Later On

Simply Shaving is gearing up for re-opening, and as part of that are offering some nice prizes. If you’re a shaver, join in!

People (in general) notoriously dislike change (in general). They cling to the relationships, jobs, neighborhoods, friends, stores, routes, restaurants, foods, etc., that they already know. Every administrator or manager has encountered strong and frequently emotional resistance to change—though I suppose all resistance originates in emotions, since rational arguments that favor a particular change usually don’t make a dent: people want things to stay the way they are, and if a change—new procedures, equipment, methods, organization, canteen hours, whatever—turmoil must ensue and be endured until things finally settle down. Then the formerly hated change becomes the new status quo, and people will now fight any changes to that.

Some resistance to change in organizations and societies comes from those in positions of power under the status quo: they usually view their power as derived not from themselves but from their position in the status quo, and if the status quo were to change, they fear they will lose power. So these people fight change, and their power often makes the fight effective. But it’s more than that: people will even resist changes that will improve things for them.

On the personal level it’s been observed that people who attempt personal change (to stop smoking, cut back on drinking, lose weight, and the like) are often sabotaged by their closest family and friends, who don’t like things to change (in general). Of course, it’s also possible that these intimates view such changes as an implicit rebuke, but mostly it seems to be a fear of change.

What’s up with that? I was thinking about it and it strikes me it has its roots in fear of the Big Change: death. Death is such a turn-off (both literally and figuratively) that people don’t want to think about it.

The (subconscious) idea is, “If I can just keep everything the way it is now, not allowing any changes, then I won’t die.” Because, of course, the final change for the individual is his or her death. People (in general) avoid looking directly at death—the number of euphemisms may even be greater than those for sex. In social exchanges people seem to embrace a tacit fantasy that death won’t happen. It’s something that people not only avoid discussing, they even avoid thinking about it.

For example, an elderly person complaining about diminished abilities is often reassured with something like, “Oh, you’re going to live forever.” This pathetic reassurance is transparently false, but it at least puts aside confronting the fact of death.

And because we won’t look squarely at death and its inevitably but push all such thoughts aside, away from our conscious mind, those concerns erupt in odd contexts (as in fighting change). I suddenly realize that this is related to the kinds of self-deception discussed by Daniel Goleman in Vital Lies, Simple Truths, a very interesting and highly recommended book.

Thanks to Joel for sending the link:

The soap at the bottom of the Marvy mug is Kingsley, an inexpensive shaving soap that’s not bad. The (new) brush is a Vie-Long badger+horsehair combo. I soaked it before first use, but the lather I got was not completely satisfactory now that I know about Creamy Lather. It seemed too loose, though certainly abundant. I did a fine first pass, using the Progress with its Swedish Gillette blade. I id notice that the Marvy is rather deep for using a regular brush and a relatively small puck. I would like a Marvy Jr. whose walls are not quite so tall.

For the second pass, I switched to a Vie-Long pure horsehair brush—the very brush with which I first observed Creamy Lather. I did indeed get a better lather, but still not quite the target. The Marvy’s tall walls are a disadvantage but since it’s made of hard rubber, I probably can cut them down a bit.

So on the third pass I went to the Gonzalo boar+horsehair. That effort generated the best lather of the three attempts, and the Gonzalo’s greater overall height made it slightly easier to use than the other, shorter brushes.

I compared Ogallala and TOBS Bay Rum as aftershaves. I definitely prefer TOBS, but these things are very shaver-dependent. The Ogallala seemed more watery than the TOBS (I assume because TOBS has more glycerin), and the TOBS had a richer fragrance. But you may find your preference is the reverse—this is very much YMMV territory.

Take a look at this list of 60 things you can do over the next 3 months to improve your life. (The article says over the next 100 days, but a good manager will cut development time by 10% to create excitement and also provide a buffer zone for schedule mishaps.)

No electronics allowed. The players that were created look wonderful: very steam-punk. What attracted my attention is the rebirth of emotion on hearing recorded music: the experience of taking a flat disk and spinning it under a needle, and then music comes out regains its novelty and excitement.

More detailed photos here, but this short video shows the process and lets you hear the results:

There is London Dry Gin, the most familiar variety. And Dutch gin. And the Plymouth gins, of which Plymouth Gin is the last distillery left of that type.

According to me and also to people who know much more than I, the best gin for a Martini is Plymouth Gin. I have long favored Noilly Prat Dry Vermouth as the vermouth, but I read a few years back that they have changed the formulation, so you’re on your own there. Vya has quite a few adherents, but I’ve not tried it. Yet.

So how do they make it so good? Here:

I love book lists. Here’s a good one in the Guardian.

Hackers are getting better tools and more support from various governments. This article struck me because of recent gmail hackings.

Here are a couple of lists of good apps:

Ten apps for the iPhone that (it says) you should install first.

Ten best smartphone apps to save money.

My friend Mr. Beetner pointed out decades ago that when a politician says, “I will not resign,” a wise office manager will call the movers and start packing: it’s all over. The reason is clear: when the situation gets to the point that the politician has to publicly state that s/he will not resign, it’s well past the point of recovery. And, being a politician, the opportunity for one more lie is irresistible. (Sorry: I also could not resist.)

This thought was raised by the news this morning that Rep. Anthony Weiner will resign. I knew he would the instant he announced that he would not.

I tried a new shaving soap today: Mountain Sky Olde Windsor Bar Soap—not to be confused with Woods of Windsor, a traditional shave soap in the traditional format. This one is part of the Mountain Sky line of interesting soaps.

I used a Rooney Super Silvertip Style 3, Size 1, but in the process of the shave tried also a Vie-Long horsehair brush and the Vie-Long Gonzalo horsehair/boar mix. I was totally unable to get a Creamy Lather, though that could be me and not the soap. OTOH, in looking at the ingredients in their products (scroll down at the link for product-specific ingredients—and note the Anise Re-bar, the first bar soap listed) the soap has an unusual mix of ingredients:

Olde Windsor - Ingredients: cocos nucifera (coconut) oil, canola oil, aqua (water), sodium hydroxide, cinamomum camphora (howood) oil, coriandrum sativum (coriander) fruit oil, eugenia caryophyllus (clove) flower oil, citrus medica limonum (lemon) peel oil, theobroma cacao (cocoa) seed butter, ricinus communis (castor) seed oil, allantoin (comfrey extract), linum usitatissimum (flax seed) powder, butyrospermum parkii (shea butter) fruit, glycerin

As I said, the lather was not bad, but not the Creamy Lather I’m now seeking.

I also tried my earlier iKon, with the straight-bar head that I purchased separately. I wanted to compare the feel of this one with the one on the OSS. I think the OSS is slightly more aggressive, though both have the comfort that seems to be an iKon characteristic.

Three passes, trying a different brush for each and alternating the two razors. It took a little longer, but I ended with a fine shave. I used TOBS Bay Rum, and since the back of the bottle never gets shown, I feature that.

Take a look.

Radley Balko has an important article, looking at the issue of imprisoning people who in fact are not guilty of the crime for which they were convicted. It begins:

When Paul House was finally released from prison in 2008, he was a specter of the man who had been sentenced to death more than 22 years earlier. When I visit his home in Crossville, Tennessee, in March, House’s mother Joyce, who has cared for him since his release, points to a photo of House taken the day he was finally allowed to come home. In that photo and others from his last days in prison, House is all of 150 pounds, ashen and drawn, his fragile frame nearly consumed by his wheelchair. In most of the images he looks days away from death, although in one he wears the broad smile of a man finally escaping a long confinement.

When House’s aunt called to congratulate him on his first day back, his mother handed him her cell phone so he could chat. He inspected the phone, gave her a frustrated look, and asked her to find him one that worked. That kind of Rip Van Winkle moment is common among people freed after a long stint in prison. Dennis Fritz, one of the two wrongly convicted men profiled in John Grisham’s 2006 bookThe Innocent Man, talks about nearly calling the police upon seeing someone use an electronic key card the first time he found himself in a hotel after his release. He thought he’d witnessed a burglar use a credit card to jimmy open a door.

“Paul’s first meal when he got home was chili verde,” Joyce House says. “It’s his favorite. And I had been waiting a long time to make it for him.” And apparently quite a few meals after that. House, now 49, has put on 75 pounds since his release. More important, he has been getting proper treatment for his advanced-stage multiple sclerosis, treatment the Tennessee prison system hadn’t given him.

The years of inadequate care have taken a toll. House can’t walk, and he needs help with such basic tasks as bathing, feeding himself, and maneuvering around in his wheelchair. His once distinctively deep voice (which had allegedly been heard by a witness at the crime scene) is now wispy and high-pitched. He spends his time playing computer games and watching game shows.

In the hour or so that I visit with House, his mental facilities fade in and out. Communicating with him can be like trying to listen to a baseball game broadcast by a distant radio station. He will give a slurred but lucid answer to one question, then answer the next one with silence, or with the answer to a previous question, or just with a random assortment of words. He frequently falls back on the resigned refrain, “Oh, well,” delivered with a shrug. The gesture and phrasing are identical every time he uses them. It’s what House says to kill the expectation that he will be able to deliver the words others in the room are waiting for. It’s his signal to stop waiting for him and move on.

In 1986 House was convicted of murdering Carolyn Muncey in Union County, Tennessee, a rural part of the state that shoulders Appalachia. He was sentenced to death. His case is a textbook study in wrongful conviction. It includes mishandled evidence, prosecutorial misconduct, bad science, cops with tunnel vision, DNA testing, the near-execution of an innocent man, and an appellate court reluctant to reopen old cases even in the face of new evidence that strongly suggests the jury got it wrong. . .

Continue reading.

It was beginning to look as though prosecuting attorneys would be granted immunity regardless of the blatant injustice of their actions (including hiding exonerating evidence in order to convict an innocent person: that’s fine, says the Supreme Court). But now a prosecutor has finally been held accountable.

A couple of days ago, I mentioned in a post how few seem able to discuss a topic in a way that advances the argument toward a better understanding. From the post:

Part of the problem is that many discussions do not follow a thread of argument, with the two parties working together to make sure each step is sound. Instead, most discussions I see—particularly on-line—work as though each participant has a deck of cards, each containing a fact or opinion or quotation. Participants take turns putting those cards on the table, but seldom do they try to work out connections or sequence. Indeed, sometimes it seems as if a player is looking only at his own cards, picking those he will lay down in his next turn, and not even looking at those placed by his discussion partner.

I realized this morning that the discussion model I described is a debate, not what I would call a true discussion. Competition is endemic in the US: we are bombarded with praise for the virtues of competition, sports competitions are a major source of entertainment, televised discussions on politics follow (often explicitly) the debate model, and cooperation is seldom praised or even exemplified. (At this point, I must recommend Alfie Kohn’s No Contest: The Case Against Competition and Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes — his arguments and evidence are convincing.)

One problem with the debate model is that it requires an impartial third party to observe and decide. The two participants focus their efforts and energy on each making the best possible case for his position, each trying his best to refute or at least undermine points raised by his opponent. Then, at the end, each awaits the decision of the judge(s). They do not even consider becoming persuaded: that’s not what a debate is about. It’s about winning, and the measure of success is the decision of the judge. Debaters are opponents, not partners.

Another problem with debate is that it is not an exploration: instead, each party begins with a position—in effect, they start with the conclusion they want to reach. Every argument each advances aims to establish the position with which they began, not to find the truth of the matter.

Whenever you begin with conclusion in hand and look for arguments to support and defend it, you’re playing a mug’s game: you can always find things consistent with some position. If you truly want to establish a position as true, you seek arguments and evidence that contradict it, and you look carefully at their truth and validity. If, not matter how hard you try, you are unable to successfully contradict a position, it may well be right.

Of course, we do not always have a position in mind: sometimes we want to figure out the truth of the matter, to decide what the true position is. The debate model doesn’t work for this approach at all: in a debate, you must have a position going in, and you must defend that position no matter what the opponent argues.

In real life we would be better off in most cases to use dialectic, rather than debate, as our model. Dialectic in its simplest form is a two-person effort to reach the truth because two are better able to advance than one. A similar notion—that two working together can achieve more than one working alone—is also seen in mountain climbing, for example, and that’s the model to keep in mind: two climbers attempting an ascent do not try to make each other fall. They work together, helping each other, so that they can climb as high as possible, together achieving a greater height than either could alone.

In dialectic the partners work together to find understanding—understanding the truth, which requires understanding each other’s position, partly because some of the truth may be in one or the other position, but also because understanding each other will assist in the cooperative enterprise. This means more than simply understanding what the other is saying—that’s true even in debate, though in a debate the purpose of understanding what the opponent says is to deliver a more efficient and effective rebuttal Note that to “win” you must attempt to rebut your opponent even when you realize that his position makes sense and you in fact agree with it and now see the flaws in your own position. You can’t support your opponent’s position in a debate or you’ll “lose”. Thus debates are frequently dishonest and lack integrity.

In a dialectic, unlike a debate, it is vital to understand both what the other is saying and also why they are saying it: how did they get to this position from the first principles on which you both agree? And how did you reach your position? The two of you work together, testing each link in the chain of reasoning to find where errors were made, regardless of who made the error. The goal is to construct (together) a flawless chain of reasoning and discover the truth.

If you don’t agree on first principles, the discussion must begin there, digging into the foundations to see why each of you has accepted your principles—especially when you find that you and your partner hold principles that contradict each other. If two statements are contradictory, at most one can be true (in the sense of corresponding to reality). So, if a principle you hold as true and self-evident is contradicted by a principle your partner holds, the two of you should be delighted: right away you’ve both learned something. You now both know that at most one of the two statements can be true. By working together you might be able to work out which is true or, possibly, that neither is true, which enables you jointly to discover a new version of the principle that is true (corresponding to reality).

I should add a parenthetical note: my friend Robert Spaeth pointed out the importance of making principles explicit, especially when someone states, “It’s a matter of principle.” Whenever you hear such a statement, always ask exactly what principle is at stake. Do not assume you know the principle to which the speaker refers. Always ask, and then examine the principle to see whether it makes sense. Sometimes when you ask which specific principle is meant, you’ll be quite surprised at the answer. Sometimes, indeed, it seems almost as if the speaker did not have a principle in mind but simply was using the phrase “It’s a matter of principle” as meaning “QED”—which it doesn’t, unfortunately. “It’s a matter of principle” is generally the beginning rather than the end of a true discussion.

Roger Fisher and William Ury, in their book Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, describe a process for a dialectic in which you and your negotiating partner (often called “the other side”) are working to find agreement with respect to a negotiation rather than to a logical argument. Most negotiations are conducted on the debate model (in which one side wins and the other loses), but Fisher and Ury make a strong case that the debate model is inappropriate for a negotiation: no third party is observing the discussion to decide who “won”. In a typical negotiation, just the two parties are involved, and if they fail to reach agreement, then the negotiation fails.

In the book—which I highly recommend—they suggest that the two parties sit not on opposite sides of a table, facing each other (which supports the idea of debate model that the two are opponents), but rather that they sit on the same side of the table, facing a blackboard on which they will jointly develop a solution: an agreement that they both can support. This is exactly the model of dialectic process: working together, cooperatively, to reach a mutually beneficial outcome.

Obviously, dialectic requires honesty and good faith from the participants: little can be achieved with a partner who advances arguments in bad faith and works only to compete and “win”. And to look seriously at your own arguments and recognize and acknowledge an error requires courage as well as honesty: it’s difficult, but it is enlightening, and once done, you get a wonderful sense of freedom: you have broken chains that bound you, cleared junk from your mental cupboard, and removed scales from your eyes. Achieving a better understanding is a refreshing rebirth that makes you stronger, not weaker. (That’s the reward for courage and honesty.)

It’s a fair amount of work to advance an argument, testing each link in the chain of reasoning and each statement against reality. If the two partners are not both committed to the process, it will not work. But if the two work together, dialectic can achieve amazing things.

I used the Vie-Long horsehair brush I bought from a fellow Pogonotomy forum member. The Malaspina I used this morning has a very nice fragrance—Tahitian Vanilla—but this was first use and the puck wanted to spin in the can, so loading the brush and working up the lather was a bit of a challenge. I got a somewhat sparse but thick lather, and on each pass I tried a different brush: another horsehair for pass 2, a new Edwin Jagger boar for pass 3. None of the lathers was spectacular, but my technique is still under development.

Still, enough lather for three smooth passes with the OSS and the Shark. I did notice that on the ATG pass the straight-bar side seemed to work a bit better. I want to test further.

A splash of Speick, and I’m ready to prepare the apartment for its fortnightly cleaning.

The US begins another war, running up quite a few recently for a nation that views itself as peace-oriented. Wars of aggression, too. And now this one gets seriously underway. Wonder whether the Nobel Committee can withdraw a prize once awarded? or at least clawback the financial award…

After losing 70 lbs over the past year, the usual question I get is, “Don’t you feel a lot better?” And my answer, as I’ve noted before, is, “No, not really.” When I was obese, I simply picked activities that would be within easy range of my diminished abilities, and since the activities I most enjoy were well within that range, I managed quite well. (For example, I was never a handball fanatic.)

In terms of changes I directly detect, they are: easier to get out of chair/car; walking up inclines no problem; can bend over easier with no roll of fat around my middle; and that’s about it for things I feel directly.

But then I observe (rather than feel directly) differences:

• On checking our flexible health savings account, we were quite surprised at how much money was remaining for the year: a moment’s reflection, though, showed that I have dropped 4 or 5 prescription meds, and a couple of those were quite expensive (not on the health insurance plan formulary). Also, one or two have gone generic, which cuts the cost.
• I can walk up hill and down with no sign of knee trouble.
• I recall, somewhat aghast, at how much meat I bought. I would leave the meat counter with 3 or 4 packages of meat. It wasn’t going to evaporate, I assure you. Now I visit the meat department rarely, and then almost always for chicken. I stop by the seafood counter more often, but not always. This has not be a conscious decision to avoid meat, which I still enjoy, it’s just happened as a matter of course as I pick foods for enjoyable meals that don’t pack on more weight.
• I’ve gradually learned to buy food in proper amounts, so my refrigerator is sparser. It does fill up on CSA delivery days, but generally, it’s got much more room—and will have more yet once I go through my mustard and condiment collection (again).
• I’ve clearly adjusted to a smaller amount of food, but I also look at food differently. More of that in the book, but essentially I have a much more utilitarian, less sentimental view of food without losing my gusto for culinary excellence.
• I have more tools with which to manage my weight: I have the 2-day plateau buster, I know how to count servings (and I maintain in my head now a rough count of what I’m eating); I know how to cut back if the scale goes up, and if that isn’t immediately effective, I go back to a food log, and that snaps everything back in place.
• As noted earlier, I sleep 8 hours a night (or slightly less) rather than 10—and I continue to go to bed when I’m sleepy and get up when I awaken. And I don’t get so tired just moving myself around (part weight loss, part being more fit).