Later On

I have repeatedly blogged how the Catholic church vigorously and knowingly protects pedophile priests, going to great lengths to keep them safe from detection and prosecution, even to the point of transferring them to new parishes (with new prey) when discovery is threatened. Indeed, bishops have agreed to stop this practice but then deliberately ignore their own agreements so as to provide the protection the pedophiles need. (See this post for an example.)

I do see, however, that this behavior seems common to all organizations: protect their members from those outside the organization at all costs—especially, it seems, if the outsiders are correct and the member is in the wrong. It’s a question of loyalty, as I’ve pointed out, and humans—as social animals—place a high value on group loyalty, much higher than the value placed on loyalty to principles and moral guidelines.

So the military covers up military crimes, the financial industry protects perpetrators of financial misdeeds, police forces protect aberrant members, and so on. Usually, at some point the misdeeds become so great that they threaten the group, at which point action is taken. But action is almost always delayed in order to hide the crime and protect the group: groups don’t like “outsiders”, even if (or especially if) they’re in the right and the group member is in the wrong.

It’s true for doctors as well. When doctors are caught in medical malpractice, the problem is finding other doctors who will testify. Difficult: doctors protect their own. And you’ll notice that many doctors (certainly not all: every group has members who are able to look dispassionately at the merits of individual cases, but these are almost always a small minority) feel that the best way to stop medical malpractice is to make it infeasible for victims to have recourse to the courts. These doctors spend all their energy attacking lawyers (“trial lawyers” can be said with a tone and inflection more commonly used with “serial rapists”) and trying to pass laws that prevent lawsuits or restrict awards regardless of harm done.

And, as in many cases of groups protection schemes, when a miscreant is eventually identified, typically by actions taken outside the group, the offenders are protected—the Catholic church transfers offenders to new locations, medical associations and licensing groups refuse to sanction members, and so on. This story, by Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein, is typical:

Two years ago, drugmaker Eli Lilly pleaded guilty to illegally marketing its blockbuster antipsychotic Zyprexa for elderly patients. Lilly paid $1.4 billion in criminal penalties and settlements in four civil lawsuits.

But a doctor named as a co-defendant in one suit – for allegedly taking kickbacks to prescribe the drug extensively at nursing homes – never was pursued.

Last year, Alpharma paid $42.5 million to settle federal allegations that it paid kickbacks to doctors to prescribe its painkiller Kadian.

“Health-care decisions must be based solely upon what is best for the individual patient and not on which pharmaceutical company is paying the doctor the biggest kickback,” Rod J. Rosenstein, U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland, said in a statement announcing the settlement.

But the doctors accused of trading prescriptions for paid speaking gigs faced no consequences.

At least 15 drug and medical-device companies have paid $6.5 billion since 2008 to settle accusations of marketing fraud or kickbacks. However, none of the more than 75 doctors named as participants were sanctioned, despite allegations of fraud or of conduct that put patients at risk, a review by ProPublica found.

Reporters reviewed hundreds of pages of court records and interviewed current and former federal prosecutors, state medical board officials, attorneys for whistleblowers and, when possible, the doctors. For each doctor identified in a suit, ProPublica checked for state medical board discipline, penalties from the Medicare program and federal criminal charges.

In many of the cases, it appears that not even a cursory investigation was done to see whether the physicians had behaved inappropriately. . .

Continue reading.

It seems unsurprising that Bisphenol-A, when used in the linings of cans holding food, appears as well in the food. This substance mimics hormones in the body: not a good thing to ingest, particularly bad for pregnant women and young children. But: industry likes using Bisphenol-A. So our government totally does not know what to do: protect children and the environment? or do what its corporate masters demand? It’s quite a dilemma, as you can imagine.

Janet Raloff has a Science News article about a recent finding:

The San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Fund has just released some provocative data on the presence of bisphenol A — a hormone-mimicking pollutant — in every brand-name canned food it tested.

Then again, it only tested a dozen cans. And considering there were two replicates of each type (one purchased in California, the other in Wisconsin), that means it examined only six foods for BPA, a constituent of food-grade plastics and metal-food-can liners.

Partially compensating for the new study’s small size, the Breast Cancer Fund argues, is that the items it focused on are “marketed to and consumed by children.”

Labels on three of those products have cartoon or Sesame Street figures, two others mention having the taste kids love and the last has a bunny on the label with kid-sized pasta inside. Since U.S. health agencies have identified developing children as being most at risk for any adverse effects of BPA, kids’ entrees and serving ware are precisely where we’d least like to find the contaminant.

Still, three soups and three pasta dishes hardly represent a reasonable cross-section of canned goods, even those typically fed to kids. So it would be hard to estimate from the values measured in these foods — from 34 to 148 parts per billion in the soups and from 10 to 34 ppb in the pasta products — a child’s weekly (much less annual) intake of foodborne BPA.

To get a better gauge of that, parents might want to consult findings of a study that we reported on four months ago (almost to the day). In that investigation, Food and Drug Administration chemists turned up the estrogen-mimicking BPA in 71 of 78 canned goods sampled.

If the Breast Cancer Fund study had been peer reviewed (which it wasn’t), reviewers should certainly have required a comparison of the newfound BPA values with previously reported amounts.

FDA, for instance, found that a number of foods that children often eat — among them canned tuna and vegetables — had BPA tainting of 300 to more than 700 ppb. Canned pasta and meat products, by contrast, tended to be on the low end of the range of BPA contamination that FDA chemists measured (and within the ballpark just reported by the Breast Cancer Fund).

The North American Metal Packaging Alliance — whose members make food cans — puts a rather upbeat spin on the Breast Cancer Fund’s findings, saying that . . .

Continue reading.

Here’s what I do: I have a more or less standard set-up: razor (one of several), blade (Swedish Gillette blade), shaving soap, trusty badger brush, and (of course) MR GLO. To explore, I go for mass change: rather than change a single variable, change ‘em all: if a little is good, more is better, right? The American way.

So today I used a brush I normally don’t use, a shaving cream (I normally use soap) that I haven’t used for a long time, a razor I don’t often use, and a brand new (to me) brand of blade. And I have a superb shave. And in addition I have no idea what contributed the magic.

Started with soaking the Omega Pro 48 boar brush while I showered. At the sink, a quick beard wash with MR GLO, then loaded the brush with shaving cream and got quite a nice lather worked up on my beard—enjoyable, so I kept at it for a while (which doubtless contributed to the shave’s excellence).

I’ve not used Kai blades before. They’re very cool looking: totally blank, no printing at all, like Tesco blade. The Gillette special adjustable is, I think, their last adjustable model. It’s quite nice, in fact, and I should get it back in regular rotation.

The first strokes with the blade were a little rough, but my guess is that the coating used often initially covers the cutting edge and must be worn away with shaving for the blade’s actual sharpness to be revealed. This is why with some blades (Sputnik, Zorrik, and others) the second shave seems better than the first. In this case, the second pass was noticeably smoother than the first. I think the next shave with this blade is going to be very good indeed.

The lather was thick and luxuriant, and the second and third passes were extremely pleasant. A pass of the alum bar after the cold-water rinse, a final rinse of that, dry, and a splash of The Shave Den’s Amber Ylang Ylang aftershave. I like her aftershaves, and after working through the samples will buy bottles of the ones I liked the most.

My face is once again exceptionally smooth. A very pleasant shave indeed.

James Fallows has a very good column that points out some uncomfortable truths about the death-penalty cheerleaders:

This is not my normal beat, and I have no expertise or special standing to comment on the case.

But before the executioner makes this matter moot about four hours from now, in my “special standing” as a human being and as an American, I wanted to say these things:

1) Please read Andrew Cohen’s masterful explanation of the philosophies, practicalities, and politics of modern capital punishment. It is long but truly important, and among other things it clarifies why use of the death penalty nationwide has been declining, even as it has been on the rise in the South. (Since 1976, there have been four times as many executions in the South as in the rest of the country combined. Texas alone has accounted for nearly 40% of all U.S. executions in that period; together with Virginia, it accounts for almost half. Texas executed 17 last year; California, with more people and more crimes, has executed a total of 13 since 1976.)

One crucial part of Cohen’s argument is that the kind of willful over-reach we see from the Georgia authorities in the Troy Davis case will eventually turn the national tide against the death penalty as a whole. He argues that the 1976 Supreme Court ruling making the death penalty permissible again was based on the faith that it would be carried out with utmost sober-minded care, even reluctance, and that operationally its workings would seem to be “fair.”

That’s quite obviously not how things seem about the death penalty in general, with the partisan whoops at the mere mention of executions and the comments from public officials (it’s not just Rick Perry) that they haven’t lost a moment’s sleep about even some obviously tainted cases. It’s also not how things seem in the Troy Davis case, in which most of the original witnesses have changed their stories and numerous non-softies including Ronald Reagan’s appointee as director of the FBI haveasked the state of Georgia not to take the irreversible step of putting him to death. As Cohen says of Davis:

Whether the trial witnesses against him were lying then or are lying now, by fighting against his requested relief Georgia is saying that its interest in the finality of its capital judgments is more important than the accuracy of its capital verdicts…. In their zeal to make good on cynical campaign promises to be “tough on crime,” in their pursuit of vengeance on behalf of grieving families, in their reckless disregard for the racial realities of capital punishment, elected or appointed proponents of the death penalty are in the process of ruining the mandate the Supreme Court gave them 35 years ago.

There is a lot more; I will simply say, please read Cohen’s essay during the next few hours. It probably won’t make a difference in Davis’s case, but it is an important analysis of a national shame.

2) Please also read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s account today of another murder case in the South, and how the death penalty may or may not be applied. Also from our site, Emily Hauser and Clive Crook.

3) OK, back to Cohen. He makes a point that can’t be emphasized often enough. The death penalty debate is not exclusively or even mainly about the condemned people themselves, including those who are indisputably guilty. It is about us. Cohen writes about Duane Buck of Texas. No one disputes that he is a killer, but the US Supreme Court this week stayed his execution because of racial bias in the sentencing process. Cohen says:

Why should I care about the procedural technicalities of this guy’s sentencing case when his guilt is not in doubt? Since he’s guilty of murder, how fair does his legal treatment really need to be? People of all political stripes asked the same questions….The guy did it. He is getting more justice than he gave to his victims.

That last part is true. Of course, defendants like Duane Buck get more justice than their victims. That’s the whole point of our criminal justice system — and of the rule of law. That’s why we outlaw lynching, why angry mobs can’t storm jailhouses, and why we have judges. It’s why we have a Constitution. In America, we aim to give the guilty more justice than they deserve. We do so because of how that reflects upon us, not upon how it reflects upon the guilty. Andwhen we fail to do so it says more about us than it does about the condemned.

Nice:

Interesting report by John Hoeffel in the LA Times. You’ll note that the city attorney’s arguments against the study’s findings and methodology are vacuous and uttered without backup data or study—just to say something negative quickly. The report begins:

Medical marijuana dispensaries — with storerooms of high-priced weed, registers brimming with cash and some clientele more interested in getting high than getting well — are often seen as magnets for crime, a perception deepened by a few high-profile murders.

But a report from the Rand Corp. reaches a startling conclusion: The opposite appears to be true.

In a study of crime near Los Angeles dispensaries — which the investigators call the most rigorous independent examination of its kind — the Santa Monica-based think tank found that crime actually increased near hundreds of pot shops after they were required to close last summer.

“What I would take away from it is maybe there should just be a little bit less fear about having dispensaries,” said Mireille Jacobson, a health economist who was the lead researcher. “Hopefully, this injects a little bit of science into the discussion.”

The researchers compared the 10 days before the city’smedical marijuana ordinance took effect June 7, 2010, with the 10 days after, when many of the more than 400 illegal dispensaries shut down — if only briefly.

They found a 59% increase in crime within three-tenths of a mile of a closed dispensary compared to an open one and a 24% increase within six-tenths of a mile.

The city attorney’s office, which has argued in court proceedings that the number of dispensaries needs to be reduced to deal with “well-documented crime,” called the report’s conclusions “highly suspect and unreliable,” saying that they were based on “faulty assumptions, conjecture, irrelevant data, untested measurements and incomplete results.”

In particular, the office challenged the idea that most dispensaries closed June 7, 2010, and were not open for at least 10 days. And it offered its own conjecture for the rise in crime: infighting among collective members, increased traffic for pot fire sales and customers disgruntled to find their dispensary closed.

Jacobson said Rand did not assume dispensaries shut down exactly on that date and said that, if more of them closed earlier or later, it would mean only that crime increased more than the report found.

The researchers acknowledge that the results are subject to a large margin of error, so the increase in crime within less than a third of a mile could range from as low as 5.4% to as high as 114%.

“These are noisy data over a short period of time,” Jacobson said. But she noted that the numbers, which were subjected to complex statistical analyses, clearly show crime increased.

The researchers did not try to draw conclusions on why crime increased, but offered the hypothesis that dispensaries may heighten security in the areas around them because they employ cameras and guards, increase late-night foot traffic, replace illicit street sales and draw heavier police patrols.

In a review of crime statistics from 2009 ordered by Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck, the LAPD found that banks were much more likely to be robbed than dispensaries. . .

Continue reading.

I find J.M. Fraser to be an exceptionally good shaving cream, lightly fragranced and curiously effective at softening the beard. I used a Vie-Long horsehair brush this morning—this one does good work, but (oddly) I had to refresh the lather for the third pass. This possibly is due to the effects of The Shave Den’s pre-shave balm, quite oil-rich. I used the last of it today—only a small amount—and I didn’t get quite same slickness at the end. I think I perhaps will omit a second MR GLO wash. When I get my supply, I’ll try washing beard with MR GLO, applying TSD pre-shave balm, shower, then return to sink and apply lather, no further wash.

We’ll just have to see whether the balm turns out to be compatible with good lather or not. (Yesterday was fine.)

At any rate, a very nice shave using the Eclipse Red Ring and the Swedish Gillette blade it’s been holding for a while. Three passes, a splash of Saint Charles Shave New Spice aftershave—a very pleasant fragrance, and unlike Old Spice: fresher, lighter…

Cleaning ladies today, so light blogging as I prepare.

Astonishing. What do you use these for? (It has a “sporting” exception that makes it legal, but what is the sport? Hunting revived Tyrannosaurus Reces?)

Like on a small island in the Pacific, or deep in the Alaskan wilderness. Fascinating Cool Tools column on some who have done it, and the record they made of their efforts: books, film, and journals. Take a look; fascinating column. Includes a video of the Alaskan homesteader.

More on asset forfeiture by John Burnett at NPR (podcast downloadable at link):

Every year, about $12 billion in drug profits returns to Mexico from the world’s largest narcotics market — the United States. As a tactic in the war on drugs, law enforcement pursues that drug money and is then allowed to keep a portion as an incentive to fight crime.

As a result, the amount of drug dollars flowing into local police budgets is staggering. Justice Department figures show that in the past four years alone, the amount of assets seized by local law enforcement agencies across the nation enrolled in the federal program—the vast majority of it cash—has tripled, from $567 million to $1.6 billion. And that doesn’t include tens of millions more the agencies got from state asset forfeiture programs.

In Texas, with its smuggling corridors to Mexico, public safety agencies seized more than $125 million last year.

While drug-related asset forfeitures have expanded police budgets, critics say the flow of money distorts law enforcement — that some cops have become more interested in seizing money than drugs, more interested in working southbound than northbound lanes. . .

Continue reading. Our War on Drugs is like a poison in the civic bloodstream, corrupting government officials everywhere: lots of money, lots of pressure. Why doesn’t it occur to Congress that this War is not working? Legalization with regulation and taxation would put an end to this nonsense. Look at LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) to see their take.

If you’re going to steal, it only makes sense to restrict your thievery to venues in which it is legal—Wall Street is a master of this, because businesses who raid their pension funds to get the millions of dollars they award to top executives as bonuses, knowing that eventually the employees whose retirement funds they’re using will get nothing. And for law enforcement, asset forfeiture works quite well:

Let’s be clear about what civil asset forfeiture is not:

• It’s not confiscation of contraband or illegal goods

• It’s not property that has been withheld as evidence during a criminal investigation.

• It’s not a fine or restitution imposed on someone duly convicted of a crime

Civil asset forfeiture instead refers to legal property or cash owned by individuals not charged with any crime, which is nevertheless seized by law enforcement agents who merely suspect it was used in a crime.

• If tens of thousands of dollars in cash are found in a person’s home, it is automatically suspected of having been used in drug dealing, because no “normal” person would have that much cash lying around. “Odd or eccentric people”, who distrust banks and keep their savings at home, are at risk.

• If trace amounts of marijuana are found in a vehicle, the vehicle may be seized, even if the owner was unaware that any drugs were transported in the vehicle.

The Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 (CAFRA), was intended to correct some of the worst abuses. (More information on the history of Civil Asset Forfeiture and CAFRA are found on our Background page.) But abuses and outrages continue . . .

• A police dog’s sniff of bundles of cash totaling $124,700 was used as sufficient evidence for the government to confiscate the money, even though a large percentage of currency in circulation contains traces of narcotics, and the government couldn’t establish how or when the money was used in criminal activity.

• An Ohio man who kept a small amount of medical marijuana and who also kept his life savings in his own home saw the money taken by the FBI – even though he was never charged with marijuana possession.

• Individuals who consent to police searches can lose money kept in their cars – even where there is no trace of illegal drugs or suspicion of illegal activity.

• A woman charged with illegally selling medical equipment saw her assets frozen by the government, on the grounds that her wealth was from ill-gotten gains – preventing her from hiring adequate council to defend herself, as is her right under the 6th Amendment.

Civil asset forfeiture can’t be “fixed” because its very essence breeds conflict-of-interest: . . .

Continue reading.

We really need to put an end to this.

Here’s Kevin Hall of McClatchy interviewing Daniel Yergin on his book The Quest:

When Daniel Yergin published “The Prize,” an 873-page exhaustive historical narrative about oil, in 1991, it changed how policymakers and academics alike thought about energy. His new book “The Quest,” published Tuesday, is likely to do the same.

“The Quest,” equally meaty at 804 pages, is broader in theme. It’s subtitled “Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World.” As with his earlier work, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, Yergin relies on stories and vignettes to bring to life the changes and challenges that are taking place in the energy sector and the global scramble for oil.

Yergin, who’s now an energy consultant, begins where he left off, highlighting the events now reshaping global politics and oil politics. The introduction covers this year’s devastating tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan and the Arab Spring, involving the collapse of strongmen across the Middle East and North Africa.

“I was really struck that here are two very major sets of events, very different, halfway around the world but each of them with major impact on what our energy future is going to look like. Both of them came as surprises, and yet we will be for many years assessing and living with the consequences,” Yergin said in a lengthy interview with McClatchy ahead of the book’s release.

“The Quest” covers everything from the peak oil theory, which holds that the world’s oil production is in or near a permanent decline, to renewable and alternative sources of energy. It took Yergin five years to write it, and even in that time frame much changed in the energy sector.

In that five years, oil prices surged, Wall Street began treating oil contracts as prize investments, new technology boosted natural gas production from shale oil, and crude oil produced from ultra-deep drilling in the Gulf of Mexico began supplanting imported oil from the Middle East. And of course, there’s demand from China.

“One of the things that surprised me was China. China hardly appears in ‘The Prize,’ because China was not a factor in the world oil market,” Yergin said. “China in ‘The Quest’ is the only country that gets two chapters. And it’s very much a narrative explaining how energy and oil have evolved as part of this larger story of China’s emergence on the world’s stage.”

“The Quest” ends on the unfolding prospects for the electric automobile.

“Around 2008, the electric car — which has a very long history — started to gain political traction and political support. And companies started to get behind it. So the book really concludes on the future of the automobile — what will we be driving in 10 or 15 years? — and it’s not clear yet by any means, and I don’t think it will be clear until after 2015 or so where the electric will fit in,” he said, concluding himself that “at least our personal transportation is going to have a larger electricity component in some form.”

Here’s more on what Yergin thinks.

Q: “The Quest,” as a title, is a metaphor?

A: I think that there is really a huge challenge. We have a $65 trillion world economy. If we get back on track it could be a $130 trillion economy by 2030, in just a couple of decades. And the question is, “What is going to be the energy system? How are we going to provide the energy that an economy of that scale needs, and at the same time how are we going to ensure the security of energy and reconcile our energy needs with environmental questions?” I found those were the underlying issues that I kept encountering as I wrote the book.

Q: Why do you see the Arab Spring as so important to the future of energy? . . .

Continue reading. There’s a video at the link.

As regular readers know, I have often objected to the universal “cure” for obesity (“eat less, move more”), which ranks (and I choose the verb advisedly) with equally effective cures for depression (“cheer up”; “look at the bright side”), poverty (“earn more money”; “spend less than you earn”), and so on: simple injunctions with no explanations of how actually to accomplish the task. These picayune pronouncements are on par with an even simpler “cure” for obesity: “Lose weight.” This is simply restating the problem as though that provided a solution. It doesn’t.

Meanwhile, in the real world, science keeps untangling the issues that create the problem of obesity. They tend not to look at moral failure as a cause, the common focus of those who are lean, but rather at how the body works.

Here’s a recent finding reported in Science News by Janet Raloff:

In obese people, even when the brain knows the body isn’t hungry, it responds to food as if it were, new brain-scan data show. That means that when obese people try to shed weight, they may find themselves on the losing side of a battle with neural centers that unconsciously encourage them to eat.

For instance, in normal-weight people a neural reward system that reinforces positive feelings associated with food turns off when levels of the blood sugar glucose return to normal after a meal — a signal that the body’s need for calories has been sated. But in obese people, that reward center in the central brain turns on at the sight of high-calorie food even when their blood sugar levels are normal.

The new findings show that “the regulatory role of glucose was missing in the obese,” says Elissa Epel of the University of California, San Francisco, an obesity researcher not involved with the new study. She says the data might “explain the drive to eat that some obese people feel despite how much they’ve eaten.”

For the study, nine lean and five obese adult volunteers viewed pictures of foods such as ice cream, french fries, cauliflower or a salad while undergoing brain scans. Throughout the procedure, researchers asked the recruits to rate their hunger and how much they wanted a particular item.

Volunteers arrived for their brain scans several hours after eating, and the researchers used insulin pumps to establish volunteers’ blood sugar levels at either normal background values (roughly 90 milligrams per deciliter), or at the “mild” end of low (around 70 milligrams per deciliter). That low value can occur briefly in some people during the day, especially in people with diabetes or metabolic conditions that precede diabetes, notes endocrinologist Robert Sherwin of Yale University, coauthor of the new study.

All volunteers reported wanting food, especially high-calorie fare, when blood glucose was low, Sherwin’s team reports online September 19 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Brain scans showed that . . .

Continue reading.

Today is one of those shaves where you keep sneaking caresses of your chin and cheek—faceturbation is the common term—because they are so astonishingly smooth.

And, of course, with a combination of new things I’ve tried, it will take a while to untangle the causes from the coincidences. Fortunately, I’m in no hurry.

I began the shave with washing my beard at the sink with MR GLO, then rinsing, then applying the last of The Shave Den pre-shave balm, rubbing it into my beard thoroughly with my fingertips. Then I showered, leaving the balm to do its thing.

Out of the shower, back at the sink, I washed my beard area again with MR GLO—habit—and then applied Nancy Boy Replenishing shaving cream, one of their two types: Signature is mint-eucalyptus and Replenishing is cucumber, so far as the fragrance is concerned. Both are designed to be used brushless if you want, but I do love to brush and they do make a modest sort of close-clinging lather. The fragrances are wonderful—the cucumber is very refreshing.

The Thäter is a redoubtable brush, and I like it a lot. It did me proud.

The Gillette Fat Boy, replated in rhodium by Razor Emporium, was using a Swedish Gillette blade of some uses, but I could tell it was doing a good job. The shaving balm, as I felt against the grain for any roughness during the final polishing pass, acted as an oil pass: same exact feeling in my left hand (pulling across the skin to find rough spots) and in my right (the razor sliding nicely through the roughness with a rush of tiny cutting sounds as the stubble fell).

I really do think the pre-shave balm contributed: I could tell as I felt the skin that the balm was still at work. I’m not a pre-shave sort of guy, but this stuff may be the ticket. Of course, it could be the Nancy Boy, but “oil-pass” feeling during the polishing pass was surely from the balm. In any event, I’ve now ordered a full jar for more testing. Any of you guys tried this?

The Nancy Boy aftershave balm is nice: a pea-sized amount in one hand, rub hands together, then rub face. Not bad.

The final result: Fantastic. This is what a morning shave should be. I’m set for the day!

Good scientific work by gamers. Thanks to The Eldest for the pointer. The article begins:

Online gamers have achieved a feat beyond the realm of Second Life or Dungeons and Dragons: they have deciphered the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus that had thwarted scientists for a decade.

The exploit is published on Sunday in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, where — exceptionally in scientific publishing — both gamers and researchers are honoured as co-authors.

Their target was a monomeric protease enzyme, a cutting agent in the complex molecular tailoring of retroviruses, a family that includes HIV.

Figuring out the structure of proteins is vital for understanding the causes of many diseases and developing drugs to block them.

But a microscope gives only a flat image of what to the outsider looks like a plate of one-dimensional scrunched-up spaghetti. Pharmacologists, though, need a 3-D picture that “unfolds” the molecule and rotates it in order to reveal potential targets for drugs.

This is where Foldit comes in.

Developed in 2008 by the University of Washington, it is a fun-for-purpose video game in which gamers, divided into competing groups, compete to unfold chains of amino acids — the building blocks of proteins — using a set of online tools.

To the astonishment of the scientists, the gamers produced an accurate model of the enzyme in just three weeks. . .

Continue reading. And here’s the story (with much more technical detail) in The Scientist.

Yesterday morning the sky was completely overcast save for a narrow band of clear sky just on the horizon. The sunlight streamed through this flat, low window to glimmer toward me across the bay, the sun totally hidden in the gray (tinted with rouge) clouds above. In the photo you can see the sun behind the clouds, but to the eye, the sky was this rose-grey flatness with a golden bar lying across the Bay.

The picture is just to give you a rough idea. The view is from my balcony.

This week I’ll be using shaving creams each day, and I begin with one that’s quite good but no longer available: an artisanal shaving cream offered by Giovanni Arbate at Razor and Brush when that was still active.

But I began with a pre-shave prep. I’ve not yet found anything that much improves over a simple wash at the sink with MR GLO (Musgo Real Glyce Lime Oil soap), but I ordered bunch of sample aftershaves from The Shave Den store and a small sample of their pre-shave balm was included. I liked the list of ingredients, so I gave it a go this morning.

I wet my beard at the sink, squeezed out some of the balm (which is quite thick), and smeared it over my (two-day) stubble and worked it in with my fingers. I then left it in place while I showered.

Once back at the sink, I washed my beard with MR GLO, worked up the lather with my new Frank Shaving brush in Finest, custom-selected for me by a Frank Shaving aficionado. I got a fine lather, and the brush held plenty—but for the real test, I must use it with soap (though a trial lathering right after I got it indicated no problems in that area).

This is the first outing of my Merkur “sledgehammer” Slant, with the heavy handle having fine spiral engravings. I took the precaution of brushing my fingertips over the alum bar before picking up the razor, and that gave me a grip that eliminated any tendency to slip—but I still don’t like the spiral engraving. Chequering, IMO, would have been better.

Still, with the previously used Iridium Super blade, I got a smooth shave: three passes with no problems, nicks, or cuts. A final rinse, and a good splash of The Shave Den Victorian Rose aftershave—feels good, smells great. I bought the aftershaves in the travel/sampler bottles so I could try a lot.

It was a very smooth and nice shave, but I’m not sure how much of that is the pre-shave balm. I will say that this balm seems as though it might actually help. I’ll use it again tomorrow, with a regular shave, then save the rest for use with shaving soap shaves: shaving-soap lather seems more delicate than shaving-cream lather: hard water, for example, has little effect on robust shaving-cream lather but can make shaving-soap lather difficult.

That title pretty much covers it, with whatever “it” you choose. I’m reminded of a good math professor I had at the U of Iowa who was telling us, in a functional analysis course, about some amazing property of linear functions in a particular type of space, and he said, “But linear functions are already a very special kind of function. Dividing functions into ‘linear’ and ‘non-linear’ is like dividing the universe into ‘bananas’ and ‘non-bananas’.”

I’m actually talking about an odd food experience I had this afternoon. I went to Whole Foods for, among other things, cream of balsamic vinegar (“grub sauce”). I was sort of peckish so I had my mid-afternoon plum shortly before I left, and that took the edge off.

Still, I found myself going up the sushi aisle, just to see what they had, when I saw something interesting: slices of seared albacore tuna, with two sauces. That looked good—and pretty much simply protein, which my dinner was a little short of. (I planned to put an over-easy egg on top.)

And then I saw a shrimp tempura roll: shrimp tempura wrapped in thin layer of sushi rice and thinly sliced fish wrapped around. That looked even better.

I was standing there, holding the things, about to put them in my cart, when I asked myself, “What’s going on? First, the albacore: I don’t need food, I have food at home waiting. I don’t need protein, because I have an egg to put on top. So why am I going to get that?” And then the other: That one was not only an escalation, it was something I didn’t really need—all that sushi rice—and, to make the point again: I didn’t need the food. I had food at home.

I suddenly realized: This wasn’t about food at all. It was about something else. So why was I holding food? I put it back and got out of there. I was told long ago by a wise friend that when I felt confused, I shouldn’t stick around and try to figure it out, I should get out of there: Get away. Beat it. Go think about it somewhere else. Feeling confused is a warning sign.

I think we may have been talking about car salesman in that specific instance, but it applies all over the place, to situations romantic, practical, friendship, and business.

This one I still haven’t figured out, but the dinner I had waiting at home was indeed perfectly satisfactory, and I have no idea what that interlude at Whole Foods was about, but whatever it was, it wasn’t food.

This article by Alix Spiegel of Morning Edition on NPR reminds me somewhat of the Pennebaker book The Secret Life of Pronouns, a very interesting read. A podcast is at the link; the article begins:

For several decades, psychiatrists who work with the dying have been trying to come up with new psychotherapies that can help people cope with the reality of their death. One of these therapies asks the dying to tell the story of their life.

This end-of-life treatment, called dignity therapy, was created by a man named Harvey Chochinov. When Chochinov was a young psychiatrist working with the dying, he had a powerful experience with one of the patients he was trying to counsel — a man with an inoperable brain tumor.

“One of the last times that I went into his room to meet with him, on his bedside table was a photograph of him when he had indeed been young and healthy and a bodybuilder, and it was this incredible juxtaposition of these two images,” says Chochinov.

So in the bed there’s his patient — this skeleton of a man — very pale and weak. On the bedside table, there’s this portrait of a glistening, muscled giant. And Chochinov says that sitting there, it was very clear to him that by placing this photograph in such a prominent position, the man was sending a message: This was how he needed to be seen.

As Chochinov continued his work with the dying, he confronted this again and again — this need people have to assert themselves in the face of death. And he started to wonder about it.

“Why is it that how people perceive themselves to be seen should have such a profound influence? How does that make sense? What does that mean?” Chochinov says.

So he tried to answer those questions. As a psychiatrist at the University of Manitoba in Canada, he did study after study trying to tease out exactly what troubled people most about dying. What he found was that what people found most assaulting and annihilating was this idea that who they were would completely cease to exist after their death. And so Chochinov decided to do something about it.

“If the idea of having something that will outlast even you matters for patients that are near the end of life, then we need to do something that will create something that will last beyond … the patient,” he says.

A Patient’s Narrative

The something that Chochinov decided to create was a formal written narrative of the patient’s life — a document that could be passed on to whomever they chose. The patients would be asked a series of questions about their life history, and the parts they remember most or think are most important. Their answers would be transcribed and presented to them for editing until, after going back and forth with the therapist, a polished document resulted that could be passed on to the people that they loved.

Chochinov named this process dignity therapy, and for the past 10 years he has used it with the dying. And one of the things that has struck him about the process is this: The stories we tell about ourselves at the end of our lives are often very different than the stories that we tell about ourselves at other points. . . .

Continue reading.

As the bulk of the population leaves traditional wetshaving for multiblade cartridges and canned foam, as the market for the old tools and methods shrinks, we have seen a blossoming of artisanal vendors of shaving supplies: shaving soaps, shaving creams, shaving brushes, aftershaves, and even razors. Thanks to the Web, artisans can now show and sell their wares to widely dispersed customers so that it becomes realistic for them to devote their time, energy, and skill to artifacts of, say, quirky appeal. As I look at their wonderful and unique offerings, I wonder why I buy commercial versions at all.

I think my focus will increasingly be on the artisans. Those will be the unique items. Of course, some offerings are made by people with good intentions but insufficient skill and talent, but the best of the artisanal items are works of art for the long term (brushes, razors, pottery, and the like) or the short (shaving soap, shaving cream, aftershaves, and the like). But in each category there are superb offerings and often at very good prices.

I was thinking about this as I looked over the vendor list in the 5th edition and realized how many 1- or 2-person operations were present, and how much I like some of the unique items I acquire from artisans.