Heart Attack on Jet Full of MDs (and Carjacking the Judo Team Minivan)

Sometimes, the stars align just right. If you're going to have a heart attack, you might as well have it on a plane full of cardiac specialists on their way to a conference. Woman Has Heart Attack on Jet Full of MDs:

A flight in the United States proved lucky for a British woman who suffered a heart attack. Fifteen heart specialists, all bound for a medical conference in Florida, stood up to offer help when a cabin attendant asked, "Is there a doctor on board?"

Of course, sometimes it works the other way, as the Miami Herald reports:

This guy picked the wrong visitors to carjack.

His victims: a college judo team from Miami-Dade that pounded him on the head, twisted him like a pretzel and pinned him on the ground until L.A. cops arrived.

"I thought it was pretty funny because out of all the cars this man picked, he picked ours," said Cristina Baldacci, 23, one of the members of Florida International University's judo team in the backseat of the rented minivan Sunday.

"All I kept thinking the whole time was, `This guy is really barking up the wrong tree.'"

Heinlein

On their 2blowhards.com blog, Michael (blowhard 1, not a SF fan) asks Friedrich (blowhard 2) about SF author Heinlein — best known for Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land:

A few of the things I've learned from hanging out online:

• How many people identify themselves as libertarians.


• How many people have gone through serious Ayn Rand phases.


• How many bright people read and enjoy sci-fi as adults.


• The immense cultural importance of Robert Heinlein.

I think I've managed to semi-understand the first three of those phenomena. The fourth still eludes me.

Friedrich's response:

Heinlein created a revolution in S.F. around 1940. He turned the genre from something along the lines of "Buck Rogers" into a vehicle for commenting on politics, religion, sociology, etc. His most influential stuff (on the development of S.F.) was his early work, which all fit together into a coherent view of about 200 years of 'future history.' His writing style owes quite a bit to hard-boiled detective fiction, but without the pessimistic social vision; several of his first person heros sound an awful lot like Archie Goodwin of the Nero Wolfe stories. So much for his place in 'literary' history.

I like him because he seemed to come from the world of pre-Depression America: self-confident, can-do attitude, big believer in free markets and the necessity for kicking ass now and then. I read him all the time at Our Lousy Ivy University as an antidote to Marxism, feminism, identity politics, and political correctness generally. One quote, obviously written in response to the expansion of 'rights' and 'entitlements' during the 60s and 70, sort of sums him up in my mind: "Nobody really has any rights, but everybody has plenty of opportunities."

I don't know if he ever heard of sociobiology, but he would have been a big fan. I recall that he was a big believer in heredity and masculinity at the exact moment that all right-thinking people disparaged them. A number of his books for teenagers show an intelligent, capable, hard-working kid facing an oppressive social situation and figuring a way to get out from under. They seemed intended for smart kids who hadn't found their place in the world yet; they were intended to empower, and they did.

Friedrich's aren't the only interesting comments though. I enjoyed many, but Steve Sailer's in particular:

I reread Heinlein's books every four years. To my taste, he was the most interesting sociological novelist of the 20th Century, but he was not a literary artist. He had a serviceable style, influenced by the best stuff of 1939, the year he started publishing: Raymond Chandler and screwball comedy dialogue. But he never let artistry slow down the flow of analysis of How The World Works.

Tom Clancy is his best known modern disciple. The team of Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle are probably his most sympatico heirs in hard sci-fi.

Heinlein means different things to different people in large part because he published three major cult novels between 1959 and 1966, each of which appeals to a completely different cult. Starship Trooper is the first book on the official U.S. Marine Corps reading list. Stranger in a Strange Land was extremely popular with the 1960s drug crowd. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a favorite of libertarians.

Many would argue, however, that the core of his achievement was his 1950s juvenile novels, perhaps culminating in "Have Space Suit, Will Travel."

Others would point to his astonishing burst of creativity from 1939-1941. For example, his 1940 short story "Solution Unsatisfactory" was the farthest anyone thought through the strategic implications of atomic weapons (which would not exist for another five years) until the later 1940s. In this pulp magazine story, the U.S. brings WWII to an end in 1945 by use of atomic weapons, then quickly falls into a global struggle with Russia. After WWIII, which lasts 4-days, world government is tried, but that quickly turns into a dictatorship run by the man in charge of the atomic weapons. The story ends in despair.

Others might like his bestsellers from the 1970s after his major illness, although some may feel he was past his peak.

His 1964 fantasy novel Glory Road is not recommended. Heinlein had an immensely practical mind and really couldn't take the genre seriously.

Iran Asks 'Why Are Our Earthquakes So Deadly?'

Iran Asks 'Why Are Our Earthquakes So Deadly?' draws a clear distinction between California and Iran:

In stark contrast to a tremor of similar strength last week in California that killed just two people, the toll in Friday's Iranian quake could reach about 50,000.
[...]
Fingers are also being pointed at the mud bricks common in towns like Bam. They are cheap and popular because they keep houses cool in summer and warm in winter. But they crumble easily, suffocating many who survive the actual quake.

"In Iran...the houses are essentially made of dust," said Enzo Boschi, president of the National Institute of Geophysics in quake-prone Italy. "When buildings made of concrete collapse there are pockets of air where you can breathe and survive two, three, maybe even five days. But with mud houses, and the dust they produce when collapsing, you die much quicker."

Two deaths versus 50,000.

U.S. Announces Ban on Ephedra Diet Supplement

The FDA has finally gone and done it. From U.S. Announces Ban on Ephedra Diet Supplement:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Tuesday it will ban the weight-loss aid ephedra, saying it is unsafe and can cause heart attacks and stroke.

It is the first time the FDA has banned a supplement.

Some quotes:

"Ephedra is an adrenaline-like stimulant that can have potentially dangerous effects on the heart," the FDA said in a statement.

"Other recent studies have also confirmed that ephedra use raises blood pressure and otherwise stresses the circulatory system, effects that have been conclusively linked to significant and substantial adverse health effects like heart problems and strokes."

Of course, caffeine "raises blood pressure and otherwise stresses the circulatory system" too.

Even if dieters are "likely to do more harm than good by taking ephedra," shouldn't that be their choice? Certainly many dieters do use ephedra productively.

Trebuchet

As Fryer's Kits' Trebuchet page points out, "the Trebuchet was a medieval siege weapon that hurled rocks at castle walls." Building a full-size trebuchet is a lot of work. They offer downloadable instructions for a tiny cardboard machine that "will hurl a grape 30 feet." Excellent.

How Santa Made Me an Atheist

I got a kick out of Julian Sanchez's How Santa Made Me an Atheist:

I don't remember clearly when my parents first told me about Santa Claus, but I do remember being skeptical. Flying reindeer? How was that possible? Bringing presents to every child on the planet? Surely that couldn't be done in a single night. Even if it could, how could you possibly fit enough presents on a sleigh without constantly running back to the North Pole for reloads? If someone had this kind of technology, why weren't we trying like crazy to replicate it?

I don't think my parents had expected these sorts of questions. They just looked at each other, seeming a bit surprised, and let it drop. Come Christmas day, they gave it one final attempt: "Look, Santa ate the cookies we left out." I considered that for a moment. I don't think I'd encountered Occam's Razor yet, but the first thing to occur to me was: "I bet Dad just ate them! That's more likely than flying reindeer." At which point they gave up.

I was slightly resentful at first — why were they trying to deceive me? I thought perhaps they'd hoped that the idea of a magical old man watching my every action, and doling out (or withholding) presents accordingly was some kind of threat to make me behave well. In the end, I concluded that probably that was what some parents were hoping to do — I knew the story was told to lots of kids — but that mine had just thought that it would be fun for me, a game of make-believe. That's why they'd just given up when I didn't seem inclined to play along.

Sometime soon after, when I started kindergarten, I first encountered the notion of "God" via another child. Again, I don't remember the specifics. But I remember thinking: "Oh, I know this game." I decided not to spoil the make-believe for the other kid. When he was older, surely his parents would explain that they hadn't been serious.

Rough Men Stand Ready

On my flight back from California, I sat across the aisle from a young man, obviously a Marine — lean, crew cut, tattoos of .223 M-16 rounds flanking a skull labelled "USMC" — and I was reminded of a famous Orwell quote:

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

Only I couldn't remember the exact quote, so I couldn't share it with my brother-in-law sitting next to me. When I looked it up, I discovered that Orwell may never have said it. The Wikiquote List of Misquotations explains:

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

Alternative: "We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us." [I've also seen it as "We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm."]

Notes: allegedly from Rough Men by George Orwell. There is no evidence in existence that Orwell ever wrote or uttered either of these versions of this idea. While these do bear some similarity to a comment made in an essay that Orwell wrote on Rudyard Kipling, the two statements above are considered to be illegitimate by Orwell scholars.

(Is it ironic that George Orwell would be quoted as saying something he never said? Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.)

A little more research found the quote from his essay on Kipling (from 1942):

Men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilised, are there to guard and feed them.

Also, I didn't realize/remember that "George Orwell" was a pseudonym for Eric Blair.

PowerPoint Is Evil

In PowerPoint Is Evil, Edward Tufte attacks "slideware":

In a business setting, a PowerPoint slide typically shows 40 words, which is about eight seconds' worth of silent reading material. With so little information per slide, many, many slides are needed. Audiences consequently endure a relentless sequentiality, one damn slide after another. When information is stacked in time, it is difficult to understand context and evaluate relationships. Visual reasoning usually works more effectively when relevant information is shown side by side. Often, the more intense the detail, the greater the clarity and understanding. This is especially so for statistical data, where the fundamental analytical act is to make comparisons.
[...]
At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play — very loud, very slow, and very simple.

Edward Tufte: Graphic of the Day

Edward Tufte's Graphic of the Day from February 10, 2002 caught my eye — it's about road and exit numbering. Why did this catch my eye? Well, I've been living in Pennsylvania and cursing the horrible freeway — pardon, turnpike — signs for a couple years now, including the numbered exits. Actually, numbering the exits isn't so bad, but not listing what exits are coming up (and how far they are) is bad. We never had exit numbers in California.

Then I visited for Christmas, and I saw that the Culver exit on the 5 (note to easterners: it's the 5) is now exit 99! Eek!

Anyway, what I didn't realize is that some states number exits consecutively, while others number them by distance. Numbering them by distance sounds...useful. And you don't have to renumber (or use A, B, etc.) when you add a new exit.

Something else I didn't realize: Pennsylvania is in the process of switching over from consecutive to distance-based exit numbers. Very interesting... (And it would explain all the "old exit" signs...)

Google Holiday Logos

I just discovered that Google has "a variety of logos commemorating holidays and events" — most banal, but some amusing. The logo for Escher's birthday could have been more...Escher-esque, but I still enjoyed it. I also enjoyed the logos for the 50th Anniversary of Understanding DNA, Michelangelo's birthday, Valentine's Day, Picasso's birthday (even though I don't enjoy Picasso's work), St. Patrick's Day, and Piet Mondrian's birthday.

Glutamine No Help for Dieting Athletes

Supposedly, glutamine, an amino acid, can help dieters maintain muscle mass while losing fat. Glutamine No Help for Dieting Athletes reports on a study with wrestlers that does not support that hypothesis:

In the present study, Finn and his colleagues set out to test the effect of glutamine in 18 college wrestlers who were enrolled in a 12-day weight-loss program. All athletes consumed the same high-protein diet, but some wrestlers also took glutamine supplements. The other athletes received an inactive placebo instead.

All participants lost a significant amount of weight during the study, researchers report. Although the aim was to lose fat, not muscle, all athletes lost similar amounts of fat-free mass.

In fact, glutamine supplements did not have a significant effect on how much muscle was maintained.

Of course, wrestlers on a 12-day crash diet lose tremendous amounts of water weight — and water weight is "lean" mass. You'd think the scientists would have taken that into account...

What I Learned During the Economic Slump

In What I Learned During the Economic Slump, David Pottruck, co-CEO of Charles Schwab draws a distinction between sales and service:

We like to say at Schwab that the difference between sales and service is relevance. If a client perceives us as presenting a solution to a problem he doesn't have, that is selling. That feels really bad, and it's a huge waste of time. On the other hand, if the client sees us as presenting a solution to a problem he does have, that's service. That's not sales.

Pottruck also comments on incentives:

One of the mistakes I made was thinking that, if I changed our incentive systems in certain fundamental ways, I would change behavior. What I've come to understand is that people do things because of lots of different motivations. Incentive systems alone can't do it.

People in sales jobs are very economically oriented and will typically respond enormously to changes in compensation. Many technologists, on the other hand, take pride in developing intellectual property, in working on the latest things. If you put such a person on technology maintenance, even if you pay him more, he won't be happy.

Another thing I've learned in the past two or three years is that we constantly underestimate how powerful recognition is. People will respond tremendously to recognition — especially in times like these, when people are feeling so bad about so many things. Feeding people's emotional souls is such an important thing. One of my guiding thoughts when I speak with employees, one on one or in large groups, is that they may forget exactly what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel.

Fear of Book Assassination Haunts Bibliophile's Musings

In Fear of Book Assassination Haunts Bibliophile's Musings, André Bernard reviews Nicholas Basbanes' A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World, a book that "examines the bonfires that have consumed entire centuries of man's musings on matters great and small":

In 1562, a Franciscan friar who had accompanied Spanish troops to Mexico ordered the burning of thousands of Mayan hieroglyphic books, in an attempt to eradicate the repository of local spiritual beliefs and to pave the way for Christianity. In one afternoon, practically the entire record of a civilization had been turned to ashes; only four codices are known to have survived. In 1914, the German Army invaded the Belgian city of Louvain, a treasure house of Gothic and Renaissance architecture. In an act of no military significance whatsoever, Louvain's magnificent library of 300,000 volumes, which included nearly a thousand irreplaceable illuminated manuscripts, was burned to the ground. ("At Louvain," said a man who watched it happen, "Germany disqualified itself as a nation of thinkers.") More recently, during its psychopathic reign in Cambodia in the mid-1970's, Pol Pot's regime destroyed nearly all of ancient Cambodia's manuscripts and monuments. In its rage against modernity and civilization, the Khmer Rouge went so far as to examine ordinary citizens for marks on the bridge of the nose, the telltale sign of reading glasses — which was enough to bring down a death sentence.

I'm surprised there are extant references to damnatio memoriae...

If books are not the most perishable products of human civilization, they have, throughout recorded history, attracted the homicidal attentions of every conquering army. In large-scale versions of the penalty the Romans called damnatio memoriae, a punishment for individuals found guilty of committing crimes against the state which involved erasing every reference — whether on stone, in a monument or on parchment — to the person in question, invaders have settled not just for mass murder of the local citizenry, but have indulged in the wholesale disappearance of every written trace of a culture (as the Taliban did to non-fundamentalist Afghans), a language (as the Normans did to the Saxons), a people (as the Romans did to the Etruscans). Early Christian and medieval monks attacked the memory of non-Christian culture with zealous efficiency.

Ooh, "bibliophilic tidbits":

And, of course, there's time for many bibliophilic tidbits. Here's a quick sample. The great English politician William Gladstone read an average of 250 books a year as an adult, and wrote an essay on how to design and arrange a home library. The Lindisfarne Gospels, the 10th-century Beowulf codex, the sole surviving copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the unique copy of William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman were all saved from destruction by the same man, 17th-century antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton. Not one literary or historical document of Etruscan origin has survived, not even in Greek or Roman translation. There is no known original manuscript of any work by Molière, nor have any poetry manuscripts by Edmund Spenser or Andrew Marvell ever been found. Charles Lamb included in his catalog of "books which are not books" — and therefore not readable — scientific treatises and almanacs. Norway has established a book repository in a series of tunnels hollowed deep into a mountainside in the Arctic Circle, where every book written in Norwegian is frigidly preserved, secure from the predations of the outside world.

The Loom: 10% Myth, 1% Fact?

In The Loom: 10% Myth, 1% Fact? Carl Zimmer explains the old "you only use 10% of your brain" myth:

In a nutshell, in the 1930s neurologists figured out that only 10% of the human cortex becomes active during sensory stimulation or the motor control of the body. So the other 90% was referred to as 'silent cortex.' This technical term doesn't mean that that 90% is useless, only that it is silent in these particular tasks, like walking and smelling. In fact, these other regions become active in other kinds of thought — such as making decisions and recalling memories. But that didn't stop the 10% figure from taking on a life of its own.

It turns out that that 10% figure is actually an overestimate:

By coincidence, the 10% story has been on my mind again recently. Over the summer I came across a fascinating paper in Current Biology by Peter Lennie of New York University. Lennie takes a look at how much energy the cortex uses to think. First, he calculates the total amount of energy used by the human cortex, based on recent neuroimaging studies. Then he calculates how much energy a single neuron in the cortex uses when it generates an electric impulse. And finally, he uses these figures to estimate how many neurons in the cortex can be active at any one time. His estimate? Around one percent.

Prospect Magazine - Albert Camus

Paul Barker discusses Albert Camus's life:

Camus's first and best-known novel, L'Étranger, written in his twenties, is a short moral tale, in the tradition of Voltairean contes, about a meaningless ('absurd') murder. Its flat short sentences have a permanent appeal to adolescent angst.

L'Étranger is one of the few novels I've read in French. "Its flat short sentences" didn't appeal so much to my adolescence as to my limited French comprehension.

I wouldn't expect these conditions to spawn a famous writer:

Camus was himself an outsider. Like the philosopher Jacques Derrida, he was Algerian-born. But Derrida was middle-class Jewish; Camus's background was humbler: the white working class of Algiers. His father was a wine company foreman, killed on the Marne in 1914, eight months after his son's birth. His mother, Spanish by origin, was illiterate and partly deaf. With her husband dead, she worked as a cleaner. Camus took his baths in a zinc tub, in a home without books.
[...]
For the settlers, in a province which was then administratively part of metropolitan France, Algeria was a Mediterranean California. Camus's early writings are suffused with the charms of sun, sea and sand. The Algerians — meaning the settlers — were, he wrote in his early twenties, "a race without a past, without tradition and yet not without poetry." The poetry largely consisted in "the cult of an admiration of the body." Algiers was then a colonists' city, with only 50,000 Arabs out of 220,000 inhabitants. Camus wrote dreamily about "the flowers and sports stadiums, the cool-legged girls." When he began to write seriously he worried about keeping a "fragile" balance between work and sun-worship.

It's hard to imagine Algeria as a Mediterranean California these days.

In 1957, Camus was offered and accepted the Nobel prize. He retained the frugality of his youth, never travelling first class on trains. For the Stockholm ceremony, he borrowed a dinner jacket; Francine borrowed a mink stole. At a question and answer session with students, he was asked about Algeria. He saiid, "I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice." From the left, Le Monde was delighted to give prominence to the quote.
[...]
Camus spent some of his Nobel money on a farmhouse in Provence, where he began a new novel, Le Premier Homme (The First Man). In 1959, after Christmas in the farmhouse with his family, he wrote fond letters to his current mistresses — two actresses and a Balmain model — saying he'd soon be back. On 3rd January 1960, he accepted a lift in his publisher Michel Gallimard's high-performance Facel Vega. The next day, after lunch, the car hit a roadside tree on the N5. Camus was killed instantly. In his briefcase were 144 pages of his draft novel, which was eventually published as he'd left it. It is about growing up as a poor white in Algeria.

I guess it's ironic that an obsessively frugal, consumptive, existentialist writer died in flashy car crash.

Waiting for Antar

In Waiting for Antar, Charles Paul Freund explains how Saddam presented himself as a courageous Arab redeemer, but he did not live up to the standard set by heroes like Antar:

The historic and cultural model of the courageous Arab redeemer could hardly stand in greater contrast. That figure is fearless, whether in face of the enemy or of death itself. He is magnanimous in victory, pious before God, noble, generous, and just to his own people. His soul is as filled with poetry as his sword is stained with the blood of the unworthy. There is a long line of fictional and historical figures who embody this role in Arab cultural artifacts, both traditional oral epics and modern TV serials, from Abu Bakr to Haroun al Rachid to Saladdin. For that matter, the fearless but noble Arab warrior even turns up in medieval European literature, appearing, for example, in Boccaccio. The original model, however, appears to be a black pre-Islamic Bedouin warrior known as Antar.

Note to self: read Boccaccio.

Antar is a remarkable character; his saga was recited in Arab squares and coffeehouses for centuries, absorbing Islamic values despite predating the coming of Islam. Among the rousing adventures of this poet-warrior was saving the Rome of the Caesars from attack by Byzantine Greeks, enemies of the Arabs. He was so noble that even the Prophet Muhammad is reported to have expressed a wish to have known him. When Westerners first encountered the Antar epic in the 19th century, they swooned, proclaiming the work to be the Arabic Iliad. The saga itself has shrunk in recent years; Westerners have nearly forgotten him, and Arabs now are likely to treat Antar's adventures as children's literature. Antar's monomythic shadow, however, is a long one, and has fallen across the shallow myth of Saddam repeatedly.

Note to self: read Antar epic too.

Antar's own death, by the way, is worth pausing over, because in one bizarre detail it actually overlaps Saddam's ignominious capture. Here's Antar's death: Antar is killed by an old enemy whom he long ago blinded, but who has learned to shoot arrows by sound. This enemy attacks Antar when the hero is vulnerable: when Antar exits a feast to urinate. Though severely wounded, Antar silently tracks his blind enemy and kills him. As Antar is leading his band to safety, however, they are again attacked. To save his men, he asks to be set one last time on his horse, with his lance in his hand. The enemy attackers, spying him, don't dare approach. At length, however, they come near, and seeing that Antar is dead, they bury him respectfully.

The screenplay practically writes itself. Hmm...

Here's where that story ties in with Saddam's capture:

What has this to do with Saddam? Time magazine has published a report about Saddam's first interrogation, and it reveals the one thing that Saddam might have picked up from the whole Antar saga: a concern about urinating. According to Time, "When asked 'How are you?' said the official, Saddam responded, 'I am sad because my people are in bondage.' When offered a glass of water by his interrogators, Saddam replied, 'If I drink water I will have to go to the bathroom and how can I use the bathroom when my people are in bondage?'"

How can I pee when my people need me? You'll find a way, Saddam.

Cookie Sale Shutdowns

Ouch. On her Dynamist Blog, Virginia Postrel mentions some harsh satire by conservative students at SMU:

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, on whose board I serve, is shaming college administrators over their latest anti-satire campaigns: shutting down conservative students' bake sales, at which cookies cost less for blacks and Latinos than for whites and Asians.

Cats Try to Eat Incapacitated Owner

I don't trust cats. From Cats Try to Eat Incapacitated Owner:

A group of hungry cats began to eat their 86-year-old owner after she suffered an apparent stroke and couldn't get up for nearly a week, officials said Thursday.
[...]
The cats, apparently without food for that time, also tried to eat Lowrie's small dog, said Jackie David, a spokeswoman for the city Animal Services Department. The terrier showed signs of hypothermic shock, severe dehydration, respiratory illness and was later euthanized, she said. One of the cats, a kitten, was found dead.

275-Pound Prostitute Strips Attacker

275-Pound Prostitute Strips Attacker:

A 140-pound rapist met his match in an angry, 275-pound prostitute, police said.

Adrian Castillo Ramirez allegedly tried to sexually assault a 24-year-old Bakersfield prostitute who was nearly twice his weight.

But she took his knife, stripped him naked and paraded him in front of other prostitutes, after asking how many of them had ever been forced into sex at knifepoint. Then she tried to take him — still naked — to the police station, reports said.

Castillo was charged with failing to register as a sex offender, and with committing forcible sex acts on the 24-year-old and on a 37-year-old woman in a previous incident. He was convicted of four counts of rape in 1988.

Castillo pleaded innocent Wednesday, and is being held on $250,000 bail, police said.

McLanguage Meets the Dictionary

McLanguage Meets the Dictionary:

McDonald's wants Merriam-Webster to take its McJob and shove it. McDonald's CEO Jim Cantalupo is steamed that the latest edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines 'McJob' as low-paying, requiring little skill, and providing little opportunity for advancement. Three years ago The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language ran a similar definition, and The Oxford English Dictionary includes 'unstimulating' in the mix of descriptors branding McJobs as dead-end.

McCEO isn't a McJob — but asking "Would you like fries with that?"...yeah, that's a McJob.

Jim Cantalupo isn't the first person to object to what he feels is bad language in the dictionary, nor is he the first to tell lexicographers how to define their words. For example, in 1872 A.S. Solomons protested G. & C. Merriam's definition of the verb "jew" as "to cheat." And in 1997 a grass-roots protest insisted that Merriam-Webster drop the word "nigger" from the dictionary. The NAACP joined that protest, calling for the dictionary to remove any reference to race in the word's definition.

Remove race from the definition?

Wildly successful business phenomena like McDonald's have a way of working their way into our language as well as our culture. In the early 20th century, Coca-Cola sued to prevent the marketing of other drinks with "cola" in their name, winning judgments against upstarts like Chero-Cola, Clio-Cola, and El-Cola but losing against Cherry-Cola, Dixie-Cola, and Koke, all of them long gone. Coke also lost its bid to prevent 7-Up from calling itself "the Un-Cola." One result of Atlanta-based Coke's domination of the cola industry is that "coke" and "co' cola" have become generic terms in the South for any soft drink. Another soft drink, Moxie, won a suit against the competitor Noxie, only to see "moxie" enter the language as an ordinary word meaning energy, guts, or chutzpah. Shredded wheat, thermos, and zipper all began as trademarked terms that morphed into everyday words as well.

I always wondered where "moxie" came from.

When I crawl into the airport early Saturday morning, I plan on asking the girl behind the McDonald's counter for Eggs McMuffin:

Ever eager to burnish its public image, the McDonald's Corporation once hired a public-relations firm to ascertain the correct plural of the Egg McMuffin. Perhaps they were hoping to gain approval for Eggs McMuffin, on the analogy of the more upmarket eggs Benedict. But that quest went nowhere. As far as I know, the company never ruled on what eaters of the Egg McMuffin should order if they want more than one.

Baron makes a point: "Dictionaries don't tell us how to use our words, they describe how we use them."

Q: What will happen when a national political machine can fit on a laptop? A: See below

In Q: What will happen when a national political machine can fit on a laptop? A: See below, Everett Ehrlich applies one of economist Coase's insights to modern, Internet-era politics:

Back in 1937, an economist named Ronald Coase realized something that helped explain the rise of modern corporations — and which just might explain the coming decline of the American two-party political system.

Coase's insight was this: The cost of gathering information determines the size of organizations.

It sounds abstract, but in the past it meant that complex tasks undertaken on vast scales required organizational behemoths. This was as true for the Democratic and Republican parties as it was for General Motors. Choosing and marketing candidates isn't so different from designing, manufacturing and selling automobiles.

But the Internet has changed all that in one crucial respect that wouldn't surprise Coase one bit. To an economist, the "trick" of the Internet is that it drives the cost of information down to virtually zero. So according to Coase's theory, smaller information-gathering costs mean smaller organizations. And that's why the Internet has made it easier for small folks, whether small firms or dark-horse candidates such as Howard Dean, to take on the big ones.

For contrast, Ehrlich shares this anecdote:

Consider, for example, the first "modern" political campaign — the Whig campaign for William Henry Harrison in 1840. Apart from some success as an Indian killer, Harrison had minimal credentials, but the Whigs figured out how to use the tremendous organizational apparatus of their party to promote him. They fabricated the image of Harrison as the "log cabin and hard cider" candidate, despite his more patrician roots, and used the party organization to enforce discipline around the fabrication — to get everyone to say the same thing at the same time. In America's first political mass media stunt, they constructed a 10-foot-high ball of twine, wood and tin, covered it with Whig political slogans, and rolled it first from Cleveland to Columbus and then from town to town across the country (hence the expression "Keep the ball rolling").

Commonwealth Club Speech

Michael Crichton's Commonwealth Club Speech may make up for Congo:

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people — the best people, the most enlightened people — do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

It gets better:

There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?

And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.

How about the human condition in the rest of the world? The Maori of New Zealand committed massacres regularly. The dyaks of Borneo were headhunters. The Polynesians, living in an environment as close to paradise as one can imagine, fought constantly, and created a society so hideously restrictive that you could lose your life if you stepped in the footprint of a chief. It was the Polynesians who gave us the very concept of taboo, as well as the word itself. The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true. That anyone still believes it, 200 years after Rousseau, shows the tenacity of religious myths, their ability to hang on in the face of centuries of factual contradiction.

This reminded me of a friend of ours who got DEET "burns" in Malaysia:

And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of days, you will quickly be disabused of all your romantic fantasies. Take a trek through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have festering sores on your skin, you'll have bugs all over your body, biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears, you'll have infections and sickness and if you're not with somebody who knows what they're doing, you'll quickly starve to death. But chances are that even in the jungles of Borneo you won't experience nature so directly, because you will have covered your entire body with DEET and you will be doing everything you can to keep those bugs off you.

Definitely read the whole article.

Annals of Homosexuality: From Greek to Grim to Gay

In Annals of Homosexuality: From Greek to Grim to Gay (note: annals, two ns), Edward Rothstein reviews Louis Crompton's Homosexuality and Civilization:

It begins in the gladness of early Greece, where homosexuality had an "honored place" for more than a millennium and concludes with the madness of 19th-century Europe. In between is what Mr. Crompton calls a "kaleidoscope of horrors" lasting more than 1,500 years. In the 13th century, a French law stated: "Whoever is proved to be a sodomite shall lose his testicles. And if he does it a second time, he shall lose his member. And if he does it a third time, he shall be burned." Beginning in 1730 in the Netherlands, 250 trials of "sodomites" took place, followed by at least 75 executions. Between 1806 and 1835, 60 homosexuals were hanged in England.

I guess those first two punishments make it clear what role the "criminal" plays in his third offense...

But what led to this "kaleidoscope of horrors"? In ancient Greece, homosexuality was philosophically praised and institutionally sanctioned, associated with virtues of courage and mentorship. In ancient Rome, it was primarily cultivated in relationships between masters and slaves, but homosexual behavior was common to Pompey, Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavius. "Of the first 15 emperors," Gibbon pointed out, "Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct."

I'm having trouble looking beyond my 21st-century American worldview.

Mr. Crompton argues that Christianity created the most radical change in attitudes toward homosexuality. "The debt owed by civilization to Christianity is enormous," he writes; but so, he believes, have been Christianity's sins. In Japan, for example, before the mid-19th-century Western influence, homosexuality was "an honored way of life among the country's religious and military leaders so that its acceptance paralleled, and in some respects even surpassed, ancient Athens." It was common among Buddhist sages, part of samurai culture and an accepted aspect of the Kabuki theater world.

Homosexuality common in monasteries, the army, and the theater? No! Christianity demonized homosexuality? Seriously, I find it hard to consider Crompton's theory groundbreaking.

Mr. Crompton traces Christian hostility to Leviticus, which may have been written around 550 B.C., at the very time that homoerotic poetry was thriving in Greece. It mandated death for homosexual acts. Mr. Crompton suggests that this law was an attempt to differentiate the Jews from Mediterranean cults in which transvestite priests, eunuchs and sexual activity played a central role in ritual and worship.

At least church was entertaining back in the Mediterranean cults...

Here's some history I never read in high school:

Judging from this history, though, prohibition seems to have been unable to quash the practice in any social class; in the European aristocracy, at any rate, it flourished. In 1610, when Louis XIII came to the French throne, Mr. Crompton notes, "one `sodomite,' James I, ruled England, Scotland, and Ireland; another, Rudolph II, presided over the Holy Roman Empire; and France had its second homosexual king within a generation."

I suspect the French and English have been saying that about one another's rulers for a long, long time.

Tanzania Rats Learn to Detect TB Bacteria

I have to admit, I love these trained-animal stories. From Tanzania Rats Learn to Detect TB Bacteria:

The giant pouched rats that have been trained to sniff out land mines in Africa are now learning to detect tuberculosis bacteria in human saliva with the help of a grant from the World Bank.
[...]
In his proposal, Weetjens said the rat, whose Latin name is Cricetomys gambianus, can sniff 120-150 human saliva samples in lab dishes in 30 minutes compared to the day's work it takes for a human technician to analyze 20 samples. The rat stops in front of samples that smell like TB and waits to be rewarded but walks past samples where TB is not present.
[...]
The first batch of 12 rats trained to detect land mines are now at work in neighboring Mozambique and so far have sniffed out 20, Weetjens said.

Pretty women scramble men's ability to assess the future

Guys take stupid risks when they see a pretty woman? Pretty women scramble men's ability to assess the future:

Both male and female students at McMaster University were shown pictures of the opposite sex of varying attractiveness taken from the website "Hot or Not". The 209 students were then offered the chance to win a reward. They could either accept a cheque for between $15 and $35 tomorrow or one for $50-$75 at a variable point in the future.

Wilson and Daly found that male students shown the pictures of averagely attractive women showed exponential discounting of the future value of the reward. This indicated that they had made a rational decision. When male students were shown pictures of pretty women, they discounted the future value of the reward in an "irrational" way — they would opt for the smaller amount of money available the next day rather than wait for a much bigger reward.

Women, by contrast, made equally rational decisions whether they had been shown pictures of handsome men or those of average attractiveness.

"We have not elucidated the psychological mechanisms mediating our results," says Margo Wilson. "But we hypothesise that viewing pictures of pretty women was mildly arousing, activating neural mechanisms associated with cues of sexual opportunity."

Tommaso Pizzari, an evolutionary biologist at Leeds University, offers another possible explanation: "If there's the prospect of getting a very attractive partner it may pay a man to take more risks than if an average partner was available."

He told New Scientist: "If this is a response to sexual selection then you would expect men who are less attractive to take more risks. If you have many attractive potential partners then it does not pay to take risks. If you are less attractive, with few potential partners, then it pays to take risks."

Advise to a liberal-arts major

Alex Tabarrok, in his Advise to a liberal-arts major, answers this letter (originally written to Marilyn vos Savant, Parade, Dec. 7, 2003):

Many of my friends and I are intelligent, liberal-arts graduate who, due to an economic system that glorifies science, medicine, business, and law, are toiling as secretaries and retail clerks. Is there any hope for the philosopher, writer, dancer, poet or sculptor to find paying work in Western society? Or are we doomed to relegate our talents to hobbies while working in drudgery until we die, just to pay the bills?

Tabarrok's response:

First, stop whining. You had a choice of poetry or business and you chose poetry. If your love for the subject is not enough to make up for the loss in income then go back to school. Two, stop blaming 'an economic system' that glorifies science etc. and notice that these jobs pay highly because the skills they require are rare and people are willing to pay for the product of these jobs. If you produce something that people want you will be paid highly also but don't expect other people to pay so that you can fulfill your dreams of writing poetry that no one wants to read. Third, what do you mean by it's difficult to find work for the philosopher, writer, dancer, poet or sculptor in 'Western society.' Do you know of any society at any time or place that has offered more for the arts? A retail clerk who does sculpture on the side has a far higher income than does your typical sculptor working in India. Try visiting most of the rest of the world — where science and business are not glorified — if you want to truly understand 'drudgery.'

The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick

The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick examines how Philip K. Dick's science fiction stories have practically taken over Hollywood:

Like the babbling psychics who predict future crimes in Minority Report, Dick was a precog. Lurking within his amphetamine-fueled fictions are truths that have only to be found and decoded. In a 1978 essay he wrote: "We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives. I distrust their power. It is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."

It didn't start off quite so auspiciously:

Dick's career in movies did not begin with a bang. It was 1977, and a small-time actor named Brian Kelly wanted to option the 9-year-old novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? For a mere $2,500, he got it. "The works of Philip K. Dick were not exactly in demand," recalls the writer's New York literary agent, Russell Galen, "and for Phil" — then 49 and living in suburban Orange County — "that was enough to make the difference between a good year and a bad year." Kelly's partner wrote a screenplay and shopped it around. Eventually it landed on the desk of Ridley Scott, who'd just directed Alien. Scott brought in a new writer and sent it to Alan Ladd Jr., one of the top players in Hollywood.

Just a few months before [Blade Runner]'s release, Dick suffered a massive stroke. [...] Before Dick died, Shusett bought the film rights to "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," a story about a nebbishy clerk with dreams of going to Mars. He retitled it Total Recall and took it to Dino De Laurentiis, who put it into development.

This part is pure Hollywood:

Total Recall languished for years before all the elements — producer, director, star — came together. At one point, Richard Dreyfuss was attached. At another, David Cronenberg was going to direct and wanted William Hurt for the lead. "I worked on it for a year and did about 12 drafts," Cronenberg recalls. "Eventually we got to a point where Ron Shusett said, 'You know what you've done? You've done the Philip K. Dick version.' I said, 'Isn't that what we're supposed to be doing?' He said, 'No, no, we want to do Raiders of the Lost Ark Go to Mars.'" Cronenberg moved on. Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted to star, but De Laurentiis refused: Even in an overamped Hollywood bastardization, he couldn't see Schwarzenegger in the part. Instead, it went to Patrick Swayze, with Bruce Beresford directing. They were building sets in Australia when De Laurentiis' company went bankrupt.

This gave Schwarzenegger his chance. He got Carolco, the high-flying mini-studio behind the Rambo series, to buy the property, and Paul Verhoeven to direct it. The henpecked clerk named Quail became a muscle-bound construction worker named Quaid, and a new ending was written to make up for what many filmmakers see as the problem with Dick's short stories: their lack of a third act that will take a movie to 90 minutes or more. But while Verhoeven's film was an interplanetary shoot-'em-up that bore little resemblance to Dick's story, it did retain the tale's essential ambiguity: At the end, we're not sure whether the main character actually went to Mars or only thought he did, thanks to some memory implants he bought. "This was extremely innovative, coming from a Hollywood studio," says Verhoeven. "To dare to say, Everything you see could be a dream, or everything you see could be reality, and we won't tell you which is true — I thought that was pretty sensational."

It sounds like Verhoeen hasn't seen a little cult classic from the late 1930's...called The Wizard of Oz.

Jonathan Yardley on Nero

Jonathan Yardley reviews Edward Champlin's Nero and quotes this "dossier" of the emperor:

"Nero murdered his mother, and Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Nero also slept with his mother. Nero married and executed one stepsister, executed his other stepsister, raped and murdered his stepbrother. In fact, he executed or murdered most of his close relatives. He kicked his pregnant wife to death. He castrated and then married a freedman. He married another freedman, this time himself playing the bride. He raped a Vestal Virgin. He melted down the household gods of Rome for their cash value. After incinerating the city in 64, he built over much of downtown Rome with his own vast Xanadu, the Golden House. He fixed the blame for the Great Fire on the Christians, some of whom he hung up as human torches to light his gardens at night. He competed as a poet, a singer, an actor, a herald and a charioteer, and he won every contest, even when he fell out of his chariot at the Olympic Games. He alienated and persecuted much of the elite, neglected the army, and drained the treasury. And he committed suicide at the age of 30, one step ahead of the executioner. His last words were, 'What an artist dies in me!'"

So at least the Neronian legend tells us.

It seems that no one explained to Nero that Christmas wouldn't be special if it came every day:

What are usually scornfully referred to as bread and circuses were in fact immensely important to the Roman people. December's Saturnalia, in which the people recreated "for a brief time the happy Golden Age when Saturn had ruled Italy," was enjoyed by all, and its "potential appeal to the leaders of society as a form of social control is clear: along with one or two other similar festivals in the Roman calendar it could offer a safety valve, a time when the normally unthinkable was possible, a time of leisure and amusement for everyone." Nero, who loved the Saturnalia, enlarged it: "by freeing saturnalian behavior from its strict seasonal confines, by redefining it, by introducing it deliberately into other parts of Roman life, Nero not only amused himself, he drew emperor and people, ruler and ruled, closer together. Saturnalian behavior made him popular."

War After the War

War After the War, by George Packer, reports on the situation in Iraq. I enjoyed this description of CPA headquarters:

The Coalition Provisional Authority, or C.P.A., is headquartered in the Republican Palace, about a mile beyond the Assassin's Gate, down a road of eucalyptus trees, past bombed state buildings and concrete barriers. The palace, protected by a high iron gate and sandbagged machine-gun positions, is a sprawling two-story office building in the Babylonian-Fascist style favored by Saddam, with Art Deco eagles spanning the doorways. Evenly spaced along the top of the façade are four identical twenty-foot gray busts of Saddam, staring straight ahead, his eyes framed by an imperial helmet. Beneath these Ozymandian tributes, twelve hundred officials of the C.P.A. go about the business of running the country. Getting in to see one of them, a senior adviser to Bremer acknowledged, "is like a jailbreak in reverse." Though it is in the geographical heart of ochre-colored, crumbling Baghdad, the C.P.A. sits in deep isolation. There are legitimate security reasons for this: on November 4th, the compound was hit by mortar fire, and four people were injured.

This scenario sounds like it's out of a spy novel:

In Ramadi, a man who speaks broken English around other Iraqis suddenly pulls Prior aside and whispers in flawless English, "I am an American, take me with you." When Prior tries to learn more, the man reverts to broken English and then clams up. Another man on another day approaches a soldier and, speaking perfect English, warns him not to trust Iraqis — that things are not what they seem. He disappears before the soldier can get more information. Prior and his first sergeant, Mark Lahan, track down the man at home with his family. Now using broken English, the man tells them that everything is fine.

In another mysterious incident, an Iraqi approaches Lahan and abruptly asks, "How are things in Baghdad? Have there been any suicide bombings? Have any Americans been killed?" Soon afterward, the guerrilla war starts.

This is a very small sample of the full article.

Enjoyment

Enjoyment examines a number of writers and the drugs they used — and concludes with this:

Drugs provided a marvellously adaptable and popular subject matter for authors — as sexy, sensational or sordid as they wanted. It has been a more mixed story for literary drug users. Although authors who took drugs for pure pleasure were the most criticised, they usually did the least harm to themselves. Druggy authors trying to turn themselves into transcendental voyagers virtually always made fools of themselves. And some writers who used substances both to cope and to unwind, found they couldn't handle the stuff, and did themselves harm. Others took the pills and went on working fine. Overall, then, authors were pretty much like everyone else.

I'll stick to caffeine. In small doses.

Who Invented the Airplane? A Brazilian, of Course

Who Invented the Airplane? A Brazilian, of Course:

Ask anyone in Brazil who invented the airplane and they will say Alberto Santos-Dumont, a 5-foot-4-inch bon vivant who was as known for his aerial prowess as he was for his dandyish dress and high society life in Belle Epoque Paris.
[...]
An idealist who believed flight was spiritually soothing, Santos-Dumont financed his lavish lifestyle and aerial experiments in Paris with the inheritance his coffee-farming father had advanced him as a young man. Always impeccably dressed, he regularly took a gourmet lunch with him on his ballooning expeditions.

But it was on Nov. 12, 1906, when Santos-Dumont flew a kite-like contraption with boxy wings called the 14-Bis some 722 feet on the outskirts of Paris. It being the first public flight in the world, he was hailed as the inventor of the airplane all over Europe.

It was only later that the secretive Orville and Wilbur Wright proved they had beaten Santos-Dumont at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, three years earlier on Dec. 17.
[...]
Henrique Lins de Barros, a Brazilian physicist and Santos-Dumont expert, argues that the Wright brothers' flight did not fulfill the conditions that had been set up at the time to distinguish a true flight from a prolonged hop.

But Santos-Dumont's flight did meet the criteria, which in essence meant he took off unassisted, publicly flew a predetermined length in front of experts and then landed safely.
[...]
Brazilians also claim that the Wrights in 1903 launched their Flyer with a catapult or at an incline, thereby disqualifying it from being a true airplane because it did not take off on its own.

Even Santos-Dumont experts like Lins de Barros concede this is wrong. But he claims that the strong, steady winds at Kitty Hawk were crucial for the Flyer's take-off, disqualifying the flight because there is no proof it could lift off on its own.

Peter Jakab, chairman of the aeronautics division at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington and a Wright brothers expert, says such claims are preposterous.

By the time Santos-Dumont got around to his maiden flight the Wright brothers had already flown numerous times, including one in which they flew 24 miles in 40 minutes.
[...]
At his summer home in the Brazilian mountain town of Petropolis, tour guides perpetuate myths about Santos-Dumont -- such as how he invented the wristwatch.

Santos-Dumont experts deny that assertion, although they concede he was probably the first male civilian to use a watch after asking his friend Louis Cartier to make him a timepiece he could use while flying. Previously, only royalty and soldiers had used watches.

To this day, you can still buy the Santos-model Cartier watch for only a couple thousand dollars.

I may need to pick up Wings of Madness (a biography mentioned in the article).

Why the Sky Was Red in Munch's 'The Scream'

When I read the title of Why the Sky Was Red in Munch's 'The Scream', I assumed it would be about some obscure neurological condition. I didn't expect it to report that Munch's locale actually experienced red skies the year he painted 'The Scream':

For those who have ever wondered why the sky was a lurid red in 'The Scream' — Edvard Munch's painting of modern angst — astronomers have an answer. They blame it on a volcanic eruption half a world away.

In the first detailed analysis of what inspired the painting, an article published on Tuesday in Sky and Telescope pinpointed the location in Norway where Munch and his friends were walking when the artist saw the blood-red sky depicted in the 1893 painting, and offered an explanation for why the sky seemed to be aflame.

Donald Olson, a physics and astronomy professor at Texas State University, and his colleagues determined that debris thrown into the atmosphere by the great eruption at the island of Krakatoa, in modern Indonesia, created vivid red twilights in Europe from November 1883 through February 1884.

The local newspaper in what is now Oslo reported that the phenomenon was widely seen, the astronomers said.

"One of the high points of our research trip to Oslo came when we rounded a bend in the road and realized we were standing in the exact spot where Munch had been 120 years ago," Olson recalled in a statement.

"It was very satisfying to stand in the exact spot where an artist had his experience," he said. "The real importance of finding the location, though, was to determine the direction of view in the painting. We could see that Munch was looking to the southwest — exactly where the Krakatoa twilights appeared in the winter of 1883-84."

Life Can Be Awful

Life Can Be Awful gives a few examples of the honest reporting The Economist provides:

• In the provinces of Afghanistan, where virtually no modern medical care is available, girls usually get engaged at ten, are usually married at 12, and usually start giving birth at 14. These girl/women have the highest rates of maternal mortality ever recorded — 500 times higher than the rate in developed countries. Superstition and bizarre traditions run rampant. Midwives refuse to tie off umbilical cords; babies are born into bowls of dirt; and one way people have of trying to cure a woman's infections is by placing dead mice in her vagina.


• The country of Congo has had a five year war, in which over 3 million people have perished.


• Canaan Banana, the first president of Zimbabwe, just died. He was a mere figurehead, apparently, with a light workload that left him "plenty of time for his hobby, which was raping his male attendants."


• Kenya's legal system has long been a joke, even to Kenyans. In the late 1980s, a chief justice "took his trousers off, balanced a shoe on his head and goose-stepped around the high-court car park chanting pro-government slogans." Justice comes at a literal price: "$250 to escape a rape charge, and $500 for murder." One investigation concluded that "only three of the country's 310 judges were neither corrupt nor incompetent."

A Biological Understanding of Human Nature

A Biological Understanding of Human Nature examines Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature:

The main question is: 'Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage? Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications to the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?' This idea has been met with demonstrations, denunciations, picketings, and comparisons to Nazism, both from the right and from the left. And these reactions affect both the day-to-day conduct of science and the public appreciation of the science. By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.
[...]
In The Blank Slate, he notes "that there is a quasi-religious theory of human nature that is prevalent among pundits and intellectuals, which includes both empirical assumptions about how the mind works and a set of values that people hang on those assumptions. The theory has three parts".

One is the doctrine of "the blank slate": that we have no inherent talents or temperaments, because the mind is shaped completely by the environment�parenting, culture, and society.

"The second is "the noble savage": that evil motives are not inherent to people but come from corrupting social institutions.

The third is "the ghost in the machine", that the most important part of us is somehow independent of our biology, so that our ability to have experiences and make choices can't be explained by our physiological makeup and evolutionary history.

These three ideas are increasingly being challenged by the sciences of the mind, brain, genes, and evolution," he says, "but they are held as much for their moral and political uplift as for any empirical rationale. People think that these doctrines are preferable on moral grounds and that the alternative is forbidden territory that we should avoid at all costs".

Secrets and Thighs

Secrets and Thighs, by Ed Halter, offers "A history of celebrity sex tapes, real and fake, from Joan Crawford to Paris Hilton" — all in a very serious journalistic tone:

The distant seeds of celebrity porn took root in 19th-century literary erotica attributed to famous authors, such as the mock-epic Don Leon, claimed to have been penned by Lord Byron as a record of his notorious exploits, or the explicitly homosexual Victorian novel Teleny, long said to have been written by Oscar Wilde. After Hollywood invented the movie star in the early 20th century, Tijuana Bibles satisfied a new desire to see screen deities stripped bare. These crudely drawn comic-book leaflets depicted stars like Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, and Clark Gable in various farcical trysts.

Hardcore porn films have existed at least since the teens, circulated through private clubs and wealthy collectors. Ancient Hollywood gossip has it that Joan Crawford acted in several early stag films, including some with lesbian scenes. But one of the earliest star-attributed films to circulate widely was a nameless one-reel nudie loop purporting to depict a young Marilyn Monroe, who would have shot it around 1948, prior to her posing nude for the inaugural issue of Playboy. In the film, a lone young woman does a striptease, rolls an apple across her chest, and then sips a soda. Later dubbed The Apple Knockers and the Coke, it was distributed to colleges and cinemas in the early '70s by Grove Films, packaged in a collection of vintage erotic shorts and experimental works like Carolee Schneemann's Fuses. Today, it's recognized that Apple Knockers and several other so-called Monroe porn films depict another early Playboy model named Arline Hunter.

One Monroe stag film remains in dispute, however. Also dated from 1948, this unnamed 16mm hardcore short shows a Monroe-ringer screwing a mustached man on a couch. According to a 1980 Penthouse cover story, a print was discovered that year by a Swedish photographer and subsequently publicized in adult magazines and tabloids worldwide. "Here, in grainy celluloid," Penthouse wrote next to copious frame-enlargements, "may well be the still unglamorized sex goddess the public never knew, before plastic surgeons, stylists, and designers transformed her into the mythical Marilyn Monroe. It's a thought to fire the imagination of every man who ever dreamed of her, a fantasy come to fruition." Another print of probably the same film garnered headlines in industry trades when it surfaced at a Spanish festival for film collectors in 1997. Those who argue the actress is Monroe point to declassified FBI files from 1965 detailing that Joe DiMaggio offered $25,000 for a print of a "French-type" movie depicting Monroe "in unnatural acts with an unknown male." Its authenticity seemed likely enough for Hollywood's Erotic Museum to purchase a print, now kept in its collection alongside artwork by Picasso and Tom of Finland.

About Last Night

About Last Night makes a sad point:

I see that Master and Commander has tanked. Not in absolute terms: a $67.5 million gross in the first three weeks of release would be perfectly respectable under normal circumstances. Unfortunately, Master and Commander cost $135 million, stars Russell Crowe, and got hysterically enthusiastic reviews. So why isn't it doing better? A whole lot better? The answer is to be found in The Wall Street Journal's post-Thanksgiving report on this year's holiday films, which declared with blunt finality that 'the adult-skewing audience it is pitched toward hasn't responded strongly enough.'

That rumble you hear in the middle distance is the sound of doom for big-budget adult movies, which were already sick unto death and have now officially straight-lined. If a film with all the advantages of Master and Commander can't do any better than $67.5 million after three weeks, don't expect any remotely similar project to get the green light. Expensive movies, like Trix, are for kids.

I hope it makes plenty of money on DVD. I definitely agree with this point:

Especially now that large-screen TVs are making it easier to watch films at home under more visually advantageous circumstances, I doubt that over-30 moviegoers will continue to subject themselves to the unpleasantries of trips to the local gigaplex. Intimate films like Lost in Translation and The Station Agent gain little or nothing when you view them in a theater, surrounded by cell-phone addicts and other freaks and morons.

Navy and Marine Rules for Gun Fighting

I can't vouch for the authenticiy of these Navy and Marine Rules for Gun Fighting, but I enjoyed them:

USMC Rules For Gun Fighting

1. Bring a gun. Preferably, bring at least two guns. Bring all of your friends who have guns.


2. Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. Ammo is cheap. Life is expensive.


3. Only hits count. A close miss is still a miss.


4. If your shooting stance is good, you're probably not moving fast enough nor using cover correctly.


5. Move away from your attacker. Distance is your friend. (Lateral and diagonal movements are preferred.)


6. If you can choose what to bring to a gunfight, bring a long gun and a friend with a long gun.


7. In ten years nobody will remember the details of caliber, stance, or tactics.


8. They will only remember who lived.


9. If you are not shooting, you should be communicating, reloading, and running.


10. Accuracy is relative: most combat shooting standards will be more dependent on "pucker factor" than the inherent accuracy of the gun.


11. Use a gun that works every time.


12. Someday someone may kill you with your own gun, but they should have to beat you to death with it because it is empty.


13. Always cheat = always win. The only unfair fight is the one you lose.


14. Have a plan.


15. Have a back-up plan, because the first one won't work.


16. Use cover and concealment as much as possible.


17. Flank your adversary when possible. Protect yours.


18. Don't drop your guard.


19. Always tactically reload and threat scan 360 degrees.


20. Watch their hands. Hands kill. (In God we trust. Everyone else, keep your hands where I can see them).


21. Decide to be aggressive enough, quickly enough.


22. The faster you finish the fight, the less shot up you will get.


23. Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.


24. Be courteous to everyone, friendly to no one.


25. Do not attend a gunfight with a handgun, the caliber of which does not start with a "4".

Navy Rules for Gun Fighting

1. Go to Sea


2. Send the Marines


3. Drink Coffee