Judo

In the Underground Forum (a mixed martial arts discussion forum), I stumbled across a short video of a truly spectacular arm-bar, from standing, pulled off in judo competition.

I also stumbled across an article on Yoshida, a judo star who has joined Pride, the renowned Japanese MMA promotion:

Yoshida, 33, came to MMA after winning the gold medal in judo at 172 pounds in the 1992 Olympics. The gold medal only tells part of the story. Yoshida won all six matches via ippon, fighting just 16:21 total in what was regarded as an incredible performance at the time. More impressive was that in 1992, when he competed at 172, he once faced Naoya Ogawa, who ended up winning the silver at 286 pounds in the same Olympics. Giving up more than 100 pounds, he defeated Ogawa. In 1996 in Atlanta, moving up to 190 pounds, he placed fifth, competing with a bad knee. However, the idea that this guy is some judo guy who peaked more than a decade ago wouldn't be fair, since he was world champion in 1999 and a gold medal favorite in 2000. He ended up suffering a broken arm in the Olympics that year and was unable to continue in the tournament. With the next Olympics not until 2004, he retired from judo, and quickly was offered a $250,000 signing bonus by Pride, looking for a national sports hero to add to its stable.

Yoshida won a controversial bout against Royce Gracie when the ref declared Yoshida the winner by choke — before Gracie tapped. He then beat Don Frye by arm-bar — dislocating his elbow before he could tap. His third match lasted less than a minute. He guillotine-choked Satake without wasting a moment — and without putting on enough of a show for the Pride promoters' taste.

I have to catch this Yoshida guy in action.

Halloween Costume Trips Airport Detector

Amusing. Halloween Costume Trips Airport Detector:

Eric Velleca, 28, was pulled off his United Airlines flight to Chicago and questioned by investigators on Wednesday while a bomb squad inspected the trunk carrying three costumes patterned after the outfits worn in the film 'Ghostbusters.'

The trunk contained PVC pipes, radios, cell phones, batteries with wires attached and car distributor caps to be used to assemble the 'proton packs' for costumes he and two friends were planning to wear for a Friday party.

The materials set off the security device and the trunk was rushed to a remote section of the airport. Officials had discussed blowing up the trunk but decided against it, Velleca said.

Rio Police Undress to Bust Beach Crime

Is this real, or is this a new show on UPN? From Rio Police Undress to Bust Beach Crime:

By stripping down to swimtrunks or bikinis and mixing with bathers, a special 50-member Rio de Janeiro police unit will combat rampant beach crime in Brazil's tourist mecca from next weekend, state security officials said on Wednesday.

Left behind

Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, authors of No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, point out a number of alarming facts in Left behind:

The student body of Cedarbrook Middle School in a Philadelphia suburb is one-third black, two-thirds white. The town has a very low poverty rate, good schools, and a long-established black middle class. But in an eighth-grade advanced algebra class that a reporter visited in June 2001, there was not a single black student. The class in which the teacher was explaining that the 2 in number 21 stands for 20, though, was 100 percent black. A few black students were taking accelerated English, but no whites were sitting in the English class that was learning to identify verbs.

The Cedarbrook picture is by no means unique. In fact, it is all too familiar. Here in Massachusetts, where the high school class of 2005 has begun the MCAS testing process, the gap is crystal clear. On the first try, 82 percent of white 10th-graders passed, and the figure for Asians was almost as high (77 percent). But the success rate for Hispanics was 42 percent and for blacks 47 percent. Across the nation, the glaring racial gap is between whites and Asians on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics on the other.

An interesting counter-point they acknowledge:

True, the black high-school graduation rate has more than doubled since 1960, and blacks today attend college at a higher rate than whites did just two decades ago.

The numbers, Thernstrom and Thernstrom say, are "heartbreaking":

• On the nation's most reliable tests, the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), the typical black or Hispanic student at age 17 is scoring less well than at least 80 percent of his or her white classmates. On average, these non-Asian minority students are four years behind whites and Asians. They are, in effect, finishing high school with a junior-high education.


• In five of the seven subjects tested by NAEP, a majority of black 17-year-olds perform in the lowest category: Below Basic. In math the figure is almost seven out of 10; in science it is more than three out of four. A majority of black students do not have even a "partial" mastery of the "fundamental" knowledge and skills expected of students in the 12th grade. (Hispanic students at the end of high school do somewhat better than their black classmates, but they too are far behind their white and Asian peers.) Though approximately two-thirds of black and Hispanic students go on to college, a great many are clearly entering higher education unprepared for true college-level work.


• The news is no better at the top of the scale. Nearly half of all whites and close to 40 percent of Asians in the 12th-grade rank in the top two NAEP categories — Proficient and Advanced — in reading. Less than one-fifth of blacks and one-quarter of Hispanics achieve those levels. In science and math, a mere 3 percent of blacks and 4 to 7 percent of Hispanics display Proficient or Advanced knowledge and skills at the end of high school, in contrast to 7 to 10 times as many whites and Asians. And at the very top, only 0.2 percent of black students perform at a level rated Advanced in math. The figure is 11 times higher for whites and 37 times higher for Asians. Again, Hispanic students are only slightly ahead of blacks.


• Black students were even farther behind a quarter of a century ago, when NAEP data first became available. But the modest progress that occurred during the 1980s has largely come to an end, and there are some indications that the racial gap is widening. Thus, current trends offer no grounds for complacency.

The authors note too that social class (including parental income, education, and place of residence) only accounts for one-third of the racial difference between non-Asian minorities and whites.

The solution? Better schools. Yeah, great insight.

The Opt-Out Revolution

While running some errands at lunch today, I caught Lisa Belkin discussing her article, The Opt-Out Revolution, on NPR:

Wander into any Starbucks in any Starbucks kind of neighborhood in the hours after the commuters are gone. See all those mothers drinking coffee and watching over toddlers at play? If you look past the Lycra gym clothes and the Internet-access cellphones, the scene could be the 50's, but for the fact that the coffee is more expensive and the mothers have M.B.A.'s.

We've gotten so used to the sight that we've lost track of the fact that this was not the way it was supposed to be. Women — specifically, educated professional women — were supposed to achieve like men. Once the barriers came down, once the playing field was leveled, they were supposed to march toward the future and take rightful ownership of the universe, or at the very least, ownership of their half. The women's movement was largely about grabbing a fair share of power — making equal money, standing at the helm in the macho realms of business and government and law. It was about running the world.
[...]
Arguably, the barriers of 40 years ago are down. Fifty percent of the undergraduate class of 2003 at Yale was female; this year's graduating class at Berkeley Law School was 63 percent women; Harvard was 46 percent; Columbia was 51. Nearly 47 percent of medical students are women, as are 50percent of undergraduate business majors (though, interestingly, about 30percent of M.B.A. candidates). They are recruited by top firms in all fields. They start strong out of the gate.

And then, suddenly, they stop. Despite all those women graduating from law school, they comprise only 16 percent of partners in law firms. Although men and women enter corporate training programs in equal numbers, just 16 percent of corporate officers are women, and only eight companies in the Fortune 500 have female C.E.O.'s. Of 435 members of the House of Representatives, 62 are women; there are 14 women in the 100-member Senate.
[...]
The talk of this new decade is less about the obstacles faced by women than it is about the obstacles faced by mothers. As Joan C. Williams, director of the Program on WorkLife Law at American University, wrote in the Harvard Women's Law Journal last spring, ''Many women never get near'' that glass ceiling, because ''they are stopped long before by the maternal wall.''
[...]
Look at Harvard Business School. A survey of women from the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 found that only 38 percent were working full time. [...] Of white men with M.B.A.'s, 95 percent are working full time, but for white women with M.B.A.'s, that number drops to 67 percent.
[...]
Why don't women run the world?

Maybe it's because they don't want to.

The 10-hour battle for Curly, Larry and Moe

I just become aware of this Telegraph story describing how American forces took three objectives — named Curly, Larry, and Moe — within Baghdad back in April. A few highlights from The 10-hour battle for Curly, Larry and Moe:

At about 7.20am, Bravo Tank Company reached Larry and immediately came under attack from rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). Lt Hunter Bowers, 23, the rugby-playing commander of White platoon, was first on the radio. 'My lead tank's been hit. He's on fire on top of the overpass.'

As flames took hold on the back of the turret, ammunition inside started 'cooking off' — blowing up. Thanks to the strengthened doors of the ammunition compartment, Staff Sgt James Lawson and his crew were finally able to escape, dousing the flames with fire extinguishers. The men were alive, badly shaken, but still able to fight.

For the next 10 hours, they had no choice but to do so. Wave after wave of seemingly suicidal soldiers, driving civilian cars, trucks and even buses, armed only with AK47s and RPGs, threw themselves at the US tanks.

These fighters were, in large part, Syrians. 'They drove straight at you at 70 miles an hour, one after the other,' said Lt Mike Martin, 24. 'They would see about a dozen or more cars already on fire, but that wouldn't put them off.'
[...]
Engineers went out in ACEs - armoured combat earthmovers — to shift the wreckage, giving the tanks a clear line of fire and allowing vehicles from other units to push further up the line.

Sgt Jason Reis, 23, from Pennsylvania, returned with his ACE sporting five dents where AK47 bullets had failed to penetrate. Days later he was still shocked, but not by the bullets. "There were bodies burning," he said. "You could smell them and you had to move them out of the way. There were arms and legs lying on the road."
[...]
"Just about every vehicle took three or four RPG hits. They were everywhere. They were even firing from the mosque.

"We fought all day and night and took out about 300 [enemy soldiers]. They would come on foot in waves, three at a time. It was almost comical. These guys would be trying to dodge 25mm high-explosive rounds from the Bradleys, which take out everything in a five-metre radius."
[...]
Sgt Major "Blackhawk Bob" Gallagher, a former special forces solder and veteran of the infamous "Black Hawk Down" mission in Somalia, quickly lived up to his other nickname, the "Metal Magnet". An RPG exploded nearby, causing a shrapnel wound to his ankle, to add to the collection begun in Mogadishu — bullet wounds in both arms and shrapnel in his back. Sgt Major Gallagher, 40, remained standing and carried on firing, ignoring the medics bandaging his legs.
[...]
About 750 of his men had faced 900 enemy fighters. The only American fatalities were the two men killed when the fuel train was ambushed. There were 30 American casualties.

Public Choice: Politics Without Romance

In Public Choice: Politics Without Romance, James Buchanan, winner of the 1986 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics at George Mason University, explains public choice theory, a field he developed:

Nations emerging from World War II, including the Western democracies, were allocating between one-third and one-half of their total product through political institutions rather than through markets. Economists, however, were devoting their efforts almost exclusively to understanding and explaining the market sector. My own modest first entry into the subject matter, in 1949, was little more than a call for those economists who examined taxes and spending to pay some attention to empirical reality, and thus to politics.
[...]
Here it is necessary to appreciate the prevailing mindset of social scientists and philosophers at the midpoint of the 20th century when public choice arose. The socialist ideology was pervasive, and was supported by the allegedly neutral research programme called 'theoretical welfare economics', which concentrated on identifying the failures of observed markets to meet idealised standards. In sum, this branch of inquiry offered theories of market failure. But failure in comparison with what? The implicit presumption was always that politicised corrections for market failures would work perfectly. In other words, market failures were set against an idealised politics.

Public choice then came along and provided analyses of the behavior of persons acting politically, whether voters, politicians or bureaucrats. These analyses exposed the essentially false comparisons that were then informing so much of both scientific and public opinion. In a very real sense, public choice became a set of theories of governmental failures, as an offset to the theories of market failures that had previously emerged from theoretical welfare economics. Or, as I put it in the title of a lecture in Vienna in 1978, public choice may be summarised by the three-word description, 'politics without romance'.

The consequences of joining the club

I was just discussing Japan's transformation from isolated island empire to modern naval empire (going into WWII) with my brother. In The consequences of joining the club, Jonathan Mirsky reviews Ian Buruma's Inventing Japan: From Empire to Economic Miracle, 1853-1964:

It is the considerable achievement of Ian Buruma's book that he eloquently describes Japan's progression from a seemingly closed country, forced open in 1853 by an American flotilla of "black ships" that sailed into Tokyo harbour, to 1964 when, as Buruma puts it, "Japan rejoined the world" by putting on the Olympics and showing that it was peaceful and democratic.
[...]
From the 17th century Japan was ruled by a samurai government in Edo, now Tokyo, led by the Shogun in the name of a figurehead emperor in Kyoto. These samurai, however, were not mere muscle-men and Japan was not wholly "closed". As Buruma says, they "knew more about the West than most other Asians", including detailed maps of the US, Western science, economies, and military affairs. All this was based on "Dutch learning", extracted from the tiny group of traders from Holland, the only foreigners permitted to live in Japan.

In the mid-19th century, an increasingly wealthy merchant class and some go-ahead samurai, aware that the West was dismembering China and that the shogunate was rotting away, concluded that it was the discipline of Christianity that made the West strong; they resolved that they too must devise a religion that would cement national unity. They reinvented the notion of a divine emperor — an ancient belief related to a nature cult with numerous gods — and cobbled this to Western ideas of nationalism, a modern army, colonialism, and Germanic state worship. Buruma states that emperor worship "was as phony as the Gothic inventions in Wilhelminian Germany", which the new nationalists admired. These modernisers "managed to pick some of the worst, most bellicose aspects of the Western world for emulation in Japan". This dangerously mobilising ideology, Buruma shows throughout his compact, learned book, was to be the model for the next century. In 1868, the samurai oligarchs who overthrew the no longer fearsome shogunate and established the Meiji emperor in Edo, now named Tokyo, were "steeped in the samurai ethos of loyalty, obedience, and military discipline". They were determined to make Japan rich, powerful, and resistant to democratic values for which they — and their Western admirers — insisted Japanese were not suited.

Armed with this set of beliefs, the new Japan defeated China in 1895 and Russia in 1905, and set out on the road to a disastrous world war in the early Thirties. "Together with millions of lives buried under the wreckage of war, a particular idea of Japan, both modern and archaic, Western and nativist, destructive of others and of the Japanese themselves, lay buried, too, one hoped forever." As Buruma shows, these ideas may have been buried but they stir still.

Toddlers Have Bad Eating Habits

Hey, who are we to tell toddlers what to eat? Toddlers Have Bad Eating Habits:

A new study of more than 3,000 youngsters found significant numbers of infants and toddlers are downing french fries, pizza, candy and soda.
[...]
Up to a third of the children under 2 consumed no fruits or vegetables, according to the survey. And for those who did have a vegetable, french fries were the most common selection for children 15 months and older.

Nine percent of children 9 months to 11 months old ate fries at least once per day. For those 19 months to 2 years old, more than 20 percent had fries daily.

Hot dogs, sausage and bacon also were daily staples for many children — 7 percent in the 9-to-11 month group, and 25 percent in the older range.

More than 60 percent of 12-month-olds had dessert or candy at least once per day, and 16 percent ate a salty snack. Those numbers rose to 70 percent and 27 percent by age 19 months.

Thirty to 40 percent of the children 15 months and up had a sugary fruit drink each day, and about 10 percent had soda.

I don't think I even need to comment on this part:

Shortcomings were more pronounced for families receiving financial assistance through the federal Women, Infants and Children program, the study found. More than 40 percent of WIC toddlers did not eat any fruit on the survey day, and those children also drank more sweetened drinks.

You Press the Button, We Do the Rest

You Press the Button, We Do the Rest tells the story of George Eastman and the original Kodak camera:

At 21 he had a job at the Rochester Savings Bank that paid him $1,000 a year, a middle-class income. In 1877 he was prosperous enough to plan a trip to Santo Domingo, and he bought a camera to take along, paying $49.58, according to his meticulously kept personal accounts. He got more than just a camera. Indeed, he also got, according to a letter he wrote in 1891, “a tripod, plus plates, paper, boxes for storing negatives, and a tent that he could set up as a darkroom, also the furnishings of a small chemistry laboratory — nitrate of silver, acetate soda, chlorides of gold, sodium, and iron, collodion, varnish, alcohol....” To learn how to use all this paraphernalia, he spent five dollars taking lessons.

As chance would have it, just as Eastman was learning the wet collodion process, photography was taking one of its great technological leaps. Dry plates, in which the light-sensitive chemicals are suspended in a thin coating of gelatin, could be stored until needed and stored after exposure until processed. Most of the stuff Eastman had had to buy with his camera would no longer be necessary.

He read about the new process in an article in the March 1878 edition of the British Journal of Photography, to which he had subscribed just the previous month. It was almost a eureka moment for the young man. He at once began tinkering with dry-plate emulsions for his own use, and he quickly realized that while wet plates could only be assembled as needed, dry plates could be manufactured. He decided to do exactly that.
[...]
George Eastman, who was still working full-time for the Rochester Savings Bank, soon developed an emulsion formula that he thought superior to any then available and created a machine for coating glass plates with it. He began manufacturing dry plates in a loft over a music store and made about $4,000 selling them in 1879 and 1880. The next year he quit his job and went to work full-time running the Eastman Dry Plate Company.

Glass, heavy and delicate, had numerous drawbacks as a substrate for light-sensitive chemicals. Plus, a fresh plate had to go into the camera for each exposure, requiring elaborate mechanisms to avoid exposing it to light during the loading and removal. Research was under way in many places to find a replacement for glass, centering on the use of nitrocellulose, or film, which was not only much lighter than glass but could be rolled around a spool, allowing multiple exposures before reloading.

Eastman and his coworkers realized that the keys to success in the photographic materials business would be film, the equipment needed to manufacture it, and the roll holder around which it would be wound. Eastman bent all his company’s efforts to developing the best in each category, patenting everything in sight as he did so.

He was soon a major player in the aborning business of photographic materials. But that was nevertheless a very small market. The average person still regarded photography as a miracle, and many of the professionals clung to the old glass plates. So Eastman decided to create a whole new market. “When we started out with our scheme of film photography, we expected that everybody who used glass plates would take up film,” he wrote much later. “But we found that the number which did so was relatively small. In order to make a large business we would have to reach the general public and create a new class of patron.”

In 1887 Eastman developed a new camera that he hoped would find a mass market. At a mere 6³/₄ by 3³/₄ by 3³/₄ inches, it was a small fraction of the size of the camera he had bought 10 years earlier, and it cost half as much. He named it the Kodak because he liked the letter K, wanted a name that both began and ended with it, and wanted a word that was unique and easily remembered.

Unlike that first camera of his, the Kodak came loaded with a roll of film that could take 100 photographs. Then the owner simply sent the camera and film back to Eastman, who returned it with the finished prints and a new roll of film in the camera. George Eastman had invented the photo-finishing business.

One more piece of the puzzle was needed to make photography a mass-market business. Eastman had to convince the public that it could handle what had always been a very complicated technology. He turned the trick with what is universally regarded as one of the greatest slogans in advertising history: “You press the button, we do the rest.” The new Kodak was a sensation, and George Eastman became fabulously rich.

Researchers Find Possible New Antibiotic

Researchers Find Possible New Antibiotic:

U.S. researchers said on Thursday they had developed a new class of antibiotic that could potentially be developed into a new drug to fight increasingly drug-resistant bacteria.

The compounds, known by the experimental name CBR703, act in a unique way to keep bacteria from reproducing, according to the team at the University of Wisconsin, Ohio State University and privately held Cumbre Inc. of Dallas, Texas.

Writing in the journal Science, they said the compounds inhibit RNA polymerase, the key enzyme used by cells to help genes express — or to turn their genetic code into a protein that does something.

Now all we need is a drug company to pump billions of dollars into its development — even though the FDA will probably restrict its use to those cases where other drugs didn't work.

Chiang Kai-Shek's Widow Dies at 106

Madame Chiang Kai-shek died yesterday — in New York. At age 106. There's a lot I didn't know about her. From Chiang Kai-Shek's Widow Dies at 106:

Madame Chiang Kai-shek, once the most powerful woman in China, has died in her sleep aged 106 in her home in New York, finally bringing down the curtain on one of the most turbulent chapters of Chinese history.
[...]
A devout Christian educated at the elite Wellesley College in Massachusetts, she was born Soong May-ling in southern China and married Chiang Kai-shek in 1927, as he was crushing warlord armies to unify China under Nationalist rule.

She became her husband's spokeswoman and China's voice to the outside world, charming the American public with her impeccable English, spoken with a southern U.S. accent, elegant silk dresses and extravagant jewelry.

During World War II, Madame Chiang brought the U.S. congress to its feet with a passionate appeal for anti-Japanese aid. Her political adeptness as a roving ambassador for the war-ravaged country led the foreign press to dub her "the brains of China."

She helped to establish the Nationalist air force and reached the pinnacle of her power in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when she influenced policy and strategy as Nationalist forces battled Japanese occupation troops.
[...]
Those who have met her say Madame Chiang's charisma was matched only by her toughness. At a White House dinner with President Franklin Roosevelt she was asked about a troublesome U.S. union leader and how her government would deal with him.

The diminutive Madame Chiang silently drew a delicate finger across her throat.

She stole the limelight from her husband at the World War II Cairo conference attended by Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, intervening frequently with: "If you allow me, I shall put before you the generalissimo's true thoughts."

Icelandic skipper kills shark with bare hands

Icelandic skipper kills shark with bare hands:

An Icelandic fishing captain, known as "the Iceman" for his tough character, grabbed a 300 kg shark with his bare hands as it swam in shallow water towards his crew, a witness said today.

The skipper of the trawler "Erik the Red" was on a beach in Kuummiit, east Greenland, watching his crew processing a catch when he saw the shark swimming towards the fish blood and guts — and his men.

Captain Sigurdur Petursson, known to locals as "the Iceman", ran into the shallow water and grabbed the shark by its tail. He dragged it off to dry land and killed it with his knife.

"He caught it just with his hands. There was a lot of blood in the sea and the shark came in and he thought it was dangerous," Frede Kilime, a hunter and fisherman who watched from the beach, told Reuters by phone from Greenland.

Icelandic author and journalist Reynir Traustason, who knows the trawler captain, said the act was typical of the man.

"He's called 'the Iceman' because he isn't scared of anything," he said. "I know the people in that part of the world. They are really tough."

'Designer Steroid' Rocking Sports World

It appears that athletes have been using a new steroid — or steroid-like substance — that disintegrates during the standard testing process. From 'Designer Steroid' Rocking Sports World:

Already, Europe's fastest man — 100-meter champion Dwain Chambers of Britain — has admitted taking tetrahydrogestrinone, or THG. Other athletes — including sluggers Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi and boxer Shane Mosley — have been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury investigating the nutritional supplement company at the center of the unfolding case.
[...]
THG's chemical components are similar to those of most banned steroids, but with an insidious twist: THG disintegrates during the standard testing process, foiling even the skilled doping detectives who hunt for steroids in urine samples, said Dr. Don Catlin of the University of California, Los Angeles Olympic Analytical Laboratory.

Jihad Slavery

Jihad Slavery describes an episode from the modern slave trade in Sudan:

That day, the Catholic boy nicknamed Piol, for rain, lost his childhood and world to the murahaliin. After torching the nearby villages and slaying their inhabitants, 20 light-skinned Juur horsemen charged into Nyamlell. They severed the heads of all Dinka men with single sword strokes, left them rolling in the blood-soaked market dust and stole off Piol’s older friends Abuk, Kwol and Nyabol in different directions. A rifleman permanently silenced a crying girl with a bullet to her head. A swordsman more “mercifully” sliced off her sister’s leg at the thigh like the branch of a small tree. Francis tried to flee. Terror squelched his cries. He was halted at gunpoint, grabbed and slung astride a small saddle, crafted specifically to carry abducted children, and ridden far north.

This is not a new phenomenon of course.

Islam captured and enslaved probably millions of children -- under the Seljuks and Ottomans, over 500 years, in Greece, Serbia, North Africa, India and over 1,400 years of Islamic history wherever Islam reigned. This would explain the surreal quality reverberating through this moving Drina passage:

It was already the sixth year since the last collection of this tribute of blood, and so this time the choice had been easy and rich; The necessary number of healthy, bright and good looking lads between ten and fifteen years old had been found without difficulty, even though many parents had hidden their children in the forest, taught them how to appear half-witted, clothed them in rags and let them get filthy, to avoid the aga’s choice. Some went so far as to maim their own children, cutting off one of their fingers with an ax….A little way behind the last horses in that strange convoy straggled, disheveled and exhausted, many parents and relatives of those children who were being carried away forever to a foreign world, where they would be circumcised, become Turkish, and forgetting their faith, their country and their origin, would pass their lives in the ranks of the janissaries or in some other, higher, service of the Empire. They were for the most part women, mothers, grandmothers and sisters of the stolen children. When they came too close, the aga’s horsemen would drive them away with whips, urging their horses at them with loud cries to Allah….. The mothers were especially persistent and hard to restrain. Some would rush forward not looking where they were going with bare breasts and disheveled hair, forgetting everything about them, wailing and lamenting as at a burial, while others almost out of their minds moaned as if their wounds were being torn by birth pangs, and blinded with tears, ran right onto the horsemen’s whips and replied to every blow with the fruitless question: “Where are you taking him? Why are you taking him from me?”

Where many went, their mothers would not like to have known: Throughout Islamic history, boys’ darkest use was as eunuchs. Islamic trade in castrated male slaves persisted until Europe pressured the Ottomans to stop in the 19th century. But from the 8th century onward, writes historian Jan Hagendorn, supplies came from “foreigners,” stolen and forced under the knife at long distances from their final markets — to limit transportation costs to the 10% or so who survived.

“Exports” came primarily from central and eastern European forest areas the Muslims called “Bilad as-Saqaaliba,” (or “slave country,”); central Asian steppes called “Bilad al-Attak” (or “Turks’ country,”); and eventually, most prominently, savannahs and wooded fringes south of the Sahara, called country of the blacks or “Bilad as-Sudan.”

Columbine Killers Documented Training on Tape

FOXNews has video footage of the two Columbine killers and a couple friends — including a girl — "plinking" various targets in the woods with a number of different firearms. In all honesty, it looks like a group of teenagers joking around, trying to look like Hollywood action heroes: firing from the hip, holding the pistol sideways (like a gangsta), firing a sawed-off shotgun one-handed, cocking that same shotgun Linda Hamilton-style (with one hand, holding it vertically, jerking it up and back down again), etc. It doesn't seem sinister at all — until you realize they went on a homicidal rampage later. Here's how Columbine Killers Documented Training on Tape describes it though:

In a snowy, wooded area in Colorado, the two teenage Columbine High School shooters laugh as they fire round after round at bowling pins and trees and wonder aloud what it would be like if real people were their targets.

The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code

In The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code, Joel Spolsky clarifies his ninth step — Do you use the best tools money can buy? — with a colorful anecdote:

At my last job, the system administrator kept sending me automated spam complaining that I was using more than ... get this ... 220 megabytes of hard drive space on the server. I pointed out that given the price of hard drives these days, the cost of this space was significantly less than the cost of the toilet paper I used. Spending even 10 minutes cleaning up my directory would be a fabulous waste of productivity.

User Interface Design for Programmers - Chapter 9

Joel Spolsky wrote a book called User Interface Design for Programmers (back in 2000), and he put some of it up on the web. Chapter 9 includes an amusing anecdote about how software gets used in the real world by real users:

In the days of Excel 1.0 through 4.0, most people at Microsoft thought that the most common user activity was doing financial what-if scenarios, where you do things like change the inflation rate and see how this affects your profitability.

When we were designing Excel 5.0, the first major release to use serious activity-based planning, we only had to watch about five customers using the product before we realized that an enormous number of people just use Excel to keep lists. They are not entering any formulas or doing any calculation at all! We hadn't even considered this before.

I've also read that the most popular database software in the world is Excel — even though, of course, it isn't even a database management system.

Quislibet: A Musical Interlude

Winds of Change pointed me to an excellent piece of translation work. It shouldn't take long to recognize the original work that Quislibet: A Musical Interlude has translated into Latin:

magnae clunes mihi placent, nec possum de hac re mentiri.
(Large buttocks are pleasing to me, nor am I able to lie concerning this matter.)
quis enim, consortes mei, non fateatur,
(For who, colleagues, would not admit,)
cum puella incedit minore medio corpore
(Whenever a girl comes by with a rather small middle part of the body)
sub quo manifestus globus, inflammare animos
(Beneath which is an obvious spherical mass, that it inflames the spirits)
virtute praestare ut velitis, notantes bracas eius
(So that you want to be conspicuous for manly virtue, noticing her breeches)
clunibus profunde fartas(*1) esse
(Have been deeply stuffed with buttock?)
a! captus sum, nec desinere intueri possum.
(Alas! I am captured, nor am I able to desist from gazing.)
o dominola mea, volo tecum congredi
(My dear lady, I want to come together with you)
pingereque picturam tui.
(And make a picture of you.)
familiares mei me monebant
(My companions were trying to warn me)
sed clunes istae libidinem in me concitant.
(But those buttocks of yours arouse lust in me.)

By all means, read the whole translation.

Libertarian Paternalism Is Not An Oxymoron

In Libertarian Paternalism Is Not An Oxymoron, Cass R. Sunstein and Richard H. Thaler argue that paternalistic policies don't have to involve coercion; simply changing the default rules, framing effects, and starting points can change behavior without twisting any arms:

The idea of libertarian paternalism might seem to be an oxymoron, but it is both possible and legitimate for private and public institutions to affect behavior while also respecting freedom of choice. Often people's preferences are ill-formed, and their choices will inevitably be influenced by default rules, framing effects, and starting points. In these circumstances, a form of paternalism cannot be avoided. Equipped with an understanding of behavioral findings of bounded rationality and bounded self-control, libertarian paternalists should attempt to steer people's choices in welfare-promoting directions without eliminating freedom of choice. It is also possible to show how a libertarian paternalist might select among the possible options and to assess how much choice to offer. Examples are given from many areas, including savings behavior, labor law, and consumer protection.

As an example, they ask us to consider two studies of savings behavior:

1. Hoping to increase savings by workers, several employers have adopted a simple strategy. Instead of asking workers to elect to participate in a 401(k) plan, workers will be assumed to want to participate in such a plan, and hence they will be automatically enrolled unless they specifically choose otherwise. This simple change in the default rule — from nonenrollment to enrollment — has produced dramatic increases in enrollment.


2. Rather than changing the default rule, some employers have provided their employees with a novel option: Allocate a portion of their future wage increases to savings. Employees who choose this plan are free to opt out at any time. A large number of employees have agreed to try the plan, and only a few have opted out. The result has been to produce significant increases in savings rates.

We are losing the peace... in Europe

We've been hearing a lot about nation-building in Iraq versus nation-building in Germany and Japan after World War II. In We are losing the peace... in Europe, Den Beste points us to some old Life magazine articles from just after the end of WWII:

Oh, dear; it seems as if we've won the war but are losing the peace... in Europe, in 1946. Jessica's Well makes a magnificent discovery: an issue of Life Magazine published in January of 1946 which contains articles about how badly things are going in Europe in the aftermath of the war. This was about seven months after V-E day, and about five months after V-J day and the end of the war. That's just about where we are now relative to the end of major combat operations in Iraq, and the article sounds uncannily like much of the negative reporting we're seeing now from Iraq. One could take that article and replace 'European' with 'Iraqi' and 'Nazi' with 'Baathist' and 'Hitler' with 'Saddam' and it would sound like it had come out of the NYTimes in the last week

Definitely read the original Life articles.

Manufacturers Supersizing Stretchers

This isn't a humor piece. Manufacturers Supersizing Stretchers:

The sharply rising number of obese Americans is leading medical-equipment manufacturers and ambulance crews to supersize their stretchers.

Manufacturers are adding thicker aluminum frames, bulkier connectors and extra spine supports to create stretchers with a capacity of 650 pounds, instead of the standard 350 to 500. Ambulance crews are switching to the heavy-duty models to avoid injuries to rescue workers and patients alike.

This passage gets a bit Onion-esque:

Josh Weiss, a spokesman for Southwest Ambulance, which serves the Phoenix and Tucson, Ariz., areas, said the company's paramedics used to employ a tarp to carry patients too big for a standard stretcher.

"You'd have to have five to 10 different firefighters lift it up. It was unsafe for our units. There would be many physical problems for our crews," he said. "Back injuries would often occur."

Southwest, which operates 225 ambulances and answers more than 200,000 calls a year, recently replaced its stretchers with those that can handle up to 650 pounds. It has also created a special unit with wider ambulances that have special hydraulic lifts and shock absorbers to carry the obese.

Attack of the Dean-Leaners

In Attack of the Dean-Leaners, Julian Sanchez questions libertarians' allegiance to the Republican party:

I don't even really care whether George W. Bush is, in his heart of hearts, a convinced Rothbardian while Howard Dean sleeps with the Communist Manifesto under his pillow. Because libertarians shouldn't be distracted by what policies the president, deep down, really wants. They should care about what he can get.

As Cato Institute economist William Niskanen observes, government tends to grow more slowly during periods when the executive and legislative branches are controlled by different parties. The mono-party regime of George W. Bush, who delivered a touching encomium to Milton Friedman mere weeks before signing new steel tariffs and a bloated farm bill into law, has increased domestic spending faster than conservative bete noire Bill Clinton. Bush has even beaten the "big government" Clinton's record when it comes to the growth of the regulatory state.

At present, the alliance (such as it is) between libertarians and the GOP seems to consist of the following compromise: we hold our noses and vote for Republican presidential candidates in close elections, while they agree to pay lip service to our cherished ideals of limited government. This seems like a fair enough trade on its face, but as "no new taxes" taught us, the lips of Republican elected officials are typically disconnected from their arms when it comes time to sign legislation. Perhaps it's time for libertarians to stop getting starry-eyed over the candidates who write us the prettiest love poems and begin comparing policy outcomes.

When we look at those outcomes, we find that, as Harvard's Jeffrey Frankel wrote in late 2002, there is a dramatic disconnect between rhetoric and reality: "The pattern is so well established that the generalisation can no longer be denied: The Republicans have become the party of fiscal irresponsibility, trade restriction, big government and bad microeconomics. Surprisingly, Democrat presidents have, relatively speaking, become the proponents of fiscal responsibility, free trade, competitive markets and neoclassical microeconomics."

Thomas Sowell: Silly letters

Evidently Thomas Sowell, black conservative, gets a lot of silly letters. From Thomas Sowell: Silly letters:

One of the silly things that gets said repeatedly is that I should not be against affirmative action because I have myself benefitted from it.

Think about it: I am 73 years old. There was no affirmative action when I went to college — or to graduate school, for that matter. There wasn't even a Civil Rights Act of 1964 when I began my academic career in 1962.

Moreover, there is nothing that I have accomplished in my education or my career that wasn't accomplished by other blacks before me — and long before affirmative action. Getting a degree from Harvard? The first black man graduated from Harvard in 1870.

Becoming a black economist? There was a black professor of economics at the University of Chicago when I first arrived there as a graduate student.

Writing a newspaper column? George Schuyler wrote newspaper columns, magazine articles, and books before I was born.

A recent silly e-mail declared that I wouldn't even be able to vote in this year's California election if there hadn't been a Voting Rights Act of 1965. I have been voting ever since I was 21 years old — in 1951.

Nocebos

Nocebos describes a sort of dark placebo effect:

The nocebo effect arises when you expect a poor health outcome, and then get one. For obvious reasons, nocebo effects are harder to test scientifically, because researchers do not wish to create them on purpose.

Robert Ehrlich, in his Eight Preposterous Propositions, reports a few experiments. A group of hospital patients were given sugar water, and were told it would induce vomiting. Eighty percent of the patients vomited as a result.

Eighty percent of the patients vomited as a result. Crazy.

Many Chinese and Japanese people believe that the number four is unlucky. Scientists studied a sample of 200,000 such people, living in America. On the fourth day of the month, the death rate from heart attacks was thirteen percent higher.. In California, where Asian population concentrations might reinforce superstitious beliefs, the death rate on the fourth was twenty-seven percent higher. I wonder how many of the 'heat deaths' in Europe were accelerated, simply because some people thought they were supposed to be dying.

Sports Officials Warn of Skin Infection

An ordinary skin wound can turn into a life-threatening blood or bone infection. Ick. From Sports Officials Warn of Skin Infection:

Health and sports officials are warning schools and sports teams about a hard-to-treat skin infection once common to hospitals and prisons that's now plaguing athletes on the playing field.
[...]
Though usually mild, methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) can progress to a life-threatening blood or bone infection. Several athletes who got the infection have been hospitalized.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the infection, which can look like an ordinary skin wound or a boil, is often not diagnosed or ends up being treated with antibiotics that can't cure it. Symptoms include fever, pus, swelling or pain.

That Damn Bird

Sunday, on my way back from Charleston, I started reading Octopus and the Orangutan: More True Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence, and Ingenuity, by Eugene Linden, author of The Parrot's Lament. Interestingly, parrots display many of the same intelligence traits as primates — despite the fact that they're not very closely related at all. That Damn Bird is chock full of interesting tidbits:

In the 1970s, Greenfield looked at young children and found that at the time they start serially and hierarchically stacking toys like cups and rings in perfect order, they also start combining their labels in somewhat regular syntactic patterns; that is, they begin to produce phrases like 'Want cookie,' or 'Want more milk.'
[...]
At this time, she also was looking at data from chimpanzees that were using sign language and computers to communicate with humans, and found that, lo and behold, just when the chimps started to stack their cups and rings hierarchically, they also started putting together their symbols to form phrases like "Want more banana."
[...]
One of my students was cleaning up the laboratory and we recycle whatever we can, so she was collecting all the empty bottles, throwing them in a bin, and separating out all the caps and putting them on the counter where Griffin [a grey parrot] was sitting. She calls me over and says, "You told me that parrots are destructive foragers and that they don't really put things together, so come here and take a look." And there was Griffin, taking smaller caps and putting them into bigger caps, and picking up the pairs and throwing them off the side of the counter. This incident occurred at about the same time that he was saying things like "want walnut," and "green grape," and other combinations of that nature.

The same region of the brain that handles physical combinations seems to handle linguistic combinations. In primates, that's Broca's area, a region with many mirror neurons:

Mirror neurons are those bits of the brain that respond to an action the same way whether you see the action being performed or if you do the action yourself. This response occurs for both gestural actions (those done physically, with one's hands), and those done orally (with one's mouth). And many of these neurons are in Broca's area. Thus data exist that can be interpreted to support the gestural origin of language; that is, that a small change in one part of the brain could have led to the change from learning communicative gesture to learning speech through an imitative program, and that the same area could indeed initially be used for both simple gestural and linguistic combinations.

Incidentally, higher primates can imitate well, but monkeys can't. Monkey see; monkey no do.

This bit of the researcher's bio caught my interest:

My interest in parrots developed in a somewhat unusual way. My doctorate is actually in theoretical chemistry from Harvard, but I was not a very happy chemist. I was good at it, but not very satisfied. While working on my doctorate, I saw several NOVA programs — that was the first year of NOVA — programs on the signing chimps, on singing whales, on communicative studies with dolphins, and the critical one, "Why do Birds Sing?" Researchers presented data on the complex communication of songbirds, and how it was somewhat learned.

And there was a striking interview with Peter Marler, who, as a botanist/chemist graduate student, noticed the different chaffinch dialects in the various areas in which he was collecting biological samples, and who described how he switched from chemistry to birdsong. It was an epiphany for me: First, the realization that one could switch from chemistry to studying birds; second, that nobody was studying birds the same way that primates were being studied. I had had parakeets as a child, and my pets always talked. So, here was a creature that could actually talk to you, and that seemed rather intelligent, and no one was trying to teach it to communicate with humans using meaningful speech. That's when I decided to pursue this topic.

By the way, I did finish the doctorate. I spent 40 hours a week finishing the doctorate, and another 40 hours a week reading in the libraries at Harvard and sitting in on courses, training myself in biology, in child language, in psychology, a little bit of anthropology — all the topics one would need to pursue studies in animal-human communication.

These ideas sound just like something I wanted to devise for infants:

One of the things we were trying to do when I was at the Media Lab was to devise different types of computer-based enrichment programs for these birds. We created something called "InterPet Explorer," which was a modified Web browser for the bird. We hadn't developed it fully, but the bird had four choices of input. It could see video, listen to music, see pictures, or play a game that we were designing. Within each of those categories were four choices. Under the music selection, for example, the bird could initially choose from clips of rock, country, classical or jazz. Alex would play with this system for about an hour in the morning before we came into the lab.

At first he was interacting with it a lot, and then seemed to lose interest; the students were concerned that the system was a failure. I asked them, "Well, how often are you changing content?" The students looked at me as though I was insane and replied, "What do you mean?" And I said, "How often do you want to hear Vivaldi's Cello Concerto?" They then reorganized the system to use four different channels of Internet radio so that Alex had something different whenever he clicked a choice, and Alex's interest shot back up.

Ben Resner and Bruce Blumberg created "Rover@Home," in which you could play with your dog over the Internet while you were at work.

Smith & Wesson Sets Sights on Clothes, Home Decor

On Sunday, in the Charleston airport, I spotted a "Smith & Wesson" decal on a police officer's bicycle. I wasn't sure if it was a joke or if Smith & Wesson started making bikes. They started making bikes — and much, much more. From Smith & Wesson Sets Sights on Clothes, Home Decor:

Smith & Wesson Holding Corp., parent of the legendary 151-year-old handgun maker, is branching out into home decor, clothing and jewelry with a new catalog, just in time for Christmas.

The Scottsdale, Arizona-based company hopes the catalog, called Crossings by Smith & Wesson, will expand the gun maker's consumer base and product offerings. The company already sells hunting gear such as binoculars and scopes, and has licensing deals for products ranging from bicycles to golf clubs.

The Smith & Wesson website doesn't seem to have any "lifestyle" merchandise beyond the clothing section.

Escaped Murder Suspect Surrenders in Pennsylvania

Daring but stupid. Escaped Murder Suspect Surrenders in Pennsylvania:

An accused murderer who escaped from prison by rappelling seven floors down the side of a jail house on a rope made of knotted bedsheets surrendered to authorities late Monday, police said.

Hugo Selenski, 30, who has been charged with murdering two of five people whose bodies were found buried in his back yard, had eluded a three-day police manhunt after he shimmied down the bedsheet rope from a window in the Luzerne County Correctional Facility on Friday, authorities said.

His former cell mate, Scott Bolton, tried to escape with Selenski but fell and was injured. Selenski climbed to freedom over the razor-wire of a perimeter fence on a prison mattress.

Selenski surrendered to authorities at his home near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, about 120 miles north of Philadelphia. He was returned to custody under a surrender agreement brokered by his attorney, police said.

"The police will never think to look for me at home!"

Study: 1 in 50 Americans Morbidly Obese

Disturbing. 1 in 50 Americans Morbidly Obese:

The number of extremely obese American adults — those who are at least 100 pounds overweight — has quadrupled since the 1980s to about 4 million. That works out to about 1 in every 50 adults.

The accompanying graphic from the CDC shows obesity more than doubling since 1986 and severe obesity almost quadrupling.

New Scientific Journal Challenges Establishment

Dr. Miguel Nicolelis's cyber-monkeys will appear in the new Public Library of Science Biology, a free, on-line scientific journal, described in New Scientific Journal Challenges Establishment:

A new scientific journal that challenges the expensive heavyweights that have dominated the world of research hits the Internet on Monday.

The journal, called the Public Library of Science Biology, is backed by leading scientists such as Dr. Harold Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health and now chief executive officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

They want to speed up the pace at which research is published, and also make it accessible to even the poorest of graduate students.

It will be available on the Internet at http://www.plosbiology.org. The non-profit group that backs PLoS is based in San Francisco and will launch a second journal, PLoS Medicine, next year.

The scientific journals that now control the world of scholarly publishing can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year. They usually require a lengthy 'peer review' process in which experts raise questions about studies and suggest changes to written reports.

I have to wonder about getting rid of that pesky peer-review process...

I found this amusing:

Authors of articles in PLoS pay $1,500 to cover the costs of carrying out peer review, editing, and managing production.

"Science thrives on the free flow of information," said Dr. Patrick O. Brown of Stanford University in California, a co-founder of the new journal.

Vanity-press science? You too can support the free flow of information — for just $1,500!

Monkey Think, Monkey Do Study May Help Paralyzed

We have entered a new era of Cyborg Monkeys. Monkey Think, Monkey Do Study May Help Paralyzed:

Three years ago, Nicolelis and colleagues at Duke University in North Carolina reported that they had allowed a monkey to move a robotic arm using only her thoughts and implanted electrodes. But the monkey continued to move her arm.

In the latest experiment, they said two monkeys figured out what was happening and played a computer game using thoughts alone.
[...]
Nicolelis and colleagues first implanted microelectrodes — each smaller than the diameter of a human hair — into the brains of two female rhesus macaque monkeys named Aurora and Ivy.

One got 96 electrodes in her frontal and parietal lobes — known to be the source of commands for muscular movement. The second monkey got 320 implants.

The electrodes transmit faint signals to a computer system the researchers have developed to recognize patterns of signals that represent particular movements by an animal's arm. These signals are translated and in turn control a robotic arm.

At first the animals were taught to use a joystick to control the cursor of a video game — which Nicolelis said they enjoyed playing. The researchers recorded and analyzed the electrical activity of the neurons near the implanted electrodes.

As the game became more complex, the monkeys learned how to control the cursor.

The scientists, of course, must maintain the facade that this is all about helping paralyzed humans — until their Robo-Monkeys conquer the world.

Low-Carb Diets Are Working

Inconceivable! At least for the Nutrition Establishment. From Low-Carb Diets Are Working:

Over the past year, several small studies have shown, to many experts' surprise, that the Atkins approach actually does work better, at least in the short run. Dieters lose more than those on a standard American Heart Association plan without driving up their cholesterol levels, as many feared would happen.

Skeptics contend, however, that these dieters simply must be eating less.
[...]
In the study, 21 overweight volunteers were divided into three categories: Two groups were randomly assigned to either lowfat or low-carb diets with 1,500 calories for women and 1,800 for men; a third group was also low-carb but got an extra 300 calories a day.

The study was unique because all the food was prepared at an upscale Italian restaurant in Cambridge, Mass., so researchers knew exactly what they ate. Most earlier studies simply sent people home with diet plans to follow as best they could.
[...]
Everyone's food looked similar but was cooked to different recipes. The low-carb meals were 5 percent carbohydrate, 15 percent protein and 65 percent fat. The rest got 55 percent carbohydrate, 15 percent protein and 30 percent fat.

In the end, everyone lost weight. Those on the lower-cal, low-carb regimen took off 23 pounds, while people who got the same calories on the lowfat approach lost 17 pounds. The big surprise, though, was that volunteers getting the extra 300 calories a day of low-carb food lost 20 pounds.

More Brazilians Have Phones Than Safe Sewage?

A telling statistic from More Brazilians Have Phones Than Safe Sewage?:

The Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics said in a report that the number of households with telephones hit 61.6 percent last year, while just 46.4 percent were connected to an appropriate sewage network.

The percentage of households with fixed or mobile telephone lines tripled in the last 10 years, highlighting the country's recent telecommunications boom following the privatization of the Telebras company five years ago, the study found.

I guess it's not as easy to privatize the sewage network...

The richest 10 percent of Brazil's workers accounted for 46.1 percent of total income while the poorest 10 percent had just 1 percent.

Brazil is considered to have the world's worst income distribution.

Well, at least the have-nots consider it to have the world's worst income distribution...

Actually, a quick web search found a very similar statistic for Australia (for wealth, not income). According to the World Socialist Web Site:

In July 1993, after 11 years of a Labor Party government led by Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, the wealthiest 50 percent of households owned about 93 percent of the total wealth. No less than 43.5 percent was held by the richest 10 percent and 12.2 percent by the top 1 percent.

By mid-1998, after three further years of Labor rule and two years of Liberal-National Party government under John Howard, the richest 10 percent had increased their total share of wealth by 4.6 percentage points to 48.2 percent.

Similarly, British Columbia demonstrates a significant wealth gap between rich and poor:

The BC data show that the wealthiest 10 percent of family units held 54.6 percent of the province's personal wealth at last count (compared to 53 percent nationally), and the top 50 percent controlled an almost unbelievable 95.7 percent of the personal wealth (compared to 94.4 percent nationally). That left only 4.3 percent of the wealth for the bottom 50 percent of British Columbian family units.

Of course, Pareto realized in 1906 that 80 percent of Italian land was owned by 20 percent of the population — hence Pareto's 80-20 rule (which applies all over the place, not just in land distribution).

Getting a Bead on 'Buzz'

Viriginia Postrel's latest NY Times article, Getting a Bead on 'Buzz', explains what researchers found when they studied what people were saying about new TV shows on various Usenet groups (on-line discussion groups):

First, they discovered that online conversations did help predict which shows would succeed — a somewhat surprising result in itself. Usenet participants are not necessarily typical TV viewers.

The Usenet discussions may have directly influenced new shows' reputations or, perhaps more likely, the online comments may have reflected offline conversations. (Negative comments were relatively rare; three-quarters of the postings in a subsample were either positive or mixed.) In either case, this result suggests that marketers can tap Internet forums to see how their products might fare.

Second, the study found that how much buzz a show gets does not predict much about how it will do. Who's talking matters more than how much they talk.

This result runs contrary to common marketing practice. Most buzz trackers, from marketing scholars to public relations firms to the Yahoo Buzz Index, simply measure how much people talk about something. More word of mouth, they assume, will spread the news faster than less.

That sounds logical. But it turns out that volume by itself did not predict future sales — or, in this case, future ratings — all that well. Volume mostly reflected past ratings.

Another factor did, however, predict whether a show's audience would build over time: dispersion, or "entropy." This technical measure essentially picks up how widespread the discussion is. Are comments concentrated in a few specialized groups, or does the show interest people in many different groups? Word of mouth spreads more quickly when it begins in different places or among people with different interests.

Help! Help! I'm being repressed!

I overheard a co-worker proclaiming "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" earlier today — in tell-tale English-peasant voice — and I couldn't stop myself from looking up Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The aforementioned passage:

ARTHUR: I am your king!
WOMAN: Well, I didn't vote for you.
ARTHUR: You don't vote for kings.
WOMAN: Well, 'ow did you become king then?
ARTHUR: The Lady of the Lake, [angels sing] her arm clad in the
purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of
the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to
carry Excalibur. [singing stops] That is why I am your king!
DENNIS: Listen -- strange women lying in ponds distributing
swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive
power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some
farcical aquatic ceremony.
ARTHUR: Be quiet!
DENNIS: Well you can't expect to wield supreme executive power
just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
ARTHUR: Shut up!
DENNIS: I mean, if I went around sayin' I was an empereror just
because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me they'd
put me away!
ARTHUR: Shut up! Will you shut up!
DENNIS: Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system.
ARTHUR: Shut up!
DENNIS: Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system!
HELP! HELP! I'm being repressed!
ARTHUR: Bloody peasant!
DENNIS: Oh, what a give away. Did you here that, did you here
that, eh? That's what I'm on about -- did you see him repressing
me, you saw it didn't you?

Animal Experts Say Tiger Meant to Kill Roy

I'm not the only one questioning the "helpful tiger" hypothesis. From Animal Experts Say Tiger Meant to Kill Roy:

"The cat wasn't trying to protect him," said Jonathan Kraft, who runs the Arizona-based nonprofit group Keepers of the Wild. "That was a typical killing bite."

"I admire the guys, I just think they are sending a wrong message," Kraft said. "The message needs to be: These are wild animals."
[...]
Louis Dorfman, a Dallas animal behaviorist, said Fischbacher's account of an accidental mauling was 'a beautiful story but it just doesn't wash.'

'Stress led to the bite,' said Dorfman, who works with the International Exotic Feline Sanctuary in Texas. 'It was an outlet for his irritation. Roy got lucky.'

NASA Model Plane Flies on Laser Power

A laser-powered airplane? NASA Model Plane Flies on Laser Power:

NASA has built and flown a remote-controlled plane powered from the ground by the beam of an invisible laser.

In indoor flights conducted last month at a NASA center in Alabama, the plane flew lap after lap, gliding to a landing once the laser beam was turned off, the agency said Thursday.

While in flight, the laser tracked the 11-ounce, five-foot wingspan plane, striking the photovoltaic cells that powered the tiny motor that turned its lone propeller.
[...]
The remote-controlled planes don't have to carry their own fuel or batteries, providing more room for scientific instruments or communications equipment.

Scientists envision flying the planes on long-duration flights to monitor the environment, including erupting volcanos. The planes also could be used for surveillance or to provide communications links.

I'm thinking a laser-powered dirigible makes more sense...

Jumpers

Jumpers addresses a creepy subject:

Every two weeks, on average, someone jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. It is the world's leading suicide location. In the eighties, workers at a local lumberyard formed the Golden Gate Leapers Association — a sports pool in which bets were placed on which day of the week someone would jump. At least twelve hundred people have been seen jumping or have been found in the water since the bridge opened, in 1937, including Roy Raymond, the founder of Victoria's Secret, in 1993, and Duane Garrett, a Democratic fund-raiser and a friend of Al Gore's, in 1995. The actual toll is probably considerably higher, swelled by legions of the stealthy, who sneak onto the bridge after the walkway closes at sundown and are carried to sea with the neap tide. Many jumpers wrap suicide notes in plastic and tuck them into their pockets. "Survival of the fittest. Adios — unfit," one seventy-year-old man said in his valedictory; another wrote, "Absolutely no reason except I have a toothache."

People who choose to jump off the bridge often fantasize about what it will be like. The real deal isn't exactly...fantastic:

But the impact is not clean: the coroner's usual verdict, suicide caused by "multiple blunt-force injuries," euphemizes the devastation. Many people don't look down first, and so those who jump from the north end of the bridge hit the land instead of the water they saw farther out. Jumpers who hit the water do so at about seventy-five miles an hour and with a force of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. Eighty-five per cent of them suffer broken ribs, which rip inward and tear through the spleen, the lungs, and the heart. Vertebrae snap, and the liver often ruptures. "It's as if someone took an eggbeater to the organs of the body and ground everything up," Ron Wilton, a Coast Guard officer, once observed.

Those who survive the impact usually die soon afterward. If they go straight in, they plunge so deeply into the water — which reaches a depth of three hundred and fifty feet — that they drown. (The rare survivors always hit feet first, and at a slight angle.) A number of bodies become trapped in the eddies stirred by the bridge's massive stone piers, and sometimes wash up as far away as the Farallon Islands, about thirty miles off. These corpses suffer from "severe marine depredation" — shark attacks and, particularly, the attentions of crabs, which feed on the eyeballs first, then the loose flesh of the cheeks. Already this year, two bodies have vanished entirely.

Man Kills Friend, Drinks Blood

Creepy. Man Kills Friend, Drinks Blood:

A Scottish man obsessed with vampires has been jailed for life after killing his best friend, drinking his blood and eating part of his skull, British media reported Thursday.

Allan Menzies, 22, told the High Court in Edinburgh, Scotland, he had made a pact with a female vampire from 2002 horror film 'Queen of the Damned' and stabbed 21-year-old Thomas McKendrick to death in the hope of becoming immortal.

Menzies said the film's lead character Akasha, played by the late U.S. singer Aaliyah, had come to his home and told him to carry out the murder.

Menzies was found guilty of murder after his offer to plead guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility was rejected.

The judge Wednesday sentenced Menzies to serve at least 18 years without parole, calling him an 'evil, violent and highly dangerous man who is not fit to be at liberty.'

Obviously we need to ban Ann Rice novels and the movies they inspire.

Images Show a Snub Really is Like Kick in the Gut

Getting snubbed really does feel like a kick to the gut. From Images Show a Snub Really is Like Kick in the Gut:

Brain imaging studies show that a social snub affects the brain precisely the way visceral pain does.
[...]
Lieberman, graduate student Naomi Eisenberger and colleagues set up a brain imaging test of 13 volunteers to find out how social distress affects the brain.

They used functional magnetic imaging -- a type of scan that allows the brain's activity to be viewed "live." The 13 volunteers were given a task that they did not know related to an experiment in social snubbing.

Writing in the journal Science, Lieberman and Eisenberger said the brains of the volunteers lit up when they were rejected in virtually the same way as a person experiencing physical pain.

"It would be odd if social pain looked like the exact same thing as someone-breaking-your-arm pain," Lieberman said in a telephone interview. "What it does look like is visceral pain."

In other words — like being punched in the stomach.

The area affected is the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain known to be involved in the emotional response to pain.

None of that is too terribly surprising, but I love the actual experiment:

In the experiment, the volunteers were asked to play a computer game. They believed they were playing two other people, but in fact played a set computer program.

"It looked like a ball being thrown around between the three people," Lieberman said.

Eventually, the game excludes the player. "For the next 45 throws they don't get thrown the ball," Lieberman said.

"It is just heartbreaking to watch. They keep indicating that they are ready to be thrown to. This really affects the person afterwards. They report feeling social distress."

The functional magnetic imaging verifies the physical basis of this feeling.

How The Lancet made medical history

Groundbreaking old papers from The Lancet are now available on-line. How The Lancet made medical history:

In the unbroken 180 years since it was first published by doctor, coroner and MP Thomas Wakley, it has become one of the most important — and most reliable sources of medical and social history around.

Now that history has been compiled in electronic form for the first time. Every edition, and every article in The Lancet has been digitised and made available to researchers.

A few key papers get links within the BBC article; other "top articles" are available at ScienceDirect.com.

Siegfried Says Tiger Attack Was an Accident

Siegrfried Fischbacher, of Siegfried and Roy, has an interesting perspective on Roy's near-fatal mauling. From Siegfried Says Tiger Attack Was an Accident:

The tiger was trying to help Roy after the magician took a fall, Fischbacher said in an interview on CNN's "Larry King Live" program.

"I just saw that the tiger grabbed him on the sleeve ... and Roy said, 'Let go,' and the tiger let go and Roy bent back and he slipped," Fischbacher said.

He said he realized there could be trouble as the tiger moved toward Horn.

"The tiger (grabbed) Roy in the neck and he pulled him back on stage," Fischbacher said.

He said that the animal sensed heightened danger when he and an animal trainer ran to Horn's aid. "So he took Roy and put him backstage behind the curtain... to protect him and then he let Roy go," Fischbacher said.

"I say it was an accident," he said, adding that if the tiger wanted to kill Horn it would have done so very quickly.

Remind me not to get a helpful tiger sidekick.

Sonar May Cause Bends Disease in Dolphins

Even whales and dolphins can get the bends (decompression sickness) — if high-power sonar disorients them and they rise to the surface too quickly. From Sonar May Cause Bends Disease in Dolphins:

Sonar may cause a type of decompression sickness in whales and dolphins similar to the 'bends' in humans, scientists said on Wednesday.

Although it seems an unlikely illness for the aquatic creatures, researchers from the Zoological Society of London and the University of Las Palmas in the Canary Islands have found bubbles in the tissue of stranded whales and dolphins similar to the effects of decompression sickness (DCS) in humans.
[...]
Scientists suspect sonar signals disorientate the animals forcing them to come up to the surface too quickly, which could cause the creation of damaging nitrogen bubbles in their tissue.
[...]
Autopsies by Spanish scientists on 10 of 14 beaked whales stranded in the Canary Islands after a multinational military exercise last year also showed evidence of DCS in the animals.

The creatures started to appear on the beaches about four hours after the start of the mid-frequency sonar activity.

"Beaked whales have the highest levels of nitrogen in their tissues normally because they dive so deep and that would be consistent with why it is the beaked whales that are most severely affected by sonar exercises," Jepson said.

U.S. Senator's Wife Abducted, Robbed, Released

So, is this going to end up on K Street on Sunday? From U.S. Senator's Wife Abducted, Robbed, Released:

The wife of U.S. Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire was abducted from their home in a tony Washington, D.C.-area suburb on Tuesday, made to withdraw money from a bank and released unharmed, police said.

Infantry Missile Weapons in the Renaissance

We now take guns for granted and assume that they were always superior to bows or crossbows. Early guns were, frankly, pretty awful weapons. From Infantry Missile Weapons in the Renaissance:

By 1500 infantrymen had three different missile weapons available to them. There was the arquebus, a relatively light firearm manageable by one man, as well as the very common crossbow, and the longbow, which was mostly limited to use by the English. Technically the arquebus was inferior to both the other two weapons in range, accuracy, and rate of fire, while the longbow was generally superior to the crossbow.

Characteristics of Infantry Missile Weapons, c. 1500
Weapon	Weight	Proj Wt	"MV"	KE	RPM	Range
	(kg)	(grms)	(m/sec)	(jls)		(m)
Arquebus	6.5	45	30	20	1	25
Crossbow	3.5	125	45	127	1-2	50
Longbow	3.0	75	45	76	2-6	50

Relatively speaking the arquebus was cheaper than either the longbow, which had to be meticulously handcrafted from yew, and the crossbow, which required equally meticulous workmanship and rather expensive steel as well. The arquebus could be mass-produced by a foundry in fairly cheap cast iron. In addition, while the range, accuracy, and effectiveness of an arquebus round were inferior to those of the other weapons, an arquebusier could carry more ammunition than either of his competitors. Arquebus ammo weighed less than arrows or crossbow bolts, even after adding in the powder charge.

Rounds in Three Kilograms of Ammunition
Weapon	Round
Arquebus	50
Crossbow	24
Longbow	40

As a result of this difference in ammunition weight, an arquebusier could sustain fire longer than either a crossbowman or a longbowman. And ultimately it was sustained fire that won battles, more than accurate fire.

In addition, despite the inferior technical performance of the arquebus ball, it was superior to arrows as an armor smasher. Rounded, soft lead bullets were less likely to be deflected by the polished curved surface of armor than were arrows.

The arquebus had one more very important advantage over its rivals. It was perhaps the critical advantage in determining the rather rapid conversion of armies from archers to arquebusiers. A man required considerably less skill to become an arquebusier than either a crossbowman or a longbowman. A few weeks training was all that was necessary to turn out a fairly capable arquebusier. In contrast, it took years to properly train a the bowman, who had to develop considerable musculature before being able to use his weapon to its fullest capacity. This was particularly true of longbowmen, of whom there was a saying that in order to a good one you had to start with his grandfather.

One other advantage of the arquebus is that it's much, much more frightening than a crossbow or longbow.

Edit: It didn't hit me at first, but the muzzle velocity the article lists for an arquebus, 30 m/s, is about 60 mph. I suspect I could throw a bullet that fast. From what I've read, an arquebus has a muzzle velocity closer to 1000 fps (like a modern pistol), or 300 m/s. Fixing that typo reveals that an arquebus round has a kinetic energy of over 2000 joules, not 20.

Remains Of Xena-Like Woman Found

Intriguing. Remains Of Xena-Like Woman Found:

The remains of a six-foot tall woman, buried with a shield and knife, were recently discovered in an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in Lincolnshire, England.

The body and artifacts, which date to A.D. 500-600, suggest that more women than previously believed may have fought alongside men during the turbulent years following England's Roman period.

Brahe's bladder & Mozart's murder

Tycho Brahe was quite a character. From Brahe's bladder & Mozart's murder:

Tycho Brahe died in 1601 at 54. He had come to Prague from his native Denmark to serve as Imperial Mathematician under Rudolph II. Legend holds that during a banquet held by Rudolph or another worthy, Brahe had to pee so bad his bladder burst. The etiquette of the day required that he not rise before his host. Probably he did postpone urinating despite extreme discomfort. His bladder did not, however, pop on the spot as some Prague guidebooks suggest.

Arriving home he was unable to urinate (or sleep) for five days. Thereafter he fell into anguished delirium for another six days before he died. He seems to have been oddly certain of his coming death. Repeatedly he said that he wanted not to have lived in vain.

Modern forensics has established — by testing remnants of his beard exhumed from his cathedral tomb — that he probably died of mercury poisoning. Foul play cannot be ruled out but the favored theory is that he took medicine of high mercury content — common in those days — to treat a longstanding urinary problem.

Indeed, so exact were the tests that it was determined from the relative position of the mercury within a single hair's length that Brahe ingested a significant quantity of the stuff about 20 hours before his death.

Brahe was an intriguing character: he had a silver prosthetic nose, for one thing, having lost the original in a duel. He is said to have reveled fiercely all his life and he kept a dwarf as a jester and an elk as a pet. A burst bladder fits nicely into this general description and seems a fitting end.

However Brahe would surely prefer — witness his dying wish — to be remembered for his scientific achievements. In addition to creating the most sophisticated astronomical instruments to date, and tutoring the next generation of astronomers including Johannes Kepler, Brahe introduced a meticulousness of observation without which further advances in astronomy would have been impossible.

Impact of Gun Control Laws Questioned

I can't say I'm surprised. Impact of Gun Control Laws Questioned:

A sweeping federal review of the nation's gun control laws — including mandatory waiting periods and bans on certain weapons — found no proof such measures reduce firearm violence.

I'm also not surprised by the conclusion drawn:

The CDC said the report suggests more study is needed, not that gun laws don't work.

Richard Sandrak Fan Club

I followed a link to the Richard Sandrak fan club, and this is the first post I looked at:

Here are Richard's stats from the RSFC Chatroom in March 2003.
Born: April 15, 1992 - Wt 6 lbs-Ht 19 in
3 yrs: Wt 25 lbs-Ht 2ft 5 in.
7yrs: Wt 60 lbs-Ht 4 ft.
10.5 yrs: Wt 80 lbs-Ht 5 ft.

Flexed Relaxed
Neck: 13 inches 12 inches
Chest: 33 inches 29.5 inches
Biceps: 11 inches 9.5 inches
Waist: 23 inches
Thighs: 18 inches 15.5 inches
Calves: 12 inches
Forearms: 10.5 inches

Lifts: We know Richard curls his bodyweight for reps, squats with 1.5X bodyweight for 1/2 hr, and benches 240 lbs. for several reps! (impressive to say the least).

However, Moderator Paul Thompson posted this message on 6/14/02:

His biceps are 12" His chest is 35" His waist is 21" His legs are 17.5" He is 4'8" and weighs 75 lbs. He has 4% body fat.

And this post from 8/7/02: One-rep max lifts are not part of his training, but Richard benches over 200 lbs., does 100 behind-the-neck chins slowly with perfect form, squats with the 100 lb. vest for 45 min., and I believe he can curl almost twice his body weight (as of several months ago).

I'd probably go with the larger numbers from the above, since months have gone by.

Those numbers are crazy! He benches 240 pounds? He does 100 behind-the-neck chins? He squats for 45 minutes straight? With a 100-pound vest on?

Edit: Evidently the Richard Sandrak Fan Club no longer exists — or no longer exists as the original Yahoo! Group.

The Interactive Way To Go

I just recently got a Go set, and I found an excellent on-line resource for learning the game, The Interactive Way To Go. I particularly enjoyed the brief introduction to the rules:

Before you begin, please remember just 3 rules below.

• Two players (black and white) take turns, placing one stone on the board at a time.
• A stone must be placed on the intersection of the vertical and horizontal lines.
• Once a stone is placed, you can't move it, although under some conditions it may be removed.

They are just too easy, aren't they? Now, you understand half the rules of Go!

I also learned (or was reminded of) a key piece of trivia:

Stones that can be removed with one more move are said to be in "Atari".

Atari isn't just a classic videogame company; it's the Go version of check.

Richard Sandrak - The Little Hercules

I don't know why I was recently reminded of Richard Sandrak - The Little Hercules, but there's something fascinating about an eight-year-old with six-pack abs:

At 8 years old Richard Sandrak is the strongest human in the world, pound for pound. It was apparent early on in his life that Richard was gifted. Father Pavel, a World Martial Arts Champion and mother Lena, an Aerobics competitor, quickly realized that they had a young prodigy on their hands. When they introduced him to light training and martial arts at the age of two his development took off in a big way and continued to improve until they sought to find an appropriate outlet for him to focus his voluminous energy and talents. If at any time they believed all of it to be a passing phase, time and Richards persistence worked to discard the notion.

Eventually Pavel and Lena contacted Frank and Sherry Goggin-Giardina to take their son under experienced wings and work with him to hone his flourishing abilities. Sherry — a Fitness America Champion and fitness cover model having graced the covers of Physical, Ironman, Muscle and Fitness, Oxygen and Musclemag and Frank — a former competitive bodybuilder with a degree in Nutrition and a major in Physical Education, were stunned when they first laid eyes on their young charge. They could not believe the level of conditioning he possessed. With 1.5% body fat and good shape on his chest, triceps, and legs — they had never seen anything like him.

The photos on his own site have a certain freak-show allure.

Gene Mutation May Explain SARS Epidemic

Gene Mutation May Explain SARS Epidemic:

A genetic susceptibility may explain why SARS raged last year in Southeast Asia and nowhere else in the world outside of Toronto, Taiwanese researchers reported this week.

They found a certain variant in an immune system gene called human leukocyte antigen, or HLA, made patients in Taiwan much more likely to develop life-threatening symptoms of SARS.

The gene variant is common in people of southern Chinese descent, the team at Mackay Memorial Hospital in Taipei reported.

Skimping on the Peace

Skimping on the Peace discusses the $87 billion price tag on rebuilding Iraq:

Congressmen needn't worry that Iraq is on the way to becoming a long-run welfare case. The country's Governing Council has passed an economic plan providing for open trade, and a pro-growth, flat-rate 15% tax on corporate and individual income.

It's enough to make you wish the US would invade...the US.

Baghdad City Cop

Mr. Kerik, a former chief of the New York City Police Department, has just returned from a four-month stint in Baghdad as senior policy adviser to Ambassador Bremer. In Baghdad City Cop, he describes a few videos he had to watch:

In my four months in Iraq, spent living with, working with, and learning from Iraqi police, I've seen things that would sicken the worst of minds. In our hunt for the Fedayeen Saddam, Saddam Hussein's trained assassins, I watched video after video of interrogations of Iraqis whose lives ended with the detonation of a grenade that was tied to the neck or stuffed in the shirt pocket of the victim. I watched the living bodies disintegrate at the pull of the pin. And if that's not enough, there's a tape of Saddam sitting and watching one of his military generals being eaten alive by Dobermans because the general's loyalty was in question.

Johann Hari - The Iraqi Homecoming

Johann Hari - The Iraqi Homecoming describes how exiled Iraqis, in the Iraqi Prospect Organisation (IPO), have tried to spread liberal thinking in their former country:

The IPO people went to Iraq with clear goals. First, they wanted to establish debating societies and newsletters in the Baghdad universities. 'These are going to be the seeds of democracy,' Yasser explains. 'Once you learn to argue against people instead of killing them as Saddam did, you're on your way. We explained to the university students that they could have different newspapers - and even have different opinions in the same newspapers - and it seemed totally surreal to them. They just couldn't understand it. But when they realised that it really was possible and nobody was going to punish them, they were so excited that they were just obsessed.
[...]
Third, Sama explains: "We took a group of university students to a workshop arranged by a Washington-based organisation about how to set up NGOs [non-governmental organisations]. To you or me it would seem incredibly basic, but to them it was a revelation. They hadn't understood that you could set up your own organisation, without any orders or permission from anyone. They thought societies and charities were something the state did to you, something secretive and conspiratorial, not something people create for themselves. It was beautiful to see this happening."

It sounds like the Kurds have flourished without Saddam:

Yet hope was restored by their trip to Northern Iraq. "It was like going into a different world," Sama says, her eyes welling up. "It's beautiful. It looks like part of Europe. It's totally free and efficient and secure and democratic. It was so encouraging, because at the end of [the first] Gulf War it was just like the rest of Iraq. We could make progress like that in the next decade. We brought one of my cousins with us, and he cried and said: `Is this my country? Is this really part of Iraq?'"