/4 to 1 inch thick
• Salt and pepper
• 1 1/2 cups freshly squeezed orange juice
• 1/4 teaspoon cayenne, or to taste
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1 shallot, minced
• Vinegar or fresh lemon or lime juice, if necessary
• 1 teaspoon grated orange rind
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley leaves.

1. Heat oven to 450º or heat broiler, adjusting rack so that it is about 4 inches from heat source. Put an ovenproof skillet large enough to hold pork in one layer on stove top and turn heat to high. Sprinkle meat with salt and pepper. Brown meat quickly on both sides, then transfer skillet to oven or broiler.

2. Meanwhile, combine orange juice, cayenne, cumin and shallots in a small saucepan and turn heat to medium. Cook, stirring, until it reduces to about 1/3 cup; taste and add salt as necessary, a touch more cayenne and cumin if you like, and some vinegar or lemon juice if sauce lacks acidity.

3. If broiling, turn meat once; if roasting, don’t bother. When meat is firm but not tough and a little pink in center (about 10 minutes if broiling, 15 if roasting), remove it to a platter. Combine orange rind with parsley. Spoon sauce over meat, then top with orange rind-parsley mixture. Serve.

I did the roasting method, not the broiling. I was skeptical that a country-style rib, which I normally roast a long time at a low temperature, would do well with this quick-cooking method, but they were fine. I had enough minced shallot (using my Veggichop) that reducing to 1/3 cup would not be possible. I reduced the sauce to about 1/3 of its original volume, or 1/2 cup, which was fine: thick enough to stay on a piece of the succulent pork as I brought it to my mouth.

If you start the sauce boiling before you brown the pork, it will be reduced by the time the pork comes out of the oven.

Very interesting article on using stimulus funds to renovate the nation’s railways. It begins:

This proposal offers dramatic improvements in highway safety and public health, as well as much reduced highway maintenance and construction costs. It will also significantly reduce energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, traffic jams, and shipping costs while providing significant short- and long-term economic stimulus. If fully implemented, it could get as many as 83 percent of all long-haul trucks off our nation’s highways by 2030, reduce carbon emissions by 39 percent and oil consumption by 15 percent. Call it the "Back on Tracks" project.

The best way to explain this proposal is to begin with a concrete example. Six days before Thanksgiving, a truck driver heading south on Interstate 81 through Shenandoah County, Virginia, ploughed his tractor-trailer into a knot of cars that had slowed on the rain-slicked highway. The collision killed an 80-year-old woman and her one- and four-year-old grandchildren, and brought traffic to a standstill along a 10-mile stretch of road for the better part of an afternoon.

It was a tragedy, but not an unusual one. Semis account for roughly one out of every four vehicles that travel through Virginia on I-81′s four lanes, the highest percentage of any interstate in the country. They are there for a reason: I-81 traces a mostly rural route from the Canadian border to Tennessee, and the cities in its path — Syracuse, Scranton, Harrisburg, Hagerstown, and Roanoke among them — are mid-sized and slow growing. This makes the highway a tempting alternative to I-95, the interstate that connects the eastern seaboard’s major metropolises, which is so beset with tolls and congestion that truckers will drive hundreds of extra miles to avoid it.

This is bad news for just about everyone. Even truckers have to deal with an increasingly overcrowded, dangerous I-81, and for motorists it’s a white- knuckle terror. Because much of the road is hilly, they find themselves repeatedly having to pass slow-moving trucks going uphill, only to see them looming large in the rearview mirror on the down grade.

[Extremely interesting graph at this point in the article. – LG]

For years, state transportation officials have watched I-81 get pounded to pieces by tractor-trailers — which are responsible for almost all non-weather-related highway wear and tear. To make matters worse, traffic is projected to rise by 67 percent in just ten years.^[1]

The conventional response to this problem would be simply to build more lanes. It is what highway departments do. But at a cost of $11 billion, or $32 million per mile, Virginia cannot afford to do that without installing tolls, which might have to be set as high as 17 cents per mile for automobiles. When Virginia’s Department of Transportation proposed doing this early last year, truckers and ordinary Virginians alike set off a firestorm of protest. At the same time, just making I-81 wider without adding tolls would make its truck traffic problems worse, as still more trucks diverted from I-95 and other routes.

There is, however, another way to tackle the problem. As it happens, running parallel to I-81 through the Shenandoah Valley and across the Piedmont are two mostly single-track rail lines belonging to the Norfolk Southern Railroad. These lines, like America’s freight railroads generally, have seen a resurgence of trains carrying containers, just like most of the trucks on I-81 do. Due to driver shortages, energy costs and highway congestion, more and more shippers want to use rail these days, and many more would do so if trains moved faster.

The problem is insufficient rail capacity to accommodate all the freight that could go by train. Without upgrading track and removing various choke points, the Norfolk Southern cannot run trains fast enough to be time competitive with most of the trucks hurtling down I-81. Even before the recent financial meltdown, the railroad could not generate enough interest from Wall Street investors to improve the line.

Here’s where the "Back on Tracks" proposal comes in. Instead of using public money to widen I-81 and other interstates to accommodate more and more trucks, use it to improve parallel freight rail infrastructure. A study sponsored by the Virginia Department of Transportation finds that a cumulative investment over 10 to 12 years of less than $8 billion would divert 30 percent of the growing truck traffic on I-81 to rail.^[2]

That would be far more bang for the state’s buck than …

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