Interesting little article on Slate: Is it better for the environment to drink cow’s milk or soy milk? by Jacob Leibenluft

it takes about 14 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce one calorie of milk protein on a conventional farm …

By comparison, Pimentel’s data suggest that it takes about 0.26 calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of organic soybeans

I’m really struggling with my resistance to being vegan these days. Someone described biofuels (at least the ones that use food crops) as a crime against humanity because the food could be used to, well, feed people. The same is therefore true of dairy and meat. Eating animals is a crime against humanity in a world that doesn’t have enough food. And yet I still find myself craving and eating dairy products, even though on a certain level I find them rather gross.

Part of the problem is eating out. It’s easy to be vegetarian eating in a restaurant, but much more difficult to be vegan — especially once you get out of major towns (at least in my corner of the US).

Another part of the problem is the label-scouring that you get into if you’re serious about being vegan. If a cookie has a trace of milk powder it’s immediately outside the pale, although practically speaking the eating of that cookie (with its half gram of milk powder) is leading to an almost immeasurably small contribution to the suffering of animals.

So what that boils down to, I suppose, is the problem of being attached to labels. I tend to think that if I can’t be completely, 100%, utterly, totally, wholeheartedly vegan, then it’s not worth doing at all. I think I’m actually more attached to the purity of labels than I am to dairy products, which I know from experience I can do without quite easily. So perhaps I should just embrace being a half-assed vegan who sometimes eats suspect cookies and who may occasionally accept pizza from his father-in-law, who hasn’t been known to cook anything else in the years I’ve known him.

As Chesterton said, “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”

Having a 20-month-old, I’ve become acutely aware of the aesthetic delights involved in blowing bubbles, but because the damn things are so ephemeral I never get a chance to really appreciate them.

Cue this slideshow. These really are quite extraordinary photographs. Enjoy!

There are some amazing pictures of Jupiter and some of its moons on Boston.com Quite astonishing,

For most of the time since buying my iPod Touch last October it’s been “jailbroken,” meaning that I’ve hacked it to bypass Apple’s propietary protections in order to install unauthorized software on it, the grounds being that it’s pretty ridiculous for a computer manufacturer to insist you can only run their software on the machine you’ve bought from them. And the iPod Touch is nothing but a handheld computer.

So that’s been great. I’ve had various programs running on it such as an ebook reader (on which I’ve read several novels), some games, a flashlight, and I can’t remember what else.

But after the launch of Apple’s Application Store on iTunes I decided to un-jailbreak my iPod by installing the latest update to the iPod firmware, meaning that I could use the store but could no longer use the free but unauthorized applications that I’d installed.

That doesn’t seem much of a loss, since the App Store is full of goodies.

• I have the mobile version of Omnifocus installed, which is a Getting It Done application. This syncs with the corresponding application on my Mac, so that I can carry around a list of outstanding tasks, categorized by project and context (e.g. “errands,” “office,” “computer,” etc.)
• I have a free ebook reader (Stanza) installed and have already read a few short stories. I’m working on a SciFi novel right now.
• I have a trial version of Remote Buddy, which turns my iPod into a remote control for my Mac Pro ( I was shocked to discover the Mac Pro didn’t come with a remote!).
• I have Twinkle, which is a Twitter client.
• Box Office tells me what movies I can’t go to see because I’m too tired after working and because we have Maia to look after
• I have a new flashlight program (yeah, it just makes the screen white and bright, but that’s very handy when I’m negotiating my way through a darkened bedroom at night).
• I have a dictionary installed (although it’s not as good as the free one I used to have).
• I have the Apple Remote program, although it only works with iTunes and I may never use it.
• Pandora is pretty cool — it generates playlists of music based on my favorite artists. It’s basically a series of customized radio stations. I’m listening to an Anthony and the Johnsons radio station right now and am hearing new music I love (I’d never heard of Peter Bradley Adams, for example, and I love his “Lay Your Head Down” from the album “Gather Up.”) I can give new music a thumbs up or a thumbs down so that the radio stations tune themselves to my tastes. So awesome!

Those are the main programs. There’s not much I can think of from the jailbroken apps that I miss!

I tried out the Wordpress app, which allows you to write to your blog, but quickly deleted it. Apart from the problem of it crashing, it also doesn’t serve any function that I can see. I can already use the Safari browser to log in to my blog and use all the admin functions, while the mobile Wordpress app offers very limited functionality. For example you can’t even edit a blog post. How useless is that!

Anyway, the app store is amazing and there’s so much free stuff that it makes my head spin.

A friend just wrote to ask whether anything was wrong, given that I haven’t been blogging here and that I haven’t been writing on Wildmind.

Actually, I’ve just been busy teaching at my local university — a six-week stint I do most years. I’ll say more about that later.

For now I just wanted to comment that I’m writing this post on my iPod Touch using the new Wordpress application. I’ve been checking the app store morning, noon, and night since the app was first announced a couple of weeks back and was excited to see that it had finally arrived.

I can’t comment too much on how it’s working given that this is my first go, but I did have problems with the app crashing when I as entering my blog details — not a promising start. But since getting past that hurdle the app seems to be working well. Now I can blog under the covers at night!

[added from my computer] Well, it seems the app doesn’t allow you to edit a post once it’s been published, so that seems like a major drawback. Actually, the idea of a Wordpress application seems fundamentally flawed given that the iPhone renders websites beautifully. I can simply use my iPod to log into my blog as I would from my computer, and then I have full access to the blog’s functionality. I’ve a feeling that a vast amount of midnight oil was burned getting this app ready for prime-time, but I’m not sure why. True, the admin area isn’t terribly well set up for blogging on an iPhone, but that’s just a layout problem. I’d imagine it would be easy enough to have a stylesheet that’s set up for an iPhone and that the website would switch to automatically when the user agent is Mobile Safari.

The Real McCain by Cliff Schecter, published a few months ago, reports an angry exchange between McCain and his wife that happened in full view of aides and reporters during a 1992 campaign stop.

Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain’s intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain’s hair and said, “You’re getting a little thin up there.” McCain’s face reddened, and he responded, “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.” McCain’s excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.

Indeed.

You’ve probably not heard about this outburst, despite the newsworthiness at the time of a Senator treating his wife in such an appalling way, and despite the insight this gives into John McCain’s character as a presidential candidate.

Why was this not covered (and why is this not being covered) in the media? The story is that the media can’t think of any way to cover a story that involves such foul language because the word “cunt” makes them too uncomfortable. The Public Service Administration has a nice wee skit on the issue:

I must say that although Obama’s luster is dimming because of his capitulation on FISA, John McCain strikes me as a disastrous choice for President, given his notorious bad temper and lack of self-control — not to mention his flip-flops, which are even more egregious than those of Obama.

Yes.

Here’s an article from Games Radar (Don’t ask. No really — don’t ask) on the skewed priorities of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s ethos is of course that any one can add information to it and therefore the information is accurate.

We learn for example that “Knuckles of Sonic the Hedgehog fame” (who?) has more words written about him than does God*, and that “Mario’s legacy” is worthy of 444 words while Jesus’ is worthy of a mere 418.

I’d go a bit further than the Games Radar article, which merely says that “the nerds and dorks tend to have a lot more free time - and passion - than the teachers and professors.” The nerds and dorks are bad enough, but there are also the obsessed nuts. I’ve had experience on Wikipedia with an article that is dominated by a couple of people who, I suspect, suffer from obsessions that amount to mental illnesses. Now who has more energy than a nutcase? In the end the nuts end up wearing you down with their sheer obsessiveness.

The funny thing is, that even though I know that Wikipedia’s information is completely unreliable**, I still use it for instant “fact-checking.” Sad.

* “All Wikipedia word counts were gathered during the week prior to this article’s date. Due to the encyclopedia’s open source nature, numbers are always subject to change.”

** Yeah, I know, someone compared physics articles from Wikipedia and Britannica and found slightly fewer errors in Wikipedia, but the articles you read right at this moment in Wikipedia may have been significantly different ten minutes ago, and may have have new errors introduced, while the Britannica article is the same as it was. That’s what I mean by unreliable.

From time to time I think that the US is destined to collapse in the way that all empires eventually do. This mood arises especially when I read one of those surveys where some incredibly large percentage of American teens can’t find their own country on a map or doesn’t know who Hitler was, or when some equally astonishingly large fraction of the population thinks that the sun revolves around the earth or that dinosaurs were walking around a few thousand years ago.

So it’s especially depressing to come across a survey of American stupidity, which is what you can find at Tomgram, where there’s an extract of a book by Rick Shenkman.

Here’s a snippet:

22 percent of Americans [can] name all five Simpson family members, compared with just 1 in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms.

We’re doomed!

It’s not often I discover a website where I want to systematically read all the articles. Today I found one. It’s We’re Only Human and it’s a psychology blog by Wray Herbert.

Here’s a great sample that’s of direct relevance to mindfulness and meditation:

Those with overall greater cognitive control–the ones who monitored themselves closely and adjusted efficiently–were also the ones who were best at handling stress … the ones who spotted and corrected errors in their own mental performance were in general more calm and relaxed, even with college life’s predictable stresses. The ones who did not inventory and learn from their mistakes were beaten down by life’s pressures.

The whole question of whether waterboarding is torture is a bogus one. Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg and found guilty of using this precise technique. And the fact that it’s even in question that it may not be torture to drown someone shows how low the current US administration has sunk on the scale of morality.

Nevertheless, because there is a pseudo debate, Christopher Hitchens bravely had himself subjected to waterboarding and describes his experiences in some detail in a Vanity Fair article.

Since the article is entitled “Believe Me, It’s Torture” I don’t need to beware of spoilers.

Some salient points to extract are:

1. The official lie is that this torture technique involves simulated drowning. That’s like saying that giving someone electric shocks is “simulated electrocution” or hanging someone by the neck is simulated hanging.” It’s real drowning, and is torture.

2. Any information extracted is likely to be worthless because people will say anything to make the torture stop.

3. The US can no longer complain if its military personnel are subjected to this torture technique. It has given up the right to do so.

For the record, I think that Hitchens is in many ways a pompous and self-deluding ass — but he’s also a brave man.

There are some great pictures of the Apollo missions (remember them?) on Boston.com. Well worth looking at just to get a sense of the magnitude of the adventure we were capable of undertaking back in the 1960s and 1970s.

Before the Apollo pics there are some contemporary images of technology that might be used on future missions.

Compare and contrast:

Calling it “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country,” John McCain ripped into the Supreme Court’s decision to allow Guantanamo detainees access to civilian trials for the second day in a row. “We’re now going to have the courts flooded with so-called “habeas corpus suits” … Our first obligation is the safety and security of this nation and the men and women who defend it. This decision will harm our ability to do that.”

John “Tough Conservative” McCain 2008

I don’t think [we should] necessarily [close Guantanamo]. But I think the important thing is it’s not the facility at Guantanamo, it’s the adjudication of the cases of the prisoners who have been held there without trial or without any adjudication of their cases. So the frustration is not the fact we have a facility at Guantanamo, although that certainly becomes symbolic. The frustration is, is: What are we going to do with these people?

Now, I know that some of these guys are terrible, terrible killers and the worst kind of scum of humanity. But, one, they deserve to have some adjudication of their cases. And there’s a fear that if you release them that they’ll go back and fight again against us. And that may have already happened. But balance that against what it’s doing to our reputation throughout the world and whether it’s enhancing recruiting for people to join al-Qaeda and other organizations and want to do bad things to the United States of America. I think, on balance, the argument has got to be–the weight of evidence has got to be that we’ve got to adjudicate these people’s cases, and that means that if it means releasing some of them, you’ll have to release them.

Look, even Adolf Eichmann got a trial. I mean, these–we are signatories to numerous agreements on human rights, against torture, universal declaration on human rights, etc. So that means we have to do something with these people. And I hope we can move that process forward very soon.

John “Bleeding-Heart Liberal” McCain 2005.

(Hat tip to Mark Nikolas).