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We're gonna meet ladymondegreen and another friend or two at Vegetarian Dim Sum House in Chinatown tomorrow afternoon (Sunday, January 1st). Wanna join us? If you have my number you could text me. Or comment here on LJ.

Monday night we're going to Original Cyn Burlesque [mildly nsfw link, unsurprisingly] at Lucky 13 Saloon, 213 13th St @ 5th Ave, Park Slope, Brooklyn. 10pm, no cover. Wanna come?

Occupy flyer in Makawao, about 6 miles from Paia, on Maui. Nov 5, 2011.

I've been saying it all year, so before the number dwindles too much more, I'll post it: All of the Republican candidates are unelectable in the primary. Not a single one of them has a chance of winning the nomination. And yet, if they're the ones running, one of them will.

This was true back when Herman Cain, Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and Sarah Palin, were part of the set. Still true now. None of them can win it, but apparently one of them will anyway.

Reading "E. O. Wilson's Theory of Everything" in The Atlantic, I ran across this:

Indeed, while we sat in camp chairs talking about conservation and ants and countless other subjects, a dispute was raging among evolutionary biologists half a world away, one of the most hotly contested in that field in years-and Wilson was at its center.
[...]
The current controversy results from another bid by Wilson to overturn conventional scientific wisdom. For more than four decades, evolutionary biology has been dominated by a school of thought known as "kin selection," which postulates that some species arrive at cooperative behavior and a complex division of labor as a matter of reproductive strategy among close relatives.
[...]
The furor erupted with the publication, in the scientific journal Nature in August 2010, of an article written by Wilson and two co-authors, Martin A. Nowak and Corina E. Tarnita, both of Harvard. Titled "The Evolution of Eusociality," it amounted to a frontal challenge to a key concept of kin-selection theory, called "inclusive fitness."

Which reminded me of a talk I went to with satyrgrl in 2008, at Harvard, about "the evolution of cooperation", in which a Harvard scientists who described himself as an evolutionary mathematician (or something like that) described his mathematical models of cooperation and what kinds of cooperation they lead to, ending with the most powerful sort based on a model of group cooperation.

I'm pretty sure that was Martin Nowak, which means that we saw a presentation of the very same ideas that ended up in this paper. Indeed, his math did explain the evolution of group cooperation without depending on arguments based on kin relationships. He just showed that group cooperation could outcompete others and provided an advantage to each individual in that group, regardless of the advantage it might also give to other members of the group, given certain models.

Since biology, evolution, and etc., are not at all my fields, it feels kinda surreal to read about a major scientific controversy in the Atlantic and partway through realize "hey, I saw that guy talk about this stuff before they published the paper, and didn't even realize it was going to be controversial".

After missing the Monday farmers market two weeks ago due to too much going on at work, and missing it again last week due to being on Maui (no regrets, since that very day I snacked on fresh mangoes and lilikoi falling from the trees around me), yesterday I went for the first time in three weeks.

Usually, by this time of year, the tomato variety has dwindled from 10+ separate labelled bins, sorted by variety, to one or two bins of assorted remainders, no longer labelled. Last time I went, there were still plenty of varieties in their own bins, but I knew that wouldn't be the case this time.

Indeed, there were only two crates of heirloom tomatoes...

... one of them full of black prince tomatoes! No labels, as I've come to expect this late in the season, but that crate on the right is very clearly all black prince. This is my favorite tomato, and it's a sort that I've never before seen later than September at this market. More than a month ago I had already eaten what I thought would be my last black prince 'til August 2012, and said goodbye.

Now I have a bagful of them.

The law clearly bans unlimited political spending by corporations:
A violation of free speech! Law overturned.

People camp out in a park to express their political views:
We have park regulations that say you can't stay there at night! Kick them out.

Mushroom basket is solid red with a really funny shaped, with kind of a point at the bottom and folds running up the sides. Maybe they named it because it looks kind of like a basket?

It turns out to be the weakest flavor tomato I've ever tried, but has a very nice texture. Almost like the tofu of tomatoes: you add what you want and it takes on the flavor.

I put some chunks in a pita with a bit of tahini on it, and the tahini soaked in; the flavor combination was really nice, as long as I didn't use too much tahini. I bet it'd work well with soy sauce (very small amount), or baba ganoush. Good on toast with salt and pepper on it.

Not quite fair to call it "tofu", though, becase it does have a noticeable tomato flavor - it's just very mild and easily overpowered.

It's also the softest tomato I've ever met. I tried to pick one of the firmer ones from the crate at the farm stand, but it still got bruised soft spots just from being carried home in a loose bag with some other tomatoes. I bet it would not last more than a week even in the fridge without starting to get too soft, and it's so fragile!

They only had it at the market last week, and I didn't see it again this week. I don't remember seeing it before, either. Perhaps it has a very short season.

Question for those if you in the world of northeast US universities: What would you consider reasonable hourly pay for hiring someone to transcribe recorded audio interviews to text, in support of someone's research?

[ I posted this in Blue Mass Group yesterday ]

The Great Depression began in the fall of 1929. For years, Congress and the Hoover administration tried to keep the Federal budget deficit down, restraining spending increases to well below what was needed and attempting to balance them with tax increases - while the economy continued to collapse and jobs continued disappearing by the millions. By the time FDR took office in 1933 and began the New Deal, this had been going on for almost three and a half years. Unemployment was 25%.

Economic expansion began in April of 1933, and continued going strong under the New Deal for the next four years.

By 1936, GDP and industrial production were above their pre-crash peaks; unemployment was down to about 15% and falling rapidly. And by 1937, as reported in in this post from the Campaign for America's Future:

A second cyclical downturn officially began in May 1937 when FDR, always a fiscal conservative, mistakenly thought the economy had become self-sustaining and slashed public spending programs to balance the budget. These harsh and premature spending cuts caused another severe recession that ended after 13 months in June 1938.

[...]

When the economy again contracted sharply in late 1937 and early 1938, FDR quickly reversed course and rapid growth immediately began again. GDP soared by 10.9 percent in 1939 and industrial production soared by 23 percent.

[ Read more: The "FDR Failed" Myth ]

Roosevelt learned his lesson quickly: With unemployment still high, it was not the time to cut spending. Economic recovery had to come first; without recovery, measures to reduce the deficit would be doomed.

A similar story, on a smaller scale, is playing out in front of us today. 2007's financial crisis precipitated a financial and economic collapse in 2008. Barack Obama took office in 2009, and economic recovery began immediately, and continued under Obama's stimulus spending. Since Obama's stimulus was relatively paltry and lacked the scope and scale of FDR's New Deal, recovery was not as robust, but it did continue until stimulus spending began to sputter. And now, two years later, we're once again about to prioritize the deficit above jobs and the economy during a time of high unemployment.



Today's Congress has forgotten this lesson from history. Republicans are dead-set on repeating the mistake of 1937 because they desperately refuse, despite all evidence, to believe the obvious. Obama and Congressional Democrats are willing to follow them down this cliff, allowing Republicans to sacrifice American jobs and the economy on the altar of their ideological purity.

Will our economic story follow the outline of the Great Depression's, complete with an avoidable mistake that harms millions of people's lives? Do you want the second chart to show a second sharp sustained downward dip, like the first chart shows in 1937-1938?

[ Please re-post this link. ]

Eeek, a long weekend snuck up on me! We have Monday and Tuesday off from work.

I only have a few scattered plans for this 4 day weekend.

Do any of you notice, when typing an email or a blog post or something like that, that you're tending to start so many sentences with a "T", you consciously try to think of non-T words to start your sentences with? Just for some balance and variety. Or is it just me?

Edit: I thought of also mentioning that the #2 letter I have this issue with is "I", but since T is the one that comes up more for me and that I try to avoid first, I left "I" out. Now I see that I should've mentioned it. More of you have this issue with "I" than with "T".

The Global Commission on Drug Policy, which was convened by the former presidents of Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, and includes former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other prominent political leaders, will hold a press conference tomorrow in New York calling for an end to the War on Drugs.

From the Global Commission's web site:

The Global Commission on Drug Policy will build on the successful experience of the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy convened by former presidents Cardoso of Brazil, Gaviria of Colombia and Zedillo of Mexico. Persuaded that the association between drug trade, violence and corruption was a threat to democracy in Latin America, the Commission reviewed the current 'war on drugs' policies and opened a public debate about an issue that tends to be surrounded by fear and misinformation.
[...]
The Global Commission on Drug Policy will host a live press conference and teleconference on Thursday, June 2 at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City to launch a new report that describes the drug war as a failure and calls for a paradigm shift in global drug policy.

The Commission is the most distinguished group of high-level leaders who have ever called for such far-reaching changes in the way society deals with illicit drugs - such as decriminalization and urging countries to experiment with legal regulation. The Executive Director of the global advocacy organization AVAAZ, with its nine million members worldwide, will present a public petition in support of the Global Commission's recommendations that will be given to the United Nations Secretary General.

Avaaz is like the international version of MoveOn.org. Would you sign their petition today, and repost this link elsewhere?

I want there to be a desktop environment for Ubuntu called Universe. Not a bad name for a desktop environment, is it? It could compete with Unity until someday, in the future, the two projects could merge. Advocates of this new merged project would be known as ...