We recently installed the new fluorescents in the sockets in our dining room. Last night, my wife and I were sitting down to eat some sushi we’d brought home. She said, "I can't believe they gave us salmon instead of tuna." As it turned out, the new lights made the red tuna look like orange salmon. She took the sushi in the kitchen, where we have the plain old bulbs and are waiting for them to expire to put in the new ones. Sure enough, the tuna in that room looked like tuna.

Also, the new bulbs, I found out after having purchased them, are loaded with mercury. So make sure you don’t break any of them. Pick your poison – reduce your carbon footprint but increase your risk of mercury poisoning.

Lastly, a relative of Edison made this point a few weeks back about warm vs. cool lighting

Speaking of mercury, reader Shaun Moore writes, "Tell this woman that CFL are better than incandescents." Hint to bulb breakers: Just get a vacuum cleaner and leave the authorities out of it. (I know mercury is poisonous, but we had so much fun as kids chasing it around the floor when the thermometer broke.)

"There is still a big hurdle in convincing Americans that lighting-purchase decisions make a big difference in individual electricity bills and collectively for the environment," said Wendy Reed, director of the federal government's Energy Star campaign, which labels products that save energy and has been working with retailers to market CFL bulbs.

No, that is not the big hurdle. The big hurdle is convincing Americans that ugly lighting is worth the savings--as Ms. Reed herself knows.

"I have heard time and again that a husband goes out and puts the bulb into the house, thinking he is doing a good thing," Reed said. "Then, the CFL bulb is changed back out by the women. It seems that women are much more concerned with how things look. We are the nesters."

If you want to get people to use compact fluorescents, convince them that the lighting looks good--they already know it saves electricity. And show, don't tell.

As an author, I want more book reviews; quantity matters more than quality when you're going for sheer exposure. But as a reader, I only want more interesting reviews, particularly of books I'm not likely to learn about otherwise. (Here's a good example, from Sunday's LAT.) What Alex calls "the loss of pagination at a few provincial newspapers"--notably, in my life, the Dallas Morning News--mostly represents the loss of reviews that are short, dull reports on books everyone already knows about. Not a crisis, let alone a war on books or even (interesting) reviewers.

Yolanda Frudden, 52, of Iowa City, transports lab results at University Hospitals. Kathy Duttlinger, 50, of Iowa City, takes care of the plants in the hospital. They seldom saw each other, except in the hallway or in the elevator.

But one day a little more than a year ago, a ride together in the elevator would change both of their lives forever.

Frudden had just gotten to the end of a rope of bad news. She recently had been diagnosed with kidney disease and was searching through her family to find a match for transplant. Both of her brothers were perfect matches. However, both had a form of hepatitis. On that day, she had just returned from a trip to the Philippines, where one of her brothers lives with her family "I was really desperate," she said. "I was actually in tears."

Duttlinger got on the elevator and asked what was wrong. She said she knew Frudden was sick, but not as sick as she actually was.

"I just felt for her, and I thought maybe I could help her," she said.

Within minutes, Duttlinger had offered Frudden her phone number--and one of her kidneys

Fiegen's article is exemplary for reporting the story long enough after the surgery--which took place in January 2006--to let readers know the results. More than a year later, both donor and recipient are doing well. And Iowa is better than most places to be a living donor, especially if you're a state employee. The state's Donor Network, which allocates organs from deceased donors, actively support living donation, and living donors get a state income tax deduction. So they're less likely to wind up financially behind, because of lost wages, than donors elsewhere.

Because Duttlinger works at University Hospitals, she got five weeks of leave for being an organ donor, and Frudden's insurance paid for both procedures.

[Iowa Donor Network spokesman Paul] Sodders said all state employees get six weeks of paid leave to donate, without cutting into vacation time. The network currently is working with other major employers to see if they will draft similar policies, he said. Iowa also is one of the few states that offer a tax deduction of up to $10,000 for living donors.

"We're trying to make the process as easy as we can on these living donors," he said. "We're really beginning to advocate people being living donors because we really think that is the answer to cutting down on the waiting time."

Bravo to the Donor Network and the state of Iowa for their progressive attitudes--and to Kathryn Fiegen for covering this important issue.

The DMN website has posted copies of documents from the case, including Turner's poignant, painfully respectfu, semi-literate letters.

As Reason's Radley Balko points out, Dallas seems to be exonerating a lot of prisoners--12 so far, with more than 400 waiting for DNA tests--but it's unlikely the city has an especially bad track record. It just has more evidence on file.

[New district attorney Craig] Watkins' quest to clear the names of the innocent is aided by the fact that Dallas County coincidentally has historically preserved blood samples from cases involving violent crime. Most other jurisdictions across the country only recently began doing that.

It's likely of no coincidence that the one jurisdiction where blood samples have been preserved is also one that's finding a shocking number of convictions of innocent people

Posted by Virginia at 10:45 PM | TrackBack

I say my kidney has made her a genius.

She says I shouldn’t get carried away."

Explanation here.

Ever hear of them?

Found in Half-Price Books, possibly Dallas's greatest institution.

I'm no foodie, let alone much of a chef, but I'm not convinced. A comfortable grip is certainly important, but it won't make up for a lousy blade. Prompted by Megan McArdle's kitchen blogging, I've become a convert to Kyocera ceramic knives. They're a great example of repurposing industrial materials for domestic use--and they are scarily sharp. If Kyocera needed advertising for its industrial applications (the way these guys do), the knives would do the trick.

Read the whole thing and enjoy the photos.

Dr. Hamill-Ruth, who noted that she never prescribed the highest-strength OxyContin tablet, said some of Dr. Hurwitz's actions were "illegal and immoral" because he prescribed high doses despite warning signs in patient behavior that the opioids were being resold or misused.

Then, during cross-examination by the defense, Dr. Hamill-Ruth was shown records of a patient who had switched to Dr. Hurwitz after being under her care at the University of Virginia Pain Management Center. This patient, Kathleen Lohrey, an occupational therapist living in Charlottesville, Va., complained of migraine headaches so severe that she stayed in bed most days.

Mrs. Lohrey had frequently gone to emergency rooms and had once been taken in handcuffs to a mental-health facility because she was suicidal. In 2001, after five years of headaches and an assortment of doctors, tests, therapies and medicines, she went to Dr. Hamill-Ruth's clinic and said that the only relief she had ever gotten was by taking Percocet and Vicodin, which contain opioids.

Mrs. Lohrey was informed that the clinic's philosophy "includes avoidance of all opioids in chronic headache management," according to the clinic's record. The clinic offered an injection to anesthetize a nerve in her forehead, but noted that "the patient is not eager to pursue this option." Mrs. Lohrey was referred to a psychologist and given a prescription for BuSpar, a drug to treat anxiety, not pain.

"You gave her BuSpar and told her to come back in two and a half months?" Richard Sauber, Dr. Hurwitz's lawyer, asked Dr. Hamill-Ruth. Dr. Hamill-Ruth replied that unfortunately, the clinic was too short-staffed at that point to see Mrs. Lohrey sooner. Under further questioning Dr. Hamill-Ruth said that she was not aware that BuSpar's side effects included headaches.

As someone who suffers from comparatively mild migraines, treatable with Imitrex (which itself can feel awfully hard to obtain when you're waiting for a pharmacy to verify your prescription while feeling an invisible spike plunged through your eye), I can only imagine how desperate Mrs. Lohrey must have been. Read the whole thing. And check out Jacob Sullum's 1997 Reason feature on the subject, which should have won a National Magazine Award (it was a finalist) but was beaten out by a far less memorable, but more establishment, feature on computers in the schools published by my current employer.

Here are some sample passages from Cosmos & Hearth: A Cosmopolite's Viewpoint, published in 1996.

Consider the expression "cosmopolitan hearth." The emphasis is on "hearth" rather than on "cosmopolitan" in recognition of a fundamental fact about human beings, which is that free spirits--true cosmopolites--whose emotional center or home is a mystical religion or philosophy, an all-consuming art or science, are few in number and always will be. The binding powers of culture are nearly inexorable: note that even the most highly educated people (the Bloomsbury literati, for example) can be as narrowly bound to a particular culture (English country house and afternoon teas), as xenophobic and intolerant of what they don’t know, as the provincials and primitive folks they disdain. So we are all more or less hearth-bound. We can, however, make a virtue of necessity. We can learn to appreciate intelligently our culture and landscape.

"Intelligently" is the word to underline. What does it mean in practice? A modest beginning would be to know the local geography, but this should include lived experience and not just impersonal facts. We need to remember how it is to wake up in the middle of the night to the crash of hail on the roof and feel, because the blanket has migrated up to our shoulders, the chill of exposed feet. Knowing places other than our own is a necessary component of the concept of "cosmopolitan hearth." The unique personality of our small part of the earth is all the more real and precious when we can compare it with other climes, other topographies. Perhaps this is another way of saying that exploration (moving out of the cosmos) enables us to know our own hearth better--indeed, "for the first time." Difference contributes to self-awareness, and that is one reason why high modernism is in favor of difference. But, curiously, awareness of commonality, rather than destroying local distinction, can subtly add to it by giving it greater weight. In a rowboat on Lake Mendota, in Madison, Wisconsin, I look at the moon. The same moon will one night enthrall someone in a rowboat on Lake Como, Italy. I do not feel diminished by sharing the moon with an Italian, nor does Lake Mendota seem less unique.

The next step is to get a firm grip on our own culture--the custom or habit that, stamped on habitat, produces a homeplace. If it is difficult to appraise habitat with the fresh and eager eyes of a visitor, it is more difficult to appraise--or even be aware of--habits, especially those that we repeat daily. I think here not only of such larger acts as getting out of bed, going to the bathroom, preparing and eating breakfast, and so on through the day, but also the infinite number of miniacts within them, such as how one squeezes the toothpaste tube, eats peas, pats the dog, smells the evening air. Miniacts (habits) have their own minihabitats, and these are even more likely to escape our conscious awareness. The recognition that living as such, in all its detail and density, is a terra incognita that eludes scientific probing is an instance of high-modern sensibility. One consequence is the wish to protect the warm core of living, so vulnerable in its inarticulateness, from aggressive rationality and modernism.

Distinct from habits and routines are celebrations and rituals that, although they are recurrent, recur after a sufficient lapse of time to seem new; in any case, they are intended to be occasions of heightened awareness. Such special occasions may be either personal-familial or public. In the first category are births, weddings, funerals; in the second are rituals that punctuate the agri-cultural calendar or memorialize historic events. They are all supported by an appropriate stage, special costumes, decorations, artworks, perhaps music. Each event is thus a large chunk of culture on display. For this reason, when people want to rehabilitate their culture, they often think of resurrecting a traditional festival or ritual. Many communities in the United States, fighting the homogenizing forces of modernization, turn to ethnic roots for significant markers of difference. some communal leaders take this returning to roots with great seriousness, for in their minds it is also a way of regaining a lost sense of collective self and authenticity. Nevertheless, in at least the well-to-do American communities (as distinct from Buber's communities of toil and tribulation), what actually happens is that people at play or engaged in display act our their "pasts" with varying degrees of self-consciousness and irony.

Without modernism, there cannot be high modernism. Modernism provides the necessary security, which includes material sufficiency, social-institutional safety nets such as insurance and government subsidies, and, thanks to science, substantial freedom from the vagaries of nature and almost total exemption from the dread of dark magic, ghosts, witches, and demons. Against this background of security, communities can separately re-create the past. None seeks to resurrect the old insecurities and fears. If an old custom is re-created, it is more likely to be a birthday or wedding than a funeral. As for agricultural rites, late-twentieth-century versions, even if they are correct in every historical-factual detail, cannot recapture the mood of helplessness and dread that drove people to practice animal and even (if one goes back far enough) human sacrifice. Another major difference is this. In the past, festivals and rituals were conducted primarily for local consumption, to establish some sort of harmony between people and nature. By contrast, in the late twentieth century, although festivals continue to promote communality and a sense of place, as much or even more are they set up to attract benign strangers. The local place in our time, far from being indifferent or hostile to the big world, welcomes it. One might say, perhaps a touch cynically, that today’s reconstituted festivals are intended to propitiate another kind of god (tourists) and induce another kind of blessing (money).

I should note that in these passages, Tuan uses "high modernism" not as I would--to indicate the mid-century high point of modernist rationalism, exemplified by International Style architecture--but, crediting Anthony Giddens, to signify a scientifically informed universalism that takes account of complexity and local attachments. His work fits comfortably into the dynamist school described in The Future and Its Enemies, making Tuan another example (to answer a common question) of a dynamist who is not a libertarian.

Here's a passage that reinforces some of the ideas toward the end of my Atlantic column on chain stores:

"Cosmopolitan hearth" is a contradiction in terms and this fact, perhaps, defines our dilemma--a human dilemma that has always existed but that becomes more evident as we move from traditional to modern, then high modern. The dilemma is captured by the observation, which George Steiner and others have made, that whereas plants have roots, human beings have feet. Feet make us mobile, but of course we also have minds, a far greater source of instability and uprooting. Consider such utterly commonplace experiences: while we are "here," we can always imagine being "there," and while we live in the present, we can recall the past and envisage the future. Stay in the same place, and we will still have moved inexorably, for the place of adulthood is not the place of childhood even if nothing in it has materially changed. Stages of life are sometimes called a "journey," a figure of speech that again vividly captures the condition of human homelessness. A paradox peculiar to our time and to Americans especially is that "searching for roots," which is intended to make us (Americans) feel more rooted, can itself be uprooting, that is, done at the expense of intimate involvement with place. Rather than immersion in the locality where we now live, our mind and emotion are ever ready to shift to other localities and times, across the Atlantic or Pacific, to ancestral lands remote from direct experience. We can be dismissive of what is right before our eyes--the local McDonald's where our young children wolf down their hamburgers, the city cemetery where our parents were recently buried—in favor of some place at the other end of the globe where distant forebears lived, toiled, and danced.

The book concludes with the following:

Singing together, working together against tangible adversaries, melds us into one whole: we become members of the community, embedded in place. By contrast, thinking--especially thinking of the reflective, ironic, quizzical mode, which is a luxury of affluent societies--threatens to isolate us from our immediate group and home. As vulnerable beings who yearn at times for total immersion, to sing in unison (eyes closed) with others of our kind, this sense of isolation--of being a unique individual--can be felt as a deep loss. Thinking, however, yields a twofold gain: although it isolates us from our immediate group it can link us both seriously and playfully to the cosmos--to strangers in other places and times; and it enables us to accept a human condition that we have always been tempted by fear and anxiety to deny, namely, the impermanence of our state wherever we are, our ultimate homelessness. A cosmopolite is one who considers the gain greater than the loss. Having seen something of the splendid spaces, he or she (like Mole [in The Wind in the Willows]) will not want to return, permanently, to the ambiguous safeness of the hearth.

Here's a lecture Tuan gave about his intellectual development. Here are a recent, very brief essay on science and magic and his archive of such "Dear Colleague" letters. In addition to Cosmos & Hearth, I would recommend Escapism and Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience .

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Isn't it about time for that MacArthur Prize?

UPDATE: A day after the surgery, Tom is home and blogging. Amazing.

What particularly fascinated me about van der Heyden, whose work I didn't know at all, was the way he combined his art with work as an inventor and entrepreneur. His most important invention was a fire-fighting system that combined an engine for pumping water with a long leather fire hose. The pump was an improvement on existing technology, the long hose a new idea that allowed firemen to get water to the heart of a fire rather than simply spraying the facade of a burning building. Van der Heyden not only invented this system but built and sold it, promoting it with a book of prints showing the devastation of urban fires and the advantages of the pump system in fighting them. He's a great example of the mingling of art, commerce, and technology, each complementing the others.

The exhibition, which runs through April 30, includes the prints, including some of Van der Heyden's preliminary sketches, and a later version of his fire engine, which was in operation from 1724 to 1928. One of the prints is shown above; click for a larger version. For more, visit the exhibit's website.

Tom is well known to the local press from his FBI work, and his donation has gotten coverage in the Sun Times, the Tribune, and the local Fox affiliate. The articles do a good job of capturing his basic thought process and his important point that donating a kidney is not an especially risky procedure or unthinkable sacrifice. That doesn't mean everyone should run out and give someone a kidney--any more than everyone should take a job in law enforcement. But we need to start thinking of kidney donors as normal people taking reasonable risks for great benefits, not as crazy or heroic.

That giving up a kidney is an inconceivable sacrifice is one of several false assumptions behind Will Saletan's recent article on organ markets in Slate and the WaPost Outlook section. Consider his lead:

If you lose your job, you can sell your home. If you lose your home, you can sell your possessions. If you lose your possessions, you can prostitute yourself. And if you lose everything else, you can sell one more thing: your organs.

Saletan is right that "transplant tourism" is a growing problem, but not because there's something inherently wrong with paying people money for their organs. The problem is that--thanks to gray or black markets--kidney vendors receive only a fraction of the market value of their organs and have few, if any, legal or financial protections. And that's not to mention the dubious sources of the cadaver organs China is offering.

But Saletan is wrong that paying for organs discourages donation. Nephrologist Ben Hippen, who has a forthcoming piece in Transplantation on the subject, notes in an email that the claim is "empirically false in the only country (Iran) where commercialization is legal. From 2000 - 2005, deceased organ donation increased from < 1% of all transplants to 10% of all transplants. The obstacle, it turns out (a la Kieran Healy) was that no procurement organizations for deceased donors were up and running until about 5 years ago." (Ben has also written a letter to the editor of the Post.)

The worst part of Saletan's article is the well-meaning but dangerously ignorant conclusion: "The surest way to stop him from selling his kidney is to make it worthless, by flooding the market with free organs. If you haven't filled out a donor card, do it now. Because if the dying can't get organs from the dead, they'll buy them from the living."

As advice, this is fine. Sign your donor card. Maybe it will do some good. As policy analysis, it is complete b.s. It might make a little more sense if Saletan added, "Then make sure you do a lot of helmetless motorcycle riding in the rain around lots of drunk drivers." Signing a card is not enough, even if your family honors your wishes. You have to die in just the right circumstances, usually from some head trauma that preserves the blood supply to your organs. Cadaver organs are great, and certainly essential for people who need, say, hearts. But not enough people die in the right circumstances to supply the need for kidneys. Any serious policy must focus on living donors.

Just to rehearse the statistics once again: As of this moment, there are 71,181 Americans on the waiting list for kidneys--a number that is bigger every time I look at the statistics. In January alone, 319 people died waiting for kidneys and 138 became too sick for transplantation. [Note: This has been corrected. The post previously attributed the numbers to the year so far.] Every year about 4,000 people die on the list, more than the number of U.S. military personnel who have been killed since the beginning of the Iraq war. On or off the list, living with kidney disease requires devoting your life to dialysis treatments--the kidney equivalent of the iron lung. It's a debilitating and disruptive way to live. As Bill "Epoman" Halcomb, the founder of I Hate Dialysis.com, wrote:

I understand HATE is a strong word, and I understand some people will be turned off from this site just because this site is named I Hate Dialysis.com, but I ask those of you who are reading this to have an open mind and realize that living with kidney failure is a terrible thing and it takes its toll on a person's physical and emotional well-being. There is a saying that goes around, "A person will NOT die from kidney failure, however, he or she will die from complications of kidney failure.

He died last month at the age of 34.

UPDATE: Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where Tom Simon and Brenda Lagrimas are having their transplant surgeries, has a terrific video on its living donation program.

You Are 55% Left Brained, 45% Right Brained

The left side of your brain controls verbal ability, attention to detail, and reasoning. Left brained people are good at communication and persuading others. If you're left brained, you are likely good at math and logic. Your left brain prefers dogs, reading, and quiet. The right side of your brain is all about creativity and flexibility. Daring and intuitive, right brained people see the world in their unique way. If you're right brained, you likely have a talent for creative writing and art. Your right brain prefers day dreaming, philosophy, and sports.

Actually, I don't like dogs or sports--but I guess that just shows I'm balanced. Via Pat Matthews, who sent me a comment about Nancy Pelosi's scarves:

I noticed Nancy Pelosi's headscarf was tied exactly the way schoolgirls of the 1940s tied theirs, so I knew at once she'd supplied herself with the sort of square scarves that fold into a triangle.

And even better solution is the sort of long, narrow rectangular scarf that looks good around the neck but unfolds into a headscarf you don't have to tie. You just flip the left end over your right shoulder and vice versa, tweakl a little, and - instant hijab. I own several which have served me well in everything from SCA events to a visit to a gurudwara and they can be beautiful.

No word on whether they were embarrassed that CBS would blatantly pretend that Katie Couric writes her own notebook.

This double standard is an old bugaboo of mine. I don't care when actors, athletes, and CEOs hire ghostwriters, though I do think they should give their ghosts credit, but people who pretend to be journalists and public intellectuals should do their own damn work.

[T]he western academic world is very much like Weimar Germany, finding itself in a situation of losing power and influence. Fortunately, the countries that matter now are China and India, and the Chinese and Indian experts do not share the mood of doom and gloom. It is amusing to see China and India take on today the role that America took in the nineteen-thirties, still believing in technology as the key to a better life for everyone....

It is also interesting in this connection to observe the similarity, in optimistic mood and rapid material progress, between China and India. Although China is traditionally non-religious and India is traditionally permeated with religion, this does not seem to make much difference. In both countries, rapidly growing wealth and technological progress create a mood of optimism, with or without religion.

Read the whole thing. (It's short.) [Via Arnold Kling.]

Inspired by Dyson's mention of it, I'm off to the library to get Bernal's The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, which, judging by its prices on Amazon, could probably support a reprint.

Behind the criticism of fashion as an artistic medium is a highly ideological prejudice: against markets, against consumers, against the dynamism of Western commercial society. The debate is not about art but about culture and economics. Critics who decry fashion collections are less troubled by the prescribed costumes of dynastic China or the aristocratic dress of baroque France than by the past century’s clothes. With its fluctuating forms and needless decoration, fashion epitomizes the supposedly unproductive waste that inspired 20th-century technocrats to dream of central planning. It exists for no good reason. But that’s practically a definition of art.

Prejudice aside, it’s hard to come up with objections to fashion collections that don’t apply to other museum departments. Fashion is mass produced? So are prints and posters, often more so than haute couture. Ephemeral? So are works on paper. Utilitarian? So are pots and vases. Customized to an individual? So were suits of armor. As for the fickle­ness of fashion, the history of Western art is a story of changing styles. And however much critics may despise commerce, many undisputed masterpieces were works for hire. “Paintings were marketable goods which competed for the attention of the purchaser,” writes the historian Michael North in Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age. Michelangelo and Ghiberti got paid.

The real question is not whether museums are too good for fashion but whether they’re good enough. Clothes are unique sculptures, dependent on a supporting human form and created to move. Yet museum mannequins stand still. Clothing is made to be seen and touched—the tactile qualities of fabric are as essential to the art as a garment’s color or shape—but light and fingertips dim colors and degrade fabrics. The first rule of fashion exhibitions is Do not touch.

Any fashion exhibition is thus a compromise. But, of course, altarpieces weren’t meant to be ripped from their candlelit sacred context and put up on museum walls to be admired by non­believers. The Elgin Marbles were supposed to be on the Parthenon. For many works of art, a museum is an artificial setting— a zoo, not a natural habitat. Some zoos, however, are worse than others.

The Atlantic's website also features a slideshow (free link) of photos from recent exhibitions, along with some audio from me. (The site's editors adeptly cut my 28 minutes of comments down to eight.)

A free archive of my past Atlantic columns is now available here.

If you really want to understand charisma, I recommend the other scholarly book I cite, Prophetic Charisma: The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities by Len Oakes. It's a dispassionate yet sympathetic treatment, with insights that apply beyond purely religious leaders. (Ayn Rand and her circle kept coming to mind.)

Sharp-eyed readers will note from the author author credit on the Post piece that I've made a deal with The Free Press to write my long-delayed book on glamour. If you've got a lot of bandwidth and would like a preview, you can read the proposal here. UPDATE: Thanks to advice from reader Lawrence Rhodes, the file is now a more manageable size.