Later On

I was directed to this article by Matt Welch at Reason by a quotation from it posted by Ed Brayton:

More than 800,000 people are still arrested each year for marijuana alone, despite the widespread misconception that pot has been largely decriminalized, and despite the fact that close to half of all Americans by now have smoked it, and more than half, by some surveys, favor legalizing it. We can thank the drug war for “stop-and-frisk” harassment of young New Yorkers, for the transfer of military equipment and tactics to local police departments, for wrong-door SWAT raids that kill innocents, for an entire shadow economy of dubious jailhouse snitching and back-room sentence reductions. Vanishingly few public officials even pretend anymore that the drug war can somehow be “won.”

Read the entire article, and then think about how much money we simply waste—and what a social mess we create—by fighting harmless drugs. (Meanwhile, alcohol and tobacco, both much more harmful than marijuana, are legal, regulated, taxed, and enjoyed by those who want them.) The article begins:

At the first presidential debate of the 2012 campaign, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson implored Republican voters to conduct a “cost-benefit analysis” of the criminal justice system. “Half of what we spend on law enforcement, the courts, and the prisons is drug related, and to what end?” Johnson asked a South Carolina audience in May. “We’re arresting 1.8 million a year in this country; we now have 2.3 million people behind bars in this country. We have the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. I would ask people to look at this issue; see if they don’t come to the same conclusion that I did, and that is that 90 percent of the drug problem is prohibition-related.”

The ends of justice, Johnson argues, have not justified the means of prosecution. This issue of reasonis a detailed brief in support of that thesis. A system designed to protect the innocent has instead become a menagerie to imprison them. A legal code designed to proscribe specific behavior has instead become a vast, vague, and unpredictable invitation to selective enforcement. Public servants who swear on the Constitution to uphold the highest principles of justice go out of their way to stop prisoners from using DNA evidence to show they were wrongly convicted. Even before you start debating the means of the four-decade crackdown on crime and drugs, it’s important to acknowledge that the ends are riddled with serious problems. . .

Continue reading.

TYD pointed out this interesting article on the impact Apple’s new OS is likely to have on some apps whose functions are now incorporated into the OS.

I recall Microsoft killing off any number of really intriguing applications by including degraded versions, with inferior capabilities, in new releases of Windows: those the Windows apps were inferior, they were also free, and the result is that the independent apps (e.g., Chameleon, a complex calendar app that did a lot more besides) folded up shop once Windows cut out most of their customer base (Outlook’s calendar function is what did it to Chameleon).

On a related note, see this post at Lifehacker on how to get Windows capabilities in your Mac OS.

I just received yesterday an order from Gifts & Care, some of which is shown in the photo. The (horsehair) brush is particularly beautiful—more beautiful with more subtle color gradations than shown by the photo above. As I posted last night on the Pogonotomy forum:

I got two of the “professional” brushes with wooden stub handle protruding from a convex brass ring, the bristles issuing from the ring. No markings whatsoever except for some decorative engraving on the brass. No lettering, no label, no ID. I think the idea is that if you’re truly a professional such blatant labeling is at best needless and at worst insulting. And with the two brushes I have, labels would be as redundant as carefully labeling transparent glass salt and pepper shakers “SALT” and “PEPPER”: hardly necessary, eh? The boar is a creamy white, and the horsehair—and this is what struck me—the horsehair is this amazingly beautiful color produced by a variety of bristles: gray, sorrel, brown, beige, … It had not previously occurred to me that a brush could be beautiful just for its color. And I like the form factor as well: it’s a comfortable handle to use and looks distinctive. And, of course, I appreciate being enough of a professional that I don’t need no stinkin’ labels.

The wooden bowl of La Toja shaving soap has a lid cut from cork, with the bottom of the lid uncut, showing exactly the profile of where the bark grew next to the sapwood. In the photo above, the dark part of the lid is that portion of the cork-oak bark.

The soap is quite nice, and I vigorously worked the brush to get a creamy lather. I was about 75% successful: creamy-ish lather. But it was first use of the brush—which had a non-unpleasant horsey smell that will quickly fade with use. But it’s a smell that I like, unlike (say) the funkier smell of some boar or badger brushes.

The brush is more resilient than my other horsehair professional (which I gave to a beginner as part of a full kit). It’s not unlike the Plisson brass-handled Chinese Grey that The Wife got for me in Paris. I’ll have to use them side by side to compare.

A fine lather, and the Red Ring Eclipse did its useful deft job of uncovering the wonderfully smooth skin underlying the jagged stubble. A splash of La Toja’s “Hombre” aftershave—I detect a cinnamon note, I think—and I’m ready for the day.

Of course, “Hombre” may not be the name of the fragrance—maybe it means simply “Pour l’Homme”. I was struck by how the word “hombre” has connotations in English that it probably lacks in Spanish. In Spanish, as I understand it, the word simply means “man,” whereas in English it has a connotation along the lines of Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and the (pre-cancerous) Marlboro Man.

Tomorrow’s shave will be an unveiling of a highly innovative new design in safety razors. Be sure to check back—and please send early any suggestions or requests regarding soap, brush, or aftershave…

In Joshua Foer’s fascinating book about human memory and how it works (or not), Moonwalking with Einstein, he discusses how the operation of memory in some way undermines the efficacy of the current prison model.

The problem is that our memories are strongest in those areas that offered a significant survival advantage during our evolution: memories of faces, routes, and visual images is extraordinarily strong, whereas memories for words and data (Johnnies-come-lately in evolutionary terms) is much weaker—indeed, the memory techniques I have learned so far involve creating (mentally) visual images and placing them along a (remembered) route.

The particular strengths and weaknesses of our memory as evolved are why, for example, that “time flies” when one’s days consist of essentially the same activities: people who work in the same office or cubicle for years, doing work whose sensory input is much the same—papers, reports, desk, meetings, papers, etc.—find that their memories, being so much alike, merge together. When they look back, they don’t feel as though they’ve been doing the job for, say, 20 years—it feels, in memory, like months: the days are just too much alike to trigger separate memories. One may remember this event or that, but overall the time seems to have passed all too quickly.

On the other hand, people who move around, living in one locale at one job for a year or two, then in a different sort of place at a different sort of job for another year or two, and so on, tend to have more vivid and distinct memories—of the year in the jungle vs. the year in the plains vs. the year in the mountains vs. the year on the sea and so on. The settings of the memories (which are carried into memory as well) are distinct, so the memories remain distinct, and, when he looks back, a person with those memories has a sense of a much longer time having been lived than the person in the unchanging environment.

Foer describes, for example, a party thrown by a somewhat recherché English mnenomicist that was specifically designed to be memorable: you entered on hands and knees, crawling through a long tubular tunnel, to emerge in the first party room, waist-deep in balloons. Each room was distinctly different, and as the party progressed, its participants built memories linked to each distinct setting—so that years later, as people recalled that evening, their memories would have lots of setting-specific associations to keep those memories strong and separate—the conversation in the balloon room with Kim and Ted will not be confused with a totally different encounter in the tiger-striped room with the big fireplace, for example: when you recall, you inevitably picture and remember the settings.

So, prison: almost every day spent in prison is more or less the same, in the same environment, doing the same activities. And so, when the prisoner is released, on average after 4.5 years, he looks back, and his time in prison seems brief—it went by before he knew it.

Sure, some markers show how much time has passed: his little boy is now in high school, cellphones are smaller, and so on. But still: in his memory, it was very little time.

I don’t think this is the desired outcome. Those who favor punishment will not like that the punishment, in retrospect, went by quickly. Those who favor rehabilitation also get nothing.

So: the question is how to build the prison experience so that, in memory, it remains big, impressive, and a deterrent? Indeed, should the prison experience simply punish or does it make sense, given that today’s prisoners will indeed be released into communities—over 2.2 million prisoners—to try to use prison time to try rehabilitation?

Save for those facing life sentences or the handful who are executed, prisoners do indeed return to the community. Prisoners in jails are released after 6 or 7 months, and those in prisons are released after—on average—55 months. (Time spent in prison varies by type of crime: the average for violent offenses is 91 months (7.6 years), for drug offenses 47 months (3.9 years), for property offenses 42 months, etc. — with 55 months (4.6 years) as the overall average.)

Thus in 4.6 years, on average, millions of former prisoners return to society, showing the effects of whatever it was they experienced in prison, shaped by their memories of that time. And what sort of memories do we want them to have? That the time whipped by seemingly overnight?

One Platonic dialogue we studied closely in my freshman year of college, and one that deserves rereading, is the Meno—or Menon as it now seems to be called. Meno was a wealthy young man who asked Socrates a pregnant question about the source of virtue: are men virtuous by nature? or do they learn virtue? or do they acquire it in some other way? Socrates then proceeds to question Meno about what he means by “virtue”, and it turns out that he doesn’t really say to what the word refers. (Woody West, a classmate at the time, sort of wished that Socrates had answered “In some other way,” and walked on—but that was when we were trying to translate the dialogue. And Jack de Raat, in our game of dreaming up covers for tawdry paperback editions of the great books, came up with a winner for Meno: a dissolute looking young man in a toga, reclining on a couch with a voluptuous slave or two, with the subtitle “He Didn’t Know What Virtue Meant!!!”)

You can see how my memories work. Sorry for the digressions, but I’ve reach an age at which such things are enjoyable. At any rate, the question Meno asks strikes at the heart of prison purpose: Can virtue be taught? Is rehabilitation possible?

My own belief is that human behavior is shaped by the interaction of genetic endowment and environmental stimuli and opportunities (or lack thereof). So I would think that a well-constructed rehabilitation program, based on what we know now of human behavior and psychology (and memory), could easily produce a bell curve of outcomes, with some who go through it completely untouched, others with their lives transformed, and most with some improvement.

It won’t happen, of course: a large contingent of legislators is focused totally on punishment and suffering as the goal (due, I think, to their own unresolved problems and issues) and another, overlapping, group focuses on program failures: if a program has any failures, then the program must be discarded. This group resists looking at the overall picture because their focus is agenda-driven: they look for failures only in those programs with which they have ideological disagreement, and of course they find some. That’s the nature of bell-curved outcomes.

So nothing will happen. But if something were to happen, what should it be? Knowing what we now know about memory and how it works, how should the prison experience be constructed?

One major task in learning a second language is amassing a good working vocabulary. Your vocabulary in English you developed (mostly) over the first two decades of your life: compressing that 20-year, admittedly diffuse, effort into just a few years as an adult, when learning a new language, requires time and begs for efficiency.

That’s one of the appeals of Esperanto: its system of correlatives makes it easy to learn a whole cluster of useful words in just a few minutes. (For comparison, look at the way correlatives work in English.)

But even more useful in building vocabulary are the affixes, pre-defined prefixes and suffixes that can be clapped onto any root to build new words on the spot. Once you know the relatively small collection of affixes (around 80), then each new root becomes the seed for dozens of new words.

Now that I’m learning Spanish vocabulary in the wild, as it were, I notice that I try to learn a cluster of words: all the common words that use the root in the new word I just found.

For example, this morning my SpanishDict word of the day was la esquina, a noun meaning “corner”. So I look it up, and the WordRef site kindly includes a list under “Ver También”–See Also:

esquiador
esquiadora
esquiar
esquife
esquila
esquilador
esquilar
esquilmar
esquimal
esquina
esquinado
esquinar
esquinazo
esquinero
esquirla
esquirol
esquirola
esquites
esquiva
esquivar

So I go through the list, adding related useful words to the Anki card I make for the word. Right now, the back (English) side of the card contains:

corner (noun)
to put into a corner
to turn the corner
(diagonally) across the corner
a corner unit or corner cupboard

And the front (Spanish) side:

la esquina
esquinar
doblar la esquina
esquinado/a
el esquinero

And so on. With one effort, I add a cluster of new words to my vocabulary and also build up more pattern recognition fodder for recognizing new words.

I remember being told how my father would read the (English) dictionary of an evening (the Merriam-Webster International Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, which I still have). Although it’s risky to learn words from the dictionary, finding clusters of words that share a common idea does add words quickly.

This is also an example of an observation that Robert Spaeth, a friend from my salad days, once made: that jazz musicians who play something other than a wind instrument—those who play piano, bass, drums, guitar, or the like—have longer performance lives than those whose instruments depend on their lung power—those who play trumpet, clarinet, trombone, or the like. If playing the instrument is simply a matter of muscle control and dexterity, players can get better and better their entire lives, it seems, but those who must rely on the strength of their lungs seem to experience a diminution of capabilities over the years.

I recall, for example, going to a concert late in Dizzy Gillespie’s life. He could still play a mean horn, but only for a while—a fair amount of the concert was him playing drums. But pianists, from Eubie Blake to Hank Jones, continue to play well and at length for decades. Same for guitarists.

The Google doodle—the little variation on the Google logo that appears at Google.com—is always fun and sometimes memorable. I appreciated, for example, the little Esperanto flag that flew on a flagpole (for the “l” in “Google”) on Zamenhof’s birthday.

Today, in celebration of Les Paul’s birthday, they have an interactive variant of the Google doodle: a guitar theme, with the strings plucked and played by dragging your mouse across them. Extremely cool little app, and with today’s technology, incredibly lightweight. I assume it’s HTML 5 and it simply loads with the screen—no plug-in, no mass of code.

So the app itself is interesting, and the implementation without a bunch of code that you have to install on your machine is impressive, but what is really intriguing (for those of us who have worked in programming-related development technology) is trying to imagine the design and development process that was used. How would you go about the design and the development, specifically?

Think of the kick-off meeting about creating an on-screen playable guitar in HTML 5, with the guy from marketing saying, “Yeah, the user must be able to get a sound when he mouses across the strings, but also random strums should produce a pleasant chord progression, and it must include a recorder. Oh, of course it has to spell ‘Google’. And that’s it. We need it by Wednesday, so you’ll want to get to work. And we’ll have a status meeting every day at 4:00.”

That last is based on bitter experience: the love of management for lots of status meetings, the worst type being where the entire development team is pulled into a conference room and each person explains his or her progress since the previous meeting some hours ago. These meetings are always scheduled for a least an hour—an hour of no work…

Think about just writing the technical specs for the app. I wouldn’t know where to start.

Went to get some salad stuff, and picked up a couple of novel items. The red things are apricots—red apricots—and they taste like the regular ones. The bumpy citrus is some variety of tangerine, I believe.

I do love to find new foods at the grocery store.

UPDATE: The tangerines were seedless and incredibly sweet and juicy—somewhat like a navel orange, but much sweeter and without the “navel” part.

Extremely good comment on the reasons people react so adversely to Rep. Weiner’s transgression, despite it’s being legal and (on the surface) simply a matter of concern to himself and his wife and the other women involved.

I blogged Sarah Palin’s bizarre statement on Paul Revere’s ride to warn the British—including the video of her panicked, hysterical laughter. The Wife pointed out that the general format—not having a clue of the answer, but smile big and keep talking—is right out of beauty-contest shtick.

Now Palin is saying that she was the victim, being set-up by a “gotcha” question that trapped her into looking like a clueless idiot. Here’s the question she was asked:

What have you seen so far today, and what are you going to take away from your visit?

And here, once again, is her answer:

Truly a devilishly clever “gotcha” question.

It occurs to me that Palin could be asked, “What would you like to say?” and she would claim it was a “gotcha” question.

Obama has adopted the Bush-Cheney position regarding black operations and human and civil rights. Indeed, Obama has expanded the Guantánamo-like prison in Afghanistan and added the right of the President to order the assassination of American citizens who say things the government dislikes. (So far as we can tell, none of the American’s on the Obama hit-list have actually done anything wrong, but Obama obviously doesn’t like what they say. The Constitution guarantees the right of free speech, but day by day we’re looking at the Constitution getting smaller in the rear-view mirror.

This article recounts Obama’s adoption of a favorite Bush tactic of keeping information from the American public for fear they would dislike what he’s doing. Remember how Bush prevented any photos of the bodies of American soldiers returning to US soil? And preventing photographers at military funerals? Now Obama is determined to conceal photographs that document US atrocities.

Nice lather again today, and again with a horsehair shaving brush. I soaked the brush, though I’m unsure whether this makes any real difference with horsehair, and I did the vigorous and lengthy brushing of the soap—Atkinson’s I Coloniali Mango-Oil shaving soap again—and Creamy Lather did form. I did want a brush a bit fuller than the Vie-Long I used, but I have a couple of horsehair brushes on order and one of those will probably be just the ticket.

The Edwin Jagger Chatsworth with a previously used Swedish Gillette blade did a fine job—I do like that razor, must return to it more often—with three good passes. A hearty splash of New York and I’m good to go.

I do like the effect that the mango-oil shaving soap seems to have on my skin.

Mantic59 has an interesting post on the effects of The Bluebeards Revenge Shaving Cream and why it retards whisker growth.

In doing my morning reading of the Hoy section of the LA Times, I came across this sentence:

Un latino de Harbor City, que uso un sitio social de Internet para conocer a menores de edad y  persuadirlas  a tener  relaciones sexuales con él, fue sentenciado  a 15 meses en prisión federal.

I thought that in this sentence, one would use “consigo” instead of “con él”, since the “él” in question is also the subject of the sentence. Do I misunderstand?

This incident that Ed Brayton blogs is only yet another small example of a national pattern that seems to be getting worse.

Very well reasoned and stated.

I just became aware that my sleep requirement has dropped 20%: a year ago I required 10 hours a night, and now I’m fine with 8. I can think of three factors that probably contribute:

a. I have had mild sleep apnea, which disrupts sleep and prevents sufficient deep sleep. Extra fat exacerbates sleep apnea, so losing this much weight undoubtedly reduced or eliminated the apnea. I think this is probably the major factor.

b. Because I now weigh less, it takes a lot less energy to move around, so I’m not so tired—and,

c. What with the 30-minute walks and the Pilates, I’m in significantly better shape than I was, so again: not so tired. And a more efficient body would not require so much down time to rebuild, it seems to me—i.e., a more efficient body even rests more efficiently.

Anyway, it’s nice because I find myself needing more hours than the day holds. I started running through in my head the things I want to do each day, and finally had to make a list: study Spanish (I want to learn well all the second semester vocabulary this summer, so I need to work at that daily), write letters, blog, keep up with a few Go games on Dragongoserver.net, read books (top of queue currently: The Will of Zeus, L.A. Noir, and Incognito, but then things get added, typically references from books or magazines I read (I subscribe to (and regularly read) New Yorker, New Scientist, Atlantic Monthly, The Week, BusinessWeek, and Wired and keep up: get the magazine, read what I want, and toss, with about an 80% success rate—plus, of course, I have my regular daily on-line reading (NY Times, LA Times, Salon.com, Pogonotomy shaving forum, and a slew of feeds from blogs and on-line columnists))—and, I suddenly remember (see how I’m already getting better at this memory thing?) that I want to read, but even more, to study and learn—memorize, if necessary—the three books I have on memory technique: Higbee, Buzan, and Lorayne), watch movies, take the 30-minute walk, go to Pilates and also start doing some Pilates mat exercises at home, which means having to read the excellent book The Everything Pilates Book (it’s out of print, but inexpensive used copies are available at the link as of the time and date of this post), write the weight-loss book, revise the shaving book, shop for and cook interesting lunches and dinners (breakfast is more or less fixed), putter, relax, and take time to smell the roses. Plus I want to somehow work in getting back to Esperanto—perhaps once the Spanish feels solid in a year or two.

Maybe I’m biting off more than I can chew?

With nutritional yeast, no less. Go see.

I’ve fallen for a couple, in which I purchased a service, thinking it was one-time, only to see it on my credit card (under a bland name) every month. I killed them off, but they got a couple of months from me.

Now Billguard.com offers protection against these creeks (portmanteau word: “crooks” and “creeps”).

Here’s a brief article in BusinessWeek describing how it works. Quite intriguing, technically. And it’s a free service for consumers.

I just signed up, and it immediately flagged two suspicious transactions (because it didn’t know the merchant). Both were okay, but it was nice to see the program in operation.

It’s still in beta, so currently you’re limited to one card. Pick carefully. Multi-card support coming soon.

I just submitted the Preon 2 as a Cool Tools submission. I’ve mentioned it before: The Wife gave me one for Christmas because my older eyes require more photons to read things—in particular, book titles in bookcases. There was just not enough light on some shelves. Once I got the new penlight, I couldn’t stop browsing my bookshelves. It was wonderful: I discovered all sorts of books that had slipped my mind.

The light at the “high” setting is 120 ANSI lumens, extremely bright. Fortunately, the light turns on at the “low” setting: 2.2 lumens, a dim light ideal for perusing a menu in a dimly lighted restaurant, or for referring to the program while a play or concert is underway: a flash of 120 lumens in those settings would be jarring and annoying. (Some reviews—and the manufacturer—uses “OTF lumens” instead of ANSI lumens, and it is 160 OTF lumens. I don’t know anything about OTF lumens, but obviously that unit is used because it gives a larger number.)

To cycle through the settings—low-med-high-low-etc—you simply partially depress the on/off toggle. There’s also a strobe and an SOS light, not of much use to me.

The penlight can issue so much light from such a small package because it uses the relatively new CREE XP-G S2 LED. And—a very nice feature—the penlight requires only two AAA batteries: no special-format battery required.

Amazon carries it. The link is to the black, but it comes in a variety of colors and also in titanium.

For the true geeks among you, I offer this video (note length of video: 23 minutes):