Pogonophilia

It’s no secret that I thoroughly enjoy beards.

Check out Etsy enabling universal beardedness:

From Boing Boing (seriously, where else?).

Remember, Remember

. . . the fifth of November.

This scene nearly reflects my tranquil first trip to Chevy Chase this morning:

From DCist.

Plan C?

Reliable birth control changed everything.  For women, this test could change everything again. A new test can detect the rate at which a woman’s reproductive genes are aging, to determine how long she will remain fertile.  Says the researcher of the test’s possibilities:

Then you can sit down and have a discussion about her reproductive life plan. In other words, ‘do you want to have your kids before you get your PhD, or afterwards?’ If the answer is ‘afterwards’, OK, but maybe you want to freeze some eggs.

Caveat, caveat, right?  I can almost hear the smart women lawyering up at this invitation to rely when it comes to such a deeply personal choice.

[A] test reliable enough to transform the lives of a large number of women will likely involve a series of genetic and hormonal markers. It will also need rigorous testing to ensure woman aren’t burdened with anxiety – or given false hope.

How exciting.

Like the Pill revolutionized social lives, this test seems poised to revolutionize family lives.  Insert more caveats, of course; a family does not require children.  Indeed, this is only arguably more-revolutionary for women because our fertility is so much more complicated and medically mysterious than men’s.  (Jezebel cautions: “[I]f we gave child-free people their due as valid families, maybe we’d also stop viewing a woman’s ability to reproduce as a measure of her value.”).

For professional women, this test represents a marginally enhanced scope of control.  Enough caveats deter from relying on this test (including an aging woman’s increased risks of carrying a baby).  But at the margin it’s exciting to think that the next generation might have a better grip on the knowledge problems that haunt too many women today.

How to Open a Bottle of Wine w/ Your Shoe

The ingenuity of the human spirit!

From Boing Boing:

Though borrowing corkscrews has been a good way to make friends on vacation!

Dear Noreena

Dear Noreena Hertz,

You were the first lady economist I followed, back in the days when I read things like The New Republic and The New Yorker, but before I discovered anything old. We met right after my Chomsky stage, when I flirted with Kibbutz-esque ideas, when I was the only person I knew who could tell you who is John Galt. The internet was still only Al Gore’s hobby then, so nothing pointed me yet to the curmudgeonly stuff I’ve come to prefer.

Noreena you wore white suits with red scarves and worked with Bono, whose music touched my life, and with Yunus, whose investment in investing still resonates for me. You have always been both smart and sexy and you became a role model at that critical time when I started actively to grab ahold of what I was starting to become.

And, perhaps more importantly, it was because I admired you that I started looking into Economics. You might be horrified to learn that I don’t believe, as you do, that Capitalism is dead. So it goes. But it was because you pointed out that Econ is important that I started thinking along those lines at all.

While I’d completely forgotten about you until I read this Jezebel profile today, I’m so glad we met, Noreena. Even if you’d like me less now, I still admire you, still find your scarf-wearing, ass-kicking self an apt role model.

But. That will not stop me from sharing this post dedicated to your communistic sensibilities with an example of the kind of “Government Inefficiency” anecdote I love:

A Chat About Inefficiency:

Speaking of government inefficiency, I was just going to get my car in the FDIC parking lot. It’s 3 levels underground and a HUGE lot.

And they had a worker down there with a broom and a dirt catcher thing.

You’d think that they would have a giant leafblower
not like . . .
a little broom.

Not even an industrial one, but like one you’d use to sweep up spilled rice in your apartment

I mean: Can you get more efficient? And this was 9 pm. And this guy was sorta halfassedly sweeping. Like: “Its impossible for me to sweep all these leaves so im just going to pretend for the 8 hours i work.”

WPA, teeny brooms — this is how we save or create, folks. Oh, and by smashing resources, like cars.

IJ Protects Individuals from Arbitrary, Life-threatening Legislation

Jeff Rowes introducing IJ’s new case:

Here’s an analogy. Congress doesn’t like big pets attacking people. After 18 months of hearings, Congress outlaws selling pets over five pounds, and defines “pets” as “dogs, cats,” and, inexplicably, “pet rocks,” even though “pet rocks” were never mentioned during the hearings, are not actually household pets, and banning their sale doesn’t advance any interest Congress was trying to address by banning the sale of dogs and cats.

The inclusion of bone marrow in NOTA, like the inclusion of pet rocks in the hypothetical law, is not the result of Congress “making a hard call” or “drawing the line somewhere.” It was just sheer error, one that has undoubtedly cost tens of thousands of lives.

Of course, not every legislative mistake is unconstitutional. But a legislative mistake so profound as to render a statutory provision irrational is unconstitutional when it affects liberty. The Supreme Court has invalidated irrational statutes under the rational basis test at least a dozen times and there are literally hundreds of state and federal cases doing the same thing.

Here’s our constitutional theory in a nutshell. The provable absence of a rational basis for the bone marrow provision of NOTA means that the statute violates the substantive due process right of doctors, nurses, patients, and donors to participate in safe, accepted, lifesaving, and otherwise legal medical treatment.

Next, throwing people in prison for compensating marrow-cell donors, but not throwing people in prison for compensating blood or sperm donors, violates equal protection because there is no non-arbitrary distinction between these acts. In all cases, the donor is being compensated for safely donating renewable cells. The flip side is also true. Just as it is arbitrary to treat similar things differently, it is also arbitrary to treat solid organs such as kidneys like bone marrow.

Monday Links

IJ’s wildly exciting new case, protecting cancer patients from arbitrarily life-threatening legislation.

Why veil, and why not to veil: Egyptian women on the niqab.

Josh on Barnett on Lochner, Natural Rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment.

This is an awful lot of verbiage (gratuitous explication!) for someone who so obvi hates free speech.

Classical Thursday

I’m in desperate need of a a little metaphysical TLC. Here is where I will be Thursday night:

One of the world’s most exciting violinists, Vadim Repin, headlines the concerts by the National Symphony Orchestra this week (November 5 to 7). He will play the Brahms violin concerto, recently recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, and Alexander Vedernikov, former music director of the Bolshoi Theater, will also conduct Prokofiev’s fifth symphony, in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall.

There must be some Brahms junkies out there in blogfanland. Come join!

From DCist.

Happy Halloween!

[Paris, October 31. Image via Getty.]
People, dress up as zombies, attend a march to celebrate Halloween, on October 31, 2009, in Paris. Halloween, which falls annually on October 31, is an ancient Celtic pagan rite, originally held to celebrate the dead and the end of the harvest season. Banner reads: ‘Living dead are hungry.’ AFP PHOTO FRANCOIS GUILLOT (Photo credit should read FRANCOIS GUILLOT/AFP/Getty Images)

From Jezebel.

Play Two of These

and call me in the morning.  This is a busy weekend, but here’s a really beautiful concerto I’m re-learning during those mental-nourishment breaks:

 

and keep nourishing w/ something pretty:

On the Wires

Lifted whole cloth from Freespace, where I loved Prof. Sandefeur’s Friday Poetry today.

It’s bizarre but I’ve read this poem before!  In college, when I was studying Descartes’s moth narratives in the “sentience” classes for my Philosophy major (perhaps needless to say, my undergrad has since cut its Phil. dept. completely):

Don Marquis is, alas, little rembered today. He was a newspaper columnist and humorist who wrote a series of poems supposedly authored by a cockroach named Archy, who banged out his work on a typewriter by leaping head first on the keys.

the lesson of the moth (1927)

i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the
wires

why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense

plenty of
it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before theybecame
too civilized to enjoy
themselves

and before i
could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity

but at the
same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry
himself

archy

Get More Sleep

Once again The Happiness Project taps directly into my brain w/ this prescient suggestion I always forget I should remember:

Get more sleep!

It’s easy to become accustomed to being sleep-deprived, but it’s not good for you. Many researchers argue that not getting enough sleep has broad health consequences, such as raising your risk for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and even obesity, but in addition to those, it has a profound effect on your happiness.

One study showed that a bad night’s sleep was one of the top two reasons for being in a bad mood at work (the other? Tight work deadlines). Another study suggested that getting one extra hour of sleep each night would do more for your daily happiness than getting a $60,000 raise.

Roger. Halloween makes this a bad weekend to set this resolution into effect, but the time change makes this a good week to remember to remember.