Later On

Interesting article:

The sun doesn’t rise over the Black Rock Desert in Nevada; it ignites. One minute the blaze-orange glow of dawn is cascading down the sulfur-rich Jackson and Kamma mountain ranges, tinting the prehistoric lakebed a million shades of pink. The next, it’s full celestial throttle. By 6:30, the sun is blinding and the heat is ratcheting up.

So if you’re going to spend a day in the open, pushing a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter attack jet that you’ve converted into a drag racer close to the speed of sound, it’s advisable to get the prep work done before the heat sets in. Yet at 7:00 on a Wednesday morning in July, hardly a single member of Team North American Eagle was stirring. By 8:00, only a few bleary-eyed troops in this volunteer army of American and Canadian aircraft mechanics, engineers, scientists, machinists and hot-rodders had emerged from a cluster of RVs parked alongside a makeshift hangar. Apparently a party at the hot springs, about 12 miles north, ended well past midnight, culminating in a car-to-car flare-gun battle on the ride back to camp.

The wind had kicked up on the playa by the time Team Eagle rolled its car out to the 3.5-mile improvised runway around 10:00. Crew members, finally looking alert and focused, ran down their checklists. Data-acquisition engineer and resident hacker Steve Wallace was up on a ladder, making some last-minute tweaks, leaning down into the web of wires, nodes and connectors set inside Eagle’s fuselage. In the supersonic zone, the slightest aerodynamic instability can cause a ripple effect, mustering forces that can annihilate a car and scatter its pieces across the desert like cracker crumbs, which is why the team had to pull off some successful data-collection runs this week. They had already pushed their erstwhile jet fighter faster than 400 mph, but before they can make their scheduled run for 800 mph—a new world land-speed record—on July 4, 2010, they need to gather enough data to finalize the vehicle’s design.

A team member towed the car to its mark with a pickup truck. Team leader and driver Ed Shadle lowered himself into the cockpit. Pulling on his helmet and lowering his oxygen mask, Shadle gave the thumb’s-up. The crew wheeled over the “huffer cart,” a mobile power unit used to start aircraft engines. With a shriek of its own small turbine, the cart cranked over the Eagle’s General Electric J79. Dust swirled as the jet engine gulped for air.

Suddenly someone ordered a shutdown. One of the parachute bays had popped open. Shadle aborted the start-up, which, as it often does, left some unspent fuel in the combustion chamber. One of the crew spotted a small orange flame burning inside the tailpipe. Shadle got the signal to restart and blow out the flame, but when he did, a fireball leaped from the exhaust, sending crew members diving for cover…

Continue reading.

On the whole, handwriting today is in bad shape—partly because good handwriting is no longer taught as an admirable skill, and in part because people more than ever rely on keyboards to produce written communications. I have a post on italic handwriting and how to learn it, and Jack of Amsterdam points out this article by Emily Yoffe in Slate:

If you have school-age children, you may have noticed their handwriting is terrible. They may communicate incessantly via written word—they can text with their heads in a paper bag—but put a pen in their hands and they can barely write a sentence in decent cursive. It’s not going to be easy to decipher one either, if they think cursive might as well be cuneiform.

My daughter is in the eighth grade, and I realized several years ago that her rudimentary block-letter printing was actually never going to improve because handwriting had been chopped from the school curriculum. Children today learn basic printing in first and second grade, then get cursory instruction in cursive in the third grade—my daughter was given a cursive workbook and told to figure it out herself. She dutifully filled in every page, but she never understood how these looping letters were supposed to become her handwriting, so they never did.

I was appalled that she seemed stuck with this crude penmanship. After all, I had spent hours in Miss Mackenzie’s fifth-grade class perfecting my Palmer-derived hand. Surely part of being literate was having decent handwriting! But I was hardly one to talk. As with the human body, over the decades people’s cursive tends toward collapse. The loops become lumps and eventually degenerate into illegibility. My script piled up on the page, letters smashed against one another at different angles like a series of derailments.

Miss Mackenzie is long gone, but I decided to see if both my daughter and I could improve our handwriting. I was hopeful for her but dubious about myself. At her age, she’s in the neuron-growing business: Certainly she could master this basic skill. But at my age, I assumed handwriting was one of those things that was so fixed it couldn’t be fixed.

We went to the Maryland farmhouse home of Nan Jay Barchowsky, 79, who for almost 30 years has been a handwriting consultant with a line of instructional materials she developed. A calligrapher and artist, she started teaching handwriting at a local school, basing her letters on italic script—the elegant, quick form developed in early-16^th-century Italy.

Barchowsky sat my daughter and me at a slanted writing desk and dictated a paragraph for us to write. She then looked at our work and tried to be diplomatic. She noted that my loops were too big and tended to get tangled in the lines of writing above and below, the sizes of my letters were inconsistent, they slanted in every direction, and certain ones—like R—were illegible while others got omitted altogether. She asked, "Do you ever go back and find you are unable to read your notes?" Yes, all the time!

Barchowsky said my daughter’s handwriting would look more sophisticated, and be both faster and more legible, if her letter size was more regular and she learned to create joins within her words. My daughter acknowledged her frustration. "My handwriting makes me look so young," she complained. "Also it’s so big that on tests and reports I can’t fit in what I want to say."

This Washington Post article describes the national abandonment of penmanship in recent decades. Until the 1970s it was taught as a separate subject through sixth grade. Children in mid-20^thcentury America spent two hours a week on it. Today the teaching of it generally ceases after third grade, and a 2003 survey found that during the years it’s taught, it’s for 10 minutes or less a day…

Continue reading.

TOBS Avocado shaving cream is one of my favorites, though I definitely prefer soap to cream. Still, creams make a good lather, and the Rooney Style 3 Small Super Silvertip held lather for passes from now till noon. The Apollo Mikron with, I believe, an Astra Keramik Platinum blade, did a stellar job, and Alt Innsbruck was a nice finish.

It really boils down to one guy:

In the basement of Aaron Beck’s house, nine miles northwest of downtown Philadelphia, in a dimly lit, dusty, concrete-walled room dedicated to his archives, there sits a pink plastic box containing patient notes from a 40-year-old case of psychotherapy. Beck, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, has short-cropped white hair, sharp blue eyes, and, at 88, a hunched and shuffling gait. He has been a practicing psychiatrist for 59 years. Among the thousands of patients Beck has treated during this time, this case rates as persistent but uncomplicated. The patient was in his mid-40s and had a good career, a loving wife, four beautiful children, and a trove of close friends. Privately, however, he struggled with an acute tendency toward self-criticism. He was of the type that can’t help but interpret neutral events as harsh reflections on his personal worth. He was forever searching for approval, and forever anticipating disapproval.

When the patient’s treatment began—the earliest notes date from the mid-1960s—the dominant psychotherapeutic approach in the United States was psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud had made his first and only visit to this country in 1909, and in the half century that followed, his approach to mental suffering took firm hold of American psychiatry, splintering into a multitude of camps but always retaining a focus on the unconscious mind, the central feature of Freudian analysis. Beck was trained in this tradition. He was a graduate of the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute, and from 1950 to 1952 he worked at the Austen Riggs Center, a world-renowned psychoanalytic hospital in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Beck was an eager student. “I have come to the conclusion,” he wrote to a colleague in 1958, “that there is one conceptual system that is peculiarly suitable for the needs of the medical student and physician-to-be: Psychoanalysis.”

Fewer than 10 years later, …

Read the rest of this entry »

Well worth reading:

During the last four decades, a well-publicized shift in what undergraduate students prefer to study has taken place in American higher education. The number of young men and women majoring in English has dropped dramatically; the same is true of philosophy, foreign languages, art history, and kindred fields, including history. As someone who has taught in four university English departments over the last 40 years, I am dismayed by this shift, as are my colleagues here and there across the land. And because it is probably irreversible, it is important to attempt to sort out the reasons—the many reasons—for what has happened.
First the facts: while the study of English has become less popular among undergraduates, the study of business has risen to become the most popular major in the nation’s colleges and universities. With more than twice the majors of any other course of study, business has become the concentration of more than one in five American undergraduates. Here is how the numbers have changed from 1970/71 to 2003/04 (the last academic year with available figures):

English: from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent
Foreign languages and literatures: from 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent
Philosophy and religious studies: from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent
History: from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent
Business: from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent

In one generation, then, the numbers of those majoring in the humanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than 16 percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from 14 percent to 22 percent. Despite last year’s debacle on Wall Street, the humanities have not benefited; students are still wagering that business jobs will be there when the economy recovers.

What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to …

Continue reading.

Amanda Terkel at ThinkProgress:

Earlier this week, the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim reported on the fact that in seven states plus the District of Columbia, “getting beaten up by your spouse is a pre-existing condition.” The insurance industry figures that if “you are in a marriage with someone who has beaten you in the past, you’re more likely to get beaten again than the average person and are therefore more expensive to insure,” but what it really does is punish these victims for something that wasn’t their fault.

But that isn’t the only policy that health insurers have that primarily discriminate against women. First of all, most individual health insurance markets don’t cover maternity care. In fact, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, only 14 states have a requirement for such coverage, and the number of plans without maternity coverage continues to rise dramatically. Why? Anthem Blue Cross — which has been actively fighting health care reform — considers pregnancy optional and therefore not necessary to insure:

“The point of insurance is to insure against catastrophic care costs. That’s what you’re trying to aggregate and pool for such things as heart attacks and cancer,” said an Anthem Blue Cross spokesman. “Having a child is a matter of choice. Dealing with an adult onset illness, such as diabetes, heart disease breast or prostate cancer, is not a matter of choice.”

Even Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) spoke an unintentional truth when he said of his parents: “When they arrived in Baton Rouge, my mother was already four-and-a-half-months pregnant. I was what folks in the insurance industry now call a pre-existing condition.”

When a woman isn’t currently pregnant, she often still cannot get coverage. Many insurers consider a Caesarean-section pregnancy a pre-existing condition and refuse to cover women who have had the procedure. From a 2008 New York Times story about a Colorado woman who had Golden Rule Insurance:

She was turned down because she had given birth by Caesarean section. Having the operation once increases the odds that it will be performed again, and if she became pregnant and needed another Caesarean, Golden Rule did not want to pay for it. A letter from the company explained that if she had been sterilized after the Caesarean, or if she were over 40 and had given birth two or more years before applying, she might have qualified.

The number of C-sections performed in the United States has been “growing steadily,” with approximately 30 percent of women having the procedure. Other insurance companies that don’t necessarily reject women with C-sections often do charge them higher premiums or “factor in chronic or recurring problems that might have led to the Caesarean.” What’s even worse is that once you’re denied by one company, it’s harder to get coverage somewhere else because you’ve been red-flagged.

Today, Golden Rule CEO Richard Collins is testifying before the House Subcommittee on Domestic Policy about “Bureaucracy of Private Health Insurance.”

Zaid Jilani at ThinkProgress:

One of the worst practices of private health insurance companies is rescission, a process in which insurers use any reason they can to cancel coverage when a person gets sick. As former Cigna executive Wendell Potter explained to Think Progress, “[The insurers have] been doing it for many years and saving billions of dollars as a result of this.” Today, the Huffington Post reports that the insurance company Fortis, now known as Assurant, been ordered by the state of South Carolina to pay $10 million for wrongly revoking the insurance policy of an HIV-positive college student:

The South Carolina Supreme Court has ordered an insurance company to pay $10 million for wrongly revoking the insurance policy of a 17-year-old college student after he tested positive for HIV. The court called the 2002 decision by the insurance company “reprehensible.”

That’s the most an insurance company has ever been ordered to pay in a case involving the practice known as rescission, in which insurance companies retroactively cancel coverage for policyholders based on alleged misstatements – sometimes right after diagnoses of life-threatening diseases.

In the ruling, Justice Jean Hoefer wrote, “We find ample support in the record that Fortis’ conduct was reprehensible. … Fortis demonstrated an indifference to Mitchell’s life and a reckless disregard to his health and safety.”

About time. Jim Tankersley and Josh Meyer in the LA Times:

The Justice Department is investigating whether former Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton illegally used her position to benefit Royal Dutch Shell PLC, the company that later hired her, according to officials in federal law enforcement and the Interior Department.

The criminal investigation centers on the Interior Department’s 2006 decision to award three lucrative oil shale leases on federal land in Colorado to a Shell subsidiary. Over the years it would take to extract the oil, according to calculations from Shell and a Rand Corp. expert, the deal could net the company hundreds of billions of dollars.

The investigation’s main focus is whether Norton violated a law that prohibits federal employees from discussing employment with a company if they are involved in dealings with the government that could benefit the firm, law enforcement and Interior officials said.

They said investigators also were trying to determine if Norton broke a broader federal "denial of honest services" law, which says a government official can be prosecuted for violating the public trust by, for example, steering government business to favored firms or friends.

The Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General began the investigation during the waning months of the George W. Bush administration and more recently made a formal criminal referral to the Justice Department. Norton is the first Bush official at the Cabinet secretary level to be the subject of a formal political corruption investigation…

Continue reading.

Andy Kroll in Salon:

At the end of this summer of discontent, of death panels and unplugging poor Grandma, of Birthers and astroturfers and rifle-toting picketers, the halcyon early days of the Obama administration feel increasingly like hazy, gilt-edged memories. The president’s sprawling legislative agenda — a healthcare overhaul, financial regulation reform, slashing wasteful military spending, and climate change legislation legislation — is slowly grinding its way through the halls of Congress. Barack Obama’s sheen, his administration’s unflagging confidence, and all the bipartisan, post-racial aspirations have been replaced by the hard realities of Washington politicking. And with the media’s lens more tightly focused than ever on Washington’s every move and utterance 24/7, anything said a few months back feels like a lifetime ago.

One particular statement from distant April, however, bears revisiting. The president’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, then grasped not only the magnitude of what was being undertaken, but the raft of entrenched interests lining up in opposition. As he told the New York Times:

We’re not taking on a fight; we’re taking on a multiple-front fight because we’ve taken on a series of entrenched interests across the waterfront — from education to health care, and the defense industry, and the lobbying industry as a whole … There will be a scorecard at the end of which ones we won and which ones we didn’t, but every one of those policy challenges have been initiated by us.

Never short on chutzpah, Emanuel made it clear: it was Us vs. Them in a "multiple-front fight." A "scorecard at the end" would determine winners and losers. As a candidate on the campaign trail, Obama himself regularly decried the undue influence of moneyed interests and lobbyists. Announcing his candidacy on Feb. 10, 2007, for instance, he declared it "time to turn the page" on the "cynics, and the lobbyists, and the special interests who’ve turned our government into a game only they can afford to play." And on Jan. 21, 2009, the very day he came into office, Obama issued one of his first executive orders aiming to limit the influence of lobbyists in the new administration. He planned to "close the revolving door that lets lobbyists come into government freely, and lets them use their time in public service as a way to promote their own interests over the interests of the American people when they leave."

The new White House stood confident in those early months that it could take on "K Street" — a street in the capital notorious for the density of its lobbying firms as well as Washington shorthand for their growing ranks. Tallied up today, however, the administration’s seven-month scorecard tells a different story. Just as sweeping as the administration’s packed domestic agenda has been the sheer force with which the lobbying industry and its clients have fought back, blocking, maligning or undermining its progress. In a Washington version of Newton’s third law, the president’s actions and those of his allies in Congress have elicited an equal and opposite reaction from opponents — inside the Beltway and beyond it.

Spending eye-popping sums of money, deploying armies of lobbyists, dispatching grass-roots foot soldiers as agents of disruption, the special interests have fought fiercely to derail the White House reform agenda. It’s now apparent that Obama and his advisors, including Rahm Emanuel, underestimated their strength. Even if Congress were to move in all four areas targeted for reform, the concessions already made, the softening of prospective regulations and restrictions, would likely signal a series of genuine victories for those special interests…

Continue reading.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., in McClatchy:

I don’t know who coined the term "culture war" to describe our political divisions, but I’m reasonably sure he or she intended it only as a figure of speech.

It feels like something else in light of a new report from the Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist groups. "Terror From The Right" is a listing of bombers, killers, would-be assassins and insurrectionists motivated by anger over abortion, gays, taxes, blacks, Muslims and illegal immigrants.

Which raises an obvious fair and balanced question: What about terror from the left? The SPLC’s Mark Potok says left-wing terror essentially means eco-terrorists, e.g., animal rights extremists. The death toll from their work, he says, is zero.

By contrast, Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people because he was angry at the government, brothers Matthew and Tyler Williams shot two men to death for being gay, James Kopp killed Dr. Barnett Slepian for being an abortion provider, and dozens of other men have been indicted for dozens of other plots to kill thousands of other people with whom they had political disagreements.

It’s one thing to read these stories in isolation and another to see them collected, and thereby connected, here, one extremist plot after another in the 14 years since Oklahoma City. It gives you a sense that — apologies to Buffalo Springfield — there’s something happening here and what it is is all too clear. The report provides troubling context for the outrageous behavior that has attended the election of our first African-American president.

When you call them on that behavior, Barack Obama’s detractors love to accuse you of equating dissent with racism. It is a specious argument. I disagree with the president’s use of signing statements to avoid complying with laws he doesn’t like, but it would never occur to me to carry a sign vowing death to him, his wife and their "two stupid kids" as a protester in Maryland did, or to pray that Obama dies of brain cancer as a "minister" in Arizona does, or to heckle him during a joint session of Congress as Rep. Joe Wilson infamously did.

That’s not dissent. It is the howl of the unhinged and the entitled. The same folks who were complacent as President Bush spent surplus into deficit, wasted $600 billion and 4,000 American lives on the wrong war and watched a major American city drown are morally outraged because the new guy wants to reform health care?

For many of them, I think — not all — that’s because they find it hard to accept that the new guy is liberal . . . and black…

Continue reading.

Now that I have a router and two computers, I’m trying to set up printer sharing and the like. It’s a struggle and it eats up a lot of time better spent doing things of greater interest.

My morning missive to Rep. Sam Farr:

I have checking and VISA accounts with Bank of America. I write to protest their practice of reflecting charges on the VISA balance immediately (within seconds), but reflecting credits only after up to 36 hours.

I needed to make a charge, but account balance was too high. I transferred money on-line directly from my BofA checking account to my BofA VISA card. Because the transfer was done after 12:30 p.m. Pacific Time, I must wait all of the day of the transfer and all of the following day before the payment is reflected.

I don’t like this asymmetry, and there is no reason for it: clearly if they can reflect charges immediately, they also can reflect credits immediately. The delay in posting credits doubtless benefits the bank, but it doesn’t help the customer.

Perhaps a requirement that credits be reflected immediately—at least on-line direct transfers—could be added to the financial regulation and credit card reform package.

Thank you for listening.

Thanks to Bob Slaughter, this article by Ezra Klein in the Washington Post:

When I was a kid, my mother was a bit obsessive about making sure I finished my antibiotics. Even if I was feeling better. That didn’t make a lot of sense to me. You take medicine until you’re not sick anymore. But when I got a bit older, she explained: If you don’t kill off the bacteria, you could be left with only the strongest bits, which then multiply and mount a counterattack. That made sense. I’d watched enough slasher flicks to know that you don’t turn your back just because the killer is down. You make sure he’s dead.

But leaving a capsule of Zithromax behind, it seems, was the least of my problems. This column is based on a single and quite extraordinary statistic: Food animal production accounts for 70 percent — 70 percent! — of the antibiotics used in the United States. That doesn’t even include the antibiotics used for animals that actually get sick. That figure is for "non-therapeutic use" such as growth promotion and disease prevention.

The heavy reliance on routine antibiotic use is a byproduct of the way we raise animals for food: packed into dim and dirty enclosures where they live amid their own filth, eat food that they haven’t evolved to digest, and are pretty much stacked atop one another. Most human beings I know can hardly spend three hours on a plane without contracting a case of the sniffles.

When you give antibiotics to animals meant to become food, however, you’re ensuring that antibiotics end up in the food in low but constant doses. That means bacteria are getting more accustomed to the antibiotics. There’s good reason to think that this background exposure to antibiotics is contributing to the startling rise in antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Everything from staph to strep to salmonella is exhibiting uncommon resilience in the face of our latest drugs. A 2003 World Health Organization study (PDF) put it pretty starkly: "There is clear evidence of the human health consequences [from agricultural use of antibiotics, including] infections that would not have otherwise occurred, increased frequency of treatment failures (in some cases death) and increased severity of infections." Even stronger was the title of a 2001 New England Journal of Medicine editorial: "Antimicrobial Use in Animal Feed — Time to Stop."

Read the rest of this entry »

We all grope for conversation starters with new people. If you’re delving into guacamole, this little gem from Wikipedia might serve: The word "avocado" comes from the Nahuatl word āhuacatl ("testicle", a reference to the shape of the fruit).

Well, it’s really only the medium size, but my Style 3 Super Silvertip feels quite large these days. It did a super job creating lather from the bowl of Tabac, and the Progress impeccably shaved away the stubble. Tabac aftershave was a great finish.

Good news for science fans. Dan Colman at Open Culture:

A little breaking news… 35 leading universities have launched a new web site, Futurity.org, with a simple goal — educating the public about new scientific breakthroughs. In the old days, universities depended on the traditional press to spread the word about new scientific advances. Now, with journalism in crisis and newspapers folding, the schools can no longer bank on that. And so we get Futurity, which is essentially a nonprofit wire service that will distribute news through major news suppliers on the web (Yahoo News & Google News) and also through social media channels (Twitter, Facebook and MySpace). On the list of participating universities, you will find UC Berkeley, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon, The University of Chicago, Duke, Princeton, Yale and many others. You can get a full list here, and read more about the venture here.

The MBT shoes just arrived—this model. When I walk down the hallway, it feels (literally) as though I were walking on air—a peculiar but not unpleasant sensation. These are quite comfortable, and I seem to have hit my size right on the mark. I’m now going outside for a little walking.

I’m somewhat surprised that this works, but I’ll accept the experience of users. Have any readers used this?