Chocolate milk was on my shopping list last week. I’ve never been a big chocolate milk person, but when appraising my cereal options, I determined that if I took the healthiest, most sugarless cereal out there and added chocolate milk, not only was it edible but I ended up ahead sugar-wise than if I take the next healthiest option with skim milk.

When I got to the milk aisle, though, I saw something bizarre: Green milk. For St. Paddy’s Day, of course. Vanilla flavored. It looked grotesque. Green milk? Who the hell would drink green milk? Not that there is anything wrong with green beverages. Many of my favorite beverages are green. But the green milk just looked… really weird. I tried, and failed, to imagine what cereal would look like in it.

So of course I bought some.

The results are below. Taste-wise, it wasn’t as good as the chocolate milk but still not too bad. I can’t tell if my mediocre impression of the taste is more related to the fact that milk and vanilla don’t seem to go together, or my own inability to process milk coming in a green color.

I previously linked to an article about a neurologist who believes ADHD doesn’t exist. Here he is making that argument.

The case for being an early riser. Maureen Mackey argues that employers should encourage napping.

401(k) prospects are actually looking pretty good.

The trials and trevails of trying to legislate social mobility (international edition).

Exploring food truck economics, as well as van-based housing.

Was this man, who was arrested and thrown in jail and then solitary for calling 911 to help someone in an accident, a victim of overaggressive law enforcement, or collateral damage to the San Francisco class wars (in infographic form)? Here’s an infographic and Salon is worried that San Francisco is going to lose its status as a liberal icon.

The Economist has a bullish article on MOOC and the future of education. [more]

Many Americans look approvingly on Germany’s education tracking system, but they’re increasingly controversial over there. Many of us have also looked favorably on their apprenticeship model, which is being increasingly spurned.

I’ve been complimentary of Texas Governor Rick Perry’s attempts at offering cheap college degrees in Texas. Florida, too, is working on the $10,000 degree.

If we’re looking to cut costs at traditional colleges, administration might be a good place to start.

James Samuelson makes the case for standardized tests.

So apparently work habits are pretty much the same across generations (from Boomers to Millenials). I hate it when science ruins perfectly fun and helpful generalizations.

Matt K Lewis defends not working. Why do we work, anyway?

Employers are getting better at measuring the value of workers. This is where the rubber hits the road on productivity measurement goes. A lot of the objections are based on their inaccuracy. What happens when they become accurate?

Jack Baruth explains how corporations increasingly devalue excellence in favor of reliable efficiency. I’d object, but I often see the appeal. For education, I’ve often said, we have to plan for the mediocre or at least middling teacher instead of worrying about the best.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder is pushing for the sort of regional visas I’ve been talking about. Adam Ozimek says more.

First “North Colorado” and now “West Maryland“?

Liberals like sharing, and New York is liberal, so why does New York hate the sharing economy? Because they love regulation more, evidently.

Peanut butter is the ultimate American food.

A long while back the Discovery Channel had a show about building a giant dome over Houston and another about making New Orleans a floating island. In both cases, to protect these places from nature. One wonders the practicality of even having cities that require such protection. It’s like having major metropolitan areas built around the scarcity of islands and bays on the east and west coasts.

Here’s a way to make a billion dollars:

Corporate money is forever finding new ways to influence government. But Mr. Ackman’s campaign to take this fight “to the end of the earth,” using every weapon in the arsenal that Washington offers in an attempt to bring ruin to one company, is a novel one, fusing the financial markets with the political system. […]

Mr. Ackman is not new to playing chess on a billionaire’s scale. The brash 47-year-old, a graduate of Harvard Business School, built his $12 billion, New York City-based hedge fund, Pershing Square Capital Management, on enormous, risky bets on companies like Jim Beam and Canadian Pacific Rail that earned billions for him and his clients. He has had some big losses too, including an estimated $473 million last August on an investment in J. C. Penney, the struggling retailer.

Regulators frequently get entreaties from financiers urging action for their own financial gain, like the hedge fund executives who in 2010 tried to secretly push Obama administration officials to investigate for-profit colleges, again citing fraudulent industry practices, after betting that their stocks would decline.

But Mr. Ackman’s efforts illustrate how Washington is increasingly becoming a battleground of Wall Street’s financial titans, whose interest in influencing public policy is driven primarily by a desire for profit — part of an expanding practice in the nation’s capital, with corporations, law firms and lobbying practices establishing political intelligence units to gather news they can trade on.

Vikram Bath focuses on the question of whether or not such actions are even wrong (or whether we can presume them to be), but I’m more interested in the NYT focus of money in politics.

Critics of money in politics often make it sound like it’s about “buying elections.” It has a ring of truth insofar as money is a necessary (though not sufficient) component of winning elections, but because the money is necessary and not sufficient that only takes you so far. I don’t worry about people buying elections because ultimately the electorate votes for what it wants and the history of losing candidates with winning war chests is very long.

No, what I worry about is money buying the office holders after they win. Ackman is lobbying. Herbalife is lobbying. Unlike an election, where my input is solicited (on however minor a scale), the Herbalife situation is one that I would know next to nothing about if not for this article. But it matters in the seven to ten digits to the involved players. At least this case involves a billionaire going up against somebody with some money to fight back, but that’s not always the case.

I’d argue that the problem is actually more insidious than that, though. Ultimately, when it’s the wealthy that have congress’s ear, even if everybody is acting entirely on good faith, the perspective of all involved is going to be skewed towards those talking to him. Even advocacy for the less fortunate is more likely than not going to be from someone looking down at them with concern from on high.

Perhaps most concerningly, this is a problem (or a series of problems) for which there are very few solutions. In this case, the money isn’t just going to the coffers of politicians but also activist groups themselves. And at the end of the day, you can’t stop a millionaire from speaking his mind.

I don’t typically sweat the wealth of the wealthy too much. I don’t view the money they have as being money that would be better spent if it were in someone else’s pockets (though, obviously, they gotta pay their taxes, too). But their are an awful lot of zero-sums expression of their wealth that do leave me concerned. Political influence is definitely one of them.

I typically listen to audiobooks throughout the day as I take care of various household chores. Lately, I’ve been watching a TV show that I will not name to avoid spoilers.

The video player on my phone is not as good as the audiobook player, so mistakes periodically happen. For example, it’ll lose its place. Also, I have been known to accidentally fast-forward due to the placement of the scroll bar. Normally this is not a problem, but I got a double wammy today, while watching the last episode of the program. As in, the last episode ever made where everything gets resolved.

In the first case, over a span of three seconds I found out that the lead character is killed, that his wife made it happen, and why she did it. In three seconds.

In a second case, I discovered that one character leaves another character. Again: Three seconds. If that.

The first hurts more than the second, but over the entirety of listening to TV shows (and watching at points) this has only happened three times. Two of which, of course, involved devastating spoilers. The other involved someone telling the main character that he would absolutely take care of it (fortunately, without a hint of what “it” was.

Twitter spambots are magical. They bring the dead back to life.

Shesahomewrecker.com is problematic on at least three levels that I can think of immediately. Could be mistaken, could be a baseless vendetta, and when true the blame does not fall on a single party. That’s just off the top of my head.

Some ladies are trying to close Wikipedia’s gender gap, which is a worthwhile goal. I’m curious what they mean by Wikipedia’s “masculine design”, however.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia is more generally having an editor retention problem.

Is the middle class being hollowed out due to a class war on the part of the wealthy? Or is it really about job polarization? Or both at once? James Joyner has more.

Michael Corwin talks about being a political PI while Jason Edwards Harrington talks about being a TSA agent. [More]

Apparently, the northeast is neurotic.

Bill Parks argues that California is the model for corporate tax reform.

It’s official: comedians are psychotic. The link comes from my friend Tony, who is trying to make it as a standup comedian, and who is probably psychotic. (Not really.)

How long does it take for a tragedy to become funny? Above five weeks.

It is not, in fact, hip to be square.

A realistic statue of a man walking around in his briefs freaked Wellesley out.

Here is a “Greatest Hits” of Huckabee that was produced in 2007:

Here is Huckabee commenting on the emerging situation in the Ukraine:

Is it me, or has his accent significantly dimished? Between that and his physical changes (aging and weight gain) he’s not all that instantly recognizable.

For the record, I don’t care if he has tried to minimize his accent so that he can be better understood, is taken more seriously, or will be a more viable presidential candidate than he otherwise would be. My own accent, or lack thereof, is variable. I just find it interesting, if I’m not imagining it.

Third-hand smoke exposure is just as deadly as smoking! Ack! Except that it’s not, of course, and eventually making everything as dangerous as smoking makes smoking actually look less dangerous (if anyone actually believed it).

Science, health and the human mind are funny things. The power of placebo.

Ack! Some crocodiles can climb trees!

NIMBYism is trying to kill housing in Evanston, Illinois, due to fear of transient academics.

A builder in Portland found it easier to build affordable housing without public funding (other than some waivers) than with the strings attached to public funding.

Maybe in the future, houses will be built in 24 hours by 3D printers.

Is your job in another state? Click here to find out!

You might be able to find a job in a lot of places (or a job that goes a lot of places), if you’re a clown, because there’s a shortage.

While raising the minimum wage will hurt McDonald’s, it’ll just be replaced by something else. The shift towards upscale has its own concerns, though.

Ryan Noonan, formerly of Ordinary Times, co-wrote an interesting paper on manufacturing wages.

According to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, extended unemployment benefits boosted our jobless numbers.

The dumb rubes in the working class aren’t the ones driving our political polarization. It’s folks who have education and income.

We think of The Big Sort as ideology determining geology. But what if it’s the other way around? I actually notice a tendency among optimistic ideologues who believe that people who relocate will absorb the politics of where they move to but then argue that the ideology of the places will shift as people move to it. There’s some truth to both of these things, but not in a predictable sort of way that justifies ideological optimism.

Last October we were expecting to hear a round of regulations that would determine the brave new frontier of vaping, but nothing game. It’s expected that it will come soon. Ordinarily, I’d fear the silence. In this case, though, I wonder if longer isn’t a little bit better. It all depends. At this point I believe the facts are on the side of less regulation and more thought out regulations will be more measured, though it seems a bit like the anti-vaping crusaders are gaining some traction.

Megan McArdle wrote a reasonably good piece on ecigarettes. In which she speaks to the fear:

As nothing but a replacement product for existing smokers, e-cigarettes seem like a public-health win. Widespread adoption by current smokers “could potentially reduce smoking deaths by more than 90 percent,” says Joel Nitzkin, a public-health physician who is a senior fellow at free-market think tank R Street in Washington.

But what if current smokers aren’t the only people who use them? What if e-cigarettes lure back people who used to smoke or attract new smokers? What if people who otherwise would have quit keep using nicotine? And perhaps the No. 1 argument: What if e-cigarettes make smoking normal again in public places, with the attendant annoyance of a neighbor or officemate blowing nicotine-laced steam everywhere?

What is really frustrating is that we don’t know. As important as anything, we don’t even know if there will be much wrong with people choosing to vape. Almost all of the anti-vaping sentiment is based on potential and hypothetical dangers. Well, it’s hard to argue with potential and hypothetical. It’s hard to argue with the notion that vaping may be dangerous, because it’s hard to prove a negative. Tests on propylene glycol, one of the chief ingredients of the eliquid, have been performed because that’s what they use for theatrical fog, and it was found to be safe. They have tested this stuff on animals saturated 24/7 for extended periods of time (eighteen months) and they found minimal consequences (reversible dehydration of the nasal and ocular areas). The head of the FDA himself has said that nicotine addicts you and tar kills you. Ecigarettes do not have tar.

I have previously expressed some skepticism of the health consequences of these things, taking the middle ground that while they’re not nearly as dangerous as the critics claim they’re probably not as safe as the advocates say. The more I’ve read, though, the more confident I am that the health threat is likely very minor to non-existent. The advocates’ claims are based on study after study after study, while the opponents claims are based on hypotheticals. Not even hypothetical models, but vague statements about what we don’t know.

Which brings us to the next argument, which is that it will prevent people from quitting smoking or quitting nicotine. In the case of the latter, if the health risks are so marginal, should we really care? In the case of the former, that could be bad, save that there is no real reason for it to be true. According to a UK study (STS140122) on cigarette, ecigarette, and NRT (nicotine replacement therapy – the gum or patch), “There is no evidence that electronic cigarettes are undermining motivation to quit or reduction in smoking prevalence.”

It goes on to say: “Use of e-cigarettes by never smokers or long-term ex-smokers is extremely rare.”

It does not provide any data on people starting with ecigarettes and moving to the regular kind, which is another concern (supported by hypotheticals). Speaking from a personal perspective, once you’re using ecigarettes and get the regular cigarettes out of your system, the latter becomes superfluous. I can quite honestly say that I have no desire to pick up a real cigarette at all. What I’m doing now isn’t just healthy, it’s more enjoyable. Vaping offers advantages that smoking can’t match. Including, I should add, the very flavoring that the anti-vaping advocates want to ban. Not to mention the ability to do it in more places, though right or wrong anti-smoking crusaders are going after that, too.

In other words, due to their anti-smoking zeal, they are methodically trying to reduce incentives to take advantage of an amazing new tool to help people quit. Even if they don’t quit the vaping, they’re still ahead. Arguments otherwise assume that if they can’t vape they will quit For Real. They remind me of my father who, on finding out that I had indeed quit smoking entirely and was now vaping, wondered if I could just quit without vaping. The last eight years of my life indicate otherwise. Strongly.

And on a more personal level, by god I have found something that works for me. Not just because I don’t smoke anymore, but because it allows me the ability to continue to do the things that drew me to smoking in the first place. I may quit the ecigarettes or I may not. But I have finally found myself not having to obsess over this question. Do you know how amazing that is? A world has been lifted from my shoulders. The monkey that has been on my back for years and years is gone. At worse, replaced by something by all measures benign by comparison. It makes me want to kiss the skies. And it makes me furious at those who see this as some nefarious new threat to the public health.

Right now I am just waiting to find out how bad it’s going to be. Whether the thing that right now costs me twenty-five cents a milliliter will shoot up to seventy-five cents (a very real possibility). Whether the people I get my supply from will be allowed to remain in business. Whether I am going to have to throw everything out and start all over with an FDA-approved device. I’m concerned about the number of people out there who could take the same path as I did to recovery, but as much as anything I just want to keep doing the thing that has put more distance between me and cigarettes than I have had in over ten years. Or whether it will be made more complicated and disrupted with right-now unthinkable consequences. In the name of public health. In the name of my own well-being.
(more…)

A few weeks ago I was listening to Robert Ludlum’s book Trevayne, which was originally published under a pseudonym because the conventional wisdom at the time was that people wouldn’t accept more than one novel a year by an individual.

Ludlum is dead now, and now, as with James Patterson and Tom Clancy, they’re putting his name on books that he didn’t write.

The notion that not only should we have to wait a year for each novel by a particular author but that this is a good thing has fallen by the wayside.

And why not? There is something to be said for novels franchising out and producing as much content and as many variations as the market will bear. Combine this with the Patterson model and there are tremendous opportunities.

It also has artistic advantages. As future installments can be planned in advance, it’s easier for storytellers to play the long game with storylines and ideas. Even better, it can add a degree of reassurance to the reader that the story will, in fact, end. Combine this with franchising and it opens up worlds of possibilities.

My creative project has me looking into our solar system and terraforming. Along the way, to help me visualize things, I have run across multiple animations of our solar system at work as well as found some interesting resources on terraforming.

The first one is from Dynamic Diagrams (or try this) and is by far the most interesting (warning, if you’re at work turn off your speakers before going there). It’s by far the best done visually insofar as it looks pretty cool. Lain absolutely loves it. She’s transfixed by the planets spinning round and round. She likes to point at the moon on the lower left hand part. She’s also used to tablets where she can make things move with her fingers, so she tries to “catch” the planets to manipulate them. It has very limited options. You can either watch the planets go around the sun or use the old Earth-as-the-center model and watch the planets (and the sun) go around us. You can also speed up or slow down (or reverse) the process.

The second one, Solar System Scope, was actually more useful for my purposes because it showed the dwarf planets and their orbits that deviate from the elliptical plane. It also gives a better idea of the sorts of distances between planets we’re talking about. Though less pretty, it actually gave me more of the visualization that I needed. There are a lot of options. You can zoom in and out, change perspective, make the planets large or realistically proportioned, and add and remove orbits, object names, and so on. You can also, like the other one, speed things up and slow them down. You can also click on a planet and get more.

The third one, Solar System Visualizer, is the only one that includes Pluto as a planet. Either because it’s outdated or because they are conscientious objectors. The options are limited here to zooming in and out. For my interest in the non-planetary items it was pretty good. Specifically around the asteroid belt which the Scope more or less ignores.

The story I am drafting up in my mind involves the Solar System being terraformed by oddly benign aliens. They’re refugees from intergalactic wars and mostly want to settle on some place really far out of the way. Having had their own planets decimated, they actually (as far as we know) have little in the way of designs on us. They basically set up shop and start terraforming everything in site. This was supposed to be an oh-by-the-way aspect of the story, but it turns out there is a lot of information out there about terraforming and a lot of things to consider.

This is the most direct source with descriptions of the possibilities and what would be required in English that I can understand. I’m also using Wikipedia’s entry on rounded orbital objects to help me figure out where to look (since there are planets with 60+ moons, I can’t just up “moons”). Wikipedia’s entry on terraforming itself was interesting.