NPR : Special Forces Recruiters Target Yuppies

I missed NPR : Special Forces Recruiters Target Yuppies when it played on the air, but it describes a fascinating new development in army recruiting:

Young men are being encouraged to give up their private-sector jobs for the opportunity to join the Special Forces. The program is attracting people who used to work as computer programmers, stockbrokers and teachers, as well as other professionals.

Young (but not that young) men just like me are being recruited into the army to (potentially) join the special forces — without having to wait three years before going to special-ops school. Hmm...

Cruise Says Role in "Samurai" Difficult

I have to say, I was a bit confused as to why Tom Cruise was starring in a Samurai movie. Cruise Says Role in "Samurai" Difficult explains his actual role:

In the film, directed by Edward Zwick, Cruise plays an American hired in the late 1800s to help Japanese warriors in Western war tactics.

Here's the part that interests me most though:

'I trained for eight months prior to shooting the film,' the 41-year-old actor told a news conference packed by some 700 reporters and cameramen Thursday. 'I put on 20 pounds for the character but also for the muscle to carry the swords and wear the armor.'

Twenty pounds of muscle is a lot of muscle — and eight months isn't very long to put on that much mass.

Sprawling Suburbs May Help Fuel Obesity

Sprawling Suburbs May Help Fuel Obesity explains some important differences between American and European (sub)urban planning:

Sprawling suburbs that make it harder for people to get around without a car may help fuel obesity: Americans who live in the most sprawling counties tend to weigh 6 more pounds than their counterparts in the most compact areas.

Adding to the sprawl concern: Pedestrians and bicyclists are much more likely to be killed by passing cars here than in parts of Europe where cities are engineered to encourage physical activity — and whose residents typically are skinnier and live longer than the average American.
[...]
"How you build things influences health in a much more pervasive way than I think most health professionals realize," said Dr. Richard Jackson of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who helped edit the research, published in the American Journal of Public Health and American Journal of Health Promotion.

"Look at many new suburbs — there are not any sidewalks at all. ... The result is we just don't walk," added John Pucher of Rutgers University, who uncovered the U.S.-European disparities that CDC's Jackson called shocking.
[...]
In Europe, people make 33 percent of their trips by foot or bicycle, compared with just 9.4 percent of Americans' trips.

Youngest in Class Face Stress Challenges

Sometimes I wonder how I survived school. Youngest in Class Face Stress Challenges explains the horrors — or moderate stress — I overcame:

The youngest children in any school year face more stress than their older peers and are at greater risk of developing mental illness, scientists have found.

A survey of more than 10,000 children in Britain between the ages of five and 15 showed that regardless of when their school year began, if they were the youngest in the class they faced greater stress.

"It is not a huge stress like family problems, trauma or being in an accident. But it is a moderate stress and, given that it applies to a lot of kids, it is a serious health threat," research leader Robert Goodman told Reuters.

New Ships Mean New Bidding

New Ships Mean New Bidding explains how some unusual companies are bidding on contracts to make a new brand of warship, the Littoral Combat Ship:

The Pentagon has been seeking bids for a new generation of small, fast-moving ships that can get far closer to enemy shorelines than the bulk of the boats that make up the U.S. Navy. And the competition for these vessels, known as Littoral Combat Ships, is turning out to be almost as revolutionary as the ships being proposed.

For years, Northrop Grumman Corp. and General Dynamics Corp. have pretty much had a lock on the military-shipbuilding market, providing the Navy with aircraft carriers, missile-toting destroyers and submarines. But in an effort to attract new ideas and expand its supplier base, the Navy, starting in April, has sought proposals from ship makers better known for luxury cruisers, ferries and tug boats.

While these newcomers, such as Bollinger Shipyards Inc. and Norway's Umoe Mandal don't have much experience in the often-arcane world of Pentagon bidding, they are teaming up with nonshipbuilding defense contractors who do, Lockheed Martin Corp. and Raytheon Co., respectively.
[...]
The LCS competitors have proposed some unconventional alternatives such as a large boat that would glide just above the water like a hydrofoil and what is known as a trimaran, essentially a catamaran with three hulls instead of two. No matter what their method of movement, though, all the vessels have to be capable of sailing at more than 50 knots and cost about $200 million each, not including special mission systems. By comparison, a naval destroyer costs about $1 billion and at full speed moves at about 30 knots.
[...]
Rather than the hundreds needed to operate a destroyer, the Navy envisions each new vessel will have around two dozen sailors to operate it. It also will weigh a lot less — Raytheon's submission comes in at 1,850 tons, for example, compared with a destroyer that weighs about 9,200 tons. And they will be capable of traveling more than 2,500 miles — even in rough seas — unlike earlier versions.

Fancy Footwork: How Impresario Of Fight Events Evades Regulation

As a fan of mixed-martial arts (or "ultimate fighting"), I cringe whenever a sensational "news" story conflates it with "toughman" competitions. Fortunately, Fancy Footwork: How Impresario Of Fight Events Evades Regulation doesn't make that mistake. Instead it explains how toughman competitions dodge regulation:

Twenty-four years ago, Mr. Dore founded the boxing equivalent of karaoke: Toughman contestants — often out of shape and in poor medical condition — climb into the ring and slug it out. Mr. Dore's skill in ducking oversight has been critical to the success of his brutal fight shows, which take place in cities and towns around the country and can gross $20,000 or more in an evening.

States, rather than the federal government, are the main regulators of professional boxing. But Mr. Dore says that avoiding state supervision is sometimes as simple as labeling Toughman contests 'amateur' events. 'Then we don't have the jurisdiction of the boxing commission,' he says.

I'm not quite sure how you can run a prize fight as an amateur event...

To bring mixed-martial arts back into the discussion:

Florida bans fighting matches involving "a combination of skills." So Toughman events in that state, including the one in which Mrs. Young fought, allow only standard boxing punches — no kicking or karate chops. That is enough to dodge the ban, says Florida's boxing commissioner, Chris Meffert. His agency oversees conventional professional fights in the state but doesn't regulate Toughman.

Legitimate athletes trained in wrestling, jiu-jitsu, and muay thai can't compete — but fat slobs can — fat, untrained slobs, in dubious health:

He argues that Toughman, which puts on about 100 fighting contests a year, leads to fewer deaths than professional boxing. Mr. Dore won't say exactly how many fighters have died from Toughman-related injuries since he founded the event. But eight are known to have died since 1981. During the same period, at least 14 professional boxers have died after competition in the U.S. The comparison is of dubious value, however, because there isn't a reliable count of how many individual bouts there have been in either category of fighting.

I shouldn't have to point out that no one has died in a mixed-martial arts competition in the US. Or Japan. Or Brazil.

Pentagon Rethinks Use of Cluster Bombs

According to Pentagon Rethinks Use of Cluster Bombs, cluster bombs don't simply leave unexploded duds that kill civilians; they also create "no-go" areas on the battlefield, keeping friendlies from advancing. Some interesting stats:

Cluster bombs are designed to destroy armor and kill troops over wide areas. The bombs scatter as many as 900 individually armed bomblets in midair, across a wide area. The U.S. showered between 1 million and 1.5 million bomblets on Iraq during the three-week invasion earlier this year.
[...]
The Pentagon said its tests show that between 2% and 6% of its bomblets don't explode on impact, which it considers acceptable at present. The General Accounting Office has found so-called dud rates as high as 16%, but Army officials call such estimates far too high. Precise rates in Iraq aren't available, but U.S. Marine experts in Karbala say they believe dud rates in some places were as much as 40%.
[...]
Marine explosives specialists in the hard-hit Karbala-Hillah area have destroyed more than 31,000 unexploded bomblets — some Iraqi, most American — that landed on fields, homes, factories and roads. Two were on the roof of a downtown hotel, one stuck in its soft tar. Many were in populated areas on Karbala's outskirts.

Moonshine Alive, but Not Well, in Atlanta

I can hear the dueling banjos as I read this. From Moonshine Alive, but Not Well, in Atlanta:

"We were under the misconception that moonshine drinking was relatively rare these days, particularly in an urban area," Dr. Brent Morgan of the Georgia Poison Center, who led the study, said in a statement.

Morgan and colleagues started their survey after four adults showing up at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta had potentially fatal lead levels in their blood.

The patients, all of whom said they had recently drunk moonshine, had seizures, a hallmark of lead poisoning, abdominal pain, kidney problems, ulcers, and anemia.

Lead gets into moonshine when certain containers are used to make or store it. Car radiators were once notorious for producing poisonous brew.

"These four patients made us realize that perhaps lead exposure from moonshine was being overlooked in the emergency department," Morgan said.

His team surveyed 531 people in the Atlanta area, of whom 8.6 percent reported they had tasted moonshine within the past five years.

Might I recommend lead-free solder for assembling a still?

Breathing-Muscle Training Helps Emphysema Patients

Breathing-Muscle Training Helps Emphysema Patients reports on some unusual resistance training:

The muscles involved in exhaling can be strengthened by specific training, and for patients with emphysema, this can help them be more physically active, Israeli researchers report.
[...]
Thirteen of the patients were randomly assigned to receive a half-hour of expiratory muscle training daily, six times a week for three months. Training involved the use of a breathing device that applied resistance during exhalation, which was gradually increased over the first month. The other 13 control patients received training only at the very lowest resistance setting.

Patients in the special training group had significantly greater improvements in expiratory muscle strength and endurance. Also, the distance they could walk in six minutes improved much more than in the control group.

Jiu-jitsu seems to offer more inhalation muscle training — since you're often trying to breath with someone's weight across your chest.

Scientists May Have Solved the Secret of Silk

We may soon see artificial silk products if its as simple as Scientists May Have Solved the Secret of Silk describes:

Scientists say they may have worked out how spiders and silkworms are able to produce such strong fibers to spin their webs and cocoons.
[...]
Kaplan and his team say the secret to silk production lies in how spiders and silkworms control silk protein solubility in their glands.

"The entire process is controlled by the amount of water, which is so simple," he told Reuters.

"The organism dumps protein into the gland but as it does that, it regulates how much water it leaves in there. That controls the entire process."

Dark Chocolate May Have Benefit

There's a reason I picked out Hershey's Special Dark With Almonds from all the goodies at Hersheypark this weekend. Dark Chocolate May Have Benefit:

Thirteen adults with untreated mild hypertension got to eat 3-ounce chocolate bars every day for two weeks. Half of the patients got white chocolate, half got dark chocolate.

Dark chocolate contains plant substances called polyphenols — ingredients scientists think are responsible for the heart-healthy attributes of red wine. Polyphenols also have been shown to lower blood pressure in animals.

Blood pressure remained pretty much unchanged in the group that ate white chocolate, which does not contain polyphenols. But after two weeks, systolic blood pressure — the top number — had dropped an average of five points in the dark-chocolate group. The lower, or diastolic, reading fell an average of almost two points.

The participants had an average blood pressure reading of about 153 over 84.

Ex-spy fingers Russians on WMD

The WMD Shell Game (on Winds of Change.NET) pointed me to an amazing article by Ion Mihai Pacepa, a self-described former Romanian spy chief. From Ex-spy fingers Russians on WMD:

As a former Romanian spy chief who used to take orders from the Soviet KGB, it is perfectly obvious to me that Russia is behind the evanescence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. After all, Russia helped Saddam get his hands on them in the first place. The Soviet Union and all its bloc states always had a standard operating procedure for deep sixing weapons of mass destruction — in Romanian it was codenamed "Sarindar, meaning "emergency exit."I implemented it in Libya. It was for ridding Third World despots of all trace of their chemical weapons if the Western imperialists ever got near them. We wanted to make sure they would never be traced back to us, and we also wanted to frustrate the West by not giving them anything they could make propaganda with.

More details:

All chemical weapons were to be immediately burned or buried deep at sea. Technological documentation, however, would be preserved in microfiche buried in waterproof containers for future reconstruction. Chemical weapons, especially those produced in Third Worldcountries,which lack sophisticated production facilities, often do not retain lethal properties after a few months on the shelf and are routinely dumped anyway. And all chemical weapons plants had a civilian cover making detection difficult, regardless of the circumstances.

Victor Davis Hanson on National Review Online

Victor Davis Hanson on National Review Online makes the point that it's all too easy to criticize the war effort from the safety of your pleasant suburban home:

My point is rather that, because we are products of an affluent and leisured West, we have a special burden to remember how tenuous and fragile civilization remains outside our suburbs.

Most of us don't fear much from the fatwa of a murderous mullah, and few have had our sisters shredded before our eyes in one of Uday's brush chippers — much less ever seen chemical-warfare trucks hosing down our block, as cropdusters fogged our backyards.

Instead, we have the leisure to engage in utopian musing, assured that our economy, or our unseen soldiers, or our system working on autopilot, will always ensure us such prerogatives. And in the La-La Land of Washington and New York, it is especially easy to forget that we are not even like our own soldiers in Iraq, now sleeping outside without toilets and air conditioners, eating dehydrated food, and trying to distinguish killers from innocents.

What does all this mean? Western societies from ancient Athens to imperial Rome to the French republic rarely collapsed because of a shortage of resources or because foreign enemies proved too numerous or formidable in arms — even when those enemies were grim Macedonians or Germans. Rather, in times of peace and prosperity there arose an unreal view of the world beyond their borders, one that was the product of insularity brought about by success, and an intellectual arrogance that for some can be the unfortunate byproduct of an enlightened society.

I think we are indulging in this unreal hypercriticism — even apart from the election-season antics of our politicians — because we are not being gassed, or shot, or even left hot or hungry.

Tanorexia

A colleague — one who lived in sunny Arizona a while — mentioned an amusing term I'd never heard before: tanorexia — the compulsion to say, "I am so pale," and tan until leathery.

Actor Arrested After Using Real Bullets

I suspect that the plot of the real-life story is far more interesting than the plot of the movie being made. From Actor Arrested After Using Real Bullets:

An actor in an action scene apparently was handed a gun with real bullets rather than blanks, causing him to shoot and kill another actor, authorities said Thursday.

Actor Flavio Peniche — brother of internationally known soap-opera star Arturo Peniche — was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter and then released on bail of $40,000 on Wednesday, according to the attorney general's office of Morelos state, just south of Mexico City.

The incident occurred on Saturday during filming of a low-budget movie, "The Scorpion's Vengeance," at a hotel in Cuernavaca.

According to a police report sent by fax to the Associated Press, the scene called for Peniche to shoot six people. After firing what were supposed to be two blanks, he realized that actor Antonio Velasco had been wounded and the crew ran for help.

Velasco died shortly afterward at a Cuernavaca hospital.

Police said they were still seeking the film's producer, Eduardo Martinez Sanchez, and a props manager known only as "El Cepillo" — "The Brush" — who disappeared after the incident.

The Europe of Yesterday

In The Europe of Yesterday, Theodore Dalrymple explains how Europe's history continues to haunt it:

There's no doubt that, more that half a century on, we haven't overcome the legacy of the Second World War, at least where our feelings are concerned. Not long ago in Germany, I went to dinner with a man in his thirties who ran a forestry company. In order to explain how difficult it was even now to be a German, he described how a meeting in his company to decide on a company slogan dragged on for hours because someone suggested as a possibility Holz mit Stolz — Wood with Pride. Was it, everyone wondered, the beginning of the slippery slope to Auschwitz? This week planks, next week planes, the week after that world conquest. After long debate, they decided that no pride was permissible for Germans in any form.

'Muppet,' 'Eeyorish' Join Oxford Lexicon

I get the impression that Jack Garland, Associated Press Writer, and the Oxford University Press staff many not really get the Muppets — or Winnie the Pooh. 'Muppet,' 'Eeyorish' Join Oxford Lexicon:

Are you feeling like a 'muppet' because you cannot remember the meaning of a word? Or are you a bit 'Eeyorish' and confused at our rapidly changing language? Those are among 3,000 new words and expressions, many of them slang or foreign, that have entered English usage and are included in the new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English, which is being released Thursday.

'Muppet,' taken from the children's TV show, 'Sesame Street,' means a foolish person, while 'Eeyorish' refers to the character in Winnie the Pooh known for his gloomy outlook on life.

Since when is a muppet a foolish person?

Anyway, a number of technical and ethnic terms have entered the language recently:

Thus "blog" (short for Web log), and "egosurfing" (searching the Internet for references to oneself) are joined in the dictionary by more unusual phrases such as "shotgun cloning" (the insertion of random fragments of DNA).
[...]
"Chacha" is a Hindi word for uncle, "doudou" is a West Indian term of endearment, "sic bo" is a Chinese game of dice, and "bashert" is a yiddish word for fate.

The U.S. influence is evident in "bada bing," the name of Tony Soprano's strip-joint in the hit HBO show "The Sopranos." The phrase is defined as "an effortless act."

The term "24/7" has officially entered common usage in the United Kingdom, as have "nerd," "geek," and "bad-hair day."

The more unpleasant side of modern life pops up with "counterterrorism," "dirty bomb," and "mission creep" all included in the dictionary.

On a lighter note, words from office life often crop up. "Prairie-dogging" is a term describing workers in cubicles who raise their heads above the partitions surrounding their desks to see what is going on.

Birth of a Medium: Video games, art, and moral panic

Birth of a Medium: Video games, art, and moral panic compares video games to early movies — and points out that early movies were not protected by the First Amendment:

For Henry Jenkins, a professor of media studies at MIT, the video game Grand Theft Auto III is a bit like Birth of a Nation, the 1915 film that cineastes praise for helping create the basic grammar of the movies and simultaneously damn for celebrating the Ku Klux Klan.

"In terms of what it does for games as a medium, Grand Theft Auto III is an enormous step forward," says Jenkins. "It represents a totally different model of how games can tell stories and what you can do in a gamespace. It happens to be yoked with some sophomoric images of violence that a lot of us wish weren't there."

Mary Lou Dickerson, a Seattle Democrat in the Washington legislature, sees only the violence. A bill she sponsored will ban stores from selling or renting violent video games to anyone under 17.
[...]
Birth of a Nation faced censorship battles too. In those days, the courts held that the First Amendment didn't apply to the movies, which were seen as a medium more for pie fights than for art. In other words, they were viewed the way video games are viewed today. In 2002 U.S. District Judge Stephen Limbaugh ruled that video games are not protected speech, a judgment that's unlikely to be law 10 years from now but sums up the current conventional wisdom.

Monsters Were Due on Maple Street

Nick Gillespie summarizes a classic Twilight Zone episode — one I recently watched on DVD — while discussing the recent power outage, in Monsters Were Due on Maple Street:

Remember the old Twilight Zone episode, "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," ranked as one of the series' best by those who care about such matters? A minor classic on Cold War hysteria, it takes place on a typical street in a typical American town, where the power goes out for no apparent reason. Within hours, the neighbors are at each other's throats, accusing one another of treachery and worse. As the lights intermittently come back on and the day turns to night, rioting and shooting occur and the whole place goes to hell in a hand basket. Because it's the Twilight Zone, with its mandatory groan-inducing denouement, we learn at the close of the show that two big-headed aliens, an advance team for a planned invasion of the planet, have been playing the Maple Streeters for suckers. What they did here, they'll soon do all over the country.

As Gillespie says, "yesterday's record-setting blackout that left some 50 million without electricity should have been a Maple Street moment," but it wasn't.

Indeed, the most interesting blackout-related story is the one that never happened. The sort of pandemonium, hysteria, looting, crime, and chaos that typically greets even minor football victories as well as catastrophic utility failures simply didn't materialize.
[...]
Compare this blackout to the last great power failure in Gotham, which ushered in what then-Mayor Abe Beame understatedly referred to as a "Night of Terror". The total damage for the crime, arson, and theft associated with the '77 blackout is generally pegged at around $150 million and the mayhem that ensued (including looting and widespread muggings in broad daylight) is considered on a par or worse with what followed in the wake of the late-'60s race riots there.

Swimmer Killed by Shark in California

Swimmer Killed by Shark in California explains why you shouldn't swim with seals of the coast of San Luis Obispo while dressed in a wetsuit:

A 50-year-old college instructor taking a morning swim bled to death after she was attacked by a great white shark 15 to 18 feet long, preliminary autopsy results showed Wednesday.

Deborah Franzman of Nipomo was killed Tuesday as she swam 75 yards offshore alongside a group of seals. Witnesses reported seeing a large fin as Franzman screamed for help.

Lifeguards pulled Franzman to shore, where she died. Bite marks on her legs were consistent with those seen in previous attacks by great white sharks, San Luis Obispo County sheriff's Lt. Martin Basti said.

Shark expert Robert Lea, present during the autopsy, estimated the fish was between 15 and 18 feet long.
[...]
Franzman's death marked the 10th fatal shark attack in California since 1952 and the first death since 1994, according to state Fish and Game records.

Lion Dung on Train Tracks Keeps Deer Safe

We may need to try this along Route 252 through Valley Forge. Lion Dung on Train Tracks Keeps Deer Safe:

Railway officials in Wakayama, a largely rural prefecture in western Japan, racked their brains for months for a way to keep wild deer from running onto train tracks and getting killed.

Finally, inspiration struck: scare them off with lion dung.

Taking hints from research by forestry experts, who found that deer shunned the aroma of the king of beasts, officials at the local branch of West Japan Railway Co (JR West) got the material they needed from a local amusement park.

'I forget how much, but it was a whole lot. I think about 100 kg (220 lb),' Takao Maeda of JR West in Shingu, some 450 km (280 miles) west of Tokyo, said on Wednesday.

'They sort of mixed it with water and then spread it along the tracks.'
The strategy appears to have worked for now.

For along a 400 meter (1,300 ft) stretch of tracks where a number of deer were struck last year — the Asahi Shimbun newspaper said 30 between January and October — none have been hit since the dung was spread last November.

As far as I know, lions are not indigenous to Japan — but Japanese deer still know to steer clear or them. As well as the lion dung works as a deer repellent, it has its downside:

"The odor is really, really foul," he said. "So we can only use it on tracks in uninhabited areas."

Probably not a good choice for Valley Forge...

Julian's Lounge: Notes from the Lounge

In Julian's Lounge: Notes from the Lounge, Julian comments on comic books and obscenity:

You've probably already heard of Jesus Castillo (interviewed here): He's the man who was recently denied an appeal by the Supremes after being convicted of selling a clearly marked adult comic book... to an adult. The key argument, apparently bought by jurors who knew nothing about contemporary comic book markets, was that all comics are inherently for kids.

Now, if you're reading this, you probably already know how preposterous that is, that there's a huge number of titles obviously geared for adults — and not just in the "adult toys" and "adult films" sense of "adult."

But it's actually worse than that. See, it occured to me that, not only are comics not entirely for kids, but I almost never see people younger than 18 or so in comic shops at all. And upon checking, it proves that, lo and behold, the average age of a comic book reader is 24. So not only was the Texas DA wrong in general to tell the jury that "Comic books, traditionally what we think of, are for kids," he wasn't even right on average. If you're in Texas, tell your governor that he's the last hope for a hapless clerk who's already paid $4,000 and is currently on probation for selling adult material to an adult cop. And send a (polite) email to the politician, Mary Poss, who's responsible for this particular case of entrapment.

I think he assumes too much when he says, "You've probably already heard of Jesus Castillo," and he treats an average like a median (are half of comic-book buyers over 24?), but he makes a good point: how is an "adult" comic obscene when an "adult" magazine isn't?

Teen Dies After Prized Fish Stuck in Throat

While recently fly-fishing in Utah, I hooked my own shin. I thought that was bad. That was nothing. Teen Dies After Prized Fish Stuck in Throat:

A Cambodian teenager died of suffocation after a fish he caught jumped out of his hands and lodged in his throat, newspapers reported on Tuesday.

Lim Vanthan, 17, and his family were planting rice at the weekend near their home on the outskirts of the impoverished Southeast Asian nation's capital, when they decided to go for a swim.

During his dip, Lim Vanthan caught a prized eight-inch fish, called kantrob in Cambodian, with his hands.

But the high school student's excitement was short-lived when his catch squirmed out of his hands and jumped into his mouth, where it became stuck because of barbs running down its back.

He died of suffocation before he could receive treatment at a local clinic, the newspapers said.

"This is an accident, but it shows we must all be careful," concluded the Khmer-language Rasmei Kampuchea (Light of Cambodia) newspaper. "Accidents can happen at any time."

Send in the Eagles to Battle Giant Gerbils

While New York is sending hawks after pigeons, China is sending eagles after giant gerbils. From Send in the Eagles to Battle Giant Gerbils:

China is deploying eagles to control giant gerbils that have damaged an area of grassland larger than Switzerland.

The China Daily said on Tuesday burrowing by great gerbils (Rhombomys opimus) and other rodents had damaged 11.76 million acres of grassland in the far west. About 81,540 acres had been completely destroyed.

'It has been the most severe rodent disaster since 1993,' Xiong Ling, an official with the region's headquarters for controlling locusts and rodents, was quoted as saying.

To combat the onslaught, the government was using poison and raising eagles to eat the burrowers now reaching the peak of their reproductive cycle, the paper said, adding as many as 790 burrow holes had been found per hectare in some areas.

Great gerbils, found in many parts of Central Asia, can grow up to 16 inches from head to tail, the Web site of Britain's National Gerbil Society at www.gerbils.co.uk said.

In addition to being an agricultural pest, the gerbils are known to carry bubonic plague, it said.

Doctor Arrested for Selling Patients as Wives

I couldn't make this up. From Doctor Arrested for Selling Patients as Wives:

Chinese police arrested the director of a psychiatric hospital for drugging female patients and selling them off as wives, a police official said Tuesday.

Dr Wang Chaoying, head of a mental hospital in Huazhou in southern Guangdong, had made more than 20 transactions since 1998 in which he sold patients as wives for 'thousands of yuan,' the government-owned Qianlong news Web site reported at www.qianlong.com.

'He was arrested for selling women. The case is still under investigation,' Ruan Rongzhi, a police officer in Huazhou, told Reuters by telephone when asked about the report. He declined to give details.

Qianlong said the women had been forced to take medicine before they were sold in order to keep the buyers from realizing they were mental patients.

Some of the men later demanded refunds, it said.

China has 70 million bachelors unable to find wives. Men outnumber women as a result of a one-child policy which led to many fetuses of girls, traditionally discriminated against, being aborted.

Detroit Tarmac

Anecdote: My colleague, Jeff, I found out yesterday, was on the very last flight out of Detroit a few days ago, when the power went out. He got through security two minutes before the power died, and he only managed to get on board his flight because a door to the tarmac had been left open when the electricity died, and the captain had the passengers board the old-fashioned way (not directly from the gate, but up some stairs). As he said, "If I'd stopped to wizz or get a paper, I would've been there another day and a half." He's counting his blessings.

Aside: I decided to look up "tarmac" — it is an odd word — and I found out that it's a shortened form of tarmacadam:

Main Entry: tar·mac·ad·am
Pronunciation: 'tär-m&-'ka-d&m
Function: noun
Date: 1882
1 : a pavement constructed by spraying or pouring a tar binder over layers of crushed stone and then rolling
2 : a material of tar and aggregates mixed in a plant and shaped on the roadway

The Cossacks' Iliad

The Cossacks' Iliad piqued my interest in Taras Bulba, an early Russian novel (from 1842) described by its author, Gogol, as an epic poem (even though it is entirely in prose):

Take the wild history of the Cossacks in the Ukraine. Add the birth of nationalism and the drawing in of the principalities around Moscow to form a modern country. Include Eastern Orthodoxy's long struggle against the Catholic Poles and the Ottoman Muslims. Don't forget a love story in which a son betrays his father and his people for the sake of a beautiful daughter of the enemy. Mix in a big dollop of anti-Semitism and alternating moments of unselfconscious joy in the midst of battle and unselfconscious moroseness at night around the campfire. Finally, douse the whole thing in huge buckets of vodka, and the result can have only one name. Russia.

The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You (and Other Riddles of Modern Life)

The New York Times has a fascinating article on Steven Levitt, an economist with a very different take on the dismal science, The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You (and Other Riddles of Modern Life). I remember reading about his famous abortion-and-crime paper a few years ago:

He is a prolific and diverse writer. But his paper linking a rise in abortion to a drop in crime has made more noise than the rest combined. Levitt and his co-author, John Donohue of Stanford Law School, argued that as much as 50 percent of the huge drop in crime since the early 1990's can be traced to Roe v. Wade. Their thinking goes like this: the women most likely to seek an abortion — poor, single, black or teenage mothers — were the very women whose children, if born, have been shown most likely to become criminals. But since those children weren't born, crime began to decrease during the years they would have entered their criminal prime. In conversation, Levitt reduces the theory to a tidy syllogism: ''Unwantedness leads to high crime; abortion leads to less unwantedness; abortion leads to less crime.''

How about this study, on drug dealers?

Venkatesh was Levitt's co-author on ''An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang's Finances,'' which found that the average street dealer lives with his mother because the take-home pay is, frankly, terrible. The paper analyzed one crack gang's financial activities as if it were any corporation. (It was Venkatesh who procured the data, from a former gang member.) Such a thing had never been tried.

I love this bit:

He takes particular delight in catching wrongdoers. In one paper, he devised a set of algorithms that could identify teachers in the Chicago public-school system who were cheating. ''Cheating classrooms will systematically differ from other classrooms along a number of dimensions,'' he and his co-author, Brian Jacob of the Kennedy School of Government, wrote in ''Catching Cheating Teachers.'' ''For instance, students in cheating classrooms are likely to experience unusually large test-score gains in the year of the cheating, followed by unusually small gains or even declines in the following year when the boost attributable to cheating disappears.''

Levitt used test-score data from the Chicago schools that had long been available to other researchers. There were a number of ways, he realized, that a teacher could cheat. If she were particularly brazen (and stupid), she might give students the correct answers. Or, after the test, she might actually erase students' wrong answers and fill in correct ones. A sophisticated cheater would be careful to avoid conspicuous blocks of identical answers. But Levitt was more sophisticated. ''The first step in analyzing suspicious strings is to estimate the probability each child would give a particular answer on each question,'' he wrote. ''This estimation is done using a multinomial logit framework with past test scores, demographics and socioeconomic characteristics as explanatory variables.''

So by measuring any number of factors — the difficulty of a particular question, the frequency with which students got hard questions right and easy ones wrong, the degree to which certain answers were highly correlated in one classroom — Levitt identified which teachers he thought were cheating. (Perhaps just as valuable, he was also able to identify the good teachers.) The Chicago school system, rather than disputing Levitt's findings, invited him into the schools for retesting. As a result, the cheaters were fired.

His bio amazes me:

He comes from a Minneapolis family of high, if unusual, achievers. His father, a medical researcher, is considered a leading authority on intestinal gas. (He bills himself as ''The Man Who Gave Status to Flatus and Class to Gas.'') One of Levitt's great uncles, Robert May, wrote ''Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer'' — the book, that is; another great uncle, Johnny Marks, later wrote the song.

At Harvard, Levitt wrote his senior thesis on thoroughbred breeding and graduated summa cum laude. (He is still obsessed with horse racing. He says he believes it is corrupt and has designed a betting system — the details of which he will not share — to take advantage of the corruption.) He worked for two years as a management consultant before enrolling at M.I.T. for a doctorate in economics. The M.I.T. program was famous for its mathematical intensity. Levitt had taken exactly one math course as an undergraduate and had forgotten even that. During his first graduate class, he asked the student next to him about a formula on the board: Is there any difference between the derivative sign that's straight up-and-down and the curly one? ''You are in so much trouble,'' he was told.

''People wrote him off,'' recalls Austan Goolsbee, the Chicago economist who was then a classmate. ''They'd say, 'That guy has no future.'''

Levitt set his own course. Other grad students stayed up all night working on problem sets, trying to make good grades. He stayed up researching and writing. ''My view was that the way you succeed in this profession is you write great papers,'' he says. ''So I just started.''

Another interesting paper:

Then he happened upon a political-science book whose authors claimed that money wins elections, period. ''They were trying to explain election outcomes as a function of campaign expenditures,'' he recalls, ''completely ignoring the fact that contributors will only give money to challengers when they have a realistic chance of winning, and incumbents only spend a lot when they have a chance of losing. They convinced themselves this was the causal story even though it's so obvious in retrospect that it's a spurious effect.''

Obvious, at least, to Levitt. Within five minutes, he had a vision of the paper he would write. ''It came to me,'' he says, ''in full bloom.''

The problem was that his data couldn't tell him who was a good candidate and who wasn't. It was therefore impossible to tease out the effect of the money. As with the police/crime rate puzzle, he had to trick the data.

Because he himself had typed in the data, he had noticed something: often, the same two candidates faced each other multiple times. By analyzing the data from only those elections, Levitt was able to find a true result. His conclusion: campaign money has about one-tenth the impact as was commonly accepted.

An unknown graduate student, he sent his paper to The Journal of Political Economy — one professor told him he was crazy for even trying — where it was published.

Read the whole article.

Trained NYC Hawks Attack Chihuahua

Crazy. Bryant Park in New York City has been using trained hawks to keep the pigeon population down — and one of them went for a Chihuahua. From Trained NYC Hawks Attack Chihuahua:

Trained hawks employed to keep pigeons from making a mess on visitors in a midtown park have been grounded because one of the birds mistook a Chihuahua as its lunch.

An 18-inch hawk swooped down and gouged the diminutive pooch with one of its talons while the dog was nosing around in the bushes of Bryant Park, located behind the landmark New York Public Library.

The hawk was quickly separated from the pooch Tuesday afternoon. A park employee flagged down a cab so the dog's owner could take it to a veterinarian, said Richard Dillon, vice president of security for Bryant Park.
[...]
"I sincerely believe the bird mistook it for a rat because it was in the shrubbery," said Thomas Cullen, the falconer hired to run the anti-pigeon program.
[...]
Daniel Biederman, executive director of the Bryant Park group, said the hawk program has been a success since it was started in April, with pigeon infestation down 50 percent and fewer complaints from visitors.

Hey, who wouldn't mistake a Chihuahua for a rat?

Researchers Develop Effective Ebola Vaccine

Good news for monkeys — from Researchers Develop Effective Ebola Vaccine:

U.S. government researchers said on Wednesday they had developed a vaccine that protected monkeys against Ebola virus with a single dose — offering a new way to stop an outbreak of the deadly disease.

OK, it's good news all around:

The vaccine was made using a new approach that should work against a range of other viruses, as well, the researchers said. And the new technology might offer a quick way to develop an instant vaccine against new infections, such as SARS, or even a biological weapon.
[...]
Nabel and colleagues started with a common virus called an adenovirus — the culprit behind many cases of the common cold and some more serious infections as well. They added one piece of DNA from the Ebola virus — the glycoprotein.

Traditional vaccines use a whole virus, live, killed or weakened, to help the immune system recognize the invader. The DNA vaccine relies on a strong immune response to the adenovirus, and the immune system recognizes the Ebola virus simply by recognizing the glycoprotein.

To the researchers' surprise, monkeys given a single jab with this vaccine were 100 percent protected from what should have been a deadly dose of Ebola, they report in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

Scientists Say They've Cloned a Horse

From Scientists Say They've Cloned a Horse:

Scientists in Italy say they have created the world's first cloned horse, raising the possibility of a sequel to the next Seabiscuit or a carbon copy of Kentucky Derby champion Funny Cide.

The small, sturdy work horse is now two months old, weighs about 220 pounds and is in excellent health, said its creators. Their announcement beats a Texas A&M team awaiting the birth of its own horse clone.

The cloned Haflinger horse is named Prometea after Prometheus, the character in Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans.

In a twist for the growing barnyard of cloned animals, the Haflinger mare that gave birth to the Promotea was also the source of her DNA, meaning she and her foal are identical twins.

Promotea isn't the only recently cloned equine though:

Prometea was born just two weeks after the first member of the equine family — a mule — was cloned at the University of Idaho. Researchers there have since produced two more cloned mules, which are a hybrid of a donkey and a horse.

Scientific differences in the two cloning projects are striking.

The mules were cloned from cells extracted from developing mule fetuses. But Prometea's DNA came from her adult mother's skin cells. Cloning adult DNA has proven more difficult than copying fetal DNA.

There were other differences. The Idaho team harvested fertile eggs, one at a time, from mares. They then removed the nucleus of each egg and inserted DNA from cells of a mule fetus. Those reconstructed eggs were surgically implanted into the wombs of female horses.

Galli's team, however, harvested hundreds of eggs from mare carcasses at a slaughterhouse. They cultured the eggs, removed their DNA and replaced it with DNA taken from either adult male or female horse skin cells.

Out of a total of 841 reconstructed embryos, only 22 developed to advanced embryos within about a week. Seventeen of those were introduced into nine mares, resulting in four pregnancies, but only one, Prometea, developed to full term.

It was delivered naturally and unassisted on May 28.

Capturing the Jacobsons

Elizabeth Einstein reviews Mark Jacobson's Capturing the Jacobsons, a (nonfiction) book with a fascinating premise:

Having reveled in the unusual (smoking a joint with Bob Marley, for instance, or going for midnight sails with caviar poachers in the Caspian Sea, or driving 32 hours to see the Dalai Lama in Dharmsala) on behalf of magazines like Esquire, Outside and Rolling Stone, Jacobson never went in for typical summer holidays. He and his wife, Nancy, had always avoided theme-park vacations, preferring instead to drive through the bayous and Cajun prairies of southern Louisiana or dig for fossils in the South Dakota Badlands. But their kids seemed stuck in a cultural wasteland. So in the summer of 2000, only something truly foreign would do: Thailand, Cambodia, India, Nepal, Egypt, Jordan and Israel and the rickety planes, trains, rental cars and rickshaws that got them there.

This should knock the kids out of their "idiot culture" stupor:

It only takes 23 hours or so on a plane to rip the family from its moorings. The book's first stop is the funeral pyres of Varanasi, where even seen-it-all Jacobson is disturbed by the sight of dismembered corpses floating down the Ganges. Torn between his bohemian dedication to the value of experience above all else and the sight of his 9-year-old coming face-to-decaying-face with a rotting body, he decides to shield his children: "In search of The Real," he writes, "it was important to screen out the Too Real."

There's more second-guessing at places like Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, where a mere 25 years ago the Khmer Rouge tortured and killed thousands of fellow Cambodians whose skulls now line its walls.

Sword of Honour

Paul Robinson opens Sword of Honour by describing an amusing scientific study:

If you are looking for some fun, and have a research grant to spend, try this. Visit an American university, bump into random students in the corridor and loudly call each one "asshole". Then measure their reactions. This is what a team of psychologists did in a controlled experiment at the University of Michigan. The results were most interesting. Students from the southern part of the United States reacted far more violently and aggressively than those from the North, were shown to have much higher levels of cortisone and testosterone, and in tests regularly suggested more belligerent solutions to problems. America, it seems, remains culturally divided along the Mason–Dixon line, and the crucial difference now, as at the time of the American Civil War, is honour.

Without the South, we wouldn't have much of a military.

Marie Curie: In the Laboratory and on the Battlefield

In Marie Curie: In the Laboratory and on the Battlefield, Lawrence Badash gives a fascinating summary of x-ray history with a few darkly comical tidbits:

X-ray instruments were widely marketed. A person could place his hand in an x-ray beam before a luminescent screen and view his own bones through a hooded visor. Thomas Edison, among others, offered this precarious experience as a diversion at amusement parks.
[...]
The element uranium, discovered by Martin Klaproth in 1789 and named after the planet discovered just eight years before (the first planet not known in antiquity) did not seem especially interesting. Its principal use was to give glass or pottery a greenish-yellow tint. Because of uranium's great density, attempts were made to incorporate it into military armor.
[...]
The same crystals that Röntgen had illuminated with x rays could also be made to glow by radioactivity. Tiny amounts of radium and those crystals, mixed in paint, could make the paint glow in the dark. This luminous paint was applied to watch dials, light switches, and even to the costumes of nightclub dancers. The patrons could also drink luminous cocktails.
[...]
The variety of radioactive medical nostrums seemed endless: pastes, plasters, muds, inhalers, drinking water, and so forth. That few people were injured by this exposure to radioactivity suggests the weakness of the products. The danger was not widely revealed until the 1920s, when some radium watch-dial painters in New Jersey died after "pointing" their brushes on their tongues and ingesting toxic amounts of radioactive paint. But the danger was already known in smaller circles around 1900, when Becquerel received a burn on his waist after carrying a tube of radium in his vest pocket, and Pierre Curie deliberately gave himself a similar burn. Some physicians were alerted by such evidence to radium's clinical potential in dermatology.
[...]
The x-ray teams were aware, to some extent, of the danger to themselves from radiation exposure, particularly from fluoroscopy. They wore lead aprons and gloves to avoid dermatitis.

One of the chief points of the article is that Marie Curie promoted x-ray diagnosis (on a large scale) in military hospitals during the Great War. How many of these earlier wars do you remember from high-school history class?

Military surgeons were enthusiastic about the "Röntgen-ray apparatus," and sets were used in military hospitals during Italy's Abyssinian War (1896), the Greco-Turkish War (1897), the British campaigns at Tyrah and the Khyber Pass (1897) and in the Sudan (1898), aboard a US ship in the Spanish-American War (1898), in the Boer War (1899), the Russo-Japanese War (1905), the Balkan War (1912-13), and in probably every other conflict of that era in which at least one combatant was technologically advanced.

The Devil's Disciples

In The Devil's Disciples, Louis Menand asks why people follow dictators:

Few puzzles in political philosophy are more daunting than the Problem of the Loyal Henchmen. The Problem of the Loyal Henchmen is a subset of the more familiar Problem of Authority. Why does authority command obedience?

The following examples figure prominently in Cialidini's Influence (a fascinating read I breezed through last Christmas):

A man who tells you to pick your gum wrapper up off the sidewalk is generally ignored; a man in a uniform who makes the same request, even if it's the uniform of a bus driver, is instinctively obeyed. People wearing white lab coats and carrying clipboards, with no other evidence of expertise, have succeeded in persuading subjects in psychology experiments to act in the belief that they are torturing other human beings. In these cases, people can persuade themselves that the authorities they obey are benign — that picking up litter and torturing other human beings in a laboratory are in the interests of civic order and scientific progress.

I love the concept of "Blofeldism" — what an excellent pop-culture reference:

The Problem of the Loyal Henchmen arises when people willingly obey authorities everyone knows to be evil. Why, after the villain has fled in his private submarine, and while the high-tech palace crashes and burns, does the last unincinerated member of the villain's private militia risk his life to take a shot at James Bond? Loyalty to Blofeld? Loyalty to the principles of Blofeldism? What could that mean?

Here's an interesting point about persuasion that rings true:

The mysterious part of totalitarianism's appeal — and here we return to the Problem of the Loyal Henchmen — is that its official ideology can be, and usually is, absurd on its face, and known to be absurd by the leaders who preach it. [...] Totalitarian rule, Arendt argued, is predicated on the assumption that proving that a thing is true is less effective than acting as though it were true. The Nazis did not invite a discussion of the merits of anti-Semitism; they simply acted out its consequences.

An excellent point about dictators:

The surest path to the top for a would-be dictator is to assure people that their fate is being determined by strangers, by people who are, in some fundamental way, unlike themselves. Several years ago, Riccardo Orizio, an Italian journalist, began to track down former dictators who are now living in disgrace and largely forgotten, and to interview them. The result, Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators (Walker; $22), is fascinating.
[...]
Each ex-dictator is mad in his own way, but what almost all of them insist on, in their interviews with Orizio, is that everything they did — the torture, the starvation, the looting of the nation's wealth, the murder of political opponents — was for the good of their country. The alternatives were chaos, colonization, or slaughter. These men and women were, in their own minds, patriots. They validate John Adams's old warning that "power always thinks it has a great soul." The degree of cognitive dissonance involved in being a person who oppresses people out of love for them is summed up in a poster that Baby Doc Duvalier had put up in Haiti. It read, "I should like to stand before the tribunal of history as the person who irreversibly founded democracy in Haiti." And it was signed "Jean-Claude Duvalier, president-for-life."