Later On

Have a hankering for a soup grub, and this occurs to me:

In 7-qt pot:

1.5 Tbsp EVOO
1.5 med yellow onions, chopped

Sauté for 5 minutes, then add:

12-14 (pre-peeled) garlic cloves, minced
4 small carrots, chopped
1 handful chopped celery (the remains of the stash)
1 bunch parsley, minced
shaking crushed red pepper
grinding black pepper
2 tsp dried marjoram
2 tsp dried thyme
2 tsp dried savory

Sauté that briskly for a while, then add:

4 oz tofu, diced
1/2 c black rice (uncooked)
1/2 c lentils (uncooked)
1/2 c mixed lentils and grains combo packaged for soup — this stuff*
28 oz canned diced tomatoes – Muir Glen “Fire-Roasted” in this case
2 qt water (I didn’t measure—may have been slightly less)
1 Tbsp Penzeys Chicken Soup Base
1/2 bunch collards, chopped small, stalks minced
good shaking of wakame flakes (required)

Brought to boil, reduced heat, covered, and simmered one hour. Very tasty indeed. I think I may add some miso later on (after a few servings plain). I estimate 6 meals or so.

UPDATE to reflect what I actually did, with appropriate revisions made above. Successful grub. A very thick soup/stew.

UPDATE 2: I was describing to The Wife how extremely tasty this one was. Part is how chewy it is from the grains and veg, but also it tastes quite rich. Of course, I got out of the practice of using herbs regularly, so I particularly notice their contribution, but as I was telling her how much umami it seemed to have, I realized, of course: the wakame flakes. Seaweed (sea vegetables if you want) are quite high in glutamate, which is the source of the umami taste. So I made a thick, high-umami vegetable soup—and hit the template rather neatly, if I say it as who shouldn’t.

Right after the soup finished, it smelled a lot like miso soup, though it had no miso in it. So I assume that what I was smelling (here and in miso soup) are the wakame flakes newly reconstituted. That smell died down over half an hour or so, and now the soup simply smells—and tastes—good.

*SooFoo update: I keep tasting this soup—can’t believe how good it is—and I have to say that SooFoo is a winner and worth tracking down. Here I have to go to Cornucopia in Carmel to get it.  Amazon lists it, but it seems unavailable for now. Still: mighty tasty stuff.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I keep tasting the soup and it tastes better and better. This recipe is definitely a keeper. The wakame flakes are not optional.

Sounds fascinating.

Apparently so. Strange religious outlook, that lies are good, but apparently that is what Santorum believes. (His belief system, overall, does not seem to be shared by many.) Glenn Kessler posts in the Washington Post:

“In the Netherlands, people wear different bracelets if they are elderly. And the bracelet is: ‘Do not euthanize me.’ Because they have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands but half of the people who are euthanized — ten percent of all deaths in the Netherlands — half of those people are enthanized involuntarily at hospitals because they are older and sick. And so elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go to the hospital. They go to another country, because they are afraid, because of budget purposes, they will not come out of that hospital if they go in there with sickness.”

— Former senator Rick Santorum, at the American Heartland Forum in Columbia, Missouri, Feb. 3, 2012

These were interesting remarks by one of the leading candidates for the GOP nomination. Though Santorum made this observation earlier in the month, a video of his comments only circulated on the web over the weekend and a number of readers asked whether he is correct. (His comments also spawned headlines in Holland, such as one that proclaimed: “Rick Santorum Thinks He Knows the Netherlands: Murder of the Elderly on a Grand Scale.”)

So we will check his statistics — 10 percent of all deaths in the Netherlands are from euthanasia and 50 percent of those die involuntarily — and also his claim that the elderly wear bracelets requesting that they not be euthanized.

(Full disclosure: The Fact Checker’s parents emigrated from Holland and I have direct, personal experience with the practice of euthanasia there. My father’s brother requested euthanasia when he was diagnosed with a terminal disease and after various remedies were ineffective. In the United States, he might have lived another two or three months, in great pain, and likely would have lapsed into a coma before death. But, after a conclusion by the Dutch medical establishment that he had no chance of survival, he arranged for his death at home with his family at his side. He even called me an hour before his death to say good-bye.)

We realize this is an emotional issue in the United States. But the simple facts, as Santorum described them, should be clear.

The Facts

In 2001, The Netherlands became the first country to legalize euthanasia, setting forth a complex process. The law, which went into effect a year later, codified a practice that has been unofficially tolerated for many years.

Under the Dutch law, a doctor must diagnose the illness as incurable and the patient must have full control of his or her mental faculties. The patient must voluntarily and repeatedly request the procedure, and another doctor must provide a written opinion agreeing with the diagnosis. After the death, a commission made up of a doctor, a jurist and an ethical expert also are required to verify that the requirements for euthanasia have been met.

Late last year, in the first such case, . .

Continue reading.

Rick Santorum is a very religious person—just ask him—and apparently his view of religion is that lies are perfectly okay. While it’s true that Santorum claims intimate knowledge of the Father of Lies (Satan, whose plans and techniques Santorum claims to know in detail), I hadn’t realize that Santorum was actually using similar techniques. Quite interesting. I hope people ask him on his religious views on lying.

One drawback of the Internet is the casual way libelous statements are spread about.

Recently a guy responded to my Sharpologist post “Shaving-Tool Innovation & the Weber Razor” that my Weber razor is not (as I thought) version 1.0—there was an earlier version, of which only a few copies were sold. That early model had no DLC coating, had a “W” embossed on the head, and other differences. It apparently did not provide so good a shave as the current model (much like the version 1.0 iKon did not match the performance of the later models). He provided a link to a Badger & Blade thread discussing the first Weber, which was quite interesting.

Since I was there, out of curiosity I did a search on “Leisureguy” and found a poisonous little post in this thread:

Notice the total lack of substantiation: just a slam, based on his “belief”, the grounds of which are not given but obviously did not include actually bothering to look at the book: in the preface, I thank “the shavers who have suggested ideas and improvements for the book.”

In explaining the origin of the book, I note:

This book grew out of my own experience, augmented and illuminated by the experiences other shavers shared in the on-line shaving forums.  I thank the guys on Pogonotomy.com, ShaveMyFace.com, TheShaveDen.com, the RazorandBrush.com Message Board, Wicked_Edge, DamnFineShave.com, and BadgerandBlade.com. I also thank the vendors listed in the appendix for the fine array of products and information they offer, essential to the practice of traditional shaving. And in particular I want to thank shaving novices, whose questions and desire for reliable information first stimulated this book.

In the book itself, I provide credits for each quotation and for many ideas (e.g., to Chris Moss for his pointing out the use of Trumper’s Coral Skin Food and of glycerin as pre-shaves—not to mention credit to him and Sara Bonneyman for the Moss Scuttle).

So the statement posted is totally false: I did not get “most of my information” from B&B, nor do I fail to offer appropriate credit. I do have to admire the writer’s hypocritical expression of pity from his august perch of ignorance and also the perfection of his ignorance.

Oh, well: such people will always be around, I suppose. And they go after almost any target, always with the same technique: utter ignorance, no substantiation, a vicious slam, and move on. Here’s an example of exactly the same sort of unsubstantiated libel, this one more general and harder to repudiate but equally based in ignorance: the writer has obviously never visited the store, just passing along (or making up) a (vicious) rumor. Malice is more common than one would like.

I found this video quite interesting.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/iKeFNjyaDNA)

It’s a Windows machine, of course: MacBooks are too expensive for this category. And it seems exceptionally capable at the price. Take a look.

Certainly puts in perspective my cataract-surgery issues. Ole H. Petersen, Oleg V. Gerasimenko, and Julia V. Gerasimenko write in The Scientist:

Sometimes the human body turns on itself. Cancer and autoimmune diseases involve some form of physiological revolt, when a body’s own cells and molecules rise up to bring about its undoing. Patients suffering from most of these disorders have a variety of treatment options, formulated from a mechanistic understanding of the molecular roots of the diseases. But in acute pancreatitis, a largely untreatable disease, the exocrine cells of the pancreas—whose role is to manufacture enzymes that are normally mixed with bile from the liver to digest dietary proteins and fats—malfunction and digest themselves and surrounding tissues and organs in a more mysterious fashion. Acute pancreatitis is usually preceded either by heavy alcohol consumption or by blockage of the duct that unites the common bile duct and the pancreatic duct with hardened lumps of bile called gallstones. Searing pain, vomiting, fever, internal bleeding, multiple organ failure, and if untreated, death, can result.

Acute pancreatitis involves an act of molecular cannibalism. A protease called trypsin, produced by the pancreas’s acinar cells, is normally released into the pancreatic duct as a proenzyme, before travelling to the gut, where it’s activated to break down the protein molecules in the food we eat. Inactive pancreatic proteases are packaged into small organelles called zymogen granules (ZGs), which are clustered inside the acinar cells. They are normally in a chemically inactivatable form, cemented together by calcium. But when acute pancreatitis strikes, the packaged enzymes become activated, break down the granules, and are then free in the cytoplasm, where they begin to digest the pancreas from the inside out.

For all that is known about the cellular progression of acute pancreatitis, its molecular triggers have remained cloaked in mystery. And neither science nor medicine has yet offered answers for how to treat the sometimes fatal disease. For more than 200,000 acute pancreatitis patients admitted to hospitals in the United States each year, that means relying only upon pain-relief drugs, intravenous fluid replacement, antibiotics, and changes in diet to stave off the serious internal damage that the disease can wreak.¹

But recently, new light has been shed on the pathobiology of acute pancreatitis, from which prevention and treatment opportunities are emerging. . .

Continue reading.

Aren’t they cute?

In an email recently I suggested that one good category of interview question is to ask about challenging trade-offs the interviewee had to make in the course of his business, art, craft, whatever.

I think it’s a good category for several reasons. For one thing, trade-off situations are common, so the interviewee will have encountered some. Moreover, trade-off situations are generally pivot points of the project or operation or whatever: the very reason that time is spent investigating trade-offs is that the decision point is critical. And a lot of thought is given to trade-offs, the interviewee can generally list the arguments for and againsst—and that provides a natural entry into the technical background of the issue.

I got to thinking recently about how my knives gradually grow dull through daily routine and use, so I periodically have to have them sharpened, and I was struck by how Megs’s toenails are the opposite: they gradually grow sharp through daily routine and use, so I periodically have to have them clipped to make them dull once more. Weird, but of course life is anti-entropy in any case.

I got to thinking—you can see how my mind wanders—to dog toenails. They may require clipping, but they don’t grow long and sharp. I was trying to picture a dog with long sharp claws, and retractability (or, what it is in fact, extensibility) of such claws is important if the animal is to run quickly over ground. (The cheetah’s claws, in fact, are not extensible: more like dog claws.)

Obviously there are trade-offs: long claws = better kills, less running. Which way to go?

The way evolution works is through letting trade-offs play out in real time: the natural selection of the active environment determines empirically which trade-offs deliver better over time—and, of course, it’s a long time: evolution takes time for many individuals and generations to be born, live, procreate (or not), and pass away, over and over, as the benefits of one or another variant pay off (or don’t).

So what we see, as we look at the biosphere (and indeed the memesphere) is the working out of trade-offs: all that you observe are the resultants to date of trade-offs along every dimension, each trade-off influenced by all the others simultaneously occurring as well as by environmental factors beyond the organism—ice ages, volcanic eruptions, great droughts, and so on: the framework changes and that changes the direction of beneficial adaptations—or, more accurately, may make a previously beneficial adaptation a handicap and elevate another as conferring great benefits in the new environment. But, of course, everything else is simultaneously changing and working out other trade-offs. The biosphere/memesphere is a system (of sorts) in which everything influences everything else, though the remoter ripples may be faint.

It’s interesting to look at the all the plant, animal, fungus life and see it as a cross-section—this instant—of an on-going process of workiing out trade-offs in response to a constantly shifting environment. The level of details is overwhelming, eh?

QED’s Mocha Java shave stick, a longtime favorite, which produced a terrific lather with my butterscotch Frank Shaving brush. I picked a Gillette Slim Adjustable that was gold-plated—one of many razors Gillette titled “Aristocrat”—with an Astra Superior Platinum blade. Three quite enjoyable passes, and then a good splash of Floris No. 89 aftershave, a fragrance I’ve lately enjoyed a lot. I have the EDT as well.