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Showing posts from October, 2011

Book review: KBL

One of the great things about working at the  Monthly , which I assume is also true of most other such publications, is that people randomly send you free books. Here's a review of a really bad one I did just for fun. Back in May, Alyssa Rosenberg wrote : As the details of the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden [come out], it was inevitable that somebody would observe (as many people did), that the operation was going to make a really fantastic action movie. Such a movie would be really hard to get right: it could easily be a cheap action picture, when this coda to the brokenness of our last ten years deserves a profound piece of art. It was thus with some trepidation that I picked up Kill bin Laden , by John Weisman. Not knowing anything about the author, I had no idea what to expect. Would this be the profound piece of art the last miserable decade deserves? That would be an emphatic no . If, as Roger Ebert says , Nicholas Sparks writes "soft porn for teenage girl

Quote for the day

On the subject of climate change deniers, Paul Krugman nails it : "Think about climate change. You have various right-wingers simultaneously (a) denying that global warming is happening (b) denying that anyone denies that global warming is happening, but denying that humans are responsible (c) denying that anyone denies that humans are causing global warming, insisting that the real argument is about the appropriate response."

Saturday museum report

It is freezing cold here in DC; you might be able to see that it's snowing outside. We spent the afternoon hanging around the Natural History and Air & Space museums. For me I think the latter is cooler. If I can make a recommendation, the "How Flight Works" display, though it's a bit cheesy and sponsored by Boeing, is actually pretty interesting. Someone with a serious science background clearly designed and fact-checked the displays. They avoid a lot of the usual myths about flight and even dispel some of my pet peeves (the "equal transit time" explanation, for example). Good stuff.

How the Pill works

I was a bit confused recently because I saw this on Rachel Maddow, but Amanda Marcotte clears it up for me : I don't know if you want to have some staff look into this, but hormonal forms of birth control work a little differently. They actually prevent implantation, not conception. I saw this exchange posted everywhere with absolutely no correction of this blatant (if unintended) misinformation. Even Jezebel’s write-up unfortunately implied that killing fertilized eggs is an evidenced mechanism of the pill, and that it happens frequently, which it doesn’t. They made it worse by making fun of Mitt Romney for not knowing how the pill works. The problem with that is he actually showed a better understanding of it than either the woman asking him a question or the Jezebel writer. If you make fun of someone for being wrong, but they’re actually right, then you’re the one with egg on your face. I get why feminists are allowing anti-choice misinformation to find home in our mouths. We

Happy Halloween!

Ok, not quite. But this is awesome:

Department of WTF, geothermal bureau

According to the Great Gazoogle , there are geothermal resources in the United States with approximately 10 times the energy potential than all currently existing coal-fired power plants. No, really: As part of that effort, the Mountain View, California-based company’s philanthropic arm, “Google.org,” on Tuesday published a new Google Earth map of the geothermal resources in the continental United States, created from data collected by the Geothermal Laboratory at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas, which received a $489,521 grant from Google for the project. The new map, an update of a running one that SMU scientists prepared in 2004 and 1992, estimates that the technical potential of geothermal in the U.S. is nearly 3 million megawatts (2,980,295), or 10 times the capacity of all the installed coal power plants in the country today. It’s available to view in an image format and also as a downloadable KML layer file for Google Earth. Ok, apparently it would take 10-

The Iraq that could have been

One of the things that most depresses me now about the Iraq War was that, regardless of how things turn out in the future, it seems pretty likely that Saddam would have been toppled by some kind of home-grown revolt in the Arab Spring; or if that didn't work, then we could have given the rebel movement the kind of support that seems to have worked in Libya. I was against the Libyan intervention for two big reasons. First, I was afraid that we'd get sucked into another ground war in a Middle Eastern country (see the " regime change ratchet "). Second, there was no authorization from Congress, and pretty much no debate beforehand. The President seems to have, now, an almost completely free hand in foreign affairs, and I think that sets dangerous precedents. For reasons laid out in The Origins of Political Order , dictatorships tend to fail because they have trouble surviving crappy leaders. As it turns out, Obama is a straight killing machine who is too cunning to get

*Margin Call*

WARNING : A few spoilers ahead. So far, this is the best movie qua movie on the financial crisis. It's a tense little drama, only encompassing about 24 hours, with mostly excellent characters, writing, pacing, acting, and directing. I won't go into too much detail; others have already done that better than I could . I will say a few words on the actual nature of the crisis, which is revealed in some very subtle and pleasing ways. First is how the further up the food chain you go, the less people in the firm understand how their business actually works, and as a consequence don't really have a good grip on what kinds of risk the firm is taking. The CEO tells the financial wizard who figures out what is going to happen to speak to him like a "small child." On a related point, when one of the few characters with a flickering of a conscience (the same wizard) lays out his impressive background in physics, we get a glimpse of how Wall Street has, through preposterou

Herman Cain's new ad

On first thought, you might expect that a kind of Darwinian mechanism operating between the press and presidential candidates these days would weed out all but two classes of political advertisements: the bland, anodyne type, and the dishonest, viciously negative type. A candidate would want to avoid even the faintest whiff of strangeness. After all, the press hounded Howard Dean from the campaign back in 2004 just for making a funny noise. You would be wrong. To be sure, the 2008 presidential season had its share of bizarreness. (Remember Mike Gravel's ad featuring him hurling a rock into a pond ?) But the 2012 season has a bad case of The Strange, and not just for fringe candidates either. First we have Lucas Baiano, who made Michael Bay movie preview-style ads first for Tim Pawlenty and then for Rick Perry , and now Herman Cain comes out with this gem: I can't believe someone paid money for this. We've got a droopy, mustachioed Mark Block, clearly unaccustomed t

Count me out on this one

Garrett Rhodes , an old South Africa Peace Corps guy: Whether it be to save money, live greener, or to cultivate a sense of self-reliance, washing your clothes by hand can be a satisfying and easy experience and can be successfully accomplished by almost anyone. Satisfying and easy? Not for me. It's not satisfying, it's actually quite difficult, and takes the better part of the day. As I said earlier : Reading Noah's comedic masterpiece about handwashing stuff made me appreciate once again what a magnificent appliance the washing machine is. I bow down and give thanks to the mines, the iron smelters, the steel foundries, the (probably) Chinese manufacturers, the 104,400 ton freighters, and the national transport system that makes it all possible.

Collected links

1. The Iraq War in photos . 2. Herman Cain's new ad is...words fail . 3. Our political moment, distilled to its essence . 4. Ex-FBI agents a little concerned about the new J. Edgar Hoover biopic . 5. Best Romney profile yet .

Trendy monetary policy

The latest thing in the world's most glamorous subject is nominal gross domestic product (NGDP) targeting. What in heaven's name is that? Well, Kevin Drum is here to help out all the non-econ majors. This post , which seems about right to me, is great because he isn't an econ major either, so he's thinking it out as he goes, and doesn't go too fast or lay down too much jargon. If you make it through that, Steve Randy Waldman has more.

What are parks for?

Atrios : I'm not sure the world agrees with us, but, yes, in the US we seem to lean a bit too much towards parks as pockets of "nature" rather than as pleasant public spaces where people are actually welcome and human activities are encouraged and enabled. A nice park can have performance spaces, cafés, sports fields, etc. He's talking about city parks, and how in DC they often don't seem to have much to offer in terms of recreation. As far as cities go, I heartily agree. The whole place is built entirely for people, and any existing "ecosystem" is completely centered around people anyway, so you might as well go whole hog and try and make the thing as attractive and useful to city residents as possible, in addition to being spots with growing green things. There is a real tension here, though, especially when we're talking about state and national parks with actual wilderness. After all, to provide development for people to enjoy a park more rea

Quote for the day

Matt Yglesias , talking about the origins of Occupy Wall Street: "This isn’t about the gini coefficient per se, it’s about the fact that people were asked to swallow a wide range of social trends in the name of economic growth and got a turd sandwich instead."

New issue online!

Many people, when I told them about the magazine I'm working for, hadn't the slightest idea what it was about. Well, here's your chance! Check out the online table of contents . I fact checked about half of those pieces.

Awesome

Morning!

They think we're stupid

One of the things that most bothers me about American advertising is the blatant contempt that companies have for their customers. Check out this picture. They're basically saying either a) that they don't assume that people can understand that 18 is a larger value than 12 or b) that they think people are so stupid that we'll be impressed by a slogan that says, in essence, "this box has more taco shells than a box with fewer taco shells!" I'm going with b). I mean, they didn't even make the qualification font very small!

Quote for the day

"They somehow managed to get a pretty decent picture of my jump. This is deceiving because it looks like I am going to push out with my knees at this point and do a nice dive but in actuality I got the Fear at this point and my legs locked up and I just kind of dropped in that position." -- Old man Prescott , in a post for the ages.

Skeptics vs. deniers

A new study is apparently about to come out confirming, yet again, the basic conclusions of climate science. This would be old hat, except that the guy who set it up was openly critical of the field, and a lot of the funding was provided by the Koch brothers, of right-wing fame. Of course, anti-climate activists who had promised to accept the result of the study beforehand conjured up reasons to reject it. Blah blah blah. Here's my beef. Check out this CNN story on the report. (It's pretty good.) What's the title? "New climate study deals blow to skeptics." Why does that chafe my strap? "Skeptic" is a word that has been highly valorized by the scientific community, and rightly so. Skepticism is one of the main intellectual forces driving the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and scientific progress generally. In the skeptic's view, everything sensible (i.e., able to be sensed) must be tested and subject to scrutiny, and no scientific

Lewis Black on Craig Ferguson

I love the crankiness here.

A flat tax is not simpler than a progressive one

This man wants a flat tax. Andrew Sullivan : And my sympathy for it lies primarily in its simplicity. There is a direct relationship between the complexity of the tax code and corruption. The rich can afford accountants to keep their taxes low - shifting money and valuables around in myriad ways. The people doing that kind of work could actually be doing something productive. I suppose a piece of paper with "9 percent" on it would be, literally speaking, slightly simpler than some kind of rate schedule—or, better yet, a mathematical formula with smoothly progressive character.  But what Sullivan's talking about is entirely a function of all the tax credits built into the system.   Yglesias : Our tax code differs from what Perry is proposing in two ways. One is that the definition of taxable income is complicated because you can deduct home mortgage interest, non-reimbursed business expenses, a whole suite of small-bore tax credits, charitable contributions, and vario

Intern jams

Here's some albums that I've been blasting while formatting the new issue (coming out next week, by the way): Gotta love the mau5 helmet.

Photo of the day

AP He's a handsome man, thin, in an immaculate well-tailored suit, perfect teeth, lovely olive skin, a smile not quite reaching his eyes. He looks confident, relaxed, and a maybe bit sharkish. Who is it? Answer here .

Collected links

1. A company sends a guy who pointed out a big security flaw a thank you...the cops and the bill . 2. Bernie Sanders' GAO report on the Fed Governors turned up some serious problems. 3. E.O. Wilson's theory of everything. 4. Jane Mayer on drone strikes . 5. NPR gets an opera radio show host fired for supporting Occupy DC . News flash: conservatives already hate NPR. Nothing you guys do will ever change that, or their conviction that NPR has a "liberal bias." All you're doing here is pissing off liberals for no reason.

I have the right job, ctd

I was a little star struck last night when I went to see Matt Yglesias at the GW Hillel, of all places, but it was a great discussion and a chance to meet one of my blog-heroes I've been reading since about 2005. It's all a bit fuzzy; I remember starting with Glenn Greenwald, but Matt wasn't far behind. This post is what convinced me to go for the web journalism career, and I don't think I've ever made a better decision. In other news, Kevin Drum picked up my piece on Herman Cain! I love this stuff.

Someone should actually do this

The Onion : SAN JOSE, CA—With funding from dozens of news outlets and media companies, the groundbreaking Outkube.com launched this week, providing an online destination where pandering and incendiary content is used to lure moronic Internet commenters away from all other websites. According to sources, Outkube boasts thousands of articles and forums carefully crafted to draw in dim-witted web users and effectively quarantine obtuse, uninformed comments on topics such as gay rights, Ryan Gosling, the threat of Sharia law in the U.S., health care reform, whether Kobe is better than LeBron, Jewish control of the government and media, the New York Jets, the Second Amendment, and professional wrestler John Cena. Most stories on the site are reportedly preloaded with several witless and profanity-laden comments specially designed to incite retaliatory remarks. "Outkube provides an immensely valuable public service," said YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar, one of the decoy website&#

Santorum wants to ban contraception

Via Igor Volsky , here's frothing Ricky living up to his name (about 17 minutes in): Obviously Santorum is stone crazy.  But stepping back, this is an unusually clear explanation of the conservative philosophy behind social policy. Santorum doesn't care that 99 percent of women have used contraceptives, or that banning them would cause a flood of unwanted children. He's not concerned about the actual effects at all . He's only concerned about the law glorifying the status of his favored tribe: heterosexual married couples who only have sex for child-bearing purposes. Conversely, we'd be expressing social disapproval of people Santorum doesn't like: homosexuals, unmarried couples, and dirty hippies who only have sex for fun. Paul Waldman may have put it better , talking about Rick Perry and his stuttering response about the failure of abstinence: Liberals may think that conservatives support abstinence education because they believe it will reduce teen pr

More on Uganda

Looking back at it, this post was kind of lazy, and not the kind of thing I want to be doing on a regular basis. Let's take a closer look, first with some background from AllAfrica: Under both Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush, Washington has provided "non-lethal" and logistical support to the Ugandan army in its efforts to subdue the LRA. The aid increased when Kony failed twice to sign a peace accord in 2008. Since 2008, Washington has provided over 40 million dollars in military assistance to regional armies fighting the LRA. In December 2008, the Ugandan, DRC and southern Sudanese armies launched "Operation Lightning Thunder", a joint effort backed by U.S. intelligence and logistical support provided by Washington's newly created Africa Command (AfriCom) to track down Kony and his armed followers.  Kony and much of his army escaped, however, and responded later that month by carrying out their own attacks against defenceless villages and civi

Malaria vaccine news

Speaking of Africa, apparently a fairly effective malaria vaccine is in trials : The malaria vaccine that now appears to be within reach, following successful large-scale trials in seven African countries, is a potential game changer for the rural villagers whose children are the main victims of this ancient disease, which was named "mal'aria" for the bad air medieval Italians thought caused it. Early results from 6,000 babies aged 5-17 months show that their risk of malaria was reduced by slightly more than half (56%) and their chance of severe malaria – the kind that affects the brain, kidneys and blood and often kills – by slightly less than half (47%). Great news, but there's (as always) the big question of who pays. I'm reminded of something Matt Yglesias said , when he and Jon Chait got in a bit of a spat over the Libya intervention: I see no particular reason to think that Libya will have any impact on malaria funding, but I do think the level of malaria

Herman Cain and small business healthcare

In a surprising swing in the Republican presidential field, Herman Cain has rocketed to second place , just behind Mitt Romney. Like all the other candidates, he has promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and even claimed ( falsely ) that he would have died from his liver cancer under Obamacare. Cain actually got his start in politics helping to defeat the 90’s health care reform plan. Organizations from several different areas attacked the Clinton effort, but some of the most effective opposition came from small business organizations, led by the National Restaurant Association and the National Federation of Independent Business. That effort to kill health care reform, coupled with the total failure of the right to pass (or even seriously propose) their own plan, ultimately hurt small businesses. In 1994, Cain, then CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, was introduced to the country in this encounter with President Clinton: As this Newsweek retrospective from 1994 makes clear, Ca

The new Republican platform

The fact that Herman Cain is now close to the lead, and his risible 9-9-9 plan is getting a lot of attention is really amazing, and speaks to the depth of the contempt that conservatives have for Mitt Romney, but on another level it has finally breathed life into the graveyard that is conservative economic policy. Just think of the history.  For the past 30 years conservatives have had tax cuts as their be-all and end-all remedy for every economic problem.  Stuck in a recession?  Cut taxes. Budget deficits? Well, tax cuts really raise revenue, so just cut them some more.  Got a bit of a surplus?  You guessed it, tax cuts. Alan Greenspan was even arguing back in 2000 that the primary policy problem we faced was the national debt being paid off too quickly . But while Reagan's and Bush's tax cuts did give most of the benefits to the rich, they at least threw some scraps down the income ladder.  Nowadays, though, we've got new ideas.  We're going to drastically cut ta

Quote for the day

"I could write a book and I could set it in Tombstone, Arizona, I could have cowboys and stage coaches, and the moment I put in one fucking dragon, they'd call me a fantasy writer. You can take out the fucking for the newspaper." -- Terry Pratchett in the Guardian . Great man.

An intervention I can (reluctantly, provisionally) support

I've been thinking a bit about this Uganda thing, and I've gradually come around to the view that it's not necessarily wrong at this point.  First, there's a modicum of Congressional support; a bill authorizing military support of the Ugandan regime was passed back in 2009.  It was sponsored by Russ Feingold, of all people.  Obviously Congress has basically abdicated its oversight role when it comes to military affairs, but the fact that there's a fig leaf here is encouraging. Second, this isn't about regime change.  The Ugandan government actually supports our presence; they say it's long overdue.  We're not, at this point, going to get involved in nation-building, or toppling a dictator, or whatnot.  I would have liked to see Obama push Museveni a bit more on his country's problem with anti-gay bigotry, but that's a minor issue comparatively. Third, the Lord's Resistance Army really are some of the worst people in the world.  We'r

Speaking of Satan

Here's Rush Limbaugh on the Lord's Resistance Army: Lord's Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them. That's what the lingo means, "to help regional forces remove from the battlefield," meaning capture or kill. So that's a new war, a hundred troops to wipe out Christians in Sudan, Uganda, and -- (interruption) no, I'm not kidding. Jacob Tapper just reported it... Lord's Resistance Army objectives. I have them here. "To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people." Now, again Lord's Resistance Army is who Obama sent troops to help nations wipe out. The objectives of the Lord's Resistance Army, what they're trying to accomplish with their military action in these countries is the following: "To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people; to fight

R2P vs. regime change

I think one of the things that drives people into the arms of the likes of Daniel Larison is this kind of thing, illustrated by Eric Martin : Consistent with this euphemistic trend, the "responsibility to protect" (R2P) doctrine is being invoked by proponents of military action in Syria when, in essence, most are calling for regime change - a policy that, again, exponentially raises the stakes in terms of costs, risks and difficulty in managing the aftermath. If people like Anne-Marie Slaughter could get divested of the Lieberman caucus, I'd take them a lot more seriously.

Collected links

1. Yglesias on public choice . 2. Obama's new tactic against medical marijuana . Asshole. 3. TB deaths in Africa at a new low . 4. Remember how everyone said Murdoch would corrupt what was left of the WSJ's credibility?   Everyone was right . 5. James Fallows (a Monthly alum, by the way) on internet security .

A modest drug reform proposal

I'd like to codify my idea to de-Schedule I the psychedelics.  The characteristics for Schedule I are as follows: 1) The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse. 2) The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States. 3) There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision. The first qualification is preposterous for every major psychedelic save perhaps ketamine, which is already Schedule III anyway.  This should be obvious.  The minor ones (such as 5-MeO-DMT) are basically unknown in the literature, but that shouldn't give the DEA license to schedule as they see fit.  If you look at their declarations ( see here for example), they usually use new drugs' similarity to existing badly-scheduled drugs as evidence toward putting them in Schedule I (by the transitive property of bullshit ). The DEA, like police organizations everywhere, tends to try and maximize th

Why South Africa's public transport is better than America's

Some time ago I made this case , and I had a pretty good discussion with my old friend Noah in the comments, so I'd like to work that up into a single post. So: let me start with the DC Metro, since I take the Red Line to work every day.  Though, on reflection, the New York subway is probably better overall, the DC metro is still better than any single public transport system in South Africa.  It's cleaner, safer, and more efficient than everything save the Gautrain, and, comparing these two government reports, carries more passengers even than the Johannesburg metrorail network.  Given our better-educated, better-trained, and far richer tax base, it's no surprise that when we put our minds to it, we can put together a very effective transport system. But where South Africa is crushing us into the dirt is in the most important area: capacity .   According to the South African National Household Travel Survey (pdf), fully 40% of all South African commuters use public

Shrooms and dying

As per my earlier post on Terry Pratchett's wrenching, moving documentary, here's Dr. Stephen Ross on the end of life: Today I want to talk about a project of ours at NYU using psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy to treat end-of-life distress in people with cancer. I also want to talk about where Americans die—generally, I think we die in the wrong place in this country—and about the domains of palliative care and what that means. Additionally, I want to discuss spirituality and the phenomenology and prevalence of end-of-life distress and the link between spiritual states as potential buffers against end-of-life distress and psilocybin as a potential modality for increasing spiritual states in patients coping with such distress. This is via Bob Jesse , a researcher on psilocybin, who posts over at the RBC.  I find it interesting how that is Mark Kleiman's home as well—for those of you don't know, Kleiman is sort of the resident drug policy concern troll, a reliable ant

Occupy DC: some additional thoughts

I think my piece here is still pretty good, in that the Occupy DC folks had a ways to go last week, but I just want to second Matt Stoller (if you can translate humanities major-speak) and Gregory Djerejian in saying that there's no need for the protesters to have a poll-tested laundry list of complaints by the end of the week. My issue with the protest on Thursday was that the stage and performers gave the appearance that the leadership wasn't really connected to the Wall Street issue, something we know to be untrue. All in all, I think especially the New York branch of this movement is doing a fine job so far.  Here's Greg: While I will readily confess I find it odd as something of a Burkean that I am sympathetic to these protesters, they are not looking to trot out the guillotines, in the main (although I did spot a "Behead the Fed" sign!), but rather, they have smelled the radicalism of the blows dealt the integrity of a representative democratic system

Inflation how-to?

Yglesias touches on something that has me frankly befuddled. One of the classic cures for a depressed economy is a bit of inflation. This does three things. 1) It encourages people and corporations with lots of money (and right now corporations are sitting on huge cash reserves) to spend it, as it will be worth less in the future. 2) Millions of people are mired in debt, the real value of which inflation will erode. 3) The dollar's trade value will fall, making our exports more competitive. But a lot of economists, including (I think) Paul Krugman, say that in a depressed economy, it's impossible to get inflation going. Yglesias: For starters, a little throat-clearing about the burden of proof. Many of the inflation skeptics have impressive resumes. What they don’t seem to have are empirical examples of central banks determined to raise inflation expectations and failing to do so. We don’t, unfortunately, have a directly parallel case to the current U.S. situation. Bu

Collected links

1. Steve Jobs, LSD, and the drug war . 2. The ups and downs of cancer screening . This is an important point. Too many people, particularly cancer survivors, underrate the effects of overdiagnosis and unnecessary treatment. 3. Al Jazeera: UN finds "systematic torture" in Afghanistan . 4. There's a pretty bad oil spill going on down in New Zealand , though not nearly as bad as the gulf spill last year. 5. Even Robert Gates is beginning to freak out about congressional dysfunction .

Terry Pratchett on assisted death

 Terry Pratchett is one of my favorite authors.  A few years back he was diagnosed with a rare form of early onset Alzheimer's disease, and has since become a passionate advocate of what he calls "assisted death."  One of the biggest problems with our healthcare system, both morally and financially, is our inability to face the end of life courageously.  To be able to choose when and how to die, to forestall what is in many cases completely pointless treatment, that is what he's talking about. This is worth watching in full: And this: If you've got the time. UPDATE: I can't recommend the second one there highly enough. One of the best documentaries I've ever seen.

The next Troy Davis?

The indefatigable Radley Balko : Skinner (who has already come within an hour of execution) is about to be executed despite the fact that there is testable DNA from the murder weapon, the rape kit, hairs one of the victims was found clutching, and a jacket left at the crime scene similar to one worn by another possible suspect, all of which has yet to be tested. And it’s even worse than that. The state started testing on the hairs a decade ago. When preliminary mitochondrial testing came back negative as a match to either Skinner or the victim, the state just decided to stop further testing. It’s one thing to consider all of the evidence, find it unconvincing, and then proceed with an execution despite strong disagreement from the suspect’s supporters. It’s a whole other level of moral culpability to deliberately remain ignorant about evidence that could definitively establish guilt or innocence. Skinner is set to be executed November 9. See here for more. Of course, Rick Perry is

Lens grinding and Avogadro's number

A bunch of scientists are working on defining the kilogram using fundamental constants of physics, rather than the weight of a particular chunk of metal, as it is now.  But before they can do that, they've got to determine Avogadro's number—the number of atoms in a particular mass of an element, 6.022 x 10^23 if I'm not mistaken—to unprecedented precision.  One strategy is to make a sphere weighing exactly one kilogram, and then count the number of atoms, thereby reverse-engineering the kilogram.  The trouble is, the sphere has to be as close to perfect as humanly possible.  How is the world's most perfect sphere created?   By hand.   No, really : To improve on the precision of his result from the 1970s and ’80s, Becker needed to reduce the irregularity of his silicon surfaces. He commissioned one of the world’s most renowned lensmakers — a German immigrant in Australia named Achim Leistner — to craft the most perfect sphere ever created, a flawless orb honed precisel