Later On

I feel sort of like a radio DJ: “This shave goes out to Eddie of Australia, who requested a test run of D.R. Harris re: Creamy Lather™ and a comparison of Shark and Astra Superior Platinum blades.

I used a new Vie-Long horsehair brush. I’ve long noticed (mainly when using a D.R. Harris shave stick) that D.R. Harris delivers (for me) an exceptionally good lather, but I had not tried the CL technique with it. I picked horsehair, since my first success was with such a brush, and as I worked up the lather I noticed that the bowl’s low sides are to some extent an advantage: the sloppy early lather—the slag—simply spills over the low sides and is gone, obviating the need to hold the bowl sideways or upside down.

I did indeed achieve a Creamy Lather, and set about shaving, using the two razors alternately. (As you can see, the Astra Superior is in the ebony-handled Chatsworth, the Shark in the ivory-handled one.) As I used each blade, I thought, “Oh, this one is better.” They’ve very close, with perhaps an edge to Shark. Or to Astra Superior Platinum.

But that’s my reaction. In blades, each man must be his own judge, as you well know.

I got the Nivea because guys who use it like it so much. Although I don’t use balms much, this one is not bad: non-greasy, absorbed quickly, and then I decided to add a splash (Lustray Spice).

I think this coming week I’ll use balms each day…

Which seems an appropriate place for him. Via Ed Brayton:

Quite interesting.

I’ll have to add this to the list of vendors. Check it out. Some stunning razors and brushes.

His high-water mark seems to have been his minor role in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (as the excruciatingly boring teacher who would pause in his speaking for a student to provide an answer of some type—the name of a treaty, for example—and drone “Anyone? Anyone?” repeatedly into the silence). — UPDATE: Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!! That was Ben Stein, not Ben Shapiro. I got the two confused in my mind because Ben Stein also holds the odd idea that evolution did not occur.

Here’s a review of Ben Shapiro’s most recent book. Ben Stein sounds like a paragon of wisdom and moderation compared to Ben Shapiro.

This recipe from Trent Hamm at The Simple Dollar sounds tasty and worth a try. I do have to point out that quinoa is not a grain (grains (aka cereals) are the seeds of grasses: wheat, rye, oats, rice, corn, barley—seeds of other plants (e.g., chia, buckwheat, quinoa, amaranth, and the like) are as much “grains” as beans would be: i.e., they’re not. They’re seeds.

Sounds like a very interesting book. The War on Drugs has been very hard on Mexico, but even apart from that there are serious challenges to be overcome.

I was reminded of Joseph Clark’s book after reading this cogent criticism of Congress in James Fallows’s column.

Very interesting column by Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic. From the column:

. . . When you are a young intellectual black kid, you often find yourself in this desperate search for some sort of anti-Western tradition. That Saul Bellow quote–”Who is the Tolstoy of the Zululs”–really captures a lot of the dilemma for those of us looking for a “native” tradition. That search ends all kinds of ways for different people. But for us, I think it ended in the rejection of the premise, in the great Ralph Wiley riposte that “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.”

That line was sorcery for me. It found me a black pathologist, and set me free by revealing that my own search for something “native” was an implicit acceptance of the very racism that I sought to counter. The way out was not to find my own, but to reject the notion of anyone’s “own.” If you reject the very premise of racism–the idea skin color directly contributes to genius or sloth–then all of humanity becomes “native” to you. And so empowered, I could–out of my own individual identity–create my own intellectual and artistic pedigree, and I was free to have it extend from Biggie to to Wharton to Melville to Hayden.

Read the whole thing.

TBT = Three-Brush Technique, and it’s nothing I’m recommending (unlike Bruce Everiss’s Three-Razor Technique, which actually makes sense: the appropriate razor for each pass). It’s just a way to experiment with making lather with different brushes.

I used Mitchell’s Wool Fat shaving soap today. MWF has a reputation as a somewhat cranky soap: great lather one day, so-so the next. I think this is particularly true if your local water is hard. (In that case, I highly recommend installing a water softener so that all household water, save the kitchen cold-water tap, goes through the softener. Because of the sodium content of softened water, it should not be regularly used for cooking, drinking, or watering houseplants. It’s best to get a softener that regenerates based on water volume used, not elapsed time. Soft water is not only better for laundry, showering and shaving, it also is much better for plumbing and faucets.)

With all three of these brushes (used from left to right in the above photo), I got a fine Creamy Lather™. The best, I think, was with the horsehair Gonzalo—the brush on the extreme right—but of course by then there was residual lather in the bowl and the soap was amply prepared.

The MWF bowl works well with vigorous lathering, I found. And the shave—the OSS still with that first Shark blade—was smooth and satisfying. A splash of Pashana—which I see I soon must reorder—and I was good to go—in this case, to the lab for a blood draw for quarterly endocrinologist visit.

Astonishing, but consistent with Obama’s general approach to the law and the powers of the President. Charlie Savage reports in the NY Times:

President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.

Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.

But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.

Presidents have the legal authority to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice, but it is extraordinarily rare for that to happen. Under normal circumstances, the office’s interpretation of the law is legally binding on the executive branch. . .

Continue reading.

Synthetic drugs—quite legal until laws are passed making them illegal because they.. what? why is it so urgent to pass laws banning these? Shouldn’t there be some proof that the substance needs to be banned? That it actually does harm?

I think legislators do not want to go in that direction because that would lead to awkward questions about tobacco and alcohol, both significantly more harmful that, say, marijuana. So the laws are passed simply because …  why? The US likes to make things illegal? I don’t get it.

Here’s a good article in BusinessWeek about the synthetic drug business.

I’m gradually starting to understand the power of persistence. I tend to develop new interests quickly, and these can eat up available time, crowding out earlier interests. I had not thought much about the benefits of sticking with the old. But now I’m experiencing success not from intense effort, but from moderate effort sustained over weeks and months.

Quite a while back I realized that when people change it doesn’t happen with the speed of insight but at the pace of plant growth. Because of my interest in novelty, I’ve tended to overvalue insight—when one suddenly grasps an overall pattern or an explanatory connection. Insights are a great pleasure and quite useful, but they don’t get the job done. A friend who was a product manager for computer games valued a great game idea at somewhere around 2%-4% of the game’s worth. The idea is important, but 96%-98% of bringing the game to market and making it a success belongs to the effort to realize the idea: test the concept, design the interface, write the code, test everything, write supporting materials and develop a marketing campaign, etc. The idea amounts to less than the tip of the iceberg. There must be an idea to start the process, but—let’s face it—ideas are a dime a dozen. The value almost always in the work that transforms the idea into a real product.

I enjoy having ideas, but quite often my work in bringing an idea into practice has been interrupted by new ideas, making it difficulty to stay on task. And even when I could stay on task, I generally had in mind making a big push for a week or so: a sprint rather than going for distance and duration.

What I’ve experienced over the past year is that quite substantial changes can follow from a persistent albeit low-key effort. For example, my weight loss: it took one year to reach my current weight and, more important, my current habits and perceptions. Learning Spanish: It will take 18 months for three semesters of Spanish, along with a modest daily time investment (the Anki review each morning: once around 20 minutes a day, it’s now about 10-15, but it is indeed a daily exercise). Pilates I do twice a week now (though for a couple of months early on I did three times a week—I’m going to add a couple of sessions a week of floor exercises at home Real Soon Now.

But those three examples are enough to convince me of the value of persisting and the magnitude of what a persistent effort can accomplish even if the daily gains seem small.

This post by Alex Tabarrok on a strange corporate city—and its successes and failings—I found via Kevin Drum. Fascinating—and the comments are good, too.

Very interesting article in Mother Jones by Kevin Drum:

Here’s something a little offbeat for a Friday morning. A team of researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine has recently documented a safe, long-lasting way of improving both your life and your personal feelings of well-being: shrooms.

Or, more precisely, psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. Here’s the boring news first: ingesting psilocybin produces a mystical experience that can be quantified. “Noetic quality,” for example, increased from 19.4 on a placebo to 70.6 on the highest dose used in the study. “Transcendence of space and time” increased from 18.3 to 78.2. Etc. You probably already knew that.

Here’s the somewhat more interesting news: psilocybin can sometimes produces bad trips full of fear and anxiety, but the researchers have also figured out how to minimize this. Partly this was due to the experimental design: “The study was designed to optimize the potential for positively valued experiences by providing 8 hours of preparation, administering psilocybin in a pleasant, supportive setting, and instructing volunteers to focus explicitly on their subjective or inner experience.” They used soothing music, too. But they also tried various dosages of psilocybin on their subjects, and it turns out that nearly all of the episodes of anxiety happened at the highest dose. Crank it down one notch and you’re still likely to get most of the benefits but with significantly less chance of a bad experience.

But now for the most interesting result: psilocybin produces not only mystical experiences, but joy, happiness, and positive social effects. And it does it for a long time: in followup interviews 14 months after the study was completed, nearly all the subjects still reported positive changes in their lives, especially if they received their psilocybin in increasing dosages. (Half the study volunteers got the highest dose first and worked down, and half started with the lowest does and worked up. All volunteers also got a placebo tossed in at some point.) Here are the geeky charts you’ve been waiting for: . . .

Continue reading. Shouldn’t this drug be legal for use under a doctor’s direction?

Interesting idea, again from The Scientist, this time by Tia Ghose:

Early stage research often gets dinged for not including enough trial subjects to be statistically valid. But adhering to the large sample-size dogma is counterproductive, says Peter Bacchetti, a biostatistician at the University of California, San Francisco. Large sample sizes waste time on unsuccessful ideas as most early stage trials fail, and can even prevent innovative treatments from moving forward if trials that don’t recruit enough patients are never performed, he argues in a perspectives piece published online today (June 15) in Science Translational Medicine.

This week, Bacchetti took time to speak with The Scientist about why sample size isn’t everything, and what scientists can use instead to measure a study’s worth.

The Scientist: Why does starting small make sense?

Peter Bacchetti: Because . . .

Continue reading.

Very interesting development reported in The Scientist by Bob Grant:

The US Food and Drug Administration recommends that doctors genotype patients before prescribing more than 70 commonly-used medications for specific genetic biomarkers. These tests, the agency suggests, can help physicians identify those in which the drug is less efficacious, poorly metabolized, or dangerous. But medicine is still far from a day when drugs and treatment regimes are fitted precisely to a patient’s genomic profile.

According to a 2008 survey conducted by the American Medical Association (AMA) and Medco Research Institute, even though 98 percent of physicians agreed that the genetic profiles of their patients may influence drug therapy, only 10 percent believed they were adequately informed about how to test their patients for biomarkers that may predict the safety and/or efficacy of a particular drug. . .

Continue reading.

Quite interesting.

Via Scott Feldstein’s blog:

After 40 years, the War on Drugs has proved to be an expensive and utter failure for the public, though as with the prohibition of alcohol, it has resulted in a wealthy and powerful criminal class that is strong enough to weaken national governments. Jimmy Carter has an excellent op-ed in the NY Times today:

IN an extraordinary new initiative announced earlier this month, the Global Commission on Drug Policy has made some courageous and profoundly important recommendations in a report on how to bring more effective control over the illicit drug trade. The commission includes the former presidents or prime ministers of five countries, a former secretary general of the United Nations, human rights leaders, and business and government leaders, including Richard Branson, George P. Shultz and Paul A. Volcker.

The report describes the total failure of the present global antidrug effort, and in particular America’s “war on drugs,” which was declared 40 years ago today. It notes that the global consumption of opiates has increased 34.5 percent, cocaine 27 percent and cannabis 8.5 percent from 1998 to 2008. Its primary recommendations are to substitute treatment for imprisonment for people who use drugs but do no harm to others, and to concentrate more coordinated international effort on combating violent criminal organizations rather than nonviolent, low-level offenders.

These recommendations are compatible with United States drug policy from three decades ago. In a message to Congress in 1977, I said the country should decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, with a full program of treatment for addicts. I also cautioned against filling our prisons with young people who were no threat to society, and summarized by saying: “Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.”

These ideas were widely accepted at the time. But in the 1980s President Ronald Reaganand Congress began to shift from balanced drug policies, including the treatment and rehabilitation of addicts, toward futile efforts to control drug imports from foreign countries.

This approach entailed an enormous expenditure of resources and the dependence on police and military forces to reduce the foreign cultivation of marijuana, coca and opium poppy and the production of cocaine and heroin. One result has been a terrible escalation in drug-related violence, corruption and gross violations of human rights in a growing number of Latin American countries.

The commission’s facts and arguments are persuasive. It recommends that governments be encouraged to experiment “with models of legal regulation of drugs … that are designed to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens.” For effective examples, they can look to policies that have shown promising results in Europe, Australia and other places.

But they probably won’t turn to the United States for advice. Drug policies here are more punitive and counterproductive than in other democracies, and have brought about anexplosion in prison populations. At the end of 1980, just before I left office, 500,000 people were incarcerated in America; at the end of 2009 the number was nearly 2.3 million. There are 743 people in prison for every 100,000 Americans, a higher portion than in any other country and seven times as great as in Europe. Some 7.2 million people are either in prison or on probation or parole — more than 3 percent of all American adults!

Some of this increase has been caused by . . .

Continue reading.