Month: August 2009

by Chris Bodenner

Michele Humes spots a trend:

Suddenly, at least in the West's more rarefied culinary environs, meat has become dessert. In Paris, Pierre Hermé's extensive macaron selection includes a chocolate-and-foie-gras flavor, shimmering with gold leaf. At Chicago's Grocery Bistro, chef Andre Christopher tops a seared lobe of foie gras with shards of Heath bar. And out of her tiny boutique in New York City, Roni-Sue Kave sells handmade "pig candy": whole strips of deep-fried bacon coated in dark or milk chocolate.

Humes also traces the fascinating history of a Turkish dessert called tavuk göğsü – a kind of milk pudding with shredded chicken. (I'll stick with the chocolate bacon.)

by Patrick Appel

Stephen Fry mocks the study that found forty percent of Tweets are "pointless babble."

by Patrick Appel

Christopher Beam puts the 1018 page health care bill in perspective:

Sure, most legislation is much shorter: The average statute passed by the 109th Congress—the latest session for which figures are available—clocked in at around 15 pages, according to the Senate Library. And the recent law authorizing President Obama to give gold medals to the Apollo 11 astronauts on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing filled just two pages. But major spending bills frequently run more than 1,000. This year's stimulus bill was 1,100 pages. The climate bill that the House passed in June was 1,200 pages. Bill Clinton's 1993 health care plan was famously 1,342 pages long. Budget bills can run even longer: In 2007, President Bush's ran to 1,482 pages.

by Chris Bodenner

Silbey has a great post on the slow but steady integration of blacks and women in the military. For the latter, the only remaining barrier is serving in combat units. But Iraq and Afghanistan are quietly undermining that:

First, because in a war with fluid front-lines–if any at all–even women supposedly out of reach of combat find themselves in the middle of a firefight. Second, and more importantly, the need for certain capabilities, skills, and warm bodies, has overridden military reluctance to put women in harm’s way. The New York Times recently published two substantial articles (1, 2) on the latter. […] :

As soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, women have done nearly as much in battle as their male counterparts: patrolled streets with machine guns, served as gunners on vehicles, disposed of explosives, and driven trucks down bomb-ridden roads. They have proved indispensable in their ability to interact with and search Iraqi and Afghan women for weapons, a job men cannot do for cultural reasons. The Marine Corps has created revolving units — “lionesses” — dedicated to just this task.

Read the rest (which addresses, among other things, sex in combat zones). Colbert also did a great service when he interviewed Sgt. Robin Balcom on his USO show; she earned a combat badge in Iraq as an MP (military police), which isn't technically a combat unit. Video after the jump:

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Tareq Salha & Robin Balcom
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Protests

by Conor Clarke

On one side of the left we have heavyweights like Paul Krugman arguing that Obama "has been weirdly reluctant to make the moral case for universal care." And on the other side of the left we have anonymous "Democratic strategists" bopping the president on the head for making the very same "discredited" moral argument. Hopefully the two sides believe their arguments, and if so they should feel free to continue making them. But these two arguments really are mutually exclusive, and it seems to me that, as a result, just about any tactic the president picks will come in for a nice round of heckling from a chunk of his base. (And I'm sure that soon we will hear about how the substance of the message was never the problem; it was the administration's inability to pick one message and stick with it.)

Anyway, I believe the relevant cliche here is "damned if you do it and damned if you don't," but I am also open to metaphors involving rocks an hard places, or perhaps the elegant simplicity of "Obama is screwed no matter what he does."

Update: In response to an email about this, let me abandon all pretense of subtly and make clear that, No, I do not consider this a "deep thought" about the health-care debate. That was an SNL reference. I consider this an embarrassingly shallow and obvious thought about the difficult tactical position in which the president finds himself. Furthermore, I believe it is traditional to use scare quotes when one doesn't take an argument seriously. When I refer to the view that the moral argument for health-care has been "discredited," I am not endorsing that position.

by Patrick Appel

Bob Wright describes his Buddhist retreat:

[M]y view of weeds changed. There’s a kind of weed that I had spent years killing, sometimes manually, sometimes with chemicals. On a walk one day I looked down at one of those weeds and it looked as beautiful as any other plant. Why, I wondered, had I bought into the “weed” label? Why had I so harshly judged an innocent plant? If this sounds crazy to you, you should hear how crazy it sounds to me. I’m not the weed-hugging type, I assure you.

And as long as we’re on the subject of crazy, there was my moment of bonding with a lizard. I looked at this lizard and watched it react to local stimuli and thought: I’m in the same boat as that lizard — born without asking to be born, trying to make sense of things, and far from getting the whole picture.

I mean, sure, I know more than the lizard — like the fact that I exist and the fact that I evolved by natural selection. But my knowledge is, like the lizard’s, hemmed in by the fact that my brain is a product of evolution, designed to perform mundane tasks, to react to local stimuli, not to understand the true nature of things. And — here’s the crazy part — I kind of loved that lizard. A little bit, for a little while.

by Patrick Appel

Jonah Leher comments on a new study:

[C]hronic stress reduces cellular plasticity (including neurogenesis), which might make us (and mice) more likely to settle into familiar ruts and routines. The end result is that people stick with the very behaviors that created the stress in the first place.

by Patrick Appel

Dale Keiger explores the connection between factory farming and disease:

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that livestock and poultry produce 335 million tons of manure per year, which is one way resistant pathogens get out of animals and into the environment. That's 40 times as much fecal waste as humans produce annually. Farms use it for fertilizer and collect it in sheds and manure lagoons, but those containment measures do not prevent infectious microbes from getting into the air, soil, and water. They can be transported off the farms by the animals themselves, houseflies, farm trucks, and farm workers, and by spreading manure on other fields. Out in the environment, they form a sort of bank of genetic material that enables the spread of resistance.

(Hat tip: 3QD)

by Patrick Appel

Apparently, it's a growing field:

Some scholars take the search for Gospel themes in the Harry Potter series quite far. Oona Eisenstadt, an assistant professor of religious studies at Pomona College, offers a particularly elaborate analysis, arguing that Rowling explores the complex natures of biblical characters by presenting two versions of each in the Potter books. Snape and Malfoy, she argues, represent competing understandings of Judas – each seeking to kill Dumbledore, but one because he is serving evil and one because destiny demands it. Eisenstadt sees Dumbledore and Harry, in different ways, as Christ figures – perhaps Harry representing the human Jesus, and Dumbledore the divine. And she posits that the New Testament depiction of elements of the Jewish community is represented by the goblins (unappealing bankers) and the Ministry of Magic (legalistic and small-minded).

by Patrick Appel

Discover tackles the question. Snippet:

Even harrowing memories—the so-called flashbulb memories that feel as if they have been permanently seared into the brain—are not as accurate as we think. Less than a year after a cargo plane crashed into an Amsterdam apartment building in 1992, 55 percent of the Dutch population said they had watched the plane hit the building on TV. Many of them recalled specifics of the crash, such as the angle of descent, and could report whether or not the plane was on fire before it hit. But the event had not been caught on video. The “memory” shared by the majority was a hallucination, a convincing

fiction pieced together out of descriptions and pictures of the event.

By the late 1990s, hundreds of psychology experiments suggested that the description of memory as a neurally encoded recapitulation of the past was so oversimplified as to completely miss the point. Instead of being a perfect movie of the past, psychologists found, memory is more like a shifting collage, a narrative spun out of scraps and constructed anew whenever recollection takes place. The science of memory was conflicted, with the neurobiological and psychological versions at odds. If a memory is wired into brain cells—a literal engraving of information—then why is it so easy to alter many years after the fact? It took an outsider to connect the dots.