Later On

This is quite nice:

Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies, a maker of cool fuel cell gadgets, like hydrogen-powered toy cars for kids, has introduced their coolest gadget yet:  a pocket-sized portable fuel cell power plant that can charge your cell phones, MP3 players and other devices.

The MiniPAK, as it’s called, comes with two refillable cartridges that each store the same amount of energy as 1,000 disposable AA batteries.  It can charge devices requiring up to 3W and has a DC output of 2.5W.  It contains an air-breathing fuel cell and a solid-state hydrogen storage unit (meaning no self-discharging of the energy).

The cartridges, called Hydrostiks, can be refilled with an included home recharging unit that uses water and electricity to generate and store the hydrogen.

The MiniPAK costs $100, not a high price to pay for grid-free charging on the go.

Not a bad soap at all. The Sabini brush immediately generated a thick, fragrant lather, and three passes of the Merkur Slant Bar holding a Swedish Gillette blade produced a smooth face. A splash of Floïd, and off to do my exercises.

Remember a while back when I was blogging about how the Athenians invented democracy, and what led to that invention? I just received a copy of Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece as a Father’s Day present (thanks to TYD, the Classics scholar), and now I’ve got exactly the book I wanted—and I didn’t even know it existed.

I’ve been using Bob Anderson’s Stretching, which has been around for more than 30 years. But I just started reading Pavel’s book Relax into Stretch, which is quite good and is helping me improve my stretches. The book also corrects quite a few wrong ideas I had about stretching, including some that could have caused damage had I followed through. I recommend the book highly. There’s also a companion DVD, which I have not seen.

From the Lexington Herald-Leader, via Steve Benen:

It’s only June, but collisions between reality and the ideals of Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul are lighting up the sky like bottle rockets on the third of July.

There’s the time that Paul, an eye doctor, wanted board certification but didn’t like the new rules for earning it. So he created his own medical board. He’s now certified by the National Board of Ophthalmology of which he’s president, his wife is vice president and his father-in-law is secretary.

At the the junction of principle and pragmatism, Paul denounces big government and its costs and intrusiveness, but depends on the little things that big government does for him. Paul’s campaign told reporter John Cheves that about half of his medical income comes from payments by Medicaid and Medicare, entitlement programs for the elderly, poor, and disabled.

The state reports that Medicaid has paid Paul $130,461 since 2006. Federal policy blocks the release of such information about Medicare. The Paul campaign is refusing to say how much his medical practice earns from Medicare, except that it provides substantially more of his income than Medicaid.

Interestingly, Paul, who wants to end federal payments to farmers and abolish the Department of Education, is OK with Medicare.

Finally, Paul promised during the primary campaign to refuse contributions from any lawmaker who supported government bailouts of banks. But now he’s agreed to be the guest of honor at a D.C. fund-raiser hosted by the Republican Senatorial Committee, which includes lawmakers who voted for bank bailouts. Seats will go for $1,000 to $5,000. His campaign apparently pulled from its Web site his earlier promise to reject contributions from bailout backers.

All this may come as a disappointment to Kentuckians who were drawn to Paul’s conservative/libertarian principals and his formerly refreshing candor. In a major turnaround, he’s begun refusing reporters’ questions unless they’re in writing.

For voters, the biggest question is how Paul’s ideas and ideals would translate on the ground.

In fairness, many of us are guilty of wanting the benefits of something — whether it’s board certification or full campaign coffers — without paying the price.

Like the Gulf Coast residents who want government off their backs, until a hurricane or oil spill comes along.

Or the Farm Bureau that wants government off the farm, except for the mailbox which is always open to subsidy checks.

Or politicians who rail against out-of-control spending but show up to take credit when a ribbon is cut or oversized check presented.

Or all the rest of us, who resent the chunk of change that government extracts from our pockets but want smooth roads, good schools, police and fire protection, national security, personal security in old age, free markets governed by laws, student loans, flood walls, lakes and parks and the list goes on.

The Tea Party movement, of which Paul is both a leader and beneficiary, feeds the comforting illusion that we can have all we’ve come to expect from government without paying for it. We buy into this illusion at our own peril.

The NY Times editorial:

In the first week of talks over a financial regulatory reform bill, Democratic lawmakers — in some cases with apparent White House backing — have been defeating or delaying reforms to protect individual investors. Instead, they are catering to corporate interests that prefer the status quo — and write big campaign checks.

At its most basic, this bill is supposed to restore stability and fairness to the markets and give Americans some confidence that their efforts to save and invest will not be undone — over and over again — by the destructive excesses of banks and corporations.

Those goals are being undermined by cynical maneuvers. Here is the damage assessment:

COOKING THE BOOKS. A majority of Senate negotiators, including two Democrats, approved a bad provision from the House version of the bill to exempt most publicly traded companies (those worth less than $75 million) from an antifraud auditing requirement in the Sarbanes-Oxley law, passed in 2002 after the Enron debacle. The argument is that the audits are too burdensome, but research shows that they reduce errors and fraud, and that refinements to the law from 2007 have made them less onerous. The upshot is that a bill that is supposed to be about strengthening regulation would instead end a safeguard against financial fraud.

KEEPING CORPORATE BOARDS SAFE FOR CRONIES. Both versions of the reform bill clarified the authority of the Securities and Exchange Commission to make it easier for shareholders to nominate corporate directors. The clarification is useful, because the S.E.C. has been threatened with lawsuits from industry-supported groups if it writes new nomination rules. The reform would give shareholders a chance to shake up boards that have become rubber stamps for management decisions.

Then, last week, Senator Christopher Dodd gutted the Senate version, with the reported encouragement of the White House. He proposed that shareholders must hold an ownership stake of at least 5 percent to nominate a director, a level that would be exceedingly difficult to reach. As such, his proposal would effectively kill shareholders’ ability to more efficiently influence boards.

House and Senate negotiators have not yet reached a decision. The correct approach is to allow the S.E.C. to write and enforce the rules as it sees fit.

SHORTCHANGING THE S.E.C. The Senate’s version of reform would allow the S.E.C. to finance itself through fees it already imposes on securities transactions and corporate filings, rather than having Congress decide its budget each year. The House was on board with the idea. Self funding would help ensure adequate resources.

But lawmakers who stand to lose control of the S.E.C. budget have objected, leading some of them to seek a deal that would somehow retain the power of Congressional appropriators. In the best interests of the S.E.C. and investors, supporters of self funding, including Senator Charles Schumer of New York, need to hang tough.

Among the other unresolved issues is a long overdue reform to require brokers who give investment advice to act in their clients’ best interest. The House version is in favor of imposing a fiduciary duty; the Senate version lamely calls for a study and other delays.

If lawmakers are unwilling to enact fundamental investor protections, there is little hope that they will act boldly on far-reaching structural reforms, like curbing banks’ risky involvement in derivatives dealmaking and establishing a strong new regulator for consumer financial protection.

I realized yesterday that I need an exercise journal just as I need a food journal: to avoid ignorance and self-deception. So today I start one…

Interesting: Judith Warner has a thumbsucker in the NY Times Magazine today looking at regulation more broadly. The column begins:

The gulf oil fiasco is just the latest instance in which a lack of regulation — or dysfunctional system of regulation — has led to a major American disaster. After the failure of the levees during Hurricane Katrina, the Wall Street meltdown of 2008, the collapse of the housing market and now the BP spill,we have come to what feels like a moment of reckoning, with some tentative signs that our country’s decades-long love affair with deregulation is starting to chill.

The Obama administration has issued hundreds of new rules and standards over the past year, the most prominent initiative, of course, being the financial-oversight bill now making its way through Congress. What remains to be seen, as we move forward into what The Times’s Eric Lipton recently called “a new age of regulation,” is whether this new spirit of control and reform will carry over into the American psyche. For in the anything-goes atmosphere of our recent past, it wasn’t just external controls that went awry; inwardly, people lost constraint and common sense, too. Now there is a case to be made that problems of self-regulation — of appetite, emotion, impulse and cupidity — may well be the defining social pathology of our time.

In the late 1970s, the historian Christopher Lasch famously described America as a culture of narcissism. Today we might well be called a nation of dysregulation. The signs that something is amiss in our inner mechanisms of control and restraint are everywhere. Eating disorders, “in general a disorder of self-regulation,” according to Darlene M. Atkins, director of the Eating Disorders Clinic at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, grew epidemic in the past few decades, and in recent years have spread to minority communities, younger girls, older women and boys and men too. Obesity is viewed in many cases by mental-health experts as another form of self-dysregulation:a “pathologically intense drive for food consumption” akin to drug addiction, in the words of Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and Charles P. O’Brien, a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, who have argued for including some forms of obesity as a mental disorder in the coming version of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-V.

Read the rest of this entry »

This morning I decided to go straight to 5-minute boiled eggs, which should have a solid white and liquid yolk. I had the eggs at room temperature, a bit pot of iced water in the sink for when the eggs are done, and a pot of boiling water on the stove: into the water, then after 5 minutes I used a slotted spoon to remove the eggs and put them in the iced water. Once they cooled, I peeled two (and lordy, do they peel easily with the direct transition from boiling to iced water), put them in a bowl with a pinch of salt and pepper. Yummy. And the yolks were fully runny. These would be good in some dish covered with aspic and the like.

Next time I’ll do 6-minute eggs to see how those work. I want just a small amount of liquid yolk, so the egg can be eaten in the hand.

On rereading the previous post, I can see now why “eating less” didn’t work: while it was easy to eat less on any day, I didn’t have a defined diet that I could alter. I was deluded, as The Eldest said, by knowing which foods are healthful and always making good choices in selecting the foods to eat. I was just eating too much of them ( touché , Jack), but I needed to have a defined diet in order to make permanent cuts, rather than just skipping something this evening.

So, really, the big first step was to actually define what I was eating—then “eating less” can make sense. I noticed that Trent Hamm has a post on this general idea: Simple changes aren’t always simple. The simple change “eat less” has a definite premise, and making that premise actual required more effort than I realized and more thought than I gave it. (One of the things I get from Healthy Way is, in effect, packaged thought: they have worked out the diet details and figured out a healthful diet in terms of the specific variety and quantities; another thing I get from them that I for one require is close monitoring.)

I was ruminating on how good my fasting blood glucose levels have become—from a normal range of 115-120, they are now below that, this morning being 97, which is great. But of course, one doesn’t want them getting too low, and I admired the point my endocrinologist made on my last visit as I was leaving. At the beginning I told him about going to the dietician and the trainer, and as the visit ended, he told me that if I started to have low blood sugar reactions, then take the glipizide once a day instead of twice, and then not at all if needed.

I appreciated his foresight, since it gives me a specific action to take if my morning BG drops too much. And then I realized that my diet has changed drastically and substantially. I don’t know what all I was eating before, but it drove my weight up to 65 lbs overweight, so it was substantial.

By saying "I don’t know what I was eating," I mean in the sense that I didn’t (and still don’t) have a good picture of my food intake: I ate what I wanted, and if I was running low on food, I bought more. Another example: I was totally unaware of my evening food habit—going into the kitchen just for a bite or two, continually over the evening, so that I really never stopped eating from the time I started dinner until I went to bed. That became "visible" to me only when I stopped doing it because it’s not on this plan here that I’m following, you see.

Although I don’t really know what all or how much I was eating before—and I did take stabs in healthful directions—I do know extremely well what I am eating now, and how much. And it is an amount and variety specifically tailored to my lean muscle mass. That change in my diet is, I think, much more substantial than I realized, and it’s no wonder I’m feeling some adjustments going on—weird kind of withdrawal symptoms, almost.

The key is that I am now eating right, and that turns out to be an enormous change from how I was eating before.

And the same with exercise: from almost none to a steady diet. Almost steady. Getting there.

I think I’ll make this recipe by Frances Lam, too:

Ginger scallion sauce
Makes 1 cup; a little goes a long way
Active time: 5 minutes

• 1 ounce ginger, peeled and cut into ½-inch chunks
• 1 bunch (about 4 ounces) whole scallions, cut into 1-inch lengths
• ½ cup oil, preferably peanut or corn (Avoid olive oil and definitely no canola, which, when heated like this, smells like a fish. And not in a good way.)
• Salt

1. Whirl the ginger in a food processor until it’s finely minced, but not puréed (meaning stop before it gets liquidy and pasty). Put it in a wide, tall, heatproof bowl, several times bigger than you think you need. For real. The bowl matters. Use a cooking pot if you have to, because when that oil gets in there, the sizzle is going to be serious business.
2. Mince the scallions in the food processor until they’re about the same size as the ginger. Add it to the ginger.
3. Salt the ginger and scallion like they called your mother a bad name and stir it well. Taste it. It won’t taste good because that much raw ginger and scallion doesn’t really taste good, but pay attention to the saltiness. You want it to be just a little too salty to be pleasant, because you have to account for all the oil you’re about to add.
4. Heat the oil in a pan until you just start seeing wisps of smoke, and pour it into the ginger scallion mixture. It’s going to sizzle and bubble like a science-fair volcano, and it’s going to smell awesome. Don’t stick your face in it. You wouldn’t stick your face in lava, would you? Give it a light stir with a heatproof spoon.
5. Let cool to room temperature. Keep it in the fridge, for whenever you want to be one spoonful away from deliciousness.

More or less. The story in the NY Times by Nina Bernstein:

The letter appealing to President Obama was written in frustration in January, by a woman who saw her family reflected in his. She was a white United States citizen married to an African man, and the couple — college-educated professionals in Manhattan — were stymied in their long legal battle to keep him in the country.

Could the president help, asked the woman, Caroline Jamieson, a marketing executive. She described the impasse that confronted her husband, Hervé Fonkou Takoulo, a citizen of Cameroon with an outstanding deportation order from a failed bid for asylum.

The response came on June 3, when two immigration agents stopped Mr. Takoulo, 34, in front of the couple’s East Village apartment building. He says one agent asked him, “Did you write a letter to President Obama?”

When he acknowledged that his wife had, he was handcuffed and sent to an immigration jail in New Jersey for deportation.

But on Thursday night, Mr. Takoulo was just as suddenly released, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials had been questioned about the case by The New York Times.

Officials said they were investigating how the letter — one of thousands routinely referred to the agency by the White House to gather information for a reply — had been improperly used by the agency’s “fugitive operations” unit to find and arrest Mr. Takoulo, who has an engineering degree and no criminal record.

While Mr. Takoulo is still subject to the deportation order, immigration officials acknowledged that their actions in the case seemed to violate their standard practice of not using letters seeking help from elected officials as investigative leads. The handling of the case also conflicted with the Obama administration’s stated policy of arresting deportable immigrants only if they have criminal records.

The agency is investigating how it happened, a spokesman said, and has released Mr. Takoulo on an electronic ankle monitor while his case is reviewed.

“ICE has a zero tolerance policy for violations of civil rights,” the spokesman, Brian P. Hale, said in a statement, adding that if it was determined “that appropriate separation between lawful correspondence and investigations was violated,” the case would be referred for immediate action by the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility and the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security.

Though the case is being treated as an anomaly that breached accepted procedures, a senior agency official acknowledged that there were no written guidelines on the handling of such letters, and that there was no way to know whether similar correspondence had prompted arrests and deportations.

If the investigation bears out what officials have learned so far, “it also flies in the face of our stated priorities to target criminal fugitives,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the agency had not authorized further discussion of the case…

Continue reading. I do not like the ICE, the TSA, and the growing number of additional officials who feel they are entitled to push people around to satisfy their own authoritarian needs. Clearly what happened here was that the ICE didn’t realize the guy would go to the NY Times, and now they’re scurrying around looking for hiding places, like cockroaches in a tenement kitchen when the light comes on.

I’ll be building on this recipe:

Grilled Beef Salad with Mint

Makes 3 to 4 servings

Time: 25 minutes

A simple, bright, and light salad with tons of flavor. One of the best possible lunch dishes. Other protein you can use: chicken, pork, shrimp.

12 ounces beef tenderloin or sirloin
4 cups torn Boston or romaine lettuce leaves, mesclun, or any salad greens mixture
1 cup torn fresh mint leaves
1/4 cup chopped red onion
1 medium cucumber, peeled and seeded if necessary, and diced
Juice of 2 limes
1 tablespoon nam pla (Thai fish sauce) or soy sauce
1/8 teaspoon cayenne, or to taste
1/2  teaspoon sugar

1. Heat a charcoal or gas grill or a broiler to medium-high; the rack should be about 4 inches from the heat source. Grill or broil the beef until medium-rare, about 5 to 10 minutes; set it aside to cool.

2. Toss the lettuce with the mint, onion, and cucumber. Combine all remaining ingredients with 1 tablespoon of water—the mixture will be thin—and toss the greens with this dressing. Transfer the greens to a platter, reserving the dressing.

3. Thinly slice the beef, reserving its juice; combine the juice with the remaining dressing. Lay the slices of beef over the salad, drizzle the dressing over all, and serve.

I be making several changes, but that’s the overall idea.

I’ll cut the recipe to a size for 1, and I’ll use skirt steak, sautéing over high heat the little strips (sort of like for fajitas). I do need to run out and get mint, cucumber, and limes, and I’ll undoubtedly skip the sugar, though maybe a half-teaspoon of agave syrup instead.

This means I can use my 2 tsp of oil on the lunch salad.

I just read the caption to a photo of a Boeing assembly line, saying that “this factory produces one $200 million aircraft a day.” That is so meaningless—it does give you the gross revenue the factory produces, but the rate (1 aircraft/day) tells you nothing by itself. A factory is in effect a transformative pipeline: parts and other materials in at one end, finished product out the other. The delivery rate tells you not much unless you know either the speed of progress through the pipeline, or the pipeline diameter/capacity.

The idea of the caption seems to be in part that 1 aircraft/day is damn fast. But there’s no information to support that. Suppose it takes one year to build an aircraft—that seems like a long time (and probably is), but it’s quite consistent with 1 aircraft/day, provided you have a factory big enough: you just start the first aircraft on 1 Jan, the next on 2 Jan, and so on throughout the year, starting a new plane each day. Nothing will come out the other end of the factory for a year, but then you’ll get exactly as the caption says: 1 aircraft per day.

Of course, the slower the assembly, the bigger the factory required for a given delivery rate. In a pipeline, that would translate to: “the slower the flow rate (in feet per second), the larger the pipe diameter needed to transport a given volume of whatever/time.” If you want 100 barrels of stuff a day coming out of the pipeline, and the stuff flows VERY slowly, to get a large amount per day you’ll need a pipe with a large diameter (and hence volume—so that it will take longer to fill the pipe before stuff starts coming out the other end), which is more expensive than a smaller pipe with a faster flow.

And whether $200 million a day is good is unclear until you know the amount of money (in terms of factory content) needed to produce that figure.

I went on at some length to The Wife, ranting about how incomplete the information is, until I suddenly thought (and asked): “Does this bother everyone or is this one of those Asperger-like things.”

She said it was indeed an Asperger itch, as it were: for most people the message of the caption is, “Wow! $200 million a day! An airplane a day! That’s a lot of money and boy, they’re whipping those planes together fast.” The hole that gapes so large and obvious to me is simply not in the picture for most.

She told me of an Aspie who got rich in the meltdown because he was reading all these company reports with what to him was obvious and ominous information. No one else seemed to notice. So he acted on the information and made a fortune. (This most definitely was not me: I can’t bring myself to read a financial report: my eyes glaze over.)

She thought that my own tendencies in that direction have been augmented by my undergraduate education, which made me think about that for a while. Four years of seminar = four years of reading difficult works and getting together a *minimum* of twice a week, two to two-and-a-half hours each time, to discuss the works. (A minimum, because the discussions went on in the coffee shop, at the dinner table, and in the dorm rooms—everyone in the freshman class was reading the same book at the same time, so we all talked about it—and all the upperclassmen had already been through this, so they would talk about it, as well as talking about the books that they were currently reading and discussing.)

St. John’s used to talk a lot about how it’s an education, not a training (meaning not oriented toward some specific vocation or profession), but in fact it was training: If for four years you are constantly reading and discussing difficult works, you get a lot of training in listening and reading critically, spotting holes in arguments, explaining (and defending) your interpretation, and so on. Through practice and habit, you learn to find flaws in arguments, build good arguments, find inconsistencies (between what was written and what is said, for example: misinterpretation), and in general master the trivial arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic.

The quadrivium—arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music—bring in number as well as logic. Geometry is certainly a matter of mastering the idea of proof and deductive logic (I think I’ve mentioned that deductive logic was discovered once in human history: by the ancient Greeks. Everyone else learned the idea from them.), but it also builds a foundation for mathematics and ultimately for science, for (it seems to me) the quadrivium is about applying mathematics and reason to the phenomena of nature and saving the appearances through finding an explanation: a narrative story that enables predictions about the real world, predictions that jibe with events.

And it’s certainly true that after four years of participating in this sort of exercise, while simultaneously observing it in action, tilt you in certain directions. When you read something (or hear some statement or argument), you automatically initiate a little unconscious routine that looks for holes and inconsistencies while simultaneously comparing what is being presented now with what you already know from other sources, etc.

One of the tutors, Bill Darkey, once said that the goal of the program was to turn out misfits, and I can see what he meant. People who habitually question things are not a good fit in our society. Add to that the Aspie attention to detail…

The above just arrived, a kind contribution from Nick. Nopal is a good source of insoluble fiber, and I’m going to have a teaspoon in a glass of water in just a little while. More on dietary fiber of various kinds here. In particular, I’ll have some in the evening to stave off the impulsive eating.

Many thanks, Nick.

Now that I see this soap, I’m sure I’ve seen it before, but I don’t recall using it. This is part of my haul from RoyalShave.com. I got a good lather from it, with a light fragrance, before three easy passes with the Elite onyx-handled razor holding a still-sharp Astra Keramik Platinum blade. Extremely nice shave, nicely finished with Alt Innsbruck.

Animals, of course, have done scent branding for years, but now industry seems to have caught on. Spencer Morgan reports in BusinessWeek:

On a recent April afternoon, a limousine carrying two French perfumers from multibillion-dollar, Manhattan-based International Flavors & Fragrances idled in front of a squat, clay-colored building in the South Bronx. The perfumers, Bruno Jovanovic and Pascal Gaurin, had with them a bottle of their newest concoction, L’Eau Verte du Bronx du Sud (translation: the Green Water of the South Bronx) to show Majora Carter, a leading green consultant and neighborhood resident. The perfume wasn’t meant for Carter. Its intended recipient was a nearby low-income housing development—the Sister Thomas Apartments. By pumping this specially engineered scent into the building’s hallways and common areas, the unlikely threesome believes the 200 residents will be infused with optimism and happiness. "The part of your brain that senses scent can allow you to feel really bad about what you see in front of you—or really good—depending on what it is," she explains. "The question is: How do you evoke a certain feeling without imposing on people in any way?"

The fragrance industry thinks it has the answer…

Continue reading.

Suppose you could send directly to your TV what is on your laptop screen, both sound and video. Pretty cool, eh? And suppose content companies started selling their content via the Internet—as some already do with movie rentals (via Roku.com).

What happens, I think, is that you suddenly have an incredibly powerful remote for your TV—one with a full keyboard that allows you to find quickly whatever it is you want to watch—and then you watch it. Although it’s big for a remote, the fact that it’s a full laptop computer as well helps.

It’s coming quite soon.

I have a 1-liter can that originally contained a particular brand of olive oil. I now refill it as needed for my on-the-counter olive-oil container. I’m now using Whole Foods Greek Extra Virgin Olive Oil—very tasty—and I just noticed that I have two unopened liters on hand. At my maximum olive oil consumption nowadays (2 tsp/day), I thus have enough in those two bottles to last 202 days. Odd: it never used to last that long.

I think when those run out, I’ll start buying olive oil in the 1-pint containers.