Having someone I respect validate a choice I’ve made always gives me a warm feeling inside. In a recent post, Marco Arment discusses and recommends humidifiers. The upshot is that evaporative humidifiers work best, but I wanted throw my four cents in.

First, steam humidifers are pretty dangerous around small children. The last thing I want is an inviting vat of hot water falling off the dresser and boiling my girls. Of course I can only find perfectly safe (though not very effective) ultrasonic Hello Kitty humidifers on the web, so it’s not a huge crisis.

Second, we have a Honeywell HCM-630 3 gallon cool moisture humidifier in our bedroom. It’s now $60 on Amazon, but it was $30 when we bought it 4 years ago. We end up refilling it almost every day and it does a pretty good job on a relatively small room with the door open. But the air coming out is cold enough that we have to be careful that it doesn’t blow too close to the baby’s sleep area.

Third, we don’t use the liquid additive that Marco recommends, but we do use these cleaning cartridges. They definitely work, but I bet Marco’s solution ends up being cheaper.

Finally, it’s really important to run the thing every day or the filter dries out and gets very gross very fast.

This post has moved to Teach Better.

[Shazam LyricPlay on Youtube]

This morning I had a real WOW moment with my iPhone. I was in the car listening to the radio and a super-catchy song I’d never heard before comes on. (If you must know, it was Maroon 5’s Moves Like Jagger–I have no shame) I quickly break out my phone, and Shazam it. That means I started the Shazam app and jammed my finger on the center of the screen so it would start listening to the song. While it tried to match the song to one in it’s vast database-in-the-cloud, I tossed my phone onto the passenger seat–I was supposed to be 100\% focused on driving the car after all. A few moments later I glance over to see if Shazam had figured it out and it was scrolling the lyrics of the song playing! In time with the music! And nice and big and appropriate for singing along! Turns out that if what you Shazam is one of their 30,000 LyricPlay-enabled songs, you just flip your phone sideways and you suddenly have a pocket-sized Karaoke machine. Awesome!

Hair metal is weird. It showed up big in the mid eighties with Mötley Crüe and Ratt and then was gone by the early nineties. It was full of macho lyrics (Shout at the Devil, Wanted Man, Lick it Up, Rock of Ages,…), big guitar solos, leather, and head-banging. It definitely wasn’t real metal, but it had the aroma of metal. But then on top of all this testosterone, hair featured tons of make up, songs about partying, and strangest of all, a power ballad on almost every album. Why? I can think of four possible explanations:

1. Sensititivy? Did every hair band have a singer/song-writer who had to let the world see his soft emotional side on a regular basis? Did they really need to express their love so sticky sweetly and publically? Based on my analysis of band behavior and song lyrics, I think probably not. “Home Sweet Home” (Motley Crue) and “Closer to My Heart”by (Ratt) are unarguably the best of genre. The first is widely interpreted as being about how the song-writer (Nicki Sixx or Tommy Lee) is on tour but really misses being back at home with his girlfriend/wife:

 
    You know I'm a dreamer
    But my heart's of gold
    I had to run away high
    So, I wouldn't come home low

But those guys were so well-known for drunken debauchery on tour that their sincerity here is hard to believe. Ratt took a more honest tack:

    When you cross the line, then you'll find
    That you're one step closer to my heart
    Closer to my heart
    One step closer to my heart
    Closer to my heart

I’m not exactly sure where Ratt draws their line, but I am sure I don’t want to know. It ain’t holding hands. These are not the words of sensitive men.

2. Rest? Hair bands expend a lot of energy jumping around during their live shows and it gets tiring. With all the partying back stage and on the tour bus, these guys aren’t in great shape either. Maybe they perform these slow songs so they can take a breath and get their energy back? If that were the case, how do the real metal bands do it? Judas Priest and Iron Maiden could crank through whole sets with no ballad breaks. That’s where the guitar solo, drum solo, and even bass solo help out. And the hair bands took advantage of these too.

3. Economics? Now we’re getting somewhere. The non-ballad songs on every hair band album all appealled primarily to a young male demographic. So when I wanted to hear Ratt’s “Lay it Down “ or Dangerous but Worth the Risk”, I had to buy Invasion of Your Privacy. No one bought (or downloaded) singles in the eighties. When Ratt added “Closer to My Heart” to the album, they suddenly doubled (or more than doubled) the number of people who might buy the album. It was a brilliant example of product bundling. The most extreme example of this was when tons of people bought Extreme’s Pornograffitti because they loved the ballad “More than Words” and were shocked to find it wasn’t so representative of the tracks on the album. I used to see tons of these cd’s in the used bins in the early nineties.

4. Girls? I went to a lot of metal and hair metal shows back in the day and the crowds couldn’t have been more different. There were actual girls at the hair shows! I’m not saying they didn’t like the heavier music, but I know the ballads were a big draw. And the bands were pretty happy about this too. A good friend of mine went to a show where Winger was the opening act (Remember “She’s only Seventeen”?) and he saw the lead singer walking around in the venue after his set was over. My friend went and asked him for an autograph and was told “Get out of here kid, I’m looking for chicks.” So the ballads worked out well for them, but I’m not sure they were smart enough to see this fringe benefit ahead of time.

So at the end of the day, I think the power ballad was a side effect of the record industry economcs of the time. We shouldn’t be sad that the hair metal power ballad is gone though. We should be happy that it existed at all!

If all this talk has got you excited to listen to a few, here is my personal top seven:

1. “Closer To My Heart” Ratt
2. “Alone Again” Docken
3. “Nobody’s Fool” Cinderella
4. “Tears Are Falling” Kiss
5. “Bringin’ On the Heartbreak” Def Leppard
6. “Still Loving You” Scorpions
7. “Home Sweet Home” Mötley Crüe

(iTunes playlist here–Thanks Ping!)

Wouldn’t you know it, the very day after I post my piece on comments on blogs, Marco Arment and Matt Alexander actually have a post, back, and forth and back. Just the kind of blog-to-blog conversation I said never happens. I guess Justin Bieber was right.

Incidentally, The Loop, where Matt Alexander posted his original article does allow comments. His take-away on Twitter seems to be that the conversation wasn’t all that fruitful:

“It’s blogging interactions like I had yesterday that prove @mattgemmell right.”

So we’ve come full circle.

I’ve been accused of having terrible taste in music. That’s not fair. I would instead say I have unsophisticated taste in music. Classical, opera, jazz, and Latin are all mysteries to me. I enjoy listening to them, but I don’t get excited about them. I like catchy simple rhythms and I like music that’s earnest and emotional. The pop music of the eighties hits a real sweet spot for me. I’m sure it also has something to do with the fact that I entered 7th grade in 1980 and graduated from college in 1989. From hair metal to boy band to new wave, and everything in between, I love it all.

Today I want to share my love of a particular sub-genre of eighties pop that I think is often overlooked. It’s that silky smooth jazzy soulful style mostly (but not entirely) performed by impeccably dressed Englishmen. Slow rhythms, horns, strings, clear vocals, just the right amount of keyboard–the whole thing feels like a soft wave crashing over you. Spandau Ballet, Johnny Hates Jazz, SImply Red, and George Michael were the leading lights. Other groups like Culture Club, Duran Duran, and Starship had a few songs that were right there, but they’re better known for their more upbeat numbers. Some bands came close but didn’t quite make it. Daryl Hall and John Oates and John Waite were all just too rockin. And Howard Jones and the real new wave bands were just too bouncy and synthy.

Without further ado, here are my top 20 smooth eighties songs, ordered as an extremely listenable playlist:

1. “Shattered Dreams” Johnny Hates Jazz
2. “Sara” Starship
3. “Time (Clock Of The Heart)” Boy George & Culture Club
4. “(I Just) Died In Your Arms” Cutting Crew
5. “Careless Whisper” Wham!
6. “Hands to Heaven” Breathe
7. “Love is Stronger Than Pride” Sade
8. “Father Figure” George Michael
9. “I’ve Been In Love Before” Cutting Crew
10. “Holding Back the Years” Simply Red
11. “Save a Prayer” Duran Duran
12. “Driving” everything but the girl
13. “Rent” Pet Shop Boys
14. “Heart” Pet Shop Boys
15. “Breakout” Swing Out Sister
16. “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” Tears For Fears
17. “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me” Boy George & Culture Club
18. “Everything She Wants” Wham!
19. “Don’t Dream It’s Over” Crowded House
20. “If You Leave” Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark

You can also check out this playlist in the iTunes Store courtesy of Ping. And please let me know if you think I’ve forgotten any gems!

It’s become very trendy on tech blogs to not allow comments on articles. And at least a couple of folks (Matt Gemmell and Ben Brooks have been actively trying to convince other bloggers to turn off their comments too. I agree that if you’ve got a popular blog (and maybe a thin skin), turning off comments can make your life easier. I would even agree that on popular blogs (and websites more generally) many (most?) comments don’t really further the discussion. In fact, I read most of my blogs (including Matt’s and Ben’s) inside an RSS reader and so I don’t even see any of the comments that might or might not be there unless I click through to the site itself.

But I have three objections to their position on comments. First, when you don’t get much traffic (I’m looking at you High Variance) and you know most of the people reading your blog, it’s really nice to get as much feedback as possible and I think comments are the best way to do that. If someone reading my article has something interesting to say about it, the comment gives them an audience. They can always email if they want to say something privately,

Second, I often like to read what other people have to say about an article (whether I’ve written it or not), even when I have to wade through some less than insightful stuff. Again, the signal-to-noise ratio is particularly high in the early days of a blog when it’s mostly friends reading, but even on a big messy site like espn.com I think it’s fun to see the popular reaction to a story. And yes, I get it that the sample is not even representative of the readership let alone the general population. I think Slashdot is a terrific example of how constructive (and entertaining) discussion of an issue can happen on the web through comments.

Third, there’s this high horse attitude that if people have something to say about an article, they should just write it up as an article on their own blog. And if the original author reads it and wants to comment back, they will write another article on their blog. I’m sorry, but this just doesn’t happen. I mean, I’ve seen blogs comment on other blogs, but in almost every case the debate stops there. And it’s impossible for someone visiting the original site to see the conversation at all. And, believe it or not, there are people with intelligent things to say that don’t have a blog.

Maybe I’ll change my tune in the future when I’m drowning in haters and forum-spam, but I have a feeling that’s going to be a while. Until then, comments will stay turned on.

UPDATE HERE

Doug Almond has turned out an impressive amount of work in recent years on how bad stuff that happens to fetuses early in pregnancy can cause long-lasting problems. His first paper on this (AER 1985) showed that babies who were in utero during the 1918 American flu pandemic “displayed reduced educational attainment, increased rates of disability, lower income, and lower socioeconomic status.”

In the last year, he has produced two more papers in this area (AEJ Applied 2011, NBER Working Paper 17713) that focus specifically on the long-term effects of the fasting of pregnant Muslim women during Ramadan. And one of his co-authors (Reyn van Ewijk) has a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Health Economics on this topic as well. While none of the papers is truly convincing on its own, taken together, the results are striking. In Michigan, England, and Indonesia, Muslim babies who were in their first trimester during Ramadan go on to experience worse health and schooling outcomes than other babies.

What’s surprising about this finding is that the Koran specifically states that pregnant women are exempt from fasting during Ramadan if the health of their baby is at risk. Van Ewijk’s paper has a terrific background section where he explains that in fact most pregnant Muslims from around the world do tend to fast during Ramadan. There are three main reasons:

• differing beliefs about whether fasting is harmful to fetuses or mothers,
• the requirement that any fasting that doesn’t happen during Ramadan must be made up later, or
• an obligation to make up the fasting with a charitable donation.

It certainly seems to me that as the results from these three papers diffuse into the popular press, they could really affect mothers’ and physicians’ beliefs. That is, this research really could have pretty direct positive effects on child health. More research like this please!

An old friend of mine (Philip Greenspun) recently predicted that Obama will win the 2012 presidency in a close election. I agree, although for very different reasons. He thinks that even though the economy will remain poor, the American public won’t put the blame entirely on Obama and that they will give him some credit for ending the war in Iraq. Phil has more confidence in the American people than I do.

At this point, the Republican nomination seems to be a two man race between Romney and Gingrich. Gingrich is a lunatic and it’s hard to imagine that even a majority of Republicans would vote for him. I mean, the guy left his first wife when she was recovering from cancer surgery. And more recently he converted to Catholicism and now panders to the religious right. Honestly though, it’s his willingness to just throw the country into chaos (remember the Contract with America?) based on whatever principles he happens to hold that day that scares the hell out of me.

So I think Romney gets the nomination. Right now, everyone knows him as a boring but competent business guy who happens to be Mormon. And Americans have a vague idea that Mormons believe wacky things. But it’s going to become very clear very quickly just how wacky that organization is. Here are just a few of quirks:

• Mandatory 10% tithing.
• Secret under-garments.
• Institutionalized racism until 1978.
• I almost forgot “plural marriage”!

And Romney’s been heavily involved as a church leader almost his whole life. Christopher Hitchens wrote a great summary for Slate just a couple months before he died–that’s the sort of story we’re going to see a lot of. Under the Banner of Heaven is going to start selling like hot cakes. The story of Joseph Smith and then Brigham Young is amazing, even without all the crazy polygamy stuff.

By he time the summer rolls around, the press is just going to drag the Mormon church through the mud. It’s going to be like watching a car crash. As someone who views religion as a great spectator sport, I can’t wait!

We do a lot of reading in my house and I don’t pay much attention to age/reading levels. R (who just turned three) likes books geared to her own age as well as lots that are for older kids. Most of the time, this works out well. She misses some nuance (e.g., the rich description of The Wizard of Oz) and sometimes the main point (e.g., the literalness of Amelia Bedelia), but she’s almost always entertained. And I think she gets a lot out of pushing the envelope. The best examples of this are science and nature books. We’ve been reading the Pooh Encyclopedias (Nature and Animals) and Chickens Aren’t the Only Ones for months and she’s learned a ton.

The place where we get in trouble is when we read books for older kids with bad behavior. I don’t mean where the main characters are having fun and they do bad stuff like jumping on the bed (like those damn monkeys and Skippyjon Jones) even though these are also inspiring in the wrong way. I mean those books that try to teach kids to behave by showing them how not to behave. The prototypical example is Berenstein Bears and Too Much Teasing which we read over Thanksgiving. What we learned is that saying “Nah nah na nah nah” and calling your father “Flub-a-dub” are hilarious. The novelty wore off fast (for me, not her). When we read Best Friends for Frances we learned that doing things with No Boys Allowed is fun. When we read How do Dinosaurs Play with Their Friends? we learned to hog up toys and say “Mine!” and when we read How do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? we learned to demand even more stories than usual before bed. R learned that fighting (and making up) with your friends is fun from the otherwise truly wonderful Oh What a Busy Day.

In fact, the only case I can think of where the authors actually pull off this trick is How to Be a Friend which is a remarkably great manual from which most adults would learn a thing or two. R has yet to copy the bad stuff and is on the edge of her seat throughout. It even gets a lot of requests (i.e., “Excuse me, will you read this?”)

The lesson we’ve learned in our house is to recognize and quarantine these books as fast as possible and hope we remember to bring them out again when the girls are ready. Of course, we’ll probably be reading them to R as her younger sister A listens in and then goes and jumps on her bed!