From Many Imaginations, One Fearsome Creature

A recent New York Times article, From Many Imaginations, One Fearsome Creature, discusses one of my favorite subjects, dragons, and presents a few explanations for why people around the world believed in them:

In "An Instinct for Dragons" (Routledge, 2000), Dr. David E. Jones, a professor of anthropology at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, posits a biological explanation that jibes with the Jungian notion of unconscious collective fears. He argues that the dragon image, fermented in the primal soup of man's first nightmares, is a composite of the carnivores who fed on human ancestors when they were tree-dwelling monkeys: the pythons, the big cats and the raptors.

Professor Jones was struck by the idea, he said, while reading about the three-alarm calls of the vervet monkey. The first, for leopards, makes them leap for the treetops. The second, for eagles, makes them duck to low branches, and the third, for snakes, makes them jump.

Obviously, there is quite an evolutionary gap between vervet monkeys and the Sumerians of 5000 B.C., the first people known to have drawn dragons. But Dr. Jones argues that the same elemental fears persist in humans as snake and bird phobias, and he cites as evidence the fact that infant chimpanzees who have never seen snakes are terrified of them.

This explanation makes some sense:

Pliny, ignoring Greek and Roman mythology, held that "dracos" did exist, but just in faraway India, where he reported that they were large enough to prey on elephants by dropping out of trees and strangling them. Modern naturalists assume that he heard reports of pythons, which not only grew bigger in retelling, but also turned into fish stories. Some dragons, Pliny wrote, had such large crests on their heads they could sail to Arabia to hunt.

This could also explain some sightings:

In 58 B.C., Pliny reported, the "spine of the sea serpent killed by Perseus at Joppa" (modern-day Jaffa) was displayed in Rome. Karl Shuker, author of "Dragons, A Natural History" (Simon & Schuster, 1995), surmises that the monster Cetus, swimming up to eat Andromeda, might have grown out of rare sightings of oarfish, a snakelike fish up to 30 feet long with a coral red head crest. Other scholars theorize that the skeleton might have been one of the sperm whales that once commonly beached near Jaffa. A half-rotted whale, with its jawbones and vestigial leg bones exposed, would look rather dragonlike, they say.

Of course, there's one particularly good reason for believing in dragons — dragon bones:

But there is another obvious source for the dragon myth: the bones of dinosaurs and extinct mammals. Bones exposed by storms, earthquakes or digging were well known to the ancients, said Dr. Adrienne Mayor, a professor of folklore at Princeton and the author of "The First Fossil Hunters" (Princeton, 2000). She argues that the myth of gold-guarding griffins arose in the red clay of the Gobi Desert, a landscape literally scattered with white Protoceratops skulls, with parrot beaks and bony neck frills.

Othenio Abel, an Austrian paleontologist, speculated as early as 1914 that the central nasal holes in skulls of prehistoric dwarf elephants were the source for Homer's Cyclops. Abel added that the skulls of cave bears — ursus spelaeus, half again as big as grizzlies — could have given rise to tales of dragons.

Medieval Europe is "full of stories of knights fighting dragons in caves," Dr. Mayor said.

Some extinct mammals have startlingly dragonlike skulls, and Asian dragon myths may be based on Pleistocene and Cretaceous fossils, which were at one time universally known as "dragon bones," Dr. Mayor added.

Sivatherium giganteum, a huge proto-giraffe, has a pointed three-foot-long skull, and another, Giraffokeryx, has four swept-back horns.

Mount Pilatus in Switzerland abounds in pterodactyl fossils, and with stories of fights between men and dragonets — small, scrawny winged dragons.

The head of a dragon sculptured in 1590 by Ulrich Vogelsang for the city of Klagenfurt, Austria, was modeled on a "dragon skull" found by quarrymen in 1335. It is now known to be that of an Ice Age woolly rhinoceros.

Paleontologists can even account for the legend that dragons have jewels in their foreheads. Big calcite crystals form on long-buried skulls.

Of course, dragon-like crocodiles and komodo "dragons" exist in the real world, but, interestingly enough, dragon myths are more common where there aren't any quasi-dragons:

[A]lthough draconian crocodiles appear in the mythology of Australian aborigines, dragons are just as common in the myths of Vikings, who might have been eaten by bears, but never by crocs. And dragon lore is rare in Africa, where crocs are common, but predator myths revolve more around lions and hyenas.

The kindest cutter of all

In The kindest cutter of all, Munro Price reviews Guillotine: The Timbers of Justice by Robert Frederick Opie:

The guillotine is a paradoxical device. It was conceived with a humanitarian purpose: to spare criminals condemned to death in 18th-century France the horrors that had traditionally been their lot — primitive hanging, breaking on the wheel or, for those who had been foolhardy enough to try to kill the king, tearing apart by wild horses. Compared to these medieval barbarities, swift dispatch by a state-of-the-art beheading machine was infinitely preferable. Yet within two years of its inauguration, the guillotine had gained a notoriety unequalled by any of these earlier, and far nastier, methods.

Before the invention of the guillotine, beheading en masse was prohibitively expensive:

Under the old regime, the luxury of decapitation, usually by the sword, was strictly reserved for the nobility; one of the Assembly's first decisions, prompted by the eponymous Dr Guillotin, was that this boon should be extended to all Frenchmen regardless of birth.

This high ideal, however, concealed major practical difficulties. Beheading the occasional aristocrat was one thing; applying the same method en masse to common criminals, not all of whom could be relied upon to rise to the occasion, was enough to make the stoutest headsman tremble. As the state executioner Charles-Henri Sanson put it, in a masterpiece of professional understatement: "In order that an execution may be completed according to the requirements of the law...the executioner [must] be very skilful and the condemned very composed, otherwise it may be impossible to complete the execution by the sword without the risk of dangerous incidents occurring.

"After each execution the sword is unfit to perform another; it is essential that the sword which is liable to damage be sharpened and reset if there are several condemned persons to be executed at the same time. It is therefore necessary to have a number of swords available in a state of readiness...The Paris executioner has only two swords."

Of course, most of us associate the guillotine with 1790's France, during the revolution, but the guillotine had a 189-year career that went beyond France, "and by the mid-19th century [it] had become the standard means of execution in most of the Italian and German states, Greece and even Newfoundland." Even the Nazis used the guillotine:

Its worst abuse occurred not in 1790s Paris, but in Nazi Germany. The guillotine claimed just under 3,000 French lives in Paris during the Terror, but 10,000 German ones in 1944 and 1945 alone.

One-Toy-Fits-All: How Industry Learned to Love the Global Kid

According to One-Toy-Fits-All: How Industry Learned to Love the Global Kid, the same toys are popular with kids around the world; they don't need to be "localized" for varying tastes:

For years, Barbie dolls sold in Japan looked different from their U.S. counterparts. They had Asian facial features, black hair and Japanese-inspired fashions.

Then, about three years ago, Mattel Inc. conducted consumer research around the world and learned something surprising: The original Barbie, with her yellow hair and blue eyes, played as well in Hong Kong as it did in Hollywood. Girls didn't care if Barbie didn't look like them.

"It's all about fantasies and hair," says Peter Broegger, general manager of Mattel's Asian operations. "Blond Barbie sells just as well in Asia as in the U.S."

It's all about fantasies and hair. I would say that little boy's toys are all about fantasies and weapons, but German kids rarely play with action figures (1% of their toy market, versus 5% of ours), and I suspect Old Europe's kids aren't allowed to play with guns. At least they play with cars — Formula One though, not Nascar.

It Ages Well, Is Kept in Cellars, Goes With a Good Cigar -- Beer?

What happens when you take micro-brewing to the extreme? You get extreme beer. It's extreme! From It Ages Well, Is Kept in Cellars, Goes With a Good Cigar — Beer?:

At 24% alcohol by volume, Utopias is also one of the strongest beers ever brewed, though it has an extreme rival down in Delaware: World Wide Stout, produced by Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, at slightly more than 23%.

Extreme beer is being made with wine grapes and chili peppers. It is aged for years in barrels and put away in cellars. Blended in the tradition of Scotch whisky, it's collected and resold for profit, like fine wine.

It's also commanding extreme prices. Vermont's Magic Hat Brewery, Washington State's Fish Brewing Co., and several other U.S. brewers now make beers retailing at more than $20 a bottle. So do some beer-makers in Belgium, the European heart of extreme beer.

"To me, making extreme beer simply means pushing the boundaries of what people have always thought of as beer," says Jim Koch, Boston Brewing's founder and president — and the father of Utopias. One extreme example: Mr. Koch (pronounced Cook), following a medieval recipe, once made up a batch of beer by throwing a cooked chicken into the beer kettle.

"I'm not really so much about trying to sell 'better beer' to beer drinkers as I am about trying to win over the cognac and wine crowd," says Sam Calagione, founder and owner of Dogfish Head in Milton, Del., whose motto is "off-centered ales for off-centered people."

Besides the ultrastrong World Wide Stout, Dogfish Head sells a beer called Midas Touch. It is concocted from a 2,700-year-old-beer recipe reverse-engineered by a University of Pennsylvania molecular archaeologist; he took scrapings from a gold-filled tomb in Turkey, which some think was the burial place of King Midas. The ingredients, along with the usual beer components of hops, malt, water and yeast, include honey, white muscat grapes and saffron.

Skipping Meals May Help, Not Hurt, Health

From Skipping Meals May Help, Not Hurt, Health:

A report released Monday found that a diet in which mice ate only every other day appeared to protect them more from diabetes and the memory-robbing Alzheimer's disease than either a low-calorie diet or eating as much food as they wanted every day.

Interesting. How did they test this exactly?

The mice were forced to fast for a day and then given free reign to gorge on food the next. Consequently, those who fasted ate as many calories as did mice given as much food as they wanted every day, the researcher explained. A third group of mice ate every day, but consumed 40 percent fewer calories than the other rodents.

After the mice followed the diet for five months, the researchers gave them a neurotoxin that selectively damages nerve cells important for learning and memory, a pattern typically seen in Alzheimer's disease.

The researchers found that the toxin damaged fewer nerve cells in the brains of mice who fasted than in those who either ate freely or followed the low-cal diet.

Furthermore, blood tests revealed that mice who fasted had lower insulin levels than those who followed the other diets, an indication they also had a reduced risk of developing diabetes.

So fasting and gorging may be healthier than eating a steady diet because...it protects mice against a neurotoxin that selectively damages nerve cells important for learning and memory?

U.S. Says Preventable Injuries Serious Health Threat

Some interesting stats from U.S. Says Preventable Injuries Serious Health Threat:

Injury is the top killer of Americans in the first four decades of life and costs the nation at least $260 billion in health care, lost productivity and other expenses each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

One in 10 people ends up in an emergency room each year as a result of car crashes, falls or violent acts.

Naturally this leads me to ask, how many of those people going to the emergency room need to go to the emergency room? That number seems quite high, since I'm certainly not in the emergency room — knock on wood — every ten years.

The Empire Slinks Back

In The Empire Slinks Back, Niall Ferguson ("a fully paid-up member of the neoimperialist gang") defends American imperialism (or "humanitarianism") — if America will just follow through:

The British Empire has had a pretty lousy press from a generation of ''postcolonial'' historians anachronistically affronted by its racism. But the reality is that the British were significantly more successful at establishing market economies, the rule of law and the transition to representative government than the majority of postcolonial governments have been. The policy ''mix'' favored by Victorian imperialists reads like something just published by the International Monetary Fund, if not the World Bank: free trade, balanced budgets, sound money, the common law, incorrupt administration and investment in infrastructure financed by international loans. These are precisely the things Iraq needs right now. If the scary-sounding ''American empire'' can deliver them, then I am all for it.

Animal Liberation at 30

In Animal Liberation at 30, Peter Singer reviews the state of animal rights 30 years after he first reviewed Animals, Men and Morals for The New York Review of Books. He presents the following argument:

If we ignore or discount their interests, simply on the grounds that they are not members of our species, the logic of our position is similar to that of the most blatant racists or sexists who think that those who belong to their race or sex have superior moral status, simply in virtue of their race or sex, and irrespective of other characteristics or qualities. Although most humans may be superior in reasoning or in other intellectual capacities to nonhuman animals, that is not enough to justify the line we draw between humans and animals. Some humans — infants and those with severe intellectual disabilities — have intellectual capacities inferior to some animals, but we would, rightly, be shocked by anyone who proposed that we inflict slow, painful deaths on these intellectually inferior humans in order to test the safety of household products. Nor, of course, would we tolerate confining them in small cages and then slaughtering them in order to eat them. The fact that we are prepared to do these things to nonhuman animals is therefore a sign of "speciesism" — a prejudice that survives because it is convenient for the dominant group — in this case not whites or males, but all humans.

I guess he finds that convincing.

Animal Rights Leader Wants to Be Barbecued

Animal Rights Leader Wants to Be Barbecued reports on PETA-president Newkirk's darkly comical last will and testament:

The leader of a prominent U.S.-based animal rights group said she had drawn up a will directing that her flesh be barbecued and her skin used to make leather products in protest at man's ill-treatment of animals.

Ingrid Newkirk, 53, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), said on Thursday she had chosen to donate her body to her organization for use in a variety of startling protests.
Newkirk also suggested her feet be removed and made into umbrella stands similar to those made from elephant feet that she had seen as a child.
[...]
In the document she also suggests her liver be vacuum-packed and sent to France to be used in a campaign to persuade shoppers not to buy foie gras, made from the livers of force-fed ducks and geese.

Beethoven's ninth symphony

The Economist presents an amusing bit of Beethoven trivia

[The ninth symphony's] status as an icon of western classical music is unquestionable: in order that listeners could enjoy the entire work at one sitting, the 74-minute ninth symphony was used to set the standard capacity for a compact disc.

Newsweek Columnist Fareed Zakaria

Fareed Zakaria ("Indian-born, educated at Harvard, conservative") is a Newsweek foreign-affairs columnist who's getting quite a bit of press these days. Newsweek Columnist Fareed Zakaria explains how he became a conservative:

Zakaria became a conservative, he says, from observing the Indian state. “People often say, ‘How could you, living in India, end up a Reaganite?’ Well, the answer is, live in India. There are two things that people don’t understand. One is the degree to which a highly regulated economy produces masses of corruption because it empowers bureaucrats. It just has to be seen to be believed.

“The second,” he continues, “is that you are very quickly inured to the charms of pre-industrial village life. Whenever someone says the word community, I want to reach for an oxygen mask.”

Heroin Busts Point to Source Of Funds for North Koreans

There isn't much difference between a criminal gang with enough "muscle" and a corrupt government, as North Korea demonstrates. From Heroin Busts Point to Source Of Funds for North Koreans:

North Korea's exports from legitimate businesses totaled just $650 million in 2001, according to South Korea's central bank. But its annual revenue from illegal drugs runs between $500 million and $1 billion, officials at the U.S. military command in South Korea estimate. Another source of hard currency: secret missile sales that U.S. forces in South Korea estimate added up to $560 million in 2001.

As long as the market for drugs is a black market, we have to expect a lot of money to find its way into criminal (or corrupt-government) hands.

Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual

Dennis Drabelle opens his review of Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual with the story of Huxley's death:

Aldous Huxley died while tripping on acid. On Nov. 22, 1963 (the day President Kennedy was assassinated), mortally ill with cancer, unable to speak, he wrote out a request for an injection of LSD, a drug he had taken several times before. His doctor consented. Huxley's second wife administered the injection and, two hours later, a second one. In keeping with the principles of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, she encouraged him to let go. When it was time, he did.

Wuther?

While reading that MTV is updating Wuthering Heights, I had to ask myself, just what does "wuthering" mean anyway? Merriam-Webster OnLine provides an answer:

Main Entry: wuth·er
Pronunciation: 'w&-[th]&r
Function: intransitive verb
Etymology: alteration of whither to rush, bluster, hurl
Date: circa 1825
dialect English: to blow with a dull roaring sound

Why a 'No Fly List' Aimed At Terrorists Delays Others

Why a 'No Fly List' Aimed At Terrorists Delays Others explains how poor name-matching algorithms are turning the No Fly List into a serious pain for certain travelers — every time they fly:

The No Fly List, quietly introduced after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, is designed to keep suspected violent types off airliners. It includes terrorism suspects thought to pose an imminent danger to flights. Some people who present a general threat to air safety because of violent behavior also make the list.

But the system comes up with an alarming number of "false positives" — often because the name-matching techniques were designed "to let agents find passenger records quickly without having a full name or a name's precise spelling":

One name-matching technique that airlines have used, called Soundex, dates back more than 100 years, to when it was invented to analyze names from the 1890 census. In its simplest form, it takes a name, strips out vowels and assigns codes to somewhat-similar-sounding consonants, such as "c" and "z."

The result can be bizarre. Hencke and Hamza, for example, have the same code, H520. If there's a Hamza on the No Fly List, a traveler named Hencke could be pulled aside for a background check before being allowed to board.

A 40-year-old method designed specifically for airlines does something similar, stripping names down to consonants and pulling up names that have the same consonants in the same order. A third technique sometimes used by airlines hunts for matches based on the first few letters of surnames.

Hence Mr. Musarra's troubles in Juneau. In an algorithm used by Sabre, whose software runs Alaska Airlines' reservations system and many others, "Musarra" appears to pop up as a match for any name starting with "Mus." A fair number of names from the Mideast and Central Asia begin that way, including at least one on the No Fly List.

New Research Questions Need For Some Common Surgeries

New Research Questions Need For Some Common Surgeries:

After years of excruciating sinus infections, Susan Doyno decided to have surgery. After two separate procedures, not only did the infections persist but she also developed headaches and blood clots.

So she consulted a third sinus surgeon, who reviewed her case history and offered a startling diagnosis: "Surgery has likely caused much of her problems," says the doctor, Robert Pincus of the New York Sinus Center.
[...]
It used to be, for example, that someone who suffered a liver or kidney injury in a car accident had the organ removed. Now in nearly all cases, the patient is tracked but not operated on — and most of the time, recovery occurs naturally.
[...]
Donlin Long, a neurosurgery professor at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore, followed 3,000 patients with severe back and leg pain for two years during the late 1990s. The longstanding approach to treating that problem has been to give patients two weeks to feel better; if they don't improve, then the doctor operates. But the study pointed out flaws in that approach: In 86% of the cases, the patients got better on their own, but it took between one and three months to get there. "The longer you wait, the better chance the patient will recover without any surgery at all," Dr. Long says.

The Redistribution of Honor

After hearing a guest on NPR discuss "imposing our narrative on the Iraqis" yesterday, I found this passage from The Redistribution of Honor particularly on target:

The funhouse of the postmodern academics was built around the two closely related themes of postmodernism and multiculturalism. Together they displaced the idea of truth and its cousin, empirical evidence, with the notion of "narrativity." All the world was simply words. There was no reality, just a series of competing stories all of which were mere social constructs and none of which was more correct than any other. In political terms, the campus postmodernists identified with the pre-modern rebels against modernity in the Arab world. But with the war in Iraq, those on campuses who, like Al Jazeera, believed "Baghdad Bob's" account of events discovered that lo and behold there is such a thing as an empirically grounded reality.

Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?

In Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?, Robert Nozick explains how the school system sets budding intellectuals up for a fall:

The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. By incorporating standards of reward that are different from the wider society, the schools guarantee that some will experience downward mobility later. Those at the top of the school's hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements. The school system thereby produces anti-capitalist feeling among intellectuals.

Unchained

Unchained reviews A History Of Mistresses by Elizabeth Abbott, and ends with this conclusion:

What made mistresses tolerable, socially acceptable or even occasionally welcomed in the past were the iron-clad arranged marriages that were completed to join bloodlines, alliances and inheritances — but never love. It was the tyranny and finality of marriage that gave the mistress her acceptable social status.

Now, with even England's royal family divorcing and remarrying for love, the chains of marriage — which Alexandre Dumas once described as being "so heavy that it often takes two people to carry them, and sometimes three" — are palpably lighter.

Every Unhappy Family Has Its Own Bilinear Influence Function

Every Unhappy Family Has Its Own Bilinear Influence Function explains some unusual work applying nonlinear equations to psychology:

In The Mathematics of Marriage: Dynamic Nonlinear Models (MIT Press), which he wrote in collaboration with four mathematicians, Mr. Gottman uses the tools of calculus to describe the interactions of couples like Angie and Dave. The models presented in the book, he says, offer insights into the heaven and hell of couplehood that he would never have found by sifting through his data with standard linear statistical tools.
[...]
The germ of The Mathematics of Marriage was a remarkable piece of luck. Around the time of the heart-to-heart conversation with his wife, Mr. Gottman forgot to send in a reply card to a scientific book-of-the-month club, and therefore received a book he'd never heard of: Mathematical Biology (Springer-Verlag, 1989), by James D. Murray, a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford. The book explains how to use nonlinear equations to illuminate the mechanics of complex dynamic systems, such as the growth of brain tumors.

"The book was so different from all the other books I'd been reading in applied mathematics," Mr. Gottman says. "Finally, concepts like catastrophe theory were very clear. I understood what it all meant." Mr. Gottman sent a letter to Mr. Murray in Oxford — but the reply came from just five blocks away. Mr. Murray had retired early from Oxford and moved to Seattle; he was teaching at Mr. Gottman's own university.

The two men met for lunch. "I thought John Gottman's ideas about having mathematics involved [in his marriage studies] were ridiculous, and I told him that," recalls Mr. Murray. "But by the end of the lunch, when I saw what he had in mind, I was totally hooked."

Marines Feast on Saddam's Wild Gazelles

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Saddam had a private wild-game reserve — and I really shouldn't be surprised that Marines would hunt gazelle there. From Marines Feast on Saddam's Wild Gazelles:

The Tikrit South airfield, where Marine Wing Support Squadron 271 set up base in this week's campaign to take the city, is on the edge of a preserve where Saddam and favored guests once hunted gazelle.

Now, Marines are venturing into the woods to hunt the animals, which stand about waist-high. They haul back the carcasses as a welcome substitute for the prepackaged Meals Ready to Eat that have been their staple.

I suspect they're having fun:

Each of the squadron's platoons has been limited to killing one gazelle a day to make sure the herd isn't depleted.

The marines are using 9mm pistols to hunt after initially being forbidden to use firearms for fear that gunshots in the woods might be mistaken for enemy fire.

"We hunted them with rocks, as Stone Age as that sounds," Wicksell said. "We gutted them and skinned them and pretty much carried them over our shoulders barbarian-style."

The preparation is almost as primitive: a fire pit dug in the ground, covered by a radiator grill from one of the Marines' trucks.

Temporary Syndrome Found in Ironman Athletes

Temporary Syndrome Found in Ironman Athletes reports on an amusingly named syndrome that affects endurance athletes who alternate between dehydration and overhydration:

Triathletes have to be the fittest of the fit, but a small, unpublished study of athletes who competed in an Ironman triathlon suggests that the arduous, all-terrain event can take its toll, creating a "constellation of symptoms" defined as post extreme endurance syndrome (PEES).

More than a third of the athletes who sought medical attention suffered from the condition, which is characterized by decreased body temperature, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness, headache, cramping and the inability to drink fluids, said Dr. Hilary Ann Petersen of the University of Arkansas Medical Center.

Dumas: The King of Romance

In Dumas: The King of Romance, David Coward gives an account of Alexandre Dumas's equally amazing father:

Dumas said he was born without even bootstraps to pull himself up with, but he chose his parents well. His mother was an innkeeper's daughter who gave him unstinting love and his father was a stupendous role model. Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie was born in Santo Domingo in 1760, the illegitimate son of a French-born Marquis and Marie-Cessette Dumas, a plantation slave. Disowned by his father, he returned to France in 1786 and, taking his mother's name, became a soldier. During the Revolution, he rose through the ranks and was a general at 33. He was a man of commanding presence, great courage and colossal physical strength: it was said that 'the Black Devil' could hold four rifles at the end of his outstretched arm, one finger in each barrel. In Egypt in 1799 he quarrelled with Napoleon, accusing him of putting personal ambition before Revolutionary principles; he was sent home. On the way, his ship was detained in Southern Italy by Ferdinand, King of the Two Sicilies, then at war with France. For two years he was left to rot in Brindisi castle. In a neighbouring cell, the geologist Dolomieu, another prisoner of war, applied himself, using soot, a stick and the margins of Bibles, to the composition of The Philosophy of Mineralogy. It was a bit like Edmond Dantés and the abbé Faria in the Chateau d'If, except that the general, his health and career broken, returned to France in 1801 and died of stomach cancer in 1806. Alexandre was four.

Why is NATO?

Den Beste gives a pretty blunt description of NATO's original purpose in his Why is NATO?:

In other words, the purpose of NATO was to get the US to impose peace on Europe, because the Europeans couldn't do it for themselves, and to protect Europe from the USSR, because the Europeans couldn't do that for themselves either. And it worked, too.

Has it continued to work?

NATO was a mutual defense pact, where all members would rally when any member was attacked. After the attack against the US in September of 2001, NATO actually did invoke Article V for the first time in its history.

And except for the UK, no one did anything because of it, or at least no one did anything helpful. Rather than rallying for war, as those who wrote the NATO treaty had expected in such a case, and committing their armies and navies to fight along side ours, they tried to use the invocation of Article V to prevent the US from fighting back. The mutual-defense pact had somehow been transformed into a mutual-surrender pact.

After Empire

As soon as Theodore Dalrymple qualified as a doctor, he went to Rhodesia, which was to transform itself into Zimbabwe five years or so later. There, he worked under a remarkable doctor (also from England), as he explains in After Empire:

He never panicked, even in the direst emergency; and he knew what to do when a man had been half eaten by a crocodile or mauled by a leopard, when a child had been bitten in the leg by a puff adder, or when a man appeared with a spear driven through his skull. When called in the early hours of the morning, as he frequently was, he was as even-tempered as if attending a social event.

Interestingly, Rhodesia paid doctors equally, regardless of race, but this didn't have the effect you'd expect:

The young black doctors who earned the same salary as we whites could not achieve the same standard of living for a very simple reason: they had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill. They were expected to provide for an ever expanding circle of family members (some of whom may have invested in their education) and people from their village, tribe, and province. An income that allowed a white to live like a lord because of a lack of such obligations scarcely raised a black above the level of his family. Mere equality of salary, therefore, was quite insufficient to procure for them the standard of living that they saw the whites had and that it was only human nature for them to desire — and believe themselves entitled to, on account of the superior talent that had allowed them to raise themselves above their fellows. In fact, a salary a thousand times as great would hardly have been sufficient to procure it: for their social obligations increased pari passu with their incomes.

Masked Wrestler Wins Japan Assembly Seat

Further proof that we gaijin will never understand Japan — Masked Wrestler Wins Japan Assembly Seat:

A professional wrestler who fought his way to victory in local assembly elections under his ring name and wearing his trademark mask has vowed the mask will not leave his face even after he enters the staid halls of Japanese politics.

"This is my face," the wrestler — known as "The Great Sasuke" — was quoted by the Nikkan Sports newspaper as saying of his black and white full-face mask with bright scarlet streaks and golden wings by the eye holes.

"I won support from voters with this face, and to take it off would be breaking promises," the 33-year-old wrestler, whose real name is Masanori Murakawa, said of his victory in conservative Iwate prefecture, some 460 km (290 miles) north of Tokyo.

The Grinch Who Stole Quagmire

Den Beste has posted a Dr. Seuss-inspired poem about the fall of Baghdad, The Grinch Who Stole Quagmire:

The Grinch Who Stole Quagmire
..."That's a noise," grinned Ms. Amanpour, "that I simply must hear!"
She paused, and the prune put a hand to her ear
And she did hear a sound rising over the sand
It started in low...then it rose to sound grand...
But this — this sound wasn't mad!
Why, this sound sounded...glad!
Every prole down in Baghdad,
the tall and the small,
was singing and dancing — without Iraq's victory at all!
They hadn't stopped Marines from coming — they came!
Somehow or other, they came just the same.
While the Arab Street, with their feet so near to the sand,
Stood puzzling and puzzling:
"This simply can't stand???
They came without raping! They came without looting!
When Iraqis surrendered, they even stopped shooting!!!"
They puzzled and puzzled, till their puzzlers were sore.
Then the witch thought of something she hadn't before:
"Maybe Joy," she thought, "doesn't come from the killing" —
Maybe Freedom — perhaps — is what has them all trilling."
And what happened then — well, in Iraq they still say
That the idiot's small brain grew three sizes that day.
But when the true meaning of Liberation broke through,
the dolt still had the brains of one neocon — less two.
Then suddenly, happily, her brain didn't feel quite so tight,
She sang with new comments through the bright Baghdad night.
With a mean smile, at her mic, she descended from Hotel PLO,
Cheerily crowing "blowback!" It surely will blow...

Knife Thrower Slices Assistant on Live TV

From Knife Thrower Slices Assistant on Live TV:

A record-breaking knife thrower shocked Britons on Thursday when one of his daggers sliced into the head of his assistant on live TV.

Circus performer Jayde Hanson, 23, was demonstrating his skills when one of his knives hit his assistant and girlfriend, 22-year-old Yana Rodianova.

As she clutched the side of her head, horrified presenter Fern Britton shouted: "Oh my God, there is blood, quick — get her off."

Smart Heuristics

In Smart Heuristics, Gerd Gigernezer examines how humans deal with uncertainty:

At the beginning of the 20th century the father of modern science fiction, Herbert George Wells, said in his writings on politics, "If we want to have an educated citizenship in a modern technological society, we need to teach them three things: reading, writing, and statistical thinking." At the beginning of the 21st century, how far have we gotten with this program? In our society, we teach most citizens reading and writing from the time they are children, but not statistical thinking. John Alan Paulos has called this phenomenon innumeracy.

There are many stories documenting this problem. For instance, there was the weather forecaster who announced on American TV that if the probability that it will rain on Saturday is 50 percent and the probability that it will rain on Sunday is 50 percent, the probability that it will rain over the weekend is 100 percent. In another recent case reported by New Scientist an inspector in the Food and Drug Administration visited a restaurant in Salt Lake City famous for its quiches made from four fresh eggs. She told the owner that according to FDA research every fourth egg has salmonella bacteria, so the restaurant should only use three eggs in a quiche. We can laugh about these examples because we easily understand the mistakes involved, but there are more serious issues. When it comes to medical and legal issues, we need exactly the kind of education that H. G. Wells was asking for, and we haven't gotten it.

We've never had it so good - and it's all thanks to science

Matt Ridley says We've never had it so good — and it's all thanks to science:

If you debate the new genetics in Europe and America these days you get asked the same question in two different ways. The average European says, with dread: "How do we stop people doing x?" The average American says with excitement: "When will I be able to do x?" For x, read "test myself for future dementia risk," "change my unborn children's genes," or even "fill my blood vessels with nano-robots to enable me to live to 150".

To the jaded European palate, the American attitude seems silly and irresponsible. Caution should be the watchword for all new technology. I beg to differ. I think the American optimism is necessary and responsible. It is the European pessimists who are in danger of causing real harm. Caution has risks, too.

The True Clash of Civilizations

In The True Clash of Civilizations, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris examine results from the World Values Survey:

At this point in history, societies throughout the world (Muslim and Judeo-Christian alike) see democracy as the best form of government. Instead, the real fault line between the West and Islam, which Huntington's theory completely overlooks, concerns gender equality and sexual liberalization.

Of course, this raises the question, what does "democracy" mean to these people?

Inglehart and Norris contend that gender equality and sexual liberalization are better indicators of "true" liberal, democratic culture:

However, when it comes to attitudes toward gender equality and sexual liberalization, the cultural gap between Islam and the West widens into a chasm. [...] These issues are part of a broader syndrome of tolerance, trust, political activism, and emphasis on individual autonomy that constitutes "self-expression values." The extent to which a society emphasizes these self-expression values has a surprisingly strong bearing on the emergence and survival of democratic institutions. Among all the countries included in the WVS, support for gender equality — a key indicator of tolerance and personal freedom — is closely linked with a society's level of democracy.

My first thought is that 18th- and 19th-century Americans would not disagree with the statement that "men make better political leaders than women," they wouldn't find homosexuality "justifiable," and they'd most likely agree that "politicians who do not believe in God are unfit for public office" — yet they established a religiously tolerant, limited government.

Australia Invents New Mousetrap with Herpes Virus

Australia Invents New Mousetrap with Herpes Virus:

Australia, regularly hit by the worst mouse plagues in the world, is claiming an international first with a genetically modified herpes virus to knock out population explosions of the small rodent.

The government-backed Co-operative Research Center (CRC) for Biological Control of Pest Animals has produced a genetically modified herpes virus that makes sexually prolific female mice infertile, by blocking sperm from entering their eggs.

Hey, what could go wrong?

Tornadoes to drop "concrete bombs"

Who'd have imagined laser-guided blocks of concrete?:

[Inert bombs] are basically blocks of concrete shaped as bombs and painted blue to identify them as non-explosive if they are discovered still intact after the war.
[...]
But they will be laser-guided 1,000-lb blocks of concrete, capable of destroying a tank or artillery piece, but without causing a devastating explosion that would put civilians at risk and shatter surrounding buildings.

Democratic Imperialism: A Blueprint

In Democratic Imperialism: A Blueprint, Stanley Kurtz examines the differences between rebuilding Japan after World War II and Iraq after Gulf War II, and between the philosophies of the Orientalists and the Liberals in ruling British India.

As a way to encourage democratization, an extended American occupation of Iraq would be just policy. Would a long-term occupation also be wise policy? That is the more difficult question. Since democratization will be more lengthy and difficult in Iraq than in postwar Japan, America will have to marshal its will and resources for a stressful and challenging enterprise.
[...]
Above all, should America undertake an extended occupation of Iraq, the dichotomy between realist caution and reformist liberalism will have to be transcended. Authentic democracy develops slowly. The trick is to encourage electoral experiments on the local level while still keeping hold of national power. Gradualism is not a betrayal of democratic principle. On the contrary, it is an insight bequeathed to us by the founders of liberalism itself.

Call to Arms

Call to Arms cites an amusing passage from Bernard Lewis's new book, This Crisis of Islam, where he draws an analogy between the Saudis and the KKK:

Imagine that the Ku Klux Klan or some similar group obtains total control of the state of Texas, of its oil and therefore its oil revenues, and having done so, uses this money to establish a network of well-endowed schools and colleges all over Christendom, peddling their own peculiar brand of Christianity.

Lanchester's Law: Too Few American Soldiers?

In Lanchester's Law: Too Few American Soldiers?, Temple math professor, John Allen Paulos, author of Innumeracy, gives a brief explanation of Lanchester's Law:

Lanchester's Law can be paraphrased as follows: "The strength of a military unit — planes, artillery, tanks, or just soldiers with rifles — is proportional not to the size of the unit, but to the square of its size."

You see, if you double the size of your force, not only do you deal out twice as many casualties, but you only take, in relative terms, half as many; your firepower gets reduced by casualties just half as quickly.

Poulos then goes on to explain that if you improve the quality of your forces — he defined this in terms of improving the accuracy of your artillery — it doesn't scale the same way. If you're twice as accurate and deal out twice as many casualties, that's merely twice as good.

Of course, quality isn't as valuable as quantity, in this case, because he defined quality in purely offensive terms. If quality took both offensive quality and defensive quality into account, it would be mathematically indistinguishable from quantity.

Girls Shot in School Crossbow Attack

Girls Shot in School Crossbow Attack reports on a horrifying, but gun-free, Columbine-esque attack in Australia:

Two Australian teenage girls were shot and wounded with a crossbow at their school on Thursday, with the arrow passing through the chest of one of the victims and into the legs of the other, an ambulance official said.

The girls were attacked by a teenage boy who was tackled as he then tried to light a petrol bomb, a witness told a Sydney radio station.

"One young female was shot in the left chest, the arrow exiting her left shoulder," the official told Reuters.

"The arrow then went into the thigh of the other female and then into her other leg. Both legs were impaled by the arrow."

Rare Colossal Squid Found Near Antarctica

Who needs sci-fi monsters from other planets when we've got colossal squid in our oceans? From Rare Colossal Squid Found Near Antarctica:

A rare and dangerous squid with eyes the size of dinner plates and scores of razor-sharp hooks to snag its prey has been caught by fishermen off Antarctica, New Zealand scientists said on Thursday.
[...]
The colossal squid finds food by literally glowing in the dark, deep waters to light up prey for its massive eyes — the biggest of any animal. But it is the colossal squid's weaponry that marks it out from its giant cousin. Its eight arms and two tentacles have up to 25 teeth-like hooks — deeply rooted into muscle and able to rotate 360 degrees — as well as the usual suckers to ensure fish do not escape.

The hooks not only hold fish for the squid's two parrot-like beaks, but also are used to fend off attacks from hungry sperm whales, O'Shea said.

The species, whose scientific name is Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, was previously thought to have lurked at least half a mile down in the freezing waters near Antarctica, but the specimen found a fortnight ago was near the surface.

The colossal squid is the giant squid's bigger, meaner cousin, but this is only the second intact specimen we've recovered; most of what we know comes from colossal squid bits found inside sperm whales (cachalots).

Dogs, Dolphins Help Protect U.S. Troops

From Dogs, Dolphins Help Protect U.S. Troops:

Chickens defy death in cages atop U.S. military Humvees to detect a possible Iraqi chemical attack. Well, some don't exactly defy death. Most expired after a short stint in the Iraqi desert — flu is suspected — and pigeons have taken their place.

Dogs, long used in warfare for scouting, relaying messages and rescuing injured soldiers, are sniffing out bombs in Iraq.

And dolphins Makai and Tacoma are helping to clear mines.

Warfare has long depended on the fowl, the feathered and four-legged, whether they were elephants bearing javelin-throwers on the battlefields of the ancient world, camels spooking Byzantine cavalry horses with their pungent smell, or Spanish Conquistadores' mastiffs hunting down Peruvian Indians.

Naturally, some people are offended:

Animal rights activists say creatures don't belong on the battlefield.

"Making these birds participate in our wars is not only cruel and unjust, it is a betrayal of the men and women who are serving under you," Machipongo, Va.-based United Poultry Concerns said in a letter to President Bush.

I could swear that came out of The Onion...

What Do You Think?

As always, I love The Onion. From their What Do You Think? feature:

In a move that has outraged many animal-rights activists, the U.S. Navy is using dolphins to find underwater mines in Iraqi harbors. What do you think?

"It's one thing to put human lives at risk in a war, but dolphins? That's just unconscionable."
— Arthur Bond, Systems Analyst

The Silent Service

In The Silent Service, Den Beste gives a potent example of how "loose lips sink ships":

Japanese anti-submarine warfare capability was never really very good, and in the early part of the war it was particularly dreadful. One reason for this was that the Japanese had incorrectly calculated the depth to which American boats could dive. They set their depth charges based on that, and the American submariners soon learned that if they dove deep enough (at depths well within the safety limit of the boat hulls) they would be all but immune to Japanese depth charging.

Obviously this was quite useful and interesting, and it began to be talked about back on shore, in a "Boy, have you heard about how stupid the Japanese are?" kind of way. The story spread, and spread, and it eventually ended up in a newspaper. And then one Congressman included it in a speech before Congress.

As might be imagined, the Japanese heard about this, and started setting their depth charges to go deeper. This prompted an officer in the Navy to send a letter to the Congressman saying that he was sure the Congressman would be pleased to learn that the Japanese had corrected their mistake.

Beste points out that our present-day Special Forces soldiers are in a similar, if even more vulnerable, situation.

US studies fuel alternatives to keep army on the move

According to US studies fuel alternatives to keep army on the move, the US military is researching fuel alternatives, because the cost of getting fuel to the battlefield is astronomical:

A gallon of modified jet fuel, which is used in tanks as well as aircraft, costs only 84 cents when bought wholesale from multinational oil companies such as Shell and ExxonMobil.

By the time the cost of transporting the fuel to the battlefield is added, that sum can rise to hundreds of dollars per gallon.

The US army says that for the campaign in Afghanistan, where there are no reliable or significant sources of fuel, the army depends on fuel flown in by helicopter from ships in the Indian Ocean. The cost per gallon: about $600 ( €557, £381).

The US army estimates it costs about $150 per gallon for fuel used in Iraq. The fuel comes from 23 US military dumps scattered across the Middle East, a number that was doubled in preparation for the current conflict.

They're developing prototype hybrid vehicles, because, "Much of the US army's current logistics support system exists for the sole purpose of moving fuel around."

The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity

In a review of The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity, Stephen Bayley quotes some ironic "stupidities":

In his promising, but Murphily exasperating, new book, Matthijs van Boxsel has a brilliant list of how technology makes us stupid. It includes these gems:

• energy-saving lightbulbs are mostly employed for decorative use in gardens
• zebra crossings [crosswalks] increase pedestrian accidents
• many tanning lotions contain carcinogens
• air-conditioning promotes the greenhouse effect
• computers vastly increase the consumption of paper
• better hygiene creates susceptibility to bacteria.

To which I can add a personal favourite. More pilots have been killed learning how to crash-land helicopters than have actually been killed in helicopter crashes.