Archive for November 2022
Carbon emissions per capita by country
From the graph:
Highest carbon emissions per capita
1 Middle East oil producing countries – Bahrain/Oman/Kuwait/Qatar/UAE
2 Canada
3 Saudi Arabia
4 US
5 Australia/NZ
6 Russia
7 South Korea
8 Kazakhstan/Turkmenistan
9 Taiwan
10 JapanOnly 9.5% of France’s electricity production comes from fossil fuels, much lower than many other developed countries like the U.S. at 60% and Japan at 69%.
“I Was Wrong About Mastodon”
Marcus Hutchins has an interesting re-evaluation of his a priori judgments about Mastodon. The entire piece is worth reading. I’ll quote just two paragraphs:
What I missed about Mastodon was its very different culture. Ad-driven social media platforms are willing to tolerate monumental volumes of abusive users. They’ve discovered the same thing the Mainstream Media did: negative emotions grip people’s attention harder than positive ones. Hate and fear drives engagement, and engagement drives ad impressions.
Mastodon is not an ad-driven platform. There is absolutely zero incentives to let awful people run amok in the name of engagement. The goal of Mastodon is to build a friendly collection of communities, not an attention leeching hate mill. As a result, most Mastodon instance operators have come to a consensus that hate speech shouldn’t be allowed. Already, that sets it far apart from twitter, but wait, there’s more. When it comes to other topics, what is and isn’t allowed is on an instance-by-instance basis, so you can choose your own adventure.
Hutchins provides yet another example of how mere logic is not a totally trustworthy guide in life, since experience not infrequently contradicts conclusions reached through logical reasoning. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. pointed this out in the context of law: “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” But it’s not just law whose life has depended on experience more than logic.
Whenever you have reached a logical conclusion, see if it holds up against experience. The testing of a theory by looking to experience is, in fact, the scientific method. Indeed, it is so common in science that Thomas Huxley’s comment on “the great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact” has been repeated many times in many contexts for many hypotheses.
I first encountered the statement in reading an account of someone being told of the tiny pores on one’s fingers, and the ridges and valleys that form fingerprints, and exclaiming, “Of course! The ridges are there to protect the pores that run along the valleys” — but the pores run along the ridges, not the valleys. Huxley’s statement was then recited to the person as a consolation.
Yu Choy Supreme: A exceptional stir-fry
An exceptionally good dish tonight in which several experiments paid off handsomely. I used both ideas from an earlier post: freezing tofu and using old-fashioned (thick) rolled oats for the grain.
Tofu prep
First I prepared a marinade, using ideas from the PDF at the link above.
I cut a block of extra-firm tofu in half lengthwise and froze it in a baggie. The next day I put the frozen block into the refrigerator to thaw, and this early this afternoon I gently squeezed the water from the thawed tofu. After freezing and thawing, the tofu was like a waterlogged sponge, and just squeezing in my hands made the water gush out. I turned it, continuing to squeeze, and once the block seems squeezed dry of water, I cut it into relatively thin slabs, stacked those and cut them into relatively thin strips, and then cut across the strips to produce relatively small dice.
Then I made the marinade, just putting into a bowl things that caught my eye.
• about 1.5 tablespoons toasted sesame oil
• about 2 tablespoons ponzu sauce
• 1 large clove Russian red garlic, sliced thinly (substitute 2 cloves regular garlic)
• about 3/4″ thick fresh ginger root, grated
• splash of rice vinegar
• splash of Red Boat fish sauce
• splash of tamari
• about 1 teaspoon honey balsamic Dijon mustard (substitute Dijon mustard)
• about 2 teaspoons nutritional yeast
• about 1 teaspoon Club House Southwest Chipotle (substitute any spicy seasoning mix)
As you can tell, measurements are approximate. The garlic could be crushed rather than sliced. I mixed the marinade well, then added the tofu, mixed it well with the marinade, and let it sit until I was ready to cook, stirring it once or twice when I happened to be in the kitchen. The tofu really sucked up the liquid, very like a sponge.
The veggies
I prepared the first three late in the afternoon and put them into a bowl to rest until time to cook. Then I drizzled some oil into my 12″ nonstick skillet, dumped in the garlic, ginger, and sun-dried tomatoes and added the vegetables as I prepared them, along with the tofu (all the marinade had been absorbed) and oats. Once everything was in the skillet, I turned on the heat and started cooking.
• 2 large cloves Russian red garlic, thinly sliced and allowed to rest (substitute 4 cloves other garlic)
• 1″ thick fresh ginger root, grated
• 4 sun-dried tomatoes, chopped small (dry ones, not those packed in oil)
• 1 long onion, chopped (substitute 3 thick scallions)
• 2 large sweet-tooth peppers, 1 orange, 1 red, chopped fairly small (substitute 1 red or yellow bell pepper)
• 1/2 block extra-firm tofu, frozen, thawed, squeezed free of water, diced small, and marinated
• 1/2 cup old-fashioned rolled oats (the thick kind, not the instant kind)
• 1 bunch yu choy mue, rinsed well and chopped (substitute 1 bunch kale or 2 bunches spinach)
• about 1 tablespoon dried marjoram
• about 1/3 teaspoon MSG (it’s okay)
• about 1/3 teaspoon Windsor iodized salt substitute
• splash of apple cider vinegar
I rinsed the yu choy well, and there was a fair amount of dirt left in the rinse water — like rinsing fresh spinach.
I cooked it covered on medium heat, stirring it from time to time. The total cooking time was around 20 minutes.
I served it in a bowl with a little Lee Kum oyster sauce on top.
Tallow + Steel Cognac and the Game Changer
Tallow + Steel’s Cognac has a satisfying fragrance: “Cognac (38%) | Oakwood (21%) | Vanilla (18%) | Orange (8%) | Tobacco (7%) | Cocoa (6%) | Jasmine (2%).” The Rooney Victorian brush made quite a good lather, and I enjoyed the feel of the knot — it’s somewhat firm and has hooked tips, which give it a velvety feel.
Three passes with the RazoRock Game Changer .68-P left my face perfectly smooth, and a splash of Cognac aftershave finished the job.
Since we’ve been discussing the ingredients of aftershave, take a look at this one. It’s pretty far from Fine’s four-ingredient idea. Tallow+Steel says:
Aftershave.Water-based splashes that soothe and invigorate the skin from irritation, dryness and razor burn. They are full of nutrient rich organic ingredients that will leave your skin feeling soft, and can be used as a daily moisturizer. Highly concentrated – apply to a wet face for best results.
Organic Witch Hazel + Organic Aloe Vera + Water + Organic Glycerin + Organic Quillaja Extract + Organic Rose Hydrosol + Organic Calendula Hydrosol + Alcohol + Organic Willow Bark Extract + Organic Cucumber Extract + Organic Licorice Root Extract + Organic Rosemary Extract + Leuconostoc / Radish Root Ferment Filtrate + Lactobacillus + Coconut Fruit Extract + Natural Fragrance (Botanical Extracts)
The tea this morning is my own blend of equal parts of Murchie’s Assam Tippy Golden, Ceylon Kenilworth, and Keemun Extra Superior.
Fermented foods and fibre may lower stress levels – new study
Vice President for Research & Innovation, University College Cork, writes in The Conversation:
When it comes to dealing with stress, we’re often told the best things we can do are exercise, make time for our favourite activities or try meditation or mindfulness.
But the kinds of foods we eat may also be an effective way of dealing with stress, according to research published by me and other members of APC Microbiome Ireland. Our latest study has shown that eating more fermented foods and fibre daily for just four weeks had a significant effect on lowering perceived stress levels.
Over the last decade, a growing body of research has shown that diet can have a huge impact on our mental health. In fact, a healthy diet may even reduce the risk of many common mental illnesses.
The mechanisms underpinning the effect of diet on mental health are still not fully understood. But one explanation for this link could be via the relationship between our brain and our microbiome (the trillions of bacteria that live in our gut). Known as the gut-brain axis, this allows the brain and gut to be in constant communication with each other, allowing essential body functions such as digestion and appetite to happen. It also means that the emotional and cognitive centres in our brain are closely connected to our gut.
While previous research has shown stress and behaviour are also linked to our microbiome, it has been unclear until now whether changing diet (and therefore our microbiome) could have a distinct effect on stress levels.
This is what our study set out to do. To test this, we recruited 45 healthy people with relatively low-fibre diets, aged 18–59 years. More than half were women. The participants were split into two groups and randomly assigned a diet to follow for the four-week duration of the study. . .
Highly Processed Foods ‘as Addictive’ as Tobacco
Highly processed foods are detrimental to health, as has been demonstrated — but they are also highly addictive, which means they are lucrative: repeat customers are guaranteed. So it comes down to whether the economic structure of the society responds to health or to money. In the US, certainly, the driving motive of any company is purely profit, so for a corporation the choice is simple.
Becky McCall writes in Medscape:
Highly processed foods meet the same criteria as tobacco for addiction, and labeling them as such might benefit public health, according to a new US study that proposes a set of criteria to assess the addictive potential of some foods.
The research suggests that healthcare professionals are taking steps towards framing food addiction as a clinical entity in its own right; it currently lacks validated treatment protocols and recognition as a clinical diagnosis.
Meanwhile, other data, reported by researchers last week at the Diabetes Professional Care (DPC) 2022 conference in London, UK, also add support to the clinical recognition of food addiction.
Clinical psychologist Jen Unwin, PhD, from Southport, UK, showed that a 3-month online program of low carbohydrate diet together with psychoeducational support significantly reduced food addiction symptoms among a varied group of individuals, not all of whom were overweight or had obesity.
Unwin said her new data represent the first widescale clinical audit of its kind, other than a prior report of three patients with food addiction who were successfully treated with a ketogenic diet.
“Food addiction explains so much of what we see in clinical practice, where intelligent people understand what we tell them about the physiology associated with a low-carb diet, and they follow it for a while, but then they relapse,” said Unwin, explaining the difficulties faced by around 20% of her patients who are considered to have food addiction.
Meanwhile, the authors of the US study, led by Ashley N. Gearhardt, PhD, a psychologist from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, write that the ability of highly processed foods (HPFs) “to rapidly . . .
Thinking about taking your computer to the repair shop? Be very afraid
Dan Goodin writes in Ars Technica:
If you’ve ever worried about the privacy of your sensitive data when seeking a computer or phone repair, a new study suggests you have good reason. It found that privacy violations occurred at least 50 percent of the time, not surprisingly with female customers bearing the brunt.
Researchers at University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, recovered logs from laptops after receiving overnight repairs from 12 commercial shops. The logs showed that technicians from six of the locations had accessed personal data and that two of those shops also copied data onto a personal device. Devices belonging to females were more likely to be snooped on, and that snooping tended to seek more sensitive data, including both sexually revealing and non-sexual pictures, documents, and financial information.
Blown away
“We were blown away by the results,” Hassan Khan, one of the researchers, said in an interview. Especially concerning, he said, was the copying of data, which happened during repairs for one from a male customer and the other from a female. “We thought they would just look at [the data] at most.”
The amount of snooping may actually have been higher than recorded in the study, which was conducted from October to December 2021. In all, the researchers took the laptops to 16 shops in the greater Ontario region. Logs on devices from two of those visits weren’t recoverable. Two of the repairs were performed on the spot and in the customer’s presence, so the technician had no opportunity to surreptitiously view personal data.
In three cases, Windows Quick Access or Recently Accessed Files had been deleted in what the researchers suspect was an attempt by the snooping technician to cover their tracks. As noted earlier, two of the visits resulted in the logs the researchers relied on being unrecoverable. In one, the researcher explained they had installed antivirus software and performed a disk cleanup to “remove multiple viruses on the device.” The researchers received no explanation in the other case.
Here’s a breakdown of the six visits that resulted in snooping: . . .
Recent Mastodon growth
I’ve been spending a fair amount of time lately on Mastodon because (so far) it’s been interesting. I just came across this chart showing its recent growth.
Total household wealth held by the wealthiest 10%
Conrad Hackett points out on Mastodon:
total household wealth held by the wealthiest 10%
🇺🇸 US 79%
🇳🇱 Netherlands 68%
🇩🇰 Denmark 64%
🇩🇪 Germany 60%
🇨🇱 Chile 58%
🇦🇹 Austria 56%
🇬🇧 UK 52%
🇨🇦 Canada 51%
🇫🇷 France 51%
🇳🇴 Norway 51%
🇦🇺 Australia 46%
🇪🇸 Spain 46%
🇫🇮 Finland 45%
🇮🇹 Italy 43%
🇯🇵 Japan 41%
Trying Diaspora
I’m liking Mastodon so much that I thought I’d try out Diaspora. It is a subscription service (because (a) no ads and (b) they don’t sell user information — compare to Facebook: a ton of ads and they sell everything they can discover about you to anyone who will pay). And the subscription is modest: 75¢ per month, paid annually ($8/year). At that price, it’s worth a shot, especially since Facebook presents me with a ton of stuff of no interest to me.
Here’s an invite. Check it out.
Another day, another slant: Lo Storto
Mike’s Natural shaving soap again today, Wild Honeysuckle its fragrance. My brush, sold for a time under the name Mr Pomp, did a very nice job, as did the excellent Fatip slant, Lo Storto. A splash of Phoenix Artisan’s Honeysuckle aftershave finished the job.
i think it’s worth noting the difference in aftershave ingredients between yesterday (Alcohol, Water, Fragrance, and Menthol) and today (Alcohol, Rose Water, Lavender Hydrosol, Essential/Fragrance Oil, Glycerin, Prickly Pear Oil, Aloe, Carrot Extract, and Alum). Preferences vary, and my preference is markedly for the latter, which provides some skincare ingredients, and I think a small amount of alum is much better than a small amount of menthol.
The tea this morning is Compagnie Coloniale’s Wasabi & Strawberry — I found a small sack with a little left in it. It’s good, but somewhat unusual. The flavors of wasabi and strawberry combine to create a new flavor that stands on its own, not sweet and having depth. Quite good on a morning that sees snow on the ground.
This course takes a broad look at failure – and what we can all learn when it occurs
, Professor of Curriculum Studies and Philosophy of Education, Indiana University, writes in The Conversation:
Unusual Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.
Title of course:
“Failure, and How We Can Learn from It”
What prompted the idea for the course?
When I was a high school teacher, I found plenty of joy and fulfillment in my work. But I also felt the sting of failure: from a student who remained disengaged throughout the semester, or even just from a lesson that went off the rails. Now I prepare aspiring K-12 teachers to navigate that messy reality themselves, and I’m struck by how tough it can be for them to develop the resilience necessary to work so hard and yet inevitably fall short of their goals.
So I began to wonder how other fields and professions might view failure. What resources do they draw upon? What common threads might exist that could help future teachers learn from failure more effectively?
What does the course explore?
We explore the role of failure in a wide range of fields, and how what counts as failure varies as well. A bridge collapsing is pretty clear, and maybe a business that goes bankrupt. But what about a team losing or a patient dying? We also consider what mechanisms and strategies these fields employ in responding to failure, and the ways in which they see failure as part of the learning and achievement process.
What’s a critical lesson from the course?
As the semester unfolds, students begin to recognize that . . .
The New York Times Is in the Tank for Crypto
I’ve noticed this, too. The NY Times rather too often has feet of clay — the effects of privilege and poor priorities (“access is everything” does not provide good guidance). Robert Kuttner writes in The American Prospect:
In a recent post, I noted in passing the oddly soft coverage of the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried in The New York Times. The Times managed to compare the woes of FTX to a bank run, to blame Bankman-Fried’s competitors for undermining his credibility, and to take his professed charitable intent at face value.
Since I wrote, the Times coverage has only gotten worse.
A piece on the interconnections between Bankman-Fried’s exchange (FTX) and the investment company he controlled (Alameda) soft-pedaled the outright illegality of his making trades with customer funds. To hear the Times tell it, “Alameda’s need for funds to run its trading business was a big reason Mr. Bankman-Fried created FTX in 2019. But the way the two entities were set up meant that trouble in one unit shook up the other as crypto prices began to drop in the spring.”
But that’s not what happened. When customers demanded their money, Fried didn’t have it, because he had been using it and losing it, illegally, for his own trades.
And this: “Alameda’s methods borrowed many aspects from traditional high finance. It was a quantitative trading firm, similar to Wall Street hedge funds that use mathematical models and data to inform decisions. It used ‘leverage’—or borrowed money—to fuel its trades and make bigger returns.”
Note the alibis, and the passive voice. The subhead tells the reader “things got out of control,” as in Nixon’s infamous “mistakes were made.” The comparable Wall Street Journal piece ran rings around the Times version, explaining the interlocks and the sheer illegality.
But the most appalling recent Times piece was . . .
The story behind the Equality v. Equity meme
Craig Froehle, who created the idea behind the meme above, has an interesting article in Medium on how the idea came about. He wanted to shift the focus from equality of aid to equality of outcomes.
A recipe hack for grain and a tofu trick
I like to include both beans/lentils and grain with each meal — as the Daily Dozen suggests — which is why the tempeh I make is 50-50 beans/lentils and (intact whole) grain. (I cook them separately before combining them for the tempeh.) But if no tempeh is on hand and I am, as usual, improvising a recipe, what do I do?
Beans are no problem. Even if I have no cooked beans in the fridge and don’t feel like cooking lentils for dinner, I can just open a can of beans or use tofu. (I mention lentils as an option because lentils require no soaking and take only about 13 minutes to cook, once the water has come to a boil.)
Grain does have a quick-cook option like lentils: unpolished millets cook quickly, as do good pseudo-grains like quinoa and amaranth. But what if I don’t feel like cooking before I cook, as it were? For beans, I open a can (or use tofu). For grain?
The answer suddenly occurred to me: old-fashioned rolled oats. True, they are not an intact whole grain, but they are close: they’ve just been steamed, squished, and lightly toasted to make them shelf-stable. And — important for improvised recipes — they cook quickly, so I can just add them directly from the package to the stir-fry or stew I’m making and they cook along with it. (Important: old-fashioned rolled oats, not instant.)
For chili or curry, I usually use my tempeh, which takes care of both beans and grain, but if I don’t have tempeh, I will often use tofu. Tofu takes care of the beans, and now I can add rolled oats to take care of the grain..
The recipe where I discovered this trick is in my post on making tempeh from Du Puy lentils and Kamut wheat. I don’t know why I never thought of this before; it seems a natural and easy way to incorporate grain into a meal — much easier than rice, which I don’t eat anyway (and certainly not white rice: which lacks bran, the source of many important nutrients).
What about rice?
Most people eat a stir-fry with rice or incorporate rice into the stir-fry. However, white rice is not a whole grain: the bran and germ have been removed, which also removes nutrients (minerals and vitamins, along with dietary fiber). Brown rice would be better, but I prefer more nutritious grains, such as wheat, oats, barley, rye, kamut, and the like.
I definitely want whole grain, with as little processing as possible. I generally use intact whole grain, but the oat groats used in making old-fashioned rolled oats are minimally processed, and given the benefit of quick cooking (so I can use it in, for example, stir-fries), I am willing to forego the intact part. Still, if I do have intact whole grain already cooked and in the fridge, that would definitely be better.
Tofu trick
Here’s a neat tofu trick I learned from a post on Mastodon: Cut a block of extra-firm tofu in two, and put each half into a sealed baggie and then into the freezer. When you want to use one, let it thaw in the refrigerator overnight. It then is like a waterlogged sponge.
Hold it over the sink and gently squeeze it, and water will gush from it into the sink. Keep turning it and gently squeezing until no more water appears. Then you can slice it (on a mandoline, for example) or dice it for cooking. The once-frozen tofu takes up marinades extremely well — like a sponge. Here’s a downloadable PDF with various marinade ideas:
The glorious Monday shave with Fine’s superb slant
Monday is always a good shave day, and the gloriosity today is helped by a splendid sun and clear sky. Today’s shave began with my Plisson Gray Badger, a wonderful brush, here with a heavy plated-brass handle. Mike’s Natural Soap, in Barbershop fragrance, makes a reliable lather.
Fine Accoutrement seems to have made but a single batch of this aluminum slant, and I’m so glad I got a copy. It’s a wonderful razor, inspired by the Merkur whited bakelite slant from the 1930s, but even more comfortable and equally efficient. It is important to mind the angle and the pressure with this razor, but if you do that, there’s none better.
A splash of Fine’s American Blend. The label notes that it consists solely of alcohol (first ingredient!), water, fragrance, and menthol. Indeed, there is but a touch of menthol, which is fine with me. But no glycerine? Nothing for the skin? With this is an aftershave, adding some balm is definitely in order — so I did. (Though my bottle is fairly old, the current version follows exactly that original formula.)
The tea today is Murchie’s Baker Street Blend: “Lapsang Souchong, smooth Keemun, rich Ceylon, Gunpowder, and floral Jasmine.”
How much public space is surrendered to cars
Saw this on Mastodon. It’s by Swedish artist Karl Jilg.
Later On 