The Dark Beauty Of Mold

Heikki Leis photographed the many varieties of mold for his series Afterlife. Mycologist Kathie Hodge enlightens us about our common roommates:

A third of food is lost to spoilage, and most of that is due either to mold or bacteria. Within the realm of the kitchen, some fungi are plant pathogens. For example, when you find a lemon with blue mold, that's a disease the lemon got in the field. That fungus has been eating it all along, despite how well you've washed it. But you don't notice it until it erupts in your kitchen.

She admires the image of beet mold seen above:

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Let The Kids Bike

Many American schools have resorted to "no-bicycle" policies, accelerating a trend of fewer and fewer children riding to school:

According to [the U.S. Department of Transportation] surveys, in 2009 only 13 percent of all children walked or rode to school, whereas in 1969 nearly half (48 percent) did. The remoteness of the new schools is not the only cause: Among students who lived within one mile of school 43 years ago, 88 percent walked or bicycled, while today only 38 percent do.

It's not just an American problem:

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Is The Wedding Industrial Complex A Good Thing?

Pamela Haag defends the industry's obsession with creating "unique" looks for Pinterest-obsessed brides:

I left the [conference of wedding merchants] feeling as if weddings are as eclectically improvised as ideas of marriage are becoming. The marriage replicates the wedding. For my parents the challenge was that they had almost no meaningful lifestyle choices. Most all were going to get married and, within marriage, the majority would follow the established gender roles, and achieve the same benchmarks. Today we have choices galore. ... Every marriage era has its trade-offs, its upsides and downsides. Still, if I had to pick, I’d go for the unique over the ambivalent consolations of conformity in the tulle-wrapped Jordan almond favor-giving day of yore. It makes for a more self-realized marriage (and wedding). 

The industry is also absorbing a backlash against the strapless dress.

(Video via Buzzfeed: "Wait for it… Gotta give it up for this bride and groom.")

Does Your Doctor Have The Time?

A recent study found that hospitals have some serious time-keeping issues:

Of over 1,700 devices checked [at four prestigious East Coast hospitals], only 3% were found to be accurate to within three seconds. One in five were off by more than 30 minutes; one ultrasound machine was running 42 years (and some minutes) early. The average error was a staggering 24 minutes.

Such discrepancies might have been responsible for drug dosing errors, missed or repeated procedures and therapies that lasted longer or shorter than necessary. In 2007 Andreas Valentin, of the Rudolfstiftung Hospital in Vienna, examined 113 intensive care units in 27 countries, finding that mistimed medications were the leading error in the administration of intravenous drugs, accounting for nearly half of all mistakes.

Creepy Ad Watch

Mark Duffy snarks:

Good idea—put a helmet on dead meat shaped like a coffin.

How The Assault-Weapons Ban Backfired

Paul M. Barrett recounts the story of Gaston Glock, the man behind the world-famous gun. How an attempt to regulate it failed:

[T]he magazine-capacity law worked in Glock’s favor. First, the law contained a loophole: All guns and magazines manufactured before the effective date in 1994 were "grandfathered" in. So Glock ran the factory at full tilt and built up a huge inventory of "pre-ban" product. When the ban took effect, the price of those guns skyrocketed, leading to huge profits for Glock.

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Heavy Baggage

Stefany Anne Golberg believes contemporary backpackers overpack:

We can see our souls in the contents of our baggage. Pack too much and we risk being weighed down by the place we’re trying to leave. Pack too little and we risk losing ourselves.

In the 1960s, backpackers left as much as they could behind in order to release themselves from the burden of self. Now backpackers take as much as they can take in order to be self-sufficient. In the ’60s, the backpacker’s quest was to remove everything — often one’s self-understanding, one’s identity — to access something pure. Today, backpackers want to assert their identity across national boundaries with the help of the things they own.

(Photo by Garry Knight)

Why Do American Women Work So Much?

Suzy Khimm investigates. One reason? American women are more scared of divorce:

[I]f divorce rates are higher in a society, women have a higher incentive to obtain work experience in case they find themselves alone in the future. ... European women anticipate not getting divorced as often and hence find less reason to insure themselves by working as much as American women.

Another factor:

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What Does The Flag Mean To You?

A reader writes:

This post perfectly captures what I have been feeling lately but unable to pinpoint. As a church organist, I am responsible for picking all the music for any given service. Yesterday I chose "America" ("Oh beautiful, for spacious skies") for the people to sing. This is a very liberal church, and I consider myself a liberal person. Several people approached me afterwards to say they felt uncomfortable singing that hymn in church (although it's included in the Hymnal) because it was "jingoistic" or "nationalistic." I had never considered these opinions and was somewhat surprised, if not shocked. In my mind, that church wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the freedoms we have in America. I'm lucky to have traveled the world and seen a lot of countries, and appreciate more than ever what we have here.

Another writes:

Here's my story about liberals and the flag; or: "What my father taught me about patriotism." We are Jewish, from Brooklyn, and very liberal.  My parents were New Deal Democrats, and worshipped FDR, JFK, and the Great Society.  In 1968 and beyond, we opposed the war in Vietnam and supported anti-war candidates.  During the Moratoriums and other anti-war protests in 1969, Nixon (whom we all despised - rightly, as it turned out) called upon the "Silent Majority" of Americans who supported him and the War to fly the flag on the upcoming holiday (I think it was Memorial Day, actually).  Come Memorial Day, my liberal father hung out his American flag. 

"But Dad," my then-teenaged sister, brother and I protested, "How can you do that?  You're showing support for Nixon and the War!"  "Let me tell you something," my father - who immigrated from Poland in 1929 at the age of 11, and had fought for the U.S. in North Africa, Italy and France - replied: "That's MY flag, too;  and that bastard isn't going to take it away from me!"

I blame conservatives for politicising the flag.  I blame liberals for letting them.  And I credit the lesson of my father, unabashed liberal, critic - and patriot.

Another:

Your reader said, "It's just a fact that liberals are squeamish about showing their patriotism" and that liberals need to "take back" the flag.  First, I didn't know that displaying the flag made you patriotic.  That's kind of like saying wearing a cross around your neck makes you a Christian, or putting a yellow ribbon on your gas-guzzling SUV means you're concerned about the troops. 

I am a liberal and I do not display the flag. 

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Face Of The Day

Carlos Hollifield of Knoxville, Tennessee, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps for 31 years, salutes with other veterans during a wreath-laying ceremony at the grave of an unknown Union soldier who died during the Civil War at the Congressional Cemetery on May 25, 2012 in Washington, DC. The ceremony is part of weekend events marking the 25th anniversary of the Rolling Thunder Ride for Freedom, a motorcycle rally in the nation's capital. Started in 1988 as a protest to bring more awarness to issues about POW/MIA, Rolling Thunder now has 90 chapters across the United States and expects more than 900,000 veterans and their supporters to participate in the ride. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

A Spritz Of Whale Poop

Ben Shattuck reviews Christopher Kemp's Floating Gold: A Natural (& Unnatural) History of Ambergris:

People have used ambergris (‘gray amber,’ French) for a long time — Moctezumaadded it to his tobacco, Casanova to his chocolate mousse, England’s King Charles II to his eggs; 17th-century French physicians used it to cure rabies, Florida’s American Indians as an antidote for fish poison, and today, companies like Chanel and Guerlain as fixative in their most expensive perfumes. 

So what does it smell like?

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Vonnegut's Battle

William Deresiewicz argues Slaughterhouse-Five is "not about time travel and flying saucers, it’s about PTSD":

The novel is framed by Vonnegut’s account of trying to write about Dresden—of trying to remember Dresden. But a different kind of memory became the novel’s very fabric. "He tried to remember how old he was, couldn’t." This is Billy the optometrist. "He tried to remember what year it was. He couldn’t remember that, either." For the traumatized soldier, the war is always present, and the present is always the war.

He is unstuck in time in the sense that he is stuck in time. His life is not linear, but radiates instead from a single event like the spokes of a wheel. Everything feels like a dream: a very bad dream. The novel is framed the way it is because Vonnegut, too, was traveling in time. He needed to make himself a part of the story because he already was a part of the story.

(Photo by Flickr user Seabamirum)

The Honest Bank Robber

Cord Jefferson is concerned about the rise of bank robbers who are "just trying to keep their heads above water":

In Mississippi this week, a man walked into a bank and handed a teller a note demanding money, according to broadcast news reporter Brittany Weiss. The man got away with a paltry $1,600 before proceeding to run errands around town to pay his bills and write checks to people to whom he owed money. He was hanging out with his mom when police finally found him. Three weeks before the Mississippi fiasco, a woman named Gwendolyn Cunningham robbed a bank in Fresno and fled in her car. Minutes later, police spotted Cunningham's car in front of downtown Fresno's Pacific Gas and Electric Building. Inside, she was trying to pay her gas bill.

It's less surprising when you consider the increasing difficulty of major bank robberies.

Mental Health Break

Creator Afiq Omar explains:

Ferienne is the third installment of an ongoing experimental study on fluid dynamics, magnetism and cymatics. These invisible forces of nature are then made visible through various liquids and mixtures, and they form patterns that are otherwise invisible to the naked eye.

Joe Hanson is a fan of the series:

The shapes you see here are like peering into the invisible, using the ferrofluids to reveal the shapes of unseen magnetic fields. These are forms that we could never create in any other way, and are so random that each one may never be seen again.

In Chicken We Trust

A history of the chicken examines the bird's religious significance:

Chickens were, and still are, a sacred animal in some cultures. The prodigious and ever-watchful hen was a worldwide symbol of nurturance and fertility. Eggs hung in Egyptian temples to ensure a bountiful river flood. The lusty rooster (a.k.a. cock) was a universal signifier of virility—but also, in the ancient Persian faith of Zoroastrianism, a benign spirit that crowed at dawn to herald a turning point in the cosmic struggle between darkness and light. For the Romans, the chicken’s killer app was fortunetelling, especially during wartime. Chickens accompanied Roman armies, and their behavior was carefully observed before battle; a good appetite meant victory was likely. According to the writings of Cicero, when one contingent of birds refused to eat before a sea battle in 249 B.C., an angry consul threw them overboard. History records that he was defeated.

Escaping Culture

Kenan Malik argues that a person's cultural past need not be his future:

‘It is in the interest of every person to be fully integrated in a cultural group’, the sociologist Joseph Raz has written. And that has become a common view in many multiculturalist claims. But what is to be fully integrated? If a Muslim woman rejects sharia law, is she demonstrating her lack of integration? What about a Jew who doesn’t believe in the legitimacy of the Jewish State? ... To view humans as having to bear specific cultures [denies] a capacity for transformation.  It suggests that every human being is so shaped by a particular culture that to change or undermine that culture would be to undermine the very dignity of that individual. It suggests that the biological fact of, say, Jewish or Bangladeshi ancestry somehow make a human being incapable of living well except as a participant of Jewish or Bangladeshi culture. This would only make sense if Jews or Bangladeshis were biologically distinct – in other words if cultural identity was really about racial difference.

(Photo of the Ontario Monument to Multiculturalism by Flickr user Shaun Merritt)

The View From Your Window

Studio City, California, 12.36 pm

Our reader writes:

This photo is kind of ordinary I know, but I live in a very blue area of the country, and it's just a fact that liberals are squeamish about showing their patriotism. This has always bothered me coming from a military family (I'm a left-leaning moderate myself). At the time of the first Obama campaign, I started festooning our vehicles and house with not only Obama signs and stickers but lots of American flags. My liberal friends asked me about this and I told them that it was a shame to let the right-wingers get away with co-opting the flag of every citizen in the country just for themselves. That we needed to "take back" our flag. They said I was right and started doing the same with flags all over the place.

Every Memorial Day, Independence Day and Veteran's Day (and September 11th), we put out all our flags. Just this morning my liberal neighbor told me how much she loved seeing the flags up and thanked me for my "beautiful patriotism." She said she would remind herself again to go out and buy a flag, we'll see ... but from the bluest of the blue places, there are many of us who remember those who serve our country and salute them.

The Teen Sleep Cycle

Bora Zivkovic finds evidence that hormones force teenagers to stay up late:

No amount of bribing or threatening can make an adolescent fall asleep early. Don’t blame video games or TV. Even if you take all of these away (and you should that late at night, and replace them with books) and switch off the lights, the poor teen will toss and turn and not fall asleep until midnight or later, thus getting only about 4-6 hours of sleep until it is time to get up and go to school again.

He argues that teenagers should be going to school later in the morning:

If [teenagers] are driving themselves to school at 6 or 7am, when their circadian clocks think is it 3 or 4am, it is as if they are driving drunk. 

Where In The World Is All The Water??

The sphere on the left represents all the water on the planet:

If you gathered all the world’s water—from oceans, lakes, groundwater, water vapor, everything—into a sphere, it would have a diameter of 860 miles. That’s the distance between Salt Lake City and Topeka, Kansas.

Jay Kimball graphed just how little of that is fresh - the sphere on the right. Coby Beck heightens our worry:

And don't forget that that ball of freshwater is mostly out of range of our drinking glasses and irrigation systems. A full 74.5% of that much smaller ball is locked away in ice caps and glaciers and 24.7% is groundwater (much of that out of reach). There is only .56% of the world's freshwater circulating in lakes, rivers, rainfall, soil and the biosphere.

Ask Bartlett Anything: Does The One Percent Pay Too Much In Taxes?

You can buy Bruce's latest book, The Benefit and The Burden: Tax Reform - Why We Need It and What It Will Take, here. Read him regularly at the Economix blog. "Ask Anything" archive here.

Underearners Anonymous

Genevieve Smith checks in with the group:

Underearning, according to UA’s adherents, is more a reflection of the feeling that we’re not where we thought we’d be, whether in terms of savings, career goals, or however else we measure prosperity and success. It was this anxiety, more than my sorry bank account, that drew me to my first UA meeting. I’d come not because I was destitute (I’m not), but because I’d grown anxious that I’d ever achieve the financial security I’d always assumed was inevitable.

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Local Limbaughs

Ed Leibowitz profiles John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, hosts of California's The John & Ken Show, who reach 1.2 million weekly in the key 3 pm to 7 pm drive-time slot:

Stretching from the Inland Empire to northern San Diego County, it is not only the most listened-to local radio talk show in Southern California, but in the whole country. “More stimulating talk radio” is KFI’s official slogan, and Kobylt and Chiam-pou deliver. They’ll talk about celebrity farces and tragedies, lurid murder trials, and weirdness wherever it materializes, but their main theme is the destruction of California—by public employee unions, by endless tax increases, by illegal immigrants, by corrupt and incompetent politicians, and by violent criminals coddled by the system.

The John & Ken Show is devoid of heroes. There are only traitors and bandits and their victims—the middle-class American taxpayers whom Kobylt and Chiampou speak to every weekday as their pockets are picked and their way of life is eroded by the border-crossing hordes.

The Evolution Of Swear Words

A short history:

Golly! Zounds! Gadzooks! These are the kind of things Captain Marvel would say. Almost any other superhero would be too mature for such, childish silly words. And yet, during Shakespeare's time, they made him one of the more edgy writers out there.

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Poem For Memorial Day

It feels a Shame to be Alive -
When Men so brave - are dead -
One envies the Distinguished Dust -
Permitted - such a Head -

The Stone - that tells defending Whom
This Spartan put away
What little of Him we - possessed
In Pawn for Liberty -

The Price is great - Sublimely paid -
Do we deserve - a Thing -
That lives - like Dollars - must be piled
Before we may obtain?

Are we that wait - sufficient worth -
That such Enormous Pearl
As life - dissolved be - for Us -
In Battle's - horrid Bowl?

It may be - a Renown to live -
I think the Men who die -
Those unsustained - Saviors -
Present Divinity -

- Emily Dickinson.

Red And Blue Team Loyalty

 Illustrated:

When pollsters ask Republicans and Democrats whether the president can do anything about high gas prices, the answers reflect the usual partisan divisions in the country. About two-thirds of Republicans say the president can do something about high gas prices, and about two-thirds of Democrats say he can’t. But six years ago, with a Republican president in the White House, the numbers were reversed: Three-fourths of Democrats said President Bush could do something about high gas prices, while the majority of Republicans said gas prices were clearly outside the president’s control.

Dave Berri draws a sports analogy:

Fans of the opposite party are not against the President because he doesn’t agree with them on the issue.  They are against the President because he plays for the “wrong” team.  And unless he is willing to change teams ... , he can try to “reach across the aisle” all day and he will never make the other team’s fans happy.   

The Antidote To Birtherism

Wiferism:

When you face the absurd, why not respond with it?

Why The IDF Stands By As Palestinians Are Attacked

A former member of the border police in Hebron explains what an ethnocracy means:

After the Shamgar Committee investigation [into the massacre of Palestinians by the Zionist extremist Baruch Goldstein in 1994], the rules of engagement changed. The command to wait for a weapons jam was replaced with the direction to “instruct the shooter or person endangering life through other means to cease his actions, or to try to overpower him immediately, while using reasonable force.” In the case that the shooter is not deterred by the soldiers’ requests to cease fire, they are required, according to the IDF instructions, to carry out something similar to the “procedure for detaining a suspect”: shots in the air, shots towards the legs, and only then, shots to neutralize the danger.

This is how it is on paper. In reality, the soldier on the ground receives oral commands that preserve the order to do nothing in instances of Israeli fire towards Palestinians, and in instances of less severe violence, “to serve as a buffer.”

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The Bain Of This Campaign, Ctd

Joe Klein has a must-read. Money quote:

It seems to me that Obama’s immediate point is wrong: Romney wasn’t primarily about job destruction and corporate plundering. His larger point–that Romney was not so much about job-creation as he was about profit-creation–is correct, though. But the largest point of all is this: private equity capitalism was all about short-term profits–maximizing shareholder value–rather than long-term growth. It ushered in an era of massive executive compensation and bonuses. It prospered because of tax rules that made debt more profitable than equity, and a “carried interest” tax dodge that enabled Mitt Romney to pay a lower percentage in taxes than your average construction worker. It can be a useful tool in restructuring companies and steering them toward profitability, but it is not the sort of model you’d want to apply to the entire American economy.

A President has to be about long-term growth, not short-term profits–and to the extent that Barack Obama is using the Bain ads to make this larger argument, he is not “stumbling” or attacking “free enterprise,” but he is steering the conversation toward the most important topic this year: what sort of economy do we want to have and how do we get there?

The point is that a president cannot just maximize profts for shareholders. Being a CEO is not the same as being a president. Moreover, even if you think that Romney's highly profitable adventures in private equity helped the economy more than hurt it, the rigged system in which he paid lower taxes, exploited other loopholes and made money regardless of the outcome in any specific case is not a pretty picture of real market capitalism.

The relevant analogy in this election is not Romney's time at Bain in terms of his ability to increase employment. It's his record in Massachusetts as governor - during which time, the state came in 47th out of 50 in terms of job growth. And his proposals for the future - which as I currently see them would either explode the debt or end Medicare and Medicaid as we have known them. Or, as Chait points out, give us a second stimulus of a kind he has spent the last four years condemning.

Is The Multiverse Real?

Brian Greene explores the concept:

Imagine that when the apple fell on Newton’s head, he wasn’t inspired to develop the law of gravity, but instead reasoned that some apples fall down, others fall up, and we observe the downward variety simply because the upward ones have long since departed for outer space. The example is facetious but the point serious: used indiscriminately, the multiverse can be a cop-out that diverts scientists from seeking deeper explanations. On the other hand, failure to consider the multiverse can place scientists on a Keplerian treadmill in which they furiously chase answers to unanswerable questions.

Which is all just to say that the multiverse falls squarely in the domain of high-risk science.

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Excusing Your Self

Bruce Hood, author of The Self Illusion, argues that a lack of self isn't as depressing as it sounds: 

When we judge others, we consider them responsible for their actions. But was Mary Bale, the bank worker from Coventry who was caught on video dropping a cat into a garbage can, being true to her self? Or was Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic rant being himself or under the influence of someone else? What motivated Senator Weiner to text naked pictures of himself to women he did not know? ... By rejecting the notion of a core self and considering how we are a multitude of competing urges and impulses, I think it is easier to understand why we suddenly go off the rails. It explains why we act, often unconsciously, in a way that is inconsistent with our self image – or the image of our self as we believe others see us.

In an interview with Jonah Lehrer, Hood addresses his critics:

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The Web Of Life

The tree metaphor gets retired:

Religion As Refuge

In reviewing What Money Can’t Buy by Michael Sandel and How Much is Enough? by Robert and Edward Skidelsky, Rowan Williams makes the case for faith:

A world in which every object is instantly capable of being rendered in terms of what it can be exchanged for is one in which there is nothing worth looking at for itself, a world systematically “de-realised.” And that is what we are threatened with: Sandel’s examples converge with the Skidelskys’ thesis in putting before us a possible world of absolute commodification. If we want to resist this intelligently, we need doctrine, ritual and narrative: sketches of the normative, practices that are not just functions, and stories of lives that communicate a sense of what being at home in the environment looks like—and the costs of failure as well. 

Taming The World

J.B. MacKinnon fears we've neutered Mother Nature:

The natural world feels like a spiritual respite: a literal sanctum, where we are safe  to reconnect to what is larger than ourselves. Compared to the cosmic rhythms of mountain, sea, and sky, it is ordinary daily life—driving at rush hour, punching security codes, navigating a shape-shifting digital culture—that seems hostile.

Yet there is a serious problem with our idea of sacred nature, and that is that the idol is a false one. If we experience the natural world as a place of succor and comfort, it is in large part because we have made it so.

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The Pursuit Of Happiness

Can prove counterproductive:

Groundbreaking work by Iris Mauss has recently supported the counterintuitive idea that striving for happiness may actually cause more harm than good. In fact, at times, the more people pursue happiness the less they seem able to obtain it. Mauss shows that the more people strive for happiness, the more likely they will be to set a high standard for happiness—then be disappointed when that standard is not met.  This is especially true when people were in positive contexts, such as listening to an upbeat song or watching a positive film clip. It is as if the harder one tries to experience happiness, the more difficult it is to actually feel happy, even in otherwise pleasant situations.

And so modern research comes way back around to ... Aristotle.

Mental Health Break

Shawn Reeder spent two years shooting a time-lapse of Yosemite National Park:

When Some Bishops Were Honest

Ah, to go back seventeen years ...

Holy Hallucinations

Alex Bellos profiles a Brazilian religion and its drug of choice:

Ayahuasca—or Daime as it is known locally—is a muddy-looking concoction made from boiling the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and the Psychotria viridis leaf. Across the Amazon, indigenous people drink it as a part of their rituals. In Brazil a century ago, however, the hallucinogen led to the birth of a new Christian movement, the religion known as Santo Daime.

How the religion started in Brazil:

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A Poem For Sunday

"The Universal Prayer" by Alexander Pope:

Father of all! In every age,
In every clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!

Thou Great First Cause, least understood
Who all my sense confined
To know but this, that Thou art good
And that myself am blind.

The poem continues.

(Image: mirrored sculptures by Rob Mulholland via Colossal)

Can Science Embrace Awe?

Philip Ball insists it's not reserved for religion:

Pretending that science is performed by people who have undergone a Baconian purification of the emotions only deepens the danger that it will seem alien and odd to outsiders, something carried out by people who do not think as they do. [Lorraine] Daston believes that we have inherited a “view of intelligence as neatly detached from emotional, moral and aesthetic impulses, and a related and coeval view of scientific objectivity that brand[s] such impulses as contaminants”.

Read On »

Sunday Dish

Two reader responses:

It's been a long week, and between a hectic business schedule and some touristing I'm doing while out of town, I completely lost track of what day it is. Thus, as I was finishing up some errands this afternoon, I thought how nice it would be to go check out what's on the Dish when I got home. Alas, when I returned home and saw my calendar, I realized it's Sunday. And sure enough, as expected, the Dish sucks today. It's full of all that god babble that you're so fond of. Down with god babble. More real content, please?

The other:

I often feel so in step with The Dish.  It is truly therapy for me.  Your post makes my heart break as my father died just two days ago, and the experience has shaken my soul.  Never have your Sunday reflections meant so much to me.  Please pray for my father and my family.

(Photo: a hospice therapy experiment with doves by John Moore/Getty.)