Sambal

Two researchers at University College Hospitals, London, have found no correlation between penis size and shoe size. But they’re not done:

“There are suggestions from the literature that hand span, finger lengths or nose size…may be predictive,” according to Shah.
“I have some ideas that I am currently putting together as a research proposal,” the researcher added. “There must be some part of the body that is predictive of penile length…the search continues.”

Who says that socialized medicine stifles research?

Except that he’s being criticized for trying to protect the privacy rights of citizens. But since these citizens are gun owners, Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick feels their privacy rights shouldn’t be protected:

For instance, last fall, Ashcroft blocked the FBI from using gun purchase records gathered under the auspices of the federal Brady Act to determine if any of the 1,200 suspected terrorists detained after Sept. 11 had purchased a gun. This is the man who didn’t hesitate to lock these same people up for months without charges, insisting that looking into their gun records violated their privacy.

Maybe Ashcroft is just, you know, concerned about civil liberties? Ever think of that? Sheesh.

Eugene Volokh has a typically erudite legal criticism of the article.

My trivial layman’s contribution to this discussion is this: Isn’t this an example of the power of the executive branch, which is balanced in our system of government by the legislative and judicial branches? How else can the executive disagree with the legislature? We don’t have a parliamentary system, where the government is the legislature; the executive is allowed to disagree, and there must be some mechanism for doing so.

Finally, and a little facetiously, I ask you: is anyone really claiming that Ashcroft, by all accounts a competent attorney with political ambitions, is actually making deliberately unconstitutional policy on subjects that are laid out clearly in the Bill of Rights?

Wait… don’t answer that.

Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s major daily newspaper, has these two articles up on it’s English-language edition.

First, from an article titled The power of the American far right:

The increased influence of the far right … [has] consequences such as … the concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people ….

Second, from an article titled Farms show better financial results - wealth unevenly distributed:

The distribution of the wealth was quite uneven. The top ten percent of farms had a financial result of at least EUR 34,200, accounting for more than a third of all agricultural income in Finland.

Funny how that works. Wealth is unevenly distributed in Finland’s agricultural sector — with better performing farms earning more income. (Helsingin Sanomat headline: Dog Bites Man, Film at 11.)

But when the same thing happens in the U.S. — when some people who earn money spend it and others keep and invest it, and thus “concentrate” wealth, it’s by the action of “the US far right wing … lurking behind the shoulder of President George W. Bush”.

Really.

(I’ve been over wealth-distribution rhetoric once before.)

Update: Yet a third article covers this ground in a slightly different way. Finland’s majority party’s policies (Social Democratic Party, SDP), are contrasted to those in neighboring Sweden:

Instead of wealth distribution, the SDP is focusing on a policy of growth.

Wealth distribution on the brain! A wealth distribution trifecta! Let me see if I have this straight. It’s a vast right-wing conspiracy when it happens in the U.S.; it’s vaguely regrettable when it happens to farmers; it’s sound public policy to avoid it when grubbing for votes. What is it? Weath redistribution!

ABC has this Reuters story: Poll Says Arafat Expected to Win January Election

The Palestinian-run Jerusalem Media and Communication Center survey said 60.6 percent of 1,199 Palestinians polled in the West Bank and Gaza Strip expect Arafat to be re-elected. That compares with 47.5 percent in June.

The story doesn’t mention any opposition candidates. Does that mean that only 60% of Palestinians expect Arafat to be re-elected in the absence of any alternative? What do the other 40% expect? That he’ll be dead?

I haven’t figured out where I stand on the future war with Iraq.

But it seems clear that the anti-war crowd lost a lot of traction in their past opposition to the ridiculously easy subjugation of Afghanistan. They said Afghanistan would be another Vietnam; it would be a quagmire — just look at the experience of the Red Army; our allies were degenerates on horseback, riding against tanks. Then the whole thing was over in a matter of weeks.

Turns out that it’s a lot easer to liberate a country from an unpopular religious mafia than it is to try to impose an unpopular communist dictator.

Now that the ground war phase is over in Afghanistan, those who oppose the war in Iraq claim we should spend more time on Afghanistan:

They could have been more outspoken about the war in Afghanistan, insisting that the Administration put resources behind police work, humanitarian aid and nation-building.

Seems to me that this comment (part of a larger argument against war in Iraq) misses the point. People were quite outspoken about the war in Afghanistan. But they didn’t offer constructive commentary about resource allocation. It’s a shame, in retrospect. It might have been better taken than the left-wing dittoheaded “quagmire” chorus we got at the time.

The U.S. is done with Afghanistan, at least in an instrumental sense. The Taliban no longer poses a threat — done! Since we’re somewhat enlightened, and to reward our allies, we’re helping out around the house as are some of our European allies. (Or not.) But the aid is incidental. It provides further incentive not to harbor terrorist groups in the future. The U.S. war aims for Afghanistan are done, and there’s no more mileage to be gotten talking about it.

I want to keep a record of this James Lileks quote, so I’m dumping it in here.

LILEKS (James) The Bleat

Bush often seems distracted, as if he has just realized there is a weasel in his pants and he’d best finish up and get out of here so he can tend to this here weasel. And when he gets wound up he’s often like a man with a wheelbarrow full of rocks going down a hill, trying to keep his balance and his cargo intact. I don’t care. He’s good with a prepared speech, because he has a secret weapon: he means it.

I have a minor quibble with Steven den Beste’s otherwise inspiring rant about ethnic studies programs. Steven argues, effectively, that a mind is a terrible thing to waste, and that ethnic studies programs are in fact an industrial-strength way to waste minds.

However, he has this to say about the organization of departments and schools in USC:

It appears that the “college of letters, arts and sciences” is a garbage can where they dumped everything that didn’t fit into one of their 17 “professional schools”

I disagree with this characterization of a common non-professional college as a “dumping ground.” I had the displeasure of doing some graduate work at UC Berkeley, and their organization of schools and colleges is even more baroque and annoying than USC’s.

For example, the College of Chemistry contains the departments of chemistry and chemical engineering. Physics and the other sciences are delegated to the College of Letters and Science, which includes all the fuzzy stuff as well. The College of Engineering is where you’ll find all the other types of engineering, including Materials Science and Engineering (MSE). So if you’re interested in studying materials at Berkeley, it’s going on in three different colleges: Chemistry, Letters and Science (as “condensed matter physics”) and Engineering (in MSE).

I suspect that this arrangement is a holdover from the time that dinosaurs named Lewis walked the earth. (That’s G.N. Lewis as in Lewis structure.) It was probably necessary to give chemistry its own College to keep Lewis happy, and the bureaucracy acquired power and has been too strong to kill ever since then.

In a sense, USC is lucky to still have all of its non-professional programs under one roof; that’ll make it easier for them to shift funding from a dying department to a growing one.

I actually once met someone who is in the target market for Juan Gato’s new foil product.

She was the only anti-Catholic bigot I’ve ever met. She actually claimed that Jean Chretien [Prime Minister of Canada] was taking some political action (I can’t remember what it was; maybe a soft line on illegal immigrants? Appeasement in Kosovo?) because of direct orders from the Pope. Apparently she didn’t know that I was Catholic.

Anyway, she complained about radiation, too. The microwave, you know, it gave her headaches. She had to turn it on, and then leave the room. Not to mention the headaches she got from the “low-quality” (Chinese, she confided) fluorescent lighting most merchants had in their stores.

I told her about Faraday cages. I almost tried to convince her to get an old birdcage and wear it, like a hat, with foil wrapped around the bars. But I didn’t try.

There wouldn’t have been any challenge in it.

Avdi, whom I’ve never read before, has an excellent point on the subject of war toys:

Some day I’m going to be handing my stepson one of the most important material gifts I’ll ever give him - his first gun…. I could not in good conscience educate my children about the necessity of war unless I knew that I was doing everything humanly possible to impress on them them what a horrible, inhuman necessity it is.

I don’t mind guns but don’t like war toys, and I haven’t thought hard about why that is. This post really grabs me.

I hope Avdi sticks around.

Today was busy. Started with walk 20 run 10 (runner’s knee, right leg, more pronounced, possibly stage II; exacerbated by walking quickly). The exercise was fun, though. We talked about drug policy; or was that Thursday? Sunrise is around the time we’re getting back, and it’s often a spectacular one.

Wasted a bunch of time this morning on the ‘net. My wife wanted to do some more work (we’re behind on time for September, even with all the on-site days we put in for the conference), but I stalled indefinitely — well, until she started playing Age of Empires, at which point I know I’m safe. But she answered some client e-mail during the game, which was a quarter here and a quarter there.

We painted the all the rough spots on the exterior of the house that are reachable from a low stepladder, which is to say all but about two of them. Scraping, sanding, cleaning, priming all took under an hour in the late morning.

We went over to her parents’ house for lunch. Pea soup and fresh yuppie bread — nice! After lunch we got to ride around in the fancy rental Jetta station wagon, which is cool but probably not what I’d buy if I actually wanted a car.

We put on the first coat of paint and then headed our for our wild orgy of home-improvement shopping. First to IKEA: plant stand, curtains, sheets, hooks for towels and coats. Then a quick run to the fabric store for material for more curtains. Then we swung by the Ben Moore store, even though it was after six and we knew they’d be closed, because we wanted to see what their Sunday hours are. Their Sunday hours: closed. I do love that company, even though their treatment of their franchisees inconveniences me. I guess as a Christian I shouldn’t be complaining.

Then we drove down to Home Depot, looked at some of their crappy paint and decided not to get any. Then we bought 5 feet of rubber-backed entryway carpet for the back entrance. Excuse me. We stood around for 20 minutes while the perfectionist Home Depot flooring guy carefully plastic-wrapped the linoleum for a very harried mom with two small kids. Then he phoned for relief, as it was 7:00 and evidently he was off shift. Then he stood around waiting for his relief for ten minutes while we waited and another flooring-starved family waited. Finally, he decided to help us.

“I want five feet of this carpet,” my wife said, brandishing our measurements of the entryway. “That’s within an inch, since we’ve got the door on one end and the stairs on the other end.”

“It’s not that precise,” he said. “The machine is out by a bit.”

“Well, how much is it out by?”

“It’s out by how much it’s out.” Deep thoughts from the Home Depot flooring guy. He looked at us accusingly. “You just don’t want to cut it.”

“That’s right. We want you to cut it.”

So he ran out five feet of material according to his measuring device. And we measured it with my measuring tape in my pocket. And it turned out to be five feet on the dot. So it wasn’t out by much.

We took off after that. Actually, there was a long interlude with a composter, vinyl floor tiles with hardwood patterns, laminate flooring, and a serious relationship discussion of our flooring preferences before we made our ultimate decision: to move the library to the basement after our housemate moves out, and to install real hardwood floors down there because we can’t stand the way laminate feels. But basically, we left Home Depot with our rug and two impulse items (airplane-hijacker knife and tiny impulse buy can of WD-40 for the water shutoff valve in the basement, which is stuck.)

On the way home I had the familiar joy of getting onto the Whitemud Freeway from Calgary Trail (see my previous post on the subject if you care). Once home, my wife stained all the raw wood pieces from IKEA while I complained about the fumes. And now I’m blogging, so there.