Later On

Very interesting article in Mother Jones by Kiera Butler:

It’s been ages since I’ve reached for a Mountain Dew, but when PepsiCo introduced its Throwback line of “retro” sodas in 2009, I was tempted. Its “real sugar” sweetener seemed much more appealing than the high-fructose corn syrup that’s been ubiquitous in sodas since the mid-1980s. Clearly, I wasn’t alone. Catering to the sensibilities of the marketplace, Starbucks, Snapple, Kraft, and food giant ConAgra have all recently ditched HFCS in favor of sugar. This sea change hasn’t escaped the notice of the Corn Refiners Association. Last September, after blowing more than $30 million on ads aimed at saving corn syrup’s faltering rep (if you think HFCS is any worse than sugar, “You’re in for a sweet surprise!”), the trade group finally threw in the towel and petitioned the USDA to let it rebrand its product as “corn sugar.”

This earned the refiners plenty of flak, but you can hardly blame them for trying. After years of flogging by nutritionists and foodies, HFCS has become, well, a four-letter word. This wasn’t always so. Back in the ’70s, table sugar (a.k.a. sucrose) was the bad guy. People associated it (rightly) with tooth decay and diabetes, whereas fructose, the predominant sugar in fruit, seemed a more natural option. Gary Taubes, author of the nutritional bestseller Good Calories, Bad Calories, explains that manufacturers of items like Snapple and sweetened yogurt didn’t want sugar in the first few ingredients, because it made their products appear unhealthy. So corn-syrup marketers capitalized on fructose’s good reputation, and by the ’80s, food and beverage manufacturers were switching to HFCS in droves.

Now the pendulum has swung back: Corn syrup is the demon, while sugar (sometimes cleverly disguised as “evaporated cane juice”) is back in vogue. But all this back-and-forth makes little sense since, nutritionally speaking, the two sweeteners are practically identical. Yes, fructose is bad for you. (More on that later.) But every nutritionist I spoke with agreed that table sugar—a molecule composed of one part fructose to one part glucose—is no better, really, than food-grade HFCS, which contains the same ingredients in a roughly 55/45 ratio. The main distinction is that the fructose and glucose units are joined in sugar and detached in corn syrup. But since the small intestine promptly breaks that bond, it doesn’t matter.Most common sweeteners, including many fruit-juice concentrates, cane juice, maple syrup, and honey, have a fructose-to-glucose ratio around 50/50. Notable exceptions include brown rice syrup and kitchen corn syrups like Karo, which contain no fructose, and certain kinds of agave nectar—which contains up to 92 percent fructose. (Agave is the sweetener du jour for the Whole Foods crowd, thanks in part to its low glycemic index—which measures how fast your blood sugar spikes after you eat a given food.)

Unlike glucose, which the body stores in various tissues for use as fuel, fructose is sent to the liver for processing. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California-San Francisco, has shown that it causes a buildup of fats there, triggering a host of health problems including diabetes, gout, and heart disease. Most worrisome, Lustig says, it can lead to insulin resistance, a hormonal snafu that makes you feel hungry even when you’re full. “The way fructose is metabolized leads you to want to eat more,” he explains—no great revelation to anyone who’s ever slain a pint of Ben & Jerry’s in one sitting.

Prior to 1900, about 4 percent of America’s calories came from fructose, while today’s teens get roughly 12 percent of their calories that way. Since sugar and corn syrup are equally efficient as fructose delivery vehicles, the obvious conclusion is simply that we’re consuming too many sweets. As for the HFCS-vs.-sugar smackdown, you might as well debate whether whiskey is healthier than rum. “In high-enough quantities, they’re both poison,” says Lustig. . .

Continue reading.

This column sums it up neatly—and also suggests that people are starting to wake up about the direction the country is being taken:

The forced “resignation” of State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley — for the mortal sin of denouncing the abusive detention of Bradley Manning — has apparently proven to be a clarifying moment for many commentators about what the President is and how he functions in these areas.  Writing at Time‘s Swampland, Mark Benjamin identifies the real crux of the controversy:

Free speech advocates are shocked, and, as I wrote last week on TIME.com, concerned over Obama’s record as the most aggressive prosecutor of suspected government leakers in U.S. history.

Those advocates have wondered whether the penchant for secrecy in the Obama administration comes from the President, or those around him. Obama’s statement on Manning, followed by Crowley’s resignation, seem to suggest some of this comes from the President himself.

It’s long been obvious that the Obama administration’s unprecedented war on whistleblowers “comes from the President himself,” notwithstanding his campaign decree — under the inspiring title “Protect Whistleblowers” — that “such acts of courage and patriotism should be encouraged rather than stifled.”  The inhumane treatment of Manning plainly has two principal effects:  it intimidates future would-be whistleblowers into knowing that they, too, will be abused without recourse, and it will break him psychologically (as prolonged solitary confinement and degrading treatment inevitably do) to render him incapable of a defense and to ensure he provides whatever statements they want about WikiLeaks.  Other than Obama’s tolerance for the same detainee abuse against which he campaigned and his ongoing subservience to the military that he supposedly “commands,” it is the way in which this Manning/Crowley behavior bolsters the regime of secrecy and the President’s obsessive attempts to destroy whistleblowing that makes this episode so important and so telling.

Denunciations of the President from his own supporters are as intensive and pervasive here as they have been for any other prior incident, if not more so.  Matt Yglesias wrote that “to hold a person without trial in solitary confinement under degrading conditions is a perversion of justice” and that it’s a ”sad statement about America that P.J. Crowley is the one being forced to resign over Bradley Manning.”  Andrew Sullivan — writing under the headline ”Obama Owns the Treatment of Manning Now” — said that Crowley was forced out “for the offense of protesting against the sadistic military treatment of Bradley Manning,” that “the president has now put his personal weight behind prisoner abuse,” and that “Obama is directly responsible for the inhumane treatment of an American citizen.”  Meanwhile, Ezra Klein previews his denunciation of the President’s treatment of Manning and Crowley by announcing that it’s his first ever lede “that isn’t about economic or domestic policy” but rather is ”about right and wrong,” and then questions “whether the Obama administration is keeping sight of its values now that it holds power.”  Those strong words are all from supporters of the President.

Elsewhere, The Philadelphia Daily News‘ progressive columnist Will Bunch accuses Obama of “lying” during the campaign by firing Crowley and endorsing “the bizarre and immoral treatment of the alleged Wikileaks leaker.”  In The Guardian, Obama voter Daniel Ellsberg condemns “this shameful abuse of Bradley Manning,” arguing that it “amounts to torture” and “makes me feel ashamed for the [Marine] Corps,” in which Ellsberg served three years, including nine months at Quantico.  Baltimore Sun columnist Ron Smith asks:  ”Why is the U.S. torturing Private Manning?,” while UCLA Professor Mark Kleiman — who only last year hailed Obama as “the greatest moral leader of our lifetime” and eagerly suggested on Friday (before Obama’s Press Conference) that Crowley was speaking for Obama — mocked Obama’s defense of the Manning treatment as “clueless on the Bush level” and now says of Crowley’s firing:  ”The Torturers Win One,” while lamenting Obama’s overt support for a policy that he calls “unconscionable and un-American and borderline criminal.”

But the news isn’t all bad for the President. . .

Continue reading.

I was surprised to see that Leisureguy’s Guide to Gourmet Shaving is currently being sold on Amazon.com for $8.60. It’s normally $11.95. That’s a discount of just over 28%.

I have no idea why it’s on sale—I would bet that some enormously complex, semi-sentient software sensed unusual activity in that sector and pruned prices on a cluster of products to encourage the growth.

Anyway, it seems like a good buy to me, and it’s written to be a good gift for men who meet two criteria:

a. They shave just about every day; AND
b. They don’t actually enjoy shaving.

So stock up for future gift occasions for the men you know who meet the criteria.

I got a draft outline of the entire weight-loss book. I’ve been struggling with the organizational issues for a while—conquering obesity is a multi-stranded project—and last night, facing a talk I must give on Monday night, I started writing a fresh Scrivener project. All the work I’ve been doing on the book finally came together in a way that allowed a linear presentation, and I worked it out: it came out to 2335 words (so far). I can readily expand what I’ve done into the book: the organization was the difficulty.

Last night I thought I’d better make notes for the talk Wednesday, and I began with the Food Journal, making notes on a list pad. I ended up doing the whole thing in note form, just using what I recalled. (Having struggled with the book so much, the material was fresh in my mind.) Then this morning I started doing the Scrivener project from those notes.

Then I decided finish the Anki deck for our current textbook, since I had but one lesson left and if I finished, I could tell the class tomorrow and they could download the complete deck. So I finished that as well, and uploaded the deck to the Anki sharing site. I did notice that there have already been three downloads.

A wonderful shave with just these tools

A really nice shave today: two-day stubble, the slant bar, Truefitt & Hill worked into a fine lather with a luxuriously soft Omega brush. Although I remain steadfast in my conviction that a perfectly fine lather can be created with a soft brush—like the Omega—I certainly do NOT maintain that everyone would or should like such a brush. Tastes vary, and some will prefer the feel of a stiffer brush, which is the kind of brush they probably should use. But preferring a stiff brush does not mean that a soft brush cannot create a good lather: it certainly can. As it happens, I was in the mood for a soft brush today: very late start, missed Pilates, etc.

Three passes to smooth perfection, a splash of TOBS Sandalwood, and I’m soon off to the dentist.

The third video at this site is particularly dramatic. Here it is:

I’m finally starting to “get” Anki—and by tomorrow, I’ll have entered the entire vocabulary in a sequence that follows (more or less) our work/textbook ¡Adelante! Uno. It’s already uploaded as MPC Spanish 1 in the list of shared decks you can download, though that version will be replaced with a completed version later today.

As the author points out, vocabulary in a language course is taught in a context, and the vocabulary cards by themselves cannot carry along that context. Thus it works best for students to make their own decks to match the sequence and content of their own course—but OTOH, if you happen to be using ¡Adelante Uno!, this particular deck should prove quite useful:

Here’s the full drill:

1. Install Anki (runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, and even smartphones)—it is free. (No charge at all, though donation requested.) Get it here: http://ankisrs.net/

2. Once you install it, click “download” on the Decks page. This will take you to the list of available decks. There are many Spanish decks, quite large, but the one developed in alignment with my textbook is titled MPC Spanish 1. (You can search on MPC and find it quickly.)

3. Download and start using it. It will automatically present cards in both directions (Español-English and English-Español), and you can indicate with a click or keystroke how difficult the particular card was, and Anki figures out the optimal time to present it again for review. If you click “again”, it will present the card again in that same session—this is useful when first learning the card: keep clicking “again” until you finally get the card right, which lets you end on a “success” and thus increase the association and attachment to the word’s meaning.

Steve of Kafeneio has an extremely interesting post on how people, on encountering something new, unconsciously push it into existing frameworks of what is already known, regardless of how the new idea is distorted and damaged in order to fit. The example he uses is Glorious One-Pot Meals—how since he began reading about them in this blog, he fit them into the “slow-cooker” category in his mind (mix of food, one pot, complete meal, …). Although the two are quite different in practice, they have enough similarities that the new idea can be folded, trimmed, and finally fit into that category so that it is, in a way, “taken care of” and doesn’t have to be considered further.

You see people doing this with events all the time: something happens, and it is trimmed, folded, and forced to fit into the ideological position they already hold. Example: Democrats who defend Obama’s human rights record. I mention that one because it seems clear to me that Obama’s actions and decisions in that arena are terrible, and I’m not having it, but I’m as guilty of this sort of thing as anyone—I imagine that it’s built into our minds, and all we can do is be aware of the tendency and try to test things against our own alert experience.

For example, when I first read about GOPM and started getting enthusiastic, The Eldest called to tell me that she and I had talked about this quite a while ago. (See GOPM posts from 8 Jan and from 9 Jan.) And so I went to my shelf of cookbooks, and lo! there I found a virginal copy of the very first edition of Elizabeth Yarnell’s Glorious One-Pot Meals. I had been intrigued enough to actually buy the book, but apparently on looking through it had assumed that this was yet another slow-cooker cookbook and put it aside. It was only when I actually cooked a meal that I got the idea—and realized that though her recipes were bland to the point of tastelessness (at least to me), that could easily be remedied, and now I really like the method and its results—plus I’m eating a lot more vegetables than I did: more per meal, and a greater variety.

So I certainly can understand the general tendency to force ideas to fit familiar categories as well as the specific tendency not to grasp that GOPM is truly a new (and extremely worthwhile) method of meal preparation. But: try it. You’ll like it.

Full disclosure: the post on how the GOPM is more or less the opposite of the slow-cooker method was triggered by Steve’s own response to me, when I told him how tasty the GOPM meals were, that yes, he himself enjoyed slow-cooker cooking. He and I had the same initial reaction.

So tonight I realized I needed to practice listening to Spanish more. I had a heck of time understanding the recorded exercise (where I listen to a snippet from the Web site and answer a question about the statement I heard). I do listen to things like the BBC Mundo broadcasts, but still am at the point where I can only make out the occasional word or phrase.

So I thought I could read things aloud from the text and that would help. So I opened it to “Ecuador en cifras” (Ecuador in numbers) and started reading aloud. It was in Spanish and it quickly started giving figures: areas, populations, altitudes of mountains, famous Ecuadors with their birth and death years—and so I had to say aloud (in Spanish) all those numbers!

Man! It was a struggle, and when I said a number, syllable by syllable, I of course had no comprehension of what I was saying overall, just the next word in the number.

I realized that I needed practice in speaking at least as much as in listening. So I read the whole damn column aloud, some lines requiring several attempts. Then I read the whole thing aloud again. Then I read it aloud a third time—and do you know what? I was surprised at how much more easily I could say things that third time through, and how the dates even made sense: all the 20th-century years, for example, start the same way—mil novecientos—so very quickly that phrase becomes “canned,” as it were: you don’t have to think of it consciously. You hear it as a single thought: “19xx”.

So then I thought I’d better do some serious reading—I suddenly realized that I should have been doing this all along, that this is (duh!) how you learn a language: you practice. A lot. It’s a skill, like learning the piano. And the amount of improvement I experienced after reading that column aloud just three times was remarkable.

So I’ve gone back to the beginning of the book and am reading aloud everything I can find. And I realize that the writers have done a really good job of finding tricky cases and forcing the reader to think about some of the issues.

I bet everyone and his brother already knew this, but I’m pleased to make the discovery now. I think the learning will go better now.

In the Obama Administration it is apparently a firing offense to speak one’s mind. Obama is doubtless admirable for many things, but he does seem increasingly authoritarian. For example, consider this column by Glenn Greenwald:

On Friday, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley denounced the conditions of Bradley Manning’s detention as “ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid,” forcing President Obama to address those comments in a Press Conference and defend the treatment of Manning. Today, CNN reports, Crowley has “abruptly resigned” under “pressure from White House officials because of controversial comments he made last week about the Bradley Manning case.” In other words, he was forced to “resign” — i.e., fired.

So, in Barack Obama’s administration, it’s perfectly acceptable to abuse an American citizen in detention who has been convicted of nothing by consigning him to 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement, barring him from exercising in his cell, punitively imposing “suicide watch” restrictions on him against the recommendations of brig psychiatrists, and subjecting him to prolonged, forced nudity designed to humiliate and degrade. But speaking out against that abuse is a firing offense. Good to know. As Matt Yglesias just put it: “Sad statement about America that P.J. Crowley is the one being forced to resign over Bradley Manning.” And as David Frum added: “Crowley firing: one more demonstration of my rule: Republican pols fear their base, Dem pols despise it.”

Of course, it’s also the case in Barack Obama’s world that those who instituted a worldwide torture and illegal eavesdropping regime are entitled to full-scale presidential immunity, while powerless individuals who blow the whistle on high-level wrongdoing and illegality are subjected to the most aggressive campaign of prosecution and persecution the country has ever seen. So protecting those who are abusing Manning, while firing Crowley for condemning the abuse, is perfectly consistent with the President’s sense of justice.

Also, remember how one frequent Democratic critique made of the Right generally and the Bush administration specifically was that they can’t and won’t tolerate dissent: everyone is required to march in lockstep? I wonder how that will be reconciled with this.

UPDATE: Remember when the Bush administration punished Gen. Eric Shinseki for his public (and prescient) dissent on the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz plan for Iraq, and all good Democrats thought that was so awful, such a terrible sign of the administration’s refusal to tolerate any open debate? And then there was that time when Bush fired his White House economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, for publicly suggesting that the Iraq War might cost $100 billion, prompting similar cries of outrage from Democrats about how the GOP crushes internal debate and dissent. Obama’s conduct seems quite far from the time during the campaign when Obama-fawning journalists like Time‘s Joe Klein were hailing him for wanting a “team of rivals”, and Obama was saying things like this: “I don’t want to have people who just agree with me. I want people who are continually pushing me out of my comfort zone.”

Steve of Kafeneio points out in this post a very nice site devoted to things French, which phrase describes also The Wife. So I post here to draw her (and your) attention to France Today.

Water with a lot of mineral content can taste great, but the minerals in the water combine with soap to create an insoluble scum, which sticks to the skin and degrades lather.

It’s not always clear how hard one’s tap water is, so I suggest the following experiment:

Go to the drugstore and buy a gallon of “purified” water—distilled water that is sold for use in steam irons, steamers, humidifiers, and the like. Heat some on the stove and use it for your next shave to get a direct comparison with your hot tap water.

If the difference is great—that is, the lather from the purified water is substantially and significantly better than the lather from your hot tap water, you undoubtedly have hard water. You have several options:

a. Ignore the problem and continue as before.

b. Continue to buy and use purified water for your shaves.

c. Get a water softener. The best approach is to use soft water for everything except the kitchen cold-water tap. The reason is that soft water is much kinder to plumbing and faucets: no mineral build up. Also, one’s shower is much nice with both hot and cold water being soft: soap rinses off instantly and completely, resulting in your skin feeling slippery because there’s no soap scum stuck to your skin.

As I wait for tonight’s Glorious One-Pot Meal to cool, I got to thinking about how every combination of vegetables I’ve tried has worked so well—vegetables that I thought didn’t even know each other turn out to be good friends. And so my assemblages have stopped being “recipes,” as The Wife observed: I pick the starch and the protein, and then start emptying out the produce bin until the pot is full. And it’s always good.

Tonight’s layers, beginning at the bottom:

1.5 c pasta (small shells and whole-wheat fusilli)
2 red spring onion, thinly sliced (including all the green)
1/2 lb Dover sole
smoked salt, freshly ground pepper, crushed red pepper
fresh fennel fronds, chopped
1 bulb fresh fennel, cored and sliced thinly
1/2 med. Italian eggplant, sliced
3/4 c green beans, cut to 1″ lengths
the other half of the eggplant
8 stalks asparagus, chopped
1 enormous heritage tomato, sliced

Whisk together and pour over:

2 Tbsp Bragg’s Ginger-Sesame Vinaigrette
2 Tbsp peach balsamic vinegar
2 Tbsp salsa verde
1 Tbsp Worcestershire
2 tsp Dijon mustard

Interesting interview in the New Scientist:

You have come up with an alternative to the body mass index as a measure of obesity. First off, what’s wrong with BMI?

The BMI has been around since the 1840s, but it has a number of weaknesses. Firstly, it doesn’t give a real estimate of percentage body fat. Secondly, the BMI can be quite different for a man and a woman with the same percentage of body fat. And thirdly, your BMI can be high even if you don’t have much fat, especially if you are male and very muscular.

How did you go about searching for an alternative to BMI?

Our goal was to find a simple index of obesity, something that a practising clinician could use. To do that we looked at a population of 2000 people of Latin American descent who had had their percentage body fat measured directly using dual-energy X-ray absorption, which is an accurate way to quantify body fat. We then asked what parameters we could measure in these people that would best predict the true percentage of fat.

What did you find?

It turned out that hip circumference and height were more correlated with percentage body fat than anything else, including waist circumference and weight. So we designed an equation that could take both of these into account. We call this the Body Adiposity Index. It turns out that BAI is a good predictor of percentage adiposity, so if your BAI is 30, then your percentage body fat is around 30 per cent. It is reasonably accurate – not terribly accurate – but usable as a clinical tool.

Is BAI better than BMI?

We think it’s better, but we have still got to prove it. Unlike BMI, the BAI for men and women is the same if they have the same percentage body fat. We have validated the BAI in African American populations too. Its utility has not been confirmed in Caucasian subjects, although we have tested it on a small group and it seemed to fit.

What are the downsides of the BAI?

The real challenge is to be able to predict the risk of obesity-related diseases such as cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and hypertension, and then to intervene. It remains to be shown that BAI is a more useful predictor of these outcomes than other measures of body adiposity.

Were you surprised that weight isn’t part of the BAI calculation?

Yes. But this means that BAI has the unexpected characteristic that it can be used where scales are unavailable or not correctly calibrated. BAI could be useful in remote locations with no reliable scales; in India, for example, where obesity is a serious problem.

Do you think BAI will one day succeed BMI as a measure of obesity?

I am agnostic on that, but I’m hopeful that BAI is better than BMI, which is misused by a lot of medical practitioners who don’t realise that it is often not a good measure of percentage body fat.

From New Scientist:

Maybe that second opinion isn’t worth the bother. A quarter of doctors who know that a colleague is underperforming or incompetent do not sound the alarm, a confidential survey reveals. They fear retribution, believe that no action would be taken, or assume that someone else is dealing with the problem.

Martin Roland of the University of Cambridge and colleagues confidentially surveyed 3000 US and UK doctors in 2009. The results suggested that almost 1 in 5 doctors had direct experience of an incompetent or poorly performing colleague in the previous three years. Twenty-one per cent of US doctors and 13 per cent of UK doctors admitted not telling patients about their or others’ mistakes for fear of being sued (BMJ Quality & Safety, DOI: 10.1136/bmjqs.2010.048173).

Niall Dickson, chief executive of the UK’s General Medical Council is worried by the survey. “Doctors have a clear duty to put patients’ interests first and act to protect them”, including raising concerns about colleagues, he says.

Dovo makes a fine lather, today with the Omega 643167 artificial badger. The Joris with a Swedish Gillette blade made three smooth passes, though it still feels a bit scary on the face, and then a good splash of Stetson Sierra.

Because Obama is staying true to the programs Yoo pushed in the Bush Administration. Ed Brayton comments.

I’m getting little done today because yesterday I picked up some books at the library, among them Worth Dying For, the new Lee Child novel. So far, it’s excellent.

UPDATE: Stayed up late and finished it. Many good touches.

These Glorious One-Pot meals seem to be tasty no matter what. I just made this:

Leftover black beans (1/2 cup approx)
1.5 cups whole-wheat fusilli (2 cups = 2 servings, so going light)
1/2 large red onion, chopped
8 oz chicken breast, cut into bite-size pieces
3 leftover mushrooms, chopped
salt, pepper, crushed red pepper, Bragg’s kelp seasoning
rest of the leftover Hatch’s green chilis—probably 8-10 chilis, cut into chunks
1 moderate size Italian eggplant
1 bunch red dandelion greens, chopped coarsely
1 head broccoli, tucked among the dandelion greens

The pour-over:

2 Tbsp Bragg’s vinaigrette
2 Tbsp Chinese black vinegar
1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 Tbsp black bean, pomegranate, chipotle sauce (just got this to try)
2 tsp Dijon mustard
4 cloves garlic, put through a garlic press

Whisked, poured over, and cooked covered for 45 minutes in 450ºF oven.

It’s extremely tasty, and no excess liquid. This method of cooking is quite a technique.

By reader request, a shave with the Merkur 1904 Classic—and a fine shave. There’s nothing wrong with the Merkur Classic head, and with the Astra Superior Platinum blade I got a very smooth and pleasant shave, thanks to the prep work (MR GLO, the Wilkinson shave stick, and the Lucretia Borgia brush by Omega). A splash of New York, and I await the tsunami. (Both The Wife and I live well up the big hill on which Monterey sits, so we are in no danger, but there are warnings to stay off the beach and away from low-lying coastal areas.) I don’t know that I’ll even be aware should the tsunami arrive: I wouldn’t think that they would make much noise.