Website design, text readability, & contrast — some interesting links

I ran across a site the other day called Web Pages That Suck. I started browsing & it has a lot of really good stuff — both humorous, but also very useful.

While reading through the 20 worst websites of 2011, I came across an extended rant discussion about contrast on web sites.

If you are building a web site & you want it to be readable, you need to look into contrast. (And if your website isn’t readable, probably no one will use it.)

One of the quickest guidelines I found is “view your site in monochrome”. If you put it in monochrome & it’s blah, with no visual landmarks or differentiation between sections, then you have a problem no matter how great your color scheme, layout or content is. (I’ve already read “view it in monochrome” in design tips for lots of other things, from drawing to jewelry design to photography.)

A really good — and very pointed — website about the need for contrast is Contrast Rebellion. And honestly, the graphics layout & design by themselves are really fun to look at. (I couldn’t the slideshows to work, but it’s such a minor part it doesn’t really detract from my enjoyment of the site.)

Web Designer Depot has a nice article on contrast in general, not just text & color, but size, placement, layout, etc.

It turns out the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) has developed a standard for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and contrast within a website is part of that standard. Some of the other sites I visited note that as people get older, their eyesight deteriorates, so a site that is no problems for someone who is 20 might cause big problems for someone who is 60.

While there’s a little bit of math at the WCAG contrast page I linked above, there’s quite a bit at the Wikipedia Visual Contrast page. I’m adding the link for that just so I can reference it later — I’m pretty good at math but I think it’ll be a long time before I get so concerned about contrast I start looking at those equations.

And A List Apart (one of my favorite sites to browse through anyway) had a really good March 2010 article titled “Contrast Is King”.

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Some sites that are more tools-to-use-right-now (and yes, most of these were taken from the articles I just linked to, but part of the reason for this post is so I can go back & easily find this information for myself later):

Colors on the web lets you input the hexadecimal codes for two colors & tells you right away if they meet the recommended web design standards for contrast.

Check My Colours will let you type in a website address & it will test entire page for you. Thoroughly. Very thoroughly. Out of curiosity, I typed in the address for this little blog (which uses one of the premade WordPress.com premade themes) and in about 5 seconds, it told me it had tested 1185 elements and found 385 failures. Wow.

Color Scheme Designer helps you design color schemes, and will also show you the color schemes in monochrome & how the color schemes would be seen by people with different types of color blindness. In a post in October of last year I had a link to another color scheme design site, kuler. kuler has a bit more regarding ways to look at color schemes artistically — do they set a mood, are they cool or warm, etc? But I think I like Color Scheme Designer more, especially with the options to check monochrome contrast & see what colors look like to someone who is colorblind.

Speaking of colorblind, Colblindor is a blog all about color blindness (of which there are many types, and more men than women are colorblind, I didn’t know that before). There’s even a page on Colblindor that lets you upload an image then run it through different filters to see how it would look for various types of colorblindness.

And lastly, while I was digging around, I also found Linotype.com, a site with tons and tons of fonts. F0r all the talk about color & contrast, choosing a readable font is just as important too.

Personal Recommendation: Spiceplace.com to buy some great spice blends

About a year ago I was cleaning out the spice cabinet when I encountered an old bottle way in the back of something called Parsley Patch spice blend. It was a no-salt blend of dried parsley, onion powder (I think) and some other ingredients. Out of curiosity, I tried it.

I loved it.

After the bottle ran out, I checked and the grocery store didn’t carry it anymore. I did some searching online and found that and a number of other blends at Spiceplace.com.

If you do a lot of cooking and like to use herbs & spices in what you make, Spiceplace.com is a great place to check out. Since I try to keep the sodium levels down when I cook, I was especially happy to see they have a whole page devoted to salt-free seasoning blends.

They also have a lot of other stuff there: herbs, spices, blends with salt, drink mixes, bouillon, utensils, etc.

They do focus on the restaurant industry, so a lot of the herbs & herb blends you’ll find there come in large containers, around 10-16 or even 20 ounces.

But, at least for me, some of those containers don’t last too long. I use it that much because they’re all really good.

My dad has even started using the McCormick Parsley Patch All Purpose Blend in his cooking, he said he tried it once in a noodle dish he was making and immediately upon eating it noticed what a difference it made.

While I’ve tried more than just these three, the following blends I use a lot are:

• McCormick Home Fry Seasoning – Awesome on potatoes & other vegetables.
• McCormick Parsley Patch All Purpose Blend – Great all around no-salt seasoning mix. I’ve used it with beef roasts, soups, fried eggs, steamed vegetables — works great.
• McCormick Parsley Patch Garlic & Herb Seasoning – This also works great on everything that you might use garlic powder on or in.

Now, Spiceplace.com probably isn’t the only place I could buy those mixes, but I’ve been so happy with their service I haven’t even thought of looking anywhere else.

Last time I ordered from them, they even sent along a note explaining that one of the seasoning companies had been bought out by a different company and even though what they were sending me had a different company name on it, they wanted to reassure me it was still the same ingredients.

Given that they target the restaurant industry & I’m ordering only a couple bottles of spice mix at a time, this attention to detail even in a small order really impressed me.

 

Wow! Yoga not as safe and low-impact as you might think — New York Times article, “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body”, adapted from forthcoming book “The Science of Yoga: The Risks and Rewards” by Broad

“How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body” by William J. Broad, dated January 5 2012, New York Times  (page last viewed January 10 2012, no subscription required as of that time).

Very interesting article. I’ve practiced some yoga poses very intermittently over the last 15 years — I found Iyengar’s book Light On Yoga in the college bookstore & started working out of that.

Based on Iyengar’s suggested workout schedule, which covers more than 50 weeks of practice, I am still . .  ummm . . . not all the way through week 1 and barely into a bit of week 2, if I remember right.

No, I am not naturally flexible — but I am more flexible now, especially on side bends, than I was when I first started. And every time I start regularly practicing the standing poses, within two weeks I’ll get compliments from others saying I look really good or asking if I’ve lost weight,  so clearly there’s some visible muscle toning results from the standing poses.

I also quickly realized there’s a lot of stances & poses that I will never be able to do. According to this New York Times article, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Broad has written a good article, I’d recommend reading the whole thing. But in case it’s behind a subscription firewall by the time you read this, here are some sections I found to be especially noteworthy. (And yes, I do intend to read Broad’s book The Science of Yoga: Risks and Rewards once it is published later this year.)

(For those wondering what an “asana” is, that’s the term yoga uses for poses, stances or positions.)

Glenn Black, a yoga teacher of nearly four decades, whose devoted clientele includes a number of celebrities and prominent gurus, was giving a master class at Sankalpah Yoga in Manhattan. Black is, in many ways, a classic yogi: he studied in Pune, India, at the institute founded by the legendary B. K. S. Iyengar, and spent years in solitude and meditation. . . . Throughout the class, he urged us to pay attention to the thresholds of pain. “I make it as hard as possible,” he told the group. “It’s up to you to make it easy on yourself.” He drove his point home with a cautionary tale. In India, he recalled, a yogi came to study at Iyengar’s school and threw himself into a spinal twist. Black said he watched in disbelief as three of the man’s ribs gave way — pop, pop, pop.

After class, I asked Black about his approach to teaching yoga — the emphasis on holding only a few simple poses, the absence of common inversions like headstands and shoulder stands. He gave me the kind of answer you’d expect from any yoga teacher: that awareness is more important than rushing through a series of postures just to say you’d done them. But then he said something more radical. Black has come to believe that “the vast majority of people” should give up yoga altogether. It’s simply too likely to cause harm.

I thought this part about lifestyle outside the yoga studio contributing to injuries inside the yoga studio was interesting. Sitting for long amounts of time on a regular basis is starting to be seen as a health risk all by itself. And speaking from personal experience, I’ll notice a loss of flexibility & an increase in stiffness if I start spending a lot of time at the computer without regularly getting up & moving around.

According to Black, a number of factors have converged to heighten the risk of practicing yoga. The biggest is the demographic shift in those who study it. Indian practitioners of yoga typically squatted and sat cross-legged in daily life, and yoga poses, or asanas, were an outgrowth of these postures. Now urbanites who sit in chairs all day walk into a studio a couple of times a week and strain to twist themselves into ever-more-difficult postures despite their lack of flexibility and other physical problems.

The whole article was full of cringe-inducing stories about self-inflicted injuries that had resulted from too much yoga. Strokes, compressed nerves in the neck, shoulders, and hips, compressed arteries in the neck & shoulders (in some cases those compressed arteries were what caused the strokes), torn muscles & connective tissue . . . ouch.

As is pointed out by Black numerous times in the article, on a philosophical level yoga is about letting go of ego.

If you bring your ego onto the yoga mat with you & try to push yourself (or a student) farther today than yesterday just to show you can, you wind up with things like this:

I asked [Black] about the worst injuries he’d seen. He spoke of well-known yoga teachers doing such basic poses as downward-facing dog, in which the body forms an inverted V, so strenuously that they tore Achilles tendons. “It’s ego,” he said. “The whole point of yoga is to get rid of ego.”

More injuries.

a growing body of medical evidence supports Black’s contention that, for many people, a number of commonly taught yoga poses are inherently risky. The first reports of yoga injuries appeared decades ago, published in some of the world’s most respected journals — among them, Neurology, The British Medical Journal and The Journal of the American Medical Association. The problems ranged from relatively mild injuries to permanent disabilities.

Years ago my sister gave me the book Relax Into Stretch by Pavel Tsatsouline as a birthday gift. I didn’t agree with everything Tsatsouline wrote, but he did come at stretching from a different viewpoint than many other books I’d read. Relax Into Stretch was one of the first books I’d seen where the author went to great effort to emphasize the difference between stretching muscles & stretching joints — because some of the things you stretch when you stretch joints stay stretched out for good (and that can result in a weaker or less stable joint).

Tsatsouline specifically pointed out & strongly criticized certain kneeling yoga positions as things that cause irreversible (and probably undesirable) stretching of connective tissues in the knees. The “specialist” noted in the 2nd paragraph below is unnamed, but it sounds like they had similar concerns.

These cases may seem exceedingly rare, but surveys by the Consumer Product Safety Commission showed that the number of emergency-room admissions related to yoga, after years of slow increases, was rising quickly. They went from 13 in 2000 to 20 in 2001. Then they more than doubled to 46 in 2002. These surveys rely on sampling rather than exhaustive reporting — they reveal trends rather than totals — but the spike was nonetheless statistically significant. Only a fraction of the injured visit hospital emergency rooms. Many of those suffering from less serious yoga injuries go to family doctors, chiropractors and various kinds of therapists.

Around this time [2000 to 2002], stories of yoga-induced injuries began to appear in the media. The Times reported that health professionals found that the penetrating heat of Bikram yoga, for example, could raise the risk of overstretching, muscle damage and torn cartilage. One specialist noted that ligaments — the tough bands of fiber that connect bones or cartilage at a joint — failed to regain their shape once stretched out, raising the risk of strains, sprains and dislocations.

In 2009, a New York City team based at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons published an ambitious worldwide survey of yoga teachers, therapists and doctors. The answers to the survey’s central question — What were the most serious yoga-related injuries (disabling and/or of long duration) they had seen? — revealed that the largest number of injuries (231) centered on the lower back. The other main sites were, in declining order of prevalence: the shoulder (219), the knee (174) and the neck (110). Then came stroke. The respondents noted four cases in which yoga’s extreme bending and contortions resulted in some degree of brain damage. The numbers weren’t alarming but the acknowledgment of risk — nearly four decades after [prominent Oxford neurophysiologist, W. Ritchie] Russell first issued his warning [in a 1972 paper about possible injuries from yoga] — pointed to a decided shift in the perception of the dangers yoga posed.

Anyway, really good article, anyone who finds the excerpts interesting should please read the whole thing, and if you’re practicing yoga please be careful.

Recipe – Easy macaroni & cheese

This recipe is adapted from the April/May 2008 “Skillet Macaroni and Cheese” recipe from Cook’s Country. It’s almost as easy as mac & cheese out of the box and 20 times better than mac & cheese out of the box.

Easy Macaroni & Cheese

• 3 cups dried macaroni
• 3-3/4 cup water
• 12 ounces evaporated milk (1 can)
• 3 cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese
• 2 cups shredded monterrey jack cheese
• 1 Tablespoon dried onions (can use 1 tsp cornstarch instead, see recipe notes below)
• Optional: Additional seasonings such as dried parsley, Italian seasoning mix, etc; Spicy seasonings such as black pepper, cayenne pepper, or red pepper flakes

Mix 3-3/4 cups water & 12 ounces evaporated milk in a large saucepan (reserve 2 ounces or 1/4 cup evaporated milk if using cornstarch). Heat on medium-high heat.

When the liquid starts simmering, reduce heat to medium, add macaroni.

Cook until macaroni is just barely done (al dente). Turn heat off, stir in dried onion & other seasonings if using them (if using cornstarch, mix with reserved 1/4 evaporated milk & stir in at this step).

Stir in cheeses, one handful at a time. Once all cheese is melted, let sit about 5 minutes to thicken — the dried onions will help soak up any excess moisture — and serve.

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If you want to add more: After macaroni is al dente, turn heat to low. Continue as directed, stirring in dried onions (or cornstarch), seasonings, and cheeses. Once cheeses are all stirred in, add any extra ingredients. Suggestions include 1 – 1-1/2 cups of a mild-flavored cooked meat such as chopped roasted chicken or chopped cooked shrimp; 1 – 2 Tablespoons of a strongly flavored meat such as chopped bacon; 1-2 cups thawed frozen peas; or 1-2 cups chopped and mildly steamed broccoli florets. Stir over low heat until all ingredients are heated through, then turn off heat & let sit for 5 minutes or so to let flavors blend before serving.

 

 

Not thinking things through — Occupy Portland shuts down three of six terminals at the port of Portland because Occupiers have decided their message on behalf of workers is bigger than workers losing wages.

Portland news stations tonight are reporting about Occupy Portland attempting to shut down the port of Portland today.* This was part of an effort by the Occupy movement to shut down all the ports on the U.S. west coast today.

One Occupy Portland participant said on camera “this is bigger than one day’s wages”, because by shutting down the ports for one day it will hurt the 1%.

Personally, I don’t see how the damage done by this one-day shutdown will be more painful to the 1% than the loss of wages will be to the parts of the 99% who lost wages today.  There were multiple clips shown of protesters talking to news cameras, and they all seemed to believe in what they were saying — shutting down the ports will get the attention of the 1% and show them the Occupy movement is sticking around & wants some collaboration, and another protester using the word “articulate” a lot, saying that workers are articulating to protesters that for many working families one day’s wages can make a difference in being able to put food on the table or presents under the tree and workers are also articulating to protesters that this is stressful to them — but I’m still not clear how shutting down the ports actually accomplishes all that.

As one of the news anchors on Fox12 reported, according to the Port of Portland 90% of the businesses shipping through the port at small- and medium-sized companies and 12 000 jobs in the Portland metro area come from maritime shipping.

I’m sure that just means the Port of Portland and Fox12 are either part of the 1% or are in a conspiracy to work with the 1%, because there’s certainly no way it could mean the Occupy protesters just did something really dumb that hurts the people they claim to be representing more than anyone else.

The article I linked at the beginning of this post mentions port operating company SSA Marine that is partly owned by Goldman Sachs, and a grain exporter EGT. Some of the EGT workers are unionized (just not the Longshoreman’s union) and some of the union workers at the port of Portland got wages for the day because the Occupy protesters made it an unsafe working environment. On the other hand some of the truck drivers stuck sitting outside the port unable to deliver weren’t paid for their lost time.

Why does sending some unionized workers home with pay, some truck drivers home without pay, and shutting down three of six ports on a not-so-big U.S. west coast port** for one day show the 1% not to mess with the Occupy Portland movement? I don’t know.

Collins’ AP article said

‘”This is a joke. What are they protesting?” said Christian Vega, who sat in his truck carrying a load of recycled paper. He said the delay was costing him $600. “It only hurts me and the other drivers.

“We have jobs and families to support and feed,” he said. “Most of them don’t.”‘

I guess Vega hadn’t seen the news clip with the protester saying “this is bigger than one day’s wages”.

On a side note, Governor Kitzhaber was also unimpressed and commented to a reporter that “a quarter of our manufacturing jobs are export dependent”, so affecting the workers at the ports runs a significant chance of hurting the 99%. (Not sure if that was a quarter of Oregon manufacturers or Portland manufacturers, link is here, if that doesn’t work check http://kptv.com/ and look for a video titled “Kitzhaber responds to Occupy protesters” dated Dec 12 2011.)

If Occupy Portland wanted to get everyone’s attention and make sure people knew they weren’t going away any time soon, I think they got their wish. But it might not be the way they were expecting.

* Article is at Fox12 KPTV’s site, if link doesn’t work look for AP article “Protesters halt operations at some western ports” by Terry Collins dated Dec 12 2011.

**I don’t have exact statistics at hand, but as of a couple years ago the Port of Portland was expecting to see a decrease in business. It’s a long way upriver compared to many other U.S. ports and part of that river passage is through a section that is too shallow for the newer bigger Pacific cargo ships. The ports in Seattle and California do more business.

Quote, December 11 2011 — Actual cool people are too busy with real life to worry about updating their status

‘ At BlogCon, there was a bar night, and someone complained of not being able to get a signal, and then said, “But all the cool people have a signal, I’m sure.”

Gabe and I both said at the same time: “All the cool people aren’t checking to see if they have a signal at all.”‘

-Ace, Ace of Spades, “Hill Staffers Tweet That They’re All Drunk ‘n Stuff At Congressional Offices; Call Boss an “Idiot” and an A-hole”, December 8 2011 (site last accessed December 11 2011)

Ace’s post was about some congressional staffers who used Twitter to write extremely unprofessional comments about their boss & their job over a few months. Unsurprisingly, they got fired (what I wonder is why it took so long for someone to notice they were doing this).

It’s a short post with a rant well worth reading about people trying to stay connected to the internet all day every day.

Great articles about photos & ways to set up your camera for faster shots — “f/8 And Be There” by Sandy Ramirez at Adorama.com

In essence, Ramirez’s advice  in his article “f/8 And Be There” is to find the lens size on your camera that will allow a large enough field of view to get enough details the photo will come with its own framing & visual context, and then find an f-stop that will keep most everything in focus (in the case of a film 35mm camera, almost everything from 9 feet to infinity will be in focus). Then, instead of worrying about using manual focus or waiting for autofocus to makes up its mind you can leave the camera on manual focus and focus on taking pictures (being there).

I would recommend the entire article. Be sure to check out the comments as there is a brief discussion about different f stops for different lens sizes for different cameras. For instance (and while I knew this at one time, I had forgotten it until I read through the comments) due to a difference in size between the CCD sensors in most digital SLRs and size of film in the original 35mm SLRs, a 35mm lens on a DSLR takes a picture with a field of view that would be closer to a 50 mm lens on a regular SLR. In general, the conversion factor is about 1.5-1.6.

Also, the f/8-and-be-there technique doesn’t work worth a darn on zoom lenses as the zoom factor makes the f stop / distance you’re in focus / lens diameter relationship much more difficult to track. If you’re having to consult charts to find out if you’ll be in focus or not, then you’re probably not being any more spontaneous with your shots than you would be with just using autofocus.

If the link above doesn’t work, full article info is: http://www.adorama.com/alc/article/f8-And-Be-There, “f/8 And Be There”, by Sandy Ramirez, dated June 22, 2011, Adorama.com

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If you’re interested in cameras at all, I’d really recommend Adorama’s site. I ran across them while buying a lens on Amazon.com (where they are a third-party seller), I’ve bought various things from them over the last few years, both through Amazon and directly through their site, and I’ve always been happy with their service. Their site and their catalog are both fun places to browse around just to see what’s out there & see what other people are recommending.

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For those confused by the acronyms being thrown around:

CCD is a Charge-Coupled Device and it is what allows digital cameras to exist — I’ve included the Wikipedia link in case you want to know more about how they work, it gets complicated quickly.

SLR stands for Single-Lens Reflex. It refers to cameras where both the view through the viewfinder and light to expose the film came through the same lens. So whatever you were looking at through the viewfinder was exactly what the camera would see when you clicked the shutter button. Light from the lens was reflected by a mirror up to the viewfinder. When a picture was taken, the mirror was flipped out of the way before the shutter opened ot expose the film. If you’ve used a film SLR and noticed both the click-clack sound it makes when a picture is taken and the momentary blackening of the image in the viewfinder, those were both consequences of that little mirror being flipped out of the way.

DSLR stands for Digital Single-Lens Reflex. In their most basic form, they work like a film SLR except when the shutter opens, it’s not a piece of film being exposed to the light but a CCD sensor. Instead of the image being stored by chemical reactions on the film, it’s stored by an electronic recording of what the CCD sensor saw. In practice, the digital part means that if the camera has a view screen that can show image from the saved files, then photos can be viewed right away instead of having to wait until they were developed in a darkroom as happened with film SLRs. Also, if a digital image doesn’t turn out it can be deleted and the memory freed up by the deletion can be used to take more photos; which is different than how film works, if you take a film picture and it doesn’t turn out, you’ve lost a frame of film and that’s all there is to it.

Quote, November 29 2011 — Thoughts on school

‘What the STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, Math] classes and the classic humanities have in common is this: they require students to master a coherent body of knowledge and learn clear thinking and accurate expression.  There are many ‘disciplines’ that don’t do any of that; they encourage mushy thinking about mushy fields.

But something else emerges from this important study that students and parents need to keep in mind.  What you study is more important than where you study it; students who take solid courses at solid schools will often learn more and do better than students who take empty classes as flashy name schools.’

- Walter Rusell Mead, “Stemming the Tide”, in his ‘Via Meadia’ column in The American Interest, October 27 2011 (site last accessed on November 29 2011)

Mead bases his article “Stemming the Tide” in part on a study by Georgetown University which showed in recent graduats, STEM degrees were in higher demand and STEM majors made approximately 50% more than non-STEM majors.

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Mead (who is a college professor himself, teaching foreign affairs and the humanities at Bard College) also has a good post with advice for students starting their college classes. The full essay is at “Back to School”. In summary, his recommendations are:

1. The real world does not work like school.
2. Most of your elders know very little about the world into which you are headed.
3. You are going to have to work much, much harder than you probably expect.
4. Choosing the right courses is more important than choosing the right college.
5. Get a traditional liberal education; it is the only thing that will do you any good.
6. Character counts; so do good habits.
7. Relax.

Point number 5 above would seem to be in conflict with his article about STEM fields, but for him the two articles are complimentary. Science, technology, engineering and math are all fields where the fundamental precepts stay the same (Newton’s Laws of Physics are still Newton’s Laws of Physics, water is still made up of two hydrogen molecules & one oxygen molecule, and sum of the current going into a single node must always be zero), but the methods & technology used can change fast. So, the liberal education would help a STEM student pick out what were fundamental precepts & what were contemporary techniques, and would also help the student with the thinking, persuading, communicating, and analytical thinking that are needed to work in any field where you work with others — and no matter what field you’re in, you will most likely be working with others at one point or another.

His full recommendation under point #5 is as follows (better yeat, read the whole essay, it’s all good advice):

5.  Get a traditional liberal education; it is the only thing that will do you any good.

Following this advice will be hard; a liberal education is no easy thing to get, and not everybody wants you to have one.  However, in times of rapid change, it is paradoxically more useful to immerse yourself in the basics and the classics than to try to keep up with the latest developments and hottest trends.  You can be almost 100% sure that the hot theories making waves in academia today will be forgotten or superseded in twenty years — but fifty years from now people will still be reading and thinking about the classic texts that have shaped our world.  Use your college years to ground yourself in the basic great books and key ideas and values that will last.

For the same reason, don’t worry too much about getting specific skills at this stage.  You are going to keep learning new skills all your life and you are going to find many of your skills obsolete as time goes on (when I was a kid I was very good at operating something called a mimeograph machine).  What you want to do now is to develop your ability to learn.

It’s a lot of work, but don’t panic; you are not going to get this all done in four years.  Becoming educated is a lifelong project; you can’t turn your mind off and stop reading books when you finish college and expect to get anywhere.  Here are some tips to help you get started.

First, getting a liberal education means you have to achieve literacy in math and at least in one science – and come to grips with the scientific method.  I’d recommend biology as the science you should spend the most time with; this is probably the science that’s going to be changing the world most radically during much of your life — and since you need some chemistry to make sense of it, you will be getting a grounding in two disciplines rather than just one.

Second, study the basic ideas, debates, books, people and events of the western world – with special attention to the Anglo-American subset of the western tradition.  You can’t understand other people’s cultures and traditions until you understand the one that surrounds you.  Art, literature and music are part of this.  Don’t neglect them.

Third, study the United States: its history, regions, culture, politics, literature and economy.  You would be surprised how many highly educated people have never seriously studied (or traveled much in) their own country.  Don’t make that mistake – and study the parts of the US you don’t know.  If you are a southerner, study the north.  If you are from the Midwest, study the two coasts; if you are coastal, study the interior.  If you are white, study African-American history.  Don’t just study this in class.  Seek people out in your school from different backgrounds and get to know them.

Fourth, study at least one language and at least one culture that is alien to you.  Pick a language that opens the door to a big world: Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic, German, the Romance languages (if you get really good in one of these last you will have a surprisingly easy time dealing with others).  Beyond the language study, take a cluster of courses that give you at least an overview of one non-western civilization.  (This works better than taking a scattering of unrelated electives on many different cultures.)  The purpose of taking a language today has less to do with learning to talk to foreigners than it used to; foreigners seem to be learning English faster than we are learning their languages and computer translation software is likely to make reading texts in other languages much easier in your time.  But learning a foreign language is still a great way to explore another world: different languages organize the world differently and to learn a language is to learn a new mental map.

Fifth, learn to write well.  This paradoxically is going to be more important than ever for the next generation.  I can’t tell you how many editors at how many famous magazines have told me over the years that most professors and academics simply cannot write, and bemoan the immense amount of time they must devote to impose some kind of intellectual structure and comprehensible prose on the crabbed drafts they get from, often, fairly well known people.

This will not last.  Publications are not going to be able to continue paying editors to spin straw into gold; if you want to have a public voice in the next generation you are going to have to learn to write well.  This is a hard skill to acquire, but it can be taught.  Most schools don’t do this well; it is expensive and academics generally don’t value clear and attractive prose writing as much as they should.  This is important enough that I would recommend you use it as a factor in choosing a college, but for those of you already enrolled, make a point of seeing what your school offers in this area.

Finally, unless you are following up on an interest that is already a deep and passionate one, try to take courses taught by great teachers.  The main purpose of an undergraduate education isn’t to polish up your knowledge and finish your learning.  It is to launch you on a lifetime quest for wisdom and understanding.  You want professors who can help you fall in love with new subjects, new ideas, new ways of investigating the world.  The courses that end up mattering the most to you will be the ones that start you on a lifetime of reading and reflection.

Quote, November 26 2011 — People like to make their jobs easier (and knowing that holiday sales in total are only 3-4% of U.S. GDP in total suddenly puts a lot of news stories in context)

‘The Media has glommed onto Black Friday for a number of flawed reasons, number one being the MSM’s ceaseless drive to reduce all complex problems down to something that can be expressed in a sound-bite voiceover and a video clip of a crowded mall.

The MSM loves binaries: two parties, two final contestants, and if Black Friday is “good,” i.e. sales exceed last year’s consumerist bacchanal, then the economy is “healthy.”‘

- Charles Hugh Smith, “Just a Holiday Reminder: Black Friday Is Utterly Meaningless”, Of Two Minds, November 25 2011 (site last accessed November 25 2011). Emphasis in original.

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A lot of topics are complicated. To take the economy as an example: how do you measure economic data? If you consider the price of a car now compared to the price of a car in the 1950s, are you adjusting the 1950s price for inflation in the intervening years? Do you use the government’s official inflation numbers, or do you use relative prices of a range of goods to come up with your own measure of inflation?

Official unemployment numbers are around 9% right now, but that is based on people who have been looking for a full-time job in the last four weeks. If you include the number of people who would like a full-time job and can only find part-time work, or those who have given up looking for work we’re closer to 16% unemployment. Which number is right? (See this Wikipedia page on unemployment to get an idea of how complicated even that one economic statistic is.)

If you want to really get complicated, start looking into the issue of gender representation in college & in the workforce. Currently there’s more women going to college to men. Is that good? Or not good? Or something that is only good or bad based on the context? Of those women going to college, many of them are in what are sometimes called “soft” degrees — liberal arts, English, communications, human resources, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, minority studies, etc. There are still more men that women in the “hard” STEM fields — Science, Technology, Engineering, Math(1) (“hard” referring to the importance of measured “hard” data, not to the difficulty of the STEM classes or degrees). Is that good or bad?

If more women prefer to go into liberal arts and related degrees, is it a sign of gender bias in schools? Or is it a sign that just like most men, most women find it easier and more interesting to write an essay about a book than go through five pages of multi-dimensional vector calculus and unlike men don’t feel it injures their pride to say they don’t enjoy getting into fields where there are so many equations to deal with, the original scientists ran through the entire Greek alphabet — and then started reusing a couple Greek symbols when they found more variables they needed to describe?

And if the lack of men in college now, combined with a lack of entry-level jobs for young men who have only a high school diploma or GED, means we’re on the verge of having a whole generation of young men who are and likely always will be 10-20 years behind in their wage earning ability, what then? Should there be discussions about forming mentoring programs for male students in high school to get them on the college track, and men-only scholarships to encourage men to go to college, just like there have been for women the last 30+ years?

Wow. That’s starting to get really complicated. How would a network anchor present all that in a way that would keep the average channel-surfer staying on the news channel?

Enter the narrative. Simplify the story, pick a narrative framework about a “good guy” and “bad guy” — or “victim” and “villain” if you prefer, or how something is “good” or “bad” for the economy or the environment or whatever else you’re talking about — and use the narrative framework as something to arrange all the complicated bits & pieces. That’s a much easier thing to catch someone’s interest as they’re flipping through the channels.

And while I think there are probably a few in the news business who are aware of the oversimplification that is done in order to make a more “entertaining” news product, I think probably most of those in the news business use narratives to oversimplify a topic because it’s easier.

But sometimes “easier” is not always better. I’d rather have news presented in all its messiness — or its irrelevance, such as noting that even if Black Friday sales drop 10% compared to last year (picking a number out of the air there, I honestly don’t know how this year’s Black Friday sales compared to last year’s), that’s 10% of some fraction of 3-4% of total U.S. GDP, so it might be an indicator but by itself it’s not huge –  than something that’s only presented after it’s been simplified into sound-bites and five minute news segments.

—

And yes, I’m aware there is a true art to being able to express complicated problems clearly and succinctly. And that a long rambling discourse on a topic that includes far too many extraneous words & unnecessary tangents can do more harm than good — or even if no actual harm is done, it can still bore people to death.

But in my personal opinion, 99.99% of the news writers, editors, and presenters — and 99.99% of the various pundits, experts, and talking heads interviewed by the presenters — do not have the artistry with words & concepts such that they can reliably deliver a clear & succinct summary of an issue as opposed to an oversimplified soundbite.

So I’d still rather they acknowledge their own limitations and quit trying to decide for me what I might or might not be interested in & what I should or shouldn’t be optimistic or pessimistc about.

—

(1) Update November 29 2011: Corrected “STEM fields — Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine” to read “STEM fields — Science, Technology, Engineering, Math”.

Banning a website just by saying it might reference something else without someone’s permission — SOPA & PIPA, active bills in the U.S. Congress

SOPA/PIPA will enable the U.S. government to force actions such as having a website’s domain name blocked from all search engines & having all advertising removed from the site, within five days, based on only an accusation of copyright infringement. Search engines, social media sites, and web site hosting companies that aren’t diligent in keeping out posts that might infringe copyrighted work can also be sued.

—

Fear of being sued means a whole host of sites (such as Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger, WordPress, just to name a few) will either have to monitor & censor everything users post to prevent any possible infringements, or shut down.

And there’s a ton of satirical humor sites, such as Cracked.com, that will also have to shut down. And pretty much any blog that might ever post a scan from a comic book, picture of art, still from a movie, or sound clip from a song will also be liable to be sued.

The legislation is so comprehensive in describing anything that might possibly be a copyright infringement, anyone who’s involved in internet content hosting or distribution at all (internet service providers, website hosting services, search engines, blog hosting sites, etc.) will have to be very vigorous in monitoring and censoring their users or they in turn could be sued by copyright holders.

—

Technical details

SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act in the U.S. House of Representatives, H.R. 3261. PIPA is the Protect IP [Intellectual Property] Act of 2011, S. 968. Both are still in committee in their respective legislative houses. Looking at the OpenCongress.org status for the bills, it looks like the Senate version got introduced in May and hasn’t moved much since. The House version got introduced in mid-November, is in committee, and has already had a hearing on it.

—

Some Explanatory Videos

According to this video from c|net TV, the hearing was a bit one-sided in witnesses. Although the bills’ titles are noble-sounding — “Stop Piracy” and “Protect Intellectual Property” — the main backers are the movie & record industry. Essentially, they’d rather break the internet than risk someone downloading a movie or song illegally. Comments about the bill begin around 1:10 in the c|net video. (Apologies, I tried but couldn’t figure out how to embed the video into this post.)

Here’s an explanatory video from AmericanCensorship.org, a website that has lots of links and information about these bills, lists of companies & organizations against the bills, e-mail alert lists, etc.

Quote, November 25 2011 — Debt is always debt, but sometimes it’s a mask for other things too

‘”But this won’t save monetary union in the end because it is not a debt crisis. It is a currency crisis. The weaker states are uncompetitive and you cannot force them to deflate their way back to competitiveness by cutting wages 30pc. The EU elites won’t admit it, but the euro experiment is over,” he [David Heathcoat-Amory, Britain's former Europe minister] said.’

- Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “Latin Showdown with Germany over ECB”, The Telegraph, November 16 2011 (site last accessed November 25 2011)

Not a lot I can add that Heathcoat-Amory didn’t already say. If someplace is not attractive to business — lack of reliable or educated workers, wages too high with regards to other business sites, too much government corruption, lack of rule of law, excessive amounts of regulation, etc. — then business will go somewhere else if it can.

I’ve known a lot of people who will say that’s because of flaws in capitalism or Western culture, but really, it’s just human nature. Same thing happens in Asian or African countries, socialist countries, or fascist countries. You can argue about what may or may not make a place attractive or unattactive to different businesses. But if it’s an unattractive place to do business, then business — or rather, the people who run businesses as they are the ultimate decision makers, a “business” doesnt’ make decisions any more than a business license is going to climb out of its frame on teh wall and go pour itself a cup of coffee — will see if there’s somewhere else to go.

And being uncompetitive in wages by 30% in comparison with other nearby countries (*coughcough* germany *cough*) is pretty darned unattractive.

Recipe: Easy & quick cornbread

From the back of the Quaker Yellow Cornmeal package, with the sugar & salt taken out. A bit bland, but goes together fast & easy, cooks up fast too.

Easy & Quick Corn Bread

• 1-1/4 C all-purpose flour
• 3/4 C cornmeal
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 C milk

Preheat oven to 400 F. Grease a 8- or 9-inch pan, a glass pie plate works well.

Mix all dry ingredients in a bowl. Add wet ingredients, mix until it’s just come together. Pour into pan, bake 25 minutes or until the bottom is golden brown (top doesn’t brown much, probably due to me taking the sugar out of the recipe).

Awesome graphic — XKCD shows how all the money in the U.S. (and quite a bit in the world) relates to itself

Even if you don’t like economics or webcomics, check it out just for the sheer amount of work that went into it. Wow!!!

Link to XKCD page where it was published: http://www.xkcd.com/980/

Link to just the graphic: http://xkcd.com/980/huge/

Small picture of the graphic:

Hats off to XKCD writer & creator Randall Munroe. WOW that’s a lot of work!!!

A downloadable file with a list of his references can be found at http://www.xkcd.com/980/sources/

 

Quote, November 19 2011 — A well-written & well-delivered rant to someone who is breaking a system but justifies it as being for the right reasons

‘And I have to say, Mr. Van Rompuy, eighteen months ago when we first met — I was wrong about you. I said you’d be the quiet assassin of nation-state democracy, but you’re not anymore, you’re rather noisy about it, aren’t you? You, an unelected man, went to Italy and said “This is not the time for elections, but the time for actions.” What in God’s name gives you the right to say that to the Italian people?’

- Nigel Farage, member of European Parliament representing southeast England, addressing a meeting of European Parliament and specifically EU Council President Van Rompuy during a debate on EU economic governance on November 16, 2011

Full video:

The explanation of what is going on in the European Union right now is very long & involved if you get into details. But as with many complicated things, deciding what principles matter in the situation in question and matter to you as a person will give you a framework to start sorting out details.

(I add the “and matter to you as a person” and highlight it because many times in policy discussions someone will argue opposing or different sets of principles, sometimes they really do believe in those other principles and sometimes they’re doing it just to play devils advocate or to be a pain in the neck & pick something to argue about as a way to prove they’re smarter than their opponent it. If you follow current events, don’t do that. If you just argue to argue but paper over it by picking a different set of principles each time, people will eventually come to see you as someone who just likes to pick a fight and that’s not a reputation anyone wants to have.)

So, a quick overview of the very last few acts and a bit of background regarding Mr. Farage’s speech: Italy and Greece (and while we’re at it, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal too but Italy & Greece are the ones who look closest to default right now) ran up too much public and private debt since they became members of the European Union about 20 years ago. You can’t run up debt without someone being willing to loan to you, and a lot of European countries & companies got very favorable loan terms while part of the European Union because Germany was also part of the European Union & Germany had a very good credit rating (due to the German central bank & nation as a whole being extremely cautious about debt and balance sheets, which in turn comes from very bad memories of the hyperinflation that hit Germany in the years after World War I.)

Everyone is finally starting to realize that some countries & companies have run up so much debt they won’t be able to pay it back. But pressure is on the European countries in question to cut way back on expenditures & try to pay it back anyway.

When the (elected) Prime Ministers of Greece & Italy were unable to persuade their (elected) national parliaments and citizens in general to agree to the reductions in government spending and/or increased taxes to pay back the debt, they were recently removed from their positions and new Prime Ministers were put in place in both countries WITHOUT ELECTIONS BEING HELD.

Which means national sovereignty in the European Union is being surplanted by other principles. And that wasn’t the way the European Union was supposed to work when it was first started & when the various treaties were first signed.

Part of this — and a general criticism of the European Union project in general — is way too much authority is placed in people who are never actually elected by citizens but are appointed by various elected parliaments — or in many cases, are appointed by people who are appointed by various elected parliaments. Meaning if you are a European Union citizen, your life is affected in many ways by people who you can never ever influence through your own vote. (Even in the United States, as much as we’re starting to build up our own perpetual and unelected governing class in the form of various government bureaucrats in various government agencies, we can still participate in the national presidential elections and the state governor’s election. And the president and state governors can drastically change various government bureaucracies.)

Another part of this — and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has written extensively on this — is that the various parts of the European Union will never fit together without a drastic change in national character and culture on the part of multiple countries. There’s multiple European countries whose governments and citizens are much more frugal and financially conservative than the average European. And there’s multiople European countries whose governments and citizens are much more free-spending and financially extravagant than the average European. So if you join them all together under one currency without making some sort of change in governing styles and lifestyles, you’ll either have the frugal ones feel like they are being forced to unfairly support the freewheelers, or have the freewheelers feel like they have been unfairly grounded for life by the frugal ones.

Or, as is happening right now, everyone in Europe feels that the other side is getting away with something unfair.

But Germany — one of the frugal ones — currently has the upper hand (sort of) because they have the strongest economy in Europe and if there’s anyone who can bail out the countries & companies that got into too much debt, it’s Germany. In fact, they’re about the only one who has a large enough and strong enough economy to do so.

But German citizens don’t want to bail everyone else out. Especially when some of the national debts run up by Greece & Italy were caused by very lavish government paychecks, pensions, and retirement programs. If you were a German citizen, would you want to pay extra taxes and maybe work a couple extra years before retirement — to fund countries where tax evasion is rampant, national retirement age is 55, and there’s been riots in the streets over suggestions such as raising the retirement age by 2 years over the next 15 years?

But if Greece & Italy start defaulting on debts, a lot of big European banks are going to be in a lot of big trouble. Including French banks and German banks. There’s already been hundreds of billions (depending on how you count it, even trillions) of dollars (or the equivalent amount of EU currency) given to the Italy & Greece. Much of which has gone to pay interest on Italian & Greek bonds — many of which are owned by European banks. Hence many critics stating that it’s not European taxpayers bailing out European countries, it’s European taxpayers bailing out European banks who were foolish enough to loan large amounts of money (which is what you are doing when you buy someone’s bond — you are loaning them your money in return for a promise that you’ll be paid a certain amount of interest at set intervals) to countries whose national histories includes repeated episodes of excessive debt & defaults on said debts.

So Germany really doesn’t have the upper hand, because Greece or Italy can still decide to default, and then German banks will be in a lot of pain because a lot of German banks still hold way too much debt from Greece or Italy. But they’re trying to make sure the money gets paid back, and part of that is by saying they won’t extend the next part of various bailout packages to countries which haven’t passed the necessary laws to cut back their expenses.

In reality, there is more debt there than will ever be able to be paid back. The debt has to be written down. The banks have to take a hit, the bank personnel who made bad investments have to be fired, the bank presidents who ran the banks while those investments were being made have to be fired too, and people have to realize that just putting your savings in “a bank” might not be enough, you need to actually keep an eye on said bank & make sure they’re a good bank. (Same thing is happening in the United States.)

And then the European Union will have to make a choice they should have made a while back — either consolidate more, turn the European Union into an actual “United States of Europe” where there is a federal government that can override subsidiary governments; or split the European Union into two, one group of the frugal states and one group of the profligate states. The profligate states will see their national currency lose a lot of value, which will make imports more expensive — but it will make their exports less expensive for buyers which will in turn help bring jobs into their economies. The frugal states will see their national currencies gain a lot of value, which will make their exports more expensive on the world market — and did I mention that much of Germany’s economic strength comes from goods they export? And that much of the problems in profligate European countries comes from not being able to compete in productivity per wage with Germany, who has held their own wages down and consequently has seen much of the European manufacturing base move to Germany because of cheaper wages there — which would reverse if the European Union split and suddenly the profligate states had much cheaper currencies and much cheaper workers?

And no matter what happens, will a lot of people get hurt (hopefully just financially, not physically, although there have already been deaths in the riots) who were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time & not realizing it? Yes.

So right now, we’re back to Mr. Farage’s rant about an unelected man going into a supposedly sovereign nation and stating “now is not the time for elections, now is the time for actions” and removing an elected Prime Minister and replacing him with a new unelected Prime Minister. All to protect some banks who loaned more money than they should have to countries who have a long history of taking on more debt than they can — or intend to — pay back.

And we’re back to principles — is it okay to break the system if you can claim it’s for good reasons?

I say no, because once you start down that path, there’s always “good reasons” to keep breaking the system more and more.

We’ll see what the Europe says. As I noted before, no matter what happens it will be painful for a lot of people.

Quote, October 31 2011 — Parties

‘Hey, everyone’s just hanging out and talking! Why aren’t the guys off at one end of the room and the girls at the other?? Why is nobody pretending to dance or drunkenly fighting or leaving in groups to go bar hopping?!

Oh, this is an actual party.

What?! Well, you could have put up a sign or something!’

- Winston Rowntree, Subnormality web comic, “masquerade” (Subnormality #190), October 31 2011

 

Although I don’t always like Rowntree’s Subnormality comics, I like them far more often than not. And occasionally he(she?) will absolutely hit the nail on the head. Such is the case with the quote above: actual parties include people having pleasant conversations with each other.

If you do follow the link to the October 31 comic (from which I got that quote) and are wondering what’s up with the Sphinx, she is a recurring character. 5000 years old, she has long since given up trying to keep track of the changes in human culture. She does like the recent inventions of interior heating though. And since she enjoys watching people, modern cities are quite a bit more useful for that than the Syrian desert thousands of years ago.

Some of the Subnormality comics are a bit not safe for work (more for profanity than anything else), so be careful if you’re browsing back through the previous comics.

 

Interesting posts talking about orange & teal color schemes in movies — if you think all the new movies seem to look the same, you might be right.

‘Am I talking about the lack of good scripts?  Do I speak of  . . . the endless sequels and television retreads?  No, I am talking about something much more dangerous, much deadlier to the health of cinema.

I speak of course, of THE COLOR GRADING VIRUS THAT IS TEAL & ORANGE!!!’

-Todd Miro, “Teal and Orange – Hollywood, Please Stop the Madness”, Into the Abyss, March 14 2010 (emphasis in original, site last accessed October 28 2011)

Related link from the post: kuler from Adobe. Color themes created by others, color wheels, all kinds of interesting things if you like to mix & match colors.

Miro has a very interesting discussion about the use of teal and orange color grading schemes in recent movies. Teal is the compliment to skin tones, so it makes the skin tones really pop & stand out. And the cold dark blue-tinged look is often used as a way to make things look “gritty” which in turn is supposed to be “realistic” — but real life has a lot more color than that and it just winds up making all the movies look dingy & the same. Which is sad because there used to be a lot of movies that were very colorful.

‘In fact, nothing ever has looked like that because it’s physically impossible.  You see, in order to get flesh tones to look that warm and orangey, the entire image would look warm and orangey – like golden hour, just before sunset. And in order to get teals to look that blue and tealey, the entire image would look cold and blue – like at night.  Never in real-life shall the two meet’

Over the last few years I’ve been reading about photography, which in turn often comes down to high the light is & how light affects the way something looks. And after all that reading and playing around with cameras, I have to agree with Miro. Really warm orangey skin tones and really cool blue surroundings usually don’t come from the same light source.

Originally found mention of this  on Ace of Spades (can’t seem to find the specific post now), who pointed to Boing Boing‘s post, which in turn mentioned posts on the topic by The Cartoon Cave and Into the Abyss.

Worst part is now I’ll be looking at stuff like this whenever I watch movies. Already got spoiled for listening to background music and noticing camera angles courtesy of a couple friends of mine in college who were music and film majors respectively.

Recommended (long) article: “The Shame of College Sports” by Taylor Branch, October 2011 edition of The Atlantic. However cynical you might have been about how idealistic (or not) universities are about their sports programs, you’re probably not cynical enough.

‘For all the outrage, the real scandal is . . . two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not.’

- Taylor Branch, “The Shame of College Sports”, The Atlantic, October 2011

First off, go read the article. Please. It’s a really good article and it covers not just what’s happening today but the history of how it got that way.

However, both for my own reference in case the link ever goes dead and for anyone who just wants to read a quick overview instead of seven pages, here are some highlights & excerpts.

The NCAA (National Collegiate Athletics Association) was not always the colossus who could break individual players or entire teams that it has become. Due to some very shrewd positioning and arm-twisting by the newly hired executive director Walter Byers, the NCAA — which had no actual legal authority over college teams — in 1951-1954 a few schools accepted judgments by an infractions board over grade-boosting for athletes at the College of William and Mary and a points-shaving-in-return-for-pay-from-gamblers scandal at five New York colleges and University of Kentucky.  At the same time, televised college sports was considered a threat to ticket sales so when Byers said no college sports could be televised except for a few licensed by the NCAA, and the University of Pennsylvania and Notre Dame wanted to make their own decisions, Byers told all the other schools to refuse to play with University of Pennsylvania and Notre Dame and for various reasons the other schools went along and University of Pennsylvania and Notre Dame gave up the fight. (The article doesn’t say how long they held out, so I don’t know if they folded immediately or after a long grudge match.)

That’s it. That why the NCAA has so much power now. They claimed they had a ton of authority, got other organizations to act like they had a ton of authority, and sixty years later people still act like they have a ton of authority. But the NCAA was never designated by government as the overseeing body, they really have no legal standing just by their existence.

But the NCAA is very good at writing contracts that make sure they have a lot of authority over the other people and entities that sign those contracts.

‘But after an inquiry that took me into locker rooms and ivory towers across the country, I have come to believe that sentiment blinds us to what’s before our eyes. Big-time college sports are fully commercialized. Billions of dollars flow through them each year. The NCAA makes money, and enables universities and corporations to make money, from the unpaid labor of young athletes.

Slavery analogies should be used carefully. College athletes are not slaves. Yet to survey the scene—corporations and universities enriching themselves on the backs of uncompensated young men, whose status as “student-athletes” deprives them of the right to due process guaranteed by the Constitution—is to catch an unmistakable whiff of the plantation. Perhaps a more apt metaphor is colonialism: college sports, as overseen by the NCAA, is a system imposed by well-meaning paternalists and rationalized with hoary sentiments about caring for the well-being of the colonized.’

In the early 1980s, a number of college football programs finally filed an anti-trust suit against the NCAA and won the right to negotiate their own broadcasting contracts. But the NCAA still has the rights to the March Madness Final Four basketball tournament — the rights to which last year went for $771 million.

And then there’s rights. The NCAA has written their contracts so they retain rights to any sports games that fall under their authority (which I would again like to point out is something they only have because of contracts signed with them, not because they enjoy any inherent special privilege — they’re a private company, not a government or government-appointed entity). You want to see some old games? Buy the DVDs. You want to create a video game with likenesses or names of actual past college players in it? Talk to the NCAA.

Don’t talk to the players, they actually give up all rights to their own likenesses for the duration they play when they sign a contract with the NCAA. (Although according to the article, there’s now a class-action antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA regarding them retaining control of players’ likenesses for perpetuity. Personally I hope the plaintiffs win.)

All those licensing fees are a lot of money. And when there’s that much money at stake, people can convince themselves of a lot of things. Or they can come up with a lot of nice rationalizations to hide behind, depending on how you look at it and how low your opinion is of the people being discussed.

And if I’m starting to sound thoroughly cynical, this article will leave you feeling that way.

‘Today, much of the NCAA’s moral authority—indeed much of the justification for its existence—is vested in its claim to protect what it calls the “student-athlete.” The term is meant to conjure the nobility of amateurism, and the precedence of scholarship over athletic endeavor. But the origins of the “student-athlete” lie not in a disinterested ideal but in a sophistic formulation designed, as the sports economist Andrew Zimbalist has written, to help the NCAA in its “fight against workmen’s compensation insurance claims for injured football players.”

. . .

The term student-athlete was deliberately ambiguous. College players were not students at play (which might understate their athletic obligations), nor were they just athletes in college (which might imply they were professionals). That they were high-performance athletes meant they could be forgiven for not meeting the academic standards of their peers; that they were students meant they did not have to be compensated, ever, for anything more than the cost of their studies. Student-athlete became the NCAA’s signature term, repeated constantly in and out of courtrooms.

Using the “student-athlete” defense, colleges have compiled a string of victories in liability cases.’

Go back and read that again if you missed it the first time: the whole point of the term “student-athlete” is so the NCAA and colleges can have it both ways. If the people playing on college teams were purely athletes, then they’d get wages and workmen’s compensation coverage. So they’re not just athletes, they’re student-athletes. But wait a minute, if they’re students shouldn’t they be held to the same standards as other students, get bad grades if they can’t do the material, etc? Shouldn’t their classes and education take precedence over how well the team is doing? Oh no, they’re not just students, they’re student-athletes.

***

In all honesty, I must admit I came to this article with an already jaded view of college sports. My younger sister is very tall & did well in basketball in high school. She was heavily recruited by various colleges. Wanting an actual education, with an actual degree at the end of it, she was very open with recruiters and coaches about wanting to go to a school that offered an engineering program (she eventually got a degree in mechanical engineering) and that she would be taking a regular load of classes and wanted assurances that she would have enough time to do all the schoolwork those classes required.

The coaches were not as supportive of this attitude as one might have expected from people who were employed at a college or university — institutions which theoretically are supposed to place some priority on education. My sister even had one coach finally come out and say “I’m very worried, I’m starting to get the impression you’ll put academics ahead of sports”.

Years ago, discussing with a co-worker my sister’s experiences with college sports, my co-worker (a man named Greg) took me aside and explained to me very seriously that college coaches might act like they’re the players’ friends but appearances could be deceiving. He had to come to this conclusion after playing on the college basketball team at a community college in Portland. At the time, a number of his teammates were all skipping classes and homework because each was convinced that he would be drafted into the NBA. Greg said he finally pointed out to some of his friends on the team that only the top one or two players on the team had even the slimmest of chances of being drafted, and seeing as how none of them were one of those top two perhaps they all should start hitting the books a bit more.

My co-worker Greg said that at this point, his coach (who had overheard his comments) called him into the office and chewed him out about his negative attitude.

***

But as cynical as I already was about college sports, I didn’t realize until I read the article I linked above that among all the other things college athletes — excuse me, student-athletes — sign away when they sign with the NCAA, they sign away their due-process rights. Client-attorney privacy, access to an attorney, that gets signed away. Or the athlete doesn’t get to play.

‘Rick Johnson, a solo practitioner specializing in legal ethics . . . directed his litigation against the two NCAA bylaws at issue. Judge Tygh M. Tone, of Erie County, came to share his outrage. On February 12, 2009, Tone struck down the ban on lawyers negotiating for student-athletes as a capricious, exploitative attempt by a private association to “dictate to an attorney where, what, how, or when he should represent his client,” violating accepted legal practice in every state. He also struck down the NCAA’s restitution rule as an intimidation that attempted to supersede the judicial system.

. . .

[After Johnson's client finally elected to settled the case against the NCAA out of court due to the NCAA pressing the lawsuit past the point where the plaintiff could afford litigation -- and the out-of-court settlement resulting in Judge Tone having to vacate his judgments against the two bylaws in question] the NCAA’s Eligibility Center devised a survey for every drafted undergraduate athlete who sought to stay in college another year. The survey asked whether an agent had conducted negotiations. It also requested a signed release waiving privacy rights and authorizing professional teams to disclose details of any interaction to the NCAA Eligibility Center.

. . .

Johnson came across a 1973 memo from the NCAA general counsel recommending the adoption of a due-process procedure for athletes in disciplinary cases. Without it, warned the organization’s lawyer, the association risked big liability claims for deprivation of rights. His proposal went nowhere. Instead, apparently to limit costs to the universities, Walter Byers had implemented the year-by-year scholarship rule that Joseph Agnew would challenge in court 37 years later. Moreover, the NCAA’s 1975 convention adopted a second recommendation “to discourage legal actions against the NCAA,” according to the minutes. The members voted to create Bylaw 19.7, Restitution, to intimidate college athletes in disputes with the NCAA. Johnson recognized this provision all too well, having won the temporary court judgment that the rule was illegal if not downright despotic. It made him nearly apoplectic to learn that the NCAA had deliberately drawn up the restitution rule as an obstacle to due process, contrary to the recommendation of its own lawyer. ‘

As pointed out in the article, when the NCAA does decide to make an example out of someone, they never seem to pick a well-heeled coach or tenured professor who might know enough about the system and have enough financial resources to fight back and win. They instead make examples out of college students and tutors who can’t afford long legal fights. And in the course of those legal fights that occur when someone does try to fight back, the students — sorry, my mistake, student-atheletes — are labeled as troublemakers and shunned by teammates, coaches and friends in the athletic departments and see that whatever degree they were working on will likely never be completed now without their athletic scholarship, while tutors are also labeled as troublemakers who shouldn’t be hired by any other university in the NCAA system lest they again display a tendency to actually think academics is at least as important as sports.

And just in case any student-athletes still find some backbone & will to fight in the midst of all that, the NCAA will start making threatening noises about maybe needing to look into compliance of an entire team or athletic department. So even if the players who are fighting the NCAA are in the right, their coach and uniersity will still sell them out rather than face an arcane and convoluted NCAA review process where the entire team might be banned from playing for a year.

It should also be mentioned that it’s not just the NCAA who is selling out student-athletes for their own interests here. The colleges & universities themselves also make a ton of money off of officially-licensed memorabilia relating to their teams or well-known players on their teams. They make a ton of money from the licensing and from donations from boosters — and then pay a ton of money in equipment, buildings, stadiums, and staffing. Personally I’m not completely convinced that in the end the ton of money they make off their sports teams outweighs the ton of money they spend exclusively on their sports teams. But then again, I’m from a family where academics is considered superior to sports, so that obviously disqualifies me from having a worthwhile opinion on the subject.

On a side-note, woe unto any player who sells memorabilia that is not officially licensed.

‘At the start of the 2010 football season, A. J. Green, a wide receiver at Georgia, confessed that he’d sold his own jersey from the Independence Bowl the year before, to raise cash for a spring-break vacation. The NCAA sentenced Green to a four-game suspension for violating his amateur status with the illicit profit generated by selling the shirt off his own back. While he served the suspension, the Georgia Bulldogs store continued legally selling replicas of Green’s No. 8 jersey for $39.95 and up.’

And I do wish Branch had gone farther into some of the problems in college sports that originate with the colleges and universities themselves. Like imposing fees on all students to help pay for sports programs, or allowing coaches to set such grueling workout hours that student-athletes may not have time for regular college classes. Or recruiting students based primarily on athletic ability, so if the student is academically unsuited for that college, they get shuffled off into remedial classes where their grades are fudged so they can stay eligible for the sports program and at the end of four years (or less) it’s doubtful they ever had a chance to get an education at all (and don’t ask about a degree).

That’s another wonderful thing about sports scholarships, there’s an NCAA rule dating to 1973 that says colleges and universities can’t give out athletic scholarships with a commitment period longer than a year. So each year, if the student-athlete has somehow displeased their coach, or if the coach decides there’s a better candidate, or if the student-athlete got injured and can no longer play (keeping in mind that the term student-athlete has been used by colleges as a way to avoid providing any workmen’s compensation programs for student-atheltes who are injured while playing for their college team) their scholarship is revoked.

On a slightly more optimistic note, there are a number of lawsuits currently against the NCAA which have a chance to go somewhere. There’s a lot more attention to college sports (and the problems therein) in general, both NCAA-related problems and problems caused by coaches & administrators, including congressional inquiries into the lack of due process in NCAA disciplinary hearings. Sonny Vacarro, who at one time excelled on getting sports equipment manufacturers’ logos onto college players, has had a change of heart, resigned from his jobs in the sporting goods industry, and is talking to anyone and everyone who will listen about the need to reform college sports. And crucially, Vacarro know where the money comes from and where it goes and what documents to ask for in discovery to show just how much money there really is in college sports and how much the rules are used as extortion — follow the arcane rules, sell out your players and friends, or no money for you!

I wish them the best of luck.

As a last item of interest, attorney Rick Johnson wrote a law-review article about some of the things he found while digging into the NCAA procedures and files, it’s titled “Submarining Due Process: How the NCAA Uses its Restitution Rule to Deprive College Athletes of their Right of Access to the Courts . . . Until Oliver v. NCAA“ by Richard G. Johson.

 

 

Quote, October 22 2011 — Money in your pocket, taxes, and the ability to make your own choices

“For, the more I think about it, the more the question of taxes is central to that of liberty in general. For the question is: Who is to run the country? Is it to be run by its citizens, free to exchange goods and services for mutual benefit, or by the government, increasing both its powers and its corruption by the ability to tax?

. . . Cut taxes and the “special interests” will have no incentive to bribe or “support” a candidate to the tune of a fortune, for the candidate, if elected, will have no ability to repay the bribe.”

-David Mamet, “Liberal Tax Dodgers and the Disrespected Sushi Chef”, Wall Street Journal, October 11 2011 (link requires subscription, unfortunately)

I wish they didn’t put as many of their articles behind a subscription wall.

For those curious abut the title of Mamet’s article, he was referring to artists & business owners he runs into who typically vote for Democratic candidates — knowing that many of the candidates they vote for are disposed towards raising taxes as a way to deal with government revenue problems – but who in their daily lives seek to avoid some of those same taxes.

In the same article, he recounted a dinner with a friend whose daughter was home from college. They were eating take-out sushi and as the father was deconstructing his California roll, his daughter was reprimanding him for disrespecting the sushi chef (who was not present, this being a take-out meal eaten in a private residence). The daughter wanted to know if the sushi chef’s work in putting together the California roll was worth nothing & Mamet said he responded by saying, no, it was worth the price that was paid for the meal, which is why the chef was selling it at that price.

Mamet’s said he wondered why the daughter was so concerned about the value of the sushi chef’s work that she apparently failed to consider the worth of her father’s work to make enough money to both buy take-out sushi & send his daughter to college.

“Why did the T-shirt maker have to whisper when he made his offer of a legitimate exchange? And who did he think was going to pay the increased taxes he voted for? Certainly not himself, as he (like everyone else) was going to dodge as many as he could. Who but “the Rich,” that magical invocation of a group in opposition to which we citizens have time and again impoverished ourselves?”

Maybe the daughter considered her dad to be one of the Rich and that’s why his work to have money to afford a nice house & take-out sushi that he could eat any way he pleased was worth less in her eyes than the work of the anonymous sushi chef?

Facebook once again admits that it doesn’t respect users’ privacy — this is what, the third or fourth time now?

This time, they were tracking your browsing history (yes, your browsing history using your Facebook account number) when you were logged in & when you were logged out.

Even if you were logged out of Facebook, your browser was sending Facebook a cookie identifying you & what website you were browsing when you looked at a website with a Facebook “Like” button.

According to Facebook, that’s now been fixed so the Facebook cookies will no longer identify which user most recently accessed Facebook from that particular computer/browser combination.

But if your browser accepts Facebook cookies, then your browser will still be sending cookies back to Facebook saying a particular browser accessed a particular site that had a Facebook “Like” button on it. There are a couple of add-ons for Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome that will delete those cookies as soon as you log out of Facebook.

Aside from using those add-ons, you can use one browser program to access Facebook & realize that all your browsing history on that browser is being tracked by Facebook, and then use a different browser program that doesn’t accept Facebook cookies for all other browsing. Or you can still use one browser for all browsing, but whenever you log out of Facebook you’ll have to delete all Facebook cookies.

Ugh.

Currently I’ve set Internet Explorer as my only browsing program that will accept Facebook cookies — of all browsers, I like IE the least and don’t mind using it only for that. Other browsers I use are Firefox & Flock, I like Flock best of all.

I’ll check out the Firefox add-ons, will be interesting to see if they might work in Flock as Flock is built on Firefox.

(I’ve yet to install Chrome on any of my own computers, in part because I’m happy with Firefox & Flock, and in part because I’m not real thrilled with Google’s endless tracking. A few years ago they started reporting to the CDC if there was an increasing number of people doing internet searches for terms such as “flu symptoms” in a geographical area. Google has a page explaining how it works & swearing that all user data is removed before the trend is reported to the CDC, but it’s still a bit creepy to me.

On a side note, once again Facebook’s changes have broken the link between Facebook & WordPress. I swear, every time they change something on their site, I have to delete & reestablish the link between Facebook & WordPress.

Side note #2: it doesn’t work to just reset the connection from WordPress’s side. I had to go in on my Facebook profile, delete WordPress as an app, delete Facebook as an connection in WordPress, and then start all over again from the WordPress side. Only reason I knew to do this is because I had to jump through that many hoops last time Facebook changed their layout.

Links:

Sept 24 2011, “Facebook is scaring me”, Dave Winer, Scripting News. Discusses how if you’re logged in to Facebook, Facebook has the ability to post to your Facebook feed what other sites you’re browsing even if you don’t hit a Facebook “Like” button on the non-Facebook site.

Sept 25 2011, “Logging out of Facebook is not enough”, Nik Cubrilovic, Nik Cubrilovic Blog. While checking on what Winer wrote, Nik Cubrilovic discovers that Facebook cookies are sending Facebook information about what sites with a Facebook “Like” button are being browsed — with the account number of the Facebook user who logged in to Facebook from that browser — even after that user has logged out of Facebook. Shows text of cookies & explains which cookies are tracking what. Reprinted as “This is how Facebook tracks you” on betanews.

Sept 26 2011, “Facebook Fixes and Explains Logout Issue”, Nik Cubrilovic, Nik Cubrilovic Blog. Facebook responds to Cubrilovic, changes the cookie that was sending back individual user information after a user had logged out. Also has information on what cookies Facebook is still leaving on your machine even after logout, what those cookies track and why. Reprinted Sept 28 2011 as “Facebook backs off tracking logged-out users” on betanews.

Sept 28 2011, “Facebook Is Tracking Your Every Move on the Web; Here’s How to Stop It”, Alan Henry, Lifehacker. Brief synopsis of Facebook cookie tracking issue to date, short list of add-ons that can remove tracking cookies from Facebook & other social networking sites such as Twitter and Google+ once a user has logged out.

Quote, September 14 2011 — Polls & Surveys

‘To which Mr. Ritz replied “No expensive survey can trump the individual right of farmers to market their own grain.”’

- Gerry Ritz, Canadian federal Agriculture Minister, quoted by Lorne Gunter in “Lorne Gunter: Ottowa delivers freedom to farmers over protests of Wheat Board”, National Post, September 13 2011 (site last accessed September 14, 2011)

For those who are unfamiliar with Canadian grain markets (and I’ll admit I’m not an expert, so apologies in advance for any mistakes), wheat & barley grown for human consumption in the Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and parts of British Columbia has to be sold to Canadian Wheat Board.

Has to be. By law.

Whatever price they pay, that’s what the producer gets. Doesn’t matter if the farmer could find a better price on the open market — or if the prices on the open market are worse, for that matter. They have to sell to the Canadian Wheat Board.

Looking at the Wikipedia article on the Canadian Wheat Board, various forms of it date back to World War I. The present organization can be traced back to 1935, although at different times it’s been in control of setting the prices for different crops. Since the early 1970s, their control has been over non-feed wheat and barley only.

The National Post article is good to read, not just for the quote, but for a discussion on how the aforementioned ‘expensive survey’ had questionable results. Poll respondents were only offered the options of marketing themselves or the Canadian Wheat Board continuing as the only legal buyer, but were not offered the option of both being available at once, meaning the Canadian Wheat Board would still exist and could be sold to but poll respondents would have the option of marketing their grain by themselves if they chose.

From the article, the option of the CWB continuing to exist but no longer being mandatory would have likely been the most popular option had it been an available option & the allegation is that option was deliberately left out of the poll in order to boost the numbers of people saying they still wanted the Canadian Wheat Board to be the only legal buyer.

And then there is the question of who actually was included in the polling –

‘Brian Otto, president of the Western Barley Growers Association (a pro market-choice organization) said he called over 1,100 producers on the list last fall and discovered “deceased producers, producers who had exited the industry, retired producers and so called interested parties, who were receiving a ballot.”

So there’s even a question as to how many current farmers voted in this poll, and whether the poll would have looked different if the polling had been limited the people most affected by the current policy.

(Which is not a discussion unique to Canada — in the U.S. there can be significant differences in polls of “adults”, “likely voters” or “registered voters”, even when the polls are taken in the same areas & are regarding the same issues.)

Anyway, interesting article, and I’m glad to see a politician say that principles trump a survey, even if it’s an expensive one.

Further links:

• Wikipedia article on Canadian Wheat Board, including history & motives for its development - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Wheat_Board
• Website of the Canadian Wheat Board – http://www.cwb.ca/public/en/

September 11 2011 — In memoriam to those who died 10 years ago today

¤*¨¨*¤.¸¸ …¸.¤\
\ 9/11 AMERICA \
.\¸.¤*¨¨*¤ .¸¸.¸.¤*
..\
☻/
/▌
/ \ NEVER FORGET!!! keep the flag going

 

(Text art copied from the Facebook post by Soldiers Angels.)

Article on food & fuel — WSJ weekend interview with Peter Brabeck-Letmathe

“If politicians of this world really want to tackle food security,” Mr. Brabeck-Letmathe says, “there’s only one decision they have to make: No food for fuel. . . . They just have to say ‘No food for fuel,’ and supply and demand would balance again.”

Brabeck-Letmathe is the chairman & former CEO of Nestlé. His interview with Brian M. Carney appears in the September 3 2011 edition of the Wall Street Journal under the title “Can the World Still Feed Itself?”

The article is well worth reading in its entirety. The debate over whether ethanal & biofuel use leads to increased food prices has been going on since at least 2008.

I think Brabeck-Letmathe puts the debate to rest with some figures I hadn’t seen cited before:

“The energy market,” Mr. Brabeck-Letmathe argues, “is 20 times as big, in calories, as the food market.” So “when politicians say, ‘We want to replace 20% of the energy market through the food market,’” this means “we would have to triple food production” to meet that goal—and that’s before we eat the first kernel of what we’ve grown.

That seems fairly conclusive to me. Even if it can still be debated whether the increase in food prices from 2008-2011 was due to ethanol & biofuel use, we’ll rapidly approach a future where the link is inarguable simply because the energy market is so much larger than the food market.

Even as it is,

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s most recent estimate predicts that this year, for the first time, American farmers will harvest more corn for ethanol than for feed. In Europe some 50% of the rapeseed crop is going into biofuel production, according to Mr. Brabeck-Letmathe, while “world-wide about 18% of sugar is being used for biofuel today.”

Numerous news articles & blog posts over the last few months have argued many of the revolts in the Middle East & northern Africa have been driven by rising food prices in those areas. There are some arguments that increased amounts of U.S. dollars floating around because of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s low interest rates and loose monetary policy of the last few years has increased commodity prices, but clearly even if that wasn’t the case, less food would mean more expensive food.

And as Brabeck-Letmathe points out, there a lot of the world — a lot — where the cost of food as a percentage of disposable income is much higher than in developed countries. For much of the Third World (which encompasses hundreds of millions of human beings) food costs can be 80% of disposable income.

Interestingly, Brabeck-Letmathe looks at both the food and fuel discussions in terms of how to produce the most calories. While I hadn’t encountered that point of view before, in a way it does make the most sense as the ultimate concern in both cases. Whether it’s W amount of beef or X amount of oatmeal, Y amount of ethanol or Z amount of heavy crude oil, it all comes down to the same question: how much use can you get out of it. And that in turn is based on the amount of energy contained in whichever commodity you’re discussing.

The comments about genetically-modified organisms were refreshing to see, so much of the press coverage I’ve seen of the issue dances around the trade-offs of the research versus rejecting the research, ignoring that in favor of talking about how strongly various interest groups feel about GMOs and accusations that GMO supporters only care about profit.

(I’ll be honest, I’ve been skeptical of GMO-haters ever since seeing a student presentation in a college class that sounded like something out of medieval witch trials. The student presenter used “GMO” as both a noun & verb, claiming — and I’m not making this up — if GMOs are ever grown in a patch of land, ever, the ground itself is GMO’d and all subsequent crops grown in that field, regardless of whether they are the same type of plant or not, will be GMO’d and become GMO’s themselves. And once those plants have become GMO’d by the soil contamination, all future descendants of those plants will be GMOs.)]

Brabeck-Letmathe seem equally skeptical,

“If you look at those countries that have introduced GMOs,” Mr. Brabeck-Letmathe says, “you will see that the yield per hectare has increased by about 30% over the past few years. Whereas the yields for non-GMO crops are flat to slightly declining.” And that gap, he says, “is a voluntary gap. . . . It’s just a political decision.”

And it’s one thing for rich, well-fed Europe to say, as Mr. Brabeck-Letmathe puts it, “I don’t want to produce GMO [crops] because frankly speaking I don’t want to produce so much food.” That, he says, he can understand.

What’s harder for him to understand is that Europe’s policies effectively forbid poor countries in places like Africa from using genetically modified seed. These countries, he says, urgently need the technology to increase yields and productivity in their backward agricultural sectors. But if they plant GMOs, then under Europe’s rules the EU “will not allow you to export anything—anything. Not just the [crop] that has GMO—anything,” because of European fears about cross-contamination and almost impossibly strict purity standards. The European fear of genetically modified crops is, he says, “purely emotional. It’s becoming almost a religious belief.”

This makes Mr. Brabeck-Letmathe, a jovial man with a quick smile, get emotional himself. “How many people,” he asks with a touch of irritation, “have died from food contamination from organic products, and how many people have died from GMO products?” He answers his own question: “None from GMO. And I don’t have to ask too long how many people have died just recently from organic,” he adds, referring to the e. coli outbreak earlier this year in Europe.

Also, Brabeck-Letmathe gives a brief historical summary of Nestlé and the food industry as a whole:

Nestlé exists, Mr. Brabeck-Letmathe says, because as Europe’s population “urbanized,” as people moved to the cities and traded their ploughshares for time cards, “somebody had to ensure that people” who worked 12 hours a day in a factory could feed themselves. For the first time in history, “you need[ed] a food industry. You need[ed] somebody who takes a product, who treats it so that its shelf life allows it to be transported, to be brought into the consumption center. That’s why we have canning, that’s why we have pasteurization, that’s why we have all these things.”

The vast majority of us would have no idea any longer how to feed ourselves if we turned up one day to find the supermarket empty. We rely on industrialized food production, distribution, preservation and storage to make our urban lifestyles, our very lives, possible.

There’s a whole separate discussion in the article regarding taxation of the 98.5% of water that humans use which isn’t used for direct consumption or washing clothes. Many processes and products — including ethanol and biofuels — are only economically possible if water is free. But water isn’t really “free”, it’s always been abundant enough that it could be treated as free yet we are approaching a time that won’t be true. If most of that water has even a nominal fee attached to it, then the uses of it that are unnecessarily wasteful will get priced out of the market. Such as biodiesel, where the production ratio is 9 100 : 1 for water used : biodiesel produced. Ouch.

Recipe: Savory Zucchini Corn Fritters

As often happens when I try new recipes, my reaction was “hmmm . . . decent, but not outstanding. Not sure if I’ll make them again but interesting to try at least once.” Mom & Dad’s reaction: “Awesome!!!! I’ll have a third helping, please!”

Dad liked the fritters best with salsa added to them, Mom ate them plain but thought they would go great with turkey at Thanksgiving.

At any rate, here is the recipe. It’s adapted from the Zucchini-Corn Fritters recipe that appeared in the most recent issue of Food Network Magazine.

 

Savor Zucchini Corn Fritters

• 2 medium zucchini, coarsely shredded, at least 3 cups or more
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 Tablespoon unsalted butter
• 1/2 medium onion, finely chopped
• 4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• kernels from 2 ears of sweet corn, at least 2 cups worth (can use thawed frozen corn if necessary)
• 1/2 cup shredded parmesan cheese
• 2 cups chopped fresh parsley
• 1 cup yellow cornmeal
• 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 large egg
• Vegetable oil for frying

Shred the zucchini, toss with salt in a bowl & let stand 10 minutes. Drain off liquid, wrap zucchini in a kitchen towel & squeeze dry.

Toss the zucchini with 1/2 teaspoon salt in a bowl; let stand 10 minutes. Wrap the zucchini in a kitchen towel and squeeze dry.

Melt the butter in a frying pan, add the onion & garlic and cook until slightly softened, stirring occasionally. Add the corn & cook, stirring occasionally, until crisp-tender. Set the frying pan aside.

Stir together the cornmeal, flour & baking soda in a medium bowl.

Whisk the buttermilk & egg in a large bowl, then add the zucchini, parsley, parmesan cheese & the corn-onion-garlic mixture.

Add the cornmeal mixture to the mixture in the large bowl, stir until combined.

Pour vegetable oil into a large skillet until about 1/8 each deep. Heat the vegetable oil over medium heat. Scoop scant 1/4 cup of the batter into the oil, use the back of the measuring cup to flatten the scoops. Cook until golden brown on one side, flip and cook until golden-brown on the other side, about 3-4 minutes per side. Drain on paper towels. Serve warm or at room temperature. Can be reheated in the oven or microwave.

Suggested reading: Michael Yon’s latest post, “The Art, Science and Carpentry of Explosives”

‘improvised bombs were around before the grandmother of any living person was born.  Interestingly, the troops I have been with in Iraq and Afghanistan nearly universally want this information disseminated, while many people far away from the jagged edge are afraid to discuss bombs.’

- Michael Yon, Michael Yon Online Magazine, “The Art, Science, and Carpentry of Explosives”, August 29 2011

Really interesting article about using explosives to flush out IEDs in Afghanistan. Lots of good pictures, also profiles his tentmates, they sound like really nice guys.

Michael Yon is an independent combat journalist who has been following U.S. troops in Afghanistan & Iraq since 2004.

To all my East Coast friends, please stay safe & I hope Hurricane Irene doesn’t do too much damage.

Hopefully it won’t do a lot of damage. Don’t know how many of you will have to evacuate, hope it goes as quickly as possible.