Author: Patrick Appel

by Patrick Appel

Bee Wilson enjoyed Mary Roach’s new book, Gulp:

If you’ve ever wondered why some people complain of gassiness after beans, while others eat them with impunity, Roach has the answer. If you’ve never wondered, too bad; Roach is going to tell you anyway. Apparently, half of the population lack a certain enzyme in the colon that is needed to break down the complex carbohydrates in legumes. As a result, they are “troubled by beans.” When the colon inflates, releasing gas, it is a “warning system”: “Because stretching can be a prelude to bursting, your brain is highly motivated to let you know what’s happening down there.”

In an interview about her book, Roach sings the praises of saliva:

[I]n saliva there’s these histatins which help wounds heal. So when someone kisses a baby’s booboo, like a scrape, or when a pet licks its wounds, it’s actually – because you think oh, oh, it’s full of bacteria, don’t do that. But there’s these healing elements. Saliva was a home remedy for cuts and scrapes and shankers and things. People would apply the spittle of a – first-thing-in-the-morning spittle of an old man or something would be, like, the remedy. But there’s some medical sense to it.

by Patrick Appel

Mark Oppenheimer reflects on the aspects of parenting he outsources to others:

Parenting has made me painfully aware of all the skills I don’t have, all that I won’t be able to pass on to my children. Before the children arrived, the future was full of possibilities for the dad I would be: the one who would teach them to play guitar, to garden, to turn table legs with a lathe. All I had to do was learn how to play guitar, to garden, and to turn table legs with a lathe. Also to chant Torah, change the oil, and throw a football with a perfect spiral. And there was plenty of time for all of that.

But then the girls arrived, in short order, all three of them. I found skills I never knew I had, like holding an infant on my forearm, her head in my palm. I once changed a cloth diaper so deftly that my friend Derek was startled to realize it was cloth. “You did that just like a regular diaper!” he said. That was one of my proudest moments. I’ve been known to take all three girls—ages two, four, and six—to the supermarket together, pilfering only one banana and one plastic carton of blackberries to keep them in line. (Shamed by the empty carton and the empty peel, I paid up.) But for all the skills I never expected I’d have, there are more that I know I’ll never acquire.

by Patrick Appel

Felix Salmon worries about it:

If millions of people started using bitcoins on a regular basis, the soaring value of bitcoins would actually be disastrous. You’ve heard of hyperinflation: this would be hyperdeflation. Take a gold bar valued at $600,000. At $60 per bitcoin, the value of that bar is 10,000 BTC. But then assume that bitcoins rise in value to $600 apiece, and then to $6,000, and then to $60,000 — as would have to happen if the fixed number of bitcoins was being used to store hundreds of billions of dollars in value. Then the value of the gold bar would plunge, in bitcoin terms — to 1,000 BTC and then 100 BTC and finally just 10 BTC. The same thing would happen to all other goods and services in the world, including your own salary. Everything would be constantly going down in price, if you thought in bitcoin terms.

Inflation is bad, but deflation is worse. The reason is that in a deflationary environment, no one spends money — because whatever you want to buy is sure to become cheaper in a few days or weeks. People hoard their cash, and spend it only begrudgingly, on absolute necessities. And they certainly don’t spend it on hiring people — no matter how productive their employees might be, they’d still be better off just holding on to that money and not paying anybody anything.

The result is an economy which would simply grind to a halt, with massive unemployment and almost no economic activity.

by Patrick Appel

Pew’s latest finds increasing support for marijuana legalization:

There are partisan differences over legalizing marijuana use and whether smoking marijuana is morally wrong. But Republicans and Democrats have similar views on enforcing marijuana laws: 57% of Republicans and 59% of Democrats say that the federal government should not enforce federal marijuana laws in states that permit its use. Substantial majorities of both Republicans (67%) and Democrats (71%) also say federal enforcement of marijuana laws is not worth the cost.

by Patrick Appel

After reviewing public opinion on immigration reform, Harry Enten finds that “overwhelmingly majority of Americans now believe that people who came to this country illegally should not be forced to leave it.” He thinks that opposing reform could hurt Republicans:

The real problem for the Republican party is that its brand is currently in the can. With favorable numbers in the low 30s, the GOP is seen as out-of-step with Americans on many issues.

That’s why you’re seeing Democrats jumping out to a large lead on the House ballot for 2014. The latest Quinnipiac poll puts Democrats up by 8pt, more than enough for them to take back the House. Voters are, at this point, not willing to vote for the party that opposes what they believe in. What Republicans don’t need, then, is another issue – that is, immigration – that contributes to notion that they’re out-of-touch with the way most Americans feel.

Opposing immigration reform would be yet another instance of GOP “obstructionism”, which is what most people see as the Republicans’ biggest fault.

by Patrick Appel

Ellen announced Finding Nemo sequel Finding Dory on her show a couple days ago:

http://youtu.be/_JJmDavBXrw

Christopher Orr is dispirited by the rash of Pixar sequels. He suspects Finding Dory was green-lighted because Nemo was “the third-highest grossing animated film—and the best-selling DVD overall—of all time.” A silver lining:

What I do know is this: If Pixar’s films seem to have been slipping back into the pack of excellent-but-not-transcendent animated features of late, it is in part because that pack has dramatically lifted its game. Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, Despicable Me, Tangled, Rise of the Guardians, and a dozen other recent offerings—animated filmmaking has rarely, if ever, produced such quality in such quantity. And it is very, very hard to imagine that this would have happened if Pixar hadn’t been around to show Hollywood that animated films could be such good films (and, not incidentally, such profitable ones).

How Alyssa thinks about sequels:

I can easily see a sequel to The Incredibles that focuses not on the grown-up Parrs, whose arc is largely resolved, but on their children, who are growing up superpowered in a world where the use of their abilities is technically illegal. For all that I’m charmed by the idea of Monsters University, I don’t see the necessity of an origin story for Mike and Sulley, just as I don’t feel particularly drawn to spend more time with Dory, the cheerful, forgetful fish voiced by Ellen Degeneres in Finding Nemo. For sequels to be artistically necessary, there needs to be some sort of narrative or character-driven urgency to them.

by Patrick Appel

Adam Alter explains:

[P]sychologist Jesse Chandler and his colleagues found that people donate significantly more money to hurricanes that share their initials.  So Roberts, Ralphs and Roses donated on average 260% more to the Hurricane Rita relief fund than did people without R initials.  Also in 2005, people with K initials donated 150% more to the Katrina relief fund, and in 2004 people with I initials donated 100% more to the Ivan relief fund.

This information isn’t just idly interesting.  Since we know that people are more likely to donate to hurricanes that share their first initials, the World Meteorological Organization has the power to increase charitable giving just by changing the composition of its hurricane name lists.  In the United States, for example, more than 10% of all males have names that begin with the letter J—names like James and John (the two most common male names), Joseph and Jose, Jason, and Jeffrey.  Instead of beginning just one hurricane name with the letter J each year (in 2013, that name will be Jerry), the World Meteorological Organization could introduce several J names each year.  Similarly, more American female names begin with M than any other letter—most of them Marys, Marias, Margarets, Michelles, and Melissas—so the Organization could introduce several more M names to each list.

Alter provides the above figure, which “illustrates the relative frequency of each first name initial in the U.S. population by linking the size of each letter to its frequency as an initial.”

by Patrick Appel

Pareene wonders whether they will make an appearance in 2016:

The question for someone considering whether or not to support Clinton in 2016 is, will a Clinton 2016 campaign pass the Mark Penn Test? The Mark Penn Test, which I just invented, determines whether or not a person should be trusted with the presidency, based solely on one criterion: Whether or not they pay Mark Penn to do anything for their campaign. Paying Mark Penn means you’ve failed the Mark Penn Test.

His larger point:

Mark Penn is just the worst example of the general Clinton family habit of associating with the most repulsive party hacks the Democrats have to offer. Her campaign was a dream team of generally useless hacks, from sweatered communications director Howard Wolfson to charmless fundraiser Terry McAuliffe to ill-tempered Harold Ickes (who, unlike the rest of the campaign, at least seemed mostly competent). These are the same Clintons who are responsible for the national stature, such as it is, of Dick Morris.