Later On

I keep forgetting to mention another Pilates benefit: I do the work in gym shorts and a t-shirt, and the mirrored wall is merciless to the notion that I’m at a good weight.

But mainly I wanted to note that this evening, after three sessions, I noticed that I noticed how I was standing, and stood differently. It was an odd feeling, and I don’t know exactly what I’m doing, but I’m certainly aware of things of which I previously was completely unaware: the way the muscles in my trunk and legs are tensed, and even the existence of various small muscles until the soreness after the second day set in. We didn’t do anything at all strenuous, but clearly a bunch of little muscles were getting the workout of their tapioca-pudding lives.

At any rate, if I’m starting to feel the stance and movement of my muscles after just three sessions, this promises to be a very interesting course.

Extremely interesting brief article. Worth reading. In a word, the reason is geography.

This I’m definitely going to make:

Just take a look at the ingredients:

• 1 ounce dried porcini or other wild mushrooms
• 2 Tbsp bacon fat or vegetable oil
• 2 pounds pork shoulder
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 1 head cabbage (regular, not savoy or red), chopped
• 1 1/2 pounds mixed fresh mushrooms
• 1-2 pounds kielbasa or other smoked sausage
• 1 smoked ham hock
• 1 pound fresh Polish sausage (optional)
• 1 25-ounce jar of fresh sauerkraut (we recommend Bubbies)
• 1 bottle of pilsner or lager beer
• 1 Tbsp juniper berries (optional)
• 1 Tbsp black peppercorns
• 1 Tbsp caraway seeds
• 2 Tbsp dried marjoram
• Salt
• 20 prunes, sliced in half (optional)
• 2 Tbsp tomato paste (optional)
• 1 15-ounce can tomato sauce (optional)
• 1-2 Tbsp mustard or horseradish (optional)

On that last one, I think the obvious choice is to use both, a tablespoon of each. (Just like using horseradish mustard.) Bubbies sauerkraut is packed in a jar and is kept in the refrigerated section. Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods both carry it, as do quite a few other stores.

Here’s the recipe.

20′ non-stop on the Nordic Track ski machine today—the first of many, is my plan. And day 1 of the Plateau Buster 2-day diet. Probably the exercise is what will make the difference.

I did discover anew the pleasures of listening to a narrative account while on the ski machine. This morning was an episode from the old Let’s Pretend radio program (specifically, “Why the sea is salt”), but I just downloaded (for free) Robinson Crusoe (at the link). I always liked that novel in any event. Audiobooks.org seems to be a good source of free audiobooks.

UPDATE: Not so good a source, as it turns out. I downloaded the MP3 file, but found it was an invalid filetype. I’ll check my library for audiobooks.

UPDATE 2: Library allows me to download audiobooks. The only problem is that the download does not work at all. I’m trying Audible.com, an Amazon.com company.  LATER: Library called. On looking at the records, they told me that the reason the download didn’t work was that I was number 15 on the hold list for the book: digital rights management limits the number of “copies” they can “check out” at any one time—thus completely subverting and negating one of the primary benefits of digital copies.

UPDATE 3: Audible.com doesn’t work at all. I did call the help number and found that their service is incompatible with Google Chrome, a fact that they carefully do not mention. I cancelled membership. (It was a trial period, with $15/month after that, and pricing on the books is EXTREMELY unclear.)

This may be one of those ideas that’s ahead of its time.

Probably not. Take, for example, this news article by Liz Goodwin:

Even as he rued an Election Day "shellacking," President Obama seemed hopeful in his post-midterms press conference yesterday that Democrats and Republicans may find common ground on education legislation, if not much else. The Washington Post’s Nick Anderson examined that wish in a story today, focusing on the handful of newly elected Republican candidates who ran on a pledge to abolish the Department of Education — a position that doesn’t exactly bode well for interparty cooperation on the issue.

Soon-to-be Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky, Rob Portman of Ohio, and Mike Lee of Utah have supported initiatives in the past to abolish the DOE or stated their support for the department’s abolition. At least 15 new House members have as well.

But GOP Rep. John Kline of Minnesota, the soon-to-be-ranking member of the House’s education and labor committee, dismissed talk that the new Congress will make it a priority to dismantle the Education Department.

"In some ways, that’s sort of a talking point," Kline told Anderson. "There will be those who campaigned on that language. I’m not sure they always know what it means."

Even so, Republican leadership will be under great pressure from new and old members of the 112th Congress to cut federal spending, and education spending will almost certainly fall under that mandate.

Continue reading. It’s a "talking point"?? What does that mean?

Christie Wilcox is a science writer and grad student who writes:

Makeup has been around for centuries. The earliest records of makeup use date back to around 3000 BC when ancient Egyptians used soot and other natural products to create their signature look. Evidence suggests that the origins of makeup may go back much further. Our closest relatives, Neandertals, may have used colored pigments on their skin some 50,000 years ago, and paint pigments date back 75,000 years, suggesting people may have used body paint before they wore clothes. Most people will say that makeup makes women look younger and more attractive, but the question is, why? What is it about a little eye shadow, some pink cheeks and red lips that makes a woman look prettier? Like everything in life, it really is all about sex.

Makeup works because it’s a good lie. In much of the animal kingdom, females advertise their youth, health and sexual availability through physical signals. Whether it be red rumps, special scents or elaborate behaviors, girls of the animal world know that sex sells, and they make it well known to the men in the area that they are ready for and capable of producing some stellar offspring. Like a peacock strutting his feathers, women do this to convince the opposite sex that they’re a good choice for a mate. But in humans, these signals are far less pronounced. Women’s bodies don’t advertise fertility loudly like our closest relatives. Instead, it’s almost impossible to tell if a woman is ovulating – almost. There are subtle signs if you know what to look for, and even though they might not realize that they realize it, men (and women!) do take notice. Studies have shown that women’s faces are more attractive to both sexes during the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle. Makeup works because it exaggerates or even completely fabricates these signs of fertility and sexual availability, thus making a woman seem more appealing.

Those ancient Egyptians were on to something with the eye makeup, for example. Women, in contrast with men, tend to be naturally darker around their eyes. Eyeliner, eye shadow and mascara all enhance this effect, thus making a face look more feminine. Studies by Richard Russell at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania have shown that the darker the eyes are in relation to the rest of the face, the more attractive a woman appears, while the opposite is true for men. In fact, the darkness of the eyes compared to the rest of the face is so important, the exact same face can be perceived as either male or female depending on the level of contrast – just take a look at the images on the right [in the original post – LG], which are of the same face with the same eyes and lips but one has a lighter skin tone, creating more contrast. Eye makeup also makes eyes seem wider and larger, and bigger eyes are perceived as more youthful.

As with eyes, Russell found that women have darker mouths than men of the same skin tone. Manipulating lips to be darker than the rest of a woman’s face makes it appear more feminine and attractive. But it turns out that the color of the lipstick matters, too…

Continue reading.

Thanks to Kafeneio for pointing out this note on various ways to lace up your shoes. Note the reasons for the various methods:

This method reduces friction, making the lacing easier to tighten and loosen plus reducing wear and tear…

This variation of Straight Lacing eliminates the underlying diagonals, which looks neater plus relieves pressure on the top ridge of the foot… 

An inside-out version of Straight (Bar) Lacing, which distributes pressure evenly plus keeps the knots & ends to the side, away from either snagging undergrowth or from bicycle chains & cranks…    

This method has all of the underlying sections pulling at a steep angle, which shifts the alignment of the sides and may correct an otherwise ill-fitting shoe…

This distinctive lacing is worn on military boots by paratroopers and ceremonial guard units. The laces weave horizontally and vertically, forming a secure "ladder"…    

This inside-out version of Bow Tie Lacing is used on combat boots by various armies. With the crossovers on the insides, the sides of the boots can flex more easily…

This patented method has the laces angled one way on the outside and the other way on the inside. The resulting double helix reduces friction and allows faster, easier lacing…

This method "locks" the laces at each eyelet pair. Great for lacing skates tightly because the lower sections hold while tightening…

This variation divides the lacing into two or more "segments", each of which can be laced up as tightly or loosely as necessary to achieve a comfortable yet secure fit for "difficult" shoes or feet…    

Footbag players use this lacing to open up the front of their shoes, making it easier to catch or otherwise control the footbag (or "Hacky Sack")…

Many more at the link.

Jason Goldman, a grad student in developmental psychology at USC, blogs:

Despite the fact that my research lies at the intersection between cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychology, I am also quite interested in the evolution of our understanding of psychopathology. The ultimate goal of the study of psychopathology is to ground such disorders in brain and body. But our understanding of some pathologies are simply not there yet (though some of our therapeutic interventions still prove effective even if we don’t quite understand the etiology of a given disease or disorder). The main conflict in the field that characterizes the study of psychopathology is regarding the nature of psychopathology itself. Do psychological disorders reflect disease states superimposed onto otherwise healthy individuals? Or are psychological disorders wrapped up in personality and fundamental to the organization of a person? And to what extent does culture determine the extent to which we pathologize certain behaviors?

Complicated questions indeed. Consider the case of ADHD as a case study in the evolution of psychopathology.

What is ADHD? Paradigm Shifts in Psychopathology
Portions of this essay originally posted at Child’s Play

Over the last one hundred years, paradigm shifts in the study of psychopathology have altered our conceptualization of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), as a construct and as a diagnostic category. With few exceptions, it has generally been accepted that there is a brain-based neurological cause for the set of behaviors associated with ADHD. However, as technology has progressed and our understanding of the brain and central nervous system has improved, the nature of the neurological etiology for ADHD has changed dramatically. The diagnostic category itself has also undergone many changes as the field of psychopathology has changed.

In the 1920s, a disorder referred to as minimal brain dysfunction described the symptoms now associated with ADHD. Researchers thought that encephalitis caused some subtle neurological deficit that could not be medically detected. Encephalitis is an acute inflammation of the brain that can be caused by a bacterial infection, or as a complication of another disease such as rabies, syphilis, or Lyme disease. Indeed, children presented in hospitals during an outbreak of encephalitis in the United States in 1917-1918 with a set of symptoms that would now be described within the construct of ADHD.

In the 1950s and 1960s, new descriptions of ADHD emerged due to the split between the neo-Kraepelinian biological psychiatrists and the Freudian psychodynamic theorists. The term hyperkinetic impulse disorder, used in the medical literature, referred to the impulsive behaviors associated with ADHD. At the same time, the Freudian psychodynamic researchers (who seem to have won the battle in the DSM-II) described a hyperkinetic reaction of childhood, in which unresolved childhood conflicts manifested in disruptive behavior. The term "hyperkinetic," which appears in both diagnoses, describes the set of behaviors that would later be known as hyperactive – despite the fact that medical and psychological professionals were aware that there were many children who presented without hyperactivity. In either case, it was the presenting behavior that was the focus – which was implicit, given the behavioral paradigm that guided the field.

When the cognitive paradigm became dominant, inattention became the focus of ADHD, and disorder was renamed attention deficit disorder (ADD). Two subtypes would later appear in the literature, which correspond to ADD with or without hyperactivity. The diagnostic nomenclature reflects the notion that the primary problem was an attentional (and thus, cognitive) one and not primarily behavioral. The attentional problems had to do with the ability to shift attention from one stimulus to another (something that Jonah Lehrer has called an attention-allocation disorder, since it isn’t really a deficit of attention). The hyperactivity symptoms were also reformulated as cognitive: connected with an executive processing deficit termed "freedom from distractibility."

In DSM-IV, published in 1994, the subtypes were made standard and there wasn’t much change in the diagnostic criteria per se, but there were changes in the name of the disorder, which reflected changes in the literature in terms of the understanding of the etiology of the disorder. The term ADD did not hold up, and the disorder became known as ADHD, with three subtypes: ADHD with hyperactivity/impulsiveness, ADHD with inattention, and a combined subtype in which patients have both hyperactive and attention-related symptoms. Due to improved neuroimaging technology, these subtypes seem to reflect structural and functional abnormalities found in the frontal lobe, and in its connections with the basal ganglia and cerebellum.

The set of the symptoms associated with ADHD seem not to have changed much in the last one hundred years. However, paradigm shifts within the field of psychopathology have changed the way in which researchers understand the underlying causal factors, as well as which of the symptoms are thought to be primary.

Developmental Continuity in ADHD

Is there such a thing as adult ADHD? . . .

Continue reading. Women: see also this note.

David Rothman writes in the Atlantic:

E-book gadgets have finally cracked the mass market here in the United States or at least have come a long way.

Consider a memorable Kindle commercial from Amazon, in which a brunette in a bikini one-ups an oafish man reading off a rival machine. Mr. Beer Belly asks about her e-reader. "It’s a Kindle," she says by the pool. "$139. I actually paid more for these sunglasses." Mad Men would be proud. A year or two from now, count on twice as much ballyhoo and on better machines for less than $99.

I myself own both a Kindle 3 and the Brand X iPad and can attest to the improved readability of the latest E Ink from Amazon’s supplier, even indoors, despite lack of built-in illumination. Outside on walks, as with earlier Kindles, I can listen to books from publishing houses savvy enough to allow text to speech. No matter where I am, I can instantly see all occurrences of a character’s name in an engrossing Louis Bayard novel. I can also track down the meanings of archaic words that Bayard’s detective narrator uses in this murder mystery set at West Point and featuring a fictionalized Edgar Allan Poe.

But there is one thing I currently cannot do with my Kindle despite all the sizzle in the commercials—read public library books. Local libraries do not use the Kindle format for their electronic collections, relying instead on rival standards used by Sony Readers and certain other devices. Amazon undoubtedly would love to fix this under terms favorable to CEO Jeff Bezos and friends. But then other issues will remain. How many Kindle books—or those readable on Sony Readers, iPads, and others—will cash-strapped libraries in poorer cities be able to lend? What range of titles will be available? And shouldn’t we look beyond books and consider the needs of researchers who, for example, could benefit from reliably preserved electronic discussions linked to individual books.

Might the time have finally come for a well-stocked national digital library system (NDLS) for the United States—a cause I’ve publicly advocated since 1992 in Computerworld, a 1996 MIT Press information science collection, the Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report, the Huffington Post, and elsewhere, including my national information stimulus plan here in the Fallows blog? That’s the topic of this essay, and many of the same concepts could apply to other countries, including Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Australia, Japan, China, India, Brazil, and various other nations. Perhaps national digital library systems could interconnect, forming a global one. But for simplicity’s sake and reasons of self interest, I’ll focus here on a digital system for the United States, which, in national digital library planning and execution, lags far behind the diligent Chinese, among others.

A library plan and related initiatives should include the actual collections, not just for traditional education and research but also for job training; tight integration with schools, libraries, and other institutions; encouragement of the spread of the right hardware and connections; and the cost-justification described in the stimulus proposal. Multimedia is essential, and Kindle-style tablets will almost surely include color and video in the future, blurring distinctions between them and iPads. But the digital library system mustn’t neglect books and other texts. Old-fashioned literacy, in fact, rather than e-book standards, should be the foremost argument for a national digital library system—as a way to expand the number and variety of books for average Americans, especially students. Without basic skills, young people will not be fit for many demanding blue-collar jobs, much less for Ph.D.-level work, and economic growth will suffer (PDF). Even recreational reading of fiction, not just nonfiction, can help develop the comprehension needed for the job-related kind. But by the end of high school, most young people in the United States no longer read for fun. E-books and other technology could expand their reading choices and make books more enticing, through such wrinkles as Kindle-style dictionaries and encyclopedia links to help students better understand the words in front of them.

The need is there. Decades ago when I worked the poverty beat at a factory-town newspaper in Lorain, Ohio, on Lake Erie, west of Cleveland, I did not see even pulp-fiction titles in the apartments of typical welfare mothers. Most middle-class homes also tended not to teem with books—probably true in New York or Boston as well. And this antediluvian era was years before distractions such as super-cheap video games, $67 color televisions from Wal-Mart, cellphones, social networks, and, of course, other sites on the World Wide Web. The 2010 Kids and Family Reading Report sponsored by Scholastic says more than half of the surveyed children read for pleasure between six and eight years of age, but that the statistic drops to a quarter for those between 15 and 17. For 15-17-year-old boys, the fraction of recreational readers is a mere fifth–maybe one reason why so many men are falling behind women in earning power.

What, however, if a well-stocked national digital library system could multiply the number of books enjoyable not just by young people but also their parents, the role models, whom schools and other institutes could encourage? Significantly the Scholastic Report—full text here—says: "It is clear that letting kids choose which books they want to read is key to raising a reader. Nine out of 10 children say they are more likely to finish books they choose themselves."

Here is another eye-opener…

Continue reading.

Interesting article by Todd Purdum in Vanity Fair on what we can expect from the GOP House.

If a visitor from a faraway place fetched up in Washington in search of a single person who embodied the manifold complications, contradictions, and pitfalls of the modern Republican Party, he would be well advised to look long and hard into the heavy-lidded blue eyes and smooth mahogany face of John Andrew Boehner, of Ohio, the minority leader of the House of Representatives. Boehner’s personal journey over the past three decades—and especially over the 20 months of Barack Obama’s presidency—neatly parallels that of his party, and presages the warfare to come.

He has gone from J.F.K. Democrat to Reagan Republican. From tavern owner’s son to packaging-and-plastics salesman and self-made millionaire. From hot-headed House freshman to a valued member of Speaker Newt Gingrich’s insurgent Republican team. After he lost that job, in the collapse of Gingrich’s reign, Boehner clawed his way back to power, building a reputation as a bipartisan deal-maker. In February 2006 he was elected the House majority leader—a job that suddenly turned into House minority leader when the G.O.P. lost Congress that fall. Ever since Obama took office, Boehner has been among the chief congressional architects of the Republicans’ “Hell, no!” strategy—their decision not to seek compromise but to attempt to block virtually all of the president’s major initiatives, from the economic-stimulus package to health-insurance overhaul to financial regulatory reform.

Such reflexive belligerence cannot have come easily to the 60-year-old Boehner (pronounced bay-nur). He has never sought an earmark. He is as natural a backslapper as anyone in contemporary politics. He counted the late Ted Kennedy among his friends. (“When Ted looked out the window and across the water, he saw Nantucket; I saw Kentucky,” Boehner once observed at a congressional roast.) On the floor or in committee he is willing, with or without a tipple, to honor colleagues by bursting into the “Boehner Birthday Song,” which consists, in its entirety, of two repetitions of the following line (to the tune of “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay”): “This is your birthday song. It doesn’t last too long. Hey!”

But Boehner has embraced obstructionism wholeheartedly all the same, in part because he has had to mediate the demands of the growing cadre of younger Republicans around him, who are more ideologically rigid or morally pure (or both) than Boehner, and who look askance at his long tenure in leadership, his close ties to lobbyists, and his two-pack-a-day baritone and retro Rat Pack persona. Boehner has also had to surf along with—in order to keep from being swamped by—the angry, even incoherent demands of the G.O.P.’s Tea Party wing, whose most extreme adherents believe that much of the ordinary business of government is simply unconstitutional. The Tea Partyers are about to send Boehner a class of freshmen who will be as mad as hornets and who despise the kind of pragmatic deal-making that has made John Boehner what he is. He is the last one to underestimate the challenge.

“Listen, I think our leadership team has done a pretty good job,” he told me and a small group of other journalists in late summer, when I asked if he’d been surprised at the degree to which he’d been able to hold his fractious caucus together. “But I’ve got to give a lot of credit to President Obama and Speaker Pelosi for pushing my colleagues into my loving arms. Listen, I’ll say it: We’re not that good.”

The world is about to find out. In the aftermath of the midterm elections, there will be endless thumb-sucking and Monday-morning quarterbacking about the results, and Boehner and his party will either be geniuses or be goats. No matter what happens, the forces inside the Republican Party that Boehner has been contending with—and bowing to—will still be there. If the primal scream of modern Republicanism can turn even a typical, traditional, not unreasonable, frankly likable Republican like Boehner into a caricature of partisan posturing, cynical opposition, and rank obstructionism, then Washington is in much deeper trouble than everyone already thinks it is.

John Boehner wasn’t born a Republican. He became one the same way that thousands of other working-class Catholic men of his generation did: through hard work and the absorption of the shifting cultural and political values that culminated in Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. He is the second-oldest of 12 children (his brother Bob is 362 days older), nine boys and three girls born over a 20-year period to Earl and Mary Ann Boehner. He grew up in the Cincinnati suburb of Reading, in a house that initially had only two bedrooms. His parents slept on a foldout couch in the living room. Jerry Vanden Eynden, a childhood friend, recalls that his most vivid memory of the Boehner household is of cloth diapers drying everywhere—on a clothesline outside in summer, and in the basement in winter. Earl Boehner ran Andy’s Café, a shot-and-a-beer bar in nearby Carthage. It specialized in sandwiches and plate lunches for truck drivers and hourly workers from a nearby Procter & Gamble plant. John worked there from the time he was old enough to push a broom, eventually holding every job in the place: bottle sorter, busboy, waiter, and finally bartender, learning, as he put it a couple of years ago, “to deal with every jackass that walks in the door.” . . .

Continue reading.

Kevin Drum offers this brief note:

Just a quick California note. On Tuesday, following our habit of the past few decades, we approved Proposition 22, which limits the ways the legislature can allocate property tax funds, and Proposition 26, which essentially eliminates the legislature’s ability to levy new fees on businesses. Today, we will undoubtedly return to our usual hobby of yelling and screaming that the legislature isn’t doing enough to balance the budget and make government work. For the past 30 years, in election after election, we have relentlessly reduced Sacramento’s ability to raise money at the same time that we’ve piled on an endless series of new spending requirements — and as the cherry on top, insisted that this citizen-created circle be squared by a bunch of term-limited amateurs who have no idea how the machinery of the state really works. And then we wonder why things aren’t going so well.

We are insane.

(And in case you’re wondering, this is why I don’t really care much that Proposition 19 failed. Legalized pot might be nice, but we’ve got way bigger things to worry about here.)

Try this program.

Perhaps the idea of the airport screenings is to reduce the populace to a dull acceptance of whatever the government chooses to do, so long as they say it’s to protect us. Patrick Smith reports on the latest:

Truly I had no intention of devoting yet another post to the sad, silly foibles of the Transportation Security Administration, but I’m risking heart attack or a nervous breakdown if I don’t get this latest one out of my system.

I was at the airport yesterday, on duty, headed through a TSA checkpoint in my full uniform and with all of my applicable credentials. I hoisted my bags onto the belt, deposited my MacBook in a plastic tray, and approached the metal detector.

"Sir," said a guard.

And I knew. I just knew this was going to be something stupid.

"I need you to remove your belt."

"Huh? My belt? Why?"

"All passengers need to remove their belts."

"I’m not a passenger."

"All pilots have to remove their belts."

"We do? Why?"

"Sir, remove your belt."

"Why?"

"Because that’s the rule."

"What rule? I never have to remove my belt. The buckle is nonmetallic."

"It’s the new rule. All belts have to come off."

"What new rule? I don’t understand."

"Sir, you need to take it off."

"But … What if I don’t?"

"Then you’ll have to go through secondary screening and a full pat-down."

And so I opted for the secondary screening. Not that a pat-down is reasonable, either, but I did not want to submit to something that I felt was excessive and ridiculous without a reason or explanation.

I was asked to stand in a cordoned-off area, where I waited for several minutes as guards stood around looking at me. Finally a supervisor came over, wearing disposable blue gloves, to administer my secondary screening.

"Sir," he said, "um, you still need to remove your belt."

"What do you mean? I chose this so I could leave the belt on."

"No, either way the belt has to come off."

"What? And if it doesn’t come off?"

"Then I cannot let you through."

So, it would seem, secondary screening isn’t really "secondary" at all. Instead of simply taking off my belt, I get a full, blue-glove groping and I have to take off my belt. Either that or I’m not allowed to fly the plane.

"Really?" I asked.

"Really."

And with that I started laughing.

Much to his credit, the supervisor also laughed. He smiled, nodded and proceeded to explain this "new rule."

Before getting to that explanation, I will note, for what it’s worth, that this particular supervisor, who asked that I not reveal his name or location, was perhaps the most decent and reasonable TSA employee I’ve ever interacted with. He was courteous and professional, not to mention sympathetic. He acknowledged that much of what flight crews are forced to endure does not make sense from a security standpoint. He does not enact policy; he enforces it. Further, he seemed fully aware of the ridiculousness of the new belts procedure.

Belts, it has been determined, can interfere with the images procured by the new full-body scanners being deployed at checkpoints around the country. And so, from now on, passengers need to remove them.

Now, although we can debate the body scanners from an effectiveness point of view, or from a privacy-rights point of view, separately, this at least makes sense.

Fair enough, except for one thing. As I looked around me, I noticed that there weren’t any body scanners anywhere at the checkpoint.

"But sir," I said, motioning to the left and right, "there are no scanners here."

"I know," he replied. "I know. But to keep things consistent, across the board, everybody has to do it."

"Really?"

"Really."

He looked at me. He shrugged and sighed.

It’s not his fault, I know.

I took off my belt.

Somebody, somewhere, needs to shake us from this stupor of blind policy and blind obedience. I’m beginning to wonder if this isn’t some test — a test of just how stupid Americans are. If TSA said that from now on we had to hop on one foot while humming "God Bless America," would we do that too?

That’d be ludicrous, certainly, but how much more ludicrous is it, really, than asking people to remove their belts for purposes of walking through a nonexistent body scanner?

We are ruled by idiots, unfortunately, people who do not understand good security practices (or much of anything else) and are not interested in learning.

The question was raised whether the “artificial badger” brushes—the newest generation of synthetic-bristled brushes—work well with shaving soaps as well as creams. I am quite certain that they do—I’ve used a variety of such brushes, and I heavily favor shaving soaps over shaving creams. But it’s always fun to run a test.

So this morning I took my Lucretia Borgia brush—one of the Omega family of artificial badger brushes—and Mitchell’s Wool Fat shaving soap, which some find a challenge to lather. I wet the brush under hot tap water, gave it a shake, and brushed vigorously the surface of the dry soap. Immediately a lather sprang up, the brush was fully loaded, and I enjoyed plenty of lather for the remainder of the (three-pass) shave, without having to return to the soap. Bottom line: Artificial badger is great for soaps.

The three passes were with my rhodium-plated Hoffritz slant bar, loaded with a Swedish Gillette blade: very smooth indeed. A splash of Mr. Taylor’s aftershave, and I’m good to go.

Here they are:

• 0042
• 1138
• 1337
• 1701
• 1969
• 3435
• 5141
• 6174

Here’s the reason for each.

Cellphone failure, big time. Summer 2013. Jim Giles reports in New Scientist:

YOUR connection to YouTube might be the first to go, with increasingly choppy videos that one day just fail to download. In your impatience, you decide to scout out the latest posts in the Twittersphere, except that, too, is temporarily down. Your email’s stalled, and even a simple text is now too arduous, as the world’s phone networks come crashing down. In the following months, it’s almost impossible to get a lasting connection – even for a voice call. Welcome to 2013, and the first mobile meltdown.

Although this is the worst-case scenario, some kind of collapse in the near future is a real possibility. Cellular networks are already showing signs of strain: your phone may temporarily cut out in large crowds or at a sporting event or music gig, and if you live in New York, San Francisco or London, you may have found it increasingly difficult to make calls in your home city. And things have the potential to get a lot worse.

Data-gobbling smartphones are, of course, the source of the problem, as they overload networks with requests for web pages, email and video streaming 24/7. If the use of these devices grows as expected, cellphone networks across the world could grind to a halt by 2013 – and since many core services depend on wireless communication, the results could be devastating. The only solution will be an overhaul of the way mobile communications are delivered.

Think of it as a road traffic problem. Governments in Europe and the US currently allocate a handful of 5-megahertz chunks of the electromagnetic spectrum to each operator’s network, which the operator uses at each of its transmitters. The chunks of spectrum correspond to the lanes of a highway, carrying data either to or from the transmitter. Many operators are given just two 5 MHz chunks – one lane either way – though some may have as many as five pairs.

Like any road, these highways can only hold so much traffic. Current 3G technologies can send roughly 1 bit of data – a one or a zero – per second over each 1 Hz of spectrum that the operator owns. That means a cell tower using one pair of 5 MHz chunks of spectrum can transmit just 5 megabytes of data per second – a handful of streamed videos at most.

Cellphone congestion seemed like a distant prospect a decade ago, when . . .

Continue reading.

James Fallows:

On TSA news in general, see Jeff Goldberg’s latest post about a kind of high-end, ultra-polite, but firm campaign of resistance by American Airlines pilots against the newest TSA rules.
On this same theme, I mentioned recently a reader’s experience when his son, who has Type 1 diabetes and wears an insulin pump, encountered the TSA’s new "enhanced pat-down" procedures. Since then I’ve heard from a variety of people about similar experiences. Here are two. First, a woman based in the South writes:

Thanks for drawing attention to the fact that the new TSA pat-downs are more than just a hassle for those of us who depend on medical devices and travel frequently. I’ve lived with Type 1 diabetes for most of my life and wear a wireless insulin pump. After experiencing the new pat-down, I talked with TSA supervisors at the Atlanta airport about the situation.

Long story short, since my medical device cannot be removed, there is no alternative to these pat-downs when the new scanners are in use – I have to tell the screener that I have a medical exemption and submit to being touched by a stranger in ways that quite frankly I wouldn’t allow anyone else to do before the third date. I also have to waste a minimum of ten minutes being groped and watch all of my carry-on luggage checked for explosives.

It seems to me like there’s the potential for a discrimination case here. The TSA is singling out an entire class of people based on our medical conditions and treating us like we’re criminals. They have NO plans for ways to deal with this (e.g., setting up a pre-approval system or using doctor notifications to clear us without the groping).

Second, a male business traveler writes, with emphasis in the original:

I’m a Type 1 diabetic, and I wear an insulin pump. Though the TSA agents routinely claim that most pumps do not set off the alarm, my pump has set off the metal detector every single time I’ve flown since I’ve gone on the pump. I refer to the ensuing pat-down as my ‘freedom search’. Insulin pumps are not approved by the FDA to go through the X-ray machine. Taking it off is not an option. In my mind, this is a good thing. My insulin pump is a life-critical organ, and I refuse to hand control of it over to anyone else… Though it’s fine to be disconnected for short periods, I am sure there are situations where they wouldn’t want to give it back right away—and not reconnecting in a short time frame is life threatening for a Type 1. In fact, I wonder if the pump manufacturers recommend against exposing the pump to X-Ray machines specifically to avoid loss of control to security personnel….

I flew last weekend, and I ended up going through the full body backscatter detector in both directions. On the way out, for the very first time since I’ve been on the pump, I did not get a freedom search. I was ecstatic. I made the agent double check when she told me to move along after going through the detector because the process has become part of my flying routine. I thought that finally, since they could see absolutely everything in this privacy invading scanner there was no longer a need for the farce of a pat-down. (They almost never even really check out the pump to make sure it’s legitimate—even though that’s the only thing setting of the alarm).

Sadly, on the return flight, even though I demanded to go through the back scatter machine (which thoroughly confused the agents—since almost everyone was trying to avoid them), I got a pat down. All my hopes of breezing through security like a normal person flew out the window. I’m still disappointed. I thought: "at least if they can see my junk they don’t have to go through with this ridiculous farce anymore."

What really gets me about this is the inconsistency of it: if my insulin pump is truly a threat that can’t be fully analyzed by this kind of scanner—then why on earth did they let me through on the originating flight? Two completely separate security protocols were employed for the exact same situation just days apart. I’m fine with the conceit of invading my privacy, wasting my time, and wasting my tax dollars if we all at least pretend it’s for security.

This is not even security theater—it’s just madness.

Michael Kinsley writes in Politico:

When foreign car companies started opening factories in the United States, back in the 1980s, it seemed like an act of obeisance. The plants didn’t make economic sense — Americans had to be paid so much more — but this was a tactful bit of tribute to Empire Central. America wants auto plants? America gets auto plants.

Last week, BMW announced it was opening a plant in South Carolina. No special explanation was required. People were lined up for jobs paying $15 an hour. Equivalent jobs in Germany pay $30 an hour. We’re now a bargain.

The theory that Americans are better than everybody else is endorsed by an overwhelming majority of U.S. voters and approximately 100 percent of all U.S. politicians, although there is less and less evidence to support it. A recent Yahoo poll (and I resist the obvious joke here) found that 75 percent of Americans believe that the United States is “the greatest country in the world.” Does any other electorate demand such constant reassurance about how wonderful it is — and how wise? Having spent a month to a couple of years and many millions of dollars trying to snooker voters, politicians awaiting poll results Tuesday will declare that they put their faith in “the fundamental wisdom of the American people.”

Not me. Democracy requires me to respect the results of the elections. It doesn’t require me to agree with them or to admire the process by which voters made up their minds. In my view, anyone who voted for Barack Obama for president in 2008 and now is supporting some tea party madwoman for senator has a bit of explaining to do. But the general view is that the voters, who may be fools individually, are infallibly wise as a collective — that their “anger,” their urgent desire, yet again, for “change,” is self-validating.

Everybody will be talking in the next few days about the “message” of the elections. They mean, of course, the message from the voters. This is one of the treasured conventions of political journalism. Yesterday, the story was all about artifice and manipulation, the possible effect of the latest attack ad or absurd lie. Today, all that melts away. The election results are deemed to reflect grand historical trends. But my colleague Joe Scarborough got it right in these pages last week when he argued that the 2010 elections, for all their passion and vitriol, are basically irrelevant. Some people are voting Tuesday for calorie-free chocolate cake, and some are voting for fat-free ice cream. Neither option is actually available. Neither party’s candidates seriously addressed the national debt, except with proposals to make it even worse. Scarborough might have added that neither party’s candidates had much to say about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (except that they “support our troops,” a flabby formulation that leaves Americans killing and dying in faraway wars that politicians won’t defend explicitly). Politicians are silent on both these issues for the same reason: There is no solution that American voters will tolerate. Why can’t we have calorie-free chocolate cake? We’re Americans!

The important message of this election is not from the voters but to the voters. Maybe it can be heard above the din. It is: You’re not so special.

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Religion has its high moments, but it also has very low moments when the insular, evidence-ignoring social structure more or less wallows in its ignorance and simply ignores actual reality in order to try to maintain erroneous ideas. The pedophile protection program that religions too frequently embrace is one example, but I’m thinking now of the religious attitude toward homosexuality. All too frequently the religious attitude is bigotry based on ignorance. (There are exceptions: the Episcopal Church and the United Church of Christ, for example, have welcomed lesbians and gays.)

The problem, so far as I can see it, is that religion is frequently divorced from learning about the universe of reality—i.e., divorced from science. When that happens, religion stops learning and—in the case of gays—fights against the facts of biology. Deborah Blum reviews in New Scientist a new book on the reality of human sexuality:

• Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The science of sexual orientation by Simon LeVay
• Published by: Oxford University Press
• Price: £17.99/$27.95

In the summer of 1991, neuroscientist Simon LeVay published a paper that would make him famous. It reported a study that clearly demonstrated a structural difference between the brains of gay and straight men. For nearly two decades since, LeVay has been in pursuit of more evidence to support the study’s core implication: that sexual orientation derives from biology, not from personal choice.

Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why is the third popular book that he has published on the topic, and its publication raises two different but equally important questions. First, how far has the science of sexual orientation advanced since LeVay’s seminal paper? Second, how far has the research – and effort by advocates like LeVay to spread its message – increased acceptance of gay people by the straight majority?

The answer to the first is: not as much as we could hope. I was dismayed to discover that many of the most influential studies cited here spring from previous decades. I’m all for historical context, but when a chapter on the importance of biology in sexuality contains 32 citations and 23 of them date to the year 2000 or earlier, a book can feel a bit dated.

I would venture to guess that the dearth of notable recent findings is due in part to the political climate of the last decade, which has not been particularly eager to fund sex research. Thankfully, though, there are some very good recent studies in human development, gender and, more sparsely, sexual orientation. LeVay does a deft job of pulling these varying threads together into his own theory of homosexuality, which nicely balances solid science and common sense.

So, gay… straight… what is the reason why? LeVay’s central claim is that “sexual orientation is an aspect of gender that emerges from the prenatal sexual differentiation of the brain”. A cocktail of sex hormones, genes and the womb environment, including factors such as stress during pregnancy, comes together to determine sexuality. That is, sexual orientation may not be determined at the moment of conception, but it’s pretty much locked down by the time we are born. This is a fairly mainstream view, and it fits with the current understanding that humans are shaped by prenatal influences in far more significant ways than once appreciated.

But importantly, LeVay reminds us that those influences don’t stop at birth. Instead, “genes and hormones exert a sustained or even growing influence over the life span”. That means there is no time during which social influences stand alone, nurture without nature.

LeVay, who notes that he is gay himself, has made it a goal to foster greater acceptance of homosexuality by educating people about its biological influences. Nonetheless, he emphasises a point with which this reviewer agrees and was delighted to see: “I also believe that there would be plenty of reasons why gay people should be accepted and valued by society, even if being gay were proven to be an outright choice.”

This brings me back to my second question. Has two decades of advocacy science by LeVay and colleagues helped change public perception of homosexuality? Again, the answer seems to be: not as much as we could hope.

Yes, I believe that many more people have grown comfortable with these ideas and more tolerant as a result. But given this season’s ugly counter-examples – the hate-driven suicides of gay teenagers in the US and the violent anti-gay protests in Serbia – it’s obvious that we haven’t yet achieved the kind of acceptance that would allow us to truly value each other.

Here’s hoping that books like this – rational, smart and compassionate – keep moving us in the right direction.

Deborah Blum is the author of The Poisoner’s Handbook (Penguin, 2010).

And yet we still have to read statements from dunderheads who talk about homosexuality as a sin—and it’s as much a sin as being the height you are.

That is this morning, several minutes ago. Today much to do: the Nordic, a Pilates session, and then some groceries. My weight loss has plateaued again, so I’m doing the two-day plateau buster diet. I have lost no weight since 29 September: that’s well over a month.