Later On

Another shave with the Queen Charlotte shaving soap, which produced a fine lather with the Omega 643167 synthetic-bristle brush. I’m growing increasingly fond of the “artificial badger” brushes, which seem to have exactly the right resilience and loft for me. The Mühle open-comb with a Swedish Gillette blade did a fine job, and then the Intesa aftershave balm provided a very nice finish.

Right now, I see any discussion of ideas and such developments as descriptions of meme ecology and evolution. It helps one see the process, I think, just as looking at living things through the lens of evolution helps one understand that process.

The above is via Open Culture, where Dan Colman writes:

Where do good ideas come from? Places that put us together. Places that allow good hunches to collide with other good hunches, sometimes creating big breakthroughs and innovations. During the Enlightenment, this all happened in Parisian salons and coffee houses. Nowadays, it’s happening on the web, in places that defy your ordinary definition of “place.” In four animated minutes, Steven Johnson outlines the argument that he makes more fully in his soon-to-be-published book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. The video is the latest from the RSAnimate series.

PS: Last week, I wrote a guest post on 5 captivating RSA videos that mull over the flaws running through modern capitalism. You can find it on Brain Pickings.

Related Content:

Ira Glass on Why Creative Excellence Takes Time

It’s not there, and they don’t respect the idea. Phillip Smith reports:

Activists in Alabama have been trying for years to get a medical marijuana bill passed there. Last year, for the first time, a bill made it out of committee. Next year, they will try again, but even if they succeed, it will be too late for Michael Lapihuska.

Lapihuska, cursed with depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), grew up in Alabama, but left the state after serving 13 months for possessing five grams of marijuana in 2003. The now card-carrying medical marijuana patient from California was arrested on marijuana possession charges again on December 15 in Anniston, Alabama, as he visited his family for the holidays.

Lapihuska was stopped by a police officer and accused of hitch hiking as he walked down a road. The officer demanded he be allowed to search Lapihuska, and he complied. The search came up with a prescription bottle containing one gram of marijuana. Lapihuska explained that he was a registered California medical marijuana patient and produced a patient ID card.

But Alabama justice doesn’t recognize medical marijuana, and Lapihuska was charged with his third marijuana possession offense, this one worth between two and 10 years in state prison. Under Alabama law, a first marijuana offense is a misdemeanor, but a second possession offense is a felony punishable by a year in prison. A third possession offense is a felony punishable by two to 10 years in prison.

"Alabama is a terrible, terrible place when it comes to drug laws," noted Loretta Nall, a long-time Alabama drug reform activist and leader of Alabamians for Compassionate Care, a medical marijuana activist group that has taken up Lapihuska’s cause.

Lapihuska’s public defender is urging him to cop a plea in which he would be sentenced to one year, with the sentence suspended and two years probation. But that deal also includes drug testing, and that’s a deal-breaker for him. "Everyone says just take the probation, but if I did that, I’d end up in prison anyway for failing the drug test," he said.

"This is Anniston, Alabama," said Lapihuska. "There is no way I’m going to win this case. But my doctor told me this was my recommended medicine. If I was prescribed Oxycontin, or morphine, or Xanax and was walking down the road, they would have had to give my medicine back. I broke the law, but I think the law is wrong. I’m looking at two to 10 years for a gram of marijuana prescribed by my doctor?"

Lapihuska has been stuck in Alabama since December while awaiting trial. It hasn’t exactly been fun, he said. "I’ve been miserable and anxious. I just want to go someplace where my medicine is safe and legal and I’m not at risk for using the medicine that works best for me."

In addition to repeated stints behind bars for using marijuana, Lapihuska has been hospitalized for mental health reasons 20 to 30 times, he said. "I’ve been on all sorts of medication. Most of my life has been eaten up with anxiety. They’ve tried Xanax, Thorazine, all kinds of things. They even gave me an anti-Parkinson’s disease medicine and told me I would have to take it the rest of my life. I would sleep 16 hours a day on those meds, I’d be shaking," he recalled.

"But now, I feel better than I’ve ever felt," he said. "I ride my bicycle 50 to 150 miles a day. And now they’re arresting me for the thing that cures me."

Continue reading. One hopes for jury nullification if this case goes to trial. Too bad that the judge would NEVER allow the defense to present this option to the jury.

The recent discoveries of hidden layers in the Platonic dialogues is intriguing but not totally surprising: Plato was always a tricky writer, and many layers of meaning had already been discovered. But this new discovery deepens our understanding and also shows again the enormous creativity of Athens at its best. So many things were started there—Herodotus invented history and figured out what and how to relate it. His model was magnificient, but you sort of had to be Herodotus to manage that sort of writing and scale. Thucydides immediately took another cut at writing history, using a different and simpler model, and Thucydides’s was the model mostly followed thereafter.

It reminds me in a way of how most chess grandmasters founded schools—Alekhine, Nimzowitsch, Tarrasch, Tartakover, Max Euwe, Reuben Fine, and so on. They all wrote books about strategic play, books with titles such as My System and No, MY System and the like. But Emanuel Lasker, world chess champion for many years, never developed a school. The reason, I’ve read, is that Lasker would simply play along whatever lines his opponent liked. Lasker figured if he played a game that his opponent favored, then the opponent would in effect come out and fight, and Lasker could then beat him into the floor. Lasker simply banked on being the better player and the better fighter, and generally he was right.

So Herodotus is like Lasker, whereas Thucydides is (to my mind) a lesser light—but easier to follow.

And Plato is like a super-Herodotus. I spend most of my freshman year in college reading, studying, and discussing the Platonic dialogues, and I highly recommend that activity. The dialogues are sufficiently deep and complex, though, that the discussion part is quite important: it’s very hard to dig deeply into a dialogue on your own, but in discussing it, many things are revealed—though not, as it turns out, all the big things.

Take a look at this page, which begins:

In a paper in the journal Apeiron and the draft of the related book currently being circulated (see below), I argued there were musical structures embedded in Plato’s dialogues. Correspondence with an expert in ancient Greek music has now clarified the nature of these structures. The paper argued that Plato divided each dialogue into twelve parts, each of which corresponded to a musical note in a twelve-note scale. This scale was, I claimed,  similar (1) to the equally-divided scales of a school of Greek theorists called the Harmonists and also (2) to the scales produced with a monochord, an instrument important in the later Pythagorean tradition. I have now been convinced that the scale embedded in the dialogues is not like the Harmonists’ scale,  but would in fact appear naturally with a monochord (whether theoretically or practically with an actual instrument). This moves the debate ahead, and strongly reinforces the main claim of the Apeiron paper that the symbolic structures in the dialogues are evidence of Plato’s Pythagoreanism.

Continue reading.

I loved fruit flies in my junior year of college, as lab subjects for genetics studies. But in the kitchen, not so much. I was delighted to read this simple tip in Cool Tools:

Fruit flies can materialize in even the most spotless kitchens. Until recently, I had no idea that they could be dealt with in a safe, effective, and cheap manner using apple cider vinegar and dish soap.

By simply pouring apple cider vinegar into an open cup or bowl and adding a drop or two of dish detergent you can easily make an incredibly effective trap for ridding your kitchen of fruit flies. Place it near your fruit bowl or trash can and within a day you will have nipped the problem in the bud.

Apple cider vinegar works as an attractant because of its strong sweet odor while the dish detergent decreases the vinegar’s surface tension so that when a fly touches the surface it immediately sinks and drowns. It’s particularly satisfying to see the collection of flies you have dealt with at the bottom of the glass. This has to be one of the best house keeping tricks I have ever picked up.

– Oliver Hulland

And good for them. I hope those particular cops lose their jobs, including the chief. Phillip Smith reports:

The Columbia, Missouri, family whose dogs were shot during a Columbia Police SWAT raid in February, video of which went viral on the Internet, filed a federal civil lawsuit Monday against the City of Columbia and 13 other defendants in US Western District Court in Jefferson City.

The raid, in which police expected to find a large quantity of marijuana and other evidence of drug dealing, turned up a miniscule amount of marijuana and a pot pipe. Jonathan Whitworth was originally charged with possession of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia and second-degree child endangerment, but in a plea agreement, pleaded guilty to the paraphernalia count, and the other charges were dropped.
The suit was filed by Columbia attorneys Milt Harper and Jeff Hilbrenner on behalf Jonathan and Brittany Whitworth and her seven-year-old son. It alleges that SWAT team members broke down the door, discharged weapons as they entered and again as they shot and killed one dog and wounded the other. It also alleges than Jonathan Whitworth was kicked by an officer as he lay on the floor at gunpoint, and that Brittany Whitworth and her child were held at gunpoint sitting on the floor in view of the child’s dead dog.

“Defendants had no reason to use deadly force or any other force upon entering the Whitworth home,” the complaint charges. “Defendants were all armed with assault weapons and side arms and other weapons. Jonathan Whitworth, Brittany Whitworth, and P. M. [the child] were not armed, were not violent, were not resisting and were no threat to Defendants or anyone else. The two pet dogs were no threat to anyone and there was no reason to use assault weapons on those two animals. Defendants, under color of law, deprived each Plaintiff of rights secured under the Constitution and laws of the United States. Defendants conspired to deprive each Plaintiff of rights secured under the Constitution and laws of the United States. Defendants refused or failed to prevent the deprivation of Plaintiffs’ rights secured under the Constitution and laws of the United States.”
The lawsuit seeks restitution for bullet hole and door damage to the Whitworth home, as well as medical and veterinary expenses for the dead and wounded dogs. It is filed against the officers who were on the scene.

“This is all about demanding professionalism from our law enforcement agencies,” Harper said Monday. “I think when they considered the 7-year-old and the fact that he had to have counseling, pay vet bills for an injured dog and the loss of another, along with repairs to the home and the trauma of that night, they made the decision that this needed to be done,” Harper said.

“Our department will discuss the matter with our risk management office and legal office and be able to comment further once we’ve had a chance to do that,” Columbia police spokeswoman Officer Jessie Haden told the Columbia Tribune Monday afternoon. “Whatever we’re able to discuss publicly and legally, we will. This incident has received an enormous amount of attention locally, and it is our intention to make the public as informed, with accurate information, as we can, without compromising the legal process.”

The raid and heated public response to it has led to repeated public hearings in Columbia, and the department moved quickly to review and revamp its policy regarding the use of the SWAT team on search warrants. But it will likely have to pay for its errors in the Whitworth raid.

Video here. It’s tough.

I happened to look out the sliding glass door at sunset, just as the full moon was rising. The setting sun reflected off the windows across the bay. Photo take from my balcony door. CTE.

Weight this morning was 222.2 lbs, with a BMI of 30.1. I am so close.

Em’s shaving creams are very nice, and the packaging makes them ideal for those who shave in the shower: a little squirt of the shaving cream onto the tips of a wet shaving brush, and you’re going to get copious amounts of good lather. The shaving brush today is the TOBS “artificial badger” brush, and I have to say that the more that I use the good-quality synthetic-bristle brushes, the more I like them: they do a terrific job.

Loads of lather, three passes with my rhodium-plated English Gillette Aristocrat #22 carrying a Swedish Gillette blade, and a totally smooth face emerges, ready for a splash of the Domenica Bay Rum.

I stopped by a local pocket billiards place to see whether they had any actual billiards tables (5′x10′, no pockets)—carom billiards, it seems to be called these days. No luck, but there are some in Gilroy, only about 45 minutes away. They, he told me, even have a fancy European model with heated slate so that the baize is perfectly dry and the balls will roll forever.

The local place was strictly pool—not even any snooker, which was the game of choice in the small Oklahoma town where I was raised. The local pool hall had half a dozen slate tables in front, where dominoes was played, and then six excellent snooker tables, and then way in the back one pool table, the "slop table". Pool was held in contempt as requiring little skill in comparison to snooker—and indeed the pockets on the snooker table are designed so that they will bounce the ball out onto the table unless the shot is perfect.

So which cue sport is your choice?

The new manager was typically extremely successful as an individual contributor, which is why s/he’s been promoted to manager. Most companies (at least in my experience) offer no sort of training or assistance. Sink or Swim is the usual approach, appropriately abbreviated “SOS”.

I was talking just now to one such manager, and I recommended the book Managing Management Time, by Bill Oncken, which directly address this transition from non-manager to manager. It provides many insights and techniques and is also enjoyable to read.

Highly recommended if you’re a manager or contemplating that step.

John Cole:

And they are with the poor little rich boys who made the financial mess:

A Republican majority in the Senate would “revisit” the Wall Street reform bill passed earlier this year, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said Tuesday.

Shelby, the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee who might become chairman under a GOP majority, suggested that Republicans might strip out elements of the bill most favored by President Obama and congressional Democrats if Republicans win control of Congress.

“The bill is so sweeping and such a game-changer in many ways that it’s incumbent upon us to revisit it,” Shelby said at the Reuters Washington Summit.

Shelby had in part led the opposition to the Wall Street reform bill that finally passed Congress in July and was signed into law by President Obama. Revisiting that law, the Alabama Republican said, would start with oversight hearings and figuring out what elements need changing.

In particular, Shelby named the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as one of the most distasteful parts of the law. Obama named Elizabeth Warren, the former chairwoman of the board overseeing the Wall Street bailout program, to an appointed advisory position to help get that agency off the ground.

Yes, I understand the Democrats suck, and yes, there are a fair number of really bad Democrats (Ben Nelson, I’m looking at you). And maybe it has always been this way, and I have just woken up, but it sure seems like the choices between the two parties are as distinct as they have ever been. In one day, we have clear evidence that the Republicans are choosing to vote for bigotry over the rights of gays, bigotry extending opportunity to immigrants, and the big corporations over the consumer. Anyone who says there is no difference between the two parties needs their head examined and their driver’s license taken away.

If Democrats can not make the case, maybe the economy is the only thing that matters and we should just say to hell with elections and apportion seats in congress based on the unemployment rate.

You’re undoubtedly familiar with the idea of the biosphere: all living things on earth. As the biosphere moves through time, its composition (the collection of all living things on earth) changes: dinosaurs were big some time back, but circumstances changed and they changed as well, becoming modern-day birds.

This process, driven by evolution once the self-replicators emerged some billions of years ago, should be familiar. If watched from a God’s-eye view at a faster pace through time, it strikes me as looking like a forest fire: spreading, changing as the environment changes, some parts dying out, other parts catching hold. The fire itself is a process through time, just like living things, and groups of living things spread quickly when the environment provides support (fuel, for a fire), and die out in environments that lack support.

Life, as you’ll recall, an example of emergence: non-living matter, over sufficient time and in appropriate conditions, will develop systems that exhibit behavior unpredictable from its elements. While not simply deterministic—what will happen is unpredictable—interesting things happen as everything follows its path of least effort, creating a system with novel aspects.

Human culture is another emergence, the self-replicators in this case being ideas and behaviors (“memes”) that influence and are influenced by the environment and enter into an evolutionary process strikingly similar to that followed by living things (the earlier emergence).

Human culture encompasses all human works, whether concrete (buildings and highways, bridges and damns) or abstract (forms of poetry, literary criticism, styles of music). And you can look at these aspects of human culture as similar to lifeforms, save that the existence of memes depends on how well they get our attention and, in a sense, allegiance.

In watching Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037, I suddenly realized that I was seeing the end times of a particular meme species: the concert piano. And, in fact, I realized that Men, Women, and Pianos: A Social History of the Piano provides an almost complete study of the development, evolution, and extinction of a particular meme: the pianoforte.

We know the origin, and we know how the instrument evolved and many of the influences on its evolution. A striking development was the social assumption that every home should have a piano. This was driven not only by an interest in music and social status, but also by the need for entertainment. At one time, much family entertainment was created by the family, and the piano fit into this niche quite well.

With this interest, evolution continued and piano species rapidly emerged. At one time, there were 1600 piano manufacturers, which meant a pool of thousands of skilled artisans and good career prospects to attract more. Companies competed, and artisans moved, and evolution continued and the pianoforte became a pre-eminent instrument.

Unfortunately for the piano, the environment changed. Family entertainment began to be imported into the family rather than created by it: radio and television brought professional entertainment into the home, and pianos—bulky, heavy, and expensive—began to lose their appeal.

Now the pool of highly skilled craftsmen is quite small, and new craftsmen are difficult to find because the external work environment has changed. As you watch the movie, you realize that you’re seeing the end of the line. This meme became over-specialized and suited only to a particular (social) environment. The environment changed, and the pianoforte will probably not survive.

The range of crafts and craft workers and the number of highly skilled artisans required to create a piano is astonishing. At the Steinway & Sons factory they have come from all over the world, and in working together their craft has developed even further. Still, each piano is different. So many different craftsmen work on a piano, and so many parts and pieces go into a piano, that different pianos seem to differ as much as different people. Some pianos are easy and light, some are stiff and require effort, and so on. And the sound of the pianos differ remarkably as well, which becomes evident in the sequences of pianists trying to pick out a piano. One goes from piano to piano, playing the opening bars of Gershwin’s second piano prelude at each of several pianos in rapid succession: the differences in the sounds of the pianos are amazing. They all sound good, and they all sound like a piano, but the differences are like the differences between human voices.

One particular pianist/composer spent quite a while in the movie playing at two pianos. He talked about how the piano is just an instrument to “open the door” to the musical conception that the composer created. The instrument must be good, but in a sense it’s like an airplane taking you to your destination, which is not an airplane at all. The piano is a means.

That made me think of all the enormous specialization the piano requires for its environment. Obviously, special skills of those who harvest and age the wood, the skills of the artisans who actually build the piano (and note the special social environment required to give rise to such artisans), but also the specializations of the music instructors, pianists, composers, and even audiences, who develop the special skills and knowledge that allow them to appreciate the music.

The chain of specialization is too vast to be supported by the current environment. The social attitude toward manual labor has changed—certainly in the US, less so in some other countries where great skill as a craftsman or artisan assures one of a comfortable and respected middle-class existence. In the US, even highly skilled artisans are categorized as “blue collar workers”, despite their knowledge and skills supporting and sustaining that ultimate musical refinement, the modern pianoforte.

But evolution continues. Already we have pianos that do not require such craftsmanship. They can be built by CNC machines and the expensive, fragile soundboard, which requires such specialized skill, can be replaced by digital sampling. Thus we still have a “piano”, but it has evolved into a new species. Instead of Tyrannosaurus Rex, we have a Plymouth Rock chicken.

And note that these new pianos will sound alike. No longer will the voice of a piano depend on the serendipitous matching of skills of builders and the pianists. Instead, the pianos are all stamped out with the same voice. In decades to come, as the knowledge and experience are lost, people will still listen to piano music, but with the pianos of that future day, all sounding much the same, people will start to wonder “What’s the big deal?” and decide that people today (by then comfortably in the distant past) simply didn’t understand good music.

I highly recommend the book, followed by the movie, followed by contemplation of the evolution in the memeosphere of human culture.

More and more we are seeing that we are composed of and surrounded by complex systems, and as we investigate the laws of complex systems we find unexpected similarities among complex systems in quite different contexts.

Extremely intriguing minimalist movie from France, A Man Escaped is a 1957 B&W movie of a true escape. A French soldier and resistance fighter is captured by the Germans who are occupying Paris, imprisoned, and headed for execution. He plans and executes an escape, and every step along the way is interesting. For example, at the last minute he gets a cellmate. He must find out whether he can trust the cellmate and whether the cellmate will help him in his escape. The extremely careful conversations and questions are fascinating to watch: he has to be sure but he can’t tip his hand. 

I’m fortunate in that I sleep easily—and long: 9-10 hours is not unusual, 8.5 probably the norm.

Truefitt & Hill West Indian Limes produced a very fine lather using the Omega “artificial badger” brush—Model 643167, my recommendation for a beginner brush. The rhodium-plated Fat Boy with a still newish Swedish Gillette blade did a fine job: smooth, close, and flawless. A splash of St. John’s Bay Rum and I ready for the day.

Fascinating post. Click and read.