Later On

I am reading some memory books now, just to learn some of the readily available techniques. From Tony Buzan’s Use Your Perfect Memory, I got a technique for remembering brief lists (10 items or fewer), and I gave it a go to remember my shopping list of 8 items (limes, red raspberries, two cucumbers, mushrooms, eggs, salad greens, pomegranate juice, and oat bran). I went the full route: did the exercise here. Then blogged for an hour without reviewing list, then went to the store.

I remembered everything, though almost forgot the oat bran. It was tied to my Number-Shape Key Memory Image (Buzan’s terminology) for 7, and that is a flag flying from a flagpole (to the left, so it sort of looks like a 7). I think that image doesn’t work well, so I’ll revise it.

The technique is easy, seems to work, and with some practice will come in handy. This particular technique he suggests for things you need to remember for only a short while, so a shopping list is ideal.

I also have Higbee’s book, and Lorayne’s is on the way. My plan is to skim them and pick out the techniques that seem most useful for me.

Buzan has written many books, but as I noted earlier, at least one person has judged them as “Same meat, different gravy.” So the book I have, which seems useful, will probably be my last Buzan book.

Glenn Greenwald finds some reasons for optimism despite the Obama Administration’s efforts to tighten the security grip on the citizenry.

Sounds like an interesting book, reviewed here.

I had trouble trilling the “R” and “RR” in Spanish. It turns out that YouTube has quite a few videos to help. Here’s one:

More and more in the US, we see corporations gaining more and more control of the government. Not in all cases, of course, and come companies are still hit hard by government regulation, control, and lawsuits—but look at the overall picture. For example, corporate tax rates:

The graphic above is by Maxwell Holyoke-Hirsch. This graphic is from Demos. Contact mhirsch@demos.org for high-resolution file.

Taxes reflect only part of the takeover of the government. The current US Supreme Court, with its aggressively corporate-friendly rulings (including the right to unlimited political contributions, along with such things as severe time limits on when a lawsuit for pay discrimination can be brought (so short that in the typical case, by the time the persons discriminated against discover the facts, it’s too late to bring a case)).

The occasional corporate setbacks are minor compared to corporate advances in control. When the tide comes in, the water does not advance in a straight line: some waves surge farther up the beach than others, but keep your eye on the overall trend. The overall trend in the US is toward corporate control of the governement.

Here’s an amazing example, reported by David Sirota in Salon:

As if we needed any more evidence that the United States is fast becoming aCorporate Police State (i.e., systematically deploying police power to protect narrow corporate interests), make sure to check out this jaw-dropping story that broke in Canada late Friday. It details how the British Columbia Supreme Court uncovered what it says is a massive collusion between computer giant Cisco and U.S. law enforcement — a collusion that seems designed to use criminal prosecution to stop a whistle-blower’s antitrust case against a powerful politically connected corporation.

The machinations in this case are complicated, but the basics go like this: Ex-Cisco exec Peter Alfred-Adekeye filed a whistle-blower suit against his former employer Cisco in civil court — a suit that could compel the company to pay millions in damages for allegedly “forcing customers to buy maintenance contracts,” according to the Vancouver Sun.

Cisco subsequently responded with two moves designed to intimidate Adekeye: First, the company filed a counter civil suit against him for allegedly “using a former colleague’s computer code to illicitly access Cisco services worth ‘more than $14,000.’” Then, the corporation had its allies in U.S. law enforcement cite the civil counter-suit to issue a whopping 97 criminal charges against Adekeye. In other words, instead of following Adekeye’s civil case with criminal antitrust charges against Cisco, U.S. authorities were convinced by the corporation to add criminal charges to Cisco’s counter civil suit against Adekeye (this move to add state-sanctioned criminal prosecution to a corporation’s civil action, of course, is a textbook definition of a Corporate Police State).

Ultimately, U.S. authorities demanded the Canadian government extradite Adekeye for prosecution, and Canadian officials proceeded to follow U.S. orders by arresting and detaining him. However, on Friday, a top Canadian court rejected the extradition request, issuing a stunning ruling that goes way beyond one whistle-blower dispute. As reported by the Sun (emphasis added): . . .

Continue reading.

Canada, of course, also allowed a lawsuit for damages for the innocent Canadian citizen that the US kidnapped, sent to Syria for torture, and ultimately released when it was discovered that he was completely innocent of any wrongdoing. (The US courts won’t allow the lawsuit: “state secrets privilege” according to the US government. So tough luck on the torture.)

It is VERY much a YMMV thing, but the Malaspina Cucumber-Melon shaving soap strikes me as an excellent summer shaving soap. A reader suggested that it was time to trot out the porcelain-handled Mühle, so that’s what I used. The Edwin Jagger razor is included in the photo simply to illustrate that these two razors use the same head.

You may also note the new Edwin Jagger boar brush. Now that I’ve discovered Creamy Lather™, each shave is focused on the foam, as it were. I did not quite achieve it with the EJ boar brush, but this is the very first use of the brush, so it’s far from broken in. I’ll continue with it from time to time. For the second (and third) pass, I bought out my trusty Tres Claveles and had no trouble working up a Creamy Lather.

The Mühle, with a previously used Gillette 7 O’Clock SharpEdge blade, did a very nice job indeed, and a big splash of Klar Seifen wrapped up the shave.

I do like the soap. I also have a Tahitian Vanilla to try. The rugged surface of the soap is interesting, and the metal tubs are quite nice. I think I might even at some point go for the Hawaiian Ginger. Soaps for US customers here. Canadians, of course, can order direct from Malaspina Soap Factory itself.

Am I just hungry? or do you also salivate as you read this article on high-end hamburgers? (The science of hamburgers included in the article is also pretty interesting.)

Fascinating.

And for more info: Honey as a Dressing for Wounds, Burns, and Ulcers: A Brief Review of Clinical Reports and Experimental Studies.

This isn’t quite my thing, but it’s cute. Buy it here.

Read it here. I have to stop for a while after reading that.

It’s amazing to me how rapidly the US is going downhill, more or less deliberately and obviously.

Fascinating story tagged by Ed Brayton. Chris Stirewalt reports for Fox News:

House Republican aides tell Power Play that a vote scheduled for today on Ohio Democrat Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s bill that would force the U.S. to withdraw from the Libyan civil war was yanked from the schedule only after it became clear that it might succeed.

“[Republican leaders] hadn’t seen much of a threat from [the Kucinich bill]. He’s kind of this marginal figure and having his resolution go down narrowly would be no big deal and might even send a message to the administration,” said one of the Republican aides. “But once they saw that there was substantial support, they were like, ‘Whoa.’” . . .

Continue reading.

Toxic compost has long been a problem, particularly when provided by city governments eager to dispose of toxic sewage sludge. Josh Harkinson wrote a recent article on the problem for Mother Jones. It begins:

Last month, at a vast composting yard owned by a Northern California waste and recycling company, Recology, I watched a load of lawn and food scraps from San Francisco residents get fed into a sorting machine. A spinning cylinder resembling a supersized cheese grater sifted out tidbits like lime wedges and grass clippings and spit the chunkier items onto a platform, where a worker in a neon vest plucked out plastic bags and an aerosol can of glass cleaner—just a few of the hundreds of pieces of contraband that he’d cull that day. I asked if he ever let anything slip by. “Sometimes,” he said with a sheepish smile. I later ran my hand through a ripened compost pile and felt little pieces of glass and plastic mixed in with the fertile humus.

As thousands of cities have begun composting yard waste and hundreds more begin collecting food scraps on a large scale, new questions are emerging about what kinds of things make their way into compost and whether any of them pose a threat to humans and the environment. . .

Continue reading.

From a story by Judy Dempsey and William Neuman about the European food-poisoning outbreak in the NY Times:

. . . Since 1996, sprouts have been linked to at least 30 illness outbreaks, according to a United States federal food safety Web site that warns that children, the elderly, pregnant women and people with weak immune systems should not eat uncooked sprouts. . .

Bacteria can flourish in the warm, humid conditions in which sprouts are grown, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control. Investigators have sometimes found that the seeds used to grow sprouts are contaminated with bad bacteria, like E. coli or salmonella. Once those seeds start growing, the bacteria can easily spread. . . .

From 1941:

Here are five. An example from the link:

Pepino Picante
Spicy and savory; this drink would be awesome paired with grilled meat.

2 lime quarters
3 slices cucumber
2 wheels jalapeno with seeds
6 cilantro leaves
1 sugar cube
1/2 ounce simple syrup
2 ounces mezcal
garnish: lime wheel

Squeeze 1 lime quarter into a cocktail shaker and add shell and other lime quarter. Add cucumber, jalapeno, cilantro leaves, and sugar cube, muddle gently. Fill with ice, add simple syrup and mezcal, shake well. Strain into an ice-filled glass, garnish with lime wheel.

The WaPo was completely oblivious to the housing bubble as it built up and burst. Why? Because they sought their economic advice on the housing market from the chief economist at the National Association of Realtors.

Did they learn their lesson? No.

And Robert Samuelson is a joke.

Excellent note by Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker on what’s happening now with the weather and what we can expect in the future. It begins:

When President Barack Obama arrived in Joplin, Missouri, on May 29th, the sun was shining. He toured one of the neighborhoods that the previous week’s tornado had destroyed, then spoke at a memorial service for the dead. (By late last week, the official toll was a hundred and thirty-eight people.) At the service, the President’s tone turned brooding. “The question that weighs on us at a time like this is: Why?” he said. “Why our town? Why our home? Why my son, or husband, or wife, or sister, or friend? Why?” Such questions, the President went on, cannot be answered, as “these things are beyond our power to control.”

Obama’s visit to Joplin was the third that he had made in a month to the site of a weather-related disaster. In mid-May, the President met with Memphis residents who had been left homeless by the flooding of the Mississippi River, and, not long before that, he toured sections of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that had also been flattened by a tornado. Meanwhile, even as the President was consoling the bereaved in Joplin, residents in Vermont were bailing out from record-high water levels around Lake Champlain; Texas was suffering from a near-record drought that could cost the state more than four billion dollars in agricultural losses; and officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were forecasting that the 2011 Atlantic hurricane season, which formally began on June 1st, would once again be “above normal.” (The 2010 season was tied for the third most active on record.) The news from abroad was, if anything, more worrisome. Last week, the Chinese government estimated that more than four million people were having trouble finding drinking water, owing to a drought along the Yangtze River. The French agricultural minister warned that an exceptionally hot, dry spring would reduce that country’s wheat harvest. And in Colombia more than two million acres of land have been submerged after almost a year of nearly continuous rain. “Over the past ten months, we have registered five or six times more rainfall than usual,” the director of Colombia’s meteorological agency, Ricardo Lozano, said.

For decades, climate scientists have predicted that, as global temperatures rose, the side effects would include deeper droughts, more intense flooding, and more ferocious storms. The details of these forecasts are immensely complicated, but the underlying science is pretty simple. Warm air can hold more moisture. This means that there is greater evaporation. It also means that there is more water, and hence more energy, available to the system.

What we are seeing now is these predictions being borne out. . .

Continue reading.

Of course, the GOP members in the House and the Senate—particularly those who get much money from the fossil-energy industry, such as Rep. Joe Barton and Sen. James Inhofe—laugh at the idea that the climate is changing and weather patterns are worsening. In fact, Inhofe claims to believe that it is all a gigantic fraud. So the GOP will fight bitterly against any constructive in this area (as in so many), even attacking the plans that they themselves proposed (cap-and-trade, for example).

Most clothing does not. People don’t understand that UV radiation can penetrate some things that block visible light. Clouds, for example, offer little or no protection against the UV radiation from the sun, so people who ignore skin protection on cloudy days may pay for it.

Solumbra was the first make of sun-protective clothing that I discovered. I bought from them a few shirts and my broad-brimmed hat. Now other clothing makers are producing sun-protective gear. The LA Times has a story on such clothing with a variety of manufacturers mentioned.

The story includes this interesting note, for those who pooh-poohed the ozone hole (e.g., Rush Limbaugh and other denizens of the Right):

The idea of weaving UV protection directly into fabric originated in Australia, where two-thirds of people are diagnosed with skin cancer by age 70, according to the country’s Institute of Health and Welfare. Australia’s proximity to the ozone hole hovering over the Antarctic contributes to its having the highest rate of skin cancer in the world.

Sounds intriguing. From the LA Times article by Chris Woolston:

. . . The idea that anything in a lotion could actually repair something as fragile and complicated as DNA may sound far-fetched, but DNA-repairing enzymes have a proven ability to heal and protect, says Dr. Steven Q. Wang, director of dermatologic surgery and dermatology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Basking Ridge, N.J.

In simple terms, endonucleases work by cutting out the damaged bits of DNA, which are then regenerated. Many studies in the last decade have shown that adding extra enzymes to the skin “enhances the body’s innate mechanisms for repairing DNA damage,” Wang says. For one example, a 2010 study in the Journal of Drugs in Dermatology by Moy and colleagues at UCLA found that using a cream with DNA repair enzymes for 48 weeks significantly reduced actinic keratoses (scaly precancerous growths) in 17 people with severely sun-damaged skin. (The product used in the study is not commercially available.)

But because Neova and similar products haven’t been thoroughly tested in clinical trials, Wang says he has some questions about their real-world benefits. His main concern is . . .