Month: April 2014

Quote For The Day III

“The blood of contention ran in [Hobbes’] veins. He acquired the lucid genius of a great expositor of ideas; but by disposition he was a fighter, and he knew no tactics save attack. He was a brilliant controversialist, deft, pertinacious and imaginative, and he disposed of the Thomas_Hobbeserrors of scholastics, Puritans and Papists with a subtle mixture of argument and ridicule.

But he made the mistake of supposing that this style was universally effective, in mathematics no less than in politics. For brilliance in controversy is a corrupting accomplishment. Always to play to win is to take one’s standards from one’s opponent, and local victory comes to displace every other consideration. Most readers will find Hobbes’s disputatiousness excessive; but it is the defect of an exceptionally active mind.

And it never quite destroyed in him the distinction between beating an opponent and establishing a proposition, and never quite silenced the conversation with himself which is the heart of philosophical thinking. But, like many controversialists, he hated error more than he loved truth, and came to depend overmuch on the stimulus of opposition. There is sagacity in Hobbes, and often a profound deliberateness; but there is no repose,” – Michael Oakeshott, quoted by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Celebrity Years

Noting that 2014 has ushered in a slew of WWI retrospectives, Simon Reid-Henry denounces the “Great Year” school of history, calling it a “form of idolatry”:

Ask any adult what 1989 means to them and they will naturally mention the Berlin Wall falling and communism in Europe coming to its juddering halt. But they may well take the year to mean those two things alone—or, worse still, to assume that one led to the other. If we stand only with the crowd who gathered on the Bornholmer Strasse at the East-West German border in Berlin in 1989, then we miss the ways in which the winds of globalisation and not just the wind of democratic change, to borrow the Scorpions’ update of Harold Macmillan, were howling about the events of that year too.

It is true that some dates do seem to cleave history in two. (Those leaning to the left might point to 1789, 1848, 1917 and 1968 as well as 1989; conservatives may prefer 1812, 1914 and 1945.) But that is a call for periodisation, not compression. In the cramped room of a single year, the air soon becomes stale. The best historians recognise this. They fling open the windows onto the recent past and open the door to the future. Which leaves you wondering why they would confine themselves to such a small room in the first place.

Traffic Accidents Of A Particular Type

Car Type

Emily Badger summarizes research on reading while driving:

Two years ago, the MIT AgeLab and Monotype began to study whether more legible typefaces could make a difference in in-car media. For men, at least, the answer has been yes. In driving simulations run by the lab, male drivers took their eyes off the road for less time when the text on a small navigation screen appeared in a typeface from what’s known as the humanist genre. The difference between humanist and grotesque typefaces amounted to the equivalent of turning away from the road over a distance of 50 feet at highway speeds.

Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan illustrates, with the above graphic, why Burlingame is easier to read:

Though Burlingame was originally designed for use in video games, [typographic firm] Monotype redesigned it for drivers based on the MIT findings. What makes it, and other “humanist” typefaces, so much less distracting? First of all, there’s absolutely no ambiguity between letters and numbers: Thanks to clever spacing techniques, it’s nearly impossible to confuse, say, the number 9 with the letter G, as you might with a square grotesque…

And see those odd oblique details on the “glyphs,” or actual letters? They make it easier to make out each glyph, even at low screen resolutions. It’s odd: You’d think the square-style, pixelated letters of the grotesque would make it better for digital interfaces. But no, the similarity of the letters and the tight spacing makes it way harder for our eyes to interpret quickly.

Beer-Soaked Meat Is Good For You

Thanks science:

A few years ago, researchers hit upon very unfortunate evidence that grilling meat could be bad for you. Specifically, they found that meat cooked at high temperatures produces polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), substances that have been linked to cancer. So much for the sweet smell of summer.

Now comes some better news. Scientists have found that marinating pork in beer—yes, beer—can reduce the level of carcinogens.

The Economist has details:

The PAHs created by grilling form from molecules called free radicals which, in turn, form from fat and protein in the intense heat of this type of cooking. One way of stopping PAH-formation, then, might be to apply chemicals called antioxidants that mop up free radicals. And beer is rich in these, in the shape of melanoidins, which form when barley is roasted. So Dr [Isabel] Ferreira and her colleagues prepared some beer marinades, bought some steaks and headed for the griddle.

One of their marinades was based on Pilsner, a pale lager. A second was based on a black beer (type unstated). Since black beers have more melanoidins than light beers—as the name suggests, they give it colour—Dr Ferreira’s hypothesis was that steaks steeped in the black-beer marinade would form fewer PAHs than those steeped in the light-beer marinade, which would, in turn, form fewer than control steaks left unmarinated.

And so it proved.

Update from a reader:

I’ve been marinating and boiling steaks and bratwursts, respectively, in Shiner Black for years. I had no idea of the possible health benefits, and it’s possible that the boiling process might make them moot anyway. But I can say from experience that the darker the beer, the better the meat will taste after grilling. Your mileage may vary, but I often find it disappointing now to eat non-barbecued beef or pork that isn’t three sheets to the wind.

So, here’s to our health!

Kids Are Having Sex Before Sex Ed

CDC Sex Ed

Tara Culp-Ressler dissects the latest CDC report on sex education (pdf):

[A]lthough about 91 percent of teen girls said they received some kind of sex ed instruction in school before they turned 18, just six in ten said that included information on both birth control and how to say no to sex. And a staggering 83 percent said they had already started having sex before they heard anything about the topic in class. … 

Although conservatives tend to deride efforts to overhaul human sexuality curricula as inappropriate attempts to implement “kindergarten sex ed,” the CDC’s research underscores the point that teaching kids about their bodies can’t wait until senior year of high school. Other data on the subject has confirmed that the majority of teens have had sex by the time they turn 18, and messages about abstinence don’t convince them to make different choices.

Rachel Bronstein explains what this means for teen pregnancy:

While births to younger teens (15-17 year-olds) declined 63 percent from 1991 to 2012, they still represent over a quarter of adolescent births. That is nearly 1,700 births a week, according to this month’s Vital Signs, with higher birth rates for Hispanic, non-Hispanic black, and American Indian/Alaska Native adolescents.

CDC researchers, analyzing birth data from the National Vital Statistics System and adolescent health behavior data from the National Survey of Family Growth, found that one in four teens from this age group had never spoken with a parent about sex. While 90 percent reported using some form of contraception, most relied on the least effective methods. (Planned Parenthood qualifies spermicide and fertility-awareness methods as least effective.)

Quote For The Day II

“The question of setting fair boundaries for debate may not be as important a problem as racism, but it is a major problem for the left. It also happens to be the problem that gave rise to Obama’s political career. The president’s transformation from regular student to national figure began at the Harvard Law Review, then torn bitterly between over race and what everybody called “political correctness.” In 1990, Obama was elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, and thus made the subject of national news coverage, because he alone was able to understand the perspective of both enemy camps.

One can see the contours of the same debate swirling around him today as president. There’s no contradiction between grasping the deep and continuing power of white supremacy in American politics and culture while still affording one’s opponents a basic presumption of fairness. One might even call this an important part of the definition of liberalism,” – Jon Chait.

The Epiphany Of John Paul Stevens

In his new book, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, the retired Supreme Court justice describes how he would rewrite our Founding document if it were up to him. Among his proposed changes, the one that has gotten the most attention is an addendum to the Eighth Amendment explicitly barring the death penalty. Andrew Cohen urges Stevens, whose voting record during his 35 years on the Court was largely pro-capital punishment, to embrace abolitionism as a sort of penance:

I have written before about how continuing exposure to capital cases turns Supreme Court justices from supporters to opponents of the death penalty. About how no one on the Court who sifts through the litany of unfair capital trials bubbling up from state courts ever becomes a more ardent supporter of the death penalty. Justice Stevens is just the latest example of this frustrating phenomenon. These jurists see the light—almost always too late to do any good.

Except it is not yet too late for Justice Stevens.

In Six Amendments, he directly criticizes Justice Antonin Scalia’s tendentious capital jurisprudence, and he should continue to do so as he now embarks upon his book tour. Freed from his obedience to Court precedent, and his self-imposed constraints as a judge, Justice Stevens should shout as loudly as his modest demeanor permits about the injustices he sees in the administration of the death penalty.

Damon Root holds up Stevens as an example of how Justices’ devotion to precedent sometimes overshadows their vow to uphold the Constitution:

In the 2008 case Baze v. Rees, the Supreme Court ruled that Kentucky’s use of lethal injection did not qualify as “cruel and unusual” under the Eighth Amendment. Justice Stevens joined in that outcome, but also filed a separate concurrence where he said the death penalty was unconstitutional in all forms. How did he reconcile those clashing positions? “This Court has held that the death penalty is constitutional,” Stevens wrote, “and has established a framework for evaluating the constitutionality of particular methods of execution. Under those precedents…I am persuaded that the evidence adduced by petitioners fails to prove that Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol violates the Eight Amendment.” Put differently, Stevens did not like those precedents, but he believed he was bound to follow them.