Later On

This country’s drug laws are schizophrenic. Some drugs are harmful, legal, and closely regulated (alcohol and tobacco). Other drugs—harmless and in common use—get the full wrath and weight of the criminal justice system. It’s all terribly broken. Take a look at this report by Philip Smith:

After more than six years of litigation, and three years of appeals for manufacturing and conspiracy to manufacture and distribute cannabis, Dr. Marion “Mollie” Fry and her husband of 25 years, civil attorney Dale Schafer, attended a hearing at the US courthouse in Sacramento Monday week, in which their bonds were revoked and they were given a the date of May 2 to surrender to serve five-year federal prison terms.

Fry and Schafer’s prior home located in the hills just north of Sacramento was raided in 2001, with 34 plants confiscated – what they believed to be well below the 99 plant limit set forth by local ordinances.

According to Schafer, the couple had never grown more than 44 plants in a given year.  A little known fact, he explained, is that under federal law more than 100 plants grown in a five year period, accumulatively, is cause for the mandatory five-year sentence, overriding state laws.

Dr. Fry, who had gone through a radical mastectomy just three years prior, had made the decision to grow her own medicine, medicating through her illness, surgery and continued to medicate from myriad complications from chemotherapy until the arrest. Schafer suffers from hemophilia and failed back syndrome, is under constant care, and had also medicated with cannabis legally.

According to Fry and Schafer, prior to the arrest they had conferred numerous times with local officials, state Attorney General Bill Lockyer, and El Dorado County Sheriff’s Detectives Timothy McNulty and Robert Ashworth, regarding the legality of their cannabis production for their own use and for Fry’s patients.

“We weren’t selling the medical cannabis to my patients,” Fry said. “We had staff and were charging $10 for delivery only, and that’s a common practice today.” . . .

Continue reading.

La profesora was kind and said that my correcting my own errors showed that I knew the material but simply lacked practice. Indeed, it’s hard to practice speaking. I am trying out a month of LoMásTV to see whether that will improve my listening comprehension, but not quite sure about the speaking. I did trying talking to myself, and I think that will work as I gain more vocabulary. I’m starting a new Anki deck of words that I have to look up. This morning, I learned, “grava” does not mean the adjective “grave” (meaning “serious”), but rather “la grava” is the word for gravel. The Spanish word for “grave” turns out to be “grave” (only said with Spanish pronunciation and in two syllables and a bit of a trill on the “r”).

At any rate, I now am on Spring break. I celebrated by getting a hair cut rather than having an enormous plate of food. I did, however, just have a very tasty meal of a sardine/rice IFC meal, and tonight I’ll make a Dover sole meal, I think with pasta.

A very smooth shave for the mid-term exam, though I don’t believe we will actually be graded on the quality of our shave. TOBS St. James generated a fine lather with the Simpson Emperor 3 Super brush. The (rhodium-plated) Gillette President carried a Personna 14 blade, which did a fine job except at the polishing stage. After the shave, I put the blade in my little homemade blade safe, the razor ready for a new blade on next use. That blade safe is getting close to full after several years’ use.

A splash of the St. James aftershave, and I’m ready for the test. I hope.

We are advised, when we have lost around 10% of our body mass, to pause a while before continuing to lose weight. I have not found that to be a problem: when I have lost enough weight, my weight loss seems to simply stop for a while. This morning I am at 185.7 lbs. That is after hitting 185.6 lbs on 18 February, then moving up as high as 193.8 before slowly settling back. I’ve been bouncing between 186 and 187 for the past 12 days. But I’ve learned if I just continue to watch what I eat and exercise regularly, eventually I resume losing weight.

My BMI today is 25.2, still in the “overweight” range but getting closer to normal weight (insofar as the BMI is a good indicator: it doesn’t apply to everyone).

I’m going for my mid-term, and then I’m on spring break for a week. I’m celebrating by getting a haircut.

Scott Feldstein asked an interesting question in his blog: What movie to watch with your workmates over lunch?

It just hit me that the TED talks would be quite interesting and fit within a one-hour lunch nicely. For example, I think this one would nicely fill 10 minutes, and then you have 40-50 minutes to talk about it.

The story speaks volumes. Report for McClatchy by James Rosen:

The good doctor was frustrated.Dr. David Cull, a prominent vascular surgeon in Greenville, S.C., had invented a small valve system that could spare 300,000 dialysis patients across the country enormous suffering — and save American taxpayers billions of dollars in Medicare costs.

Yet, Cull’s hometown senator, Jim DeMint, refused to write a letter supporting the surgeon’s application for a federal grant under the landmark health care bill that President Barack Obama signed into law a year ago this week.

As a hardcore conservative with a growing national following, DeMint opposes most federal spending.

Backing a doctor’s grant application under the law — even from a constituent who lives in the same city as DeMint — would leave the senator open to charges of hypocrisy.

And DeMint, who vowed in 2009 to make health care Obama’s “Waterloo,” is leading Republican efforts in Congress to repeal the law to provide medical coverage to 31 million uninsured Americans — or, if that can’t be done, to deny it funding. . .

Continue reading. The mindset that drives DeMint’s actions is completely alien to me.

Fascinating article in ProPublica by T. Christian Miller and Daniel Zwerdling:

MINOT, ND — At 8:20 p.m. on Sept. 21, 2010, Iraq veteran Brock Savelkoul decided it was time to die. He lurched from his black Tacoma pickup truck, gripping a 9-mm pistol. In front of him, a half dozen law enforcement officers crouched behind patrol cars with their weapons drawn. They had surrounded him on a muddy red road after an hour-long chase that reached speeds of 105 miles per hour. Savelkoul stared at the ring of men and women before ducking into the cab of his truck. He cranked up the radio. A country song about whiskey and cigarettes wafted out across an endless sprawl of North Dakota farmland, stubbled from the recent harvest. Sleet was falling, chilling the air. Savelkoul, 29, walked slowly toward the officers. He gestured wildly with his gun. “Go ahead, shoot me! … Please, shoot me,” he yelled, his face illuminated in a chiaroscuro of blazing spotlights and the deepening darkness. “Do it. Pull it. Do I have to point my gun at you to … do it?”

Twenty feet away, the officers shifted nervously. Some placed their fingers on the triggers of their shotguns and took aim at Savelkoul’s chest. They were exhausted, on edge after the chase and long standoff. They knew only the sketchiest of details about the man in front of them, his blond hair short, his face twisted in grief and anger. Dispatchers had told them that Savelkoul had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. They warned that he might have been drinking. Family members told police that Savelkoul had fled his home with six weapons, including a semiautomatic assault rifle and several hundred rounds of hollow point ammunition. To Megan Christopher, a trooper with the North Dakota Highway Patrol, Savelkoul’s intentions seemed obvious. “Suicide by cop,” she thought. “He wants to go out in a blaze of glory.”As it happened, Savelkoul’s state of mind was of interest not only to the cops, but to some of the nation’s top military officers and medical researchers.

More than 2 million troops have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. Tens of thousands have returned with a bedeviling mix of psychological and cognitive problems. For decades, doctors have recognized that soldiers can suffer lasting wounds from the sheer terror of combat, a condition referred to today as post-traumatic stress disorder. They also have come to know that blows to the head from roadside bombs — the signature weapon in Iraq and Afghanistan — can result in mild traumatic injuries to the brain, or concussions, that can leave soldiers unable to remember, to follow orders, to think normally.

Now it is becoming clear that soldiers like Savelkoul are coming home afflicted with both conditions, in numbers never seen before. Studies have estimated that about 20 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered a mild traumatic brain injury while deployed. Of those, anywhere between 5 percent to nearly 50 percent may suffer both PTSD and lingering problems from traumatic brain injuries. It is an epidemic so new that doctors aren’t even sure what to call it, let alone how best to diagnose and treat it.

Savelkoul and four of his comrades landed on the front lines of this confounding new conflict over the minds of America’s soldiers when an Iraqi rocket exploded near their trailer in January 2009. By chance, a senior Army neuropsychologist was in Iraq at the time to conduct a study on the military’s tools for diagnosing concussions. After learning of the attack, he persuaded Savelkoul and the others to enroll. The men became the first fully documented victims of “pure blast” concussions — that is, mild traumatic brain injuries caused by the force of an explosion, rather than a secondary effect, such as slamming into a Humvee wall after a roadside bomb.

The concussions marked only the beginning of the men’s problems. Aftershocks from the blast would ripple through each of their lives differently, mirroring the spectrum of psychic and physical outcomes that doctors have begun to catalog. Of the five men injured that night, three remain in the Army and are currently deployed to overseas war zones. One recovered quickly, though he continues to suffer occasional severe headaches. Two recuperated more gradually but complain of forgetfulness and problems concentrating. A fourth left the military, tired of the violence and still grappling with concussion symptoms.

Savelkoul struggled the most to return to the person he had been before. On that night last September, . . .

Continue reading.

Some sidebars to the article:

Interesting report:

A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers.

The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.

The team’s mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one.

The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries.

The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: . . .

Continue reading.

Just in the current issue:

What if supersymmetry is wrong?

Three decades of theorising and calculating. Entire careers spent constructing ideas. Nine billion dollars invested in an underground ring that spans two nations. Ten thousand dedicated scientists and engineers looking for the particle physics equivalent of a needle in a haystack. It’s all been leading to this moment. Small wonder that amid bated breath, you can hear a lot of nervous laughter.

“It’s got to be there, damn it!” Nobel prizewinning physicist Frank Wilczek chuckles in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He’s talking about supersymmetry, endearingly known as SUSY, a theory that most physicists believe will lead them beyond the standard model of particle physics, the tried-and-true model of how particles and forces interact, and one big step closer to understanding how reality works.

Physicists are doggedly searching for it in the debris of particle collisions from ATLAS and CMS, two experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. A year into their runs, neither have glimpsed so much as a hint of SUSY particles at masses up to 700 gigaelectronvolts – well within the range theorists expect it to lurk (arxiv.org/abs/1103.1984, arxiv.org/abs/1102.2357, arxiv.org/abs/1102.5290, arxiv.org/abs/1101.1628).

Rumours are spreading of SUSY’s demise, and alternative theories are already waiting in the wings (see box below). But for many physicists like Wilczek, SUSY is just too beautiful to be wrong. “It would be really cruel of nature to get us this far, and have the next step in sight, and then it’s all just a joke on us.”

Supersymmetry suggests that the two basic types of particles that make up our world – fermions, the matter particles such as electrons and quarks, and bosons, the force-carrying particles such as photons and gluons – are merely two aspects of a single particle…

And it continues with what SUSY offers and what directions theory will go if it fails.

How not to change a climate sceptic’s mind

What approaches to try, given our experience that evidence and logic don’t work.

Sea level’s rise and rise is down to melting ice sheets

Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice at a faster and faster rate, according to a study that has tracked the rate of melting in two different ways. The results suggest that melting ice sheets could dominate sea level rise in the 21st century.

The most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested that sea levels could rise by between 18 and 59 centimetres by 2100—but that estimate didn’t take the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets into account.

Eric Rignot’s team at the University of California, Irvine, studied changes in the ice sheets between 2002 and 2010. . .

Article goes on to provide evidence and logical argument. Will not be of interest to conservatives, who continue to deny that climate change is happening.

Banking cheats will always prosper

A rather depressing article on the futility of trying to stamp out financial skullduggery. Obviously, however, one can make banking cheats have to work harder, and also institute mechanisms that will detect cheating at an early stage.

The mathematics of being nice

Using mathematics to tackle some of biology’s biggest questions, Martin Nowak has concluded that an ability to cooperate is the secret of humanity’s success. He talks to Michael Marshall about drawing fire from Richard Dawkins, the perils of punishment, and devising the mathematical equivalent of the rules of religion

Why are you so fascinated by our ability to help each other out?
Cooperation is interesting because it essentially means that you help someone else, someone who is a potential competitor. You reduce your own success in order to increase the success of somebody else. Why should you do that? Why should natural selection favour such behaviour? To answer these questions I use evolutionary dynamics, evolutionary game theory and experimental tests of human behaviour.

You say there are five different ways in which we cooperate that give us an edge, in terms of natural selection. Tell me about them. . .

I’ve mentioned before Robert Axelrod’s fascinating book The Evolution of Cooperation, so let me just recommend it again. (At the link, used copies @ $1.)

Modern bodies: Our 10,000-year makeover

The directions evolution has taken us once we began to live in human, tool-using culture. Quite interesting, though those who deny the existence of evolution will have to squeeze shut their eyes, put their hands over their ears, and sing “Lalalalala…” quite loudly. I speak metaphorically of course, and the evolution ostriches are fully experienced at ignoring evidence and logical argument—much like the climate change deniers.

Kindergarten co-op: How babysitting made us brainy

An example of the evolutionary benefits of cooperation, in addition to the benefits to the group and the individual. The article begins:

Picture the scene: you’re having a Sunday afternoon dinner with family and friends. Dad is busy in the kitchen demonstrating how to chop the veg and granny is sitting in the corner telling a story to the kids. In a while you will all sit down to share good food and conversation.

Now imagine a similar scene involving our closest ape cousins. For all the sophisticated mental powers that have been attributed to chimpanzees in recent years, they wouldn’t do well in this situation. Pandemonium would reign in the kitchen, some chimp would take all the food and the only conversation would be screeching. Poor granny would be out in the cold and the smallest kids, if left unattended, might well be kidnapped and eaten.

What could explain these dramatic differences between us and our nearest relatives? Over the last few years, a handful of researchers have been building a case for the idea that cooperation arose from the development of a single behaviour: shared childcare. They claim that the care, nutrition and protection of youngsters by adults other than the mother bring about profound psychological changes in a species. In humanity, this paved the way for the enhanced cooperation and altruism that ultimately led to culture, language and technology. . .

‘We are not primarily rational creatures’

The fact is evident on every hand, and it’s obvious that, by looking at all the creatures who have brains, that the brain’s primary job is to process sensory input from inside and outside the body and—quickly—figure out what to do next. I see the brain as juggling all those inputs and memories of prior experiences and quickly finding the path of least effort, which it then moves the organism along. “Least effort” is, of course, modified by primary directives of living creatures: resist dying, and try to mate.

This interview begins:

Emotion, not rationality, rules our world – something policymakers should learn. So says David Brooks, who uses fiction to illustrate cognitive science

Where did the idea for your book The Social Animal come from?
It came from covering policy failures as a journalist. For example, one factor in the financial crisis were regulations that assumed bankers made decisions rationally. Also, in education, we in the US have spent 30 years just reorganising the bureaucratic boxes of our education system.

These failures were based on a false view of human nature, which is that we are rational individuals who respond in straightforward ways to incentives.

In the cognitive sciences, however, they have come up with a different and more accurate view of human nature. My book is an attempt to put this together and capture the implications it has for the rest of us: how to do education, business and policy.

Is there one insight from the cognitive sciences that really stands out for you?
I guess there are three. The first is that most of our thinking is below the level of awareness and that these processes are very different from the linear and logical processes of consciousness.

The second is . . .

And every issue is filled with goodies like this. The magazine is weekly. You can subscribe to a digital edition, especially nice for the iPadded among us.

Though the Obama Administration will doubtless fight to the bitter end, those who favor the rule of law have made some progress by finally getting a ruling that allows a lawsuit to proceed. The government, under Bush/Obama, has attempted to stymie such lawsuits by keeping secret those subjected to warrantless wiretapping so that anyone who tried to sue first had to prove that they were a victim, and the government kept secret the list of victims: clever, in a Stalinist sort of way.

Now the case will move ahead. Here are comments on this rule by Ed Brayton and by the editors of the NY Times.

My endocrinologist gleefully discontinued two more of my prescriptions. He commented that, though he regularly prescribes more medications for people, what really pleases him is dropping meds. I’ve already dropped two (the anti-depressant and Zetia) and now two more (metaprolol tartrate and glipizide). My HbA1c was 5.8%, not bad: in the normal range, as were my HDL, LDL, and triglycerides. All in all, I’m doing well. Feeling spry.

Interesting post, though with a typo right at the onset (corrected in the extract below):

Esperanto is the butt of many a joke, both from geeks and the general population alike, calling it a fake language or mocking those who choose to learn it. While it may not have the history that other languages do or be as easily found in colleges and high schools around the world, it often doesn’t get the credit it deserves as a real, well-planned out language that’s one of the easiest to learn and use in the world. Learning a bit more about this language showcases just how interesting it really can be, and may motivate students of language to give it more serious thought in the future.

1. The full name for Esperanto is Doktoro Esperanto. It translates to “one who hopes” and is drawn from the pseudonym L.L. Zamenhoff, the creator of Esperanto, used when he published his first book on the language called Unua Libro in 1887.
2. Dr. Zamenhoff created the language to help promote peace and diplomacy. He thought that by creating a politically neutral language that was easy-to-learn that he could help forge better relationships between nations and greater international understanding. While many around the world speak the language today, Zamenhoff’s dream was never realized and Esperanto has been used to divide people just as much as unite them as you’ll see later in this article.
3. Estimates of Esperanto speakers range from 10,000 to two million active or fluent speakers. Different studies have come up with widely varied results but scholars generally agree that the number tends towards the larger of these two figures. For a language with no nationality, this is a surprisingly large number of speakers.
4. Esperanto has native speakers. You might think that a language that was created around the turn of the century and that isn’t the official language of any nation wouldn’t have any native speakers– but you’d be wrong. Some parents who speak Esperanto teach it to their children as babies, meaning that they grow up knowing the language and are native speakers.
5. Esperanto is currently the language of instruction of the International Academy of Sciences in San Marino. This scientific association and school, located in the Republic of San Marino, was founded in 1983. Today it holds a number of scientific conventions in San Marino and throughout Europe as well as awarding degrees at all levels. If you visit the academy’s website, you’ll find it is entirely in Esperanto, as this is the official language of the school, intended to keep all cultural and linguistic biases in check and to help students and scholars focus on science instead.
6. . . .

Continue reading.

It’s good to be proud of oneself, though I think the point is not so much that pride itself is good but rather than the accomplishments that trigger a feeling of pride are, in general, good things to have accomplished (hence the pride).

OTOH, pride is considered by Christians as one of the seven deadly sins and is often seen as a burden leading to a downfall through selective blindness to important facts.

Trent Hamm looks at the pride issue in dealing with financial straits. Interesting post, with interesting comments.

You can find it here. From that link:

A Swadesh word list, developed by the linguist Morris Swadesh, is used as a tool to study the evolution of languages. It contains a set of basic words which can be found in every language to varying degrees. Various versions have been created, in particular:

• a complete 207-words version, in which some of the words are not found in every environment (it contains for instance snake and snow)

• a reduced 100-words version.

Some versions are more reliable than others in terms of the universality of concurrence between the words’ meanings.

This reminds me of the basic word lists given in the book Teach Yourself to Learn a Language: the author comments:

. . . In chapter 2, I came out against the learning of word lists (on most occasions)—while I now suggest an exception to this… After learning the basic facts about the language, it is useful to have a list of the most frequently recurring words in the language at your disposal before you go on to study the language in greater detail. With these words you will be able to make a large number of sentences of simple construction.

He provides a list of around 400 words that are in common use, while warning also to learn the names of numbers, both ordinals and cardinals: it is not good to ask “Where is Five Street?” when you want Fifth Street; and you’ll need the cardinals the first time you ask for a phone number. For the same reason, you have to learn the alphabet (as said in the language) because you will inevitably have to ask at some point for a word to be spelled, and the spelling will use the language’s own names for letters.

I’m currently creating an Anki two-way deck for the initial word list from Teach Yourself to Learn a Language. I’ll upload it to the shared decks list once I’ve completed it.

I’ve always liked TOBS Avocado shaving cream, so since I am using shaving creams right now, I was happy to revisit it. It’s still excellent, and I got an immediate and good lather with the Plisson Chinese Grey. The Mühle open comb did a fine three-pass shave, a good splash of Floris No. 89, and I’m ready for the day.

Good blog for language fans. And I like this post:

Tempeh is a terrific food, once you take care of things like the B12 issue, but it is indeed terribly bland. I got more tempeh today, including one made of millet, barley, oats, and soybeans.

Because the stuff has about as intense a taste as tofu, I decided to marinate this latest piece before cooking. So I cut it into small blocks, and those are now stting in a bath of tamari, crushed garlic, grated ginger, Worcestershire sauce, and a splash of rice vinegar. I may not cook it until tomorrow, so it has plenty of time to soak in.

Interesting article by Hannah Waters in The Scientist:

Scientific debates don’t get much hotter than the one surrounding the origin of organic molecules at the dawn of life on Earth. New findings, based on a reanalysis of a 50-year-old experiment, suggests that ancient volcanic activity was the source of the very first amino acids.

The findings, published open access today (March 21) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, lend support to the theory that the building blocks of organic life spewed from volcanoes billions of years ago.

“Volcanic discharges could have been important in forming pre-organic molecules, which is consistent with this experiment,” said volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer of the University of Cambridge, who was not involved with the study. “And it’s a nice piece of science revisiting itself.”

In the 1950s, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey of the University of Chicago performed a series of “spark discharge” experiments, in which the researchers applied electrical sparks—meant to simulate lightning—to a mixture of gases in steam-filled flasks. As the heat inside the flasks rose and the sparks flew, solids were produced and were captured in vials that could be stored for later analysis. Amino acids were formed in these reactions and they provided support for Miller’s hypothesis that organic molecules could be formed from inorganic gases.

When Miller died in 2007, he left his entire lab to his second graduate student Jeffrey Bada, who is now a marine chemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Among this collection was a small cardboard box with the words “spark discharge” scrawled on its side. Inside the box were some of those vials from the 1950s experiments containing solid product, some of it unanalyzed.

“It’s like someone had hit me over the head with a bat,” said Bada of the find. “I was just flabbergasted that he had never mentioned it.”

Out of this collection, Bada selected two vials for analysis: . . .

Continue reading.

I generally prefer shaving soaps to shaving creams, but I recently passed along a batch and that made me think perhaps I should try them more often. So this morning I enjoyed TOBS Sandalwood in two formats: first, a fragrant lather, with the aid of the Gerson brush, and then—after 3 smooth passes with the Progress—a splash of the aftershave.

This will have a big impact, I would think:

Just a month before a powerful earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Daiichi plant at the center of Japan’s nuclear crisis, government regulators approved a 10-year extension for the oldest of the six reactors at the power station despite warnings about its safety.The committee reviewing extensions pointed to stress cracks in the backup diesel-powered engines at Reactor No. 1 at the Daiichi plant, according to a summary of its deliberations that was posted on the Web site of Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency after each meeting. The cracks made the engines vulnerable to corrosion from seawater and rainwater. The engines are thought to have been knocked out by the tsunami, shutting down the reactor’s vital cooling system.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the plant, has since struggled to keep the reactor and spent fuel pool from overheating and emitting radioactive materials.

Several weeks after the extension was granted, the company admitted that it had failed to inspect 33 pieces of equipment related to the cooling systems, including water pumps and diesel generators, at the power station’s six reactors, according to findings published on the agency’s Web site shortly before the earthquake.

Regulators said that “maintenance management was inadequate” and that the “quality of inspection was insufficient.”

Less than two weeks later, the earthquake and tsunami set off the crisis at the power station. . .

Continue reading. The answer to the question posed by the post title is, I believe, a vigorous and independent press.