Later On

That’s a 7-string guitar.

This morning I weighed at break of day on my own scales. The day I left I was at 220.2 lbs. This morning: 218.0 lbs, a new low in my current program. That’s after a couple of expansive meals on the road but also quite a bit of "regular" eating—that is, regular eating nowadays: few seconds, nothing between meals or after dinner, modest portions, etc. I think this is working. BMI is 29.5.

My cold is better. My right ear is plugged, but it will work loose in time. Tons of mail, including around 1,000 emails.

Fortunately, I awakened at 3:30 a.m., ready to go. ("That’s 6:30 a.m.," my body insisted, still on Eastern time.) I shall take a nap.

Megs has been glad to see me, but careful not to get maudlin about it.

The Frank shaving brushes (I have 3 now) look great, but for some reason I cannot get the lather to persist on them. For me, it’s almost as if the brushes have been dipped in a lather-killing solution. I gave up on this one when, after loading it with lots of soap, I had no lather for the second pass. Life’s too short.

I did finish the shave (using the smallest Frank brush, which seems to do the best job), and it was a good shave. I know the soap is not at fault—I used the Prairie Creations shave stick with great success on the trip (until I forgot it and left it at TYD’s). Just to be sure, I’ll use the same soap tomorrow with the Rooney Style 2. The soap has a fine fragrance.

And my razor is the newly gold-plated Pils stainless. Pils does make a gold-plated razor, but it’s gold-plated brass. I decided to gold plate this one after getting rust spots under the cap. The gold plating will put paid to that. (I’ve heard that Pils has done a recall—a bad batch of stainless—but I know nothing more of that. Contact your dealer if you have a stainless Pils that’s shown rust spots.) I think it turned out extremely handsome, and with a new Swedish Gillette blade it gave a fine shave.

A splash of TOBS Mr. Taylor’s aftershave, and I’m good for the day.

Interesting and useful post at The Simple Dollar.

Businesses consider shareholders a nuisance. The professional managers ignore shareholders as much as they can—much like elected officials ignore the public will—and thus both businesses and governments love secrecy: don’t let the owners/voters know what we’re doing—because they would not like it.

Marian Wang reports for ProPublica:

Business groups and financial regulators are going head-to-head in court over a rule adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission that would give shareholders more say in a company’s leadership. Shareholders who were disappointed that such a rule was omitted from this year’s financial reform law scored a victory in August when the SEC voted to adopt what’s known as a proxy access rule.

But any celebration on the part of investor groups may have been premature. After the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable – two of the largest business trade groups – fought to overturn the SEC’s new rule, the SEC agreed this week to put the new rule on hold while awaiting a court ruling on the matter.

As we noted at the time of the rulemaking, the proxy access rule gave shareholders more power to nominate directors to the board of publicly traded companies by requiring companies to include outside candidates on the company’s corporate ballots, or proxy materials. Shareholders currently have to mail out separate ballots to nominate their own candidates, and that takes more time, effort, and expense. (To be eligible to nominate a director, a shareholder or a group of shareholders must own at least 3 percent of the company’s stock and have held the shares for at least three years.)

Former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt told us after the passage of the Dodd-Frank bill that proxy access was the most important omission from the bill because “as the system has been structured, shareholders have no say in the management of the company except in very, very unusual circumstances.”

Investor groups seem to agree. The Council of Institutional Investors called the Chamber and the Business Roundtable’s lawsuit “an assault on a fundamental shareholder right,” and said it planned to file a legal brief in support of the rule [PDF].

The Chamber of Commerce, however, has argued that the rule gives “special interests the ability to hold the board hostage on narrow issues at the expense of other shareholders.

Mistermix at Balloon-Juice has an interesting post:

The taxpayer receipt has been making the rounds of blogs this week. The example used in the white paper shows that most of the taxes for someone earning the US median income goes to Medicare and Social Security.

That’s true, but it’s interesting to play around with the do-it-yourself version and use the mean family income (instead of the median personal income). As income goes up, the percentage of income that goes to federal income tax versus FICA goes up, which makes entitlements a smaller piece of the pie. And as entitlements get smaller, the amount allotted to defense and debt get bigger.

For someone making the mean household income of around $60K, filing as married with one child, around $3,000 of total tax burden goes to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Almost as much ($2,900) goes to military and police, and $500 goes to debt service. I wonder how the average American is going to react to that.

(Here’s a big image of the whole calculation, and here’s the paycheck calculator that I used.)

The Eldest has introduced me to James Patrick Hunt by checking out Bridger, one of his works, at the Baltimore County Public Library Towson Branch—which, BTW, uses RFID chips in their books so you can check out an entire batch simultaneously by stacking them on the reader: wonderful! (though I understand it’s a slippery slope and soon babies will be implanted with chips that control their thoughts). Bridger reminds me a lot of Elmore Leonard generally, and Stick in particular. Highly recommended.

Bottom line, Obama opposes Constituional rights—in practice, that is, not in speeches and particularly not when campaigning. But when it comes time to recognize Constitutional rights, he’s first in line to beat them down. He seems to want dictatorial powers. Adam Liptak reports in the NY Times:

Abdullah al-Kidd, born in Kansas and once a star running back at the University of Idaho, spent 16 days in federal detention in three states in 2003, sometimes naked and sometimes shackled hand and foot, but was never charged with a crime.On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to decide whether he may sue John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, for what Mr. Kidd contends was an unconstitutional use of a law meant to hold “material witnesses.” Mr. Kidd says the law was used as a pretext for detaining him because he was suspected of terrorist activities.

The material witness law is typically used to hold people who have information about crimes committed by others when there is reason to think they would otherwise not appear at trial to give testimony. Critics say the Bush administration radically reinterpreted the law after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, using it as a preventive-detention tool.

Laws allowing the preventive detention of suspected terrorists are common in Europe. The United States does not have such a law, but Mr. Kidd contends that a policy set by Mr. Ashcroft allowed federal prosecutors to use the material witness law to the same end.

Mr. Kidd, who described himself in a 2004 interview as “anti-bin Laden, anti-Taliban, anti-suicide bombing, anti-terrorism,” was never called to testify as a witness.

The Obama administration had urged the justices to reverse a decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, that had allowed Mr. Kidd’s lawsuit to proceed. “If permitted to stand,” Acting Solicitor General Neal K. Katyal wrote, “the decision below would seriously limit the circumstances in which prosecutors could invoke the material witness statute without fear of personal liability.”  [That is, if allowed to stand, prosecutors would labor under the terrible burden of obeying the law and respecting the Constitution, an eventuality so horrible to the Obama Administration that it will go to any lengths to avoid that. - LG]

Mr. Kidd, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, said the appeals court’s ruling was straightforward and correct. Mr. Ashcroft’s “deliberate decision to authorize the pretextual arrest of witnesses was clearly unconstitutional,” Mr. Kidd’s lawyers told the justices.

Mr. Kidd, who was known as Lavoni T. Kidd in 1995 when he led the University of Idaho football team, the Vandals, in rushing, was on his way to Saudi Arabia to work on a doctorate in Islamic studies in March 2003 when he was arrested and handcuffed at Dulles International Airport outside Washington.

Magistrate Judge Mikel H. Williams of the Federal District Court in Boise, Idaho, authorized the arrest, based on an affidavit from Special Agent Scott Mace of the F.B.I. “Kidd is scheduled to take a one-way, first-class flight (costing approximately $5,000),” the affidavit said.

That statement was false: the ticket was for a round trip, in coach, costing $1,700. [Another drawback for the Obama Administration: Having law enforcement officials have to restrict themselves to true statements instead of lying to get what they want. - LG]

In the 2004 interview, Mr. Kidd said he did not understand why someone held as a mere witness should be subjected to harsh treatment.

“I was made to sit in a small cell for hours and hours and hours, buck naked,” he said. “I was treated worse than murderers.”

Justice Elena Kagan disqualified herself from the case because she had worked on it when she was United States solicitor general.

The grandsons were playing with tops, a toy I remember from my own childhood. Our tops, however, were just wooden objects with iron tips: you wrapped a string around them, threw them down, and they spun. Then you did it again. Of somewhat limited interest, but much better than, say, mowing the lawn.

Tops today—like other toys—are part of an overall entertainment platform built around the object. The tops differ (different colors, different spinning tips, which are interchangeable so that you can customize your top), and each variety has a backstory that is related in a TV series and in comic books. Each top, instead of being a singular toy, is a participant in a little top universe with on-going dramas, thus allowing the child to play in a richer imagined context.

Toys have grown more far-reaching and complex, it seems. The joys of spinning the top are still present (with launchers much easier to use than the wrapped-string method), but drama has been added.

The Eldest, rather than having her auto-insurance rates based on coarse measures (sex, age, where you live, your driving record, etc.) took advantage of a program/device offered by her insurance company. The device installed in the car tracks several indicators, which in turn determine your insurance rates. The indicators include: total mileage driven, mileage driven between 12:00m and 4:00am, and the number of “abrupt stops.” If you do brake too hard, the device emits a triple beep, so you quickly learn how fast you can decelerate.

Pretty clever and seems fair. More info here.

Some people simply have difficulty constructing (or following) a logical chain of argument. PZ Myers here offers some help:

The head of the Pontificia Academia Pro Vita, the specifically crazy anti-choice arm of the Catholic Church, has already issued a statement about the Nobel Prize awarded to an IVF pioneer. He’s against it, of course.

Among his peculiar complaints is the objection that it "didn’t treat the underlying problem of infertility but rather skirted it", which is rather odd. This:

Couples can’t have children
↓
Couples use IVF
↓
Couples now have children

Looks to me like a rather direct way to treat infertility. Where they once could have no children, now they have children.

They also don’t like the fact that the procedure produces excess embryos which are then discarded, stored, or used in further research in reproduction. They prefer the natural method of intercourse, which produces excess embryos which are then flushed down the toilet to rot in the sewers.

The church is also deeply concerned that the technology has produced a market for women to sell a few cells from their ovaries, when everyone knows that women are supposed to be sold whole and intact and dedicate every aspect of their lives to their owners.

As yet, there is no word from Bill Donohue.

A haiku (at least in terms of syllable count) by The Older Grandson:

Haikus are awesome,
But they don’t always make sense.
Refrigerator.

I have now taken 4GB of photos, so we went out for a quick shopping trip at Target. I got an 8GB SDHC card and a new supply of Zicam (the zinc supplement), along with some Bayer aspirin—aspirin seems to work better for me than ibuprofen.

The Eldest pointed out an interesting article about a recent discovery: as women reach menopause and the estrogen shuts down, they can develop ADHD. This was not noticed until recently, because women who saw doctors got hormone replacement therapy (which is now not being used so much) and because ADHD has be studied a lot only in recent years. Some self-medicate (e.g., lots of caffeine), but a consultation with an gynecological endocrinologist might suggest a more direct attack on the ADHD. Here’s one article. Googling will find more.

The zinc seems to be holding the cold at bay: I definitely have a cold, but it’s quite well controlled and not bothering me all that much.

Last night’s big meal was tasty and I enjoyed it, yet I can tell I don’t miss that way of eating. I think that was a last hurrah, and now I’m happily back to my new mode of eating. Still, it was fun.

Today, I think, will be a quiet day. The Younger Grandson is also a bit under the weather, so naps are likely. My attention is starting to drift toward the trip home on Tuesday. I have an empty 1-liter bottle to fill with water once past security, and if they have the full-body scanners I am ready to opt out.

The Eldest has been reading Stirring the Pot: A History of African Cuisine, by James McCaan, and reading me bits from it. Its focus is on sub-Saharan Africa: Northern African cuisine is a variety of Mediterranean cuisine.

It turns out that there’s a reason that the African restaurants we know are Ethiopian restaurants: Ethiopia was particularly fortunate in its native food resources and in also having an abundance of salt, which it traded for other foods (and goods) at its ports.

Fascinating book, in any event.

Thanks to TYD for pointing out this article by Anahad O’Connor in the NY Times:

The prospect of ingesting pesticides and other contaminants can make supermarket produce seem less than appetizing. Buying organic lowers the risk, but is no guarantee against food-borne pathogens.

Scientists have found some effective household measures that can eliminate germs and pesticides. The simplest? Rinsing with tap water, which works as well as a mild soap solution or fruit and vegetable washes.

In studies at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in 2000, for example, scientists compared pesticide removal methods on 196 samples of lettuce, strawberries and tomatoes. Some were rinsed under tap water for a minute; others were treated with either a 1 percent solution of Palmolive or a fruit and vegetable wash. Tap water “significantly reduced” residues of 9 of 12 pesticides, and it worked as well as soap and wash products, the studies found.

Water temperature was not the key; friction was. “The mechanical action of rubbing the produce under tap water is likely responsible for removing pesticide residues,” scientists wrote.

For micro-organisms, try rinsing produce with a mild solution of vinegar, about 10 percent. In a 2003 study at the University of Florida, researchers tested disinfectants on strawberries contaminated with E. coli and other germs. They found the vinegar mixture reduced bacteria by 90 percent and viruses by about 95 percent.

THE BOTTOM LINE To remove pesticides and germs, rinse produce with a vinegar solution, then wash with tap water for at least 30 seconds.

Jascha Hoffman writes in the NY Times:

Benoît B. Mandelbrot, a maverick mathematician who developed an innovative theory of roughness and applied it to physics, biology, finance and many other fields, died on Thursday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 85.

His death was caused by pancreatic cancer, his wife, Aliette, said. He had lived in Cambridge.

Dr. Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” to refer to a new class of mathematical shapes whose uneven contours could mimic the irregularities found in nature.

“Applied mathematics had been concentrating for a century on phenomena which were smooth, but many things were not like that: the more you blew them up with a microscope the more complexity you found,” said David Mumford, a professor of mathematics at Brown University. “He was one of the primary people who realized these were legitimate objects of study.”

In a seminal book, “The Fractal Geometry of Nature,” published in 1982, Dr. Mandelbrot defended mathematical objects that he said others had dismissed as “monstrous” and “pathological.” Using fractal geometry, he argued, the complex outlines of clouds and coastlines, once considered unmeasurable, could now “be approached in rigorous and vigorous quantitative fashion.”

For most of his career, Dr. Mandelbrot had a reputation as an outsider to the mathematical establishment. From his perch as a researcher for I.B.M. in New York, where he worked for decades before accepting a position at Yale University, he noticed patterns that other researchers may have overlooked in their own data, then often swooped in to collaborate.

“He knew everybody, with interests going off in every possible direction,” Professor Mumford said. “Every time he gave a talk, it was about something different.”

Dr. Mandelbrot traced his work on fractals to a question he first encountered as a young researcher: how long is the coast of Britain? The answer, he was surprised to discover, depends on how closely one looks. On a map an island may appear smooth, but zooming in will reveal jagged edges that add up to a longer coast. Zooming in further will reveal even more coastline.

“Here is a question, a staple of grade-school geometry that, if you think about it, is impossible,” Dr. Mandelbrot told The New York Times earlier this year in an interview. “The length of the coastline, in a sense, is infinite.”

In the 1950s, Dr. Mandelbrot proposed a simple but radical way to quantify the crookedness of such an object by assigning it a “fractal dimension,” an insight that has proved useful well beyond the field of cartography.

Over nearly seven decades, working with dozens of scientists, Dr. Mandelbrot contributed to the fields of geology, medicine, cosmology and engineering. He used the geometry of fractals to explain how galaxies cluster, how wheat prices change over time and how mammalian brains fold as they grow, among other phenomena.

His influence has also been felt within the field of geometry, where he was one of the first to use computer graphics to study mathematical objects like the Mandelbrot set, which was named in his honor.

“I decided to go into fields where mathematicians would never go because the problems were badly stated,” Dr. Mandelbrot said. “I have played a strange role that none of my students dare to take.”

Benoît B. Mandelbrot (he added the middle initial himself, though it does not stand for a middle name) was born on Nov. 20, 1924, to a Lithuanian Jewish family in Warsaw. In 1936 his family fled the Nazis, first to Paris and then to the south of France, where he tended horses and fixed tools.

After the war he enrolled in the École Polytechnique in Paris, where his sharp eye compensated for a lack of conventional education. His career soon spanned the Atlantic. He earned a master’s degree in aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology, returned to Paris for his doctorate in mathematics in 1952, then went on to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., for a postdoctoral degree under the mathematician John von Neumann.

After several years spent largely at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, Dr. Mandelbrot was hired by I.B.M. in 1958 to work at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. Although he worked frequently with academic researchers and served as a visiting professor at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it was not until 1987 that he began to teach at Yale, where he earned tenure in 1999.

Dr. Mandelbrot received more than 15 honorary doctorates and served on the board of many scientific journals, as well as the Mandelbrot Foundation for Fractals. Instead of rigorously proving his insights in each field, he said he preferred to “stimulate the field by making bold and crazy conjectures” — and then move on before his claims had been verified. This habit earned him some skepticism in mathematical circles.

“He doesn’t spend months or years proving what he has observed,” said Heinz-Otto Peitgen, a professor of mathematics and biomedical sciences at the University of Bremen. And for that, he said, Dr. Mandelbrot “has received quite a bit of criticism.”

“But if we talk about impact inside mathematics, and applications in the sciences,” Professor Peitgen said, “he is one of the most important figures of the last 50 years.” . . .

Continue reading.

From a NY Times article by Adam Nagourney:

Washington has generally looked the other way as a growing medical marijuana industry has prospered here and in 14 other states and the District of Columbia, but Mr. Holder’s position — revealed in a letter this week to nine former chiefs of the Drug Enforcement Administration that was made public on Friday — made explicit that legalizing marijuana for recreational use would bring a whole new level of scrutiny from Washington.

Mr. Holder did not fully spell out the reasons for the decision, but he did allude to the reluctance of the federal government to enforce drug laws differently in different states. “If passed, this legislation will greatly complicate federal drug enforcement efforts to the detriment of our citizens,” he wrote.

The Los Angeles County sheriff, Lee Baca, who has been one of the leading opponents of the measure, quickly embraced the Justice Department’s stance. He said that the initiative was unconstitutional and vowed to continue enforcing marijuana laws, no matter what voters do in November.

I am unpersuaded by arguments based on reasons that cannot be revealed: who can tell whether the reasons makes sense or not if the person making the argument refuses to give the reasons. My assumption is that Holder won’t give the reasons because he knows they don’t make sense.

So far as having differing laws from state to state: I wonder whether Mr. Holder is aware of how alcoholic beverages are sold: each state decides for itself how to handle those sales (and my natal state, Oklahoma, did not allow spirits to be sold in the state until around 1958—it was a dry state, and kept that way for a long time by a coalition of temperance preachers and bootleggers, neither of whom wanted the legal sale of spirits). The Federal government doesn’t have to worry about enforcement of those laws because it is not a Federal matter—and the same should go for marijuana: why on earth is that a Federal concern? (The reasons, if any, are secret.) Texas manages to police alcohol sales despite having a county-option policy: what is legal in one county may be legal in the adjoining county. Doesn’t seem to cause terrible problems.

Los Angeles has had a long string of terrible sheriffs, and Baca seems to be in that tradition. Someone should explain to him (using diagrams if necessary) that it is not the sheriff’s job, responsibility, or right to decide which laws are constitutional or not: that is the job of the courts. (Of course it is not unusal for a sheriff to believe that he can assume the powers of the court.)

But Roger Salazar, a political consultant who has been directing the effort to defeat the proposal, said that Mr. Holder’s statement should reinforce deep concerns about the initiative, including the way it was drafted and what he called inflated claims by its backers of what legalization might do.

“This is sort of a shot across the bow from the federal government: They’re saying that, ‘If this thing moves the way we think it is, we’re going to come after you guys,’ ” he said. “That gives California voters one more reason to take a deep breath.”

Vague threats are all very well, but such an approach seems highly improper for the US Attorney General. If a majority of voters in California believe that marijuan should be legal in California, it should be. And the Federal government should get out of the game—unless some of those secret reasons make sense. But they are secret.

I forgot to pack my shave stick, which remains with TYD. Fortunately I had sent some MWF to The Older Grandson, so I used that this morning. Immediate great lather, using the Muhle shaving brush. Three passes with the Feather Premium holding a new Feather blade, a splashof Royal Copenhagen, and I am groomed for the steakhouse tonight: Fleming’s in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, just at the foot of the Jones Falls Expressway.

Einstein famously remarked that one should keep things as simple as possible—but not simpler. And often the more one looks at something simple (sharpening a knife, for example), it turns out to be not nearly so simple as one thought. The simple way to fight the obesity epidemic is to advise people to eat less and move more, on the assumption that the cause is eating too much and not moving enough: quite simple. Too simple.

For example, it’s now been found that obesity in children is linked to a specific common cold virus. Additional possible causes:

Obesity has risen dramatically in the United States and many other countries during the past 30 years. A combination of increased calorie intake and decreased physical activity is the most obvious explanation, but other factors may play a role as well. A team of researchers led by David B. Allison of the University of Alabama at Birmingham considered some of those possible contributors in a 2009 paper in Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, including these:

Older mothers

Studies have shown that the offspring of older mothers are more likely to be obese; birthrates have increased since the 1970s among women 30 and older.

Air-conditioning

It takes energy both to keep cool in hot weather and warm when the mercury drops. Some researchers have proposed that increasingly climate-controlled lifestyles have made people soft in more ways than one.

Medication

Certain antidepressants, birth control drugs and other medications that have become more common in recent decades produce weight gain as a side effect.

Less sleep

Sleep deprivation leads to metabolic changes that foster weight gain; epidemiological data suggest that sleep duration has fallen steadily over the past century.

Environmental contaminants

The increase of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the environment over the past few decades has raised a number of concerns, including the possibility that the compounds might interfere with hormones that regulate metabolism.

On the last, see this article.

Also, too much light at night seems to trigger obesity:

Persistent exposure to light at night may lead to weight gain, even without changing physical activity or eating more food, according to new research in mice.

More at the link.

Sounds like a useful book, reviewed here on Cool Tools.

From a Greenwald column:

I’m convinced that drug prohibition, and especially the “War on Drugs” which enables it, is going to be one of those policies which, decades from now, future generations will be completely unable to understand how we could have tolerated.  So irrational and empirically false are the justifications for drug prohibition, and so costly is the War waged in its name, that it is difficult to imagine a more counter-productive policy than this (that’s why public opinion is inexorably realizing this despite decades of Drug War propaganda and the absence of any real advocacy for decriminalization on the part of national political leaders).  In that regard, and in virtually every other, the War on Drugs is a mirror image of the War on Terror:  sustained with the same deceitful propaganda, driven by many of the same motives, prosecuted with similar templates, and destructive in many of the same ways.

The similarities are obvious.  Both wars rely upon cartoon depictions of Scary Villains (The Drug Kingpin, Mexican Cartels, the Terrorist Mastermind) to keep the population in a state of heightened fear and thus blind them to rational discourse.  But both wars are not only complete failures in eradicating those villains, but they both do more to empower those very villains than any other single cause — the War on Drugs by ensuring that cartels’ profits from the illegal drug trade remain sky-high, and the War on Terror by ensuring more and more support and recruits for anti-American extremists.  And both, separately and together, endlessly erode basic American liberties by convincing a frightened public that they can Stay Safe only if they cede more and more power to the state.  Many of the civil liberties erosions from the War on Terror have their genesis in the War on Drugs.

The most important commonality between these two wars is …

Read the whole thing.