Which Can Of Shaving Cream Should I Buy? A Surprisingly Complex Analysis

Enlarge image i

iStockphoto.com

Because my morning routine involves the waking, feeding, dressing, brushing and sunblocking of a 6-year-old and a 4-year-old, certain personal morning grooming habits fall by the wayside. Like, all of them. This is why I think of the gym mainly as a place to wash up.

Which is a long way of saying I ran out of shaving cream the other day.

It was a travel-size, 2.5 ounce can that I carried in my gym bag for about three months. At the local Duane Reade, it cost $2.99 to replace. But then, a few aisles over, I found a 7-ounce can of shaving cream that also cost $2.99 — almost three times as much shaving cream for the same price.

And yet, there's a value in the convenience of the smaller can. The 7-ounce can — let's call it "The Mick"— actually outweighs the 2.5 ounce can — henceforth, "Roger" — by about 8 ounces, once you include the extra metal involved. (This difference is a rough approximation that I basically made up, by the way.)

So the question becomes: How much would I pay to eliminate my load by half a pound per day? Would I pay a penny a day? Obviously. Would I pay 2 cents a day? Sure. But that's the limit. Three cents a day just seems like too much. Bottom line: I'd pay $1.32 to carry Roger instead of The Mick for three months. (There are 22 weekdays in a typical month; I generally don't shave on weekends.)

But then there's the psychological cost of knowing I'm a sucker for paying three times as much per ounce. How much would I pay not to think of myself as a sucker? It would be convenient if the answer were $1.33 or more, thus negating the convenience premium of Roger. But it isn't. I just don't feel like that much of a sucker because I know I'm paying more for the convenience.

If you have followed me this far, let me throw a five-bladed, pivot-head monkey wrench into the works. Our original calculation assumed a 5-ounce difference in weight between Roger and The Mick. But there will come a time in the shaving-cream-can cycle of life when I would need to buy a new Roger, while The Mick would still have 4.5 ounces of shaving cream left to give. And — crucially — a round after that, when I would be on my third Roger and still my first Mick. By this point, The Mick would be almost empty — and just a few ounces heavier than Roger.

Add in the psychological satisfaction I'd derive from beating the system during the period when the Mick was lightest, for which I'd pay at least a penny a day, and my decision is made: Buying The Mick is the more rational choice, by a whisker.

Special DVD Extra: Somewhere there is a secret, industry-sponsored Shaving Cream Hall of Fame. Enshrined in this underground Shaving Cream Hall of Fame is the guy who invented the nozzle that even with the lightest touch squirts out more shaving cream than any one face can possibly accommodate — but not so much shaving cream as to have the user curse all the excess shaving cream and begin to question the (very precarious) underpinnings of the shaving cream-industrial complex.

Making Census Data Taste Like New York City

Enlarge image i

The spices were created by analyzing recipes and correlating ingredients with census data.

Courtesy of Hanna Kang-Brown

The Fourth of July is America's favorite holiday to get together, grill barbecue, and celebrate what it means to be American. It's also probably our best opportunity to debate whose barbecue is the best. With its regional varieties, the rubs-vs.-sauce debates and the fiercely guarded recipe secrets, arguing about barbecue is almost an American pastime. Few foods better demonstrate the diversity of our country.

Growing up in Los Angeles as the child of Korean immigrants, I found that food could be used as a yardstick to test how "American" — how "normal" — someone was. I remember my non-Korean friends at school barely being able to conceal their disgust when they caught a whiff of my kimchi. Sometimes my mom packed my school lunch with kimbap or fried dumplings, and I could understand that this wasn't normal. But I never quite understood why a saran-wrapped hot dog with ketchup packets from McDonald's still didn't make the cut.

Michael Pollan once wrote that America's conflicted relationship with food has to do with not having a strong culinary tradition, a result of a "new nation drawn from many different immigrant populations, each with its own culture of food." But amid constant debates about what American food is, barbecue stands out as a food that we can all agree America has made its own.

While taking a class on data representation, I began to wonder if barbecue — this indisputably American food — could offer us another way of representing familiar places within America and the diverse mix of people residing here. The connections between neighborhoods, ethnicities and food are quite strong. So I wondered, What if we could relate data about geography and ethnicity through taste?

I decided I was going to represent the five distinct boroughs of New York City. For my data, I went to the U.S. census for the most comprehensive data on population demographics. The first thing I learned is that there is no comprehensive ethnicity data. There are three tables with related information — one for ethnicity (Hispanic or Latino), one for race (Asian and Pacific Islander, Native American, black, white, and various subcategories), and one for ancestry, from the American Community Survey. In order to get as full a picture as I could of the cultural diversity within a borough, I compiled population figures from each of the three tables.

Next, I studied barbecue rub recipes, making a list of ingredients to draw from. I researched ethnic recipes and spice mixes, noting what ingredients were being used most frequently. I consulted the Yummly API, analyzing thousands of recipes to see which ingredients matched which ethnic parameters.

I then created recipes for each borough, assigning ingredients to each group of people, keeping proportions, flavor profiles and reasonable correlations in mind. The population figures of each group determined the volume of each ingredient and when combined, produced five different spice rubs, one for each borough of New York City.

People were invited to sample each spice and take a guess on which borough it was supposed to represent.

Courtesy of Hanna Kang-Brown

Finally, once all the boroughs were mixed, I set up a tasting station open to the general public. The spices were bloomed in oil, bread was available for dipping, and I let each participant decide if they wanted to do a blind tasting or not. I labeled each jar of spices with simple bar graphics to show what ingredient represented which group, hoping that at minimum, participants could use their sense of taste and the printed ingredients to orient themselves. For example, garlic powder represented the Italian population. If you knew that, you could taste Manhattan (close to 6 percent) and Staten Island (nearly 30 percent), and immediately get a sense for the makeup of each borough.

When people began to taste the recipes, something remarkable happened. Instead of simply using their sense of taste to make correlations, participants swore that different spice mixes tasted just like their experience of a certain borough. One man from the Bronx tasted the Bronx mix and exclaimed in shock, "That is the Bronx! That is the Bronx, right there! You got it!"

Since I didn't require a blind tasting, some of the reactions were based on correct guesses while others were based on what they already knew. But what struck me was that there could even be consistent consensus on what a borough should taste like. Staten Island, with its majority Italian population (i.e. 30 percent garlic powder) was a big hit and the easiest for people to guess. Even if they had flubbed through some of the other rubs and guessed incorrectly, when it came to Staten Island, there was no mistaking it. "Oh, that's gotta be Staten Island!" was a common response.

For others, the interaction of spices in the mouth set the stage for analyzing ethnic behavior. One Chinese-American women tasted Queens and described it like so: "At first, it tasted very Italian, like oregano and basil, and after a while, this Chinese shacha sauce just like takes over your mouth." (I'd like to point out that not only were Italians not represented by oregano or basil, I definitely did not put shacha sauce — Chinese barbecue sauce, in the mix; the Chinese were represented with ginger powder.) She added that it's just like the Chinese to come at you from the back and take over even if it's the Italians starting out in front.

Some mixes were singled out just by smell. One woman sniffed a spice mix and said, "Ugh, this smells like hipster. Like patchouli. I don't like it. This has to be Brooklyn." She was right.

When asked for a favorite, many were loyalists, preferring their borough above all others. But some were surprised to find that another, unlikely suspect was a clear favorite in blind tastings. For more than a few Manhattanites, Bronx was their mix of choice. When I revealed that they were eating the Bronx, I got reactions like, "Really. The Bronx?!" followed by either concern and dismay or a newfound interest in exploring the borough and cultures there.

Enlarge image i

Manhattan in 2010 and Manhattan in 1980.

Courtesy of Hanna Kang-Brown

Not everyone loved the rubs, of course. A few people were angry and offended as soon as they understood that the barbecue rubs represented census data and people groups. "You know," they would say, "some people would find this very offensive." "Are you saying that this group is this ingredient?" "Isn't this racist?" "How do you know this is the right ingredient?"

Of course, there is no right ingredient, just like there is no right color for Dominicans on a bar chart. I found the angry reactions interesting: Why might ingredients provoke more vitriol than colors on a bar chart?

I consulted sociologist and census expert Ann Morning. She pointed out that although we often perceive census designations as "objective," its system of racial and ethnic categorization includes hundreds of years of subjective decisions made by individuals for a variety of idiosyncratic reasons. One could argue that ingredients are neither more or less subjective a way of representing people than labels.

Race is a complex topic, and food, as one colleague noted, has a lot of baggage. Eating is our most interactive activity, involving all five senses, and smell is closely linked with our memories. Pairing spices with race, ethnicity and ancestry data allowed people to experience that data more viscerally than a chart or a map could accomplish. It tapped into gut reactions, and best of all, it tasted good. It was amazing to see people of all backgrounds — friends, families, strangers— talking about race, identity and place with ease and pleasure.

We'll continue to argue over where the best barbecue comes from. We'll probably always argue about what "American-ness" is or isn't. Perhaps the best versions of those conversations will use flavors just as much as words.

Hanna Kang-Brown is a writer, interaction designer and recent graduate of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. She works with data, conversational spaces and emerging technology. Follow her at twitter.com/hannasoyk.

How A Used Bottle Becomes A New Bottle, In 6 Gifs

For more, watch our video: Secrets From The Recycling Plant

The rise of curbside recycling programs over the past few decades has meant more glass recycling. But for a long time, many recycling centers didn't have the technology to turn recycled glass into the raw material for new bottles. Instead, recycled glass often wound up being used as a cheap construction material, or even to cover landfills.

Now, with new technology that can better sort glass collected in curbside recycling, more used glass bottles can be turned back into new glass bottles. To see how this works, we went to a glass recycling facility and a bottle factory.

Outside a recycling plant in Jersey City, N.J., there are piles and piles of what looks like garbage.

Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR

But it's actually broken glass, mixed with things like plastic bags, bottle caps, etc. Large items like some cans and plastic jugs have already been sorted out.

Inside the plant, the stuff goes through more sorting. To isolate the glass, a magnet first pulls out metal caps, lids, small tin cans, and other pieces of metal.

Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR

Getting the metal out is the easy part. But to turn glass back into bottles, you also have to sort the broken glass by color. (Clear glass is the easiest to turn back into bottles, and the most valuable product of glass recycling.)

When recycling centers relied mainly on human labor, sorting out broken pieces of clear glass from the greens, browns and blues was a slow and dangerous job, according to Tom Outerbridge, the general manager at the recycling facility.

Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR

Today, recycling plants use optical sorting machines. These machines take pictures of all the glass, and then use air jets to blow the clear glass onto a different conveyor belt.

The recycling plant sells the crushed clear glass to bottle manufacturers, like Ardagh Group in Salem, N.J. When we visited, they were making Snapple bottles, mason jars and Nantucket Nectar bottles. Gary Shears, the general manager, says that they use about 150 tons of clear recycled glass a day.

Here's a front-end loader delivering 25 tons of recycled glass to the bottle factory:

Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR

The recycled glass is mixed with soda ash, sand and limestone, and everything is melted together in furnace heated to 2,700 degrees. (We wanted to take a picture of the furnace, but they warned us that it was so hot that getting close to it could destroy our camera lens. Which makes sense, given that it was hot enough to melt glass.)

Gary says they can never get enough recycled glass. Recycled glass melts at a lower temperature than the raw materials used to make glass from scratch. So more recycled glass means huge energy savings. Right now, his bottles are made of about 20-25 percent recycled glass. Gary said he would use two or three times as much, if there was more recycled glass available.

The bright orange molten glass is weighed and cut into pieces called gobs, which are dropped onto molds to create the mouth of the bottles.

Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR

Then a glass-blowing machine blows the gobs of molten glass into red-hot bottles. Salem's newer machines can make about 400 bottles a minute.

Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR

The Salem glass factory ships about 3 million Snapple bottles a day, six days a week.

* Note: A previous version referred to a bulldozer delivering recycled glass to the bottle manufacturer. It is actually a front-end loader.

The patents were challenged by scientists and doctors who said their research and ability to help patients had been frustrated. The particular genes at issue received public attention after the actress Angelina Jolie revealed in May that she had had a preventive double mastectomy after learning that she had inherited a faulty copy of a gene that put her at high risk for breast cancer.

The price of the test, often more than $3,000, was partly a product of Myriad’s patent, putting it out of reach for some women. The company filed patent infringement suits against others who conducted testing based on the gene. The price of the test is expected to fall because of Thursday’s decision.

As we’ve covered before, this case has huge implications–not just for breast and ovarian cancer treatment but all our health. Last month, when Angelina Jolie wrote about getting a double mastectomy after genetic testing revealed that she’s at high risk for the diseases, it highlighted the fact that such testing is inaccessible for many. As Breast Cancer Action wrote in a statement of victory, “We urgently need more and better options for the treatment and risk reduction of breast cancer, and we cannot afford to have progress stymied by the monopolies that gene patents create.”

Image via. 

Women, Action, and the Media (WAM!) is organizing its first-ever social media initiative today around content promoting gender-based hate on Facebook, targeting companies like Dove, American Express, and Audible.com. Read the Open Letter to Facebook and visit the WAM website for more information. Judging from the responses from advertisers, the campaign is already a huge success.

Our hearts go out to everyone affected by the massive tornado in Oklahoma and especially those who lost loved ones. Donations to the Red Cross are needed; to make one, go to www.redcross.org, call 1-800-Red-Cross, or text “Red Cross” to 90999 to make a $10 donation. Nb: This heartwarming video shows a a survivor of the Oklahoma City tornado recovering her dog alive while mid-interview with CBS News’ Anna Werner.

Does Cannes have a women problem?

How sexual stigma is undermining HIV treatment on American-Indian reservations.

“It remains a radical act to be fat and happy.”