Month: March 2014

Spurred by Nick Richardson’s brief history of Lorem Ipsum, the enduring dummy text from the 16th century, Sal Robinson looks to variants in the Internet Age:

[T]here are Lorem Ipsum generators that combine dialogue from Downton Abbey and The IT Crowd and SpongeBob Squarepants; there are regional generators (the Mainer, the Newfie), and generators that mix and match language often considered to be babble anyway (the po-mo academic paper, corporate-speak,inspirational quotes). As a nearly full-time text generator myself, I don’t see one for book jacket copy, though there is an excellent old school chart for assembling your own blurbs.

These generators are pretty satisfying for people who miss Maurice Moss or have to write academic papers, and give you plenty of useful dummy text, but they don’t often come close to the original’s level of lyricism. Maybe you’re only as good as the guys you steal from? For superior nonsense, it’s best to turn to Lewis Carroll, who, when Lorem Ipsumated, produces passages like this:

Alice laughed. ‘There’s a mile high and down
in an egg, Sir,’ Alice asked, handing her hand and drank some poetry repeated thoughtfully. ‘An
uncomfortable sort of old clothes
than anything else, you know, with some time the
poor Gnat went on growing older.’

‘ONE can’t, you know, with all alive, and thirsty!’

One has the feeling that Carroll would approve.

Here he emphasizes how terribly ineffective solitary confinement is as a method of rehabilitation:

And in our final video from Shane, he shares how he and his fellow hostages kept each other sane while imprisoned in Iran:

Shane, Sarah and Josh’s memoir based on their experience as political prisoners in Iran is called A Sliver Of Light. You can find a selection of excerpts from the book here, or read about what happened when Shane was able to break out of his cell for a night here. Bauer’s Mother Jones special report about solitary confinement in America is here. You can also support his further efforts to investigate the US prison system by contributing to his Beacon campaign. His previous Ask Anything answers are here.

(Archive)

Tom Jokinen ponders an afterlife of neither bliss nor torment, but unrelenting banality:

The 2004 French film Les Revenants (translated as They Came Back and since spun off into a Sundance TV series) imagines a world in which the dead neither ascend to heaven nor disappear to a black oblivion, but merely, as the title says, come back. To pick up where they left off. One day they emerge on the streets of a small French town in the same business-casual attire and over-coiffed funeral-home hairdos in which they were buried, seeming no worse for the wear. But they’ve changed. Emotionally flat and unreachable, it’s as if they’ve emerged from an unsatisfying, dreamless sleep and are caught in some vague, post-traumatic affective disorder which seems reasonable. Their attempts to re-integrate into society are fraught. Their families don’t know what to do with them. From here the director and co-writer Robin Campillo takes the ball and doesn’t so much run with it as amble into dark corners: this is a very quiet, very European zombie film.

For one thing, the return of the dead presents a social problem without precedent.

Do they get their old jobs back, given that they’re just not as bright or engaged as they used to be? Committees are struck, town meetings are held. Some families have moved on, spouses have remarried, so where will the dead sleep? Refugee-style facilities are considered. What about social programs? Are the dead still eligible for unclaimed pension benefits? Implications mount.

He goes on to compare the film to the “postmortem rom-com” Truly, Madly, Deeply:

[B]oth films have [a] thread in common: they present death as something less than spectacular, not unlike certain after-Modernist views on life itself—one dull thing after another. There are no zithers. We wear the same clothes. Cold air still chills us, we suffer from hangovers. It is a view of death for those who have outgrown grand narratives, where the afterlife is just more of the same. It is neither alluring nor transcendent: we will not come back as a flower or a frog or a potato, all of which at least promise a change of scenery. These films contemplate the plodding, uneventful banality of death: we’ve lost the comfort of the story with a happy ending.

(Video: Scenes from Les Revenants)

James Hamblin reviews new research on nutrition:

[David] Katz and Yale colleague Stephanie Meller published their findings in the current issue of the journal [Annual Review of Public Health] in a paper titled, “Can We Say What Diet Is Best for Health?” In it, they compare the major diets of the day: Low carb, low fat, low glycemic, Mediterranean, mixed/balanced (DASH), Paleolithic, vegan, and elements of other diets. Despite the pervasiveness of these diets in culture and media, Katz and Meller write, “There have been no rigorous, long-term studies comparing contenders for best diet laurels using methodology that precludes bias and confounding. For many reasons, such studies are unlikely.” They conclude that no diet is clearly best, but there are common elements across eating patterns that are proven to be beneficial to health. “A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention.”

In a commentary, Katz slams low-fat junk food:

For years, the food industry has willfully misinterpreted prevailing dietary guidance into the most profitable of distortions. No nutrition expert ever said “eat low-fat, starchy, high-sugar, high-calorie cookies.” But when we were fixated on low-fat eating, that’s just what the food industry gave us. They have done much the same with every nutritional preoccupation to follow.

But that sort of thing can’t happen when we know where we are going. For those who understood that advice to eat “low fat” meant less meat and cheese, more vegetables and fruits, Snackwell cookies were never much of a temptation, and certainly never mistaken for a panacea. Similarly, for those inclined to seek the benefits of prudent low carb dieting, low-carb brownies cobbled together out of miscellaneous junk are not much of a temptation – but again, those looking at their feet and not clear on where they are going on vulnerable to the sales pitch for just such junk. Low-carb eating was intended to be about less starch and added sugar, more lean meats, nuts, seeds, and vegetables – not the reinvention of brownies and cupcakes.

He adds:

A basic knowledge of where we are going is required to avoid getting misdirected in the interests of someone else’s interests, and at the expense of our good health. We have that basic knowledge. We are not clueless about the basic care and feeding of Homo sapiens. …. Whether low-fat or high, low-carb or high, with or without grains, with or without meat, with or without dairy; Paleo or Asian or vegan; Michael Pollan really did pretty much nail it: eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

Meg Favreau reflects on the centuries-old practice of “sin eating”:

The belief [hundreds of years ago] was that, by consuming food and drink that had been passed over the body of the deceased, sin-eaters could take on the sins of the dead. Generally, these sin-eaters were poor, paid a pittance for their work, and treated with disdain in a community. Sometimes, however, the sin-eating was performed by more prominent members of the community or even members of the funeral party. In 2010, BBC News reported on efforts to restore the grave of Richard Munslow, a prominent Ratlinghope farmer who was buried in 1906 and purported to be the “last-known sin eater.” And the 1894 edition of Bye-Gones: Relating to Wales and the Border Countries, includes a letter from woman named Gertrude Hope, who had this note about an 1892 funeral in Shropshire:

Directly the minister ended, the woman in charge of the arrangements poured out four glasses of wine and handed one to each bearer present across the coffin with a biscuit called a ‘funeral biscuit.’ One of the bearers being absent at the moment, the fourth glass of wine and biscuit were offered to the eldest son of the deceased woman, who however, refused to take them, and was not obliged to do so. The biscuits were ordinary sponge biscuits usually called ‘sponge fingers’ or ‘lady’s fingers.’ They are however also known in the shops of Market Drayton as ‘funeral biscuits.’ The minister, who had lately come from Pembrokeshire, remarked to my informant that he was sorry to see that pagan custom still observed.

While sin-eating might indeed have pagan origins, the sin-eating in this case was conducted as part of Christian funerals.

The size of different nations’ highly enriched uranium (HEU) stockpiles:

Graham Allison is happy that, “in just the last five years, the number of states with nuclear-weapons material that could fuel a terrorist’s bomb has shrunk by more than one-third”:

In Europe, six nations—Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine—have become nuclear-weapons-material-free in the past five years. Belarus and Poland are the only countries preventing Eastern and Central Europe from becoming the second [nuclear-weapons-material-free zone (NWMFZ)]. In Africa, only one state, South Africa, continues to keep a cache of nuclear weapons material large enough to allow terrorists to build more than 20 nuclear bombs. South America could complement its status as the first NWFZ by becoming an NWMFZ—if it could persuade the single holdout, Argentina, to dispose of its 17 pounds of highly enriched uranium.

But, even if uranium supplies are further reduced, Douglas Birch illustrates the difficulties associated in getting nations to give up their plutonium stockpiles:

The call to restrict plutonium production — which applies to both military and civilian programs — is a departure and nettlesome to some countries.

Japan, India, and Russia, for example, plan to build new energy systems based on advanced plutonium-burning reactors. France and Great Britain have produced plutonium under contract for other countries. Separately, India, Pakistan, and Israel produce plutonium for weapons, according to a 2013 report by the International Panel on Fissile Materials.

As a result, while the global stocks of weapons-grade uranium have been shrinking after the Cold War, the stocks of plutonium have been growing. They are now estimated at 490 metric tons – enough, in theory, to fuel tens of thousands of weapons.

W. James Antle III wants Republicans to take note of Asian-American discomfort with the practice:

California lawmakers seemed poised to advance a constitutional amendment allowing the state’s universities to consider race in admissions. Senate Constitutional Amendment 5, which easily passed the Democratic-controlled Senate, would have exempted universities from Prop 209’s edict: “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”

In the end, it was the Democrats – for the most part, the party that really matters in California state politics – who folded on SCA 5. And it was Chinese-Americans who were the pivotal group in the measure’s defeat. Olivia Liao, president of the Joint Chinese University Alumni Association, was quoted in the local press describing the initiative as racist. “[Legislators] feel like the Chinese-American community isn’t paying attention to politics,” Liao said, according to the Pasadena Star News. “We are concerned citizens. We need to stand up when things are not right; we need to be heard. We shouldn’t have any [exceptions] related to race. After all, America is a free country.”

Shikha Dalmia suggests affirmative action is “profoundly at odds with Asian-American interests”:

They form about 12 percent of the Golden State’s population, but in 2008, they constituted 40 percent of the student body at UCLA and 43 percent at UC Berkeley – California’s most selective public universities – as well as 50 percent at UC San Diego and 54 percent at UC Irvine. They have an admission rate of 73 percent compared to 63 percent of all in-state applicants. …

Yet, with each passing year, getting into top universities gets harder and harder. For example, between 1982 and 2004, the number of applicants to selective private four-year colleges increased 36 percent but enrollment increased 0.7 percent. Things are a bit, but not a whole lot, better in public universities.

Under such increasingly competitive circumstances, it’ll be a losing battle to ask Asians to conform to the mentality of white liberal guilt. They won’t apologize for their success or abandon their dreams – especially since they themselves have been repeatedly subjected to white discrimination.

But The Economist notes that Asian-Americans are far from united on the issue:

Asian-Americans, the country’s fastest-growing minority, are a notably diverse bunch, bundled together for convenience more than analytical accuracy. As Karthick Ramakrishnan, a political scientist at UC Riverside, points out, the SCA 5 campaign was dominated by Chinese-Americans. Indians did not play much of a role; south-east Asians, poorer and less likely to attend university, tend to back affirmative action. Even some Chinese-Americans declared support for SCA 5. California’s demographic changes have upended politics in new and curious ways; there are plenty more to come.