How to Shave (Your Face)

Anthropologist Ralph Linton’s 1936 essay about cultural borrowing describes shaving as “a masochistic rite which seems to have been derived from either Sumer or ancient Egypt.” See, that’s where snooty shaving gear companies missed the turn.

The people who are trying to transform shaving into some kind of upmarket metrosexual deal do not have your best interests at heart. Somewhere down deep, shaving is a rite of purification, where you battle the dark side into submission for another few hours. For this to work, you have to treat your facial scruff like a worthy adversary. No challenge, no victory. Take my advice, you misguided shaving gear marketers. You’ll never get it right as long as you’re trying to make whisker abatement easy, comfortable and certain. Here’s the kind of process real guys are looking for, even if they may not articulate it very well.

1. Wash your face with the toughest soap fit for human use. Grandma’s Lye Soap would be great. You shouldn’t feel “moisturized.” You should feel like a mighty battle is joined, and it’s time to wake the hell up.

2. Second coat: more soapsuds, but applied with a brush. Forget shaving gel that lasts the whole shave. It’s just another copout, and will do your soul no good. Real soapsuds will not stay there very long, so you need more soap and hot water and more every few scrapes. A couple sopping-wet, steaming-hot hand towels aren’t a bad idea, either. Remember, this is a fight between you and your whiskers. It’s a war of attrition. You can never win, you can only hold the line. Your whiskers even keep growing for a few days after you’re dead.

3. Next, choose your weapon for the good fight. If you use a barber’s straight razor that you sharpen yourself, and know how to use a few hones and a strop, full marks. If there’s a big back-story about how you got the straight razor, extra credit. If the story involves New Orleans, you can stop reading right here—you’re in the pantheon already.

4. If you use one of those World War II Rolls Razors that has built-in hones and strops, but maintains the sharpening and stropping angles for you, that’s still pretty good. Anything south of that, you’re caving in to consumer culture. It’s your decision. I’m just here to set the bar.

5. Actual shaving is a test of how well you’ve been paying attention up to now, and how well you’re paying attention right this minute. You think you need a yoga instructor to get you into the moment? Scraping hair off your face is way more Zen than meditating. If you drift off while you’re meditating, so what? If you drift off while you’re shaving—damn! Instant feedback. You should have home court advantage here, so forget any excuses. No place where you’re going to nick yourself changed overnight, you know.

6. When you’ve covered the acreage, check your work thoroughly. Every place that you missed, and don’t notice until later today, is a silent indictment of your basic competency at life in general. No pressure.

7. Done with the razor? Get rid of the rest of the soap with one of those hot towels, if the dog hasn’t stolen it by now.

8. Next, apply some after-shave that came with the NIH Warren Grant Magnuson Clinic Pain Scale in the box. If you wouldn’t shake hands with Chuck Yeager smelling the way you do, you’re using The Wrong Stuff.

9. Finally, a quick pass along the jawline with a kerosene blowtorch, and you’re good to go.



(Dedicated to the memory of my father, who woke us up all the way through high school with the sound of his WWII Rolls Razor strop, and my younger brother, who was the only kid in his freshman dorm to use a straight razor and shaving brush.)

(c)2009 coyoteplaystheblues

Got us both riled

We'll take a pause after this, swear off the NY Times and its excesses for awhile. As Larned Jetmore noted in the earlier post, the Times conferred its aura of intellectual respectability on columnist Charles Blow, holding him out as someone who can help ordinary people "get the picture" through graphic representation of quantitative matters.

He's won awards for graphic design, and, per the paper's bio, "...graduated magna cum laude from Grambling State University in Louisiana, where he received a B.A. in mass communications." Great for graphics; apparently not so great for behavioral statistics and their representation.

Below, a point I thought worth making about police interactions across racial lines: a white cop / black stop is many times more likely, just based on the numbers in the population and random chance, as the reverse black cop / white stop. The NY Times apparently did not take this into consideration when designing their poll. Their results may reflect little more than the fact that there are six times as many opportunities for the complaint to occur in one direction as in the reverse direction. Yet, both the original poll and Charles Blow's piece on the Henry Louis Gates incident cite this as evidence of overwhelming police racism.

Geronimo

Let's play cops and professors--you're it!

Charles Blow writes a column called “By the Numbers,” in the New York Times. Linked below is his commentary on the Henry Louis Gates incident. He recounts a personal episode, a chilling police stop in Louisiana where a cop said he could kill him without cause and without consequences. Inexcusable behavior that’s relevant to the discussion—“so far, so good,” as President Obama said in his remarks about Gates.

Blow then seeks to support his point of view with some graphs that I believe are deeply misleading. The graphs, attributed to a 2008 NY Times / CBS survey, depict that black men are about seven times as likely as white men to answer “yes” to the question, “Have you ever felt you were stopped by the police just because of your race or ethnic background?”

By the numbers, indeed. Blacks are about 12% of the US population, whites about 75%. What does that predict about the likelihood—at random—that when stopped by police, blacks will experience a white police contact, versus whites experiencing a black police contact? Forget good or bad. Just consider, “If I’m stopped, what is the probability that the officer will not be my own race?”

Whites (or anybody) contacted by a police officer have about one chance in eight that the officer will be black--ie, will be a different-race police officer that’s relevant to this discussion. But blacks (or anybody) have six chances in eight that, if they encounter the police, their contact will be with a white officer. So, regardless of what the question is, blacks should report six times--600%--the frequency of observing a white officer doing anything, versus the frequency whites would report of observing a black officer doing the same thing—whether it’s acting aggressively, chewing gum on the job, or trying to sell tickets to the policemen’s ball.

Why? Once more—because, based purely on the racial make-up of the US population, blacks are six times as likely to be stopped at random by a police officer who’s white as whites are to be stopped by a police officer who’s black.

The graphs accompanying the article are very misleading, in a way that supports Mr. Blow’s narrative, and the New York Times’ political agenda, but wouldn’t pass muster in a behavioral statistics class. Police racism is bad enough when it’s accurately reported and depicted. But, to portray some ill-behavior as occurring six times more likely than chance, when it's really only occurring a few percent more than chance, is a serious inadequacy.

Geronimo

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/25/opinion/25blow.html?scp=3&sq=charles%20blow&st=cse

Charles Blow's color pic of an echo chamber

I must admit, when I first learned that Charles Blow was going to be writing a weekly column for The New York Times based upon interesting graphic representations of statistics related to the goings on of the world, I thought it was a great idea. As a magazine guy, I've learned to appreciate the deeper insight that can come from studying a really clever graphic. I especially like charts or graphs that can depict cumulative value or change over time, rather than simple snapshots or time slices.

Blow's graphics are pedestrian and elementary, however. And he uses them only to frame his point of view, and consciously chooses not give a full perspective. They aren't playful and artful in the way that best graphics are. They look like something that would illustrate an overhead projector presentation for the Politburo. And nothing meaningful really jumps out at you.


At a magazine where I once was a writer, we set out to invent a standing feature we called the "charticle." We never really succeeded because we were too old-fashioned, and our art department wasn't tightly integrated with the writing staff. We liked each other, but spoke different languages. Those of us with a mathematical inclination (as opposed to "quantitative") felt even more estranged from the design people. I remember trying to convey an idea to illustrate the cumulative change in revenue from Microsoft's various product lines as they evolved over time as a series of concentric circles with the smaller ones nudged down to touch tangents at the bottom so that the effect looked like an onion bulb. The outer circle would be the biggest revenue producer, while the core would be the newest line of business. Seemed simple enough to me, and a good way to quite literally show the company's growth in various dimensions. In fact, with the right color choice it could've been quite beautiful. I even drew it up and sent it to them:


But as usual, NIH [the ‘not-invented-here’ syndrome] struck. How could a word guy make such an explicit suggestion? We ended up with a bar chart with a linear scale that didn't allow for tracing the company's entire 30-year history, so it could only start in 1995, thus obscuring the whole point of how Microsoft's business evolved and adapted. Good graphics aren't just pretty pictures, but they're better and often more informative when they are.

I guess my point here is that Blow is not particularly imaginative graphically. Nor, as his columns show, is he a very rigorous thinker. That's not exactly a powerful combination, sorry to say.

He reminds me of Bill Maher, who thinks he understands everything, and that anyone who doesn't agree with his opinions is an ignoramus or worse. As Blow puts it in this article, "Trapped in their vacuum of ideas, too many Republicans continue to display an astounding ability to believe utter nonsense, even when faced with facts that contradict it."

Mmm-hmmm. . . .

I'd say that's like the pot calling the kettle black, but I guess that would be racist.

L.J.

Suppress cancer cures? Sure, no prob

Today's question came over the transom via a swim team buddy from high school. Someone...

…told me that ‘big pharma’ has a cure for cancer but is sitting on it because they make more money off the chemo drugs. I asked her how that could be 'cuz there are 200-300 types of blood cancers alone, according to a pathologist friend of mine. But she insisted it was true, and [that] prostate cancer was the main one!

Story lines like this hit my urban legend trip-wire. They remind me of hanging around my dad's used car lot at First and Main as a kid, hearing the salesmen talk about the 400 mile-per-gallon carburetor that GM had and was holding off the market, in collusion with the oil companies.

For the claim of a suppressed "cancer cure," I'll first mention some reasons for skepticism, then an example that could lend a little support to the conspiracy theorists.

Reasons to be skeptical
First and foremost, this particular example doesn't make sense. Prostate cancer is about the only cancer whose progress is normally so slow that "no treatment" is sometimes a valid medical option. As a population, patients with this diagnosis are likely to die of something else before the prostate cancer reaches lethal proportions. So, if you want to start a scandal rumor, get smarter. You picked the wrong medical condition for your conspiracy theories.

Conspiracies and cartels

Many years ago, I heard a Stanford economics professor address the question of the OPEC oil cartel. He did so by explaining the inherent instability of any cartel. Built into the cartel mechanism are the seeds of its own failure. The cycle goes something like this:

• All or most of the suppliers of something decide to cooperate to control the price, with the goal of limiting the supply so that their product is not available from anyone except the cartel, ensuring that they will get their preferred price.
• If few competitors exist outside the cartel, the price control mechanism goes into effect.
• The cartel discovers that it has an unavoidable task: to tell each of its members how much of the artificially-costly product they can produce and sell. Not all of them will be happy with their allocation. Maybe a lot of them are unhappy with their allocation.
• Some smart person in one of the unhappy units of the cartel gets out his abacus and figures, "We could make a dump-truck load more money if we left this dang cartel, cut our prices ever so slightly, and siphoned off a ton of business by beating the cartel-enforced price."
• They do.
• The decay of cartel loyalty and control is begun. As others defect and cut their prices to raise their sales volume, the cartel's efforts to enforce its high price against the free-market defectors actually help accelerate the disintegration of the cartel.

Similar to cartels, conspiracies that depend on absolute confidentiality and secrecy are horribly unstable. For them to disintegrate, it doesn't even take a monetary incentive. All that has to happen is that one of the parties to the secret conspiracy has to get hacked off, and blab.

From "quackwatch.com," a Snopes-type website for medical issues:

What about scientists who discover new treatments? If they can demonstrate effectiveness, publishing their data will bring them fame and fortune. The benefits could include research grants, academic promotion, enhanced research facilities, speaking invitations, honors, awards, and other career opportunities. Even scientists who are selfish and greedy would have much to gain by making their information public—and so would the institutions in which they work.

What about drug companies? Won't they simply abandon a new drug that threatens their existing drugs? This scenario is also far-fetched. Drug companies are continuously looking for new drugs, because existing drugs have patents that will run out. Also, any company that can market a new drug that is effective against cancer will come out billions of dollars ahead, even if existing drugs become obsolete. Some conspiracy theorists claim that drug companies ignore "natural" substances that cannot be patented and therefore cannot be profitable. However, if a natural substance is found useful, drug companies can develop related chemicals that are more effective.

Even if a short-sighted drug company executive decided to suppress a new drug because it was too effective, the scientists involved might still go public with the information, for the general good if for no other reason. Among the dozens of people who have inside knowledge, someone is likely to have a conscience. The need for drug company support could be eliminated by obtaining a grant from the National Cancer Institute. Also, if the treatment really worked, other researchers would eventually be able to demonstrate to the world that the treatment did in fact cure cancer. This has never been done for any supposedly 'suppressed' cancer cure.

A reason to believe it could happen
A company where I worked sold a medical infusion pump worn on the arm or on the torso to a competing pharmaceutical and medical device company many years ago. It was a case of a competitor buying a competitor. We worked with them to get our product through its final development stages and onto the market, but our engineers felt that the client / acquirer was moving very slowly. Even if this was true, it wasn't a case of a "better fix" being held off the market. It was an example of an existing fix being held on the market, by neutralizing a new entrant. I would like to think our pump was better, but if the acquiring company thought "we own both products now, and we're sticking with Product A, which is already out there and doing just fine," that's a legitimate business tactic. Even at that, it was very expensive for them to prevent a new entrant coming into the market--in essence, we got "paid" for our product by having a competitor buy all of our product, instead of having to fight that competitor to give retail customers an opportunity to buy any of our product. This is about the only example I ran across in 30 years in the industry.

Bottom line
To believe that a cancer cure is being held off the market by the companies who are supposedly searching for cancer cures, you have to believe that all the following things are absolutely true:

• The cure was developed in the pharma industry, and is highly effective. If so, hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of people have to have been involved. How will all the people who know about it be silenced with perfect, 100% certainty?
• The cure is so certain to make present therapy obsolete that it is being held off the market, despite being worth billions itself. Come on, folks. Only about a hundred drugs have an annual revenue line of a billion or more. Versus a sure and certain cancer cure? No contest, cancer cure wins and gets to the market.
• The secret has leaked to the Internet, email-forwarding strings, gym discussions, barbershops and cab drivers, but is still somehow so closely held that nobody can ever catch the villains at it. Huh?