Later On

Read this post. Unbelievable, even by Texas standards.

It’s exactly like the pen that Annabelle Sciorra wrote in her journal with in What Dreams May Come, a movie that had its moments and its scenes but did not quite succeed. The pen, as I recall, is a Parker 60, with the little gold arrow inlay above the point. Very cool. Too bad the point is so narrow.

The wild blueberry bush has a lifespan of 13,000 years.

Zaid Jilani at ThinkProgress:

One of the worst tragedies of the recession has been people losing their health insurance because they lost their job. Nearly 14,000 Americans lose their insurance every day. Wisconsin father Bill Caudle was laid off from his job at a plastics company in March 2009, which resulted in his family losing their employer-subsidized health care coverage. This put the family in an especially precarious position, because Bill’s wife, Michelle, was an ovarian cancer patient. After months of unsuccessfully looking for work, Caudle did the only thing he could to get his wife chemotherapy — he joined the Army:

Bill needed a job. He needed health benefits. [...]

The Army would solve their health coverage problem. In years past he would have been too old, but in 2005 the age limit for enlistment was increased from 35 to 40, and a year later it was raised again to 42. The tradeoff would be his absence from home.

In the end, although he risked leaving Michelle to fight cancer on her own, Bill chose the Army. He signed on for a job as a signal support systems specialist, a soldier who works with communications equipment.

“Seventy percent of the reason is for the insurance,” said Bill’s mother, Marguerite Hemiller. “He told me, ‘I’ve always wanted to do something for my country and I have to help Michelle.’”

The United States is the only industrialized country in the world that does not guarantee comprehensive health coverage to all of its citizens. In the rest of the developed world, Bill would not have to leave his cancer-stricken wife behind and risk his own life in order to get her care.

The theory of evolution solves many problems in biology, but it leaves unanswered (so far) how life originated. We may be getting very close to that. Nick Lane in New Scientist:

Peter Mitchell was an eccentric figure. For much of his career he worked in his own lab in a restored manor house in Cornwall in the UK, his research funded in part by a herd of dairy cows. His ideas about the most basic process of life – how it gets energy – seemed ridiculous to his fellow biologists.

"I remember thinking to myself that I would bet anything that [it] didn’t work that way," biochemist Leslie Orgel wrote of his meeting with Mitchell half a century ago. "Not since Darwin and Wallace has biology come up with an idea as counter-intuitive as those of, say, Einstein, Heisenberg and Schrödinger."

Over the following decades, however, it became clear that Mitchell was right. His vindication was complete when he won a Nobel prize in 1978. Even today, though, most biologists have yet to grasp the full implications of his revolutionary ideas – especially for the origin of life.

"Mitchell’s ideas were about how cells are organised in space, and cellular energy generation is a feature of that," says geochemist Mike Russell of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "The problem is that most ideas on the origin of life lack both spatial organisation and a supply of energy to drive replication or growth."

Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting New Scientist article by Bob Holmes:

Women of the future are likely to be slightly shorter and plumper, have healthier hearts and longer reproductive windows. These changes are predicted by the strongest proof to date that humans are still evolving.

Medical advances mean that many people who once would have died young now live to a ripe old age. This has led to a belief that natural selection no longer affects humans and, therefore, that we have stopped evolving.

"That’s just plain false," says Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University. He says although differences in survival may no longer select "fitter" humans and their genes, differences in reproduction still can. The question is whether women who have more children have distinguishing traits which they pass on to their offspring.

To find out, Stearns and his colleagues turned to data from the Framingham Heart Study, which has tracked the medical histories of more than 14,000 residents of the town of Framingham, Massachusetts, since 1948 – spanning three generations in some families.

The team studied 2238 women who had passed menopause and so completed their reproductive lives. For this group, Stearns’s team tested whether a woman’s height, weight, blood pressure, cholesterol or other traits correlated with the number of children she had borne. They controlled for changes due to social and cultural factors to calculate how strongly natural selection is shaping these traits.

Quite a lot, it turns out…

Continue reading.

Spencer Ackerman in the Washington Independent:

The New America Foundation’s Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann have a new report out tallying how many civilians have died in the Pakistani tribal areas thanks to the CIA’s drone strikes. Their conclusion: the strikes have killed, since 2006, between 750 and 1000 people; 20 of them have been “leaders of al Qaeda, the Taliban, and allied groups”; and “the real total of civilian deaths since 2006 appears to be in the range of 250 to 320, or between 31 and 33 percent.” That low?

Bergen and Tiedemann got their report by tallying up media reports on the drone strikes. They explain:

Our analysis of the drone campaign is based only on accounts from reliable media organizations with substantial reporting capabilities in Pakistan. We restricted our analysis to reports in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, accounts by major news services and networks–the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, CNN, and the BBC–and reports in the leading English-language newspapers in Pakistan–The Daily Times, Dawn, and The News–as well as those from Geo TV, the largest independent Pakistani television network. (Links to all those individual reports can be found in Appendix 1 of this paper.)

They don’t pretend their material is “accurate down to the last civilian death in every drone strike.” And they’re probably right that this is the best that can be compiled through open-source material. (I would go so far as to suggest that the CIA probably doesn’t have much better methodology, either.) But how to account for the variance in what a “militant” is? A lot of times, the way these press reports generate their descriptions of “militants” are through phone calls made from stringers to people in the vicinity of a strike. “[O]f those killed in drone attacks from 2006 through mid-October 2009, between 500 and 700 were described in reliable press reports as militants, or some 66 to 68 percent,” the authors write. Not the most precise measurement.

After all, who’s a “militant”? A cook in a village known to be swarming with Taliban? Someone who pays taxes to a shadow government? How do we judge the complicity of a given population? There’s a spectrum here, running from insurgent to civilian effectively held hostage. As a result, it’s probably fair and sensible to read Bergen and Tiedemann’s report as a low estimate for civilian deaths from the drones.

I asked the CIA about the report, even though it typically doesn’t comment on anything Pakistan-drone-related. To my surprise, agency spokesman George Little responded, “The CIA employs lawful, highly precise, battle-tested tactics and tools against al-Qaeda and its violent allies.  Al-Qaeda and its sympathizers, though still very dangerous and determined, have seen both their leadership and their fighting capabilities eroded.” So nothing specifically on the New America report one way or the other — I can’t tell if that quote supports it or undermines it, truth be told.

Update: Ackerman adds to this initial report.

Interesting article by Tom Shone at More Intelligent Life:

“What is a masterpiece and why are there so few of them?” asked Gertrude Stein in 1936. An answer has finally arrived from an economist, Tyler Cowen. In his new book “Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World”, Cowen argues: “The current trend…is that a lot of our culture is coming in shorter and smaller bits…When access is easy, we tend to favor the short, the sweet and the bitty. When access is difficult, we look for large-scale productions, extravaganzas and masterpieces.”

His point is not that great works are in decline, blotted out by clouds of grey mediocrity massing on the horizon. It’s that when communications are slow and information scarce, we favour works of art that aggregate and summarise and synthesise. A glance at the list of all-time top-selling records reveals that those albums that bestrode the 1970s and 1980s like colossi—from “Dark Side of the Moon” to “The Joshua Tree”—are now relics of the past. The last band to attempt one, Guns N’ Roses, almost killed themselves in the process, spending 17 years on an album, “Chinese Democracy”, that promptly went phut.

The list of Best Film Oscars tells a similar story, with epics like “The English Patient” and “Titanic”, which ruled the Nineties, giving way to small, left-field, indie hits—“Crash”, “No Country For Old Men”, “Slumdog Millionaire”. When Scorsese finally won his Oscar, it was not for his wayward epics but for his scrappy cop drama “The Departed”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Pretty cool.

An interesting email from the Center for American Progress:

On Friday, the Center for American Progress (CAP), in partnership with California First Lady Maria Shriver, released The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, a groundbreaking examination of how "women’s changing roles are affecting our major societal institutions, from government and businesses to our faith communities." For the first time in American history, women are half of all U.S. workers and mothers are the primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of American families. Considering that in 1967, women made up only one-third of all workers, this is a dramatic transformation that fundamentally changes how all Americans work and live, "not just women but also their families, their co-workers, their bosses, their faith institutions, and their communities." Unfortunately, America as a nation has not yet come to terms with what this means. "This report tries to chapter those things out and say all of these institutions have failed to adapt to this change that has happened, and that in order for them to survive and become smart about the American worker they must adapt and must change," Shriver said on NBC’s Meet The Press yesterday. "Our policy landscape remains stuck in an idealized past," writes CAP President and CEO John Podesta in his preface to the report. "This report contemplates what a new America should look like after we finally embrace this important new dynamic in our lives and the changes it has caused in our homes and businesses."

Read the rest of this entry »

Mind Hacks:

Science News has a brilliant special issue on the ‘science of slumber’ that tackles sleep disorders, the mental impact of sleep deprivation, how sleep differs across species and the still mysterious question of why we need to sleep.

I found the article on two seemingly straightforward sleep disorders, insomnia and narcolepsy, the most interesting. They seem straightforward because they appear as a lack and an excess of sleep, but as the piece makes clear, they are still quite mysterious.

Insomnia is particularly interesting because having trouble sleeping happens to everyone at some point, so in itself, it’s not abnormal – meaning that research into what triggers it is unlikely to find anything striking.

Instead research has shifted to try and understand what prevents insomnia from resolving naturally so it becomes a chronic condition:

Sleeplessness may be brought on by traumatic events such as a death in the family, an illness such as cancer or anything else distressing, causing a person to lie awake at night with a racing mind. For a subset of people, though, insomnia has no prompting signal — a condition called primary insomnia.

Regardless of the trigger (or lack thereof), temporary insomnia has a nasty way of becoming a habit. Poor sleep habits can become ingrained. When trouble sleeping persists for three or four nights a week over several months, insomnia is considered chronic.

It may turn out that untangling the prompting signals of insomnia, as many sleep researchers attempt, is a fool’s errand, says Michael Perlis, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program in Philadelphia. “The whole zeitgeist has changed,” he says. Most sleep researchers now agree that “once insomnia goes chronic, it stays that way,” regardless of the prompting signal, Perlis says. So rather than focusing on the immediate trigger for insomnia, many scientists are trying to figure out why it becomes chronic and how to prevent that from happening.

I also liked the short piece that briefly compares the amount of type of sleep between lots of different animals. It seems dolphins don’t have REM sleep. I wonder if that means that they lack or have very limited dreams?

Anyway, a great collection of articles and all freely available online.

Via Open Culture:

Dan Colman writes:

The Bayeux Tapestry famously offers a pictorial interpretation of the Norman Conquest of England (1066), a pivotal moment in medieval history, and the events leading to the invasion itself. Currently residing in France, the tapestry measures 20 inches by 230 feet, and you can now see an animated version of the story it narrates. The clip above starts roughly halfway through the story, with the appearance of Halley’s Comet, and concludes with the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Glenn Greenwald:

Yesterday I wrote about the first installment of the account by The New York Times‘ David Rohde of his seven months as a hostage held by the Taliban, and specifically how — as he put it — some of "Washington’s antiterrorism policies had galvanized the Taliban."  His second installment is now available, describing his first several weeks of captivity after being moved to Pakistan, and it includes this:

For the next several nights, a stream of Haqqani commanders overflowing with hatred for the United States and Israel visited us, unleashing blistering critiques that would continue throughout our captivity.

Some of their comments were factual. They said large numbers of civilians had been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Palestinian territories in aerial bombings. Muslim prisoners had been physically abused and sexually humiliated in Iraq. Scores of men had been detained in Cuba and Afghanistan for up to seven years without charges.

To Americans, these episodes were aberrations. To my captors, they were proof that the United States was a hypocritical and duplicitous power that flouted international law.

When I told them I was an innocent civilian who should be released, they responded that the United States had held and tortured Muslims in secret detention centers for years. Commanders said they themselves had been imprisoned, their families ignorant of their fate. Why, they asked, should they treat me differently?

Just consider how often those thoughts repeat themselves throughout the Muslim world, how many people have been filled with rage and unrestrained anti-American hatred as a result. As the Open Society Institute’s Jonathan Horowitz told me from Kabul when I interviewed him in July, our practice of imprisoning people at Bagram with no charges by itself enrages much of the Afghan population that might otherwise be helpful or at least neutral.

Read the rest of this entry »

From a Steven Benen post:

A month ago, Harvard Medical School researchers published a key study that found nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — because of a lack of health insurance. CBS News reported, "After factoring in education and income, smoking, drinking and obesity, researchers found that the uninsured had about a 40 percent higher risk of death, linking 45,000 American deaths a year to lack of insurance. In 1993 it was 25 percent."

The US turned itself inside out when fewer than 3,000 died on 9/11—but doesn’t seem all that concerned that 45,000 die each year because of the way the US delivers (or fails to deliver) healthcare.

The health (and education, for that matter) of its citizens should be a national priority for any nation.

One thing I like about the Roku is that it allows me to movie surf: I watch 20 or so movies at a time, jumping from one to another, and each movie starts exactly where I left off. (The Wife thinks this is weird, but it seems quite natural to me: the same way I read books.) Some especially good titles I’m currently watching:

Bon Cop, Bad Cop – I’ve already mentioned this one, but it gets better and better.

Dr. Who, Season 1 – I’d heard lots about Dr. Who and didn’t get why it was so good, but I added the first season to my Watch Instantly queue just to check it out. My God! it’s good. I was completely hooked before I finished the first episode, and now Season 2 and 3 are also in the watch instantly queue.

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies – A French parody of a James-Bond-like series, and totally wonderful. Some quite witty things among the humor.

Film Geek – A wonderful indie comedy. I unfortunately understand the protagonist only too well.

The IT Crowd, Seasons 1, 2, and 3: Comedy gold for techies and those who work with them.

WALL-E – The scenes with subdued lighting don’t play too well, but overall: still great.

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 – And I don’t even like football.

Played – Crime caper movie with Vinnie Jones.

A Bridge Too Far – WWII and Monty overreaches.

It Happened One Night – Still great. When Clark Gable took off his shirt to reveal that he wasn’t wearing an undershirt, men all over the country stopped wearing undershirts—at least for a while. This movie was the first of the screwball comedies.

Carbide & Sorrel – A comedy from East Germany, made in 1962.

Crazy Little Thing – An indie romantic comedy—so far excellent.

There—that’ll keep you busy.

First thing this morning I took Megs to the vet, and let me tell you that I now want a pubic option for pets: $121 for a quick visit just to get meds. Apparently Megs picked up a ringworm infection during her Great Adventure, and it only this weekend became evident: little raised circles on the back of one ear. The vet took one look, then carried Megs out for an exam under UV light—apparently ringworm (actually a fungus) fluoresces. So long as I was there anyway, I had them clip Megs’s nails.

Megs is a trouper: totally silent for the entire trip. She doesn’t like the vet’s office much, and wants to stay in her carrier, but she tolerated it. Very happy to get back into the carrier though.

I got a lotion to rub onto her ear three times a day for two or three weeks. Fungi are hard to kill because they are so closely related to animals.

After all that, I treated myself to breakfast at Toastie’s.

Glenn Greenwald explores the implications:

This is one of those rare instances of unadulterated good news from Washington:

The Obama administration will not seek to arrest medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they conform to state laws, under new policy guidelines to be sent to federal prosecutors Monday.

Two Justice Department officials described the new policy to The Associated Press, saying prosecutors will be told it is not a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state laws.

The new policy is a significant departure from the Bush administration, which insisted it would continue to enforce federal anti-pot laws regardless of state codes.

Criminalizing cancer and AIDS patients for using a substance that is (a) prescribed by their doctors and (b) legal under the laws of their state has always been abominable.  The Obama administration deserves major credit not only for ceasing this practice, but for memorializing it formally in writing.  Just as is true for Jim Webb’s brave crusade to radically revise the nation’s criminal justice and drug laws, there is little political gain — and some political risk — in adopting a policy that can be depicted as "soft on drugs" or even "pro-marijuana."  It’s a change that has concrete benefits for many people who are sick and for those who provide them with treatments that benefit them.  So credit where it’s due to the Obama DOJ, for fulfilling a long-standing commitment on this issue.

Beyond the tangible benefits to patients and providers, there is the issue of states’ right.  Fourteen states have legalized medical marijuana, many by referendum.  The Bush administration’s refusal to honor or even recognize those states’ decisions — by arresting people for doing things which are perfectly legal under state law — was one of many examples giving the lie to the conservative movement’s alleged belief in federalism and limited federal power (see here, for instance, how John Ashcroft and GOP Senators tried deceitfully and undemocratically to exploit the aftermath of 9/11 to prevent Oregon from implementing its assisted suicide law).  Constitutionally and otherwise, what possible justification is there for federalizing decisions about whether individuals can use marijuana for medical purposes?  Ironically (given the "socialism" and "fascism" rhetoric spewed at it by the Fox News faction), the Obama administration’s decision is a major advancement for the rights of states to have their laws respected by the federal government.

This action also reflects the clear sea change taking place, both domestically and especially internationally, regarding drug policy.  When Mexico decriminalized drugs for "personal use" in August, the silence — including from Washington — was deafening: …

Continue reading.

A perfect shave today, assisted by a two-day stubble and the right tools: a Wilkinson shave stick and the Simpsons Key Hole 3 Best to gin up a great lather, then a Merkur slant bar with a much-used Swedish Gillette blade. Three easy passes to a perfectly smooth visiage. A splash of Stetson Sierra, and I’m on my way.