A (slightly) reassuring fact

I definitely remember hearing about how a penny could kill somebody if dropped from a skyscraper. A (slightly) reassuring fact (slightly) reassures me that this is an urban myth:

A penny dropped from the Empire State Building would not kill someone standing below, most likely. The observation deck is 1050 feet high, and the penny would reach a maximum velocity of 57 miles an hour after falling 500 feet. That's enough to hurt pretty bad, but only a very very lucky (unlucky) shot would kill you. Most importantly of all, there is an updraft. Tossed coins generally land on the setback roof of floor 80.

Reward Mechanism Involved In Addiction Likely Regulates Pair Bonds Between Monogamous Animals

I'm certainly addicted to my prairie vole. Reward Mechanism Involved In Addiction Likely Regulates Pair Bonds Between Monogamous Animals:

The reward mechanism involved in addiction appears to regulate lifelong social or pair bonds between monogamous mating animals, according to a Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN) study of prairie voles published in the January 19 edition of the Journal of Comparative Neurology. The finding could have implications for understanding the basis of romantic love and disorders of the ability to form social attachments, such as autism and schizophrenia.

Best non-fiction books of the twentieth century

Best non-fiction books of the twentieth century reports on some recent "100 Best" book lists:

Here is a left-wing list. Here is a National Review list, with Hayek and Robert Conquest near the top. Here are two Random House lists. The critics elevate Henry Adams, William James, and Booker T. Washington. The readers favor Ayn Rand, L. Ron Hubbard, and John Lott. The readers' list has all kind of libertarian books, including David Boaz and Tibor Machan.

I find it deeply amusing that the top two books on the Random House reader's list are The Virtue of Selfishness, by Ayn Rand, and Dianetics, by L. Ron Hubbard. As a rule, the reader's list is full of highly ideological texts — a surprisingly large number of libertarian texts, many left-wing texts, and a few conservative texts. Naturally, the National Review list is full of conservative texts, including many Christian works. The left-wing list seems almost laughable — at least to me.

Teen Called Weakling; Saves Man From Pond

Teen Called Weakling; Saves Man From Pond:

A high school freshman who walked out of a weightlifting session after being called a weakling became a hero minutes later when he saved an elderly man who had driven into a pond.

Justin Gregorich, 14, was one of three people who jumped into the water Wednesday to pull Raymond J. Kane from his sinking Lincoln Town Car.

"It's amazing — there are snakes and there are alligators ... all three of them just jumped in right after that guy," said paramedic Mike Eash.

Gregorich then woke up from his dream.

Badly Behaved American Kicked Out of Brazil

When I read this headline — Badly Behaved American Kicked Out of Brazil — I quickly thought, wait, all my friends are back from Brazil. The real story even involves a guy from Pennsylvania:

An American tourist who splashed a cup of water over a crying baby on a flight from the United States headed back home two days after being barred from entering Brazil, police said on Friday.

Ronald Duffy, a 35-year-old from Pennsylvania, had been denied entry to the country on Wednesday morning because of the incident and was then kicked off another flight back to Miami on Thursday after he began misbehaving again before take-off.

He eventually left just before midnight on Thursday after spending most of the day in police custody, a police spokeswoman said.

Duffy had planned to spend Carnival in the northern city of Salvador with his Brazilian girlfriend. His woes began in Miami on Tuesday.

American Airlines refused to board him on its flight to Sao Paulo because of his behavior at check-in. He got on a TAM airlines flight and found himself sitting by a couple with a baby.

Annoyed by the toddler's crying, he asked for a cup of water then doused the baby with it. He said he had wanted to sleep. Police said later he was drunk.

Duffy narrowly avoided being beaten up by other passengers and was arrested — to applause — when the plane landed in Sao Paulo.

"He can try and get another visa but he might find it difficult as his last one was canceled for bad behavior," the spokeswoman said."

Decomposing Whale Explodes on Street

The image of a dead 56-foot, 60-ton sperm whale is bad enough — before it explodes. Nonetheless, I may need to find video footage. From Decomposing Whale Explodes on Street:

The decomposing remains of a 60-ton sperm whale exploded on a busy Taiwan street, showering nearby cars and shops with blood and organs and stopping traffic for hours, local newspapers said.

The 56-foot dead whale had been on a truck headed for an autopsy at a university earlier this week, when gases from internal decay caused its entrails to explode in the southern city of Tainan.

Steeped in Confusion

Steeped in Confusion discusses the evidence (or lack of it) for tea's health benefits. It also explains the differences between black, green, and white teas — which all come from the same plant:

Real tea, and the type researchers are focusing on, comes from the Camellia sinensis, a white-flowered evergreen shrub. But the shade of the tea depends on the picking and processing of the leaves and buds and their contact with oxygen.

Black teas such as darjeeling and ceylon result when the leaves are fully fermented, while oolong comes from partially fermenting leaves. Green tea results from withering, and then heating, dried leaves at a very high temperature, while white tea arises when the plant's silver-haired buds are plucked by hand in late March before blooming, air-dried and steamed.

Alternatives to Amnio

Alternatives to Amnio presents a few statistics that surprise me in some ways (but not in others):

Indeed, in a 1994 study of 161,560 fetuses, 86% of women who found out they were carrying a Down syndrome baby elected to abort [...]

One potential downside of all the early screens is that they don't detect other genetic abnormalities found by amniocentesis, including Klinefelter's syndrome and Turner's syndrome. About 50% of the time, a mother chooses to abort when an amnio finds those disorders, Dr. Wapner says, though both are less serious than Down syndrome. Klinefelter's, which affects only boys, causes infertility, a feminized body shape and sometimes mental retardation. Turner's syndrome, which affects only girls, results in a short stature, webbed neck and some mental retardation.

The Gender Gap

The Gender Gap examines gender differences with respect to health and medicine:

[T]he difference in life expectancy for men and women decreases significantly as people get older. At birth, for example, a woman's life expectancy in the U.S. is 79 years, compared with 73 for men. But most of the difference can be accounted for by the fact that men are more likely to die between the ages of 20 and 45.

"These are the decades where men are outdying women due to accidents, violence and suicide," says Dr. Marts. Heart disease is also a major factor, especially between 45 and 60. But then "if a man reaches 70, he is likely to live almost as long as his wife."

Morocco's Fragile Democracy Tests U.S. Prescription for World

Morocco's Fragile Democracy Tests U.S. Prescription for World describes itself as "the first in a series of articles exploring America's dominant place in the world and the limits to it." The series' basic premise is that democracy often puts tremendously illiberal parties in power:

Democracy has had a good run in the past decade and a half. It put down roots, albeit often shallow, across much of the former Soviet Union. It swept apartheid from South Africa, communism from Eastern Europe, dictatorships from South America and political machines from Taiwan, Indonesia and South Korea. Yet democracy has sometimes empowered the intolerant. The big winner in a December election in Serbia, for instance, was an ultranationalist party allied with ex-President Slobodan Milosevic, now on trial in The Hague for war crimes.

The perils are especially keen in Muslim lands, where fervent Islamists are often the only organized alternative to entrenched and frequently corrupt elites. In Iraq, the U.S. wrestles with the influence of clerics from the Shiite Muslim majority, including some radicals who want a rigid theocracy. Others don't push for this but insist on direct elections likely to be dominated by sectarian passions. And here in Morocco, after the suicide attacks, King Mohammed VI, in a somber television address, pinpointed the cause in those "who take advantage of democracy ... to sow seeds of ostracism, fanaticism and discord."

Are athletes Bayesians?

Are athletes Bayesians? excerpts an intriguing New York Times article on Bayesian inference and how we unconsciously perform probability calculations:

Mark A. Walker and John C. Wooders, economists at the University of Arizona, recently studied old videotapes of tennis matches involving stars like Bjorn Borg, Ivan Lendl and Pete Sampras. The economists looked at the serves in each match to see how well players randomly altered playing the ball to an opponent's forehand or backhand.

Many people do poorly on similar tests when they are conducted in a laboratory. Ask somebody to write down a list of hypothetical coin-flip outcomes, for example, and the result will probably contain too few streaks of heads or tails. Because people know that the overall odds are 50-50, they underestimate how often three straight tails or four straight heads turn up.

But professional tennis players realize, on some level, that their opponent will have an advantage if he knows that a serve to the forehand is likely to be followed by one to the backhand. They do a relatively good job of mixing serves, though still not as randomly as a computer program would, Professors Walker and Wooders reported in a 2001 paper.

Could a little poison be a good thing?

Could a little poison be a good thing? discusses hormesis, the notion that "moderate doses of bad things like radiation and toxins can improve health":

Evidence is building for hormesis, the theory that suggests that moderate doses of bad things like radiation and toxins can improve health. Interestingly, much of the evidence has been around for a long time but it has been ignored because the focus was on proving the harm that toxins can cause and because low-dose effects are, by their nature, harder to identify so positive effects at low doses were typically discounted.

The Scientific American article he cites, Nietzsche's Toxicology, explains:

The stress triggers cellular repair and maintenance systems. A modest amount of overcompensation then produces the low-dose effect, which is often beneficial.

This idea may sound bizarre, but such adaptation to stress is common, says physiologist Suresh Rattan of Aarhus University in Denmark. Exercise, for instance, plays biochemical havoc with the body: starving some cells of oxygen and glucose, flooding others with oxidants, and depressing immune functions. "At first glance, there is nothing good for the body about exercise," he notes. But even couch potatoes know that moderate exercise is worthwhile. Rattan says that the cellular insults from exercise prompt the defense system to work more efficiently.

Some fascinating examples:

For example, the prevailing theory is that any increase in radiation exposure increases the risk of cancer. But biologist Ronald Mitchel of Atomic Energy of Canada has shown that a single low dose of ionizing radiation stimulates DNA repair, delaying the onset of cancer in mice; high doses produced the opposite effect, as expected. Prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures is also harmful, but Rattan has found that heating up human skin cells to 41 degrees Celsius (106 degrees Fahrenheit) twice a week for an hour slows aging in the cells.

Even well-established environmental headaches display some hormesis. The definitive rat study that linked high doses of dioxin to cancer, published in 1978 by Richard Kociba of Dow Chemical and his colleagues, also found that low doses reduced the incidence of tumors.

Here's where it all gets controversial:

Calabrese suspects that in many cases, the benefits of hormesis may occur at levels higher than the recommended safe doses for humans.

FDA Big Factor Behind High Drug Costs

The pharmaceutical industry must be one of the least understood industries out there. From FDA Big Factor Behind High Drug Costs:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, with its costly and time-consuming drug approval process, is a big reason Americans pay far more for medicine than consumers in the rest of the world, U.S. Nobel laureate Milton Friedman said on Tuesday.

"The FDA is the most serious situation regarding the high costs of prescription drugs in this country," Friedman told a San Francisco forum on U.S. importation of Canadian drugs.

"Their (the FDA's) whole incentive is to be ultra-careful, to not make a mistake ... but that's where the problem starts," said the economist, one of the most prominent free market advocates the past century.

NPR : Ricky Gervais, a Hit at 'The Office'

Every once in a while, I find myself at NPR.org, and I realize all the NPR stories I missed. Anyway, I recently got the first season of The Office, a BBC comedy, on DVD, and I enjoyed it immensely — in a darkly, comic, Curb Your Enthusiasm kind of way. NPR's Liane Hansen interviews the star in NPR : Ricky Gervais, a Hit at 'The Office':

In The Office, British comedian Ricky Gervais plays David Brent, a buffoonish, self-involved but affable office manager at a dismal paper supply company called Wernham Hogg, in the London suburb of Slough. Gervais created the faux documentary and co-writes and directs the series, which appears on the BBC and has a small cult following on BBC America.

The 61st annual Golden Globe Awards ceremony is tonight, and Gervais is up for a Golden Globe award in the Lead Actor category. He speaks with NPR's Liane Hansen.

Sleep inspires insight

A recent study by German researchers demonstrated what many of us already knew: a good night's sleep helps you "gain insight" into a problem. Perhaps before writing the abstract to the original Nature paper, Sleep inspires insight, the authors should have put in a good eight or nine hours of sleep:

Insight denotes a mental restructuring that leads to a sudden gain of explicit knowledge allowing qualitatively changed behaviour. Anecdotal reports on scientific discovery suggest that pivotal insights can be gained through sleep. Sleep consolidates recent memories and, concomitantly, could allow insight by changing their representational structure. Here we show a facilitating role of sleep in a process of insight. Subjects performed a cognitive task requiring the learning of stimulus-response sequences, in which they improved gradually by increasing response speed across task blocks. However, they could also improve abruptly after gaining insight into a hidden abstract rule underlying all sequences. Initial training establishing a task representation was followed by 8 h of nocturnal sleep, nocturnal wakefulness, or daytime wakefulness. At subsequent retesting, more than twice as many subjects gained insight into the hidden rule after sleep as after wakefulness, regardless of time of day. Sleep did not enhance insight in the absence of initial training. A characteristic antecedent of sleep-related insight was revealed in a slowing of reaction times across sleep. We conclude that sleep, by restructuring new memory representations, facilitates extraction of explicit knowledge and insightful behaviour.

Rabbit Redux: A Once-Lowly Fur Finds New Luster

According to Rabbit Redux: A Once-Lowly Fur Finds New Luster, fur is making a come-back with help from a special breed of rabbit:

Much of rabbit's new higher status is due to a special breed of rabbit known as the 'Rex,' whose fur is denser and silkier than regular rabbit fur. The Rex's growing popularity, especially among designers not normally known for working with fur, is helping democratize the once elite fur market. Now, instead of spending $20,000 and up on a floor-length mink status symbol, fur fans are buying a rabbit vest, shawl or poncho for just $150 to $2,500.
[...]
It has been a long journey back from fashion oblivion for the rabbit. For decades, rabbit pelts were considered declasse -- cheap, scraggly and prone to shedding. Fur fans scorned rabbit, confining its audience to teenagers or those who couldn't afford anything better. "Traditional furriers always pooh-poohed rabbit as something the maids wore," says Ms. Cassin, the designer.

Nearly driven out of business by the early 1990s by antifur activists, the fur industry has rebounded. A new generation of women who don't remember the heated animal-rights battles of the '70s and '80s is embracing fur. "The whole morality issue about furs seems to have gone away," says David Wolfe, creative director of Doneger Group, a fashion forecasting firm.
[...]
Rabbit's transition from poor relation to star performer got a big boost from the Rex. According to the National Rex Rabbit Club, the breed was the product of a recessive gene first spotted in France in 1919 by a parish priest. Unlike garden-variety rabbits, the Rex has no prominent "guard hair" -- the rougher top coat that characterizes traditional rabbit fur. The result is a silky, dense fur that furriers say most resembles chinchilla or sheered mink.

Rex rabbits were imported into the U.S. in the 1920s, where their luxurious fur quickly made them popular at livestock shows, says Rex rabbit judge Cathy Szychulda. But after the antifur movement began in the 1960s, fur fell out of fashion and Rex rabbit breeders retreated to backyard sheds, where they raised small batches to show in demanding Rex rabbit competitions. "Ten years ago, you couldn't give them away," says Tom James, a Rex rabbit breeder in American Fork, Utah.

The rigorous show culture created steady improvements in Rex rabbit quality, including even more lustrous coats and much larger rabbits, whose pelts measure as long as 25 inches -- or nearly three times the length of a traditional rabbit.

By the mid-1990s, U.S.-bred Rex rabbits became coveted for their champion bloodlines, attracting commercial rabbit farmers from as far away as China and Argentina.

For India's Youth, New Money Fuels A Revolution

A little over a decade ago, India liberalized its formerly socialist economy. With the influx of foreign investment came foreign attitudes and culture. From For India's Youth, New Money Fuels A Revolution:

Frederick Hamilton, a manager at Wipro Spectramind, India's largest call-center company, says the father of a young female employee recently came to him with suspicions that she was secretly dating someone at the office. "He said, 'Her values have changed, and I blame it on this business,' " recalls Mr. Hamilton. "Parents think they've brought up their children well, with conservative values -- and a year later they come back hip."

Nikesh Soares, who worked at Wipro last year, was a "little gentleman" before he got into the call-center business a little over three years ago, according to his mother, Alisha. He wore button-down shirts and refused to wear sandals, even in Bombay's sultry weather. He wouldn't watch Hollywood movies because of all the "sex and smooching," he says. He knew exactly the kind of woman he was going to marry: demure and old-fashioned.

Today, the 29-year-old Mr. Soares says, "The only thing that hasn't changed is my haircut."

His outlook began to change when he joined eFunds, a Bombay call center, in 2000. Each night, he answered calls from Americans responding to infomercials, selling them tummy crunchers, diet pills, miniature rotisseries and orthopedic insoles. The $220-a-month salary -- more than double his wages at previous jobs -- was a revelation, as was the company of fun-loving colleagues his own age.

Telling his mother he had to work late, he and his friends headed for all-night bars and drank until dawn before stumbling home for a few hours' sleep. "Girls do it also," he says. "They say they're working when they're actually out with their boyfriends."

Mr. Soares married one of those girls, Sophia D'Souza, who sat in the next cubicle and didn't hesitate to strike up a conversation. With an independent streak and a preference for jeans, she is neither demure nor old-fashioned. "My friends all say, 'Nikesh, what happened? We thought you wanted someone traditional,' " he laughs.

In a culture where women rarely wear shorts or skirts above the knee, the work itself was an eye-opener. Mr. Soares and his future wife found themselves fielding calls from people who wanted to buy "Girls Gone Wild," a hit video featuring scantily clad or topless young women frolicking on vacation. One night, a father called from the U.S. to buy the video as a birthday present for his college-age son, something Mr. Soares could never imagine an Indian parent doing.

Outside the office, it was a different world. When Mr. Soares picked up his wife on his motorbike at the end of the shift, sometimes the police stopped them and asked what they were doing out so late.

How Driving Prices Lower Can Violate Antitrust Statutes

How Driving Prices Lower Can Violate Antitrust Statutes reports on the mirror image of monopoly:

Usually relegated to the back pages of law books, this mirror image of monopoly is known as monopsony or, when more than one company is involved, oligopsony. It arises when one or more companies gain enough buying power to push their suppliers' prices down.

Frankly, I'm now looking for an opportunity to use "oligopsony" in conversation.

Performance enhancing drugs that are good for you

Performance enhancing drugs that are good for you makes some valid points but misses one key point: the most famous performance-enhancing drugs we already have, steroids, are already safe in therapeutic doses — they're used for male hormone replacement and for mass-gain/retention in AIDS patients — and they're particularly healthful for athletes trying to recover from tremendous training stresses:

One of the big sports scandals of 2003 was the discovery that athletes were using a designer steroid called THG [*] that was undetectable with the current tests. Subsequently we got to enjoy the usual gnashing of teeth about how drug use was destroying sports.

The standard argument for why performance enhancing drugs are bad looks something like this:

1. The drugs are bad for you.
2. People shouldn't have to take health risks in order to compete.

There's an obvious problem with this line of argument: training is bad for you. It's true that getting some exercise is good for you, but the training loads used by elite athlets are well beyond that point. When you're training 20+ hours a week, you're at serious risk for overuse injuries. There's also evidence that overtraining leads to immune system depression [*]. In fact, one of the major limiting factors in the performance of elite athletes is how much they're able to train before their performance (and health) starts to decline due to overtraining, so athletes already have to take health risks in order to be competitive.

It's not clear how true the first half of the argument is, either. Not all of the performance enhancing drugs are bad for you in therapeutic doses. Take a look at the International Cycling Union's list of prohibited substances. All the major stimulants are banned, including Ritalin (methylphenidate), which ADD patients take every day. The World Anti-Doping Agency even bans pseudoephedrine, which is a common decongestant used in a large number of cold medicines. There's a lot of debate about whether steroids are actually that bad for you, but there's no serious debate about whether pseudoephedrine is.

Worse yet, it's only a matter of time before some doping agent comes out that's actually good for you. It's easy to imagine such an agent, say something that would improve your recovery time from training, build more muscle with less training load (suggested by Kevin Dick) or keep your immune system high even under high training loads. Are those drugs going to be banned too? Based on the situation with
pseudoephedrine, I'd say so. If and when that happens we'll need a new rationale for why we're doing it, though.

Reproduction and bonding don't necessarily go together

Reproduction and bonding don't necessarily go together cites a passage from Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee (which I've been meaning to get, then read) that raises a few eyebrows:

People have many reasons to lie when asked whether they have committed adultery. That's why it's notoriously difficult to get accurate scientific information about this important subject. One of the few existing sets of hard facts emerged as a totally unexpected by-product of a medical study, per- formed nearly half a century ago for a different reason. That study's findings have never been revealed until now.

I recently learned these facts from the distinguished medical scientist who ran the study. (Since he does not wish to be identified in this connection, I shall refer to him as Dr. X.) In the 1940s Dr. X. was studying the genetics of human blood groups, which are molecules that we acquire only by inertness. Each of us has dozens of blood-group substances on our red blood cells, and we inherit each substance either from our mother or from our father. The study's research plan was straightforward: go to the obstetrics ward of a highly respectable U.S. hospital; collect blood samples from one thousand newborn babies and their mothers and fathers; identify the blood groups in all the samples; and then use standard genetic reasoning to deduce the inheritance patterns.

To Dr. X's shock, the blood groups revealed nearly 10 percent of these babies to be the fruits of adultery! Proof of the babies' illegitimate origin was that they had one or more blood groups lacking in both alleged parents. There could be no question of mistaken maternity: the blood samples were drawn from an infant and its mother soon after the infant emerged from the mother. A blood group present in a baby but absent in its undoubted mother could only have come from its father. Absence of the blood group from the mother's husband as well showed conclusively that the baby had been sired by some other man, extramaritally. The true incidence of extramarital sex must have been considerably higher than 10 percent, since many other blood-group substances now being used in paternity tests were not yet known in the 1940s, and since most bouts of intercourse do not result in conception.

At the time that Dr.X made his discovery, research on American sexual habits was virtually taboo. He decided to maintain a prudent silence, never published his findings, and it was only with difficulty that I got his permission to mention his results without betraying his name. However, his results were later confirmed by several similar genetic studies whose results did get published. Those studies variously showed between about 5 and 30 percent of American and British babies to have been adulterously conceived. Again, the proportion of the tested couples of whom at least the wife had practiced adultery must have been higher, for the same two reasons as in Dr. X's study.

Ricardo's Difficult Idea

The introduction to Ricardo's Difficult Idea strikes me as very, very true:

The idea of comparative advantage — with its implication that trade between two nations normally raises the real incomes of both — is, like evolution via natural selection, a concept that seems simple and compelling to those who understand it. Yet anyone who becomes involved in discussions of international trade beyond the narrow circle of academic economists quickly realizes that it must be, in some sense, a very difficult concept indeed.

Putin's Trap

In Putin's Trap, Robert Cotrell reviews Volkov's Violent Entrepreneurs (and two other books on Russian organized crime). In his review, Cotrell cites a passage describing "Roman," a mid-ranking member of a Petersburg crime gang and "a good man to know":

At the age of seventeen he received the highest title in boxing, master of sports. After completing his schooling, he was drafted into the army and sent to fight in Afghanistan. On his return in 1989, Roman began to cooperate with various groups of swindlers and shadow businessmen, providing them physical protection and participating in violent disputes. At the same time, he never missed an opportunity to take part in local wars as a mercenary and fought in Abkhasia, the Transdniester Republic, and even Bosnia. His current major business is managing the illegal production of vodka from cheap ethyl alcohol imported from Belorussia.

Interesting:

The bandits come from all sorts of backgrounds in which group loyalties are formed and can be depended on: criminal networks in Soviet prisons, sports teams, organizations of Afghan war veterans, Cossack unions, even the state security services. The professional criminals carry out the same basic activities. They intimidate, protect, gather information, settle disputes, give guarantees, enforce contracts, and impose taxes. They have the same resource at their disposal, organized violence. The better they manage its use, the stronger they become. Hence Volkov's name for them, "violent entrepreneurs."

He distinguishes these bandits of the 1990s, whose techniques he traces back to the street markets and small-scale protection rackets of the late 1980s, from the more traditional type of Russian thief^*. The thief produces nothing, and does not claim to do so. The bandit, by contrast, claims to offer services based on the use or threat of force, and wants to advertise this fact. Hence, says Volkov, you could, in any known city during the 1990s, identify the bandits by their gold jewelry, crew-cut hair, leather jackets, big black cars, and assertive behavior. The thief aims to pass unnoticed in public places; the bandit wants to be recognized.

I particularly enjoyed this footnote on his use of "thief":

I say "Russian thief" here as shorthand for what Russians would call a vor v zakone, or a "thief professing the code," a professional thief honored by his peers and steeped in prison traditions.

I'm going to have to pick up a fun, true-crime book on the Russian maffiya.

Violence and Economy Building

Violence and Economy Building discusses Vadim Volkov's Violent Entrepreneurs, a book on the Russian maffiya:

Vadim Volkov's 'Violent Entrepreneurs' has an interesting discussion of protection rackets in the Russian economy. An interesting point is that Russian business and oranized crime have become symbiotic. Once a gang provides 'protection' to a business, the gang considers the business their 'turf' and becomes dependent on the income from the business. Eventually, gangsters come to guarantee transactions of the businesses they protect, a sort of underwriter that facilitates business. Volkov points out that a later wave of ex-army 'protectors' came to provide a more legitimate, institutionalized form of protection against these earlier gangsters, which in turn opens the door for the reclaiming of the Russian state's monopoly over violence. Robert Cottrell has a nice discussion in his New York Review of Books essay.

It sounds like a discussion of the evolution of government in general.

I enjoyed this bit from the Amazon blurb:

Volkov investigates the making of violence-prone groups in sports clubs (particularly martial arts clubs), associations for veterans of the Soviet-Afghan war, ethnic gangs, and regionally based social groups, and he traces the changes in their activities across the decade.

Martial artists? Engaged in protection rackets? Inconceivable! Incidentally, Vladimir Putin is a dedicated judo "player"; he even wrote a book on judo.

Zoo to Take 1st Cloned Endangered Animal

While a cloned banteng doesn't look any different from a normal, non-clone banteng — they both look like mildly unusual cattle — I'd still like to swing by the San Diego Zoo. From Zoo to Take 1st Cloned Endangered Animal:

The world's first clone of an endangered species is getting ready for his public debut at the San Diego Zoo.

Jahava, an 8-month-old male banteng, was expected to be moved Thursday from the San Diego Wild Animal Park in north San Diego to the zoo, where he will share an area with three banteng females.

Jahava was cloned from skin cells collected from a male banteng born at the zoo in 1974 that never reproduced. A banteng is a form of wild cattle from Southeast Asia.
The cells were cultured by the Zoological Society of San Diego's Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species and were stored in liquid nitrogen at minus 328 degrees. Last year, the cells were inserted into the egg of an Iowa cow.

Although Jahava looks like a banteng, he has genetic material from the cow, zoo geneticist Oliver Ryder said. If Jahava mates with another banteng, the offspring is expected to be full banteng, he said.

In his new home from the zoo, Jahava will be the smallest of the banteng group for some time. He will be distinguishable by his thicker and slightly parted horns.

Jahava should have pure, bateng, nuclear DNA. The genetic material that came from the cow was the mitochondrial DNA from the egg — which comes completely from the mother's side. Since Jahava is a male bateng, his offspring won't inherit that cow DNA.

The Savage Savage

Many people live under the notion that civilization is corrupt, and that savages aren't savage at all; they live peaceful, pastoral lives — at least if they can stay away from cruel, war-mongering, imperialists.

The Savage Savage presents a graph "transcribed from Steven Pinker's excellent book The Blank Slate and based on data from Lawrence Keeley's War Before Civilization."

Gettin' a MoveOn

Almost a year ago, I stumbled across Evan Coyne Maloney's Protesting the Protesters videos. He's added quite a few videos of interviews since then. He introduces his most recent video, Gettin' a MoveOn with this lead-in:

On January 15th, New Yorkers awoke to single-digit temperatures and a few inches of new snowfall. Al Gore chose the day to give a speech on global warming. The speech — delivered at the Beacon Theatre on Manhattan's Upper West Side — was sponsored by MoveOn.org, a website-turned-political-action-committee that recently gained notoriety by hosting two political ads equating President Bush with Adolf Hitler. Although such comparisons were common at anti-war rallies, I still wasn't sure whether this mindset was now infecting the Democratic base — the sort of folks who'd brave the cold to hear Al Gore speak. To find out, I spent a few shivering hours outside the Beacon.

Ice Age Mammoth's Skull Found in England

Ice Age Mammoth's Skull Found in England:

The unusually well-preserved skull of an Ice Age mammoth estimated to be 50,000 years old has been discovered in a gravel pit in southern England, an official said Tuesday.

The skull was found Jan. 11 in a pit in the Cotswold Water Park by Neville Hollingworth, a paleontologist for the Natural Environment Research Council in Swindon.
[...]
"I saw a small piece of bone sticking out at the side of this clay face which had gravel in it. I started to dig and it got bigger and bigger."

Seven hours later, they unearthed the skull, which was so big it barely fit into the trunk of Hollingworth's car.

Adrian Lister, an expert on mammoths from University College London, carried out a preliminary analysis of the skull, which weighs between 175 and 220 pounds.

The tusks were missing, and Hollingworth plans to look for them in the quarry, which is flooded with rainwater.

Can you announce where you found a mammoth skull, leave, then come back for the tusks later? I see that mammoth ivory walking away...

Civet Coffee: Strange Brew With SARS

I don't even know what to say. From Civet Coffee: Strange Brew With SARS:

SARS fears have stopped the Chinese from eating civet cats. But that hasn't turned off others from sipping the strangest of brews — one they insist is made from coffee beans eaten, partly digested and then excreted by the weasel-like animals.

The story goes like this: Civets live in the foliage of plantations across Southeast Asia. These fussy foragers pick the best and ripest coffee berries. Enzymes in their digestive system break down the flesh of the fruit before the animals expel the bean.

Workers collect beans from the plantation floor, wash away the dung and roast them to produce a unique drink that devotees might say is good to the last dropping.

Skeptics, though, dismiss it all as a weird and unverifiable marketing gimmick.

Men's Health Club Owner Aims for Success

When I first heard about Curves for Women, the single-sex gym franchise, I immediately joked that someone would create Angles for Men. It was only a matter of time. From Men's Health Club Owner Aims for Success:

Gennaro borrowed an idea from Curves International for women, the fastest-growing gym franchise in the world, and created a single-sex exercise franchise for men.

'I've done circuit training for men pretty much as Curves has done it,' Gennaro said. 'A lot of my friends' wives or mothers own a Curves. I said, 'This is for women. Why not for men?''
[...]
Curves leaped from a standing start in 1992 to about 6,000 facilities today, and claims to open around 200 franchises a month. Cuts Fitness for Men is trying to get rolling, having started in February 2003 with one facility in Clark, N.J. It has 10 open now, with at least two more on the way.

What's the formula?

As with Curves, Cuts offers a half-hour aerobics-and-strength combination at a low price in a facility that can be tucked into the space of a men's store in a strip mall. It's a bare-bones workout shop. There are no coffee bars, no dance floors, not even a shower. It specializes in fast fitness for time-pressured participants.

Doesn't sound too bad so far.

Like Curves, Cuts programs target beginners, with strength training equipment that does not require anyone to do so much as load a weight onto a bar. The machines work on hydraulics — they resist the pressure of an exerciser pushing just as a car shock absorber resists the pressure of a car hitting a bump. Exercisers who want to work harder push harder, which creates more resistance in the hydraulics.

Ooh, that's a problem. Without an objective measure of how hard you're working, you naturally won't work quite as hard. And without any spandex-clad ladies to impress, you definitely won't work as hard.

Armed Gangs Threaten Mexican Sea Turtles

I could have guessed that outlawing turtle eggs wouldn't end the turtle-egg trade, but reality takes the drug-trafficking metaphor further than I ever would have guessed. From Armed Gangs Threaten Mexican Sea Turtles:

Laws barring the killing of protected sea turtles and the sale of their eggs have been as effective as anti-drug trafficking programs: driving the practice underground but failing to stop it.

The latest threat is a horseback-riding gang whose members wield Kalashnikov rifles to drive away police and unarmed environmental activists.

Centuries-old traditions make the turtles, and especially their eggs, highly prized in Mexico, where officials have spent decades trying to protect the sea creatures.

Gangsters on horseback? With AKs? Is this Afghanistan?

High Doses of Vitamins Ward Off Alzheimer's

Very interesting. High Doses of Vitamins Ward Off Alzheimer's:

The 4,740 participants in the five-year study were aged 65 or older when the study began in 1995.

In the first phase of the study, 200 cases of Alzheimer's were diagnosed, and those who had been taking vitamin supplements were at a 78 percent lower risk of the disease than those who had not. At the end of the study, another 104 participants had developed the disease, and the risk factor was 64 percent lower among supplement users.

Taking a lower-dose multivitamin or one of the two vitamin supplements taken alone did not have the protective effect.

Taking a lower-dose multivitamin or one of the two vitamin supplements taken alone did not have the protective effect. Very interesting. What I find almost shocking — having read quite a few news stories about nutritional-supplement studies — is that they were willing to say the following:

High-dose vitamin supplements are rarely toxic and could have wide-ranging health benefits, the report said.

Brazil Arrests U.S. Pilot Over Gesture

When I traveled to Brazil last year, I needed to get a $100 visa — as a result of the of "reciprocity" between Brazil and the US. You see, the US charges Brazilians $100 for a visa to enter the country.

Now the US is requiring fingerprints and a photo to enter the country, and, in reciprocity, Brazil is requiring the same of Americans. One American Airlines pilot objected. Brazil Arrests U.S. Pilot Over Gesture explains:

An American Airlines pilot was arrested by federal police Wednesday after making an obscene gesture when being photographed at the airport as part of a newly imposed entry requirement for U.S. citizens, federal police said
[...]
The pilot, Dale Robbin Hirsh, lifted his middle finger while undergoing the new security process, said Francisco Baltazar da Silva, chief of Sao Paulo's federal police.

The pilot was taken to a federal courthouse, where he could be charged with showing disrespect to authorities, a crime in Brazil punishable by between six months and two years in jail or a fine, da Silva said. He could also be deported without any further legal action.

He could be charged with showing disrespect to authorities, a crime in Brazil punishable by between six months and two years in jail or a fine.

On Monday, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva asked President Bush (news - web sites) to drop the visa requirement for Brazilians entering the United States, while Brazil's Foreign Ministry said the requirement could lead to a souring between the two nations.

Incidentally, I have a Brazilian jiu-jitsu instructor still in Brazil for the holidays who won't be back as soon as he planned, because of visa problems. (Of course, none of the Brazilians I know do anything on time...)

But in Rio de Janeiro, tourism officials are trying to console American tourists arriving at the airport by treating them to samba music and dancers and giving them flowers, jewelry and T-shirts.

I also have some American jiu-jitsu buddies in Brazil. (Or maybe they just got back.) I'll have to ask them if they got flowers and t-shirts.

Frito-Lay Introduces Low-Carb Chips

Frito-Lay Introduces Low-Carb Chips:

Snack foods company Frito-Lay said Wednesday it is introducing two new types of chips to capitalize on the popularity of low-carbohydrate diets.

The two new products, called Doritos Edge and Tostitos Edge, will cut out 60 percent of the carbohydrates that are in regular Doritos and Tostitos.

Frito-Lay, a unit of PepsiCo Inc., has already eliminated trans fats from its brands. Trans fats, which give products a longer shelf life, have been linked to heart disease.

The new chips will use soy proteins and fiber as substitute ingredients, the company said in a statement. Both Tostitos Edge and Doritos Edge will have six net carbohydrates, 10 grams of protein, and three grams of fiber.

Naturally, these will taste just like their normal chips...

UCLA Team Claims It Can Predict Earthquakes

In UCLA Team Claims It Can Predict Earthquakes, Randall Parker cites a UC NewsWire article that claims that earthquakes can now be predicted months in advance:

'Earthquake prediction is called the Holy Grail of earthquake science, and has been considered impossible by many scientists,' said Keilis-Borok, a professor in residence in UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and department of earth and space sciences. 'It is not impossible.'

'We have made a major breakthrough, discovering the possibility of making predictions months ahead of time, instead of years, as in previously known methods,' Keilis-Borok said. 'This discovery was not generated by an instant inspiration, but culminates 20 years of multinational, interdisciplinary collaboration by a team of scientists from Russia, the United States, Western Europe, Japan and Canada.'

The team includes experts in pattern recognition, geodynamics, seismology, chaos theory, statistical physics and public safety. They have developed algorithms to detect precursory earthquake patterns.

The real news story is that Keilis-Borok, the lead scientist, is 82 years old:

Kellis-Borok apparently took on earthquake prediction to give him something worthwhile to do in his old age. Incredible.

Ritalin Exposure May Increase Risk Of Depression, Alter Reward Sensitivity

In Ritalin Exposure May Increase Risk Of Depression, Alter Reward Sensitivity, Randall Parker reports on the long-term effects of the popular ADD drug — on rats. More interesting is his secondary point:

What is amazing about this is the scale on which doctors and parents have embarked upon a massive experiment that may cause a variety of lasting changes on cognitive function. As of 1995 2.8 percent of American children were on methylphenidate (Ritalin) and that represented a sharp increase from 1.2% in 1990. Methylphenidate use is also up in Canada and some other Western countries in about the same time period.

If anyone doubts whether, when it becomes possible to do so, humans will be willing to reengineer their minds or the minds of their offspring consider the use of nervous system-altering drugs on children today. Look at how willing parents and authority figures are to embrace treatments that are not sufficiently well understood and which probably have a number of lasting effects on cognitive function thoroughout the rest of the lives of the children who are given methylphenidate and other nervous system drugs.

Health Journal

Somewhere along the way, softdrink vending machines took hold in America's (and Canada's) schools. Now schools are trying to replace the softdrinks with healthier fare — that isn't always healthier. From the Wall Street Journal's recent Health Journal:

In New York, carbonated drinks have been replaced by 100% juice versions of Snapple, which actually have more calories and grams of sugar than regular soda.

Most experts agree that while sports and juice-flavored drinks may sound healthier, they are simply noncarbonated versions of sodas — often with water and high-fructose corn syrup as the first two ingredients. Even 100% juice drinks often are made with concentrates of pear, apple and grape and in the end are really just water and sugar.

Why do kids drink so many sugary drinks?

"One of the first questions a new parent will ask a pediatrician is 'when can I start juice?'" says Robert Murray, professor of pediatrics at the Columbus Children's Hospital and principal author of the American Academy of Pediatrics statement. "We've really created the habit of dealing with thirst with sweetened drinks."

What happens when schools replace the softdrinks with healthier fare?

But schools can stock vending machines with healthier fare without losing income. When Iowa City schools added milk to vending machines, overall sales increased 42%, while soda sales dropped 58%. Vista Unified School District in San Diego limited sodas to 20% of vending slots instead of the previous 66%. The machines now offer bagels, yogurt, nuts, cheese and crackers and fresh fruit as well as water, milk and 100% juice. During the first year, Vista High School generated $200,000 more in sales than the previous year.

The 'We' Word: And the Tyranny of the Majority

The Australian Policy magazine's The 'We' Word: And the Tyranny of the Majority comes with the following subtitle:

False collectives — what Americans call 'weasel words' — poison the language we use to talk about public affairs by cobbling together spurious majorities, writes Roger Kerr.

Perhaps that sounds perfectly reasonable to an Australian audience. Weasel words? It turns out that the article is quoting Hayek, an Austrian, describing how a word like "social" can be "applied indiscriminately to a huge number of nouns in a way that undermines their original meanings and recruits them into a collectivist cause":

. . . it has in fact become the most harmful instance of what, after Shakespeare's 'I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs' (As You Like It, II, 5), some Americans call a 'weasel word'. As a weasel is alleged to be able to empty an egg without leaving a visible sign, so can these words deprive of content any term to which they are prefixed while seemingly leaving them untouched. A weasel word is used to draw the teeth from a concept one is obliged to employ, but from which one wishes to eliminate all implications that challenge one's ideological premises.

From Here to Eternity

In From Here to Eternity, Jon Meacham looks at Victor Davis Hanson's latest book, Ripples of Battle. But first he tips his hat to An Autumn of War:

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, horrified by the news from the East Coast, Victor Davis Hanson began writing. A classicist and farmer in California, Hanson kept at it everyday through that momentous fall, ultimately publishing his thoughts and pieces in a small but highly influential book entitled An Autumn of War. The collection's overarching (and, to me, convincing) theme: that war is an inherent element of the human condition and that the wisest course in a fallen world--one in which evil can strike out at innocents, without warning, on a brilliantly blue morning, widowing spouses and orphaning children--is to appreciate the tragic quality of life. Once we accept that the world will almost always fall short of our expectations, that man is not perfectible, and that answering violence with violence is sometimes the moral thing to do, we can start to make ourselves, our children, and our culture more secure. Hanson's book was read at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

I'll probably have to read both books.

The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick

Michael Holland reviews The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick, by Peter Lamont, a book that demonstrates "how people will believe a thing is true, despite all rational evidence to the contrary, indeed despite outright denials of its existence, if it is repeated that it is true often enough":

It goes like this: "The fakir drew from under his knee a ball of grey twine. Taking the loose end between his teeth, he, with a quick upward motion, tossed the ball into the air. Instead of coming back to him, it kept on going up and up until out of sight and there remained only the long swaying end... [A] boy about six-years-old... walked over to the twine and began climbing up it... the boy disappeared when he had reached a point 30 or 40ft from the ground... a moment later, the twine disappeared."

This purported to be an eye-witness account of the trick given by a couple of American travellers returning from the mysterious Orient. Within a few months, however, the editor of the Tribune was forced to come clean and admit that not only was the account bogus but that the travellers did not even exist.

Too late. By then, the account had been reprinted in newspapers and journals around the world and the denial scarcely caused a ripple. Over the next half century, the story of the rope trick gathered momentum and, more to the point, wonderful embellishments. By the mid-1930s, other "eye-witnesses" reported seeing the "fakir" pick up a knife and scramble up the "rope" after the boy. After a while, bloody limbs, a torso and, finally, a head would drop to the ground, followed by the fakir who would reassemble the pieces and the original boy would spring smiling back to life.

With each new account receiving graphic treatment in the popular (and more arcane) prints, millions believed in the trick, while thousands more tried to explain it. But they were all completely and absolutely wrong. The trick was not even an illusion; it simply did not and had never existed.

Poor Man's Hero

In Poor Man's Hero, Reason magazine interviews Johan Norberg, Swedish author of In Defense of Global Capitalism. Norberg makes a number of interesting points:

Look at Vietnam, which I visited recently. It had the benefit that when the Communists took power there, they actually implemented their ideas. They collectivized agriculture and they destroyed private property, which meant that in the mid-1980s people were starving there. The Communists' own ideas managed to do what the American bombs never did: destroy communism. In the wake of such failure, the government began to look for other examples, and they saw that Taiwan had succeeded by globalizing. The Communists in China were liberalizing trade and ownership laws and were seeing fast progress. The contrast is especially clear on the Korean peninsula. It's the same population, with the same culture, just having two very different political and economic systems. In 50 years, one of them went from hunger and poverty to Southern European living standards. The other one is still starving.

I particularly like this point:

Sweatshops are a natural stage of development. We had sweatshops in Sweden in the late 19th century. We complained about Japanese sweatshops 40 years ago. You had them here. In fact, you still do in some places. One mistake that Western critics of globalization make is that they compare their current working standards to those in the developing world: "Look, I'm sitting in a nice, air-conditioned office. Why should people in Vietnam really have to work in those terrible factories?" But you've got to compare things with the alternatives that people actually have in their own countries. The reason why their workplace standards and wages are generally lower is the lack of productivity, the lack of infrastructure, the lack of machinery, and so on. If workers were paid U.S. wages in Vietnam, employers wouldn't be able to hire them. The alternative for most workers would be to go back to agriculture, where they could work longer hours and get irregular and much lower wages.
[...]
When I was in Vietnam, I interviewed workers about their dreams and aspirations. The most common wish was that Nike, one of the major targets of the anti-globalization movement, would expand so that a worker's relatives could get a job with the company.

I've seen this point before:

Places without natural resources, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, have developed relatively broad-based economies, where countries rich in oil or minerals often have not. The broader an economy is, the more wealth and income are spread around. The best thing that could happen to the Arab world would be for them to run out of oil. Then they'd have to open up to trade, and a small number of people wouldn't be in control all of the wealth, as is the case in Saudi Arabia.

Returning to the idea of developing versus developed economies:

Many environmentalists care about green forests, clean air, clean water, and so on. What they don't appreciate is that attitude is itself a result of industrial development. In our countries, people didn't care about these things 100 years ago. Preferences shift when you can feed your children and give them an education. That's when you begin to care about these sorts of things.

So, Scrooge was right after all

So, Scrooge was right after all addresses the economics of gift giving:

Conventional economics teaches that gift giving is irrational. The satisfaction or "utility" a person derives from consumption is determined by their personal preferences. But no one understands your preferences as well as you do.

So when I give up $50 worth of utility to buy a present for you, the chances are high that you'll value it at less than $50. If so, there's been a mutual loss of utility. The transaction has been inefficient and "welfare reducing", thus making it irrational. As an economist would put it, "unless a gift that costs the giver p dollars exactly matches the way in which the recipient would have spent the p dollars, the gift is suboptimal".

This astonishing intellectual breakthrough was first formulated in 1993 by Joel Waldfogel, an economics professor now at the University of Pennsylvania, in his seminal paper, The Deadweight Loss of Christmas.

You'll excuse me if I don't accept Waldfogel's paper as the first time "this astonishing intellectual breakthrough was...formulated." It's still good stuff though:

The guru Waldfogel has recently refined his calculations on Christmas's deadweight cost, using a new survey to estimate that, per dollar spent, people value their own purchases 18 per cent more than they value items they receive as gifts. (Being a rigorous scientist, the prof has carefully excluded any allowance for the "sentimental value" of gifts.)

Waldfogel's case is bolstered by the news that, according to a US survey conducted by American Express, 28 per cent of respondents admitted to engaging in "gift recycling".

I agree with Bradley Ruffle and Todd Kaplan: gift giving makes sense in cases where the giver's knowledge of where to find something the recipient wants is greater than the recipient's own knowledge. Or if the giver is in a position to get it cheaper:

This emphasis on the hassle involved in finding suitable presents helps explain why, even though it's regarded as poor form to give money, parents are more likely to resort to money as their children get older. The parents' search costs rise as they become less certain what their kids would like, whereas the kids' search costs fall as they become more independent. This theory also helps explain why people who go on trips return with presents. Their gifts tend to be things that are dearer or harder to find at home. Even so, it's hard to believe the theory accounts for more than a fraction of gifts.

Iraqi War Too Long? Some comparisons.

I got a kick out of this Command Post Op Ed, Iraqi War Too Long? Some comparisons:

It took less time to take Iraq than it took Janet Reno to take the Branch Davidian compound. That was a 51-day operation. In fact, it took less time to take Iraq than it took to count the votes in Florida!

It took less time to find Saddam's sons in Iraq than it took Hillary Clinton to find the Rose Law Firm billing records.

It took less time for the 3rd Infantry Division and the Marines to destroy the Medina Republican Guard than it took Teddy Kennedy to call the police after his Oldsmobile sank at Chappaquiddick.

The Man Behind Bin Laden

The Man Behind Bin Laden provides a biography of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the other Islamist mastermind. What most caught my eye though was this description of the community he grew up in (or just outside of):

Five miles south of the chaos of Cairo is a quiet middle-class suburb called Maadi. A consortium of Egyptian Jewish financiers, intending to create a kind of English village amid the mango and guava plantations and Bedouin settlements on the eastern bank of the Nile, began selling lots in the first decade of the twentieth century. The developers regulated everything, from the height of the garden fences to the color of the shutters on the grand villas that lined the streets. They dreamed of an Egypt that was safe and clean and orderly, and also secular and ethnically diverse — though still married to British notions of class. They planted eucalyptus trees to repel flies and mosquitoes, and gardens to perfume the air with the fragrance of roses and jasmine and bougainvillea. Many of the early settlers were British military officers and civil servants, whose wives started garden clubs and literary salons; they were followed by Jewish families, who by the end of the Second World War made up nearly a third of Maadi's population. After the war, Maadi evolved into a community of expatriate Europeans, American businessmen and missionaries, and a certain type of Egyptian — one who spoke French at dinner and followed the cricket matches.

Gamers Make Good Soldiers

NPR's All Things Considered show from a few days ago (January 5, 2004) had a commentary piece called "Gamers Make Go