David Archer

"the whole point of technology"

2012-01-30T21:51:00.001-07:00

That’s the whole point of technology: achieving more with less. It’s also part of the promise of technology: freeing people from annoying social structures that they wish they could opt out of, anyway. But there’s a problem: 30-year treasuries and defined-benefit pension plans don’t pay out in terms of hours of enjoyment or numbers of yoga classes—they pay out in dollar terms. A heavily indebted country doesn’t have the freedom to allow deflationary forces without facing some serious consequences. Interestingly enough, these consequences are somewhat balanced: older people tend to spend far more money on the Internet, and they tend to get far more of their income from fixed income sources, whatever those might be. So this web-based deflation will transfer money to older, wealthier savers—who will promptly transfer some of it right back to web companies. Whether that is an unstable equilibrium or a self-balancing one depends mostly on whether or not web companies will hire more people.

That's Byrne Holbert at Digital Due Diligence.

"The Human Lake"

2012-01-30T21:46:00.004-07:00

Here's a fantastic article by Carl Zimmer that I came across a few weeks ago in Ed Yong's list of best science writing from 2011:

The microbes in your body at this moment outnumber your cells by ten to one. And they come in a huge diversity of species—somewhere in the thousands, although no one has a precise count yet. By some estimates there are twenty million microbial genes in your body: about a thousand times more than the 20,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome. So the Human Genome Project was, at best, a nice start. If we really want to understand all the genes in the human body, we have a long way to go.

Seriously, read the whole article.

Great surf video

2011-04-25T21:15:00.003-06:00

Canon 5D Mark II Slow Motion + Jaws ( Peahi ) 12-7-09 from iamkalaniprince on Vimeo.

This is one of the better short surf videos I've seen. Somehow it surpasses the Laird Hamilton big wave video.

Neat video

2011-02-20T18:04:00.001-07:00

7D 2000 fps from Oton Bačar on Vimeo.

Be sure to check out this video as well, also by Bačar.

Skiing Great Sand Dunes National Park

2011-01-12T21:56:00.001-07:00

Earth (and beyond?)

2011-01-11T17:39:00.001-07:00

Winter surfing

2011-01-06T08:01:00.000-07:00

Malick's Tree of Life

2010-12-29T08:00:00.005-07:00

Here's the trailer to Terrence Malick's forthcoming "Tree of Life," due in theaters in May:

Here's the film's wikipedia page, and its IMDB page.

Cheese helps prevent tooth decay?

2010-06-05T22:07:00.007-06:00

I was just flipping through the index of Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" when I noticed a section on cheese and tooth decay. McGee writes:

Tooth Decay Finally, it has been recognized for decades that eating cheese slows tooth decay, which is caused by acid secretion from relatives of yogurt bacterium (especially Streptococcus mutans) that adhere to the teeth. Just why is still not entirely clear, but it appears that eaten at the end of a meal, when streptococcal acid production is on the rise, calcium and phosphate from the cheese diffuse into the bacterial colonies and blunt the acid rise.

OK, so that's super interesting, and not something that I've ever heard about cheese (heard it about apples, though I've always been skeptical of that claim because they're mostly made of sugar). Michael Pollan and others have focused on the underlying health benefits of long-practiced culinary traditions, so perhaps this outcome might help explain why cheese is sometimes served after dinner.

But then elsewhere in the section, McGee cautions that cheese is:

"abundant [in] saturated fat and therefore tends to raise blood cholesterol levels. However, France and Greece lead the world in per capita cheese consumption... yet they're remarkable among Western countries for their relatively low rates of heart disease, probably thanks to their high consumption of heart-protective vegetables, fruits, and wine."

Emphasis is mine. Is his causal arrow pointed in the right direction? When it comes to human health, it's always hard to say, but I wonder if the low rates of heart disease are not in spite of the cheese, but because of it (at least in part).

Stephen Guyenet recently suggested that pastured dairy products may be good for the heart, possibly because of high concentrations of K2, CLA, vitamin A, or even certain kinds of saturated fats. Guyenet doesn't mention bacteria, but if it's good for dental health, as McGee documents, might it contribute to gut or heart health as well? (See Seth Roberts's "umami hypothesis" posts for more thoughts on good bacteria and health).

Here are entries by Guyenet that touch on cheese consumption. He notes in one of the posts:

Contrary to popular belief, full-fat dairy, including milk, butter and cheese, has never been convincingly linked to cardiovascular disease. In fact, it has rather consistently been linked to a lower risk, particularly for stroke.

So there's that--the comments on his blog, including his own, are always worth reading.

I'm not a nutritionist, but Guyenet is probably the best writer on the subject that I've encountered. He might also be a good example of an "insider/outsider."

Alcohol and heart attacks

2010-05-30T14:16:00.002-06:00

So does red wine decrease the risk of having a heart attack? Yes, just as effectively as malt liquor. It's not the antioxidants and resveratrol, it's the ethanol. The reason the French avoid heart attacks is not because of some fancy compound in their wine that protects them from a high saturated fat intake. It's because they have preserved their diet traditions to a greater degree than most industrialized nations.

That's Stephen at his excellent blog.

Death in the age of celebrity

2010-05-30T14:00:00.003-06:00

"Baby Boomers have created so many celebrities that, in the future, somebody famous will die every fifteen minutes."

That's David Kipen quoted by Kurt Anderson--more thoughts and quotes on the subject at Kottke.

Do stuff--now.

2010-05-30T13:50:00.002-06:00

All productivity books can be summarized in 11 words: One thing at a time. Most important thing first. Start now.

That's Penelope Trunk.

I have met my enemy, and his name is Timmy
Well, not really. It's short for "Timidity". He just finds his given name a bit too fancy to use. He fears embarrassment, or, worse, getting pounded into the wood chips for his lunch money. Timmy fears a wide range of things, real and imagined, and knowing him, he wouldn't put up a fight against any of them. I can say this because, despite his being the greatest living impediment to my progress, I'm actually on fairly intimate terms with him. Timmy, you see, lives inside my brain.

You might assume there's an easy fix: get Timmy to step outside for a moment, say, then lock the door behind him. The problem is that Timmy is a total and utter homebody. He never leaves.

That's Colin Marshall.

"I don't think of my life as a career," he says. "I do stuff. I respond to stuff. That's not a career — it's a life!"

That's Steve Jobs.

Football, concussions, and longevity

2009-12-18T08:34:00.005-07:00

Over at the Overcoming Bias blog, Robin Hanson notes that "The average NFL player plays just 3.52 seasons and loses two to three years off his life expectancy for every season played," and offers the following comment:

If true, this is an amazingly huge health harm, especially considering how much we regulate health harms in most areas. It is far beyond the risk we’ll allow people to take on most jobs, even soldiers or astronauts. And it is far beyond the risk we’d let customers accept in a consumer product... [W]hy do we regulate other health harms so strictly, yet so eagerly watch this decimation?

The comments are worth reading, too. Some observe that boxing and MMA are no less violent than football, and that may be true--I haven't seen a side-by-side comparison--but it's also the case that thousands more Americans play football than those other sports.

In this same vein, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article earlier this year in which he compared the morality of dog fighting to that of watching football. Gladwell's piece focused on the frequency and severity of head injuries, and included this striking passage:

“The first concussion was during preseason. The team was doing two-a-days,” he said, referring to the habit of practicing in both the morning and the evening in the preseason. “It was August 9th, 9:55 A.M. He has an 80-g hit to the front of his head. About ten minutes later, he has a 98-g acceleration to the front of his head.” To put those numbers in perspective, Guskiewicz explained, if you drove your car into a wall at twenty-five miles per hour and you weren’t wearing your seat belt, the force of your head hitting the windshield would be around 100 gs: in effect, the player had two car accidents that morning.

Going forward, I think the sport's long-term viability--economically and otherwise--hinges on its ability to address these health risks. If football cannot make the necessary safety adjustments that auto racing, for instance, has made in the last two decades, then I could envision a growing disgust among the fan base and a slow waning of interest in mainstream America.

A less-discussed feature of this story concerns how salaries might rise for what increasingly appears to be "hazard" work. For a variety of reasons, NFL owners currently flex more economic muscle than their counterparts in other leagues, and have managed to keep salaries and salary caps comparatively low. And perhaps these health risks are fairly factored into today's salaries, though that seems unlikely in the absence of widespread agreement that there's a big problem. So as the evidence mounts that players are literally sacrificing many years of their lives and many more quality years of post-football living--with early-onset dementia and Alzheimers--I'd guess that agents and the union will justifiably demand greater compensation for those future losses.

Congress, for its part, is preparing to hold a second round of hearings on concussions in football.

Buying a house and intergenerational wealth transfer

2009-12-12T10:35:00.004-07:00

I think one overlooked aspect of the rent v. buy debate is that buying facilitates an inter-generational wealth transfer (from parents to offspring), while renting typically does not. Due to the widespread belief that buying a house gives you shelter and a secure investment future (you can't live in a share of stock), it can be relatively easy to ask parents and grandparents to chip in 25 grand, or however much, in order to buy a first home. It would be harder to say, "Mom, Dad, my wife and I have decided that it makes more financial sense to continue renting, but we would like you to give us $25,000 to buy some stocks." The latter plan, sensible though it may be in many cases, isn't as emotionally rewarding to parents, nor is there much broad cultural support for such a wealth transfer, as far as I know (hard to say, though; intra-familial financial transactions are usually closely guarded secrets--is there any economics literature on these family dynamics?).

Seven mph

2009-11-22T10:41:00.005-07:00

“People recognize the traffic in this town is unbearable,” said Villaraigosa, 53. Without significant mass- transit improvements, the city estimates average speeds across Los Angeles at rush hour will drop to “just 7 miles per hour by 2020,” he said.

That's from an Alan Ohnsman article in Bloomberg. I'm not a traffic engineer, but it seems like there are enormous opportunities to expand public transit in LA. Huge swaths of the metropolis are densely populated (by some measures it's the most densely populated city in the U.S.) and even if people will not, with good reason, abandon their cars, they would use them less frequently if attractive alternatives were available for some routes.

New problems with Dreamliner

2009-11-13T08:20:00.002-07:00

Boeing Co. said Thursday it had finished fixing the problem that had forced it to postpone the maiden flight of its long-delayed 787 Dreamliner. But in making the repair, the aerospace giant got a fresh reminder of the complexities involved in working with the high-tech materials used to build the aircraft.

That's from today's Wall Street Journal. The article includes this interactive timeline of the severely delayed project. A two year delay doesn't seem like a long time in light of the project's complexities, but they would have caught a lot less flak had they not overpromised on their ambitious delivery schedule in the first place. Obviously, the sales and marketing teams wanted to secure orders, but not pissing off your customers is also a pretty good business rule of thumb that they aren't exactly respecting. There is probably a decent book herein.

Felix Salmon on the Dodd bill

2009-11-11T00:34:00.002-07:00

The heart of the Dodd bill involves setting up three new agencies: the Financial Institutions Regulatory Administration, the Agency for Financial Stability, and the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. The last — the CFPA — is if anything a beefed-up version of the agency envisaged in Treasury’s proposal, and it’s a very good idea. But the first two are new.

That's Felix Salmon on the Dodd bill. There's a lot in the bill, and Salmon sums it up nicely, so check out the whole post.

Tom Wolfe's "Back to Blood"

2009-11-10T20:43:00.004-07:00

Tom Wolfe is working on a book about the contemporary American immigrant experience, set in Miami. I hadn't heard too much more about it beyond what was reported in this Wikipedia page devoted to the book, but for months it has been reporting that the book is due out this year.

It's mid-November and I began to wonder why I had heard so little about this novel--say what you will about the man and his writing (I'm personally a big fan of his non-fiction), but a Tom Wolfe book does not quietly land on the shelves. Nor did it receive mention on this fairly comprehensive list of then-forthcoming 2009 titles, assembled by the The Millions blog.

Well, perhaps not surprisingly, it turns out that the Wikipedia page is wrong. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette reported last week that Little, Brown & Co. (not FSG) plans to publish the book in Fall 2010. So there's that.

Here is an excerpt of the Post Gazette article:

"You have people from another country with a different language and a very different culture coming into Miami and dominating it politically through the voting machine," Mr. Wolfe said. "Only in America could people from a foreign country with a foreign language and foreign culture establish themselves so quickly in 30 years."

I wonder what's next. Does he write an autobiography or memoir at some point? The chronicles of a desk-bound writer in a white suit might be a waste of his time when the billion-footed beast waits outside, but I for one would be curious to read a work of self-reflection by the uniquely American author.

More brushes

2009-11-08T21:28:00.004-07:00

Brushes test

2009-11-08T11:20:00.003-07:00

Brushes is fun.

Wyoming coal excavation

2009-11-05T18:01:00.000-07:00

Earlier today I came across this incredible slideshow of the Black Thunder Mine in Wyoming's Powder River Basin, the single largest source of coal mined in the U.S. Here is the wiki entry on the Black Thunder Mine.

Is internet writing any good?

2009-10-20T22:30:00.003-06:00

As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can't write—and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into "bleak, bald, sad shorthand" (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?

Andrea Lunsford isn't so sure...

That's from a Clive Thompson article in Wired, arguing that "young people today write far more than any generation before them" and they do it well.

Also, see Penelope Trunk's post (from which I got the original Thompson link), The internet has created a generation of great writers: "the best way to have a population of good writers is for people to write constantly, in the language that is theirs, so that they are great at expressing themselves."

Sometimes I despair about not reading more books, and I do think that books confer certain advantages that blogs & net culture often lack. But I think it's also true that the internet has successfully assembled in one (mostly) free and (mostly) accessible forum the best-educated, and most thoughtful and expressive people in human history and that there are very good reasons--if you are curious--to spend a lot of time reading online.

No need to buy the Snow Leopard box set

2009-10-19T19:49:00.006-06:00

I've owned my Macbook for a couple years now and never upgraded from OS Tiger to Leopard, and was resigned to buying the new $169 box set rather than the $29 upgrade, but apparently that isn't necessary. According to Lifehacker, the upgrade includes the entire Snow Leopard OS regardless of your prior OS, so you can save your $140 for other pricey Apple objects.
I haven't installed the upgrade yet, but the corroborating stories seem legitimate.

(Flickr photo courtesy of Celtic Tiger (1974))

(H/T: Kirby Francis)

Hockney's landscapes

2009-10-18T23:41:00.006-06:00

As he recently approached his seventies, David Hockney left Los Angeles for his native England and started painting some really large, brilliantly imagined, and wonderful landscapes of the countryside on canvas panels. The New York Times published a story about Hockney's now-ongoing project last week and it's worth a read, but be sure to check out the two accompanying multimedia features: the video, and the slideshow. And if you're in New York, you could probably do worse than to visit the exhibition at the Pace gallery.
There is some fairly harsh criticism in the article that doesn't exactly seem warranted, but I suppose the art world is subject to its strange ways.

You can view some of the paneled landscapes here, though naturally the scale is lost on your computer screen.

If I had a large sum of money, and could buy any Hockney it would be his photocollage, Pearblossom Hwy., 11 - 18th April 1986, #2.

Richard Serra's crew

2009-10-18T23:36:00.002-06:00

"Philip Glass had quit his plumbing job to become Serra's paid studio assistant. The painter Chuck Close, Serra's Yale classmate, the musician Steve Reich, the writer Rudy Wurlitzer, the actor Spalding Gray, and two or three others could be counted on to help assemble heavier pieces..."

Holy Cow, what a crew! Imagine if one of Serra's heavier pieces had collapsed on them.
(Another Serra piece did actually crush someone to death.)

The quote is from a Calvin Tomkins profile on Richard Serra, collected in the book, Lives of the Artists, by Tomkins. One thing that really stands out in the profiles of Jasper Johns, Richard Serra, Julian Schnabel, and Damien Hurst, among others, is how staggeringly wealthy some artists become.

From the Flickr Brushes Gallery

2009-10-11T13:35:00.003-06:00

Here is the complete Flickr Brushes Gallery.

LA iPhone paintings

2009-10-11T13:20:00.001-06:00

These LA-themed iPhone paintings by Stef Kardos are great.

NY Skyline "painting"

2009-10-11T13:09:00.003-06:00

Here's another iPhone Brush "painting," this one by Jorge Colombo:

Here are more of Colombo's paintings.

And here's a video that depicts a New Yorker cover that Colombo created using his iPhone:

Hockney's iPhone drawings: "it's just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad.'"

2009-10-04T22:08:00.004-06:00

Over the past six months, Hockney has fashioned literally hundreds, probably over a thousand, such images, often sending out four or five a day to a group of about a dozen friends, and not really caring what happens to them after that. (He assumes the friends pass them along through the digital ether.) These are, mind you, not second-generation digital copies of images that exist in some other medium: their digital expression constitutes the sole (albeit multiple) original of the image.

That's Lawrence Weschler writing in the New York Review of Books about David Hockney's iPhone drawings. Read the whole thing, of course. Hockney also shares this interesting observation with Weschler:

I asked Hockney whether he'd mind my sharing some of these images with a wider audience across a printed medium, and he said, not really, he more or less assumed that the pictures would one by one find their way into the world. "Though it is worth noting," he adds, lighting one of his perennial cigarettes, "that the images always look better on the screen than on the page. After all, this is a medium of pure light, not ink or pigment, if anything more akin to a stained glass window than an illustration on paper."

One of Tiger's best years?

2009-09-14T19:52:00.003-06:00

It is by his lights:

"Absolutely, it's one of my best years. There's no doubt about that. You know, I haven't won as many times as I did in 2000, didn't win any majors this year, but I've never had a year where I've been this consistent, either, this many high finishes and the number of events I've played."

In 16 starts, he has won six tournaments, finished in the top-three eight times, and finished in the top-ten 13 times. He hasn't won a major, but every tournament he has won has been in a very competitive field with the exception of the Buick Open. For his part, ESPN's Jason Sobel puts Tiger's "2009 campaign somewhere behind 1999, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2006 and 2007, but in front of 1997, 1998, 2001, 2003, 2004 and 2008, making this the seventh-best season of his 13-year PGA Tour career, right in the middle."

Solar energy

2009-09-13T23:02:00.004-06:00

George Johnson's National Geographic article on solar power provides a good summary of the current state of play. Here's an excerpt:

About every 30 seconds there is a soft buzz as a motor moves the mirrors a little higher; by midday they will be looking straight up. It's so quiet out here one can hardly fathom how much work is being done: Each of the 760 arrays of mirrors can produce about 84,000 watts—almost 113 horsepower. By 8 a.m. the oil coursing through the pipes has reached operating temperature. A white plume is spewing from a cooling stack. Half an hour later, the sound of the turbine inside the generating station has reached a high-pitched scream. Nevada Solar One is ready to go on line.

There are also accompanying photos that are worth viewing.

Reflecting on the 2008 presidential election

2009-09-13T22:27:00.003-06:00

The Boston Review published a long essay by Andrew Gelman and John Sides on what we know--or what we think we know--about why President Obama was elected. They conclude:

Our story of the 2008 campaign confirms some parts of the journalistic narrative and refutes others. Yes, the economy was important; yes, young voters swung to Obama and the Congressional Democrats; yes, Obama did particularly well among minorities (Latinos and Asians as well as African Americans), even beyond the Democrats’ usual strength among these groups; yes, the Democrats made new inroads among the most affluent voters. But no, working-class whites did not run away from Obama; and no, Obama did not redraw the electoral map. Since 2004 the Democratic Party gained about five percentage points of the vote both in presidential and Congressional elections: not a landslide but a large swing by historical standards. The chief lesson for Obama’s first term is that the fundamentals will rule. Future elections will likely turn on the economy’s performance under the new administration.

Read the whole thing.

The Myths of MJ

2009-09-12T10:47:00.005-06:00

We have been told that in this early disgrace lay the seed of his greatness. As the story goes, he became mad as a hatter, practiced furiously, and set himself on the course to greatness.

Only, it's not true. He was never cut from anything.

That's Henry Abbott writing about Michael Jordan, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame this week. Abbott goes on to explain the true story.

Aviation links

2009-08-25T22:56:00.004-06:00

This aborted Concorde landing is fascinating:

Here's a nearly-botched takeoff:

Finally, the Big Picture blog has a new aviation-themed entry up this week.

"16: Moments"

2009-08-25T22:07:00.002-06:00

Here is the site of the filmmaker, William Hoffman.

(Source: The Frontal Cortext)

Vaguely reminds me of this old Nike ad:

Weschler, again

2009-08-22T13:25:00.006-06:00

Readers of this blog know I'm a fan of Lawrence Weschler, and because his writing appears all over the place I make a habit of searching for it periodically to see what I've missed. Here are two pieces--a conversation and a long-form piece--from 2009:

Q: Do you have another book about art under way?

A: I am going to be doing a book called "The Ones That Got Away," which will be a kind of anti-memoir of all the pieces I've meant to write but have never got around to writing, a kind of subjunctive case memoir.

That's Weschler talking to the University of California Press Blog last February.

And here's an excerpt of one of Weschler's latest pieces, "Double Vision: The Art of Trevor and Ryan Oakes," published earlier this year in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

The way other identical twins might invent a spooky secret language, the two of them became engaged in a long-term conversation, a continuous tandem investigation into the very fundaments of visual perception. “On long drives,” Trevor recalls, “we used to talk about the way a bug splattered on the windshield would appear to double if you looked out beyond it, and what then happened when you tilted your head from side to side.” How old were they when they were doing this? “Oh,” surmises Ryan, “three or four.” They’d dissect the foreshortening of approaching rows of telephone poles, tapping out rhythms with their fingers in syncopation with the passing poles, and they’d talk about that. They spent a lot of time analyzing their parents’ potential sightlines as they hid in a pantry or up on the garage roof behind the basketball backboard.

As usual, read the whole thing!

Here is the official site of the Oakes brothers.

Immaculate innings

2009-08-21T08:07:00.001-06:00

Baseball is a vast chamber of oddities, and among them is the "immaculate inning," which I first stumbled upon recently as I read about Cubs pitcher Rich Harden. An immaculate inning occurs when a pitcher strikes out three batters in nine pitches. It is a surprisingly rare occurrence in the history of professional baseball. Only three pitchers have done it twice, and no pitcher has done it three times. It happened once earlier this year, when AJ Burnett faced the Marlins, and a number of other times this decade, as the phenomenon has become increasingly common.

To demonstrate the change in frequency over time, I made this chart showing immaculate innings pitched in the MLB by decade since 1880:

As one friend pointed out, the best explanation for the increase in recent decades appears to be the advent of the modern reliever, especially the flame-throwing, one inning closer (more immaculate innings have been thrown in the 9th inning* (eight) than in any other inning), though starters--such as Burnett--have also been throwing them with impressive frequency. Additionally, a lot more teams play today, meaning more innings pitched and more opportunities for immaculate innings.

* To be sure, two of those eight innings were thrown by starters who threw complete games--talk about an impressive way to finish the day.

BOLT one of the GOATs

2009-08-20T18:47:00.008-06:00

Unbelievable: Usain Bolt ran a 19.19 in the 200-Meter today in Berlin, destroying his previous record of 19.30. Earlier in the week he ran an equally unreal, record-setting 9.58 in the 100-Meter event.

It was a significant achievement when Bolt beat Michael Johnson's record of 19.32 in Beijing last year. And before Bolt, Johnson's time was so fast that no one else had come even close to breaking it. Now Bolt has done it twice (Tyson Gay ran a 19.58 in May, which makes him only the third runner to break 19.60).

Here is Ethan Siegel modeling 100-Meter world records (for men) over the coming decades based on current rates of improvement, and demonstrating how much of an outlier Bolt really is:

[Y]ou can also see that Usain Bolt is running much faster than humans ought to be running right now. This should give you an inkling of just how special these performances we're seeing from him are. We shouldn't be seeing times like this until the 2030s. Which means, honestly, that it ought to take around 30 years for someone else to come along and break his record.

Bolt is only 22, but I think it is safe to say that he is one of the greatest athletes of all time.

Greenhouses of Aremia

2009-06-25T20:49:00.005-06:00

This is one of the more extraordinary photos that I've seen in awhile (click on the photo for a full-screen version):

Here is a satellite image of the area: "An estimated 20,000 hecatres of extra-early market produce is grown in greenhouses in the Campo de Dalías, and it accounts for over $1.5 billion in economic activity."

P.S. "I just found my cane"

2009-05-31T19:25:00.002-06:00

This is great:

Later on this mystification and ceremoniousness became so much part of him [Proust] that his letters sometimes constitute whole systems of parentheses, and not just in the grammatical sense—letters which despite their infinitely ingenious, flexible composition occasionally call to mind the specimen of a letter writer's handbook: "My dear Madam, I just noticed that I forgot my cane at your house yesterday; please be good enough to give it to the bearer of this letter. P.S. Kindly pardon me for disturbing you; I just found my cane." Proust was most resourceful in creating complications. [E.A.]

That's from Walter Benjamin's essay, "The Image of Proust."

Bullfighting

2009-05-29T08:29:00.005-06:00

This bullfighting video starts out violently with a bull goring a matador (so be warned), but the whole thing is interesting. The matadors move as gracefully as ballerinas, and their uniforms might be the best in all of sports:

Homemade sauerkraut

2009-05-25T11:14:00.003-06:00

Sauerkraut is easy to make and only requires vegetables--cabbage and carrots in this case--water, salt, a jar, and some patience. Here's what it looked like after a couple days on my kitchen counter:

Tweeting from orbit

2009-05-25T11:06:00.003-06:00

I've been enjoying Astro_Mike's Twitter feed. Mike Massimino was one of the astronauts on the just-concluded shuttle mission.

A couple days ago he wrote:

"From orbit: Flying over the Pacific Ocean at night there were some thunder storms, it is so cool to see lightning go off below the clouds"

Hard not to be a little envious of an experience like that.

Here's a photo set of the mission from the always excellent Big Picture.

Carless in America?

2009-05-13T12:31:00.005-06:00

The New York Times is hosting a discussion among a variety of city experts about the possibility of creating more "car-free" communities in the U.S. Witold Rybczynski argues that passing a critical density threshold is key to achieving some measure of carless-ness. It's not enough to create neighborhoods that are sort of densely populated. They need to be substantially more dense than their conventional suburban counterparts:

There are only six American downtown districts that are dense enough to support mass transit, which you need if you’re going to be carless: New York City (Midtown and Downtown), Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco. That’s it. The breaking-point for density and mass transit feasibility seems to be about 50 persons per acre, which means families living in flats and apartments, rather than single-family houses, even row houses. Not necessarily high-rise apartments, but at least walk-ups.

Other contributors to the discussion include: D.J. Waldie, author of “Holy Land;” Dolores Hayden, professor of architecture; Christopher B. Leinberger, real estate developer and author; Alex Marshall, transportation columnist, Governing magazine; J.H. Crawford, author of “Carfree Cities;" Marc Schlossberg, professor of public policy

India's cities

2009-05-12T22:23:00.003-06:00

This Wall Street Journal article about megacities in India is filled with interesting facts:

[The city of] Lucknow has more than 780 slums, overflowing sewage pipes and streets choked by gridlock. Its population of 2.7 million, nearly triple the number in the 1980s, is adding as many as 150,000 new residents a year.
[Lucknow] hasn't completed any major new sewage infrastructure since before the country won independence in 1947. As much as 70% of residents don't have sewage service
Mayor Dinesh Sharma, a university professor, says his annual budget is $139 million. Some similar-size cities in the U.S. have budgets in the billions.
India has at least 41 cities with more than one million people, up from 23 two decades ago. A half dozen others will soon join the megacity list.
70% of the population still lives in the countryside.
India is expected to add 10 million people a year between 2000 and 2030 to its 5,161 cities, according to the United Nations.
The country already has 25 of the world's 100-fastest growing urban areas...That compares with eight in China.

Read the whole thing!

Briefly, books and baseball

2009-05-07T22:55:00.007-06:00

The Literary Saloon reports that Kazuo Ishiguro has a new book out, "Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall." It's available in Britain now, though it appears that the American edition is not scheduled for publication until September. It's a collection of short stories about music and musicianship. I liked his first three books, but haven't read his most recent four. The Times of London recently profiled Ishiguro in anticipation of the book's release. Last year the Paris Review interviewed Ishiguro.
Here's Joe Posnanski with some "fun facts" on Royals pitcher Zach Greinke, who is off to a very good start this season.

Mental distress in the U.S.

2009-05-06T15:56:00.003-06:00

That is a map of mental distress in the U.S. (darker shading indicates more distress), posted at Gene Expression by Razib. Kentucky is the most mentally distressed state, and Hawai'i the least. I wonder what explains the high levels of distress in southwest Wyoming and northwest New Mexico.

There appears to be a lot going on here, but I'd guess that mental distress correlates strongly with poverty. Here's a map of poverty in the U.S.:

Are pastured eggs more nutritious?

2009-05-05T20:06:00.002-06:00

Yes they are, according to Stephen at the excellent Whole Health Source blog: "The reason pastured eggs are so nutritious is that the chickens get to supplement their diets with abundant fresh plants and insects."

Chickens are not vegetarians; in addition to insects, they will eat almost anything that they can catch, including mice. So even though the "vegetarian feed" that some companies advertise really means "fed no chicken parts," they are unintentionally saying to shoppers, "our chickens are fed an unnatural sub-optimal diet."

Revisiting the Irish Miracle

2009-05-05T10:46:00.002-06:00

A short while ago, I emailed Tyler Cowen and asked him to revisit the "Irish Miracle," and today he posted his response. He mentions "overconfidence" in two of his four points. Read the whole thing.

Someone actually bought my old digicam

2009-05-04T17:21:00.005-06:00

Five years ago I bought a 4 megapixel Canon S410 for a few hundred dollars (I don't remember the exact amount--but it was at least $350). At the time, it was one of the best point-and-shoot cameras on the market and I was satisfied with the quality of the photos it captured. Over the years, however, newer cameras have emerged with image stabilization, more megapixels, greater zoom capacity, and all for much less money. By comparison, the images from my S410 look terrible.

So I decided to buy another point-and-shoot and will probably purchase something like the Canon A1000 for under $200. In the meantime, I also decided to see if my old Canon could fetch anything in the online used camera market, and remarkably someone bought it for about $80. In absolute terms, the depreciation is fairly severe, but in relative consumer tech terms, it's a great price... for the seller. I cannot comprehend why someone would buy that camera (even if it was in great condition) for that price. Art project? Style preference? Scam? Collector's item? Who knows?

I mean it's true that I did throw in 64 MB and 256 MB cards, but that alone can't explain the buyer's behavior.

Artifacts of Chrysler's Chapter 11

2009-04-30T22:17:00.006-06:00

In case you are having trouble reading the fine print, this document is the first page of Chrysler's bankruptcy filing. Friend and occasional blog commenter Ben sent me a link, and I agree with his assessment that it's surreal. Someone had to go through and list the company's address, and check those boxes--over 100,000 creditors, more than $1 billion in liabilities. The New York Times has published the full 29-page filing here.

A-Rod's "slump insurance"

2009-04-30T21:48:00.004-06:00

Alex Rodriguez is an unusual baseball player, as fans are learning with every passing day and story. The latest oddity, according to the New York Daily News, comes from Selena Roberts who reports in her forthcoming biography that Rodriguez would tip pitches to opposing hitters in the hope that they would return the favor. While playing for the Texas Rangers, he would let "a friendly opponent at the plate know which pitch was coming in lopsided games. Rodriguez expected players he helped would do the same for him when he was having an off night and needed to get his batting average up and it wouldn't affect the outcome of the game."

Here's an interview with Roberts published by Sports Illustrated. What's equally interesting is this comment:

I don't know the history of how it has worked in the major leagues, but from my reporting and the people I spoke with on the Rangers, what they noticed was a pattern of behavior by Alex over a pretty lengthy period of time, two or three years, where it just became more noticeable that his mannerisms on the field were different in games that were already over, its 10-2, something like that.

Roberts is suggesting that there is a "history" of pitch tipping in the major leagues, though I can't find much to confirm such a contention. It does seem that careful analysis of video and statistical evidence could clear Rodriguez or validate Roberts. If only baseball fans were interested in arguments about stats...

Best Places--Central Europe, and the U.S.

2009-04-30T15:09:00.007-06:00

Business Week just published a list ranking the best cities in the world. These lists tend to be gimmicks, and the methodologies arbitrary, but I still thought it was interesting that seven of the ten "Best Places" to live in the world are within a 400-or-so mile radius in Central Europe. They are: Vienna; Berne, Zurich, and Geneva; and Dusseldorf, Munich, and Frankfurt:

View Larger Map

Drive a little further, and you'll arrive in Berlin, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam, which are also in the top 15. At least two cities each in Canada, Australia and New Zealand appear in the top 20.
American cities do not fare well. Honolulu and San Francisco are the highest ranked, coming in at 29 and 30 respectively. American cities are marked by inequality and sometimes seem to resemble cities in the developing world more than they do cities in the developed world. Los Angeles is a chaotic megacity more in the mold of Sao Paulo or Mexico City than of any city in Europe; if LA were a nation, its Gini coefficient would be closest to Malaysia and Venezuela; New York City's Gini coefficient is comparable to those of Brazil and South Africa, among others. Or as Andres Duany wrote of another American city: New Orleans is "not among the most haphazard, poorest, or misgoverned American cities, but rather the most organized, wealthiest, cleanest, and competently governed of the Caribbean cities."
Even metropolitan areas like Denver and the Twin Cities do not begin to approach the income equality prevalent in Western Europe.
The cities were ranked according to a methodology devised by Mercer Consulting. For reasons that aren't totally clear, Mercer designates "New York as the base city with an index score of 100."

If you've seen one, you've seen one

2009-04-29T15:21:00.004-06:00

"Influenza is a virus full of mystery and surprises. The more we study it the more complicated it becomes. Remember the adage: "If you've seen one flu pandemic, you've seen one flu pandemic.""

That's from the blog Effect Measure of the Science Blogs network.

I suppose you can over-report stories about existential risks to humanity, but as a general matter, they're probably under-reported. Threats of asteroid collisions, nuclear war/winter, pandemics, technological disasters are probably all too little reported and understood given the consequences (even if the events are relatively unlikely on any short time horizon).

Draft day and quarterbacks

2009-04-25T11:40:00.005-06:00

It's draft day and the hapless Detroit Lions have already committed $40 million in guaranteed money to the first overall pick, quarterback Matt Stafford of the University of Georgia.
It's well-documented that drafting quarterbacks is more art than science, but I was curious to see exactly when the most successful active quarterbacks were drafted, so I dropped some numbers in a spreadsheet.

Draft position among the top 30 active quarterbacks in career QB rating

Average draft position: 104*
Median draft position: 102
Number of number one overall picks: 4
Number of un-drafted QBs: 6**
Number drafted in the first round: 12
Number drafted in the 150th position or higher: 12

* This number is a little deceptive because 6 QBs went un-drafted--as a workaround, I assigned them the draft number of the last player drafted in their respective draft year plus one. For example, 262 players were drafted in the year Tony Romo became eligible, so I assigned him number 263. Not perfect, I know.
** This shouldn't be too surprising. The universe of QBs who go un-drafted every year is very large. There are 120 D-1 schools each with a QB, many with a draft-eligible QB every year, in addition to the QBs who emerge from lesser divisions (49ers QB JT O'Sullivan, for instance, played at D-2 UC-Davis). That some of them would get overlooked should not be that surprising given the uncertainty involved in QB assessment.

For further analysis of why NFL teams have struggled to identify which quarterbacks will excel at the professional level, be sure to read Jonah Lehrer's blog commentary on a Malcom Gladwell article on the subject.

Oakeshott and market skepticism

2009-04-22T12:56:00.003-06:00

Last week I read this profile of Andrew Sullivan on the same day that tea partiers congregated at Denver's capitol across the street from the central branch of the public library, and I found this passage interesting:

Oakeshott believed we should be sceptical of all human institutions—including markets. He savaged Hayek’s market fundamentalist bible, “The Road to Serfdom”, as another rationalist delusion. He saw it as a utopian plan to end planning, yet another argument that a perfect system could be found, this time in markets. Sullivan’s scepticism, by contrast, has been lop-sided. He is highly sceptical of the capacity of governments to act, but he has often presented markets as close to infallible, if left undistorted by government action.

There was no such outrage at markets by the partiers--judging by their signs and chants--and all copies of Oakeshott were available for checkout at the library.

Fermented foods

2009-04-21T18:30:00.004-06:00

Seth Roberts continues to write about fermented food:

At a store today I saw two containers of Siggis “Icelandic style” yogurt I wanted. One said “best by 4/27/09″; the other said “best by 5/18/09″. To my shock I realized the older one was better. It had more bacteria.
The opposite of what we’re supposed to think.
Expired food — don’t throw it out, give it to me.

I eat sauerkraut, yogurt, and kimchi, but I can't say that I've noticed any particular boost to my health or energy levels.

Here's Stephen at Whole Health Source on soaking and fermenting brown rice.

New Tyler Cowen book forthcoming

2009-04-21T15:30:00.006-06:00

Tyler Cowen has written a new, non-academic book due out in July. Published by Penguin, it's titled, Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World:

[T]he way we think now is changing more rapidly than it has in a very long time. Not since the Industrial Revolution has a man-made creation—in this case, the World Wide Web—so greatly influenced the way our minds work and our human potential. Cowen argues brilliantly that we are breaking down cultural information into ever-smaller tidbits, ordering and reordering them in our minds (and our computers) to meet our own specific needs.

Create Your Own Economy explains why the coming world of Web 3.0 is good for us; why social networking sites such as Facebook are so necessary; what’s so great about “Tweeting” and texting; how education will get better; and why politics, literature, and philosophy will become richer.

Bag-less grocery store

2009-04-07T00:27:00.000-06:00

One of my local grocery stores, Vitamin Cottage, has completely stopped giving out bags--plastic or paper. They will give you a box, though sizes are hit and miss.

Baseball season

2009-04-06T12:55:00.004-06:00

Baseball season began yesterday, which is great. Baseball is different than, say, football inasmuch as I tend to follow the general arc of the season rather than focus on individual games. I can get excited about key matches, of course, but it's the long-running narratives that draw me--the grinding division races, or the chase for this or that discrete achievement--as if following a soap opera with statistics.

Lance and A-Rod

2009-04-03T12:26:00.001-06:00

Lance Armstrong and Alex Rodriguez suddenly have a lot in common. Two of the most successful athletes of the last decade, both men have reputations tainted by performance-enhancing drug (PED) use, and both men are faced with a similar challenge in 2009: restore their reputations by excelling at the highest levels of their sport under intense public scrutiny and with zero assistance from PEDs. (And both men are now sidelined by injuries.)

On the surface of things, they are confronted with what sounds like a fair test. If Lance can win the Tour de France, and Rodriguez can maintain his prodigious output as a hitter, then perhaps we could conclude that PEDs failed to significantly boost their performance in the first place. With clean systems devoid of PEDs, we know they are excelling on account of their wits, talent, and natural strength, right?

Not quite.

Rodriguez should have difficulty clearing his name because the benefits of anabolic steroid use endure long after usage has stopped. A 2008 study concluded that, "a period of anabolic steroid usage is an advantage for a power lifter in competition, even several years after they stop taking a doping drug."

I'm not aware of any reason why anabolic steroid use by baseball players wouldn't confer the same long-term advantages as those experienced by power lifters.

Armstrong's case is even more ambiguous, in part because the testing that connect him to PED use have not been definitive, forcing his accusers to rely on more circumstantial evidence. Additionally, even if we knew he was a user, no one has studied the long-term effects of EPO use in athletes. Until those tests are conducted, we cannot know if simply stopping use returns the body to its prior state.

In short, if using performance-enhancing drugs permanently alters body composition, then regulatory regimes and the public need to reconsider how to penalize and how to rehabilitate known users.

Towers in the park

2009-03-27T12:24:00.002-06:00

On the heels of this NYT article about a Le Corbusier exhibition in London, Slate posts a slideshow of housing projects around the world.

Is Twitter blowing up?

2009-03-25T22:56:00.010-06:00

Has Twitter suddenly blown up?
Mickey Kaus speculates that Twitter has been quietly paying people to spread the word and asks "hasn't there been a whole lot of seemingly spontaneous and semi-mindless mentioning of Twitter lately?"

I have no insight into the company's marketing strategy, but I have also noticed that a lot people have been talking and writing about Twitter in the last month or two.
Google Trends shows a dramatic increase in searches for "Twitter" beginning sometime in December.

The web traffic monitoring site Alexa shows that Twitter's traffic grew steadily through 2008, tripling over the year, and that their traffic appears to have tripled again in the last three months.

And Quantcast--whoever they are--charts a significant uptick in visits to Twitter occurring in the last month or so:

So it appears that, yes, Twitter has really been blowing up in the last few months. Why has this happened so suddenly? Why did ABC feel compelled to advertise their Twittering during Obama's news conference last night? It's hard to say (maybe an internet epidemiologist could tell us).

Winning and MLB attendance

2009-03-19T17:17:00.004-06:00

People like to watch winning teams, but how much does winning actually influence attendance? It depends.
Someone on Athletics Nation took a look at MLB attendance figures and the number of wins that a team needs in order to achieve league-average attendance. Success on the field tends to correlate with success in attendance, but the strength of that correlation varies greatly from team to team.
In order for the Oakland A's to attract a league-average number of fans, they need to win about 100 games, which is obviously very difficult to do. Pittsburgh, Florida, and Tampa Bay also struggle to attract fans regardless of how well they perform.
On the other end of the spectrum sit teams that attract lots of fans regardless of how they perform. The Dodgers, for instance, would attract league-average attendance by winning just 42 games. In recent decades, the Yankees, Boston, Toronto, and Colorado all have had robust attendance regardless of their win-loss record.
On average, new parks increase attendance and decrease a team's reliance on wins, which shouldn't be a huge surprise (though some teams, like the White Sox and the Reds, have suffered lower attendance in their newer stadiums).
Read the whole thing!

TNR Sold!

2009-03-19T13:04:00.003-06:00

So, to follow up on a previous post, Canwest has sold The New Republic back to a group led by Marty Peretz, according to Reuters. For its part, TNR describes the group as being led by Larry Grafstein. Grafstein is a "former investment banker" and regular donor to Democratic candidates (though not exclusively: David Vitter, Mel Martinez, Mitt Romney, and Rudy Giuliani have all received money from Grafstein, according to Newsmeat).

What exactly is in it for Grafstein? It's hard to say, but supporting Israel appears to be at least one factor in the decision.
Anyone who's read Marty Peretz's blog, The Spine, knows that Israel is dear to him. Evidently Canwest shared Peretz's interest in defending the interests of Israel in the public sphere (in addition to the hope that the property would turn profits). And the Daily Beast reports that Grafstein has demonstrated "an ironclad commitment to supporting Israel."
There have been no changes to the editorial stuff thus far, which probably isn't a huge surprise considering Peretz continues to oversee operations.

Beef: It probably doesn't cause colon cancer

2009-03-18T23:56:00.002-06:00

I was recently arguing with someone about whether meat causes colon cancer. My antagonist was vehement in her belief that it does, and I'd read and heard as much before, but I was skeptical. I just came across an article that corroborates that skepticism:

"Compared to those eating meat, vegetarians and vegans turned out to have an increased risk of colorectal (cancer in the colon or rectum). Risk in these people was 39 per cent higher than in meat eaters. They also compared risk of colorectal cancer in individuals classed as vegetarian (vegetarian and vegans) with non-vegetarians (eaters of meat and/or fish). Here, vegetarians had a 49 per cent increased risk of colorectal cancer."

This may not be conclusive, but at the very least, there's a reasonable argument to be made against those who smugly affix "Beef: It's what gives you colon cancer" stickers to their cars.

Nellie ball!

2009-03-18T23:54:00.001-06:00

Maureen Dowd writes of President Obama: "His lofty team of economic rivals is looking more like a team of small forwards and shooting guards."

Has MoDo been watching the Warriors?

The New Republic for sale?

2009-01-30T15:50:00.006-07:00

Mickey Kaus reported, in a recent Bloggingheads episode with Robert Wright, that The New Republic is "about to be sold... back to Marty." I have no reason to doubt Kaus on this one, though I looked around and didn't turn up any other information about the story, and I couldn't get through to Canwest Publishing, which currently owns the magazine. Kaus says it's being sold to Marty Peretz and a consortium. Here's the clip:

Antarctic warming

2009-01-30T12:14:00.003-07:00

A paper on some pretty important climate science regarding warming in Antarctica was recently published in Nature. The Real Climate authors explain the findings in layman's terms here.

"So what do our results show? Essentially, that the big picture of Antarctic climate change in the latter part of the 20th century has been largely overlooked. It is well known that it has been warming on the Antarctic Peninsula, probably for the last 100 years (measurements begin at the sub-Antarctic Island of Orcadas in 1901 and show a nearly monotonic warming trend). And yes, East Antarctica cooled over the 1980s and 1990s (though not, in our results, at a statistically significant rate). But West Antarctica, which no one really has paid much attention to (as far as temperature changes are concerned), has been warming rapidly for at least the last 50 years."

There's a part of me that wishes these scientists were wrong, and that the skeptics were somehow right, but the evidence doesn't seem to support that hope, meaning major climate change action, initiated by the U.S., should be a high priority for Congress and the White House.

Unfortunately, support for climate change legislation currently polls very poorly due to the recession. Investing in any green infrastructure upgrades via the stimulus bill is certainly an important step toward reducing emissions in the U.S. (though the overarching goal of the bill is to increase economic growth, which necessarily includes emissions). What the country--and the world--really needs, however, is long-term climate legislation that establishes meaningful standards for the U.S. and a framework for international treaties among developed and developing countries. And ideally this will happen in time for the White House to present a coherent plan of action when the world convenes to revise the Kyoto Protocol at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December.

The age of the orb

2009-01-30T12:03:00.003-07:00

From The Vine, TNR's very good blog on energy and the environment:

New regulatory czar Cass Sunstein riffs on "Nudge"-like solutions to reduce energy use in the Chicago Tribune: "Early attempts to notify people of their energy use with e-mails and text messages did no good. What worked was to give people something called an Ambient Orb, a little ball that glows red when people are using lots of energy, but green when their use is modest. In a period of weeks, users of the orb reduced their energy consumption during peak times by 40 percent!"

As far as paternalism goes, yielding to benevolent Ambient Orb overlords sounds relatively painless. Though one has to ask where this Ambient Orb slippery slope ultimately leads us.

Lake swimming (in the winter)

2009-01-30T11:40:00.004-07:00

When I last visited Chicago a couple summers ago, I thought it was pretty cool that the city had set up swimming lanes in Lake Michigan, and that people were taking advantage of them. Little did I know that some Chicagoans regularly swim in the Lake during the winter. But that's exactly what the guys who write the Open Water Chicago blog do (be sure to visit the photos they've posted in their January posts).
The Chicago Sun Times published a story about them earlier this week, which includes video footage:

A day before this particular swim, it was so cold, they had to smash through a thin layer of ice to get to open water. Extreme cold never deters them -- only dangerous waves, they say.

Oliva and Schroeder say they enjoy the uncrowded freedom they get from lake swimming.

"It's relaxing," says Schroeder, who lives in Elmhurst. "It's like a meditation thing."

There's no open water in my neighborhood, but I can attest to the exhilaration of exposing yourself to the cold.

Interview of the day: Elizabeth Alexander

2009-01-20T13:28:00.004-07:00

Time recently interviewed Elizabeth Alexander, who read a poem at President Obama's inauguration this morning.

Excerpt:

How do you think your body of work is relevant to Obama's election?
I'm very attentive to history and to a historical understanding of any given present as a way of both looking back and moving forward. That theme resonated throughout the Obama campaign.

We're also of the same generation. Seeing him rise to this mighty challenge and go with such grace and brilliance through the campaign has made a lot of my age peers and me say we're going to step up our game. We're going to contribute. We're going to do more. We're going to work harder. We want to be better.

Here's Alexander's home page.

Interview of the day: Jennifer McLagan

2009-01-19T12:38:00.003-07:00

To continue with the food and health related interviews, Salon recently interviewed Jennifer McLagan, author of Fat: An Appreciation of Misunderstood Ingredient:

So how exactly is cooking with animal fat better for us?
Unlike vegetable oils, animal fats are very stable and don't turn rancid easily. This makes them ideal for cooking, which involves heating the fat. And they have no trans fats.
It is much easier to roast a bird or a joint of meat if it has a good quantity of fat. The fat guarantees taste and succulence. Without it, the meat will be dry and tasteless.
Animal fats have lots of good fatty acids that fight disease, help absorb vitamins and lower cholesterol. Your body burns the short-chained fatty acids found in animal fats and stores the long-chained ones found in polyunsaturated fat. It is a myth that eating animal fat makes you fat.
Animal fat also has a good ratio of essential fatty acids. Many of us have a skewed ratio thanks to too much vegetable oil. When this ratio is out of balance, it results in illness and depression.
But best of all, fat -- with its big round molecules -- tastes good, it feels good in your mouth, on your tongue and it carries flavors.

You can read other interviews with McLagan at Modern Forager, and Gremolata.

Interview of the day: Gary Taubes

2009-01-18T17:19:00.001-07:00

Seth Roberts recently interviewed Gary Taubes. Here's an excerpt:

SETH: I see. So that’s a good summing up of what was in your article that you believe, and what you don’t believe anymore.

GARY TAUBES: There are other related facts, as well. I never imagined when I wrote that original article that I would come to believe that exercise won’t make you lose weight, even though I’ve been an athlete my entire life and it’s never helped me. So it’s fair to say that when I wrote that New York Times article five years ago, I had an entirely different conception about the causes and cures of obesity and overweight. Carbohydrates were key, but my understanding of the mechanisms was completely different. That’s the kicker with research and reporting: you don’t know what you’ll find until you do it.

Interview of the day: Erwan Le Corre

2009-01-17T12:16:00.003-07:00

Chris of Conditioning Research interviewed Erwan Le Corre recently. Here's an excerpt:

What implications does your particular philosophy have in terms of diet? Sleep? Posture?

Evolutionary biology but also experience makes it clear we should go for a diet that is as close as possible to the one of our ancestors before the rise of civilization, agriculture, and more recently industrially processed food. Mostly raw, made of lots of vegetables, fruits, meat, fish, eggs, nuts and containing no grains and no dairies. Recovering true, natural taste and smell and the ability to fast sometimes.

Sleeping enough, resting frequently, going to bed early, let a window open to make sure air is renewed, avoiding synthetic fabrics.

I personally like to sleep on the floor, not in a bed, not even on a real mattress. To me it's more comfortable this way, and this way I can sleep about anywhere without experiencing discomfort whenever I'm traveling.

Avoiding staying still for too long, checking body tensions frequently and relax, breathing well, slowly and deeply.

That's a few insights, though in my opinion no personal lifestyle should ever become an obsessive application of overly strict rules.

Chin up, novelists!

2009-01-16T21:06:00.002-07:00

According to the National Endowment of the Arts:

For the first time in more than 25 years, the number of people reading fiction is on the rise... In these new and improved numbers of readers given to us by the NEA, the most heartening rise is in the 18-to-24-year-old group, the ones who seem to have been born with iPod buds stuck in their ears. They've recently taken the biggest bump up in readership after years of the most significant decline.

Here's the whole article from the Wall Street Journal.

Interview of the day: Natasha Wimmer, Roberto Bolaño translator

2009-01-16T14:43:00.004-07:00

Here's a link to the interview in Powell's, and an excerpt:

Jeremy [Garber]: I suspect most readers are unaware of the translation process. I've read elsewhere that you proceed page by page. Is that your general method of working?

[Natasha] Wimmer: I usually do between five and ten pages a day. I do a quick translation in the afternoon of, say, five pages, and the next morning I revise. Working that way, I make my way through the book, and then at the end I spend a pretty long time going back over the whole thing and revising it again.

Here are a few other interviews with Wimmer: New York Times, The Quarterly Conversation, New York Magazine.

Interview of the day: Denis Dutton

2009-01-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

Seed Magazine interviews Denis Dutton, author of The Art Instinct.

Excerpt:

What prompted you to make a connection between evolution and the arts?
The arts have a central place in human experience across the globe. They take place in all cultures in a spontaneously understood, pleasurable, make-believe world. The universality of the arts is crying out for some general explanation. In my view, only Darwin can supply it. We have to acknowledge first that these commonalities exist and then ask how we can explain them. That's what my book is about.

Unanimous election to the Hall of Fame

2009-01-15T10:35:00.000-07:00

After an extraordinary and lengthy career, Rickey Henderson was just elected to the Hall of Fame, which should surprise no one--Bill James said you could split him in two and you'd have two Hall of Famers. Nonetheless, he did not secure a unanimous vote, which leaves me to wonder if anyone can. Joe Posnanski thinks Greg Maddux has a shot:
"His Hall of Fame call is five years away, but I’m already making the prediction: Greg Maddux will finish with the highest percentage in baseball history. And he has a shot at unanimous — I say he gets within five votes of unanimous."
It is difficult to imagine how a voter could exclude Maddux, on his merits, on the first ballot, but it's easy to imagine a voter ignoring the merits and opposing based on other motives.
With that said, there are at least two active players who might join Maddux in warranting a unanimous vote:

Alex Rodriguez--His fielding and hitting stats are superb across the board, but some voters will oppose his election if he fails to win a World Series. They may also vote against him for ambiguous character issues.

Albert Pujols--His hitting numbers are stellar, almost unparalleled, he has won a World Series, and his character appears solid, but it remains to be seen whether he can sustain such a prodigious output into his mid- to late-thirties.

Existential risks: Yellowstone edition

2009-01-14T23:20:00.006-07:00

Yellowstone Park has recently been struck by swarms of earthquakes--900 in all since December 26--and while seismologists insist that there's no reason for alarm, one has to wonder if their models are sufficiently calibrated to predict the next big one. The USGS places the annual risk of eruption at "1 in 730,000 or 0.00014%" based, perhaps crudely, on the intervals of previous eruptions at the site.
Yellowstone sits on a large and relatively volatile caldera that has erupted massively three times in the last two million years in 600,000 to 800,000 year intervals. The most recent explosion, roughly 600,000 years ago, may have been the "biggest geologic event" on Earth in the last million years, according to one geologist. Ash covered lands as far away as Texas and Missouri in depths up to an inch, and piled hundreds of feet high closer to the eruption. As Bill Bryson pointed out in his book "A Short History of Nearly Everything," another Yellowstone eruption would be ecologically disastrous, wreaking havoc on agriculture throughout North America in addition to damaging Earth's climate. Greenland ice cores from the last "supervolcano" eruption at Toba, in Sumatra, 70,000 years ago, Bryson reports, show evidence of a "volcanic winter" that endured for six years and bringing humans to the brink of extinction.
Here's a paper by Nick Bostrom on existential risks, which includes a passing reference to supervolcanos. In his first footnote, he notes the possibility of ranking the probability of existential risks by using betting markets, but reminds us that it's a slightly problematic tool since "Only a fool would bet on human extinction since there would be no chance of getting paid whether one won or lost."
ADDENDUM: Here's Robin Hanson on volcanos and global cooling: "It would also increase ozone depletion a bit. But these seem minor compared with dire warnings on warming. And people seem to have unfairly lumped this very solid approach with far more speculative approaches, e.g., orbiting shades or iron ocean seeding. Volcano shading is all well-understood physics and chemistry!"

Recent Weschler

2009-01-14T22:10:00.008-07:00

Ever since I read A Wanderer in the Perfect City, Lawrence Weschler has been one of my favorite writers, but his writing can be difficult to find these days as he no longer writes regularly for the New Yorker. It takes some searching to find his work, but he has certainly been industrious and recent work includes books, articles, and a podcast (in addition to the interview that I linked to in the previous post):

Tara Donovan, The Monacelli Press, September, 2008--A book collaborative between Donovan and Weschler.

True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney, University of California Press, January, 2009--A collection of conversations between Weschler and Hockney.

Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, University of California Press, February, 2009--This biography of Robert Irwin was, of course, his first book and is being reissued with new material by Weschler, who has continued to cover Irwin for the last three decades.

The Paralyzed Cyclops, The Believer, December, 2008--About the converging and contrasting styles and ideas of art represented by David Hockney and Robert Irwin.

Lawrence Weschler: The P.T. Barnum of the Mind, The Stranger, December, 2008--A podcast interview of Weschler. For literary gossip hounds: he describes then-New Yorker editor Tina Brown's disapproval of the length of his 10,000-word piece on Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, which eventually ran in Harper's, and her subsequent diatribe-letter against "Ren."

The Emperor's Deathbed: An Exchange, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter, 2008--A written exchange between Weschler and Salman Rushdie on Ryszard Kapuściński.

Interview of the day: Lawrence Weschler & Tara Donovan

2009-01-14T21:56:00.003-07:00

Lawrence Weschler, who evidently possesses the "genius grant" midas touch, recently interviewed artist Tara Donovan for Design Observer. The two also collaborated on a book about Donovan's art.

Excerpt:

W: Did they know you were an artist at the time?

D: No. Nobody knew I was an artist. I did finally work up the nerve to introduce myself to Chuck. He was on the board of the foundation that had awarded me a workspace, and he subsequently came to the open studio, liked my work, and ended up nominating me for a Tiffany grant.

Photo source: The Ace Gallery, which did not give me permission to post this image.

Making stuff

2009-01-11T00:10:00.000-07:00

I think there's a place in everyone's heart for the craftsman/small manufacturer.

In Granta

2009-01-11T00:09:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed reading this short reflection about a woman's father.
"When I asked him what you do if you see something in the dark that frightens you, he said, ‘What you do is, you go up to it, and touch it.’"

The largest MLB contracts, and when they were signed

2009-01-09T11:38:00.004-07:00

It's odd that three of the seven largest contracts in MLB history were signed in 2001 (by Rodriguez, Jeter, and Manny, respectively), according to Cot's Baseball Contracts. And only one of the ten largest contracts was signed between 2002 and 2008, and only four of the top 26 contracts were signed between 2003-2006.

Number of the 26 largest contracts signed in:
1999-2002: 10
2003-2006: 4
2007-2009: 12

Is this just random chance? My guess is that broader economic trends, like the tech boom and bust, underlie these numbers, but it's hard to say. I wonder what it would look like if we analyzed the top 50 or 100 contracts.

Electricity

2009-01-09T11:34:00.000-07:00

"Children in rural villages in Nepal often have no electricity and have to walk more than an hour to school. As an incentive to show up, teachers are keeping the battery rechargers for the laptops at the schools, and attendance has soared as a result."
Here's the article.

Reinvention of American cuisine--beer edition

2008-11-25T07:34:00.001-07:00

"America used to be full of odd beers. In 1873, the country had some four thousand breweries, working in dozens of regional and ethnic styles. Brooklyn alone had nearly fifty... Beer has lagged well behind wine and organic produce in the ongoing reinvention of American cuisine. Yet the change over the past twenty years has been startling. In 1965, the United States had a single craft brewery: Anchor Brewing, in San Francisco. Today, there are nearly fifteen hundred."

This from an excellent New Yorker article about Sam Caglione of Dogfish Head and the rise of craft brewing in America.

Zimmer's Cabinet of Wonders

2008-11-22T10:49:00.002-07:00

Carl Zimmer's science tattoo "emporium" continues to grow. Neat!

Time for a Big Foodie lobby?

2008-11-21T21:00:00.005-07:00

"I can imagine Slow Food over time having a membership and a reach that enables it to put real pressure on federal policymakers in the next food and farm bill discussion in the same way the Natural Resources Defense Council or the Sierra Club could affect policy for the environmental movement."

This, from Gourmet magazine, is a ripe idea, ready for harvest. Isn't it time that Americans started wresting control of food policy from corporations? I could easily see hundreds of thousands of Americans joining to create a lobby for better food policy. Hard to say if Slow Food is the best group--or set of principles--to organize around from a broader policy perspective, but I think we can increasingly agree that America's agriculture policies do not currently best serve the public health or the needs of our myriad food cultures.

Reducing your transportation emissions

2008-11-10T07:45:00.000-07:00

From the Real Climate blog:

What reduces emissions more?
A. Someone swapping their old SUV (which gets 12 miles per gallon) for a hybrid version (18 mpg)
B. someone upgrading their 25 mpg compact to a new 46 mpg Prius?
(ignore for a minute manufacturing issues or driving habits and assume the miles driven are the same).

The surprising answer (for those who don't work it out) is A. It's easy enough to see why this is the case. If the driving distance is 100 miles, then for case A the saving in fuel used (and hence emissions) is 100/12-100/18 = 2.8 gallons, while for B, you have 100/25-100/46 = 1.8 gallons. The confusion arises because people like to think linearly about numbers, not inversely, and so tend to assume that a similar change in mpg has a similar impact on fuel usage. This is not however the case - improvements in efficiency at the low end of the scale are much more useful at reducing emissions. This is actually a very general point - when trying to raise efficiency it is always
sensible to start with the least efficient processes.

One could also upgrade from the SUV to the Prius, of course, or walk or ride your bike.

Sunstein-Power power couple

2008-10-15T08:01:00.004-06:00

Cass Sunstein and Samantha Power are an item?

They met just a few months ago through the Obama campaign, for which they were both advisors, and started dating during the Iowa caucuses. "You know what they say," says Sunstein. "Obama brings people together."

That's hot.

Humans in a tube

2008-10-15T08:00:00.002-06:00

This year, Colorado's ballot features a constitutional amendment (48) that would define conception as the point of personhood thereby outlawing abortions and possibly some forms of birth control (and inviting other questions, too: e.g. would miscarriages be manslaughter?). The idea isn't so much to outlaw abortions in Colorado (though there is that), but to turn out the base on the radical Christian right, and to create a test case to send to the Supreme Court in the hope that Roberts et al. overturn Roe v. Wade. In any event, they have a few odd commercials about what it means to be a human. The first is especially interesting as it asserts in no uncertain terms that an embryo in a tube is a human.

Commercial one

Commercial two

Commercial three

Voting in red and blue states

2008-09-23T08:02:00.003-06:00

Quick thought on voting for President even if you live in a non-swing state like California or Alabama:
The 12th amendment dictates that in the event of a tie in the electoral vote--269-269--the House of Representatives "shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President."
In deciding who to elect in the event of an electoral vote tie, Congressmen will be forced to consider who won the popular vote; in fact, the popular vote count might be the only politically palatable factor for Congress to consider. So remind your friends in non-purple states to vote even if that state's electoral college outcome seems foregone because there's a small but real chance that the popular count will determine the election (and if you're in California, don't forget to vote yes on proposition 1A because an SF-LA supertrain would be awesome).

Here's an article about some wild scenarios that could ensue in the event of a tie. For instance, Obama as President, and Palin as VP.

Paper v. pixels

2008-09-23T08:01:00.000-06:00

I liked this thought on data and paper from Edward Tufte's forum:

"I love my PDA and cell phone but that would never work; the issue is data density.

"Paper has so many advantages is it not even a contest. It is light weight. It can be made weather-proof by being laminated (although that does make it much more difficult to modify on the fly). It operates at a resolution typically around 1200 dpi or better. You can zoom in just by moving your eyes closer. It has two sides. And it comes in zillions of sizes, and you can make your own custom sizes by using a really low-tech device: the scissors! And if you don't have one of those, you can just use your hands and tear it!"

It won't hurt a bit

2008-09-23T08:00:00.000-06:00

This is a catchy way to think about the $700 billion bailout package:

It's the "equivalent of a one-time 55 percent income tax surcharge."

Via Yglesias.

Rushdie and Postrel on glamour and terrorism

2008-09-12T08:00:00.001-06:00

"To someone who thinks "glamour" means movie stars and designer dresses, the idea that terrorism is glamorous sounds bizarre. But Rushdie is wise to the deeper meaning of glamour, as a form of magic and persuasion. Glamour is in the audience's eyes, and the phenomenon long preceded Hollywood. Jihadi terrorism in fact combines two ancient forms of glamour--the martial and the religious--with the modern promise of media celebrity...
The question for this September 11 is, How do we puncture the glamour of Jihadi terrorism? The first step is recognizing that such glamour exists."

Here's the whole post on Postrel's Deep Glamour blog.

Measuring

2008-09-09T18:59:00.001-06:00

I thought this was a worthwhile insight from Seth Roberts:

"The usual idea is that knowledge is power. Sure, if you measure your blood pressure every day you can better control it than if you measure it once per six months. That’s obvious. This is different: knowledge is motivation. If you measure your blood pressure every day you’ll want to control it more than if you measure it every six months."

Booming

2008-09-09T18:52:00.004-06:00

How many new buildings have gone up in New York City in the last 15 years?
76,000, according to New York Magazine.
"In the past fifteen fat years, more than 76,000 new buildings have gone up, more than 44,000 were razed, another 83,000 were radically renovated."

Water

2008-09-01T16:14:00.004-06:00

I would think that residents of Las Vegas would consume less water than residents of a city like Seattle, but as it happens, the opposite is true, largely because the latter has adopted smarter pricing policies that incentivize conservation after basic needs are met:

Seattle has aggressively tiered water rates that top out at $10.50 per thousand gallons. The city uses about 100 gallons per person per day. Las Vegas, meanwhile, has rates that top out at $4 per thousand gallons, and it uses 227 gallons of water per person per day. The lesson for Las Vegas—and John McCain, for that matter—should be that it's a whole lot easier to change water prices than to start water wars.

Here's the whole post. Water is scarce and the population growth of the American west continues to push us to the limits of supply at current rates of consumption, but there's no real reason why we can't conserve on a variety of fronts and allow growth to continue while still meeting essential needs. On the more draconian side, homeowners do not need lawns in the desert, and outlawing them altogether would be reasonable. But a market-based approach seems to be working in Seattle, and it would be nice to give people the choice to grow a lawn and garden if they want to pay much higher rates for such extravagance.

Binge drinking

2008-08-18T22:41:00.009-06:00

College presidents from about 100 of the nation's best-known universities, including Duke, Dartmouth and Ohio State, are calling on lawmakers to consider lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18, saying current laws actually encourage dangerous binge drinking on campus.

This is probably a good idea. Basically, you want to encourage teens to drink moderately--if for no other reason than that their brains are still developing--but moderation isn't going to prevail when they can only drink by breaking the law. If you're breaking the law with one beer, why not with nine? Short of lowering the drinking age in all settings, lawmakers could make it legal for the 18-21 crowd to drink in bars, where most patrons view drinking at a bar with friends as a fundamentally civil, adult activity. In short, you want to find a way to socialize new drinkers and teach them how to enjoy alcohol, and teenagers aren't currently getting those cues at beer-soaked house parties.