Later On

Fascinating article, difficult (as you see) to capture in a headline. It’s in New Scientist, it’s by Amanda Gepfer, and it begins:

It wasn’t so long ago we thought space and time were the absolute and unchanging scaffolding of the universe. Then along came Albert Einstein, who showed that different observers can disagree about the length of objects and the timing of events. His theory of relativity unified space and time into a single entity – space-time. It meant the way we thought about the fabric of reality would never be the same again. “Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade into mere shadows,” declared mathematician Hermann Minkowski. “Only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”

But did Einstein’s revolution go far enough? Physicist Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, doesn’t think so. He and a trio of colleagues are aiming to take relativity to a whole new level, and they have space-time in their sights. They say we need to forget about the home Einstein invented for us: we live instead in a place called phase space.

If this radical claim is true, it could solve a troubling paradox about black holes that has stumped physicists for decades. What’s more, it could set them on the path towards their heart’s desire: a “theory of everything” that will finally unite general relativity and quantum mechanics.

So what is phase space? It is a curious eight-dimensional world that merges our familiar four dimensions of space and time and a four-dimensional world called momentum space.

Momentum space isn’t as alien as it first sounds. When you look at the world around you, says Smolin, you don’t ever observe space or time – instead you see energy and momentum. When you look at your watch, for example, photons bounce off a surface and land on your retina. By detecting the energy and momentum of the photons, your brain reconstructs events in space and time.

The same is true of physics experiments. . .

Continue reading.

I am staggered by the effrontery of a police department hauling people in for violations of police department aesthetic standards. Is this a new development we can expect all over this great (and fearful) nation of ours? Take a look.

I wonder if galleries in Long Beach have to get a police permit when they show art to prove that the art is police-approved?

I posted the following on wicked_edge, but it has not proved popular. I believe that the notion (that some brushes are soap brushes and some are shaving-cream brushes) is strongly embedded in some of the forums, in the “not to be questioned” category. If anyone knows a brush for which the claim is made that it cannot get a good lather from soap, I’d like to know.

Here’s what I posted:

Take a look. Then take another look.

Some signs of hope, that I’m sure the Obama Administration will pull out all stops to quash. Dahlia Lithwick at Slate:

Last week, a federal district court judge in Washington, D.C., determined that a lawsuit filed against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld by a former military translator who claimed to have been tortured by U.S. forces at Camp Cropper in Iraq could go forward despite claims from Rumsfeld and the Obama administration that he should be immune from suit. After assessing the claims of “John Doe,” Judge James S. Gwin found that American citizens don’t lose their constitutional rights simply because it’s wartime. “The court finds no convincing reason,” wrote Gwin, “that United States citizens in Iraq should or must lose previously-declared substantive due process protections during prolonged detention in a conflict zone abroad.”

On Monday, a three-judge panel from the Chicago-based 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals came to pretty much the same conclusion. Reviewing a different lawsuit, filed by two different military contractors, alleging similar forms of abuse at the same camp, the panel determined, with one judge filing a partial dissent, that their suit against Rumsfeld could proceed.The case of Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel reads like Catch-22, updated for an even sillier war. In a 2006 profile of Vance for theNew York Times, Michael Moss laid out the story: Vance was “a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a security contractor. He wound up as a whistle-blower, passing information to the FBI about suspicious activities at the Iraqi security firm where he worked, including what he said was possible illegal weapons trading. But when American soldiers raided the company at his urging, Mr. Vance and another American who worked there [Ertel] were detained as suspects by the military, which was unaware that Mr. Vance was an informer, according to officials and military documents.”

Vance and Ertel became suspicious about activities at Shield Group Security the Iraqi security firm that employed them—activities that included stockpiling weapons and offering liquor to U.S. soldiers in exchange for bullets and weapon repairs. When he became an informant for the FBI, he was risking his life to protect national security. Shield Group Security began to suspect Vance and Ertel and things got hairy. A military team sent in to rescue them ended up shipping them to Camp Cropper and warehoused them at Compound 5, the maximum-security unit where Saddam Hussein was held.

Overnight, Vance and Ertel went from U.S. contractors to “enemy combatants,” and both were allegedly subjected to sleep deprivation, aggressive interrogation, blindfolding, shackling, hooding, and “walling.” Both were denied access to legal counsel for their appearances before the Detainee Status Board, and neither was allowed to see the evidence against them. Writing for the majority today, Judge David Hamilton doesn’t mince words about this treatment: . . .

Continue reading.

This is the Week of Synthetic Brushes, a festival that is celebrated in my apartment. I don’t have six synthetics, so I began yesterday with the Wee Scot, entranced by using a brush smaller than the shave stick. But the Wee Scot, of course, is a high-quality badger brush, so now I embark upon the synthetics. This Omega Lucretia Borgia model was my first “artificial badger” synthetic and remains a favorite: excellent performance, good feel, and (to my eye, at any rate) an attractive appearance.

I did the lengthy loading that Creamy Lather requires and I got a fine, rich lather from the Geo. F. Trumper Rose shaving soap. This is a tallow-based, triple-milled shaving soap that delivers great lather. Nothing wrong with quality, if you ask me.

I really like the Merkur Progress and if you’re considering an adjustable razor, think about this one. Nice chunky feel, and the closest modern equivalent to the redoubtable Mikron Apollo.

A commenter had asked about rose-fragranced aftershaves, since he wanted to continue the theme of the soap. Rose is a classic English men’s fragrance—from the Wars of the Roses, perhaps?—and a real delight, but I drew a blank on the aftershaves. “Coral” doesn’t connect with “rose” in my mind, but Coral Skin Food is indeed rose-fragranced, as is D.R. Harris Pink Lotion. And of course there’s Thayers Rose Petal Witch Hazel Toner (toner=no alcohol, astringent=10% alcohol, highly astringent=20% alcohol, in the Thayers line) is nice, but a trifle lacking in zip. (The Thayers Sampler Pack is a good way to try out their product line.)

You probably have already seen Buffett’s op-ed in today’s NY Times, the one that begins:

OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.

These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot. . .

Continue reading.

The Wife and I love cilantro, but to The Eldest it tastes like soap—a common complaint from those who don’t like the taste of soap. From an article by Harold McGee in the NY Times:

. . . Some people may be genetically predisposed to dislike cilantro, according to often-cited studies by Charles J. Wysocki of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. But cilantrophobe genetics remain little known and aren’t under systematic investigation. Meanwhile, history, chemistry, and neurology have been adding some valuable pieces to the puzzle.

The coriander plant is native to the eastern Mediterranean, and European cooks used both seeds and leaves well into medieval times.

Helen Leach, an anthropologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, has traced unflattering remarks about cilantro flavor and the bug etymology — not endorsed by modern dictionaries — back to English garden books and French farming books from around 1600, when medieval dishes had fallen out of fashion. She suggests that cilantro was disparaged as part of a general effort to define the new European table against the flavors of the old.

Modern cilantrophobes tend to describe the offending flavor as soapy rather than buggy. I don’t hate cilantro, but it does sometimes remind me of hand lotion. Each of these associations turns out to make good chemical sense.

Flavor chemists have found that cilantro aroma is created by a half-dozen or so substances, and most of these are modified fragments of fat molecules called aldehydes. The same or similar aldehydes are also found in soaps and lotions and the bug family of insects.

Soaps are made by fragmenting fat molecules with strongly alkaline lye or its equivalent, and aldehydes are a byproduct of this process, as they are when oxygen in the air attacks the fats and oils in cosmetics. And many bugs make strong-smelling, aldehyde-rich body fluids to attract or repel other creatures.

The published studies of cilantro aroma describe individual aldehydes as having both cilantrolike and soapy qualities. Several flavor chemists told me in e-mail messages that they smell a soapy note in the whole herb as well, but still find its aroma fresh and pleasant.

So the cilantro aldehydes are olfactory Jekyll-and-Hydes. Why is it only the evil, soapy side that shows up for cilantrophobes, and not the charming one?

I posed this question to Jay Gottfried, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University who studies how the brain perceives smells.

Dr. Gottfried turned out to be a former cilantrophobe who could speak from personal experience. He said that the great cilantro split probably reflects the primal importance of smell and taste to survival, and the brain’s constant updating of its database of experiences.

The senses of smell and taste evolved to evoke strong emotions, he explained, because they were critical to finding food and mates and avoiding poisons and predators. When we taste a food, the brain searches its memory to find a pattern from past experience that the flavor belongs to. Then it uses that pattern to create a perception of flavor, including an evaluation of its desirability.

If the flavor doesn’t fit a familiar food experience, and instead fits into a pattern that involves chemical cleaning agents and dirt, or crawly insects, then the brain highlights the mismatch and the potential threat to our safety. We react strongly and throw the offending ingredient on the floor where it belongs.

“When your brain detects a potential threat, it narrows your attention,” Dr. Gottfried told me in a telephone conversation. “You don’t need to know that a dangerous food has a hint of asparagus and sorrel to it. You just get it away from your mouth.”

But he explained that every new experience causes the brain to update and enlarge its set of patterns, and this can lead to a shift in how we perceive a food.

“I didn’t like cilantro to begin with,” he said. “But I love food, and I ate all kinds of things, and I kept encountering it. My brain must have developed new patterns for cilantro flavor from those experiences, which included pleasure from the other flavors and the sharing with friends and family. That’s how people in cilantro-eating countries experience it every day.”

“So I began to like cilantro,” he said. “It can still remind me of soap, but it’s not threatening anymore, so that association fades into the background, and I enjoy its other qualities. On the other hand, if I ate cilantro once and never willingly let it pass my lips again, there wouldn’t have been a chance to reshape that perception.”

Cilantro itself can be reshaped to make it easier to take. A Japanese study published in January suggested that crushing the leaves will give leaf enzymes the chance to gradually convert the aldehydes into other substances with no aroma.

Sure enough, I’ve found cilantro pestos to be lotion-free and surprisingly mild. They actually have deeper roots in the Mediterranean than the basil version, and can be delicious on pasta and breads and meats. If you’re looking to work on your cilantro patterns, pesto might be the place to start.

I think the Catholic church, as an organization and institution, has indeed lost its way. Laurie Goodstein has this report in the NY Times:

In the annals of the sexual abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, most of the cases that have come to light happened years before to children and teenagers who have long since grown into adults.

But a painfully fresh case is devastating Catholics in Kansas City, Mo., where a priest, who was arrested in May, has been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of taking indecent photographs of young girls, most recently during an Easter egg hunt just four months ago.

Bishop Robert Finn of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph has acknowledged that he knew of the existence of photographs last December but did not turn them over to the police until May.

A civil lawsuit filed last week claims that during those five months, the priest, the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, attended children’s birthday parties, spent weekends in the homes of parish families, hosted the Easter egg hunt and presided, with the bishop’s permission, at a girl’s First Communion.

“All these parishioners just feel so betrayed, because we knew nothing,” said Thu Meng, whose daughter attended the preschool in Father Ratigan’s last parish. “And we were welcoming this guy into our homes, asking him to come bless this or that. They saw all these signs, and they didn’t do anything.”

The case has generated fury at a bishop who was already a polarizing figure in his diocese, and there are widespread calls for him to resign or even to be prosecuted. Parishioners started a Facebook page called “Bishop Finn Must Go” and are circulating a petition. An editorial in The Kansas City Star in June calling for the bishop to step down concluded that prosecutors must “actively pursue all relevant criminal charges” against everyone involved.

Stoking much of the anger is the fact that only three years ago, Bishop Finn settled lawsuits with 47 plaintiffs in sexual abuse cases for $10 million and agreed to a long list of preventive measures, among them to immediately report anyone suspected of being a pedophile to law enforcement authorities.

Michael Hunter, an abuse victim who was part of that settlement and is now the president of the Kansas City chapter of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said: “There were 19 nonmonetary agreements that the diocese signed on to, and they were things like reporting immediately to the police. And they didn’t do it. That’s really what sickens us as much as the abuse.” . . .

Continue reading. Of course, if things start looking bad for the bishop, he will be spirited out of the country and given a cushy job in the Vatican, where they have high regard for this sort of thing. They gave that sort of reward to Cardinal Law of Boston.

The Catholic church doesn’t seem too concerned about pedophilia in its ranks. What really enrages it are things like birth control (even when used by non-Catholics), abortion rights, and homosexual rights (including marriage): those are the sorts of things the Catholic church sees as things to be fought to the death. Pedophilia, so far as one can tell from their actions, is mainly to be concealed and continued. And they damn sure don’t want the police notified or otherwise involved in any way. The church knows how to handle this kind of problem. (Transfer the priest to a new parish.)

Dean Baker has a regular routine of pointing out the many errors and what amount to lies in Robert Samuleson’s columns in the Washington Post, as he does here:

It’s always fun to read Robert Samuelson’s column on Monday morning to see what silliness he is pushing to justify cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Today he has his plan for balancing the budget over the next decade (the country’s most important problem for people who never heard about unemployment).

As part of his argument for cutting benefits for the elderly Samuelson tells us that, “in 2008, the median net worth of married elderly couples was $385,000.” (Actually, if we check his source, it looks like the year is 2007.)

Okay boys and girls, can anyone think of anything that might have affected the net worth of the elderly between 2007 and today? Apparently no one at the Post has noticed anything or they might have suggested that Samuelson try to use more recent data in his column.

Naturally, Samuelson doesn’t suggest doing anything about the real cause of his deficit crisis story, exploding private sector health care costs. Nor does he consider any measures that might hurt the Wall Street folks that helped inflate the housing bubble that wrecked the economy. But who would expect more from Samuelson or Fox on 15th Street?

Very compact shave. The Palmolive shave stick is terrific, but I’d love a work with their marketing director: that foil really should be imprinted with the logo. There’s nothing to identify the product at this point save my memory, though I do have to recognize that most shavers probably don’t have a dozen or so shave sticks open.

The Wee Scot produced a wonderful lather, and I am still amazed at the little guy’s capacity: no worries at all about not having enough lather for three passes. You guys who travel should consider this mighty mouse.

Three smooth passes with the vintage Merkur Slant using a Schick Plus Platinum blade. Because of a query on Wicked_Edge I kept track of how often I rinsed my blade. I was somewhat surprised to find that I can do the entire first pass without a rinse: the razor can readily hold that much lather. I normally, though, do rinse the razor for the upper lip so I can see better. But this came out to be one rinse per pass with little effort.

But then at the end a good rinse with hot water, then with cold, then the alum bar. After cleaning up the sink area, a final rinse, dry, and splash of TOBS No. 74. It’s good to start the week with a great shave.

The video in the post at the link is electrifying—and it has a reality that transcends any mere movie-making. And it is from just hours ago. This is, in effect, happening now.

Take a look.

A useful list.

It amazes me the degree to which people find it difficult to learn from the experience of others. The Japanese public are rapidly finding out the degree to which their government and their nuclear power industry were in collusion to underplay risks and hide negative findings, keeping secret the dangers until after thousands had been exposed. It’s as if the US thinks it is somehow immune to such things, when in fact our own nuclear industry is a safety shambles: we store more spent fuel rods in less water than the Japanese ever considered doing, and the companies doing that are now circling the wagons (with the government’s help) and denying that there are any risks at all. So I guess we’ll need our own disaster before we’ll wake up and take action.

Our government is now a tax-law debating society and is currently ignoring its responsibility to govern, and the public on the whole seems satisfied with that. Weird. Ralph Vartabedian reports for the LA Times:

The Energy Department has asserted that Bechtel Corp. underplayed safety risks from equipment it is installing at the nation’s largest nuclear waste cleanup project, according to government records.

A federal engineering review team found in late July that Bechtel’s safety evaluation of key equipment at the plant at the Hanford site in Washington state was incomplete and that “the risks are more serious” than Bechtel acknowledged when it sought approval to continue with construction, the documents say.

Senior scientists at the site said in emails obtained by The Times that Bechtel’s designs for tanks and mixing equipment are flawed, representing such a massive risk that work should be stopped on that part of the construction project.

But Energy Department officials in Washington said they believed the problems were fixable and that they had authorized Bechtel to keep going for the time being. Bechtel officials said Friday that the matter was not a safety issue and that sticking to the current construction schedule would save money.

The Hanford project is the most important environmental cleanup program in the nation. It seeks to prevent 56 million gallons of radioactive sludge in underground tanks, some of which are leaking, from contaminating the nearby Columbia River.

Bechtel is under contract to build a $12.3-billion treatment plant at the former nuclear weapons center to convert the radioactive sludge to solid glass that could be more safely buried at a future high-level waste dump.

But the plant has been repeatedly stung by problems and delays, including a 2006 work stoppage when engineers determined it could not withstand a severe earthquake and that major retrofitting was required.

The latest problem hit this year, when engineers and scientists began to raise serious doubts about the safety of key tanks and mixing systems that would process the radioactive waste.

A government engineering team and a separate safety team evaluated the Bechtel design and determined that it did not meet safety requirements set by the Energy Department, and that Bechtel had failed to justify a request to continue construction.

In an Aug. 2 letter, Dale Knutson, the Energy Department’s senior on-site manager, told Bechtel officials that their requests to continue construction had “insufficient information for demonstrating that the … vessels will meet their credited safety functions.”

But Knutson authorized Bechtel to continue construction anyway, including welding shut tanks that use a controversial new mixing technology. . .

Continue reading.

Apparently once the evidence is sufficiently overwhelming, at least some will respond. It would be interesting to study the differences between those evangelicals that recognize the facts presented by evidence and those who continue to shut their eyes to those facts. This report is by Barbara Hagerty at NPR:

Let’s go back to the beginning — all the way to Adam and Eve, and to the question: Did they exist, and did all of humanity descend from that single pair?

According to the Bible (Genesis 2:7), this is how humanity began: “The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” God then called the man Adam, and later created Eve from Adam’s rib.

Polls by Gallup and the Pew Research Center find that four out of 10 Americans believe this account. It’s a central tenet for much of conservative Christianity, from evangelicals to confessional churches such as the Christian Reformed Church.

But now some conservative scholars are saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account. Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: “That would be against all the genomic evidence that we’ve assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all.”

Venema says there is no way we can be traced back to a single couple. He says with the mapping of the human genome, it’s clear that modern humans emerged from other primates as a large population — long before the Genesis time frame of a few thousand years ago. And given the genetic variation of people today, he says scientists can’t get that population size below 10,000 people at any time in our evolutionary history.To get down to just two ancestors, Venema says, “You would have to postulate that there’s been this absolutely astronomical mutation rate that has produced all these new variants in an incredibly short period of time. Those types of mutation rates are just not possible. It would mutate us out of existence.”

Venema is a senior fellow at BioLogos Foundation, a Christian group that tries to reconcile faith and science. The group was founded by Francis Collins, an evangelical and the current head of the National Institutes of Health, who, because of his position, declined an interview.

And Venema is part of a growing cadre of Christian scholars who say they want their faith to come into the 21st century. Another one is John Schneider, who taught theology at Calvin College in Michigan until recently. He says it’s time to face facts: There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence.

“Evolution makes it pretty clear that in nature, and in the moral experience of human beings, there never was any such paradise to be lost,” Schneider says. “So Christians, I think, have a challenge, have a job on their hands to reformulate some of their tradition about human beginnings.”

To many evangelicals, this is heresy. . .

Continue reading for how some cling to the Genesis myth in the face of massive physical evidence to the contrary. What’s weird is that these same people have no trouble at all in seeing that factual evidence contradicts (say) the pantheon of Gods of the Mayan, Aztec, classical Greek, Norse religions. But somehow (they think) their own religion is totally different in this regard, and for their own religion facts are irrelevant. Or something. (I do not fully understand the mindset, I’ll grant.)

Interesting report by Gretchen Cuda-Kroen of NPR on one origin of food preferences:

Want your child to love veggies? Start early. Very early. Research shows that what a woman eats during pregnancy not only nourishes her baby in the womb, but may shape food preferences later in life.

At 21 weeks after conception, a developing baby weighs about as much as a can of Coke — and he or she can taste it, too. Still in the womb, the growing baby gulps down several ounces of amniotic fluid daily. That fluid surrounding the baby is actually flavored by the foods and beverages the mother has eaten in the last few hours.

“Things like vanilla, carrot, garlic, anise, mint — these are some of the flavors that have been shown to be transmitted to amniotic fluid or mother’s milk,” says Julie Mennella, who studies taste in infants at the Monell Chemical Senses Center. In fact, Mennella says there isn’t a single flavor they have found that doesn’t show up in utero. Her work has been published in the journal Pediatrics.

To determine whether flavors are passed from the mother to the the baby via the amniotic fluid, researchers gave women garlic capsules or sugar capsules before taking a routine sample of their amniotic fluid — and then asked a panel of people to smell the samples.

“And it was easy,” says Mennella. “They could pick out the samples easily from the women who ate garlic.” The sense of taste is actually 90-percent smell, she added, so they knew just from the odor that the babies could taste it. . .

Continue reading to learn about carrot-juice experiments performed on unborn children!!!

I guess the genre is probably caper cum political thriller. At any rate, I’m enjoying a mature but still active Jean-Paul Belmondo in The Professional. This is one that keeps me watching.

Huh. I just looked again, and it’s available on Watch Instantly at a different link.

UPDATE: Another good movie, in two words: Donnie Yen. This one is Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen, and it’s available on Watch Instantly as well.

Not that I expect it will do any good: our country has doubled down on ignorance and a kind of belligerent victimhood from the wealthy Christian Right, who feel terribly discriminated against (though I recently read of an openly Christian man who was able to be elected to public office even though he was wealthy, if you can believe that).

Still, this article by Jackie Calmes in the NY Times is well worth reading:

The boasts of Congressional Republicans about their cost-cutting victories are ringing hollow to some well-known economists, financial analysts and corporate leaders, including some Republicans, who are expressing increasing alarm over Washington’s new austerity and antitax orthodoxy.

Their critiques have grown sharper since last week, when President Obama signed his deficit reduction deal with Republicans and, a few days later, when Standard & Poor’s downgraded the credit rating of the United States.

But even before that, macroeconomists and private sector forecasters were warning that the direction in which the new House Republican majority had pushed the White House and Congress this year — for immediate spending cuts, no further stimulus measures and no tax increases, ever — was wrong for addressing the nation’s two main ills, a weak economy now and projections of unsustainably high federal debt in coming years.

Instead, these critics say, Washington should be focusing on stimulating the economy in the near term to induce people to spend money and create jobs, while settling on a long-term plan for spending cuts and tax increases to take effect only after the economy recovers.

But Republicans in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail refuse to back down.

Economists disagree about the proper balance between spending cuts and tax increases in reducing a government’s debts. Some studies by both liberal and conservative economists suggest that emphasizing spending cuts is better for long-term growth. But there are few if any precedents for paying down such a large debt solely through spending cuts.

Among those calling for a mix of cuts and revenue are onetime standard-bearers of Republican economic philosophy like . . .

Continue reading.

Wonderful post by Deborah Fallows (the wife of James Fallows) on the joys of flying low and slow in a small plane. My father was a pilot and indeed made a little gyrocopter and flew it over Healdton. And my mother was taking flying lessons when I came along and ended those.

I like to try artisanal shaving soaps when I can, and Soapier got a glowing review at Wicked_Edge. So I ordered a couple of pucks (the standard order: $5.45 for the two), and they arrived yesterday. As to the pronunciation (whether it’s pronounced to mean “more soapy” or to mean “soapmonger”), I have no idea, but I’ve sent an email query. UPDATE: It’s pronounced to mean “more soapy.”

The other novelty—though I’ve used them previously, just not for a while—are the Treet Durasharp blades: coated carbon steel. (Treet seems to like the name “Durasharp” and uses that for several different blades. These are the ones packaged as shown.) I got one out after reading this post on Simply Shaving praising the blade. (I’m open to ideas.)

First, the soap. I used one of my stable (ahem) of fine horsehair brushes. Unfortunately, the lather I got was somewhat thinner than I like: somewhat sparse. I’ll try again, but perhaps my local water doesn’t work well with this soap. Certainly the reviewer to whom I linked above was quite enthusiastic.

Still, the lather worked for the shave and the Durasharp blade, in the Merkur 1904 Classic, did a fine job: very smooth and sharp. As usual with carbon steel, I ran the head of the razor under hot water to rinse off all soap, then swished the head in 99% rubbing alcohol (91% is also fine) to ensure that the blade was completely dry. (Alcohol displaces the water and then instantly evaporates.)

BTW, a tip I’m including in the 5th edition: I got my high-proof rubbing alcohol at Safeway, and it came in a plastic bottle, which I imagine is common. Over the course of 2-3 years, the alcohol has practically all evaporated through the porous plastic. My advice: when you get the rubbing alcohol home, transfer it to a glass bottle so you don’t lose it.

Although I use the alcohol rinse simply to dry the blade, guys with acne might want to use it routinely before and after the shave to sterilize the blade.

A splash Pashana set me up for our celebratory dinner tonight at Fifi’s: a terrific menu prepared under the direction of chef Janet Melac, former co-owner (with her husband Jacque) of Melac’s in Pacific Grove, by far our favorite restaurant of all time, which (alas) closed some years back when their child entered school and they wanted to be home in the evenings to be with him.

The menu:

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