The Yin Blog

I won't complain (too much) about gray drizzly days in late March/early April

Here in Portland we've broken two weather records, apparently -- the most days in a row with some rain (29 and counting, I think), and the latest date in the year for the temperature to hit 60 degrees (still waiting, compared to a norm of mid-February). However, I'm not going to complain, not when I see that parts of the northeast are going to get up to 6 inches of snow on April 1:

On learning Chinese

Although most academic subjects in school were fairly straightforward for me (until I got to Caltech, that is), foreign languages have been my Achilles' heel. If I were ever to get a PhD, it would've been in a field where I could have substituted mathematics for a language.

It didn't help that the school I attended from grades 6-10 kept changing the foreign language offering, so I know a smattering of Spanish (naturally, growing up in Southern California) and a tiny bit of German. Thanks to my parents, I can speak Chinese at a conversational level, but unfortunately, neither they nor I was very diligent about getting me to learn to read and write Chinese.

However, the combination of sending my son to a weekly Chinese class along with seeing the alarming amount of U.S. debt held by China has led me to think that I should probably devote some time to trying to amass a rudimentary level of literacy in Chinese. It's supposedly easier to learn foreign languages as a child, but on the other hand, being able to speak Chinese means that I don't have to grapple with learning vocabulary in quite the same way.

Of course, written Chinese is a character-based language, not an alphabet-based one. So you have to learn each word on its own, rather than an alphabet used to construct words.

There is something of a pattern to a number of words, though, since some characters are built from other characters -- boy, for example, is field plus strength (and strength resembles knife). Some animals, like dog and cat, share the same strokes on the left side of the character.

Anyway, apparently, if you can read 100 characters, you understand approximately 42% of what you might typically read. Reading 500 characters gets you up to 75% understanding.

So what I'm doing is going off this list of the ~3000 most common Chinese characters, starting at the top, and trying to learn one or two characters a day. I guess this will be a long-term project.

Taking part in a mostly auto-pick fantasy baseball draft

On a whim, I signed up last week for an ESPN public fantasy baseball league.  It was quite a strange experience, because only one other manager showed up for the live draft.  The other eight elected for auto-pick.

I had the #6 pick overall, and the other live manager had #10.  My picks and reasoning:

1. Robinson Cano (2b) - the first five picks were Pujols, Hanley Ramirez, Crawford, Longoria, and Braun.  I debated between Cano and Miguel Cabrera, but went with Cano because of positional scarcity and the potent Yankees lineup.

2. Ryan Zimmerman (3b) - I could have taken Felix Hernandez or Josh Hamilton instead.  I don't like to take pitchers before round 5 if possible, and I think Hamilton won't be as good this year as last year.

3. Joe Mauer (c) - This might have been a reach, but I liked him better than Jon Lester, Adam Dunn, or Dustin Pedroia, who were the next picks.

4. Jose Reyes (ss) - In the past, I've tended to neglect speed, or relied on some semi-fast players, hoping for an overall decent total of stolen bases.  Let's see if this results in something different.

5. Justin Verlander (sp) - I gave in one round earlier than I would've liked, but top starting pitchers were gone.  Verlander's been good for a number of years, and one of these years, he's going to put everything together.  Maybe.

6. Andre Ethier (of) - I needed some outfielders . . . .

7. Jered Weaver (sp) - He led the AL in Ks last year.  Hopefully it wasn't a fluke.

8. Paul Konerko (1b) - He's older of a player than I'd like, but first basemen seem to age somewhat better, and he's been pretty consistent.

9. Neftali Feliz (rp) - I think closers are vastly overrated, but it was time to pick one up.

10. Max Scherzer (sp) - I *really* like Scherzer.  Last year, he got off to a bad start, got sent down to Triple-A, and worked out some mechanical flaw.  When he returned, he was lights out.

11. Carlos Quentin (of) - Kind of a risky pick, but some potential reward there.

12. Gordon Beckham (mi) - I hope last year was a (bad) fluke.

13. Adam Jones (of) - Ditto.

14. JJ Putz (rp) - More saves please.

15. Jeremy Hellickson (sp) - I like gambling on young pitchers, and I think he could potentially be the best pitcher on the Rays.  It should be either him or Price.

16. Brandon Morrow (sp) - Cal grad, awesome K/9 ratio, and not a lot of innings on his arm last year.

17. Drew Storen (rp) - Relatively low risk closer.

18. Mitch Moreland (ci) - I needed another corner infielder, and the remaining names weren't that appealing.  Playing in Texas has got to count for something.

19. Carlos Beltran (of) - Another risk/reward pick.

20. Manny Ramirez (of) - Um, yeah, another risk/reward pick.  Well, he's pretty awesome when he plays . . . .

21. Leo Nunez (rp) - Closer.

22. Ryan Raburn (of) - He was more valuable last year when he qualified at second base, but he's got some pop.

23. Hong-Chih Kuo (rp) - Pretty awesome rate stats.  But I ended up cutting him after the draft to pick up Gio Gonzalez.

24. Peter Bourjos (of) - My hometown pick, and some cheap speed.  We'll see if he's worth playing.

25. Ryan Madson (rp) - Fill-in closer, might still keep him after Lidge returns.

That radiation plume headed our way from Japan . . . .

Supposedly it'll be so diluted that it won't pose any danger, but this graphic doesn't really offer much comfort.

Any chance we can line up US Navy ships along the West Coast and have them turn on giant fans to blow the plume away?

Farewell, ABC's "V"?

I'm not exactly proud of having stuck with ABC's "V" remake to what looks like the bitter end, but the combination of a serialized sci-fi drama and pleasant memories of the cheesy 1980s mini-series (x2) and TV show made it irresistible to me.

And yet, last night was the season finale -- and given the fairly anemic ratings, likely the series finale. Naturally, it ended in a cliff-hanger, which is especially dissatisfying if it doesn't return to the fall schedule.

Here's a pretty good dissection of all that went wrong with the series (finale spoilers abound within):

After ineptly attempting to make viewers care with and root for a rag-tag bunch of wretchedly written, poorly portrayed freedom fighters for the better part of 22 episodes, "V" surrendered on Tuesday night and just admitted what's been blatantly obvious since the premiere: Morena Baccarin's Anna is the show. Period. And she isn't just the show. She's the freakin' hero of the show. If that makes Humanity and The Fifth Column the villains on "V"? So be it. I'm not sure that there's a single human character on the show that I don't view as cannon fodder and it was almost courageous of the "V" writers to admit that over 22 episodes, they'd shaped The Fifth Column into the most useless resistance force ever.

Yeah, there were some human characters that I hoped would become cannon fodder . . . .

Oh well, here's the next serialized sci-fi series on my radar, coming this summer.

Newsweek magazine -- it's still around?

I grew up reading Newsweek rather than Time or U.S. News & World Report, and when I was an adult on my own, it was one of my numerous magazine subscriptions.  But after the revamp a couple of years ago, my wife found it less interesting, and I let the subscription lapse.  Apparently it's undergone another revamp of sorts, but one that Mickey Kaus finds going in the wrong direction.

Me?  I was left thinking, "Huh, oh yeah, Newsweek. . . that's still around?"  I'm not sure if it says something unhealthy about the state of modern American print journalism, or American magazine news journalism, or just Newsweek, but I honestly have not missed it at all.

Now Entertainment Weekly . . . that's something different.  I would TOTALLY miss that.

UPDATE: A friend (G.L.) sends the following link, which is even harsher on Newsweek than I was:

It should change its name to "Lastweek," or maybe "Last Century."

But who'll come along for the ride?

Ouch.

Is the body mass index calculator relentlessly harsh?

Throughout adolescence and early adulthood, I was perpetually underweight.  I ate a lot, but between a fast metabolism, cross-country (one season), tennis (two seasons), and Ultimate (throughout journalism school and law school), I was never more than 150 pounds at 5'10", and frequently, I was more like 135 pounds, or even less.

Somehow -- and there's probably a direct causation here -- when I started working as a lawyer, however, I broke past 160 pounds, and at times hit as much as 170.  I managed to get down to about 165, but when we moved to Oregon, my beloved treadmill did not make the trip with us.  For the first year and a half or so of being in Oregon, I was without that treadmill and too lazy/unmotivated/busy to find a gym, so I hit 170 or so again.

Now, I don't need the body mass index calculator to tell me that 170 is too much for me to weigh.  Per my height, that's a BMI of 24.4, which is still in the "normal range" for weight, but dangerously close to 24.9, which is the upper limit before you get classified as "overweight."  (Basically, another 3.5 pounds. . . .)  Some generous folks have told me that I didn't look nearly overweight last fall, so maybe I hid the extra pounds well.

Anyway, I found a nearby gym/club that I like and have been going there since the beginning of this year, and I've managed to drop about 8-10 pounds so far.

But wow, BMI is pretty harsh!  At 160 pounds, my BMI is still 23.0.  To put that in context, "normal weight" is a BMI range of 18.5 to 24.9.  The middle point of that range (~21.75) would correspond to 152 pounds for me.  It's not so much that 152 pounds is an unreasonable weight goal for me (I think at this point I'd be pleased with anything from 150-155 pounds), but that I could weigh as little as 128 pounds and still be considered normal weight per BMI.

128 pounds?  Really?  I mean, I know that we Americans are relatively overweight as a group, but is it really healthy for a 5'10" male to be below 135-140 pounds?

Bribing enemy soldiers

Yale law prof Ian Ayres blogs about bribing Libyan troops to defect:

[T]he officer’s story reminded me of an alternative, more economic, incentive deployed in Iraq, where the U.S. offered defecting officers cash to lay down their arms.

* * *

One advantage of cash compensation over Kristof’s recommendation of safe passage is that it might be more credible. Libyan officers can verify a transfer of funds, whereas a U.S. assurance that an officer’s family will be protected may go unfulfilled.

To say that Coasean bribes might be an effective strategy, however, does not necessarily mean that we should offer these blandishments. Inducing officers of another country to mutiny might violate international law. Coasean bribes are almost certainly a legitimate war-time tactic – even though it is a step toward a mercenary fighting force. But soliciting military insurrection by officers of a country with which we are not at war may be a different normative story altogether.

A couple of years ago, I addressed a related issue in Distinguishing Soldiers and Non-State Actors: Clarifying the Geneva Convention's Regulation of Interrogation of Captured Combatants Through Positive Inducements.  My abstract:

While attention has understandably been focused on the coercive tactics used to question detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere in secret prisons, much less has been written about the use of positive inducements to bribe detained combatants into cooperating with their captors. For the most part, commentators have suggested that the Geneva Convention raises no obstacles to the use of positive inducements, even against prisoners of war. While I agree that positive inducements are permissible against members of non-state groups such as al Qaeda, I argue that the Geneva Convention should be read as prohibiting the use of such inducements against members of the armed forces of nations, because doing so involves tempting detained POWs into betraying their home nations. The crux of my argument is based on the Geneva Convention's restrictions on compelling or seeking volunteers from POWs to perform labor that materially assists the war effort against their home countries. It seems perverse therefore to allow them to volunteer potentially critical military information. I further distinguish positive inducements to commit espionage in non-armed conflict situations on the ground that the induced betrayal is the same, but the exploitation of detention and captivity is not. The conclusion that the Geneva Convention prohibits the use of positive inducements against POWs, however, does not mean that positive inducements are barred against detainees who are members of non-state groups. Here, I argue that the non-state group's claim of its members' loyalty is not entitled to the same degree of protection as a nation's claim to its citizens' loyalty. While this conclusion may appear circular in privileging nations, it is a structural consequence of the restriction of the right to use military force. Finally, I consider whether positive inducements could be expected to work against suspected al Qaeda members.

There is, to be sure, a meaningful difference between using cash incentives to induce an enemy soldier to surrender when that soldier is not a captive of the bribing nation, compared to bribing a captured soldier to give up potentially valuable military intelligence. 

 

Medicare cuts and the future of healthcare following ObamaCare?

Over at the Faculty Lounge, Sharona Hoffman reflects on how her elderly relative died of a cancer that her doctor failed to detect despite the fact that the tumor was egg-sized and visible to the naked eye:

However, when listening to her heart, her doctor never paid enough attention to see the egg-sized tumor that was clearly visible to the naked eye right beneath the heart area and never took the time to ask her whether there was anything else that was of concern to her.  My elderly relative told me that she always felt the doctor wanted to end the visit right away, and she never felt it was appropriate to bother him with any additional questions.  Thus,  the tumor was not discovered until it grew completely out of control and was a stage 4 cancer.

96 is a long life, but the tragedy is that the woman's life was still cut shorter than it necessarily needed to have been, if the doctor had had more time to diagnose the tumor.

Given that one of the ways in which ObamaCare purports to reduce health care costs is by imposing reductions in fees paid to doctors who accept Medicare, one wonders whether this sort of story -- "she always felt the doctor wanted to end the visit right away" -- will become even more commonplace.  I don't mean that in the sense that doctors will spend less time on patients to "get back" at Medicare, but rather than economic pressures will require that the reduction in per patient income be made up with a higher volume of patients, and hence less time per patient.

Books by authors braver than I am

A couple of recent books spring to mind where I was left thinking, how seriously brave/crazy did the author have to be to do the research to write this book?

First, there's Megan Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar, which is a collection of vignettes about her life in the early 2000s reporting from Afghanistan, Lebanon, and other dangerous places, and often without any sort of military escort.

Then there's Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God, which synthesizes four years of on-and-off research where the author interviewed a whole bunch of religiously motivated terrorists -- Christian, Jewish, and Muslim.  Most of them were not in prison when she interviewed them, and in many instances, this took place in foreign countries where she was suspected of being CIA or Mossad!  Stern did have her limits, though; the only al Qaeda person she interviewed was in U.S. custody.  She forthrightly admits that she was afraid to seek out others.  I don't blame her!

I suppose another book by someone braver than I am is Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down, given that Bowden ventured into Somalia with an interpreter to get as much of a picture as he could from the Somali point of view of the 1993 firefight that killed over a dozen U.S. troops and hundreds of Somalis.