federal income taxes

Why are "taxes" and "federal income taxes" so often thought of as synonymous?

Part of it is that those are the most noticeable on Apr 15, and part is that they're easier to have a national conversation about, but part really is a deliberate effort from right-wingers. The progression of arguments is pretty amazing (from rushlimbaugh.com):

Only the Rich Pay Taxes!
NEW UPDATED FIGURES: Top 20% Pay 80% of Taxes
New York Times Buries, But Reports, Truth on Taxes
	CBO report misheadlined by New York Times still reveals truth...tscript, • CBO Report: Effective Federal Tax Rates Under Current Law, 2001 to 2014 • Posted Forever: Top 50% of Wage Earners Pay 96.03% of Income Taxes • Excel file: IRS Income Stats • Myth Buster: Democrats Get More Campaign Cash from "Rich"

Only the rich pay taxes!!!
Well, 20% pay 80% but that's still a lot of money wasted on public goods.
and by taxes, I mean "federal income taxes."

(Context: Overall the tax burden is a pretty even share of income for everyone, or if anything is slightly regressive. But the federal income tax is strongly progressive, and that's what everyone notices.)

I found this while trying to substantiate the argument that Rush Limbaugh's genius is to approach familiar issues with unfamiliar arguments. I do have to admit that the Club G'itmo golf shirt definitely was an unfamiliar approach to an issue I thought I knew.

peliculas con pasión

My impressions of the movie Bad Education. Click below if you want to read the post and don't mind hearing about the plot.

To see how to do this sort of thing, see Suzanne's description or the javascript method I ended up using.)

read the rest of the post

Almodovar's Bad Education closes with the self-referential line "Enrique continued to make films with passion" and then zooms in on the word "pasión" until it fills the screen. Why does that sound so false after a movie with priests molesting little boys, brother betraying brother, a plot driven by desperation, sex, drugs and love, and great acting, especially from Gael Garcia Bernal?

This confused me for awhile, and I thought I might just be getting jaded, but that's not it. The problem is that the intricately twisting plot, in which every character, every scene and every relationship is doubled and redoubled, in a film script, a flashback or a fantasy about what might have been. When the terrifying Father Manolo is knocking one by one on the bathroom doors, it's like the knock on the door in Rear Window, or maybe the late-night bathroom crackdown in Apocalypse Now, and even when he's sitting behind his desk being blackmailed, you feel like he holds the cards. But then he follows Juan puppy-dog style to the film set, and when asked by Enrique to identify himself, self-consciously says "I'm the villain in your film." This right after we see that the claustrophobic office that had trapped Ignacio is part of a set that gets taken apart while the camera slowly zooms farther and farther out. So it's all very postmodern and fascinating, but emotionally totally pulls its punches. Then at the end Manolo has taken the place of Ignacio as the one desperate for love and for control, who tries blackmail and only ends up getting killed.

It's hard to really believe that anyone is suffering when the movie moves so fluidly between different realizations of the same drama. It's as though halfway through Schindler's List, the Jews went to Israel and started bulldozing Palestinian homes while the Germans started going to onion cellars to make themselves cry, and then AIDS victims in San Francisco adopted the onion cellar idea to deal with their own pain. Yes, they're all very tragic stories, but really it gets hard to take any of this stuff seriously after a while.

Still a really nice movie (beautiful, thought-provoking, well-acted) if you don't mind the passion not being there.

Pink tuur daal

from Piali's mom
Ingredients:

• 1 cup daal
• 2 ripe tomatoes
• 1 inch fresh ginger, finely chopped
• 2 fat cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 1 heaped teaspoon Indian cumin
• quarter teaspoon turmeric
• 1 tablespoon coriander powder, or half a cup of finely chopped cilantro
• salt to taste

Wash the daal a couple of times, rubbing it well. Soak for up to an hour (cooks faster!). Bring to a boil in 4 cups of water in a medium size pot on low heat for about 15 minutes. Add turmeric and very finely choppped tomatoes, and continue to simmer until very tender and tomatoes have disintegrated. Keep simmering on low heat.

In a frying pan, heat a tablespoon of oil. When hot, add the cumin seeds, lower heat to avid burning the garlic and add the garlic and ginger. Stir well, add a bit of the daal, covering the pan immediately to prevent the aromas from escaping. Immediately transfer the mix to the rest of the daal. Rinse the pan with a bit of water, and add that to the daal too.

Add salt and pepper (check the heat!) and garnish with cilantro, only if good and fresh leaves are available. If not, just add the corriander powder instead, and bring to one more final boil. Serve with rice?

I have substituted garlic for the asafoetida and curry leaves, which I use. Those are very ethnic, very hard to find, and need cultivated taste! I have also substituted black pepper for dry red chilli, since the "heat" is moderate. Also, the ginger adds to the heat. [I made this and it's tasty! I added green chili peppers, cayenne and a little lemon juice. --Aram]

If you have a hammer....

...everything looks like a nail.

This list makes me happy; not so much the specific examples on it (some of which seem a little dubious), but just the fact that such a list exists. It helps me get through those depressing moments when I fear that the only useful Fourier transforms are over abelian groups. And I like the idea of working to add quantum information theory to the list.

biting the hand

In case you haven't been following the debate over the Chinese's central bank's practice of linking the renminbi to the dollar, here's the background: China has kept the renminbi at the artificial low price of 8.28 since 1994. It does this by buying hundreds of billions of dollars of US debt per year - basically financing our budget and trade deficits. The low renminbi/high dollar helps Chinese exports and US imports, while hurting Chinese imports and US exports. It also keeps interest rates low in the US, encouraging borrowing/investment.

Americans who are trying to compete with Chinese imports don't like the cheap renminbi, and politicians can often be seen denouncing China's currency peg as "unfair" to American manufacturers and whatnot. But, if China didn't buy all our debt, we quickly have to face the laws of economics and, for example, pay for the war in Iraq. Wikipedia puts it in terms more dramatic than you usually get from economists

The ensuing depreciation of the US dollar might price oil out of the reach of the american economy, causing stagflation, a collapse of US oil dependant industries, massive unemployment and other dire economic consequences.

And it would be no picnic for China either; aside from the collapse of their largest trading partner, having too much cash could lead to the sort of crises that SE Asia had in the late 1990's, though I don't entirely understand how. (Good references are Nouriel Roubini's blog post, his paper with Brad SetserWill the Bretton Woods 2 regime unravel soon? The Risk of a Hard Landing in 2005-6, and billmon's posts (1 and 2)). Roubini actually thinks it would be best if China started letting its currency slide now, before it gets any worse.

But the point is that the U.S. and China are locked in a weird kind of mutual death-grip, with China having slightly more control over the situation, but all of the fiscal irresponsibility coming from the U.S. So it's natural that in this situation Congress would start blaming China for the situation. But what somehow still managed to blow me away is that their threaten-China bill would be attached as a rider to a spending bill that will only sink us further into this mess. The NYT article doesn't say which spending bill it is, but I bet it's the supplemental $82 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan that Bush didn't deign to put in the budget.

Mr. [Charles] Schumer [D-NY] and Senator Lindsey O. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, stunned administration officials last month by winning bipartisan Senate support for a measure that would threaten China with tariffs up to 27.5 percent if it failed to change its currency policies.

The Senate voted 67 to 33 against killing an amendment that would have attached the provision to a spending bill. Mr. Schumer withdrew the amendment, but Senate Republicans have agreed to allow a vote on the measure before the end of July.

law of the father

I should be horrified at how Christian fundamentalists want to bring back honor killings (via atrios and pandagon)

Daddy, What's A Virgin?

Virginity was an inheritance to be brought into a marriage, and the father of the bride was responsible to preserve that inheritance. If a new husband slandered his bride and claimed that she was not a virgin, the bride's father and mother would defend her name and the name of their family. They would present the evidence of her virginity to the elders of the city (Deuteronomy 22:15). But if the charge was true, and the woman was not a virgin, then the bride was to be executed in front of her father's house. "But if the thing is true, and evidences of virginity are not found for the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done a disgraceful thing in Israel, to play the harlot in her father's house. So you shall put away the evil from among you" (Deuteronomy. 22:20-21). Why the doorway to her father's house, rather than her husband's house? Because she had rebelled against her father's authority, and dishonored him. [see illustration]

In scripture it is obvious that daughters are to submit to their father's authority, while the father's responsibility is to protect their daughters.

But instead I can't help but find the whole thing (especially the despicable article Daddy's Girl: Courtship and a Father's Rights) not so much threatening as pathetically reminiscent of a scene in The Satanic Verses. But I lent my copy to someone who I think lost it! So the relevant quote will have to wait... Check back in this spot later.

Quantum error correction fails only when you don't use it

This (or a more formal version) is going to get posted to the arxiv, unless one of my quantum compadres tells me why I shouldn't do it.

In "Quantum error correction fails for Hamiltonian models" (quant-ph/0411008), Alicki argues that when our controls are Hamiltonians of bounded strength (say the gate time is t_0), error correction fails. How badly does it fail? Well, suppose we want to protect a single logical qubit, and have M physical qubits, which are subject to independent depolarizing noise at rate lambda². Then he says that every encode-protect-decode cycle of arbitrary length has fidelity no greater than exp(-M t_0 lambda²). First of all, I think there must be a mistake somewhere since increasing M shouldn't necessarily make the system decohere faster; after all you can always add qubits that you don't use. Worryingly, I can't find the mistake... Second of all, this doesn't mean that fault-tolerance, or even error-correction, don't work. His analysis (minus the math) is roughly as follows. You start and end with an unencoded qubit. The Hamiltonian has finite strength, so the qubit must be unencoded for the first O(t_0) time and the last O(t_0) time. During this time errors act on it.

This means the problem isn't that your Hamiltonians aren't infinitely fast. The problem is leaving a qubit sit around unprotected by any code. In FTQC this doesn't happen. Computatons map one encoded state to another. Ergo no problem.

This argument could be better written, but hopefully the point is clear.

recipes I actually use

Unlike other recipes I've posted, I've made these recipes many times and highly recommend them all.

Rice Pulao

from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest

Spiced Lentils with spinach and applies

• 1 Tbs canola or peanut oil
• 1 Tbs butter
• 2 cup minced onion
• 2 cup dried lentils
• 5 cups water
• 2 large stalks of celery, minced
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 2 tsp dried mustard
• 1 Tbs minced fresh ginger
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• 1/2 tsp tumeric
• 3 Tbs fresh lemon juice
• 3 large cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tsp salt (or more if needed)
• black pepper to taste
• cayenne to taste
• 1/2 lb fresh spinach, *washed*, stems removed, and chopped (note: if making this for hundreds of people, use frozen spinach to save time.)
• 2 medium-sized tart apples (Granny Smiths work well) peeled and chopped

1. Heat oil in medium-sized skillet, and melt in the butter. Add the onion and cook over medium heat for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the onion is soft and turning golden.
2. Meanwhile, place the lentils and water in a large saucepan or Dutch oven, and bring to a boil. Lower the heat, partially cover, and let simmer for 15 minutes.
3. Add to the onion: celery, cumin, mustard, ginger, coriander, and tumeric. Cook together over medium-low heat for 10 minutes, or until the celery is tender. Scrape all of this into the lentils, add the lemon juice and garlic, and stir. Simmer, partially covered, for 10 more minutes--until the lentils are tender.
4. Stir in the salt, black pepper, cayenne, spinach, and apples. COok for just a few minutes longer--until the spinach is wilted and the apples begin to soften. Serve hot.

Raita

• 2 cups yogurt
• 1 tsp whole cumin seeds
• 1 tsp fennel seeds
• salt and cayenne

MANY POSSIBLE ADDITIONS:

• minced ripe tomato (seed it first)
• minced or grated cucumber (peel and seed it first)
• minced bell pepper
• minced red onion (ew) or scallion
• minced fresh herbs (cilantro, mint, parsley, chives)
• grated carrot
• grated beet
• minced spinach

cranberry scones

• 2.5 cups flour
• 2.5 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp soda
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup butter (cold, cut into small pieces)
• 1 cup coursely chopped dried cranberries
• 3/4 cup buttermilk

Mix flour, baking powder and soda. Cut in butter with pastry blender until coarse crumbs. Stir in cranberries and sugar then buttermilk until blended. Cut dough in half. Lightly flour surface and knead dough lightly. Press into 8" circle 1/2" thick, cut into 8 wedges. Place 1/2" apart on ungreased cookie sheet.

Preheat oven to 400° F. Bake 12-15 minutes.

You can substitute nuts, choc chips, or other dried fruit for the cranberries.

Scones can be frozen unbaked; bake without thawing.

cauliflower curry

from book two of the vegetarian epicure

• 1 large head cauliflower
• 1 small potato (6-8oz)
• 4 tbs vegetable oil
• 1 tsp black mustard seds
• 1 tsp ground turmeric
• 1/2 tsp ground cumin
• 1/2 tsp ground coriander
• 1/2 tsp cayenne
• 1 clove garlic, minced or crushed
• 1/2 onion, slivered
• 1 tsp salt
• 1.25 cups water
• 1 tomato, chopped
• 2 tbs lemon juice

Scrub, then boil the potato in salted water until it's nearly done. Wash and chop up the cauliflower into small pieces.

Heat the oil over medium-low heat and add the mustard seeds. Cover until they pop, then remove from heat until they're done popping (they should turn grey). Then add the onion, garlic and spices. Saute over medium heat for 3-4 minutes, stirring constantly. Then add cauliflower, saute for a few minutes, add salt and water, cover the pan and cook for another few minutes. Meanwhile, chop the potato into 1" cubes. Then add the potato, cover again and simmer for 10minutes. Finally, add the tomato and lemon juice, stir and cook uncovered for a few minutes fbefore serving.

another pilau

(also from the Vegetarian Epicure, book 2)

• 4 tbs butter
• 2 cups long-grain white rice
• 1/4 tsp cinnamon
• crushed seeds from 8 cardamom pods
• 3/4c blanched, slivered almonds
• 1/2c raisins or currants
• 1c green peas
• 4c hot water
• 1.5tsp salt.

Melt the butter and fry the rice in it over low heat until it just starts to color. Add the cinnamon and cardamom, and fry for antoher minute or two. Then add everything else, stir, bring the water to a boil, lower the heat, cover the pot and cook for however long the rice needs.

You need a heavy-bottomed pot that can be tightly covered for this. The important thing is to fry the rice before boiling, and to add vaguely sweet, nutty and salty flavors - otherwise don't worry about following the recipe too closely.

E=mc2

I always imagined that this equation would appear somewhere in Einstein's original paper. But not so. Here's the relevant text (he uses V instead of c to denote the speed of light):

If a body gives off the energy L in the form of radiation, its mass diminishes by L/V². The fact that the energy withdrawn from the body becomes energy of radiation evidently makes no difference, so that we are led to the more general conclusion that:

The mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content;; if the energy changes by L, the mass changes in the same sense by L/9×10²⁰, the energy being measured in ergs, and the mass in grammes.

One thing that struck me is how Einstein's approach today feels dated, belonging to a time (perhaps the last time) when you could do physics without knowing so much math. Or maybe it was just Einstein who could jump to such broad conclusions from one thought experiment involving radiation emitted by a slowly moving object. It's as though he knew the answer all along and just gave us an example to illustrate the point.

For example, today people favor the mathy Lorentz approach because it shows energy and momentum form a covariant 4-vector just like time and position do. So massless particles satisfy E=cp and light carries momentum. But Einstein saw this (and more) immediately with no intervening math! The next (and final) two sentences of the paper are:

It is not impossible that with bodies whose energy-content is variable to a high degree (e.g. with radium salts) the theory may be successfully put to the test.

If the theory corresponds to the facts, radiation conveys inertia between the emitting and absorbing bodies.

[Here's Einstein's first paper on special relativity.

Another old paper worth finding is the one where Born's rule that probability is the absolute value of the wavefunction squared is introduced wrong in the main text, and then later corrected in a footnote. I can't find it online, but the cite is Born, M., 1926a, Zeitschrift für Physik 37, 863; translated in (Wheeler, 1983), pp. 52-55. See also Born, M., 1926b, Zeitschrift für Physik 38, 803. and Born, M., 1927, Nature 119, 354.]

genocide-related program activities

I think I liked the State Department's previous politically-motivated exaggerations of the deaths in Darfur better than their new politically-motivated minimizations of those deaths. So far probably 400,000 have died, and if aid stops because of insecurity, 100,000 deaths/month are possible.

The NYT recently published pictures drawn by kids in refugee camps on the border of Chad.

Top:Rashid, 13, from western Darfur "I saw janjaweed coming quickly, on horses and camels. They were shooting guns and yelling, 'Kill the slaves. . . . ' I saw people falling on the ground and bleeding. They chased after my brother; he is 12. One girl I saw -- they tied her up, put her on a camel and went away. All our animals were taken. Then the planes came and bombed our village."

Bottom:Salim, 13, from northern Darfur "We returned from school. . . . We are all looking, and not imagining bombing. The first bomb landed in our garden. The bombs killed six people, including a young boy, two women, a boy carried by his mother and a girl. Now my sleep is hard because I feel frightened."

Unfortunately, even if Western governments are pressured into action, it's not clear that what they do is likely to be productive. I'm not sure what I think is the right thing to advocate for, but am sympathetic to this argument by Alex de Waal, which is vaguely reminiscent of what Republicans said about Clinton's intervention in Bosnia:

Sudan is back at the top of the UN Security Council agenda and a focus for concern in Washington and London. Much of this concern is framed by the ICI report and the agenda of prosecutions. But these issues are marginal to the central challenges of Sudan and are indeed a distraction from investing the necessary political and diplomatic energies in the search for long-term solutions. The call for sanctions is similarly a response to the pressure to be seen to be ‘doing something'. There are no realistic scenarios in which sanctions would have a major positive impact: they are simply a means of expressing outrage. This is symptomatic of the way in which international engagement in Sudan has become focused upon short-term management rather than strategic thinking. In turn this reflects the predominance of activist agendas, and the lack of strong material interests in the outcome for Sudan.

french toast recipe

• one loaf French bread cut into one-inch slices put in glass pan
• 4 eggs
• 1.5c milk
• 1/2c OJ
• 1/4c sugar
• 2 tbsp orange liqueur (like Grand Marnier)
• 1 tbsp vanilla

Cover with saran wrap and refrigerate for 1-24 hours. Transfer to lightly buttered pan so they're not touching. Bake for 12-15 minute at 425 or until it starts to turn brown. Add powdered sugar.

raw salsa

• 2 cans black beans
• 2 cans corn
• 1 large red onion, chopped
• 2 red and 2 green bell peppers, chopped
• 1-1.5 bunches of cilantro
• 1-1.5c red wine vinegar
• maybe some avocado would be good too
• jalapenos to taste (dice, put in half raw, cook half on low heat in oil; alternatively you can broil them and pull the skin off)

another change of blog focus

Two things:

1. Inspired by Jeff's blog, I'm going to start posting about things I've been learning. The idea is a) to not forget as much and b) to sometimes get people to tell me more about these things. The post below is an example of this.
2. Inspired by the experimentalists in my lab, I started a blog to track my thesis work (or lack thereof) at aramthesis.blogspot.com. The sort-of-Ilya-inspired idea is related to time management; seeing how long I spend on tasks vis-a-vis their importance. And hopefully it'll lower the interestingness threshold for posting.

How many people live on less than $1/day?

It's weird how hard this question is to answer. The two kinds of statistics I'm aware of are household surveys, which ask people to estimate their consumption, and national account statistics, like per capita GDP, which measure output. Both are seriously flawed and different methods give dramatically different answers. For example, Sala-i-Martin's 2002 paper The World Distribution of Income (estimated from Individual Country Distributions) argues that the number of poor has dropped dramatically from 1976-1998, while Ravallion and Chen's paper How have the world’s poorest fared in the 1980s? says that poverty rates have been close to flat from 1987-1998; and the differences aren't explained by the differnet time periods they look at. Some of the controversy is addressed in Ravallion's response to Sala-i-Martin.

A summary of the household survey vs. national accounts statistics dilemma is in the abstract of Deaton's 2005 paper Measuring Poverty in a Growing World (or measuring growth in a poor world):

Abstract—The extent to which growth reduces global poverty has been disputed for 30 years. Although there are better data than ever before, controversies are not resolved. A major problem is that consumption measured from household surveys, which is used to measure poverty, grows less rapidly than consumption measured in national accounts, in the world as a whole and in large countries, particularly India, China, and the United States. In consequence, measured poverty has fallen less rapidly than appears warranted by measured growth in poor countries. One plausible cause is that richer households are less likely to participate in surveys. But growth in the national accounts is also upward biased, and consumption in the national accounts contains large and rapidly growing items that are not consumed by the poor and not included in surveys. So it is possible for consumption of the poor to grow less rapidly than national consumption, without any increase in measured inequality. Current statistical procedures in poor countries understate the rate of global poverty reduction, and overstate growth in the world.

Another pitfall is how people approach the topic with preconceptions (also known as null hypotheses). For example, the paper by two World Bank economists [Dollar, David and Aart Kraay (2002) “Growth is Good for the Poor,” Journal of Economic Growth, 7(3) 195-225.] should really be titled "Growth cannot be shown to not be good for the poor," since rather than showing that the bottom 20% receive an equal share of growth, they fail to reject the null hypothesis that the bottom 20% receive an equal share of growth.

Got it? They find that a 1% increase in GDP increase the income of the bottom 20% by an amount that is not significantly different from 1%. But that doesn't mean it's close to 1%, just that their data is sufficiently noisy that 1% lies within their error bars. So maybe "Growth might be good for the poor" would be a better way to put it.

Also, household surveys are probably more accurate for levels of consumption by the poor than for the relative share of consumption of the poor (since the rich underreport consumption or don't reply to surveys). But this paper uses household surveys only to establish the poor's share of consumption, and then estimates the level of consumption by multiplying this by GDP. Since GDP in India (for example) has grown 5-10%/decade faster than consumption measured by surveys, this should systematically overestimate both the level of income the poor get, and the rate at which it grows.

That was worse than a crime; it was a mistake

Not as entertaining as the sewer rat letter, but hopefully clearer.

To the Editor,

The May 1 op-ed "The war we could have won" ignores the staggering immorality of killing 2-4 million people who posed (let's be honest) no threat to the U.S. Imagine how Germans today would feel about speculation that the Final Solution was actually not such a hopeless goal.

It's hard to admit that Americans were on the wrong side of history, so that a defeat for the U.S. was a victory for humanity. However, like Germany, Japan and other nations with war crimes in their past, we need to ground our public discourse in honest remorse for our crimes before going on to speculate about how to fight more effectively.

Sincerely,

Aram Harrow

We're just here to help.

To an outsider, a "problem-solving court" might not look very different from a traditional one. These courts exist, for the most part, in regular courthouses, and there are judges in robes and court officers in uniform.

But there are significant differences. The judges often have an unusual amount of information about the people who appear before them. These people, who are often called clients, rather than defendants, can talk directly to the judges, rather than communicating through lawyers.

And the judges monitor these defendants for months, even years, using a system of rewards and punishments, which can include jail time. Judges also receive training in their court's specialty and may have a psychologist on the staff.

New York Times
In Problem-Solving Court, Judges Turn Therapist
April 26, 2005

There are two images, then, of discipline. At one extreme, the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time. At the other extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come. The movement from one project to the other, from a schema of exceptional discipline to one of a generalized surveillance, rests on a historical transformation: the gradual extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread throughout the whole social body, the formation of what might be called in general the disciplinary society.

Michel Foucault
Discipline and Punish
1973

Introduction

This article refers to the findings of a study into the way that nursing staff working in high security forensic settings construct accounts of offending behaviour, most notably that the concept of ‘evil’ retains usage alongside clinical language. The results have previously been reported in the professional literature (Richman, Mercer & Mason 1999; Mercer, Mason & Richman 1999), and here some more general reflections are offered about the implications of ‘medicalised deviance’ (Conrad & Schneider 1980) for mental health nursing practice and research. Attention is focused on the dominance of psychiatric language in a borderline territory where medicine, morality and the law compete for ownership of the disordered offender. Ultimately, though, it raises concerns about the way that research is conducted, funded and presented. In an era of deference to the ‘gold standard’ of the randomised-controlled trial, the gospel of the ‘systematic review’ and the grail of evidence-based practice it urges us to re-examine the neutrality and benevolence of ‘science’.

Nurse2Nurse magazine
‘Speak no Evil’ Research in a Forensic
Sep 1, 2002

3:49:46

splits:

• first 7 miles: 1 hour
• next 7 miles: 1 hour
• next 7 miles: 62:30
• last 5.2 miles: 47:15

why I love economics papers

because of lines like "The policy recommendations would involve a reallocation of children into "fun" activities." .

And because of the whole link turn philosophy of unintended consequences: the paper argues that vegetarianism can make animals worse off because cows raised for meat are treated better than dairy cows. ("In fact, animal welfare conceivably could be improved by a boycott of vegetables and an increase in meat eating.") Of course, similar sorts of argument could also be made about problems of trying to act altruistically towards people when you're only able to make a small difference.

Also while reading marginal revolution: It's funny how economists have such physics envy, when I read econ papers for fun, but am apathetic about quantum gravity, the black hole information paradox, or other physics things outside my work.

Ph.D comics

somehow the humor of reading phdcomics while procrastinating on the thesis never gets old for me.

recipes

Copied from Saveur, an absurdly chi-chi cooking magazine.

warm soft chocolate cake

1 stick butter (8tbsp)
6 tsp flour
4 oz bittersweet chocolate
2 eggs
2 egg yolks
1/4 c sugar
1 tbsp unsweetened cocoa

1. Preheat oven to 450 and butter four 4-oz molds with some extra butter. Then dust each mold with 1tsp flour and tap out the extra.
2. Cook chocolate + butter in a double boiler on medium-low heat until almost melted, 10 minutes.
3. Beat eggs, egg yolks, sugar until thick + pale yellow, 2-3 minutes.
4. Stir choc. + eggs together and then whisk in 2tsp flour.
5. Pour into molds and bake for 6-7 minutes - should still be soft on inside. Invert onto plates and wait 10 seconds before lifting the mold to let them drop out. Dust with cocoa.

ponche

2 lbs seckel pears (or tejocote)
4 oz peeled tamarind pods
6 6" pieces of sugarcane
5 peeled, seeded, quartered guavas
3 tart apples, cored and cut into wedges
12 prunes
2 tbsp. raisins
2 sticks cinnamon
2 cones piloncillo (Mexican brown sugar)
usually there's some alcohol in it too, though this recipe doesn't mention it

1. Simmer pears + 1 gallon of water for 5 minutes, then remove the pears and cut them in half.
2. Add taramind + sugarcane, cook for 30 mintues until taramind is soft and starting to fall apart.
3. Add the rest and cook until the sugar falls apart, 10 minutes.

spiced okra

1/4c vegetable oil
1tsp brown mustard seeds
1/2tsp urad dhal (black gram beans)
1/2" ginger, grated
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 large yellow onion, chopped
1 medium tomato, chopped
1 lb okra, thinly sliced
1/2 tsp cayenne
1/4 tsp tumeric
salt
juice of half a lime
4 sprigs cilanto, chopped

Heat oil, add mustard seeds, wait 1 minute for them to pop, add urad dhal and fry, stirring constantly until golden, about another minute. Add ginger and garlic and cook another minute. Add onions and cook until soft, another 5 minutes of so. Then add tomatos and okra, and cook until okra begins to soften, 2-3 minutes. Add cayenne, tumeric and salt to taste. Add 1/2c water, reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until the okra is soft and the liquid has thickened. Add lime and top with cilantro.

carrot halwa

4 tbsp butter
5 carrots, grated (about 3 cups)
1.5c half-and-half
1c sugar
10 cashews, chopped
2 tbsp raisins
1/2 tsp cardamom
18 blanched sliced almonds

1. Cook butter in nonstick pot on medium-low for 15 minutes until milk solids fall to the bottom and start to brown. Then pour off the melted better and throw away the milk solids.
2. Fry the carrots in 2 tbsp of this butter at high heat until they start to brown, about 5 min. Then add half-and-half and sugar, reduce heat to medium and cook until thick, 35-45 minutes.
3. Fry the cashews in the rest of the butter until pale golden, for 1 minute.
4. Mix it all and top with almonds.

spinach and ricotta gnocchi

2.5c ricotta
1 bunch spinach
2/3c flour
2c grated parmesan cheese
4 egg yolks
10 leaves mint, minced
salt, pepper and nutmeg
8 tbsp butter
10 small leaves sage

1. Drain ricotta in cheesecloth lined strainer in fridge overnight.
2. Bring water to boil and cook spinach until wilted, about 5 seconds. Drain, cool under cold water, squeeze out exra water, finely chop and then pound into paste with mortar and pestle.
3. Add flour, parmesan, egg yolks, ricotta, mint, nutmeg/salt/pepper to taste and mix well. Dust a surface with 1/3c flour and drop mixture on, 1 tbsp at a time. should make about 40 gnocchi.
4. Bring a pot of salted water to simmer. Cook sage and butter for 2-3 minutes on medium heat until leaves start to fry, then keep it warm on low heat.
5. Cook gnocchi in simmering water in two batches until they float, 3-5 minutes. Remove them and cook in the sage butter until heated through, 1-2 minutes.
6. sprinkle 1/2c more parmesan on top to serve.

turnips with yogurt and tomatoes

1.5c plain yogurt
6 turnips, peeled and cut into 1/2" cubes
3 tbsp peanut or canola oil
2 shallots, thinly sliced
1/2 tsp cumin seeds
2 tomatoes, chopped
1/4 tsp cayenne

1. Put yogurt + 1 tsp salt in bowl with turnips, cover with plastic wrap and marinate in fridge at least 3 hours.
2. Drain, and keep yogurt and turnips separate.
3. Fry shallots, 1-2 minutes, then turnips + cumin seeds, 10 minutes, then the rest until turnips are a little soft and the sauce has thickened, another 10 minutes. Salt to taste.

turnip fries

Cut 4 peeled turnips into 1/2" slices. Toss in a bowl with 1/4c olive oil, 1/4 parmesan, nutmeg, salt + pepper. Bake on oiled sheet at 450 for 18-20 minutes.

a random Mahfouz quote

This is from "Autumn Quail," and it's very simple, but I like it.

In spite of this scene, Isa decided not to give in to despair before making one final effort to defend the sole corner of consolation that had not yet been destroyed for him: the last word had to come from Salwa and no one else. Neither the strength of her character nor the depth of her love gave him great expectations, but he phoned her next day in the afternoon. "Salwa," he pleaded, "I've got to see you immediately."

Back came her answer like a slap in the face.

---------end of chapter------------

and for my next act....

Possibly better than the article ahren linked to is this story about why you should always prepare a followup, even if you don't think you'll need it. Click here and skip past the first 22 minutes.