More is Not Better

From an excellent NPR story on the puzzling regional variations in health care; there are adjacent towns with similar populations in which some medical procedures are performed five times as often in one as in the other. And more procedures does not lead to better care:

A couple of years ago Keller and some colleagues did an elegant study of one kind of back surgery in Maine, a procedure called discectomy. Keller found communities in Maine that had high rates of this surgery, communities with low rates, and communities that were somewhere in the middle. Then he followed patients who had had surgery in those communities over a five-year period to see how they fared. Keller says the conclusion was undeniable.

"In the high rate of surgery overall, the patient outcomes were the least good of those three categories. In the middle rates, the outcomes of the patients were in the middle. And in the low-rate areas — less frequent operations per capita — the outcomes were the best."

The reason that areas with more back surgery did worse, Keller says, is that doctors in those areas were operating on people whose issues were less severe; that is, patients who might not have been good candidates for an operation. So the problems associated with the surgery probably outweighed the problems of their actual sickness. For them, more wasn't better.

White House Art

Every new first couple gets to redecorate the White House with pieces that government museums own but don't have on display, and I am sad to report that the Obamas have made some atrocious choices, like this field of blue blotches by Alma Thomas. The thing looks like a magic eye stereogram, but it isn't.

Soccer Sisters

Behind the line of grownups watching the boys play soccer, the girls make friends.

Undulatus Asperatus

Meteorologists are considering defining a new type of cloud, Asperatus. They sure look cool.

Tragic Humanism

Terry Eagleton:

The distinction between Hitchens or Dawkins and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic humanism. There are those who hold that if we can only shake off a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, we can be free. Such a hope in my own view is itself a myth, though a generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision of the free flourishing of humanity, but holds that attaining it is possible only by confronting the very worst.

The only affirmation of humanity ultimately worth having is one that, like the disillusioned post-Restoration Milton, seriously wonders whether humanity is worth saving in the first place, and understands Swift’s king of Brobdingnag with his vision of the human species as an odious race of vermin. Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals got out of its way.

Knowing vs. Knowing

The British Psychological Society asked a bunch of psychologists to describe "one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves." Many of the responses are like these:

David Buss: One nagging thing that I still don’t understand about myself is why I often succumb to well-documented psychological biases, even though I’m acutely aware of these biases. One example is my failure at affective forecasting, such as believing that I will be happy for a long time after some accomplishment (e.g. publishing a new book), when in fact the happiness dissipates more quickly than anticipated.

Norbert Schwartz: One nagging thing I don’t understand about myself is why I’m still fooled by incidental feelings. Some 25 years ago Jerry Clore and I studied how gloomy weather makes one’s whole life look bad -- unless one becomes aware of the weather and attributes one’s gloomy mood to the gloomy sky, which eliminates the influence. You’d think I learned that lesson and now know how to deal with gloomy skies. I don’t, they still get me.

In other words, being an expert in how the mind works doesn't help much in making your own mind work better.

Advice for Doctors, Nurses, and the Rest of Us

"When in doubt, be human."

--Dr. Alfred Shulman

Indignation

Theodore Dalrymple, former prison doctor and now professional curmudgeon, confesses to his love of indignation:

I once had a patient who had had the words ‘Fuck off’ tattooed on his forehead in mirror writing. When I asked him for the reason for this, he said that it was to wake him up in the morning when he looked at himself in the glass. It never failed, he said.

Newspapers perform more or less the same function for me. There is always something in them to irritate me profoundly, and there is nothing quite like irritation to get the juices circulating and the mind working. . . .

Whenever I am in France, I read the French newspapers. There is always plenty in them to infuriate me, and so they are well worth the reading; for it must be confessed that indignation is one of the most rewarding of all emotions, as well as one that automatically gives meaning to life. When one is indignant, one does not wonder what life is for or about, the immensity of the universe does not trouble one, and the profound and unanswerable questions of the metaphysics of morals are held temporarily in abeyance.

I used to share this sentiment. I used to read things that I knew would offend me, seeking offense, and of course I found it. I reveled in intellectual condescension, moral superiority, and social snobbery. The pronouncements of idiots delighted me, and the actions of trashy people made me laugh.

I decided, though, that the whole business was at best a waste of energy and possibly a real danger to my soul. I now believe that a taste for indignation corrupts our judgment, and easy condemnation of others corrodes our morals. The root of any true morality is compassion, coupled to a sense of our own weakness. Not that I don't have opinions -- as anyone who reads this blog knows, I have a great many. I believe firmly that many ideas are stupid and many actions wrong. But I do not think that anger, mockery, or scorn are the right responses to human foibles.

And, honestly, I do not find that giving up the pleasure of indignation makes me less happy. I find, instead, that compassion releases me from anger, and that letting go of anger makes me much more pleased with myself and the world. To go about in a state of fury may have sharpened my wits for debate, but the price was constant tension and outbursts of anger and gloom. For me, at least, the Buddha was right: the way to happiness is compassion. I believe that indignation is something like bacon, or whiskey. A little may make you smile, but too much for too long and you have ruined your body, or your life.

Limits

“Our country should not be asked, and should not ask of itself, to shoulder the main burden of determining the political realities in any other country. . . . This is not only not our business, but I don’t think we can do it successfully.”

--George Kennan, Testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1966

The Libertarian Experiment, Continued

Interesting NY Times article about Mohamed Aden, who emigrated to the United States at the age of 22 but returned to Somalia 15 years later when the elders of his tribe offered to make him their leader. He has been finding the job easier than he expected:

But however playful or flamboyant he may come across, Mr. Aden seems to have hit upon a deeper truth. People want government, he says, even in Somalia. “They’re begging for it,” he said.

And for all you former and current Minnesotans out there:

“We needed a man of peace and he is from a peaceful place, Minnesota,” said one elder, Mohamed Ali Farah.

Williamsport

I'm working now up on the C&O Canal in Williamsport, Maryland. Williamsport was near the midpoint of the canal, and it was one of the three major ports along it. The other two were Cumberland at the western end, which is way out in the middle of nowhere, and Georgetown, DC at the eastern end, where it is too expensive to acquire land. So the National Park Service has planned since the 1970s to make Williamsport into a center for interpreting how the canal worked. This pictured shows the boat basin known late in the canal's history as the Cushwa Basin, after the owners of the warehouse that still stands beside it. When the NPS acquired the canal, this was a muddy, trash-strewn hole, and its excavation and rewatering were part of the first phase of the Williamsport restoration.

The next phase is to rewater a mile or so of the canal, including a lock and the aqueduct across Conococheague Creek, and then have boat rides. The construction might involve disturbing a couple of known archaeological sites, and right now we are testing part of a prehistoric site along the canal. This site includes a surface layer full of artifacts dating to the Late Woodland period, AD 1000 to 1550, and, we think, another occupation layer about 4 feet down. Not sure how old that is, but as a guess maybe 4000 years. Here my crew is opening a test unit into the edge of the river terrace. We found a lot of small potsherds and a couple of broken stone tools in the upper levels, but we haven't reached the lower occupation surface yet. The weather for the past few days has been wonderful, dry, partly sunny and about 70 degrees. On days like this, finding artifacts in the woods, archaeology is a wonderful thing.

Loneliness and Craigslist

Another answer to the problem of loneliness in the modern world: using Craigslist to put together a group of like-minded people to share a house:

The impetus for the group home or collective they hope to form is less about finances — though it is true that pooling resources yields better real estate — and more about community building. Indeed, Ms. Berger and others seem to share the ideals of the old-fashioned communes of yore, except that their groups are tiny, urban-centric and linked to outside interests like fixing bikes or, here in New York City, membership in the Park Slope food co-op. And like communes, many collectives give themselves names: The House of Tiny Egos (a name that’s decidedly more evocative than, say, Findhorn, that of the hoary Scottish commune) is a five-person collective in a century-old brick bungalow in Bed-Stuy. Not only do they aim to remain of the world, they hope for a convenient location, one that’s near all the major subway stops.

Are their numbers surging? Hard to tell, though people who study more traditional “intentional communities” — that is, any group of individuals living together with shared values, as in a commune or collective — say that they are demonstrably on the rise. Laird Schaub, executive secretary of the Fellowship for Intentional Community, said his nonprofit’s database has swelled from 614 communities in 2005 to more than 1,300 this year.

Real Science

A very depressing article on scientific research, primarily biomedical research, at PLoS Biology. Science these days, it seems, is mostly about writing grants and producing publications, and very little about discovery.

The article has struck a nerve with researchers and generated lots of emails:

“The problem is, over and over again, that many very creative young people, who have demonstrated their creativity, can't figure out what the system wants of them—which hoops should they jump through? By the time many young people figure out the system, they are so much a part of it, so obsessed with keeping their grants, that their imagination and instincts have been so muted (or corrupted) that their best work is already behind them. This is made much worse by the US system in which assistant professors in medical schools will soon have to raise their own salaries. Who would dare to pursue risky ideas under these circumstances? Who could dare change their research field, ever?”—Ted Cox, Edwin Grant Conklin Professor of Biology, Director of the Program on Biophysics, Princeton University

“You can write a grant for an important project for which there is ample pilot data. It can be very well reviewed but still fail to be funded. Money is limited, and maybe the projects funded are even better, so you cannot necessarily complain. But the issue is wastage. The pilot data may go nowhere—just languish in a drawer. Expertise will be lost—the applicants will have to work on something else. Eventually, someone else may repeat the work and bring it to publication, but without the advantage of knowing what had already been done. So the previous investment of the funding bodies is wasted.”—David Strutt, Senior Research Fellow, Professor, Department of Biomedical Science, University of Sheffield

Science has become a bureaucratic activity, like just about everything else in our bureaucratic age. Everyone complains about the horrid drain of writing endless grant proposals, but how else to decide who will get the funding? It is one of the peculiarities of our age that we have both a huge problem with illiteracy and innumeracy in the population and an oversupply of professors and researchers.

Annals of Really Obvious Research

High-heels Linked To Heel And Ankle Pain.

The mind boggles at the audacity of this claim.

Andy Warhol

A dispute has broken out over which works by Andy Warhol are "authentic." This has a marvelous irony about it, because Warhol's whole career was aimed at undermining the concept of "authentic" art. He was fascinated by the notion of creating works of art that he never touched with his hands, and he even created a stamp of his signature. He was interested in the image, not doing anything with his own hands, which is why he called his studio the Factory. Nonetheless, the art world has decided that there must be authentic Warhols and inauthentic Warhols, and so now we have lawsuits over the matter. What a joke.

But I am writing about Warhol not because of this absurd fooferaw about authenticity, but because of the widely entrenched notion that he was some kind of sage:

Warhol asked different questions about art. How does it differ from any other commodity? What value do we place on originality, invention, rarity, and the uniqueness of the art object? To do this he revisited long-neglected artistic genres such as history painting in his disaster series, still life in his soup cans and Brillo boxes, and the society portrait in Ethel Scull Thirty-Six Times. Though Warhol isn't always seen as a conceptual artist, his most perceptive critic, Arthur C. Danto, calls him "the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced."

Everything that passed before Warhol's basilisk gaze—celebrities, socialites, speed freaks, rock bands, film, and fashion—he imprinted with his deadpan mixture of glamour and humor, then cast them back into the world as narcissistic reflections of his own personality. This is what makes him one of the most complex and elusive figures in the history of art. As Danto explains in his brilliant short study of Warhol, the question Warhol asked is not "What is art?" but "What is the difference between two things, exactly alike, one of which is art and one of which is not?"

Now I grant you that Warhol was clever, and he certainly understood some things about the twentieth-century art world better than anyone else. Hence his mockery of the fetish for "authenticity," and his insights into the nature of celebrity and the power of a simple image reproduced a thousand times.

To me, though, philosophy should go beyond this. To me, sages are supposed to do something besides observe the foibles of their own times. They should point toward something of value; they should say, not just how things are, but how they might be better. Warhol explicitly rejected this notion of wisdom. To him artists were people who made striking images, and who somehow embodied the excitement, the glamor, and the eroticism of art as a way of life. Which is certainly his right, and I have no real complaint about Warhol's life. He made striking images, got rich, and lived just the way he wanted to. Great for him.

What bothers me is holding Warhol up as some kind of model of what art is. To me, Warhol was essentially a clown. Or perhaps a fool would be better. Just as fools mocked kings in some way that was supposed to enhance the kings' glory, Warhol mocked art, and the art world has decided that his mockery somehow enhances the glory of contemporary art. But it doesn't. Warhol showed that art is just a species of entertainment and artists are no different from other celebrities, and therefore that is it completely absurd to pay thousands of dollars for works that are no different in kind from Campbell's Soup cans. Somehow the art world embraces this notion while still insisting that works of art are objects of great value. If Warhol was right, original works of art have no value at all. If he was wrong -- well, what? What would show that he was wrong? Have any of the people who buy and sell contemporary art given any thought to what would show that Warhol was wrong? To what would really give art value?

Warhol's questions are neither original nor interesting. The problem of what constitutes art has been debated since the 1700s, and Marcel Duchamp already asked Warhol's questions in the most extreme possible way. And, frankly, who cares? Nobody but people who have millions of dollars invested in things that they consider works of art. I couldn't care less what art is. When I look at something, I ask myself, is it interesting? Is it beautiful? Does it have some effect on my mind and my emotions that goes beyond the effect that reading the catalog description would have? And is that effect a good thing or a bad one?

But this is somehow too deep for the contemporary art world, just as it was too deep for Andy Warhol. His glitzy silk screens leave me completely cold. I have read in several places that Warhol was proud of having no hidden depths. Everything, he liked to say, was right there on the surface, and likewise there was nothing to his art except what you saw. Still, critics have loaded his works with meaning, just as they have loaded some of his silk screens with authenticity.

Enough already. There is nothing to Warhol's works but the image, and there is nothing to his thinking but one long-running joke. There is no there there.

The American Speech Community (?)

E.D. Hirsch, Jr., writing in the Chronicle ("How Schools Fail Democracy"), bemoans the many Americans who don't seem to have a common language for talking about political problems:

Full membership in any speech community and in any democracy involves mastery not just of grammar and pronunciation, but also of commonly shared knowledge—often unspoken and unwritten—that is equally essential to communication. All effective writers and speakers have learned the convention of tacit knowledge. They know that a baseball metaphor like "he struck out" can be confidently used, but a cricket metaphor like "he was leg before" cannot. Their audience will know the name Franklin D. Roosevelt, but not necessarily Harold L. Ickes.

Obviously there is something to this. You can't have much of a conversation without some shared knowledge and experience. We do count on our schools to teach students enough American history and civics to understand the basic political discourse.

But the whole piece still reeks of white privilege and smug conservatism. Hirsch assumes that everybody but a few kooks agrees on what our students ought to be learning, and that what they agree on is the standard patriotic historical narrative, plus the Bible, Shakespeare, and a few other classics. In fact there is no such agreement, and every time somebody tries to create such a standard curriculum a horrible row breaks out. Who are the historical figures American students should be learning about? Should we have Ronald Reagan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Thomas Edison? Or perhaps Nat Turner, Samuel Gompers, and Medgar Evers?

And what should the students learn about whatever heroes we choose? I think we could probably agree that George Washington belongs in the curriculum, but what will we say about him? Should we point out that he believed very strongly that society should be dominated by the wealthy, educated elite, and that he was very suspicious of democracy? Should we note that he was a deist who said a great deal about Providence and next to nothing about Jesus, and who explicitly said that the United States was not a Christian nation? (I dare you to try that one in rural Virginia.) Should we point out that Thomas Jefferson was one of history's leading hypocrites? That Martin Luther King cheated on his wife and was at least interested in socialism?

There is no politically neutral way to teach history. By what we choose to include or exclude, and what we chose to say, we offer an interpretation of the past that somebody else will challenge. When I teach recent history I try to convey what political activists of all stripes believe in and what vision they pursued, and I strive to be even-handed. But this is itself a political act, because it asserts that the past is not of immediate political relevance. It denies the stories that, for example, labor activists and religious conservatives believe ought to be told. By teaching without villains and heroes, without white hats and blacks, I reject certain approaches to both the past and to contemporary politics.

Literature is no easier. There is no list of books that everyone agrees are important, nor is there any agreed way to teach the ones that show up on numerous lists. And why do kids need to know baseball metaphors, when a lot more of them play soccer?

Hirsch wants to use the school curriculum to promote American unity:

Mastery of the knowledge assumed within the American speech community is not just a technical prerequisite for proficiency in the standard language. It is also a prerequisite to something equally profound in a democracy—a sense of community and solidarity within the nation.

But does a real knowledge of history promote a "sense of community," or does it show that we have always been in conflict with each other? Should we exclude, say, slavery, the Civil War, the coal mine wars, and the Civil Rights struggle in the name of "solidarity"?

I have a better idea: instead of trying to create a sense of community through shared metaphors, how about we actually work together and help each other? When rich bankers oppose giving basic health care to poor people, and CEOs take no interest in whether their lower-ranking employees can make ends meet, maybe people should fight them, instead of looking for some kind of common ground based on baseball metaphors and the Federalist Papers.

Hyenas are Smarter than You Think

At least when they are working together:

Spotted hyenas may not be smarter than chimpanzees, but a new study shows that they outperform the primates on cooperative problem-solving tests.

Captive pairs of spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) that needed to tug two ropes in unison to earn a food reward cooperated successfully and learned the maneuvers quickly with no training. Experienced hyenas even helped inexperienced partners do the trick.

When confronted with a similar task, chimpanzees and other primates often require extensive training and cooperation between individuals may not be easy, said Christine Drea, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University.

I think this study supports the notion that "Intelligence" is not a simple, single thing, but a bundle of skills, some of them only loosely connected. Hyenas survive by hunting as a pack, so they are good at seeing how their actions will work together with those of a companion to achieve a desired goal: if I make this zebra turn while you go for the hind leg. . . . Chimps by contrast rarely do that sort of thing, so they aren't naturally good at it. On the other hand they were able to learn with enough work, which shows an advantage they have over hyenas: they can learn to do unnatural, unfamiliar things if they have to.

New Species

As a result of all the biodiversity surveys going on around the world, hundreds of new animal species are being discovered every year. Of course a lot of them are nematodes and ants, but many of them are mammals, like the Laotian Rock Rat, reptiles like this gekko, and amphibians. The world truly is a big and fascinating place.

Reasoning

"Reasoning is a robust source of hope and confidence in a world darkened by murky deeds. . . . The remedy for bad reasoning is better reasoning."

-- Amartya Sen

My Favorite Definition of Justice

". . . the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society."

--Learned Hand

Mandatory Flu Shots?

The New York state government is requiring that all health care workers who have direct contact with patients get both the annual flu and H1N1 vaccines. And lots of people are upset about it. Some, of course, are crying "big government" and moaning about the erosion of individual rights. But in another sign that anarchists understand the world better than libertarians, some private companies, including HCA, the largest private hospital chain, are requiring the vaccinations for their employees. All big bureaucracies, private or public, limit freedom, and since public bureaucracies are subject to more kinds of pressure, they are generally less arbitrary than private companies. Case in point: NY is allowing a religious exemption from the vaccination requirement, but HCA is not.

The rationale is that doctors and nurses who get the flu can spread it to their patients, especially hospital employees who work with sick and vulnerable people.

"The rationale begins with the health-care ethic, which is: The patient's well-being comes ahead of the personal preferences of health-care workers," New York State Health Commissioner Richard F. Daines said.

I find it interesting that only about half of health care workers get the annual flu vaccine, a number that is frustrating to disease fighters. Some of this is just the inevitable carelessness that people develop about routine activities, like doctors who don't wash their hands, or organic chemists who have to be forced by OSHA to work under fume hoods. But I think lots of people, including doctors and nurses, are freaked out about shots. A nurse in NYC:

I have a problem with being mandated to put something in my body.

Is this fed by the movies, in which injections are almost always given by bad guys and contain something horrible?

But NY State and the hospital companies are holding firm, saying that the vaccines are safe. An HCA administrator:

If somebody didn't want to wash their hands or scrub before going into surgery, you can imagine there wouldn't be a lot of tolerance for that.

There certainly wouldn't. The protection of public health is one area in which governments have long wielded great powers, going back to medieval efforts to combat the plague, so there is nothing new about any of this. And I think in this case the bureaucrats are right. Health care providers do have an obligation not to make their patients sick, one they very often fail at. Here is a simple way they can perform their duties better. If you're that freaked out about shots, and about regulations designed to protect patient health, maybe you shouldn't be working in health care.

Genetic Evidence for an Aryan Invasion of India

The languages of northern India are Indo-European, related to the languages of Iran and Europe. This, plus the caste system and certain other details of ancient Indian society, have long led European scholars to imagine an invasion of India by Indo-European or Aryans around 3000 years ago. However, Indian nationalists hate this notion. They want Indian civilization to be wholly native-grown, and they want all Indians to more closely related to each other than they are to any outside growth. They especially hate the notion that the caste system is the remnant of an ancient conquest, since in their view it was an organic product of Indian religion.

Now a genetic study of the Indian population by an international Indian and American team supports the invasion hypothesis:

The new research reveals that nearly all Indians carry genomic contributions from two distinct ancestral populations. Following this ancient mixture, many groups experienced periods of genetic isolation from each other for thousands of years. . . .

These genomic analyses revealed two ancestral populations. "Different Indian groups have inherited forty to eighty percent of their ancestry from a population that we call the Ancestral North Indians who are related to western Eurasians, and the rest from the Ancestral South Indians, who are not related to any group outside India," said co-author David Reich.

All current genetic research should carry the label, "interesting if true," but this seems like a good study, and it confirms what I think is the obvious interpretation of Indian history.

Anglo-Saxon Gold

What can you say about this discovery except, wow. The hoard contains 1500 objects and 12 pounds of gold. From the curator:

The two most striking features of the hoard are that it is unbalanced and it is of exceptionally high quality. It is unbalanced because of what we don’t find. There is absolutely nothing feminine. There are no dress fittings, brooches or pendants. These are the gold objects most commonly found from the Anglo-Saxon era. The vast majority of items in the hoard are martial - war gear, especially sword fittings.

The quantity of gold amazing but, more importantly, the craftsmanship is consummate, this was the very best that the Anglo-Saxon metalworkers could do, and they were very good. Tiny garnets were cut to shape and set in a mass of cells to give a rich, glowing effect, it is stunning. Its origins are clearly the very highest-levels of Saxon aristocracy or royalty. It belonged to the elite.

Most of the gold and silver items appear to have been deliberately torn from the objects to which they were originally attached. We have over 80 gold and garnet pommel caps, and there also appear to be fittings from helmets.

This is not simply loot; swords were being singled out for special treatment. If it was just gold they were after we would have found the rich fittings from sword belts. Perhaps gold fittings were stripped from the swords to depersonalise them – to remove the identity of the previous owner. The blades then being remounted and reused.

It looks like a collection of trophies, but it is impossible to say if the hoard was the spoils from a single battle or a long and highly successful military career. We also cannot say who the original, or the final, owners were, who took it from them, why they buried it or when. it will be debated for decades.

We don’t know how it came to be buried in that field, it may have been a tribute to the pagan gods or concealed in the face of a perceived, but all too real, threat, which led to it not being recovered.

The Lure of Tabloid Love

Sometimes I just can't resist the articles of dating advice that Yahoo dangles before my eyes when I sign out of my email account. There is something so intriguingly tawdry about them. Something sexy and ridiculous at the same time. And the worldview they represent is so incoherent. Take this latest, "Nine Signs a Guy is a Keeper," from Glamour magazine.

1) He has his act together.

Girls, fight that impulse to heal a crazy guy with your love and settle for the stable lunkhead!

2) He puts you first. Picture a delicious platter of grilled steak. Does your man offer it to you first to pick the best piece? He does if he's a keeper!

Because you're so narcissistic you couldn't possibly live with a guy who didn't accept how much more important you are than he is.

3) He's not afraid of your germs. You know a guy is really into you when he can't stay away, even when you're bedridden and snotty. When you're sick with the flu, he says, 'Let me come over and take care of you,' rather than, 'Oooh, you sound really contagious... call me when you're feeling better."

The first clue that there is something weirdly maternal going on here.

4) He asks about your family, and he seems to genuinely want to hear about them.

Now I see; this wasn't written by a woman of dating age, but a mother with daughters of dating age. Date nice boys who will want to take me to lunch!

5) He makes time for your friends. In the beginning of your relationship, does your man show an interest in meeting your besties? And does he follow it up with a plan, like hosting a low-key dinner party?

Honestly, ladies, how many of you have ever dated a man who would hold a dinner party and invite your friends? And why doesn't he have any friends of his own?

6) He's your biggest cheerleader.

Is this your boyfriend or your mom?

7) He remembers the little things. Does your man really listen to you? You'll know he's a keeper if you tell him you have a big scary work meeting and the next time you talk, he asks how it went. Or if you tell him you left your sunglasses at his house and he remembers them on your next date.

Looking past weird assumption that "you" have "scary" work meetings -- why are "you" scared of your job, anyway? -- we have to ask what this implies. If you ask me, it means, "only guys who act like girlfriends can be considered keepers."

8) He's happy when you're happy. This is the guy who goes to a chick flick with you on Friday night rather than an action film -- not because he actually wants to, but because it makes you happy.

Or because he's a weak-kneed mama's boy with no mind of his own and a deep-seated need to please women.

9) He makes you the best you can be. A guy who makes you feel like the luckiest woman alive -- like you can (and should!) be your confident, fabulous self -- is worth hanging on to.

Well, it's hard to argue with that.

Read this list over, close your eyes, and imagine the man who would meet all of these criteria. I see a sweet gay guy in a light blue sweater. Just what your mom wants for you.

Biden Turns Against the Afghan War

Joe Biden, who was one of the biggest early supporters of the Afghan War (and who voted for the Iraq war), has now turned against sending more troops. He has not said much in public, but all the usual sources are saying that in the administration's internal debates he is the loudest voice against continuing the war. The New Republic:

When Obama's national security team first considered a troop increase for Afghanistan in March, Biden circulated a document that outlined alternatives to a major escalation. Although the White House won't provide precise details, aides acknowledge that Biden urged the president to consider a narrow counterterrorism mission, heavy on Special Forces and Predator drone strikes, which would require far less manpower than the military was seeking. Obama ultimately sided with other administration officials arguing for a larger counterinsurgency operation, and approved 4,000 more troops on the heels of the 17,000 he'd dispatched in February. But Biden continues to argue that it may not be possible to defeat the Taliban and stabilize Afghanistan at a reasonable cost.

Good for Biden. I hope Obama listens.

Everything I Hate is the Same Thing

There is a common human error, for which there ought to be a name, which is assuming that all the things you hate are somehow connected, or even are somehow expressions of the same deeper reality. Case in point: Republican Congressman Steve King of Iowa has decided that gay marriage is socialism:

If there's a push for a socialist society where the foundations of individual rights and liberties are undermined and everybody is thrown together living collectively off one pot of resources earned by everyone, this is one of the goals they have to go to, same sex marriage, because it has to plow through marriage in order to get to their goal. They want public affirmation, they want access to public funds and resources. . . . Not only is it a radical social idea, it is a purely socialist concept in the final analysis.

But as this case shows to anyone with a mind, the things we hate may be completely unrelated. It is not true that warmongering is racist, that capitalism is sexist, that high taxes destroy traditional communities, or that gay marriage promotes socialism.

Now that I think about it, this might be a subspecies of "tabloid thinking," which is defined in rhetoric as assuming that things are much simpler than they are. But it still deserves a special name.

The Very Small

Those aren't bacteria in this picture, they're molecules. Pentacene, to be precise, which consists, as you can see, of five fused benzene rings. Astonishing.

Note the scale: 20 angstroms is 0.000000002 meters.

The News Business

From Michael Massing, former editor of the Columbia Journalism Review:

While doing some recent research on the news business, I came upon this remarkable fact: Katie Couric's annual salary is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined. Couric's salary comes to an estimated $15 million a year; NPR spends $6 million a year on its morning show and $5 million on its afternoon one. NPR has seventeen foreign bureaus (which costs it another $9.4 million a year); CBS has twelve. Few figures, I think, better capture the absurd financial structure of the network news.

Of course this isn't really CBS's fault. Most people don't choose which news show to watch based on the quality of the reporting, but on whether they like the anchor. But this does point out the absurd salary structure at the heights of American corporate power. Does anybody think they couldn't get lots of charismatic people to apply for the job even if it only paid $2 million a year?

One Seriously Weird Fish

According to National Geographic, this thing, recently caught off the coast of Brazil, is a member of a group called the "jellynose fish", which live in deep waters around the world. Weird.

Those to Whom Evil is Done

In 1994, Rwandan Hutus killed about 800,000 of their Tutsi compatriots. Before they finished their genocide their government was overthrown by an invading Tutsi army, widely assumed to have been backed by the CIA and British intelligence. The Tutsi invaders set up a new government and told the world that they supported peace and "ethnic reconciliation."

Alas, they have turned out to be monsters. They have fomented a war in eastern Congo that has claimed more than 5 million lives; their stated reason for intervening is to fight the remnants of the genocidal Hutu state, gone into Congolese exile. But it has become clear that they continue to intervene mainly to loot Congo's minerals, which they trade for the weapons they use to strengthen their dictatorship at home and increase their control of eastern Congo.

We would like to think that the victims of horrible crimes will be strengthened in virtue, but it is not so. Instead, what we see again and again is that "those to whom evil is done do evil in return."