Cautious drug approval

None of this is news to me, but I think Steven Den Beste's Cautious drug approval piece gives a decent summary of why prescription drugs seem so expensive:

After the Thalidomide catastrophe, the FDA became notoriously cautious about approving new drugs. Thalidomide wasn't approved in the US (it was still in process at the time) and Thalidomide caused no deformed babies in the US. This reinforced the bureaucratic culture of caution at the FDA.

But the FDA is also inherently cautious, simply because of the situation they're in. If they approve a drug which ends up being dangerous, they will get roasted for it. But if they refuse to approve a safe drug, or if the approval process is extremely slow, they don't get roasted for all the people who suffer and die who could have been helped if the drug had been approved sooner. It's inherent in their situation that they will err on the side of caution because it's much riskier for the FDA bureaucrats to be too eager to approve a drug than to be too cautious about doing so. Whether that's good or bad for the rest of us is less clear.

The approval process is so long and so involved and requires such a mountain of data to be collected, that it is massively expensive. The total cost for development and approval can exceed $100 million per drug. And a lot of money can be consumed during the testing and approval for drugs which are ultimately rejected.

Pharmaceutical companies have to recoup that cost, and the money can only come from sales of drugs after approval. That's why drugs which are still under patent are so expensive compared to generics after patent expiration. Generics are priced based on a markup over manufacturing and distribution costs, whereas drugs under patent are priced to amortize the cost of development and regulatory approval, as well as to amortize the money spent on other drugs which were rejected.

The amortization premium paid by Americans is all the greater because most other nations in the world "free ride" on American drug development.

Love in the Time of No Time

In The Economics of On-Line Dating, Tyler Cowen cites a New York Times Magazine article, Love in the Time of No Time, that "is not full of economic reasoning though the interesting and salacious content may keep you reading." It does mention one bit of economic data though:

In the first half of 2003, Americans spent $214.3 million on personals and dating sites — almost triple what they spent in all of 2001. Online dating is the most lucrative form of legal paid online content.

I knew I should've started an on-line dating site...

After working through eight or nine pages of salacious details I reached this bit that amused me:

Online dates that lead to love — and they are legion — are a little like Tolstoy's happy families: for all their quirky particularity, they end up sounding strangely alike. There's Kellie Smith, 33, from outside Boston, an occupational therapist who whimsically clicked ''Love on AOL'' during her lunch break and found herself on Match.com, where she dashed off e-mail messages to several men who interested her. Michael DuGally, 35, a partner in a Massachusetts furniture manufacturing company, was her first online date; they met for lunch and never really parted. Last summer, the couple asked Match.com for a logo banner so they could be photographed with it on their wedding day.

I enjoyed Cowen's analysis:

The bottom line, however, is simple. On-line dating seems to serve (at least) two major constituencies. First, many people use it to marry or otherwise find a monogamous relationship. Match.com claims to have lost 140,000 members, by enabling those people to find partners. Second, many people use internet dating to find casual sex or serial partners. The article quotes a "Greg," who enjoys a first date with quickie sex at the end, and then offers the following remark: "I liked her, but not enough to merit fireworks. Given the seemingly endless selectoin, I get to be a little less forgiving."

Since I suspect that on-line dating is more effective than not, people will increasingly choose one category or the other. Those people who are willing and able to marry, will find their partners and marry. After some period of time, the stock of marriageable people will be smaller. (Note: I believe that some decent chunk of the unmarried are simply emotionally incapable of marrying, for whatever reason.) The remaining unmarried will then find relatively higher returns from the serial dating and casual sex routes. So the distribution of the number of sexual partners will become more bimodal over time.

Furthermore, the last two years have been an especially good time to marry through on-line dating. The new technology is being applied to a large stock of unmarried people who could marry and be happy, but who otherwise could not find the right partner. Yes, an ongoing flow will replenish the stock but arguably the stock has been at a peak in recent times, given that on-line dating has just taken off. So if you want to marry, hurry up and get on-line. If you are just looking for casual sex, well, you have a greater luxury of waiting and in fact your options will likely improve with time.

Get Your Flu Shot!

Even after reading Get Your Flu Shot!, I doubt I will — proving its point:

We do not respond to risks rationally. We are scared of Ebola, pesticides, nuclear radiation and terrorists but the flu? Who cares about the flu? You should. In an average year, the flu kills almost as many people as die in auto accidents (36,000 for the flu, 42, 815 for highway accidents in 2002) and this year experts expect some 50-70 thousand flu deaths. True, those over 65 years of age and older are most at risk but thousands of younger people die from the flu every year. A flu shot reduces your chances of death by 50 percent. (Here is more flu info from the CDC.)

The Burden of Carrying a Lethal Weapon

I stumbled across this story, by a guy named Jess Lebow, about his trip to Thailand when he was 13, and what he bought with the money burning a hole in his pocket there (since the exchange rate was so favorable):

That's when I saw it: the samurai sword that I had always wanted. Actually, there were thousands of them. This merchant had two different sizes — long and short. The longer ones (which I now know were katana) were black and the shorter ones (wakizashi) were red. The blades were made of polished, sharpened metal, but the sheathes were made of wood. Colored straw had been wrapped around the handle and glued to various parts of the sheath to add a little ornamentation.

Not exactly quality construction.

Still, it didn't matter. I had to have one. So I began my haggling routine, purchased a black-sheathed katana with the last of my money, and returned to find my mother.

And she was livid.

How were we going to get a full-sized samurai sword (she used this term, too) through the airport and back home? They were going to stop us, she said, and maybe even put us in jail. Airport security wasn't exactly what it is today, but hijackings and bombings were prominent in the public eye.

Taking a martial weapon on a plane was frowned upon.

Still, I somehow convinced her that everything would be fine, but as a compromise I had to agree to surrender the sword if we were hassled. She was skeptical, but we were running behind, and she didn't want to argue. She shoved the tape recorder she'd bought as a gift for my brother into my open suitcase as I repacked.

To make matters worse, the sword in its sheath was too long to fit. I had to pull it out of its sheath to get it packed, but I did get it in. Pushing the underwear and sweatpants down as I closed the zipper, I heard a tremendous rip.

The tip had punched through the side of the suitcase.

Now my mother was even more pissed, and we were late for our flight. Nothing will push my mother over the edge faster than being late for an airplane. In a fit of what I can only call simple brilliant ingenuity, my mother came up with an engineering feat that rivals the likes of MacGyver or even the A-Team. Diving into a restaurant across the street, she came out with a wine bottle cork. Jamming it on the tip of my sword, she shoved the blade deep within the same suitcase and smashed it closed. No rip, no pop, no protruding weapon tip, and we were off.

So, of course, we got stopped at the airport. The gate agent X-rayed our bags and stopped us before we finished checking in. Back then they had to ask your permission to open your bags (ah, the good old days), and we told them they could.

They went right for the bag with the sword in it. A pair of armed guards appeared from out of nowhere, standing behind the gate agent who was searching the bag. They carried machine guns on straps over their shoulders. One actually held the handle of his gun -- ready to lift and shoot at hijackers or thirteen-year-old samurai wannabes -- with one hand as he casually ate an apple with the other.

My mother glared down at me, and I withered. Her words of warning rang through head. ". . . maybe even go to jail." Then a more sickening thought pushed that one aside.

These guys might take my sword.

Not that. Anything but that.

The gate agent began piling my stuff on the stand next to him. Out came my swimming suit, my running shoes, the miniature pirate ship, a pair of stop watches, and the samurai sword with its exposed blade and wine cork on the tip.

Time seemed to slow down for me then. The gate agent lifted the sword into the air -- a warrior about to strike me down. He was going to take it. I knew it. We were going to go to jail. And when we got out, I was going to be grounded for a least a month.

Probably more.

The gate agent plunged his hand deeper into the suitcase and pulled out the tape recorder. Plopping the naked blade down on top of my clothing he held out his other hand.

What's this?"

"A-a gift," my mother stammered. "A tape recorder."

"Make it play."

She took it and pressed the button, but nothing happened. It had worked when she bought it. I'd heard it myself. But now either the batteries were dead or the cheap-o cassette player was simply broken. Whatever the case, they confiscated the tape recorder, thinking it could be a bomb.

Then they let us go — after they neatly packed my sword back inside the suitcase.

I got on the plane with a smug look on my face. My mother was quite embarrassed that it had been her purchase and not mine that had gotten us stopped, and she was probably at least a little unnerved that the gate agent seemed to sense no danger from a 3-foot-long samurai sword.

I guess the cork put him at ease.

Deadly Ebola Virus Kills 18 in Northwest Congo

The black magic is working. Deadly Ebola Virus Kills 18 in Northwest Congo:

An outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus has killed 18 people in northwestern Congo Republic, where the disease killed 120 earlier this year, state television said.
[...]
Officials believe the latest outbreak, first reported earlier this month, started after a group of hunters ate a dead boar they found in the forest.

Scientists think the previous Ebola outbreak in the region, known as Cuvette-Ouest, was caused by the consumption of infected monkey meat. Bushmeat is a staple among forest communities and a delicacy in many cities.

Many locals, however, believe occult forces are behind the spread of the disease. They have recently blamed Red Cross workers for conjuring up the virus through black magic.

During the previous outbreak, villagers stoned and beat to death four teachers accused of casting a spell to cause the disease.

Root from Peru Holds Hope for Dieters, Diabetics

Peru is home to quite a few interesting crops. Root from Peru Holds Hope for Dieters, Diabetics:

Peru, the land that gave the world potatoes, is home to yacon, a tasty root that scientists say is good for the gut, potentially safeguards against cancer, helps absorption of calcium and vitamins and can lessen the blood sugar peaks from eating sweet food that are a problem for diabetics.
[...]
Yacon, which is native to an Andean region stretching from Venezuela to northern Argentina, has a crunchy texture like a water chestnut and is refreshingly sweet and juicy. Left in the sun, its sweetness intensifies, and it can be eaten as a fruit, consumed in drinks, syrups, cakes or pickles or in stir-fries.

Though packed with sugar, its principal appeal to the health conscious lies in the fact that the sugar in question is mainly oligofructose, which cannot be absorbed by the body.
[...]
In addition, oligofructose promotes beneficial bacteria in the colon.
[...]
Yacon — the root of a tall, leafy plant with tiny yellow sunflowers that Inca "chasquis," or messengers, pulled from the pathside to slake their thirst — is thought to have originated in a region stretching from central Peru to northern Bolivia.
[...]
It was in Japan, Hermann said, that yacon's oligofructose qualities were discovered. "The Japanese also found out that if the leaves are used in tea, it has the effect of avoiding the peaks that you have when eating sugary or starchy food, when your blood sugar level goes up violently," he said.

Perhaps I could sweeten my yerba mate tea with a bit of yacon.

Brazil Seeks to Show Coffee's Health Benefits

Brazil Seeks to Show Coffee's Health Benefits:

Brazil, the world's No. 1 coffee producer, hopes to convince people to drink up — and ease a global crisis caused by oversupply — by proving that coffee is good for you.

The country that offers school children "coffee breaks," plans to try to show that coffee can help reduce heart disease, countering the conventional wisdom that coffee causes health problems including anxiety and hypertension.

In other news, Columbia is studying the health benefits of cocaine. (OK, I made that one up.)

World's Only Known Albino Gorilla Dies

Albinism is such a simple change, but people go crazy over it. From World's Only Known Albino Gorilla Dies:

The world's only known albino gorilla, Copito de Nieve (Snowflake), died early Monday at the Barcelona zoo, leaving this city without a beloved mascot and the scientific world without one of its most unique creatures.

Now we just need a talking albino ape.

Stressful and Insecure Jobs Take a Toll on Health

This should surprise no one. Stressful and Insecure Jobs Take a Toll on Health:

Australian researchers found that managers and other professionals who were under a strong threat of being laid off were more than three times as likely to report depression, anxiety or being in poor health than people in more secure positions.

And people who said they worked in highly stressful jobs with little control over how and when they work were also more likely than others to have depression or anxiety.

Scan Painlessly Pinpoints Muscle Stiffness

I didn't know that we needed a way to scan for muscle stiffness — I can usually tell where I'm sore — but Scan Painlessly Pinpoints Muscle Stiffness reports on the new use for MRI machines:

An experimental technique that uses widely available imaging technology is a painless way to measure muscle stiffness, researchers report.
[...]
The technique, known as magnetic resonance elastography (MRE), involves the same scanner used to perform magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a technique that provides a good view of the internal structures of the body, particularly soft tissue, the brain, spinal cord and joints.
[...]
Within an MRI scanner, the skin is vibrated, which causes waves to penetrate tissue and to multiply in muscle. Doctors take an image of these waves and then measure them to evaluate muscle stiffness.

I foresee the following exchange with an orthopedist in the future:

"You see these black dots?"
"Yeah."
"That's where you're not stiff and sore."
"Hmm...looks about right."

Man Dies After Winning Vodka-Drinking Contest

The "winner" died after downing 1.5 liters of vodka — more than half a liter of pure alcohol (assuming the vodka was 80 proof). Man Dies After Winning Vodka-Drinking Contest:

A vodka-drinking competition in a southern Russian town ended in tragedy with the winner dead and several runners-up in intensive care.

'The competition lasted 30, perhaps 40 minutes and the winner downed three half-liter bottles. He was taken home by taxi but died within 20 minutes,' said Roman Popov, a prosecutor pursuing the case in the town of Volgodonsk.

'Five contestants ended up in intensive care. Those not in hospital turned up the next day, ostensibly for another drink.'

Popov said the director of the shop organizing this month's contest had been charged with manslaughter. He had offered 10 liters of vodka to the competitor drinking the most in the shortest time.

Russians drink the equivalent of 15 liters of pure alcohol per head annually, one of the highest rates in the world. Some experts estimate one in seven Russians is an alcoholic.

Face Transplants Possible But More Research Needed

You could replace "face transplants" with just about anything and this headline would be valid — Face Transplants Possible But More Research Needed:

Face transplants are technically possible and could arguably be less difficult than reattaching a severed finger, surgeons said on Wednesday, but they called for more research into the risks involved before they are attempted.

Truly a creepy image — face-transplant rejection:

The microsurgical skills needed for a face transplant are already well established, according to a report by the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

But too little is known about the psychological impact it would have on the recipient or the donor family, the ethical issues or the long-term risks of immunosuppressive drugs that would have to be taken for life to prevent the immune system from rejecting the new face.

This might surprise some people — and ruin a number of movie plots:

"We need to get across the complexities of this medical advance and dismiss the myths that have been reported — for example the first face transplant recipients will not necessarily look like the donor," he said.

Transplanting the skin and underlying soft tissue from one individual to the facial structure of another would give an appearance that would be different from the donor and the recipient, he added in a statement.

So much for Face Off...

Man Armed With Knife Kills Hungry Bear

Whoa. Man Armed With Knife Kills Hungry Bear:

Hirsch had only a 3 1/2-inch knife blade when he came across the bear in his backyard in Williams Lake, about 190 miles northeast of Vancouver.
[...]
As the bear began to circle him, Hirsch faced it like a wrestler in a ring.

"It was like a knife fight that you'd see in an old-time Western," he said. The bear swatted out at him, but each time it lunged, he managed to stab it.

"I couldn't tell you if the fight lasted three seconds or three minutes," Hirsch said.

Three stabs to the bear's chest and one to its neck finally did the bruin in.

It stood about 5 foot 7 inches to Hirsch's 5 feet 9 inches and weighed 200 pounds, according to conservation officers who inspected it.

"I can say it sure looked smaller the next morning than it did during the fight," said Hirsch.

The bear was in poor shape, suffering from a severed tongue and broken jaw, the conservation officer said. Its stomach was empty and the bear had little fat on it.

Hirsch, a retired electrical foreman at B.C. Hydro, suffered a scratch to the top of his head and scratches to his back — and a shredded T-shirt.

Fat Cells May Be the Obesity-Hypertension Link

Fat Cells May Be the Obesity-Hypertension Link reports on a recent PNAS paper:

Fat cells produce factors that directly stimulate the adrenal gland to release the hormone aldosterone, new findings show. Because aldosterone regulates blood pressure, these factors may at least partly explain the link between obesity and high blood pressure.
[...]
Other hormones produced by the cells also increased: cortisol was nearly tripled, and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) levels increased 1.5-fold.

Milestones

Milestones quotes an interesting passage from Inventing Japan. Compare post-war Japan to present-day Iraq:

Tokyo endured [the] winter [of 1945-1946] on the workings of an illegal economy. The black market encompassed thousands of sellers and millions of buyers dealing in every commodity of daily life. It was also a vast jungle of lawlessness that began with thefts and led to gang killings, turf wars, and casual murders, becoming at last a criminal demimonde of immense proportions. It embraced all classes and kinds of people. When the war ended, sake, bread, clothing, shoes, sugar and blankets had disappeared from military depots all over the country, pilfered wholesale by officers and enlisted men alike. Small thefts were the routine of daily existence. A bicycle snatched at Ueno's railway station turned up repainted and for sale two hours later at the station in Shimbashi. Koreans and Chinese, forced-labor immigrants during the war, prospered with goods smuggled from Hong Kong and Taiwan, and by the Occupation's ruling, they could not be arrested by Japanese police.

It was the beginning for many mobster organizations, some of whose descendants still operate today. In Tokyo there were eight major syndicates, each with its own piece of turf around the major train stations...They fought amongst themselves and against other gangs, the Japanese mobs battling constantly for territory against the Koreans and Chinese. Guns were plentiful, another result of looted army depots. Unable or unwilling to intervene, police let gangs have at one another, and the shootouts continued for several years into the Occupation. One day in April 1948, two gangs — one Japanese, one Korean — fought it out with pistols in the Hamamatsu district. The next day, about one hundred Japanese returned to the attack on the Koreans' black market there and killed or wounded more than 15 men.

Ancients Manipulated Corn Genes

According to Ancients Manipulated Corn Genes, the grass-like teosinte plant become the domesticated maize plant when early farmers bred for useful traits — useful to humans, at any rate:

The ancestral plant of corn, teosinte, was first domesticated some 6,000 to 9,000 years ago in the Balsas River Valley of southern Mexico, the researchers said in this week's issue of Science magazine. At first, teosinte was a grassy-like plant with many stems bearing small cobs with kernels sheathed in hard shells.

By cultivating plants with desirable characteristics, farmers caused teosinte to morph into an increasingly useful crop. The researchers said by 5,500 years ago the size of the kernels was larger. By 4,400 years ago, all of the gene variants found in modern corn were present in crops grown in Mexico.

The plant and its grain were so changed by the directed cultivation that it evolved into a form that could not grow in the wild and was dependent on farmers to survive from generation to generation, the study found.

The genes:

One gene changed the architecture of corn from a plant with many branches to one with a single stalk with a male tassel at the top and female cobs growing along the side.

Another genetic change softened the outer hull on the kernel. Before the change, the plant depended on animals to spread its seeds. After animals ate the corn, the tough outer shells would allow the kernels to pass unharmed through the gut.

With a softer hull, the kernels would not survive passage through the gut of an animal. As a result, the plant became dependent on farmers to spread its seeds.

Another genetic change caused the kernels to stick more tightly to the cob. And still another change modified the starch of the grain.

This final change, the authors wrote, made the corn more suitable for making tortillas, and, thus, may have been an early variant encouraged by the farmers.

Fiji Villagers Apologize for Cannibalism

Fiji Villagers Apologize for Cannibalism:

Villagers in a remote Fijian community staged an elaborate ceremony of apology Thursday for the relatives of a British missionary killed and eaten here 136 years ago.

The Rev. Thomas Baker and eight Fijian followers were killed and devoured by cannibals in 1867 in the village of Nabutautau, high in the hills of the South Pacific island of Viti Levu. Residents say their community has been cursed ever since.

In a mixture of ancient pagan and modern Christian rites, the villagers have staged a series of ceremonies hoping to erase the misfortunes they believe have kept them poor.

If you're staging ceremonies to lift the curse that has left you poor, I'm betting you'll stay poor for a long, long time.

It's the little details that make the story — like trying to eat his boots:

The rituals — which started about a month ago — culminated Thursday with the offering of cows, specially woven mats and 30 carved sperm-whale teeth known as tabua to 10 Australian descendants of Baker.

"This is our third apology but, unlike the first two, this one is being offered physically to the family of Mr. Baker," Ratu Filimoni Nawawabalavu, the village's chief, told The Associated Press.

Nawawabalavu is the great-grandson of the chief responsible for cooking the missionary in an earthen oven.

Past apologies have not helped. In 1993, villagers presented the Methodist Church of Fiji with Baker's boots — which cannibals tried unsuccessfully to cook and eat.

Why did they kill and eat the missionary?

There are differing accounts of Baker's demise. A villager said last month the incident started when the chief borrowed Baker's hat. Baker tried to take it back without knowing that touching a chief's head was taboo and punishable by death.

Others say the missionary lent the chief a comb, then touched his head as he tried to retrieve it from the chief's tight, curly hair.

Back to my original point:

Villagers believe that since 1867, either Baker's spirit or disapproving gods have made sure that modern developments like electricity, a school, piped water supply and other essentials enjoyed by most Fijian villagers have been kept from them.

California Bison Sent to New Dakota Home

About 100 bison are being moved from Catalina Island to South Dakota. From California Bison Sent to New Dakota Home:

About a third of the Southern California island's 300 bison were shipped off this week to South Dakota, where they will live on two Indian reservations.
[...]
A study released last year showed that bison severely damaged native plants by grazing, wallowing in dirt and rubbing themselves against trees to scratch or shed their thick coats. The animals also spread nonnative plants by carrying seeds in their hair.

The animals, however, are extremely popular with tourists, the lifeblood of the island economy.

How did they get on the island. Good question.

Bison have lived on Catalina Island since the 1920s, when 14 animals were brought in for a movie shoot.

The finished film, "The Vanishing American," had no footage of bison. Still, the wooly beasts became a mainstay on Santa Catalina a few years later, after chewing gum mogul William Wrigley Jr. acquired a majority interest in the company that owned the island.

Every Man a Demiurge

Every Man a Demiurge presents an amusing take on the Matrix trilogy:

If you want to understand the Matrix trilogy, think of it as a capsule history of baby-boom rock. The original Matrix is a three-chord riff of a movie: a simple, familiar idea — "What if reality is a great big fake?" — amplified and transformed into an irresistible hook. The Matrix Reloaded is a 1970s prog-rock concept album: sprawling, pretentious, and ultimately incoherent, but brimming with ideas and virtuoso displays. And The Matrix: Revolutions is an over-the-hill pop star recycling someone else's material — the sort of music you'd hear on a Michelob commercial, circa 1987.

Even if Revolutions weren't already slated to be the final installment, its chilly critical and commercial reception should guarantee we won't find ourselves awash in ads next year hyping The Matrix 4: This Time, It's Personal.

Airpower's Century

Airpower's Century presents an excellent interview with Walter Boyne about the history of airpower. Boyne points out that reconnaissance aircraft quickly proved their worth, and soon aircraft found a related role:

Well, the Germans had overextended themselves on two fronts, and they had to depend upon superior artillery on the Western Front to hold their line. Long-range artillery has to be precise to be effective; you have to hit what you're aiming at, and to do this, you have to know where your shots fall. It didn't take long for both sides to figure out that with an airplane you could bring your guns on target very quickly. So observation planes became critical, and that meant you needed fighter planes to shoot them down. Then you needed fighters to fight those fighters, so an entirely new generation of aircraft, the fighter airplane, grew out of it. They got all the glory, but they were an afterthought. They were necessary only because airborne observation had changed the nature of war.

Naturally, when we think of WWI, we think of WWI flying aces — but strategic bombing got its start in WWI:

The odd thing is that while the First World War saw almost every sort of airpower that would be used in the Second — even the cruise missile — the only things we remember are the dogfights and the aces. We think of strategic bombing — striking targets designed to destroy a whole nation's will to fight, as opposed to simply winning a battle — as a development of World War II. But it wasn't. The German bomber and Zeppelin raids on London during World War I were an immense campaign. It's been almost entirely forgotten, but it made a lasting impression on both belligerents. The Zeppelins dropped more than 200 tons of bombs and killed over 500 people, while the bombers killed another 800 and wounded over 2,000. The Germans thought that this was a very small return for a large investment, so German planners stayed away from strategic bombing when they prepared for the next war. But the British, who, after all, had had the bombs fall on them, thought the campaign was a success. They believed strategic bombing would be vastly more destructive in the next war, and as a result, the British — and we Americans — eventually developed devastating strategic bombing forces. Germany never did. Moreover, Britain had a pretty good air defense system in place in time for the 1940 Blitz.

German Zeppelins dropped more than 200 tons of bombs on London. Wow.

Americans and the British both had the wrong idea about fighter planes. They thought: We'll send fighters over to Germany, and the Germans will come up, and we'll shoot them down. But the Germans would just sit on the ground, because the Allied fighter planes weren't doing any harm. The only way you could get the Germans in the air was to attack a target sufficiently valuable that they had to come up and defend it. [...] Even those massive portions of the strategic bombing campaign against targets that didn't matter, or couldn't be destroyed — the cities, or the will of the Germans to fight — nonetheless forced the relocation of the Luftwaffe's fighters to Germany, away from the fronts, which allowed them to be destroyed, and hugely contributed to the Allied victories on the ground.

Allied strategic bombing pulled a lot of German resources away from both (ground) fronts.

Hitler would probably have been better advised to say, "We'll accept the damage. We won't make the choice for anti-aircraft guns instead of anti-tank guns, because the air campaign isn't gaining any territory and the tanks are."The thousands of gunners, the tens of thousands of shells they required, and the 88-millimeter guns taken away from the front: All these had an immense effect, and in the west, possibly a decisive one.

Read the whole article.

Vietnam Unveils Ancient Artifacts from Excavation

Vietnam Unveils Ancient Artifacts from Excavation:

Ancient terracotta dragons, phoenix statues and ceramic urns unearthed from a royal compound accidentally discovered where Vietnam's new parliament was being built were put on display for the first time on Tuesday.

I have to wonder what kind of mystical powers these ancient artifacts possess...

So how many artifacts are we talking about?

In its first international briefing at the site, the Ministry of Information and Culture displayed some of the estimated two million items that have been uncovered since excavation began in December 2002 in the capital Hanoi.

Two million artifacts? Well, they're not all cool artifacts:

Deep wells, ornate pavilions and bases for mighty pillars were found along with the more mundane rubbish dumps and tiled drains. Some gold jewelry, decorated swords and a cannon were also retrieved along with skeletal remains from a later period.

So why haven't we heard anything about this until now?

Access to the site has been strictly controlled, with foreign media not permitted to visit.

K-1 USA News - Sumo Star Akebono to Fight Bob Sapp

My sumo-savvy buddy, John, clued me in to this piece of K-1 USA News:

In a press conference at the Imperial Palace Hotel, K-1 announced today that Sumo star Akebono will fight Bob Sapp on New Year's Eve.

K-1 is Japan's premier kickboxing promotion, and Bob Sapp is their latest star. He's 6'7" and 374 lbs (with defined abs) — and Akebono dwarfs him.

Akebono was born Chad Rowan in Oahu, Hawaii. In 1993 he was given the fighting name Akebono when he became the first non-Japanese to achieve the ranking of Yokozuna (Grand Champion), Sumo's highest honor. In his nine years as a Yokozuna, Akebono amassed a sparkling record of 432 wins in 554 bouts.

Said Akebono at the press conference: "I would like to announce that I, Taro Akebono, applied for leave from the Japan Sumo Association on November 5th, and today this request has been granted. From now on, I will take up a new direction as a professional fighter in K-1. I would like to thank the Japan Sumo Association and Azuma-Seki Oyakata [Akebono's stable master] for supporting me, and also everyone in the K-1 organization."

Akebono's announcement garnered a phenomenal amount of interest. The press conference attracted a total of 300 media people, including Japanese national broadcasters NHK. In all a total of 23 TV cameras were focused on the 34 year-old Yokozuna, making this by far the biggest-ever K-1 press conference -- two TV stations went so far as to interrupt their regular programming to carry the announcement live!

Akebono said he learned about K-1 from fighters such as Francisco Filho and Ray Sefo, and wanted to compete in K-1 to show his three children (too young to have followed his Sumo career) that their father still has his fighting spirit.

Clone Wars

I hated both of the recent Star Wars movies — or, at least, I was sorely disappointed by them — but I'm enthralled by the new Clone Wars five-minute, animated shorts on Cartoon Network. (You can watch them on-line too.) I had a similar reaction to the toys; they were much, much cooler than the movies. (I didn't buy any of the toys, but seeing them at Target did get me excited to see the movies.)

The Marxist and the Methodist

In The Marxist and the Methodist, Murray Sayle reviews Jonathan Fenby's Chiang Kai-Shek and the China He Lost — and shares some amusing tidbits in the process:

Even in his glory days Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, durable president of the Republic of China, had his critics. American liberals derided him as "Cash-my-cheque" in acknowledgment of the monstrous corruption of his in-laws, although not of the abstemious Gimo, as his grandiose rank was usually abbreviated, himself. General Joseph "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, the American chief of staff forced on him by President Roosevelt, referred to him as "The Peanut" because of his short stature and shiny bald head, and described him to a journalist as "an ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, peasant son-of-a-bitch". No respecter of persons, Vinegar Joe in the privacy of his diary called Chiang's great rival Mouse Tongue (Patrick Hurley, boozy US ambassador to China, made it Moose Dung) and here lies the reason for the Gimo's relative eclipse. History worships winners, and the Gimo had the bad luck to come up against Mao Tse-tung (in the old spelling), military/political commander of genius and the cruellest ruler China has ever had, at least since Emperor Chin Shi-Huang-Ti built the Great Wall ("a human life for every stone"), ordered the burning of the books and gave the country its western name.

Here's an interesting cast of characters — and an interesting way of introducing them:

When China's Doctor Zhivago is filmed they will provide a rich cast of tragi-comedians. The Christian General, Feng Yuxiang, who kidnapped recruits from the countryside and baptised them with a fire hose. The Dog Meat General, Zhang Zongchang, named after his preferred summer dish, who was described as having "the physique of an elephant, the brain of a pig and the temperament of a tiger", a type not uncommon in military history. Zhang was reputed to have a penis as long as a pile of 86 silver dollars and to have given his concubines numbers as he could not remember their names. In Manchuria an illiterate bandit, Zhang Zuolin, promoted himself Marshal and ruled an area as large as France and Germany. When his son Zhang Xueliang took the family rank Zhang became the Old Marshal and his boy the Young Marshal. Others included the Philosopher General and the Model Governor. Flavourful character parts included Dr Sun's portly, cigar-smoking bodyguard, the London arms dealer Morris "Two-Gun" Cohen, Big-Eared Du, boss of the Shanghai underworld, the communist International agents Hendricus Sneevliet and Borodin, otherwise General Vasilii Konstantinovich Blyukher, symbols of Moscow's catastrophic meddling in Chiang's China.

More good "dirt":

But Fenby has dug up new dirt on the Gimo. He already had a wife, and knew Shanghai rather better than he let on. Earlier in the 1920s he had married Cheih-ju ("pure and unblemished") Chen, known as Jennie, a statuesque middle-class girl 19 years his junior he had courted strenuously since she was 13. A few weeks after the wedding Jennie was diagnosed as having gonorrhoea that her husband admitted having picked up in his days as a fashionable young man-about-Shanghai when he may, says Fenby, have joined Big-Eared Du's gang. The disease, Jennie recounted in a long-lost autobiography, left them both sterile. Certainly neither she nor Meiling had children; Chiang's only son, Chiang Ching-kuo, future president of the Republic of China on Taiwan, was born of an even earlier marriage arranged by the Chiang family. The Gimo dumped faithful Jennie and, despite his connections there gave Shanghai a wide berth and fixed his capital at Nanking, 200 miles up the Yangtze River from the raffish City by the Sea.

An amusing language bit:

Had Japan been able to add China's resources to the Axis I might well be writing this in another language, mit some difficulty.

(That reminds me of the Hollywood screenwriting abbreviation for silence: M.O.S. — mitout sound, a term used by a powerful German-speaking producer in the early days.)

And here's a factoid I already knew:

Gung Ho, "work together", was the slogan of a Chinese farmers' co-op picked up by US Marines.

Gung ho, in English, isn't so much about teamwork as about a can-do attitude. Merriam-Webster defines it as:

Main Entry: gung ho
Pronunciation: 'g&[ng]-'hO
Function: adjective
Etymology: Gung ho!, motto (interpreted as meaning "work together") adopted by certain U.S. marines, from Chinese (Beijing) gōnghé, short for Zhōngguó Gōngyè Hézuò Shè Chinese Industrial Cooperative Society
Date: 1942
: extremely or overly zealous or enthusiastic

Bigger Products Made for Bigger People

Bigger Products Made for Bigger People reports on some disturbing products customized for larger customers:

Goliath Casket of Lynn, Ind., every month ships four or five triplewide models, 44 inches wide compared to the standard 24. In July, Goliath started offering a 52-inch-wide model and has already sold three, company vice president Julane Davis said.

Bill Fabrey and Nancy Summer founded Amplestuff, of Bearsville, N.Y., when Summer, who weighs 450 pounds, told Fabrey that she couldn't find a sponge to reach certain parts of her body. Fabrey, an engineer, came up with Sponge on a Stick. The company has built an entire line of products with heavier people in mind, including seat belt extenders, higher-limit scales and extra-large towels.

Children Wait Patiently For Heavily Fortified Tree House To Be Attacked

It's funny because it's true. Children Wait Patiently For Heavily Fortified Tree House To Be Attacked:

For the third uneventful day in a row, members of the Poison Ninjas Club awaited the invasion of their tree house, sources in the backyard of 1740 Sumac Road reported Monday.

"We spent all day Saturday making dirt bombs and dragging buckets of pine cones up into the tree house," said 10-year-old club president Carrie Williams, her eyes trained on the southern border of the lawn. "When the enemy attacks, we'll be ready. Actually, we've been ready for, like, three whole days."

After standing guard throughout the weekend, Williams and her fellow Poison Ninjas left the tree unsupervised while they attended school on Monday. The Ninjas reconvened at the tree house after school and found their supplies undisturbed and no evidence of nefarious activity near the tree. Disappointed, they took up arms once again and began to stare out at the lawn in search of some sign of a threat.

Americans Demand Increased Governmental Protection From Selves

I love The Onion. Americans Demand Increased Governmental Protection From Selves:

Alarmed by the unhealthy choices they make every day, more and more Americans are calling on the government to enact legislation that will protect them from their own behavior.

"The government is finally starting to take some responsibility for the effect my behavior has on others," said New York City resident Alec Haverchuk, 44, who is prohibited by law from smoking in restaurants and bars. "But we have a long way to go. I can still light up on city streets and in the privacy of my own home. I mean, legislators acknowledge that my cigarette smoke could give others cancer, but don't they care about me, too?"

"It's not just about Americans eating too many fries or cracking their skulls open when they fall off their bicycles," said Los Angeles resident Rebecca Burnie, 26. "It's a financial issue, too. I spend all my money on trendy clothes and a nightlife that I can't afford. I'm $23,000 in debt, but the credit-card companies keep letting me spend. It's obscene that the government allows those companies to allow me to do this to myself. Why do I pay my taxes?"
[...]
"The fact is, personal responsibility doesn't work," Nathansen said. "Take a good look at the way others around you are living, and I'm sure you'll agree. It's time for the American people to demand that someone force them to do something about it."

The World of Tomorrow

Harry Knowles, on his Ain't It Cool News site, describes The World of Tomorrow as a must-see deco sci-fi masterpiece with giant robots. That caught my attention. One of his readers caught a few unfinished minutes of it in New York, and "apparently it was shot entirely against blue screen on digital video by a first time director." Interesting. Here are some more in-depth comments:

And, even in rough form, it looks fantastic.

Like "Down With Love" was a 60s-style movie shot like a 60s movie, World looks almost exactly like a 1930s sci-fi flick. The fact that the backgrounds and other elements look hand-drawn actually adds rather than detracts from the appeal. This could be the first example of a movie in which the stiff and artificial look that the blue screen creates actually improves the overall effect. It reminded me of an Alan Moore comic come to life (Giant robots walking down the streets of Art Deco Manhattan? Awesome)

Since I'd seen and heard nothing about it, I looked it up on Yahoo! Movies and found out some technical details:

The Los Angeles Times has revealed that Kerry Cornan is a CalArts graduate, and his software is a CGI program that allows him to shoot his entire movie against blue screens, and fill in the backgrounds later with images he's been working on for years, which are mostly already done. What this allows Conran to do, which is what is so revolutionary, is to have an already existing 3-D storyboard of every scene, with stick figures in place where the actors are supposed to be. Now, all he has to do is stick in his cast, and he's basically done, it sounds like.

Martial arts expert kills two raiders

This is real life, not a movie. From Martial arts expert kills two raiders:

A Chinese martial arts expert was in custody yesterday after turning the tables on four burglars armed with knives, killing two of them and seriously wounding a third.

The 28-year-old man, known as "the doctor" for his practice of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, managed to seize one of the two knives carried by his assailants and saw off the entire group with the ferocity of his reaction.

Magistrates in the central Italian town of Empoli are now seeking to establish whether his self-defence constituted an excessive use of force.

The butchery, worthy of a Quentin Tarantino film, began shortly before midnight on Friday when the four men knocked at the apartment of a Chinese hairdresser in the centre of Empoli.

The hairdresser, her assistant and "the doctor", who operated from the same premises, were reportedly overpowered and tied up before the group, all thought to be in their 20s and 30s, ransacked the apartment.

Disappointed by their meagre booty, the attackers allegedly threatened to rape the two women unless they told them where the rest of their money was hidden.

At this point the doctor managed to free himself, seize a knife from one of the aggressors and deliver a series of lethal stab wounds.

Investigators found the body of one man, who had been stabbed in the heart, sprawled on the staircase and another man bleeding to death in the street from a wound to his leg. A third man is recovering in hospital from a punctured lung.

The doctor was found crouching in the entrance to the building with cuts to his shoulder, face and hands.

Investigators are trying to determine whether he inflicted the injuries while defending himself inside the apartment, or hunted down the burglars after they had fled.

Govermentium

Silly, but I saw it on Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, and it's amusing in its own way:

A major research institution has recently announced the discovery of the heaviest chemical element yet known to science. The new element has been tentatively named 'Governmentium'. Governmentium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 11 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of Governmentium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would normally take less than a second. Governmentium has a normal half-life of three years; it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to speculate that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as 'Critical Morass'. You will know it when you see it.

More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well

The Hoover Institute, a conservative thinktank, publishes a number of books, including More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well — which they adverstise with these controversial excerpts:

Women in the Military. "At Parris Island, it was discovered that 45 percent of female Marines were unable to throw a hand grenade far enough to avoid blowing themselves up. If I were in a foxhole with a woman about to toss a hand grenade, I'd consider her the enemy."

Racial and Gender Quotas. "The only reason the elite haven't mandated quotas for women, Japanese, and other underrepresented groups in the NBA and the NFL is because the folly and costs of their cosmic justice vision would be exposed."

Affirmative Action. "Too many blacks receive twelve years of fraudulent primary and secondary education that cannot be overcome by four years of college. Unfortunately, liberals and civil rights organizations add to that disaster by giving unquestioned support to a corrupt education establishment that produces the fraud."

The Americans with Disabilities Act. "In some quarters, the ADA is taken to stand for 'Attorney's Dream Answered.' And who pays? You and I, through higher prices or less convenience."

The Minimum Wage. "Low wages are more a result of people being underproductive than being underpaid. They simply do not have the skills to produce and do things their fellow man highly values. The minimum wage law is evil legislation and deserving of repeal altogether."

Medical Student Epithet Makes Patients Wary

The power of euphemism, from Medical Student Epithet Makes Patients Wary:

Patients reluctant to have a medical student sit in on their consultation are less worried if the student is introduced as a 'trainee' instead, a doctor wrote on Friday in Britain's leading medical journal.

Patients are much more willing to accept the presence of a 'trainee doctor' or even a 'student doctor' than a 'medical student,' Hany George El-Sayeh wrote in the British Medical Journal.

He said patients feared they would be seen by a scruffy, disinterested youth who might later report their intimacies in the bar.

Describing a student as a trainee doctor would also heighten the youngster's esteem, he added. But trainees themselves ought to counter stereotypes by making a greater effort to appear interested, smart and punctual, he said.

Foreign Belly Dancers Fight Ban in Egypt

I'm a bit confused about how Muslim nation can have a strong, proud tradition of belly dancing. Anyway, the Egyptians don't seem to like foreign competition. Foreign Belly Dancers Fight Ban in Egypt:

Foreign belly dancers are appealing to the Egyptian courts to overturn a decree that stops them working in the country they consider the home of the dance, a performer and her lawyer said Thursday.

Mohamed Ibrahim, a lawyer representing two dancers, Australian Caroline Evanoff and a Russian known as Nour, said Manpower and Employment Minister Ahmed el-Amawi issued the decree preventing foreign belly dancers from working in Egypt.
[...]
Tickets fetch 200 Egyptian pounds ($35.52) for performances by top dancers in Cairo's luxury hotels, where the mixed-sex audiences often throw generous tips onto the dance floor.

Some dancers perform in cheaper, smoke-filled bars, frequented almost entirely by men, venues which some say give a bad reputation to an art form that requires years of training to perfect.

Singapore Policeman Gets Two Years for Oral Sex

Singapore never ceases to amaze me. Singapore Policeman Gets Two Years for Oral Sex:

A Singaporean police sergeant has been jailed for two years for having oral sex in a country where prostitution is legal but oral sex is not, a newspaper reported Friday.

The Straits Times reported that the 27-year-old police coast guard sergeant landed in court after a 16-year-old reported to the police that she had performed oral sex on the man.

She was above the age of consent and agreed to perform the act, but oral sex is against the law in the city-state, the paper said.

'The act by itself is an offence. It is not a question of consent or no consent. Even between consenting people, it is an offence,' criminal lawyer Subhas Anandan told the paper.

The maximum punishment for the offence is life imprisonment.

'Hitler's Mountain Home' from Homes and Gardens November 1938 - p 193

Wow. The Guardian Unlimited has reprinted Hitler's Mountain Home from Homes and Gardens November 1938 - p 193.

It turns out that one of the Guardian's editors had stumbled across the magazine article, as he describes in At home with the Führer:

My discovery was an article headlined 'Hitler's Mountain Home' - a breathless, three-page Hello!-style tour around Haus Wachenfeld, Hitler's chalet in the Bavarian Alps. In it, the author, the improbably named Ignatius Phayre, tells us that 'it is over 12 years since Herr Hitler fixed on the site of his one and only home. It had to be close to the Austrian border'. It was originally little more than a shed, but he was able to develop it 'as his famous book Mein Kampf became a bestseller of astonishing power'.

The great dictator, it seems, was quite the interiors wizard: "The colour scheme throughout this bright, airy chalet is light jade green. The Führer is his own decorator, designer and furnisher, as well as architect... [Hitler] has a passion about cut flowers in his home."

And he is seldom alone in his mountain hideaway, as he "delights in the society of brilliant foreigners, especially painters, musicians and singers. As host, he is a droll raconteur... "

Knowledge Problem: Moral Hazard and Protective Gear

It turns out that people take greater risks when they're protected against the consequencies. Knowledge Problem: Moral Hazard and Protective Gear brings up an example I've heard before:

My interest is in pointing out that the seatbelt phenomenon for which Sam Peltzman is known here — that mandatory seatbelt laws can and do, at the margin, induce less careful driving than in the absence of such laws — is not just restricted to seatbelt laws. (Heck, have ya seen the way Volvo drivers drive?)

Take my favorite example, from my favorite sport: hockey. When I was a wee lassie and we had season tix to the Penguins, the players soared around the ice with their locks flowing (this was the mid-70s, after all), and there were fights, and people got injured.

Then the NHL implemented a mandatory helmet rule for all entering players; existing players were grandfathered out of having to comply. Both my casual empiricism and statistics on penalty minutes and the increase in incidence of particular penalties (especially high sticking) suggest that the Peltzman effect was in full force: mandatory helmets seem, at the margin, to have contributed to an increase in violence in hockey, particularly the nasty, cheap crap that gives hockey such a bad name.

What this moral hazard problem has provoked in the NHL is not a reconsideration of the wisdom of mandatory helmet rules, far from it. It has led to two decades of inveighing against fighting, roughing, high sticking, checking from behind, all of the behaviors that increased after the helmet rule.

Similarly, American football players tackle their opponents much more violently than rugby players can afford to, and gloved boxers hit harder than bareknuckle fighters.

Coolie?

After reading Upwardly mobile phone jockey... or 'cyber-coolie'?, I decided to look up "coolie"; it was one of those words I more-or-less knew, but didn't know the origin of. Merriam-Webster OnLine defines it as follows:

Main Entry: coo·lie
Pronunciation: \ˈkü-lē\
Function: noun
Etymology: Hindi & Urdu qulī
Date: 1638
: an unskilled laborer or porter usually in or from the Far East hired for low or subsistence wages

Beyond face values

Beyond face values reviews Portraits: A History — and shares some amusing art history:

For example, until the 19th century the only permissible way an artist could paint a naked female portrait was for the sitter to pretend to be a goddess. Even Rubens's blatant celebration of the sexiness of his young second wife was rendered respectable by deriving her pose from an ancient statue of Venus. Diane de Poitiers, posing starkers as the virgin goddess Diana, must be the cheekiest. She was both widowed and the mistress of Henry II at the time.

It was Goya who broke the convention with his Naked Maja, "the first purely profane, life-sized female nude in Western art". The picture was commissioned by a Spanish politician for his secret erotic collection, only gossip identifying the subject as the Duchess of Alba — a slur which so rankled with her family that 150 years later, in 1945, the duke had his ancestor's remains exhumed, unfortunately to no conclusive proof.

Upwardly mobile phone jockey... or 'cyber-coolie'?

Upwardly mobile phone jockey... or 'cyber-coolie'? describes India's success in taking over the call-center business:

In India, which has been most successful in stealing call-centre business from the rich countries, companies teach their operators to understand American accents and imitate them. They watch American movies together, and those who can easily comprehend Sylvester Stallone's dialogue are said to be approaching perfection. Some companies try to create an American ambience by putting little American flags on the desks and providing pizza.

India now has more than 160,000 call-centre workers and expects to have a million by 2008. Raman Roy, who runs a company called Wipro Spectramind, imagines India becoming 'the back office of the world.' He had 200 employees three years ago and now has 5,100. They take catalogue orders, book hotel and airline reservations, do some telemarketing, and then move up to computer help desks, insurance claims processing, various forms of accounting, and payroll management.

This is where it gets interesting though:

Not everyone finds this system admirable. Last year, a reporter for the Times of India mentioned to Roy that there are those who think these workers operate at the lowest end of the value chain. Roy replied that you can do a low-end job and then maybe move to a better job. "Without the low end, you cannot proceed to the high end."

This controversy recently broke out in an unlikely place, the letters column of the Times Literary Supplement. After Susan Sontag praised Indians for putting their English-language skills to work through call centres, a furious professor in New Delhi denounced her for failing to see that "These poor young men and women are indeed the cyber-coolies of our global age." In the next issue, another Delhi resident wrote that what the professor considers exploitation looks to workers like a way to acquire skills as well as income. He acknowledged that while "it isn't much fun to persuade someone in Detroit to pay his credit card bill" (yet another function of call centres), it builds negotiating skills.

It is an iron law of international economics that the Exploitation Police will swoop down and denounce anyone who creates new jobs, particularly in relatively poor areas. The common complaint is that call-centre companies set up shop in places (New Brunswick is a good example) where they can find well-educated workers at relatively low wages. The Exploitation Police make this sound almost criminal. In fact, it's the way capitalism has always expanded and the way that poor regions have traditionally turned themselves into less poor regions. To consider this sort of change deplorable is to miss the fact that business lives by ingenuity and perishes when it ceases to find new and cheaper ways to get its work done.

It is an iron law of international economics that the Exploitation Police will swoop down and denounce anyone who creates new jobs, particularly in relatively poor areas. I love that line.

Rorschach Inkblot Test, Fortune Tellers, and Cold Reading

Rorschach Inkblot Test, Fortune Tellers, and Cold Reading draws an intriguing connection between the famous psychological intrument and astrology:

Introduced in 1921 by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach, the test bears a charming resemblance to a party game. A person is shown ten inkblots and asked to tell what each resembles. Like swirling images in a crystal ball, the ambiguous blots tell a different story to every person who gazes upon them. There are butterflies and bats, diaphanous dresses and bow ties, monkeys, monsters, and mountain-climbing bears. When scored and interpreted by an expert, people's responses to the blots are said to provide a full and penetrating portrait of their personalities.

The scientific evidence for the Rorschach has always been feeble.

How did the Rorschach test become so popular then? Because Rorschach "wizards" were able to make uncannily accurate "blind readings" of patients from just their test responses. Only these amazing Rorschach readings were no more accurate than a good palm reading:

In the late 1940s, psychologist Bertram Forer published an eye-opening study that he called a "demonstration of gullibility" (Forer 1949). After administering a questionnaire to his introductory psychology class, he prepared personality sketches. For example: "Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations."

Forer asked the students to rate their own sketches for accuracy. The students gave an average rating of "very good." More than 40 percent said that their sketch provided a perfect fit to their personality.

The results seemed to show that Forer's personality questionnaire possessed a high degree of validity. However, there was a diabolical catch: Forer had given all the students the same personality sketch, which he manufactured using horoscopes from an astrology book. The students had gullibly accepted this boiler-plate personality description as if it applied to them uniquely as individuals.

Although the statements borrowed from the astrology book were seemingly precise, they applied to almost all people. Following the eminent researcher Paul Meehl, psychologists now call such personality statements "Barnum statements," after the great showman P.T. Barnum who said, "A circus should have a little something for everybody" (he's also credited with, "There's a sucker born every minute").

As Forer had discovered, people tend to seriously overestimate the degree to which Barnum statements fit them uniquely. For example, students in one study who were given Barnum statements disguised as test results responded with glowing praise: "On the nose! Very good"; "Applies to me individually, as there are too many facets which fit me too well to be a generalization."

Interestingly, many "psychics" believe in their own powers — and most Rorschach "wizards" probably believed in theirs.

Falling on Deaf Ears

Falling on Deaf Ears asks, how reliable are ear-witnesses? Not very:

Bruno Richard Hauptmann was executed in Trenton, N.J., in April 1936, for kidnapping and murdering the young son of the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. The most dramatic moment in Hauptmann's closely watched trial came when Lindbergh identified Hauptmann's voice as that of his son's kidnapper. "The minute Lindbergh pointed his finger at Hauptmann, the trial was over," said Hauptmann's lawyer after the conviction. "Jesus Christ himself said he was convinced this was the man who killed his son. Who was anybody to doubt him or deny him justice?"

Lindbergh had heard the voice of his son's kidnapper three years earlier. Still hoping to get the child back alive, Lindbergh had accompanied Dr. John Condon to St. Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx to deliver ransom money. Condon handed off $50,000 in marked gold certificates, while Lindbergh waited nearly 100 yards away in a car. Out of the darkness came the words, "Hey, doctor! Over here, over here."

Twenty-nine months after the encounter in the cemetery, in September 1934, Lindbergh told a Bronx grand jury that "it would be very difficult to sit here and say that I could pick a man by that voice." Undeterred, the district attorney asked Lindbergh later that day: "Would you like to see the man who kidnapped your son?" The next morning, while Lindbergh sat in the back of the D.A.'s office among a group of detectives, Hauptmann was brought in and asked to repeat the words, "Hey, doctor. Here, doctor, over here." Lindbergh told the prosecutor that he recognized the voice as that of the kidnapper, and he testified under oath at the trial that Hauptmann was the man he had heard in the cemetery.
[...]
One year after Hauptmann's execution, Frances McGehee, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois, had students listen to a person read a 56-word passage from behind a screen. The students were then tested at various times to see whether they could pick the reader out from a group of five voices. They did so with 83 percent accuracy the next day. Three weeks later, however, their success rate had declined dramatically to 51 percent. Five months later they were down to a dismal 13 percent accuracy rate — well below chance.

Chick Lit Keeps on Clicking

Chick Lit Keeps on Clicking succinctly enumerates "chick lit" genre conventions:

Like all genres, chick lit has its conventions. Its protagonists tend to be attractive women in their 20s or 30s; they're educated, self-aware and quick with a snarky retort or a wise aside; they live in New York, San Francisco or London; they work in publishing, advertising, media or entertainment; they lament their single status; their families appear every few chapters, Greek chorus-style, to shake their heads in synchronized dismay; in the end, a Cinderella ending makes everything right. Chick lit is marketed like the candy it is. The books are wrapped in brightly coloured covers with girly typography, often treated as a point-of-sale impulse purchase. Titles are often child's book simple, like See Jane Date or Run Catch Kiss.

Vigor of Life

The Journal of Manly Arts (I still love that name) provides an excerpt from Teddy Roosevelt's autobiography, Vigor of Life, that describes how "having been a sickly boy, with no natural bodily prowess, and having lived much at home," he couldn't hold his own with the other boys, so he took up boxing (at age 14). From there, he kept up a fairly active lifestyle:

I did a good deal of boxing and wrestling in Harvard, but never attained to the first rank in either, even at my own weight. Once, in the big contests in the Gym, I got either into the finals or semi-finals, I forgot which; but aside from this the chief part I played was to act as trial horse for some friend or classmate who did have a chance of distinguishing himself in the championship contests.

When obliged to live in cities, I for a long time found that boxing and wrestling enabled me to get a good deal of exercise in condensed and attractive form. I was reluctantly obliged to abandon both as I grew older. I dropped the wrestling earliest. When I became Governor, the champion middleweight wrestler of America happened to be in Albany, and I got him to come round three or four afternoons a week. Incidentally I may mention that his presence caused me a difficulty with the Comptroller, who refused to audit a bill I put in for a wrestling-mat, explaining that I could have a billiard-table, billiards being recognized as a proper Gubernatorial amusement, but that a wrestling-mat symbolized something unusual and unheard of and could not be permitted. The middleweight champion was of course so much better than I was that he could not only take care of himself but of me too and see that I was not hurt — for wrestling is a much more violent amusement than boxing. But after a couple of months he had to go away, and he left as a substitute a good-humored, stalwart professional oarsman. The oarsman turned out to know very little about wrestling. He could not even take care of himself, not to speak of me. By the end of our second afternoon one of his long ribs had been caved in and two of my short ribs badly damaged, and my left shoulder-blade so nearly shoved out of place that it creaked. He was nearly as pleased as I was when I told him I thought we would "vote the war a failure" and abandon wrestling. After that I took up boxing again. While President I used to box with some of the aides, as well as play single-stick with General Wood. After a few years I had to abandon boxing as well as wrestling, for in one bout a young captain of artillery cross-countered me on the eye, and the blow smashed the little blood-vessels. Fortunately it was my left eye, but the sight has been dim ever since, and if it had been the right eye I should have been entirely unable to shoot. Accordingly I thought it better to acknowledge that I had become an elderly man and would have to stop boxing. I then took up jiu-jitsu for a year or two.

When I was in the Legislature and was working very hard, with little chance of getting out of doors, all the exercise I got was boxing and wrestling.

I enjoyed these comments on boxing:

Powerful, vigorous men of strong animal development must have some way in which their animal spirits can find vent. When I was Police Commissioner I found (and Jacob Riis will back me up in this) that the establishment of a boxing club in a tough neighborhood always tended to do away with knifing and gun-fighting among the young fellows who would otherwise have been in murderous gangs. Many of these young fellows were not naturally criminals at all, but they had to have some outlet for their activities. In the same way I have always regarded boxing as a first-class sport to encourage in the Young Men's Christian Association. I do not like to see young Christians with shoulders that slope like a champagne bottle.

Naturally, I'm most interested in Roosevelt's jiu-jitsu training. Here's what he had to say in a letter dated February 24, 1905:

I still box with Grant, who has now become the champion middleweight wrestler of the United States. Yesterday afternoon we had Professor Yamashita up here to wrestle with Grant. It was very interesting, but of course jiu jitsu and our wrestling are so far apart that it is difficult to make any comparison between them. Wrestling is simply a sport with rules almost as conventional as those of tennis, while jiu jitsu is really meant for practice in killing or disabling our adversary. In consequence, Grant did not know what to do except to put Yamashita on his back, and Yamashita was perfectly content to be on his back. Inside of a minute Yamashita had choked Grant, and inside of two minutes more he got an elbow hold on him that would have enabled him to break his arm; so that there is no question but that he could have put Grant out. So far this made it evident that the jiu jitsu man could handle the ordinary wrestler. But Grant, in the actual wrestling and throwing was about as good as the Japanese, and he was so much stronger that he evidently hurt and wore out the Japanese. With a little practice in the art I am sure that one of our big wrestlers or boxers, simply because of his greatly superior strength, would be able to kill any of those Japanese, who though very good men for their inches and pounds are altogether too small to hold their own against big, powerful, quick men who are as well trained.

Where To Get Rich

From Where To Get Rich:

What do these towns have in common: Albuquerque, Austin, Bentonville, Dayton, Denver, Omaha, Racine and Tacoma? They are the birthplaces of firms that created 17 of the top 25 personal fortunes in this year's FORBES 400 list.
[...]
There is a funny American myth that you have to go to big places such as New York or California to make your fame and fortune. Maybe fame. But fortune, as this year's FORBES 400 shows, is more often found off the beaten track.

Best place to make a future FORBES 400 fortune? Start with this proposition: The most valuable natural resource in the 21st century is brains. Smart people tend to be mobile. Watch where they go! Because where they go, robust economic activity will follow.

If you agree, then put your chips on cities that: a) attract smart people; and b) are low-cost enough to incubate a business so it won't need much outside capital, which is dilutive to wealth building. In other words, look for cities with these attributes:

• Universities
• Stellar K-12 education
• Capital for experimentation
• Capital for business risk
• Low taxes and light regulations
• Love of creative mess
• Inclusive optimism
• Respect for the risk taker

A Burden Too Heavy to Put Down

In A Burden Too Heavy to Put Down David Brooks paints an ugly picture:

Um Haydar was a 25-year-old Iraqi woman whose husband displeased Saddam Hussein's government. After he fled the country in 2000, some members of the Fedayeen Saddam grabbed her from her home and brought her out on the street. There, in front of her children and mother-in-law, two men grabbed her arms while another pulled her head back and beheaded her. Baath Party officials watched the murder, put her head in a plastic bag and took away her children.

Try to put yourself in the mind of the killer, or of the guy with the plastic bag. You are part of Saddam's vast apparatus of rape squads, torture teams and mass-grave fillers. Every time you walk down the street, people tremble in fear. Everything else in society is arbitrary, but you are absolute. When you kill, your craving for power and significance is sated. You are infused with the joy of domination.

These are the people we are still fighting in Iraq.

Why History Has No End

In Why History Has No End, Victor Davis Hanson dismisses Francis Fukuyama's famous announcement of the "End of History" and describes some important differences between Europe and America:

European visionaries have had a long history of dreaming up and seeking to implement nationalist or socialist utopias—schemes, doomed to fail, that have trampled individuals under the heavy boot of the state as the price of creating a “new man” and a perfect world, bringing history to fulfillment. The murderous fraternity of the French Revolution, nineteenth-century Bonapartism, Marxism and modern communism, Francoism, Italian fascism, Nazism—all these coercive programs for remaking the world sprang from what seems an ineradicable Continental impulse.

The European Union, benign as it currently seems, is the latest manifestation of this utopian spirit. The E.U.’s greatest hubris is to imagine that it can completely overcome the historical allegiances and political cultures of Europe’s many nations by creating a “European” man, freed entirely from local attachments and resentments, conflicting interests, ethnicity, and differing visions of the good life, and wedded instead to rationality, egalitarianism, secularism, and the enlightened rule of wise bureaucrats. No less utopian is the E.U.’s assumption, contrary to all economic reason, that a 35-hour workweek, retirement at 55, ever-longer vacations, extensive welfare benefits, and massive economic regulation can go together with swelling prosperity. All that makes this squaring of the circle plausible even in the short term is Europe’s choice to spend little on defense, which allows more money to go to welfare programs—a choice itself resting on another utopian assumption: that the world has entered a new era in which disagreements between nations can be resolved peacefully, through the guidance and pressure of international organizations—above all, the United Nations. In reality, of course, Europe relies on the United States to take care of many of its defense needs.

Like Europe’s brave new worlds of the past, the E.U. is in fact a deeply anti-democratic mechanism that elites can use to grab power while mouthing platitudes about “brotherhood,” designed to appeal to the citizen’s desire to participate in some kind of higher vision. The E.U.’s transnational government has nothing in place to ensure an institutional opposition—no bicameral legislature, no independent review by high courts, no veto power for individual member states. This authoritarian arrangement allows the E.U. to rule by diktat rather than by consensus and review. Rural Montanans can complain to their congressmen that Washington is out of touch; to whom will Estonians complain that Brussels has no right to decide what goes on their restaurant menus?
[...]
It’s understandable, really, that the E.U. has set itself against America. Nothing is more foreign to European statist utopianism than the American emphasis on individual liberty, local self-government, equality under the law, and slow, imperfect reform. America has always been immune to utopian fantasies—indeed, it has always opposed them. The skeptical Founding Fathers, influenced by the prudence and love of liberty of the British Enlightenment, built the American republic based on the anti-utopian belief that men are fallible and self-interested, love their property, and can best manage their affairs locally. The Founders saw the café theorizing of Continental elites and French philosophers as a danger to good government, which requires not some grand, all-encompassing blueprint but rather institutional checks and balances and a citizenry of perennially vigilant individual citizens.

I love Hanson's more personal take on the differences between Europe and America:

I farm, among other things, raisins. Recently, the price of raisins crashed below its level of some 40 years ago. My friends casually suggested that I pack it in, uproot an ancestral vineyard, move on to something else — not, as in Europe, circle the tractor around the capitol, block traffic, or seek government protection and subsidies as a representative of a hallowed way of life under threat from globalization.

Unreason's Seductive Charms

In Unreason's Seductive Charms, David P. Barash, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington at Seattle, discusses reason and unreason, citing a number of amusing anecdotes:

To be sure, excessive reason is easy to caricature. Thus, at one point in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, our hero journeys to Laputa, whose male inhabitants are utterly devoted to their intellects: One eye focuses inward and the other upon the stars. Neither looks straight ahead. The Laputans are so cerebral that they cannot hold a normal conversation; their minds wander off into sheer contemplation. They require servants who swat them with special instruments about the mouth and ears, reminding them to speak or listen as needed. Laputans concern themselves only with pure mathematics and equally pure music. Appropriately, they inhabit an island that floats, in ethereal indifference, above the ground. Laputan women, however, are unhappy and regularly cuckold their husbands, who do not notice. The prime minister's wife, for example, repeatedly runs away, preferring to live down on Earth with a drunk who beats her.

He points out a number of famously "rational" people who have behaved less than rationally:

Legend has it, for example, that when Pythagoras came up with his famous theorem, justly renowned as the cornerstone of geometry (that most logical of mental pursuits), he immediately sacrificed a bull to Apollo. Or think of Isaac Newton: pioneering physicist, both theoretical and empirical, he of the laws of motion and gravity, inventor of calculus, and widely acknowledged as the greatest of all scientists. ("Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:/God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.") This same Newton wrote literally thousands of pages, far more than all his physics and mathematics combined, seeking to explicate the prophecies in the Book of Daniel.

He also brings in some behavioral economics:

Would you accept a gamble that offers a 10-percent chance to win $95 and a 90-percent chance to lose $5? The great majority of people in the study rejected this proposition as a loser. Yet, a bit later, the same individuals were asked this question: Would you pay $5 to participate in a lottery that offers a 10-percent chance to win $100 and a 90-percent chance to win nothing? A large proportion of those who refused the first option accepted the second. But the options offer identical outcomes. As Kahneman and Tversky see it: "Thinking of the $5 as a payment makes the venture more acceptable than thinking of the same amount as a loss." It's all a matter of how the situation is framedin this case, the extent to which people are "risk averse."

Some evolutionary psychology:

Which brings us to yet another perspective on why Homo sapiens isn't always strictly sapient. Let's start by agreeing with Herbert Simon (who also won a Nobel Prize in economics) that the mind is simply incapable of solving many of the problems posed by the real world, just because the world is big and the mind is small. But add this: The human mind did not develop as a calculator designed to solve logical problems. Rather, it evolved for a very limited purpose, one not fundamentally different from that of the heart, lungs, or kidneys; that is, the job of the brain is simply to enhance the reproductive success of the body within which it resides.

This is the biological purpose of every mind, human as well as animal, and moreover, it is its only purpose. The purpose of the heart is to pump blood, of the lungs to exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide, while the kidneys' work is the elimination of toxic chemicals. The brain's purpose is to direct our internal organs and our external behavior in a way that maximizes our evolutionary success. That's it. Given this, it is remarkable that the human mind is good at solving any problems whatsoever, beyond "Who should I mate with?," "What is that guy up to?," "How can I help my kid?," "Where are the antelopes hanging out at this time of year?" There is nothing in the biological specifications for brain-building that calls for a device capable of high-powered reasoning, or of solving abstract problems, or even providing an accurate picture of the "outside" world, beyond what is needed to enable its possessors to thrive and reproduce. Put these requirements together, on the other hand, and it appears that the result turns out to be a pretty good (that is, rational) calculating device.

One of the most famous examples of evolutionary psychology is the Wason test:

In short, the evolutionary design features of the human brain may well hold the key to our penchant for logic as well as illogic. Following is a particularly revealing example, known as the Wason Test.

Imagine that you are confronted with four cards. Each has a letter of the alphabet on one side and a number on the other. You are also told this rule: If there is a vowel on one side, there must be an even number on the other. Your job is to determine which (if any) of the cards must be turned over in order to determine whether the rule is being followed. However, you must only turn over those cards that require turning over. Let's say that the four cards are as follows:

T 6 E 9

Which ones should you turn over?
[...]
Next, consider this puzzle. You are a bartender at a nightclub where the legal drinking age is 21. Your job is to make sure that this rule is followed: People younger than 21 must not be drinking alcohol. Toward that end, you can ask individuals their age, or check what they are drinking, but you are required not to be any more intrusive than is absolutely necessary. You are confronted with four different situations, as shown below. In which case (if any) should you ask a patron his or her age, or find out what beverage is being consumed?

#1 Drinking Water
#2 Over 21
#3 Drinking Beer
#4 Under 21

Nearly everyone finds this problem easy.

The two problems are logically identical.

The hard-liner

The hard-liner discusses Richard Pipes, a Harvard historian whose support for confrontation over containment helped shape the Reagan administration's aggressive approach to the Soviet Union. His support for confrontation over containment prefigured the Bush foreign policy of today:

Pipes's journey from the archive to the cabinet meeting is related in his newly published autobiography "Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger" (Yale). A compact volume, modest in scale if not in tone, "Vixi" (Latin for "I have lived") might as well be titled "Vinci," for it is very much a record of unlikely triumph over formidable odds, beginning with its gripping account of Pipes's days as a young Jew living in Nazi-occupied Warsaw.

Pipes's father, a successful businessman, plied his many contacts and at last secured passports for his family. They fled in 1939, when Pipes was 16, escaping through Italy to the United States. The son, recreated as an American, served in World War II, received a doctorate from Harvard, stayed on as an instructor and was tenured in 1958. He soon established himself as one of his generation's leading experts on Russia.

Beginning with his 1954 book "The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923," Pipes focused on the endurance of Russia's autocratic traditions. His thinking derived in part from his own brief experience of totalitarianism. "When I was in Poland under the Germans, any German in uniform could take out his revolver and shoot me just because he didn't like my face," Pipes said in a recent interview. "When you see this violence, when you see these cruel barbarities, you tend to look at things more realistically." More realistically, he means, than do most Americans, to whom such barbarity "all seems very remote."

U.S. Administrator Imposes Flat Tax System on Iraq

It's not enough to get me to move to Iraq — or Russia — but it sounds like a good idea. From U.S. Administrator Imposes Flat Tax System on Iraq:

The flat tax, long a dream of economic conservatives, is finally getting its day — not in the United States, but in Iraq.

It took L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Baghdad, no more than a stroke of the pen Sept. 15 to accomplish what eluded the likes of publisher Steve Forbes, Reps. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.) and Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.), and Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) over the course of a decade and two presidential campaigns.

"The highest individual and corporate income tax rates for 2004 and subsequent years shall not exceed 15 percent," Bremer wrote in Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 37, "Tax Strategy for 2003," issued last month.

Voilà! Iraq has a flat tax, and the 15 percent rate is even lower than Forbes (17 percent) and Gramm (16 percent) favored for the United States. And, unless a future Iraqi government rescinds it, the flat tax will remain long after the Americans have left.
[...]
Bremer's new economic policy for Iraq will slash Saddam Hussein's top tax rate for individuals and businesses from 45 to 15 percent. Of course, since Hussein's government, like others in the Middle East, almost never enforced tax collection, there is no real history of paying taxes in the country.

During the more than three decades of Baath Party rule, Hussein ran a centrally controlled economy with most large businesses owned or operated by the state. The government also managed the import of most goods.
[...]
Bartlett, once an aide to Kemp and now with the National Center for Policy Analysis, said the model for Iraq should be Russia, which in 2001 set a 13 percent flat tax on individual income. The Bush administration, still disturbed by much higher tax rates here, has said it admires Russia's flat tax. Russia "understands the importance of getting the tax structure right in your economy," Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans told the conservative Heritage Foundation last year.

President Bush, in Russia last year to see President Vladimir Putin, said: "The good news is that the flat tax in Russia is a good, fair tax — much more fair, by the way, than many Western countries, I might add."

One economist familiar with the area said: "At the previous 40 percent to 50 percent, Russian people were evading. Now at a lower rate, they are paying because the penalties are so heavy."
[...]
American flat-tax advocates have made little headway at home, in part because Democrats say it would disproportionately hurt lower-income Americans and because expensive tax breaks such as the deductions for mortgage interest and charitable donations are beloved in both parties. But in places such as Russia, the Baltic states and Iraq, there was no well-established tax code defended by an army of lobbyists. "Somehow, it's easier when you start from scratch," Norquist said.

Darwin and Political Theory

In Darwin and Political Theory, Denis Dutton reviews Rubin's Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom:

Evolutionary psychology gives hope against this pessimism. Political philosophers are right to posit a natural background that underlies construction of political systems, evolutionary psychologists say, but it required Darwin finally to explain that background to us. A lucid attempt to spell out the implications evolution for politics has now been published by Paul H. Rubin, a professor of economics and law at Emory University, in the form of Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom (Rutgers University Press, $25.00, paperback). Some of his conclusions are what anyone familiar with evolutionary psychology might suppose even without picking up the book. Others come as a surprise, and were unexpected even by Rubin himself. The book is both fascinating and unpredictable.

It sounds like a book I'll have to pick up — or at least add to the old wish list.

Dutton gives a brief primer on human evolution:

The scene of evolution is the Environment of Evolutionary Adapted-ness, the EEA, essentially the Pleistocene, the whole, long period lasting from 1.6 million years ago up until the shift to the Holocene with the invention of agriculture and large settlements 10,000 years ago. Our present intellectual constitution was achieved by about 50,000 years ago, or 40,000 before the Holocene. Keep in mind the immensity of this time scale: calculating at twenty years for a generation, there were 80,000 generations of humans and proto-humans in the Pleistocene, while there have been a mere 500 generations since agriculture and the first cities. It was in the earlier, much longer period that selective pressures created genetically modern humans.

From there, he reviews "a few basic components of hunter-gatherer political structures as described by Rubin" — or, more accurately, the modern, political consequences of having evolved in bands of about 100 hunter-gatherers:

Group size.
Dominance Hierarchies.
Envy in a zero-sum society.
Risk and welfarism.
Youth, defense, and monogamy.
Untenable libertarianism.

Read the whole article for the details.

Singlestick by Phillipps-Wolley

After finding the Journal of Manly Arts and reading a bit about singlestick, I had to read more. Fortunately, that first article referenced another, Singlestick by Phillipps-Wolley (Originally published as chapter IV of Broadsword and Single-stick, with Chapters on Quarter-Staff, Bayonet, Cudgel, Shillalah, Walking-Stick, and Other Weapons of Self-Defence, by R.G. Allanson-Winn and C. Phillipps-Wolley; George Bell and Sons, York Street, Covent Garden and New York, 1898):

But gunpowder has taken the place of "cold steel," and arms of precision at a thousand yards have ousted the "white arm" of the chivalrous ages, so that it is really only of single-stick as a sport that men think, if they think of it at all, today. As a sport it is second to none of those which can be indulged in the gymnasium, unless it be boxing; and even boxing has its disadvantages. What the ordinary Englishman wants is a game with which he may fill up the hours during which he cannot play cricket and need not work; a game in which he may exercise those muscles with which good mother Nature meant him to earn his living, but which custom has condemned to rust, while his brain wears out; a game in which he may hurt some one else, is extremely likely to be hurt himself, and is certain to earn an appetite for dinner. If any one tells me that my views of amusement are barbaric or brutal, that no reasonable man ever wants to hurt any one else or to risk his own precious carcass, I accept the charge of brutality, merely remarking that it was the national love of hard knocks which made this little island famous, and I for one do not wish to be thought any better than the old folk of England's fighting days.

It gets even better:

There is just enough pain in the use of the sticks to make self-control during the use of them a necessity; just enough danger to a sensitive hide to make the game thoroughly English, for no game which puts a strain upon the player's strength and agility only, and none on his nerve, endurance, and temper, should take rank with the best of our national pastimes.

Gallant Lindsey Gordon knew the people he was writing for when he wrote —

No game was ever worth a rap,
For a rational man to play,
Into which no accident, no mishap,
Could possibly find its way.

[...]
There is just enough sting in the ash-plant's kiss, when it catches you on the softer parts of your thigh, your funny bone, or your wrist, to keep you wide awake and remind you of the good old rule of "grin and bear it;" but the ash-plant leaves no marks which are likely to offend the eye of squeamish clients or female relations.

The British Empire flavor gets even thicker as he describes the true test of weapon mastery:

The best school appears to be that in which all hits are allowed, such as might be given by a rough in a street row, or by a Soudanese running a-muck. The old trial for teachers of fencing was not a bad test of real excellence in the mastery of their weapons — a fight with three skilled masters of fence (one at a time, of course), then three bouts with valiant unskilled men, then three bouts against three half-drunken men. A man who could pass this test was a man whose sword could be relied upon to keep his head, and that is what is wanted. All rules, then, which provide artificial protection, as it were — protection other than that afforded by the swordsman's guard — to any part of the body are wrong, and should be avoided.

Sherlock Holmes, His Limits (and Singlesticking)

I haven't read A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes story, in quite some time, but I stumbled across this amusing list penned by Watson soon after meeting the consulting detective (reproduced at The Man Sherlock Holmes):

SHERLOCK HOLMES - his limits.
1. Knowledge of Literature. - Nil.
2.     '      ' Philosophy. - Nil.
3.     '      ' Astronomy.  - Nil.
4.     '      ' Politics.   - Feeble.
5.     '      ' Botany.     - Variable.
 Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally.
 Knows nothing of practical gardening.
6. Knowledge of Geology.    - Practical, but limited.
 Tells at aglance different soils from each other.
 After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told
 me by their colour and consistence in what part of Londonn he
 had received them.
7. Knowledge of Chemistry.  - Profound.
8.     '      ' Anatomy.    - Accurate, but un-systematic.
9.     '      ' Sensatinal Literature. - Immense. He appears to
 know every horror perpetrated in the century.
10.Plays the violin well.
11.Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.
12.Has a good practical knowledge of British law.

A modern reader might ask, what's singlestick? Some kind of field hockey? No, it's "swordfighting" with wooden swords. The Journal of Manly Arts (I could not make up such a thing) has a wonderful article on the once-popular sport, Singlestick Fencing: 1787-1923, by Tony Wolf:

Singlesticks — wooden rods of about thirty-five inches in length, equipped with rigid guards which completely enclose the fencer's hand — were the 18th and 19th century descendants of Medieval wasters, wooden facsimile weapons popularly used for weapon training. These practice tools allowed a greater measure of safety, and were less expensive to replace, than steel swords. During the Georgian and Victorian eras, Singlestick play was popularly employed in prize-fights and tournament competitions, for which purposes it was sometimes also known as cudgelling or backswording. The weapon was also used as a substitute for the Naval cutlass and cavalry sabre during training exercises.

Singlestick fencing was widely practised throughout England, the British Commonwealth, and the U.S.A. until the early part of the 20th century, often in tandem with the other popular recreations of the salle d'armes, including foil, duelling-sword (epee), bayonet and quarterstaff fencing. Two annual English Singlestick competitions were instituted between 1880-1900; one held in June as part of the Grand Military Tournament, and the other hosted by the German Gymnasium in December. Thus, by the turn of the twentieth century, Singlestick fencing had become established as an internationally popular combat sport, drawing from the intertwined traditions of rustic cudgel-play, military drill and the private fencing academy.

The first decades of the twentieth century brought about the decline of Singlestick play. Tragically, many young athletes lost their lives in the Great War (1914-1919). Subsequent advances in technology allowed the mass-manufacture of relatively inexpensive, flexible and lightweight steel fencing blades, and in the 1920's the organisers of the Olympic Games selected three fencing sports — foil, epee and sabre — as Olympic events. As a result, many clubs began to focus exclusively on these forms of fencing, with sabre in particular coming to subsume a great deal of Singlestick practice and technique. The Great Depression of the 1930s and the Second World War in the '40s similarly diminished interest in obscure fencing methods, until the sport of Singlestick effectively became extinct.

The accompanying timeline has some wonderful tidbits. I love the title of this 1790 text: Anti-Pugilism; or, The Science of Defence Exemplified In Short and Easy Lessons for the Practice of the Broad Sword and Single Stick Illustrated with Copper Plates By a Highland Officer. Or how about this excerpt from a letter from architect William Thornton to Thomas Jefferson, discussing plans for a University in the state of Virginia:

Let all the Exercises be such as would tend to make great and useful men, and the military Exercises, fencing with the broad and small sword, boxing with mufflers, playing the single Stick, jumping, wrestling, throwing the Javelin and whatever tends to render men most athletic, at the same time that it tends to perfect them in what may eventually be of use, ought only to be permitted as sports in their leisure hours. Thus would I make men of active Bodies, as well as of extraordinary Minds.

Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown's Schooldays described "backswording" (singlesticking) from his youth:

The weapon is a good stout ash-stick with a large basket-handle — The players are called "old gamesters," — why, I can't tell you, — and their object is simply to break one another's heads: for the moment that blood runs an inch anywhere above the eyebrow, the old gamester to whom it belongs is beaten, and has to stop. A very slight blow with the sticks will fetch blood, so that it is by no means a punishing pastime, if the men don't play on purpose, and savagely, at the body and arms of their adversaries.

This reminds me that I should really get back into escrima (Filipino stickfighting) — only that's much easier to find in the OC than on the Main Line.

How could Hitler happen?

In How could Hitler happen? Max Hastings reviews The Coming of The Third Reich by Richard J. Evans :

A generation of historians, among them A. J. P. Taylor, believed that Hitler was inevitable. Germany possessed a long tradition of authoritarianism and indifference to human rights, matched by dreams of world domination, of which Hitler was the logical consequence.

Richard Evans's new study of the rise of Nazism, the first volume of a trilogy, argues that this perspective is mistaken. At every turn in the few short years of Hitler's rise to power, he says, matters could have turned out differently.

It is scarcely surprising that Germany's post-1918 experiment with democracy suffered difficulties from the outset. The country possessed no convincing democratic tradition. Although the Kaiser's subjects had the vote, real power had always been vested in the crown. Anti-Semitism was less widespread in Germany than in France or Russia, but by 1914 was already gaining ground in the political mainstream. The Army was able to impose its will ruthlessly upon Germany's colonies and indeed upon Alsace-Lorraine. The Kaiser was vastly more influenced by his generals than by his civilian ministers.

In 1918, German soldiers returned to their native land to find its monarchy overthrown by revolutionaries, the nation's dreams of greatness cast down. A 30-year-old army officer wrote: "We no longer found an honest German people, but a mob stirred up by its lowest instincts. Whatever virtues were once found among the Germans seemed to have sunk once and for all into the muddy flood . . . Promiscuity, shamelessness and corruption ruled supreme. German women seemed to have forgotten their German ways. German men seemed to have forgotten their sense of honour and honesty. Jewish writers and the Jewish press could 'go to town' with impunity, dragging everything into the dirt."

I was almost surprised that that 30-year-old army officer wasn't Hitler.

The German republic brought little happiness to its citizens between 1918 and 1933. It failed to maintain social order, or to establish its legitimacy in the minds of many of its people, at a period when the middle classes were thoroughly frightened by communism. Its economic policies were crippled first by blockade and the reparations imposed at Versailles, then by the 1929 slump.

Casting For The Wallace and Gromit Film Is Underway

From Casting For The Wallace and Gromit Film Is Underway:

Oscar-nominated stars Helena Bonham-Carter and Ralph Fiennes will lend their voices to the first ever feature length Wallace And Gromit movie. The project, titled Curse Of The Wererabbit, will begin shooting in Bristol, England this week at Aardman Animations's studio. The movie sees the studio's popular characters Wallace and Gromit hunt down the mysterious beast which has been rampaging their village's prize marrows and potatoes just days before the giant vegetable growing contest. Helena will voice new character Lady Tottington, and Ralph will provide the sound for Lord Victor Quatermaine. Curse of the Wererabbit — with a budget in excess of $80 million — will take 18 months to make and is expected to be released in 2005.

Actually, 18 months doesn't sound that long for a claymation movie.

Surfing Star Loses Arm in Shark Attack

Shark stories are just plain scary. From Surfing Star Loses Arm in Shark Attack:

The water was clear and there was no indication of danger when a 13-year-old surfing star went out on the waves with her best friend and her friend's father. But while Bethany Hamilton was lying on her board off Kauai's North Shore, a shark bit once and then disappeared, taking off her left arm just below the shoulder.
[...]
Bethany, of Princeville, was attacked in an area known as Tunnels, a quarter-mile off Makua Beach near Haena.

Bethany was surfing with best friend Alana Blanchard, also 13, and Alana's father, Holt Blanchard, her family said.

Holt Blanchard immediately applied a tourniquet to Hamilton's arm using a surfboard leash, the family said.
[...]
The shark took a chunk out of Bethany's surfboard that measured about 16 inches across and 8 inches deep, penetrating nearly to the center of the board, which suggests the shark was 12 to 15 feet long, Kauai fire Battalion Chief Bob Kaden said. It may have been a tiger shark, said Randy Honebrink, spokesman for the state Shark Task Force.

Obesity Rise Not Fattening Fitness Firms

From Obesity Rise Not Fattening Fitness Firms:

Some of the biggest names in the fitness and weight-loss industries are struggling to sign up members, and sales of home exercise equipment are sliding despite the obesity epidemic.

Interesting use of "despite" there. Anyway, companies like Weight Watchers and Nutri/System aren't growing, despite the growing need for their services.

Companies that sell gym memberships and equipment are also suffering.

Nautilus Group Inc. said last month it would cut an unspecified number of jobs after a steep drop in quarterly sales and income resulting from increased competition and weak consumer spending.

Bally Total Fitness Holding Corp., owner of 420 health clubs, cited similar problems when it reported a 58 percent drop in quarterly profit last August.

The Chicago company, which operates under its own name as well as the Crunch and Gorilla Sports brands, said overall membership revenue was down 9 percent for the quarter. It had also found it difficult to sign up new members last year.

"A lot of it stems from the economy," said analyst Reed Anderson of U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray. "Ultimately for Bally (customers), it's a discretionary purchase."

Not all fitness businesses are doing poorly though:

Heavy participants in these "kindler, gentler" activities are women over 55 — the nation's single fastest-growing group of exercisers in the Unites States, he said.

That trend could explain the standout success of Curves International, the women-only fitness center chain that Entrepreneur Magazine earlier this year called the fastest-growing franchise in history.

"The conventional fitness industry is out there targeting 18-to-32-year-old men and women who are generally comfortable with the way they look. They had written off older women," Curves founder and Chief Executive Gary Heavin said in an interview. "Perhaps the most important key was that we created an environment that was comfortable."

Privately held Curves has rocketed from its small-town Texas roots in 1992 to more than 6,000 clubs with 2 million members, by offering 30-minute low-impact circuit training for a low monthly membership fee of around $30. A new Curves opens about every four hours.

Curves' unthreatening environment is "appealing to overweight, nonathletic women who've never done anything," Lauer said.

Curves' unthreatening environment is "appealing to overweight, nonathletic women who've never done anything" — and not so appealing to young, athletic men who've played a number of sports.