Later On

The US and China are doing all within their power to block any action to combat climate change, having come to a reasoned position that it’s better for our planet to be hotter, and with a significantly higher sea level. Once we reach that condition, we won’t be leaving it for thousands of years, so I certainly hope they’ve done their homework.

Who am I kidding? It’s a pack of ignorant, power-hungry fools who cater only to the wishes of big businesses, which believe that having lots of money makes everything okay, regardless of what happens to the world in which we live. They know that they will not be around for the suffering of later generations, so they simply don’t care: they have to power to stop effective action, and they get money from companies to do that, so that’s the way we’re going, regardless.

It’s hopeless, people. We’ve missed the windows. Our grandchildren will suffer, as will the generations to come.

We are a stupid species. I certainly understand that Old-Testament God.

Pat Reber reports in McClatchy:

Tempers flared Wednesday over the glacial pace of progress in climate talks taking place in Durban, with the European Union berating the United States and China for blocking the way forward.

“What is really frustrating is to see for the third time … that this U.N. conference is hijacked by the pingpong game between the U.S. and China,” said Jo Leinen, a leading environmental expert in the European Parliament.

Neither China nor the U.S. has agreed to start a new round of talks that would lead to a new, broader and legally binding treaty to reduce carbon emissions blamed for global warming.

But the EU will not commit to a second Kyoto Protocol after the first one expires in December 2012 unless the world’s two largest emitters get on board. The U.S. never ratified the first Kyoto agreement, and China was exempted as an emerging economy.

The EU commissioner on climate action, Connie Hedegaard, has insisted that not only the U.S. but also China, which produces 23 percent of carbon pollution, must legally pledge to reduce their emissions.

“The EU has put forth a significant offer,” Hedegaard said Wednesday. “Even if other countries are not ready to commit to a second period of Kyoto, we must be reassured that others will join us in a legally binding framework.”

The U.S. insists that a new agreement is already in place in the form of voluntary reduction pledges made in Cancun in 2010 by Washington, Beijing and many emerging economies now exempted under Kyoto. Those pledges run out in 2020, when the U.S. says it would be time to consider a new agreement.

The U.S., which accounts for about 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, was also lambasted by environmental groups on a separate issue, the Green Climate Fund, which is seen as the absolute minimum achievement for the South African talks.

“The U.S. actions to throw obstacles in the way of any discussion on sources of finance for the Green Climate Fund risks condemning the fund to kick off as an empty shell,” said David Waskow, policy adviser for Oxfam. . .

Continue reading.

Congress increasingly seems to deserve its poor reputation. Despite having some really excellent members, the body as a whole simply cannot do a decent job. Phillip Smith reports:

Going in the face of an ever-increasing clamor to reform decades of failed drug policies, the US House of Representatives is poised to pass two bills that promise more of the same. The House is set to vote any day now—the vote was originally set until Wednesday night, but was pushed back—on HR 1254, the Synthetic Drug Control Act of 2011, which would criminalize not only synthetic stimulants (“bath salts”), but also synthetic cannabinoids (“fake pot”) marketed under names such as “K2″ and “Spice.”

“This is almost certain to pass,” said Grant Smith, federal affairs coordinator for the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), which has been lobbying to try to stop it. “We’re doing our best to try to block it, but it’s unlikely we will succeed,” he said.

The bill foresees prison sentences of up to 20 years for the distribution of small quantities of synthetic drugs. But despite an intense debate in the House Judiciary Committee last month over the bill’s implications, it is moving ahead.

At least 40 states have passed bans on the new synthetic drugs, and the DEA has placed both fake weed and bath salts under emergency bans. The bill would make both sets of substances Schedule I drugs under the Controlled Substances Act, which would make them difficult to research. Scientists have warned Congress that placing synthetic drugs under Schedule I will have a chilling effect on research intended to explore treatments for a range of diseases and disorders. . .

Continue reading. Later in the article:

The second bill, HR 313, the Drug Trafficker Safe Harbor Elimination Act of 2011, introduced by veteran drug warrior Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) would make it a criminal offense to plan to engage in an activity in another country if that activity would violate US drug laws if committed in the US — even if that activity is legal in the country where it takes place.

While Smith and other bill supporters say the legislation is aimed at drug traffickers who conspire in the US, opponents point out that it could just as easily be applied to someone who makes plans to attend and partake at the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, work at a safe injection site in Vancouver or any of the other 64 cities that have them, or work in a medical marijuana program in Israel. All of those activities are illegal under federal drug laws and thus subject to the purview of the bill.

“Since the war on drugs was declared 40 years ago, the US has spent more than one trillion dollars and arrested tens of millions of Americans for drug law violations, yet drugs are readily available in every community and the problems associated with them continue to mount,” said Bill Piper, DPA director of national affairs. “When you’re in a hole, you shouldn’t just keep digging,” he added.

“Facing massive budget deficits, policymakers from both parties should be searching for alternatives to prison for nonviolent drug law offenders, because locking them up is only making us poorer, not safer,” said Piper. “The US can’t incarcerate its way out of its drug problems and should stop trying. The only way out of the drug war mess is to start treating drug use as a health issue instead of a criminal justice issue.”

“By rushing to criminalize synthetic drugs, Congress is condemning more Americans to years in prison and ignoring warnings from the scientific community that this bill will hurt medical research,” said Smith. “Outright criminalization compromises both public health and safety by shifting demand for synthetic drugs into the criminal market. It would be more effective for Congress to pursue comprehensive drug education and create a regulatory framework to reduce youth access to synthetic drugs. This approach is working for tobacco, which has contributed to more deaths than alcohol and illicit drugs combined.”

An extremely pleasant shave today. I had to use my Rooney Style 2 Finest once more: a very fine brush. D.R. Harris shave sticks are excellent—The Son has an Almond one—and produce a very nice lather indeed. Start with brush sort of shaken out, and add driblets of water as you work up the lather on your beard.

My rhodium-plated (thanks to Razor Emporium) Gillette Super Speed did a very nice job with a previously used Astra Superior Platinum blade. I focused on keeping the cap’s edge in contact with my skin, and the stubble just slides off.

A splash of Marlborough aftershave, and I’m ready for a good day.

I used red lentils rather than white, and increased the greens/lentils ratio by including one bunch of baby broccoli along with the bunch of fresh spinach and the bunch of Italian parsley. Along with the cubed Meyer lemon, I also cut up about 1.25 c cherry plum tomatoes and added those, along with leek, onion, garlic, salt, and pepper. I added a little jar of capers (without the liquid) and this time I did remember Kalamata olives, which I halved and did indeed discover a pit—but even if not, it’s good to get more bang for the buck: a half is plenty for an olive hit. I had a Parmesan crust, so I included that for the umami, otherwise I would use Worcestershire sauce.

I added a good slug of Vya sweet vermouth (killing off the bottle) along with about 2 Tbsp sherry vinegar (acid brightens the taste) and ended up with too much liquid, but 2-4 Tbsp chia seeds helped that, and the cubed 6 oz sockeye salmon was again belle of the ball after the dish simmer covered for 20-30 min, with me stirring occasionally. Really excellent.

Thinking about the lentils, though, I got an idea for a salad. I think I’ll poach some cubed fresh tuna for this: 8 oz white split lentils, cooked, plus 1 c black rice, cooked, as a salad with scallions, celery, endive, parsley, cilantro, black olives, cherry tomatoes, yellow or orange bell pepper, red bell pepper, lemon juice, olive oil, salt, pepper. Hmm. Maybe a minced jalapeño as well.

I hope that you will make this and then invite me.

Quite an interesting talk:

The DEA is a peculiar institution, and perhaps as a result it seems to attract peculiar people. Alex Pareene in Salon takes note of some recent oddities:

It’s time for an important lesson in proper, civilized behavior. Drug war soldier Gallant launders vast sums of money for the Mexican drug cartels. Drug war soldier Goofus expresses skepticism at the size and scope of this expensive and deadly boondoggle. Goofus gets canned. Gallant is the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Sorry, what’s our DEA doing this time?

Today, in operations supervised by the Justice Department and orchestrated to get around sovereignty restrictions, the United States is running numerous undercover laundering investigations against Mexico’s most powerful cartels. One D.E.A. official said it was not unusual for American agents to pick up two or three loads of Mexican drug money each week. A second official said that as Mexican cartels extended their operations from Latin America to Africa, Europe and the Middle East, the reach of the operations had grown as well. When asked how much money had been laundered as a part of the operations, the official would only say, “A lot.”

“If you’re going to get into the business of laundering money,” the official added, “then you have to be able to launder money.”

Yes, but how do the feds decide which cartels to launder money for? Should the government really be picking “winners and losers” when it comes to Mexican drug cartels?

An expensive boondoggle like the ongoing war on drugs has its own nutty logic that may not make much sense to outsiders. Outsiders, for example, might think that laundering “a lot” of money for cartels in order to eventually follow that money to someone in a position of authority is a huge waste of time and resources that only makes the deadly gangs even stronger. But the agencies waging the war don’t seem to have a lot of tolerance for opinions along those lines.

When Border Patrol agent Bryan Gonzalez told a colleague that legalizing marijuana would probably lessen violence in Mexico, his colleague reported Gonzalez to their bosses, and Gonzalez was fired.

Those remarks, along with others expressing sympathy for illegal immigrants from Mexico, were passed along to the Border Patrol headquarters in Washington. After an investigation, a termination letter arrived that said Mr. Gonzalez held “personal views that were contrary to core characteristics of Border Patrol Agents, which are patriotism, dedication and esprit de corps.”

Gonzalez is now with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, and the ACLU has filed a suit on his behalf.

But LEAP’s membership drives are slightly handicapped by the fact that law enforcement agencies see any sort of skepticism regarding the efficacy and morality of the drug war as dangerous and, apparently, unpatriotic. “We all know the drug war is a bad joke,” an unidentified police officer told the Times. “But we also know that you’ll never get promoted if you’re seen as soft on drugs”

Its this institutional unwillingness to question the mission that leads to the DEA “combating” drug cartels by laundering their money and selling them weapons. Drug war logic means rural Washington needs a million dollars in federal grants going to a “task force” that busts small-time dealers and raids houses of medicinal marijuana users with paramilitary weaponry and tactics. Does that seems extreme and wasteful? What are you, some kind of unpatriotic hippie?

DHS is not known for its listening skills, so far as I can tell. But Michael Grabell reports in ProPublica that people hate the X-ray body scanners—just don’t like to be bathed in ionizing radiation, apparently.

Even if X-ray body scanners would prevent terrorists from smuggling explosives onto planes, nearly half of Americans still oppose using them because they could cause a few people to eventually develop cancer, according to a new Harris Interactive poll conducted online for ProPublica.

Slightly more than third of Americans supported using the scanners, while almost a fifth were unsure.

The Transportation Security Administration plans to install body scanners, which can detect explosives and other objects hidden under clothing, at nearly every airport security lane in the country by the end of 2014. It’s the biggest change to airport security since metal detectors were introduced more than 35 years ago.

The scanners have long faced vocal opposition. Privacy advocates have decried them as a “virtual strip search” because the raw images show genitalia, breasts and buttocks – a concern the TSA addressed by requiring software that makes the images less graphic. But in addition to privacy objections, scientists and some lawmakers oppose one type of scanner because it uses X-rays, which damage DNA and could potentially lead to a few additional cancer cases among the 100 million travelers who fly every year. They say an alternative technology, which uses radio frequency waves, is safer.

Some travelers like Kathy Blomker, a breast cancer survivor from Madison, Wis., have decided to forgo the machines altogether and opt for a physical pat-down instead. . .

Continue reading. Later in the article:

After ProPublica published an investigation, reported in conjunction with PBS NewsHour, showing that the X-ray scanners had evaded rigorous safety evaluations, the head of the TSA told Senator Susan Collins that his agency would conduct a new independent safety study. He subsequently backed off that promise, prompting the senator to write the TSA pressing the agency to go ahead with the study and asking it to post larger signs alerting pregnant women that they have the option to have a physical pat-down instead of going through the X-ray scanners.

The head of the TSA is showing bad faith here. No surprise. I do not trust that agency.

Things that are important and urgent are no problem: those tend to get your attention. And things that are neither important nor urgent we usually have no problem with: we can just ignore them.

The problem comes, as Stephen Covey discusses in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (useful PDF guide to supplement the book) in the other two possibilities:

1. Urgent but not important
2. Important but not urgent

The problem is that urgency captures our attention, and we waste time by doing unimportant things simply because they are urgent. And how did these things become urgent? Often because they were postponed or overlooked: timely attention could have removed them early from consideration.

Covey recommends scheduling time every week to focus on things that are important but not urgent: build in an appointment, and when the time comes, work on the important thing before it’s urgent. “Early” is the watchword: today you are assigned a report that is due in three months. My own process is to sit down today and draft a basic outline of what I think the report will be. At this point the outline (and I like to use ThinkLinkr.com: free, powerful, Web-resident, and can export the outline) cannot be very specific. It generally will look something like this:

a. Background – how did problem get to this point
b. Alternatives – define at least three solutions, with tradeoffs (maybe outsourcing? look at domestic vs. international)
c. Prevention – how can we avoid the problem? which office should be responsible in the future/

And so on—mainly ideas, guesses to confirm or disconfirm, things to investigate and information I need to find. The point of the first-day outline is not to solve the problem or even to define the problem—those will come later—but rather simply to break the ice, to get my unconscious to thinking about it, to list some things to investigate.

Once the ice is broken, I usually can come up with a few things I can do right away, and doing those will reveal more. I tend to front-load the work, because often the assignment will grow: looking into it leads to other things, and one wants to have time to address those.

So always try for “early”: the earlier you can start, the easier the job becomes and the better the final product.

This post started simply to point out Trent Hamm’s post on the same topic, but I drifted into my own rap. His post is good, though, and I recommend you click through and read it.

Scott Feldstein has a good guide on how he uses Apple’s cloud-storage service not only to store his music, but also to upgrade tracks as needed. Useful information.

This sounds like just the ticket. I thought the kick wheel for pottery making sounded cool, but the south-pointing chariot would be hard to resist.

Yesterday’s use of Geo. F. Trumper Eucris shaving soap, which apparently is not well-liked, was okay for two passes, but the lather faded for the third (which I still managed). Still, it was a new brush—first use of brush (a Lijun) and Eucris—so I decided today to go with Old Reliable, my Rooney Style 2 Finest.

Once again I simply held the puck in my left hand and brushed it briskly with the wet brush. This time I loaded the brush at length—no third-pass falling-off for me, thank you—and got a good thick lather.

No problems this time: three passes of plentiful lather. Those having problems might try extended loading—and I do have the benefit of fairly soft water.

The Feather Premium stainless razor—model AS-D1, I discover—did its usual fine and comfortable job. Like my iKon razors, the Feather is noticeably comfortable, and with it the Feather blades are both efficient and kind.

A splash of Saint Charles Shave Sandalwood aftershave, and I’m ready for the day.

Very tasty lunch:

2 tsp virgin coconut oil in large sauté pan (or whatever oil you want to use—peanut would be good, or olive, or duck fat; the coconut oil happened to be sitting there, and it was that or the ghee)
1 leek, halved lengthwise, rinsed well, white part chopped
1/2 medium Spanish onion, chopped
[2 handfuls chopped celerey -- only I forgot again ]
salt, freshly ground pepper

Sauté that for a while. I simmered the split white lentils for 10 minutes in hot water, then drained in sieve. You could use split red lentils equally well, but those simmer for only 5 minutes. If anything, you want the lentils slightly undercooked rather than overcooked (and mushy). Add to skillet:

8 oz split white (or red) lentils, cooked and drained – nothing magic about 8 oz: that was merely the package size
4 large cloves garlic, minced
1 Meyer lemon, diced
1 bunch fresh spinach, rinsed well and chopped

You can use pretty much any greens, just adjust cooking times (chard, dandelion greens: 20-30 minutes; kale, collards: 30-40 minutes, and check for liquid, adding a Tbsp if needed: but you want it to end up moist rather than wet).

1/2 bunch Italian parsley, rinsed well and chopped
1 yellow crookneck squash, cut in small dice
2 Tbsp capers [or substitute 2 Tbsp dried currants to take the recipe in a different direction; it's always good, though, to have some smal round dark things in the dish for the picky eater to notice---it gratifies them]
[12 pitted Kalamata olives, halved - would have included if I had them. I halve them to make sure they have no pits and to make them go further: half of one is still enough to give a Kalamata hit.]
2 Tbsp homemade pepper sauce
1 small wad slivered dried tomatoes
2 tsp dried herbs de Provence
1 Tbsp brown rice vinegar (or whatever vinegar you prefer)
2 Tbsp homemade Worcestershire sauce

Cover and simmer, adding the lentils 10 minutes before the end of the cooking time. I used spinach, which doesn’t take much cooking, so I added the lentils with the spinach.

Stir occasionally. Timing is pretty flexible, and after the greens are done you’re mainly working on concentrating flavors and cooking the lemon. I like the peel because it’s nicely bitter.

Once all the vegetables are done, add the fish:

8 oz sockeye salmon, cut into squares—cubes, really: width = height = thickness.

Stir in salmon, cover and cook the fish for 7-8 minutes, which gives the veg that much more cooking (and flavor-melding).

You could use pretty much any other fish: fresh tuna, Pacific swordfish, rockfish, cod, haddock—even sole, though that is more cut in squares (which will undoubtedly come apart, but still tasty). I avoid catfish and tilapia: bad omega-6 balance with omega-3 (because grain-fed).

Quite tasty. Makes 3-4 meals (lunch or dinner).

I got a shipment and tried three new products.

First, MR GLO is getting difficult to find, so I thought I’d explore other pre-shave soaps. Gary of Shoebox Shaveshop recommended Proraso’s Sul Filo Del Rasoio so I ordered a couple of bars. It has the same high-glycerin slickness as MR GLO, and seemed to do a fine job as a pre-shave soap. I’ll continue using it, alternating with MR GLO, but it certainly strikes me as a viable alternative after using it this morning.

The Lijun shaving brush I ordered to complement my Frank Shaving brush of similar design, the Frank having a black rather than white handle. The two brushes are not quite the same, but close. I don’t now recall where I ordered it, I’m embarrassed to say.

Geo. F. Trumper Eucris shaving soap was ordered as a test. I worked up a good lather using the Lijun brush: quite thick and slick—I was simply holding the soap puck in my left hand as I loaded the brush, so got quite a bit of lather on that hand and noticed it seemed particularly slick and protective.

The first two passes had plentiful thick lather, but by the third pass the lather had become somewhat skimpy. Whether this is due to soap or brush I don’t yet know. I’ll try both again. Still I got enough lather for a good third pass.

The Futur with a previously used Swedish Gillette blade did a fine job. I focused on keeping the edge of the cap—right where the cap clamps onto the blade, just behind the cutting edge—in contact with my skin, more or less ignoring the guard (which just goes along for the ride, not really touchin my skin). I’ve found this works well with the Futur and something you can try with any razor: focusing on the position of the edge of the cap rather than on the position of the guard: that seems to result in a better blade angle.

Three passes, a fine smooth shave, and a splash of Pashana. All is well.

Corporations have always wielded outsize power in city halls, county governments, and statehouses, but their growing hold over the Federal government means that the lower-level control can be tightened up now and direction made more explicit. Brendan Greeley and Alison Fitzgerald have a sobering article on this in Bloomberg BusinessWeek:

Joey Durel likes to describe himself as a private-sector guy. Before he was elected mayor of Lafayette, La., in 2003, Durel, a Republican, ran a chain of pet stores and several restaurant franchises. He chaired the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce. Then, in his first months in office, he took what still seems to him a natural step: He agreed to have Lafayette’s municipal electric, water, and sewer utility run fiber-optic cable all the way to the city’s homes. It would compete with copper wire that Lafayette’s two commercial telecom outfits already had in place, but both had said Lafayette’s market—just over 60,000 people—was too small to justify fiber.

For private companies it has always been expensive to lay cable over mountains and across bayous, where there are often too few potential customers per square mile to make the effort worth it. Right where the suburbs disappear, the interests of telecommunications companies begin to diverge from those of residents and local politicians. Rural mayors know that to get the jobs President Barack Obama calls “insourcing,” they need not just adequate Internet capacity but the same capacity as their competitors, the metropolises. So small towns and isolated cities have started to do what their forebears did during the decades of electrification: They pay to run the wires themselves.

To Durel, the fiber-optic Internet is to Lafayette’s businesses what electricity was in the 1890s and roads in the 1950s. Durel wants Lafayette to remain a regional hub. When he ran for mayor, he says, people asked him why he’d subject his family to politics. His answer: “Because I want my kids to stay home.”

Durel and Terry Huval, who runs Lafayette’s utility, didn’t believe the city needed a new law to provide high-speed Internet access. They saw their existing charter as broad enough; the Internet, like water and electricity, was a public utility, necessary for business development. In April 2004 they readied a feasibility study and announced at a city council meeting that they would conduct a market survey.

A week after the meeting, Huval got a call from Lafayette’s statehouse lobbyist in Baton Rouge. Noble Ellington, then a state senator from Winnsboro, three hours northeast of Lafayette, was going to introduce a bill. It was too late in the session for new legislation, but Ellington would offer it as a wholesale substitution for a bill that had been filed two months earlier.

The lobbyist brought back to Lafayette a copy of what would become Senate Bill 877. It named telecommunications as a permitted city utility, then hamstrung municipalities with a list of conditions. It demanded that new projects show positive revenue within the first year. It required a city to calculate and charge itself taxes, as if it were a private company. Cities could not borrow startup costs or secure bonds from any other sources of income. The bill demanded unrealistic accounting arrangements, and it suggested a referendum that would have to pass with an absolute majority. It also, almost word for word, matched a piece of legislation kept in the library of the American Legislative Exchange Council. The council’s bill reads, “The people of the State of _______ do enact as follows … ”

According to Ellington, he substituted the bill after a lobbyist for several of the state’s cable companies approached him, concerned about Lafayette’s project. Ellington’s district did not have plans to run fiber. Nor did any other city or parish in the state. “We were just making sure that the field was level,” he says. “We weren’t trying to keep them from doing what they wanted to do, we just wanted to make sure the public entity couldn’t go in and shortstop the private entities.” Ellington is probably sincere about that. The lobbyist who came to him probably wasn’t. The bill was not designed to level the playing field. It was designed to keep new teams on the sidelines. . . .

Continue reading. There is much more—and think about the direction in which we’re rapidly moving.

The war in Iraq is just about over—the country now totally wrecked, so we’re leaving, and they’re not even thanking us—and Afghanistan wants us out, tired of seeing us kill civilians and then deny it and then apologize and say steps will be taken, and then we slaughter some more. So what is the military-industrial complex going to do? Well, we’re working our way toward more wars, since we have to use up all that military materiel that we’ve bought.

Looks like Iran is the next target.

The TSA never hesitates to broaden its mission. And indeed, on looking at that person I find that I personally am terrified, so it is clearly a terrorist sort of thing.

Interesting: now that we are comfortable with data-storage capacities in the terabyte and petabyte range, we now face the problem of finding information from the data. Bob Grant reports in The Scientist on one aspect of the Big Data problem:

Gene sequencing technology has advanced in leaps and bounds in the past couple of decades. But as genomicists and others involved in research projects that generate reams of DNA, RNA, or proteomic data know well, storing and analyzing all that information is rapidly becoming an intractable problem.

A recent article in The New York Times highlights the difficulty, citing many leading researchers airing their frustrations with discrepancies in the pace of innovation between sequencing and data handling technologies. “Data handling is now the bottleneck,” David Haussler, director of the center for biomolecular science and engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told the Times. “It costs more to analyze a genome than to sequence a genome.”

Indeed, though the price of sequencing an entire human genome is expected to decrease to the long-anticipated $1,000 mark in the next couple of years, that cost is dwarfed by the mounting expenses of storing and analyzing genomic data.

And the data deluge (which The Scientist covered in its October issue) may also cause the shuttering of federal repositories designed to store the information. The amount of data stored one such database has more than tripled in the past year alone, according to the Times article, bulging at the seams with 300 trillion nitrogenous bases occupying almost 700 trillion bytes of computer memory.

“We have these giant piles of data and no way to connect them,” Steven Wiley, a biologist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, told the Times. “I’m sitting in front of a pile of data that we’ve been trying to analyze for the last year and a half.”

Strangely, scientists can’t seem to get their head around the simple “Eat less, move more” explanation regularly offered. They seem to think that there’s more to it. Beverly Tepper and Katherine Keller write in The Scientist:

People the world over are getting fatter. Today more than one-third of adults in the United States are obese, and the rates in other industrialized countries are catching up. Obesity is no longer considered a condition particular to affluent societies—it has now spread to developing nations such as China and India, resulting in a global health crisis. According to the World Health Organization, 500 million adults worldwide are now obese, and this number is expected to climb well into the foreseeable future. Obesity is so problematic because it poses serious threats to personal health and well-being. Obese people are at an increased risk of chronic and potentially debilitating diseases such as cardiovascular disease and stroke, certain forms of cancer, type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis, and asthma, among others. And the impact of obesity on an individual’s work and family life can be far-reaching, affecting a person’s employability, work productivity, and ability to pursue interests and activities of daily life.

Although the consequences of obesity are clear, its origins are poorly understood. Since our genetic makeup has not changed appreciably in the past 30 years, changes in the food environment have been identified as causing much of the dramatic rise in obesity rates that began in the 1980s. Our food environment is often described as “toxic,” meaning that our constant exposure to palatable, high-fat, and energy-dense foods, coupled with a sedentary lifestyle, is likely making us fat. Nevertheless, despite access to the same foods, not everyone becomes obese. And so, genetic variation must also play a role, rendering some people more vulnerable to caloric excess, and resulting in a range of body weights. Identifying the genes that are making such individuals more susceptible to weight gain is critical to understanding the basis of obesity as well as devising strategies to combat the condition.A great deal of progress has been made in identifying the genes that may contribute to obesity. According to recent estimates, 135 different candidate genes have been linked with obesity and the eating patterns associated with it.¹ Except for a handful of single-gene mutations that produce extreme obesity, the common, everyday form that we typically encounter on a city street probably reflects very modest contributions from each of a large number of individual genes.

Many of the genes implicated in obesity modify how energy is spent, how fat is metabolized and stored, and how nutrients are partitioned. Conspicuously absent from the list of obesity genes are genes involved in taste. According to consumers, “taste” (loosely defined here as the composite of the taste, smell, and texture of a food) is one of the top three factors guiding food choices, along with cost/convenience and nutritional content. Throughout human history, chemosensory cues have helped us navigate the uncertainties of the natural environment, where many of the available food choices may have been toxic. Moreover, the ability to recognize important nutritional components such as fats, carbohydrates, and salt, which were often limited in the food supply, would have been critical to our survival. Ironically, genetic variation in taste, which served us well in the preindustrial era when cycles of feast and famine were the rule, may be conspiring against us in the modern age when we have continuous access to highly palatable, energy-dense foods.

For the past 15 years, our laboratories have been studying the impact of taste genes on food preferences and their contribution to diet selection and body weight. Though it may not be a taste in the traditional sense of the word, recent studies point to evidence that humans can in fact perceive fat, and that this perception may affect our food choices. . .

Continue reading.

Sometimes when you proceed in the face of your fears, it turns out that the thing dreaded was a mere phantasm, fading away like fog. A bit of that sometimes occurs when a guy first must face putting a double-edged safety razor to his face for the first time. (I know that I was a tad nervous about that.)

Poached eggs have been a challenge, and I have always found refuge in various kinds of egg cookers, either the Sunbeam electric or a top-of-stove egg poacher. After reading this article I decided to try true poached eggs: eggs in simmering water, poaching traditionally.

I was nervous, but it was easy and worked like a charm. I did a test egg last night (feeling somewhat peckish to boot), and this morning cooked another to top my hot cereal. Very enjoyable. The paper-towel trick helps a lot: gets rid of the clinging water.

I didn’t bother to strain off the thin part of the white: I don’t require neatness from my eggs. It would be unfair, I think.