Complaining about Color-Coded Cakes

I realized I'm not only behind the times but also a sourpuss when I read yesterday's story by Bob Shaw in the Pioneer Press: Boy? Girl? Ask the Cake.

It seems the latest fashion in how to expect when you're expecting is to have an ultrasound done to identify the baby's sex, but don't find out right then. Instead, have the technician write the result on a slip of paper and put in an envelope. Then give the envelope to a bakery, which makes you a cake that's yellow or some other agreed-upon neutral color outside. The inside of the cake, though, is solid pink or blue. Then hold a "reveal party" (yet another party, right, and opportunity for gift-giving) where you cut the cake in front of an audience.

Photo by Pioneer Press photographer Sherri LaRose-Chiglo

My main reaction to all of this was eye rolling, head banging, and a bit of groaning.

Nothing is private in this most personal moment; everything becomes entertainment. I score very low when it comes to holding anything sacred, but this crosses the line for me.

And even worse was this bit: "At the...party, guests wore pink or blue stickers, showing their preference." What??! Treating children as if they're a sporting event is too much.


One expectant mother was quoted at the end of the story as saying, "It's fun to wait to find out, but waiting for the whole nine months would be too long."

I know she's speaking without thinking of how a Scrooge like me would respond, but wow. If you can't wait to find out the sex of your baby, how are you going to put up with all the other delayed gratification you'll encounter as a parent?

Advice from GOP Je$us

Mother Jones has a nice story on Paul Ryan's (R-Wis.) recent speaking engagement at Georgetown University, which was met with protests by his fellow Catholics. For some reason, they find his proposed budget un-Christian.

My favorite part of the story told about one creative demonstrator, dressed as GOP Je$us, who read from the Me-Attitudes:

Blessed are the rich, the reign of this world is ours. The rich rule the world, and the rest suffer and die, often in misery. Do not let this be you, my brothers! Easier to use your riches to genetically engineer very small camels that can fit through the needle's eye…

Blessed are the violent and the invincible, the proud and the powerful, the domineering and oppressive. We can have it all! And let our status of power be the proof that we are deserving of the fruits of the labor of the middle class and poor…

Blessed are those who show no mercy. No mercy to the poor, to women and children, the elderly and the homeless, victims, outcasts, enemies, refugees, the hungry, the undocumented, the unborn, those on death row, those who are different, those we don’t like. And of course, those who happen to be in the way of what we want…

Blessed are the warmakers. Yea I say unto you, if we were not making war, we could not be said to be making much. That is what China is for! Lo, the Lord looked at China and said "Let it be the worlds factory floor," and it was good…

I especially liked the part about the genetically engineered camels.

Seven camels in the eye of a needle by artist Nicolai Aldunin. Photo from My Modern Met.

There Are No Highlights in this Case

I've been following the Amy Senser hit-and-run case pretty closely.

It's kind of the inverse of the Koua Fong Lee case: Instead of an Asian immigrant whose car killed innocent U.S. citizens, we have an innocent Asian immigrant, Anousone Phanthavong, killed by a U.S. citizen in her car.

Lee's accident took place in daytime, with his family in the car; Senser's was at night, when she was alone. She left the scene of the accident, while Lee did not. And Senser is the wife of a local celebrity/media figure to boot instead of an immigrant from one of the Twin Cities' most outsider communities.

So of course the case raises all sorts of issues of disparity. Senser has the best defense money can buy; in Lee's initial case, that clearly wasn't true. Senser will be perceived as sympathetic by the jury because she's familiar to them -- a white woman, a soccer mom, in effect, whose tears well up when her teenaged daughters are called to testify. Lee, on the other hand, remained stoic throughout his trial. He just didn't seem to be sorry.

I can't get into the whole story, which has been covered extensively (although I would recommend reading this commentary piece from the Star Tribune, written by Phanthavong's boss, Anna Prasomphol Fieser, to get a sense of how the coverage was in the months before the trial).

What I wanted to say is a minor point. Each day for the past week or so the Strib has reported on Senser's trial, and each day they have included a "highlights" box.

Am I being overly sensitive when I say that highlights seems like the wrong word? Highlight has an unquestionably positive connotation.

Maybe the copy editors could try:

• Key moments Friday
• Friday summary
• What happened Friday

Any of those would be much better. Almost anything other than highlights, please.

This is a trial about a tragic death, not a reality TV show or a sporting event.

Flowchart to the Magic Underwear

An ex-Mormon named Molly posted this flowchart of whose soul gets what within the Mormon world view. I learned some things from it.

This is just the first third or so. Click it for a larger version:



So that's the Mormon deal with black folks. Wow. I wondered about that.

Be sure to click through to get all the good parts about how women fare along the way, not to mention the incentive for men to have multiple wives.

Bears Bad News

The front page of today's Star Tribune was a double dose of bad news for people without means: More news on Accretive's strong-arm tactics in hospitals plus a New York Times story titled Banks Woo Poor Clients for Fees.

Basically, banks are figuring out ways to get to a lower common denominator than payday lenders, using fine-print fees like a 10 percent "origination fee" on loans, on top of interest charges. And they can take payments from the customer's account whether the money is in there or not, resulting in overdraft charges galore. Bonus!

Then page 2 had this from the Los Angeles Times: Exposure to Violence Harms DNA. A British separated twins study found that kids who had been abused, bullied, or had witnessed domestic violence had shorter telomeres in their DNA than their identical twins who had not had the same experience. Shorter telomeres mean greater susceptibility to disease, and generally are considered a marker of age (i.e., proximity to death).

Violence in this case is serving as a proxy for extreme stress. " 'Kids who are raised in poverty and hardship have more disease. This might explain why,' said Dr. Owen Wolkowitz, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco," the story said.

As I recall, African Americans -- regardless of economic status -- have poorer health than white Americans, and an earlier age of death, on average. Some researchers are trying to figure out why that is by looking for reasons within people's genetic heritage, but I've always thought that the stress of living in a racist society, or being in a devalued group, might account for it somehow. Maybe this is the mechanism.

Scalia's Vision for Health Care Takes Shape

You may remember my earlier mention of Accretive, a company with a bad name that lost an unencrypted laptop full of medical records belonging to its client hospitals.

Accretive is in the local news again, this time because state Attorney General Lori Swanson has found the company "used high-pressure tactics in emergency rooms, cancer units and delivery wards to try to collect money from patients before they were treated," according to the Star Tribune.

All this took place at hospitals in the nonprofit Fairview chain, which includes the University of Minnesota's facilities. Fairview immediately announced they have dropped this "service" from Accretive, although they continue to hire it as a consultant for "other services."

And get this:

Swanson's probe found that Accretive employed collection quotas, cash inducements and in-house competitions using National Football League team names to motivate staff members to squeeze upfront payments from patients. At patient registration desks, for example, employees were told to follow lengthy scripts, written by Accretive, to press patients for payments before they got treatment, according to the six-volume report.

In one case, a child who sought treatment at the University of Minnesota Amplatz Emergency Room reportedly was kept waiting while the parents, who were uninsured, met with an Accretive "financial counselor." The incident prompted the hospital's own employees to question whether Accretive was violating federal law, which requires emergency rooms to see patients without such delays.

Swanson started her investigation following the laptop incident, but that wasn't the only thing: "a group of Fairview ER workers went to Swanson with fears that they could be fired for failing to increase collections."

Accretive created "stop lists" of patients who were to be pressured for payments before the could receive treatment. The lists included breast cancer patients. Accretive also "used religion, gender and marital status to create credit scores on Fairview patients, a potential violation of state and federal law."

All of this is a foreshadowing of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's recommendations during the hearings on the Affordable Care Act. And imagine all of the nonproductive labor expended on tracking and pressuring patients... that's part of the 30 percent of health care costs that would immediately evaporate if we had a single-payer system.

Only One Right Answer

If you don't follow the ongoing struggle over standardized testing in schools, you may not have heard about the pineapple question yet. Basically, a New York State reading comprehension test used a modified version of an absurdist story by Daniel Pinkwater, then asked inane questions about it.

Given that the test's outcome is used to judge important things like school progress and teacher's reputations, there's been a fair amount of outrage about this, and questions raised about the quality of the questions in general, the way they're developed and approved, and the opacity of the whole process.

Today's Star Tribune letters section included another fine example of what's wrong with reading comprehension tests. Like the writer, Natalie Goodson of New Hope, I find it hard not to be sad when I contemplate the logical outcome of the situation she describes:

STANDARDIZED TESTS
Some thinking just might be squeezed out

My third-grade twin sons are taking the MCA tests for the first time this year, and their teacher has been sending home some practice packets as homework. One of the reading selections was a poem about children planting a garden, and the question was asked, "What are the children likely to do next summer?"

My son chose "have a springtime party" but the "correct" answer was "plant another garden." I asked why he'd chosen the party answer.

He said, "Because I thought they would like to do something different next year."

I told him the correct answer, and he said, "But they already did that!" I pointed out that a lot of people plant gardens every year, and he looked outside at our blooming tulips and daffodils (perennials, of course) and said, "We don't!"

Finally, I told him, "Well, that's the answer they want you to have," so he fixed it and moved on. But I felt like I had squelched some creativity and intelligent thinking out of him. These tests are supposed to measure their comprehension, but he had understood the poem fine. He just thought about it a little differently than the testmakers did.

It made me wonder: How useful are these tests in measuring what kids know or what they can do? I suppose he's learning how to take standardized tests, of which there will be many in the years to come, but I wondered if his time would be better spent reading more poems, writing poems of his own, or even playing outside.

Mourning the Death of Facts, 360 B.C.E. - 2012 C.E.

It was Allen West and his insistence on 81 or so Communist members of Congress that finally killed Facts, according to Rex Huppke, writing in the Chicago Tribune.

"Facts is survived by two brothers, Rumor and Innuendo, and a sister, Emphatic Assertion."

Via kottke.org

Scrambled Slogans

My NPR Sunday Puzzle credentials go back just about to the beginning of its run in 1987, but today's was one of the funniest I can remember.

Will Shortz gave the contestant and host Rachel Martin seven classic advertising slogans with the last word scrambled. They were supposed to unscramble and name the brand or product associated with the phrase.

Here are the clues, with a bit of visual assistance from me. Pretend it's one of those matching quizzes, and draw an imaginary line between the phrase and the appropriate visual reference:

Get a piece of the cork.
Obey your tshirt.
I can't believe I ate the whole night.
You've questions, we've got rawness.
The breakfast of nacho imps.
Please don't squeeze the rich man.
There are some things money can't buy, for everything else there's mad craters.

I'll leave you to it. Excuse me while I go obey my tshirt.

An Earth Day at the Museum

It's Earth Day tomorrow. I spent part of today at the Science Museum of Minnesota's Earth Day Tweetup, which featured talks by Will Steger, Shawn Otto, and Maggie Koerth-Baker.

Steger shared his observations from traveling in the Arctic over the last 20 years. It's an area the size of the U.S. and Mexico combined, which used to be solid ice. Now you can no longer reach the North Pole by dog sled because there's too much open water. He also talked about the glaciers of Greenland, which are moving much more rapidly now than in the past because more melt means more lubrication, speeding their ooze to the sea.

He showed a time-lapse video like this one, from extremeicesurvey.org, of a Greenland glacier. The glacier is three miles wide, and a mile of it disappears in the two months under observation.

Shawn Otto was almost as scary when he showed a clip of John Boehner opining that CO2 isn't carcinogenic (???), and that the idea CO2 could be harmful to the environment is "almost comical" (around minute 3). Otto's book, Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America, just won a Minnesota Book Award for nonfiction. I loved when he said "Science is never partisan, but it's always political." I'll have to read that book soon.

Unfortunately, I had to leave before Maggie KB gave her talk, but I gather from the tweets it was similar to parts of her recent book, Before the Lights Go Out. And since I've already read it, I will have to share some thoughts on it here soon.

The Science Museum also today opened its Future Earth exhibit on energy and climate change, with interactive displays on ocean acidification, farm land use, and wasted energy.

Did you know that natural gas burns at 3600°F to heat your house to 75°, and then the excess is vented into the atmosphere -- but if the same gas is burned to create electricity, the excess heat can be used to heat buildings and water instead of being vented?

The museum's giant pinball machine explains it all.

A Billboard Done Right

Anchor Bank, a small, local financial institution, has long used billboards with clever headlines. Their most recent, along I-94 in Saint Paul, is no exception.


This billboard design does everything right:

• The wording is very short and instantly graspable when driving past, but the play on words makes it memorable.
• The condensed typeface allows the letters to be made as large as possible.
• The yellow-on-blue color scheme makes for great contrast and readability.

I don't know if anyone would choose to bank with Anchor because of one of these ads, but the campaign leads me to think there are human beings running the place, which seems like a good branding move these days.

The Most Famous F in the World

Here it is immortalized in wood. Well, if not immortalized, then definitely durablized:


If it doesn't look familiar, imagine the background is blue and the "f" is white.

The Facebook f comes from the typeface Klavika, by Eric Olson of Process Type Foundry, a two-person Minneapolis company. Olson and his partner Nicole Dotin were presented with this 3D version of the logo by Target after it was used at a private event.

Just one of those facts of the modern age that it seems more people should know.