Month: November 2010

Sarah Zhang explains:

Those familiar with the artificial lives of farmed cows or chickens would not be shocked to learn that farmed fish live similarly unnatural ones. Instead of their natural diet of zooplankton, which is difficult to domesticate, juvenile bass are fed rotifers and artemia. Adult fish are given feed made of ground up wild fish. The most crucial step in domesticating fish is controlling their reproductive cycle, which is done by implanting a microscopic polymer-based sphere that slowly releases hormone into the fish’s bloodstream.

This is a long essay but worth your time. A small excerpt:

Born to Run, the whole album, was about longing, open highway, the amusement park rising bold and stark, the poets who write nothing at all, the ghosts in the eyes of all the boys Mary sent away. Born to Run is about that brilliant age when you know dreams don't come true, but you still believe they might come true FOR YOU.

And The Promise is about the every day numbing of those dreams. It is a follow-up to Thunder Road, that song about the guy who learned how to make his guitar talk, and the girl who ain't a beauty (but hey, she's all right), both of them, pulling out of that town full of losers, pulling out of there to win. Now, that guy's got a job. It's a night job. Some nights he don't go. A friend told me, "You have to listen to this song. I can't believe you haven't heard this song."

The above video, which is over a year old, went viral recently (Update: the Youtube has been removed, but you can view the video here). Aaron Carroll is troubled:

I have three children, one not much older than this girl.  I’m really having a problem with this.

We spend a lot of time, especially as pediatricians, talking with children about how they should be touched.  There are acceptable and unacceptable touches.  More importantly, there are only a small class of adults that a child should be comfortable being touched by at all.

I’m sorry, but a TSA security person does not fall in that group.  Moreover, any parent could tell you that the TSA person in this video has no idea how to deal with a small child.  The way she grabs and child, while the child is struggling, isn’t ok.

A reader writes:

I spent the summer of 2008 in West Africa learning about local music and culture.  While translating from English to French and vice versa for a friend who was compiling a word list in the Anii language, spoken in mid-western Benin, I found out that the Anii have no native word for blue (they use an adaptation of the English word), and instead say the sky is white. 

Their word for leaf also means green, yellow is ginger (the root), and red and pink are the same color to them (I believe they use their word for earth; it certainly is red there).  Only black has a word not associated with anything natural. 

I thought, arrogantly, that this was charmingly primitive, not giving colors their own names.  When I got back to America, I looked up the etymologies for the English words for colors, thinking them all just abstract concepts (and therefore more advanced?). But, lo and behold, a pink is a flower, black comes from a term for soot, and orange, well… 

Our concepts of color are so vastly different, yet so similar.  I love it!

Marc Lynch is skeptical of the new deal with Israel:

The United States seems to be giving a lot for a temporary fix which only kicks the can down the road another few months, while neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians seem to see this as a moment of opportunity.

The deal only makes sense if serious progress on reaching agreement on borders can be made in three months. But the three months in question include Thanksgiving, the Eid al-Adha, Hanukkah, Christmas, New Years, and the seating of the new U.S. Congress. Even if the parties have already sketched out the contours of the deal — and I sure hope they did that spadework before committing themselves to such a high-stakes deadline, though I'm kind of afraid that they didn't — experience suggests that getting that deal through the Israeli and Palestinian systems won't be easy. Since the United States promises not to ask for another extension, the 90-day deadline gives all kinds of incentives for those who don't really want a deal to stall.

Matt Steinglass poses some tough questions to death penalty supporters.

A reader writes:

There are several forums that extensively cover the topic of the various synthetic cannabinoids.  The type of "review" you posted is quite unusual in the very large body of discourse about these drugs. The "pot is a miracle drug" die-hards primarily post such reviews, typically after having paid absolutely no attention to simple rules of use (for instance, you don't pack a huge bowl of synthetics and smoke it all at once, as anyone with even a casual interest in researching what they're going to use would have seen).

As someone who has used a wide variety of herbal blends (substrate sprayed with various synthetic cannabinoids), as well as the raw synthetics themselves, I want to counter your reader with the following:

1.  Yes, synthetic cannabinoids can be less forgiving.  However, the side effects are little different than for pot.  The difference lies in the strength of some cannabinoids, specifically the popular JWH-018.  This has a propensity to send an unwary user into a panic attack that can be quite uncomfortable, but which can also be achieved on cannabis itself.  Simple attention to usage helps to avoid this.

2.  Many other cannabinoids have little such "danger" (and I object to the word "danger" here; this is the same type of language that pot die-hards complain about when others apply it to pot).  JWH-250, for example, packs a significant head high and can be used in much larger and more forgiving dosages.  It is difficult to use "too much," and the duration is between 15 and 30 minutes.  When an "OD" can take place, it is significantly different than for JWH-018 (which is what is in virtually all herbal blends talked about on your blog) due to the difference in the way it interacts with receptors.

3.  Anyone claiming there are not powerful strains of pot that would blow a first-time user's mind is lying.  Anything that can "happen to you" on synthetics can also happen on pot.  As above, pot is simply more forgiving (although it's worth pointing out that many people eventually stop using pot, or simply never take up its regular use, because of paranoia and/or anxiety stemming from its use).

4.  Just as many people were "not sure what the big deal was" the first time they smoked pot, synthetics often take some time to acclimate to.  There are several synthetics I absolutely did not enjoy until I had used them approximately five times over the course of 7 to 10 days, after which they took on a much more robust quality.  Learning how to embrace the high applies as much to these as it does with pot.  I hated JWH-250 initially, for example, but it's now easily my favorite synthetic, and it as well as JWH-081 (not JWH-018) are better than 90% of the pot I've tried.  (And I've tried a lot of good pot.)

Another writes:

Your reader condemned the "herbal incense" high as something dangerous and unpleasant after trying it twice – once while exacerbating the high with alcohol. And at $15 per gram? That's the cheapest shit out there.

I've used herbal incense to get high for over a year now and have tried many different varieties … some are better than pot and some are worse. I've found a brand that works well for me and I thoroughly enjoy it. It brings me a sense of calm and also enhances my creative side. I am always pleasantly surprised at the places my mind wanders while I'm high.

If marijuana were legal, I would smoke it. But it's not and I don't. I have smoked it in the past, but my happy, average, mid-class existence would cease if I brought legal troubles on myself. Plus, my live-in boyfriend is a cop, so I would never put his career in jeopardy just to indulge. I look forward to the day with MJ is legal again, but for now, the legal herbals work just fine with a little trial and error.

The NYT has created an interactive tool for that purpose, if you missed it. Felix Salmon is underwhelmed:

[T]he NYT options on both the spending-cut and the tax-hike side tend to hit the poor and the middle classes more drastically than the rich; what’s missing here is the option to implement something much more progressive, in both senses of the word. It’s a missed opportunity, and a shame.

A reader writes:

Your recent posting of a gay vintage photo blog made me want to share this circa 1860 carte-de-visite from my collection with you.  It is the only photograph of a would-be transsexual I have ever discovered in 40 years of photo collecting:

The photograph was taken by O. Desmarais of Montreal, P.Q.  It photo depicts a young man posing with his sister and mother in a studio. A spidery hand has written the word "HOWARD" beneath his portrait.  The look of forbearance on the faces of his sister and mother is something to behold.  Born a century too soon.