Archive for March 29th, 2012
Interesting view of issues in the Israeli/Iran confrontation
Read James Fallows’s latest post. A reader has submitted a very intriguing reading of the issues.
Tasty eggplant grub with tomatoes
This turned out extremely well. Quite different from other recent grubs. Worth a repeat, definitely. In 4-qt sauté pan:
2 Tbsp EVOO
1 large onion, chopped
4-6 large shallots, sliced thin
Sweat shallots until quite limp, adding:
good pinch of salt
sprinkling (generous, if you’re me) of crushed red pepper
grinding of black pepper
1-2 tsp paprika (love it)
When shallots are really cooked, but before they brown, add:
A lot of garlic, minced—basically, an entire head of garlic, cloves peeled, trimmed, and minced
Sauté until fragrant, about a minute. Then add (and thus: have ready):
6 oz firm tofu, cubed small
4 domestic white mushrooms, of a good size, sliced
1/4 c pignolas
Sauté, stirring with spatula and scraping pan, for a few minutes, then add and stir together:
1 large bunch Italian parsley, chopped
1/4 (or 1/2, if you want) head green cabbage, chopped
1 red bell pepper, seeded and chopped small
1 c cooked black rice
Sauté, stirring frequently. Evidence of sticking will soon ensue. Add:
2 Tbsp red wine vinegar
1/2 c red wine
Stir and scrape with spatula to deglaze pan. Add:
1 Italian eggplant (the black banana-shaped ones), diced fairly small
28-oz can diced organic fire-roasted tomatoes
1/2 c (or a bit more) Kalamata olives, halved
more red wine if it seems desirable
Stir well together. This would be a good place to add oregano, but I didn’t. Should have.
Cover, simmer 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Variations: I think I’ll top this with shredded Parmesan for at least one meal—and, logically, yogurt topping also. Lemon juice (and zest) instead of red wine vinegar would be good, too, and then Amontillado instead of red wine. Worcestershire sauce or anchovies are a possibility—in fact, I’m going to add anchovies now: just the direction I want to go.
Template: Hit four-square, as you see. It’s more black rice than I would normally use, but I was finishing off a pan, and this looks to be at least three meals. (One cup rice = 2 full starch servings or 3 starch servings of my size.) Greens there (and this would be good also with spinach or red chard), protein. And plenty of peppers.
Tomorrow I’m making a pork-cabbage-fennel-apple-sweet onion-garlic-raisin-walnuts-rice grub: the name pretty much says it all. I’m torn between white rice and black. I’m going with wild rice as a compromise.
UPDATE: When I refer to my “spatula”, I mean this spatula except that the width is 4″ (less than shown). The 11″ handle with 4″ spatula turns out to be my most useful tool when cooking at the stove: for stirring (it stirs better than a wooden spoon because it’s wider), for scraping (the flat side scrapes well), and for turning. You can specifically request that model with a 4″ width, and they’ll make it for you. That’s what I recommend. I have three of them: I’m never going to be without one. Well worth the price, in my opinion.
Another option: Order this spootle as a spatula—i.e., no “spoon” dip. (Reason: the spatula format is more agile and not so thick as the spootle.) The 12″ handle is nice, too.
Very interesting project: Air-Quality Egg
Crowdsourcing weather observations. Take a look.
(Past) Time to End the War on Drugs
Philip Smith reports:
In a historic meeting in Antigua, Guatemala, Saturday, three Central American heads of state attended a regional summit to discuss alternatives to the current drug prohibition regime, which has left their countries wracked by violence. No consensus was reached and three other regional leaders failed to attend, but for the first time, regional heads of state have met explicitly to discuss ending the war on drugs as we know it.
“We have realized that the strategy in the fight against drug trafficking in the past 40 years has failed. We have to look for new alternatives,” said the host, Guatemalan President Oscar Pérez Molina, a former army general who first called for such a meeting last month, shortly after taking office. “We must end the myths, the taboos, and tell people you have to discuss it, debate it.”
According to the Associated Press, Pérez Molina said that drug use, production, and sales should be legalized and regulated. He suggested that the region jointly regulate the drug trade, perhaps by establishing transit corridors through which regulated drug shipments could pass.
Also in attendance were Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla and Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli. Former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria, a harsh critic of US-style drug policies and a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy was an invited guest and addressed the summit. Outside of Central America, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and Mexican President Felipe Calderon have expressed support for the meeting.
Not attending were Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes, Honduran President Porfirio Lobo, and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. While Funes initially expressed support for the summit, he has since backed away. Lobo and Ortega have opposed the idea from the beginning. Funes and Ortega did send lower ranking members of the governments to the meeting, and the Salvadoran delegation called for a future meeting on the subject, saying it remained a topic of great interest and import in the region.
Some leaders are pushing for a discussion on alternatives to the drug war to be on the agenda at next month’s Organization of American States (OAS) summit in Cartagena, Colombia, where President Santos has also been signaling an openness to debate on the issue. US President Barack Obama is expected to attend that summit, setting the stage for a particularly sticky diplomatic dance, given US opposition to changes in regional drug policies.
But US-backed drug policies have in recent years brought a wave of violence to the region, which is used as a springboard for Colombian cocaine headed north to the US and Canada, either direct or via Mexico. Mexican drug cartels have expanded their operations in Central America in the past few year, perhaps in response to the pressures they face at home. . .
Particle-Wave Duality Shown With Largest Molecules Yet
This is amazing. I can’t wait until they show interference by using, say, a rabbit. Matthew Francis reports at Ars Technica:
One of the deepest mysteries in quantum physics is the wave-particle duality: every quantum object has properties of both a wave and a particle. Nowhere is this effect more beautifully demonstrated than in the double-slit experiment: streams of particles (photons, electrons, whatever) are directed at a barrier with two narrow openings. While each particle shows up at the detector individually, the population as a whole creates an interference pattern as though they are waves. Neither a pure wave or a pure particle description has proven successful in explaining these experiments.
Now researchers have successfully performed a quantum interference experiment with much larger and more massive molecules than ever before. Thomas Juffmann et al. fired molecules composed of over 100 atoms at a barrier with openings designed to minimize molecular interactions, and observed the build-up of an interference pattern. The experiment approaches the regime where macroscopic and quantum physics overlap, offering a possible way to study the transition that has frustrated many scientists for decades.
The interference of waves is determined in part by the wavelength. According to quantum physics, the wavelength of a massive particle is inversely proportional to its momentum: the mass multiplied by the particle’s speed. In other words, the heavier the object, the shorter its wavelength at a given speed.
A kicked football (for example) has a very tiny wavelength compared to the size of the ball because it has a relatively large mass and a speed measured in meters per second (rather than nanometers or such). In contrast, an electron has a relatively large wavelength (though still microscopic) because it has a small mass. Longer wavelengths make it easier to generate interference so, while it isn’t going to be possible to make two footballs interfere with each other (in the quantum sense!), it’s comparatively straightforward to produce electron interference.
The relatively large phthalocyanine (C32H18N8) and derivative molecules (C48H26F24N8O8) have more mass than anything in which quantum interference has previously been observed. To have wavelengths that are relatively large compared to their sizes, the molecules need to move very slowly. Juffmann et al. achieved this by directing a blue diode laser onto a very thin film of molecules in a vacuum chamber, effectively boiling off individual molecules directly under the beam while leaving the rest unaffected.
After separation from the film, the molecules were sent through a collimator to ensure they formed a beam before reaching the barrier, which had a number of parallel slits to produce the actual interference pattern. To prevent excessive interactions (primarily van der Waals forces) between the molecules and the edges of the slits, the researchers used a specially-prepared grating coated in silicon nitride membranes. Without such preparation, the molecules are likely to be deflected by ordinary interactions with the hardware.
After passing through the slits, the molecules’ positions were recorded using fluorescence microscopy, which has both sufficient spatial resolution and fast response to detect when and where the molecules arrive. The positions of individual spots were measured to 10 nanometer accuracy. Additionally, the molecules lodged in the fluorescent screen, meaning their positions could be independently verified in the form of build-up at the experiment’s end.
The researchers observed the particle nature of the molecules in the form of individual light spots appearing singly in the fluorescent detector as they arrived. But, over time, these spots formed an interference pattern due to the molecules’ wavelike character.
As the Juffmann et al. point out, no other . . .
Continue reading. Reality is very weird, at least to our understanding.
The real Foxconn
Again via Scott Feldstein’s blog, this interesting story by Tim Culpan in the Bloomberg Tech Blog:
So Mike Daisey’s been outed. The things he said he saw, he didn’t. The people he said he spoke to, he didn’t. The discoveries he said he made, he didn’t. He lied.
It matters a lot that Mike Daisey lied, and it matters that he was caught. You really should listen to the episode of This American Life in which Ira Glass takes a deep breath and lets it all out. It’s great storytelling by Rob Schmitz, as fantastic as the story Daisey himself told. Anyone who has become invested in this story of Apple and Foxconn needs to listen to that episode. If you’ve ever tweeted about how bad Apple is, blogged about the evils of Foxconn’s sweatshops, or “Liked” a Facebook post excoriating how iPads are made, then you should listen. Don’t take the word of the dozens of bloggers and news outlets who’ve tried to summarize the whole saga into bite-sized morsels—go listen for yourself. Go on, do it now. I’ll wait. You heard it? Good.
Now let me tell you what I’ve seen at Foxconn. I’ve covered the company as a reporter for more than a decade, since before the iPhone was a twinkle in Steve Jobs’s eye and just after Foxconn landed Dell as a PC customer. Then in 2010, when a series of suicides caught the world’s attention and made sure you now know who makes your iPhone, my colleague Frederik Balfour and I started looking deeper. The result was “Inside Foxconn,” a 6,000-plus-word cover story for Bloomberg Businessweek.
We interviewed Foxconn’s founder Terry Gou for many hours. But before sitting down with Gou (and walking the Shenzhen campus with him), we spoke to dozens of people who worked at, dealt with, supplied to, bought from, or otherwise had firsthand dealings with Foxconn and its founder. Foxconn doesn’t know who most of these people are, and they never asked. We also had a Foxconn-led tour inside dorm rooms, the pool, the cafeterias, and a factory line. We knew very well they were trying to show their best side. We smiled and nodded and did our own research anyway.
Among those we spoke to were about two dozen workers, mostly factory personnel, who spoke without supervisors present and spoke freely. Again, Foxconn doesn’t know who we spoke with, and they never asked.Mike Daisey claimed to have come across 12-year-old workers, armed guards, crippled factory operators. We saw none of that. And we did try to find them. Nothing would have been more compelling for us and our story than to have a chat with a preteen factory operator about how she enjoyed (or not) working 12-hour shifts making iPads. We didn’t get such an anecdote.
In our reporting, as “Inside Foxconn” detailed, we found a group of workers who have complaints, but complaints not starkly different from those of workers in any other company. The biggest gripe, which surprised us somewhat, is that they don’t get enough overtime. They wanted to work more, to get more money.
Less than a year later, I went back again with another colleague. . .
All kine today descended from a single herd
It’s sort of surprising that all domesticated cattle in the world today are descended from a single herd of about 80 aurochs, but then all domesticated horses are descendents of a single stallion. (Horses run harems, and a stallion will protect his harem fiercely against other stallions, so a young stallion pretty much is forced from the herd and leads a lonely bachelor existence. Stallions are rambunctious and rebellious, but apparently one stallion decided that the prospect of having his own mares was worth his freedom, and so domestication began. But they never found another compliant stallion. (This is discussed in the fascinating book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, by David Anthony—well worth reading.)
Here’s the story of the origin of kine, by Duncan Geere of Wired UK:
A genetic study of cattle has claimed that all modern domesticated bovines are descended from a single herd of wild ox, which lived 10,500 years ago.
A team of geneticists from the National Museum of Natural History in France, the University of Mainz in Germany, and UCL in the UK excavated the bones of domestic cattle on archaeological sites in Iran, and then compared those to modern cows. They looked at how differences in DNA sequences could have arisen under different population history scenarios, modeled in computer simulations.
The team found that the differences that show up between the two populations could only have arisen if a relatively small number of animals — approximately 80 — had been domesticated from a now-extinct species of wild ox, known as aurochs, which roamed across Europe and Asia. Those cattle were then bred into the 1.4 billion cattle estimated by the UN to exist in mid-2011.
The process of collecting the data was tricky. . .
A Jewish view of modern-day Jewish political culture
Very interesting excerpt from Peter Beinart’s book The Crisis of Zionism that appears in Salon:
I remember walking back with my grandmother one night from synagogue, past the loquat trees of Sea Point, South Africa, the most beautiful Jewish ghetto in the world. I was a kid, and boasting about the United States, the country to which her daughter — my mother — had immigrated. She grew annoyed. “Don’t get too attached,” she announced. “The Jews are like rats. We leave the sinking ship. One day, please God, we’ll all join Isaac in Israel.”
Isaac was her brother. They had parted ways four decades earlier, as the ancient Jewish community of Alexandria, Egypt, broke under the strain of economic depression, Arab nationalism, and world war. My grandmother’s family were Sephardic Jews. They took their name, Albel-das, from a Spanish town cleansed of Jews five hundred years ago. From Spain, her ancestors crossed the Mediterranean. Her father hailed from Izmir in what is now Turkey, her mother from the Isle of Rhodes in what is now Greece.
When the Jewish community of Alexandria collapsed, everyone in the family except Isaac went south, to a corner of the Belgian Congo where Jews from Rhodes were congregating. A few years later, the Jews who still remained in Rhodes found themselves under Nazi rule. The Nazis rounded them up, stole their possessions, extracted their gold teeth, stripped them naked to search for hidden jewelry, starved them, and put them in cargo ships and sealed cars for the two-week trip to Auschwitz. Virtually the entire community — which dated from the second century B.C.E. — was murdered. Now there were no more Jews there either.
When the war ended, my grandmother moved again, this time to South Africa, where she met my grandfather. Fifteen years later, the Congo erupted in civil war, and the Jews there fled. Now, in her old age, racial violence was bloodying South Africa, too, and all around her, Jews were again packing their things. Only later did I realize: My grandmother had spent her life burying Jewish communities. So had her parents. She suspected I would do the same.
Yet she was at peace, because of Israel. She never joined Isaac, who ran a store in Haifa. But Israel’s existence calmed her, comforted her, rooted her. It made her feel that Jewish history was more than an endless cycle of estrangement and dislocation; it actually led somewhere. It made her feel that not all Jewish homes need be temporary, that all the running had not been in vain.
My life has been very different from my grandmother’s. But I have seen enough to understand how she feels. When I was thirteen, I watched footage of thousands of emaciated Ethiopian Jews, isolated from the rest of their people since the days when the First Temple stood, trekking through the Sahara to reach the planes that the Jewish state had sent to take them home. When I was fourteen, I saw a squat, bald Russian named Anatoly Sharansky — fresh from eight years in a Soviet jail — raise his hands in triumph as he descended the steps at Ben-Gurion Airport. In those soul-stirring scenes, I saw my grandmother’s Zionism — the Zionism of refuge — play out before my eyes. It became my Zionism, too. Like her, I sleep better knowing that the world contains a Jewish state.
But not any Jewish state. Roughly eighteen months ago, an Israeli friend sent me a video. It was of a Palestinian man named Fadel Jaber, who was being arrested for stealing water. His family had repeatedly asked Israeli authorities for access to the pipes that service a nearby Jewish settlement. But the Jabers have little influence over the Israeli authorities: like all Palestinians in the West Bank, they are subjects, not citizens. Partly as a result, West Bank Palestinians use roughly one-fifth as much water per person as do Jewish settlers, which means that while settlements often boast swimming pools and intensive irrigation systems, Palestinians fall far below the World Health Organization’s recommended daily water consumption rate. In the video, Israeli police drag Fadel toward some kind of paddy wagon. And then the camera pans down, to a five-year-old boy with a striped shirt and short brown hair, Khaled, who is frantically trying to navigate the thicket of adults in order to reach his father. As his father is pulled away, he keeps screaming, “Baba, Baba.”
As soon as I began watching the video, I wished I had never turned it on. For most of my life, my reaction to accounts of Palestinian suffering has been rationalization, a search for reasons why the accounts are exaggerated or the suffering self-inflicted. In that respect, I suspect, I’m like many American Jews. But in recent years, for reasons I can’t fully explain, I had been lowering my defenses, and Khaled’s cries left me staring in mute horror at my computer screen.
Perhaps it is because my son is Khaled’s age. He attends a Jewish school, has an Israeli flag on his wall, and can recount Bible stories testifying to our ancient ties to the land. When he was younger, we thought he would call me Abba, the Hebrew word for father. But he couldn’t say Abba, so he calls me Baba, the same name Khaled calls his father.
One day, when they’re old enough to understand, I’ll tell . . .
Rise in allergies linked to our war on bacteria
Interesting note by Diana Gitig of Ars Technica:
“Allergic diseases have reached pandemic levels,” begins David Artis’s new paper in Nature Medicine. Artis goes on to say that, while everyone knows allergies are caused by a combination of factors involving both nature and nurture, that knowledge doesn’t help us identify what is culpable — it is not at all clear exactly what is involved, or how the relevant players promote allergic responses.
There is some evidence that one of the causes lies within our guts. Epidemiological studies have linked changes in the species present in commensal bacteria — the trillions of microorganisms that reside in our colon — to the development of allergic diseases. (Typically, somewhere between 1,000 and 15,000 different bacterial species inhabit our guts.) And immunologists know that signaling molecules produced by some immune cells mediate allergic inflammation.
Animal studies have provided the link between these two, showing that commensal bacteria promote allergic inflammation. But these researchers wanted to know more about how.
To figure it out, Artis and his colleagues at Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine treated mice with a broad range of oral antibiotics to diminish or deplete their commensal bacteria and then examined different immunological parameters. They used a combination of five different antibiotics, ranging from ampicillin, which is fairly run of the mill, to vancomycin, which is kind of a nasty one.
They found that mice treated with antibiotics had elevated levels of antibodies known to be important in allergies and asthma (IgE class antibodies). The elevated antibodies in turn increased the levels of basophils, immune cells that play a role in inflammation, both allergic and otherwise.
This connection doesn’t only apply to mice but also to humans who have high levels of IgE for genetic reasons. People with genetically elevated levels of IgE are hypersusceptible to eczema and infections, and antibodies that neutralize IgE are used to treat asthma.
The antibiotic treatments and IgE did not act by promoting the survival of mature basophils, but rather by promoting the proliferation of basophil precursor cells in the bone marrow. Commensal bacteria limit this proliferative capacity.
That discovery is the real insight contributed by this paper. It has been well known for some time that . . .
Here’s another brief note (from The Scientist) on the topic. I almost blogged this some days ago, with the idea that people (especially Americans?) who are culturally inclined to admire Rugged Individualism—the person who is entire unto him/herself, independent of others and not requiring help—tend to see the individual as remarkably separate (despite the fact that the individual’s clothing, food, shelter, knowledge, and language all come from other people, and all of us (save for some hypothetical handful) live interdependently with our fellows. In particular, as the note suggests, our own bodily processes cannot operate properly without the incorporation and cooperation of microbes that are not really a part of us but live in us and are essential to our health.
The line between us and our environment is very fuzzy indeed: we and our environment merge into each other.
Interesting walking facts
From Wendy Baumgartner at About.com’s Walking section:
If you add just 2000 more steps a day to your regular activities, you may never gain another pound. So says research by Dr. James O. Hill of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. To lose weight, add in more steps.
Move More
Sedentary people in the USA generally move only 2000-3000 steps a day. Previous studies have shown that moving 6000 steps a day significantly reduces risk of death, and 8000-10,000 a day promotes weight loss.How far is 2000 steps? It is about a mile. But the benefits for health and for weight management don’t depend on you walking a mile all at one time, but simply adding in more steps throughout the day. . .
The post continues, discussing pedometers. I have to say, though, that the Fitbit Ultra has been delightful. It’s quite light—it weighs less than half an ounce: 0.4 oz. And you can clip it to your pyjama sleeve (or use the comfortable wristlet) and wear it while you sleep, which gives you this sort of information:
Being an old guy, I get up at night to pee—and I don’t require much sleep nowadays. (I note, BTW, that normally I fall asleep in 6-8 minutes—last night was an exception.)
It also tracks ascents (e.g., walking up hills), which it translates into “flights of stairs”. Altogether I’m very happy with this. You also have access to a food log, activity log, weight tracker (and you can link it to the Withings site so it automatically reflects info from the wireless Withings scale).
This is head and shoulders about any pedometer I’ve had.
Interesting lifestyle in 5000-sq ft one-room home
The guy who made this:
.
Very interesting profile by Joyce Wadler in the NY Times of a Czech who resettled in Utah:
WHEN a man escapes from an Iron Curtain country in an aircraft he built himself, perhaps it should not be surprising, nearly three decades later, to find him making his home in an airplane hangar.
The three runways surrounding Ivo Zdarsky’s hangar are not pristine, despite his continual battle with the badgers that burrow underneath, threatening them with collapse. But at least he has managed to keep them clear of the cattle. Lucin International Airport is what Mr. Zdarsky calls this place, though the only plane that lands regularly in this ghost town a 180-mile drive northwest of Salt Lake City is his own. (If you go to Ogden, 160 miles away, to stock up on groceries, it is good to have your own plane.)
Do not think, however, that the home of Mr. Zdarsky, who makes his living manufacturing airplane propellers, is austere. His great room — essentially his only room — is dominated by such big-box treasures as a 90-inch flat-screen TV, with four-foot-tall speakers in the corners of the room. There is also a drum set, a desk and a computer, two mattresses in front of the TV and an upside-down inflatable hot tub covered with a sheet and repurposed as a settee.
You must be really close to the U.P.S. guy, the reporter says.
“Brent,” says Mr. Zdarsky, 51, who retains the accent of his native Czechoslovakia, and has a high-pitched voice and a dry but wicked sense of humor. “He lives in Ogden. He is my lifeline to civilization.”
And sitting on the bed and settee, as casually as you might toss a sweater, are two assault weapons.
“I use them on the badgers because they dig in my ground,” Mr. Zdarsky explains. “You cannot imagine the damage these badgers do.”
In fact, looking around, the reporter counts seven weapons in the room. Specifics, please.
“That’s a .308 sniper rifle,” Mr. Zdarsky says. “That’s a .223 sniper rifle. There is a shotgun if the badgers get too close. There is a Belgium FS2000.”
He gestures toward some ammunition on a homemade table nearby. “That’s what our guys are using in Afghanistan. It’s very effective against badgers. And probably terrorists too.”
There is also camouflage clothing. Why would Mr. Zdarsky, who may be the only resident of Lucin, need camouflage clothing?
“Because they don’t get dirty,” Mr. Zdarsky says. “Plus, the badgers don’t see it.”
THERE are ghost towns, and then there are towns that are so deserted they aren’t even the ghosts of ghost towns. Lucin, in Box Elder County, is the latter. In the late 1800s, steam engines stopped nearby to take on water. In the 1970s, a few retired railroad workers were still living here, but they are long gone.
More significant to Mr. Zdarsky is the area’s military history — which may be the reason he found a mysterious 500-foot-wide, 4,000-foot-long runway on his property. . .
Another excellent shave
Excellent, but hard to tell whether it’s the equal of the previous shave. Still, no complaints. I used the Veleiro pre-shave soap again, and I must say I need to get back to using my Thater brushes. This morning the brush felt particularly soft at the tips while still resilient and producing good lather. These are top-notch brushes.
I got a good lather with the I Coloniali rhubarb shaving cream, and it’s quite a nice cream. I took my time working in the lather because I was enjoying the brush so much, then did three passes with the Weber holding a Wilkinson Sword Blade. (Soon I’ll try it with an Astra Superior Platinum, which may well contribute to the exceptional shaves I’ve recently enjoyed. YMMV: it’s a razor blade.)
A little squirt of TOBS A Gentleman’s Aftershave Balm, very nice, and now ready to go, drinking a nice cup of Lapsang Souchong (from Mariage Frères: terrific teas).
Later On 