More Brain Power Needed for Mandarin Than English

According to More Brain Power Needed for Mandarin Than English, Mandarin speakers use the left lobe, like English speakers, but they also use the right lobe, which is normally used to process melody, presumably because Mandarin is a tonal language:

Unlike English speakers, who use one side of their brain to understand the language, scientists at the Wellcome Trust research charity in Britain discovered that both sides of the brain are used to interpret variations in sounds in Mandarin. "We were very surprised to discover that people who speak different sorts of languages use their brains to decode speech in different ways; it overturned some long-held theories," said Dr. Sophie Scott, a psychologist at the charity.

Using brain scans on volunteers, Scott discovered that different areas of the brain are used to interpret words and intonation.

The left temporal lobe of the brain is active when English speakers hear the language but Mandarin speakers use the left and right lobe, which is normally used to process melody in music and speech.

Intonation is important in Mandarin because it gives different meanings to the same word. The word "ma" for example can mean mother, scold, horse or hemp, depending on the tone.

"We think Mandarin speakers interpret intonation and melody in the right temporal lobe to give the correct meaning to the spoken word," Scott said in a statement.

Blunder Leaves Woman Awake for Surgery

Blunder Leaves Woman Awake for Surgery presents a true horror story:

A woman lay awake during surgery for 45 minutes, unable to move or call for help, after staff forgot to hook up the machine pumping out anaesthetic, the Austrian daily Kurier reported Monday.

The woman was temporarily paralyzed because she had been given a muscle relaxant, and her ordeal ended only after a replacement doctor who came into the operating room saw tears in her eyes and noticed the machine was not connected properly.

The woman, who was undergoing abdominal surgery, is suing for 70,000 euro ($79,970) in damages, the hospital in the Austrian province of Carinthia confirmed.

Iraq: The Computer Game

Slate has a fascinating article on what "virtual world" games can teach us about geopolitical hotspots, Iraq: The Computer Game. One section of the article discusses what Richard "Lord British" Garriott learned from "ruling" Ultima Online:

In the startup of a virtual world, Garriott says, the players — like Iraqis — face anarchy, confusion, and unclear rules. They are poor, they are at the mercy of brutal spoilers (players who rob and kill other players for kicks), and they are subject to a whimsical, alien overlord (the programmers). Of course players don't actually risk their lives, but they are passionate about constructing a successful society, and there are hundreds of thousands of them.

Virtual worlds with thousands of players may not offer much useful economic insight for Iraq or help anyone understand Iraqi social structure. But, says Garriott, the games do clarify the essential rules for stabilizing a chaotic society. Virtual worlds teach that there are really only two of those rules, one obvious, one surprising.

The first is the urgent need to protect lives and property. Ultima was plagued by murder and theft from its earliest days, as players exploited software loopholes to wreak havoc and get rich. As a result, other players quit the game or simply become villains themselves. Garriott says they had to fix the code and evict the anti-social players who were ruining the civilization for everyone else. Ultima didn't take off until the caretakers established security and law. Neither can Iraq.

The second requirement is an idea that hasn't gotten much attention from the U.S. occupation. It is that the ruler must let the people know he has heard their complaints. In a virtual-world startup, thousands of players gripe about the same thing (there's not enough money, my character keeps getting robbed). It's incredibly important, Garriott says, that the ruler acknowledge he has heard the complaints. Not acknowledging complaints makes people nervous: It destabilizes and enrages them. Even if you have a plan to deal with a problem, you still have to let participants know they have been heard. Otherwise they panic or turn to some rival power that does admit their complaint. Broadcasting the acknowledgement to the whole community — "yes, we know you don't have enough running water" — is as essential as actually fixing the problem. Only once you have publicly recognized the problem, Garriott says, do you present your plan to remedy it.

Air Force Doctrine

In Air Force Doctrine, Den Beste argues that the Air Force doesn't really want to work with the other branches. It wants sleek, high-tech aircraft, even when ugly, low-tech aircraft, like the A-10 can perform an important job better:

The problem is that no matter what the Air Force gets that has wings and might fly into a combat zone, the Air Force insists that it be designed to be able to participate in strategic bombing in hostile unsecured airspace. Which means everything has to be stealthy. Everything has to be loaded to the gills with avionics. And everything ends up costing a bloody fortune. (And it all ends up having to be "multimission".)

He argues against the super-expensive jack-of-all-trades:

There seem to be two kinds of heavy bomber missions:

• getting into well-defended areas, bypassing air defenses, and taking out high value targets by delivering a small number of bombs very precisely.
• carrying a maximum bombload into an area where air supremacy has been established, and dumping it from high altitude to thoroughly plaster a huge area (or dump parts of it to thoroughly plaster several smaller areas in close succession).

The first requires bombers which cost their weight in platinum, if not more. It's the B2 type mission, but does it really make sense for every single heavy bomber to be like that, at the expense of carrying capacity? Why is it that some bombs have to be shoved out the back of cargo jets? It's because those bombs can't be carried by aircraft made of platinum. They dump those mothers out of C-5's because they won't fit in the bomb bay of a B-1 (and the hardpoint can't support that much weight). And even if a B-1 or B-2 could carry such ordnance, they cost so damned much that we can't afford to purchase as many as we would really need for the area-obliteration mission. What's needed is something that's big, inexpensive, slow, heavy, unstealthy, inexpensive, long ranged and capable of carrying a hell of a lot reliably. And inexpensive.

I love this idea:

Some have proposed that the Air Force should augment its heavy bombers by purchasing what is half-facetiously referred to as "B-767's". (Jim Dunnigan is a big fan of this concept.) The idea would be to contract with Boeing to create a militarized bomber version of the 767, with a huge bomb bay and such essential structural changes as that would require but otherwise little different from the civilian 767. They'd be relatively cheap, have a huge carrying capacity (on the order of 4 times what a B1 can carry), fly long distances without refueling, be extremely reliable, and wouldn't be even faintly "stealthy". They might carry flares and ECM, but aside from that there'd be no defenses.

They could probably be acquired for about $80 million each, as opposed to about $200 million for the B-1 and a stunning $2.1 billion each for the B-2.

It is astounding to realize that the acquisition cost of two B-2's exceeds the cost of one Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. For the cost of one B-1 we can purchase more than 4,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Who is the Ornery American?

I can't believe I didn't know where "ornery" came from. The Ornery American explains:

The word "ornery" began as "ordinary." In the days when you were either of the "gentle" class or merely "ordinary," parents would say to their stubborn children when they refused to do as they were told, "Don't be so ordin'ry."

Naturally, I now need to know where high falutin' comes from. According to the American Heritage Dictionary:

H.L. Mencken, in his famous book The American Language, mentions highfalutin as an example of the many native U.S. words coined during the 19th-century period of vigorous growth. Although highfalutin is characteristic of American folk speech, it is not a true regionalism because it has always occurred in all regions of the country, with its use and popularity spurred by its appearance in print. The origin of highfalutin, like that of many folk expressions, is obscure. It has been suggested that the second element, 'falutin, comes from the verb flute — hence high-fluting, a comical indictment of people who think too highly of themselves.

Staying in Touch : One More Thing At Which Women Beat Out Men

Ah, I remember friends... Staying in Touch: One More Thing At Which Women Beat Out Men:

Male relationships follow a different pattern. Men tend to build friendships until about age 30, but there's often a steady fall-off after that, researchers say. Among the reasons: Male friendships are more likely to be hurt by geographical moves, lifestyle changes, or differences in career trajectories. And many men turn to wives, girlfriends, sisters or platonic female friends to share emotional issues, assuming male friends will be of little help.

For perhaps some of the same reasons, women tend to turn to close female friends for emotional support rather than their spouses. Consequently, women with strong friendships often have closer marriages, in part because they don't burden husbands with all their emotional needs, according to research by Stacey Oliker, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The Poor Like Globalization

According to The Poor Like Globalization, a recent Pew survey shows that "views of globalization are distinctly more positive in low-income countries than in rich ones":

Contradicting the anti-globalization movement's claims, Dollar says that most "striking in the survey is that views of globalization are distinctly more positive in low-income countries than in rich ones." For example, in Sub-Saharan Africa 75% of households thought that multinational corporations had a positive influence on their country, compared to only 54% in rich countries. Of the 38,000 people in 44 nations surveyed, those in the developing world generally blamed their local governments, not globalization, for their country's ills.

Three Nebraska Men Develop Rabbit Fever

When I read Three Nebraska Men Develop Rabbit Fever, I immediately thought of Bugs Bunny, seeing spots — which is the same thing I thought of, to be honest, when I first heard about monkey pox. That's a real disease? Anyway:

Two men who mowed over a nest of rabbits, killing some of them, and another who cleaned the mower developed a rare disease known as rabbit fever, authorities said.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has launched an investigation into the incident. The disease, also called pneumonic tularemia, is generally treatable with antibiotics but can lead to pneumonia.

The illness is caused by a bacterium found in wild animals, particularly rodents and rabbits. People can become infected through bites from infected animals or infected insects, handling carcasses, eating contaminated food or, in rare cases, inhaling the bacterium. It is not transmitted person-to-person.
[...]
Tularemia is caused by the organism Francisella tularensis, a bacteria studied widely during World War II as a biological weapon. Depending on how the person is infected, it can cause flu-like symptoms, skin ulcers, swollen eyes and a sore throat.

Playboy Models' Curves May Be Sign of the Times

Playboy Models' Curves May Be Sign of the Times demonstrates the great use to which a psychology Ph.D. can be put:

According to researchers, a comparison of the faces and figures of Playmates of the Year from 1960 to 2000 suggests men may prefer stronger-looking women in hard times, and softer, more vulnerable types when bull markets resume.

"In short, we want someone to have fun with when times are good, and we want someone to take care of us — and themselves — when times are bad," said psychology researcher Dr. Terry F. Pettijohn II, of Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Riiiigghhht. So how did they go about this scientific process?

In their research, Pettijohn and Jungeberg created an annual "hard times measure" by tracking changes in U.S. statistics on unemployment, marriage, homicide and other factors for the years 1960 through 2000.

Hard times? No comment.

Then, using clear, front-on photographs of Playboy Playmates of the Year for each of those 40 years, the two researchers made precise measurements of key face and body dimensions.

I'm guessing that, for once, the grad students didn't do all the work.

Cultured Bacteria Save Medieval Italian Frescoes

Microbes do plenty of amazing things. Now they restore medieval art. From Cultured Bacteria Save Medieval Italian Frescoes:

After a glue used in a bungled earlier restoration attempt clouded one of the 14th and 15th century paintings in the Camposanto cemetery fresco cycle in Pisa, scientists turned to a bacteria called Pseudomonas Stutzeri — with spectacular results.
[...]
The 4,900-square-foot of frescoes in the "Conversion of Saint Efisio and Battle" by Spinello Aretino were nearly destroyed in a World War II air raid, and were further damaged by botched restoration efforts when the paintings were peeled off the walls and glued to canvases.

Over the following years, the organic glue used hardened and clouded, wrecking paint pigments and resisting all efforts at removal. Attempts at using chemical solvents took their own toll on the frescoes.

But the revolutionary bacteria culture degraded 80 percent of the glue within just 10 hours, revealing the colorful garments of Aretino's angels and of Saint Efisio himself.

In War on Poverty, Pipeline In Chad Plays Unusual Role

In War on Poverty, Pipeline In Chad Plays Unusual Role:

Massive trucks and drilling rigs deployed by an Exxon Mobil-led consortium rumble through the sand and bush of Kome, Chad, rushing to complete one of largest private-sector investments — $3.5 billion — in sub-Saharan Africa. In a few weeks, the Miandoum I well, pumping in the shade of an ancient fig tree, is expected to tap the first drops of a one-billion-barrel oil reservoir. The crude is set to flow 663 miles through a pipeline that slithers under hippo-filled rivers, parched savannahs, tropical rain forests and the hunting grounds of the Bakola pygmies, before emptying into storage tanks anchored in the Atlantic surf off the coast of Cameroon.

Pardon my cynicism, but my first thought was: how long until this all gets nationalized? Or, how much of this oil money will "the people" ever see?

That's the simple part. More audacious is the route along which Chad's oil money will flow. For the first time, a nation has agreed to surrender part of its sovereignty over how to spend the money earned by unlocking its oil wealth. Proceeds from Chad's sale of oil from the first three fields — expected to exceed $100 million a year, nearly doubling the nation's fiscal revenue — will travel a financial pipeline designed, and insisted upon, by the World Bank and other outsiders and monitored by a Chadian committee that includes Muslim and Christian religious figures and other community leaders. Their job is to ensure the money is spent on development projects such as schools, clinics and rural roads, and isn't siphoned into secret overseas bank accounts, as happened in neighboring Nigeria, or funneled into civil wars, as in Angola and Sudan.

So, is this Western Imperialism or not?

Some Commercials Strike Wrong Note With Viewers

Everyone hates Carrot Top, right? Maybe not, according to Some Commercials Strike Wrong Note With Viewers:

AT&T has a different view. Carrot Top has made more than 50 commercials for the 1-800-CALL-ATT calling service, and is now in his third year as its pitchman. AT&T says research indicated that the consumers it wants to use the service — young adults ages 18 to 24 — have an affinity for irreverent spokespeople. Within a week of its first campaign featuring Carrot Top, AT&T says, the company noticed an upswing in calling.

Savant for a Day

A recent NY Times article, Savant for a Day, reports on a hard-to-believe invention:

The Medtronic was originally developed as a tool for brain surgery: by stimulating or slowing down specific regions of the brain, it allowed doctors to monitor the effects of surgery in real time. But it also produced, they noted, strange and unexpected effects on patients' mental functions: one minute they would lose the ability to speak, another minute they would speak easily but would make odd linguistic errors and so on. A number of researchers started to look into the possibilities, but one in particular intrigued Snyder: that people undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, could suddenly exhibit savant intelligence — those isolated pockets of geniuslike mental ability that most often appear in autistic people.
[...]
He has used TMS dozens of times on university students, measuring its effect on their ability to draw, to proofread and to perform difficult mathematical functions like identifying prime numbers by sight. Hooked up to the machine, 40 percent of test subjects exhibited extraordinary, and newfound, mental skills. That Snyder was able to induce these remarkable feats in a controlled, repeatable experiment is more than just a great party trick; it's a breakthrough that may lead to a revolution in the way we understand the limits of our own intelligence — and the functioning of the human brain in general.
[...]
Perhaps the most famous savant was Dustin Hoffman's character in ''Rain Man,'' who could count hundreds of matchsticks at a glance. But the truth has often been even stranger: one celebrated savant in turn-of-the-century Vienna could calculate the day of the week for every date since the birth of Christ. Other savants can speak dozens of languages without formally studying any of them or can reproduce music at the piano after only a single hearing. A savant studied by the English doctor J. Langdon Down in 1887 had memorized every page of Gibbon's ''Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'' At the beginning of the 19th century, the splendidly named Gottfried Mind became famous all over Europe for the amazing pictures he drew of cats.

Gel Used in Diapers Is a Fire Retardant

Gel Used in Diapers Is a Fire Retardant:

Judith Withers watched in horror from the desert floor as a raging wildfire consumed the mountainside outside San Diego where her home stood. "It looked like an atomic bomb blast up there," she recalls of that day last summer.

She returned to the charred landscape a few days later and was shocked to find her house standing and unscathed. "It looked like God picked up my house, and the fire blew by, and then he put it back down," she says.

It wasn't divine force that saved her house. It was a man-made gel, one of a family of superabsorbent plastics known as polyacrylates, which are probably best known for the vital role they play in disposable diapers.

Inside a dry diaper, the material is fibrous and grainy; it becomes a thick goo when wet. Unknown to Ms. Withers, firefighters had slathered her house with a premixed version of the superabsorbent gel, like a giant wet blanket, in a test of its fire-fighting potential.

There does appear to be a downside though:

With some brands of the gel, cleanup is a major headache. Sprayed over an entire house — windows, walls, porches, roof — the gel is slimy at first. Eventually, it dries to a nearly invisible film. Add water — such as rain — and the stuff comes back to life, oozing out over porches and driveways and sliming the house all over again. It takes weeks or months to wear off.

When fire rampaged through their neighborhood outside Jackson Hole, Wyo., George and Barbara Erb were among the first to have their house gelled in a test two years ago. Their 2,800-square-foot log house survived, and insurance paid to have the gel power-washed off.

But then it rained. "This white gooey stuff started coming out between the logs," Mr. Erb recalls. Powerwashing ruined his roof, which the insurance company replaced. He had to have the log exterior refinished. Still, the long cleanup beat having to rebuild a burned-down house.

Aladdin Is to Become Planet Hollywood Casino

I was just at the Aladdin last week, and I had no idea that it was on its way out. From Aladdin Is to Become Planet Hollywood Casino:

The ailing Aladdin casino in Las Vegas will become a Planet Hollywood casino and a Sheraton hotel, according to a ruling by a federal bankruptcy-court judge on Friday.

I don't have a good feeling about this:

During the next 18 months or so, the casino will be renovated — getting a new facade, refurbished suites and other changes — into a celebrity-theme Planet Hollywood. "It's a chance to put Planet back into ascendancy," Mr. Earl said in an interview. He and Bay Harbour recently brought Planet Hollywood, an Orlando, Fla., company Mr. Earl co-founded, out of bankruptcy-court protection.

The top floor will have "celebrity suites" devoted to the lives and careers of various stars. One floor below will have suites themed along the lines of Hollywood memorabilia, such as a room with the ice pick from the movie "Basic Instinct" and another room with the bed from the Madonna film "Truth or Dare."

I was quite impressed with the Desert Passage mall:

New entrances will be opened to the Desert Passage shopping mall, and new restaurants placed with doors opening to both the mall and casino. The mall was designed to be part of the casino but was largely cut off from it after relations soured early on between the mall owners, Chicago-based Trizec Properties Inc. and the Aladdin. "We're going to carefully correct all the design errors" of the Aladdin, Mr. Earl said.

That is partly where Mr. Gluck comes in. Mr. Gluck, 75 years old, sold Caesars World to the former ITT Corp. in 1995. He was the first casino operator to bring retail stores to Las Vegas casinos when he opened the Forum Shops in 1992. The Forum Shops mall, which has the highest sales per square foot of any U.S. shopping center, brought on a wave of retail development in Las Vegas casinos, including Desert Passage and the Venetian casino's Grand Canal Shoppes.

The Planet Hollywood-Starwood group is hoping Mr. Gluck might work something similar with Desert Passage. But it isn't yet precisely clear what Mr. Gluck's role will be. "I'm going to help them put it together," he said in an interview. "They want to take advantage of my experience in having done this before."

The New TNN

TNN has repositioned itself as the new TNN, the first network for men. Normally I'd applaud a new line-up of animation for adults, but I'm not sure where I stand on the new TNN's animation behaving badly:

The cult cartoon classic Ren & Stimpy has returned, teamed with two brand new adult series, for a raw and raucous block of late night animation. 'Toon in for the June 26th premiere beginning at 10pm ET/PT for the hot line-up of Ren & Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon, Stripperella, and all new Gary the Rat.

Stripperella?

From legendary Spider-Man creator Stan Lee and featuring the voice of Pamela Anderson — she's an exotic dancer by night, a sexy superhero by...later night.

Bob 'The Beast' Sapp Is Conquering Japan

I was shocked to see Bob Sapp mentioned in my Yahoo! News listings a few weeks ago. Now he's on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. From Bob 'The Beast' Sapp Is Conquering Japan:

Bob Sapp was a third-round draft pick in 1997 of the Chicago Bears, and mostly sat on the sidelines. He was dropped by the Bears, picked up by another team, then got suspended for using a nutrition drink that broke the league's steroid policy. He ended his career in 1999 with crippling tendinitis.

Then he lost his $800,000 in football savings in an investment swindle. He couldn't find work. He applied for a chance to transport corpses from an Atlanta morgue to a cemetery for $100 a body, but somebody else got the job. Eventually, he won a spot in a second-tier professional-wrestling franchise, World Championship Wrestling. It went defunct.

Today, after one of the most remarkable sports comebacks ever, he is Bob "The Beast" Sapp, a superstar on the Japanese "K-1" circuit. It pits men using different martial arts, such as karate, kickboxing and tae kwon do, against each other to see who prevails in three short, violent rounds.

Mr. Sapp, 28 years old, has also become one of Japan's hottest comedians. The 6-foot-3, 380-pounder has appeared in hundreds of Japanese television shows, biting into a foam rubber doll, trying on blond wigs and plugging "Sapp Time," his hit rap single.

It's hard to explain just how massive Bob Sapp is:

Mr. Ishii saw Mr. Sapp's U.S. wrestling matches in 2001 and recognized star quality: a 60-inch chest, 37-inch thighs and a seven-foot arm span.

The Genome Changes Everything

I quite enjoy Matt Ridley's work, and he has come out with a new book, Nature via Nuture, that he discusses in The Genome Changes Everything:

For the first time in four billion years a species on this planet has read its own recipe, or is in the process of reading its own recipe. That seems to me to be an epochal moment, because we're going to get depths of insight into the nature of human nature that we never could have imagined, and that will dwarf anything that philosophers and indeed scientists have managed to produce in the last two millennia. That's not to denigrate what's gone before, but the genome changes everything. We know that just because the first one or two glimpses inside this box, the first lifting of the lid of the human genome, reveals to us enormous insights into what's going on, and just from the first few genes we're looking at.

What does he mean by Nature via Nurture?

The substance of what I'm interested in is that it's the genes that are related to behavior, and how they work. The big insight is that genes are the agents of nurture as well as nature. Experience is a huge part of a developing human brain, the human mind, and a human organism. We need to develop in a social world and get things in from the outside. It's enormously important to the development of human nature. You can't describe human nature without it. But that process is itself genetic, in the sense that there are genes in there designed to get the experience out of the world and into the organism. In the human case you're going to have genes that set up systems for learning that are not going to be present in other animals, language being the classic example. Language is something that in every sense is a genetic instinct. There's no question that human beings, unless they're unlucky and have a genetic mutation, inherit a capacity for learning language. That capacity is simply not inherited in anything like the same degree by a chimpanzee or a dolphin or any other creature. But you don't inherit the language; you inherit the capacity for learning the language from the environment.

Guarding Liberty from Democracy

It seems that everyone is reviewing Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. In Guarding Liberty from Democracy, Roger Scruton, of The American Conservative, takes his turn:

Ancient writers on political themes would seldom recommend a purely democratic constitution on the grounds that, unless checked by powerful countervailing forces, democracy could at any moment degenerate into mob rule. The argument was refined by later thinkers, and notably in the 19th century by Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, both of whom warned against the "tyranny of the majority." Unless the constitution protects the rights and freedoms of individuals and minorities, they argued, democratic choice could threaten anyone at any time — as it did in Hitler's Germany. Put another way, the argument tells us that there is nothing inherently liberal in popular choice and that individual freedom might be better protected under an aristocracy than when exposed to the whims of democratic resentment. Indeed, that is what Edmund Burke thought and what he showed to be the case in his great study of the French Revolution.

Scruton's review turns decidedly...conservative:

In this well-argued and far-ranging survey, Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria shows the damage that is being done by this un-nuanced pursuit of the democratic idea and argues once again for a society in which elites are accorded their proper place and esteemed for what they are — the true guardians of individual freedom and the ones who have the greatest stake in maintaining law, order, and accountability in the public realm. His argument is particularly pertinent now, when allied forces are attempting to bring freedom to Iraq by imposing democratic procedures on its people.

Here's the true core of Zakaria's argument:

Elected dictatorships, which extinguish opposition, destroy the political process too. It is only where people are free to dissent that genuine democratic choice is possible. Hence liberty should come higher than democracy in the wish list of our politicians. You can have liberty without democracy, but not democracy without liberty: such is the lesson of European history. Before imposing democratic regimes, therefore, we should ensure that civil liberty is properly entrenched in a rule of law, a rotation of offices, and the freedom to dissent. These institutions tend to arise naturally, Zakaria argues, with the emergence of a socially mobile middle class. That is why the transition to democracy is successful in countries with a per capita GDP of $3,000 to $6,000 but not in countries where it is significantly less.

The argument here is pertinent and fascinating. As Zakaria makes clear, there is all the difference in the world between a country where this relatively high GDP is achieved by the enterprise of the citizens and a country where it comes simply from selling off some natural resource like oil. The high GDP of Saudi Arabia is a kind of political illusion since it does nothing to indicate the emergence of a resourceful middle class or the demand for freedom, law, and citizenship that such a class will inevitably make. Thanks to oil, Saudi Arabia exists in a state of feudal hypostasis, even though it can treat its citizens — who are not true citizens but subjects — to a middle-class lifestyle.

Taste Test May Predict Alcoholism Risk

Taste Test May Predict Alcoholism Risk reports on an odd association between sense of taste and risk of alcoholism:

A new study of children of alcoholics suggests that people at risk for alcoholism may experience some flavors differently than those not at risk for the drinking disorder.

Researchers found that men and women who were not alcoholics — but had an alcoholic father — found salty tastes less appetizing and sour flavors more intense than did their counterparts without alcohol-addicted dads.
[...]
Previous studies have demonstrated an inverse relationship between enjoyment of salt and alcohol consumption. In one, rats bred to like alcohol drank less of a salty solution than rats bred to dislike alcohol.

Giant Spiders, Prickly Sharks Found Off New Zealand

Giant Spiders, Prickly Sharks Found Off New Zealand reports on some crazy sea creatures recently discovered off New Zealand:

A giant sea spider the size of a dinner plate and armored shrimps are just some of the new species discovered by a marine expedition in deep water northwest of New Zealand.

Researchers on a New Zealand and Australian research voyage also photographed deep sea sponges and a prickly shark, said New Zealand government agency the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).

Tacit Knowledge -- Writing a Book

Tacit Knowledge -- Writing a Book describes how the publishing industry doesn't work the way people would like to think it works:

Fact #1: Millions of people are working on books, or believe that they could write a book, or are planning to write a book.
[...]
Millions would like to do it. A couple of hundred actually manage it.

In other words, your chances of making a living writing books are perhaps better than are your chances of ever playing in the NBA. But not all that much better.

Technical pause here: there's an important-to-understand distinction that needs to be made between "book publishing" generally and "trade book publishing," which is what most of us think of when we think of book publishing — i.e., the biz that creates the books that fill up the local bookstore. Book publishing generally is a fairly substantial industry, and most of the money in the field — two-thirds, if I remember right — doesn't come from "trade book" publishing. It's generated by the sales of products many of us almost never think of as books: medical reference books, atlases, textbooks. This end of the biz operates in the semi-rational way many businesses do, with similar profit margins and incentive structures. There's real money to be made here, other words. You can get rich writing and/or publishing textbooks, for instance — but it's a very competitive industry.

A Troubling Empire

In A Troubling Empire, Edward Luce reviews Eraly's The Mughal Throne: The Saga of India's Great Emperors:

One of the most striking aspects of modern India is that almost all its major cities were founded either by Islamic or European imperialists. Nationalists of various stripes are acutely sensitive to this and have renamed Bombay as Mumbai, Madras as Chennai and Calcutta as Kolkata. Even so, no amount of nominal revisionism can alter the fact that many of India's most visible monuments were bequeathed by imperial invaders. Of these, perhaps the grandest architectural legacy is that of the Mughal dynasty.

A group of Hindu youth activists recently graffitied the Taj Mahal, the most impressive of Mughal buildings, and there have been many such disturbing incidents. Abraham Eraly is one of the many who are deeply concerned that historical revisionism shows no signs of abating in India. From this, he correctly concludes that India's identity as a nation state is still in the process of being settled.

"In every other major civilisation the past has died so that the future could be born," he writes. "But India seems to be killing the future so that the past can live on." The central Hindu nationalist thesis is this: India flowered under a golden age of Hindu civilisation that was systematically destroyed, first by the various Islamic invasions between the 11th and 17th centuries, and then by the British colonial period that lasted until 1947. Finally, after more than 50 years of independence, India has a Hindu nationalist government that can correct the distortions of history. Or, if you take Eraly's view, a standpoint which is "snared in self-delusions, fighting quixotic battles with the spectres of the past".

Here's the part of the book that sounds like fun though:

Instead, Eraly treats us to what another partisan school of history would describe as an "Orientalist" narrative of the kings and concubines of Mughaldom. For those seeking thrills in the emperor's harem or horror in the fratricidal and parricidal battles of succession, such material is abundant. There are endless accounts of battlefield victories and defeats with the attendant elephant charges and last-minute changes of loyalty. Eunuchs and dancing girls conspire and carouse throughout.

The Little Tyrant

In The Little Tyrant, Victor Davis Hanson reviews Paul Johnson's Napoleon: A Penguin Life and comments on how we excuse "great" men's atrocities:

Why do so many western intellectuals excuse thuggery and whitewash the crimes of megalomaniacs? I have received more angry mail, for example, over a brief article I published a few years ago called "Alexander the Killer" than about anything I have ever written. And the myth of Napoleon, like that of Alexander the Great, is also deeply enshrined in our collective romance — to question either risks real outrage.

Both dictators were eerily similar in ways that go beyond being military geniuses who ruled entire continents by their early 30s. In each case ghastly records of slaughter were carefully masked by a professed concern for the arts and sciences — e.g., silly tales of Alexander sleeping with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow and his real efforts to bring a legion of Greek natural scientists with him eastward; or Napoleon's patronage of Vivant Denon (author of the monumental 24-volume Description de l'Egypte) and his gifts of Egyptian booty to a generation of French scholars. Like Hitler's Speer and de Gaulle's Malraux, Denon was one of a long line of gifted toadies dating back to Alexander's Callisthenes, court intellectuals who simultaneously worshiped and loathed the powers that be, who at least noticed them.

This particular excerpt from Johnson's Napoleon biography made me cringe; it describes Napoleon's autopsy:

The teeth were healthy but stained black by the chewing of licorice. The left kidney was one-third larger than the right. The urinary bladder was small and it contained gravel; the mucosa was thickened with numerous red patches. Had the urethra been sectioned (or so runs the theory) it would probably have demonstrated a small circular scar, too tight to allow the passing of even small stones. That would have been the key to the slow decline in health and performance that started when Bonaparte was in his late thirties. The body was what doctors call "feminized" — that is, covered by a deep layer of fat, with scarcely any hair and well-developed breasts and mons veneris. The shoulders were narrow, hips broad, and genitals small. We can all make up our minds about these findings, their significance and reliability.

The farmer

I read a few pages of Carnage and Culture this past weekend. Then I stumbled across an article on the author, The farmer:

Victor Davis Hanson leads a double life. A fifth-generation raisin farmer in California's fertile Central Valley, Hanson is also a historian of ancient Greece, a lyrical defender of American agrarianism, and a prolific contributor to conservative opinion magazines. His columns so caught the fancy of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney that he has enjoyed audiences with both. It's hard to say which is stranger: that a raisin farmer should exert such influence, or that a classics scholar should.

It helps that one of Hanson's areas of academic expertise coincides with the national agenda: war. ''Carnage and Culture,'' his recent book arguing that the West has produced a uniquely effective military culture thanks to inherited Greek values, was a New York Times bestseller and a particular favorite of Vice President Cheney. Random House has paid a stunning $500,000 for Hanson's forthcoming book on the Peloponnesian war.

These are confusing times, and Hanson wields a few simple ideas with blunt force. Western culture, in his view, emanates from ancient Greece and prizes consensual government, private markets, self-criticism, and rational inquiry. Where such values are found, political, economic, and military preeminence follow. The non-Western world lags behind the West because it does not share in the Greek cultural legacy, having opted instead for despotism, theocracy, illiberal markets, and the plain old laziness that has men whiling away afternoons playing backgammon in the cafes of the Middle East.

I may have to go back and get a classics degree — in my copious free time.

What Makes You Who You Are

In What Makes You Who You Are, Matt Ridley attacks the false dichotomy of nature versus nurture and gives some quick background:

It was Charles Darwin's eccentric mathematician cousin Francis Galton who in 1874 ignited the nature-nurture controversy in its present form and coined the very phrase (borrowing the alliteration from Shakespeare, who had lifted it from an Elizabethan schoolmaster named Richard Mulcaster). Galton asserted that human personalities were born, not made by experience. At the same time, the philosopher William James argued that human beings have more instincts than animals, not fewer.

In the first decades of the 20th century, nature held sway over nurture in most fields. In the wake of World War I, however, three men recaptured the social sciences for nurture: John B. Watson, who set out to show how the conditioned reflex, discovered by Ivan Pavlov, could explain human learning; Sigmund Freud, who sought to explain the influence of parents and early experiences on young minds; and Franz Boas, who argued that the origin of ethnic differences lay with history, experience and circumstance, not physiology and psychology.

Galton's insistence on innate explanations of human abilities had led him to espouse eugenics, a term he coined. Eugenics was enthusiastically adopted by the Nazis to justify their campaign of mass murder against the disabled and the Jews. Tainted by this association, the idea of innate behavior was in full retreat for most of the middle years of the century. In 1958, however, two men began the counterattack on behalf of nature. Noam Chomsky, in his review of a book by the behaviorist B.F. Skinner, argued that it was impossible to learn human language by trial and error alone; human beings must come already equipped with an innate grammatical skill. Harry Harlow did a simple experiment that showed that a baby monkey prefers a soft, cloth model of a mother to a hard, wire-frame mother, even if the wire-frame mother provides it with all its milk; some preferences are innate.

Ridley also gives a succinct description of how a few genes can make a huge difference:

To make grand changes in the body plan of animals, there is no need to invent new genes, just as there's no need to invent new words to write an original novel (unless your name is Joyce). All you need do is switch the same ones on and off in different patterns. Suddenly, here is a mechanism for creating large and small evolutionary changes from small genetic differences. Merely by adjusting the sequence of a promoter or adding a new one, you could alter the expression of a gene.

In one sense, this is a bit depressing. It means that until scientists know how to find gene promoters in the vast text of the genome, they will not learn how the recipe for a chimpanzee differs from that for a person. But in another sense, it is also uplifting, for it reminds us more forcefully than ever of a simple truth that is all too often forgotten: bodies are not made, they grow. The genome is not a blueprint for constructing a body. It is a recipe for baking a body.

The genome is not a blueprint for constructing a body. It is a recipe for baking a body.

Too Smart To Be So Dumb

Too Smart To Be So Dumb makes an age-old point:

The truth, which Orwell pointed out, is that truly brilliant people and truly talented people often believe truly stupid things: G.B. Shaw believed in Hitler and Stalin. Norman Mailer believed that convicted murderer Jack Henry Abbot deserved to be paroled because he could write well (and that we went to war in Iraq to bolster the white-male ego). Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich believed that the few hundred of us still alive after the ecological holocaust of the '80s and '90s would be living in caves. The academic establishment believed in the efficacy of bilingual education and largely continues to believe that communism spreads prosperity and social justice. Princeton professor of bioethics Peter Singer believes that parents ought to be able to murder their disabled children. And Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta believes that a 70-year-old lady from Vero Beach and a young Arab man chanting Koranic verses are equally likely to hijack a plane.

American Bioscience Meets the American Dream

In American Bioscience Meets the American Dream, Carl Elliott makes a fascinating point:

Even as we use medical technologies to transform ourselves, often in the most dramatic ways — face-lifts, personality makeovers, extreme body modifications — we describe these transformations as a way of finding our true selves.

Some examples:

The transformation in Fussell's appearance is astonishing. Photographs in his memoir show a shy-looking 22-year-old man, bony and longhaired, legs crossed and seated in a lawn chair. Several years later, they show a man so changed it is difficult to imagine it is the same person: an enormous, oiled, steroid-enhanced bodybuilder with a buzz cut, muscles bulging freakishly, eyes glazed, veins popping out all over his body, strutting and preening on a stage in southern California. But how does Fussell describe the change? As a transformation into his true self. It was his need to discover and reveal himself that drove him to steroids. "I, for one, couldn't wait three or four or five more years to become myself," Fussell writes. "I was so uncomfortable not being me that I had to have (steroids) now."
[...]
When Williams began giving public interviews about his condition several years ago, it was as a paid spokesman for GlaxoSmithKline, the makers of Paxil, the first antidepressant approved by the Food and Drug Administration for social anxiety disorder. Williams explained to the press that medication had allowed his true identity to emerge. "As part of my treatment program," Williams said, "my physician prescribed the antidepressant Paxil, in combination with therapy. Soon thereafter I was able to start acting like the real Ricky Williams."
[...]
"I have been born again," he told the astonished group. "I have been through a psychiatric experience which has completely changed me." The psychiatric experience to which Grant was referring was the result of LSD, which he claimed to have used more than 60 times. As he sat tanning himself on the deck of a pink submarine, Grant described the way that LSD had put him in touch with his inner self. "I found I was hiding behind all kinds of defenses, hypocrisies and vanities," Grant said. LSD allowed him to get past the mask that had hidden his true nature. "I had to face things about myself which I had never admitted," Grant said. "I was an utter fake." Only with LSD was he able to overcome this fakery and become who he really was inside.
[...]
"I know this is not a personality flaw," said one executive who had begun taking stimulants. Many people concluded that stimulants had restored to them a true self that had been hidden by pathology. One patient taking Ritalin told Time magazine, "I had 38 years of thinking I was a bad person. Now I'm rewriting the tapes of who I thought I was to who I really am."

I left off the examples of sex-reassignment surgery and voluntary amputation.

Addicted to Oil

In Addicted to Oil, Elizabeth Shelburne summarizes U.S.-Saudi history before interviewing Robert Baer, a CIA veteran:

The history of U.S. involvement in Saudi Arabia goes back nearly to that nation's birth. In 1933, a year after the kingdom was declared, the first American oil concession was granted. Over time, U.S. interest in Saudi oil evolved into a company called Aramco, which controlled all of the oil in Saudi Arabia — 25 percent of the world's total. Aramco was a private company held by four large U.S. oil companies, with immense influence on the U.S. government. (It is now wholly owned by the Saudi government.) Moreover, the relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia extends beyond this private interest — as early as 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt asserted that protecting the kingdom, and its oil, was of vital economic importance to the United States as a whole. The precedent of maintaining a friendly relationship with Saudi Arabia, for both public and private reasons, has remained unchanged in the intervening years.

Baer's take on Sunni Islam:

We, as a country, not just the CIA, didn't think that Sunni fundamentalism was all that bad. It helped us defeat Egypt in a large sense, and it helped us in the Yemen civil war in the sixties, and then in Afghanistan. So we were supportive of Sunni fundamentalism, never thinking that once the Russians were run out of Afghanistan the Sunnis would turn on us. It was a failure to see forward to this possibility. It wasn't just the CIA. It was the CIA, the State Department, the White House, and the American press as well. They all said, "Saudi Arabia is a medieval country, we don't really need to worry about it, it's very conservative, it doesn't change very fast, it's a mutually beneficial relationship. They pump the oil, they bank our oil, they buy our weapons, it's all to our advantage."

U.S.-Saudi relations:

There's an extremely close relationship between the White House and the king of Saudi Arabia, along with the oil minister and the ambassador. You can call the ambassador up and say, "Look, we're forecasting a shortage in the world oil market because of speculation. Can you pump more?" In every crisis, the Saudis have come through. Let's be frank about it — they were our best allies in the Middle East. They banked this oil — 2-3 million barrels — at a very high cost, they never got reimbursed for it, and they were always there. The Iran-Iraq war, they were there. When the Iraqis overran Kuwait, they were there. Strikes in Venezuela, they came through and pumped more oil. They had their own interests, but they also protected our markets as well.

How the royal family divvies up oil money:

It's all hidden in defense and construction contracts. What has happened is that the price of Saudi oil is really transparent when it's sold. Aramco has contracts, they sell oil at world prices, and they get reimbursed. It's part of their budget. Some of their oil is called "political oil" which they give to their allies for free, whether it's Yemen or Jordan, or at times, Bahrain and even Afghanistan and the Taliban. Where the money is stolen — and I call it stolen; the Saudis might not — is in construction and defense contracts. You pay commissions of 20-40 percent for arms deals. That's divided among senior princes in the royal family and commission agents. The same thing happens in construction. When they rebuilt Mecca and Medina, they were overpaying for projects and the money went into the royal family, into the bin Laden family, into the bin Mahfouz family. I mean, what's a commission? If you get 40 percent on a deal, it seems like bribery to me. And the royal family divides these commissions up, which supplements money they get in their allowances.

Hey, Wanna Score Some Cheese?

While we were visiting Ireland, we had to explain to Irish friends why Americans wanted to buy cheese so badly — and why they'd have to sneak it home. From Hey, Wanna Score Some Cheese?:

Even as America guards its borders against threats from abroad ranging from terrorism to mad cow disease, one intruder is proving particularly difficult to keep out: illegal cheese. The stinky French kind.

Cheese lovers — a fast-growing constituency in the U.S. — covet the stuff because it is made from raw, unpasteurized milk. That is the ingredient that gives many French and other handmade cheeses their distinctive, complex flavors. But the Food and Drug Administration bans the sale of all cheeses made with raw milk that haven't been aged for at least 60 days. It says they are unsafe because raw-milk products can carry pathogens including E. coli and listeria.

The rule is even more restrictive for cheeses made in that hotbed of forbidden fromage, France. Thanks to a listeria outbreak in the mid-1980s, the U.S. bans any soft raw-milk cheese that is produced there, regardless of how long it is aged. These rules prohibit even basic cheeses like genuine Brie and Camembert. (Sorry, but the Brie that supermarkets stock here has been pasteurized, making it more bland and rubbery than the real thing.)

You Got a Light?

You Got a Light? points out something I've thought about as I walked past countless smokers just outside countless office buildings:

But I would observe that smokers now constitute one of the most fascinating and largely ignored social groups in America — transcending all rules of race, class, gender or position. They have become a sort of persecuted minority, with many of the feelings of commonality that such a status can bring.

Any smoker is socially allowed to talk to any other smoker at any time, to ask for a cigarette or a light. The most successful opening line in the known universe — male or female — is "Can I bum a cigarette?" It's non-threatening, instantly personal and highly sympathetic. All smokers know what it's like to crave a cigarette and be without one, and so they are always willing to help, always empathetic and egalitarian. No other social phenomenon is quite like it.

With the spreading restrictions on smoking in offices, restaurants and other public spaces, smokers are being pushed into ever smaller fringe spaces, making their community all the more tightly united. They sympathize with one another as members of what they perceive to be a shunned group. To one another, in the safety of their reserved zones, they are struggling, suffering heroes and comrades.

In office politics, smoking can be a great aid to connection-making — almost worth the toxins to some.

The New York Review of Books: Bohemia in Baghdad

The New York Review of Books: Bohemia in Baghdad summarizes Iraqi attitudes towards America and the West:

Kurds regard the two Bushes as national heroes, yet they fear that America may again betray them as it has several times in living memory. Christians yearn for Western protection, yet worry that the end of Baathist secularism may have uncorked the wicked genie of political Islam. The Shiite clergy, despite schisms over their proper role in politics, deliver a surprisingly uniform message. America has served its only purpose by getting rid of Saddam. Its army is here at our sufferance, and sooner or later we will make them leave.

Dr. Sex

Dr. Sex opens with an ironically non-ironic twist:

J. Michael Bailey clicks on an audio recording of four men: Two are gay and two are straight. Can the audience guess which ones are gay just by listening to their voices? asks Mr. Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University.

When the majority of those in the Stanford University lecture hall decide that a man with hissy s's and precise articulation is gay, the professor pronounces them correct. The lesson: You can determine a man's sexual orientation after simply listening to him talk for 20 seconds.

Bailey's The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism presents plenty of "politically incorrect" material:

"People for emotional reasons were saying stuff that simply wasn't true, like castration won't work because rape and child molestation are crimes of violence, not crimes of sex," says Mr. Bailey. "Although this may have been violent to the victims and wasn't sexually enjoyable, that doesn't mean it wasn't for the rapist."
[...]
Mr. Bailey also believes AIDS-education campaigns are misguided. "Middle-class, straight kids at Northwestern who are having sex with other middle-class, straight kids at Northwestern have a close to zero chance of getting AIDS," he says. "They are being over-worried about AIDS. If people feel there's little difference between gay or straight and getting AIDS, gay men are going to underestimate the risk."

Orwell and me

Margaret Atwood went on to write her own dystopic novel (The Handmaid's Tale), but long before that, she read Orwell's Animal Farm — and it scared her. From Orwell and me:

I grew up with George Orwell. I was born in 1939, and Animal Farm was published in 1945. Thus, I was able to read it at the age of nine. It was lying around the house, and I mistook it for a book about talking animals, sort of like Wind in the Willows. I knew nothing about the kind of politics in the book - the child's version of politics then, just after the war, consisted of the simple notion that Hitler was bad but dead.

So I gobbled up the adventures of Napoleon and Snowball, the smart, greedy, upwardly mobile pigs, and Squealer the spin-doctor, and Boxer the noble but thick-witted horse, and the easily led, slogan-chanting sheep, without making any connection with historical events.

To say that I was horrified by this book is an understatement.

Down-Home No More: Soul Food Moves On Up

The Wall Street Journal reports that high-end restaurants are now serving low-end favorites, in Down-Home No More: Soul Food Moves On Up:

Down-home soul food has gone uptown. The cholesterol-packed, well-seasoned cuisine once found only in Southern kitchens is turning up in pricey eateries from New York to Los Angeles. With ethnic food one of the restaurant industry's major growth areas, soul food is the fifth most-sampled ethnic cuisine, according to the National Restaurant Association, ahead of such trendy favorites as Cajun/Creole (No. 6), Thai (No. 11) and Indian (No. 12).

I may have to go out and cast another vote for Indian food this weekend.

Mooove Over, Milkman

I commented on Dr Pepper/Seven Up's Raging Cow drink a few months ago. Now the Wall Street Journal reports on Raging Cow and Coke's new Swerve drink. From Mooove Over, Milkman:

But are Raging Cow and Swerve what mom and dad have in mind when they tell their kids to drink milk? Probably not. An eight-ounce serving of Raging Cow's Chocolate Insanity has 170 calories and 25 grams of sugar, compared with 150 calories and 11 grams of sugar in the same size glass of whole milk, or 100 calories and 12 sugar grams in 1% milk. The new drink has five fat grams — double the 2.5 grams of fat in 1% milk, but less than the eight grams in whole milk. A 12-ounce can of Coke's Swerve, made with skim milk, is expected to have 150 calories — about 10 more calories than its trademark soda.
[...]
Just over 50% of the new drinks' content actually consists of milk, which means they lack enough calcium and other nutrients to meet the Food and Drug Administration's minimum standard for using "milk" on the label.

Instead, they are called "dairy drinks," because the other half of their content is made up of water, sugar and flavorings. (The drinks do have enough milk to use the American Dairy Association's "Real" seal.)

Another element that kind of scares me:

One plus for the new drinks: They don't need refrigeration.

They can't be labelled "milk" or "real" dairy, and they don't need refrigeration. Healthy soft-drink alternatives indeed!

Kids Be Warned: Don't Flush Your Fish

From Kids Be Warned: Don't Flush Your Fish:

Kids be warned: Flushing your pet fish down the drain will not send it safely into the ocean as depicted in the new computer-animated movie "Finding Nemo."

A company that manufactures equipment used to process sewage issued a news release Thursday warning that drain pipes do lead to the ocean — eventually — but first the fluid goes through powerful machines that "shred solids into tiny particles."

"In truth, no one would ever find Nemo and the movie would be called 'Grinding Nemo,'" wrote the JWC Environmental company, which makes the trademarked "Muffin Monster" shredding pumps.

In the unlikely event Nemo survived the deadly machines, the company added, he would probably be killed by the chlorine disinfection.

Bob Sapp, from NFL Washup to Marketing Tsunami

I never expected to see this kind of mixed-martial-arts news in the mainstream press. From Bob Sapp, from NFL Washup to Marketing Tsunami:

For much of the past year, Bob Sapp has led the double life of a closet celebrity.

His family thought he was hanging around his college town of Seattle, making ends meet as a personal trainer after tendinitis cut short an unremarkable pro football career.

Sapp, 28, let them think that.

The truth was too strange for words: How do you tell people that you've reinvented yourself as a wildly popular martial arts superhero in a far-away land? What kind of job description is it to be Japan's favorite gentle giant?

"It's very difficult to explain," Sapp told Reuters during a recent visit to Los Angeles. "It can get to be crazy. I never had an idea that this would explode like it has."

In less than a year, Sapp has gone from NFL wash-up in America to marketing tsunami in Japan, where his image as a kind-hearted kickboxer is being used to sell everything from alarm clocks and pizza to wide-screen TVs and slot machines.

He has a rap CD in Japan, a retail store in the trendy Harajuku section of Tokyo devoted exclusively to Sapp-branded merchandise and a fan base so insanely devoted that the 6-foot-7-inch (200-cm), 375-pound (170-kg) Sapp cannot venture out without bodyguards.

Boasting over 200 TV appearances and three biographies, he also has become a favorite target of paparazzi, now vying, he believes, to sneak the money shot Tokyo tabloids crave: Bob Sapp naked. "When I go into a hotel bathroom, I close the door and I lock it," he said.

Sapp himself finds it hard to describe his transformation into a Japanese pop culture icon. "It's definitely like Hello Kitty or Pokemon. In America it would be like the Beatles or Elvis," said Sapp, who only recently disclosed to family his new life as a superstar export.

And now Hollywood is calling.

The Danger Of The Low-Cost Cruise Missile

In The Danger Of The Low-Cost Cruise Missile, Bruce Simpson explains how it doesn't take much to build a cruise missile these days:

However, during the past decade, huge strides have been made in commercializing much of the technology on which the cruise missile is based and it is my firm belief that building a low-cost, autonomous, self-guided, air-breathing missile with a significant payload capability is now well within the reach of almost any person or small group of persons with the necessary knowledge and skills.

In fact, he has started a project to build a cruise missile for under $5,000, and he has started a project diary.

NPR : The 'Sabre Dance' Man

Somehow I missed NPR : The 'Sabre Dance' Man:

It was one of the catchiest, most familiar — perhaps most maddening — tunes to come out of the 20th century. It was heard in cartoons. It heightened the drama of plate spinners doing their shtick on the Ed Sullivan Show. In celebration of the 100th anniversary of composer Aram Khachaturian's birth, NPR's Tom Huizenga profiles the man behind "Sabre Dance."

What sometimes shocks me is how recently many of these "classical" works were composed:

The song was part of the Armenian composer's Gayane ballet, which he completed in 1942.

Interesting history:

Khachaturian came of age as a composer during the Stalin regime. Though he wasn't considered a party apparatchik, he was swept up in the fervor of the new socialist dream.

"He did absolutely everything right, as far as the Soviet ideology is concerned," says pianist Sahan Arzruni, who worked with, and has written about Khachaturian. "He used the folk material of all the republics, not only the Armenia folk material but the Ukrainian, Georgian, Azerbaijani, Turkmenistani... The primary dogma, as far as the Soviet ideology is concerned, is to make the art relevant to the people. Not art for the sake of art."

Khachaturian churned out well-crafted, party-pleasing compositions such as the "Song of Stalin," "Ode in Memory of Lenin" and a popular violin concerto. But in 1948, Khachaturian suddenly found himself on the wrong side of the Soviet art police — officially denounced, along with fellow composers Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev.

Khachaturian apologized and even agreed to be sent back to Armenia to be "reeducated." In 1957, four years after Stalin died, Khachaturian was re-appointed to the Composer's Union. But by then, "all his major works were behind him," Huizenga says.

The primary dogma, as far as the Soviet ideology is concerned, is to make the art relevant to the people. Not art for the sake of art. Sounds more like network TV to me.

NPR : Writer Michael Lewis

Last week, I caught an interview with writer Michael Lewis on NPR:

His new book is Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. It's the story of how the Oakland A's turned their team around and made history, winning 20 games in a row to set a new American League record. Lewis goes behind the scenes and finds a new kind of baseball knowledge.

I don't follow baseball, and I certainly don't follow the Oakland A's, but Lewis discussed how the A's applied statistics to baseball, drafting players undervalued by the market, and avoiding "flashy" players overvalued by the market. With next to no budget, they put together a strong team, emphasizing players without blazing footspeed (overvalued), but who could fatigue a pitcher by not swinging at questionable pitches (undervalued). (The site has archived audio — but a written transcript costs money...)

13-Year-Old Prodigy Heads to Grad School

From 13-Year-Old Prodigy Heads to Grad School:

Greg Smith, who graduated from Randolph-Macon College at age 13, will attend graduate school at the University of Virginia, the university said Wednesday.

Smith will pursue a Ph.D. in mathematics. He plans to take two summer courses and attend U.Va.'s orientation on Monday, his 14th birthday.

"It has been my plan since I graduated from high school to apply to U.Va. for my graduate work," said Smith. "I am so excited to have this wonderful opportunity to study at one of our country's best universities."

Smith has kept a rapid academic pace since early childhood, solving math problems at 14 months and reading by age 2. He was 10 when he enrolled at Randolph-Macon, where he majored in math and graduated cum laude Saturday.

Smith has twice been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with International Youth Advocates