TWA

1. http://www.slate.com/blogs/how_babies_work/2013/03/20/the_science_of_breast_milk_latest_research_on_nursing_and_milk_vs_formula.html
Fascinating. Seriously. The more you know about breast milk the more amazing it is.

2. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Unintended-and-Deadly-Consequences-of-Living-in-the-Industrialized-World-199164051.html
Living laboratory: Finland and Russia. One side has huge numbers of Type 1 Diabetes, the other side has very low incidents of Type 1 Diabetes. But
which is which? And more importantly, WHY? Great article.

3. Up All Night, New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/03/11/130311fa_fact_kolbert
This one is about sleep...or lack there of. Basically a group of book reviews, there are some interesting nuggets in there. For example, couples
sleep better apart. A LOT BETTER. I can buy that. And there is a nugget about a naked Ben Franklin in the article too, Keith...

4. Similar, but not the Same, Businessweek
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-21/biosimilars-lure-major-drugmakers-into-the-generics-biz
Are generic drugs the same as the designer drugs? Nope. So what does that mean for all of the drugs that are going off patent? A mess.

That's all for now.

TWA

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/fashion/england-develops-a-voracious-appetite-for-a-new-diet.html?src=me&ref=general

new diet out of england...look to see more about it. eat all week and then fast saturday and sunday. interesting. a good friend's brother did the reverse of this: fast all week and eat whatever on the weekends...worked. i would like to see more about how this impacts your bodies' bugs...of course. i have a good friend who has had good results fasting...feeling better...so maybe post-baby...

2. The Appetite Workout

This was interesting. Working out will make you hungry, but if you keep working out overtime, your body will compensate. It takes 3 months, so stick with it.

3. http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/
Ok, this article reminded me of an article a friend sent around last year about how the mice we use in all of our scientific testing are all creating false results. Similarlly, psychologists have thought that the western brain was the "normal" brain, while the rest of the world's brains were strange. Take China. There the nail that sticks out gets the hammer. Here, the squeeky wheel gets the grease. So, we thought most of the world felt that sticking out and being an individual was the best way of thinking. Well most of the world thinks like the Chinese. This has implications for lots of science and really how we view and interact with the world. Excellent article. Hat tip to Keith.

this weeks articles: TWA

1. http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2012/12/18/when-you-swallow-a-grenade/

great article about the human biome and why you should really think three times before taking antibiotics. "don't kill the good guys, bro."

2. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/health/mediterranean-diet-can-cut-heart-disease-study-finds.html?pagewanted=all

the Mediterranean diet may work...and the up side is that people stay on the diet rather than going off it...like they do with low fat diets. go get some olive oil. but...one of our cult leaders, dr. esselystyn doesn't agree. he doesn't allow any fat in his diet...and look how greatbill clinton looks these days.

3. http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/
 
Want to understand what is taking down our economy? Let me explain: health care costs. Why are the costs so high? Read the article. Get angry.

that's it this week.
n

This Week's Articles of Interest

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/magazine/why-can-some-kids-handle-pressure-while-others-fall-apart.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all
The author Po Bronson has been on a life long quest to figure out how to live his life. I guess he is looking back to his childhood now. Children and stress: two types of kids are Worriers and Warriors. Both have pluses and negatives, but was seems to be clear is that too much pressure on children will make them under-preform.

2. http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/jan/31/wes-anderson-worlds/
Some people like Wes Anderson some people hate him...but this essay is a fine meditation on what his art means and why it matters in helping you make sense of the world. All this time I thought Owen Wilson was Wes Anderson...Strange.

3. http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2013/jan/15/bitter-end/
This is a podcast about what care doctors choose at the end of their own lives v. what the average person would choose. Doctors only want pain medication. Full stop. The rest of the stuff: CPR, chemo, etc., just makes the last days of your life miserable. Worth a listen and ponder.

4. Spirit Guide, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/02/11/130211fa_fact_sanneh.
The first problem with the New Yorker is that it comes every week. The second problem is that even the articles you think you can skip turn out to be fascinating. Take whisky. I don't care about whisky or that it lacks an 'e' if Scottish. But there I was reading along. But again, don't expect a solid ending.

5. Antarctica, by Gabrielle Walker
This book was interesting...but there were a few mind blowing nuggets. First, there is a single celled organism below Antarctica that shoots way above its weight. It can eat other multicelled organisms. Foraminifera. They might even be able to walk. SINGLE CELLED. Seriously. We continue to revise Darwin...And then there are some other little guys down there who live in the driest place on Earth called Tardigrades. "They grow up to a millimeter long, making the adults just barely visible to the naked eye. They are stubby and cute with four pairs of fat little legs, a vole-like snout, and a complexion of a gummy bear." Apparently no matter what you do to them they just don't die. And when things get too bad they swap out their body's water for sugar and can hibernate for decades. AWESOME.
I can send this book to you if you want it. Just email me.

This Week’s Articles of Interest to Nicole

In Summary (200 words or less)

 

1. The Quantified Spouse

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/28/quantified-spouse-movement_n_2567459.html

Some spouses are crazy and taking the quantified self-movement too far...tracking their spouses eating, sleeping, and even pooping.

“Christine, a 20-something New Yorker who asked to be identified by her first name, had plans to move in with her boyfriend, and the couple spent every minute outside of work searching for a new apartment -- or so Christine thought. She logged into the Kindle account they shared to read an e-book she and her boyfriend had started in tandem, only to discover he’d plowed several hundred pages ahead, while she was still just two chapters in.”

Clearly a deal breaker....REALLY?

 

2. The Boy with a Thorn in His Joints

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/magazine/the-boy-with-a-thorn-in-his-joints.html?_r=0

Three year old gets arthritis. Doctors prescribe steroids. They don't work. Mom tries alternative stuff like Omega-3 pills, probiotics, some leaky gut stuff (which turns out to be a real issue), and waits 6 weeks. Kid gets worse. Then on the 7^th day of the 6^th week, kid wakes up and can walk again. Remission. The article also talks about a topic I am into: fecal transplants. This is a topic de jour as people learn how important bacteria are for our bodies. Actually, we are bacteria vectors, no individuals.Well written and you really cheer for this mom.

 

3. Anarchist Calisthenics, Harper’s

http://harpers.org/archive/2012/12/anarchist-calisthenics/

Cute article about how people in Germany follow the rules and how one town put in round abouts which turns out to make people drive better. Fewer accidents. Interesting, as they put in a round about in my hometown of Kalispell that every one hates. I would like to see the numbers. From a book by James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism.

 

4. A Lifetime of Tag
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323375204578269991660836834.html

These guys, including a priest from Montana, have been playing tag with each other for decades. They buy plane tickets and surprise one another. They enjoy life. Cute.

 

5. They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside | Danger Room
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/11/ff-the-manuscript/all/

This one was super interesting about a strange code from the 1700s. The pictures are very interesting and the history of secret societies that is included is fascinating. The article falls down at the end a bit, but ending stories, or anything is difficult, so don’t let that stop you from reading the article.

Harry Lattin

From the Daily Interlake, Kalispell, Mt.

Former Kalispell banker Harry Lattin died Jan. 14 in Portland, Ore., from end-stage renal disease. Lattin was 76.

After years in the banking industry in Nevada, Lattin moved to Kalispell in 1971 as a vice president at Conrad National Bank (later First Interstate Bank). Eventually he became president of the bank. He also served as president of the Kalispell Chamber of Commerce and was chairman of the Kalispell Art Show and Auction for three years. He was especially proud of the bank’s sponsorship of the Men’s U.S. National Downhill Championships at Big Mountain in 1982.

He began a new career as an investment executive at D.A. Davidson in Kalispell in 1984. Soon thereafter he was diagnosed with liver failure. He received a new liver in 1987 and was grateful for the support the Kalispell community gave him and the trust fund set up to help defray his medical costs.

Unable to work, he retired in Kalispell but kept busy through a longstanding commitment to the Republican Party in Flathead County. Lattin served as president of the Pachyderm Club in the early 1990s and was a longtime finance chairman for the Flathead Republican Central Committee. He was also involved in campaigns for the U.S. House by Ron Marlenee and Rick Hill. In 2006 received a special award from the Flathead County Republican Central Committee in recognition of his work. 

In 2008 Lattin moved to Portland to be closer to his son.

He is survived by two sons, Dr. Brandon Hayes-Lattin (Courtney Hayes-Lattin) of Portland and Brent Lattin (Nicole Harkin) of Washington, D.C.; three grandchildren; and his brother, Frank Lattin (Donna Lattin), of Las Vegas, Nevada.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the United Network for Organ Sharing, www.unos.org, in memory of Harry Lattin.

homeschooling

Learning historically was the goal of schooling: kids went to school to learn about the world and foster an interest in our world. Is that true? Or has school always been about socialization of our children to follow the leader, and do what they are told?

I think that the most important thing that a child can learn is how to think on their own; how to reason complicated things through and come to a logical conclusion. We won’t be around forever, and they need these abilities.

Schools today are largely teaching to tests. So today’s children are going to school 1) to be socialized and 2) to learn to rote-ly regurgitate the information for tests.

I consider homeschooling because I don’t want Oskar to learn either of these things, necessarily. Of course there is value in learning how to get along or ahead in the systems of our society. But that is not what I think school should be about.

I want Oskar to keep his innate interest in the world fully intact. I want him to always be interested in learning new things and trying new things. I want him to have the opportunity to keep learning more about a topic he is interested in.

My 6^th grade class in Georgia, had this VERY progressive education plan which fully integrated all of the subjects around one major subject: Humpback Whales. Music: we learned about whale songs. Math: we leaned about waves and how to calculate the waves made by the whale songs. English: we learned facts about whales and wrote about these. Spelling: Our vocabulary was all about whales. Science: more whales. It was so much fun. I loved it. And this really helped me see all of the connections in the world, something I still see today.

I want Oskar to have the chance to explore the world through school, not learn that life is shit and you just have to memorize stuff and get through...to what? Life is today. Getting through is not enough. I want him to regularly enjoy the wonder of our world. And 35 hour a week at school might just kill the wonder in him.

someone else with beliefs

the designers at office:

What We Believe /

1. We believe that mediocrity is our nemesis.
2. We believe that design should make you feel something.
3. We believe in clarity.
4. We believe that gut instincts are usually right.
5. We believe in bringing together extraordinary creative minds. And then going bowling.
6. We believe any color can be the new black … except for purple.
7. We believe Buckminster Fuller when he said, “A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist.”
   (And we wish we had said it first.)

blogshop!!

Sorry for the radio silence folks. I took a great weekend course on photoshop and blogging last weekend and want to share one thing I made!

Oskar...crawling! He walks now though...

The Blogshop girls have quite a following and people flew in from Chicago and New York to attend the class. I heard about it from a friend of a friend who took the class in LA. Whitney is now their intern. Met lots of fun people and that was great.  It was also great to meet two women entrepreneurs clearly doing what they love. Inspiration.

Links to Photoshop: http://www.photoshop.com/ and Blogshop: http://iheartblogshop.com/.

Full disclosure: with this post I am entering the Blogshop/Photoshop contest to win the new Photoshop 6! Fingers crossed!

they look happy here

book review: the lifespan of a fact

Reblogged from www.bureauphile.com.

The Lifespan of a Fact, by John D'Agata, author. Jim Fingal, fact-checker.

I heard about this book from a podcast out of Wisconsin, TTBOOK. Listen to the interview if you have a few minutes. But you might be wondering what this has to do with bureauphiles. Well, lots of our government's time, and energy, all joking aside, is spent checking facts before government publications are published. As an intelligence analyst I spent days double and triple checking reports before they were "sent forward" for review and action upon my recommendations.But working at GAO is where I spent the most time checking facts. All words in GAO reports have been fact-checked. What Lifespan of a Fact distills so clearly is the back and forth regarding facts. A friend once spent hours trying to find original support for the assertion that the F-22 is the Raptor...hours. I spent time citing the Periodic Table of Elements to prove that Na was indeed sodium.

The flip side of this obsessive compulsive checking is that the information is reliable.
What is somewhat disappointing about the book is that it is apparently some kind of meta commentary on the nature of fact checking. The book itself, while publicized as nonfiction, is actually fiction.

So check out the book if you want to read some entertaining, yet apparently not entirely factual, insanity...and pull your hair out a bit.

book review: an everlasting meal

An Everlasting Meal, Cooking with Economy and Grace
by Tamar Adler

She gets a bit philosophical at times, but overall, this is one of the best cookbooks I have ever read. Less recipes, and more home cooking theory, if you will, we have already started implementing a lot of Adler's ideas into our kitchen. For instance, we now have "spread night." You basically make pestos out of whatever you have in your fridge with olive oil and walnuts (we used pistachios last night) in your handy chopper. Have someone bring home a fresh baguette and call it dinner.

She also instructs the reader to shop and then cook immediately all of your veggies, so you have them ready at hand to put into other meals, such as omelets or soups or pasta. This saves you time on the other end. We have done this for a few weeks now with great success. We are eating better and cheaper, at home.

Fun quote:
"Children must shell peas. In a world of things too big, getting peas from pods is a chance for pea-sized people to exercise authority. Always told to put things back where they found them, here, children have it right. Pea shelling goes only in one direction: dig, disperse, and never look back." pg. 53

This book is so good, I am going to buy it. (I got it from the library...)

bureauphile

I have been spending some amount of my time blogging over at www.bureauphile.com. I need to spend more time there. For those inclined we are posting information and topics of interest to people interested in government.

We are also looking for guest posters...so if you are interested, drop me a line!

40 under 40

Had a great time today at the Renwick Gallery's 40 under 40 exhibit. The art was amazing. Oskar enjoyed the Ostridge feather dress.

Worth checking on online or in person.

Click here to see more.

about our mission statement

A good friend asked us why we say, "we believe" rather than "we value" in our mission statement.

What is the difference between beliefs and values? Brent and I chatted about this and I am not sure where things will shake out.

This is how it would change...I think.

we value spending time with our family and helping our family financially if needed.

we value friends and family.

we value helping the less fortunate.

we value living close to work.

we value our money.

we value the benefits of small living.

we value our time away from work and therefore take all of our vacation days.

we living each day fully.

we value honesty.

we value promises.

we love.

book review: "getting started with R"

From Brent's blog:

Book Review: 25 Recipes for Getting Started with R by Paul Teetor; O'Reilly Media

25 Recipes for Getting Started with R by Paul Teetor is a little book of examples that solve particular problems using R. What's "R" you ask? Well, then this isn't the book for you, despite its "Getting Started" moniker. I knew that R was a hot new thing (program or programming language or environment or something) that people were using to do neat stuff with data and statistics. But I wanted to know more and this seemed like a good book start with. I should have read the Preface a bit more carefully as it clearly says:

This book is not a tutorial on R, although you will learn something by studying the recipes. The book is not an introduction to statistics either.

Those are both important caveats. While I know slightly more about R than I used to, I'm still looking to "get started" using R. The problem here, to be fair to to Teetor, is probably the publisher's (which it pains me to say since I love them so and I got this book for free in order to review it). This book is a set of excerpts from a larger book of recipes called the "R Cookbook." That book probably makes sense to buy if you've already gotten your start with R and want some guidance on how to solve problems using R. The "25 Recipes" book is too short (only 44 pages of actual "recipes", the first 6 pages of which cover installing and getting help on the web) to provide more than a very cursory overview. More troubling is that some of the explanations within the recipes seem truncated. I'm guessing that's because they refer to recipes in the full book that weren't included here. For example, Problem 1.10 carefully explains that, depending on how you select a column you might get a "vector" or a "data frame" returned. While most people reading a book about R are probably going to be able to intuit the distinction it still would have been helpful to have thrown in a "recipe" about it.  But of course, that would be more of a "tutorial" which this book states that it is not. As a positive, the book does cover the main things you'd want to know (basic statistical function, basic plotting/graphing, regressions). But it's hard to imagine that there aren't free alternatives on the web that get you at least as far. In sum, I like the idea behind the book but couldn't recommend this version. Perhaps the full "R Cookbook" is the way to go. Find the book here: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018315.do

going dancing...

book review: And Then We Came to the End

By Brent:
I wanted to like this book. But I didn't. I thought I was enjoying it for a while; it is clever and well-written. But by about page 100 I was tired of clever and well-written and funny observations about work life. I get it, I'm employed. The major plot themes move too slowly and the book is written in the first person plural ("we") which, for me, meant I never quite got attached to any of the characters. First person plural isn't done much in novels, it's considered very hard. I can see why because even though, as I said, the book was well written, I kept feeling like it was being told from the point of view of a particular person who never let us hear what he or she was thinking. Who is this "we" and why don't "we" ever say what "we're" thinking? And then I realized that, by definition, "we" is all of the characters in the book and I don't like any of them. So I stopped reading the book. There's a middle section (written more conventionally as "she") that was well done and somewhat more engaging. And then I skipped to the end. And the was nice but there's like, 278 pages from where I stopped to the end and I didn't really miss anything. So there you have it. Read 100 pages; skip to page 196 and read for, like, 30 more page, and then read the end. Or just let this book go even though it was highly regarded by reviewers.

photography drama

I am in the middle of frantically trying to get my photography site together because I am doing a big shoot in September. I wanted to come up with some fun name for my photography, but it turns out that everyone uses their name. Which is lame, but I am crunched for time so I need to just go with it.

Here's what the site looks like now:
www.nicoleharkin.com

You can click around and like pictures if you are so inclined.

I am super excited about the event. I am going to set up a photo booth to take pictures of families.

Matthias, in Berlin, is working on a new banner for me. He liked the name "Tripody." Which is cute, but is a little too close to potty in English.

mission statement

We worked on these a few months ago and then let them marinate. I would like to share our family's mission statement with you. I thought it was a good thing to do since we are not religious. I wanted to have written down what we value. I am sure we will refine this as time goes on, but for now this is it.

we believe in spending time with our family and helping our family financially if needed.

we believe some friends are like family.

we believe in helping the less fortunate.

we believe in not commuting.

we believe in living debt free, even if we aren't there yet.

we believe in small living.

we believe in taking all of our vacation days.

we believe life is short and working is a means to an end.

we believe in honesty.

we believe promises matter.

we believe in love.

pie town

retirement in america

I worked on retirement issues for a few years and this paragraph, from the New York Times, by Teresa Ghilarducci explains the reality that we currently live in with respect to retirement:

"Not yet convinced that failure is baked into the voluntary, self-directed, commercially run retirement plans system? Consider what would have to happen for it to work for you. First, figure out when you and your spouse will be laid off or be too sick to work. Second, figure out when you will die. Third, understand that you need to save 7 percent of every dollar you earn. (Didn’t start doing that when you were 25 and you are 55 now? Just save 30 percent of every dollar.) Fourth, earn at least 3 percent above inflation on your investments, every year. (Easy. Just find the best funds for the lowest price and have them optimally allocated.) Fifth, do not withdraw any funds when you lose your job, have a health problem, get divorced, buy a house or send a kid to college. Sixth, time your retirement account withdrawals so the last cent is spent the day you die."

My friends in Europe will not understand why we have this problem...

facebook

I lost a friend. Not lost in the sense that I misplaced her. We just aren’t friends anymore. There was an event, but that doesn’t really matter anymore. What matters is that person is gone from my life.

But she isn’t.

I collect people. Once we are friends, I stay in contact. I may move or you may move, but I am good at making sure I am still in contact. And I was good at this even before facebook.

But with facebook, instead of my no longer having contact with this lost friend, I see what is going on her life. I can monitor her. Does she monitor my life?

Cleaning out my desk space today I ran across a container of black sand from New Zealand. Years ago, I gave some of this special sand to my lost friend. Does she still have that bit of sand? Why do I still have the sand? I think it is cool, and it reminds me of my trip to New Zealand. And of my lost friend. Without facebook I would only think of her when I saw the sand, not whenever she posted on facebook.

Unfriending this friend would seem too harsh. I like seeing what is going on in her life.

But what do I want to spend my time thinking about? Real friends now, or old friends from the past?

And that is the problem I have with facebook. It is sucking up time that I could spend doing other things. It has become my TV. We don’t watch TV because of this. I can’t seem to decide to only sometimes check facebook, so I am now going to delete my account.

I will miss the pictures of my nieces and nephews. I will miss seeing my friends from time to time. But really, I want to have intentional interactions. Not what I have now, which is unfulling and a waste of time.

Please email me if you want to stay in touch.

**UPDATE** A good friend called and said I did not need to get off of facebook, I just needed to manage my use better...DONE. We will see how that goes.

flyfishing movie

My brother is involved with this kickstarter campaign to help raise money for this movie about cancer and fly fishing. Please consider donating.

Kickstarter campaign page here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/travisswartz/fish-on-stories-from-a-reel-recovery-retreat

cool stuff