Accidental Blogger

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  • Too much of a good thing (Sujatha)

    There is such a thing as too much chocolate.

    We just got back from a two day trip to Hershey,
    PA,  the 'Sweetest Place on Earth'.
    I've always had an affinity for chocolate, lovingly lingering on those
    tiny bars of Cadbury's milk chocolate that were a rare treat in
    childhood. We had to study how Theobroma Cacao was cultivated and
    cocoa harvested and processed in the Ivory Coast and Ghana for a whole
    unit in our 10th grade geography class. I still remember marveling over
    the size of the pods in the photos. No words in the textbook of the
    Mayans or Aztecs, a missing part of the story deftly dismissed in a
    single line about South American origins of the tree.
    After several years in the U.S., I've been able to indulge at will in
    that sweet pastime of buying and eating Hershey's bars or Kisses when
    the mood strikes, or when the Halloween candy is in, or the Easter sales
    and Christmas sales are round the corner.
    This year, we actually paid a visit to that shrine to Chocolate:
    Hershey, Pennsylvania. It was a model town back in the 19th century, the
    brainchild of Milton
    S. Hershey    , built around the chocolate factory. Sort of like Willie
    Wonka, but with human workers instead of Oompa-Loompas. And
    of course, human workers need much more than just cacao beans to stay
    alive. So they were recipients of the well-planned munificence of Milton
    Hershey, who left much of his fortune to establishing charitable trusts
    that ensured the well-being of future generations of Hersheyites. The
    town and the charity school he founded bear his imprimatur, to this day.
    The air there smells of chocolate, the streetlights are shaped like
    Hershey's Kisses, the main buildings on the main avenue are museums to
    Hershey's life and times. The crowds come pouring in, every spring, as
    the theme park with its roller coasters and rides opens, and the
    Disneyesque entertainments of the Chocolate World keep the tourists
    entertained, with everything from '3-D' shows to 'Chocolate tasting
    tours' to simulated 'Factory Tours'. The real business of Hershey's goes
    on quietly, away from the tourist paradise, a large antiseptic factory
    in white and blue, tucked away on the far end of the main avenue as it
    peters out into the countryside.

    It's a place well worth visiting, and will work wonders for those who
    are in the mode to either indulge or rid themselves of an addiction to
    chocolate.

    (cross-posted from Fluff 'n' Stuff)

  • A Vaccine Revisited (Sujatha)

    Remember the outcry that rose when Texas governor Rick Perry attempted to make HPV vaccinations mandatory about 3 years ago? He backtracked when clear conflicts of interest were revealed, along with the pharmaceutical company's links to the decision-makers in the administration. (Link to Ruchira's earlier post regarding this)

    Yesterday, a familiar news snippet surfaced in The Hindu, one of the best-known newspapers in India: The government had decided to terminate trials of a HPV vaccine under way in various states, citing deaths among the vaccinated population.

    An in-depth report by Tehelka.com, dating from 3 weeks ago unveils the reason for the abrupt scrambling back by the government. Politicos like Brinda Karat of the CPI-(M) have been pushing hard and loud for the stoppage of these vaccine trials, which are funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and supplied with free vaccines by Merck.

    Think of what is at stake for Merck and Glaxo Smith-Kline, the makers of Gardasil and Cervarix, respectively- Billions of dollars in sales in a global market, to offset those pesky losses from Vioxx lawsuits and Rotarix problems.

    The issue now arises of whether ethics were breached by not adequately informing the families of girls enrolled in the vaccine trials of the side effects and dangers. These are the protocols adopted for the studies, but the 'informed consent' clause was evidently given short shrift.

  • Despite Beck, Limbaugh, Palin, Bachman and the Tea Party, what Obama has managed to do …

    Below the fold is a list of things that the Obama administration has managed to do (in its first six months). There are many things more that some of us would like to see him do and some things here that we wish he hadn't done. But all said and done, compared to the years 2000 – 2008, it sure looks like things are moving in the right direction. One of the most important steps that Obama has taken is the re-thinking of the US nuclear policy (link: Brian Leiter) and this despite the constant insinuation that he may be unpatriotic and even un-American. (the list of Obama's six month achievements came to me from a friend via e-mail)  

    Meanwhile, the Tea Partiers continue to be nasty while denying that they are nasty.

    (more…)

  • iPad Bashing (Sujatha)

    Figurative:

    Wi-Fi problems

    "Users who rushed to snap up Apple's iPad are complaining within days of
    the slate computer's highly anticipated release that they're having
    trouble connecting it to the Internet.

    On Apple's technical
    support Web site, there were 11 pages of comments Tuesday morning on a
    post saying Wi-Fi connections were weak or kept cutting out."

    Seasoned in the Sun

    "..stories are starting to trickle in (and no, we're not talking an avalanche of complaints here) from iPad owners who say their glossy new tablets are going into a high-temperature-triggered sleep mode after being out in the sun for too long — more than an hour in one case, or just 10 minutes in another."

    and 

    Literal:

    A Teen too rich for his own good:

    "The American high school student behind a video of teenagers
    destroying a brand new iPad with a baseball bat says he just "wanted to
    be the first to do it".

    The video,
    posted on YouTube, shows the US$500 device being smashed outside a Best
    Buy store and has attracted more than 450,000 views on the site."

    (The said teen justifies his urge to waste the money on buying and bashing in an iPad by stating his family donated over $10,000 last year to charities!)

  • Pissed off by Obama’s health care

    "If you voted for Obama, seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your healthcare begin right now, not in four years."

    That's the curious, angry reaction from a Florida urologist who is upset with Obama and his health care reform legislation. The doctor's admonition does not break any laws. It is just obnoxious.

    Florida doctor sign 

    MOUNT DORA, Fla. – A central Florida urologist has posted a sign on his office door warning supporters of President Barack Obama to find a different doctor.

    The notice on Dr. Jack Cassell's Mount Dora practice says, "If you voted for Obama, seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your healthcare begin right now, not in four years."

    Cassell told the Orlando Sentinel on Thursday he wasn't questioning patients or refusing care, because that would be unethical.

     "But if they read the sign and turn the other way, so be it," he said.

    Cassell, 56, also provides Republican reading material in the waiting room — probably not a risky move, given that Mount Dora's 10,000 residents and the surrounding area lean heavily conservative. Above a stack of GOP health care literature, a sign reads: "This is what the morons in Washington have done to your health care. Take one, read it and vote out anyone who voted for it."

    A spokeswoman from the Florida Department of Health, which licenses physicians and investigates complaints, said Friday there was no law prohibiting Cassell from advertising himself this way.

    "Because there is no statute, there would be no grounds for a complaint," spokeswoman Eulinda Smith said. "It would be legally deficient."

     

  • Who’s buried in Jesus’ tomb?

    Here is an alternate view of Jesus' resurrection. This story makes its rounds every year around Easter in one form or the other and it is not really as new as the BBC report makes it out to be. I had heard it many times as a child in India.

    The reason why the Rozabal shrine has only recently been getting attention in the west could be because not many people outside India knew much about the place until the 1990s and the advent of the World Wide Web. Jesus' resurrection is not uppermost in the religious narratives of Indian Muslims and Hindus. The local lore surrounding Jesus' tomb in Kashmir has therefore always been a minor myth in the northern Indian regions. It was only after India established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992 and young Israeli tourists began flocking to India that a large influx of foreign visitors to Rozabal began. For the Israelis, a non-Christian version of Jesus' fate after crucifixion probably has a high curiosity value. It is only since then that the "Jesus is buried in Kashmir" theory has found widespread popularity outside India.

    Rozabal Shrine 

    A belief that Jesus survived the crucifixion and spent his remaining years in Kashmir has led to a run-down shrine in Srinagar making it firmly onto the must-visit-in India tourist trail.

    In the backstreets of downtown Srinagar is an old building known as the Rozabal shrine.

    It's in a part of the city where the Indian security forces are on regular patrol, or peering out from behind check-posts made of sandbags.

    There are still occasional clashes with militants or stone-throwing children, but the security situation has improved in recent times and the tourists are returning.

    When I first searched for Rozabal two years ago, the taxi circled around a minor Muslim tomb in a city of many mosques and mausoleums, the driver asking directions several times before we found it.

    The shrine, on a street corner, is a modest stone building with a traditional Kashmiri multi-tiered sloping roof.

    A watchman led me in and encouraged me to inspect the smaller wooden chamber within, with its trellis-like, perforated screen.

    Through the gaps I could see a gravestone covered with a green cloth.

    When I returned to the shrine recently though, it was shut – its gate padlocked because it had attracted too many visitors.

    The reason? Well, according to an eclectic combination of New Age Christians, unorthodox Muslims and fans of the Da Vinci Code, the grave contains the mortal remains of a candidate for the most important visitor of all time to India.

     

  • Is liberal blogging on the wane?

    After a four year run, the Carnival of the Liberals has folded its tent. On his blog, Neural Gourmet, CotL's founder Leo Lincourt writes: 

    Dear Liberal Carnivalers,

    We’ve had a good run. 102 separate editions, over four years and two months. Edition #103 was supposed to appear yesterday but after reviewing the submissions, or lack thereof, I think it’s time to end Carnival of the Liberals.

    I had hoped that changing to the monthly format, and the other changes to the structure and format of the carnival would revitalize CotL, but it wasn’t to be. On average, over 70% of the submissions to each edition now are spam and there’s no denying the apathy, both my own and on the part of carnival participants, toward CotL the last year or so.

    I think a lot of it has to do with the changing face of the blogosphere, and social media obsolescing the blog carnival idea. I’ll have more to say on this topic in future days, but the capsule summary is that I think that the two main functions of blog carnivals, high quality, relevant curated content and building blogger communities, are done better and faster by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, et. al. Even I have got to admit that I very rarely read blog carnivals anymore….

    As an early beneficiary of CotL where a few of my political posts were featured soon after I started blogging and as its one time host, I feel that the closing of the carnival is somewhat akin to the end of a chapter in A.B.'s blogging life. Although I have announced most editions of the carnival on A.B. through the years, I must confess that of late I hadn't been reading the submissions on a regular basis. So, I can't honestly say that I am terribly sad to see CotL go but I take it as a portent of things to come for smaller political blogs, particularly those with a liberal slant.

    Closer to home, our rate of blogging on Accidental Blogger is down. Many of our authors have not made an appearance here for several months. My own blogging schedule is sporadic at best, unlike the fast and furious pace of just a year ago. While the big liberal blogs continue to refresh their sites regularly and their traffic remains high, several smaller blogs like ours are beginning to see apathy on the part of both readers and the writers. Some liberal bloggers with serious journalistic aspirations have moved on to big and small organized news media outlets and often maintain their original blogs as archives. Many other popular liberal blogs where politics was an adjunct to academic and professional matters, have increasingly reverted to their original intent and character. Many smaller liberal blogs have closed shop altogether or are not posting with the enthusiasm they exhibited some years ago. The phenomenon of blogging is relatively new. Blogs on the left side of the political spectrum began sprouting in small numbers after the Iraq war was launched and a veritable explosion of such sites, ours included, occurred soon after Bush-Cheney's re-election in 2004.

    The slump in liberal blogging is not a surprise. Clearly it has much to do with the change in the political scene in 2008 when Democrats regained the White House and achieved majorities in both the US House and Senate after eight years of Bush-Cheney and a GOP dominated congress. Liberals probably have lost the anger that fueled their blogging energies. With their own side in power they are a bit less focused on governmental malfeasance and are therefore blogging less, even if they don't agree with everything that their elected leaders are doing. I wonder if by the same logic, blogging is experiencing an up-tick on the conservative side because of the right wing's irrational anger at Obama-Pelosi-Reid. On the other hand, may be the angry right doesn't believe in a wussy mode of protest like blogging and its members are spending their energies organizing Tea Parties and armed militias.

    Also, Leo Lincourt may be on to something when he speculates that Internet social sites may have cut into the domain previously dominated by blogging. I know that I myself find it far easier to put up a link on my Facebook page than compose a more thoughtful and lengthy piece on the blog. I have also noticed that when I link my blog posts on Facebook, many of my "friends" will read the the post here and then go back and comment on the FB link rather than on the original blog post. I wonder if people are more comfortable at the social forum than on the blog where they may feel that a bit more formality is required in commenting. And oh, I found Leo's announcement of the CotL closing on his Facebook page, followed the link to his blog post and came back and commented on Facebook!

    (Note: Although he's not a liberal, my long time blogging friend Razib has left the Science Blogs and moved to Discover Magazine. His blog Gene Expression can be now be found here. The URL of his site on our blog roll has been changed accordingly)

  • The right wing’s “illogical anger” : what’s the real cause?

    Frank Rich of the New York Times sums it up, providing the relevant historical and psychological underpinnings for the rage that is fueling the angry rhetoric and violence of the right wing of American politics.  The last few paragraphs of the article: (please read the whole thing)

    Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

    … they can’t emulate the 1995 G.O.P. by remaining silent as mass hysteria, some of it encompassing armed militias, runs amok in their own precincts. We know the end of that story. And they can’t pretend that we’re talking about “isolated incidents” or a “fringe” utterly divorced from the G.O.P. A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 74 percent of Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while only 16 percent are aligned with Democrats.

    After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.

    Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.

    I won't go over the public incidents that have been widely reported in the media and are methodically listed by Rich in his article. Rather, a bit on  what I observe around me, coming from everyday "normal" folks. Many of my Republican neighbors and acquaintances describe Obama as un-Amerian (in his attitude as well as by virtue of his birth), socialist, terrorist sympathizer … and yes, that catchall pejorative for all uppity minorities, arrogant. He is so undeserving of their respect, they say, that they cannot in a "million years," bring themselves to call him the president of the United States. Yet, if you ask them to specify the evidence for the charges, the most common answer is, "He is destroying the country as we knew it." Actually, he is not. The country is changing due to societal and cultural forces long in coming and Obama, a dark skinned man at the helm, is the scapegoat for the right wingers' paranoia. Here are a couple of more extreme examples of the manifestation of that angst.

    Here is some breaking news as I write; an ad that aired on a radio station in Kansas; Texans refusing (due to ignorance, apathy and to thumb their noses at the federal government) to answer the 2010 census survey; and this ugly cartoon, stoking the primal fears of every racist, that was recently seen on many right wing blogs and message boards.  

  • A Magnetic Distraction

    An interesting story in Thursday's Houston Chronicle about a scientist's decades long wait to patent an invention. There are no details of the exact bureaucratic snarl that held up the application for so long. But I suspect that the back and forth between the physicist and the patent office may have resembled Narayan's experience with Aetna when he applied for Medicare supplemental insurance. 

    Magnet

    Roy Weinstein had given up.

    To heck with the patent office, the 82-year-old physicist decided. After waiting two decades for a patent on his potentially revolutionary superconducting magnets, he'd had enough.

    “As you might imagine, waiting 20 years is a pretty nasty chore,” said Weinstein, an emeritus professor at the University of Houston.

    Then, amazingly, the patent arrived on Feb. 23 — 20 years and three days after he applied for it. The breakthrough came after the intervention of his son, Lee, an engineer and inventor who has had his own battles with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

    The patent lets Weinstein move forward with commercial development of his supermagnets that, when chilled to super-low temperatures, can produce a field with the strength of 2 tesla, billions of times stronger than the magnet on your refrigerator.

    Weinstein's magnets are about the size of a stack of five dimes, weigh an ounce, and cost $300. Commercially available electromagnets that can produce a comparable magnetic field weigh two tons and cost $60,000 to $100,000, he says.

    The most immediate application may be in motors, which use magnets to create motion. The stronger the magnet, the more powerful the motor. Although the magnets would have to be kept cool with liquid nitrogen, this would be cost-effective in larger motors, Weinstein said.

    The prospect of a more powerful, much smaller magnet has experts excited.

    “The basic design of motors has been understood for about a century,” said Robert Hebner, director of the Center for Electromechanics at the University of Texas at Austin.

    “It's new materials that make it exciting, and it seems to me this is a material that has the potential to revolutionize motors.”

    Weinstein said he is developing a $7 million agreement with Round Rock-based TECO-Westinghouse Motor Co. to construct a 1 megawatt motor that will be a prototype for a 10 megawatt version. The company declined comment.

    The U.S. Navy is expected to provide much of the funding, Weinstein said, because of the potential to reduce the size of ship-borne motors by three-fourths.

    “On a Navy ship that extra space is pure gold,” the physicist said.

    And there are other potential applications, a gusher of which Weinstein expects to flow now that the patent has been approved.

  • Health Care Reform: The party that tried and the one that lied

    The health care reform bill passed the House and was signed into law by President Barack Obama this morning. There is much background news, ups and downs, the determination of some and display of ugliness by others in the run up to this historic event. Here are some of the principle features of the bill and how it came to pass.

    Obama signing HCR bill 

    The short and long term implications the bill:

    THIS YEAR

    _ Sets up a high-risk health insurance pool to provide affordable coverage for uninsured people with medical problems.

    _ Starting six months after enactment, requires all health insurance plans to maintain dependent coverage for children until they turn 26.

    _ For children with medical problems, prohibits insurers from writing a policy that excludes payment for the particular condition. Insurers in the individual market could still deny new coverage to children in poor health.

    _ Bars insurance companies from putting lifetime dollar limits on coverage, and canceling policies except for fraud.

    _ Provides tax credits to help small businesses with up to 25 employees get and keep coverage for their employees.

    _ Begins narrowing the Medicare prescription coverage gap by providing a $250 rebate to seniors in the gap, which starts this year once they have spent $2,830. It would be fully closed by 2020.

    _ Reduces projected Medicare payments to hospitals, home health agencies, nursing homes, hospices and other providers.

    _ Imposes 10 percent sales tax on indoor tanning. (The rest here)

    Mommy Care, not Kiddie Care : Speaker Nancy Pelosi's role in the health care overhaul:

    WASHINGTON – The landmark health care bill about to be signed into law is as large as it is due in no small part to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's stewardship. When Democrats in Congress and the White House were despondent and inclined to retreat on health care just two months ago, Pelosi stood firm against despair and downsizing.

    As a result, she could emerge from the yearlong struggle among the most powerful speakers in history…

    "'We are not kicking this can down the road,'" Pelosi told Obama by phone last month just before their seven-hour televised health care conference, according to Rep. Louise Slaughter of New York and three other officials who heard the call.

    It was an abrupt reminder to those on the White House end of the line: Whatever is said at the big bipartisan meeting, there would be no substantive rewrite of the bill as Republicans were demanding. Obama said he understood and agreed: They were moving in one direction only, toward passage. And soon….

    When Democrats panicked after Republican Scott Brown won Edward Kennedy's Senate seat, Pelosi rebuffed feelers by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and others for a smaller version of the bill. She dismissed that approach as incrementalism and derisively dubbed it, "kiddie care."

    The bitter reaction of the "Just Say No" Republicans:

    (more…)

  • 10 Minutes (Sujatha)

    The health care debate of yesterday condensed to 10 minutes (from Huffington Post)

  • You go girls!

    Defying the Catholic church's traditional hierarchy, US nuns have come out in support of the health care bill.

    Their numbers and influence may be declining, but American nuns demonstrated Wednesday what generations of schoolchildren already knew: They are a force to be reckoned with.

    By sending a letter to Congress in support of the Senate health care bill, a wide coalition of nuns took sides against not only the Republican minority but against their own church hierarchy, as represented by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which opposes the bill. The nuns' letter contributed to the momentum in favor of the legislation, despite opposition that is partially rooted in a disagreement over abortion funding.

    "We agree that there shouldn't be any federal funding of abortion," said Sister Simone Campbell, the executive director of Network, a national Catholic social justice advocacy organization that spearheaded the effort. "From our reading of the bill, there isn't any federal funding of abortion."

    Moreover, she said, the reverence for life that underpins Catholic opposition to abortion also argues for passage of health care reform. "For us, first of all, tens of thousands of people are dying each year because they don't have access to health care, so that is a life issue," she said.

    Campbell said her organization, which has long supported health care reform, drafted the letter within hours of hearing that the Catholic Health Association, which represents some 600 hospitals, had come out in favor of the bill last week. The letter was signed by the leaders of more than 50 Catholic women's orders and organizations, including the Leadership Conference for Women Religious, which says it represents more than 90 percent of the 59,000 American Catholic nuns.

    The courage of the nuns is being characterized as backstabbing by an anti-Obama Catholic news site.

  • A Text Without Content (Dean)

    Having read (just) a few of her reviews over the years, I don't believe Michiko Kakutani knows much about books or literature. But I am quite confident that she knows even less about network technologies and even less than that about literary theory. Look at this rambling mess. On second thought, skip directly to the article's third "page" as formatted for the Web, where this appears:

    As for the textual analysis known as deconstruction, which became
    fashionable in American academia in the 1980s, it enshrined individual
    readers’ subjective responses to a text over the text itself, thereby
    suggesting that the very idea of the author (and any sense of original
    intent) was dead. In doing so, deconstruction uncannily presaged
    arguments advanced by digerati like Kevin Kelly, who in a 2006 article
    for The New York Times Magazine     looked forward to the day when
    books would cease to be individual works but would be scanned and
    digitized into one great, big continuous text that could be “unraveled
    into single pages” or “reduced further, into snippets of a page,” which
    readers — like David Shields, presumably — could then appropriate and
    remix, like bits of music, into new works of their own.

    Sheer nonsense. Not a word of it corresponds to the faintest semblance of reality. The easy targets: Deconstruction is not textual analysis. It became fashionable in the '70s. It had nothing to do with subjective responses to texts. The death of the author was most famously proclaimed by Barthes and Foucault, neither of whom was aligned with deconstruction. Many of the important texts associated with deconstruction focused obsessively on certain authors qua authors. Kevin Kelly did write that piece of drivel for the Times magazine. I'll give her that.

    The article worries about reading and writing in the age of the Internet, about how "social networking and popular software designs are changing the way
    people think and process information." In order to change the way people think, people first must think. When you've encountered a thought, Ms. Kakutani, drop me a post card, please.