[A general officer at the Pentagon’s] summary of her approach [to managing her affairs] was as follows: “first, I make a list of priorities: one, two, three and so on. Then I cross out everything from three on down.” p. 74

From Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

… that women (or any assemblies of individuals) are somehow monolithic…

Via Mano Singham…, but will anyone agree with me?

From Suzanne DeGaetano at Mac’s Backs:

Hi all,

You may have heard that the Justice Department is suing five publishers and Apple for price-fixing on ebooks. Three publishers have settled but Macmillan, Penguin and Apple will go to court.

Two years ago Macmillan changed the way they charge vendors for ebooks. Amazon had dropped the price of ebooks to 9.99–even though they would lose money on the books it was a lure to purchase the Kindle which they would profit from.

Macmillan’s CEO John Sargent knew these low prices were unsustainable and might lead to the collapse of the publishing industry. So he changed the pricing model and other publishers followed suit.

The result of the new policy stabilized the book industry. Ebook prices were raised to an average of 12.99 which reflected the true cost of doing business. Amazon went from a 90 percent share of the ebook market to 60 percent, with Barnes and Noble able to gain significant share with their Nook. Even independent bookstores could now compete—that is why Mac’s is able to sell ebooks on our website. The publishers move created a level playing field and forged a healthy competitive environment.

The Justice Dept. did not see it that way and hence the lawsuit. It’s as if the Justice Dept. is handing a monopoly right back to Amazon.

Independent bookstores are used to competing and we try to do the best things to thrive without complaint, but the corporate welfare handed to Amazon is galling. I have long been angered that Amazon does not collect sales tax and stymies and fights states that try to collect what is their due. Bookstores collect sales tax for the state, badly needed sales tax, why can’t the internet vendors? Take a look at the state’s economy and connect the dots.

The Author’s Guild website is a good resource for readers who want to know more about the suit, including Guild President Scott Turow’s position on the issues.

I think these are vital matters and I will keep you informed through our website or Facebook postings.

As always, hope to see you at Mac’s for the events listed below.

Thanks for reading!

0808: Who makes up the ‘Christian Right’?

Go ahead, tell me I’m wrong.

“On the whole, tho’ I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell short of it, yet I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.” Benjamin Franklin. p. 71

From Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Scott Adams nails precisely how Baumeister tells us willpower works.

I reached another milestone this morning with a weight of 195.1 pounds. I know it sounds silly, but I’ve been thinking of my weight since I shot past 201.2 pounds in relation to the current year — 201.2 = 2012, 199.0 = 1999, &c — and this is the first weight associated with a year before I was born in 1955.

This morning’s weight puts me less than four pounds away from my goal of normal weight at 191.3 pounds.

For your culinary pornography, here’s a picture of the tiffin I assembled this morning. I normally pack a hard-boiled egg for my mid-morning snack, but I discovered this morning that I didn’t have any of the snacky ovoids and quickly assembled a one-egg omelet with scallions and Shitake mushrooms and a finger-food alternative.

The tin on the left contains turkey-bite rollups with apple and green beans, carrot bites and a saki cup of pickled ginger. The tin on the right contains celery bites and apple slices in lemon juice. The one-egg omelet slipped in on top of the left-hand tin.

I fully expect to reach my weight goal in the next week and need to think about how I enter a maintenance mode.

Suggestions?

Roldo Bartimole writes:

It was inevitable.

Once again the sale of the historic Cleveland school administration building is front and center.

Why?

There’s big money to be made.

The historic public building sits strategically centered now. The building and open land sits in the prime location for a hotel with the construction of the $400-million medical mart/convention center at its doorstep. Right across the street in fact. With more than adequate parking facilities adjacent.

Perfect for exploitation. And exploitation is a going business in Cleveland, even with Jimmy in jail.

What makes it even more attractive to some developer is that the schools are controlled by the mayor of Cleveland.

Frank Jackson, keep your hands off this historic building!

African-Americans in particular should be outraged Continue Reading »

1143: Is philosophy science?

The group with proximal [short-term] goals outperformed everyone else when the program was over and competence was tested. They succeeded, apparently, because meeting these daily goals gradually built their confidence and self-efficacy. With their focus on a specific goal for each session, they learned better and faster than the others. Even though they spent less time per session, they got more done, thus progressing through all the material faster. At the end, when faced with hard problems, they persevered longer and were less likely to give up. It turned out that the distal [long-term] goals were no better than having no goals at all. Only the proximal goals produced improvement in learning, self-efficacy and performance. p. 70

From Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

A Tiffin is the ubiquitous south Asia lunch bucket. I got mine from a kind friend who traveled in India.

I’ve been learning about Bento boxes and decided to adapt my traveling food to the Tiffin. On the left is my mid-afternoon snack of apple chunks and celery bits. On the right is my mid-morning snack — a hard-boiled egg that I munch with a bottle of diluted grapefruit juice — and my lunch: turkey bites, seared deli turkey wrapped around apple chunks and green beans with carrot bits.

As the body uses glucose during self-control, it starts to crave sweet things to eat – which is bad news for people hoping to use their self-control to avoid sweets. When people have more demands for self-control in their lives, their hunger for sweets increases. It’s not a simple matter of wanted all food more – they seem to be specifically hungry for sweets. In the lab, students who have just performed a self-control task eat more sweet snacks but not other (salty) snacks. [This is true for me and Snickers bars, doughnut holes and Jolly Ranchers. JH] p. 51

From Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Jonah Edelman of Stand For Children said:

“I think charter schools should be paying advocacy organizations for their advocacy work out of their per pupil dollars. If you think of running a school as running a business, any sound business is going to allocate right off the bat a certain percentage of their funding towards lobbying, advocacy work.”

Via Hired Guns on Astroturf: How to Buy and Sell School Reform.

This evening, because my 1700 student canceled after I had already driven to the home, I found myself a few blocks away from Geraci’s with the time and money to conduct my pizza experiment. If there has been one food in my life that I craved more than all others, that food has been pizza. Numerous times I have declared that pizza is the perfect food and that if I could eat only one food for the rest of my life, I would select pizza.

When I was in high school and working as an usher at the Colony Theater in Marietta, I would order a whole, large pepperoni pizza from Pastime Pizza and eat the whole pie on my Saturday dinner break. This became a pattern in my life and with the few exceptions when I would buy a single slice on Coventry, I’ve always ordered large pizzas that I would eat all by myself. When the $5 pizzas appeared a few years ago, I would often grab one on my way home in the evening as the fast and easy way to get my pizza fix. I’m not certain, but I think that the last pizza I ate was sometime in September or October of last year. (I did make mini-pizzas after I started to change my eating patterns using small flat breads and anchovies.)

My doctor at the Veterans Administration had suggested on my penultimate appointment with him that I order a small pizza and test my ability to enjoy a special food without gorging (my choice of word, not his) myself and, in line with the suggestion from Willpower regarding giving myself permission to eat something at a future, unspecified time, I said that I would do so. As part of that experiment I told my doctor that I would dissect a small Geraci’s pizza and that is exactly what I did last evening.

The pizza right out of the box weighed 465 grams. When ordering the pizza I specifically requested that the pie not be sliced to facilitate my dissection I first cut off the crust, but could have skipped this step since the Geraci’s pie did not have the standard rolled edge of most pizzas – a feature I’d forgotten about, but one of the reasons I have long rated Geraci’s No. 1 in Cleveland – and found that the crust weighed 39 grams. I disposed of that crust and was left with a 9-inch diameter pie. I did the grade-school math calculation and determined that I was working with 63.6 square inches of pizza.

I next cut a 2-inch by 2-inch section from one quadrant of the pizza and further divided that into four, one-inch square servings. I weighed the four servings and recorded their weights as: 25 grams, 26 grams, 28 grams and 29 grams or an average of 27 grams. I carefully removed and weighed all the mushrooms from each piece and together they weighed 13 grams. I then lifted the cheese off each piece and scrapped any sauce clinging to the cheese back onto the crust. In total, the four pieces of pizza contained 26 grams of cheese.

I found after scrapping the accumulated sauce onto the scale that that ingredient weighed 13 grams. The final component, the remaining four pieces of crust, weighed a total of 54 grams, more than all the other ingredients combined (54 g vs. 52 g) and if I were to repeat this experiment sometime in the future, I would do so with a thin- crust pizza.

The analysis of the 2-inch by 2-inch sample then is this: crust, 54 g @ 132 calories, cheese, 26 g @ 104 calories, sauce, 13 g @ 8 calories and mushrooms, 13 g @ 4 calories for a total of 248 calories or 62 calories per square inch of pizza. That puts my estimate of the whole pie at 3,944 calories. Wow. Just feckin’ wow.

That one pizza represents 250 percent of my daily total goal of 1,600 calories, and that was a small pizza. No wonder I used to weigh 265 pounds since I was previously eating about two large pepperoni pizzas a month.

The reality that rose up and bit me on the ass from all of this was not the calories or the weight but that after all these months of dreaming of a Geraci’s Pizza, I was underwhelmed by the experience. The pizza hasn’t changed, I’m certain that the pie was a excellent as ever, but I’ve changed and as I was eating I kept thinking: when is this going to become awesome?

I may never eat another pizza as long as I live.

(Oh yeah, I weighed 197.8 pounds this morning; 67 down, 6.5 to go.)

The last of the Gawd Squad suspended – I’m sorry, I can’t get the hanged man image out of my head – his quest for the 2012 Republican Party nomination this week. Rick Santorum, whose name is synonymous with the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex, cinched his own noose and hoisted himself to the tree branch in the hope of resurrection (no, not the kind involving a rapture) in the political future. Santorum knew that his prospects of showing even remotely well – win? forget about it – in his home state of Pennsylvania were not looking good and that a loss in that primary would forever brand him as the loony loser he is.

Gawd did not deliver in 2012. Four republican darlings of the Religious Wrong – Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and finally Rick Santorum – each in turn touted Gawd’s blessing and guidance for their bid on the Republican nomination. That delusional endorsement and $3.79 would get them a gallon of gas.

From Jennifer Brunner via Courage PAC:

The Ohio Democratic Party will elect a chair tomorrow, Wednesday, April 11, 2012 at 7:00 p.m. at Ohio Democratic Party headquarters at 340 E. Fulton Street, Columbus, Ohio 43215. The two contenders are current Chair Chris Redfern and Lorain County Democratic Party Chair Tony Giardini.

The result of tomorrow evening’s vote of the 66-member state central committee will likely come down to whether members of the committee are permitted to vote a paper ballot.

Many in the Redfern camp will claim that a secret ballot is specifically forbidden by Democratic National Committee rules and will try to prevent any form of paper ballot voting from happening. In fact, this happened in 2005, when Chair Redfern was first elected. The Lieberman camp sought to use paper ballots that provided for signing in to receive a ballot and a signature on the ballot, presumably to avoid violating a national committee rule against secret ballot voting. (DNC rules in effect at the time the ODP Bylaws were approved did not forbid paper ballot voting, nor do they now. Moreover, the ODP rules adopting DNC rules did not specifically provide for later DNC rule changes, so it is the 2005 DNC rules that should be followed.

Here is one description of what happened in 2005:

“Watching the melee that ensued for the Ohio Democratic Party Continue Reading »